Two Sides of the Same Bridge

A highlight for travelers visiting Africa is white-water rafting the Nile just north of its principle source, the great Lake Victoria, near the town of Jinja, Uganda. There are five Grade 5 rapids, several points of Grades 3 and 4, and inevitably the inflatable rubber raft you ride capsizes, the violent current swallows you whole and tumbles you like a filthy sock, but because of your life jacket you are spit back up towards the surface. There are crocodiles lurking in the area, but the agency that sponsors these excursions has the rafts escorted by members of the Uganda Olympic squad, who kayak ahead chasing off carnivorous predators with good solid paddle whacks. As a preliminary, release forms are signed beforehand and when you are being helplessly tossed about the foamy currents, the thought crosses your mind that a crocodile bite would hurt, perhaps gravely. Much of the thirty kilometer journey, however, is a torpid, tranquil drift downriver, eating watermelon down to the rinds, gabbing about 'where you from?' and gazing with lazy, sunburnt eyes at the jungle-- a lush and flourishing wilderness crowding the river's edges. The boat courses through a quiet, undeveloped Africa, not quite tame yet not very mysterious either. Something, some unquantifiable emotion seems to be missing, or perhaps it has just been lost.

At the end of the journey, the rafts capsize for the last time. The tourists are thrust into the rapids where two strong currents collide to form a whirlpool nicknamed 'The Bad Place.' Afterwards, soaked adrenaline junkies tramp up the hillside (there are porters to take care of the rafts) where a large banquet has been prearranged in a large, grassy picnic area overlooking the river. Stacked on huge plates are piles of grilled pork, fried chicken, and salads. The coolers containing ice-cold Nile Specials, the local Ugandan beer, are completely raided within thirty minutes. Later that night at Bujagali campsite, amid conventional rock and roll anthems and the cash bar making a handsome take,  the rafters are called together to enjoy a DVD production edited to bam-bam go-go music from The White Stripes and Nelly. The video stars we rafters, being smashed and throttled and occasionally surmounting the brutish currents heroically. Much whooping and whistling punctuate the larger wipeouts.

Of course the DVD is available for purchase, $45, which sounded to me a bit of a kick in the stomach after the $95 price tag charged for the trip itself. Cash preferred but credit cards are accepted with a five percent surcharge added. "Sweet!" was the buyer's exclamation handing over his greenbacks. A prefabbed memory, now post-packaged.

This is the other side of Africa. Not all the continent is defined by civil wars, diamond mines, child soldiers and the smuggling of antiquities. A busy industry for outdoorsmen in particular thrives on the border of darkness from which Kurtz never returned. Enjoying Africa at its most picturesque or romantic is not for cheapskates. It takes a solid credit rating to go on safari ($65 to $200 a day), to climb Kilamanjaro (at least $800 to do it appropriately) or even visit an economically disadvantaged South African township ($50).

Many of the continent's prime visiting centers run a very sophisticated tourist infrastructure. These businesses are run with foreign capital catering to a clientele almost uniformly Euro-American (there were no African tourists getting dunked in the Nile when I was there). Perhaps that would be inevitable in a pattern that many Africans perceive as an outgrowth of neo-colonization. According to international trade laws operating ostensibly in the interests of debt-ridden Third World countries (encouraging foreign investors to do business in Africa requires a hefty lure), transnational companies build branch offices, use trademarks and most importantly, repatriate their earnings. Thus, lucrative profits cannot be taxed by the host country, denying revenue for improving basic infrastructure. There are many ugly words for this sort of parasitism, but the designation ballyhooed by boosters is the much more marketable term, 'globalization.'  

Perhaps nothing emblemizes this trend better than enormous 4WD utility vehicles preferred by young backpackers on overland journeys. Customized itineraries between Masai Mara and Cape Town provide the tourist with a desired experience without having to get one's hands dirty. These monster cars are designed with optimal window space: mobile isolation chambers perfect for gawking at perceived dangers, whether they be maneating lions or savvy street hustlers in Nairobi.

photo by ARIKO

About a thousand miles south of Jinja, on the southern tip of Zambia lies a town called Livingstone.  The square concrete one- and two-story units and bubble-gum advertising remind me of an ordinary town in the California suburbs. It is a rather unremarkable place, colorless for an African city. However, the ubiquity of billboard signs, upmarket hotels, and big family restaurants suggest prosperity. There is money to be made in Livingstone, a boom town in the vicinity of Victoria Falls, arguably the greatest waterfall in the world.

Victoria Falls (another colonial sticker) is known among locals as Mosi-oa-Tunya in the indigenous Kololo language: 'The Smoke that Thunders' (a much more appropriate appellation). At 1708 meters wide and falling between 90 and 108 meters it is the largest waterfall on earth, so large in fact, that it straddles two nations, Zambia and Zimbabwe. In 1855 its Anglican name was christened in honor of the Queen of England by the Scottish explorer and missionary, Dr. David Livingstone, who was exploring the interior of Africa by means of the Zambezi River. Today, most backpackers have given it the shorthand epithet 'Vic Falls.'

Because of its runaway inflation and resulting crime waves, I had no intention of visiting Zimbabwe, content to view the cataract on the Zambian side. The lip of the falls is accessed along a pedestrian walkway. The morning I was there was bright and beautiful, the park crowded, mostly with African tourists. Engaged couples come here for wedding photographs, as cascades (think Niagara Falls) for some reason have always figured prominently in the romantic psyche. An ebullient atmosphere pervades the occasion and the rising mist from the surging torrents feels cool on this warm, winter day.

The falls of Mosi-oa-Tunya are a phenomenon to itself, but for some it's just another waterfall. For those with greater expectations, numerous activities abound. Livinstone and its sister city on the Zimbabwe side, Vic Falls, are competitively self-aggrandizing, both boasting credentials to be Africa's adrenaline capital.  From either side of the falls extreme sports enthusiasts can arrange skydiving, bungee jumping, microlighting, abesailing, white-water rafting and canoeing on the Zambezi, gorge-swinging, river-boarding, horseback riding, elephant-back safaris, tandem kayaking, jetboating, and sunset booze cruises. 

It's all there. All you need is the cash.

I didn't have the cash or at least I didn't have money allocated for bungee jumping but I did want to check it out before I left. The jumping point was not at the falls themselves but a fifteen minute walk outside the national park to a bridge that represents in both physical and psychological terms the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe. To access the bridge immigration officials issue you a sightseeing pass allowing entrance into this 'no-man's land.'

The jump is into a huge ravine carved by the Zambezi and extraordinary geological forces. It is the second-highest jump in the world and when I arrived at the site it was a hullabaloo. I did not see any alcohol but a fiesta temperament prevailed. I could not believe the Top 40 teenybopper punk shrieking from tinny speakers (wouldn't you think the thunder emanating from the world's greatest waterfall had already enhanced the drama of the moment?). Those yet to take the fall paced the railing in the anticipatory adrenaline rush while the just-initiated, flushed and effusive, were frothing with excited, hurried talk. Jumpers on the platform sported huge 'can't-blame-me-for-trying' grins. You could see their chests rising with great gulps of air, the survival instinct manifesting itself-- a contact high that makes your own heart begin to rush when the countdown is cried by the gleeful participants.

"Five. Four. Three. Two. One!"

The jumpers plummeted into the gorge, popping back up with the 'hang loose' sign, A-oking their dopamine high before bouncing away again like ham dangling loosely from a tethered meat hook.

What is particularly surreal about the experience and sums up the two conditions of this continent with alarming eloquence is the stream of Africans on the other side of the bridge shuffling along. They look exhausted, weak, and some of them from the condition of their clothes, nearly indigent. Why were they crossing this bridge? For family? work? a new beginning? And what did they think of the sport of wealthy white men hurling themselves into oblivion for a hundred dollars a pop when there was a famine of maize crop in Zimbabwe and 50% unemployment in Zambia? They passed on the other side of the bridge inconspicuous to the jumpers because they did not get in the way and hardly made a sound.

