Juha Uitto

The Whale Warriors

2012-01-15T13:53:00.000-08:00

The Whale Warriors: On Board a Pirate Ship in the Battle to Save the World's Largest Mammals by Peter Heller

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

As Japan is again continuing its whaling in the Antarctic waters against international law and the world's public opinion, this book describing the winter 2005-2006 campaign by Sea Shepherd is very timely. On January 9th this year, under the cover of darkness, three Australian Sea Shepherd activists managed to board the Japanese harpoon ship Shonan Maru No. 2 when it was just 26 km off the Australian west coast. The Japanese proceeded to arrest the environmentalists and took them to Tokyo, where a court released them without charges. The reason for the prompt release was probably that Japan does not want to draw undue attention to its controversial whaling activities.

Japan's insistence to go ahead with its extensive whaling is somewhat baffling. As Peter Heller demonstrates in his book, the government is forced to heavily subsidize the companies doing the whale hunt. There is very little demand for whale meat in Japan (only a tenth of the population confesses to ever eating it) and it has to be pushed on school lunch menus in some of the coastal areas with a high price to the tax payers. Tons of whale meat are piling up in freezers. Yet, more and more is brought in every year. Why? The officials cite traditional culture, but even that is a suspect argument. While some fishing communities, notably on the island of Shikoku, traditionally did hunt whales, this was limited to their coastal waters. Large scale commercial whaling only started when Japan built up its ocean going fleet after Commodore Perry's 'black ships' forced the opening of Japan to the outside world in 1854. The tradition certainly is not based in the ancient Japanese culture. The most likely explanation to the Japanese incalcitrance is nationalistic defiance against foreigners trying to tell them what to do. Sounds infantile? Well, it is, but it wouldn't be the first time.

Japan is a member of the International Whaling Commission (IWC), set up in 1946 "to provide for the proper conservation of whale stocks and thus make possible the orderly development of the whaling industry." IWC is thus not a conservation organization, but works for the long-term sustainability of the industry. So it can hardly be accused of sensationalizing the statistics. Yet, IWC recognizes that many whale species are endangered. On its website IWC acknowledges that many stocks of the thirteen species of 'great whales' have been depleted through over-exploitation. The authoritative Red List of endangered species compiled by the World Conservation Union identifies a number of whales as endangered. These include the Blue Whale, Fin Whale (Japan's self-set quota includes 50 Fin Whales per season), North Atlantic Right Whale and North Pacific Right Whale. In addition, a number of species are identified as threatened or vulnerable. Importantly, there is deficient data for most species to determine their status. Because of this state of affairs and the uncertainty about whale numbers, a moratorium on commercial whaling endorsed by IWC has been in place since 1986 (the UN Conference on Environment and Human Health originally proposed such a moratorium in 1972, but it was voted down by Japan, Russia, Iceland, Norway, South Africa and Panama).

As a response, Japan has circumvented the commercial whaling ban by claiming, quite disingenously, that its whaling program is for research purposes. This lethal research has been criticized by scientists and environmentalists alike. There are now non-lethal research methods that can be used to obtain the same data - and even if there were none, the large catch numbers could never be justified by the research argument. In IWC, a coalition led by by the USA, Canada, New Zealand and Australia has often challenged Japan for its "research" whaling. However, like in the UN, IWC operates on a one nation, one vote basis. Consequently, Japan has been able to purchase the votes of a number of tiny countries by providing them financial support. A number of Caribbean and Pacific Island countries - even the West Africa country of Togo - have voted in line with Japan in IWC following promises of official aid or even just covering travel and expenses of individual government officials. In all fairness, it must be said that there are also other countries that continue to kill whales, including Norway, Iceland, the Danish Faroe Islands and Russia.

When I was on the faculty of the UN University based in Tokyo in the early 1990s, I remember that we were approached by a consultant to the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries who proposed to pay for a study that we would conduct to show that whales were not endangered. During the meeting the gentleman got somewhat carried away and outlined a vision how whales could be domesticated to produce meat and milk for the growing human population. He further accused Western "meat eaters" for an emotional reaction to whaling. When I politely explained that we would gladly consider undertaking such a study, but that we would have to be in control of the study, select the research design and researchers, and that there could be no preagreed conclusions, he got up and promised to get back to us. Needless to say, he never did.

Adventure writer Peter Heller joined Sea Shepherd's ship Farley Mowat on a two-month expedition to the Antarctic in the 2005-2006 season to intercept the Japanese fleet. In 'The Whale Warriors' he provides an interesting and quite balanced account of the challenging trip during which the mostly volunteer crew under the command of Sea Shepherd founder Capt. Paul Watson searches, chases and engages with the Japanese fleet in the Antarctic waters. The book is written in a generally lively manner following the format of Heller's log of the days and weeks at sea, interspersed with information about the history of whaling, the Japanese whaling industry, ecology, the organizations that work against whaling (including Sea Shepherd and Greenpeace), and the international politics surrounding the issues. The format works well overall, but because of the lengthy search for the Japanese whalers and Heller's faithful depiction of the tedium at sea, the book feels a bit long (it could easily have been 50 pages shorter, I think). Even if the author's descriptions of the weather, the sea, the penguins, albatrosses and other sea birds, the icebergs, are beautiful, they also become somewhat repetitive. Finally, it is only on page 215 when the Farley Mowat first finds the location of the Japanese factory boat Nishin Maru and things start speeding up.

In the meantime, we meet the dedicated environmentalists from many countries (USA, Canada, Holland, Sweden, Brazil, South Africa, Australia, France) that make up the crew. These women and men form an interesting bunch, by no means homogenous in their philosophy, but all committed to saving the large, peaceful and highly intelligent animals. Heller observers exchanges that highlight the tensions between unexpected groups, such as between vegans and vegetarians or between conservationists and animal rights activists. His observations are often quite revealing and at best very funny. When the small helicopter onboard returns from a surveillance flight and performs a delicate landing on the deck of the ship rolling in heavy waves, Heller sees how the deck crew took only seconds to secure the landed chopper to the deck. "Pretty good for vegans with advanced degrees," he quips (page 267).

The book also sheds light on the continued rift between Sea Shepherd and Greenpeace. Paul Watson was one of the founders of Greenpeace and served as its Director from 1972 to 1977 when he left to found Sea Shepherd. He was growing frustrated with what he considered ineffective methods of Greenpeace, believing in a need for more direct action. The quartermaster of Farley Mowat on this trip is Emily Hunter, daughter of the Greenpeace co-founder and first President, the late Robert Hunter. Greenpeace manages to locate the Nishin Maru much before Sea Shepherd, but refuses to release the coordinates. The schism appears to be mostly with the top of the organizations and individual crew members of the Greenpeace ship Esperanza leak updates to Watson. As Farley Mowat finally sails to engage with Nishin Maru, Esperanza crew cheer it on. The trouble with Greenpeace non-confrontational tactics is that they only look on and document as the Japanese proceed to slaughter the whales in the most brutal and inhumane manner imaginable.

Whether the Sea Shepherd's more direct approach is any more effective is the question. As the Nishin Maru and its harpoon boats see Farley Mowat approaching they escape, only to move to another location to continue their hunt. Both organizations clearly have done much to bring the vicious and criminal activity to the forefront and thus influencing world opinion.

Yet, politics is what it is. Most of Japan's whaling takes place in the areas designated as off limits under the international moratorium and much in the territorial waters of other countries. Heller points out that if the whaling fleets were from less powerful developing countries, countries like Australia would not hesitate to intercept and arrest them in their territorial waters. Indeed, even earlier this week the Australian prime minister Julia Gillard criticized the Sea Shepherd activists for boarding the Shonan Maru, which was engaged in illegal activities in Australian territorial waters.

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Kathmandu and Bhaktapur: Growth and Conservation

2011-12-19T16:05:00.000-08:00

Kathmandu had changed in the 21 years I had not visited. The city had swelled with migrants from the countryside and was now home to more than 4 million people. In the meantime, the valley in the Himalayan foothills where the city is located had not miraculously expanded. Consequently, the place was now crowded. It was no longer the quaint village-like old town it had been in the late-1980s and early-1990s when I used to come here. On my first morning back, I went to the New Road area in the center of the city. Most of the buildings were still the same old ones, now distinctly rundown, although new commercial buildings with glass walls that reflected the scenery and shiny malls had sprung up here and there. The Chinese center looked particularly impressive. The leisurely pace was gone and the place was bustling with people hurrying to get wherever it was they were going. There were peasant looking women and men carrying huge loads on their backs and heads, their sun-drenched faces lined and leathery making them look old (although many were probably younger than me). Women wearing colorful saris mingled with young people dressed in jeans. A couple of farmer women sat on the pavement selling fruit from baskets amidst the busy pedestrians.

Most obviously, there was the traffic. Where there had been lots of bicycles and few cars, the bikes were now almost gone—I only saw one pedicab that morning—and cars, motorbikes and scooters ruled the streets. A lone traffic police stood on the pedestal of a status at an intersection trying to create order in the chaos. The officer’s mouth and nose were covered with a cloth mask, wisely, as the exhaust fumes would choke anyone standing in the middle for any length of time. The driver from our office who had taken me downtown had things to say about the traffic and the pollution. “These people are from the rural areas. They have never lived in the city and don’t know anything about traffic rules, nor did they ever learn to drive in the first place,” he lamented. As we waited at another junction where another officer, this time a woman, made valiant efforts to directing the crowds, the driver had a long story about futile efforts to control air pollution that had been in place for the better part of the past decade. The bottom line seemed to be that the government did not want to enforce the rules, as it would have meant replacing all the official vehicles that the city nor the national government could never afford. Consequently, everyone continued to use the noisy motorbikes and old cars without catalyzers, and the antique buses continued to belch thick smoke into the mountain air. It’s not that there were no new cars, as well, just that these had been added to the existing fleet of ancient vehicles.

Even under normal circumstances, developing country cities grow at breakneck speeds. People move to the cities for the economic opportunities that exist in them, even if it means living in a slum. At the same time, they continue to have many children, as if from an old habit, although the children in the city no longer provide the same useful workforce they were on the farm. With improved healthcare, sanitation and nutrition, child mortality has decreased and more children survive. All this contributes to a huge boost in city sizes. Now more than half of the world’s population lives in cities, many of them enormous mega-cities. Out of the 10 largest cities in the world, 6 are now in the developing countries (and 7 in Asia).

Kathmandu’s growth was still a special case. A long-lasting Maoist rebellion had chased people away from the countryside. Originally, the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) declared an armed rebellion on February 13, 1996, with the objective of establishing a communist state. The Maoists opposing what admittedly was rather a feudal system prevailing in Nepal terrorized people for a decade. There were forced ‘land reforms,’ whereby poor farmers lost their lands to collectivization, and plenty of violence against perceived enemies of the revolution, as well as between the Maoists and the government forces. Many people died during the conflict. At the same time, as so often happens, some revolutionaries descended into criminality, while criminals saw the opportunity to make money by pretending to be revolutionaries (think of similar cases in, say, Colombia or the southern islands of the Philippines). Kidnappings for ransom became common and the victims often got killed by the bandits whether their family or company paid up or not. In the Terai region in the south, gangs would haul their victims across the border to India not to be seen again. The situation only changed when a comprehensive peace accord was signed on November 21, 2006, which allowed the Maoists to join the transitional government. While they later emerged as the largest party in the Constituent Assembly, they never gained the majority. Instability in Nepalese politics has continued.

The purpose of my trip related to an evaluation my office had conducted about UNDP’s contributions to national development results in Nepal over the past 8 years. These had been particularly turbulent years in the history of the country. Apart from the internal conflict that had peaked during the period, an extraordinary event had added to the extreme political turmoil. On June 1, 2001, Crown Prince Dipendra in an alcohol fueled craze shot and killed nine members of the royal family, including his own father King Birendra and mother Queen Aiswarya. It is said he was mad at his parents for opposing his marriage to a girl from a rival family. The revered royal family had been virtually the only institution that had kept the kingdom together. Following the regicide, a new king, Gyanendra, was crowned. This signaled the beginning of the end of the monarchy. Gyanendra dissolved the parliament and suspended elections indefinitely in 2002 following the failure of peace talks with the rebels. The state of emergency was lifted only in April 2005 under international pressure and the parliament was finally reinstated a year later. Immediately afterwards, the newly established parliament, quite understandably, voted unanimously to curtail the king’s political powers. In December 2007, the parliament voted to abolish the monarchy altogether and the constituent assembly declared Nepal a republic on May 28, 2008.

During this period, UNDP had done its best to support post-conflict recovery and a transition to democracy. Things were peaceful now and Nepal had been turned into a parliamentary democracy (with the Maoists learning to play by the rules in the parliament) with an emerging federal structure. Local elections had not yet been held—the security situation did not yet allow for it and there was too much uncertainty in the government—and consequently appointed local officials did not feel accountable to the electorate. We heard lots of complaints about rampant corruption in the rural areas.

One afternoon I had free time and joined one of our local consultants, Kanta Singh, who had promised to take our South African consultant Angela Bester to visit Bhaktapur, a World Heritage Site just half an hour’s drive to the east from Kathmandu. Half an hour, that is, without traffic. Including the driver, we were four people crammed into the tiny Hyundai as we hit the traffic. We started in Lalitpur, a peaceful neighborhood of small streets on a hill where I was staying, and headed across the city. The road towards the airport was being widened. For already two decades, apparently, there had been a ban to construct buildings within a certain limit from the existing road because of the eventual plans to widen the road. However, people had ignored it and now, finally, when the road project was underway, the authorities were in the business of leveling illegally constructed houses. We passed official buildings heavily guarded by police in camouflage uniforms and riot gear armed with guns and long sticks. The congestion got worse before we reached the city limits. In one spot, hundreds of small vans and buses transporting people seemed to stop to let off their passengers and to attract more, thus creating a near standstill. The road passed just below the landing route to the airport and several planes appeared to be heading straight towards us only to roar past almost touching the rooftops.

Once we hit the highway towards Bhaktapur, the traffic eased and our car picked up speed. “Ten years ago, this was an agricultural area and we came here to get our vegetables directly from the farmers,” Kanta explained. Now the entire road was lined with new construction, buildings of up to 5 stories high. In between there were still small patches of agriculture. Rice paddies could be seen on the slopes leading to small creeks. What struck me was how shoddy the construction looked. Most buildings seemed to consist of red bricks piled up on top of each other, often in a seemingly haphazard way. Nepal did have a building code, according to Kanta, but nobody really enforced it. Sitting on the edge of the Indian and Eurasian plates, this was earthquake country and I suspected most of the new buildings would not stand a chance if a big one hit the area.

Bhaktapur, just 13 km east of the modern capital, is considered the cultural capital of Nepal. It has been restored with technical cooperation from Germany and is recognized by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site. Originally an agricultural market and artisan town, its history can be traced back to the 7th century C.E. It is built on a hill with narrow winding roads. According to tourist information, it is “geographically shaped as a conch-shell and geometrically designed into the Tantric fabric shaped Shree Yantra.” I take them at their word on this. Suffice it to say that the city is lovely and wonderfully preserved. It is still a perfectly living piece of history. The artisanal legacy of bronze-casting, carving, masonry, painting and other crafts lives on, while much of the economy seems to have turned to the tourist industry, with numerous small shops lining the streets. As we headed towards the Durbar Square in the middle of the town, we met with a wedding celebration. The proceeding was headed by a brass band that was blowing away with abandon, the trumpeters, other horn players and drummers dressed snappily in red jackets. Old men and women carried traditional items and candles in front of the small car wrapped in celebratory decorations that was carrying the wedding couple. The guests—men dressed in Western suits, women in gorgeous saris of deep red, yellow, green and gold—followed behind on foot.

Separating ourselves from the celebrators, we explored Bhaktapur on foot for the next 3 hours. Here in the town between the fabulous squares, like the Durbar, Taumadhi and Dattatreya Squares, that housed all the incredible temples and palaces, regular people lived. Their houses were old and many still not renovated. We could see signs from old earthquakes that had bent and twisted old brick walls into odd shapes. Even the amazing five centuries old Fifty-Five Windows Palace was badly damaged in the powerful 1934 earthquake. A beautiful little girl was leaning against the wall of her house—several stories high—that had cracked so badly that the residents had erected a pole in the adjacent alley to prevent the side wall of the building from collapsing.

One of the beauties of Bhaktapur and Nepal in general is how for hundreds of years Buddhism and Hinduism have existed peacefully side by side. Bhaktapur has temples for both religions, but sometimes they seem so mixed that it is hard to say which religion they really belong to. I suppose the correct—and most beautiful—answer would be: they belong to both. On another morning when we had a few hours of free time between appointments, Angela and I walked over to Patan Square, another restored World Heritage Site in Lalitpur. In its museum I again reflected with fascination upon the intermingling of the Buddhist and Hindu traditions. Not only were they practiced side by side, their very deities and sacred texts were intertwined. (Similarly in Japan, where it is said 90% of the people are Shintoist and 80% are Buddhist, religions—or perhaps more correctly traditions—coexist. One cannot help wonder what it is with these Middle Eastern religions—Judaism, Christianity and Islam—that makes them so intolerant of what each sect perceives as the only correct orthodoxy.)

We had a good guide in Kanta’s driver whose home was close by and he was quite familiar with Bhaktapur and could show us out of the way attractions. At one point he led us through a small porch leading to a tiny inner yard in between residential buildings. The yard contained a small Hindu temple with an altar for sacrifices attached to it. The altar and the ground beneath it were splattered with the red of the blood of the chicken and goats that had been slaughtered there. A beautiful black cat with a shiny fur presided over the square languidly strolling around, ignoring us.

One of the interesting parts of the walking tour was to observe how the old social mores still prevailed. Kanta showed us a number of water wells, which were traditionally social gathering points for women. A particularly large one was protected by a statue of a cobra, with a serpentine carving surrounding it. The water points could be found in many places of the city and it was clear they still served a social function for the women. The men stuck to themselves and when the afternoon advanced one could see pairs and groups of them sitting around the squares, often on the steps leading to temples or palaces making them part of the everyday life of the town dwellers.

I wanted to buy some good Nepali tea, which is similar to but less well known than Darjeeling (some tea connoisseurs even consider the Nepali variety to be superior to the Indian). I was guided to a small store kept by a sweet and rather sophisticated young couple. On the wall there was a snapshot of the couple in Paris where they had gone for their honeymoon. They showed me the various varieties from the most highly priced white-tipped tea. My goal was to settle for the second flush, which is harvested in the season between May and July, and has a lush mellow taste.

While inspecting the teas, I couldn’t help getting carried away by the lovely flute music coming from the stereo. I asked the husband about it and he explained it to be traditional Nepali music. The band, Kutumba, plays traditional Nepali tunes and instruments—flutes, strings, drums and bells—in an improvisatory style. When we had established that I was particularly fond of Asian flute music, he introduced me to a contemporary version by Kala Chakra, which was now popular in Nepal. “Lounge,” I suggested as we sampled the music; “Fusion,” corrected the owner. Either way, the music captured the tradition in a contemporary electronic, yet lovely manner. Later in the evening, beautiful flute sounds again drifted to my ears. It turned out that there was another wedding procession that had made a more traditional musical choice, with a band of young people playing the bamboo flutes from the region.

By the time we returned to Kathmandu, the night had fallen and with no streetlights it was pitch dark. The driver decided to take a shortcut through Patan. Its narrow streets were full of people, cars, motorbikes, dogs, an occasional goat. Three-wheeled motorized rickshaws, here called ‘Tempu’ and larger than the famous Tuk-Tuks of Bangkok, were cruising the streets and abruptly stopping for passengers. Our tiny Hyundai zipped in between buildings, people and vehicles, filling any small space that would open up. At times we got stuck for a minute or two as a truck or a larger vehicle would come from the other direction (luckily, most of the cars in Kathmandu are small). Then again the driver would accelerate to what I considered a dangerous speed when he’d see an opening. Horns were blaring all around us as every user of the road employed the same strategy of advancement. On several occasions I was certain that we’d hit a lady waddling on the side in a sari, or a family walking in a group as if they had all the space in the world, but nothing happened. It was just me who was not used to the going.

Finally we reached Lalitpur and our hotel, a veritable sanctuary so close to the madness of the commercial city. The dry air had been so saturated with dust that I noticed my throat was parched. That was helped by a cold Everest beer before washing off the dirt in a hot shower. Somehow despite its uncontrollable growth and seeming chaos, Kathmandu has maintained its charm and humanity. Efforts to restore and renovate old towns like Bhaktapur and Patan are important beyond their value as repositories of history and culture, as they are attractions that bring much needed income to the country. The fact that both are also living environments where people lead their lives is a highly positive aspect. The harmony that exists between the Buddhist and Hindu traditions should serve as an example for many other places.

Upon my return home, I rummaged through my bookshelf for some old books about Nepal to revisit how the country was described just two decades or so ago. (In the dust jacket of one, Nepal: Socio-Economic Change and Rural Migration by Poona Thapa, I discovered the invoice from Ratna Pustak Bhandar booksellers in Kathmandu where I had purchased the book on May 16, 1990, for Rp. 327.60.) One striking figure was that in 1991, Kathmandu had had a population of just 421,000, indicating that the city had actually grown ten-fold since then. But even before that, the growth had been tremendous, as the 1981 data showed a population of only 235,000 for the city! Many issues that were highlighted by the older publications are still valid concerns: poverty, major inequalities between regions, heavy internal migration. Despite these challenges, much progress has been made, especially since the worst of the political troubles have calmed down. Measured on the UN Human Development Index, Nepal is still on the 138th place amongst the 169 countries included, but its rating is constantly and rapidly rising. One must hope that this trend will continue. Much will depend on the continued political stability, peace and security in the country.

2011-12-05T20:45:00.001-08:00

The Lunatic Express by Carl Hoffman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a travel book focusing on modes of transportation that most travellers would prefer to avoid. Carl Hoffman’s stated desire was to circumnavigate the globe on the cheapest and most dangerous forms of mass transit. For most of humankind, travel was no pleasurable touring, but a necessary movement from point A to point B often involving terribly long and uncomfortable, not to mention perilous, trips on decrepit buses that would plunge into gorges from the winding mountainside roads that they travelled, on overcrowded, capsizing ferries, unmaintained ancient aircraft, and trains that were so stuffed with people that they just fell off on the tracks. Hoffman’s travels over several months involved all of the above, as he left his home in Washington, DC, and toured around the Andes and Amazon basin in South America, the roads and railroads of East and West Africa, the notorious deathtraps that ferries in Indonesia and Bangladesh were. He had weeks of relative leisure in India before flying to Afghanistan on the national airline Ariana (a.k.a. Scariana). Then returning home by train and gas truck through China, Mongolia and Siberia. Through all these segments of travel he reports on the exotic places he encounters, the hairy situations arising and, most importantly, the various people he meets.

Carl Hoffman is plagued by wanderlust. He is middle-aged, married with three kids, a journalist, but for a long time he has felt compelled to leave the comforts of home behind and travel. This is the other theme of the book: man’s struggle between loneliness and belonging. The book gets quite personal, as Hoffman misses his family while at the same time feels alive only travelling in risky places amongst strange people. At times his descriptions of his own addiction to danger seem slightly too heroic, but at least I personally can very well relate to his contradictory feelings. He observes with some envy people in the poor countries that he visits and interacts with, how they all have strong bonds in their communities and families; at the same time, he knows that he could never live that way, with no privacy or time alone. When he finally is returning home, he notes that he was settling in and getting a little bored on the trip. He concludes that it was time to go home: “Travel was only worthwhile when your eyes were fresh, when it surprised you and amazed you and made you think about yourself in a new way. You couldn’t travel forever. When you stopped seeing, when you lost your curiosity and openness to the world, it was time to return to your starting point and see where you stood” (p. 263).

I found the book to be well worth reading, well written, even quite wise. Although the narrative was generally entertaining, I found there was a certain unevenness to the chapters (probably reflecting the interestingness of the segment and the people Hoffman happened to meet). The cover of my edition touted it as a “Wall Street Journal Book of the Year.” I wouldn’t go that far and the accolade baffled me initially, before I realized that for an average WJS reader the book would cover territory that was strange and likely unsightly. The Lunatic Express certainly serves its purpose as an antidote to seeing travel only through the lens of comfortable business travel or relaxing tourism. Carl Hoffman made a superb effort to experience travel the way the majority of the world’s people experience it. In the process he met numerous interesting and hospitable people whom he recalls frequently with warmth, always with understanding.

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A Week (or Two) in Music: Only in New York

2011-10-23T10:54:00.000-07:00

It’s been a New York week—well, I guess every week is like this in New York. Actually, I only listened to three live performances, although there’d be something worthwhile to hear every night and I in fact had noted a couple of more possible concerts in my calendar. That’s what I do: I scan the opportunities to listen to some interesting music in advance and mark them in my Google calendar, so that I won’t forget about them or won’t be at a loss if one evening I just feel like catching some act. The reason why I thought of jotting down this week’s crop is because the three acts were all quite different from each other but represented broad categories of music that are all close to my heart. All were also played in quite intimate settings and mostly with acoustic instruments.

First, on Tuesday night (October 4), there was a duo performance by two of my favourite instrumentalists at the Living Room in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. As it happens, I also know both Oran Etkin and Ben Allison personally and they are both the nicest boys in the business. What I didn’t know is that they played together—and apparently it is a perfectly new thing. Their performance was part of celebrating the Independent Music Awards—Oran had just won the ‘Best World Beat’ award for his album Kelenia—and there was a succession of winning bands at this bar-cum-performance space. Oran and Ben had a half hour slot in the middle of the evening, which they filled with three pieces of fantastic communication with acoustic wooden instruments. All compositions were Etkin originals, starting with the hypnotic Kelenia from his African music project. This time played only on bass clarinet and contrabass, the tune produced a wonderful atmosphere with its ostinato-like theme. This was followed by Wake Up, Clarinet!, an entertaining number from Oran’s popular children’s album. It’s easy to see why kids would find it irresistibly fun when the cheerful bearded guy has a great time communing with his clarinet. The duo’s last piece was Lacy—dedicated to the soprano saxophone innovator Steve Lacy—a quirky jazz tune in which the musicians’ interplay was again seamless, with Ben providing a solid basis for the music as he pulled double stops on his bass.

(Exceptionally, these pictures are not mine, but by Yoko Takahashi, so that I could get into the photo with the guys.)

The following night I headed to the City Winery to catch a concert with Bebel Gilberto, the famous contemporary Brazilian singer. The star spent last summer as artist in residence at City Winery and performed several sold-out concerts. I only managed to get my act together and buy a ticket to the last extra one organized as an in August due to high demand. Alas, the concert was rescheduled due to the rare Hurricane Irene that hit New York just on the evening when Gilberto was supposed to perform. It thus took more than a month to organize the concert until Wednesday, October 5. In August, the extra concert was supposed to be an intimate evening only with the songstress and an acoustic guitarist. When I entered the crowded hall on this Wednesday evening, it was clear we would be now treated to the full band. There was a drum set, keyboards and amplifiers on stage. There was tangible electricity in the air—and the audience would not be disappointed. The diva, dressed in a tight black dress, was at her best, chatting with the audience in between the tunes, with a glass of wine constantly at her side. The daughter of legendary Brazilian musicians, Joao Gilberto and Miúcha, Bebel carries the torch of the bossa nova tradition that her parents were amongst the core group creating. Despite the five-piece band, the music remained very intimate and the volume at a very moderate level. She performed a long set consisting of hits from her own albums as well as a number of older songs. Personally, I was most taken by Jorge Continentino, whose alto flute provided an atmospheric ambience to most of the songs. On one tune, he switched to a horizontal bamboo flute, which he handled very nicely and entirely in tune (not always so easy with a bamboo flute). There was also a trombone in the band, which together with the alto flute produced a pleasant mellow addition to the music. At one point of the evening, Bebel asked an audience member to pass a candle from the table to her. Then she started the birthday song, approached the trombonist for a hug and passed the candle on to him. The birthday boy was so moved that he started to weep. “More than 20 years of friendship,” Bebel declared to the audience. Clearly, the star has a faithful relationship with her musicians. We were allowed to witness some intimate moments of her singing accompanied only by Bebel’s long-term guitarist, Masa Shimizu. On some of the later pieces of the evening, the tempos increased. Continentino switched his small pipes to a large curved baritone sax with which he joined in funky riffs with the trombonist. All in all, a superb concert.

Then, on Sunday, Yoko and I headed to one of our favourite Sunday afternoon places, the Noguchi Museum in Queens. The afternoon Music in the Garden promised shakuhachi music with Elizabeth Brown. We couldn’t have been luckier, as after a cool spell of autumn weather New York was experiencing Indian summer. We sat out in the garden with some 50 other listeners enjoying a most beautiful sunny afternoon amongst Isamu Noguchi’s sculptures and the verdant trees. Elizabeth Brown is an award winning composer and performer on the shakuhachi, the western flute and theremin. She took her place under a large aspen whose leaves had already turned largely bright yellow. Her set alternated traditional shakuchachi honkyoku—Oshu Sashi and Sokaku Reibo—with her own compositions, Hermit Thrush (1991) and From Isle Royale (2005). Her own pieces combine contemporary music aspects with traditional Japanese tonalities. Both pieces were inspired by the sounds of birds she had listened to while composing the music in the middle of nature. Here, the meditative sounds of shakuhachi mixed with the more urban soundscape of the inevitable helicopters and cars crossing Queens. For the last piece, Shika no Tone—another honkyoku tune in Kinko-ryu style—Elizabeth Brown called Ralph Samuelson to join her. She introduced Ralph “her mentor, teacher and friend.“ The two flutists moved to the opposite sides of the garden creating a lovely echo mimicking the distant cry of the deer that the tune’s title implies. Moving slowly closer to each other, the stereo effect created by the two shakuhachis was purely lovely.

Originally, I had intended to just describe these three exquisite concerts in such disparate styles and venues all played during the same week in this city—hence the title of this blog. But as I failed to complete writing this in time, I feel compelled to add to the mix. On the following Sunday, October 16th, we took our friend Masako, visiting from Tokyo, to Le Poisson Rouge to listen to a piano recital by Peter Hill. The concert was constructed around the music of Olivier Messiaen, whose premier interpreter the British pianist is. He made a smart strategic move by starting the modern concert with J.S. Bach, making the connections that both Bach and Messiaen were organists and both also superb improvisers. The beautiful start served its purpose of focusing the attention of the audience in the concert venue that doubles up as a restaurant. The rest of the evening consisted of pieces by Messiaen, with the exception of one piece by Toru Takemitsu composed in memoriam of the French composer. The highly sympathetic Peter Hill explained that he had selected the program around Messiaen’s compositions inspired by birdsong (something in common with Elizabeth Brown’s shakuhachi music!), starting with La Colombe that Messiaen had written in 1926 when he was just 18. Later pieces from the 1950s and Cantéyodjayâ that Messiaen composed while in Tanglewood in 1949 demonstrated how his musical language had evolved. The last number was lovely, contrasting the dark night when the composer had been driving in France with his wife, with the competing coloratura of a pair of larks and a nightingale they had observed. Messiaen was an accomplished ornithologist who incorporated birdsong systematically in his music. I was absolutely delighted to have decided to come to the concert. Messiaen’s music was not very familiar to me and this recital, enhanced with Peter Hill’s commentary, truly opened up his music to me. As an encore, Hill played a piece that Messiaen had written as a sight reading exercise for his students. Apparently, the master had written many such exercises but this was the only one that had survived—a tragedy of 20th century music, as recounted by Hill.

Then finally, on Tuesday, October 18th, Masako’s last night in New York, she and I went to the Jazz Standard while Yoko was rehearsing for her own forthcoming performance. The work we heard was Race Riot Suite composed by Chris Combs and performed by the Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey. The lengthy suite in 12 parts turned out to be an incredible tour de force by both the composer and the orchestra. I had picked the show only based on the description, which explained that the suite had been composed to tell the story of the evolution and destruction of Greenwood, a highly successful African-American neighbourhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma (the centre of Greenwood was known as the “Black Wall Street”). On May 31, 1921, in an occurrence of exceptional racial conflict, white mobs invaded Greenwood and as a result at least 40 people were killed and over 800 were hospitalized. Some 35 city blocks were destroyed by fire and an estimated 10,000 people were left homeless. The all-white Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey hails from Tulsa and consists normally of four musicians: Brian Haas, Josh Raymer, Chris Combs and Jeff Harshbarger. A unique feature of the band is that to the normal piano trio is added a lap steel guitar played by Combs, the writer of the Race Riot Suite. For performing the Suite, the band was strengthened by three horn players: Steven Bernstein (trumpet and slide trumpet), Mark Southerland (tenor and soprano saxes) and Peter Apfelbaum (tenor and baritone saxophones). This was one of the best and most innovative pieces of new jazz music that I have heard in a long while. The composition builds upon a long tradition of New Orleans jazz and ragtime and contains clear nods towards the great composers and band leaders, such as Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus. The expression is contemporary and the harmonies very interesting, with the steel guitar’s wails often blending in with the horns. Every player contributed wonderful solos throughout the music, so I would just highlight a couple that stayed with me. Overall, I loved Apfelbaum’s work on both of his saxes. The tenor was exceptional warm (and contrasted well with Southerland’s stormier approach) and there was an interesting moment when the baritone soloed only against Haas’ piano accompaniment (and what a rare treat it was to hear a second excellent baritone player in just two weeks!). Overall, Haas provided some entertaining piano playing, while Bernstein’s trumpet channelled Roy Eldridge and Cootie Williams transported into the 21st century. Harshbarger and Raymer on bass and drums soloed less, but ensured that there was a solid rhythmic structure—at times chaotic, but always firmly rooted—to this complex music. This was programmatic music at its best.

Sikkim Earthquake, 18 September 2011

2011-10-02T16:19:00.000-07:00

On Sunday, just when I had arrived, there was an earthquake. It didn’t really register with me. Delhi shook gently, enough for many others to notice, but I was jetlagged and went to sleep. My colleague Gus thought he was suddenly feeling the symptoms of old age as dizziness set in and he had to sit down on the sofa, he told me afterwards.

