Lost in the illusion - It's a wonderful world

Colonialism and humanity perhaps cannot exist in the same sentence. As an Indian when i read colonial accounts of the how the Europeans brought civlisation to the uncivilized masses of India or when i read about how Indian economy, one of the richest in the world in the 16th century with positive balance of payments was plundered systematically by the British, my blood boils. Descendants of a civilisation that contemplated the true nature of reality in glorious hymns of the vedas atleast a couple of thousand years before the mighty Roman empire came to exist did not necessarily need the brand of civlisation that the whiteman brought. The colonisation of India was one of the earliest proactive attempts to set right a trade balance that was heavily tilted in favour of India. In the pre-colonial era balance of trade was very often positive in favour of the Asians especially the large empires of India and China. (The Europeans rammed at the walls of the middle kingdom for over 150 years t...

Me: FuQuan Bei Lu. (North FuQuan Road) Taxi Driver: Shenma Lu? (Which Road?) Me: FuQuan Bei Lu, near Xiehe Lu and Beidi Lu (North FuQuan Road, near Xiehe road and Beidi road) Taxi Driver: OK. OK. (Gesticulated to me to get in). Nothing momentous, but for the first time in two months I managed to answer a question that was posed to me in Mandarin. My Mandarin classes of the last 7 weeks seem to be working as i can now catch snatches of phrases, words in others' conversations. I can also reply to simple questions beyond the artificial setting of Chinese classroom comprising me, my wife and a private tutor. Any case it was for me one of many firsts. Never in the years after college have language classes been attended so diligently. German classes didn't last more than 6 weeks though i did pick up reasonable German to get by even after the classes. Nepalese was like a amalgam of Hindi (the syntax), some Bengal...

Shanghai - Pudong, Skyline. Barely 15 - 20 years ago this land was all paddy fields . There is heaven in the sky and Hangzhou on earth goes a Chinese saying. As Chinese sayings go this was fairly straight forward. Otherwise most of the Chinese sayings one hears tend to be full of Confucian wisdom, full of gravitas and make you feel guilty that you have not fully understood the saying despite being from the 'East'. However to get to this heaven on earth early enough for a 10.30 AM consumer group - I had to take the 7.30 AM train from Shanghai south station. It was only a short 20 minute ride early in the morning to get to the station. Coming in to the station I barely recognised it as a railway station. It looked and felt like the access to an airport. Coming from India i am used to two alternate looks in railway stations - grand colonial structures that are Chennai central, Mumbai VT or some of the more picturesque small town railway statio...