We are not amused

‘I just don’t care about the Royal wedding’ is the standard dinner party line of early 2011. Expressing a contemptuous, or at least weary, indifference towards the upcoming wedding of Prince William to his uni girlfriend Kate Middleton has become an article faith among enlightened British society. In neat conversational shorthand, the speaker establishes his or her liberal, cosmopolitan, freedom-loving credentials, lest it be doubted by their liberal, cosmopolitan, freedom-loving friends. Above all, it lays down the gaping intellectual chasm that separates them from the Daily Mail-reading ‘plebs’ who find meaning and emotional sustenance in the expensive marriage of a hereditary toff to a presumably vapid brunette.

At times like these, the liberal elite is given the chance to demonstrate its superiority over the ignorant, bigoted, unclean masses who rush out to buy Wills’n’Kate tea-towels – and they seize on it greedily. A similar rhetorical stunt is at work among those who, in the summer of 2010, declared their heroic lack of interest in the football World Cup, and among those who profess to be mystified by the appeal of Top Gear. They, you see, are not like ‘them’ down below on the social ladder; their thoughts are set on an altogether higher plane, and they would much sooner be practicing the piano or reading an Ian McEwen novel than poring over Hello photo-spreads of the newly engaged couple.

This pseudo-cheeky iconoclasm, itself a modern secular orthodoxy set against a make-believe Royalist consensus, is at play in the commentary pages of Britain’s broadsheet newspapers. ‘I’m afraid I just can’t get excited about the royal wedding but, unfortunately, if [the] media frenzy is anything to go by, it seems I am in the minority,’ writes journalist Molly Lynch. In the Guardian Tanya Gold pipes in, ‘I am going to be tried for saying this, but a Royal wedding will make idiots of us Brits.’ Quite who this embattled minority of far-sighted opinion-makers is going to be ‘tried’ by is not altogether clear. But never mind: the liberal commentariat could not care less about the big Royal do, and they are ever so keen for us to know this. They intend to ignore the coming wedding, and so write endless column inches on the necessity of ignoring it (the irony having blissfully escaped them).

Yet this trendy republicanism is not as embedded as one might think – something attested to by the formidable commercial and critical success of The King’s Speech, which was showered with gongs in the recent Bafta awards ceremony, and received favourable reviews in the very same papers that declared their noble disdain for the Royal wedding. This handsomely made film is so staunchly and persuasively monarchist, you’d be forgiven for expecting to discover Prince Philip among its executive producers. Not only is the shy, impenetrable historical figure of King George VI successfully ‘humanised’, but his role as a pillar of historical continuity and a repository of national sentiment, given a fresh lease with the advent of World War Two, is not left in doubt.

The film's defence of the Royal office is made partially through a simplified, although narratively satisfying, division between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Royals. Edward VIII, or ‘David’, as played by the Australian Guy Pearce, is a ‘bad’ Royal. His irresponsible playboy lifestyle, and churlish insistence on wedding the American divorcee harpy Wallace Simpson, precipitates his early abdication – a travesty of the kingly virtues of duty and self-sacrifice which George VI, or ‘Bertie’, as played by the ever-sympathetic Colin Firth, comes to embody as he masters his stammer and delivers a rousing speech to the nation on the eve of world war. Bertie is the very archetype of the ‘good’ Royal.

This good/bad distinction – analogous to the similarly vapid distinction between ‘good’ (moderate) and ‘bad’ (extreme) Islam insisted on in debates over multiculturalism – nonetheless neatly captures the schizophrenic attitude of the chattering classes towards the monarchy, the half-baked radicalism which can never quite rouse itself into a genuine political movement. Our Queen Elizabeth, for instance, is unanimously deemed a ‘good’ Royal, carrying out her ‘job’ as head of state with a dignity and sense of duty she is said to have inherited from her dad, the protagonist of The King’s Speech. Even the shoutiest republicans find it impossible to work up an appropriate rage about the dear old lady. How could anyone?

The Crown Prince Charles, however, generally sits on the ‘bad’ half of the divide. He is considered fair sport by journalists on both the left and right, who find bottomless good copy in his publicly vented opinions on modern architecture, environmentalism, and the evils of foie gras. Veteran political commentator Christopher Hitchens, for instance, known for his appetite for taking on the big issues – contemporary warfare, international diplomacy, God – threw himself into a baffling rage over ‘the prospect of a morose bat-eared and chinless man, prematurely aged, and with the most abysmal taste in royal consorts [becoming] head of state, head of the armed forces, and head of the Church of England.'

This contempt is shared by many in Britain today. The ascension of a ‘bad’ Royal to the head of the nation will likely overturn the British public’s affection and tolerance towards hereditary ‘rule’, bound up as all ceremonial posts are with personality. The sudden appearance of Charles’ ‘bat-eared and chinless’ visage on our pennies and five pound notes could prove the point where festering republican angst develops into an organized campaign with mass support.

The monarchy, politically impotent as it is, rests on the mercy of public opinion, and it is hard to see how it could withstand any kind of popular, coordinated opposition. With an elderly Queen, we might well be within the twilight years of the British monarchy. It’s abolition in the next decade cannot be ruled out, ushering in a slew of name changes among our public services and forces (the Royal Mail, the Royal Bank of Scotland, the Royal Air Force, to name but a few), and the installation of a presidency, or something like it. Remember, it’s happened before.

Reflections on the revolution in Egypt

I was in Egypt during the revolution. 23rd January till 4th February – just a couple of weeks spent seeing ancient temples, photographing mosques, traversing the Nile and eating kebabs: so we thought to ourselves before embarking on our early morning Easy Jet flight to Sharm-el-Shark-Attack.

We left Sharm with its teeming Russians immediately, arriving in Dahab that evening in order to see Mount Sinai (of Ten Commandment and Burning Bush fame) and St Katherine’s Monastery (the world’s oldest inhabited Christian monastery, thereby rather holy) the next day. Both were well worth the slog into the interior, especially the views from the Mount: the vast emptiness of the Sinai desert stretched out under beating sunlight. At the top we were met with a mean brick chapel, a teenage Bedouin flogging tea and tepid Coca Cola, and a tour group of middle aged Koreans conducting a Mass, their faces turned to the sunset, drinking in the UV light of Jesus. For our part, the climb earned us heaps of religious merit, which would serve us well for arrival in Cairo the next day, the 25th: National Police Day – coinciding, auspiciously enough, with Burns Night, that ebullient Scottish vigil to boiled offal.

‘Tahir Square, let’s go there,’ we told ourselves after depositing our bags in Amin Hotel – a multi-storey dive festooned with sawdust, cracked paint, and a lift poised on the grassy verge of death. First we had a round of Stella beer – an Egyptian brand, over a hundred years old; not the famous Belgian wife-disciplining nectar – in Hurrea, a thirties-era bar with a large open floor plan, decked with smudged mirrors and limp stationary fans. A piece of drunken theatre played itself out: a Russian traveller, from a group of three with a mess of half-drunken bottles on their table, stood up and began to chug on a 500ml Stella bottle, much to the delight of the chubby bearded waiter who cheered him on. Half of it coursed over the Russian’s beard, but the bottle was emptied. After slamming it on the table he teetered a moment, then crumpled sideways onto the sticky floor – out cold. A few slaps from his friends were enough to rouse him; he sat back down and re-commenced drinking. That, boys, is how it is done: the message was clear.

Refreshed, if a tad unnerved, we proceeded onwards to Tahir Square, the city’s heart-chamber, from which wide colonial roads radiate out into downtown Cairo. Large green-painted trucks filled the kerb-sides, and all along the pavements lolled riot police with helmets, shields and batons. Their numbers thickened as we reached the square – a staggering show of force, outnumbering the protesters which we now glimpsed in the centre, waving signboards and chanting feverishly. Much of them were of student age; word had it there was some grievance about rising tuition fees, of all things.

