Tag: China

To Egypt with Syed Mujtaba Ali and Nazes Afroz

Post author By borderlesssg1
Post date October 16, 2023
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A discussion with Nazes Afroz along with a brief introduction to his new translation of Syed Mujtaba Ali’s Tales of a Voyager (Joley Dangay), brought out by Speaking Tiger Books.

Joley Dangay by Syed Mujtaba Ali in Bengali

Translations bridge borders, bring diverse cultures to our doorstep. But here is a translation of a man, who congealed diversity into his very being — Syed Mujtaba Ali (1904-1974), a student of Tagore, who lived by his convictions and wit. Like his guru, Mujtaba Ali, was a well-travelled polyglot, who till a few years ago was popular only among Bengali readers with his wide plethora of literary gems that can never be boxed into genres precisely. People were wary of translating his witty but touching renditions of various aspects of life, including travel and history from a refreshing perspective, till Nazes Afroz, a former BBC editor, took it up. His debut translation Mujtaba Ali’s Deshe Bideshe as In a Land Far from Home: A Bengali in Afghanistan in 2015 was outstanding enough to be nominated for the Crossword Prize. Recently, he has translated another book by Mujtaba Ali, Tales of a Voyager (Joley Dangay[1]), a book that takes us back a hundred years in time — a travelogue about a sea voyage to Egypt and travel within.

This narrative almost evokes a flavour of Egypt as depicted by Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile (1937) or The Mummy (film, set in 1932), simply because it is set around the same time period. Afroz in his introduction sets the date of Mujtaba Ali’s travels translated here between 1935 and 1939. The book was published in 1955. This book is a treasure not only because it gives a slice of historic perspective but also weaves together diverse cultures with syncretism.

Mujtaba Ali has two young travel companions, Percy and Paul, who despite being British (one of them is on the way to study in Oxford) seem to have a fair knowledge of Indian lore and there is the inimitable Abul Asfia Noor Uddin Muhammad Abdul Karim Siddiqi, who almost misses a train while trying to argue about the discrepancies shown in the time between his Swiss watch and the clock at Cairo. The description is sprinkled with tongue-in-cheek humour.

The voyage starts at Sri Lanka and sails through the Arabian Sea to Africa, where the ship pauses at Djibouti. Here, Mujtaba Ali expands his entourage with the addition of the long-named Abul Asfia, well-described in the blurb as a man who “carried toffees, a gold cigarette case, and other sundry items in his capacious overcoat pocket and who had the answer to all problems though he barely spoke a word ever.” Afroz himself has given an excellent introduction to the writer and the book — almost in the style of Mujtaba Ali himself. This is a necessary addition as it highlights Mujtaba Ali’s perspectives and gives his background to contextualise the relevance of this translation.

Mujtaba Ali’s style is poetic and humorous. It demystifies erudition and touches the heart simultaneously. His ability to laugh at himself is inimitable. He tells us a story about how the giraffe from Africa was introduced to China by a king from Bengal. At the end, he and his companions reflect about the tallness of this tale!

Mujtaba Ali contends: “‘…One of my friends is learning Chinese in order to read Buddhist scriptures in that language. Possibly you know that many of our ancient scriptures were destroyed with the decline of Buddhism in India. But they are still available in Chinese translations. My friend came across this story while searching for Buddhist scriptures. He had it translated and published in Bengali with the copy of the painting in a newspaper. Or else Bengalis would never have known of this because there is no mention of it in our history books or documents in the archives in Bengal.’”

The irony is not lost that Buddha is of Indian origin and yet an Indian has to learn Chinese to read the scriptures. The narrative continues with more dialogues:

“Percy said, ‘But sir, it didn’t sound like history. It [the giraffe’s story] exceeds fiction.’

“I [Mujtaba Ali] replied, ‘Why, brother? There is the saying in your language, ‘Truth is stranger than fiction.’

“And my personal opinion was that if the narrative of an event could not rouse interest in someone more than fiction, then that event had no historical value. Or I would say that the narrator was not a true historian. In our land, most of our historians are such dry bores.”

As Mujtaba Ali’s renditions are colourful – is he a ‘true historian’ by his own definition? Such narratives dot the travelogue, generating curiosity about major issues in a light vein and linking ancient cultures with the commonality of human needs, creating bridges, taking us to another time, finding parallels and making learned, hard concepts comprehensible by the simplicity of his observations.

Similarly, he says of the rose: “The Mughal-Pathan era of India ended a long time ago, but can we say for how long the roses brought by them will continue to give us fragrance?”

Some of his renditions are poetic and beautiful. Mujtaba Ali watches the sunrise by the pyramids and describes it: “Streaks of light were gradually lighting up the liquid darkness. The white parting in the middle of black hair was becoming visible. There was a light daubing of vermillion on that.”

Borrowing from diverse cultures, Mujtaba Ali skilfully weaves the commonality of cultures, customs and countries into his narrative under the umbrella of humanity. Afroz with his journalistic background and a traveller himself, is perhaps the best person to translate this narrative of another traveller from the past. The depth of erudition simplified with humour has been well captured in this translation too. In this interview, Afroz discusses more about the author, his new translation and the relevance of the book in the present context.

You have translated two books by Mujtaba Ali. Is he essentially an essayist? Were there many essayists and travel writers at that point, especially from within Bengal? Where would you place him as a writer in the annals of Bengali literature?

I don’t think that ‘essentially an essayist’ is the right description of Mujtaba Ali. Of course he wrote many essays but his repertoire included novels, short stories, funny anecdotal pieces based on his experiences (in Bangla they are called romyorochona) and stories from his travels, his encounters with extremely interesting people across the globe. He was deeply interested in culinary experiences. So he wrote a lot about food habits, multitude of cuisine and also gave recipes. Hence, it is difficult to box him into one genre of writing. With the publication of his first book, Deshe Bideshe, (serialised in 1948 in Bangla literary magazine Desh and as a book in 1949) he instantly occupied a significant place in Bengali literature.

His Bangla prose, steeped in effortless and seamless multilingual and multicultural references, swept the discerning readers of Bangla literature off their feet. It was not only the prose that he created but the breadth and depth of subjects his pen touched was unparalleled. No author in Bangla language has been able to write on such a wide range of topics till date.

Coming to the other part of the question about travel writers and essayist in Bengal in early part of the twentieth century: the short answer is, yes there were many. Travel writing has been an important genre in Bangla literature. Bengalis had been travelling – for pilgrimage, for rest and recuperation following illnesses, or just for pleasure since the middle of the nineteenth century, which was the time of Bengal renaissance. Writers who undertook such journeys, wrote about their travels too. So Mujtaba Ali is no exception in that regard. He followed in the footsteps of his predecessors and also his peers.

You have called the book ‘Tales’ of the Voyager — would you say that some of the stories are like tall tales here — perhaps tales to convey an idea or a thought which in itself would be larger than history in explaining the truth of a civilisation, like the tale of the giraffe? Would you see this as a comment on the gap between popular and documented narratives in history and on the different interpretations of history?

Ali was an excellent raconteur. He was also gifted with an almost eidetic memory. This allowed him to learn a dozen languages – some with native proficiency. He was a voracious reader too. So, not only did he read tomes on history and philosophy in many languages across cultures but also he gathered fascinating tales from many corners of the world as he loved storytelling. Whenever opportunities came, he masterfully wove those stories into his writing. Thus the tale of the giraffe’s journey from Africa to China via Bengal found its way in this book as he was narrating stories from the east coast of Africa. There is another thing that makes Ali’s writing attractive. He weaves in fascinating quirky funny stories while discussing something apparently dense and dry. I have not come across many writers who have done that. I don’t know whether to name it as his comment on bridging the gap between popular and documented history. There’s no evidence to prove that he was trying to achieve that as he never mentioned it. We could only conclude that it was a style that he invented and mastered in an effort to engage with his readers.

A writer that came to mind while reading this book of Mujtaba Ali is, one who is really more entertaining than accurate –Marco Polo. We know he lived five centuries before Mujtaba Ali. Mujtaba Ali of course is erudite, a scholar, but he seems to have a similar fire within him, a wanderlust. Do you think he would have been impacted by the writings of Marco Polo? Was wanderlust not a very typical phenomenon that was part of the culture that had evolved in Bengal post the Tagorean renaissance? Did Mujtaba Ali also travel for wanderlust?

Reading Ali’s books, one may think that he had wanderlust in the true sense. It will be correct to assume that he was fidgety; he refused to settle down; he moved jobs; he moved cities and even continents. But to be truly smitten by wanderlust, one has to enjoy the travel, which wasn’t possibly the case for Ali. His son told me that even though he travelled extensively, Ali didn’t enjoy travelling much. There had been many, of his time, who were really smitten by wanderlust — like Rahul Sankrityayan (1893-1963, walked to Tibet twice and wrote only in Hindi), Bimal Mukherjee (1903-1996, a true globetrotter who cycled to London from Kolkata), Umaprasad Mukhopadhyay (1902-1997, who crisscrossed the Himalayas from one end to another), Probodh Kumar Sanyal (1905-1983, his travelogues of the Himalayas), Premankur Atorthi (1890-1964, author of Mahasthobir Jatok) — to name a few. While these authors were inherently bohemian and were drawn towards travelling only for the sake of it, Ali was more of an unsettled soul who travelled with a particular purpose and wrote about his experiences as he had picked up fascinating stories and observed connections between cultures. Because he loved to tell stories and also because he was infused with the idea of internationalism that he inculcated from Tagore, there was no way he could escape but narrating the stories and cultural experienced from his travels.

Tales of a Voyager takes us on a sea voyage to Egypt. Did you travel to Egypt while translating the book? Would you say that the Egypt of those times still resonates in the present day — especially after the 2011 uprising?

Even before his one night stopover in Cairo that he narrated in Tales of a Voyager, Ali had previous experience of Cairo where he spent a year as a post-doctoral scholar in 1933-34 at the Al-Azhar University. So there are many short pieces on Cairo and Egypt by him in his other books. He raved about the café-culture of Cairo and came to the conclusion that Egyptians surpassed the Bengali in terms of adda—hours of the purposeless sessions of chitchat and chinwag. I have been to Cairo at least half a dozen times and realised how acute his observation was. I witnessed in person why Ali mentioned that this was a city that never slept. The cafes and shops were open all night and the streets were full of people with families including children until well past midnight.

Late night, a cafe in Cairo. Photo Courtesy: Nazes Afroz

As expected, the political landscape that you mention in the question, would be completely different between Ali’s time in the 1930s and in 2010 when I started visiting Cairo. When Ali first went to Cairo in 1933, Cairo had just gained full independence from the forty years of British occupation (not as an annexed state but more of a protectorate). So there are some references of the political figures like Sa’ad Zaghloul Pasha[2] in his various writings but the main focus was on its cultures.

When I started travelling to Cairo from 2010, I witnessed some similarities in the cultural traits as elaborated by Ali. But politically by then, Egypt had moved far from where it was in the 1930. It had become an architect of the Non-Aligned Movement in the 1950s. It was the most prosperous country in North Africa and an important leader among the Arab nations. But it was also reeling under the oppression of one party rule and the youth were bubbling to break away from that. This is something we witnessed unfolding from 2011.

What were the challenges you faced while translating this book? Was it easier to handle as it was the second book by the same author?

The main challenge of translating Mujtaba Ali is transposing his unique language steeped in multi-lingual references into English. Also to get his oblique sense of wit and puns from Bangla into another language, which at times, may not have the right words for them. Translating the second book of the same author doesn’t make it easier as the challenges I just mentioned remain for every book.

Tell us what spurs you on to continue translating Mujtaba Ali. Please elaborate.

Syed Mujtaba Ali’s writing had a huge influence on me from my young age. His writing shaped my worldview, planted the seeds of curiosity about many societies, taught me how to make friends in distant lands and start making connections between cultures. So what I’m today is largely due to his writing. As an avid reader of his texts, I felt that it was my duty to introduce him to a wider readership. That’s the motivation of my taking up the translation of Ali. It is also a tribute to a writer who had such an impact on me.

In your introduction you have written of Mujtaba Ali and his writing. What had he written to be put on the Pakistani watchlist in 1950s?

He had penned an essay opposing the imposition of Urdu as Pakistan’s national language on the Bengalis who were in majority in the newly created East Pakistan. He even predicted how the Bengalis would rebel against such a policy, which came true in 1952 in the form of the Language Movement. He wrote this when he was the principal of a government college in Bogura. So he drew wrath of the Pakistani leaders and an arrest warrant was issued against him. That was the time when he left Pakistan and returned to India in 1949.

There also the other difficult personal situation. His wife (married in 1951) who was from Dhaka and was working in the education ministry, continued to live in East Pakistan with their two sons while he lived in India working for the Indian Government. So Pakistanis always thought he was an Indian spy while he was under suspicion in India that he was on the side of Pakistan!

