Tom Spender

Freelance journalist & photographer in Beijing

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Philippines – Manila

October 2nd, 2011 · Rest of Asia

After five months without even leaving Beijing, let alone China, I needed a break from the city’s blocky buildings, its “fog”, its faces – everything about it. Where could one go that was more or less the opposite of Beijing?

The Philippines seemed like a good bet. Unlike the Middle Kingdom and its age-old bureaucracy, the Philippines didn’t appear to have much of a system at all, to the extent that its biggest export was its people, eager to work in low-paid jobs as maids, restaurant staff and singers from Dubai to Shanghai and supporting their clans at home through remittances.

I was also curious about the country in its own right – I met a lot of Filipinos in the UAE and was struck by how they seemed to go cheerfully about their lives, putting in long hours for low salaries while I and many others bitched incessantly about the heat, the place and the life there as the dirhams piled up in our bank accounts. Some of the best bars in the UAE are run by the Filipino community, with terrific live music and no elitist door policy, and are full of friendly young guys and girls without any discernible chip on their shoulder.

It helped that Cebu Pacific, the Philippines’ biggest low-cost airline, flies to Manila direct from Beijing for very few pesos. I booked a two-and-a-half week trip a day in advance and got the hell out of Zhongguo.

Manila really was very unBeijinglike. I stayed in Malate, whose scruffy downtown streets are full of rundown vice, massage parlours and karaoke bars bearing big pictures of hordes of women, and all manner of street kids, vagrants and pimps. Many of the ubiquitous security guards are armed. One of the hostels I had a look in was full of safety warnings about nice girls who invite you for a drink and then spike it with rohypnol and steal all your things. Taxi drivers make sure to lock the doors once you are in the cab. There was an edge to the place, a sense of a predatory existence that is wholly absent from the Beijing zones I blithely stroll around in at all hours. I’ve become soft, I thought.

Yet the city’s reputation for being a mess is perhaps only half-deserved. Its traffic is bad but at least it moves. Pollution is nothing like as bad as in Beijing. There’s not much planning in evidence, but it’s not vast and chaotic on the epic scale of Jakarta. There’s an edge to the place and a lot of struggling, but it’s not dangerous in the same way as (I imagine) Latin American cities are and its slums are nothing like as big as those in India.

I spent an enjoyable few days stomping around. The elevated metro line is crowded but works well and I rode it up to the old city – Intramuros – which I learned suffered some of the worst destruction of any city in the world during WWII as the Americans shelled it to boot out the Japanese, ripping Manila’s heart out in the process. A fair number of pretty colonial buildings survived and still line the cobbled streets, but it’s a zone that feels decidedly quiet and empty, a backwater in the city centre. At Manila cathedral, big posters proclaimed the Catholic church’s staunch opposition to a proposed new family law that would see easier access to contraception etc. Such resistance is part of the reason why the Philippines has such a high rate of population growth – “We do family planting instead of family planning,” one of my trekking guides later said – even as other Southeast Asian countries are seeing their demographic growth rates level off.

The real action is outside the old walled city in Quiapo and Chinatown (where you can find fresh fruit being sold on the street, a similarity to China that I was thankful for). I wandered through Quiapo’s maze of markets, flooded in the wake of a heavy downpour, and meandered across to Globo de Oro, the Muslim quarter. The attractive gold-domed mosque there was apparently financed by Colonel Gaddafi, according the Lonely Planet, and I was pleased to see written on a board that many of the Ramadan Iftar meals had been provided by the UAE, some by a Filipino expat there and others from the UAE embassy in Manila. Further up the metro line is the Chinese cemetery, where rich Chinese residents have been buried in huge tombs and memorials describe the contribution made by Manila’s Chinese youth to fighting the Japanese in WWII. The Chinese are pretty dominant in trade in Manila, but have not recently suffered the kind of anti-Chinese pogroms that took place in Jakarta around the turn of the century.

I was intrigued by Makati, where most of Manila’s super-rich live and which boasts the terrific Ayala Museum, with a great set of historical tableaux illustrating defining moments in Filipino history (and also including repeated height measurements for both Filipino and foreign historical actors) and a fascinating exhibition of gold’s significance in local tribal culture.

The museum is housed in what is the best shopping mall I have ever seen, and I’ve seen a few. Dubai has some spectacular malls – Mall of the Emirates and Ibn Battuta are highlights – and Hong Kong’s malls ooze sophistication, but Greenbelts trumps them all by doing something very simple. Amid a big ugly urban area, it combines a sense of not being in the city with retail by arranging long two-storey arcades around a lush central garden. In some ways, using nature for retail ends is the height of cynicism, yet it also responds to a real need to escape the concrete. A great place to sit down with a coffee and watch some of Manila’s various characters cruising around.

