Motorcycle Diaries (Carnets de voyage) by Walter Salles

Choose the poster you like better.

The first one is more modern in some way.

The second one depicts the fact that the movie is adapted from a diary relating a trip through South America.

The third one plays with Che Guevara's image.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi & Romain Rolland

Since I talk about Gandhi, I decided to put at least one photo with him on it. This one is my favorite. He is talking with the French author Romain Rolland who fight for peace and for European reconcilation during WWI and after.

Photograph taken in 1931, photographer unknown, public domain.

I did actually forget to talk about Gandhi

After thinking for a while, I did find another person who is as symbolic as Che Guevara. It is Mahatma Gandhi. I should have thought of him earlier since we have a weekly lesson about South Asia but he just seems to have got out of my mind (maybe I just didn't want to think about PSSA, maybe I'm becoming allergic to it). But being a serious person, I can't forget that Gandhi became a symbol in the same way as El Che. Not for the same reasons, Gandhi was a more peaceful guy and a much more down-to-earth person.
However there is not really one photograph of Gandhi that inspired people. And that's my point. For the photographs of Che Guevara and the Afghan girl, they became famous and symbolic due to their portrays and their gesture. It's their expressivness that reached people.
Copyright to oliviakin.

Another symbol

Usually symbols are objects. Sometimes it can be animals or plants. But a symbol is rarely a person.

Indeed a symbol is something that should be eternal and universal and there are few people that are seen in the same way in every part of the world.

However it's different for Ernesto "Che" Guevara. How did he become so popular? I can't really answer this question, I wasn't born the day he died. However I've seen his face and his name used very frequently until now before I knew what he exactly did. For all people he is a hero. The symbol for rebellion and struggle against oppression. It is this way I always perceived him.

I put here the two well-know photographs of him. The first is his portray and the second one shows his dead body as army officials exhibit it a few days after he was captured and executed. It was in 1967. His body disappeared a few days later because they feared that his body would become a relic. But it contributed to make his name last. And when the place where is body was buried was found outa few years later, it actually became a cult object.

He was a guerillero fighting for a goal he could never attain: he wanted to unite all South America as one and unique folk. He took part in many revolts and guerillas, he fought on Fidel Castro's side during the Cuban revolution.

Most of people forgot that he advocated violence as the only way to overthrow a governement and that he should have killed many people.
He is a man that fought for his ideas and died for them. And people remember that. I'm not trying to praise Che Guevara. I'm just interested in him, the way he lived and what made him such a symbol. I'm interested of the way the people all over the world unanimously agree about him when usually for great men there is always an existing opposition. Try to find another man in the world History that had such a influence on people. For instance, Leonardo da Vinci was a great scientist, painter and humanist, but his name doesn't carry as much emotions.
Photographs taken by Alberto Korda on the 5th March 1960 and by Gustavo Villoldo on the 9th October 1967.

The "Afghan girl"

I came across this photograph working on my presentation about wars in Kashmir and Afghanistan. And I just wanted to put it here because I think it's one of the most beautiful I've ever seen.

This photo was taken during the Soviet war in Afghanistan. It was one girl who was in a refugee camp. The photographer Steve McCurry published the photograph in the June 1985 issue of National Geographic and it became famous world-wide as symbol for the war in Afghanistan because of her eyes expressing anger and fear at the same time.

Here is the article accompanying the photograph:

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2002/04/afghan-girl/original-story-text

But until recently the photograph and the girl in it were referred by as "the Afghan girl" because Steve McCurry didn't know the name of the girl. He only knew that she was from a Pashtun tribe (in the Southern regions) and that she was around 12 in 1985. So he decided to go look for her. He found her after many difficulties. The article describing his trip was published in the April 2002 issue of National Geographic.

Here is the link if you want to read it: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/03/0311_020312_sharbat.html

Her name is Sharbat Gula and she has never been aware she became a symbol for the Afghan people in the world. She had been living according to Pashtun customs, almost isolated with her husband and she had four daughter.

Here you can see how she looks like now:

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2002/04/afghan-girl/index-text

I truly the look she has. She expresses fear and anger at the same time as she is hiding a terrible inner strengh. When I look at her, I see misery but I see pride too. It is a terrible picture but so beautiful. In my opinion, such a picture would always be more beautiful and magnificient than any picture of landscape or than any painting, be it Mona Lisa or the Niagara falls. Just because it is a real person on there and she is how reality looks like.

Copyright to National Geographic and the photographer Steve McCurry.

Where is time running, I wonder...

That's a good question, in fact.

Time is a huge issue in my life. It's always time to study and it's never time to sleep, to eat, to shower nor to go to the supermarket. If I didn't ignore time passing by, I would always study.

