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- Denis Giles
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Years ago one of the first songs I loved playing on my harmonica was the Negro Spiritual, “Gone Are The Days.” It was a sad song and had a plaintive melody but ended with the words, “I’m coming!” as the black slave sang out to his God that he would soon be with Him. A friend sent me these words below, which reminded me of the same song and days gone by:
Gone are the days when we queued up in the book depot, and got our new books and notes. The days when we wanted two Sundays and no Mondays, yet managed to line up daily for the morning prayers.
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- Denis Giles
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Though the remarks by the Maldives deputy minister in ridiculing our PM as a ‘clown’ and a ‘puppet’ are immature and uncalled for, I do believe the bigger thing to have been done in this situation was for the PM to have laughed it off, instead of making it a focus of so much discussion and activity. Suddenly a huge amount of money is being poured into Lakshadweep in retaliation, but are there better causes for those same funds than that of building an alternative to the Maldives tourism, just to retaliate?
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- Denis Giles
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"Would you like to see the pictures I clicked?" she asked me as I sat at a restaurant somewhere up near the Fox Glacier in New Zealand. I looked at her, she had been sitting alone at the next table and had waited for this opportunity to speak with me once my family had decided to visit the stores outside. She was in her seventies and I saw her holding out her camera phone with eyes that pleaded for someone to see what she had taken.
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- Denis Giles
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“…..A common courtyard is swept by none’….” Chinese Proverb
“Park your taxi to the side of the road!” I told the taxi driver gently as he got out of his cab to go to the local temple.
“Are you the police?” he asked me.
“No!” I said.
“Then mind your own business!”
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- Denis Giles
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As rapes and molestations take place in the country, we find that instead of making the streets safer, we insist that women should remain at home, dress in a particular way, and keep themselves out of sight. The girls are most often blamed for a crime either for their dressing sense or asked why they were staying out so late, or why they needed to go partying.
In other words we are saying the victims were actually the cause of the crime. I am reminded of a story by Kalil Gibran: