Was the fiddler framed? How Nero may have been a good guy after all

 He was a demonic emperor who stabbed citizens at random and let Rome burn. Or was he? We go behind the scenes at a new show exploding myths about the ancient world’s favourite baddie

Nero comes with a lurid reputation. “The main thing we know about him is his infamy,” says Thorsten Opper, curator of the first British exhibition devoted to the Roman emperor. “The glutton, the profligate, the matricide, the megalomaniac.” Also, the pyromaniac: famously, Nero “fiddled while Rome burned”, or at least strummed his kithara to one of his own compositions, The Fall of Troy, while a fire, supposedly begun by him, destroyed three of Rome’s 14 districts and seriously damaged seven.

Friend of the homeless … this Roman bust of Nero, remade to look thuggish, features in the British Museum show; Peter Ustinov playing the emperor as a mincing toddler in Quo Vadis. Composite: Alamy, Mgm/Allstar

His afterlife on the page and screen is certainly arresting. Nero inspired some of the greatest Renaissance and baroque operas, notably Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea and Handel’s Agrippina, which chart the emperor’s adulterous love for Poppaea, who became his second wife. In the epic 1951 movie Quo Vadis, Peter Ustinov played Nero as entirely unhinged: a mincing, purple-swathed toddler in a man’s body. Christopher Biggins took him on in I, Claudius, the classic BBC adaptation of Robert Graves’s novel, and made him power-hungry, baby-faced and quite, quite mad.

The main ancient sources on Nero are uncompromising. The historian Tacitus offers a vivid picture of a ruler consumed by cruelty and paranoia during his 14-year reign, which ended after an armed rebellion precipitated his suicide, aged just 31. This portrait includes the story of his extraordinarily elaborate plot to assassinate his powerful mother, Agrippina, using a trick boat designed to collapse at sea and drown her (the doughty dowager empress swam to shore, but was later dispatched by sword). It also includes, even less palatably, the information that the emperor killed his wife Poppaea by kicking her in the stomach when pregnant. Nero’s biographer Suetonius, meanwhile, tells us that – aside from his disgraceful habit of singing and playing on the public stage – the emperor liked to amuse himself by going out into the streets after dinner in disguise, attacking and stabbing people, and then chucking their corpses into the sewers.

Baby-faced and quite mad … Christopher Biggins as Nero in the BBC adaptation of I, Claudius. Photograph: BBC

As for fiddling while Rome burned, he wasn't even in the city at the time

But the thrust of the British Museum’s exhibition, which opens this week, is that this story of wantonness and degeneracy is, essentially, propaganda. “The sources need to be seen as texts that have a clear agenda,” says Opper, the museum’s curator of Greek and Roman sculpture. The “elite senatorial writers” who formed this negative picture, he argues, could not reconcile themselves to the demise of the republic and the establishing of populist, one-person rule.

Nero: The Man Behind the Myth tries to hint at another, suppressed version of the emperor – one that survives only in scraps of pro-Nero graffiti found on the walls of Pompeii, in asides in the main ancient texts, and in objects and sculptures that managed to escape the Roman habit of destroying images of a discredited ruler (known as damnatio memoriae, the damnation of memory).

The reputation for “sex and violence and gluttony” that swirls around Nero was, argues Opper, carefully built up through the lavish invocation of unfounded conspiracy theories and deliberate use of the rhetorical tropes of vituperatio. These techniques of undermining opponents – untrammelled by modern legal restraints on libel or slander – often focused on the target’s supposed sexual incontinence and financial profligacy. The British Museum exhibition, he says, “isn’t about rehabilitating Nero – it’s about critically reading the sources and stripping out the accretions”.

Trouble in store … Colchester’s Fenwick Treasure. Photograph: British Museum

Once you push the anecdotes and gossip out of the way, he says, there is a rich and intriguing political picture to be discerned – one of a traditional ruling class threatened by the wealth of an insurgent group of provincials; political pressure building up as “anxiety about money blurs class divides”; and an emperor who is attempting to shore up a shaky power base through currying popularity with the plebeians, or ordinary people of Rome, all the while coping with pressures on the eastern and western fringes of the empire, in what are now Armenia and Britain.

The exhibition begins with a powerful metaphor for the shading of the “real” Nero into the Nero of myth. A bust normally housed in the Capitoline Museums, Rome, showing Nero with a brooding, malevolent physiognomy: a cruel curve to the mouth and an oversized chin that give him a rather thuggish air. This is the Nero Ustinov skilfully and enjoyably inhabits in Quo Vadis. Yet, says Opper, the sculpture was fragmentary: only the area above the right eye and left cheek is original. It was heavily restored in the 17th century by a baroque artist who gave Nero that mad chin and depraved mouth – one who’d read his Suetonius, or at least had a firm idea of the “wicked” character passed down from the Roman historians.

