← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
The secrets of eternal youth
00:28:10
Andrew North reflects on whether the recent rape and murder of a woman in Delhi might...
Loading summary
Transcript16 lines
- [00:00]
A
You're listening to a download from the BBC. This is from our own correspondent.
- [00:04]
B
You can hear the version of the
- [00:06]
A
programme we make for the BBC World Service by visiting our site at BBConline.
- [00:11]
C
But here's the latest edition broadcast on
- [00:13]
A
BBC Radio 4 and introduced by Kate Ady.
- [00:17]
D
Today we're teetering on the fiscal cliff with Grover Norquist. We have a nostalgic return to Phnom Penh, the long, long lives of the inhabitants of Ikaria and banishing the January blues. Our correspondent explores P Woodhouse's love affair with France. A week has passed since a woman died from the severe injuries she sustained after being attacked and raped by a group of six men in Delhi. Thousands have taken part in protest rallies. Indian officials have agreed to increase the recruitment of female police officers in an attempt to address the daily sexual harassment and violence women in the country experience. Andrew north has attended the demonstrations in Delhi and been to the area where the accused men live, and he reflects on whether the incident might bring about a greater soul searching amongst all sections of Indian society.
- [01:13]
A
A small lemon hanging from a string caught my eye outside the door of the hut where the bus driver and lead accused in this horrific case was living with his brother. Someone put it there last week, a neighbour said, as a charm to ward off the evil eye. This tightly packed south Delhi settlement is now under a cloud of shame because four of the six arrested for the savage rape and killing of the young woman were living here. The case has also badly tarnished India's image abroad. Journalists have come looking for symbols of the bigger picture, and this place has come to signify the dark side of India many see as being behind this gruesome crime. Most of its residents are migrants who have come to Delhi from impoverished rural areas widely seen as the cradle of regressive attitudes to women, where figures show rapes are commonplace but rarely reported because of the social stigma. Fitting perhaps that the district takes its name from a nearby shrine to a man born of one of India's untouchable castes. And yet the narrative many had given this place to didn't entirely fit. This is not a tumble down slum for just arrived rural migrants, as some reports have suggested, the soil of the field still under their nails. Many residents have been here 20 years. It's far from comfortable living, but far better than many slum settlements I've seen, with solidly built stone dwellings, neat and brightly painted, and everyone has basic services like electricity, water and sewage. Don't think we're all like the accused, said another near neighbor when you grind wheat to make flour, she said, insects will come out with it too. All the children go to school every day, and as we were talking to neighbors of the accused, I noticed three older boys listening. It turned out they all spoke perfect English and were doing business studies at a local college. They wouldn't have looked out of place among the many young people protesting over the rape in recent weeks. And it got me thinking about the many competing realities to this story. Along with many others I've reported the middle class Indians, young and old, who've been taking the lead. The narrative has been one I've gone with too, that these are the people standing up for a more liberal, open country. But there's plenty of evidence India's wealthier, more educated classes can be just as sexist in their attitudes towards girls and women. Every year, thousands of girls are aborted because of a traditional preference for sons, medical staff bribed into revealing the sex of the child. It's leading to an increasingly skewed ratio of women to men. And some of the worst figures are in rich south Delhi. Just like in a small village, many middle class families also prefer a son to inherit their property. One of the many consequences of having fewer women is is increased trafficking for forced marriage and prostitution. And so the cycle of abuse goes on. And while a badly shaken government has condemned the gang rape and promised new fast track courts to deal with it, no politician has addressed the wider cultural issues. Yet something has also changed in the questions people are asking and how they're acting. During the week, I interviewed a woman who'd survived a rape, and years after the attack, she's still struggling to get justice. She joined the protests on the streets of Delhi too, where there were plenty of reports of men using the opportunity to grope women. But she said she was struck by how many young men also intervened to protect her and her friends, forming a circle around them if anyone got too close. Musicians and Bollywood filmmakers are suddenly under pressure to justify songs and movies portraying women as sex objects. More harrowing details from an interview the victim's friend has given about the attack and the way the authorities treated them may encourage even more soul searching. And one image sticks in my mind after these past few weeks. A young Indian man sitting alone at one of the protests with a candle at his feet, quietly showing his feelings. And in front of him, he had placed a placard which read, let us look at ourselves first.
