Disability Attitudes, A Contrast

The former Sunday Times sports writer, Simon Barnes, has written this about political correctness in Britain.  For a writer in such a right-wing magazine, he is surprisingly approving.  His son has Down’s Syndrome, which makes his shift in beliefs understandable.  Reading this made me think.

Among the surprising things about living in Pakistan is the attitude to disabled people.  In my very first visit, I stayed at a medical campus, in Lahore – don’t ask, it’s a long story.

The facilities for students seemed rudimentary at the time, but there was a fruit shop that sold fruit shakes, juices and anything else that contained the word ‘fruit’.  Placed under some trees, on a patch of waste ground, it felt idyllic.  Inspite of being near an expressway and on a busy campus site, anyone could have sat there and watched the world trundle by.

One of the guys working there had a problem.  One of his hands was a stump, missing all the fingers and thumb.  The guy used it to carry glasses and balance trays of drinks.  He never broke anything, the whole time I was there.

The point I want to make is that nobody dwelt on his disability.  Nobody patted his boss on the head saying, ‘you’re so generous employing that man’.  He was accepted as just another guy working at the fruit shop.  Everyone just got on with it.

In that same stay, I found myself on the sleeper train between Lahore and Karachi, heading for a job interview in that giantopolis.  This train was fairly new (at the time), it was clean, reliable and punctual, if somewhat spartan.  That was a step up from British trains which often felt little better than an excuse mill, apologizing for their very existence.  Even the excuses felt like excuses for excuses – we apologise for being late because the previous service was late.

Riding this train in Pakistan was such a contrast.

The steward on this sleeper had a problem.  He was deaf and unable to speak.  Fairly profound for a customer facing worker.  Not here.  He communicated in his own sign language, we pointed to what we wanted on the menu and made hand gestures for the number of dishes, drinks and so on.  He too made gestures, a bit like a magician trying to trick the eye, to confirm the orders and off he went.

I presume he was experienced because he was efficient and reliable.  The communication problem only meant finding other ways to generate understanding.  Again, nobody looked twice.

That’s not strictly true.  This was my first time in Pakistan, and I was astonished that a disabled man would be employed, let alone without some kind of fanfare from passengers or company.   Once again, everyone just got on with it.

It’s easy for someone in Britain to be sniffy about a country like Pakistan, in terms of its treatment of disabled people.  It can’t be called ‘disabled friendly’.  There are steps everywhere and lifts frequently don’t work, that’s if the riff-raff, i.e. regular service users, can be allowed to use them.  There are occasionally ramps for wheelchairs and mobility impaired people, but a carabine, climbing boots and ice axe are necessary to climb them.

Worse still are the numbers of people used by criminals as a source of income in begging rings.  Many of the victims are often deliberately maimed to make them more…productive, something touched on by Slumdog Millionaire.  It should be said, this is not only a problem in South Asia

Here’s the rub.  I have never heard of people with disabilities being the subject of hate crimes and accusations of malingering, swinging the lead and so on that emanate from British media and politicians.  Nor have I come across the kind of patronizing, self-congratulation that everyone produces when disabled people are allowed to work.

Life in Pakistan may be more hazardous and tenuous than in Britain (at least, until David Cameron became Prime Minister) and yet the general attitude toward them is healthier in Pakistan than in Britain.

When The Going Gets Tough The Tough…Give Up

The campaign is already gearing up for the UK’s In/Out European Union Referendum sometime this year 2017, even though the exact date is yet to be decided.    When everyone else is settling down into trade blocs and multilateral organisations, the UK appears to want to go it alone.

Are they mad?  There are tonnes of reasons for staying put, that range from the geo-political to the historical and geographical.

Psycho-Geography

The first thing to notice about the UK is its psycho-geography.  It’s an archipelago of islands off the European coast.  Usually, offshore islands are very different to their continental neighbours.  Think Cuba and the US, Taiwan and China or Japan and the rest of east Asia.  The people of Madagascar aren’t Africans by decent, culture or language but descended from Malayan migrants.

I would include Britain in the trend because its history in the last 500 or so years has lent itself to isolation, even if it has been involved from time to time in European power politics.  The big factor here is the Empire and the relationship with the sea.  Other colonial powers had land borders with their European neighbours, especially France, Holland and Spain.  England (later, Britain) had…well nobody.

That has continued right up to the modern myth of the   And that’s the point, the British are still obsessed with Empire, even though it has been long dead.

Joining the Common Market (as it was called in the early 1970s) has been Britain’s biggest European adventure since England abolished the monasteries and overthrew the Catholic Church in 1535.

The Bear in the Room

So why stay?  Where do I start?  Geo-politics.  The elephant in the room isn’t an elephant at all, it’s a bear.  Russia is trying to exert as much pressure on the EU as possible with its war in the Ukraine and military campaign in Syria.  The EU has sanctions against Russia in response to its invasion of Ukraine.  That was prompted by the overhrow of the client president Viktor Yanukovich.  He was toppled by demonstrations sparked by his junking of an economic agreement with the EU, choosing a package of loans from Russia instead.

Russia quietly invading Ukraine caught the West napping.  The intervention in Syria has had a similar surprise factor alongside with the hundreds of thousands of people fleeing the war zone to get to the safety of Europe.    That poses an even greater problem because the vast numbers of people seeking shelter are pushing European cohesion to breaking point.  Much more of this and the free movement of people, a corner stone of the Union, could end.   Russia wants those sanctions ended and wants the reduction of a regional rival.

Could plucky Britain really stand up to that kind of thing, alone, without the help or co-operation of allies across the English Channel

Britain’s oldest ally, since 1386

The Cold of the Global Village

Then there are the vagaries of globalization.  I doubt China, the US or the EU intend to give much ground to each other when they negotiate trade deals, which is the way of the world. China has set up its Shanghai Co-Operation Organisation, sometimes referred to as ‘the dictators’ club’, drawing in the former Soviet Republics of central Asia.  While Russia is a member, it is also trying to set up its own Eurasian Economic Community.

Other states are not jumping out of economic co-operation blocs, but are building more.  This has happened in North America with NAFTA, South America’s Mercusur, with even African states getting in on the idea with the African Union.

It is a long time since the UK was a serious power in the world, able to act alone with a free hand.    Belonging to the EU shores up Britain’s reputation and prestige.  States as powerful as China and the US see political / economic bloc making as underpinning both the economy and their political stature.  Membership of the EU guarantees a place at the top table, not least because of the sheer size of the market it belongs and exports to.

Being Norway, or Not

Opponents of UK membership of the EU suggest Britain can survive outside of the Union, in a manner similar to Switzerland and Norway, both successful countries who are pointedly not members.   The difficulty here is that Norway and Switzerland are powerless to change anything because they are members of the European Economic Area, not full members of the EU.  Therefore  things just happen, they have to conform to everything the Union requires in areas such as student exchanges, food regulations and exporting goods into the EU.  And these still cost money.