Few complete original sculptures of Nero survive. But one or two do remain: a striking statue of an angelic-looking boy of 12 or 13, on loan from the Louvre, presents a very different picture. This is a portrait of a young boy “making his debut as part of the imperial family”, according to Opper. The sculpture was perhaps once part of a dynastic group: officially adopted by his predecessor and stepfather, Claudius, this boy was groomed for power early to ensure a smooth transition. This was, in fact, achieved, says Opper, pooh-poohing the notion that Nero’s mother, Agrippina, killed Claudius – poisoning him, as ancient sources insist, with mushrooms.

For Opper, the real brutality of Nero’s reign is contained not within the emperor’s personal acts of violence, whether real or imagined, but within the cruelty and exploitation of the Roman imperial system. A section of the show is devoted to Britain – at the time a young, unstable addition to Rome’s empire, the southern and eastern part of the island having been invaded and conquered by Claudius in AD43. Nero’s reign, however, saw one of the most famous incidents in Britain’s Roman history: the uprising of the former Roman ally Boudicca, queen of the Iceni people in what is now East Anglia.

Ancient sources hint at corruption, greed and tax-farming (auctioning off the right to collect taxes) on the part of the recent imperial rulers. Thus provoked, Boudicca’s revolt was bloody, as described by the historian Tacitus, and as observed in the archaeological record. The exhibition includes a recent find: a hoard of coins and jewellery excavated from beneath a branch of Fenwick in Colchester, then Britannia’s provincial capital. They seem to have been buried, perhaps by the terrified and fleeing Roman inhabitants, most of whom Boudicca’s forces massacred. The hoard was found beneath the layer of burned material that is the physical trace of Boudicca’s rampage through the town. Also on show is the recent find of a kneecap that a sword sliced off, and a jawbone hacked through by a blade.

Perhaps most chilling of all, though, is the evidence of Roman chain gangs, discovered on Anglesey: metal shackles that would have restrained five slaves, or prisoners, or prisoners-of-war, a reminder of the fact that the Roman empire ran on the muscle power of the enslaved. Anglesey was the scene of fighting between Romans and – according to Tacitus – a force of Britons that included “black-robed women with dishevelled hair like Furies” and druids “screaming dreadful curses”.

It was the general Gaius Suetonius Paulinus’s advance towards Anglesey that gave Boudicca her chance to strike while the bulk of Roman forces were occupied in the west. She very nearly got rid of the Romans altogether. There’s a bronze Roman head in the British Museum’s collection, included in the exhibition, that was found in the River Alde in Suffolk in 1907. Opper thinks it could represent Nero. Theories have been put forward that it was Iceni war loot, ritually deposited in the river after being snatched from Colchester or another Roman centre.

What about the story that Nero was responsible for the fire that devastated Rome in AD64? Surely that – the single most famous thing about Nero – must be true? Opper shakes his head. Nero wasn’t even in Rome at the time, he says, and the city – with its badly built, overcrowded housing – “was due a fire”. He argues that the story of Nero fiddling while Rome burned is a kind of slippage, the solidification of a rumour based on the fact that he really did write a poem about the fall of Troy, which included scenes of a city ablaze. Instead, he points out, even the ancient sources concede that Nero made sure the homeless were housed and that rebuilding was along much safer, more regulated lines – albeit with a giant palace of his own, the Domus Aurea, spilling forth magnificently over the Oppian, Caelian and Esquiline hills like a kind of city-centre Versailles.

The enjoyably monstrous Nero, then, seems to be fading away under Opper’s critical gaze. So who was he? The “real Nero”, he argues, is no longer recoverable, so effective was the propaganda of his opponents. The exhibition ends as it begins, with another powerful image of the emperor’s erasure. After Nero’s death, a brutal civil war broke out. One after another, four powerful generals attempted to seize power. The one who finally succeeded was Vespasian, who had led the Second Legion into south-west England and Wales. He founded the second dynasty of Roman emperors, the Flavians. That final object is a stone head of Vespasian, recycled and recarved from a sculpture of Nero.

Nero: The Man Behind The Myth opens at the British Museum, London, on Thursday.

(Source: The Guardian)

A history of body hair removal and distorted body image

For centuries, society has dictated women’s choices over their appearance, by telling them how to dress and be ‘ladylike’. As a direct result of this normalized instruction, women have internalized the misogynistic idea that in order to be seen as presentable, they must self-edit and self-harm.

Exerting dominance over a woman by asserting the unrealistic beauty standards she must attain is just one of the many ways in which patriarchy, globally, has been oppressing women. For instance, the Chinese had a tradition of foot-binding, or ‘lotus-feet’, which persisted for almost 8 centuries. The arches of women’s feet were systematically broken and reshaped by forcing them to wear tiny ‘lotus-shoes’ that didn’t allow their feet to grow beyond 3-4 inches. The smaller the feet, the higher the chances of marriage, as small feet were seen as a status symbol for the elite.

