In war, who won and who lost is not the question. There is only destruction.

(and more things we can learn from Vietnamese artists who have gone through all of this war nonsense before)

Pham Luc, Mother and Child, Ben Tre, 1972

I was at NUS last weekend, the National University of Singapore — and here are two things that happened.

First, in the university garden, we came eye-to-eye with a Pied Malabar Hornbill, one of the most fantastic creatures one can ever meet. If you want to know what this evoked in me, read this story, in which I relate how seeing a hornbill made me study the rhinoceros sutra (khaggavisana sutta), an enigmatic but most wonderful early Buddhist poem that sort of stayed with me and part of me for the rest of my life.

Then, we went to an art show at the NUS museum— with drawings and posters collected by Dato N. Parameswaran, erstwhile ambassador of Malaysia to Vietnam — and made by Vietnamese artists in what I have grown up with in the early seventies and always known and referred to as The Vietnamese War, but from the Vietnamese perspective is engrained in the collective mind as the horrible memory of The Great American War.

And look. Both events — the hornbill and the art — perturbed me deeply.