It is still light outside, even thought is past eight. Had a chicken tikka. Go for a walk towards the Thames. Find a small alley that brings to a tiny park behind the archbishop house. A signs says that the park was opened in 1901. Pater Gabriel sings Heroes, his voice just gets better as he gets solder. A man sits alone on the a bench and reads a hardcover book. Red brick houses surround this tiny park. A man is changing the t-short near the football pitch. Kids play in the playground on the other side. I walk back. People sitting at wooden table on the pavements at a corner pub. A police car passes with blue lights on. The A380 from Singapore glides towards Heathrow. Under the bridge of Waterloo station a huge drink advertisement portraits Wayne Rooney who is ready for the World Cup. The circular Plaza Hotel is now ready. The Big Ben says it is 8:45. Two Indian guys talk in the middle of the bridge. One wears slippers. A group of tourists take pictures from the bridge and try to capture the Parliament. A woman takes a picture of a man in his early forties. Blue jeans. Nice shoes, a blue cotton jumper. A sad expression in his face. A pub with a very large lamp as a sign. The peace camp next to Churchill statue. Parliament street towards Whitehall. People waiting for the bus number 12. One man with trench coat and hat rests his elbow on a low grating, he seems tired of the day and too-warmly-dresses. Chinese tourists take picture at the gate at the entrance of Downing Street. A police man is on this side of the and jokes with three colleagues on the other side of the gate. American tourists try to get a glimpse of N. 10. They are in bad shape. At the Horse Guard a very young soldier is cleaning the shit left by the horses. He is in his army fatigue. A nasty commander in a black coat points where he had not managed to clean. He uses the brush also from the stick side. He has a embarrassed expression as many tourists pass by. I think, don’t worry. one day you will get this back. A group of eight men and women of people enters a theatre holding a bottle of white wine and plastic glasses. The three men all dressed in the same style: black shoes, jeans, shirt outside the trousers. Trafalgar square, the National Gallery is still open. A very long white limousine passes with drunk girls shouting from the windows. Nelson sailing boats rests in the huge bottle closed by a cork that must be almost a meter in diameter. The sails of the boat are really as they said: colorful and representing world cultures. A man with a black hat points the bottle to the young girls at his side. People sit under Nelson column and watch the time go by. The Korean cultural centre advertises a Buddha exhibit which will start in a couple of day. Charring Cross bridge is almost empty. A drunk young boy, oversized and with jeans that are falling from his bottom tries to keep up with his more sober friend who tells him to keep up. Italian tourists take pictures of the London Eye. A Eastern European couple walks hand in hand towards me. The field at the London Eye has very short grass. In a group of youngsters sharing drinks and sitting on the grass I notice a girls. She is on her knees opening a bottle. Very blond hairs, almost white. Very white skin and red lipstick that shines out and seems a drop of blood on a white bed sheet. An Indian guy take a picture with his mobile phone. People in group. People alone, walking , sitting. A loud Greek restaurant and the the waiter of a nearby Chinese one having a rest and smoking a cigarette his shoulder resting on a wall. Three drunk homeless waiting at a bus stop. One looks to me, red nose and cheeks. His expression foggy. The Indian fruits and vegetable shop open 7 days a week until 11pm. All of a sudden I feel the urge to travel in this country, from one hostel to the next, up north to Scotland to win my fears. The corner pub I passed earlier. Less people at the wooden tables. The sky yet not dark, the last snapshots of a London walk on a Friday night.
The cost of reaching our dreams
What is the cost we pay when we reach our dream? Is there a cost? What do we do once a dream has become reality and is part of the past?
A child is sitting in a dentist waiting room. He opens a magazines and reads that in NY they are planning to build the tallest buildings on earth: the World Trade Center.