I also went to Makati in search of the local salsa scene, which I imagined would be lively given the Filipinos’ reputation as the “Latinos of Asia” but actually turned out to be rather elusive. Both events I had found on the web weren’t actually taking place and instead I caught a typically brilliant covers band in a biker bar and, in the red-light district beyond, midget- and womens-boxing in a strip bar called The Ring. The female boxing was particularly entertaining because they asked for a volunteer from the public to umpire the bout. A young American volunteered and told his friends to make sure they got everything on video. The women then spent much of the fight whacking him with their oversized gloves and, after he declared a winner, forced him to take down his trousers and underwear and lie on his back in the ring while one of the women gave him a handjob, his friends dutifully filming it all. It was a fun place, but one that was rinsing my wallet as its army of bar staff, masseuses, dancing girls and fighters demanded a continuous stream of tips for not doing very much, so I legged it.

Manila was my introduction to Filipino food, which, while reasonably tasty, also seemed pretty limited. There was a surprising insistence on fried meat and eggs and gross negligence of vegetables. I asked about this several times, people said (in their unimpeachable English) it was because Filipinos are poor and are therefore bored with constantly eating vegetables. I had some nice food in the Philippines, but the cuisine there is definitely not the country’s major attraction.

Having spent a bit of time in Indonesia, I was particularly interested in how the Philippines compared to it. Both are diverse archipelagos with Austronesian roots, a history of colonisation and a relatively recently-formed national consciousness. One is mostly Muslim and one mostly Christian, and both experience bloody religious friction. Both have relatively recently emerged from kleptocratic dictatorships and are clearly deeply corrupt, yet people in both countries are almost all genuinely friendly and aren’t prey to the kind of isolationism and nationalism that afflict northeast Asian countries. Filipinos are perhaps more worldly thanks to their command of English and the job opportunities abroad that affords them, but Indonesia seems to be doing better economically and offers its citizens better opportunities at home.

Manado, located just to the south of the Philippines and with its modern westward-looking Christian population, its shopping malls and fast food outlets, could be a Filipino city, yet it would be a very prosperous and well-maintained one, while Manila is a bit like Jakarta’s smaller cousin. I was impressed with the division of the entire country – including Manila – into barangays, or village units, yet organisation on a bigger scale seemed somewhat lacking. But people were optimistic. The latest President, Noynoy Aquino, is less corrupt than his predecessors, they said, and in broad terms the sheer development rush of all the countries around them must surely carry the Philippines along in its slipstream, to some extent.

Anyway, I didn’t go to the Philippines to spend all my time in a dirty big city – I wanted to get into nature. I took an overnight bus to the north of Luzon island to do some hiking amid ancient rice terraces and headhunter tribes and that’s what I’ll write about next…

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China – integrating offline, diverging online

September 1st, 2011 · China, Journalism

Is the Chinese internet more sophisticated than the rest of the web?

A couple of months ago, I emailed a few questions to Bill Dodson – author of the book China inside out, published March this year – about differences in the way Chinese and Americans use the internet for a piece on the Chinese online advertising industry.

His view was that while China is generally integrating more with the rest of the world, the Chinese internet is actually diverging from the internet in the rest of the world owing to the language difference and blocking carried out by the Chinese government for political and commercial reasons.

Round about the same time, an Amcham survey found that while both domestic Chinese and multinational firms assumed that MNCs were making better use of the internet for e-commerce, in fact – to everyone’s surprise – the opposite was true.

“Both Western MNCs and Chinese companies think MNCs are better at responding to IT and taking advantage of the trend,” said JoAnne Bessler, partner at Booz & Company, which conducted the survey along with AmCham. “However, in reality Chinese companies have much higher adoption of e-commerce.”

Will the increasing divergence of the Chinese online experience help to maintain the imagined gulf between Zhongguoren and Waiguoren in the minds of ordinary Chinese people, even as their horizons broaden?

If so, I would imagine this to be a desirable outcome for the Chinese government, which uses nationalism to argue for its legitimacy and aims to adopt foreign technology without being contaminated, for better or worse, by foreign ideas.

Anyway, here are Bill Dodson’s thoughts.

1 – In your view, do Chinese people use the internet in a different way from people in the West and if so, how? In what areas is activity on the Chinese internet going beyond that which already exists in other parts of the world?

