‘Our truth has been distorted’

Novelist Shahnaz Bashir of The Half Mother tells Hiren Kumar Bose that ordinary Kashmiris are as peace-loving and resistance-loving as those who fight oppression and crave peace

The story of a Kashmiri mother’s search for her son who is whisked away by an army team in the 90s and never returns sounds very familiar. Then, why call it a novel?

I wouldn’t say that I once met a “half mother” somewhere and started writing about her, no, not that. It grew up within me. I had always been thinking to write some small non-fiction piece on disappearances in Kashmir. I thought that every loss in Kashmir was getting lost in the general database of facts and statistics. The loss was, and still is, becoming dangerously normal. That, for example, if people do not die, the way they die here, it will be abnormal. That if you write the stories of the disappeared as small newspaper reports maybe a hundred times over but it would look like a normal daily report, and then this normality enters into our psyches. It seems somewhat normal that this person disappeared, that that mother is looking for her son, that a wife is going to be remarried because her husband couldn’t be found, so forth. And then this is my personal politics as a writer to expand the fact as much as possible because I think that so much that is happening to us is not only unheeded but also internationally ignored. We have only statistics, you know, so I believe it is really important to expand it as much as possible and that expansion can largely be done with fiction. Fiction, as I always say, is the truth told more beautifully, creatively, extensively, patiently and understandably. Non-fiction has its own essence. Literary fiction is where you free your characters and yourself and live and let live a life you have never been allowed to live in the reality. In fiction you would not only write about what actually happened but you would be able to write it well, that how it happened that happened. And that is how The Half Mother happened.

Has the situation in the valley changed since those days of “occupation and resistance”?

The ‘occupation and resistance’ is still in place. There might have been a few changes, but oppression continues to be there. Ordinary Kashmiris are as peace-loving and resistance-loving as are any other people in the world who fight oppression and crave peace. Ordinary Kashmiris are constantly struggling for their rights to determine their political selves — right to self-determination is an international democratic right.

How difficult was to reclaim the real story from the official version?

We are constantly struggling to tell the world how much our freedom of expression has been gagged; how much the mainstream Indian media has misrepresented us, distorted our truth. We are constantly striving to tell the world that how repressed and threatened we feel with the status quo. It was almost impossible to reclaim the story from the official version.

You’ve liberally used Kashmiri words in the text. Don’t you think you should have avoided it for a larger audience?

There were ten times more Kashmiri words – with translation even – in the draft than there are now in the book. Those had to be edited, for the reader outside Kashmir had to be considered. You will be surprised to know that I do not think in English when I write but in Kashmiri and I translate it in my mind to English, and then I write in English. I cannot think in English and write directly in English, that’s not possible for me. The chief reason to use a lot of Kashmiri words was to first to attract the non-Kashmiri reader to Kashmiri and to create prominent literary and linguistic connections between the identities of Kashmiri and English languages.

How does it feel to be considered a bold new voice from the Valley?

Initially, you feel good when published famously. Next, you feel better when praised for the publication. And finally, sincerely, you do not cherish it as you become more and more responsible. You want your voice to sustain the boldness.

Who are your favourite authors?

I admire a cluster of great writers: Leo Tolstoy for the way he captures almost all the human emotions in his stories, Anton Chekov for his highly nuanced characters and the underlying subjects of his themes, Fyodor Dostoevsky for his outstanding plots and analysis of psycho-philosophical sides of his characters, Guy De Maupassant for the variety of his characters and his literary simplicity, J M Coetzee for the paradoxes in his themes and his realism, Arundhati Roy for her style and tragicomic sense, John Banville for his craft. V S Naipaul and James Joyce are also on my list. I have been influenced mostly by Russian writers; the giant among them being Tolstoy.

 

In search of ‘questers’

Chris Guillebeau, author of  The Happiness of Pursuit who travelled to 193 countries before he turned 35 tells Hiren Kumar Bose about those who make daily down payments on their dream

You call those who pursue a challenging quest as ‘questers’. Those working toward extraordinary goals, making daily down payments on their dream. In order to become one what are the first steps one should take?

It usually begins with selecting a goal, or at least selecting an area of focus. Then it turns into the question of packaging — what form will this journey or form of study take? How will I know when I’ve arrived at the end point? What will be the challenges, and (most important) why is this important to me?

