Justine Hardy Journalism - All Articles

Mumbai Mirror just asked Justine for her reflections on the hard winter in Kashmir

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

This is the coldest winter in Kashmir since 1995, with substantial snowfall, power outages and other hardships for the people. Mumbai's popular Mirror newspaper invited Justine, who is in the valley now, for her reflections on this bitter winter. You can read the article here:

http://www.justinehardy.com/assets_cm/files/pdf/mumbai%20mirror%20kashmir%20bitter%20winter.pdf

Justine reviews The Collaborator by Mirza Waheed in The Times of London

Wed, 2 Mar 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

Justine has written a feature review of Mirza Waheed's first novel for The Times of London:

The Collaborator by Mirza Waheed

A Kashmiri novelist investigates the conflicted loyalties and brutal violence of his homeland

Review by Justine Hardy

Does conflict silence creativity? A loud “no” comes in answer — think of the poets of the First World War, voices such as Primo Levi’s, whole literary undergrounds churning beneath the oppressive regimes of the late 20th century.

There are times, however, when the nature of a conflict is so brutal that the human spirit would seem to fail. So it was in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, in northern India. For almost two decades, from the beginning of an armed revolt against India that spun out far beyond the borders of the exquisite Kashmir Valley, the collective poetic voice of the Kashmiri people was struck dumb by violence.

Their pain was expressed, almost solely, in the words of the late poet Agha Shahid Ali, aKashmiri in self-imposed exile in America. His verses have been carried in the pockets and wallets of thousands of Kashmiris as they searched for talismans in a world of checkpoints, bombs and crossfire.

During the second decade of the fighting the frozen silence gave way a little, with books such as The Tiger Ladies, an elegant memoir of a Kashmiri childhood by another writer who had left the valley, Sudha Koul, and then, last year, with Curfewed Night, BasharatPeer’s hard-kicking record of growing up during the insurgency.

Mirza Waheed’s first novel, The Collaborator, brings down the last vestiges of the walls of silence. Like the delicate pashmina shawls of Kashmir, his story is woven tight with autobiographical detail. His narrator is a village headman’s son, a Gujjar from one of the region’s nomadic herding tribes, though his family, and others from the tribe, have “gone into the bricks”, as some Romany Gypsies describe those who have left the road and settled. This nameless boy-man tells his story, shifting between his past and a present that is the early 1990s, the worst years of fighting between the various separatist and pro-Pakistan militant groups, and the Indian security forces. The latter comprise the Indian Army, the various paramilitary and counterinsurgency forces, and the Jammu and Kashmir Police, a combination that, in real terms, amounts to approximately an armed member of these forces for every seven Kashmiris.

The narrator’s past is a place full of with the melancholia of a lost time, a sanctuary of tradition and tight geography. It is a softly buffered world that contains him and his four most-loved friends as they flex their pubescent personalities. In their hidden playground, the “Valley of Yellow Flowers”, Waheed sings a hurr (a wedding song, sung in mourning for those who die young), a memorial to all that Kashmiris feel they have lost over the past 20 years: peace, fecundity, beauty and innocence.

The beginning of what many Kashmiri Muslims call their Tahreek-e-Azadi, their freedom movement, enters this hidden valley on cloudy wisps of rumour, almost ignored at first. These are people already inured to the Pakistani and Indian checkpoints that have long ridden the Line of Control, the disputed border between the two countries, just above their valley and the surrounding forest.

The rumours gather and are intensified by Islamic radicalisation until, one by one, the four friends leave to “cross over” and train on the other side as militants. Their disappearance nudges the narrator towards his own crossing, though each time he resolves to go he is viscerally reminded of the devastation that his friends’ departures have caused to their families and then to the village as the army decides to make an example of the tiny hamlet. The punishment for nurturing militants is a crackdown. The army descends, en masse, ordering all the villagers out of their homes to sit in a nearby field, the men on one side, the women on the other, day after day.

It is winter, there is no respite from the sitting: “Late January is still the time of winter proper ... the mornings hang heavy and frigid with chill and fog. People find it hard to smile. Sometimes the fog doesn’t clear all day; it just breathes over everything like a vast, over-bearing organism. Sometimes the sun may make a very small, coin-like appearance through a crevice in the blankets of fog.”

The crackdown empties the hamlet, leaving only the headman and his family to pretend that there is some continuity. It is a fraying normality, held together by the daily round that his parents cling to: his mother tending her beloved vegetable garden, his father sucking at his hookah as though it is a life-support machine.

From these frail semblances of life as it was, the narrator is drawn into becoming the collaborator of the title, working under a cartoonish Indian Army captain, a man soaked in whisky, foul language and a psychotic loathing of Pakistan. The boy’s new role is as a scavenger of corpses, his putrid job a device for portraying the abominable excesses of both the security forces and the militants. Waheed was raised in a mohalla of Srinagar, a downtown neighbourhood, and yet his familiarity with the country people of his home state gives him the licence to portray what must be the layers of his own life, growing up in conflict, using fiction to explore the nature of brutality.

It is through this kind of fiction that collective memories of violence can be given the freedom to breathe again, breaking free of the received wisdom of how an entire people’s story has been portrayed and manipulated in the media. With this liberation comes responsibility: to understand that even though the work is fiction, for many it will be read as documentary evidence. In this Waheed’s writing combines the elegance and gymnastics of another reinterpreter of recent wars and revolutions, Ryszard Kapuscinski, and of Waheed’s own friend, literary ally and author of the sublime Pakistani satire ACase of Exploding Mangoes, Mohammed Hanif. There are times when Waheed’s own use of satire slides towards crude cartoon, when portraying those he believes inflicted the deepest wounds on his home. It is an understandable use of this weapon and while his countrymen will applaud him for it, others will use it against him.

If this book were to be read in every contemporary literature class in Kashmir and India, some of the younger generation in Kashmir, who are now throwing stones in their version of an intifada, might begin to free themselves by writing their own stories, and many more in India might begin really to understand what happens to the human condition when it is bludgeoned through life by rifle butts.

The Collaborator by Mirza Waheed (Viking, £12.99; 320pp)
Justine Hardy is a journalist and novelist. She has written three books about Kashmir, where she lives and works

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http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/arts/books/fiction/article2917321.ece

Justine writes a feature article in The Times of India calling for creativity is the search for peace in Kashmir

Tue, 21 Dec 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/A-Guggenheim-for-Kashmir-/articleshow/6123394.cms

I am not in Kashmir now.I have not been there since the spring,but every day emails come in from those I am lucky enough to be working with there,dedicated doctors and psychiatrists who are at the other frontline of the conflict.One of these recent emails read: "I am in despair now at this calendar of violence we have been given ... it means that we cannot get to see our patients.I am so filled with sadness and feel,too,that we doctors will soon be needing counselling because of what it is we are having to deal with all the time.''

In most parts of the world,every psychiatrist is required to have a psychiatrist or therapist who looks after them,checking if they are able to handle the process of treating the layers of trauma they deal with.In Kashmir,the sheer volume does not allow for this kind of secondary care even if there were psychiatrists to watch over those who are treating the mental scars of this apparently intractable situation.In the psychiatric outpatients' clinics in Srinagar,it is standard for each doctor to see between 200-300 patients per day.Clinic hours usually run for about four hours.This means that if there are 300 patients at the clinic,each one will get less than one minute with a doctor.How much can any doctor,regardless of her talent,ability and sense of vocation,really achieve in less than a minute when trying to establish how best to heal a mind that has been fractured by a constant state of fear?

Why does it go on? Why is there no end to it?

These two questions are the ones that I am asked most frequently when talking about Kashmir to audiences outside the state,particularly in Europe and the US,where the idea of Kashmir is so distant - and still steeped in images of soft green beauty.After more than 30 years of watching Kashmir's story unfold,both inside the state and from the outside - but always from the position of being an outsider,however long I may stay - there is a word that keeps churning around time and again (already used in this piece).Intractable.How often have we seen the words 'intractable' and 'Kashmir' in the same sentence? They sit together,scattered throughout the world's print media,an ugly marriage of two seemingly inseparable words.

But why intractable? What creates this state of intractability? There are libraries of answers,volumes arguing the politics and the history,the apportioning of blame,the tilt of history one way or the other,each point of view backed by brutal examples.

Intractability in conflict is the result of the cycle of violence.When it is being explained,this cycle is usually drawn as a circle,its stages written in like the numerals of a clock,marking off the destructive progress.It begins with an initial act of violence.The next stage is shock.Then comes grief.Then anger.And then the anger triggers bitterness.This leads to retaliation.And so,another act of violence takes place.The circle - this is Kashmir.The cycle spins.Intractable again.

But the cycle can be broken.The method of interruption is applied in much of basic psychology when treating victims of violence and trauma.The cycle is broken before it gets to the stage of anger.The rage that is building is dissipated.If an individual is being treated,this could mean that the nature of fury is examined,its outcomes worked through,highlighting the deadlock that will be created by reacting to violence with more violence.The energy of that fury is channeled in a different direction by outlining alternative outcomes,ones that are nonviolent,that portray a possible and positive future.

Kashmir is once again moving with speed through the cycle,and the same responses are being used that have continually exacerbated violence for the past 20 years.To make the intractable tractable requires a shift in both point of view and response.Both of these things require strong leadership and a creative surge.The first can be supported by establishing a police force that is wholly trusted by the people to keep the civil peace,that is not corrupt,whose ordinary policeman and officers are well paid enough not to have to seek 'mithai'.

An example of the healing effect of the second point,the creative surge,is Bilbao in Northern Spain.The Basque separatist movement ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna,meaning Basque Homeland and Freedom) operates in both Spain and France,across the whole Basque region.ETA sees Bilbao as its capital,and the city was designated as the capital of the Basque Autonomous Region during the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39.Due to the frequency of ETA's attacks and kidnappings in Bilbao,the city's economy was suffering.And then one of the world's most extraordinary modern arts museums was built there.The Guggenheim Bilbao was opened to the public in 1997.This iconic titanium-sheathed building by the Canadian-American architect Frank Gehry has become an international destination for contemporary art,particularly Spanish modern art.Since the museum opened,Bilbao's economy has grown and the level of attacks has dropped significantly.The past 13 years in Bilbao since the museum's opening are referred to by many as the time of 'the art ceasefire.'

Bilbao may seem like a singular example,but it illustrates that the paths to peace are not just drawn up by politicians and generals.I chose to give the example of an art museum in another country and region with a separatist history because,like the Basque region,Kashmir is a place of artists and artisans,poets and writers.Creativity can be healing,and good civil governance can act as the bedrock of this kind of recovery.

Justine writes on the mental health crisis in Kashmir for India Today

Tue, 29 Jun 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

IN THE VALLEY OF DESPAIR, 90 PER
CENT OF PEOPLE LIVE WITH MENTAL SCARS

by Justine Hardy

http://epaper.mailtoday.in/Details.aspx?boxid=1214993&id=38465&issuedate=2762010

THIS is an experiment in stepping away from all that is intractable in this discussion: from 1947 to 1989, the election fixing, cross- border training camp sponsorship, corruption, separatism, geopolitics and human rights, the past and the future. This is about bringing the current situation home, to all of our homes, our streets, our families.

Imagine leaving your home, perhaps as you did today. Beside you is your husband or wife, or your son, or daughter, your mother or father, brother or sister — it could be anyone, but someone who you cannot imagine life without.

As you step out to cross the street, in the same place as you always do, there is brutal blaring and screeching, a rush of pressured air, a body lurching beside you. In the silence that follows you realise you are still alive, and that, though they have fallen, the ones beside you are also still alive, but you are not sure if they were hit or not.

If you were to be analytical now you would notice the rush of adrenalin, your chest- thudding heart rate, the playing out in your mind of a stream of imagined worst scenarios: possible injuries, pain, disability, even death. And then how, as the adrenalin drops away, this is followed by a sensation of being totally drained, wrung out.

Now imagine this happening every day — day in and day out, sometimes several times a day, sometimes many times a day, and at night too. Try and imagine how it might be if life were a series of moments of this kind of terror, combined with the expectation of violence, and that this threat of danger was not coming from a speeding, screeching lorry breaking the speed and safety limit on your street, leaving you in a haze of adrenalin, watching Blow Horn rushing away from you, but that your street had become entirely different.

In your street there are now regular crackdowns, crossfire, people beating down your door in the middle of the night, constant sleep deprivation caused by the anxiety of keeping your family safe and together, stone- throwing breaking out randomly, and other daily acts of violence that come out of a society living in fear.

Then ask the question of how you think you would be doing if this was your life on your street.

The mind simply cannot survive a constant barrage of this kind, and so it fragments, either little by little, or in one big collapse, with psychosis and total mental breakdown.

When this is the on- going situation across months, years, decades, perhaps for all of your life, what kind of mindset do you think you might have? Whe

Sunday's Times of India's Special Report features an essay from Justine on current troubles in Kashmir

Mon, 1 Mar 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

The Times of India for Sunday, February 28 has a Special Report on the epidemic of stone throwing young people in Kashmir. Justine contributes an essay on the perspectives of young people who grew up with a conflict. You can find it here: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/sunday-toi/special-report/Children-of-a-violent-past-see-no-future/articleshow/5626226.cms

Justine has written a feature commentary for Mail Today India on frustration and alienation in Kashmir

Sat, 20 Feb 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

As part of a double page feature spread, Justine has contributed the lead article on the frustration and alienation of young people in Kashmir cause by the conflict over the past twenty years. You can read it here http://epaper.mailtoday.in/showtext.aspx?boxid=5825828&parentid=33387&issuedate=2022010 and see the complete feature on pages 18 and 19 at http://epaper.mailtoday.in/epaperhome.aspx?issue=2022010.

Random House India has published a blog entry by Justine

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

The official Random House India blog features a new essay today by Justine on her new mental health project in Kashmir, Healing Kashmir. You can find the essay here http://randomhouseindia.wordpress.com/2010/01/27/justine-hardy-the-hospital/ and more information on the project on her website here http://www.justinehardy.com/pages/aid_projects/healing_kashmir/intro.asp

India Today: 2000s: Decade That Changed the World: Fast Food for the Soul

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Justine has a feature article in India Today on the rise of modern "gurus" of Indian philosophy:

"It is a staggering irony that we are now in the age of gigabyte gurus. The way of the Gurukul, the long pupillage of a child with a guru to establish if the child was even a worthy vessel of Vedic learning, has now been usurped by the Coca Cola factor. Years of preparing and honing a mind to the subtleties of the scriptures have been replaced by our impatience to get it all in one easy download, our need for instant gratification, and for not wanting to put in the earnest and ascetic legwork of decades of study and practice."

http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/Fast+food+for+the+soul/1/73513.html

BOOK CHAPTER - UNDERSTANDING HINDUISM

Thu, 21 Feb 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

He looked at me with slightly glazed eyes through the pulse of bodies on the banks of the Ganges.

