Battles over Books and Statues

Summary

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Podcast Summary: "Battles over Books and Statues"

Podcast: From Our Own Correspondent (BBC Radio 4)
Date: April 11, 2015
Host: Kate Adie
Episode Theme:
This episode explores contentious debates over history, identity, and cultural memory—from the removal of colonial statues in South Africa, to textbook and statue disputes in Korea and Japan, persistent HIV and drug policy failures in Russia, a glimpse at Cuba’s shifting politics, and a personal search for tranquility at a Thai monastery. The correspondents probe how societies remember, reconcile, or rewrite their pasts, and what these “battles” mean for today and tomorrow.

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1. South Africa's Battle Over the Cecil Rhodes Statue

Correspondent: Andrew Harding
Key Segment: 01:16–06:21

• The episode opens with the dramatic removal of the statue of British colonialist Cecil Rhodes from the University of Cape Town following weeks of student protests.
• The protests began when a student, Tsimane Makwele, dumped excrement on the statue, symbolically confronting the nation’s colonial legacy.
• The debate quickly polarized:
  • Many white South Africans condemned the act as an “infantile, uneducated stunt,” an attack on history and the spirit of reconciliation associated with Nelson Mandela.
  • Black South Africans, including academics and students, spoke about ongoing feelings of humiliation and ‘subtle racism,’ and the continued dominance of a white, Anglo-Saxon worldview on campuses.
• The protests spread, with vandalism targeting other monuments, and counter-protests by Afrikaners (white South Africans of Dutch descent) defending their own icons.
• Harding stresses:

  “South Africa is not on the brink of a race war. Something crops up every few months to stir passions in a young nation still trying to work out how to tackle the legacies of racial apartheid.” (05:01)

• He observes the political vacuum left by the ruling ANC, increasingly perceived as part of the establishment and out of touch:

  “Once upon a time, the governing ANC would have taken the lead … Instead, this week there’s been silence.” (05:48)

• The episode closes on a note of generational anger and impatience:

  “Many, for better or worse, will take a different lesson from what Mr. Makwele did with that statue, that patience has its place. But sometimes anger is necessary, even constructive.” (06:13)

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2. Korea and Japan's "Battle of the Books"

Correspondent: Steve Evans
Key Segment: 07:03–11:45

• Evans reports from Seoul on how war memory and colonial tensions between Korea and Japan are being reignited—not with weapons, but with statues and textbooks.
• The “comfort woman” statue outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul is a powerful, daily reminder for diplomats of Japan’s wartime sexual slavery. Korean nationalists also celebrate an assassin of a Japanese prime minister.
• The latest spat revolves around new Japanese textbooks that claim disputed islands and promote a nationalist view of history:

  “There is at the moment a sort of battle of the books going on.” (09:20)

• Simultaneously, South Korea imposes its own patriotic narrative in schools, underlining mutual, government-driven myth-making.
• The U.S., frustrated by its bickering allies at a time of growing Chinese power, called in both ambassadors for talks.
• Evans’ trenchant observation:

  “Readings of history really do matter. In portraying the past, they define the present and create, or at least perpetuate, animosities which last well into the future… A battle of the books must be better than a battle of the bullets.” (11:19)

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3. Russia’s Rising HIV Crisis: Ideology Over Evidence

Correspondent: Lucy Ash
Key Segment: 12:29–17:18

• Russia’s official HIV rates rise despite global decline—fueled by restrictive drug and sexuality laws.
• Ash follows “Nixon,” a volunteer from Moscow’s Andrei Rilkov Foundation—the city’s only source of clean syringes and naloxone. Their work is stigmatized and starved of funding due to foreign support.
• Homemade drugs like “krokodil” (flesh-rotting) and “tropicamide” (deadly) remain common; users still face high likelihood of HIV infection.
• Harm reduction methods, like methadone therapy, are banned in Russia. Ash interviews Yevgeny Brun, Russia’s chief narcologist, who dismisses methadone:

  “Our professional joke is that methadone is similar to treating the vodka alcoholic so with cognac.” (14:51)

• However, Brun concedes that his rehabilitation results are poor (only 10% long-term recovery).
• By contrast, Ukraine, embracing harm reduction, has seen its infection rates fall.
• Stark quote from harm-reduction leader Anya Sarang:

  “Why do they keep opposing methods that have proved effective everywhere else in the world? ... They just don’t want anything coming from the West.” (16:24)

• The segment ends on a note of frustration and resignation amid relentless bureaucracy and nationalistic suspicion.

