More mumbai

My most intense reaction in India came as a considerable shock. I was overwhelmed by the immense number of people crammed together in the stinking slums of northern Mumbai. Apart from two relatively quiet hours between 2-4am, every single street in the city is seathing - with lorries, cars, rickshaws, motercylces, bicycles and (fearless) pedestrians, dogs, cows and even one elephant all jostling to get in front. Over a billion people in the country, and 18 million in Mumbai alone. The noise and smell are so intense. What shocked me about my reaction to all this was that I found myself thinking about the people as drones or parasites, rather than as precious individuals loved and cherished by God, just as I am.

My main companions during the WSF were people I luckily met on the plane. When we touched down at midnight on wednesday last week, I had no idea where I was going to stay that night. But as we were preparing to leave the plane someone overheard my conversation with my neighbour about Iraq - the person turned out to be Andreas, an American filmmaker also going to the WSF. So I waited and chatted, for about an hour it turned out because his traveling companion Myrna, an energetic 70yr old Pueto Rican activist, had lost her luggage in transit. By the time all the lost-luggage paperwork was completed, and the clock had passed 1.30am, I had two new friends and a place to stay for the week. Andreas is cheerful, bearded, passionate and wears a distinctive sailors cap. He fasted for 50 days (6 longer than David Blaine!) to try and persuade Bill Clinton to meet religious leaders from Pueto Rica to hear about the suffering of the people of Viequez, the little island where Myrna lives which for 60 years had been used by the US Navy to test weapons. He's also been a tireless campaigner against the School of the Americas (where the US trains Latin American police in torture). Myrna is a radiant and gregarious. She has recently survived a bout of cancer, quite possibly caused by depleted uranium or other toxins from the weapons testing on Viequez. I was exhausted by the WSF, and so I don't know how Myrna, nearly triple my age, managed to thrive in that environment. Both Andreas and Myrna were a barrel of laughs whether we were chewing the cud at the hotel or braving the streets in a rickshaw. The third member of the gang, who joined us a couple of days later, was an Swedish-Iraqi girl we christened "the princess" (al-emira in Arabic) because of her appauled reaction to Myrna's basic hotel room which she was going to share!

Mumbai photos

My snaps from the World Social Forum now online. I'll try to write up some more about the trip this weekend.

I've managed to come back not with an exciting tropical illness, but a boring irritating common cold. Also managed to walk into a lampost today. Yes, really - I was texting at the time! Luckily it was in a dark sidestreet so no one saw me do it, but I have got a gash on my forehead as proof! Might be doing CNN interview tomorrow on James Baker's trip to Gulf about debt, so prayers welcome as those cameras still scare the pants off me.

A hard time in Baghdad

This is an email from an Iraqi friend who has just returned home after many years in exile with the hope of helping rebuild the country, his reaction indicates the difficulty of the situation:

...As for business please forget any thing whatsoever. If I can come back tommorow i will do so. It is a place that we can not live.. no way you can make a deal with people that have lived with corruption and deceit. No electicity for the last 24 hours. After my last eamil to u, we were tapped as 14 canons hit an american convoy in the area where i live- 4 helicoptere and hundred of tanks surrounded and blocked the area.. you cannot imagine the horror and panic in this internet cafe."

Lord Lucan sighted in Mumbai

After three days in Bombay I'm caked in dirt and have assumed local dress. If i added a fake beard then perhaps i might be mistaken for a long lost British peer of the realm. However, aside from a warm shower, I lack nothing. I will post up some photos when I return home next week, but i doubt they will begin to convey the colour and vibe of the World Social Forum.

The opening plenary of the WSF, including speeches by Arundati Roy and some veterans of the struggle against us Brits in the 1930s and 40s, still fiery in their 90s. The warm up act was Junoon, an intriguing rock band that looked and sounded a lot like early U2, but turned out to be Pakistani Sufis (Islamic mystics). I was sitting near the found and a pile of teenage Hindu girls were squealing with Junoonmania, while the group of Nepalese speaking refugees from Bhutan (100,000 were expelled apparently) were doing amazing dances.

Navigating about the Forum site is difficult because there are endless marches within the venue's grounds, blocking up the main arteries with processions by dalits, Tibetans, LGBs, victims of dams... you name it, all complete with colourful banners, drummers and stilt walkers.

The workshops (of which there are about 140 going on at anytime, so I tend to be at least quintruple booked and flutter between them - when i'm able to squeeze through the marches mentioned above) are a bit of a disappointment. I know (because i'm busy trying to figure out how to run ours tomorrow) that it's hard to work out what level to pitch them at, and also having translation really slows them down. I was in a potentially interesting one this afternoon about nonviolent tactics in situations of armed conflict, but the day was hot, i was exhausted, and listening to 10 minutes of Italian (before the translation) was very soporific and I was fighting to keep my eyes open.

I rode on my first Indian train today. The women sit in central compartments, while the men crowd into smaller standing room only compartments with open sides. I copied my fellow passengers in holding onto a handle and leaning out of the open door to see the world go by and enjoy the rush of the wind.

