From ‘India. A civilization of differences. The Ancient tradition of universal tolerance’ by Alain Danielou

ईशा वास्यम् इदं सर्वं यत् किञ्च जगत्यां जगत् ।

तेन त्यक्तेन भुञ्जीथा मा गृधः कस्य स्विद्धनम् ॥

ईशावास्य उपनिषद

I – In a world where everything changes [where nothing is permanent] the divine is everywhere present [in flowers, birds, animals, in forests, in man].

II – Enjoy fully what the god concedes to you and never covet what belongs to others [neither their goods, nor their talent, nor their success].

-          Isha Upanishad……

Hinduism is not a dogmatic religion. It is not even a religion in the Judeo-Christian sense of the word. What binds Hindus together is a common search, the utilization of all perceptive, intuitive, and intellectual means in the attempt to pierce the enigma of the visible and invisible world. It is an effort to comprehend our deepest nature and our role in the cosmic order, so that we can best fulfill that role collectively and individually.

From ‘Crossing the Shadow Line. Travels in South-East Asia’ by Andrew Eames

The sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his own room

-          Blaise Pascal, Pensees

In the first half of 1982, 5,700 murders were recorded in Thailand. Police seized 481 weapons, including 135 automatic rifles and 206 hand grenades……Bangkok accounts for the vast majority of all criminal activity in the nation, just as it accounts for most of the nation’s industry. Every year the Bangkok police arrest an average of 20,000 prostitutes in the capital, only to release them again; the state cannot afford to feed them any more than their families in the provinces ……

Bangkok’s Chinatown still bears the mark of the Chinese, even though integration here is more complete than that in Indonesia or Malaysia, and the Chinese Thais all have Thai names.

Soft drinks always come in bags in Thailand. Bottles are in short supply and no drinks vendor will let a customer take one away.

Chiang Mai and the provinces of the north only became regarded as the property of Thailand by default: no one else had a better claim. Even now the northern Thais have their own dialect and regard themselves as a race apart. Further up the hillsides behind the northern Thai villages live seven major distinct hill-tribes, even further removed from control at Bangkok. In fact, laying aside the troubles on the Kampuchean border and the communists in the south, the hill-tribes are the government’s main security worry……….Although the tribesmen are now incorporated into the body of Thailand they are not Thai. Most of them originate from the province of Yunnan, in southern China. They are wandering farmers by tradition, because their slash-and-burn type agriculture destroys the forest land. When the tribes first settled in the area it was then all contested land. Burma, China, Laos and Thailand all laid claim to ownership, and now that the borders are fixed there are tribes in all four countries. The principle of a national frontier makes no sense to the people up above 1,600 feet in the rain forests; they only understand the need to plant at the end of the rains and shift when the soil is exhausted. They owe no allegiance to any country, and no country has ever done much for them – which is as they would wish. They are hardly conscious even of today’s borders, which follow no natural barriers. The 1,100 miles of Burmese / Thai border is particularly hard to police.

Solitude – lack of family and friends – is regarded as a terrible fate throughout Asia.

No one in Thailand ever seems to be called by their proper names (except apparently by angry mothers)…….

Two turbaned Sikhs – a rare sight in Thailand – boarded at one stop with large bundles of textiles that they were touting from village to village.

Many children in Asia will run crying from matsaleh (the original Malay word for white man) simply because the only vision they get of white society and behavior is through the crime series they see on TV, where each starts with a murder and ends with a fight.

Mersing is a fairly typical small east coast fishing town. The Chinese control everything that makes money: they own the taxis at the taxi-stand, the boats that line they creek, the Japanese cars that line the streets, the larger shops, the restaurants and the hotels, and all despite the fact that they are discriminated against in the nation’s bumiputra laws, which are tailored to try to encourage more Malay involvement in the nation’s economy.

I hated Singapore when I first arrived……They way in which the old shop houses were razed to the ground to make way for further shopping centres seemed to me a wanton destruction of basic Singaporean culture. When the oldest mosque in the city was demolished there was hardly a murmur of disapproval in the press. ……..there were always rumours in Singapore, largely because the press was muzzled…….three different ethnic groups (Chinese seventy-six per cent, Malay fifteen per cent, and Indian seven per cent) that make up the island’s population……Sometimes I found the children quite frightening. Unlike the adults, they had no experience of another society with which to compare Singapore. They rarely travelled, and they had no counter-argument to the messages put across to them in their repressed society – nor even an appreciation of the need for debate. ………..In 1984 eighty per cent of graduate women were remaining unmarried, reputedly because Chinese menfolk were not keen to marry women more intelligent than themselves…….

