QIZ and all that…

When I was first introduced to the concept of QIZ… I was literally floored. It was one of the most original and thought provoking model of incentivizing peace and interaction between entities that are naturally estranged.

So what is QIZ…? It is short form of Qualifying Industrial Zone. Quoting from the horse's mouth…

Qualifying Industrial Zones (QIZ) are designated geographic areas, within Egypt (and Jordan), that enjoy a duty free status with the United States. Companies located within such zones are granted duty free access to the US markets, provided that they satisfy the agreed upon Israeli component, as per the pre-defined rules of origin.

So basically what it does… is that it incentivizes a joint Egypt-Israel or joint Jordan-Israel production (that is, the final production would happen in Egypt but with a pre-decided amount of Israeli component)… thus leading to more than normal economic exchange between these estranged nations. And then this joint production gets preferential treatment in the US markets. Marvelous piece of policy… and salute to the team that came up with the idea.

The beauty about the policy is that it is downright practical… it doesn’t have any other-worldly notions about politics prevailing in the Middle East that Egypt and Israel can be best pals… after having fought 3 (or is it 4) wars and all that. It proposes an economic solution to the political problem… it assumes that economic relations forces the adversaries to temporarily bury the hatchet for mutual economic benefit. This in turn can help in the longer run… because a larger interaction opens a possibility of understanding each other better…. And then it could lead to some kind of reconciliation in the longer run.

So why do I write about it in my blog… wasn’t my blog supposed to be apolitical and downright boring… well it was… but then I write about this because of a reason.

Yesterday I was interacting with a friend of mine who works for a NGO called Pratham… which works for education of street kids… I have been associated on and off with the NGO. The NGO lauched an ambitious program an all-India teaching program… which was a great success… and now it plans to replicate its success in Pakistan. He went to Pakistan to do some field study and realized that the aspiration levels and the thought pattern of an average Pakistani is more or less similar. I always believed that… I am a firm believer that the Pakistan has all the ingredient of becoming a successful nation… but the Indian pre-occupation of their ruling elite… has actually distorted both their external and internal policies.

So how do you bring about reconciliation between the two countries… well do the same thing… be downright BLOODY practical… realize that we are not friends and are not going to become one in the near or not-so-near future… but that we can bury the hatchet if something incentivizes that… and then try to find what can actually help in incentivizing the same.

And what can do the trick is mutual economic benefit… look around… Egypt and Israel are trading… China and Japan are trading… the World's most fruitful and revolutionary economic partnership is between China and US… the nations that fought bitterly over Vietnam and Korea. Closer home… India and China are trading… even India and Myanmar are trying to do the same. So examples are aplenty.

Let us make a Free-trade zone… activate SAFTA or SAPTA (whatever serves the purpose) invest in each other's country… like India can invest in Information Technology… I am told that Pakistani youth is equally good at computer skills and English… let us create competition for ourselves that would keep us evolving… similarly India can import food grains from Pakistan… thus opening more and more land for cash crops (like Jatropha… incidentally Jatropha farming in India is under intense criticism due to food shortages)…the benefits are mutual. And once these benefits are established, we will be forced to bury the hatchet (if not become friends)… I think, as a thumb rule, India-Pakistan trade should be at least half of India-China trade, owing to historical linkages, societal linkages.

This brings me to a more important issue… that is of Kashmir. Well let us be downrightly practical… if we create massive opportunities for Kashmiri youth in the economic miracle of India… they would be incentivized to remain a part of India… the economic incentive should be more organically linked to mainland India than tourism… lets say if we have 100s of Engineering colleges in Kashmir and a large number of Kashmiri youth working in software firms in Hyderabad and Bangalore… to the tune that every family has one of its earning member working in Indian silicon valley… well then who would like to rock the boat….

I know things are not as simple as I depict… but these are the broad contours that I am arguing my case in…. this is the template… we can work on it to refine it.

But how it is related to the travels of a pondering vagabond… simply because I saw it in action in Egypt… that set me thinking… if we can apply the same template in India… as I have always said different countries are doing different things and are doing similar things differently to be happier societies… and some of the learning from these countries can definitely be applied in the case of India.

