Ariuna's blog

Citizenship

ariuna — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 08:38:48 +0000

It takes a lot of bureaucracy and labor to be a citizen of a country/ a nation state (I used the word nation state because it might be useful later when I edit this entry for other purposes). You got to have no job to stand in lines for civil registration office for 2 hours. If I had a job and wanted to be registered, I would be ranting like hell. Luckily (in this case) there is constant 30% of unemplpoyment in this country, which means every third person is unemployed. Since I was the third person, I stood there for 2 hours and finally got to the counter. The things did not turn out to be as bureaucratic as I thought, it was worse. I had to go to UB to get my birth certificate (side note: I live in Darkhan). Such a hassle to go inter cities when you have a local registration office! Anyways now I understand why English speakers use the word bureaucracy as a synonym for public service. BINGO!!! Hereinafter turiin alba should be referred to as hund surtliin alba.

I used the word “a country” in the beginning of this entry, not a particular country, because the phenomena of bureaucracy and labor exist not only in Mongolia but everywhere. Living in the territories of a nation state requires you to be registered with all your details- name, birth date, address, religion (Indonesia), colour of your eyes ( USA), finger prints (Mongolia). I.e a nation state is a “control freak” who is in desperate need of knowing its habitants. If you are an Australian citizen, voting is mandatory or you’ll get a fine. If you are a male Korean citizen, army service is mandatory. These I call the labor- the state want you do something for it. This kind of labor is tangible and its written in the state laws and regulations. More or less tangible is the labor that asks for your patriotism and nationalism. The two are debatable concepts in all spheres and I acknowledge the competing arguments here, but I won’t go in depth with them. Just want to note that patriotism and nationalism is not inscribed in legal documents, but it permeates in the social norms and cultures. Politicians are automatically seen as patriots and they are respected because it’s a social norm/cultures.It reminds me of the saying “Turiin min suld urshuu”. Thus, social norms are invisible structures that impact your decision making. For example, people buy products made in their country even if the same products from other countries could be high quality and/or cheaper. I call this moral labor (moral tribute to your country of citizenship). Nationalism, on the other hand, is propagated by art and show business industry i.e pop culture. I will not go deeper about nationalism here because I had my say earlier. As is patriotism, nationalism is too a moral tribute to your country of citizenship. You can’t say it is a tangible labor that you specifically devote time to do it, but your actions are influenced by it. I almost got carried away from talking about bureaucracy and labor to patriotism and nationalism, but the bottom line is that “citizenship” makes you pay tribute (moral and tangible) to your country of citizenship both extrinsically and intrinsically. Bla bla.

Being twenty something

ariuna — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 13:29:30 +0000

I found this from somebody’s blog, but i can relate myself to a lot of it.

They call it the “Quarter-life Crisis”. It is when you stop going along with the crowd and start realizing that there are many things about yourself that you didn’t know and may not like. You start feeling insecure and wonder where you will be in a year or two, but then get scared because you barely know where you are now. You start realizing that people are selfish and that, maybe, those friends that you thought you were so close to aren’t exactly the greatest people you have ever met, and the people you have lost touch with are some of the most important ones.

What you don’t recognize is that they are realizing that too, and aren’t really cold, catty, mean or insincere, but that they are as confused as you. You look at your job… and it is not even close to what you thought you would be doing, or maybe you are looking for a job and realizing that you are going to have to start at the bottom and that scares you. Your opinions have gotten stronger. You see what others are doing and find yourself judging more than usual because suddenly you realize that you have certain boundaries in your life and are constantly adding things to your list of what is acceptable and what isn’t. One minute, you are insecure and then the next, secure.

You laugh and cry with the greatest force of your life. You feel alone and scared and confused. Suddenly, change is the enemy and you try and cling on to the past with dear life, but soon realize that the past is drifting further and further away, and there is nothing to do but stay where you are or move forward. You get your heart broken and wonder how someone you loved could do such damage to you. Or you lie in bed and wonder why you can’t meet anyone decent enough that you want to get to know better. Or maybe you love someone but love someone else too and cannot figure out why you are doing this because you know that you aren’t a bad person. One night stands and random hook-ups start to look cheap. Getting wasted and acting like an idiot starts to look pathetic. You go through the same emotions and questions over and over, and talk with your friends about the same topics because you cannot seem to make a decision.

You worry about loans, money, the future and making a life for yourself… and while winning the race would be great, right now you’d just like to be a contender! What you may not realize is that everyone reading this relates to it. We are in our best of times and our worst of times, trying as hard as we can to figure this whole thing out.