- [05:27]
D
Andrew north in Delhi. As billions around the world were welcoming the New Year in the United States, political leaders were locked in gruelling negotiations about the country's budget deficit. Both occasions included fireworks. Faced with the so called fiscal cliff of being forced to bring in huge tax rises combined with spending cuts in an attempt to reduce the deficit, the White House and Congress who'd been locked in battle, finally agreed a package of limited increase increases and delayed cuts. It's a compromise that has previously proved impossible to reach due in part to the remarkable efforts of a single campaigner. As own Bennett Jones has been finding
- [06:10]
B
out, he has never held elected office and is for the most part known only to Washington insiders. The most senior Democrat in the Senate, Harry Reid, recently accused him of controlling congressional Republicans like puppets. The former Republican Senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming went even further describing him as the most powerful man in America. They are Talking about a 56 year old red headed political activist called Grover Norquist. He began his remarkable assent in 1986 when he suggested that anyone in Congress and anyone running for Congress should sign a pledge. It goes like I, and there's a blank where you fill in the name, hereby promise to oppose any and all effort to increase the marginal income tax rate for individuals and businesses. To oppose any net reduction or elimination of deductions and credits unless matched dollar for dollar by further reducing tax rates. Keen to impress their voters, Republican politicians started taking the pledge. And by last year Grover Norquist had secured the signatures of 41 out of 47 Republicans in the Senate and 238 out of 242 Republicans in the House of Representatives. He had in fact locked up the tax debate in the United States. And they didn't just sign, they competed to sign fast. Grover Norquist says that when Mitt Romney launched his bid for the Republicans presidential ticket, he hurriedly faxed a completed copy of the pledge to Norquist's Washington office so that he could boast that he'd signed up before his rivals. Should Grover Norquist find one of his pledges going wobbly, he'd accuse them of, in his phrase, impure thoughts and administer a harsh punishment. I recently met Grover Norquist in his Washington office, his rooms lined from floor to ceiling with books, mostly conservative texts on economics, politics and philosophy. He told me how recently he'd spent half a million dollars to alert the voters of Nebraska that their senator, Ben Nelson, had, by supporting President Obama's health care plan, voted for a tax increase. Senator Nelson is no longer in Congress. There are many other such examples. Some say Norquist is paid by rich people to keep rich people rich. He says no one likes paying tax he's helping all Americans. Yet in reality, Americans pay relatively little tax. I tried saying that to a Washington taxi driver the other day. He almost threw me out of the cab. But it's true nonetheless. If you take all the different types of taxes together, the tax to GDP ratio in the United States is one of the lowest of all developed economies. To give an example of one tax, federal income tax. An average American family, own home, two children and $46,000 income pay just 1.3% federal income tax. But hostility to tax in the United States has a long history. The anti British insurgency, starting with the Boston Tea Party, could be seen in part as a tax revolt. The 16th Constitutional Amendment, which allows the state to gather federal income tax, was only passed in 1913. More recently, Hollywood Westerns have kept the tradition alive. In the 1965 movie Shenandoah, Jimmy Stewart talked about his children when they were babies. I don't remember the state coming around with a spare tit. We never asked anything of the state and never expected anything. We do our own living. And thanks to no man for the right. Of course, however resourceful they were, the early American pioneers did owe something to the state, which in many cases violently cleared American Indians from the lands the farmers then settled. And for all their claims to be hardy and independent today, many American farmers would go bust without generous government subsidies. But at a political level, the evocation of rugged self reliance still resonates. In fact, tax has become so difficult an issue that a couple of years ago, the Congress and the White House agreed to point a fiscal gun to their own heads. Failure to agree a tax and spending package by the 1st of January this year would have triggered automatic spending cuts so deep and tax increases so sharp as to guarantee a recession. Under that pressure, a deal was done. And as part of it, many Republicans voted for a tax increase. Before that moment, Grover Norquist liked to boast that no Republican had voted for a tax increase in 22 years. Now they have. They have broken his pledge. As you might expect, Grover Norquist is trying to resist that interpretation. He has said the pledge has not been violated because tax increases on people earning over 400,000 secured a tax cut for those earning less than that. But even Norquist's most ardent supporters would have to accept that's quite a stretch. So the question now is whether, after two decades of political success, Grover Norquist's remarkable run is coming to an end.
