An evening in Amsterdam

 

As our flight from Dublin approached Amsterdam, the sun was setting. In the diffused twilight under a cloudy sky, we saw the Dutch coastline dotted with windmills. There is poetry in the architecture of the traditional windmills, their enormous light blades fixed on robust structures. Shortly, as the aircraft descended further, the intricate network of semi-circular canals which makes Amsterdam such a unique city rose before our rivetted eyes.

When we had been booking a room for our stay in Amsterdam, I’d found a conveniently priced hotel with decent rooms. Most alluringly, it was located at the border of the red-light district in Amsterdam. But my wife had rejected it out of hand. I wish she hadn’t. In that case, we wouldn’t have been nearly lost in a new city. (It can be safely argued it couldn't have been difficult to find the biggest brothel in Europe.) In a moment, I am going to narrate our adventures that evening. But before that, we had to overcome a lesser problem. 

As our departure from Bengaluru had been delayed, we’d missed our connecting flight at Abu Dhabi. When Etihad Airlines rerouted us through Dublin, we were happy at the prospect of getting a glimpse of the beautiful country of Ireland. However, sitting in the airport transit lounge in Dublin, we were able to see just a flat barren patch of land and a highway in the distance. It could have been anywhere. 

At Schiphol airport in Amsterdam, we waited as passengers collected their luggage and left one after the other, until the last bag came out on the baggage carousel. But unfortunately, it wasn’t ours. When we informed the KLM helpdesk, they were able to locate our missing suitcases within minutes, but to our dismay, the luggage was still in Abu Dhabi. The matronly KLM personnel who were womanning the helpdesk quickly brought out two faux leather pouches with combs, toothbrushes etc., and promised to send the suitcases to our hotel within 48 hours. They also said we could buy a change of clothes, which the airlines would reimburse within a limit. 

As we got through immigration, I fixed the international SIM we had been carrying in my phone. It worked perfectly: we called our son and daughter, and checked the direction to the hotel we had been booked in. A metro rail station is located within Schiphol airport. We utilised the freedom offered by the absence of baggage by boarding a train to Amsterdam Central. Our hotel was just four kilometres away from the Central station, which the Dutch spell as Centraal. 

We had hoped to buy some clothes near the railway station, but the airline was destined to save a few euros. It was the Easter Thursday, the long weekend had begun, and all the stores had been shut. To complicate matters, my new SIM card went to sleep when we needed it most. So, we knew the address of our hotel (117 Saarphatistraat), but had no idea how to get there. We were in an unfamiliar city in an evening of overcast sky. 

In front of the railway station, there were five or six tramlines, where empty, almost surrealistic trams were coming in and going away every minute, seemingly without a purpose. Two Indian students we met on the street checked Google Map on their phone and said we could take the metro to Weesperplein (Whisper plains?), which was just three stations away. The station was at the crossing of the streets Weesperplein and Saarphatistraat, in which was our hotel located, you might recall. (The Dutch, it seemed, are fond of double vowels and unfond of short names.) Our hotel would be a short walk from the metro station. 

At Weesperplein, we were the only people to get off the train. As we climbed up the stairs, we were greeted by two absolutely empty wide streets and howling winds. Some cars went past, but there was no one on the streets, not a soul. Every shutter was down and every door, closed. Europe is far away from summer in mid April. Gusts of cold wind pierced the light jacket I was wearing. My wife didn’t have even that little protection.

We were at the crossing of two major roads, but there were no road signs; we couldn’t figure out which of the two streets was Saarphatistraat. After spending 24 sleepless hours on three aircraft and at three airports, we were not too keen to walk more than what was necessary. Which road should we take? As we were thinking of tossing a coin, a tall well-built elderly gentleman emerged from the metro station swinging a large cloth bag which looked like what we use in Indian bazaars. He was exceedingly helpful. Although he didn’t know which of the streets we should take, he volunteered to telephone our hotel and find out where exactly it was. He called up the hotel and had a long conversation in Dutch. 

After disconnecting, he said, ‘Sorry, I don’t understand a word of what she says!’ 

Our jaws fell. He was speaking Dutch in the capital of the Netherlands! Was there actually a hotel or had we been conned? (A friend of mine had once found a warehouse at the address of a hotel he had booked in Beijing.) Either way, there was no question of detaining the good Samaritan any longer. He left. 

