From ‘Henna for the Broken-Hearted. When the search for meaning takes you all the way to India’ by Sharell Cook

  

Indians can be extremely adjustable or extremely stubborn, depending on the perception of power. Rules are created or bent at will to suit situations. Definitions of right and wrong are never absolute, and instead depend on the context and the desired outcome.

 

In India, it was hard to get the most straightforward tasks done, amid systems that were confusing to learn.

 

………beauty of India is that there’s always a positive to the negative, if you take the time to notice it.

 

It was another common Indian trait to always find an excuse and never admit liability.

 

Indian culture lacked not only privacy, but also equality.

 

I soon discovered that southern Indians were particularly enthusiastic head-wobblers.

 

Poverty-stricken, overburdened and uncivilised, most of Uttar Pradesh isn’t welcoming to visitors. The state is home to the Taj Mahal and Varanasi, two of the most popular tourist destinations in India. Yet, most of it consists of rural farming land that is unable to support the largest population, of almost 200 million inhabitants, in India. Crime, lack of education, unemployment and ‘eve teasing’ (sexual harassment of women) plagues the state.

 

……..after taking another bus from the border, we arrived in Kathmandu………. The atmosphere was noticeably different in Nepal. Despite being a very poor country, a certain dignity was apparent. People greeted me with a ‘Namaste’. Staring was minimal. And there were no rude comments ………

 

Why was it so impossible for anything to go to plan in India?

From ‘….and then you're dead ! 47 reasons to start living your life’ by Jim Rai

 

 

Take good care of your knees

 

Our greatest danger in life, is not that our aim is too high, and we miss it but that it is too low and we reach it.

-        Michelangelo

 

Look after your gums

 

Dear Optimist, Pessimist and Realist, While you were busy arguing about the glass of water, I drank it!

Sincerely, The Opportunist.

 

If you don’t ask, then the answer is always “no!”

 

Andre Gide ………….”Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.”

 

Two important things in life; never compromise on the quality of a good mattress and good shoes, because if you’re not in one, you’re always in the other.

 

Listen to sit properly, keep your posture upright – look after your back.

 

Do not continually use and breathe in cleaning products and detergents

 

Capture your grandparents’ history on tape as it will be lost once they have gone.

 

Stretch for five minutes every morning.

 

Taking lemon and probiotics daily is great for the digestive system.

 

Cut out the white bread and white sugar.

 

Use almond or mustard oil and give yourself a body massage twice a month.

 

Einstein once defined insanity as “Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

 

If you are in a hard water area, install a water softener – the difference is amazing.

 

“The true meaning of life is to plant trees under whose shade you don’t expect to sit.” – A Greek proverb.

From ‘Delhi. Mostly Harmless. One women's vision of the city’ by Elizabeth Chatterjee

  

It is a truth universally acknowledged that nobody who lives there, nobody at all, has much good to say about Delhi. ……it is one of the world’s great unloved destinations. Its inhabitants, Dilliwallas, take a perverse pride in complaining about it. At best they tolerate it. At worse, some despise it with the fire of a thousand June suns. In his novel Delhi (1990), the irascible Khushwant Singh describes how the city appears to a stranger:

a gangrenous accretion of noisy bazaars and mean-looking hovels growing round a few tumble-down forts and mosques along a dead river … [T]he stench of raw sewage may bring vomit to his throat.

- and he’s a fan.

Sure, there have been writers who praise the city’s magnificent imperial past as the heart of Mughal civilization. But they lament its subsequent decline into Punjabi aggression and consumerist bling. Others damn it with faint praise …………..

Delhi’s inhabitants are scarcely more popular…..According to stereotype….New Yorkers are foulmouthed, over-caffeinated snobs. Parisians are viciously rude and dipsomaniacal sexual deviants (if exquisitely dressed). Londoners are famously grumpy, as territorial and hostile to eye contact as feral dogs ………Other Indians are just as brutal in stereotyping Dilliwallas. In this bitchy vision……it is a city of touts, thugs, gluttons, brats, voyeurs, hustlers, crooked politicians, suits, pencil-pushers, pimps, perverts – every kind of sinner. Khushwant Singh again:

They spit….; they urinate and defecate whenever and wherever the urge overtakes them; they are loud-mouthed, express familiarity with incestuous abuse and scratch their privates while they talk.

 

Many migrants……can become more Indian than the Indians, militantly committed to a very particular idea of India. And ordinarily, no community is more militant about this cultural preservation than the Bengalis.

In India, the ‘Bongs’ are stereotyped as braining dweebs……Bengalis are bespectacled, soft-handed and sweet-toothed intellectuals, most often to be found spouting leftwing political philosophy late into the night. The only thing they love more than fish is arguing, and the only thing they don’t argue about is Bengali culture: they are utterly convinced that their language, literature and brains are the greatest in all world history.

But in London my grandfather’s plucky Bengali spermatozoa encountered my grandmother. In this formidable Finnish ice-hockey player with a taste for bespectacled brown men half her height, he met his match. The two nationalities could not be more different. Bengal is muggy, filled with mangrove swamps at one end and the hilly tea plantations of Darjeeling at the other; Finland is flat and icy. The population of the Kolkata metropolitan area alone is almost three times the entire population of Finland; its population density is a thousand times greater. The Bengalis chatter and eat sweets and dodge sport; the Finns ski in grumpy silence. The two share only a depressing handful of things: the aforementioned love of fish, the ability to survive sauna conditions, and a disproportionate propensity to commit suicide.

 

But we never visited India. My father had been, and assured us it wasn’t worth it. He told tales of despotic relatives, diarrhoea and magpie-sized cockroaches………

 

…….there is a lot of money in Delhi – and I mean a lot. You can almost smell it in the air: the warm and faintly sweaty vegetable smell of old paper money.

 

…….its frontier town reputation: that beneath the veneer of universities and galleries lurks a semi-wilderness of casual violence, opportunism, machismo, and enormous self-made fortunes.

 

The upshot of this moneyed ferment is that house prices, and increasingly rents, are becoming more and more expensively bubbly, hitting Manhattan or even Moscow levels.

 

………..Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008) advises, China leads India on all metrics,

except that you don’t have entrepreneurs. And our nation, though it has no drinking water, electricity, sewage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy or punctuality, does have entrepreneurs.

 

……….a 2011 Credit Suisse survey suggested Indians typically spend 7.5 percent of their income on education, ahead of the Chinese, Russians and Brazilians.

 

……….India has only 1 percent of the world cars, and 10 percent of the world’s road deaths.

 

The toilets of the French, Britain’s historical enemy, are mere holes in the ground, which emit a terrible stench of cheese and surrender. Japanese toilets sing and vibrate and spurt unexpected jets of water; German toilets contain a sinister tray to catch and inspect turds; all Australian toilets are rusty outside dunnies full of poisonous animals.

 

‘………It’s a formality. Paperwork. Just like a buffalo needs grass, the government needs paper.’

-      -   Tarun J. Tejpal, The Story of My Assassins

 

…………transfer of the capital from Calcutta to New Delhi, during the spectacular imperial coronation durbar of 1911…………. Delhi was in the boondocks, deprived of water and full of fever. Former viceroy Lord Curzon, a Calcutta fan, felt moved to condemn it in London’s House of Lords as ‘a mass of deserted ruins and graves.’………..Delhi presented to visitors ‘the most sorrowful picture you can conceive of the mutability of human fortunes.’

 

Like the elephant India is, in the words of a longstanding foreign correspondent on his way out, ‘a country easier to describe than to explain, and easier to explain than to understand.’

 

Travel is glamorous only in retrospect

-        - Paul Theroux

 

….there’s a venerable tradition of not doing a whole lot in India. Its no accident that one of India’s most famous exports, meditation, is basically about boredom. It means taking that grey husk of frustration and tedium and repetition, and enclosing yourself in it, exploring its corners, until its something like bliss.

 

Clumps of bored young men – they are almost always men – are ubiquitous. They ‘hang out’, smoke bidis, snack, drink tea, drink booze, piss on walls, do odd jobs, wander around, mutter and whistle and sing to one another. At college they are loud and lascivious and obnoxious. In the parks they blast cellphone love songs and hold hands and lie in each other’s laps (macho Indian behavior is more overtly homoerotic than its English equivalent). They stand around watching their friends work, lounging against walls, sprawled over the city.

I watch them sidelong, they stare at me. These sleazy and occasionally aggressive young men, purveyors of sexual harassment, are flippantly termed ‘roadside Romeos.’ They are everywhere and they are threatening. Often they leer and catcall at passers-by………Everywhere they seek to dominate space. Boredom, anger, fear. It shapes the city’s psychogeography.