What had taken place was an earthquake with an epicentre in Sikkim, hundreds of kilometres away from the national capital region. The quake hit the Sikkim-Nepal border area at 18:10 hours near the boundary between India and Eurasia plates. It was 6.8 on the Richter Scale and, given the style of construction and rough hilly terrain, it would turn out to be the most destructive earthquake to hit India in ten years. People rushed out of the houses that started to collapse. In addition, there were reports of extensive landslides and downed power lines. “Tremors were felt between 30 seconds to one minute in some parts of Sikkim, including Gangtok,” the State capital, said Shalesh Nayak, Secretary in the Indian Earth Sciences Ministry, said according to The Times of India (19 September 2011). Nearly everyone in Sikkim and Darjeeling spent Sunday night in the open as aftershocks triggered fears of a second wave of destruction.

Sikkim is a Himalayan state in the Indian northeast, bordered by Nepal to the west, Tibet (China) to the north and Bhutan to the east. Its southern border is with the Indian state of West Bengal. The mountainous State is quite sparsely populated—according to the latest 2001 census, the total population was only 540,000 people—and only 11% of the people live in urban areas. “Sikkim is sheer magic,” gushes the State’s official website. “This is not just the most beautiful place in the world but cleanest and safest too,” it continues. This pristine idyll was shattered by the quake.

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called Sikkim’s Chief Minister Pawan Kumar Chamling, who reportedly described the damage as serious. Early reports confirmed 15 dead in Sikkim and across the border in Nepal, but the death toll would keep on rising. By the following Saturday, 24th of September, there were reportedly 75 dead and more than 61,000 left homeless in Sikkim alone. In addition, 10 people were reported dead in Bengal and 7 in Bihar. And the rescue crews had not yet reached the most remote areas due to landslides and heavy rains.

On Tuesday, 20 September, The Times reported that virtually nothing was left intact on the 100 km long road connecting Gangtok to Chungthang, and that roads and bridges between Meeli and Namchi in south Sikkim and Rawangala in west Sikkim had been severely damaged. All of this hampered rescue operations.

Rumtek, a major Buddhist monastery, located at an elevation of 1,768 metres some 24 kilomters from Gangtok, was badly damaged, leaving some 400 monks without shelter. A team of ten South African engineers were in the Teesta River area working together with the locals to develop a hydroelectric scheme. Two of the men had been inside a tunnel when the quake took place. They were barely able to escape as a major crack developed and the tunnel was suddenly flooded with water from the river. These kinds of stories catch the eye as they find themselves into the newspapers. Inevitably, rumours would emerge that the Teesta hydroelectric project was somehow connected to the earthquake. Needless to say, such rumours are obviously baseless.

The official response to the disaster was quite rapid and effective, it would seem. The Government of India immediately declared Sikkim a disaster area and promised funds for reconstruction and recovery. Prime Minister Singh would visit the quake stricken areas in Sikkim on 29 September 2011. Nearly 6,000 Army and paramilitary forces personnel were deployed without delay. However, their work was hampered by the landslides and it took days for the troops to reach Mangan, the quake’s epicentre, and nearby areas of north and west Sikkim, where the heaviest damage had been reported. The rescue convoys were stuck at various locations with fallen trees, downed power lines and landslides. It was reported that two young Army men and a junior engineer had also been killed.

By Monday, Army helicopters started dropping food and supplies to people in the worst affected areas. They also started evacuating people to safety. Apart from the general destruction and lost homes caused by earthquakes, death often comes afterwards from diseases that spread when people must stay in the open and without adequate food, clean water or sanitation.

On Wednesday (21 September 2011) The Times ran an article about how Dipak Ghosh at Jadavpur University had detected abnormalities that could presage a major earthquake. The scientist runs a solid-state nuclear track detector that he has embedded 70 cm underground besides the Faculty Club. As he monitored the devise 9 days before the earthquake, he noticed abnormal fluctuations in radon gas emissions from below. Should he have reported this to warn authorities of the impending danger? This would have been risky, as earthquake prediction is far from an exact science. In 2009 when a 6.3 magnitude quake destroyed the medieval city of l’Aquila in the Abruzzo region of Italy, a local scientist Giampaolo Giuliani had recorded similar forewarnings from his four radometers in the area. He however was under injunction barring him from reporting the monitoring data, as officials claimed that such predictions would spread unwarranted panic. In that quake, 308 people including 20 children died, 1,500 were injured and perhaps 80,000 left homeless.

Ghosh, Director of the Biren Roy Research Laboratory for Radioactivity and Earthquake Studies at Jadavpur University, was well aware of the criticism that Giuliani had had to face around his earthquake predictions. “It is not so easy. I am into this research monitoring soil radon since 2006,” he told The Times. “What I gathered from the data is that there is a direct correlation between the soil radon anomaly within 1,000 kilometres from the measuring site, and for intensity above 4 in the Richter scale. They occur 7-15 days before an earthquake with few exceptions,” said Ghosh, comparing earthquake prediction based on radon with a doctor performing an ECG on patient, which would indicate that the person is at risk of a heart attack but would not be able to predict its timing. Earthquake forecasting using radon monitoring remains controversial amongst the scientific community.

On Thursday, when many people had slowly started returning home—or whatever was left of it—for shelter from the continued rain, an aftershock of 3.9 shook Gangtok at 22:30 sending people scurrying out into the open. During the same evening, a 4.8 magnitude quake, with its epicentre in Myanmar, was felt in parts of Meghalaya, Manipur, Tripura and Mizoram in northeast India, but there were no reports of casualties according to Mail Today (23 September 2011).

As always, it is the regular people, poor folks eking out a living in the harsh environment where flat agricultural land is hard to come by and where it has been constructed on elaborate terraces for generations, that are most affected by disasters such as this. These are the people who lost family members amongst the dead.

As I left Delhi on Saturday night, it was reported that fresh landslides in Langchun in the rain-soaked northern Sikkim were again stopping rescuers from reaching remote villages. The landslides and the aftershocks would continue for the days and weeks to come. Casualty figures from Sikkim’s neighbours confirmed 6 dead in Nepal and 7 in Tibet; 2,322 and 2,960 buildings, respectively, were completely destroyed in these states. On 28 September 2011, authorities downgraded the casualty estimates in Sikkim from 77 to 60 following verification of double counting and locating people who had been listed as missing in the confusion of the immediate aftermath of the earthquake. This at least was good news.

Cape Town R&R

2011-10-02T15:26:00.000-07:00

The extraordinary beauty of the city and how it sits on the oceanic front and sprawls into the valleys between the mountains was evident seen from the air as we descended in the rapidly darkening dusk. I had specifically asked for a window seat and not over a wing so as to have the chance to behold what I anticipated would be a gorgeous landing. But this was even more beautiful, as the changing colouring of the landscape conspired to make the scene mystical. First, the sun shone bright, almost dark red seemingly at the level of the plane. Soon it disappeared behind the western horizon sinking into the Atlantic Ocean leaving an orange glow in the sky. There were narrow vertical layers of high clouds that were gilded by the sun’s last rays, while the lower level clouds hanging languidly over the valleys were turning dark. Below, the city lights were already on as the night had fallen on the ground. City suburbs and the vineyards of Stellenbosch and Kirstenbosch were connected by the pearly strings of roads on which car headlights were moving. The Table Mountain stood black surrounded by twinkling city lights. In the harbour off the coast a few large container ships were moored with all their lights glittering against the water.

It was indeed fully dark when we deboarded at the Cape Town international airport and walked across the tarmac to the terminal building. The Kulula flight from Johannesburg had taken two hours. I collected my bag and chose one of the several car rental companies almost at random based on name recognition and a vague recollection that they might contribute miles to one of my frequent flyer programs. The choice was good, as the efficient, friendly and very attractive lady of vaguely South Asian origin quickly dispatched me on my way with a very reasonably priced Chevy Spark equipped with a GPS navigation system. The latter was essential as I immediately had to navigate the airport exits and then the highways in this unfamiliar city, again getting used to driving on the left side of the road in a new car with a stick shift. I managed to get off the freeway at the right junction and entered the suburbs at Claremont and found my way to Newlands close to the Kirstenbosch vineyards on the northern side of the Table Mountain. The classic Vineyard Hotel & Spa had been recommended to me by my friend, Cape Town native David Simon, who now teaches development geography in London. I thoroughly looked forward to three days of R&R in between the conference that had just finished in Johannesburg and my next work engagement that would take me across the Indian Ocean over the coming weekend. Over dinner in New York a few weeks ago, David had virtually planned my visit highlighting all the necessary things I would have to do and see. I would have to find the right balance between doing that and just relaxing.

Cape Town is very different from Johannesburg in Gauteng, the business and government heart of South Africa. This town—often compared in its beauty to Rio de Janeiro—located in the southwestern tip of the African continent is much more relaxed and blessed with an extraordinary natural setting. When I woke up the following morning in my comfortable room with panoramic windows over the luxurious gardens of the hotel, it was drizzling and the Table Mountain was entirely covered in low hanging clouds. I knew then that today was the day to explore the city itself. The drive to the centre some 10 km away passed through clean and beautiful neighbourhoods with manicured lawns that gave way to the bustle of the city. Cape Town has a turbulent history since the first encounters between Europeans and native Africans here more than half a millennium ago. In the more recent past, the city has seen strife as a result of the unjust apartheid system that had legislated inequality between the races. The city also has slums, or townships, that are run down and lack infrastructure, but not on the scale of Gauteng where places like Soweto became symbols of the violent struggle against apartheid.

I started my visit at the Castle of Good Hope, built by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in the late-17th century. It is an historical landmark that still houses the South African military, as well as the Military Museum. Its collections around the history of the Cape were to me very enlightening, starting as they were with the first encounters between European explorers and the African tribes living in the area. The very first European contact with the Khoi (or Khoikhoi) was in 1488 when the Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias reached the Cape. A more intense period of European intrusions started with the rounding of the stormy waters of the Cape of Good Hope by Vasco da Gama in 1497, in a quest to find a sea route to India around Africa. Dias and da Gama’s countryman Francisco d’Almeida sailed to the Cape in 1510, but his fate was less fortunate than that of his predecessors. Lured to the shore, he and more than 50 of his crew were slaughtered by the Khoi who surrounded the men. This setback was such that it took decades before the Europeans again landed in the area.

The Dutch were the first to permanently settle into the Cape area, which was administered by VOC from 1656 to 1795. During this period, large numbers of European immigrants of mostly Dutch, but also of German, French and other origins—who would become the Boers—arrived in the Cape and spread deeper into the country. Their hunger for agricultural land inevitably led to clashes with the pastoralist tribes like the Khoi (who were dubbed ’Hottentots’ by the settlers) who were used to following their cattle roaming around according to seasons. A series of Khoi-Dutch wars ensued between 1659 and 1677.

Since those times, the Cape became a frontier in the struggle for control by successive European nations—Portugal, Holland, England, France—who all invariably fought the various native tribes, at times enlisting them to fight against the European rival of the day. One of the military brigades whose intriguing name caught my attention in the museum was the ‘Bastaart Hottentotten,’ which in 1781 consisted of Khoi soldiers recruited to serve under Dutch command.

The wars between the Europeans and Africans, however, were far from over. There would be nine Frontier Wars between 1779 and 1878 caused by the expansion of European settlements into the African lands. These wars were first fought mainly by the Dutch, but following the annexation of the Cape by Britain in 1806, they got drawn into the conflicts to protect the settlers.

But it was really the competition between the Boers and the English that defined much of the 19th century history of South Africa. The Boer farmers started their Great Trek away from the British controlled areas moving inland in large numbers in the 1830s and 1840s. They also founded a number of republics, notably Transvaal and Orange Free State, under their own rule. The discovery of rich gold and diamond deposits some decades later resulted in gold rushes that again pitted the Boer settlers against the British who followed inland after the valuable minerals. Finally, in 1910 the Union of South Africa was formed following the British victory in the bloody Boer War of 1897-1903. The former Boer republics were merged into the union.

The castle also contains the William Fehr Collection consisting of artworks and furniture styles from the VOC days until the mid-19th century (Fehr was a South African businessman and art collector). I was entirely taken by the numerous paintings by artists such as Thomas Whitcombe (1760-1825), William John Huggins (1781-1845), William Syme (1824-1866) and John Thomas Baines (1820-1875) whose works depict powerful scenes in which the waters of the Cape are always turbulent. I stared for a long time at a Baines painting of a boat carrying newly arrived European immigrants—men, women and children—from a mother ship to the shore with waves churning around the hull. Irrespective of what one thinks about the consequent subordination of the native populations, one can only admire the courage and determination of the people moving to a new and strange continent under such conditions.

Race-based oppression was part of black South Africans’ life much before apartheid, which institutionalized the separation of the races (whites, blacks, Asians and coloureds) following the electoral victory of the Boer National Party in 1948. The superb District Six Museum tells the story of one particular residential area in Cape Town. Established in 1867, the Sixth Municipal District used to be a mixed neighbourhood, originally of freed slaves, merchants, artisans, labourers and immigrants that became a target of successive white city administrations. Already in 1901, the Africans were forcibly resettled from the district that was located close to the city centre and port. As the wealthier parts of the population started moving out, District Six became increasingly marginalized. Despite the intentional neglect by the city authorities that ran down the place, it had a rich communal and cultural life with plenty of music and other forms of culture. A particular type of music that developed there was Langaarm played by dance bands inspired by early jazz. Using the degradation of the District Six as an excuse—and it was true that the area lacked sanitation and most of the houses were decrepit—the city government declared District Six as unsuitable for human habitation. In 1966, based on the Group Areas Act of 1950, District Six was declared a White Group Area and the forcible removal of its 60,000 inhabitants was completed by 1982 when all the buildings were bulldozed to make way for new construction for whites. The museum’s historical collections, including photographs and audiovisual recordings, show in grim detail the timeline of this brutal process.

Following this quick immersion in South African history, I needed a walk to absorb all the information swirling in my brain and to sort out the often confusing timeline of events. The spring weather was fresh and I walked pass the College of Cape Town on the walking street where groups of students—black, white and mixed race—sat smoking under the trees, and continued to the City Hall square where I had parked. Reaching my car, I saw two young African men approaching me from opposite directions. Both turned out to be unofficial parking attendants who looked after the safety of the vehicles left on the square. I recognized one of them, a tall fellow with a bright smile under his woollen cap, as the one who had been there when I arrived. Consequently, I passed the 10 rand note to him. This resulted in an argument between the two and I saw the boys scuffle as I drove away towards my next stop.

Long Street is to Cape Town what the Village (or today Brooklyn’s Williamsburg) is to New York, a mixed and hip neighbourhood with alternative types of shops, ethnic restaurants and bars. I spent the following hours browsing in excellent second hand bookstores (including the classic Clarke’s Bookshop, which has been around since 1956) and music shops, before settling down on the second floor terrace of the ‘Neighbourhood’ bar with a badly needed pint of Castle. In this late-afternoon hour the place was starting to fill up. Opposite from my still empty table on a tall stool sat a beautiful young black woman who was soon joined by two white chaps who had the air of being designers or perhaps theatre people. In this joint, young white waiters happily served a clientele whose skin colours reflected a wide scale of hues. As the crowd increased, I shared my table with a group of cheerful young Africans, two boys and three girls. It was happy hour and the kids were getting two-for-one cocktails. I clinked my glass with theirs and let them have the whole table after I downed my second pint.

The following morning the sky was clear and iconic shape of Table Mountain stood free of clouds outside of my window. I programmed the GPS navigator, which was a blessing as the route to the seemingly nearby mountain turned out to be complicated, involving a rather long drive on the freeway, then heading up steep city streets before reaching a winding road that leads halfway up the mountain to the ropeway (or aerial cableway, as it is officially called). Although it was a Friday, the place was crowded and I had to leave the car several hundreds of metres from the entrance. Luckily I had bought the cableway ticket online so I did not have to wait in the queue. The wait for the ride up was quick as there are two gondolas that move up and down the cables in opposite directions. I took a deep breath and tried to calm my nerves as I stepped into the gondola. I must confess that riding in a small cabin suspended from a cable tens of metres above a steep mountainside makes me nervous. It didn’t help that this particular cabin was designed to rotate throughout its five-minute (it felt much longer) ride to the top at 1,067 metres. En route I could see a group of climbers heading to the top the hard way, clinging to the vertical rock face aided with little equipment.

From the top the view was magnificent far over the city and its harbour. Robben Island, that houses the prison where Nelson Mandela was held for 27 years alongside other leaders of the African National Congress opposing the apartheid government, sat in the bay like a southern Alcatraz. To the south, beyond the mountains, one could see the place where the Atlantic and Indian Ocean meet. The mountain itself is a natural wonder: a 3-km long plateau of sandstone with an elevation variation of only 19 metres. Its nearly treeless and rocky expanse hides a rich biodiversity. In particular its flora is unique, consisting of endemic ’fynbos’ (’delicate bush’ in Afrikaans) vegetation. Fynbos, threatened by erosion, fires and human impact, consists of four primary plant groups: proteas (large broad-leafed shrubs), ericas (low-growing shrubs), restios (thin reed-like plants) and geophytes (bulbs). Due to its uniqueness and the rich variety of almost 1,500 plant species found there, the Cape Floristic Region has been declared a biodiversity hotspot and Table Mountain is recognized as a World Heritage Site. Although the fauna on this rough windswept plateau is less abundant, there are still several species of rodents, snakes, lizards, frogs and other animals who call Table Mountain home. Numerous birds ranging from smaller thrushes, bulbuls and doves to buzzards and eagles are found on the mountain. As we descended, I observed a pair of black eagles soaring majestically across the sky lifted by the air currents flowing up the hillside.

I drove south on the road that lines Western Cape. The ocean to my right glimmered brightly. After a while I entered the Chapman’s Peak Drive, a 9-km toll road that winds in between the hillside and the shining sea through some of the most stunning scenery I’ve ever seen. Unfortunately, it was virtually impossible to stop and take photos without endangering the traffic. I accepted this fact with some regret and continued the drive until I reached the extension of the Table Mountain National Park at the southern tip of the peninsula between the Atlantic Ocean and False Bay to the east. The land has a barren beauty accentuated by the rocky beaches that disappear into the sea. I reached the legendary Cape of Good Hope, the southwestern-most point on the continent of Africa. It was obvious why it had posed a challenge for early navigators and had become the site of many a shipwreck over the centuries. Even on this beautiful and relatively calm spring day, the sea was churning and waves struck the rocks with mighty force splashing water high into the air. Bartolomeu Dias originally named this the Cape of Storms (Cabo das Tormentas) but the Portuguese king changed this to Cape of Good Hope (Cabo da Boa Esperança). Never having actually faced the force of the sea at the Cape, the king only saw the hope of his fleet reaching the riches of the east through this route.

As I was relating these thoughts to the historical facts I had learned the day before, the place was suddenly invaded by several large tourist buses. Out poured tens of young Africans screaming with delight at the gorgeous sight that awaited them. They quickly spread around the beach and lined up to take each other’s photos at the wooden sign that declared the longitude and latitude of our location. Many of the girls were dressed in short skirts and light blouses that seemed to provide inadequate cover against the strong wind gusting from the open ocean, but this didn’t seem to quell their enthusiasm.

I decided it was time to continue my journey and head to Cape Point occupying the eastern fork of the peninsula. On the shore three ostriches were grazing, their silhouettes against the blue of the sea—an unlikely sight. There were signs posted warning about the pesky baboons, but I was not bothered by any. Cape Point was equally or more crowded than the commercially undeveloped Cape of Good Hope. Here there was a large parking lot lined with shops where the walkway up towards the lighthouse on the hilltop began. The elevation was much higher here and the views over the two oceans very beautiful.

My return route went north on the coast of False Bay. I had spent so much time admiring the spot where the waters of the two mighty oceans merge that I was now very conscious of the time. I definitely wanted to get to Boulders Beach while it was still light. Here on the east coast of the peninsula the road was already darkened by the shadows of the hills to my left, although the sun was still relatively high above the horizon. I stepped on the gas to the extent I could safely do on this unfamiliar winding road. Passing Simon’s Town, I arrived at Boulders Beach just after 5 pm. Here, the daylight would still linger for a good hour or more, although its warm yellow glow already reflected the sun’s position low on the western sky. I started walking on the small road parallel to the beach, which then turned into a wooden walk bridge across coastal bushes. That’s where I detected the first penguins. They were small, standing or lying down among the bushes; not a habitat that one immediately associates with these birds. The Boulders Beach – Simon’s Town area is host to the northern-most colony of penguins in the world.

A bit further on, the bushes gave way to bare rocks that descended into the bay. This was more like it, I thought. I found penguins basking in the sun on these rocks, their white and black appearance dignified in all its bowling pin –like roundness. There were lone males standing still and proud against the wind and there were small groups lying on the rocks. Many were in couples, with the female standing beside her male, sometimes grooming him. Occasionally they would peck each other tenderly. A lovely scene against the most beautiful natural setting. A lone white lighthouse stood in the middle of the bay. There was a group of kayakers paddling among the boulders that must have given the name to the community. There were also seabirds other than the flightless penguins: gulls were coasting in the wind; a goose family with fluffy chicks was determinedly heading somewhere; a handsome white heron stood on a rock just off the shoreline. Just behind on the gently sloping hillside stood the idyllic small town of Boulders Beach with its white houses and romantic little restaurants. What a lovely place to live one’s life, I thought. Signs warned motorists to look under their vehicles for penguins before starting their engines.

I had seen many such beautiful settlements along the coastal road today. In Cape Town itself, there were fabulous neighbourhoods facing the blue Atlantic that were as clean and white as their inhabitants (or at least the absolute majority of them). Seventeen years after the arrival of democracy in South Africa, political equality hadn’t translated into economic equality. In fact, the income differences had actually risen. Despite the emergence of a black elite and a growing middle class, most Africans were still poor and worked in manual labour or lower service positions, if they were lucky enough to have a job at all. Driving to the airport the following day, I saw a large township next to the highway. It was an entirely unplanned settlement some ten kilometres outside of the city where presumably most of its inhabitants sought employment. The small houses were built with corrugated iron and were immensely densely packed leaving just narrow unpaved lanes in between. At the airport, I talked with a shoeshine man while waiting for the departure of my flight back to Johannesburg. Having discovered a sympathetic ear, he opened up about the hardships of life. He was lucky, in relative terms, to have a job at the airport relatively close to the townships. But the job paid a pittance and it was virtually impossible to survive on the income. And there was little hope for anything better. A bitterness came through in his voice.

South Africa’s development after the democratic transition has been positive and first of all peaceful, thanks largely to the wisdom of Nelson Mandela and his associates, like Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who understood that South Africa had to continue on its multiracial path and put the painful inequalities and injustices behind. But one had to wonder at the patience of the people who had seen so little improvement in their lives despite the promise of majority rule, while they saw a minority—no longer determined solely on the colour of one’s skin—thrive and grow rich. Something must be done about the growing gap in standards of living lest the multitude left behind lose its patience and take matters into its own hands. In that case, everyone would lose and the regional superpower could no longer be a model for its neighbours.

Development with growing inequalities: Johannesburg

2011-09-21T22:47:00.000-07:00

“The murder rate is down to some 15,000 per year—and they’re proud of it.” This was Indran speaking as we were driving on the highway from Sandton in northern Johannesburg towards Pretoria past some areas that were not quite as nice as the sunny suburb. At each junction there were men selling anything between bath toys to paper towels to the passing cars. All of the men were black. Indran clarified: “Of course it’s progress. The murder rate used to be 30,000 a year just in the 1990s. But it’s still pretty high for a nation of only some 50 million people!” According to him, class had replaced race as the new distinguishing factor in South Africa, a country with one of the highest rates of inequalities in the world. And there was a lot of alcohol abuse, which led to aggression and many other problems. Having consumed adequate quantities of good South African wine with him over the past three nights, I knew Indran was no prude. His judgement was a factual assessment of what was happening. As Deputy Director-General of the country’s Public Service Commission, a serious watchdog, he knew what he talked about.

We had just spent some days in an international conference that our respective offices co-organized around the topic of national evaluation capacity and how evaluation can be used to enhance accountability in public administration. We organized the conference in Sandton at the oddly named sprawling hotel complex Balalaika. Sandton is a nice place, perfectly safe to walk around along its clean streets. Even the stalls selling African trinkets around Maude Street, across from Deutsche Bank and HSBC head offices, are neat and orderly. Like in many other places where the original city centre has become too dangerous and unruly, a new centre has evolved on the outskirts where things are kept more under control (Gigiri with its Village Market outside of Nairobi comes readily to mind).

On Sunday, I walked over to the Nelson Mandela Square, a huge complex of shops and restaurants that would put any American or European mall at shame with its style and sophistication. At the centre of the large square surrounded by tempting terraces serving food and drinks stands a six-meter tall statue of Nelson Mandela. On this Sunday, a live band was playing smooth jazz and bossa nova on the balcony of a Thai restaurant just behind the great leader’s bronze head. Talk about globalization!

South Africa’s divided history is equally well-known as it is brutal. The conservative Dutch settlers moved into the Cape of Good Hope already in the mid-1600s creating a society where time had stopped for three centuries. They started spreading across the southern cone of the continent through their Great Trek of 1836 getting into conflict with pastoral tribes herding their cattle in the areas the Boers wanted to settle in. Then there was the gold rush of the late-19th century and the ensuing Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902. South Africa was contested land between the blacks and the whites, between the Boers and the British (and before that the fight included the Portuguese, the French and the Dutch, while the alliances constantly changed), and between different African population groups (who also were occasionally recruited to support one side or the other).

The Union of South Africa was finally formed in 1910 uniting Boer and British controlled areas, soon restricting black people to specific reservations. The official policy of racial discrimination, apartheid, was finally formalized legally following the electoral wins (of course, only the whites had the vote) by the National Party in 1948. What followed was a decades-long period of systematic discrimination and racial hatred that only ended when Nelson Mandela, the leader of the banned African National Congress (ANC), was released from jail where he had spent 27 years by 1990, and then democratically elected as the first black President of the Republic of South Africa in 1994. Mandela, now 93, became an iconic figure, perhaps the most admired leader in the world, by his visionary leadership, clear thinking and braveness. With associates, such as Archbishop Desmond Tutu, he made the case for reconciliation, and against all odds was able to avoid major civil unrest or bloodshed in post-apartheid South Africa.

Mandela stepped down from the presidency in 1999 after just one term and nobody can blame him for giving up official duties too early. He clearly had done more than anyone could reasonably expect from one individual. Furthermore, he had seen so many African liberation leaders become ‘Big Men’ and never voluntarily leave office. In all fairness, there are a few exceptions amongst the first generation of post-colonial leaders, such as Tanzania’s Mwalimu (‘Teacher’) Julius Nyerere and Zambia’s Kenneth Kaunda. Regretfully, both had largely run down the economies of their countries, not through self-aggrandisement but through misguided economic policies; both nevertheless achieved ‘elder statesman’ status by gracefully withdrawing when the time came.

The worst remaining offender is the leader of Zimbabwe, South Africa’s neighbour, Robert Mugabe. When he led his country, then Northern Rhodesia, to independence in 1980 after a prolonged civil war with the privileged white settlers, Mugabe was seen as a freedom fighter with serious ideals and credentials. Alas, history has proven otherwise and the ruthless old man has not hesitated to use extreme violence to kill and intimidate his own people who have dared to protest the economic ruin and starvation that his policies have caused. Recent reports indicate that the now 87-year-old dictator has been diagnosed with prostate cancer and has about 1.5 years to live. His departure will solve a problem that has been an embarrassment to South Africa, as the bigger neighbour has not been able to influence Mugabe to step down or at least change his policies (the mediation efforts of Mandela’s successor Thabo Mbeki were widely regarded as half-hearted).

Unfortunately, ANC leadership after Mandela has not been equally wise as Mandela was. The political leaders of the party that dominates South Africa have assumed features that Mandela wanted expressly to avoid. To him, it was important to ensure the independence of the judiciary and freedom of press. His heirs have increasingly succumbed to the temptation to control these sometimes inconvenient institutions.

At the time of the shift from the first majority president to the next, the Republic of South Africa was developing surprisingly harmoniously, given the extent of hatred, violence and discrimination of past decades, and experienced a steady economic growth of 5-6% annually year after year. The past racial injustices were being acknowledged and addressed to the extent possible and a democratic society was being built (although in all honesty, Mandela and Tutu’s ‘reconciliation’ were a compromise and seen by many as not dealing adequately with past injustices, as explained by Alec Russell in his superb new book, After Mandela: The Battle for the Soul of South Africa).

The fundamentals of the economy are still quite strong, thanks largely to the rich mineral resources (including diamonds, gold and many other minerals that are in high demand) that have protected the country against the global economic crisis. Mandela also succeeded in avoiding an exodus of skilled professionals, most of whom were white or Asian, experienced by other countries, such as Zimbabwe. Nevertheless, poverty is rampant amongst people, while a minority is getting richer by the day The UN ranks South Africa as a middle-income country with a medium level of human development based on health, education and income statistics. In 2010 South Africa ranked 110th in human development amongst the 169 countries ranked. What brings down South Africa’s ratings are a low life expectancy of just 52 years (largely due to the HIV/AIDS epidemic) and inequality in opportunities to education, health and economic development. The mostly black underclass still suffers from powerlessness, with unemployment rates of some 30%. Russell quotes a 2008 employment report by the United Association of South Africa, a trade union, that found that at that time, 14 years after the democratic shift, whites’ incomes on average were 450 times higher than those of the blacks—and economic inequalities had actually been rising, despite the increasing number of blacks entering the middle class. It is not saying that the different groups would not have equal access under the law. It’s more like in the USA: opportunities for liberty and the pursuit of happiness are limited for a large number of people by structural constraints.

Of course, affirmative action was necessary after decades of legislated and harshly enforced racial oppression. The whites and the Asians are still doing fine, largely thanks to Mandela’s insistence on national reconciliation. I certainly have no intention to imply that all black leaders would be corrupt or incompetent. There is a highly professional black middle class, steadily growing, with a strong role in both the private sector as well as public administration. One good example is Mashwale Diphofa, the Director-General of the Public Service Commission (and Indran’s boss). With a strong ethical backbone, high professional skills and political savvy, Mash is a model that many officials from the so called ‘developed’ countries could emulate. What’s more to emulate is that the stylish and smooth man knows his music. I was amazed how we could discuss jazz together after we had witnessed an exciting dance and music performance at Balalaika (no Russian triangular string instruments included).

One of the greatest challenges to South Africa is the high prevalence of HIV infection and consequently AIDS. The disease affects very much the middle class and professionals in their prime who would be so badly needed to contribute to the economy and to enhance the performance of the civil service. One evening over some excellent local Pinotage, Indran told me how he had recently lost an assistant, a young and highly capable woman in the Office of the Public Service Commission. Initially, one does not notice anything and for a long while the only visible change is that the person starts losing weight (not necessarily a bad sign in this country of many large people). But at some point of time, after months, it starts to become evident that something is seriously wrong. The victim becomes lethargic and loses energy. Then the cheeks sink in and a special look appears on the person’s face. It’s like her eyes had gotten bigger and they just stare out of the increasingly skull-like visage. After that, the end often comes quickly.

The topic of AIDS has been a political hot potato in South Africa, to a large extent for political reasons. Initially Mandela attempted to address it, but faced so much resistance from his audiences that even he had to make a calculation of the trade-offs between pushing the issue and political survival. The societal forces were just dead against him. Regular people would accuse him of encouraging promiscuity as he advocated for condom use, while the truly promiscuous politicians and power-brokers certainly did not want to hear about the topic. Mandela’s successor as President, Thabo Mbeki, notoriously questioned the causal linkage between HIV and AIDS. The current President Jacob Zuma was accused of (and acquitted from ) raping a daughter of a political ally—more than 30 years his junior—she herself an HIV positive AIDS activist. Zuma has some twenty children from five wives. In the meantime, this conspiracy of silence continues to kill people and take a toll on the very development of the society.

After somewhat complicated shortcuts Indran had followed upon instructions from the GPS, we were approaching Lanseria International Airport constructed only years ago in the middle of the rolling hills between Johannesburg and the capital Pretoria. Indran turned the BMW to an apparent entrance to the airport and we suddenly hit a checkpoint with two uniformed guards. One of the guards, a friendly black woman, approached us and explained that this was a special entrance and one needed a permit to pass through here. The alternative was to continue on the main road and go through the main gate, but that would be another 19 km. We opted for getting the permit, which was free but only obtainable by driving to a trailer parked some way at the side. There we found two more uniformed officers, one resting his head on his arms apparently asleep in the afternoon heat pounding on the container they called office. Paperwork was filled for both of us by the more alert officer, while the sleepy one took my passport and studied it at length, holding each page against the light wondering at the perforations and watermarks that were supposed to make it counterfeit-proof, before handing it back to me. The alert one asked me whether I was carrying any fire arms. “Not today,” I responded, but wondered whether this was a relevant concern upon entering an airport (“Oh yeah, they’re obsessed with firearms,” responded Indran casually).

Off we sped and after several twists and turns around airline offices, hangars and cargo areas we reached the spanking new terminal building. From there on, everything was smooth as silk. While I sat on the observation deck waiting for the departure of my Kulula jet towards Cape Town, I considered the balance between the benefits of keeping four uniformed personnel filling in forms for non-fee entry permit to the premises vs. the need for expediency to attract more passengers to use this new airport instead of the established O.R. Tambo International Airport serving the twin cities. Clearly, this was an employment scheme and, as such, it had much merit. At least these guards were proudly wearing their uniforms and receiving salaries, thus not entering the ranks of the unemployed, desperate and potentially violent. To me, there is great value in that for human dignity and contributions to society.

I also pondered what the word ‘international’ actually referred to in the case of the Lanseria airfield where tiny Cessna and Piper aircraft kept landing and taking off while I sipped my cool drink.

Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents, by Ian Buruma

2011-09-04T09:33:00.001-07:00

In this short and reasoned treatise, Ian Buruma addresses a central issue of democracy, namely the separation of church and state, from a historical, social and political perspective.

