The Power of None

I find one of the most unfortunate paradoxes of student lifestyle to be that, while the very design of our endeavour mandates us to engage our minds in the heights of academic debate, thinking thoughts with various degree of real life applicability, that same occupational design forces us to fight the most mundane of battles. In other words, intellectual rigor is not yet purchasing power, and I for one have found my rights as a consumer violated on a number of occasions chiefly because my pattern of consumption, saving, spending, or rent-paying evidently does not tickle the relevant service providers sufficiently for them to care about the quality of their product. The particular disturbance I find myself entrapped by, and the bizzare fuel for my attention deficit vis-a-vis academia, is that my landlord has undertaken a, as of the moment, two month long repair work of my terrace, rending it inaccessible, failing to complete the work on time or provide adequate compensation for the inconvenience caused. What could I possibly leverage in this dispute? My Financial Regulation essay? My knowledge of market based regulation? My ability to express my utter aggravation with a number of synonyms and metaphors? None of these would work, that is certain. My intuitive decision to assess whether the UK housing market has a built in safety net helpful in my situation led me to the advice to contact a solicitor. A banal advice which, again, brings my monetary predicament to the forefront, not to mention my distaste for wasting time at the moment. Oh dear.

I won !!!

I freakin' won the Bernard Levin award. I am just going to use this platform to brag, since it's pretty much only darling Aleks Giga who reads my blog, I think ... I will be going an internship at the Daily Mail this summer and fingers crossed find a way to stay in jounralism. So here's the entire winning essay. The award presented said it was "un-put-downable"!

Failing LSE

7AM. Vivaldi’s Spring. Lights. And all that jazz. Toothbrush, coffee cup, run for the 243. Monday traffic, newspaper. Oh, look, it’s my Financial Regulation professor in Letters to the Editor again, and the topic for next class on the front page. Who needs a course pack anyway? Aldwych, The Royal Court of Justice. BUS STOPPING. Dash to class. Good morning, Buenos Días, Привет. I can never remember how many times they kiss hello in Chile. 22 classmates, 18 countries, 10 accents, 100 opinions. We are an argumentative bunch. Last Friday we came up with 12 reasons why new policy of the old chairman of the Federal Reserve might be wrong. In the break between two lectures we disagreed on Beckett as well. Professionals go to conferences abroad to discuss change with leading academics and other bright minds. I go to school.
Have you listened to a Rachmaninov concert for piano and orchestra? It usually starts off with a theme played by the string instruments, which later repeats, while the sounds of a grand piano pierce the violin-lead harmony to disturb the unison and leave a mark. Existing in the LSE reality makes me want to be a Rachmaninov piano. The student body would be my string ensemble. I marvel at the thought, energy, and enthusiasm accumulated on Houghton Street. Yet every day, I get reminded, I am not the only piano around. The Union, the street, the classroom, the pub are buzzing with the allegro appassionato solos of young people decisively taking over platforms and championing the causes they hold dear. In discussions on state intervention and entrepreneurship, on racism and freedom of speech, the public-private border is stormed. Private conversations can be as enlightening as public events, making it incredibly difficult to choose between spending Tuesday evening sparring intellectually among the Debate Society or discussing climate change with a Lord. Ultimately, the discourses enrich us more than the conclusions. In the dissonance of melodies, we strive to emerge harmonious, failing gloriously and walking away with more questions than answers. It’s a failure worth every penny.
One of my favorite things about the LSE is that it trivializes exceptionality. Take for example the book I bought this week from the bookshop on campus. It is arguably one of the most up-to-date and well argued books on its subject at the moment. It was Tuesday afternoon, and equipped with my new purchase, a cup of fair-trade mint tea, and a spare hour I sat in the Fourth Floor Café, only to be handed a colorful schedule for this year’s Economics and Finance Society conference. Imagine the pleasant astonishment when among the familiar names of LSE academic champions, I spotted the very author of the book I was holding. Before I knew it, I found myself front row seated, bright light lit, questions scribbling, and talking to a friend who had just interviewed the star panelist for the school newspaper. A nonchalant waltz to the forefronts on knowledge.
I went home that evening and stayed up late finishing the book, going over the issues the writer had raised in her speech, and trying to come up with conclusions of my own. As student tradition requires, my nocturnal musings completely disarmed the frantic sounds of my wake up alarm, forcing me to fast forward my mourning routine and speed off to class. Yawning recollections from last night’s reading collided with the sounds and smells of London in the morning; my affection for living in a dazzling metropolis mildly diluted by the pressing need to make my way through the cultural smorgasbord and get to class on time. Valuing punctuality is generally a good idea. Valuing punctuality was particularly beneficial that day, as the guest lecturer was not only an accomplished professional, but a change maker discussed in that very book bought, by that very writer I met earlier in the week. This lecture was an exceptional opportunity; it was also just another day at the LSE.
7AM. Vivaldi’s Spring. Lights. It is Friday already. As the pages of the calendar turn, I wonder will I ever be surrounded by a group of individuals this diverse, intriguing, witty and challenging, as I have been throughout the year. The chatter of Houghton Street campaigning shakes me off of my introverted retrospect. A line for tickets in front of the Student Union desk. Whose prime minister will be visiting the School next week? E-mail. Will I join few friends for a concert at the Royal Festival Hall next Monday? Of course I will, Rachmaninov is in the program. Glance over the seminar topics for the next lectures. More questions with no clear answers, another discussion to be had in class and continued over mint tea, another chance to learn what I need to learn more about.
LSE’s “motto rerum cognoscere causas” or “to know the causes of things” is a quote from Virgil's Georgics. Virgil's affinity for Epicureanism and the belief that the highest pleasure is achieved through knowledge and friendship suits us well, even if epicurean value of modesty and moderation does not completely fit a student body whose protests kidnapped the British headlines in the 1960s.
Midnight will strike shortly. A question I have been putting off all week lingers on my mind – how to encapsulate LSE’s vigor, where to apply the drive and curiosity the School fosters when the academic year is over? The concern is legitimate, but I am not too worried. Bernard Levin himself was never able to choose between Vietnam and Wagner. After all, to know that the best question is the one with no easy answer or a single answer at all, to be able to fail at being one-dimensional and narrow-minded is what our LSE degrees are really about.