A large proportion of cheap industrial labour was imported from Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. Factory workers crossed the causeway from Malaysia every day- they were not allowed to become resident in Singapore. Every three weeks Thai workers returned in busloads to Thailand to renew their visas. Many of the higher management positions were filled by Europeans and the expatriate population of Japanese was second only in number to that of Los Angeles. Construction workers were imported from Korea, but by agreement with the government they were not allowed on to the streets. Buses took them from their work-sites to “rest and recreation” in the seedier parts of the city……..No one can deny that Singapore’s track record is impressive. When it became a nation …it was …..fifty per cent mangrove swamp and jungle.

Racism was another issue on which the government was particularly sensitive………..the Malays, Chinese and Indians may not have mingled readily, but they did live together in relative harmony. It was the government’s policy to distribute the different ethnic groups evenly around the housing estates; no ghettos were allowed.

In truth I envied the Singaporeans for their green and clean city, their bus-services and their police efficiency. I envied them their food, their hotels, the then strength of their economy and the cheapness of their telephone bills. I envied them their new airport and the way the post office handled their mail, and I admired my students for the diligent way in which they noted down carefully whatever I said or wrote in class.

……..Java……the densest agricultural population in the world with over 1,500 people per square kilometer……cracking of joints – many Asians do it as a habit……..They are easily superstitious, the Indonesians……….Older people on many of the islands often don’t speak Bahasa Indonesia, the new national language, and many of them speak Dutch as fluently as they do their own dialect…….on the island of Alor alone there are reputedly seventy different dialects.

Kumpung Hijau was a Muslim village, and made quite a contrast to the Hindu villages on Bali. The sand was dirty, the houses poor, the people much less free and open. For us as foreigners the pockets of Catholicism on the islands gave us much the best reception. By the end of our journey we had all developed a slight antipathy to Muslim strongholds, which generally were a good deal friendly. On one of the later Muslim islands (the further from central Indonesia and the more remote the people, the more fanatical the isolated religions seemed to get) a couple of boys threw stones at me whilst their parents looked on indulgently.

…………Komodo Dragon …….is in fact a monitor lizard, the largest and fiercest of its kind…….It lives only on three islands in the world – Rintja, part of Flores, and Komodo……Every now and then the beasts show their power by eating a local or a visitor.

…….Lamakera, a whaling village on the other end of Solor …….The villagers had an unusually perilous way of hunting: the spear-thrower stood on the bows until the whale was close enough, then jumped on the animal’s back before stabbing it with his spear. The boats were often dragged huge distances before the whales died – and sometimes the spear-throwers themselves died too.

The population of Darwin was a strange mixture. The town was still very much a frontier outpost, and seventy-five per cent of employment was in the administration machinery that kept it going. The employed section of the community was relatively small, however, and the civil servants were easily identifiable by their neatly pressed shorts and their white socks which never fell down. There was also a significant population of Asians, but these Asians did not stop and smile at white men. …….I found the sophistication of the Asians in Darwin rather disappointing. ……Darwin seemed a sleepy backwater…….like an eddy between two whirlpools. Out of the Australian whirlpool drifted a wide variety of young people who for some reason or other couldn’t handle life in the mainstream, whilst out of the Asian whirlpool came odds and ends who were united by one factor – they had managed their paperwork cleverly enough to enable them to stay. ……..But while most of the white drifters were unemployed, the Asians were largely well set up in a variety of small businesses.

…….like everything else in Australia the mosquitos were enormous.

The people of north-eastern Thailand are particularly charming despite being the poorest in the country……..

Thai dining-cars are a delight, and this was no exception. Fresh purple table-cloths and fresh purple orchids; cheap, quick, good food, and plenty to look at. Here were number of business-women with half-empty bottles of beer between them; beer-drinking women are a very rare sight in Asia, but in Thailand the women are a force to be reckoned with.

Durian have a very distinctive smell, and no airline will allow them on board. One wag likened the experience of eating the fruit to eating an old raspberry yoghurt in a French urinal!

