Sunday, July 24, 2011

For the love of country

The week long vacation during Naadam holiday provided good opportunity for the body to rest and for the mind to feed on good reading. This year Mongolia celebrated important dates of its history, marking 90 years of independence from Qing empire, 2220 years of great statehood Xiongnu. I for myself, observed Naadam after 6 years of intermission. There was plenty of pre-naadam pressure and stress. Everybody was rushing to get things done since most Mongolians would take extended vacation following the festival. Frustration and deadlines ran high and close. During this chaotic pre-naadam week I stumbled upon an amazing video of 999 youth simultaneously performing old classic "Duut Nuur". What I noticed about the video is that it elicited strong emotional response from both types of audience, the statesmen who sat viewing the performance live and those who were viewing through media channel. The country with fragile and often capricious political environment where statesmen most often hold blame for the development misgivings bonded with the mass through the special emotional response, creating perfect catharsis. The performance of "Duut Nuur" brought out on the surface what binds us as nation, its imagined boundaries of intangible and often nostalgic sentiments. The song and the performance represented how wrestling, flag bearing, waving, participating in parades, pride in our country and history constitutes the being of Mongolian.

Monday, July 4, 2011

Apogee of my thoughts

A while ago, Oscar Wilde wrote that we simply forgot to construct anymore decent lies. In his essay The Decay of Lying he argues about the power of beautiful lies that traditional literature is saturated with and how with the decline of novel writing the age of lying has come to its end. Along with the decays of art of lying however, Wilde argues the need for imitation of art has morphed into petty mimics of popular tabloid news. Hence, instead of reading novels and getting enamored by its sentiments we are more often involved in the world of pure information.