Did Mujtaba Ali participate in the political upheaval between Pakistan and Bangladesh? Please elaborate if possible.

Ali was hugely affected in 1971 because of his personal situation as I just mentioned. I don’t know how deeply he was involved with the liberation war in Bangladesh but he wrote a novel, Tulonaheena (his last novel), against that backdrop – based in Kolkata, Shillong and Agartala and told through the story of a lover couple – Shipra and Kirti. So it is likely that he was involved in some capacity with the war efforts.

Tulonaheen( Incomparable), Syed Mujtaba Ali’s last novel

Mujtaba Ali studied in Santiniketan — that would have been in the early days of the university. Would he have been influenced by Tagore himself and the other luminaries who were in Santiniketan at that time? Can you tell us how? And did that impact his work and outlook?

The simple answer is: it was huge. Tagore was the polar star for Mujtaba Ali, which he acknowledged every now and then in his writing. This experience also decided his life’s journey. He imbibed humanism and internationalism as a direct student of Tagore in Santiniketan. He also developed deep apathy towards all sorts of bigotry. So it was not surprising that he would find it very difficult to accept a country that was created on the basis of religion.

Do you find him relevant in the present-day context? Is your writing influenced or inspired by his style?

I feel that his relevance will never fade. His ability to create cultural connection from different corners of the world will continue to fascinate readers for generations. Yes, in this globalised world when information from around the world are at our finger tips with the click of a button but one also needs to learn how to look at those information beyond mere facts and go deep underneath to make a sense. Apart from being fun and entertaining read, I feel his writing is one such training tool to learn how to make cultural connections. This way, if one wants, one can truly become a global citizen.

As for me, my outlook towards the world is massively influenced by Ali’s writing but not my writing style. It’s simply because I’m not a polyglot like him! I’ll not be able to come anywhere close to his style even if I try.

Well, that is for the reader to judge I guess! You have books on Afghanistan. But you do travel with your camera often. Will you write of your own travels at some point — like Mujtaba Ali but in English?

I have only one book on Afghanistan – a cultural guide book that I co-authored with an Afghan friend. I was working on my own book on Afghanistan, which would have capture one decade of Afghan history and interspersed with my own direct experiences of the country between 2002 and 2015. But the research got stalled for lack of funding. I hope to revive it at some point. And, yes I would like to do my own writing from my travels. That’s there in the wish list.

What are your future plans as a journalist, writer and photographer?

Travel more, see the world more, make more friends and photograph more!

Thanks a lot for giving us your time and the wonderful translation.

[1] Literal translation from Bengali, In Water and On Land

[2] 1857-1957, Egyptian revolutionary and statesman

Read the excerpt from Tales of a Voyager by clicking here

(The online interview has been conducted through emails by Mitali Chakravarty)

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Poetry

A Homage to Yuan Zhen’s Grief of Separation

Post author By borderlesssg1
Post date October 16, 2023
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Poetry and translation by Rex Tan

A Homage to Yuan Zhen’s Grief of Separation*

Shall I compare an ocean's vastness to 
the width of the greatest river? The 
evening sky pales to the azure of the summit. 

The time I wandered through a familiar flower field --
I can’t be bothered to look back, partly due 
to Fate’s weaving hands, partly due to you. 

Smoking under the 
bleak wintery overcast
memories of your 
bright summery laugh dissipates 
into a fleeting mist.

Forlorn, I’m a shadow by the hills 
of a spire-filled dream.
And with a gentle flick, I cast 
the hanging memories of your sojourn 
into the wind. 

*The first two paras are a liberal translation of Yuan Zhen's "Grief of Separation". 
Yuan Zhen was a Tang dynasty poet, lived from 779 to 831 in Luoyang, China

Rex Tan is a journalist by trade and a poet at heart. As a Malaysian, he is fluent in English, Mandarin, and Malay, yet he calls none his first language.

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Tags "Grief of Separation", China, English, Luoyang, Malay, Malaysian, Mandarin, Rex Tan, Tang Dynasty, Translation, Yuan Zhen

Essay

The Saga of a Dictionary: Japanese-Malayalam Affinities

Post author By borderlesssg1
Post date October 16, 2023
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By Dr. KPP Nambiar

Can anyone say for sure, when Japan and Kerala or, for that matter, Japanese and Malayalam languages, came into contact for the first time? No, it is all buried in the chronicles of yore! This is so, in spite of the legendary Bodhidharma travelling from somewhere in the South-West part of India (Kerala?) to China on its way to Japan in AD 520, albeit still disputed!

With the arrival of the Portuguese in Southern Japan from Cochin(?) during AD 1543, there was obviously a possibility of Malayalee priests or laymen including ‘horse trainers’ and cooks, reaching Japan along with Portuguese navigators. But records of such visits are yet to be made public, being either in Portuguese, Chinese or Japanese archives.

However, according to Takako Mulloor, a daughter-in-law from Japan living in Kerala for the past half a century, such obscurities need not always be the case. She remembers the story of four Japanese youths who happened to visit Quilon and from there to North Kerala, sometime during the reign of Ōtomo Sōrin (1530-1587).

Sorin was one of the few feudal lords of Japan (Daimyo), to embrace Catholicism under the influence of Portuguese missionaries. Originally known as ‘Fujiwara-no-Yoshishige’, he was very powerful at the time, ruling most of Japan. Apparently, he thought it apt to ascertain the ‘truth’ behind the new religion that was spreading fast in his domain. Thus, he is said to have deputed four Japanese youths to Rome and Europe – a new world — to meet the Holy Pope and report back to him.

These youths, after completing their mission successfully, landed in Quilon, on their return voyage. Quilon was a flourishing port of that period. Due to some unknown reasons, they proceeded further north towards Cochin by local crafts, called ‘Kettuvalloms’. Unfortunately, one of them caught malaria and died somewhere on the way and was buried.

According to personal communication from Takako, such records are available with the NHK ( Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai) Brodcasting Corporation of Japan. She remembered that a TV team from NHK had visited Kerala sometime in 1979-80, to make a documentary on these youths and to locate the grave of the one who had lost his life. Takako was their interpreter on this mission, being fluent in Malayalam, Japanese and English.

While I was in Japan from 1965 to 1969, very little information was available in Kerala about Japan. Prior to leaving India, except for some writings by the renowned author MT Vasudevan Nair, the knowledge of Japanese language or culture was scanty.

On joining Osaka University of Foreign Languages (Ōsaka Gaidai), I was fascinated by the general manners of people in and out of the university. They were always kind, polite and willing to help especially students and others from abroad.

Despite having an advanced ‘Language Laboratory’ and excellent faculty, my language proficiency was mostly strengthened by the people on the street or in the villages of the Osaka suburbs. From the very beginning, I was also struck with an inexplicable quality in their language, with its unaccented delivery and melodious intonations that always reminded me nostalgically, of Malayalam!

Amazingly, both these languages were similar in several respects such as the order of alphabets, vowels and structure of sentences that usually didn’t end in a consonant.

We foreign students had to learn some special topics namely ‘Things Japanese’ that included Flower arrangement (Ikebana); Japanese theatre traditions Kabuki, Bunraku and the oral Rakugo and so on. In general, most of them including folk arts, proverbs, and day to day practices, reminded me of the village life in Kerala.

For instance, ‘banishing’ evil spirits from home was just the same as practiced in villages here. Above all, I could also recognise a few Japanese words more or less similar in meaning and pronunciation, synonymous with Malayalam!

That was when the idea of a Japanese-Malayalam Dictionary germinated in me. But, back in Tokyo University after completing six months’ language course, my attention was mainly focused on research, to earn a doctorate. Still, I was able to hone my Japanese speaking skills by constant interaction with the local people who were always enthusiastic about teaching foreigners, their language.

During the second year in Tokyo, unexpectedly one day, the Indian Embassy in Tokyo called me to enquire if I could teach a few senior Japanese government officials, Malayalam.

Didactic skill being not my forte with Malayalam, my first response was a polite ‘no’, despite the attractive remuneration offered. But the potential pupils would not be dissuaded. Thus started my part-time job as ‘Malayalam Teacher’, in Tokyo. Nearly three years of teaching came to an end on my completing my doctoral research, so as to return home.

Contacts with my erstwhile students were soon reduced to almost nil. One exception was an exchange of communication with a Shyoichi Itoh, who retained his interest in Malayalam as also Kerala. Occasionally, he used to write to me in Malayalam to my great delight, for comments and correction. He had also written some articles on Kerala in Japanese journals, on topics of interest to Japanese readers, based on his experience.

The unique Writers’ Co-operative of Kerala (SPCS) was one of such topics covered. Similarly, at my request and as suggested by the editor M T Vasudevan Nair, he wrote an article for the Malayalam weekly, Mathrubhoomi, focusing on the ritual suicide of the famous Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, in 1970. He had also written a guide book for Japanese students interested in learning Malayalam entitled ‘Malayalam for Beginners’.

Subsequently in 1974, Itoh made a surprise visit to me in Poona where I was working at the time. In fact, he came with the happy news of joining The Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (TUFS) as Professor and Head of the Department of Malayalam. That was a deserving recognition of his dedication to the study of Malayalam. His Malayalam for Beginners is still in use in the University and elsewhere.

My last meeting with Prof. Itoh was during early 1982, when he visited my official residence in Tokyo, with his dear daughter. At that time, I was on a government of India assignment (1981-’85), renewing old contacts as well.

Sadly, Prof. Itoh passed away rather prematurely, in 1998.

After taking superannuation from my employer — an international organisation at that time – at the beginning of the current millennium, I settled down in Cochin, India. Still, the dictionary dream was alive and efforts for bringing Japanese and Malayalam closer, was always a passion!

During the early nineties, despite being immersed in professional activities, I had undertaken the translation of Nobel Laureate Yasunari Kawabata’s [1]novel, Yama no Oto or ‘Sound of the Mountain’ (1971) directly from Japanese to Malayalam as Malayute Shabdam.

Published by Current Books (Trissur) in 1994, the translation was well received by Malayalee readers, resulting in more editions. Considering the fact that such translations are usually based on the English version due to language constrains, my work, directly from the original Japanese, is thought to be the first of its kind, in Malayalam.

However, the dictionary project could not be taken up immediately even after retirement, due to personal preoccupations. Ultimately, work on this long-awaited project was started in 2002, two years after retirement, in right earnest.

An old dictionary of Japanese-English-Japanese format, brought along from my ‘student’ days in Osaka was used as the first reference source. Published in 1950 by the Obunsha Company of Tokyo, it was the only one available for me at that juncture.

Following untiring work, the first draft was ready in two years. It was prepared in the Japanese-English-Malayalam format covering some 2000 foolscap pages and nearly a hundred thousand head-words. The meaning of each word and phrase was given in English and Malayalam with Japanese pronunciation in Malayalam fonts. The entire manuscript was compiled in long hand, without using a typewriter or computer!

Thereafter, attempts to get a competent publisher in Kerala was futile mainly due to the non-availability of Japanese fonts for printing. As a final solution, it was felt necessary to obtain fonts from Japan. However, the impasse was broken finally when my old friend and great historian Prof (Dr.) M.G.S. Narayanan introduced Toshie Awaya, a faculty member of the TUFS, as a conduit for assistance from that university.

While discussing various possibilities with Awaya, it was a pleasant surprise to know that late Prof. Itoh, my ‘old student’, used to be her Malayalam Professor!

Subsequently, on visiting Japan with my wife, a meeting was arranged with the late Indologist and renowned historian, Prof. Noboru Karashima, whom I knew during Tokyo University days. He was living in Kamakura, and Awaye took us to his very impressive residence for discussion.

On that occasion, as he suggested, it was decided we meet Prof. Jun Takashima and Prof. Makoto Minegishi engaged in dictionary-related research, in TUFS. They were attached to the Institute of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa (ILCAA). Established in 1964 within TUFS, this institute was engaged in promoting academic exchanges between Japan and other Asian-African nations, having been recognised as competent to carry out that task.

The two Professors during a meeting that ensued in the Institute, were amazed to see the sample manuscript of the dictionary that was shown to them. Firstly, use of ‘long hand’ instead of typing or computer printing, seemed out of this world to them.

Another fact, of more importance, was that the dictionary used as reference source material was outdated. It was pointed out that in view of the fast-evolving nature of languages with the addition of new words incessantly, the earlier work had become redundant.

While agreeing to discard the manuscript, we decided to start afresh using a latest dictionary as source to digitalise the new version with the help of a software developed by Prof. Takashima! It was also agreed that the manuscript thus produced with my data would be arranged in a ‘camera-ready’ copy at the ILCAA, that could be suitably published in Kerala.

After several exchanges of visits from India to Japan and Japan to India followed by umpteen number of corrections and revisions, the promised ‘final’ product was ready by the end of 2018.