In each area of our lives, being part of the EU has given the British the kinds of standards a civilized society should aspire to.  Be it not being killed at work, having food that doesn’t poison us and having beaches and waters that are clean and safe to enjoy.  All of this risks being swept away if the UK jumps ship, not least because of its unwillingness to stand up to corporate power within and without its borders.

Even these two have been allies since 1904

The Invasions

Other reasons for remaining in the EU are cultural, historical and geographical.  Whether anyone likes it or not, the UK is physically a part of Europe.  That isn’t going to change any time soon.   Our history has been bound up with Europe since people first arrived on what was to become these islands.  Invasions by the ‘Celts’, the Romans, Saxons, Vikings, Normans still have a massive and lasting effect on our landscape, language and culture.  Much of our involvement was a jostling rivalry with mainland European powers, often it was co-operation under hard circumstances.  This co-operation has only deepened with the EU because it has made war unthinkable within its borders.

The original swashbuckler.  Anthony Van Dyke, Flemish, court painter to Charles I and driving force in English / British Baroque art; self portrait 1623

Culturally, the British have changed markedly since they began holidaying in Europe.  We now have a café culture and a love of good food & wine, we even like to hug each other and sometimes greet each other with a kiss, ok mostly the women.  All because of the ability to travel cheaply and freely in Europe.  This is a stark contrast to the kind of country my parents grew up in in the 1950s & 60s where restaurants served the same bland, boring food; cafes were mostly of the ‘greasy spoon’ variety (nothing wrong with them, just nice to have variety) and people were stiffly formal in public.

Our art, music and philosophy have been greatly influenced by European artists bringing their skills to Britain, from where we have become hugely influential in our own right.

Joining the EU has been enormously beneficial to the UK, giving it a post-imperial role like nothing else.  It has enriched our national life in so many ways.  Leaving would be foolish.

Where do you think Monet got it from?  JMW Turner, British; Tours, Sunset

Variations on Beauty

Art Mastered is a simple, straightforward and unpretentious blog about art, on the Tumblr site.  It’s run by Helen Turner, herself a recent  M.A. History of Art graduate.

Every couple of days she posts photographic reproductions of a some paintings, sculptures, photography;  something new, something old – alongside comments or explanatories of the item.  Sometimes she might write about the art related things she’s noticed on her travels.  Lately she’s added reviews of exhibitions and a newsletter.

Over the last four years, this site has become a part of my day.

You might ask ‘why’?

What I love about Art Mastered is that I can usually find something beautiful and fascinating, very often something  I’ve never seen before and introduced to painters who are new to me.

This has allowed me to explore and find good stuff elsewhere.

Above all, I love Art Mastered because it’s beautiful.

My affair with the site started, so far as I can tell, four years ago.  I was looking for some pictures of poppies when I spotted Emile Nolde’s ‘Red Poppies’ in the Google Images search results.  When I followed the link to Art Mastered  there was so much to see I was hooked straight away.

The blogger, Miss Turner, has put much effort into varying her output.  To start with she had a ‘Nude of the Week’ and introduced a couple of themed weeks when time allowed.  The ‘Nude of the Week’ varied from the sensual to the primitive.  My favourite of her themed weeks was ‘The Renaissance’.  It was a great showcase of the vitality and vision of people working at the edge of art; a legacy so rich it has been mined for centuries.

Strangely similar

I’ve noticed that viewing an online gallery-cum-art blog is strangely similar to going to a real gallery.  There are loads of pictures to trawl through, many different areas devoted to different movements, styles and forms.  Some will specialize in one thing; others will be more varied.

Overpowered

After my first visit to the National Gallery, I said to an old friend ‘there’s a lot of dross on those walls’.  He replied ‘that’s how you tell the good stuff from the bad’.  Which put an experience at the Victoria and Albert Museum into perspective.

I went to the V&A’s Islamic Gallery on my birthday.  I hadn’t seen it in 12 years.   I was overpowered by the beauty of the objects on show, the skill of the craftsmen who made them, the sheer quality of each item.  I got to the point where I thought ‘oh no, not another piece of outstanding quality and beauty’.  I was emotionally exhausted, just by seeing all this amazing art in one place.

The secret of Art Mastered

Which brings me to the genius bit about Art Mastered.

Some years into the life of her site, Miss Turner changed its focus.  She started featuring contemporary work, installations, conceptual art and sculpture.  She moved it away from a narrow focus on the Old Masters and pre-1960 20^th Century painters.

A massive chunk of contemporary art is not, how can I say, my cup of tea.  But this is my view.  I read about it because I want to know what’s going on, but I remain to be convinced of its merits.

Why is it good that Art Mastered features stuff that I don’t really like?  For me, it increases my interest when I find something I DO like, that stands out, that grabs me.  I don’t doubt many other followers of the site get a lot of joy from seeing the contemporary featured so heavily.  It’s just that this is not for me.

The problem with uniformity

This contrasts with other Tumblr art blogs I’ve come across just recently.

With few exceptions they concentrate on paintings and sometimes sculpture from the Old Master / early 20^th Century stream.  There is no variation, no relief from being overpowered by the quality of what’s on display.

Seeing these blogs is a strangely exhausting experience.  The paintings blend into a solid miasma of emotional strain.  Each work becomes indissoluble from its companions.  Reading, working through  hundreds of pages of this is hard work because there is no end in sight.  At least with a traditional gallery  you can see a selection, go to the café for a coffee, come back and then go home at the end of several hours.

Strangely samey

A side issue with this is that it’s surprising how ‘same-y’ everything gets.  200 paintings by minor Impressionists (many remarkable little gems), with a few Monets, Renoirs and Pissaros thrown in for good measure, can get a viewer believing they really are all the same; that there is no standard.

Seeing something without variation and nuance can lead to visual and aesthetic antennae being clogged with the sheer volume of material there is to see.

Art Mastered doesn’t do this.  Its very variation is what keeps it vital and nimble.  The stodge is kept to a bare minimum.  In a new turn,  Turner has recently begun reviewing major and minor exhibitions, so her users get a good flavour of what art was, is and can be.  What’s more, the site now has a presence on Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest.  She’s exploring the full potential of the web and creating something of a ‘brand’.

This is why I think Art Mastered will last as long as Helen Turner wants it to last and will be successful in the future.   I certainly hope so because I have really taken to it in a big way.

Pictures, all courtesy Art Mastered.

Yum-Yum

Is it me or…

I don’t know how true this is in reality, but I’ve noticed something, a difference between British websites that post recipes and US sites that post recipes.   Perhaps it might be that I’ve only seen the really BIG sites, the one from the BBC and others from the big name TV chefs.

