New Old World: An Indian Journalist Discovers the Changing Face of Europe
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New Old World: An Indian Journalist Discovers the Changing Face of Europe
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Overview
After several years documenting the rise of China, award-winning Indian journalist Pallavi Aiyar moved to Brussels, the headquarters of the European Union, to discover a Europe plagued by a financial crisis, and unsure of its place in a world where new Asian challengers are eroding its old and comfortable certainties. With a lively mix of memoir, reportage and analysis, Aiyar takes the reader on a romp across the continent, meeting workaholic Indian diamond merchants in Antwerp, upstart Chinese wine barons in Bordeaux, Sikh farmhands in the Italian countryside, and Indian engineers running offshore energy turbines in Belgium.
In the Europe of today everything is in flux, as she discovers through conversations with Muslim immigrants struggling to define their identities, the austere bosses of Germany's world-beating companies, and bewildered Eurocrats struggling to keep the European Union from splitting apart. Examining the diverse challenges the continent faces today—among them, bloated welfare states, the accommodation of Islam, the European ambitions of Indian and Chinese entrepreneurs, and ancient intra-cultural fissures — New Old World offers a panoramic look at Europe's first-world crisis from a unique Asian perspective.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466883901 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 09/29/2015 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| File size: | 402 KB |
About the Author
Pallavi Aiyar is an award winning journalist who has worked as a foreign correspondent for over a decade, reporting from China, Europe and South East Asia. She is the author of the 2008 China memoir, Smoke and Mirrors, which won the Vodafone-Crossword Popular Award. Her 2011 novel, Chinese Whiskers, a modern fable set in Beijing, was published in the United States, Italy, Belgium and India. She lives in Brussels.
Award winning journalist and author PALLAVI AIYAR spent six years living in a hutong home in the heart of the old imperial city of Beijing. She reported from across China for the Hindu and Indian Express in addition to teaching English at the Beijing Broadcasting Institute. She is the winner of the 2007 Prem Bhatia Memorial Award for excellence in political reporting and analysis for her dispatches from China. Her book Smoke and Mirrors: An Experience of China won the Vodafone-Crossword Popular Book Award for 2008. Her first novel, Chinese Whiskers, was published by Harper Collins India to excellent reviews. She currently lives in Brussels with her husband, son and two Chinese cats, where she writes about Europe for the Business Standard. Pallavi has degrees in Philosophy, History and Media Sociology from St. Stephens College Delhi University, Oxford and the London School of Economics.
Read an Excerpt
New Old World
An Indian Journalist Discovers the Changing Face of Europe
By Pallavi Aiyar
St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2015 Pallavi AiyarAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-8390-1
CHAPTER 1
Adventures in Occidentalism
The plane hiccupped its way down toward the runway. I wiggled my ankles, stiff from the long ride from Beijing to Brussels. Another journey; another country. Seven years had passed since I had first landed in China, and now this new moment of arrival, with its attendant anxieties and anticipations.
Once inside the airport building, I looked on enviously as Julio and Ishaan sailed through immigration, their smart maroon Spanish passports in hand. As usual, I was left alone in the people-with-potentially-suspect-motives line, an unavoidable consequence of my Indian nationality. A salty whiff of nervousness wafted about the inhabitants of my queue.
We were the headscarved, the brown-faced; the wrong religion, the wrong smell. We tried to look confident, even nonchalant, as we approached the dispassionate scrutiny of the uniformed immigration officials ahead. But no matter if we were Indian or Moroccan, Chinese or Turkish, our hearts beat a tad faster as we moved forward. No matter if we were cash-rich tourists or scholarship-winning students, we were diminished to supplicants.
I hated the feeling, even more so because those closest to me — my husband and friends — were such strangers to it. As a Western-educated Indian I occupied a peculiar kind of space from their perspective, somewhere in the fuzzy middle ground between "us" and "them." In this I mirrored the predicament of emerging countries like India more broadly, the perception of which pinged between the poles of embryonic great powers and hopeless hellholes.