At the same time in Europe, corsets and other equivalent pieces of clothing, that sought to restrict the growth of the waist, were popular, as small waists were seen as the epitome of femininity and female refinement. Even today, there are a plethora of examples all around us which illustrate how society takes it upon itself to decide the ‘appropriate’ look for a woman, and judge how she fares on a scale of expected femininity by attaching ‘positives’ and ‘negatives’ to aspects of her appearance.

Image Source: History of Corsetry

The length of her clothes (leading to the atrocious question of how ‘revealing’ they are), the colour of her hair (‘boldly’ coloured short hair may indicate that she is ‘rebellious’ or ‘promiscuous’), the number and locations of her piercings, etc., are all placed under society’s microscope of patriarchy.

Expecting a woman to get rid of all her visible body hair is just another example of how women are expected to conform to the societal perception of an ‘ideal’ image. While many women start removing body hair for social/normative reasons, they continue to do so to appear more feminine/attractive.

Body hair removal emerged as a survival tactic many millennia ago. With time, it was reduced to an aesthetic value, which then served as a foundation for the oppressive, modern and gendered notions of feminine hairlessness.

Older methods and ideas of body hair removal
Removal of body hair has a long and complex history, dating all the way back to The Stone Age, 100,000 years ago. Cavemen used flint blades, seashells and other sharp objects to shave off all body hair. Hair removal was done for practical reasons, such as to prevent frostbites (especially during the Ice Age, when the unending winter would make the water freeze on their body hair); not provide a breeding ground for parasites like mites and lice and to take away any advantage an adversary might get in a brawl by grabbing.

In Ancient Egypt (around 3000 B.C.), men and women were sticklers for cleanliness. They maintained a strict regiment of bathing and removing body hair; primarily because of the blistering heat that they lived in, but also because they believed that having body hair was an indicator of being ‘uncivilized’. Cleopatra, a trendsetter of her time, is one of the individuals to whom the creation of this beauty standard can be attributed. Thus, they used one of the many processes available at the time, such as ‘sugaring’, tweezers, shaving, a combination of depilatory creams (such as a mixture of burnt lotus leaf, tortoiseshell and hippo fat) and pumice stones, to remove all hair from their body, except for their eyebrows.

The Romans (around 400 B.C) too, like the Egyptians, viewed body hair as a class issue, wherein the amount of body hair was inversely proportional to one’s status in society. However, unlike the Egyptians, this norm was restricted only to women. The testament to this is that upper–class women in portraits and statues of divine beings were always hairless.

Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus” and a sculpture of Aphrodite. Image Source: Culture Hook

Queen Elizabeth formulated the norm for European women during her reign around the 1500s. She believed that hair on the face must be groomed at all times, requiring the eyebrows to be shaped and, hair on the forehead and upper-lip removed. Europeans developed a fashion of long foreheads, and in adherence, women would remove all hair from the forehead, and were encouraged to raise their hairlines by one inch. Mothers from wealthy families would rub walnut oil, and the less economically privileged would use bandages soaked in ammonia (which they obtained from their feline pets’ faeces) on their daughter’s foreheads to prevent hair growth. However, arm and leg hair did not matter, as clothes always covered them.

Therefore, hairlessness is a value that that has deep roots in many cultures all around the world. Historically, societal perceptions on ‘what’, ‘how’ and ‘why’ regarding body hair removal differed. However, when modern notions of body hair entered the picture in the 1900s, the answers to these questions, globally, became more uniform.

Modern methods and ideas of body hair removal
By 1900s, women started wearing sleeveless clothes that exposed more skin, and manufacturers of razors and depilatory creams wasted no time in capitalizing on this change in style of clothing. Gilette, the pioneer for women’s razors, marketed strategically so as to use its product to create the problem and provide a solution: to save women from the “embarrassing personal problem”.

In 1915, Gilette created the first ever razor especially for women, ‘Milady Décolletée’ which promised to remove the “humiliating growth of hair on face, neck and arms”. It referred to shaving as a “refinement that has become a modern necessity”, and to its product as “the dainty little Gilette used by the well-groomed woman to keep her underarm white and smooth”. Looking back, a century later, this proves to be a landmark year in the history of social norms related to women’s body hair.

Image Source: VELA

Advertisements in magazines at the time sought to inform women of the changing fashion trends that demanded women to remove all visible body hair apart from that on the head, labelling it “superfluous”, “ugly”, “unwanted” and “unfashionable”. These advertisements marked the beginning of the ‘The Great Underarm Campaign’. 66% of the advertisements found in Harper’s Bazaar’s editions glorified shaving by the planned use of pictures, taglines and markedly increased the frequency of such messages.

