Visit to Beichuan Earthquake Site in Sichuan, China

In November I paid a visit to Old Beichuan in Sichuan which was devastated in the earthquake of May 12, 2008.  To this day, one and a half years after the earthquake, the town is still buried in mud that had slid down the sides of the mountains surrounding it.  No amount of news photos, or news footage on television could have prepared me for the sight of the place where tens of thousands lost their lives.   Many people that I met on this trip have lost spouses, children in the earthquake, but few would, or could talk about it on a personal level.  There is, though, in all of them, the determination to carry on, to make what must seem like to them a second chance in life worth it all.

“Old Filth” by Jane Gardam

FILTH, which stands for “Failed in London Try Hong Kong,” is the nickname that the main character Sir Edward Feathers is said to have given himself.  The nickname is self-deprecating. Feathers has had a long and illustrious career in Commercial Law which has made him prosperous, and during his time as a judge of the Supreme Court in Hong Kong, he has hobnobbed with heads of governments and wealthy international traders. He is respected by his peers and, among young lawyers, he has almost legendary status. In one scene, a young female lawyer, upon learning that she has been talking to Feathers says, “Oliver, it was Old Filth. Of Hong Kong. And he became a wonderful Judge…. I told him all about the Bar. And how easy it was to pass the Bar exams…. I want to die.”

Filth himself would probably be shocked by the reverential tone in which others speak about him. He feels that he is a failure, not in the professional sense but in human terms. To him, this is all that matters. He has no children, his wife has recently died a sudden death, and he has no friends. The dreadful loneliness, Filth himself knows all too well, is the result of his lifelong inability to develop any feelings of love towards other human beings. Now that he is in his eighties, it is almost too late for him to break out of this protective isolation and reach out to others to find solace.

Filth, however, has been “more sinned against than sinning.” Like a lot of children with fathers who worked in various capacities for the British Foreign Office in the Far East pre-World World II, Filth was a Raj orphan — a child who was removed from his parents and brought back “Home” to live with a foster family so that he could be educated as “a true Englishman.”

For Filth, his life as a Raj orphan starts when he turns four. Like all the other Raj orphans, he has no choice in the matter. His future has been plotted out for him by the missionaries — he will live with a foster family until he is old enough to attend his father’s old prep school, then his father’s old public school and his father’s old college at Oxford. All will be as tradition dictates.

In this life devoid of love, care and intimacy, there is other baggage that Filth must bear . He has never known his mother who died of puerperal fever when he was only two days old. His father, who is a District Officer in some remote region in Malaya, has continued to suffer the lingering effects of shell-shock from his time as a soldier in WWI, and who, at the time of Filth’s birth, depends on the bottle to get him through the days. Baby Filth is banished from the compound where his father lives and made to spend the first four years of his life in the long house with the Malay tribe over whom his father holds sway.

Forever on the outside, unloved, unregarded, his wishes ignored, constantly tormented by the memories of an awful event that happened during his time with his foster family, his heart seemingly turned to stone, Filth plods on.

Eventually, Filth does find absolution.  He learns that there are those who are given Grace, himself being one, because he has never lost his humanity despite all the evil he has had to contend with, “I cannot bear to think about the cruelty at the core of this foul world. Or the vengeance dormant even in children. All there, ready, waiting for use. Without love, Cumberledge was given Grace. That’s all I can say.” The realization frees Filth so that, liberated from the regrets that have enchained him all through life, he is able to die a peaceful and quiet death not long after.

Thoughts on Holidaying in a Cuban All-Inclusive Resort

Beach at Costa Morena

I think of an all-inclusive holiday as a kind of “lazy person’s vacation” — one’s intention is not to see the sights, or study the local history, or get a feel of how the locals live — it is to take a week off doing nothing.  Of course, one can go on excursions; but I must say that most of the excursions I’ve gone on over the years have been trips to places that were created specially for the tourist trade.  There’s nothing authentic, or even vaguely interesting about them.  These days, when I go on an all-inclusive holiday, I spend all my time at the resort.

Over the years, the reception of guests both at the point of check-in and during the stay has been made so efficient that there is little interaction necessary between hotel staff and guests.  Upon arrival at the airport, one is met by the “hotel’s representative” (who, together with the porters who tag and put one’s luggage in the bus, incidentally, do not work at the hotel; they stay at the airport and their job is to meet every group that arrives and put them on the bus).  One is given an envelope with the ID bracelet and the Guest Information Card inside.  One is instructed to put on the bracelet and fill out the Information Card during the ride to the hotel.  On arrival at the hotel, the Information Cards are collected and turned over to Reception.  Since all the luggage has been tagged with one’s room number, those will be unloaded and taken to the room by the bell staf.  All this leaves the tourist totally free of any responsibility — it is like, You have arrived at your destination and your mindless holiday starts now. If you should lose your way while looking for your room in the extensive grounds, there are always staff driving people-movers around on some errand who will gladly give you a ride.

