One of the strangest lucid dreams I’ve ever had was indeed being caught inside a dream in a dream in a dream in a dream. I found myself waking up one morning, taking a shower, brushing my teeth, getting dressed, and going to school. During my first class, I woke up again. And so I got out of bed and repeated my morning rituals. This time round though, I only got as far as the bus ride to school. I found myself waking up again. That’s when I realized something strange was going on. This scenario would continue to repeat itself several times, each dream sequence getting shorter and shorter until I couldn’t get any further than stepping out of my bed before ending back to where I was. Finally, I was awake. But even then, doubts remained. How could I be sure I wasn’t still dreaming? It was only after my day had progressed well passed the afternoon that I started to relax and assume that I really had returned to reality.

Since then, I have found an easy way of determining whether I am trapped in a lucid dream or not: In my dreams, I can float mid-air, sometime two or three stories high. It’s not easy and a bit scary, but I guarantee you it’s a really cool sensation. I can only recommend it. But after seeing Inception, I may have to rethink my floating totem. For until know, I’ve always assumed my inner thoughts and dreams would always be safe from others. Not anymore.

Disclaimer: The butler did it!

It goes without saying, if you haven’t seen Inception yet, the following article will contain spoilers. Lots of them!

Now that we got that out of the way

To spin, or to topple, that’s the question. If it weren’t for the last few seconds of the film, you probably wouldn’t be here in the first place. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to give a definitive answer whether the reality that Cobbs believes he is in is real or not. The film goes to great lengths to ensure that every point that could indicate what is real and what is not is kept very ambiguous. There is enough material for both sides of the argument, but nothing that can be used as decisive proof. So I offer you two possible interpretations of the film. The real one, and the dream version.

Interpretation one: It’s real

The top will topple over and we can safely assume that Cobb was right. This is the simplest interpretation of the two  versions and we can simply take the film at face value. He has returned to reality in which Mal unwittingly killed herself. After struggling with his guilt for losing his wife, he is finally united with his children. End of story.

Because if the whole film had been a dream? What’s the point? Why should we care if nothing is real and without consequence anyway?

Personally, I’m not too happy with this interpretation. My first impression of Inception was that it was sanitized version of eXistenz. The both play the exact same theme. But with eXistenz, instead of a dream in a dream, it used the concept of a virtual reality game inside a virtual reality game. As a result, the players themselves eventually don’t know if they are actually still inside the game or not. The difference is, even though eXistenz was weird and unbalancing, it managed to tell its story without getting lost in the complexities of its technology. With Inception on the other hand, you need a chart just to figure out who was dreaming where and when, where and why were they being kicked or killed.

Interpretation two:  It’s all a dream

For this version of the story, it doesn’t matter if the totem topples over at the end or not. Becaue everything is possible when you’re dreaming and I love solving a good movie puzzle.

The long con

This is of course is my interpretation of the film and is by no means a definitive explanation. The trick to doing this is to explain as much as possible without having to leave behind too many loose ends. So if you have a better theory, I would like to hear it.

As I see it, the film is a combination between a love story and a how-to-con-a-conman. Because when it comes down to it, Cobb and his team are nothing more than  just that: conmen. They are the Ocean 11’s of the dream world. They find a mark, observe him and then play an array of confidence tricks to gain their victim’s trust. Once they have achieved that, they can start extracting deep routed secrets from their mark.

At first glance, it would seem that Saito was the first mark, but that mission failed. Saito at one point even claims the mission was a test, but never elaborates for what. When Saito returns to hire Cobb, a new mark is set. This time it is Fisher.

However, it’s more plausible that from the beginning, the real mark was actually Cobb himself. The two missions he is sent out to do are actually a ruse. It’s a classic case of the conman being conned without him realizing it. But why? And by whom?

A leap of faith

For my theory, you’ll have to take a leap of faith. Saito is actually Mal, or at the very least, one of her projections. As a matter of fact, they both even utter those same words. The both ask Cobb to take a leap of faith.

Ok, but how can Saito be Mal? To wrap your head around that, I’ll start by explaining the events of the movie.

We know that Cobb planted the idea in Mal’s head that the limbo they were trapped in wasn’t real. But when they kill themselves, they end up in a different limbo. Mal realizes this, but it’s Cobb that now believes that they are living in reality. When Mal can’t convince him otherwise, she plans an elaborate scheme to force Cobb into jumping with her off the ledges of the hotel room windows. If he doesn’t he will not only loose her, but also lose access to his children. Unfortunately for Mal, her plan backfires. Cobb is now not only left behind and trapped in his own limbo, he is now doomed to grow old and become a lonely and guilt ridden  man.

