A Seated Debate

CCIS (Centennial Centre for Interdisciplinary Science) [see-sis] Noun.                              A building which, at any given time, hold approximately 2000 students and about four and a half chairs.

In my experience, I’ve often found that one is wise in learning to pick their battles. For—while there are many noble causes one may choose to pursue—I believe many would be well advised to learn to strive within the bounds of reality. This belief led me to hesitate before heckling the obvious problems at the university. Tuition is increasingly expensive, not all the professors should be professors, and Indira makes a little too much money. These are issues, but—for better or worse—they are also largely beyond my control. So, before pondering where one sits on the aforementioned matters, one must ask where they sit at all.


As trivial as it may seem, a substantial proportion of the buildings at our university find themselves with a shortage of things students can sit on when not in class. What this results in is a rather pathetic game of musical chairs in the buildings most affected. Monday to Friday, I find myself finishing class at 11:00 and making a mad dash (well, perhaps a mad speed-walk) to CCIS so I can find somewhere to have lunch before my next class starts an hour (and a half) later. Even then, my success rate is less than impressive.

As a large university, we have multiple departments devoted the wellbeing and success of the student. That being stated, it should come as no surprise that sitting on a concrete floor and propping oneself against a wall or into a corner is not conducive to learning—or much else for that matter. Nonetheless, every day I see people do this. Even now—as I write this very sentence—I watch as a group of girls furiously peck away at calculators and scribble answers onto loose leaf that sits on the floor beside them. What solutions they’ve found I do not know, but the problems they face are all much the same.

In the grander scope of things, my complaint has a relatively simple solution—especially when compared to the nature of more complex issues such as tuition and staffing. At an estimated cost of $250 for a set of four chairs and a simple table, the university could retrofit its buildings campus-wide with seating for 4000 students at a cost less than the salary of any of our faculties’ deans. Considering the fact we are consistently building entirely new (and often arguably unnecessary) structures, and the sheer scale of our university’s budget, it is difficult to fathom that basic seating is beyond our means. Even if such was the case, I wouldn’t think it unreasonable to sequester a single lecture hall in the major buildings, assuring that it is not booked for class—at least during the lunch hour, when the seating is most needed.

All being considered, and costs being weighed, I’d my wager my complaint and its solution to be reasonable. Today I was one of the lucky ones and am seated relatively comfortably in a table overlooking quad. Tomorrow I could just as easily not. The girls left a moment ago. Perhaps, like myself, they have a class in ten minutes. Maybe they simply got tired of working on a hard, uncaring floor. Regardless, for over an hour, there they sat, and indisputably they should not have had to.

Better Neighbours

I’m not a particularly religious individual, never was. It’s not that I have anything against those whom take faith in a higher power: rather I imagine it would be a somewhat comforting pillar in an existence rife with the uncomfortable. Instead—I suppose—I tend to place my confidence, be that for better or worse, elsewhere. But while I’m not much an adherent myself, it seems amusing with what frequency I find that biblical verses so succinctly condense an idea or a thought or an argument. So when presented with this blog topic—after a moment or so of brainstorming—one of my first tangible ideas was that of Matthew 5:30 “And if your right hand subverts you, cut it off, cast it from you”. So now a nation sits in the flickering light of a fire, watching a blade glow red—thinking.

Now while to call Quebec—a province on the verge of another succession movement—the right hand of our country is likely a bit of a stretch, the subversion of the latter by the former is still very real. To view evidence of such—at least by a fiscal measure—one need not look farther than the nature and details of Canada’s equalization program. This concept, embedded in the most basic legislation of our nation—the Constitution Act of 1982— states

"Parliament and the government of Canada are committed to the principle of making equalization payments to ensure that provincial governments have sufficient revenues to provide reasonably comparable levels of public services at reasonably comparable levels of taxation.”

I should qualify my stance in saying I do not host objection to the idea of equalization payments in and of themselves. The ebb and flow of money at the direction of the federal government should in theory make for a stronger Canada, assisting provinces in temporary times of recession at the expense of those still standing strong. The unfortunate reality, however, is that for a give and take system to work, each province has to eventually give. It seems that Quebec missed that memo.

