The fastest way between Delhi and Hawaii is via Taiwan. You arrive in Honolulu eight hours before you leave Taipei. Astute readers who have been Around the World in Eighty Days with Jules Verne or David Niven will understand why. Somewhere over the Pacific Ocean the world begins, you cross the Dateline and save one whole day of your life. Next question: What do you do with an extra day in Hawaii?
Bad news for all those who have been spoilt by Baywatch into believing that ogling is time well spent. The Hawaii beach is not full of extras from Hollywood. It is full of Middle American tourists. Anyone who is young, and pretty is hired as a waitress, so the chances of meeting a Hollywood wannabe is much higher in a restaurant than on the sand. Needless to add, there is nothing called a free lunch in a tourist trap. Enjoy, but carry an extra credit card.
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The one thing that the Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China share is pride in the past. To those unfamiliar with the two Chinas, the first is the successor state that Chiang Kai-shek established after being thrown out of Beijing by Mao Zedong’s Communists. They may now share a pride in the future as well. Taiwan’s obsessive fear for five years has been that the Communists will invade and absorb Taiwan. It seems now that mainland China should be worried about being absorbed by Taiwan.
Conquest these days is far easier through the power of the economy than the power of the military. Mainland China may still be a one-party state (as Taiwan was, in effect, till 1996), but it is no longer a Communist state for the good reason that it does not believe in a Marxist economy. It has defused the social simmer that destroyed Soviet Communism by consumerism. Communism has evolved from ideology into a bureaucracy — but what could be more natural in a nation traditionally ruled by mandarins?
The mainland mandarins still scowl at religion; the offshore mandarins shrug and let people worship Buddha or Confucius. The difference is indifferent.
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“It is a pleasure to greet friends coming from afar.” That was the message on the official bag full of brochures and an obligatory tie from the government of Taiwan. Since Confucius said this, it must have a deeper meaning than the obvious, which, frankly, is pretty humdrum and could have been handed out by the local ad agency. So I bowed my head, knit my brows and started to think of deeper nuances. Did Confucius mean that it’s not a big deal to greet friends from near? I could see the point of that, particularly if they were of the kind that dropped in to share every sorrow. Or was old Confucius suggesting that since you were from afar you were automatically a friend? This made sense. Only enemies came from the neighborhood. India vs. Pakistan; Korea vs. Korea; China vs. China; Israel vs. Everyone Else; Husband vs. Wife. And so on. Only empire builders have enemies outside hearing reach.
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Jetlag opens up strange new worlds on television. Late night viewing is a sub-culture that defies understanding. The favorite movie star at two in a restless morning in Taiwan was Arnold Schwarzenegger, the world’s most famous moral moron and candidate for election to the job of governor of California, America’s most famous state and the sixth largest economy in the world. He is called a star of B-Grade movies. That is incorrect.
The one that flickered across my screen was D-Grade. Its characters came out of a static template. The lost child prince was a brat, his butler a giggler. That was the comic element. The heroine had a face longer than her sword and a dress shorter than her temper. She spoke stilted Hollywood. Her idiot brother who had lost the magic talisman spoke fluent Chinese pidgin. The villain had a dark goatee and a perfect BBC accent. Arnold had no accent.
An accent is not required in monosyllables: “I go!” “You come!” The heroine was cold to men, warm to battle and indifferent to advice. (I am not going to mention her name as this might be construed to have political undertones.) She ditched Arnie after he had saved her life at the gates of hell without a blink of an eyelid.
Official statistics issued by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics show that 99.1percent of Taiwan has color television. I congratulate the .9percent who have kept television out of their homes.
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When I switched channels, CNN was showing a B-Grade movie as well, called Today in Iraq. Its hero, Colin Powell, was speaking from a new script. America wanted to get out of Iraq, the cost was too heavy, the boys wanted to go home, but they had to defeat terrorists first.
The Iraqi on the street hoped, pointedly, that Powell would speak to more than his employees during his first visit to Baghdad. The CNN correspondent ended the story on an honest note. He called the American presence an occupation.
Later in the week, George Bush told the American people that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11. So what was the war all about then? That is becoming the growing theme of the presidential campaign of 2004 that will determine whether or not George Junior will emulate his father as a one-term president.
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But the big campaign now is for California, with Arnie center-stage. It is evident now that Arnie is honest: he is the same guy off-screen that he is on-screen. He is monosyllabic in real life as well. He is his language. His movie writers did not make anything up; they just placed a tape recorder in front of him. He believes that he will be elected governor of California by the consistent use of short sentences. He also makes Ronald Reagan sound like a Harvard intellectual. Is low IQ a liability in politics? No. You have to be shrewd, not brilliant.
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Everyone wants to be on first name terms with Hawaii. It is extraordinary, isn’t it, that history is often rewritten before it is written.
On Friday afternoon our hosts, the East-West Center, ensured that our eclectic discussions on Islam were completed in time for Friday prayers. We were bused to a residence that was the local mosque.
A mosque does not have to be topped off by a dome. You can pray anywhere. A congregation creates a mosque; a mosque does not create a congregation. The imam was a gentle, avuncular visiting Egyptian. Relief again. An imam does not have to possess a beard that is more luxurious than his hair. Any believer can lead the prayers. There is no clergy in Islam.
The khutba, or sermon was an instruction on how to come to terms with 9/11 peacefully, with head held high, without compromise on either personal faith or America.
But the keepers of the mosque were more strict than comfortable. Religion is funded, and the piper calls the tune. Women were segregated rather than separated. At the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina women can pray behind the same imam as men, only divided by a notional line. In the only mosque at Honolulu they were offered a video vision of the prayer. Why do believers from the subcontinent, whether Hindu or Muslim, become extra-believers the further they go from home?
After lunch came the spiel from the brethren. Hawaii, he said, was of local origin; it was an Arab word that had been changed. Hawa — air in Arabic, therefore Hawaii was the name given by Arab merchants to Hawaii... The truth is not important; ownership is. There is nothing Arabic about Hawaii.
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An American researcher Allen Konopaki, of Incomm Research, has produced these statistics for America: children smile 300 times a day, adults 21 times and teenagers 30 times. Come to Hawaii and the order is reversed.
- 21 September 2003