 

……….as in so many countries, is a dangerously large and disaffected group who are really, really bored with the status quo. And prices are rising. There are considerably more young men than women around. Cities everywhere tend to attract more men, and in North India’s patriarchal rural regions women are scarcer still. And all the time, Delhi’s wealth is in their face……….India’s population may be surprisingly unrevolutionary – but as The Economist wrote recently, perhaps the country’s rich ‘might want to pay their security guards a little more, though. Just in case.’

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

 

In the same way that Spain has a handy way with bulls and America with portion sizes, Indians excel at festivals.

 

Admittedly in my Indian travels around I have encountered a crocodile, cobras (twice), giant venomous spiders, moonshine, wild dogs, a scorpion, a convicted stalker, homemade guns, angry monkeys, angry bulls, angry camels, a Mach 6 earthquake, and a short circuit that exploded a lightbulb and sent fan blades whirling at my head. I have been escorted by the military through an armed uprising, and drunk tea with a group of opium-addled headhunters – skull-collectors rather than especially extreme corporate recruiters – who had facial tattoos to show they’d succeeded in carrying off a head or two.  (They were friendly enough, but their children threw rocks at me.) I’ve also been given warnings of varying degrees of plausibility about the dangers presented by to me personally by black bears, Islamist terrorists, tigers, fake gurus, wildfires, striking transport workers, leopards, bandits, corrupt policemen, bull sharks, wild elephants, Maoists, tsunamis, Pakistan, disgruntled cricket fans, and the metre-long flesh-eating turtles released into the Ganges to help dispose of half-burned corpses.

I have encountered precisely one of these in Delhi: the earthquake.

 

…….murder. Other countries challenging India as new emergent powers on the global scene include Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, and Nigeria. Big cities in all four of these are far more dangerous than Delhi. Latin American cities are in an entirely different league of violence. A widely covered study published in early 2013 showed that five of the ten cities with the world’s highest murder rates are Mexican, and fourteen of the fifty worst are in Brazil. Four cities in South Africa and the United States also feature in the top fifty, but not a single Indian city. In 2011, the homicide rate per 100,000 residents in Delhi was 2.7, versus 20.7 in Philadelphia and 58 in New Orleans. That’s a rate not so different to London. Reassuring conclusion: you’re extremely unlikely to be murdered.

 

Indian men – and, dare I say it, especially Delhi men – are notorious for their stalkerish tendencies. Rare is the woman, Western or Indian, who has not been pestered far, far beyond the point of flattery.

 

…..estimated 23,000 rape cases are stuck in the judicial system. In 2011 its chief justice reported that of the Delhi High Court was lagging 466 years behind schedule, despite the fact that it considers each case for an average of only four minutes and 55 seconds. ‘It’s a completely collapsed system,’ the prominent advocate Prashant Bhushan was quoted as saying. ‘This country only lives under the illusion that there is a judicial system.’

 

‘Hinduism respects women,’ one of my interviewees said, in yet another of those answers that seems puzzling in retrospect, given our interview was about pylons.

 

…….Indians do not distribute pleases and thank-yous with the same wantonness (and insincerity) as the British.

 

……..Mark Twain, I ‘never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.’

 

…….visually India is a graffiti wall. Across the country different languages have different alphabets. Gujarati is crimped and hatless, Bengali has gnarled runes, while the east coast’s Oriya (Odia) appears to made up of cartoon Cubist faces…………Southern scripts have more curves ………Tamil is all jalebi whorls, Kannada whorls with eyebrows, Malayalam McDonalds logos……..

 

India might just be the one big place where the internet has yet to vanquish the power of print.

 

Nizamuddin is one of the Delhi’s more schizophrenic neighbourhoods. It is named after the great Sufi saint Nizamuddin Auliya, and simultaneously manages to host a urine-tinged railway station, a rather covetable residential area, and a series of grubby chattering alleys of staring eyes and pirate DVDs………at the end of these alleys is the saint’s shrine, and a host of other tombs – including that of Inayat Khan, bearer of Sufism to London and the father of a glamorous British spy.

Sufism is a mystical, ascetic brand of Islam, which over the centuries fused bits and bobs of magic and other devotional traditions with Quranic meditation ………..It welcomes all faiths; people of all religions visit to pray for favours……The dargah is an oddly welcoming mausoleum, an onion-domed and pillared shelter for the coloured tomb inside.

 

At a conference in Delhi I met a Nigerian who was studying in Pune (near Mumbai – even more famous for its intolerance to migrants). She spoke of insults in the street, of strangers touching her hair uninvited, and how no Indian student would be seen hanging out with her. Nepalis are stereotyped; Tibetan refugees are put in preventive detention……Nor is racism confined to foreigners. Migrants from Bihar are mocked as crude, alien and endlessly breeding……….Poor Muslims are accused of being ‘Bangladeshi infiltrators,’ Kashmiris suspected of being terrorists, and everyone is judged by how dark they are. All this is complicated by caste……Northeasterners face particular discrimination, the beautiful Nagamese wife of a rugby player told me: constantly asked for ID, called ‘chinki’ – an insult recently made punishable with imprisonment – and treated as outsiders. In 2007, the Delhi police produced the infamous Security Tips for Northeast Students/Visitors in Delhi. ‘Dress code: When in rooms do as Roman does,’ it instructs, cryptically. It goes on to warn Northeasterners against ‘creating ruckus’ by cooking their ‘smelly dishes.’ Boy does Delhi know how to win over the already disenchanted margins…… The Nagas have become justly famous for their linguistic skills – ‘the air is full of them!’ a middle-aged man told me, glaring at the plane’s stewardesses – and all spoke four or five languages. But in the village there was little employment, crap roads, no electricity …………

 

That India smells is a motif almost as classic as its spirituality………..Blogs burst with horrified ramblings of travellers who have forgotten their nose pegs. They complain about the smell of urine-soaked walls and beaches covered in (human) turds. They complain about garlicky body odour on public transport and rotting garbage in the heat. They complain about the smell of cow dung, rivers of raw sewage, and offal around the Old Delhi butchers………… But I think India’s stinkiness is seriously overplayed………the first condition of understanding a foreign place is to smell it……….The problem is that modernity is anti-smell. It might even be anti-nose entirely………’Civilisation’ means freeing us from streams of shit in the street, oniony dinner-table burps, flatulent beasts……..Instead the world is scrubbed clean and neutered. Our workspaces are chilled, food wrapped, flowers scentless, armpits deodorized, sewage safely sealed on the other side of the U-bend. Noses dormant, retired like old hound-dogs………..our noses are ignored, except perhaps at mealtimes, and when they choose to dribble in the winter.

In India the nose is restored to its queenly place.

 

………..The glorious flat burnt smell of rain on hot dry earth called manvasanai in Tamil, in English its little-known but evocative name is ‘petrichor’ ………..

 

On one hand, bad smells play a potent role in upper-caste, prejudice: traditional ‘untouchable’ work often involved ‘unclean’ substances with unpleasant smells, like blood, corpses, leatherwork or human waste. Once again, smell, disgust and bigotry appear closely linked. ………Pleasant or auspicious smells are offered up to the gods…..

 

Journalist and professional sociopath A.A.Gill wrote, ‘If New York is a wise guy, Paris a coquette, Rome a gigolo and Berlin a wicked uncle, then London is an old lady who mutters and has the second sight. She is slightly deaf, and doesn’t suffer fools gladly.’ Delhi, then, might be an ageing tsarina: ruthless, capricious, avaricious, paranoid – and fond of bright colours, pretty trinkets, and sex scandals. Like all grandes dames, she’s showy, cash-splurging, hard to love, easy to photograph. Or perhaps, given her recent reinvention, she’s more like a nouveau riche socialite – exactly as above but on Twitter. The whole city jangles with theatricality, bling and the so-bad-its-good.

 

From ‘With Cyclists around the world’ by Adi B Hakim, Jal P Bapasola, Rustom B Bhumgara

 

(circumnavigating the world on bicycles from 15 October 1923 to 18 March 1928)

There is a saying current about Multan ……Dust, heat, beggars and cemeteries are the four specialities of Multan.

 

……….mountainous territory of British Baluchistan. It is bounded on the north by Afghanistan and by Persia on the west. The whole country is rocky and barren as if condemned to eternal sterility. The mountains in the district provide unique fastnesses to the tribes of dacoits and marauders who infest them with impunity. With insecurity of life and property, it is not surprising that this district is economically poor and otherwise backward. Pax Britannica is almost unknown beyond a radius of 20 miles from Quetta, the capital. Civilization has scarcely encroached upon this region. Law is honoured more in breach than in obedience. The sturdy race in this territory is a race of born-fighters. Accustomed to fight for life at every moment of their existence, the law of survival of the fittest seems to have asserted itself here completely…….We had three enemies to contend within the course of our travel through Baluchistan – mountains, marauders, and intense cold.