The theme of efficiency and functionality extends to the rooms.   All the guest rooms are housed in two-storey  concrete blocks that require minimal maintenance.  The rooms themselves, from resort to resort, are almost identical — a bed, two wicker chairs, a wicker table, wicker bedside tables and that would be it.  The idea behind all this seems to be that no one will want to spend any length of time in their room other than for the night’s sleep, so, there’s really no point in equipping the rooms to real five-star standards.  This is not to say that the rooms are unpleasant in any way.  They lack character, that’s all, but they are easy to clean (for the staff) and, if some drunken guest should go berserk, any damaged furniture can be quickly replaced.  Despite the care that goes into the landscaping around the blocks, it is hard to shake off the impersonal feel.  Words like “tourist factory,” “battery cages” come readily to mind.

The hotel lobby is dominated by the bar.  The Reception and Housekeeping are off to one side — one hardly notices them since one does not need to have any dealings with them until checkout time.  The bar never, ever stops.  The buffets and the restaurants are only open during meal times, but the bar is humming every single minute.  To their credit, all the bar-tenders that I have come across in Cuba are knowledgeable, attentive and humorous, and they all make awesome cappuccinos.  There is nowhere else in the resort where you will be more willing to tip.

The heart of all the resorts is the pool.  I truly believe that at the resort we were at last, (Melia Las Dunas in Cayo Santa Maria) there was a chaise longue for every single guest that wanted one.  Of course, whether it was in the shade, or near the bar, or faced the direction that you wanted was another matter.  So, yes, people did get up before breakfast to stake their claim by putting their belongings on the chaise of their choice, though they might not want to go lie on it until late afternoon.  At this resort, the pool-cleaner was always on duty.  He was there setting up the cleaning hoses before breakfast.  He was there in the pool vacuuming all day or checking the water quality, and then, when the pool was closed and everyone was going off to dinner, he was there re-arranging the chaise longues and doing some more vacuuming.  He was probably the hardest-working employee on the entire resort; yet, surprisingly, I did not see anyone tipping him.

Ah, tipping — the life blood of the Cuban resort.  One sometimes gets the feeling tha t everything that is done for the guests is done with a tip in mind.  It starts with the bus-driver that takes one from the airport to the resort, and of course, one cannot overlook the local guide that accompanies the bus.  There is the gardener who waits to give a flower to the ladies and to say good morning to them, the waiters in the lobby who are very quick  to remove one’s half-drained glass and replace it with a fresh drink, the housekeeping staff who do not replace all the bath towels they remove from one’s room so that when one asks for and has the towel brought to the room, one is obligated to tip, the bank employee who points to the loose change left  behind by the last guest and states, “This is my tip,”  and, of course, there is the towel exchange guy who dispenses with all hints and uncertainty by putting a box marked “Tips” right on his counter.  It is not that I grudge the employees the tip.  In Cuba, everyone, irrespective of rank, makes only $25 (U.S.) a month.  It is only natural that they seek to supplement their meagre income with tips from the tourists.  What they do not seem to understand is, good and attentive service deserves to be rewarded, whereas basic level service is what the customer is entitled to and has paid for.  If the hotel is committed to providing fresh towels at the pool everyday, then there is no reason for the towel guy to expect a tip when a guest exchanges a used towel for a fresh one.

All this is not to say that we don’t enjoy our time at all-inclusive resorts; these are mere personal observations.  In fact, Cuba is one of those places where the sun always shines, the sea is always blue and the air always fragrant.  If you take the trouble to go to Havana, you will also see competent art work in public squares and public buildings and, of course, the unique colonial architecture in the old town.

“Wit’s End” by Karen Joy Fowler

Fathers and daughters, mothers and sons, brothers and sisters — do we really know what we are and who we are to each other, and how do we relate to each other?

Rima Lansill has lost everyone in her family — mother, brother and now her father. She is staying with Addison, her godmother for the time-being to get over her grief. She also wants to find out more about what really happened between her father and Addison; after all, Addison, a renowned mystery writer, named a murderer in one of her books after Rima’s father.

As Rima goes about looking for clues, asking questions, drawing ever closer to the truth, she also learns that she has not truly understood and appreciated her own father. Her most important discovery is not what happened between Addison and her father, but that her father is an honourable man, an outstanding reporter, but also a man racked by guilt.

All of Fowler’s characters are flawed one way or another, but they are deserving of our sympathy because we recognize ourselves, our weakness and our little neuroses in them. No one is perfect, but Fowler does not expect her characters to be perfect.  She only wants them to trust their own instincts and behave as sensible human being.   True, there is evil in the world, but we are able to find regeneration through love, courage and simple human decency.