In Bangkok sex is presented as public entertainment…….

‘No sir. This is Padang Bawah. Ipoh is thirty kilometres from here.’ Judging by the accuracy of his language he must have been an Indian.

Kali Gandaki is the deepest river gorge in the world and the path is narrow and treacherous, the route is still the steadiest ascent from the countries of the south of Tibet, and large numbers of mule trains and porters move along its length.

Even the transport was depressing. Where Burma had horsecarts and Thailand had trishaws, the rickshaw-wallahs in Calcutta just used their own two feet. For me this epitomized the lack of humanity in the city – and even in the nation.

I found Calcutta hard to take ………..streets were full of tiredness, tragedy and filth, and partly because the Indian culture was too large and too new for me to want to attempt to assimilate it at this late stage in my travels.

From ‘Slow Boats to China’ by Gavin Young

‘Greek captains never will use a chart,’ E.M. Forster wrote on a Mediterranean cruise ………. ‘Although they sometimes do have one aboard, it is always locked up in a drawer; for as they truly say, it is nothing but paper and lines, which are not the least like the sea, and its far better to trust to yourself, especially in parts where you have never been before.’

……the contrast between a Greek harbor and a Turkish one, even the difference in the Greek and Turkish attitudes to life. In Greece anyone can wander down to the quayside; it is impossible to imagine anyone in seafaring Greece being arrested for wanting to look at the sea or at ships. Kusadasi [Turkey] is small and of no military importance, yet a cloud of police surrounded the gate, and big-chested loiterers in jeans and T-shirts, obviously plain-clothes men……..By temperament, Turks are lockers-up and lockers-out. …….Few Turks seem to think the world is a happy place.

Most Turkish boys, particularly those working in hotels, yearned for jobs in Germany. They said they wouldn’t hesitate to marry any German girl – ‘She could look like a sausage’ – if it helped them to get work permits there. Many did marry for work permits, and were the envy of their friends, who had to stay behind in Turkey and go through their military service.

‘…………Turks ….are a bit quiet, reserved, but Parisians are much more so.’

Turkey is a cat country. In Ephesus you come across them everywhere………

The Smyrna waterfront is spectacular.

By then he [Ataturk] must have begun his slow decline into terminal cirrhosis of the liver. The heavy-drinking Turks are not hypocrites; they have never held the manner of Ataturk’s death against him.

Turkish music is the perfect Oriental music for Westerners. Much Arab music is too snaky, but the Turkish variety thumps along merrily with zithers, or slows to a gentle berceuse for lutes and two-foot flutes; it is, on the whole, simple and melodic and can be whistled.

…….the countrymen of Ataturk, who possess one of the world’s finest cuisines……..

Turkish Cypriot friends had told me that many of them, particularly the young, were disenchanted by the crude manners of the mainland Turkish soldiers.

A Turkish Cypriot friend once said to me, ‘There are men here of thirty who are still virgins. Muslim tradition prevents them, on pain of death or a terrible beating at the hands of the girl’s brothers or rather, from touching a Turkish girl. They’d do anything to get their hands on a foreign girl, but, of course, its not always possible. You have no idea of the intensity of the frustration here.’

Cyprus is friendly. On the Greek side they overcharge tourists, no doubt, but, while Turkish attitudes are often surly or take-it-or-leave-it, Greek Cypriots usually smile and are usually helpful.

……the Egyptian saying, ‘God has given earrings to those who have no ears.’

Egypt is a very poor country of great charm and spiritual resource, and it deserves better times and at least minimal riches. The receptionists had charm too – like most Egyptians – and deserved a richer country.

Incidentally, if you fall from a big ship – or even from a relatively small big one – your chances of survival are virtually nil. Sea, wind and engines would overwhelm your cries, and you could wave until you were blue in the face but a ship’s wake or a swell would hide you. Once overboard, ten to one you’re a goner.

Soon they pulled themselves back to the normal, vociferous world, and resumed their animated chatter – which, for peasant voices born and bred to carry long distances across villages and fields, meant something more like raucous shouting.

