Social-Class Mosaic (click to move closer)

Commentary: Note the contrast between the fat, rotund, well-to-do man in dapper polished shoes and gleaming belt with the poor wretched man working in the ditch pouring water down a sewer drain.

(click image to move closer)

Learning to beg

'The test of a civilization is the way that it cares for its helpless members' (Pearl Buck)

'O scathful harm, condition of poverte!' (Chaucer)

Flying coaches, donkey-carts and humanity is a cockroach

The drive from Mirpur to Lahore in the so called 'flying coach' is anything but 'flying'. Perhaps the descriptions 'shove', 'push' and 'bully' your way past traffic are more apt. But even words like these fail to describe the true horror of the journey. Firstly the word 'flying coach' describes a road vehicle (usually a Toyota Hiace) that guarantees to get you to Lahore in four hours. It does this by not stopping frequently to pick up itinerant passengers and driving very fast. Dangerously fast. So that when confronted with an obstacle (like another vehicle for example) instead of slowing down the driver keeps the horn button depressed until the obstacle moves out of the way. It's a wonderful technique and it works remarkably well. You should try it! All objects on the road are seen as mere impediments and obstacles to your forward movement. And the obstacles do come thick and fast and in a wealth of guises:

They include other vehicles (which is expected), motorcycles (also expected), a man on a bicycle (kind of expected) but you do think 'what an idiot', but before you've had time to contemplate his idiocy, you spot a bunch of school kids (4 year-olds with bags on backs) crossing the busy Grand Trunk road, and then a donkey, a black bull, a lone goat coming your way so the driver swerves to miss him, an old man in tattered pyjamas pushing a box-cart (when the driver horns in a vain attempt to force him off the road it's useless - he's stone deaf), a rickshaw wallah huffing and puffing at 5 miles an hour (because he has seven passengers when he can only carry two), another old man stooped over his walking stick trying to get to the other side of the road, another hobbling along with one and a half legs (his right leg a congealed stump above his kneecaps), and then there's an almighty bang and the flying coach comes to a screeching halt on the side of the road in a dust cloud - you've burst a tyre. But the other passengers don't flinch a muscle. They seem to be taking the trauma rather well.

The driver and his 'passenger fare collection buddy' (a straggly skinny youth constantly dangling from the side of the vehicle on perpetual look-out duties for potential passengers), get out remarkably quickly and proceed to mend the tyre - their speed of reaction reassures you but it also fills you with dread: they must do this fairly often. Whilst repair work is underway you jump behind some straggly wild-bushes besides a battered wall for a quick piss, but before you've finished you get chased out by a fierce looking man belligerently waving a stick in his hand and all the while swearing at you (swearing at your mother, your sister and your unborn children) - apparently you we're pissing in his front garden! How were you to know? It certainly didn't look like someones garden.

The journey continues but within five minutes another (or perhaps the same) tyre bursts again. With your ruck-sack in your lap, a book by Paul Theroux in your hand, you look at the other passengers and notice that none of them looks perturbed or even remotely bothered. So you stop worrying, why worry? Let it go. So you let it go and relax. But only a little. The tyre is 'fixed' again and you head off. Your feet are aching, your legs are cramped, your bum is hurting from the constant sitting and the bone shaking jolts, you've snatched not a wink of sleep on the aeroplane nor will you now. Outside you look at the knotted mass of humanity besides the road, the shops, the lean-to's on the banks of the stinking sewers, this constipated coagulated mire of people along this artery and your mind wanders.

Your wander and you think about all the accidents that must happen, the sheer number of people that must die or get maimed everyday on this road. Does it matter? Perhaps in a country with a population three times that of the UK it doesn't? Ahead you spot a police car beside a fresh accident site - this doesn't surprise you but what does is the street seller selling fruit to the people that have congregated around the accident. Yes selling fruit to those ogling and loitering around the crash scene to get a glimpse of the carnage! - like popcorn in a movie theatre. But this is no movie theatre. This is real life and people are really dying. Your mind is filled with one thought:

Cockroaches. Men are cockroaches and humanity is one big fucking cockroach.

Homo Swashbucklus Vagabondus

Countdown - The Return of the Vagabond

T-minus 10 days...the countdown now begins for the biggest, brashest, most inexplicably bonking adventure in the history of nutty adventures. More brasher then Marco Polo's ramble to China (ahh! a mere walk in the park), more daring then Humboldt's bumbling about in the Amazon (ahh humbug! a walk through my garden), more testosterone-fuelled then Christopher Columbus's trip to the Americas (aha! a skip across a pond) and more full of virulence then 'Madame Gonorrhea's Den for Gentlemen of Disrepute'.

A trip that promises to be more full of wonderfully exciting people then an Asian wedding with the guests high on substance ego. More full of dodgy characters then the streets of Birmingham at half-past midnight on a Friday night. More riddled with sex then the nocturnal goings on in the 'Stoke Newington Parish for the Aged and Infirme' and more full of excitement then the monthly meets of the 'Solar-Powered Casio Calculator Appreciation Society of Mongolia' - whose motto is:

'sunlight is free, why waste it?'

Do not be deterred by those way-too-many charlatans on the world-wide-web claiming to be Vagabonds. They know not what it means. There is only one original. There is only one feranji. There is only one true Swashbuckling Vagabond.