Nationalism in Mongolia

ariuna — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 16:52:21 +0000

I’ve been thinking about nationalism a lot lately because the filthy consequences are all around me. Nationalism is not only a power relations to maintain social cohesion, but also an instrument of aggression – within the nation-state as well as externally against other people.
Fear of other nations specially Chinese is concomitant with a strategy to promote nationalism in Mongolia with a mixture of fear of attack, fear of diluting the blood (I don’t see any rational& logical reason to this statement- there is no such thing as Mongolian blood or Chinese blood), some groups physically abusing girls who meet with foreigners, and instilling fear in the society. There are other soft methods that nationalists use such as poems, slogans, songs, comedy and some incident interpreted differently. I call it brain washing. People sub-consciously follow this propaganda because it seems the right thing to do and it is safe. However, lets see what impact the propaganda has on people who call themselves Mongolians.

Group dayar mongol

My interpretation: These people inflict their aggression on girls. They abuse Mongolian girls physically.

Poem

Монголоо өмөөрөхдөө сэлэмний ир шиг хурц бай, Монголоо өрөвдөхдөө сэтгэл зүрхнээсээ хайлж бай, Түүхийг чинь гутааж байвал түүнийг чи мохоож бай Түмнийг чинь зовоож байвал тэднийг чи тонилгож бай Тэнгэр заяатайгаа бүү март Ядравч харийн шашин бүү шүт Янаглавч харийн хүүхэн бүү тэвэр Цус чинь ариун гэдгийг бүү март Яс нутагтаа үлдэхийг үргэлж сана аа Чи Чин гүрний үлдэц биш Чингис богдын үр сад Чи чиигтэй шавар тагзанд төрөөгүй Чилийсэн шаргал талд Мэлийсэн сарны доор Онгон дагшин байгалын Орон зайд ор

This is how I understand this poem. Be aggressive, have pity on who you are, don’t admit that we invaded Eurasia, send the foreigners back if u don’t like them, be xenophobic, don’t ask for help, be superstitious, and believe that there is pure blood and not pure blood. So I guess you have to be a super complexed person to be a Mongolian.

Slogan

Ohid ariun bol tur ariun…
This basically means Mongolian woman should marry a Mongolian man. I don’t think you are born with a stamp on your skin that declares your nationality. You are born as a person not as a Mongolian.

Songs

Haranga – Zuvhun Mongoldoo.

This kind of songs disseminate wrong message that everything about Mongolia is great just because it’s Mongolian. You might care more about Mongolians and things associated with Mongolia, but it doesn’t mean the rest of the world is worse. The song could imply, in my opinion that Mongolia is the center of universe so rest of the world should know.

Comedy

X-Tuts- Geriin bogd

Statements such as ‘Have you seen Chinggis khan sweeping the floor? ’ instills patriarchy in the society. It makes patriarchy something inevitable, granted, fixed, and encourages superiority of men over women.

In the following video,http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/21/genghis-khan-returns-to-u_n_546631.html you will see a man trying to answer why he respects Chinggis Khaan in 1:09. I think the person who wrote the sub-title did a better job in answering than the man answering the question. This is how people become so nationalists-revering a historical figure/hero without any conscious reason why they do it.

I think we (Mongolia) need less nationalist and more patriots, because nationalist are “hooson tseejee balbasan humuus” but patriots give more priority to the interest of Mongolians without diminishing the value of other nations.

Analyzing June 1 from the Structural Violence Perspective (Part 2)

ariuna — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 14:28:37 +0000

The analysis of the June 1 incident from the structural violence perspective, does not point a finger to any person or entity or the government. But rather, it tries to condemn systems of the nation state for the outbreak of aggression. Here I am talking about volatility of the economical, cultural, and political systems of the nation state. Our current societal structures sub-consciously or consciously create volatility. The physical violence that we experienced from the state during the incident is the outer form of inner or structural violence. Direct violence is referred to physical injuries and the infliction of pain caused by specific person or the state. Structural violence, however, works slowly in eroding human values and shortening life spans. The structural violence is “damaging deprivations caused by the nature of social institutions and policies …and avoidable, perhaps a deliberate, violence against the person or community” (Burton 1997:32). For example, unequal access to resources, to political power, to education, to health care, or to legal standing are the forms of structural violence. Poverty, hunger repression, and social alienation constitute another way to characterize situations causing human misery. Quality of life is reduced by denial of educational opportunities, free speech and freedom of association. So in my analyses, I would conclude that June 1 was an aggression caused by accumulation of frustration with human misery and bad quality of life embedded in our current societal structure.

