East and West Pakistan

Taking off from Dhaka and subsequently landing in Karachi is a study in contrasts – you rise above this incredibly wet and green world, crisscrossed with rivers, lush and verdant, and then 3 hours later you begin descending across this brown arid wasteland, crisscrossed with dry wadis and the occasional rock strewn escarpment. The two places couldn’t be more different.

The other thing one notices about the flight is how long it is. It takes something like four hours to go from Bangladesh to Pakistan. And this is in a modern 21st century aeroplane. God knows what it would have taken in 1947. It's during this long flight that I began to realise what a doomed and faintly ridiculous idea it was to create this one country with so much (sporadically hostile) territory between its seperate bits. Who thought it might be a good idea? It's amazing that it actually lasted for 24 years before imploding. For anyone wishing to read about the mess that was East and West Pakistan, and the resultant civil war/war of independence/brutal response to Bangladeshi uprsising, this Wikipedia article is worth a read. I had read before about the atrocities and the brutality that Bengalis suffered in that war of liberation (mostly in John Pilger's "Heroes"), but I had forgotten just how brutal and atrocious it really was.

On other historical matters, while I was in Karachi, I had a long and involved conversation with a (semi-famous?) writer on the subject of the founding of Pakistan and the role and philosophy of Muhammed Iqbal. To be honest, I hadn't heard of Iqbal before, though he was obviously crucial in the creation of the "idea" of Pakistan, and is still seen as the grandfather of the nation (with Jinnah as its father). I opined that founding a state on religious grounds (or ethno-religious grounds) was something I couldn't quite get my head around. The only two such states that I know of are Pakistan and Israel, and while I understand the rationale behind the formation of both, the "dream" on which they were founded seems to have run aground in both cases. My interlocutor said that he saw Pakistan as being founded upon an idea, rather like the US was, which I am not terribly sure I buy, but I suspect that's because he was coming from the literary perspective of the study of Iqbal. We were agreed, however, that whatever the ideal of Pakistan was, the reality was nowhere close.

Pakistan in general is more and more seen as the centre of the world - at least in a Huntington-esque clash of civilisations world. Military dictatorship vs Islamic fundamentalism vs secular / islamic-with-a-small-i democracy. The British government have realised this, it seems, and are devoting lots of resources to education there. Maybe they've got the message that education is more likely to win hearts and minds than bombing the fuck out of people, and then torturing those who are left alive. (Surprisingly the latter approach seems not to be terribly effective).

Side effects of the smoking ban

I spent last week in Aberdeen, which, being in Scotland, has a full on smoking ban in pubs, restaurants, etc. (England & Wales don't yet, but Scotland does). Walking into a genuine UK style pub, and finding nobody smoking is somewhat strange at first. I've been in countries and states that have smoking bans before, but pubs are different - I mean I grew up passively (and, at times, actively) smoking in pubs, and having one without the all pervasive smell of smoke is almost as weird as being in one that doesn't serve beer or sell crisps.

The hotel I was staying in, for example, had a cellar pub bit in which there were at least 10 TV screens showing football from various different locations simultaneously. The night I walked in it was packed with men - many of whom I took to be oil-workers, as they seem to make up much of the transient population of the city ("Aberdeen: Oil Capital of Europe" signs proclaimed, though I'm figuring there must be somewhere in Norway that has at least as good a claim on that title) . A bar full of burly looking blokes watching football and not a whiff of smoke. Very peculiar and somehow unsettling (much more unusual than the lack of women, for example)

But then it was that I began to realise the downside of the smoking ban. That is that the benefit of cigarette smoke is that it is extremely effective at masking any other odours hanging around. And in this bar, I soon realised, there was very definitely an odour. And it was fairly pervasive, almost to a post-match-changing-room level of acridity. Funny, they never mention B.O. when discussing the pros and cons of the ban, do they? Mind you, as unpleasant as the smell of poorly-deoderised sweat may be (and it is, believe me, very unpleasant), at least your clothes don't stink of other people when you get home.

Not just BO, apparently

Catching Up

Got back home on Monday evening, with much relief. A week is hard enough to be away, whereas I was gone for nearly 4. In my absence, Paula has stopped climbing on everything (or rather she's no longer obsessively climbing on everything), and is now veryinto walking around on tiptoes. She is also calling everyone bigger than herself "Anyu" or "Anyuka", which is a bit disconcerting. (For non-Hungarian speakers, these are roughly equivalent to "mum" and "mummy", but its unusual even here for babies to skip over the interim "mama" step before going straight to the more commonly used version). Bogi on the other hand has come down with chicken pox (every year I go to to the same conference in the UK in April, and every year while I'm there, Bogi picks up some childhood ailment - last year mumps, this year chicken pox). Fortunately it's a mild case and she isn't itching, she just looks dead spotty.

Now, the next stage in the revolving door family has kicked in, as Erika left this morning for a project meeting in France. We are obviously an international bunch.

Romania made the international news last week twice - once for the political turmoil, with the government suspending the president, pending a referendum on impeachment which he will clearly win -an act that strikes me as being bafflingly time-wasting. But there you go. Secondly because one of the teachers killed at Virginia Tech was a 76 year old holocaust survivor from here.

