Mahabharata 1

Mahabharata
“O Arjuna,”, “in this world I have taught a twofold way of life; the way of knowledge for men who engage in contemplation, & the way of works for men of actions. One cannot maintain even one’s physical life without action.
Therefore, do your allotted work regardless of results, for men attain the highest good by doing work without attachment to its results. Resign yourself to me & fix your consciousness in the self, without desire or egoism, & then fight, freed from your fever.”Krishna
Following is a gleaning from The Argumentative Indian
Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity
By Amartya Sen

The Argumentative Indian
Prolixity is not alien to us in India. We are able to talk at some length. Krishna Menon’s record of the longest speech ever delivered at the United Nations (nine hours non-stop), established half a century ago (when Menon was leading the Indian delegation), has not been equaled by anyone from anywhere. Other peaks of loquaciousness have been scaled by other Indians. We do like to speak.
This is not a new habit. The ancient Sanskrit epics the Ramayana [2] and the Mahabharata [1], which are frequently compared with the Iliad and the Odyssey, are colossally longer than the works that the modest Homer could manage. Indeed, the Mahabharata alone is about seven times as long as the Iliad and the Odyssey put together. The Ramayana [3] and the Mahabharata are certainly great epics: I recall with much joy how my own life was vastly enriched when I encountered them first as a restless youngster looking for intellectual stimulation as well as sheer entertainment. But they proceed from stories to stories woven around their principal tales, and are engagingly full of dialogues, dilemmas and alternative perspectives. And we encounter masses of arguments and counterarguments spread over incessant debates and disputations.

Dialogues and Significance
The arguments are also, often enough, quite substantive. For example, the famous Bhagavad Gia, which is one small section of the Mahabharata, presents a tussle between two contrary moral positions-Krishna’s emphasis on doing one’s duty, on one side, and Arjuna’s focus on avoiding bad consequences (and gathering good ones), on the other. The debate occurs on the eve of the Great War that is a central event in the Mahabharata. Watching the two armies readying for war, profound doubts about the correctness of what they are doing raised by Aruba, the peerless and invincible warrior in the army of the just and honorable royal family (the Pandavas) who are about to fight the unjust usurpers (the Kauravas). Arjuna questions whether it is right to be concerned only with one’s duty to promote a just cause and be indifferent to the misery and the slaughter-even of one’s kin-that the war itself would undoubtedly cause. Krisha, a divine incarnation in the form of a human being (in fact, he is also Arjuna’s charioteer), argues against Arjuna. His response takes the form of articulating principles of action- based on the priority of doing one’s duty-which have been repeated again and again in Indian philosophy.

Krishna insists on Arjuna’s duty to fight, irrespective of his evaluation of the consequences. It is a just cause, and as a warrior and a general on whom his side must rely, Arjuna cannot waver from his obligations, no matter what the consequences are.
Krishna’s hallowing of the demands of duty wins the argument, at least as seen in the religious perspective. Indeed, Krishna’s conversations with Arjuna, the Bhagavad Gita, became a treatise of great theological importance in Hindu philosophy, focusing particularly on the ‘removal’ of Arjuna’s doubts. Krishna’s moral position has also been eloquently endorsed by many philosophical and literary commentators across the world, such as Christopher Isherwood and T. S. Eliot. Isherwood in fact translated the Bhagavad Gita into English. This admiration for the Gita, and for Krishna’s arguments in particular, has been a lasting phenomenon in parts of European culture. It was spectacularly praised in the early nineteenth century by Wilhelm von Humboldt as ‘the most beautiful, perhaps the only true philosophical song existing in any known tongue’. In a poem in Four Quartets, Eliot summarizes Krishna’s view in the form of an admonishment: ‘And do not think of the fruit of action/Fare forward.’ Eliot explains: ‘Not fare well, /But fare forward, voyagers.’
And yet, as a debate in which there are two reasonable sides, the epic Mahabharata itself presents, sequentially, each of the two contrary arguments with much care and sympathy. Indeed, the tragic desolation that the post-combat and post-carnage land-largely the Indo-Gangetic plain-seems to face towards the end of the Mahabharata can even be seen as something of a vindication of Arjuna’s profound doubts. Arjuna’s contrary arguments are not really vanquished, no matter what the ‘message’ of the Bhagavad Gita is meant to be. There remains a powerful case for ‘faring well’, and not just ‘forward.
J. Robert Openheimer, the leader of the American team that developed the ultimate ‘weapon of mass destruction’ during the Second World War, was moved to quote Krishna’s words (‘I am become death, the destroyer of the worlds’) as he watched, on 16 July 1945, the awesome force of the first nuclear explosion devised by man. Like the advice that Arjuna had received about his duty as a warrior fighting for a just cause, Oppenheimer the physicist could well find justification in his technical commitment to develop a momb for what was clearly the right side. Scrutinizing-indeed criticizing-his own actions, Oppenhiemer said later on: ‘When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only only after you have had your technical success. Despite that compulsion to ‘fare forward’, there was reason also for reflecting on Arjuna’s concerns; How can good come from killing so many people? And why should I seek victory, kingdom or happiness for my own side?

These arguments remain thoroughly relevant in the contemporary world. The case for doing what one sees as one’s duty must be strong, but how can we be indifferent to the consequences that may follow from our doing what we take to be our just duty? As we reflect on the manifest problems of our global world ( from terrorism, wars and violence to epidemics, insecurity and grueling poverty), or on India’s special concerns (such as economic development, nuclear confrontation or regional peace),it is important to take on board Arjuna’s consequential analysis, in addition to considering Krishna’s arguments for doing one’s duty. The univocal ‘message of the Gita’ requires supplementation by the broader argumentative wisdom of the Mahabharata, of which the Gita is only a small part.