It was an interesting experiment in human transplantation. Iraq, rich in oil and land and poor in population, and Egypt, nearly destitute and barely able to support a population that seemed hell-bent on doubling itself in a few decades, had come to an agreement. I had seen fellahin [Egyptian peasant] from the Nile clumping about the riverine towns of Iraq, easily distinguishable from the native peasants by their browner skins, round-necked galabiehs and speech (the accents and idioms of Egyptian Arabic are as strange to the Arabs of Iraq as the English spoken in Kansas is to the people of Yorkshire). But not only fellahin were transplanted. Young Egyptians with some minimal experience in hotels in Cairo are to be found in the hotels and restaurants of Baghdad, Basra and Mosul. It is good to see them there, because however adept or inept they may be in their work they are always cheerful; Egyptians are inveterate jokers. Iraqis, on the other hand, like the English, feel that waiters’ work is mysteriously demeaning to the soul, and work off their humiliation on the diners.

………like many Egyptians, he was a man of much laughter and kindness; he was also very serious and a passionate talker.

In Jedda, attitudes to foreigners – any foreigners, not only sea travelers – depend largely on the whims and personal relationships of individual Saudi officials.

The official puritanism of the Saudis involves depriving even passing sailors of so much as a glass of wine or beer, while behind their high marble walls the Saudi elite make merry with their cellars of smuggled Scotch.

Like Cubans, Filipinos are easygoing, irrepressible people, and their country is an uproarious mélange of spontaneous song, easy sex and flamboyant spirits highly spiced with a strong dash of day-to-day mayhem, mostly by shooting.

Jedda hotels are always full of affluent pilgrims or businessmen. People come to Saudi Arabia to find God or gold; there is nothing else there.

The Saudis were, almost to a man, deliberately rude and unhelpful, he said. ‘They actually put obstacles in your way for the hell of it. Yet if they want something from you, they expect you to go miles out of your way on their behalf.’ There was only a hint of indignation in his diplomat’s voice. ……. ‘As we all know, they have all the money,’ Dr Watson said with a sad smile. ‘And, as we all know, we need it, don’t we?’

Ask ten urban-dwelling Saudis directions, and you’ll probably get at least six different answers and four arrogant shrugs – and, if you cant speak Arabic, you’ll get no answers at all.

Most blacks in Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries are descendants of slaves brought over from Africa……… Slavery in Saudi Arabia was a strange system. Despite an official ban on the practice, there were slaves there until quite recently. The term can be misleading. In Arabia slaves often became affectionate servants rather than the pitifully ill-treated human beings we read about in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Furthermore, eventually a faithful slave was almost invariable rewarded with his freedom.

Abha! The capital of the Asir province on the northern Yemen border, a mountainous but watery region…….It was a region of some of the loveliest villages I had ever seen, with miniature skyscrapers that were really mud towers with small shuttered windows. After sunset they glowed like dolls’ houses……The people of Asir were short and dark……Abha …….It was cool up there after the desert; the food was good; and the girls, who were beautiful, went about unveiled and often bare-breasted…….

……..Saudi Airlines office …….I ……survived a stiff dose of rudeness from two Saudi clerks, and finally bought a ticket to Bahrain from a jolly Pakistani from Lahore.

I realized with joy that people like my taxi driver existed – exceptions to the evident rule that wealth and its arrogance had deprived too many Saudis of all grace, generosity and tolerance.

….flights….. ‘All go on time,’ he grinned, ‘except Saudia. With Saudia, some prince comes along with eleven persons and everyone is turned off the flight.’

When I pointed to a group of Pakistani labourers and said, ‘Once all the work was done by the Yemenis, and by black Takrunis from Nigeria,’ he answered, ‘The Koreans are the strongest workers now.’

‘Pakistanis?’

‘Lazy, lazy.’

Twenty-five years ago Dubai was little more than a mosque, a modest palace, a shipping office and a clump of palms. No census has been taken in Dubai for some time, but estimates circulate of an immigrant population that outnumbers the Arabs of Dubai by ten to one. The vast majority of the expatriates are Indian or Pakistani…….

He repeated bleakly, ‘Desperate I am saying. You know, I’ve been back to Pakistan only once in two years, and there’s no sex for people like me here. The prosses have all gone.’

‘Prosses?’