Chinese netizens spend more of their time playing games and reading soft news than do Americans. Chinese also spend more time than Americans socializing online, especially through QQ, which they sign on to first. Americans access their email first, then check the news. Hard news coverage is important to Westerners. Increasingly, more Americans spend time in Facebook, even sending their email through Facebook. In that sense, Chinese have been ahead of Americans for years in the social media space with QQ. Chinese have been streaming media (Hollywood movies, especially) for years; Americans caught on to streaming only within the last two years, which has wreaked havoc on DVD sales (which was never a concern to China’s underground DVD industry). Chinese tend to be more socially connected than Americans and Europeans, so social networking sites will see incremental innovations that suit Chinese tastes.

2 – Do you see more integration happening between the Chinese internet and the non-Chinese internet? Why/not? What could that mean for the online advertising industry both in the West/other regions and in China?

I see a divergence between the Chinese internet and the internet in the rest of the world. Much of that has to do with controls and filters the central government has placed on content passing through the internet from the Chinese net to the rest. Reduced access speeds due to filtering and monitoring the internet as well as barred access to what seems at time random sources of information are plainly a deterrent for Chinese internet developers who want to learn about the innovations occurring in other countries. Chinese programmers will also increasingly fall behind major innovations in cyberspace because it will be difficult for them to piece together the complete, social and network context in which innovations in the outside world service customers and profit companies. Also, much of programming education and innovation occurs in English as an international language; isolation within the Chinese space will make it difficult for all but the most determined programmers to keep abreast of technology developments.

The wall China is building around its internet – linguistically, politically, technologically and commercially – will mean that the gulf in the advertising industry between China and the rest will remain wide – and perhaps even widen. Of course, China will be able to advertise to overseas Chinese who would like to keep abreast of social developments on the Mainland, or buy China-only products; however, advertising for Chinese companies will remain for the most part in the Chinese domain.

China can afford to insulate its application and use of the internet to its domestic market. After all, China’s population represents nearly 20% of humanity. That is a very large market, indeed. American firms in the past, during the industrial revolution and after World War II, were able to grow into some of the largest in the world just by doing business within the United States. Chinese internet firms have the same potential, because they arguably have the largest captive audience in the world. In other words, Chinese localization of the internet will benefit more interests commercially than opening its internet out to the world.

3 – What specific challenges exist in China for anyone trying to make a business work on the Chinese internet?

The presentation of information on Chinese websites is radically different from the more staid displays found on Western sites. Chinese websites reflect the condition and dynamics of Chinese society itself: crowded and kinetic. It is very difficult for Westerners – and for overseas Chinese – to understand this difference between the two worlds, and to adapt not just once to the way things are done in the Chinese space, but over and over again. Chinese internet application developers are not only learning about what works and what does not in the Chinese space; but Chinese society at large is also trying to figure out how the internet fits into society and its future. Recall, China only entered the industrial revolution 30 years ago, with computers becoming ubiquitous only in the last five years. The West has had decades to learn what its tastes are and to adapt the technology to its needs.

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English isn’t anyone’s property

June 21st, 2011 · China, Uncategorized

 

 

My second guest blogpost for my friends over at English Trackers, who for reasons best known to themselves have committed to posting 100 blogposts in 100 days. Good luck!

Read it on the English Trackers blog!

Growing use of English all over the world inevitably means innovation in the way it is used, the fruit of a creative encounter between flexible language and local culture.

This gives rise to fun and often enlightening variants, but the question of whether these innovations are “right” or “wrong” has become vexed. This was the subject of an amusing article on the CNNGo website about “Indianisms”, in which the author vented about how Indians commonly use English, which is relatively widely spoken in the country.

Phrases such as “doing the needful”, which means doing what must be done, “went out of style decades ago, about the time the British left,” according to writer Daniel DMello.

“Using it today indicates you are a dinosaur, a dinosaur with bad grammar,” added DMello.

Other phrases, such as “discussing about” a topic rather than just discussing a topic, are simply wrong, DMello says. But are they? It’s true that “discuss” is a transitive verb and thus in theory does not need to be followed by “about”.

However, as plenty of people pointed out in the 40 pages of comments beneath the article, language is constantly evolving and grammatical concerns alone have not prevented new ways of using English from becoming accepted.

My favourite “wrong” bit of global English is the north American style of following the adjective “different” with “than” instead of “from” or “to”, which are more common in the UK. As I understand it, “than” is used to denote a comparison of a particular aspect of something, i.e. “X is smaller than Y.” Saying something is different just means it is not the same.

There is substantial debate over this point. The British Chambers Dictionary recommends avoiding “different than”, however the American Merriam Webster dictionary insists that “different than” has been in use since the 17th Century and claims “different from” often sounds clumsy.

