Someone has asked to see some pictures of the Paris Hotel that I mentioned in my last post so here are a couple. Enjoy.

The Paris Hotel

I don't cook anymore. It wasn't a conscious decision but all of the vegetables I understand have seized to grow and I'm left with what look like a hundred variations of cucumber. The fruit is excellent; lychees, mangoes, pinapples, jack fruit are piled high and provide a kaleidoscopic treat every time I visit the fruit vendors. But the veg... Another reason I don't cook is that I have one gas burner. I'm an incredibly average cook anyway and struggle to whip up anything very edible with a normal cooker. I certainly lack the culinary dexterity to make a meal on a single gas stove. And so I've just stopped. As a result me and Mbaya (a Kenyan volunteer who lives around the corner) have taken to eating out every night. We eat at a place that they say has no name so we have called it the Paris Hotel. Here is a description of our evenings there. It never changes.

The room is painted white and there are white patterned tiles that go half way up the walls. The lights are strip lights and they bleed out through the open front into the heavy dark night in the street. We climb up the concrete step past the huge steel pots with today’s menu inside. The food is overcooked with too many spices. Fish curry, beef curry, stewed mushy yellow vegetables, good thick dhal and mounds of rice. On the opposite side of the entrance there’s man rolling bread dough. He cuts it, rolls it into a long sausage then cuts it into even pieces. His expert hands work quickly like these actions are all they know. He couldn’t get the them to write or shake hands if he tried.He rolls them into balls, pounds them and rolls them flat on a heavy floured table and then throws them onto a big blackened iron skillet heated from a fire below. They smell good. We walk through to the back of the room, the faces look up from their meals and watch us as we go past. They always watch us. At the back there’s a concrete basin that looks more like a feeding trough for animals. Three plastic taps stick out of the wall. There we wash our hands, using some fluorescent pink overly perfumed Lux soap. It’s dotted with what look like dried fruit chunks.Other men are washing their hands, hocking up and spitting into the basin. Revolting. We sit. The Formica tables are chipped and beaten after years of cleaning and plastic plates being passed along them. The benches either side used to be painted a bright orange. Now they’re dilapidated and look rusted rather than painted. Within seconds two plastic plates are shoved under our noses with three hot rotis, giving off some soft floury steam. Sobji or dhal? The man asks. Vegetable or dhal? We both go for dhal and a plate of beef curry. They arrive in little dishes. Methodically I tear into the first roti and roll it up. I scoop up some of the thick dhal and put it in my mouth. It tastes good. With the next piece I tear off a chunk of beef and dip it in the dhal. It tastes better. Then I get the curry juices from the meat dish and mix them into the dhal to make a browny yellowy mess. I continue to work with various combinations of meat, curry, dhal, and roti until all three rotis are gone and I’m left burping. Cha? The man asks. Tea? Yes, less sugar, chini kom. I say. We talk and let the food go down for a few minute until the thick sugary tea arrives in glasses. It’s more like a stew than a drink. Sickly sweet, a rich brown colour with lumps of unpasteurised milk floating lazily in it. We drink it slowly and talk. There’s not much else to do. Sated we walk to the counter at the front and pay. 120taka. From the sharp clinical light we walk into the thick black air. Like Guinness. We hail a rickshaw and set off into the night.

Guitar Hero

I’ve been trying to figure out why I’m such a dreadful guitar player. I just can’t figure it out. I was strumming away just now and I was so horrified by the spasmodic movements I was making with my hands that I felt compelled to retire here and seek refuge at the computer. Let my fingers near a computer keyboard and they’re like the proverbial ducks to water, wriggling about happily, moving gracefully from Q right the way over to the Ctrl key on the other side with the greatest of ease. Plonk them on a fret board however and they wander around stunned, disorientated, directionless, like people stumbling out of a crash; unharmed but far from able to master any of the more advanced motor skills.