They showed women with bare arms and underarms raised above the head, accompanied with taglines such as “The fastidious woman today must have immaculate underarms if she is to be unembarrassed”; “Summer Dress and Modern Dancing combine to make it necessary to remove objectionable hair” and “If we were the dean of women, we would levy a demerit on every hairy leg on campus”.

McCall, a popular American magazine with a considerable readership, gave an advertisement accompanied with the tagline, “Let’s look at your legs – Everyone else does”. Life, another magazine gave another such advertisement, stating that in order to wear those sleeveless tops that had just come into vogue, “armpits must be smooth as your cheeks and sweet as your breath”.

Harper’s Bazaar, 1922

A few more factors added to the normalization of hair removal. In the 1940s, World War II forced women to go out and work. However, due to the nylon shortage, they were forced to do so without pantyhose, thereby requiring them to bare their legs. Women were now imposed with the duty of ensuring their mates’ fidelity by keeping strict a check on their appearance.

Aided by changing fashion trends, skirts became shorter, silk stockings more prevalent and swimsuits more revealing. Manufacturers saw this as an opportunity and marketed even more aggressively for hair removal. Their advertisements encouraged women to abide by the ‘right’ look that was slender, sophisticated, youthful and sensual.

By the 1940s, women did not need to be convinced to remove hair – they had internalized the modern link between attractiveness, femininity and hairlessness. Rather than focusing on the practice itself, advertisements now emphasized on the superiority of their own product.

For instance, Remington came up with the first ever electric razor that was presented as a better alternative to manual shaving and depilatory creams that tended to irritate the skin. By the 1950s, society had accepted that a woman must be hairless in order to be truly feminine. Shaving had changed from being a freak story to the new normal. Waxing was introduced in the 1960s and electrolysis in the 1970s. With the increasing popularity of swimsuits in the 1960s, bikini hair removal gained momentum in the 1970s.

Thus, between 1940-1980, body hair removal crystalized as the norm in the USA. As a result of multiple factors such as increasing globalization, colonialism, ‘modernisation’ and Westernisation, the practice, slowly and gradually permeated into parts of the world as well.

(Source: FII)

The ancient world was full of warrior women – and men were terrified of them

When Romans encountered women in battle, it created quite a stir

One of the great things about computer games is that anything is possible in the almost endless array of situations on offer, whether in realistic or fantasy worlds. But it has been reported that gamers are boycotting Total War: Rome II on the grounds of historical accuracy after developers introduced women generals, apparently to please “feminists”.

But while it’s true that the Romans would not have had female soldiers in their armies, they certainly encountered women in battle – and when they did it created quite a stir. The historians of the ancient world recorded tales of impressive female military commanders from across many cultures.

Zenobia, queen of Palmyra, took advantage of a period of upheaval in the late 3rd century AD to carve a kingdom for herself ( National Gallery/Giambattista Tiepolo )

In the ancient world, when women did go to war, it was usually reported as a complete reversal of the natural order of things. The ancients believed, as Homer’s Iliad claimed, that “war will be men’s business”. In the eyes of the (male) contemporary historians, female warriors were aberrations and often remembered as embodiments of the mythical one-breasted Amazons. These legendary warriors were usually portrayed as slightly unhinged women who behaved unnaturally, and symbolised – to ancient men at least – a world turned on its head.

Yet the star-crossed tale of Achilles and the Amazon warrior queen Penthesilea fascinated the ancient chroniclers. Penthesilea, who led her troops to the support of Troy, was the mythical daughter of Ares, the god of war. She was killed in combat by Achilles who then mourned her, falling in love with the warrior queen for her beauty and valour. The moment is captured on a famous sixth-century BC vase now in the British Museum and was represented in text and imagery across classical Greece and Rome.

When Artemisia of Caria commanded ships on the side of Persians at the Battle of Salamis in 480BC she fought so well that the Persian king Xerxes exclaimed: “My men have become women and my women men.” It was a world turned upside down according to the Greek historian Herodotus – but the soldiers who willingly followed Artemisia into battle could not have thought that way. She must have been skilled and competent and inspired those she commanded.

Amazon warrior queen Penthesilea was killed in combat by Achilles, who then fell in love with her (British Museum)

Cleopatra’s warlike family
In the Hellenistic period – which is generally held to be the period between the death of Alexander the Great in 323BC and the conquest of Egypt by Rome in 31BC – women with real power and agency appear in numerous kingdoms across the eastern Mediterranean. These extraordinary and influential queens often held the keys to power, had personal armies and would not hesitate to go to war.

They were the mothers, daughters and sisters of the kings and generals who succeeded Alexander the Great. The fabulous Cleopatra VII – best known for her affair with Julius Caesar and marriage to Mark Anthony – was the last of a long line of impressive Egyptian queens who went to war. The role of fighting queen had already been well established by her namesakes including Cleopatra Thea and Cleopatra IV.

