You start learning French. You have no doubts whatsoever why. Oh, yes, as a handmaiden to your English Studies! Yet the goalpost slightly shifts because France starts growing on you, and, most of all, it IS Paris that you genuinely like the most.
The Paris of Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities" where the futility of the erstwhile victim becoming the present victimiser came alive, the Paris of Hugo's Notre Dame, the Paris of Dan Brown's "Da Vinci Code", the Paris you meet in so very many literary texts and countless films begins to come alive as your tongue negotiates the half unspoken French spellings.
Why, as a teacher, technologically you make your 'étudiant(e)s' visit "le quartier Latin" of Beauvoir and Sartre, le Pont Neuf, la Seine, l'Arc de Triomphe, le Louvre, and so on, whenever some tricky point of the feckless French grammar has to be driven home.
Paris, a city where the past nestles with the present, where over centuries every intellectual seed sprouted, where dry humour is as dominant as the "fraternité, égalité, liberté" spirit, that Paris is burning, and not like the falling London Bridge of the nursery rhymes, but actually burning, getting gutted, getting reduced to heaps of ashes.
Channel after t.v. channel is providing second by minute visuals of the Parisian unrest which, you realize, is an intoxicant more potent than all the Bordeau wines put together, because it is, though sugar-coated as 'student unrest', made of religious n racial rabidity so 'etrangére' to the rational, secular, socialist spirit of Paris, of France. Yes, mourning the sad demise of a city that symbolised very many idea(l)s for very many centuries for the rest of the world is indeed an "auld lang syne" feel!
Pratima@ Why is literally everywhere on the boil? No Nostradamus is needed to know that the laissez-faire laxitude, convenient to the 'developed' world in the post World War era, created all sorts of migrant ghettoes, acutely unhappy with the adopted countries' policies. Add to that explosive heap the oil prices, the oil crises, the weapons industry, the Deep State control freaks, the centuries old Crusades assuming newer forms, and literally the whole world is atop a volcano worse than an endless Etna! Where, oh, when can be found a solution to such crises?!?
Quote of the day: George Orwell lamented, "To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization." So true the quote rings now, about the 'ruined rues of Paris', and of very many other cities, nay, countries!
Word of the day: unrest 'Unrest' is a situation in which people are angry or not happy, and likely to protest or fight.
N.B: The French words used in this blog can be easily understood in the context, and everybody knows the nostalgic 'old lang syne' song, right?
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