Mal however still loves him. It was never her intention to punish him like this. So if she can’t convince him to return to reality, she can at least try to make his time in limbo as pleasant as possible. And so she plans an inception that will not only unite Cobb with his children, but also free him of his guilt. Eventually, Cobb will wake up out of his limbo and they will be reunited, but until that time comes, she simply wants him to be happy again.

So she returns. Quite likely disguised as Saito. For it’s not impossible to appear as someone else in a dream. As a matter of fact, Earns, the forger, actually pulls this type of confidence trick several times during the Fisher heist. The first time, he plays Fisher’s uncle, and the second time, as hot blond woman at the bar to distract Fishers attention. At other times, Saito is probably just a projection. For example when Saito and Mal are seen in the same room. We can probably also go as far as concluding that all the other characters in the film are projections. Some are created by Cobb, the others by Mal.

Conning Cobb and planting the inception requires several steps. The first one is making sure that Cobb cannot trust his own instincts, pretty much in the same way as the gambit used in the Fisher heist: The one where Cobb becomes Mr. Charles to trick Fisher into not trusting his own self defense mechanisms.

The Saito Heist

The first seed of doubt is planted into Cobb’s  mind during the first heist at the Japanese beach house. Cobb believes Mal is dead, so when he sees her there, he actually believes that what he is seeing is nothing more than a projection of his own mind. But because he can’t control her (the chair incident and the fact that she further sabotages the mission), he is therefore led to believe that he may be losing his mind.

The sabotage of the mission doesn’t stop there however. There is also the carpet fiasco in Saito’s love nest. It didn’t really matter what the carpet was made of. All that Saito had to do was pretend it was some kind of totem and claim it should have been made of a different material than intended. This not only sabotages the mission even further, but more importantly, it also places doubt in the abilities of the architect. Why? Because it’s actually a smart ploy by Mal to smooth the path of having Cobb’s architect replaced by one of hers: Ariadne.

When Saito claims the whole mission was a test, it not only implies he knew about it, it was also to see if Cobb could be manipulated enough for the Con to go through. And it does. The second stage of the con can now commence.

The Helicopter Scene

With the failed mission, Cobb and his team are now on the run from some anonymous global corporation. Something that Mal has probably setup in the hope that Cobb may still eventually question the reality of his world. (side note: Cobol Engineering, Cobb; coincidence?)

When they try to escape via helicopter, Cobbs is tested again. Saito has not only captured his architect, but tells Cobb he betrayed him by giving away their location. If Cobb still had any faith in his own architect, it’s now completely gone. Saito then offers Cobb to shoot him.

Cobb refuses. It proves he still firmly believes he is still living in reality. When Arthur was shot by Mal, Cobb didn’t hesitate to kill Arthur to put him out of his pain, because he know he would just end up a level higher in the dreamscape. But in this dimension, he believes that shooting anyone will actually kill them for real. Either way, Mal is now able to remove Cobb’s architect completely out of the picture.

Now it is time for Saito to reel him into the con. The bait is a job offer: one that requires an inception of an idea in someone’s mind. Mal knows this idea intrigues Cobb. He pretty much spelt it out during the Saito heist just before it went wrong. The hook that will lure him into the con is the offer that if he successfully does the job, he will be able to see his children again.

Ariadne

As Mal has gotten rid of Cobbs original architect, he needs a new one. Mal creates one for him: Ariadne. Her name is derived from the Greek mythology. In the myth, she falls in love with Theseus and gives him a sword to fight the Minotaur and a ball of red fleece to find his way through the labyrinth. So it’s no coincidence that it’s Ariadne’s job to design all the mazes. She’ll be responsible for luring Cobb all the way down to the original limbo.

It’s also not surprising that Ariadne picks up dream building so quickly. Being Mals projection, Mal already has plenty of experience building entire worlds.

When Cobb sets of with her in a dreamscape to test her possibilities, she creates a scene of a bridge with mirrors. A place that Mal and Cobb knew well. By placing a projection of an old romantic memory there, it further destabilizes Cobb’s frame of mind. Cobb who is clearly rattled warns her never to use elements from memory, because that is the easiest way to lose grasp of what is real and what is a dream. And there may lie Cobb’s problem. The limbo world he is trapped in now  is not one he created, but one that was subconsciously built entirely from memory. That is why he confuses it for being real

Mombasa

When Cobb heads off to Mombasa, he meets Eans, the forger, who introduced him to Yusaf, the pharmacist. Both of them are probably projections too, though it is not clear if they belong to Cobb or Mal. I would guess that Eans may be Cobb’s projection, because they already knew each other.  Yusaf on the other hand is Mals projection. Being that Cobb is the mark, she’ll want as many of her projections on the team as possible.