Co-option as a policy is one of the most effective way of sorting out differences…. Sadly one of the biggest proponents of the same policy, US- that has done wonders in case of China, Vietnam and Latin America, and in recent times in North Korea and Libya… is not following the policy of co-option in Iran and Sudan… perhaps it should… though I am extremely under-equipped to comment on that

Who needs Equal Opportunity?

Accidentally deleted

Hiking with my son…

On last weekend, I went on hiking with my 2.5 year old son… well, not exactly hiking but a casual walk in the woods…

Just across the road where my residence is located… lies a city forest… stretching may be, in an area of 2 square kilometers. Not very big… but indeed, it is a far cry from the usual concrete jungles, we tend to see all around…

For last few months, I had been seeing them while commuting to and from the office… and always promised that I will take my son Vidhu… there. And then finally I was able to keep the promise… and what a day it was… when I first did it.

Some words about Vidhu… he is an average two year old kid… who loves to run around, do mischief, to see cartoon (his favourite these days is Popeye the Sailorman and Ben 10)… what makes him special… is the way he treats his younger brother, Kinshu… with so much of care and affection… that we almost feel as if he was an elderly person… He often supervises Kinshu… checks what he is picking up from the floor and eating… he beckons us from other rooms when Kinshu reaches the edge of bed and is about to fall… and holds his baby carriage when we go for a walk. We surely are blessed.

Sadly… he is having speech delay… he is not able to speak, as fluently, as any other kid of his age would do… he can say Mama, Baba, What Happened, Yes and No… but not much beyond that… we took him to few doctors… one said that he needs speech therapy… other said he needs psychological tests… till one day, a senior doctor, whom I know… reprimanded me for treating the kid as a guinea pig and said that every kid has his way of growing… and so has Vidhu… and that day we decided to just leave him alone for a while.

Coming to the hike… well it was raining heavily when I decided to take him for a hike… my wife found it to be a preposterous idea… why on earth do I want to hike when it's raining cats and dogs… I told her just because it’s the best time to hike and see Mother Nature in its most bountiful moods. She gave in to my logic…. For whatever it meant.

I packed Vidhu's bag with Potato Chips, Umbrella, bananas, Water bottle, Camera and a spare pairs of clothes…. He was so excited to see his being packed… it meant that he was out for something big…

When we entered the woods… we were overwhelmed with the greenery all around… for the first time… or may be after a long long time (when I took him to a botanical garden in Allahabad)… he was seeing so much of greenery… I gave him a stick, and showed him how to use a stick while hiking… of first checking the grass… and plant outgrowths before treading over them…. He found everything so amusing… he smiled and came close to me and kissed me on cheeks. It was a lovely feeling…

We saw many large trees… I helped him to climb one of them… initially he was bit scared… but then after checking the fun of it all… he volunteered to climb higher and higher… till the reach of my hands just gave in….

A couple of steps ahead we found a stream of water… and some frogs… and earthworms and leeches… he was particularly amused to see a frog jump after being bothered by the stick… however, he found earthworms and leeches a bit detestable and yucky. And another couple of steps later, we found some village boys plucking Jamuns (a tropical fruit found in India and Pakistan… is considered very good for Diabetes and other medicinal purposes)… we joined them… it was fun to see Vidhu trying to throw pebbles high in the air to get some jamuns… then we struck a new idea… I started shaking the tree so that some ripe jamun would fall… he followed me and started shaking the tree…. The village boys laughed at his antics. But when I gathered the jamuns… he plainly refused to eat them…after all weren’t they littered on earth… and how his mother had told him not to eat anything fallen on earth… or not to let Kinshu eat anything fallen on earth…

We then just sat on a bench and picnicked, he ate some chips and drank some juice… then I told a nearby Churmura (a north Indian snack made up of puffed rice, herbs and spices) vendor to give me a pack of churmura… we enjoyed that, too.

We saw some animals too… a crow, a buffalo, a hare (just a glimpse), a crane… every animal was a new discovery for Vidhu.

There after, we left the place… came out of the woods… to the streets… in a near by place… a person was selling Chokha Bati (a East Indian snack), we enjoyed that together… we went to a park and played there for a while… with few other village kids… and then it was time to go….