Then, it was a matter of finding a qualified publisher. The Kerala State Institute of Languages, Thiruvananthapuram, that readily agreed, was found to be the most appropriate one to accomplish that task, in an excellent manner.

The formal release of the beautifully printed and bound Japanese-Malayalam Dictionary of some 1500 pages was formally carried out in the presence of the ILCAA Professors, by Kerala State Cultural Minister A.K. Balan. Hideki Asari, Minister and Dy. Chief of Mission, Japanese Embassy, New Delhi and several other dignitaries were present on the occasion in Thiruvananthapuram on March 8, 2019.

With such a happy finale of a hard work put in during some sixteen years of my post-retirement years, the dictionary may represent a milestone in the annals of Japanese-Malayalam affinities.

During the half a century that elapsed from the time of my first landing in Japan and the release of the dictionary, major changes are manifested in the ethos of Japan-Kerala interactions. Exchange of visits by artists, academics, writers and common people, resulted in the publication of several travelogues, translations, studies, and so forth enabling people of these two parts of the world to come closer, as I dreamt in the 1960s.

Several literary works from Japanese were translated into Malayalam by eminent writers from Kerala including M.K. Menon (Vilasini), K. Kunhikrishnan and others! General studies were also published about Japan, in Malayalam. An in-depth study of Kerala-Japan cultural relations is available in the remarkable book, ‘The Throne of Chrysanthemums’ by the gifted writer and artist, K. Asok Kumar.

In addition to such developments, many professionals from Kerala are now finding gainful employment in Japan, something unheard of a few years back.

In conclusion, it has to be emphasised that the age-old affinity between Japanese and Malayalam needs to be studied afresh by our linguists and historians, in the light of significant evidence emerging from various new studies.

When Rev.(Dr.) Robert Caldwell (1814-1891) postulated the theory of possible origin of Japanese and Tamil languages from the same root, there was no mention of Malayalam, in particular. So also Japanese professors – Akira Fujiwara (1981) and Susumu Ohno (2007) — who revived that hypothesis recently, were also not referring to the Malayalam connection.

Meanwhile, some of our erudite linguists such as Prof. Naduvattom Gopala Krishnan, were able to prove the ancient origin of Malayalam, from the same root as modern Tamil, proving eligibility of both these languages to be included in the ‘Classical Languages’ category, already accepted officially.

According to Prof Gopala Krishnan, the very fact that some ‘Malayalam only’ words were identified in ‘Sangam Literature’ of 300 BCE- 300 ACE, reaffirms its classical position. Even epigraphical evidence from the Edakkal Caves of Wayanad (Malabar), that go back to 6000 BCE, are said to be supportive of ancient origin of Malayalam, together with Tamil.

As such, there is an urgent need for a relook into our perspective of the gamut of Japanese-Malayalam affinities!

[1] Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1972) was the first Japanese to win a Nobel prize in 1968

Dr. KPP Nambiar, formerly a Consultant/Technocrat at the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, is the author of many scientific papers and books, including a 1500-page Japanese-Malayalam dictionary.

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Interview Review

In Conversation with Ujjal Dosanjh

Post author By borderlesssg1
Post date August 14, 2023
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Ujjal Dosanjh left his village in Punjab in quest of a better life. He had a bare smattering of English, very less money and some family overseas when he left his home at Dosanjh Kalan at the age of seventeen. That was in 1964. He spent the first three years in Britain and then, moved to Canada to become a prominent lawyer, activist and political figure.

When he started in the 1960s, to earn a livelihood in England, he shunted trains in the British Railways. He left for Canada in hope of a better future. He had to work initially in sawmills and factories to support himself. Eventually, he could get an education and satisfy his ambitions in British Columbia, which became his home. Coming from a family which contributed to the freedom struggle of India, it was but natural that he would turn towards a public life. His uprightness, courage, tolerance, openness and commitment had roots in his background, where his parents despite different political ideologies, lived together in harmony. His family, despite their diverse beliefs, stood by him as he tried to live by his values.

Dosanjh voiced out against separatist forces that continue to demand an autonomous country for Sikhs to this day. In 1985, he was beaten almost to death by such Khalistani separatists as he boldly opposed the movement that had earlier led to the assassination of the Indian Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi (1917-1984) and to the bombing of an aircraft where all 329 people aboard died. However, undaunted by such attacks, he continues to talk unity, welfare for the underprivileged and upholds Mahatma Gandhi as his ideal. He went into Canadian politics with unfractured belief in the Mahatma. Dosanjh was the Health Minister of Canada and earlier the Premier of British Columbia. He has been honoured by both the Indian and Canadian governments. In 2003, he received the highest award for diaspora living outside India, Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, and, in 2009, he was a recipient of the Top 25 Canadian Immigrant Award.

Now, sixty years from the time he left his country of birth, he shares his narratives with the world with his updated autobiography — the first edition had been published in 2016 — and also with fiction. As an immigrant with his life spread over different geographies, he tells us in his non-fiction, Journey After Midnight – A Punjabi Life: From India to Canada: “Canada has been my abode, providing me with physical comforts and the arena for being an active citizen. India has been my spiritual refuge and my sanctuary.” He writes of what he had hoped could be a better future for humankind based on the gleanings from his own experiences and contributions to the world: “If humanity isn’t going to drown in the chaos of its own creation, the leading nations of the world will have to create a new world order, which may involve fewer international boundaries.”

In this interview, he shares his journey and expands further his vision of a world with diminishing borders.

You travelled from a village in Punjab, through UK and ended up in the Canadian cabinet to make changes that impacted humanity in your various public roles as a politician. Would you have been able to make an impact in a similar public role if you had never left India? Was the journey you went through necessary to help you become who you are?

It’s almost next to impossible to imagine what actually would have happened to my life in India had I stayed there. The most complicating element would be the standards that I would apply in such reimagining, the standards I most certainly wouldn’t have known or applied to my Indian life’s journey. I do think though and I have said it often in conversations with friends that had I stayed in India I would have either turned into a saint or devil; nothing in between for one who in 1964, the year I left, already hated the beginnings of the corruption that has now almost completely enslaved the country’s polity and ensnared the society.

Even though what has guided me throughout my life were the lessons I learnt from my freedom fighter maternal grandfather, my activist father and Mahatma Gandhi’s life, I believe the ethics and mores of public life, first in Britain and then in Canada helped shape and sculpt who I became and how I conducted myself. Had I not been to Britain and not lived most of my life in Canada, it’s impossible even to imagine the ‘me’ that would now be walking upon our planet earth.

While within five years of landing in Canada, you were studying in University of British Columbia and driving an Austin, some other immigrants fifteen years down the line continued in abject poverty. What does it take to rise out of endemic poverty? Do you see that happening in the world around us today?

The way you phrased the question conceals the fact that before I resumed full time college in January 1970s and went on to complete my BA and then LL.B. in 1976, I had spent full six years of my life in UK and Canada working jobs including shunting trains with British Rail, making crayons in a factory, being a lab assistant in a secondary school and pulling lumber on the green chain in a saw mill in Canada while often attending night school.

And I must add that my extended family and my spouse were largely responsible for paying my way through my B.A. and LL.B.

While even then it wasn’t easy, I do recognise the union wage then available to students in summer employment enabled them to save enough for the school year; with most summer jobs that’s not the case now. The students now more often than not have to depend on loans or help from the parents.

A significant section of the immigrant diaspora has done reasonably well while for many it’s becoming harder and harder to just make ends meet.

And by the way the Austin, you refer to, was the used Austin 1100, Austin Mini’s sister, I had bought for the then princely sum of six hundred dollars; it took mere six dollars to fill its tank.

That’s truly interesting. At the beginning of your biography, you stated ‘politics is a noble calling’. Later you have written, “I had realized I needed to make a clean break from the pettiness of politics.” Which of these is true? And why the dichotomy — pettiness as opposed to nobleness? And what made you change your perspective?

No, I have not changed my view of politics. It is a noble calling but only if you do it for the right reasons. More and more I found that a significant number of people seeking public office did so for glory that they perceived the elected public office bestowed upon them. Shorn of any lofty ideals and the pursuit of public good politics often degenerates into petty squabbles rather than the giant battles of great and contrasting ideas.

The pettiness is the result of small minds pursuing the mirage of glory in phony battles that barely move the needle on the bar of public good. I often refer to the absence of great leaders in the political landscape of India and the world; Canada has not escaped the current curse of the dearth of great minds in the political arena. Hence my exasperation at the situation I found myself in.

The world over, politics seems to have become the refuge of intellectual dwarfs—no offence intended to our shorter brothers and sisters. The small minds tend not to see too far into the future; they are oblivious to the need to constantly challenge the world to be what it could be.

After a lifetime of activism and close to eighteen years of elected office it was only natural for me to tire of the myopia and pettiness in what otherwise remains a noble endeavour.

You met Indira Gandhi — the second woman to lead a country in a prime ministerial role — and had this to say of her “Indira Gandhi loved India immensely. One can be an imperfect leader and yet a patriot”. Do you think she was an effective leader for India?

My wife and I spent an hour speaking with Indira Gandhi on the afternoon of January 13, 1984. We spent the first few minutes comparing notes about our grandparents and parents as freedom fighters and activists before discussing the issues related to the agitation in Punjab, its growing militancy and increasing violence in and outside the Golden Temple. From what she said it was clear she was extremely troubled about the dangerous situation of the militants holed up in the Temple and the toll it was taking on the peace, politics and the economy of the state. I sensed a certain helplessness in this otherwise quite brave woman when describing the unsuccessful efforts she and her office had made to reach a peaceful settlement of the issues raised by the Sikh agitation. Because I had met both the militant Bhindranwale and the peace loving leader of the agitation, Longowal, and understood the tension between the two men and their followers, I knew she was grappling with a political minefield. All of this and much more that we discussed left me in no doubt about her love for the country and all its people.

But I do believe she allowed the situation at the Golden Temple to linger too long and deteriorate before trying to bring it under control; thus, it and the Operation Bluestar, her ultimate response to the armed militants holed up in the Temple, remains one of her great misjudgements—perhaps as grave as the declaration of the National Emergency in 1975.

Imperfection being part of the human condition, one isn’t surprised that Indira Gandhi who saw all Indians as equally Indian, too, was imperfect; a strong but imperfect leader.

“Sikri was the capital for the new world of unity that Akbar had wanted to create. Ashoka took a similarly bold leap toward peace after a bloody war. Two millennia after Ashoka and four centuries after Akbar, Mahatma Gandhi shared with India a similar vision and a path out of colonialism. India killed him.” Please explain why you feel India killed Gandhi.

One can’t and mustn’t blame an entire country for the actions of one or two persons and yet what I said of Gandhi’s assassination, at least figuratively if not literally, can be said with ample justification; not one but several attempts were made to end Gandhi the mortal. If many Indian hearts and minds—and there were many in his lifetime, perhaps not as many as there are in Modi’s India—wanted Gandhi and his philosophy of nonviolence and love for all dead, then I must say, even without resorting to the writers’ licence, India stands accused and guilty of his January 30th, 1948 assassination; India killed Gandhi.

Even before the advent of Modi on the national scene India’s politicians had substantially diminished and damaged Gandhi’s legacy of Truth, Love and Non-violence. Considering the so few prominent voices in the public domain criticising the Modi regime’s single-minded undermining of Gandhi’s legacy, almost to the point of extinction, it can be said that if it already hasn’t done so, India is close to annihilating Gandhi’s Truth, Love and Non-violence.

“To India’s shame, the rich and ruling classes of today mimic the sahibs of yore. Some of them still head to the hills with their servants, the Indian equivalent of the slaves of the United States.” As Gandhi is seen as one of the architects of modern India, what would have Gandhi’s stand been on this?

When Gandhi lived in England and South Africa, he was part of the diaspora of his time and learnt new things as such. Today with social and digital media one hopes even living in India he would have been aware of the yearning of humanity for equality and economic and social justice. The way most rich and powerful treat the poor and the weak in India is absolutely antithetical to what an egalitarian India would demand of them.

I’m aware of how Gandhi didn’t support the abolition of caste and of his position or lack thereof on the question of equality for the blacks of South Africa at the time. But different times throw up leaders with different and perhaps better approaches to the fundamental issues. Were he alive today, he would have argued for the abolition of caste, equality for all and he wouldn’t have accepted or ignored how India treats its workers, poor and the powerless.

You have told us “India leads the world in the curse of child slavery and labour. Millions of India’s children are trapped in bonded labour, sex trafficking and domestic ‘help’ servitude.” Most people plead poverty and survival when they talk of children working. Do you see a way out? Is there a solution?

Yes, like all problems, this, too, has a solution:

Legislate, legislate and legislate.

Enforce, enforce and enforce the legislation.

