Gerard Lemos's places etc

1989: A year like any other? - Ai Wei wei in Munich

2009-11-24T10:34:00.000Z

At the Haus der Kunst, a stark museum built by the Nazis in Munich, is a remarkable exhibition by the Chinese artist Ai Wei wei. He was the original inspiration behind the Bird’s Nest Beijing Olympic Stadium, though he abandoned the commission. He is one of the most influential artists in the world because he brings his unique, personal, shocking and sometimes heart-rending vision to the contemporary destruction, as he sees it, of Chinese traditions and culture. His most famous art work is three photos of himself dropping – and smashing – a Han dynasty urn. In the Munich exhibition that sense of wanton destruction, of its traumatic effect, is shown in a collection of Neolithic pots which have been simply and brightly painted in colours you could see in Ikea – the modern simply effacing and destroying the ancient without, as it were, a backward look.

His vision of destruction, sadness, loss and memory took on a particularly poignant turn when he got involved in the aftermath of the Sichuan earthquake. He visited the site of schools which had collapsed killing all the pupils. All that remained of the children were their plastic backpacks. So, for the Munich show, he made a gigantic plastic cover for the whole gallery with a quote from one of the parents about the death of their child. The whole piece is made of schoolchildren’s plastic backpacks stitched together. In the same way some of the wooden sculptures in the exhibition are made of wood salvaged from ancient temples that have been demolished. Or they are traditional wooden Chinese furniture cut in half, or with a great log through it. All these works give a powerful feeling of how history in China has suddenly accelerated, memory can hardly keep up and everywhere there is a feeling of the traditional being ruptured and disappearing. Those feelings of sadness and loss can exist alongside a sense of delight and wonder at what China is achieving. The reflective self-consciousness about what we are losing and what we are gaining all the time is most of what makes us human.

And how important these themes of loss and change are so significant at the time of the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall. I went to a debate about human rights between Bianca Jagger, who is now a fabulously glamorous and intensely serious campaigner against human rights violations, Helena Waldmann, a a ground-breaking German choreographer who had worked with Iranian and Palestinian women and Yang Lian, a Chinese poet who now lives in London. Involving a Chinese poet with personal memories of the events in Tiananmen Square in 1989 was a stroke of genius because it reminded us that, although 1989 felt like a year of opening and freedom in Europe (even with the many subsequent doubts and regrets), for some, as Yang Lian wrote in one of his poems, 1989 was ‘a year like any other’.

Religion and politics in Ahmadabad

2009-11-19T14:58:00.003Z

Ahmadabad has a beautiful Jain temple built in 1850. You enter through an arch covered with sculptures of rounded animals and gods from Hindu mythology into a courtyard with four ornate cloisters around the sides. In the courtyard too the walls are covered with elegant, sinuous carved figures of Radha and Krishna playing his flute and other Hindu gods. Away from the noisy street full of horn-blaring cars, scooters and lorries, the courtyard is quiet and still. The only other person around is a temple widow dressed in a white sari, bowing and praying at each chapel in turn. Around each of the four walls are chapels behind wooden doors containing trios of white marble gods with jewelled all-seeing eyes. You walk around a cloister looking in turn into each chapel, each subtly different, but all the statues are white. In the middle of the cloister a bell hangs from the roof. You ring the bell and then pass on to the next chapel - and in it are gods which are not white like all the others. The first one is black. Ringing the bell and the sudden sight of something unexpected are connected in your mind, as if when you rang the bell the god came alive and became different from all the others, as if by magic. The meditative act of ringing the bell and then contemplating the effect has brought you into a sharper contact with the deity you are now looking at, different to all those you have looked at before, The vast distance between your material self and the divine is momentarily, magically shortened; your belief in magic as an explanation for the inexplicable is momentarily restored. You walk round the three cloisters and ring three bells. Each unexpected god following the bell is more ornate than the last. And the third is gold and crowned. To ring the fourth and largest bell you enter the temple in the middle of the quadrangle. This is the sanctum sanctorum, the holy of holies and here is the group of three most divine statues, white again, two smaller ones on each side and in the centre a large statue with wide-opened jewelled eyes.

Ahmadabad is Mahatma Gandhi’s home town and his ashram is here by the river, the place from where he launched many of his protests and campaigns. It is now a simple museum, untainted by theme park commercialism. The most moving room in the small collection of rooms in which he and his wife Kasturba lived is the small white room in which he lived where his low table and his spinning wheel remain. On the outside are the original instructions for life in the ashram, embracing poverty, chastity, respect for all religions, the unacceptable and irreligious nature of caste divisions and so on. The ashram has no religious iconography, in fact the only icons are the Chinese symbol of the three wise monkeys, see no evil, speak no evil and hear no evil; symbols to which Gandhi was much attached. But nevertheless there are many references to the importance of spirituality. The connection between religion and political liberation is made explicit. The importance of connecting individual moral and spiritual acts to collective and political acts is constantly re-emphasised. As in the Jain temple, the link between the mortal, temporal life of individuals and the divine is constantly re-emphasised. The notion of individual influence or agency is morally and mystically connected to the unknowable divine.

These two experiences draws attention to the central place of spirituality in motivating belief as well as action in all aspects of Indian life. Almudena from Mexico, another very religious country, worked on the victorious presidential campaign of Vicente Fox and, at the Gandhi ashram, she recalls how old people, particularly in rural areas, who came to Fox’s rallies would want to touch him and then begin to cry, as if he was somehow sanctified and contact with him would bring blessings to their life. Frederico from Brazil recounts a story of a participatory budgeting exercise conducted in Brazil when local people were consulted about their priorities for public expenditure. They did not want to see public money spent on a school or a clinic to the surprise of the local government officials. Instead they wanted the money spent on building a church, which was not at all the outcome intended.

Posthumous lives in Rome

2009-10-26T16:00:00.001Z

The area around the Spanish Steps in Rome is still sometimes quaintly referred to as the English quarter. At the bottom in Piazza di Spagna on one side of the steps is Babington's Tea Room, where a small fortune will buy you an English cup of tea. On the other side of the steps is the Keats Shelley Museum. This is the apartment where the English poet Keats died of tuberculosis at the age of 25. His days of writing poetry were at an end, only 18 months long, but nevertheless producing some of the most famous and beautiful poetry in English literature. My favourite line from Keats is ‘alone and palely loitering' (from the poem, La Belle Dam Sans Mercy), which, when I was a student, is how I imagined myself; the dark romantic typeon the North York moors, never without a volume of poetry, a jazz record and a packet of Gauloises.

Keats came to Rome having been an apothecary and a physician in London, both rather lower class professions. As a result his poetry went unregarded and more famous poets like Byron looked snobbishly down on him. For a short while his health did improve and he saw some of the famous Roman sights. In the Villa Borghese he was shocked by Canova's sculpture, which would then only have been a few decades old and daringly modern, of Paolina Borghese with her breasts bared and holding an apple, a Christian symbol of her temptress nature. But the revival in his health was short-lived and he soon took to his bed to live out what he called in a beautiful, tragic phrase ‘his posthumous life'. Looked after, and occasionally movingly painted by his artist friend, John Severn, his health diminished and his death mask, which is in the museum, shows that he died a gaunt, shrunken man. He had no posthumous reputation, no fortune, no good name - but he left a beautiful oeuvre of romantic poetry which was eventually revived by the Pre-Raphaelites decades after his death.

Another famous English artist is also currently making a more transitory but nevertheless remarkable impact on Rome: FrancisBacon. In the gorgeous Villa Borghese(where Keats was shocked by the bare-breasted Paolina) there is an exhibition of Bacon paintings alongside the paintings of Caravaggio, that most realistic and down-to-earth of Rennaissance painters. The contorted and unrecognisable features of Bacon's subjects sit alongside the peasants and urchins that Caravaggio had transmogrified into hyper-realistic images of saints and classical heroes with his remarkable control of light and shadow, chiaroscuro, and his bold painting techniques. My favourite Caravaggio painting is not famous and rarely shown in exhibitions, though it is on display in this exhibition. Its normal home is a dark, dusty corner of the church of Santa Maria del Popolo, just outside the Borghese gardens. The painting appears
to be a man injured by being thrown from a horse. Most of the painting is taken up with the rear end of the horse and the man lies swooning and unconscious in the bottom right hand corner of the painting by the horse's side. In fact, the subject of the painting is the conversion of St Paul on the road to Damascus. So what seems an earthy, realistic painting is in fact depicting a moment of transfiguration; a miraculous moment of enlightenment. The conversion of the real to the transfigured is Caravaggio's gift, as it is that of many other Rennaissance painters.

But by inserting Bacon paintings seemingly randomly amongt the Rennaissance masters, not just Caravaggio, but also Raphael, Cranach, Titian, Dossi, Lippi and the spectacular Bernini statues (amongst the greatest sculptures in the world), the curator is posing a big question about realism. Francis Bacon believed, as do many of those who look at his paintings, that his distortions of physical reality in the depiction of his subject brings out thier truer selves. In other words, the apparently distorted was more real, in the sense of true, than the realistic image. In thinking that he was influenced by Freudian notions of the unconscious. So here was the point of the show. The ‘realism' in painting to which Rennaissance art gave birth, with its unprecedented understanding of perspective and landscape as well as its humanistic portrayal of religious figures, was in fact depicting the spiritual, the miraculous, the transfigured: realism in painting to connect our human experiences to the divine. Francis Bacon also seemed to be arguing that realism did not serve reality. All the painters seemed to be using the voices of different times to say the real is rarely the true; look harder if you want to find the truer meaning.

Two schools in Johannesburg

2009-10-12T09:35:00.001+01:00

The first school we visited in Johannesburg was the African Leadership Academy, a new school for students between 16 and 18 which had just taken in its first intake of 180 students. The school was set on a green, leafy campus on the outskirts of Johannesburg in an area that was until recently farmland. Peacocks roamed the campus. They had been inherited from the printing college that used to be on the campus. Some of the staff told me that the peacocks were noisy and messy pests which had gone feral. If I wanted to take one with me, I would be welcome. This seemed implausible to me so I enquired further with the students. The students told me that, in fact, the peacocks were looked after by the cooks who fed them left over food from the students’ meals. They were thriving on it and the numbers were rising rapidly. Some of the peacocks were starting to show telltale signs of obesity.

The students were from all over Africa and 85 per cent of them received scholarships, meaning that the entry criteria were based on merit rather than wealth. Most of the recruitment was done on line and relied in part on academic achievement, but also on leadership potential. The founder, whom we met, was concerned that young potential leaders from Africa almost always went abroad to study and, in many cases, never returned. Students who received a scholarship signed a contract that they would return from study abroad to work in Africa for at least five years. So he wanted to nurture a new generation of African leaders at the school. They studied for A levels, because they were more flexible than the International Baccalaureate. The greater flexibility of A levels meant that the school could add three subjects to the curriculum: leadership, entrepreneurship and African studies – a very telling and modern combination I thought. The downside of A levels was that the curriculum was British, not African. Some of it was flexible; a young man I met was doing Literature and his set texts were Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, but there were inevitable irrelevances. The case study of hyper-inflation was Germany after the First World War, though the teachers felt that Zimbabwe in recent times might be more interesting and pertinent.

