Adam Yamey's Blog: YAMEY, page 219

Theatrical haiku

[image error]

 

People enter keenly

The auditorium fills

Let the show begin

 

Auditorium of the Bridge Theatre, London

Captured by the British

[image error]

 

This true story in this recently published book covers three contintents:

* It concerns the adventures of an educated South African, who was captured by the British during the Boer war (1899-1902)

* The prisoner of war (POW) was held in prison camps in what was then British India.

*Whilst in Captivity, he visited Indian localities such as Madras, Trichinopoly, Kolar, Amritsar, and Bangalore. Being observant, he made notes on what he experienced. His observations form the centrepiece of this book, which is also rich in South African history.

* The POW’s descriptions of Bangalore in 1901 are particularly detailed, and will fascinate anyone who knows the city today

* This book will appeal to anyone interested in the histories of South Africa and/or India 

 

“IMPRISONED IN INDIA” by Adam Yamey

is available as a paperback (ISBN: 9780244826161) at:

http://www.lulu.com/shop/adam-yamey/imprisoned-in-india/paperback/product-24280162.html

For readers in India: https://pothi.com/pothi/book/adam-yamey-imprisoned-india

and on Kindle

Veggie burgers and other creatures

[image error]

The popularity of vegetarianism and its relative veganism has greatly increased in the western world in recent years, and is still increasing. Popular reasons for abandoning the consumption of meat and/or products derived from animals (e.g. milk and eggs) include seemingly virtuous reasons such as love of animals and a desire to protect the world’s climate.

On the 23rd of July 1939, one world-famous vegetarian wrote a letter to another equally well-known vegetarian. Mahatma Gandhi wrote to Adolf Hitler. Here it is in a much abbreviated form (from: https://www.mkgandhi.org/letters/hitler_ltr1.htm):

“ DEAR FRIEND,

That I address you as a friend is no formality. I own no foes.

… We have no doubt about your bravery or devotion to your fatherland, nor do we believe that you are the monster described by your opponents. But your own writings and pronouncements and those of your friends and admirers leave no room for doubt that many of your acts are monstrous and unbecoming of human dignity, especially in the estimation of men like me who believe in universal friendliness

… I, therefore, appeal to you in the name of humanity to stop the war. You will lose nothing by referring all the matters of dispute between you and Great Britain to an international tribunal of your joint choice

… You know that not long ago I made an appeal to every Briton to accept my method of non-violent resistance.

… During this season when the hearts of the peoples of Europe yearn for peace, we have suspended even our own peaceful struggle. Is it too much to ask you to make an effort for peace during a time which may mean nothing to you personally but which must mean much to the millions of Europeans whose dumb cry for peace I hear, for my ears are attended to hearing the dumb millions? …

I am,

Your sincere friend,

M. K. GANDHI “

The letter never reached Hitler; it was intercepted by the British in India.

I have no idea what the monster Adolf Hitler had to say about vegetarianism, but the saintly and peace-loving Gandhi wrote much about his abstinence from meat. For example, in 1932 he wrote :

“ I do feel that spiritual progress does demand at some stage that we should cease to

kill our fellow creatures for the satisfaction of our bodily wants. The beautiful lines

of Goldsmith occurs to me as I tell you of my vegetarian fad:

‘No flocks that range the valley free

To slaughter I condemn;

Taught by the Power that pities me

I learn to pity them’ “

(see: https://www.mkgandhi.org/ebks/moralbasis_vegetarianism.pdf)

And at another time:

“ “It is very significant that some of the most thoughtful and cultured men are partisans of a pure vegetable diet.” “.

Maybe, he was thinking of the man of culture, Bernard Shaw, rather than Adolf Hitler!

Returning to the present day and the increasing appetite for meatless and dairy-free food, let us consider the current desire for vegetarian products to resemble meat products. Supermarket shelves are filling up with veggie burgers, meatless steaks, meatless meat balls, meatless shawarma, and many other products made to resemble meat without containing it. Recently, I was in a Chinese restaurant, which offered diners vegetarian chicken and vegetarian duck dishes. This yearning for vegetarian products to be named like and to look like meat products is absurd,

There are plenty of delicious vegetarian dishes that are not made to resemble foods that usually contain meat. Middle-Eastern and Turkish cuisine, for example, offer vegetarian eaters delights such as: humous, fattoush, Imam Bayildi, Mutabbel (an aubergine dish), falaffel, stuffed peppers,etc. Even the French, who until recently have not been overly attracted to vegetarianism, have a traditional dish perfect for vegetarians: ratatouille. As for Indian cuisine, there is a plethora of dishes that are vegetarian and do not try to appear like meat. In India, the land where Gandhi was born, vegetarianism is a way of life, rather than a changed lifestyle, for hundreds of millions of people. This has been the case in India for many millennia.

