City2Surf 2010: Running for Fun & Charity

I am taking part in this year's City2Surf fun run to be held on Sunday, August 8. The run starts at Sydney's Hyde Park at the heart of the city and ends 14.1km later at Bondi Beach in the eastern suburbs. This will be my third participation in this event, which is regarded as the world's largest fun run. More than 75,000 people took part in it last year.

This year, I am raising funds for RSPCA, which is Australia's only truly national animal welfare organization. If you can, please help me raise funds for RSPCA via my HeroPage here. Your tax-deductible contributions will help RSPCA accept and take care of unwanted animals and investigate cases of animal cruelty.

Three Chinese Poets

After one of my friends made a favourable comment on the Tang poem posted in the previous entry, I picked up from my modestly-stocked bookshelf Vikram Seth's Three Chinese Poets, a translation of poems by the three major Tang Dynasty (618-907) poets, Wang Wei, Li Bai and Du Fu. I have this habit of signing and dating books after I buy them, and this is how I know that I purchased this hardcover edition on March 1, 1993, probably from one of my three favourite bookshops in Kathmandu.

When I visited the small Himalayan Book Centre opposite the old bus park at Bagh Bazaar, Kathmandu, in 2007 after an 8-year-long self-imposed antipodean exile, I was pleasantly surprised and moved when the elderly bookstore owner with thick glasses and slick oiled hair recognized me and enquired where I had been for so long!

Seth, who spent eleven years at Stanford University from 1975 to 1986 researching an economic doctoral thesis that he never completed, went to China to collect field data. While there, he honed his Mandarin. This must have inspired and emboldened him to translate the three premier classical Chinese poets later on.

Seth introduces the three near contemporary poets thus:  "The standard trichotomy of Wang Wei as Buddhist recluse, Li Bai as Taoist immortal and Du Fu as Confucian sage has been rejected by some critics as unsubtle and artificial, but it can act as a clarifying approximation for those approaching Chinese poetry of this period for the first time.

"Wang Wei's typical mood is that of aloneness, quiet, a retreat into nature and Buddhism. What one associates with him are running water, evening and dawn, bamboo, the absence of men's voices. The word 'empty' is almost his signature."

Enough talk. Here is a famous poem by Wang Wei as translated by Seth that distills the essence of the contemplative state of mind of a Buddhist hermit:

Birdsong Brook

Idly I watch cassia flowers fall.
Still is the night, empty the hill in Spring.
Up comes the moon, startling the mountain birds.
Once in a while in the Spring brook they sing.

The theme of aloneness and emptiness that Seth associates with Wang Wei is expressed masterfully in the following verse. In the introduction to the translations, Seth draws readers' attention to the contrast of meaning between lines three and four, and five and six, which was required by the strictures of the regulated form of the octet.

Living in the Hills: Impromptu Verses

I close my brushwood door in solitude
And face the vast sky as late sunlight falls.
The pine trees: cranes are nesting all around.
My wicker gate: a visitor seldom calls.
The tender bamboo's dusted with fresh powder.
Red lotuses strip off their former bloom.
Lamps shine out at the ford, and everywhere
The water-chestnut pickers wander home.

In terms of poetic sensibilities, Li Bai was the opposite of Wang Wei. In Seth's words, "Li Bai's poetry sparkles with zest, impulsiveness, exuberance, even at the risk of bombast and imbalance. Sword, horse, wine, gold, the moon, the Milky Way and impossibly large numbers are recurring features of his work. He attempts alchemically to transmute life through the intoxication of poetry or music or wine into delight and forgetfulness." This is what Seth means:

The Waterfall at Lu Shan

In sunshine, Censer Peak breathes purple mist.
A jutting stream, the cataract hangs in spray
Far off, then plunges down three thousand feet --
As if the sky had dropped the Milky Way.

'Bromance' was a staple of classical Chinese poetry long before Matt Damon and Ben Affleck pioneered it in Hollywood. Just like everywhere at the time, in classical China, travels were ponderous, long and fraught with many dangers, and, when friends parted, they could not be sure if they would ever see each other again. After one such parting, Li Bai wrote the following:

Parting at a Wineshop in Nanjing

Breeze bearing willow-cotton fills the shop with scent.
A Wu girl, pouring wine, exhorts us to drink up.
We Nanjing friends are here to see each other off.
Those who must go, and those who don't, each drains his cup.
Go ask the Yangtze, which of these two sooner ends:
Its waters flowing east - the love of parting friends.

