July-August 2004
I have never traveled to Southeast Asia. I have
never noticed this before, really, but there it is. I have studied Southeast
Asia, I have read about it, I have Southeast Asian friends, I have even flown
through, but I have never visited this region before. And now, an opportunity
presents itself to do some work that will take me there. I can hardly do the
work for the excitement of looking up travel-sites and so on, and that
excitement is part of the adrenalin rush that completes the assignment.
Hotels, tickets, visas, work, wire-transfers and
now it is August 15 and for the first time, I am not thinking about India that
day but another place. Thailand. Bangkok.
Snatches of that 1980s hit keep going through my
head and each time I am struck by how meaningless the lyrics are. “Bangkok,
Oriental City.” I reckon Lisbon was as exotic to me as Bangkok. I was just as
excited. It was just as familiar through my studies and as unfamiliar to me in
reality. “One night in Bangkok makes a tough guy crumble, something about grim
despair and ecstasy.” Faux profundity is more annoying than banality in my
book.
Anyway, I am checking in at the Thai Airways
counter and even the really tiring timing of this short flight—the dead of
night take-off and crack of dawn landing—cannot dim my enthusiasm.
Bangkok
Dawn
August 16, 2004
The colours of a Bangkok dawn coordinate,
impossible to imagine, with the purple orchids people are always putting on
your plate, on your bed, on your towel, everywhere. I have no complaint about
either. I love purple.
As we drive in from Don Huang International,
Bangkok is barely awake. Lights are still turned out in the blocks of flats we
pass. The roads are emptier than I will see them after this. At certain moments
on our trip, we might be on an interstate in the Midwest, driving towards
Chicago or Detroit. On either side, there are tenement-like buildings, or posh
glass-front corporate buildings, or warehouse-like structures. Then we pass a
gold-trimmed temple and we are in Asia.
This is something I will repeatedly observe in
the next few days—Benetton and Esprit, Armani and Versace, Boots and Dunkin
Donuts, CD Warehouse and Pizza Hut notwithstanding, the boys and girls in
vehemently western attire and blond hair notwithstanding—Bangkok is an Asian
city. This is not because of its Wats, its Buddhas, the smell of Thai cooking
everywhere. It just has an Asian spirit.
On that first morning, I am too groggy to think
very much. I just sink into the seat of the Mercedes that the hotel has sent
and watch Bangkok go by. The closer we come to the hotel, the more signs of
life become evident. We slow down to a pause at a stop-light and from the van
in front of us, four energetic Thais jump out and march to work (or back from
work) in different directions. I remember that the girl I talked with on the
plane said this was the business district.
We drive in and the lobby of the Royal Orchid
Sheraton is full of people. Most of them are slumped around the sofas, either
waiting for their rooms or their rides to the airport. I head out confidently
to the reception desk but have to change rooms twice before I can set my bags
down.
The manager asks if I want the curtains drawn apart
on the river-view. I say, “Absolutely.” Beyond, the sun has risen; the Chao
Phraya is waking up to the first boat traffic of the day and in the distance
Wat Arun witnesses yet another Bangkok dawn.
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The curtains stay parted for the next three days.
Deep-fried
corn cakes and lime juice with mint leaves
August 16, 2004
Finding good food and making new friends at the
same time are an uncommon experience. The first is harder for vegetarians
almost anywhere in the world outside India and gets harder for anyone as they
move further away from their kindergarten years. My first morning in Bangkok
holds out the promise of both, and for an ageing vegetarian, that itself makes
the trip worthwhile.
I am in Bangkok to make a presentation and my
partner in this assignment has travelled from another continent. We have worked
easily together so far, and our emails have moved from cordial to friendly, but
we have not met as yet. So going down that first morning—a little weary from
the strange flight timings and very hungry—I am not sure what I will find. Still,
one knows any interaction in these circumstances can always assume a default
minimum professional level.
A very pleasant surprise then to meet my
colleague who is warm, enthusiastic, shares my values and perhaps most
important at a breakfast meeting—as hungry and interested in the food as I am.
