I came across this article in Ode Magazine today. It talks about what the West can learn from the rest of the world and highlights some key values, habits and priorities in countries in Africa and Asia. As someone from the ‘rest of the world’, and because India featured more than once, it was interesting to see that some things that one considers rather commonplace in one’s own culture are thought of as worth learning by someone, somewhere else. Undoubtedly, if I put together a similar list, it would reflect things about other cultures that they take for granted.

Anyway, the article talks about learning humility from Sri Lanka, community and raising children from Kenya, democracy from Ghana, work from Nigeria, the village from Tanzania, and ingenuity, non-violence, yoga and food from India. My favourite is happiness from Bhutan:

The king of Bhutan introduced the concept of gross national happiness (GNH), which is based on the idea that true development of society takes place when material and spiritual development occur side by side to complement and reinforce each other. That’s why for the past two decades, happiness has been incorporated as a guiding principle in Bhutan’s policies.

Over the years, we’ve made Bhutan greener than most countries and despite the advent of satellite TV and the Internet, the social fabric is still intact. These policies have also made Bhutan more secure than ever before. To us, these are all indications that our policies are beginning to realize the goal of making people happy. And that’s what all of us want: to find more ways we can engage in the pursuit of happiness.

An entire country which pursues happiness — what can be more fabulous than that? No countries from South East Asia and the Middle East feature. Zen and the art of eating fish from Japan? Martial arts and food from China? Well, I suppose it’s impossible to be really inclusive in any list.

Increasingly, there’s a lot of thrust on cross-cultural learning and the importance of understanding other cultures because of the shrinking world we live in. With the Internet at our disposal, it’s easier than ever before to know about other cultures — at least at a prima facie or superficial level. Whether or not, this fuels more unity is still debatable. In some case, knowledge does equal understanding and better empathy. But in others, a single cultural tradition or habit that you find distasteful or unethical can turn you off a particular culture and prevent you from caring enough to find out about other aspects. Sometimes, there is an uneasy balance of respect of repugnance. On the whole, I would say it’s better to know rather than not. I think one of the measures of the Internet’s success is that there is still a great deal of communication and harmony between individuals in different countries today despite overwhelming counter factors like terrorism and war.

The Centre for Intercultural Learning and the Cultural Profiles Project are great sites for those who want to know more about people elsewhere in the world. Go on, take a virtual dip into another culture. Have fun!

I started my Monday morning with this video on continued human rights violations in China. Not a very cheery beginning to the week, but I definitely recommend a watch.

China is gearing up for the 2008 Olympic Games which are to be hosted in Beijing. There is something far more important than sport being played out in this arena, however. The world now has its eye on China’s human rights standards and is watching to see whether it will make good on its promise to improve its dismal human rights records. In December 2006, the Chinese government also unveiled new temporary regulations to give accredited foreign journalists more freedom in the run-up to and during the Games.

According to the Human Rights Watch overview, the country “remains a one-party state that does not hold national elections, has no independent judiciary, leads the world in executions, aggressively censors the Internet, bans independent trade unions, and represses minorities such as Tibetans, Uighurs, and Mongolians.”

Things have not improved much despite the promises according to this report. In the run-up to the Games, China is keen to present its best face to the world and freedom of expression is being heavily curtailed. Recently, Reporters Without Borders activists rallied in front of the Olympic museum in Lausanne even as the Chinese Communist Party’s 17th congress opened to protest continued inaction on the human rights agenda.

“For the past several weeks an icy wind has blown through freedom of expression in China. This with less than 10 months to go before the opening of the Olympic Games. How can the IOC and its ethical commission remain silent before such a heavy toll of violations of freedom of expression?” it asked.

“More than 30 foreign journalists have been arrested and prevented from working since the start of the year. No fewer than one thousand discussion forums and websites have been closed since July. And a score of dissidents have been imprisoned for expressing themselves freely,” Reporters Without Borders said.

For some background information on the human rights situation in China, read RWB’s Annual Report 2007 which details some of the atrocities committed by Hu Jintao’s government in the name of “harmonious society”.

Hu Jintao’s voiced rage against “hostile forces”, whom he accused of fomenting a “coloured revolution” backed by the United States and led by human rights activists and liberal journalists, when he spoke to an audience of ministers, ambassadors and party provincial officials in August 2006. As preparations got under way for the next Communist Party Congress in October 2007, public security arrested at least 12 journalists and placed scores more under surveillance. This crackdown has also extended to lawyers. In March they were banned by China’s Association of Lawyers from speaking to foreign journalists about “masses incidents”, concerning groups such as the unemployed and the peasants. In September, Chinese judges had the same ban on speaking to the press slapped on them.

