From ‘four seasons in rome. On twins, insomnia and the biggest funeral in the history of the world’ by Anthony Doerr

…a headline from the newspaper: Marriage and Children Kill Creativity in Men? ……Here’s Einstein himself: “A person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of thirty will never do so.”

…I ….read…..Pliny’s Natural History. He is half-genius, half-lunatic….The more pages I turn, the more I find an endearing sweetness in Pliny; he is so curious, so ardent. The elephant’s “natural gentleness toward those not so strong as itself,” he writes, “is so great that if it gets among a flock of sheep it will remove with its trunk those that come in its way, so as not unwittingly to crush one.”

Near the vegetable market we pass a man holding hands with a little girl. She gazes at the boys [twin boys of the author] with a bright, impersonal wonder. Her father whispers something to her as they pull even with us; she laughs; it is as if skeins of love are passing invisibly between them. And suddenly the gulf between me and the Italians of the neighborhood seems navigable ….

….a Tom Andrews poem… “The dead drag a grappling hook for the living. The hook is enormous”

“Habitualization,” a Russian army-commissar-turned-literary-critic named Viktor Shklovsky wrote in 1917, “devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war.” What he argued is that, over time, we stop perceiving familiar things – words, friends, apartments – as they truly are.

The oldest building in Rome with its original roof still intact is the Pantheon, rebuilt atop an older, fire-damaged temple by the emperor Hadrian around AD 125….Its doors are twenty-one feet high and weigh eight tons each. The sixteen columns on its porch are thirty-nine feet high and weigh about sixty tons each, roughly the weight of two fully loaded eighteen-wheelers, crushed and compacted into a cylinder five feet across. The columns…were quarried in eastern Egypt, dragged on sledges to the Nile, rowed across the Mediterranean, barged up the Tiber, and carted through the streets of Rome. They are ocean gray, flecked with mica, glassy and cold….The vault of the Pantheon is made of concrete and has a diameter of 143 feet…..For thirteen centuries, it was the largest dome in the world. For nineteen centuries, it has resisted lightning strikes and earthquakes and barbarians.

Neither [of the twins] seems very interested in food. Both want to be held all the time. Is this what it means to be a parent – to constantly fail to be in control of anything?

In 1890, in New York City, a drug manufacturer named Eugene Schieffelin, who wanted to make sure that every bird mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays was introduced to America, released eighty starlings in Central Park. A hundred and fifteen years later the United States alone has 200 million – and angry wheat farmers and flocks sucked into jet engines and histoplasmosis, a respiratory disease that originates in starling feces.

….Christmas ….gifts …The Italian ones are easy to find: wrapped gloriously. The Italians could wrap a used textbook and make it look like gold and frankincense.

…..mushrooms, how the stems and caps we eat are only fractions of the real organism. The vast percentage of any mushroom, it turns out, lives underground, in a network of extremely fine fibers, or hyphae, that prowl the soil gathering nutrients. A single cubic centimeter of dirt might contain as much as two thousand meters of hyphae.

Rome is like that, I think. The bulk of it lies underground, its history ramified so densely under there, ten centuries in every thimbleful, that no one will ever unravel it all.

…..you are fifty times more likely to die on the roads in Rome than you are in Los Angeles or London.

Out here in Umbria, perhaps even more so than in Rome, you begin to get a sense of how long Italy has been home to humans. Everywhere we walk there are centuries-old groves and sleep-soaked farmhouses and ruins of walls.

Watching teething babies is like watching over a thermonuclear reactor – it is best done in shifts, by well-rested people.

A line from Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead comes back to me. “There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient.”

Olive oil was the muscle, hair tonic, soap, and lamp fuel of the Empire, the flavor of its meals, the illumination of its dramas…. Soothe a toothache, alleviate stretch marks, grease a chariot axle, cool your scalp, anoint a dead Christian…..

“Italians,” our friend…says “will stop anything for pleasure.” And the longer we’re here, the more we feel he’s right. Expresso, silk pajamas, a five-minute kiss; the sleekest, thinnest cell phone; extremely smooth leather. Truffles. Yachts. Four-hour dinners.

Romans discuss death over dinner; they wait in line to examine the corpses of their dead heroes; they take the arms of revered old parents and escort them through the parks on Sundays. Six or seven times, since coming to Italy, I’ve seen young people on park benches reading novels to grandmothers. I’ve seen hundred-year-old women picking stolidly through eggplants at the market…..

What is Rome? …..Its a feast every damned week. Its maddenly retail hours. It’s a city about to become half old-people’s home/half tourist museum. Its like America was before coffee was “to go,” when a playground was a patch of gravel, some cigarette butts, and an uninspected swing set; when everybody smoked; when businesses in your neighborhood were owned by people who lived in your neighborhood; when children still stood on the front seats of moving cars and spread their fingers across the dash. It’s a public health-care service that ensures assistance to both Italians and foreigners in an equal manner ……Its an economy in recession, the lowest birthrate in Europe (1.3 children per woman), 40 per cent of thirty-to thirty-four-year-olds still living with their parents. It’s a place where stoplights are open to interpretation, lattes should never be ordered after lunch, and a man is not considered a failure if he’s forty years old and still spinning dough in a pizzeria. It’s a country where parents let their kids play soccer in the streets and walk home from school unaccompanied, where your first thought when you see an adult man talking to a child in the street is not necessarily Child molester.

….from the poet Belli: “I’m not myself when I exert myself.”

Roma, they say, non basta una vita. One life is not enough.

From ‘All Kinds of Magic. One man's search for meaning across the modern world’ by Piers Moore Ede

All kinds of magic are out of date and done away with, except in India, where nothing changes in spite of the shiny, top-scum stuff that people call ‘civilization’.

(Rudyard Kipling …)

….Environmental writer Gregg Easterbrook …wrote: ‘capitalism renders its chosen covetous, insecure, unfulfilled, constantly twitching…Materialist obsession has performed the amazing feat of making unprecedented abundance unsatisfactory to its beneficiaries.’

Despite enormous poverty and social problems, the Indians seemed to have an awareness of their place in the scheme of things very different from our own. Although anxious neither to idealise the East nor demonise the West, I couldn’t help but see a thread of meaning in Indian life, long since exorcised from my own culture. It was the meaning provided by religion, and it was evident in a thousand sparkling details on any given day: a rickshaw wallah touching his statue of Ganesh before a journey, a smouldering incense stick or the Muslim call to prayer, echoing through the dawn. Despite having been an atheist for as long as I can remember, I found this intensely moving.

Inside my rational empirically driven culture nothing was allowed a significance beyond itself. But in India, the opposite felt true. Everything, both animate and inanimate, was filled with a living spirit.

Like nowhere I’d ever been, India seemed to shine in my mind’s eye as somewhere alive with possibility.

……sadhus …..They lived life on their own terms. Their obsession with their inner journey was such that they’d given up everything to pursue it. They were romantic figures without the burden of possesions, worldly ambition, money of any kind. ….They weren’t trying to ‘be’ anything, unlike the rest of us. They were interested in absolute freedom and that suggested a sort of evolution to me.