 

……….every inspection bungalow throughout the wild Baluchistan has some tale of its own to tell. Almost all of them were scenes of murder some time or the other. Inspection bungalows furnished little security against the ferocity of the Baluchi dacoits….. Cattle-lifting – horses included – was an art in which the Baluchi thief, through continuous practice, had acquired singular perfection. Horse stables, therefore, were a standing invitation to the Baluchi brigand to try his technique and passing a night in this stable was simply inviting otherwise avoidable trouble.

 

Flesh and blood indeed seems very cheap in this semi-barbarous region of Baluchistan. Curious customs and beliefs that cause us to shudder prevail in this country. Even the sacred institution of marriage is reduced to a form of trafficking in women. The average price of a bride varies from Rs 500 to Rs 2000, according to the beauty of the bride. Divorce is easy and cheap, if not free. The husband who feels ‘fed up’ with his wife has only to leave her again at her father’s place. Nor does her father look upon this as a necessary evil. The divorce is a source of income to him. The divorced daughter is put up for auction. The suitor who bids the highest gets the girl. When he in his turn finds that the charm of novelty has vanished, he divorces her; once again the poor wife is auctioned. Each additional divorce enhances the price of the poor creature.

The ties of filial affection are scarcely visible here. Just as the father without compunction auctions the daughter, so is the son anxious to hear about the death of his father. No sooner his ‘old man’ dies than the son, the heir and legal representative , inherits everything, including his mother.

 

At Kachhar we find the Pathans of the Kachhar tribes who are a ferocious race with devilish features. Some of these Kachhar tribes are religious fanatics. They believe in the attainment of heaven through the murder of kafirs or infidels, all persons not professing their faith are considered infidels……..

 

…..Ziarat, a summer resort for well-to-do and nothing-to-do inhabitants of Quetta.

 

……mode of life in Baluchistan…..a man according to the Mohammedan law is entitled to marry four wives, but many of the important preliminaries of the marriage are gone through by proxy…….the bridegroom…..a pawn in the game. The bridegroom is neither consulted in the choice of the bride nor as a rule does he see his bride before the betrothal ceremony…….the father of the bride is always careful to receive half the portion of the selling price of the bride strictly in advance before the betrothal. After the ceremony, the bridegroom is permitted to visit his fiancée; as a rule he does not wait for his marriage for the enjoyment of marital privileges. It is a peculiar custom in these regions and is not regarded as immorality. Only on payment of the full price, or whatever you may choose to call it, is the date for the marriage fixed……. In the event of the death of the bride before the marriage or nikah, half the price paid is refunded to the bridegroom.

The main tribes in Baluchistan are Kakars, Khetrans, Musa Khels, Dumars, Tarins, Saiyads, and Lunis. The masses live in villages of usual Pathan style – mud houses piled up in clusters without the remotest thought to plans and architectural designs. There is prevalent amongst the masses another curious custom relating to hospitality, which fortunately now is fast disappearing. The members of the Sazar Khels, Zakhphels, Dumars, and Pachis tribes consider it an obligation of hospitality to permit a grown-up girl of the family to associate with their guests for the satisfaction of his grosser self. The pernicious conservatism in this respect is so deep-rooted that in the absence of a suitable girl or woman in the family the host procures a girl from his relatives or friends by way of a loan……we may mention here that from the information we derived from various sources we found this crude notion of hospitality was confined to a few tribes only, though many of them have now begun to realize the perverted mentality underlying this custom………….the way in which …..food is prepared is equally remarkable. There is a proverb amongst the Persians something to the effect that it would be wise for a man not to see the place where his food is cooked……We had a peep at the cuisine of a host of ours………..usual procedure is to kindle a fire using the dried excreta of goats and other animals. The dough is then spread out on a hot stone and without much precaution the stone is shoved into the fire; thus particles of the excretion stick to the bread …..

 

Quetta is in many respects a pleasant city. Situated at an altitude of 5,500 ft above the sea level, it has a salubrious climate except perhaps in winter, when the barometer often registers a fall below the freezing point………it has a pleasant summer and a picturesque springtime. The winter is at times exceptionally severe.

 

Generally the roads in Persia are as safe as roads in any country in the West.

 

The Persians are a very polite nation and very well known for their hospitality………The Persians have a high opinion about the Parsi community in India. They imagine that every Parsi who comes to Persia comes for floating a company or undertaking some other commercial enterprise…….. women in Persia very seldom move out without their purdah or veil. This dates back to the times of lawlessness and disorder once prevalent in Persia, when men carried both their lives and their wives in hand. Nobody’s pretty sister or wife was ever safe from the rapacious attention of the highway marauder or what was as bad as that being, the licentious officials of the town. Though the causes that led to the adoption of the purdah system have largely disappeared, the purdah still remains. With certain orthodox Persians the system of purdah is so rigidly observed that none, save the husband, is permitted to lift the veil off the face of the woman.

 

…..Baghdad…..A large number of Hindus and Mohammedans are seen here engaged in government or railway services though now a days the Indian is ousted and way made for the local inhabitants.

 

Cairo, the Egyptian metropolis was humming with throng and activities. The honk of the cars, the hum of the tramcars, the creeking of the cart wheels, the none too polite language of the hack-victoria driver when he finds his progress impeded, the brawls at toddy shops – all vest Cairo with a marked resemblance to Bombay.

 

Our journey from Brindisi to Naples………it totally destroyed the high opinion we held about European countries in general. The roads were bad, houses awful and the people dirty. Little urchins ran about streets as if they were nobody’s children. They wore tattered clothes that bore blots and patches of grease, dirt, soot, mud and everything, and wherefrom a stench of the most unbearable type ensued. No doubt the poverty of the Italian peasants is one reason for the wretched state of existence and social backwardness they are found in. But every allowance being made for economic backwardness one feels a conclusion would hardly be inevitable that the people of Southern Italy as a rule prefer to wear unclean attires to decent ones….. The hotels [in Italy] were little better than the serais of Persia. Both harboured teeming colonies of all imaginable types of vermin; both were receptacles for filth, ire, refuse and all that nobody in the town seemed to need.

The less we refer to the costumes of the Southern Italian peasants the better for your appetite. …..the necktie, which always seemed to have served more than one owner and which invariably was the dirtiest piece in their dirty attire…….The manners of the Italian peasant are none too winning. At times while we were seated at our meals, some rustic would occupy a chair at the same table, pushing our chairs aside without the least courtesy of politely asking us to make room for him. Some other rustic, not content with such rude intrusion, would seek to converse with us – not politely asking permission to introduce himself, but rudely knocking the toes of his feet against ours. Then he would ask us from what country we came and without waiting for a reply ask us if we were Americans or Belgians, Germans, Austrians, or inhabitants of any country which found a place within his limited geography……We were much pestered by the idly curious people.

 

When we used to talk French we were mistaken for the Frenchmen. When we corrected the error saying we came from India, we could perceive a vacant gaze on their faces. Evidently the peasant of Italy does not know where India is or whether India is an island or a lake or a small town or a continent!

The houses tenanted by such a people could not be very attractive. The streets were narrow, dirty and ill-drained. The rows of houses were not regular, some houses starting forward, others receding backward, some tottering, some leaning against a neighbourhood tenement as if for support, some damaged, many lacking repairs and all dirt. Many streets were nothing short of a maze of dirty squalid buildings, with unwholesome smell steaming from the surface, swarming with half-nude urchins and ‘whole worlds of dirty people.’

On the first day of our journey from Brindisi we covered 60 miles. There was not a signboard or a milestone to tell us the distance. …..with the roads getting worse and worse.

 

There is a proverb ‘see Naples and die.’ We have seen Naples and we do not understand what the proverb means. There is not much to be seen in the city itself though the environments are interesting, historically.

 

As George-Stillman Hillard says, ‘By day the Coliseum is an impressive fact; by night it is a stately vision. By day it is a lifeless form; by night a vital thought.’

 

‘The Swiss people,’ says an author, ‘are the Dutch of the mountains, the same cold, unimaginative, money-seeking, yet vigorous, determined, energetic people.’ While we came across many with a canine intelligence, always eager to knock a little dough out of the tourist, on the whole they were more cleanly, mannerly and kind than the Italians. The Swiss people follow mainly agricultural vocations and still retain their rustic simplicity.