To conclude, what I am trying to say is that if you wish to abandon eating meat for whatever reason, then you might as well abandon the desire to eat things that look like meat, but are not. If you are adopting vegetarianism, then enjoy meatless dishes for their own sake, not because they remind you of meat! Bon apetit!

Picture source: tesco.com

My artistic mother

[image error]

 

My late mother died at the age of 60 in 1980. Her mother, who was born late in the 19th century in South Africa, held an old-fashioned opinion that girls should not attend university however bright they were. My mother would certainly have been able to cope with a university course of study, but, instead, she enrolled in the prestigious Michaelis  School of Fine Art in Cape Town. Founded in 1925, it is now ironically a department of the University of Cape Town.

Mom studied commercial art. Her first employment was hand painting posters, advertising cinema films. When I began visiting India in the 1990s, many film posters were still being painted by hand. Often, we saw workers perched on rickety bamboo scaffolding, painting the details of huge posters. Two years ago while visiting Bhuj in Kutch (part of Gujarat), we found a workshop where two men produced hand painted posters. They told us that the demand for these was dying out rapidly. It is interesting to note that, like my mother, the great Indian artist MF Hussain began his creative life as a painter of cinema posters.

Returning to my mother, she designed and painted advertising material for the Red Cross in Cape Town during WW2. In 1947, she followed her fiancé, my father, to the UK. She married in 1948, and I arrived a few years later. According to my father, Mom took painting classes with the the famous Sir Stanley Spencer (1891-1959).  Sometime after that, she began creating sculptures.

When I was born, I had a torticollis (twisting of muscles of the neck beyond their normal position) that caused my head to be bent to one side. At that time in the early 1950s, the doctors told my mother that there was nothing to be done about this, and we would just have to live with it. My feisty mother refused to believe this. Every day, she manipulated my head and neck and gradually corrected the situation. Whether it was this manipulation that caused my mother to become a sculptor, I cannot say. However, one of her first sculpures was a terracotta mother and child, which she reproduced much later as an alabaster carving (see photo above).

When I was a young child, my mother used to attend the sculture studios at the St Martin School of Art in London’s Tottenham Court Road. She was not a student; she used the facilities and received advice from other sculptors including Philip King and Antony Caro. At that time, she became a close friend of the sculptor Dame Elizabeth Frink, who visited our home regularly. At St Martins, Mom learnt how to weld and work with metal. She created several quite attractive abstract metal artworks. Being a perfectionist, she destroyed much of what she made, but not before having it photographed by a competent photographer. Sadly, these photos have gone missing.

By the time I was a teenager, my mother had ceased working at St Martins, possibly not of her own volition. She rented a large garage in Golders Green and used it as a studio, where she created huge abstract sculptures in timber. She found working on her own to be lonely. However, without the benefit of proper lifting equipment, she produced quite a few sculptures.

Around about 1970, Mom began complaining of back pains, which she thought were the result of the heavy work she was doing in her garage. She abandoned the garage and more or less stopped creating any artworks except for a very few abstract pen and ink drawings, which she considered good enough to be framed.

The back pains continued. My mother became disillusioned with the contemporary art scene. She was familiar with the great renaissance  works of art which she visited every year in Florence (Italy), and comparing these with what she and her contemporaries were producing added to her disinclination to produce any more art of her own. For the last ten years of her life, Mom continued to search (unsuccessfully) for an interest to replace the creation of art. Tragically, she died young because of a cancer, which might well have been contributing to her long-lasting back pain.

Whatever the reason, if an artist loses the urge to create, it must produce a huge hole in his or her life, something like losing a loved one.

Hard sell

[image error]

 

An engraving of the Tower of Babel by Dolf Rieser (see: More about Dolf Rieser) used to hang overlooking the first landing of the staircase in our family home in north-west London.

In my thirties I worked as a dentist and lived in north Kent. Almost every weekend, I used to drive to visit my widowed father in our family home. On one of these visits I noticed a box lying on the landing beneath the Tower of Babel engraving. It was an unopened, sealed box containing a dental water pik. This is a device that can be used to pulse tiny jets of water between neighbouring teeth in order to dislodge deposits of dental plaque (bacterial debris). It has proved to be a far less effective method of removing plague than dental floss, which itself is less eggective than the use of  tiny interdental brushes. I was a bit surprised that my father had bought a water pik as he is not a lover of gadgets.