I know some laws do exist but we need legislation with more teeth. The laws regarding minimum wage, hours of work, overtime and holiday pay and health regulations must be strengthened and more vigorously enforced, in particular, in the so-called domestic help sector. Better wages and working conditions rigorously enforced would attract adult workers who would be able to send their children to proper schools rather than thrust them in to slavery in exploitative homes, factories and workplaces.

Not much will improve on this front though unless Indians end the endemic corruption in law enforcement. You see corruption confronts and stares us in almost all, if not all, issues Indian; it is the elephant almost in each and every room.

“Violence can never be a tool for change in a modern, democratic nation.” You tried to use Gandhian principles through your life — even in Canada. Do you think non-violence can be a way of life given the current world scenario with wars and dissensions? How do you view Gandhi sanctioning the participation of soldiers in the first and second world wars? Can wars ever be erased or made non-violent?

First let’s deal with Gandhi’s sanction of the soldiers in the two world wars. Whether or not he had sanctioned their participation, the soldiers would have gone to war; most of them fought for wages, not for the love of war or the country except those for whom the Second World War was a war against fascism and hence justified.

I don’t believe Gandhi ever stated that in fighting a violent enemy or a perceived enemy one was not allowed to use violence. All I ever remember him saying was that you throw your unarmed body wrapped in soul force in front of the enemy but if you are too chicken to do so or can’t do so for some other reason but fight an aggressor you must, violence is better than doing nothing.

As for countries fighting each other I don’t believe he ever said that, in an uncertain world where the military of another country could invade at any moment, a country must forego a military of its own.

As for nonviolence being a way of life, it can and must be for a country in its internal life. On the borders however one always has to deal with what one is presented with; you can’t ask Ukraine to not fight; in the face of a suddenly expansionist China or a belligerent Pakistan, Gandhi wouldn’t have urged the Buddha’s meditational pose for India; he didn’t do so in late 1947 when Pakistani fighters invaded Kashmir.

As for wars being non-violent, they can never be if the likes of Russia continue to invade others.

You opposed the Khalistani separatists and stood for a united India. What is your stand on Khalistan, given the recent flare up? Did you do anything this time to allay the situation in Canada?

I have always been opposed to countries being carved out on ethnic, linguistic or religious basis; I am a firm believer in multilingual, multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multi-racial populations living together in peace within the boundaries of peaceful countries; for that to happen, secularism remains a sine qua non[1]. That is why I so passionately continue to support a secular and inclusive India.

As for me doing something in the face of what is happening in Canada today vis a vis the Khalistanis, I didn’t say anything because I don’t believe it would have added to the debate; everyone already knows what I think and believe.

What does concern me though is the weak-kneed response and reaction of the public leaders of Canada; they have not unconditionally condemned the glorification of terrorists, known murderers or those who on the streets of Canada glorify and revere the killers of Air India passengers or of Mrs. Indira Gandhi. For me, someone who immigrated to Canada in 1968 when the elder Trudeau became the Prime Minister of the country, the near silence of our politicians on Khalistani violence and its glorification has been a low point; the older Trudeau knew how to deal with the terrorists; he didn’t and wouldn’t have pussy footed around terrorism or its glorification.

When your autobiography was published the first time in 2016, your column in Indian Express was cancelled. As many of us grew up in India of the past, we believed in secularism and democracy with freedom of expression. How has it changed over a period of time?

After I left India and particularly when I was introduced to the Hyde Park, I reflected on India and it seemed to be one of the freest places in the world; any intersection of a city road or a corner of the village served as a mini Hyde Park; from the millions of speeches made in such Hyde Parks all over India, millions of ideas tumbled forth from the lips of ordinary but engaged Indians.

Of course, I do realise that in the lives of the poor and the powerless, the freedom hadn’t shone as bright. The imprisoning of the Naxalites without charges and Indira Gandhi’s Emergency were the first real jolts of un-democracy and unfreedom I felt India as a whole had suffered. From there it went downhill; that sporadic communal riots continued; that Godhra was done to the Muslims as was done the post Indira assassination violence to the Sikhs; lynchings of Muslims and Dalits continue today.

India’s response to the first major unfreedom, Indira’s Emergency censorship, was encapsulated in the blank front pages of the censored Indian Express, that symbol of the Journalism of Courage. That symbol may still burn today but it is smouldering and clearly less bright enveloped as it and others are in the atmosphere of fear of the likes of ED[2] and CBI[3]; almost none amongst the traditional media homes shines much or at all; the digital media has thrown up some brave examples like The Wire. But the overall scene is dismal. India needs many revolutions; one of them is the reawakening of some semblance of fortitude in India’s Godi[4] media outlets.

Over repeated trips to India, you observed that people did not want to talk of major issues like availability of potable water but wanted to discuss issues like the eroding culture among the diaspora. Why do you think this has happened? Is there a way to change this mindset?

Human mind is an amazing thing; it seeks engagement but when the immediate is painful to observe and feel, it finds solace in contemplating the scenes afar; for sheer survival in its troubled and troubling milieu it develops numbness; such numbness shields it from the immediate while thinking about the distant problems, imagined or real, offer it a sense of engagement. Such is what I thought happened to many in Punjab.

Another troubling thing was that much beyond the essential human pride a sense of chauvinism and superiority, at least among its rich and powerful, has plagued Punjab for a long time which has blinded it to the need for change and progress—one didn’t need to improve what one believed to be perfect and hence superior.

Punjab has significantly slipped in the Human Development Index. That this humbling fact is now quite widely acknowledged in intellectual and political circles gives me some hope that things may improve.

“There are massive water shortages across the country. There’s a crisis in health care…Under the weight of crippling debts and droughts, small and marginal farmers are killing themselves. There aren’t enough jobs being created for the millions of youth joining the job market every year. The human-rights record of the Indian State in Kashmir, the Northeast and other parts in the grip of insurgency is horrific and shameful. Dalits and Muslims are lynched with impunity by Hindutva-inspired mobs for skinning dead cows, or being in the vicinity of meat that may or may not be beef.” Do you see a way out? What can India do to step out of the condition you have described so accurately?

I have argued for some time that what India needs is a new freedom struggle, a Values’ Revolution, to rid itself of corruption—rishwat[5], unethicality, religious and cultural fanaticism that impinges on many Indians’ right to life, dignity and liberty. In arguing this I am aided by Gandhi’s dictum—that I have always alluded to in my own writings—that he was engaged in not creating a new India but a new Indian; my reading of what he said has led me to conclude he meant a caring, humane, compassionate, egalitarian and an ethical Indian. To create an India with 1.4 billion ethical and progressive Indians requires a mammoth revolutionary change in our values; hence a Values’ Revolution.

At the moment I see the country’s civil society under constant attack by the forces of social division whereas in fact social solidarity and cohesion are sorely needed. A Values’ Revolution will require giant leaders; I see none on the scene today but I’m not disheartened because once begun the Revolution itself may, as do all revolutions, throw up the necessary giants.

You are an immigrant who has lived out of India for almost half a century. Do you think as part of the diaspora living outside India, we could all act together to heal a region broken by its own inability to live up to the vision created by those who wrote the constitution of the country? What would be your vision of India?

The diaspora coming together to even slightly nudge India forward is an emotionally compelling and noble thought; many of us constantly dream of doing something for the country we have left behind. Some of us do so while others revel in its imaginings only.

A major stumbling block to the diasporic unity on this question has been the ideological divisions amongst the Indians abroad which usually mirror India’s domestic political fault lines and unfortunately those difference have been only rendered sharper by the way elements of the diaspora have recently been employed in aid of India’s domestic political machinations. The old diasporic divisions now seem and feel more rabid; it is as if the political battles of India now rage equally actively in the diaspora itself.

I always dream of India as a caring, compassionate, egalitarian and ethical India. One that values all its citizens equally and brims with social and economic justice.

That is such a wonderful thought with which many of us agree wholeheartedly. You have written: “If humanity isn’t going to drown in the chaos of its own creation, the leading nations of the world will have to create a new world order, which may involve fewer international boundaries.” What is the world order you suggest?

For starter no order can be imposed by the so-called leading nations, no matter how powerful. It may take a significant amount of nudging and cajoling by them to change anything.

When I wrote my autobiography, I was imagining the world moving, at least to begin with, in the direction of regional groupings like the European Union. We saw that as the number of member states of the United Nations trended upwards, Europe witnessed the opposite where many countries dared to create the EU practically erasing borders; granted Britain rebelled – but even within its borders a referendum held today would most likely approve it re-joining the EU.

As a possible beginning for the rest of the world, our best hope lies in grand imaginings such as a South Asian Common Market at once reducing the expense of standing militaries staring angrily at each other across the borders; Southeast Asia, Africa, South America could follow; North American Free Trade Agreement already exists creating at least an economic union.

If to begin with the countries regionally moved toward the free flow of human beings along with the necessary and more convenient local trading, one could foresee the international will and desire developing toward a world populated by fewer borders and more freedom. Hopefully that would move humanity toward more international egalitarianism, prosperity and fewer wars.

Hopefully, the vision materialises. Thank you very much for giving us your time and wonderful books that make us think and emote.

Click here to access an excerpt from Journey After Midnight – A Punjabi Life: From India to Canada

[1] An essential condition, Latin phrase

[2] Enforcement Directorate

[3] Central Bureau of Investigation

[4] Lap, Hindi word

[5] Bribery, Hindi word

(The online interview has been conducted by emails by Mitali Chakravarty)

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Tags Africa, Akbar, Austin 1100, Austin Mini, Bhindranwale, Britain, British Columbia, British Railways, Canada, China, Dalits, Dosanjh Kalan, England, EU, European Union, Godhra, Golden temple, Hyde Park, Indian Express, Indira Gandhi, Indira Gandhi's Emergency, Journey After Midnight - A Punjabi Life: From India to Canada, Kashmir, Khalistani, Longlowal, Lynchings, Mahatma Gandhi, Mitali Chakravarty, Modi's India, Muslims, Naxalites, North American Free Trade Agreement, Operation Bluestar, Pakistan, Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, Punjab, Russia, Second World War, Sikh agitation, Sikhs, South Africa, South America, South Asian Common Market, Southeast Asia, The Past is Never Dead: A Nove, Top 25 Canadian Immigrant Award, Trudeau, U K, Ujjal Dosanjh, Ukraine, United Nations, University of British Columbia

Stories

Belacan

Migrant stories of yore from Malaysia by Farouk Gulsara

“There she goes again,” thought Saraswati as she cut vegetables she had never seen in her native country. “Here goes Ah Soh cooking her stinky dish again.”

Ah Soh with Nand Lal, Sarawswati’s son.(Photo taken circa the early 2000s).Courtesy: Farouk Gulsara

Saraswati, Ah Soh and the rest of the pack are people commonly called fresh off the boat. They hail from various parts of China and India.

The loud beating of a metal ladle against a frying pan, accompanied by the shrilling Chinese opera over the radio and her shrieking at her children, need no guessing whose kitchen ‘aroma’ is coming from. Everyone knows Ah Soh is frying belacan, a fermented Malay shrimp paste.

A house in the New Village (Photo taken circa the early 2000s). Courtesy: Farouk Gulsara

Ah Soh is Saraswati’s immediate neighbour in a New Village in Ipoh. Ah Soh, by default, is the self-appointed leader of the pack. Since she is one of the oldest occupants of New Village, she leads the group of housewives, all living along the same row of single-story wooden houses. These houses were the brainchild of the British when they wanted to keep the communist at bay in the 1950s. More than ten years into its inception, the houses are still strong and are a catch for many newcomers to Malaya.

Ah Soh and her husband, Ah Leong, hail from Canton, China. Escaping poverty and famine, Ah Leong scrapped the bottom of the barrel to buy himself a one-way ticket to Singapore in the early 1950s, then an up-and-coming international port, to try his luck.

After trying a few odd jobs here and there, Ah Leong heard of an opening in newly opened tin mines in Ipoh. He made a dash for it and found Ipoh and the work he liked. Soon, he saved enough cash and paid an agent to bring over the newly married wife that he left behind in China. Ah Leong, Ah Soh and later, their two young daughters develop roots in the New Village.

Life was no bed of roses for Saraswati either. Losing most of her family members to famine, a 13-year-old Saraswati was bundled off to a distant relative’s house in Bihar. Saraswati is pretty sure she was sold off to work as a maid, as she scrubbed and cleaned from dawn to dusk.

Lady Luck manifested most peculiarly. Saraswati was labelled bad luck when many mishaps hit her new family soon after joining them. One of the kids died of diarrhoea, and a big branch of a peepal tree growing in the compound fell on the house, destroying the roof. So, when the family heard of an elderly widower looking for a suitable bride, Saraswati was bundled off yet again.