“A Thousand Splendid Suns” by Khaled Hosseini

With a war going on in Afghanistan, and the dearth of easy-reading mass market books about the people or the country, it’s no surprise that both The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns have made it onto the bestsellers lists, and quickly, too. This is not to say that Hosseini wrote the two books with the intention of exploiting the current situation; but the popularity of the two books, in my opinion, certainly has more to do with their timeliness than literary merit.

The Kite Runner gives a young man’s perspective of Afghanistan before, during and after the Russian invasion.  Running through the novel is the idea that despite all its imperfections, small cruelties and inequalities, pre-Russian occupation Afghanistan was an idyllic world that came to be poisoned by the invader’s  presence and all the political turmoil that subsequently happened in the country, so that loyalty gave way to betrayal, hope to fear and it was a world of every man for himself.

A Thousand Splendid Suns tackles the same themes, but from the perspectives of two women, Mariam and Laila.  In a Muslim world where men dominate, the two have even less control over their own fates than the young boy Amir in The Kite Runner. For the two women, tragedy piles upon tragedy — Mariam’s mother commits suicide in the mistaken belief that she has been abandoned by her own daughter; Mariam’s subsequent arranged marriage to Rasheed; her inability to bear a child which leaves her vulnerable to the cruel treatment by Rasheed; the death, first of Laila’s brothers, then both her parents; Laila’s forced separation from Tariq, her long-time love and father of her daughter Aziza; the two women’s failed attempt at escape; these are just some of their misfortunes. There is little they can do, being members of the “inferior sex” and having been robbed of all human dignity, to counteract any of it.  The final resolution comes when Mariam, in an act of supreme selflessness, murders Rasheed so that Tariq and Laila can escape to a new life while she submits to the death penalty.

Dramatic as the plot sounds, the book is not as touching as one would expect. All the characters, including Mariam and Laila, lack a convincing inner life. They are essentially two-dimensional characters, distinguished by some physical characteristic — Mariam’s mother’s epilepsy, Tariq’s missing leg, Laila’s green eyes — rather than by any compelling personal quality that gives them an interesting emotional life. The result is, in everything that they do, in every decision they make, the characters fail to convince us because we cannot find the answer to the question: Why?

I cannot help but feel that Hosseini has set himself a really ambitious target that he, as a novelist, lacks the skill to hit. The relationship between Mariam, her father Jalil and her mother Nana which the novel starts with and which is intended to set the tone for what is to follow is anemic. There is no adequate explanation for the back story, for example, the reader has no idea if Jalil raped Nana. While rape will explain Nana’s rage and shame, yet Jalil turns up dutifully every week to visit Mariam and to talk to her about the world beyond the hovel she lives in. Why would he do that? Is that what a rapist will do? Is he a kind father or is he not? As a successful merchant, he is powerful man and yet, in his own household, he seems to have little authority, so much so that he allows his wives to arrange for Mariam to marry Rasheed, knowing full well that his daughter is being condemned to a life of misery. At the very end of the novel, when Laila tries to track down Mariam’s family, she is given the letter Jalil has written to Mariam in which he expresses remorse for his own cowardice. Yet, over the years, through all the turmoil that the country has been through, he has not done anything that a truly penitent man will do to alleviate the suffering that he knows his daughter has been married into. As the reader, I find it impossible to feel any sympathy for a character that appears to me to be half-drawn and unfinished like Jalil, a character whose actions are inexplicable to me. And Jalil is only one example. There are also Laila’s parents, Tariq’s parents, indeed Tariq himself — all of them characters who have great potential to touch but have remained lifeless and flat.

Like Tess in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, at the end Mariam chooses to kill her cruel captor so that she can set Laila and Tariq free. It is sad, but Mariam does not strike me as heroic because in the novel, as soon as Laila assumes prominence as a character, Mariam is relegated to the background. In her sisterly relationship with Laila, she is the one who follows, the pallid one. When she finally wields the knife and kills Rasheed, I can only see her acting out of hopelessness rather than defiance. Much as I wish, the fate of Mariam does not suggest to me that “As flies to the wanton boys are we to the gods/They kill us for their sport;” which is what Tess’s death in Hardy’s novel evokes.

“How Proust Can Change Your Life” by Alain de Botton

Having maintained through eight chapters that reading Proust (or learning from Proust through reading de Botton) will make us happier  in life, de Botton surprises the reader by ending the book with a chapter entitled “How to Put Books Down.” In this chapter, he concludes that while for the reader a book can perform the important and life-changing function of bringing back to life “from the deadness caused by habit and inattention, valuable yet neglected aspects of experience,” the lesson that the reader ultimately needs to learn is “To make (reading) into a discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement.  Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it; it does not constitute it.” It is a challenge to the reader to go out and put into practice all that he has learned from reading the book.

