School's out in the Netherlands

One of the most important aspects of Dutch identity is that they talk about their identity a lot, even more since the murders of the sociologist and politician Pim Fortuyn and filmmaker Theo van Gogh. Both these events asked the Dutch a host of uncomfortable questions about immigration, multiculturalism, their globally famed liberal values, their commitment to consensus and so on. In short these events made the Dutch think about who they were. And more than that, to talk about it. That was a few years ago. Now they are feeling a bit better. The far right seems to have stalled and the measures taken to re-assert Dutch traditions, such as citizenship classes and lessons in the Dutch language, as well as a tax on importing spouses, have re-asserted a feeling that there is a national identity to hold on to. Everything has not been lost in a post-modern haze of anything goes cultural relativism and insoluble inter-group conflicts.

As part of the national process of reflection and debate, a commission was established to identify and set out the fundamentals of Dutch identity and values. Liberal democratic governments all over the world have a touching faith in the ability of committees to answer questions that everyone else, including the government, find impossible - and impossibly tedious. They almost invariably reach conclusions that represent the lowest common denominator. If consensus is being sought where no consensus exists, reductionism is inevitable. This committee concluded that hallmark of Dutch values were democracy and the rule of law. That raised two immediate and enormous difficulties: many nations would claim democracy and rule of law as their birthright. The French and the British might even claim copyright. Secondly, Dutch people, when thinking about themselves, did not immediately think about democracy and rule of law. So that commission was all set to be a damp squib, until it was electrified by a throwaway remark from Princess Maxima, the Argentine born Crown Princess of the Netherlands. She observed that there was no single Dutch identity. Not an unreasonable assertion, you might think, given the rather anodyne conclusions of the Commission. Unfortunately for the Princess, the sky fell in and the Dutch debate and consensus model was threatened once more with the possibility of a collective nervous breakdown. The poor sociologist who chaired the Commission, a woman of considerable academic distinction and unimpeachable integrity, has lost a lot of weight and looks very stressed. There is indeed more than one Dutch identity. If identity partly resides in appearance and outlook, her identity had been altered by the debate about identity.

But I was in the Netherlands to talk to some senior people about a different aspect of identity: the attitudes of young people and what the generation gap looked like in 2007, if indeed it still exists at all. I suppose they thought I would tell them what I thought of young people today. Instead I told them what young people thought of them at least in my interpretation. I said that the brightest and best young people were angry and bitter about the legacy left them by the smug babyboomers. Sexual liberation, at which the Dutch had been at the forefront, had proved a pretty mixed blessing. AIDS and abortion left deep social and psychological scars on gay rights and feminism. Female equailty, in the having it all variant, had just made a lot of women feel stressed and inadequate, no wonder increasing numbers of professional women choose not to have children. Whether or not you choose to have children, you live with some uncomfortable consequences of the decision all your life. Liberal attitudes to drugs had simply left moral confusion and a trail of broken lives. Young people wondered how our developed societies had managed to radically increase prosperity and even more radically increase inequality at the same time. Internationally, global propserity had also left so many behind, most notably in Africa. Anti-poverty campaign members are heavily biased towards young people. And the consequence of inequality was instability, war and genocide. Above all the babyboomers had tragically neglected and raped the environment, leaving a disaster that may prove irreversible.

These were the matters of their discontent, but they also had many criticisms, not just of these matters, but also the manner of the political process. Politics as usual was no answer, either nationally or through international institutions. National politicians seem to have large ambitions and small minds. Most of their debate was self-seeking and power hungry. They were engaged in a private slagging match, only fascinating to the soon to be extinct newspapers. International politics looks and sounds like a dialogue of deaf competing factions. Kyoto and Gleneagles, to name but two, were just broken promises.

You might think, given all that, young people could be forgiven for being cynical or pessimistic. On the contrary, they were energetic and optimistic, if only the babyboomers would get out of the way. They were keen to look for new approaches and solutions - and they knew that those new solutions would be found in new ways. The potential of technology was something that the young felt could be a powerful force for good. International dialogues in the spaces being created in civil society were not all backward-looking neo-Marxism (though those tendencies still exist, courtesy of not yet retired once-Marxist academics who still leave a transitory mark on young people in their early 20s; mercifully it is generally eradicated by their thirtieth birthday). New kinds of international co-operation are emerging across cyberspace.

Once I had finished speaking, a very senior police officer said, "But you do know what is going on in the Netherlands today, don't you?" I looked baffled, wondering whether he met 'today' in the general sense or what. In fact he meant today literally. He said that for the very first time Dutch school children had gone on strike. They were protesting against the Dutch's government insistence that pupils should remain in school for 1040 hours a year, although there were not enough teachers to teach that number of hours. As a result, school students just sat round bored watching the clock go round. A charismatic 17 year old, Sywert van Lienden, had organised the first protest using the internet and mobile telephones and it had quickly spread across the school system and taking the authorities completely by surprise. Within hours he was a media hit, articulately setting out the students' case on the TV news. Fifteen thousand school students gathered in Museum Plein in Amsterdam for the second demonstration instead of going to school. The Government was left looking flat-footed and out of touch - as indeed they were. They compromised, and then stonewalled - which was almost certainly the wrong way round. Then there were the usual oldie remarks about students not knowing what they were protesting about, just having fun, not serious politics etc. This incident, whilst not an exact case study of what I had been theorising about, was pretty damn close, giving me the flush of prophecy almost totally absent in the life of a researcher. A small, harmless, meaningless gratification.

Before going to the airport I spent the afternoon in the Boijmans museum, a very fine private art collection in Rotterdam. It contained many world class exhibits, paintings by Van Gogh and Monet and so on, but the Dutch exhibits were the most interesting. Pictures of dark grey stormy skies and emotion-charged seas battering the flat, fragile lowlands of Holland, the boats tilting dizzily towards collapse. The high, white, unadorned vaulted ceilings of Dutch protestant churches, with their clean, symmetrical perspectives. All those flower paintings made out of a similar spirit of modest, understated protestant aesthetics, a counterpoint to the overblown, decadent outpourings of artists in Catholic countries. The serene merchants' houses and housewives painted so precisely by those warm humanistic artists, Pieter de Hooch and Gerrit Dou (less allegorical and more likable than the austere, brilliant Vermeer). The harmony and order of the domestic interior represents a psychological and emotional as well as an aesthetic counterpoint to those stormy, challenging seas always threatening to overwhelm the Dutch (in the era of global warming perhaps more than ever: the centre of Amsterdam is now 5 metres below sea level). Rembrandt's son Titus at his homework; his mother bearing all the wisdom, worries and weariness of the long years in the lines on her face. In the modern part of the collection were the beautiful compositions of Mondrian, who, for me, represents more clearly than any other modern artist, the Dutch blend of order and harmony on the one hand and randomness and unpredictability on the other.

Here, seen through the eyes of Dutch artists were the enduring aspects of Dutch identity and they seemed as vivid and enduring to me as they ever had: the respect for nature, the value of order and the high premium on human co-operation, combined with a distinct scepticism for messianic simplicities. A subtle harmony matters more to the Dutch than a strident melody. Pride is the worst of the seven deadly sins, and one of which the Dutch would never be convicted. They incessantly question the things they should be proud of.

see photos of Boijmans Museum in Rotterdam at www.flickr.com/photos/gerardlemos/sets

The last Tamil in Budapest

The last time I was in Budapest I was arrested. It was early in 1990, a few months after the Berlin wall had come down. Hungary had already had its uprising and I watched the red star being taken down from above the parliament building, a slow, painstaking business undertaken by workmen, not the result of a surge of popular sentiment. I wasn’t arrested because I was associated with the fight for freedom. I was arrested coming out of church after mass on a Sunday morning. The church was a rococo spectacular of gold cherubim and seraphim and the mass, though Roman Catholic, had many touches of the Eastern orthodox: incense, chanting and old ladies in black bowing repeatedly.