I’ve been playing now on and off since I was twelve, that’s thirteen years. Even with the breaks I should be pretty good by now, I should have at least got all of Dylan licked. This is not the case. I have a total repertoire of about five songs that I know all the way through. I was in a band once; I even did a bit of writing, something I still do. The problem was the same then as it is now, I’m held back somewhat by my inability to play the bloody thing. It would be like a novelist not being able to write in joined up letters or having to type the way so many of our parents do; with short stabbing movements aimed precisely at the keys but with a fair degree of trepidation every ten seconds or so, interspersed by agonising waits as they look for the next letter, “I saw that fucking ‘D’ just a minute a go, where’s the bugger gone?”

I get real joy out of playing the guitar because it’s completely different from anything else I do. It’s not work, it’s not reading, it’s not watching TV, it’s not exercising, it’s creative and doesn’t use words and for that reason it’s incredibly refreshing. And what’s more important in Bangladesh it doesn’t use electricity so I can use it even during the regular power cuts here. I know though that I’d get so much more pleasure out of it if I could play it better. I think it’s partly down to a lack of natural ability although really it’s far more down to my not being disciplined with it enough to put in the time and effort to learn the technical skills. I know I use it precisely because, for me, it’s directionless; I pick it up when I don’t want to try, when I’m tired and not in the mood for concentrating. Which doesn’t stop me being jealous of good guitar players when I hear one. But then I think to myself ‘Ah-ha! But does he know the current problems facing local government in Bangladesh? I think not! Joe: one, Guitar Player: Nil.’

Kolkata Knight Riders

I’ve been to the New Home of Cricket today, Calcutta (or Kolkata) to be precise for this month has seen the start of the inaugural season of the Indian Premier League. I’m not sure if it’s making ripples in Europe but its waves have been rising to a crescendo in this part of the world. In many ways it’s bigger than cricket. It is a potent symbol of the emergence of a new world power and encapsulates its brash confidence perfectly. And last night I was there to witness it first hand as I saw Kolkata Knight Riders play their first home game of the season versus Hyderabad’s Deccan Chargers. When I arrived at the Eden Gardens stadium the atmosphere was pulsating. The mid-afternoon heat blazed down on a roaring crowd of 75,000 people who were singing and dancing and may even have been there to see some cricket. Except the cricket was often little more than a break between the cheerleaders, the celebrities, and the Bollywood beats blasting out of speakers. It was like cricket had been crossed with American Football, wrestling, the circus, and a Roman gladiatorial battle. To see how far the game has come you just have to look at the new kits. Gone are the days of whites, and in their place the Knight Riders wear an absurd kit that is mostly golden spangles. Even the helmets and shin pads are gold. Overnight it’s like the sport has mutated from an old respectable albeit slightly dull gentleman into a raving masked wrestler. Presiding over all of this was Shah Rukh Kahn who is officially India’s king celebrity. His God like status dwarfs anything Beckham was able to muster in his heyday. Any time this man waved or talked to a neighbour or stood up the whole crowd went crazy with enraptured adulation, chanting his name cheering and standing on their chairs to get a better look at him. You just don’t see that for Roman Abramovich.

I must confess I felt rather English at times, rather politely tapping on the back of the bloke in front of me who was standing on his chair gyrating maniacally. ‘Excuse me squire I’d dearly like to see some of the game if that’s alright with you.’ No chance. Luckily I’m taller than the average Bengali by a good foot or so which meant I could see most of the game. I’m quite new to cricket but I couldn’t help feeling a buzz of anticipation when Gilchrist and Symonds teamed up at the wicket (is that the expression?) for these players represent some of the best talent in the world. Ponting was out off the first ball and Ganguly did nothing in particular but it was still great to see them.