'Hinduism is as big as your mind or as small as your mind,' said the smiling sadhu, stroking a belly that was as swollen and smooth as a spacehopper. Well, that seemed to wrap it all up really, one of those great throw-a-way lines that the wandering holy men of India, the sadhus, know the foreigners want to hear and will mull over for hours in the shimmering heat of the subcontinent. But beneath the glaze-eyed guru gimmick was the nut of Hinduism. It is a huge religion, the oldest in the world with a confusion of thousands in the Hindu pantheon of gods. And even if you were to crack the cast of thousands, each one of them has a vehicle, an animal of some description that flies or trundles them around the heavens on their otherworldly missions. It is this hugeness that is daunting but it is an onion religion that is heavy with the ritual paraphernalia attached to it by the Indian nature and culture. As you peel away the layers the simple moral codes of human behaviour are at the root of Hinduism. If you dig down through the extraordinary scriptures to one of the main works, The Upanishads (400-200BC) there is the nub that is the same basis of the majority of the world's main religions: 'The Great God is One, and the learned call him by different names.'

Hinduism's thousands of gods lead to the big three: Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the preserver and Shiva the Destroyer, three in one, and the physical representations of the unseen omnipotent God, Parabrahma.

When the glaze-eyed sadhu with the spacehopper belly said that it was 'as big as your mind' he was referring to the ability of Hinduism to embrace so many forms of worship; every family has a favourite god or goddess to whom they turn for guidance, support and comfort. But from out of all the layers of belief comes one core creed: the acceptance of Samsara, Karma and Dharma: Samsara, the cycle of rebirth through many lives on the way to attaining perfection, Moksha, spiritual salvation and release from the cycle of reincarnation; Karma, the law of cause and effect, whatever you do, good or bad, there will be a consequence and crimes and good deeds that are not recognised in the current life may be punished or rewarded in the next; Dharma, the natural balance of the universe, the law of the caste system and the moral code that each person should follow.

For the visitor to India and Asia, whether travelling through Hindu societies or living in them, a basic understanding of the caste system is important. The control of the caste system has been profoundly challenged for centuries, and most dramatically in 1947 when Jawaharlal Nehru became the first prime minister of independent India and called for secular government. Nehru's hope to form a government free of religious undertone was an idealistic cry for a newly independent nation that has always ebbed and flowed on the tides of religious passion. The caste system is deeply ingrained in the Indian psyche and, even though it no longer officially exists as a class structure, the four main castes still effect daily life at every level. It has become largely diluted in the cities but it remains the rule of thumb in most rural areas. To ignore it is to bypass a great chunk of India at its pulse.

There are two things about Hinduism that are set in stone: you are either born a Hindu or you are not, you cannot truly convert to Hinduism; if you are a Hindu you are born into a cast and there you remain for your lifetime. This may well be one of the reasons that foreigners find Hinduism so fascinating, because ultimately we can find out as much about it as we like, we can read the Mahabharata, the Bhagavad Gita, the Ramayana, the Vedas, the Upanishads an

Listen to FM4 channel broadcast a feature interview with Justine

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

Reality Check: Pakistan, (ORF’s) FM4, 15 February 2008
Austrian Radio (ORF’s) FM4 channel broadcast a feature interview with Justine in a program of its Reality Check series devoted to the elections in Pakistan.

MY FATHER'S RIFLE: A CHILDHOOD IN KURDISTAN - HINER SALEEM

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

Kurdish was a term I heard long before I had any real sense of the world, of where Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey are, or what cultural and religious intolerance mean. When I was about 7, a Kurdish girl called Hozan showed me how her people danced at weddings, and at great moments of celebration: stamping, swirling and clicking her tongue. She was 15, and to me she was glamour personified, spinning in a field, her tiny denim shorts alarmingly far up her bottom, her head thrown back. This was in the mid-Seventies, in Oxfordshire, and Hozan’s family was encamped with some local Romany gypsies. At about the same time, in March 1975, the Shah of Iran signed a treaty with Saddam Hussein. The Kurds of Iraq thereby lost all their external support. And so they began to be exterminated.

The Kurds, scattered across much of the Middle East, are the largest population in the Middle East without a homeland of their own, and their recent history is also the story of the changing political maps of the twentieth century. Hiner Saleem’s memoir of his childhood in Kurdistan, My Father’s Rifle, begins:

My grandfather had a good sense of humour. He used to say he was born a Kurd, in a free country. Then the Ottomans arrived and said to my grandfather, ‘You’re Ottoman,’ so he became an Ottoman. At the fall of the Ottoman Empire, he became Turkish. The Turks left and he became a Kurd again in the kingdom of Mahmoud, King of the Kurds. Then the British arrived, so my grandfather became a subject of His Gracious Majesty and even learned a few words of English.

The British invented Iraq, so my grandfather became Iraqi, but this new word, Iraq, always remained an enigma to him, and to his dying breath he was never proud of being Iraqi; nor was his son, my father Shero Selim Malay.

The story of Saleem’s family is the story of a people who are Muslim but not Arab, whose land has been fought over, whose culture has been trampled.

Saleem himself was born in Iraqi Kurdistan in 1954. His father, Shero, was the radio operator for General Barzani, the leader of the Kurdish patriots. This meant that he was also a freedom fighter, and the tool of his trade was a Brno, the Czech rifle of the title, a weapon long out of date by the time this story begins.

Saleem is now a film-maker based in Paris, and it is with his powerful visual sense that he draws us into the world of his boyhood. Early on in the book he leads us up a stepladder to the roof where his cousin Cheto keeps his stunt pigeons. And there he throws the birds up into the air, to watch them tumble back down out of the blue sky. In this way he draws us through the lushness of his life as a child in full Technicolor close-up. The rawness that follows, the persecution of his family and of his people, is stripped down to bare black and white. His spare use of language leaves the white page beyond the words heavy with the unwritten.

Seated under the mulberry tree in the garden of our beautiful old house, my mother was seeding pomegranates. I could see only the tip of her flowery scarf. The pulp from the seeds colored her hands and her face was stained with the red juice of the autumn fruit. Me, I was squatting on my heels stuffing myself.

Saleem was 11 and this was how he remembered the scene that began the end of his boyhood. This minute and careful rendering is immediately followed by the arrival of the pro-government militia in search of a cousin, thought to be a sympathizer of General Barzani, the same man for whom Saleem’s father had fought. Seven of the men of Saleem’s family were shot in the flight that followed the scene under the mulberry tree.

The traditional structure of their life ended that day. They fled, and they went on running from Saddam’s men, living in caves up in the mountains as planes flew over, bombing the villages of Kurdish resista

RUNNING IN THE FAMILY - MICHAEL ONDAATJE

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

Eight winters ago in India I fled the manila-folder-bound desiccation of Delhi for the south and Kerala. The backwaters there have a sensuality that slides about you as you enter, moving you away from the frantic buzz of life, separating you from a sense of time and place. The slowness starts to seep into your skin, spreading itself over you, drinking you in.

I took with me a novel that was making a lot of noise at the time, an overripe Booker prizewinner that, being in my impressionable twenties and passionate about my adopted subcontinent, I felt duty-bound to read. That took a day, and then I found myself with nothing else except decades’ worth of back copies of The Reader’s Digest piled up in the sitting-room of the houseboat on which I drifted.

Except there was something else, buried at the bottom of my suitcase and momentarily forgotten – a small and beautifully produced Bloomsbury Classics hardback edition of Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family. My sister had sent it to me as a Christmas present. The problem was that it was set in Sri Lanka, to which I was travelling on from Kerala. I like to read books in situ, and I had been trying to save it up, at least until I hit the tarmac in Colombo. But in the end, unable to resist the feel of it, I opened it and began to read.

Running in the Family is Ondaatje’s memoir of his birthplace, of his Dutch-Sinhalese family and the characters who peopled the first eleven years of his life. His father, Mervyn Ondaatje – part Errol Flynn, part South Asian aristocrat – had taken a boat to England in the late 1920s, where, having managed to convince his parents that he had passed the Oxbridge entrance exam, he proceeded to live in elegant style in Cambridge without ever darkening the doors of the university. At his parents’ expense, Mervyn boated, had numerous love affairs, including one with a Russian countess, and even, at one point, donned a uniform to fight the rebels in Ireland.

Eventually he was rumbled and dragged home, where he quickly announced his engagement to Doris Gratiaan, a Dutch-Sinhalese beauty whose brother Noel, Mervyn had caroused with in England. Noel too had returned home. He had been sent down from Oxford for setting fire to his rooms – a not entirely unusual occurrence then but one which was made unpardonable when he threw the flaming furniture out of the window and dragged it to the river, where it sank three of the Oxford rowing crews’ boats. Mervyn had lost his heart to Noel’s exotic sister when he saw her and a pal, got up in a swimsuits and gold paint, giving their version of Isadora Duncan’s wild new interpretation of dance. So the union was made in 1932 that produced the author and his three siblings.

Running in the Family winds its way between past and present, gathering memories rather as the family were gathered into cars as the hot season crushed Colombo. Children were taken out of school, and amid a mélêe of books, sweaters, golf clubs, rifles and dogs, the Ondaatjes transplanted themselves to the heights of Nuwara Eliya, 6,000 feet up, a place of parties, ‘serious golf’ and the All Ceylon Tennis Tournament.

Within the confines of an island everything that happens is connected and everyone is related to everyone else; Sinhalese with Tamil, Dutch with British. But within these limits the Ondaatjes spread themselves, leaving behind them, over the years, a trail of broken marriages – love drowned and numbed in gin, to the clinking of ice in the glass.

To Ondaatje Sri Lanka is an island of allegorical earth and air, a place of both Caliban and Ariel, where the sea fuses with the sky, and the past co-exists with the present. His parents, Mervyn, sometime tea and rubber plantation superintendent, and full-time alcoholic, a

TOWARDS THE FUTURE? JAMMU AND KASHMIR IN 21ST CENTURY - VERNON HEWITT

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

Here’s the dichotomy: it is both apposite and inappropriate to be reviewing this book almost two and a half years after it was finished. The former being the case because the balance of the world has shifted on its axis on so many levels since the publication of this work, drawing the focus of the West so sharply to South Asia, the latter because the risk that any writer on this region runs is that their conclusion will be out of date the moment it goes to print.

Starting with the apposite: the studies, reflections and rants on the situation resulting from the fallout of Indian Independence in August 1947, and the confused and tardy accession of Kashmir in late October 1947, divide fairly neatly into three categories. The first group is of those written by tub-thumpers with partisan slants. They usually come in the form of the memoirs of military or political characters who, at one time or other, peopled the stage on which the Kashmiri saga is played out. Whether they are pro-India or Pakistan they often make for intriguing reading while leaving the reader feeling uneasy, often knocked about by the pomposity and posturing.

The second category is often the most fascinating for the lay reader. This comprises the overviews by journalists or contemporary political writers, some with angles, some without. They range from dry accounts to heart-breaking human stories, the quality of knowledge being also variable, with the occasional detached and balanced gem.

The third section is that of the books by academics who have studied the region to the point where they have a detailed recall that can tap into all the sub-clauses of each of the eleven UN resolutions, passed on Kashmir between 1948 and 1971, at any given moment, probably even down to the detail of what the resolution draft writers preferred to eat for breakfast. The danger of this category for any lay reader, or indeed any reader trying to deepen their understanding of the conflict and the region, is that the devil is in the detail, or rather the surfeit of detail. As you, the reader, are dragged into a vortex of lost elections, coups, UN resolutions, articles, clauses and sub-clauses, the overview can be lost along the way, only brought temporarily back into focus in the summary, this closing insight being also dependent on the pithiness of the writing.

Outside these three generalised categories there are the wild cards too, the books by ex- or serving leaders of the various militant groups. These are page-turning though seldom balanced.

Whatever the category the more any of these books is condemned by both India and Pakistan the more likely they are to be a realistic study of the reality of the situation in, and on either side of, Kashmir.

There is no question of Vernon Hewitt’s qualification as a member of the third category. Hewitt has already written several books on the region to which he frequently refers in Towards the Future? But why the question mark? There is no direction except forward, whether it be through violence or attempts at more peaceful solutions.

This is Hewitt’s fourth book on the South Asia, and more specifically his second on the political and cultural identity and struggle in Jammu and Kashmir. Rather than being a new book it is a fairly extensively revised version of Reclaiming the Past? (Another question mark) The Search for the Political and Cultural Unity in Contemporary Kashmir published in 1995 by Portland Books. Hewitt was felt by some to have been too openly pro-India in his coverage of the situation in the first edition, something that always makes the falcons swoop on the literary rabbit.

Much of this has been redressed in the newer edition, though Hewitt still makes it clear that he feels that Pakistan has played a consistently dark political game, using Kashmir as its bargaining chip to suit itself primarily in its search

SURVIVING WITH THE YOGICALLY SMUG

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

You feel over-dressed, red-faced, and sweaty among the barely-dressed yogi folk wafting past in the Om peace reception area. Jetlag is hitting and the ‘shanti welcome’ chai that you have been given.

For the sake of this argument we’re in India. It could be anywhere in Asia but India is good. The setting is part stripped down resort-white, part indigenous Indian village (the gentle jangle of local women’s wedding bangles in the background for soothing authenticity). You feel over-dressed, red-faced, and sweaty among the barely-dressed yogi folk wafting past in the Om peace reception area. Jetlag is hitting and the ‘shanti welcome’ chai that you have been given in an unfired terracotta cup tastes as though it might have been strained through the undies of the old fella who helped carry in your bags. More...

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RE-READING STAYING ON - PAUL SCOTT

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

The idea of ‘Britishers’ still stuck in the craw of most Indians when Paul Scott’s The Raj Quartet was being published in the late 1960s. Then India produced her very own ‘oppressor’. In 1975 Mrs Gandhi was accused of election violations in the Supreme Court, and then visited on her countrymen the brutish dictatorship that was The Emergency. At the end of this extreme period in India’s recent history Scott’s epilogue to the quartet, Staying On, was published. It was greeted with enthusiasm in India by an increasing number of Indians of the ‘old school’, Indians from the army and the very colonially structured civil service, who were beginning to feel sentimental about the Raj. Scott had sensed the spirit of this time, in defiance of its dynastic leadership and the pervasion of creeping corruption. He took the moment and turned it into a gentle tale from the hills.

