Speakers Corner

When I was at university in London a few years ago, a friend of mine told me about Hyde Park Speakers Corner. He said it was a place where every Sunday, you’ll find people giving talks and speeches about various subjects. I never found the time to check it out while living in London, but I was there last week on holiday and decided to see what it was about. I went along not really knowing what to expect, half thinking that I would end up listening to a bunch of crazy people with no sense of reality. Who else would spend a day of their weekend steeped up on a small ladder trying to get complete strangers to listen to them?

The first person I came across did somewhat confirm my idea. He talked about the world being controlled by a handful of super rich people who just play a game to manipulate the rest of us. “How is it that at a house that was worth £2,000 in 1950 is worth £2 million in 2009?” he asked. It’s just a game they are playing with us and the middle class are stupid for accepting it. He went on to criticise everyone from the Bankers to the British Royal Family. Someone in the audience shouted out “you’re very angry at the world mate, you’re just slagging everyone off.”

At this point, I found it very strange that people in the audience actually engage with him. I was thinking that he was just talking nonsense and arguing with him never crossed my mind. Some people in the crowd thought very differently, although some of them strongly disagreed with him, they were listening to him and challenging him on his points.

“Well yes” he replied, “people are stupid, they need to wake up”

“Well what do you suggest they do?”

“They have to come here and listen to me on a Sunday!” he said with a smile.

I may have presented him as a mindless individual up to this point, but that is not fair to him. He spoke a lot about current affairs and history and you could tell that he was very well read.

Eventually, I got a bit bored and went to an area where there was a lot of noise and shouting. The speaker this time was a religious one, standing in front of a poster with the word Jesus.

Unfortunately, 70% of his audience were Muslims and in no mood to be converted! There were three mean right up by him, ridiculing every sentence he spoke. It was useless trying to speak of Christianity to this group so he started to criticise Islam. “If your book is so holy, why is it full of contradictions,” he asked. He took out a copy of the Qu’ran out and read a couple of verses from different chapters about angels. I didn’t really understand either of the verses and by this point it was all turning into a big shouting match and I was too far to be able to hear much so I left.

I moved on this time to see speaker just as he was starting out and trying to draw a crowd.

“Ladies and Gentleman…speakers corner has been invaded by a bunch of religious lunatics!” he shouted out.

“Look at that clown over there” he said pointing to the preacher…“All he talks about is Jesus and heaven and God.”

“I don’t want to go to his heaven”

“There are no black people in his heaven! (its worth mentioning here that the preacher he was pointing at was himself black, which made this comment even funnier)

“Europeans think that Jesus was white and looked like them.” Do they not realise that Jesus was from the f****** Middle East!”

“If Jesus were alive today…and wanted to visit Britain…he would need a f******g visa!”

The crowd were loving him and within minutes he had about a 100 people around him. In the hour that I listened to him, he spoke with incredible knowledge about the Middle East, Barack Obama and Israeli settlements, Darfur, Rwanda and female oppression. On Darfur, he talked about his visit to Sudan and went into the details of the tribes fighting each other and said that while the media present the violence as Muslims killing non Muslims, a large part of it is Muslims killing Muslims over resources.

It turns out his name is Ishmael Blagrove, he is a Jamaican/British journalist and documentary film maker. He is part of a website called www.ricenpeas.com and there are several videos of him at Speakers corner on youtube.

He was regularly heckled by some in the audience – all the speakers were – and had some funny responses. When someone said something that he found ridiculous, he would snap back with “What are you smoking and please tell me where can I get some?!”

There was an Arab guy standing very close to him, constantly challenging him and wanting to speak. “Hold on, I will get to you in a second, let me finish my point! he would say. “Once he made his point, he let they guy speak.

“I’m not talking now, you didn’t let me talk before.”

“Man…you one argumentative mother fu**** ,” he shouted, “you’re even arguing with me about the gaps!”

Lebanon in December

A bomb attack had killed an army general a week before my planned trip to Beirut. I remember this as I land in Beirut airport, looking nervously out of the plane’s window. I enter the airport to find that it is organised and clean. The immigration officer is professional and I ask whether I would be allowed back into Lebanon if I travel to Syria by road. Yes he replies without hesitation, “just as I stamped your passport on, the immigration officer at the Syrian-Lebanese border will do the same.”

