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.

Dispatch One: A Rough Crossing

I shall begin this travel diary with the flight. The flight! Now that was something – enervating, elevating, energising, ergonomic (I don’t actually know what this means); really, you wouldn’t believe.

So I had this flight booked with Virgin Atlantic at 10pm on the 23rd of June. I started packing, as I always do, on the day of departure. As I was tossing boxer shorts and adapter plugs to the far distant corners of my bedroom, I got a text telling me the flight was cancelled, and that I should call the number provided to arrange another. I did so promptly and, after suffering a tinny rendition of a Motown ‘classic’, I was connected (to use the term as loosely as a Catholic schoolboy’s posterior) with a mentally challenged young man called David Harbour – he gave me his name, the mentally challenged fool – who stated categorically that the only possibility for me was to board another Virgin flight in two days time. I made the appropriate noises, flipping between fiery indignation and whimpering helplessness, but Dave was as firm on the matter as he mentally could be. I then chose, wisely, to phone back – and I spoke to another, mentally sound, man who put me on a Jet Airways flight an hour earlier and told me I was entitled to 600 Euros compensation (still hearing back from the Stalinist bureaucrats at Virgin ‘customer relations’ on that one). So, back of the net; Ben Dunant one, Richard Branson nil; next conquest globalisation.

Jet Airways is India’s best airline by a good many airmiles. Decent food, humane service, an extensive and at times eccentric film selection, and best of all the cute yellow waistcoats the air hostesses are forced to wear. So very, very different from Air India, that conspiracy of miserable sadists I had the misfortune of flying to Kathmandu with last summer. If you only take away one lesson from this blog post, take this: if you are a spirited masochist, or a Presbyterian, and consider bodily discomfort to be the highest human good, don’t hesitate to fly with Air India.

I’m sure you’ve found this flight business fascinating, and I know you crave finer detail. But I prefer to tantalize – and so I shall move on to the landing.

So: I took a taxi from the airport to Majnu ka Tilla, a Tibetan colony in north Delhi, from which buses leave nightly for Dharamsala. The minute I stepped out of the terminal I was enveloped in the familiar film of sweat. It was overcast but muggy; Delhi was a moist grey troll, lurching into the distance in a vista of dismal concrete. The taxi cab was the usual rattling, seatbelt-less rust trap, and the driver an extension of it – a stunted, skinny, unshaven man in grimed blue pyjamas, visibly beaten down by the vicissitudes of Delhi underclass life. The airport is in the south; the ride went, with ample traffic standstills, from one end of the city to the other, a ninety-minute tour that took in the avenues of Lutyen’s Delhi, India Gate and the Red Fort of Old Delhi, among other landmarks glimpsed through the smog.

In Majnu ka Tilla I bought a Dharamsala-bound bust ticket for half six that evening and found a cheap guest house to nap in for a few hours. I sweated gently and felt mosquitoes eat me. Afterwards I explored the place a little, wearily. It was the usual mess of concrete and dangling electrical wire that make up Delhi’s residential areas, only this time interspersed with primary-colour Tibetan Buddhist temples radiating prayer flags down into rubbish-packed gutters, and stalls selling prayer wheels, cashmere shawls and miscellaneous Tibetan tourist tack. Free Tibet flags dotted the sides of buildings and monks, old and young, shuffled past thumbing rosary beads – but otherwise these Tibetan exiles appeared resigned to their cramped Delhi life, a world so far from the cool, high-altitude pastures of their former kingdom. While sat in a café eating beef momos – a species of dumpling; the closest Tibetan food comes to delicacy – a young Tibetan boy sauntered in wearing shorts and Nike trainers, and booted up his metal-grey Apple Mac at his table. A regular Delhi boy, like so many of his fellow second-generation exiles.

I turned up on time, but the bus took an hour to fill – and, as is the case with private bus companies across India, it could only conceivably leave when bursting at the seams. I was the only whitie on the bus; the rest were mostly Tibetan. Majnu ka Tilla and Dharamsala are India’s two premier Tibetan settlements, and this bus journey India’s premier Tibetan thoroughfare. A steady traffic of red robes pass either way each night. Very few in the bus seemed phased by the horror that lay ahead. With an ominous stutter the engine came to life.