Du Fu was born into an impoverished, cadet branch of the royal family, and, despite his prodigious poetic talents, did not pass the imperial civil service exams after repeated attempts (Empress Wu, a concubine of the founding Tang Dynasty Emperor Tai Zong, introduced verse composition into civil service exams during her 15 year reign, prompting a critic to observe that the Chinese thought poets made the best administrators). This effectively hobbled his Confucian aspirations to high office. He spent the rest of his life in penury and desperation, holding minor official posts and suffering horribly during a rebellion from which the Tang Dynasty never recovered.

Typically, the rebellion was started by a 'barbarian' general named An Lushan, who had managed to gain the trust of Emperor Ming Huang's favorite concubine Yang Guifei. When An Lushan marched on the imperial capital Changan, the court fled the capital. The emperor was powerless to save Yang Guifei from the murderous rage of court officials, who strangled her to death with a silk scarf. Whenever I mentioned this episode to my Chinese friends at university, all of them would automatically assume that I had learnt about it by watching Chinese TV soaps on the topic.

Seth writes: "Du Fu's poetry is informed by deeply suggestive and often sad reflections on society, history, the state and his own disturbed times, all central concerns of Confucianism. But what especially endears him to the Chinese is his wry self-deprecation combined with an intense compassion for the oppressed or dispossessed people of every kind in a time of poverty, famine and war."

The following poem is interpreted either as the universe's indifference to human suffering or life's capacity for renewal and growth in the face of wars and tragedies.

Spring Scene in Time of War

The state lies ruined; hills and streams survive.
Spring in the city; grass and leaves now thrive.
Moved by the times the flowers shed their dew.
The birds seem startled; they hate parting too.
The steady beacon fires are three months old.
A word from home is worth a ton of gold.
I scratch my white hair, which has grown so thin
It soon won't let me stick my hatpin in.

Du Fu was too poor to keep his family in the capital Changan. In the following poem, he pines for his family in a moonlit night in Changan:

Moonlit Night

In Fuzhou, far away, my wife is watching
The moon alone tonight, and my thoughts fill
With sadness for my children, who can't think
Of me here in Changan; they're too young still.
Her cloud-soft hair is moist with fragrant mist.
In the clear light her white arms sense the chill.
When will we feel the moonlight dry our tears,
Leaning together on our window-sill?

On Climbing Orchid Mountain In The Autumn To Zhang

By Meng Haoran

On a northern peak among white clouds
You have found your hermitage of peace;
And now, as I climb this mountain to see you,
High with the wildgeese flies my heart.
The quiet dusk might seem a little sad
If this autumn weather were not so brisk and clear;
I look down at the river bank, with homeward-bound villagers
Resting on the sand till the ferry returns;
There are trees at the horizon like a row of grasses
And against the river's rim an island like the moon
I hope that you will come and meet me, bringing a basket of wine --
And we'll celebrate together the Mountain Holiday.

Memoir of a Long Distance Runner

In his former life, Haruki Murakami used to be a  jazz club owner in Tokyo who smoked 60 cigarettes a day. In his current avatar, he is a passionate long distance runner who quit smoking when he started running. By his own confession, he runs 10k everyday, and a half marathon and a marathon every year. From New York City to Boston Marathon, he has done it all. Many times. And he once ran a soul-sapping 100k ultramarathon.

In 1982, he ran his first unofficial marathon, in the original marathon course in Greece in sweltering summer heat, from Athens to the eponymous village of Marathon. It was near this small village that a small army of Athenians defeated the invading Persian force of Darius in 490 BC (British author Tom Holland's 2005 book Persian Fire re-tells the story of this battle in a colorful style although his barely disguised contempt for orientals might put off some readers). On the busy straight highway that links Athens to Marathon, Murakami kept the count of roadkill: three dogs and eleven cats flattened against the bitumen.

Murakami also happens to be a world famous writer. Everyday, before hitting the road for his daily 10k run, he sits at his desk for four hours,  applying the same intensity, focus and perseverance to writing that he cultivates during long solitary runs. In fact, Murakami claims that he learned everything about writing from long distance running. These two key preoccupations of his life, writing and running, furnish the subject matter of his slim memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running published by Vintage in 2008.