More to follow, when I have a moment after the kids have crashed.

Och Aye

I am still alive, and have much to blog about, including impressions from Karachi, where I spent last week. This week I am in Aberdeen, where the weather is, let's just say, slightly colder than both Pakistan and Bangladesh. Normal blogging ought to probably resume next week, when I will be back in my Transylvanian castle (or 3 room apartment)

More things about Bangladesh

We are based here at the BRAC Centre for Development Management (BCDM),which is an educational retreat centre about an hour and a half outside Dhaka, set up by BRAC. BRAC is the largest NGO in the world (or at least it was when I first heard of it about ten years ago - that Wiki article uses "one of the largest"). It's an incredible organisation doing some really amazing work in the country covering health, education and development.

Bangladesh seems to have something about it as it is also the home of the Grameen Bank, which was founded by Mohammed Younus, winner of this year's Nobel Peace Prize, which is another amazingly successful organisation in helping alleviate poverty. Both articles are well worth a read if you're at all interested.

Brief notes from Bangladesh

Bangladesh is going well. The people are great, the food is fan-bloody-tastic, and the location of this course is a great out of town idyllic retreat-style campus, bougainvillas (is that how you spell it?) and water everywhere.

Some brief notes on Bangladesh:
1. The traffic in Dhaka makes Bucharest seem like a small village with the occasional horse cart by comparison. I didn't see a single bus that wasn't banged up and dented everywhere. The traffic rule is "if you see a gap, take it". That appears to be it.

2. It's really hot and humid. I'm told that Karachi next week will be even worse. The only nice time of day is very early morning. This is a time of day that I often avoid (not actively, but by dint of not getting around to it), but here I have found that I can manage to be around earlyish, most likely because...

3. Everywhere I have so far been is dry. Not dry in the sense of lacking water, since there's an abundance of that, it being basically an entire country situated on the Ganges Delta, but in the sense of being alcohol free. I don't think it's illegal, so it must exist somewhere, but I haven't found it yet.

4. Surprisingly for a fairly traditional Islamic society, the women here seem to have very strong characters and be quite argumentative, while the men seem quite meek and repressed. (Take this comment with the large amount of salt it merits, given that it's a massive generalisation and one which is based upon all of 4 days of casual observation)

5. They have a vegetable here called (something like) Corolla, which is quite possibly the most bitter thing I've ever tasted (even more bitter than Unicum). The first mouthful was quite a shock, but after that I've got used to it, and quite like it. In general the food is really really good - spicy, tasty, interesting, everything you could want from a cuisine. I need to find a Bangla cookbook.

6. Bangladesh are doing well (or at least better than expected) in the cricket world cup and everyone is staying up all night to watch cricket beamed live from the Caribbean. Except that the channel it is on keeps breaking for prayers or news or other unknown (to me) reasons

7. There is something of a political vacuum right now - the election earlier this year was a disaster and ended up in riots and other disturbances. Eventually the army have taken power, which never bodes well, though my participants (who are all teachers and fairly educated and clued in), seem to believe that in general the changes are for the better, and that it's better that there is this period of transition - the army insist they're just there until the new elections can be held, though that will be at least a year, before all the chaos is dealt with - and that the old politicians were all a bunch of corrupt gits anyway. So we'll see.

I'm about to be kicked out of this Internet cafe, so that will have to do for your taste of Bangladesh for the time being

Baby Einstein

If you don't have children you'll be unaware of the phenomenon of Baby Einstein. So, let me fill you in. Baby Einstein is the biggest, most annoyingly simple money making scheme in the world outside of all those US companies who grow fat over "reconstructing" stuff that the US government bombs.

It works like this: some genius in San Francisco or somewhere had this idea that parents want their kids to be exposed to culture and all that stuff, while also being taken out of their hands for a while. Additionally that research was published some time ago suggesting that babies (and foetuses) who listen to Mozart will be vastly more intelligent than ones who listen to heavy metal or boy bands or something. So, they came up with the baby Einstein videos. In these videos music is played (we have the "Baby Beethoven" one), while on screen there are pictures of toys. And, in a nutshell, that's it. And, get this, they don't even pay for the toys - at the end of the video (which only lasts half an hour for your 15 quid or whatever they cost) there is a list of toyshops which supplied the toys.

So their business plan went something like this -
1. Get toyshops to give us a bunch of toys,
2. film them in action,
3. put the film to Beethoven's music (obviously out of copyright),
4. produce vast quantities of DVDs,
5. charge inflated prices for them
6. sell them to middle class parents

More or less no overheads, and a huge profit margin. It's brilliant. Really, I am always simultaneously irritated and impressed by people who come up with some incredibly simple idea through which they can make vast amounts of money. Bastards.