The book is divided into three main parts. In the first, Full Tents and Empty Cathedrals, Buruma juxtaposes the experiences in Europe and in America, providing an insightful analysis of what separates—and unites—the old and the new continent, including the role of born-again evangelical Christians in American politics. His conclusion, perhaps surprisingly, is that the gulf between ‘secular’ Europe and more traditionally religious America is not as large as it often is made to be. Buruma writes: “Our histories are not the same and we have different notions of who we are. But everywhere people are trying to cope with the confusions of a fast-changing world by reaching for fixed—and quite often newly made up—identities based on race, religion, or national culture” (p. 46). This summarizes one of the main theses in the book: that religious fervor must be understood not in theological, but in social and political terms.

The second part of the book, Oriental Wisdom, turns attention to China and Japan. He draws parallels and explains differences in history that led to different outcomes. Buruma is particularly well versed in Japan’s history since the Meiji Restoration through the pre-war years until today, and this knowledge translates into a clear analysis in this book, as well as several others by him. He provides an interesting analysis of Maoism in China and Emperor worship in Japan as examples where state and spiritual authority coincided. While religion today plays a smaller role in these East Asian countries, Buruma traces the rise of a variety of cults and other religious groups, such as the Falun Gong, to the spiritual vacuum left by the collapse of Maoism in China and the prohibition of political participation by the Chinese people. Similarly in Japan the focus on chasing economic prosperity has left such a vacuum.

The final part, Enlightenment Values, focuses on how Western liberal societies should deal with the rising multiculturalism in our societies. This is a particularly balanced and coherent section of the book. Buruma draws from well-known cases that have led to the Kulturkampf in Europe, over issues such as the cultural rights (to discriminate against women or for women to wear a veil) of immigrant groups in Europe against the demands for them to integrate into the host societies and their norms. It all boils down to a confrontation between those who defend anyone’s right to stick to his or her culture of origin (with no consideration of its respect for host country values) vs. those (probably in the majority in Europe now) who want immigrants to integrate into the society. It is very interesting to follow Buruma’s argumentation around the very difficult question between people’s right to their own culture vs. respecting ‘universal’ – or at least those of the majority of people in the country – values of Enlightenment. This is a dilemma many liberals in the West face, torn between the values of freedom that we so cherish and the knee-jerk desire to respect others’ cultural values, how much at cross-purposes they might be with ours. Buruma points out how it is often the same people (many of them left leaning intellectuals) who in the 1960s and 1970s defended Third World rights against Western (cultural) imperialism that now are most worried about the spread of illiberal values into Europe through immigration from poor countries. The comparisons between the different approaches towards immigrant groups taken by the UK, Holland and France is quite illuminating.

He discusses at some length problems related, especially, to the integration of Muslims (both immigrant and those born there) into the European society. One interesting example is the case of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who by now is a talk show star in the US, who having overcome her challenges in the home country of Somalia and the morally relativist Holland now fights for the rights of Muslim women to break away from the oppression of their original culture. Another case that Buruma discusses at some length is that of Salman Rushdie who earned himself a fatwa for his book The Satanic Verses and had to go into hiding as a result.

Buruma draws a clear line against terrorists and religious fundamentalists who resort to violence. “The use of violence in a democracy, for whatever reason, can only be met with force,” he states (p. 115). He recognizes that while religious orthodoxy and political extremism can be linked, they are not the same thing nor does one necessarily lead to the other. However, discussing the cases of Mohammed Bouyeri, the Dutch born son of Moroccan immigrants who killed the film maker Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam, and Mohammad Sidique Khan, leader of the 7/7 terrorists who bombed the London underground, Buruma traces their violent terrorism and ‘religious awakening’ to the isolation and cultural rootlessness they experienced in the European countries they were born into.

Buruma concludes convincingly that the separation of state and religion is quite essential in a democracy. A well functioning democratic society does not have to share the same social or religious values as long as everybody abides by the society’s rules and laws. He also makes a valuable distinction between respecting other people, while not necessarily respecting their beliefs. “Liberal democracies are not well served by laws that limit free speech, such as laws against blasphemy or denying the Holocaust or the Armenian genocide,” he writes, and continues “(T)here are ways, however, to respect the dignity of fellow citizens without recourse to the law” (p. 123).

Ian Buruma’s book is fabulously erudite. The writing is stellar and lucid, anchored firmly in the writings of Enlightenment philosophers, such as Spinoza and Hume, as well as Tocqueville, Confucius and others. He gets to the heart of the matter without getting bogged down in unnecessary detail. Born in Holland from Dutch and British parents, Buruma spent a significant portion of his career in Japan and China. He now teaches at Bard College in New York. He is thus extraordinarily well placed to understand the historical and social situations in these countries located on three continents. He ends with paraphrasing Confucius: Let us leave the spirits aside, until we know how best to serve men.

Helsinki Summer

2011-07-20T17:06:00.000-07:00

Helsinki, my old hometown, which I left more than half a lifetime ago, is a fantastic summer city. During the twelve days I just spent there, the temperature dropped below 25 degrees Celsius only during one day. At times, the heat and humidity were almost unbearable when the sun was burning down from a cloudless sky for almost 20 hours every day. Especially the nights were tough as none of the older buildings have air conditioning and the thick stone walls store heat during the day, which then radiates into the living quarters during night. I suppose the summer nights just are not meant for sleeping.

During days like these, the city is a true delight, with people strolling around languidly in their skimpy summer wear or lying down on the grass in the many parks. Even those having to work tend to take long lunch breaks in places like the Esplanade or the old market place, and then leave their offices in mid-afternoon to spend another day’s worth of light evenings. Terraces seem to sprout everywhere in the city serving cold beer and cider to cool down the dehydrated denizens. Not to forget gin long drink—lovingly known as ‘lonkero’ (meaning tentacle) by the Finns. A readymade concoction consisting of gin and grapefruit soda invented for the 1952 Helsinki Olympics, lonkero will celebrate its 60th anniversary next year—still going strong! And for better or for worse, the Finns like their brews, which they on occasion consume in somewhat unreasonable quantities. At some 9.7 liters per capita annually, Finnish alcohol consumption falls in the international mid-range (for example, for USA the figure is 8.4 liters and for Russia 11 liters), but instead of sipping a glass of wine with our meals, the Finns have the tendency to down it all at once. Not even the high prices, which are rather striking for someone coming from outside of the euro zone, can dampen demand. (In fact, Finland has the dubious distinction of being overall the third most expensive country in Europe, after Norway and Switzerland.)

The Helsinki cityscape has changed considerably since my days there. For one, there has been a notable liberalization of entertainment policies. Restaurants can now stay open until early in the morning (except for the terraces, which must chase their customers indoors at 10 pm so that they don’t disturb the sleep of nearby residents) and they now can—and many do—import their own wines directly from the producing countries. Although not exactly legal, the police do not interfere when people walk around the city or rest in the parks with their own drinks as long as they do not cause any public disturbance.

Another major change in the past couple of decades has been the rapid internationalization of the city. Tourists have of course visited the country also before, but no t in these numbers. Today, walking around Helsinki one can hear a multitude of languages, not only those of the neighboring Scandinavian countries, Russia and Estonia, but virtually any imaginable European and non-European lingo. There are hordes of East Asians, most likely thanks to the national airline, Finnair, which offers the best gateway from Europe to Asia, with daily flights to several destinations in Japan, China, Thailand, India and elsewhere. I stayed in my brother’s apartment and each morning I would wake up to huge tourist buses hauling visitors to the adjacent Temppeliaukio church, famous for having been built inside a rock.

There are also unprecedented numbers of foreign residents in Finland. Many, like Victor who hails from Brazil and married my niece Jenni, have come for personal reasons. Others, in waves of refugees: Chileans after the 1973 coup that killed democratically elected president Salvador Allende and ushered in a period of military dictatorship; then Vietnamese boat people; later Somalis fleeing the chaos in their fractured homeland for safety or for economic reasons; next Libyans, whom Finland has pledged to the United Nations to accommodate. The opponents of Finland’s joining the European Union in 1995 attempted to scare voters that our pure country would be overrun by foreigners because of our strong economy and social security. Such a massive invasion, naturally, never materialized. The Portuguese sardine fishermen or the unemployed Italian autoworkers never moved up to Finland to seek employment with Nokia or the forest industry. The long winters and the thorny language, added to the Europeans’ general reluctance to move outside of their native comfort zone, took care of that. Nevertheless, immigration has steadily increased and with it tensions between the native Finns and the newer inhabitants. One group that is now conspicuous in the city consists of Romanian gypsies who beg professionally on the streets. Their presence has divided the citizenship into the liberals who defend their human rights and wish to extend the social benefits to them, and the average guy who finds them to be a general nuisance.

My friend Ilkka who works in forensic science had been briefed by the Helsinki chief of police who had provided some statistics. Out of the top 20 most wanted criminals in Finland, only one is currently a foreigner, compared with 17 in Sweden. This is, however, rapidly changing and, according to the chief, the next wave of dangerous foreign criminals has already entered the country. Twenty years ago, 17 of the 20 most wanted in Sweden would have been Finns, I pointed out.

Tensions created by the new foreigners in Finland, as well as the plans to bail out Greece and other EU countries whose economy has gone south (even further south, that is, from the Finnish point of view), led to stunning electoral results earlier in the spring. A xenophobic protest party, True Finns, emerged as the third largest party in the parliament. This Finnish version of the Tea Party sees the European Union as the biggest threat to the country’s sovereignty and way of life. Now, in the Finnish political landscape there are numerous parties—some of which survive only one electoral cycle—and no one will ever gain the majority of the vote. In fact, there are several, including the conservative National Coalition Party, the Social Democrats, the rural oriented Centre Party and, now, the True Finns, that all hover around the 20 percent mark. Given the rather parochial perspectives of the True Finns, they were not able to form a government despite their win. Consequently, the leader of the National Coalition Party was charged with the task of putting together a government consisting of its own representatives, the Social Democrats and a bunch of smaller parties. This includes the Greens, who lost a number of seats in the latest election but still got two portfolios in the new government. (I had the pleasure of meeting briefly with the new Minister for International Development, Heidi Hautala, as she was interviewed in a TV program produced by my old friend Matti.) The electoral loss may have been a boon to the Greens, as it shocked many passive supporters to join the party in unprecedented numbers.

On the first Saturday of July the Helsinki Pride events culminated in a massive parade in support of the gay and lesbian communities. The parade passing through the centre of the city demonstrated great solidarity amongst the population, gay and straight alike. A year ago, there had been an attack on the parade by a gang of young right-wingers who used pepper spray and some other gas on the marchers. The perpetrators, all dressed in black, were soon arrested and dealt with. The huge participation in the parade this year must have been partly due to the actions of these nitwits. One of the key demands associated with Helsinki Pride this year was the call for a gender neutral marriage law. Most Finns would either support such legislation or pay little attention to the matter. However, due to the inclusion of the tiny Christian Democratic Party in the new coalition government, the proposal was dropped from the government’s program.

Another distinction of Helsinki is that it has more live music performances per capita than any other European city. Finland is quite well known internationally for its classical musicians and opera singers, like Karita Mattila whose performances at the New York Metropolitan have delighted opera fans (as well as those who found her nude dance as Salome titillating), as well as orchestra conductors, starting with our most famous composer Jean Sibelius. (My friend Vesa, who maintains the Sibelius website linked herewith, has recently published a massive 1,000-page volume about Finnish conductors for which he received the prestigious Finlandia prize for non-fiction.) But most of the live music takes place in clubs (and during the summer in the parks) where varieties of rock, blues and pop are performed.

Unfortunately, the jazz scene these days leaves much to be desired (a glance at the programs of the summer’s ‘jazz festivals’ in Finland reveals that some of the key performers include stars like Tom Jones, Elton John and Jethro Tull, who hardly are at the forefront of contemporary jazz). The most popular joint is Storyville, which I visited one evening with my friend Erkki. On most evenings, the music on offer in the pleasant basement club can barely be called jazz. At best, it tends to fall into the ‘happy jazz’ category or, if you’re lucky, the blues. Storyville’s attraction seems to be more as a venue where middle-aged women and men on the prowl can find each other and dance until it’s time to go home around 3 am (but then the question is, whose home?). Somehow, more ‘serious’ jazz has had a hard time finding a permanent home in Helsinki in the past few years. Even the local franchise of the legendary New York club, Birdland, went bust and closed its doors after just a year of operation. There is a new club, Koko, which I heard about—that it is good and fills a niche for contemporary jazz—but didn’t have the chance to visit.

On my last morning before returning to New York the following day, I walked to the nearby Töölöntori market place for a cup of coffee. Then I continued on a lengthy walk around the shoreline. Helsinki is built on a peninsula and a large number of islands in the Gulf of Finland, so the sea is never far. The Hietaniemi beach was getting crowded already in the morning. People had spread their towels on the sand or on the rocks and grass a bit further from the sea. Pretty girls in bikinis mixed with families and older folks taking in the sun and frolicking in the waves. Had I had one more day I would have risked sunburn and skin cancer and joined them. But alas, time flies and holidays are never long enough.

The rest of the day was spent with my friend Kari. We met early in the afternoon in the city centre. The day was already hot and the previous night had been quite late, so we decided to sit down, refresh ourselves with a lonkero and plan our route. We ended up walking for kilometers in the midday sunshine, exploring shops where I would purchase things to bring back home—Finnish music, a couple of novels (it is too seldom I read in my native language anymore), food items (such as hard bread, fish preserves, mustard) that may have more childhood nostalgia than actual nutritional value—and stopping at intervals to gather strength on a shady terrace. The long day—and my vacation back in the old country—ended on Kari’s balcony where we sat listening to an eclectic collection of music from our youth—ranging from old favorites (Kate Bush, Boz Scaggs and others) to 1970s Finnish progressive jazz of Eero Koivistoinen—watching the sun go down but never quite set far behind the horizon.

Music for Lights @ Baruch Performing Arts Center, June 12, 2011

2011-06-20T06:00:00.000-07:00

It is now three months since the unprecedented earthquake and tsunami ravaged northeastern Japan and, although much of Japan has returned to normal, recovery in the regions directly hit is still far away. Still now more than 90,000 people stay in temporary shelters. Then there is the whole nuclear hazard caused by the meltdown of three reactors in the Fukushima nuclear power plant. The Japanese authorities have clearly been complicit with TEPCO, the company that runs the plant, in playing down the extent of the disaster and it has come to light that the radiation escaped in the accident has been twice the level that was officially reported. All of this has implications to how soon—if ever—the inhabitants from around Fukushima can return home to restart their lives.

Music for Lights was a benefit concert for Japan relief efforts organized by two young Japanese women, Jun Kubo and Hiromi Abe, based in New York. Both are versatile musicians comfortable in a variety of idioms ranging from Western classical to jazz. The concert was held in the beautiful Engelman Recital Hall of the Baruch Performing Arts Center in New York City’s Gramercy Park neighborhood.

The two women started the concert with three duets for flute and piano. The first, Sonatine pour Flûte et Piano by Pierre Sancan (1916-2008), was a new acquaintance for me and I was taken by the beauty of the music. Jun Kubo’s golden flute sounded lovely in the modern piece. Her tone is very smooth, especially in the lower register. I have earlier heard her in Meg Ogura’s Pan Asian Jazz Orchestra and I have to say that her clean flute sounds more convincing in this classical context, rather than the contemporary band. Next Jun Kubo played Kojo no Tsuki, an old Japanese song which belongs to the shakuhachi repertoire. Kubo started the song with another type of bamboo flute, the transverse shinobue, before switching back to the Western flute. The arrangement was impressionistic and the overall performance quite low key. Hiromi Abe stumbled barely noticeably in some of the piano interludes. The ladies’ performance ended with Sicilienne et Burlesque by Alfredo Casella (1883-1947), a rather playful piece in three parts, which suited the temperament of the two musicians well.

In between the pieces, Jun Kubo, who left Japan at 10 but keeps close contact there and even speaks the language fluently, told the audience how she had been in a meeting in Tokyo when the earthquake struck. By that time, she had already been five months pregnant. She had initially thought it was one of the “routine” Japanese earthquakes, but realized that this was something different when all the Japanese colleagues rushed screaming under their desks.

The star of the event was Jun Kubo’s former teacher, Robert Dick. He has been called by some—and with some justification—the best flute player in the world. Dick is technically superior and enormously creative on flutes of various length. Like his young student, Dick is enormously versatile and at home in many kinds of music. Unlike her, though, he can be quite untamed when the music so requires. This was the third time I had the chance to witness his live performance and every time the setting has been entirely different. Again this evening the music presented a different side of the maestro. Dick briefed the rather conservative looking audience before starting his performance, saying that the best way to listen to his music was, well, just to listen to it: “Don’t worry about the flute, that’s my job.”

Robert Dick began his segment of the concert with his own 1973 composition, Afterlight, an expressionistic exploration of the flute in which he blew two, three, even four tones at the same time, at times creating a rather eerie atmosphere. He then moved on to play the Sonata Appassionata composed by Sigfried Karg-Elert (1877-1933) in 1917, thus establishing his classical music bona fides before returning to his own compositions. What followed was Bells for Diz, a bass flute improvisation dedicated to Dizzy Gillespie who, as Robert Dick remarked, had two different stage personalities: one extremely focused when playing the trumpet and another, bubbling and lively when playing Afro-Caribbean percussion. Bells for Diz was an homage to the latter and the creative composer-performer used the big curved flute to generate an array of percussive sounds using the big keypads and blowing into the flute in various ways. The resulting music was inventive and joyful.

The final piece introduced a Dick invention, the glissando headjoint, which on the flute performs the same function as the whammy bar on an electric guitar. The inventor was initially inspired by Jimi Hendrix' guitar playing to explore how to create similar effects on the flute. He then worked over many years with instrument makers to realize his invention. The piece that concluded his part of the concert was a blues in which Robert Dick stretched the possibilities of the flute. The piece started and ended with slow slide guitar like licks. In between, he demonstrated a resourceful musicality and stunning technique moving from the blues to West African native flute tonalities and back via impressive runs.

Following Robert Dick in a concert is an unthankful position to be in. Therefore it was just as well that the next performer, singer Sahoko Sato, switched gears and genres entirely. The mezzo-soprano sang four songs accompanied by Rikako Asanuma (this young pianist is a native of Iwate, the prefecture in Japan closest to the epicenter of the March earthquake). These included Ave Maria by Pietro Mascagni (1963-1945); Kono Michi, composed by Kousaku Yamada (1886-1965) to a poem by Hakushu Kitahara (1885-1942); Chiisana Sora, an unusually conventional song by Toru Takemitsu (1930-1996), which he had written for a 1962 Japanese TV drama for children; and a Rogers & Hammerstein number, You’ll Never Walk Alone.

The concert ended with a tune by one of the co-organizers, Hiromi Abe, who herself hails from Soma town in Fukushima prefecture. She told about the panicky times when it took her more than 24 hours after the earthquake to be able to get in touch with her parents who still live there (we had the same harrowing experience in trying to connect with my mother-in-law in Iwate). Abe’s parents were safe but their town lost 500 people to the tsunami. Now Soma, just over 50 km from the Fukushima reactor, faces an uncertain future. Hiromi Abe ended the concert with her own song, To the People of Our Hometown Who Became the Light, with English lyrics translated by her friend Hitomi Demura-Devore. Sitting behind the grand piano, Abe accompanied herself as she sang, slightly tentatively, her mellow jazz-influenced ballad. It was clear to the audience that the words that she sang in a husky voice came straight from the heart.

Oran Etkin @ Barbes, May 21, 2011

2011-05-22T17:49:00.000-07:00

This Saturday night some forty people witnessed excellent intercultural musical cooperation in the shabby backroom of Barbès in Brooklyn where Israel-born Oran Etkin was joined by two Malian musicians, Makane Kouyate and Yacouba Sissoko. The combination of clarinet, kora and calabash is unusual enough, but the musical cross-fertilization and sheer talent of the trio made the event memorable. In the beginning, I thought the music lacked a bit in foundation, because there was no bass in the band. Both kora and clarinet play in treble pitches. However, this shortcoming—mostly in my own head and expectations—was soon overcome, largely because of Makane’s amazing handling of the calabash. While playing complex rhythms and a remarkable range of tones by handling the single drum with his hands and fingers, he was also able to produce a steady bass beat with the base of his hand.

The music was basically based on West African rhythms and tones to which Oran brought his jazz and klezmer influenced clarinet. The concert started with a joyful tune, to be followed by a more melancholy love song, in which Oran switched to bass clarinet. The entire performance alternated between speedier jams and thoughtful and invariably very beautiful pieces mostly featuring the deep sounds of the larger curved clarinet.

Makane was the flashiest performer of the evening. In addition to his calabash, he sang the vocal numbers in an expressive lamenting voice. His percussion work was marvelous. Without warning, he would change the rhythm into double tempo and play flamboyant solos while the kora would keep the tune moving with a steady ostinato. All in all, there was a phenomenal cooperation between the musicians, with the clarinet and kora joining in unison as the drum would strike powerful thumps and bangs to signify a change in a segment or to end a song in a catchy phrase.

Barbès is a small bar and music space in Brooklyn’s Park Slope. It is run by two Frenchmen who named it after the Paris neighborhood, which has a large North African immigrant population. The Brooklyn place has a distinctly Parisian underground feel and a clientele who perfectly fits into the scene. The age range is wide but a certain bohemian demeanor seems to unite the generations. The highly atmospheric music was further lubricated by freely flowing wine and cocktails, which the patrons imbibed in quantities. Although I was irrigating my own throat only with Diet Coke, I did not find any of my fellow audience to be the least annoying, not even those who were clearly quite well marinated.

Oran Etkin is a remarkably creative musician. A student of Yusef Lateef, he has taken after his legendary teacher in his open mind and broad musical vision that bridges a whole range of genres and cultural traditions in an eclectic manner. Lateef (born in 1920 and still going strong) has for decades been one of my greatest inspirations just for the reason of his limitless imagination and incorporation of African, Middle Eastern and Asian music into his own special style. In fact, one of the most intriguing numbers of the evening was a quirky slow blues-based tune that Oran said he had written for his mentor and played on a wailing clarinet. It also took the kora to directions and dimensions that are not normally heard on the stringed instrument. Yacouba Sissoko, however, is a master kora player who has the facility and musical sense to manage such challenges.

The concert was further spiced up by Oran’s good-humored banter in between the tunes. He encouraged the audience to participate in an African style call and response chorus in one of the songs sung by Makane and he also gave people the license to dance, which they took up with delight. During the last number, Yekeke, I observed a middle-aged white couple who were totally absorbed in the moment. The woman shook in overtime as if possessed by a Mandingo spirit, while her partner wearing a pale blazer seemed to imitate former President George W. Bush when he joined in a tribal dance performance during one of his visits to Africa. But how could I blame them? Such was the intensity of the music and rhythm produced by this unorthodox acoustic trio.

Delhi Heat

2011-05-14T13:12:00.000-07:00

Delhi is hot. I mean not warm and sunny. I mean searing hot. The sun is shining from a cloudless sky and the temperature is around +40 degrees Celsius. As we walked the few hundred metres to have lunch at the India International Centre, Jayati with whom I am working here remarked: “You’re lucky you weren’t here last week; now it’s a bit cooler.” But according to the forecast would soon again get warmer—and indeed, on May 12th the year’s record was broken with an official high of +43.1 degrees Celsius. Khushwant Singh, the famous Indian writer, sums it up in his latest, The Sunset Club: “It is said hell is a very hot place. If you want a foretaste of what may be your fate, you should spend the month of June in Delhi.” It is now May, and maybe this is only a foretaste of what comes after.

Last time I was here, in January, just four months ago, it was freezing. The cold and damp fog of winter enveloped the city for weeks. A dozen or more people died as the frigid winds blew down to the northern plains from the Himalayas. Now they die of the heat. People with no shelter, exposed to the vagaries of climate. It is the rag pickers and the poor elderly who perish when the weather gets too cold or too hot. Or when it floods. Delhi is renowned for its floods when the monsoon rains come later in the year. The river Yamuna, which crosses the vast conglomeration, rises above its banks. The slums are soaked and again poor people are washed away with the waters. Which kills more people, I ask myself. So far, it is not the cold of the winter, although the seasons are getting quite extreme lately. Which way would I prefer myself, if I had the unenviable choice? They say one feels numb and warm before one passes away from freezing. Drowning is supposed to bring along a calm, with a light that shines presumably from somewhere above. But how do they know? As far as I can see, nobody has really died and come back to tell. I think that, considering the options, I’d prefer succumbing to the heat. Maybe my brain is already overheating, as I'm thinking this way.

In the evening the heat subsides with the sun and it is actually quite pleasant. Hot and dry, but not suffocating. A couple of nights ago, I headed out by myself, as my travelling companion had acquired an acute case of ‘Delhi Belly.’ No wonder, as in this heat all kinds of micro-organisms thrive. It was more of a wonder in January, when it was cold, that I acquired a bad case of the same ailment. I attribute it to complacency. Then I had thought it was safe enough to eat salads and other uncooked food. Obviously I was badly mistaken. After a couple of agonizing days when I finally was strong enough to get on my feet I headed to the Max Healthcare Super Speciality Hospital. I could see why today so many people, including Westerners, choose to have themselves treated in Indian hospitals if they get gravely ill. Of course, this option is only available to those who can afford it; which is to say, perhaps the top 10 percent of Indians plus the foreigners who see the value of being treated here. The Max was a sprawling complex in a park-like setting, spanking clean, friendly, efficient and cheap by Western standards. After just a quarter of an hour wait, I was examined by the highly professional Dr. Monica Mahajan who discharged me with a set of prescriptions that I was able to pick up from the ground floor dispensary on my way out. Give me this anytime over an overpriced and unfriendly American hospital where they ask for your religious affiliation and credit card before they even start treating you.

This recent night I was perfectly fine and jumped into the tiny white Tata taxi that I had hired on a weekly basis to take me around. I asked the dark skinned moustachioed driver, Shiva Dayal, to take me to Khan Market. I wanted to visit the two fabulous bookstores operating at the popular place. Just a few years ago, this was just a local market. Today it is one of the fanciest shopping areas in New Delhi with lots of boutiques frequented by fancy ladies sporting expensive jewellery and handbags. Khan Market was crowded, the lights of the shops beckoned browsers. I first went to Bahri Sons, but soon realized they were about to close for the night. The two young women tending the cashier were no longer interested in making a sell. Instead they were counting the stack of bills the shop had collected from customers during the day, joking and giggling with each other. I decided to head to Faqir-Chand & Sons, a small but magnificent book handler not far away in the same row of shops. They gave me more leeway time-wise, as well as service-wise, and I was able to browse through their amazing and amazingly disorganized collections. In a place where the newest books on politics and international affairs lie next to an assortment of other tomes with no apparent connection through their topics—Jack London’s Call of the Wild adjacent to Mein Kampf; biographies of Che Guevara and the Beatles next to a photographic guide to sex positions from Kama Sutra—one can find true surprises that one just has to purchase. I picked up an inspiring anthology of Indian environmental writing, Voices in the Wilderness: Contemporary Wildlife Writings, edited by Prerna Singh Bindra.

Having picked my selection, I continued to an alley on the side of Khan Market where several small doors lead up to discreet little bars. Discreet only from the outside, however. I climbed the stairs to one called Route 04 and found a noisy room crowded with mostly young people, all Indian, consuming quantities of beer and cocktails. I could see plates of nachos carried to the tables to be consumed by the lively customers. Many of the women were breathtakingly beautiful, as many Indians are, with their large dark eyes lined with kohl. It was still early on a Monday evening, but the DJ in a corner was playing Led Zeppelin at high volume. A group of fashionable kids were sharing an oversized hookah at a close-by table. As it was happy hour, I got a second bottle of Tuborg for the same price. IMFL, they call it: Indian made foreign liquor. I could have stayed for the rest of the evening, but I was getting hungry and the somewhat depressing looking pseudo-Mexican/New Yorker snacks did not appeal to me.

I asked Shiva to recommend a restaurant with good Indian food that also served beer. The latter was a condition I would not compromise upon tonight. He said he knew just the place for me and off we drove to a new shopping centre close to Lodhi Gardens not far from Khan Market. The restaurant was called Pindi and boasted a neon sign promising genuine Mughal and Chinese cuisine. It was brightly lit with tables lining the sides of two adjacent oblong rooms. I sat at one and started browsing the menu. Soon Shiva returned with the bad news: the place had no beer. A discussion ensued involving the portentous proprietor and a couple of waiters mixing Hindi and English in a way that left me completely confused. I was led to a less conspicuous corner table and told to sit down. The paunchy owner assured me that things would work out. I would just have to be discreet about my beer. He only had two left and he had already told a group of some half a dozen foreigners sitting in the next room that there was no beer. The manager did not want them to see that someone arriving after them was actually served the cold drink. I agreed to be prudent and a waiter brought me a can carefully wrapped in a paper towel, so that it would not be obvious to any observer that the tin contained the coveted brew. With this, the evening proceeded. In my euphoria I ordered far too much food: succulent Rada mutton, with large chunks of soft lamb attached to bone served in an onion sauce containing minced lamb; delicious Karani Paneer, cottage cheese stewed in wonderful gravy; white long-grained rice.

India’s economy is growing rapidly and in the West this is often seen as a threat. People in the US complain about outsourcing of jobs, as well as about bright and hardworking Indian professionals taking jobs in America. Some of it may be true, but the thriving modern sector is still only a thin layer: icing on the boiling cake of India. Most of India is still very poor and this poverty has both a geographical dimension as well as many social aspects. Often these overlap. The UN ranks India 119th among 169 countries based on the Human Development Index. This ranking does not only include monetary income but takes into account aspects such as health and education. This puts India into the ‘medium human development’ category. The index, however, hides huge differences between people. These differences can be explained in numerous ways: historical and structural factors, the highly varying government policies between states, inefficiencies, corruption, the caste system, rural to urban migration, etc.

Some Indian states lie very far behind Delhi, Mumbai and other major cities in the level of human development. Within the big cities, too, the inequality between people is staggering. Huge slums sprout beside shiny new skyscrapers and fancy villas. Little children and severely handicapped people beg at each intersection in Delhi accosting cars as they have to stop at traffic lights. New Delhi is a gorgeously beautiful city with ample green parks lining the streets. Its majestic avenues linking parts of the spread-out city are good for cars but the distances are long for people without transportation. Old Delhi is different, picturesque for a casual visitor, but rough on those who must live there. Teeming with humanity, its narrow streets are cramped up and dirty, buildings crumbling. Violence flares up easily in poverty.

On 11 May 2011, in the middle of my stay here, the Planning Commission of the Government of India redrew the official national poverty line at Rp. 20, or less than US$0.50, per day. The motivation can only be to reduce the number of people living below the poverty line, so that India doesn’t look so bad in international comparisons or so that the government doesn’t have to extend social services to as many people. But poverty remains, wherever you draw the line.

On a recent night, my friend Nidhi took me to the Sikh temple, Gurudwara Bangla Sahib. The place was crowded and very welcoming to people of any creed or colour. We removed our shoes and were given saffron headscarves to cover our hair in respect to the Sikh faith and culture. The gorgeous white temple was alive with music as people gathered there for prayers. We walked slowly around the vast square pool reflecting the lights of the temple in the dark evening. The Sikhs are proud people, never to be found among the beggars. Instead they have formed a supportive social system whereby any person in need—and one does not have to be Sikh—can find food and shelter in the temple. A tall and thin pole with lights on top has been raised high to guide people to the temple from a long distance. Also now we observed a large crowd of men and women, young and old, who had gathered waiting on the porch of a big hall to be fed. As we passed by, the gates were opened and the people streamed in for their free meal.

Our meal wasn’t free at the Blues café and bar on Connaught Place at Delhi’s commercial and business heart not too far from the temple. Sitting in the air-conditioned comfort listening to rather loud rock, we talked about the inequality and the persistence of abject poverty in India. Like Nidhi said, “Delhi is not a good place if you don’t have money,” The trouble is, there are so many who do not—and even the climate conspires against them.

Musical Benefits for the Great Eastern Japan Earthquake Victims

2011-04-12T07:08:00.000-07:00

On that fatal Friday, March 11, 2011, when the massive earthquake and tsunami struck Japan, the Tenri Gagaku orchestra was scheduled to play a concert at the Tenri Cultural Institute (TCI) near Union Square in Manhattan. Our phones were ringing as the TV poured live coverage of the wreckage in the distant island nation. My wife Yoko’s home prefecture, Iwate, was at the heart of the disaster and she was not able to get in touch with family. She also plays ryuteki, a vertical bamboo flute in Tenri Gagaku. At last, it was decided that the concert would go on but that all proceeds from the ticket sales would be sent to Japan. Most certainly, this became the first in a long series of benefit concerts to aid the earthquake and tsunami victims. In the days and weeks to come when the extent of the disaster became clearer—and a nuclear hazard was added to the original woes—and that likely between 20,000 and 30,000 people had perished and many more left homeless and without livelihood, many musicians in New York, Japanese and foreign alike, joined forces to create some of the most innovative musical events to support the recovery in Japan. I had the honor of witnessing several of them and, thus in a small way, chipping in.

Tenri Gagaku @ Tenri Cultural Institute, 11 March 2011

Gagaku—literally translated as ‘elegant music’—is the oldest form of orchestral music that has survived continuously in the world and Tenri Gagaku Music Society is arguably (but then again, I might be biased) the best gagaku group outside of Japan. The music has its roots in the Silk Road period during which gagaku-like music was widely played in various parts of Asia, ranging from China to Southeast Asia. From the Tang Dynasty (AD 618-907) court in China it traveled east and landed in the Japanese islands via the Korean peninsula. In its new home, Gagaku was refined over centuries and passed down through generations of court musicians who belonged to hereditary guilds. While Gagaku has disappeared from countries in continental Asia, in Japan it was played in the homes of the military aristocracy and later preserved as living tradition in the ceremonies of the Imperial family.

The instrumentation used in gagaku today consists of a number of wind, string and percussion instruments, such as the ryuteki, hichiriki (a kind of double-reed oboe with a nasal tone), sho (a mouth organ), the biwa lute, the koto zither, and various drums, the kakko (small drum), shoko (metallic percussion) and taiko (large drum). Gagaku has a quality to it that sounds odd to the unaccustomed ear, but it definitely grows on you when you listen to it more.