In the East, religion has always been more about practice and experience than dogma……What was important for these pilgrims was not so much the writtten scriptures of the canon of any specific tradition. It was the idea of religion as practice, as lived experience bringing one closer to God. ….Ramakrishna, the Bengali saint of the nineteenth century. For him the scriptures were ‘a mixture of sand and sugar’ and science ‘mere dirt and straw after the realization of God’. Learned people, to him, were like wanderers in an orchard, who count the leaves and fruit and argue over their value instead of plucking and relishing the crop.

…a Swedish Indologist… ‘The opening up of the self to the mystical realms of consciousness can be very dangerous,’ he said, ‘because it leaves the practitioner open to all kinds of influences. That’s why sadhus are always drawing boundaries around themselves. They do it with their lines drawn in the earth, by sprinkling water and by sitting before fire. This protects and grounds them. It purifies everything it touches.’

I realized that the Indians made no distinction between a foreign sadhu like Ram and any of the others.

‘Jadoo is certainly there,’ he said. ‘But you’ll never see it outright…… It’s seen as a display of ego to show off one’s powers. The only reason people do it is to nudge the common man from his dream, get him thinking that there’s something else going on in the universe. …..there have been occasions, yes, when I have felt myself subtly manipulated, moved in various directions. There’s no doubt in my mind that powerful forces are at work. We call them siddhas, actually – the power to control, through yoga, the subtle energies. …..dedicate yourself to the most rigid austerities under the tutelage of a guru. And the irony will be that when you finally gain the ability to perform these feats, you’ll realize how irrelevant they are.’

‘What is important then?’ I asked

‘Merging with the Absolute,’ said Ram. ‘Nothing else.’

For now, India remained the best place in the world to follow a mystical path……

Until now, India has yet to impose those strict barriers between the animal and human worlds that render Western cities so particularly sterile. To see a cow garlanded and sleeping between rows of traffic, a temple monkey receiving prasad or vultures descending upon the Towers of Silence, is to feel connected still to a larger web of life, the Indian gods, too, in all their animal forms, remind us that the natural world is one of the most obvious manifestations of the divine we have.

The contrast struck me as amusing, for it is all too often the case that despite our comparative wealth by Indian standards, we travelers are invariably dirtier and less well presented than even the poorest peasant….Our scruffiness and sheer disarray never fail to baffle the spotlessly clean Indians, whose very religion equates worldly cleanliness with spiritual purity….

‘It is true,’ he muttered, ‘that I find a lot to admire in the Indians. They are so kind, no – even to someone like myself. But more than that, they see God so clearly, don’t you think? More than any other country in which I’ve travelled. They see Him. One can be walking through the poorest slum and this woman will step out, so beautiful, and light incense before a statue, and then she is set, you know, knowing that all is OK.’ …. ‘They know something, I think,’ he chuckled, lapsing back into badinage. ‘But its out of reach for someone like me.’

And yet despite the ambiguity of India, or perhaps merely its complexity for someone like myself, it was by far the most absorbing place I had ever been. Religion, as I had learned it in childhood, seemed to divide the world into two halves: one sacred, one profane. In India that division was gone. Here everything was sacred, everything was set apart for the worship or service of God. People say Him everywhere – in elephants, in river stones……

The town of Dras in Kargil district has the dubious distinction of being the second coldest inhabited town in the world.

…Leh valley, Kushok Bakula Rimpoche airport, the highest commercial landing strip in the world…..

….its the Ladakhi people who enliven their surroundings. Weather-worn like almost no other people on earth, they bear the distinctive pink complexion of high altitude dwellers, as well as the most evocative smiles I’ve ever encountered.

….a young man, lean and dark from the fields, and an old woman, yellow-eyed; both projecting that interested but non-judgemental stare that I’ve found all over India.

In Hinduism, after the three main stages of life are fulfilled (student/householder/retirement) a fourth may be adopted – that of sannyasin or renunciate. While most men defer this final stage to a future life, the most ardent bid farewell to their families and possessions and set out, during their final years, to find detachment from all worldly pleasures and thus draw closer to moksha, enlightenment or liberation from the wheel of rebirth. As a cultural institution, it is perhaps the greatest signifier of just how much orthodox Hinduism venerates the spiritual quest.

While Hinduism has numerous weird and wonderful subgroups, its largely a devotional religion in which everyone finds their own form of the divine and pours all their human energies into its worship…..

At lunchtime we stopped at a dosa stall, where there were lines of makeshift tables and benches, beside which sizzling pans fried the fermented rice-batter pancakes, with their distinctive sour taste, which are such a feature of the South Indian meal. In all my worldwide travels I have never known such good value. For just five rupees (three pence) it was possible to eat as much as one wanted.

…Rumi

Soul drunk, body ruined, these two

sit helpless in a wrecked wagon.

Neither knows how to fix it.

And my heart, I’d say it was more

like a donkey sunk in a mudhole,

struggling and miring deeper.

But listen to me: for one moment,

quit being sad. Hear blessings

dropping their blossoms

around you. God.

I spent several hours at the [Hazrat Nizamuddin] dargah that morning. Certainly it was one of the most vivacious places I had been to in Delhi….

…although Turkey was the place where the great mystic [Rumi] lived and died, and his image is still used in the glossy pamphlets of the tourist board, the practice of Sufism is illegal in Turkey, punishable by imprisonment. While the rest of the world is experiencing an unparalleled mystical resurgence, Turkey, it seems, harbours old grudges still…

….Istanbul …Out of a city of fifteen million, perhaps six million live in …shanty houses built without permission, foundations or amenities. Largely populated by economic migrants from Anatolia……

….gliding into the Bosporous. At 17 miles long and just 700 yards wide at its narrowest point, this has been one of the world’s most strategic waterways for millennia.

…Rumi

I died a mineral, and became a plant.

I died a plant and rose an animal.

I died an animal and I was man.

Why should I fear

When was I less by dying.

….Ataturk…wanted to cut off all ties with tradition…

‘Before Ataturk?’ I asked. ‘What percentage of Turks practiced Sufism?’

He considered for a moment. ‘At that time Istanbul had a population of about 500,000 people. For that number there were some 360 dervish lodges open. Based on what we know, approximately 90 per cent of the city’s population were affiliated to a tekke!’

‘……..When they ban Sufism they are opening the gates for radicalism.’ ….Sufism, in itself, represents a notably liberal and pluralistic interpretation of Islamic doctrine…Rumi. ‘Love’s creed is separate from all religions,’ he wrote. ‘The creed and denomination of lovers is God.’ Certainly, Rumi’s own path to the divine was Islamic, and yet he excluded no one on a different route.

It was in Konya, on the central Anatolian Plateau, that Rumi had spent his life. For the pro-European, Western-facing Turks, Anatolia is often described as ‘backward’ these days….In Rumi’s time, the city was the capital of the Seljuk empire, a liberal, highly creative hub of spiritual and artistic thought. Today, it’s the most conservative town in modern Turkey: sleepy, producing cement, carpets and fertilizer, home town of Necmeddin Erbakan, the nation’s most famous hard-line Islamic politician, and indeed one of the places where he found his strongest support.

Some Islamic modernists go further still, rejecting Rumi altogether. Their principal complaint, it seems, is in Rumi’s assertion of absolute unity with God – called Wahdat-ul-wujood in Sufism. From the earliest origins of Sufi mysticism, this notion has caused problems. That anyone should claim absolute unity with god smacks of heresy, a lack of humility. In times gone by, many Sufis were put to death for such statements, such as Husayn ibn Mansur al-Hallaj, also known as al-Hallaj (the wool-carder), who was beheaded in Baghdad for having uttered ‘Ana ‘l haqq’ – I am the Truth.

