The River Laughs

Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha, 1922
This allegorical tale of a Brahmin's son who gives up everything in the search for his self is, in my opinion, one of the masterpieces of the 20th century. The story is short and clear, with one foot in Buddhism and another in Modernism. The first time I read this book (during one sitting in a Toronto cafe), I fell in love with it. Now, after reading it for the second time, I feel as if it will be the book I keep by my side, through out my life, for whenever I need to be comforted.

If you feel lost, depressed, unhappy or unsure about life in general, this book is worth a thousand self-help tomes injected into your blood.

Guilty Until Proven Innocent

I find it ludicrous that the Portuguese police wish to turn the parents of Madeleine McCann into suspects [Google News]. Anyone who has been following the case from the start and has an ounce of common sense knows they are innocent.

To me, this is just another notch on the long list of errors and mistakes the Portuguese police have committed. Starting from a crime scene that was not protected (anyone could wander into the room and check out the bed from which Madeleine was kidnapped) to material needed to be flown to the UK for DNA tests because they didn't have adequate facilities, the whole investigation has been a joke and I'm sympathetic towards Madeleine's parents fight to keep the case on the news - it's not like they could rely on the Portuguese.

I can see how seductive it is to believe the McCann's did it (as already seen in most tabloids): it plays into many people wishing the McCann's to be punished for leaving their children asleep while they dined with friends; it plays into our desire to see a Hollywood lining, a conspiracy theory, behind any crime that becomes major news; and it plays into the hands of news addicts who need a twist in the story to keep them interested, or their tabloids selling. But the truth is that if you look at the whole thing objectively, it's impossible the McCann's did it. Remember, they were in a resort with plenty of witnesses that had seen them with Madeleine until dinner time (leading to an initial suspicion that someone had photographed Madeleine at the beach); they were in a foreign country which they didn't speak the local language nor lived there; they were with friends during dinner and had no time to get rid of the body; and as soon as the alarm was raised (during dinner) they were surrounded by the media, the police and their family/friends/lawyers to the extent that they would have to be Houdini to sneak a body out and bury it.

The truth is that Madeleine was taken by a stranger (as witnessed by one of the dinner guests, who only realized the gravity of what she saw afterwards) and is now buried somewhere. Like the thousands of children that disappear each year, we'll probably never know the truth. As for the blood found in the car the McCann's rented 25 days after the disappearance, if you consider that these are parents holding on to any memento they have from their lost child, they could have easily carried into the car a piece of her clothing that had blood (from a nose bruise, from a cut) - the kind of minuscule evidence they were not even aware of as they drove around carrying Madeleine's old stuff - and some of it remainded in the car.

A part of me wonders if this latest turn in the investigation was some cynical arrangement between the McCanns and the police to keep the story in the news. But then I can't imagine the Portuguese police would be so crap as to allow that kind of manipulation to take place. It's more likely that they wanted to pose new questions to the McCanns, the kind they are not allowed to make if they are not suspects, and thus the reason for the whole charade. What a circus.