While coming home… we encountered a commonly found grass… whose flowers stick to your clothes… I tried to show him that grass… he wasn’t amused… and threw that flower away… and started laughing…

Everything was a new discovery for him… he reminded me of times when I used to react to new things in the same fashion… when we reached home… we were drenched… just before we entered the colony gate… I saw rainbow… and tried to show that to Vidhu… I don’t know whether he realized it or not… but he kept staring at the sky for a while…

What a great day it was….

Aimless wanderings in the Egyptian heartland. Part Nine- In the terrorland or Was it?

The coming 36 hours were going to be long and tiring…

Though my initial plan wasn’t like that… I planned to travel to Luxor… take a bus to Aswan… and then take some rest there… before leaving for Abu Simble… I even called Hotel Keylany in Aswan… for a room.

The bus to Luxor arrived at 7 pm… by that time… darkness had engulfed El-Tor… I was sitting alone on a bench of El-Tor bus stand… with a Sandwich store owner… I told him my plan … and he was amazed … from El Tor to Abu Simble in 36 hours… I must be crazy… travelers are crazy.

The bus to Luxor… travels first to Suez and then drives along the Red Sea coast… up to Safaga and then turns right to travel towards Qena… the northern end of Upper Nile Valley. It passes through the resort town of Hurgadha… one of the few places that I couldn’t visit during my stay in Egypt… Hurgadha used to be a much liked resort for Egyptians … till Russians arrived… with their money and numbers, they changed the way the resort used to be… not a new story… I have heard the same things about Goa, Ayanapa, and to some extent about Antalya.

Qena is a special town… in Pharaonic period a canal was dug from Qena to Quseir… the canal was used by Pharaonic ships to travel to Red Sea and back… Queen Hatepshut went to Punt through the same route… but with time this canal got destroyed… I am told a few decades ago, there was a move to reconstruct it… but techno-economic studies rejected the idea as preposterous.

I was sitting beside an old man… an Egyptian… who was from Hurgadha… ran a resort over there… his son had started a resort in Nuweiba… and he was coming after meeting him. He told me something I knew and had completely forgotten… the convoys between Luxor and Aswan.

In mid 1990s, Egypt faced a massive outbreak of Islamic terrorism… mainly propagated by a group called Gamaa al-Islamiya… it carried out a number of attacks on tourists in Cairo, Luxor… and other places… these attacks created a huge challenge for the Egyptian tourism industry. The Egyptian Government took some hard steps.. it strengthen its intelligence network, gave them sweeping powers, recruited thousands and thousands of police personnel (they later on became ubiquitous, manning the railway crossings, standing without any purpose by the river side in Cairo and what not)… In Minya and adjoining regions, they prohibited farmers from growing sugarcane… as its fields were used by terrorists as a hideout… this decision killed the sugar industry in Egypt… it also introduced the system of convoys.

It introduced a system of convoys, by which… all the vehicles in the main tourist circuits move in a convoy… Luxor to Aswan and Aswan to Abu Simble are two examples… these convoys are prevalent elsewhere too. Long after the threat of terrorism has dissipated and gone….

The elderly gentleman told me that I would reach Luxor by 7 am… and that the next convoy to Aswan wouldn’t be before 2 pm… so I would have to fend for myself for 7 hours…

Now I had visited Luxor 3 times… seen most of the places over there… and I was in no mood to spend 7 hours, yet again, in Luxor… I struck an idea… that of alighting at Qena… and trying to see the temple of Dendera and then come back to Luxor to push for Aswan. The Dendera temple has been out of bounds for most tourists…. Plainly because the Authorities don’t allow people to visit it… for fear of more terrorist attacks… but I argued, what if I just land over there… the police wouldn’t just shoo me away… they will allow me to see the place… and then probably tell me to retrace my steps and go to safer zones.

At 5 am in the morning, I alighted in Qena… little did I know that my entire programme would change… I saw a new face of Egypt… where people were most helpful, least greedy, simple and ever smiling… sadly, this is not what tourist are able to see… and probably that is what keeps these people pure… one of my teacher in AUC was lamenting… how people in Aswan have changed over the years… mainly due to influx of tourists…

I had to change two microbuses to reach Dendera… people helped, they were elated to see a foreigner… they told me much of the foreign tourists that come to see Dendera… come via Luxor in buses, escorted by police vans… they don’t get to feel the real Dendera… or Qena.