One sure sign of a poor cup of Turkish coffee is to get a mouthful of grounds in the first sip…

‘……Rumi compared the Koran to a bride. “Although you pull the veil away from her face, she will not show herself to you,” he said.’

‘Then what is the trick?’

A chuckle. ‘Stop pulling!’

….Rumi lived in times similar to our own in many ways, with wars and strife… They, like the Sufis before and after them, rejected conventional beliefs. God is in our hearts, they claimed. He is not in the mosque or the madrasa or in the pages of books. He is within us……

….Idries Shah wrote:

Cross and the churches, from end to end

I surveyed: He was not on the cross.

I went to the idol temple, to the ancient pagoda.

No trace was visible there.

I bent the reins of search to the Ka’ba.

He was not in the resort of old and yound.

I gazed into my own heart.

There I saw Him, He was nowhere else.

The philosopher Colin Wilson speaks of our normal waking consciousness as a ‘robot’, a creature which goes through the motions of life with only occasional glimpses of the intelligence within. For the Sufis, that ‘intelligence’ is God, and in their rituals they find ways to reconnect precisely because of its ability to convey the essence of that experience, the sheer exuberance of connectedness.

Perhaps as many as 25,000 years ago, during Palaeolithic times, the hunting cultures of Siberia and Central Asia coined a word, saman, defined as a technique of ecstasy. From this came the word ‘shaman’, meaning religious leader, priest or healer, but more specifically describing someone with the ability to enter trance states in order to gather knowledge in the non-human realms.

Shamans spend years in the most arduous training in order to explore and penetrate layers of consciousness. They are the masters of expanded awareness, with infinitely subtler, more penetrating understanding than our own.

‘Are you a god?’ asked several men to him, shortly after his enlightenment. ‘No,’ replied the Buddha. ‘I am awake.’

From ‘Uniqueness of Sri Bhagavan’ by K Subrahmanian

The most extraordinary thing about the Maharshi was his twenty-four hour accessibility. No permission was needed to see him and there were no special darshan hours.

Duncan Greenlees who had met the Maharshi several times wrote: “I know no other man whose mere presence has thus enabled me to make the personality drop down into the abyss of nothingness where it belongs. I have found no other human being who so emanates his grace that it can plunge him deep in the ecstasy of timeless omnipresent being.”

“There are also other methods. You can do pooja or japa. But dhyana is the simplest and the best.”

In Uttararamacharita, Bhavabhuti says: “The words of ordinary people follow meaning: but meaning runs after words uttered by great sages.”

It has become fashionable to criticize religious rituals….But in secular life, we perform certain rituals and are very proud of them. We salute the national flag…..There is a purpose behind the rituals also. …..In the early stages of one’s sadhana, rituals are necessary for disciplining the mind. Rituals may not be necessary for those who have advanced considerably in the spiritual field …..When the mind of man matures considerably, rituals will drop of their own record…..

When we are in the presence of a sage or saint, it is like standing under a waterfall. The descent of grace from such people will wash away all mental dirt.

From ‘Sri Ramana Maharshi. The Advent Centenary Souveneir 1896-1996’ by Sri Ramanasramam, Tiruvannamalai

“To teach without words and to be useful without action – few among men are capable of this.” Thus spoke LAOTSE

What a beautiful word the Hebrew language has for God: “Yahweh” which means “I AM”. Jehovah is the anglicized form of the word Yahweh. Sri Ramana said that the Old Testament’s “I AM that I AM” is even better than “Aham Brahmasmi” (“I AM Brahman”) as a description of the Self.

Sri Bhagavan has said, “Vichara is the process and the goal also. ‘I Am’ is the goal and final Reality. To hold to it with effort is vichara. When spontaneous and natural, it is Realization.””

I spoke to Bhagavan for some time; and then while taking leave of him said, “You have attained a great stage”. He replied ‘Distance lends enchantment to the view’. By this he meant, as I later learnt from many of his teachings directly and indirectly to me, that a householder’s life was as good as that of an ascetic, and could equally lead one to Jnana.

The Maharshi a master cook, calligraphist and caricaturist, and naturpath, raconteur, editor and engineer extraordinaire, spoke little and wrote even less. His poems in Tamil, Sanskrit, Telugu and Malayalam are not only mystic and magnificent mantras, but also potent seeds sown for the integration of a people who are presently so asleep as to consider as weakness the timeless strength inherent in the bewildering bewitching diversity of their culture.

Ramana says:

“If you have surrendered, you must be able to abide by the will of God and not make a grievance out of what may not please you.”

Ramana’s solution is to let the mind subside to the point where it disappears, and what remains when the mind has subsided is the simple, pure being that was always there.

Ramana says: “Your duty is to be, and not to be this or that….The method is summed up in ‘Be Still’”

When one attempts to practice this conviction by putting attention on the feeling of being that is within us, thoughts and desires will initially continue to flow at their normal rate, but if attention is maintained over a period of time, the density of thoughts decreases, and in the space between them, there emerges the clarity, the stillness and the peace of pure being. Occasionally this stillness and this peace will expand and intensify until a point is reached where no effort is needed to sustain the awareness of being, the attention merges imperceptibly with the being itself, and the occasional stray thoughts no longer have the power to distract.

In the case of surrender, the initial effort is the shifting of one’s attention from the world of thoughts to the feeling of being. When there is no attention to it, the mind subsides revealing the being from which it came, then in some mysterious way, the Self eliminates the residual ignorance and Realisation dawns.

“The purpose of self-enquiry is to focus the entire mind at its source.”

The mind is simply fattened by new thoughts rising up. Therefore it is foolish to attempt to kill the mind by means of the mind. The only way to do it is to find its source and hold on to it.

The precise method is simple and well known. When thoughts arise, one does not allow them to develop. One asks oneself the words, “To whom do these thoughts occur?” And the answer is “To me,” and then the question occurs, “Then who am I? What is this thing in me which I keep calling’I’?” By doing this practice one is shifting attention from the world of thoughts to the being from where the thought and the thinker first emerged. The transfer of attention is simply executed, because if one holds on to the feeling “I am” the initial thought of ‘I’ will gradually give way to a feeling of ‘I’, and then sooner or later, this feeling “I am” will merge into being itself, to a state where there is no longer either a thinker of the thought ‘I’, or a feeler of the feeling ‘I am’; there will only be being itself.

…Superior to loud praise of God and to inaudible japa is the purely mental process of meditation.

…Uninterrupted meditation, resembling the flow of water or of ghee, is superior to that which is discontinuous.

…If after stilling the mind by stilling the breath, the mind be fixed on one point, then the mind would be dissolved (and the Mindless State would be reached).

…Right Awareness of the Self is just the mind becoming aware of its own true Nature as Pure Consciousness, as the result of the mind being disentangled from (attachment to) outside objects.

…If the truth of the mind be persistently investigated (Keeping it away from all outside objects) in the end there will be no mind left. This is the Direct Path which is available to one and all.

…The mind is nothing but a series of thoughts. Of all the thoughts the root is the ‘I’ thought. Hence the ‘I’ – the ego – is the mind.

