Monsoon thoughts

Over a month already in McLeod Ganj. I can barely recall Britain now – please, someone out there, tell me what it’s like. Do people really shy from using their car horns, and if so only to express annoyance? Do they really have bins stationed in public places, so passers-by have somewhere to put their used crisp packets and drinks cans? Do they really have sewage systems that don’t belch their contents onto the roadside when it rains? Do they really have pavements set aside from the roads, for people to walk on without having to dodge traffic? Do they really have street lighting to illuminate towns and cities during the dark hours? Is leprosy really a medieval comedy disease? Surely not; memory playing tricks on me again; I have grown misty-eyed in my exile.

According to the people who know best, I am the guest of a rising world power, a monster economy, a fearsome leviathan just waking up from a four hundred year slumber. India, according to business leaders and politicians and other repositories of wisdom and foresight, will once again become the richest country on earth – just like it was in the seventeenth century when the Mughal Empire stretched from Hyderabad to Kabul, and Emperor Shah Jahan built the Taj Mahal and staged elephant fights in the Red Fort (a step up from cricket). India’s progress will be checked only by those persistent little authoritarians, the Chinese; competition between the two Asian hopefuls has shifted from the military to the economic, or something like that.

I have discussed the soaring fortunes of India with many of the colourful types who sail within her. For instance, the leper lady who can be found each morning in McLeod Ganj at the spot where Tipa Road merges with Bhagsu Road, waving around the stumps where her hands used to be and mouthing for food from a caved-in face. Among other frivolous body parts, she has been relieved of her nose – quite an advantage in India’s urban areas, which tend to smell of urine (both fresh and stale).

She expressed great excitement at India’s 8% growth rate last year – take that America! she bellowed through her peeling lips – and told me in detail of her plans to invest her fortunes made begging at the roadside in some prime Mumbai real estate, currently valued at something close to London prices. To wish her well on her immanent rise to first world citizenship, I gifted her a tasty wedge of Tibetan bread. This she refused, because – duh – she didn’t have any teeth to chew on it with, bless her! (I should have given her porridge; note for next time.)

Furthermore, just yesterday I had a similarly animated chat with an old man who lives in a rusted metal box on stilts on Jogiwara Road – his home for over twenty years, according to the nearby street vendors. At first I couldn’t tell whether he was Indian or Tibetan, so grimed was he in the filth of two decades. Then I chose not to bother trying to distinguish – all are welcome, regardless, in the new Indian golden age. He told me of the killing he was making in the Bangalore outsourcing industry, and of all the American IT executives he’d lunched with that week at the chai stall opposite his box.

He was fortunate, he said, to be alive in India at this phenomenal juncture in history, going on to quote David Cameron, who is at-this-moment leading a business envoy to Delhi to strengthen UK-India ties: ‘India’s economy is set to overtake Britain’s in a decade, hence why I’m here to exchange grins with lots of fat greasy industry tycoons’ (more or less verbatim). Indeed, the tramp looked on me with pity, as a denizen of an ailing post-industrial nation that was fast on the way out. ‘You poor white bastard,’ he said, ‘have a biscuit.’ And a very nice biscuit it was too – Parle G, a fine Indian brand; it goes marvellously with tea, really it does.

Balram Halwai, the protagonist of Adiga’s The White Tiger (bloody excellent book; drop everything and read it), expresses India’s new national confidence in an idiosyncratic yet zeitgeist-humping manner – with a dash of homophobia served up on the side, if you’re into that sort of thing:

White people are on the way out. All of them look so emaciated – so puny. You’ll never see any of them with a decent belly. For this I blame the president of America; he has made buggery perfectly legal in his country, and men are marrying other men instead of women. This was on the radio. This is leading to the decline of the white man. Then white people use mobile phones too much, and that is destroying their brains. It’s a known fact. Mobile phones cause cancer in the brain and shrink your masculinity; the Japanese invented them to diminish the white man’s brain and balls at the same time. I overheard this at the bus stand one night. […] My humble prediction: in twenty years’ time, it will be just us yellow men and brown men at the top of the pyramid, and we’ll rule the whole world. And God save everyone else.

Now isn’t that the punchiest bit of prose you’ve read all year? (I knew the Japanese were up to something, anyhow, with their dubious little gadgets and pervy cartoons and electronic colonialism and I really could go on...) Okay, so the wilder statements of Mr. Halwai – for instance that rampant buggery is contributing to Eastern political resurgence (although the Japanese assertion remains reasonable, of course) – may not chime terribly well with our Western liberal sensibilities, but perhaps that’s the point Adiga is cleverly making: the rise of the East will not be polite, neither will it be liberal.

