What do I say about this?

Georgia Tech hosted a Palestinian Film Festival, screening a series of Documentaries and films by Palestinian directors, to raise awareness of the conflict that exists in Israel. I can already read your mind, what? You mean some people don't know? As sad as it may sound, some people are really ignorant about what else goes on in the world. I attended the festival just because these are things I would not be able to watch easily, as obtaining these films would be very difficult. I managed to attend 4 out of the 5 nights, because I had a Computer Science test on Tuesday, so I had to miss the Monday night premiere. So I managed to catch 'Rana's Wedding,' 'Frontiers of Dreams & Fear,' 'Chronicles of a Disappearance' and 'Arna's Children.' Two films and two documentaries. I must say, they were excellent, at
least in my eyes. The documentaries were filled with emotion, especially last night's 'Arna's Children' where the documentary spans over a decade, and it starts off with showing children drawing or acting in a theatre play in a children's home, but slowly they turn from innocent children to adults with a vengeance. It was really sad
to see these kids who we somehow found an attachment to in the beginning of the film ended up committing suicide or being killed while attempting to fight against the occupation. It was somewhat 'The Motorcycle Diaries' like, which disturbed me very much for the night. Equally interested was what followed after Thursday night's
screening, where, during an open forum, a guy stood up and blatantly criticized the film ('Chronicles of a Disappearance') and the purpose of the film series. He identified himself as a person who actually grew up in Palestine, who saw his friend shot dead in front of his own eyes and also someone who survived getting shot. He accused the festival of not being useful, that all we do at the end of the day is watch the films, talk about it, but do nothing about it in the end and make ourselves believe that we're enriched by the event. He has a point, I must agree. To an extent, for some people, this is a facade into thinking that we're being so artistic, that we care for peace in Israel and fighting for justice, but what more are we doing about it? There's hundreds of festivals like these, but nothing is changing. Palestinians are still dying, suffering and there's no progress. If we really cared, then we would have conducted a collective effort to do something about it. But in the festival's defense, that's not what the festival aimed for. This was to raise awareness, not to kick start a renegade campaign. Besides, the conflict has existed for at least 57 years since the creation of the State of Israel, and hundreds and thousands of years before that, it's not going to be that simple to put the conflict to an end.

But then again, at the end of the day, who am I to say such things? I am neither an Israeli or an Palestinian. There were times during the
guy's rant that I wanted to stand up and tell him that it's not going to be easy with the way he's proposing things, that it's not just an one-sided affair and that no matter what people like me say, there'll always be people like him who'll ask in return 'Did you go through this,' 'have you seen that' and basically put our attempts down. Who am I? I am nobody in this argument. All I can do is take opinions
from both side and come to my own conclusion. He's gone through a rough life, I must admit, but at the same time, I don't think that being bitter about it for the rest of his life is going to make things any easier for him and the people around him. But then again, who am I to say that to him? Saying things like that is so easy for
us people who's never gone through such pain and suffering as he has.

So the Palestinian Film Festival did serve its purpose, with
controversial confrontation to raising awareness. I'm glad that I attended as much as I could for this event.

On the other hand, something unusual took place over the course of the end of the week. I probably should not mention any specific name, but apparently, some professional was trying to find out more information about the company that I work for by googling it and somehow, that led him to this blog, since I had mentioned the company's name in my earlier entries. He then attempted to contact me by googling my name, which led him to my ex-room mate's webpage, where he then contact him to contact me. We ended up exchanging e-mails and even talking to each other on the phone in the end. I didn't see any foul play, he was simply a professional trying to find out more about the company that he was intending to interview to get a position for. I helped him as much as I could without compromising the company's stand on confidentiality and privacy. But just the way this took place caught me a little off-guard, and got me thinking about a lot of things. Almost instantaneously, this led me to back to my high school days where a friend of mine wrote some derogatory statements about our chemistry professor, not realizing that the professor was married to a very respectable professor in an
university and the nickname that she put up in her blog was not our professor's name, but actually what he was prominently known for. So some person was looking up this famous professor in the internet and because my friend has mentioned that name in her blog, that led the person to her blog, and guess what, that led to a whole lot of
ugliness, she getting called into the professor's office and having to explain why she made such comments and whatnot, and it ended up in she having to shut down her blog. Now, my situation isn't like that at all, but it got me thinking about how people can be tracked down in the net. He mentioned in the phone call, 'You leave tracks everywhere.' It is so chillingly true. At times, I feel like I cannot
be completely free in expressing my thought, and feel like I have to censor myself, but then again, by doing so, I'm not fully conveying my message. Some people believes that what they say in their blog or webpage is personal and thus, no one else can say otherwise. But that is not the case. If you're putting anything in the world wide web, it is public, no matter what. The fact that anyone can visit your blog, unless you have a password protection (even then) is what exists in a public domain, nothing is private. Which means, anyone can read your blog and take your words against you. There were number of high profile cases where some employees got fired because they bad mouthed something in their blog, and as much as I hate to say, they deserved
it, because now everyone can see what you say, and that'll damage the company's image.

What am I trying to tell you all? What watch you say. Sure, it may be your blog and whatnot, but that doesn't give you the right to say anything that you want. AND don't mention anything that will cause you to bring yourself trouble. That's just plain dumb, if you were to say that you were smoking week or getting drunk on your website, anyone can take that against you.

For a moment, I thought of shutting my blog to private, so that only my friends could have access to it. I'd like to keep my thoughts and opinion private, and especially after this incident, it gives me a lot to think about about what I can actually put up on my blog.

I rented Akira Kurosawa's collection of short stories, called 'Yume' (or 'Dreams') on Netflix, and boy, I must say that I was stunned by the beauty of it. Some of them are really dark, but it's a nice examination of how we don't value our lives and all. It was a
really nice escapism into his dreams to get something out of it.

I've gotten some of my tests results back and they don't look good at all. I barely made Cs in the two that I have gotten back. From next week onwards, I'm actually gonna start revising for the finals which is in about 30 days. I have to make sure I get at least a 3.0 for this semester and if I go on like this, I won't make it. Next week will be last of the testing weeks before the monday of thanksgiving which will be my last Material Science test, so after that, I should
go all out into finals preparation.

But until then, I'd like to take a big rest from the week by getting plenty of sleep and catching as many movies as I can. That's my antidote to the life that is at Georgia Tech.