In unison they derided the elderly despot who for the last thirty years had presided over a military dictatorship in Egypt: Hosni Mubarak, who keeps his grey hairs at bay with liberal coatings of black hair dye, just as he was known to keep his political opponents down with energetic campaigns of violent intimidation, electoral fraud, and torture, among other displays of manly virility becoming of an Arab dictator in the tradition of the still-revered Gamal Abdel Nasser (who was known to suspend political prisoners upside-down and dip them in boiling excrement, which betrays a certain ingenuity and willingness to experiment). Inspired by the recent revolution in Tunisia, many were prepared to brave overnight stays in the police ‘special room’ in a concerted demonstration of popular will – unprecedented in a country where protests are illegal, owing to ‘emergency laws’ that have been in place ever since the assassination of the former president, Anwar El Sadat, in 1981.

The scene was an exciting one that first night in Cairo. Over the streets and squares hung a mood of collective purpose, and collective promise. The crowds in Tahir Square were awed at the force of their own numbers: the din they were capable of making, the gravitational pull they were exerting on thousands of their fellow Cairenes, and the unholy numbers of riot police that began to amass conspicuously around them. But violence was just as conspicuously absent (even if, in a fit of democratic exuberance, a stuffed effigy of Mubarak had been hung from a lamppost in the centre of the square).

The riot police for their part appeared relaxed, even bored, presiding over the protest like a patient mother keeping watch over the boisterous birthday party of her five year old son, to make sure no one gets hit with Lego. Many were nonchalantly tucking into crisp packets. Yet what struck me most was their youth; some looked scarcely over sixteen. There was a grim irony in witnessing these boy-police, drawn largely from the ranks of the urban poor, being ranged against a crowd whose centre was comprised of middle-class, well-educated student activists, presumably fighting in the former’s best interests. But such is the way with oversized, unwieldy governments in search of legitimacy – buying out the masses with schemes of mass employment in the civilian and military forces.

We soon left Tahir Square, for food and further bottles of cheap Egyptian beer. During our meal in a brightly lit ‘family’ restaurant, we were approached by a young Egyptian man in international student costume: grubby jeans, Converse trainers, and a t-shirt with writing on it. In graceful tones and immaculate English, he regaled us with the efforts of his comrades at the nearby protest, ‘fighting against the police because they oppress us’. And would we three Britishers like to join them in this noble cause, in a demonstration of international student solidarity? ‘If white people are present, the police won’t be violent; they don’t want a fuss,’ he claimed as the indispensible contribution we would make to this nascent revolution. We nodded a great deal and stated our enthusiasm and sympathy towards their cause. But we declined the opportunity to be human shields, doubting that the niceties of international diplomacy would be foremost in the minds of teenage riot police during a stampede. The young man thanked us for our time and returned to his table, there to talk with his friends about the moral cowardice of the imperialist races, or the motif of the voyeur in the films of David Lynch.

We returned to the protest to find it bigger and louder. The police had grown visibly edgy, and were no longer munching on multi-flavoured crisps. They had begun to restrict numbers entering the square, and officers with over-sized coats were strutting around shouting orders. Something was about to happen; we braced ourselves and readied our cameras, like the shallow tourists we were. Soon enough trails of smoke fell in smooth arcs over the crowd; their ranks collapsed immediately, and protesters ran screaming and flailing into the outer streets. A tear-gas barrage was underway. The square was now a swirling, foggy chaos. Suddenly a line of riot police surged into the square, in a stampede to oust those that remained. Frightened protesters continued to pour past us as we stood on the square’s edge, pondering our proximity to numerous guttering tear-gas shells.

The boy-police had reclaimed Tahir Square, but the protesters regrouped and began to march the wide pavements of central Cairo, chanting anti-Mubarak slogans and waving whatever signboards remained legible. They still had the rest of the city to play with. The police fell into phalanx formations, in the manner of ancient Pharaonic warriors, and began stamping and chanting and heaving – a psychological training exercise, it appeared, aimed at bracing themselves for violence and intimidating others, which immediately brought to mind the fearsome ‘haka’ dance performed by the New Zealand All Blacks before rugby games. But thankfully they refrained from going all Spartan on the protestors with their batons and shields, and instead fell to blocking off certain roads. With remarkable composure they faced down the jeering and gesticulating of protestors who brushed up against them. (The police weren’t quite the ‘violent brutes’ described in Western broadsheet news stories.) We witnessed one elderly man with a white moustache and grey suit, shrieking heated invective and flapping his arms at a line of riot police hiding meekly behind their shields. He was clearly having the time of his life.

We retired eventually to our dingy room with its leaking tap, and stationed ourselves on the balcony with glasses of the gin we had bought on the Easy Jet flight (ten quid for a litre; back of the net) mixed with Sprite. A thick line of protesters continued to coil itself around the main arteries of downtown, and lines of riot police stood in ghostly, watchful lines across junctions and roads, keeping their silent vigil well into the night. Cairo wouldn’t burn just yet, so we took to sleep.

Over the following two days we remained in Cairo, and saw the sights untroubled: the exquisite mosques and madrassas of Islamic Cairo, dizzyingly plentiful in what was once known as ‘the city of a thousand minarets’; the Pyramids and Sphinx at Giza, an obscure collection of monuments you probably haven’t heard of; and the churches of the Coptic quarter, the oldest existing part of Cairo – a testament to Egypt’s pre-Islamic Christian heritage and sizeable Christian minority (between fifteen and twenty percent at present), which in recent months has come under attack from Islamic terrorism, in a spate of bomb attacks on Christian sites (a reminder to any of those well-meaning commentators who insist that Islamist groups are ‘not a problem’ in Egypt but merely a ‘convenient distraction’ for anti-democrats).

In the evenings the crowds re-gathered in Tahir Square, and the shouting and signboard-waving continued afresh. The only disruption caused was the closure of Tahir’s metro station; otherwise Cairo continued as normal: shops stayed open, the traffic remained dreadful, and old men still sat in shisha bars grumbling to each other. We left on Thursday evening, the 27th, taking an overnight bus ride to Luxor in Upper (southern) Egypt, which proved a bitter trial indeed. A posse of Egyptian ‘lads’ played hideous Arab pop music from their 3G phones – much as a tracksuited chav would on a British train – while an over-head TV with burnt-out speakers beamed out primary-colour Egyptian TV programmes throughout the night.

Despite the dire rigours of the journey, we had left Cairo at a good time. According to a know-it-all American student we met in the same Hurrea bar, ‘the shit’s really going down on Friday; people are pouring into Cairo from elsewhere; the activists are planning something huge.’ The smart-arse yank proved correct. From Luxor we caught snatches of Arabic news reports on TVs in cafes, in which footage of tanks patrolling the streets of Cairo neatly summarised the breakdown of police discipline and the handover to the army. We heard that thousands of tourists were mobbing Cairo airport, trying to leave the country. This was sobering news to hear just five days into a two week trip, but there was no question of our forsaking our travels. Besides, we felt relatively safe in Upper Egypt. There were only small-scale protests in Luxor and Aswan: mostly a bit of shouting and signboard-waving in central locations, although we did witness another tear-gas barrage and a spot of arson in Luxor. Civilisation as we knew it appeared to have the upper hand.

The real problem turned out to be, not the protests themselves, but the repressive response of the (clearly terrified) Egyptian government. On Friday the 28th, the internet was shut down, and remained so until the penultimate day of our trip. It was hard to know precisely what was going on; all we had to go by were occasional glimpses of news reports in Arabic, and rather over-heated predictions from friendly Egyptians we met: for instance that, ‘tomorrow we will be free and everything will be okay, promise’ – heard repeatedly throughout the trip from various different people. We had little idea that Egypt was front page news around the world for the duration of our time there.

What was worse, all banks were closed from the 30th, after a bank was looted in central Cairo. The mist of panic descended: we had run out of money, we had no means of getting any more, and we very far away indeed from Sharm-el-Sheikh, our point of departure. We were saved only by the apparition of a Barclays ATM in Aswan, the first we’d seen in Egypt (the government couldn’t close down international banking outlets, of which there were precious few). A bloody good thing we had climbed Mount Sinai and communed with the Bush in the monastery, then.

The train network was shut down soon after the banks, to prevent futher protesters travelling to Cairo or other major cities. We had planned originally to travel from Aswan to Alexandria by train, and then onto Sinai for our flight home – but that proved impossible. After much pacing about and Hamlet-like soliloquies about the cruel hand fate had dealt us, we decided with the grimmest reluctance to try for the bus from Luxor – which we returned to, by bus, after our three days in Aswan, witnessing a couple of burning police stations on the way – all the way to Sharm-el-Sheikh.