The US sites will tell you to use a can of this, a can of that and to buy the pastry (if you’re using) from the supermarket.  A load of ingredients will be anything but fresh and will have been processed to within an inch of their lives.

The British sites I’ve seen are, frankly, food porn.   They’re full of stuff the great British middle classes have come to take for granted in their food shows.  Balsamic this, Morrocan that and full of ingredients that nobody where I am currently living has even heard of .

Needless to say, the supermarket plays a large part in sourcing these things too.

On the whole, I’m beginning to find the US sites more useful because they’re more practical and less pretentious.   I can mostly get straightforward ingredients, fresh vegetables, fresh meat and fish (in the winter only for the fish).   I’m more likely to get what I need from my local vegetable walah or the nearby small shops than the supermarket – because the supermarket is 15 or so kilometres away and far more expensive.

Stalls like these are all over Pakistan. The veg is only couple of days old. Very handy and addictive if you’re a foodie.

Even if the recipe talks of tinned foods, I can get the fresh versions so it’s better and cheaper all round for me.

Another point is that anything that talks about using a food processer is out because I don’t have one.  Even if I did, the power supply is unreliable and there are frequent power cuts, sometimes scheduled, often not.  And they can last up to ten hours though more often it’s one or two hours.  So I have to do my cooking the old fashioned way.

All these factors became an issue when I was looking for something new to try because my repertoire as it stands was (is) getting a bit staid.

Chicken Pie, the cooking

I found this recipe on a site which I didn’t pay much attention to but I can’t find right now.  It’s not something I developed myself.

It’s dead easy and came out really well.

The pie filling was dead easy to do.  I only had to fry the onions and begin frying other veggies in butter before adding water and a stock cube.

I didn’t realise the difference frying in butter makes.  I normally use extra virgin olive oil, which I’ve come to love.  Butter brings out something very different in the vegetables a really sweet aspect I didn’t expect.

The chicken itself was a bit harder to do.  Because the recipe calls for cooked chicken,  I boiled it for an hour before using it.

Then I had to begin frying it in butter and add flour & milk.  This is something I’ve never tried before ; I found it comes out as more exotic and exciting than it has a right to be, a creamy, thick mixture which gives the dish a sense of luxury.  Though, I think I could have used a bit more milk than I did.  I found the 125 mls in the recipe to be…I won’t say inadequate but I found it wasn’t enough.  Maybe it’s just me.

Normally, when I do pastry I mix the butter and flour with my hands to prepare the breadcrumb-like mixture.  After adding water or milk (depending on what dish I’m doing) I usually mix it with a fork or a spoon because I really dislike that slimy, nasty seeming mixture on my hands.  However, my pastry never comes out as easy to roll later on.  So this time I did it all by hand.

I think I’ve learned something new here because my pastry has never come out so well.  Mixing it by hand, making it into dough (even though it’s not dough) by hand makes all the difference.  I could do it with a thoroughness I’ve never been able to achieve before.  The results were excellent later on.

I found this to be a great recipe; straightforward, practical, warming and tasty, luxurious even.   It’s become another staple in my recipe list.

Here’s the recipe itself.  Apologies to whoever developed it, I never expected to be writing about it so I didn’t save the link.  Sorry!

Chicken pie

When it’s done, the pie should look something like this…

Ingredients
Serves: 8

• 2 sheets shortcrust pastry
• 60g butter
• 1 small onion, minced
• 2 sticks celery, chopped
• 2 carrots, diced
• salt and pepper to taste
• 2 chicken stock cubes
• 500ml water
• 3 potatoes, peeled and cubed
• 225g cooked chicken, cubed
• 3 tablespoons plain flour
• 125ml full fat milk
• 3 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley
• 1 teaspoon chopped fresh oregano

Method
Prep:20min  ›  Cook:1hr  ›  Ready in:1hr20min

1. Preheat oven to 220 C / Gas 7. Roll out one piece of pastry and place in a 20cm pie dish and set aside.
2. Place 1/2 of the butter in a large frying pan. Add the onion, celery, carrots, salt and pepper. Cook and stir until the vegetables are soft. Stir in the stock cubes and water. Bring mixture to the boil. Stir in the potatoes, and cook until tender but still firm.
3. In a medium saucepan, melt the remaining butter. Stir in the chicken and flour. Add the milk, and heat through. Stir the chicken mixture into the vegetable mixture, and cook until thickened. Add fresh herbs. Pour mixture into the unbaked pastry case. Roll out the top piece of pastry, and place on top of filling. Flute edges, and make 4 slits in the top to let out steam.
4. Bake in the preheated oven for 15 minutes. Reduce oven temperature to 180 C / Gas 4 and continue baking for 20 minutes, or until pastry is golden brown.

Caffeine Fixed

Ahhh coffee. One of the world’s favourite drinks, though I don’t know if it’s more popular than tea.
But here in Pakistan, I do admire the way people have with coffee. They can make a cappuccino without a machine. Which is more than I can do. You mix your dry coffee with a couple of teaspoons of milk and beat hell out of it with a teaspoon until it’s peaky like heavy cream. Add hot water and yum-yum it’s delicious.

I’ve tried to do this myself and met with degrees of failure from horrible to marginal.

The king of coffees or not…this is my favourite

This afternoon I put two teaspoons of ‘Douwe Egberts’ (my coffee of choice)into a cup, mixed with two teaspoons of water, a little sugar and a dash of milk and began beating. It looked like melted chocolate but never thick cream. It even frothed for a moment when I poured in the water.

The flavour was no more than ok-ish. The froth didn’t last and the creamy, velvety consistency in my mouth was missing. My wife enjoyed it but I’m not satisfied. Next time, I’ll put in the coffee and sugar, mix that, add a teaspoon of milk and then beat the life into it. Or maybe I can buy an electric whisk to do the job for me.
I’m not a long time caffeine user. I only discovered the joys of the liquid form drug almost nine years ago. After that, there was no stopping me.

A supremely better coffee than I can make

Plain, cappuccino, mocha, latte…I love them all. But not espresso. Espresso is too intense, too bitter, too nasty for my mind to suck in. Over ten years ago I made the mistake of having a double espresso by accident.

It was a branch of Café Nero in Heathrow Airport. I was there for some time waiting for my Tube (the Underground system) connection to central London. I would kill time by trying this legendary hot drink. When it was my turn to be served I asked for the espresso only to be asked how many shots I wanted. Shots? Shots of what? I didn’t expect this so I asked for two.

I quickly learned why this is served in such a small cup. I drank it, took my time, I had to it was impossible to knock straight back. The bitterness, the pungency overpowered me. I spent the rest of the day trying to undo the flavour assault I’d subjected myself to. It was still on my tongue and in my stomach eleven hours later.

When I joined the rest of humanity in appreciating the finer powers of coffee, I made sure I kept off the rocket fuel espresso. Instead I fell for the more luxurious end of the market – mocha, cappuccino, latte, all full fat of course.