I watched three guys find their rush, a future cocktail boast, and returned to the falls. On my way at the Zambian checkpoint a large clunker of a bus coughed to a halt in front of the fenced gates. The roof of the bus was loaded with suitcases, garbage bags, even furniture, perhaps the total belongings of some of the passengers. One of the park's many baboons, a curious and mischievous rabblerouser leaped onto the roof and moseyed through the chattel, scavenging for edibles. An apoplectic driver hopped out of the bus and shook his fist at the primate, who reacted to the man's curses indifferently. Travelers, slouched and exhausted, filed past the driver expressionlessly to present their passports and paperwork to immigration officials so that they could cross the bridge, where they would rejoin the bus and continue onwards towards wherever they were headed, to Zimbabwe, or beyond.
Edited from an earlier draft dated 2005

The Serendipity Factor Divided by the Butterfly Effect

Those skilled in 'Where's Waldo?' workbooks would perform admirably in any sort of safari but particularly in one in which we are searching for the Siberian Crane. You presume we would have to journey into the Russian heartland in order to spot this large and gorgeous bird, yawning its dazzling wingspan, wading in some ice-cold creek, scouring for small fish with an elongated, orange beak. Well, the Siberian Crane is a migratory bird, sensibly fleeing the miserable Russian winter for the savannah plains of Keoladeo National Park in India's eastern Rajasthan. Only, this year, as it has been annually for nearly a decade, the rains failed, the monsoon didn't hit and the water levels at the park looked depressingly shallow. So the birds did not come, flying the proverbial coop, resulting in a tranquil landscape, but eerily so.

Fortitude, patience, and an encyclopedic knowledge make bird watching quite worthwhile; skills most of us lack in considerable sums. Nevertheless, I journeyed into the park optimistically. Hardly an expert on the birds of South Asia, I was mostly excited to ride a bicycle through a national park. Before that, I hired the service of a cycle rickshaw driver hoping he might acquaint me with the prime vista spots.

Unfortunately, he was able to reveal very little. The birds must have flown across the continent, thousands of miles, bursting with anticipatory glee for the Indian winter only to be disappointed by the water levels and compelled to continue their peregrinations. Or had their expectations already been lowered considerably? Maybe this year they flew right by, or simply paused long enough to rinse out the dust.

As we rode past kiosk signposts with illustrations of the migratory birds, the rickshaw driver mumbled in a low voice, "No come." The greylag goose: "No come." The Asian Open Bill Stork: "No come." The truly radical Painted Stork: "No come." But he pointed out the kiosks, regardless-- something to look at since there was nothing much moving in the trees. "Many parrot sightings," someone at the hotel had quipped facetiously. He might have added crows, swallows and various sundry fowl familiar from home.

There are no Big Five birds to market the pastime (as there is such a trademark in African safaris where you can count on five fingers your sightings of rhinos, cape buffalo, elephants, leopards, and lions). Like all cultural subgroups, birders have a particular vernacular that isolates them from the greater population who "doesn't get it." One theory that explains their phenomenon is its relation to the male hunting instinct. Another is that it appeals to the male habit of "systemizing" (men are disproportionately represented in this particular pursuit). Birders can be handy if you are in the market for new binoculars or a telephoto lens. Of course they have a thriving online presence. On birdwatching.com, you can peruse new technologies ("gifts for birdwatchers"), advice on birding with your kids, tips for "watching birds with your ears", and even a special section entitled "Birding for Hard Times," which contains a number of bromidic themes referring to the activity's high returns on a low-cost investment: stress relief, good exercise, family fun, friendship, and happiness: "the ultimate wealth." However, in Keoladeo, morale was low among the amateur ornithologists, birders, and bird nerds, who grumbling into their zoom scope, spoke wistfully of better days.

Riding through a small, narrow path on my bicycle I spotted an altogether different sign posted explaining all so much: "In your next incarnation you might be an endangered species. Please help save the Siberian Crane." Appealing to one's better karmic instincts is a nice maneuver, especially in a Hindu nation. However, as far as animal conservation goes, India's karma is somewhat dubious. Bureaucracy has done little to heed the warnings of animal rights activists. The Bengal Tiger-- one of the symbols of India's majestic history and its many kingdoms-- is near extinction. As for the birds, the droughts have not helped. Yet even when the monsoons don't fail, there is not enough water for India's ever-expanding population. And as tourism and industry improves the lot of many, an emerging middle class is going to use more water simply because it can. With the arrival of new money lifestyles evolve in kind. Consequently, when golf courses go up so does the dust from an empty lake. And the birds: they just fly on, abandoning the park for something greener, wetter, and perhaps more pristine, wherever that may be...

I spent two days exploring Keoladeo. Unfortunately, officials insist that visitors use bicycles issued by the National Park. Thus your sole option is a noisy, clanky, single gear bicycle, which tends to notify most wildlife of one's presence long before you are able to view the animal yourself. There is no element of surprise. Nevertheless, there were a few moments of accidental sightings. I surprised a family of jackals savoring a cow's carcass and a mongoose and I enjoyed a fierce stare down. I was charmed by mud flap turtles, giant creatures, wrestling in their gooey environment beneath a small copse of deciduous. Owls and kingfishers delighted.

And that night I dreamt of the Siberian Crane. She was lovely in that cavernous, blue sky.

Edited from an earlier draft dated 2006

A View From the Train

photo by ARIKO

Something is amiss on the express train from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, to Kapira Mposhi, Zambia. As I awaken I want to urinate but struggle to dismiss this urge, as the train is stopped and one is only supposed to use the commode when the train is in motion, as to better disseminate waste. It is just after eight in the morning and everything is very still and soundless. Lying there for several minutes wishing a return to deep sleep, I overhear a passenger talking to one of the conductors; his english isn't good and the duration of the dilemma is not clear. He may have said it was a six-hour delay or six hours to our destination. The locomotive is broken down and they are waiting for someone to arrive and fix it.

The Tazara line between Dar es Salaam and Kapira Mposhi is one of Africa's most famous railways. It's nearly 2000 kilometers long but not long enough. It finishes in Kapira Mposhi, a depot for copper transport but rather inconvenient for most travelers as a terminus goes. Kapiri is the hub of the region's copper belt but commuters and wayfarers must take a three-hour bus ride to Lusaka, the capital of Zambia, for all ongoing transportation options. Thus the railway feels uncompleted, as if the money just ran out.

No matter, the Tazara line is the technological pride of Zambia, as the country, fetal-shaped and perhaps its potential unborn, is large but landlocked and without the rail system could not conduct its commerce with nearly as much efficiency. Zambia is poor in comparison to its southern Africa neighbors, especially Botswana, Namibia, and South Africa, who have benefitted from lucrative amounts of diamonds and uranium under their terrain. Zambia is at the mercy of the copper market which fluctuates more often towards depression than boom and the country often collapses into famine. Unlike other African nations it has a crisis of resources and lacks its neighbors' potential for growth.

Built as a socialist project co-sponsored by the Chinese, the Tazara line has fallen into disrepair. Millions of dollars are required to rehabilitate tracks and the locomotives themselves. Workers' paychecks are overdue. Of course, the financial crisis has affected the price of copper and volume of traffic, underperforming at all levels. Ironically, the service will betray its people's power intentions and be privatized, most likely sold to foreign capitalists from... China.

The train has been stopped for nearly three hours when I rise from my couchette to investigate. Outside my window on the adjoining rails, children wiggle in discarded secondhand rags in an attempt to stay warm. It is quite cold in the winter morning-- the train had traveled a great distance from Dar es Salaam and we were probably close to a thousand kilometers south of the equator and well into the region's Southern Highlands-- but the kids giggle and hop. They are twirling. That was the thing about Africa that struck the visitor, the streams of joyful children, dressed in scuzzy hand-me-downs, bereft of baubles, doohickeys and knickknacks who had but their own bodies to bid play, a joy of movement, of jumping and leaping and laughing. It's not at all easy to romanticize-- too many are pushed into labor at a young age. Education is something they will never have. Instead, they carry baskets of bananas, oranges, potato chips; the stronger ones wield buckets of bottled juice and soda. They hustle for trade wherever the train slows to dislodge passengers. Many have a habit of standing still, trying to look you in the eye long after you have turned their offers down. There is a vast range of emotions to draw from the window of the train and the casual observer can be confused as to whether his hopefulness can be substantiated or is just plain wishful thinking.

photo by ARIKO

There is nothing to look at beyond the depot where we are broken down and so the children don't intend to leave in spite of the windy winter chill. It is unlikely they see many foreigners and they cast playful glances at the window. It is an eventful day when the locomotive breaks down near their village, a spectacle to be appreciated. This is backwater country and mostly the train charges past imperviously, not disclosing its myth or mystery.