If we feel unfulfilled, inadequate, put upon, the fault lies not so much with “life,” or the people around us, or other extrinsic factors as with ourselves. Most of the time, it is our unrealistic expectations, our lack of self-knowledge and our inability to pay attention to what really matters in life that make us miserable.  If we yearn for change, then we must reevaluate our priorities, stop wasting time and start to appreciate life. de Botton is there to usher us through the process and he, in turn, uses as his guideposts Proust’s seven-volume, a-million-and-a-quarter word masterpiece “In Search of Lost Time.”

The key to making life interesting and satisfying for ourselves is to learn to make what we see and do everyday a meaningful activity. It could be reading a book, looking at a painting, being ill, making conversation with friends, or just sitting in one’s kitchen. According to Proust/de Botton, each is an opportunity for “intelligent, imaginary inquiry.” What this requires of us is attention and honesty. If we would only see that there is beauty even in everyday, mundane objects like saltcellars and apples, then we would not hanker for a lifestyle that is beyond our means, even though that is what is being promoted endlessly on home improvement shows on television. If we would only say what we mean to say , our conversation would probably be more genuine and, hence, more interesting to others than if we were to parrot the cliches that we hear everyone uses and which are essentially meaningless because they have been used once too often.

All this may sound simple, but it requires that we give up preconceived notions and be realistic about life. If what we hope for in friendship is to be loved, then we must be prepared to keep silent about our friends’ inadequacies as people. Flawed as we ourselves are, our friends cannot help but be just as selfish, uninspiring and plain unlovable as we ourselves often are.  We need to know that and not expect them to be always loyal, caring and be there for us every minute of the day.  Similarly, we need to realize that the routines of marriage can lead to boredom, and the way to counteract it is to put more effort into thinking about the person we love and learning to focus on what attracted us to our partner in the first place. Take nothing for granted is how we can become more appreciative of the life we have.

To be sure that we are up to the challenge that de Botton lays down for us in the last chapter, we have to learn to think about life and all that we do in a new way.  In the process, we will probably have to give up a lot of old, but bad habits, and the easy life of the automaton.  It may be a lot of hard work, but happiness does come with a price.

Cambodia

Angkor Wat

Angkor Wat entered my consciousness in 1967 when news photos of Jacqueline Kennedy’s visit to the ruins were published in the local papers. I remember I marveled at the architecture that I saw in the pictures; they appeared ancient to me and I wondered about that great civilization that created them. I could not quite understand at the time why I had not heard much about Angkor Wat before.

When we finally decided to take a short trip to Cambodia in 2007, I found that instead of feeling the excitement of having a lifetime’s longing fulfilled, I was of two minds about actually taking the trip.

In the forty years since I first saw that picture of Jackie Kennedy standing in front of Angkor Wat, I have heard about The Killing Fields, I have met Cambodian expatriates who suffered unspeakable privations under the Khmer Rouge, I have seen pictures of the map of Cambodia composed of the skulls of those killed by Pol Pot’s genocidal regime, I have seen TV programs on child prostitution and sex tourism in Cambodia — in short, I wasn’t sure what I was going to find in Cambodia and I had some difficulty about spending money in a country where the government was still corrupt and where those who perpetrated horrendous crimes against their fellow countrymen were still walking free.

There were also the logistical problems. Flights to and from Siem Reap and Phnom Penh were limited in number; unless I was prepared to spend a couple of weeks there, it looked like I would have to fly in on Tuesday and leave on Friday. It did not feel like enough time for doing what I wanted to do in the two cities.

Siem Reap

Siem Reap would have no existence apart from the ancient ruins of Angkor Wat. It appeared to me that the entire town as it stands now was built to accommodate the tourist trade. There was hotel after hotel after hotel all along the way from the airport to the city centre. When we arrived in Siem Reap, it was early evening and in the twilight, it seemed to me that there were chaotic crowds everywhere outside the hotels, milling around.

After check-in and a quick dinner, we decided we would stroll around the city centre to get “a feel of the place.” Some of the local stores were still open; many of these appeared to be video rental stores and there were several barber shops and some clothing stores. Business was certainly not brisk,; many of the stores did not have their interior lights on. There was little merchandise on display and almost no shoppers. Eventually, closer to the Le Meridien Angkor, we came across an entire block that was given over to stores that catered to tourists. There were the usual silver trinkets, wood carvings, and local silk. What was interesting about all these stores was that they all carried a range of books and videos on the history, social history of the Khmer Rouge and Khmer society, biographies of all of the Khmer Rouge leaders — probably every book that has ever been written about the rule of the Khmer Rouge — a collection that I had never seen before and have not seen again outside Cambodia. It suggested to me that, business opportunity aside,  there was a need among Cambodians to bring the story of those years of great suffering to the outside world.

