We are truly heartened by your warm, enthusiastic response to our inaugural issue and would like to thank you for your continued support. Thank you for reading, and thank you for spreading the word!

We are happy to welcome this month several new contributors – we’re sure that their disparate styles and contents will add to your reading pleasure. This month our house blend includes, among others, a treatise on art and the Indian state , a call for change, the nutty undertones of modern mutterings, as well as a selection of poetry served to the age-old refrain of love and unlove.

As usual, we would like to stress that L’Inkre is non-profit, monetarily or academically, non-partisan, non-prejudiced. We do it to write – and would like to invite you to join us on this journey! This month all our entries happen to be in English, but we welcome submissions in any languages. We’d love for you to join us as a writer, but as a reader, you’re important to us too – we need your feedback! Be it on the writing, or on the content, or on the website, any suggestions and comments are welcome, here on the blog or at inkre.magazine@gmail.com.

And for now, bonne lecture!



Or, a case of inextricably tangled metaphors

by &c

It started from the day your grandfather demonstrated that all it took to get rid of the white noise disturbing your favourite cartoon were a couple of firm knocks of his cane on the side of the television set – and perhaps a third on the top for good measure. A few judicious taps of the wand and voilà, problem solved! Just like in Harry Potter! People say the supernatural is just phenomena the sciences cannot explain yet – or could it be that we’re just n00bs?

In any case, technology has become like a religion to us, at whose altar we perform daily devotions, and there even is a plurality of cults – from the ascetic Linux adherents to the evangelical Mac users. Now that the “computer is personal again”, according to the HP prophets, we’ve gotten into the habit of carrying these little high-tech helpers around. And like any believer worth his salt, we have our superstitions too.

These personal gods or genies are highly temperamental, and we pander to their whims, afraid of offending them. We apologise for any inadvertent harm that comes to their, er, chassis, and plead for forgiveness. We bargain with them, to hold off their blue-screened wrath until our essays are saved. We bribe them with promises of lavish attention in the form of a scan session followed by defragmentation therapy, if they would deign to start their royal selves up.

Sometimes things go wrong anyway, and we seek guidance from other lost souls who have found the way. They proffer enlightenment in the form of shamanic rites: “remove the battery, then unplug the AC power source. Press and hold the power button for as long as the breath of a calf born on the last new moon, and don’t forget the single phoenix tear – your Bluetooth should work again the next time you start it up”. Had the instructions involved the drawing of a pentagram and human sacrifice we would remain unfazed.

Yet sometimes we are driven to despair, and begin to question God. We try to hide our crisis of faith, and surreptitiously look up other deities on public terminals, hoping to circumvent a rebellion, but the little devils are omniscient and our blasphemy does not go unpunished. Only as we are struck down by pent-up electrical rage do we repent, but by then it is too late, too late – the day we were taken in by the snake’s slippery promises of knowledge at the tip of our fingers is the day we condemn ourselves to the eternal vagaries of the coy, capricious entities occupying our magic boxes.

by anonymous

Look, touch, red, lip, dress, night
One, two, three – turn
Hold, smell, hips, back, chin, hands
Four, five, six – bend
Hold me tight tonight
Even if you don’t feel for me
I prefer you lying to me

Press, taste, neck, step, curl, ear
One, two, three – turn
Feel, pull, rose, tongue, leg, heel
Four, five, six – bend
Kiss me deep tonight
To leave a print inside
I prefer to bleed of you

Go, spin, elbow, circle, up, breast
One, two, three – turn
Come, grab, mole, eye, skin, whisper
Four, five, six – bend
Tear my dress
Crush my skin
I prefer to be emptied
To taste passion with a bitter tongue
Turn, bend
Red, lip, dress, night

When he told her he would leave her, she was not surprised. She was not afraid. In fact, her only emotion was sadness. Sadness flowed through her and she understood that the time had come where she would experience pain instead of happiness. All her arrogant assumptions that she would get what she deserved had failed her. Actually, what had failed her; was a routine. A routine where everything always went her way. Where she had only to wish for something and it would arrive. Suddenly she realised that she had not been wishing for him to stay, she had felt that with him everything was already certain. He kissed her passionately, held her close, they slept entwined and dined surrounded by laughter. She had left many men and never looked back, while he had never left a woman before. It was her turn to be left behind and she deserved that. He spoke as if he would return, he promised her everything he wanted. When he left; he kissed her gently and she cried. He, however, never understood that this was their last kiss.

This sterile landscape
will breed no sparks
but its infinite sea
of fine white sand
reflects the sun
well enough.

Welcome to the inaugural issue of L’Inkre Magazine, October 2009!

The idea for our little online magazine was created during the last month of summer before coming back to Sciences Po. After a lot of cross-continental emailing and a good dose of daydreaming, a small group of us decided to get together and set up L’Inkre out of a pure and simple love of writing.