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4. Cuba and the US: A Carefully Staged Handshake

Correspondent: Will Grant
Key Segment: 18:07–22:33

• Against the backdrop of a historic summit and easing U.S.-Cuba relations, Fidel Castro makes a rare public appearance, coinciding with Cuba’s delicate balancing act between its old ally Venezuela and new overtures to the U.S.
• Grant notes Fidel’s acute political timing:

  “…he demonstrated an uncanny, almost unnatural ability to predict which way the political winds would blow…It is what he called having a sense of the historical moment.” (18:15)

• Grant visits artist Alexis “Kcho” Leyva Machado, whose renovated warehouses double as community hubs and offer rare free public Wi-Fi—a revolutionary act in internet-starved Cuba.
• Kcho asserts:

  “I’m 3,000% revolutionary… No one should doubt that everything I do is for the good of the revolution.” (21:28)

• Grant frames Cuba’s dilemma: opening to the U.S. means risking old alliances and ideological purity, but refusing means stagnation.
• The absence of overt crackdowns on Kcho’s Wi-Fi is explained by personal ties with the Castros, underlining the interplay of loyalty, ideology, and pragmatism.

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5. Monastic Minimalism in Modern Thailand

Correspondent: Rajan Datta
Key Segment: 23:15–27:58

• Datta seeks respite from modern chaos at a Buddhist monastery in Thailand—amid a context of declining, sometimes scandal-tainted monasticism and a society overrun by consumerism, military rule, and skepticism.
• The monastery offers a spartan experience: no electricity, no hot water, no bed, no Wi-Fi, and only one meal a day.
• Datta’s personal struggle:

  “My aim is to get a taste of the monastic lifestyle at a time when the monkhood is under pressure… But how conducive is that, really, to [a] healthy psyche?” (23:19)

• He admits to cheating (a cereal bar), battles mosquitoes, and grapples with meditative disciplines. Yet conversations with Western monks, including a former photographer and a “Woodstock generation” hippy, contextualize his discomfort.
• Key monastic teaching:

  “The root of all suffering, a senior monk told me, was craving—material or sensory gratification.” (25:43)

• By the end, he comes to a “mini epiphany”:

  “There’s actually a huge appeal in a world without constant chatter, gossip and speculation, without meaningless distractions and empty choices to make and without having to find fault in everything.” (27:35)

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Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• Andrew Harding (South Africa):
  • “But sometimes anger is necessary, even constructive.” (06:13)
• Steve Evans (Seoul):
  • “A battle of the books must be better than a battle of the bullets.” (11:19)
• Lucy Ash (Russia):
  • “Our professional joke is that methadone is similar to treating the vodka alcoholic so with cognac.” (14:51)
  • “Why do they keep opposing methods that have proved effective everywhere else in the world?” (16:24)
• Will Grant (Cuba):
  • “I’m 3,000% revolutionary… No one should doubt that everything I do is for the good of the revolution.” (21:28)
• Rajan Datta (Thailand):
  • “The root of all suffering…was craving—material or sensory gratification.” (25:43)
  • “There’s actually a huge appeal in a world without constant chatter, gossip and speculation…” (27:35)

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Episode Flow and Tone

Witty, thoughtful, and often poignant, the correspondents move beyond headlines to show how history and memory are negotiated in the public sphere and in individual lives. Each segment carefully blends personal narrative with broader social analysis, drawing clear links between the cultural battles of today and the deeper currents of national identity, resilience, and change.

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Transcript

[Narrator]

Thank you for downloading this podcast we

[Andrew Harding]

make from our own correspondent for the

[Rajan Datta]

BBC World Service as well.