"Image of Three Bulgarias"

I'm back home on holiday from school, reading a recently published book of a Bulgarian journalist and graduate of my high school, whom I've always admired. The man was already in his eighties when I first learned who he was. I recall a tall, well-groomed, evidently intelligent elderly man giving interviews against a background of the purple-and-golden American College of Sofia diploma. The same one graces my grandma's living room right now. The idea that the erudite journalist and I shared a common educational background has always tickled my self-confidence.

Reading his book, I realized however that ACS in his time, in the 1930's, before the school was closed during the Bulgaria's communist era, had much more influence on its pupils than it did when I attended it, or than it does now. He speaks of single-sex residence halls, strict curfews, and punctual punishments, we knew nothing of in our frivolous days of high school. Anyhow, ACS and the contacts you make there have a way of sticking with you for life. It has been true for the author of the book; it has so far been true for me. This is not really the motivation behind my blog post.

The writer's surprising short-sightedness on some issues is. Born and raised in the perfect centre of Sofia, educated in law, with a career in news reporting, who managed to never join the Communist Party, and stay, from what I am reading, critical of his time and his politicians, he shares some astonishingly flat views on the Balkans. Perhaps I have lost my taste for nationalism, more precisely I have never had one, but his account of Macedonians as a nation towards which Bulgaria should take a strict lack of tolerance policy, and Serbs as the arrogant man of the Balkans who is now left in Europe's back yard, bothers me.

The reasons are few. It does bug me when Macedonian press denies the presence of Bulgarian minority on their territory, of course it does. But leading a foreign policy based on threats, mimicking the IR farce Greece has been promoting for years now -- that's petty and counterproductive. If Macedonians see themselves as different ethnic group, let them. Their entry into NATO or the EU is not a matter of what the official name of their country is. It's a matter of ethic stability and economic indicators. Simples.

Then there is the story of meeting this Serbian Associated Press reporter in the 1970s the writer shares. He was full of himself, he concludes, because he spoke to him in impeccable British accent, refusing to speak in Serbian. Well I speak English with my Serbian friends. It IS easier. And it is in English that I've found out their views on Balkan politics, their sometimes inexplicable to me national pride, other questions on which we disagree, and quite a few things we share and which have made us very close. What I really don't enjoy is this incentive for comparison of nationalistic egos that the Balkans so successfully foster. So I am more critical of my country than you might be of yours. This doesn't make our institutions more democratic, our political leaders better versed, or our judicial systems more transparent. And we're not fooling anyone, except, perhaps, each other.

Coming to the end of this book makes me wonder, was the destiny of a critical intellectual living his most active years in communist Bulgaria bound to come down to believing that everything around you is idiotic, including the transition years and all international conflicts. Quite possibly living with the schizophrenic five-year plans of the Red Party leaders, a truly twisted take on economics as I learned by a bear-of-a-Russian professor of economics in Haverford College, Pennsylvania, really makes one an irrevocable skeptic, adamantly believing that human stupidity and herd like behavior is the root of all evils.