The all star Filipino Women's Boxing Team

Big Boss Patricio Gaspi

The coaches Roel Velasco (Centre), Mel Briz (Right)

Irish Magno

The Juniors

Champions - Nesthy Peticio (Left) and Josie Gabuco

Join my speech in Manila, The Philippines

My open letter to open letter writers

The culture of writing open letters has taken India by storm. What essentially began as a subculture among unknown IIT graduates (remember those 'Open Letter from an IITian to Shivaji Das'), has now been taken over by celebrities. That is somewhat understandable because Open Letters are highly secure, the recipient can never get the contact details of the sender, so no chance of receiving Tution and Insurance agent fliers. Open Letters also solve the problem of having to know and write down the detailed address of the recipient.

So while the Indian Postal Service still rules the roost with more than 50 million letter deliveries a day, open letters are catching up fast [over 3 million open letters in circulation in India if Google Search is God].

But a stinky reality of this open letter obsession is that if no open letter has been addressed to you, you are a complete nobody. So friends please write me a one. I was kidding earlier about that open letter to me. I am still waiting for one at my mailbox.

Jamming with Nepalese security guards in Malaysia

A little shy, a little hesitant, quite a bit out of place; they are conspicuous with their uniforms; sometimes a cowboy attire, sometimes wearing a fluorescent volunteer jacket, or a white shirt with shoulder straps; security guards from Nepal are conspicuous all over Malaysia. They form the frontline, and the rear-guard; in shopping malls, condominiums, parking lots, and corporate towers.

At the rear gate of my friend’s condominium in Kuala Lumpur, one of them asks me who I want to meet. He is Niroj, 25, lean, with cropped hair, small eyes, sharp but small nose, and a deep tanned skin. He is from Phulwa, a village near the Indian border and the Indian resort town of Darjeeling. He has been in Malaysia for more than a year.

“I work 12 hours every day, seven days a week. There are no holidays for us,” Niroj is already smiling and friendly. He works from 8AM to 8PM, and his shift pattern changes every fifteen days.

Niroj is keen to share all, “I came here after paying 200,000 Nepalese Rupiah to the agent in Nepal. Here I get 1500 Ringgit every month as salary. Then my boss also gives me 200 ringgit for food and 100 for calling home. And I get a dormitory nearby. Every month, I send home 500 ringgit.”

“And how much is your salary in Singapore?” Niroj asks innocently. I have always heard this question from migrant workers, right after they had candidly disclosed theirs without me asking for it. And like always, I don’t return back the honesty. I cook up a number. Niroj also says what I always hear after this, “It is very good, brother.”

Niroj used to work as a policeman in Nepal. Under Malaysian law, only Malaysians and Nepalese men were allowed to work as security guards. And only those Nepalese men who had been in the army or police were eligible. Every year there are stories about migrants from other countries such as Pakistan or Bangladesh working as security guards under the radar, sometimes using fake identity cards. There are reports of there being anywhere between 10,000 to 70,000 Nepalese migrants working as security guards in Malaysia

I ask Niroj why he left the police.

“I ran into some problems with my friends there,” he lowers his head. Out here, in this gated condominium, his demeanour had shed all semblance of authority a policeman naturally gains on the job.

Niroj talks about Indian movies. “That’s how I picked up Hindi.” It was rather good, better than most people’s I had come across in Nepal.

“I get to speak often in Hindi here. So many residents in this condo are Indians.”

“I can stay here for another two years. May be I can save enough to get married. If I can’t, I will have to apply again.”

It is getting dark. Niroj turns on the light in the one square metre room built for guards at the gate.

“Do you like my office? Is your office nicer? Must be, I have no chair” says Niroj.

“But I don’t have all these pictures,” I say, referring to the posters of eleven headed Hindu goddesses he has on the walls. “These are not mine. My boss is a Hindu man. But it’s good this way. There was a Bangladeshi guard here sometime back. He was Muslim but would not mind these pictures. He was a good man. I heard he was caught and sent back.” The Malaysian authorities often conduct checks to fish out migrants working illegally as guards.

Late in the evening, I am sitting by myself in a desolate Indian Muslim restaurant in the business district. A somewhat overweight Nepalese guard enters, looks around with a faint smile, and then serves himself a big pile of rice and dal (lentil soup). He sits behind my table. His face is from somewhere halfway between the highland and the plains. I can’t help asking him about his choice of meal.