Since the introduction of equalization payments in 1957, Quebec has taken more than it has contributed every fiscal year. That has equated to a total net influx of 253 billion dollars—just 1.6% less than the payments to all other provinces combined. I suppose if water ever hits $100 a barrel things might even out, but if that becomes the case we’ll have bigger problems to solve.

I’d like to think that—if that was the only problem—I could look past it. Perhaps in some parallel universe Quebec has oil, we have lakes, and the fiscal sponge has shifted west. I cannot blame a province for a lack of natural resources. If that was their only offence, I think I’d understand. For many years, Newfoundland and Labrador leeched western dividends to compensate for collapsing fish stocks. What they didn’t do—and I don’t know how much I can stress this—is complain. They lived quietly, humbly and by modest means. When they couldn’t find work, many packed a duffle bag, bought a Greyhound ticket and took the long ride to Alberta. Here they provided straight edge labour in the patch, and were appreciative for the opportunity.

On the contrary, however, many of the people of Quebec seem perpetually dissatisfied with their cozy conditions. In 2012, large protests broke out among university students over tuition increases. These increases resulted in average undergraduate tuitions still less than half of what we pay in Alberta. Pardon my lack of sympathy.

If one expects federal welfare, one cannot concurrently demand that they pay less than their benefactors. Costs can be subsidized or income can be supplemented. It is unreasonable to expect both, and ludicrous to complain when that expectation is not met. If Quebec wishes to break free from our nation—be their motive cultural, political or otherwise—I avow we let them do so. It seems to me they’d make a better neighbour than a roommate: it is far cheaper to lend a cup of sugar than to pay the grocery bill. If the hand subverts the body, cut it off. If the same hand is willing to perform the amputation, how much simpler it all will be.

Perhaps I’ll Stay With the Mountains: Part II

Déjà vu is not inherently pleasant nor inherently repulsive, it simply reminds us that we’ve walked this way once before. That’s good, because—in this case—I would be leaning more towards the repulsive. It seems—or rather it feels—as if time has slipped backwards some four months, and collapsed into the waning autumn that was early November. With something less than fond recollection, my thoughts make course in that direction—though successful navigation is not always call for celebration. Truly though, I tell you, I think back to sitting at this very desk when I wrote this blog—the first time.

“I struggled greatly with this sixth and final blog entry,” I started. Whereas final may have proven untrue, the struggle is still very real. As a rule, I enjoy writing. But to write of music? It seems when tasked with such I’m suddenly rendered intellectually incompetent. Even now, I’m writing—not terribly, either—but not about the music. I skirt the peripheries of my subject with all the grace of a cougar that has trapped a beaver in its lodge: hosting the needed arsenal to dispatch my quarry, but none of the precision to extract it. And so I circle… 

When I last suggested that I was scarcely an authority of any music, Indian music perhaps least of all, that was clearly the product (and the product alone) of me not being privy to the existence of K-Pop. A relatively recent large-scale cultural export, it seems that Korean Pop Music or K-Pop has come to be a massive commercial success in North America. I must have missed that memo—maybe I was climbing.

After having spent half an hour or so browsing through the internet’s finest selection of synthesizers, Auto-Tune and a language I don’t understand, I can’t claim myself a convert. The only things that have changed in that time is the fact my Monster now sits half empty, and the gentle sweep of the clock’s minute hand has reversed its prior bearing. I do not see Psy displacing Mick Jagger in my iTunes library anytime soon, nor do I hold any contempt for those whose only knowledge of the latter revolves around Ke$ha’s preference in men. All loss is relative. So as this blog entry clings to life like a washed up actor’s career, I think I’ll do the merciful thing—the Liberals just voted in favour, too. I found a genre of which I was unaware, but—for my purposes—no lesser for that oversight. Having plucked its offerings and found no harbour for my interest, I set sail for calmer seas in more familiar waters. After weeks of midterms and papers, I leave on a hiking trip this Friday. That’s good: I need the break. For last time I pondered but now I state: K-Pop may do as it pleases, the mountains will do fine by me.

What It Is

If the following line in its namesake track didn’t—quite expressly—read “Sweet Home Alabama”, it could well be a blue collar man in any Alberta home this past week. It seems, however, that Ronnie Van Zant was well based when he voiced his opinions of Neil Young’s intruding tendencies thirty-some years ago. Now though, with “Southern Man” long since fallen off the charts, Mr. Young has taken it upon himself to set out on a new moral crusade. His hair might be a little greyer now, but Young’s misinformed and overgeneralized opinions are just as lively as they were in 1970.