There will be an opportunity in this essay, and in others to follow, to examine the reach and significance of many of the debates and altercations that have figured prominently in the Indian argumentative tradition. We have to take note not only of the opinion that won-or allegedly won-in the debates, but also of the other points of view that were presented and are recorded or remembered. A defeated argument that refuses to be obliterated can remain very alive.
The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity by Amartya Sen. ISBN 0-71399-687-0

Footnotes are by bunpeiris
"Once, while I was in Mumbai, a friend (Malathi Kembhavi) of a friend of mine (Anita A. Lewis) took trouble to take me to her favourite bookshop in Bombay. “The Argumentative Indian” is one of the dozen of books she encouraged me to buy." My Sri Lanka Holidays bunpeiris
[1] Mahabharata is the ultimate literary work.Buy it and read it before you die.
[2] Ramayana, one of the greatest ever epic poems in the world was composed by Valmiki (400 BC, northern India) narrating a great war that is widely believed in India to have taken place in Sri Lanka then called Lanka. The Hindu epic has been orally traditional in Sri Lanka to a great extent. Though Ramayana is considered as mythology in Sri Lanka, some of the important Sri Lanka Holidays attractions are associated with the great poem: Adam's Bridge between Rameswaram at Ramanathapuram of Tamil Nadu the southernmost state of India; Ritigala ancient monastery and wildlife reserve at Ritigala Hill, Rumassala Kanda hill close to Unawatuna Bay Beach: Kanniyai hot springs at Trincomalee; The rock of Hakgala (Jaw Rock) at Hakgala Botanical Gardens close to Nuwara Eliya of Central Highlands.
All of these sites are Sri Lanka Holidays destinations in their own right. Association of Ramayana, in no way heightens or diminishes the value of these attractions.
However, since Ramayana has no historical background at all, so called uncalled for “Ramayana Trail” tourism promotion has been widely condemned as a hoax by the general public as well as in the academic circles of Sri Lanka. A public symposium was held by Royal Asiatic Society of Sri Lanka on Ramayana Trail Hoax.
Though Ramayana has no place in the history and cultural heritage of Sri Lanka, the leading tourism promoter of the island deemed it appropriate to declare: "It is not our job to verify historical accuracies but to encourage tourism, which is what we are doing by promoting the Ramayana Trail." That's a mouthful from the horse's mouth itself and it spilled the beans and the carrot. bunpeiris
Sri Lanka Holidays: Academics and Scholars close ranks to shed light on Ramayana Trail Hoax.
Royal Asiatic Society of Sri Lanka shed light on the hoax and enlightened the public: Professor Tissa Kariyawasma, Prof. Oliver Abeynaike, Dr. Hema Goonatilake, Dr. Nihal Perera, Dr. Malini Dias and Venerable Hegoda Vipassi delivered speeches on "Ramayana in Sinhalese literature", Indian Tourist Authorities' "Buddhist Circuit" but no Indian "Ramayana Circuit', "The factual pre-history of Sri Lanka", "Distortions of archeological evidence" and "My travails in refuting the Ramayana Trail".

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Opium addiction

Opium addiction
Ji, Sethji, said Neel. He ran his eye over the lines and said: It seems that these are excerpts from a memorandum written by a high-ranking Chinese official and sent to the Emperor.
Yes, said Baharam. Go on. What does he say?

Opium is a poisonous drug, brought from foreign countries. To the question, what are its virtues, the answer is: it raises the animal spirits and prevents lassitude. Hence the Chinese continually run into its toils. At first they merely strive to follow the fashion of the day; but in the sequel the poison takes effect, the habit become fixed, and the sleeping smokers are more like corpses-lean and haggard as demons. Such are the injuries which it does to life. Moreover the drug maintains an exorbitant price and cannot be obtained except with the pure metal. Smoking opium [1], in its first stages, impedes business; and when the practice is continued for any considerable length of time, it throws whole families into ruin, dissipates every kind of property, and destroys man himself. There cannot be greater evil than this. In comparison with arsenic I pronounce it tenfold greater poison. A man swallows arsenic because he has lost his reputation and is so involved that he cannot extricate himself. Thus driven to desperation, he takes the dose and is destroyed at once. But those who smoked drug are injured in many different ways.

When the smoker commences the practice, he seems to imagine his spirits are thereby augmented; but he ought to know that this appearance is factitious. It may be compared to raising the wick of a lamp, which, while it increases the flame, hastens the exhaustion of the oil and the extinction of the light. Hence the youth who smoke will shorten their own days and cut off all hope of posterity, leaving their father and mothers and wives without anyone on whom to depend; and those in middle and advanced life, who smoke, will accelerate the termination of their years.
Stop! Bas! Enough.
Bahram snatched the journal out of Neel’s hand and tossed it on a table.
All right, munshiji, it is clear that you can read English without difficulty. If you want the job it is yours.
Above is a gleaning from River of Smoke by Amitav Ghosh

Following footnotes are by bunpeiris
[1] Opium
Opium, with its properties of alleviation of pain and induction of sleep together with other virtues then only known to the Ayurvedic medical practitioners and prescribed in Ayurvedic medicine in certain medications and treatments, was imported into Sri Lanka, though in limited quantities, only during the colonial era: Portuguese (1505-1656), the Dutch (1656-1796), and the British (1796-1948). De Queryroz, the Portuguese historian, mentions that during the Portuguese occupation Opium was imported by the king of Kandy. The port of call was Cotiar near Trincomalee, which was part of the kingdom of Kandy at the time. Ryckloff Van Goens, the Dutch governor in Ceylon during 1660-1663, recorded in his memoirs on the importation of opium from Surat and Bengal in India.