- [11:27]
D
Owen Bennett Jones Childhood memories are powerful, especially when they recall times in countries experiencing turbulent transitions. It's been over 40 years since Nicholas Shakespeare lived in Cambodia as a schoolboy in 1964 his parents were forced to leave A decade later the Khmer Rouge came to power introducing one of the most brutal regimes of the 20th cent responsible for the deaths of over a million people Recently Nicholas returned with his father to the country's capital Phnom Penh
- [12:03]
E
welcome back says the receptionist at the Hotel ROYALE it is 50 years since we last stayed here and my father has brought with him our original bill when the manager sees it he wants to have it framed the receipt for 5,090 riyals is the only original document relating to the hotel to survive the Khmer Rouge rule in the 1970s we had left Cambodia in March 1964 after then Prince Norodom Sihanouk, the country's petulant chief of state ordered a mob to sack the British Embassy where my father worked as a diplomat I was seven at the time and remember driving with our suitcases to the Thai border if I open my child's eyes I see Phlompen receding through the back of the Land Rover A drowsy French style provincial town with one petrol station and elephants that ambled past the Royal palace we were there in the last year of what was regarded as a golden age my father tells me now in a traffic jam on the way in from the airport I'd never been in a country where people were as happy he looks around at the bumper to bumper Toyotas and half completed skyscrapers, bewildered this is another city, this is like Dubai on the Mekong we cannot find our original house but the Lyce Descartes where I received my earliest history lessons is still there on our first morning back I address a class of 7 year olds in the same bad French that I had learnt then I asked them what they want to be when they are my age Hands fly up Sorcerer, prince, safari leader, toy seller, president, fighter pilot none of them says a teacher Several of the Khmer Rouge leaders were teachers Some had even been pupils at the Lyce Descartes and yet everything that they and I had learnt in this classroom became a reason to be re educated or killed in their three year rule a third of Cambodia's population was executed the cadres came for you at night and took away anyone who spoke French, read, had a qualification soft hands, coloured clothes or wore glasses an example of the surreal nature of the Khmer Rouge One of the most bizarre political phenomena in history is the bespectacled yang Tirith the 80 year old former Minister of social affairs and sister in law of Pol Pot in the early 1950s when my father was a lecturer at the Ecole Normale in Paris and Tirith was studying Shakespeare at the Sorbonne just before we flew back to Phnom Penh. This time the young Tirith was released from detention because she had Alzheimer's. Her lawyer, who's English, told me that the UN backed tribunal's Cambodian judges initially experienced difficulty with the concept of Alzheimer's. They didn't understand it, the lawyer thought, because few Cambodians had lived long enough to experience it. The Khmer Rouge leader was among the few people in her country who had grown old enough to be in the fortunate position of not remembering what she had done. One evening, my father and I have dinner beside the Tonle SAP the only river in the world that changes direction. Punctual as blossom at the end of the rainy season in November, the grey waters start flowing the other way rather like the shifting political views of Prince Sihanouk and his successors. We are shocked when we discover that some of the same people who, out of extreme Maoist views expelled Phnom Penh population into the countryside, including our gardener Hem, are still in power and that they continue to drive Cambodians from their land only this time from no ideology other than profit. A young Cambodian working for Oxfam tells us that since 1998, when the Khmer Rouge laid down their arms, some 700,000 people have been dispossessed and huge tracts of arable land sold off to private companies. My country, he says, is like an old and dilapidated house newly painted on the outside. But go inside and you see it's going to break down very soon. Democracy is only a shadow, a black shadow. No one casts a longer or more complicated shadow than the man who had ejected us. Sihanouk, who had ruled Cambodia since it gained independence in 1953 and was known by his people as Prince Daddy. His death at the end of our visit brought hundreds of thousands onto the streets. His body won't be cremated until February. Meanwhile, TV stations are continuously broadcasting historic footage of Sihanouk from the 1960s. Some mourners have even detected his face in the rising half moon.