This sets the tone for our work together in the next two days—a harmonious
working rhythm which makes room for food, among other important things. Neither
of us considers starvation, stress or ponderousness a prerequisite for
efficiency, and this is a relief to me.
There is nothing more annoying to me than people
who never get hungry. In my life, I have met met many of them. Most of them are
also smaller and thinner, so that their appalling lack of appetite acquires the
glow of virtue and judgment along the way. Most annoying.
Hunger at mealtimes is a sign that your body is
working well. It is processing food as it is meant to and you are probably
eating right as well. In addition, one does not have to be a gourmand to have a
healthy appetite—not just for food but also for life. To enjoy and savour the
tastes and textures of food, to delight in its appearance and be able to relax
into the ambience of a good meal—whether cooked at home or eaten out is one of
the pleasures of living in society. Those of us who have at different times
been condemned to the deadline-driven, fast-track (to indigestion) lifestyle
where this is denied us know there is no real pleasure in the alternative.
At one time, when people were still introducing
me to eligible men, I realised that for me, losing my appetite around a person
was a sure sign that he was no suitable life-partner. And believe me, I have
starved myself through meetings with men because while my mind was working
overtime to wrap itself around the idea that a person was a suitable match, my
gut was saying, “Sorry, can’t stomach this one.” My gut was always right. Since
then, I have thought, this applies to friends as well. People with whom I can
eat without self-consciousness, apology or guilt are the people I now want in
my life; especially, in my working life.
Thus my two days of very good work done with my
new colleague-friend are also two days of good eating—good food and good
mealtime conversation. And of all the things we ate together, for me, the great
discoveries were deep-fried corn cakes and lime juice with mint leaves.
I am not very good at recipe creation so I will just describe the two to you in my own words. For the first, the Thai un-cob the corn and then rolling it into cornflour—batter, I think—pat it into cakes and deep-fry them. This sinful appetizer is then served with something that looks like the sambol Sri Lankans make—it is fresh cucumber in a sweet sauce with some other herbs, so that we can pretend there is something healthful about it. The second is something my colleague, who is Palestinian, introduced me to. It is regular lime juice with a handful of fresh mint leaves dunked in it. As you sip it, it feels very, very cool, and I am not exactly the type of person who throws summer garden parties, but I can imagine that this is a really neat thing to serve at them. I can see a nice tall jug of cold lime juice with lots of mint leaves floating around the bottom. Try it!
Chinatown
August 16, 2004
My first excursion into Bangkok is to Chinatown.
My colleague has a list of video games she needs to buy her brother and a
Chinatown address for finding them. She has been to Bangkok before, and has
been in town two days. So we set out in a tuk-tuk to find Chinatown, the market
with the electronic goods and the video games.
Still a little disoriented, I simply follow her
lead, get into the tuk-tuk which is like a South Asian auto-rickshaw (scooter,
auto, phat-phati or trishaw, depening on where you are) except that the
passenger seat more closely resembles a wheelbarrow with a bench than a
rickshaw carriage. I must say that while we in the subcontinent have found cute
appellations for this mode of transport (scootie, rick, for instance),
‘tuk-tuk’ has to be about the sweetest name it has anywhere.
Tuk-tuk
drivers, I have discovered during my week in Bangkok, are speed demons. On a
ride back from the National Museum during rush hour later in the week, the
driver of my tuk-tuk turned back several times to stress this point to me, in
the universal creole of broken English and expressive gestures: “Taxi no good
(followed by acting out sitting for hours in traffic). Tuk-tuk (followed by his
hands snaking forward swiftly through the roads packed with four-wheelers).
Taxi two hours. Tuk-tuk half-hour. Maybe one hour.” I have to agree. We do not
share enough of a vocabulary, but I would have added to his statement that in a
tuk-tuk you feel less claustrophobic in the middle of the road.