Of course it’s full fat! I’m drooling just looking at this…

Starbucks has no presence in Pakistan or in Lahore that I’m aware of. Instead, the most prevalent coffee chain is ‘Gloria Jean’s’, which I’d never heard of before I arrived here. A night out with friends put me in touch with their ‘Very Vanilla Latte’. What a coffee (albeit with enough sugar and fat to stop an elephant). Wow.
So now I am a confirmed coffee lover but not an addict because when I need to be refreshed, to get my thinking cap working, or just revive me it’s tea I turn to. That said I do love coffee because for me, it’s a great treat, something out of the ordinary, especially when it’s done properly.
So I just have to learn to do it, then don’t I?

Another fine mess they gotten us into…Britain in Afghanistan

Afghan fighters, First Anglo – Afghan War, 1839 – 42. They haven’t changed that much.

So ISAF has wound up its operation in Afghanistan and declared its objectives achieved after 4,500 military deaths, many times that in civilian deaths; billions of dollars worth of destruction and so on and so on. Predictably, the Taliban have also declared victory labeling the foreign intervention a failure.

Just as predictably, commentators of all national origins and political stripes have tried to paint Afghanistan as some kind of black hole into which an army will march and never return. The British in 1839 – 42, (and another twice over) the Russians in the 1980s and now the Americans and British (again) in the 2000s.

I’m not so sure about ‘the graveyard of Empire’ label. Afghanistan highlights something systemic about foreign intervention there; failure of leadership, failure to plan, failure to understand the terrain (physical, cultural, psychological), failure to follow expert knowledge and advice. As cunning, brave, determined and atavistic as the Afghans need to be (and are) to defeat foreign adventures, we also like to ignore how the incompetence and arrogance of foreign militaries contribute to their own defeat.

As a Briton, the two most stunning examples have to be the first and last British contributions to this history.
The First Anglo Afghan War of 1839 – 42 was an unmitigated disaster. Sparked by the refusal to follow expert advice from specialists on the ground, who understood the Afghan ruler, Dost Muhamad, and what was going on in the country.

It followed the usual pattern: seemingly easy initial victories followed by the realization of backing the wrong man, poor leadership, confusion, defeat and humiliation.

A British army chaplain, the Reverand G.R. Gleig summed it up best when he wrote in 1843 that the First Anglo-Afghan War was

“begun for no wise purpose, carried on with a strange mixture of rashness and timidity, [and] brought to a close after suffering and disaster, without much glory attached either to the government which directed, or the great body of troops which waged it.”

The Remnants of an Army. William Brydona, assistant surgeon in the British East India Company Army arrives at Jalalabad, 1842.

The campaign was a misbegotten mess from start to finish. To begin with, the war was unnecessary. Having decided to fight it, the British conducted the war in such a way as to make defeat the only possible outcome.
This gives an astonishing account of how it happened. This is a shorter appraisal, but equally eye opening.

***

No luck second time around. British and allied forces at Kandahar after the 1880 Battle of Kandahar, during the Second Anglo-Afghan War.

Fast forward to the modern era and we can see a similar pattern, as this article in Foreign Policy makes clear.
The attacks on New York and Washington on the 11th September 2001 made action of some kind inevitable. I remember a die-hard liberal friend of mine (and near pacifist) asking ‘what else can they (the US) do?’ Which was a good question.

From the moment the US presence in Afghanistan arrived, they had no interest in nation building. No interest in attempting to solve the problems that had created the Taliban in the first place. They were only interested in driving out the Taliban and hunting down Al-Qaida. In fact, the ‘driving out the Taliban’ bit was outsourced to any Afghan force that would do the fighting.

The result was missed opportunities to round up the leadership of Al-Qaida and the Taliban holed up in the Tora Bora mountains.

This was compounded by a catastrophic misunderstanding of Pakistan. The US never properly got to grips with the fact that Pakistan was riding two horses at once. Taking US money and weapons to hunt down selected Al-Qaida leaders and personnel whilst quietly supporting the return of Taliban proxies to fight in Afghanistan. All the while giving safe haven to these proxies in Quetta and North Waziristan. And sheltering Osama Bin Laden.
Probably the worst blunder was allowing the return to power of the old Mujahedeen warlords who had sparked a vicious civil war, allowing for the creation of the Taliban and its spectacular military victories, in the early 1990s.

The Bush administration never properly tried to solve these problems and remained blissfully ignorant of Pakistan’s double game (as William Dalrymple’s review of Ahmed Rashid’s Descent into Chaos’ makes clear).
So when the new Obama administration recalibrated the US approach with the so called Af-Pak Strategy in 2009 / 10, it was already too late. The accumulated detritus of mistakes: corruption, neglect, ignorance and inaction had created a vortex that gained its own momentum.

There’s also the singular fact that Western militaries were geared toward fighting the wrong war. The Taliban insurgency was never the Soviet Army pouring into the plains of Germany. This analysis of the war against ISIS applies equally to Afghanistan.

Finally, the most remarkable account of military folly comes courtesy of the British once again. In a book review published in the London Review of Books, journalist and novelist James Meek describes something that can only be described as a disaster:

“The British army is back in Warminster and its other bases around the country. Its eight-year venture in southern Afghanistan is over. The extent of the military and political catastrophe it represents is hard to overstate. It was doomed to fail before it began, and fail it did, at a terrible cost in lives and money.
How bad was it? In a way it was worse than a defeat, because to be defeated, an army and its masters must understand the nature of the conflict they are fighting. Britain never did understand, and now we would rather not think about it.”

That gives a flavour of what the review is about.

Simply put, the British didn’t go to Afghanistan in 2001 and beyond to defeat the Taliban, restore order and create a nice place to live for Afghans. They went there for one reason: to impress the Americans.

Let me say that again. The British forces were in Afghanistan to impress the Americans. Everything they did was geared to showing the US that Britain could still cut it as a reliable partner and military power. That’s the British raison d’etre in Afghanistan. They had neither the money nor the manpower to do it, but that didn’t matter. Everything else flowed out of that.

British soldiers in Afghanistan, 2000s. At least the Army got out in one piece, but left it’s pride behind.

In terms of deaths, this disaster wasn’t as bloody (for the British at least) as the first round in 1839 – 42. In terms of treasure, it broke the bank; not least because Britain’s economy in the 2000s could buy considerably less than in the 19th Century.

It isn’t even as if they ever knew what was happening on the ground.

Putting British forces in Helmand province had no historical literacy. Meek’s article shows how the British were distrusted and hated from the start. And the British never understood why.

Meanwhile, Afghans couldn’t believe the British could be as stupid as they appeared; concocting an elaborate conspiracy theory to explain British incompetence. The 19th Century experience had left Afghans with a folk memory of the British as ingenious, cunning devils. A memory that failed to take into account what they saw in front of them.