Staying On surprised people with its success in India, a readership that had struggled with The Quartet and often raged against it in print. But this was now a time of such distaste for government that perhaps the book struck chords of rebellion and nostalgia. It seems sadly ironic that Scott died so soon after it was published, perhaps before he had a chance to enjoy being accepted by a widening readership in the country that had imprinted itself on him so markedly, though he was rewarded with the Booker prize.
He was often reviewed as someone who wrote caricatures of the British in India, and those who served them but, to this reader, both in my late teens and then twenty years on, they are not. I have met versions of the characters in Staying On over and over across an adult lifetime spent in India, scattered not only among hill stations in the Himalayas and The Western Ghats, but also in Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta and beyond.

When I first read Staying On I was in Shimla, the former summer capital of the Raj, a creaking mess of mock-Tudor official buildings and cottages crossbred somewhere between village Sussex and The Brighton Pavilion. The house where I was staying, Chapslee, time-arrested somewhere in the 40s. The plumbing still has to be taken by surprise, the beds have brass knobs, and the food is perfect Chutney Mary. I buried myself there, your average teenage reader, using the privacy of a book as a way to avoid interaction with real life. But the world that I had come into in India came right out at me from Scott’s pages.

I had already read The Raj Quartet, liking it in parts, but having such a profound loathing for the linking character of the repulsive Ronald Merrick that I did not really feel I had enjoyed it. Staying On was different. The first time it made me cry, now it reads as a memento mori, not just to the passing of a way of life for all those who served under the Raj, but also for a time in contemporary Indian history when the lustre of Independence was fading, the joy of ‘freedom at midnight’ almost lost as the country struggled to find her way both domestically and internationally. Some gentler older Indians refer to it now as ‘the time of darkness’, when the patriotic spirit of a new India had been ground down by economic instability, and Mrs Gandhi was seen as the emasculator of so much of the country’s masculine pride.
To that self-involved teenager at Chapslee House in Shimla, more interested in the crumpets that came on a silver chaffing dish for tea, this was a straightforward story of an old English couple in the imaginary hill station of Pankot. Tusker and Lucy Smalley, now centre stage, had played bit parts in Scott’s quartet, and indeed within the structures of the Raj. Around them move a cast of characters in ever-increasing circles. These were the same people that I was meeting in the bazaars, shrieking at each other

ASSAM: TEA AND TERRORISM

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

The smell of rain on the bright tea was sharp and clean, hinting of the aroma that comes from a cup; the backs of the tea-pickers were burnt in the white, midday heat, even in the shade of their umbrellas. More...

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CONTEMPORARY INDIAN WRITERS

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

Diwali is festive warfare, an almost narcotic experience of noise and cordite ingestion. This festival of lights, this evocation of Maha Lakshmi, the mother of prosperity and good fortune. More...

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MUMBAI - CITY ANATOMY

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

It’s a fleshy city. The heat of its body rises up from the pavements, smothering its people in a great swell that lifts from Back Bay and the Arabian Sea to the peachy heights of Malabar and Cumballa Hills. But whilst it has a natural geography that rides the curves and lines of the land this is a city that is ever remoulding, ever-expanding, inhaling and exhaling, reclaiming land from the sea, and spreading itself further into the hinterland.

The Weight of Heat

The weight of its heat is so heavy that sometimes it seems to melt the shapes of this island peninsula, the outline shimmering and seeming almost to reform as you watch. And indeed it is changing fast, encapsulating all that is re-emerging India with the old crushing up against the new. Acres of glossy office plate glass reflect semi-naked labourers scrambling up and down precarious wooden scaffolding on old and lavishly curlicued apartment buildings beside the sea. Beneath the lengthening high rises the heaving throng jostles for space, high end finance side-by-side with the millions pouring into the city in search of work, survival, a place to bring their families in the hope of a better future. Sometimes it feels hard to breathe.

An Empire’s Architecture

Above in the hills there is sweeter air and houses with high walls, the rich and famous shutting the world away behind electric gates and darkened limo windows. From those higher hills the hips of the city fall back down to the water, to the big old arch beside the sea, the Gateway of India, the salt-singed monument grandly commissioned in Indo-Saracenic style to commemorate the royal visit of the King Emperor, George V, in 1911, and through which that limping empire retreated just thirty-seven year later, on the tailwind of India’s independence in August 1947. Honeymoon couples pose for nervous newly-wed pictures beneath its mixture of arch and minarets, looking out to sea on one side and across to the Taj Mahal Hotel on the other. Here is another institution, part of the architectural landscape, built at the turn of the 19th century by the industrialist Jamshedji Tata, purportedly to take on the British stance that Indians were not allowed in the ‘Britishers’ hotels. Of course Jamshedji chose George Wittet, the same architect who designed The Gateway. And this is the style that echoes across the colonial architecture of the city, particularly to that of what used to be called Victoria Terminus, now renamed as Chatrapati Shivaji Terminus, all part and parcel of India’s bid to shrug off memoirs and mementos of its colonial past in a fit of renaming. But as the largest railway station in the East, with its Venetian Gothic style, it is still VT to most, just as few locals refer to their renamed city as Mumbai, sticking with Bombay, because that’s what they grew up with, the vagaries of local and national politics boring most of them into rolling their eyes and carrying on regardless.

Fantasy Machine

Though many may ignore the name changes there is no question that the city has been re-branded, and not only as India’s financial capital. Beyond the architectural landmarks of the past, this is a rapidly growing high rise city of big money, and international business. It is also a studio city, the fantasy fodder factory of the subcontinent, with a movie industry pumping out twice as many films every year as Hollywood to satisfy the romantic cravings of an audience that is more than a billion strong. Many of these films now portray a glossy modern Mumbai, an image loved by so many of the new generation of vibrant economic India. This version of the city is perhaps easiest to find in Colaba, mainline Bombay Central, where the pretty people come out to play in restaurants and bars filled with chilled air, icy beer, and even chillier expressions of cool above hipster diamante-

THE SONG OF THE SPITI VALLEY

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

You can cross the Himalayas to reach the Spiti Valley, hidden beyond some of the most ragged peaks of this high-altitude reach. What you find is a cupping bowl of Buddhist life and learning that has survived intact. More...

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BEATEN DOWN BY SILENCE (Part 1)

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

“At last they entered a different world within a world – a valley of leagues where the high hills were fashioned of the mere rubble and refuse from the knees of the mountains… This place is no place for man.”

It is a hard place for man, this high-altitude valley described so starkly by Rudyard Kipling in his classic novel Kim over a century ago. Nudging up against India’s border with Tibet, Spiti Valley has a minimum height of 3,000m, and its needle peaks thread the few clouds that dare to pass into their rain shadow at heights around 6,000m. Everything of the human condition is dwarfed by the dimensions of this place, stripped as it of vegetation to reveal a rippled and muted color chart. It is regarded as one of the great geological museums of the world. Its perfect forms cover every rocky epoch since the pre-Cambrian period, ranging in wild numbers from 4,500 million years ago, to the time when worms and jellied animals began to emerge merely 543 million years ago; a vast stretch covering seven-eighths of the world’s history.

Sitting as it does on a delicate border, an area often referred to as the Tibetan Frontierlands, it became a disputed region and was closed down to the outside world for 40 years. Then, in the early 1990s, the closure was eased, and if you were able to wangle a visa it was possible to enter the valley with a minimum group of five. I managed to persuade four friends to take the tentative journey, and so we were one of the first groups back into the valley in 1992.

Over the Edge

We faced a brutal journey climbing in, our lungs rattling over the highest pass, Pin-Parbati, at about 16,000ft. We descended, beaten down by snow blindness and cracked skin, and found ourselves in the upper reaches of a world stripped bare of all that was recognizable. Rearing rock faces descended to scree fields and down to a turquoise ribbon of water, the Pin, one of the main tributaries of the Spiti River. And as we came down from the outer limits we found white-painted villages, limpet-clinging to the valley walls, their tiny patchworks of subsistence farming clawed back in terraces from the mountainsides.

We were met by a high altitude people, the faces of even the young already carved with lines by the dry winds and lack of moisture in the air, broad Mongolian brows and narrow, dark eyes squeezed tight against either the glare of the sun, or the bite of the wind. They greeted us with amazement, most of them having never seen outsiders. They insisted that we went to their homes and that we join them for tsampa, a leaden mix of boiled barley and tea. Cup after cup of butter tea was pressed on us, a mixture almost impossible not to choke on unless you throw out an idea of it being a relation of tea, and think of it more as salty, greasy soup. A convergence of heart-melting kindness and bitter reality, perhaps nothing could have epitomized our hosts better than this.

The Silence of Snow

There has always been a mythical quality to Spiti, a veil of thin-aired secrecy that hangs over it. The tribal areas around Kinnaur and Lahual practice polyandry, but in order to ensure the survival of tiny landholdings wrested back from sheer mountain faces Spiti evolved its own system of primogeniture. The eldest son inherits the land, the eldest daughter is given all her mother’s jewelry, and any other children are expected to become Buddhist monks or nuns. Farming methods remained unchanged and the monasteries and nunneries are full.

The article is continued here: http://www.justinehardy.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=95

MA GANGA - IN SEARCH OF THE SOURCE

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

Just two legs, the feet submerged, a pair of chappals on the bank behind, a raw sewage outlet running into the water just beyond where he stoops down to lift handfuls of the river water over his head, washing his face, his neck, his chest and arms, his legs right up to where his lungi loops over his hip bones.

Huddled around this bather are family groups wrapped up like those king size basin ki ladoo: balaclavas popping off the tops of their heads, tracksuits under jerseys, under cardigans, under ski-jackets, puffball families reaching for biscuits, chai, dates, chocolate, any food fuel available to give comfort, succour and calorie-courage enough to be able to mount the mules that will carry them on the pilgrimage they have come to make. They move around the almost-naked man like a herd as he finishes his freezing ablutions. They shout at each other:

‘Who used all the hot water? Who made the bad stink in the pot? Where is chai? What time are we taking off?’

The bather lifts a final handful of water and throws it over his head. Some of it catches a young, overly-layered girl behind him. She jumps out of the way, in as much as anyone can jump when wrapped in logo’d swaddling bands. Her family laughs, the almost naked man laughs.

It is the Durga Puja holiday and the family is from West Bengal, their fluffed up coats and imported biscuits from some aspirational emporium, Park Street, Uptown Cal/Kol (the old and the new, or the new and the old, take your pick). The bather is from Bihar. State lines, acres of flesh, and at least five layers of clothing separate them, but beside the Ganges at Gangotri at 7am in the October mist they are all part of the same pilgrimage.

They have come together after long journeys. Rice and sloppy subji served Indian Railways casual style, feet crossed on the seat, shoes underneath, neat and side-by-side. Across West Bengal, Bihar, chai, chai, Uttar Pradesh. Quick stop with relis-in-Delhi, and Auntie Rani’s chola bhatura gobbled double quick time, and back to the station scrum. Bodies under blankets, faces covered, like the dead. India Today and Stardust bought from the man with one eye and a lop-sided smile at the magazine stand beside pungent urinals and a group of smoking soldiers. The snoring Sird on the bunk above, shunting and grinding his way through the night above his netted beard. Chai, chai, Uttaranachal, Rishikesh, Spirituality Central. They’re on their way, all joined together by a glorious knowingness of where they are going, and bad, bad wind from Auntiejis chola bhatura gobbled too quick.

Did we lose along the way the thing they still have, the sense of the journey? Are we now transiting too fast from Heathrow or JFK to the Maldives, to the resort with private villas? Hard fought corporate wars for privacy at a price, individual pools, raked sand, and a Jacuzzi for champagne and bubbles with your bubbles as the sun goes down—not at all like Auntieji’s bad, bad bhatura bubbles through the night on the bottom bunk. What are we trying to stitch together in just fourteen days? The fall out from work, the failure to communicate with each other at the end of each sapping day, the overload of life, chip-chipping away, year in, year out, so that one Black Card holiday melts into another, one resort into the next, each one distinguishable only for the difference in length of the wine list at the top-of-the-range restaurant, or by how bad the fight was on the second last day. Do we even remember what we were fighting about? Are we investing too much in those manicured places, seeking something that is not to be found in the spa or at the watersports centre, expecting to find salvation in a Jacuzzi with a view? When and why did we start competitive holidaying?

There is no fluff around the views in among the Himalayas, no orchids on pillows in a tent, no scent of frangipani

CHAPPATI WESTERNS AND DISCO DIVAS

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

At the end of Pedder Road in Cumballa Hill, uptown Bombay, there is an advertising hoarding site that rises up over six lanes of traffic indigestion below. Once a month one or two boys climb up bamboo ladders, the rungs tied together with fraying rope, and they paint advertisements for the next Hindi film that is going to be hitting the big screens of India. They spend days teetering above the fug of exhaust, lovingly caressing and recreating the curves and curls of their favourite celluloid heroines.

I have sat on a bench on the other side of the road and watched them painting one of the biggest stars of Hindi film, first her naked breasts, and then a token diaphanous layer of wet sari. I was transfixed as a spindly boy painted in the nipples with such loving tenderness. As he added the final touches the grid-locked traffic below honked in orgasmic symphony, and a bunch of bristling pubescent boys next to me moaned in echo. It is cinema as living art. The Hindi film industry of Bombay is as buxom and beloved as the hand painted hoardings on Pedder Road.

Bombay is the cash cow of India’s huge film industry. Bollywood is the Hindi movie capital pumping out at least twice as many films a year as its box office Mecca, Hollywood. Out of the Bombay film industry come chappati westerns, Saturday Night Fever sari thrillers, desperate tales of murder thick with twirling disco divas; in short the formula is referred to as the masala movie. It is modern Indian, art mirroring life, spicy, loud, bright, over-acted, heavily bosomed, heavily censored, full of high camp dance scenes and trilling playback songs, and each and every one carrying a heavy-handed subtext about how Indian family life should be.

To the rest of the world it is a film formula that defies logic. How can you break all the rules and get away with it, mixing poignant family tragedy with car chases, death scenes with disco, chappati-making with sky-diving, and all this stretched out to approximately three hours a pop?