The global reach of American culture and its economic clout mean “different than” is now widely used, even in the UK. Presumably, millions of Chinese students who have chosen to study “American English” instead of “British English” are even now learning “different than” from their textbooks.

It’s perhaps quixotic to insist that this is “wrong”, since a living language isn’t anyone’s property but rather is defined by the way people use it.

As such, does it make sense for students of English to choose between narrowly-defined “British English” or “American English”? In an increasingly globalised and English-literate world, smart young people are increasingly likely to encounter English speakers from all over the world, perhaps using a form of English known as “Globish”, particularly now that most economic growth is taking place outside the anglosphere.

Perhaps students should be doing the needful to ensure they are prepared for English as it is spoken everywhere, including in emerging economic centres such as Mumbai and Beijing and not just in London or New York.

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Sketches

June 13th, 2011 · Uncategorized

Some of what I think are my most interesting life drawing results from the last six months. Work has prevented me from doing any drawing of late but I hope to be back at it next week.

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Propaganda posters – art that wasn’t about the money

April 6th, 2011 · China

Shanghai’s roaring commercial energy is its signature, but one of the most interesting places to visit there has little to do with moneymaking.

Nestling in the basement of an unremarkable apartment block in the French Concession area is the Shanghai Propaganda Art Center, a private collection of Communist Party (CCP) propaganda posters dating from 1949, the year of the Communist victory over Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists, and 1979, when China’s “Reform and opening up” policy was getting underway.

During these 30 years, Chinese artists were told to create art in service of the CCP. According to Yang Pei Ming, the softly-spoken 60-year-old former university lecturer who collected the posters, this work was the only artistic outlet the artists had so they put their heart and soul into the work, transcending propaganda to create great art.

There’s a steady stream of visitors to the Propaganda Art Center. On the two occasions I visited, most were foreigners. Many Chinese are grasping the opportunity to make money and improve their material lives and have little time or inclination to rake back over the poverty, chaos and violence of the Mao Zedong era, Yang says.

“Between 60% and 70% of Chinese are focusing on materialism. When they have settled down they will talk about the past. When they get comfortable they like to talk history,” said Pei in an interview.

“Someday they will want to discuss the Cultural Revolution, but this art will not be an overnight taste for them. Now they have money, they want to buy art, but 798 style [798 is a modern art zone in Beijing]. They buy expensive stuff. If it’s not expensive they don’t want it.”

Yang Pei Ming in his Shanghai Propaganda Art Center

The posters are in a range of styles and have a variety of themes, including works clearly influenced by Soviet Realism celebrating industrial and farming achievement and posters attacking American and British imperialism around the world (France is spared because it set up a relationship with China in the 1950s, according to Yang. Britain did too, but still held Hong Kong). There is also the entire genre of Mao posters, depicting the “Great helmsman” and vast crowds of Chinese citizens brandishing his “Little red book” of quotations.

“There was so much history and art in these posters. They were rare. I saw it as my responsibility to put them together. It will be good for the education of young people in the future and also for our generation, which has passed through so many hardships,” said Yang, who lived through the Mao era and first encountered the posters about 10 years ago.

“Each poster tells a story and there were so many stories in these 30 years. Now there is money but back then there was only stories. It’s very difficult to pass some things on to people now.”

The standout works in Yang’s collection are the “Da zi bao”, or Big character posters”, which are Chinese characters scrawled in red and black ink an apparently chaotic manner onto paper (I wasn’t allowed to photograph them). They date from the Cultural Revolution, a 10-year purge of “capitalist elements” from 1966 to 1976 that caused millions of deaths.

To my western frame of cultural reference, they remind me of the kind of deranged creativity that, in films, police bursting into the houses of psychopaths and serial killers often find. The posters show the essence of violent hysteria and are powerful and terrifying. A calligrapher as well as a poet, Mao created the genre himself, Yang said.

“Mao dictated the Cultural Revolution as an art movement with paper and pen and his Dazibao was the most powerful artwork in the Cultural Revolution,” said Yang. “The Dazibao were a response to the violence, paranoia and chaos of the era. They had no link to any truth yet had a powerful ability to drag the physical world into their illusions.

“Mao was a calligrapher, artist and poet. Hitler was also an artist, but Mao was different. In China, most emperors are good writers but Mao was different. He demonstrated it. He said the poster was a revolutionary weapon.”

Yang has 500 such posters (the best of which are not displayed on his website). Those that can be found on the internet are mostly fakes, he says.