The microbus… left me at a place… from where Dendera Temple was a two kilometer walk… instead of taking another microbus… I decided to walk the entire distance… flanked by green fields… village simpletons, riding on donkeys… cheery children… and a rustic smell… it was a home-coming… as if, I have reached my village in India… I was blessed.

When I reached the security gate of Dendera… the guards were surprised… I was taken to a room… of the Superintendent, who grilled me… as to how I came over here… what are my plans… he checked my passport… and then relayed a message that an unescorted Indian had come to see the Temple… I was amused… the entire place looked so safe…and yet so much of paraphernalia to ensure safety…

While alighting from the Microbus on the main road… some one told me that I should definitely go to Balyana… where the Abydos Temple lies… he said it was more beautiful than Dendera… and that he was from Balyana… he said that he had a small general store in Balyana… and if I come over there… then he should ask for Yousuf…. I thanked him… and made up my mind… I wouldn’t be going back to Luxor… I will proceed to Balyana… and my entire plan got changed.

The Superintendent asked me… where do you go from here… I said Abydos… he relayed the message on a walkie talkie… and let me enter the periphery of Dendera…

First view and I said WOW….

The Great Travelers: Part Two- Guillaume Le Gentil

"The one real interest in life is the flies… No mosquitoes… but flies by day and flies by night… flies in the water… flies in the food"

Harry Moseley

Moseley wrote these words to his mother… when he was fighting for British forces in Gallipoli… against the mighty Turks… in the First World War. He died at the hands of the Turks… he was a promising scientist, who fell… not for science… but for stupid political ideologies.

The story is not about him… these are the words, which Moseley wrote to his mother while on the battle front. These words capture the emotions of a man, who had been plucked out of his natural surrounding and thrown into an alien atmosphere… where everything is different… and strange. And many of us do it almost willingly… and these words would always remain a tribute to those daring few.

It's about another scientist… who traveled distant lands in search of science…and by a quirk of fate, today; he is not so very known for his scientific works but for the travels. He represents both the scientific quest and the thirst to travel… and therefore he is the second traveler… I am going to write about.

He had a rather long name… Guillaume Joseph Hyacinthe Jean-Baptiste Le Gentil de la Galaisière… for us he is just Guillaume Le Gentil… and he is best known for his travelogue " Voyage dans les mers de l'Inde, fait par ordre du Roi, à l'occasion du passage de Vénus, sur le disque du Soleil"- literally that means "Travel in the seas of India, made by order of King, during the passage of Venus on the disc of the Sun"

I was first introduced to the name of this man, by an elderly Bengali gentleman… in Kolkata. I remember the date… it was 8th June 2004… there was something very special about the day. It was a 'Transit of Venus'. I didn’t know this… in the morning I woke up… decided to go to Kumartuli… a Kolkata suburb famous for its huge workshops that makes clay images of Durga… and every other conceivable personalities on earth… Sachin Tendulkar, Saurav Ganguly and Saddam Hussein. While walking down from the by-lanes of Kumartuli towards the metro station… I met a bunch of excited people… who were glued to some astronomical gadgets… I asked what it was…

"Why young men… don’t you know its Transit of Venus"… the elderly gentleman then told me about the importance of the event and how the next such event would happen only in 2012 and then never in our lifetimes. It was a big event. I saw the Transit of Venus. Later that gentleman invited me to his house that was nearby… the name plate in his old Kolkata home read N.C. Bandopadhyay (I didn’t dare to ask him his name, he was authoritative to say the least)… his house was in a dilapidated state… as more or less every other house in this Kolkata suburb was. He offered me some plain water, 'sandesh' and some words about the importance of this event… and how it had helped us in understanding the universe. It helped us in calculating the distance between Sun and Earth… by simple trigonometry.

It is nothing but when Venus comes in between Sun and Earth… thus causing a small eclipse… it's like a black dot traveling across the sun… the event happens in pairs… like 2004 and 2012…

Earlier, it happened on 1874 and 1882… and even earlier on 1761 and 1769… the story of Le Gentil happened then.