I illegally rode 4 in a rickshaw yesterday. Whenever our driver saw a traffic policeman he would shout "inspector, inspector!" and tug my sleeve, which was the signal for me to clamber off Andreas' lap and run ahead past the junction to be picked up out of sight! Another little transport story was when our rickshaw was stopped at a light. I noticed that the people in the taxi next to ours looked "of a certain type" so I lent over and asked if they were at the WSF. They were, and we had a quick conversation about who we all were and even exchanged cards before the traffic moved off. My traveling companion thought I was an impressively dedicated networker, but the truth was that it was really just an excuse to talk to the passengers in the other car, who were three cute Mexican girls. I am very good at talking to strangers in this kind of setting, which friends back home who know my shy side might find surprising. Somehow as soon as I cross the English Channel, and certainly once I escape Europe, I transform into a raging extrovert. I guess travel (for the previlaged minority of us who can afford it) gives an opportunity to redefine ourselves for a brief period, away from the patterns of everyday life.

A Bombay Mix

I'm in Bombay/Mumbai at the World Social Forum. Delegates are beginnng to trickle in, but over 75,000 have registered, so it's going to be huge! This is my first time beyond Europe and the Middle East, and there is an explosion of experiences - sight, sounds and especially smells, that any visitor to India will be familiar with. I've just been wandering around the conferene grounds acclimatising and meeting people. The most fun was swinging on vines with some kids! So much great stuff is happening here, that I'm finding myself quadruple booked for most of the three seminar slots each day. I though Baghdad traffic was crazy - but Bombay can certainly compete for chaos on a grand scale - no roadblocks or tanks though, thank goodness. I find the WSF experience partiularly intriguing because it's the first time I've been to a stand alone civil society summit. Normally there are counter summits at IMF, WTO and G8 events, but this is unique in being internally driven (although the name is a counter to the World Economic Forum in Davos). In fact, bizarrely enough, there is actually a kind of counter summit to the WSF, called "Mumbai Resistane" (they've managed to graffiti half the city) which I understand is a really far left alternative. Can't type much more on this dodgy keyboard. One exciting thing to report, I'm having breakfast in a few days with a Nobel Prize winning economist. He's a bit of a personal hero, and I'm very embarrased because both sets of cloths i brought are already caked in grime!

Space waste?

I've just heard rumours that President Bush will be announcing long term plans for a lunar station and a manned mission to Mars next week. I'm internally divided on this. It seems crazy spending huge amounts of resources on space exploration when there is such huge poverty and environmental degragation here on Earth. But on the other hand I'm a lifelong space junkie and Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars comes very near Lord of the Rings in my personal chart of all-time favourite reads. I couldn't help the butterflies of excitement stir in my chest when I heard this rumour about Bush's forthcoming announcement, so unexpected after the Columbia shuttle disaster. However one worrying aspect was a reference in the articles to "closer cooperation between NASA and the Pentagon" - if Bush is going to use science and exploration as a cover for the militarisation of space then this is very ominous.

Stories from Iraq

I spent some time over the weekend with a couple of Iraqi friends, one of whom will now be in the air somewhere over the mediteranian on route back to Iraq for the first time in 31 years. Iraqis are great story tellers, and some of the anecdotes they told me are worth repeating.

The first took place in the Ministry of Planning back in the early 1970s, when my friend first came face-to-face with Saddam, not yet president, but already holding most of the reins of power. The meeting concerned projections for the economy, and Saddam's reaction to one particular statistic is very revealing. He became very angry with the statistician who estimated the population growth rate at 3.2%. "You must make it higher," Saddam bizarrely insisted, "we need to have more people than the neighbouring countries." He was candid about the reason: "I need people to fight when we invade Iran." Remember that he said this almost a decade before the Iranian revolution and the Iran-Iraq war - he was already hungrily looking East.

The second anecdote concerns an Iraqi gradute student studying linguistics in the UK in the 1970s. The title of his Ph.D thesis was "The similarities between the Tikriti accent and Hebrew." My friends explained that people from Tikrit (Saddam's home) speak in a thick accent which can be incomprehensible to other Iraqis - a bit like an American trying to understand thick Glaswegian English. In fact one of them claimed that an Israeli might be able to understand more of it than an Arab. The reason being that historically the Tikrit area was settled by Jews (because of the Assyrian and Babylonian transmigration policies), whom later assimilated into the Arab world, many embracing Islam. Hence the Tikriti dialect of Arabic is strongly influenced by Hebrew. At least this was the contention of my Iraqi friend and the subject of the Pd.D thesis. This is intriguing stuff. Unfortunately there is an unhappy ending. The Iraqi embassy in London heard about the thesis, and was not best pleased with someone investigating links with their enemies in Israel, and an offical was heard to said that the student was liable to end up being put in a diplomatic box and shipped to Iraq. Soon after the student disappeared, and has not been heard of since.