When Mother Closes Her Eyes (Satis Shroff)

When Mother Closes Her Eyes (Satis Shroff)

When mother closes her eyes,
She sees everything in its place
In the kingdom of Nepal.
She sees the highest building in Kathmandu,
The King’s Narayanhiti palace.
It looms higher than the dharara,
Swayambhu, Taleju and Pashupati,
For therein lives Vishnu,
Whom the Hindus call the unconquerable preserver.

The conqueror of Nepal?
No, that was his ancestor Prithvi Narayan Shah,
A king of Gorkha.
Vishnu is the preserver of the world,
With qualities of mercy and goodness.
Vishnu is all-pervading and self existent,
Visits the Nepal’s remote districts
In a helicopter with his consort and militia.
He inaugurates building
Factories and events.
Vishnu dissolves the parliament too,
For the sake of his kingdom.
His subjects and worshippers are, of late, divided.
Have Ravana and his demons besieged his land?

When mother opens her eyes,
She sees Vishnu still slumbering
On his bed of Sesha, the serpent
In the pools of Budanilkantha and Balaju.

Where is the Creator?
When will he wake up from his eternal sleep?
Only Bhairab’s destruction of the Himalayan world is to be seen.
Much blood has been shed between the decades and the centuries.
The mound of noses and ears of the vanquished at Kirtipur,
The shot and mutilated at the Kot massacre,
The revolution in front of the Narayanhiti Palace,
When Nepalis screamed and died for democracy.
And now the corpses of the Maobadis,
Civilians and Nepali security men.

Hush! Sleeping Gods should not be awakened.
-------------------------------------------------------

A DISRUPTED LIFE (Satis Shroff)

I bought some buns and bread at the local bakery
And met our elderly neighbour Frau Nelles
She looked well-dressed and walked with a careful gait,
Up the Pochgasse having done her errands.
She greeted in German with ‘Guten morgen.’
Sighed and said, ‘ Wissen Sie,
I feel a wave of sadness sweep over me.’
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘Today is our wedding anniversary.’

‘Is it that bad?’ I whispered.

‘Yes,’ she replied.
‘My husband just stares at me and says nothing,
And has that blank expression on his face.
This isn’t the optimistic, respected philology professor
I married thirty years ago.

He forgets everything.
Our birthdays, the anniversaries of our children, the seasons.
My husband has Alzheimer.
Es tut so weh!
Our double bed isn’t a bed of roses anymore,
It’s a bed of thorny roses.
I snatch a couple of hours of sleep,
When I can.

I don’t have a husband now,
I have a child,
That needs caring day and night.
I’ve become apprehensive.
I’m concerned when he coughs
Or when he stops to breathe.
He snores again,
And keeps me awake.
Has prostrate problems,
And is fragile.
Like Shakespeare aptly said:
‘Care keeps his watch in every old (wo)man’s eye,
And where care lodges, sleep will never lie.’

Neither can I live with myself,
Nor can I bring him to a home.

Glossary:
Guten morgen: good morning
Es tut so weh!: It pains such a lot

-----------------------------

KATHMANDU IS NEPAL (Satis Shroff)

There were two young men, brothers
Who left their homes
In the foothills of the Eastern Himalayas.
The older one, for his father had barked at him,
“Go to Nepal and never come home again.”
The younger, for he couldn’t bear the beatings
At the hands of his old man
.
The older brother sobbed and stifled his sorrow and anger
For Nepal was in fact Kathmandu,
With its colleges, universities, Education Ministry,
Temples, Rana-palaces and golden pagodas
And also its share of hippies, hashish, tourists,
Rising prices and expensive rooms to rent.

The younger brother went to Dharan,
And enlisted in the British Army depot
To become a Gurkha, a soldier in King Edwards Own Gurkha Rifles.
He came home the day became a recruit,
With a bald head, as though his father had died.
He looked forward to the parades and hardships
That went under the guise of physical exercises.
He thought of stern, merciless sergeants and corporals
Of soccer games and regimental drills
A young man’s thrill of war-films and scotch and Gurkha-rum evenings.
He’d heard it all from the Gurkhas who’s returned in the Dasain festivals.
There was Kunjo Lama his maternal cousin,
Who boasted of his judo-prowess and showed photos of his British gal,
A pale blonde from Chichester in an English living-room.

It was a glorious sunset,
The clouds blazing in scarlet and orange hues,
As the young man, riding on the back of a lorry,
Sacks full of rice and salt,
Stared at the Siwaliks and Mahabharat mountains
Dwindling behind him.
As the sun set in the Himalayas,
The shadows grew longer in the vales.
The young man saw the golden moon,
Shining from a cloudy sky.
The same moon he’d seen on a poster in his uncle’s kitchen
As he ate cross-legged his dal-bhat-shikar after the hand-washing ritual.
Was the moon a metaphor?
Was it his fate to travel to Kathmandu,
Leaving behind his childhood friends and relatives in the hills,
Who were struggling for their very existence,
In the foothills of the Kanchenjunga,
Where the peaks were not summits to be scaled, with or without oxygen,
But the abodes of the Gods and Goddesses.
A realm where bhuts and prets, boksas and boksis,
Demons and dakinis prevailed.

Glossary:
Ranas: a ruling class that usurped the throne and ruled for 104 years in Nepal
Gurkhas: Nepali soldiers serving in Nepalese, Indian and British armies
Dal-bhat: Linsen und Reis
Shikar: Fleischgericht
-------------------------------------------------
Patchwork Kaleidoscope (Satis Shroff)

What’s happening around us?
Lovers getting united,
Only to be separated.
Champagne glasses are raised.
We look deep into our eyes,
Our very souls.
There are reunions
But with other partners and families.
Patchwork families,
With tormented and bewildered children.
Marriages between gays and lesbians,
Adopted children to give the new bond
A family touch.

A colourful kaleidoscope unfurls before our eyes.
Do we know enough about relationships?
You and me.
Me and you.
Till death do us part?
Or till someone enters your or my life,
And takes my breath away.
Or yours.

******

The Street Where I Lived (Satis Shroff)

Three decades ago, I remember
I lived at the Maru Tole.
In my student days in Kathmandu,
Right near the Kastamandap,
The temple that gave Kathmandu
Its name.

The rent of the room wasn't much
But water was scarce.
There were always people
Gathered around the only tap.
There was a bathroom with a tub,
But nobody took a bath.
There was no running-water.
It was like in a fake ad.
When I washed myself in the morning
A few rats and cockroaches would scurry by.
It just wasn’t the same as my parents’ home.
An elderly Newar gentleman would sing,
A Sanskrit verse ‘Om jaya jagadisha hare.’

Nearby, you could hear the beat of the damaru,
The chiming of the temple bells,
The blowing of a conch to round up the morning prayers.

The entrance near the street was always open,
And the heavy wooden doors had the eyes
Of  the primordeal Buddha carved and painted on them,
As if to say--- God sees you everywhere:
Up in the hills, down in the plains,
When you’re alone, and in company.

The sahu, our landlord, was a lean Newar,
Who preferred traditional Nepali clothes to shirts and trousers.
He composed Nepali music for Radio Nepal
And his songs could be heard
In the evening programmes of the Valley radio.
He didn't care who lived in his house,
Didn't bother about repairing
Or renovating the rooms,
As long as they paid the monthly rent in rupees.

From the window, sans glass, which was normal,
I could see funeral-processions rushing
To the cremation ghats of the holy,
But filthy Bishnumati river.
Below my window lived a Dutch man
With a Sherpa woman.
One day I opened the third page of The Rising Nepal
And saw my neighbour from the Netherlands:
Nabbed by the police and photographed by a city reporter.
The charge was ‘illegally smuggling hashish.’
After a few days he was in the Sherpa woman’s arms again.

People of tall stature always banged
Their heads on the house-entrances in Kathmandu.
The doors were meant for small Newaris,
Tamangs, Gurungs, Rais, Thakalis,
Not for tall plainsmen or westerners.
Many a rasta-haired Hippy cursed the wooden doors of Valley,
For they didn't give in, but the foreign skulls did.

After dinner I often strolled the streets of Maru Tole,
Didn't go far and entered a house
Where Led Zeppelin's music
Was oozing out of every old brick.
Man, this was groovy.
A semi-dark room with scarlet light,
Jimmy Hendrix, Santana posters,
And suddenly psychedelic colours,
Low tables and the sweet smell of charas.
Kathmandu's chocolate cake
Baked with plenty of hash and flower-power love
Did the rounds and so did the cannabis,
Passed on by friendly, blonde, red-headed, brunette,
Long and sticky-haired, roadies from the whole world,
Who donned gaudy Indian cotton clothes,
Spoke of nirvana, karma-cola and imitated tantric-sex.