“People aren’t aware of this art because it’s rare. Politically people don’t look. And after so much struggling people feel bad about the past. Then, Da zi bao were everywhere but now you can’t see them. It’s modern art. It wasn’t done for money. It was political graffiti.”

Propaganda posters: “Firmly support US black people’s justice struggle” & “Vigorously respond to Chairman Mao’s great appeal to ‘Support the army, love the people’” (photographs from postcard prints)

Yet if the Chinese public has little interest in the Cultural Revolution, the same is true of artists, Yang says.

“Modern artists have seen some Cultural Revolution pictures in books. They have created Mao iconography. But they don’t have much knowledge. Some contemporary artists have more of a context with western art culture. Perhaps they have lived there for a time, have brought back its ideas. Only a few want to look at the Cultural Revolution. Eventually they will become more serious. They are artists so they need to be more responsible,” he said.

“It’s the same everywhere. Technique is seen as most important. The stories are told by critics,” he added.

The same is true in literature, according to satirical writer Yan Lianke, who railed against Chinese writers’ apparent lack of desire to engage with traumatic events in China’s recent past at a literary festival talk in Beijing.

“Chinese writers should all feel guilty, no one can say we did our duty,” he said. “Between 1949 and now there have been many big events that were not dealt with. In the Great Leap Forward, 30 million people died. There is very little literature written about it what actually happened in the Cultural Revolution. That’s why Chinese writers, when faced with their own history, should hang their heads and apologise to the Chinese people.”

He added: “The worst thing is not that we are not allowed to write about it [the suffering of ordinary people] but that we have lost the ability. We have lost the ability to represent reality.”

Yan Lianke speaking at the Bookworm Literary Festival in Beijing

Neither does the Chinese political establishment much fancy delving into the past. Its recently re-opened National Museum of China in Tiananmen Square, which took more than a decade and nearly US$400 million to turn into a showcase of history and culture, has exactly one photograph and three lines of text referring to the Cultural Revolution, according to this New York Times article. A short walk away, the giant Mao portrait still dominates the north end of the square, while his embalmed body is on display at the south end.

“The party wants to determine historical truth,” the New York Times was told by Yang Jisheng, a historian whose book on the Great Leap Forward famine, which caused about 30 million deaths, was banned in China. “It worries that if competing versions are allowed, then its legitimacy will be called into question.”

For this reason, Party leaders are also nervous of art, said Yang.

“The government doesn’t want to spend money on art. Everything is still developing. The leaders privately like art. But they are unsure of the relationship between art, society and people. It’s very hard to control.”

[A bit of a deviation, but this is also in evidence in the Arab world, now roiled by a wave of protest for democracy. The UAE is far from democratic but positions itself as promoter of culture. However, much of the best modern art exhibited there has the kind of rebellious spirit that isn't allowed in the country's media.]

As a result, the Chinese authorities are spending a lot of money on faux-culture, such as traditionally-themed shopping districts, Yang said.

“At the moment new cultural things should either be ultramodern or have some kind of traditional element. But it all ends up looking cheap. They spend lots of money on this stuff but in the future it will be a disaster and no one will be interested,” he said.

But the past won’t go away. There was a fascinating article in the Global Times recently about Lin Yuntao, whose father was killed during the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution and who took his revenge last November, more than 30 years later, by stabbing to death one of the men he believed to be responsible.

“The Cultural Revolution is still a mystery,” said Yang. “It will be an interesting subject for research. There will be discoveries. There are so many stories to create art from. Chinese contemporary artists will have a very big historical responsibility in the future. They should be a mirror to reflect a period in history.”

Yang is pragmatic when discussing his own experience of the Cultural Revolution: “We who lived it are both unlucky and lucky. Unlucky because we suffered and lost our youth and the freedom to pursue petty bourgeois pastimes. Lucky because we lived through a unique period.”

He himself says he doesn’t think about the Cultural Revolution too much – “It’s good to forget. If you don’t it will be heavy on your soul” – but he also says that at the age of 60 one should “tell the truth”.

On my first visit to Shanghai in 2008, he offered a more personal perspective (I don’t have notes and the following is paraphrased).

During the Cultural Revolution, Chinese like Yang were told to be good citizens and tell the truth. But they saw that those who told the truth got into big trouble while those who lied did well. Some people, like him, chose not to say anything – they didn’t want to lie but we did want to survive. He recalled that when Mao died in 1976, it was very strange to go out onto the street because no one knew if it was safe to smile or not. His collection of propaganda art posters is his way of telling truths that he couldn’t tell back then.

And the rest of the world is interested in this truth – Yang said there are plans for about 100 of his posters, including some Da zi bao, to be exhibited in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum this year.

