The Pedestrian - Strolling with the professor

Thursday, April 23rd, 2009 03:13:00

OCCASIONALLY, I coerce a ride from a friend with a car. And when I last did so it was with good reason.

I had to a pick up a well-known academician from his hotel in downtown Bukit Bintang and get him to Central Market.

It’s not a long walk from the hotel but the pavement isn’t good enough.

It’s bad for walking and even worse for having a conversation.

Besides, I was just not going to take the risk of Prof Benedict Anderson stumbling over, falling into, or bumping his toe against the great Malaysian pavement.

More importantly, I didn’t want to waste our precious time.

If we had walked we would have been occupied wholly with negotiating the city’s walkways.

These have become more like obstacle courses over the years.

In another city it would be time spent talking and thinking.

We would have been able to stroll.

When I was at university a couple of decades ago, Prof. Anderson’s name was already well known in circles interested in Southeast Asian studies, and more generally, in the study of nationalism.

He coined a phrase that caught the imagination of so many: that nations are “imagined communities”.

His book of that title is rated one of the most cited for the last century.

It is subtitled Reflections on the origins and spread of nationalisms.

As a student I would walk miles through the library, taking small steps past bookshelves, pulling out books, reading synopsis and the biographical notes.

Wondering about the person behind the author’s name.

I never expected to one day encounter Prof. Anderson in the flesh. I remember, as an undergraduate, reading an essay of Ben Anderson’s about Thailand and in particular, his insight into the change of the kingdom’s name from Siam to Thailand.

This, he argued, has had profound consequence for how this nation-State is governed.

The marginality of Lao and Malay speaking minorities is a case in point.

Last year, I read his recently published history tracing the flows of anarchist thought over three continents:

Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination. I came to the end of the book with regret.

I didn’t want this wondrous, almost magical, tour of people, places and ideas to end. In the Sixties, he and other scholars questioned the official version of history that legitimised General Suharto’s coup and the mass killings that came in its wake.

Hundreds of thousands were murdered or imprisoned.

Prof Anderson’s quest for truth was rewarded with a decade long ban.

After which he strolled into the study of the Philippines and Thailand.

He admires Amir Muhammad's documentaries. In fact he would quote from scenes of The Last Communist.

And although I had not only seen the documentary several times, but had reviewed it, I could not keep up with his enthusiasm for it. There was a sparkle in his eyes, spiced with a cheeky grin, when he spoke about Malaysians and our ever-evolving region.

While it is easier to stroll in Central Market than it is on the streets, eventually we settled down to talk. In typical Malaysian style; why walk when you can sit.

Ben might strike the man on the street as an ordinary tourist, an orang putih. In fact he so objected to being called this while in Indonesia that he coined a new term.

“I said, look at my colour.It’s pink, blotchy with bits of yellow and brown. It’s more of the colour of an albino kerbau, bule,” he told a local audience recently.

Amazingly, the word entered popular usage.

At this lecture, he revealed something of the deep ties he has to this part of the globe. It was prompted by a well meaning academic who welcomed him as an “outsider”.

Not only was he born in China but his father was born in Penang.

And the house that his grandfather built still stands on Penang Hill.

Perhaps it is this knowledge of his own complex origins that enables him to have such insight and to tell such great stories.

A man to stroll with for sure.

● Sharaad Kuttan is a journalist, human rights activist and tourist. Recently he spent a year in the Philippines and Thailand on Nippon Foundation’s Asian Public Intellectuals Fellowship programme. He walks a lot.

The Pedestrian - On the streets where they sleep

Thursday, April 16th, 2009 04:05:00

IT started to drizzle as I headed back to my hotel down the wide riverside walk along one of Phnom Penh’s more well trod streets. Cambodia’s famed Foreign Correspondents’ Club sits elegantly along this road.

Here the journalist Nate Thayer would have regaled many about his interview with the infamous Pol Pot, one of the principle authors of his tiny nation’s genocide.

Sharing this road are also some of the city’s poorer citizens who eke a living from the tourist trade. The promise of more rain was pushing all street life back into cafes, some huddling in any available shelter.

But the street kids who saw me rushing past on the opposite and rain-drenched side of the boulevard were unstoppable.

They headed straight for me. Pestering me for money, I decided instead to buy some fruits from a nearby vendor.

With my plastic bag of fruits held out before me, I suggested, in the universal language of hand gestures, that each kid take a fruit each.

The children did well at first. Each in turn, one little hand at a time, popped into the bag and pulled of a single fruit.

Then one kid decided that having two hands, he’d use both of them.

His cleverness was amply rewarded; first with smile at having two fruits, then with horror, as the other kids went wild with envy or desperation.

It was a feeding frenzy that broke the bag and sent fruits scattering across the walkway.

I could not keep track of all that was happening but I was soon confronted by the luckless many who begged me for more.

Not wanting a repeat performance, I resigned myself to the fact that I was in no position to impose any order on the situation.

I was too much of an outsider. I did not share their language and I certainly did not inspire fear, respect or love in anybody.

So I went back to the street vendor, bought more fruits but this time, I promptly handed the bag back to him and asked him, again in my less than fluent hand gestures, to distribute the fruits to the kids.

Ignored, I quick stepped peacefully back to the hotel. I thought to myself; how fragile my elegant system of redistribution was.

If only that kid did not put both his hands in the bag, the system would have worked until at least the fruits ran out.

At which point I could have bought more. My approach might have been. in my mind at least, elegant, but it is far from sustainable.

Moreover, I don’t generally expect much from street kids. If they are insistent and pester, it’s only because their lives are so hard.

Their lives seem so radically different from the security and comfort of my own childhood. When living in Quezon City in the Philippines for more than half a year, I was able to learn the names of the kids on my street.

And learned something of their personalities too. I still remember five-year-old Angelica, who was nothing like her name suggested. And Salvadore, who repeated the phrase “I am hungry” out of habit, so much so that he’d say it even while stuffing his face. And the boy I called “Fatty”, who lived on the highly sugared dregs from unfinished drinks at the local Coffee Bean.

As far as I was concerned, he was pulling the rug from under his own trade. I recall all this for a purpose. Some years ago, two friends of mine adopted children from Cambodia, effectively rescuing them from a life on the streets.

Their love for the children, four siblings in all, has expanded into a project to help many more children back in Cambodia. They started a project to help the community from which their children came from.

If you have access to the Net, you can see something of their good work on www.riverkidsproject.org. This is what I would call a sustainable approach to helping street kids.

As well as others in poverty or at risk. Their effort, while quiet, have benefited from media attention. It stands in stark contrast to the media-driven celebrity adoptions which occupy far too much of our attention.

● Sharaad Kuttan has no children of his own but has tremendous respect for those who lavish care on all kids, including those brought into the world by others.