World poverty reduction has come to a stop

October 14th, 2022 by Roger Darlington

The UN has identified 54 developing economies with severe debt problems. While accounting for little more than 3% of the global economy, they represent 18% of the world’s population, and more than 50% of people living in extreme poverty.

Some countries are spending more on debt interest payments than on health, education and social protection combined, and that is hindering the fight against poverty.

The UN has a goal of reducing extreme poverty to 3% of the world’s population by 2030, but Indermit Gill, the World Bank’s chief economist, says on current trends the target will be missed. “We are totally off course. Poverty reduction has come to a stop.”

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The global cost of covid in lives and illness

October 13th, 2022 by Roger Darlington

Covid has killed almost 6.5 million people and infected more than 600 million.

The WHO estimates that 10% to 20% of survivors have been left with mid- and long-term symptoms such as fatigue, breathlessness and cognitive dysfunction.

Women are more likely to suffer from the condition.

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A review of the new action film “The Woman King”

October 12th, 2022 by Roger Darlington

Imagine a mainstream movie both written and directed by women: respectively American Dana Stevens and African-American Gina Prince-Bythewood. Unusual but not unknown. Imagine a film in which all the leading roles are taken by black women: outstanding African-American Viola Davis in the titular role plus young South African Thuso Mbedu, black British Lashana Lynch and Ugandan Sheila Atim. Now that is really is unusual.

Next imagine a story set in the West African state of Dahomey (modern day Benin) in 1823 featuring an all-female unit of warriors who beat the male warriors of the neighbouring Oyo kingdom and free slaves from Portuguese slave traders. Now we’re talking. Well, this is “The Woman King”.

There really was such an all-female force known as the Agojie, but they didn’t achieve quite the success represented in this fictional work which, in its revisioning of history. is a bit like Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained” or Ridley Scott’s “Gladiator”.

Shot on location in South Africa with striking costumes and an exciting score, it looks good and it sounds good. So, if this is not history as it was so much as history as we would like it to have been, this is an exciting feel-good movie with plenty of action and a fair amount of violence.

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Why do so many migrants wish to reach Britain?

October 9th, 2022 by Roger Darlington

As I regularly do, I spent the day in Milton Keynes entertaining my two granddaughters. Now the local taxi company that I use in the city is staffed by drivers who normally hail from Pakistan. But not today. This time my driver was from Afghanistan.

There are many ethnic groups in Afghanistan and I was interested to learn that my driver was an Hazara. Hazara speaks Hazaragi which is a dialect of Persian and they practice a branch of Shi’a Islam called the Twelvers which puts them very much at odds with the Taliban which is largely Pashtun and adherents of an extreme form of Sunni Islam. Over the years, there have been many murders and massacres of the Hazara community.

It is no wonder, therefore, that my driver fled Afghanistan and sought refugee status in Europe. He started in Greece but eventually made his home in Italy where he lived for years. There he made a family, obtained a good job and learned Italian. Here he works on three jobs to keep his wife and three children and – as I can avow – he is struggling to learn English.

So why is he is in Britain? He told me that he wishes his three children to be judged on their abilities and nto on the colour of their skin or the identity of their religion and he believes that they will have a fairer chance in this country.

Britain has many problems and our treatment of people of colour is far from perfect, but we tend to forget that, for many people around the world, Britain is still seen as a haven of stability and fairness and a land of genuine opportunity.

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A review of the important book of world history: “Guns, Germs And Steel” by Jared Diamond

October 8th, 2022 by Roger Darlington

Diamond is professor of geography at the University of California Los Angeles and he is a noted polymath who won a Pulitzer Prize for this outstanding work first published in 1997. I read a 20th anniversary edition with a new afterword and by then the book was an established classic.

It is a hugely ambitious work as indicated by the sub-title: “A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years”. It attempts to answer a fundamental question of world history: “Why did history unfold differently on different continents?” Or, to put the question in more provocative terms: why did ‘civilisation’ start in Europe and how did Europeans manage to colonise the rest of the world?

Over 500 pages later, the answer to this question can be summarised as follows: “History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples’ environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves”. Diamond rejects utterly any notions of racial superiority.

Diamond argues that nomad hunter-gathers settled down to grow crops and rear animals first in the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the so-called Fertile Crescent because the temperate climate provided a greater number of crops (such as wheat, barley, lentil, chickpea and flax) and mammals (notably the goat, sheep, pig, cow and horse)) that could be domesticated compared to any other part of the world.