Time is really a scary thing. You know there's no ending to it but you never have enough time. You try to spare time, to organise it, not to waste it but it just continues to flow. Furthermore everyone needs time. I need time to finish my oral presentation, my mom needs time to recover from her depression, my sister needs time to choose where she wants to go to school next year and my dad just doesn't complain so I think he's the only person in the whole world that doesn't run after time.

Time is flying. But I doubt it goes to the sky with little birds otherwise everyone would have noticed a huge growing cloud made of time in the sky. Maybe it goes into space. And it forms back holes that swallow up spaceships just like in "Planet of the apes".

Time is flowing too. It's melting with water and that's why there is always big swirls in big rivers. Once in a while when seas did eat up too much time, it provokes tsunamis that kill a lot of people for the time to be released. Time is a really dangerous thing.

There are just too many legends and stories about immortality and eternal life. I don't really know what people blessed with eternal life are doing because most of the people I know (all of them I'm sure of it) are obsessed with time. Maybe we can find an answer in the "Highlander" films (I should really stop putting so bad references in this post), but I don't think that fighting with swords with every other immortal person to be sure not to have your head cut down is really fun. It must be really tiring.

However I'd really like to have the power to bless people with eternal life so I could give immortality to my grandmother so that she will stop talking about the time when she won't be there anymore.

That was my philosophical delirium of the week.

I think I drained my brain, I'm really tired, I'm going to sleep. Time to work will be tomorrow.

:)

P.S. TV show Supernatural's third season ended last Thursday. It's so unfair. I want it back on track right now. I won't be able to finish the pop corn's bag that is waiting in my kitchen. It's sad.

Copyright to whoever owns this photo (not me that is for sure).

Minicrit Dijon 2008

Six hours to go to Dijon, around one hour to find the right place we should go to and we met people from the other programs of Sciences-Po Paris on Saturday for a sport contest. In fact the Minicrit is much more than just a sport contest, it is the only occasion for all these people to meet. And we felt it when all the people welcomed us by shouting and cheering when we arrived (we were the last ones and we were late for the volleyball competition).

Being the first year of our campus, we didn't prepare anything because we were not really motivated and didn't really had time. But next year we swore we'll be ready. We cheered for our team and other teams, we ran around, some lost themselves in the city, we partied a lot and we came back exhausted but really happy.

I want to say word about Alice too, who organised our trip and came with us but on a wheelchair because she was operated last week. She was with us the all time and took part in all the activities with us. She really deserves to be congratulated.

But there are some disadvantages to this week-end: first we didn't want to come back in Le Havre, secondly we are far more tired than when we left, we couldn't revise for the History exam on thursday (in fact some revised in the bus on the way back, but I, personnally, wasn't really in the mood), and finally we got sunburns (the weather was really hot in Dijon) and lost weight (I never ate so few in three entire days) .

My final words will be for the people that didn't come: they really really really missed something great.

Artwork by Nachoyague on Deviantart.com

Links

Three links I wanted to recommand (in fact I wanted to write them down somewhere, and because I always lost my papers I said myself that I will post them here so that they won't disappear. In addition, I make a bit of advertising so it's all good.)

-http://www.mangapop.com/ & http://www.deviantart.com/: two websites exposing artworks of people that are not always professionals

-another link, if you want to read a cute story talking about japanese mythology:

http://www.blackmoontides.com/e/doujin/kage/kage0.html

Artwork by Sho-U ("Show You": play on words, I understood only recently.) Tajima

What I like (and what I don't like)

Here is a small Edward Scissorhands to begin my post today and to inspire me. He looks poetic, funny and lost at the same time. Isn't he sort of cute?

Five-points lists are the best when you're lacking ideas.

1) I love Edward (this one) and drawings (both to look at and to draw) and kitsune smileys (and I don't like the smiley that Fabien always put at the end of his sentences on msn, he looks creepy, I don't like the one with the big glasses neither, he looks like Mr Schwarz and I get the impression that he is spying on my msn chats).

2) I love the scent of my berries flavoured tea. And I don't like the smell of incense sticks that my sister and my mother put in the house once in a while.

3) I like to sleep. And I don't like when my neighbors start to play music at 2am, or when they are doing a rap contest at 3am. I don't like workers checking heaters or waterways to wake me up at 9 am on the only morning I have free in the week.

4) I like to watch film trailers on allocine.com to find new interesting films to rent. And I don't like the fact that they use famous people to dubb characters in cartoons. As if the character could be magically transformed by the person who dubbs him.

5) I like to search for books in shops or libraries. I can stay here for hours reading the small summaries on the back covers and asking myself which one I will choose. I don't like books with no summary on the back cover and I prefer pocket books because you can take them in your hand easily. Plus large-framed books are too expensive.

A five-points list is just magic . Ideas are starting to come back. My brain went on vacation and it still hasn't completely come back yet. (Maybe it is the reason why I had a so hard time working on my Economics presentation.)

Artwork by JollyRotten on Deviantart.com