Yusaf will also be the key to luring Cobb into the original Limbo that Mal and Cobb once shared. He does this by making Cobb unwittingly changing the rules of the dream world. He can convince Cobb that by introducing a sedative, being killed in a dream will no longer return you to the higher up level, but will throw you into limbo instead.

Before that, the three ways of getting out of a dream were:

• Time: Wait until you wake up, possibly after the sedative has worn out.
• Externally: If someone wakes you up from your sleep, by using some kind of kick.
• Internally: Waking up from within your dream, you have to kill yourself.

The prison of regrets

Of course, Cobb isn’t going as crazy as he thinks he is. In fact, he has managed to contain his memories and projections of Mal in a type of dream prison. It’s a place where he can store all his regrets, the very things he wants to change.

To be more precise, it’s actually not a prison. Rather, they are his deepest secrets. But unlike the others who tend to lock theirs away in a safe, he has hidden his in a different dreamscape.  At least until Mal, through Ariadne, manages to infiltrate it. It is here were she learns of Cobb’s biggest regrets:

• That he didn’t see his children’s faces before he was forced to run
• His real guilt however stems from a broken promise: that he and Mal would grow old together. He feels responsible for her demise.

Uniting Cobb with their children will be the easy part. The hard part will be planting the inception that will relieve him of his guilt. That is where the Fisher heist comes in to play.

The Fisher heist: Level one

The first stage of the trap is set. The goal is to trick Cobb into returning to the original limbo. That means sabotaging the Fisher heist as well. To begin with, Mal lets a train race through the middle of street full of traffic. It’s enough to convince Cobb that he’s now really loosing it. It doesn’t take much for Ariadne to convince him that he no longer is in control of his state of mind and that he has become a real threat to everyone else on the mission. Cobb must now reluctantly place his faith in Ariadnes hands. It’s here were he tells here why Mal killed herself and why he can’t see his children.

Thanks to the sedatives, the stakes have been upped. So Mal also sends out an unexpected but heavily armed attack team. Not to protect Fisher, but to have Saito shot and wounded. If he dies, Cobb will have no choice but to follow him into limbo and bring him back. Saito is his only chance of ever seeing his children again. More subtly though, after talking to wounded Saito, the idea is planted in Cobb’s mind that if you get trapped in Limbo, there is a very big risks growing old there before you can return.

The Fisher heist: Level two

As in level one, the deceptions being played on Fisher are actually the same deceptions that Mal is playing on Cobb. Mal doesn’t show up in this level though, but Cobb does start seeing projections of his children for the first time popping up in a heist.

The Fisher heist: Level three

Now is a good time to ask ourselves how Fisher’s story relates to Cobb. If Mal thought up this mission, why this mission? Well, it’s actually quite simple. Fisher lost his mother at an early age and his father was never there for him. Cobb’s children also lost their mother at an early age, and because Cobb is on the run, he isn’t there for his children either.

Mal unexpectedly reappears and sabotages the mission by killing Fisher, sending him into limbo before the inception could be completed. Cobb loses all hope and is about to give up. That is when Ariadne steps in and pulls him deeper into the maze. By convincing Cobb to enter limbo as well, they may still have a chance of saving the mission.

The Fisher heist: Limbo

Once here, Cobb confronts Mal. She tries to convince him to stay, but Cobb finally confesses that he was responsible for planting the idea that her world wasn’t real. And that he feels guilty and responsible for her jumping from the hotel room window.

From here, things start to move very fast: Cobb tricks Mal into releasing Fisher. When she does, he changes his mind and decides to leave her anyway and search for Saito instead. Mal attacks Cobb with a knife, and then something strange happens. Ariadne, an innocent school girl, all of a sudden pulls out a gun out of nowhere and shoots Mal down, Not killing her, just wounding her.

Ariadne then throws Fisher of the balcony, killing him and sending him back to the third level where he can complete the mission. Ariadne then follows him down killing herself.

Catharsis

After unlocking the doors of the safe, Fisher is reunited with his father. A chance to relive those last moments with him. Here, the idea is planted that his father’s biggest regret was creating an empire rather than spending time with what was most important: the time spent with his loved ones, his son. Fisher now believes his father doesn’t want him to make the same mistake.

At the same time, another inception is taking place: Cobb’s last moments with dying Mal. The lesson here for Cobb is pretty much the same. When they were still living together in the limbo world they had built, Cobb probably suffered from the creators paradox: how can you create a work of fiction, and then believe to be true? To him, once the fun had worn off of acting like gods, everything he had created felt fake and meaningless. Mal on the other hand had a different perspective on things. She loved this world, not because of the things they had built, but simply because they were together. For her, this was all that mattered and is why she hid her totem. At least until Cobb passed his idea that everything was fake off as hers.