Here’s James Meek again:

”Helmandis believed deeply in the natural cunning of the British, so much so that the former chief (actual) Taliban commander in Helmand, the late Mullah Dadullah, was known as ‘the lame Englishman’ on account of his one leg and his extreme deviousness. For this reason people found it hard to account for Britain’s conduct in Helmand. There were two possibilities: the less likely was that the British were naive and ignorant. The favourite explanation, widely and sincerely believed, was that, secretly continuing to exercise imperial control over Pakistan, they were working hand in hand with the (actual) Taliban to punish Helmand, and that the Americans were trying to stop them.”

Whatever angle you look at it, this latest ignominious withdrawal from Afghanistan signals another failure of leadership and knowledge. It does not suggest the invincibility of the Afghans in their mountain fastness. Afghan history is more complex than that.

The Fruits of Failure

It’s Eid ul Azha, a major Muslim festival that marks the end of the Hajj pilgrimage in Mecca

As always, the headlines contain the latest ‘news’ about the deadlock in the Israeli / Palestinian mess, speculation on terrorism and the latest Western plans to bomb Iraq.

This year the terrorism and bombing plans have taken on a newly apocalyptic turn with the rise of the so-called Islamic State, controlling territory in eastern Syria and Iraq.

They’re terrifying, deliberately so; with their snuff videos, genocidal clearings of non-Sunni Muslims and enslavement of non-Sunni Muslim women and girls.

It’s easy to see Islamic State as both a continuation of some assumed barbarity within the Islamic world & mindset and an aberration divorced from any human origin. This contradiction in the popular and political mind says more about the opponents of Islamic State than it says about Islamic State.

***

Islamic State, Boko Haram, the Taliban, Al Shabaab, Al Qaida & it’s franchises et al represent the utter failure of the Islamic world in northern Africa, the Middle East and south west Asia.

These organizations wouldn’t have the space to operate without the rotting away of state superstructures; without the failure of politics to deliver anything other than exploitation and oppression; without the failure of education and the wider culture to both challenge fanatic ideologies and deliver a viable alternative.

Failure in the face of what, you might ask?

To understand the plight of the Islamic world, you have to understand something of the success of its past. In terms of the achievements of culture, science, medicine, architecture, town planning and organization; the various components of the early medieval Islamic world were way ahead of the West, rivalling (and even exceeding in some instances) the achievements of China and India.

Muslim scholars and the societies in which they lived were intellectually curious, bold, adventurous and ground breaking. The European Rennaissance wasn’t merely a rediscovery and renewed interest in the learning and culture of the Classical past, it was the investigation and repurposing of Islamic achievements.

In more recent centuries the Islamic world has found itself overtaken in absolute terms, subject to the imperial ambitions of European powers, severe economic competition from Europe and the US, often being late adopters of modern advances in medicine, science, education, manufacturing, digital technology.

From what I’ve read, failing societies seem to turn to extremes to explain and survive their failure. Old Kingdom ancient Egypt collapsed under the weight of environmental change to which hunger and extreme violence became the norm. Another instance might be the rise of far right ideologies in Europe and Asia after the calamity of the First World War and the current ongoing financial crises around the world.

Similarly, the profound failures of the Islamic world, the very rotting away of states, has given us fundamentalist political Islam. Earlier responses to the depredations of Western colonialism such as Arab nationalism have utterly failed; contained or crushed, by Anglo – US actions (similarly, the US / UK backed 1953 coup d’état in Iran) and finally undermined by the collapse of Soviet power at the end of the Cold War.

Mirroring the political failure is the wider societal failure (economic, educational, developmental) which prompted the Arab Spring. At the same time, deep seated corruption and exploitation have seen states such as Pakistan, Nigeria, Sudan, Libya, Somalia, Iraq and Syria partially or totally vanish as a result of industrial scale corruption, mismanagement and blind intransigence.

All that’s left to fill the void are organizations made up of thugs, criminals, political and intellectual fantasists and failures who are left to rampage across a territory.

The kinds of organizations exemplified by Islamic State look back to some kind of past golden age when everyone was bound by Islam and there was justice, peace and prosperity. This fictional past bares resemblance to the fantasies of European fascists of the 1920s and 30s; Hitler’s bold Teutonic culture represented by Wagner and Nordic myths of Aryan warriors; Mussolini’s dreams of reviving a golden Roman past or the political Catholicism of Franco.

Each driven by a profound failure of economics, education, politics, culture and above all of imagination.

Abu-Bakr al-Baghdadi, the so called Caliph of the Islamic State is a failed cleric. Most of his followers have a very selective knowledge of Islam. Indeed, Muslims themselves would say these people only do what they do because of their profound ignorance of Islam as a set of ideas to live life by, as a spiritual philosophy and as a means of organizing society. It seems the only people who agree with supporters of fundamentalist terrorists in the extremist interpretation of Islam are the Saudi state and Western ‘Islamophobes’. That is, the progeny of a profound failure of imagination and people whose main motivation is xenophobia at best and racism at worst.

***

Baghdadi is not the first warlord to set himself up as a king in the Middle East and probably won’t be the last. Inspite of appearances, I think he and his ilk represent a profoundly twentieth century and Western vision of the nature of humanity and power.

The situation is complicated by what look like successful alternatives in the Persian Gulf, the monarchies of the Arabian Peninsula. Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. Each of these has based its wealth on petrodollars (or in the case of Dubai, gold smuggling from India in the 70s and 80s), the media and sporting industries or on speculative, spectacular property deals.

At their core, they remain unreformed, exploitative, absolutist monarchies whose position is only guaranteed by the flow of money from the wider global economy. Underlying it all is the potential for deep instability. Witness Saudi Arabia’s battles with Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula and its recent de facto acknowledgement of supporting Islamic State as a huge regional policy mistake.

***

It was possible to support the US intervention in Afghanistan, because the Al-Qaida presence had to be rooted out; especially after 11th September 2001. The later invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a disaster waiting to happen. It was so clearly misguided, such an obvious mistake that it’s hard to see how people with the most expensive education money can buy could have thought it was sensible from any angle.

This situation is itself a consequence of the destruction of Iraq and the botched political legacy the US and Iran both agreed upon in 2011.

To add complexity to complexity, it’s also a product of the mishandling of the Syrian civil war, not only by the US and Europe, but also by Russia, Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. This is a mess with many fathers.

The new situation in Iraq and Syria isn’t going to be solved by US and allied bombing raids alone. Someone’s boots need to be on the ground, but whose? The only power with the ability to decisively defeat Islamic State on the battle field is the US.

Meanwhile, the zenith of US power and its ability to act unchecked has passed and the American people remain suspicious of open ended military commitments in the Middle East. Besides, the US no longer has the money and is more concerned about China.