For several weeks after I first noticed the unopened package, I kept returning to my family home and seeing the unopened package, which was gradually becoming covered with dust. Eventually, I asked my father about it.

He told me that each time he visited his dentist, ‘D’, he was asked to purchase one of these water piks. After a series of visits, he paid out almost £100 to buy one. I asked him why he had wasted his money on something he was not going to use. He said:

“D kept on pestering me to buy one. He was getting on my nerves, so to shut him up I bought one. I have no intention of using it.”

No doubt profit was not the only motive for D wanting my father to own a water pik, and he might have been surprised by my father’s reason for buying one, namely to put an end to his ‘hard sell’.

 

To see the Tower of Babel engraving, click: HERE

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

 

A heron by the water

[image error]

 

You can never tell

What you might chance to see

When walking in the park

 

A heron in London’s Regents Park

Urban animals

[image error]

Exactly when great cities were founded is often unclear. However, sometimes there is a myth involving the animal world that is associated with the genesis of a great city. In the case of Rome (Italy), the story of Romulus and Remus and the wolf that suckled them is too well-known to be repeated here. If you do not know it, read about it HERE .

The great city of Ahmedabad in Gujarat (India) was founded in the 15th century AD by Ahmed Shah, who governed the Sultanate of Gujarat  from 1411 until  1442. According to the writers Achyut Yagnik and Suchitra Sheth in their book Ahmedabad: From Royal City to Megacity:

“One popular myth says that Ahmed Shah went hunting one day on the banks of the Sabarmati and saw a hare chasing a dog. Amazed by the the unusual role reversal and interpreting it as an auspicious omen, Ahmed Shah decided to found a city at that spot by the river“.

This kind of myth in which a predator is chased by its prey is shared by several other cities including Malacca (now in Malaysia), Chandrapur (in Maharashtra), and the ancient city of Vijaynagara (in Karnataka). In the case of Malacca, a mouse deer being chased by a dog managed to push its pursuer into a river (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandrapur) . As for Chandrapur, there was a hare chasing a dog. In each case, a city was founded on the spot where these unusual occurrences were reported.

Vijanagara on the banks of the River Tungabadra thrived from the 14th century until the 16th century and was during its heyday one of the largest and richest cities of its time.  Today, its extensive, impressive, and attractive ruins can be explored by visitors to Hampi (near the city of Hospet). According to Robert Sewell (1845-1925) in his A Forgotten Empire (first published 1900), a chieftain Deva Raya (aka ‘Deorao’) was:

“… one day hunting amongst the mountains south of the river when a hare, instead of fleeing from his dogs, flew at them and bit them…”

When Deva Raya told the sage Vidyaranya about this incident, the wise man told him to build a city on this spot. That was in 1336 AD, and the city became Vijaynagara. In another version of  this story, as related by Ratnakar Sadasyula in his recently published book City of Victory says that the hare attacking the dogs (at the place Vijaynagara was started) was seen by the brothers Harihara and Bukka, who were the first two rulers of the Empire of Vijaynagara (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harihara_I). It matters not who actually witnessed this extraordinary attack of the dogs by a hare. What is interesting  is that the locations of several cities has been ascribed to the siting of  prey pursuing its predator(s). 

 

Picture source: wikipedia

An automobile in Albania

[image error]

This is an extract from my book “REDISCOVERING ALBANIA” (ISBN: 978-1326807108). The extract describes a visit to a historic town and problems with a rented car.

“When we have hired cars in the past, we have been presented with a car which is almost new and totally flawless. This was not the case with Enterprise at Tirana’s airport. We had ordered a Tata Indica car – I had chosen it because of the price and also because I had not driven an Indian car since 1994, the first and only time that I ever drove in India. Our Tata was distinctly tatty in appearance. It was covered in scratches and dents, all of which were carefully noted and photographed by the Enterprise representative and me. The upholstery was clean but looked well worn. He told us that the car was “quite new”; it had “…only done about 32,000 kilometres”. Dubious at first, I realised later that this unprepossessing vehicle was just the job for the terrain that we were going to traverse.