In the nineteenth century, the British cranked up the importation of opium with a view of quick profit. In 1834, with the free market in opium that would have destined to corrupt the values of the Sinhalese, there arose a rumor, if found true in substance, that could have been fatal to the British colonialists themselves. Molligoda, the First Adigar of Sri Wickrama Rajasinghe, the last king of Kandy (1798-1815) was suspected of hatching a plot to poison then Governor of Ceylon (1831-1837), Sir Robert Wilmot Horton (Horton Plains, a UNESCO World heritage Site of Sri Lanka Holidays was named after Lady Horton; in fact it was called Lady Horton’s Plains) and the principal officials at a banquet.It was believed the Kandyan chief, the most distinguished aristocrat of Kandy made attempts to seduce, by means Opium, the highly regarded Malay troops of the British colonialists. The opium affairs kept bubbling up now and then, here and there, during the British occupation of Ceylon. To illustrious Major Thomas Skinner (1804 - 1877), the famous builder of Colombo- Kandy Road, the gravitation of his Malay troops towards opium was a matter of consternation.

In June 1857 opium had a sinking feeling: during a squall, the P. & O. liner, Erin carrying a consignment of opium from Bombay to China struck a sand bank and sank at the mouth of the river Kaluganga, thirty miles south of Colombo. The entire consignment of opium, worth 170,000 Sterling Pound, an enormous sum in those days, was lost.

The first opium shop in Sri Lanka was at Chilaw, south of modern Kalpitiya peninsula Beach Resort and it was in existence in 1850. The second opium shop was opened about 1860 in Hambantota, then a small town, yet with a considerable Malay population. The number of shops shot up during the period of 1867-1890 from 31 to 56. Following the orchestrated protest by the Ceylonese, mainly by the Sinhalese Buddhist, in 1867, then governor of Ceylon, Sir West Ridgway, by an ordinance doubled the duty on opium from Ceylon rupees 1 to 3 per pound. The importation of Bang or Ganga was banned too. However Ganja continued to be grown, in deep secrecy, here and there, in the deep jungles of Ceylon: Dr. Richard Lionel Spittle (Dr. R. L. Spittel) (1881 –1969) in his book “Thisaham” narrated how a Malay trader persuaded a Ceylonese Veddha (Sri Lanka’s aborigines) named Thisahami to grow Ganja in his jungle hideout.

The opposition to government policy of opium was spearheaded by the Rev. Hikkaduwa Sri Sumangala (1827-1911), a leading light of Buddhist renaissance, and Mr. S.C. Obeysekera, a member of the Legislative council with a petition to the British colonialists in Ceylon. The signatories’ featured13,967 Sinhalese, 11878 Tamils, 1265 Tamils, 265 Burghers, and 465 of other nationalities. The disparity of the nationalities in comparison to population (Sinhalese: 74%; Tamils: 12%) was owing to the fact, the petition was confined to those literate. In 1867 a committee headed by R. F. Morgan, Queen’s Advocate admitted the increase of opium consumption was probably helped by its free availability in opium shops. To give the devil his due, it must be said, Opium shops in Ceylon were closed down subsequently by a decree British colonial government.

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Opium: Bombay to Canton

Opium: Bombay (Mumbai) to Canton (Guangzhou)

Following text is a gleaning from River of Smoke by Amitav Ghosh
Later there would be much discussion on whether the Anahita was struck by the same storm that had hit the Ibis. Such information as was available then made it impossible to come to any reliable determination on this: what was certain was that the Anahita was less than a hundred miles west of Great Nicobar Island, heading for the Nicobar Channel, when she too an into bad weather. She had left Bombay sixteen days earlier and was on her way to Canton, by way of Singapore.

Until then the voyage had been uneventful and the Anahita had sailed through the few squalls that had crossed her path with a ful suit of sails aloft. A sleek and elegant three-master, she was one of the few Bombay-built vessels that regularly outran the swiftest British-and American-made opium carriers, even such legendary ships as Red Rover and Seawitch. On this voyage too she had posted very good times and seemed to be heading for another record run. But the weather in the Bay of Bengal was notoriously unpredictable in September, so when the skies began to darken, the captain, a taciturn New Zealander, wasted no time in snuggling the ship down. When the winds reached gale force he sent down a note to his employer, Seth Bahramji, recommending that he retire to the Owner’s Suite and remain there for the duration.

The "yellow fever" yachts

"factories" where American and English merchants sold opium in Canton, China.

Baharam was still there, hours later, when his purser, Vico, burst in to tell him that the cargo of opium in the ship’s hold had broken loose.
Kya? How is that possible, Vico?
It’s happened, patrao; we have to do something, jaldi.
Following at Vico’s heels, Bahram went hurrying down, struggling to keep his footing on the slippery companion-ladders. The hatch that led to the hold was carefully secured against pilferage, and the rolling of the ship made the chains and padlocks difficult to undo. When at last Bahram was able to lower a lantern through the hatch, he found himself looking down upon a scene that defied comprehension.

