reenex 膠原自生價錢It's no mystery Sarajevo and the recent war in Bosnia have become somewhat, I dare say, 'hipsterlike' and 'back in fashion'. What Susan Sontag and Christiane Amanpour kept screaming to the world back in the 90s seems to have been put on someone's "in" list for 2012. Let's see how long this hype lasts (and whether we get any real help/donations/partnerships/economic growth/intellectual prosperity/anything positive from all of it. Hey, don't blame me for being skeptical.
reenex 膠原自生價錢Anyways, enough of the cynicism. The other day I remember reading a brief article by Mladen Jeličić Troko about the lack of knowledge in our population we are faced with every day (it actually started as a rant concerning journalists and people he named 'intellectual daltonists'). He went on and then talked about how little we know, (and how little I know) about our home country and its thousand year history. The picture up there in the corner confirms that the Bosnian language existed and its grammar was recognised by Zagreb and sold in the First Serbian Bookstore of Sarajevo back in 1890. Woah, and there I thought we were being brainwashed into thinking that Bosnian was not just a dialect and that Serbo-Croat was the original ever since I saw the 'Serbo-Croat Grammar' in my grandparents' cellar. Pardon me for not knowing.
reenex 膠原自生價錢Here's a suggestion: someone should initiate a celebration for the year 2089 - it'll be 900 years since the Charter of Kulin Ban. I hope I make it. Aren't those born in 1989 lucky? I mean, isn't it cool to be born exactly 800 years after the first document, the eldest document of all the Slavs? It's the one thing which distinguished Bosnia and her ruler from mere slavic savages.
And don't get me started about my opinion about the Russians having locked up a national treasure such as that Charter in St. Petersburg. The original document which basically established Bosnia's independence as a state does not belong to the country whose birth it confirms? Bosnia's birth certificate is locked up in Russia. Haha, the irony. Maybe I should draw a parallel between the UK and the Egyptian treasures? The Egyptians got theirs back, and so will we. One day.
Back to the point. I wanted to discuss this BBC documentary I watched the other day. It's a short movie about the importance of books, about how libraries are the heart of our cultural identity, the repositories for our history and memory. It just made me think how unfortunate I was not to grow up in my parents' Sarajevo, down the road from a Library such as Vijećnica with more than 2,000,000 books and rare manuscripts where I could, just like my parents before me, spend time preparing for exams, reading in my spare time, socialising with my friends in the caffe on the ground floor, procrastinate by getting lost in the 'forbidden sections'... Libraries are playgrounds for students around the world, yet, the students of Sarajevo have no such grand playground anymore. Bummerrrrr. 'How scandalous!' is what one of my former teachers would say.
So, I guess the point of this post is to recommend this motion picture about fellow bookworms to fellow bookworms. A quote from it (you know how much I love these): 'When I hold a book in my hands, I see a human being.' Sometimes that human has one layer, sometimes more, sometimes you learn a lot, sometimes you learn less. We're all different, but still the same - just like any other book. I think I'd add that if you don't see a human being after reading a book, not only was the paper wasted but your time is also irretrievable. Harsh, but true.