Outside in the bright sunlight in the square in front of the church were many Tamil young men, presumably having escaped from war-torn Sri Lanka. I was assumed, I guess, to be one of them. I am indeed of Tamil origin, so in a way the two burly policemen in grey and navy blue were right. I was taken firmly by the upper arm, a policeman at either side, put in the back of a police car and taken to a police station in a dingy suburb. There they put me against the wall and demanded my passport, which I didn’t have with me. It was in the hotel. I explained this in my best schoolboy German, which only served to incense them further. In their minds there was clearly something frustrating and unacceptable about the difficulties of locating who I was and where I came from. They laughed at the suggestion I was British. They searched my wallet, examining each credit card and looking particularly derisively at the BMW rescue card. They made me remove my shoes and pulled the inner soles of them out. I was baffled by it all and they were increasingly irritated. Then they left me on my own in a grey, windowless corridor for twenty minutes or so. After that a more senior, but smaller, police officer appeared in civvies and told them to release me. He had confirmed my identity with the hotel and had clearly angrily denounced the hotel staff for not registering all foreigners with the police station. The old Soviet practices were not yet extinguished.

Budapest is still the same beautiful Austro-Hungarian city it was then, now much cleaned up and restored. If Berlin is a miracle, Budapest is a fantasy. It is a city of castles and palaces; of dogs hunting outside the classical museum, angels poised to fly down from the Pest hillside across the city and lions guarding access to the bridge. The city that looked to Austria, but also to Transylvania is once more evident and points the mind to the fairy tale and fantasy traditions, of magical castles and terrifying wolves, that emanates from central Europe.

The churches are brightly lit at nights, their illuminated tracery like filigree. And through it all runs the broad, curving, river Danube, looking almost organic as it sways through the city. The metro is something like the New York subway and something like the Paris Metro. It is older than both. The wood panelled funicular still climbs the hill to Pest. Hungarian wine is much improved and Zara and H&M have replaced the old shops selling Austrian hunting jackets and pipes made from deer horn. Amazingly the Luxus department store, though re-located, remains and still has a certain drab GDR-chic. It doesn’t look like the window dressers have been made redundant.

No sign yet of Gucci and the other top end brands. Hungary is the least successful of the accession economies. Unlike the Czech Republic, the growth rate is pathetic and the Government unpopular. Nor have a million people left to seek their fortunes elsewhere, as in Poland. The old Magyar aristocracy have returned from Vienna and other European cities and reclaimed their place in Hungarian society, arranging congenial jobs for their children in the Brussels bureaucracy. They are, according to more ordinary middle class Hungarians, staggeringly sentimental, becoming dewy-eyed at the mere utterance of the word Mozart or Sachertorte. They are also un-self-critical and incompetent. The Budapest Sun says Ferenc Gyursany, the Hungarian Prime Minister, has ‘become synonymous with lies and disliked reforms in Hungary…He is, without doubt, more popular everywhere else than at home…the majority of a non-Hungarian audience (at the London School of Economics) is simply more optimistic, gullible or just not affected nor interested’. Freedom of the press, in Hungary as elsewhere, has evidently been worth fighting for. Irony and sarcasm are the beneficiaries.

There is nothing here for Tamils now. I am the only Tamil in Budapest now.

See the photos of Budapest at www.flickr.com/photos/gerardlemos/sets

Where to buy a tweed jacket in Dublin

If you’re cool, when you visit Dublin you’ll stay at Morrison’s Hotel. It’s on the other side of the Liffey opposite Temple Bar. The staff are all handsome men and women under 30, dressed in black and universally not Irish. The interior is all white stone floors, horizontal dark wood panelling and low sepulchral lighting. Over the curved dinning room hangs a gigantic sculpture of a male athlete, with a mildly Soviet air about him. The lifts are black outside and in. In the rooms are TVs which are also computers, with a personal welcome message on the screen. There is also a stereo system with an LCD display of the names of Irish radio stations. If you are the sort of person whose sleep is disturbed by too many winking lights the only solution is to unplug the lot. That probably destroys the finely balanced computer programme. Let’s hope so.

You can get into the heart of historic Dublin in a moment or two. Walk along Ormand Quay, past the lovely Winding Stair bookshop, cross the river and into the narrow cobbled streets of Temple Bar. Trinity and the Bank of Ireland are just up the road to the left. They are your first brush with neo-classical and Georgian Dublin.

Head down Grafton Street for the shops. The first stop in search of the Donegal tweed jacket is Brown Thomas. The department store is full of the coolest, cutting edge global fashion brands, Prada, Y3, Gucci etc. Some of the fashion brands are only available in their home towns and, of course, New York, such as the Hong Kong brand, Vera Wang. Hong Kong, New York, Dublin. No tweed jackets here.

Angela says that she remembers her first visit to Dublin. There were no restaurants. Priests and nuns were everywhere. Everyone was small, pale and looked miserable. The centre of Dublin is now one of the most diverse places in the world. Women wearing the hijab, origin not obvious, sit drinking coffee and talking to their friends in Starbucks, gently pushing a baby buggy back and forth in the hope of the child staying asleep a little longer. The buggy is festooned with carrier bags like a Christmas tree. On Grafton Road a Roma woman stands holding her child on her hip next to a big flower stall, not begging, just watching. Young men of various non-white ethnic origins stand with billboards pointing you to Timberland, Guess and other shops just off Grafton Road, lest you don’t spot them. They are busy talking and laughing together and don’t look like they care much whether you see their signs or not. From time to time they give their signs to each other to hold while they answer their mobile phones. So one young man is holding signs pointing to two different shops in opposite directions.

The only nun visible is black and looks like she comes from Africa. No priests are evident on the street, but they are still a part of Irish life. Father Brian D’Arcy told the Irish Times of his concern (apparently shared by many other priests) that the shortage of priests mean that they now have to say several masses a day. As a result their increased consumption of communion wine may take them over the legal limit for alcohol consumption when driving. “I don’t like to use the word wine, as it is the precious blood in the Eucharist, it still has all the characteristics of wine when in the blood stream”. Apparently the Vatican bans the use of non-alcoholic wine even if the priests have confessed to being alcoholics.

The great influx of migrants to Ireland (now ten per cent of Ireland's population, mostly arriving in the last decade) from all over the world has left the authorities scrambling to work out the ways and means of identity and integration. The subject is hotly debated. NGOs have sprung up to research, campaign and lobby. Academics are busily researching. Officials in local authorities and the Civil Service have started drawing up plans and strategies to promote anti-racism and equality. They look for ideas and a compass from universities and from other countries. Should they be accepting the new arrivals as new Irish citizens, here to stay, or are they travellers in a global labour market, here today, gone tomorrow? Politicians are wary of the issue, speaking with forked tongue, pointing to economic benefits, talking about the need for fairness and tolerance but also seeking to assuage the fears of more traditional Irish people. They may feel that, whilst much has been gained by economic growth in the Celtic Tiger, something else - durable and significant traditions and certainties - has been lost. Something of the Irish identity is going, perhaps gone. And the loss has been unplanned; a casual destruction. Or perhaps their anxieties and fears are less clearly defined than that, just a feeling that things have changed and the consequences will be unfamiliar and maybe unwelcome. The fear is of the unknown, the different; the feeling that they may become outsiders in Ireland's ill-defined post-modern future. Bertie Ahern's says that immigrants must be 'Irish first'.