“I eat this every day,” Ram Bahadur unleashes a big laugh, “Because in Nepal we always eat dal-bhat.”  I watch him eat silently; such a look of content; he has created a small transient Nepal blanket around him at that moment.

In the morning, I look out for Niroj. But it is 8AM and I get to watch the change of guards ceremony. The new comer, Khagendra, takes off his denim jacket. Niroj puts in a denim jacket. Khagendra puts on a cap. Niroj takes off his cap. Niroj hands over his walkie talkie to Khogendra. The ceremony is over. Both of them live in the same dormitory.

“What will you do now?” I ask Niroj.

“Just go home, eat, wash clothes, sleep, then cook, get ready to come here. There is nothing much we can do. Every day is like this. But it is all good. Our boss is good.”

The new guards settle down; three of them, moving from front gate to back gate and then around the compound. Khagendra is now at the rear gate. But seeing us talk, another guard joins in. He is Lalim. Both Khagendra and Lalim are in there mid-thirties and have come around Kathmandu. Lalim looks like a copy of Niroj but Khagendra has more lowland features. They have been working in Malaysia for over five years with breaks in between. They used to be in the Army but had left it after a short stint.

Khagendra says, “The Maoists were after us. I couldn’t take it anymore. They came only when they knew that we were outnumbered and they could kill us all. At the army, every day was full of anxiety. When will they come? Tomorrow?”

“I had a wife and a daughter. And the pay was not worth it. I couldn’t stay long.”

I ask him about the contrast in his work here.

“You are right. Hardly much work here. See, we need to be really good at pressing this button to open the gate, like this,” he has a smirk on his face as he presses the button a few times, each time with a bizarre beep.

“And, we also need to know how to give a good salute when one of the resident’s cars passes by,” he gives me a demo. I realized that I got some pleasure from that. Outside of condominiums, where else could I hope to get such a military style salute?

“The most difficult things can get here is when a visitor comes in or when a contractor comes in with their van and we have to check whether they should be let in. In all my five years as a guard here, I have never seen any theft or anything more violent. Of course, if something bad happens, then it will be a problem.”

Lalim shows me the visitor’s register, “This is my list of Facebook friends,” they both laugh.

I ask them if they have picked much local language.

“Just a few words only. We barely know much English. Once I wished a man ‘Selamat Mati’ instead of ‘Selamat Pagi.’ That’s Happy Death instead of Good Morning. Imagine the man’s reaction.”

I tell them that I had been to Kathmandu and I was not allowed inside the Pashupatinath temple because my wife is Chinese.

“That’s horrible. Just not right for the Nepalese to behave like that,” both of them repeat this.

“Did you go to Kashi Vishwanath temple in Varanasi in your India?” asks Lalim.

“Yes, and there they let us in.”

“Terrible. That’s how Nepal is you see,” both apologized on behalf of the whole of Nepal.

I defend Nepal saying the people we met were rather friendly, even when denying us the permission to go in to the temple.

“Maybe, because you are a foreigner,” says Khagendra.

In my subsequent trips, I meet them on and off. Typically cheerful, they sometimes do let out their frustration.

 “Boring, boring, life here is so boring.”

“Some of these contractors are so rude. When we ask which flat they need to go to and if they have a written permit; they speak in bad language. Just because we are foreigners.”

“We heard that the government will change law and send us back. What have we done wrong?”

Once I ask them about the political situation back home. Lalim, the most confident of all the Nepalese men I had met, sighs, “What can I tell you. So much has happened. So many big words. So many promises. So many died. And in the end it’s still the same. The rich are getting richer. The same politicians are getting even richer. Maoists, Nepalese Congress, there is no difference.”

That sounded a lot like Thailand. The only difference was that in Nepal, the king had to go. But the upper caste old elite managed to hold on. The same old faces, the same old habits, just that the royal palace has become a museum.

As for Khagendra and Lalim; back in Nepal, they had been entrusted with protecting this old elite from the peasant and low-caste Maoist militia. And now in Kuala Lumpur, their job was to protect the new elite; the rising middle class, the expatriates, their condominiums and their cars. Here, the nature of the enemy has changed; a faceless, generalized possibility. Here, they were no longer called agents of the class enemy; rather being marketed as ‘known for their loyalty, honesty, and courage’; a necessity to manage the ‘high attrition rates’ characteristic of the industry.

Khagendra sums it up, “In my army days, I wondered if I will see my wife and daughter again. Out here, I haven’t anyway been with my wife and daughter for three years. I feel like I have come so far away from them and I am scared they feel the same way.”