Hence, Saraswati’s next phase of life started with her boarding a ship, S Rajula, from Calcutta to Penang, Malaya. She spent an entire month suffering from motion sickness, not only from the ship’s motion but by the various smells of people and their cooking. Starting life as a complete vegetarian, by the time she arrived in Malaya, after overexposure to a plethora of aromas and sights, she had garnered enough courage to taste various types of meat.

So, Ah Soh’s pungent belacan was tolerable to Saraswati’s smell buds, even though she hails from the Hindi heartland where, by design, everybody in her community was vegetarian.

Saraswati’s husband, Lal, had his own tale of melancholy. After losing his family to famine, he became an orphan and a guardian to his 12-year-old sister. With much difficulty, he somehow, doing odd jobs, managed to sustain his little family to adulthood. He was in the marriage market after getting his little sister happily married off. Unfortunately, three months into his marriage, the young bride succumbed to tuberculosis, then a deadly death sentence to anyone. Even the President of Pakistan had died of TB.

Nursing a heartbreak, he heard the news that some people he knew were going to try their luck in Malaya. The talk around town was that Malaya, the land of milk and honey, was the darling was the Empire and had great job opportunities. So that is how he landed in Malaya.

Again, after doing whatever work that came by, he landed in a more secure job washing the British Army’s dirty laundry in a camp in Ipoh. Cleaning, starching and ironing kept him busy, but he was happy for the first time. With money in his pocket and regular meals to look for, he ventured out for humble accommodation. That is how this New Village house came about.

He returned to his hometown in Bihar, India and got a bride for himself. So, here he is, with his second wife, Saraswati, and two young boys.

The New Village is a melting potpourri of people escaping from famine and depravity. If in the 1950s, this place protected the country from communist threat, in the 1960s, it was a pillar of hope for displaced people to start life anew.

Ah Soh had her kind, who hailed from China, and Saraswati had hers hail from various parts of India. It is incredible that despite the skirmishes between the two countries, they were bosom buddies here. These economic immigrants soldiered on, straddled in unfamiliar circumstances, struggling towards an uncertain future with zest in their chests and youth in their limbs. They go on to build their camaraderie, work, mingle, and live in harmony. Graduating from convenient sign language, they have now mastered the art of communication. Like how a cat would communicate with a dog in an adverse situation, such as absconding from the animal catcher, they cling to each other desperately as they go on with life.

Saraswati’s new home gave them, the newcomers, a simple language that contained many Chinese and Indian words to use. Language or no language, they were still able to communicate and fulfil each other’s needs. If one person from one part of China or India could not connect with a fellow compatriot, here they had a motley crew of economic migrants from these countries speaking, eating and looking out for each other.

Lal’s contract workers took him to various towns and kept him away from the family for months. An illiterate Saraswati with only street smartness skills would go on to manage the children and household on her own. With the convoy of housewives from New Village, Saraswati would do her marketing and grocery. Pointing and making gesticulating would constitute making an order, and hawkers were honest enough to return correct change. Slowly, she began to develop a liking for Chinese food.

Monthly grocery was by credit, and things were obtained from Ah Meng’s sundry shop, packed to the brim with everything under the sun. Lal would pay the bills at the end of the month as he returned from numerous contract jobs.

Besides her Chinese neighbours, Saraswati had neighbours from Punjab, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh. Ajit Singh had a few dairy cows at the back compound of his house. From Ajit, Saraswati and her children had an uninterrupted supply of fresh milk.

R-L: Shobha(Saraswati‘s daughter) , Ah Soh(by then in her early 70s), Meela (Sarawati’s daughter), Saraswati and Kamala. (Photo taken circa the early 2000s). Courtesy: Farouk Gulsara

Two doors away from Saraswati’s house was Kamala’s. It was always a hive of activities from day to night. Kamala had so many children that Saraswati had lost count. People came and went as if it were the marketplace, and their main door was always open. There were always people singing, dancing or simply yakking there.

Ah Soh’s house was next to Devi’s house. Her household was loud, too, at the end of the month, but for a different reason. Devi has five children to show for her seven years of marriage. Her husband, a postman, also had something to offer, a mistress. Somewhere along the way, he picked up drinking, and his frequenting at the local liquor shop introduced him to a dancer. It was a routine that at the end of the month, as everyone received their pay, the neighbourhood would be filled with much noise; the clanging of kitchen utensils from Devi’s, music from Kamala’a and shuffling of mahjong tiles from Ah Soh’s front porch. Devi’s family quarrel noise over money got buried over the rest.

Saraswati has been feeling easily lethargic these days. She realises that her monthlies have been delayed. Her husband’s monthly visit has been productive. She now has to get used to the idea that there will be an addition to the family.

Maybe it is the pregnancy; she is getting a little pensive these days. She sometimes reminisces about the life that she had. Uprooted from her family by the forces of nature, she started a life as a child labour. Because of superstition, she was packed off again into marriage. Driven by economic hardship, she and her husband crossed the dreaded Black Waters to try their luck in a new land.

From an illiterate teenager, now she has morphed into a woman who could command leadership in her circle of friends and care for her family. From a meek non-adventurous vegetarian, she has savoured all meats and dishes, some of which her ancestors would have never dreamt of tasting.

She wonders what the future holds for her, her husband and the three kids she will raise to adulthood in this independent young country called Malaya as it crawls into the mid-1960s.

The foreground: Rohan, Saraswati’s grandson. In the background, Kamala’s son, Raja, in deep conversation with Nanda Lal and Shobha (Saraswati’ kids). The same house they all grew up in, albeit the extensions and refurbishments. (Picture taken circa the early 2000s) Courtesy: Farouk Gulsara

Farouk Gulsara is a daytime healer and a writer by night. After developing his left side of his brain almost half his lifetime, this johnny-come-lately decided to stimulate the non-dominant part of his remaining half. An author of two non-fiction books, ‘Inside the twisted mind of Rifle Range Boy’ and ‘Real Lessons from Reel Life’, he writes regularly in his blog ‘Rifle Range Boy’.

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Tags Andhra Pradesh, Belacan, Bihar, Black Waters, British, British Army, Calcutta, Canton, China, Chinese Opera, Farouk Gulsara, Hindi, Ipoh, Malay, Malaya, Pakistan, Penang, Punjab, Tamil Nadu, Tuberculosis

Review

Smoke & Ashes

Book Review by Somdatta Mandal

Title: Smoke and Ashes: A Writer’s Journey Through Opium’s Hidden Histories

Author: Amitav Ghosh

Publisher: HarperCollins India

Amitav Ghosh has been traversing the boundaries between fiction, non-fiction, history, anthropology with ease for a long time. After the publication of his Ibis Trilogy [Sea of Poppies (2008), River of Smoke (2011) and Flood of Fire (2012)] more than a decade earlier, he has been primarily focusing on issues related to environment, global warming and ecology in his later novels like Gun Island (2019), The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis (2021), a non-fiction like The Great Derangement (2016), and two slim volumes of fables, Jungle Nama (2021) and The Living Mountain (2022). Now in his latest book Smoke and Ashes: A Writer’s Journey Through Opium’s Hidden Histories (2023), he blends travelogue, memoir, and historical tract into a multi-textured narrative that tells us about how ‘opium is a historical force in its own right’ and ‘must be approached with due attention to the ways in which it has interacted with humans over time.’ When he began his research for the Ibis Trilogy, he was startled to find how the lives of the nineteenth-century sailors and soldiers he wrote of were dictated not only by the currents of the Indian Ocean, but also by a precious commodity carried in enormous quantities on those currents: opium. Through both economic and cultural history, Ghosh traces the transformative effect the opium trade had on Britain, India and China; the trade and its revenues were essential to the Empire’s survival.

Of the eighteen chapters of the book, the first two enlighten the reader about little knowledge of China and the way tea (cha or chai) became an inevitable part of living both in the West and in India. It was after Ghosh’s first trip to Guangzhou (anglicized later to Canton) that the epiphany occurred about the very subtle influence of China and how the British actually stole the technology of tea plantation to make it flourish in the colonies. Thus ‘tea came to India as a corollary of a sustained contest – economic, social and military – between the West and China.’

From the third chapter onwards Ghosh gives us the history of the opium poppy and how social conventions that had developed through centuries of exposure to opium may have helped to protect some parts of Eurasia from highly addictive forms of opioid use and also how the drug was instrumental in the creation of a certain kind of colonial modernity. We get to know how it was the Dutch who led the way in enmeshing opium with colonialism, and in creating the first imperial narco-state, heavily dependent on drug revenues. But in India, the model of the colonial narco-state was perfected by the British. In the entire region of Purvanchal, the British created a system that was coercive to its core. The growth and cultivation of opium poppy was entirely controlled by them and the drug was mass produced in the two largest factories in Patna and Ghazipur. Though the dangers of opium were certainly no secret to the British government, yet they did not bat an eyelid in exporting the drug to China, knowing fully well it was a criminal enterprise utterly indefensible by the standards of its own time as well as ours.

Ghosh then gives details of the poppy cultivation in Malwa and the western provinces of India. By thwarting the British efforts to impose a monopoly on the trade, Malwa opium sustained Bombay and left a large share of the profits to remain in indigenous hands. Throughout the colonial era therefore, Calcutta and Bombay defined the two opposite poles of India’s political economy; the way in which business was conducted in the two cities were completely different and soon the Parsis turned out to be the maximum number of the non-western merchants who were present in Guangzhou in the years before the First Opium War. Thus, Bombay and its hinterlands benefited from Malwa’s opium in multiple ways. From Mumbai’s Parsis we go to the horticulturists and weavers, potters and painters of China, especially of the great city of Guangzhou. The intricacies of the Parsi Gara saris are traced back to weavers of Guangzhou, and so are the origins of an artistic ferment in Bombay when Jamsetji Tata, the founder of the Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai, brought back many paintings to India from China. The idea for an art school in Bombay came to Jamstjee Jejeebhoy after his Guangzhou visits, and the JJ School of Art came about.

Ghosh describes how opium money seeped so deeply into nineteenth century Britain that it essentially became invisible through ubiquity. After Britain, the country that benefited the most from the China trade and therefore, the global traffic in opium, was none other than the United States and the beneficiaries included many of the prominent families, institutions, and individuals in the land. By 1818 Americans were smuggling as much as a third of all the opium consumed in China thereby posing a major challenge to the East India Company’s domination of the market. Known as the Boston Concern, all the rich families from Boston, Massachusetts and the fortunate Americans were a series of names from the Northeastern upper crust — Astor, Cabot, Peabody, and so on. The young returnees from China ploughed their opium money into every sector of the rapidly expanding American economy. Even the opium money used in the railroad industry also came from China. “Opium was really a way that America was able to transfer China’s economic power to America’s industrial revolution”. In the United States the connection between opium and philanthropy has endured till the present day. It also left a distinct stamp on American architectural styles, modes of consumption, interior décor, philanthropy, and forms of recreation. Interestingly, Ghosh’s narrative keeps circling back to the present, when in the US as well in many countries around the world including India, the opioid crisis has reached epic proportions and the American government is bullish about its “War on Drugs”. Ghosh candidly states, “The ideology of Free Trade capitalism sanctioned entirely new levels of depravity in the pursuit of profit and the demons that were engendered as a result that have now so viscerally taken hold of the world that they can probably never be exorcised.”

Ghosh reiterates through the book that binary narratives about countries and culture — like, China is evil — that is entrenched in popular perception is misleading and takes away the historical context of trade relations among nations. “The staggering reality is that many of the cities that are now pillars of the modern globalised economy — Mumbai, Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai — were initially sustained by opium.”

There are many places in the book where Ghosh skilfully refers to his actual borrowing of historical details in his Ibis trilogy and these interjections add flavour to the non-fiction narration. Chapter Eight again is a memoir of Ghosh’s own lineage and how that has connections with the opium trade. Moving away from their ancestral home in East Bengal, it was the opium industry that took his ancestors to Chhapra in Bihar and kept them there. Like the millions of people that opium trading affected, uprooted, and dehumanised, his father told him stories of growing up in Chhapra and seeing opium ruin as well as make lives. These digressions add zing to the often-monotonous narration of facts and figures of the opium trade.

Ghosh goes on to devote pages to the nature of grassroots psychoactive substances and how opium was different in this class of psychoactive because it became a mainstay among pharmaceuticals too: “The reality is that all other efforts at curbing the spread of opioids have failed: the opium poppy has always found a way of circumventing them.” Towards the end of the book, after Ghosh finds that the wealthy and powerful people of the world to be suicidally indifferent to the prospect of a global catastrophe vis-s-vis the drug scenario, he asks a seminal question: “In such a world does it serve any purpose to recount this bleak and unedifying story?” Apparently, this question had haunted him since he first started working on the book, many years ago. It was the reason why, at a certain point, he felt he could not go on, even though he had already accumulated an enormous amount of material. It seemed to him then that Tagore had got it exactly right when he wrote: ‘in the Indo-China opium traffic, human nature itself sinks down to such a depth of despicable meanness, that is hateful even to follow the story to its conclusion.’ So persuaded was he of this that he decided to abandon the project: he cancelled the contracts he had signed and returned the advances he had been paid by his publishers.

