Paris Palette
Text & Photographs : Rupin Nair Thomas

It was 2001, as I sat in my honors seminar class I was handed the reading package for the semester. We were to participate in a ‘conversation’ for a semester on Francis Fukuyama’s, The End of History and the Last Man. Immediately, the cynic that lived within awoke and told the timidly intrigues me, ‘regardless the subject matter any conversation that last a semester sounds destined to be repetitive and frankly a bore, just figure out what the number of pages you need to write and paraphrase your way past this, death by a thousand paper cuts’. Before I had a chance to skim through the material in walked a Japanese man proclaiming and yes I am paraphrasing, ‘For centuries now history has ended in the context of the evolution of mankind…history only repeats itself.

I was immediately pretty certain which side of this argument I would be on but I humored the argument this gentleman made humoring a willingness to be convinced. Years later, after being vehemently against such a position because it seemed to point towards a purposeless summation of individual achievement; an inability to break out of the rut of the status quo, or maybe this was just my interpretation of the argument. I sat here at that famous corner of Saint- Germain and St. Benoit – Cafe de Flore, and I wondered whether it was in this struggle to fight the stark reality of our repetitive and seemingly redundant existence, that Sartre also sat peeking into the lives of passers by drinking a beer, finally coming to the conclusion that Parisians were only truly free once, when under German occupation. Every once in a while I too looked up towards the tower of Paroisse Saint-Germain des-Pres and humored myself with the trite satisfaction of knowing that even Sartre probably sat stifled, suffocated looking up towards the sky and his view obstructed by this majestic creation with the blood of many a man.