The students, with whom we had a long discussion, were wonderful: animated, argumentative, idealistic, articulate – terrific in every way. Every single one of them intended to study in the US if they could. Most had already identified which college they wanted to attend. This is surely a warning sign for British universities. Apparently, American universities have more flexible, less academic entry criteria (debatable, I suspect) and more numerous and more generous scholarships (undoubtedly true).

The other school we visited was Tulani School in Soweto. The school had more than 1000 pupils and had good facilities, both classrooms and playing fields, though no peacocks. The average class size was 56 but nevertheless more than 90 per cent of students passed their matric. This statistic was all the more impressive as a good proportion of the students lived in the nearby informal settlements. Even though the school is well run and has an inspirational Principal, the problems of the local community do intrude on school life. Drug dealers come through the fence and sell drugs on the sports pitches to the pupils in breaks, making some pupils reluctant to come to sports classes. The children here too were wonderful.

These were both excellent schools but, having visited them both within 24 hours, my mind inevitably turned to the inequalities that shaped the differences between the two schools. Social justice implies a concern about the extent, nature and damaging effects of inequality. But a great fallacy of social change is the assumption that because something should be done it can be done or will be done.

Meetings with remarkable Indians

2009-08-30T16:34:00.001+01:00

Poonam Mutreja, MacArthur Foundation
The MacArthur Foundation has conducted what is probably the largest ever survey of adolescents in India, 25,000 young people in each of six Indian states; 150,000 in all. The results are to be published at the end of the year. The findings from the survey shows what many have started to suspect anecdotally from the experience of their own families and children: Middle class Indian youth is beginning to display all the alienations and anomie of Western youth; a rash of what Poonam Mutreja called psycho-social problems, like anorexia, freely available ‘leisure’ drugs (300 rupees, about £4, will buy you a good time on the latest designer drug apparently), confused sexual identities and all the familiar traumas of Western adolescence – but without yet the propensity to rebel which has been institutionalized amongst adolescents in Western societies. The transition to adulthood, which was once so predictable and perhaps stifling in India, has now become a complex and, for some, confusing and uncertain mosaic.

Indira Jaiasingh, Additional Attorney General
The Indian Supreme Court complex has a special post-Raj atmosphere. It is in one of Lutyens’ wonderful cupola-ed red sandstone temples, at the heart of New Delhi. Once you get through security, which has the familiar air of barely suppressed chaos that often reigns in Indian Government environments, the compound is full of black-clad lawyers rushing hither and thither, gowns billowing behind them, mostly men, but now a few women. Laptops poke out from under flowing batwing sleeves. Following rapidly behind them are assistants carrying bursting bundles of papers. It is like a grand conclave of large black birds in permanent motion. Watching them all swirl around you feel that if you clapped your hands loudly perhaps all the black-clad lawyers would simply fly away.

Indira Jaiasingh is a radical lawyer who has fought many cases in Indian courts about the adverse consequences for poor and marginalized people of globalization and privatization. In a highly significant and confident move after the victory of his UPA coalition in the General Election, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has appointed her Additional Attorney General. So from being a radical critic, she is, now a Government official, but she has not the slightest intention of abandoning what she called her campaigning ‘baggage.’ Her radical passions burn with as much fervour as ever. Proximity to power combines the feeling that something can at last be done with the frustration that even where power supposedly resides, getting things done can still be maddeningly difficult.

Indira Jaisingh, in a white patterned sari, the blouse adapted for a legal collar combined with a black waistcoat, to denote her legal uniform. Her grey hair is firmly scraped back in a utilitarian fashion. She sits calmly in her office waiting for her two young legal assistants, who are tapping away at laptops and mobile phones in the corner, to tell her that the Supreme Court is ready for her. She is appearing for the Government to argue the case for the Delhi Master Plan which makes provision for legalizing some informal settlements and allowing some hawkers, street vendors and small traders to regularize their status and continue to trade with the protection, rather than the hostility, of the police and the law. The middle class residents of Delhi have organized themselves into a powerful and litigious network of residents’ associations and they are opposing the Master Plan. Their objections have gone all through the courts and have now landed in the Supreme Court. Indira Jaisingh regards their objections as ‘frivolous’. There is in her view no constitutional right to walk on a clear pavement unimpeded by hawkers or pavement dwellers when the people involved have nowhere else to go and no other way to make a living. Her anger is controlled, precise and absolutely to the point; she speaks slowly, in short, lucid, incontrovertible sentences which go straight to the heart of the matter. Being polite or amiable just for its own sake is evidently terra incognita. One imagines how phased her opponents must feel when fixed with her steely, unphased glare. Despite the frivolousness of the residents’ associations’ objections in the current case she fears the court may uphold them. In her view the courts have been consistently biased against slum dwellers and street hawkers and willing to back middle class residents. She is not impressed and she intends to spend the afternoon over turning that bias.

Andre Beteille, Sociologist
The monsoon, due in June, had yet to arrive when I landed in Delhi two months later at the end of July. The humidity was so high and the air so thick and viscous, you could almost pick it up with a spoon and put it in a bowl. If one ignores the traffic chaos and the hopeless overflowing drains, the monsoon is wonderful, cool and fresh – particularly for me as I hadn’t been in a monsoon in India since my childhood, so it was almost Proust-ian to feel the atmosphere lift as the rain began falling.

As the skies darkened and the heavy rain started to fall, not in drops, but in ropes, Sujata and I arrived to visit India’s most distinguished sociologists, Andre Beteille. He lives in Jor Bagh, that lovely residential district of leafy green squares near the centre of New Delhi next to the Lodhi Gardens with its palm trees and monumental Mughal tombs. We sat in his small but beautiful sitting room, surrounded be fascinating abstract paintings, with the fan whirring on the ceiling. In the rain trees turn a luminous emerald green and we sat looking out on his garden eating delicious home-made cake and drinking tea.

Andre Beteille has gained a certain notoriety in India for being an active promoter of equality for the under-privileged or ‘scheduled’ castes in India, but an active opponent of quotas in universities and jobs for them. This latter opposition had led him to resign from the Indian Government’s powerful Knowledge Commission, somewhat to the Government’s consternation. He dismisses this high-profile act of objection and defiance as unimportant. “I’m not really the committee-type. I’m at my best in the seminar room.” Under-statement, like its close cousin irony, may be one of the more benign British post-colonial legacies.

The morphing of universities
Universities, as he defines them, are a threatened species, in India as elsewhere. The heart of the traditional university, as invented in Europe and particularly in Oxford and Cambridge (800 years old this year) was teaching and research of science and humanities. The more applied academic disciplines were on the periphery. Using academic research to influence public policy or practice was more or less unheard of. The point of it all was increasing the sum of human knowledge. He sensed that this model of the university was now moribund for two reasons. Firstly, the applied disciplines of technology and business management were fast becoming the core and humanities and natural sciences were being shunted to the periphery. Secondly, academics were no longer content with just teaching and research. They also wanted to write in the newspapers, influence public debate and be policy makers (not just policy analysts) in Government. These new ambitions could not in his view be achieved through institutions such as traditional universities, but were most effectively achieved through fluid personal networks.

Institutions vs networks
He has written a paper about the differences between institutions and networks; “just a rant”, he said modestly. In fact the analysis was compelling. Institutions are characterized by clear and manifold rules and regulations. Even if many people think the rules are absurd and unjustified, compliance will still be required. Institutions also have fixed membership which is hard to enter and which people were reluctant to leave. The essence of the institution is typified, according to Andre Beteille, by the British boarding school. Traditionally universities were certainly such institutions. Networks on the other hand relied on agreements and values, rather than traditions and rules and entry and exit was straightforward, common and frequent. Networks could be long-lived but had no aspirations to permanence, whereas institutions wanted to see themselves as eternal and were therefore prone regularly to publicly celebrate their longevity.

Isher Ahluwallia, Education policy-maker
“Please come,” Isher Aluwalia, smiling warmly, shows us into her office at the Habitat Centre. The power is out at her home where we were going to meet. Even the important and influential are not immune to the egalitarianism of the ubiquitous power cut in India. She is an elegant woman in an electric blue silk sari and striking jewellery. Her thick grey hair is elegantly and perfectly evenly bobbed.
She is a distinguished researcher and has looked in great depth at the learning outcomes achieved by primary schools, comparing the performance of schools in the Punjab, one of India’s wealthiest states, with those achieved in other states. She is generally not impressed. Results are poorer even when school buildings may be better and classes smaller, not to mention higher spending per capita. Her diagnosis, in line with a great deal of international research, is that not enough has been spent on improving the skills and quality of teachers. Investment in education is not neutral. The greatest benefit, rupee for rupee, is to be had from teacher development, a very important area of work for the Council in numerous countries.

She visited a school in the Punjab with her husband, Montek Singh Aluwallia, the Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission, and one of the closest associates of Manmohan Singh, the Prime Minister. He is therefore said to be one of the four most influential people in India. The local officials were proudly showing Montek, (as everyone calls him, even those, like me, who don’t know him) and his wife their new buildings, the new separate toilets for boys and girls and the much improved classroom equipment. They were seeking to demonstrate that the education budgets, which have recently (and very belatedly) been greatly increased all over India, were being wisely spent and not squandered in rake-offs and other forms of corruption. The officials were therefore disconcerted when Mrs Aluwallia, who was presumably supposed to just nod and smile in the background, flatly asserted that she had looked at the evidence and they were probably spending money on the wrong things, as the state of Punjab needed to spend a great deal more on improving the quality of its teachers, not just the quality of its school buildings. Cue deflated officials.

She says Indians are reluctant to compare what they are doing with foreigners because they think that talking about things too much, particularly boasting, leads to people putting the evil eye on you. Superstitions, even amongst intellectuals, die hard. She has been involved in many international exchanges. Her eyes twinkling with mischief and merriment, she tells us about a high level exchange with Chinese academics and officials, who amongst other things, wanted to find out about the Indian IT industry. As the leader of the Indian delegation she tells them, showing the smiling directness we are coming to recognize as her trademark, “The Indian IT industry happened by accident; it happened despite the Government, not because of the Government.” The Chinese officials were astonished and frankly disbelieving. They thought the Indian delegation were being disingenuous, perhaps seeking to avoid the evil eye. Such a thing would be impossible in China: a world-beating industry being created without Government support. This subject kept recurring in all their exchanges so eventually, Isher Aluwallia repeated her observation in the presence of an Indian Government Minister. He nodded vigorously and the Chinese delegation were finally convinced that things can happen without Governments and sometimes Governments even get in the way.