 

The rude attire of the villagers and the poverty-striken appearance of the towns bore testimony to Austria’s departed prosperity. Austria had evidently not recovered from the setback she received in the World War and one doesn’t know how long it will take her to attain to her pre-war eminence…..Lax morality is perhaps but a necessary concomitant of dire poverty. Due to stark poverty, one finds a number of women and girls in streets, soliciting at times with a persistence that rouses at once our pity and anger. Vienna with a population of 2000,000 people ranks fourth in the list of largest cities in the continent. Vienna has all the attractions that go with the large cities…….

 

Hungary is less densely populated than Austria, as the comparatively larger distance between the villages indicates. The cultivation of the land is rude and the population poor.

 

Various writers have spoken of Holland discouragingly. Phillip II defined it as ‘the country nearest to hell.’ But out of that uninhabitable tract, the patience and perseverance of the Hollanders created a beautiful country, though artificial. Nature has denied to this land most of her blessings. Holland had miles of sand and clay and barren soil. The Hollanders imported fertile soil and made her plains smile with abundant harvest. Holland was denied iron and coal; Hollanders imported these and constructed a beautiful country. The unfavourable position of the country costs her very much. A huge army of engineers and labourers continually stand sentinel over the dikes to see that no breach is made by the enemy……

 

…..London is not the capital of England alone; it is the most important city in the world, with perhaps a rival only in New York…….display of wealth and display of poverty, display of the brilliance side by side with display of drabness. Wherever we turned out gaze we saw men, women and children…… Here west is mingled with the east, falsifying Kipling’s prophecy ‘East is East and West is West. And never the twain shall meet.’ There is the Englishman who is all silk and starch; the factory operative all black and grease; the Chinaman with his peering almond eyes; the Japanese with his high cheek bones; the Lascer with his weather-beaten face; the Arab in long robes; the Hindu Westernized but Easterner; the Persian beautiful and white; the African with curly hair and white teeth; Princes, Dukes, Earls, Counts, Lords and Knights; Chinese coffee houses, Jewish synagogues; tourists chatting; foreigners enjoying; endless miles of buses, taxis, Rolls Royces and Fords, headlamp to tail-lamp, tail-lamp to head-lamp, one undending line…….streets and miles of streets

 

In England one can be sure of anything but the weather. One does not know when the brief spell of bright weather will yield place to rains. In fact the whimsical weather is given first preference in all dialogues.

 

Iowa’s Lake District stands favourably in comparison with lake districts of Switzerland and England. In some districts there are thousands of lakes many of which make a landscape off enchanting beauty at all hours of the day. Sunsets in these regions are glorious. They reveal nature in one of her most sublime and dazzling aspects, but alas, with so few of God’s creatures to admire her.

 

……..we were promenading about some unfrequented quarter of the ship watching the billows as one bigger than the rest swept across the deck, we found several Japanese girls taking their bath in the open with not an inch of clothing. What was more, on seeing us as they exhibited neither discernment nor surprise, regarding us with total indifference. In fact, they stood enjoying their bath. Experience in Japan later on, showed us that the Japanese regards his bath as a function to be performed open to the public gaze and whether there be crowds or none, it does not make material difference to him.

 

Japan like China is a topsey-turvy land, at least as the foreigner sees it. The Japanese appear to do things in an upside-down manner. Babies are carried slung across the back and not in front in arms as we do; the baby is considered a year old on the day it is born, so that the child born on the last day of the year is reckoned two years old, the next day; their books are read commencing at the back in lines running vertical; footnotes are placed at the top and not at the bottom of the page; they build the roofs of the house first and then construct the sides; they shudder at the immodesty of the scanty dress of Miss America, but enjoy a mixed bathing with men without clothes in the same hot spring; their theatres are without seats; their drawing rooms are without chairs; their dining rooms without forks, spoons, table cloths and tumblers; belching while dining is height of good manners; the houses have paper walls; they call bed, and rest their head on a pillow of wood; their cherries have no stones; oranges no pips, and the bells have no tongues; their screws work in reverse way, their locks open the reverse way and their ships are beached stern foremost; women blacken their teeth instead of whitening them; the babies are solemn like men; and the men are like babies, simple. The Japanese are born grown-up and remain children all their lives; their cab-men are cab-horses too; and common horses are quite uncommon; the Japanese baby never washes with soap and never gets kisses; Japanese have buttons three inches long; but no button-holes; their domestic servants are honoured, and merchants are regarded as outcasts; on entering your room you take off your boots and not your hat; and if it is hot, your host removes the front of the house for your benefit; the Japanese sells his goods to pay his debts as all debts must be paid of before New Year Day so that he can start contracting debts afresh; some of their temples are more famous for the beautiful groves of cherry-trees than their Gods. The Japanese wife gives precedence to her husband; it is place aux homes for place aux dames in Japan; the Japanese on receiving a guest bows several times instead of one; and the call of a visitor extends anything from 5 to 10 hours.

 

The love of flowers is the most predominating sentiment in the Japanese race.

 

Though the Japanese house is scantily furnished it invariably bears evidence of tender loving care bestowed upon it.

 

But ‘Japan is a man’s country where women are regarded as conveniences.’ In this respect Japan is antipodes of America which is a woman’s country where men are regarded as conveniences either carrying women’s poodles or furnishing defendants in divorce suits. But in Japan the woman is an obedient slave. Ever since she was tiny mite playing shuttlecock with her next brother-baby slung across her back, she is taught obedience to father while a child, obedience to husband while a wife and obedience to a grown-up son while a mother.

 

The Japanese trader has unfortunately an evil repute. Deception is his monopoly mainly, though the rickshaw boy has made encroachments upon it.………..His vocation has endowed him with a sturdy physique. No ordinary man can draw a rickshaw for miles like a horse and yet bear a smile on his face at the end of the journey.

 

He does not take his religion very seriously. Often Japanese is both a Shintoist and a Buddhist. Buddhism has found favour in Japan as it did not preach any dogma conflicting with any principle of the Shinto religion. It is supplementary in character. The gods are common; the temples of both faiths are often found side by side and often managed by the same priests. There are very few pure Shintoists or pure Buddhists in Japan…….Broadly speaking, writes an author ‘the peasantry are rather Shintoist than Buddhist, the Samurai and town people rather Buddhist than Shintoist in their faith; while the literature are mostly indifferentists.’

 

The Koreans though in such proximity of China and Japan do not resemble either the Chinese or the Japanese in their attire or mode of life…The Koreans fume and fret at Japanese domination, not without good cause.

 

Strange as it may seem, the inhabitants of the Hermit Kingdom as a rule are exceedingly courteous to foreigners though their land has been brought into contact with the outside world in very recent times…..Koreans are a gay people when they are out to enjoy life, and if the thermometer indicated 7 degrees below the freezing point, to them it mattered little……The Koreans are courteous and realize the language difficulty of the foreigners, hence they are always eager to learn from gestures and facial expressions of their guests of honour what they desire to convey……the unfailing courtesy of the Koreans manifest itself towards the foreigner in many ways…….the average Korean is habituated to talk loudly. Talking loudly is height of good manners in Korea; Koreans have good lungs………a trait of the Korean character, which strikes even a casual observer, and that is filial devotion……….most curious in Korea is perhaps an incomprehensible tradition that sons of the noble families or the Yangban as they are called must not work for livelihood. A nobleman may beg, but working, bah, that would be below his dignity………..we felt sorry for leaving a quaint nation behind us, which displayed, in spite of all its quaintness, an innate good nature.

 

…….Manchus differ physignomically much from the Chinese of the south, being also taller and better built than the people whom they subjugated.

 

……some of the natives take pride in partaking of a special dish. This consists of little mice dipped alive in honey and eaten while yet life is not extinct from the poor creatures. If Japanese eat live fish, it is no surprise the Chinaman should go one better and take a delight in devouring live mice.

 

Though Manchuria passes off usually as a limb of mighty China, in fact it is but a separate country with a race of people essentially different from the Chinaman of the south.

 

….The blazing sun began scorching even our sheltered heads. Village after village were passed. We could not procure food anywhere. The superstitious Chinamen regarded us with considerable suspicion. Though often the villager had enough and to spare and though we exhibited our willingness to pay cash for whatever we took, we were denied any help or food. The ‘Foreign Devil’ is not a harmonious figure in the Chinese landscape…….Often we rested at places which reminded us of the Persian caravansrai. It would be difficult not to assign them a place below that of the Persian inns. White lice and mosquitoes were in abundance. At every halt quite a colony of the former would creep into our packages and would venture out in the heat of the sun and overrun our bodies……….The further southward we went, we encountered increasing resistance from the natives. Foreigners are evidently disliked by every Chinaman ……….The conflicting news of strifes and warfare had instilled in them a fear for everything that was not Chinese. At times we were mistaken for robbers.