The confidence felt in the West at the fall of the Berlin Wall – that liberal democracy was the happy end-game of human progress, distilled in Francis Fukuyama’s triumphalist neo-con tract, The End of History – has melted away. With the Cold War over, America enjoyed a decade-long honeymoon of global dominance, on a scale never seen before in human history – even the British Empire fell short, in terms of economic penetration and the ubiquity of its military bases. Until 9/11, that is, when history resumed itself and the world became ‘interesting’ again. We now find ourselves in an age where the single greatest rising power – China – is far from being a liberal democracy, and whose free-market reforms have only strengthened the clout of the Communist Party over its beleaguered populace, through an easily-won alliance between the new class of business leaders and the old political oligarchy.

The great age of liberal democracy – instilled across the globe, ironically, by the far-from-benign British Empire – is in its death spasms, and will be looked on in future centuries as an agreeable curiosity, like the penny-farthing bicycle or a regency armchair. The symptoms of decay can be found in the West itself. Even the Euro-American Left, once the beating conscience of international affairs, doesn’t know what it stands for anymore: you see them marching against Western intervention in Iraq or Afghanistan one sunny weekend, and in favour of Western intervention in Israel the next. Out of the Middle East, imperialist pig-dogs; now back into the Middle East, governments of the Good, and stand up to this nasty regime we dislike – please.

Furthermore, starved of moral certainty, they’ve retreated into environmental Armageddon cults on a scale not seen since the Middle Ages. The end is nigh, we are repeatedly told – and the citizens of the West couldn’t seem more pleased about it. Repent ye your consumerist sins now, for the end it commeth, and kit out your house with EU-approved energy saving light bulbs while you’re at it.

But then, the West lost its certainties at the end of World War Two – an epoch of history we keep turning back to, 65 years on, in an increasingly pathetic attempt to salvage a sense of national identity and moral direction. But we don’t need ‘national identity’; that’s just fodder for nationalism, and that’s nasty and kind of raaacist innit. Try telling that to the Tibetan exiles I’ve met with here in McLeod Ganj, who, under Chinese rule, have suffered a cultural genocide – over six thousand monasteries destroyed by the People’s Liberation Army, their manuscripts burnt and statues melted down to make bullets – in the name of that modern holy grail: social justice. They’re rather keen on national identity, those chaps – reactionary fools, right?

Anyhow, what am I getting at? Good question. But I’ve had fun writing this. (It’s been raining a lot recently – monsoon season, you see.) Yet I feel obliged to offer up a lesson of some sort, something you can take home, share, cherish, draw inspiration form, write on a post-it note on stick on your desk. (I should really do that more myself – write interesting stuff down on post-it notes; but I digress; it is raining very hard outside, and a monkey is pressed up against my window, staring at me.) Yet, in lieu of a nice pithy conclusion I have to come up with myself, I leave you with a quotation from the political philosopher John Gray, who captures the modern condition with such withering style I want to track him down and buy him a pint of ale (how I miss ale):

The Soviet Union has ceased to exist and Europe has been reunified; but Russia has not adopted liberal democracy. In the thirty years after his death in 1976 China shook off Mao’s inheritance and adopted a type of capitalism – without accepting any Western model of government or society. The advance of globalisation continued, with the result that America has lost its central position. The US is in steep decline, its system of finance capitalism in a condition of collapse and its vast military machine effectively paid for by Chinese funding of the federal deficit. All mainstream parties in democratic countries converged on a free-market model at just the moment in history when that model definitively ceased to be viable. With the world’s financial system facing a crisis deeper that any since the 1930s, the advancing states are now authoritarian regimes. The bipolar world has not been followed by one ruled by “the last superpower”. Instead we have a world that nobody rules.

Well, that might not all fit on a post-it note. But there’s room for the final sentence. A world that nobody rules – a cause for horror or for celebration? Discuss.

Elections Exiled

Originally published in Contact Magazine, Dharamsala

As the great communist leviathan in China persists in denying its citizens their most basic civil liberties, democracy among the Tibetan exiled community continues to innovate. But the vigour of its democratic institutions has not always been matched by the objects of their service – the exiled Tibetans themselves. According to Tenzin Dhardon Sharling, Research and Media Officer for the Tibetan Women’s Association (TWA), turnout in electing both the parliament and the Kalon Tripa (Prime Minister) among the Tibetan diaspora – from California to London to Dharamsala, they are allowed to vote every four years – has been ‘disappointing’; some regions barely register a few percentage points.

