A PLACE IN THE WORLD

Photograph Palani Mohan from his book Hunting With Eagles

A place in the world. A crack in time. An awful dread and a magnificent resonance. Their hearts lifted as they looked out on the steep valley scenes. He only went to Sapa in the north of Vietnam because someone had said, "It's like Tibet". So yes, for a brief moment, as they looked out across the surrounding scenes, already wreathed in cloud, their hearts lifted. But it was not to last. The tourist industry was well developed, machine like. You were only ever shuffling through these people's lives; part of an industry. There was no belonging. There never would be.

"There's only one family we would trust," an old timer said, one of the very few Westerners who had lived there for several years, made a home there. They were drinking too much in the middle of the day and he stopped to converse, starved of conversation, having no idea, hobbling after falling off a motorbike, why exactly he was there. Disoriented; it became a regular saying repeating like bad fruit in his head, "I don't know what I'm doing here." And also repeating in his head, the loss of what might have been a home, or a life of sorts, back there in Sydney where he had so avidly declared he did not want to be.

So it was, if nothing else, elderly and confused. "You must heal yourself, no one else can, no one else should," the Buddha had reportedly said, but what was to be cured, vanquished, and what was to be retained, he did not know. He felt hunted, that was all, and was desperate to be invisible, looking out from hotel rooms across valleys, hearing the rise of unfamiliar voices and unfamiliar thoughts from the hotels, houses, restaurants and businesses below. The walks were lonely. He stepped through isolation like treacle, because, if nothing else, he had lost his place in the world; or so it felt.

"You are where you're meant to be," was an old saying, as much as a longing for place. A cheerful older man in a restaurant by West Lake, who at the mere sight of him seemed to sense how lost he felt, said: "You've done the hardest thing, you've escaped. It's the landing you're having problems with. We all know what is waiting for us back there."

Four walls. Indifferent communities. Television that ignored virtually all the concerns of ordinary people. And God forbid that you should be a man, when you would be ignored even more thoroughly. Or so the conversation drifted; just as he drifted. Until he saw the black swans by the lake in the Illawarra,  those symbols of protective spirits, and he watched the fine arks of the storks and plover birds and a lone Ibis, and wondered why, in those shadows of terror, he could come to be so fragile in such an ephemeral place; or perhaps that was not it at all. Hunted to extinction. There was no choice but to dive into the ordinary. We're all, as the saying went, standing in the mud, but only some of us are looking at the stars. Heal yourself.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2015/oct/31/russian-passenger-plane-crashes-in-egypts-sinai-live

Summary

We’re wrapping up our live coverage of the plane crash. Here’s what we know:

Russian plane crash: investigation begins into cause of A321 crash

Both black boxes recovered as Russian aviation regulator cautions against speculation on causes of crash

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• All 224 on board, including 17 children were killed, when a Metrojet flight from Sharm el-Sheikh bound for St Petersburg when the Airbus A321 crashed into the Sinai desert.
• Images of the wreckage show that the plane was almost completely destroyed.
• The cause of the crash remains unknown and claims of responsibility from Islamic State have been dismissed by Russian authorities.
• Families of the passengers have gathered at St Petersburg airport as bodies begin to arrive back in Russia.

Mokhtar Awad, an analyst with the Center for American Progress, tells the Guardian that the Islamic State’s claim of responsibility is quite vague.

“It doesn’t state how they were able to ‘down’ the plane allegedly. Even the most sophisticated of portable surface-to-air missiles cannot reach that high an altitude and are only a threat during periods of take-off or landing, but the plane had already climbed to its target altitude (from what we know thus far) when it began to likely experience technical failures.
The local affiliate, Wilayat Sinai, has been under some pressure over the past few months and may have jumped the gun on taking credit. Although there isn’t a precedent for such a spectacular lie about something they claim to have done, Islamic State itself has recently been embellishing more and more. For instance it claimed that the recent prison raid by Kurdish and US special forces were a total failure, when in fact video evidence surfaced showed them freeing the hostages. So this may be an instance of the rooster taking credit for the dawn.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/rugbyunion/rugby-world-cup/11963694/New-Zealand-vs-Australia-Rugby-World-Cup-final-live.html

New Zealand win the World Cup

Ruthless New Zealand withstood a rousing fightback from Australia before crushing the Wallabies 34-17 at Twickenham to become world champions for a record third time and the first team to retain the Webb Ellis Cup.