The most formative night of my life – the night I became a man – was, on reflection, a bus ride in the first few weeks of my virgin trip to India during my gap year: Junagadh to Bhuj in the Kutch region of Gujurat, leaving at 10pm (so much is seared in my memory) and lasting over ten hours. About a couple of hours in my stomach began to turn against me, and without a chest-lurch to warn me it erupted. As fashionable student parlance would put it, I ‘chundered everywah’. Or rather, all over myself. I then made a dexterous clothes-change from my backpack, much to the consternation of the several peasant women looking on. But my stomach would not be quelled and for the remainder of the night I periodically emptied myself out of the nearest window, decorating the glass pane in the process with some fabulously daring modernist pattern-work, reminiscent of either Jackson Pollock or Wassily Kandinsky (depending on the volume, content and trajectory). Eventually the chunder-art ceased and I found sleep just as the sun rose. Peace. I was shaken awake not long after by the bus conductor, who kindly informed me I had missed my stop and that Bhuj lay firmly behind me. It was at that moment – tired, panicked and comprehensively emptied – that I became a man.

There were no fire works on this journey – not one lone, solitary chunder – but it was nonetheless a bitter trial of my human resources. I think I slept for half an hour at some point, before being woken by a service-station stop; its arrival was announced by concentration-tramp floodlights and noxious hindi music streaming from long burnt-out speakers (thankfully I was spared this on the bus itself; now that’s a first).

As the sun rose, all blotchy and orange against the monsoon mist, we left the Punjab for the torturous mountain roads of Himachal Pradesh – which translates quaintly as the ‘snow state’. Then the bus chose to break down, with a few gurgles and minor explosions. ‘Engine finished’ a fellow passenger kindly explained. We got out on the damp roadside – it had been raining heavily – and tried to wave down passing traffic. One bastard bus didn’t even stop for us – though admittedly it was full; but buses in India are never ‘full’. Me and six others eventually managed to pile into a jeep to take us the remaining twenty or so kilometres to Dharamsala.

Opposite me were two Indians. From the mouth of one came ultra-courteous, upper-middle-class Delhi speech; he was a university student heading to McLeod Ganj to ‘study the Tibetan Buddhist culture’. From the mouth of the other came a thick Mancunian accent. ‘I’m on me gap year. Travelling Asia like. Going Leeds university next year.’ To this I was able, vainly, to play the seasoned India-hand, listing off places he should visit and dumps he should miss. ‘Manchester, famous for cotton,’ the Delhi-ite piped in, speaking the fact proudly. A dignified silence followed. Manchester – famous for cotton; there was really nothing more to be said on the matter.

The jeep dropped us off in the crowded bazaar of lower Dharamsala – there was still ten steep kilometres to climb to the hill station of McLeod Ganj at just below two thousand metres (a good five hundred metres higher than Ben Nevis, but still sat at midget-height by himalayan standards; this is only the foothills). The three new companions – the Delhi-ite, the Mancunian and I (a winning title for a buddy comedy movie) – sat by a fork in the road and waited for the bus, which came soon enough and took us upwards with no serious engine complaints.

And so, there I was – after forty eight hours of no sleep, intermittent sweat and non-stop fun, I had reached my destination: McLeod Ganj, former colonial administrative post and the present home of the fourteenth Dalai Lama, the Tibetan government in exile and a vast and growing settlement of Tibetan exiles.

The publisher-in-chief of Contact magazine, for whom I would be working for the next two months, had sorted out an apartment for me to rent. Sadly he was unable to tell me the address of said apartment in the many emails we exchanged. And so I arrived clueless. In a spike of initiative I headed to the nearest café with wireless internet – there’s a surprising amount of them here – and called Lobsang Rabsel, for that was his name. He arrived twenty minutes later and after the mandatory small-talk – how was your journey? (crap) how are you feeling? (crap) – he briefed me on the situation with Contact magazine: they once had a staff of five Tibetans, but they had all fled to greener pastures; now it was to be just Lobsang and I. Yes, two people, this writer included, are about to attempt a monthly community magazine. Watch this space for the mad-cap capers that will doubtless ensue.