 

Most of the railway stations along this route have been built by Germans. In fact, wherever roads have been built by them they are found to be in much better condition than those built by the British. The latter always degenerate into mule tracks.

 

In many places in China, we were mistaken on account of our clean shaven faces for Russians……….We turned to villagers for food, but they would have nothing to do with us as we were mistaken for Russians.

 

…….Shanghai …….The city has a population of over a million and a half and is composed of International Settlement, French Town and the Chinese City. Wherever the tourist goes, his eyes rest upon a serging mass of humanity that flows into tortuous and sticky streets or lies nestling in narrow dingy lanes, like caterpillars. Everywhere the vast mass of humanity seems to be moving, pale-faced, bare-breasted, eager, pressing, heedless of everything else save their own little affairs, evidently taking a grim part in the struggle for existence ……..The delicacies which the shopkeepers expose with pride and by way of advertisement, consists among other things, of varnished ducks, dogs with skins flayed, lacquered rats, decayed eggs and decomposing fruits. Hygiene does not seem to have made much progress even in a centre of civilization, like Shanghai……….There is observable in the Chinese quarter of Shanghai a civilisation quite different from that observable elsewhere, degenerating at times into monotony. As one moves from street to street, he sees the same shops, same sellers, same bloodless faces, same eager looks, same dilapidated houses, same temples and same goods. One section of the city is but a faithful duplication of the other.

 

There are many dialects in China and a Chinese of the north is as much at sea in southern China as any Englishman or Tartar.

 

Generally speaking it is futile to expect hospitality in China. But all deserts have their oasis. It seems absence of hospitality is more attributable to their superstition, ignorance, and suspicion of the foreigners than an innately bad human nature. There would seem some justification for the Chinamen taking to the foreigner with a strong aversion. In fairness to the Chinamen it should be acknowledged he never was fairly treated by the foreigner and he is a little to blame if impelled by an instinct of self-preservation, he displays hostility towards those whom he looks upon as his born enemies.

 

….we had a duck cooked. This was not the type of varnished duck left hanging for sale, in dirt and filth at a Chinese stall; but live duck slaughtered for the occasion.

 

The Chinese are industrious, gentle and pleasant people, with a philosophy of life very different from that of the West. …….is a curious mixture of child-like simplicity and cunning; of fetishes and wisdom; of superstition and commonsense……..In China everything seems topsy-turvy though the Chinese have good reasons for behaving in what seems to us an eccentric manner. You find Chinamen putting on skirts and women wearing trousers; men carry umbrellas but women carry walking-sticks; men fly kites and children just look on; the pupil says his lessons with his back turned towards the master, and not his face; it is height of bad manners to take off one’s cap in the presence of superiors or even to wear spectacles; the years are reckoned not backwards and forwards from Christian era, but with every emperor’s reign they are computed……..the Chinaman writes from bottom to top and from right to left; his novels run into scores of volumes; his alphabet has 40,000 letters or pictures which he paints with a brush; his theatres are least artistic; his dramas seem to be without beginning or end, lasting over a year at times; he eats with chopsticks; his delicacies are our emetics; men must be served first and not ladies; he shakes his own hands when he meets you and not yours; the place of honour at the dining table is on the left; his boats are towed with horses; but his field wheel-barrows may have sails; coffin is the commonest article of domestic furniture and his greatest ambition is to be buried in a ‘swell’ coffin; though monogamy is the rule, there is no shame in taking as many additional concubines as he can support; husband and wife will not sit at the same table nor can the wife be audacious enough to hang her clothes on her husband’s peg; boys of seven will be served with food separately from their sisters and women will not be reckoned often in counting the members of the family; the Chinaman takes delight in extremely long nails, and women, till recently, were made small-footed; the Chinaman carries a visiting card nine inches long; he has a ‘milk’ name, a ‘school’ name, a ‘trade’ name and a ‘degree’ name; anyone can contract a debt on the guarantee of a son; for the grandson is liable to pay his grandfather’s debts; until recently the Chinese warring armies used to stop fighting on all holidays; if it rained hard, fighting might be carried on, the soldiers holding umbrella in one hand; at night there would be no fighting………..his mourning colour is white and not black; he wails near the coffin for seven days and removes the corpse not on hygienic grounds, but on a lucky day, at the dictation of an augur; beggars like trades people have powerful guilds; Chinaman’s music is ear-splitting, the actors like barbers are regarded as social outcasts………..the honour conferred by an emperor does not descend to a Chinaman’s descendants, but ascends to as many dead ancestors as the Imperial will may dictate; the Chinaman will create noise when an eclipse occurs beating a drum to frighten away the ‘Heavenly dog’ from swallowing up the moon…….The houses of the masses are poorly built and present little idea of comfort. Usually these are mat-shed houses made of coarse woven or plaited bamboo leaves, shoved upon bamboo framework and secured rudely by fibre……… The rooms are often over-heated and always under-ventilated. There is usually a courtyard at the entrance of which we find painted monstrosities of wood or stone, designed to frighten away evil spirits. But consistently with the sense of contrariness, these horrid figures are regarded by the Chinaman as ornaments…… Wall decorations are conspicuous by their absence. Usually there is a courtyard attached to a house, but unlike the Japanese courtyard it may contain a dunghill instead of a pretty little garden. The house of upper classes of mandarins or wealthy Manchus contain numerous articles of luxury and are well-built where even a Westerner may feel quite comfortable……… sampan dwellers. China has an immense floating population, literally floating. The Yangtze, the Hoang-ho, the Canton River and many others hold millions of junks and sampans, very inconvenient little crafts, in which men and women lie huddled up in intimate proximity……..On these little sampans births, death, marriages and all important domestic events take place……. Their lot is miserable, but still they seem to be cheery and contented, and not unoften quite merry.

The Chinese have very curious social customs……..Tight-fitting clothes, which reveal the outlines of the body, are considered indecorous. The higher classes of women cover their heads with beautiful headgears; the poorer ones go bareheaded……. The wife is a household drudge, under the iron-rule of the mother-in-law. Her inferior status is symbolized by her prostration at her husband’s feet at the time of her marriage. The husband is far above the wife to eat together with her……..

 

Foot-binding though gradually dying is yet in evidence. As a rule the Chinaman takes to babies kindly, but at places a baby-tower is seen, where the unwanted baby girls are left to exposure to die. A rude, windowless and roofless structure is seen in some solitary part, with an aperture in a wall some five to six feet above the ground. Here the unfortunate offspring is placed. The next comer pushes the infant into the tower – the fall probably completing the work if not done by the exposure and starvation – and places his child there. This system has the redeeming feature of no parent being compelled to kill his own child……..

 

The most notorious is the Beggar’s Guild. This guild levies a rate upon every shopkeeper. The rate duly paid, no beggar will approach the shop. Any inclination on the part of the trader to resist the demand of the guild would be instantly visited with punishment. Horribly disfigured and diseased beggars would be let loose upon him, who will soon pester him, into submission. …………a Chinaman has no religion, three hold the field. Confucianism is really nothing more than a theory of applied ethics. Taoism is more philosophy than religion; but there is Buddhism with all its elaborate paraphernalia and four million gods. …..There are numerous joss houses, or small idol temples to which the devotee turns for prayer or relief from his worries. The devotee rings gongs and bells, and in answer a priest comes with a few papyrus rolls of which the devotee selects one at random. This roll contains the answer to the devotee’s petition to his god; the answer may be uncertain, equivocal or irrelevant. If the devotee is not satisfied with the divine reply, he pays another coin and tries his luck again, until either his purse is exhausted or he gets a reply he likes to have.

 

……when we crossed over into Indo-China we did not feel very sorry for having finished with China and the Chinese. In no country in the world we were pestered so much or ill treated to such an extent as in China. Yet we firmly believe this is more due to ignorance, illiteracy and superstition than innate evil nature; that given the light of knowledge and culture, the Chinaman may prove as good as any other human being in the world.

 

The rude savage Arab has a better ethical code than what prevails in Indo-China, a land over which the tri-coloured flag of France flies, and where liberty, equality and fraternity, mean just a regime of sham liberty, sham equality, and sham fraternity……….Indians in Indo-China are made to labour under humiliating disabilities the like of which no civilized government seeks to impose even upon a conquered race. The immigration rules are designed with a devilish ingenuity to keep Indo-China free from Indian and Chinese immigrants. Directly the Indian enters the Saigon port, his passport is confiscated and he is marched into a lock-up. If he can furnish a security, well and good. Otherwise detention is inevitable. Then follows the terrible ordeal of filling up ‘forms’ wherein the Indian immigrant is subjected to a searching cross-examination. The immigrant, no matter what his social status and position are, is asked to furnish fingerprints of all his fingers. As if this were not enough a heavy poll tax is levied for the terrible offence the Indian has committed of having been born an Indian.