How could China and India, veritable superpowers, claim the sham titles of "developing countries" anymore, I would be asked repeatedly in the months that followed. In the run-up to the United Nations' talks on climate change in Copenhagen that December, there was much indignation at the defiance of emerging Asian countries that refused to commit to carbon cuts on the "spurious" grounds of equity.
Admittedly, the connection between carbon emissions and visas is not statistically robust, but there was an unreflexive hypocrisy in the way that the developing/emerging world was treated in Europe that was irksome. We were firmly of the Third World when it came to the granting, or not, of visas but morphed into superpowers on a level playing field with the West when it was a question of taking the economic hit for climate change mitigation.
Of course, this did not preclude my having my own brand of visa-related hypocrisy. I often oscillated between the desire to distance myself from the unmannered poor of the developing world and a more "noble" feeling of solidarity with the visa-hungry. Sometimes I was upset because it was I, the Oxford-educated sophisticate, who was being treated on par with the illiterate Punjabi peasantry. But at other times, I felt full of indignation on behalf of the illiterate Punjabi peasantry who were so regularly humiliated by the whole visa process.
But on that day, I was preoccupied by thoughts of a more prosaic nature — how to get us all out of the airport and into our serviced apartment with the minimum of stress. Luckily we bumped into Dimitri, a Dutch friend who worked for the United Nations in Beijing, as we exited the flight, and he offered to help us with our luggage: several large suitcases, car seat, stroller, travel cot, two cat carriers with cats, in addition to an assortment of backpacks and laptop bags.
Dimitri had also long crossed over to the other side of freedom and baggage claim as I continued my slow shuffle along the queue, sandwiched between an elderly Chinese couple in polyester suits and a large, turbaned African woman with a sleeping baby tied to her back. By the time I made it through, Julio and Dimitri had unloaded our bags from the carousel and rescued the cats.
We walked through customs, our expensive and hard-won pet paperwork at hand. It had taken three months to have Caramel and Tofu certified EU-worthy, including sending blood samples to a lab in Europe and injecting them with microchips that effectively functioned as their visas. But it had turned out that a cat could gain easier entry into Belgium than an Indian: no one stopped us to scan the cats or check their paperwork because no one was in fact manning customs.
On emerging into the arrivals area, we were introduced to Dimitri's father, who'd come to pick him up. Hands were shaken, and Ishaan dutifully cooed at. Then Julio went off to explore the cab situation, anxious to find one commodious enough for our effects.
Dimitri, his father and I stood in front of Ishaan's stroller, chit-chatting about nothing in particular. The cats lay curled up in their cages, panting in exhaustion. Behind us a uniformed officer yawned lazily as he reclined in his seat within the cocoon of the security booth located at the exit of the customs area.
Despite the early hour, the airport was swarming with people reuniting, kissing, weeping, backslapping. I felt a light tap on my shoulder and turned to face a tall young man who spoke to me in rapid-fire French. I picked out "excusez-moi," "ici," "arrivees" and "departs." He was asking me whether this was arrivals or departures, I divined. "Arrivals," I replied triumphantly, my hand making what I hoped looked like plane-landing motions, and felt most clever at being able to understand French without ever having learnt it.
The man looked gratified and strode off into the crowds with a "merci," and I turned to Dimitri, smirking. "Not bad, my French, huh?"
"What the f —!" he snarled in response and began to run manically away. I was a bit put out. This wasn't quite the reaction I'd been expecting. I turned in bewilderment to his father, who appeared equally deranged, rummaging wildly through the bags that we had stacked up on the trolleys parked next to us.
Only then did it dawn on me that various items were missing: my handbag, our computer case. We'd been robbed. On our first morning in Brussels. Bang in front of the security booth. Dimitri had put it so well: "What the f — !"
Dimitri's father explained the mechanics of the trick we'd fallen so hard for. The man had asked me a question, not in order to ascertain whether this was arrivals or departures (come to think of it, there was a large sign indicating "arrivals" right above us), but to distract all of us for the few seconds it took for his accomplice to help himself to the choicest pickings among our belongings and disappear.