In a press conference in Dharamsala on March 31, 2010, the Central TWA announced their action plan towards a 2011 Kalon Tripa election that properly represents the exiled Tibetan polity. 75% is their goal. And so, across 40 regions, three continents and 6 countries – India, Nepal, Switzerland, England, USA, Canada – TWA successfully staged the first ever Kalon Tripa Mass Mock Election on July 6th, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama’s 75th birthday. TWA’s Vice President Samten Chodon stated, ‘TWA is determined to prepare the Tibetan voters […] the mock election is a wakeup call.’

The mock election was undertaken with optimism: 100,000 voting forms were fanned out to regional centres across the world. In the event, 10,000 were used. In London the turnout was notably poor: out of 600 forms, 15 were filled in. Tenzin Dhardon Sharling cited ignorance of the process as the main barrier. Even in Dharamsala, which saw the greatest concentration of publicity – nonetheless summoning only a 20% turnout – many did not know how to complete their voting forms and a fair few forgot their mandatory Green Book, she reported. ‘Some even turned up thinking it was the actual election!’

With the mock election wrapped up, the executive members of regional chapters took the ballots to the 10th Working Committee Meeting of TWA, held in Manali from July 16th to 22nd, for an aggregate and transparent counting. Having carefully analysed voter turnout, TWA is busy producing a report to be launched on September 10th, on the occasion of the 26th anniversary of TWA’s refounding in exile. The report will, it is hoped, provide valuable pointers for the Electoral Commission on how to better engage and respond to the needs of the Tibetan electorate. A short film, documenting the course of the mammoth operation, is slated to be shown alongside it. Most excitingly, however: after the primary election of the Kalon Tripa on October 3 this year, TWA are to convene a televised debate among the endorsed candidates – another first – to provide exiled Tibetans with a more substantial, interactive alternative to pre-written press statements.

The Tibetan Government-in-Exile was based originally on the Westminster model, used also by India – the Prime Minister was a member of parliament, and was voted into office by it alone. In the year 2000, however, the 40th year of Tibetan democracy in exile, His Holiness the Dalai Lama called for the Kalon Tripa to be elected directly by the Tibetan people. The 2011 Kalon Tripa Election, finalising on 20th March, is the third of its kind. A more presidential system has been ushered in – although His Holiness remains the head of state – under the pretext of furthering the goal of secular Tibetan institutions towards full democratic governance. Exiled Tibetans, however, have yet to show the enthusiasm expected from – and indeed, required for – this greater opportunity for democratic participation.

As Pema Thinley, editor of the independent monthly Tibetan Review, once wrote: ‘I hate to say it, but we have always lacked and still do lack the most basic requisite for democratisation: willingness on the part of the people to take responsibility for their own affairs and destiny. Our stock response to all national issues still remains, “His Holiness knows best,” even though the Dalai Lama has repeatedly emphasised that it is not in Tibet’s best interest for the people to depend on him for everything and for ever.’

Talking Animal

Ronald was a ferret but could speak fluent English and a school-boy smattering of French and German. Despite being a small woodland creature he was made fully welcome by the community of Upper Oldington. For alongside a quiet conservatism and a disdain for modernity and anything from London, these people were fond of their only Indian takeaway – and one of their three pubs was known to play hip-hop music on Thursday nights, albeit at a moderate volume and not after ten pm. Difference, they had decided, was no bad thing. And it was in this atmosphere of hushed tolerance that Ronald the ferret established himself as a pillar of Upper Oldington, and its foremost voice for progressive integrationist policy.

Early on Ronald secured a seat on the village council, and a reputation as a radical firebrand swiftly blossomed. He stood athwart the weekly meetings, raised up high on a baby-seat borrowed from the nearby tea shop, his neat black eyes staring down the timid protestations of Hugo the vicar and Peter the pub landlord. ‘Upper Oldington must purge itself of its residual chauvinism,’ his shrill tenor would echo the length of the town hall. Despite his small stature – roughly that of the average shrew – his words carried a weight beyond his species; few dared contradict his calls for Inclusion and Respect and better access to public services for creatures of the neighbouring forest. ‘So what if most of them choose to remain silent? They too can shoulder responsibility, they too deserve rights. Their silence is our burden, their wretchedness our shame. Yes we can, Upper Oldington, yes we can.’