That being stated, his thoughts don’t entirely lack merit, nor is there a complete absence of truth from his doctrine. The unfortunate reality, however, is that by basing his argument so intensively on rhetoric and spouting statements riddled with factual errors, Young’s ‘Honour the Treaties’ tour can be considered no less an opinion-piece than this blog. Consequently, while he might have raised a few bucks for a fair cause, he won’t change the hearts and minds of the decided. Those who oppose oil sands development will continue to act upon their beliefs, and oil sands proponents much the same.

Adversely, if Young wishes to sweep new support in his favour, he needs to drop the bullwhip images and play the big-boy game with big-boy facts—accurate and emotionally-detached. Whereas Fort McMurray might be experiencing outrageous inflation, it certainly isn’t Hiroshima, as Young implied it to be. Even with skyrocketing costs on your basic necessities—rent, food, and cocaine—most inhabitants are doing just fine, because that’s the reality of a booming oil economy. The oil sands mines north of the Mac don’t resemble the Japanese city either: they look much, much worse. I’ll attest to that first hand after having flown over them in a light aircraft on several occasions—at least there were still a few branchless tree trunks amid the rubble in the weeks that followed the blast. There are no tree trunks there, nor is there much of anything else.

Man’s anthill stretches out, where fifty-tonne trucks scuttle like insects, and carry their loads back to the colony. Trees go down, bitumen comes out, and oil fans out into the pipelines that are the arteries of our society. Our cars can run, our wounds are bandaged, and dorm students can use plastic cutlery to avoid doing dishes. Our air gets worse, our economy keeps floating and jobs are made available. An aging rock star does his rounds in support of what he feels right—and he has every right to do so. I sit here and type this post, and the world keeps on spinning.

It is what it is.

Base Camp

I love Edmonton dearly—and I leave it every chance I get.

It’s strange how I feel about this city. I’ve got an address on the north side, one I’ve held for nearly sixteen years—but I’d hesitate to call Edmonton my home. I was born here, raised here—I’ve lived here my entire life—but I didn’t grow up in Edmonton. Much of my family, most of my friends: nearly all the people I truly know live in Edmonton—but most of the strongest bonds were not forged in city limits. Edmonton is where I live, but Edmonton it is not where I am.

For when my mind wanders it does not come to rest on images of large malls, potholes and urban sprawl. In the stressful days and long, sleepless nights of the academic year I do not wish for a trip to Whyte Avenue or a gander around the art gallery. No, I speak truly when I say that my yearning for something conjures not images of passing cars and city lights. I daydream of smiling as I look over my left shoulder to see the “Welcome to Edmonton, the City of Champions” sign greeting the oncoming traffic as I bear west on the Yellowhead or south on the QEII.

You see, for I am home—really at home—not as I collapse into bed after a dozen hours of studying, nor as I look down my block and smile on a beautiful spring morning. I am home as I tap tent stakes into the soil of a high alpine cirque, as I watch the sun set across the lake from a remote fly-in cabin or gaze at the stars—unobstructed and unpolluted—from a makeshift camp on some long forgotten logging road.

I grew, and I grow not as elementary faded into junior and senior high schools, nor as my doctor marked my height and weight each year. Rather, I grew as I watched trout emerge from cover in a clear foothill stream to examine and strike my fly. I grew as my photography matured and improved, and I composed art through my viewfinder in all corners of this province. I grew when I surmounted some barren crag of a ridge, alone—silent, save the sound gusting wind and my beating heart—to catch first light on a frosty August morning.

The strongest bonds were formed—with friends and family alike—not when I celebrated the championship with the school team, or united with students who also call my faculty theirs. Instead, they were formed when two of us had fish on the line, and there was only one net in the boat. They were formed arriving at a high alpine lake so stunningly beautiful that the blisters, bruises, pains and sprains faded away in that moment of elation. Bonds were forged when I sacrificed the solitude of a place I called my own such that I could share the beauty with another.