So just before she dies again, she reiterates their promise that they would grow old together. Cobb realizes that in a way, they actually already had lived a lifetime together: fifty years in limbo is a very long time. But until that moment, they always look the same age in his flashbacks of limbo. Even when they decided to commit suicide on the train tracks. But from that point on, he now remembers her and himself as an old couple walking through the world they had both created. He finally comes to believe that they did grow old together and as a result his promise had already been fulfilled. Mal’s inception succeeded and Cobb is cured of his guilt.

The inception worked so well that when Cobb does find Saito, he too appears as an old man, despite being the last one to enter limbo. (Fisher, Ariadne, Mal and Cobb didn’t age one bit even though they all had spent a longer time in limbo than Saito).

The End

Everybody wakes up. Saito makes the call. Cobb returns home and spins his totem one last time. But he doesn’t wait for the outcome. Whether he is in reality or a dream, it doesn’t matter to him anymore. The important thing is the time spent with the ones he love: his children.

As for Mal. Cobb will eventually wake up and they will be reunited again.

The totum top

While the idea of using a totem is sound, the top that Cobb uses on the other hand has been compromised, defeating its original purpose. So as a measure of reality, it has become useless. For starters, it belonged to Mal as a way of determining if she  was still inside of Cobb’s dreams or not.

Cobb never had a totem of his own to start with. Probably because if you are the dreamer, you would already know the secret properties of your totem, leaving yourself open to being deceived by your own sub consciousness.

As Saito claimed in the beginning of the film: if you are the dreamer, you make the rules, and so you would need another way to test if you are dreaming or not. Like I mentioned before, I try floating. If I can’t, I know I’m not dreaming.

Cobb on the other hand truly believes he is in reality, so he doesn’t try changing anything in his world. In fact, he refuses to change anything. This even extends to when he does enter other dream worlds, he leaves the creation of them to others. And this despite being a brilliant architect himself. So if Cobb is the dreamer, but believes everything is real; subconsciously, he would make the top topple over to keep the illusion alive.

In fact, the only time we ever see Cobb using the top in the dream world, making it spin endlessly, is when he planted the inception in Mal’s safe. It is only after Mal committed suicide that he started using the top and only when he believes he has returned to the real world. Never during his heists or escapades with Ariadne in dream space.

Compromising the totem even further,  he at one point explains to Ariadne how it works. Doing so opens up the possibility that others can manipulate you into making you believe what they want. He did however mention that it belonged to Mal, so it’s always possible that Ariadne never assumed he himself used it, but still. It’s not really clear if the other members new about it too.

And then there is the moment when Cobb finds Saito as an old man. When he is dragged into the room, one of Saito’s henchmen places two items they found on Cobb’s body on the table. A gun and the top. Saito recognizes it immediately. Saito then gives it a spin and it does so without ever toppling over. So Saito must have known of its secret property. If Saito is Mal, that would make perfect sense. If not, then it’s clear the totem had become a public secret to all the members of the team.

And that brings us to the very end of the film. Does it topple over or not? If it kept on spinning, we would know that Cobb was still dreaming. If it toppled over, we would still be guessing anyway. Did it topple over because it really is reality, or because Cobb subconsciously still believes it to be? In Cobb’s case, the totem is nothing more than an indication of his state of mind.

So back to the final moments of the spinning top. What we actually see is the top spinning for a while, starts loosing it’s momentum as if it is about to topple over, but then all of a sudden, it regains its spin again. The table is ruled out as it is too smooth to affect it, so why does it do that?

The answer may lie with the children.

Who will think of the children?

If the whole film is a dream, then what about the children? Are they real? Or let me rephrase that: did Mal and Cobb ever have any children in the real world to begin with? Once again, the film is too ambiguous to tell either way.

It does however seem very strange that a mother and a father could break away from their children for fifty years no matter how perfect their new world surroundings could be. Most parents probably wouldn’t last 50 hours before trying to return to their children. So personally, I don’t think they ever had any real children to begin with.

Then there are the beach scenes. Chronologically, the first beach scene is of Cobb and Mal building sandcastles right after arriving in the original limbo. They didn’t have any children yet and the only time they do appear in this world is when Cobb returns to limbo to get Fisher back. But by then, he was seeing projections of them everywhere.

The second time the beach appears is when Ariadne infiltrates Cobb’s dream. He takes the elevator to the top level, and there we see Mal together with the children building castles in the sand.

After returning to Limbo and letting go of Mal, Cobb now goes after Saito. Cobb once again lands on the beach and when he looks up, the first image he sees before noticing the guard and the Japanese beach house, are his children building sandcastles. Only, Mal is no longer in the picture anymore.

