Has Capitalism destroyed human compassion?

Melancholy of loss

See all 19 photos

"We are hurtling into an uncertain future," said my favourite author, Orphan Pamuk, the Turkey's Nobel laureate,

who has brought his fictional museum from his latest novel 'Museum of Innocence' to life.

This is Istanbul's first city museum, it covers daily life from 1950 to 2000.

In the main protagonist's lifetime, Istanbul has swelled from 1.5 million inhabitants to 15 millions.

Gone are sleepy willages on the Bosporus. Tall glass skycrapers dominate where wolves roamed.

The book charts special moments in Turkey's modernization as the city's elite, desperate to not be 'Eastern' and backward struggle with...

Parisian fashion, premarital sex and alcohol. The house is full of everyday objects from a particular period. There is an atmosphere.

You walk around the rooms and you feel an unspoken anxiety about forever struggling to be something else - more modern, more Western...

and the secret fear that whatever we are, it just isn't good enough. A Turkish museum shows us our lives as they really are.

Why not dedicate a museum to what might seem shameful, to a longing to come clean, to admit to very human imperfection and pain?

There is a Turkish word for this melancholy of loss, HUZUN, a term first used to evoke the ache of man's loneliness.

In the 8 years Turkish prime minister Erdogan has been in power, Turkey's per capita GDP has grown nearly threefold and the lives of ordinary Turks improved dramatically.

And yet, that lump-in-throat feeling you get on your first night in a foreign bed, that ache of man's loneliness is more prevalent than ever before.

Orphan Pamuk's story is an ode to human fragility, its HUZUN is universal and widely experienced everywhere in our modern world.

The West may have lost the luxury of time. Countries may have to liberalize immigration policies to expand their working population and offset the burden of aging.

We need growth to make the world sustainable, but what we need the most is what French call 'solidarite' - mutual sacrifice for the common good.

What has happened to the entrepreneurial spirit and the desire to excel? People have to be encouraged to take their future into their hands.

With debt ballooning, inverstors in panic, policy-makers working on thougher choices that ever before in allocating tax receipts,

the question we have to ask: "Will they fund health care benefits, hire more teachers or buy more tanks?"

IN AN AGE OF TRANSFORMATION

more connected

as a world

we ever have been

in a 24/7

information drill.

Whatever happens

here

has an impact

immediately

all around

the world,

no safety barriers

no time to react,

technology

takes us on a ride

in a fast train

rushing

in a speed of light.

Governments

still play it safe,

chuffing along

on an old fashioned

steam train,

organized

as they were

in 1912.

Institutions

are the same

as they were

in 1950,

and companies

are operating

the way

they did

at the start

of the century.

We all rush

to hop on

that new-age train,

but the question is,

what set of values

we should leave behind

and which ones to take.

Some people

think about

cohesion,

growth

and greater equity.

Others

look for

more

innovation

and more productivity.

New industrialists

wish for new growth

without destroying

environment

while doing so...

Looking around

the crowded platform,

we realize

how important

is

the human factor

and its capability.

Is 20th century capitalism

failing

21st century society?

When even the haves

and the have-mores

can't agree.

Pushing each other

to get in

we don't even feel

ashamed,

having lost

our moral compass

living

in the world

of greatest

inequity

going backwards

on equailty.

Corporation

and greed

is on top of our list,

not innovation,

sustainability

and reform.

Many hubbers

answering this question

pointed out

great virtues

of capitalist society,

and I have to agree,

being the one,

leaving communism behind

so I can dream big

and live free.

Many people

are wealthier

than they ever were before

but we haven't solved

the problem

of economic disparity.

Reason,

values,

morals,

human knowledge

and people's collective unhappiness

are what bring about change.

People are critical

and the government reacts

by being progressive

moving for reforms

or being repressive.

Finishing my university in Russia,

I often question

the Putin's choice.

A great dose

of economic

stability

corruption

abuse of power

have emerged

in this new capitalist state.

In our capitalist dreamland

of America

people are selected by cosmetics

not substance.

Americans have come to feel

that politics is not going to change anything.

'Gone with the Wind'

an unrelenting tale

of how honour

gives in to greed.

Many Americans

suddenly realize,

wake-up calls in life

often come too late

or not at all....

In the more established democracies,

just like my new homeland,

Australia is,

people doubt major parties,

recoiling at their number games.

Australia is far away

from everyone,

but in today's world

we are more connected

than we ever have been,

Australians have grown cynical,

some of us have settled

for being disconnected.

In newly emerging capitalist states,

just like my old homeland

in Eastern Europe is,

people are tired of ballot ringing

and vote buying

and schoolteachers not being paid.

The loss of connection

with each other,

with the natural world

is the source of our apathy.

You can buy so much,

and yet

the most important things in life

are never for sale.

Do you have a favorite world in the English Language?

An aesthete from desert

See all 30 photos

"In 1960s a newborn baby's cry breaks the silence of the desert on the outskirt of an Aboriginal settlement.

She is born under a tree int he bush. Her name is 'Shell on Sand', after the place her child spirit came from.

It is a hard world that she has been born into. Central Australia is in drought.

She is the ninth child her mother has carried; four have died in infancy in the previous decade.

She is tiny, sickly looking the 'runt of the litter'.

Her mother makes a decision that is as old and harsh as the desert.

She decides to leave the baby girl where she has been born, to be killed by a snake."

We are sitting on a beach on the North Western Australian shore. It is a warm autumn day and the well-known Aboriginal painter is telling me the story of her life.

"I was left in the small shade of a burned tree," she pauses, legs crossed under her skirt, feet bare, staring at the coarse sand:

"In the last minute my mother changed her mind and came back for me, I am eternally grateful to her...

...otherwise I would miss to see all this beauty around me." She smiles her toothless smile.