Opium Den in Cantaon, China

The cargo in the after-hold consisted almost entirely of opium. Under the battering of the storm, hundreds of chests had broken loose and splintered, spilling their contents. Earthenware containers of opium were crashing into the bulkheads like cannonballs.
Opium, in this form, was of a mud-brown color: although leathery to the touch, it dissolved when mixed and stirred with liquids. The Anahita’s builders had not been unmindful of this, and a great deal of ingenuity had been expended in trying to make the hold watertight. But the storm was shaking the vessel so hard that the joins between the planks had begun to bleed, letting in a slick of rain-and-bilge-water. The wetness had weakened the hemp bindings that held the cargo in place and they had snapped; the chests had crashed into each other, spilling their contents into the sludge. Waves of this gummy, stinking liquid were now sweeping from side to side, breaking against the walls of the hold as the vessel rolled and lurched.

[Opium factory in Patna,India:stacking room and drying room]

Nothing like this had ever happened to Bahram before: he had ridden out many a storm, without having a consignment of opium run amuck as it had now. He liked to think of himself s a careful man and in the course of thirty-odd years in the China trade, he had evolved his own procedures for stacking the chests in which the drug was packed. The opium in the hold was of two kinds: about two thirds of it was ‘Malwa’, from western India- a product that was sold in the shape of small, round cakes, much like certain kinds of Jaggery [1]. These were shipped without any protective covering, other than a wrapping of leaves and a light dusting of poppy ‘trash’. The rest of the shipment consisted of ‘Bengal’ opium, which had more durable packaging, with each cake of the drug being fitted inside a hard-shelled clay container, of about the shape and size of a cannonball. Every chest contained forty of these and each ball was nested inside a crib of poppy leaves, straw, and each ball was nested inside a crib of poppy leaves, straw, and other remains from the harvest. The chests were made of mango-wood and were certainly sturdy enough to keep their contents secure during the three or four weeks it usually took to sail from Bombay to Canton; breakages were rare, and damage, when it occurred, was generally caused by seepage and damp. To prevent this, Bahram generally left some space between the rows o that air could circulate freely between the chests.
Over the years, Bahram’s procedures had proved their worth: through decades of travelling between India and China he had never, in the course of a single voyage, had to write off more than a chest or two of his cargo. Experience had given him such confidence in his methods that he had not taken the trouble to check the hold when the Anahita was hit by the storm. It was the crashing of the runway chests that had alerted the ship’s crew, who had then brought the problem to Vico’s attention.

Looking down now, Bahram could see the crates crashing against the bulkheads like rafts against a reef; all round the hold, hard-shelled balls of opium were exploding upon the timbers, and gobs of the raw gum were hurtling about like shrapnel.

Footnotes by bunpeiris
[1] Hakuru (Snhala: Jaggery) is produced from sugar cane and coconut palm in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean. But then the finest quality jaggery is a product of the sap of Caryota urens (Sago Palm or Fishtail Palm), a species of flowering plant in the palm family. The epithet urens is Latin for 'stinging' alluding to the chemicals in the fruit The sago palm is tapped for producing jaggery in Sri Lanka, West Bengal, South India and Pakistan. In Sri Lanka Sago Palm called Kitul grows in abundance in the wet zone. The nature and adventure attraction of Kitulgala (Sinhala: rock of Sago palm trees), famous for White Water rafting in the rapids of River Mahaweli Ganga, affords the opportunity to taste Kitul Palm Honey with Curd (fermented buffalo milk) as well as Kitul Palm Jaggery. Such is the distinctive taste of Kitul Palm Honey and Kitul Palm Jaggery, no world in English language seems to serve the purpose of describing it satisfactory: ‘tastes like molasses, brown sugar or maple syrup’ do no justice at all.
Kitul Jaggery is produced in the rural areas of the Central Highlands of Sri Lanka. The access to these villages can be made via the hill country health resorts of Bandarawela, Badulla and Nuwara Eliya of Sri Lanka Holidays. The rural areas of the Kandy district too produce Kitul Palm Jaggery and Kitul Palm Honey. During the Sinhala and Hindu New Year in April, Kitul Palm Honey and Kitul Palm Jaggery are in high demand: no new year feast would be complete without the traditional sweets such as Katta bibikkan, Kalu dodol (both are baked soft cakes made of Rice flour, coconut milk and Kitul Palm jaggery or Honey) and Saudodol (cooked pudding of Rice flour steamed and solidified, coconut milk and Kitul Palm jaggery or Honey). All these sweet cakes are very lightly spiced with Ceylon Cinnamon, Sri Lanka Cardammom (Enasal) and Karubunati(Sinhala: cloves) of Spice Island.

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Poppy fields

Poppy fields, Opium, Taliban, Mujahadeen, Russians and Americans

Following is an extraction from Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie
The Russians were in Afghanistan and consuqently many Afghans had fled to Pakistan, and were even to be found at forward camp number 22 in the “free”-Azad-sector of Kashmir. In spite of the enormous numbers of refugees occupying huge, town-sized camps in the Pak northwest, the Afghans were not poor. There were extensive opium fields in the vicinity of the camps and the refugee chieftains brought their way into the poppy business, using the gold and jewelry they had brought across the border for capital and backing it up with menaces and guns. Once they had gained the control of poppy fields they instituted a system of double cropping so that they could produce heroin as well as opium. The income from the heroin is large enough to pay off the Pak authorities and to pay for the costs of the refugee camps as well. The authorities turned a blind eye to what was going on in the poppy fields because it prevented the refugees from becoming a burden on the state and besides there were the payoffs, which were generous.