- [17:00]
D
Nicholas Shakespeare Icarus, the mythical figure who flew too close to the sun on his wings of wax and crashed into the Aegean Sea, has an island named after him. But that's not Icaria's only claim to fame. Its 8,000 inhabitants include some of the oldest on earth, and a study by the University of Athens has concluded that they enjoy better health with less depression and dementia than those living in more developed parts of the world like the United States. Andrew Bomford went to try to discover the secrets of eternal youth.
- [17:37]
F
There are some journalists I know who rely on serendipity, that happy moment when the stars align and a chance encounter with a random stranger gets them that fabulous insight into the country or story they're investigating. I'm not one of them. I'm a planner. I'll leave a little bit to chance, but not much. So as the days drew nearer to my assignment on the Greek island of Ikaria and I was no nearer to lining up my interviewees and mapping out the glorious filming opportunities I could see in my mind's eye, I did begin to panic. I was going there to report on the extraordinary longevity of the island's residents. On average, they live at least 10 years longer than most Europeans. It seems to be down to a combination of their healthy diet, copious amounts of local wine, and the relaxed and laid back attitude to life. The irony was not lost on me as my tension continued to mount. And in case any editors are listening, my lack of progress was not for want of trying, I promise. But my lack of Greek and the frankly infuriating lack of urgency from everyone I talked to on the island meant that any appointment I tried to make ended with only the vaguest suggestions of arrangements. None of them even had addresses. Just ask anyone where I live, they said. This, coupled with the ridiculous timetable I'd imposed on myself and the lack of daylight hours for filming at this time of year, was all giving me a headache. Don't worry, was the standard response I kept on hearing as I tried to set up complicated filming opportunities with people aged 100 years or more. I guess my frustration was obvious to them even down a distant telephone line. I knew in my head that I was being my own worst enemy, that I was completely missing the point in my haste to make the most of my limited time on the island. But it took me until the day before arriving for that realization to really sink in, that I did have to just relax and think like Icarians think. Then it would happen. I finally admitted this in an apologetic email to someone on the island whom I'd probably been stalking. I I promised to relax, to stop pestering, and to let events just take their course. What will be, will be. Her tone changed immediately. Now that's the Andrew I'm looking forward to meeting, she said with a laugh. She was right. Of course she was right. Within an hour of arriving, we found one of the people I'd been hoping to meet, a sturdy 98 year old who insists he's 103 and adding a few years rather than knocking them off as is more often the case. Up a set of ladders, picking olives from his trees over mid morning glasses of wine, he told me how he was given just nine months to live after being diagnosed with terminal lung cancer 45 years ago. He was residing in America at the time and came back to the island to die. He was clearly still going very strong. He mentioned in passing that a few people were getting together that evening to celebrate his cousin's saint's day, a big thing in Greece. This was exactly what I'd been trying and failing to capture. Apart from a healthy diet and active physical life, it's the extended social network of friends and family which seems to give people here a reason to go on living. So without even trying, we soon found ourselves invited to a gathering which drifted delightfully through the evening with different people coming and going and lots and lots of wine was drunk. It was a perfect way to witness the open door culture, the intimacy of young and old in the most natural way possible. I thought back to my earlier worries and realized once again that in their vague, laid back, even lackadaisical attitude to life, the Ikarines had been right, that things would sort themselves out and there was no point getting worked up about it. After all, they're the ones I was there to learn from. They've discovered the secrets of a long and happy life and getting stressed is no part of life on Ikaria. For me, it was a valuable lesson to learn in life as well as in journalism.
