s in town

when an intellectual firebrand that's simone flies in and hooks up for coffee three consecutive days, challenging conversations and the deconstruction of current trends are as inevitable as yet another drivel. but when today, the coffee-table got surrounded by simone, me, drew, and edison, it was the bohemia that i had missed so much, enacted, if only barely, all over again. ed had casually remarked that singapore's an intellectual deadpan, i thought him generous. because singapore's wasnt even about dispassion, apathy - it was pathos and passion for all the wrong things; because the intelligent has got conflated and confused with the (absent) intellectual, and the term 'scholarship' has become a catachresis. ashis couldnt be more prescient when he said, "knowledge without ethics is not so much bad ethics as inferior knowledge." so it was too, for truth, for passion. when i held my coffeecup and felt its warmth, when i closed my eyes and stretched my ears, snatching at those brilliant bursts of remonstrations all in the spirit of debate, three years ago seemed there and then.