The indomitable Cleopatra Thea held her own in the ruthless world of Hellenistic dynastic chaos as the queen to three Hellenistic kings, while Cleopatra IV, when divorced from one husband, took a personal army with her to her next husband as dowry.

Palmyra’s warrior queen
Centuries later, Zenobia, queen of Palmyra, took advantage of a period of upheaval in the Middle East in the late third century AD to carve a kingdom for herself and her city – and it was no coincidence that she connected her ancestry back to the fighting traditions of the Hellenistic Cleopatras.

When Zenobia led her armies she did so in the name of her son and took on the Roman emperor Aurelian to protect her city, her region and the interests of her realm. According to the Greek historian Zosimus, Zenobia commanded her troops in battle and people from across the region flocked to her side. Ancient writers were scandalised at the idea of a woman dominating Roman power but she remained a legend across the Middle East in classical and early Islamic histories.

Boudicca was viewed by the Roman men who recorded her history as a woman hell-bent on vengeance (Thomas Thornycroft/Paul Walter)

Boudicca: Britain’s greatest warrior queen
But the most legendary of the female warriors from antiquity has to be the Iceni queen Boudicca. When Boudicca led her rebellion against the Roman occupation of her land in around AD60, the historian Cassius Dio remembered it thus: “All this ruin was brought upon the Romans by a woman, the fact which in itself caused them the greatest shame.”

There is a visceral image that accompanies her name, with long red hair flowing behind (although Dio says she was blonde) as she charges forth in her war chariot. The ancient writers speak of her terrorising the Roman occupants of newly conquered Britannia with her tall stature and fierce eyes. Boudicca was viewed by the Roman men who recorded her history as a woman wronged and hell-bent on vengeance.

Tacitus, our best source for Boudicca’s rebellion, claims that the Celtic women of the British Isles and Ireland frequently fought alongside their men. And when wars were about the survival of a kingdom, a family or a home and children, women would fight if they had to, especially when the only other option was slavery or death.

So when women took to the field in battle in antiquity it was both astonishing and terrifying for the men who recorded the events and shameful to lose to them. It almost always occurred at times of political chaos and dynastic upheaval, when society’s structures loosened and women had to, and could, stand up for themselves. Ancient men did not like to think about having to fight women or having women fight – and it still seems to irk some people today.

(Source: The Independent) 

Lankan diaries: Negambo, the Little Rome

To celebrate our son’s third birthday, we planned a long trip of 16 nights and 17 days to Sri Lanka. We started our first day in Negambo. Tourists usually spend their first day in Negambo after a long and exhausting travel before going on to explore the island of Sri Lanka. So we were no exception to this. After arrival at 9 am, we headed directly towards Negambo, a small city just 7 km away from the Bandaranaike International Airport in Colombo.

The word Negambo was first used by the Portuguese. In Sinhalese, it was called as Migamuva, which means “Group of bees”. It is said that the army of King Kavantissa found bee honey in a canoe near the seashore, for Viharamahadevi who was pregnant with the prince Dutugamunu. So, the place was named as "Mee-Gomuwa".

Little Rome
Negambo, an important sources of wild cinnamon during the colonial rule, still reminds us of the European rule with its colonial buildings. The Dutch captured the town from the Portuguese in 1640. They lost it and recaptured it in 1644, but the British took it from them in 1796.

The small town is filled with several churches and we soon realized that the culture is greatly influenced by the Roman Catholic Church and a majority of the population is Roman Catholics. No wonder, the town is called “Little Rome”. It gave us an impression of Goa!

Interestingly, most of the hotels and guesthouses are located at the main road that heads north from the town, parallel to the beach. The price of the hotels and guesthouses just opposite the road is very less compared to the ones parallel to the beach.

Hamilton Canal
The Dutch showed their love for canals here like nowhere else in the island country. They built Hamilton Canal that extends from Negombo all the way south to Colombo, and north to Puttalam, a total distance of over 120 km.

Tourists, especially westerners, usually hire a bicycle from their hotels and ride the canal-side paths of the canal, enjoying picturesque views and small villages along the way. However, we did hire a tuk-tuk to go around the town and then walked around the town in the night.

Fish market
Before reaching the hotel, on the way we went to the fish market. Yes, though I can’t stand the smell of fish, we went to a fist market. My kid loved looking at various types of fishes at the market. Negombo is home to the country's second-largest fish market. Locals call this market as Lellama, which is at the north-end of the lagoon.

We were informed that every day before dawn, fishermen go in their canoes, locally called as “oruvas”, for fishing and come back with heaps of fresh fishes for auction. The catch is not all from the open sea.

Negambo is at the northern end of the lagoon renowned for its lobsters, crabs and prawns. The market was abuzz with people buying various types of fishes. It was fun to see how sellers were wooing people to buy from their shops.