Let’s look at the formula in all its glory. Boy meets Girl. Girl plays hard to get. Boy falls in love with Girl—big flirty dance number. Cue the bad buys, who have many varied ways and means of scuppering Boy’s love chances. They fail and Boy gets Girl—big sexy dance number. Girl gets remorseful about:

a) Other boy back home in medium-sized town who her parents have lined up for an arranged marriage. These home boys always have nice sensible jobs but are not very hot on the dance numbers. This means the audience knows for sure that they are very boring and will not give our heroine a romantic and exciting life.

b) Her mother is dying and needs her beloved daughter’s constant nursing and attention. This is a potent symbol of the dutiful daughter scenario.

c) Her unmarried older sister makes it very clear that she will be disowned by the family if she tries to get married before number one sister.

Boy gets angry and frustrated, aided and abetted by the bad guys in dark glasses, black jeans and with Eurotrash arm candy girlfriends—big aggressive dance number. Girl gets huffy and says that Boy has changed. Boy swears undying love and gives 100% guarantee that he will change his ways, this entails promising never to see the bad buys again—big dance number with Girl shunning Boy and Boy making big hip swinging promises. Exit bad guys. Boys gets Girl back. They kiss in chaste fashion. Big end dance number with lots of glitter and costume changes. The End.

And the actors who play the roles are as gloriously technicolored as the parts they play. A whole magazine industry is based on their day to day shenanigans, much of it fabricated to create the necessary hype to kick the relevant star’s next film into gear. Every month the filmi magazines lead off their star stories with such sumptuous introduc

LETTER FROM THE NORTHWEST FRONTIER

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

A Pathan walks into a chai shop on the corner Tanai Scout Post Road in Wana and asks everyone there to a circumcision party. As jokes go it could be straight out of some city boy's recession-war-bombing-weary perk-up collection, but it's not, the Pathan really did walk in, or rather he ran in, his blue eyes wide and his beard at full sail. He wanted everyone to come to his first son's do, he wanted us all to celebrate with him and his family. More...

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A SHROUDED VIEW - FEMALE ACTIVISTS WITHIN ISLAM

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

We have created and absorbed a portrait, tapped out and beamed across the media in hyperbole. It is of the oppressed women of totalitarian Islamic states and nations, their humanity shrouded, their role in society made servile and secondary by the dictates of their various mullah classes. It is a homogenized cartoon that has been increasingly delineated and reworked since September 2001.

During the American spearheaded campaign against the Taliban and al-Qa’eda the pale blue shuttlecock burqas of the women of Afghanistan became an international symbol of repression. Each throwing-off of hijab, of a veil, an abaya, a chador, or a burqa, was carefully captured on film a symbol of the liberation of the oppressed.

‘Why do you always want to know about the thing that covers us?’ A Kashmiri woman replies to a female journalist’s question.

The journalist is wearing army fatigues, her t-shirt shows more of her upper arms than is advised, her blonde hair is neither tied back nor covered in the Friday market place in Srinagar, the summer capital of Jammu and Kashmir in North India.

Behind the journalist men and women stream out of the great wooden Jama Masjid, the Friday mosque.

‘You are no different. You only see the veil.’ The woman turns away leaving the young journalist standing in a sea of black, grey and white burqas, and bright patterned headscarves over abayas. She looks unsettled by the response.

As power shifts within these societies, propelled along the road maps being charted for them, the role of their women continues to be etched as that of a subjugated class. As these countries re-open educated women begin to emerge from underground networks that they have risked their lives to run, or they return from exile to work again among their countrywomen.

It does not automatically follow that they are held up as role-models for the future by the women they work among.

Tamara Chalabi travelled to Tehran in January this year, and from there she crossed the border into Northern Iraq, into the area that had been the Iraqi National Congress’ base before her father, Ahmad Chalabi, the leader of the INC, had been forced to leave Iraq in 1996 following the Iraqi Army’s suppression of the INC in their stronghold of Abril.

Tamara travelled with her father, members of the INC, and other political parties, through Iraq leading up to the war, arriving in Baghdad as the statues of Saddam Hussein fell.

‘I did not think that I would be away for so long, nor that I would be travelling as part of a delegation. That only really became apparent as we crossed into the north from Iran. I did not realize I would be among 800 men and more, the only women, prominent simply because of my sex.’

Tamara’s education has been the veil she has worn, her Harvard Ph.D protecting her from being dismissed by the politicians-in-waiting with whom she lived in the INC compound in Baghdad.
When she had contacted her father about joining him in Tehran there had not been a particular plan. Her graduation had been approaching. She had neither packed nor planned to be away for five months.
‘Of course I am a political animal. My father has been my greatest influence and I come from a family where the pursuit of education was never questioned, but I am also from a Middle Eastern background with its concept of not being raised to earn, an almost 19th century English view of education as a means of betterment through knowledge rather than as a path towards employment.’

Tamara was born in Lebanon in 1973, her mother’s homeland, and where her father taught mathematics at the American University in Beirut. The family left during the civil war and Tamara was educated in Jordan until her family was forced to leave in 1989 foll

ALL THE RAGE - THE HEALING HANDS NETWORK

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

We hear a lot about the first casualties of war: truth, trust and faith. In real terms, on the ground, the first things to go are the details of daily life: reading the paper over coffee at the local café which has since become a check post; or physical touch, the caress or enveloping hug of a husband, the one who was killed by a shell in the marketplace yesterday.

The body remembers and stores this kind of pain. The laying on of hands has a power to reconnect, to reassure and to heal, in ways that are both powerfully tangible and intangible. This was the conclusion that three English women came too in the aftermath of the Bosnian war after one of them had travelled around the country. In 1996 they started the Healing Hands Network, sending massage therapists from England to Bosnia and Herzegovina to work with the victims of that war and attempted genocide.

‘It is almost impossible to over-estimate the effect that massage can have on a woman who was raped over and over again, maybe a hundred times in a twenty-four hours period,’ says Richard Rasdall, one of the directors of the Healing Hands Network. Richard runs a family sweet shop in Stow in Gloucestershire, the deliciously named Honey Pot, but he is also remedial massage and reiki therapist. He first went to Sarajevo in May 2000 and he has been going back ever since. HHN rents a house in Sarajevo where the therapists stay when they spend their two-week treatment periods in the slowly healing city. Each one of them takes time away from their massage practices, or other jobs, to go to Bosnia. They have to raise £700 to cover their airfare and living costs, and it costs the charity another £1,500 to send each therapist. The time in Sarajevo cannot help but change the lives of the therapists. Returning to England can seem very flat.

Anne Smith is a freelance journalist and massage therapist who has just returned from her first two weeks in Sarajevo. ‘Therapists are often people who are naturally loners so, the dynamic of putting people together in a house for two weeks of very intensive work and experiences throws up interesting stuff,’ Anne says.

Terry, a butcher from Sussex who is also a healer, was out in Sarajevo at the same time. He brought his squeeze box along and the evenings were a mixture of Terry on squeeze box, Lynne, massage and reiki practitioner, on penny whistle, and Margaret, massage and lymph drainage therapist, with her belly-dancing turn. And there was much story-telling over cheap Serbian wine, though no-one quite topped Kate, the reiki and vibrational healing Bowen therapist, who had an on-going ear problem after being hit by a high-speed Bosnian goat.

‘One of the people I treated several times was a very sophisticated woman called Mira,’ says Anne. ‘ She would give me a big hug after each treatment and then we would settle to discuss the session with the translator. At the end of one she said how she had witnessed her son having his throat cut, right in front of her. There were tears in her eyes, but when she saw my reaction of sadness in me she reached across and patted my face gently. The translator told me that Mira said that she did not want her pain to be my pain. That generosity of spirit sort of defies description.’

There is an immense amount of trust that goes with touch, not only are old wounds re-opened but there are celebratory moments as well. Richard Rasdall once persuaded his translator to explain the conversation between two elderly women who were chatting in a lull after he had given one of them a massage. The one who had not been treated had asked her friend whether Richard was any good because, if he was, she might book him for the following week. ‘My dear,’ replied her friend. ‘I have been touched in places where I have never been touched before, and no, you may not book him next week, because I h

WRITING UNDER THE THREAT OF SPIN AND MR O BIN L

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

It is a parasitic thing writing about war. It is also a heavily censored thing.

Carte blanche was granted to write what I liked about a circumcision party, nothing was too much, the knife incision, the screams of the minimised babe and all, but writing about babies that were dying simply from lack of salt, water and sugar in over-crowded refugee camps was not allowed. The message came back that it would give the wrong sort of impression to the folks back home. The circumcision party and its diminutive amounts of spare flesh were the acceptable side of the ‘war against terrorism’, homeless families and dying babies were not.

Oh, such an opportunity to trumpet about truth being the first casualty of war, but it is also an oversimplification. It is balanced reporting that is lost in the mêlée of tough politicos with smooth hair-dos, winging their way around the world, shoring up shaky alliances, and the queues of foreign journalists trying to nudge their way in with the turncoat warriors who might be able to give them the big story, a ride up front into the next town to be liberated from beards and burqas.

The invitation to a circumcision came after your standard late autumn morning in Wana in the Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan; a standard morning meaning the local Pathani lads taking pot shots at an area military commander who had been checking out the lay of the land in his helicopter. We the viewers had repaired to a chai shop for a restorative small glass of what tastes like liquid fudge. That was when the invitation came in the form of an excited Pathan, moving at speed, his beard flying, his blue eyes flashing and his AK47 slung across his big old chest. Some say the Pathans are one of the ten lost tribes of Israel so the invitation to this wild-eyed warrior’s baby son’s circumcision party was just about understandable. That half hour of jolly japes with those woolly tribals, who people most of northern Pakistan and southern Afghanistan, had to be spun out to 3,000 words of copy. The sheaves of stuff that was being written about the dispossessed, disenfranchised and dying Afghans in the refugee camps was spiked, because it was felt that the wideness of the eyes of the suffering children might undermine belief in the bombing campaign that was producing an unpalatable number of civilian casualties.

The first American fatality of this war was all over the front pages. The first Aghan fatalities were lost along the way. It is unlikely that there will be any kind of memorial to them.

(originally published in Wexas Traveller)

MARK SHAND - NELLYS ON PROZAC

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

It’s a curious start for an elephant story.

Rain on a hot tin roof in a time of drought, the edge of the hot season when the gulmohar trees fluff out on fire along their branches, ready for the big fry. An old retainer, graying at the edges, leads me into a long, even greyer room. Big aboriginal art pieces cart-wheel across the walls among the monsoon cracks and damp-bulged photographs of highly-bred Maharajahs of Jaipur and all points beyond. The sofas are boxy, 1930s squared-off in that ‘back off’ kind of way. The greying man asks me if I want tea, and even amid the outback colours on the peeling walls, peered at by plumed princes and princesses, he still manages to give the question an elegance that hangs damply in the corner of Ayesha Devi’s sitting-room, just around the corner from the Lodhi tombs.

The television is blaring, excited front-liners rant from Baghdad in the springtime at a time when Saddam still just stands on his pedestals around town.

Mark Shand is on the phone next door and in no hurry, hence I have all the time to suck up the above detailing and gurgle it about. An ashtray, full; cuttings from Keralan newspapers about the latest killer elephant on the rampage, I read the article, and others too, and Mark is still on the phone. So, I look through ‘brides wanted’ section, and then back to the raging elephant story. In the picture a mahout, an elephant’s guardian and keeper, is being destroyed like a doll, wound around by the trunk of a temple elephant and smashed against a wall until his ‘body parts separated’, as it is pithily put. There are other papers with the same pictures, over and over, but these reports are in the curling and indecipherable Mallayalam script.

‘Rough aren’t they?’ Mark appears from the bedroom. He paces. ‘These are the apex species. They made the earliest tracks across the earth.’ He lights a cigarette. ‘They have to be protected.’ He paces, smokes, watches the television, and talks. ‘Asia is the guardian of the last of these extraordinary animals. Tell me, go on tell me, what other animal has so many stories of life attached to it?’
I fail.

‘You know how many houses in India, America, England, everywhere, have a Ganesha, you know, you’ve seen?”

I have, across the globe, as far as the Indian has travelled and settled.

‘And they, we, all ask him for blessings on our new beginnings, for protection.’ Mark paces, then sits. One leg jiggles across the other. ‘Isn’t that ironic, the Lord Protector is under threat of extinction, hypocritical don’t you think? Ask him for protection every day but don’t do anything about protecting him?’ He lights another cigarette. ‘The governments of Asia are the keepers of the elephant and they don’t take its future seriously.’ He stretches back out over his chair. ‘Not at all.’ There is a fat pause. ‘We have to change that.’

Mark Shand is beautiful. It’s fine for a male writer to say that of a woman he is interviewing, but if it’s done the other way round it smacks of time spent beyond the text. But Mark is talking about the apex species. He is alpha male. Utterly. It’s fine to say he’s beautiful. He coils up, angry about the elephant, and then unwinds to pace, waving through his smoke, playing to his audience, whether it’s one or a thousand.

Sixteen years ago he bought an elephant to ride across India, and to write about it. Travels with My Elephant was a success, sitting Ganesha-style on the top of the bestseller list week after week in 1991. Mark won prizes and became one of the new generation of well-bred, well put together, utterly connected people who rage for a cause and make change. His is a pretty Asian elephant. S

CONFESSIONS OF A TOURIST

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

The thing with East on West is that the slow glide of spice-scented skin over pale intrigued thighs, and the glow of the one against the other, can get in the way of the day-to-day stuff. That international, intercultural post coital stillness just gets interrupted by his jangling mental desire for desi khana, those hand-ground spices in the dhal and palak paneer the way Mamaji tells the servants to do it at home, while back on London time you’re up for a bit of pizza and some earnest chit chat about the latest killer film from Croatia. But perhaps that’s more a man woman thing than a Hindi-Estuarine schism. Let’s get right back to the shining dark gloss of those pale thighs and get it right from there.

Lights down, schmooz, get into kitsch mode. Think thick fake pink fur, eyelashes that you could comb hair with, shiny fabrics that ignite at 50 metres, cue Frank—

Come fly with me, let's fly let's fly away

If you can use, some exotic booze

There's a bar in far Bombay…

Bar Indigo in Colaba, white hot Bombay-Mumbai, about the most happening joint in town. Colaba is mainline Bombay Central where the polished people come out to play in restaurants and bars filled with chilled air, icy beer, and even chillier expressions of cool above smooth flat navels, hipster D&G jeans and sparkly sandals on display on the young and unlined party people. Sometimes I find it hard to breathe with the humidity and the studied cool of the crowd, the money crunchers and the boys and girls of Bollywood. There is season’s black over here as well as over there, incase you haven’t read a paper for two months.