- [22:16]
D
Andrew Bomford, have you been dipping into the works of your favourite authors during the long Christmas break? Perhaps PG Wodehouse is amongst them. Although the creator of Bertie Worcester, Jeeves and the Empress of Blandings was born in England and died in the United States, for many years he lived in France, where he was eventually interned by the advancing German army in 1940. But reflections of happier times in the country have left an indelible mark on several of his books. As Hugh Schofield, Based in Paris and A Dyed in the Wool Wodehouse, Ian has been finding out it's true what
- [22:53]
C
they say in the blurb. There honestly is no better antidote to anguish, ennui or general world weariness than to flick through a few pages of the Master. I speak from experience. PG Wodehouse has coaxed me out of many a dark place and now I've become intrigued by a hitherto unexplored sidelight on the life and earth really, someone should take it up as an academic thesis. Woodhouse and the French plumb, as he was known, began living in France in 1934. He chose Le Touquet on the north coast because it was a fashionable resort with golf, casino and beach for the dogs. He'd visited the country many times before, of course, and French places and characters were already featuring regularly in the books. Cannes, the playground of toffs par excellence, was a favourite in the story. Noblesse Oblige, Drones Club stalwart Freddy Widgeon is invited to be the judge in a seafront pretty mother and baby competition. He exceeds understanding that his reward will be a much needed 500 franc note. Too late does he realize that the 500 francs is what he, an evidently copiously endowed English milord, is supposed to supply to the winning mother and baby. And of course, noblesse oblige. So he does can also provides the setting for what buffs regard as one of the most perfect opening Woodhouse paragraphs this from the luck of the bodkins into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique, there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty hang dog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French. Pidgey Wodehouse always said his own French was rudimentary, but his unfailingly brilliant ear, combined, one supposes, with a solid grounding from school, meant that his renderings on the page were always perfectly hilarious. And nowhere is this truer than in depictions of his most famous French character, that gift of God to the gastric juices, the temperamental chef Anatole. In Right Hoe Jeeves, Anatole is described as a tubby little man with a moustache of the outsize or soup strainer type, which turns up or droops down depending on mood, with his sylphide a la creme de crevice or his nonnette de pouler Agnes Sorel, Anatole alone is capable of soothing the chronic indigestion of Tom Travers, businessman, husband of Bertie Worcester's favourite Aunt Dahlia. And there's much intriguing by various malefactors who try to to steal Anatol for their own kitchens. Anatol's English is fluent but mixed to add to his inevitable gallicisms. He also once worked for an American family in Nice where he studied under their chauffeur, one of the Maloney's of Brooklyn, we're told, and this gives a certain rough colour to his language. But when fully Aroused, he reverts to French words like marmitant de domange, pinuf, heurlu, berlus and rustic sur were fluttering from him like bats out of a barn. Lost on me, of course. This is Bertie Worcester writing in the first person, because I'm still more or less in the esca vous ave stage. I regretted this, for they sounded good. Those words do exist, by the way. Then there's Nicolas Jules St Xavier Auguste, Marquis de Maufragneus et Valerie Mauborin, lead rogue in the book French Leave, who has a job in the Ministry as employe attache a l' l expedition du Troisien bureau. In other words, Clarke. Or the picturesque Brittany town of St. Roch, site of Chateau Blissac, where in one delicious scene in Hot Water, two characters, neither of whom can speak French, are both pretending to be French and so have to improvise a French sounding conversation in front of a third party in order to preserve their false credentials. Poor old Plum's time in France didn't end happily. In 1940, he was detained at his home, Low Water in Le Tuquet, by the advancing German army. Sent to an internment camp, he was released the next year when he turned 60. But he then made his famously ill judged broadcasts, intended as light hearted diversions for American fans, but of great propaganda value to the Nazis. Woodhouse ended the war in Paris and it was at the Hotel Bristol, down the road from where I write this in the BBC office, that at the liberation in 1944, he was found and questioned by the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, then working for MI6. Woodhouse was detained by the French for a while, but he was never charged and in 1947 he left for the United States. I know he must have loved it in France. They're a minor theme, of course, but in his hands, France and the French radiate, optimism, gaiety, sheer fun. Now as ever, now more than ever. Balm for the soul.
- [28:00]
D
Highly recommended at this time of year. Hugh Schofield's homage to P.G. woodhouse, bringing this episode to an end. Join us next Saturday for more from our own correspondence. Goodbye.