For me, this was a fascinating scenario,
For I came from the foothills of the Eastern Himalayas,
Where the majestic peaks bore names like Jammu,
Kabru and Kanchenjunga.
I’d visited a Kindergarden run by western nuns
And an Irish boarding-school, which was originally a British cadet-school
With strict rules, canes on our young buttocks
If we broke the rules.
Discipline, obedience and no-nonsense.

The Christian Brothers of Ireland ruled the school with an iron fist.
Many a hill school-boy had to give up schooling,
When the poor parents couldn’t pay the exorbitant fees.
Drop outs had to join the Gurkhas, and fight India’s wars
With China in the Himalayas, against the Portugese in Goa,
In East Pakistan to help the Bengalis against the West Pakistanis,
In the Falklands on Her Majesty’s Service against the Argentinians,
And Nepal’s numerous UN Peace Keeping Missions.

Later I joined another school run by American priests,
Which was much more liberal and democratic.
We did a play called the Judgement at Nuremburg
And our music teacher was a colossal bloke from Germany.
His blonde son David gave us free shaves
With his Papa’s electric Rasierapparat.
The school-band played marching songs with a lot of oomph.

******

The Street Where I Live (Satis Shroff)

The street where I live with my family is the Pochgasse.

It lies to the north of Freiburg, in Zähringen.
Zähringen has a castle ruin, which is a tourist attraction.
In the early days they dug for silver ores below the castle.
The ores were brought to the 'Poche',
Where they separated the silver from the ore
By melting them at high temperatures in the charcoal-kilns.

Our house is fondly remembered as ‘the milk shop of family Wichmann.’
People used to tell us often,
“Gel, ihr wohnt da, wo früher die Wichmanns gewohnt haben?“

Frau Sanders, who lives at the charcoal-street, said to me,
'I went there often to buy milk.'
I tried to imagine our house with cows, big milk-cans and haystacks.
At the moment it smells of smoked-fish.
The adjacent barn has been rented to a German,
Who wears his spectacles on the tip of his nose,
He lisps and tells stories of the old times in Zähringen.
He smokes trout from the Black Forest thrice a year.
I think he sells them, otherwise he wouldn't smoke so many fishes.
He always hands me a freshly smoked trout
Wrapped on a piece of German newspaper.
I thank him and hand him a bottle of Weissherbst from our cellar.

My one-eyed neighbour Herr Huber and I relish the trouts.
He drives an old, broken-down car and has two big, black Rotweiler dogs.
He calls them Zeus and Apollo.
They're nice and always leashed.
At noon, when Herr Huber is away, and they have hunger,
You hear blood-curdling howls reminiscent of the hound of Baskerville.

When I sit and read a book on the terrace,
Frau Keller greets me with a friendly 'Hallochen!' from the street.
She has short, silvery hair and has a warm smile across her face.
She's an ethnic German from Romania.
I like her soft-spoken East Bloc accent.
Her friendliness is disarming even though she has a lot of pain.
She used to go walking in the European countryside with her husband.
He’s dead and she undertakes only small walks in the Black Forest now.

Then there are two Frau Maiers, a thin and an obese one.
The obese one is fighting a losing battle with her breath and varicose veins.
One can plainly see that she has a tough time
Walking up the steep and narrow Pochgasse.
Bur her pain-filled countenance disappears,
When she emits a courageous smile and greets me.
It's like watching the sun breaking
Through the sky on a clouded, winter morning day.
‘One has to walk as long as one can, night wahr?’ she says.

The thin Frau Maier wears spectacles and is over 70,
Likes to chat about the weather and the day's headlines.
She certainly is going strong.
She knows every Zähringer,
And everyone knows her.
In the afternoon I hear soft piano melodies,
When my son Julian does his music exercises.
The tones of the piano mingle with bird-cries,
And suddenly one hears the loud noise of a lorry,
Transporting either furniture or building materials,
Up and down the Pochgasse.
A lot of expensive villas are under construction.

'Ach, Zähringen isn't what it was previously ' says Herr Flamm,
Who lives four houses down the street.
Herr Flamm knows Zähringen, for he and his grandparents were born here.
The entire Music Choir Zäringia, of which he's a member,
Has aging problems.
The choir sings only the old traditional songs.
Broadway songs, rap, hip-hop, gospels aren't traditional enough.
The German youth just keep away.
They've become Europeans.

The Zähringer, as people living in Zähringen are wont to be called,
Are an active folk when it comes to organising things.
Every autumn there's a Hock around the St. Blasius church,
A get together, with Blasmusik, children's cries of joy,
The smell of waffel, noodle soup, roasted pork, sausages,
Fried potatoes and pizza lies in the air.

The ancestors of the people in Zähringer were charcoal-burners,
Who lived behind the castle.
One day the coal-burner discovered melted silver under his oven.
In those days there used to live a king, who'd fled to Kaisersstuhl.
He lived with his family in poverty.
The coal-burner went and gave the silver he'd found to the king.
The king was so impressed that he gave his daughter in marriage to the coal-burner,
As well as the land surrounding Freiburg.
The king named him the Herzog von Zähringen.
The Zähringer duke founded Freiburg and other castles.

Sometimes, we send our children to Herr Laule, the fat grocer.
The children like doing errands to Herrr Laule,
For he never forgets to reward them with candies.
The bespectacled Frau Laule, is stout and kind and both come from Waldkirch.
Hope they'll run the shop for years to come.
The children get a slice of Lyoner as a treat at the butcher Sumser's shop.
My daughter Natasha loves Lyoner.

There's a tunnel at the end of the Pochgasse.
The cars drive below and the ICE and Swiss trains above.
Young and elderly Germans come by and ask only one question:
„Wo, bitte, geht’s zum Zähringerburg?“
Where's the road to the Zähringen castle-ruins?

The castle was built in 1091 by Herzog Bertold V.
It was destroyed by war and fire.
What has remained is an 18 meter high tower,
With a commanding view of Freiburg.

Glossary:

Gasse: small lane
Köhler: charcoal-burner
Köhlerei: charcoal works
Weissherbst: a German wine
Blasmusic: brass band music
Burg: castle
Meiler: charcoal-kiln
Blaskapelle: brass-band
spanferkel: porkling
Herzog: Duke of Zähringen


THE HOLY COWS OF KATHMANDU (Satis Shroff)

Holy cow! The mayor of Kathmandu
Has done it.
Since ancient times a taboo
The free, nonchalant cows
Of Kathmandu were rounded up
In a rodeo by the Nepalese police.
Was it Nandi, Shiva's bull?
Or holy cows?
"They're cattle still",said the mayor.
"Straying cattle are not wanted".

Eighty-eight holy cows
Were auctioned
Not at Sotheby's
But in Kathmandu.
The auction yielded 64,460 rupees
Said the mayor of Kathmandu.

Cows that were a nuisance
To pedestrians and tourists at Thamel.
Cows that provided dung
And four other products:
Milk, yoghurt, butter and urine
For many a hearth.
Cows that gave urine
That the Hindus collected.
Cows that were sacred
And worshipped as the cow-mother.
Cows that were donated
And set free by Brahmins and Chettris
To set themselves free from sins.
Cows that marked the Gaijatra,
An eight-day homage to the dead.

It was a king, according to legend,
Who ordered cows to be set free
By families in mourning
In the streets of Kathmandu, Patan and Bhaktapur.
To share the bereaved pain of
The death of a beloved prince
And a sad mother and queen.

The children disguised themselves
As grotesque cows and motley figures
And danced to Nepalese music
To make the queen laugh,
And forget her tears.

Even today the bereaved
Families drive their cows
Through the streets of Kathmandu
On the day of Gaijatra:
The festival of the cows.
Despite the ecological control
On the cows of Kathmandu,
Lalitpur and Bhaktapur.

From ancient times
Kings, noblemen, pedestrians
Cyclists, pullcarts, cars,
Scooters and rickshaws,
The traffic snaked around the holy cows.

The umwelt-conscious mayor
Has made up his mind:
The cattle are obstructing the traffic
Long-haired Nepalese youth need a crew-cut
Horse-pulled carts and rickshaws must go.
They worsen sanitation
And environmental problems.
But the carpets and cars must stay.