On this evening Tenri Gagaku played a set of slow court pieces, starting with ‘Etenraku.’ This is probably the most well-known piece in the gagaku repertoire. It has a simple but catchy melody played alternately by hichiriki and ryuteki. Gagaku as music is monophonic, meaning that the melodies are played in unison by all instruments. The only real harmonies are provided by the sho, which provides a kind of solid mat of sound to the music (think harmonium in Indian traditional music).

The last piece of the concert was a dance number, bugaku, performed by Tazuko Ikedo dressed in a heavy and colorfully decorated costume. This was Tazuko’s last performance before returning to Japan after several years in New York, so it was not to be missed. Her slow and deliberate movements to the plodding music produced a somewhat hypnotic mood that definitely captivated the audience of some 100 people who had crowded into the TCI hall. Gagaku and bugaku are a total experience that provide a feast for both the visual and auditory senses.

Concert for Japan @ Tenri Cultural Institute, 27 March 2011

Some two weeks later another Concert for Japan took place at TCI, this time featuring some of the foremost artists specializing in traditional Japanese music in New York. This concert was particularly precious for me, as it featured three shakuhachi masters: James Nyoraku Schlefer, Ronnie Nyogetsu Reishin Seldin and Ralph Samuelson. The concert started with ‘Banshiki,’ a tune belonging to the Meian Honkyoku tradition. The three masters were joined on stage with five shakuhachi students from the Tenri Cultural Institute. Clearly, ‘Banshiki’ was a tune that the students had to study and the group produced a decent version of the piece played on eight flutes that were only slightly out of tune. Some of the three men and two women were following closer in the footsteps of their teachers than others.

The concert also highlighted the versatility of the instrument to reflect the character of not only the music but equally the musicians. The temperaments of the three artists could not be more different and it was very interesting—and pleasurable—to observe how three players who are each trained in Japanese musical tradition and have reached the top levels in their chosen instrument could produce such differing artistic impressions. After the initial tune, the first concert performance was ‘Haru no Umi’ (or ‘The Sea in Spring’) featuring Nyoraku together with Masayo Ishigure, a masterful player of koto. ‘Haru no Umi’ is not a traditional Honkyaku piece, but rather a modern number composed by Michio Miyagi. It features lively dialogue between the two traditional instruments played in a not so traditional manner. The main theme of the composition is lovely and the variations indeed bring to mind the fickleness of the sea in springtime. It requires considerable skill from both instrumentalists and James played his part so smooth and clean that one could imagine listening to a Western flute instead of its bamboo ancestor.

‘Jinbo Sanya’ in the hands of Nyogetsu was an entirely different affair. The big man approaches shakuhachi from its original Buddhist perspective and had chosen this other Meian Honkyoku piece as his first solo number of the evening. The tune is haunting and Nyogetsu’s interpretation used the full range of possibilities that the simple five-holed tube offers. The way he bent the tones using different techniques involving breathing, fingering, movement of lips, blowing angle and neck twists (known as kubi-furi, this is an essential, but hard to master technique for shakuhachi) produced remarkable sounds and effects that transported the listener to a medieval monastery in the misty mountains of Japan where the spirits of generations of Buddhist monks still linger.

Samuelson’s first solo number was also a Honkyoku piece, but from a somewhat different tradition. The song entitled ‘Choshi’ was accompanied by the dancer Sachiyo Ito whose slow and sparse movements mirrored the music. Wearing a white kimono covered with a thin red coat, she moved deliberately with two fans in her hands to emphasize her choreography.

The first part of the concert ended with a koto solo by Masayo. It was ‘Asa no Uta’ or ‘Morning Song’ composed by her own teacher, Tadao Sawai. True to Sawai’s style, this piece emphasized rapid movements and complex arpeggios. It was a koto player’s delight, demonstrating virtuosity.

After the intermission, the three shakuhachi players returned each playing a solo piece. Nyoraku again started the set with a non-traditional tune, ‘Ichijo’ by Seiho Kinea. He explained to the audience in his jovial manner how the composer—a shamisen player who composed plenty of music for all Japanese instruments—had composed this tune in shock after a dear friend had “just dropped dead” after a pleasant evening they had spent together. The piece, in English ‘Immutability,’ conveyed the unpredictability of life and was therefore suitable for the occasion. I was not familiar with the composer, let alone the piece itself, but this would change after I heard the wonderful music. James was again smooth and perfect in his playing, but this time the song itself contained elements that were specifically shakuhachi-style, rather than any other flute. It was to me the highlight of the evening.

Ralph followed with a Honkyoku from the Kinko Ryu school, entitled ‘Kyo Reibo.’ Standing against the white wall and pieces of contemporary art Ralph, as usual dressed all in black, provided a stark contrast that suited the austerity of the song. His performance was less flashy or decorated than those of his peers, but it was deep, sincere and moving.

Nyogetsu returned with a jinashi shakuhachi that was longer than a regular shakuhachi and had a lower range. His final piece was another Meian Honkyoku with the title ‘Futaiken Reibo.’ The deep tonality of the slow moving tune resonated in the room, which has acoustics as if made for the sound of the flute.

The evening ended with a ritual: ‘Chanting from the Heart’ created by Sachiyo Ito. It involved Buddhist chants, dance movement and ringing of a traditional bell. Ito was this time dressed in an all white and light grey outfit. She was assisted by three younger ladies—Keiko Ehara, Hazuki Honma and Yukiko Yamamoto—all dressed in black trousers and shirts. One had the role of sitting on her knees throughout the performance, still and with a blank face, except when it was her turn to sound the large brass bell in front of her. As a final, all audience was invited to join in a walking meditation following the lead dancer.

Plastic Ono Band and Others @ Le Poisson Rouge, 29 March 2011

On the following Tuesday, an historical event took place at Le Poisson Rouge. Sean Ono Lennon had put together an amazing program for a Japan benefit concert. We arrived at the venue around 9:30 pm and the queue was literally around the corner from Bleecker Street down Thompson Street. Luckily the night was not particularly cold, as we waited in line until the doors opened at 10:30 pm. The crowd was very mixed, but many were middle aged and looked like they had a history of listening to rock. All the tables and chairs had been removed and we crowded around the slightly elevated stage. The floor was already flowing with beer, as someone had dropped a pint. We took our place close to a rowdy group of rather rough looking lesbians.

The music started when Miho Hattori and Yuka Honda climbed on the stage. The two Japanese woman form the band Cibo Matto, which clearly has a large following of its own. I understand very well, as their music is charming and intelligent despite being essentially produced by electronic keyboards by Yuka over which Miho sings. After two songs played by the duo the stage was suddenly crowded by musicians, including Yuko Araki who sat behind the drum kit, two horn players, a guitarist and Sean Lennon on bass. Understandably the sound expanded and the rhythms became funkier. A somewhat silly looking male singer whose name eluded me joined Miho in a flowing version of the Bossa Nova classic 'Águas de Março.' After a few intensive pieces in which the horns provided funky riffs and the interplay between bass and drums worked, Cibo Matto and their entourage left the stage.

After a short break, the house erupted, as Patti Smith entered the stage. Her set was entirely acoustic, except for the electric bass played by Tony Shanahan (during the concert, the bass was passed around and the two guitarists also took turns playing it, while Shanahan grabbed a guitar or sat behind the piano), and she took the audience by her sheer charisma and the amazing musical quality of the performance. The lanky Lenny Kaye, with his long hair flowing to his shoulders, played some exquisite solos on the acoustic guitar which were some of the most beautiful moments of the evening. Patti chatted with the audience and appeared to be in a good mood, although she did attempt to block the lenses of some of the more intrusive photographers next to the stage. The whole performance was thrilling and I had tears streaming down my cheeks when Patti and her crew performed a magical version of ‘Ghost Dance’ dedicated to the people of Japan: “We shall live again.”

Shortly after midnight, Sean Lennon announced that his mother, Yoko Ono, had entered the premises and right at that moment the diminutive lady dressed in black and donning a hat and large sunglasses perched on her nose climbed on the stage. That is when the real party began, with a new version of Plastic Ono Band led by Sean setting the tempo. The band was extended, with three guitars (including Sean and Shimmy Hirotaka Shimizu), keyboards, drums and trumpet. Time has not mellowed Yoko who started—and ended—the show with her trademark wails and screams. Throughout the night she jumped around the stage energetically, betraying her age: in February, Yoko Ono had just turned 78! Apart from directing the music, Sean played some of the most inspired guitar solos of the evening. Given that women so often in rock music have been relegated to the role of singers and dancers, it was very satisfying to see three highly professional female musicians solidifying the backbone of the band: tiny Yuko Araki whose tight beats kept the music rolling; the tall supermodel looking bassist who excelled in particular in some of the slower numbers where her musicality came through best; and Yuka Honda handling the keyboards.

As the night progressed, more guests climbed on the stage. The most prominent of them was Lou Reed. At mere 69, he should have been a real spring chicken compared with the evening’s leading lady, but Reed appeared stiff and unsteady in his walking. He performed one long number with the band, a heavy rolling rock song, egging the little drummer girl to beat the cans ever harder. A man in the audience next to me said, incredulously, “I can’t believe that these two are both together on stage!” I don’t know whether this had ever happened before, but it was indeed historical to have Yoko Ono, Lou Reed and Patti Smith all in one concert! Another guest star was Antony who sang a number of duets with Yoko Ono. The large man with long hair and a baby face sang with a sweet voice and the entire impression was quite a contrast to the older star of the night.

The evening culminated in an extended version of ‘Give Peace a Chance’ during which most of the musicians who had performed during the evening returned on the stage. Sean Lennon standing next to his mother led them into the iconic song made famous by his father. Miho Hattori took the lead during the second verse until the others—and the audience—joined in. At 01:30 am as the concert wound to a close, we all felt the warmth and love channeled by the music to the people in Japan.

Taka Kigawa @ Le Poisson Rouge, 2 April 2011

When we returned to Le Poisson Rouge later in the same week, the place had been restored to its normal setting with tightly packed tables. The waitresses were cruising between them while we settled at a table in the second row in front of the stage. We were early and had time for a light meal before the show.

I used the word “show” intentionally, as that is what was in store for us. Taka Kigawa is a classical musician who plays the music as the composers meant it to be played without any tricks or gimmicks. But his interpretations are strong and engaging—and he communicates with the audience. He talked about the concert and commented on the pieces in between. Dressed in an open red shirt and black jeans, his long dark hair covering part of his face, Taka looked more like a rock musician than a classical pianist. All of this is why he has created a following that tonight sold out the large space. For tonight, Taka had put together an extraordinary program that would captivate everyone in the room. And as he would explain, there was a logic behind every piece that he had placed on the program. Obviously, much of the music would be Japanese, but those pieces that were not all had a reason to be included.

The concert started with two contemporary pieces by Japanese composer: ‘atardecer/a...retraced’ by Hiroya Miura and ‘Crystalline’ by Karen Tanaka. Taka is a specialist in contemporary music and plays it forcefully and with amazing concentration. However, on this emotional evening it was important to connect with everyone in the audience. This happened next when Taka played ‘Images, Book I’ by Debussy, with its three parts: ‘Reflets dans l’eau,’ ‘Hommage à Rameau,’ and ‘Mouvement.’ These lovely pieces demonstrated Taka’s fluency in Debussy’s language and the fluidity of especially his left hand. This was followed by two works by Chopin, ‘Prelude in C-sharp minor, Op. 45’ and the wonderful ‘Ballade No. 4 in F minor, Op. 52,’ Chopin’s last, which Taka interpreted with incredible dynamism and emotion, earning him a huge ovation from the audience. Speaking about these choices, Taka explained how Chopin, while living in Paris, never forgot about and was always concerned about his home country of Poland, implying a similar feeling inside of him regarding Japan.

Next Kigawa inserted three more pieces by Japanese contemporary composers: ‘Rain Tree Sketch II (In Memoriam Olivier Messiaen)’ by Toru Takemitsu; a short piece, like the title implies, by Toshio Hosokawa, ‘Haiku for Pierre Boulez,’ and ‘Joule’ by Dai Fujikura, which Taka had premiered in the USA in January 2010.

The rest of the concert consisted of guaranteed crowd pleasers that Taka Kigawa played with unusual flair. Stravinsky’s ‘Trois Mouvements de Petrouchka,’ derived from the ballet and transcribed for solo piano by the composer himself, in Taka’s performance was simply incredible. The rhythm, the power, the energy just overwhelmed the audience who exploded in applause and cheers. The pianist came to the edge of the stage to take a bow after the piece, which could have been the grand finale for the concert. But he remembered having scheduled one more number in the program, Ravel’s lovely ‘Pavane pour une infante défunte.’ The exquisite and pensive piece brought the thoughts back to the sadness of the situation in Japan.

Inspired by the cause and the enthusiasm of the audience, Taka took not one, but four encores, the highlight of which was Debussy’s ‘L'isle joyeuse,’ an obvious reference to what the pianist—and we all—hope that Japan will once again be in the not too distant future.

Concert for Japan @ The Japan Society, 9 April 2011

The Japan Society had put up a nonstop musical program that lasted for 12 straight hours on this Saturday. Finally, after a long and cold winter there was spring in the air and the sun was shining from a blue sky as Yoko and I approached the Society’s headquarters in front of Dag Hammarsköljd Park in Midtown. There was a large crowd gathered on the street and in the park to listen to a Taiko drum performance outside of the entrance to the premises. There were also vendors selling Japanese food from several stalls, proceeds from which would be donated to the earthquake relief fund. The day’s program alternated between free concerts of both Japanese traditional music and Western classical music, with two sold-out ‘Gala Blocks’ with reserved seating and big ticket items. We heard performances by Sadahiro Kakitani on solo ryuteki; Masayo Ishigure with a large group of koto, shamisen and shakuhachi players; James Nyoraku Schlefer playing his shakuhachi both solo and in group; and Yumi Kurosawa, whose piece on a 20-string koto impressed us.

For us the main attraction of the day was the first of the Gala Blocks, which featured Philip Glass. While we have often heard his music played in concerts in several cities, it was the first time ever to witness the composer himself behind the piano playing his own music. There was excitement in the air as we took our seats in the middle of the second row. The concert started with a performance in which Hal Willner read poetry by Allen Ginsberg accompanied by Philip Glass. Both of the performers had personally known Ginsberg and the jolly Willner explained the context of the poems that had been written over a lengthy period of time from the 1950s to the 1970s. There were some powerful images (and some very amusing ones, too) conjured up by the poems (note to self: reacquaint yourself with Ginsberg’s works) and the pianist followed and strengthened the moods expertly.

Musically, however, what followed was more interesting. Philip Glass played against a film by Harry Smith, ‘Early Abstractions’ from 1946. I was not familiar with Smith, but according to Hal Wilner he was one of the greatest creative geniuses of the 20th Century, creating films and other works, including an anthology of American music, while never gaining wide recognition. As the abstract pictures moved on the large screen behind the piano, Philip Glass created an equally hectic music through his trademark fast and repetitive motifs that flowed into the hall seamlessly mixing with the visual media.

The final part of the concert was a 20-minute collective creation by three unorthodox features of New York’s art scene: John Zorn, Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed. Zorn with his alto saxophone was flanked on both sides by arrays of electronics associated with Anderson and Reed. The latter took a very different role today from his recent rocker performance with the Plastic Ono Band. This was experimental music in which his contributions were through innovative effects on guitar and other electronics. The piece was loosely structured around segments and motifs but most of the playing appeared improvised. Laurie Anderson alternated between solos and accompanying effects on her electric violin. John Zorn blew into his alto at times lyrically just to be followed by aggressive bursts of raw energy as the piece grew in intensity. The culmination was when the trio was joined on stage by a Japanese Taiko player who beat thunderously into the large drum towards the final shock and awe of the music.

The above constitutes just a sample of all great (and some less so) music played to benefit the victims of the earthquake and tsunami that struck Northeastern Japan in March. It is wonderful to see all the empathy and support for the people on the other side of the world facing an unimaginable challenge to recover from the loss of families and loved ones and to start rebuilding the nation from the rubble. But this will not be the first time Japan raises from destruction. I do believe in the resilience of the nation.

Massive earthquake and tsunami devastate northeastern Japan

2011-03-13T12:37:00.000-07:00

On Friday, 11 March 2011, at 14:46 hrs, disaster struck Japan. One of the largest earthquakes on record struck just off the Pacific coast of the island nation. The shaking lasted for a full five minutes—a terrifyingly long time when one entirely loses orientation, may not be able to stand up, with everything falling down around you, walls and houses crumbling, the rumble of the earth drowning all other sounds—triggering a massive tsunami. Because the epicentre was so close to the coast, there was hardly any warning or time to evacuate. The first waves reached the Sanriku coast within ten minutes completely overrunning the towns and ports leaving total destruction in their wake.

The worst affected areas were in the northeast of the main island, Honshu. The prefectures of Miyagi and Iwate bore the brunt of the force. Iwate is the home area of my wife’s family where we have also planned to return eventually to live in the lovely valleys between forested mountains. It has been considered the most stable region of Japan, least at risk from earthquakes. There was no way to get in touch with relatives and friends as, of course, all communications were cut. Whatever communications infrastructure was left standing was immediately overstretched as millions of people tried to contact their loved ones. We were left helplessly glued to TV Japan that broadcast horrifying live footage from the disaster zones. Initial films were mostly from Tokyo with some footage shot from helicopters flying over the coast. The northern Tohoku region where Miyagi, Iwate and Aomori Prefectures are located was cut off the rest of the world.

Tohoku’s largest city, Sendai, situated on higher ground and away from the sea was largely spared from major damage. The city airport closer to the coast was not so lucky. Cameras from there showed the massive wave sweeping slowly across the runways. Large jet planes floated away like toy models. Aerial shots from the close by mountain areas showed huge liquefaction of the soil, again in slow motion, wiping away entire villages, houses crumbling and being washed down the slopes into the sea. The destruction there was complete.

The magnitude of the earthquake and the ensuing tsunami entirely overwhelmed all preparedness plans in Japan, probably the best prepared country in the world. The infrastructure was destroyed to such an extent that no rescue teams could reach the area. Places that we so well know were no more. Kesennuma, a major port city on the Sanriku coast in Miyagi, was gone. First the tsunami swept across the entire low lying valley. When it receded, fires that ensued as gas pipelines were destroyed finished the job burning down the entire old wooden town. Kesennuma had been the site of a large fishing port and the centre of the Pacific shark fisheries just because of the shape of its natural harbour. Now this same geographic advantage had provided the tsunami a perfect entrance to the harbour bowl allowing the water to rise unhindered into the city. A couple of years ago we spent some lovely time in Kesennuma enjoying its fabulous seafood. Yoko’s old high school geography teacher, Abe Take Sensei, took us to his favourite restaurant and was slightly upset with me for ordering simple grilled fish in this haven of amazing specialities from the sea. Abe Take Sensei himself ordered shark’s heart to accompany his beer. We all feasted on the weird looking sunfish from deep under the ocean. Now, none of these places would no longer be in existence.

Luckily, Yoko’s family resides mostly further inland, in and around Oshu-shi straight north from Sendai halfway to Morioka, the second largest city in Tohoku. Their towns—Mizusawa, Esashi Maesawa, Koromokawa—were at least out of the reach of the tsunami. Late on Friday afternoon when it was already night in Japan we finally received a brief text message from an aunt, Shigeyo. She had been in touch with Yoko’s mother Tomoko. Both elderly ladies were fine, but there was no electricity and no water. The entire area was in pitch darkness and it was cold. Snow was falling on the ravaged land. Nevertheless, it was a huge relief to hear from the family.

Another major worry, however, remained. Yoko’s 15 year old nephew Hiromichi and his mother Miho lived in Hakodate, a coastal city on the northern island of Hokkaido and there were reports about the tsunami having soaked the city.

I was scheduled to fly into Japan in the beginning of the coming week in connection with an Asian business trip, but I cancelled the trip. There was no sense in going and adding to the chaos and possibly hampering transportation of relief workers and supplies. Some economists were already calculating how such dedication of port facilities to relief needs would be blocking Japan’s exports. Other economists were estimating how the reconstruction that follows might actually provide a boost to Japanese manufacturing and economy. Economists are a different breed. No one was able to estimate the human death toll from the disaster, but there were reports of 200-300 bodies floating in the water on Miyagi coast, whom nobody was able to reach. But for the economists, there were more important and urgent calculations to be made.

On Saturday there was more live footage from Sanriku. Rikuzentakada, Ofunato, Kamaishi and other towns had been completely wiped out. It was impossible to imagine how one might even begin clearing the debris and start reconstruction. Only some sturdier concrete buildings stood amongst the rubble. Some lucky people had managed to reach their rooftops or run up the slopes to be saved only to observe the annihilation of their homes. Many old people didn’t make it. In Kamaishi there was a home for disabled children. It seems it was gone with the waves.

In January 1995, a strong earthquake hit the western Japanese port city of Kobe and its surroundings. It was the worst disaster in Japan for decades before that. I was then in Osaka, just some 80 kilometres from the worst affected areas. I was woken up in my small 10th floor hotel room in the early morning hours. The shaking was intense but much shorter and less powerful than this time. But it was the scariest moment that I had ever experienced—before or after. On the following day I managed to get to Kobe to observe the damage together with colleagues who were world’s leading earthquake experts. They were all shocked. Tsuneo Katayama, then earthquake engineering professor at Tokyo University and a top authority on the topic, estimated in the morning that several hundred people may have perished. In reality, the final count was more than 6,000 dead. The trust in Japanese engineering solutions and earthquake preparedness had bred complacency. It turned out to be mistaken, as large buildings pancaked, elevated expressways broke up and crashed, fires engulfed older neighbourhoods.

But the Great Hanshin Earthquake that destroyed Kobe was small compared with the current Miyagi-Iwate Earthquake. On Saturday night, the Japanese authorities adjusted the original estimates of the earthquake’s magnitude upward to 9.0 on the Richter scale, making it one of the most powerful events ever experienced anywhere. Furthermore, the Great Hanshin Earthquake was relatively concentrated in a limited geographical area. While this time the main epicentre was off the coast in the northeast, earthquakes erupted throughout a huge area some 500 km long and 200 km wide running in parallel of the Honshu coastline. Even in Tokyo, the shaking had been at the level of 7.0 Richter.

On Saturday we finally got through to Yoko’s mother. It was an incredible relief to hear my dear mother-in-law at the other end of a surprisingly clear phone line. True to her nature, Okaa-san (or mother as we call her) sounded upbeat. She too was very happy to talk to her daughter on the other side of the world. Somewhat against the odds, the rather flimsy home in Mizusawa was still standing and relatively undamaged.

As electricity and communications were slowly being restored, we managed to get in touch with the rest of the family. Everyone seemed to be accounted for. Miho told that the tsunami had completely soaked Hakodate with the streets flowing with 1-2 metres of water, cars and other loose items piling up in heaps where the waves threw them. But miraculously hardly any lives were lost. Akiko, a cousin who manages a Buddhist temple in Esashi after her late monk husband, reported that the graveyard on the slope had been destroyed, but that she was fine. So were the other cousins and relatives in Maesawa and Koromokawa. Akiko had slept the past two nights in her car. It was freezing.

Many other families were of course not so fortunate. Today, Sunday, there are still no firm figures on casualties, but it is likely that the death toll will exceed 10,000. Prime Minister Naoto Kan stated that this was the worst disaster Japan had faced since World War II. The National Broadcasting Company NHK is interviewing survivors. A man survived by swimming for almost 30 minutes in the freezing waters. His face was badly bruised and all his ribs were broken. An elderly woman had been riding in a car driven by her husband along the coast in Kamaishi when the tsunami hit. It lifted the tiny Japanese car 2 metres up a tree where it got stuck in a hook between branches, which saved her life. There she sat, soaked and frozen as snow was falling, until she was rescued and lifted up into a helicopter that transported her to a hospital. These were amongst the lucky people.

Then there is the issue of the nuclear power plants, which the resource-strapped Japan relies on for its energy needs. There were immediate reports that the coastal plant in Fukushima would become a radiation risk. Already on Friday, the government ordered an evacuation of people on a 3 kilometre radius from the plant. People within a 10 kilometre radius were supposed to stay inside and close the windows. That obviously assumed they still had some place to stay in. Also many people in the vicinity, especially old people, were not able to evacuate. On Saturday, there was an explosion in the plant and hundreds of people were exposed to radiation.

It further turned out that it was not only the Fukushima plant that was at risk. The Japanese nuclear plants—the best in the world and supposedly entirely secured against seismic risk—had not been prepared against quite this magnitude of an earthquake. A good friend of mine called from Vienna, Austria, where he works at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). I could hear he was upset with his engineer colleagues who had always underplayed any risks with nuclear energy. The problem is that nuclear plants, like other such systems, are designed to withstand incidents based on a calculation of historical risk. Cost-benefit calculations are made relating the investment needed to the likelihood of an incidence above a certain magnitude. How low the likelihood may ever be, when such an incident takes place, its impact is 100 percent.

As I write this, Tokyo Electric Power Company officials on TV are appealing to citizens to limit their electricity use, as facilities are not able to provide them sufficient current. This inconvenience pales in comparison with what may happen if the nuclear plants start blowing up.

Despite all this amazing damage and chaos, Japanese preparedness seems to be paying off and organizational effectiveness is facilitating early rescue and recovery efforts. Footage from centres where survivors have gathered shows people behaving calmly, keeping warm in groups around stoves, waiting in orderly lines to get water or reach a telephone that has been provided by the authorities. In Japan, people are self-disciplined and well educated. They do not riot or loot or start fighting with each other. One can only imagine what kind of consequences this kind of disaster could have in many other countries.

In the meantime, powerful aftershocks continue and the danger is far from over. According to the scientists, there is still a 70 percent probability for a 7.0 magnitude aftershock in the coming 3 days. We will continue monitoring the situation from a distance. Our thoughts and our hearts are with the people in Japan, family, friends and strangers alike.

Mandala in New York

2011-02-06T10:48:00.000-08:00

On the last Sunday of January the Buddhist monks destroyed the mandala they had constructed over the past several days in the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Mandalas have been found in many spiritual traditions, including Hindu and Buddhist, although the most famous ones are associated with Tibet. In Tantric Buddhist practice, these cosmic diagrams assist in inner spiritual development. Mandalas are created from a variety of materials and for a variety of purposes, meditation, healing and purification. The one in AMNH, like most of the Tibetan ones, had been made of sand and was a healing or medicine mandala. It was part of a series on ‘Brain and the Tibetan Creative Mind’ that the museum organized. It complemented the fascinating exhibition on Tibetan medical paintings, ‘Body & Spirit,’ curated by Laila Williamson, that had opened just before in the museum, as well as the scientific exhibition ‘Brain: The Inside Story.’

The centrepiece itself was truly beautiful. The hall where it was placed was obscured in semi-darkness and the lights directed to the mandala lit it up so that the bright red, green and yellow of the sand painting literally shone. The beauty of the piece of art was breathtaking, even in the less than perfect setting. A picture of the Dalai Lama sat on a table behind the mandala and behind him were the museum’s permanent dioramas of Antarctic nature complete with penguins. Himalaya in the Antarctica. The hall was also so crowded with people that the security guards had to shout and push them back so that the perimeter around the object of admiration was clear. They also tried to get people to circulate around the mandala in a clockwise movement, so that all and everyone would get a closer look at the work. “Keep on moving, perambulate! You don’t need thirty photographs, ten is enough!,” the guards kept on prodding the less than cooperative crowd. I heard the event coordinator, a tiny grey-haired Asian woman, say to one of the guards that their plan and organization were not perfect.

The monks who created the mandala came from two monasteries, including the Tashi Lhunpo Monastery in India. This inter-monastic cooperation in itself is quite rare. They had come to create and then destroy the mandala – a symbol of the impermanence of life and the futility of human effort –at AMNH to raise awareness of their culture, but also to raise support to the Tibetan cause.

After a lengthy thank you session during which – it seemed – half of the museum staff received long white scarves and a paper bag from the monks showing their gratitude (although this part of the event would have been better suited to a celebration behind closed doors, I thought it was still nice that the monks did not forget anyone, not even the security guards who got their uniformed necks wrapped in white), the spokesperson, a youngish monk with a round shaved head and eyeglasses, launched into a prolonged diatribe against the Chinese. He poured vitriol over the occupying Chinese who systematically suppressed religion and were responsible for the deaths of uncounted Tibetans. He explained how the Dalai Lama’s entourage of only thousands of monks were the last holdout defending the old culture and religion in Dharamsala in India. This political message obviously sunk into the spiritually-inclined audience gathered here. They had heard Richard Gere and other celebrities explain this to them before. The truth, as always, is less black and white. The Chinese I have talked with over the years – academics, government officials, oversees expats, regular folks – have been invariably baffled about the strong resistance of the Tibetans to their efforts to bring them progress. The communist ideology is, of course, negatively disposed to religion, which it sees as backward, maintaining the oppressive feudal system. But the main motivation of the Chinese, I would argue, is to bring economic development to Tibet and they just can’t understand why the locals don’t embrace the inevitable march of progress and accept the necessary sacrifices, like destroying old neighbourhoods to make way for superior new concrete blocks or turning the sacred lake in Lhasa into an amusement park for the invading entrepreneurs from the east. The greatest crime of the Chinese in Tibet and elsewhere is gross cultural insensitivity and a criminal level of tone deafness to local sensibilities. Mind you, last month on a trip to New Delhi I discovered that the staff in the gym and spa I patronized were Tibetans. I talked with one of the ladies and she explained that she’d been to India for ten years and that it was virtually impossible for her to get a visa to go back and visit her homeland. So it is true that the Chinese government to whom internal security is paramount does also pose unacceptable and stupid restrictions on people. What security threat did this soft-spoken woman pose, I wondered. Perhaps the blissful massage she provided would be too calming, so that people would forget their duty to conquer the earth and turn natural resources into wealth by creating billions of trinkets that the world would buy.

Finally the ceremony itself was ready to begin. The bespectacled spokesman withdrew to the back as nine saffron-robed monks formed a line behind the mandala. They all placed high yellow felt hats on their shaved heads, their tops curving into a big hook. The leader started the chant in which the eight others would join. The leader displayed extraordinary skill in using his voice. At times he would recite the sutra at a very low pitch using his throat to create an otherworldly two-layered gurgling sound. At other times, the entire monks’ choir got into a hypnotic chant that was paced to induce trance. In Tibet, chanting is an integral part of religious rituals and involve recitation of sacred texts or sutras. The chants are rhythmically complex and involve minutely executed changes in mood and tempo.

I observed the audience and saw that many people had their eyes closed, several of them clearly praying to whatever gods they had. Only an elderly Jewish man in front of me was restless. He had come to the event with his extended family (and I’m sure attending had not been his own idea), but the family was dispersed around the mandala in the dense crowd. The yarmulke and jeans wearing gent did not stay restful for more than ten seconds at a time. He was fidgeting and glancing around constantly. He tried to wave and make faces to his granddaughters on the other side of the stage (sensibly, the young girls ignored the silly grandfather). At one point when the chanting intensified into a rhythmic crescendo, the man started chanting his own syncopated counter-riffs while taking a few klezmer dance steps. Luckily for him, the rest of the audience seemed to be too absorbed in the beautiful ritual to take too much notice of his disrespectful distractions.

In the middle of the chanting at a particularly intense moment two of the monks blew into their long trumpets known as dungchen, while two of their colleagues crashed cymbals and beat on a large bass drum creating a majestic ruckus. One could only imagine how these sounds would soar above the Himalayas and echo from the walls of the mountains across green, fertile valleys inspiring awe in the farmers down in their fields. This mighty clamour was repeated towards the end before the chanting died and the monks removed their crooked headgear.

Then one of them approached the mandala and slowly circled it drawing lines across it with his hand: from south to north, from east to west, entering from the four gates on each side of the mandala. He then proceeded to stir the carefully arranged sand, the result of many days of painstaking work by the monks from two monasteries high in the Asian mountains, into colourful swirls before entirely destroying the patterns. The futility and impermanence of human endeavour. Grains of this sand were then distributed to the spectators in small plastic sachets, so we too now have a tiny piece of the mandala to enhance the peace of our home.

Bali: People and Pollution in Paradise

2010-12-30T12:09:00.000-08:00

“It’s Galungan and I’m very busy,” Putri said as she was pouring me a drink. She works at the hotel where I was staying. It was already close to midnight and she would have a short night. Although she said she lived close by here in Nusa Dua, during the festival she would have to go to her parental village, which involves a 1.5 hour ride on her moped. And she will have to be ready to go to the temple to make offerings to ancestors with her family at 5:30 am. Galungan is a Hindu festival, closely related to Diwali, the festival of light celebrated in India. But Galungan – like Hinduism here in general – has a distinct Balinese twist. First, unlike the annual Diwali, Gadung is celebrated twice a year and celebrates the creation of the world. For Putri and many others like her employed in the booming commercial sector the traditional festival is a source of both devotion and stress. Tradition is alive and well on Bali.
ting.”

Bali has the reputation of being as close to paradise as any place on earth. The mostly Hindu island in the world’s largest Muslim nation is known for its temples, relaxing lifestyle, friendly people and beaches of white sand. But there are mounting pressures that threaten the paradise-like setting. A place whose charm so much depends on its beauty and clean nature is particularly vulnerable to environmental problems.

The most obvious pressure comes from the sheer number of people. The tiny island has some 3.5 million permanent inhabitants, making it one of the most densely populated places on the planet. This is particularly striking to me, as my own country of birth lies at the opposite end of the spectrum: Finland with sixty times the land area of Bali has just 5 million people. Of course, Bali’s tropical climate and fertile soils have in the first place been able to support such a large and growing population, unlike the frigid conditions up north. Still, the place is increasingly crowded and despite the recent rapid urbanization it is overpopulated. As reported in The Jakarta Post (30 April 2010), according to Indonesian national standard, the maximum population to be supported in Bali in a sustainable manner would only be about 1.6 million people or less than half the current population.