Then the lights went out. Now the game had not been going as planned anyway. The big screen didn’t work, the water had ran out, the toilets weren’t functioning and the pitch (is it a pitch?) was a shambles. Kolkata were staring defeat in the face and the mood was becoming downbeat if not a little hostile. Then two of the four floodlights failed and we were plunged into semi darkness. The players left the field and the mood of the brooding crowd hung on a knife edge. So what did I do? I left. That meant I missed the end of the game and Kolkata’s eventual triumph as the lights came back half an hour later, but I stand by the decision. I’ve been to many parts of the world and have emerged largely unscathed. This, in my opinion, is partly because I get out of situations that I think may be volatile. The crowds in this part of the world are notorious for becoming very mean very quickly and Bengalis in particular are hot blooded and have shorter fuses than even the Spanish. Imagine, I thought, if the other two lights go out. I’ll be stuck in a stadium with 75,000 miffed Bengalis in almost total darkness. It was like I was stood in a large room full of cans of petrol and boxes of fireworks and someone had just walked in with a match. No thanks.

It was an awesome, exhilarating, slightly terrifying evening. And just to quote a match report from the Indian Telegraph today: ‘The stands were rife with an ominous on-the-edge sense. A trigger and Eden (Gardens) could have become another tragic spectacle.’ Nice to know I wasn’t just being paranoid.

Pohila Boyshack

Happy New Year! The year is 1415 and I hope it’s going to be a belter. 14^th April was Bengali New Year and I’m not sure how they measure it but that’s the year here. Although really they just use the same year and calendar as us on a day to day basis. I know I know, I haven’t written for ages. I have been writing a lot but non of it is suitable for this blog because it’s often angry and overwhelmingly dull and self-indulgent. I could have written about my holiday to India which was lovely and infinitely bloggable (if it really is an adjective). Indeed that was my intention on my return here but then I was mauled by Bangladesh. I’m going to spare you the details because they involve visas and half finished houses and funding and all manner of things I won’t bore you with, suffice to say that the last two weeks have been perhaps my toughest here so far and so I’ve been in no mood to write.

Now with that said, New Year came as a breath of fresh air. In Bengali it’s called Pohila Boyshack, hence the title, and it is by far the most fun I’ve seen Bangladeshis have en masse and in public. I was invited by my good friends at Rajshahi University to come and spend a couple of days with them so off I went. One of them insisted that if I was going to attend the festivities I had better look the part and so they bought me a panchabi and a dhutti. The panchabi is a long sleeved gown that is either made of cotton or silk and comes down to the knees. The dhutti is a very traditional, if slightly antiquated form of dress that is worn around the bottom half. It’s starched white cotton and is folded intricately around until it resembles a skirt or a kilt or something of that ilk. Needless to say that I looked pretty daft, and yet I drew compliments for the entire day. Apparently I looked like an old Bengali prince so I wasn’t really complaining. The first thing I noticed on our walk around the university campus where the festivities were taking place was that this was first big gathering I’d seen that didn’t appear to have any overtly religious overtones. There is a real divide here between Hindus and Muslims and so it was great to see everybody congregate together as Bangladeshis. The day seemed to allow everyone to meet on common ground.

I’ll be honest, that wasn’t the first thing I noticed, rather the thing that struck me were the women. Women here have a habit of being tucked away, out of the public gaze, either in the house or behind the burqa. And yet today they weren’t just visible, they were stunning. The vast majority were decked out in saris of all colours and patterns although most opted for the traditional white and red, often with a gold trim. The fabrics shimmered and shone in the sun and seemed to accentuate the grace with which the women here move. All around us there was the sound of laughter, singing and of traditional music, the harmonium, the khol (a type of drum), cymbals and bells. The air was heady with the smell of cooking as the food stands thronged with people eating ilish mach, a prized river fish, and rice out of earthenware bowls. I found it utterly enthralling and overwhelming. My friends did their utmost to make sure I was included and that I was comfortable but they couldn’t stem the almost constant tide of people coming up to talk to me and to take my picture. Almost all of them were polite and courteous and merely wanted to know where I was from and what I thought of the place but it felt a little bit like some kind of state visit and by five o’clock I was exhausted. I took my leave and went and sat in my cool dark room for a couple of hours in a rather serene daze.