We had heard of such a bus – which took a truly gross journey of some 1,500 kilometres, from the Nile Valley up the Red Sea coast till Suez and down through Sinai – but we were sceptical of its existence; surely it was just a figment of some backpacker’s lurid nightmare? But it proved to be all too real, and made the ten hour ride from Cairo to Luxor seem like a wistful Sunday ramble in Kensington Gardens. The Luxor-Sharm journey would normally have taken 16 hours. What with the relentless military check points, where AK-47-sporting soldiers stepped on board and demanded to see our passports and sometimes the contents of our luggage, it took 21 hours. This, for us, was the greatest hurt the Egyptian ‘emergency’ inflicted on our trip. I still haven’t fully recovered. Occasionally I wake up in a cold sweat with the ghost of an Egyptian service station before my eyes.

We took our scheduled flight back to London, surrounded by half the rabble of Moscow. We reflected that, aside from Alexandria and a second visit to Cairo on the way back to Sinai, we had done pretty much everything we had intended to do. We had seen Mount Sinai, Islamic Cairo, the Pyramids at Giza, Karnak, the Valley of the Kings and the Theban Necropolis, Philae, a good length of stunning Nile scenery, and more besides. Furthermore, we had demolished about eighty pints of Egyptian Stella and a litre of Gordon’s Gin; not at all bad in a predominantly Muslim country. And, if anything, the ‘emergency’ added an extra level of excitement and interest to our trip. We had many fascinating conversations with Egyptians, who were keen to communicate their frustration with the 30-year-old ruling regime, and some not-so-enlightening but still enjoyable instances when random men (it was invariably men) pulled us aside and bellowed ‘Mubarak no!’, lest we should think fondly of the dear old man. We left Egypt content that we had witnessed a turning point in world history.

The God Hypothesis

The Saint, St Andrews

It was while jostling for a drink in the Union bar last week – amongst impeccably well mannered, considerate, sober first years out for a quiet drink – that a question struck me, seemingly from above, like a neat, grey-white globule of pigeon poo: Does God actually exist?

The question has occurred to me a few times before, quietly yet urgently – while approaching the Tesco self-service check-out with a basket full of processed meat; while sifting through the many intricate layers of WebCT (now mournfully departed) for a buried file of lecture notes; while defecating voluptuously in a Cambodian bus station during my gap year; while in Dundee. God, the Almighty, Our Lord, Our Father – is he perched up there, on his cloud, watching over our student ‘banter’, nodding and frowning accordingly? (And he is most certainly a ‘he’, with a big manly beard; his ethnicity is disputed, although it’s safe to assume he isn’t Siberian – I mean, obviously.)

I hazard I am not alone in confronting this deep, deep question while passing a polite evening in our lavishly maintained and amiably populated Union bar. It compliments so well the other pertinent questions that fall on one in those tasteful environs. For instance, how many venereal treats lurk within that second-year medic over by the drinking-fountain? Or, must I really put myself through the Friday Bop again? Or – especially while being repeatedly elbowed by effortlessly stylish ‘lads’ wearing white trainers in front of the bar – what’s so great about people anyway? Ultimately, these questions mesh together, creating a mutually supportive web of doubt or belief, depending on your own degree of faith. To successfully answer one question is to illuminate, at least, another. Such is our task as conscionable students, in pursuit of truth and other splendid, delightful things.

Yet, certainty is a fickle tart at the best of times. You just can’t nail it, however firm you try to be. The further you chase the little strumpet, the further she recedes – the more you know, the more you discover you don’t know. Philosophers like to call it ‘letting the sceptic out of the box’. I like to call it a waste of time. It is best, ultimately, to accept that some questions must remain unanswerable, that mystery has an inviolable and enduring role to play in the Human Comedy – or Human Bop, if you will. You may never know why you keep ordering Tennents at the Union bar, knowing you will loathe every chemically-tinged dreg of it. Or, for that matter, why you ever went to the Bop a second time.

As with God, there is only so much light that rational enquiry can shed on the matter. We must embrace doubt, confusion, self-loathing, inebriation – these are peculiarly human things, and make us different from, say, badgers or aphids or monitor lizards, all of whom could scarcely organise a Friday Bop if they tried. So, if you ever find yourself vomiting into a Union loo-bowl of a Friday night, bereft and friendless and with your mobile phone stolen, you can comfort yourself with that. I know I do.

An anecdote will serve to drive the point home. A few nights ago I witnessed an argument between two friends – whom I considered, out of decency, not naming; but whom, on second thoughts, I decided to name anyway: John Palmer and Jonathon Deakin (lads). They were bickering fiercely over their preferred J.K. Rowling novel, as students are known to do. ‘THE CHAMBER OF GODDAM SECRETS,’ said John Palmer, slamming his almost-empty pint onto the worn polished surface of their table in the Central. ‘LIKE HELL IT IS,’ said Jonathon Deakin, in the lively manner for which he is famous, spilling little streams of London Pride as he did so. ‘IT IS SO TOTALLY THE HALF BLOOD PRINCE.’ And so they went on, neither budging from their favoured magical adventure. It was bruising to watch, especially considering that the best Harry Potter novel is, obviously, The Prisoner of Azkaban.

Yet perhaps, ultimately, such things are unknowable; maybe the best of them is, in fact, The Goblet of Fire – who knows, alas. Who knows. In any case, Harry Potter examples and references generally help to illuminate any problem, and should be used whenever and wherever possible. This, beyond anything else I may have said, is my sovereign piece of advice for young people in Britain today.

So, that’s it. I hope I have imparted something of liturgical weight and scriptural resonance. I hope you have looked deep inside yourself and discovered a yawning spiritual vacuum. I hope you have reconciled your opposites. I hope you have a nice day. You deserve it.

Grasmere anecdote

By Caroline Hughes-Dunant

Below is merely a copy-and-paste entry taken from an email my mother sent to me, in which she recounted an anecdote from a recent trip to the Lake District; specifically, a visit to Dove Cottage, the erstwhile home of the romantic poet William Wordsworth on the edge of Grasmere village. I believed it deserved some kind of airing; it speaks so eloquently of the human comedy and English heritage coffee-house culture, among other things simple and profound.

I’m in the Dove Cottage cafe, having a coffee and a bun, sitting by a window and minding my own business. The place isn’t busy. In fact, I’m the only person. All the hordes, including half of Japan, are down in Grasmere village buying fancy Gore-Tex ‘strenuous weather’ gear and shiny walking poles. I notice, because I’m by the window, a car roar into the car park and skid to a stop. Not normal. Poet fanciers usually come in rather quietly. A big, bluff man jumps out and slams the car door and stands, the embodiment of impatience. A small but round woman gets slowly out of the passenger side and clicks her door closed. He says something to her, she almost visibly flinches. He stalks off, in the direction of Dove cottage and the museum. She follows.

A few minutes later, certainly not time to do either the cottage or the museum, unless at a fast run, the cafe door bangs open and in walks the (at odds) couple. He looked apoplectic, she terrified, but sullen, defiant, like she had decided to make a stand about something and accept the probably terrible consequences. His furious eye alighted on me. There was no one else. He approached, and then began the most extraordinary rant. It’s fixed in the mind. I can still hear him. Broad Yorkshire.

He barked a question. “Missus, you been round cottage?” I had. “What’s it like?” I told him. Small – he cut me short. “Yeh, small, in’t it? Hardly big enough to piss in, but didn’t do that in them days. In’t shed, or garden, out back. Aye, small. That’s what I told her. The wife. Only small. But the wife,” he jabbed a finger at the woman, “won’t go in. I drive 200 mile and stay in fancy bloomin’ hotel, all that coffee in’t lounge nonsense and getting tarted up for over priced nosh and some bloody poof warblin’ over tinny speakers. You know, going round and round, same song till screamin’. That in’t poetry for sure. But that’s what she wants and I give it to her! But I want to go round cottage and she won’t. Don’t know poetry she says. Don’t understand it. Don’t matter, I say. Just words and feelings put in’t good order. Better than we can do. That’s it, in’t it?”