The highs and lows of Banjarmasin

Perhaps Banjarmasin is an amphibian. On land, I found this South Kalimantan town like any other Indonesian town, with streaming motorcycles, markets overflowing with stuffed toys, and thousands of Aneka Gorengan (Deep fried snacks) carts continuing their millennial race. But once I ventured into one of the town’s hundreds of canals, Banjarmasin revealed its true character.

When the engines of my small boat began humming, it was like Basho’s ‘frog jumping into an ancient pond’ moment. “Foreigner, foreigner,” a child screamed at the top of her voice. And this message got relayed from one house’s backyard to the next like wildfire. What I had planned to be a one hour for fifty-thousand rupiah contract with my boatman turned into the greatest egotistical trip of my life. For never had I imagined I had such great capacity to bring happiness to others. The residents of the canal-side houses came out in hordes; bare-naked children, bent-backed grannies, cool-vibe oozing soccer teens, toned young males made of copper and beaming pregnant mothers. At my very sight, the children became ecstatic. The boys jumped from their backyards creating waves that folded the otherwise perfect reflection of the houses on the canals. Kids dropped all around me, splashing water that drenched me wet. They swam as fast as they could to my boat, hoping to touch me just once or even better, give a high-five. The stronger boys managed to climb on to my boat and not knowing what to do afterwards, just gave me a smile and fell back into the water. The younger ones screamed out, shaking their head, closing their eyes in utter delight. The girls and the older people folded hands and greeted me with big smiles. There was no doubt! What a wonderful person I am! I didn’t know how to react. It was a sudden attack of innocence on my senses. I wanted to join in the ecstasy, somersault and dive in the murky water, and then scream around with the jovial children. But I had a one hour fifty thousand rupiah contract. So I just waved and waved. “He waved at me, he waved at me!” the neighbourhood was in raptures. I almost felt like I could make the world a better place.

Once things calmed down, I could finally marvel at the endless stream of houses sitting at the banks canals, leisurely hanging their scrawny wooden legs in the water. Houses, mosques, madrasas, grocery shops, furniture stalls, all built with patches of wood, the same colour as the canals, nailed to each other. Some of the houses had lost their footing and were slowly merging with the canals, looking like old men slowly crouching for a hot spring bath. Colourful coffins waited patiently in the coffin workshops along the canal. Canals, canals, more canals; some wide as a soccer field pretending to be a river, some narrow as a log of wood; they connected here and there creating a maze, going about quietly with the business of moving all the muddy water from the washing of the Meratus Mountains; closely watched over by roaming patrols of hyacinths and water lilies.

Here, mornings began with the boatmen and boatwomen waking up the owners of the gasoline stalls by the canals; first by calling their name, then clapping, and then a friendly shove with the oars. Soon, Gauguin’s women came out from the backyards of each house and lather their whole bodies and mouths sitting on the small jetties built from their house, for the women of Banjarmasin love to shower and brush their teeth at the same time. The elderly man came out too, and hundreds of eager fish would splash out begging them for food in the fisheries built on the canals, because it was breakfast time in Banjarmasin.

As the day progressed, the canals became the highways moving people in all direction, tiny heads in white hijab going to school, ducking every time their boat passes under a bridge. An endless flow of motorcycles with their helmets keep running on these bridges; from the boats below, they look like chess pawns on roller blades. The canal fairies of Banjarmasin, the colourful old women selling bananas, guavas, rice and other supplies on canoes, rowed from door to door looking for custom. Throughout the day, elderly women sat facing the canoe holding a fishing rod. And also throughout the day, a thousand and one buckets tied with long strings, built to fetch water from the canals, swung from each backyard like a pendulum, keeping time in the canals of Banjarmasin.

During noon, Banjarmasin is an oppressive piece of earth as the sun turns into a baker. I rushed indoors, inside my small room in the Sariah-compliant hotel, sitting, dozing, moist from the sweat, my arms feeling like enormous concrete blocks. Hour after hour of doing nothing, not a single movement in the dark windowless room, trying to think but soon losing every chain of thought. I was turning into a statue with a drooping head. I was decomposing in Banjarmasin. I was scared. I needed to make a move before the flies moved in from under the doorsil. But I was in a state of trance. My elephant limbs refused to budge. I recalled the high-fives. The children must be waiting for me in the canals, their heads bobbing in and out of the murky water. I had to go. I had to stay alive. I concentrated. My head rose up slowly. The fingers moved. In one huge effort, I left my damp grave and soon I was on a boat in the canals of Banjarmasin.