From the other perspective, Ireland has at last become a cosmopolitan place, not only because of migration, at peace with freedom, individuality and diversity. The theocratic reactionary past has been discredited and shaken off, and not a moment before time. On this wing of the debate they think that too little has yet changed and too late. The referendum on divorce was divisive. The forthcoming referendum to legalise gay and lesbian civil partnerships promise to make the debate about divorce look like a well-mannered discussion over tea in Bewley’s. And on migration and diversity, they look for leadership which clearly states that diversity is an irreversible benefit, fairness a requirement. Intolerance is unacceptable and will be punished. From both perspectives change has been so rapid that consequences are confusing; destination unknown.

The lovely Bewley’s Oriental Cafe is still there unchanged on Grafton Street, with its beautiful art deco gold mosaics. In the window behind the grinning pumpkins (today being Halloween) are three elderly ladies having tea and a glass of sherry. Why not, even if its’s only 3pm? Behind them are a group of Chinese people having tea. No sign of any tweed jackets for sale anywhere on Grafton Road.

St Stephens Green looks magical with the last of the red and golden autumn trees losing their leaves and taking on the skeletal air of winter. If you come out by the Shelbourne, you can walk down Kildare Street and have a look through the windows at the sleek diners in the Shelbourne’s restaurant. Down Kildare Street are some of the most distinctive Georgian buildings in Dublin. The National Museum and the National Library and the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland. All are elegant unadorned statements of clarity and symmetry

At the bottom of Kildare Street you come out on Nassau Street, opposite Trinity again. Here there are some Irish souvenir shops. None of them sell Donegal tweed. And then - at last - I spot Kevin&Howland Ltd, an old-fashioned shop containing every imaginable pattern of tweed for men and women. Mostly it’s brown. The outside is painted brown; the furniture is brown and most of the items for sale are brown. The suits and coats are in long rows. Not for this shop is the modern retailing habit of hanging just a few identical black clothes a respectful distance apart from each other and bathing them in sharp white down light. The selection of tweed fabrics is enormous though the styles are rather more standard. The staff are formal and friendly. A trendy, bespectacled, overweight, bald young man is encouraged to think that a pillar box red tweed waistcoat is not too ‘shouty’. Another young male customer is reassured that the floppy ‘Great Gatsby’ cap will return to its original shape after a soaking of Irish rain if you squash up plastic carrier bags and stuff the cap with them until it dries. The fabric I especially like is not available in my size. It appears that virtually every item is unique. I settle on one quite like my original choice, but the pattern is ‘herringbone’ not ‘window pane’. The middle aged man who serves me has a tiny pair of scissors in his pocket to cut away the threads keeping the pockets stitched. If you want a lovely tweed jacket go to Kevin&Howland, but you’d best go soon.

In the National Library is an exhibition about the life of William Butler Yeats. The photo of the poet shows a romantic young man, fine hair flying, with a firm jaw line, a serious expression and a romantic look, his far-sighted eyes behind wire-rimmed lorgnettes. The exhibition has a mock up of his library and the backstage area at the Abbey Theatre, displays of his manuscripts under glass, first editions of programmes for his plays, portraits of Maud Gonne and large backlit photos of the Lake Isle of Innisfree and Coole House. There is also a dark moody photo of his mossy gravestone and his famous epitaph.

Cast a cold Eye
On Life, on Death.
Horseman, pass by!

A recording of WHAuden’s In Memory of WBYeats, read by the author, is playing softly in the background. Then a recording of Sinead O’Connor reading Easter 1916.

All changed, changed utterly, a terrible beauty is born.

see the photos of Dublin at www.flickr.com/photos/gerardlemos/sets

How to open a shopping mall in Hong Kong

1. Find a piece of real estate which you already own in a central location, such as an airport or an underground station

2. If it is an underground station you will need planning permission to build on top of it. You will have to compensate all those who hold low value ransom strips and leases at ground level.

4. Conduct a global search for architects. The best architects are likely to be international and have done big shopping malls before, in the USA or Japan perhaps. The newest shopping mall in Hong Kong, above the Jordan MTR station, called Elements was designed by the architects of Bluewater, built on an old quarry, south of London

5. Work out your concept; develop a brand and a brand identity. Elements wanted a more contemporary, less conventional feel than the other top end mall in Hong Kong, Pacific Place. In Pacific Place, the identity is rigidly controlled. All the shops have to do their fascias in white and chrome. The only latitude they have is over the choice of font. This gives the whole place a uniform white-ness and chrome-ness.

6. In Elements, along with global brands like Gucci (the biggest Gucci store in the world is in Elements), they also persuaded funky and less well known Japanese brands to take out leases, such as the design shop BALS Tokyo. Many of these have no other outlets in Hong Kong. British fashion brands, some of which do have a quirky alternative appeal, at least to foreigners are notoriously parochial and almost impossible to persuade. Hence you rarely see a Paul Smith or a Kilgour or even a Top Shop. Meanwhile Zara (Spanish) and H&M (Swedish), along with all the French and Italian luxury brands are absolutely everywhere in Hong Kong and everywhere else. The only British brands in Elements are Kent&Curwen and Karen Millen. Karen Millen is now owned by Philip Green who was reluctant to expand in Hong Kong and the store in Elements is a franchise. Fewer restrictions were placed on visuals.

7. Build the space, Elements is more than a million square feet, not including a huge open air 'civic space' on the roof.

8. Hire an international art consultant from New York or London to buy and install cutting edge contemporary art, particularly large sculptures, in the public areas of the mall.

8. Make sure there are plenty of nice places to eat with cutting edge fusion cuisine and the best European chocolate and patisserie. That will re-energise your customers for another bout of wandering and spending.

9. Make the loos fabulous and build luxurious baby changing facilities. They should be like a first class airport lounge, not just a fold down plastic table falling off the wall of the loo. There is almost nowhere to go in Hong Kong with a small baby. A mall is perfect, air-conditioned and plenty of places to sit, eat, drink and talk whilst the baby sleeps. Then a nice lounge for baby feeding, changing and chatting to other mothers.

10. Use your launch marketing to get yourself on the front page of the newspaper. Elements had aerial acrobats acting as flying advertisements. That got them the photo slot on the front page of the South China Morning Post.

11. When you open make sure you have loads of handsome, well-dressed, knowledgeable staff everywhere to point people in the right direction.

12. Watch the queues form with quiet pleasure on the opening day.

13. On the opening weekend check that all the restaurants and cafes have queues and stop at a bar incognito and enjoy a glass of champagne and a bowl of noodles (a little known but wonderful combination). Sit on your own, savouring the taste of your own success.

14. Don't go near the place for another two or three years, just check the rentals on-line, while keeping an eye on commercial rents generally.

15. Pay off the debt in three years.

16. Build another one.

Source: Betty Leong over an espresso and a chocolate cake on the opening Saturday in Elements, with my own additional suggestions

How to make the perfect cup of green tea

1. Warm the pot, both inside and outside. First pour some hot water into the pot and leave it to warm. Then pour hot water over the outside of the pot, including over the spout. Pour away the water in the pot.

2. Put the tea leaves in the pot, a little more than a teaspoon of leaves per cup.

3. Wet the green tea leaves with water at room temperature (not too cold). Green tea tastes bitter if made with boiling water. The perfect temperature is 90 degrees.