While writing the book you met and corresponded with hundreds of questers. What do you think makes them different from the ordinary 9-5 folks?

They aren’t more intelligent than others and they don’t have special gifts or advantages. However, they tend to be curious (they ask good questions) and they take action. They’re not just dreamers; they’re do-ers.

You believe that there is a direct link between questing and long-term happiness — how going after something in a methodical way enriches our lives. Can you elaborate?

By pursuing the quest to visit every country, a journey that took more than ten years, I found a “grounding” in my life that I didn’t know before. No matter what else was happening, I always knew what to do next—I had another country to visit, and a long visit of places to go. I took joy in the striving as well as the achievement of milestones along the way.

Chris you hold the distinction of travelling to 193 countries before you turned 35. Tell us how you went about achieving it.

I loved travel, and I loved goal-setting. I put the two together and came up with the travel quest. From there, I worked on going from 30 countries (where I started) to the first 100, then the next 50, and finally the last 43. I structured my life around the goal and did everything I could to work to it. Finally, I arrived in Norway (country #193 of 193) on my 35th birthday. I began as an independent traveler, and by the time the journey ended I was surrounded by friends and a wonderful community.

Yesterday I was talking about you to a friend and he said: Ok, he may not have any responsibilities, so he could. Do you encounter such questions too?

Everyone is busy and everyone has responsibilities of one kind of another, but we all make time for what’s important to us. I have a family and I worked full-time throughout the journey.

While reading about you I came across the concept of “selfish generosity.” Please elaborate.

I spent four years living on a hospital ship in West Africa, volunteering for a medical charity and working in the poorest countries in the world. Yet the whole time I felt like I was the one who was benefitting the most. I call this “selfish generosity” because as we seek to serve others, we improve ourselves as well.

Your book The $100 Startup is creating freedom through entrepreneurship. Are there takers for this?

It’s much more about the freedom part than the startup part. The point is: everyone’s looking for freedom, and value — helping people — is the way to achieve it. People all over the world are living this dream and building their lives in a meaningful way through small business. It’s a great time to be alive.

An abridged extract was published in btw

‘Good fiction has more staying power’

Short story writer Siddharth Chowdhury and the author of The Patna Manual of Style—Stories, opens up to Hiren Kumar Bose on his favourite writers and his favourite city, Patna

A city so real, so vibrant and one which has witnessed lawless times of Lalu’s Raj and now experiencing the veneer of urbanity of Nitish’s rule, Patna has seen all but sadly not much has been written about. Why do you think it has been so?

On the contrary I think much actually has been written on Patna and Bihar in Indian writing in English in recent times. Top fiction writers like Vikram Seth, Tabish Khair, Joydeep Roy Bhattacharya, Amitava Kumar and Raj Kamal Jha come from the state. But I do agree that more can be written and find the absence of good women writers glaring and unexplicable. Though there was Anita Rathore before.

A city in fiction stays with the reader for ages rather than in reportage. Is that the reason you chose fiction to depict Patna?  

More or less I would agree. Good fiction does have more staying power than good non-fiction. And also I am primarily a storyteller by temperament. Non-fiction does not give me that buzzy high.

The books currently waiting on your night stand

The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson; Brando: The biography by Peter Manso; The Lives of Others by Neel Mukherjee

The storytellers you consider timeless

Salman Rushdie, Philip Roth, R. K. Naraynan, Jhumpa Lahiri among many others.

What books might we be surprised to find on your shelves?

The Old Georges Simenon Omnibuses that Penguin used to bring out

Do you remember the last book you put down without reading?

No. If I start, I usually finish.

If you had to name one book that made you who you’re today, what would it be?

The First Forty-Nine Stories by Ernest Hemingway

An abridged extract of the interview was published in btw

Merits of Mindsight

Hiren Kumar Bose engages Dr Daniel J Siege, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine and author of Brainstorm on the ‘power and purpose of the teenage brain’

What does brain science tell us about the teenage brain?

The teenage brain is undergoing a period of “remodeling” which consists of both the pruning away of unused connections among neurons and the increasing connection among those that remain called “myelination.” Remodeling can help us understand many of the changes in adolescence in new and empowering ways. The emotional spark, social engagement, novelty-seeking, and creative exploration of this period of time are results of the brain’s remodeling—not from what erroneously we thought were the causes of immaturity or “raging hormones.”