Nor is it obvious that regional powers such as Iran and Saudi Arabia want the return of US troops to their backyard. For Iran, however much they hate and fear IS, they probably hate and fear the US more. For Saudi Arabia, they probably wouldn’t be able to stop their population uprooting and going to fight for IS en masse.

For a good 40 years, Western news headlines and political debate has been punctuated by ever more massive arms sales to Saudi Arabia and other Gulf monarchies. Billions of dollars sent from the world’s consumers of oil products to (among other destinations) Western arms companies via Gulf Arab bank accounts.

And they still want the West to fight their battles for them, from containing and crushing Iran to defeating Bashar al Assad in Syria to eradicating IS.

The ‘dog that hasn’t barked’ so far, is Turkey. It was doing so well. Growing links with regional powers fuelling and driving increased ambition on the international stage; enabled by a thriving economy, vibrant democracy and a groundbreaking ‘no problems with neighbours’ foreign policy. Now, all that is a distant memory. The democracy is returning to authoritarianism, the economy was buffeted by the 2008 crash and worst of all, the foreign policy has been exchanged for serious misjudgements in Syria and now Iraq.

Turkey has yet to fully declare its hand in the face of Islamic State.

The stuff I’ve read about the crimes of IS make me think of death cults such as the Nazis (and I don’t say that without reason) and the Khmer Rouge – the very reason for their existence is the exercise of murderous power over entire peoples, with limitless ambitions for destruction and death.

That they must be stopped is common sense. But how?

The only way this can be ended and that ending be politically acceptable is for the regional powers to end it themselves independent of the old imperial and Cold War powers.

It also means more distant international powers not interfering in the region and allowing their own interests and prejudices to come before local interests; preventing any kind of equitable settlement to local problems.

This has the disadvantage that they can’t throw their populations the bone of quietly blaming the Americans for their discomfort, but it has the advantage that the solution will be more agreeable to the people that matter, the people that live there.

Other changes that are necessary would have to be more far reaching. An education system that doesn’t teach hate, war and murder as justified domestic and foreign policy goals. An economic system that creates space for ordinary people to take make a living for themselves outside of foreign multi nationals and domestic slavery. A political system that allows everyone a chance to control their own destiny and (more importantly) to let off steam by making the changes that respond to their needs. An attempt to change the culture from one of imperial expansion and the caricaturing of non Sunni / Wahhabi / Salafi Muslims as ignorant dogs deserving of conversion at sword point.

Each of these would undercut the position of groups such as Islamic State as the true champions of ‘real Islam’, whatever that means. And everybody might have a chance of getting on with their lives in peace and quiet at last.

The Impossibility of Words

I’ve often wondered how it’s possible for non musicians to write about music. Indeed, writing about music can be pretty tough because words don’t convey sound, only an approximation and then only in the very best poetry.

When I was young and cool (HA…not sure the ‘cool’ bit ever happened but, hey, I can dream!) I used to read the British music weekly New Musical Express (NME for short) a publication covering the then popular genre of rock and roll. I always found the ability of journalists to describe what they heard to be remarkably limited. The, then really popular, BBC Radio 1 show Steve Wright in the Afternoon used to feature a comedy character called The Music Journalist who would describe everything as a remarkable ‘sonic cathedral of sound’. Which wasn’t too far from the NME.

The great Roddy Doyle novel, ‘The Commitments’, about a soul band forming and breaking up in the Irish capital, Dublin, of all places, is equally unable to describe the music it’s trying to depict. You’re left to your own knowledge and memories of Wilson Pickett, James Brown and others.

This is why Alan Parker’s movie of ‘The Commitments’ is so much better than the novel; you see and hear the real sound of the music; even if Doyle’s writing is witty, full of life and gives you a good grounding in a moment of the lives of some ‘typical’ Dubliners.

The Commitments, Try a Little Tenderness…So cool, there are icicles on the ceiling

1991, the year ‘The Commitments’ movie appeared, I saw Bertrand Blier’s ‘Trop Belle Pour Toi’ (Too Beautiful for You) for the first time. It’s a slightly strange telling of the manager of a car dealership (Gerard Depardieu) falling out of love with his beautiful wife (Carole Bouquet) and into love with his plain, frumpy secretary (Josiane Balasko).

Trop Belle Pour Toi…A waking dream that isn’t a nightmare

We see dream sequences in which Balasko tells the car salesman how she thinks he will leave her; dinner parties thrown by Depardieu and Bouquet in which the tension and pressure to stay with such an accomplished, beautiful woman is palpable.

The whole film feels like a dream. At the centre of it is a piece of music, Franz Schubert’s ‘Piano Impromptu No. 3’. At one point, Depardieu is listening to this whilst his family are asleep, he simply says “this music, it shatters me”. When I heard it and saw this, I was helpless. If ever there was music to fall in love to, this is it.

Now that I’ve thrown up my hands at the difficulty of describing music with words, I’m going to attempt to tell you why this music reduces me to a misty eyed jelly. There is a problem, I can’t read or write music, my descriptive abilities in musical theory are non-existent. So this is going to be difficult.

But here goes.

This is a work meant for piano, you don’t hear any other instrument. The first couple of bars are wonderfully delicate, tender and tentative as if beginning is something to be shy of. As the main motif moves on, a fluttering as if in a gentle breeze picks up underneath it.

What’s that about, you might wonder? The main sound gives you an aching, yearning of the kind you feel when what you need is in sight but only a fingers length out of reach. The piano breeze tells you what’s going on in the heart, the gentle emotion rising to near fever, calming and building again; whilst the main tune (how inadequate that word is here) keeps up a front of ‘should I, shouldn’t I?’ At the half way point, the keys are struck so gently it’s hard to believe they’ve been touched, more they’ve been breathed on to produce the lightest of chimes.

I’ve always had a sense of two people coming close, moving away, raising their hands in a half gesture before pulling back. All the while, what they’re thinking, the pounding of the heart remains private and unspoken, without needing to be spoken.

Sometimes the couple is faced with the storm of circumstance trying to pull them apart; be it personality, family, work, whatever. If they’re meant for each other, the couple might be inviolable regardless of what happens, like a lighthouse on the edge of an ocean hurricane.

It finishes with the same heartbreaking ache that began it, if maybe more knowing and understanding than before. All achieved without words, without touch; only through the most delicate, intricate of sounds barely registering but doing so powerfully.

This is what’s going on in this piano impromptu. No other music moves and touches me in quite the way this does.

Israel and Gaza: the more things stay the same, the more they change

So another ceasefire has ended in Gaza.   A minor interruption to an offensive (offensive, in its truest sense) designed, we’re told, to destroy tunnels constructed by Hamas to bring in supplies under the Egyptian border, or to take Hamas fighters under the border and into Israel.