Bangladesh is in the news again. This time for violent demonstrations against women’s rights. It’ll be in the news again, when the floods start, or when another ferry sinks, or to show lines of people queuing for rice. Bangladesh is plagued by poverty but it is not defined by it. It is an incredibly complex and diverse country and yet it is squashed into a strange two dimensional parody of itself in the western media. I want to tell you about my time here because you should know that Bangladesh is more than its poverty, it’s better than its Islamic extremism, it contains beauty and life and it’s these things that I want to cherish and preserve from my time here, things that I hope to share with you.

Development according to me.

Give a man a fish and he can feed himself for a day. Give a man a fishing rod and he can feed himself and his family for ever. Amen. If development had a Bible this would probably be on the front cover. The old mantra is well known, even to those who know nothing about development. Indeed, development itself has become such a powerful idea, and effects so many people that some could argue that it is a kind of religion. Now despite what I’m about to say I remain a priest, as it were, of this modern church. However, I am a rather troubled new convert and the catechisms of ‘gender mainstreaming’ and ‘rights based development’ don’t rest easily on my mind. It’s like I’m back at school singing hymns in assembly. Some around me are singing with complete conviction while I mouth the words half-heartedly, shuffling from one foot to the other, sniggering quietly with my friends. In short, I just don’t buy it.

My opinions are not formed on the basis of books; they are taken from my admittedly brief (5 month) stay in Bangladesh. I can’t speak about what I don’t know, development may be a very different thing in other countries but here it’s a bit – how shall I say – it’s a bit warped. To explain I’m afraid I’m going to have to give you a dry, but hopefully quick, crash course in how development works here so bear with me.

Right, first you have poor people. Now this lot are really important. You might assume that because they don’t have TVs and shower gel and things like that they’d be quite a demanding bunch. Well let me tell you they’re not really. You see we tend to shout quite loudly when we think we’re missing something but that’s because we think we have a right to it. This is really the thing here, the crux of the matter: rights. There are millions, literally millions of people in Bangladesh who don’t have any concepts of human rights, or the rights of the citizen, or the rights of the child, or any of those other things that Geldof and his monkey side-kick Bono carp on about. This means that they are just passive recipients of aid. This, of course, is far from ideal. To go back to that tired phrase; if a man or woman doesn’t realise that they have a right to a fishing rod then they’ll be bloody happy with a fish. And so what happens here is that lots of NGOs and donors, who I’ll come to later, have been throwing (not literally) latrines, and tube wells, and anything else they feel that the ‘poor’ need. In turn the Bangladeshis take what they’re given, whether they actually need it or not, and go about their business. The problem is that nothing actually changes. You get a few short term benefits but the people stay poor.

Now here comes ‘rights base development’. This is a very new and shiny idea with cool words like ‘duty bearers’. What it basically says is that until people are aware of their rights and are organised enough to demand them collectively then no real development can take place. Why? Because people need to be empowered so that they can develop themselves. They must become active citizens rather than passive recipients otherwise the body politic will whither and die. The social contract of the Enlightenment must be restored. You see? Lovely isn’t it.

So what’s this got to do with Bangladesh? Well as you may know the government here ranks as one of the most corrupt on the planet and doesn’t really function in any real sense to provide its’ citizens with the services they have a right to like healthcare and a clean water supply and a fair trial. So what in theory is happening is that NGOs (Non Governmental Organisations) are trying to work with the people and the government to ensure that the former can advocate for their rights and the latter can deliver on those rights. Fair enough. Where does the money come from? The donors; who are quite and eclectic bunch. They include big multinational organisations such as the IMF and the World Bank, they include the UN, they include the developmental arms of various governments from Canada, Britain, and the EU, pretty much anyone. They also include familiar names such as Oxfam, and Save the Children. If you want to develop a country you have to have serious amounts of cash. Oxfam et al. have serious amounts of cash. And this is really where the problem lies. You can talk about rights based development all you want but the problem is that you need money, or at least control over money, before you can have rights. The situation in Bangladesh now is that development is led completely by the donors. This is hardly empowering to the people.