Tell us how can a parent form a deeper understanding to connect with a teenager?

When you understand yourself as a parent, research shows, you are better able to offer your child or adolescent the kind of mental presence and attuned communication that supports their optimal development. Further, when you understand what is going on in the mind, brain, and relationships of your teen, you can better negotiate these challenging years and keep the channels of communication wide open. Such forms of understanding are available through new insights from science made into practical tools for parents.

The adolescent years have a direct impact on how we live the rest of our lives. How does one navigate these growing up years for good results?

iIt is best to see the essence of the adolescent period as having both downsides that can lead to destructive outcomes, and having upsides which can be optimized to make developmental more constructive. The downside of emotional spark is moodiness and intense emotional outbursts; the upside is passion and vitality. The downside of social engagement is being vulnerable to peer pressure and giving up morality for membership in a group; the upside is that relationships are one of the most important aspects of mental and medical well-being. The downside of novelty-seeking is dangerous, risk-taking behavior; the upside is curiosity and courage to try something new and explore the world. The downside of creative exploration is a feeling of disorientation and alienation with the natural push against the status quo; the upside is imagination that can help create innovation and be both productive for society and personally rewarding. Optimizing the upsides and minimizing the downsides is a useful and effective strategy to make the most of the adolescent period.

Your term ‘mindsight’ describes the human capacity to perceive the mind of the self and of others. Please elaborate.

We have physical sight enabling us to see objects in the world, with our eyes. And we have mindsight enabling us to sense the mental world of self and others, something we use many parts of our brain to achieve. When people don’t use mindsight, they treat others like objects without an internal sense of subjective reality—without meanings, feelings, memories. In contrast, a life lived with well-developed mindsight means that we can enrich our own lives with insight and with and understanding of others with empathy. And when we respect differences and cultivate compassionate linkages, we also see that mindsight involves integration—the linkage of differentiated parts. With integration we cultivate well-being in our inner and interpersonal lives.

You dispel the myth that the upheavals of adolescence are due to raging hormones and that the best strategy for adults and kids is to just get through it. How does a teenager get through it?

By understanding how the remodeling of the brain is occurring, adolescents—well into their twenties—can gain insights into this important period of life. And when we see the power of the mind—including its focus of attention—to change the developing structural changes of the brain, empowerment is created. Adolescents can see how this new realization that the challenges of adolescence are due to the remodeling of the brain and not simply to hormones raging out of control that you can do nothing to change helps them to see practical steps to improve their lives. One example is the learning of mindsight tools, a way to increase insight and empathy and to increase integration in the brain and in relationships. Integration can be seen as the mechanism beneath well-being, and thus mindsight helps promote a life of both understanding self and others as well as well-being.

Risks, and the rewards adolescents associate with taking risks, come from innate changes in brain development during this phase of life. The challenge is to support exploration while minimizing the chances of harm. What strategy should a parent follow?

When adolescents and the adults who care for them realize that raging hormones and immaturity are generally not the root causes of risk-taking behavior, many things can change. Instead, we see that the remodeling of the adolescent brain involves changes in regions associated with impulse control. These develop in the mid-teens, and so impulsivity may be understood to be an important source or risk-taking early in the adolescent period. But risks continue even beyond this time, likely due to something we did not know about earlier. This is the changes in the dopamine based reward system of the brain. With essentially lower baseline levels of dopamine and higher release levels, an adolescent may experience the following ways of being that can be altered with awareness and mindful action. One is that there may be a sense of restlessness and boredom. That’s the lower baseline level. The reward system is activated with novelty, and so trying something new, especially something with risk, can lead to a release of this rewarding neurotransmitter. And since the release levels are higher, this means that the pull to do something risk may be very high given the increased levels released with that new and risky behavior. Keeping this new view of risk taking in mind, an adolescent, and an adult, can help structure their lives to involve novelty and even structured risk, such as with sports and athletics that respect these drives but also minimize permanent harm. Furthermore, having “rights of passage” for both males and females, novel experiences with trustable non-parent adult figures, can support these changes as well.

The key issue is that each of these aspects of remodeling can be understood and that understanding can lead to effective ways of living the journey of adolescence to optimize the upsides of its essence while minimizing the downsides. This is an exciting and productive time to bring science to life and support the growth of individuals in this period of life. And for adults, too, it turns out that cultivating the essence is the best way to keep our brains growing well across the lifespan!