4. Boil the kettle. Once it has boiled wait for a moment and then pour hot water on to wet leaves.

5. Leave to stand for a few seconds. This is to cleanse the tea leaves.

6. Pour the first pot of tea away. It will be too bitter.

7. Wet the leaves again with water at room temperature.

8. Add hot water and leave to stand for 2-3 minutes. If you leave to stand for longer, the first pouring will steal all the taste and the second pourings and those thereafter will be weak and uninteresting.

9. Enjoy the perfect cup of green tea

10. When the tea is finished keep the leaves and use them again later (following steps 3 - 9).

11. Tomorrow start again with some new leaves.


Source: Tea house in Hong Kong park, with suggested improvements in search of perfection from Ann Wong

Berlin: City of Satan's Throne

"It would not be enough for a poet to have memories," said Rainer Maria Rilke's protagonist and oracle, the young poet Malte Laurids Brigge. "You must be able to forget them."

Whether memories are something you have or something you should forget resonates and echoes in almost every street in Berlin. There are all the obvious echoes, Frederick the Great laying the foundations of what we now know as Germany, not just territorially, but culturally in the row of Hohenzollern palaces and universities at one end of Unter den Linden . Nazism, the Holocaust, Communism, the Warsaw Pact and the fall of the Berlin Wall; the symbols and icons are everywhere. Here’s a remnant of the Berlin Wall, there’s a sign indicating the site of Hitler’s bunker. Here’s where the Communist leaders lived, set apart from the general populace, there is the office of Hitler’s secret police, now the Ministry of Finance. The uplifting realist murals of der volk, smiling and strong, are intact. One’s responses are inevitably cliché ridden. The ghosts stalk the streets and everywhere sotto voce can be heard Wordsworth’s still sad music of humanity. But, that Berlin is still there, intact and vibrant, is itself a miracle. It is a miraculous city of ghosts. Ghosts which it seems the city has decided not to forget.

Berlin’s museums contain three of the most remarkable relics of antiquity anywhere in the world. The Pergamon altar is a gigantic, classical temple of statues, pillars and carved friezes. Construction began about 160BCE; the altar was dedicated to Zeus and was a site of human sacrifice in the great city of Pergamon, in what is now Turkey. Ancient texts call it “Satan’s Throne” and it crops up in the Book of Revelations. The sculptured frieze depicts the struggle of the Gods and the giants, but also contains numerous embedded literary references. The library in Pergamon was second only to the great, now mythical, library at Alexandria. It was built following the decline of Athens when no other city had gained hegemony. Pergamon had ambitions. The heroic and morbid qualities of the Pergamon altar recommended themselves as inspirations to Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect. In this one of the greatest ancient monuments anywhere, with the benefit of hindsight, are the first resonances of Berlin’s heroic ambitions and tragic realities.

Also in the Pergamon Museum is the equally astounding Ishtar Gate, built by King Nebuchadnezzar in Babylon, now Iraq. It is a solid crenellated fortress wall around a high perfect arch. The wall and the arched gate are covered in the deepest blue ceramics decorated by alternating rows of aurochs and dragons. The dragons are elegant and long-legged, rather than frightening, conveying their unnatural, magical qualities. They are creatures of another world. The approach to the gate was made along a processional avenue, also tiled in blue. The frieze is inlaid with rows of life size lions, strutting with calm and dignity towards the Ishtar Gate. Statues of the Gods were paraded down this processional route on New Year’s Day. A replica of the gate was built in Iraq but has reportedly been badly damaged in the recent war.

The third great antiquity in a Berlin museum is the statue of arguably the most beautiful women the world has ever known, Nefertiti, the wife of Akhenaton and the mother of Tutankhamen, both beautiful too. Olive-skinned, long necked, with high cheekbones and a long angular jaw line, her forehead thrust back, her eyes pointing upwards, the air of mystery and beauty is only compounded by the fact that Nefertiti now only has one eye, the other socket is blank but not empty.

Fast forward to Berlin’s troubled and tragic twentieth century history. The Nazi period is commemorated in two immensely sensitive, subtle and sad memorials. Under the cobbles in the square across Unter den Linden from the Humboldt University is a glass panel. Invisible from a distance, it is less than a metre square. Below the glass pane is a lit room of empty white bookshelves. This is the site where the Nazis brought 20,000 books from the University and burnt them. No commentary is offered. The empty shelves, as it were, speak volumes.

Near to the Brandenburg Gate and opposite the Tiergarten are a vast collection of oblong grey stone blocks. This is the Holocaust memorial and, once one knows that, one immediately imagines in a literal way that these stones represent coffins. Perhaps, but not only that. From the edge of the blocks they all seem more or less the same height, rising evenly to the horizon. This is an optical illusion. Walk amongst them and the cobbled stone floor undulates and sinks rapidly down into a valley. Very quickly the blocks, now apparently set on their narrow ends, loom above you. Above only the sky. The alleyways between them are narrow and no one else can be seen. Occasionally someone fleetingly crosses your path – and immediately disappears. Again no commentary is offered, the passerby must decide on meaning and symbol for themselves. Children, unaware of meaning and symbol and unburdened by history, run around amongst the blocks treating them as a playground or a maze. They have accepted Rilke’s injunction about the necessity of forgetting.

Attitudes to remembering communism seem to be more ragged, much less clear cut. The tall, thin radio tower with its disco mirror ball at the top remains and dominates the Berlin skyline as its builders intended it should. Below is the spiky white concrete radio building, still a masterpiece of modernist aesthetics. Walk away from Alexanderplatz and towards Unter den Linden and you come upon the huge site of Frederick the Great’s Royal Palace. Much of it is now a car park, but about half of it was where the Communists built their people’s palace. In its latter days it was known as Honecker’s lamp shop. Square and gargantuan, through the smoky brown glass, clearly visible within were many of those gigantic hanging lamps with long cords and many white plastic shades which you used to see in every hotel lobby and public building in the old Eastern Europe. They cast a baleful and inadequate light, never enough to read a newspaper, over orange leatherette furniture and patterned chocolate carpets. But now the lamp shop is gone. It is being dismantled by huge cranes because demolition would do too much damage to the surrounding historic buildings, including Berlin’s cathedral, which was virtually demolished twice during the Second World War. Accidental demolition in peacetime would be frowned upon. So the brown glass skin has gone, as has much of the concrete structure. What remains is a rusting steel skeleton which is being removed piecemeal. Once the demolition is complete the intention is to build a facsimile of the old Royal Palace. This time around it will be a shopping mall, offices and a hotel. The price tag currently is estimated at 750 million Euros, which will no doubt prove conservative. Public funds are not yet forthcoming. That building, if it ever gets built, will tell its own story about what shall be remembered, albeit in a bastardised form, and the uses that memory can be put to. Outside on the chain link fence that surrounds the building site is a poster in English saying ‘East Germany asserts its legitimacy.’

