Thaneshwar's Blog

Around the world, people vote for a new leader in their countries every election. And they feel very proud to be a part of their country and celebrate it, which is known as patriotism. But there can also be differences in the opinions of people who choose their leader. Some people can never feel patriotic because of their feelings about the actions of the government. One example of this is when the United States had a huge slavery issue. Because of this many African Americans don't feel patriotic about being an American, and when Frederick Douglass delivered his speech, he too said the same. The appeal that July 4th had toward white people only brought sadness and anger to Douglass as the country did not live up to what the founding fathers wrote in the Constitution. The country treated the African Americans poorly so they did not feel the need to feel patriotic toward the same country. Another instance of this is in Sherman Alexie's  Because My Father Always Said He Was the On...

We are so insignificant on this planet with 8.1 billion other people living. Yet, when we do things we typically disregard the existence of other people and events and only focus on ourselves. For example, when we are stuck in a problem we don't think about people in a worse situation than us, and because of this, we are also ungrateful for a lot of things. In our own lives, we are the main characters, no matter what other people do or tell us to do, we are only going to listen to ourselves and worry about ourselves.  Even Claudius Ptolemy, an Egyptian astronomer, thought the Earth was the center of the universe, and ideologies and beliefs stuck for 1400 years before scientists like Galileo and Newton showed up. In the speech, "This is Water" by David Foster Wallace, Wallace uses an analogy with fish to further explain the topic of self-centeredness. The point of this little story was that the fish themselves did not know what they were swimming in. And it is very compara...

Memorials are a place to commemorate and mourn people who lost their lives. Two weeks this was the extent of my knowledge on memorials. It was only after I started studying and analyzing the memorials I understood the thought process behind the location, design, architecture and presentation of each memorial. Now I know that there are different types of memorials like cenotaphs and catafalques. I also learned what each of the elements of a memorial represents toward the bigger picture. For example, in the Missing of the Somme memorial, the large arches represent the space for the people who lost their lives. In Maya Lin's Vietnam War Memorial, the reflection material used for the walls creates a division between our world and the world of the dead. After this knowledge, I was amused at the memorials I had visited in the past. It gave me a whole new perspective of how much thought and consideration went into designing the memorials. But this wasn't the end. When we did a synthes...