Blogs to watch, on the UK and NZ

"Out of the bombings a national consensus has emerged: what we need in Britain is a renewed sense of patriotism. The rightwing papers have been making their usual noises about old maids and warm beer, but in the past 10 days they’ve been joined by Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian, Tristram Hunt in the New Statesman, the New Statesman itself and just about everyone who has opened his mouth on the subject of terrorism and national identity. Emboldened by this consensus, the Sun now insists that anyone who isn’t loyal to this country should leave it.(1) The way things are going, it can’t be long before I’m deported."

And, on the NZ elections, we seemed to have joined the anti immigration political flag wavers: "There is resentment that too many immigrants, and especially those who arrive as refugees, go straight onto a benefit, and live for years at the expense of the hard-working New Zealand taxpayer.
There is resentment that, when we let in one refugee, we then let in his extended family group as well. Like the case of the refugee who brought in his father, mother, two dependent brothers, two dependent sisters, a dependent sister-in-law and her four dependent children!"

Yerrkkk. Is anywhere safe from bigotry?

The truest book you'll ever read

I've been to India twice now and am more confused than ever, makes my cosy little world seem surreal and can't help feeling that there is something in the Western society that is fundamentally flawed and inhibiting. Am going back again for work in October and wanted to try and understand a little bit more so that I wouldn't feel so lost there, started reading Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts. Blog title says it all.

I was a revolutionary who lost his ideals in heroin, a philosopher who lost his integrity in crime, and a poet who lost his soul in a maximum-security prison. When I escaped from that prison, over the front wall, between two gun-towers, I became my country's most wanted man. Luck ran with me and flew with me across the world to India, where I set up and ran a free clinic in a crowded Bombay slum. I joined the Bombay mafia, and worked as a gunrunner, a smuggler, and a counterfeiter. I was chained on three continents, beaten, stabbed, and starved. I went to war. I ran into the enemy guns. And when those wilderness years of hunted exile came to an end, when I changed my life, when I stopped running onto the knives and started running into the light of love instead, I wrote the novel, Shantaram, that was based on my wild and wicked life.
Now, the novel is a best-seller, has been described as a masterpiece, appears as major hard-back releases in London and New York this year, and will be made into a Hollywood film.
Now I, the author, Gregory David Roberts, once known as Public Enemy Number One and Australia's Most Wanted Man, lecture on literature and art at universities, and teach my philosophy and cosmosophy to students from every walk of life, including business leaders and creative artists in the fields of movies, writing, music, and drama.

Forgetting your wife?

A Macedonian man forgot his wife at an Italian service station and only realised he had driven off without her six hours later...