The urban centres themselves present a slew of problems. With haphazard growth and inadequate infrastructure, pollution runs into the rivers and pristine places are transformed into townships. Denpasar, the capital, is now like a miniature Jakarta, crowded with people, cars, mopeds and pollution. The city has a distinct waste management problem that is acknowledged by Indonesian researchers and environmentalists. The city alone produces more than 1,500 m3 of garbage every day, rendering the city planners’ beautification efforts futile. Other growing urban centres are quickly following in its destructive path.

Nusa Dua at the southern tip of the island is an ecosystem in itself. Developed for tourism, the area is built with self-sustaining hotel complexes complete with numerous restaurants, spas, pools and sporting facilities. The entire area is spotlessly clean, neat and well organized with straight roads and perfectly manicured lawns. The main shopping centre, Bali Collection, contains a complex of shops and restaurants where the prices are fixed to a level that would be far above affordable to locals used to viewing bargaining as a competitive, if good-humoured and friendly sport.

Despite this cleanliness, tourism is one of the greatest causes of strain to Bali’s environment. Again, it’s the sheer numbers of people visiting the island. There are 1.9 million visitors annually to the tiny island! The Balinese receive the visitors well and are very tolerant of their sometimes less than gracious ways. In fact, the locals are so tolerant that Indonesian Muslim terrorists bombed entertainment establishments in 2002 and 2005. The earlier bombing in Kuta killed 202 people, including 88 Australian tourists. This put a dent into Bali’s reputation as a party destination and somewhat reduced its popularity among Australians and other Westerners. But whatever slack developed, it has been quickly taken over by others. Apart from the Japanese who have been there for a long time, Chinese tourists are increasingly visible, although most of them seem to be young couples or move only in small groups. What struck me in Nusa Dua was the number of Russians. The beach was crowded with shapely blonds trying to turn their colour darker in places where their tiny bikinis didn’t cover the flesh. The men already tended to sport a naturally redder colour on their bellies, which they started to fill with the refreshing Bingtang or Bali Hai beers from an early hour.

Tourism is blamed for overcrowding the island and straining its environment. In an article with the website Bali Discovery (18 May 2009), the Executive Director of WALHI, an environmental watchdog, Agung Wardana in particular highlights the role of tourism in depleting Bali’s precious water resources. He estimates that every hotel room adds around 3,000 litres to the daily consumption of water. And the golf courses that are converting agricultural land to artificial parks for the benefit of rich and spoiled visitors add another 3 million litres a day to the consumption. This can be contrasted with the average of only 200 litres per day used by the local Balinese. There have been well justified calls for limiting the number of tourists and the construction of new facilities to accommodate them.

My purpose for being here was attending an international meeting, so one afternoon my fellow participants and I embarked on a cultural tour heading towards the temples in Taman Ayun and Tanah Lot. We passed through the booming town of Kuta, first driving through the touristic area with its rows of bars, restaurants and shops; then moving to the more traditional quarters where the locals reside. Ayu, our talkative guide, pointed out the canal running in parallel to the street, suggesting that it would not be a good idea to take a dip there. “The town has grown so quickly and there’s no sewage treatment. These canals used to be nice, actually,” she commented.

Nevertheless, the town does not by any means give an impression of a slum. It all looks rather upbeat unlike many others elsewhere in the developing world (or the USA). Nobody has the time to loiter around, as everyone goes about their business. The Galungan decorations are everywhere. Tall decorated wooden poles line the streets and statues by the numerous temples have been dressed up in checkered black and white clothes – yin and yang – intended to ward off the evil.

Ayu whose name translates into ‘beautiful’ keeps up a running commentary on the history and culture of Bali, as well as the present we can observe as we drive on. Ayu is a rather tall and lively girl whose constant white smile does indeed make her live up to her name. Both Ayu and Putri at the hotel would dispel any preconceived notions of tiny, waif-like Indonesian girls, neither one being particularly petite or shy.

We continue further inland and see construction everywhere. “Corn to concrete,” the observant Ayu remarks. Indeed, in the outskirts of Kuta farmland is incessantly being converted into buildings. But still every available plot in between has been dedicated to small rice paddies. Farmers still keep cows that roam freely in open spaces.

This land transformation – from agriculture and forest into cities, roads and, yes, hotels and golf courses – is one of the biggest problems affecting the future sustainability of the environment and even the economy of Bali. Apart from converting beautiful landscapes into sprawl, it negatively affects the ecological and water balance on the island. It even threatens food production. Every year, tracts of agricultural land is converted into non-agricultural uses.

It started to rain and the landscape turned dark. The traffic was really bad and we were barely moving forward. In the nearly two hours in the car we had gotten only half way where we wanted to go. Suddenly the driver had had enough and without saying a word decided to turn the vehicle around blocking the traffic further. We then headed back and found a roundabout route between agricultural fields where fewer drivers had wandered. Here the landscape was still serene with terraced paddies glistening wet. In spite of the rain that was getting heavier, some farmers were still working their fields. The hillsides were forested.

On the way, we made a stop at a private smaller place of worship at a traditional Balinese house in Baha Village. We caught the proprietor preparing candles and offerings to the deities. Dressed in a yellow blouse and a sarong, she went around from one shrine to the next, placing the candle and the offerings, then put her hands together in a silent prayer.

At the big temple at Taman Ayun the mood was dampened by the rain, but the hawkers along the parking lot beckoned us to shop for trinkets and soft drinks. No doubt, their business would have been better in less inclement weather. More and more busses brought in tourists as we entered. The temple complex is very impressive. Built in 1634 as the main temple of the historical Mengwi Kingdom, the area consists of a huge number of multilayered shrines known as Meru. In the middle yard there is a tower with wooden bells or Kulkul. The entire area is surrounded by a moat.

Wet and tired of sitting in the traffic in between the sights, we continued towards our final destination. Even Ayu was rather low key, only promising that the ride would not take long to reach Tanah Lot on the coast. The place turned out to be extraordinarily beautiful, the small temple of Tanah Lot being perched on a rock protruding into the Timor Sea. It has stood there facing the sometimes stormy (like now) sea since the 16th century when it was established by the Javanese priest Danghyan Nirartha. This was a spot from which to enjoy the sun setting in the west over the sea, but on this particular evening clouds obscured most of the daily spectacle. We were just happy to enjoy refreshing coconuts prepared by three sweet young ladies before settling in for a grilled seafood dinner containing fresh fish, lobster, prawns and mussels.

During the evening we were also treated to a delightful performance of traditional Balinese dance. The dancers in delicate outfits glittering with colour and gold performed elaborate dramas from history and mythology. The movements of their eyes are as important as the movement of other parts of the body. A skilful band of stone-faced musicians sitting on the floor behind their Gamelan instruments produced a hypnotic yet dynamic accompaniment to the dance. Later, we witnessed a performance unique to the Tanah Lot region. The music accompanied Barong, a story-telling dance about the fight between good and evil. Completely different from the Gamelan, the music reminded me more of the rituals seen in the South Pacific.

On a different night, I grabbed a taxi to Kuta in order to observe first hand the impacts of backpacking and party tourism on a local city. It was around 11 pm when the driver dropped me off at one end of the beach boulevard. The strip was quieter than I had thought, probably expecting to see a replica of some similar coastal towns in Thailand. This was not the case, at least yet. There were of course numerous bars lining the street, including the ubiquitous Hard Rock Cafe, but the scene was generally quite sedate. As I strolled along the waterfront, I was several times approached by local men offering young women for massage or hashish and marijuana – a particularly stupid proposition in a country where possession of drugs carries the death penalty. Most often, they only offered ‘transportation’, meaning a ride on the back of their light motorcycle. Nusa Dua was too far to make such offers attractive. Another thing that was conspicuous was the extensive construction that was going on even after midnight on this weekend night. New hotels were coming and traditional quarters were being erased to make space for them. Clearly, the local financiers and tourist industry were not paying heed to the warning calls about overcrowding the island or overextending its environment.

Bali is still beautiful and the Timor Sea surrounding it is still full of fish and accommodating to humans who wish to join them for a swim. Ample water is a key element of Bali’s attraction. It is essential equally for the survival of the traditional way of life and agriculture and the tourism-based economy. One can only hope that the quest for money will not entirely spoil the basis of which life and the rich culture rely on. At least today, we can still enjoy the beauty and hospitality of Bali and its people to the soothing sounds of Gamelan.

The Second World: Geopolitics vs. Globalization

2010-12-08T18:09:00.000-08:00

Geopolitics vs. globalization. Now that’s an interesting juxtaposition and it’s at the heart of the book The Second World: How Emerging Powers Are Redefining Competition in the Twenty-first Century by Parag Khanna. The focus of the book is fresh and delightfully geographical. Khanna, a senior fellow and program director at the New America Foundation, takes us on a whirlwind tour around the world hopping from one region to next focusing on the ‘second world,’ emerging countries that are no longer part of the third world but have not quite reached the first world status. The author’s credible claim is that much of the future of the world will depend on what happens in these countries, many of which are now finding their place amongst the larger geopolitical scene. Geopolitics is the great game in which countries and especially the dominant powers vie for influence and advantage over others. Khanna sees globalization as a potential counterforce to geopolitics wherein the interconnectedness of the entire world makes it a safer place. He is no starry-eyed idealist who believes in an overpowering positive force of globalization. Geopolitics is alive and well there is no doubt it. Khanna also recognizes that the United States is no longer the sole superpower as it might have appeared at the end of the Cold War. In fact, he makes a convincing case that its star is fading. For the first time, we live in a tripolar world, with the US, the European Union and China making claims at being dominant powers, both regionally and on a global scale. This constellation and how these three powers interact with the second world is at the heart of the book.

Like a good regional geography, the book is organized in five sections along continental lines. The first part, entitled The West’s East, focuses on the eastern periphery of Europe and the aspiring members of the EU. The second part, Affairs of the Heartland, covers the Eurasian landmass, Central Asia, which is now again the chessboard in a new Great Game, this time played by the three new dominant powers. The title of the third part, The End of the Monroe Doctrine, says it all. US dominance is no longer a given in its own backyard where the links with the old colonial powers in Europe remain strong while China is making inroads into the region. Part IV, In Search of the “Middle East” hones in on the turbulent Arab world, while the fifth part makes a call for Asia for Asians. On this tour of the world, Khanna takes us to close to forty countries or autonomous (some more than others) regions (like Tibet, Xinjiang and Palestine) all of which belong to the second world. Some are covered in a detailed and insightful manner, while others receive more superficial treatment. Some (think Azerbaijan or Syria) are covered in a couple of pages, while others stretch out over much longer passages (the longest section, at 21 pages, is dedicated to China; and this is the main section on China, not including the Tibet and Xinjiang parts or the frequent references to it throughout the book). Despite this regional treatment, as is the wont of good regional geographies (and judging from the extensive bibliography, Khanna is quite aware of the geography literature), the different parts do hang together in an exemplary manner and the author constantly reminds us of the interlinkages between places and issues. When I say that the book is very geographical, I mean that the author is acutely aware of how geography plays into the geopolitics of the places. Factors such as natural resources, mountain ranges, sea lanes, pipeline routes or urban dominance are often mentioned explaining strategic and tactical choices that countries make.

The style of the book is rather unusual in the sense that it is at the same time erudite and quite personal. The many anecdotes suggest that Khanna has indeed visited all of the countries and territories he writes about. In that sense, the book occasionally takes the form of a travelogue (and there’s nothing wrong with that; it’s a perfectly legitimate literary form). On the other hand, as witnessed by the 23-page bibliography and 65 pages of endnotes, this is a very well researched book. What put me off slightly in the beginning was Khanna’s somewhat breathless writing style. It seems that his aim has been to write a book, which doesn’t mince words and in which surprising insights sometimes shock the reader. One gets the impression that the book has been written at a flow-of-consciousness speed. At times, this has led to bad similes that make one cringe (“Latin America’s dances—salsa, samba, rumba, tango—all involve swift, jerking maneuvers, even unpredictable lurches. The same is true of Latin politics.” – p. 130).

At other times, Khanna’s attempts to move fluidly from one subject to the next has produced apparent non-sequiturs: (is it just me who cannot fully follow the logic in this passage: “In the great informality of Arab encounters, the culture of wasta—personal connections—is preferred to modern institutions. Beyond the narrow elite, which seems lost without the use of English, bloated public sectors from Libya to Saudi Arabia and also Iran remain bastions of stultifying inefficiency.” – p. 202)

Then again, this is never a dull read and the style grows on you (admittedly, some chapters are better argued than others) and the non-diplomatic language is refreshing when, for instance, Khanna writes about tiny, poor Georgia in the Caucasus that bought wholesale a neoliberal, almost libertarian stance to its development after its release from under the Soviet rule. Khanna writes: “Imagine a country of abandoned villages, collapsed buildings, battered trucks belching clouds of foul exhaust, women selling corn on the roadside, children bathing in drying riverbeds, and haggard beggars in the capital city. Now imagine that its citizens are white (p. 48).” Having visited Georgia earlier this year, I can attest to the vast differences between the lifestyles of the regular people and the new elite driving around in big German cars.

Or when he writes about America’s leading partner in the Middle East in securing the flow of oil and fighting terrorism: “Globalization appears to accelerate history, but in Saudi Arabia, history moves at two completely different speeds, one for the head and another for the heart. There are limits to how far a civilization can advance when people pray five times a day and live in the paralyzing heat of an endless desert (p. 240).” It is worth noting that Khanna is equally sanguine about the situation in Israel-Palestine, sparing no words in assessing the reality of the dual and highly unequal nation.

The author was prescient in writing the book. My paperback edition was published in 2009 and some events that Khanna predicted have already taken place, like in the case of the Central Asian ‘Stans’ when he writes that “it is a shock that there have been no major conflicts in the region (p. 76).” Well, the Kyrgyzstan coup and ethnic-based slaughter took place soon after the publication of the book.

He is critical of America’s imperial pretensions and stubbornness when it comes to dealing with ‘rogue’ nations, noting that “America’s childish silent treatment of Iran ignores the reality that in the geopolitical marketplace, attempting to isolate a country is about as effective as ignoring its existence ... Iran is diplomatically sophisticated enough to derive benefits from multiple powers simultaneously—particularly if those powers have competing motivations. The United States has focused strictly on the military potential of Iran’s nuclear program, ignoring its civilian uses and Iran’s other commercial needs (p. 230).” This is a theme that pervades the book: second world nations have a choice in the global marketplace and by trying to isolate them the United States ends up isolating itself.

Writing on the Arab region, one has to agree with Khanna when he observes that “America considers the region strategically important, but that does not guarantee it a right to military interventions, particularly since its blunders, not Arab genetic defects, are widely held to be the chief cause of terrorism, proliferation, and conflict (p. 253).”

In general, Parag Khanna is quite critical of the United States and how it sees itself in the world. America believes in military power as its strength. However, it has misunderstood both Hobbes and Darwin in the sense that it thinks that it can dominate others just by being the strongest bully on the block: “The real lessons of Hobbes and Darwin are that no single power will dominate others; rather, the most adaptive system will prevail (p. 322).” He points out that America’s prestige has waned fastest where it has been most aggressive, in Arab States and East Asia.

Similarly, America’s soft power is on the wane as the EU, China and many second world countries rise. America’s arbitrary visa restrictions stifle fertilization of the scientific and professional fields. Leading scientists have a choice of gathering elsewhere. In the moneyed sphere, hedge funds and gambling are increasingly moving to Hong Kong and London. The Al Jazeera network is effectively competing with American cable networks, except in the United States (writing this as I am in Indonesia, I can confirm that Al Jazeera is indeed a preferred source of global news). In the world of sports, America is alone not understanding soccer and cricket, the most popular sports on the globe. Even many of Hollywood’s latest successes are based on innovations from Hong Kong and Japan. Higher education has for half a century been dominated by American universities from Harvard to Yale. Now, more Indonesian kids go to universities in China than in the United States. Who would have thought that would happen so soon?

Like many observers today, Parag Khanna is upbeat about what is happening in Asia and how the Asian model provides a viable alternative to the West, and especially the United States. He praises Asian values, which feature “open societies but closed polities, restoring democracy to its place as a means to an end—not the highest virtue, but just one agenda item among many (p. 266).” He makes the extremely valid point about how East Asian traditions challenge American notions of human rights. Americans give utmost priority to economic freedom and individual rights, even if they infringe on other people’s freedoms, while Asians emphasize communitarian wellbeing. As in Europe, human rights are seen as encompassing the right from need and want for all, rather than individual liberty to do whatever one wants irrespective of its impacts on others and the larger communal good.

He astutely observes the differences between how Asians and Americans view government. In America—witness the lunacy of the Tea Party movement—government is seen as something apart from the people, something that hinders innovation and development. In Asia (and in much of Europe, especially the northern fringe where I hail from) government plays a key role in inserting capital and innovation into the system, while at the same time ensuring that the excesses of capitalism do not destroy social fabric. Khanna makes a clear distinction between the United States and Europe in this regard. He remarks that Europe is by and large welcomed in Asia for developing capacity and providing new models.

Khanna is by no means naïve, so he does not see Asia as a monolithic success story. Somewhat surprisingly, he is rather dismissive of India, stating that “India is big but not yet important. Outsourcing has made it a leading back office for Western firms, but except for a few segregated twenty-first-century oases of development, India is almost completely third-world, most of its billion-plus people living in poverty (p. 276).” He sees China, and still also Japan (as well as Korea, Singapore and Taiwan), driving change in Asia and globally.

He passes a pretty rough judgment on Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous nation. He appears to think that as a country Indonesia has little right to exist as a sovereign state. According to Khanna, the Indonesian archipelago is impossible to govern, by either dictatorship or democracy. The distances – both geographically and socially in this world’s largest Muslim nation where some parts are primarily Hindu – are just too great to bridge easily.

Understandably, China and its role in the world is one of the important themes that permeates the book. In many sections, he describes China’s emerging role as a donor nation and partner to poorer countries. Years ago, I have myself witnessed China’s rather heavy presence in less developed countries, such as Laos, in its backyard. The Chinese footprint could be seen both in commercial connections as well as state-sponsored projects. Both had the tendency of leading to the depletion of forests and other natural resources, while helping the country to develop its roads and other infrastructure (partly to facilitate the said extraction of natural resources). Khanna describes in some detail how China has expanded its horizons and is making similar inroads into Central and Western Asia, Africa and Latin America, often competing with the United States and other developed countries. This was again confirmed by several African participants at a very recent meeting I participated in on harmonization of development aid. The Africans, at least at an official level, tend to see this mostly in positive terms. China gives as well as takes, and this is seen as a fair exchanged with little strings attached as it comes to social or environmental safeguards that more traditional donors tend to harp on. (China is not alone in this. For instance, in Portuguese-speaking Mozambique, Brazil has stepped in with its own commercial and aid programs.)

China itself is still a developing country. Or as Khanna says, there are really four Chinas: the southeast region that houses Shanghai and Hong Kong (as well as Taiwan that is technically a separate country but economically and culturally integrated into the motherland), and contains 60 percent of China’s wealth; the northeast quadrant, including the imperial capital of Beijing, that is not equally rich but certainly no longer third world either; then the two western quadrants (including the autonomous provinces of Tibet and Xinjiang, which are ethnically and culturally separate from the Han China, but increasingly integrated through migration and economic links), which are still seriously poor and undeveloped. Like one Chinese official told me earlier this year, “China has seven Least Developed Countries in its west.”

Parag Khanna predicts that China will not democratize before it reaches its goal of a increasing the material standard of living of all its populace by mid-century. However, he also recognizes that the heavy-handed censorship of thought and jailing of China critical thinkers – and China remains “a country where telling the truth and telling lies are equally dangerous” (p. 320) – its international reputation will continue to suffer. He thinks that the country is now strong enough and its economic development so compelling that the government and Party could well afford to relax the controls.

One of the main conclusions in this interesting book focuses on the fluidity and uncertainty of the geopolitical landscape where the United States, Europe and China form competing spheres of interest, and where the increasingly powerful second world nations act as pieces on a great chessboard. In this tripolar world, each of the aspiring superpowers in its own way undermines the international architecture of global governance, “eroding the fiction that laws and institutions alone can restrain imperial competition (p. 335).”

The outcome of such a competition is not a given and each of the three have their weakness, summarized by Khanna: “America may not be able to afford its excessive consumption, nor Europe its expansion, nor China its environmental and social burdens (p. 321).”

The United States’ role is increasingly challenged in economic, financial and moral spheres. This is witnessed by how America today has must go it alone as its supposed allies balk at the military ventures, as well as America’s flaunting of international law and institutions (for example when it comes to trying to manage global climate change). The United States was central in creating the United Nations, but now disregards the organization in a way that Khanna calls “abusive negligence” (p. 336), which gives other nations the excuse to downplay the UN role equally.

One of the last chapters in the book is posed as a question, America: from the first world to the second? Referring to Toynbee, who seems to be an intellectual father of the author, Khanna recognizes that historically the most common causes of the decline of great nations have been increasing militarism and the deterioration of the creative minority. These both are evident in America’s recent developments. He observes what we living in the United States see every day, that America is no longer a middle-class nation. While the middle class is constantly squeezed, America is polarized into extremes of a superrich privileged class and a vast base of poorly educated and economically disadvantaged people. These are sure signs that the United States is inevitably slipping into the second world. In terms of income equality, the US is now competing with nations such as Brazil in displaying the widest differences.

Meanwhile, the second world is realigning itself in relation to the three poles as well as forming alliances amongst themselves. As Khanna observes, “the second-world anti-imperial belt of Venezuela, Iran, Kazakhstan, Libya, Malaysia and others will continue to focus as much on building ties among themselves as with Washington, Brussels, or Beijing (p. 325).” This process is dramatically changing the world geopolitics.

Khanna compares the tripolar world order to a stool, which can only be stable if all the three legs are steady. He calls for a new equilibrium in which the United States, the European Union, and China jointly determine the rules of the geopolitical game. He places some hope in the power of globalization that has linked the world into an intricate web of mutual interdependences that increasingly makes conflict a non-win situation. He ends the book by stating: “A century ago, globalization was defeated by geopolitics, unleashing World War I. The question is whether history will repeat itself a century later. The answer remains unknown, for as the second world shapes both geopolitics and globalization, diplomacy becomes ever more an art (p. 341).”

The Second World is an insightful and refreshing book in its politically incorrect frankness. Even if one were not to agree with every detail or prediction that Parag Khanna puts forth – as is inevitable in such a wide-ranging treatise – it seems impossible to ignore his basic arguments and conclusions about the great geopolitical changes that we are witnessing. The world will no longer be what we grew up with.

Pianoforte/pianissimo – Variations in New York

2010-11-25T05:52:00.000-08:00

The piano is certainly the most versatile of musical instruments invented by man. I know that it can’t produce the delicate quarter tones that the violin or the flute can do. It isn’t either well-adapted to the Indian raga or Japanese gagaku. West African percussions, maybe, could be produced by banging on a Steinway, but that’s not the intention of the instrument. But I maintain: it is the most versatile instrument invented by man. As evidence, I suggest my experiences from a small number of performances held in New York City in the past couple of months that I was able to attend.

Ayako Shirasaki @ Smalls, 15 September 2010

Ayako Shirasaki is the most amazing up-and-coming pianist around New York City these days. On September 15th, I caught her at Smalls, a club in West Village that distinctly lives up to its name. The place had been set up with rows of folding chairs in front of the grand piano. I preferred to settle down on a high stool at the bar on the side. The tiny place was packed with customers. This was Ayako’s solo piano performance to launch her latest CD, Falling Leaves. She was born in Japan and graduated from the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music with a major in classical music, but she then moved to the States to study jazz at the Manhattan School of Music. She never moved back to her native country, although she keeps close links there. In the name of full disclosure, Ayako and I have become friendly over the past several years I’ve gone to listen to her relatively frequent performances around town.

She started the concert with a Billy Strayhorn classic, followed by Charlie Parker’s Confirmation, thus establishing her jazz credentials right at the outset. On the latter piece, the walking bass she played with her left hand while the right hand chased rapid be-bop phrases was impressive, to say the least. The third tune was also a classic, Round Midnight. This Thelonius Monk masterpiece is so gorgeous that just playing the haunting melody is guaranteed to send shivers down one’s spine. At the same time it is so harmonically complex that it offers endless pitfalls for the performer to stumble on and creating an improvisation that flows logically is a major challenge to most players. Not to Ayako, who breezed through the harmonies with extraordinary versatility. Smalls is the perfect venue for this kind of music: it’s cosy and intimate, not overtly commercial. In many ways it is the prototype image of a New York jazz club from a bygone era.

Ayako Shirasaki is no shrinking violet. Or perhaps it is better to say that her music, like that of Monk, conveys strong emotions without ever becoming schmaltzy. Her technique is amazing and she does virtually anything she wants on the piano. She never fails to amaze me with her left hand virtuosity, no doubt a legacy of her classical training.

The rest of the two-set performance consisted of a number of standards and a few originals, like Monkey Punch, a fluid tune in a brisk tempo; or her own bop creation Three Steps Forward. She played a Bud Powell number in a somewhat aggressive style effortlessly sliding from the Latin groove to a stride piano. Some of the highlights of the evening for me were standards like Someday My Prince Will Come and Turn Out the Lights, to which Ayako gave her on distinct flair. The excellent concert ended with one of my all time favourite tunes, It’s Alright with Me. The title also pretty much summarized my feeling.

Puppets Jazz Bar, featuring Arturo O’Farrill and Ayako Shirasaki, 27 August 2010

Not much earlier, I had joined my friends Nanthi and Vasuki at a fund raiser in support of another excellent small club, Puppets Jazz Bar in the Park Slope neighbourhood of Brooklyn. The club philosophy is that it should offer quality music to aficionados while keeping the entrance free. The club makes its money from drinks and the excellent vegetarian fare that it sells. Unfortunately, this doesn’t appear to be quite enough to pay for the rent. So on this Friday night, the owner, Jaime Aff, had put together an extraordinary group of musicians who played in a nonstop succession from early evening until late at night. Even then there was no cover charge but buckets were sent around to make a voluntary collection from the full house of fans who had gathered in the small space.

The musicians included such local players as the trumpeter John McNeill and guitarist Randy Johnston. As always, Jaime spent much of the time on stage behind his drum kit backing up several of the other performers. The evening also highlighted two excellent yet very different pianists. Ayako Shirasaki was there, this time with a trio. This is another setting that truly suits her style. The other one was Arturo O'Farrill, the son of the legendary Cuban-born orchestra leader Chico O’Farrill (1921-2001). It was rewarding to be able to enjoy—and compare—the two pianists playing back-to-back. Arturo is a big man hulking over the grand piano. Sitting close by but right behind him it was hard to see what was happening on the keyboard as it was hidden behind his broad back. But hearing the music, there was no doubt that what did happen was very interesting. O’Farrill is a very physical player. He beats the keys with powerful chords and Latin tinged patterns. The force is by no means a substitute for sophistication or intended to hide a lack of technique. On the contrary, his chops are definitely inventive and his melodic sense is most pleasurable. It is just that he has this take-no-prisoners approach to his music.

Taka Kigawa @ Le Poisson Rouge, 26 August 2010

Taka Kigawa is a classical pianist who specializes in modern and contemporary music. I can by no means claim to be an expert in the field, but I’ve learned much about the music through Taka who is a friend. He performs regularly around town, but one of his favourite locations is Le Poisson Rouge on Bleecker Street in the Village. It is an unusual venue for classical music, as the spacious place also serves as a restaurant and patrons can order food and drinks to lubricate their artistic experience. Departing from established classical music tradition, Taka also behaves as if he were playing at a club. He dresses casually and communicates with the audience in between the pieces, making personal comments on the music and what it means to him. Consequently, despite the less than easily accessible repertoire, Taka has developed a dedicated following and even on this evening the place was packed. Thanks to Taka’s wife, Michiyo, and our friend Steve who arrived early, we were able to secure seats at a cramped up table right by the stage.

The recital started with Variations for Piano by Anton Webern, a 1936 composition that is particularly close to Taka’s heart. The rather sparse piece silenced the audience forcing us to concentrate on the notes and the spaces in between. From that point on, the mood only intensified. The second composition was Evryali by the French-Greek composer, Iannis Xenakis, which was in stark contrast to the spaciousness of Webern. Evryali hit hard with thick chords and square rhythms. Two contemporary pieces followed: On a Clear Day by the German contemporary composer Matthias Pintscher and Echoes’ White Veil by Jason Eckardt. I have to admit that to my ear Eckardt’s composition was perhaps the most pleasing of the evening, perhaps because the tune has almost an ECM jazz-like flow to it. The composer was present and Taka introduced him on stage to the audience.

Taka rounded off the recital by Pierre Boulez’s First Sonata. As the pianist stepped to the edge of the stage for deep Japanese style bows, the audience broke into a massive applause demanding more. Taka decided to reward the devoted spectatorship with a lovely Debussy rendition that provided a soothing ending to the interesting evening..

Henry Grimes with Marilyn Crispell @ Harlem in the Himalayas, 24 September 2010

A completely different experience was offered by the bassist Henry Grimes who partnered with the pianist Marilyn Crispell at the Rubin Museum of Art as part of the museum’s Harlem in the Himalayas –series (the Rubin Museum collections focus on Himalayan arts and culture). This concert took rather a free form, with both of the musicians having earned their laurels in the avant garde jazz scene of the 1960s and 1970s.

Henry Grimes’ story is quite incredible and in some ways illustrative of the situation of jazz musicians in the United Sates. The nation hardly treats the masters of its native art form with much reverence. Grimes was one of the top bassists in the heyday of experimental jazz, trusted by such luminaries as Sonny Rollins and McCoy Tyner, as well as by more avant garde experimenters like Albert Ayler, Don Cherry and Archie Shepp. Then in the late-1960s, on a concert tour to the West Coast with Al Jarreau and Jon Hendricks, Grimes’ bass was broken and he could not afford to repair it. The Philadelphia man was thus stranded in Los Angeles, without money and a job. This unfortunate episode led to the leading bass man dropping out of the music scene altogether and working as a manual labourer and maintenance man for over three decades. During this period, writing poetry was his creative outlet. Finally, in 2002 he was discovered working in LA by William Parker, a travelling fan from Georgia who then gave Grimes a bass. The old pro went into intensive practice and made his highly successful return to the New York music scene already the following year! At the tender age of 70, he added a second instrument to his repertoire, debuting on the violin!

The performance that night had a high level of energy, with intensive periods of crescendo and overwhelming cascades of notes interspersed with contemplative rubato passages during which Grimes frequently bowed his bass. At one point he also engaged in a dialogue with the piano on his newly found violin. Marilyn Crispell is also a veteran of the contemporary school of acoustic jazz that spurns the conventions of the more traditional strains of the genre. For a decade she played with the innovative composer/saxophonist Anthony Braxton and has performed with many other top names of free jazz persuasion. Not unexpectedly, then, the duo performance was scarce on the more common jazz idiom. Henry Grimes’ bass playing did contain elements of the blues and was occasionally even swinging, despite the fact that basically none of the pieces were based on a chord structure or a steady beat. The piano was even less ‘jazzy’ with Crispell creating whirlwinds of notes that flowed freely over the entire range of the keyboard, at times using the piano more as a percussive instrument, often playing arpeggios like on a harp.

Chick Corea @ Highline Ballroom, 1 October 2010

Yoko couldn’t believe that I would get tickets for Friday night when I mentioned the forthcoming Chick Corea Trio performance to her just two days before. In Tokyo, she said, Chick Corea would sell out at least half a year in advance. I am sure she is right that this would be the case in Japan; but not in the States. There are two reasons to this. First and most obviously, New York City has so much going on that even a big name will not be able to sell out his concerts easily. Secondly, jazz here where it was born seems now to be too intellectual music for most of the people. It seems fair to say that America today embraces a culture that glorifies wealth, violence and ignorance—ingredients that characterize much of the popular music of today—and there is a strong anti-elitist stream in the country that is reflected in all spheres, including politics (just think of the Tea Party movement!). Not to paint the whole nation with too broad a brush, I hasten to add, there are very many Americans in this big country who appreciate more sophisticated aesthetics and even tonight the huge locale that is the Highline Ballroom in Chelsea was quite packed.

The Chick Corea Trio consisted of Christian McBride on bass, Brian Blade on drums, and the master himself at the piano. He was his jovial self chatting to the audience in a friendly manner before the trio got to work. The concert was set to start at 8 pm and just ten minutes past the hour when no-one appeared on stage someone started a round of applause that the entire hall joined in. This was repeated in about another ten minutes. When the band appeared on stage shortly after, Chick Corea asked, “Are we too early?”

The trio started with a Kurt Weill tune, displaying the amazing lightness of Chick Corea’s touch on the ivory. He just seemed to float on it totally effortlessly. Next came an amazing interpretation of a prelude by A. Scriabin, maybe doing it more justice than the composer had himself ever foreseen when he wrote the beautiful and harmonically complex piece. In Corea’s interpretation, it had a lovely ethnic feel and ended with some well timed hand claps by the leader to accentuate the rhythm. It also was the first piece in which the incredibly talented Christian McBride played a memorable solo.

A Monkish tune followed, which Corea confirmed later as being a tribute to the late genius. McBride again played an impressive solo. The bass player is these days seen as something like Ron Carter was two decades ago, towering over the field. McBride is a guaranteed crowd pleaser – and he is truly amazing – but sometimes he appears a prisoner of his own superior technique that at times seems to obscure the purpose of his solos.

A lovely moment followed with a beautiful bolero in which Corea and McBride cooperated wonderfully in unison passages as Blake worked his array of cymbals in a highly sensitive manner. All in all, throughout the evening the trio played together seamlessly. The music was beautiful and Corea’s piano playing so effortless that it really seemed light as a feather. Yet, perhaps because of the size of the locale and the location of our table on the balcony overlooking the stage, the performance remained a bit un-engaging and distant.