Ashis Nandy, Sociologist
Ashis Nandy lives in a lovely flat in Delhi, with the illustrations for the covers of his book on the wall interspersed with tribal art. There are books and paper everywhere with sculptures and computers scattered amongst them. Perched precariously on the top of his bookshelf is a large poster with a poem written by his brother to celebrate Ashis’s 65th birthday. “You left home before I smoked my first cigarette”; the opening line summons up a touching sense of sibling intimacy. Uma, Ashis’s wife, breaks off watching an angry TV debate about corruption in the distribution of the Government’s flagship cash benefit scheme for the poorest of the poor, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, to serve delicious, freshly-cooked, bite-size pakora, cooked in the Guajarati way.

Ashis Nandy is one of India’s most distinguished – and controversial – social critics. He has argued that the nation state as defined by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 and developed in Europe thereafter, which has been enthusiastically embraced by the post-colonial Indian elite, is deeply flawed for the Indian context. It can never produces stability and harmony, just varying degrees of, at least, discord and, at worst, chaos. He argues controversially that nation states will always privilege military security over social development. Their primary focus is always on strengthening the state, if necessary at the expense of the interests of the people. He goes even further to argue that nation states, whilst claiming to represent and preserve cultural traditions and linguistic identities, consistently and systematically undermine and trash traditional forms of knowledge and celebrate technocratic and globalised information even though the champions of these hyper-modern approaches know perfectly well that everyone in India can never live like people in Western Europe; there are simply not enough resources to go round. Again he points to middle-class self-interest dressed up as a nation-building project of economic and social development. In these culture and political wars, truth is often a casualty, but so too are the rights and aspirations of individual citizens.

Anil Gupta, Social alchemist
Anil Gupta is a Professor of Entrepreneurship at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmadabad, probably India’s best management school, in Gujarat, India’s fastest growing state – and its most religiously divided. But his much greater claim to fame is that he is a great champion of social innovation – probably the greatest in the world; he is a social alchemist seeking to turn poor people’s base metals into gold for their benefit. Dressed in an unostentatious traditional cotton kurta and taking his shoes off in every building he entered (though insisting we need not) his office on the lovely campus is small, dark and full of books and news cuttings from all over the world.

Although he is less combative than Ashis Nandy, he makes the same point: India is too poor to wait for globalization to bring about huge increases in material standards of living for everyone. In the meantime the productive and creative potential of poor people is their greatest asset. In developed countries highly stratified education systems identify those with talent early in life. Ignoring humble origins (like mine), the education system will make many of the talented successful, (making the successful talented is of course impossible, or perhaps that’s too unkind!). This is what Michael Young called meritocracy. India is not a meritocracy, particularly in the rural areas where three quarters of the population continue to live, many of them in great poverty. Talent is held back, and therefore, ironically, beneficially present almost everywhere, if only the best ideas could be collected, shared and developed using more conventional investment and management methods. That is Professor Gupta’s mission.

His method of research is walks around the country, a tradition inherited from Gandhi from whom many of his ideas are clearly drawn, though much adapted and modernized. These walks are long and undertaken in high summer or the depth of winter, sleeping out where necessary. He believes fervently that you listen better when walking. He and his companions record the ideas of those that they meet and publish them on the internet. We are astonished to discover that so far he has collected and published 164,000, including shoes to walk on water (invented by a farmer who wanted to visit his girlfriend on the other side of the river) and a washing machine powered by pedal power.

Using funds he received from an award from an American foundation, he has established a laboratory to test some of the ideas he encounters in a more scientific environment (his original expertise was in genetics). He shows us some of the experiments. They are conducting tests on the immunizing properties of single-bulb garlic, which some rural people told him they used for treating many ailments. He shows us the petri dish whish shows the garlic producing a larger zone of immunity than a conventional drug. If these tests prove successful, his laboratory will patent the single-bulb garlic and the farmer and his community will receive the royalties. They have already brought many products to market, including an organic fly spray (which Moumitra uses in her garden and recommends) and a natural cream for cracked skins on heels.

In another room in the laboratory, pots of earth are organized in tidy rows, some are cheap factory-made earthenware and others are darker, almost black, and handmade. In each one a small seedling is growing. The seedlings in the handmade pots seem to be larger and healthier than the ones in the factory-made pots. Sujata picks up one of these handmade pots and asks Professor Gupta, “What is this?” “That pot,” he replies, “is made of cow dung and we are testing what farmers have told us: cow dung pots retain water better and produce healthier plants than factory-made pots.” Sujata swiftly returns the pot she is holding to the table and gingerly dusts off her fingers seeking to discreetly remove the remaining traces of cow dung without looking too urban and fastidious.

Ela Bhatt: global activist for women
At dinner in a wonderful vegetarian restaurant in a historic building in the centre of Ahmadabad we meet Ela Bhatt who is the leader of a million-strong women’s movement. She is a small, thin woman, perhaps not so young now, in a pink starched cotton sari. Her balance and poise, hands folded on the table in front of her, head still, half a smile, makes me think she is probably a long-time practitioner of yoga; asking, though tempting, seemed rather personal as I had just met her.
She is feted all over the world and consulted by leaders from all over the world, including Hillary Clinton, who recently visited SEWA. Mrs Clinton has visited before, but on this visit she asked for the first time about the women’s views on environmental sustainability. The French have given her the Legion d’Honneur, nothing yet from the Brits as far as I can tell.

We are deep in conversation and she asks me about the lives of women from the sub-continent in the UK. I explain some research I had done with Bangladeshi women in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets: how difficult it was for them to care for many children and look after ailing, prematurely aged husbands and how many had taken to chewing tobacco for its sedative effects to such an extent that there was now an epidemic of mouth cancer. She listened carefully to what I had to say and at the end, moving her head from side to side in that characteristically Indian way, she said “But the men are tyrants, no?”

Animals in the Western Cape South Africa

2009-03-08T13:47:00.002Z

The relationships between human and other animal species will forever be contested; a contest for space, nutrition, power, freedom. In South Africa the proximity of wildlife to human settlements is greater than anywhere in Europe, where many millennia of human domination has left the landscape bereft and empty of the larger mammals. But the accommodation between animals and humans remains uneasy – and as a result of the growing competition the relationships and co-operation between animals and members of their own species is also contested. Zorro the hippomotamus escaped from a ‘reserve’ near Cape Town to escape bullying and attacks from his father. Perhaps his father felt it was time for the adolescent to leave home, but there’s nowhere far enough away to go in a game park. Zorro somehow managed to escape and found a more peaceful home in one of the City’s sewage farm, where he gives the impression of bliss. He reigns supreme in a kingdom of shit devoid of all other hippos. But he will have to be re-homed eventually into one of the proliferating number of game parks, all in search of a hippo.

Amongst the lizards, too, things have got difficult. One of the more colourful chameleon lizards has developed a transvestite strain. These are adolescent males (again!) who don the colouring of the females of the species in the hope of avoiding attacks and evictions by the dominant males. This strategy seems to be working and the transvestite lizards are scoring with the females before the typically stupid males realise what’s going on. As a result, the selfish genetic adaptation that allowed them to take on female colouring seems for the moment to be prospering.

But, as far as humans are concerned, our most complex mythical and practical relationships are with big cats and with the higher primates. Baboons are notoriously territorial and aggressive apes and continue to resist human invasion of their territory long after the roads and houses have been built and the people have moved in. They keep a watchful gaze from a distance and mount guerrilla attacks when they can, both in defence of their territory, causing as much mayhem as possible, but also in search of relatively easily accessible food. As well as urinating and defecating on beds and cushions, where presumably the human scent is strongest, they also steal fruit, vegetable and most other edibles. An avocado from a salad bowl is a good deal less effort, after all, than climbing all those trees. And we humans are inadequate protectors of our abundant food supplies. Unlike the transvestite lizards, this is a learnt adaptation and undoubtedly a functional one. Many groups of birds and animals are losing their fear of humans – squirrels and pigeons in North London for example.

So, once battle with the baboons is joined, fear must be deployed. Many baboons that live near humans bear the scars. A troop living in Pringle Bay near Cape Town had broken fingers, tails, hands and legs. Many other injuries had been terminal. Some injuries have been gained in fights with other baboons, motivated either by sexual competition or by an attempt to upset the established hierarchy, the former being a particularly irritating example of the latter from the point of view of the alpha male. Others have been attacked by humans, hit with stones from catapults, shot at and run over by cars, not always accidentally. Some have been attacked by man’s most faithful friends, dogs. They survive despite their disabilities, by compensating in other physical ways and by sticking with the pack.

But one human couple in Pringle Bay have come to some kind of accommodation with the baboons. Kate Jagoe-Davis is an artist who is also a paraplegic and a continuous wheelchair user. The baboons are much less aggressive to her, in part because they are less aggressive towards women: apparently they find the smell of testosterone particularly annoying. But the baboons have gone further and made friends with her, playing with her bangles, sitting on her knee and even grooming her hair. One young mother even brings her newborn to show her. They remain wary of her partner, Brian, meanwhile. He occasionally has to adopt an assertive male stance, either standing his ground in stand offs with the baboon bosses or seeing them off the premises with shows of aggression. This bizarre accommodation leads to confusion all round and even this benign human couple trying to come to terms with their baboon neighbours will more likely than not come unstuck. It will end in tears, because the baboons will eventually call Brian’s bluff. A show of aggression will not be enough.

Animals in Amsterdam

2009-01-06T21:35:00.006Z

At the FOAM photographic gallery in Amsterdam, in a lovely canalside town house, there were two exhibitions, one by an African photographer, Malick Sidibe, and the other with an African subject , The Hyena and Other Men, by Pieter Hugo. The photographs in the Malick Sidibe exhibition were mostly taken in his studio in Bamako, Mali in the 1970s. They are devoid of the all too familiar stereotypes of Africa. Instead, sharply dressed, mostly young people went to his studio to have a photo taken, which conveyed their strength of pride about themselves, as if they were setting off for a night on the town, perhaps with romantic conquest in mind. Many of the outfits give them a kind of gangster quality, complete with mirror sunglasses. Not gangsta in the contemporary sense, but gangster in the sense of 1930s Chicago: dapper men in sharply cut suits; feminine, glamorous women.

Malick Sidibe also specialised in wedding photography and these photographs convey all the joys of crowds and community, of spontaneity, celebration and hospitality that one might struggle to find in Europe nowadays. Finding celebration and crowds might be particularly difficult in Amsterdam, where all is cool, distant, elegant and now conservative. How different to the 1970s when Amsterdam was colour, youth and freedom, whilst London was grey, old, broke and broken.

The other exhibition by Pieter Hugo could not be more of a contrast. Instead of the small studio portraits, the huge photographs are of men with hyenas, dogs and monkeys on chains. These men are a group of travelling musicians and performers in Nigeria whom the photographer has got to know. But the subjects do not seek to reveal intimacy or vulnerability. Instead they want to convey strength, control and, above all, mastery over the hyenas, muzzled and on the end of a thick chain. These animals are forcibly controlled, not tamed – and God knows how they were made to suffer in order to contain their fear and aggression. Aggression must have been beaten out of them.