Elephant-rides remain for the tourists
After all, we've developed
A yen for dollars, francs and marks.
Kathmandu is catching up
With the rest of the world.

Glossary:
Umwelt: German word for environment
Braahmins, Chettris: high castes in Hinduism
___________________________________________________________________


THE HILLS ARE EMPTY (Satis Shroff)

Where have all the young folk gone?
The men are in foreign armies
Serving strange masters.
The servile, pretty women
Have been enticed to India's brothels
And you ask me:
"Where have all the young folk gone?"
They went to survive
The coldness that has swept the land
The drought, famine
Poverty, nepotism and feudalism
And the curse that goes
Under the name of afno manchey'
And chakari.

Glossary:
afno manchey: one's own clan or own people in a set-up
chakari: service done in a feudal heirarchy system (Speicheleckerei) to attain personal gains
___________________________________________________________________

BACK TO THE VILLAGE (Satis Shroff)

Go back to the village
And order and a decree
With the blessing of the palace
To send the rural people home
And urbanised spectators to rural Nepal
Villagers who fled from the poverty
And the barrenness of their homes.
___________________________________________________________________

The Loss of Mental Metamorphosis (Satis Shroff)

The Loss of Mental Metamorphosis (Satis Shroff)

Eight Indians on the run,
Fifty Neonazis behind them.
'Deutschland den Deutschen,
Ausländer raus!
Hier regiert der nationale Widerstand!'
Roars from the throats of the Neos,
Beer in their blood,
Defiance in their sanguine eyes.

The puls races,
Adrenalin surges in the veins:
Fight or flight.
Naked angst.
Hyperventilation,
Tachycardy.
No one helps,
They just look on,
Like Bertold Brecht would say.
As the Jews were beated and transported,
To Auschwitz, Gürs or alsewhere.
The Indians run as fast
As their legs can carry them.
'Jaldi bhago!
Zindagi bachau!

The bald headed, overfed, pink Neos
Overrun the scared Indians.
What follows is the bashing
Of the underdogs in the German society.
Of migrants who love Deutschland.
Their only crime,
The colour of their complexion.
The police of Saxony's Mügeln come,
But are hesistant about the xenophobia
That has broken out.
The rightists agitate conspiratively,
Said the Verfassungsschutz in 2006.

In Mügeln
Akin to Hoyerswerda and Mölln.
The ethnic Germans peer and look away
At the brutality and intolerance
Unfurling before their eyes.
The teuro, the joblessness in the East
Has made them indifferent and complacent.

Give us more money to integrate the Neos,
In families, schools, communities,
Say some politicians.
Federalism and democracy is not inaction,
Where intolerance and racism rears its ugly head.
It happens from Mügeln to Mainz.
Anti-discrimination laws alone
Help neither the Wessies nor the Ossies.
A mental metamorphosis is in demand.
Have we Germans learned from history?
Haben wir, die Bürger, aus der Geschichte gelernt?
Alas, we've become complacent again.

Germany, Austria and Switzerland
Are striving for an European cultural identity,
Where foreign traditions and culture
Are the essence of togetherness,
Of Miteinander.
The enclaves of intolerance should remain
Ghosts of the past.
Liberalism, democracy, civilisation and society
Should be the order of the day.
Mental changes in our thinking processes,
Not mental molotovs,
Should be the cry of the day.


MENTAL MOLOTOVS (Satis Shroff)

When Hoyerswerda burns
They discuss about the asylum-seekers.
Peaceful, righteous Germans go
In the streets with candles.

When a house burns in Mölln
They discuss about bringing back
Soldiers from the dangers of Somalia.

At the Turkish funeral in Solingen
The Chancellor keeps away
And avoids thus
Rotten eggs and tomatoes
That might come his way.

When the trial comes
The former skinhead neonazi
Has a lot of hair.
He wears a two-piece suit,
Ties a tie around his neck
And looks oh-so-respectable.
He peers into the cameras
With clear blue eyes and says:
"I'm innocent and a victim
Of the modern industrial society."
And withdraws his statement.

The judges are lenient,
And the neo gets off on bail,
Gestures with his middle finger
And quips: "Leck mich am Arsch!"
As he speeds away in a car
Only to reappear with a Molotov
Like the Sphinx again.

"Ausländer Raus!
Deutschland den Deutschen!"
These are the slogans
Still making the rounds in 2006.

The old black and white flag
From the Third Reich
Raises no eyebrows
At soccer stadiums, streets and pubs.

It's fashionable again
To throw mental Molotovs
At blacks, browns, yellows,
And all non-Teutonics
At cocktails, chats
Stammtisch and in the streets
Against anything alien.

‘I don't like foreigners
I'll kill you,’ says a drunk
In broad daylight at the local Bahnhof.
Bharati Mukerjee a New Yorker writer
Once asked me in Freiburg:

'How does it feel
To be a non-Teutonic
In Germany?'
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

THE AGONY OF WAR (Satis Shroff)

Once upon a time there was a seventeen year old boy
Who lived in the Polish city of Danzig.
He was ordered to join the Waffen-SS,
Hitler’s elite division.
Oh, what an honour for a seventeen year old,
Almost a privilege to join the Waffen-SS.
The boy said, “Wir wurden von früh bis spät
Geschliffen und sollten
Zur Sau gemacht werden.”

A Russian grenade shrapnel brought his role
In the war to an abrupt end.
That was on April 20, 1945.
In the same evening,
He was brought to Meissen,
Where he came to know about his Vaterland’s defeat.
The war was lost long ago.
He realised how an ordinary soldier
Became helpless after being used as a tool in the war,
Following orders that didn’t demand heroism
In the brutal reality of war.

It was a streak of luck,
And his inability to ride a bicycle,
That saved his skin
At the Russian-held village of Niederlausitz.
His comrades rode the bicycle,
And he was obliged to give them fire-support
With a maschine-gun.
His seven comrades and the officer
Were slain by the Russians.
The only survivor was a boy
Of seventeen.
He abandoned his light maschine-gun,
And left the house of the bicycle-seller,
Through the backyard garden
With its creaky gate.

What were the chances in the days of the Third Reich
For a 17 year old boy named Günter Grass
To understand the world?
The BBC was a feindliche radio,
And Goebbels’ propaganda maschinery
Was in full swing.
There was no time to reflect in those days.
Fürcht und Elend im Dritten Reich,
Wrote Bertold Brecht later.
Why did he wait till he was almost eighty?
Why did he torment his soul all these years?
Why didn’t he tell the bitter truth,
About his tragi-comical role in the war
With the Waffen-SS?
He was a Hitlerjunge,
A young Nazi.
Faithful till the end.
A boy who was seduced by the Waffen-SS.
His excuse:
„Ich habe mich verführen lassen.“

The reality of the war brought
Endless death and suffering.
He felt the fear in his bones,
His eyes were opened at last.

Günter Grass is a figure,
You think you know well.
Yet he’s aloof
And you hardly know him,
This literary titan.
He breathes literature
And political engagement.
In his new book:
Beim Häuten der Zwiebeln
He confides he has lived from page to page,
And from book to book.

Is he a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde?
Doctor Faustus and Mephistopheles,
In the same breast?
Grass belongs to us,
For he has spent the time with us.
It was his personal weakness
Not to tell earlier.
He’s a playwright, director and actor
Of his own creativeness,
And tells his own tale.
His characters Oskar and Mahlke weren’t holy Joes.
It was his way of indirectly showing
What went inside him.
Ach, his true confession took time.
It was like peeling an onion with tears,
One layer after the other.
Better late than never.

******

Shakespeare Country and London's East End (Satis Shroff)

Shakespeare Country and London's East End (Satis Shroff, Freiburg)

Stratford-upon-Avon is a fascinating little town. We went to the spacious farmhouse which was the early home of William Shakespeare's wife: Anne Hathaway. It was a house made of wattle, stone and brick, the earliest part dating back to the 15th century. I had done a lot of Shakespeare at school and even performed ‘As you like it’ on stage, but Shakespeare’s spouse was not a theme then. However, there are scholars who have depicted her as a woman who reproached the Bard, and that she nagged, railed and even drove him away from her life, like Old Abe's nagging, dissatisfied wife, or for that matter Tolstoy's spouse.