My wallet was gone and with it my credit cards and cash. Our laptop had been taken and with it the external hard drive on which we had so carefully backed up all our pictures and important documents from sundry computers we'd used in Beijing over the years. And our hard-won documentation for the cats had been in the laptop case as well. In an instant, Caramel and Tofu had been transformed from EU-certified, high-quality felines to paperless potential bearers of fleas.
And so, instead of making our way to the nice serviced apartment we had booked for some well-deserved rest, I spent the next hour at the airport police station getting my first glimpse into the kind of predicaments that were confounding Europe.
"So," the balding, thickset policeman in charge of interviewing me began laconically, "welcome to Brussels." I launched into the story of what had happened, as animated as the cop was phlegmatic. "What did he look like, the man who talked to you?" he asked, once I'd finished describing the exact contents of my handbag. "Um, he was tall, quite thin," I answered. The cop looked unimpressed. "He had wavy hair," I continued, trying to do better. The policeman sighed and put his pen down.
"Did he look North African?" Wow! That cut to the chase. "I suppose he might have been," I replied lamely. "Yes," he thundered, suddenly a lot livelier than before. "They always are North African. What can we do? They come here, they rob, they return to Morocco."
"Does this happen often?" I ventured. "Oh yes," he replied, "several times a day. In fact, you're lucky you only lost a wallet and laptop. The other day, a Chinese lady lost everything, even her passport. And she didn't speak English. It was terrible for her." He began chuckling most ghoulishly.
"Are you from India?" he asked, when the tide of mirth appeared to have passed. I nodded, hoping to wrap up the conversation, but the cop's loquaciousness was boundless by then. "I really like Indian food," he continued rubbing his ample belly unappetizingly. "It's strange, because Mexican food always gives me an upset stomach, but Indian is just fine."
He handed me a typed-up copy of the police report. "Well, hope you settle in soon. Brussels has some good Indian restaurants." It was obvious I was being dismissed.
"Um, wouldn't you like some contact information for me?" I asked, taken aback at the abrupt conclusion to our interview. "Why would I need that?" he queried, looking genuinely perplexed. "So that you can let me know if you find anything?" He looked at me as though I were a particularly exotic Indian insect. "You can phone the airport's lost-and-found department in a few days. If we find anything, we'll deposit it there."
It was turning out to be quite a first morning in Brussels, "the heart of Europe" as it liked to boast of itself. "Ah! You fell for the question trick," clucked the taxi driver when we were finally on our way into town along with the recently filed police report and what remained of our baggage. "In Brussels you should remember to never answer a question from a stranger."
I thought back to the numerous times in Beijing when I'd turned to passersby for help. Despite my imperfect Chinese, I had always met with kind, helpful responses that involved neither violence nor silence. But of course that was in the developing world, I thought to myself bitterly.
Being careful when approached by strangers is something that every mother teaches her babe around the world. But in the vast megalopolises of the developing world, a sense of familial connectedness, an anachronistic spillover from village to city life persists, even in cities like Beijing and Delhi, which are home to upward of 17 million people. This is evident in the way that one addresses strangers: not an impersonal "madame" or "monsieur" but "brother" and "sister," "auntie" and "uncle," appellations that instantly transform unknown and potentially threatening strangers into presumed allies who can be called upon for help.
Beggars and traffic-intersection hawkers make particularly good use of this tradition. In Delhi, gangly adolescents trying to sell trinkets to motorists at red lights had been a constant in my life. Nothing quite drove home one's arrival in middle age with the same punch as when these youth switched from calling out to me as "didi," or sister, to "auntieji."
Ishaan suffered his first experience of culture shock when a year into our stay in Brussels, he greeted a neighbor with a "Hi, auntie." The lady, a kindly schoolteacher, shook her head and clarified, "I'm not your auntie, dear." She wasn't being rude, merely factual. But the manner in which we address each other can push us apart, emphasizing our separateness, just as it can draw us closer, underlying our connections. And in moving to Europe I sometimes felt adrift, isolated from those I lived among, in a way that I'd never experienced in China.