After walking about 100 metres, he shouted something to us excitedly in Dutch. In a few moments, we understood why he was excited. He was calling out, ‘Saarphatistraat, Saarphatistraat!,’ pointing his index finger at a road sign hidden behind a tree. 

Therefore, one problem was solved. We knew which street we had to take, but we still didn’t know which way to go: up or down. Somewhat strangely, there were no door numbers. We started walking in a direction and came across a few passersby. They spoke English, but every one of them was a tourist who had come to the city to spend their Easter weekend. We kept walking and asking the same question: 'Sir/Madam, could you tell us which way 117 Saarphatistraat is?' 

It started raining, first drizzles, and then a proper light shower, with a concomitant steep fall in temperature. We were looking at an uncertain night in freezing cold. Finally, I buttonholed a man who was carrying a large phone and requested him to check the address of our hotel. Google showed the path in dots; we had been walking away from our destination.

It didn’t take much longer to find the building numbered 117, where there was indeed a small hotel with nobody except the receptionist in the lobby. When we—decently drenched—were checking in, the penny dropped. We understood why the Dutch gentleman couldn’t follow a word of what the receptionist had said. 

She was a young Chinese student working part time in a hotel owned by a Chinese family. She spoke decent English with some effort, but she had just arrived in the Netherlands. Was she a precursor to a future Chinese Empire will stretch across the globe?

From the bowl of welcome candies kept on the reception desk, I grabbed a handful and said, ‘Please forgive me for taking so many. This is going to be our dinner.’

Krishnagiri / 28 August 2021

The Digital Divide

The graphic above is true and so sad! If anything shows our government’s complete indifference – if not disdain – for ordinary people, it is the COWIN app. Our rulers have made internet access almost a precondition for the life-saving vaccination against COVID-19. The poor in India don’t get anything easily, from ration card to medical aid. Now, a vast majority of them who don’t have internet access have an even bigger handicap vis-à-vis the vaccine.

However, India was not like this always. When I was a child, once a year, our whole family would visit a nearby corporation office for the small-pox vaccine to be administered with a bifurcated needle that would make two parallel punctures. It was open and free to all and the government advertised it widely to encourage people to get vaccinated. In fact, the efforts were much more than mere publicity. The University of Michigan Library website says:

“[In India in 1974] During a six-day period each month, health workers visited every one of the country’s 100 million households. Supervised by about fifty international advisors and an equal number of Indian officials, some thirty-three thousand district health personnel and more than 100,000 additional field workers conducted house-to-house searches in a total of 575,721 villages and 2,641 cities.”

Clearly, a much poorer India had wiser and better educated leadership that invested scarce resources into public health programmes thanks to which India has been able to kill to demons: small pox and polio. The second graphic has captured our past beautifully.

But today, we have a government run by idiots with phoney degrees and charlatans who promote unscientific, so-called ayurvedic cures so that fellow crooks can make a quick buck even in the middle of a devastating pandemic. More importantly, the government invested nothing except on the 3^rd stage clinical trial of the vaccine developed by the Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR) and Bharat Biotech. Even Covaxin, the vaccine jointly developed by ICMR, they didn’t license to other manufacturers. Contrarily, the Russian Sputnik-V vaccine is going to be manufactured by six companies in India. Why did the government restrict production of Covaxin to only a small Hyderabad-based private company? If you know the answer, please tell me. Questions galore. Why do the owners of the biggest vaccine manufacturer Serum Institute of India have to run away to England when they should try to augment their manufacturing capacity to help millions of Indians?

Since the middle of 2020 the USA (even under a madman president) and Europe have been investing heavily into private companies for researching vaccines; many governments bought millions of doses of vaccine much before they were tested or produced. But our government ignored warnings from the scientific community about an impending second wave and didn't pre-book a single dose of the vaccine. What were they doing with the thousands of crores reportedly received in the completely opaque PM Care Fund if they didn’t utilise it for vaccines?

Our government has messed up every aspect of the problem whether making digital access a priority or the pricing of the vaccine or the age-group to which it should be given first. It has come out with a series of seemingly random decisions which has helped none. But these acts of stupidity pale into insignificance when you consider that in the humongous machinery called government and its adjuncts like the Niti Ayog, there was nobody to compare the number of vaccines required and the available production capacity in the country. Did they actually forget to do this when they were gleefully celebrating their stupidity as late as in March 2021? Can anything be more bizarre?