Anyway, in Anne Hathaway's cottage garden, there were some local workmen busy repairing the stones, bricks between clipped box hedges and shrubs. You could only imagine that Shakespeare had once written about this very garden as: 'a world of pleasure in't. Here's flowers for you. Hot lavender, mints, savory, marjoram.'
Who wouldn't be moved and impressed by the Bard's sonnets), especially the ultimate statement of the doctrine of marriage as a spiritual discipline as depicted in Sonnet 116:

Love's not time's fool, though rosy
lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass
come.
Love alters not with his brief hours
and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of
doom.
If this be error and upon me
proved,
I never lived, nor no man (one) ever
loved.

But alas, it being still winter we could only hope and ask what Shelley would have asked:..'can Spring be far behind ?'

Nevertheless, I found delight at the thought that this was where William had wooed, and won, his beloved Anne Hathaway. The thatch-roofed cottage had a bed with a canopy, because 'if you slept with your mouth open, all sorts of insects, reptiles, mice and squirrels would drop in', we were told.

Off we went, curious as we were, to the Bard's house in the Henley Street, where he was born in 1564. How wonderful it was to be in Shakespeare's house, I thought. The birth­place was inherited by him and remained in the family, until the death of his sister Joan Hart, 1646. It was purchased for the British Nation for 3,000 pounds in 1847.

Life in Stratford was dull and boring, and Shakespeare left for London in 1586. He wrote 37 plays and 50 sonnets, which are still presented throughout the globe. His first play to be published was "Love's Labor's Lost" written in 1594. I found Stratford-upon-Avon extremely touristic but doubtlessly picturesque in its own right. Avon is the Celtic word for 'river', so if you said the Avon River, it would be obviously redundant. We undertook a quick march to the vicinity of the Holy Trinity church, where Shakespeare was buried, and took some photographs of the serene Avon and the church, before making it to Stratford town, to view the home of the Bard's favourite daughter Susanna and her husband Dr. John Hall. Hall's Croft was a fine Tudor half-timbered house, with fine Elizabethan and Jacobean furniture.

Shakespeare retired to Stratford in 1610 and lived at New Place, the second largest house in Stratford, which he purchased in 1597. We were told that the ambassadors of all nations pay their floral tributes on the grave of immortal Shakespeare on his Birthday celebrations even today.

"Even in winter it's full and there are long queues all over the place," said the guide.

We had to head for the town of Warwick to the north to get the car-route, so we told our London guide that we wanted to get off at East End. Her eyes popped out, and her eyebrows left off like two Harrier jets, her mouth opened and she asked, "East End? What on earth do you want to do at East End?"

We gulped because she'd said it so loud. She gave the impression that decent people didn't go to London’s East End. But we'd already made their our minds to go for dinner to 'little Calcutta', and she had to oblige.

We sped past a part of the 650 square miles of London area which had houses with chimneys, without smoke. Most of them managed to snooze along the way to London. You could see semi-detached houses and terraced houses, joined in rows.

We had a Bengali dinner in Jack the Ripper territory with pilau rice, peas, aloo, mutton, yoghurt, raw onions and masala everywhere, rounded up with sweet-meat: rasagollas, rasmalai just like in the Indian Subcontinent. The annual turnover of ‘Indian’, pardon me Bangladeshi, restaurants is more than 1.5 billion Sterling pounds, and they employ between 60,000 and 70,000 people.

After that I suddenly wanted to catch up on my Bollywood (Bombay as India’s Hollywood) film reading, which I'd had neglected since a long time, and bought: Asian Times, Indiamail, Cineblitz and some classical music. Claudia has developed a deep love for Indian and Nepali classical music because they possess an exhalted psychic and religious nature, and she can feel the music touching her deeply like a prayer, and she undergoes a lot of emotions whenever she hears classical music. I feel the same way.

After all, the music from the Hindustani subcontinent was over 4000 years old. It all began with the Sama Veda, which was recited with certain notes. Originally such recitations were performed with three notes, and later developed into a whole octave.

Music became a prayer. Humans tend to be in communion with God when we hear or play real music, and the musician identifies himself or herself with Godliness. And there are musicians who are able to awake and imbibe this godliness in their listeners. I loved to listen to the ragas and the talas. In a raga there are 72 scales, and every scale has 8, 10, 20, 30 ragas. Thousands of ragas are possible, and each of these ragas has its characteristics with ascending and descending scales. These ragas depend upon the time of day and season. And a classical musician improvised the instrumental raga compositions, with the result that the music is never the same. It's always changing, metamorphosing into something new.

Claudia and I prefer listening to such music rather than the noisy, vulgar music-cocktails that are actually lifted from the western hit charts, for want of inspiration, and dubbed in Hindi, giving them a cacophonous Indian slant. But the masses love them. ‘Hare Krishna, you are the greatest musician of this vurld’ was blaring from a cassette-recorder in a corner of the stuffy Asian shop. You could even buy, chew and spit your pan without causing eye-brows to be raised at the East End, not that we did it. It was a pucca bazaar with all the wallahs.

Claudia expressed her disgust in German with ‘Igit-igit!’ as a Bengali spat on the wall of an East Londoner Brick Lane house. A scarlet blotch on a creamy reddish house-wall.

I quipped, ‘Well, as long as the bloke doesn’t spit at us, it’s all right.’

It was dark by the time we went for a walk over the bridge across the Thames at Westmin­ster, which was floodlit, and there was a laser show in progress on the other side of the bridge. Big Ben struck 10pm and we took in the scenery around us, for it was our last night in London, before heading for the underground to Paddington.

We bade goodbye to Westminster and the scenic coloured lights of the Thames water­front.

After getting up at 8am we had the usual continental breakfast, and started from Paddington to Charing-cross, and eventually to Trafalgar Square, where we strolled and took snapshots of the out-sized British lions. We proceeded further towards Picadilly Circus and photographed the statues of Florence Nightingale and lots of other British motifs with pigeons shitting on their heads nonchalantly as usual.

What a romantic setting, with all those monumental buildings and cosmopolitan atmo­sphere, I thought. A coloured Bobby chatting and walking with a white colleague was keeping an eye on Picadilly's streets. I had to admit, I liked the idea and had to think of Freiburg in south west Germany, actually a provincial area, and rather conservative.

It would be impossible to have an Asian driving a Strassenbahn or an Asian working as a teacher with a civil-servant status, or even in the police department. But then, Germany didn't have colonies in Asia, and only in south-west Africa (Namibia), and as such no German Commonwealth. What with the kids of the GIs, and guest workers growing up in Germany, the influx of refugees from the whole world, including the boat-people of Vietnam, Bosnia and Croatia, ethnic Russians from Russia, Poland, former Czechoslovakia, Slovaks from Slovenia, Romanians, Albanians from Albania and Kosovo coming in, Germany is under Angelika Merkel trying to terms with its foreigners and grant them their rights like the rest of the Germans. In the past the migrants were only tolerated, but now Merkel's Christian Democratic Party (CDU) has brought out an integration program and she means business. The multicultural society is in their midst, even though most Germans fail to see it.

At Paddington I had to exchange another fifty euros at a bank counter. There was an Asian female behind the counter, and so I asked her where she originally came from. She felt uncomfortable, like when she was asked by an Indian scientist at the Goethe Institute in Freiburg, ‘Which-kuntry-are-you-from?’ The swarthy woman with fine features replied in a melodious voice, "Sri Lanka."

"How's the job?" I asked her.

"Oh, it's all right", she said without any enthusiasm.

We bought some sandwiches for the long wait at Gattwick airport and also because we thought about the not-so-good food in the air. The flight was at 16:35 and we'd already checked-out from our hotel. There were lots of young people waiting for the bus to Gattwick.

I left London with pleasant memories. I'd seen London by night and by day, by rain, mist and sunshine. The Londoners, be they commuters, conductors, policemen, beef-eaters, yeomen, bobbies and pedestrians had all been extremely polite and helpful.

As you went collecting the passengers for the flight to Düsseldorf and Frankfurt, you could see restaurants with names like: 'The Magic Wok', 'Marco Polo's Mongolian Barbecue,' followed by 'Flats to Let'.

The present generation of Britain travels a lot abroad and there are enough immigrants from all over the world, and predominantly from the old colonies who cater to the gastrono­mic delights of the British. The British export tikka masala chicken to India now.

"Run For Your Wife" was running at the Duchess Theatre, described as 'dottily hilarious' to 'superbly demented.'

Claudia and I arrived in Kensington Gardens. Collecting the baggage was indeed a tedious affair.

There was an interesting newscast by the BBC on the role of the British forces in Iraque. According to the Christian concept, wars are not just, but some wars are justified. Jewish opinion is divided, it was stated. A war waged in self-defence is only justified according to it. Is it justified to increase one's military field of influence, as in the case of the USA because of oil interests?