An abridged edition of the interview was published in btw of January 2015 issue

 

Idris: Keeper of Light

A historical novel set in 1659, it’s a story of Idris, a jewelled-eye Somali trader, who is  in Malabar to attend the Zamorin’s Mamangam festivities. A strange twist of fate brings Idris face to face with his nine-year-old son, Kandavar, born of a mysterious midnight tryst in this very land. Anxious to remain close to him for as long as possible, he joins the Nair household headed by Kandavar’s uncle, and is charged with a crucial task: of distracting the boy from his dream of becoming a Chaver, a warrior whose sole ambition is to assassinate the Zamorin, in a tradition whose beginnings have been lost in time. In an attempt to stave off the inevitable,  Idris embarks with his son on a voyage that takes them from Malabar to Ceylon, and from Thoothukudi to the diamond mines of Golkonda, where he meets the queenly Thilothamma, as solitary a being as he is.

Hiren Kumar Bose engages the author of Idris: Keeper of the Light, Anita Nair, on the making of the this fascinating novel and its sequels

You’ve been an essayist, poet, children’s writer, playwright, novelist and now a book (Idris: Keeper of the Light) which has already been snapped up four foreign language publishers and one in Malayalam. How does it feel?

As a writer who has spent several years working on a book, it is tremendously gratifying and satisfying to know that Idris will travel to various parts of the world.

Idris’ breadth is vast. The book is commingling of cultures as disparate as 17th century Malabar and Golconda, Arabic, Portuguese and Dutch.  How did you go about researching and bringing this varied bouquet into your story?

The research involved was so time consuming and arduous that as I inched along, I worried if this novel would ever get written. There is hardly anything written about southern India and so I had to scrounge for every single detail be it lifestyle, names, weights & measures, geographical details etc. I tried to read up everything that was written about the realm in that period; looked for artworks that originated from South India again from that period; sought nuggets of information wherever I could find it be it a register or a folk tale, and eventually distilled it all to base my narrative upon.

How difficult was it bringing into life the fascinating insights into life in the 17th century India? And what were your reference points?

The story of Idris originated from a Kerala folk ballad about the last hours of Kandavar’s life. This was a man who went to battle thinking he would be victorious as his horoscope had said he would die at a later date. That was all I had to draw from. For the rest, I had to turn into a sleuth and find my way along. The most important lesson I learnt as I began looking at that period of Southern Indian history was that I had to unlearn everything I thought I knew. The foreign powers had just about started making serious inroads into India and the Indian way of life so we were still untouched by western beliefs and influences. So I drew up a chart of the period and went at it section by section trying to fact check every single detail I was going to include in my novel. In many ways, the writing of Idris was as much a voyage of discovery for me as it was for my characters.

Idris being a trilogy what can a reader expect in the sequels? Will Idris and his son Kandavar still be around? 

Kandavar will certainly be part of vol 2 and 3. Of Idris, I am uncertain. The trilogy is ultimately a mapping of Kandavar’s life.

Do tell us about your favourite writers and their books?

I am a voracious reader and read everything except science fiction and fantasy so the list is long and uneven but generally what draws me to a book is the story telling rather than how lyrical the telling is. If a writer marries both, then I am his or her slave for the rest of my reading life.

 An edited copy of the chat appeared in http://www.btw.co.in (February 2014 issue)

The First Muslim

British-born Lesley Hazleton’s The First Muslim tells the story of the prophet Muhammad in a masterful way, crucially demystifying both the man himself and the birth of Islam. A psychologist by training and Middle East reporter by experience her previous book includes After the Prophet: the epic story of the Shia-Sunni split, and Mary: a flesh-and-blood biography. Her blog The Accidental Theologist casts “an agnostic eye on politics, religion, and existence.” Hiren Kumar Bose speaks to Lesley Hazleton on the life and times of The Prophet

How difficult was it to write a novelistic portrait of the man who upended the established order and became the Prophet?