Coming out of the airport, I see a scene which I can’t remember seeing anywhere else. There is a large crowd of people excitedly waiting to greet their family and friends who have just flown in, and several of them are carrying colour colourful bouquets of flowers. It looks wonderful.

My first impressions of the city are that is a classically Mediterranean. Palm trees line the roads. The streets are very clean. There are tanks and personnel carriers at some street corners, but the soldiers are standing around casually while the people walking by are oblivious to them. I pass the spot where Hariri was killed in 2005. There is a poster of him and a digital clock set at the of the explosion: 10:49.

I travelled South to the cities of Saida (Sidon) and Sur (Tyre) an area rich in citrus fruits. While having lunch my grandmother complained to the waiter that the white peelings on the juicy part of the mandarin were too thick. Yes, the waiter responded with a smile “they’re thick skinned, just like us, the men of the south.” This response delights my grandmother and all of a sudden, she forgets about her complaint.

From my six days in Lebanon, it was the attitude of the people, their cheerfulness and energy which really made an impression on me. They are very lively, they talk fast, and at times I feel myself to be boring and slow in front of them, I cannot keep up with their pace and enthusiasm.

I went to a town called Zahle, near the border with Syria for a wedding. It is high in the mountains and the temperature was close to zero. The guests were doing the traditional dabke dance and I was watching it for 20 minutes and then got tired of looking and decided to join in with my cousin. But, I didn’t know the steps, and I only lasted a few minutes before I noticed people either side of me leaving and going to join another part of the circle..

I never made it to Syria, but I hope I will do that as well...

Lisbon it is!

Lisbon it is! After weeks of discussing where to go on holiday with one my friends, we finally agree on Lisbon. I start to make preparation but find out that there is not even a Portuguese embassy in the UAE. I need to go to the Spanish embassy instead. There are no direct flights to Portugal from the UAE either so I have to go via Amsterdam where I have a 6 hour stop. I walk around Schiphol airport and can hear multiple languages being spoken: English, Dutch, Spanish and another that sounds Eastern European. I also hear Turkish, there are quite a few Turkish staff working in the airport. I envy the way Europe has integrated itself so well, how all these nations with different identities and languages have formed this block where they interact with each other so much.

A few days before travelling, I find out that Portugal has taken over the 6 month rotating EU presidency and they have said that they will support Turkey’s membership to join the EU. I mention this to my Portuguese friend in Dubai, and he seemed disinterested, telling me not to think too much of it, “I wouldn’t expect too much from the Portuguese, they don’t get things done.”

Lisbon as a city is simply beautiful. I walked all over the city for my first two days. The architecture is attractive and varied. There are tall trees on the sides of the road to provide shading for pedestrians. I also go to Estoril a town called Estoril to the beach and the water is ice cold. I cannot even enter past my ankles and it is July, the middle of summer! Unfortunately, I left my ankles a bit too long in the water, and that night I got a fever.

The people I saw seemed to be very reserved, they aren’t very loud or animated in their behaviour. People walk around very slowly in the streets, almost dragging their feet. My friend says that it looks as if they have come out of a long war and are all very tired. I look again, and it really does seem that way. Traditional Portuguese music, Fado also reflects this. It is slow and mournful, even painful. It is similar to traditional Middle Eastern music, and indeed, it does have Moorish influences.

Interesting Blogs from Iraq and Cuba

It’s been a quite a while since I updated my blog. In fact, I haven't even accessed it for the last month. I haven’t been particularly busy, I just kind of forgot that I had a blog. Anyways, I've been looking at other people's blogs around the world and I found two good ones I want to mention.

The first is a blog from a guy in Iraq talking about daily life in the country. He has a post titled "Sample Threat Letters from Iraq" which shows some of the messages various groups use to threaten people (October 9, 2006). Below is one of the letters:

Warning. Warning. Warning.

All members of the Sunni community, Wahhabis and Takfiris, are required to leave the Abu Al-Khasib province immediately as a result of the killings and deportation suffered by the [Shia] followers of the Prophet’s household. We do not exclude anyone. You have destroyed holy sites and you have slaughtered the Shia based on their identity. We were patient but not any more. We will not be silent from now on. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, and the first transgressor is more unjust. We will take revenge for the Shia and the followers of the Prophet’s household. We will not stay silent in the face of injustice. Never. We will not tolerate humiliation. You do not have much time to leave.