Ice, Sun, and Shopping

We won! When I say "we" of course, I mean Sport Club Miercurea Ciuc, who finally triumphed in the Romanian ice hockey championship last Friday, winning the final best-of-seven-game playoffs against perennial rivals Steaua Bucharest 4-1. The town is buzzing with excitement, or to be more accurate, there is a faint barely detectable low grade hum, which those attuned to the usual lack of excitement in Csikszereda can just about pick up. It's been a very good season for the team - they also won the Romanian cup, and finished third in their first season in the Hungarian league (I don't know if that makes them the third best team in Hungary - since they're obviously not in Hungary - but that's by-the-by)

Apologies for my lack of posts of late - I have been extremely busy seemingly juggling about 5 balls, and it doesn't promise to get any less busy any time soon. Last week, I was supposed to be in Tashkent, for example, but it got called off at the last minute for unspecified political reasons (quite possibly related to the very recent publication of this book in paperback), and instead I was whisked off to London. A city which I imagine looks much like Tashkent. It was a sunny week and I (as I do when it's sunny in London) was thinking how much I like the city. Of course, it's normally grey and miserable and that's the problem with the place. Still, maybe global warming will solve all that and it will become the Rome de nos jours. Except it would be a Rome in which every other building housed a sandwich shop.

One thing I did find myself moved to comment upon while there was shopping. Now it has come to my attention that shopping has become a leisure pursuit of sorts, a hobby, if you will. Why? What possible pleasure is there to be had in wandering through crowded shops desperately trying to find the one or two things you know you want, with thousands of other harried people, getting in each others way, surrounded by unhelpful shop assistants, people who stop at the moment they get off the escalator, bright neon lighting, and general rampant materialism? It's baffling to me. I mean truly baffling. There are few things I really can't get a handle on, and the enjoyment of shopping is one of them. And I was doing it in the cathedral of English shopping, Oxford Street. Browsing in a small out of the way second hand book shop or record shop, I can understand. Looking for specific items in the heart of London, I cannot.

Autonomy 2

I did promise some time ago to do a series of pieces about the movement for Székely autonomy, and suggested that my review of Alina Pippidi’s article about Transylvania would be a good first step (she never wrote back to me by the way, in case you were all waiting for me to publish her response)

Anyway, just to set the scene for those unaware of what is going on, the region in which I live – Székelyföld in Hungarian, Szekler Land in English, Ţinutul Secuiesc in Romanian – is angling for some form of autonomy. Now, I have to confess that at this point it gets a little bit confusing to me. What is being requested is referred to as “Cultural Autonomy” and not “Territorial Autonomy”. The latter is discounted mostly because there are obviously Romanians living in this region too, and the quickest way to get anyone’s back up is to call for territorial autonomy. But that means what is being sought is something which I can’t quite get my head around – this mysterious cultural autonomy. To me, cultural autonomy already exists (as it does in every non-dictatorship) – the Székely are free to speak their own language, print their own newspapers, pursue their own traditions and culture, and receive an education in their native tongue. So it’s unclear to me what cultural autonomy means.

Which brings us back to some form of territorially based autonomy. What would be the advantages and disadvantages of such a change in the status of the region?

Firstly, the idea of giving the regions of Romania more autonomy is something I strongly believe in. Romania is extremely centralised and more regional autonomy would make the local political leaders more accountable, would mean actions could better address the needs of local populations and ultimately would make the country more democratic. This doesn’t of course mean that things would be better, but at least shit decisions would be more locally accountable.

Recently, the Romanian president made some comment to the effect that Székelyföld would have autonomy when Caracal (a region somewhere in the south) had autonomy. This was taken by many to mean that the Székely could stick their autonomy where the sun doesn’t shine but could also be read as him knowing that the writing was on the wall for the over-centralised Romanian state and making it clear that he knew that the way forward was much more regional autonomy. It may even be that the EU are pressing Romania to be more regionally based, and that this will happen sooner rather than later. Hence, there will be greater regional autonomy, but it will happen on a countrywide basis rather than just granting autonomy to one particular region.

The question then is not whether there should be regional autonomy, but when it will happen and, crucially, on what basis the new regions will be formed. This is why the question is important now, because it is almost certainly the case that it is now that the decisions to devolve power to as-yet-unformed regions is being taken – and if the Székely want to benefit from this change they will need to put across a strong case for one of the regions being Székelyföld (and I’m quite sure that the Romanian government will be looking to create regions that neutralize or dilute Székely autonomy). Already I’ve heard on the grapevine that the new regions are liable to be formed of three counties each, and that Harghita and Covasna would be connected to Brasov rather than Mures county. That would (I imagine) ensure a Romanian majority in the new region, and finish any moves for an autonomous Székelyföld. I have no idea whether this is indeed likely or whether it’s just rumour and hearsay. [It ought to be noted that the current counties themselves were created under Ceausescu and were designed to break up the historical regions and dilute ethnic identity – or so Hungarian Romanians tell me, at any rate. I can’t say whether this is valid or not]

So, the next piece in this series will be on whether it would be a good idea for Székelyföld to be one of the new regions in a more federal Romania. A subject which I have decidedly mixed feelings about.

Pictures from Kathmandu

A slideshow of some selected pictures from Kathmandu can be seen here, in case you're interested.