An interviewer once asked James Baldwin if he'd ever write something without a message. "No writer who ever lived," Baldwin said, "could have written a line without a message." This is true. People write because they have something to say. Baldwin had something to say, and he spent his life saying it. But many who thought they got his message didn't get it at all.
"Are we here or not? If we are, where and if not, where have we gone? If we exist, for whom and when? Sir... were we ever there, or never at all?" This powerful dialogue from 'Haider' captures the existential questions surrounding the identity and presence of Kashmiris amid conflict.
The sense that we are a solid entity, an unchanging entity that exists someplace in our body and takes ownership of our body, and even ownership of our brain rather than being identical to our brain, that is where the illusion lies.
"We work so hard for something that is so fleeting. The feeling of winning-it just doesn't last that long. When I sit back at the end of the year and reflect on things, I have a deep sense of gratitude, but it just doesn't satisfy."
Essentialism is the belief that members of a category share an inherent and immutable essence or core that distinguishes them from non-members (Gelman, 2003). Most people, for example, believe that living things are fundamentally different from non-living things.
"The irony wasn't lost on me. Here I was, producing a documentary about mothers who had overcome adversity to find success, and I was suddenly facing one of my greatest adversities."
I have a recurring dream about my father and me, one of the few welcome dreams I have about him. We're both in our late thirties, though he's fitter than I remember him ever being. We're at Fenway, out in the right-field bleachers, several rows behind Ted Williams's red seat.
Two people sitting with their backs to each other in a bistro - that was marriage. Chairs flung across the room; tables flipped; fingers idling on the switch of an electric carving knife: all these things were marriage, too.
Without these people, without supporters, I would be nothing. Chef Bruja published her first cookbook, titled Tales Of The Bronx, which records the cultural melting pot of New York City by highlighting the blend of the Bronx and the Caribbean in food.