Across the lagoon bridge there’s a second fish market, but we didn’t dare go there again to bear the stench! But if one loves fishes and can wake up early in the morning, it’s the best place to watch bigger fishing boats with bigger catches.

Paradise Beach Hotel
We reached the hotel around 11.45 am. The hotel was ok types, and looked like more or less like a lodge in Indian terms. They had lovely swimming pool, but couldn’t use it as it was raining.

We ordered one veg rice and curry, and one fish and chips. The food was average. They were surprised that we ordered vegetarian food.

They didn’t have many choices in veg food and I had the similar veg food even for dinner!

Beach
There was high tide and we just walked in the beach after lunch. Most of the beaches in this town are not clean, yes, nothing similar to the ones we see in the pics and imagine! However, we loved the beaches in Trincomalee and Bentota than the one in Negambo. But if the travelers want to stay close to the Colombo airport, then Negambo is and can be the best choice.

As mentioned earlier, most of the hotels and guesthouses are located at the main road parallel to the beach, and cost a bomb on the pockets of travelers. Just cross the road, the price comes down for less than half of what the hotels charge on the other side. So if you are not a beach person, just do a proper research before booking the hotel, as it can save you several hundreds, if not thousands. If not for the hotels, just do a proper study even before heading towards this island, because you can save yourselves from getting cheated by drivers or guides!

Moreover, if tourists are travelling from India, it’s a sheer waste of time to spend one entire day doing nothing much in Negambo. It’s helpful to take rest for those who come from faraway countries, spending 10-15, sometimes even 20-24 hours in a flight. 

Airports are the worst thing about travelling, especially in Europe: Vir Sanghvi

In his weekly column in the HT, Vir Sanghvi compares the world’s airports, and how Delhi’s Indira Gandhi may be far better than even London’s Heathrow, Singapore’s Changi or Narita in Japan:

Ask any frequent traveller what the worst part of travel is and you will usually elicit the same response: Airports.

The general rule is that the further West you go, the worse the airports get. As even Donald Trump has said, US airports are terrible, almost as bad as US airlines.There are very few world class European airports and British airports have declined dramatically over the last decade or so. Even when the West tries to get it right, it fails. British Airways’ so-called state-of-the-art Terminal 5 at Heathrow has been plagued with problems of one kind or the other ever since it opened. (Mostly: technology-related.)

A Singapore Airlines flight at Changi Airport. (Shutterstock)

Asian airports, on the other hand, are among the world’s finest. Singapore’s Changi is not as good as it used to be but it is still pretty damn good. Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi and Seoul’s Incheon are all far ahead of their counterparts in the West. The international airport I use the most, Delhi’s Indira Gandhi, is terrific.

One reason why we don’t like airports has nothing to do with the buildings themselves but with the staff. In the old days, I used to dread flying back to India because the immigration counters (run, in that era, by policemen) would be too few and the officials would be corrupt or illiterate or both.Then, customs would open all your bags and make you explain the provenance of each item of clothing.

In those days, the cops at immigration desks routinely extorted money from passengers. It very nearly happened to me. On a trip out of Delhi in the late 1980s, the policeman at the Immigration Desk looked at both my passport booklets and pointed out that one had a Bombay address while the other had a Calcutta address. Why was this?

I explained that the first booklet had been issued in Bombay when I lived there. It had run out of pages so I had been issued a new booklet. This happened in Calcutta because I had now shifted there. I offered to show him ID and address proof (I was then editor of Sunday, a Calcutta-based weekly). In any case, it was quite legal to have a passport issued by any passport office anywhere in India.

No, he said. This was very suspicious. He would not let me board my flight.

Even as I outraged about this, he took me into an inside room and indicated that we could come to some kind of arrangement. By then, Air-India had noticed that a passenger was missing and traced me to the room where the cop was trying to shake me down.

“Paagal ho!” the Air-India Duty Officer said to the cop. ‘Yeh toh patrakar hai!”

Senior immigration officials were summoned and I was allowed to board the flight.

Air India planes docked at Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport. (Shutterstock)

I asked the Air-India guy what that was all about. “It is very common,” he told me. “They do this routinely with labourers going to the Gulf. If those guys miss their flights and do not report for work on time, they lose their jobs. So they have no choice and have to pay these policemen whatever they ask for. You are a journalist so the police let you go.”

Fired with righteous indignation, I wrote detailed letters of complaint to everyone in the chain of command all the way up to the then Home Minister Buta Singh, who the Delhi police reported to.

Not one person even acknowledged the letter.

I wrote to Buta Singh again. When he did not respond, I called his office. Had my letter reached? It had. Would the Home Minister be looking into the racket at Immigration? They had no idea.

I never got a response from anyone and the racket went on.