It soon got dark and we decided to walk back to the hotel. It was then we noticed that the street lamps were not on and we were walking mostly in the dark. We did not feel unsafe as we kept to the main roads. The only inconvenience was after we turned off the main road to walk down the side street that led to our hotel, we realized that the sidewalks were all broken up so that we had to walk on the road. By the looks of it, the sidewalks had fallen into disrepair for a long time and it did not look like it would be re-paved any time soon.

Angkor Thom, Ta Prohm and Angkor Wat

Angkor Thom

Much like what I had noticed outside the hotels we passed the evening before, there was much crowding at the entrance to Angkor Thom — the largest of the temple ruins. There were the usual vendors of souvenirs, bottled water and snacks; added to these, were several large groups of Korean and Chinese tourists blocking the walkway, as well as an elderly white couple  riding atop an elephant which everyone had to give way to.

My first feeling upon seeing the huge stone Giants guarding the causeway that leads to the main entrance of Angkor Thom was dismay. Although, I believe, all of the 54 Giants were still standing, the faces, arms and legs of many had been badly eroded. Where there used to be facial features, there was now only a blank. It was no longer possible to tell if they all had the same facial expression at one time or if they all had different faces and idiosyncrasies at the time they were carved. The naga, the huge stone serpent that the Giants were supposed to be holding was missing many sections, so that the Giants, instead of being linked by the naga, now stood as individual statues along the causeway.

Bayon, the “Hall of the Proper Conduct” where the gods gathered at the heart of Angkor Thom, must have been magnificent at its prime. Today, the stone floor was uneven, many of the stones having broken off or eroded. It was necessary to walk around it with great care, and there was really just one route a person could take to get from one side to the other. Despite the dilapidation and the fact that it was overrun by tourists who obviously had little respect for the place as a once holy site, it was clearly still a working, everyday shrine. In front of the the statue of Buddha right in the centre of Bayon, one found offerings of fresh incense sticks, candles, and flowers — gifts which could only have been put there by the local people who would not be distracted from performing their religious duties by the hordes of noisy tourists. That, to me, was a comforting thought.

Ta Prohm

If not for “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider,” I don’t know how many tourists would make the effort to visit Ta Prohm. Here, most of the buildings had collapsed and nature had resumed its dominance. It was a magnificent sight, nevertheless — the roots of one single banyan tree wrapping round an entire courtyard in a stranglehold, a roll of stone columns half fallen as if the collapse had only occurred yesterday. Everywhere I looked, I was reminded of P. B. Shelley’s poem Ozymandias,

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

John said that Ta Prohm reminded him of the Mayan ruins at Chichen Itza and they made him wonder about what had happened to those once-mighty civilizations. My feelings, though, are different. At Chichen Itza, one does not feel as strongly the power of nature; some of the damage there, like the building that was blown up by a French archaeologist looking for hidden treasure, was inflicted by man. At Ta Prohm, one feels that nature has returned and reclaimed the lease. There is a lot of restoration going on in the temples in Siem Reap, but Ta Prohm is not a site that can be restored. Any attempt at cutting down the trees and removing the roots will cause the ruins to finally, totally collapse.

Of all of the temples, Angkor Wat was the best maintained. Restorations efforts on this site probably started back in 1960, if not before. Just like at Bayon, it is still used as a temple for worship by the locals. For them, Angkor Wat does not belong on a postcard or a travel video; it’s still very much a part of their lives. Much more than at Bayon, though, one saw the influence of the Hindu religion. The most famous bas relief, The Churning of the Sea of Milk, is a Hindu creation myth. Yet, today, it is used as a Buddhist temple and houses giant statues of Buddha. As we were leaving, the guide showed me where shrapnel from Khmer Rouge guns hit one of the stone steps. I have also read in various guide books that many of the temple ruins in the outlying areas have not yet been entirely cleared of landmines planted by the Khmer Rouge. It’s distressing to think that the revolutionary soldiers of the Khmer Rouge would risk the total destruction of the main cultural heritage of the country in their effort to crush their enemies.