…When the source, wherefrom the ego arises is sought, the ego perishes. This is the method of Inquiry (Vichara), leading to Right Awareness (of the Real Self).

…Becoming aware of one’s Self apart from the vehicle (the five sheaths making up the body) is itself rightly Knowing God, because it is He that shines (in the Heart) as the Self.

When the breath is held, it is observed that the thoughts also decrease and finally when the breath-movement is brought to a stand-still the thoughts also completely subside.

There are several methods advocated as to the manner of breath control. The method the Maharshi teaches is a rare one; if it is merely watched, and no attempt at control is made, the breath, of itself, slows down almost to a vanishing point.

Normally, in ‘Hatha Yoga’ the nostrils are closed and opened with the fingers for definite intervals…..The sadhaka practicing in this way is fighting a battle, as it were, with the force of the breath; were this battle to be conducted on wrong lines, dangers or disaster might follow, particularly were it to be lost. Forced effort may end in various kinds of diseases; it may entail madness, and in some cases, if the kundalini or life-force rises uncontrolled, the body gets almost burnt up, and death results; this practice is to be done under the personal surveillance of the Master, with great care and circumspection adopting easy techniques from time to time, and under different restrictions as to diet, time and posture. The Maharshi bids us strictly to avoid this method of Hatha Yoga.

Do not fight with the natural flow of the breath; only watch it, as if you were a witness to a process. It is called the ‘sakshi bhava’ in philosophical terminology.

……Not for him are the emotional surges and fits of despair found in the bhakti marga. Nor are the anxieties of the karma marga present. The dangers of the yoga marga will never touch him; not even the troubles of the path of raja yoga will face him…

He says in “Upadesa Saram”, “Japa of mantras is better than hymnal praise; and the mental repetition of the mantra or the name is more effective thatn the utterance of either, aloud or in whisper.” And then he explains, “If you continue sticking to the sound or the idea, there will come a stage when there will be only a sound, undifferentiated even into various letters.” As you go deeper and deeper, even the sound dissolves, and that process he calls ‘dipping in’.

From ‘The Indian Ferment. A Traveller's tale’ by H G Alexander

(From his travels in 1927-28)

…cultivators are all in the hands of the money-lenders. They can only work for seven or eight months in the year. It is suggested that the real purpose of Mr.Gandhi’s spinning wheel isto give the ryots something to occupy themselves with when otherwise they would be idle. Also it might keep them out of debt. But apparently it is almost an accepted custom to be in debt.

The attitude towards cattle seems to be rather like “the sanctity of human life” in the West. You may twist the tails of the cattle; you may beat them and prod them and neglect them, and starve them; but if you are guilty of the death of a cow, you have committed the greatest crime. I have seen a greater number of poor, diseased, starved cattle …since I reached India than I have ever seen before ……

When I was in Bulgaria one of the Bulgarians I met said that the way to tell where the west ends and the east begins is by observing whether men wear their shirts inside or outside their trousers….the Bulgarians wear the shirt inside, the Rumanians outside…..

The vast army of worthless sadhus …..who live by terrorizing the people by threats of Divine wrath into giving them food and money, seems to be one of the major curses of India.

…second-generation young Christians…..They are outcaste from Hinduism, belonging to the Christian community in some cases from necessity rather than conviction.

…the Principal…persuaded me to come and speak to his students…on “Whither the World is Tending” – the stupendous kind of question that Indians love to discuss…

I think the average sadhu repels me more than any other Indian type. He seems to make the idea of religion disgusting. Most of them have a cruel, disdainful expression, quite unlike the friendly countenance of the ordinary Hindu.

The most amazing feature of Delhi is not its endless ruined monuments of forgotten empires, but its myriads of vultures and kites…..Other Indian cities boast many kites and some vultures; but Delhi easily outdoes all the other cities I have visited…

…..Tagore’s young men at Santiniketan, seem to have learnt what was good from Western ways of thought without losing those fine qualities of intuition which are characteristic of Hindus…. My impression is that caste is breaking down very rapidly indeed among the younger educated Hindus; and when the older generation (over fifty) are dead, it will largely disappear in all the centres of culture….

We generally had rather silent meals (that is, of course, the old Hindu custom, but Tagore does not stick to it as a principle)…..When he does speak he expects his audience to attend, and to pay the respect due to an oracle; and he could give a poet’s justification for this….. Our (British) rule, he said, is in many ways better than that of other Western peoples in the East – American, Dutch, or French. We allow so much personal freedom……It is largely the inspiration of England that has stirred in India the passion to be free….

….C. F. Andrews…. His attitude is practically this, as I understand it. Let each religion be true to itself, respecting the others, and ready to learn from the others. A Christian living in that spirit is welcome anywhere among enlightened Indians.

The taxi-drivers in Calcutta are nearly all Sikhs and nearly all opium-eaters. They are furious drivers, but personally I found them safe.

The …..people of Orissa are, indeed, a sorrowful people. They are very poor…Many have to migrate to other places on labour contracts…..

….Indian students I certainly think many of them want to use force. I do not think they are restrained by cowardice, but rather by ancient Hindu tradition, perhaps also by reluctant consent to Mr.Gandhi’s principle of non-violence; and it may be, by older men who have learned wisdom and caution through experience.

…one impression that has been made upon me in India generally, but especially in Calcutta. It is the refinement of feature that is characteristic of a great proportion of Indians. Over and over again I have seen men wearing nothing but a loin-cloth doing heavy manual work, whose faces suggested intellectual distinction and spiritual refinement. When you meet people casually in the street it is quite impossible to judge of their education and social standing from their general appearance……my father-in-law…he told me that , according to Sir Francis Younghusband, you can travel from the Himalayas to the Cape Comorin and never meet a vulgar person. I think there is much in that saying. The struggle for existence in India is terribly severe, and no doubt it leads to much cunning and brutality; but the lust for wealth as such would seem to be rare…..

Assam was never conquered by the Moguls. Until the British conquest of Burma, whose king had recently conquered Assam, the Assamese had been for a long time outside India. Nevertheless, their religion is largely Hindu. I saw no traces of Buddhism in the Assam valley. The people mostly look more Indian than Mongolian, but many have strongly Mongolian features with Hindu colour. The hill tribes, south as well as north, are thoroughly Mongolian in appearance…..Why, it may be asked, if the country is so productive, do not the Assamese people increase and multiply and flourish exceedingly? Are they inherently lazy? …answer is contained in the one word “opium”. Take India as a whole, and the opium problem is a minor concern….Take the Assam valley alone and it is one of the gravest problems in the country….the Assamese people have been under its influence for about a century. ….In 1921…Gandhi visited Assam, and appealed to people to abstain…..Consumption dropped by nearly one-half in the year. The Government claim some part in this decrease….I do not think there is the least doubt that the real job was done by Gandhi and the other workers whom he inspired.

….I have often noticed that if an Indian starts off with an erroneous idea in his head it takes some patience and tact to eradicate it.

…. “inevitable long-windedness of all Indian speeches”

The Indian attitude towards birds is excellent. They leave them alone; and the birds respond by being more confiding than in any European country. But Indians seem to have no inquisitiveness about birds; they do not trouble to distinguish one from another, or study their habits…..