‘Prostitutes – girls and women, mostly from India. The Dubai government sent them off home, so now there are only the air hostesses………..The go only with the hotel’s front-office managers and assistant managers, who have more money……..the Filipino girls……They all make jigajig with Arabs for money’

Maudsley said bluntly that, though British seamen probably weren’t any less good at sea than others, and perhaps just as good, they certainly could be a liability ashore, delaying the ship. This was the downfall of British seamen. ‘My last job ……..Terrible trouble we had with the Brits – knifings, fights, arrests. Its always been unusual to have no trouble with British seamen. You have to have someone standing at the top of the gangway when they come back on board, taking bottles off them. We’d have to go around all the brothels to rout them out, and they’d be hiding under the beds…….Of course, the Scawegians (Scandinavians) can be the wildest cowboys, but the Brits always seem to find the lowest dives possible. The British seaman has always had a reputation ashore.’

You cant argue with a Baluchi demonstrating hospitality; they are among the most stubborn peoples of the world. In my distant days as a shipping clerk in Basra…….. Baluchis had been much prized as watchmen, as much for their stolid honesty and unshakeable devotion to whoever employed them as for their physical toughness.

It is odd how, to the half-wakeful brain, Baluchi sounded like English, and once or twice I started up, thinking that someone had said something to me.

There was no place for enmities or secrets aboard Al Raza. She had no cabins, and no one could steal a little privacy behind closed doors, for there were no doors. The eight men slept, in shifts as their watches dictated, on small wooden bunks in four partitions two feet high and opening onto each other. Every word, every action was public property except in the thunderbox (toilet), and even that was not soundproof. But there is no privacy on any Asian native craft between Suez and the Sulu Sea. Asia is no place for privacy.

Ghani Adam asked, ‘Why do you travel with us on Al Raza when you can fly?’

I would have liked to quote Graham Greene about ‘the universal desire to see a little bit further, before the surrender to old age and the blank certitude of death’.

There are only two Master Attendants in the world; one is in Colombo, the other in Singapore. All other ports have harbor masters. It is not clear why. In ‘The End of the Tether’, Joseph Conrad writes of the Master Attendant in Singapore:

A Master Attendant is a superior sort of harbor master …a Government official, a magistrate for the waters of his port…..

………the Baghdad Gate (an old and still-existing trade with Iraq accounts not only for this name but also for the Muslim population of Colombo).

Between Sri Lanka and the Maldives were great sub-oceanic trenches, some perhaps thirteen thousand feet deep.

……..pan, the tiny sandwich of betel leaf, areca nut and lime that all Asia east of the Gulf chews……

……..though I had been glad to sail with Maldivians, somehow the crew lacked the spirit of other seamen I had met. Was it shyness, wariness or xenophobia? Shyness, I think. The Maldives have always been isolated, and the islanders have little knowledge of outsiders. Today fifteen or sixteen islands of the archipelago have been turned into tourist resorts. But everything has to be imported……….so the resorts are horrifically expensive and have little to do with the people of the Maldives………

These Tamils are far more open, friendly and less shy than the Maldivians ………Physically they are not so different.

Tuticorin’s population consisted of Hindus and Muslims as well as Catholics, he said, but the non-Catholics were shopkeepers or workers, while those involved with the sea were, to a man, members of the Church. ……….Tuticorin is surrounded by flat land as white as snow. ……..The salt here is marvelously pure,’ the chevalier said. ‘In fact, one third of India’s salt comes from Tuticorin.’

For some reason, Tamil eyes often seem larger and brighter than other people’s. Like all Asian seamen, Tamils seem to be compulsive washers.

………..Andamans ……… ‘Elephants here are imported from Assam. They’re less temperamental than the ones from Burma…..’

Captain Sujit Choudhuri lived up to the standards of no-nonsense friendliness I had come to expect from Indian masters like Dennis Beale, Bala and John. In fact, now that I think about it, I found this quality in all the masters I met between Cyprus and Singapore. It is as if ships’captains live at some isolated level of self-assurance, philosophically removed by a life sandwiched between sea and sky from the landlubberly pettiness of the rest of us.

‘We are Kurds,’ they said gruffly.

When I asked them who they preferred, the Shah or Ayatollah Khomeini, they answered, ‘Both are bad. The Shah is looking too far forward, Khomeini too far back – he wants to see 700 AD in 1980.’

………Chinese faces began to turn a deep pink, the inevitable and undisguisable effect that liquor has on pale Oriental skin.

…..among the young Malays, homosexuality is not rare.

