I wept when I witnessed the video of US Airman Aaron Bushnell setting himself on fire in front of the Israeli Embassy in America in protest at the Gaza War, and later passing away from his injuries. It cannot not be spoken of…What cuts through my own emotions is a real need to plead to everyone hurting out there - please reach out and connect with others - and young people of conscience, please don’t leave us. We need you more than ever.

It seems to be that during times of great planetary change, if you’ve lived a while and done a lot, you find yourself looking back and taking stock to try to better understand the present. Artists,..we tend to keep a lot of diaries and notes too. Here are some visual and audio diary entries from between 2009 and 2010 right in the middle of painting my series The Assassination of Judy Garland, which was a processing of the 2008-09 Gaza War, the election of Barack Obama, the start of drone use in wars, and of course the so-called ‘war on terror’ years.

I urge you to take a break from people who don't allow you to grieve, and it's ok to tunnel vision for a short while, but leave the door to your tunnel ajar, for all our survival depends on that tiny sliver of hope, of light we allow, like a thread to keep us from getting lost in the forrest.

On this tragic, painful week for both innocent Israeli victims of the Hamas attacks and innocent Palestinian civilian families suffering in Israel’s bombings and water, electricity, medicine and food siege of Gaza, I am reposting some paintings I did around 2009/10 after the Gaza War of 2008-9…and nearly fifteen years later, they have lost none of their meaning for me.

Sometimes it seems like we learn nothing from our conversations. From 2012 when I addressed policymakers in international intervention in the UK, to this 2017 cover art for Kyle Grayson’s book on targeted killing and drones, the warnings have been clear from many well-informed people. Yet we just didn’t want to think too deeply about it. This May 2023 article by Gabriel Honrada in Asia Times triggered that sense of “again?” feeling…

This post is a little drip-feed post of excerpts from my Dad’s unfinished memoirs. I’ll keep adding to it off and on. He died in 2018. Dad (Ramanathan Gopalkrishnan) was only 8 years old when war came to Penang in Malaysia in what we now call the ‘Indo-Pacific’. His father, my grandad, was assumed dead after not returning home after the 1941 bombing & occupation of Penang by the Japanese.