[Presenter]

But this is the edition broadcast on Radio 4 and it's introduced by Kate Ady. Hello. Today, battles over books and statues. South Africans wonder what pooh on the face of Cecil Rhodes means for their country's future. The US tells South Korea and Japan to stop bickering about history. Commandante Fidel makes a rare appearance as Cuba and the US turn their backs on more than half a century of hostility. And no novels, no WI fi, no bed. We find out if our correspondent managed to find inner peace at a monastery in Thailand. The students in Cape Town were cheering on Thursday as a statue of the British colonialist Cecil Rhodes was removed from the university after weeks of protests. It had been vandalised and then covered up as students, both black and white, demanded its removal. The campaign against the statue led to attacks on other monuments considered to represent the country's racist past. Andrew Harding's been considering what the week's developments say about the state of South Africa today.

[Andrew Harding]

It all started with some excrement. One night last month, a student called Tsimane Makwele scooped some poo from one of the portable toilets that dot the often turbulent, crowded townships on the windswept plains outside Cape Town. The next morning, Mr. Makwele took his package to the foot of nearby Table Mountain and to the imposing grounds of one of South Africa's oldest and most prestigious universities. Overlooking the rugby field in the center of the campus is an old bronze statue of a white man. He's in an armchair, one hand on his chin, the other holding some paper, and he's sitting forwards like. Like a man startled by something he's just seen on television. Mr. Macaulay promptly set about smearing the statue and in the process ignited a furious, fascinating row about history, race and equality. The statue, of course, was of Cecil Rhodes, British diamond magnate, politician and unapologetic colonialist. A man who dreamed of a British empire built on slave labor stretching from Cape Town to Cairo. The reaction to Mr. Machwele's daubings was swift, loud, often eloquent and polarised. Critics, yes, lots of them white, condemned it as an infantile, uneducated stunt, a crude attempt to reject history and an insult to the consensus building. Why can't we all try to get along? Spirit of Nelson Mandela. After all, they argued, Cecil Rhodes had generously donated land to the University of Cape Town. Plenty of black South Africans have since benefitted from rhodes scholarships. Surely Mr. Macwelly could have found a more relevant target and perhaps a less repulsive weapon. As usual, far nastier arguments were flung on the Internet. Online anonymity breeds contempt here, as it does Everywhere else. But Mr. Macwellay stood by his actions as a black South African, he said he simply found it unbearably humiliating to walk every day past a statue glorifying a an undeniable racist. Many others then took that argument further. Black academics called into radio stations to complain about how campuses were still dominated by white men and by an Anglo Saxon worldview. Black students poured out their stories of belittlement, of subtle racism, of the way their accents and first languages still condemn them to a second class status in their own 21 year old democracy. And as often happens here, some people got a little too carried away. Students broke into staff meetings to jeer and intimidate. Copycats took their spray cans to deface other statues, including one in Port Elizabeth that commemorates the horses that served and died over a century ago. During the Boer War in Pretoria, angry Afrikaners, stout bearded white men in brown military uniforms gathered to guard a statue of their iconic Boer War leader, Paul Kruger. Someone had splashed it with green paint. I should say at this point that South Africa is not on the brink of a race war. Something crops up here every few months to stir passions in a young nation still trying to work out how to tackle the legacies of racial apartheid. So as symbolic as it necessarily is, the poo on Cecil Rhodes face is unlikely to go down as some sort of turning point the moment Mandela's rainbow nation was swept aside by a thunderstorm. In fact, a sensible compromise has already been hammered out at the university, and the bronze man in the armchair has been lifted off his plinth to be mothballed until a suitable new location can be found. And yet, for me, this whole business has raised some profound issues about today's South Africa. First is the way it's exposed a growing political vacuum here. Once upon a time, the governing ANC would have taken the lead on Cecil Rhodes. It would have marched at the front of the protesters, harnessing their anger but urging them to focus on the future, not the past. Instead, this week there's been silence. After 21 years in power, the ANC is the establishment, the status quo. It's losing votes and credibility as its leader, President Jacob Zuma, lurches from corruption scandals to indignant outbursts to denials. The second, related issue is about anger. For many years, black South Africans have waited patiently for the fruits of democracy, guided by Mandela's vision of a gentle, negotiated transition. But while life has improved here for most, millions of young people are trapped in crime ridden townships with little education and no hope of work. And now, unsurprisingly, we're seeing anger growing. Some will argue that it's dangerous, misguided, fuelled by new populist firebrands. But many, for better or worse, will take a different lesson from what Mr. Makwelli did with that statue, that patience has its place. But sometimes anger is necessary, even constructive.

