Indian Entertainment Extraordinaire

One of the best things for me here is the ever-present Indian entertainment in the media. Some people find this the worst thing in their Afghan experience but not me - it is a treat. The drivers play the latest Hindi hits (Afghan and Iranian too), my regular stress release is to blast the Hindi radio channel while in the gym, and my TV has about eight channels of Indian dance, songs, news, gameshows like Indian Idol (fantastic, especially with Asha Bhosle as a judge!) and dramas (normally about people getting married).

I thought my liking for Bollywood would wear off after my gap year but it never did, and I have gone from thinking it's ridiculous and funny to actually (worryingly) liking it for real. However there are, as I recently discovered, limits. This dance and song number "Catch me if you can" from the film Sapoot (1996) is truly unbelievable in its awfulness. It has tested my love of the Hindi film industry to its limits. Brace yourselves...



I have also come across this Indian Pole Gymnastics (called Mallakhamb, apparently), something I have never, ever seen before. It is completely awe-inspiring. The second contestant is especially impressive as he has a physique that suggests 'give me another chapati' as opposed to 'give me a pole to hop up'. As one comment on YouTube said, "why they don't send these people to Olympic?". The answer is nothing as bizarre as this has made it to the Olympics yet, but these people deserve gold medals without a doubt. Brace yourselves again...

Food!

Food has always been one of my top priorities. We've always eaten very well at home, thanks to Mum. It was also because we lived in tropical countries where wonderful fruits and vegetables could be found. I often base holiday destination decisions on the local cuisine. When I was a child I would throw tantrums if my parents suggested we have brunch at weekends (I was opposed to the idea of missing a separate breakfast and lunch), if we only had time for a quick pizza/sandwich etc. for dinner (I wanted a proper meal) or if we ordered room service in a hotel (I wanted to go out to a restaurant). When we play golf, Dad will be concentrating on the essentials such as packing the balls and tees, whereas I will be in the kitchen preparing triple-decker, mammoth sandwiches and rummaging around for any other portable foods to take on the golf course. I have a mild phobia of running out of food; I can think of few worse scenarios (perhaps I should work for World Food Programme (WFP)). One of the things that kept me in Japan so long was the incredible cuisine, which is my all-time favourite. A life without sashimi and tofu was, for quite a while, unthinkable!

So I've naturally been very curious to become acquainted with Afghan food. Overall I have been fairly pleased with what I have found, but it probably isn't up there with Japanese or Nepali on my favourites list.

The standard meal - as far as I can gather - is pulao, a rice dish with meat (normally lamb), raisins, nuts and spices (cardamom is most prominent) inside. This is pretty tasty, but is a good example of the the excessive use of oil in Afghan cuisine. It's similar to Uzbek plov, Indian biryani or pilaf  (where's that originally from?), and although the main version here is Kabuli Pulao, there are also Uzbek and Turkmen versions (the latter uses sesame oil, which makes for an interesting change). The downside is the rice is often dripping in oil - how I would love some plain white Japanese gohan! Never have I seen so much oil used in food as here, even in China. It is a commonly heard complaint, even from Indians and Pakistanis, whose diet is not exactly oil-free. Everything here is literally swimming in the stuff, whether it is pulao, meat curries or vegetable stews. The other day I had burani - an eggplant, tomato, onion stew, not dissimilar to ratatouille, that was so drenched in luminescent orange oil that I wish I had taken a photo and sent it off the Guinness Book of Records. I am convinced it would have been listed under 'world's oiliest dish'.

Lamb and beef are the common meats, either in the pulao or separately as a curry. The beef is very tough. I prefer chicken though, and have found the Afghan chickens to be surprisingly meaty (not like Nepal, where surely the globe's scrawniest chickens are found). The cooks at work make the most delicious (of course oily) chicken in a coriander and tomato sauce. Unfortunately they only make it once a week but I am in my element when they do. Other dishes they make are shurba, a noodle soup with indeterminate bits of animal in it, or another dish which is quite bizarre. It's cheap spaghetti noodles submerged in a sort of thin brown juice, with chickpeas and carrots floating in it. On top of this you sprinkle a variety of dried spices and herbs (e.g. mint, cumin and couple of others which I have not got the translation of yet). It's an interesting culinary experience - not one that will earn any awards though - and is fairly tasty.

Fish is, unsurprisingly for this landlocked country, nowhere to be seen. I miss it a lot, given that I prefer it to meat and ate it everyday in Japan. I make do with canned tuna and John West mackerel (which I wouldn't touch in UK but here is a treasure). There are a range of vegetable dishes too, mainly in the form of spicy stews. The dal and chana are fantastic, as ever (I could live on yellow dal), and there is also a great okra/ladies' fingers stew which is gloriously gloupey and green (I'm a fan of mushy and sloppy foods; hence my love of every type of Japanese tofu, konnyaku (jelly made from devil's tongue plant starch) and the manju sweets). I remember my friend Nick used to order an okra dish - bhindi bhaji - at the local Raj Tandoori restaurant that we used to sneak off to on Saturday afternoons, when at boarding school in UK. But these days I no longer eat it together with pints of sickly sweet cider. 