Analysing July 1 from the Structural Violence Perspective

ariuna — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 05:40:28 +0000

On 1 July 2008 thousands of people gathered in Sukhbaatar Square, Ulaanbaatar,
Mongolia to protest allegations of widespread fraud in parliamentary elections held on 29
June. The riot on 1 July was unexpected and unexpectedly violent. Police arrested over 700 people on the night of 1 and 2 July and over 100 more were arrested in the weeks following, for suspected offences committed during the riot. At least nine people were shot by the police, four people fatally and a fifth person died allegedly from smoke inhalation. The headquarters of the ruling Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party (MPRP) was destroyed by fire and protesters looted shops and commercial offices located on the first floor of the building. Police used truncheons, shields, tear gas, guns with rubber bullets and blanks, and live ammunition to disperse the crowds. The National Human Rights Commission of Mongolia also reported that police used “sprays with asphyxiant” and “electric truncheons” (Amnesty International, 2008).

Amnesty International and United Nations Special Rapporteurs on “inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, and the promotion” and “protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression” have condemned the actions taken by the Mongolian government in reaction to the riot. The government used force against the resistance to settle peace. However, it is a negative peace because they merely removed the violent situation by sweeping away the people who were participating in the riot. The state of emergency was merely a forceful decision to retain the social order prior to the election. The government’s response to fraud election was to hold another election in just one district out of 76 districts. Unfortunately, re-election in one district does not answer the structural questions. “Why fraud elections keep happening since 1990’s” ? “Why government is still oppressing political opinions with physical force ?”. According to Johan Galtung (1996) Negative peace is based on policy to lessen violence without altering the social order, but the threat and application of force pervades as deterrence to crime and violence, Positive peace, in contrast, is based on the eliminations of the structural sources of violence based on a different type of society. The structural sources of never ending election fraud since 1990’s lie in the concentration of power in the hands of few ruling elites. The power is about control dominations, and exploitation, and is constructed as relations of force because power involves coercion and repression (Foucault 2004). Where there is power there is resistance (Foucualt 2004). The the structural source of oppressing political opinion lies in the social inequality that out broke since 1990’s continues to widen until today. According to Paul (2009) “State imposes relations of inequality…to control [human] behavior and impose societal cohesion”. Therefore, societal cohesion or oppression is favorable for the ruling elites who hold the power.

Courtesy of Amnesty International

Reflections on cultural/societal difference

ariuna — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 12:59:38 +0000

March 27, 2010

They create system, framework, procedures, and models to create and mechanism to make decisions. I feel that this is a time consuming process. However, at the end, it would justify the outcome which is transparent, consulted by the group, taken into account different factors.
I am used to a decision making process where I take into account the in-depth knowledge of my supervisors, my boss or coordinator. Because I’m used to thinking that they know better. They have strategic vision. (Is it because their information/knowledge is usually not passed onto subordinates?) We make decisions as the issues come to our ways, which is time consuming as well, but if issues don’t come, we save time. Which is quite risky.
May1.
Another difference that I observed while working in Australia is that, they pay attention to every detail. They think that if one person addresses a question or issue, there are others who will be feeling the same way. Therefore this only issue is as important as other questions raised by few people. They are given equal importance.
I give priority importance to things that are addressed several times. I would pay almost no attention to issues that are addressed just ones. While I was thinking about this behavior I understood that my attitude being raised in socialist country may be coming out like this. The group rights and group interests are given more importance than individual needs or interest. Well, as I said it, another phrase comes to my mind- Majority rules. It is predominantly a democratic value. But my question is what is the difference between “Majority rules” and “group rights over individual rights”?

Finally at the Sydney Acquarium

ariuna — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 12:55:56 +0000

Crocodiles in Northern rivers

Crocodile is the first thing you will see when you enter Sydney aquarium. Huge and scary. This crocodile didn’t move an inch. We thought it was dead. Hopefully not.

Penguin-g zuvhun antarktidad baidag bh gej bodson chin australiin southers ocean-d bas baidag genee. Haluun orond ch bas Penguin bdiin bn.

Moon Jelly Fish

Jelly fish-g tsahilgaan tsohiuldag, aimar gej medne. Tiim l yum bn. Ene Jelly fish todruulagch shig ungutei haranhuid gereltdeg. BAckground hugjim n neg l freaky…sansart nisch baiga yum shig.

Dugong fish

shark

Dugong ged ene zagas delfin shig to hemjeetei yum blee. Tgeed neeh uruvdultei duu gargadag. Mahchin amitan bish bolohoor hoolloj boldgiin bn le.