We were in Gattwick by then and ready for the check-in. I showed my passport to a young lady in uniform probably of Indian descent, who asked where my next stop would be.

"Frankfurt,", I replied. And she wished me 'a good journey' and all that jazz (hope you'll visit our country again).

It was 17:15pm when we went through customs and it was the same show as before. The detector gave a beep and I was obliged to open my handbag and dismantle my camera again.

The customs officer wanted to know what I had in the sealed round tin-box.

"It's purified butter: ghee", I told him.

"Gee, that must be good," he replied with a grin and went to the next passenger. A customs officer with a jolly sense of humour indeed.

We boarded the scarlet jet and were off. At 11,000metres We were flying over wonderful fluffy clouds. Their short flight dinner was over and We were at a height of 29,000 feet. As high as Mount Everest.

You could see the sundown: a blazing orange above the clouds, which became the horizon and suddenly the sun was obscured and We passed through heavy grey clouds, and it gradually became dark outside. The 'fasten-your-seat-belts' sign appeared and I could feel a mounting pressure in her ears. The flight back to Frankfurt was nevertheless pleasant in comparison to the flight to Gattwick.

"10,000 feet and landing in 10 minutes", said the captain. You could see only a few lights below. Was it a football field or was it a well-lit winter garden?

And suddenly the lights of Frankfurt appeared below.

"Cabin crew, take your seats for the landing, please", said the captain again.

We went past the sky-blue uniformed stewardesses and entered the Frankfurt-am-Main terminal and went through the German customs. There was a long queue in the 'non-EG' section. A cultural troupe from Ethopia or Somalia dressed in white tunics stood up front, mostly children, led by a few elderly people and a blonde manager, who was similarly dressed. The kids had crude ethnological musical instruments in their hands.
One of the Bundesgrenzschutz guards responsible for security at the airport asked his German colleague jokingly in German,"Are those all your kids?"

The young teutonic guard didn't like the joke, gave a laconic smile and changed the position of his Sturmgewehr, made in Oberndorf, a Swabian town near Rottweil, by Heckler & Koch (now a British firm).

I gave the khaki-clad customs officer her passport, who scrutinized it briefly and handed it back. She walked outside with her handbag to collect the main luggage which was somewhere in exit 415. Claudia and I were separated (different check-ins and exist) because I had an Asian passport and Claudia had a European one. It was a case of the Third World and the First World.

On Caroline Walter, When the Soul Leaves (Satis Shroff, Freiburg)

ON CAROLINE WALTER (Satis Shroff)

I took a walk to the old cemetery
With its cultural treasures,
And saw the Dance of Death
At the entrance of Michael’s chapel.

The gravestones expressed
The self-consciousness of the citizens.
There were many stories
That made their rounds
In the town of Freiburg.

I felt drawn to one gravestone
It was that of Caroline Walter
Lying on her bed of concrete,
Her head reposing on a big pillow.

She had aesthetic features
And wore a long dress.
Her left arm rested on her breast.
Her nose was elegantly long and pointed.
Her eyes were closed,
As though she’d fallen asleep
In the afternoon.
Her lips were well chiselled.
On her right hand
She held a book she’d been reading.

I discern the strings of a fiddle from the neighbourhood.

Fresh scarlet and pink roses
Lay under her chin,
As if she was taking in their scent
With her fine nostrils.

A breeze undulates the leaves on the floor
And disappears.

The expression on her face
Was serene and tranquil.
A lady in harmony and peace
With herself and the world
She lived in.
A Fräulein from a decent family.

*****

WHEN THE SOUL LEAVES (Satis Shroff)

Like Shakespeare said, 'All the world's a stage'
And we've played many different roles in our lives
In various places and scenarios.
As we grow old and ripe, our knowledge of the world grows.
We hold what we cannot see, smell, taste and touch in our memories.
We only have to walk down memory lane
To find the countless faces, places, sights and sounds that we have stored,
To be recalled and retrieved through association
In conversations with others
Or when we contemplate alone.

Why should elderly people be scared of social terror and aging?
Aging is a biological phenomenon.
We should be glad that we have lived useful lives,
Filled with good experiences.
The wonderful children that we have created,
The very gems of our genes,
Each so individual in their personalities.
The house we lived in and filled
With love, laughter, songs and music.
The parents and grand-parents, friends and relatives
We have had the time to share with.
But we should be able to assert our exit from this earthly existence
In the manner that we desire,
And not leave it in the hands
Of an intensive life-extension unit.

Let us dwell on common experiences and encounters
That we can take with us,
When the massless soul leaves the body
And races with the speed of light
Towards space and becomes unified
With the ever expanding, timeless cosmos.

-----------------------------------------

Let's Live Together, Despite the Differences (Satis Shroff)

Eva Gerhards, Satis Shroff & Toni Hagen at a pub in Freiburg

Let’s Live Together, Despite the Differences

(Satis Shroff, Freiburg)

I met Toni Hagen ages ago in Freiburg where he’d come to give a talk about Nepal, and I must say he made a jolly good impression. As a long-time Freiburger, I went with him to a local tavern near the Schwabentor for a swig of German beer. ‘I’ve travelled 14,000 km on foot in Nepal’ said Toni Hagen, a soft-spoken, silvery-haired Swiss-geologist who would be 89 years now, hadn’t Yamaraj beckoned him earlier. He had that typical Schwyzerdeutsch accent, and he liked to think of his days in Nepal in the early fifties as his ‘wandering years,’ for as is the custom in Switzerland and Germany, when you’re through with learning your trade you embark upon an adventurous trip seeking expertise in as many cities and countries as possible before you settle down some place. His poor wife had to remain in Lenzerheide with the children.

In the case of Toni Hagen, however, he seemed to be a wandering soul, even in the winter of his life, spending half of his time in the Swiss Alps and the other half in the Himalayas. He was one of the last living witnesses of a secretive Nepal of the Middle Ages. He entered the Kingdom at a time when it was a “forbidden land” in the early fifties. As the first foreigner who had the freedom of travelling in Nepal as he pleased, Hagen visited areas which are still forbidden to most people even today. Most Toni Hagen admirers can view his life and experiences in the film ‘The Ring of Buddha.’ It is a melange of original film material from the fifties, colour transparencies from his book on the geology of Nepal, and the viewer gets an idea of the Kingdom of Nepal and its peoples. When I saw the film, I had the uneasy feeling that he was saying goodbye to us all.

With the passage of time, Toni Hagen changed his profession from geology to development-work, and he was deeply concerned about the problems of development aid, its successes and failures not only in Nepal but also in many other countries. The people interested him more than the stratigraphic formations. In a book published by the Unesco, dealing with the ‘socio-economic problems of Nepal’ he mentioned the development projects in Nepal and said that the ‘ecological catastrophe prophesy’ that he made in the early fifties ‘has come true’ and talked about the pioneer work in the geological survey of Nepal from 1960 till 1970, and wrote about his new edition of ‘Nepal’ and proudly mentioned that it was a fourth edition ‘without any changes’, and called it a standard work on Nepal, which indeed it is.

He took delight in the fact that the World Bank stopped the Arun III project in Nepal thanks to his efforts and the united lobbying on the part of the ecological organisation Urgewalt, Dr. Hermann Warth, and the political fractions from the SPD, Bündnis 90, the Greens and the PDS in influencing the German government, in addition to the decision of the new World Bank president James Wolfensohn and the assertion of the then prime minister Adhikary. After the World Bank decision not to finance the dam project, it was taken for granted that the 235 million marks from the German side would be set aside for other smaller projects. The Arun III was observed in Germany as development-politics gone haywire.

‘What Nepal needs,’ he stressed, ‘is not road-building projects but genuine and effective help in the agricultural sector. What Nepal needs are not atomic plants but water-works.’ And he wasn’t tired of mentioning, with a sense of pride, that His Majesty King Birendra had read his old reports and had asked him for his opinion regarding Nepal’s optimal development.

‘Is it too late for my country?’ was the question asked by King Birendra, he said, and in the same breath he expressed his admiration for the Nepalese King. He was of the opinion that ‘constitutional monarchy and continuity are essential for Nepal’s survival,’ and praised the advantages of decentralisation, which according to him, is a central characteristic of democracy and is important for every case involving planning whether it’s hydroelectric plants or tourism. In those days, the only pressure that Nepal had as a sovereign state was from India in connection with the trade and transit disagreements. Times have changed and the threat is from within, in the form of maoists, and not from without.