Tonle Sap

We were taken by car through the countryside to Tonle Sap, which sits smack in the middle of the huge alluvial plain formed by the mighty Mekong. On the way, we saw houses built on stilts so that the lives of the people living in them would not be majorly affected by the annual flooding of the river. We saw stalls by the roadside where petrol was sold in two-litre plastic bottles because few people could afford to buy a lot of petrol at one go at a gas station. While there was poverty, it did not strike me that people were feeling abject. It might have something to do with the fact that they were still able to make a living fishing in the lake. On the lake itself, people lived as nomads on water. There were houseboats moored along the waterway where groups of women could be seen repairing fishnets, or doing what it was that fishermen usually did. There was even a floating school with a floating basketball court. As our boat moved farther out into the lake, vendors of soft drinks, bottled water and snacks in speedboats quickly surrounded our boat. Our guide muttered under his breath that it was best that we did not buy anything from anyone; it would just be too much trouble.

Both at Tonle Sap and on the grounds of the temples back in Siem Reap, it was evident that tourism had had no small impact on the lives of the locals. Rather than being in school on a school day, many young children were selling bottled water to tourists for $1 U. S. per bottle. In restaurants, most of the waiters were young teenagers who had learned enough basic English to take orders and answer simple questions from the patrons. I am sure that there is money to be made from the tourists, and any family in such an impoverished country would find the extra income a great help. I could not help feeling concern, though, about the future of these young people. Would they spend the rest of their lives selling bottled water to tourists because that’s how you make a quick buck? Would it not serve their country better if these young people could go to school and get a proper education which will prepare them for life for when tourists tire of visiting this part of the world?

Floating Village at Tonle Sap

Phnom Penh

My reason for going to Phnom Penh was to go to S-21 or Tuol Sleng, the Genocide Museum. After all that I had read and heard, I felt I could not go to Cambodia and bypass the place.

If Siem Reap appeared chaotic, then Phnom Penh was many more times more disorderly. There seemed to be a lot more commercial activity here compared to Siem Reap, which was clearly a provincial town. Along the main road that led from the airport into town, there were many new medium-sized office buildings. As it was close to dinner time, there was much hustle and bustle in the streets.

Our driver, who did not know a word of English, picked us up from the airport; our guide was nowhere in sight. I was surprised that just before we arrived at our hotel, the driver stopped the car, pointed to the great, big fortress that took up an entire block and said, “American Embassy.” I had no idea why he did that, maybe he thought we were Americans. It was hard to tell from his tone of voice if he was merely pointing out what he thought was a landmark, or that he was trying to communicate the sense of violation of having a military edifice that belonged to a foreign country right in the heart of his own capital city.

The next morning, our guide was waiting for us in the lobby. He was a real smooth operator. He told us that he was a civil servant, but he was working as a tour guide on the side. The tour lasted only half a day, and at the end of that, he blithely announced that he was going back to the office where he was sure he would find no work waiting for him.

Tuol Sleng, I was told, was not on the itinerary. If we wanted to go there, we would have to give up going to either the palace or the national museum. If was an easy choice. We decided against the palace.

Tucked behind the main road on one of the side streets, Tuol Sleng looked no different from any regular school building in any Southeast Asian country. (This torture centre was really a school and its dreaded director, Duch, who, upon the collapse of the Khmer Rouge, converted to Christianity and managed to escape retribution, was a schoolteacher.) The buildings had been cleaned up and whitewashed. It felt like there had been some attempt at “sanitizing” the experience, at imposing some form of order to a national experience that must have felt senseless, random and fearful at the time it happened and for years afterward. How else could this page of history be shared with the rest of the world? Inside there were rows upon rows of photographs of the victims — men, women, children who looked at the camera with blank faces and no expressions in their eyes. Did they feel no fear or had they already given up hope? Did they wonder why they had been brought to the centre for interrogation or didn’t they care any more? It was hard to imagine who could have gone on in their minds. According to statistics provided in a brochure for visitors, in a four-year period, 10, 499 people died within the walls of the one-time school. It was the first time in my life that I came face to face with evidence of the evil man is capable of committing against his fellow men. I was stunned by the scale of it all. John told me he had to leave, it was really getting to him.

Rules for Detainees at Tuol Sleng

In the afternoon, after a rather expensive and not quite up to par lunch at the famed Foreign Correspondents’ Club; we decided to walk back to the hotel. It would take something like forty minutes, but it allowed us an opportunity to just walk around the streets and get a feel of the city.

There were a lot of small, dingy hotels all along the promenade by the side of the Mekong. These would be the places where the budget traveler would stay. Instead of the carefree, park-like atmosphere that my guidebook talked about, the famous promenade felt tired and run-down. We didn’t see many of the French colonial-style houses, probably because we were in the wrong part of town. The people we encountered did not seem hopeful or contented. Just like in the child vendors we came across at Angkor Wat, there was a strong sense of uncertainty, as if they were not very sure if the opening up of the country to masses of tourists was what they really wanted.