The train begins chugging again but we're several hours late. You take arrival times in Africa as optimistic conjecture-- an arrival time is a great variable.

The train's compartments are somewhat cushy and travel in first class isn't crowded as each room contains four beds. My girlfriend and I are sharing quarters with an elder Englishman and his African paramour, a young Tanzanian with beautiful plaited hair and jackpot eyes. Bearded, portly, and a gentleman rough around the edges, Raymond the Englishman, conveys his opinions with a frank earnestness and upon complicated questions elaborates for Judy, his beloved, so that she can follow in on his talk. He is patronizing at times, offhandedly acknowledging socioeconomic discrepancies and her coming up in the world with his numerous references to Judy's matriculation in a computer course. He's old enough to be her dad and probably big enough to crush her but there is something honest and intimate in their relationship nonetheless.

Raymond often refers to a detailed topographical map. You could almost picture him as a lieutenant for Mr. Cecil Rhodes, the great imperialist and diamond magnate, who once envisioned a transcontinental Cape-Cairo railway that had it been realized, would have been a fairly profitable crown jewel in the British empire.  Raymond's giddiness peaks as we zoom past some godforsaken station so that he can correspondingly zero in on the map. Only do the curmudgeonly aspects of his personality come out when dealing with moneychangers, bureaucrats and dangerous traveling logistics. "Thieves," he snarls at me, under his breath when stray African eyes linger as they pass our compartment: "Will you please shut the door?"

There are few Western travelers. Some Australians have a problem with two intoxicated customs authorities who board the train and demand $25 for a Zambian visa when it is clearly not required. These officials are very drunk and stubborn and only become more angry when the afflicted Australians point out the absence of any documentation to prove their point. There is a middle-aged American academic traveling onwards to Botswana; she is performing a comparative study between HIV/AIDS in that country and Tanzania ("Do you want me to go into this disaster...?"). Otherwise, the other passengers are Africans, many of whom crowd the dining car: inebriated commuters hollering to be heard over the thundering din of the locomotive. They yell for more beer from exasperated waiters, suffering these humiliations in kitschy uniforms of slacks, bowties, and leopard-print vests. The beer is flowing but otherwise the kitchen suffers issues of privation. There was no coffee loaded onboard in Dar es Salam. And culinary selections run the gamut from fried chicken to fried beef to fried fish. Being that the chicken is woefully undernourished and the fish terrifying, I subsist on beef, requiring serious mastication for its leathery toughness.

Upon awakening, I had originally surmised that our train's delay had not been due to an engineering malfunction but that the police had mandated our delay in order to investigate. For the night before the breakdown a passenger had been caught stealing from the cupboard. Thrashed by an angry mob, the offender was marched down through the train to the caboose and involuntarily expelled to the abyssal night. This was not uncommon in Africa, where vigilante justice compensates for inadequate investments in security.

This uproar is a brief spark of frenzy. Mostly I sit back and watch the countryside. The railway runs through the Selous Game Reserve but despite my best efforts for the thrill of a herd of giraffes or elephants viewed from a rushing train there are no lucky sightings. But after so much looking, it hits me: there is so much space in Africa! All one hears on the other side of the ocean is the common refrain of a population spiralling out of control. But the revelation gathered from the train window is that there is space, so much space and Africa is big, so big, you can't write the continent off. Violent dictators, misuse of agricultural land, and the AIDS crisis have done damage but none of it irreprable. There is potential here. Its mark is the untouched land, which reminds me of a 19th century America on the verge of breakthhroughs.

 

For the moment, however, wintertime grips the land in signature despair: yellow grass, weeds, skeletal, half-dressed trees-- and land not yet touched, farmed, irrigated. So much of it. Occasionally the train zips by the occassional village composed of mud and straw, whizzing past the farmer leaning on his shovel to observe the noisy serpentine machine careen past, creating for a brief moment in his day a gust of exuberant pandemonium.

photo by ARIKO

Edited from an earlier draft dated 2005

The Queen of Chapati

During a festival seven years ago, Shashi, a woman of the prestigious Brahmin caste lost her husband when his best friend murdered him over a sum of 35,000 rupees (the equivalent of about $1,250). During the 45-day period of mourning Shashi was not allowed to leave her house and was expected to lament his death with the many members of his family as they arrived day-by-day to pay respects. When it had come time to move on, Shashi was not allowed to remarry or to work, and if she were to follow her role in Hindu tradition she was required to shave her head and dress in white rags, living the remainder of her life in poverty, for those who supposedly knew better held her responsible for this senseless tragedy, which had certainly been a terrible consequence of dour karma. With two young sons to raise the option of renunciating the world was quite unfeasible. She needed work or at least help of some kind but her husband's family, who lived upstairs, refused her requests for aid and in fact stopped paying her utility bills. Shashi's downstairs flat went into a dry darkness, as she lost access to water and electricity. These were the desperate circumstances in which the widowed mother of two had to restart her life.

That Shashi would eventually manage to overcome the tragic circumstances endemic in this "secular democracy" is a tale of perseverance. Her story is not generally heard by most vacationing westerners and is not on Saturday's itinerary sandwiched between Buddhist rock caves and Jain temples. And if it weren't for her ingenuity I might not have been fortunate enough to meet her and her story would have remained an internal affair, a covered-up pimple nevertheless scarring the diamond face of India.

Two Women, Jodhpur

Shashi lives in Udaipur, which any badge-pinned guide worth his hyperbolic salt will tell you, is the "Venice of the Orient," flying past exaggeration into outright distortion, Venice being a coastal city of canals and Udaipur being an inland, aggregated city situated around a lake. The city is certainly most famous for being the primary setting of Octopussy, one of the James Bond franchise episodes in which Roger Moore is at his most cheeky (the movie plays ad nauseum every day in the numerous lakeside restaurants; will play in all likelihood until the end of the world—a waiter told me he's seen the movie 10,000 times). When the monsoons are good and drought is remote the lake shimmers, landmarked by a gorgeous palace in its center (rooms about the better suites running $2,500 a night). In fact, water—as a source of life and nourishment— is nearly supplementary to its aesthetic value, for when the lakebed dries business dies and India being a large country, the tourists roam elsewhere.

Shashi is not from Udaipur but from a neighboring village with very traditional values. Being from a good family of respected caste, Shashi was wedded to a handsome man of similar social standing and solid career prospects. Like most marriages in Hindu tradition, her marriage was arranged and the day before the wedding she had not yet met the man she was to spend the rest of her life with, having only seen his photo once before the ceremony. After the marriage, she left her family and village and the people she had known all her life for the big city.

Her husband ran a lakefront restaurant geared towards tourists. Like nearly all eating establishments in Udaipur, meals were served on the roof with a view to the lake and palace, insinuating the romance of the maharaja and a more gilded age. She bore him two sons and their family lived well. When a ten-day festival came to Udaipur seven years ago, Shashi's husband and his best friend set up a food stall to cater to the crowds. Their profits were excellent and when it came to split the money, the best friend proved to be his worst enemy. After arriving by scooter at his house, the friend suggested supper before business. Unbeknownst to Shashi's husband, the food had been heavily drugged and after he passed out his friend used a plastic rope to strangle him to death. Despite the cover-up, a police investigation found evidence of rope marks but even though the friend was indicted, tried and convicted for murder, he managed to bribe his way through the courts, serving a jail sentence of just one year, allowed to keep the balance of his dirty money.

Meanwhile Shashi received nothing that was rightfully hers and no compensation for the heinous crime. Instead of empathizing with her situation, her husband's family blamed her for the bad luck, cutting off her electricity and water hoping she would go away for good. They lived right upstairs, they saw her every day, and they did nothing for her.

Left to her own device, Shashi betrayed the rules of her caste. She had her sons visit the guesthouses to retrieve laundry, which she washed in the very early morning as not to attract attention for she was not supposed to work. Later she snuck out at dawn to clean hotel rooms. It went on like this for nearly five years, a desperate time with almost no money and both fear and shame dominating her emotions. Then, less than two years ago, one of her sons brought home two Australian tourists who wanted to learn how to make chutney. And that was how she found a way out of the darkness and a calling that would utilize her charms and talents: cooking classes.