Poppy field in Pakistan

Poppy field in Bakwa, Aghaistan

Opium field in Kandhar,Afghanitan

Poppy field in Kashmir

The Afghans had freedom fighters of their own, and the United States decided to support these freedom fighters against its own great enemy, which had occupied their country. U. S. operatives in the field-CIA, Counter-Terrorism and Special Units personal-took to referring to these fighters as the Muj, which sounded mysterious and exciting and concealed the fact that the word mujahid meant the same thing as the word jihadi, “holy warrior”. Weapons, blankets and cash poured into northern Pakistan, and some of this aid did reach the Muj. Much of it ended up in the arms bazaars of the wild frontier zone, and a percentage of it reached Azad Kashmir. After a while the fighters gathering in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir started calling themelves the Kashmiri Muj. The ISI provided them with powerful long-range missiles which had been intended for the Afghan front, but had unfortunately been diverted along the way. Other high-quality arms also began to appear at FC-22: automatic grenade launchers of Soviet and Chinese origin, rocket pods with solar-powered timing devices that made possible delayed-firing rocket barrages, 60-mm mortars. At a certain point Stringer missiles, SAMs, were also made available to the “Kashmiri Muj”. Weapons training took up much everyday. The chief instructor was an Afghan war buddy of Janjalani the Filipino’s, a black-turbaned warrior from Kandahar who called himself simply Talib, meaning “the student”. The word for knowledge was taleem. Those who acquired knowledge were scholars; Taliban. Talib the student was a mullah of a sort, or, at least, had been trained at a religious school, madrasa.

Like the iron mullah Bulbul Fakh, however, he never mentioned the name of his seminary. Talib the Afghan had lost an eye in battle [in Afghanistan] and wore a black patch. As a result he had been temporarily withdrawn from the front line, but he was determined to return to combat duties as soon as possible. “In the meanwhile,” he said, “God’s work can be done here [Kahmir] also.”
Talib the Afghan’s one eye bored through Shalimar the clown and seemed to read his thoughts, to see the pretence there as Janjalani had, the untold, forbidden secret. Janjalani understood his reasons but Shalimar the clown feared Talib would not. He felt like a fraud and feared exposure constantly. He had not surrendered his self as he had been required to do, had hidden it deep beneath a performance of abnegation, the greatest performance he had ever given. He had his own goals in life and he would not give them up. I am ready to kill but I am not ready to stop being myself, he repeated many times in his heart. I will kill readily but I will not give myself up. But his goals did not officially exist, not in this dangerous place.
“You were an actor,” Talib the Afghan said scornfully in bad, heavily accented Urdu. “God spits on actors. God spits on dancing and singing. Maybe you are acting now. Maybe you are a traitor and a spy. You are fortunate I am not the one in charge of this camp. I would immediately order the execution of entertainers. God spits on entertainment. I would also order execution of dentists, professors, sportsmen and whores. God spits on intellectualism and licentious and games. If you hold the rocket launcher like that it will break your shoulder. This is the way to do it.”

“The Americans bring us weapons to kill the Russians,” Zahir said. “Thus even the infidel can be made to do the work of God. They send their important people to deal with us and think of us as allies. It is amusing.” Ambassador Max Ophuls, who these days was supporting terror activities while calling himself an ambassador of counterterrorism, had been in chare of liaison with Talib the Afghan branch of the Muj.
He was ready for battle. Winter was dissolving into spring and the mountain pathways were becoming passable. The forward bases were filling up with men. FC-22 was bursting at the seams with men with the snarling, spittle-flecked manner of attack dogs straining to be unleashed. New groups were appearing everyday, or so it seemed: Harakas, Lashkars [1], Hizabs of this or that, martyrdom or faith or glory. The word was that Amanullah Khan had come to Pakistan from England to assume command of the JKLF. Shalimar the clown went through his daily routine, the fitness regimen, the commando training, the weapons work, and wondered what it would be like to kill a man. Then the iron mullah asked him if he would like to go abroad.

Footnotes by bunpeiris
[1] Lashkars
Sri Lanka too had its painful share of Lashkars or Lascarins (or Lascareen) (Sinhala: laskirigngna) during the colonial era of Portuguese (1505-1656), Dutch (1656-1805), British (1805-1948). Those militias of Lascarins had been composed of Europeans, Malabar Sipahis Indonesians, Javans and Malays, Chinese or even Criminals from Batavia. They were involved in numerous battles of European colonial powers against the Sinhalese of Sri Lanka. In the year 1795, during the little known brief occupation of Kandy, then impregnable domain of the Sinhalese king, by the Dutch lead by Van Eck too was strengthened by a militia of Lascarins (or Lascareen). Today Kandy (the cultural capital and gateway to the Central Highlands) is, one of 8 UNESCO World Heritage Site is a major tourist attraction of Sri Lanka Holidays.
To learn more of Opium and Heroin visit "Cold Turkey Off Heroin".
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Cold turkey off Heroin

Cold turkey off Heroin
Following is a gleaning from Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts ISBN 0-349-11754-3

We all cope with anxiety and stress, to one degree or another, with the help of a cocktail of chemicals produced in the body and released in the brain. Chief among them is the endorphin group. The endorphins are peptide neurotransmitters that have pain-relieving properties. Anxiety and stress and pain bring on the endorphin response as a natural coping mechanism.
When we take any of the opiates-morphine or opium or heroin, in particular-the body stops producing endorphins. When we stop talking opiates, there’s a lag of between five or fourteen days before the body begins a new endorphin production cycle. In the meantime, in that black, tortured crawlspace of one to two weeks without heroin and without endorphins, we learn what anxiety and stress and pain really are.