After I’d finished breakfast he led me up a pot-holed track, Tipa Road, to the place I’d be sleeping in for the next couple of months. A family home, it turned out, lorded over by a stout old Tibetan lady who spoke no English, of which the top four rooms were rented out routinely. My room was much as I expected: ultra-simple, spartan even, with a hard bed, cupboard-like loo-cum-shower, a wooden cabinet sheltering framed photos of the Dalai Lama beside iconographic thangka paintings, and a dusty floor that quickly turned bare feet grey – but it opened onto a shared balcony with a sweeping view of the steep valley, where the odd tall building poked out from clusters of pine trees and a bird of prey soared puppet-like overhead. It was exactly what I wanted, and I couldn’t argue with the price – equivalent to ₤16 a week, which is frankly rather awesome, wouldn’t you agree?

But the lurking menace of the place showed its face quickly – monkeys, the damn monkeys. Large grey types, many of them mothers with small furry children dangling from their bellies. As I took my first piss into the ceramic toilet bowl, staking my claim on this virgin territory, one monkey made a stab at an opportunist theft: reaching stealthily through the monkey-proof window bars, he grabbed my wash bag by its handle and inched it along the windowsill towards him. I only just stopped pissing in time to scare the gangly fucker off. A close shave, and a lesson learnt: never leave stuff on windowsills. I sighed and took comfort from the himalayan view.

Well that’s all I can be arsed with for now. I have written a bloody essay and I thank you kindly for reading this far. This is my sixth day in McLeod Ganj and my days have been busy; I have a bounty of things to tell you about, really I do. I am having a wonderful time and I miss most of you at least some of the time. I look forward to updating you all on my doings and thoughts – at least once a week. My future blog posts will (probably) be briefer, pithier, have less bus and airplane stuff in them, and will contain a lot more swearing, cultural stereotypes and balls-to-the-wall action. Prepare yourselves.

Creature from the deep

Originally published in Himal Southasian, August '09

With Indo-Pak relations still reeling from the November Mumbai terrorist attacks, Pakistan has thrown a nervous fit over India’s launch of Southasia’s first nuclear-powered submarine on 26 July. The Pakistan foreign ministry immediately condemned it as a grave threat to regional peace and declared that ‘Pakistan will take appropriate steps to safeguard its security without entering an arms race.’ The strategic balance of Southasia – precarious at the best of times – has been decisively tipped.

Jitters have rebounded throughout Pakistan’s defense community. Captain Abid Majeed Butt of the Pakistan Navy said the submarine would ‘jeopardise the security paradigm of the entire Indian Ocean region,’ and suggested that a nuclear arms race was not unforeseeable. For this is India’s loudest display of military muscle since it tested its first ‘peaceful nuclear explosive’ in 1974. Capable of launching missiles at targets 700km away, the 6,000 tonne Arihant carries up to 100 soldiers and can stay underwater for long periods to evade detection – when India’s antiquated diesel-powered submarines need to resurface constantly to recharge their batteries.

India has made no official statements on the size of its nuclear arsenal; estimates indicate between 40 and 95 weapons – a kit that includes short and middle range ballistic missiles, nuclear-armed aircraft and surface ships. The Arihant adds a ‘third dimension’ to India’s defense capability; previously it could only launch ballistic missiles from the land and the air. India is only the sixth country to have built its own nuclear-powered submarine, after America, Russia, Britain, France, and China. Its military dominance in Southasia is now beyond dispute. India refused to sign the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, rejecting it as discriminatory; and its stubborn independence on defence matters – the last true survivor of the non-alignment ethos – has led to eager diplomatic courtship from America, much to the consternation of Pakistan.

On the Sunday launch, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh waved off criticisms that India had hawkish designs on anyone, and stressed the need for India to keep abreast of worldwide technological advancements – in all spheres, from agriculture to expensive weaponry. There is a clear shift evident in India’s defense priorities from land to sea, giving lie to the notion that the north east and the Kashmir Line of Control are the be and all and end all. And, despite Pakistan’s vexations, India considers the greatest potential threat to come from China, whose naval presence in the region has grown manifold in the last few years – and is busy dismantling India hegemony.