Stanley Clarke Band featuring Hiromi @ Blue Note, 3 October 2010

Let me state it upfront: The Stanley Clarke Band featuring Hiromi produced the best concert I have witnessed in a long time. We caught the group on the last show of a six night engagement at the Blue Note in West Village. Despite the cold rain and the fact that it was 10 pm on a Sunday night, a long line had formed on the sidewalk outside of the club, a testimony to the star status of the leader. When the Philadelphia native (like the elder Grimes) Stanley Clarke burst onto the scene in the 1970s he was an immediate sensation. The lanky teenager handled the upright bass with amazing dexterity and musicality. Like so many others, I was totally taken by his playing with Chick Corea’s original Return to Forever band. Clarke was soon making his own records as a leader while being in demand as a sideman.

At the Blue Note the band featured Ruslan Sirota on electric keyboards and Ronald Bruner, Jr. on drums. But the start of the evening was Hiromi, the piano phenomenon who is making waves on the music scene on both sides of the Pacific. Hiromi Uehara is another Japanese child prodigy who made her debut as orchestra soloist at 12. Now at 31 Hiromi has recorded six excellent jazz CDs under her own name.

The entire band played like a single unit, a result of tight arrangements and discipline imposed by the leader. This didn’t take anything away from the spontaneity or creative of the music. On the contrary, this created an amazing tension in the music that was released during periods of untamed improvisation. While the tall and still boyish Stanley Clarke—this time focusing entirely on his acoustic bass—painted some of the most lyrical pictures of the evening in his solos, Hiromi was entirely uncontrollable. The diminutive pixie-like pianist went wild on the grand piano, jumping on her seat as she spanned the entire range of the 88 keys, playing furious runs or beating dense chords. Always inventive, Hiromi’s playing avoids any clichés just relying on her amazing technique and most of all talent. It was clear that it was not only the audience who were fascinated with her playing, but she equally inspired the veteran bassist and his band.

These opportunities of hearing half a dozen highly skilled yet so different pianists again proved that the only limits there are to the musical expression are between the ears of the artist.

Breathing Zen

2010-11-02T15:12:00.000-07:00

A week ago I participated in a workshop with the shakuhachi master Akikazu Nakamura. The event was organized at the Japan Society in New York on October 24, 2010. Nakamura is one of the greatest contemporary shakuhachi players. He studied the traditional Japanese bamboo flute with master Katsuya Yokoyama and also graduated from the NHK (Japanese broadcasting company) school of traditional music. On top of that, he is an accomplished jazz musician, with degrees from the famous Berklee College of Music in Boston and the New England Conservatory.

The first part of the Sunday afternoon consisted of a workshop on a breathing style called missoku. This workshop had attracted a fairly large crowd of quite a mixed group of people. Most were white, although there were some Asians and African Americans amongst us. The age range was from people in their 20s to those in their 70s. The artistic director of the Japan Society, Yoko Shioya, was curious as she asked for a show of hands why people had joined the workshop. A significant segment raised their hands to affirm that their interest was through shakuhachi, but still a larger group was there because they were interested in Zen. A regular collection of New Age freaks and Buddhist romantics, I thought.

There are basically four types of breathing, Nakamura explained. The most common that we all practise daily are chest breathing and the deeper abdominal breathing. There is also contra-abdominal breathing, practised in particular in yoga, whereby the abdominal movements are opposite to what usually takes place: the abdominal muscles contract when one breaths in, and expand when one breaths out. In missoku, abdominal muscles remain immobile, as the air is pushed out by the diaphragm moving up. Nakamura believes this type of breathing was common in Japan during the Edo Period, but later disappeared. He contended that missoku was actually the feature that made Japanese culture unique from those close to it, like Chinese and Korean cultures. We all practised missoku by sitting still on the edges of our seats. As missoku breathing allows one’s body to remain immobile, it is good for work that requires precision. It is also perfect for playing Japanese traditional music on the shakuhachi, as it reduces movement as well as the sound of breathing.

The second part of the evening focused explicitly on the shakuhachi, which meant that more than half of the people in the previous workshop left. The two-hour session was listed as a ‘master class’, which had slightly intimidated me. Although I have studied the instrument for several years now under the tutelage of a professional recording and performing artist, Marco Lienhard, I had my doubts about whether I’d qualify for a master class or embarrass myself. I shouldn’t have worried. This being America, most people possess such self-confidence that they would never have doubts about their own abilities. It turned out that amongst the twenty plus participants, I was clearly amongst the top tier. Perhaps only one, Perry Yung, who is also one of the few established shakuhachi makers in America, actually belonged to a true master class, but a few of us had clearly studied the instrument with some seriousness. To my astonishment, a number of people who had decided to take the master class were actually complete beginners, some barely that. This clearly surprised the sensei as well, who gently suggested that if he comes back it might be better to divide the class into beginners and more advanced players, so that he might be able to better teach both groups.

Nonetheless, we proceeded with the class and Nakamura turned out to be an excellent teacher. Our object of study was ‘Hon Shirabe’, a classic shakuhachi honkyoku meditation. We spent more than an hour just honing the phrases of the first half – just five lines – of the piece. I had tried to play the piece also earlier and was quite familiar with it. Yet, Nakamura’s explanations and demonstrations allowed me to understand the tune better than ever before. Just for this, it was worth participating in the class.

As a bonus – or a present to us, as the master himself said – Nakamura proceeded to play two classic numbers for us. The first, ‘Tsuru no sugomori’ (or ‘Cranes nesting’), is a standard in the shakuhachi repertoire. Like so often, there are many slightly different versions of the piece being played and this night Nakamura played the most complete and complex version of the song, depicting two wounded cranes returning to their nest. When their chicks hatch, it is time for the parents to die. This sad piece of farewell demonstrates the Japanese sense of beauty found in the impermanence of life. From the point of view of the player, it requires admirable technique to reproduce the cries of the cranes and the twittering of the chicks. Akikazu Nakamura produced the whole landscape of sounds from his flute taking us to the foggy marshes of Western Japan where the red-crowned cranes nest.

The second piece was even more amazing. It was called ‘Saji’, which refers to the compassion of Bodhisattva. This piece was originally played by a monk called Shinshichi who introduced it to the Ichoken komuso temple in Hakata on the Japanese island of Kyushu. From there it found its way to Kyoto and became known in the shakuhachi catalogue. However, it is very rarely played because it is so difficult. Nakamura said that he only was able to start playing the song after he mastered missoku breathing. He also used circular breathing in order to be able to play the long fluid and dramatic segments of the tune with interruption. Akikazu Nakamura was the first shakuhachi player to develop a circular breathing technique. This technique is common with, especially oboists, but is also used by a number of jazz saxophonists and trumpeters (the most famous of whom must have been Rahsaan Roland Kirk). The idea is to push the air from your mouth into the horn using your muscles while breathing in through the nose, so as to produce an uninterrupted flow of air into the instrument. With a shakuhachi, this is particularly difficult, because any movement in the cheeks or upper lip inevitably changes the tone and the pitch. Faced with this dilemma, Nakamura developed a technique whereby he stores the air into the lower part of his mouth. ‘Saji’ left all of us spectators more breathless than the missoku-breathing master.

When the class was over and we spread out into the dark and cool autumn air in Dag Hammarskjöld Park, I was awed by the experience and inspired to redouble my own study of the wonderfully expressive instrument. A few blocks away on Second Avenue I was caught up by one of the participants, a friendly lady of a certain age. She explained to me that she loved flutes and was a collector of all kinds of wooden and clay flutes and ocarinas. She had heard the shakuhachi and thought it sounded free-flowing. Tonight she had learned that there are subtle and definite rules that guide shakuhachi music. While, she confessed, she had not understood much of the explanations by the teacher, she had realized that the shakuhachi indeed required serious study. Her enthusiasm and newly found humbleness convinced me that it was after all not so bad to have the novices in the class. Still, I hope that next time the class will be split into two.

Lac Rose

2010-08-11T14:32:00.000-07:00

They were all young men, their dark bodies glistening with beurre de karité (or shea butter) intended to protect them against the salty water. They were immersed up to their necks in the lake excavating salt from the bottom. This was hard work, spending hours at the time digging with their spades underwater and lifting the heavy load of crystallized salt to the boats. Standing neck-deep in the water meant that every spade full of the white crystals had to be lifted to the height or above their heads. Their shining muscles strained with the movement as they heaved the load to the wooden pirogues some of which were already so overloaded that one more addition would risk sinking the morning's work.

It was still before noon and I was observing this tedious extraction work sitting in one of the flat-bottom pirogues that we had rented on the shore. The man who had leased out the boat was sitting behind me giving a non-stop commentary in monotonous French about the operation. Another man was standing in the rear steering the boat with a long pole. We were at Lac Rose in Senegal.

The lake gets its name from the vaguely red hue of its water, which is caused by an algae that blooms in this favoured ecosystem of theirs. With 380 grams of salt per one litre of water, the lake's salinity is second to only that of the Dead Sea. The salt enters the lake through periodic floods and inundation from the Atlantic Ocean, only a few hundred metres away behind prominent sand dunes. At the opposite end, the lake is fed by a freshwater aquifer. It is this combination that creates the unique conditions in which the algae thrive.

Most of the extractors in the water come from Mali, Senegal's landlocked neighbour to the east. Altogether, there are some 1,000 of them -- 600 men and 400 women -- who work in two-day shifts. Today is the men's turn. In one day, a good worker can fill about 20 sacks of salt each weighing 50 kg. These he or she can then sell to middlemen for 2,000 CFA (Central African francs) (approximately US$ 4) a piece. The money makes the toil worthwhile, although the hard work and the constant exposure to salt water has its health risks that are not insignificant. None of the men appeared to be over 30 years of age.

The shore was lined with huge piles of salt, each attributed by a sign to one of the boats. Both the salt and the beach itself glared white in the tropical midday sun. After a while, it was hard on the eyes.

Senegal has plans to develop this area into a touristic attraction. As we were standing on the shore, a couple of car loads of foreigners, mostly French, were driven in to admire the rare colour of the lake and the exotic industry it supports. A half a dozen local women had spread a long cloth on the bare ground and were hawking handicrafts and other souvenirs to us visitors. Next to them, a local artist sold small art pieces painted on wood in red, brown green and black, depicting scenes from the lake. The salt heaps in the art pieces were made from the real thing. Inevitably entering into a haggle, the vendors eventually won and I felt obliged to purchase various trinkets and a painting from a couple of them. Supporting the local economy, I rationalized. I could always give them as presents to friends...

The tourism enterprise doesn't appear particularly lucrative. A few hotels have emerged close to the lake and observing the salt extraction is certainly interesting. However, despite the scene with the colourfully painted pirogues and the dark profiles of the men toiling away in the lake, the piles of salt on the shore and the small lorries taking it away give the landscape of vaguely industrial look. This is not a place where you would like to spend days or even an entire weekend relaxing and pouring money into the incipient establishments.

Furthermore, although the place is a mere 40 km from Dakar, the capital, the road trip takes at least 1.5 hours on a good day, if the traffic cooperates. Soon after leaving the city, the fabulous four-lane highway turns into a potholed road where hundreds of vendors selling anything between telephone cards and sunglasses, water and pirated Michael Jackson CDs, wander between the cars and trucks stalled in the traffic jam. Dakar being located on a narrow peninsula jutting into the Atlantic, this is the only way out of town. Then at some point -- unmarked by any visible road sign -- one has to turn left, north, entering an unpaved road that in places is in such shape that it's safer to drive on the shoulder. This region, Rufisque, is the centre of Senegal's poultry industry and thus by no means impoverished. Heading towards the lake, we passed through a number of bustling small towns, each one of which seemed to be under construction. The driver, Romain, pointed out a huge tract of land walled off on the left side of the road. It had been acquired by the president, Abdoulaye Wade. On the right side of the road, there was a more reasonably sized area reserved for the first lady.

Having observed the salt production and bought the souvenirs, we headed towards the freshwater end of the lake, source d'eau douce, entering a small village determined to capitalize on the visitors. There was a comfortable looking fruit stand run by a group of women in the shade of a large flowering tree. It was loaded with delicious looking mangoes that were in season. There were also about a dozen or more small stands, all operated by men, selling wood carvings, small paintings, African style costume jewellery, crudely made but charming toy cars and aeroplanes, etc. Again, it turned out to be impossible to pass through the alley without stopping and ending up providing more support to the local economy.

Down by the lakeside there was a lovely shady grove lined with palms, banana trees and the full richness of the tropical landscape. A small hotel complex consisting of low bungalows, a restaurant and more souvenir shops had sprung up in this peaceful place. There was also a small crescent shaped beach here where the sweet water flows into the lake. There were small groups of people relaxing on the beach and actually frolicking in the lake, which at this end was not red. I overheard two couples speaking Spanish, while a family with mixed race daughters communicated in French. A group of Chinese (these days they are everywhere in Africa) sat at a table drinking beer, ready for lunch. On a closer look, the white beach was made entirely of beautiful small shells.

Sitting in the shade under an awning, we ordered lunch from the friendly if somewhat languorous staff. The wait was very long and when the fish finally came -- in my case a sole, which they must have gone to catch from the nearby ocean when I ordered it -- it was extremely dry and almost impossible to separate the meagre meat from the myriad bones. The fleur de sel, which must have been produced locally, however, was of high quality. Despite the toughness of the fish, it was quite pleasant to sit and relax. We were also entertained by an elderly man dressed in a pale blue kaftan and a white Muslim cap playing softly on the kora, a traditional West African instrument with numerous strings attached to a long neck and a calabash for amplification. The music was very soothing. A few days here and there'd be not a single tense muscle in your body, I thought. In fact, you might be brain dead from sheer lack of stimulation.

In the end, the two main uses for the lake -- salt extraction and tourism -- may not be fully compatible. At the very least, the salt mining brings to the lakeshore a rare kind of economic activity that visitors may find fascinating, although it is not particularly pleasing aesthetically. The salt extraction itself may not be sustainable in the long run. Meanwhile, land transformation and draining of the wetlands around the capital for to accommodate for the constantly growing settlements is altering the sensitive ecological balance. There is also evidence that the rains in the past years -- like this current rainy season -- have been erratic, possibly due to changes in the climate. Put together, these forces may result in Lac Rose turning less pink in the years to come.

Air @ Montreux Jazz Festival, 2 July 2010

2010-07-11T13:09:00.000-07:00

I caught Air on the first night of the legendary Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland. Like most jazz festivals today, Montreux interprets 'jazz' rather liberally. Consequently, these slim former academics, both born in France in 1969, whose act can hardly be classified as jazz fit in perfectly. The Miles Davis Hall was packed and the audience revved up when the two unshaven co-leaders dressed in white entered the stage.

The music started with songs from their latest album, Love 2, with fantastic soundscapes created by the duo backed by the black-clad drummer. The first tune was 'Do the Joy' from the new album. The bass and drums laid out the heavy beat against which the Moog synthesizer played the superficially simple but memorable melody. It's hard to describe how good the beat was, but it immediately sucked into the mood everyone in the audience. For the diehard fans of Air (a category I readily include myself in) it hit us in all the right places. The bass vamp melded with the drums in a seamless groove, while the keyboards set the tone for things to come.

Air's music is often classified as electronica, but this is a gross simplification. Electronic instruments obviously do play a central role in the duo's music, but that is not necessarily the point. The point is that theirs is music that crosses boundaries, using elements from rock, pop, electronica and others. Their sound is uniquely their own. I've seen it compared to Pink Floyd and Tangerine Dream and others equally wide apart. There is no doubt that the two musicians have had their influences (like everyone else), but they have been quite varied (including the Carpenters, according to the musicians themselves). The music of Air was brought to a wider attention in Sophia Coppola's movie Lost in Translation and the duo gained popularity amongst hipsters. It's equally clear that their music is highly original, unlike anything else that I've come across.

Air (apart from the obvious, the letters are supposed to stand for amour, imagination, rêve) has been around for a decade and a half, since the time the two friends formed the duo in 1995. Nicolas Godin was a student of architecture in Paris, while Jean-Benoît Dunckel studied mathematics. Both had played in the band Orange before. In Air, they were able to create their own sound and vision, which is both intellectual and emotionally compelling. The music is imaginative and the sounds are amazingly strong. The melodies, sung primarily by Dunckel almost effeminately softly , are simple but invariably beautiful and memorable, like in the sweet pop song 'Heaven's Light' they performed in the set tonight.

Some tunes clearly reveal the origin of the duo. Like the experimental instrumental 'Be a Bee,' which despite its steady rock beat and 4/4 bass, somehow sounds so quintessentially French.

What boggles my mind is that still today, in 2010 when everything seems to be about hype and commercialism, a band that plays intellectual music, much of which is instrumental, can command such a following of people from different genders, countries and ages. It does give hope for the future.

'Tropical Disease,' with its complex structure and tempo changes, many layers of keyboards (that Dunckel mastered superbly in a live situation) and the deceivingly facile snippets of melody, is an example of the most unlikely hit song. Yet it completely enticed the audience in the Miles Davis Hall.

The stage setting was highly psychedelic. The groovy light show was reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey with swirling colours and black-and-white kinetic visions. The spaced out impression was further enhanced by Godin using the Vocoder, sounding like Hal, in his vocals (and occasionally thanking the audience, "Merci beaucoup," in between the tunes).

Throughout the concert, Dunckel in his white trousers, shirt and tie stood between his banks of keyboards, consisting of a white Wurlitzer electric piano, a string machine and several analogue synthesizers by legendary makers such as Moog and ARP. He swayed slightly while his hands were playing the keyboards ambidextrously on both sides simultaneously. The set was designed so that the slight man in white playing the keyboards would not be obscured by the instruments. He seemed completely content at filling the centre stage.

On the right side of the stage, the bearded Godin had his own set of period synthesizers (just two of them in a 70s style wobbly stand), which he'd use sparingly. But he focused on his bass and acoustic guitars. Especially as a bass player, Godin is fabulous. With no gimmicks, he would lay the foundation solid on his white Fender Mustang. He is also a highly musical player, who plays the bass guitar melodically and expressively, while never sacrificing the groove.

Both of the Frenchmen acted cool as cornichons during the entire concert. Once in a while, Dunckel allowed himself a small smile that someone might have interpreted as arrogant, but which most likely was just an expression of satisfaction of how well the concert was going and how it was received by the mixed audience. Between the songs, one of the five little American girls, barely 20, I guessed, standing next to me screamed to the gentlemen: "We love you, sexy boys!!!"

In a recent interview with Electronic Musician, Godin and Dunckel talked about their new own studio and their music. They observed how Love 2 is more natural, using more acoustic instruments (and of course analogue synthesizers) than their earlier efforts. This was obvious also in Montreux. The electronics played a key role, but the music never sounded pretentious or cold. On the contrary, the beat was real and the sounds naturally appealing.

One of the key strengths of Air is that they have an impeccable melodic sense. So often in today's pop, the musicians are skilful at their instruments, the sound is excellent and the production flawless. But the songs just don't cut it (perhaps it's understandable: after all, there are only twelve tones in the Western scale). That is not the case with Air. Some of the songs are rather simplistic ('Sing Sang Sung'), but still somehow smart; others are just simple, but masterly so. All are carefully crafted, melodically natural, and pleasing without exception.

Towards the end of the concert the mood intensified. When after 1.5 hours of non-stop ecstasy the show was over, there was no way the audience would allow the musicians to leave the stage. They didn't and we were treated to an ample serving of more of the good stuff.

When I finally exited the hall into the balmy night, it was close to midnight. It was impossible even to think about sleep right now, so I joined the thousands of others who had crowded into the lakeside park. The night by now was dark, the Alps looming gloomily in the background as the lights from the numerous stalls selling anything from Thai noodles to tattoos, from Tarot cards to wine from neighbouring vineyards, reflected on the lake's calm surface. I felt like walking on water or, rather, air.

In defence of decency

2010-07-05T16:07:00.000-07:00

At midnight I walked back to my hotel through the darkened city park. On this July night, not even the lights here and there could lighten up the quiet and verdant place by the lake, mostly because the lindens and other trees were covered in thick foliage through which the lamplight hardly could penetrate. It was lonesome although I was not alone. There were shapes lurking in the shadows. Mostly lovers embracing each other, but also small groups taking advantage of the balmy summer night. I could see the shapes of wine bottles as they were lifted to thirsty lips. It never crossed my mind that I should be worried that someone might try to rob me (or worse). I was in Geneva, Switzerland, a place known for its safety and decency.

When you talk with people who 'have been around', Geneva, and entire Switzerland for that matter, often come up in discussions as a 'boring' place. Yes, it's beautiful, but so dull and regulated. Pedestrians wait for the light to turn green before they cross the street, even if there's no traffic. And when there is, cars stop politely when you're about to step onto the zebra crossing. It's so neat and clean; a real traveller would need some more grit. The trains leave exactly on time, so if you're even 20 seconds late you've missed it.

Horrible, isn't it? How can a creative and free human being live under such constraints? In New York where I live, every self-respecting person takes pride in not hesitating to exercise their rights enshrined in the Constitution. Pedestrians hover halfway through the street when there's heavy and unruly traffic from all directions, thus making everyone a little less safe and a little less efficient. But waiting would show your meekness and respect for rules that someone else created. Completely unacceptable. It would cramp your style, even if it benefitted the society as a whole. Maybe it's a reaction to the fact that your risk of being run over by a rogue driver is highest when the walk/don't walk sign is green at the same time as that of turning traffic from behind. If one runs through red lights, like half of the people who drive in the city, then everyone is alert and avoids accidents.

And isn't it a sign of fascism that trains run on time? That's what Mussolini made them do in the Italy of the 1930s. It doesn't take into account that individualistic and relaxed people have to have some leeway. Never mind that they make others wait. It's their individual right.

The cleanliness must also be some form of fascism. At least it is very bourgeois and thus reprehensible. A society that is so efficient and organized must surely be repressive to the wild individualism that we're all entitled to. My freedom is sacred, even if it tramples on yours. It is my right to mess up the environment in my pursuit of my happiness.

Friends of mine once moved to Zurich. In their apartment building there was a written house rule that, after 10 pm, men also had to sit down to pee. This was so that they wouldn't disturb the neighbours with the sound of the stream hitting the water. They didn't last long and moved back to Tokyo. But hey, wait a minute, isn't Japan also supposed to be a conformist society of uniformed robots? Well, in fact, no. It's another society that allows for the pursuit of individual interests, however nutty or eccentric they may be (think about obsession with cafés where the waitresses are dolled up as manga characters), as long as they do not infringe on other people's freedoms to pursue their own happiness. Freedom with responsibility, such a new and foreign idea, especially to Americans.

Another such repressive place, of course, is Singapore. A place everyone with any sophistication loves to hate. Chewing gum is frowned upon, not because it's an ugly habit, but because the chewers have a tendency to stick their chewed globs mixed with saliva in places where other people step or, worse, try to hold onto for balance on public transportation. Anyway, public transportation is for losers, of course. Just look at the lowlife who take the 'loser cruiser,' as buses are called in the States. If you have your own car or SUV you don't have to deal with such petty inconveniences. Unless someone messes with your car.

Several years ago, Singapore had the audacity of caning an American youth, Michael Fay, for running amok in the city and spray-painting cars that had the misfortune of having been parked by their owners along his route. This was barbaric (the caning, that is). Even the then-president Bill Clinton interfered and successfully convinced the government of the independent country that an American should not be so inhumanely punished for just innocently expressing his stupidity. Singapore agreed to reduce the number of the lashes from six to just four, but still the poor lad did get spanked for his offence and could not sit for a lengthy while. It must have been so humiliating and painful. A gross violation of human rights! And for what? Just for some youthful indiscretion and fun destroying innocent people's property on which they had spent hard-earned pay. Everyone does that, right? (Somewhat ironically, just this June a Swiss business consultant, Oliver Fricker (32), confessed to spray-painting a Singapore metro-car and may thus be subject to the same fate.)

Singapore, like Switzerland, is such an oppressive place. The only thing one can do is to go drown one's sorrows on Clarke Quay or one of the other clean and lively entertainment areas by the seaside and join the thousands of other merrymakers for a Singapore Sling and some fabulous fried noodles (guaranteed not to make you sick, because the fascist state has set up draconian health controls on the restaurants that restrict the God-given right of the entrepreneur to maximize his profit). Or go to one of the many clubs for some music and dancing with the scantily clad locals (poor things are not even obese).

It seems indisputable from the evidence of places like Switzerland, Japan, Singapore and, yes, my country of origin, Finland, that wealth and its relatively even distribution, high levels of education throughout the population, and a strong government are good for the environment and well-being of the people.

Back to Geneva. It's a small town, that's for sure. But for its size it's not dead. Just this past Tuesday night I was sitting with my friend Azusa in a waterfront bar by Lac Léman. The place was crowded, but not unruly. Plenty of people were having drinks and mingling with others from different national and ethnic backgrounds in the cosmopolitan town. The noise level was such that one could actually have a discussion. All were dressed well. Not fancily or expensively, but in style. Most women looked quite sexy in their summer dresses. Midnight came and the keepers of the establishment rapidly and effectively expelled us. The closing hour specified in their licence had arrived and everyone had to leave, which we all did in an orderly fashion and without protest. Had we wanted to continue, we could easily have gone to any one of the many bars that have a licence to stay open until 2 am or stay in a nightclub until 5 am. We did not feel the urge, nor did we feel particularly deprived by the fact that we were thrown out onto the beautiful lakeside walk at this early hour.

As I wrote this, the weekend was coming and the lakeside was even more crowded than on that particular Tuesday. Some hours ago the sun had set over France. The recognizable silhouette of Mont Blanc behind the gorgeous lake had faded into darkness. The restaurants in the city centre were still teeming with people and there was excitement in the air: after all, this weekend would bring important matches of the football World Cup in South Africa and the Wimbledon finals. When I headed towards the leafy darkness of the park, the sidewalk bars were still selling drinks and hundreds of people were perusing them. Those who couldn't fit into the seating areas were lounging leisurely on the lawn. The establishments served the beers in real glasses, as opposed to plastic. It was a risk, of course, as common sense would dictate that the glasses would be broken on the grass or on the next guy's head. But these domesticated people didn't do that. They just lay there enjoying the balmy evening in harmony with friends and actually returning the empty glasses to the bars.

They must have felt so deprived. After all, they didn't even have concealed handguns on them to protect their freedom and liberty from each other and the government.

Nine Lives @ Asia Society, 19 June 2010

2010-06-26T11:29:00.000-07:00

Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern South Asia is the new book of British author William Dalrymple who has lived in and written several books about the subcontinent. On Saturday night, Yoko and I attended an unusual event at the Asia Society in New York to launch the book.

The event was built around the theme of the book, which searches the expression of the sacred in the rapidly changing and increasingly materialistic region. On both sides of the stage, square platform covered with oriental carpets had been placed. William Dalrymple sat himself down on the one to the left and introduced the evening’s program. It was organized around four different performances all bringing out dimensions of the sacred and spiritual from the subcontinent. These would be interspersed with readings by the author from his book.

The first performer was Paban Das Baul. The Bauls are a group of mystics from the Bengal region of India who perform a specific type of folk song. Their beliefs draw from Vaishnavite Hindu and Sufi Muslim traditions. Paban Das Paul was dressed in a colourful outfit that contrasted with his long curly grey hair that surrounded his bearded face. His powerful voice carried the soulful melodies to the accompaniment of an equally colourfully robed lady, Mimlu Sen, who sat calmly next to the singer providing a serene rhythm by a pair of tiny finger cymbals. She is said to be a storyteller, musician, dancer and writer in her own right, who tours and performs with Paban Das Baul.

The order of the performances had to be slightly changed, as the Shah Jo Raag Fakirs were stuck in the immigration at the JFK airport (“Could you kindly step to the side, sir?”). Apparently the three traditionally dressed and bearded men from Pakistan had raised the suspicions of the homeland security types at the border. Ironically, these gentlemen were Sufi who, as Dalrymple explained, are at the frontlines of intra-Islamic fight with the Taliban hardliners who accuse them of adulterating the pure faith. Never mind that Sufism has been around much longer than the intolerant Wahhabism that has been imported from Saudi Arabia to the volatile region mostly by the Jihadists fighting in Afghanistan. The Sufis’ celebration of the mysticism of Islam through song and dance is too much for the narrow-minded soldiers for Islam. If only there was more intelligence in the homeland security crowd to understand this, sighed Dalrymple.

While we were waiting for the Fakirs, next came the Theyyam Dance Group from North Kerala in India, who performed an ancient dance that has a tradition of more than 1,000 years. The main dancer, Hari Das, is one of the characters featured in Dalrymple’s book. He wore a spectacular red costume not very much like anything that I had seen before. In fact, the costume was a huge square from the top of which the dancer’s masked face protruded.

After the intermission, the author informed the audience that the Sufis had been allowed entrance and were in a taxi approaching Asia Society. To fill in the time, Dalrymple read another passage from Nine Lives, a moving story of a young Jain nun who witnessed the death of another nun and her friend.

Then joy: Shah Jo Raag Fakirs entered the stage and sat down on the carpeted square to the right. The three Fakirs performed two numbers with high-pitched vocals and stringed instruments, the dhamboor, created by Shah Jo Raag himself. The intensity of the music was amazing and rose constantly towards a wailing climax.

The final performer of the evening—and at this time William Dalrymple exited the stage after having introduced the act—was by far the best known in the West: the famous Tamil performer from London, Susheela Raman. She is a composer, arranger and singer who over the past decade has performed and recorded music that crosses the divisions of genre and ethnicity, incorporating ample South Asian elements from her own cultural heritage. This time, she would perform Thevaram hymns from the temples of Tamil Nadu state of India. She had studied these spiritual songs, which she had arranged to her own style.

Susheela Raman was accompanied by her long-term musical partners Sam Mills on guitar and Aref Durvesh on tabla. This trio produced sounds that were hard to believe came from such sparse instrumentation. Mills modified the sounds of his acoustic guitar electronically adding a stronger bass and full effects. Durvesh’ tabla playing was superb. He created amazing rhythms and tones from the three small drums sitting on a table in front of him, playing complex patterns on the fingers of his right hand, while providing a fluid bass beat on the left. At the centre of attention was Susheela Rahman, dressed in black with her big curly dark hair flowing. Her voice is so powerful that it is an instrument in itself, which she used skilfully to deliver new meaning to these ancient songs.

The highlight of the evening was when at the end all of the musicians gathered on the stage for several additional numbers. The first was a duet sung by Susheela Rahman with Shah Jo Raag. The second, to me perhaps the high point of the entire evening, again brought to the forefront Paban Das Paul (with Mimlu Sen again sitting quietly alone on the carpet while the mood on stage was getting riotous). He sang and danced in a highly spirited manner his colourful robes flowing as he whirled around ecstatically. The final soloist was again Shah Jo Raag whose forceful falsetto captured the audience and the other performers alike. The concert was a true treat that demonstrated the variety and the beauty of South Asian traditional music.

A further treat was to continue to a reception in Asia Society’s beautiful café where we could mingle with the artists while sampling Indian fare and fine wines. A delightful evening altogether.

Caucasus Contradictions

2010-06-20T18:40:00.000-07:00

It sounds like a cliché to say that something lies between East and West, but for Caucasus its geographical position between the Black and Caspian Seas guarantees that this literally is the case. Georgia has straddled this balance for centuries but, at least for now, its heart is in the West. The small country has been occupied numerous times by its neighbours and conquerors from further away: the Byzantine Empire, the Arabs from the south, Turkey, Persia, even the Mongols. In 1801, Georgia was annexed to the Russian Empire. Just for a few years after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia, Georgia enjoyed independence but in 1921 the Red Army marched into Tbilisi, the capital, and again brought the country under Moscow rule where it remained until the breakup of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. The Soviet dictator Josef Stalin was born in the town of Gori in central Georgia, which guaranteed a special place for the country in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Privileged Communist Party bosses would come for rest and recreation on the Black Sea coast.

Less than two years ago Georgia emerged from a short but traumatic war with Russia. The conflict flared up when the little country provoked its much larger northern neighbour regarding two separatist regions, Southern Ossetia and Abhkazia. These separatist enclaves are supported by Russia, partly to irk Georgia, which had aligned itself clearly with the West. There's indication that the Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili rather naively assumed that NATO would come to the little ally's rescue. This did not happen. As might appear likely to any observer, NATO and the United States would not risk a war with the Russian Federation on behalf of a tiny country in a remote region that until rather recently was part of the Soviet Union. Not even if the little country had whole-heartedly embraced the market liberalization and 'freedom' agenda of George W. Bush. Georgia got a bloody nose and Russia recognized the rebel regions. South Ossetia declared independence. The war triggered a huge flow of refugees adding to the numerous internally displaced persons (IDPs) that already existed as a result of earlier conflicts. August 2008 was not a happy month for Georgia.

Now in the spring of 2010 things looked up again. The issues with the secessionist regions were not solved, IDPs were still a problem (there were close to a quarter million of them) and internal travel remained difficult, but the May sun shone brightly and the country was excitedly awaiting municipal elections. Kura River flowed freely through Tbilisi, its muddy water whirling turbulently on its way down from the mountains surrounding the capital.

When Georgia achieved independence from Russia in the aftermath of the disintegration of the Soviet empire, the first president, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, proved to be short-live: he was deposed off in a coup already in January 1992. He was replaced by Eduard Shevardnadze, who had served as the last foreign minister of the Soviet Union. During his reign, Georgia’s economy largely collapsed and the state was unable to provide basic services, such as electricity, to the citizens. His time in power also solidified the corruption, black marketing and smuggling that continue to thrive to this day. Shevardnadze was thrown out in the popular 'Rose Revolution' of 2003. The new crowd that took over was not apologetic for its distaste for anything that smacked of socialism. The young guns considered any government control or planning as communist legacy. The majority of the new guard that now ruled the republic was in their 30s and 40s, many of them educated in the United States in the heady days of the NeoCons.

The government of this underdeveloped land did not initially even recognize that there was a poverty problem. In their libertarian mindset, the new rulers put priority on overall economic growth, believing that it would be enough for the benefits eventually to trickle down to all people. In fact, they were remarkably successful in instigating economic growth by removing red tape and bureaucracy hindering the private sector and by cutting taxes. Georgia achieved an annual growth rate of some 10 percent over several years. Today in Tbilisi, new construction and renovation of old buildings is ubiquitous. And so are the numerous German luxury cars—MBs, BMWs and Audis—cruising the poorly maintained streets alongside the old Volgas and Ladas. Business thrives, especially in the capital, but not all of it is legitimate by any stretch of imagination.