I bought Murakami's memoir to seek inspiration and concrete advice on training, strategy, race-day tactics, etc, in order to rekindle my own flagging running motivation. On these counts, the book was a bit disappointing. Sure, Murakami takes readers through his elaborate preparations for 2005 New York City Marathon and triathlons held in Japan and Hawaii, and how he fared in them. However, they come between extended meditations on aging and its corrosive effects on creativity and physical abilities. After a certain age, just as the wellspring of creativity starts to dry up, so does distance running increasingly become an exercise in diminishing returns.

This is not to say that the book was not a pleasure to read. It is just that it dwells less on the mundane details of distance running and more on its metaphysics. If you are after a distance running training manual, you have to look somewhere else.

Watson Bay to Bondi Beach

On the day that 16-year-old Jessica Watson sailed back into the Sydney Harbour after her solo world round trip in her pink yacht, we walked from the Gap in Watson Bay to the famous Bondi Beach along the track that hugs the cliffs in Sydney's beautiful eastern suburbs. On the left, we could observe a flotilla of boats sailing out on the turquoise blue waters of the Tasman Sea to escort back Australia's latest teen hero. On the right, the Sydney Harbour was teeming with more watercraft.

Along the track from the Gap to the Lighthouse Reserve and further down in Dover Heights, walkers and tourists, some of them with binoculars, were peering out to the sea at a distant cluster of  boats,  which had circled a seemingly stationary pink speck that we surmised was Jessica's yacht. During the whole time that the cluster was in our field of vision, it did not seem to move an inch.

The Watson Bay to Bondi Beach walk, along with Manly to the Spit and Bondi to Clovelly walks, must rank among Sydney's three most beautiful walks. The trail itself is easy with no sharp elevations, and is less than nine kilometers long. At the Bondi Beach, instead of hopping onto a Sydney bus, we decided to keep pushing on foot along Bondi Road to the nearest train station at Bondi Junction, notching up another couple of kilometers.

To get to Watson Bay, buy a return train ticket from your nearest train station to Bondi Beach, get off at Edge Cliff station and catch 324 or 325 bus from Stand C to Watson Bay. The bus ride takes around half an hour.  You can use the train ticket to catch a bus from Bondi Beach to Bondi Junction.

I took a few pictures with my old, automatic Sony DSC-W70 along the way, which you can see below.

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Three Cheers To the Old Champion

With the successful defense of his second world title against the formidable Bulgarian GM Veselin Topalov earlier this month, Indian GM Vishwanathan Anand has again proved himself to be one of the greatest chess players of his era. The match went down to the wire, with both GMs tied at 5.5 with one game to play. In the final game, Anand, disadvantaged with Black pieces, still prevailed over his illustrious opponent.

[caption id="attachment_351" align="alignright" width="297" caption="Anand contemplates the position on the board."][/caption]

Anand was a childhood hero of mine. After he became the FIDE world junior champion in 1987, I think it was the Indian sports magazine, Sports Stars, that shipped with a centerfold of a youthful, bespectacled Anand staring intensely at a chess board. That image adorned the wall of my bedroom and fueled my own youthful, quixotic dreams of becoming a GM.

In a sense, Anand carried the hopes of all the youth from the developing world but specifically from South Asia. The fact that India is today poised not only as a rising economic but also a chess powerhouse owes a lot to Anand's spectacular exploits at the highest levels of chess. He has inspired an entire generation of chess players in India and South Asia. The only other Indian chess player to make his mark at international level before was Mir Sultan Khan (1905 - 1966), who won the prestigious British Championship three times between 1929 and 1933 before his promising career was cut short to attend to his duties in the service of an Indian prince.

When Anand first won the FIDE world chess championship in 2000, he became only the second person to wear the crown who was not of Russian or former Soviet background since 1937. The other person was the mercurial American GM Bobby Fischer, who, in a highly charged Cold War superpower theatrics of 1972, defeated the then world champion Boris Spassky of the USSR in Reykjavik, Iceland.

What was astonishing about Anand's meteoric rise was the suddenness with which he appeared out of seemingly nowhere to take the chess world by storm. Although the birthplace of chess, India did not have the state-backed chess patronage system of the USSR, which marketed the post-WW II global dominance of its chess players as the validation of its ideology, or a vibrant community of grandmasters, theorists, writers, supporters and clubs to match those in the US and Britain. When he attained the rank of grandmaster in 1988 at the age of 18, it was the first for his country.