It is curious that our national game, cricket, hardly spreads beyond the English countries. Even Americans seem to find no merit in it. So it is the more remarkable that young India – especially in the towns – seems to play cricket with as much zest as young England…..there must be more in common between British and Indians than is usually supposed. I suggest that the practical British have deep down in their nature a strain of quiet contemplation which a few of them have developed into Quakerism, while the majority prefer to sit in silence round a cricket ground, or to stand bareheaded in the field waiting for the ball that never comes, or the turn to bat which passes so quickly. We are shy about our innate mysticism, so we work it out in cricket; the Indians are less shy, so they have not needed to evolve cricket for themselves; but their mystical nature finds it attractive now that we have introduced it to them.

India is immense and unfathomable; Assam, by contrast, compact and straightforward….

….the great snowy range of Kinchinjunga…..the first glow of the rising sun. It was a great sight, finer, said my father-in-law, than the dawn on Monte Rosa from the plains of Lombardy.

Our guide seems to be a real Christian and a real Indian. Too many Indian Christians I have met seem to be neither.

….I think the personal relationship of the Dutch to the Javanese is better than that of the British to the Indians. ….partly due to the fact that the Dutch live a more homelike life…..The position of the Eurasians is much better than in British India. An English business man told me that no white man in Java would speak disparagingly of half-castes……More remarkable is the fact that Dutch and Javanese “Tommies” serve together in the Army and fraternize without discord. If you suggested such a possibility to a British officer in the Indian Army he would certainly have a fit!

The people of Jave are nearly all nominally Muslims ….I saw neither the regular devotions nor the orderly democratic feeling, nor any of the harsher Muslim characteristics. I suspect that the people are still closer to the Hindus in life and thought than to the full-blooded Muslims of North India and the Middle East. Their culture is, of course, notoriously Hindu in origin; the batik work, the puppet-shows and drame, are derived from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata.

All the people I saw in Java looked better fed and more prosperous than India’s underfed millions. Generally speaking, they have much better houses.

Compared with the Indians, I think the Javanese are an unsophisticated, gay, happy-go-lucky people…I can well believe that they spend all their money as soon as they get it. …One day I saw a big youth in the street suddenly catch hold of his little brother’s foot and kiss his leg, apparently out of sheer elder-brotherly emotion. I think they live very much in the present. Perhaps all unsophisticated people do.

…..for four hundred years or so Malaya has been colonized by the Chinese; and today they form two-thirds of the population of Singapore and the backbone of all the towns in the country….thousands of Tamil labourers from South India come and work on the rubber estates and in the tin mines. As you travel through the country by train or motor-car you see Chinese everywhere and Indians nearly everywhere, and you begin to wonder where on earth the Malays can be. The explanation is that most Malays live by the rivers, and they do not take much part in the development of the country……A further complication arises from the fact that a good number of the present inhabitants of Malaya are recent immigrants from Sumatra or Java.

The Malays seem to live a placid, unambitious life….A good many of them have shown capacity as mechanics, motor-drivers, sea captains, and in various crafts; but a Malayan merchant, or a Malayan rubber-planter or tin-miner, is almost or quite unknown. …Some people think the Malays are a dying race – that they will gradually disappear under the pressure of their neighbours, especially the Chinese.

The [Malayan] jungle contains an immense variety of trees. Over twelve hundred species are known, which is a larger number than all the species found in India. Many of the forest trees grow straight for 50 or 100 feet before they have any branches. …The rapidity of growth is equally remarkable. Some of the bamboos grow six inches in one day…..To atone for the absence of flowers the Malayan jungle is very rich in butterflies. I have been seeing gorgeous butterflies everywhere since I reached India, but the butterflies of the Malayan jungle surpass all the others, alike in size, variety, and brilliance of colouring.

So long as the country remains prosperous the various communities – Chinese, Indian, Malay, and European – seem to live contentedly side by side…..though each community lives mainly to itself, and the Europeans suffer from the usual “superiority complex” of the white man. I fancy that the Chinese also regard all the other races, or at least the Europeans, with silent contempt…..The whole country is bent on getting rich quickly, and the Chinese certainly lead in the race. Nearly all the big houses of Penang and Singapore and Kuala Lumpur have Chinese names advertised on their gates, and the tawdriness of the display is not pleasing….They have “made the country”, and they are still making it, and they intend the fact to be known.

Practically all Malays are Muhammedans; and there are clauses in the treaties with the Sultans which may be interpreted as precluding Christian missions among Malays – or at least as precluding any Government support of mission institutions. Nearly all the mission work is among Chinese and Tamils.

…. That disgusting “superiority complex”, which is the hallmark of almost every Englishman outside his native land – the quality which our Continental neighbours less politely describe as “hypocrisy”.

I see in nearly all I meet, especially those one meets casually on trains and boats, a loss of refinement, of true gentleness, of that consideration and courtesy and self-restraint on which we English pride ourselves, The Englishman in the Tropics often ceases to be a gentleman.

The problem is not mainly political, British administration is very generally respected, in the eyes of many business men in the East the administrators are too generous to the “natives”. An American missionary in the school at Ipoh said that, after seeing the administration of the Dutch in Java and the Americans in the Philippines, he had the greatest respect for the British. Chinese and Indians have spoken to me of their respect for many of our administrators.

…..I met some more of the typical young English business men…The recognized opening for a conversation with a stranger about India is to abuse all Indians as incompetent, untrustworthy, deceitful, and so on. You laugh and remain silent ….it is no use trying to refute them for of course they know and you do not.

….Muhammedans in East Bengal….They are, as generally in India, ignorant and backward; and there are far more crimes of violence among them than among the Hindus

Mr.Gandhi enjoyed himself by stretching out his hand as if to catch one or two small infants who were running about near him; and when he did catch them they crowed with joy. I found it hard to feel that I was looking on one of the great souls who have shaken the world, he has not the “presence” of Tagore. Perhaps he could show it, but he prefers to keep his great soul veiled behind his marvelous humility. So what you see is a man full of simple human emotions: very quick to understand, with a genius for giving and inspiring trust. ….His eyes have, indeed, a beautiful expression, and when he comes to the point of something he is saying he looks at you with a quick glance that is very direct……. His face has the look of one who has undergone much spiritual conflict; but in his expression there is the peace that comes to those who have overcome.

I never spoke to Mrs. Gandhi, though she does speak a little English. I believe she several times told people in the kitchen to offer me more milk or what not; and she “took notice” when I was saying good-bye. She is a motherly woman, who is, I should think, a very good hausfrau; and she looks as if she shared pretty fully the burdens that have fallen upon her husband’s back. Yet I never saw them even exchange a glance. All the same, I am sure they know what is in one another’s mind.

…..hand-spinning ….Its moral value is, I think, absolutely proved. There appears to be less drinking in the villages that have taken it up. And it is bringing professional men into intimate association with the villagers, helping to form a union of hearts….

Part of a letter written to me by Mr. Gandhi ….. “….if a man has true religion in him it must show itself in the smallest details of life. ….The slightest irregularity in sanitary, social and political life is a sign of spiritual poverty. It is a sign of inattention, neglect of duty….”