The men are exotically dressed in beads and animal skins, whilst some of the animals are dressed up in human clothes: two monkeys are wearing football shirts and they stare at the camera in a defiant, knowing way. So somehow the so-called hyena men have tried to pull off a kind of anthropomorphic role reversal. The men are posing with their legs apart and their chest out, as if they are wild, dominant animals. The animals are supposedly becalmed and deferential. But the pose is obviously fake. The viewer senses immediately not that these men are powerful, but that they are powerless, poor and desperate. The animals, however, still suggest their barely contained wildness. The human trick has failed. We are not the masters of wild animals. We only convey an illusion of brutal power, seeking more than anything to convince ourselves, whilst those over which we claim power know that our power is conditional and temporary. One day the fight will come and the fight will be to the death.

Human anthropocentric delusion is a subject which John Gray addresses in Amsterdam. He tells the story of a vegan cat. A friend of his told him that he had trained, cajoled and tricked his cat into being a vegan and therefore to eschew meat and other animal products. The animal had apparently thrived on this unusual diet. Even a cursory acquaintance with cats confirms that there is no cat in the world that does not eat meat and fish. But then one of John’s questions hit the bullseye. Was the cat kept indoors, he asked his friend. No, came the reply, the cat was free to come and go as it pleased. The owner apparently believed that the cat maintained its vegan habits whilst out on the town alone.

The cat, one suspects, may have had a friend like Yvonne who feeds Herman the cat from next door, to the point where he is now overweight; some might even say obese. His owners think he has a poor appetite. They may even think he is a vegan.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gerardlemos/sets/ for a few photographs of Amsterdam

Lighthouses at Dartington

2008-12-25T09:01:00.004Z

Peter Maxwell Davies, one of Britain’s greatest living composers, was once the Director of the Dartington International Summer School. After a long absence of more than 25 years, this year he returned. He gave master classes in composing and the musicians present played many of his pieces in the Great Hall, which, notwithstanding its name, high windows and vaulted ceiling, is a surprisingly intimate place to listen to music. If you sit in the front row, you can almost touch the musician.

Maxwell Davies' music is not simple or romantic; harmony and melody are hard to get hold of and there is no soothing flow in which to get lost. Instead the music is abstract, mathematical and sometimes atonal. His music, some might say, is ‘difficult’. His explanations of his music, which precursed each piece played at Dartington, are, on the other hand, not difficult at all. They are simple, clear and almost always point to Orkney, a place, at least in his descriptions, which is so profoundly connected to the sea that the relentless sea makes sure the place never changes.

From his front window on Orkney Maxwell Davies can, he told us, see four lighthouses. That seemed an amazing fact in itself. Imagine living in a place so surrounded by and exposed to the sea and its dangers that four lighthouses are needed to protect boats from going to close to the rocks. The light from each lighthouse has a different pulse, as every lighthouse everywhere in the world does, making their lights instantly recognisable to the knowledgeable seaman. And so each instrument in his string quartet represented the pulse of one of these four lighthouses. One day he had imagined he had seen a mirage, a kind of vision: a fifth lighthouse had appeared in the bay outside his house, but this one was upside down, with its pulsing light at sea level. And that impossibility was at the heart of this piece of music.

At the climax, the music is shocking, convulsive and loud, like the vision of the upside down lighthouse. Having heard that explanation the music became straightforward, logical, easy to follow, evocative of a place the listener had never been, but now felt some intimate understanding of. Above all, the music seemed to suggest that lighthouses might appear for a moment upside down in the sea. Everything’s possible in music.

Man eating sharks in Recife

2008-12-11T07:23:00.001Z

Recife has been a port since colonial times, but, as everywhere, a deep water port was needed to cope with modern container traffic. This was built some way from the city and the old port., with its rundown streets, customs house and red light district. Unfortunately the new port was built in the feeding grounds of the local sharks. So they moved down the coast to the golden, palm fringed beach right in the heart of the city, Boa Viagem. Now right outside the biggest hotels, the streaming traffic and under the bright arc lights illuminating the beach, the sharks hang around just beyond a low reef not far out from the beach. At high tide they can get over the reef and there are one or two breaks in the reef which hungry baby sharks can get through. The only food available is bathing human beings so every now and again they attack one of those with a view to eating them. But human beings are not tasty, so they generally just spit the flesh out and move on, still hungry. A lorry driver, desperate for a pee, went into the sea and relieved himself. That was a bad mistake. The smell attracted the sharks and one of them took a big bite out of his leg. So the moral of the tale is don't pee in the sea if there are sharks about.

Angels of Brasilia

2008-12-08T01:11:00.001Z

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gerardlemos/sets/ for photos of Brasilia

Angels of Bogota

2008-12-06T05:04:00.001Z

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gerardlemos/sets/ for photos of Bogota

Fishing for miracles in Bogota

2008-12-05T11:51:00.005Z

Ingrid Betancourt was held hostage for many years by FARC guerrillas in the impenetrable lowland jungles in the east of Colombia. She was held in a distant jungle camp along with three Americans and seven Colombian soldiers. Hostage-taking has been one of the most effective tactics of the guerrillas in Colombia, not just FARC but also other paramilitary and Maoist groups. Taking hostages has dual benefits. Considerable sums are raised in ransom money, some paid, as it were, below the counter by worried, wealthy families. The second benefit is sowing fear and anxiety in the civilian community going about their day-to-day business. Some of the kidnapped were ordinary people, chosen by the upmarket brand of their car, whom the guerrillas hoped came from prosperous and privileged families and may therefore command larger ransoms. The market, so ubiquitous, even has it place in the world of hostage-taking. This semi-random approach to the choice of civilian hostages came to be known by the darkly ironic name of ‘miracle fishing’.

Even though FARC activities have been much curbed and their leader is dead, many other paramilitaries group are still active. Some say that the price that the wildly popular but aggressive President Uribe has paid for putting an end to negotiations with FARC and seeking to defeat them militarily is that other paramilitary groups operate with impunity and sometimes with covert official support. The main losers are the peasants, turfed from their land by intimidation. Two thousand people are still believed to be being held as hostages, 700 of them by FARC. The latest estimates are that about 30 hostages are soldiers in the Colombian army and two politicians remain in captivity. FARC maybe in retreat and the security situation much improved, but the war is not yet won and the consequences of lawlessness, crime and corruption will be a long time in the eradication.

As the world now knows, Betancourt and the other hostages with whom she was being held were rescued in a James Bond-like mission. Undercover Colombian army officers, operating on intelligence acquired over many years with foreign help, found the guerrillas’ hideout in the jungle. The guards at the camp were persuaded that the army officers were in fact also guerrillas under orders from headquarters to move the hostages to an even more remote camp close to the Venezuelan border. One of the hostages, Lieutenant Malagon, had been keen not to submit to the Stockholm syndrome, in which captives start to identify with their captors (most famously, Patty Hearst). So he took every opportunity to assert his true identity. On seeing the fake guerrillas arriving in the helicopter, believing them to be real guerrillas, he said “I am Lieutenant Malagon of the glorious Colombian army”. So convinced were the guerrilla captors that the men who had arrived by helicopter were their own kind that two of them went into the helicopter with the hostages. Once the helicopter was airborne the rescuing soldiers abandoned their cover and revealed their true identity. It was their turn to say that they were soldiers of the glorious Colombian army. At this point Ingrid Betancourt, who unsurprisingly had been depressed for a long time, burst into tears.

When the soldiers had been taken hostage they spoke no English. They had been taught English in the long tedious hours of captivity by the three American hostages and in return had taught them Spanish. Since being released the soldiers have gone through all the ‘detoxification’ procedures with psychologists and the army, particularly with a view to curing any lingering traces of the Stockholm syndrome. They are now to be re-commissioned. The legal advisor for kidnapped soldiers to the army suggested to them that they may like to continue their English studies in the rather more congenial but less dramatic setting of the British Council in Bogota. So yesterday, on a stormy afternoon in the upmarket Northern part of the Bogota, in the bright, glassy offices of the British Council, three officers were sitting at separate desks (presumably to avoid plagiarism; standards must be maintained!) taking their assessment test to check their current level of English alongside teenage students. On the surface the scene could not have been more humdrum. But the youngsters recognised these three soldiers as former hostages because they had been extensively on television. Lieutenant Malagon has been nominated for Colombian personality of the year, along with Olympic medallists, sports celebrities and President Uribe. Whilst doing their own tests, the teenagers cast a furtive glance at the soldiers and raised a small smile, comparing the routine business of sitting English language tests at the British Council with the outrageous extremes of being held hostage in the jungle and being taught English by your fellow hostages.

I shook hands with Lieutenant Malagon and wondered at the extraordinary miracle that had been fished from teaching English.

Religion and sex in Kyiv

2008-07-02T11:51:00.013+01:00

Kyiv has some of the most beautiful and least well known churches in the world. At least, they are not well known to Westerners. Orthodox monks lived in the caves under the Lavra monastery from the sixth century onwards, eventually bringing Christianity to Russia. Now the Lavra monastery is a UNESCO world heritage site. It's the only place in Kyiv where you might see groups of elderly American tourists of the sort that are everywhere in Florence or Siena. They go down in single file into the tunnels and caves carrying thin candles. The orthodox style is to carry the candles between the fingers of your left hand leaving your right hand free for repeated crossing of yourself. The tunnels are so low that the head of someone of medium height brushes the ceiling and tall people walk along stooped and uncomfortable. In the caves are small wooden altars.

In niches in the tunnels are the covered bodies of saints, whose holiness has apparently ensured that their bodies remain intact and undecayed. Small coffins, covered in silk, contain the remains of child saints, some of whom had compelling religious visions and others were said to be able to perform miracles. Most of the walls are now white but some paintings remain. They are brown with age and are done in the iconic, pre-Rennaisance style, presumably frescoes painted on wet plaster. Given the number of people in the tunnels breathing on the paintings, their continued survival depends upon a miracle. One short, stout, female American tourist, whose plastic hip made her walking slightly unsteady and gave her a wary respect for steps, wore a tee shirt which informed everybody "I'm not dead yet", reminding me of the Dorothy Parker joke. When she was told that President Calvin Coolidge had died she replied "how could they tell?".

Above ground restoration is busily going on everywhere. Mechanical diggers gingerly excavate around ancient walls and towers and in one corner of the monastery new gold cupolas are arranged in rows on the ground alongside a stack of huge golden crosses, soon to be levitated and erected above the restored walls of the church. One of the two great churches is closed and being restored but the other, smaller church remains pretty much as it was, without the golden cupolas and with the paint flaking on the white walls. Inside the paintings have turned brown and indistinct with only the golden haloes surounding the heads of the saints shining out of the murk. This rather unrecontructed atmosphere creates a simpler, much less ornate aesthetic, which is paradoxically more appealing to contemporary sensibilities.