These scenes may illustrate the progression of Cobb’s inner world as all these scenes are memories or at least projections of them. So what’s going on?

Cobb is convinced that inception is difficult. Unfortunately, this is not really true. There is a whole field of science dedicated to studying how false memories are formed. We tend to believe of ourselves that we are logical, rational beings and that our memories never change. In reality, we are everything but logical, rational beings and our memories are constantly susceptible to change. In fact, scientist have now figured out that every time we try to remember a memory, we risk changing it forever (and therefore makes planting false memories possible). It may be that this little oversight on Cobb’s part that makes it so easy for Mal to manipulate him.

It’s very likely that Mal planted the idea that they had children, possibly because they wanted kids or as part of her plan to blackmail Cobb into committing suicide together. And because the idea was planted, Cobb never knew what his children actually looked like.

So at the very end, when the totem is about to topple over, Cobb creates something new for the very first time in what he had believed was a reality he couldn’t control: He finally gives his children a face. And the top returns to spinning perfectly again.

If you enjoyed this, you may also be interested in: Lost Highway explained.

As one Belgian – the first European to do so – handed over the command of the ISS back to the Americans, and will be returning to earth shortly after a six month stint in space; another Belgian was handing in his government back to the king, so he can prepare to become the first president of Europe in January.

And I would, for the first time, be visiting the European Parliament in Brussels. As this event pales in comparison to what my fellow countrymen have lately achieved, don’t expect to find my little excursion mentioned in any history book; not even as a small obscure footnote on page 527 or other. But I was there for a reason though. The TEDx Brussels event, also a first, was being held there, an independent spin-off the TED events that have brought world inspiration since… well, since its inception. While the official TED event is by invitation only, they do post videos online of some of their most inspirational speakers and their ideas about the world. Definitely worth a visit if you haven’t heard of it yet.

The European Parliament

The first Parliament building I have ever visited was in Dhaka Bangladesh as child. It was during a school trip shortly after it was completed. It’s an amazing building that probably got me interested in modern architecture. But the European Parliament (EP) doesn’t fail to impress either. As we walked through the Leopold park towards it, a huge complex of post-modern glass and steel emerged from behind the trees. Once inside, it was understandable why our ministers are always so enthusiastic about being seated in the EP. The place has an open, transparent and organic feel to it with rich details and enhancements everywhere. Nothing seems to have been left to chance here and is almost a city in itself. As we were guided thru its labyrinth from one building to the other, I couldn’t help but think: I wouldn’t mind chatting in one of the many open spaces with colleagues about trading tariffs with East Tuvalu if I could work here. Maybe explains why the British tabloids are so green with envy when it comes to the EU. :-)

Due to heavy traffic interfering our journey as we headed to Brussels, we missed the speakers and weren’t allowed in until after the first break. The conference itself was held in one of the smaller hemicycles, but still able to fit in more than 400 guests. The room was surrounded by almost 30 translation booths, seating two interpreters each. It’s an impressive amount just to manage all the different official languages spoken in Europe. Within the half circles center of attention, a simple stage was erected where speakers would advocate their points.

Many guests were apparently TED addicts who seem to live on a regular diet of the inspirational talks you can view on their site. So expectations were high. Many were expecting to be blown out of their minds, or as one of the visitors put it: he wanted to be kept awake at night.

TEDx Brussels

The first session I saw focused mainly on the problems of Africa. While I had the impression that for most, this was a far-from-my-bed-show*, I found the first speaker, Dambisa Moyo, quite interesting. She went on to explain something I had long suspected. That aid to Africa was in fact not helping it, but actually making things worse. The way I see it, anything that is advocated from the top down has no long term benefit. Those at the bottom will eventually become disenfranchised. I believe this is true in politics, urban planning, business and also aid. A bottom up approach has better chance of success. And from my experience when I was last in Malawi, it was from the individuals who were starting to take responsibility for their own future that gave me hope that things will and can get better. But the road is long and the problems faced still plenty.

One good thing about the TED sessions is that they are kept short. Each speaker has twenty minutes to get their point across. Unfortunately, not everyone was able to put together a coherent message and pretty much left their audience behind more puzzled then inspired.

So some of the more memorable talks were from Conrad Wolfram – creator of the Wolfram Alpha search engine – about his vision on how mathematics should be taught. Catherine Verfaillie gave us a down to earth explanation on the state of stem-cell research, the difficulties still faced, and how it will and will not help us in the future once we are able to regenerate cells of our own choosing.
The sessions I found most inspirational was that of time travel by Serguei Krasnikov, which now has gotten me pondering on how to build my very own time machine and how to test it, if it is ever completed.

