The Echo of Memory

In this post I propose a return to origins, with a musical twist.

I started this newsletter about two years ago thinking I would be writing mostly reflections, vignettes, and anecdotes about the past, particularly the foreign service part of my past. Diplomats are nothing if not storehouses of stories, some of them quite fascinating and fun. Since most of my friends and family have heard most of my stories or even lived through some of them alongside me, I figured I’d share the wealth with others. And not only my own. I planned to borrow and steal from other foreign service friends and colleagues too, some of whom have stories far more colorful and riveting than mine.

But then politics intervened.

The first Trump election occurred several months after I returned from what turned out to be—though I didn’t know it at the time—my final overseas post, as head of the political section in Brazil. During the four tough years that followed, I served in the belly of the beast, doing my humble best as a modest career official to defend the US Constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic. For most of the strangely ephemeral (in retrospect) Biden administration, which turned out to be my three final years as a diplomat, I focused on an issue of genuine personal interest: professional diplomatic education (a term I borrow from the US military, given that unlike military officers diplomats typically don’t get much time off for professional training and study in the course of their careers). That focus doubled as the perfect career offramp.

Trump’s indefensible post-January 6 insurrection re-election in 2024 took place several months after my transition to the other side. Apart from the aimless wandering of the practiced flaneur, I imagined my new life would consist of a mosaic of activities. These would include reading, teaching, traveling at home and abroad, trying to pay attention to things that matter most, and maybe a modest bit of writing. For background, I hailed from the failed writer school of foreign service, which (to beat the dead horse of my tired personal schtick) sounds better in French. “Écrivain manqué,” for those who must know.

Since January 20, 2025, like tens of millions of my fellow Americans and hundreds of millions of other humans across the world, I’ve found myself overtaken by events, drone-swarmed by the politics of the deliberately flooded zone—dazed, rattled, and confused. Did it matter that the president was taking a sledgehammer to the federal government? Did it matter that he was cozying up to our sworn enemies and attacking our closest friends? Did it matter that nothing he did made sense through the lens of our national security interests? Did it matter that he was behaving as a “Reality TV” president, literally making things up on the fly as though the gravitational forces of real world politics didn’t apply?

How long could this magical thinking approach to politics last before it came crashing down?

In a post-truth world in which reality is replaced by deliberate misrepresentations of it, Trump’s political project seemed like a systematic, targeted attack on the very foundations of human civilization. Not just the free discussion and open debate of an open society, not just the necessary give and take of a dynamic and adaptable democracy, not just the checks and balances of our flawed but functional constitutional system, but the categorical imperative of living life in a viable political community of any kind was in question. Imagine not just every leader but every person in the world behaving the way he did. What would happen?

The answer to that question should cause more people to recalibrate, reconsider, and return to their senses. It is plainly not a good idea to have a shameless liar and criminal con artist in charge of any country, much less the United States.

What to do about all this? Remain silent? Grin and bear it? Pretend it wasn’t happening? I simply couldn’t. While delusions of grandeur are not among my weaknesses, I decided to pipe into the public conversation from the pipsqueak sidelines from time to time. Given my own foreign service past, this meant commenting on current events through the lens of past experiences in other countries, sometimes speculating about what it might mean for the future. Whatever happens next, I’ll bet I’m not finished speaking my piece.

I invite readers to tell me why I should or shouldn’t. Or why it matters or doesn’t. Believe me, I’m open to the many good reasons for remaining silent. As Marcus Aurelius notes in Book VII, Meditation 21:

“Near at hand is your forgetting all; near too, all forgetting you.”

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This brings me back to my anecdote about music. Thinking back, some of my most distinctive memories have a close association with music. Different songs, different singers, different styles and genres of music are directly linked in my mind to the different places in the world I’ve been, and to different moments experienced in them. Like the olfactory sense, music is redolent of memory. But instead, it resonates. In some cases, it strikes an almost mystical chord.

Is this instance one?

Several weeks ago, I found myself humming the opening bars of a catchy tune I remembered from my time in Malaysia, where I served from 2000-2003. The tune came from a Tamil song. My Indian-Malaysian friend and fantastic former colleague Ravi Manickam played mostly Tamil music when we drove together in his car to meetings in Kuala Lumpur, to a nearby banana-leaf restaurant, or on professional travel to different parts of the country. I came to enjoy the music he played on our travels a lot. Noting my appreciation, he gave me several CDs. One had that catchy tune on it. Even if I could find that CD now, a quarter of a century later, I would have no easy way to play it. So I searched for the song on YouTube, Spotify, and other such newfangled places. I even turned to Claude for help, trying to recall the sounds of words sung in a language I couldn’t understand. After not too much persistence down these digital garden paths, I came up empty.

What else could I do to find it?

I decided to give Ravi himself a shout. We’re still in touch from time to time; he even wrote a personal reflection in the early days of my Substack newsletter. So I went out on a limb and sent him a WhatsApp snippet of me humming the catchy opening refrain. I asked him to forward me a link if he was able to make out the song I was trying to sing. Unsurprisingly, Ravi responded immediately, surprised at the fidelity of my memory after all this time. He also expressed amazement with my superb singing, as—he said—did his wife. (Flattery will get you everywhere. And as James Joyce wrote somewhere apropos of nothing, tenors get the best women.) Ravi posted the link1 (also pasted below) to what I trust readers and listeners will agree is a truly lovely Tamil song. But the kicker was this.

Why had I suddenly remembered that song out of the blue?

It turns out I had half-consciously overheard my younger son, who was born in Kuala Lumpur in September of 2002, humming the tune to himself several days before. “Isn’t this song from Malaysia?,” he had apparently asked his mother in passing. When I asked him about it later, he confirmed he couldn’t recall ever listening to the song at any time since.

Wow!

As my friend Ravi clarified, the title of the song is “nadhiya nadhiya kadal nadhiya neeyum penn thaney.” Translated literally, he wrote, it means “oh river loving river you are also a woman.” I’ve asked Claude for more background, but won’t put most of that here. Suffice it to say it is one of the theme songs having to do with the four elements—this one focused on water—from the Tamil movie “Rhythm”, which I’m now trying to find on Netflix or anywhere else. Preferably with subtitles.

Suggestions welcome.