The church is crowded with people standing for the service. Most of the congrgation are young-ish women, all wearing headscarves. There are lots of priests in black cassocks, many of them young, singing the mesmerising orthodox chants in contrapunctal to the most senior, bearded priest in a tall hat. He intones in that remarkable basso profondo, which is the envy of male opera singers all over the world, but only to be truly encountered in orthodox priests. The devotion is remarkable. An extraordinary religious revival is clearly well advanced in the Ukraine.

The other great churches of Kyiv are St Michael's Cathedral, also now fully restored, and Santa Sophia, restored but as a museum, no longer as a church. St Michael's is more recent than the churches in the Lavra monastery. The walls are powder blue and flying buttresses hold them up. A plethora of gold cupolas, all crowded together, rise above the church alongside the bell tower. The interior is baroque, with golden screens and icons in gold frames. But, to my mind, Santa Sophia is the most remarkable of the three great churches. Set in its own tranquil gardens behind high walls, this 11th century church has a similar shape to Aya Sophia in Istanbul with half-domes surrounding the main dome. Above the main altar in the big dome are icons in gold moasics of Christ and the saints. Looking at these gorgeous mosaics the golden thread of Byzantium from Constantinople to Kyiv to St Marks in Venice is immediately drawn. Living in the penumbra of Ancient Greece, the Italian Rennaissance and the European Englightenment, westerners forget too easily the gorgeous stretch of the mystical Byzantine world, the Holy Roman Empire, and its continuing hold in the countries where orthodoxy thrives.

Santa Sophia has all its frescoes intact and restored and they are as lovely as anything in Rome or Florence. The angels and saints are set against pale blue skies and white clouds. All the faces express an intense human sensitivity. Here, a couple of centuries before the Italian Rennaisance, is the place where the iconic tradition of aloof, remote Gods and saints, disapproving of and judging humanity, are transformed into the saints who sympathise with our human failings and supplicate on our behalf to a forgiving God. That remarkable religious and aesthetic joining which dominated religious thinking from the Middle Ages until the beginning of our Godless twentieth century all over Europe seems to have happened here in the east first. Visiting with Arjeta, an Albanian from Kosovo, we were both moved to note that the orthodox heartbeat which is so profound in the Serb community (and coming here one can see why) will not be so easily surrendered for the banal secular prosperity promised by the European Union.

The strongest echoes of the Soviet era in Kyiv are to be discerned at the war memorial and in the Opera House. The war memorial is shaped like a concrete bunker and rusting Russian tanks encircle it. Monumental sculptures of the suffering people of the Ukraine, cut from the stone in the crude socialist realist style, line the walls of a tunnel. At the end you emerge into a park over which looms the gigantic silver Motherland statue. The iconography is the same as the Statue of Liberty, but the aesthetic is crude and the feeling engendered more tragic than heroic.

The people of the Ukraine suffered greatly alongside Russia in the Second World War. Many millions of Ukrainians died. More than 600,000 died in the defence of Kyiv alone. The sacrifices were tremendous and unimaginable and they loom vivid in the contemporary mind. Young people in Russia today will have been told by their Grannies when they were children to finish their food with a reminder that so many million Russians had starved to death and even those that had survived, had survived on little more than love, courage and fresh air. Now the feeling, so far as one can tell, Ukrainians have for Russia is ambivalent. Their culture, identity and history are almost mystically intertwined almost to the point of being indistinguishable, but their contemporary political interests are fraught and divisive.

The revolution that brought Viktor Yuschenko to power has been followed by internal division and international uncertainty. The Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, complete with the (false) plait across the crown of her head and the innocent appearance of a country girl, battles for eventual power in the Ukraine. Apparently many peasants in the Ukraine believe that the Ukraine will be saved by a woman and Tymoshenko seeks to appeal to that folklore. Russia and the European Union contemplate the political scene with concern, wondering which way Ukraine may turn and with what consequences.

The Opera House is an entirely unreformed Soviet-style institution. It is an ornate 19th century building, laid out in the same style as La Scala or La Fenice, with one set of stalls and five stacked rows of boxes in semi-circular balconies. The interior is mostly wooden and has been painted a pinky-biscuit colour, with gilded cherubs and curlicues. It's an attractive example of the form. The opera itself, Verdi's Macbeth, is played well by the orchestra and the singers have strong, distinctive voices, particularly MacDuff, but the set and the costumes are execrable. Great flats have been painted with hell-ish characters and they shake and tremble from time to time, like the set of an English sitcom in the 1970s. The costumes are standard-issue amateur dramatic: lacy, flowing red robes for the women, and loosely crocheted 'chain mail' for the men. Most of the time the performers are static. The entire mise en scene completely lacks the dramatic quality that should characterise operatic singing. The best thing to do is to close one's eyes and imagine that one is listening to the radio.

There are three intervals each more than half and hour long, but the bell starts ringing encouraging you to return to your seat after five minutes. In the interval you can have a delicious but unchilled glass of Crimean champagne, sold by quantity, with a bar of excellent Ukrainian chocolate. At the beginning of the third interval the lady selling the drinks and the chocolates is busily putting them away, removing any chance that you might buy one and thereby delay her early departure after another undemanding evening behind the bar.
Customer service in many places in Kyiv is appalling. When asked if we could order a second bottle of excellent Georgian wine the waitress in a (rather expensive) restaurant simply shrugged indifferently. When we asked the woman at the airport where we check in for British Airways she replied "you're too early. Go home."

But in the local fruit and vegetable market where no tourists go, except those with local friends, everyone is friendly and smiling. The Azerbaijani fruit seller gives a free peach to Katya, a pretty girl. The elderly woman selling cream cheese, offers a large blob to taste on the end of a knife. It's delicious and sour-sweet. Even the pig's heads sold at the butchers are smiling, with ears removed and tongues extracted laid neatly by the side. Next to them lie great rolls of pork fat, a great Ukrainian delicacy served cold or, if you like, dipped in chocolate. The Ukraine is a great food-producing country and it seems being close to food makes Ukrainians happy.

Out in the streets many pavements are broken down and many nineteenth century townhouses remain unrestored. One has a tree growing out of its roof. Belle epoque Kyiv evidently doesn't attract the beneficence that religious Kyiv does. On a backstreet, a young couple dressed for the occasion, are having their wedding photos taken in front of a graffiti-ed wall. This is a dress rehearsal, not the big day. The photos, if the setting is anything to go by, promise to be post-modern. On the same street a building site has been excavated but a disused train carriage remains rusting on the site. On the boilerplate an elderly man sits absolutely naked in the sunshine, crossing his legs and fixing me with an aggressive, disdainful stare. My resolve crumbles and I put the camera back in the bag.

Crossing the square with my three female friends, all senior international officials, two elderly women pass us and one says to the other "He must be rich to be able to afford three wives." I don't have time to think about this remark because I am too busy trying to get out of the way of the British Ambassador's Range Rover which is heading diagonally across a pedestrianised square and, in pursuit of another perfect photograph, I am in their way. Another diplomat tells me that the far right is rapidly on the rise amongst young unemployed men and a racist stabbing or murder occurs about once a month. Since I've only seen one other black person in Kyiv, I guess it's him or me next, so I'd better be careful, something I'm not generally keen on.
Back in the hotel, at 2.30 in the morning, my next door neighbour is on the phone. Only semi-awake, I think he is ordering room service. "how long will it take? twenty minutes is fine." As I soon discover he is ordering a prostitute. The walls of this quite expensive hotel are as thin as paper and I can hear everything. After much turning taps on and off and flushing toilets, everyone seems to have a satisfactory experience - twice - and then it's time for the girl to leave. Before she goes she asks if he would like her to come again the next day. He says yes; same time, same place. My heart sinks. She leaves. He goes to sleep. I remain awake for a long disturbed night contemplating the sacred and the profane.

www.flickr.com/photos/gerardlemos/sets for pictures of Kyiv

Why diabetes is so high in South Asians

2008-05-21T20:23:00.002+01:00

Medical statistics in the UK have persistently shown that diabetes, heart disease and other related conditions grouped together as the metabolic syndrome are far more common amongst people from the South Asian sub-continent than in other communities. Most of the speculation for the reasons for this has ascribed it to a diet full of sweet and fried food combined with a lack of exercise, though why the effects of those shortcomings (which are common in other communities too) should apparently have more negative effects in the South Asian community has never been clear to me. Apparently, central obesity, tums and bums in other words, is more common in South Asians. What's more, the extent of central obesity is more or less in direct proportion to the likelihood of diabetes and heart disease. I got the explanation for all this in Chennai from Dr Ramachandran, who probably knows more about diabetes than anybody else in the world.

The statistics in India are even more striking. One in five Indians has diabetes and in the urban areas and the middle classes the proportions are even higher. Something similar has been noted in communities in the Gulf States. Richer, more comfortable lifestyles, it would seem, have their cost, but why should the cost, at least in diabetes, be so strikingly frequent in some communities more than others. The answer is climate-related. In hot countries the problems of food storage are extreme. Sir Francis Bacon tried to prove that freezing a chicken would preserve it. He was right, but the attempt to stuff the chicken with snow gave him such a bad bout of influenza that he died in the pursuit of knowledge. As a result, people whose genetic make-up has evolved in cold, northern countries are less good at storing foods in their bodies. They have less need to do so. The beneficial effects of a cold climate have meant that food is more evenly consumed through the seasons. In hot countries food was plentiful after rainy seasons and scarce in dry seasons. As a result the metabolism of the denizens of hot countries developed the ability to better store food and therefore to go for longer with less food if need be. The same chemical processes that go into storing food in our bodies are also the ones, when food is consistently in excess, which produce diabetes and its metabolic cousins. Now that food, at least for the urban middle classes in India and for almost everyone in the Gulf states, is in consistent and plentiful supply, no famine comes to pass, only constant feast. We Indians eat too much for a while and then, instead of eating less for a while, we continue to eat too much. The result is diabetes and heart disease. Geneticists argue that the rate of human evolution has slowed and may even have been stopped altogether because of better medicines, changes in philosophical and social attitudes to people with congenital disabilities and a reduction in the wholesale risks to groups of humans such as famine, flood and pestilence. So whatever genetic predilections some communities have are likely to remain.

What then is to be done? Well, the increased risk of suffering from the detriments of the metabolic syndrome remain and persist. They can be partially ameliorated by less red meat, less alcohol and more exercise. But that will postpone the metabolic effects, not remove them entirely. The day of shuffling off this mortal coil can be postponed, not indefinitely avoided.