Back to the Chinatown trip, though: When I am in
other parts of Asia, I often forget to look around me at this new place I am
in. There is something very familiar about the buildings, the people, and the
juxtaposition of old and new. In Bangkok, this passivity is challenged when one
crosses a canal (or a moat). One remembers then that this was the “Venice of
the East.”
Apart from that, solid concrete structures of
the kind found also in Bombay’s Fort Area abound, and are punctuated by puny
buildings with balconies that have lattice patterns in concrete on the bottom
and cast-iron grills on the top. These are residences, I think, with clothes
hanging out to dry. At the street level, there are more stores than you would
think necessary anywhere in the world! But this is Asia in the twenty-first
century, where the selling and shopping never seem to end, notwithstanding the
poverty.
We seem to travel a long time and the entrance
into Chinatown in Bangkok is a subtler one than in the American towns where I
have been to Chinatown. The Chinese and Thai both consider red and gold lucky
colours so the difference is in the lettering on the storefront. The Chinatown
stores place their names up in Chinese, Thai and English.
Traffic is heavy, and we slowly round a block to
be dropped at a point that the tuk-tuk driver gesticulates is our destination.
My colleague leads us confidently to our destination.
This is a covered bazaar built around very
narrow alleyways. Stalls sit close together, some at the entrance scarcely more
than tables. We enquire at a few places and are led to a store on the side.
While my friend and the storekeepers work their way through her very long list,
I wander around the labyrinthine bazaar. Video games. Playstations. Video
games. Cell-phones. Playstations. Video games. Telephones. Toasters. Video
games. Cell-phones. Playstations.
Selling and buying are not handicapped by
linguistic differences. My friend reads from her list, which is then translated
into the local accent and one by one, each item is produced. It takes a team of
translators, searchers and finders in each store.
In the few unused spaces, food-vendors perch.
They exemplify the spirit of enterprise. They are not selling packaged food,
but sitting there with a little stove or a tray, with an assortment of
ingredients ready to put together. People make their way around the market
holding elaborate meals assembled and sold right there. Several times in the
hour or so we are there, a woman wheels her barrow around the narrow alleyways.
She is selling something that is either iced green tea or lichee juice in clear
plastic bags, tied at the top, and served with a straw that is inserted through
that sealed opening.
Every store has a little shrine, usually placed
on a shelf near the ceiling. Most of them are dedicated to Taoist or Confucian
saints; I did ask one woman for the name of the person represented within her
altar, but must confess that I did not comprehend and the exchange was hard
enough given each of our linguistic limitations that I faint-heartedly
abandoned the quest. Buddhist monks make their way around the bazaar. They are
seeking alms. Clearly, commerce knows no religious differences. This is a
common experience in all Asian marketplaces; all faiths encourage the giving of
alms, and this is done without regard to the faith of the recipient. It also
serves the purpose of extra-insurance!
I am the one traveling from a sub-tropical city,
but the crowded alleyways are too hot for me. I feel a shortage of air, and
when we finally emerge with our shopping done, I am relieved to step outdoors
onto the crowded streets of Chinatown.
August 17, 2004
In the sitting area before the business center,
I sit working on our presentation, waiting for my colleague. Slowly, the words
blur and my eyes give up on the endeavour to stay open. The night of travel is
beginning to take its toll. Calling it quits, I retire at a child’s bedtime,
just around seven o’ clock in the evening.
The feeling of a tired body, pushed to its
breaking point by prolonging bedtime rituals, being laid down on a bed is
indescribable (but I will try anyway)! Every limb, every muscle explores the
receiving mattress with the joy of a long-awaited reunion. The body seems to
ask of the mattress, “Is it really there? Will it receive me securely? Will it
support me through this night, and sustain this brief moment of respite for as
long as possible?” Satisfied (or satisficing, but let us stick with the fantasy
here), the head finally surrenders to the pillow. Then a brief struggle follows
as both body and head adjust to the needs of their weary muscles and find
positions that they can remain in awhile. Eyelids shut and the spirit
surrenders day to night, activity to dream, consciousness to the subconscious.
