Tactics & Strategies

Last night I watched Slumdog Millionaire for the first time.

First of all, I just have to say that I finally realized why it won so many awards - great movie! Now, I think it's pretty clear from the get go that Jamal's main strategy for entering Who Wants to be a Millionaire isn't the money. In fact, Who Wants to be a Millionaire is a mere tactic for his main strategy: finding Latika:

Ever since Jamal loses Latika for the first time, his strategy always is to get her back. First he gets a job back where they lost her in the first place and tracks her down in a bad part of town. His tactic is to find one of the beggars that he used to run with as a child and to have him lead Jamal to Latika. After they escape, Latika disappears again, this time with his brother Salim. Now Jamal's tactic is to track Salim down with help from his telephone company, somehow hoping to find Latika with his brother as well.

Salim has a different strategy, however: Money.

Salim will do whatever tactic it takes to accomplish his goal of gaining money: murder, theft, abduction. Two brothers with two entirely different strategies, both with their own tactics, and only one outcome: Jamal and Latika.

Overall, there are tactics and strategies almost anywhere you look, this movie was only one great example of them.

Spaces

All of this time and I still haven't found an awe-inspiring connection with spaces in my life. In her book, Juffer brings in this quote from Doreen Massey:

Instead, then, of thinking of places as areas with boundaries around, they can be imagined as articulated moments in networks of social relations and understandings, but where a large proportion of those relations, experiences, and understandings are constructed on a far larger scale than what we happen to define for that moment as the place itself, whether that be a street, or a region, or even continent. And this in turn allows a sense of place which is extroverted, which includes a consciousness of its links with the wider world, which integrates in a positive way the global and the local.

I like that Massey uses the word 'moment' because I find it so much more fitting than 'place' when talking about spaces. I started to think of my 'space' here on St. Ben's and then started to think of a "Bennie" in general. Why is it that so many people are proud to call themselves a Bennie if it just represents a college? This space that we exist in is more than just ... a physical space. The College of Saint Benedict, in logical terms, is an institution. A collection of buildings - made of cement, stone, wood, etc - inhabited by us students.

But a space, in Juffer's terms, is not entirely logical. Like Klein would say, it's the differences that construct the space. That is what makes a Benny proud of their name - differences. Our 'second campus' - St. John's - is part of that difference. Although someone from St. Ben's may rightfully feel like a part of St. John's, it's still different. St. Ben's is where they sleep, where they 'live', where they first met some of their closest friends. Those tiny differences help to make up their own "sphere" of what it means to be a Benny. Maybe it's the fact that they're proud of being "different", aka rivals, than St. Thomas. Or maybe their being different by being the first generation in their family to go to college.

Whatever it is, there are different spheres that connect to form the 'space' of being a Benny, different...differences... that either bring people together, or leave others to their own spaces. To each his or her own little moment in time that is constantly changing as the world constantly becomes different.