The real treat here is the bread. The Lonely Planet to Afghanistan says "Afghan bread is something of a treat", but this is an understatement. The nan here is just amazing, especially when hot and crusty on the outside. As I can't really handle eating Afghan food more than once a day (due to the grease factor), I often stop off to get a piping hot nan on the way home (I have frequently burned my hands when insisting to the shopkeeper that he gives me his most 'garam' (hot) one in the shop; he literally scoops it out of the giant furnace behind him). The nan comes in various shapes - round, oval, rectangular - and sizes (ranging from a petit one-person size to absolutely giant, family-sized ones, which could easily double as a tablecloth or child's blanket. The round nan often have an ornate stamped pattern in the middle, similar to ones I saw in Uzbekistan (we have the wooden stamps at home). The elongated ones tend to have parallel lines running down them (making them easy to tear apart). There aren't any gigantic ones in this photo, but it gives an impression of the variety.

The fruit here is very impressive. One of the first things I saw on the drive from the airport when I arrived were the melons - gigantic boulders being sold by the roadside. How on earth people without a car carry them home, I don't know. These are both watermelons and honeydew melons, and both are delicious. The latter are slightly more crunchy and nutty than I have experienced before. They are a frequent dessert in the canteen at work and in the guesthouse where I live. We also have grapes, peaches, apricots, apples and imported bananas. I am yet to try the famed anaar (pomegranates), for which Afghanistan is world-famous. Perhaps they are out of season. I remember eating copious amounts of pomegranates in Tehran in 2007, including inside meat stews, which I found to be an acquired taste.

The highlight, though, have been the mangoes imported by truck from Pakistan. Golden, succulent and amazingly sweet, I literally ate two or three a day for about a month. The fact that they often come with some gaudy tinsel stuck to them makes them even more special (see photo). My office colleague taught me a new way to eat them. You cut them in half and pull the two halves apart from each end, remove the stone and then scoop out the inside with a spoon. This ensures maximum consumption/minimum wastage of all the juicy flesh.

Sadly the mango season is now coming to an end and those in the supermarket are mostly rotten. This doesn't stop the supermarket fruit-man trying to convince me otherwise, though, although the other day he handed me one that practically disintegrated in my hands. We both just cracked up at his ambitious but futile attempt to dupe me into buying this mass of rotten fruit. Now I have got the drivers to stop outside certain street-side fruit stalls on the way home, which, for some reason, still stock good ones. I risk kidnap and actually get out of the car (my security manager would not be happy) to get some more stocks. It takes a lot to dissuade me from getting my mangoes... 

A very big transition

Coming to Afghanistan has probably been the biggest transition I've ever experienced. This isn't because Afghanistan itself is so mind-blowingly different to anywhere else I've been (although life here is certainly unique). In many ways, it is very much like Cairo, Tashkent, Delhi or Kathmandu. It's instead because I was previously based in Tokyo for seven years.

I remember going to Tokyo in 2003 after living in a Himalayan village in Nepal and feeling pretty dazed and appalled by the crowded trains, lack of greenery and coldness of the immense concrete-ness. But that doesn't compare to now - there is something about going somewhere after Japan, which makes that change all the more severe. Japan sucks you in and makes you comfortable. Very, very comfortable. You begin to think it's normal to walk around with 500 dollars in cash. Tokyo makes you think it is right that your train driver apologises for being 30 seconds late into the station. But it's not normal; Japan is abnormally safe, clean, efficient and, well, comfortable.

Kabul and Tokyo may both be in Asia but I don't think you could get a bigger contrast than these two cities. In almost every way. The culture, religions, diet (fish/meat), dress (both styles and amount of), topography and climate (green, humid, island vs. brown, dry, inland) are just a few examples of the dichotomy. I can now understand why the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs classifies Afghanistan as the Middle East and not Asia.

The top three contrasts, though, are the the security/safety, the level of development and the amount of choice.

Japan is without a doubt the safest country I've been fortunate enough to live in, where people (many of their military included) have little or no sense of danger. Japanese ladies go into a cafe and nonchalantly leave their Louis Vuitton handbags on their chosen chairs, to reserve them before going off to the counter to order. Afghanistan, on the other hand, is definitely the most dangerous, with everything affected by the security situation and danger being ever-present; always there in one's mind. Interestingly, one doesn't really think about crime so much here, because instead the threat to life is (unsurprisingly) so much more the key concern. In Lagos, where my family lived from 1993-97, there was no walking on the streets and we had massive razor-wired walls surrounding our guarded and alarm-filled home. But that was because of the threat of robbery. Here in Kabul, the reason for not walking on the street or for having guards is because you may be killed. Japan is surely a utopia for a policeman and soldier but Afghanistan must be the worst place to embark on such a career.