He who has warned is henceforth excused.

Saraya Al-Tha’r

The strangest thing I found about these letters is the way most of them begin with the words:

“Warning...Warning...Warning”

After making a threat and explaining their motivations, nearly all of them end with

“He who has warned is henceforth excused.”

It almost sounds like a proverb.

Another good blog I found is from an exchange student in Cuba which you can see here

For a while I had some very positive beliefs about Cuba, I still do actually, but not as much as before. I always thought that even though people were poor, they had all the basics in life like food, shelter, education, and a very good health care system. But, I've read some more about the place to suggest that its really not like that. But still, maybe the life of a poor person in socialist Cuba is better than the life of a poor person in a capitalist Latin American country like Brazil or Columbia.

Capital cities, Mystery Creatures...

I had a bit of a boring week and spent a lot of time surfing the net and thinking of some random articles on wikipedia to look up. I got this idea to memorise the capital city of every country in the world. There's really not much point in it, but maybe if I meet someone from an obscure country like Burkina Faso, I can say to them, so are you from the capital, Ouagadogou? And they'll look at me like, wow, you know the capital?!

Or maybe they'll just answer yes or no in an indifferent way...

Anyway, Ouagadogou is the first capital I've memorised. I'll try to memorise two capitals everyday from now on. The other one I learned today is Lilongwe, the capital of Malawi, where Madonna adoped a child from.
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There's news of some sea creature attacking people in the waters in Dubai. It started off with some guy writing a letter to 7days about how he went to the beach and felt something biting his ankle which led to extreme bleeding and pain and he ended up in hospital. Someone else then wrote another letter saying, yeah the exact thing happened to me too, and now the story about this "mystery creature" is on the front page of 7days.

Maybe these are just rare freak accidents, but I usually go to the beach every weekend and this has put me off from going a bit. According to some marine biologists, all the offshore construction might be displacing some of the sea creatures which normally live further out at sea. Bummer.

Living in the real world

Dubai is so fake, Dubai is not the real world and Dubai is like Disneyland ! These are some of the comments I've heard people say about Dubai over the years. I have to admit I have never asked them what they mean when they say the "real world" but I think that they are referring to the US and Europe, a world where people pay taxes, commute to work using public transport and have a democracy.

When people say Dubai is not real, I guess they are talking about things like Palm Island, tax free incomes, and a media which never seems to say anything critical of the country's leaders.

Fair enough, these things may make Dubai fake, but why is the US and Europe the "real world?" I think the "real world" should be an expression used to describe how the majority of people on this planet live. If you pick a person at random on earth, there is a greater than 50% chance that the person you pick will be someone who lives on less than US$ 2 a day. I am not exaggerating, more than half the world's population lives below the poverty line of US$ 2 a day. More than half the world's population has never made a phone call (you can confirm these statistics if you do a search on google for "poverty statistics" or something similar).

For a person who has such a life, life in the US or Europe must seem like a Disneyland where people can afford to spend money on going to the cinema and eat out at restaurants, rather than just make enough to survive.

Sweating it out

This morning I posted quite a long article about public transport in Dubai. My friend Mira read it and although she liked the article, she said that it was too informative and I should avoid things like that on my blog. Damn you Mira!!

Well, I guess she has a point and I doubt many people are going to want to read a 1000 word article on a blog about buses and traffic and so on.

So anyway, if you look at the photo above, you can see 2 guys at a bus stop taking shelter under a tree. I took this photo in July when the outside temperature was 40+ degrees and the feeling of the sun on your head is so intense. I passed some other bus stops as well, where there weren't any nearby tress and some people were holding bits of paper over their heads and some had umbrellas. Why are there no shades over these bus stops? Its a real shame that a city which has all these ultra luxury developments, indoor ski slopes, 7 star hotels, etc, chooses to completely ignore the needs of people who travel on public transport.

To be fair, the Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) did announce plans to build air conditioned bus stops, but is every bus stop in the city going to be air conidtioned? If not, then there should at least be some simple shaded structures.

Finally, here is a quote from Margaret Thatcher, the former British prime minister summarising her attitude about public transport:
"A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself a failure.”