And so, under the progressive tutelage of Ronald the ferret, Upper Oldington was transformed from a bastion of rural English tradition to the country’s leading practitioner of inclusive citizenship. The hares and voles were no longer sport for excitable village boys with shotguns and cricket bats, ferret racing was struck from the midsummer village talent contest – reportedly Ronald’s proudest achievement – and the Dusky Swan was forced to stop serving its signature rabbit pie, famous throughout the county and beyond, in favour of a bland beef alternative.

Not a corner of village life was spared the writ of the benign ferret. A small number of formerly respectable villagers were, yes, taken into a forest clearing and variously speared through the chest with pitchforks or shot in the face by Hugo the vicar’s WWII rifle – but these were backwards, reactionary elements that stood obstinately in the path of Progress and Inclusion. ‘Change,’ announced Ronald at the opening ceremony of the midsummer village talent contest, ‘is best achieved through the barrel of a vintage firearm. Or a crude farm implement, if one is to hand.’ It is through such neat surgical strikes alone that Tradition could be brought to its knees and Progress installed in its place.

All the villagers publicly approved this revolutionary logic, as they were brought one by one before Ronald – now styled Our Dear Creature – who sat perched on his (now lavishly decorated) baby-seat, and anointed each subject with a dab of ferret scent to the forehead. Appropriately blessed, they staged a lavish bonfire before Him, in which various relics of the indecent past were thrust: slices of Mrs Bradshaw’s coffee and walnut cake, a stained-glass church window from the thirteenth century, most of the contents of the community library, carved busts of past eminent locals, among many other tools of ancient barbarism. As the flames lapped up the weighted chains of their past, the good gentle people of Upper Oldington, free for the very first time, danced and chanted and lacerated their backs in a grand welcome for this brave new chapter of civilisation. As the flames petered and died they fell to awkward copulation, with a good deal of grunting and heaving and other, indecipherable noises. Thirty minutes later they hobbled homeward, much satiated, for a variety of herbal teas and the evening news on Radio 4. Upper Oldington slept, deeply, peacefully, their dreams haunted by images of a giant bearded ferret riding on a cloud, summoning the dead and dispensing sound justice on mortals below. No one saw Ronald as he stole away into the gloaming, beyond the village fringes and into the forest.

Morning brought a gentle rain. But this didn’t bother Simon the butcher’s son, as the stout, tracksuited fourteen-year-old bicycled form thatched cottage to thatched cottage, delivering the Oldington Herald before the doors of villagers still dozing under patterned duvets. Simon always dreaded the steep, wooded ride up to the manor house, where Sir Oldington-Blithe breakfasted on deviled kidneys, opposite a wife who sipped earl grey and pondered their upcoming summer holiday in Cumbria; just a couple of months off in July, she consoled herself, rapping her teaspoon on a china teacup with a painted vole on one side.

The boy is late, the knighted patriarch thought to himself, and I am without my crossword. Damn that fat, asthmatic turd, on his bloody creaking bicycle that upsets my poultry. Not that I care for my poultry; but anyhow, my wife does – I think. And I should probably show concern for that sort of thing.

Upper Oldington, he mused further, is in grave decline. And it’s all because of that scheming, hissing, squinty-eyed ferret. Ronald, he calls himself. How absurd. That’s not a ferret name. Little shit. How dare he accuse us of chauvinism and reactionaryism, whatever that bastard word actually means. Pfft. The peace of Upper Oldington, the peace that existed for centuries before we let that odious woodland creature into our living rooms, was an achievement, an achievement won through centuries of quiet English common sense and moderation. It did not spring into being through decree, or a resolution passed at our village council. That confederacy of inbred dunces was only ever good for the midsummer village talent contest. No, you can’t legislate fairness or impose toleration. Ronald’s been reading too much of that bloody idiot Rousseau, I know it. The French pansy. Mankind was not born into freedom; just barbarism, that’s all, barbarism and ignorance and grunting. Hobbes had it right. Gosh, I have grown wise in my years. I should probably write a book of some sort, some day. Not a pamphlet, a book. Not that anyone actually reads them in this village. Good thing too. They’d probably read the wrong stuff. Idiot stuff like….