The developed world's stranger anxiety has its roots in textbook sociological catchphrases: urbanization, atomization, anomie, mechanization, individualism. There is a teleological feel to these theories. Societies when poor are largely agrarian and characterized by dense networks of family and clan that provide traditional welfare nets. With industrialization and increasing urbanization, in short, "modernity," traditional social networks lose their potency. Extended families are replaced by the nuclear family. The individual's choices gain precedence over the community's ways. Traditional values rooted in religion are replaced by consumerism. Even as people come to live in ever more populous urban conglomerations, there is a breakdown of trust between people who have no shared history.
There are certainly aspects of this trajectory to be spied in both China and India. But the crucial difference between Europe and these Asian behemoths is in the sheer number of people that Chindia is home to, which makes the demarcations between public and private, mine and yours, a lot fuzzier than in the West.
In Delhi and Beijing, to live is to jostle. The idea of some kind of sacrosanct personal space is impossible to achieve in any sustained way, although the elite certainly strive to realize it. But even the plushest of air-conditioned cars bear the telltale bruises other vehicles invariably inflict on them in the frenzied crush of parking spaces. The grimy fingerprints of street urchins adorn their tinted windows, mementos of the tap-tapping of hungry children demanding money at stoplights.
I had grown up with what to a Westerner would seem a very lax consciousness of private property. I'd thought nothing of stopping by a parked car to hitch my foot up onto the hood and tie a shoelace. I got the shock of my life the first time I tried this on a car in England back in my student days and set a car alarm off.
I still smart with embarrassment remembering the sharp reaction I provoked in a German college mate at Oxford when I unselfconsciously helped myself to his open packet of chips while we sat chatting in the common room one afternoon. In China, even the poorest peasants share their boiled eggs and oranges with whoever happens to be seated next to them on a bus or train.
In the shabbier addresses of Beijing and Delhi, cramped quarters and an unreliable electricity supply force people out onto the streets; so, much of private life is lived in public. But even in the posh, gated communities of south Delhi and Beijing's Central Business District, one's aural space is anything but private, constantly intruded upon by a variable mixture of honking cars, tinkling cycle bells, barking stray dogs, belching cows, itinerant knife sharpeners, the local temple's devotional songs, the jack-hammering of construction sites, and the neighbor's mobile phone conversations.
Would this physical and aural jostle for space gradually disappear as India and China grew richer? So far, it had only gotten worse, as ever more people poured into the upwardly mobile cities from the poorer countryside.
Regardless, avoiding strangers and their questions in Europe was advice that was not solely rooted in the region's high level of urbanization. It also had to do with the insecurities provoked by the millions of immigrants who had transformed swaths of many European cities into culturally unfamiliar and potentially menacing spaces. A few months into my first year in Brussels, I had lunch with a young Taiwanese academic who was spending a few months in the city to research EU-China relations. His wife, who had recently joined him from Taipei, had come along as well. As we took a post-lunch stroll in the streets that criss-crossed their largely immigrant neighborhood, she told me that Brussels was not quite what she had expected. I asked her what she meant.
"Where do Brussels people come from?" she queried in response. I spent the next ten minutes trying to explain the complex divisions between Dutch-speaking Flanders and French-speaking Wallonia, and Brussels's unique position as a francophone enclave in Flanders. "So, although historically Brussels folk were Flemish, the city became majority French-speaking under King Leopold II; and although genuine Bruxellois don't identify themselves as either Flemish or Walloon, they are a dying breed," I concluded my lengthy discourse. She looked at me clearly dazed. There was a brief pause before she shrugged and said, "Really? It feels to me they mostly come from Turkey."
It was a comical moment, but her comment highlighted the fact that almost a quarter of Brussels's population, or some 250,000 people, are immigrants from Muslim countries, primarily Morocco and Turkey. In many schools in certain Brussels municipalities like Anderlecht and Schaerbeek, over 90 percent of pupils are Muslim.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from New Old World by Pallavi Aiyar. Copyright © 2015 Pallavi Aiyar. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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Table of Contents
Introduction
1. Adventures in Occidentalism
2. A Hall of Mirrors
3. The Veiled Threat
4. Tilting At Windmills
5. The Austere New Boss
6. Chateau Chongqing
7. The Global Gherkin
8. Disunity in Diversity
9. Celebrating the Decline of Europe?
Acknowledgements