Many years later (around 1996 or so, I reckon), I had an even worse experience at Bombay airport. I was horrified to see a passenger slipping a few high denomination currency notes to the cop at the X-Ray so that he would let him take on board whatever dangerous substance had been discovered in the X-Ray of his bag.

I complained to the Inspector on duty. He said he might listen to my complaint but it would take time. If I wanted to make an issue of it, I would miss my flight because he would stop me from boarding the plane.

To the credit of the Bombay police, when I later filed a written complaint they conducted an inquiry and took action against both policemen.

That incident restored my faith in the system and since then, whenever I have come across anything untoward, I have always complained. Fortunately, things are much better at Indian airports now. The CISF handles airport security and does a far better job than the police used to. Customs (at least at Delhi airport) are usually polite and reasonable. And a new Immigration outfit has taken over. This is still the weak link in the chain but it performs much better than the local police ever did.

A fleet of British Airways planes at London’s Heathrow Airport. (Shutterstock)

It helps also that this government has taken the sensible step of doing away with the pointless arrival and departure cards that Indians had to fill in when they travelled. Senior officers at airports are also more responsive.

Last week, I flew from Delhi to Bangkok. The Immigration Officer looked at my Thai visa and asked where I was going. Thailand, I said. Was the visa valid, he asked. Yes, I said and showed him the dates. I didn’t really need the visa, I said, because Thailand gives visas on arrival. But I had a long-term, multi-entry visa anyway.

Part of it was written in Thai, he then pointed out. Yes, I said, many foreign countries did that. They used their own languages, along with English on the visas. But all he had to do was read the English part.

No, he said. He could not read what was written in Thai. So he would not stamp my passport. I explained that I had already travelled out of Delhi three times on the same visa. He was not interested.

Eventually I asked him to call his supervisor. He took my passport, left the counter and disappeared for many minutes. Finally, he returned and conceded that I could board my flight.

I could have left it at that but mindful of the fact that this man could deny boarding to other less experienced passengers on similar trumped-up grounds, I went to the complaints counter. They took me to see a senior officer. By then, my Immigration Officer had also arrived at the senior officer’s cabin.

The officer heard us both out, apologised to me and upbraided the man who wouldn’t let me travel because he did not read Thai. I was impressed. Things appeared to have changed for the better.

Later, as I walked to the plane, many people who worked at the airport congratulated me for complaining. “These guys bully passengers all the time,” they said. “Thank God somebody complained to their bosses.” So perhaps things haven’t changed all that much!

But fear of officialdom is not restricted to Indian airports. Passengers can be hassled anywhere. In the US, immigration officers can be rude and menacing. They can’t really deny you entry if your papers are in order. But they can send you for a secondary examination, a process that involves a wait of several hours. In Britain they are friendly but over-worked. The queues at the so-called Fast Track counters at Heathrow are mind boggling. In most of Europe, on the other hand, they couldn’t care less about admitting you as long as you have a valid Schengen visa so queues move quickly.

An Al Italia plane stands at Rome Airport. (Shutterstock)

The worst airport in Europe is Rome where, in keeping with the fine traditions of Italian bureaucracy, the Immigration guys take long cigarette breaks ignoring the queues in front of their desks, flirt lazily and at great length with women passengers and take ages to read a single passport. It does not matter to them that the Immigration hall is over full or that passengers are fainting from the heat. Even Dhaka is better.

In some Asian countries, officials may be bent. When I arrived in Rangoon in the early 1990s, my host had to bribe the immigration officer to stamp my passport though my documents were in order. (“It is normal here” he said nonchalantly while I looked horrified.) In Cambodia, two years ago, the Immigration officer asked if I had a gift for him. When I said a firm no, he looked angry but let me through. Leaving Thailand once, many years ago, the Immigration Officer took my passport, left his desk and asked me to follow him. I wondered what this was about but, to my surprise, he did not take me to an office. Instead we went to the duty free shop where he used my boarding card and passport to buy three bottles of whisky for himself. (“You no mind?” he twinkled.)

A fleet of Japan Airlines planes at Narita Airport. (Shutterstock)

And sometimes, airports can surprise you. Japan is one of the most civilised countries in the world but on the two recent occasions when I have landed at Tokyo’s Narita airport, the scene at the Immigration Hall has been one of total mayhem.

But Narita is an exception. On the whole, countries get the airports they deserve. It was at Heathrow a decade ago that I first noticed the signs that read “It is a crime to abuse or assault any member of our staff.”

And indeed it should be. But as somebody who has seen how Heathrow is run, I can understand why they need to put the signs up.

When pirates kidnapped Julius Caesar he laughed at their ransom demands

Long ago a 25-year-old Roman author, poet, priest, and aristocrat was kidnapped by pirates. Rather than plead for his release, however, he ordered them to increase his ransom, even though it could have meant being their captive for much longer. His name was Gaius Julius Caesar.