From then onwards, the key determinant was latitude. It was much easier for the relevant techniques and tools to spread east-west across the massive land mass of Eurasia, where the climate was similar and geographical obstacles surmountable, than it was for this process to occur north-south in the Americas, Africa and Australia.

When Europeans of seven states sailed to the Americas, guns and horses gave them an enormous advantage, but the real killer was the infectious diseases that had evolved from animals in Eurasia to which the indigenous Americans had no resistance: smallpox, flu, tuberculosis, malaria, plague, measles and cholera. As Diamond reminds us, these diseases killed an estimated 95 percent of the pre-Columbian Native American population.

This thesis of the centrality of axis orientation has been called – but not by Jared himself – the “lucky latitudes”. In this trans-disciplinary book, Diamond makes his compelling case by quoting voluminous evidence from the fields of geography, history, archaeology, language and other fields.

He applies all this evidence to a succession of studies of different parts of the world, always drawing the same conclusion: “the striking differences between the long-term histories of peoples of the different continents have been due not to innate differences in the peoples themselves but to differences in their environments”.

“Guns, Germs And Steel” is quite a heavy read with masses of detail and some repetition, but it is a formidable work which has advanced our understanding of both world history and current geopolitics.

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A review of the 1961 classic French film “Last Year In Marienbad”

October 5th, 2022 by Roger Darlington

Marienbad is a spa town in the Czech Republic, but no filming was done there for this thoroughly enigmatic work. The locations used for most of the interiors and gardens were the palaces of Schleissheim and Nymphenburg and other locations in and around Munich. But this is the least of the deceits, or at least doubts, in this radical French work directed by Alain Resnais and written by Alain Robbe-Grillet.

Whether anything happened at Marienbad last year or at all cannot be known to the viewer. It might all be a game of imagination – there are lots of games in this film – of the principal character or of the writer and director themselves. Really we know nothing for sure. The characters have no names and no backstory; the woman (played by Delphine Seyrig) may be the wife of one of the men (Sacha Pitoëff) and may have had an affair with one of the other men (Giorgio Albertazzi), but who knows?

What we do know is that the film looks extraordinary: the rooms, corridors, and ceilings of the luxury hotel are spectacularly ornate, the actors are frequently as frozen as the constant focus on statues, the woman’s dresses were designed by Chanel, and the wide-angle photography is stunning. The music by Francis Seyrig adds powerfully to the overall sense of dissonance.

Therefore it is little wonder that, while some critics regard this as one of the best films ever made, others have excoriated it. Personally, if all films were like this one, I would never visit the cinema again but, as a challenging and innovative contribution to the endlessly colourful palette of film-making, I was glad that I viewed it.

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A review of the 1931 classic German film “M”

September 30th, 2022 by Roger Darlington

German cinema in the 1930s gave the world some striking and innovative work and this thriller directed by Austria-born Fritz Lang is one of those classics. It is notable both for the unusual subject matter and the humanistic approach to that subject and for the original use of sound in its storytelling.

Loosely inspired by the criminal case of serial child killer Peter Körten, it portrays the attempts by the local police, the criminal underworld and the general public to apprehend a child molester played by Peter Lorre. The presentation is surprisingly modern in not demonising the killer but instead showing how the murderer is himself the victim of uncontrollable forces and – again in modern style – we are offered an ending which is inconclusive and open to some interpretation.

This film was made shortly after the arrival of sound when cinema was still in a state of transition. So the work looks back to the silent era in the somewhat exaggerated acting style of Lorre and the occasional slapstick behaviour of police characters. But it embraces sound in a limited way so that, outside the actual dialogue, there is little of what is called diegetic sound (that is, sound that emanates from the storyworld of the film). Sound also plays a role in identifying the killer since he frequently whistles a tune from Edvard Grieg’s “Hall Of The Mountain King”.

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How many countries are double landlocked?

September 30th, 2022 by Roger Darlington

A country is “doubly landlocked” or “double-landlocked” when it is surrounded only by landlocked countries (requiring the crossing of at least two national borders to reach a coastline). There are two such countries:

I have just returned from almost two weeks in Uzbekistan but I have never visited Liechtenstein.