I have my eye on a boy. For quite some time I’ve had my eye on this boy, six foot, green eyes, sack ‘o’python body, he’s as hip hop hot as every other smooth-skinned schmoozer in this bar put together in another sack to fight it out with the pythons.

There’s an age thing. I’m 35, he’s 26. I have a thing about that, older women, younger men, oh God, so Pauline Collins under an olive tree, so sad old cow with hair brush lashes, and blown up condoms for boobs fighting it out in a top that would look just about right on my ten year old niece. But it’s okay, I’m doing demure with an edge, the edge being a pink t-shirt over army fatigues with a deeply edgy pair of sparkly but sadly flat sandals. I think they’re good. Will he like them? He looks like he doesn’t like a whole load of gloop on a girl.

A heavenly babe in heels as high as the distance from my wrist to my elbow treads on my toe. ‘Hey bitch,’ I say in my dream world of studied cool, ‘get a licence before you go out in those.’ But no, I apologise to her for being in the way of her Himalayan stacks. She looks me up and down. She’s confused. ‘Why are you here?’ say those Surrey with the Fringe on Top lashes. What she really says is:

‘No problem. Cool here naar?’

Indeed it is. I want him. She may have a clue, a tip, an idea. We get talking. I ooze charm from every pore and oil my way across her defenses. I tell her my plan.

‘What man, are you mad?’ Her belly button smiles at me as she crunches over in horror.

I explain that I know the odds are against it but I’m a tryer. I jut a hip as if to show that this body is up for anything.

‘I’ve got a date with him,’ I let slip to the heavenly babe.

‘Bullshit man,’ she spits in my eye.

I did, I do. It’s taken me a year. But I got the boy. But then 25 million other women in India might claim the same thing as they get to see him in the movies any hour of the day they choose, or splashed over every filmi magazine on the subcontinen

LETTER FROM INDIA

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

Those of us who went to catch the sunrise through the dust haze, picking out the swoops and swirls of Shah Jahan’s brilliant vision, got to pay $20 for the privilege.

‘Tamasha’ is a Hindi onomatopoeia. It’s perfect. It means ‘a drama’, and there’s nothing the Indians like more than a good drama. When they are at their bellicose best you can pick the word out, scatter-gunning conversations like a shoot out at the OK Corral. And when tamasha is all used up they use their Yiddish-on-Ganges rhyming slang version instead, drama-sharma. The Delhi daily round is just not the same without at least five tamasha, drama-sharmas. More...

www.travelintelligence.com

ESCAPING CHRISTMAS

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

I close my eyes and smell frangipani on the evening air. A place where it is warm enough to wear a flimsy dress, many thousands of miles away from the cold dankness I intend to leave behind on the Piccadilly Line. More...

www.travelintelligence.com

GHEE AND NIKE

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

West clashes with East: this time it's a death match between ghee-nurtured cholestrol and the giant, cross-training, pump-up shoe-selling sports corporations. More...

www.travelintelligence.com

HERE'S BOLLYWOOD

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

At Indigo the joint was thrusting and grinding. The midriffs on display were not the kind on the postcards home of 'Rajasthan woman carrying a water jar in the bright colours of the Madwari tribe’. More...

www.travelintelligence.com

BEATEN DOWN BY SILENCE (Part 2)

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

This same mythical quality is on show in Spiti’s culture, which is by turns wonderfully serene and joltingly lurid. Our visit revealed both faces. Once, while in the Pin Valley, we were treated to a show by the Buchans, a wild troop of wandering lama acrobats who move from village to village through the winter, presenting their strange show of silk, burlesque, grotesque masks and shaman trances.

With the first of the winter snows tailing us, we then descended from the valley, gunmetal cloud rolling down through the pass we had just crossed. On the valley floor we came to the soft, quiet curves of Tabo, one of the most important Tibetan Buddhist gompas (monasteries) in the region. In style it is unusual because it does not cling to an outcrop, floating above the valley as the other main monasteries of the valley such as Key and Dhankar, huddling as they do against the altitude in whitewashed clumps with kohl-eyed windows.

We sat with the monks of Tabo, looking back up to where the cloud was now beginning to close Spiti in with the silence of snow, shutting off again this “different world within a world,” while the isolated villages awaited the arrival of the dancing lamas.

Navigation

Getting there

From New Delhi there are various train links but the most direct is to Shimla via Kalpa. From there it is an overnight bus journey via Manali to Kalpa in the Spiti Valley. To get from Shimla directly to Tabo it is a three day bus journey, or two days with a jeep and driver, with overnight stays in Sarahan and Kalpa. It is necessary for non-Indians to have an Inner Line Permit to get into Spiti, and this can be obtained in a day from the District Magistrates office in Shimla, the state capital of Himachal Pradesh, or from the sub-divisional Magistrates offices in Rekong Peo in Kinnaur District, Keylong in Lahaul District, and Kaza in Spiti District. Permits can only be given to a group of four, or more. It is not an easy journey in, and it is not for the faint-hearted.

Staying there

Most people visiting Spiti are either on jeep safari or trekking on foot, and so pitching camp in the remoter areas as they travel through. This comes with the responsibility of being in a fragile eco-system, and therefore taking out everything brought in that cannot be easily burnt down without contaminating the campsites. In the small towns of Tabo and Kaza in the Spiti Valley there is a selection of government rest houses that you need to book in to via a local agent. There are also small locally run hotels with basic comforts and a lot of valley tradition and colour.

The outer limit

The valley is very high, and if you are trekking in over any of the passes, or coming by jeep, altitude sickness (AMS) can cause problems. Ascend slowly, the recommendation if you are walking is no more than 300 metres a day once over 3,000 metres. This is hard to stick to when climbing over passes, so it is important to take rest days as and when recommended by your guides. It is never a good idea, and indeed can be fatal, to push on, when rest, or even descent, have been advised.

THE BOY FROM THE GHATS

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

The ghats in the evenings are a huge dhal pot of sound and smell simmering with all the scents and echoes of my life; the bells and the drums, the cymbals and pipes of the puja.

I met a boy beside the Ganges. His name was Ranji and he talked to me about his city while around us the old place heaved and sighed beside the sacred river. More...

(originally written for BBC Radio 4)

TAKE NEW YORK

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

Central Park, 7.30am.

Spring in Central Park is like everything else in this city. It roars through town without looking to left or right. No polite faffing around with a few snowdrops and daffs in February and March. No, it’s blossom at Mach 10 while The Great Lawn is still lay-me-down-and-take-me flat from the last of the snow melt. The first flush of dog walkers is out too, pooper-scoops and fluorescent ball-throwers in hand.

An Upper East Side matriarch enters from near the Guggenheim, around the high 80s. Age-wise she’s not much more than a decade behind. Her silky trench coat is cinched into a grip that a small child could fit its hands around. It comes just above her knees. Big mistake. These knobbles look like individual Yorkshire puddings, or popovers as they would say here, that have only risen on one side, and are strapped onto the middle of two sweet pea stakes. More...

www.travelintelligence.com

CHICAGO

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

I was beginning to turn against the Midwest, so returning to my hotel I perused the room service menu. I was hoping to find a snack that might not be double-chunked, supa-sweet whipped or Hi-Lowed. Perhaps I’m beginning to sound like an internet porn-cruiser but I find something faintly perverse about a store that encourages small and not so small children to ‘Dress Like Your Doll’. This one’s got five levels and is in Downtown Chicago, just off the ‘Magnificent Mile’ shopathon of Michigan Avenue. More...

www.travelintelligence.com

JUDGES COURT, KANGRA

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

Judges Court is a beautiful small hotel that is also an organic farm set in orchards and wheat fields, in the Kangra Valley, a rocky, rolling place of high speed rivers and manicured tea estates. The Kangra Valley is a bit of a secret. It is in the foothills of the Himalayas, just where the plains run out on the edge of the Punjab. It is a rocky, rolling place of high-speed rivers and manicured tea estates. Secret part two is a bit of a surprise in India: a beautiful small hotel that is also an organic farm set in orchards and wheat fields. More...

www.travelintelligence.com

KARMIC CRUISING

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

High-octane materialism created a void in our lives, and now high-octane spirituality has come along to fill it. Take an inner journey to an outer destination, find a guru, learn to meditate. Here we are in a shiny new millennium, and whatever we want is out there for the taking: salaries ending with strings of noughts, toy boys, cosmetically-enhanced women from Venus, 100% mortgages, dog psychiatrists, virtual reality haute couture supermarkets, house husbands who lunch, gastrodomes for the worship of llama pecorino. But what about inner peace? In this new age of consumerism, have we sold our souls down the Swanee? More...

www.travelintelligence.com

DIWALI

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

Flying into an Indian city on Diwali night has the same eerie and cruel beauty of descending into a war zone. Beneath the wing tips of the plane the air explodes in mushrooms of light, a world exhaling over and over in brilliant cloud puffs of red, blue, gold, white, silver and blue. But this is not war, except in that it is the celebration of the defeat of evil by good, of darkness by light.

To fly into this Festival of Light is to enter Indian culture by many doors at the same time. This is not a festival of just one religion but of three; for Hindus, Sikhs and Jains, held in the late autumn as the hot season breaks, shifting with the calendar between late October and early November. The main night of celebration comes in the midst of a festival that runs for several days, the number varying between religion and region. But on this night all the reasons and roots come together when the moon wanes at the end of the Hindu month of Ashwayuja, when there is no lunar aura, a night of absolute darkness out of which the Festival of Light can explode.

There are many stories that wind together to make Diwali, whether you look at it through the prism of Hinduism, Sikhism or the Jain religion. The myths, parables and tales are different, the rituals vary, the colours change, but they all meet loosely under the banner of Diwali, the name more commonly used in the north of India, whilst in the south it is called Deepavali. From India the festival spreads across the world, through Nepal, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, Canada, Europe, America, Suriname, Thailand, Indonesia, the United Kingdom, anywhere and everywhere that any of the three religions has travelled, Diwali has followed.

The more formal southern name, Deepavali comes from the linking of two Sanskrit words that mean simply a row of lights, or, in broader terms light in the darkness, the conquest of good over evil.

The derivations create a cobweb of tales, each theme creating another fine section of minute detail. In rinsed down terms there are three main Hindu threads. The first is the return of Rama, the King of Ayodhya, to his kingdom after an absence of fourteen years. His home-coming is triumphal as he has his wife with him, the goddess Sita, having freed her from the clutches of the demon Ravana, the king of Lanka, with the help of his brother Lakshman, and Hanuman, the monkey god. Sita and Rama link back to a more ancient thread: Rama is seen as the seventh manifestation of the great god Vishnu, one of the high triumvirate in the massive pantheon of Hindu gods and demigods, beside Brahma and Shiva. Sita, Rama’s wife, is regarded as a manifestation of the goddess Lakshmi, Vishnu’s consort. In this earlier generation of the gods Diwali marks the return of Vishnu, Lord of the Universe and Preserver, from the Nether World. Lakshmi went to get him back because he had kept a promise to Bali, a demon king, who Vishnu had sent to rule the Nether World. Bali had gone on the condition that Vishnu be his gatekeeper in the world below. Vishnu had kept his promise, gone to the Nether World, and so Lakshmi went to get her man back. The third strand celebrates the beloved and hugely popular blue boyish god Krishna and his defeat of a demon called Narakasura.

In the Sikh context Diwali marks the day when the fourth of the great Mughal emperors, Jehangir, is said to have released the sixth Sikh guru, Hargobind Singh, from imprisonment in 1619. In memory of this the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the highest gurdwara of Sikhism, is entirely lit, the surrounding water of the temple complex reflecting the hundreds of thousands of lights and candles in a shivering glow.
For the Jains it is their major festival, the time when the greatest of their twenty-four main saints, Lord Mahavira, attained nirvana, the state of non-suffering, the highest attainment on the path of spiritual practice.

In the Hindu calendar the festival comes twenty days after Dussehra, another big Hindu festival that in religious terms marks the actual defeat of the wife-napping demon Ravana by Rama. Both festivals honour the natural calendar in more rural communities as time of harvest, the bringing in the crops, the turn of the season towards winter, particularly in the Himalayas where the first heavy snows usually come at about this time, cutting off high villages from the outside world until the following spring. And, acoording to the Hindu calendar, the festival begins with the Lakshmi Puja, the prayer ceremony to Lakshmi, on the day of the fully waned moon.

As well as being consort to Vishnu, Lakshmi is the goddess of good fortune and wealth, and so the card-playing begins, sometimes weeks before Diwali. If the goddess is smiling down why not play cards, why not take advantage of a time when she might favour gambling? Every night, particularly during the week before Diwali, there are card parties. These are not the orderly and upright gatherings of bridge fours. Sheets are spread out on the floor as extended card tables, the stakes rising as the less divine spirits flow. But this is just the warm up, and while old friends bicker over sleights of hand, in a mostly good-humoured way, vast numbers of people are on the move, coming home for Diwali. From all over the country, and increasingly from all over the world, they come, by every means possible, from private jet to bullock cart. This is a time a family, and for those who cannot get home it is keenly felt, that neglected emptiness in a foreign city, knowing that family is coming together, the emotional distance hard and harsh. They know that all the local markets of home will have doubled in size, trestle tables laid out in front of all the stalls so that everything from fruit to DVDs can be stacked into baskets, wrapped around in acres of shiny cellophane, and twisted about with ribbon.

While the matriarchs stock up on everything edible for countless family and friends, many of these hampers are the core of a huge corporate gift-fest. In the business world everyone ‘gifts’ everyone else that they are doing business with, and particularly those they would like to do business with—after all Lakshmi might be smiling down.

And beyond the mounds of food and fruit, the hampers and ribbons, displays of pyrotechnics spread out beyond every small boy’s wildest dreams.

This is not just a festival of light, but one of noise too.

From first thing on Diwali morning firecrackers cackle in every street. This is no carefully planned Guy Fawkes display but a wild firework marathon. In North India the festival comes at the edge of the cool season, when the days begin to close in. The earlier sunset is battered down by the sound of firecrackers, great mounds of them set off and thrown about with more than faintly nerve-wracking abandon. Twilight is pre-empted by a thick cordite fog as neighbourhoods flair. Diwali neophytes flying into town are unsure whether they are entering into a war zone or the biggest party on earth. Pets and their owners are sedated, and the firework averse leave town or wear earplugs. The noise and smog pollution has, in some cities, led to curfews. In Delhi, the capital, it has been ruled that firecrackers can only be let off between 6pm and 10pm. But how do you police a nation in celebration?