[Presenter]

That's Andrew Harding in South Africa. Another statue, this one in the South Korean capital Seoul, plays a part in our next story, as does the US Under Secretary of State Wendy Sherman. Yesterday in Washington, she called in the South Korean and the Japanese ambassadors for separate meetings, seen as a sign that the US Is trying to help improve relations between the two key Asian allies. Her move comes after a recent knife attack by a Korean nationalist on the US Ambassador in Seoul. The latest row between South Korea and Japan is all about textbooks. Steve Evans tells us their spat has brought long simmering regional resentments back to the surface.

[Narrator]

It must be quite hard for the Japanese to forget. Across the road from the fortress, which is the Japanese embassy in Seoul, is a bronze statue of a sweet looking girl on a chair. Under the chair are a pair of small shoes, real shoes, placed by anti Japanese protesters who in the rain place a coat over her and a hat on her head in the cold. The girl is a comfort woman, a Korean enslaved for sex by the Japanese during the Second World War. She with her young innocent face is staring across the road at the embassy, just sitting there, accusingly unmissable by every Japanese diplomat who comes out. The plaque alongside describes the statue, somewhat incongruously as a peace monument to Japanese military sexual slavery, though it's hard to imagine the Japanese who pass the statue seeing it as a peace gesture. Should the Japanese diplomat stroll to the other side of the embassy in Seoul, he might visit South Korea's National Museum of Contemporary History. At the moment, the special exhibition there is a celebration of the life of a Korean nationalist who shot and killed a prime minister of Japan more than a century ago and who waved the Korean flag and as the colonial ruler died. The exhibition's called Wurim, which means echo, by which the museum means the echo resounding today from the gunshots which killed the Japanese leader on October 26, 1909, three days before pulling the trigger. The assassin Ahn Jungkun wrote, although the east wind is getting colder, the strongman's Spirit is roaring. The wind from the east came, of course, from Japan, and it continues to chill Korea even today. The Korean nationalist, who last month slashed the American ambassador's face with a knife, had previously thrown a rock at the Japanese ambassador. Japan and the United States are the targets of Korean nationalists, the Japanese for the colonial rule over Korea, the from 1910 until Japan was defeated in 1945, and the Americans for their continuing presence in this country. I occasionally meet a Japanese diplomat here for lunch. And very pleasant it is. The tiny, delicate courses of raw fish arrive, served like works of art which should never be violated. We do violate them, of course. That's what food is for. But in ever such a refined way. With our chopsticks, we sip green tea and muse quietly over relations between the countries. The diplomat is bemused by the Koreans animosity. The current upsurge in that animosity was caused by new Japanese textbooks, which have a couple of rocky islands in the ocean between the two countries as an undisputed part of Japan and not of Korea, which thinks it owns them. There is at the moment a sort of battle of the books going on. South Korea points the finger at Tokyo for approving these books, which reflect an unambiguous, nationalistic Japanese view. And from this side of the water, the South Korean government also wants a stronger official hand on the pen that writes the school books. The high court here has just ruled that the government can insist that textbooks reflect what it would see as a patriotic Korean view. As all this perpetual squabbling goes on, the Americans look on in despair. As they see it, their two big allies in these parts bicker and snipe at each other at a time when China is becoming more powerful. There is the old adage that the pen is mightier than the sword, though the cynic replies that that's only if it's a very short sword and a very long, sharp pen. But the cynical view is wrong. Readings of history really do matter. In portraying the past. They define the present and create, or at least perpetuate animosities which last well into the future. There is one thing to be said, though. A battle of the books must be better than a battle of the bullets.