 

In some places in America there are exhibited sign-boards, ‘Japs, Indians, Chinese, dogs and cats not allowed.’

 

………..entered Cambodia. When we arrived at Phnom Penh we found we had once gain to put up with humiliating Immigration rules. Fingerprints had to be given again.

 

In the jungles of Siam you do not find men to appreciate an undertaking like ours……We could not deliver lectures; there did not seem enough intelligent men worth talking to.

 

The Burmese as a race are essentially different from any of the Indian communities, showing nearer resemblance to the Chinese with the prominent flat physiognomy. Around 85 per cent of the people are Buddhists though most of them retain primitive beliefs in the Nats or spirits of forests and mountains. Burma is full of pagodas and monasteries.

 

………….Naga Hills form a sort of natural boundary between the state of Manipur and Assam.

 

……Madras Presidency. The caste system is extremely rigid and untouchability, in its most inhuman forms is common here……In matters of caste system they are extremely rigid and orthodox.

 

The Mysore Palace of the maharaja is the outstanding feature of this old capital. Silver doors give you entrance to the main building. There is an armoury in the palace which is particularly interesting……It contains the sword of Sultan Tipu, and the wag-nakh or tiger’s claws alleged to have been used by Shivaji.

 

From ‘Strangers in my Sleeper. Rail journeys and encounters on the Indian subcontinent’ by Peter Riordan

 

 

Indians have a penchant for bureaucratic obfuscation and flowery titles, and at Chennai Central Station, as at all the country’s main stations, this bent is given full expression.

 

‘How do you like Sri Lanka?’ I was repeatedly asked and I found myself saying, ‘The people are friendly.’ I did like Sri Lanka, but something about it left me feeling faintly irritated. An apathy clung in the air, and a trace of anger. Perhaps the twenty-year civil war had left them spent and lethargic and resentful. Or perhaps nature was too bountiful for their own good: fruit fell from the trees and any seed tossed on the ground soon sprouted and flourished…………..Villagers seemed to move without purpose or industry. In fact, I’d seen no one really exerting themselves. The most industrious worker seemed to be nature itself, which was forever germinating and regenerating and leaping upwards and outwards.

 

First-class train travel suggests sumptuous comfort, but in Sri Lanka it means no such thing…..upholstery that is not tattered, a passable toilet……a compartment that is not grubby and ceiling fans that work. But nothing more. No porters dancing at your attendance, no plush compartments, no catering service, just the rudiments of train travel, the absence of unpleasantness.

 

For some unaccountable reason, trains in Sri Lanka did not dilly-dally at stations, pausing only long enough to provoke a mad push-and-shove contest between those disembarking and those hastening aboard.

 

Trivandrum is, for India, an oddity; an unspoilt capital city. ‘This is the loveliest city in India,’ I said…….

From ‘My Mercedes is not for sale’ by Jeroen van Bergeijk

 

 

Of the more than seven million cars driving around on Dutch roads in 2005, more than a quarter million had been exported by the end of the year. All the wealthy Western European countries export their old automobiles, millions in total. Nowadays most go to Eastern Europe, but a considerable minority, estimated 500,000 per year, wind up in Africa. ……Most of the old automobiles that leave Europe for Africa are shipped by boat, but a small number are driven there. In fact, since the 1970s, driving a used car to West Africa has become a popular pastime among French, Belgian, German, and Dutch adventurers. ……Every winter they flock to West Africa, selling their castoffs at a tidy profit in countries like Mauritania, Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso. To get there they have to bribe customs officials, befriend corrupt cops, and – above all – drive straight through the Sahara.

 

….how to drive an ordinary automobile through loose sand……..lets the air escape [from the tire]……a tire deflated……..like that provides greater contact surface between tire and sand. The tire grips better and slips less. A fully inflated tire offers little contact surface. In loose sand, a full tire begins to slip, digs itself in, and – voila – the car is stuck.

 

The ship is packed; there’s not a seat to be found. Moroccan children dance on the tables, tug at their mothers’ skirts, and scream themselves hoarse. White tourists look up, annoyed; the Moroccan parents don’t see anything wrong. We, the whites, want quiet and privacy; they, the Africans, bustle and conviviality.

 

Things in Africa come in two forms: broken or almost broken. Whether it’s the power plant or the water supply, the Internet café’s computers or the city buses, the sewage system or the airport runway – seldom does anything in Africa work like its supposed to work.

 

…..the African state must choose between food for its citizens and investment in the future………..the African state expects free help from the wealthy West ……….

 

On account of the combination of high temperature and dry air, a person loses fluid at an alarming rate in the Sahara. If you sit in the full sun – and remain perfectly motionless – at a temperature of a hundred degrees……….In five hours, you’re seriously dehydrated; in two days, dead. Sahara Overland recommends drinking more than five quarts of water a day in the winter and more than two and a half gallons in the summer…….. [dehydration] begins with innocent symptoms like dry lips, loss of appetite, and headache. But after that, with a fluid loss of about 10 percent, the symptoms rapidly progress to dizziness, trouble breathing, sunken eyes, a lack of saliva, and a tendency to babble. At that point, you can still stem the tide by getting out of the sun and especially by drinking lots of water. Its another matter when serious dehydration sets in. With a loss of 20 percent of body fluid ……….there’s no chance of survival without admission to the hospital; the tongue and throat are so swollen that you can no longer drink on your own. You go deaf, your lips turn blue, your skin shrivels up and loses feeling. The body manufactures large quantities of endorphins, which produce a sense of euphoria. Finally delirium sets in ………..During the terminal phase of dehydration, the body extracts so much fluid from the blood that the blood thickens and the body’s heat can no longer be released through the skin. The body temperature rises dramatically, one or more of the vital organs (the heart, brain, and lungs) fail, and death follows.

 

Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania, is a city with no cinemas, department stores, theaters, bookshops, discos, concert halls, or bars. Everything that makes a city fun is missing here. Everything that makes a city unpleasant – people, cars, filth – can be found here in spades. ……….the entrance to the city is a garbage dump. Coming from the north, you drive for miles through an apocalyptic landscape of piles of stinking refuse, smoldering fires, flapping plastic bags, and the rusting hulks of junked cars.

A few highways are paved, but most of the “streets” are sandy trails where your car gets stuck just as bad as in the barren, lifeless desert……….Nouakchott is the Sahara’s largest metropolis. In 1963 it was a sleepy little fishing village. But after the country gained its independence from France, there had to be a capital. Nouakchott was designed for fifteen thousand people; nearly a million live here now.

Still, Nouakchott does try to be a capital. There’s a TV station, a stadium, a presidential palace – and a museum. The Musee National is the only museum in Mauritania. It takes fifteen minutes to find somebody who can sell me a ticket. The building consists of two galleries. One contains a collection of potsherds and arrowheads; the other is devoted to the local costume. I’m the only visitor.

 

Nouakchott is hit by sandstorms two hundred days a year……..If you want to go out in such a storm, you better make sure your whole body is covered. The sand gets in everything: in your bag, in your food, even in your underwear. But a storm like this has more consequences than just physical discomfort. For one thing, you cant drive your car in a sandstorm. Not so much because of the poor visibility, as because your car is literally sandblasted. The finish dulls; the windshield and headlight glass turns matte. The glass in some Mauritanian cars has turned almost milky white.

A country’s traffic is a metaphor for its culture. In the Netherlands, the cars gleam, the roads are well maintained, and rules and warnings……encourage motorists to drive safely and courteously. At the same time, if there are no cops in sight, everyone drives over the speed limit. The Dutchman likes to think of his country that way: clean and orderly but with a touch of antiauthoritarianism.

In Mauritania, the drivers fear neither God nor man. In the week I’m here, I see a collision per day. The traffic in Nouakchott is a disorderly mess, a jumble, a free-for-all in which everyone does whatever he wants. The cars here – the overwhelming majority of which are Benzes, by the way – are like the bicycles Dutch students ride: rusty wrecks with no lights. In the West, these cars couldn’t even be sold for parts: everything of value has already been removed. Brakes, headlights, the upholstery on the seats, let alone chrome mirrors or a working CD player – everything is missing. ………Cars have to share the road with donkey and horse carts. …..so people always pass on the shoulder or over the median strip. No one waits for the stoplight (there are only three stoplights in all of Nouakchott anyhow), and everyone drives into oncoming traffic……. Whoever’s the most aggressive has the right-of-way. …….A city with no culture or diversion, where you cant see any farther than twenty yards during the sandstorms…….