Well, I don’t think of The First Muslim as novelistic — i.e. there is nothing fictional here. It’s narrative history. And yes, history is a narrative. The essence of the word ‘history’ is ‘story’ — the story not only of what happened when, but also of how and why it happened. In other words, the full story, in all its human complexity. And to tell it this way, what’s needed is empathy — not sympathy, but empathy, which is the good-faith attempt to understand someone else’s experience. In this case, that of Muhammad. Difficult? Of course. It involved an immense amount of research. Some of it was mind-numbingly academic, but much of it — like the earliest Islamic histories — was thrillingly dramatic, full of vitality and detail. True, you needed a love of the Middle Eastern style of story-telling to appreciate these histories, but that was one of the advantages I had in writing this book: a good sense of Middle East place and culture. Among my other advantages: my experience as a psychologist; my own agnosticism, which meant that I could come fresh to Muhammad’s life and see it without preconceptions and bias; and of course as a writer, my recognition of a remarkable life story begging to be told well.

Writing about a man who lived 1443 years ago and putting him in the context and reality of the 21st century was it easy achieving the feat?

My task was to see Muhammad in his time and place, not mine. This meant that in the years I worked on this book, I was living a kind of dual existence, waking each morning in misty 21st-century Seattle and sitting down at my desk to the high desert of 7th-century Arabia. While I can see that such a dual existence might present a problem to some, to me it was a delight.

In 2010, you gave a TED talk debunking some of the myths about the Koran, notably the salaciously Orientalist `72 virgins.’ What was the reaction of the Muslim world to the talk?

It’s hard to talk about the reaction of ‘the Muslim world,’ because Islam is not a monolith. It takes different forms in different countries, in different cities, in different communities, in different minds. What I can say is that I was both delighted and even overwhelmed by the responses I received to that talk from individual Muslims worldwide, some of them so moving that they brought me to tears. I hadn’t anticipated such a reaction, not least because the talk was for a non-Muslim audience, and I’d expected Muslims, if anything, to simply ignore it. So while many non-Muslims indeed thanked me for new insight into what the Quran actually says, it was especially moving — even humbling — for an agnostic Jew to be thanked for deepening a stranger’s Islamic faith!

An abridged and edited parts of the interview earlier appeared in http://www.btw.co.in and its print edition, btw, November 2013 issue

A Home in Tibet

Author Tsering Wangmo Dhompa of A Home in Tibet, speaks to Hiren Kumar Bose on her growing up years in three countries and on the future of Tibet

Your parents fled Tibet and settled in India. You were raised in Nepal and India, and now reside in the US. Where is home?

The answer seems to depend on my location. When I am in the US, I consider Tibet, India or Nepal to be home, and when I am in any of the other countries, I think of San Francisco as home because I have lived there for almost 15 years now.

When you returned to Tibet, you met members of your extended family, an experience that also happens to be the book’s focus. How different was it from the memories your mother shared with you?

On my first visit I think I was seeing everything – the land, the people, the stories I was listening to – through the lens I had acquired from her. I felt as though I was returning to a home and family she had already acquainted me to. On subsequent visits I was able to see the subtle nuances and the realities of place and people more clearly. Everything changes and time has a big hand in maturing one’s vision too.

Nostalgia, despair the loss and the absence of a country to call their ‘own’ is recurrent theme in most Tibetan writings. Comment  

I belong to the first generation of Tibetans born in exile so we feel the loss of country and family keenly. We were raised with elders who went through great travails and who suffered a great deal; it is impossible to be indifferent to that narrative of history. I grew up without seeing or knowing any of my mother’s immediate family so I lived with the knowledge that my life was shaped by the past in very material ways.

Being Tibetan outside Tibet most live with a dream to return to their home land one day. As a poet and a writer do you consider it to be a possibility in your lifetime?

It seems like a very difficult goal at the moment. Yet impossible things have been known to happen in the history of the world. As a poet and writer, I come to hope more readily so I keep the possible in the impossible within view.

As a writer what do you think should the international community need to do to pressurize China to free Tibet?

Persisting in keeping the Tibet issue alive. To keep reminding ourselves and others that China’s prosperity cannot be divorced from its ethical responsibilities and that freedom is a basic human’s right.

 

 

 

Smart Thinking

Behavioural scientist and author of Smart Thinking Art Markman, Ph.D talks about issues related to being a smart thinker with Hiren Kumar Bose

You write that Smart Thinking is not an attribute but a skill to be mastered. How does one do it?