Painters of secrets in the Hague

2008-05-19T21:00:00.005+01:00

In the lovely Mauritshuis in the Hague so many of the paintings from the Dutch Golden Age seem to portray an unrevealed secret. Almost all have a domestic setting, but something intruding from beyond is frequently suggested. Jan Verkolje's painting is of someone delivering a message to the housewife in an impeccable Dutch home, but we don't know what's in the message. There is no melodrama, scarcely a hint about whether the message is tragic or joyful. The message seems important, but enigmatic. One of the greatest of all Dutch painters, Pieter de Hooch, portrays a man reading a letter to a woman. Again we don't know what the letter says, and their facial expressions give only clues, not answers. Judith Leyster's painting is of a man offering money, but for what? So strong are the hints and the innuendoes that even where there appears to be no hidden meaning, no secret, such as in Jacob Ochterveld's painting of a fishmonger at the door, the viewer, having looked at all the other paintings with their incinuations and implications, starts to wonder whether there is some hidden possibility. Why exactly is the fishmonger at the door?

Everywhere under the pall of discretion is hidden the possibility of joy or loss. Whether the emotions are glad or tragic, they must best be expressed in private, so privately that even the person looking at the painting who has been admitted into the domestic space cannot know the whole story. The door must be closed on solitude before the entire truth comes out. Until then everything is hints, echoes and possibilities. As in Chekhov, the turbulent world always incinuates itself into even the most orderly existences, but only in private and beneath the surface calm. Without the surface calm all would be chaos.

Adriaen Coorte is a minor master painter of the Dutch golden age. His life, not just his work, is a total secret. Nothing of note is known about him. All is guesswork. And his exquisite painting offer precious little to guess at. He emerges fully formed as a painter. His palate of colours, his subjects and genres are decided from the off and they never change throughout his life's work. There is no development, no journey, no destination. He painted still lives almost exclusively. Almost all are set against black backdrops, rather like Spanish still life paintings. And the subject matter is always selected from the same range: bowls of strawberries, blackberries, gooseberries, grapes, redcurrants. All are shown, shining, ripe and unspoilt. Occasionally the white flowers produced by all these fruits which grow in the cool, soft shade are depicted. Bundles of white asparagus endowed with an almost ethereal luminescence are set alongside the bowls of fruit. Exquisite butterflies with filigree wings as fine as a spider web hover over the fruit. He also painted sea shells covered with patterns of random symmetry that only nature and evolution could produce. No human eye or mind could conceive them. Nothing happens, nobody is present. The infinite refinement of the natural is complexity enough. That's not a secret, it's a revelation almost divine.

No more vultures circle the Towers of Silence in Delhi

2008-05-06T07:51:00.003+01:00

The Parsi community of northern India have a unique burial tradition. They put their dead out at the sacred Towers of Silence and the vultures that constantly circle, sometimes turning the sky dark by their numbers, devour the flesh on the bodies until the bones are picked clean and white. This tradition dates back centuries but is shortly to end if we're not careful.

Since the 1990s the vulture population all over South Asia has rapidly depleted to the point where 99.9 per cent of them have died. For several years no one understood the phenomenon, but in 2003 a scientific study of the post mortems conducted on vulture corpses in Pakistan made a breakthrough. The anti-inflammatory antibiotic drug widely used on cattle diclofenac, produced by the Swiss company Pfizer and sold at a discount in South Asia, had produced a toxic reaction in the vultures that fed on the cattle carcases. The drug is highly beneficial to cattle and, for that matter, to humans. It has a short half-life, produces no toxic waste and has few side effects. No wonder it rapidly grew popular amongst Indian and Pakistani farmers. But when red meat containing the drug, and some others like it, are eaten by vultures, despite their notoriously resilient digestive systems which can processes all manners of other substances in meat that would be toxic to humans, it causes uric acid to form and that quickly leads to renal failure and the vulture dies. Hence the collapse in vulture numbers. Vultures breed only once a year and produce only one egg. To restore their numbers, even if the causes of their decline were eradicated, would take a hundred years according to environmental filmamker, Mike Pandey, who drew this sad story to my attention. The benefits to humans once more in conflict with the welfare of the natural world and the natural order.

But the story gets more complicated on closer scrutiny. Vulture numbers are also depleting in countries such as South Africa where diclofenac is not in common use. Here this has been attributed to power lines, climate change and, controversially, to the harvesting of vulture body parts for medicinal purposes by Sangoma, traditional Southern African healers. Nor would simply banning the drug necessarily solve the problem according to scientists. No one knows whether the substitutes may have the same, different or worse effects.

So the large, dark vultures, with their priestly white collars, once so common circling hopefully and watchfully in the shimmering, hot, white-grey Northern Indian sky have gone and a deeper silence has fallen on the Towers of Silence.

The Old Flower Market, Beijing

2008-03-23T14:21:00.008Z

The city of Beijing took on its current square layout in the Ming dynasty. Taking the Forbidden City as the centre, a street grid was laid out around it emanating out to a high grey wall which encompassed the city in a square. Sections of this wall remain, roughly where the second (of five contemporary) ring road now runs. Were it to have been built on similarly arduous terrain it would be as remarkable a construction as the Great Wall itself. It is wide enough for fifteen people to walk abreast. At regular intervals on the wall the Ming emperors built watchtowers. These are large rectangular buildings, with the long face parallel to the wall. Built of grey Chinese brick with a pagoda roof, they are probably the height of a modern six-storey building. The walls are covered with parallel lines of slit windows, like a cheese grater. From behind these windows archers would watch for the marauding armies of the ever disloyal warlords. The most famous of these watchtowers is, of course, in Tian An Men Square. Its cautionary effect has rather been tempered because its perfect feng shui alignment with the Forbidden City is starkly interrupted by the Mao mausoleum, a perfect acknowledgement that Communism represents a decisive break with China's imperial past.

About two kilometres from Tian An Men to the east at what would have been the South Eastern corner of the city is the next watchtower, called Tung Bian Men. Just outside this stretch of wall, during the Qing dynasty, a flower market came into spontaneous existence. The aristocrats, senior Mandarins and the imperial household would come here not just to buy fresh flowers brought in from the countryside but also to buy handmade silk flowers. According to legend they were the most beautiful and the most well-crafted silk flowers in the whole of China. Small workshops run by master teachers grew up around the main street which was the flower market and for decades it was a hive of industry, employment and community, with those that worked in these workshops and the flower market, living in the streets and hutongs nearby. All that was brought to an abrupt end in the Cultural Revolution when the market was closed, along with all Beijing's markets, the furniture market, the market for horses and donkeys. These were examples of capitalism and rightism and therefore had to be removed from the face of the city.

The neighbourhood fell into poverty without the market and many of the people who had worked in the local industry could not get registrations and jobs in a daan wei because the system then was that you had to be resident in the area to get a job in the factory and you had to work in the factory to get a flat, the combination of household registration (hu kou) and employment effectively excluding the former small business people and craftsmen - as the system was designed to do.

In 2003 the neighbourhood was rebuilt. The old 1950s and 1960s brick flats were demolished and much of the land was sold off to private developers who also had to provide replacement housing for the poor people who had been living there. Attracting the interest of private developers was not difficult. The neighbourhood, by the standards of the modern city is very central, a few minutes from Beijing East station from where the new white bullet trains with noses like dolphins rush from the city to the big cities of China's eastern seaboard. The new homes for sale have been built in high blocks with their south sides glassed over to attract light and heat during the many cold, grey, polluted months of the Beijing winter. In the middle of the blocks is a gated courtyard with a strange sculpture of a flowering cabbage.

On a Saturday morning there are few young couples around, they are too busy shopping and doing chores in their smart new flats. But there are plenty of children, mostly being tended by indulgent grandparents, for whom their sole grandchild is a precious gift to be nurtured and cherished. All grandparents are more lenient than all parents, but when there is only one grandchild, how special must that relationship be. Many of these little emperors have the latest in expensive childhood accessories, including motorised jeeps and scooters which whirr around the square guided by a three year old, kitted out in designer baby wear, complete with baseball cap at a tilted angle. Others are on roller skates. None have nothing. China has changed and who would begrudge these families these luxuries of love and generosity so long unavailable?

The old flower makers are still around too. They now live in small flats, the smallness of them being their principle complaint. Mostly they have televisions and refrigerators, supplied by their children in some cases. But something has been lost. Many old people in China still feel superstitious about living off the ground and there is nowhere amidst these flats for those communal activities that are the mainstay of Chinese community life, Tai Qi and Mah Jongg. In the older communities based around the daan wei there is always a place to gather, gossip, gamble; a place for communal singing, ping pong and exercising. Since the flats were so small and the interiors often unappealing many old people spend hours and hours out and about with friends and neighbours, not so much with families. Many of their children have moved away to find work, some have moved out of Beijing to the cities of the Pearl River delta where jobs are easier to come by, particularly for those with few qualifications, and salaries are higher. But in the old flower market too much time is spent cooped up at home with your spouse and the Pekinese dog for company.

The community is still called the East Flower Community and many of the elderly residents still make silk flowers as a leisure past time. They also make fruit out of glass under the tutelage of the acknowledged expert whom they call Master Grape, because his glass grapes are utterly life like. There is one other echo of their flower-making past. Along the pavement a flower bed has been laid. Plastic grass has been put down and the real stumps of small trees have been stuck into the ground. On to these living branches the local people have attached the silk roses and cherry blossom they have made which will bloom all year round forever - never withering; never dying.

More pictures of the old flower market in its new form on www.flickr.com/photos/gerardlemos/sets

Memories of the Cultural Revolution, Dashanzi, Beijing

2008-03-23T11:34:00.004Z

Victors in war often memorialise their darkest hour, thereby stressing the magnitude of their achievement, not just in winning, but winning from extreme adversity. Hence the British obsession with the Dunkerque landings, which were in reality a brave but ragged retreat. If they had been a precursor of ultimate defeat perhaps they would not now be so celebrated. The Long March has a similar place in the history of the Chinese Communist Party’s victory over Chiang Kai-shek’s Guomindang which led to the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. The Long March was in fact a long retreat from the advancing Nationalist troops, ending in the mountainous North East Shanxi province in the Yan’an area. According to the mythology more than 800,000 Communists embarked on the Long March and about 25000 made it to the end. Jung Chang has suggested in her biography of Mao that Mao didn’t do much marching, spending much of the time being carried in a Sedan chair.

In the Dashanzi area of Beijing, adjacent to the hyper-contemporary art zone, 798, a theme park celebrating the Long March and the Shanxi region has been established. You enter a courtyard to the sound of revolutionary songs broadcast across a tinny public address system. Around the courtyard are revolutionary statues and red stars. One of the buildings contains a museum about the Long March and the Yan’an area of Shanxi. Most of the exhibits are photographs of the founders of the Chinese Communist Party, including Mao and Zhou En lai. They are dressed in thickly padded and very crumpled Chinese suits, swathed against the cold which would have been extreme, and they look sternly out of grainy black and white photographs against a backdrop of grey mountains. Mao looks haughty and, relatively speaking, well-groomed. Zhou looks determined with a firm expression and that dignified, upright bearing which was so much a part of the grace and style with which he approached foreign relations in his long years as Chinese premier. There are a few exhibits, some chairs said to have been used by Mao, his calligraphy brush and inkpot, the binoculars and leather bag supposedly carried by Mao’s bodyguards. The photos are prints and they are a mix of pictures of meetings, where a crowd of seated participants listen to what one suspects were long-ish speeches from their leaders. The guide tells us all the important decisions about the foundation of the People’s Republic of China were taken in these meetings in the mountains. There are also pictures of the warm reception the Communists received from local farmers. These are, needless to say, wholly unconvincing.