The Chinese government monitors every bit of information passing in and out of the country. Which is why news reports on China usually focus on its booming economic prospects and speak nothing of the poverty, corruption and inhuman prison conditions. but here is Amnesty International’s lowdown on the rights violations plaguing China’s 1.3 billion people.

Torture and ill-treatment remained widespread. Common methods included kicking, beating, electric shocks, suspension by the arms, shackling in painful positions, cigarette burns, and sleep and food deprivation. In November a senior official admitted that at least 30 wrongful convictions handed down each year resulted from the use of torture, with the true number likely being higher.

I don’t know about you but I’m going to find it hard to muster too much enthusiasm about the Games this time.

Next time you walk down the street, take a closer look at the trash cans. You never know what you may find! This woman found a genuine masterpiece by Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo. The painting, which had been stolen in 1987, turned up in the trash on a Manhattan street four years ago. Instinctively knowing that there was something magnificent about the painting, Elizabeth Gibson took it home and started a search to find out the real story behind the painting.

I think it’s fabulous that she was observant enough to notice the painting, gutsy enough to pick it out of a trash can and take it home and then persevering enough to hunt out the truth. From the report:

Something about the painting pulled her in, Gibson said, and she took it home and put it on a wall.

“It is huge and it’s very brilliant coloured, very abstract, but you can make out three figures and it’s just very powerful, it’s overwhelming,” she said.

The 1970 painting is titled Tres Personajes and other works by its painter, Tamayo, have soared in value in recent years.

Tamayo’s paintings do have a very strong, almost overwhelming presence. You can view some of them here. The painting will now fetch $ 1 million at an auction.

This also reminds me of the two Edvard Munch paintings that were found last year: The Scream and Madonna. The Scream is considered one of Norwegian artists Munch’s most important works. The motives for the theft aroused much speculation that time around, primarily because the painting had clearly suffered a great deal of neglect. From a Guardian article:

Looking at The Scream now, it is shockingly clear that the damage was caused by carelessness and neglect. A huge watery stain, like a watermark on a tea bag, seeps over its bottom left-hand corner, on the walkway and even on the lower part of the figure. Pigment has dissolved or been washed away.

Why would anyone let that happen? It had to be because the painting didn’t interest them at all. Neither in the drag racer’s bus nor wherever it went after that did anyone even bother to look at The Scream. It was wrapped in a damp blanket and forgotten about.

In this case also, the thief was obviously careless enough to let the painting end up in a trash can. It’s heartbreaking, really.

Art theft is a major category of international crime. Selling a masterpiece in the open market is difficult but it can be used to extort rewards or ransom or as currency in the underworld. There can be other more twisted reasons. Such as the desire to steal cultural property or sheer bravado. This article explores the different motives in detail.

Here is a chronicle of the world’s most wanted art. At the top of the list is a Johannes Vermeer masterpiece taken during the notorious Gardner museum heist of 1990. Some of the biggest heists are still unsolved which means there’s a lot of stolen art floating around out there. One can only hope that in time the lost paintings will find their way back to where they belong. In the meantime, keep your eyes peeled.

Here is an interesting competition aimed at encouraging global changemakers. An initiative by BBC World and Newsweek, World Challenge 2007 will reward projects and businesses that not only make a profit, but also put something back into the community. The 12 finalists have been chosen and programs profiling the finalists are on at BBC World through this month and the next and you can vote for them on the website. Reality TV with a difference.

Expectedly, most of the finalists are from developing countries. Where there is necessity, there is invention. Sri Lanka, Nepal, Brazil and Vietnam are some of the countries in the running. I think Sri Lanka’s sweet wrappers receycled into fashion accessories and Nepal’s artificial limbs made from waste material are particularly ingenious. Also, sanitary napkins made out of indigenous material in Uganda strike a chord because it’s heart wrenching to think of how many women across the world are denied access to basic hygiene. A commenter on the message board provides perspective:

I live and work here and recently visited a school where Dr. Musaazi had provided MakaPads to the school. For the first time, the girls were having discussions about menstruation and the girls outnumbered the boys in enrollment. I didn’t realize that many girls drop out of school because they simply cannot afford pads and the banana leaves that they use are too unreliable to be out in public. Menstruation in many countries is the end of education and the beginning of too early motherhood. I have visited the place where the pads are made. It’s an amazing story and a wonderful support to young woman in Uganda.

Even if the comment itself is rigged (a possibility that cannot be dismissed in any competition), I think it points yet again to the tremendous effects that basic hygiene and sanitation has on human lives. Another article I read once pointed out how similarly lack of water for washing and bathing contributes to a drop in social standing because cleanliness is inextricably linked with dignity. We see this around us all the time. People who look unclean or smell bad are routinely denied admission into restaurants, salons, shops, supermarkets — all public spaces — and it leads to a systematic rejection, a ‘keeping out’, of a whole section of people. The wealthier patrons of these places seldom stop to think, while turning up their nose or casting distasteful glances, that people seldom choose to be unclean. Most often, they have no options and no access to facilities. The feeling of personal degradation is compounded by lack of social dignity. Expensive water, lack of public toilets, inadequate drainage systems, expensive sanitary napkins — all contribute towards this humiliation.