…..passed three young Malays who pranced and giggled in women’s dresses. Bushey said, ‘Malays don’t mind that sort at all. They accept transvestism as quite normal. ………..Wonderfully tolerant about that, the Malays. Good for them…….’

…….the waters of South-east Asia are full of waving, smiling people.

The mountains of Sabah rise up like a series of tidal waves, with Mount Kinabalu dominating the skyline at fourteen thousand feet, the highest peak in South-east Asia.

…..ships’ officers are an easygoing, friendly – though often bitchy – lot with an interest in talking as a safety valve for the restrictive nature of their monkish existence. Relationships on ships are generally easy and casual, and antipathies are kept well in hand, even ashore.

The headlands and forests of North Borneo remain as mysterious and reticent as ever. ……These are the shores of the Land Below the Wind, as Malay sailors still call the wilderness of Borneo because they lie ten degree below the typhoon belt from Japan to Luzon.

The superintendant, a stout and friendly Malay ……….. ‘Lets say that the Sulu pirates are not as bad as the Thai pirates in the Gulf of Siam. They don’t rape all the women they capture, and don’t kill all the men. I can’t say I’m sure of the percentage.’

He spoke with the Hispano-American accent that distinguishes a Filipino from a Malay.

The others washed their mouths as most Asians do after a meal, swilling water around their tongues, using their fingers as toothbrushes to rub their teeth, and spitting over the side.

Frank …..took me to the harbor. There one realizes what a seafaring people Filipinos are; the bustle of the port was greater than anything I’d seen since Singapore. Zamboanga is not a big city, but its port serves all the south-west of the Philippines.

The ship’s decks are covered by folding beds or bedrolls with hardly any space between, so men and women of all ages are stretched out side by side. ….Young men and young women lie together, their brown skins almost touching, but this doesn’t seem to create any problems; no one takes advantage of anyone else. Such a mess of humanity on the deck of a shipful of Arabs …..would soon create a shambles of spit, dirty paper, bits of food, babies’ pee. Here people eat and drink from flasks or beercans, smoke, peel fruit – and then clear it up. There is no squalor or smell. Once again I notice the extraordinary cleanness and almost finicky neatness of people in South-east Asia. Their clothes and bodies are always clean; they never stop scrubbing themselves. They don’t seem to sweat much, and even the men’s bodies are virtually hairless., which I suppose helps. They think Europeans smell of death. To me, Asians smell faintly of straw-green tea, a pleasant smell. In the eastern Mediterranean or the Red Sea a ship’s toilets are soon clogged and stinking, the floors awash with urine and vomit. How do they get so much of their shit on the seats and walls? On m.v. Jhuvel, at 11.00 p.m. off Zamboanga del Norte, with hundreds of passengers aboard, the toilets are immaculate.

Compared with Manila or at least the southern Philippines, Cebu is a quiet, unhurried place that pillows its cheek against the soft folds of a mountain range and seems to doze.

…… ‘Anyone who says he’s busy in Cebu is a liar. People work harder in Luzon ………where life is more insecure. It is harder to find work there, and they are frequently visited by typhoons that sweep away hillsides, bridges, even dams. Cebu is a city of the semi-retired.’

There is a saying in Manila: ‘Filipinos have survived Spanish and American domination: four hundred years in a convent and fifty years in Hollywood.’

………. ‘Curry ship’ means any ship from India.

‘Boys throw stones at frogs in sport,’ wrote Plutarch. ‘But frogs do not die in sport, they die in earnest.’

From ‘Mantras & Misdemeanours. An accidental love story’ by Vanessa Walker

In Lhasa I joined great streams of Tibetans circumambulating the sacred Jokhang Temple, falling in next to an ambling elderly nomad who had taken his best friend – a goat on a leash, its snout covered with a pink-crocheted mouthguard – on the circumambulation in an attempt to rid of its bad karma so it could climb higher up the species ladder to be reborn a human.

Throughout India, I’ve learned, every donut looks good and tastes bad.

Tibetans embraced Buddhism so strongly that, before the Chinese arrived, one in ten people was a monk or a nun. One of the first things Tibetans did when they went into exile was to rebuild their three largest monasteries so monks could immediately continue their study. But they too old habits with them. The nuns were forgotten. Many faded into obscurity and poverty, their traditions dying with them.