Toni Hagen said, ‘Development must come from the grassroots.’ He was awarded the title of ‘Distinguished Person of Kathmandu City’ on 15th of June 1995 by the mayor of Kathmandu Mr. P.L. Singh, who also presented him a key to the city. On this occasion Toni Hagen went on record as saying ‘Despite the failure of some politicians and parties, freedom of speech, press-freedom, multiparty system and the role of the opposition in the parliament remain the most important trait of the new system in Nepale­se politics.

Nepal can be divided into seven zones: the Terai, the Siwalik Hills, the Mahabharat Mountains (Lekh), the Nepal Midlands, the Himalayas, the Inner Himalayas and the Tibetan marginal mountains. And according to Toni Hagen the river system existed before the Nepal Himalayas came into existence. The Himalayan rivers carved gigantic gorges. According to him it would be appropriate if the Midlands were not ignored today. Almost lamentably he said that the terai urwald, primeval forest, did not exist anymore and talked about the World Bank and the Nepalese government’s project of settling people from the hills to the terai.

From the terai to the hills you have in ascending order of crop cultivation: rice, wheat, maize, millet, potatoes and grassland. Wheat is a relatively new crop in Nepal. He found the soft green revolution in Kathmandu welcome, but at the same time he pointed to the fact that the population had risen in the last decade at an alarming tempo, and called it ‘schlimm’ and bad enough. Nepal, in comparison to other Asian countries, has five persons per hectre of land’, he said and ‘possesses the biggest concentration of population density’.

And then he started to talk about the soil erosion. From the terai at the gangetic-level upto a height of 1800m you have rice terraces and from there up to 3000m you have the Kampf­zone (battle-zone) for existence and above that you have, till an elevation of 3500m, forests with increasing erosion and then grasslands in the Himalaya regions. He pointed out that the steep terraces resulted in soil erosion caused by human beings. The yield per hectre had been decreasing and the land for cultivation had also been decreasing.

As far as the terai was concerned, his prognosis was that it would produce surplus food for a decade, and mentioned that most of the food went to India, because the traders in the plains offered better prices and the transport infrastructure was already there in form of good railways and roads.

In the terai the ground water can be reached at a depth of 2 metres. The terai, with its rich alluvial soil, could be developed into the corn-chamber of Nepal, much like the Punjab in India. And Nepal should not export its rice to India but keep it for domestic demands in the Kingdom. He shook his head and said, ‘It’s easy, but it doesn’t function. We may have a surplus at the moment but the question is whether we can keep up this production or not?’

The farmers must be helped was his argument. Toni Hagen admitted he didn’t have a patent recipe for the problems of Nepal. The farmers had been ignored in Nepal according to Toni Hagen (not so in Taiwan and Niger). He complained that the Foreign Aid until 1976 invested money mostly in road-construction projects which was a grave mistake, for it sucked up the last reserves of Nepal.

Nepal is like a very sick patient. Multilateral and bilateral aid agencies at the governmental and non-governmental level have injected foreign cash and material into Nepal, and the result is that the very economic structure has been weakened. A sum of US 552.8 million was transferred to Nepal without any visible changes in the economic structure of the country and has created an aid-industry in which the corrupt middlemen earn a good living. The country’s masses suffer stoically, as they have done throughout the centuries at the hands of other rulers. Chakari, nepotism and corruption are just as rampant in the post-democratic era as in the past.

It must be noted, he said, that above 90% of the Nepalese population lives on agriculture. The first priority was given to transport, then agriculture and lastly energy. The other way round would have been better on the long run.

He held a pedagogic finger and reminded one Nepal is a country with the biggest hydro-electric potential in the world. ‘Even back in the fifties I suggested to the government to develop energy. Some officials regarded him as ‘backward in his thinking,’ and according to him foreign ex­change was wasted on useless thermal energy projects.

Whereas the population of Nepal in 1950 was 8 million, in 1988 it was 17,5 million. Today it’s 27 million. And whereas the mean life expectancy in 1950 was 26 years, a Nepalese now can live to be 40 to 50 years old if not more. Malaria was rampant in 1950 with 3 million cases, and in the eighties malaria, which was thought to have been eradicated, has made a comeback because the ‘mosquitoes are immune’. Whereas there were 2,5 million domestic animals in 1962, there are over 3,2 million these days. And whereas there were 6,4 million hectares of forest in 1950, it was reduced to half, namely 3,2 hectares in 1982. And whereas the illiteracy in 1950 was 98%, by 1976 almost 77% of the boys (and 25% girls) had gone through compulsory primary school. And as for the medical aspects, 50% more Nepalese doctors are concentrated in Kathmandu Valley than anywhere else in the Kingdom. Due to the war between the Maoists and the government troops and police there has been a steady decline (38%) in the tourist since 1998. And more than 13 000 Nepalese have died in the struggle for power. This would have appeared like a nightmare to Toni Hagen, who had another picture of Nepal in his mind—corrupt, but peaceful and tolerant. Live and let live was the life philosophy. Today it’s live and let die.

The rate of people leaving the rural areas was 3% in 1951 in comparison to 12% in 1982. The crop production figures and prospects according to the Swiss expert look gloomy with a deficit in the year 2000, beginning already in the early with a downward trend.

To a question about the Swiss road in Jiri, which had been praised in German TV as an ecological and technical masterpiece, he said: ‘It’s well built, but wrongly laid (falsch Angelegt). Neither did he have words of praise for the Nepal-India road, nor for the Kathmandu-Lhasa highway, which were great engineering feats. The Tribhuvan Rajpath connecting Nepal with India (built in 1956) was very bad because of erosion along the sides of the road. He called it a ‘terrible construction’. In the meantime the road is open for traffic.

‘In development aid there’s always a wrong investment. The aid-donors wanted to do too much in Nepal. That was the problem’, says Toni Hagen.

On the 11th of April 1996 there was a two-day ‘Nepal Aid Group’ conference in Paris, the first of its kind since 1992. The participating 13 donor nations were: Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Holland, Norway, the Saudi Development Fond, Switzerland, U.K., USA, in addition to various international finance organisations. The summit granted for the period 1996-97 assistance worth US$ 993 million to Nepal.

The then Nepalese finance minister Dr. Ram Sharan Mahat said, ‘The meeting in Paris has proved that the donor-nations show a cooperative attitude towards Nepal. The main points that these countries complained about were: the constant posting of the government employees, their sinking morale and the delay in the posting and transfers of the civil servants engaged in the development works. The aid-donors suggested that the prices of the public service should be oriented to the actual costs and emphasised the necessity of controlling the rampant corruption’.

Another current trend in development aid from Europe is this ‘Help to Self-Help’ especi­ally from the Germans. In 1995 Nepal received 29.3 million German marks for the projects and programmes of the financial and technical cooperation (FZ & TZ). The financial cooperation involves family-planning, a road infrastructure and a biogas project.

Toni Hagen said, ‘The Nepalese, for instance, should plant trees and care for them for five years. Integral projects would be good for Nepal’ and went on to talk about big projects with the motto: ‘No money, no water’ in other countries. The big organisations of rich countries have lots of money for development projects but how the money was invested was another matter. In his book on development problems he analysed 230 development projects, and according to him in rural areas only small projects have a chance to survive.

He quoted the villager who said, ‘My village has survived so many development projects’. Does it do good to bring the villages in developing countries to modern levels?

Even Swiss villages have come into being through laborious processes of development over long periods of history. Nepal is trying to catch up with the developed world within a few decades. There’s also the question of loss of identity due to development aid. Toni Hagen’s world existed during the Hippie-happy and Flower-power days, for there were no signs of militant maoists in those days. I remember a visitor from England, who was travelling with his side-kick from south India, who said, ‘In Nepal even children can walk around the countryside without fear of being molested or abducted. The Nepalese are such a wonderful people.’ Today, the parents would think twice before they let their children roam about in Nepal.

During my Tri Chandra College days, the communist students came from Doti, Silgadi and Dharan and had stacks of literature penned by Kim Il Sung, Lenin, Marx and Mao’s red books, all made available by the respective cultural centres of these communist countries in Kathmandu. Nobody raised an eyebrow, for these books were available every, even at the Sajha shops of Kathmandu and elsewhere. Today the maoists have spread from Rukum and the Far West but also in Kathmandu. An educated working mother from Kathmandu, with a PhD from Germany, wrote recently to me, ‘Imagine how life in Kathmandu is, due to the corrupt politicians. Right now there are street blockades, actually economic blockades around Kathmandu imposed by the Maoists, The market-price of food commodities have gone pretty high. Sugar, kerosine and other fuels are not available. The businessmen are also responsible for the artificial scarcity. One has to be prepared to pay thrice the price for these commodities and you will get these. Life has become insecure for us Nepalese these days. Once you leave your house, you will never know what might happen. A bomb on the roadside might blow you up.’