He didn’t wait for affirmation. “And cottage only small in’t it? Won’t take long, will it? Don’t need to bloody understand poetry neither. Don’t know whether I do, but I like it. Other one. What’s he called?” Other one ... he did want an answer now and was impatient for it. “You know, died young. Some rubbish film about him.” Ah ... “Keats” I offer. “That’s the one! Wrote poem about pot.” (That’s what Yorkshire said. He really did.) “Grecian Urn” I offer. “Yeh, pot. Don’t matter if Turkish or Swahili, if you can slap words together about pot that people the world over for a hundred year n’ more thinks is beautiful, you’re good. You’re very good. Not goin’ to manage that now, are we? No poetry in’t bloody internet, is there? Not real stuff. Not goin’ to last any road.”

With that, he turned back to the wife. “Do as you like. I’m going round cottage.” He left. She sat down at a table the other end of the cafe from me and ordered whatever she did. I had to leave soon after. I scribbled it down immediately I got back in the car. Couldn’t make that up. I think ‘Yorkshire’, in his bluff, bullying way, uttered some truths.

Bad citizens

Sunday Times, Sri Lanka

‘Is this art or bullshit?’ begins Asgar Hussein’s short story collection, The Mirror of Paradise, in ‘A Tale of Two Artists’, a satire on the pretensions of the Colombo art scene. The reader may well ask the same question of Asgar’s writing – is this art or bullshit? While there are elements of both in these thirteen stories, the truth is ultimately neither.

Asgar doesn’t demand of his readers the sort of lofty, sophisticated appraisal, feigned or otherwise, that the abstract painter Shantha from the opening story does from his viewers, with his portentously titled abstract canvases (‘Finite Evolution’, ‘Angst of the soul’). Despite the book’s title, from which you might expect a grim, social-realist dirge on Sri Lankan underclass life – a ‘mirror’ to the sandy beach, swaying palm tree ‘paradise’ promised by tourist brochures (get it?) – Asgar offers up a series of comic fables that gently satirise the anxieties and absurdities of Sri Lankan, largely middle class, life.

A dull accountant frets over the noise of cricket-playing boys, which threatens the calm of his respectable neighbourhood; a man who has spent his working life in England returns to Colombo to relive his carefree schooldays, only to have his nostalgia checked by the presence of an old nemesis; two students play at being prospective husbands and assume false, worthier identities in order to fool rich Kandyan families into lavishly entertaining them for their daughters.

But they aren’t all tales of well-to-do urbanites: tucked in among them are rustic, ‘village’ pieces, where the petty worries of their city counterparts are mirrored in the superstitions of the simple country folk that populate stories like ‘Grease Yaka’, where the fishing community of Makaragoda make increasingly farcical attempts to slay a black furry demon they believe keeps groping their women.

However, set against the ‘city’ stories, these tales of simple, credulous peasants, which take the form of traditional folk tales, can’t help but look condescending. They perhaps betray the writer’s own decidedly urban upbringing in Kandy, and his view of the countryside as someplace ‘other’ – a view no doubt shared by the city-dwelling characters he mocks so expertly elsewhere. Although charming and inventive as individual stories, the ‘village’ pieces together appear as contrived attempts to balance the affluent urban scenario that marks the rest of the book – something Asgar needn’t do.

The blurb on the back cover describes the stories as ‘a satire on human nature […] linked by a comic view of human existence […] intriguing and often outrageously funny.’ Although the better comic set-pieces will make any reader smile, especially those familiar with the insularity and aspirational fervour of Sri Lankan middle class life, it is at no point ‘outrageously funny’.

Asgar is often brutal to his protagonists – who, remaining largely likeable despite their comic foibles, are alternately beaten up, cheated out of millions, wrongly imprisoned and even driven to death. But their fates read more like cautionary tales, with all the cosiness and moral certainty that this implies, than black comedies – a genre which requires a certain trampling over taboos and a consequent discomfort in the reader. Indeed this could be just the sort of cheery, inoffensive poolside reading that tourists indulge in on their two-week visits to ‘paradise’.

Assuming the classical Greek comedy formula, each of the stories’ tragic-comic heroes has a blind spot that hampers their relations with others; in the case of Bandula in ‘A Man of Strong Opinions’, an overly zealous objection to both mosquitoes and politicians, which causes him to offend and alienate others at parties. This ultimately leads them, despite obvious warnings and omens to change their ways, to whatever calamity Asgar has in store for them – and so lessons are learnt and the greater cohesion of the community is validated.

Sometimes Asgar eschews these comeuppances and ends his stories with punchline gags – often scatological, and in one case involving urine – in a last ditch attempt to be ‘outrageously funny’. If they were bolder and wittier, the reader might excuse the shamelessly contrived and arbitrary manner in which these gags are brought about, and their failure to properly conclude the narratives. As such they come off as botched writerly tricks.

Yet, despite the breezy tone of Asgar’s prose – itself a model of good, plain writing that makes the whole thing wonderfully readable – the dark portents of the book’s title aren’t completely unwarranted. Although his characters for the most part enjoy great material comfort – spacious bungalows with fish tanks in smart districts of Colombo predominate – the bourgeois world that Asgar portrays is one crumbling under the heaped-up weight of envy, suspicion and avarice, and whose barricades against the uncertainty and chaos of the ‘real’ Sri Lanka prove thin. A wedding between a Sri Lankan Muslim man and a Dutch ‘Burgher’ woman is ruined due to their respective families’ fussy insistence on differing notions of ‘correct’ wedding conduct, and a drinking session among male friends descends from an exchange of work-related woes into insults and violence.

This is the true achievement of The Mirror of Paradise. What it lacks in belly laughs and black comic shudders, it makes up with a well-observed, subtle, yet fond parody of a society that fails to live up to its own prudish morals – and which constantly needs saving from itself.

The answer begins in art

Sunday Times, Sri Lanka

For four days only – 28th till 31st August (10am-7pm) – the Lionel Wendt Gallery and the Harold Pieris Gallery are hosting an exhibition that aims to distil the artistic response to 26 years of civil war from across Sri Lanka’s social spectrum. The plainly titled Visual Responses During the War: Selected Works of Artists features painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, photography and video from 22 artists who together represent the island in miniature. Tamil artists Kiko, T. Shanathanan, G. R. Constantine, Vaidehi Rajasingam and Kamala Vasuki are exhibited alongside Sinhalese artists such as Jagath Weerasinghe and Muslims such as Muhanned Cader. Together they conjure a shared experience of conflict and suffering, and warn against the toxins of ethnic and religious chauvinism.

Chandradguptha Thenuwara, the curator of the exhibition, and a painter whose work also features on its walls, described to the Sunday Times the process of introspection and re-evaluation that the war forced upon Sri Lankan artists – something like a call to artistic responsibility, he recounted. Conventional notions of beauty and traditional methods of representation, such as the flat painted rectangle, were no longer felt to be sufficient in communicating the contradictions and cruelties of a society in perpetual war. A new artistic language had to emerge, with new formats and mediums of expression, to surprise viewers and shock them into a full consciousness of their present condition, and – most importantly – of how the division and mutual hatred had come to pass. ‘We were seeing things,’ Thenuwara said, ‘but we were not looking.’

Thenuwara went on to describe the delayed response of Sri Lankan artists to the transformed realities of war. Although the civil war is commonly said to have begun in 1983, with the Tamil pogroms, it was not until the early nineties that the ‘new’ art began to appear, grappling with the conflict head-on. Indeed, there is nothing in the exhibition that predates the nineties. New formats took precedence, such as multi-media installations, sculpture-painting hybrids, and video and digital art. Traditional Sri Lankan motifs were reworked; for instance, the exhibition contains a painting by Kiko of what at first appears to be a conventional image of Ganesh – only, on closer inspection, the elephant god is revealed to have striped tiger skin and to be wielding axes from multiple arms, expressing Kiko’s disquiet that her Tamil Hindu identity was being hijacked and distorted by Tamil militant groups for their own violent cause.

