Fellow Camels,
I hope you’re having a good summer (or winter in the southern hemisphere). I’ve been in India, traveling for the most part. As I travel, I’ve been reading a few American magazines to keep in touch with the red, white and blue hues. For now I bring you Obit. More to follow, I promise.
OBIT
Obit, a cognate now appropriated by the magazine, recognizable in the short-form of ‘obituary’ is a remarkable attempt for our Happy Meal times. Obit claims to “examine life through the lens of death”. An online magazine based in New York City, the barely four year old magazine is drawing attention from fiction and non-fiction writers alike and the magazine’s creative collaboration extends to prominent publications like the New Yorker, Rolling Stone and Atlantic Daily.
The lens of death?: Obituaries in Obit are limited to one section, and the other sections include science, sports, arts, business & politics. The subtitle of the magazine reads, “Life. Death. Transition. Death is only half the story, Obit is about Life”. Indeed. If it might have seemed that this was an attempt at the dark side of every front-page story, Obit provides nothing of the sort. Obit is, as I understand it, an urgent engagement with the confrontation of death (a universal, as the magazine emphasizes) in contemporary matters even as some delusional folks like Raymond Kurzweil are harping on about human immortality. For example, an article about Tiger Woods aging is written bearing in mind the impermanence of youth, reeking of Buddhist understandings of death even in life, or life without life, is titled “The Aging athlete: A Haunting Reminder of Death”. And this is exactly what its thrust seems to be for readers – a reminder of death in times when we live in the hope that a “cure” for death is just around the corner. Whether or not that might be the case, for the time being we can rest be assured to be buried, cremated or destined to dust in multifarious ways. Obit does the essential in this regard, i.e. it surmounts the wisdom arising from a sincere handshake with death in order to live a more enthused, invigorating and ethical life.
You might want to read the recent obituary to Osama Bin Laden featured in the magazine (http://www.obit-mag.com/articles/osama-bin-laden-he-brought-terror-to-america).
Tashi Delek! (Greetings in Tibetan from the Tibetan centre in-exile, McLeod Ganj, H.P., India)