The second session was by Marc Millis and his search for habitable worlds. That one was a real eye opener. The time, distances, resources and energy needed to reach other planets outside our own solar system is staggering. If you look what we’ve already accomplished with the ISS, we’re still in our baby-shoes*. So simply packing up our bags, and starting a new life on another planet – after we’ve completely messed things up over here – is not really an option right now. And hopping over to the next closest solar system in a timely fashion would require so much energy, we would have to sacrifice our own sun just to have enough fuel. In a way, it is hard to say if this talk was inspirational or more of a disillusion popped by a reality check. I therefore regret to inform you that it looks like we are going to be stuck on this rock a little longer than planned. In the mean time, be patient, make yourself comfortable and just try to make the best of it all.

*I’m finding that translating common Dutch phrases into English has a strange yet lovely appeal to it.

Remembering Chittagong, Bangladesh

Some ships meet their fate at the bottom of the ocean. Others continue sailing, long exceeding their expiry date, or are docked as museum pieces for the generations to come. But for most ships, their demise is spelled on the beaches of the poorest nations. In particular: the shorelines of Chittagong, the southernmost province of Bangladesh.

I was reminded of this place when seeing the photographic series of ‘Manufactured Landscapes’ by Edward Burtynsky. He has created fascinating photo essays on how mankind’s industrial hunger has radically altered our landscapes into beautifully disturbing places.  (His website unfortunately doesn’t allow direct links to the ship breaking series, so to get there, pick: works > ships > shipbreaking. His other series are also well worth visiting).

But it was thanks to a recent reunion with a classmate from my Bangladeshi days, that brought back many of my memories from that time.

A School Field Trip

It must have been in ’86 when my class traveled from Dhaka to Chittagong by train. Twenty-three years later, many of the details escape me. I can’t quite remember if this particular trip was supposed to have any educational value, nor whether we ended up in a guesthouse near Chittagong city or Cox Bazar, a place situated on the longest natural beach in the world. But what I do remember is this trip was fun. It was one filled with many firsts for me. For it was here were I was introduced to ‘UNO’. Easy to learn, and playable with many, it’s the one card game I almost always take with me when I travel.

More importantly though – and with a class of pre-adolescent teens whose hormones were starting to kick in – we discovered there was more to the opposite sex than we had been led to believe. And so we took our first clumsy steps in flirting with each other through elaborate paper counting games that would help us predict our future partners. The rules of which are now lost on me, but I’m sure it’s still played today by the upcoming youth. And as if that wasn’t enough, we even went to the trouble of organizing an ad-hoc dance party one night. Missing the proper ingredients to successfully pull such a thing off, such us proper mood lighting, we huddled into a small dark room, where we silently danced, so that we could here a puny sound coming off of the speakers of a small walkman someone had brought along. By all objective metrics, it was a disaster. But that wasn’t the point. When The Eye of the Tiger or Tarzan Boy played, all was good. We were having fun and that all that mattered.

It was also here were I learnt to spin the bottle and play truth or dare. It was even thanks to these very likable games that I was first kissed. Looking back, it was all very innocent of course. But at the same time, very new and exciting as well. It was just a matter of time, but by the end of the trip, the first couple of our class had formed.

A Hike to the Beach

It was during this trip – one late afternoon – that our chaperones took us out on a hike. We trekked over rolling hills covered by lush and green grass. Peering over hills and cliffs, the surrounding views were magnificent. Walking between natures untouched vastness, it was hard not to feel incredibly small and meaningless. It was a humbling experience.
If I have a penchant of traveling to weird and strange places, then this is probably where I got my first taste. For it was on these hills that I discovered the romance of travel. I’ve been pursuing it ever since.

As we walked closer to the coast, the Indian Ocean started to appear along the distant horizon. As we reached a cliff overlooking the shore line, the sun started to set. It was a dreamy and surreal sight to behold. At low tide, we stood before an almost endless and deserted beach. On it laid these two huge and rusty old ships – like fish out of water – and in a stage of decay. They had been brought here to die.

Although the clues were there, it’s not something I could have witnessed during a single sunset. But what happens here is the industrial equivalent of nature at work. The local villagers, using only their bare hands, will – like little creatures – crawl over these gigantic carcasses. As the oil – like blood –spills over and onto the beaches, they are slowly, bit by bit, torn apart, until over a period of weeks and months, nothing of these mighty ships are left.¹

Recycling to Survive

For me, the fact of seeing these ships in a place where they normally wouldn’t belong was amazement enough. If our teachers hadn’t stopped us, we would have probably turned them into a huge playground.