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Holiday in Central Asia (27): conclusion

September 29th, 2022 by Roger Darlington

It was always apparent that this trip to Central Asia would be a challenging one.  In the end, we visited four countries and not five (because Turkmenistan would not allow us entry); we made seven flights instead of nine; and we stayed at 16 hotels instead of 18. So, not quite what we expected, but still a very full programme with lots and lots of travelling often on very poor roads.  The weather was fantastic but typical temperatures in the mid 30sC could be quite wearing. 

In a group of only eight, one went down with covid and spent three days in bed, two had such severe diarrhoea that they need medical attention and a drip, and all but three of us – that included me – had bouts of diarrhoea necessitating the use of Imodium. Even without these problems, three of the group had walking difficulties. I was pleased that, even at my advanced age, I was able to manage everything physically. But a problem for me was that at least three voted for Brexit and I had to try hard to avoid political debates. 

In spite of challenges and issues, it was a simply fabulous trip. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan were mostly about scenery: canyons, rocks and lakes. Uzbekistan was essentially about architecture: mosques, mihrabs, minbars, minarets, madrassas, monuments and many many more miles. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan are poor countries but Uzbekistan is thriving and I was pleased to find it more politically relaxed and more economically advanced on on my previous visit.

We had lots of knowledgeable local guides but most of them spoke too much and too fast and their speech was heavily accented, so that concentrating on the information was hard. The toilet situation in Central Asia is something else. When you can find them, they are probably squatting affairs with no paper and no running water. The highlights of the trip were our visits to Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva.  Although I saw each of them 16 years ago, I loved seeing them again.  

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Holiday in Central Asia (26): Tashkent in Uzbekistan

September 28th, 2022 by Roger Darlington

Our last day in Central Asia (Day 25) was one of the very busiest of a consistently full itinerary. 

In Nukus, the hotel offered the smallest breakfast selection of the trip.  We left the hotel at 8 am and reached the airport in a mere 10 minutes and then the flight to Tashkent was just over an hour. Back in in the Uzbek capital, the temperature was a comfortable 28C and our local guide was a woman called Sayora. I saw some of Tashkent in 2006. These days, it is very different: a thriving modern city full of new shopping malls, accommodation blocks, cafes & restaurants and bright lights, with a population swollen to 4M. 

Our visits before lunch could not have been more different, First, we went to the Khast

Imom Square to see the oldest Koran in the world: the huge 7th century Osman Koran. I saw this book on my visit in 2006, but the square and its buildings are new and the final new building, an enormous new mosque, is due to open in 2025.

Next we did something that I have not done before: we travelled a short distance on the famed Tashkent metro system which, in terms of grand design, is apparently second only to that of Moscow (where I have never been and do not expect to visit any time soon). The Tashkent metro has 46 stations and there is a security guard at the entrance to each. We admired two of the stations: one named after the Uzbek poet Alisha Noveji with a roof of domes and walls with turquoise panels and one named Cosmonauts and dedicated to the pioneers of space including the first man in space Yuri Gagarin and the first woman in space Valentina Tereshkova.  

At last, it was time for lunch.  Our meagre breakfast was about 7 am and it was now 1.30 pm. At the very large and overly ornate “Sim Sim” restaurant, we enjoyed kebabs. The afternoon involved two museums: one on the official tour and the other an optional extra.

We spent half an hour at the Museum of Applied Art located in the former palace of a 19th century Russian diplomat. The museum contains some beautiful artefacts. Then, having booked into our hotel (we were back at the Lotte City), those who wished to view a second museum – only me and two others did – had a few minutes to find our rooms before walking round to the newly recurated National History Museum. This proved to be more interesting than feared with a final, extensive section on post-independence Uzbekistan, so it was an hour well-spent. 

Back at the hotel, there was barely half an hour before the group was off again for a special farewell evening. It started with a classical concert of just over an hour and a half delivered by a full string orchestra.  I am a lifelong lover of classical music, but I did not recognise any of the four pieces (the last and longest was ‘Stabat Mater’). but I thoroughly enjoyed all of them. Then, we had a late-ish dinner at a restaurant with live music called “Caravan”. So it was about 10.30 pm before we returned to hotel, over 14 hours since we had left the previous hotel in the morning. 

Day 26 was all about travelling home: a four hour flight from Tashkent to Istanbul and then a three hour plus flight from Istanbul to London, again both with Turkish Airlines. I was met at the airport by a car arranged by VJV, so I reached home 16 1/2 hours after leaving the hotel in Tashkent. While I had been away, I had grown a beard and the UK had obtained a new prime minister, a new monarch and a collapsed pound. 

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