The day is erased and along with it, all worries, all agendas, all complexes
and all lists.
If you are lucky, sleep truly does claim you at
this point. More often than not, for me, it does not. Teasing me, it leaves me
lying there, exhausted, desperate for rest and abandoned to a thought-filled
wake. Too tired to work, too tired to sleep. And in the morning, too tired to
face the day.
So believe me when I tell you that of all pleasures,
the sweetest is rest. In Bangkok, facing the Chao Phraya and the illuminated
prang of Wat Arun and then overlooking a rain-drenched Sukhumvit soi,
I slept well.
Shuffle,
shuffle, toil and trouble
August 17, 2004
Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle—papers, disks, ideas
and assignments
Shuffle down corridors with heavy files and
laptops
Shuffle down discursive alleys that go nowhere
in a straight line
looping back to new points of departure.
Shuffle, shuffle, this and that, in search of a
table with two chairs,
Enough surface space and a power outlet.
Shuffle through your list of needs and toss out
the Internet!
Shuffle the deck of cards you hold and pull out
the cards
that pack the most punch. Throw them out.
We do not believe in violence or its
pornography.
Shuffle the words you know to soften the blow.
Shuffle your list of things to do, and
prioritize the ones
you can do best in the time available.
Review the slides, so the best ones don’t get
lost in the scuffle.
Shuffle around the projector with the lapel mike
and shuffle the mike between the two of us so
that
We lose the podium in turn but keep the
audience.
Shuffle the audience around in your head—
red dress Manila, blue saree Delhi, green skirt
Kabul,
grey shirt Tel Aviv, brown hijab Sanaa, black
suit DC.
Shuffle the audience around in your head—
This one I want to talk to, this one I don’t
care,
This one I have seen before, this one I never
want to see again.
Shuffle the audience once more in your head—
she said; he said; he said she said; she said he
said.
So many wasted words, so many people dead.
Shuffle our feet as we share the mike to reply,
So many words we waste, so many people die.
Enough words then and silence, o mortal, shuffle
off and toil!
One
in every six humans is an Indian… and it shows
August 18, 2004
We Indians are everywhere. Why should Bangkok be
an exception?
We are Thai. We look Indian and could be from
any part of the Indian diaspora, but we are Thai. Our names are no longer
Indian but have been transformed as Thai names have, making a similar journey
from the Prakrit to Thai. We own parts of this town and it owns us.
We are Indians posted in Bangkok by the
government of India, private companies or international organizations. We are
harder to see everywhere but every now and then, at skytrain stations or the
better malls, we reveal ourselves by our manner of dress. The fabric is more
likely to be handwoven silk or cotton. The cut of our dress is more likely to
have come out of a boutique—no rough and tough ethno-chic here though.
We are also Indian tourists of all classes and
hues. We are convention visitors. We are families on vacation in the new
post-liberalization dispensation. We are stopping by on our way to or back from
the US. You see us, a little hungry, a little lost. Many of us are trailing
heavy shopping bags.
We are just everywhere. How we get there, what
we do remains a mystery.
We know that Indians traveled through the centuries
and this accounts for the Indian civilizational influence in Southeast Asia.
We know that Indians were transported across the world as indentured labour
in the colonial period. Other Indians took advantage of the reach of the British
Empire to engage in their trades in other British colonies. We know that anticolonial
exiles found homes outside the reach of the empire. We know about the Indian
diaspora and its cultural and political identity formation in contemporary
times.
But the more I travel, the more I discover that
there are communities we don’t know at all. Two and a half years ago, I
realised there was a large Indian community in Lisbon that had moved from Daman
to Mozambique and then to Lisbon.
What brought Indians to Thailand? Judging by
their names, by the Indian-Thai marriages you see everywhere, by the way in
which Thai-Indians or Indian-Thais (whatever name they give their hyphenated identity)
melt into Bangkok streets and plazas, they have been here at least one
generation. The fact that there are Indian temples even in older parts of town
means that there presence probably is even older.