Right now, we are a group of less than 10 people. Almost everyone of us in wrote a piece for this October. This issue is a simple mélange of the things found in the memory of travels, in the middle of a phone conversation, in a heartbeat skipped in a moment of happiness.

Most of our works are anonymous because we believe names and accredition is distracting. L’Inkre was not created for academic credit. We are running the magazine cost- and prejudice-free, so that hopefully the bulk of the work we do will be recognized on its own merit.

Voilà! We really hope that you will enjoy reading this issue. If you like the idea of L’Inkre and want to join the team or support the magazine in any way, please do write to us at inkre.magazine@gmail.com!

A girl on a bicycle, laughing as she darts a glance at the boys behind her. One is carefully balancing the other on the handlebars of his bicycle. Casually, despite the concentration the pose must have required, he offers,

“La première fois où j’ai dansé sur scène c’était là, au Petit Théâtre. »

Milan Kundera wrote in The Unbearable Lightness of Being: “The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful,” and it must’ve been in this area of my brain that this 10-second motion picture was recorded. A chance encounter in the fine needle-like rain of early autumn in Le Havre, affirming the universality that is this special place we accord to “firsts”.

First class, top notch – we often associate “first” with “best”, and the stereotypical overachieving Asian seeking more accolades to attach to his name perhaps personifies this. But there is that other kind of first, the over-sentimentalised, romanticised notion of “firsts”. Baby’s first steps. Photographs of your first day at school. A first crush, first love, first kiss.

And why not? If this is kitsch, it is the only base on which the brotherhood of man on earth is possible. You can’t trust lasts to be the last – the knowledge comes only from the bittersweet realisation that comes with hindsight. If you had known, there is no end to the perhaps you could have attempted, to satisfy your poetic memory’s need for closure. Beginnings, on the other hand, don’t betray you. There is only never before a first, and only possibilities after.

Not everyone can be first, but everyone can have firsts. All you have to do is dare.

Cap ou pas cap?

We sold the future on your doorstep

In April, with the distant horizon lending the perfect background.

Your eyes had that spark that I’d never seen before.

There was one feet between the both of us

Approximately the same distance as between the earth

And the sun.

Your face was to the side,

your cheeks dotted with gentle red.

But your eyes were somewhere else.

I don’t remember

who walked out.

It might’ve been me,

And it’s funny that I miss you,

Considering I don’t even know that

You’re there, or in my mind.

And you shine in that beautiful starry sky,

But it’s not mine.

Amidst the meandering Hutongs near Shichahai Lake in central Beijing north to the Forbidden City and in the shades of bending scholar trees, hides one of the most beautiful prince mansions in China: Prince Gong Mansion, whose two lords in the old days were amongst the most celebrated figures in Qing Dynasty: one of them is Prince Gong, brother of Emperor Xianfeng as well as a very important figure in the 19^th century modernization of China. The other was the notoriously corrupt Manchu minister Heshen, of Niohuru clan, who claimed, in his serving Emperor Qianlong, to have gathered a wealth equivalent to the revenue of Qing government for 15 years.

On entering the back garden of the mansion through the baroque-style marble gate, I was especially impressed by the elegance and tranquility of it (Yes, tranquility, albeit that there was a large flock of tourists). Clear streams of waterfall poured down from the ‘Taihu Stone’ into the bat-shaped pond (which symbolizes the notion of prosperity) beneath, and it is said that when the gingko leaves turn yellow in autumn, they would drop into the pond and drift gently amidst the ripples; in beams of sunshine, the leaves would look as if they were pieces of gold clustered in a basin. Careful tourists would notice that whereas running water flows through Heshen’s garden, there is no single drop of it to be found in the cloistered imperial garden in the Forbidden City, which fact later became one of the accusations against Heshen in bringing him to his downfall. However, history seemed to me too heavy a subject in such a romantic ambiance: I thought I could spend the whole afternoon half-lying on the bench in the water pavilion only to watch the ducks being chased by the geese in the lovely pond, and all the nuisance of life seemed to be blown away by the breeze to melt into the ripples.

Yet, I cannot help but once more think of that legendary figure who ordered this garden to be built, only to realize that I had felt by now more or less identified with Heshen: Although he was accused for being the most corrupt minister in Chinese history, compared to the Emperor, he was the one who really knew how to enjoy life. Despite all those traditional Chinese symbols that indicate wealth and fortune, the garden itself is not at all frivolous, but rather conveys an air of purity and serenity, and such is the magic of the place.

Moreover, Heshen might not have been the antagonist after all. To me, his figure was closer to that of an antihero. I was well conscious that Chinese official records are not always reliable, just as some scholars have pointed out, many of Heshen’s treasures were given by Emperor Qianlong as gifts. Whether Heshen enriched himself avariciously or not, I feel almost sure that the main reason why Emperor Jiaqing, son of Qianlong, wanted to get rid of him was the fear for his overwhelming power in court rather than repulsiveness against corruption. It is still so common today that ‘corrupt officials’ are convicted only when they begin to threaten ‘the balance of power’ of the centre government.