For all that, the most vivid images coming out of that small territory involve the destruction of schools, hospitals and the killing of civilians.

The other day I read a comment that it’s becoming increasingly difficult for Israel to deny that it is targeting infrastructure.  Because, self evidently, it has been attacking infrastructure.

Smoke rises from a building in Gaza.

Firstly, I want to say that I think Israel clearly has and must have a right to exist.  That’s a statement of first principles.  What it does not have is a right to do what it has done in Gaza.

Secondly, Hamas is a militant Islamist grouping that is not averse to hiding itself within the civilian population or using foreign journalists for cover.  It is not an organization with a democratic vision, being more akin to Saudi Arabia or the Muslim Brotherhood in outlook (if not loyalty).  I would not want to live in a society dominated by Hamas.

What has Israel done in Gaza?

Prior to the siege, Gaza was a nightmare for the IDF.  A place that exacted a disproportionate toll on its soldiers; out of all keeping with the number of settlers, who lived there and its geographical size.  The occupation had failed in a way the West Bank occupation hadn’t.

The withdrawal and removal of settlements in 2005 made the siege a possible next move.

Now after 8 years of siege Israel has a problem.  Gaza still hasn’t collapsed.  The siege has taken a lot of diplomatic, military and political resources out of the country, with very little palpable result.

After all, life still goes on there.  Palestinians, still live there.  It is not a safe space for Israel to claim for itself…yet.  After all this time it this siege risks becoming some kind of Trojan war, on a giant scale.

As miserable as the lives of Gazans must be, they still get access to health care, albeit under highly stressed, marginal conditions.  Their children still get education, again under highly stressed marginal conditions.  Ditto, the power supply.

This Operation Protective Edge is about removing all that.  Gazans get health care?  Destroy the hospitals.  That kills the professionals who cannot be replaced.  It destroys equipment, medicine and the built facilities to house it.  It destroys medical records and things such as blood banks.

The patients don’t matter, in fact if they die, that’s all to the better because it creates misery and fear.  Meanwhile, foreigners may be horrified, but they will be too afraid to work there if they think Israel will not spare them.

Similarly, education.  Education provides hope for the future, a way out of poverty, squalor and tyranny.  That’s why tyrants hate it, why theocracies and ‘democracies’ alike interfere and divert it.  No or poor access to it means that people are without the intellectual tools to question, challenge then change their circumstances.

A wrecked building

Schools, therefore, must also become a target.

Remove energy generation, education and health care and you tear apart the ability of a society to sustain itself, to create even a semblance of normality even under highly abnormal circumstances.

Talking of energy, Israel itself is facing an energy crisis.  It’s a net importer of energy and would like to end this whilst opening gas exports to Europe and the Middle East. 

It just so happens that there’s also gas in Gaza.  Not quite, but offshore, in the Mediterranean.  It turns out there’s rather a lot of gas in the eastern Mediterranean.  The difficulty is that the largest field, the Leviathan field straddles waters where border disputes impede Israel’s ability to exploit it – disputes with Syria, Lebanon and Egypt.  Whilst Gaza has an offshore gas field; two wells worth $4billion.

When this operation ends, as it eventually must, what will Gazans have?  Will the UN and the EU build more schools and hospitals only for Israel to smash them later?  Who will work in them with teachers, doctors, patients and students dead or scattered and the ever present danger of death?

The reality is that this operation is about tightening the siege of Gaza and not about touching Hamas.  Israel needs Hamas.  Just as Hamas (like Hezbollah) needs Israel.  Both sides use the other to cohere around.

Hamas, before this operation, was dying.  Starved of funds, fallen out with Iran and Hezbollah over Syria, increasingly lacking direction.  Israel invades

Rubble and wreckage, Gaza

and Hamas is suddenly energized again.

Israel uses Hamas as a bogeyman to terrify its people, to remove debate about economic injustice and to keep Israelis terrified for their future; to justify all kinds of criminality – from petty corruption and the vilification of liberal politics to murderous atrocities to open, legally enforced apartheid.  It creates the conditions under which the whole Israeli population has a hand in these crimes, by ensuring every family has members who belong to the military and security forces that enforce the Gaza Seige or the Occupation of the West Bank; the killings, routine humiliations, deprivation and apartheid that goes with so called National Security.  Nobody is innocent, everybody has to continue with it or face a reckoning.

And, it is slowly becoming less democratic, the very reason given by the Wet to support Israel.

Israel has many reasons for attacking Gaza.  None of them involve ‘rooting out terror’.  These days the ‘terror’ is mostly, not by any means exclusively’ one way.  All the cards appear to be in Israel’s favour; military, technological, economic and diplomatic power appear to favour Israel.

However, the sands are shifting.  US power in the Middle East (as in Europe) is waning whilst it shifts its focus to China and the Pacific.  Consequently there is an ongoing reordering of the status quo in the region and nobody knows how things will look when that process is complete.  The old borders imposed by the French and British in 1918 are breaking down.  New powers will arise, the question to ask is ‘what will be the nature of those powers?’

The danger for Israel is that they will look like the so called Islamic State group, now attempting to solidify its gains in eastern Syria and northern Iraq. Well financed through oil sales from captured oil and gas facilities, with funds also coming from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states.  It is battle hardened and well equipped with Russian and US equipment captured on the battlefield.  Curing that poison will not be as easy a removing the Taliban or Islamist militants in Mali.

From the West, a more militantly nationalist Egypt could pose a growing threat.  Plus, Iran’s power and influence has been growing since the overthrow of Saddam by US forces in 2003.

Even US President Obama has questioned the Gaza blockade (a symbolic change signaling nothing practical).

Meanwhile the arrival of social media has made it harder for Israel and its supporters to dominate the news and information agenda.  Israel finds itself questioned like never before in countries that traditionally supported it.  The World is not as supportive as it was (also here and here).  Conservative politicians in the UK ( here, here and here) and Australia are wondering about the Gaza operation, not least because ordinary people open Facebook and Twitter and find unfiltered accounts of journalists on the ground describing death and destruction, bombing from the air, shelling on the ground and the killing of civilians.

Protests in London against Israeli actions in Gaza

Nobody believes the ‘rooting out terror’ argument anymore.  The Iraq War and Israel’s subsequent wars in Lebanon and Gaza have undermined any belief in the official narrative.  Now social media is giving that disbelief a solidity it lacked (paywall).  Even the British Broadcasting  Corporation is quietly shifting its ground.

The risks and stakes for Israel are growing and its ability to control its destiny through the use of sheer violence – imposing so called solutions through ‘changing facts on the ground’ – is slowly diminishing.

Meanwhile, as ever with modern warfare, it’s the civilians who continue to suffer and die; caught between sets of fanatic politicians who even whilst they compete with each other in their viciousness, actually have more in common with each other than they have with the people they claim to represent.