*

I belong to the privileged minority that has much better access to scarce resources. I personally have access to most of the ladders shown in this graphic. Therefore, anything I write on ordinary people not getting the COVID-19 vaccination would amount to hypocrisy. I accept the charge, but that doesn’t alter facts. We have a bunch of moronic rulers who are destroying the country.

The PM must resign. If ever a national government was needed with the best talents available in the country, it is now.

 18 May 2021

 

The Corona Timeline, China, and WHO

[The information below has been collated from sources like the Wikipedia, BBC, Al Jazeera, ANI, and TOI]

1 December 2019: In the city of Wuhan in China’s Hubei province, symptoms of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) were first noticed in a man.

6 December: His 53-year-old wife showed similar symptoms; hospitalized.

25 December: Two more Chinese in Wuhan quarantined after they showed similar symptoms. Later that week, hospitals in Wuhan saw an exponential increase of comparable cases.

In the same week, Dr. Li Wenliang, a 33-year old ophthalmologist, informed a group of doctors about a new virus.

31 December: The Wuhan Municipal Health Commission declared that there was no clear human to human transmission of the virus. China got in touch with the World Health Organisation (WHO). They reprimanded Dr. Li Wenliang for spreading rumours.

1 January 2020: Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market was shut down as several of those infected had reportedly worked at the market.

3 January 2020: Li Wenliang had to sign a declaration to the police that he had been spreading ‘fake information’. Same day, the Hubei Provincial Health Commission asked doctors not to test for new cases. Doctors had to destroy the existing samples. The Wuhan Municipal Health Commission reiterated its position on no human to human infection, indicating collaboration in suppression of truth.

8 January: China claimed they had identified the virus and reiterated no human to human transmission.

11 January: The Wuhan Municipality published a report stating that the infected people had a history of contact with the wet market. It reiterated the absence of human transmission.

12 January: Li Wenliang was admitted to the hospital following severe breathing problems and was put in intensive care.

13 January: Thailand reported the first case of coronavirus outside China: a Chinese woman who had a travelled to Wuhan.

14 January: WHO issued a statement saying that the preliminary investigation conducted by China showed no trace of human to human infection.

15 January: Japan reported the first case of coronavirus. The patient had no history of visiting any wet market of China. After this, the Wuhan Health Commission admitted the possibility of human transmission.

21 January: The United States reported its first confirmed case of a patient who had returned from China six days earlier.

22 January: The WHO conducts a field visit to China and concludes that human to human transmission is taking place in Wuhan.

31 January: Speaking at a news conference in Geneva, the Chief of the WHO described the virus as an "unprecedented outbreak". But he praised the "extraordinary measures" the Chinese had taken, and said there was “no reason TO LIMIT TRADE OR TRAVEL TO CHINA”. (BBC, emphasis added)

7 February: Li Wenliang passed away in hospital. Wikipedia says “A subsequent Chinese official inquiry exonerated him and the Communist Party of China formally offered a "solemn apology" to his family and revoked its admonishment of him.”

11 March: World Health Organisation (WHO) declared the Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) as pandemic.

31 March: The virus has shut down the world, with 178 countries infected, more than 7,87,000 confirmed cases, and over 37,000 dead.

*

Five dates are crucial on the timeline:

1.       31 December, when China informed the WHO, but suppressed its severity.

2.       14 January, when the WHO downplayed the infectivity of the virus and misled the world community.

3.       22 January, when the WHO found out human to human transmission, but did nothing to warn the rest of the world.

4.       31 January, when the WHO refused to limit travel to and trade with China.

5.       11 March, when the WHO declared the disease as pandemic, A MONTH AND 20 DAYS LATER.

Will anyone be punished for this humongous criminal delay?

Photograph of Dr. Li Wenliang courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63046734

NIGHT: “A slim volume of terrifying power”

When the slim volume arrived by courier, I’d been reading other books. I looked at the new arrival, read the blurbs, and smelled it for its deeply sensual pleasure. Then I decided to read a few pages before returning to Barbara Tuchman’s history of the Vietnam War.

I could put down Elie Wiesel’s NIGHT only after reading it completely, every word of it. 

If the lines above gave you the impression it was pleasure reading the 135 pages, you would be grossly mistaken. It was one of the most difficult and disturbing books I’ve ever read. It tells us about the monster that lives within each one of us. It is mind-numbing, and I wouldn’t even try to review it. I am just presenting the basic “storyline”. It will help you understand human nature better.