In the morning, we flew out. It was a quick visit and I know I did not really get to know Cambodia the way I would like to; nevertheless, it was a trip like no other I have taken. It has got me thinking about the role of history and the preservation of a people’s history, the assumption that most of us have about the good in human nature, consumerism and tourism, and human dignity. I came away feeling challenged. Maybe that’s what traveling and seeing the world should be all about.

“God is Not Great — How Religion Poisons Everything” by Christopher Hitchens

One cannot but admire Christopher Hitchens for his courage in writing this book at a time when religious fundamentalism has taken such a hold among the nations and has created such havoc in the world.

Through an examination of the origins of the holy books and precepts of the three major monotheisms of Christianity, Judaism and Islam, Hitchens makes the case that god and religion were concoctions by men in times when there was little understanding of the natural world .  Based on the contradictions that he has found and the historical evidence he has gathered, Hitchens rejects the theory of “intelligent design.”  He believes, instead, that the human race is the result of evolution and that we are but mere flawed creatures.

What resonates with me is when through the ages, so much brutality has been committed in the name of religion, how any religion can continue to make the claim that their god is the supreme being and that their followers alone are the reason for the existence of every planet, every natural phenomenon, every living creature in the universe. What hubris this is, how lacking in humility — ironically, a virtue preached by all religions — those who proclaim this are.  Alexander Pope puts it rather well when he writes,

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of Mankind is Man.
…
In doubt his Mind or Body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reas’ning but to err;
Alike in ignorance, his reason such,
Whether he thinks too little, or too much;
Chaos of Thought and Passion, all confused;
Still by himself abus’d, or disabus’d;
Created half to rise, and half to fall;
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
Sole Judge of Truth, in endless Error hurl’d;
The glory, jest and riddle of the world!

(Epistle II, Essay on Man)

Religion, now as in the ancient times, continues to prey on the credulous. For a couple of years now, I have been feeling quite uneasy about what I can only describe as superstitious behaviour among some of my Roman Catholic friends.  They regularly attend “healing masses” where the presiding priest is accorded close to “saviour” status — the idea is one accrues real physical benefits through being blessed by the priest, and the way the faithful can tell if one has been touched is that one’s legs go weak and one falls down at the moment of the blessing being uttered. The overriding question is, if the prayers are efficacious, what need do we still have of doctors or medical treatments or healthy living practices?  Surprisingly, the fact that their health has not improved one jot after all this time has not yet led my dear friends to re-examine the claims that are made.  This same group of people, too, have gone on pilgrimages to Medugorje in Herzegovina where the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared a number of times to six Herzegovinian Croats. When I went on to the Medugorje website recently, I read that Mary had announced that she would now limit the apparitions to once a year, on December 25,  and her latest message to the faithful on December 25, 2008 was “Dear children! Today, in a special way, I call you to pray for peace. Without God you cannot have peace or live in peace. Therefore, little children, today on this day of grace open your hearts to the King of peace, for Him to be born in you and to grant you His peace – and you be carriers of peace in this peaceless world. Thank you for having responded to my call.” This is a pretty mundane message. Given that we have two wars going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as countless internal conflicts in the other countries in the world, would we not naturally, if we have any sense of human decency, desire peace in the world? Do we really need an apparition from the Virgin Mary to tell us this?

When aid to impoverished Third World countries, disaster relief, education for children in the Third World all get mixed up with proselytizing, religion becomes distasteful. The various faiths have made god out to be just as materialistic as we are and, like our bosses at work, he will decide whether we will be given the bonus of life after death upon the evidence of our sales/conversion figures. That god cannot be a benevolent god and we should not allow ourselves to be fooled into acceptance.

Two Houses

House in the Country

I did not find this house likable on first sight. It looked dowdy, old fashioned, even a bit frumpy – somewhat in the manner of an elderly, widowed aunt who’s living on her own. It didn’t seem to me to be a good match for the tasteful, stylish new owners who were about to move in.

The second time I saw the house, it had had a make-over. It was not what would be known on TV as an “extreme makeover” – where the person goes under the knife, and returns with a totally different face or something. It was more along the lines of, “Let’s see how we can get you to dress differently to bring out your natural physical advantages.”

This house certainly has natural physical advantages galore. Now that the drapes have gone, the light has taken over, so that being in the house is like talking to an open, direct person, where you don’t need to read between the lines or worry about what’s the right thing to say. It is an honest house without a hidden agenda.

It is interesting that those features which contributed to the sense of dowdiness now give the house its character. The wooden deck with its peeling paint, for example, fits perfectly into the environment – the rushes, the lagoon at the bottom of the slope, the birds that come to feed. It gives a sense of a life lived, of life stories having unfolded in front of its eyes, but it has not become jaded.