Let me explain. If an NGO wants to do a project, for example, a women’s education project in ten communities, it needs money. What it does is it goes to the donor with a funding proposal detailing what it wants to do and how much it’ll cost. The donor then says yes or no. It sounds simple but actually what it creates is a bidding war. There are thousands of NGOs, employing hundreds of thousands of people who are all competing for the lucrative contracts with big donors. Each donor has its’ own policies and approaches and so what the NGOs end up doing is proposing programmes that they know the donor wants to hear. And what voice does the community have in all of this? Effectively none. They have no money and so usually a cursory study is taken to canvass their opinions, just to make the project look legit. Each programme is short term, usually for no more than a few years, and so all of these NGOs are effectively free-lancing. There is no job security and so they frantically create new programmes and, when trying to monitor the effectiveness of their performance, i.e. how much they’re actually helping the poor, they twist and bend the evidence until it comes out positive because they’re terrified that a failing project will lead to the funding being cut. And funding is cut here all the time. The thing is that there are no formal, legally binding contracts between NGOs and donors and so donors can effectively break deals on a whim, with no legal repercussions or compensation to be paid.

I fear this is becoming a rant. Am I losing you? Are you getting bored? There is a lot more to say but I realise I’m probably a lot more interested in this than you are so I’ll try and wrap this up. What we have here is a kind of blurring between what is a government and what isn’t. Bangladesh has become so saturated by development that it’s utterly changed the political and economic make-up of the country. All of the money, all of the services, are coming from outside. There are some exceptions but they are few and far between and merely serve to prove the rule. If we’re serious about development we have to rethink our entire approach in this country. Giving a man a fishing rod is fine, but we’re also supplying the fish.

The Family. Part Two.

An update on the family I know if you read the last blog. I was looking at the last one I wrote and how lamentable the ending was. Rather sad and lonely you see. Well I decided I didn’t want to leave it like that so I bit the proverbial bullet and made contact with them. I’ve been learning a lot of Bangla recently and so my confidence with language has increased. So I used the old tactic of making friends with the kids first as they larked around on the roof of the house. The ploy worked. The indomitable Sheela came over and chatted to me. I understood in my own muddled way that she’d seen all the plastic bottles I’d accrued and that she wanted them. So I said, why don’t I bring them over? She said fine so over I went.

The change in perspective was revelatory. For a start I saw a world that I’d only seen from above from ground level. The goats and cow were bigger than I imagined and the people were smaller. Perhaps that wasn’t the most astonishing discovery. It was actually feeling I was experiencing the family and being a part of it rather than just peering at it from the outside. They invited me to eat with them and so I finally got to taste the source of the beautiful evocative smells that had come drifting into my window for so many months. It was delicious. Piles of steaming rice accompanied by potato curry, meaty pieces of fresh fish and stewed green vegetables peppered with aromatic cumin and coriander. They kept forcing more food on me until I genuinely feared I was going to bring some of it back up. My protestations finally stemmed the relentless tide of food and I subsided into happy burps (which is fine here) and chatting in very broken Bangla. I went over the next day and started taking some of the pictures you see here. I also went to the shop and gave them some of the copies which they were dead chuffed with. It felt like a nice way to repay them for their hospitality.

Maybe I was shooting myself in the foot because now I’ve finally got to know them it’s even more of a wrench leaving them. Still, I’m glad I did. It can be a risk making friends when I have to do so much travelling because I’m always sad to leave them but I can’t really see the point of shutting myself away just because my life here is transitory. I feel honoured and privileged to have been taken in as a friend by that family. And memories of Sheela’s cooking will stay with me for a long time to come.