What’s it like, Karla asked me once, cold turkey off heroin?
I tried to explain it.
Think about every time in your life that you’ve ever been afraid, really afraid. Someone sneaks up behind you when you think you’re alone, and shouts to frighten you. The gang of thugs closes in around you.
You fall from a great height in a dream, or you stand on the very edge of a steep cliff. Someone hold you under water and you feel the breath gone, and you scramble, fight, and claw you way to the surface.
You lose control of the car and see the wall rushing into your soundless shout. Then add them all up, all those chest-tightening terrors, and feel them all at once, all at the same time, hour after hour, and day after day.
And think of every pain you’ve ever known-the burn with hot oil, the sharp silver of glass, the broken bone, the gravel rash when you fell on the rough road in winter, the headache and earache and the toothache. Then add them all up, all those groin-squeezing, stomach tensing shrieks of pains, and feel them all at once, hour after hour, and day after day.
Then think of every anguish you’ve ever known. Remember the death of a loved one. Remember a lover’s rejection. Recall you feelings of failure and shame and unspeakably bitter remorse. And add them all up, all the heart-stabbing grieves and miseries, and feel them all at once, hour after hour, and day after day.

That’s cold turkey. Cold turkey off heroin is life with the skin torn away
The assault of anxiety on the unprotected mind, the brain without natural endorphins, makes men and women mad. Every junkie going through cold turkey is mad. The madness is so fierce and cruel that some die of it. And in the temporary insanity of that skinned, excruciated world, we commit crimes. And if we survive, years later and become well, our healthy recollections of those crimes leaves us wretched, bewildered, and as self-disgusted as men and women who betray their comrades and country under torture.

Two full days and nights into the torment, I knew I wasn’t going to make it. Most of the vomiting and diarrhea had passed, but the pain and anxieties were worse, much worse, every minute. Beneath the screaming in my blood there was a calm, insistent voice; You can stop this…you can fix this… you can stop this… take the money.. get a fix… you can stop this pain…
Nazeer’s bamboo and coconut-fiber cot was in the far corner of the room. I lurched toward it, watched closely by the burly Afghan, who was still sitting on hi mat near the door. Trembling and moaning with pain, I dragged the cot closer to the great window that overlooked out on the sea. I took up cotton sheet and began to tear at tit with my teeth. It gave way in few places, and I ripped it along the length, tearing off strips of cloth. Frantic in my movements and close to panic, I hurled two thick, embroidered quilts onto the rope bed for a mattress and lay down on it. Using two of the strips, I tied my ankles to the bed. With a third strip, I secured my left wrist. Then I lay down, and turned my head to look at Nazeer. I held out the remaining strip, and asked him with my eyes to bind my arm to the bed. It was the first time that we’d ever met one another’s eyes to bind my arm to the bed. It was the first time that we’d ever met one another’s eyes in an equally honest stare.

He rose from his square of carpet and walked toward me, holding the stare. He took the strip of cloth from my hand and bound my right wrist to the frame of the bed. A shout of trapped, panic-fear escaped from my open mouth, and another. I bit down on my tongue, biting through the flesh at the sides until blood ran past my lips. Nazeer nodded slowly. He tore another thick strip from the sheet and twirled it into a corkscrew tube. Sliding it between my teeth, he tried the gag behind my head. And I bit down on the devil’s tail. And I screamed. And I turned my head to see my own reflection tied to the night in the window. And for a while I was Modena, waiting and watching and screaming with my eyes.

Two days and nights I was tied to the bed. Nazeer nursed me with tenderness and constancy. He was always there. Every time I opened my eyes, I felt his rough hand my brow, wiping the sweat and the tears into my hair. Every time the lightening strike of cramp twisted a leg or arm or my stomach, he was there, massaging warmth into the gag, he held my eyes with his, willing me to endure and succeed. He removed the gag when I choked on a trickle of vomit or my blocked nose let no air pass, but he was a strong man and he knew that I didn’t want my screams to be heard. When I nodded my head, he replaces the gag and tied it fast.

And then, when I knew that I was either strong enough to stay or too weak to leave, I nodded to Nazeer, blinking my eyes, and he removed the gag for the last time. One by one he untied the bonds at my wrists and ankles. He brought me a broth made from chicken and barley and tomatoes, unspiced, except for salt. It was the richest and most delicious thing I ever tasted in my life. He fed it to me, spoon by spoon. After an hour, when I finished the little bowl, he smiled at me for the first time, and that smile was like sunlight on sea rocks after summer rain.
Cold turkey goes on for about two weeks, but the first five days are the worst. If you can get through the first five3 days, if you can crawl and drag yourself into that sixth morning without drugs, you know you’re clean, and you know you’ll make it. Every hour, for the next eight to en days you feel a little better and a little stronger. The cramps fade, the nausea passes, the fever and chills subside. After a while, the worst of it simply that you can’t sleep. You lie on the bed at n night, twisting and writhing in discomfort, and sleep never comes. In those last days and very long nights of the cold turkey, I became a Standing Baba: I never sat or lay down, all day and all night, until exhaustion collapsed my legs at last and I sank into sleep.
And it passes, the turkey passes, and you emerge from the cobra bite of heroin addiction like any survivor from any disaster: dazed, wounded forever, and glad to be alive.

Amy Jade Winehouse (14 September 1983 – 23 July 2011) before and after her addiction to heroin and cocaine.

Nazeer took my first sarcastic jokes, twelve days after the cold turkey began, as the cue fro my training to commence. From the sixth day I’d been walking with him as light exercise, and for the fresh air. The first of those walks ahead been slow and halting, and I’d returned to the house after fifteen minutes. By the twelfth day I was walking the length of the beach with him, hoping to tire myself so much that I could sleep. Finally, he took me to the stable where Khader’s horses were kept. The stable was a converted boathouse, one street away from the beach. The horses were trained for beginning riders, and carried tourists up and down the beach in the high season. The while gelding and grey mare were large, docile animals. We took them from Khader’s stable-master and led them down to the flat, hard-packed sand of the beach.