I had not driven for two years, the last time being when we hired a car in Palermo (Sicily) in 2014. However, I soon got into the swing of driving. I was pleased that we had not hired the car from an office in Tirana, where traffic is heavy, but from the airport where traffic is light. Soon, we left the main Tirana to Shkodër ‘highway’, and then began winding our way uphill to the small town of Krujë, which is where Albania’s hero Skanderbeg had his headquarters while he was combatting the invasion of the Ottomans.

Skanderbeg, the son of a noble-man called Kastrioti, was taken forcibly by the Turks to Turkey as a young boy (as many Christian youths were in that time). He was converted to Islam, educated as a soldier, and became a good fighter in the Ottoman Army. In 1443, aged 38, Skanderbeg along with several other Albanian soldiers abandoned the Turks. Soon, he took command of the Castle at Krujë, which became his headquarters from where he harassed the Ottomans, who were trying to invade what is now Albania. After many military exploits both in Italy and in Albania, Skanderbeg finally succumbed to malaria in 1468. This is a very brief account of the career of a man who saved Western Europe from becoming part of the Ottoman Empire. Albania did become part of the Empire, but in the words of a guidebook published in 1969 by Albturist, the state tourist agency of Albania:

“Although their heroic efforts were not crowned with final victory, the Albanian people did not kneel down. Throughout the centuries that followed, our people continued their resistance against the Ottoman feudal regime.”  

The road became steeper and steeper until we entered the town in which level ground is a rarity. We parked the car on a steeply sloping street and made our way to a café, whose terrace provided a great view of the town’s castle, which overlooked us, and the old bazaar, which was several metres below us. From where we were sitting we saw one or two elderly people wearing what looked to us like traditional costumes, but most people were dressed in modern clothing.

We made our way along the shiny cobbled street that runs between the two lines of shops that make up the old bazaar. This has been extended since I saw it in 1984, but the extension has been made to look as if it were original. As in 1984, all of the shops in the bazaar are selling goods aimed at tourists: everything from tasteless ‘tat’ to some very lovely antiques. One particular shop contained superb examples of traditional Albanian handicrafts, some pieces including some wooden cradles for babies were quite old. Some weeks later in Tirana, we met, quite by chance, the shop owner’s cousin, the daughter-in-law of one of Albania’s foremost artists. Although the bazaar resembles what I remembered from my first visit in 1984, the town is filled with new buildings, including mosques and churches, which might have existed before Enver Hoxha destroyed them, but are now reconstructed or entirely new. Many but not all of the old Ottoman era buildings that made Krujë so attractive to me in 1984 have been demolished to make way for newer mostly less-attractive constructions. Nevertheless, Krujë, nestling in the wooded hills that surround it, is still a lovely place to visit.

After stumbling through the cobbled market, we began climbing the path that leads to the castle complex. On our way we passed an old (Ottoman?) structure that housed what must have once been the outlet for a spring. It was filled with fragments of old carvings including an eight-pointed star, and just above the outlet for the water two animals (lions?) facing each other.  Nearby, two young boys selling small round green plums asked where we were from, and then tried to sell us some of their fruit. Just before we reached the entrance to the castle, we came across a man sitting on a wall selling books. He was the author of the various volumes that he had set out for sale. We said hello to him, and told him that we would have a look at his books after we had visited the castle.

Parts of the vast area of the interior of the castle walls are still inhabited. Much of the space is covered with ruins of what had originally been Skanderbeg’s castle and then later the Ottomans’. These ruins include a solitary watchtower and the base of a large minaret. We had read that there was a Bektashi mosque, the Tekke (‘teqe’ in Albanian) of Dollma, in the grounds. A young man offered to guide us to it. Because the way to it was extremely rough and Lopa had a bad ankle, she decided to wait for me while I went to see the mosque. The young man explained to me (in good English) that he is a Bektashi, a member of a ‘sect’ of Muslims (although many Muslims disclaim them) that is halfway between Shia and Sufi. It is particularly popular in Albania, Bulgaria, and Anatolia. Unemployed as so many Albanian graduates are, he spends his time looking after the tekke and its surroundings. On our way along the path to the tekke, we met a woman, aged about 30, with her small child. She spoke some English, but mainly gossiped in Albanian with my new acquaintance. We stood next to what looked to me like an Ottoman hammam or bathhouse. It was, but it has been heavily restored with bright new roof tiles that detract from its character and beauty. After the woman left, he explained that when she had been orphaned, his family had informally adopted her and brought her up as a daughter.