What brought them here? Given that many of them
seem to be in the retail business, opportunity is a good guess. But would
someone not like to live in Bangkok for six months to a year to profile this
interesting community and its history and to write a real history that would
tell their story?
August 18, 2004
The cultural connection between India and
Thailand, of course, predates the emigration of this community. I once bought a
book, that I must still own, that was called ‘Greater India’—a term of some
political disrepute. It had photographs and text describing the reaches of the
subcontinent’s civilization. Thailand was one of the countries included, and
when you are in Thailand, from Buddhism to the Ramakien, this cultural
connection is evident. Thai tourist literature alludes to it in the discussion
of Buddhism’s importance, the Ramakien, the architecture of particular spaces
and the origins of Thai cuisine.
To me, one of the most striking products of this
cultural confluence is the integration of gods and other characters from the
Puranic literature into the universe of the Buddhist temple. You also see this
in Sri Lanka, where it is constantly proffered as an example of religious
harmony and integration. To the Thais, who live at a greater distance from the
overwhelming and overbearing universe of a Hindutva-ized Hindu India, there is
no religious difference to remark upon. These are simply characters from the
Ramakien who surround the Buddha.
Ramakien paintings are found surrounding the
Buddha in some of Thailand’s holiest shrines. For instance, the cloisters
around the Wat Phra Kaeo where the Emerald Buddha image is housed are decorated
with 178 panels depicting the Thai version of the Ramayana. The Buddhaisawan
chapel in the National Museum is home to the important Phra Buddha Sing image
has old screens depicting the Ramayana right behind the Buddha image. Ramakien
images also decorate the main shrine of the Wat Pho complex.
In addition, figures familiar to those who who
visit Indian temples such as kinnaras, yakshas and lions decorate the compound
walls and guard most of the temples in Bangkok.
At Kandy’s Temple of the Tooth, there are four
devales or temples to Hindu gods around the perimeter of the main temple that
are said to guard it. In their own right, they have followers and dispense
particular favours. In the context of South Asia’s politics of religion, they
are placed in a particular hierarchical relationship, serving the Buddha. In
fact, Vishnu is said to have been charged by the Buddha with the protection of
Sri Lanka.
Walking through Bangkok, I am moved to offer an
interpretation that is a little different. Given the beliefs common to Buddhism
and Vedanta, could we not say that in the devas serving the enlightened one
lies an illustration of an important idea? The idea that each of us has the
potential for self-realization and that the anthropomorphic and other forms of
divinity that we imagine and represent in images serve us towards that end.
Further, consistent with the Rig Veda’s Hymn of Creation, we create those forms
because of our need. Therefore, insofar as each one of us is a potential
bodhisattva, those forms guard and serve us. Stories like the Ramayana/Ramakien
are guideposts for us along the way to self-realization that can happen over many
lifetimes or in the many lives that one embodied self can see.
These musings take me in another direction. What
is the contemporary relationship between India and Thailand? Recently, they
have signed a free trade agreement, and it appears that there is some
understanding on cooperation in the area of Buddhist pilgrimage tourism.
Flights operate from Bangkok to Bodh Gaya and one runs into people going there
via Bangkok or coming to Bangkok after visiting Bodh Gaya or Sri Lanka.
What can we learn from each other in this age? I
was impressed by the ban on exporting Buddha images because they are sacred.
Not bad, I thought, after all, why should something that they hold as sacred
become a paperweight or a bedside decoration in another person’s home. Would I
place someone’s mother’s photograph in my bathroom as a decoration? But in
Bangkok, tourists swarm the temples and for those who actually come to pray, it
can hardly be edifying to hear people compare notes on their flight from
Kathmandu or last night’s dinner or the shopping in the night market at Pat
Pong. Perhaps they could restrict access—not as rudely as priests in Hindu
temples do—but in some other way.
More saliently, how do we manage to forces of change
that sweep through our cultures in this age of globalization?
