Hypocrite's Haunt

On Wednesday, the tenth of November, the constitutional court of Thailand ruled that the three major figures of a pro-democracy protest from last year were guilty of trying to overthrow the monarchy. One judge claimed that any attempt to “weaken or undermine” the monarchy was tantamount to an attempt to destroy the institution – and therefore, it is an act of treason, an attempt to destroy the country’s system of government. In Thailand, treason is punishable by death.   Milan Kundera said in his book The Unbearable Lightness of Being that metaphors were dangerous. Let’s see how dangerous they are then, shall we?   Protesters in Thailand fight so that our country can return to the rightful and legitimate form of governance – a fair democracy with a monarch as the figurehead. The court accuses them of trying to overthrow the “constitutional democracy.”   A general overthrows a democratically elected government and rewrites the constitution to remain in power t...

            In The Unbearable Lightness of Being , the main character, Tomas, noted that it was only because of a string of coincidences that he ended up meeting, and falling in love, with his partner, Tereza, and that if anything was even slightly different, she could have been spending the rest of her life with a different man. My meeting with this book itself was a similar, if much less dramatic, collision of chance. I had read another of Kundera’s book in a class on Czech literature – it was The Joke – and therefore was familiar with his biography and the themes he played with in his works. Nevertheless, I never got around to reading his most popular book, The Unbearable Lightness of Being . Years of mandatory readings have left me burnt out on literature, and it wasn’t until I went through a year of business school that I regained a hunger for stories. Near the end of my time at that university, I was moving out and had dumped a bunch of my stuf...