Now we are happy that the story of the opium poppy had its cathartic effect upon Ghosh and in retrospect, after a period of more than a decade, he could give us the story from multiple perspectives today. Like his other books, this text is also accompanied by voluminous end notes which will deter the layman reader from enjoying the book. The amount of material and the different issues that Ghosh mentions is fit for at least four books but it is to his credit that he manages to present to us this world-roving tale in his signature method of weaving diverse narrative strands together into this book. How Ghosh establishes the interconnectedness of economic agency with geopolitics, a plant with human flourishing and wreckage and produces a narrative as luxuriant as it is painstaking in detail and density is his mastery as a prose writer and thinker.

Somdatta Mandal, author, academic and translator is former Professor of English at Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, India.

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Stories

Mister Wilkens

By Paul Mirabile

“Indeed, so fierce was this sense of resistance to change, and so universal were the powers ascribed to it, that in reading the Orientalists one understands that the apocalypse to be feared was not the destruction of Western civilisation but rather the destruction of the barriers that kept East and West from each other.”

This unreferenced passage was found upon the mangled body of a certain Mister Wilkens after he had thrown himself from a speeding night express from Paris to Madrid. I, riding on that train, and possessing a peculiar nature for the bizarre, decided to investigate rhe reasons for such a gruesome suicide. Fortunately, upon arriving in Madrid, I ran into the Englishman who had shared the compartment in which Mister Wilkens had been travelling on that memorable night. I had seen him on the railway tracks whilst the train officials searched the surrounding embankments for the body of the poor man. Apparently, it had been Mister Wilkens’ travelling companion who had alerted the officials. He knew why Mister Wilkens had killed himself but seemed rather parsimonious with the details when questioned by the police or the press, feigning that he was about to fall asleep when the tragic event occurred, and was only awakened by a terrible laugh or scream. (Which we shall soon learn was a blatant lie!)

When I met him in Madrid by some extraordinary chance and bought him a drink at the famous beer saloon at the Plaza Santa Anna, made famous by its association with Ernest Hemingway who drank and got rowdy there, I offered the man money to divulge the reason for the suicide to me. He bluntly refused. I explained my idiosyncrasies towards the bizarre and he, smiling a wicked smile, promised to tell me only if I would not submit the story for publication or spread its contents orally to the press, friends or family until he authorised me to do so. As to my offer of payment, he suggested two hundred quid would do! I agreed all agog, albeit the amount of money seemed to be rather steep. In any case, I assured him that I had neither friends nor family, and that I had no great love for journalists. His story, thus, would be perfectly safe with me.

This was how I came to be the first to put into writing the nature of Mister Wilkens and the reasons for his suicide. Now if readers ask themselves how I’ve managed to publish the testimony without breaking my solemn oath, I would then have to elaborate on the unforeseeable and tragic end of my informer (whose name, by the way, I never learned). But that is yet another story. Permit me to recount this one first.

“We were the only two in the compartment.” My English informant began smugly in a slightly high nasal tone while the air smelt somewhat of that Cambridge midnight lamp oil. “I can genuinely recollect at the train station in Paris that his personality was of a sullen, meek sort, one of a man who had fallen hard, got up, but only to fall again. He wore a tragic, tormented face, and if I recall correctly, every two or three minutes suffered an unsightly twitch under his left eye that made the other eye seem exorbitant. Anyway, once we had left Paris far behind, he engaged in the most singular gambit as regards the way in which he sought to enlist my attention : ‘Have you ever travelled to the Orient ?’ The gambit put so bluntly shook me out of my dreamy thoughts. I noted that his left eye began to twitch as if it sought to put me out even before I ventured an answer.

“‘No I haven’t, although I’ve read many travel writers and adventurers’ tales of the Orient.’

“‘Oh really !’ he snorted in overt contempt. ‘For example ?’

“ ‘Well … there’s Marco Polo.’

“He guffawed : ‘He never left his dingy cell in Venice, the seedy bugger !’ I shrugged my shoulders.

“ ‘I have perused Sir Richard Burton[1].’

“He lifted an appraising eyebrow : ‘Yes, a remarkable polyglot and reader of the Oriental heart ; an ethnologist and anthropologist avant la lettre. He was, nevertheless, a man fraught with prejudices and terribly dogmatic. Alas, a man of his times. Yet, his writings do hold much insight, and so humorous at that. Did he not say that England was just a tiny island ? He secretly despised it for he breathed more spacious air in Asia, Africa and Continental Europe.’ He adjusted his badly knotted tie. ‘Go on …’

“ ‘I’ve read all of Alexandra David-Néel’s novels[2]?’ I pursued with an amused air of a child.

“ ‘Ah ! Now there’s an outstanding, pugnacious explorer ! She outstrips them all — except Burton of course — in intrepidity, intelligence, will-power and writing style. Her sarcasm and irony suit my humour, whilst her practice and research into Buddhism bear the seriousness of any so called specialist or expert.’ He smiled a self-congratulatory smile as if he had brought up the name himself. I must admit that I too was pleased at his overt approval; indeed, to have outsmarted the Brits and the Tibetans through cunning and acumen in order to reach Lhasa on foot safe and sound was a fantastic feat.

“My travelling companion lifted his chin for me to continue my enumeration : ‘Pierre Loti[3] ?’

“He snorted : ‘Please be serious, sir.’ And he yawned.

“‘André Malraux[4],’ I jested.

“He threw up his hands : ‘His novels are wonderful, but his Orient is as imaginary as his imaginary museums.’

“‘Pearl Buck[5] ?’ I countered with excessive decorum as if all this were just a parlour game.

“ ‘Hum … yes, she is the only Westerner who really knew China, more so than the American journalists Louis Strong and Edgar Snow. Read her Nobel Prize speech, it’s an incredible lesson in Chinese literature. Yes, Pearl Buck had a genuine love for the East. Her books plunge us into the remotest depths of twentieth century rural China. The Mother is a sparkling piece of penmanship …’

“ ‘I shall not name all the modern travel-writers to the East whom I have read on my train rides, many of whose narratives are quite dull and stereotyped.’ I rejoined, hoping to put an end to this ridiculous ‘parlour game’.

“ ‘So right you are, sir,’ he beamed. He sat back in his seat fidgeting with the buttons on his vest, some of which were missing. ‘I noted, too ….’

“Our compartment door slid open violently. The conductor practically jumped in demanding our tickets. My heart almost jumped with his jump ! Anyway, we dutifully showed them to him. When he had jumped out, so to speak, Mister Wilkens, although unperturbed by all this jumping about, seemed, none the less, beset by something, his eyes staring blankly at the table aside the window where he had placed a shoulder-bag, perhaps because he had lost the thread of our conversation. He looked up and blurted out: ‘You know sir, I spent over forty years living in the East : Turkey, Syria, Armenia, India, China, Laos, Mongolia, not as a conquering dolt, a cosmopolitan snob or a professional prig, but as a pilgrim in quest of my humane origins.’

“My travelling companion was in a state of unusual excitement. ‘Humane origins ?’ I repeated with a soupçon of irony.

“ ‘Yes, humane origins. I see that you fail to grasp the essence of that formula. Humane is another word for Humanism, my dear fellow. Humane defines our human heritage, the fount of our soul and spirit.’

“Just at that moment several French customs officials slid our door open and asked for our passports. When they were examined and returned, a few minutes later the Spanish police entered and inspected them in the same taciturn manner. As soon as these formalities had been completed we leaned back in our seats.

“I sat politely, absorbed in Mister Wilkens’ rather dark comments, exposed with such bursts of emotion. I swallowed every word he said, albeit the digestion caused me great discomfort. Be that as it may, sceptical at first, I grew somewhat more interested as he rambled on, amused at the man’s gyrating gesticulations, wondering, however, if he had gleaned his monologue from a book or from his own experiences as he so pompously pretended. This being said, I did feel a certain fraternal respect for him, although I will confess that he annoyed me with that composed self-sufficient poise. A poise I had stupidly preened in my old university days at Cambridge; you know, the eloquence of words, however boastful and bombastic, hollowing out dismal logic and stale equations. But I was dead sure that if I hadn’t been to Cambridge, this man would have never even addressed a single word to me. He sniffed out his ‘own kind’ ! But of this ‘kind’ I was particularly sceptical and mistrustful, especially of pedants like him. A sentiment of distrust one encounters in people who throw themselves upon you, spilling out their watered down philosophies or immature phantasies during long hours in trains. To be fair though, I did not detect this incorrigible comportment in Mister Wilkens’ hurried, but measured spurts. His words were solid, linked together like the shiny mail-coats of those fine mediaeval smithies.

“ ‘Are you then not content with your many years spent amongst the populations of Asia ?’ It was a mundane question but…

“ ‘Disorientation …’

“ ‘What ? Disorientation ?’

“ ‘Yes, disorientation, sir. Look at the word closely : ‘dis-‘ apart from and ‘orient’ … I am separated from the Orient … my Orient ; like dis-order, out of order, or dis-jointed, out of joint. Or how does disease appeal to you : out of or separated from ‘ease’, or disaster, out of the harmonious movements of the ‘astres‘ or stars ? The Eastern stars of course. Have I made myself understood ?’ He sneezed.

“I nodded without conviction. That pedantic tone, plus his semantic shenanigans unnerved me as well as that left eye of his which had been twitching with each jerky gesture of head and hands. He then began wringing those hands of his like some sort of maniac, gazing at the top berth above me, starry-eyed.

“ ‘Were you there on mission ?’ I ventured, hoping to regain his attention.

“ ‘Mission ? Yes, my mission ; not there, but here in Europe. I must relocate my orientation here in the West, if that is at all possible, given the fact that I am completely disorientated.’ He scratched that twitching eye peevishly. ‘So many languages and cultures studied and taught all gone up in smoke. A tragic fire has set aflame my life since returning to Europe; it has turned all my dreams to ashes. All my written and spoken words wrapped in the flame of a setting sun! And I can assure you sir, no phoenix will ever arise from them. Once disorientated, always disorientated as they say.’ He reached for his shoulder-bag, pulled out a soft-covered book, opening it at random with a look of disdain.

“I must admit that I found it painstaking to follow Mister Wilkens’ histrionic tirade with any seriousness. There he sat, lofty and smile-less, his head swaying listlessly from one side to the other like a puppet. His twitching eye had become intolerable to look at; I turned my head away and peered out of the window. Darkness had mantled the low-lying countryside in a softness that diverted my attention momentarily from those inflamed words. During this dream-like state, the darkness absorbing me within her lush, humid vortex, it seemed to me — though I am hardly a psychologist — that my travelling companion had experienced a traumatic relationship crisis with peoples of very alien values to his own European ones, a crisis that exhausted and put to trial his intellectual and emotional limits, exhausting him of any margin of repartee, driving him to self-accusation, even to self-maceration. His ‘Oriental’ experiences hardly broadened his vision of the world; on the contrary, they left him in an utter state of culpability. I felt that all his monologuing, if I may use that ugly word, was a confession pronounced before the hour of death. This may be an exaggeration, but I did sense that Mister Wilkens had been touched by some unknown madness, perhaps a loss of identification or an explosion of a multitude of identifications with which he could not cope … nor wished to cope! He made weird grimaces, sighed, fidgeted about in his seat, ignoring me completely until the train pulled into a station. Three minutes later we pulled out. Mister Wilkens had not once raised his eyes from that book, which I am sure he was not reading at all.

“If I remember correctly it was a very cold night, the sky, a crisp, obsidian black, the stars, frozen, and the moon, full and bright. I dare say our compartment was so cold that we were forced to bundle up in our overcoats. Mister Wilkens looked up at me several times from his pretended book-reading, though he displayed no desire for conversation. I broke in on him once, rather bombastically, lauding the French railway system. He nodded apathetically, then plunged his pug nose back into those pages. A few moments later the conductor poked his head in to apologise about the heating that, he promised, should be coming on shortly. I sighed in relief for I was freezing.

“Mister Wilkens cast me a cursory glance: ‘Have you studied things seriously, sir ? I mean the things in life, yourself, for example ?’

“I found the question impertinent, but answered, none the less: ‘Yes I have as a matter of fact … including myself,’ I retorted, holding my head haughtily high. ‘I too have travelled widely.’ He snorted. I remember at that point I had taken off my overcoat, for the heating was slowly coming back on. Mister Wilkens, however, kept his on in spite of the beads of sweat rising to the surface of his high, furrowed forehead. He offered no repartee, thumbing nervously through that book of his.