Nothing is permanent, not even culture
August 19, 2004
A few years ago, when the Bamiyan Buddhas were
destroyed by Afghanistan, the act seemed to illustrate one of the essential
tenets of Buddhism: that everything is transient. Acceptance of the destruction
of the Buddhas was a different matter. It was a World Heritage site and as such
of value to everyone. But one viewpoint articulated by some Buddhists was that
this is of no more value than anything else. This was an opportunity to develop
compassion towards and learn from the Taliban. Certainly in an Afghanistan
where civil war and drought were taking their toll, stone sculptures could not
be the most urgent issue. But the Bamiyan statues are only a tangible (and
dramatic) example of change overtaking cultural practices and symbols. That
happens everyday in every sphere in every society.
In Bangkok, like the parts of South Asia I know,
old and new, traditional and modern co-exist quite comfortably. This is
exemplified best by the way in which hotel staff dress. Those on display—front
office, restaurant staff and entertainers—are in Thai costume. Those in the
managerial cadres are in business suits. The Thai costumes are ornate for the
most part and the business suits could have stepped out of any European
catalog. There appears to be no casual meeting-ground of styles—no Thai in a
shopping mall is in traditional dress.
It was when I was studying Sri Lanka initially
that I began to comprehend the great difference in the extent to which
Europeans had influenced Sri Lanka and India. In India, the diffusion of
western dress, ideas, practices and ‘culture’ is still much less. As a much
larger country, much of our lives, customs and practices remained inaccessible
to outsiders. Gradual synthesis rather than an erosion of tradition appears to
have been the mode of change here. However, while Thailand was never colonized,
unlike India and Sri Lanka, in the post-war period, it seems to have fallen
head over heels in love with western dress, western goods and western products.
In a very superficial way, Thailand, like other
parts of East and Southeast Asia, is very westernized. Bangkok is full of tall,
shining, glass-fronted buildings with escalators and indoor atriums. There are
glitzy shopping malls everywhere, and they are packed, not with tourists as
with Thais. These are young Thai people, complete with the latest Esprit or
Abercrombie clothes, blond streaks and cosmetics straight out of western
fashion magazines.
In fact, the performer at my second hotel
epitomizes this. Dressed in western evening clothes, her beautiful voice belts
out old 1950s and 1970s easy listening classics. She gets the tune mostly
right, jazzes it up after a fashion, and the accent is often a perfect
imitation, but suddenly, she sings a lyric that could not possibly be written
by a native English speaker, or she sings it in an accent unmistakably
Southeast Asian. What remains of a good performance, to my picky ears alone
undoubtedly, is a studied imitation. I want to ask her, is this the music of
your soul?
The question towards which I am tortuously
working my way is a simple one: How do societies cope with the bulldozer of
rapid change? Thailand’s answer seems to be a good one: go with the flow.
It seems to me that the Thais have decided not
to worry overly about western influence, showing a confidence in their culture
that India lacks. Even as we worry about Valentine’s Day cards and MTV eroding
the bases of our culture, Thais embrace the appurtenances of change. And they
are only appurtenances—whether the Thais are conscious of that or not.
Across the Chao Phraya, Bangkok is a city of dirty canals and seedy housing where time seems to have stopped still. On that bank stands the Wat Arun, itself a monument to the absorption of outside influences with its Khmer-style prang and yet irrevocably linked to Thai history and identity as the place on the river where King Taksin embanked at sunrise (hence the name) as he fled a sacked Ayutthaya in 1767.
The summer palace at Bang Pa-in carries this
nonchalance about absorption further. In the palace complex, there are a Thai
pavilion, a minaret for observation, a Swiss chalet, Italian marble statues and
Spanish-style folly, among others. The gardens are landscaped in the European
style. And plumb in the middle sits yet another offshoot of the Indian Bodhi
tree under which the Buddha was enlightened. Yet, in its genius and in its
spirit, the Bang Pa-in complex is unmistakeably Thai.
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