“International art collectors are not stupid – they look for Chinese contemporary art because they know this history. Sooner or later there will great masterpieces, it’s just beginning,” said Yang.

“The time will come when art is not just about money but also history. Money is everywhere, this is unique. The government doesn’t talk [about recent historical events], which makes it more secret, more interesting. I’m very confident and I hope I can be the first to explain this.”

ENDS

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Corporate photos for English Trackers

April 4th, 2011 · Photography

A few corporate-style photos for my friends at English Trackers, which sponsored a few events at the Bookworm Literary Festival last month. The cupcakes were particularly fun to work with…









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India Chowk

March 20th, 2011 · Photography, Rest of Asia

I like shooting photos on the street best. There’s never a shortage of characters unless there’s a shortage of people, and with a population of 1.2 billion that’s unlikely to be the case in India. Photos from Pune, Nasik, Mumbai and Delhi. Music is Sheila Ki Jawani from the film Tees Maar Khan (terrible film, sat through it on the bus from Pune to Nasik, but an unbelievable song).

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Islamic hangouts

March 20th, 2011 · Photography, Rest of Asia

What I like most about visiting mosques and other Islamic places is that – more than for other religions – they are absolutely great places simply to hang out. You can show up and just sit around and enjoy, comfortable on the carpets inside or on the warm stone ground outside, no pressure to really do anything. As such, these places are great for people-watching…

Haji Ali Dargah, Mumbai

The mosque itself appears to be under repair, but the atmosphere is so cheerful, people throng along a causeway to the mosque and sit about on the rocky islet. Great fun.






Humayun’s Tomb, Delhi

A tomb and the precursor to the Taj Mahal. A stunning building in beautiful gardens.

Nizamuddin Dargah

Just a magical place in a warren of alleys near Humayun’s Tomb. The Dargah is a shrine to Nizamuddin, a famous Sufi saint held in deep affection, and the area around it was packed with pilgrims, many from Afghanistan.





Jama Masjid, Delhi

Tremendous place. Ok, I and most of the other tourists were booted out pretty officiously by the guys clearing away the non-believers before prayertime, but the place has great arches to lounge around in and is an elevated plane of calm in red sandstone amid the street bedlam around it.




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Family footsteps in Deolali

March 20th, 2011 · Rest of Asia, Uncategorized

During the time of the British Raj in India, my grandfather Boris moved to Kolkata (then known as Calcutta) to work as a lawyer. He regaled us as kids with stories about his time in India and we never tired of hearing them.

When the Second World War broke out, my grandfather joined the army and waited for the Japanese army to arrive across Burma – they never did. He was then sent to a vast British military camp at Deolali, not far from Mumbai, to work as an artillery ballistics instructor.

My mother and uncle were both born in the camp’s military hospital (their older sister was born in Kolkata) and so I went to have a look. From Pune I got a bus to Nasik, a pilgrimage city of which Deolali is a satellite.

Nasik is a remarkable place where some of the big Hindu stories are said to have taken place – Sita was kidnapped by Rawan there, prompting Rama to go off and try to rescue her (as told in the Ramayana). The name Nasik actually means “nose” and relates to a story in which Lakshmana cut off Surpanakha‘s nose and threw it in the local river. It is also one of the four Kumbh Mela locations (the world’s biggest festival). The place is jam-packed with temples and tourists from all over India flock there to visit them and jump in the bathing ghats. Amazing scenes.

Deolali is a few km up the road from Nasik, so I hired a wallah and his autorickshaw and pootled along there at about 8am. It’s about 500m elevation above sea level, giving it a nice climate – chilly at night, crips and hot in the sunshine – and there were quite a few sanatoria along the road to Deolali, along with some decomposing mansions that were obviously once very grand.

Deolali itself is pretty unremarkable, a small place with a market square at its core where there are a few stalls, people hanging around and minibuses, autoricks etc.

The army base is just around the corner and is absolutely humongous. The camp at Deolali is at the origin of the phrase “to go doolally”, or go nuts. It received British soldiers arriving in India before they got their onward marching orders, but the documentation for some unfortunates got lost, so they were never redeployed and stayed there for years going slowly demented.

We showed up at the main gate and the soldiers asked us which zone in the 50 square km complex we wanted to visit. Obviously I had no idea, I just fancied having a stroll around, but we weren’t allowed in anyway.

One officer said we could drive down a road a bit and have a look around some of the civilian installations, so we did. There was a railway station leading to the main Mumbai-Delhi line and various compounds dealing with artillery-related functions – equipment testing etc. Lots of soldiers walking from one place to another.

