19th September

I was planning to use today to start my essay on Swift, but it did not go well. Decided to read for most of the day instead. Productive, but not as productive as I was hoping for.

We had extra class this morning with Udaya Kumar. I think he may be the best lecturer, though I am torn between him and Gautam. Plato or Sidney? That is the question. We have finally finished Plato though, so we are moving on to Aristotle next class. I will need to read the Poetics before hand. So much work! I suppose it will all stand me in good stead for the obscene amount of assessment I will have in October. Today’s lecture was very good. It was on the Platonic idea of the soul as an eternal thing that was an original creation that inhabits a number of bodies. The soul is not destroyed when the body dies, it inhabits another body, which means that the soul was not created with the body. There seems to be an idea that the soul has inherent memory of past life. They give an example of a slave boy in a different text whom Socrates questions until he is able to solve a geometric problem he has been given. The slave boy has had no education; his ability to solve the problem merely had to be coaxed out through the constant questioning of Socrates. Therefore, he must have had some knowledge of geometry in his memory that has been there since a previous life. We also talked about the higher and lower faculties of the soul, and how mimesis applies to the lower faculties or irrational part of the soul. Whereas diesis applies to the higher or rational part of the soul.

I got a rickshaw home with Tanya and almost took out my tongue when we went over a pothole in the road. The roads round by us are terrible. Huge potholes all over the place. On a manual rickshaw, they can be perilous. You think you are about to be thrown out every second. We complain about the state of the roads back home, but by god are these something else. They are just rubble with sporadic pieces of concrete. It is always worse though when you go through puddles or the bits where the sewer ends and just runs into the street. Who knows what all is flying up all over the place?

Once home I tried to do a bit of work and failed. Got a cup of tea to try and distract myself and failed. Went to the gym instead and sweated the toxins out. It is slightly horrifying how you go to the gym and the sweat is black and grey. Let’s you know just how polluted the air you have been wandering around in all day was.

We had to elect a representative to the student council of the hostel. Lauren came up with a game of picking hands, and I have been chosen. I cannot wait to show films about the UK. That is the main reason we wanted to be involved. We feel the first screening will be Trainspotting, and then This Is England. Give everyone a different viewpoint of the glorious UK. I feel it will be educational. I also want to see if I can teach some girls to ceilidh, and then perhaps we could get some men in to dance. Unlikely though, but no use in not trying at least. We had another wee meeting about the fresher’s party as well. They asked if I had any suggestions and I had to keep my mouth very tightly shut to stop myself from saying something like “well men and booze would be a start”. I don’t think that would have gone down well at all.

We watched the rest of Train to Pakistan tonight. It is a very interesting film actually. In the second half, the district judge, who has been sleeping with a Muslim girl, decides he will send all the Muslims in his village to Pakistan to avoid sectarian violence in the village. Outsiders come and rally the Sikhs, who were once happy to live alongside Muslims, and they end up rioting and driving the Muslims out. Everyone thinks that the Muslims can go to Pakistan and then come home when the rioting has died down as it surely will. All the people are packed onto a train bound for Pakistan. Some Sikhs hear about it though, and they set up a trap to divert the train and kill everyone. When one Sikh who loves a Muslim girl hears about the plot, he risks his life to cut the ropes that will divert the train signal. The other Sikhs see him go and try to shoot him down, but he manages to cut the rope in time and then dies from his wounds. The train manages to continue to Pakistan. It was interesting how they portrayed the ambivalence of the district judge, and the whole idea that these people were expected to be able to come home, which of course they never will. It was quite an upsetting film. It demonstrated how sectarian violence can erase so much goodwill in such a short space of time when an atmosphere of fear is created. It didn’t judge as such, it just demonstrated how the fear created two opposing sides when before there was none.