And although I knew they would eventually vanish, little did I realize the scale and endeavor neded to undertake such a job of breaking down a ship. Especially with the little means they had available to them. But then, by then, I had taken for granted that everything in Bangladesh got recycled. This was long before such behavior became fashionable in the west. Of course, this was not done out of any environmental concerns, but pure out of necessity to survive. Like the little children that would daily roam our neighborhood in Dhaka, carrying jute bags and filling them with any litter they could find. What ever they found would then be sold off to be recycled. Despite the lack of proper municipal services, our streets were always clean and for many, this was their way of staying alive. Witnessing this from the other side of the divide, I knew early on that I was in a privileged position.

And so upon our return to the guesthouse and sheltered lives, our only worry was organizing a party that night. The only thing we had to concern ourselves with was being the children we were, trying hard to grow up in a place where ships were sent to die.

¹) In Lord of War – a film about an opportunistic weapons dealer fueling the fires of war– a similar scene is depicted. Only here, we’re in Africa where an airplane is being dismantled overnight by the locals.

Improvising My Way Through School

The biggest culture shock I’ve ever had to experience in my life was when I had to return to my own country. I was thirteen when I was sent to a strict Catholic school in my new home town. Until then, most of my youth had been spent in international schools abroad. In comparison, my previous schools had been very lax and easy going. To add to the difficulty and after for years of living in an English speaking environment, I had pretty much forgotten how to speak Dutch and had to relearn it for the third time in my life.. I was given a crash course over the summer with a private tutor. But even then, it would take years before I actually mastered it well enough to take part in conversations. It was a frustrating experience. By the time I had found the right words to say, the conversation had long moved on to something else.

And if the communication problem wasn’t enough, I quickly discovered I had little in common with my most of my fellow students. Frankly, I found them to be close minded. Not that it was their fault. They had simply lived very insulating lives. While I had already seen half the world by then, most of them had rarely ever left the villages they had lived in all their lives.

I also had a serious problem with the strictness of the school system. Being in a position to compare, I found that the way they went about things to be very counterproductive. And to make things worse, I was not only subjected to the normal school curriculum, I also had to spend an hour after school every day in study. It was a moment where one was supposed to do their homework and review the subjects they had seen that day. Doing my homework was rarely a problem, but I was never one to actually study. I simply didn’t have the patience to take the time and memorize stuff. If the subject matter was interesting enough, I would automatically remember it. Otherwise I couldn’t really be bothered. That meant that in practice, the subjects I enjoyed, I usually past with flying colors (Do colors actually fly?). And the subjects that couldn’t hold my attention didn’t get my attention either. When faced with tests and exams, I simply improvised my way through it. This is probably also the reason why I always failed in French. You can’t invent new words and grammar in an existing language spoken by two hundred million people around the world. They simply won’t stand for it, and my French teachers shared the same sentiment. My lack of effort in certain domains showed in my grades and is it’s probably also the reason I was forced to follow study in the first place. What goes around, comes around.

Subverting the System

I had to fill an hour every day in which I was not aloud to leave my desk or even make a sound let alone talk to the others around me. The only thing expected from me was to do my homework and study, and that posed a serious a problem. I really had no intention of wasting my precious time on this planet with such silly things. So I tried to make the best of my less the stellar situation and started to improvise my way out of it. On my first day, I decided to write a book.

Big mistake!

Coming from schools with a relaxed attitude, the concept of punishment essays was completely alien to me. In my previous schools, you really had to misbehave before a teacher would intervene, and at worst, that meant being sent to the superintendent’s office. Not so in my new school. Any behavior that deviated from what was expected of the ideal student was enough to get you punished. Talking in class? A two page essay on why not to talk in class. Chewing gum? A five page essay on why gum chewing is an abomination of civilization. Not paying attention? Rewrite the school rules three times. Even not knowing the correct answer to a question could at times be punishable by essay.

And each lesson would begin with the students – whom had previously been punished – coming forward handing in their essays. And each lesson would end with a role call of all the students that had received punishment during the lesson as a reminder of how much and when their essays where due.

And there I was, on my first day at study, confidently writing the first pages of my first book. As they saw me write, some of the students around me started to react in excitement pointing their fingers at me, sniggling and giggling. Puzzled by their reactions, I continued writing, but without a clue of what all the fuss was about. Alerted by all the commotion around me, one of the study masters walked up to my table. Once he saw what I was doing gave me a frown. He then asked me if I was writing an essay. Well, actually, I was writing a book. But fearing I had to explain myself in a language I didn’t quite master yet, I went for the obvious answer and replied with a simple ‘yes’. Little did I know right then that ‘essay’ was actually code for ‘punishment’. Unwittingly, I had gained the reputation of a troublemaker on my very first day of school.