The key aspect of being smart is to use the knowledge you have when you need it. The idea is to develop Smart Habits to acquire HQK (High Quality Knowledge), and to learn to use that knowledge when you need it.  Let me tell you a few things about each of these elements.

Habits drive most of our lives.  Whenever we do the same thing over and over, the brain develops routines to allow us to perform these behaviours again without thinking about them.  Habits are wonderful things to have.  And we need to focus on developing new habits that will allow us to be smarter.

HQK is the kind of knowledge that allows us to understand the way the world works.  This knowledge is called ‘causal knowledge’. The more we understand the way the world works, the better equipped we are to solve new problems.

Once you have that knowledge, you have to be able to retrieve it from your memory to use it when you need it.  Sometimes, that is easy, because the problem you are trying to solve comes from the same area that you have learned about in the past.  Doctors use their medical knowledge to solve problems.  But at other times, it doesn’t seem like we know anything that will help us to solve a problem.  At those times, we need to find analogies between the new problem and knowledge from a different area of our expertise to help us solve the problem.

How does one develop habits to create HQK and harness it when required?

One of the barriers to having HQK is that we think we understand more about the way the world works than we really do.  In order to improve the quality of our knowledge, we have to develop the habit to explain things to ourselves as we learn them.  Often, we just listen to what people say to us.  It is important to give these self-explanations in order to make sure that we really understand the way the world works.

You say that our mind is designed to think as little as possible. Why is this so?

The mind is a habit creation machine.  You want to avoid having to think about the behaviours you perform as a routine.  By compiling these routines into habits, it frees up our mind to think about new things that help us solve new problems.

You stress on replacing a bad habit with a good one which you address as ‘new memories’. And that if one doesn’t do so,  they will continue to retrieve old memories. How does one go about doing this?

It is important to realise that habits are embedded in your memory. And retrieval from memory happens automatically without effort. So, you will continue to pull the habit out of memory whenever you are in the environment in which you should perform that habit.  As a result, the only way to change a habit is to replace one behaviour with another, which allows you to create new memories that support a new habit.

You mention that our mind may limit what we can remember about past events. What are these limits?

Generally speaking, you will remember three things about any new situation  (the ‘Role of 3’).  The way to maximise what you learn then is to find connections among the new information you are learning and to review what you have learned whenever you leave a meeting, finish reading an article or exit a lecture. This review allows you to exert control over what you remember. The things we remember can be made larger by finding connections among the pieces of knowledge.  So, over the course of our lives, we need to find more and more ways to connect pieces of knowledge so that the chunks of knowledge we have get larger.

Companies often reward those who contribute directly to quarterly profits than those who make everyone around them more effective. How can companies be made to understand that this is contrary to the Culture of Smart?   

Companies have to realise that long-term profits depend on having a workforce that is made up of agile thinkers.  Hence, a company has to promote an attitude that Smart Thinking is important.  To do that, they have to create what I call a Culture of Smart that gives people time to learn new behaviours and develop strategies to use their knowledge when they need it. A great example of a Culture of Smart is Procter & Gamble. They give their employees an opportunity to take some days off their jobs to learn new things and hone their skills. That long-term investment in their employees’ knowledge pays off in more innovative thinking.

Smart Thinking, Art Markman, Ph. D, Piactus 

A Fort of Nine Towers

Hiren Kumar Bose engages novelist Qais Akbar Omar of A Fort of Nine Towers on the past and future of Afghanistan

Afghanistan, the popular image is of warlords, drug dealers, Taliban, Al Qaeda and all. But it was not so before the Soviets came and later when it was dragged into the civil war. How was life then?

Even in my childhood, Kabul was a lush garden.  We had a normal life.  When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, shells and rockets fell everywhere. After they were defeated, the civil war started. More shells and rockets, and everything was left in ruins. When the Taliban came, they brought a kind of peace, but took the country to the Stone Age.  Over the past 30 years, while other countries were moving ahead, Afghanistan was pushed backward by one faction after another.

You bring the natural beauty of Afghanistan…the scent of the naan, the fruit trees blooming between mud walls, and bracing winds sweeping down through the valley between mountain peaks running along with raw descriptions of suffering and death.

Thank you.  Over the past 12 years, many books have been written about Afghanistan, mostly by foreigners.  Some of them have described the beauties of our country very poetically, but most have focused on the problems we have had.  In my book, I’ve tried to keep the balance between the two.

