The rape of Nanking - Iris Chang

Nowadays what happened in Nanking (current name: Nanjing) on the eve of WWII, when the Japanese army invaded the city, looted it, killed and raped hundreds of thousands - children and elderly alike - is a very well established, known and discussed fact. But up until the mid ’90s it had been swept under the carpet of history, quite unbelievably, given the prominence of the sides involved and the magnitude/typology of the tragedy.
Iris Chang’s book is one of the main sources of the limelight that was suddenly and belatedly shed on the event.

Five past midnight in Bhopal - Dominique Lapierre & Javier Moro

I’d already read a couple of books by the French author Dominique Lapierre. I particularly liked “Freedom at midnight” about India and Pakistan independence and partition, which I read when I was traveling in the subcontinent. “O Jerusalem”, about the birth of the State of Israel and the first dramatic days of war between the Jewish state and its neighboring Arab countries, is also a very good one.

“Five past midnight in Bhopal” takes us back to India, a country that the author knows well. Lapierre often collaborates with some colleague when writing non fictional works. He wrote the aforementioned books together with the American journalist Larry Collins and this one with Javier Moro from Spain.

Bhopal is for chemical accidents what Chernobyl is for nuclear ones.

South East Asia disgust test

Thinking of going to South East Asia for an adventurous, fun or relaxing trip? If you are not prepared to face the following scenes it is better for you to change plans before it is too late. Well maybe the aseptic Singapore can be fine, but just that one...

The house with a nice view...in Asia

No...you can forget about this view...

If you've just moved to Asia and you have based the choice of the apartment you're renting on the great view that you can enjoy from the bedroom window...you might have made a gross mistake. 
Check the adjacent lot. In case it's empty, or used as a parking area, a new building can pop up and darken your house in a matter of few months.
And you'll regret the other option, the one with a view on tangles of electricity cables and a trafficked thoroughfare, the one you rejected with haughty contempts, taking your leave from the agent that recommended it with one of your hateful sarcastic jokes.

There is a smelly key attached to our ankles

My left foot

Look at them, more sectarian than the fascist, classist, racist people they feel they are so different from, as a result of self-proclamation rather than their actual way of life. They look down on you because you don't wear the same fluttering rags they do, they snob you because you don't take part in their rituals, maybe they even despise you for the fragments of your conversations they manage to overhear. If you only dare include them in the varied "tourist category" that you feel every westerner passing by a tropical island belongs to they will interrupt you, indignant, and they will point out with arrogance and conceit that "I will never be a despicable tourist!" Not even a budget tourist? "No! I am a traveler!"
They manage to give the worst of themselves when they walk, actually glide over the world barefoot, with the air of a modern Jesus who finally learned to walk on water, free from that bourgeois burden which is a pair of shoes, receiving the light of an ultimate answer to an existential question each time they step on a thorn, a dog shit or some city sewage.

Silence is not an absolute necessity

The restaurant (in Thailand).

You're having dinner at a nice little restaurant, vapors rising from the iced bottle of beer mixed with the aroma of the spices that soak the seafood laid out in front of you stroke the flushed skin of your cheeks. The breeze of a distant fan intermittently struggles to divert the course of the beads of sweat that are gliding down your brow. It's stifling hot. The heat of a season that will end soon, swept away by the violence of the monsoons, but you've learned to fend those heat waves off and keep them out of the peaceful and cool cocoon where you like to hide yourself away. Maybe it's your ancestral spirit of adaptation, or maybe some of the nirvanic skills of the Buddhist monks have been finally absorbed by an unidentified spiritual element hidden somewhere inside of you. You might even be able to enjoy the moment. Because it is supposed to be a nice, enjoyable moment. You might, as I said, if it wasn't for the vibrations of an electric guitar and the catlike yelling of a singer hitting your eardrums pointblank. You realize that this place is really changing you when you notice that instead of cursing and insulting them you are actually singing the refrain between a mouthful and the next one, while your right sole keeps the rhythm under the table, chasing away a cockroach or a rat that had come to feast on the leftovers.

Tourists, travelers or just confused?

In Asia I often meet Westerners who feel offended if someone calls them tourists.

"How come? Do you live here, by any chance?"

"No, I don't"

"Well, then, what do you do?"

"I travel."

"And how would you define yourself, if not a tourist?"

"A traveler!"

"Oh, I see..."

Word vs. Zen

After reading the following paragraphs from Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, by Robert M. Pirsig, I got a sort of enlightenment:

"[...]The term logos, the root word of ``logic,'' refers to the sum total of our rational understanding of the world. Mythos is the sum total of the early historic and prehistoric myths which preceded the logos. The mythos includes not only the Greek myths but the Old Testament, the Vedic Hymns and the early legends of all cultures which have contributed to our present world understanding. The mythos-over-logos argument states that our rationality is shaped by these legends, that our knowledge today is in relation to these legends as a tree is in relation to the little shrub it once was.

[...]One finds that in the Judeo-Christian culture in which the Old Testament ``Word'' had an intrinsic sacredness of its own, men are willing to sacrifice and live by and die for words. In this culture, a court of law can ask a witness to tell ``the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God,'' and expect the truth to be told. But one can transport this court to India, as did the British, with no real success on the matter of perjury because the Indian mythos is different and this sacredness of words is not felt in the same way."

Suddenly so many things became clear. I could finally find an explanation for some of the most puzzling cultural differences between West and East (especially where the mythos is mainly of Hindu, Buddhist and Taoist origin). For those aspects whose existence I've known for so long but for which I couldn't find a root. We - I mean westerners - give great importance to our word, our promises, the truth. Asians value these things as well, of course, but in a different way. And they probably value other things even more. Else, how could we explain the never say no culture, or all the incongruent behaviors that Asians can naturally adopt so that no one is forced to lose face?

AirAsia: not so cool anymore

Having been a rather regular customer of AirAsia - since the beginning, when they were still using old planes and few people trusted them (“They are always late...they'll lose your luggage.” was the typical refrain people were singing in Malaysia) - I can say that their online booking procedure was fast, simple, transparent and fair, their prices among the cheapest and their brand one of the coolest. Well...not anymore.

Going through just a few screens, filling a limited number of fields and clicking some buttons one could choose date, destination, number of passengers, one way or return, could select their favorite flight among the available options, enter their personal data, the credit card ones and that was it. As I said: fast, simple, transparent and fair. No free meal and no seat allocation, true, but their prices were dirt cheap, really unbeatable on some routes.

This took by surprise the traditional carriers that lost large shares of the market while AirAsia, from a small player of the low cost niche, became one of the sector leaders. A real success story for Tony Fernandes, the Malaysian who, from a Warner Music manager, after acquiring an almost bankrupt state owned airline, got to be one of the richest and most innovative Asian entrepreneurs.

Little by little the disbanded forces of the enemies managed to reorganize themselves, filling the gap, while AirAsia incredibly decided to waste its resources of know-how and excellent reputation accumulated over the years, starting to make some of the same mistakes that had forced their competitors to give up their leading positions, plus others whose copyright its management is fully entitled to claim.