One section of the display contains photographs of Yan’an in the Cultural Revolution. Schoolchildren had been brought to live there and are being ‘educated’ by farmers. The pictures are of meetings, more meetings, and students working in the fields alongside the farmers. We know from the testimonies of people who subsequently emigrated to the USA that, in fact, the children from the cities had contributed little and learnt less. They had been distributed amongst local families, often miles apart across fields and mountains. They had just been another hungry mouth to feed, though occasionally they brought with them useful things like medicines which could be shared.

Suddenly we discover that the group of middle-aged Chinese people in the museum with us are in fact a class reunion of the pupils in the photographs who had been sent to Yan’an in the Cultural Revolution. We get talking to one of them. He looks about 40, thin and dressed entirely in black, on the surface every inch the modern Beijing-er. He tells us he was taken straight from school with a group of his classmates. Taking classes of schoolchildren to the countryside at short – or no- notice was fairly routine at the height of the Cultural Revolution. None of their families came with him. He was about fourteen years old, just at the school leaving age. He points out himself in one of the photographs, an earnest, worried looking adolescent marching along a dusty rural street. In other photos unhappy-looking people have banners around their necks bearing slogans and pictures of Mao. These people are probably being denounced by the Red Guards, but in the photo of the marching students no one is carrying banners, nor are they surrounded by a watchful crowd. We ask him if it had been hard. He looks down at his shoes, wary and evasive but certainly not wishing to be disingenuous, smiling weakly. It had been very hard he says softly. He was there for a few years until he was an adult, working in the fields and ‘learning’ from the peasants. Then he was assigned to a job in a factory in Shanxi province and did not return to Beijing until 1990, by when he was middle-aged. We want to ask what had happened to his family, but the interpreter is becoming anxious and tells us we must be going. “It’s controversial”, he says simply, again combining discretion with a wish not to be dishonest.

Human failings in Budapest

2008-03-10T17:37:00.006Z

At a conference in Budapest about identity the Eastern Europeans and those from Southern countries still outside the European Union talk only of national and ethnic identities. They talk, paradoxically, about their pride in their reclaimed national identities while claiming ‘there is no problem with minorities in…’. They strongly resent the suggestion that all national identities are coded for violence and carry the implication of inevitable past and future violence. My friends from Kosovo, all Albanian, try to appear dignified in their fresh victory, not gloating or triumphalist. Independence was declared on February 17th with tacit EU and American support. They are keen to stress the spirit of reconciliation; the secular nature of the new state; the protections for the Serb minorities – and how all these high-minded ideals are guaranteed by their aspirations to join the European Union. All talk of tradition, religion, memory, landscape and separate cultures is banished. Inherited identities are too dangerous even to mention. I, rather rudely, point out that it profits a man nothing to lose his soul to gain the whole world, but the European Union? Even more rudely, I predict that the Albanian elite may end up prosperous, deracinated cosmopolitans eager to get the hell out of Pristina to Geneva or Brussels. Meanwhile the Serbs, with their spiritual home (as they would see it) now in the territory of Kosovo will be the only ones with memories and meanings drawn from a rich and troubled past which lives on vividly. The question on the minds of the young politicians, none of them Serbs, is the question of St John of the Cross, Tolstoy and Lenin: what then is to be done?

The Western Europeans listen politely but are probably a little bored and a little impatient with all this national/ethnic old-think, described disparagingly as ‘anthropological’. Waving flags is so over. For them also, but for different reasons, inherited identities are a thing of the past. They want to talk instead about gay adoption, Pop Idol and plastic surgery makeover television shows. Even in Northern Ireland apparently more people attend the Gay Pride parade than the St. Patrick's Day parade. These concerns all seem narcissistic and, sometimes, insufferably smug – the pain of alienation only being the flipside of carefree prosperity. The question for the Northern and Western Europeans is not what is to be done, but what have we become?

In a field outside Budapest is the ‘Statue Park’. It’s not really a park at all. It’s a windswept field, halfway up a hill with ugly views, criss-crossed with power lines. Electricity pylons march unrelentingly across the landscape. Onto this field the Hungarian authorities have towed all the old Communist statues. Lenin, Marx and Engels guard the entry. Inside, statues of a few besuited, bespectacled men represent Hungarian Communist leaders. They don’t look like much of a match for Russian tanks. But the most monumental statues are the ones of anonymous heroes. They are huge, bulging, muscular men in dramatic action poses. They are crudely crafted in the Social Realist tradition and, to our post-modern eyes, have a homo-erotic tinge. The statues of women and children represent symbols of purity and clarity. Strength lies with the men. You don’t have to be an ex-Communist to feel some sadness at the loss of idealism and the descent into an unheroic (cowardly?) era where no one seems willing to fight for anything much anymore. In order perhaps to reduce the sense of complicity and guilt, the park presents Communism as kitsch. The souvenir shop sells mouse mats with South Park-like figures saying ‘They killed Lenin, the bastards.’ Kitsch - and the ironic language in which kitsch speaks - is all that is left. There are no Hungarian visitors to the park and only a few foreigners.

The Hungarian National Art Gallery is popular with Hungarians. The exhibition about the Medicis is crammed. Hungarians are voting with their feet about which bits of their past they intend to validate as part of their contemporary identity. The gallery is in Heroes’ Square and is one of the greatest collections of old masters in Europe. The stars of the show are their collection of Spanish masters and the best of these are the several El Grecos. El Greco’s most important insight in these paintings is a profound understanding of human fallibility and failure. One picture is of the agony in the garden, the sky at dusk showing a red version of that stark, unique El Greco chiaroscuro. In front of the kneeling, praying Christ are the apostles asleep and oblivious. Another picture is of the disrobing of Christ. As in the Gethsemane picture he stares upwards, his face brightly lit, from within and from above, transcending the ugly and violent scene. Behind Christ El Greco has painted two thickset Roman soldiers looking shame-facedly at each other, as if to say ‘We know this is wrong, but what else can we do?’ They are not asleep and unaware. They are awake and active, but don’t seem to have any choice. These pictures of human shortcomings next to the transcendent and translucent Christ move Yvonne to tears. Her tears are not for what we have become, but for what we are.

for pictures of Statue Park, Budapest go to www.flickr.com/photos/gerardlemos/sets

The possibilities of silence in Egypt

2008-03-05T12:06:00.002Z

All cities are noisy. Cities in developing countries are noisier still. Cairo, so they say, is the noisiest city in the world. Using the car horn to get through traffic is the main offender, but people also say that the Egyptian way of talking is loud and guttural. The latter point is debatable. However, if you are in Egypt for a while you do start to long for silence, so here are a few suggestions of where to find it.

Outside all the big hotels in Cairo which are ranged along the banks of the Nile and on Zamalek Island you can hire a felucca. The best time is sundown. The Nile in Cairo runs almost directly south to north; so on a clear day the west bank is bathed in the most beautiful golden light while the east bank becomes completely dark. The asymmetric effect is disorienting. It’s only a shame that most of the buildings on the river banks are hideous concrete monstrosities – evidence of a dictatorship combining its interests with capitalism. Feluccas rely on sail power and so once you get out into the middle of the river complete silence falls, it’s a very relaxing, hypnotic feeling. At about 5.50 pm, the first distant wail of a muezzin starts up from somewhere. Quickly all the mosques call out to the faithful. Apparently there are 1000 mosques in Cairo and in a few minutes you can hear all of them, each in a slightly different register. The total effect is like listening to a harmonious polyphony in a low volume echo chamber. It is transfixing.

The other place to find a beautiful silence in Cairo is in the Coptic Museum after hours. The Coptic patriarch established the museum when European archaeologists were removing Egyptian antiquities as fast as boats would carry them back to the Louvre, the British Museum and the Pergamon Museum. The Coptic Museum was established to save some of these antiquities for Egypt. It is a beautiful building set around a tranquil courtyard full of date palms and orange trees. The windows are in traditional Egyptian style, covered with dark wooden intricate trellis work, to filter in the light of the sun while keeping out the heat of the day. At sundown the golden light plays through the windows in filigree patterns on the sandy walls. Inside the museum are lovely frescoes from desert monasteries, some of the earliest sites of worship in Christendom. You can see the beginning of the Iconic tradition still strong in the Orthodox tradition. Perhaps even a little hint of the Romanesque, but that might be your imagination.

Christianity is said to have arrived in Egypt in 45 AD, just 12 years after the death of Jesus Christ. Since then the Coptic Church has flourished, waned and flourished again. But it flourishes now and has a special place in the cultural, linguistic and archaeological history of Egypt. The Coptic era is the bridge between Pharaonic and Ptolemaic Egypt and Islamic Egypt. To this day prayers are said in Aramaic, the language of Christ’s preaching. Many of the items on displays are funerary ornaments and feature the dead person laid out with their arms splayed back beside their head, like a baby asleep. They are often set in alcoves of Corinthian pillars with a Coptic cross above showing the long exchange of decorative and religious ideas between Egypt’s great religions, both past and present. This tradition of syncretism, borrowing from past religious and cultural traditions to establish new ones, is a feature of all ancient cultures and societies, including for example India and China. The Coptic tradition does not have the glamour and drama of the Pharaohs and is therefore readily ignored, but it should not be ignored. The pleasures of the Coptic tradition are the pleasures of heartfelt devotion set against a vast historical backdrop going back to the several roots of our civilisation.

The Coptic tradition has been very much revived in the last 150 years or so by enlightened, outward looking Patriarchs and monks. Sadat, Egypt’s second military ruler, exiled the Coptic Pope from Cairo, which is perhaps some kind of compliment. At least he must have been relevant. There are now six million devotees, almost all in Egypt. The sites of the Coptic monasteries in the desert are around the ancient oasis of Wadi Natrun, now a poor and dusty desert town. The monastery of St Bishoi attracts many thousands of devout Coptic pilgrims. It is nearly, but not quite silent. You can hear the quiet sobbing of a troubled pilgrim asking for the saint’s help while family members look on morosely. Who knows what troubles they face, illness, penury – perhaps the Saint can help. The pilgrims gather around the tomb of the saint and stroke the casket, which has been worn shiny by the hands of the faithful. The casket is shaped like a body and has an effigy of the Saint on the cover. The structure and style is not dissimilar to the tombs of the Pharaohs.

You can also hear the Monks praying at small altars behind a curtain with a painting of the Saint. Once they have finished praying they emerge from behind the screen in their long black soutanes and their tight fitting caps which stretch down like veils to their shoulders and flap in the wind as they walk. All have long beards but they have tidily trimmed and squared off at the bottom. They leave the church one by one, still munching the bread broken in the name of the body of Christ in the service. Again silence is not quite possible, because they greet passing strangers cheerfully. They all seem to speak good English:

Monk to tourist: “Hi, how are you?”