Eliezer Wiesel’s Jewish family lived happily in the small town of Sighet, Romania. Buffered by Austria and Hungary from Germany, they believed they were safe. Moreover, in the spring of 1944, “there was splendid news from the Russian front. There could no longer be any doubt: Germany would be defeated.” A deeply observant 13-year-old Elie watched elders going about their life, concerned about everything else except “their own fate”.

Their fate was foretold when Budapest radio suddenly announced that the Fascist Party had seized power in Hungary. In less than a week, the German army was in their street. And shortly, the entire Jewish population of the town was moved into and confined in two ghettos. Even then, they believed they would just live there in peace until the Red Army came to free them. “The ghetto was ruled by neither German nor Jew; it was ruled by delusion.”

Soon all of them would be packed in closed cattle cars so tightly that they wouldn’t even be able to sit down. They would be transported to Auschwitz death camps, where 90% of the deportees would be murdered on arrival, after being shorn of whatever valuables they had on them, including gold teeth. Most would die in gas chambers. Children would be thrown into a fire-pit.

The healthiest 10% would live on to deliver hard labour on near starvation diet … and die slow, miserable deaths.

As Eliezer’s family entered the camp facing SS men and their guns and clubs, someone commanded: “Men to the left! Women to the right!”

Just eight words “spoken quietly, indifferently, without emotion” decimated a family. And many other families. That was the last time Elie and his father saw his mother and little sister, who – unknown to them – would be killed soon. He would meet his two older sisters after many years at a camp for war orphans.

The real story begins. The Nazis, with their famous eye for details, would have calculated the bare minimum nutrition needed for a person to survive. The prisoners got not a calorie more. Food consisted of watery soup, and bread, that too on good days. They went without any food many a day.

Hygiene was limited to a jar of disinfectants kept at the entrance of every block, with which the men had to soak themselves before having a luxurious shower followed by sleep on tightly packed hard wooden bunks without sheets. They would begin a day of hard labour early next morning.

They would be driven like than animals, but without the faintest trace of compassion that humans have for cattle, besides incessant abuses, threats, blows, lashes, and execution by public hanging for the slightest perceived lapse. (The extra effort was clearly unnecessary as people were shot at the drop of a hat, but I think the SS needed the spectacle to drive in the wedge of terror deeper into the heart of the prisoner.) Nazis had discovered a simple management principle, if you fell at work, you’d be marked for slaughter.

So the men toiled under the shadow of a chimney bellowing smoke a part of which had been living human beings a few hours ago. The men struggled to the limits of endurance literally under the shadow of death. Period.

If you thought things couldn’t be worse. You would be wrong, again. As the front came closer, Nazis decided to relocate the prisoners to another camp, this time, deep within Germany, in Buchenwald.

To the utter misfortune of the prisoners, the winter had set in. All they had for warm clothing were shirts and trousers removed from their dead comrades. Wiesel writes: “We each had put on several garments, one over the other, to better protect ourselves from the cold. Poor clowns, wider than tall, more dead than alive, poor creatures whose deathly faces peeked out from layers of prisoner’s clothes.”

An icy wind was blowing violently that morning. The prisoners were made to run on snow, pushed by gun wielding guards shouting, “Faster, you filthy dogs!” They ran through the day, they ran through the night. Their guards changed shifts when tired, but the prisoners ran on. Anyone falling behind was shot. But it was more for pleasure, because anyone lying on snow under a pitiless winter night sky didn’t have a ghost of a chance to survive in any case.

It is not clear how long the journey went until they are transferred to another cattle-car, this time, without a roof! And as the train trudges on through pouring snow and stops for eternity, the prisoners have nothing to eat or drink, except when curious German onlookers throw a few loaves of bread to the pitiable creatures on board. And as many men fight for the crumbs, people die. Eliezer – he is just 15 – watches a son snatching away bread from his dying father. They old man desperately clings on to his bread and pleads, “Son, you are killing me for a loaf of bread?”

By the time son achieves his goal, father is dead. The living desperately munches the food that might have saved the dead.

On the way, corpses are thrown out casually by men who themselves could have been cast away, dead. A hundred men boarded a wagon with Elie; only 12 get off at Buchenwald, where they would wait for death or liberation.

Some tragedy can only be described only in words, and not by pictures or films. Printed words can expand our horizon in a unique way and help us see the unseen, without which our world view would be much poorer.

