Rotimi babatunde biography of michael

However, unlike sloth, play and work connote engagement in activity; the key difference is that play, unlike work, is activity directed towards ends that are not utilitarian.

Rotimi babatunde biography of michael

Play is an adventure undertaken for its own sake, without any functional purpose and without material profit as an objective. Play seeks to contribute nothing to the GDP of any country. Play, as conceived here, is not, as some rotimi babatunde biography of michael presume, a rest or holiday from work. If play is transgression, many of the best minds in history stand guilty of it.

Ironically, it is the very purposelessness of play that enables it to enrich our world in ways that transcend the quotidian. The Greek poet C. The benefits of play, though, are not only intangible. Paul Klee could not have foreseen that his ruminations on line and colour—which formed the bedrock of his pedagogy at the Bauhaus—and the equally rarefied meditations of such colleagues of his like Kandinsky would have an influence so ubiquitous on the design of buildings, furniture and industrial products around us that we have almost stopped noticing it.

Nor could Joyce have anticipated the huge tourist draw Bloomsday would become in Dublin and other cities around the world. All work and no play makes the world a stagnant place. Playing hard turns out not to be as useless as it might appear. The publication of the anthology is timely: in Nigeria and around the world, emerging realities are currently destabilising traditional assumptions about the connection between work and income.

As the rapid advances being made in the field of robotics continue to imbue the long-deferred nightmare of the Luddites with contemporary relevance, the prospect that intelligent machines, working more efficiently and at cheaper costs, will soon make a wide variety of professions extinct has led to calls in many countries for the introduction of a universal basic income, to be paid by the government to all citizens.

And in Nigeria, a freer press and more vigorous citizen journalism, deploying the new tools provided by information technology, have bared the extraordinary dimensions of corruption by public office holders, initiating a crisis of confidence in the populace about the hitherto sacrosanct belief in the correlation between work and wealth.

Let somebody shout hallelujah. Work Naija: The Book of Vocations contributes to these national and international conversations in direct and oblique ways. Rotimi Babatunde is a Nigerian writer and playwright. Stories and Poems. Simeon Mpamugoh June 28, References [ edit ]. The Sunday Times. Archived from the original on 7 February Hay Festival.

External links [ edit ]. Hidden categories: Webarchive template wayback links Use dmy dates from June Articles with short description Short description matches Wikidata Year of birth missing living people. Babutunde did a wonderful job of letting us see what it was like to fight in the Burmese jungle. Just the bugs were enough to kill a lot of people on both sides.

He saw terrible things and he did them also. One day he learns the war ended a week ago when the Americans dropped a very big bomb on the Japanese. Not that many of the Nigerian soldiers made it home and everybody had a lot of questions for our central character. The war changed him in lots of subtle and large ways. He no longer looked up to the whites or feared them, he had contempt for African policemen and such who enforced the rules of the colony.

The story develops wonderfully when he gets back home to Lagos. I really do not want to give away more of this plot because it is so much fun, so smart and really flat our hilarious. In the closing pages of "Bombay's Republic" Babatunde takes into a different mode of narrative that totally fits with the plot of the story, a marvelous combination of form and content.

The story has a lot to teach us about colonialism and government authority in general. It seemed as it closed almost like an Orwellian precautionary fable. His prose style is perfect. You can find all of the short listed stories at the Caine Prize web pageas well as more background information on the award. I mean you work on manuscripts for an audacious length of time it makes me fear and tremble!

Does this distinction exist for you, between an important piece of writing and an urgent one? RB Journalism and literature are urgent in different ways. In literature though, it is more important to get a piece right before releasing it for public consumption. Thomas Hardy felt that the Flaubertian extreme in matters of revision would make a work texture-less and over-polished, like an old, well-thumbed coin.

ED I think every writer must work with different sets of virtues and imperatives. RB I consider writing as a continuous discovery of the self and as a dialogue with other works of art. And a follow-up question will be where do you hope your writing will take you? RB I would be glad if my writing took me back to itself — if I could read my works many years after they were written and still find them engaging.

I would find such survival sufficient recompense. Emmanuel Iduma. Sign-up to our newsletter and receive all our latest news straight to your inbox. Subscribe to our newsletter Subscribe. Follow us on our social media channels to stay in the loop and join in with discussions. International Contemporary Writing. Subscribe Basket Search.