Tourist replies: “Fine, thanks. This is a lovely place.”

Monk: “What religion are you?”

Tourist pauses and decides to avoid a long complicated explanation of their doubts and certainties and replies: “Catholics.”

Monk, still chewing bread, replies: “Ah well, you’re the same as us. You have seven sacraments and we have seven sacraments. Anyway, nice to see you.” And he wanders off between the ancient red domes of mud and sand looking down at the ground with his hands behind his back, humming to himself. Silence returns.

The monks are not enclosed and are passionate social actors and agents. An Abbot of one of the nearby monasteries set his monks the target of producing enough food to feed 1000 people each. The monks rose to the challenge and have mastered pinpoint irrigation, greening the desert with, for example, banana trees. They have also mastered bovine embryology; not for them a life of irrelevance and sequestration.

Alexandria, another noisy city, has one or two places where silence is to be found. One is in the basement of the National Museum in Alexandria, one of the most beautiful and - beautifully lit – museums in the world containing a remarkable collection of Greek, Ptolemaic and Coptic artefacts. The basement is a Pharaoh’s tomb. In the centre is the boy God-King’s golden death mask and casket covering his mummy. Another casket is suspended open to show how the intricate designs and hieroglyphics are repeated at each layer of the casket. Statues of Horus, the hawk, and Anubis, the dog, guard the entrance. No living person was ever meant to enter here so take care.

Absolute silence can be guaranteed diving in the Mediterranean. Under the ocean are sphinxes and statues of Pharaohs and Egyptian gods which have been submerged in earthquakes during the long centuries of Alex’s decline during which the great capital of Alexander the Great was reduced to a fishing village. Cleopatra is said to lie somewhere beneath this ocean as her palace was on an island long engulfed by the Mediterranean. Nobody knows exactly where Alexander is buried. His silent sleep, unlike so many of the Pharaohs, is for the moment undisturbed.

Egypt photos at www.flickr.com/photos/gerardlemos/sets

A hope of home in Beijing: Akram Khan's bahok

2008-03-04T14:13:00.007Z

The Akram Khan Company new contemporary dance piece had its premiere in Beijing. The show is called bahok, which is Bengali for carrier. Akram's artistic genius stems from his capacity to create new striking movement sequences, drawing on Indian classical and contemporary dance languages, to convey some more profound truth about a universal experience. In this show the context is journeys and the setting is very simple and totally familiar: people are gathered under one of those signs that you see in stations and airports on which place name, times and messages revolve every few moments. We have all stood staring up at one of these signs waiting for our destination, or feeling apprehensive about some problem which is about to be revealed about the journey we want to undertake. Wanting to get the journey over with, particularly if we are going home.

Over the length of the show the dancers, from European contemporary dance traditions and from the National Ballet of China, configure themselves into pairs and groups and movement is set to some small scene we have all witnessed in stations and airports: someone asleep who keeps tilting and tumbling on to the person next to them; boys arguing about a computer game; someone humming the tune they are listening to on their IPod - all instantly recognisable, but not the movements or the meanings drawn from them in the show: are these people really going anywhere? do they have homes - or destinations? In our world of frantic motion has the business of being on a journey from one place to another - from one identity to another - become an identity in itself? Perhaps if we keep on moving, home isn't a place anymore. Home becomes just an idea, a sentiment, a memory. It no longer has a physical meaning. Home, in Akram's piece, becomes your body and your memories - disconnected entirely from the actuality of place.

These are all the thoughts that go through your mind, but what you are watching is a scintillating display of exuberant, original movement by a fantastic young troupe. That excitement counterposed against the reflections about home and memory that the piece brings to mind, in that juxtaposition of movement and reflection, that's where the power of the work lives - as in all Akram's work.

Watching this in the evanescent streets and spaces of Beijing, which change from week to week and month to month, particularly as the Olympics draw nearer, of course, makes one wonder what Chinese people think of their home now, now that everywhere is so changed. Tian An Men Square is probably the most iconic and notorious space in China, filled with symbols of power and tradition: the Forbidden City; the Great Hall of the People. But right next to the Great Hall of the People a hyper-modern temple has been unveiled. It is shaped like a gigantic half of an egg laid on its side made from silver titanium and glass. The egg sits in a glassy moat, which reflects the other half of the egg. No entrance is visible. The entrance is below ground, under the moat. This building is a dramatic piece of theatre in itself, set against the classic backdrop of Tian An Men Square, and how right that it should be theatrical because it is the new National Centre for Performing Arts.

It is designed to inspire awe in anyone looking at it, awe at the drama of the building, but more importantly awe at the audacity and speed with which the Chinese authorities are embracing modernity in its most extreme variants. Sadly the work performed in the centre will take longer to reach the levels of quality and modernity achieved by the building. The Chinese leaders are rushing to the future, perhaps leaving the people who live in the ancient hutongs behind the Forbidden City wondering if all they will shortly have of their homes are their memories and their bodies.

For pictures of Akram Khan Company's bahok go to www.flickr.com/photos/gerardlemos/sets

Modern Rome

2008-03-03T09:38:00.012Z

Since Rome finds it impossible to shake off all those associations of antiquity that attach to its brand, we thought we would go in search of modern Rome. In the centre of Rome, just off the Via del Corso, is Richard Meier's museum of the Ara Pacis, probably the most important antiquity in Rome, it is the altar Augustus built to celebrate peace; in fact he meant victory. The Museum, like all Meier's contemporary buildings is intersecting slim, sheets of white concrete, set at harmonious angles to glass in the roof and in the walls. The whole effect is simple and dramatic, celebrating all the renunciations and clarity of the modern and setting them against the ambiguities and paradoxes summoned up by all great historical monuments. Tradtional Romans wished for something more, well, traditional, but the effect of the glass ceiling and walls is to bathe the altar in an ethereal light, whilst allowing the person looking at the altar to see beyond into the city and the world. The altar is given its special aura without being disconnected from the city, past and present. If architecture is the relationship between light and space this building is a triumph.

Richard Meier has another amazing building, his Jubilee church built for the Millennium, which for the Roman Catholic church was a Jubilee year. John Paul II, with the audacity for which he was renowned, decided that Rome needed another church (some might say like a hole in the head) - and what a church they got, designed by a Jewish American. It is in the outer suburbs, getting there involving a longish drive from the centre through many underpasses and flyovers. The neighbourhood is undistinguished, apartment blocks like barriers and barracks surround the church. At ground level are the random selection of disconnected shops and bars which Italian town planners never succeed in resisting. In the midst of this the Church soars three parallel, sail-like curved white planes, evoking a dome without being one. The other side is straight and flat and, as with the Ara Pacis, glass intersects everywhere. Inside the church all is light and white, creating, as intended, a heavenly quality. High above the altar is a solitary, unadorned crucifix against a backdrop of sheer white. All the wood inside the church is light and warm and, the organ is set against the light oak, its chrome pipe standing out against wood and white.

The parishioners are standard issue modern Italian Catholics, disproportionately old and poor, many of the men hanging around outside smoking for much of the mass; lots of pushchairs in a country where reproduction has largely been abandoned for the higher pleasures of consumption and lifestyle. The locals seem quite at home in their hyper-modern settting - but all simplicity and clarity quickly unleashes a suppressed force for entropy (it's kind of thermo-dynamic law). The application of the irrepressible urge for disorder comes in the form of cheap indoor plants, distributed around the church, arbitrarily interrupting the clear lines the architect so carefully sought and so brilliantly achieved.

You can find modern art, as well as architecture, in Rome too. No modern art museum is complete without its acronym and in Rome it is MACRO - Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome. The show we saw was an identikit contemporary art show, you could see something similar in twenty European cities. The artist must have several implausibly mixed ethnic origins, there must be a large element of fairly ponderous video and the work should tell the viewer something of the (usually rather banal) passion and horror with which the artist contemplates contemporary society - the personal perspective being apparently easier to communicate than the scientific or technocratic. This show was by a Iranian-Italian and was her animated videos of mankind's confused and horrible relationships with animals and biodiversity. So one video showed a man stabbing an irritating pet dog in his living room. Another longer video described the collapse of biodversity as witnessed by a modern day voyager on a modern day Beagle. This was juxtaposed with a video of a family argument. Geddit?

An even more flash up to date acronymous museum is planned for Rome designed by the Queen of flash modernity, Zaha Hadid, for whom the greatest sin is that a new building might in any way refer to its surroundings. She has that in common with one or two other superstar architects: Frank Gehry; Daniel Liebeskind. The building was scheduled for completion in early 2006. In February 2008 it remained a deserted fenced-off scene of large, angular, grey concrete lumps randomly distributed. The architecture may be modern but Italian builders are apparently immutable. Maxxi is yet to come.

As well as architecture and art, you can encounter the modern in food too. Gusto is a whole collection of food buying opportunities - shops, cafes, restaurants - on the same square as the Ara Pacis. The food is delicious - but all Italian. Another, perhaps even more cutting edge restaurant is in a backstreet behind the Pantheon. Its confusingly traditional name is Trattoria. The restaurant is all pale wood and digital art installations. The kitchen is encased in glass so you can watch Africans and Bangladeshis cook modern Sicilian cuisine. My pasta starter came with oranges, potatoes and deep-fried anchovies - how modern is that? Delicious, actually; from Sicily via Southern California. None of the waiters were Italian. Ours waitress was Chinese and had dyed her hair blonde - a little echo there of life at the cutting edge in London or New York.

But one can't suppress the feeling that Romans have an abiding attachment to their traditional dolce vita. In Gusto and Trattoria only Italian food and Italian wine are sold. Most of the high end fashion shops on the Via Condotti are Italian. A few global French brands make it -Chanel, Lanvin - but the Brits, the Japanese, the Americans are nowhere in sight. If you buy a hat in Rome the shop still has a hand-operated machine for stretching the headband to fit. And perhaps the biggest signal of all are the smoothly dressed elderly Italian men in pastel coloured v-neck sweaters, carefully ironed corduroy trousers and unbuttoned, swinging, pleated green Loden overcoats, leaning close together and muttering to one another as they stroll past an ancient monument with their hands behind their backs. Italians have not - and perhaps will not - embrace the future, why should they?

(Thanks to Paul Docherty for finding the Jubilee church and restaurant recommendations)

For photos of modern Rome go to www.flickr.com/photos/gerardlemos/sets

School's out in the Netherlands

2007-12-28T15:25:00.000Z

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

2007-11-26T11:55:00.000Z

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

2007-11-04T14:45:00.000Z

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

2007-11-01T09:20:00.000Z

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

2007-11-01T09:10:00.000Z

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

2007-10-29T09:01:00.000Z

"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

2007-10-29T08:52:00.000Z

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

2007-10-15T13:22:00.000+01:00

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

2007-09-16T04:29:00.000+01:00

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