And the economic juggernaut has not been able to eradicate poverty. Although the government stopped even tracking poverty levels in its firm belief that the wave of liberalization would lift all boats equally, it is obvious that inequality remains and has even increased. A 2007 World Bank study estimated that 24 percent of Georgians were living in poverty. Out of these, 40 percent (translating to almost one in ten of all people in the country) were living in extreme poverty. The 2008 double whammy of the war with Russia, which destroyed much of Georgia’s infrastructure and natural resources and increased the IDP problem, and the onset of the world economic crisis, further exacerbated poverty. The economic development has a geographical dimension and much of the abject poverty is found in the rural areas.

Like everywhere, the Soviet rule resulted in environmental degradation as polluting industries sprouted and natural resources were exploited for the benefit of the new Soviet citizen. These effects were somewhat eased up following the collapse of the Soviet Union, largely because industrial production fell dramatically in most of the former satellites. The downside of this was of course social and economic deprivation in communities that had depended on these industries for their livelihoods. The lack of regulations in today’s Georgia has exerted new pressures on the country’s environment and natural resources. For instance, the government removed any controls with regard to emissions from cars, arguing convincingly that the existence of control and licensing processes only provided opportunities for corruption. But a consequence of this has been that the air pollution from traffic in parts of Tbilisi is quite obvious for anyone taking a stroll.

Also, during the war of 2008, the Russian air force systematically bombed forest reserve areas in the central Georgian mountains causing significant environmental damage.

On the first evening just hours after I had arrived in Tbilisi, my colleague Masa who has spent more time in Georgia undertaking an evaluation of UN programs in the country, met me in the lobby of our small hotel in a residential neighbourhood. He led us out and walked determinedly down the steep street on which we were staying. I tried to keep up with him, skipping between the potholes and trying to avoid tripping in the cracks in the pavement. This was one of the best neighbourhoods in the city, I was informed. A few blocks on, Masa opened an unmarked door on the corner of an old solid looking building and continued down the stairs that led to the cellar. Here we found a large space with solid wooden block tables without tablecloths and a well stocked bar against one wall. The ceiling was held up by thick rock pillars.

In the adjacent room, a middle-aged man was singing the George Harrison tune ‘Something’ against a taped background karaoke style. He looked like an unlikely pop star with his thinning white hair and rather bulky body. He was dressed like a waiter in a white shirt and black vest.

Only a couple of the tables were occupied as we sat down at one. Soon a young woman in blue jeans appeared to take our order. I left it to Masa who ordered an excellent selection of natural cheeses, olives, the freshest vegetables imaginable, and kebabs of juicy minced meat wrapped in thin bread. We washed it all down with a couple of bottles of excellent Georgian red wine. Wine making was one of the few successful industries in the country since the Soviet times.

As the corpulent man continued to sing, it dawned on me that this was the job he had been hired to do; to entertain the guests at this establishment. In fact, he was a very good singer, indeed, and had a seemingly endless repertoire of Western pop songs which he interpreted with understated elegance. At the end of the evening, when I went to tell him how much I had appreciated his performance, it turned out that his spoken English was quite limited, although he had just sung several dozen songs in that language.

The municipal elections were to be the week after my visit and the country was full of excitement. My friend Natya stated the obvious: "The elections are very political." I asked another friend, George (there is no need to protect the innocent: half of the women in Georgia are called Natya and half of the men George) about the likely outcomes. He said he didn't expect any changes because the government controls the media and the political apparatus. George's point was that since the government came in power in 2003, the electoral system has not been open and transparent. This has been clearly confirmed by many outside observers. In fact, following the Rose Revolution, President Saakashvili closed down several independent newspapers and TV stations that opposed his policies. A similar fate befell several NGOs that criticized the laissez-faire policies that did not improve the social and economic situation quickly enough.

On a sunny but windy morning I went for a long walk in the old part of town. The old town is a living city with people residing there, not a museum. Many of the buildings, however, are desperately in need of repair. The walls appear to be crumbling and many houses are heavily tilted this way or that as they rest on the steep streets climbing the hillsides. A peek to the backyards reveals poor living conditions. Skinny cats stared suspiciously at the intruder.

Here and there, however, some of the houses had been recently renovated. A few of them looked truly impressive, with fancy roof terraces and modernized penthouses that were visible as one climbed higher on the slopes. There is a lot of money amongst the poverty. I climbed the Betlemi street-stairs, built in 1850. The climb to the top was very steep and the irregular old stone steps didn't help (nor did my being more out of shape than I had imagined). I passed several old churches along the way, their sharp conical steeples sprouting with green weeds. Georgian Orthodox crosses topped the spires.

About halfway up there was a beautiful rose garden. Then still the final squeeze towards the top of the ridge, which was getting ever steeper. Gnarly pines hung on to the hillside from which grey rocks protruded. The austere slope was lightened up by small yellow flowers and an occasional red poppy that would grow in between the stones. Finally, out of breath and panting, I reached the foot of the huge white statue of the city's guardian saint. She stood tall overlooking the city with her prominent breasts jutting above the valley.

From the top of the hill there was a stunning view over the old city and its red and brown rooftops. The Kura was flowing brown through the centre down in the valley. From this vantage point I could also observe that there was indeed a lot of renovation and new construction going on. In my dehydrated state, I could imagine the pleasure of relaxing on one of the renovated rooftop terraces with a cold drink in hand. These buildings were in a stark contrast to the dire Soviet era suburban blocks that could be seen against the horizon. Thankfully, they had been built rather far on the outskirts of the city to leave the old town in place. At least this way there is still a chance that Tbilisi will achieve its old glorious charm.

On the other side of the ridge away from the city, the landscape opened to green hills. Rows of poplars stood guard protecting the ruins of an old fort. I realized that this was a popular spot for young lovers. Even on this Thursday morning, couples were strolling arms around each other, kissing on secluded benches partly hidden by bushes.

Georgia does play an important role in the great game between the West and the East, especially when it comes to energy. The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline inaugurated in 2005 carries almost a tenth of the world’s oil from the Caspian Sea to the Mediterranean through Turkey while avoiding Russian territory. Although the BTC only passes through Georgia carrying Azeri oil to the West, it still places the transit country into a strategic position, a fact that Georgia intends to capitalize upon to the full extent. Parag Khanna in his recent book The Second World: How Emerging Powers are Redefining Global Competition in the Twenty-first Century quotes a Georgian government adviser as saying: “Now that the West’s energy security depends on our strategic position, it will have to help us get control of the country.” The West's inaction in the 2008 war must have been a disappointment from this point of view.

Energy security is of course very important and competition over the world’s oil resources has been increasing with the emergence of new actors in the game. Especially China is very active in trying to secure fuel for its overheated economy. It has expanded its operations notably into Africa where its companies work to bring home oil and other minerals in exchange of infrastructure development. Russia, which has huge oil and gas reserves of its own, wants to use them to control Europe, especially its old satellites. Americans for their part are in search of oil that would come from more acceptable sources than the less than democratic Gulf Arab countries—not to mention Iran and Venezuela—that hold so much of the black stuff. America’s plans to expand its own oil production through offshore drilling just hit a major hindrance with the explosion of BP’s Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico. The unmitigated disaster graphically showed the risks of drilling to the environment and local economy, energizing the opponents of the oil economy. The Caspian Sea falls smack in the middle of these rivalries. Although Georgia is not itself oil producing, its position as a transit country does give it a bargaining chip.

The walk down from the hilltop with the huge white saviour saint was easier, although it was necessary to watch your step when descending the steep and uneven old stone stairs. It was still early and not quite lunchtime. I was hot and tired from the walk under the blazing sun, so I decided to enter one of the several churches lining the Kura river. The beautiful church was indeed cool inside and the darkness was restful to the eyes. Despite the soothing silence, the church was teeming with people. The Georgian Orthodox faith is alive and well and plays an important role in many people’s lives. Georgians are proud of the fact that the country was amongst the first ones to adopt Christianity as the official state religion. Caucasus itself is a religious mosaic. In the neighbourhood, most nations except Georgia and Armenia adhere to a different creed. Turkey, Iran, Azerbaijan and the southern Russian regions, such as the troubled land of Chechnya, are all Islamic.

Inside the church, worshippers were moving from one altar to the next, lighting candles in front of shrines devoted to various saints. There were equally many young people as old. The younger ones wore their Western street cloths, but the women had covered their heads and arms with scarves. Many of the older women wore all black. Despite the crowd, the scene was tranquil. The gold in the many beautiful icons glistened in the flickering candlelight.

Once outside, I found a shady table on a terrace in a small mall with several restaurants clustered in the semi-closed open courtyard. I ordered a tall glass of ice water, which I gulped down before selecting a chicken salad and a glass of dry white wine for lunch. The mall was clearly newly built, but the style fit nicely with the old neighbourhood by the riverside. Little by little people started to come in until after a while all the tables in the restaurants were occupied. There were a couple of foreigners—a Norwegian father and son enjoying a cold beer after sightseeing; a British businessman directing a deal on the cell phone while sipping wine—but almost all of the people were locals. Almost all were also youngish, elegantly dressed and well groomed, smoking and chatting while waiting for their lunches. Presumably they were workers from offices and shops located in and around the mall. Sitting here, I had to remind myself that this was a post-conflict country where one quarter of the people lived in absolute poverty.

It has proved challenging for the United Nations to find a proper niche and to promote human development in Georgia, especially as the government has not been very susceptible to ideas that target specific poor and vulnerable groups for assistance. The 2008 Georgia Human Development Report, The Reforms and Beyond, prepared under the auspices of UNDP, identifies a number of areas where creation of wealth is not enough to guarantee human development. On the political front, it is important to ensure rule of law and to reign in corruption. Social issues, such as health and education are equally important, as is environmental quality. Lately, the government has become more inclined to address specific social problems, notably the very high unemployment rate, that mar the country.

The elections came and went without any troubles and with few surprises. The Council of Europe that sent observers to the elections commended Georgia for significant progress towards international electoral standards, although in some regions systemic problems, such as ballot box stuffing, were still reported. As my new buddy, George, had predicted, no major changes took place. But as he said, the key should be to keep a cordial relationship with Russia. Whatever happens in Georgia, the neighbours are going to stay and they are big and aggressive.

Florent Ghys @ Noguchi Museum, 13 June 2010

2010-06-15T04:53:00.000-07:00

As the rain was nearing, the performance was moved inside from the lovely sculpture garden. It was probably better for the music anyway.The main room with Isamu Noguchi’s works is wonderful in its own right. The Noguchi Museum is one of my favourite places in New York and it was the perfect setting for this afternoon’s concert with the French composer and bassist Florent Ghys. The young man was a new acquaintance to us, but being a part of the adventurous Bang on a Can collective was enough of a recommendation for Yoko and me to take the bus-subway combination to Queens. A decent sized crowd had gathered at the museum for the event, lounging on the floor between the sculptures.

Florent Ghys stood in the corner of the spacious room alone with his bass and laptop computer. The bass itself was a stripped down version of a double bass, electrically amplified without the wooden body. Florent, who is classically trained and has played with the Paris Opera Orchestra, would today play his own music, which combines elements from contemporary music, rock, jazz and electronic. For the following 70 minutes we, together with the entire audience, would sit transfixed by the enticing sounds of Florent Ghys.

While the bass was naturally in the leading role, the composer used it in a very interesting way. In many pieces, Florent Ghys would set up an ostinato or a pattern that he would play on the bass, either bowing or picking the strings, while recording it on the laptop. He would then let the computer repeat the recorded piece while he would lay over textures or a melody on top of it. Many of the melodies he created were truly beautiful. As a highly skilled bassist, he would play them high on the strings making the big instrument sound like a cello.

In between the pieces, all of which were clearly circumscribed and never extended beyond their predefined extent, Florent would communicate with the audience in a shy and friendly manner. He would tell a few words about the pieces and express his joy at playing in this beautiful place.

Not all of the music was instantly played and replayed on location. Some of the background tracks had been recorded in advance by the composer himself. They contained mainly percussion and some bits with guitar. On several tracks he used voice samples. These were mostly in French (for which he modestly apologized to the American audience) but one was in English and another one in Japanese. Apparently, he was not sure what the Japanese text was about, so he asked whether there was anyone in the audience who could tell. A Japanese woman with short spiked hair and big white-framed sunglasses said it was about bad news, which again brought out a ‘sorry’ from the composer. (According to Yoko it was actually about local elections, which may or may not be bad news.)

One of the best pieces included an American weather report as a voice track around which Ghys had composed the music. According to Florent himself, weather reports (alongside things like hair dryers, numbers, girls and blinkers) are amongst his interests. The melody he bowed on top of the music and the weather report had a melancholy beauty that was quintessentially French.

Perhaps the most interesting moment to me was rather early on in the concert. It was a composition built around a sampled French woman’s voice. In the middle of the piece when the woman continued speaking all other music stopped and Florent followed the melody and rhythm of her speech on the bow. The effect was unique and demonstrated both the tonality of the French language and Ghys’ impeccable ear.

There was a surprising variety to the music. Some tunes were rather avant-garde exploring the harmonies of the strings. Others had a pulse that made you want to tap your foot, even if the time was not always straightforward. One of the last pieces combined both. It was, the composer explained, the first piece ever in which he had sampled a speech that had a political message (as opposed to, say, a weather report). This one was about closing down of factories and consequent lay-offs plaguing France.

What a delightful event this was. The music was both captivating and innovative. Florent Ghys is a composer and musician whose explorations I am sure to follow in the future.

Kings of Convenience @ Warsaw, 4 June 2010

2010-06-13T06:41:00.000-07:00

The Norwegian duo had packed the Polish National Home, Warsaw, in Brooklyn's Greenpoint on this Friday night. The demographics of the audience were somewhat unusual, with a preponderance of geeks and oriental girls. Of course, there were also a large number of tall blond Norwegians and other Nordic types amongst those crowding in front of the stage. It struck me that Yoko and I fit quite neatly in at least two of these categories. I went to the bar to get us cups of white wine and as I returned I found that there had been a further condensation of the throng close to the stage and I had to push myself through to reach Yoko in their midst.

I had been aware of the Kings of Convenience for a long time and I had listened to their CDs, Versus and Quiet is the New Loud, which we had at home. We also had the solo disc, Unrest, of Erlend Øye who together with Erik Glambek Bøe forms the duo. But although I had found these records to be generally good and quite soothing, they always were more Yoko's music than mine. Neither was I aware that the Kings had such a following even here in the States, so I was surprised at the whistling and girls screaming when Erlend Øye modestly showed up on the stage just to announce the warm-up act.

So the concert started with Franklin for Short, a less known band from Ventura, California, performing for the first time on the East Coast on this Kings of Convenience tour. As Erik Glambek Bøe would later say, Franklin for Short is their favourite American band, for now. And I could see why. Franklin for Short was quite fresh with an early-1970s spirit in their music (think The Beatles, Beach Boys, The Byrds, with a heavier Indie rock sound) that extended to their appearances. The bearded lead singer/guitarist, Seth Petterson, wearing a baseball cap, had the air of the Beach Boys after they had abandoned the clean look of the 1960s. The bass player Trevor Beld's style was that of George Harrison of All Things Must Pass period, with skinny white pants and a beard as long as his hair. Even the instruments reflected the bygone era. The lead guitarist Bryan Russell played a green Fender Telecaster, while Beld used a white Fender Mustang, which he plucked very skilfully with his thumb. But the most impressive was the set-up of the long-haired keyboardist, Matt Barks, with a drooping moustache, who in addition to a vintage looking keyboard had a theremin hooked up in front of him. All in all the quintet's music was quite engaging, with with better than average vocals and definitely better than average melodies. I only found the drummer Brian Granillo to be a bit heavy handed, but there was a nice variety in the arrangements.

Then finally the boys from Bergen came on stage accompanied by wild screams and applause from the audience. From the moment they launched into their first song (which they announced as playing their first song), they held the rapt attention of the audience throughout the lengthy and rather low volume concert. It was just the two of them and their acoustic guitars, Erlend on steel strings and Erik on nylon strings. The music was interspersed by low key banter by the two friends in their heavy Norwegian accents. Erik apologized for their concert starting 15 minutes late and told that Guns and Roses had just been to Bergen and that their concert started 3 hours late: “Everything is so big in America.” They played their known songs that had been modest hits, such as ‘I Don’t Know What I Can Save You From,’ as well as numbers from their new album, Declaration of Dependence. At times they sounded like young Simon and Garfunkel with quiet songs and close harmonies. Apart from mellow love songs, their lyrics would reflect a modesty that is quite rare on this side of the Atlantic (“Failure is always the best way to learn…”). At times, they’d be quite riotous, as far as one could be with just two acoustic guitars. In the song ‘The Girl from Back Then,’ Erik cooked a lively jazz beat with a strong bass on his guitar, while Erlend jumped behind the grand piano. The result was a very nice jazzy jam. Frequently, the mood turned Latin with Erlend playing solo against Erik’s thick Bossa Nova chords. At one dramatic moment, which the boys made their best to hype up in their deadpan way, they switched instruments, both of them testifying how liberating it was after having had their specific roles in the duo for a decade. But the switch was only for one song before they were back with their own guitars in hand.

It is hard to pinpoint why the music of the Kings of Convenience is truly so appealing. I guess it has to do with many factors, not least that the songs are really very good (as my friend Jussi observed, “the boys play nice music”). But it also has to do with the fact that Erik and Erlend are deceptively good musicians. They both play the guitar amazingly well and the arrangements for the two acoustic instruments are very imaginative indeed, making them sound like a larger instrumentation. It also helps that the fellows are genuinely sympathetic and clearly are having a good time on stage.

Towards the end of the concert, they invited Franklin for Short back. From that moment on the mood again changed as the music was fortified with the electric instruments and drums. Erlend, who at that time was liberated from the guitar hanging around his neck, danced around goofily with his red hair swaying above the bespectacled face as he craned his long neck to the reggae tinged beats. He also went back to the piano and added some well-placed accents to the music. Franklin for Short proved their own skills as musicians, having mastered the intricacies of the Kings of Convenience songs. The audience was dancing along and reacted enthusiastically when asked whether they’d want to hear another song (Erik: “Good, because we wanted to play one more song”). When the concert finally ended, I could see only happy faces streaming out to the warm Brooklyn night.

Chick Corea with Hubert Laws @ Blue Note, May 13, 2010

2010-05-16T10:07:00.000-07:00

The fact that Chick Corea can pack New York’s Blue Note club for 24 shows over a two-week period is firm proof, if any was needed, that he remains a jazz superstar. The theme was ‘Further Explorations of Bill Evans’ and Corea had for the occasion put together a trio with two important Evans alumni: Paul Motian played drums with the pianist’s legendary trio since 1959 till 1964; Eddie Gomez became the chosen bass player for Evans in 1966 and stayed with the maestro for eleven years recording a number of classic trio and duo recordings.

On selected evenings of this month’s Blue Note gig, the trio was supplemented by stellar guest artists, such as Joe Lovano, Greg Osby and John Scofield. I timed my concert going to the evening when the guest soloist was the flutist Hubert Laws, an early hero since I was a boy back in Helsinki. This was actually the first time I’d ever heard Laws live, as the gentleman is not a frequent sight at even New York’s best and foremost jazz venues. Apart from having had an outstanding career as a studio musician and the preferred flautist to producers such as Quincy Jones, Laws has released some twenty records under his own name (many of them, I must admit, fall under the category of smooth jazz, some borderline schmaltz). He has also played solo flute with top-notch classical orchestras, such as the New York Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera. His records Afro-Classic and The Rite of Spring, released in 1970 and 1972 respectively, in which he combined his classical acumen with jazz arrangements, were cherished treasures to me when I was studying the flute.

So I was appropriately excited when the band walked down the stairs of the legendary West Village club onto the stage in front of a packed audience. Corea, who will turn 69 in June, appeared as boyish and communicative as ever. He stood up to introduce the band—each member of which has been a leader in his own right—including Laws with whom he said he’d been buddies since the 1960s. Then he simply announced that, “This is a jam session. We’re going to start with something.” He sat behind the piano and started a lively solo, which the band joined in after just a brief intro. Laws initially took the lead melody but the band soon settled into a mood that would permeate the evening.

While all of the players are virtuosos in their instruments, none of them would dominate. The music was distinctly characterized by collective interplay where all players would closely listen to each other and keenly react to impulses emanating from their band mates. Throughout the concert, Paul Motian would keep a low profile avoiding any flashy displays, rather sensitively contributing to the music with delicate accents. The music played this evening would be light as a feather.

After the first tune, Corea and Laws apparently felt that the flute microphone wasn’t turned high enough in the mix. The leader got up and told the soundman in a thick fake foreign accent, “The flute player need more flute.” Once the volume was adjusted, Corea continued joking, “The flute player will now play solo flute.”

What followed was one of the high points of the evening for me. The piano led the band into a light medium waltz, which I soon recognized as the familiar and wonderful Bill Evans piece ‘Waltz for Debby’ from half a century ago. Laws played the lovely melody with a beautiful tone. With Hubert Laws, you don’t expect vocalizing or any of the other gimmicks so common with many jazz flutists; just smooth and beautiful playing with a fluid technique. His tone is thick like Gazzelloni’s and his double and triple tonguing as facile as Rampal’s. Indeed, Laws’ flute playing sounds so light and easy that it belies the complexity and skill.

Next, Corea explained that they would now try to play a Bill Evans tune that they had just discovered on a tape and transcribed this week. He said shrugging that it had simply been titled ‘Song #1’ on the tape. It turned out to be an exquisite ballad with a melody that fit perfectly the band’s harmonic combination of flute, piano and bass.

The next number was introduced by Gomez skilfully bowing his bass in a classically-inspired solo, which at times sounded like a cello as he climbed high on neck. The solo then morphed into a dramatic tango rhythm into which the rest of the band joined. This to me would be the second high point of the show. The band explored the piece from various angles and in his solo Corea himself brought out the unmistakably Moorish roots of the Argentinean music. The atmosphere intensified, as the players ventured outside of the strictures of the genre, the Puerto Rican born bass player slapping the strings before switching back to his French style bow, again bringing order to the dance.

The remaining two numbers were more mainstream jazz. Hubert Laws played both somewhat unusually on a piccolo. The first, a medium swing, was light and good humoured. Finally, a fast be-bop version of the standard ‘What is This Thing Called Love?’ brought the concert to a satisfying close.

Yukari @ Tea Lounge, 21 April 2010

2010-05-16T09:38:00.000-07:00

Flute is my thing, so when I learn about new flutists on the scene I always head out to check them out. Yukari has been around for a while and has actually produced several CDs under her own name (the latest one, Dreams, is just about to be released and features recording artists such as Greg Osby). I’ve heard her play in bands and in a private party. Recently I’ve also come to know her personally. However, I had never heard her own band live before I listened to her at the Tea Lounge in Brooklyn last month. It has to be said that she is very versatile and plays many kinds of music—from jazz to pop to classical—so the Brooklyn performance was but one example of her many sides.

The Tea Lounge in Brooklyn's Park Slope neighbourhood is an eclectic place with a variety of comfy sofas for folks to lounge in and a well stocked bar (‘tea’ in this case has to be understood more broadly than just referring to the stuff brewed from the leaves of the evergreen bush grown in Asian highlands). When I entered from the rain outside, the place was already crowded, so I settled into the bar to wait for my buddy Nanthi to arrive. Not all people in the spacious joint were there for the musical experience, but as the evening wore on I noticed that a solid following had gathered at the back of the room where the band would play.

Tonight’s band consisted of a trio, with Yukari on the flute, Mike Pride on drums and Peter Bitenc on double bass. The two lengthy sets remained interesting throughout despite the limited instrumentation and no-one providing chordal accompaniment. This of course is testimony to the creativity of the players. Yukari herself is a highly skilled flautist. Since moving to New York from her native Japan, Yukari studied at the Manhattan School of Music and has played with many of the city’s premier young jazz players.

The repertoire of the evening ranged from free improvisation to be-bop tinged contemporary pieces. Most were Yukari’s own compositions, although one or two standards made it into the mix, including one Ellington ballad, which showcased the flutist’s beautiful sound. The mood in the dimly lit cozy café was warm and enthusiastic as the audience witnessed the performance of this highly original new force in jazz flute.

Tomasz Stánko New Quintet @ Birdland, April 13, 2010

2010-05-16T08:57:00.000-07:00

In Europe, Tomasz Stanko is a legend. The Polish trumpeter has been around as a composer and band leader in the forefront of modern jazz since the 1960s. He made it big in the 1970s when he co-led a highly innovative orchestra with the late Finnish percussionist Edward Wesala. When my friends and I headed to the famous Birdland club on a mid-April evening, I wasn’t sure what to expect and whether the audiences on this side of the Atlantic would be equally familiar with Stanko. I needn’t have worried. While the place wasn’t exactly packed, most of the tables were filling up quickly. I could hear Polish and Finnish spoken.

Tomasz Stanko is often compared to Miles Davis, whom he is also said to admire. There are distinct similarities in their rather sparse and thoughtful style of playing, Another particular parallel between the two is that both musicians have been known to be sharp-eyed scouts and cultivators of new talent. Stanko’s new quintet that he brought to New York consisted of four young Nordics joining the leader: two Finns—Alexi Tuomarila on piano and Olavi Louhivuori on drums—and two Danes—Jakob Bro on guitar and Anders Christensen on electric bass. As we would find out, the band was already very cohesive and created its own distinct sound around Stanko’s compositions.

The concert basically featured songs from the new Tomasz Stanko Quintet CD, Dark Eyes, released on ECM in 2009. Stanko stood in his tennis shoes at the centre of the stage wearing a hat and all grey clothing. He would not once communicate verbally with the audience during the concert, which started with the rubato theme of ‘So Nice’ played in unison by trumpet, piano and guitar. The piece would then gradually break up into a slow and lyrical solo by Tuomarila, his playing clearly reminiscent of Keith Jarrett.

The rubato melody starting a song, often played in unison, is a Stanko trademark and several numbers in the concert followed that formula. Stanko’s melodies contain a haunting beauty. His music is introspective and rather dark, belying his Slavic background. It is definitely northern European and perfectly fits the ethereal ECM trademark sound. This doesn’t mean that Stanko’s music doesn’t have a groove. On the contrary. But it is different from the blues based harmonies and syncopated rhythms of American jazz.

Alexi Tuomarila received the first real applause of the evening following a crisp and thoughtful solo that reminded me of the playing of another ECM pianist, Richie Beirach. After a couple of more soft tunes which Louhivuori backed with brushes, the band started a tune based on a one note bass pick. Bro played a Scofield-inspired solo on his Telecaster on top of the vamp. Then the trumpet entered with a high growl that was the most exuberant that Stanko had played thus far in the evening. An inspired piano solo followed and the temperature in the room rose noticeably.

This was followed with yet another rubato passage with a unison theme by the entire band. Then Tuomarila started a vamp in the lower section of the piano. The drums followed with an enthusiastic, light but steady beat on top of which the trumpet and guitar played a catchy melody. This was ‘Grand Central’, perhaps the most memorable piece in the entire evening.

My friend Nanthi commented how he was startled to discover similarities in the tonalities and rhythms of Stanko’s Slavic dances with those of his own native Sri Lanka. This was a new connection to me as well.

The next tune, ‘Samba Nova’, continued in similarly festive mood. It started with a long rubato segment before settling into a soft bossa nova rhythm. Louhivuori’s light and nuanced percussions ensured there was not a dull moment. The tune provided one of the rare opportunities in the evening for Jakob Bro to solo. His guitar solo was clean with no gimmickry.

‘The Dark Eyes of Martha Hirsch’, a slow tune with oriental overtones brought a new twist to the repertoire. It highlighted the baseball cap wearing Anders Christensen, who played an oddly low keysolo on his bass guitar. His sound was quite without resonance and the solo left me cold. Apparently, both of the Danes see their role as adding to the sound of the band, rather than shining as soloists. Both seem to approach their stringed instruments more from an intellectual rather than emotional perspective.

Another one chord romp followed. Then came a tune with an actual straight jazz rhythm and walking bass plucked by Christensen on his electric instrument. The solos by Stanko, Bro and Tuomarila were short and controlled. This was one of the most enjoyable moments of the concert.

Clearly some of the most inspired playing this evening (and I’m not saying this as their compatriot) came from the Finns. Louhivuori’s percussions were sensitive and musical throughout the evening and, at best, his beats were truly intense. The most sparkling solos were no doubt provided by the young Tuomarila who increasingly found his own style as the evening progressed. He follows in the intellectual tradition of Bill Evans and Keith Jarrett, thoughtfully developing his solos with a beautiful sense of melody. He also possesses an admirable technical facility.

All in all, this was a beautiful and satisfying concert, but despite the intensity of the faster jams there was strangely little what could be described as ‘physical’. Although the program was paced with the quiet segments intercepting the upbeat sections with fine solos, I afterwards found it difficult to distinguish between the different pieces. That was probably the intention, to create a whole that flows seamlessly from one part to the next. Stanko melodies have great brooding beauty, which make even the more joyous romps feel a bit melancholy. I do think that his new quintet is one of the more cohesive and interesting working bands around these days. And that’s a lot.

Randy Weston's African Rhythms Quintet

2010-04-13T14:38:00.000-07:00

Randy Weston is one of the first and foremost American artists to convincingly incorporate African sounds into the jazz vocabulary. Wait a minute, you might think, African sounds and rhythms have been around in jazz for a long time. Well, so has Randy Weston. The concert at New York’s Jazz Standard club I heard on April 8th, 2010, was part of the weeklong 84th birthday celebration of the maestro. The last time I had heard Weston live was during his 80th birthday celebration at the same venue.

Although jazz has its roots in Africa, it is a quintessentially American invention. The roots were dug up a long time ago, replanted in the soil of the new continent, and cross fertilized with implants from many other traditions. True, band leaders and composers like the great Duke Ellington inserted African influences into their music, like the Duke’s 'Black and Tan Fantasy.' But this was not African music. The real exotic influences from Africa and the Middle East were really introduced only by men like Randy Weston and Yusef Lateef starting in the 1950s.

The big man—Randy Weston stands 2.03 metres (6ft8) tall—came on stage and sat behind the grand piano. The solo introduction soon led to a slow blues in 3/4 tempo in which his long-time band, African Rhythms Quintet, joined, all five musicians donning white African Muslim style caps. The crisp-toned alto saxophone of TK Blue took the lead in stating the theme of the tune and continued with a lively solo. The band’s rhythm section differs from the average jazz combo as it does not include a regular drum kit. Instead, Neil Clarke sat behind three large congas surrounded with cymbals and other percussion instruments. Another feature that makes the rhythm section distinctive is the presence of Alex Blake, another long-term Weston collaborator whose work on the double bass is just unique. In a world full of amazing bass players, I am not aware of anyone else quite like Alex Blake. In these hands, the slow tune soon developed a tension that forced me to sit on the edge of my high bar stool.

Following the alto solo, Randy Weston himself began a solo using distinctly North African tonalities. He was on firm ground, having studied the region’s music for the past half a century. The atmosphere was ripe with Saharan winds as Weston hit the keys carefully choosing the notes using a scale that contained the telltale 1.5 step intervals. As the tension further increased, Blake and Clarke would alternate the slow tempo with sudden bursts of double time.

Sitting down on a low stool and hanging onto the fretboard high above his head, Blake picked the strings with the four fingers of his right hand. He slapped the thick strings and beat the big instrument as if it were a flamenco guitar. At the times I’ve seen him perform, I’ve always feared that any time one or more of his fingertips would just be severed and fly across the room.

The second tune, 'Saucer Eyes,' also started with Mr. Weston’s solo piano introduction. This time it displayed clear ragtime influences, as the leader launched into some mean stride piano. Like all real music reformers, Randy Weston is deeply aware of the history of jazz and stands firmly on the shoulders of his predecessors. The song turned more into a conventional jazz tune, with Neil Clarke playing the role of a conventional drummer with a cymbal ride above the congas. Alex Blake slapped his bass irreverently in the up-tempo piece. The tune also gave the opportunity to the trombonist, Benny Powell, to join in and to show his chops. Again, TK Blue took a solo, his clear alto soaring with references to well-known classics such as 'Take the A Train' and 'St. Thomas.'

Randy Weston was born in Brooklyn in 1926. He is a New Yorker who grew up listening to American piano jazz à la Fats Waller and Duke Ellington (he even recorded their songs in the 1950s) and, later, Thelonius Monk. You can still hear this tradition clearly in his playing.

But his adventurous mind led him to explore other musical styles. At the end of World War II, Weston was sent to the Pacific Theatre where he served as staff sergeant in the Philippines and Okinawa. This experience exposed him to Asian music, which in these archipelagos has a particular flavour and rhythm. In the late-1950s, he started exploring the integration of African musical forms into jazz. Already at that time he created a number of highly original and to my ear extremely successful fusion records, such as Uhuru Afrika and Highlife celebrating the newly independent African states. During those years, Randy Weston travelled to West Africa, visiting countries such as Nigeria and Ghana to study their music and culture.

In fact, Randy Weston clearly sees the connection between jazz and its African roots. According to him, there is no contradiction between the tribal traditions found in the villages of West Africa and the urban culture of New York. This is demonstrated, for example, by his masterful composition, 'African Village Bedford-Stuyvesant,' featured on the wonderful double LP The Spirits of Our Ancestors recorded in 1991. The album features a 9-piece jazz band amended with African percussion and instruments, such as the stringed genbri and karkaba metal castanets, all arranged by Weston’s long-time musical partner Melba Liston who regretfully passed away in 1999. The music benefits from guest appearances by two other great musicians who have sought to expand the geographical limits of expression, Dizzy Gillespie and Pharaoh Sanders.

Like all tunes that recent Thursday evening, the next one also started with the leader’s solo piano. Randy Weston again introduced new elements in his prelude to 'African Sunrise.' Playing a powerful bass with his left hand, Weston combined liberally traditional jazz elements with atonal quirks reminiscent of Monk. After the lengthy introduction, the trombone joined the piano in a low ostinato that evolved into a slow Latin tinged rhythm in 7/4. The alto again took the lead, backed by Blake’s bass and Clarke’s conga and maracas.