Coming back to the competition itself, last year’s winner was a paper-making firm in Sri Lanka called ecoMaximus which uses different types of wastes to produce high quality products.

The firm set up shop in Kegalle, Sri Lanka, in 1997, not far from an elephant orphanage. In Sri Lanka there is competition between elephants and a growing human population for land. The proximity of elephants was a boon for the papermakers; for as they soon discovered elephant dung is an ideal raw material for paper products they began a range of elephant-dung paper to draw attention to the plight of the Sri Lankan elephant. This unusual product has found buyers within Sri Lanka and throughout the world.

It would be interesting to see how the winners are doing a year later. How the competition helps them and how their efforts grow or are sustained. I wonder if BBC World has done any follow-up stories on this. The biggest challenge for many development projects is sustainability so it would be a logical next step for the program to look at this aspect.

Every now and then, somebody does a study on which countries are the best to live in. The latest is a Reader’s Digest study which has declared that Finland is at the top of the heap. The study was conducted by US environmental economist Matthew Kahn and this may explain why apart from the factors usually considered, environmental ones were also taken into account. The Nordic countries are the greenest in the world according to the study so Finland was closely followed by Iceland, Norway, Sweden and Austria.

“Finland wins high marks for air and water quality, a low incidence of infant disease and how well it protects citizens from water pollution and natural disasters,” the study said.

The United States was 23rd on the list of 141 countries, Britain was 25th and China 84th. Nations at the bottom of the table were all African. Stockholm scored as the best city to live in out of 72 major metropolitan hubs, followed by Oslo, Munich and Paris. Four German cities won a spot in the top 10 list. New York was 15th and London 27th.

From here.

I wonder how useful such studies or polls really are. At a certain level, I can understand that it’s useful to know which places offer the best education, the most jobs, the cleanest water or freshest air. But not all human needs and wants, whims, fancies, desires and eccentricities can be neatly categorised, can they? Life, after all, is rather more complex and variegated than that. For example, New York was 15th in this study but where I come from, I meet many more people who want to live in New York than in Munich, Stockholm, Zurich or Oslo, which are usually higher up on lists like this. The reasons usually have little to do with the quality of the air, education or roads and often involve a perception of what the city offers, an imagining of how it moves and breathes, a dream.

In this column, Shashi Tharoor (a writer who I occasionally agree with) talks about the soft power of nations. Giving an example of what he means by soft power, he says:

Indian cuisine, spreading around the world, raises our culture higher in people’s reckoning; the way to foreigners’ hearts is through their palates. In England today, Indian curry houses employ more people than the iron and steel, coal and shipbuilding industries combined.

When Indian filmmakers or sportspeople succeed internationally or when Indian writers win the Booker or Pulitzer Prizes, our country’s soft power is enhanced. (Ask yourself how many Chinese novelists the typical literate American reader can name. Indeed, how many non-Western countries can claim a presence in the Occidental mind comparable to India’s?)

I think, soft powers or ’soft factors’ play an important role in people choosing where they want to live. Apart from convenience, safety and comfort, there are other things we as humans need — identity, belonging, acceptance, friendship, resonance, freedom, excitement, fulfillment and so on. And I think when choosing a country to move to (or stay in), many of us are likely to look at these factors as well.

I don’t know about the ‘best’ cities but the greatest cities are invariably not the neatest or cleanest places. They are the ones with the most history, movement, freedom or culture. They are the ones that fascinate, enthrall, excite, or even exasperate. The ones that build strong communities and stronger individuals. Of course, occasionally they get some of the basics right too.

I know many people who just want the best quality of life available out there and such studies can help them make informed choices. Then there are others who are entirely led by emotion and couldn’t care less about the smoothness of roads. I’m guessing most people are a mix of the two. What do you think?

Imagine getting married at 13. In some places in the world, it’s not so hard to imagine. Thirteen-year-old Shimu in Bangladesh is having a hard time warding off proposals. Her grandmother wants her to stop studying and marry one of her many suitors. Ironically, Shimu is a popular TV star in Bangladesh and plays the title role in a serial which promotes girls’ education.

In the television serial, her character Alo fights to stay in the fifth grade instead of working in a garment factory or getting married like her family members demand. In her real life, she wants to study but is finding it increasingly difficult to remain in school because of poverty and age-old traditions that dictate a girl is better married off.

