Accidental Blogger

A few days ago I posted a Brazilian professor’s impressions of India’s erstwhile Portuguese colony of Goa on India’s west coast. Today’s New York Times travel section has an article on Pondicherry, a tiny town in south India on the Bay of Bengal which was once colonized by the French. 

AS colonies go, Pondicherry was not exactly a success story. Almost immediately after the French set up this lovely nugget on the Bay of Bengal in 1674, it was captured by the Dutch, retaken by its founders, then sacked and destroyed by the British. And though the French kept rebuilding it, Pondicherry never became more than a stopover on the way to Indochina. Even after Pondy, as it is nicknamed, rejoined India — late, in 1956 — it languished, out of step with the rest of the nation. In other words, for most of its history, Pondicherry was a backwater, in decline.

No more. Today, Puducherry, as it is officially known but rarely called, is capitalizing on a glammed-up version of that history, and emerging as an artsy, design-savvy destination with a quasi-Gallic approach to eating, drinking, shopping and relaxing. It’s like India seen through a French lens, or maybe vice versa.

On the southeastern coast, about 150 miles south of Chennai, Pondicherry is, for an Indian city, tiny. Just about a million people live there, mostly in the types of charmless, three- and four-story concrete buildings erected all over the poorer parts of Asia. But near the Bay of Bengal, the cityscape changes drastically. Soon you see tile roofs and wooden shutters, balconies and colonnades, wide brick streets and pastel Catholic churches — the neighborhood once known as the Ville Blanche, or White Town, where the colonists lived.

Ron Rosenbaum ponders over Hiroshima in Slate:

My Amex itinerary listed my room in the Hotel Hiroshima this way: "1 KING BED SMOKING CITY." SMOKING CITY! Turns out "CITY" was shorthand for "city view." But do I need to spell out why I find the name Hotel Hiroshima so resonant? Sure, you hate the Eagles. It’s practically a cultural requirement that you do (sometimes I think everybody but me does, but then again, the Eagles seem to sell a lot of music). Still—admit it—there are some lines that will last. Like the one from "Hotel California": "You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave."

So it is with the Hotel Hiroshima. We checked in to a metaphoric Hotel Hiroshima—"we" as a culture—on Aug. 6, 1945, when the 16-kiloton atomic weapon detonated about 800 meters over a hospital here. (The hospital wasn’t the ostensible target; a nearby bridge was, but needless to say, the hospital and all those in it were vaporized.) Nearly 100,000 people died instantly or within hours from the original blast and the firestorms that followed (by the end of 1945, 140,000 were dead). Estimates of those who died over a longer period from radiation sicknesses, from radiation-induced cancers, and other disease sequela range far upward.

We checked in to the First Nuclear Age that day in 1945, and yes, sometimes we check out, in the sense of repressed memory, willed or unconscious denial, cultural amnesia. It’s happened for prolonged periods after the end of the Cold War. That all-too-brief "holiday from history" some called it.

So yes, we’ve checked out, but it doesn’t look like we’re ever going to leave: The nuclear weapons are still there—thousands of them under the badlands of the Dakotas and the trans-Ural steppes and the sands of the Middle East, all still armed and ready. As they say in "Hotel California," in a phrase that never made sense to me until now, "We are all just prisoners here/ of our own device."

(I left the following comment at 3 QD in a post that links to Rosenbaum’s essay)

This piece evoked kaleidoscopic memories of Hiroshima, of nuclear wars and hotels.

For some reason, I have visited Hiroshima several times – more than I have any other Japanese city. The very first time on a beautiful fall day, the visit to the Peace Memorial left me shaken. During subsequent visits I did note the clutter of memorials and tourist memorabilia that have sprouted. I see nothing wrong with that. The Peace Memorials in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Nagasaki got bombed under plan B because the skies over Fukuoka the original target, on August 9, 1945 were clouded) are beautiful, excruciatingly well chronicled and amazingly free of rancor. If these two cities choose to continue amidst their "normalcy," to remind the rest of the world what a nuclear powered war (with just two bombs lightheartedly named the "Little Boy" and the "Fat Man") can do to people’s lives and possessions, it is a heroic endeavor.

Hiroshima is a busy but strangely peaceful and yes, "normal" industrial city. It does have some unusual hotels. I remember one well appointed business hotel which was as soul-less as the "All Night Kinkos of Hiroshima." Another hotel, enigmatically named "The Hiroshima Intelligent Hotel" is designed with maximum ergonomics in mind but has the atmosphere of a cozy Mediterranean outfit in the south of France. The Hiroshima pancakes (Okonomi-yaki) are indeed delicious and the best ones are to be found in a cramped, smoky cafeteria at the city’s main railway station.

Coincidentally, we too have been pondering over hotels at our blog recently. Ron Rosenbaum says:

Sure, you hate the Eagles. It’s practically a cultural requirement that you do (sometimes I think everybody but me does, but then again, the Eagles seem to sell a lot of music). Still—admit it—there are some lines that will last. Like the one from "Hotel California": "You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave."

So, everyone hates the Eagles? Well, everyone except Rosenbaum and Abbas Raza.

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Included here are a few photos from my trips to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Photo #1 and #3 show the Peace Memorials in Hiroshima and Nagasaki respectively. In the second photo you can see the light bulb factory shown above in its current condition. The factory was Ground Zero when the Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima. The original bombed out structure has been preserved to look like it did in August 1945. (click to enlarge)

A Brazilian in Goa – Arthur Ituassu reflects on the cultural pasts of two Portuguese colonies continents apart, that in many ways mirror each other.  Their present challenges he notes, though similar, are independent of their shared history.

"Our food is Goan. It is not Indian, nor Portuguese. It is Goan. We are not Portuguese. We are Indian for sure, but we are also Goan."

The speaker is Jeanette Afonso, a middle-aged Portuguese teacher in Panaji, the small, historic capital city of the Indian state of Goa. As well as teaching, Jeanette runs a small guest-house at her Cantinho dos Afonsos, a double-yellow house in Panaji’s beautiful Old Quarter. At the end of the street, the little white church of São Francisco de Assis bathes in the light, blessing the neighbourhood and enshrining its history – there is even a crucifix that had given authority to the trials of the Goan inquisition (1560-1774).

For a Brazilian, this is a very interesting place to be. It is so clear that both former colonies of Portugal (Brazil 1500-1882, Goa 1510-1961) are products of a shared history – Portugal’s pioneering globalisation – that enables people from widely distant territories to feel at home in the other. When, for example, a mass in Portuguese is celebrated on Sunday morning at the church of Imaculada Conceição, both the oceans and the centuries between Brazil and Goa seem to fall away.

But a common history, as Amartya Sen argues, is no excuse from reasoning. A Brazilian in Goa can equally see that everything here is also "similar, but different". The space for human creation and intervention – for making it new – must never be suppressed. It is such intervention that has also made Brazilia and Goan cultures – their shared histories notwithstanding – different.

For more on the Indian state of Goa see here.