"I was raised in humpies and promised in marriage at birth."

"Pregnant at 13 to a young man who grew to like the taste of bashing me and then my son died."

The memory of her dead son casts her suddenly into silence.

She ran away from her drunk husband and fell in love with a white man.

Their life roads joined in one, he healed her wounds, she started to paint...

She could see the spirit of her dead son everywhere around her...in the skin of a wild animal...

in the seagrass washed on the shore...

in the creek running wild through her dry country after rainy season...

in the colour of the rocks that shelter the settlement of her childhood....

Every morning she travels far into the desert, her home, to find the natural colours to mix and to paint with...

Every evening she sits next to creek bed soaking the beauty around her...

getting inspiration for the next painting...

the colours, the moods, the lines, everything is there in front of her, she just needs to look carefully and remember it....

Her story is told and I am sad but also in a blissed-out state of mine I suddenly touch a little shell next to my feet, just to feel what the texture is.

"I will paint this for you," she suddenly says: "The hand, the attachment of a person to a natural object, the light, it is a perfect portrait of you."

"Paint me like this?" I check my ruffled hair and dirty shorts, " Better not, I have to make myself more presentable."

She shakes her head sadly: "You, white people don't know anything about beauty, you just look for perfection...

I suddenly felt very ashamed, but she just takes my hand: "Come back and I will show you a beautiful world inhabited by pure and sincere people - a world that is almost at reach...

but doesn't exist for real." I kiss her good bye and she smiles for the last time: " In this world world, living, loving and dying are desirable, just come back and I show you..."

'Aesthete refers to a lover of art'

I read in a dictionary

imagining

an old and wealthy

hiding his priceless collection

then lending it

with a heavy heart

to one of those arty places.

Becoming a teacher

of Art,

an aesthete

is suddenly

an ordinary person

just like you and me,

sensitive to beauty,

with open heart

and attentive eyes

appreciating life around.

Aesthetic

relates to beauty

and good taste.

A subjective choice,

we make

in our daily lives,

but we all

find beauty

inevitably

in the arms of the person

we love

and suddenly realize

a simple life

really can be

a perfect life.

Aesthetics is the subject

of any conversation

among students of Art:

"Aestheticism is the study

of beauty

arising

from harmonious arrangement

of an eye-pleasing parts."

They say,

forgetting

that a myriad

of imperfections

unique to each part

make the beauty lasts.

And what about womanly beauty

of a dangerously bewitching kind,

over-represented in every type of art.

The unravelling of secrets,

the evocation of her desires,

a place shrowded in myth

for many of her admirers.

Once he find his beauty,

his object of desire,

he becomes

an aesthete of the heart.

As a photographer in a new landscape

he has to learn

his camera all over again.

He has to understand

how the light falls,

so he can capture

the beauty in her best.

It is up to her

to learn

how to live

in the arms

of her partner

and through the patterns

of her longings

and losses,

moments of being

a beauty on a string

learns to beautify the place around her.

"You should never neglect the edge of your vision,"

She reminds him sadly:

"It's there that something

is likely to reveal itself,

the development of wisdom

against a larger frame

of questions

that no one can answer."

He nodds

with absent present

slowly creating

a portrait of her

window to her soul.

He already knows

there is more to a great image

that a likeness to its subject.

A closer look,

her perfect stillness,

until he notices

those few

shifts in movement,

barely perceptible.

She became his lover

object of his art

and now she is leaving.

Portrait that has gone so far

into making his own character

out of this person

before an artist.

it really does raise

a lot of questions

about how we define art.

She stopped being

just being,

to become

an artist,

the creator

of the beautiful things,

that unlike her

will last.

Meditation on art,

the place of women in it,

their beauty

and their creativity,

the balance required

for the women artists of today

to sculpt a place for art

within the demands of love

and domesticity.

Beauty is known

for residing

in the limited spaces

where life reality and fiction meet,

often mediated by the poetic.

Aesthetes of my kind often ask,

where to find,

beautiful,

attractive

gorgeous,

ravishing

in a powerful sensual way

luscious,

voluptuous

beautifully dignified

delicately beautiful

exquisite...and so on...

It is all hidden

in the small transactions

of everyday life,

alongside

shared intimacies,

a sense of the human

of generosity

and charm,

familiar landscapes,

suburbs,

backyards,

passing scenes

outside

train or car windows.

A sense of what exists

outside the body

or just outside the mind,

especially

in heightened

states

stillness

of sleep

a shifting

and subtle exploration

of creativity

darkness

dreaming

and night

are tied inevitably

to the imagination

to the unconscious

and the irrational

alongside this

wild imagination

and the domestic

coexist

and the small,

practical details of lives

a kind of universality

that is practical and wordly

exists alongside miracle and creation,

in all of this

beauty of every kind resides.

Art is always about results

and there is no one way

of getting there...

there is a constant dialogue

between different ways

of accomplishing

the beautiful image.

The thing about art

it's always going to surprise you

so you are not going to imagine

what is coming,

the new thing

will always be

the thing you didn't expect.

It's enigma,

we often look up

for something

extraordinary

just to find out

a banal,

everyday scene

to take our breath away

and suddenly

ordinary

becomes

so memorable

so untrivial...

Art today,

as well as art of yesterday,

always presented us

with what we think we know

and then

offer us a totally different view.

Artists through their art

take us where are no roads,

to explore the new ways,

to go beyond

mere likeness and accuracy

and dwelve into something

deeper

something which reveals

the layers beneath the physical surface,

it has to tell a story,

a larger narrative

about us

and the world

we don't yet know....

'Aesthete' is my favourite English word,

because it describes you and me

and everyone

who is brave enough

to go to places

where others went before

and said

there is nothing to see....