Of course, despite the growing conflict, the early nineties was also the era that conceptual, installation art became a big seller on the international art market – something that gained particular fame and notoriety with the Brit Art movement characterized by Damien Hurst and Tracey Emin – and its flowering in Sri Lanka at the time can perhaps be attributed as much to this as to the changed social realities of ethnic conflict. Yet there can be no doubt that it captured the shared suffering of civil war in a unique and often haunting way.

The exhibition contains an innovative piece of ‘book art’ from Kingsley Gunatillake: on an existing book that surveys the ‘culture’ of Sri Lanka, Kingsley has scrawled in pen the wording of the 1972 constitution, a resonate legal gesture that embodied the hope at the time for an end to Tamil grievances with an equitable settlement of rights – only, on either side of the open book, the respective armies of the government and the LTTE have burst through the pages in toy soldier form, firing at each other across the book’s spine. The violence committed against the cultural fabric of Sri Lanka is hinted at in the book’s ruptured pages, but the position of the two miniature sculptural armies on either side of the same book affirms the essential unity of the island, and the absurdity of the war itself.

The exhibition also sees the return of Anoma Rajakaruna’s multi-media installation, Quest, first exhibited in Colombo’s National Art Gallery in 2006 and exhibited here in a paired-down format. Anoma, who confesses to beginning her projects with no clear idea of their outcome, travelled with a collection of white paper doves from Jaffna to Matara to Colombo in the immediate aftermath of the 2002 ceasefire agreement, which at the time signalled a pause for rehabilitation and, crucially, reflection on the harm and suffering committed and felt on both sides. Shocked by the devastation she saw, she begun taking photographs which she later manipulated on a computer. The project evolved, however, when she began documenting, in a similar fashion, the aftermath of the 2004 Tsunami, which in a single day killed 30,000, half the number of those killed in two whole decades of civil war. This added dimension underlined, she felt, the message of her work: the common experience of suffering as a universal evil, which begs nothing less than a universal response to alleviate.

Quest took the eventual form of a series of digital images set alongside a selection of quotations from authors, philosophers, politicians and ordinary Sri Lankans, with a dialogue to be drawn between them. The images and quotations were also synthesised in a 36 minute film projected on three different screens in one room of the gallery, each in one of the three principal languages of Sri Lanka: Sinhala, Tamil and English. Visual Responses to the War will display only the English version, which, as the Sunday Times can enthusiastically attest to, retains the original work’s hypnotic visual spell and urgent message of peace and moral regeneration. ‘How do we build up from these ashes of devastation…how do we get to peace from here?’ the artists asks. ‘For me, the answer begins in art.’

Plain tales from the hills

Five weeks had passed in McLeod Ganj. It was beginning to show. All the signs were in place: I had begun retching at the sight of beaded necklaces and foaming at the lips at the sound of bongo jam sessions (I’m not joking, they happen). Although I have been known to enjoy its stranger aspects, I had grown weary of the traveller scene, of which McLeod Ganj is a regional capital, with its endless procession of ‘laid back’ budget traveller ‘hangouts’ – by which I mean bizarre Western-Indian hybrid restaurants or cafes piping out soothing ethnic music, with hippies wrapped up in shawls stationed in their dark corners dozing or, worse, making loud conversation with other hippies about whatever they happen to be ‘thinking’ of that day. ‘You know, the thing I’ve found about India is…. (insert nauseating cod-profundity here).’

I hope I have painted a suitably lurid picture – because it is lurid (trust me), and quite enough to chill the blood of any sensible Englishman, for whom enlightenment is an altogether distasteful project and yoga an inoffensive form of physical exercise, nothing more. When you start moaning about ‘bloody white people’ you know its time to move on to somewhere a little less trodden over. And so I took the bus to Chamba, a town in north-western Himachal Pradesh – to accept the wholesome sandwich of destiny that fate would serve me.

It was a change to another extreme: I must have been the only ‘bloody white person’ in a hundred mile radius. Only bloody Indians – friendly, expansive Indians, I must add. Living in such a cosmopolitan country as England (less so Scotland, but still), it can come as a surprise just how racially uniform much of the rest of the world is. Despite the monolithic north-south/Aryan-Dravidian divide, a small and dwindling population of Chinese in Calcutta, and the notable exception of the heavily tribal areas of Chhattisgarh, Orissa, and the North-Eastern states (Mizoram, Manipur, Nagaland and so on), India is a strikingly mono-ethnic nation. Even metropolitan centres like Delhi and Bombay are completely free of the ethnic ghetto-isation that characterise cities in the West; there is nothing akin to the Latino or Russian ‘quarters’ you’d find in New York, or the Thai restaurants run by immigrant Thais you’d find in London. Just a hell of a lot of Indians – 1.2 billion of them, last I saw. An Indian equivalent of the BNP wouldn’t know where to start – there simply aren’t enough foreigners to blame stuff on (although Muslims too often constitute the other in Indian society, as BJP rhetoric has been known to attest to).

It is one of the most striking imbalances between first and third world nations, a cosmopolitan drain from the south to the global north. Perhaps the see-saw will tip the other way, with the decline of Euro-America and the rise of Chindia, as the dual (if uneven) rise of the two nations has been crassly labelled. Imagine: the British, a beleaguered minority in India, descendants of economic migrants, populating the more deprived sectors of Delhi and Bombay – not inconceivable. Britain has certainly become a less appetising place in which to forge one’s career/fortune, and even America has lost something of its promised-land allure. There are certainly far fewer Indians seeking a fresh start for themselves and their families in Britain. Why would they want to go there? Far better to move to Bombay and live in one of its festering slums, waiting for the breaks that land for the lucky few.

I had arrived in Chamba right smack in the middle of the annual harvest festival: something of a park fair held on a football pitch, complete with ferris wheels, candyfloss vendors, promotional stalls, a stage hosting god-awful Hindi pop music performances (which extended far into the night, cutting into my precious sleep) and no discernable reference to agriculture. It proved a mixed blessing for me. Although I got to witness a bizarre and slightly grotesque parody of English fairground culture, which is always fun, finding a room for the night was a prolonged, harrowing nightmare. I eventually found somewhere, at double this price it should have been, and went off to see Chamba’s historic and rather beautiful temples, which relieved an otherwise rather dull, workaday provincial town.

I headed to Bharmour the next morning. My guidebook described the road there as a ‘perilous track prone to frequent landslides.’ No understatement; it was one of the most terrifying three and a half hours of my life. I’d almost sooner sit through David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button again. Wait, actually, no; I’d rather fancy my chances with tumbling boulders. Anyhow, I arrived at around lunch time, safe and thankful, without having faced any serious challenges to my mortality. The entrance to the small town was framed by a multi-coloured, fairy-cake archway of lurid pinks and blues, with the gods Hanuman and Ganesh stood in giant relief on either pillar – the cheery sentinels of Bharmour.

Many complain about the creeping Punjabi-isation of Himachal Pradesh. Punjabis, I must add, with their allegedly course speech and manners and brash displays of wealth – theirs is the richest state in the country – are subjected in India to the similar sort of snobbery the British reserve for the ‘done-good’ Essex man. Delhi, for instance, is often said to have been ‘invaded by the Punjab’, and it is true that Punjabi immigrants make up much of Delhi’s new entrepreneurial class. Bharmour, however, remains the stoutly traditional home of the Gaddi Rajputs – a pastoral, goat-grazing people with their own language and idiosyncratic store of Hindu folklore, and one of the indigenous peoples of the Indian Himalaya.

I once had a rather bizarre conversation – more of lecture, as I noted half an hour into it – with a Gaddi travel agent in McLeod Ganj. The man launched into a mournful paean to his (apparently) dwindling people, and the ignominy they had suffered under the incursions of mainstream Indian society, with its aberrant plans for the ‘modernisation’ of their ancestral lands. He went on and on, as I sat there nodding, claiming the Gaddi to be the original guardians of India’s natural inheritance, who still considered the Aryans (the stock from which North Indians generally derive their ancestry) to be foreign intruders who continue to misuse and exploit their land.

