I write from New York - having just roared up the east coast in an aluminium snake of a train from Washington to stay here with some old friends from another hemisphere. The summer is well and truly Indian in the big apple, and the smell downtown is not unlike Delhi either. Despite the sticky subways, I’ve been enjoying vegan cuisine, Brooklyn community life and scintillating conversation. My friends, like me, have been recently introduced into the wonderful world of parenting and, naturally much conversation blossomed around this topic.

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I read today on the Al Jazeera website that google are expanding their news search engine to include news archives from the last 200 years. I guess this will be a fantastic thing for journalists and researchers alike - giving them access to a wonderful perspective of history when writing articles.

Then I looked a little closer at which archives would be covered - “The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Time magazine and The Washington Post.” - all notoriously american publications.

Google is fast becoming (or already is) the global search engine of choice, does their american orientation mean that our global history will start to be viewed increasingly through star-spangled lenses?

I had an unwritten contract with my mother. She gave me a physical body and a home in which to nourish it, and in return I went to Sunday school every Sunday till I was confirmed into the school of religion of her choice.This was 1980’s South Africa. We lived in Durban, often termed “The Last British Outpost” - a pure WASP bubble where even white Afrikaners were considered foreigners. So my mother’s choice of religions for me was really between different flavours of Anglican Christianity. Even Catholicism was considered a little too “out there” to be a viable religion.

Mom had opted in her late twenties to join the Methodists. Not because of their superior ideology or any previous affiliation to this “tearaway” Anglican rebellion, but rather because she liked the singing. I guess secretly she wanted me to like it too. Behind my youthful posturing at Sunday school once a week, I now confess that I did actually kind of like a few of those melodies. Not that I would let on in front of the blushing pubescent girls in my class though, when you came from an all boys’ (all shiny white and all English) school, it was important to make a cool impression in your only mixed class in the week.

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“Can they not see that this conduct ultimately leads to violence?”, a remark made by a French friend of mine recently. He was really upset by the world cup final incident largely because of the conduct of the players. Speaking yesterday, Zidane said “My act is not forgivable, but they must also punish the true guilty party, and the guilty party is the one who provokes.” In this light, do we condemn the violence or the conduct which causes it?

Zizou was under immense pressure in the final - the whole French team had been formed around him, and the final result arguably rested heavily on his shoulders. It was one of these shoulders which was almost dislocated in an Italian challenge just prior to his headbutting incident as he was relentlessly marked and hounded by the Italian team. However, Materazzi took the hounding to a new level by insulting Zidane’s family on top of nipple tweaking, shirt pulling and all the other crude insults. If you take a man and pile more and more pressure on him, at some point he will break. To me, the measure of the man is how much pressure he can take before that point is reached. In Zidane’s case, I take the measure of his worth as pretty high. Read more…

Fear, shadow-cage I daren’t face and fight,
though I thrust out against it with all of my might.
Sidestepped, I embrace the fear of fright,
and prison walls melt in That all-loving light.