Toni Hagen would have thought differently were he living these days, for Nepal has been undergoing a political and military turmoil and Nepal’s face has changed a lot. But let’s talk about our ageing Swiss friend. Toni Hagen’s eyes twinkled when he spoke about the humorous and sunny nature of the Nepalese soul. He called it ‘die Heiterkeit der Seele’ in German, which means the joyousness of the soul.

‘The Nepalese don’t take anything seriously, and themselves the least,’ he said with a smile. And then he switched over to an anecdote about one of the first DC-3 landings in Pokhara in 1950, which was quite a feat then. There was a big crowd of Gurung, Thakali and Tamang farmers gathered to watch the propeller-driven Dakota- aircraft. Out of the DC-3 came a jeep along the ramp and an astonished Nepali farmer said: “It’s like a birth. The small vehicle will learn to fly soon!” In his film he also mentioned his early porters who’d thrown his geological data, namely rocks from the Himalayas, because they’d though rocks are everywhere, so why carry them. It was a hilarious situation in the film, but such a thing wouldn’t have happened if he’d taken the trouble to talk with his porters in their lingo about the importance of the specimens they were carrying behind their backs.

‘Nepal hasn’t changed since the last 45 years in the hills,’ he said, with a twinge of nostalgia and talked about Pokhara with its backdrop of the gigantic Annapurna and Dhaulagiri mountains. He liked to call the Machapuchare the ‘Nepalese Matterhorn’ in his exquisite Swiss accent and said the Swiss Matterhorn looked so insignificant when compared with the Fish-Tail Mountain. And then he expressed his praise and admiration for the ‘precisely laid rice terraces in Nepal, a wonderful innovation of the Nepali people.’ The terrace farming is a several 100 year old tradition in Nepal. Speaking English as a Swiss geologist from Lenzerheide is one thing, but learning the Nepali language and speaking it is another. Most visitors to Nepal have the attitude that the Nepalese speak English, and they should learn German, Japanese which easier and more convenient for visitors than the other way around.

‘Rice is regarded noble and millet as of lesser quality,’ said Toni Hagen and spoke of the golden yellow millet fields below the Machapuchare. Below the 2000m Dhaulagiri you have the red ‘kodo’ millet-fields and kodo is protein-rich. He was also all-praise for the Nepali farmers with their diversification of products. There was no monoculture in Nepal (except in the tea-plantations of Ilam and Darjeeling). The farmers planted rice, wheat, potatoes and varied them.

The Rara lake at 3000m reminded him of the Swiss lakes in the Alps. And Langtang at 3,500m had lush meadows, with hundreds of edelweiss flowers like in the Alps. He said: ‘When I was in Langtang for the first time, I thought we could make cheese here with yak-milk and that’s how the Swiss-idea of setting up a dozen cheese factories in the Nepal Himalayas began. The cheese is transported on the backs of the Tamang and Sherpa porters from a height of 5,800m to Kathmandu. The Tibetans, Sherpas, Tamangs and other Nepalese ethnic groups knew only churpi, the Nepalese hard-cheese, which is pure casein.

I told him, ‘We, Nepalese, call it Nepali chewing-gum’ and he laughed. Toni Hagen appreciated the Swiss-aided Himalayan cheese and said they tasted just as good as the Swiss ones.

‘And some even have Swiss-holes in the cheese,’ he said with a laugh. This scribe remembers eating cheese and drinking yak-milk during his Amrit Science College days with his Nepalese Ascolite friends at the milk-shop in Thamel. It can happen that some have no enzyme called lactase in their intestine flora and cannot digest the milk-products and suffer from Kathmandu-quicksteps. The Swiss-idea was also a boon to the tourists, foreign residents and western-oriented Nepalese.

Recalling his surveys in the Khumbu area: Ama Damlam, Makalu and Mt. Everest he said, like a boarding-school boy who had gone out of bounds, “ In 1956 I managed to go to Tibet, to the north of Everest without permission. The Chinese were then in Tibet.” And talked about the dangerous and treacherous glaciers: “You’re never sure when water flows under the glacier.”

According to him there was an increasing population mobility in Nepal, but the racial schemes still exist. Then he was ecstatic about the incomparable harmonious religious tolerance in Nepal.

‘Take Swayambhunath for instance, which is for all Hindus and Buddhists. The Nepalese live near each other, mingle with each other: nebeneinander, durcheinander.’ he said. Today it`s more durcheinander due to the war in Nepal. But he certainly wasn’t thinking about Nepal’s political problems with the Maoists. What Nepal needs is a culture of tolerance between the warring political parties, for after battling with each other, the Maoists, democratic parties and the monarch should realise that what all in the end desire is peace. Peace and tolerance is a better path than violence. Aggressive behaviour and politics has only lead to destruction of all involved in Nepal’s struggle. Like old Hagen said, “Let us live together, despite the differences.”

Toni Hagen is dead, but my memories of him remain. His ashes were strewn over the Khumbu Himalayas at an altitude of 5500m by his daughter Katrin from a Karnali Air helicopter. I still see him with his blue glassy eyes, as he raised his beer glass, and said with a tinge of nostalgia, ‘Auf Nepal .’ I followed it up with ‘Auf die Schweiz!’ He’d invited me to Lenzerheide, but I never made it.


Satis Shroff describes himself as a mediator between western and eastern cultures and sees his future as a writer and poet. He lives in Germany according to the motto: once a journalist, always a journalist and has written over a period of three decades, what the Germans would call a “Landesumschau,” for his Nepalese readers with impressions from Freiburg, Venice, Rottweil, Prague, Paris, London, Frankfurt, Basel and Grindelwald. Satis Shroff has worked with The Rising Nepal (Gorkhapatra Corporation), where he wrote a weekly Science Spot and editorials and commentaries on Nepal’s development, health, wildlife, politics and culture. He also wrote weekly commentaries for Radio Nepal. He has studied Zoology and Geology in Kathmandu, Medicine and Social Science in Freiburg and Creative Writing under Associate Prof. Bruce Dobler, MFA, Iowa University and with Writers Bureau (Manchester). He was awarded the German Academic Prize.

Writing experience: Satis Shroff’s anthology ‘Between Two Worlds’ published by www.Lulu.com is about a writer caught between upheavals in two countries, Nepal and Germany, where maoists and skin-heads are respectively trying to undermine democratic values, religious and cultural life. Satis Shroff writes political poetry, in German and English, about the war in Nepal (My Nepal, Quo vadis?), the sad fate of the Nepalese people (My Nightmare, Only Sagarmatha Knows), the emergence of neo-fascism in Germany (Mental Molotovs, The Last Tram to Littenweiler) and love (An Dich, The Broken Poet, Without Words, About You), women’s woes (Nirmala, Bombay Brothel). His bicultural perspective makes his poems rich, full of awe and at the same time heartbreakingly sad. In writing ‘home,’ he not only returns to his country of origin time and again, he also carries the fate of his people to readers in the West, and his task of writing is a very important one in political and social terms. His true gift is to invent Nepalese metaphors and make them accessible to the West through his poetry. Read his poems, articles and essays on www.google & www.yahoo under search: satis shroff

Impressions From Switzerland (Satis Shroff)

Switzerland:

Impressions From Central Switzerland (Satis Shroff)

It’s a sunny afternoon when Claudia and I boarded the ICE (Inter City Express) train from the Black Forest town Freiburg, then switch trains at the Swiss Badische Bahnhof (SBB) and travelled via Olten in a Swiss regional train towards Luzern. The train sped past small hills, spurs, lakes, scores of tunnels and towns with church spires, Swiss cows and horses grazing on the lush green meadows.

Inside the train were young men and women in trekking outfits, talking rather animatedly and laughing incessantly at their own jokes told in the Schwyzer dialect with a lot of guttural sounds and softly produced words with ‘Ts.’ If you know Schwyzer Deutsch, you’ve won the hearts of the Swiss people. I find it just wonderful to hear and reproduce the Schweizer sounds, especially the Basle dialect.