Got me jabs
Got me rucksack
Got me towel
Got me balls
But most important of all...
Got me calculator

And it's solar-powered too.


'sunlight is free, why waste it?'

WALL-E

The year is 2700.

Wall-E, a cleaning robot, spends everyday doing what he was made for.
But soon, he will discover what he was meant for...



WALL-E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth class), directed with a poet's eye, is some kind of miracle. It's Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot mixed with Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and Terry Gilliam's Brazil, topped with the cherry of George Lucas' Star Wars and Steven Spielberg's E.T. , and wrapped up in a G-rated whipped- cream package.

What could have been a mess of influences is instead unique and unforgettable. Tons of movies promise something for everyone WALL-E actually makes good on that promise. It's a landmark in modern moviemaking that lifts you up on waves of humor, heartbreak and ravishing romance.




(Backpacking WALL-E)

The Dark Knight (Coming July 25)

An almighty thunderbolt is about to rip through the puppy-soft blandness of this summer's movies. And it takes the form of The Dark Knight, director Christopher Nolan's follow-up to 2005's Batman Begins. There's something raw and elemental at work in this artfully imagined universe. We have a movie with deeper dimension. Huh? What? How can a mentally scarred bloke in a bat suit and a villain with a cracked, painted-on clown smile speak to the essentials of the human condition? Watch this and you'll see. The Dark Knight creates a place where good and evil — expected to do battle — instead decide to get it on and dance:

"I don't want to kill you," Heath Ledger's psycho Joker tells Batman. "You complete me."
Don't buy the tease. He means it. Some of the darkness that made Heath Ledger kill himself surfaces in the Joker too. Real life inacted on screen.

It's not who you are underneath

but what you do that defines you

(Batman begins)

Currently re-reading: Down and Out in Paris and London (George Orwell)

What was a nice Eton boy like Eric Blair doing in scummy slums instead of being upwardly mobile at Oxford or Cambridge? Living Down and Out in Paris and London, repudiating respectable imperialist society, and reinventing himself as George Orwell.

In Paris, Orwell lived in verminous rooms and washed dishes at the overpriced 'Hotel X' in a remarkably filthy, 110-degree kitchen. He met "eccentric people--people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent." Though Orwell's tone is that of an outraged reformer, it's surprising how entertaining many of his adventures are: gnawing poverty only enlivens the imagination, and the wild characters he met often swindled each other and themselves.

The wackiest tale involves a miser who ate cats, wore newspapers for underwear, invested 6,000 francs in cocaine, and hid it in a face-powder tin when the cops raided. They had to free him, because the apparently controlled substance turned out to be face powder instead of cocaine.

In London, Orwell studied begging with a crippled expert named Bozo, a great storyteller and philosopher. Orwell devotes a chapter to the fine points of London guttersnipe slang. Years later, he would put his lexical bent to work by inventing Newspeak, and draw on his down-and-out experience to evoke the plight of the Proles in his classic '1984'.

Coming soon...Imagine revisited (with a sprinkling of sex)

My piece 'Imagine' for some inexplicable reason is very popular. Perhaps it's the sparsness of it, or how the deliberate short sentences and simple words force you stop and saviour. Usually there's so much going on in a sentence that before you have fully absorbed it, you move on to the next piece. So one must go back and re-read. But this wreaks havoc with the rhythmn.

I think there is more to writing then the actual words. That the rhythmn of what is written is just as important. Rhythmn is determined by the length of the sentences, the pauses, and the positioning of the colons and semicolons. Whenever I write something I always read it aloud to myself to hear how it sounds to my ears. I think you get a better sense of rhythmn when you read something out aloud.

So let's revisit 'Imagine' but this time with a bit of sex thrown in for good measure. I've never written heady, surreal and delicious sex scenes before so this should be fun.

So Imagine. Imagine a balcony. A balcony with a view...

We are Stardust

Imperial College News Release

Scientists at Imperial College London, have confirmed for the first time that an important component of early genetic material which has been found in meteorite fragments is extraterrestrial in origin, in a paper published on 15 June 2008.

The finding suggests that parts of the raw materials to make the first molecules of DNA and RNA may have come from the stars...


(Images: Canon 5D, 16mm focal length, Exposure 3-5 hours)





So...we are all aliens from outer space? I don't know about you but I've always known that I, Ghettoblastfrizzlebumpoo, was not of this world. My home lies somewhere amongst the stars. In a far out place (mentally and spatially) where sunshine is purple, the seas pink, the skies a virulent ultraviolet and air teeming with methane and ozone molecules...

Life, as a purely biological phenomenon, is perhaps the greatest and most complex thing our universe has and will ever spawn. Whenever I look at life in that way I am filled with awe and wonder. Life is something that crawls, scuttles, swoops and burrows around, struggling everyday to stay alive and make copies of itself. That is what we do. Survive long enough to make copies. Is that all you wonder? Yes! that is all! - What more do you want?

Isn't it wonderful to be part of this biological phenomenon? And here we are trying to make sense of it all! And we will continue to try and make sense till the day our eyes close forever.

'Don't get lost in life. Let life loose in you'


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