Please read this book if you can. And think how well we have been able to deal with the monster that lives within every one of us.

06 September 2017

[Photo of Buchenwald Camp taken five days after its liberation by the Red Army; Elie Wiesel is on the second row from bottom, seventh from left, next to the plank. Courtesy the Wikipedia]

Sir Nicholas Winton

Nicholas Winton's statue at Prague rail station 

While doing research for a book I am writing, I came across the extraordinary story of Nicholas George Winton, an ordinary man who proved himself to be a true hero at an extremely dangerous time in history. I cannot but share it here. The Photograph is from Wikipedia and the information is from Wikipedia and a few other sources.

In 1939, just days before the Second World War began, Nicholas Winton risked his life to save 669 mostly Jewish children from Czechoslovakia in an operation later known as the Czech Kindertransport (German for "child transportation"). He ensured their safe passage to Britain.  They would have been dead otherwise. And some of the children saved by Winton grew up to become mathematician, paediatric geneticist, film maker, parliamentarian, and so on. 

If Winton’s feat was incredible, what followed was even more so.

Like a true hero, he never publicised his efforts. Neither did he try to profit from it. Fifty years later, his wife found a scrapbook in their attic that contained the names, pictures, and documents of the children he had saved. 

And the world came to know his humongous exploits much later, through an episode of the BBC television programme That’s Life! in 1988. BBC invited Winton to the programme as a member of the audience. During the programme, the host of the programme, Esther Rantzen showed Winton's scrapbook and narrated his achievements. Then she asked if anybody in the audience owed their live to Winton, and if so, to stand up. More than two dozen people sitting around Winton and his wife rose and applauded.

Sir Nicholas was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2003 and received the highest Czech honour, the Order of the White Lion in 2014. He died on 1 July 2015, aged 106. 

Nicholas Winton was born on 19 May 1909 in Hampstead, London. His parents were German Jews who had relocated to London two years before. The family name was Wertheim, but they changed it to Winton in an effort at integration. They also converted to Christianity, and Winton was baptised. 

In 1923, Winton entered school, but left without qualifications. He attended night school while volunteering at the Midland Bank. He then moved to Hamburg, Berlin, and Paris, working for different banks. He also earned a banking qualification in France. Returning to London, he became a broker at the London Stock Exchange. 

Shortly before Christmas 1938, Winton was planning to travel to Switzerland for a skiing holiday. But he decided instead to visit Prague and help the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia, then in the process of being occupied by Germany. 

Winton single-handedly established an organization to aid children from Jewish families at risk from the Nazis. He set up his office at a dining room table in his Prague hotel. 

In the night of 9-10 November 1938, paramilitary forces and German civilians killed Jews throughout Nazi Germany, while the German authorities looked on. The pogrom was known as the Night of Broken Glass. The name comes from shards of broken glass that littered the streets of German cities after windows of Jewish-owned stores, buildings, and synagogues were smashed.

After the Night of the broken glass, the British Parliament allowed the entry into Britain of refugees younger than 17, provided they had a place to stay and a warranty of £50 was deposited for their eventual return to their own country. 

However, the Dutch government refused Jewish refugees to enter the Netherlands, and the children were to board a ferry from there. The Dutch border guards sent the refugees back to Germany, despite the horrors being well known. 

Winton was able to overcome the impediment thanks to guarantees he had obtained from Britain. After the first train, the process of crossing the Netherlands went smoothly. Winton ultimately found homes in Britain for 669 children, many of whose parents would later perish in the Auschwitz concentration camp. Throughout the summer of 1939, he, with the help of his mother, placed photographs of the children in Picture Post seeking families to adopt them. He also wrote to US politicians such as Roosevelt, asking them to take in more children. 

Winton later said that two thousand more might have been saved if they had helped, but only Sweden accepted some refugee children, besides Britain. 

The last group of 250, scheduled to leave Prague on 1 September 1939, was unable to depart as Hitler invaded Poland on the same day, and the Second World War had begun. Of the children due to leave by that train, only two survived the war.

* 

Sadly, 2017 looks disturbingly like 1938. As I write this, millions of refugees are living in terrible camps unprotected from cold, rain, and snow. And borders are being sealed. People who could have had the same fate as the Syrian refugees if history had moved in a different direction, are trying their best to throw out starving children from their doors. 

The world needs lots of Nichlas George Wintons today.

Bengaluru / 05 Feb 2017