At a superficial glance it might appear as if Edmonton means little to me, but that would be untrue. This city has done much to shape me—for better or worse—that is certain. It offers me stability, an education and the prospect of growth and development. I eat, sleep and breathe here. It offers me a foundation, a springboard from which I can leap forth and explore the world to my heart’s content. Every expedition needs a base camp, and if Edmonton can be the base camp to them all that’s good enough for me.

Perhaps I’ll Stay with the Mountains

I struggled greatly with this sixth and final blog entry. It seems—to no surprise of mine—that my area of authority scarcely borders on music of any type, Indian music perhaps least of all. I find myself trekking uncharted territory. Coincidentally—should that be taken in a literal sense—it would put me quite at home. However, trapped in the realms of the figurative, I probe with all the grace of a blind man trying to summit one of the peaks whose coarse and rocky faces are all but memorized by me. I suppose we all started somewhere.

It’s odd how difficult it seems to be to describe the effects of something that inherently should evoke emotion. Perhaps the issue lay not in the evoking but rather in the describing, but I doubt it. For if I was asked to convey my ponderings and considerations when I stood, alone, atop some barren and snowy crag, the only sounds the whipping wind and my pounding heart, my thoughts would brim and spill out as words onto paper. Here; however, I am left to ramble: so distant off topic that I couldn’t be found with a map. Meanwhile the nine odd minutes of classical Indian instrumental I have chosen plays on repeat in the background, if only to remind me that I am nine minutes nearer the deadline.

A sombre, haunting flute dominates. Drums—seemingly struck only by hand—provide a continual background presence that speed and slow at the request of the flute. Occasionally it is supplemented by the delicate plucking of a stringed instrument that’s name I do not know and likely could not pronounce if I did. It’s something like what I imagine might be played at base camp before an attempt at Kangchenjunga, arguably the most difficult summit anywhere on Earth.

I chose this piece, I suppose, because its instrumental nature permitted me to focus—however futile my focus was—on what it was trying to convey, while not having to consider the aspects of both vocal and instrumental contribution. With the video only displaying the occasional still of the revered musician who played this piece, my mind is left to concentrate on the music without diluted attention. My thoughts again diverge, pausing on images of fluttering prayer flags and blowing snow. Between the wind gusts, the bustle of anxious preparation and a dozen strange languages sound off. Meanwhile an Indian guide, his face aged by the unending wind and the frying of high altitude sun, completes his morning prayers and plays his flute in the hopes that The Five Treasures of the High Snow will pardon his intrusion and spare his life once more in the coming days.

The Music

Hiding in Plain Sight: The Billionaires of India

In a country where the average per capita income is just $1209, over a hundred individuals each possess more than one million times that. Truthfully, India: a country marred by widespread and extreme poverty, houses the sixth largest number of billionaires of any nation. Effectively, these individuals each could give every man, woman and child in India a crisp greenback and still have more money than most of us could ever fathom. This is the reality of a massive wealth disparity, not good, nor bad, but invariably and undeniably true.

Whereas the existence of billionaires in India may not be particularly surprising—let’s face it, where there is money to be made there will be someone who makes it—the origin and distribution of these individuals is certainly thought provoking. Standing out sharply against world-wide trends, the majority of Indian billionaires are both self-made and residing in India (60% and 95%, respectively). It seems—even if an impression is merely that—that billionaires in India are more likely to be what one might call ‘truly Indian’.
In an exclusive club that sees most of its members moving swiftly to places with sunny beaches and lax (if sometimes shady) tax laws, India has built a culture of super-rich that are more inclined to remain with their roots. This comments broadly on the connection and loyalty that Indian citizens feel to their country, and perhaps—depending on your degree of cynicism—on the ease of having tax workers make typos on their assessments. Regardless, something more than a desire to create an empire in India is keeping those who do firmly planted. As the socio-cultural factors that influence this are likely far more intricately complex than a first year bio-sci is willing to speculate on, I will suggest only that a billion dollars could make even Svalbard a pleasant place to live.

That being stated, India, to these individuals is home. Be that choice strategic, personal or a matter of convenience it is true. In the grand scheme of all things, they will breeze, in this home, under the radar: little attention paid because little attention is needed. They will ultimately go unnoticed by the world, and I will venture a guess that such an oversight need not concern them at all.

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