The next tune was a ballad featuring the horns. TK Blue’s alto was this time so old-fashioned lyrical that one could imagine sitting in a smoky Harlem jazz den of the 1940s. Alex Blake’s bass highlighted the big instrument’s amazing melodic and percussive possibilities in the right hands.

My first introduction to Randy Weston’s music was his 1972 album Blue Moses. I remember as a young schoolboy visiting the NK record store in Stockholm with my mother and choosing this album based on the intriguing concept that the cover and the names of the tunes conveyed. I also recognized the sidemen listed on the jacket. They included both established veterans, like Freddie Hubbard and Ron Carter, as well as rising stars of the calibre of Billy Cobham and Grover Washington, Jr. Perhaps most importantly, the cover informed me that the group included Hubert Laws, who was a great idol and inspiration to me as an aspiring flute player. While the record was a Creed Taylor production on his successful CTI label, there was nothing too sleek or superficial about it. The music was raw and its North African influences unapologetic. Don Sebesky's arrangements featured more instruments than most of jazz orchestras, including such unusual additions as oboe and the French horn.

Randy Weston himself played the Fender Rhodes throughout the record, which somewhat oddly did not distract from the genuineness of the music. On the contrary, the reverb of the Rhodes produced a haunting atmosphere in the rubato parts of the music against which the vocalist Madame Meddah could wail her Berber voice. At times when exotic rhythms took over, the Rhodes sounded more like a West African balaphone.

The interplay between Carter and Cobham is impeccable, the latter refraining from displaying his most showman-like pyrotechnics. The trumpet, tenor and—yes!—the flute all play inspired solos. Still today, the record holds a central place in my collection and, every time I listen to it, I get the goose bumps when, after a complex rhythmic element on the title track, Cobham cracks the rim of his snare drum indicating the beginning of the most swinging straight drive ever and Hubbard dives into a broad-sounded trumpet solo. Or when the electric piano intro of 'Night in Medina' turns into a compelling slow melody played by the horns, with Laws’ flute and percussionist Airto Moreira’s voice hovering mysteriously around it. Yes, indeed, Blue Moses is still just about the best record ever made.

A number of years ago, I was lucky to catch Randy Weston at the World Financial Centre in downtown Manhattan. That time he had brought with him a group of Gnawa musicians from Morocco to supplement the African Rhythms Quintet. The vast atrium with its evergreen winter garden and huge windows giving to the Hudson River and skylights allowing sunlight in from the blue sky was an appropriate location for the music that really should have been played outdoors. The Gnawa are a Moroccan ethnic group belonging to the Sufi Muslim sect known for their music that involves hypnotic rhythms, call-and-response vocals and string instruments.

The concert turned into a riot. The mood was so celebratory that Randy Weston himself, dressed in a flowing Berber gown and wearing a white North African cap, spent more time dancing with a big smile on his face to the music of the Gnawa than playing the piano. I remember that my wife Yoko and I went home completely exhilarated and exhausted, although it was only afternoon and no other stimulants had been involved apart from the music and the general joy.

Back at Jazz Standard, the final full piece the band played was another slow blues in 3/4 time, with Alex Blake producing rubbery glissandos on his bass. As the concert ended and the big man rose from his piano chair, TK Blue finally picked up his flute. Throughout the concert I had watched longingly at the flute and soprano saxophone that he had brought with him to the stage. Alas, he had until now chosen to focus on the alto. This was the first set in the series and I am sure he’d play more on the smaller winds later in the week. At least I was happy to hear the husky flute blow against the slow North African rhythm as the gentleman we had come to celebrate walked backstage.

I truly wish for many, many more happy birthdays to celebrate with the musical force and genius of Randy Weston.

Sandy Weather in Beijing

2010-03-31T12:47:00.000-07:00

When I returned to Beijing on a late March evening, the sandstorms had subsided but one could still taste the dust particles in the air. The night was moonless and there was a slight haze. The meteorological authorities had recommended that residents stay inside as much as possible and keep their windows closed. Inhaling too much of the dust would have negative health effects, especially on respiratory organs.

The worst sandstorm of the year hit Beijing on a Saturday. It was the 20th of March 2010. On the following Monday, a second storm enveloped the capital city in a shroud of yellow dust that covered everything from the rooftops to the pavement on the streets. Trees as well as cars were coated by a layer of sandy dust. As an immediate result, dust pollution in the air rose to intolerable levels. People on the streets wore facemasks to protect their mouths and noses. Pharmacies were reportedly selling these items in ten times larger quantities than during normal times. Patients with asthma and other respiratory illnesses flooded the hospitals. Schools banned outdoors sports and even class breaks in the school yard.

Despite these dramatic consequences, the sandstorms were by no means unique in Beijing or elsewhere in China. In fact, according to the Chinese National Meteorological Centre, there have been on the average eight to nine sandstorms in Beijing each year over the past decade. Four-fifths of them occur in the spring.

The news reported that sandstorms over the weekend affected some 270 million people in 16 Chinese provinces covering an area of 2 million square kilometres. The numbers are staggering, but so is the scale of these storms. Fuelled by high winds from the north, the storms affected not only the capital region and the provinces north from it—Shaanxi, Hebei and Shanxi—but reached far south to the coast. Reportedly, the touristic city of Hangzhou—known as the most beautiful in China—in Zheijiang province in the east, and Fujian province on the southeast coast of the country were blanketed in yellow dust. As far south as Hong Kong, air pollution levels caused by the dust shot through the roof. Not even the island of Taiwan was spared: the dust pollution index in the capital of Taipei doubled.

In an interview with the China Daily on 23 March 2010, Duan Li, chief weather forecaster with the Beijing Meteorological Bureau, explained that, strictly speaking, rather than a sandstorm, we had just experienced a mere dust storm. The word ‘sandstorm’ is used when visibility falls to less than 1 km, she clarified, while this time visibility averaged between 2-3 km. Whatever the definition, the Beijing municipal Environmental Protection Bureau reported that the air quality was promptly deteriorating due to the dust and the city was experiencing level-four air pollution.

The perennial sandstorms plaguing the city originate in the northern parts of the country, often in the vast dry open areas of Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang and Tibet. A perfect sandstorm is created when cold Siberian winds from the northwest meet with soil that has been dried by the warming spring weather. The high wind velocity associated with the winter monsoon can reach 18-28 metres per second. Historically, strong winds occur for about a month every year but in rare cases they can last for up to a hundred days. Often the windiest days coincide with the dry season when sandstorms develop and blow away the dry loose surface soil. This time the epicentre of the sandstorm was located in the Inner Mongolia and Ningxia Hui autonomous regions.

Needless to say, the sandstorms are frequently seen as yet another consequence of human mismanagement of nature. Surely this must be yet one manifestation of how the greed of the contemporary man destroys the very base on which our lives depend? Undoubtedly, overgrazing of animals and deforestation in these naturally arid lands has caused significant erosion and loosened the topsoil that can now be blown away by the winds. Urbanization that these traditionally pastoralist societies are facing has put additional pressures on the natural vegetation that holds the soil together. The grasslands of northern China have been significantly degraded and deserts now cover 16 percent of the country. No-one can deny these facts.

But is this a new phenomenon? And is it particularly related to the exceedingly rapid economic growth and modernization of China over the past couple of decades? It would seem safe to argue, no, on the contrary, grassland degradation and drought have plagued northern China for centuries. My Beijing–based friend John explained how Chang’an, the former eastern terminus of the legendary Silk Road in Shaanxi province, collapsed in the 10th century C.E., partly due to environmental stresses on land and water caused by the large settlement. Sandstorms must have been a nuisance already then, more than a thousand years ago.

It is easy to blame recent developments for environmental degradation and the current trajectory may indeed not be sustainable. However, people’s memories are short and many environmentally concerned folks are intuitively sceptical about economic development. Yet, the history of degradation is often much longer and in some cases economic development has actually helped halt environmental damage as local people’s awareness and possibilities to invest in environmental protection improved. This has been convincingly shown by Jack Ives and Bruno Messerli in their now classic 1989 volume The Himalayan Dilemma: Reconciling Development and Conservation in which the two geographers show that, based on a historical record, the deforestation and land degradation in the world’s highest mountain range goes back hundreds of years and was largely due to colonial policies. According to their research, the intensive smallholder terraced agriculture has actually resulted in the stabilization of the slopes.

A similar storyline emerges from the book The Ordos Plateau of China: An Endangered Environment by another geographer and friend, Hong Jiang at the University of Hawaii. Ordos Plateau in the Inner Mongolia autonomous region is a fragile environment that is easily impacted by human activities, be it animal grazing, agriculture or construction. Subjected to overgrazing and deforestation, the flat open land becomes increasingly exposed to wind erosion that can have disastrous proportions. However, Hong’s detailed historical and field research demonstrates that the most rampant degradation in the region occurred during the first three decades after the takeover by Mao’s revolutionary guard in 1949. During this period that included the 'Great Leap Forward' (read: the opposite), the Chinese masses were mobilized to conquer the nature for the benefit of the new communist state. Since 1978, the degradation started slowing down and has in some areas even been reversed after environmental protection efforts were put in place.

Human factors were the triggering forces for environmental degradation, as well as the determining forces for environmental improvement, she concludes. Government policies played the most important role both in initially leading to the runaway degradation and, later, its reversal. Such policies were more important in determining the environmental outcomes than other factors, including economic growth, population increase and social practices.

With wealth often comes a raised awareness of the importance of environmental quality and an ability to do something about it. The Beijing-based Global Times reported that the Tibetan authorities have pledged to improve close to a million hectares of desert areas over the coming two decades by planting trees and grass. Similarly, according to China Daily, Beijing and its port city Tianjin have invested 4 billion yuan (more than 500 million dollars) into wind and sandstorm control since 2000.

Then again, the prominent ecologist Jiang Gaoming of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has pointed out that tree-planting projects in north China have been in existence for three decades and 60 billion yuan has been spent on preventing the sandstorms, but the results have not been impressive. To the question why this is the case, Jiang provides a set of answers that combine the technical (planting grass rather than trees; need to include remote, inaccessible areas that are ecologically degraded) and the social. His point is that many of these formerly nomadic areas in the northwest just are too fragile for permanent settlement and their carrying capacities have been exceeded by the current population levels (just as they were towards the end of the glory of Chang'an). Furthermore, there is a link to poverty, as poor people rely on the grasslands to feed their livestock and clear land for their crops.

But for now the dust had settled and I was able to enjoy a pleasant lunch in a courtyard of an old hutong converted into a trendy café near the Lama Temple just two days after the second sandstorm. The sky was blue and breathing the air was no problem. Still, another eight to ten sandstorms are expected to hit northern China between April and May this year. Zhang Peiqun, chief forecaster at the National Meteorological Centre, explained in the newspaper that this could be predicted due to the fluctuation between warm spring weather and sudden cold spells causing heavy winds to blow away the dry sand. We got a demonstration of the sudden variability of the weather the same evening when wet snow like white rags was pouring from the sky and everything was momentarily covered in sleet.

Like everywhere, springtime weather in Beijing is unpredictable. What is sure, however, is that the sandstorms will recur for the foreseeable future.

Tripoli

2010-01-19T10:55:00.000-08:00

Libya does not have a great reputation amongst Westerners. That’s too bad, because the country actually has a lot to offer for a visitor: it has unique historic sites—including what is said to be the best preserved Roman ruins outside of Italy in Sabratha and Leptis Magna—decent food and a beautiful Mediterranean coastline. Yet, the US State Department keeps Libya on its watch list and even the Lonely Planet founder Tony Wheeler included Libya in his travel book Bad Lands: A Tourist on the Axis of Evil.

Libya’s bad rap of course has its roots in the unorthodox rule by the country’s long-time dictator, Muammar al-Gaddafi, whose larger-than-life pictures adorn all public spaces in Tripoli. There are so many of them and most of them different from each other: some depict the leader scanning the horizon for new challenges with a far-sighted look in his glinting eyes, while others show him smiling at his subjects in a fatherly and encouraging manner. Some are clearly from his younger days; others show a more mature Gaddafi sporting a moustache and a goatee. There are even posters of him praying on his knees at a mosque. The pious colonel is personally well-known for travelling with a troupe of gorgeous but lethal female bodyguards.

In 2009, the nation celebrated 40 years of Gaddafi’s rule. Libya has been accused of being a state sponsor of terrorism, and most likely for a good reason. Already in 1986 during the Reagan administration, the United States bombed Tripoli and the Benghazi region accusing Libya of terrorism. The United Nations imposed sanctions on Libya in 1992. These were suspended in 1999 and finally lifted in 2003 when Gaddafi agreed not to pursue weapons of mass destruction and voluntarily gave up his nuclear program. The relations with the West took a new hit in August 2009 when the Lockerbie bomber Abdelbeset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi was freed from a Scottish prison due to his terminal cancer. Unwisely, Gaddafi gave the convicted terrorist a hero’s welcome back home.

Personality cult aside, Gaddafi has done many good things for his country. He has posited himself as the self-proclaimed champion of Pan-Africanism, but his is probably the only country on the continent where abject poverty really does not exist. Women’s position is also quite equal compared with most other Arab countries. Women still wear headscarves and dress modestly in Islamic garb, but in all offices that I visited there were many highly professional and outspoken women in senior professional positions. Women’s literacy rate at 78.4 percent is almost as high as that of men—and exceptional in the Arab region. Today, the UN ranks Libyan Arab Jamahiriya—as it is officially called—as a country of ‘high human development.’ Its GDP per capita has doubled from $7,250 in 1990 to $14,364 in 2007 and life expectancy of the Libyans has risen from 62 to 71.6 years (and for women it is now 76.8 years, at par with many industrialized nations!).

One obviously unintended consequence of the international sanctions was that over the decades when the country was isolated ordinary Libyans suffered from deficiencies in education. Due to the isolation, the generation that today occupies important positions is largely monolingual Arabic speakers. Some people speak English, but the language skills of even well-placed government officials tend to be meagre.

The capital, Tripoli where I spent several days in December, is a historical city, dating back to 7th century BCE when it was apparently founded by the Phoenicians. Today it is a clean, white city, despite being Libya’s main port and commercial centre. Coming from anywhere in the neighbouring countries east or west—or north across the sea, for that matter—it gives a neat and organized impression. The architecture is quite attractive and most of the buildings are white, irrespective of whether they are of colonial or Arabic origin. Many have been renovated or are now being renovated. There is no litter on the streets and the traffic is more orderly than in other cities of comparable size.

My travel companions, Ragaa Makharita and my colleague Mike, and I had to visit a number of government offices, many of which were located in the suburbs outside of the city centre. Driving in the daylight confirmed what I had already observed during my first drive into town from the airport at night time. The suburbs were generally neat and orderly. Plenty of new housing seemed to be available and most of the complexes looked rather attractive. I asked Ragaa, an old Libya hand, whether there were any slums in Tripoli. He said no. All the slums that used to be there were or are being cleared and new housing is being created for the inhabitants. There are apparently many new projects that are being constructed by Korean firms. It was striking to see large groups of African day labourers gathered at virtually all major junctions outside of the centre waiting to be picked up for the various construction sites. This entire arrangement thus bypasses the traditional 'development partners' in Europe and North America.

One of the institutes we visited was the Libyan National Meteorological Centre on its new and impressive premises outside of the city. The UN has supported the centre in upgrading its operations and facilities with technical assistance from the World Meteorological Organization and the French Meteorological Services. The spic-and-span facilities now contain state-of-the-art computer systems capable of receiving satellite information and translating it into accurate real-time weather reports. This has been one of the most successful international collaborations in the country in recent years and a flagship project for the UN. What characterized the project and also lay behind its success was that weather services are largely technical and their political dimensions do not seriously challenge any mode of cooperation. The UN Development Programme that was managing the international effort was able to procure equipment and expertise where it was available without getting into the ill-defined issues of governance and democracy.

I had an interesting discussion with two senior officials at the centre, Muftaf Khdashi and Hisham Ganedi, Director of Forecasting and Director of Technical Directorate, respectively, about cloud seeding. Libya, located between the Mediterranean Sea and the Sahara desert, is dry, its natural climate characterized by sparse and erratic rainfall. The country's leader has for long attempted to overcome such challenges to boosting agricultural and industrial development through various schemes, many of them quite bold to say the least. One of the more ‘visionary’ (read: ‘dangerous’) schemes has been the Great Manmade River, which aims to transport huge amounts of water from the Nubian Aquifer to Tripoli, Benghazi and other cities. While Gaddafi has called it the 'Eighth Wonder of the World,' it has been widely criticized for its unknown and potentially disastrous ecological impacts, including exhausting the huge fossil aquifer it draws upon in possibly just a century. But the project has proceeded since 1983 when the Colonel passed it through the General People’s Congress.

Another scheme, implemented by the Libyan National Meteorological Centre where I found myself on that particular sunny but extremely dry morning, pertains to cloud seeding. The aim is to distribute silver iodide into the clouds so that moisture in them will condense around these artificial particles and fall onto the ground as rain. Such technocratic solutions to natural problems are embraced also by other hubristic countries, notably China, with little consideration for their potential unforeseen negative impacts. How is the work going?, I interrogated my hosts as we strolled along the long corridors inside the centre’s headquarters. Not very well, was the answer. While cloud seeding appears to increase rainfall, it is very difficult to manage. Of course, it can only be applied from November to April when in the first place there are some clouds and rains might also appear naturally, so it’s actually hard to verify the actual increment caused by the seeding. More importantly, it’s impossible to accurately direct the rains. The Mediterranean weather patterns are unpredictable and orographic rains fall as moist air cools down while climbing the slopes behind the coastline. Sometimes, the rains become torrential and destroy the very crops they were intended to sooth.

Our visit to the meteorological centre took place on the day following the end of the 2009 climate summit, which had in the last minute produced only a watered down version of the Copenhagen Accords disappointing many activists. One of the many frontlines in the climate change debates is between those who urge serious cuts in greenhouse gas emissions and those who believe in technological solutions. On a small scale, the Libyan cloud seeding experiments demonstrate the practical difficulties in managing weather. Influencing global climate through technological means—many of which are now being cooked up in the wild dreams of mad scientists—would be infinitely more difficult and wrought with unimagined and possibly catastrophic consequences.

Clearly, one area where improvements are still needed if Libya is to attract more visitors is service. Ragaa, Mike and I stayed at what used to be one of the better large hotels in the centre of Tripoli. The building had all the necessary attributes to be fine—a solid construction, an elegant old-fashioned lobby, spacious rooms—but it wasn’t. The guest rooms had absolutely awful, narrow beds with only shallow flat mattresses and shabby linen thrown on them. The bathroom had hordes of uninvited non-paying occupants who would scurry to their hiding places brown antennae wagging always when I unexpectedly turned on the lights. After a couple of times, I learned to wait a few seconds before entering the bare room.

Most bizarrely, the hotel would want to receive payment for the room every evening in advance, although I had a reservation with them for the entire period I would stay in the country. Needless to say, this was a cash economy and no credit cards would be accepted. Like in cheap New York eateries that don’t either accept credit cards, there was an ATM in the lobby. So, one had to withdraw the funds and provide the lazy cashier a thick pile of well-worn dinars in order for him to agree to open the room door for you. On my last night, I had carefully miscalculated my supply of dinars, so that I wouldn’t have any left over upon leaving, and fell short by four (amounting to very little in any convertible currency). The man who knew me by then did let me into my room while I tried to contact Mike to lend me the missing notes. Unfortunately, he had gone out and couldn’t help at that very moment. Later, the cashier made a big joke about this to the both of us, repeatedly telling in halting English that I wouldn’t be able to leave in the morning without doling out the money.

On the last evening, our small group headed to the Alsaht Street fish market along the Mediterranean coast. Ragaa was our eager guide, as during his last visit to Tripoli he had been very disappointed to find the entire market closed. The evening was already dark when we arrived at the open door market but the numerous stalls were filled with fresh fish and other sea creatures. The vendors were all calling to us to inspect their catch. We approached one friendly fisherman and each selected a silver sided medium sized Dorato and instructed the delighted man to simply grill it to perfection. As a next step, we selected the restaurant where we would enjoy our meal. This was easy, as Ragaa led us directly to his favourite establishment, Astakosa, a spacious but warm restaurant spread over two floors. The system was interesting. The fishermen and the restaurants were independent of each other and one could order the former to bring the prepared fish to any one of the restaurants established adjacent to the fishing port. The restaurants made their money by selling the accompanying rice, cous-cous and vegetables. We started our meal with a wonderful assortment of olives, fresh salads and various mezze, as well as delicious seafood soup. When the fish came, it was grilled to perfection and tasted heavenly with ample lemon squeezed on it.

The enjoyable dinner helped me to endure the innate jokes of the lethargic cashier at the hotel and my full stomach provided a needed extra cushion against the hard cardboard bed before leaving Tripoli in the wee hours of the morning.

Casablanca

2010-01-03T12:49:00.000-08:00

Casablanca. A city made legendary by a movie. The name conjures up images of intrigue, danger and, most of all, romance in a distinctly unromantic time. Casablanca is the largest city in Morocco and a major port on the Atlantic coast. The city, like the country, is quite liberal and rather cosmopolitan, defying the stereotypes of today’s Arab world. In fact, the North African nation of originally Berber culture is a relative newcomer to the ranks of Arab nations having been conquered by the Arabs arriving there via Andalusia only in the 8th century. Spain is just a stone’s throw away, only 14 km from the north coast across the Strait of Gibraltar.

Morocco has changed rapidly in the past couple of decades, much of it to the better. I was in town attending an international conference on national evaluation capacity, which focused on monitoring and evaluation for public sector accountability. The idea is that if citizens follow and assess the performance of their government, the latter has an incentive to ensure results that benefit the people. Transparent systems that monitor the performance of authorities and evaluate in an independent and credible manner the actual results of policies and programs can be powerful tools for democratic governance. The conference was organized jointly by the UN Development Programme and the newly established National Human Development Observatory under the Moroccan Prime Minister’s Office, known as ONDH based on its French name (Obvervatoire National du Développement Humain).

On the evening before the start of the conference, I was sitting in a lovely traditional restaurant, La Fibule, serving wonderful Moroccan cuisine. The host was Rachid Benmokhtar Benabdellah, president of ONDH, an intelligent and gentle man with a warm glint in his eye. Benmokhtar had studied IT engineering in France and started his working life with IBM. He had made most of his career in the private sector until he had been appointed Minister of Education by the King. He told stories about him being the first minister in the country to visit schools in remote rural areas and how his staffers were horrified when the minister wanted to talk freely with the local people.

The meal started with an amazing selection of mezze, small plates of North African starters ranging from hummus, babaganoush, tomato and beet salads to tasty pastries with meat and vegetable fillings. There were fantastic ornaments in the ceiling and the walls carved so delicately that one could only stare in awe at the craftsmanship. We were sipping good locally produced Cabernet Sauvignon and discussing the situation in Morocco.

“We’ve had some bombings here,” said Benmokhtar, “but always when there’s trouble here there’s some link to Europe, usually Belgium or France, from where the radicalized Islamists come from.” The soft spoken engineer continued: “Moroccans are not strict Muslims. It’s all mixed up with other traditions here.” This was confirmed by, Salima Aissaoua, a young woman who had only recently returned from France to join ONDH. Many Moroccans, like her own family, are not even believers but enjoy all celebrations, whether of Muslim, Christian or Berber origin. I noted that I had seen very few headscarves during my brief stay in Casablanca. Salima said that there was absolutely no pressure to wear a headscarf and that in the countryside it was even freer. This sounded counterintuitive, but on second thought may be understandable, as the Berber culture remains strong in the rural areas.

Another ONDH colleague, Mohammed Bijaad, was a Berber from Agadir. He had never learned English, so our discussion relied on my halting French. Bijaad originally went to a French school in Agadir. Then in 1960 a major earthquake struck his hometown and little Mohammed had to be evacuated with his family. Just when it would have been time for him to start learning English, his new school in the interior introduced Arabic instead.

As we continued with the main course, a delicious pot of chicken, rice and vegetables baked in a clay pot, Tajine, we were entertained by a highly skilful musician playing Oud, a traditional lute, and singing joyous songs whose lyrics mixed love and longing with religious themes. Some Moroccan colleagues joined in the songs and enthusiastically clapped their hands to the complex rhythms. It was a spontaneous and relaxing evening with excellent food and wine and delightful entertainment.

The conference started the following morning with more than sixty participants from twenty-two governments in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as select representatives from international organizations. One of the key discussions from the beginning focused around who has the right to evaluate government policy. The room became divided. On the one side were those, like Angela Bester, a former government official from South Africa now with the private firm Deloitte-Touche, who in her opening salvo questioned the assumption that policy was always right and the tendency to blame everything on poor implementation. On the other side were some government officials, vocally led by a gentleman from Ghana, who argued that only the government itself could assess policy and, ultimately in a democracy, the voters would decide whether it worked. The role of independent evaluation was only to focus on programs and projects. This debate would be a recurrent theme over the coming three days.

In the evening I wanted to escape the hotel where the conference was held and where all the participants stayed. I went for a walk in the city centre—Centre Ville—where we were located. French is more commonly spoken in Morocco, at least in the big cities, than Arabic and I had noted that amongst all the government officials and academics I had met French was the language in which they would communicate with each other. I crossed l’Avenue de l’Armée Royale and entered into lively quarters with narrow streets and shops. I passed a bar from where an animated cacophony of discussion was flowing to the street. Its name was Chatan. With only a second’s hesitation, I entered the premises and ordered a Stork (bière de luxe première). The place was a far cry from what one could expect in an Islamic country. It was far from sophisticated (an understatement). Everyone—every single one of the patrons—was smoking and the air was thick with blue cigarette smoke. The age bracket was wide, I would say from people in their twenties into their sixties, which suited me just fine. I would melt in, I gathered. The present king and his father, King Hassan V and VI, stared from the wall above the bar counter. The old Italian hit Volare turned into Michael Jackson, while Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta Jones were silently robbing a vault on the small old TV screen. A large elderly woman in a pink kaftan was gesticulating agitatedly to her companions. A guy leaning on the counter already had five empty beer bottles in front of him—and it was only 7 pm on a week night. In one corner, a young woman dressed in jeans and a sweater stood alone smoking and drinking beer. At a nearby table, a shabby looking man was pouring beer into the mouth of a woman wearing a baseball cap.

While I was taking in the scene, I felt a bump and thought the man with a moustache and dirty red jacket had accidentally crashed into me. To my surprise, he handed me another bottle of Stork and said in gruff English that it was for me. We went through an elaborate handshake, shifting grips and ending in a rough bear hug, as I was profusely thanking him. The man returned to his table and his red wine. In Casa, the lingua franca is French, yet the man had spoken to me in English. Apparently, I hadn’t quite melted in and passed for a local. Maybe he was a seaman who had sailed the seven seas and visited bars like this in innumerable ports? Or was I just romanticizing things?

The port remains an important part of this city of some 3.5 million inhabitants. The architecture is today mostly modern. Wide thoroughfares cross the centre. The old town, Medina, still stands and is surrounded by the tall wall since time immemorial. Inside it is bustling with endless alleys, small shops and a bazaar. There are also cafés and small hotels. It is a place where one had better keep track of the wallet, both for pickpockets in the crowded and winding alleys, as well as the shopkeepers determined to part you from your money. Bargaining was never a sport I mastered, so I mostly focused on enjoying the colourful scene in which locals and visitors mingled. Casablanca is not a touristic city. Its raison d’être is purely commercial.

Morocco’s economy is doing relatively well. On my first day while driving from the capital of Rabat to Casablanca by the fine houses lining the churning ocean front, I asked the driver, Habibi, about the economy. His initial comment: “Ça va.” But the business was still good, he elaborated, and generally things were looking up.

The United Nations ranks Morocco as a ‘medium human development’ country. The country has made strides in the recent past. Its GDP per capita has more than doubled from $1,700 to more than $4,000 in just two decades. Social indicators show similar improvements: life expectancy has risen from 62 to 71 years and adult literacy from 34 to 52 percent. Especially female literacy levels have improved rapidly. While in 1987, only 22 percent of the women could read, this figure is now 43 percent. In particular, during the rule of the present youthful King Hassan VI, the human rights situation in Morocco has improved significantly. Still, big differences do exist between urban and rural dwellers. Some 14 percent of Moroccans still subsist on less than $2 per day.

On the day after the conference, I walked to the Mosque Hassan II, which took me about 45 minutes along a main street. It passed between the wall of the old Medina and the harbour; then onwards past the fashionable restaurants of La Sqala and Rick’s Café, which successfully capitalizes on its imitation of the scene where Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman meet. There was a segment that was quite slum-like, although nothing compared with the shanties in other African countries further south. Women there wore their traditional djellabas. Like everywhere, poverty and tradition went hand in hand here.

The mosque, while not a historical building, is impressive nevertheless. It was commissioned by its namesake King Hassan II in 1980 and was completed only in 1993. The construction is said to have cost $800 million. It is located in a gorgeous spot right on the shore of the open Atlantic Ocean. The huge yard with the smaller buildings surrounding it reminded me of Saint Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican. The mosque has a capacity to accommodate 25,000 worshippers and its minarets rise to the height of 210 metres.

While I was admiring the considerable waves breaking to the shore by the Corniche, Casablanca’s seaside entertainment district, I met Mohammed Sharif, a man of my own age or perhaps a few years older. He introduced himself as a tour guide and after some chitchat offered his services to me. I told him that I unfortunately didn’t have time for sightseeing. This was partially true, as I had reserved the afternoon and evening for myself, having spent several days in the company of many people. We nevertheless talked for a while. Today was Hijra, the Muslim new year, marking the Prophet’s and his followers’ move from Mecca to Medina in the year 622 CE. This was a big holiday and a long weekend all over the Islamic world. Here in relatively secular Morocco people enjoyed the long weekend. Like Mohammed said: ”In Morocco religion is not that important. We welcome everyone here, Christians, Jews, Muslims.”

A powerful wind blew from the sea raising dust into the air from the dry sidewalk. My eyeglasses were dimmed by the salt in the air spraying from the breaking waves. Mohammed knew that this northerly wind had brought first snow into the Atlas mountains.

I walked back to Centre Ville. Everything was dusty and my throat was dry. I bought a Fanta from a kiosk and found an old shoeshine man. He did a good job on my dusty shoes. There was a Moroccan man standing next to me having his shoes shined. I asked him how much I should pay; he told me 5 dirhams. When I gave the shiner his five dirham coin plus some change, he protested wildly. Expectations are that foreigners should add another zero at the end of the bill.

I had indeed decided to enjoy my last evening alone in Casablanca. I started it with a visit to a sauna to relax my sore muscles after my walk of several hours earlier in the day. Clean and equipped with an appropriate thirst, I then again crossed l’Avenue de l’Armée Royale and entered Saillant, a bar that I had already visited on earlier occasion. It is in the same neighbourhood as Chatan, but a notch above in style and clientele. It still is just a simple establishment with a long counter and a few wooden tables. Like on my earlier visits, I was the only foreigner. I ordered a Stork from the bar maid who reminded me of Herman Munster. When I took out a 100 dirham note to pay, she pleaded with me to find smaller change. The equivalent of $12 was far too large a denomination for this place. She only relented when I promised to have a second beer afterwards. Having served me, she returned to her own beer and cigarette while Egyptian style pop played on the background.

I continued my trip and followed a route that I had memorized from a map that I had studied prior to leaving my hotel this evening. The shop-lined pedestrian streets and plazas with fountains in the city centre were crowded with people and the lights from the various establishments provided a cosy atmosphere in the darkening night. After one junction, the street turned dark and quiet and I started to doubt my mental map. Just when I was about to turn around, I detected the sign to Al Mounia. A wooden door opened to a garden and I walked through it to the restaurant known for its authentic Moroccan cuisine. The two small rooms were decorated with elaborate carvings. A sofa circled the walls and small round copper tables were arranged in front of it. The place was not crowded yet. In a nearby table were three men discussing in Swedish. The waiters, all men, wore red fezzes on their heads, pasha pants, vests and pointed slippers. While thinking about what to eat, I started the meal with succulent olives and delicious bread, which I washed down with local Cuvée du President Cabernet. I decided to order brochettes kefta—Moroccan grilled meatballs—which came with six plates with different kinds of salads of tomato, onion, eggplant, zucchini, carrots and peppers. The food was exquisite both to the palate and the eye, and one could hardly eat a healthier yet fulfilling meal. By the time I left around 9:30 p.m., the place was starting to fill up. With the Swedes also gone, all customers were locals.

Not quite done yet, I headed to Cas-Bar, which I had heard was a hot nightspot in Casa. At 11 p.m. the place was still sedate but people were starting to arrive in groups. The majority appeared to be young women and all were Moroccan. The theme turned out to be karaoke, but what a feast it turned out to be. With the exception of a few English pop songs, all of the songs that evening were in Arabic. A bald headed DJ in the corner made sure that the right discs were turning. Without exception, the singers were good. They attacked with flair the polyrhythmic songs with meandering melodies. Two men sang a series of duets in complex harmonies. A particular young woman in a black miniskirt stood up to sing several songs with the panache of a professional karaoke star. The only place where the Islamic propriety was evident was the videos accompanying the songs: instead of people, they showed bees pollinating flowers. Their meaning would hardly elude the revellers.

On the last day of the conference Benmokhtar had once and for all settled the question of who could evaluate policy. In his final speech, he recalled how King Hassan VI was concerned with the lack of development in the country. While in purely economic terms Morocco was almost as wealthy as Portugal, it was lagging seriously behind in terms of human development. The King appointed a group headed by Benmokhtar to evaluate the policies of the past decades to find out what had gone wrong. The evaluation was highly critical and identified all the areas where the country’s policies were amiss: education, distribution of resources, gender, democratic governance, health inequities, and the differences between urban and rural areas. All findings of the evaluation were made public and decisions were taken to revise policies accordingly. Evaluating policy requires political will and courage, concluded Benmokhtar. As he said, the King did not have to worry about re-election. The point didn’t go unnoticed by many political appointees in the audience.