Epiphany on the Central Line

Do you ever find yourself assessing people on the Tube? Yestarday I was standing in a crammed carriage and found myself unconsiously passing the time by inspecting my fellow passangers. It's the shallowest kind of judgement, deciding whether someone looks interesting or attractive based on a few seconds glance in a sweaty train. Most of the people around me looked depressing, ugly and smelly (as I'm sure I appeared to them). No one's at their best on the Tube, but some people look particularly repelant (and other passangers edge away from them, not wanting to be squeezed up with against an Arsenal supporter reeking of lager or an obesse American tourist) while once every few days, among the thousands of people one passes, there is the flash of an angelic face, seemingly untainted by the London grime, which causes one to gasp and almost miss a stop.

Then it struck me. Looking around at all those depressing and ugly faces of my fellow commuters - God loves them.

Not in some sort of general philosophical way (love is an attribute of the divine nature) but in an intense and individual way. Mel Gibson's controversial new film The Passion covers the most extreme expression of this love - that God "became nothing, taking the very nature of a servant" and chose to bear immense suffering to wipe away our sins. But God's love is also revealed in more tender ways. The Bible says that he counts the numbers of hairs on each of our heads (the sort of thing lovers might do as they are wrapped in each other's embrace) and that he even sings love songs about us! [Phil.2.7, Matt.10.30 and Zeph.3.17]

I've known this all for many years, but occassionally it strikes me at a particular moment in a profound way. And that's what happened yestarday on the Central line between Oxford Circus and Bond Street!

I've just watched the DVD of "Bruce Almighty" the rather mediocre Jim Carrey film in which a very self-centred TV reporter is given God's power for a week. The film is not very theologically sound of course, but I rather like Morgan Freeman's representation of God as a wise-cracking cleaner. It captures two characteristics of God - the way he humbles himself in order to relate to humans and the deep love he has even for Carrey's spoilt and irritating character.

Nonviolent muslims and Bollywood stars

I'm reading a really inspiring book "Nonviolent Soldier of Islam" about Badshah Khan, Ghandi's contemporary in the North Western Frontier province (now the Afghan/Pakistan border). He transformed a hundred thousand Pathans, renowned for their blood feuds and fierceness as warriors, into a nonviolent satyagraha force (the Khudai Khimatgars = "Servants of God") who contributed a great deal to the end of the British Raj. Here is a quote:

"There is nothing surprising in a Muslim or a Pathan like me subscribing to the creed of nonviolence. It is not a new creed. It was followed 1400 years ago by the Prophet all the time he was in Mecca, and it has since been followed by all those who wanted to throw of an oppressor's yoke."

It would be wonderful if this example of effective Islamic nonviolent resistance could inspire people in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East. If anyone has any ideas on how to go about doing this then please do get in touch.

Lots happening with Jubilee Iraq over then next fortnight: A demonstration in Geneva against the reparations Iraq is paying, a conference on Saddam's odious debt in Berlin hosted by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation and then a meeting in Vienna with Austrian MPs. Alongside this I'm writing articles, putting together a report for Iraqi politicians, failing to control my bursting inbox... as well as doing my day job and trying to keep some contact with my friends and family.

Just discovered that a friend from university, Soha Ali Khan, has become a rising star of the Bollywood film industry! She has two (!) films under production and when I Googled for her I found over a thousand articles, mainly from the last few months, in english alone! Her forthcoming films are "Yeh Dil Maange More" and "Mohabbat Ki Kii Kiii" which is apparently a "breezy romantic comedy depicting three phases of love directed by Ananth Narayan". Here's an early interview and a more recent one. Here are some photos. Also turns out one of the stars of my favourite Bollywood fic Dil Chahta Hai is Soha's brother Saif.

I wonder which of our Balliol colleagues will be next on the big screen? Will Adi McGowan quit his job as a Vice-President at Deutsche Bank and become the next James Bond? Will Mike Follett soon eclipse Hugh Grant in trans-Atlantic romantic comedies? What about John Riordan in Dennis Hoper style bad-guy roles? All of this will be meaningless of course to most of the readers of this blog.

SPEAK against the arms trade

Today I participated in an inspiring prayer and protest action against the arms trade. About 400 young people from SPEAK gathered at the Defence Export Service Organisation to repent of our nation's involvement in the arms trade and pray for its abolishment. DESO is funded with £16m a year of British taxpayers money and exists to push the arms trade, often to poor countries and oppressive regimes.

(see my photos from the event - they're not great unfortunately because I was in the thick of it).

The day began in nearby Bloomsberry Baptist Church for teaching and prayer. We then walked to DESO in a silent funeral procession. On the way a guy in the top floor of a building we passedspontaneouslyy stuck his head out and added some beautiful mournful harmonica music to the slow drum beat at the head of the procession. A mock World War 1 trench had been constructed in the road opposite DESO, to symbolise the horror and pointlessness of war, and we all descended into the trench. The trench also represented the "gap"referredd to in Ezekiel "The people of the land practiceextraordinaryn and commit robbery; they oppress the poor and needy and mistreat the foreigner, denying them justice. I looked for a man among them who would stand before me in the gap onbehalfd of the land so I would not have to destroy it." (Ezekiel.22.29-30) The gap of sinfulnessseparatingg God and people has been bridged by Jesus'sacrificiall death.

The main action began with a drama about the lies of the arms trade (it brings security, it is essential to our economy etc.) and using the light of God's word to reveal them as falsehoods. Next we all participated in a liturgy of repentance for the sins of our nations, involving reflection on the terrible facts about the arms trade and confession on behalf of ourselves and our nation.

(some extracts)

"We pray for those who are starving whilst their leaders buy more weapons. We pray for those trapped in a land full of war. We pray for child soldiers who have never had childhoods... Set us all free God"

"In permitting the continuation of this brutal trade: Lord we have sinned.Inn our worship of money and materialism: Lord we have sinned. In walking past on the other side: Lord we have sinned. In failing to pray for change: Lord we have sinned. In our unjust colonial history: Lord we have sinned...."

After the litugy we all shared communion. By this stage we were freezing from kneeling on concrete on a cold, rainy February day - but it was appropriate that our repentance for the arms trade involved discomfort. As you'll see from the photos, we were kneeling in quite a disordered way, and could learn a lot from muslim friends about how to organise into neat ranks. As Christians we need to rediscover communal prayer involving kneeling and prostration which was common in the early church - in fact in many ways the style of Islamic prayer would be very familiar to early Christians.

Next we prayed for strength to bring about change and advocate for the rights of the poor. Here we tied messages calling for an end to government support for the arms to daffodils (representing the alternative to war: life) which were handed into DESO. We ended the day with drumming and song in praise of God's love and justice.

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.