In the middle of the 1st century BC, the Roman republic began to break down. Its volunteer militia had evolved into a permanent force of battle-scarred professional veterans who became a force to reckon with, allowing Rome to further increase its territory. However, they were often more loyal to their Generals than the state – Generals such as Sulla; men who would often use the legions to further their own ambitions.

In the city itself, however, riots and violent political upheaval became the norm as rival gangs fought for dominance in the streets. Rome was plunging into a state of near anarchic chaos. Aristocrats like Caesar vied for power, often using corruption and intimidation to get what they wanted.

Caesar was born into this environment on July 13th 100 BC as a member of the Julia, an old clan of Roman aristocrats. He was named after his father, who was the governor of Asia (now western Turkey). His sister, Julia, was married to Gaius Marius, a general and statesman who held the highest office of consul seven times –  a great achievement.

Things changed for Caesar in 85 BC when his father died, making him the head of the family at 16. Civil war broke out between his uncle, Marius, and Lucius Cornelius Sulla (who twice held the rank of consul). More street battles and assassinations gripped the city until Marius won. Caesar was given the job of high priest of Jupiter and married off to Cornelia.

On January 13th 86 BC, however, Marius died and Sulla rose to power. The latter purged the government and city of anyone associated with Marius, so Caesar lost his job, his inheritance and wife’s dowry, and was ordered to divorce his wife. However, Caesar refused to let Cornelia go. His mother, Aurelia Cotta, used her family’s influence (some of whom supported Sulla) to save his life.

Caesar decided to play it safe by leaving Rome for Asia where he joined the army.  In 81 BC, he participated in the Siege of Mytilene (now the Greek island of Lesbos), he was so effective that he received a Civic Crown – the second highest military award that a Roman could achieve.

Sulla finally died in 78 BC, making it safe for Caesar to return to Rome. Unable to reclaim his inheritance, he moved into a poor district and became a famous lawyer renowned for his successful prosecution of corrupt officials. This made him very popular among many lower class Romans, despite his aristocratic heritage.

By 75 BC, he had moved up in the world and went off on a business trip to the island of Rhodes accompanied by several servants and friends. They never made it there. The Mediterranean Sea was full of pirates and they preyed on every ship that came their way. Pirates attached  Caesar’s ship and he and his companions ended up becoming captives on an islet off Cilicia (now the southern coast of Turkey). All aboard were given two choices: pay a ransom or be sold into slavery.

Caesar chose the former, so his captors set a ransom of 20 talents of silver – about 620 kg worth, which is roughly around $600,000 dollars in today’s values. Caesar gasped in shock. Then he burst out laughing. It wasn’t because of the exorbitant price, but rather because he was offended.

The Julia family were direct descendants of Iulus, son of Aeneas, a Trojan prince. Someone with his bloodline was worth far more than the paltry sum they demanded – in his opinion. He insisted that they set his ransom at 50 talents (about 1,550 kg) of silver, instead.

Impressed, the pirates agreed and let some of his friends go to gather that amount, but Caesar wasn’t finished. He swore that as soon as he was free, he’d have them all crucified.

Given the circumstances, the pirates roared with laughter, but it wouldn’t last. Caesar refused to play the role of a cowed hostage victim. He demanded that his servants be free to continue serving him, even ordering the pirates to shut up or lower their voices whenever he slept.

He spent his days writing poetry and composing speeches, then demanded that the pirates listen carefully while he read them aloud. If they didn’t praise his work, he’d yell at them and call them illiterate savages.

His uncompromising stance and haughty demeanor worked. Instead of annoying the pirates, he ended up earning their respect. He was allowed to move about freely and sometimes joined in their games. To his captors, Caesar’s attitude was either that of a simpleton, or the result of boyish playfulness.

Given the amount involved, it took 38 days to raise the money, after which Caesar and his men were finally allowed to leave. As soon as he reached Miletus (a long-abandoned port city south of present day Söke in Turkey) he began raising an armed fleet. With it, he returned to the islet, captured most of the pirates, and took their property as his own.

He sailed off to Pergamon (outside the modern Turkish city of Bakırçay) and chucked them all into prison. Then he went to Marcus Junius, the governor of Asia, and demanded the right to mete out the pirates’ punishment. But Junius couldn’t stop ogling all that money, so he told Caesar that he’d have to look into the matter more fully.

Yet Caesar couldn’t wait, so he returned to Pergamon, took the pirates out of prison, and ordered them all to be crucified. Some begged for mercy, reminding him of the fun times they had shared together, so Caesar’s heart melted and he decided to relent.

He had their throats slit. Then he had them crucified because he prided himself on being a man of his word. With such a character, it’s hardly surprising that he would go on become Rome’s first emperor.

(Source: War History Online)