[Presenter]

Steve Evans in Seoul. Now, why is it that while the number of people around the world infected with the HIV virus is dropping, rates remain high in Russia, Official figures say there have been 900,000 cases in recent years. 170,000 people have died. But the real numbers, it's thought, could be significantly higher. International health workers believe that Russia's repressive drug and homosexuality laws are contributing to an increase in the numbers of people infected. Lucy Asch says that those few people in Russia who are trying to help drug users are caught up in an ideological war and a sense that what works in the west must be bad for Russia.

[Lucy Asch]

I'm with a man with a scraggy beard, gap teeth, and a peaked cap with the incongruous nickname of Nixon. Carrying a big blue rucksack, he looks as if he's off on a camping trip. In fact, he's off to the local chemist. Outside the shop, Nixon sets down his rucksack and waits. It's a cold night, and as we stamp our feet to keep warm, I wonder if we'll have any customers. Then a guy in a puffer jacket sidles up to see if we can spare 10 rubles. Nyet, says Nixon, and the man disappears into the chemistry. We never give money, says Nixon. It set a bad precedent. Minutes later, the man comes back and wants to know what's inside the rucksack. Nixon tells him he's from a charity called the Andrei Rilkov foundation, which promotes better health for people who use drugs. It's now the only organization in Moscow distributing clean syringes and naloxone, a medicine which prevents overdoses. The foundation's outreach work has certainly saved lives, but since it's partly supported by foreign funding and expertise, some health officials here see it as alien, dangerous, and even anti Russian. The guy asks for some Dvushkas two millilitre syringes and grudgingly accepts a pack of condoms. He tells me he's an economics graduate but is currently unemployed and has been injecting drugs for five years. I'm not a kid, he says contemptuously. I'm 30 years old. I know how to protect myself. And with that, he walks off into the night. Many of Russia's drug users get their highs by injecting something more accessible than heroin, made from ingredients you can buy over the counter in any chemist. Not long ago, the drug of choice was Krokodil, so named because it turns users skin dark and scaly before rotting the body tissue. Krokodil's active ingredient, codeine, used in cough remedies, is mixed with lighter fuel liquid to unblock drains, iodine and red phosphorus scraped off matches. Eventually, the Russian government banned sales of codeine without a prescription. The latest drug is tropicamide, used to dilate pupils during eye examinations. Sales of the drops have gone up 13 fold in Russia over the past five years, and that has little to do with eye problems. The concoction, which causes hallucinations and kidney pain, is sometimes called the seven monthr, because that's how long it can take to kill you. But if the homemade drugs don't finish you off, there's a high likelihood of contracting HIV from contaminated needles. The rate of new infections continues to climb year on year, and 170,000 officially registered people have already died. So you might expect the government to embrace harm reduction policies. The World Health Organization recommends methadone, the synthetic opiate taken by mouth, to curb heroin use and thus avoid infection from shared needles. But in Russia, methadone is banned. It can get you up to 20 years in prison. Our job is to wean people off addictive substances, says Yevgeny Brun, Russia's chief narcologist at the country's biggest treatment center for drug users. You see? He smiles. Our professional joke is that methadone is similar to treating the vodka alcoholic so with cognac. Yet Dr. Brune admits that his own methods are not particularly effective. A minority of patients go on to rehabilitation after the initial detox, and official data suggests just 10% are not injecting drugs after five years. Across the border, Ukraine is making progress against HIV. Unlike Russia, it has taken foreign advice and money and has set up methadone clinics and clean needle programs. In 2012, the country reported its first drop in new infections since 1999. One of Russia's first steps when it annexed Crimea was to close the methadone clinic, servicing more than 800 drug users there, according to the United Nations. Nearly 100 of them have since died. I just don't get it, says Anya Sarang from the Andrei Rilkov Street Outreach Charity. Why do they keep opposing methods that have proved effective everywhere else in the world? These programs aren't expensive, nor are they hard to implement. I guess they just don't want anything coming from the West. Nixon says it would be nice to have a minivan to sit in to keep warm and perhaps offer free HIV tests. But, he adds sadly, there's no money for that. So he buckles up his rucksack and sets off for home.