I quickly gave up on my idea of writing a book and concluded that if I was going to survive in this environment, I would have to outfox the system and everyone in it. It’s here where I discovered the ninety/ten rule. If you appear to be good ninety percent of the time, people around you will automatically assume you’re also being well behaved in the remaining ten percent of the time. Of course, no one can possibly always be a saint 100% of the time. But in practice, most people never question this assumption unless given good reason to. We generally don’t like unpredictable and complex world views.

And so I was quick to learn how to become a mischievous little bastard without ever getting caught. Especially considering some of the things I pulled off where quite public affairs. I would skip school on occasion, get into fights, commit acts of creative sabotage, sneak my way out of ever writing punishment essays, psychological manipulation, signature forgery, trespass, gamble with money, indulge in chalk graffiti… all while maintaining the image of a boy that would never hurt a fly. As I said before, it was counterproductive system. I was much better behaved in the schools that showed more tolerance.

Art School

But back to my problem: how to spend an hour in study without actually studying? I learnt how to pretend. Turns out, it’s really easy to fake. It’s sufficient to just stare at a page to fool a study master that has to keep a watchful eye on a fifty other students. And instead of making notes, I made little drawing instead. And it was during this time that I started dreaming up all kinds of funny situations and translating them into to cartoons.

Predictably, while I was having fun during study, some of my grades suffered. When I passed my second year there, it was deliberated that my scores where ok, but not good enough to continue in this particular school. I was thrilled. I had always wanted to continue studying in an art school, but they had denied me that option on the grounds that I was too intelligent for such a thing (In Belgium, a school education is mandatory until you’re 18 years of age. As a result, art school had a reputation as a place for students who would have otherwise dropped out if it weren’t for this law). But thanks to my laziness and my grades not up to standards, I was finally able to do what I always wanted to do: learn something at school that I actually enjoyed. Add to that, it wasn’t Catholic and it wasn’t strict. It was perfect. It was also a relief. I knew that if I had to remain in a strict school, that eventually, the only thing I would learn was how to be become an accomplished petty criminal.

But things turned around. The predictions that the lack of discipline at my new school would further make my grades suffer, were proven wrong. It was actually quite the opposite. Though I must admit, I was still not able improvise my way through French, but at least I was passing, though just barely.

The Cartoon Collection

But after two years of study at my old school, I had managed to accumulate quite a lot cartoon sketches. And it was during my first year at art school that I brought them all together, redrew them in a formal format and started to ink them in. A year later, I had created about eighty such cartoons. I even managed to get one published in a national newspaper. My biggest dream at the time was to one day win a place at the International Cartoon Festival of Knokke. It had even become a yearly pilgrimage to take a train to the coast and visit the festival exposition.

But those dreams came to an abrupt end once my second year at art school commenced. Play time was over. Faced with being creative against constant and extreme tight deadlines plus a very tough grading process to boot, everybody’s stress levels skyrocketed. Those who couldn’t take it bailed out and probably still have nightmares from that period. I managed to hang on long enough to see the light. But it left me with little time for other things. Especially after I quite by accident started publishing my own weekly class newspaper (which I continued doing until I finally graduated from secondary school). Somehow by then, I had lost interest in drawing cartoons. Instead I had discovered I had new passion: though I couldn’t spell, I loved to write.

This seems like a fitting post, especially now that she’s finally won an Academy Award for best leading actress in ‘The Reader’.

For most of us however, Kate Winslet’s greatest contribution to mankind must be that single most iconic scene from the film: ‘The Titanic’. For since then, any man or woman, setting foot on a boat or ship, will always be plagued by the irresistible urge to stand at its bow, with arms stretched wide and open.

Phone Sex

But it is her appearance in the comedy sit-com called ‘Extras’, that’s pure comic genius and just as memorable. ‘Extras’ revolves around Andy, a struggling actor with aspirations of one day making it big. But in the mean time, he has to make do with the actor’s equivalent of breadcrumbs: playing as an extra in the shadow of stars.

In this particular episode, he’s been given a small role as a German foot soldier in a movie about the Holocaust. The films lead role of a devout nun is played and portrayed beautifully by Kate Winslet. But in between takes – and still dressed as a nun – she freely exalts her advice on how to talk dirty on the phone to one of her colleagues in need. But then, she takes it a bit too far and gets caught.

I did finally see it, many years later. And if I remember correctly, it was in the Dutch Club in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Every Saturday afternoon, they’d show a children’s movie for us kids. The film, as it turned out, was terrible. Even though it featured Robin Williams as Popeye, it just seemed long and winding and everything but fun. Nothing like the cartoons.

The film did however give us this wonderfully odd little song by Shelley Duvall: “He needs me“. The song was used again in Punch-Drunk-Love, a quirky song for a really quirky film. This movie on the other hand, I can only highly recommend.