The methodology to measure Distance between Sun and Earth (known then as astronomical unit) was developed by Kepler and subsequent Kepler followers. The idea was to see the transit from different points and calculate the total time of transit from there and use parallax method and simple trigonometry to calculate the distance. This method was first tested in 1761, when hundreds of scientists from Europe traveled far and wide to Africa, South America, North America, Siberia, Asia… to find suitable points to observe the Transit…. One such man, Le Gentil mounted an expedition to India… Pondicherry, to be precise. Before this, he was a not-so-great astronomer… having discovered a few heavenly bodies… but after this trip… he became famous for something he never thought… his travelogue.

He set out for India in 1760… via Cape of Good Hope and Mauritius… the same route, as was taken by Vasco Da Gama. The journey was going along nicely… and he arrived in Mauritius, ahead of schedule… what else he could have asked for… he took a ship to Pondicherry, when the misfortune struck.

In 1758, almost taking a cue from the 7-year war between the French plus Austrian forces and British plus Prussian forces in Europe… the two forces also clashed in India… popularly known as the Third and the decisive Carnatic War. The French side, which had seen great victories in the First and Second Carnatic war under the leadership of great Dupleix, lost this war badly… and that was the end of great French dream to win India…. By 1761, Pondicherry had fallen to the British… and it was end of Le Gentil's dream to observe the Transit of Venus. He could have taken the observation from the high-seas… but even that was not allowed by the British Naval forces, which forced him to return to Mauritius.

Heartbroken… Le Gentil made up his mind to wait for 8 more years to observe the Transit… but the question he faced was what to do for these 8 years… he set up an observatory in Mauritius… went to Madagascar… discovered hitherto unknown places over there… and waited. Then he went to Philippines… and made up his mind to observe it in Manila… but then fate was never with him…. In 1768-69, France and Spain clashed over the some territories in the North America… (This event in history is known as Rebellion of 1768)… and then the tensions between the two rose… Philippines, at that time, was a Spanish colony… and they forced Le Gentil to leave Manila…

Le Gentil came back to Pondicherry… by then it was firmly under the control of French. He set up an observatory and waited for the fateful day… but the day turned out to be cloudy… he couldn’t observe the Transit. He couldn’t observe it ever… and to think of it, Le Gentil's entire career was about trying to see it.

Le Gentil left India… but his misfortune didn’t leave him… he fell for a mysterious illness… and was forced to disembark the ship at Reunion Island….. He stayed there, almost anonymously, till he was rescued by a Spanish ship (yeah a Spanish ship!!! Aren't the ways of life amazing)…

When he returned back… he found that he had been declared dead, his wife had remarried, his wealth had been plundered…. And he was a pauper… he rebuilt his life from scratch and wrote a book on his experience… "Travel in the seas of India, made by order of King, during the passage of Venus on the disc of the Sun"… it became a huge commercial success and he lived happily ever after.

Amazing isn’t it. His travels are a tribute to many scientists and discoverers who set out to change the world… some of them… and very few of them found their place under the sun… most of them perished unknown… unsung… his story is a tribute to them all…

And what is more interesting… is that his story is linked with the history of India… Carnatic War… was an event that changed the course of history in India… and then it is related to one of my wanderings near Kolkata…

As French saying goes…

"One often meets his destiny often in the road he takes to avoid it"… Le Gentil accidentally met his destiny… Some day I will also meet my destiny in some corner of this mother earth.

Aimless wanderings in the Egyptian heartland. Part Eight- Home to a weary traveler

El Tor is nowhere… Ask any tourist, he mustn’t have heard about it…

When I reached the bus stand of Dahab… I realized that there was no bus to the mainland Egypt till late in the evening… there was a bus going to Port Suez… but that at around 2 in the noon, and after reaching there… I could have taken a bus going to anywhere in Egypt… but then I couldn’t have waited that long. It was then I met Wahid.

Wahid was a plumpy fellow… driving a pick-up van… he used to ferry to El-Tor and back… to buy some ration for his small resort in Dahab… ever smiling, with yellow teeth and more than a bad breath… his hallmark was a packet-full of Egyptian sandwiches, always ready to quench his appetite.