One of the crowd-pleasing features of Anand's style is the speed with which he makes his moves. This has served him well in shorter formats of the game as well as in the classical format, where he almost never runs into time troubles. Imagine Sachin Tendulkar and Cameron White, unrivaled masters of Test and Twenty20 cricket, respectively, rolled into one. This capacity for lightning fast thinking earned Anand the nickname of 'speed demon' early in his career.

A new brat pack of chess superstars led by the 19-year-old Norwegian GM Magnus Carlsen, who became a GM at the age of 13, is snapping at the heels of Anand and his generation of grandmasters. In the next world championship cycle in 2012, Anand will face players who grew up on a diet of computer chess. It will be interesting to see if this new breed of players will be able to topple the last of the pre-Internet generation of grandmasters who still rule chess.

Reading Best Australian Essays: An Annual Rite

Reading Black Inc. anthology of best Australian essays of the year has become something of an annual rite for my readerly self. Edited by a well-known published writer, the anthology showcases essays that meet three criteria.

Firstly, the essays have to satisfy the standards set by the editor, which could include parameters such as currency and relevance to contemporary debates and issues, literary and aesthetic merits, and whatever else the particular  idiosyncrasies of the editor dictates. Secondly, the writers have to be Australians and/or the essays have to engage Australian topics. Lastly, the essays have to have been published in the previous calendar year.

Having found last year's offering, The Best Australian Essays 2008, which was edited by David Marr, a bit disappointing, I bought this year's collection with a degree of reservations. I need not have worried. So far, the essays, which range far and wide just as Black Inc. promises, have succeeded to 'entertain, inspire and provoke'.

I have been reading the essays in random order (surely, an oxymoron), and two essays that have so far stood out are Richard Castles' Death Duties and Robert Dessaix's The Grand Illusion. In the former, Castles recounts the year when he worked in the grandiosely named Transfer Response Unit but which the author liked to think of as a 'taxi service for the already departed'. In unadorned terms, the job involved collecting dead bodies or body parts from homes, hospitals, nursing homes and crash sites whenever the coroner wanted to examine the bodies.

Castles observes that 'death could be beautiful', especially when old folks died in nursing homes. However, "Like all things in life, death can be done in a variety of bizarre and often messy ways". And, yes, people die during sex, he informs helpfully from his macabre experience.

The writer describes his first body pick-up memorably. A gung-ho homicide detective greets him and has a dig at him for his inexperience. He writes: "I simply told him that he was right, that this was my first time. As I walked through the door, I caught first glimpse of the body in situ. I never got used to the jolt of those moments. A dead body is always out of place: an interruption in the picture; a spectre; a mistake."

In a culture where death is sanitized, where most people have never seen a dead body, Castles' essay confronts readers with the pervasiveness of death, its finality and  implacability, the stark reality that it is always lurking nearby in the shadows, just below our consciousness.

[caption id="attachment_344" align="alignright" width="105" caption="Robyn Davidson, editor of The Best Australian Essays 2009. Picture Courtesy of Black Inc."][/caption]

Dessaix's essay The Grand Illusion sifts through the travel industry hype and hyperbole to re-define the notion of a perfect getaway, in itself a quaint Victorian notion that became a 20th century mass consumer craze just like MacDonald's thanks to the swelling of the middle class rank in the developed countries.

For Dessaix, who, among others, authored Twilight of Love: Travels with Turgenev (2004), the perfect holiday destination is not tourist-infested Bali but the "grubby little Tozeur on the edge of the Sahara in Tunisia's south, however, where there's nothing to see and nothing ever happens" but where "I feel dense with wakefulness".

"In Tozeur, in the labyrinth of the old town, lost amongst the endless palms, or just loitering with intent outside a carpet shop at night, when the town springs to life, I find myself very interesting indeed."

The central contention of this essay is that modern travel is a form of escape from our own bored, satiated selves to places where we find ourselves interesting again. This may not necessarily happen in luxury hotels and resorts where we end up drinking the same cocktails and watching the same silly sitcoms as at home.

"The antidote to boredom lies not in excitement, amazement, unparalleled vistas or repose in paradise, but in being woken up to our own inner complexity, our density, and befriending it," Dessaix writes. He cheekily suggests that such inner awakenings could take place even in, wait for it, Dubai, the new Mecca of conspicuous consumerism, for "Good travelling depends not on the travel, but on the traveller."