Water, water…not more bloody water

The monsoon is like nothing I’ve ever seen before.  When the monsoon strikes, each storm has a ferocity, an energy and volatility that is exhilarating, visceral.  This is no genteel storm that announces itself and stays at a distance for you to watch in the stadium without getting wet.  These are up front, in your face storms that force themselves on you.

When the lightning comes, it covers the sky in a tree of power, energy and light – from east to west.  Or put another way, it cascades like a waterfall of pure energy from one side of the compass to the other.

For a brief moment, you watch a waterfall of electricity in its purest, rawest, uncontained and dangerous form.  If storm chasing is thunderstorm as snowboarding or base jumping, then watching these storms is thunder and lightning as close in spectator sport.

A downpour shot with a flash, so everything lights up like a diamond. No, it wasn’t deliberate.

British storms can be small scale, almost polite in comparison.  I say this because the thunder storms, the rain storms I’ve seen with my own eyes don’t compare to anything I’ve seen here in Lahore, Pakistan, northern Subcontinent.  What in Britain is a heavy, torrential downpour of the sort that makes us say ‘the heavens opened’ is, in Pakistan, a moderate, middling storm.  The truly torrential downpours are what it must be like to live inside a washing machine during the rinse cycle.

To get an idea of what it’s like, take a middling size bucket of water and fill it to the top.  Get the largest household sieve you can find.  Maybe a colander, anything that has lots of holes and can hold water, even if only for half a second.  But it has to be fairly large.  Then you pour the water from the bucket into the sieve or colander (how you hold the sieve / colander whilst pouring the water is up to you).  What you’re seeing as the water rushes through each hole is an approximation of a northern Pakistani rain storm.  If you can film it with your mobile phone, you can even watch it later and get a better idea of what I’m trying to describe.

The streets flood in minutes.  It’s then that you realize the roads here double as dry river or canal beds. Cars and trucks double as motorboats.  The only form of transport that can negotiate this torrent as if it isn’t there is the ‘humble’ donkey cart.  Donkeys and horses can wade through the water, find their footing in a way that even a 4×4 cannot.  And the cart itself, like a sailing ship, can get soaked without the engine burning out.

Pakistanis love the rain, they run, play and dance when it arrives.

The streets flood during this deluge because the drainage system simply cannot cope; either because it’s lousy or non-existent.  If you know your history, you’ll know that public drainage and sanitation, indeed the planned city, was invented here in Pakistan by the ‘Indus Valley civilisation’ .  You can see the remains of drainage channels and public baths at Harrapa and Mohenjo Daro.

What you’ll see there is channels on either side of the street that carry away waste water.  Unfortunately, whilst the rest of the world has (or maybe has not) improved on this, Pakistan by and large hasn’t.  Not really.  And so the streets flood with rainwater mixed with sewage.

Then there’s all that dust.  If the monsoon was all you ever saw of the Subcontinent, you would think you’ve arrived in a real life Atlantis where the city is doomed to drown.  If you never saw the monsoon and only saw the Subcontinent during the long dry spells, you would think you seeing a desert in action and wonder at the existence of any greenery at all.

The dryness creates dust.  Mountains of dust.  Dust that is so ubiquitous that if you left it alone, you’d quickly lose sight of your floor, the roads and buildings would be buried in months or perhaps a few years.

The rain turns this into a mudbath.  The floodwaters turn a muddy brown and when they melt away, roads resemble dried river beds with the tell tale patterns left by running water.  Each surface open to the skies resembles a carefully disguised concrete and tarmacked beach.

I grew up on the coast near a tidal salt marsh.  When it rained or merely threatened to rain, the scent in the air was pungent with salt and dank, musty growth.  It wasn’t an unpleasant smell but it would clear my nostrils.  In Lahore, during and after the rain or maybe even before the rain, the air itself is thick with the perfume of the soil.

I only noticed this after a former work colleague quoted E M Forster’s ‘A Passage to India’; a female character says the smell of the monsoon is like nothing she’s ever experienced.  Forster was right.  It’s not a sweet smell but it’s not pungent either.  It isn’t rotten with decay or seasoned with salt and undergrowth.  It’s the odour of all that dust and dirt.  ‘Mitti’ is the local Urdu word for soil and clay.  Sometimes people will say to each other ‘Kees mitti ke bunni ho’…’what clay are you made from?’  The dust and soil are also called ‘mitti’.

The roads don’t take long to dry off, especially under that merciless sun.  Sometimes they’re helped along by tankers sucking the water from the road; so the water becomes merely hazardous rather than impassable.  Once it’s vanished into the air the water must go somewhere.

That’s where the humidity kicks in.  The Pakistani writer Tariq Ali once described Punjab after the rains as like living in a sauna.  I didn’t realize how right he was until my second  summer here.

In 2010 the monsoon seemed to dump the Indian Ocean on northern Pakistan.  In its eagerness to obey the laws of gravity and return to the Indian Ocean, the water forced its way through and past everything in its path.  The destruction was breathtaking, even if I only saw the video footage on TV.  Towns and villages looked as though they’d been trashed by a retreating army caught in a rout.

Then came the humidity.

After taking a shower, the atmosphere in anyone’s washroom would be filled with water droplets gently breezing and swirling in the air currents before settling on the wals and windows to resemble perspiration.  After the rain, especially the monsoon, the whole city, indeed the whole province of Punjab, is one open air washroom with all that water floating around in aerosol form, looking for any surface to collect on.  It might be the cold glass of air conditioned rooms or cars.  More likely it’ll be your clothes and skin.

In five minutes you might feel that familiar, clammy sensation you get when you walk into a house that’s not been properly dried out.  After ten minutes you notice the beads of sweat and water on your forehead.  After fifteen minutes your clothes need drying out.  Later, the humidity was overpowering.  If my clothes and my skin had become flecked with black  mould, I wouldn’t have been surprised.

I notice it goes in cycles.  My first monsoon was nearly bone dry.  ‘Don’t tell me, THIS is the famous monsoon?!!?’  I wondered what all the fuss was about.  That was in 2009.  2010 isthe closest I’ve been to living like a fish since I arrived here.  The atmosphere was filled with water.  In fact, the rains brought with them the widest spread single natural disaster ever when floods destroyed the homes and villages, crops and livelihoods of 20 million people in one go.

The next couple of years were not as wet.  2013 was another washout.  The humidity had the quality of a solid wall, you could see and almost touch it in a way that you can see and touch a solid object  Even more so than fog.

This year, we’ve had the humidity but not the rain.  Thunderstorms and heavy rain are frequently forecast, but never or rarely materialize.  When the clouds arrive, the rain spits and spots but never deluges.  As though an invasion has failed.

Perhaps next year will be sunnier and the year after will make us all feel that the sea is descending on us, one phase at a time.