In Udaipur, the competition is cutthroat. Around the streets of the tourist enclaves on the north side of the lake, signs, bulletins, and flyers for cooking classes are as ubiquitous as announcements for the 7pm Octopussy showing. Many of these schools have been in operation for years and in becoming profitable have, in the balance, lost a certain homespun touch. Classes can fill a dozen spots, can charge up to $25, and with nearly all the vegetables prepped there is little hands-on participation for students—consequently the event is more that of an expensive meal rather than a learning experience.

Shashi restricts her classes to three students for that is the limit that can fit comfortably in her kitchen. The kitchen adjoins her living room, where her home-from-school sons put their feet up on the family bed and watch television. It took us four hours to prep and cook the entire menu—masala tea (mixed with fresh-ground cardamon, peppercorn, and ginger), potato and onion pakora, coriander and mango chutneys, aubergine and tomato curry, vegetable palau, naan with cheese and tomato, potato parantha, coconut sweet parantha, and a stack of chapatti, the dishes variously spiced with anise, oregano, garlic, tumeric, cumin, chili pepper and sugar, a comprehensive overview of a very regular Indian diet.

Two years ago when Shashi began her classes she did not speak a word of English. Raised in a Rajasthani village and a fixture in the household under her husband's shadow, she did not learn any vocabulary until she discovered her talent for teaching. In the beginning she relied on hand signals for communication, but being attentive to the tourists' a-ha exclamations regarding what she wanted to express, Shashi catalogued a phonetic dictionary of common words, culinary and otherwise, that began to pepper her vocabulary: "grind," "stir," "heat," "boil," "flip," "cauliflower," "peas," "waste," "burn," "knead," "dough," "rolling pin," "spatula," and eventually she learned the tragic words which chronicled her life story: "murder," "bad man," "police," "bribe," "injustice," "widow," "bad luck," "abandoned," "shame," "fear." In conversation she makes the grammatical mistakes typical of people speaking English as a foreign language, dropping noun articles and mixing tenses; she has a preference for imperatives ("Flip now!"). Nevertheless, her concise speech is quite clear, her culinary directions nearly flawless, and it is quite a feat to learn how far she has come in so short a time as a result of her assiduous note-taking.

Indian food continues to be a mystery for Westerners. Quality in most restaurants is often elusive. I could taste the difference in the food Shashi taught me to cook: the recipes being quite specific about spice content, length of cooking time, the balance of ingredients. Her precise interpretation of common Indian dishes is spectacular. Having spent six months in India on various trips, the food I cooked under Shashi's guidance had been one of the great meals I have had. She is a bit of an underground sensation in Udaipur, surviving and succeeding on word-of-mouth alone. Still despised by her husband's family she shares the building with, she is now envied for her good luck and the well-deserved popularity that she's earned for herself. Her sons are nearly of age, university-bound, likely for positions of hotel management and decent salaries which according to Shashi means the misshapen fortune that darkly characterized the family in the past is gone and they have grown to be most eligible bachelors.

It's been suggested in some Indian literature that a woman directly transfers her emotions into her chutney so that the eater of samosas and pakoras consumes not only mango, mint, or coriander but regret, sorrow, love, indulgence, heartbreak, tenderness…and perhaps this may be the very reason her meals are so wonderfully palatable. There is a strong, redemptive spirit here, seasoned with salt and lemon juice, blending effortlessly into the chili taste. Like all the very best meals, it is rejuvenating.

Prayers Made, Rishkesh

Edited from an earlier draft dated 2008

To Be Legal Or Not To Be Legal

Drugs are, without a doubt, dangerous. There is nothing to debate there. But so is tobacco and alcohol. Surfing and skateboards are too. In the U.S. alone, there are six million car accidents annually, leaving more than two million with permanent injuries and killing more than 40,000. These are shockingly dangerous numbers. Should the automobile be put on the black market? The debilitating effects of eating junk food daily are well-documented. Bootleg Twinkies? Oh, and what about all those guns?

As Obama said in his inauguration speech, "the time has come to set aside childish things." American leaders have a bad habit of treating its citizens as petty, naughty children, promising to know what's best for us. Perhaps this trend reached its apogee in the Bush years with his terror alerts and the culture of fear that infused his State of the Unions. But although the government might claim to know what's best for us, its pretty clear it doesn't know how to manage money very well. Ten trillion dollars in debt with a huge stimulus package and more tax cuts looming, it's just going to get worse. If we are going to avoid inflation, then we are going to have to act decisively as well as creatively.

Some states, deeply troubled by huge deficits, are trying to legalize some forms of gambling to cover shortfalls. This is a good idea. I don't gamble and feel bad for the families whose fortunes are ruined by addicts but gambling, like all vices, thrive on one of the most classic American homilies ever followed: "When there's a will, there's a way."

It's the same with prostitution. Luckily, like gambling, I have no need for it, but I am not so close-minded I cannot overlook its necessity. The irony of the existence of prostitution is that it is the rigid dogmas of Judeo-Christian society that create unhappy marriages, loveless, single men and the desperate women that have to turn their bodies into profits. Through legalization we can regulate the industry with regular health checkups for workers which would then do a little to turn back the tide of AIDS. I could even see prostitution as a feminist issue. If it were legalized, they would have their rights protected by police authorities against dangerous and violent men. Put those pimps out of business! It could be win/win for both Libertarians and puritanical capitalists: legitimize the work of the afflicted and then tax them! 

 

Finally, there's narcotics. Like the windfall created by legalizing the sex trades, the income derived from taxes on hallucinogenics and related paraphernalia could be incredible. (Who knows? You could even create a special deposit account in which the government revenue from marijuana funds universal health care--considering how lucrative the drug trade is, it wouldn't take as long as you think). But why stop at marijuana? Cocaine, ecstasy, mushrooms, even heroin-- are they anymore dangerous than extreme sports or supersizing every meal at McDonalds for one month? For every user, there's a dealer in the shadows. Not only would legalization wipe out kingpins, on a street level it would strip gangs of their raison d'etre. After all, the sensational turf wars tolling death and destruction in America's inner city neighborhoods are fought over who gets to deal where. 

There are over 2.3 million Americans in prison, a higher percentage of incarceration per population than any other nation in the world. It goes without saying that this is absolutely shameful. Moreover, it is unaffordable. With legalization, it would not be right to move ahead without granting amnesty to all nonviolent drug offenders. The money saved from paying for the upkeep of the prison system could be used in social programs providing a soft landing for those looking forward to a second chance. 

Rather than swim any more against the current, in the First Hundred Days of Roosevelt's Presidency the government repealed Prohibition. It did not fix the Great Depression but it certainly provided revenue and castrated the bootlegger.

What is more dangerous? A sixteen year old smoking pot in his front yard or a devalued dollar made worthless because of irresponsible fiscal spending.

The logistics of such an endeavor would be difficult, to say nothing of the leap into the great gap of the Culture War. It would entail great courage from politicians willing to risk outrage from a general public conditioned to view drug use as a crime rather than a disease.

Like I said, we are going to have to get creative if we are going to get out of this financial catastrophe.

Yes, we can.

You Don't Know What You've Got Until It's Gone

From the Center for Research on Globalization, we are now learning that the large media conglomerates, including Verizon, AT&T, Time Warner and Comcast, are teaming up to usurp Internet Neutrality. What this means is fast service for corporations who can afford the adjusted rates and very poor speeds for small businesses and individuals. The benefit from the corporate standpoint would be two-fold: greater profits as well as the suppression of dissent. In the last decade we have experienced an open vein to information like never before in history. Should these conglomerates succeed in their intentions it would be a coup de grace for freedom of expression.

Even though there are Democratic majorities in Congress and the White House, I remain concerned, for after all it was Bill Clinton who signed into law the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which deregulated radio outlets leading to enormous consolidation of corporate media.

I cannot help but wonder that the power structure was a little taken back by the potential of the Internet to unite grass roots organizations, as it did to great success in the election of Barack Obama. Every year, the potential of the Internet seems to be improving, a purposeful tool for organization and knowledge.

We should cherish this right.

Speak up.