Meanwhile Mrs. Oldington-Blithe debated vigorously the competing merits of Lake Windermere and Wast Water. The former has that particular rolling English prettiness, certainly, but there’s an austere dignity to the latter – the sort of place where you’d expect to find an old stone monastery, somehow spared the sacking of Henry VIII, a lengthy book about whom she had finished that February; a rather disappointing read it had proved to be, but never the matter, she was now re-reading Fanny Hill, her favourite. I should really read more contemporary fiction, she thought, since I have the time. Who’s that J.D. Salinger fellow I keep reading about? Perhaps I should read him. They probably have his books in the community library. But wait, Ronald has seen to that; that poisonous ferret had all its decent volumes burnt as reactionary material. Dreadful, dreadful, perfectly dreadful. What shall ever I bloody do when…

Just then the letterbox fluttered, and a crumpled, sodden Oldington Herald fell onto the welcome matt, which was patterned with two tabby cats, grinning – eerily, Mrs. Oldington-Blithe had always thought (her husband never noticed this sort of thing). Sir dropped his fork on the octagonal plate beneath him, red with kidney juice, and paced out of the dining room, through the hall, past the life-sized portrait of his great-grandfather Keith and an original J.M.W. Turner which he never much cared for, and to the doorway where he bent to grab the newspaper. What a vile welcome matt, he thought; there’s something creepy about those grinning tabbies; had it always been there? He stood back up, shook the moisture off of the pages, and scanned the headline.

Mrs. Oldington-Blithe was deep into imagining the lavish collection of untarnished illuminated manuscripts housed in the monastery above Wast Water, when her husband walked back into the dining room holding aloft the Oldington Herald – something he only ever did when his name was in a headline. Mr. Oldington-Blithe stopped at the head of the table and thrust the paper on top of his used, bloody plate. ‘Wife,’ he said, ‘there’s an open letter from Ronald on the front page. Looks important. I can hardly bear to look at the thing. Bastard ferret. What does he want now?’

‘Why don’t you read it out loud, dear?’ she said. ‘I haven’t my reading spectacles.’

‘They’re on the mantelpiece behind you, next to the framed photograph of our newly dead collie dog. You read it first, then give me the potted version. Shouldn’t take long, I’d imagine. Go on.’

She turned to fetch her glasses, sniffing slightly at the image of her dearly deceased Alfred, smiling at her imploringly through the glass, tongue wagging, tail limp and lustrous, as it had always been. She adjusted herself at the table, breathed long and deep, wiped off the kidney juice from the pages, and started on Ronald’s torturous prose. Minutes passed and her face muscles tightened. She didn’t allow herself to frown. Her husband looked on. Something was amiss, he knew. She reached the end – it was a mere few hundred words – and read it again. Then a third time. Then a fourth. She folded the paper and drank the last from her cup, the tea now cold and over-strong.

‘Well?’ her husband said, growing slowly puce. ‘Out with it, woman. What has that fucking critter said this time?’

Mrs. Oldington-Blithe remained quiet, settled her cup on its saucer with slow deliberation, and looked out through the window beyond her husband’s back. Upper Oldington in its entire idiot multitude was walking up their driveway, slowly, determinately, carrying various objects she couldn’t make out. Before them was Peter the pub landlord, Hugo the vicar and that sweaty fat teenager who had just delivered their newspaper. They grew nearer. She turned to her husband: ‘Nothing, dearest, absolutely nothing. More silly directives, about agricultural reform and the prohibition of chewing gum. Something like that. Nothing that need concern us. Not in the slightest.’

*

In the far recesses of the forest, Ronald sat atop a newly fallen tree trunk next to Timothy the badger. Both chewed meditatively on twigs. ‘A responsive bunch, then?’ Timothy said, after spitting out a strip of bark that had gotten lodged in his teeth. Bark, he thought to himself: a hell of a lot of faff but always worth it.

‘You wouldn’t believe,’ Ronald said. ‘Like putty. Are you familiar with putty, Timothy?

‘Nope.’ Timothy scratched his arse with vigour and reached for another twig.

‘A highly malleable synthetic substance, used commonly for the purposes of puerile human entertainment.’ Ronald tossed the remainder of his twig over his shoulder. He never enjoyed the bottom part of twigs anyhow. ‘But I digress. You see, stability in a community is a fragile thing – so very, very fragile. We woodland creatures know that. Humans rarely do – and if so, for the most part only intuitively. It is something they rarely articulate.’