…my impression of the ashram [Sabarmati]. One cannot but be aware of the contrast between this place and Santiniketan. The Satyagrahashram (the Soul-force Community) relies on a severe daily discipline, strict asceticism, and the regular performance of menial tasks; Gandhi is a strict Puritan. Tagore is a Poet. He relies on aesthetic expression, on releasing the soul of man, on silent meditation. Yet I think their goal is the same ….Tagore seems to doubt the efficacy of the way of renunciation, while Gandhi doubts the efficacy of the way of free growth. But it may well be that each method is needed for various types of men …..The Servants of India are following yet another road – in some respects closely parallel to Mr. Gandhi’s – to the same goal.

India is an unhappy land – unhappy and at the same time fascinating. She has a freedom of the soul – a freedom from the tyranny of convention – that seems to me to lie deeper than our political freedom, deeper even than our “freedom of thought” in the West.

From ‘Walking the Himalayas’ by Levison Wood

….the chilling words of warning Kipling issues….

When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,

And the women come out to cut up what remains,

Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains

An’go to your Gawd like a soldier.

…the Wakhan corridor, a narrow valley that juts out from the main body of the country….. and acts as a buffer between Tajikistan, China and Pakistan. It was the wildest, most remote and inaccessible part of Afghanistan.

….infamous Hindu Kush mountains – or the Hindu Killers – so named because of the vast numbers of Indian slaves who died while being transported through them en route to the Khanates of Central Asia, during the Middle Ages.

The old adage was true; the Afghans simply loved fighting each other. But when foreign powers dare to invade, they have a habit of putting their differences aside and ganging up to oust the invader. Most of them weren’t, and still aren’t, particularly inspired by religious fanaticism, but rather an innate sense of war, one that is in the blood after centuries of violence.

….the Wakhan corridor….the reason that this remote strip of land belongs to Afghanistan is that it provided a convenient buffer zone during perhaps the most intriguing of all the political conflicts of recent times: the Great Game.

‘The Afghans say that the Pamir is so high, even the birds must cross on foot.’

The Wakhan is in fact the most impoverished region in Afghanistan. Farming is virtually impossible because of the harsh climate and there are no roads. All of the borders are closed and so trade is limited to that which occasional merchants can smuggle over the high passes from Pakistan or China – which isn’t much. As a result, there’s no need for currency and people simple barter a yak for some sheep, or a guard dog for a rifle. There’s just a few basic school houses…..and there are no clinics or medical facilities. The Wakhan has the highest rate of infant mortality in the world – every second child dies at birth; the average life expectancy is under forty.

…..the Irshad valley ….Malang ….laughed…. ‘They love a good drink. We are Ismaili here. We’re not like those Sunni Muslims. We don’t do Ramadan and look around – do you see any mosques?’

[Pakistan]…The trucks were painted like Wedgwood china vases…..Pashtu tradition from Peshawar…. ‘Isnt it unislamic to draw pictures of living beings?’ I asked, wondering how the tribesmen of the North West Frontier, the wildest men in Asia – supplier of recruits to the Taliban and supposed religious fanatics – reconciled this art with their version of Islam.

‘They were drawing pictures much before Islam came. These Pasthtuns have a very long history, and good art.’

Sost [Pakistan]…. Reminded me of one of those Wild West frontier towns… Inspite of the fact that Ramadan had begun just a few days before nobody seemed to be paying the slightest attention to it…. ‘I am Wakhi, you have seen how we live, we do Ramadan all year round, just drinking salty tea and eating bread. We don’t need to fast any more to show we are good people. And anyway I am Ismaili, and the Aga Khan has shown us that these Sunni ideas are just stupid. Those Muslims in the south are bad people and fasting won’t change that.’

….the majestic 7,800-metre white face of Rakaposhi, which Wilfred Thesiger described as one of the finest mountains he’d ever seen….Here the people were from the Burusho tribe among whom, like in Afghanistan, they liked to claim descent from the soldiers of Alexander the Great. Their dialect is unlike any other in the world, bearing no relation to the neighbouring Pashtun, Urdu and Persian languages and has left anthropologists bewildered for centuries.

….literacy rate for Pakistan…..average is sixty-three per cent…in some tribal regions it’s only twenty per cent, and for women, ten……in the Hunza….We have ninety-five per cent …..because we aren’t like those Sunni barbarians….before we became Ismaili we were pretty savage ourselves. We prayed to trees and rocks and birds and stuff like that……You know that we have the longest lifespan in the world here….No processed food, we grow it all ourselves and we drink clean water from the mountains….

….Nagar valley. If Hunza was spectacular, then the Nagar was sublime… Gilgit lies just north of the confluence of the Gilgit and Indus rivers, marking the exact convergence of the Hindu Kush, Karakoram and Western Himalaya mountains…Some of the names of the villages, like Ganish and Gorikot, indicated a Hindu heritage. Other signs clearly showed Buddhist influence. At Kargah Nalah, a vast image of the living god is carved into a cliff-face, too high for vandals to desecrate. It was chiseled in the seventh century, when the whole of Gilgit-Baltistan was part of a greater Tibet, and later China. Muslim rule cam much later…..

Gilgit bazaar was heaving with men. Pashtuns, Uighurs, Punjabis and Shina tribals mixed freely…. The few women to be seen in the streets were dressed in burkhas. Until now, the rural areas had seemed liberal and welcoming. The influences of Ismaili Shia Islam had given the Hunza a progressive and tolerant outlook, and I’d been surprised by the high levels of education, spoken English and gender equality. But here in town there seemed to be undertones of a stricter, less compromising culture going on. For the first time on the journey, there were large mosques and almost everyone wore salwar kameez…..the majority of men wore long beards, often with the upper lip shaved – a sure sign of orthodoxy……I had noticed a tension in the air the moment we crossed the Gilgit river; stares and squinting looks and no smiles. The people weren’t hostile, just a lot less friendly than we’d become accustomed to ….Maybe we’d been spoilt by the hospitality of the Wakhi and Hunzakut.

It is only a one-day walk that separates the Karakorum from the Himalayas, but those few miles heralded a new world – one that was less harsh on the eyes, less craggy …But something sinister remained, both in the nature and in the people that lived there.

Pilgrimages are an integral part of Indian culture. For thousands of years Hindus and Buddhists have embarked on journeys to show their devotion to God.

In many places I’d travelled, the concept of walking would raise eyebrows and protests of disbelief. In Africa the locals would laugh at me or ask if my car had broken down. ‘Only a poor man travels on foot,’ they’d say. Or they would just shake their heads and tut and tell me that I must be quite stupid…. In India it was different. Walking is so deeply ingrained in the national psyche that nobody batted an eyelid. There was no question of my motivations; of course I was on a pilgrimage. It didn’t matter which god I worshipped, or where I was going – there was just a simple understanding that I was a traveler. Nothing more, just another walker with my own mission, and that was something to be respected.

We passed shrines to Shiva, Brahma and Vishnu…..We’d left the Islamic world behind now, although there were still mosques in some of the villages. We’d entered a new world where spirituality was more tangible, more colourful and generally a bit more fun. ….Nothing was too bright or vulgar; plastic and concrete were just as suitable a medium for the gods as wood and stone.

…Umanga told us…. ‘If we see a tiger, best thing is, don’t turn your back. If you turn your back, tiger will attack. They always come at you from behind’ ….. ‘If a rhino is charging, you must climb a tree, but if we see a bear, no climbing a tree. The bears can climb very easily. In this case, you must stand your ground. The leopards are afraid of the humans, so they wont come close. No worrying about the leopards.’