Child marriage, which has long been prevalent in south Asian countries, has many harmful, long-term effects. It leads to utter powerlessness on the girl’s part because with no education, she has no means to support herself in the outside world. In a male-dominated society, it is one of the most effective ways of ensuring that she is never able to stand up for her rights. The husband is in an advantageous position in multiple ways. Usually much older, he is also more educated and therefore able to earn. The wife, is therefore, reduced to a slave in many cases. From the Washington Post story on Shimu:

In Bangladesh, two in five girls ages 15 to 17 are married, even though the minimum age at which it is legal to marry is 18, according to UNICEF, the U.N. agency for children. Violence in such marriages is frequent. There are thousands of cases each year in Bangladesh in which child brides are drenched in acid for refusing sex, talking back to mothers-in-law or not doing enough housework, aid workers say.

To many of those who live in developed countries, these may seem like gruesome but remote tales and there is little sense of what one can do about such things. But in an increasingly globalised world, one can hope that there will be a trickle effect in many areas, not just the economic. As Kathleen Selvaggio of International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) points out in a letter to the editor of WP:

Sens. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) and Rep. Betty McCollum (D-Minn.) have introduced bipartisan legislation to curb child marriage by addressing its root causes — poverty and inequality. Their bills would monitor child marriage in the annual U.S. human rights reports and authorize modest funds to support community-based programs targeting adolescent girls to prevent early marriage.

Those who read the article may be wondering what they can do. One simple step is to ask their elected officials to support these bills.

Approximately 50 million girls are married in the developing world, and 100 million more girls are expected to marry in the next decade if nothing changes. By urging Congress to support this legislation, we can begin to reverse this trend. Collectively, in partnership with developing countries, we can help girls walk into classrooms, not down the aisle.

Shimu’s future, meanwhile, remains uncertain. Her grandfather wants her to continue studying but funds are low and they will soon be evicted from their current house. UNICEF workers recently started a fund to help the family relocate, which may ease the family’s financial burden. Hopefully, like her character Alo, Shimu too will be able to remain in school.

Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
~ Dylan Thomas

The bloodbath that followed the peaceful protest of monks in Burma last week has the world reeling. Unarmed protesters were beaten, tear-gassed and shot at — all in a day’s work for Burma’s ruling junta which has stifled every gasp of freedom in the country for the last 50 years or so. Thousands of monks have been imprisoned, “disrobed and shackled”. Now, they will be sent away to prisons in the far north of the country. It is doubtful that they will ever emerge once they are sent away. Meanwhile, it’s hard to know exactly what is going on in Rangoon because the government’s stranglehold on media remains strong.

What one does glean is that an UN convoy has had talks with opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi and the world is looking anxiously to Asean countries to use their influence on Burma. But economic links and trade ties seem to have blindfolded and gagged Burma’s neighbours, even if one of them is the world’s largest democracy. India is not only practicing a level of ‘diplomacy’ that is faintly disgusting, it also continues to supply arms to Burma’s government. This article points to the strategic concerns underlying India’s low key response. And this earlier story in Himal Magazine looks at the India-Burma embrace in greater detail.

Though India continues to request cooperation from the Burmese side in counter-insurgency operations, the generals have at best been lethargic. Upon pressure from New Delhi, they attack the NSCN-K camps in Burma, but show little interest in cracking down on the other insurgent groups.

In trying to work with Rangoon, Indian policy makers forget that many of the problems they face are linked to the nature of governance in Burma, which precludes a sustained and co-operative bilateral relationship. There is no space for dialogue, freedom of speech and political expression in a country where the foremost pro-democracy leader and Nobel Laureate remains under strict house arrest. It is estimated that around 1000 political prisoners, including members elected to Parliament in 1990, are detained in jails across Burma.

China has also largely remained quiet, driven by its commercial interests and its need for stability in the region. Here is an article analyzing where the country stands with regard to the Burmese issue. To me, here is an important point:

China’s Communist-dominated domestic politics also explain its reluctance to intervene.

“If you support peaceful political change in Burma, then it opens too many doors and questions like ‘Why aren’t you supporting it here?’ ” says Russell Leigh Moses, a Beijing-based China specialist.

So between commercial priorities, political backslapping and the pot being unable to call the kettle black, it looks like Burma’s monks can depend little on anyone to come to their help. This is disturbing but I’m sure surprises no one really. Commentators can do little except shake their heads solemnly and articulate once again the sanctions which, if imposed on Burma, would compel the government to change its mind. Or talk about how nobody’s clean in the Burmese blame game. Or suggest a rethink, without actually offering any concrete solutions. Well, comment is free and in the absence of any other choice, we can do little else.

You can, however, add your little bit to the fight by signing the Awaaz petition. A drop in the ocean is better than none at all — and who knows, maybe the monks will actually be freed some day. Hope is what we all live on.