[Presenter]

And that's Lucy Ashe. The presidents of the United States and Cuba have shaken hands and chatted cordially at the start of the Summit of the Americas in Panama. It was a clear sign that the two men want to end decades of enmity between their countries. President Obama and Raul Castro are due to have historic formal talks there later today. But it's not all Peace and Harmony. Cuba's big ally in the region, oil rich Venezuela, has attacked Washington for continuing to impose economic sanctions on the island. And that's left Cuba torn between supporting its main ideological and financial backer and becoming closer friends with the us. Well, Raul Castro may be in charge of Cuba now, but as Will Grant's been reminded, Big Brother is still watching.

[Will Grant]

Never let it be said of Fidel Castro that he doesn't have an impeccable sense of timing. Throughout his political career, he demonstrated an uncanny, almost unnatural ability to predict which way the political winds would blow. Then, with unbending decisiveness, he would make his bold, even reckless choices and take Cuba in the direction he'd charted. For better or worse, it is what he called having a sense of the historical moment. Timing in the Cuban Revolution, it seems, is everything. So when the octogenarian revolutionary leader appeared in public for the first time in over a year, you can be pretty sure it was no coincidence. Dressed not in the trademark olive green fatigues of his youth, but the now customary blue and white tracksuit of his old age, Comandante Fidel was seen perched inside a people carrier shaking hands with an adoring group of Venezuelan students gathered at the car window. These days a hearing aid is visible in one ear, but otherwise there are no outward signs of weakness or frailty. The beard is now white, the hands and face are weathered and. But in the photographs, Fidel looks undimmed and defiant. One of the pictures shows him wearing a black baseball cap and clasping the hand of a young woman carrying a small Venezuelan flag while he jabs the air with his index finger, a characteristic gesture from his long televised speeches as a younger, more vigorous man. The morning the pictures of him were published on the front page of the state run newspaper Granma I happened to be at the place he'd last been seen in public some 14 months earlier. El Romerillo Cultural Centre is a collection of industrial warehouses in a poor neighbourhood of Havana which have been renovated by an artist called Alexis Leyva Machado, better known as Cacio. Cacio is an imposing kind of a man, stocky and robust, with thick rimmed glasses and his salt and pepper hair shaved short. He commands attention when he walks into the artistic complex he's created in this crumbling corner of the capital. Cacio's work has a recurring nautical theme, as over the years he has constantly been fascinated by the idea that people risk their lives trying to flee the island for the United States on rickety rafts. Inside his workshop, the nave, which means ship is one of his seminal works, El Pensador, a giant sculpture echoing August Rodin's the Thinker, built of balsa wood and broken boats with vast oars as the fingers on one hand. On this particular Saturday, Catcho is a little hoarse, his voice rasping as he tells me about his most recent effort to capture people's free WI fi. Cuba has one of the lowest rates of Internet penetration in the world, with the communist island recently ranked 125th of 166 nations in terms of information and communication technology. Access to the Internet in Cuba is limited and expensive, so Cacio's idea was truly revolutionary. He took the WI fi he's permitted as one of the country's leading artists and made it available to anyone who wanted to come and use it for free. Dotted around the cultural centre, sat on chairs and benches in the shade, are dozens of local people who have logged on to Cuba's only free and publicly available WI fi service. There is a quiet hum of contented computer users as they get their fix of Facebook, Google and Twitter. Others are chatting with family members abroad or downloading apps that would take too long and cost too much if you had to pay by the hour. Of course, greater access to the Internet in Cuba is one of Washington's stated aims in re engaging with the communist island, so you might think Katio offering it for free would be in hot water with the authorities. But nothing could be further from the truth, depending on who you believe. Fidel is either Cacio's godfather or was the best man at the artist's wedding, or both. I'm 3,000% revolutionary, Catchel tells me emphatically. No one should doubt that everything I do is for the good of the revolution. In the coming hours, the leader of that revolution today Fidel's brother Raoul, will be photographed with the president of the United States, a country that has used every possible method it can think of since 1950, from exploding cigars to an economic embargo to fostering unrest via the Internet to bring down that revolution. Little wonder Fidel chose to be pictured instead with adoring Venezuelan students.