Tara is among the most loved of the Buddhis deities and is said to be the mother of all the Buddhas. She was born from a tear that fell down the cheek of Chenrezig, the God of Compassion, after his realization that sentient beings were locked into a cycle of suffering. Her image represents enlightened activity.……..Tara has a reputation for fast action.

…….that peculiar Indian stench of rotting vegetables mixed with kerosene.

Prior to the Chinese invasion, of the three provinces, Amdo, Kham and U-Tsang, the government in Lhasa had effective political authority only in U-Tsang.

…..the long-haired charismatic Amdo boys who break into beautiful song at the slightest provocation and see the world as artists do. Khampa people tend to be the most direct and toughest of all Tibetans; their reputation as people who, once riled, will fight to the death frightens even other Tibetans. It was the Khampas, pa meaning people or person, who escorted the Dalai Lama to exile in 1959 and who, in those early years, formed the CIA-trained Four Rivers Six Ranges, the guerilla group that was the backbone of armed resistance to the Chinese occupation. Those from U-Tsang or Central Tibet tend to be worldlier. Unlike Amdos they don’t need a singing voice that will carry across distant valleys and they have long since filed down the rough edges of the Khampas. Other Tibetans will secretly whisper that Lhasa people smile at you, uttering soft words as they poison your drink.

Tibetans have never experienced women’s liberation. Society is essentially conservative. Wives still honour and obey their husbands. A wife’s behavior reflects tenfold on her husband. In this world the best thing a wife can do for a harmonious relationship is to be observant of traditions, subdued and shy in public and accommodating in private …….

In a typically Tibetan manner, he wanted to know, ‘Does she have a good heart?’ In my experience one of the most refreshing things about Tibetan men is their attitude to female beauty. While it is given the highest currency in the western world, in Tibet it is simply not that relevant. It is a person’s heart, and their mind that count.

When Tibetans are sick they like company.

Lamas are always reminding students to contemplate that death – the gateway to reincarnation – can come at any time……..Death is used as a constant reminder both to value life and to be vigilant.

The difficulties he has experienced would be enough to throw most western people into despair. It seems to be a Tibetan trait to be perceptive yet angst-free. Unlike many of us raised in the west it would never occur to Choying that his self-esteem would go up and down according to his fortunes or that he should judge himself by comparing to others. His deep acceptance of the law of karma, that whatever happens to him in this life is the result of his past actions, gives him an ease of being that I find refreshing.

…….in Tibetan culture there is little notion of dating and once a couple are in a relationship they are automatically referred to as husband and wife.

……having at least one monk or nun in the family is a matter of pride for most Tibetans.

By 1962 ninety-seven per cent of monasteries and nunneries in the area designated by China the Tibet Autonomous Region (and up to ninety-nine per cent in areas outside TAR but inside Tibet’s historical territory) lay in ruins. The people of Tibet suffered a devastating famine during the Great Leap Forward and numerous disastrous social and political experiments.

….the Dalai Lama’s previous incarnation, the thirteenth Dalai Lama, starkly warned Tibetans of the threat shortly before he died. He was very specific, announcing, ‘In my lifetime conditions will be as they are now, peaceful and quiet. But the future holds darkness and misery. I have warned you of these things.’ He further prophesised:

It will not be long before we find the red onslaught at your own front door.

Despite the Dalai Lama urging restraint and a new push for vegetarianism, most Tibetans I know, having come from a place of scarce vegetation, are devoted meat-eaters and any occasion that calls for a celebration is judged successful or otherwise by the amount of mutton and chicken on offer.

Tenzin Palmo ….. ‘………Women on the whole are better at meditation, many senior meditation teachers have told me. Women have a natural affinity with meditation, they are much more intuitive. Men as a whole tend to be more analytical and pragmatic, going one step at a time. Women are more able to take a leap – they don’t feel threatened by something which is beyond words.’

……….my flight to Kathmandu, one of the most stunning air descents in the world.

While Tibetans are generally a tidy people they often have little concern for bathroom hygiene, coming as they do from a country like a refrigerator.

Tibetans are a very social people but there is, I’ve noticed, no need for small talk. Just to visit and sit quietly is enough – as long as you eat the host’s food you’ve done the right thing.

From ‘Saffron and Silk. An Australian in India’ by Anne Benjamin

Christopher Kremmer’s explanation of India today as ‘a secular society grafted onto a deeply spiritual society’ ………For centuries, India has balanced its cauldron of faiths and cultures with spectacular resilience…….