Gendarmenmarkt is the most beautiful square in Berlin. On each flank are identical rococo churches, one the French church built for the Huguenot émigrés and the other the German Lutheran church. Between these two and facing the square is the neo-classical concert hall, all sweeping steps, arcades of pillars and statues stalking the edge of the roof. It is vaguely reminiscent of the Pergamon altar, as perhaps all neo-classical buildings are. In the evening all three of these buildings are built in different soft pastel colours, orange, pink and green this evening. The buildings glow and appear weightless; ethereal. On one corner of Gendarmenmarkt is a fantastic chocolate shop, Fassbender & Rausch. In the window is a gigantic dark chocolate sculpture of the Brandenburg Gate, complete with chariot and charging horses about to smash through the shop window and rush across Gendarmenmarkt. In the next window is a similarly huge chocolate structure of a perilously tilting Titanic.
On the south eastern edge of East Berlin is a fascinating flea market, not mentioned in the guide books. It too can be interpreted as a site of memory. The people wandering through the town square where it is held are punks, white Rastas and Mohicans. Occasionally people sunbathe nude in the market and cool off in the fountain. The books for sale at the second hand bookstalls speak of a particular moment of twentieth century intellectual history: Freud, Kafka, Koestler, Susan Sontag ‘On Photography’, Camus’s ‘La Peste’, of course. Anarchist slogans have been printed on clothes and bits of material: ‘Stop me before I kill again’, ‘the system works because you work’, ‘television is not the revolution’. The second hand records for sale are divided by cardboard dividers: ‘doom’ and ‘death’ are two of the categories. We use to have places like this in London, like Camden Lock, but mostly they have been redeveloped now. In their place are Starbucks and Lush. Unburdened of memories of tragedy and clinging dimly to memories of heroism perhaps we wonder what to remember and what to forget.

See the photos of Berlin at www.flickr.com/photos/gerardlemos/sets

Love on Lamma Island, Hong Kong

Hong Kong has two monsoons. The winter monsoon which begins in October is blown in on south winds from China. Those winds now come from Shenzhen and Guangzhou. Shenzhen was a fishing village until a couple of decades ago. Now it’s a manufacturing powerhouse where 11million people live. Factories making tee shirts and trainers are stacked up against barracks for workers for miles and miles. The pollution from all this activity blows down to Hong Kong and gathers in Victoria Harbour. As a result when you get the star ferry from the central terminal to Kowloon, by the time you arrive in Tsim Sha Tsui a few minutes later the famous Hong Kong skyline is covered in a muddy brown haze. IM Pei’s knife like Bank of China building and the giant finger of IFC2 are hardly visible.

Few tourists bother to get the ferry from pier 4 at the central ferry terminal to go to Lamma Island. The ferry chugs across the front of the harbour, leaving the glass and steel skyscrapers behind and passing rows and rows of high rise flats, past Hong Kong University and out beyond the western end of Hong Kong Island. In this outer part of the harbour there are only small islands around. They are hilly and verdant, not built up at all. You also leave behind all the frantic seaborne activity of Hong Kong Harbour. The ferry only passes the odd large, flat barge loaded with containers for Indonesia or Malaysia. After about half an hour you arrive on Lamma Island. The atmosphere here could not be more different to Hong Kong. No cars, no high rise, no flyovers, no walkways in the sky. When you leave the ferry, what looks like hundred of bicycles are tethered to the railings on the jetty. The municipality has built some narrow concrete trails to navigate pedestrians and hikers across the island with helpful signs pointing to pagodas, temples, beaches and villages. The dark green, monsoon-fed hills extend up to the skyline, as once they must have done on Hong Kong Island and Kowloon, before all that flat land was reclaimed and created with sand imported from Singapore and Indonesia. Victoria harbour has been pushed back, narrowed and become more turbulent, especially at typhoon time.

A few hundred metres down the jetty a small village straggles along the shore line. The buildings barely extend back a couple of streets. Little blocks of six or eight flats are built behind concrete yards. Colourful, homely washing blows about on washing lines on balconies or out of windows. The buildings are clad in white or grey ceramic tiles, as they are in many places in China, giving them a shiny, slippery look, but they still seem a little unfinished. Telephone and electricity wires enter and leave the flats at unlikely points, their trajectory determined by random functionality. The need to keep facades uniform and clear, a lesson we learnt in the UK from the Georgians and Palladians, is neither here nor there. On the ground floors, all the front doors are open and the dark, the stark interior is covered with a bead curtain. The sound of a TV filters through from some houses. The front yards contain selections of fishing nets, tyres, boat engines and all manner of other objects, each in its place notwithstanding the disorderly appearance. A few enterprising locals have acquired coca cola fridges and are selling bottles of water and fizzy drinks from their front yards. People sit around in the shade of the front yard, playing cards, chatting or fanning themselves, staring out in a preoccupied or vacant fashion. You might have seen a similar scene on Greek islands or in the south of Spain, though perhaps not for much longer. This is not a place where people go away from home to work. They either put fishing boats out when the right time and tide comes, run restaurants and cafés from the front of their houses or sell drinks to passers by. Many do all of the above. There is no industrial division of labour. The ferry to Lamma Island seems to have taken you back fifty years in half an hour.

On the other side of the island are some larger, swankier restaurants where fresh fish are kept in tanks aerated by pipes. You choose the one you want and it is cooked up for you to eat at a plastic table overlooking the sea. You can have a decent bottle of Australian wine to go with it. Just below the restaurant balconies in the sea fisher folk wearing large, traditional straw hats (for sale for HK$10, about 65 pence) are out on their own on launches spreading fine white nets near the shore line. But the fish served in the restaurants was probably flown in live from the Philippines or Thailand. Eating out on Lamma Island is popular with Hong Kong people and some of the restaurants have their own boats plying back and forth.

If you follow the path for 15 minutes or so, you come to a beach, not a big beach, not Bondi or Venice, but nevertheless a golden sandy beach, where people in their swimming costumes play with beach balls, children build their own sandcastles and destroy those created by other children. Complex irrigation systems are constructed with plastic buckets and spades, the hilarious fun being in watching a small wave overwhelm the six inches of sand barricades in an instant. Under the trees the adults keep out of the sun and smile benignly. Some go swimming. A portion of the sea is roped off with yellow ropes and buoys for safe swimming. A handsome lifeguard in a surprisingly large concrete watchtower surveys the scene apathetically. The dangers are minimal. No one is taking any risks at all. The swimming is sedate, the swimmers keeping their heads out of the water. Some swim with their sunglasses on. The tinies are ankle deep in the shallows, clinging to their parents’ fingers.

A young couple come down to the beach for a photo shoot. The photographer has an enormous paparazzi lens. The girl is dressed in a flouncing white cotton gypsy dress. The boy is wearing a bow tie, cream silk shirt and white trousers with a sharp pleat. They pose in numerous informal poses on the rocks and on the beach. Then they go into the sea fully clothed, get themselves soaked and adopt various suggestive poses, rolling in the surf, the boy bearing the girl in his arms while emerging from the waves. She is obviously hysterical with pleasure. Her worlds of fantasy and reality have finally aligned. He looks more nervous and wary, perhaps a little embarrassed. He needn’t be. Everyone gathers to watch; everyone has an approving look; small rounds of applause ripple round for particularly good magazine-like poses. Other people’s happiness is contagious.

The photographer has presumably taken care to screen out of shot the enormous coal fired power station that flanks one side of the beach. The chimneys are huge and billow clouds of white steam and there is a mountain of coal standing in readiness to feed the hungry beast. This power station is owned by the richest man in Hong Kong, Li Ka shing, and provides all the electricity for Hong Kong Island. Those lights that dance across the buildings on the harbour waterfront as you return, celebrating hypermodernity, start their journey in that mountain of coal amidst the fisher folks, the swimmers and the newlyweds.