I went wandering around and took a load of photos, which predictably led to me being intercepted by a nice career soldier called Satish and taken to an office so the guys could find out what the hell I was doing.

I gave them the whole spiel about the family history during the Second World War but they were unimpressed and they got more suspicious when they saw the Chinese visa in my passport. In the end they made me delete all the photos of the base that I had – as expected – and then a sourfaced officer told me to “push off”. I think that was the first time I’ve ever heard anyone actually use that phrase in real life, pure “Boys Own” English.

What I saw was a lot of old-looking barracks-style buildings, quite a nice architectural style, two storeys high, big sloping roofs… There were also a few big houses with signs at the front showing that they were being lived in by Indian brigadiers and so on.

A lot of the buildings seemed to be a bit dilapidated and overgrown with plants, but they were obviously still being used one way or another – a game of basketball was going on beside one, for example, and there were a lot of people strolling around. There was a fence between these installations and the artillery base proper.

We went up a little hill nearby with a small temple on top. I was hoping to get a photo from there but there were a few soldiers lounging around up there so it was a no go. The only shot I did get was of a billboard bearing the slogan “Power flows from the barrel of a gun”, taken from Mao Zedong’s famous line: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun”. Underneath the big picture of a huge gun firing was the line: “Please keep Deolali clean and green.”

I and the driver went to the marketplace for a tea – the owner of the shop next to the tea stand turned out to have just come back from Dubai. He worked there for 10 years in the hospitality sector, earning about Dh1,000 ($270) a month but said the economic downturn in Dubai meant he was better off in Deolali, where he made about 10,000 rupees ($220) a month from his shop. It’s less money, but presumably some of his overheads are lower and he is near his family. Every Deolali family had had at least one family member in Dubai, he said (18,000 people shuttle between India and Dubai every day, with Mumbai-Dubai the most popular route).

There was a big mosque nearby and I was invited to another tea by a group of guys who said that their ancestors had been Buddhist kings but that the Hindus being in power meant that their wealth had been taken from them and they were now very poor. I commiserated. Everyone seemed to agree that Deolali was a pretty poor place. I took a few more snaps and then went back to have a look at Nasik (photos below).

Later in Mumbai, where I was staying with a friend, I got talking to the neighbour, a Hindu who ended up in Pakistan after Partition. He never had any trouble there, he said. Like my grandfather, he was full of terrific stories of days gone by. Human stories have a timeless quality, but the textures of the times they take place in are just the opposite, rich but ephemeral.

NASIK



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Osho dynamic meditation

March 20th, 2011 · Rest of Asia, Uncategorized

Beep-beep-beep, beep-beep-beep…

5.25am

Turn off the mobile phone alarm, roll out of bed before I can go back to sleep again (although I know there’s little danger of that).

Brush teeth. Put on maroon robe. Shoes and socks. Get carpet.

Walk up Lane C. Still chilly, dark. A street dog wanders alongside for a while. Another robed figure on the move, 30 metres ahead. Past Buddha Paradise on the left, a guy standing outside it not doing anything, perhaps waiting to prepare the cafe for opening.

A girl ahead, stops, offers a quick prayer to the small Ganesh temple (very small, about 2 square metres) on the corner of Lane C and North Main Road, then moves on. Before I catch up with her she’s picked up by a staff bus and driven off to a job somewhere.

Cross North Main Road, tricky during the daytime but clear at this time of the morning. A lone autorickshaw some distance away still honks his horn to make sure I don’t contrive to fall under his cab.

Walk along North Main Road and then up Lane 1. More figures in maroon robes. Some old, some young. Some with shoulders hunched against the chill.

Get to the ashram gate, show my pass to the guard and walk in. Take a leak even though I’ve just had one, have a mug of water. Walk towards the auditorium, under tall trees with big spreading canopies, I don’t know what kind they are but you don’t see many of them in Beijing.

Security check. Then along a walkway between two pools of water towards the auditorium, a big black pyramid with stairs leading up to its entrance. A bat flaps back overhead, returning from the night’s business. I saw hundreds of them flying in the opposite direction the night before.

Walk up the stairs and into the entrance, put shoes in a rack. People are blowing their noses. A voice reading the meditation instructions comes from inside.

“Osho Dynamic Meditation is one hour long…”

6am

More than a hundred people are standing in the auditorium, each in their own space. Many are wearing maroon blindfolds. Put jacket, stuff on the side and find a space. I’m usually somewhere on the left about midway to the front. Put on blindfold.

10 minutes breathing chaotically out through your nose.