Apart from the Terai lowlands, the rest of the country is so mountaineous that it is said that if you flattened out Nepal, like pulling on a creased tablecloth, then the surface would amount to an area bigger than the whole of the USA.

…the difference I encountered walking into Bhutan.

The Indian town of Jaigaoon ….was crowded, filthy and noisy….Nobody bothered to clean the streets because the monkeys and the cows would do it for them….Everyone, it seemed, thought it perfectly acceptable to spit vile globules of phlegm onto the pavement….or to piss in the gutters in broad daylight. The whole town stank of shit ….On the far side we emerged into Phuentsholing and it was another world. There were no beggars or lepers. No car horns – everything was eerily quiet. Signs everywhere indicated that smoking cigarettes was illegal. So was ‘spitting on the walls’ …..Almost all the men and women sported the traditional national dress……

Thimpu is a bizarre town. Despite being a capital city, its barely worthy of the title of city; with a population of fewer than 80,000, you can fit more people in Wembley football stadium. It must be one of the smallest cities in the world and it doesn’t have a single traffic light. There’s only one road in and out…..It was peculiarly quiet, except for the howling of a few street dogs…People moved about shiftily, looking around as if they knew that their happiness lay elsewhere – in the mountains and villages, and that life in the miniature metropolis was an unnatural sin.

I found out that in fact high-altitude mountaineering was illegal in Bhutan.

‘Its because we don’t have any rescue infrastructure here….only one helicopter….It would be embarrassing to have a foreigner die in our mountains, so we ban it.’

Behind the facade of modernity and development and cleanliness there seemed to be a mystical, almost Shamanist undercurrent to life in Bhutan. In spite of the image of a happy, pure nation there were hints at a darker, more superstitious existence.

Even though I don’t believe in superstition, after so long spent walking through this part of the world I knew never to underestimate the power of spirituality and people’s beliefs. There seemed to be some things we couldn’t just explain away. Call it God, fate, karma or magic……

Great things are done when men and mountains meet;

This is not done by jostling in the street

-          William Blake

From ‘Himalaya’ by Michael Palin

Great journeys tend to bring me out in a rash of over-used superlatives, so all I will say this time is that Himalaya was a wonderfully, magically, brilliant journey, with more gasps of astonishment per square mile than any other in my entire life. And for once, I think I might be right.

Despite the bloody nose of that terrible defeat in 1842, the British returned to Khyber almost 50 years later. Recognizing that the Afghans could not be subdued by war, they sought to keep them in their place by peaceful treaty…..they instructed Mortimer Durand to invent a border between Afghanistan and Queen Victoria’s India….Durand marked the borderline with giant numerals engraved on the foothills, and they can still be seen on the Afghan side of the pass……the Durand line made no sense, then or now, to the Pathans who live on either side of it……

One of the twin pillars of Pathan tribal society is the concept of melmastia – hospitality. Unfortunately, the other is badal – revenge – which can be swift and violent and provoked by as little as a glance at someone else’s wife.

Darra High Street [Peshawar], described by Geoffrey Moorhouse as ‘the noisiest street in the world,’ runs for almost a mile and is filled with the roar of horn-blaring, gear-changing trucks punctuated by the crackle of gun-fire…..As I cross the street a preoccupied figure in a white robe pops out of a shop behind me, raises an AK-47, blasts a few rounds into the air, shakes his head, and disappears inside again to make adjustments.

[in the Kalash valleys] ……he points out decomposing coffins on top of the ground. That’s the Kalash way of death, he says. The bodies are never buried and the tops of the coffins are left open to let the souls escape.

….Tirich Mir, 25,228 feet (7708 m), the highest mountain in the Hindu Kush…..

For men, literacy in Pakistan is around 60 per cent; for women, 35 per cent.

….the Karakoram Highway….A collaboration between the Chinese and the Pakistanis, the road winds 800 formidable and majestic miles, from Kashgar in western China almost to the Pakistan capital, Islamabad. It first took traffic in 1978 after 20 years of construction. Considering the obstacles in its course – some of the highest and least stable mountains in the world, fierce winds, temperature extremes ranging from icy cold to blazing summer heat ……the human price paid was considerable. Between 500 and 800 Pakistanis and untold Chinese died in its construction, roughly one life for every kilometre.

…..the westernmost bastion of the Himalaya. Nanga Parbat, an uncompromising, irregular giant of a mountain, rises to 26,650 feet (8125 m).

His views on the trigger-happy North-West Frontier…… ‘They’ll shoot you if they feel like it. Any excuse. If they don’t like the food, or the way you smile, or farting. ….Farting is a crime on the North-West Frontier……’

[at Wagah] ….The Indian guard…..march out….They try hard to be as theatrically aggressive as their Pakistani counterparts but somehow you don’t feel their hearts are really in it.

The Vice-Regal lodge [Simla] has been reborn as an Institute for South-East Asian Affairs….Entertainment has given way to enlightenment. This bastion of British certainty has become a place of enquiry, curiosity and debate. Three very Indian preoccupations.

[Dalai Lama] crossed the Himalaya into India and in a brave gesture of generosity, Prime Minister Nehru gave him sanctuary …. (Many other countries would have had misgivings about what this would do to their relations with China).

I learn that he [Dalai Lama] gets up at 3.30 every morning, but goes to bed around 8.30, and that he recently lost his temper, in a dream.

I ask him if he ever loses his temper in real life.

‘Sometimes yes, but not remain long.’

…..For a world leader he seems extraordinarily well-balanced, natural and unaffected. His emotions are spontaneous, his judgements carefully pragmatic….he is happy to pose for a photograph….The crew are spread out on either side and I don’t think I’ve ever seen this hard-worked unit looking so happy.

I’m back among mountain people – patient, taciturn and politely wary of outsiders. Masters of survival.

…….not only is Hinduism the religion of 90 per cent of Nepal, the Nepalis take pride in being more scrupulous in their observance of festivals. The Indians, she says, have shortened their ceremonies.

…..the Kathmandu Valley, the widest valley in the Himalaya. Over a third of Nepal’s urban population lives here ……

….Nepal….has a fundamental ethnic division between the Indo-Aryan with origins in the south and the Mongolian who originates from the north. Sherpas [Gurkhas / Mongolians] think of themselves as Flat Noses and superior to the Long Noses, who in turn think of themselves as more urban and intellectual than the Flat Noses.

‘Traditionally, but not exclusively, its been the Mongolian hill men we’ve recruited [as Gorkhas for the British Army]’….

Nepal was never colonized, so the architecture has no Western derivative and its distinctive fusion of Indian and Tibetan influences was created by the Newars, the people of the valley, and craftsmen of the highest order.

The road that winds its way northeast from Kathmandu is called the Arnika Highway….Arniko was the Nepali architect credited with introducing the pagoda to China and the road that bears his name leads to the only crossing point between the two countries.

It is quite likely that there was more contact between Nepal and China 600 years ago than there is today. The road route from Kathmandu to Lhasa has only been open since the 1980s.

In every country we’ve been so far [Pakistan, India, Nepal] private cleanliness and public squalor seem to quite happily co-exist and I’ve never really been able to work out why.

The government of China, in their wisdom, decreed that the whole country, wider than the United States, should have only one time zone.