Footnotes by bunpeiris
Narcotics including heroin and opium are banned in Sri Lanka. Importation of Narcotics such as Heroin into Sri Lanka is an offense that carries the death penalty. However the capital punishment hasn’t been carried out recent. The most notorious case of capital punishment was that in respect of the assassination of Prime Mininster S. W. R. D. Bandaranayake. The Sri Lankan seized to smile. Courts of Law found Buddhist monk Somarama guilty; but the nation wasn't convinced at all. There was a notorious local name & name of a foreign Intelligence Agency in the winds of conspiracy. Those were the days of the assassination of another nationalist, Patrice Lulumba. Ceylon's Warren commission + John Kennedy + Edgar Hoover + FBI + CIA + Mob + Marylyn Monroe + Lee Harvey Oswald + second gunman + Oliver Stone maze. Please refrain from bringing narcotics to Sri Lanka even for private consumption. You are bound to lose all your smiles. And Sri Lankans too will have the their smiles frozen.
The only criminal that ever walked to the gallows with a smile in his face in Sri Lanka was said to be Koti Albert that was in the sixties. Defiant Keppetipola and Defiant Puran Appu (Francisco Fernando) weren’t criminals, they are national heroes who fought against British colonialists in Sri Lanka , then called Ceylon. In the last day too, at the Sacred Temple of the Tooth at Kandy, Kepptipola wished to be born again Sri Lanka to fight against the British; Puran Appu facing the firing squad, proclaimed that if there were another ten men like him in Ceylon, the British would have been wiped out .
During the seventies Sri Lanka Holidays Hikkaduwa of South western coastal belt swarmed with European counter culture stinking long-haired hippies smoking narcotics. Following the decline of Hippie counter culture, Hikkaduwa too got cleansed. Today Hikkaduwa is one of the major beach tourist resorts of Sri Lanka Holidays.
Opium is grown in great secrecy, on a small scale, in the deep jungles of some of the dry zone areas of Sri Lanka. Consumption of opium that is called “Ganja” in Sri Lanka (Uzbek, Moldavian and Ukrainian girls too call it Ganja) is a punishable offence though not strictly enforced. However Ganja in larger quantities in possession could land you in unnecessary trouble in Sri Lanka.

Images are by courtesy of
http://www.sciencephoto.com/media/268411/enlarge
http://www.drugrehab.co.uk/FAQ-heroin.htm
http://www.howcelebsloseweight.com/2008/08/25/amy-winehouse-before-heroin/
http://blog.rockstarsuperstarproject.com/
http://www.heroinaddicts.org/help-for-heroin-addiction/

To read about Poppy fields viist here.

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PAPILLON THEME-JERRY GOLDSMITH-SOUNDTRACK-MEMORIES MC QUEEN

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Editors - Papillon

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Karla and Shantaram at Goa

Karla and Shantaram at Goa is a gleaning  from Gregory David Roberts’s Shantaram

‘I love you , Karla,’ I said when we were alone again. ‘I loved you the first second I saw you. I think I’ve loved you for so long as there’s been love in the world. I love your voice. I love your face. I love your hands. I love everything you do, and I love the way your mind works, and the things you say. And even though it’s all true, all that, I don’t really understand it, and I can’t explain it-to you or to myself. I just love you. I just love you with all my heart. You do what God should do; you give me a reason to live. You give me reason to love the world.’
She kissed me, and our bodies settled together on the yielding sand. She clasped her hand in mine, and with our arms outstretched above our heads we made love while he praying moon seduced he sea, luring the waves crash and crumble on the charmed, unfailing shore.
And for a week, then, we played at being tourists in Goa. We visited all the beaches on the coast of the Arabian Sea, from Chapora to Cape Rama. We slept for two nights on the white gold wonder of Colva Beach. We inspected all the churches in the Old Goa settlement. The Festival of Francis Xavier, held on the anniversary of the saint’s death, every year, bound us in immense crowds of happy, hysterical pilgrims. The streets were thronged with people on their Sunday-best clothes. Merchants and street-stall operators came from all over the territory. Processions of the blind, the lame, and he afflicted, hoping for a miracle, rambled toward the basilica of the saints. Xavier, a Spanish monk, was one of the seven original Jesuits in the order founded by his friend Ignatius Loyola. Xavier died in 1552. He was just forty-six years old, but his spectacular proselytizing missions to India, and what was then called the Far East, established his enduring legend. After numerous burials and disinterments, the much-exhumed body of St. Francis was finally installed in the Basilica in the Bom Jesus, in Goa, in the early seventeenth century. Still remarkably-some would say miraculously-well preserved, the body was exposed to public view once in every ten years. While seemingly immune to decay, the saint’s body has suffered various amputations and subtractions over the centuries. A Portuguese woman had bitten off one of the saint’s toes, in the sixteenth century, in the hope of keeping it as a relic. Parts of the right hand had been sent to religious centers, as had chunks of the holy intestines.
Karla and I offered outrageously extravagant bribes to the caretakers of the basilica, laughing all the while, but they steadfastly refused to allow us a peak at the venerable corpse.