The revolution in Nepal starts today

The dawn chorus in Kathmandu is unique. Himalayan birds have a high, pure melodic song, still beautifully evident, even omnipresent, particularly at sunrise. But their delightful sound is being elbowed aside by the caw caw of large black crows. According to Nepalis they are blow-ins from India, like so many other unwelcome things. In the distance the sound of metal on metal could be a temple bell, or a hammer on an anvil. It’s probably a temple, because you can also hear the Tibetan-style chanting now and again. A Bollywood song floats across the fields from someone’s transistor radio. But above all this chaotic but gentle near-harmony rises an atonal symphony of dogs barking. Big and small, some bark in loud, deep staccato bursts, others snap in a rapid-fire high pitch; some issue protracted howls. One responds to another, sensing some atavistic threat or possibility. Inaudible are the sighs of the stirring, turning and waking people as the frequency and volume of dogs barking rises to a frenzied crescendo. It’s too early to get out of bed.

Once you do get out of the bed, get dressed, leave the house and get out on the street, the shops are open. Children in smart matching uniforms, hair parted and plastered down with water or oil, are off to school. People go to work on motorbikes or wait for a bus. Hailing a taxi is a vain hope. They are all stationary in endless queues for petrol stretching hundreds of yards; dirty white small Maruti Suzukis (not dissimilar to the short-lived British Mini Metro) wait patiently in line. The drivers are nowhere near the cars because the queue isn’t moving. They have disappeared for a cup of tea. Some have appointed children as watchmen. In the unlikely event of the queue moving, the children scamper off to find the driver, but there is no hurry. Progress is made in yards over hours. Or perhaps there is no petrol at all and the wait will be entirely futile.

Indian Oil supplies all Nepal’s oil, like its crows, from India. It is paid for by the Nepali government. The Government then sells it on at the pump at a subsidised price. World oil prices are now as high as they have ever been - $82 a barrel and still rising for the time being. The wholesale price rises and the retail price stays fixed, so the payment by the Nepali government to Indian Oil simply continues to rise, or to be more exact the Nepali Government’s debt to Indian Oil continues to rise. The Government cannot afford the repayments and Indian Oil have run out of patience, cutting off credit and petrol supplies. The Government is reluctant to increase the price at the pump for fear of a citizens’ revolt. Perhaps their fears are justified. Although the Nepali petrol shortage started some time ago, it was a Government-imposed petrol price increase that resulted in the monks taking to the streets in Burma. Events in Burma will not have encouraged the Government to increase petrol prices – and so the shortage simply continues with no end in sight.

In the UK taxi drivers have opinions about everything and are treated by journalists and politicians as having a Delphic connection to ‘what’s really going on’. In many poorer countries servants play that oracular role. Reality as experienced by most ordinary people only intrudes on the sequestered life of the elite when the servant tells them of some disaster or depredation in their life or in the life of their family. These tales almost always feature unconscionable hardship for someone close to the servant. So the servant of a friend in Nepal reported that her husband, a taxi driver, had defaulted on the bank loan he had taken to buy the taxi as a result of the petrol shortage. The car had been repossessed; the repayments he had already made counted for nought. He was now unemployed and without savings. The family now relies on the maid’s wages.

But the traffic situation was to get much worse as the day wore on. By lunch time news was starting to filter out from a meeting between the Prime Minister and the two Maoist leaders, Prachanda and Bhattarya, that they had not reached an agreement about the Maoist demand that a republic be declared and the King removed from all constitutional roles forthwith before elections to a constituent assembly which had been agreed in a UN-brokered ceasefire. The Maoists had indicated that without the declaration of a republic they would leave the seven-party Government and that would put the elections scheduled for November in jeopardy. Almost everyone agreed about the Maoists true motives for withdrawing from the Government. They had recognised that they were not going to do well at the ballot box, perhaps reduced to eight or ten per cent of the vote so they were keen to find an excuse to delay the election. Sure enough, no deal was reached to continue with the Government and a rally was called for a sports field in central Kathmandu where Bhattarya was to announce the Maoist programme of action to bring about a republic.

Notwithstanding the Maoists tactics one can understand the growth of Republican sentiment in Nepal. The Nepali royal family has a particularly colourful recent history that would make most other royal families blanch, even those with the most bloodthirsty pasts. In 2001 a psychopathic Crown Prince committed regicide, murdering the King, his mother, several other members of the Royal Family and, finally, himself. An uncle of the dead king was quickly found to replace him, King Gyanendra. The previous Kings, while not exactly having the superstar reforming status of Spain’s Juan Carlos, had more or less kept Nepali politics in one piece. In particular they had succeeded in keeping the Nepali army in their barracks, except where they were fighting the Maoist insurgency in rural areas. This the military had done in a dirty, oppressive and not very effective way. By the standards of say Latin America in the 1980s, this war was nevertheless a pretty mild affair. About 13000 people are said to have died in the State’s war with the Maoists, but this sounds like a very unreliable statistic.

The new King Gyanendra had pretty quickly tired of his (admittedly ineffectual) Governments and sacked the Prime Minister, executing a kind of a constitutional coup in 2005 with the lukewarm support of some of the army. That situation had only been prevented from sliding into dictatorship by the intervention of the international community, particularly India, who had its own insurgent problems across the border in Bihar. A peace process was established and, one way and another, the Maoists were persuaded to abandon their uprising and join a seven party Government. In reality the Government’s seven parties divide into three factions: the monarchists sympathetic to the military; a broad left republican movement and the Maoists. Plans were put in place, hugger mugger, for a new constitution and elections. All that came to a juddering halt this afternoon.

The Maoists reckon that the monarchy is extremely unpopular and calls for a republic are likely to make them popular with the electorate. They’re probably right about the unpopularity of the Monarchy. Not only has the King displayed unappealing tendencies towards authoritarianism and incompetence, the Crown Prince Paras is also a pretty unattractive prospect. Exceedingly overweight, he also has a reputation for hard drinking, womanising and a generally dissolute lifestyle. He recently had a heart attack at a relatively young age and, according to one of the heart surgeons, was smoking in his hospital bed whilst still coming round from the anaesthetic. Not a nice guy.

The belief that the unpopularity of the Monarchy would make them more popular stands on less sure foundations. The original intention was that the Constituent Assembly, once elected, would decide the fate of the Monarchy, perhaps through a plebiscite of some kind. Calling for a republic now gives them casus belli for further agitation in the streets, villages and towns that would lead to the cancellation of the elections. Their real motives for wanting the elections cancelled is that their polling suggests that they would only get about 10 per cent of the vote and that would leave them in a weak position to join a new Government. This has come to a shock to the Maoists. Perhaps they believed their own PR: that they ‘controlled’ 80 per cent of the country. Nearer the truth is that they had the run of 80 per cent of the country and in some areas where traditional administration had more or less collapsed, they had established some rudimentary local administration along with rough and summary justice, no doubt with considerable emphasis on protection and racketeering.

Again the experience of servants provides a small insight into what’s really going on. An expat was unhappy with her maid and wanted to be rid of her. So she sacked her; not an unusual event. The servant was mightily disgruntled and reported the matter to the local Maoists, who visited the erstwhile employer and demanded compensation. After much discussion and some mild threats, modest compensation was paid, not to the Maoists, but to the servant. Whether a proportion passed to the Maoists is a matter of speculation, but maybe they nevertheless did the lady some good, by fair means and foul. Allegations of skulduggery abound.