Ronald reached for another twig and found them all gone. Timothy always ate quicker than he did. But no matter; Ronald didn’t feel hungry any more. He continued: ‘Upper Oldington is dead. The residents don’t even know it yet, but sometime soon they will. The truth always dawns. One by one they will perish in their armchairs or move to the cities, to take up insurance jobs and visit the countryside on weekends. They will be happy, for the most part, and they won’t even know what they’ve lost. Which is why they won’t thank me. I will have liberated them, but the lot of the liberator is ever a thankless one. I accept it, for there is such a thing as the Greater Good, I tell you, Timothy. The Greater Good.’

Timothy wasn’t listening, but thought happily about the months of summer ahead. He didn’t much care about the Greater Good, whatever that was. ‘The country is a deathly, hopeless place,’ Ronald pronounced. ‘That’s why I’m off to London on Tuesday – forever. Plenty more opportunities there for a bright animal like me. Do wish me luck, Timothy. I suspect I’ll need it. But don’t you worry, I’ll be back to visit on weekends.’

‘Yeah, good luck and stuff,’ said Timothy. ‘Kind of jealous. But then, dunno, not really. Heard the food’s a bit off. Miserable bastards too, apparently. Perhaps I’ll come visit, at some point, on a weekday. Maybe.’

The sun fell. Ronald walked to the forest edge and gazed over Upper Oldington, his erstwhile home. He scratched his chin and twitched his nose. The trees hummed and rustled. Ronald looked upon his work, and saw that it was good.

Hippies: A Moderate Critique

This is to be an unreasonable diatribe. I am so through with fair play and broadmindedness – these pansy New Testament stumbling blocks only prevent us from expressing what we feel. Let us emancipate ourselves; let us be unpleasant. And in this spirit of anti-Buddhist invective I shall align my prey: hippies. Fucking hippies.

The saving grace of this dwindling tribe – India is one of its last remaining habitats, despite my own sincere efforts towards cultural genocide – is that they are easily recognizable. Bangle-crap, bead-things, ‘ethnic’ shawls, circus-like pyjama bottoms, dreadlocks or some other form of hair torture, strong whiffs of hash and a refined stench of month-long, hard-won body odor – all this and more differentiates the hippy from the more reasonable traveller. It is a uniform, a code, a shorthand whereby they can broadcast their vocation in life (if you can call it that) and attract others of their kind toward them for cheap drugs and inane conversation.

Do they wear this sort of thing at home? Most of them not – unless, of course, they live in California. As soon as they arrive back home in London or New York or Paris or Tel Aviv, they put their jeans back on, take a shower, bin their bangles and start writing up job applications. I can’t help but find this inconsistency and the attitude behind it arrogant, insulting even – that at home you must dress and maintain yourself according to some standard or norm, but that in the ‘third world’ you can smell all you like and dress however the hell you want; because, hey, you’re only going to be judged by little natives and their opinion doesn’t actually matter. That this isn’t much appreciated by said ‘natives’ is hinted at by the name used by Tibetans here to refer to hippies, which translates as ‘street dogs’.

So, for most hippies, the neat and absolute separation between home and ‘there’ is spelt out sartorially. ‘There’ has a liminal, carnivalesque function; it is a suspension from mundane, normal life, felt as a state of frenzy from which one wakes with a dull headache and a curious sense of stolen dignity. In this bardo (the Tibetan Buddhist notion of the finite stage through which souls must travel before reincarnation) the soul is purged of its workaday impurities and life appears clearer: seen from a distance, with the jigsaw pieces snugly snapping together. Only life isn’t seen more clearly: it is seen through a kaleidoscope, a mess of fat splinters you dread having to sweep up when you get back home. It is a postponement of life’s problems, not a quick-fix, do-it-yourself, ten-step-plan solution as many dream it be when they say, ‘if only I could go to India for six months I could really get my shit together’. These people are not going to get their ‘shit’ together. And their ‘shit’ probably isn’t worth gathering into one pile anyhow.

But I do not intend to be discouraging in all this; far from it. Go, travel, see the world, now. It is an exciting, formative and (although I use the word cautiously) enlightening experience. Above all travel is a learning process, about the world and your ability to handle it. It is about meeting people and seeing places that exist fully outside yourself. I only regret that the culture of therapy, imported from America and quickly pervading Britain, has reduced travel to a masturbatory self-help exercise, akin to yoga or a carrot juice diet. This demeans travel, turns into another facet of our self-gratifying, me-centric worship of ‘potential’ (such a ghastly word), which reifies the self above its surroundings, when the hierarchy should be inverted: the conscientious traveller learns to exercise a religious sense of humility before foreign landscapes. Because if travel teaches you anything, it is that you are very, very small and so, so insignificant. And this should be felt as a gain rather than a loss; your ‘shit’ really doesn’t matter shit after all.

