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Thursday, 24 December 2009

In a visit to Europe last fall, I purchased small gift items from a paper shop called Fabriano. It was established in Italy in 1264. It has been run by the same family for 750 years. Michelangelo purchased paper from it for his paintings. Today Euro notes are printed on Fabriano paper. The shop is extremely modern in its style and taste. It has been changing with times but it has not given up its original business. If it continues this way, it will certainly survive another thousand years. We don’t know if the world will survive that long.

In another visit to Europe, I stayed in three different hotels in Switzerland. One was in the old part of Bern, the capital city. Another was on the shores of Lake Zurich. The third one was Guest House Egilasu by the Rhine River. All three were almost 500 years old and run as hotels all along. They had changed hands along the way but not the original business. The Guest House Egilasu was particularly charming. It preserved 300 year old cupboards in every room. I used to hang my clothes in one of them, opening the huge bolt with some effort. Having breakfast by the river, it was amazing to imagine the travellers who might have stayed in the same room as I did 500 years ago. The facilities in this old hotel were modern. In my travels to fifty countries around the world, I have stayed at an innumerable number of hotels. The Guest House Egilasu is certainly one of the best on the planet.

I studied at St. John’s College of Oxford University. Recently the college celebrated its 500th anniversary. I stayed in Thomas White Quad, the modern section of the college. But my British friends used to compete for rooms in the old sections. I attended tutorials in 450-500 year old rooms and participated in rituals that could be traced to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As I walked from one Quad to another everyday, I followed the footsteps of scholars in medieval England.

In a visit to Istanbul, I was invited by the President of Turkey to attend a state dinner at Dolmabahçe Palace. This is from where Ottomans used to run their empire and host state dinners 150 years ago. Even today it is used as a venue for special events of the state.

I have seen houses in Turkey, England and Switzerland where people have been living for centuries. With the passage of time, they have modernised these dwellings. I once spent a memorable evening with my friends Julie and Claes Lindahl outside Stockholm. They have a modest house across the Royal Palace, which was built some 250 years ago. They studied the history of the house and discovered that it was once used as a home for the palace staff and over a century ago as a school for the children in the area. Julie and Claes’ house has all modern amenities and comforts, but they have preserved a dungeon where their children play and do their homework.

What distinguishes the Guest House Egilasu, Dolmabahçe Palace and the Lindahl house from many places in ancient cultures such as Egypt, China and India is that the latter have converted their old life into museums. It is history. It is past. It is something to read about, something to see through glass doors, not something to live, nor something to renew. It is something that is over. In all these countries it is considered ‘prestigious’ to spend time in shopping malls made with marble floors, displaying glittering boutiques of clothes and cosmetics, and selling pizzas and burgers in the food court on the top floor.

When people in former colonies – now known as emerging economies - disrupt river flows to build dams, destroy paddy fields and mangroves to create skyscrapers, and go on construction sprees to build uniform style buildings with leakages in walls, they don’t necessarily do it for the development of society, though that is the language they use for justifying such activities. If you examine their deep pockets, you will find other reasons. More important, if you look deep into their hearts, you will find them clamouring for satisfying a psychological need to globalise, to modernise and to be one with the West. They don’t realise that in the Western world, a conscious effort is made to run Fabriano for 750 years, St. John’s College for 500 years and Guest House Egilasu for over 500 years continuously. They also don’t realise that these old enterprises produce the most modern breakthroughs. Oxford University is presently the home for a new engine to enable vehicles to run on hydrogen cells, a new technique to map human genomes at rates very poor people in poor countries can easily afford, and research to increase the human lifespan to more than 200 years, possibly 500-1000 years.

It is sad to see the Pyramids in Cairo hidden by ugly buildings around them, Lake Palace in Udaipur converted into a hotel amidst a lake that is constantly shrinking, and millions of people in Asia and Africa forcefully displaced every year because of the destruction of their eco-systems and habitats – all in the name of modernity, development and progress.

I am not arguing that everything that is old is gold. It was good to ban slavery, feudalism (at least in some parts of the world), colonialism, gender inequality and smoking (at least in aeroplanes and public buildings). It will be good to reduce time taken for going round the world from several months 500 years ago to a couple of hours when stratospheric planes are introduced five years from now. And it is certainly better to reach my kids on a mobile phone in two seconds from North America to India than the two weeks I made my parents wait for each letter that I wrote from across the Atlantic a little over a decade ago.

As we welcome the New Year, it is about time to pause and reflect on what is new and what is old. It is necessary to debate the concept of progress and seek a common universal ground around it, simultaneously recognising and preserving the peculiarities of every culture. It is in our interest to draw from the best of human endeavour in the past and the present, from the East and the West, and the North and the South. Our search for the best from all times and all places will help us to renew human spirit. There is no doubt that we need such renewal as otherwise decadence threatens our civilization.