The Maoist rally to announce their programme of action was held on a sports field in the centre of Kathmandu. The prospect of the rally pretty soon brought traffic, which rarely flows smoothly through narrow, pot-holed lanes, to a standstill. Occasionally a bus from a rural area would cut its way through the streets full of young people, including those packed on the roof. The horn blared and the people on the roof waved large red flags with hammers and sickles. Many wore combat fatigues and red bandanas emulating Che Guevara chic. Others wore red and blue tracksuits with Y.C.L on their backs: Young Communist League. On the sports fields there was a large passive crowd, mostly standing around, many clearly from rural areas, mostly young. Some stood with their back to the stage, others read newspapers and most looked bored, but mildly apprehensive. The only cheering or clapping came from people at the front near the stage, usually at the mention of Washington or Iraq. Over the stage a large sign had been erected calling for the immediate declaration of a republic. Many people milled about the stage and to one side was a lectern with a hammer and sickle flag planted on it. Prachandra, the boss of the Maoists, had cried off attending the rally through ill-health and Bhattarya was making a long speech lacking much animation, in the familiar prolix style of Leftist leaders, who generally do not regard brevity as the soul of wit. Nor do they have to worry too much about the intimate scrutiny of a television camera. Long-windedness is not a problem.

Bhattarya promised that they would go from house to house seeking support for their call for a republic. They would organise rallies and demonstrations. He stopped short of saying that the Maoists would ‘return to the jungle’ calling out their cadres from the camps where they had been more or less harmlessly installed since the peace process. There is widespread scepticism about the extent that the Maoists had given up their weapons and a ready supply of more guns is available over the border in India, where the Maoists move freely without official obstruction. Presumably they could resume the armed struggle, but, for the time being, they are not going to.

India’s role in all this is complex and contradictory. One often-recycled rumour is that Chou En lai and Nehru did a deal many years ago. China could have Tibet and India would control Nepal. China duly took over Tibet but when India sought to exert its own expansionist territorial claims in 1962, the Chinese sent nearly a million PLA troops over the Himalayas and India was swiftly put in its place. That story is so neat that it is almost certainly apocryphal.

The source of all this tamasha in Nepali politics is increasingly obscure. What everyone wanted and what they want now is more or less lost in confusion. Peace seems far away and economic prospects are very poor. Tourism is still moderately busy, but mostly of the low return backpacking variety, and very susceptible to a crash in confidence. (Neighbouring Bhutan is doing very well at attracting the high net worth crowd, like Mick Jagger and Sting, and they don’t come much higher net worth than them. If you go to Bhutan you are required to spend a minimum of US$200 a day.) Handicrafts are not well organised and exports are minimal, logging is extensive and mostly illegal, even though Nepalis have done groundbreaking work in the past on forestry governance. Long-term investment is negligible. Hydroelectric power generated in the Himalayas to be sold to power-hungry India, though a long-cherished ambition, is for the moment a pipedream.

Because of the Maoist rally many of the tourist sites in Kathmandu’s wonderful Durbar Square were relatively deserted, at least as far as foreigners were concerned. The locals went about their business as usual. The only Sanskrit University in Nepal carries on. Hindu and Buddhist temples made from red brick and beautiful, carved wood, stand side by side in religious and architectural harmony. Some are festooned with colourful bunting. On the steps courting couple sit talking quietly, or just looking at each other. Inside, worshippers light incense and walk along wooden balconies rotating prayer wheels. Someone rings the temple bell, chanting their prayers sotto voce. In the Hindu temples you can buy the prashad. The blessed temple sweets made from condensed milk and sugar.

One temple in Durbar Square is the temple of the Kumari, the child Goddess. Priests choose a girl destined for this role early in her life and she leaves her family and lives on an upper floor of the temple. There she remains until puberty. Occasionally she appears at the window and will, in some circumstances, bless a visitor. Whilst we were there the current Kumari did appear at the window. A full-faced girl, perhaps ten or eleven years old (and therefore nearing the end of her tenure), olive-skinned and heavily made up, her eyes blackened and pointing upwards like an Indian dancer, wearing a surly, bored, unhappy expression appeared for a few seconds, her face filling the carved wooden window like a framed portrait. As quickly as she appeared, she vanished again. Visitors were instructed not to take photos and to put some money into a box for her ‘private tuition’.

The Kumari, despite her divine status, is being drawn into Nepal’s current political tribulations. King Gyanendra has said that he is going to leave his palace and go to the Kumari’s temple to seek her blessing. This was interpreted in the media as a way of currying favour with the more conservative rural citizens of Nepal who still revere the Kumari and the idea of living deities. As a result they would be reluctant, it was believed, to vote for the extinction of an institution and its office holder whom the Kumari had blessed. The Prime Minister evidently took this threat seriously because he was quick to publicly denounce the King’s ‘irresponsible behaviour’. More no doubt anon.

At the end of the Maoist rally towards dusk, the YCL cadres took once more to their buses and, horns blaring, flags waving, left Kathmandu. Rumours were that each participant was paid about 200 rupees to attend, about £1.30. Most people cancelled their evening arrangements and stayed at home and so, after dark, the streets were quiet, the shops were shuttered and the only people on the streets, other than us, were a group of brightly made up transvestite prostitutes, mourning the poor business, hoping that we might offer a little relief, or perhaps they might offer us some.

see the photos of Nepal at www.flickr.com/photos/gerardlemos/sets

In Bangladesh for a couple of days...or longer?
September 2007

For the last half hour of the flight into Dhaka out of the window all you can see is flooded fields. All you can see of the rectangular fields are the low fences and the water in them. In some the water is so deep that it has a mirror-like, reflective stillness. Others, where fences have burst, have turned brown with churned up mud, blurring into the clearer, stiller water. Slow moving streams curl their way through the fields and into the beginnings of the silted up delta. In some of the deeper floods you can't see fields at all, just the tall chimneys of brick kilns rising out of the water. The occasional house on stilts is in the water. All the other houses and buildings stand with water right up to or even in the doors, looking fragile and vulnerable. One has the sense they could be engulfed at any moment.

This is the second big flood of this monsoon season and it has come towards the end of the traditional rainy season when the waters should be subsiding into the sea. People blame climate change, but perhaps there was always an unpredictable element to monsoons and the consequent floods, both in scale and time. The more important question is why, considering that flooding happens pretty much every year when there isn't a drought, the authorities have not built better - or any - flood defences and why so many people live so close to the water in what is said to be the most densely populated piece of land on earth. Twenty million people have been displaced, apparently awaiting flood and food relief. The people may be resilient but the country's infrastructure is not. The consequences of the flood is likely to be widespread dysentery, which is a perennial hazard not just for tourists, and possibly if things go badly wrong, cholera too. People wait with a fatalistic air, not hopeful of ready or permanent relief.

When it rains in downtown Dhaka the water does not run off through street drains. There aren't many and they are mostly blocked or broken. The potholes fill and the narrower roads turn into greenish-brownish ponds. The pavements are high so, if the rain is not too heavy, the water is contained on the roads and riskshaws and cars splash slowly through them. Children, barefoot and some naked, play noisily with smiles and laughter in the water, unaware of the dangers to their health and it would seem with nowhere else to go. One lucky group of children has a deflated football bouncing across the surface of the water. One small child wearing no shoes, perhaps seven years old, is knee deep in water pushing his father along in a wheelchair in the middle of the road, with cars and rickshaws going round him. His air is determined and defiant, defying the cars not to give way.

The Radisson hotel is near the airport in the cantonment part of Dhaka which has been smartened up for a south Asian international summit a few years ago, complete with a new wide road and the first flyover in Bangladesh. The hotel is new, vast and rather empty. At breakfast most of the others there look like young people working for international development agencies. The odd European businessman eats breakfast in a white shirt and tie, probably contemplating ruefully how he managed to blot his copybook and not get sent somewhere with better prospects, like India or China. Being far from home at the weekend had best be in a good cause. One or two chic European women look like they might be sourcing suppliers in the garment trade for European fashion chains. These women wear white cotton and have acquired a brightly coloured Bangladeshi silk dupatta which they wear in the Punjabi style, round the front with the ends over both shoulders. If they wear it again when they get back to Europe, it will be in another style. Or perhaps it'll stay in the cupboard, because orange doesn't look great on a grey day in Antwerp.