 

“A Moor looks down on physical labor,”….. Mauritania is a segregated society: Moors and blacks live in separate worlds. Slavery was only officially abolished here in 1981……..the Moorish minority still calls the shots, and blacks do the dirty work……..what do the Moors do?

“All a Moor cares about,”………… “is chep-chep”

Chep-chep is something like finagling. Chep-chep means trying to gain an advantage from everything. Chep-chep means doing business with a wink and a nod. Chep-chep means playing a game where dirty tricks are allowed…… Chep-chep is the plumber who comes to fix …..broken toilet but manages to “repair” it in such a way that is breaks again in two weeks and [you] have to call him again.

 

Rosso is known as the most notorious border crossing in West Africa, some say in all of Africa. The border is supposedly occupied not only by a small army of corrupt customs agents but also by dozens of hustlers who try every trick in the book to rob travelers blind………The message: whatever you do, avoid Rosso………Rosso is the most important border crossing between Mauritania and Senegal

 

Until recently, Saint-Louis, Senegal, was the end of the road for Europeans with used cars to sell. Senegal was a great place to sell your car. The prices were good, and ……..you could take a nice vacation here. You never have a problem finding a decent hotel or restaurant in Senegal. ……….Little of that remains.

In 2003 the Senegalese government prohibited the importation of automobiles more than five years old. The official reason for the prohibition was that so many junky old cars were entering the country that they constituted a threat to the environment and traffic safety. The real reason, they think in Saint-Louis, was that the government wanted to stamp out the booming car trade, which was happening almost completely without state supervision and thus taxation. ……..the used-car market here has totally collapsed since then.

 

Downtown Dakar seems trapped in a time warp. Practically all the buildings date to the 1970s – nothing earlier, nothing later. ………Dakar is busy, full of aggressive hustlers. It is, thank God, no Nouakchott. There are sewers here, and cars stop for stoplights. There are patisseries, expensive restaurants, nice hotels…..

 

Gambia is an insignificant little country. It’s the smallest country in Africa, consisting of a strip of land on either side of the Gambia River. With a total area of 4,363 square miles, its about a quarter the size of the Netherlands. Of all the West African countries, Gambia may be the most attuned to traditional tourism. You’ll find dozens of luxury beach hotels there whose clientele is primarily British and Dutch.

 

Dusk doesn’t exist in Africa. Its either light or dark. Night falls in Africa as if God in heaven flipped a light switch.

 

Suame Magazine – Suame for short – is Ghana’s scorched industrial underbelly. It’s the country’s largest automotive repair center – many say the largest in all West Africa. Here, in this suburb of Kumasi, ten thousand mechanics work at keeping the decrepit West African auto fleet on the road………may seem chaotic, but if you walk around a little longer, you notice how efficiently the area is actually organized. There’s a corner for each speciality: here are the sheet metal workers; there, the painters; here, the flat fixers; there, the welders. Mechanics are divided according to make of car. There’s a Daewoo Street, a Toyota District, a Renault Alley……Suame Magazine’s pluses: Ghana’s largest employer, the largest and most efficient automotive repair center in West Africa………..the soil is heavily polluted, and drained oil is being dumped directly in the sewer and stream.

 

….Togo is a small, narrow country – about as big as the Netherlands and Belgium put together. From border to border, its only about thirty-five miles. …….Because the Prussians colonized “Togoland” for a brief period in the nineteenth century, Germany is one of the few European countries with an embassy here. Togo was a favorite vacation destination among Germans in the 1970s and 1980s, and many have stayed.

 

There is also little left of that other pillar of the Togolese economy: the trans-Africa auto trade. When the route through Algeria was still the most popular, Lome was the favourite destination of many a Western European car trader. Once you’d conquered the Sahara of Algeria and Niger, it was but a short distance to the magnificent beaches of Togo. The traders chilled out here and disposed of their cars……..the walls of Chez Alice are lined with European license plates – but only an occasional Western tourist arrives with his own car these days. No one dares drive through Algeria anymore on account of terrorist attacks, and Lebanese traders offer cars at such rockbottom prices in the port of Lome that it no longer pays to sell your car here.

 

Nowhere in West Africa do so many used cars arrive in one place as here, in the port of Cotonou. In the mid-1980s the trade consisted of a few thousand cars per year; by the beginning of the century, that had risen to 200,000. The whole economy of the city revolves around the car trade.

 

The international trade in used cars is constantly in motion. One year, most of the cars go to Africa; the next year, Eastern Europe; the year after that, the Middle East. Hardly any used cars were exported to Iraq under Saddam Hussein, because Iraqis had to pay thousands of dollars in import duties for every car. After America ousted the dictator in 2003, however, the import duties were lifted, and almost all the available Western European used cars disappeared to Iraq that year. In Africa, trade with Liberia and Sierra Leone was interrupted by civil war; now lots of cars go there. The Ivory Coast was always an excellent market but has fallen out of favor since 2003.

 

…..Benin ….Just as in Lome, the trade here is mostly in the hands of the Lebanese, who, like the Indians, have often lived in Africa for generations. In addition to selling used cars, the Lebanese often run supermarkets or restaurants.

 

…..the first car dealers in Africa made enormous profits. Just as in the gold rush, the party ended as soon as thousands of fortune seekers showed up.

 

According to Beuving’s study, the Lebanese actually aren’t so terribly interested in making a profit at all, let alone in the car business. What motivates them instead is the exciting life of the expatriate. Beuving paints a picture of young adults who want nothing more than to escape the oppressive family ties and rigid social conventions of home. The immigrate to West Africa in hopes of a carefree life full of booze and broads. And though there’s little to be made in the car trade, there’s still an ample supply of women and drink. “Its really hard to meet girls in Lebanon,” says John. “A girlfriend just for sex? Forget about it.” In Cotonou, however, that’s not a problem.

 

…..I’m in Ouagadougou, which everyone calls Waga for short. The city makes a bad first impression. Interminable, half-built suburbs ring the outskirts, and the road downtown is a long-drawn-out assemblage of phone centers, food vendors, and secondhand auto parts stores…… There’s more life here, more fun, more enjoyment than elsewhere.

 

In the average African city, three-quarters of the cars are cabs.

 

From ‘The Psychology of Money. Timeless lessons on wealth, greed and happiness’ by Morgan Housel

 

“A genius is the man who can do the average thing when everyone else around him is losing his mind.”

-        Napoleon

 

“The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.”

-        Sherlock Holmes

 

Forty percent of Americans cannot come up with $400 in an emergency.

 

Before World War II, most Americans worked until they died. That was the expectation and the reality.

 

…….people who have control over their time tend to be happier in life is a broad and common enough observation that you can do something with it.

 

As I write this,Warren Buffett's net worth is $84.5 billion. Of that, $84.2 billion was accumulated after his 50^th birthday. $81.5 billion came after he qualified for Social Security, in his mid-60s……. His skill is investing, but his secret is time. That’s how compounding works.

 

Jim Simons, head of the hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, has compounded money at 66% annually since 1988. No one comes close to this record. ….. Buffett has compounded at roughly 22% annually, a third as much.

 

….thats only one way to stay wealthy: some combination of frugality and paranoia.

 

…..40% of companies successful enough to become publicly traded lost effectively all of their value over time.

 

Planning is important, but the most important part of every plan is to plan on the plan not going according to plan.

 

The great art dealers operated like index funds. They bought everything they could. And they bought it in portfolios, not individual pieces they happened to like. Then they sat and waited for a few winners to emerge.

That’s all that happens.

Perhaps 99% of the works someone like Berggruen…..[art dealer]………..acquired in his life turned out to be of little value. But that doesn’t particularly matter if the other 1% turn out to be the work of someone like Picasso.  Berggruen could be wrong most of the time and still end up stupendously right.

A lot of things in business and investing work this way…………It means we underestimate how normal it is for a lot of things to fail. Which causes us to overreact when they do.

 

Investment firm Correlation Ventures once crunched ….numbers. Out of more than 21,000 venture financings from 2004 to 2014:

65% lost money.

Two and a half percent of investments made 10x-20x.

One percent made more than a 20x return.

Half a percent – about 100 companies out of 21,000 – earned 50x or more. That’s where the majority of the industry’s returns come from.

This, you might think, is what makes venture capital so risky. And everyone investing in VC knows its risky. Most startups fail and the world is only kind enough to allow a few mega successes………Remember, tails drive everything.

 

Napoleon’s definition of a military genius was, “The man who can do the average thing when all those around him are going crazy.”