And indeed how can you police a nation with a staggeringly sweet tooth when it comes to Diwali?
For several years I lived near what is probably the best sweet market in Delhi, the Bengali Sweet Market. This is not a location to be taken lightly. Mithai, Indian sweets, are a culture unto themselves. They are too rich for most people who aren’t used to them, based as they are on a fudgey mix of reduced milk and sugar. It is their visual appearance that stuns, mounded up at mithai shop counters, layered in elegant honeycomb piles, some prickling with cashews, almonds and pistachios, others like tiny Chinese New Year kites flecked with silver. They come in every pastel shade from faintly sickly lime green to fully blown herbaceous border rose pink. Leading up to Diwali the mithai-makers are in over-drive, whilst the Delhi matrons are in mithai-buying super-drive. Quite a sight they are, their fabulously long and polished finger nails flailing across the counters, grabbing at the attention of one of the sweating servers, the women’s mithai-plumped arms waving from under the tight sleeves of their fitted sari bodices. These women, and indeed men (though the latter are less silken-sari resplendent in their mithai shopping) do not buy in grams but in tens of kilos. Box upon box of mithai need to be bought and sent off to Auntie Ayesha in Jaipur, Uncle Partha in Bangalore, Cousin Madhu in New Jersey, and many more besides, the boxes accompanied by sparkling Diwali cards that will be opened in other countries, bringing with them that particular sweet musty smell of over-treated paper and buttery sugar that means ‘from India, with love’.

But beyond the jangle, the be-ribboned packaging and pyrotechnics Diwali is simply the Festival of Light, a time to reflect on inner light. To find a place beyond the commercial hullabaloo is really to witness the heart of this time. In a city like Rishikesh, a spirituality-central on the banks of the river Ganges in the foothills of the Himalayas in North India, Diwali is practiced in its essence. This is a holy city of ashrams, wandering holy men, pilgrims and seekers. Diwali in Rishikesh can be summed up by the image of a single diya, a small clay butter lamp, set afloat on the waters of the sacred river. The windows of every house and ashram are lined with these little lamps that are so much a physical manifestation of the meaning of the festival. Their clarified butter-soaked wicks flicker as they emerge through the twilight. Crowds gather on the riverbanks to set diyas on the water in leaf boats. The surface of the river is spotted with tiny brave lights in the darkness. Even the great lorries, the jauntily painted juggernauts of India’s road haulage, have their bumpers lined with flickering diyas. The whole city is washed in the light of butter lamps, and temple bells ring out across the water to chase away the darkness.

(originally published in Morning Calm, Korean Airlines magazine)

LETTER FROM BALI

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

I am told I am on Prospero's Isle, where the scent of the cempak flower is said to ease the pains of the world, where frangipani blooms rain down as harbingers of a storm, where even the poverty is wrapped in shiny banana leaves. But I can’t see it for the golf buggies. More...

www.travelintelligence.com

POST OLYMPIC SYDNEY

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

The passing of the Olympic bandwagon gives visitors an unrivalled opportunity to sample some of Justine Hardy’s favourite Bondi hang-outs.

On my recent visit New South Wales basked in a state of bliss as it awaited the arrival of that big old torch, jogging in with a gnarled athletic veteran to light the eternal flame. Finally, true blue Ozzie jingoism was officially set alight when Sydney and Australia became the centre of the sporting universe. It’s a theory most Sydneysiders have held for decades, with their Bondi surf. More...

(originally on BizTraveler.com website)

SYDNEY

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

The Harbour is the pulse of the city and the people of Sydney are proud of the polyglottal, multi-cultural melting pot that has grown up around this sometimes blue, sometimes green, shimmering central organ.

We are talking about a young city, a bright, eclectic and sometimes confused place. The old boys, who fought for King and far distant country in World War Two, drink their lager beside gay Mardi Gras revellers decked out in more feathers and spangles than you could shake a stick at. This is a water city, a series of peninsulas stretching their fingers into Port Jackson. This Harbour is the pulse of the city and the people of Sydney are proud of the polyglottal, multi-cultural melting pot that has grown up around this sometimes blue, sometimes green, shimmering central organ. More...

(originally on BizTraveler.com website)

Withdrawing room

Sat, 9 Feb 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

Eastern philosophy and those over-sized cowbells of Switzerland do not necessarily meld. A wizened sadhu , an ascetic holy man of India, wound up in a skimpy loin cloth, skipping through an Alpine meadow is not a common sight.

But much of the teaching of Indian philosophy, you could argue, fits pretty tidily into the Swiss context. So much of what is at the heart of the philosophy is right there in the Swiss mountains: it is quiet, peaceful, clean and very, very well run - a good place to go to study and withdraw. I went to Kiental, a very small village high up in the Alps, to do just that. Read the full article...

Withdrawing room
By Justin Hardy, Financial Times
Published: Feb 09, 2008

NOT OF PAKISTAN

Thu, 27 Dec 2007 -1:00:00 GMT

Benazir Bhutto’s death should remind us that Pakistan is not a pro-Western democracy. More...

www..nationalreview.com

STRIKING A NEW POSE

Mon, 1 Oct 2007 -1:00:00 GMT

Yoga on the Subcontinent once meant only soulful swamis and asceticism. No longer. Embraced—and reinvented—by the West, it's now more about slick mat work and toned muscles than spiritual searching. Justine Hardy has it both ways. More...

www.concierge.com

PRAGUE - GUILT IN THE GOLDEN CITY

Sat, 25 Aug 2007 -1:00:00 GMT

We were at high mass on a summer Sunday in Prague, sitting below a large bishop in a swingy skirt bottomed off with gold bootees, and thinking that his moves had a sort of stripper quality to them. Not very Catholic thoughts, perhaps, but we were at St Jacobus on Mala Stupartská behind Old Town Square, a church with a certain beauty to it, the full-flush kind of Peter Paul Rubens and Scarlett Johansson. We bobbed, bowed, knelt and struggled to work out where the hell we were in a service conducted in Czech. Read the full article...

FT WEEKEND - TRAVEL: Guilt in the golden city
By Justin Hardy, Financial Times
Published: Aug 25, 2007

INSIDE KASHMIR

Fri, 1 Jun 2007 -1:00:00 GMT

The first time I celebrated Eid was in a house beside one of Srinagar’s lakes, in the summer capital of The Kashmir Valley, up in the Himalayas of North India. I was nine, I think, young enough to remember certain things in great detail, and the greater things barely at all. We sat on a stone floor to break the final fast of Ramadan with dates from Jordan, and I spat out a partly-mulched almond that had been pushed inside the date, more out of surprise than anything else. It was my first stuffed date. No one seemed to mind. More...

www.brooklynrail.org

ARTISTS OR FRESHWATER SHARKS?

Sat, 21 Apr 2007 -1:00:00 GMT

The silence of snow has a quality that most of us crave. Everything is softened, dirt, rubbish and scarred landscapes are smoothed over, made ageless, returned to innocence as the flakes fall. This is how the lakes of The Kashmir Valley in North India are in winter, a generation of conflict buried for a while, the wounds blanketed. But winter is not a time of tourists here. Perhaps that is why I come back over and over. But then there have not been many foreign visitors at any time during the past seventeen years of tension in The Valley. More...

(originally published in The Financial Times 21st April 2007)

FLITTING ACROSS THE WATER LIKE DRAGONFLIES

Sat, 21 Apr 2007 -1:00:00 GMT

The silence of snow has a quality that most of us crave. Everything is softened, dirt, rubbish and scarred landscapes are smoothed over, made ageless, as the flakes fall. This is how the lakes of the Kashmir valley in North India are in winter, a generation of conflict buried for a while, the wounds blanketed. But winter is not a time of tourists here. Perhaps that is why I come back over and over. But then there have not been many foreign visitors during the past 15 years of tension in thevalley. Even in the boom years of the 80s, when the tourist magnets of Dal and Nagin Lakes bulged with houseboats, the winter was too cold for most people. Read the full article...

Financial Times, Apr 21, 2007

INDIA - STRIPPED DOWN TO OUR ESSENTIAL SELVES

Sat, 6 Jan 2007 -1:00:00 GMT

"Great things are done when men and mountains meet; these are not done by jostling on the street.”

Those backboned sentiments were written more than a century before the first tourists began to hit the trekking trails of the world, and indeed many decades before the first records of the confrontation between mountain and the ego of man hit the bookshelves. William Blake managed to cut through a lot of the nonsense that comes with bivouacs, crampons and perhaps the greatest of all climbing evils. Read the full article...

Financial Times, Jan 06, 2007

HOLLAND - AMSTERDAM HASHVILLE

Sun, 31 Dec 2006 -1:00:00 GMT

There is no value to being a narcotic virgin in Amsterdam. The point of decades of ‘no thank-you’, and passing the joint right along, is utterly wasted on the free bicycling and bell-ringing residents of this city-as-movie-set. More...

www.travelintelligence.com

ZURICH - THE SPIRIT OF AIR BESIDE WATER

Sat, 19 Aug 2006 -1:00:00 GMT

I go to Zürich because it is everything that most big cities are not. It is Ariel to London's Caliban. Where summer in west London is a brute slave to fickle fashion's Prospero, Zürich has the spirit of air beside water. All is in order there and everything is just as it should be, much to the chagrin of most Zürchers, many of whom would relish a little moral turpitude, just as long as the trams kept running on time. Read the full article...

FT WEEKEND - TRAVEL: The spirit of air beside water
By Justine Hardy, Financial Times
Published: Aug 19, 2006

DELHI COFFEE-CHAI CULTURE

Thu, 1 Jun 2006 -1:00:00 GMT

There is a nearby chai-wallah whose name is Manmohan Singh. If you are new to his stall he will tell you this as he pours his liquid fudge mix of tea, milk, sugar, cardamom and black pepper from one pan to another. More...

(originally published in Condé Nast Traveller UK edition June 2006)

GOA RETURNED

Sat, 1 Apr 2006 -1:00:00 GMT

Many generations have fought for the title of being the one that deflowered Goa. It all began at the very graphic level of cherry-popping on the beaches by Portuguese colonists in the mid-16th century, as reported back to Lisbon by wide-eyed merchants and mariners. The explorer, Sir Richard Burton, followed in the tracks of those earlier hedonists, and perhaps he was one of the first British lotus-eaters to cavort joyously with local lads in the lapping water of the Arabian Sea. Then there was the metaphorical loss of virginity when the Goans, their sensibilities informed by the Catholic legacy of the Portuguese, the pantheon of Hindu gods, and the constrictions of Sunni Islam, found themselves host to the hippy arrivals of the sixties; this influx prone to a slightly different kind of trance-like naked dancing on the beaches.

(originally published in Wexas Traveller spring 2006 edition)

FAR FROM THE PETRUS-SWILLING CROWD

Sat, 11 Mar 2006 -1:00:00 GMT

The food and beverages manager of a certain five-star hotel in Delhi is what is charmlessly referred to as an RNRI, a Returned Non-Resident Indian. There is a slight curl to his lip as he talks, he refers to himself in the third person, and he makes it abundantly clear that he has been living out of India for long enough to shake the dirt of his mother country right off his shoes. There is a lot of chat about Louis Vuitton, handmade loafers, truffle oil and P‚trus, the latter being because I had heard a Delhi columnist talking on BBC Radio 4 about how the new moneyed Indians "are drinking P‚trus as though it was water". I wanted to know what Mr Food and Truffle thought about that. "Oh come on," he said. "Who is kidding who, no one was drinking wine here a few years ago and now they suddenly all know about Petrus?" Read the full article...

Financial Times, Mar 11, 2006

ON THE BANKS OF A TEMPLE OF TRANSCIENCE

Fri, 16 Sep 2005 -1:00:00 GMT

If you scan the hyperbole written about Varanasi, it's enough to put you off Divine River toe-dipping for life. "Fecund", "kaleidoscopic", "foetid", are regular descriptions and leave an image of a pot-bellied, grubby kind of bloke with a rainbow afro do, not unlike some of the characters that wander the banks of the said sacred river. Read the full article...

FT.com site, Sep 16, 2005

WRITER'S TALK: FACT TO FICTION

Thu, 1 Sep 2005 -1:00:00 GMT

‘But you’d be committing literary suicide to move from non-fiction into fiction,’ said the wise folk of the publishing chorus.

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Missy Hubris as she floated pompously on the lower reaches of the bestseller list with her latest non-fiction offering, a deep plunge right into the tits and arse of all things Bollywood and beyond. Before that it had been Kashmir and pashmina, a dose of life on an Indian newspaper, and before that Tibet.

‘But you’re creating a niche for yourself in alternative travel writing,’ chorus said.

‘Pah,’ Hubris replied. ‘I’ve been planting signposts towards fiction to the extent that several of the reviews for the most recent books billed them as novels.’ And she puffed her chest and headed off into the blue yonder to write a novel.

That was over three years ago. Not long for some writers but for someone with a book-a-year habit it seemed like a big stint between drinks at the new ISBN bar and bar code.

‘You will have to re-invent yourself,’ they had said.

‘Pants,’ Hubris had replied.

Pants it was not. You do, in almost every sense, have to start all over again. Non-fiction, especially travel writing, is a game of formula. Subject: Tall woman takes small dog up Everest with just four packets of Smarties and a length of inner tubing. Target market: all mountaineers and wannabe mountaineers, all dog owners, all Smartie lovers, all fetishists. Fiction is a game of hazard: Subject: Tricky triangular love story set in North Indian state that has been in conflict since 1989. Target market: Umm, people who might like guns and kissing.

‘And where do you find them?’ asked the marketing people.

‘Oh, I don’t know, on the rifle range at funfairs, behind the row of fluffy toy prizes,’ Missy Not-So-Hubristic-Now replied.

‘Bit risky for us,’ said most of the publishing chorus. ‘Set in Islamic state, written largely from a Kashmiri point of view, that’s fine if you’re one of them but you’re a white girl from Oxfordshire, anyway you’re a travel writer aren’t you?’

‘I know, I know, but I’ve spent all that time in Kashmir and I can wear a burqa like a good un’,’ she pleaded.

And they smiled and said ‘No thank-you,’ in various courteous ways.