“I thought to retaliate, judging him an unmannerly upstart: ‘So you consider yourself an Orientalist ?’

“He looked up from his ‘perusing’ and stared at me as if I had insulted him with the grossest of four-lettered words. ‘That is an ugly word,’ he sneered. ‘All your years at Cambridge have taught you nothing. Anyway, to answer your question: no, I am not an Orientalist. Alas, as I have just finished explaining, everything has gone up into smoke: to have learned all those languages for nothing… to have undertaken all those voyages for nothing; to have taught and written for nothing ! Do you understand, sir … For nothing …’

“ ‘But …’

“ ‘But what ? Please, don’t pretend to console or pamper me, I abhor puerile commiseration. For nothing, sir. Do you realise that besides this train from Paris to Madrid back and forth, back and forth …’ A woman threw open our compartment door to step in, but when she saw Mister Wilkens’ twisted face and his twitching eye, she gasped and slammed it shut. He scoffed, fell mute and turned to the window.

“Large snowflakes fell. They formed little rims of melting sleet on the window. The wind whipped them about, giving an impression of so many odd geometric configurations. During that uneasy interlude I searched frantically for something to say. I couldn’t bear that slice of silence arching over us, that biting irony of contempt.

“Before I was able to say what I had finally conjured up to say, he burst brusquely into my crowded thoughts: ‘I must tell you a little story about Sandy, a mate of ours at Cambridge with whom we would go out on Saturday nights to “drink up the town” as the Americans say! There we were, a bit tipsy, carousing with the crowd, having a jolly good time, and Sandy, making a perfect bore of himself. So, to enliven the ambience I mustered everyone’s attention to inform them that I had stuck up for Sandy a week ago. Hearing his name suddenly mentioned, he raised his fat face out of the beer mug and looked blankly at me. I turned to Sandy and said : ”Sandy, how ungrateful you are, just think, I stuck up for you the other day, someone said that Sandy wasn’t fit to live with the pigs and I said that he certainly was !” All of us roared with laughter whilst poor Sandy buried his pasty face in the froth of his beer. In fact the whole pub was howling with laughter. It was truly a smashing night out.’

“Mister Wilkens was choking with laughter. He appeared so pathetic to me. He wore such a cretinous smirk on his twitching face. That revolting anecdote of his was cheap and full of childish contempt. Was he doing this purposely to disgust me, to urge me to get up and leave the compartment? He calmed down and eyed me with a sort of conspiratorial smile: ‘Have you ever thought of taking the Leap, sir ?’ He pushed his tortured face forward waiting for an answer. His hysterical tone had shaken me up a bit. I wished only now to be left alone.

“ ‘The leap ?’ I asked, examining him rather warily. It was an odd word which he emphasised with an accompanying gesture of his hand raised high overhead. He noted the tint of circumspection in my voice. He sneered and threw open our compartment window. Stretching his hand out, he caught the flakes of snow that shone in the half-lit wintry night. I made no move. Cold air rushed into the warmth of the compartment. I nodded towards the window. He feigned to ignore me and his sneer erupted into a series of ugly snickers. I snuggled up in a corner and for an instant thought it best to leave him to his madness. It was becoming frightfully cold, and furthermore, his attitude frightened me, his gestures were nervous, erratic. His face, morose, spiteful. He kept tapping his feet and hands, playing nervously with the frayed ends of the cuffs of his shirt. Was it because of the cold or some inner anxiety? I sensed that he was displeased with the tone of my voice and most probably even disgusted with my company, and was undoubtedly endeavouring to communicate it to me. I sprang to my feet to take leave of him. He grasped my shoulder. His fingers were wiry, hard as steel.

“ ‘Yes, the leap, my good fellow. Leaps are like twilights and rainbows, terribly brief. Do you understand who all those peanuts in a jar are ? No, you have understood absolutely nothing of what I have been saying.’ I stood gaping at him, frozen in terror. He released his grip and in one violent movement pushed me aside against the compartment door. ‘You may plead in my favour that I’ve had my day in the sun; I shan’t disapprove of that banality. But tell me, sir, you, so well cultivated, was it all then just fairy dust ? A forty-year timeless fairy tale existence before … before the plunge into this nightmare, waking up into a dank, grim prison of biological and material utility ? Are we all forbidden to accomplish our dreams ? Must we live out our lives in a stifling cocoon of time- and energy-consuming survival of the fittest ? Well sir, yes, I’ve had my day in the bold, rising sun, but it has since sunk …’ Mister Wilkens threw back his head in the most theatrical fashion, grabbed his book, leapt up on to the table aside the window then rolled out of it without uttering the slightest sound. Confounded, I made no effort to stop him. At length, coming to myself, I ran for the conductor. The rest of the story you know.”

When he had finished his account and his fifth beer (which I had been paying for) I again promised him that I would neither write nor mention this unusual event to anyone. I enquired, however, about the book he had been reading or pretended to be reading in the train. My informer said that he had tumbled out of the window with it cradled in his arms, but no one, apparently, made any effort to find it. I paid him, and without another word, he stood and left the beer-hall.

At this point the reader is undoubtedly eager to know why I have broken my vow and have divulged the tragic end of Mister Wilkens. Well, let me record without going into details that a similar tragedy befell my English informer some months ago on the December 9, 1976, on a night train between Paris and Madrid, so reported El Pais[6]. A large photo of him reminded me that I had never asked him his name, and it was only by the photo that I knew it was my informer. Perhaps he, like Mister Wilkens, had also made the leap, although I doubt whether he dabbled in the field of Orientalism. This being said, I hope these suicides are not contagious, and that because of poor Mister Wilken’s embryonic virus, I too have been contaminated by his travelling companion! To look at it from another point of view, however, I have often wondered about that book; that is, Mister Wilkens’ book which he had held in his arms when he leapt out of the speeding train. My guess is that it may be the key in understanding the reason for killing himself, that and the citation found on him, which I have put into quotation as an epigraph to my narrative, and unfortunately –I must confess– whose author I have never been able to discover. I’m sure the key to the mystery lies in that name of the book.

[1] (1821-1890) British military officer, explorer, erudite, writer and polyglot.

[2] (1868-1969) French explorer, intellectual and writer.

[3] (1850-1923) French military officer, traveller and writer.

[4] (1901-1976) French writer, traveller and Minister of Culture under President General De Gaulle.

[5] (1892-1973) American writer, winner of the Nobe Prize for Literature in 1938, born in China.

[6] The national newspaper of Spain (The Nation)

Paul Mirabile is a retired professor of philology now living in France. He has published mostly academic works centred on philology, history, pedagogy and religion. He has also published stories of his travels throughout Asia, where he spent thirty years.

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

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Tags Armenia, Cambridge, China, French, general De Gaulle, India, Laos, Marco Polo, Mongolia, Paul Mirabile, Pearl Buck, Sir Richard Burton, Spain, Syria, Turkey

Musings

Should I Stay or Should I Go?

Post author By borderlesssg1
Post date July 14, 2023
No Comments on Should I Stay or Should I Go?

When and how do you know when it is time to change your life, job, relationship, friends, plans or location? Keith Lyons examines the push and pull factors of change

If you ever feel trapped in a predictable, boring routine, or wake with a nagging feeling that something isn’t quite right with your life, perhaps it is time to take action. But how can you decide to leave your familiar workplace, hometown, or social networks and start a fresh career, move to another place, or find new friends? And what happens if the grass isn’t greener on the other side – and it doesn’t work out?

These are the dilemmas many of us face at different stages of our lives. The challenge when we’ve got just a bit too comfortable and lazy in our comfort zone. The inner voice that whispers of incredible opportunities in other places. The gut feeling that reminds us that right here and now we aren’t living our best life.

If most Sunday evenings a sense of dread creeps up on you, and you feel you aren’t able to be your true self, maybe it is time for a change. But how can you escape the harsh circumstances of your life, whether it is your fate or misfortune, largely out of your control?

I believe there are many aspects of our lives that we can influence. We can be the architects of better lives, authors of inspiring life stories, creators of meaningful existences.

But first, we need to take stock, and clearly identify what the problem is, so we can find solutions that will work. A useful exercise is to write down all the things which are making us unsatisfied.

A list makes tangible our concerns, showing not just the things which irk us, but also providing guidance on what we are seeking on the other side. Whether it is a relationship, role or place which is the issue, it could be because you don’t feel fulfilled, engaged, valued/appreciated or inspired where you are right now.

For some, it is the negativity of the environment or culture, while others are held back from being their authentic selves by too much drama, toxicity, and hostility. Ultimately it might come to whether you like the person you are right now.

If you are shrinking rather than growing, and bending over instead of standing tall, it might be time to move on, if you can. Looking back on my life, in my late 30s my significant long-term relationship ended, and as I came to the end of a job contract, I didn’t feel in a good space, living in a damp house, feeling depressed about how things had worked out and the gloom of winter. I thought back to the last location I felt content and happy, and booked a flight to get back to a place where I’d lingered while on holiday. That move — to a place some 10,000kms away — did work out, but I had never imagined previously that I would end up moving to live and work in a very foreign, yet welcoming, country that was a world away from my mundane existence.

Let’s also acknowledge that in some circumstances, you can’t easily extricate yourself from ties, responsibilities, relationships and locations. For example, you might have duties to your family, expectations around obligations to others, or constrains on moving — ranging from financial and political to cultural and social.

Ideally, you want to find your place, your tribe. You want to be surrounded by others who understand and support you. That could mean hoping for a geographic cure, or even finding your community of peers whose values align with yours online.

The hardest part is overcoming your fears and anxieties going from the familiar to the unknown. You might have the concern that things won’t work out. Or the worry that you will never be happy, and that there is something wrong with you. That’s perfectly normal. No, there isn’t something wrong with you — this is just a reality of our existence. Change is scary.

Those who’ve made tough choices in their lives report it does take courage to put into action the difficult decisions, but once the first step is made towards a fresh start, it can be liberating and empowering beyond expectation.

Keith Lyons (keithlyons.net) is an award-winning writer and creative writing mentor originally from New Zealand who has spent a quarter of his existence living and working in Asia including southwest China, Myanmar and Bali. His Venn diagram of happiness features the aroma of freshly-roasted coffee, the negative ions of the natural world including moving water, and connecting with others in meaningful ways. A Contributing Editor on Borderless journal’s Editorial Board, his work has appeared in Borderless since its early days, and his writing featured in the anthology Monalisa No Longer Smiles.

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL.

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Kindle Amazon International

Tags Bali, Borderless Journal, China, Keith Lyons, Myanma, New Zealand

Essay

‘Wormholes to other Worlds’

Post author By borderlesssg1
Post date July 14, 2023
No Comments on ‘Wormholes to other Worlds’

Ravi Shankar writes about museums in Kuala Lumpur

Perdana Botanical Gardens. Courtesy: Creative Commons

I had a feeling of quiet satisfaction. I was finally able to locate the passage. I had spent a few weeks trying to do so without success. At ten in the morning, the iron gates of the passage/tunnel under the busy road were open as mentioned in the video on YouTube. I could see the lakes of the Perdana Gardens ahead. The Perdana Botanical Gardens is one of the major attractions of Kuala Lumpur.

There are also several attractions located around the garden. Among these are the KL Bird Park, the Butterfly Park, the National Planetarium, the Islamic art museum, the Royal Police Museum, and the Tun Razak Memorial. I visited these museums over several weekends. Walking to and from and within these museums keeps me active. Many are located around the Perdana Botanical Garden. Two are around the Dataran Merdeka, the Merdeka Square. The Royal Museum is separate but not very far from these two locations. KL has several other museums that we will examine in a later article.

The pandemic had created a sense of fear within me. In late 2000, COVID was still under control in Malaysia and the national museum was open with pandemic protocols. I was apprehensive but my entry to the museum was smooth. The National Museum of Malaysia (Muzium Negara in Malay) is an impressive structure inaugurated in 1963. The museum was designed in the style of a Malay palace and UNESCO had provided consultants from different countries. The museum is impressive and modern.

The ground floor details the history of Malaysia from ancient times to the Sultanate of Melaka. Kedah in the north was a major historical centre. Excavations have revealed old civilisations. Melaka was a major trading post. Various European colonial powers had fought over the state. The second-floor deals with the colonial and modern history of the country. I was fascinated by images of the Japanese occupation and the civil war. There are various exhibits located outside on the museum grounds. As the pandemic has slowly declined, the museum has come to life again attracting crowds, especially on weekends. There are local crafts and food items on display and sale.

There is a museum café on the premises that serves good Malay food. I often have lunched there while visiting the botanical garden and surrounding attractions. The textile museum or Muzium Tekstil is in a beautiful old heritage building near Merdeka Square, the country’s historical heart. The building started as the headquarter of the Federated Malay states railways and served later as the main office for different government entities.