….the Tibetan plateau. The Roof of the World was once a seabed. What lay beneath the ancient sea of Tethys was heaved up onto the top of the world by the same collision of the Indian and Eurasian plates that built the Himalaya. It now rests at an average height of 13,100 feet (4000 m) and from its steep sides stream some of the world’s greatest rivers: the Indus, Salween, Yangtze, Irrawady, Yellow River and Brahmaputra.

[Yaks] ….big expediations rely on them to transport heavy equipment up as high as 21,500 feet (6550 m). Its on the lower slopes that the yaks suffer. Anything below 8000 feet (2440 m) can be very uncomfortable for them, as they tend to overheat.

In his book Tibet, Tibet, Patrick French quotes a contemporary Jesuit priest’s verdict on the sixth Dalai Lama [1683-1706]: ‘No girl, or married woman or good-looking person of either sex was safe from his unbridled licentiousness.’

As if that wasn’t enough, he also wrote poetry. Such apparently unrestrained love of life is not as incompatible with Buddhism as it is with Christianity…..

Drepung Monastery, once the biggest in the world, with 10,000 monks living and studying here in the mid 17^th century, stands slightly outside the city, overlooking Lhasa from high ground to the northwest.

The Communists came close to expunging Buddhism from Tibet. Six thousand monasteries, 95 per cent of all those in the country, were destroyed. But Buddhism is 2000 years old and Chinese Communism was only 60 years old, so it was not a battle they could win….possession of any image of the Dalai Lama remains a political crime in China.

Potala Palace and Potala Square …One is the greatest building in Tibet, and the other is a large open space created by filling in a lake and flattening a neighbourhood of old Tibetan houses in order to celebrate 20 years of the creation of the Tibetan Autonomous Region…..The Tibetans call the peak on which the palace is built Mount Marpori and the soaring upward curve of the Potala’s walls, rising 13 storeys and nearly 400 feet (120 m) high….. Until the first sky-scrapers were built, the Potala Palace was believed to be the tallest building in the world. …The entire complex has 1000 rooms. Despite that, it wasn’t considered sufficient for the Dalai Lama of the time and within 50 years another palace, Norbulinka, was constructed on a 40-hectare site, a couple of miles to the west, in which His Holiness could spend the summer months.

….91 per cent of the peoples of China are from the same ethnic group, the Han.

In eastern Tibet and western Yunnan something quite dramatic happens to the Himalaya. They change direction. Crushed up against two unyielding plateau, the world’s mightiest mountain range meets its match and is turned inexorably southwards. The meltwaters of the Tibetan plateau, gratefully unleashed, pour south through a series of plunging, often impenetrable gorges, to spill into the Bay of Bengal or the South China Sea.

All except one.

At a small town called Shigu, some 100 miles into Yunnan, the Yangtze….changes direction, a quirk of geography that Simon Winchester, in his book The River at the Centre of the World, regards as being responsible for the very existence of what we know as China.

Having carved its way off the plateau and running hard alongside the Mekong, the Salween and the Irrawady, the Yangtze-Kiang, now called the Jinsha Jiang, River of Golden Sand, meets an obstruction. A thousand miles of tumbling water heading for Vietnam and the Gulf of Tonkin is, within a few hundred yards, spun round to the north and, though it twists and turns and tries to find its way south again, it is now effectively a Chinese river, heading east to create the enormous bowl of fertility and prosperity that is the heart and soul of the Middle Kingdom.

There are 26 officially recognized nationalities within Yunnan, the most ethnically diverse province in China

Intense as the ceremony (Lijiang Dongba shaman) has been….I don’t think any of us felt the sensation of the supernatural presence….But a week or so after we got back, Basil called me…on the photos he’d taken. No problems, except for all those taken with a flash at the Dongba’s ceremony. Despite his camera being fully charged up, all the prints came back over-exposed and burnt out. It has happened to him once before, when photographing the Ghost Festival in Penang. All his shots were fine except those taken when the shaman entered a trance.

Whats more, he knows colleagues who’ve experienced the same thing. Everything seems to point to some powerful force or energy current being emitted on the same frequency as the strobe of the flashlight.

Such has been the success of the American Baptist Church that 99 per cent of the Naga have been converted to Christianity. Nakedness is a thing of the past, as is the once common custom of head-hunting (Though a recent National Geographic article reported evidence of active head-hunters as recently as 1991.)

….Beijing is as close to Assam as Delhi.

Since the Rhino Protection Act of 1913 the horned rhino has returned from the brink of extinction….there are now 1500 to 1600 of them in the park [Kaziranga], 70 per cent of the world’s population……

[Bhutan] …a little larger than Switzerland, with a population less than the city of Birmingham …..only two planes…comprise the national fleet….over two-thirds of the country remains forested ….over 80 per cent of Bhutanese still work on the land….Bhutan may be a Buddhist kingdom, but the sects here are different from those in Tibet. …the Yellow Hats dominate in Tibet and ….the Red Hats in Bhutan. The Je Khenpo, head of the Drukpa school, is the religious authority here. The Dalai Lama has no jurisdiction in Bhutan and has never visited the country.

In the foothills near Paro is a complex of holy buildings….Takstang, meaning ‘Tiger’s Lair’, is built on precipitous rock ledges….Takstang stands out as one of the most spectacular holy places anywhere in the world.

Bhutan’s ubiquitous stray dogs (which, of course, no-one is allowed to cull)…..

In one of the rare examples of sex discrimination in Bhutan, women are not allowed to take part in traditional archery competitions….it looks pretty difficult and most of the participants are roaring drunk…..one man sings…at full volume, another lurches by with a whisky and loud yell, another becomes droolingly amorous. Khendum introduces me to them.

One is the Secretary of Employment, another the Managing Director of the National Bank. Others are chairmen of this and that…..the night before a match the men sleep together in a dormitory with the door locked, as sex before a big game is considered bad luck.

At their closest point Bhutan and Bangladesh are some 25 miles (40 km) apart, yet they could scarcely be more different. One is entirely composed of mountains, the other flat as a pancake. One is among the least crowded countries in the world, the other the most densely packed. One is an absolute monarchy with a stable government, the other a people’s republic that has just topped the list of the world’s most corrupt countries…. Bangladesh, three times as big as Bhutan, with 75 times the number of people, has a population of around 135 million, and the only reason it can support so many is because two of the greatest mountain rivers, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, funnel down through the country on their way to the sea, depositing billions of tonnes of rich, recycled Himalaya.

Combined with the heavy monsoons that are the blessing and the bane of Bangladesh, this gives the country some of the most productive land in Asia…..The most recent serious flood, in 1998, inundated two-thirds of the country and left 22 million homeless.

The Burmese immigrants in Bangladesh are as much of a sore point here as the Bangladeshi immigrants are in India.

….the astonishing statistic that Bangladesh has 5000 miles (8000 km) of navigable waterways.

[Dhaka] ….In 1971 the population was one million. Even conservative estimates believe that number to have grown to 15 million, and with 80 per cent of the country’s jobs located here, there’s little sign of this headlong growth rate slowing down.

The waterways of Bangladesh seem to operate on the same philosophy as the roads of Dhaka, an improbable synergy that, by the most dangerous means possible, successfully accommodates every kind of river user. None of them seem to have lights or horns.