The 18th century tekke is in good state of preservation. By the way, a tekke is a gathering place for Sufi and Bektashi believers. Its interior walls and ceilings are covered with delicately painted frescos and lines of Arabic or Turkish calligraphy. There are several tombs of dervishes within the mosque, and also some outside it in its grounds. Near the tekke, I saw some old stone fragments that looked as if once they had been part of an earlier structure, maybe a church. My guide introduced me to an elder man who lives in a recently built circular meeting place next to the mosque. The old man, I was told, had spent 12 years in prison during the Communist era simply because he was a Bektashi adherent. Some years ago I showed my friend Bejtulla Destani, an academic from Kosovo, pictures in a book by Albert Mahuzier who visited Albania in the early 1960s, in the years before Enver Hoxha outlawed religion. The book included a photograph of the imam or priest of the tekke in Gjirokastër. Without hesitating, Bejtulla said that it was most likely that that man would have been killed by Hoxha’s people soon after 1967.

The visit to the tekke took rather longer than I had anticipated. As we were making our way back to where I had left Lopa, a security man came rushing towards me shouting: “Mister Adam?” I nodded, and he led me not to where I had left my wife, but instead to the Ethnographic Museum, where Lopa was passing the time and also becoming concerned that I might have been kidnapped or worse. After being reunited, I took a look around the museum which was not only interesting on account of its exhibits, but also because it was housed in a very old Ottoman era building.

Our way back to the castle entrance took us past the impressive but incongruous fortress-like building, built in 1982 by the Communists to house a museum or mausoleum to honour Skanderbeg. I did not enter it in 1984, and not on this visit (because it is closed on Mondays). When we emerged from the castle, we stopped by the man selling books. He introduced himself as Professor Baki Dollma (he was related to the Dollma family after whom the tekke is named), a professor of history. Most of his books are in Albanian. We bought a couple that contained some English and were related to the history of Krujë. When he learnt that I also write books, the professor became very friendly, and kept addressing me as ‘Professor’.

We left the amiable professor, and returned to our car. I turned the ignition key, and nothing happened. I tried several times, and then assumed that we had been given a dud hire car. I rang Enterprise, and explained the situation, and was told that someone would ring me back in a few minutes. When this happened, I was asked if I had used the remote control. I told the person on the ‘phone that I had not the remotest idea of what she was talking about. I was told to look under the driver’s seat where I would find a little box on a cable, and that I should always press a blue button on it before starting the car. It worked. However, it would have been helpful to have known about this security feature when we took possession of the vehicle.”

 

Enjoyed the extract? Then read more!   Buy a copy of “REDISCOVERING ALBANIA” by Adam Yamey. It is available from on-line bookstores such as Amazon, bookdepository.com, lulu.com, and as an e-book on Kindle

What is in a name?

[image error]

 

An old mosaic adorns the facade of the big Apple store on London’s Regent Street. It harks back to the time long ago when the building housing the store was a London Branch of a big insurance company. The mosaic was assembled and installed long before the great Russian Revolution of 1917. Various cities are named on the mosaic. One of these is St Petersburg. After the revolution , St Petersburg was renamed ‘Petrograd’ and then ‘Leningrad’, which remaine dits name until the 1990s when the city reverted to being ‘St Petersburg’. During my childhood and early adulthood, St Petersburg was ‘Leningrad’. Whenever I passed that mosaic, I used to marvel that the city’s old name remained unchanged on the facade of the building. It was a memory of historic times. Now, by chance, it is up to date.

Many of the readers of this blog will have realised that I visit India regularly. Most people know that Bombay is now known as ‘Mumbai’. Actually, speakers of Marathi and Gujarati have always called it that, but often still call it Bombay when speaking in English.

Madras has become Chennai. So what should one ask for when ordering Chicken Madras, which appears on many menus in Britain’s Indian restaurants?

In Karnataka, Bangalore has become Bengaluru, Mysore is now Mysuru, and Halebid is Halebidu. When I bought a bus ticket to Gulbarga in northern Karnataka, I was puzzled to see I had been issued with a ticket to Kalaburgi. This turns out to be the new name for Gulbarga.

Allahabad is now Prayagraj, a name that removes the Islamic flavour of its former name. There are moves afoot to de-islmamicise the name of Ahmedabad in Gujarat. The proposed name for the city founded by Ahmed is ‘Karnavati’, but the change has not yet been enforced.

Whether these changes of Indian place names will stick remains to be seen. Who can say whether they will revert like Leningrad that became St Petersburg again?

Haiku on the grill

[image error]

 

Enjoyable and healthy,

Highly satisfactory:

Grill’d veg, of course