Nice To Meet You, Mr. Recession

Narratives without some sort of reverse chronology is going extinct. If creative in the beginning, reverse chronology has become the default form of telling a story. Now, THAT is annoying.

Take the movie La Vie En Rose, the life story of French singer Edith Piaf. It is a classic example of too much creativity in narratives comes in the way of telling the story. For over a dozen times, audience is brought to another time and place, another stage of her life. It is not in chronological nor strict reverse chronological order. It jumps from childhood to death bed, then back to childhood, then midlife, then youth, then old age, then youth…

The director takes great pleasure in constructing the story as if her life is a jigsaw puzzle. You are confused about why she prays for her Dad? Here, another piece of her childhood, and Voila, puzzle solved, and we should all exclaim at the director's genius: oh…that's why. How clever! The biggest surprise comes at the end, when at death bed, the director takes us again back to her youth where the biggest riddle was solved. But come on, telling an interesting person's life story need not be an art of cutting, dicing and reconnecting the little pieces. There is great beauty in starting a story by "once upon a time…" and ending it "lived happily ever after."

Another disappointment is Joseph Stiglitz's Globalization And Its Discontents. Claimed as a key piece of analysis on the past several decades' development issues, the book did not appear as a serious academic endeavor. There is no depth and no research to back many of his arguments. Besides, the whole book is a repudiation of the IMF policies, yet without properly laying out the argument on IMF's side, it lacks credibility in its attacks against it.

Recently, I had the pleasure of meeting a powerful man – Mr. Recession. Since his arrival, my world has changed lots. From missing co-workers to closed stores on my neighborhood, I am just getting to know him more. And the hope is he does not stay for too long.