A soundtrack of hammering bongos, everyone starts snorting wildly. If I have a moment of thinking that the scene I’m in could be viewed as absurd and/or unhealthy, it’s usually about now.

Snort out, breathe in through the nose. Mouth shut. Tissues necessary. Put your whole body into the outsnort, do it arrhythmically. Build up energy.

10 minutes “going consciously mad”.

A gong sounds, people scream, the drums continue. While most people’s snorting had the same basic texture, each person’s catharsis is different. Male and female roars and screams, the occasional high-pitched squeal, some people shouting words.

(“A little acting often helps to get you started”).

The maddest thing you could do here is remain still and silent and absorb everyone else’s outblast.

Jump up and down. Beat chest. I’m usually growling, sometimes thrusting out my chest, lifting my face to the skies and howling until there’s a vacuum in my lungs.

This reverse engineering brings up feelings buried in the body. It’s amazing what can come up, particularly during the first week or so of doing the meditation. Hopefully, once you’ve felt them, they are gone.

10 minutes jumping up and down on the soles of your feet, hands in the air, shouting the mantra “Hoo!”

(“Hoo” is from Sufi Islam, the last syllable of “Allahu”. Of all the sounds you can make, this one apparently comes more from your centre, just below the navel, than any other).

Tough, for about the first week and a half. There’s no way you have the energy to do this, you think.

No need to think. Cut through to the next layer of energy. Jumping, shouting Hoo, Hoo, Hoo as feet hit floor.

Release pent-up sexual energy, the impact on the floor jolting it out of the legs, up the body and out through the upstretched fingers.

Not necessarily good for the knees, hence the carpet.

A joy to jump, on a good day a sense of neverending energy.

FREEZE!

15 minutes staying completely still.

Silence. Sweat pours. Hands are up. Try not to move a muscle.

Look inward.

Where’s that?

Arms start aching. Took three weeks plus to be able to hold them up for the full 15 minutes. A personal jihad, a lot of straining, not really in the spirit of utter stillness, a new mantra: “When you think you can’t, that’s when you can,” over and over.

In theory, this is when your energy and awareness reaches its peak.

The occasional sound of arms flopping down nearby.

Some days it feels more like an hour, others time concertinas and it’s over, seemingly in about 5 minutes.

I don’t know what meditation is…

According to Osho, it’s “going beyond the mind”. If you work your body and flush out your mind then you’re well set to meditate.

… but I think I may have managed something like it for a few minutes on my fourth day.

An experience of stillness, a sense of vast inner space, of a universe of space inside. An awareness and enjoyment of this experience. A sense of regret-tinged acceptance as the music starts to play and it is no longer possible to stay there. Waves of sensory information wash back in.

15 minutes dancing.

Soft flute music.

The sound made as everyone relaxes. Arms fall, bodies move and flex. Coughing.

Guitar and sitar. The irrevocable arrival of the DAY and we are now in it.

Stretch, move, sway. Enjoy, whether it’s relief or something stronger.

Made it.

The music ends, people shuffle quietly off. Bright sunlight coming in from the side windows.

Made it.

7am

Sort out a huge breakfast of porridge, eggs, a tomato, a banana, a chocolate croissant and ginger tea.

Eat the aforementioned under a huge tree, in company or alone.

There is no better way on earth to start the day.

* * *

I spent a month-and-a-half from mid-December to early January at the Osho ashram in Pune, India.

What an eye-opener.

I started every day with dynamic meditation, as described above. In the afternoon there was kundalini meditaion (15 minutes shaking, 15 minutes dancing, 15 minutes sitting, 15 minutes lying down) and in the evening there was the evening meeting, with dancing to (terrific) live music and a videorecorded discourse by Osho. Lots of other meditations, activities and courses were also on offer, I took advantage of it all as much as possible, a great opportunity to try things out.

It was just amazing to see what an effect a different lifestyle can have – a daily routine of early rises, vegetarian food, no booze, at least an hour of dancing, meditation and some intellectual stimulation. 45 days of that and I felt like a champion.

I’m now back to Beijing and renegotiating the meaty, boozy, smoky, hungover, late-rising, coffee-addled and cynical elements to life here. I’ve long chafed at much of this stuff, but I’ve acquiesced too in order not to extract myself completely from the social network it has grown up to serve.

But knowing from experience how different one can feel by making certain changes is a powerful tool and I’m very grateful to Osho and his ashram for that alone. I would recommend checking it out to absolutely anyone.

This is what Dilbert cartoon creator Scott Adams has to say about more or less the same thing – he calls it “happiness engineering”.

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