Inside the textile museum. Photo Courtesy: Ravi Shankar

The textile museum was opened in 2010. There are four galleries over two floors. The Pohon Budi Gallery deals with the tools, materials, and techniques of textile making over the ages. The Pelangi Gallery deals with batik. I visited the museum with a friend who hailed from Gujarat, and he was fascinated by how batik had been adopted here . The Teluk Berantai gallery concentrates on the teluk berantai (interlocking bays), a harmonious motif made up of individual flower designs stitched together into geometric patterns. The Ratna Sari gallery is also located upstairs. The British had brought in artists and artisans mainly from India to construct several colonial-era buildings in the Mughal style. The museum is within walking distance from the Masjid Jamek station on the Sri Petaling line.

The KL City Gallery tells the story of the city from its founding as a tin mining town to eventually becoming the capital of British Malaya and modern Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur comes from two Malay words meaning the muddy confluence of two rivers. The town at the confluence of the Gombak and the Klang rivers grew rapidly into a modern metropolis. The gallery is operated by ARCH, a Malaysian brand making hand-assembled collectibles and gifts. The story of the city is told through old prints, miniatures, and photos. The centrepiece is the hand-assembled KL City model with over 5000 miniature buildings. The gallery has a café, and the city’s love of food is well showcased. At the entrance there is an I love KL sign popular with tourists and locals as a backdrop for photos.

The National art gallery (Balai Seni Negara) is within walking distance from the KL Hospital station on the newly opened Putrajaya line. The gallery is designed as spaces flanking the circular ramp to serve as exhibition areas for more intimate and contemplative viewing. The spiral ramp in the middle provides a dynamic visual experience to visitors showcasing the building from different angles at every level. There are galleries located on three levels. There is a mixture of different media like paintings, a few miniature paintings, sculptures, installations, and projected images among others. I love the space and feel of the building. There is a good collection of paintings and other works by Malaysian artists. British colonial artists and their impressions of life in colonial Malaysia are also featured. The gallery makes for an interesting and contemplative outing.

Minnature Gallery advertises itself not as a museum as the pieces on display were all created specifically and are not of historical value. There are thousands of miniature pieces, and the buildings were 3D printed. The location is within the Sungai Wang Plaza, near the Merdeka Square. The recreation of the Dataran Merdeka or the Independence Square and the light show at this historic location (in miniature) is impressive. are miniature models of several locations in the country. While the pandemic protocols lasted, these served as a good introduction for me to the attractions of other states in the country. They have a small store selling merchandise. Most museums in Malaysia have a gift shop and a dining area. The models of different foods from Malaysia in the Minnature gallery are impressive though I am not sure if there is a restaurant on the premises. The amount of detail is huge and the proportions of the structure correspond to the real world.

An artifact from the Islamic Museum. Photo Courtesy: Ravi Shankar

The Islamic Arts Museum (Muzium Kesenian Islam Malaysia) is located around the perimeter of the Perdana Garden. The museum claims to be the largest one on Islamic art in Southeast Asia. The Nusantara region including Malaysia and Indonesia claims to have the largest Muslim population in the world. There are more than 7000 artefacts. The building is spacious with large glass frames letting in plenty of light. The museum is spread over two levels. Level one contains galleries devoted to architecture, the Quran, and other manuscripts, and a gallery each for the art of India, China, and the Malay Peninsula. The second level is dedicated to Arms and Armours, Textiles, Jewelry, and Coins, and three galleries consisting of artworks categorised by their materials – Metal, Wood, and Ceramics. The craftsmanship of some of the pieces is sublime. The dedication of the craftsmen and the time they devoted to their tasks has to be admired. The highlight of the gallery to me was the delightful and elaborate roofs. Each is a masterpiece of design! There is also a fine dining restaurant on the premises.

The original Royal Malaysia police museum (Muzium Polis di Raja Malaysia) was built in 1958. The new building located on the outskirts of Perdana Garden was inaugurated in 1998. There are three galleries: one deals with policing during the early days of the Malay sultanate, the other, with the Colonial Era and the last with the period called Emergency, the Anti–British National Liberation War (1948-1980) which involved guerrilla warfare. There are a variety of materials used by the police force over the ages in the collection. There is a good collection of motorcycles and other vehicles. The police persons on duty at the museum are very friendly. There is a large collection of armoured vehicles and cars and a plane model on the grounds of the museum.

The Royal Museum (Muzium di Raja) was inaugurated in 2013 and was the residence of the King of Malaysia till the royal family moved to a new residence. The huge two-story property was built in 1928 by a Chinese mining tycoon for his huge family and was one of the biggest residences in Kuala Lumpur (KL). The museum provides a glimpse into the life of the royal family though most rooms can only be seen from the walkway. There is a good view of the KL skyline, including the iconic Petronas Tower.

All these museums are visitor friendly and provide a unique glimpse into the history of the city, the state of Selangor, and Malaysia. Tourists might need around three or four days to do justice to the richness on offer. Museums take you to other worlds and times. The American art critic, Jerry Saltz says, “Don’t go to a museum with a destination. Museums are wormholes to other worlds. They are ecstasy machines. Follow your eyes to wherever they lead you…and the world should begin to change for you.”

A restored museum room in the Islamic Arts Museum. Photo Courtesy: Ravi Shankar

Dr. P Ravi Shankar is a faculty member at the IMU Centre for Education (ICE), International Medical University, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He enjoys traveling and is a creative writer and photographer.

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Kindle Amazon International

Tags China, Dataran Merdeka, Dr. P Ravi Shankar, Emergency, India, Islam, Jerry Salz, Kedah, KL, Malay, Malaysia, Muslim, Nusantara, Petronas Tower, Quran, Sultanate of Melaka

Essay

No Bucket Lists, No Regrets

Post author By borderlesssg1
Post date June 14, 2023
No Comments on No Bucket Lists, No Regrets

Does having a to-do list help or hinder your journey, whether it be exploring the world or having a sense of achievement in your life? Keith Lyons ponders on the pointlessness and purpose of such lists.

In an article I recently came across on how to live with no regrets, it started out with the words ‘Make a bucket list’.

I admit, I didn’t read further. I dislike the term ‘bucket list’. Whether it is a list of random destinations you want to visit before you die, or some vague wish list of goals and accomplishments, there is something fundamentally flawed about creating ‘The List’.

So what’s so bad about coming up with a list of goals and experiences you’d like to complete in your lifetime? I have several qualms about this approach to life.

Firstly, bucket lists imply that you have to be close to actually ‘kicking the bucket’ before you start working on that list. That means they can be put off until there is time. Wait til you’ve raised your family. Defer til you’ve retired from work. Pull out the list when your doctor gives you half a year to live.

The second issue I have about bucket lists is we never know when we are doing to die. The assumption of a bucket list is often that we will live well into old age. Perhaps even make it to 100. But as Allen Saunders pointed out in 1957 Reader’s Digest (and John Lennon later echoed), ‘Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans’. The upshot is that by ‘kicking the can down the road’ , we end up putting off what we desire the most.

Thirdly, often the formation of these lists comes from fantasy, illusion and magical thinking. We add sights or experiences to the list not from our own innermost selves, but to conform to the aspirations, social norms, and dreams of others. We might hear about a friend’s amazing holiday experiences, be inspired by a travel documentary, or adopt someone’s wish list items, without having compelling reasons or an authentic ownership of the list.

I’ve seen how this plays out in my previous roles as a professional tour guide and travel writer. Some readers have admitted to me that after coming across an article I’ve written about a remote island eco-resort in the Andaman Sea or a Buddhist temple on the hill flanks of a bamboo forest where monks serve green tea to pilgrims that they’ve added the location to their bucket list. But given that we all experience places differently, how can they hope to replicate my (peak) experience? The other problem with having a bucket list is that it creates great expectations, and those perfect ideals might not match the harsh realities.

I believe we shouldn’t focus so much on external achievements and tick-box experiences because often the joy and satisfaction they possibly offer can sometimes be fleeting, ephemeral or non-existent. I’ll give you three examples from my own life of some bucket list goals and how their attainment wasn’t all it was made out to be. Maybe you have the same three on your list: running a marathon, seeing the Taj Mahal, and having a story published in a major newspaper.

Crossing the finish line after 42.195km is a wonderful feeling of completion and exhaustion, and while I still look back on that marathon and marvel at how I managed to sustain my effort over three plus hours, I gained greater satisfaction in training for the run on the coastal hills near my hometown. Perhaps it was the ‘runners high’ and the feelings of agency, freedom and bodily locomotion. I do know the day after the marathon I couldn’t walk up any stairs.

Not all bucket list endeavours are over-hyped. When I finally made it to Agra to witness for myself the immense white marble mausoleum of the Taj Mahal, I got the standard photo sitting on a bench in front of the reflected structure. But just as memorable were the hours I spent on-site before the tourist throngs packed the grounds, meditatively wandering and pausing to observe and appreciate the monument as the sun rose over the Yamuna River. For me, my time and experience there exceeded my expectations. But other visitors I met during my travels reported vastly different perceptions of the heritage ‘Wonder of the World’.

When I was studying post-graduate journalism at university, I had a bet with a colleague about paying our fees by selling articles to newspapers. The first story I had published took up the front page of the features section of the newspaper, and I got two copies of the newspaper to keep for posterity’s sake. So, imagine how I felt the next day seeing a discarded newspaper floating in the lake beside the university library. Working on bigger projects such as books can also be a roller coaster of emotions varying from elation and excitement to anxiety and relief. Still harbour the deep desire to turn your life story into a book? If so, what have you done lately to put your pen to paper?

As you can see from my examples — and from your lived experience — there is often a gap between how we reckon things will be and how they pan out in the end. There are also another couple of issues with having bucket lists. What we want and truly desire can change over time. What’s important in our 20s or what we are expected to do by our peers and communities can evolve over the decades. Swimming with dolphins might drop from the list if you learn about the treatment of marine mammals. Driving on Route 66 might not have that allure and mystique when you look at the practicalities. Crashing a stranger’s wedding to object to the coupling might have other consequences. As we mature, we might find that our achievement orientation and ambition for success wanes, and that being becomes more important than doing.

I suspect that many people who do have bucket lists don’t actually do many of the things they have declared will signal they have accomplished something in their lives. They might talk about the things they want to have and exotic places they wish to see, but it is easy to have those items on the list unfulfilled. Not today. Maybe later.

By the same token, there are many, many people who aspire to better themselves by getting their dream job, migrating to a faraway country, or winning the lottery who never succeed. Having a bucket list is a First World problem. Going through a divorce, developing an addiction, and clocking up debt might be other life experiences we didn’t think we’d signed up for.

The term bucket list comes from the Justin Zackham’s screenplay which was made into the 2007 film featuring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman as two terminally ill guys making a list of things to do before they die. In another (better-known) movie, The Shawshank Redemption, Freeman as Red is told by Andy Dufresne (played by Tim Robbins) the sage advice ‘Get busy living or get busy dying’. Perhaps that is the answer to living in the now without regret, rather than having a list of unobtainable items. What’s the best motivation for you?

Palliative nurse Bronnie Ware compiled a list, but it wasn’t a bucket list. Instead, through her work with the ill and dying, she put together their top five regrets. Number one was ‘I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me’. The second was ‘I wish I hadn’t worked so hard’ — every male patient said this, missing their children’s youth and their partner’s companionship.

Third on the list was ‘I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings’. Many people suppressed their feelings in order to keep peace with others. As a result, they settled for a mediocre existence and never become who they were truly capable of becoming. According to Ware, many developed illnesses relating to the bitterness and resentment they carried as a result.

Number four on the list of regrets was ‘I wish I’d stayed in touch with my friends’, while the fifth regret was ‘I wish I’d let myself be happier’. “Many did not realise until the end that happiness is a choice. Fear of change had them pretending to others and their selves, that they were content, when deep within, they longed to laugh properly and have silliness in their life again.”

How about you? Anything on this list that resonates with you? Carpe the hell out of this Diem (Don’t let life pass you by!)

Keith Lyons (keithlyons.net) is an award-winning writer and creative writing mentor originally from New Zealand who has spent a quarter of his existence living and working in Asia including southwest China, Myanmar and Bali. His Venn diagram of happiness features the aroma of freshly-roasted coffee, the negative ions of the natural world including moving water, and connecting with others in meaningful ways. A Contributing Editor on Borderless Journal’s Editorial Board, his work has appeared in Borderless since its early days, and his writing featured in the anthology Monalisa No Longer Smiles.

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Kindle Amazon International

Tags Andaman Sea, Asia, Bali, China, Jack Nicholson, John Lennon, Justin Zackham, Keith Lyons, Morgan Freeman, Myanmar, New Zealand, Reader's Digest, Taj Mahal, The Shawshank Redemption, Wonder of the World