Anyhow, back to hippies. In this critique so far I have left out a sub-species separate from the charas-toking reprobate: the White Messiah, who travels long distances to do Good on the behalf of helpless brown people the world over. Some might argue that the White Messiah is not a true hippy, as he or she tends to have a rather well-scrubbed, private school demeanour and takes seriously the prospect of a future career. A fair few of these can be seen wandering around here in McLeod Ganj – in many respects another Asian backpacker Mecca where earnest, privileged young white people can play at real life. (Perhaps I’m being unkind; I myself am a privileged young white person playing at real life, although I like to think I’m beyond earnestness.)

This breed of untermensch youth – and they tend to be of immediately post-school or student age – was lampooned expertly by the ‘Gap Yah’ sketch, that YouTube phenomenon which was funny in the week before it went viral and every last idiot started quoting it. Are these types honest-to-god hippies? I would argue that they are, in that they share a view of the ‘third world’ as a postcolonial playground – in this case more of a finishing school – for them to stomp around in before they start ‘serious’ life in the ‘real’ world. The ‘East’ is once again that liminal space, only this time it has a more limited shelf-life of a year or so. For the White Messiah, impermanence is key.

Both this and the more conventional (oh the irony) hippy tend to stay in one ‘third world’ locale for an extended period, the former engaged in some worthy project – building loos, saving whales, enriching ex-military volunteer agency operators – the latter doing nothing zealously. As a result both manage to cultivate a familiarity with their surroundings, and evince an easy confidence in their day-to-day doings in an alien culture. They can be seen chatting casually with the locals – and sometimes dating them, particularly here with the ubiquitous Tibetan male/ white female relationships – while casually dispensing sentences in the native language. They often appear to have crossed that misty divide that separates the casual tourist from the places he or she tours. But on questioning them on matters of, say, Indian politics or history, they turn out the most trite generalisations and platitudes. India, the land of religious transcendence; Tibet, the lost land of Arcadian peace; their native country, a spiritual vacuum from which they have escaped by the hem of their patterned pyjamas. In all this their thought is little more sophisticated than that of the average Eastbourne pensioner.

But of course I’m generalising, and being rather rude. They’re sometimes quite nice, these people I’m rubbishing, and they probably wouldn’t do the same to me. Nevertheless I’m trying to make a serious point. Indulgence is all very well – and a staple of the free, liberal lifestyle we all prize (though sometimes secretly) in the West – but when dressed up as virtue it becomes obnoxious. This attempt to ‘escape’ Western consumerism and ‘embrace’ the East isn’t really an escape at all, but an extension of Western consumerism – that mode of life which upholds choice as the highest moral imperative. Benjamin Disraeli once said, referring to colonial endeavour, that ‘the East is a career’. Nowadays, in our nominally post-colonial age, the East has become a lifestyle choice, an option among many such as born-again Christianity and environmentalism (ironically the ultimate example of consumer lifestyle fetishism). The ‘East’, that artificial yet tangible crucible of transcendental religions and colourful festivals, is a commodity of difference ready to be consumed by the Western traveller, provided he or she has suitable resources of time and money.

Once again, I don’t mean to be a spoilsport. I’m not suggesting for a moment that these friendly (if credulous) types pack off back home and stop having their fun – or that you shouldn’t go and follow them; by all means, do. My modest proposal is that they drop the pretension and accept that what they’re doing is a pleasurable, indulgent but for the most part harmless and healthy diversion from normal life, not a heroic act of defiance against spiritual vacuity nor a break-out from the chains of late global capitalism. Relax, enjoy yourselves, but leave off with the worthiness. Then I’ll stop writing sardonic things about you. Promise.

If I have offended anyone in writing this, it is only because I am another tiresomely prevalent traveller type: the know-it-all, scholar-backpacker cynic, who looks on the passing landscape beneath an arched eyebrow. This I could also blog about – in the future, maybe, possibly, if I care sufficiently. Bye for now.