After another evening of boosting my ego I rushed back to my hotel to retire early for next day, I had an appointment to keep with my boatman at five in the morning. On my way, I realized that Banjarmasin had changed its streets. Jamu, jamu, jamu; traditional male-power drinks; had lined up neatly along an endless chain of small tables that had sprung up from nowhere. Where had all the shops that I had seen during the day eloped? Jamu, jamu, jamu; this was serious business and vendors were indeed looking dead serious. They set up small stools in front of their table-stalls because at nights, Banjarmasin becomes an enormous winding serpent of Jamu bars where patrons swarm in looking grim, focused, not exchanging a single word with anyone around, ordering a Jamu drink with a gesture, then quietly finishing it in small sips, looking down all the time, their mojo building up inside, and then, with burning eyes, hitting the streets of Banjarmasin.

And then I realized, in this archetype conservative town, some windows and doors were lighting up and calling out to these Jamu filled men; one of such love hotels right in front of my Sariah hotel.    That night, I dreamt that I was frolicking about among thousands of half-opened durians, all a bright orange that I had only seen in Banjarmasin.

5 AM, and it was very dark, but the motorcycles were still keeping the streets awake in Banjarmasin. I walked along the banks of one the canals to meet my boatman. There were a few people slumbering about; dark silhouettes, a woman in sleepwear, certainly insane, holding up one arm to heaven; a man walking in helical steps, a stick in his hand; another man wearing a hat, peeing in bits here and there, marking territory. I tried to disappear into the night as well as I could, moving like only a black cat could. And then I came across a young woman who was perhaps wearing a tight jacket and jeans. She had obviously been standing for long as she kept shifting weight from one leg to another. She whistled at me and said, “Come on, young man, let’s play.” I hurried my pace and my heart caught up. What harm could she do to me? But I was petrified. She didn’t walk after me but kept talking, “Come on, darling.” The mosques across the canal began speaking out too and their synchronized muezzin calls were drowning out her voice. I had almost escaped her, when she called out, “It’s cheap!” The muezzin calls wouldn’t stop. “Help me, I am hungry,” she screamed. That moment my hurt sunk and I wept along the canals of Banjarmasin. 

Fishing the Bowels of the Earth – Artisanal Diamond Mining in South Kalimantan, Indonesia

As my motorcycle entered the diamond mines at Pumpung, a village near Cempaka in South Kalimantan, I was greeted by the buzz of several throbbing hurts, makeshift water pumps scattered around a vast green flatland interspersed with tiny brown hillocks. Each hillock had a bamboo stairway to heaven placed in front of them.  The trail to these was flooded, and I walked like a drunkard along the edges, trying to keep my feet dry and clean. Soon I spotted the first pit, where the earth had hidden its treasures but failed to keep the secret.

Four men stood along the slopes of the pit, digging for fortune. The earth, a swampland, constantly oozed water into these pits to annoy these men, like a child not wanting to share her toys. The pumps worked for the men to suck out this water while the sun worked for the earth to scorch the men. Again and again, the men would slip and slide down the mud. But they climbed back, fully layered in mud, almost unrecognizable from the pit, and then again gave the pit a few blows with their shovel before sliding down. I imagined the fancy jewellery stores with perfect air-conditioning in Singapore and Jakarta, with sharp-suited sales girls guiding our vision with warm spotlights on dark velvet. This world couldn’t have been further from that.

As soon as the miners saw me, they found an excuse to take a break from this contest and struggled up the pit to give me high-fives. Then immediately, they apologized realizing that their hands were full of mud. “Look what we found today!” Anang, a man in his thirties with a chiselled face and weather-beaten skin, showed me two rocks with black innards, “It’s not that most precious stone, but these will get us ten thousand rupiah.” That’s a little less than a dollar. Mostafa, a miner in his early twenties with baby cheeks, was the most excited, “Come take my picture with these rocks!” he poses, “Hey, you!” He shouts to the two men working the pump, “Pose for him.”

Anang and Mostafa showed me around, “We dig out the mud and then mix it with more water and then put it in these machines,” The machines, which I had taken to be the stairway to heaven, were for sluicing. “Then the mineral bearing rocks separate out from the mud after which we have to inspect these rocks manually.” Three old men were shovelling up the mud to the mouth of the sluicing machines. They were panting in the heat, resting after every four or five attempts. “We take turns to do this,” said Anang, “All of us are from the same village. I have been doing this for twelve years. My father has been at it for thirty years.”