A grey-haired obese lady was siting with her husband near us. She was wearing spectacles and had a cloth bag in beige leather dangling in front of her legs with the words: ‘Wir handeln für die Umwelt.’ There was a pun on the word ‘handeln,’ which means ‘we trade for the environment’ or ‘we do something about the environment.’ The Swiss engage themselves a lot in humanitarian, cultural, environmental and money matters.

We are surrounded by hummocky hills and then blue snow-capped mountains. There are Swiss farms in the foothills of the mountains. Miles of maize fields appear. The Swiss train is heading for Central Switzerland. We’re approaching Luzern. An impressive grey castle fleets by and then you come across pompous mansions. An Appenzeller advertisment appears with the message: ‘Seit 700 Jahre in Einklang mit der Natur,’ which means that the Swiss cheese is in harmony with Mother Nature since seven hundred years.

A well-dressed, curt train-conductor comes along the gangway with his ticket-puncher looks through his glasses and says, ‘Richtig, gute Reise.’ Something like ‘Richt ho! Have a good journey.’ We’ve left Luzern behind. You see myriads of Schreber gardens, which are small patches of gardens for city dwellers who want to flee from the smoggy cities and enjoy a bit of greenery, flowers and barbecues in the weekends. A lake algae-green water dashes past and hundreds of houses on the lakeside hillocks and spurs. That’s quality of life for you. The hills in the outskirts of Luzern reminded me of those in Grindelwald, where you can ride up almost to the mountains Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau in scarlet cable-cars. Suddenly a wonderful view of a lake and mountains appeared, with the Swiss autobahn below. An ugly landslide scar made its appearance. Aqua-ducts, bridges, hills, meadows, houses with the old traditional church of Arth-Goldau.

A merry holiday whiff floated in the air. A sleek train from the Südostbahn came by. Near the railway station was wood stacked for the winter. A crane, a lorry and cars sped by. The well-fed and obese Swiss youth in the train were having a jolly time. We went via Schwyz and took a bus to Morschach at an elevation of 800m, with mountains all around.

It’s evening and the sun is going down in the central Swiss Alps. You can see the snow on the summits and the ice-walls from the spacious balcony of the Swiss Holiday Park. There’s a serene and tranquil atmosphere, and the air is so fresh in the Swiss Alps. That’s landluft for you.

Morschach lies on a plateau at the foot of the 1922m peak called Fronalpstock with 900 souls, and its known for its Swiss Holiday Park and also Landal Parks. Morschach lies above the Lake of the Four Cantons (Vierwaldstättersee). A cable car brings you to the skiing area of Stoos-Fronalpstock, where you can also do a bit of trekking in spring, summer and autumn. The scenery of the Lake of the Four Cantons really took my breath away, even though I’m originally from the foothills of the Himalayas.

After a sound sleep with an open window to let in the fresh alpine air, you are woken up by the ding-dongs of the Swiss cow-bells, as they are herded and walk languidly on their way to the higher meadows. As you look out of the window you see the black and white coloured cows grazing in the green meadows above the Bauernhaus which is three-storied with white windows and dark brown wooden walls.

The next morning it was refreshing to go to the local bakery run by Ms. M. Judd and her lovely Swiss girls. You could buy balance bread, Schnitzer, Kneipp and Ballenberg-bread in addition to croissants and small round buns. Digestion is excellent in Switzerland due to the cereals and high percentage of Ballaststoff (roughage) in the bread in addition to folic acid.
After a hearty Swiss breakfast we went from Morschach (800m) to Stoos (1300m) and from there to the Fronalpstock (1922m), which is the highest viewpoint of the Stoos region.

There is a relative easy panorama walk up to Fronalpstock but you can also use the cable-car and ski-lift to the top and can see the healthy cows grazing below you. They don’t even bat an eyelid when the ski-lifts come near. They’re used to visitors from all over the world. There’s an excellent summit restaurant and naturally souvenir-shops. Last summer, one of the most beautiful ridge hiking trails in Switzerland underwent thorough reconstruction for the 150th anniversary of the hiking trails in the Canton Schwyz.

A burly Swiss man and his wife who had rosy cheeks said to me in the cable-car, ‘I’ve worked in Basle for 41 years. We live in Morschach now and are very happy. In Basel I had a brain-stroke and had to take Marcumar, and as a side-effect I developed asthma. I had to inhale all the time.’

He made a hand movement as though he was inhaling.

‘Don’t you have to take Budes, Salbutamol and Singular anymore?’ I asked him.

‘Nein, Gott sei Dank! Meine Lungen sind frei.’ Thank God, my lungs are free now.

I ventured to say, ‘It’s the wonderful Swiss alpine air, I suppose.’

‘Jawohl, it is. We’ve bought a house and don’t want to leave this place anymore.’

From the summit of Fronalpstock you can not only see the Lake of the Four Cantons but also the village of Brunnen, where we went later to visit a dear friend Gertrude, who is a nun in retirement. Her home-peak (Hausberg) is the Mythen.

An expression of cool exhilaration comes across as you peer at the Swiss landscape unfolding before your eyes. Nature manifests itself in every season in its characteristic way and all the four seasons have their own charms. The Spring in the mountains with its Crocus flower mantle and patches of snow covered meadows. The Summer with its magnificent and colourful alpine flora pristine in beautiful sunshine. The grey misty and rainy days, accompanied by thunder and lightning, landscapes after the torrential rains and Swiss houses under water and schlamm. Muddy everywhere. The Autumn with its brocade of diverse leaves in the trees and everywhere. Strewn wantonly by the wind in yellow, scarlet, light green and brown colours. And in the distance clear views of the mountains, valleys and spurs. Just as in Nepal’s hills you hear the grass-cutting women singing their ghasi-geet (grass-songs) and a refrain or even a spontaneous reply comes from the other side of the hill, the people of the Alps fold their hands to a cup in front of their mouths and shout their prayers to the Gods in the Alps. It could be Jesus, Holy Mary or one of the many Saints. The prayers deal with the protection of the people, cows, Alpine-huts, meadows and they expect the blessings from God or Maria Hilf.

When humans are confronted with the elements and Nature they have similar lines of thinking irrespective of their domiciles. In Hinduism and Buddhism for instance when a bhakal (Gelübde) or promise to God has been made in exchange for a favour, then it is expected that the promise is held. My Mom had wished a son and had prayed to Shiva, Sita and Mahakal and had promised to go on a pilgrimage if her wish came true. She got her son and complied by undertaking a pilgrim’s journey to Darjeeling’s Mahakal temple, Kathmandu’s Pashupatinath temple, Jagannath Puri, Hardwar and Sita’s temple in Janakpur. If she hadn’t fulfilled her promises then she’d have remained an uneasy, restless soul for the rest of her life.

The Ocean of Wisdom (Satis Shroff, Freiburg)

The Ocean of Wisdom (Satis Shroff)

Tenzin Gyatso, the spiritual and former
Temporal ruler of Tibet,
Came to a town in the Black Forest
And conquered the hearts of the Freiburger.
A lama in a back limousine,
Applauded by hundreds of Europeans and Asians.
You could feel the goose-pimples in your body,
Tears of joy came to your eyes.
His Holiness prays and blesses
The Tibet Kailash Haus,
A thousand Tibetan prayer flags
Flutter merrily in the wind,
Carrying the mumbled words to Himmel.

At the Freiburger Town Council
Says the lama:
‘Nations, races, social classes
Even religions are secondary.
What is important is that
We are all human beings.

Even the sun breaks through the clouds
When Tenzin Gyatso folds his hands,
Smiles from the balcony,
And throws flying kisses
To the German masses.
Even Petrus seems to be smile in Heaven.

The Ambassador of Peace
Hopes for a peaceful change,
In Tibet, the Roof of the World,
Where the economy booms
Under the control of the Chinese,
But where democracy and human rights
Are still stifled.

I remember seeing His Holiness
As a child in the foothills of the Himalayas,
As he fled across the Abode of the Snows.
Crowds thronged with snow white khadas,
To greet the Dalai Lama.
And here was I in Germany
With my humble prayers,
And there His Holiness,
Blessing us all,
The personification of the Ocean of Wisdom.
A seventy-two year old monk,
With the charisma and spontaneity of a child.
A message which said:
‘Whether you are a Christian, Buddhist or atheist,
If you have compassion for humans,
You can’t be wrong.’
What counts are the inner values
Within us:
Love, forgiveness, tolerance and self-discipline.
Religions help us to make these values even stronger.
Like the inner love and dialogue,
Between a mother and a child,.
To help create a Century of Dialogue.