The area around the hotel is green and manicured with large army buildings painted in benign shades of cream and pale yellow, none of them look like they are really there for military purposes, they are hospitals, clinics or leisure clubs for the military and the diplomats who live in Gulshan, the most posh end of town where most Expats live in houses rather bigger than the ones they could afford back home. Fortunately servants are readily available to keep them clean and indeed for everything else, including avoiding the walk from the sofa to the fridge for a drink. The drink when it arrives is accompanied by the thought that they must go to the gym at the club or in an international hotel soon. The neighbours are usually also expats and neighbourly relations are generally poor. The differences in'hardship' allowances paid by the various European Governments is a consuming subject of conversation, as endlessly fascinating as house prices, school fees and the demise of occupational pension schemes are to the good people of Weybridge.

Beyond the cantonement, driving into town you go past various missiles and heavy duty armoury now painted up or polished up until they shine as bright as a good soldier's boots and turned into benign street sculpture. And then the white walls of what was the Prime Minister's office. Since the military established order and control and installed a caretaker Government apparently within acceptable constitutional limits, the Prime Minister has been re-titled the Chief Advisor; presumably advisor to the Generals, not the people. Politics in Bangladesh is poisonous. All the leaders from the dynasties established after the 1971 war of independence from Pakistan are in gaol, amidst recomriminations and mutual loathing of epic proprotions. Mutual loathing is their overarching ideology. They are, by common consent, an unappealing lot and no one, even amongst the liberal intelligentsia, is arguing for a rapid return to civilian democratic rule if it would mean putting any combination of that lot back in power. So, the current arrangements of a caretaker Goverment, approved by the military, seems to be acceptable, for no better reason than it has re-established day to day order, put food back in the shops, stopped buses being overturned and spontaneous rioting in the streets. Corruption, often sponsored by a political faction, is endemic, taking the form of vote-buying in elections alongside the quotidian hassles of bribery to get anything ordinary done. Nepotism, again in the patronage of political factions, has corroded the fabric of academic and intellectual life. For their own reasons the international community also probably think that the current relatively stable arrangements are the least worst option. Above all they fear that the civilian political parties will turn a blind eye, or perhaps even tactily encourage the rise of ultra-conservative and militant Islamic leaders. The military no doubt know that, in international eyes, a good part of their legitimacy comes from their secular, rather than constitutional or democratic credentials. The political future in the short and the long term remains uncertain, perhaps bleak. Local newspaper commentators watch the scene in Pakistan with interest, where Musharaf appears to want Benazir Bhutto to return, but has booted out Nawaz Sharif. Maybe watching this delicate military-democratic dance is of particular interest in Bangladesh because it is an emerging kind of politics which, because it brings a certain kind of stability, might find its way here soon. Not the least of the reasons for the democratic and economic success of India is the resolute disinterest of the military in politics. My experience of military top brass in India is that they find the complications of Indian politics boring.

Amidst all this the Bangladeshi economy is growing healthily, the manufacturing sector, particularly garments, benefits from benign world economic conditions and rampant consumer demand in developed countries. Their cost base is one of the lowest in the world and that has for the moment, along with high quality standards in textiles, allowed them to fend off Chinese competition. But some of their competitive advantage may come from ignoring decent labour and environmental standards. In order to avoid a monstrous traffic jam, we took a detour via the back streets in which many of the garment factories are sited. Unlike in Shenzhen and Guangzhou, these are not vast, relatively modern factories with equally vast dormitories attached. They are small, rundown shabby buildings, whitewashed a long time ago but now covered in green-black mould from floods and the general levels of humidity. Often the tops of the buildings are not complete, because the owners intend to put another storey on top at some undefined point in the future. Or, conversely, a random enforcement of local planning laws has forced the owner to remove a storey or two or, probably, face an extortionate fine. Ouside these buildings are small handpainted signs giving the name of the company, "Yung Fashions", for example. Occasionally I was told the streets fill with the run off of dye and blue and green water runs through the streets, temporarily dyeing the road and any unwary passer-by who could stand the overpowering chemical stench. Standards of machinery and technology must be low and labour standards are undoubtedly rock bottom, so either vigorous enforcement measures by European or American companies responding to ethical or reputational concerns are a threat. Indonesia's textile exports have been more or less wiped out by Chinese competition. One wonders what is to be the fate of the Bangladeshi garment industry over the next couple of deacdes.

Law enforcement, which looks pretty random, can be seen here and there. Buildings built illegally into the road have had their fronts shaved off, with the result that the front of the building is now what used to be the corridor with doors opening straight onto a precipitate drop into the road. Street vendors get moved on regularly, even in the midst of selling a bunch of bananas. There has also been a crackdown on 'illegal' rickshaw owners. Their rickshaws (the prettiest, most colourful and most cherished in the world in my limited experience) are either turned over backwards with their handlebars and wheels in the air and stacked in ditches by the side of the road or they are impounded in a swampy enclosure at the edge of the city. If the owners cannot pay for a licence and thereby reclaim them, they sink slowly into the swamp. In this morning's paper the photograph of the day is the colourful canopies of rickshaws seemingly mushrooming out of an emerald green field. In fact they are sinking and will shortly be sunk.

By far the highest earner of GDP is migrant remittances, apparently according to an economist I spoke to, running to US$6 billion a year. (Second is foreign development aid, US$250 million for UK's DIFD this year, shortly to double.) The largest single source of those migrant remittances is Saudi Arabia with the USA and the UK following behind. Most UK remittances go to the Sylhet region from where most British Bangladeshis originate. As a result longevity and health in Sylhet is better than the average in Bangladesh and fertility rates are coming down as people start to believe that their families abroad bring a degree of economic stability to their future and having large numbers of children is no longer a necessary insurance policy against impoverishment in old age. Apparently, British Bangladeshi businessmen, mainly in the restaurant trade, have built themselves enormous balustraded Greco-Roman villas, painted white and pastel shades, amongst the palm trees and the flooded fields of Sylhet. I haven't seen them, but it sounds plausible. Old money in Bengal on both sides of the India-Bangladesh border with its long, distinguished cultural traditions in literature, music and painting are inevitably snobbish about the accoutrements of new money. The (Bangladeshi-born) British High Commissioner, Anwar Choudhury, had the temerity to mention on Bangladeshi radio that he thought (I paraphrase) that Tagore was a bore. Immediately afterwards he wondered whether he had gone a little far for a professional diplomat even with the benefit of a local ethnic origin, treading too heavily on local elite sensibilities. In fact he received a thousand SMS messages agreeing with him.

Tagore told Michael Young when he was a pupil at Dartington school, that, if he wanted to be a writer, he would have to learn to describe the sound of a door opening and closing. Presumably this line was used to many aspirant writers and was meant both literally and metaphorically. Another great Bengali writer, Arundhati Roy, in the God of Small Things, does indeed describe the sound of a door opening, so perhaps this piece of Tagore-ian wisdom is handed down in a secret covenant to Bengali writers, into the fellowship of whom old Tagore was seeking to recruit young Michael Young.

Getting in and out of Bangladesh by air is an unpredictable business. I am writing this at 11.30 on Sunday morning waiting for a flight to Kathmandu which was due to leave at 10.30. No information is currently available about the expected time of departure. It's started raining.

See the photos of Bangladesh at www.flickr.com/photos/gerardlemos/sets