The development aspect is so incomparable that I don't know where to start. Tokyo trains run every 3 minutes, to the second; in Afghanistan I'm not aware if there are trains. In Tokyo I paid for everything by swiping my 'Pasmo' card on screens, whether in the station, the grocery store or the bus - my life was a constant card-swiping exercise. Here in Kabul I have difficulty spending money, as I have only been to about three shops in a month. I live in one of the top central neighbourhoods of Kabul but the road outside is completely unpaved and potholed. I feel I have moved from 2050 to 1850 (except the mobile phones of course!).

In terms of choice, the differences are again immense. In Tokyo, when you want a cup of coffee you have about five options at any one time or place (not to mention the headache of choosing which out of the variety of coffees you want, once inside). In Kabul I pre-select one cafe (out of about three I know), phone the office for a car (which could turn up in anything between 10 to 45 minutes), get driven to the place and then probably find out there is no milk for that treasured cafe latte. Feeling peckish at 3 am in Shibuya? A kombini (convenience store) will be within 50 metres, and true to its name, it will sell you anything you could possibly wish to consume - hot or cold, wrapped in excessive layers of plastic and paper. Here my room is well stocked with biscuits or fruit because I know that a) there is no shop around b) even if there was, it would not be open and c) even if it was open, I would not even dream of walking there!

Having lived in various countries since I was 0 and having spent a childhood constantly switching between schools and homes, I've always thought I could adapt to anything, anywhere, in an instant. Tokyo to Kabul, though, took a good few weeks before I could finally sit back and relax. 

A Night at the Theatre

On 7 July, I went to the Foundation for Culture and Civil Society (FCCS) to watch a ‘Civic Education through Mobile Theatre’ performance that the Elections Team of The Asia Foundation has been collaborating on with FCCS.

Firstly, I was impressed by the FCCS’ physical environment. Although the entrance felt fairly dilapidated and made me wonder where I had arrived, I then emerged into a beautiful garden full of fruit trees and backed by a characteristic old mansion and its surrounding outbuildings. It was a world away from the dusty brown streets of Kabul and simply sitting there in greenery was a treat. I was warmly welcomed by Mr. Timor Hakimyar (Executive Director, FCCS) and his staff. Full of energy, he was an engaging person to chat with.

The musicians

As we sat in the garden sipping green tea, a trio of musicians started playing some traditional music on the rubab, tabla and flute (Afghan name unknown). Apparently, the rubab player, Mr. Hussain (sitting in the middle of the below photo), is one of the most famous in Afghanistan. I am no expert, but it was truly beautiful music.

After some time the theatre group, who had been sitting in the garden patiently, signaled it was time to start. They had set up a stage with floodlights, which gave it quite a professional feel. The lights showed up shocking clouds of dust swirling in the air – to think we breathe that in every day!

The final scene

Thankfully, my colleague Mr. Asheq interpreted the actors’ words so we could understand what was happening. Although simple (for example there were no stage props) I found the acting was of a high quality. They were all clearly experienced. I was surprised and impressed that there was also an actress among the cast. The different scenes were all entertaining with their respective stories, and the way they were later interwoven to create powerful messages about corruption, greed, ambition, education, the underprivileged and violence was skilful. The key underlying message, of course, was the importance of democracy and transparency/accountability in elections. At times funny and at times serious, the play left a deep impression.

After the play finished, we had a series of photos with the actors on stage, and were able to ask questions about the play, their roles and the logistics of organizing such mobile theatres. We heard some incredible stories about how actors had to hide in vehicles or use other innovative methods to travel through certain regions in order to perform. As ever in Afghanistan, security considerations are a fundamental part of the planning process.

Photo with the cast

Although I have not seen the effect first-hand that such mobile theaters have in rural areas of Afghanistan, the aims of this project are extremely commendable. By taking the messages to the rural populations and providing them, not through documents or speeches, but through theater which all members of the population can appreciate (literate or not) I’m convinced the effects must linger long after the mobile theater has moved on.

It crossed my mind that working on such ‘immediate impact’ projects contrasts heavily with other types of peace and development initiatives (e.g. international conferences), whose effects are not seen for long periods of time. Having personally come to Kabul from working in an Embassy, where our work on bilateral relations rarely produced ‘fruits’ in the short-term, I thought about how worthwhile it is to also work on ‘on-the-ground’ projects such as this TAF/FCCS initiative.

We were then invited to have dinner, which was a veritable feast. They evidently had prepared for an army of people, and we tucked into giant chunks of stewed beef, roast chicken, Kabuli pulao, spinach, naan bread and succulent peaches. This was all accompanied by another performance by the same musicians who had patiently waited until the play was over to resume.

The entertainment had not yet finished, though. The actors, clearly wishing to stay in the limelight and with much energy in reserve, started dancing. Ranging from traditional Pashtun styles, which were dramatic (almost aggressive) and performed in a circle, to a hilarious Indian Bollywood-style performance by the ‘Commander’ in the play, this was perhaps the most entertaining part of the evening.

Energetic dancing

Overall, it was the most interesting evening I have spent since arriving in Afghanistan a month ago. What was originally a theater performance turned out to be so much more, with the beautiful gardens, wonderful music, delicious dinner and impressive dance all combining to create a magical experience. I felt honored to be invited and certainly hope to return there again.