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biology, Darwin, evolution, Humboldt, installation, life, natural, selection, tree, von, wallace
15 Monday Sep 2025
Posted in 2025, installations
04 Friday Jul 2025
Posted in 2025, Asia, Bali, Commentary, Tamil Coast, thoughts
Tags
art, Asia, Bali, culture, east, hindu, India, Indonesia, life, music, news, rumination, SE, south, Southeast, thought, writing
A millennium before Christopher Columbus was born, my people – since I am descendant of the Tamil Kings – embarked to sea without knowing what they would find; explorers, with ships filled with the best spices, jewelry and manufactured goods on the planet.
They were headed toward the dawn, open ocean to the East and South, with probably very well-thought-out research, because we’re Tamil, on what they’d find.
For the next twelve hundred years they met, traded with, loved and engaged with every single culture from my birthplace to the “Wallace line” – end of the Sunda shelf.
This is why, every time I travel in what you call South East Asia, I feel intense kinship with every person I meet. They feel it instantly, and I acknowledge it openly, with deference and appreciation.
My pleasure at the exquisite variations of the cultures here that were born from those now ancient relationships THRRRUMMMMS! with a harmony of centuries.
That I know this pleases everyone – and their cultures flower before me in brilliant ways:
Here’s a current playlist on my travels:
The White Man just. doesn’t. get it. It’s a god damn distant object of exotic fascination from what they perceive of falsely as a lesser culture.
My people had libraries and Universities while the European man was still crawling in the dirt.
Then slowly, they learned everything from us. Then they ran out of room for themselves, built ships and started “colonizing”: calling all other people animals and heathens and enslaving and murdering us. For five hundred years.
It’s certainly political. People don’t like us … Hindus. Because they’re not sure what they’re gonna get when they open the pack. Surprise! Wild card!
Rest assured, what you will get will be deeply civilized and intellectual.
Take me for example, I am not a practicing Hindu anymore, I have been studying Buddhism for three decades and am an atheist dedicated to a scientific interpretation of our universe for the good of all humanity.
Well look, I gotta go. But anyway, I’m in Bali and I love every single person from here to Tamil Nad. But not enough to call you back.
23 Monday Jun 2025
“It’s a bit of classical music at one end, and hip-hop at the other.”
— Dinesh Karthik, describing KL Rahul batting at one end and Rishabh Pant at the other, versus aggressive English bowling on day four
“Test is life.”
— Harsha Bhogle, longtime Indian cricket commentator
Test cricket is the closest thing we have in team sports to life, itself, because there is no clock except for the sunlight and weather conditions, and
it’s played for eight hours a day, for two innings over five days, with the result only coming from the taking of a sides’ ten wickets all-out, or the surpassing of a sides’ chased total.
Conditions.
Bowling.
and then
Batting.
is the order of importance in Test.
And if it’s a draw after five days, real fans still find the greatest enjoyment from the contest.
I love it.
19 Thursday Jun 2025
Posted in 2025, beliefs, Commentary, journal entries, Letter From MTK
It has been a month and a half since last I wrote. The statistics for this site reveal that no one reads what I write. It is, and has been, a resource for documenting my view of this existence in which I was born the eleventh mouth to feed in a two-room apartment in India, moved at two to the United States of America, the youngest of a family of five that disintegrated.
And who then travelled alone for years and lived in Austin, Taiwan, Japan, India, Thailand, Washington D.C., and New Orleans before moving to San Francisco in 1993, to New York in ’97, and L.A. in 2002 – where I fathered a child and was a local radio personality – and back to Japan for all of 2005; India ’06 – ’07 and finally back to Oakland and the San Francisco Bay Area.
Ten years ago, I began to split my time between SF and San Antonio, Texas, where my father – undeniably a great American – wished to die.
Now, five years in the wake of his passing, I write to you from back home in my favorite city, San Francisco, where I am alone.
My eighth trip around the world was embarked upon from here in late 2022 when I spent significant time in Amsterdam and same in Bangkok in 2023.
It has taken me 40 years to free myself of the burdensome garbage I’ve had to participate in – just to be an American.
But now, I consider myself like Tolstoy after the wars, or the young boys of the golden era of dutch painting, wealthy scions of colonists bringing everything from around the world back to Amsterdam. I’m financially stable, experienced, educated and have been writing and making art for 30 years.
I am widely disliked and in 55 years of being in the United States, I never made a friend. What friends I made are no longer friends, and I’m now separated from my family and from my ex- and our child, who has not spoken to me in more than five years.
In the United States now, I am persona non grata for my beliefs first and my behavior in societal situations next. Most people who meet me have no interest in befriending me any more because I reject the society and maintain the uncompromised position that is a thread throughout my life and work. Being true to myself has “cost” me every relationship I ever made.
In a controlled way, and very aware of the audience, I still perform somewhat loudly in public space – coffeeshops, bars, alleys – as I have done for thirty years in the United States, expressing my truths … but now they tire of the “act,” that has been my existence here.
I continue to read in public as well, promoting the act of reading and general intellectual pursuits. I have been reading novels for decades and intend still to write a good one – let’s see.
To most, I am merely an immigrant they can either use or forget.
To me this separation was an inevitable eventuality to my methodology. It is not to be railed against, but to be rolled with and seized for the immense value it has. I have time, resources, abilities I need to let flower. Please support me or leave me alone, thanks.
love,
mtk
20 Thursday Apr 2017
Posted in architecture, downtown
23 Wednesday Oct 1996
imagine if I were to collect every single word I wrote and saved over the last fifteen years and bound them into one very fat, long book.
I have dozens of stories, poems, journal entries, drawings, notations, thoughts,
words.
Suppose I were to collect all of this and then Bind it.
I could see an ordering using language (words are lies)
of my life.
of my lie(f).