Aquariumiin hamgiin gol amitan bol akul. Akul harahad zoriulaad Cistern dotor yavdag 2 zam bdiin bn le. Teher 1 zamaas nuguu taliin zamaar yavaa humuusiig harj bolno. Usan dotor hun baiga yum shig.

Ene aquariumiig haraad hool idehed ih saihan taivan gazar bn le. Buur zoriulaad heden suudaltai. Nadaas gadbna olon hun udriin hooloo avchraad idej bsan.Eej aav n huuhduudee avchraad. Happy families harsan chin Odbayriiga sanasan shuu.Neg egduutei shar huuhed bii.

Yurunhiidee olon humuustei yavsan bolohoor zugaatai hugjiltei bsan l da. Gehdee Seoul-n Coex Mall-d baidag aquarium-g guitsehgui yum shig sanagdsan. Minii uzsen anhnii aquarium bolood ch tegej bj magadgui. Gehdee Solongos bol gadaad baidal, uzemjidee ih anhaardag bolohoor ih goy tohijuulsan bsan.
Dalaid gartsgui ornii hun bolohoor medeej hereg aquarium oroh ih durtei. Ene sydney-d ireed ochij uzej baigaa 2 dah acquarium bolloo. Ehleed Manly-n Ocean world-d ochson. Sydney acquarium-n jijig huvilbar. Gehdee 2-la l hugjiltei. Manly aquarium n jijig uzuulber hiidiin bn le. Teruugeere Sydney aquarium-s yalgaatai.

Daraagiin doloo honogt Taroonga zoo orno bh. Teheere Kangaroo, emu geed nuguu aldart amitdiin zurag tavinaa

Friends around the world

ariuna — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 13:39:37 +0000

Zola and I at the airport

Naiz gedeg bol chinii itgedeg, durtai, hairtai, chamaig demjdeg, tusaldag, oilgodog huniig helne gej toli bichgend tailbarlasan bn. Nadad naiz gedeg n yamar baih yostoig oilguulsan Zoloo, Natalie 2-t zoriulj ene blogiig bichlee.

Ariuna bol hunees hamaaraltai bh durgui, tuslamj avdaggui, biyee daasan, buh yumiig uuriinhuuruu hiideg emegtei (Minii sul tal l da). Harin uuriinhuu medehgui gazar, hiliin tsaana garahaara ariuna naiz Zoloogoosoo hamaaraltai bolson. Buh yumiig Zolo umnuus n hiij uguud. Hunees tuslamj avch dasaagui ariuna, zolood hiisen buhniih n tuluu hariu barih yostoi gej bodjee. Tgd Ariuna neg yum bodood yag hiih gesen chin tuluvlusniih n daguu bolsongui…tegeed zolood helehees uur argagui boljee. Tegsen chin Zolo uund n durguitseed “Tgvel naizuud baigaad yaah ve” gej helsen. Zoloog ingej helehed bi ch yostoi muuhai baidald orloo. Hunii saihan setgel ruu us tsatsah shig bolson bz. Gehdee bi uuchlalt guisan l da. Nadad saihan setgel gargasniih n hariud bi busad naizuuddaa saihan sentgel gargah yostoig oilgoloo. Amidraliin hicheel 1.Life lesson 1.

When you come to a foreign country, you don’t know anyone, you don’t know where is, what is and why is… and you become solely dependent on your one and only friend, Natalie. I am a person who like to do things on my own, independent, don’t like to get help from others and don’t like to be dependent on others. When I do get help I have to give back. I’m not used to having so much help, support and care. Therefore I wanted to say thank you very much. As much as I wanted to payback by all means. I know she wouldn’t let me. So I should give this back to my other friends when they need help. Thank you Nat for all that you’ve done over the past month. (This is the life lesson I learned from the girl in earlier paragraph. So I should’t repeat my mistake this time.)

Natalie and I in Mongolia

Why I’m writing a blog

ariuna — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 12:07:40 +0000

The movie Julia and Julie inspired me to write a blog. I used to think that blog was created to share your thoughts or what’s happening in your life, but Now I know you can you use it for anything. Like in the movie, Julie was a writer and she blogged about her experiment cooking food from the Julia’s cookbook. Someday I want to write a book. This blog will help me be motivated. Occasionally I will use the blog to update my friends and families about what’s happening with me here in Sydney.

My blog will be written both Mongolian and English languages, depending on the nature of the topic. As much as I wanted the first entry to be in Mongolian, I couldn’t get the Mongolian language installed on my computer. So here it is….