It was the stuff of a tear-jerking Bollywood historical epic – The Last of the Gaddis, in which evil pot-bellied developers start crapping all over the sacred wood, until a young hero (whose parents are savagely killed by a JCB in the opening frames) takes up the family bow-and-arrow, unused since the days of his great grandfather, and begins the fight for his people. A few song-and-dance numbers may need to thrown in, a crafty Pakistani would need to rear his head at some point, and large-breasted women in wet saris might need to gyrate inexplicably around the hero for a bit – but that should be enough to secure some Bombay mafia funding.

Bharmour itself had a collection of exquisite ancient Shiva temples arranged around a paved square at the heart of town, which also served as school yard where smartly dressed children ran around hitting each other. That was about it – so I headed out of town onto the hillside that rose steeply above Bharmour, with the purpose of stumbling awkwardly into the traditional Gaddi villages that dotted the area. This I did with zest.

The peasant locals didn’t know what hit them; as with Chamba, I was the only foreigner around. Kids spotted me from a while off, peering through their wooden window frames, and began jumping up and down, unable to contain their excitement at the approach of a sweaty white man in a Tintin in Tibet t-shirt (a bit of McLeod Ganj chic there). Old men in grimed waistcoats, hunched over their walking sticks, stared at me with a mixture of suspicion and dry amusement – some ventured to ask the question I have lobbed at me several times a day in South Asia: ‘what is your country?’ (Often suffixed with ‘sir’ or ‘friend’, and sometimes extended into an elaborate interrogation session, in which my name, my age, my marital status and my father’s job is teased from me with steely determination.) The women, normally a diminutive bunch in India, looked up from their weaving or dusting or clothes-thrashing to grin warmly at me. Even the livestock appeared interested, albeit a little disturbed.

I have yet to receive this sort of treatment in a British country village – although I would certainly welcome it. What with the industrial revolution, we no longer have any proper peasants to speak of (except maybe in Wales, but that’s just Wales, and they’re welcome to them). Shame. I want our peasants back.

I made my way upwards through the roughly paved streets of a Gaddi village. The houses were handsome, crumbling rectangles supported by finely carved wooden beams and sheltered with layerings of slate tiles. They followed a simple rustic formula: humans on the overhanging first floor, cows and chickens on the cracked stone courtyard beneath, with a warped wooden ladder connecting the two. Children with healthy layers of dirt on their faces teased the cows as they munched thoughtfully on dry grass and shat elegantly onto the paving stones. Women with patterned headscarves returned from the fields at sunfall with wicker baskets of freshly scythed crop on their backs. Elderly patriarchs sat smoking pipes, framed in their door lintels. It was precisely this sort of bucolic rural Arcadia, belying a hardy lifestyle, which drew me to this remote corner of Himachal Pradesh. I am an unrepentant Orientalist. Edward Said can turn in his grave as he pleases – like a spit roast, for all I care. (Yeah, take that outdated university humanity syllabuses; I am so over you).

On my way back to Bharmour, with the light of the day dimming fast, I stumbled quite literally into a Gaddi wedding. I found it in one of the many preliminary stages of the Indian marriage process, in which the groom and his family visit the bride’s family home and are subjected to a variety of interminable rituals, where Sanskrit is mumbled by a dour-faced Brahmin and an array of sparkly things are thrown everywhere. (They do like their sparkly things, Indians.) The bride’s house was a pearl-white, heavily pillared, mock-Palladian monstrosity, of the sort that South Asian villagers often have built on arriving into big money, having first demolished their beautiful ancestral homes and sold off their carved wooden window frames. A sort of rural Indian bling, I suppose, and a sure sign of status in the community.

A young man dressed in a Western suit – the rest wore pyjamas and turbans – caught my eye and ushered me into the throng of guests in the courtyard. I found myself a patch of ground and squatted awkwardly, as a vast and sickly bounty of sweets was shoved in my face. In the corner was perched a group of elderly village ladies, who sang hypnotic, melancholy folk songs in the Gaddi language – so the young suited man informed me, as he kept up a running commentary on the proceedings. A brother of the groom, he now lived in Ludhiana, a large industrial city in the Punjab, and was training in the hospitality industry. ‘An area of growth,’ he stated proudly, going to on to suggest plans of moving abroad. When I announced my exit, he escorted me out of the house, and fought off a mentally challenged villager who lunged at me on the footpath outside.

The following evening I was taking a stroll down the hillside, to investigate another Gaddi village a little below Bharmour. It was around half six, and the sky was just beginning to darken. The perfect time of day for walking – pleasantly cool, with everything under a soft, golden light. Having a good look around the village, I continued further down the hillside. As I made my way along a narrow dirt path that bordered a stream, I encountered a middle-aged Gaddi man shepherding two cows back to the village. He had a curved black moustache and a red pillar-box hat with a feather tucked into the front.

On seeing me he started, and began waving furiously with gestures that spoke: ‘get the fuck back to the village – right now, idiot.’ He repeatedly shouted ‘balu! balu!’ – which translates as ‘bear’, as Jungle Book enthusiasts can easily attest to – and made scratching motions across his face. It became clear that vicious bears roamed the wooded hillside at dusk; it was a dangerously stupid time of day to be taking a ramble. Not doubting his authority on the local wildlife and its capacity for violence, I followed him back to the village, where he showed me his orchard and harangued me into taking four of his reddest, ripest apples. He then escorted me to his house, introduced me to his wife, offered tea, and even implored me to stay for the night. Reeling at this onslaught of Gaddi hospitality, I made my excuses and hurried back to Bharmour before the sun fell.

The bus ride back to Chamba began at 6.30 am after my second night in Bharmour, with very few passengers on board – in India, to think! The rusted vehicle started to trundle, with much deafening clanking and thundering, down the narrow mountain path. The ash-white mist that had gathered in the night thinned as the sun rose higher. An hour into it the bus was waved down by a group of men stood in the middle of the road. A landslide had happened – I wasn’t to miss out after all; joy – and we joined a queue of stationary vehicles, waiting for a double-team of JCBs to push a considerable heap of boulders into the valley bellow. It took them only around half an hour – excellent machines, JCBs – and we were on our way again, with no further rock-related fun to enliven our journey.

At Chamba I changed buses and continued onto Dalhousie, one of those former British administrative hillstations, like Shimla and Mussoorie and Darjeeling, replete with mock-Tudor houses, Anglican churches, elite boarding schools and elderly Indian men with handlebar moustaches and stripy woollen pullovers. Like McLeod Ganj, it was named after another of the infinite Scotsmen who administered the Raj. The scene was set by the Dalhousie Club (est. 1895) near the bus stand, a venerable colonial institution with a wood-panelled interior decorated with hunting trophies and framed black-and-white photographs of sunburnt Britishers in shorts and pith helmets. The monsoon had reduced the badminton court outside to a sad swamp, and it was clear that the place had seen finer decades. There being a number of barracks stationed a little below Dalhousie – the town was founded as a military garrison – the Club membership now consists largely of pudgy army officers, the ‘old chaps’ who still maintain their crusty Edwardian speech and affectations, alongside a fondness for imported Scotch whisky.

I’d love to tell you more about Dalhousie, but there simply isn’t much to the town. Not that that’s a criticism; it’s the sort of place to stroll around idly, admiring the beautiful vista of rolling greens hills and steep river valleys, preferably equipped with a pipe, walking stick and a membership card to the local tennis club. I wasn’t properly equipped, tragically, but I had a pleasant enough couple of days. Indeed, it was the sort of ‘pleasant’ not normally associated with India – more with the Cotswolds or Stratford upon Avon. I headed back to McLeod Ganj at 7:15 am – as scenic a five hour bus ride as I could possibly have asked for. I arrived mid-afternoon, and there they were: white people – everywhere.

I’ve just checked my word count – 2,629. Gosh, I thought to myself; the work I put in for you people! What’s my motivation? Attention seeking, perhaps, alongside a selfless desire to inform and entertain – naturally. Anyhow, I can’t be bothered to type any more. I could tell you about Chandigarh and Delhi – and then there’s the small matter that I happen to be writing all this from Sri Lanka, a beautiful and fascinating island I could also go on about at length. But I grow weary and the word count keeps going up the more I type. (Funny, that.) So, I shall leave you all hanging, vertiginously, unable to get on with your lives and plagued with loss of sleep. Bye for now.