There is, too, a strong sense of serenity in the house. There is nothing frantic, fast-paced about it. It is an inviting spot for reading an interesting book, daydreaming, idle chat and being oneself. There are no chairs that one sinks deep into or overstuffed sofas; the comfort one feels is part of the aura that emanates from it. This is a house where happiness resides.

House in an Industrial City

I feel rather sorry for this poor house because its owners don’t seem to like it very much; and really, it is through no fault of its own. It’s a bit like being an adopted child who has failed to please her new family.

From the very beginning, this house was assigned a difficult task – to be a “show home” but without anyone being aware of it. It is a bit like those little girls whose mothers dress them up in expensive designer children’s wear so that people will go “ooh” and “aah” and say, “What a pretty child you have there!” But a child dressed in designer clothing cannot forget her ladylike manners, and that precludes fun, games and having a good time.

I always get a strong feeling that the house is a bit lost because it hasn’t been asked to fulfill the function for which it was created – to be a home to its owners. It is a fully-equipped house, but daily living hasn’t been able to make it presence felt. There are few indications of what the people who live here do on a day to day basis. Nothing is ever out of place. There isn’t a half-read magazine lying around anywhere, there is no daily newspaper on the kitchen table, there are no indications of what books the owners have been reading or what music they have been listening to. Every item that is taken out of the storage cupboard is quickly put back inside. Neat and new as the house is, expensive as the fixtures are, the house feels sterile.

To return to the analogy of an adopted child – a child who is loved returns the love; a child can only bring happiness if he is allowed to live in a happy environment. Life, of course, can bring us heartaches, frustration, and stress, but it is also where we will find passion, love, happiness, and contentment. The deal, though is, you can’t have one without the other. If we are won’t let heartaches and frustration into our lives, then happiness and contentment will turn their backs on us too. Life is messy, and it is mirrored by the state of the homes that we live in. A home where the signs of living are not evident can never be a happy home.

“The Art of Travel” by Alain de Botton

We often forget (and I believe, we often choose to forget) that happiness comes with self-actualization. Instead of looking into ourselves for the abilities we have for satisfying our longing for happiness; we look at the world around us and ask, “Where is that which will make me happy?” when all the time, the answer to the question is, “We make ourselves happy.  No one, nothing else can do that for us.”  That is what Alain de Botton tries to explain to us in The Art of Travel.

Li Jiang, China

There is nothing new about the idea; indeed, one reviewer criticized de Botton for “stating the bleeding obvious;” the truth, though, remains that very few of us actually believe in its validity and even fewer have attempted to act on it.

What de Botton shows us in “The Art of Travel” is, it is not the knowing that counts, but rather, the knowing what to do that will make the difference. The idea is simple, but the process of getting there is not. Before we even set off on “the greatest trip of our life,” we need to be aware of why there is this burning desire in us to leave home — what is it that we are dissatisfied with or looking for,  and what “antidote” it is that we think we will find once we get there. A change of scenery does not guarantee a change of mood. We can be in the most beautiful place on earth and still be in a state of discontent.

Self-awareness is important, but even more important is the awareness of the places we are in and the sights we are seeing. For many of us who rely heavily on guidebooks, we can only be, at best, the dutiful traveler. We read about what we should look at and we go and look at it. True enjoyment comes not from knowing that we have been there (or, “having done Rome, Paris and Athens”) but from knowing why we enjoy something, from knowing that we like something for reasons of our own. This requires that we look carefully rather than cursorily, that we pay attention to the details and not just the broad strokes. If I am touched by a painting that I see in the Louvre, then I should know what it is in the painting that moves me. In short, what aspect of the painting am I responding to.  This applies equally to a street in the city of Bath, an aerial view of the islands in the Taiwan Strait and a corner of the night market in Wangfujing in Beijing.

What many travelers do these days, and I certainly have been guilty of, is to get to a sight, pull out a camera, take a picture of what is in front of us and then move on. Perhaps we think that with the picture, we can now reminisce and recall the scene later , when we have returned home. But memories of this sort, at best, are only partial because our minds are on framing the photograph and then pressing the shutter before some  tourist walks across our view. That, likely, is what our memory will be instead of the sight that we have taken a picture of.  de Botton recommends that instead of reaching for the camera, we consider drawing or doing a “word painting” of what we see — both are recommended by Ruskin for enabling us to truly “possess” the beauty of the scene. Make ourselves a part of the process and we will be able to remember and relive the sensations of the moment.

All this, of course, can be hard work. It is quite the opposite of instant gratification, which modern travel appears to have evolved into. It requires that we are prepared for the trip, and, while we are traveling, to constantly ask ourselves, “Why does this interest me? Why do I find this beautiful? Why do I respond in this way? What about this do I like and what do I not like?”

This is the attitude that we, perhaps, should cultivate for everything that we do in life and not just travel. We do not live until we are aware.