It's Great To Be Indian (And Not...Pakistani)

As soon as I exit the taxi four small children carrying handfuls of India's national flag surround me. One of them, waving the saffron-green colors, yells, "Go, India, yeaaaa! Go! Go! Go!" I push off, following the large crowds past tea vendors and other makeshift refreshment stands. Everyone is walking very quickly because we are late for the performance. At the gate I am shocked when I see the grandstands. There are hundreds, if not thousands of people, murmuring excitedly, many of whom carrying those little flags sons and daughters whirl in the air, pockets of color flashing against the falling light.

Every evening, the sleepy border community of Wagha improvises quite a party. People from all over India drive some hundreds of miles just for the event, which in its pomp, spectacle, music, dance, and lowbrow entertainment is not much different from a circus though one could fairly call it a political rally with a not-to-be-taken-lightly subtext. What is happening is the daily closure of the border between Pakistan and India, a checkpoint between the electrical barbed-wire fences where visa papers are examined, passports are stamped, and bags occasionally searched, a process of dull but necessary bureaucracy. But life in India is hardly ever dull. So if life can be dressed up at all, then it may as well put on a great costume.

And certainly the border guards look great. India has a huge standing army, largely kept in place because of frequent diplomatic fallouts with Pakistan over the situation in Kashmir. Like the United States, the army in India represents an opportunity for social mobility and perhaps glory. So they have a large talent pool from which they can cast stars and the border guards are stars. Very tall, lean, and handsome, they sport handlebar mustaches of a quality I have only seen in photographs of French Foreign Legion officers. Their hats are indescribable: a dark cap with a striped, tasseled sash wrapped around, crowned by a Chinese fan in red and gold colors. To me they look like cockatiels rather than gladiators though I am not sure what the intended effect is. It becomes comic when you examine the whole uniform: the brown shirts look all right but the chinos finish halfway down the calves and white underpants with stirrups trail down to shiny, polished boots.

I am ushered into the stands. The seating capacity is huge, probably roomy enough for three thousand, yet it's such a large turnout there are hundreds sitting on the sidewalk. Literally, it's standing room only. On the other side of the international gates, the cheering potential for Pakistan looks dismal in comparison. Not only were the stands smaller, they were barely half filled, a last-place team kind of crowd. Just the day before, in India, an explosion had detonated an international train killing around 70, most of them Pakistanis, though Muslim extremist groups were suspected. I didn't know if the mood at the border ceremony would consequently be subdued or hot-blooded. Instead it turned out to be vaguely ridiculous.

I don't suppose the program varies too much regardless of current events. An emcee moderates, while guards march back and forth in exaggerated gaits. Then a male performer finds the spotlight, leaping and lunging and lip-syncing to some Bollywood hit with operatic intensity. He looks like a regular Joe, a little pot-bellied, but he has great hair and Elvis sunglasses. When his performance concludes, dozens of men rush the stage and start dancing. A few modern women form their own circle and the dancing goes on for about ten minutes with the stadium crowd clapping along. I can't believe how weird this all is.

After some time the emcee breaks up the party and we get back to marching, along with some call-and-response vis-a-vis the audience. Some of it was in English and some of it in discernable Hindi. The emcee would cry, "HINDUSTAN!" which the audience would repeat. This was followed by "ONE DAY!" which again the audience repeated. The context of the cheer was disturbing: India is ostensibly a pluralistic society. There are 130 million Muslims as well as substantial populations of Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains, and Christians. The northeastern regions near the Burmese border are so "wild" and "tribal" that some practice animistic rituals,  living almost completely independently of the greater economy. It's commendable that India should have as its motto, "Unity in Diversity." But hearing such a chant now declared in such bald language causes me to wonder how genuine is the sentiment Indians regard their multiculturalism.

There's more marching. And then the guards line up and sound off a long cry into a microphone while their nemesis competes for the biggest lung pull on the other side. There's some more marching, more call-and-response. And then the flags are rolled down, carefully folded, and locked away. I feel something's missing like fireworks or a cannon boom. Everyone poses for pictures with the handlebar mustaches and attempt to stride past little kids aggressively hawking the show's DVDs.

When I return to the parking lot I find the taxi driver, who leads myself along with the other passengers up to the side of an embankment. He points to the electrical fence. Every now and then a crow is fried when alighting the wire. The taxi driver is a small man and excitable. In his wallet there's a 1973 military identification card where he looks handsome and slightly defiant. Proud of his service, he tells me, "India is great." This simple, declarative axiom is a bumper sticker you see on buses and taxis all over the country. When we climb down the hill there are a few kids waiting by our taxi, stragglers with flags bunched in their tiny hands.

Of all great human passions, the one I find least endearing and probably most dangerous is nationalism. This is a sad fact in America, of course, where people confuse patriotism for nationalism (which is perhaps an inevitable consequence when the military is wealthy and education underfunded). No one, and I mean no one, should love their country without reservations. Though they go out of their way to proclaim otherwise, governments (including the United States), do not have the interests of their people at stake. To put brutal policies into effect— war, counterterrorism, as well as the revocation of "certain, unalienable rights"—devastating measures are promoted, masked in Orwellian double-speak, dressed up as the devil or the debutante, depending on the expedience of the situation.

Samuel Johnson, a British lexicographer, famously said patriotism is the refuge of the scoundrel; perhaps you could say in my nation's case, so-called patriots draw the line between America and the un-American. But though I may loathe my congressmen and the former Bush administration, I feel very patriotic about my country. I'm not ashamed to be American and I have never lied about where I'm from and have defended it against those who blindly attack it baselessly. For me, patriotism is wanting what's best for the people of a country, not what's best for the state's power, which is nationalism, an unexamined allegiance to authority. This simple discrepancy in semantics is typical in the United States, where the educational system fails to inspire curiosity in the details of day-to-day governance. Politics: along with sex and religion one of the great dinner table taboos. Add a mainstream media complicit in simplifying the message with its narrative filters and sound byte propaganda, the citizen's misinformation opens them up for irrational military programs that they would otherwise protest.

And then there's the idea of a nation-state, a country that is supposed to represent our collective interests. Despite advances in technology, especially television, which have led to homogenization, I still feel the idea of a country is an abstraction, especially as a tool for defining personality or social characteristics. For example, in America, there are many cities where I'd feel out of place, philosophically as well as socially. I prefer the city to the suburbs, walking to driving. An empty street makes me nervous—it's not right, counter to millions of years of evolving social beings. Red State/ Blue State: in only the most general sense is there something so encompassing as 'American culture' (which if one is to believe the media has been at war with itself since the 1960s). I think of culture as a disposition, a perspective as well as a common knowledge, much more micro than macro, grass roots rather than 'sea to shining sea.' It can be aesthetic like an interest in the arts or it can be functional, related to sundry necessities like shortcuts to beat freeway congestion or the location of a town's most authentic tacos. I'm talking about intimacy in culture on an everyday footing.

India, as a country, is even a larger abstraction. The facts supporting this are indisputable. For one thing, what has come to define the modern state more than anything is a shared national language. India has eighteen of them. English is the language of politics and finance and the lingua franca of the rich. Most people in the north speak Hindi though it's very rare you will find a native Hindi speaker south of Bombay where most people speak Dravidian languages like Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu, and Kannada. Ironically, Urdu, the main language of Pakistan, India's arch-enemy, is an Indo-Aryan language: thus northern Indians would be able to converse with Pakistanis better than hundreds of millions of their own countrymen!

Beyond the difference in language are the details that make cultures so unique: religion, cuisine, music, dance, art, literature. Then there are different concepts of political thought, economics, and education. Boston and Miami may be pretty different in temperament but that is nothing compared to Madras and Kochi, which are roughly in the same region.

Because India is unnecessarily large it has always been in a sense, unmanageable, three regions, in particular: Kashmir, the Northeast territories, and Bihar in the Gangetic plain have been in open revolt or characterized by rampant lawlessness for years. Violent banditry in the historical holy land of the Buddha has devastated Bihar while secessionist movements in Kashmir and the Northeast have been exorbitant for the government to suppress. The conflict in Kashmir in particular has precipitated four wars costing tens of thousands of lives, years of civil unrest and has led India to the expensive and dangerous program of nuclear proliferation. When India detonated its first nuclear weapons in the Thar Desert in 1998, it was met with great jubilee. Perhaps nothing better illustrates the madness of irrational nationalism than the fact that the greatest exultations were among the poor, who have had basic services like education, health care, electricity, and basic plumbing denied them because of the disproportionate investment in war instead of infrastructure. Substituting basic human decency for a national identity has preserved a status quo of Dickensian disparity.