While fleeing from Kabul you and family lived in a cave in Bamiyan like the Kuchi nomads. As a child how was the experience like.

I loved what seemed to me to be a carefree life, one day living on the side of a mountain, another day in someone’s pomegranate garden, another in a cave, and another with nomads.  I remember everything vividly and fondly.  But as for my parents, they had the hardest time of their life, to feed, clothe and constantly look after us, while searching for a way to get our family out of Afghanistan.

You mention about you and your siblings listening to your mother’s stories while Kabul is bombed and your father is glued to the BBC for his only purpose was to “keep you all alive.”

My mother is the greatest storyteller in our family.  Her stories can last from one hour to one year.  Most of what I know of storytelling comes from her.  If it were not for her stories that kept us distracted, we would have died of despair if not by rockets, because there were days when more than 3,000 rockets rained on Kabul.

You travel the world lecturing about Afghani carpets. How did you become one because your father was a teacher and mother a banker?

My family has been trading in carpets for four generations.  In the Taliban times, my family had very little income, so I started making carpets to earn money.  I eventually had a factory with about 40 women weaving for me. I am now finishing a book on Afghan carpets, and hope to have it published next year:  The Carpet Makers: Weaving the soul of Afghanistan.

Do you foresee a future where poetry again becomes a way of life, where people debate issues, where educated and working women move about without burqas and there is all around economic progress?

Yes.  In fact, many of these things are already happening in Afghanistan, but you never hear about them because the media reports only the bad news.  We can hasten the process of peace and progress by putting the guns down and picking up pens.  We can survive war, but we can’t survive life without poetry.

How do you see Afghanistan post the pullout of the US forces?

We have done a lot for the world.  It was Afghanistan who finally defeated the Soviets, freed Eastern Europe and ended the Cold War.  In the process, it cost us many lives, and the destruction of our country.  We, Afghans, believe that the world owes us this much: let peace return back to Afghanistan.

A Fort of Nine Towers, Qais Omar Akbar, Picador (an imprint of Pan Macmillan)

 

 

Massage No Boom Boom

Anand Prabhu, author of Massage No Boom Boom,  talks to Hiren Kumar Bose on why getting a massage should be a right of every Indian

You say India was the birthplace of massage but it is countries like Thailand and Indonesia that have a made an industry out of it. How did that happen?

I think it is the moral confusion that has resulted from the British rule, Victorian morality and British laws that enforce and enshrine Victorian morality, and the series of invasions that made India lose its self-confidence. Modern life in India results in high levels of stress. Why don’t we have thousands of massage parlors everywhere, out in the open? It would make us a far more relaxed and tolerant nation. I have feeling that much of our anger and violence proceeds from our repression.

A massage aficionado, do tell us about the variety of massages and the country which offers the most and the best experiences.

As far as my experience goes, if you’re on a budget, or if you wish to get the best value for your money, Thailand offers massages starting from as little as three dollars an hour to $ 50 or 100 an hour, with various combinations (a simultaneous massage by multiple masseuses, sex, oral sex, sandwich massages, and so on) and prices in between.  Indonesia, especially the island of Bali, is quite close, and may even be competitive—though the sexual component is far more open in Thailand than in Indonesia. If you have deep pockets, though, anything you want is available in places like New York, London, and Singapore.

Massage parlour is a bad word in India. Why is it so?

How many of our Ministers and other powerful people, when they visit Thailand on official business or for some conference, do you think do not order a masseuse to their rooms? They would be crazy not to experience the pleasure that is available? In which case, why should people have to pay so much to get this pleasure? Why, in a country that is supposed to have a Constitution that promises equality and an egalitarian society, should these pleasures and healthful necessities be restricted to a privileged few?

What next? An erotic novel.

Yes indeed. I have one in progress, and hope to have it ready in four to six months. Why is it that 50 million women in the West have read the erotic trilogy 50 Shades of Grey, but that we pretend to be uninterested? This hypocrisy is highly oppressive, and it is an unnecessary oppression of self. Thai and Chinese cultures have absolutely no guilt about sex; on the contrary, the greater your libido, the higher the respect in which you are held.

Massage No Boom Boom, Anand Prabhu, Harper Collins