McLeod Ganj, Dharamsala: portrait of a rainy hillstation

Sunday Times, Sri Lanka

Sat at just bellow 2,000 metres in the north-western corner of Himachal Pradesh, India, the former British administrative hillstation of McLeod Ganj – annexed after the Second Anglo-Sikh War and named after a Scottish Lieutenant Governor of the Punjab, Sir Donald Friell McLeod – should by rights be a model of sleepy, Anglo-Indian quaintness. Yet, in the course of the last fifty years, it has become an international capital of Tibetan culture and Vajrayana tantric Buddhism – and a Mecca for Free Tibet activists and general do-gooders from across the world.

The home of the Tibetan Government-in-Exile and the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, since he fled Tibet in the wake of a failed uprising in Lhasa, McLeod Ganj continues to house thousands of Tibetan refugees whose numbers swell as fresh arrivals pour over the Himalayan divide, escaping the persecution and dearth of religious freedom that has only worsened since the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. For them it is a place of sanctuary, where their freedom to both worship and protest is for the most part guaranteed and their ancient culture is permitted to flourish – albeit on a life-support machine of Indian governmental assistance and Western aid which cannot be relied upon forever. Their situation remains precarious in McLeod Ganj – and many find themselves returning to Tibet, frustrated by the lack of work and grieved at the estrangement from their families – but for the moment they can enjoy a climate of hope and mutual support, as against the climate of fear and mutual suspicion that persists in Chinese-controlled Tibet.

But with the frost-bitten Tibetan runaways come other visitors: brash nouveaux riche Punjabis flood in on weekends in their honking cars; lank-haired, heavily bangled hippies step wearily from the overnight buses from Delhi or Manali; earnest American high school students with bags of malaria pills arrive for cultural exchange programmes. A cultural and spiritual free-for-all, McLeod Ganj achieves that kind of cosmopolitanism particular to Indian visitor-hubs like Varanasi and Auroville.

Many on carefully worked out backpacking itineraries arrive with the intention of staying just a couple of days. But, jaded after weeks under the rigours of Indian travel and finding themselves suddenly in a cool climate among beautiful hills, with cheap meditation/yoga/language courses and volunteer opportunities all about them, they end up staying for weeks, often months. Many initial travellers end up dedicating their lives to the small town and its Tibetan population, interspersing their time there with stints back home working low-end jobs to feed their McLeod habit. For many it fulfils the tired cliché of finding oneself in India.

McLeod Ganj has been called the NGO capital of India. And, with the trendiness of the Free Tibet cause set alongside the popularity of Buddhism and Tibetan culture in a West grown increasingly neurotic at its perceived spiritual vacuum, it is well supplied with people eager to aid the refugee population in whatever way they can. Teaching English is the most common pursuit, to Tibetan adults as much as to children – a skill that most visitors in at least some measure possess, even if few volunteers are qualified in any formal way. It is made ultra accessible and, with the different NGOs fanned across the small town, the visitor is confronted with a buffet of teaching opportunities they can march into that very day.

The stream of practical support from eager foreigners, which grows almost competitive during the high seasons of early summer (May/June) and autumn (October/November), is reinforced with hefty donations from Free Tibet societies based in wealthy Western nations. The Tibetan Children’s Village, for instance – an ‘educational community’ in McLeod Ganj, providing free education for Tibetan children in exile, with further branches dotted across India from Ladakh in the north to Bylakuppe in the south – is a mammoth operation funded by private donors and international aid organisations. Such handsome assistance has led some to declare exiled Tibetans, a little callously perhaps, as the richest refugees in the world. What Tibetans lack in overt political assistance from national governments, is in some measure made up for by a sustained outpouring of charity from across the globe. But it is the former, and the dearth of it despite odd kind words from individual politicians, that must ultimately sway the balance for Tibet.

Although the Dalai Lama has met privately with all former American presidents in his lifetime, George W. Bush was the first to stage a public meeting with His Holiness, and awarded him the Congressional Gold Medal in 2007. But, however much China loathes these stunts and is quick to make its displeasure known to the countries that host them, powerful nations such as America have not matched them with any concrete political action. The punishing economic sanctions regularly meted out to Burma and North Korea have not been entertained, let alone applied, to China. This is pure realpolitik; China’s rise in power and economic clout has consigned Western nations to straightjackets – and with China effectively owning America’s vast national debt and funding its oversized military machine, the ‘leader of the free world’ is unable to lead in any meaningful way. In a world that nobody rules, words are light currency.

Even the ‘stances’ taken by Western governments regarding Tibet, with occasional noises made about Human Rights and such, are growing rarer and even now being subverted. The then British Foreign Secretary David Miliband, in a written ministerial statement issued on October 29th 2008, renegaded on a 94 year old diplomatic position, with its roots in the British Empire’s interest in Tibet as buffer against Russia and China. This recognised China’s ‘special position’ and ‘suzerainty’ in Tibet, but not Chinese sovereignty, and was entrenched in international law, with the UN Security Council recognising it as distinct from other ‘provinces’ of China. Miliband declared this distinction and the very notion of ‘suzerainty’ to be outdated, going on to say that, ‘Like every other EU member state, and the United States, we regard Tibet as part of the People's Republic of China’.

In October 2009, Barack Obama refused to meet with the Dalai Lama on the latter’s visit to Washington, until he had first met with the Chinese president Hu Jintao in Beijing the next month. Although Obama later met with him in February and expressed his solidarity, it was the first such snub to be given to His Holiness by an American president, and couldn’t help but look like a bad omen. In a weakened, cash-strapped America – and Britain – the well-meaning gestures of the past are simply too expensive.

Much of this stems, no doubt, from the growing hopelessness of the Tibetan cause, and a reluctance to anger a potential ally through gestures towards increasingly fanciful political goals. The Dalai Lama has downgraded his demands to the Middle Way Approach, advocating greater political autonomy and the right to elect a regional government within China, while allowing Beijing to maintain control of defence and diplomacy. Despite odd grumblings about ‘defeatism’ by more radical outfits like the Tibetan Youth Congress, the Middle Way Approach, entailing the renunciation of hopes of true independence, has been accepted by the great majority of Tibetans. But even this moderate approach has failed to garner results. Much-vaunted talks between China and the exile government – held in stages before and after the Olympic Games, and largely as a result of the violent protests proceeding it in March 2008 across Tibet – proved to be a humiliating walk up the garden path, with the Chinese ultimately refusing to budge on anything that smacked of ‘separatism’ from the Motherland, despite the insistence of the Dalai Lama’s envoys that calls for ‘meaningful autonomy’ did not violate China’s constitution.

Many assert that Tibet has now missed any chance it might have had of finding a solution, and its rise in power and influence will make China ever less sensitive to international opinion. Furthermore, the notion of a ‘free’ Tibet within China, with the full trappings of democracy and a system of rights, alongside a mainland China which denies these absolutely, is a fantasy. A free Tibet presupposes a free China. Tibet must pin its hopes on a nationwide democratic revolution within China, whose stirrings may well start a long way from the Tibetan plateau.

Yet the Dalai Lama, even in his old age, remains highly active in drumming up support for the Tibetan cause throughout the world, with a dizzying timetable of lectures and audiences and meetings with high profile individuals (even if many of them are Hollywood celebrity groupies). In this way he continues to foster an atmosphere of hope among Tibetans, illusory or otherwise – which, after even a brief stay in McLeod Ganj, becomes infectious. According to many Tibetan exiles, the foremost reason for their dangerous escape over the Himalayas – beyond even political persecution and the chance of a fully Tibetan education for their children, so they say – is the chance to meet the Dalai Lama, a privilege allotted to every newly escaped exile. A similar impetus is found in the many foreign visitors who make their own rather less perilous journeys to the hillstation. However, much to their chagrin, they are rarely granted an audience. The days when interested travellers could rock up to McLeod Ganj and casually organise a conversation with His Holiness are long past, due to the growing demand of His presence across the globe, the much-increased tourist traffic, and the increasing fragility of his health at the age of 75.