That is until someone was brave enough to think that high risk was okay. And so all those stories, absorbed across 15 years in Kashmir and censored or cut along the way, finally found a home, re-stitched, rewritten and given new life.

The Wonder House is being published by Atlantic Books in August. Previous non-relevant non-fiction travelish books include: The Ochre Border – a Journey through the Tibetan Frontier Lands; Scoop-Wallah – Life on a Delhi Daily; Goat – A Story of Kashmir and Notting Hill; Bollywod Boy – Right Inside the Hindi Film Industry.

(originally published in Wexas Traveller magazine September 2005)

FALL OF THE TIGHTROPE WALKER (SHALIMAR THE CLOWN - SALMAN RUSHDIE)

Sat, 27 Aug 2005 -1:00:00 GMT

The puppet master is back. He was absent for a while, busy with re-invention, polemic and courtship. The intervening years have perhaps softened him to the extent that he almost allows us to believe that we are independently able to grasp his art. But no, with a snap, he reminds us that he holds the strings. We just get to dance around beneath his elevated acrobatics, bragging to our friends that yes, indeed we understand how the tightrope tricks are done. More...

www.timesonline.co.uk

OF ALL THINGS: ALL THE RAGE IN YOGA TEACHING

Sat, 6 Aug 2005 -1:00:00 GMT

A student asked if he had been studying for long enough to begin teaching others. "If you have to ask me that question," said his Indian teacher, "then you are not ready." And the student accepted the answer, although he had already been studying yoga for seven years.

This is how students have traditionally learned yoga, studying for many years with the same teacher, absorbing the Brahminic tradition. Yet in the new era of yoga, those who want to become teachers are often determined to do so in the shortest possible time. More...

Financial Times, Aug 06, 2005

SPEAKING PEACE: WOMEN'S VOICES FROM KASHMIR

Mon, 1 Aug 2005 -1:00:00 GMT

Our lives segment into many lifetimes, marked out by beginnings and endings: school, university, career, marriage, illness, children, loss, love. In each of these sub-divisions we find giants. Then we move into the next phase, pulling out a slingshot and knocking our heroes down, like any number of images of Ozymandian Saddam crashing to the ground all over Baghdad in April 2003. Among the cast of giants there are the literary ones, but those who were our iconic foundation stones at eighteen are often forgotten, or perhaps no longer relevant, twenty years later. More...

(originally published in The Independent August 2005)

INDIA'S PEOPLE

Fri, 1 Apr 2005 -1:00:00 GMT

You often hear earnest foreigners talking about the "real India." They mean village India, relatively untouched by modernity and the outside world. Perhaps there is no such thing as an Indian. More...

(originally published in ABTA Magazine April 2005)

RAGS AND RICHES IN GLORIFIED GOA

Sat, 5 Mar 2005 -1:00:00 GMT

They call them 'raggytaggys', with that Goan knack for finding words both onomatopoeic and visual for everything from bhang to crocheted bikinis - the latter being 'ladee teabags'. There are those who say these raggy-taggys are part of a modern malaise that has hit just about every sun'n'sand strip in south- east Asia. Goa, India's west coast tourist trap, was perhaps the first to be infected by the hippy crowd. Its palm fringes were hemp heaven in the dog-end of the 1960s for kids rolling their nirvana between Rizlas while John, Paul, George and Ringo were rolling out the mantras with the Maharishi beside the banks of the Ganges in Rishikesh. Read the full article...

Financial Times, Mar 05, 2005

JO MANUEL: YOGA CHILD

Sat, 1 Jan 2005 -1:00:00 GMT

In thick morning mist it is hard to see what a group of children is doing in a bare cement-block room in a simple building in a city slum. Winter fog in Delhi hangs like a veil, almost hiding the children, but there are a hundred of them there in halasana, the plough. For half an hour at the end of the teaching day at this foundation slum school these children are removed from the narrow and harrowing parameters of their daily life. With breath they find possibility and release.

A clear airy room in Queen’s Park in Northwest London is packed with girls lying in savasana. This group of pre-teens find a place where they can drop into the silence so often unattainable to them in this jangling hormonal period of their lives.

Nathan is the father of Eyar who is four and a half and lives with Cerebral Palsy: ‘Eyar started yoga with Jo when she was two and a half. Through yoga her breathing improved significantly which is the basis for good posture and improved speech. The practice of yoga has helped with the stability of her upper body, increased her muscle tone, helped her motor control, gave her balance and allowed her to develop good co-ordination…our pediatrician and physio therapists are amazed by her progress…she is doing things they never thought possible.’

These children across the world and across circumstance are linked by a practice that gives them a sense of the intangible quality of peace, a thing practically impossible to describe to so many child.

Both the group in Queen’s Park and Eyar are linked by one person, the Jo of Nathan’s testimony. This is Jo Manuel, a yoga teacher and mother. She has been practicing for twenty years, and teaching for nine, having worked closely with Sonia Sumar, the creator of the programme Yoga for the Special Child. Jo recognized the potential of using yoga as a way of drawing children into a genuine awareness of their bodies, and hence their lives.

The slum children of the opening section absorb yoga as enthusiastic sponges, for the escape that it offers them, but also because it is an accepted and integral aspect of their culture. Some would say it is a part of their birthright. But it has taken the energy of someone like Jo to bring this idea to enhance the lives of children in this country, and particularly the day-to-day lives of those with special needs.

Yvonne Dykes is a Year Four teacher at Salusbury Primary School, where Jo has been working with the children: ‘After the yoga the children were able to sit quietly and think about being calm and how it feels. A carefully administered course of yoga classes is really needed. I am convinced that some of our more difficult and behaviourally challenged children need yoga to aid concentration and to feel more positive about themselves.’

When Jo began to see how much could be done with children she envisaged trying to find ways of introducing yoga to as many children as possible. So the idea of The Special Yoga Centre came into being; a place that offered support and wellbeing to families with a daily timetable of classes that provided for both children and adults. The plan was to run the centre as a non-profit organisation with charges on a sliding scale, so enabling the community of teachers to give one-on-one tuition to special needs children with such conditions as autism, epilepsy, Down’s Syndrome, cerebral palsy and microcephaly, as well as other developmental and physical difficulties.

Howard Napper, a fellow yoga teacher of Jo’s and the founder of the Agoy yoga company, is a trustee of The Special Yoga Centre: ‘Jo wanted to integrate yoga into the school system but she also wanted to take it to children that might find the greatest benefits – children with special needs. Over the past few years I’ve watched her challenging journey, which at last is s

OF ALL THINGS: ALL THE RAGE IN INDIA

Sat, 18 Dec 2004 -1:00:00 GMT

A French clown sits in a garden in Gujarat. He is rehearsing, blowing up a balloon using his trumpet. Even when he is not rehearsing, the children around him continue laughing at the seemingly boneless comedy of his body.

In January 2001 an earthquake in Gujarat killed more than 20,000 people. In February 2002 there were Hindu-Muslim riots that threatened to spread across the whole country. In November 2004, in this garden just outside Ahmedabad, the city where the riots raged, a woman is suspended over the heads of the clown and a small crowd of children. She is cocooned in thin cotton 20ft above them, the planes of her body pressing through the sheeting as she emerges: a trapeze-artist butterfly. A strange circus has come to town. Read the full article...

Financial Times, Dec 18, 2004

OLD WORLD CHARM, NEW WORLD SNOBS

Fri, 23 Apr 2004 -1:00:00 GMT

It all depends on your definition of clubability. This is not a question of the difference between clubbing and the club. This is about the new generation of clubs that are so "of the moment" that to pass within their portals is to catch zeitgeist dust, even if it gives you an allergy. As long as you have a gloss wand (for either sex), a colour Blackberry and no free evenings to the end of the organiser's memory, you may enter. Read the full article...

FT.com site, Apr 23, 2004

DOMINICA

Sat, 27 Mar 2004 -1:00:00 GMT

There is an air of permanent Sunday about the island, as though the quality of a soft summer week-end afternoon sits across the serrated contour of the landmass. And that is where the name came from. Columbus first set eye on the island on Sunday 3rd November 1493, and so he named it after the holy day—Domingo. More...

(originally published in The Financial Times 27th March 2004)

SEARCH FOR THE EGOLESS STATE

Fri, 12 Sep 2003 -1:00:00 GMT

So there we were, four of us: a man in orange robes with a dead angel's smile, a tall blonde, a mad cross-eyed woman, and me. We were talking to the man in the robes about the year 1968, when The Beatles turned an obscure town in northern India into the most famous place in the world. Two of us were talking, in Hindi and English, and the mad woman was rolling her eyes a lot - a disconcerting thing when you are trying to talk, translate, and not sit on your microphone pack at the same time - amid the curious breast-like domes, where John, the boys, the babes and the Maharishi once roamed. Read the full article...

FT.com site, Sep 12, 2003

THE ROOTS OF MODERN YOGA

Fri, 12 Sep 2003 -1:00:00 GMT

Some of the main schools now dominant in the west stemmed from one source, Professor T. Krishnamacharya, considered by many to be the father of the modern form. His son, T.K.V Deshikachar, said of yoga at a conference in 1999: "Yoga is like a river that has been flowing for many years. It has now entered the western world. It will have many tributaries, it will swell. Read the full article...

FT.com site, Sep 12, 2003

SERBIA - SHADES OF BOMBAY COLOUR BELGRADE

Fri, 29 Aug 2003 -1:00:00 GMT

Communism was a drab thing, wasn't it? Cement blocks, empty shelves in shops, queues of people with dripping noses, a uniform skin pallor somewhere around hospital-wing grey and blokes in bad macs talking to sexually confused Oxbridge types on park benches about tulips in Amsterdam.

Then there's Bollywood, India's manic film industry and its overseas incarnations - a big, bright spangly-boobs-and-bits thing that took over British lives and magazine pages last year - when Mira Nair's Monsoon Wedding hit the mainstream and Meera Syal's Bombay Dreams became the patron saint of all things Indo-Brit during the long Indian summer of all things sparkly. Read the full article...

Shades of Bombay colour Belgrade
Drab post-communist Serbia is a long way from spangly Bollywood, but Justine Hardy finds it has a vital energy, FT.com site
Published: Aug 29, 2003

THE CRAFT OF TITS AND ARSE

Sat, 1 Jun 2002 -1:00:00 GMT

It’s those feverish dawn dreams that rip you out of sleep, the psychedelic ones in puce and lime, orange and gold, with dancing girls and fat blokes who are always trying to catch you as you try to fly away, the ones where everything is over-lit and over-fed, neon-nausea bright. This sweaty Technicolor hallucination, this spinning core of Hindi film—it’s in your face in every curve of flesh as thick and soft as warm figs, spilling onto hungry chins with the ripeness of it all, figments-on-sea, flesh-on-Arabian Sea.

Bombay-Mumbai, the studio city and fantasy fodder factory of the Subcontinent, an industry that pumps out twice as many pictures a year as Hollywood to satisfy the cravings of its billion strong audience. Welcome to Bollywood, the celluloid city that hides it alchemy among the alleys of rotting flesh and star jasmine.

Shubash Ghai, showman, director, purveyor of high voltage phantasmagoria in puce and lime, latex and Lycra, sits before me in a director’s chair on the set of his latest designer label dancerama, his mobile in his hand, his chubby fingers pumping the digits at Gameboy speed as he speaks.

‘Do not call it Bollywood. This is a very wrong thing to call it. We are not trying to copy Hollywood. We are making films for an audience of a billion people. Over 80 percent of these people don’t have enough food in their bellies. Our country does not provide its people with pool halls, basketball courts and video parlours, so we make films for them that will let them forget their lives for three hours. We create total fantasy, not the polished reality that Hollywood portrays. Never forget that, never forget that we are making films that allow people to believe for three hours that they are not poor and hungry.’ Ghai closes his eyes to end his speech and the chubby fingers begin to pump again.

And across town in a cell another movie-dream broker is awaiting trial. When Bharat Shah was arrested in January 2001 a significant number of the films in production in and around Bombay went on hold. He was financing them. Shah is a diamond merchant of Koh-i-noor proportions who has crossed over into movies, or to be more precise into movie finance. He was arrested for having direct links with underworld characters that reap rewards from the filmi world of Bombay: filmi, of Hindi film, of the fantasy fodder factory. The filmi dons collect their dues in foreign film rights and distribution deals in return for backing given, and favours done, Sicilian-style but with darker glasses and worse lapels. If the directors and actors don’t pay they get shot. Very simple. Very final. Bharat Shah is still being held without bail under the state’s anti-organised crime act.

Fantasy and dirty money, fluffy stuff and real live hit men, all hooked up with the Boy meets Girl formula and Hindi ditties danced around trees in wet saris. Adolescent boys jostle in the cheap seats, hot and hard, their necks craned back as fountains spurt forth when Girl arches away from Boy’s lingering touch up there on the silver screen. Secret sex sold in song and dance routines to about 23 million people a day who are hungry for romance, or just plain hungry. The dons go home with the big haul while so many of the men and women of India go home to hollow arranged marriages with love in their hearts and irritation at the beggars on the road. And all this comes at just 50 rupees (about 74 pence) a shot.
So, we laugh at the movies that are pumped out like so many gallons per minute from a mass-sucking milking machine. Or rather we were laughing at the biceps in neoprene, and sprayed-on and upon sari routines, until it was decided that Karma kitsch was bindas-cool. A year ago faces went blank as I raved about the sculptured rarity of the hottest new star Hrithik Roshan’s upper arms, and the flick of his hip as the bhangra music ramped up for the semi

THE HOUSE OF BLUE MANGOES BY DAVID DAVIDAR

Fri, 1 Mar 2002 -1:00:00 GMT

Out of the heat and ferment of the very southern tip of India come the blue mangoes of Chevathar, fruit ‘so sweet that after you’ve eaten one you cannot taste sugar for three days.’ The mangoes, the river after which they are named, and the similarly eponymous village, are imagined, as are the three castes that David Davidar uses as his vehicles for the great truth of India: everything changes but nothing alters. To carry his story he employs three generations of the same family, the Dorais, who, at the start of the book in 1899, are the main landowners of Chevathar, and Christians in the face of the caste tensions of the time.

Out of the introductory steam of the licking tongue tip set between the coasts of Coromandel and Malabar comes the pacesetter, the rape of a young girl. The crime is a hangover from the infamous Breast Wars of 1859. The women of the lower castes had to leave their breasts uncovered for the pleasure and perusal of their caste superiors. When Christianity and missionary zeal made its mark in the region those who converted were encouraged to cover their breasts. Riots ensued. The flames died down, but the resentment lingered on, like the sweetness of the blue mangoes.