Following extract is copied from Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie
True believers, those nightmarish dreamers, grabbed at the corpse of Ayatollah Khomeini, as once other true believers in another place, in India whose name she bore, had bitten off chunks of the cadaver of St. Francis Xavier. One piece ended up in Macao, another in Rome. She wanted shadows, chiaroscuro, nuance. She wanted to see below the meniscus of the blinding brightness, to push through the hymen of the brightness, into the bloody hidden truth. What was not hidden, what was overt, was not true.

Following is from My Sri Lanka Holidays by bunpeiris.
The most venerated sacred relic of Theravada Buddhism is enshrined at the Holy Temple of the Tooth at Kandy, the medieval cultural capital and the gateway to the Central Highlands of Sri Lanka. It is the sacred Tooth relic of Gauthama Buddha, the exposition of which is bound to cause great rain in view of the tremendous atmospheric disturbance caused by the congregation of millions of gods at the location thereon to pay homage to the master who ceased to exist. Those gods are superior beings living in great splendor and grandeur in other planets of the universe who had lent hear to the doctrine of the Gauthama Buddha prior to his final extinction in 543 BC.
Dalada Sirita, a Buddhist treatise advises the exposition of Sacred Relic of Buddha in Kandy Esala Perahera pageant during a drawn out drought. The validity of the advise was authenticated in the year 1829 following a long drawn out drought in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in the British Colonial era. The uncommon phenomenon of heavy rain and resulting flood was recorded by then British colonial governor Sir Edward Barnes among the many others.

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Bollywood

Bollywood

Hindi movies aren’t to everyone’s taste. Some foreigners I’d dealt with had told me that they loathed the kaleidoscopic turmoil of musical numbers, bursting stochastically between weeping mothers, sighing infatuations, and brawling villains. I understood what they meant, but I didn’t agree with them. A year before, Johnny Cigar had told me that in former lives I must’ve been at least six different Indian personalities. I’d taken it as a high complement, but it wasn’t until I saw my first Bollywood movie shoot that I knew at last, and exactly, what he’d meant. I loved the singing, the dancing, and the music with the whole of my heart from the very first instant.
Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts

“Once a friend of mine wanted me to write the home page article on Bollywood movies for his website: www.bollywoodmoviesz.com. I wrote with all my heart and the friend of mine recognizing the passion of mine decided to leave my pen name bunpeiris at the end of the Home page article. bunpeiris

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Black Bombay: the Travel Racket

Black Bombay: the Travel Racket
Following is a gleaning from Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts.

Pop star Madonna and her husband Guy Ritchie, wearing a cap, visit Mumbai’s Ambedkarnagar slums on Tuesday. Author Gregory David Roberts, (behind Madonna) who spent a long time in the slums, showed them around.

The travel racket, he explained, was an especially lucrative part of the currency trade. It involved large numbers of people from the millions of Indians who worked in Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Muscat, Bahrain, Kuwait, and elsewhere throughout the Arab Gulf. The Indian workers, employed on contracts for three, six, or twelve months as domestics, cleaners, and laborers, were usually paid in foreign currency.
Most of the workers tried to exchange their wages on the black market as soon as they got back to India, in order to gain a few extra rupees. Khader’s mafia council offered the employers and the workers a short-cut. When they sold their foreign currencies in bulk to Khaderbhai, the Arab employers received a slightly more favorable rate, allowing them to pay their workers in rupees, at the black-market rate, in India. That left then with a surplus of rupees, and gave them a net profit from paying their workers.
For many Gulf State employers, the temptation to such currency crime was irresistible. They too, had caches of undeclared, un-taxed money under their opulent beds, Syndicates developed to organize the payment of India guest workers in rupees when they returned to India.
The workers were happy because they got the black-market rate but didn’t have to negotiate with hard-nosed black market dealers personally.
The bosses were happy because they made profits from payment through their syndicates.
The black marketers were happy because a steady stream of dollars, Deutschmarks, riyals, and dirhams flowed into the river of demand created by Indian business travelers.
Only the government missed out, and no-one in the thousands upon thousands of people involved in the trade shamed himself beyond endurance on that account.
‘I.. this whole business was once something of a specialty with me…, Khaled said, when that long first lesson finally ended. His voice trailed off, and I couldn’t be certain whether he was reminiscing or simply reluctant to talk further. I waited.
‘When I was studying, in New York,’ he went on at last,’ I was working on a thesis..Well, I wrote a thesis, on un-organized trade in the ancient world. It’s an area that my mother was researching, before the ’67 war. When I was a kid, she got me interested in the black markets of Assyria, Akkad, and Sumer, and how they related to trade routes, and taxes, and the empires that built up around them. When I started it myself, I called it Black Babylon.’
‘It’s catchy title.’
He fired a glance at me to reassure himself that I wasn’t mocking him.
‘I mean it,’ I said quickly, wanting to put him at ease because I was beginning to like him. ‘I think it’s a good topic for a thesis, and it’s a very catchy title. I think you should go ahead and finish it.’
He smiled again.
‘Well, Lin, life has lot of surprises, and, as my uncle in New York used to say, most of them ain’t happy ones for a working stiff. Now I’m working for a black market, instead of working on one. Now, it’s Black Bombay.

Shantaram. A literary masterpiece… it has the grit and pace of a thriller. Daily Telegraph
Gregory David Roberts was born in Melbourne in 1952, After surviving the events dealt with Shantaram, he was captured in Germany in 1990 and eventually extradited to Australia. On completing his prison sentence, he established a small multi-media company and is now a full time writer. He lives in Melbourne

"Once, while I was in Mumbai, a friend(Malathi Kembhavi) of a friend of mine (Anita Lewis) took trouble to take me to her favourite bookshop in Bombay. Shantaram is one of the dozen of books she encouraged me to buy." bunpeiris

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