Gelek's story

Yesterday I interviewed an ex political prisoner newly escaped from Tibet, a former monk called Gelek currently being rehabilitated in the reception centre here in McLeod Ganj. With the help of a translator and three (often frustrating) hours, I took down his story and reproduced it as an article for The Tibet Post. You can read it in its unedited form below:

Gelek: the story of an ex political prisoner

Originally published in The Tibet Post

Gelek was a monk from the eastern part of the Tibet Autonomous Region, and was pursuing a life of contemplation in Sera monastery near Lhasa before an irreversible brush with the Chinese state on March 2008. On March 10th, as anti-Chinese sentiment was brewing across the plateau in the run up to the Beijing Olympics, thirteen monks marched through Lhasa demanding human rights and freedom of expression and religion. All were arrested.

The situation escalated: the next day five hundred monks from Sera monastery, Gelek included, marched on Lhasa shouting for the release of the arrested monks alongside the aforementioned calls for greater freedom. Fifteen minutes into it they were met by almost a thousand Chinese paramilitary troops with tear gas, riot shields, electrical batons and guns. The monks were forcibly escorted back to Sera and surrounded in the monastery yard while negotiations were undertaken between the state and monastery officials (a proportion of the latter being state-appointed). As a result they were allowed back into their monastery, only with prison-like strictures imposed: none were allowed to contact the outside world, let alone leave.

On the 12th, between 3 and 5pm, around a hundred monks began shouting protest slogans. The act was repeated the next day, and on the 14th the monastery authorities warned that, if they continued, Chinese troops would storm the monastery and search their possessions for defamatory material – anything that might warrant arrest, pictures of the Dalai Lama included. And so the monks stopped. But the troops would not disperse from outside the monastery. The monks remained in effective house arrest for a month, denied any outside contact. Many become sick, and were helpless to remedy themselves.

On the 10th of April, at 3am, paramilitary troops burst in with the common armoury of guns, tear gas, electrical batons – and in this case axes, to splinter the door of any monk who would deny them entry to their room. Gelek opened the door to one soldier and three policemen, who immediately fell to beating him with their electrical batons. Phones, wallets and rosaries were confiscated and 400 monks, Gelek included, were bundled into trucks and taken to Tsal Gongthang Detention Centre, 3km from Lhasa.

Monks such as Gelek from the Autonomous Region were detained for eight months, with monks from elsewhere carted off to detention centres in their respective provinces. Alongside meagre food rations and a draconian regime of rules and regulations, Gelek was subjected to daily ‘patriotic’ re-education: Chinese development tales of shiny new bridges and bountiful food provision were told, and their ‘crime’ of protest was condemned as a dangerous act of separatism with the probable backing of foreign anti-Chinese forces – in much the same manner as the Dalai Lama is condemned as a lackey of Western imperialist powers. The monks were interrogated one by one, and Gelek was firm that he protested neither for the Dalai Lama nor foreign intervention but simply to bemoan the lack of religious freedom and the Chinese state limitation of monk numbers in monasteries. The interrogator, however, was a sympathetic Tibetan who advised him to exercise caution in everything he said.

As time went on many monks became sick, and were only allocated medical help if they successfully coughed up blood. The ‘beds’ provided – raised plinths of concrete on the cell floor – gave rise to agonising swelling conditions, not least for Gelek. After the eight months they were transferred to detention centres in their own respective districts – Chamdo county, in Gelek’s case. Much the same rigmarole continued for Gelek for the next month and eleven days, after which he was finally released on the 12th January 2009. Gelek returned to his village, but life could not return to how it was. He was forbidden for two years to travel beyond his village without official permission, he was kept under regular surveillance and, most galling of all, he could never again practice as a monk.

Increasingly frustrated at the half-life he was forced to lead, he made contact, through a series of discreet connections, with an outfit dedicated to smuggling Tibetans across the Himalayan divide. He paid the mandatory 16,000 Chinese Yen (2,362 US Dollars) and his escape began on the 27th of May 2010, travelling in a taxi for three days and a night and walking the rest of the way. Thanks to an expert guide with a knowledge of hidden routes, he evaded capture from the Chinese border guards and arrived in Nepal on the 4th of June. After a stint of rehabilitation in the reception centre in Kathmandu, he was conveyed to Delhi on the 18th of June, arriving two days later in McLeod Ganj, Dharamsala. Since then Gelek has been lodging in the reception centre for recent arrivals on Jogiwara road, and he looks forward to his meeting with the Dalai Lama, whose presence drives so many Tibetans to brave the escape over the high Himalayan passes. Reduced circumstances may still plague Gelek in McLeod Ganj, and his future remains uncertain – but for now he can enjoy an environment of relative freedom among his own kind, in a society where his rights are respected and his ancient culture is permitted to flourish.