It doesn't make sense. Why should India fight four wars in addition to an ongoing civil insurrection to keep Kashmir? After all, more than seventy percent of the population there is Muslim. Just as important, the common language is Kashmiri, which though similar to Hindi (as a branch of Indo-Aryan), is nevertheless distinct. A region of tall mountain passes and rugged peaks, Kashmir for centuries has celebrated a unique and vibrant culture in arts, literature, and especially music. Yet I met only one Indian out of dozens who believed that Kashmir might be better off without India, seceding and becoming an autonomous state. Everyone else believed that it was to be subdued and preserved at any cost, even if were to bring the conflict with Pakistan to an irrevocable brinksmanship.

I tend to empathize with Indian (or should I say Keralan) author Arundhati Roy, who interpreted the explosions and resultant fervor as a "crisis of imagination." But that's where nationalism leads us, up in the smoke of a mushroom cloud.

The first thing Indians will want to know when I meet them is where I'm from. And I always want to know where they're from too. I'm always dumbfounded when they tell me, 'India.' That seems rather obvious. But of the hundreds of conversations, very rarely did anyone tell me first and foremost, they were from Delhi, Bombay, or regions like Gujarat or Tamil Nadu. India would always come first as a point of identification.

But what's interesting is how much people love India. Kids and people who don't speak English will shout out at me, "India #1," prompted simply by my foreignness. Sitting with businessmen or guesthouse owners I learned how optimistic Indians are for their economic future. I heard many businessmen speak of India's glorious future quoting fancy forecasted numbers for GDP and GNP growth. One businessman told me that within thirty years India would be wealthier than America. I thought of the rickety, overcrowded bus I had taken that day, bouncing against potholes, passing rural settlements made of mud and straw. He had decided to focus on numbers rather than what was happening right in front of him.

It's true India has enjoyed tremendous economic growth in the last two decades. This bull market began when the national government decided to privatize the economy. What did deregulation mean for India? Outside conglomerates trickling into the country buying up India's major industries. Control of the nation's resources moved from the state to private enterprise. Monopolization of industries as well as bribery have enabled special interests to run India as a corporate oligarchy. The rich getting... you know where this is going. Twenty-five percent of the population lives below the poverty threshold. Roughly estimated we're talking about 300 million people living on about one U.S. dollar a day. That is nothing to be proud of. It should bring great shame to the patriots. But the media, like its counterpart in America, crops the picture to fit the story. "India Shining," as the government's current promo-tag is called, beams its spotlight selectively.

As I'm in my thirties I find it amusing along with other Americans when we discuss how powerful the Pledge of Allegiance shadows our unconscious. I adore pop music but I cannot seem to remember the lyrics to any of my favorite songs. Yet, I can place my right hand over my heart and recite the Pledge verbatim. I can do it in my sleep. It scares me sometimes. And it should scare you.

I bring this up only because I found a clue to Indian nationalism while on a bicycle ride on country roads outside the fallen kingdom of Vijayanagar or its present offshoot, Hampi. This was in the morning and I stumbled upon a school assembly. I had been attracted by the drumming, which sounded martial in its cadence. I found a few hundred kids standing in locked formations while a principal yelled and the students called back, all the while the drumming never ceased. I imagined this went on every day of these school children's career until they entered the university.

What I think the kids were saying was something like, "I pledge allegiance…"

How do I stay optimistic then? For India's sake? I must admit there was a bit of flair in that border ceremony. The mustaches, the dancing, the music, and the crowds contained all the elements of the absurd. Rather than interpreting the show as a playful method of indoctrination, I want to believe that this was, if not an outlet, then another opportunity to indulge in a love of spectacle. I didn't think anyone there would feel comfortable annihilating Pakistan. Anyway that would not be good sportsmanship. As long as we could scream louder than the other side, maybe that would be enough.


Edited from an earlier draft dated 2007

Does God Leave Footprints in the Sand?

There's a great desert in Namibia, in Africa's southwest, where two German geologists went AWOL during the Second World War. They didn't believe in Thousand Year Reichs, Jewish pogroms or master races; they were scientists and primarily curious about what lay under of the surface of the world's upheavals. I mean this literally. Namibia is a region rich in reserves of quartz, jasper, amethyst, among hundreds of other minerals. While rock could transcend eras, the war was a pocket in time, a manmade catastrophe that they did not believe in and were determined to survive so that they might continue their studies. They escaped to the desert where they hid out among the dunes and ridges, canvassed for water and hunted antelope and other animals, much as man must have lived in this region for centuries. Amazingly, they survived for two and a half years before they exhausted themselves of game, water and the gambit of living in the harshest of climates, finally surrendering themselves to the authorities.

Bordering South Africa, Angola and Botswana, Namibia does not figure prominently on most people's minds when they think of Africa, as its recent history is not so pathetic or violent as many others on the continent. In the 19th century, during the gluttonous appropriation of lands, rivers, and mountains it was ignored by the the European colonial powers in the initial rush for conquest. The British had put a flag down in the deep harbor of Walvis Bay but otherwise the coast was not advantageous and the land beyond it, inhospitable. The Germans eventually claimed it for the Kaiser but as with every area of land in Africa, there had been someone settled there beforehand. The Germans fought a vicious battle with the indigenous San Bushmen, forcing thousands to migrate east to the Kalahari Desert where they starved to death or perished from dehydration.

Namibia was pretty much ignored afterwards as a frontier post until diamonds were discovered in 1908. Of course, this raised its profile considerably and became a source of contention among the great powers. It was forfeited by the Germans along with their entire colonial holdings following their defeat in the First World War. A treaty put Namibia under a mandate to be administered by South Africa, back then still a member of the Queen's empire but more or less autonomous. When South Africa achieved nationhood, the rigid and racist social structure known infamously as apartheid was firmly entrenched in its society as well as within its colony in Namibia. Great diplomatic pressure from the UN could not sway South Africa to release its grip until an internal guerrilla movement called SWAPO made things untenable for South Africa to effective govern. Independence was finally granted in 1990.

A lucrative industry, there are very few unemployed geologists in Namibia. For underneath the barren plateaus and mountains of sands are rich reserves of diamonds, copper, gold, lead, tin, lithium, and zinc. Namibia is the world's fifth largest exporter of uranium. Because of the wealth generated from the mining industry, the country feels wealthy by African standards. When I crossed the border from Zambia the landscape was just as forlorn on the Namibian side but the bus stopped at the OK Market, a generic supermarket outfit with America-sized food packages and correspondingly high prices. I was surprised to find three dollar magic shell syrup for ice cream amid the merchandise.

This wealth, is of course, quite deceptive. Like South Africa, there are two worlds in Namibia, black and white, and the distribution is very uneven. The major industries are still controlled by old Afrikaans and English families and wages do not correspond to rising prices. 35% of Namibians are unemployed and 50% live below the poverty line (nearly one-third of Namibians have annual incomes of less than $1400). The desert climate is as inhospitable now as it was a century before. Less than one percent of the land is arable and during prolonged droughts starvation is rampant. And the economic success itself is precarious, dependent on the availability of underground minerals. When they will eventually be irreprably exploited the country's infrastructure has few economic alternatives.

Regardless of technology, irrespective of the minerals, the desert remains formidable, dangerous, unforgiving. It is also a source of tourism. There are canyons, plateaus, vleis (dry river beds), and dunes that give the desert its geographical character. The dunes of Sossuvlei are particularly special--they rise nearly 300 meters from the earth, unnatural mountains undulating into the horizon, a great sand sea. When the wind picks up, sand scurries across the desert's face, giving the land its voice--lingering and soulful-- between the long, stoic silence it invariably defaults on.

How the sand dunes are formed is a bit of magic that takes millions of years to develop. Sediment of iron oxide is carried down the Orange River into the Atlantic where it meets a strong surface current called the Benguola. The Benguola spins the minerals in a cyclical direction against the coastline grinding it up into a fine red sand that is then blown across the land by a southwesternly wind that eventually meets a southeasterly wind, that has picked up along the way sediment from the Orange River upstream. The two winds clash and the fallout is deposited so that the dunes are balanced and colored on both sides, a finely carved ridge forming the dunes' backbone. Erosion from the nearby mountains is the source of quartz and dolorite blown in from more desert winds creating a delicate, sparkling sheen. When the sun rises over the dunes, its ascent to the sky douses the landscape with shifting light like a great finespun Arabian carpet washed over in fresh dye.