Many such mines are scattered around south Kalimantan. The miners exhaust one pit and then move further to dig a new one. Diamond mining here is over a hundred and fifty years old practice though some date this to over four hundred years. Apart from Diamond, the pits give out other minerals such as topaz, emerald, amethyst and gold. In 1965, a 166.85 carat diamond named Trisakti was found in Pumpung. And in 2008, a 200 carat diamond named Puteri Malu was found nearby. However, it is unusual to find anything over 5 carats from these mines. Anang says, “It’s not just the size. Most of the diamonds have defects and sell for much less. But we just need one big one,” he makes a round hole with his fingers, “Just once, this big!”

 

Anywhere in the world, artisanal mining is as much about hard work as it is about superstitions. At Pumpung, one shouldn't ever say the word intan (diamond) in the vicinity of the pits; else he will not hit diamond for years; just like Garimpos in Mato Grasso in Brazil believe that one is doomed if one finds gold instead of diamonds. Mostafa whispers as he giggles, “That man with the hat working at the machine; he doesn’t talk to anyone. He keeps saying some prayers all the time when at work. But he hasn’t got any big diamond yet.”

The Pumpung miners and the Garimpos also deploy similar business models. The proceeds from the sale is divided between the miners, the owners of the machines and the owner of the land. “Whatever we get, our leader goes and sells at Martapura. We keep fifty percent which we share equally among ourselves, the owner of the machine gets fifteen, and the landowner gets the rest. Some miners don’t use machines and just sort with pans.” Conditioned by my grab-it-all urban conditioning, I have the obvious question; what if you don’t tell the others. “Oh no, that is not possible,” says Anang, “Everyone knows everyone here. You cheat once and you will be outcast for life.”  I recall stories of cheating Garimpos desperately begging anyone to buy all their diamonds in return for a single bowl of Feijoada (bean stew) because not a single buyer would buy from them.

The diamonds and other gems collected from Pumpung are processed in small workshops in the neighbouring town of Martapura. At Martapura, there are many small stores selling the jewels. Visitors come from all over Indonesia to these jewellery stores in Martapura. Again these are not fancy stores; just countless beads hanging from walls and dooframes and the more precious jewels housed inside glasstop wooden cupboards. Some individual sellers just walk around from one prospect to another, taking out his handkerchief to show his collection of gems.

It is time for lunch and the miners gather at a makeshift warung which has been set up by one of the villagers near the pit. “Each pit has its own warung, if she sees us walk over to the next warung, she will scream louder than these pumps” the man who says prayers takes a break to crack this joke at the warung’s owner and the entire group breaks into laughter. Mostafa says, “Yes, that’s another rule for the miners. Even though our house is just a five-minute walk, we have to have lunch at our respective warungs.” Lunch is instant noodles with a glass of tea and afterwards, as the miners relax over a smoke, I head on to the neighbouring pits.

Again, the young men digging the sides are overjoyed and pose for me, asking for photographs, some raising Ronnie James Dio’s famous sign of the horns. The youngest of the lot slides in the walls of the pit and lands on the water below. He then goes completely under the muddy water. His elder brother, Ahmed, walks up to talk to me, “My brother is a water buffalo. He can’t take the heat for long and goes in the water every now and then.” Ahmed is twenty five and has been working at the mine for five years, “I have two daughters already. Both go to school. We get married by the time we are twenty.” Ahmed says that working in the mines is safe but it is tough initially, “When I started here, I used to get fever every few days. The sun was unbearable. But you get used to it.” The miners work from sunrise to sunset and take a day off on Friday.

Diamond mining in South Kalimantan has been through ups and downs; a contest between greater mechanization and the consequent depletion followed by even greater mechanization. And despite so much depending on the hope of that one big find, the miners remain equanimous about their lives. They are driven by natural human spirits; to take risks but also to share risks. They are curious to know about the outside world and relish interacting with outsiders. Pumpung, the home they have built for themselves, is a charming idyll of colourful clothes on washing lines with only the occasional scampering chickens disturbing the peace. And on Fridays, they don their best clothes to go to Martapura to pray at its Grand Mosque and shop and eat with their family at the market.

As I rode back, the women and children shouted goodbyes and I was left with a warm feeling. My hands, muddy from the high-fives, had dried-up. And I had this sudden whim to never wash my hands again.