It’s the same in investing.

 

There is an old pilot quip that their jobs are “hours and hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.” It’s the same in investing. Your success as an investor will be determined by how you respond to punctuated moments of terror, not the years spent on cruise control………… Tails drive everything.

 

 

At the Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting in 2013 Warren Buffett said he’s owned 400 to 500 stocks during his life and made most of his money on 10 of them…….. “Its not whether you’re right or wrong that’s important,” George Soros once said, “but how much money you make when you’re right and how much you lose when you’re wrong.” You can be wrong half the time and still make a fortune.

 

Having a strong sense of controlling one’s life is a more dependable predictor of positive feelings of wellbeing than any of the objective conditions of life we have considered.

More than your salary. More than the size of your house. More than the prestige of your job. Control over doing what you want, when you want to, with the people you want to, is the broadest lifestyle variable that makes people happy.

 

A wise old owl lived in an oak,

The more he saw the less he spoke,

The less he spoke, the more he heard,

Why aren’t we all like that wise old bird?

 

 

We now have better, more scientific evidence of fever’s usefulness in fighting infection. A one-degree increase in body temperature has been shown to slow the replication rate of some viruses by a factor of 200.

 

……progress happens too slowly to notice, but setbacks happen too quickly to ignore.

There are lots of overnight tragedies. There are rarely overnight miracles.

 

Nassim Taleb explained: “True success is exiting some rat race to modulate one’s activities for peace of mind.”

 

“The first rule of compounding is to never interrupt it unnecessarily.”

 

August, 1945. World War II ends

…..Sixteen million Americans – 11% of the population – served in the war. About eight million were overseas at the end. Their average age was 23. Within 18 months all but 1.5 million of them would be home and out of uniform.

And then what?

What were they going to do next?

……no one knew the answers….the most likely scenario – in the eyes of many economists – was that the economy would slip back int the depths of the Great Depression.

Three forces had built up during the war:

1.      Housing construction ground to a halt, as virtually all production capacity was shifted to building war supplies. Fewer than 12,000 homes per month were built in 1943, equivalent to less than one new home per American city. Returning soldiers faced a severe housing shortage.

2.      The specific jobs created during the war – building ships, tanks, and planes – were very suddenly not necessary after it, stopping with a speed and magnitude rarely seen in private business. It was unclear where soldiers could work.

3.      The marriage rate spiked during and immediately after the war. Soldiers didn’t want to return to their mothers basement. They wanted to start a family, in their own home, with a good job, right away.

 

This worried policymakers, especially since the Great Depression was still a recent memory, having ended just five years prior.

……This fear was exacerbated by the fact that exports couldn’t be immediately relied upon for growth, as two of the largest economies – Europe and Japan – sat in ruins dealing with humanitarian crisis. And America itself was buried in more debt than ever before, limiting direct government stimulus.

So we did something about it.

………The first thing we did to keep the economy afloat after the war was keep interest rates low. This wasn’t an easy decision, because when soldiers came home to a shortage of everything from clothes to cars it temporarily sent inflation into double digits.

……..low rates………made borrowing to buy homes, cars, gadgets, and toys really cheap………..Consumption became an explicit economic strategy in the years after World War II.

An era of encouraging thrift and saving to fund the war quickly turned into an era of actively promoting spending…….the GI Bill, ….offered unprecedented mortgage opportunities. Sixteen million veterans could buy a home often with no money down, no interest in the first year, and fixed rates so low that monthly mortgage payments could be lower than a rental.

The second was an explosion of consumer credit, enabled by the loosening of Depression-era regulations. The first credit card was introduced in 1950. Store credit, installment credit, personal loans, payday loans – everything took off.

 

………demand from GIs ……..Married, eager to get on with life, and emboldened with new cheap consumer credit, they went on a buying spree like the country had never seen.

…….Commercial car and truck manufacturing virtually ceased from 1942 to 1945. Then 21 million cares were sold from 1945 to 1949. Another 37 million were sold by 1955.

Just under two million homes were built from 1940 to 1945. Then seven million were built from 1945 to 1950. Another eight million were built by 1955.

Pent-up demand for stuff, and our newfound ability to make stuff, created the jobs that put returning GIs back to work. ………..The defining characteristic of economics in the 1950s is that the country got rich by making the poor less poor.

Average wages doubled from 1940 to 1948, then doubled again by 1963.

And those gains focused on those who had been left behind for decades before. The gap between rich and poor narrowed by an extraordinary amount.

….Women held jobs outside the home in record numbers. Their labor force participation rate went from 31% after the war to 37% by 1955, and to 40% by 1965.

Minorities gained, too………..Women and minority rights were still a fraction of what they are today. But the progress toward equality in the late ‘40s and ‘50s was extraordinary.

The levelling out of classes meant a levelling out of lifestyles……… TV and radio equalized the entertainment and culture people enjoyed regardless of class. Mail-order catalogs equalized the clothes people wore and the goods they bought regardless of where they lived. ……..most people – lived lives that were either equal or at least fathomable to those around them…….Debt rose tremendously. But so did incomes, so the impact wasn’t a big deal……… the growth in household debt-to-income from 1947-1957 was manageable………..

The homeownership rate in 1900 was 47%. It stayed right about there for the next four decades. Then it took off, hitting 53% by 1945 and 62% by 1970………….

1973……..The recession that began that year brought unemployment to the highest it had been since the 1930s.

Inflation surged. But unlike the post-war spikes, it stayed high.

Short-term interest rates hit 8% in 1973, up from 2.5% a decade earlier.

And you have to put all of that in the context of how much fear there was between Vietnam, riots, and the assassination of Martin Luther King, and John and Bobby Kennedy.

It got bleak.

America dominated the world economy in the two decades after the war. Many of the largest countries had their manufacturing capacity bombed into rubble. But as the 1970s emerged, that changed. Japan was booming. China’s economy was opening up. The Middle East was flexing its oil muscles.

A combination of lucky economic advantages and a culture shared by the Greatest Generation – hardened by the Depression and anchored in systematic cooperation from the war – shifted when Baby Boomers began coming of age. A new generation that had a different view of what's normal hit at the same time a lot of the economic tailwinds of the previous two decades ended.

………between the early 1970s through the early 2000s …… growth continued, but became more uneven…..Ronald Reagan’s 1984………GDP growth was the highest it had been since the 1950s. by 1989 there were six million fewer unemployed Americans than there were seven years before. The S&P 500 rose almost fourfold between 1982 and 1990. Total real GDP growth in the 1990s was roughly equal to that of the 1950s – 40% vs 42% ………..Between 1993 and 2012, the top 1 percent saw their incomes grow 86.1 percent, while the bottom 99 percent saw just 6.6 percent growth………It was nearly the opposite of the flattening that occurred after the war.

 

Rising incomes among a small group of Americans led to that group breaking away in lifestyle.

They bought bigger homes, nicer cars, went to expensive schools, and took fancy vacations………….The lifestyles of a small portion of legitimately rich Americans inflated the aspirations of the majority of Americans, whose incomes weren’t rising.

A culture of equality and togetherness that came out of the 1950s-1970s innocently morphs into a Keeping Up With The Joneses effect.

……..the beginning of debt crises: The moment when people take on more debt than they can service………what happened in 2008.

….A lot of debt was shed after 2008. And then interest rates plunged. ….The Fed backstopped corporate debt in 2008. That helped those who owned that debt – mostly rich people.

Tax cuts over the last 20 years have predominantly gone to those with higher incomes. People with higher incomes send their kids to the best colleges. Those kids can go on to earn higher incomes and invest in corporate debt that will be backstopped by the Fed, own stocks that will be supported by various government policies, and so on………the bigger thing that’s happened since the early 1980s. The economy works better for some people than others. Success isn’t as meritocratic as it used to be ………….

You can scoff at linking the rise of Trump to income inequality alone. And you should. These things are always layers of complexity deep. But it’s a key part of what drives people to think, “I don’t live in the world I expected. That pisses me off. So screw this. And screw you! I’m going to fight for something totally different, because this – whatever it is – isn’t working.”

Take that mentality and raise it to the power of Facebook, Instagram, and cable news – where people are more keenly aware of how other people live than ever before……. “The more the Internet exposes people to new points of view, the angrier people get that different views exist.”

………….The unemployment rate is now the lowest its been in decades. Wages are now actually growing faster for low-income workers than the rich. ……….If everyone studied advances in health care, communication, transportation, and civil rights since the Glorious 1950s, my guess is most wouldn’t want to go back……..expectations move slower than reality on the ground ……..So the era of “This isn’t working” may stick around.

And the era of “We need something radically new, right now, whatever it is” may stick around.