……….what it means to be poor as expressed by a Dalit (‘Untouchable’) poet in 1973. The poem, ‘Mother’, starts with children waiting alone at home in the dark in the early morning while around them they smell the food which other families are enjoying. One day, their mother is bitten by a snake and dies.

…In our nostrils, the smell of food. In our stomachs,

darkness

From our eyes, welling up, streams of tears.

Slicing darkness, a shadow heavily draws near.

On her head, a burden. Her legs a-totter.

Thin, dark of body ……my mother.

All day she combs the forest for firewood.

We wait her return.

When she brings no firewood to sell we go to bed hungry.

One day something happens. How we don’t know …

The day ends. So does her life …

Mother is gone. We, her brood, thrown to the winds.

Even now my eyes search for mother. My sadness grows.

When I see a thin woman with firewood on her head,

I go and buy all her firewood.

Warman Nimbalkar

……..a Tamil proverb……

What we have learnt is a handful of sand.

What we have not learnt is as big as this world.

………the man is – like every other Indian I have met – so proud of his country.

From ‘Healthy Living. According to Gandhi’ by Gandhi

Walking gives movement to every portion of the body, and ensures vigorous circulation of the blood ……Walking a mile or two is no walking at all; at least ten or twelve miles are necessary for exercise.

As most fevers are caused by disorders of the bowels, the very first thing to do is to starve the patient. ………In fever the digestive organs are very weak, the tongue gets coated, and the lips are hard and dry. If any food is given to the patient in this condition, it will remain undigested and aid the fever. Starving the patient gives his digestive organs time to perform their work; hence the need to starve him for a day or two.

From ‘Long Way Round. Chasing Shadows across the World’ by Ewan McGregor & Charley Boorman

The first thing we noticed about the Czech Republic was that the road leading away from the [German] border was teeming with prostitutes….We passed on into the Czech Republic……..the landscape was the same as in Germany – wide plains dotted with small copses and woods – but it felt different. The road was rougher, narrower and more potholed. The villages we passed through were shabby. There as little advertising, a legacy from the country’s days as an Eastern Bloc satellite of the Soviet Union.

‘Slovaks work hard and want to make the country better,’ Csaba said, his wife translating. ‘But gypsies just play music and dance and want to do nothing,’………

Many people in the Ukraine spoke at length about the mafia but nobody would let us use this in the documentary. It was a potent indication of the hold the mafia had over Ukranians and their country, possibly greater than the fear instilled by the communist regime fifteen years earlier.

….the poverty we saw in the Ukranian countryside had given us a lot to contemplate…….

We’d been alerted to the behavior of the police in eastern Europe and central Asia. Every guidebook we’d read and every traveler we’d spoken to had warned us they were notoriously unpredictable.

…….Avon Skin So Soft, which an angler friend had told me was the best mosquito repellent…..

It didn’t seem to matter where you were in Mongolia; if anything went wrong somebody would soon turn up. Two old boys in the obligatory blue canvas baseball caps got out of the jeep. Like most Mongolians, the first thing they did was offer us a smoke.

It seemed that few transactions in Mongolia were complete without a vodka toast….

……..I’d come to love Mongolia…….I’d enjoyed meeting people along the road and I’d been blown away by the helpfulness of complete strangers……

……….Ulaanbaatar ………The city was a strange place, an ugly blot on Mongolia’s stunning landscape with a filthy power station near its centre expelling dirty smoke into the atmosphere and pumping hot water along city streets through massive asbestos-clad pipes. Since Mongolia shook off its Soviet satellite status in the 1990s and embraced independence, the number of street children had mushroomed. Unemployment had soared, welfare services declined and the gap between rich and poor widened as the country embraced free market economics.

….the most beautiful part of Mongolia. It had been like riding through the pages of National Geographic. Every time we blinked there would be a jaw-dropping sight to look at or think about. A land in which most of the people still rode horses and wore traditional clothes, it was timeless without being stuck in the past. Much of the rural population still lived in gers, but they’d have solar panels and satellite dishes. All the guys we met just wanted to be herdsmen, happy to spend their lives on horses, rounding up sheep and goats, while the girls all had ambitions to head for Ulaanbaatar to go to university.