So, a young girl is raped and then commits suicide in the aftermath. Solomon Dorai, the first patriarch of the family that we meet, is killed in the fight that follows. His elder son Daniel turns to medicine, while his golden younger son fails to fulfill his burnish. Aaron Dorai dies in prison serving a life sentence of his involvement with the freedom fighters. Daniel restores the family wealth through his invention, Dr Dorai’s Moonwhite Cream, guaranteed to give the paler complexion yearned for by the women of India as the freedom fighters struggle to get the pale faces off their patch. Daniel Dorai returns to Chevathar to build Doraipuram, a kind of family kibbutz. The House of the Blue Mangoes is at its heart, just as the naming of the house comes in the very heart of the book, carefully picked and placed, like the blue mangoes. Daniel’s son Kannan defies his father for love of an Anglo girl. He tries to re-invents himself as a pukka sahib on a tea estate up in the hills as his marriage fails, and his identity fades. Daniel’s ensuing death is perhaps the finest part of the book. The keenly attended reading of his will promises everything and delivers nothing to those who sit in greedy anticipation. Kannan’s tea career culminates in a curious though beautifully fashioned non sequitur about a man-eating tiger.

If writing is a science then David Davidar has written a great book. If writing is invention then he has studied his craft to the point where the intangible has been almost diluted from the ether. As the head of Penguin India he must have mulled over many great novelists during the ten-year gestation period of this novel. He draws from these to write of people who live by duty and, in the sensual fecundity of the south, they seem sometimes desiccated, as if hammered into their roles as history marches past their lives, sometimes through an open window, sometimes with the sound shut out. The House of Blue Mangoes is a perfect body of work, honed and polished to a high gloss, but at times its soul is wanting.

Bollywood Boy by Justine Hardy is published on 18 April by John Murray

(originally published in The Times March 2002)

DEATH BY FIRE - MALA SEN

Fri, 1 Mar 2002 -1:00:00 GMT

There are intersections of fact and figures in India that are too hard to ignore:

In a survey of 1,200 babies born in one year among the Kallar caste near Madurai in Tamil Nadu in South India, 600 were girls. 570 of those were dead within days of being born. Causes of death were varied and questionable.

An abortion clinic in a town in Central India gave the following annual statistic. Out of 8,000 abortions, 7,000 were female foetuses. The exception being that of a Jewish woman who wanted a daughter.

Every year between twenty and thirty thousand women in India allegedly die in what are called dowry cases. The scooter or colour television promised by the bride’s family was not delivered and the girl was punished with death or disfigurement.

60% of women in Indian prisons are over 60 years old. They are almost without exception the mother-in-laws of alleged victims in dowry cases.

In most rural areas of India there is a literacy rate of only about 20% among women.

India’s population of over a billion is approximately 70% rural.

Mala Sen, already seen in India by some as a radical figure for having taken on the subject of Phoolan Devi, the Bandit Queen, has wrapped herself around the subjects of the opening statistics, sati, dowry death and female infanticide in modern India. But this is not a book specifically about those three things. It is a very personal account of one woman’s reactions to three horrific crimes against women in India. The first is sati and the case of Roop Kanwar, a young bride of 18, who committed sati in 1987, in the village of Deorala in Rajasthan. The second is dowry death. Maria Selvi, a dark-eyed beauty who looks after Sen when she stays in the hill station of Kodaikanal in Tamil Nadu, tells Sen the utterly horrific story of how she was drenched in kerosene by her husband and set alight. Selvi did not die though her life was torn apart. The third is about Karrupayee, a young woman from the Kallar caste in Tamil Nadu, the first woman in India to be convicted of murdering her baby daughter. Sen follows these three stories and intertwines her own. She unravels each one like a detective, her writing deft in its use of detail. As the reader you are never quite sure whether a fact is just an etching of description or a major piece of the jigsaw. It fast paces the book.

There are many graphic things that choke you, others that are utterly depressing. A line from Roop Kanwar’s aunt combines many of the sentiments that Sen tries to explore on her journey. The old widow tells her: ‘If you expect nothing you will never be disappointed.’ And it is this worn out acceptance of the uneducated, voiceless role of women in 70% of India that leaves such a bitter taste. Mala Sen has not ranted as an enflamed feminist, even though so many of her childhood friends in India have become key figures in the feminist movement. She has clearly shown in the telling of her tale that the women of India are, in many cases, as guilty as the men of perpetuating the horrendous crimes against humanity shown in the opening linking statistics.

(originally published in The Times March 2002)

DANCING GHOSTS

Mon, 1 Jan 2001 -1:00:00 GMT

High up on the road that runs between Srinigar and Leh is a town that every traveller to India has seen a hundred times while bouncing across chunks of country on the springless seats of local buses. You have watched countless chubby heroes and heroines bouncing around its slopes and pretty tree-lined paths in a string of over-coloured, under-directed Hindi films. And for 17 hours on the loop those Hindi films blared out to the happy passengers. They merrily nodded along to the soundtracks, as you pushed a goat out of your face and tried to ignore the combined essences of the farmyard and vomit. Hence the piece of advice we all pass on to those who have not been to India before:

‘Take earplugs.’

‘Do Indians snore a lot?’ The Indian innocent asks.

‘They do, but you will need them for travelling on buses.’

I use my earplugs all the time in Kashmir now. The Hindi film location on the Srinigar-Leh road is no longer the honeymooners paradise that it once was, and no bhangra Bollywood dance sequences have been filmed there for several years . The nights I was there I slept with earplugs to lessen the sound of shelling. The young officer from the Rashtriya Rifles regiment who had been assigned to look after me asked me why I was putting them in. I told him I had not been able to sleep for the previous three nights because of the shelling. I was so tired I was not sure whether I had just been hallucinating about Joan Collins on a waterbed in a scene from The Bitch or whether the shelling was getting to me.

‘I think I have stopped noticing,’ the young officer said.

When he was looking after me in April 2000 he had been up in Kashmir for 18 months without leave, right through a major conflict between Pakistan and India that ran from May until July 1999, and then right through the heightened border tension when General Pervez Musharraf led the coup in Pakistan in October 1999.

‘Before the coup in October last I knew that if I did not have leave soon I would go mad. Now it is so long I feel numb. My wife had a baby during the war in June last year and so far I have only seen snaps of my son. I hope that it will be possible to be home for his first birthday,’ the young captain said, trying to smile.

He referred to the fighting before the coup as a war. The rest of the world had called it a conflict. India has marked it down as a war because the Indian Army made the most strategic gains. It was their war. The victory parades were hollow, many of the wounded and disabled hidden away. Kashmir is not a place of victories and defeats. It is a theatre of modern terrorist warfare, constant and unpredictable; a place where the enemy can be invisible or your own son or brother.

The young captain and I spent a month together, going through the border towns along the Line of Control, the famously fragile disputed border area of Kashmir between Pakistan and India. Sometimes we stayed in army quarters. That was fine for him, just the usual scene, but it embarrassed me because a couple of junior officers would get kicked out of their room or tent so that the female firangi (foreign) journalist could have some privacy. They had to make do doubling-up elsewhere.

The young captain and I spent a few days in a bunker when there was a local flare-up after some terrorist insurgents were reported to have crossed over from Pakistan, supposedly heading for one of the Taliban’s training camps high up above the voluptuous valley. While the shelling continued we played cards most of the time, and the boys talked about what they were going to do when they finally went on leave. They had all been in Kashmir for over a year. I was the first woman that they had lived around since they had last been on leave. They were polite and bemused. It was while we were playing cards that they talked about how much they misse

YOGA RETREATS

Fri, 1 Dec 2000 -1:00:00 GMT

1) Windfire Yoga, Can Am, Ibiza

Om – set at the end of a donkey track. The house is half an hour’s walk through fields and villages to the wild cliffs and beaches of the quiet north of rave, disco-biscuit island. It is built on the model of a traditional farmhouse. Bedrooms are shared and of the faintly dormitory variety. There are teepees for those who want to take to the wilds. Yoga – purist school of Ashtanga Yoga, the yoga of eight limbs, very nice limbs if the polished bodies of Madonna and Geri Halliwell are anything to go by, the real limbs being: yama-ethical discipline, niyama-self-observation, asana-postures, pranayama-breathing, pratyahara-withdrawal of the senses, dharana-concentration, dhyana-meditation, samadhi-the state of joy and peace. Guru – Godfrey Devereux, one of the leading Ashtanga teachers and practitioners around, set up Can Am in 1996. He is a teacher who pushes you right to the edge until you teeter. Rhythm – each day follows a fairly strict yogic regime of asana (posture) practice, brunch, karma yoga (stick-gathering, bathroom cleaning for the greater good), some free time, more asanas, supper and a chat from Godfrey or meditation. Ambrosia – macrobiotic diet based on brown rice and using as much local produce as possible. Can Am has a very interesting house brew of twig tea. Elixirs – walking among the sabina trees and burying your head in Ibithencan rosemary bushes when another bowl of brown rice is just too much. Nirvana factor – yes, thighs you dreamt about after a week of downward-facing dog, seriously cleaned out body, soul and bowels. This is a serious retreat for those in search of a place to withdraw. Filthy lucre - holidays start at £200 a week including accommodation, food and yoga. For reservations contact: email: bookings@windfireyoga.com or tel: 00 34 971 187 996

2) Sivananda Yoga Retreat, Nassau, Bahamas

Om – island setting with all the fun of the sun and the sea. The main house is built with a balance of indoor and outdoor rooms. It is simple but comfortable, with communal eating and shared or single rooms. Children are very welcome and are half rate up the age of 12. Be warned that your children will always be better and bendier than you. Yoga – Sivananda, a softer physical style than the sweatier schools of Ashtanga, Iyengar, and Bikram. Guru – Swami Sivananda who started the movement in the 1920s, so around in spirit though not in person. There are latter-day swamis who run the 87 Sivananda ashrams and centres around the world. Rhythm – it is run as an ashram based on the five Sivananda principals of asanas (postures), pranayama (breathing), dhyana (meditation), karma yoga (more stick gathering) and diet. It is relaxed but all visitors are requested to attend all asana and meditation practices. Ambrosia – based on the South Indian Ayurvedic diet of using local vegetarian produce and eating it calmly and quietly at body temperature. A lot tastier than it sounds and eating without chitter chatter becomes strangely enjoyable, you realise how much taste you miss through chat. Elixirs – well, you’re in the Bahamas. Nirvana factor – return cleansed at every level though in less whipcord thigh fashion than CanAm. Filthy lucre - standard rate $89 a day including food, single accommodation, all yoga and workshops. Information and booking: email: More...

(originally published in The Sunday Telegraph March 1999)

UPSIDE DOWN IN SRI LANKA

Fri, 1 Jan 1999 -1:00:00 GMT

As experiments in organic living go this one is absolutely nothing to do with mung beans, cheesecloth or patchouli oil.

Sri Lanka has always been a bit of a place of wonder, sitting just across the Gulf of Mannar from the rawness of India. And plopped right in the heartland of this country is one of those places that makes your average travel writer momentarily consider flinging the laptop to aside, girding a sarong and taking to the simple life. These are the kind of places that really should remain a secret. I should stop right now but I can't and I won't, so I'll just shoot my mouth off and probably live to regret it. More...

(originally published in The Telegraph January 1999)

PORTUGAL - AN ALENTEJANO VINEYARD

Tue, 1 Sep 1998 -1:00:00 GMT

'You have to remember that this is a very local winery. The people come with their flagons and fill up straight from the barrels. This is an important part of the life of Mouchão.' And away the villagers and the estate workers go with the red froth on the new wine still bubbling in the necks of their flagons. More...

(originally published in Conde Nast Traveller UK edition September 1998)

YOGA HOLIDAYS

Sun, 2 Mar 1997 -1:00:00 GMT

Yoga has returned to the limelight, coinciding nicely with modern man's feelings of spiritual emptiness and physical exhaustion, arriving just in time to rescue us from darkness in our higher chakras and rigidity in our lower backs. The image of lumpy leotards and boiled cabbage community centre classes is gone, replaced by a lean new version. Yoga has been re-packaged as a mental and physical survival kit for the millennium. More...

(originally published in The Sunday Times 2nd March 1997)

SHOPPING AND FAKING

Fri, 1 Nov 1996 -1:00:00 GMT

Five thousand miles may be a long way to go shopping but, let's face it, there are those among us who have travelled further.

Of course it was a good idea. How could it not be? Save thousands and wallow amongst the sensuous stench of Delhi with all the technicoloured parphanelia of India thrown in as a bonus. More...

(originally published in Evening Standard November 1996)

RIDING WITH THE BERBERS

Tue, 1 Nov 1994 -1:00:00 GMT

We were given Barbe-Arabian horses to ride across the High Atlas. The Berbers speak of them in hushed tones as if they are referring to deities. They are pretty little things with floating manes and dished faces. The old Berber tribesman walked just ahead showing his apple trees and rubbing the red mountain dust off the ripe fruit. His long hooded robe was trailing on the ground and each time he turned to say something he would trip on the hem, spit in the dust in disgust and continue his sentence. He took an old bone-handled knife out of the folds of his robe and cut one of the apples, leaving a slight rust mark on the white fruit. He held one of the halves. More...

(originally published in The European in November 1994)

GREECE - AL�NISSOS - THE SILENT ISLAND

Sat, 1 Jan 1994 -1:00:00 GMT

On display in the shop was a blown-up article from an international newspaper. It listed the places where you could really hide from the attentions of the world if you needed to become removed and anonymous. The man in the bicycle shop put his hands on his hips and stuck out his moussaka belly with pride. He slapped it and smiled at the solid sound.

"Tomorrow it is going to rain and that is good for the plants and for the air and it is good for you too because then you will be able to smell the atmosphere." His accent was Athens-on-Thames, almost the mimic doing the souvlaki salesman in a comedy sketch. More...

(originally published in The European in 1994)

FRANCE - ALONG THE PEAGE

Fri, 1 Jan 1993 -1:00:00 GMT

Sometimes the promises may be a little hollow and the veneer on the reproduction furniture a touch too thin, the pillows a bit hard and the sauces reduced just too far, but other times it is all run as if Madame La Duchesse had just left for a quick flurry to Versailles to teeter amongst the courtesans. More...

(originally published in The European in 1993)