While I was sitting on one of the benches of the Dahab bus stand, wondering what to do next… he arrived with a few foreigners, who wanted to board a bus going to Saint Katherine. He saw me for a while, bid farewell to his foreigner customer cum friends… and then came close to me and cheerfully greeted me "Salaam Alaikum"…

Peace be upon me... Yeah I needed these good words… here I was sitting alone… and without a plan, with an uncertainty hovering over my plans… uncertainty that threatened to gobble up one valuable day of my journey. "Wa Alaikum As-Salaam"… I replied back…

"Inta Hindi"….

I always used to wonder… as to how they guess that I am an Indian… I mean, I resemble a 'Saeedi' in colour and contours… and yet I am so discernable… So discernable, that the moment I step into the streets of Khan-e-Khalili or Luxor- I am greeted with Namaste and Amitabh Bachhan.

"Naam"… yes. While replying, I started doing a threat assessment… what would this guy say next… will he sell me his resort room… or offer me to take to Dahab… ahhhhhhhh! I wanted none of these.

He didn’t…. He plainly told me that there was no bus to anywhere for next three-four hours… I took a deep breath… and said that-yes, I know. And then, he offered me something that was sweet to my ears…. He offered me to take to El-Tor, for free. As he confided later… he gets bored on these long monotonous drives and needs to talk to somebody… and often takes people for a ride (no pun intended)….

It was two and half hours journey to El-Tor… through a magical route… surrounded by the majesty of Sinai… one bat of an eyelid and it was difficult to remember if I was in Sinai… or Spiti or Heaven. He told me something interesting… Dahab in Arabic means Gold… and in ancient times… when Arab sailors used to pass through the Gulf of Aqaba, they used to see the shining hillocks of the place, which glittered like gold… and hence named the place- Dahab, the Gold… many of them came to Sinai… to hunt for the gold… some died at the hands of treacherous nature and some at the hands of robbers… and nobody could find gold…

The ride was very interesting… Wahid offered me different types of sandwiches… one that really set my taste bud on fire were filled with Tuna, Baba Ghanoug (eggplant) and Tahina sauce. Only hitch… the worst smelling breath, I ever smelt, coming out of constant chattering mouth.

El-Tor is the capital of South Sinai Governorate… it is a small township with a few shops that cater to people around… I asked Wahid, as to why he comes to El-Tor for his rations… and why not to Sharm… his reply was simple… things in Sharm are sold at inflated prices… in fact a lot of people, running small time resorts in Nama Bay and Sharm… often purchase their wares from El-Tor.

El-Tor is hardly a tourist spot… but often it is a great stop-over for people planning to go to Saint Katherine… or Sharm or Moses Spring (which, I was told was a small tourist spot very close to El-Tor… it is supposed to be a biblical spring that has now dried up with some portions having brackish water… not really very enticing, is it)

I had a few hours to go… before I could have taken any bus to the mainland Egypt… one option was taking a bus coming from Saint Kathrine… going towards Port Suez or Cairo… and the other was taking the bus to Luxor… the same bus that starts from Dahab at four in the evening and reached El-Tor at six in the evening… I chose the latter course…

El-Tor is a friendly place… though quite deserted…most of the people living here, come from the canal region… and are very gentle… their main business is trading and not tourism… and therefore they treat tourists as one of them… Wahid was right… I would be better off at El-Tor than in Dahab…

The other reason was the beauty of the place itself… wide roads… surrounded by beautiful hills… cold breeze… you could sit anywhere… any Ahwa… without being bothered by a persistent waiter… you could have eaten anything… without being bothered about being over-charged… you could pick-up conversation with anybody without being treated as a potential customer… this is what I missed in Dahab…. Bohemian or not.

I slept at one of the road side Ahwa, tried out my hands on Domino with a local-ite… in short I was really having a vacation… it was a strange feeling… it was like as if… I , a weary traveler, had reached an abode to rest….

The next two days were going to be difficult and harrowing… little did I know this… but destiny had brought me to a place… where I got recharged….to travel… to learn and to yearn….

El-Tor was magical in its own way… I would remember that local lad who taught me to play domino… or the policeman who listened to my description of India… in broken Arabic… or that Ahwa-owner who didn’t bother me, when I was sleeping without buying anything from his Ahwa….