[Presenter]

And that's Will Grant, currently in Panama. Thailand doesn't always strike the visitor as a deeply devout Buddhist country. Sure, lines of monks clad in saffron robes can still be seen asking for alms every morning, but fewer and fewer of them are signing up every year. Thailand's a place where the military is now in charge after a coup last year, a country where another rumour about a counter coup is never far away and where corruption, sleaze and crime are also recurring themes. Rajan Datta has been to see how much Buddhism still holds sway in this rapidly growing consumerist nation. He also wondered if it had anything to offer him.

[Rajan Datta]

I'm going to a Buddhist monastery called Wat Bhu Bunyawad in Chandburi Province. My aim is to get a taste of the monastic lifestyle at a time when the Sangha, or monkhood, is under pressure. In addition to the declining numbers, there are stories circulating of bogus monks, corrupt monks and monks behaving badly, ordering takeaway pizzas, accepting gifts of Rolex watches and being found playing on games consoles and with forbidden substances. Nevertheless, I can't deny a creeping personal interest in the Buddhist faith and its relevance to an increasingly frenetic and globalised world. No, let me correct that. It's healing value for my own increasingly cluttered and cynical mind. And I don't think I'm alone. I've long suspected many journalists have a strangely skewed perspective on life because we're programmed to look for the flaws in everything. Of course, it can be useful to question things and sometimes to be critical. But how conducive is that, really, to healthy psyche? I'm taken down a long path to the cabin where I will stay. It's a pleasant, isolated spot and as darkness falls, the night chorus of local wildlife is already in full voice. My living quarters are clean and bare, just a bookcase and some candles. There's no electricity, no hot water, no bed and gasp. No wi fi. Reading fiction or even doing the crossword is discouraged. And so to the clearing my head steadying my breathing and attempting to meditate. At this monastery, more time is allotted to individual contemplation than to group instruction. Now I'm all for free time and pursuing mindfulness, but achieving it proves to be very elusive, especially as I have no real idea what it is. A storm begins outside and my easily distracted attention is lost to it. I feel like I need a chat. But you can't use your phone here. There's no mobile signal anyway. The house rules also say no snacking after the one meal of the day, and that was at breakfast time. I have to confess, I've already cheated and munched an old cereal bar I found at the bottom of my rucksack, and I'm still hungry. The world of social media, multimedia and multiple stimuli I've become so used to is just not available right now. And right now feels like a very long time. Plus, a few mosquitoes have sneaked into the room they're beginning to cause me immense irritation. Bed would have been an attractive option, but here the bed is the hard floor and I know I'm going to have trouble sleeping. My thoughts drift to a couple of the foreign monks I met earlier in the day. The enigmatic Michael from Germany, who quit his life as a fashion photographer and also apparently as the manager of the model Claudia Schiffer to become a Buddhist monk and Harrow, who said he was a child of the Woodstock generation. A former hippie, he cheerfully admitted that when he first came to the monastery, it felt like being in prison. I try to concentrate on some Buddhist maxims. The root of all suffering, a senior monk told me, was craving material or sensory gratification. The ultimate aim is to take yourself into a realm beyond the body, beyond the mind, beyond any notion of the self. All fine and dandy, but hellishly hard to achieve in a strange hut on day one in a monastery in the middle of a tropical rainstorm and it's only half past eight in the evening. Help. A recorded chant blasts out at 3am to remind me to wake up and meditate. By then I've got a tiny glimpse of the first micro step to nirvana and it's called acceptance. Acceptance that I'm not going to get a wink of sleep, that I'm going to shuffle my body around fruitlessly to find a vaguely comfortable position. Acceptance that I'm pining for breakfast to come round. And a recognition that I'm never going to be a monk and I'm too much a city kid to feel comfortable in rural isolation. But at the end of my stay at the Bunyawad monastery, there's a further insight, a mini epiphany, because I realise there's actually a huge appeal in a world without constant chatter, gossip and speculation, without meaningless distractions and empty choices to make and without having to find fault in everything. I think most people in my profession would benefit from a break from all of that.

[Presenter]

And that's Rajan Datta now back with Wi Fi and a comfortable bed. And I think, happy to be home. More from around the world next Saturday morning. Do join us. Goodbye.