Namibia is a geologist's playground, an inspiration, a neverending story of development, formation, erosion. But for most of the country's inhabitants the dunes have very different origins. Like many countries in Africa, almost ninety percent of Namibians are Christians and they believe in the Old Testament, biblical creationism, Intelligent Design. Thousands of miles to the north, the men of the Sahara explain, 'God created the desert for man to find his soul.' Is this because the desert, like any embittered environment can bring out mans' great virtues and extreme depravity? When you think of life and the desert, survival comes to mind because if water is the source of life, surely the absence of it is the proximity of death?

Life manages to persist. Amid the rugged terrain outlining the desert's frontier, trees are sparse but they do grow and some of them are home to giant nests of birds calles sociable weavers. Dozens of these birds live in the same nest, building upon the shelters to accommodate growing populations. Creating a complex apartment aviary, the nests can grow so large they uproot trees. 

On the road between the urban sprawl of Windhoek and the desert are birds-of-prey gliding in slow, deliberate circles, wild horses grazing on yellow grass, fat cattle slouching on the long march, and the occasional baboon seemingly shiftless and bored on a rocky outcropping. Indeed, in Nambia, one gets the impression that biblical creationists would lose the great evolutionary debate. Even to the casual, amateur eye, the formations and the adaptive qualities of the wildlife indicate the earth is a very old place.

Yet one can't help but feel that God does exist, because the desert and the surrounding landscape feels much more intricate than the aftermath of a climate pattern. This is divine and inspired beauty and while I don't think it necessarily demonstrates a Biblical Jehovah at work one is inclined to believe in some mysterious force present.

At a distance the sand dunes are conspicuously empty of life. But when one puts his or her foot in the sand, a little black-rounded bug, with a curved thrusting blade in front emerges from the depths. If one touches your shoe they squeeze into a little ball or dig themselves under the grain. The 'bulldozer' beetles have managed to stay alive in the desert for millions of years, through unbelivable summer temperatures and great desert storms. These robust creatures persist in a climate not made for life at all.

There is something both frightening and wonderful in that.

Edited from an earlier draft dated 2005

Mickey Mouse, A Mentor Named Don Quixote, a Cameleer Called Abdul, A Beast Monikered Bob Marley, A Man Without a Past

A Spot in the Western Sahara

"The less she bore man’s imprint, the more room she offered for the expansion of his heart.”

Marcel Proust on Nature

Sunrise in the desert is a true delight. With the stars slowly fading out, a purple haze becomes the western horizon. Light diffuses across your vision in rainbow patches, a hue of Venetian wild yonder gathered wishfully from Bradbury stories. And to be alone on the sands is to give in to imagination, to the magic of fairy tales and serialized adventure musings. It is desolate and cold yet romantic and rejuvenating. In central Morocco, I was wandering the Sahara dunes, alone, just after the sun had risen and a sky being blued. From the distance there was a lone figure coming towards me. My hotel, where I was the only guest, was on the outskirts of the village of Merzouga, a good six kilometers away from any dwellings or fashionable auberges. The person seemed to arrive with the dawn, a man born of the light. As he approached, I discerned his navy tunic and matching turquoise turban-- ‘le hommes bleu’ the tourist literature calls the Bedouin of the Western Sahara. Amid the wide expanse of sand, he approached my vantage point, called out a 'Bonjour,' and kneeled before me. From a satchel, he unrolled some newspaper and produced specimens of fossilized rock. "Good price," he said in English once he had successfully discriminated my American accent.

The first nick in the relevance of the Western Sahara caravan route came in the 16th century when the Portuguese opened the Atlantic coast with coastal shipping. Nevertheless, men, camels, and goods continued to cross the Sahara for hundreds of years, from Marrakech to Timbuktu, trading in salt, spices, ivory, slaves. In the 20th century the French established a Protectorate. Under their colonial supervision a modern highway infrastructure was constructed. Later than that, airplanes made transport quicker and more efficient. Thus, the legendary caravan routes have largely disappeared and very few hardy men still make this difficult journey. Still the desert grows, it effuses, beckons, and challenges. In this era of mass tourism and virtual experience, it is this market that is the only lucrative one left in this arid, foreboding land.

All along my travels I’d been warned against the hustlers of Merzouga, a small village on the edge of Erg Cherebi, where the largest sand dunes in the country were accessible via a good, paved road. Supposedly busloads of tourists made the stop, posed with camels for five minutes and took off on the long trip back to Ourezazate or even Marrakech, a good six hours drive away in grueling heat. This stretch of the desert has also become something of a Land Rover’s amusement grounds with manic cavalcades of sports utility monsters roaring through the gentle ambience, bellowing  berserk macho energy. The camel tracks were covered by their 4x4 ruts and the quietude compromised beyond pity.

I was on the local long-distance bus from Tinehir to Erfoud, where I would have to change buses to get to Rissani. There, a taxi would take me to Merzouga. It was a convoluted route and I expected some trouble. Still almost a hundred kilometers from my destination two slick young cads took two seats across from me. Our conversation was typical of two hustlers making the peripatetic strike. They praised my coming to Morocco, for taking local buses, for meeting real Moroccans; these people on the tour buses, they said, missed out on the whole experience. "You are like Berber,” they announced, intending it as a compliment, a comparison to the indigenous population, the original Moroccans. 

Following the obligatory round of sickly, sweet praise they turned their talk to camel treks. “I’m a musician,” the thin, peppy one informed me. “I will perform a party tonight. You must come.” I told them that I hardly had a party in mind for the desert and that I actually wanted someplace very quiet, remote, soundless… I told them I had chosen my hotel, the Nomad Palace, precisely because it was far away from all the other hotels in the area.

Ah, but the dunes weren’t as high, they said. Undeterred by my steadfastness, they remarked the place was dangerous, too close to the Algerian border and that sometimes Americans were kidnapped or even shot by snipers. I politely smiled, acknowledging their desperate spinning with a skeptical eyebrow furrow. The younger one, the musician, slipped into a pouting silence. His friend persisted, lamely, recommending a compromise: if I went on their desert excursion, they would be happy to drop me off at the Nomad Hotel in the morning. Nope. A series of unrelated personal questions followed--to save face or win me over I could not decide but answered them succinctly. When it was discovered that I lived in Japan, the melancholy musician sprang to life in simple, but perfectly pronounced Japanese: "Honto ni? O-genki desu ka? Sabaku ni ikitai?"  Really? How are you, my good man? So you want to go to the desert?

The bus had reached Erfoud and was nearing its terminus. They reminded me that they were my ‘friends,’ and that I would be hounded by “faux” guides as soon as I stepped off the bus.

“Those people outside, they’re going to make couscous in your head.”

“Yeah,” I asked. “Then what are you making?”

“An egg.”

“Oh, so you’re frying an egg in my head?”

“Yes. With a Moroccan salad.”

“Abunai,” he said in Japanese, cocking his head to the faces outside the parked bus. Dangerous.

They weren't lying about that. I was hounded as soon as I disembarked. At a teleboutique, I called up the Nomad Palace: Ali, the proprietor, was in Erfoud picking up fresh produce from the weekly souk. A lucky break. He would be over in a few minutes to pick me up. I waited on the curb while some woebegone tout, stubbornly hovered over me, promising a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

I had visited various African deserts and witnessed their commercialization. I knew it by the sound of a flipped silver coin hitting the plastic table. But I couldn’t help myself: I clung to my expectations, I had visions of romance, adventure, and mysticism, but so tenuously held on.

Perhaps the desert loses its enchantment when it's turned into a postcard. Can a tourist really claim he’s been to the desert and the ascetic hardships the journey implies? Or has he merely seen it? If you walk far enough there’s the silence and the wind envelops, the sand gets in your eyes and mouth and scratches your skin. But the danger of its indifference to life, of its potential ruthlessness has been sanitized. The French Foreign Legion outposts have been replaced with ‘auberge avec piscine.’ Men who may have once raised camels mop the floors of honeymoon suites. The old ways are gone or put on as ‘authentic’ cultural experiences.  It's not enough that the ways of the infidels had to contaminate the national governments, the cities, the youth... even in the desert, archetype of the middle-of-nowhere, the infidels had it right: money makes the world go round.