The worldwide popularity of Tenzin Gyatso, with his bestselling books and DVDs and sold-out teaching tours, has almost singlehandedly kept the Free Tibet torch alight within the international conscience, even if this has never been satisfactorily translated into the policy of any government. For Tibetans he has become a living embodiment not only of compassion, but of Tibetan nationhood itself, to any extent never dreamed in pre-invasion Tibet with its diverse centres of both political and spiritual power (the Dalai Lama is head of only one of the four schools of Tibetan Buddhism, the Gelupa, and formerly was not the spiritual leader of all Tibetans). He has brought the Tibetan people, formerly divided by language and geography and religious sects, under one tent. One of the few pleasant upshots of exile governance, Tibetans have, away from home, become one people for the very first time.

But if the charm and influence of His Holiness is the greatest weapon in the Tibetan armoury, it is also Tibet’s chief weakness. The aspirations of Tibetans have become so concentrated in the person of Tenzin Gyatso, his probable death in the next decade or so would leave them bereft. He does enjoy the divine caveat of reincarnation, permitting His work to be continued afresh in the body of a small boy in some corner of Tibet. But the totalitarian nature of Chinese rule complicates this hugely, as China seeks to control, rather absurdly and with zero popular mandate, the spiritual as well as the political sources of power in Tibet. The Dalai Lama’s identification on May 14, 1995, of the six-year-old Gedhun Choekyi Nyima as the reincarnate (11th) Panchen Lama – the second highest spiritual authority in Tibet, who is in turn charged with locating reincarnate Dalai Lamas – resulted in tragedy. The boy from Lhari County was immediately imprisoned by the Chinese. With the dubious distinction of being the youngest political prisoner in the world, his whereabouts remain unknown; many fear him dead. With typical hubris and ignorance of the workings of piety, China then went on to select their own ‘official’ Panchen Lama, Gyancain Norbu, who predictably commands no respect among Tibetans. Something equally farcical but damaging is likely to result with the death of the Dalai Lama, made worse by the absence of even a properly authoritative Panchen Lama to select his reincarnation.

Tenzin Gyatso is fully aware of this perhaps insoluble problem, and the possible collapse of the institution of the Dalai Lama itself. He has tried his utmost to wean Tibetans off their absolute dependence on him, and has made steps to devolve his power onto something approaching a democratic apparatus in the Tibetan Government-in-Exile. There exists now an elected parliament, a Kashag (cabinet) made up of the heads of various ministries, and as of the year 2000 a directly elected Kalon Tripa (Prime Minister). Although His Holiness remains the head of state, there now exists a power structure capable in theory of providing continuity and sustained political will in the event of His death. However, the Tibetan exile community’s lack of enthusiasm for this modern, secular, democratic alternative to traditional feudal power – voter turnout in both priministerial and parliamentary elections, held once every four years, is invariably dismal – hardly inspires confidence. Tibet after the Dalai Lama looks set to be more uncertain and vulnerable than it has ever been.

Now, then, is the time to visit McLeod Ganj, with the Dalai Lama still vigorously alive and the Free Tibet cause still energetic and hopeful. It is a bubble than cannot keep afloat forever, and must some day burst either through a grim acceptance of defeat or, at last, a free Tibet. In the meanwhile we can pray for the latter outcome; the suffering and resilience of the Tibetan people deserve nothing less.

This book is intended to be written in

Sunday Times, Sri Lanka

Colombo’s Barefoot Gallery is hosting an exhibition and has launched two new book projects by three of the most innovative artists now practising in South Asia. Sri Lankan artist Arjuna Gunarathne’s exhibition Me, Myself and I was opened alongside the promotion of Pakistani artists Imran Qureshi’s and Aisha Khalid’s Side by Side and Name Class Subject.

Through the medium of the book, Qureshi and Khalid renegotiate the status of the artwork as a pristine object aloof from the interactions of everyday life. Not to make their artworks out as arch and stuffy – far from it. Both are carried out with wit and irreverence. They do not wish for their viewers/readers to treat their works piously, as near-sacred objects they daren’t touch. On the contrary, they want the owners of their books to draw on them, write on them, deface them, do whatever they like with them; it’s theirs after all. As the text buried within the pages of Name Class Subject makes clear: ‘this book is intended to be written in.’

With Side by Side Imran Qureshi offers up two individual books, which the title invites us to consider as companion pieces. Yet the difference is stark: one is a far larger production (209 x 275mm) called The True Path, an imaginative take on the children’s join-the-dots playbook, where a line of numbered dots traverses from page to page across an abstract thread of natural forms – a landscape at turns benign and sinister. Very much a narrative work, the line – to be filled in by the ‘reader’, who, in an inversion of the traditional hierarchy, becomes the final author of the work – becomes a heroic character in its own right and sets off on a picaresque adventure, leaping and falling, dodging missiles and scaling boulders, and transforming into umbrellas and trees.

Qureshi’s accompanying book, Moderate Enlightenment, is by contrast a small hardback booklet (120 x 180) containing what at first appears to be a collection of Mughal-esque miniature portraits, beautifully rendered in the traditional style with bright slabs of colour and intricate brushwork. On closer inspection, however, what on first glance seemed to be Mughal courtier becomes a bearded man with a Nike satchel, and a hijab-clad woman is found to be wearing blue jeans. These exquisite paintings aim for a more rounded, human portrait of the pious Pakistani – who, despite the crude generalisations about Muslims that have proliferated during the American-led War on Terror, is fully capable of combining sincere religious faith with secular pursuits and concerns, and can not be reduced as a person solely to his or her religion.

Name, Class, Subject is itself something of a double book project, although bound within one frame. It is drawn from Aisha Khalid’s schooldays in Pakistan, and captures the period of confusion and disquiet when English text books were introduced into her formerly Urdu-dominated curriculum – a juncture in her life in which her cultural certainties and very identity began to fracture. From a state of innocence she was initiated into the complexities of a bilingual, post-colonial society in which proficiency in English is a fast-track to success and a badge of prestige. The book takes the form of a plain hard-back exercise book, with two front-covers on either side – with ‘Name, Class, Subject’ and the accompanying dotted spaces inscribed in English on one side, and in Urdu on the other; the former inviting the ‘student’ to work from left to right, and vice-versa with the latter. The simple hierarchy of the two-tier language system is illustrated by the varying quality of the different sides: the English half features a more elaborate four-line layout on each page, while the ‘inferior’ Urdu half uses a plainer single-line format and is stuffed full of mocked-up printing errors, with pages unaligned or stuck in upside down with their corners dog-eared. Despite its authentic appearance, the book is in fact a collection of over 300 original paintings of ruled pages, in the manner of traditional Mughal miniature painting. Furthermore, as above, the artwork is surrendered to the owner to be finished – he or she must write between the lines.

Arjuna Gunarathne’s exhibition Me, Myself and I is, in a similar spirit, a profoundly autobiographical collection of miniature pen-on-paper line drawings that chart the Sri Lankan artist’s experience of alienation and cultural displacement while living in London with his wife and first child and working in a supermarket. Each one is a black ink self-portrait, cartoonish and often highly abstract. Every full-length figure is deprived of a head, which is replaced by houses, mountain rages, smoke trails and indiscernible, ominous shapes. The denial to the subject of the face, the body-part through which communication is mediated, leaves him vulnerable and isolated on the page, and reflects the artist’s estrangement from those that surrounded him in London. It furthermore robs the figure of a distinct identity, allowing it to extend beyond the self-portrait and embody the common immigrant experience. At times almost the entire body is obliterated by a storm cloud or black smudge marks, suggesting Gunarathne’s complete disappearance as a person, beneath an alien cultural hegemony that denies him full recognition. The exhibition will be held in the Barefoot Gallery from now until August 25 (open 10am–7pm weekdays, 11am–5pm Sundays), with an accompanying booklet of the drawings to be sold alongside.

The three artists are linked by a common experience of studying art in Pakistan, and share a grounding in miniature painting. Their works here were curated by Sharmini Pereira, the founder and acting director of Raking Leaves, a not-for-profit independent publishing imprint which commissions two book projects each year, from artists from across the world. For more information on the artists, Sharmini Pereira or Raking Leaves, visit http://www.rakingleaves.org/.

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.