Perhaps I'm naive.  You can’t blame the local 'men in blue' for wanting to make a little bit of profit out of us. For those  who were born and will die there, the desert will always be a rough place, real rather than romantic. It's my fault, rather, for wanting to believe in Mickey Mouse although he’s just a cartoon character.

One can interpret a child’s innocence as having no real illusions. Fantasy and reality can be one thing: whole.  At Disneyland there are no costumes. It is not a fabrication; there is no man sweating underneath cursing his lot in life, craving a cold beer. To adults, fairy tales imply whimsical make-believe, but for a child it is the way the world works. When the wizard of Oz turns out to be just a man behind a curtain, you know Paradise has been irrevocably lost.

I arrived in the desert as the reluctant cynic: I had my vision of the Sahara, its tranquil beauty, its dangerous history, and its savage light, and I expected disappointment. The only way I could come out unscathed was to adapt a special attitude, that of a fabulist, or a young child, an innocent. Perhaps channeling Don Quixote was the only worthwhile solution. All or nothing.

My cameleer, Abdul, didn’t speak English, mumbling his French incoherently, as if he had been to the dentist and injected with large doses of Novocain. Ah, but he had no tongue; it had been chopped off as punishment for a lascivious comment regarding the Sultan’s harem.

The camel, single-humped and technically a dromedary, was named  Bob Marley. The resemblance to the Rastafarian legend was a stretch though the beast did have a friendly smile. The animal would be my carriage into the great sand sea.

And who was I but a Man Without a Past. Why had I come to the desert? Why was I intent on being here? Abdul inquired with his mangled tongue the origins of my history and my quest but I accepted the questions in silence, letting his enquiries echo into the void.

Leaving the village of Merzouga behind we entered the dunes. There on a small ridge of sand: a woman of Latin heritage in a tight white suit chaperoned by a heavyset man riding down the dunes on a piece of board. Surely, with her dark, agile beauty she was a foreign princess sold to the chief of a local tribe and he a carpenter and inventor showing off an ingenious device of transport. But where was her palanquin and her porters?

Along and over the dunes we trudged. Abdul faithfully inquired after my state of being: I was absorbed by the light playing upon the dunes, how it made ever so delicate shapes, shadows slipping away like a receding tide or its creeping arrival delivering coolness, all motions at the mercy of solar angles. Contentment did not describe my feelings. I was dazzled.

I thought I would have the dunes to myself but a group of eight camels came trawling from the opposite direction—their riders looked droopy and ill-begotten— perhaps they had made the 1000-mile journey from Timbuktu? Their gaudy social attire was terribly inappropriate for the desert… Did they run out of water and have to barter their raiments? I wanted to ask them about the oasis, as the desert was vast and harsh and what if we were to be lost should we fall under the spell of landscapes? But chagrined jowls set forward—I was out of their peripheral vision. I did not exist.

Going my way were a young couple from Switzerland. Abdul was friendly with the other cameleer and he tied my reins to the rear dromedary. I took them to be speculative merchants. They didn’t talk about their purpose here. They spoke of home. The desert has that effect.

The sun set. And the sky was cast with a mulberry glow, like a plum ripening through four seasons. The moon was nearly full, just a sliver bit off and the way was lit by lunar shine. We continued, our small camel train, cresting a high sand dune where we looked down upon an oasis, small, verdant, a cluster of palms, spilled figs, small shacks of wood covered in tarp, a well containing spring water, a fire and a cooking pot.

Abdul spoke to my dromedary and the beast collapsed onto itself in a sitting position. I dismounted and entered the camp. There was food and music and in the songs a local lore which seemed culturally impenetrable, yet exquisitely beautiful. The hand drums were spanked, an oriental flute was blown, lyrics lapping the night in a harmony barked as well as sung. I lay back, looking towards distant crowns and let the sound envelop me. The tumescent moon subdued the incandescence of the constellation but no matter.  I could see the bushy bedhead outline of the palm grove poised before the great sand dune and the miracle of the oasis came to me— how water, the source of life, could be discovered in the most unlikely of places and because of these marvelous springs the desert could be crossed on foot or by beast. It has been crossed and will be crossed again. For a brief, ecstatic moment I fancied I could be one of those men, if only I wanted to. And then a shooting star defied the lunar light. It sparkled in the sky in a moment’s burst, just long enough to pause for wishes and dreams.

Edited from an earlier draft dated 2005

Tonight the Lady Does Not Sing the Blues

Like nearly every rational person on the planet, I was thrilled by the election of Barack Hussein Obama. Living in Japan, I had voted absentee a month before (my fourth election eligible to vote, having cast my lot with Clinton in ’96, Nader in ’00, and Kerry in ’04). For the first time in years I regretted my choice to be living abroad.  Because America had changed, and in doing so had become a lot more interesting than it had been in the go-go 90s. For better. For worse. The powers that be should have been able to recognize this inevitability. Bush had politicized Americans like very few predecessors: the youth organized, soldiers revolted, housewives marched, many staunch conservatives rescinded their views. In all likelihood, a President Obama would not have existed without an incompetent like W. As they say, sometimes you have to hit bottom before you can go back up. Or if Obama had not existed, it would have been necessary to invent him.

Living in Japan with its seventeen hour time difference against the west coast meant that Obama was officially declared victorious in the election around noon. I had no television so I had to listen to developments on public radio selected from itunes radio. As the results were coming in state-by-state, new Democratic Senators and states gone blue for Obama (Pennsylvania! Ohio! Virginia! North Carolina!) I discovered myself hollering yahoos and delivering fist pumps, for what I believed I was witnessing was not a vote for the Democratic candidate or even Barack Obama but a passionate repudiation of the status quo: the occupations and wars, the financial mismanagement, the curtailing of our civil rights. When Obama delivered his speech, in front of hundreds of thousands in the cold autumnal Chicago night, I cried not just from joy but out of relief that there was a way out of the darkness for America:

It’s been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America.

For the first time in years, perhaps my life even, I felt shining pride of my Americaness. Oh, I’ve always been proud of American culture, its music, its films and literature, its muckrakers and its dissidents, the diversity and the friendliness of the average person but I loathed the government, the corporations who were controlling it, the kingmakers who pushed us pawns to the brink. It seemed to me patriotism for your country should have been incomprehensible when your government condoned unregulated greed, preemptive war, and the torture of human beings denied habeas corpus. I believe that when historians look back at the Bush era, they will find a society that had been gripped with madness and fear, a chicken running amok with its head cut off.

I do not think it was policy that was behind Obama’s rising star—rather it had everything to do with the man’s theme. In this hyperkinetic culture we have permanently entered, the medium is the message, and hope was what the man promised. Not in so many words, but in his charisma, his character, and his ability to inspire us to dream.

photo by UCHUJIN

So, because of the said time difference, when some friends and I wanted to watch the inauguration, it was inconveniently scheduled for 2am Tokyo time. We jerry-rigged a film projector to a laptop’s live feed telecast. It did not go as well as planned. CNN did not include Japan in its coverage area and BBC’s circuits were jammed. 

The whole world is watching. 

We ended up with Fox News, only the visuals were slow and choppy and quickly fell behind the audio, turning the ceremony into a bit of a spectacle. Therefore, part of Obama’s speech occurred when various dignitaries (and villains, Dick Cheney in his wheelchair) were rolling out to their seats. Like some commentators' reactions I subsequently read on the Internet, I was satisfied by what Obama said but I had not been inspired. There were moments—for example when he declaimed against America’s enemies and more or less declared the American way of life sacred—when he reminded me of Bush but with a more arresting rhetoric. To reference a comedian’s take, excusing the tough talk, he wondered aloud why melted cheese tasted good on Italian but just ruins Chinese food?

I went to sleep feeling a little bit skeptical about the disconnect between what a man says and what a man does. But I do think that all the hagiographic feting Obama has received might be a positive influence in the end. For Obama has an opportunity to be one of history’s most remarkable men, if only he be brave. To hope will not be enough. 

Finally the time has come, the time for action.

Let’s see what happens next.