Those towers do not exist yet, but his dream is and will drive him for many years to come. Man on Wire is about finding and pursuing your dream, despite the odds. While often dreams cannot be reached alone, Man on Wire is also about friendship and the emotions ad fears that accompany the pursue of a dream. To me it is also about the changes and the pain that comes with reaching a dream, and thus start to write on a new page of our book of life. Reaching a dream can break friendship and love and make us move to a new direction. It is as simple as that, but I suspect when we live the dream we are not aware of it.
Paul Krugman on Soros back, in 1998
Recently I found myself in not one but two meetings that also included George Soros, and I was inspired to furious intellectual effort. You see, I’m convinced it’s possible to construct a terrific palindrome centering on the famous investor’s reversible last name. Unfortunately, the best I’ve come up with so far is an imaginary conversation wherein I ask the great man what to make of the gyrations of Japan’s exchange rate, and he tells me it means we must introduce a unified global currency: “Yen omen, O Soros?”; “One money!”
Of course, that’s not what Soros is really saying. His actual message–expounded in a series of articles and speeches over the past two years, and soon to be restated in his forthcoming book, The Crisis of Global Capitalism–might be described as “Stop me before I speculate again!” And considering the source–a man whose funds have attacked currencies around the world, from the British pound to the Hong Kong dollar–it’s a message that needs to be taken seriously.
I’m not necessarily suggesting you read Soros in the original. It’s not that he writes like a businessman; it’s that he writes like a Central European intellectual, which is far worse. Someone should tell him it doesn’t help his case to dress up fairly simple ideas in pretentious philosophical language. In particular, many people have argued that financial markets tend toward boom-and-bust cycles, that investors tend to engage in herd behavior, and that financial systems are subject to self-justifying panics. But such observations are not enough for Soros: For him they must serve as illustrations of the general principle of “reflexivity,” which I take to mean that human perceptions both affect events and are themselves affected by them. Gosh, I never thought of that!
But if reading Soros isn’t exactly a pleasure, he is nonetheless saying something important–namely, that the rules of the game under which he and others like him have prospered are dangerous for society as a whole. This is not what you’d expect to hear from a speculator, or for that matter anyone in the financial world. The typical view from Wall Street or London’s City is that left to its own devices, the global capital market will always reward economic virtue and punish only vice. As one Wall Street Journal op-ed writer enthused, “Foreign-exchange markets are a continuing, minute-by-minute election in which everyone with wealth at stake, including residents of the country, gets to vote, an election in which the winners are those countries whose governments have the most pro-growth policies.” Accordingly, if these days national economies seem to be falling like dominoes, it must be their own fault–or that of the IMF, which many conservatives see as having a demonic ability to wreak economic havoc with very little actual money. (Has anyone noticed just how small a player the IMF really is? That $18 billion U.S. contribution to the IMF, which has finally been agreed upon after countless Administration appeals and conservative denunciations, is about the same size as the short position that Soros single-handedly took against the British pound in 1992–and little more than half the position Soros’ Quantum Fund, Julian Robertson’s Tiger Fund, and a few others took against Hong Kong last August.) Soros, however, believes that financial markets are “inherently unstable,” that left unregulated they inevitably produce recurrent crises. And he should know.
What would a defender of free capital markets say in response to Soros? True believers would doubtless be unshaken. Never mind who Soros is and what he’s done, they would claim that people who worry about destabilizing speculation just don’t understand how markets work. Others, however, would agree that financial markets are inherently unstable, but argue that this is a price worth paying, that the presumed huge returns from free markets outweigh the risks. And indeed that was the position I myself took a year and a half ago, when Soros and I staged a fundraising debate on global capitalism for the Council on Foreign Relations. (Yes, I was pro, he was anti.) But events since May 1997 have certainly reinforced his position, and led those of us who still believe in the extraordinary merits of free markets in goods, services, and long-term capital to search for ways to protect those merits from the destructive effects of destabilizing hot money flows.
Rather oddly, I can’t quite figure out what Soros himself thinks we should do. In general, for a businessman his approach seems peculiarly abstract and philosophical: He seems far more concerned with denouncing laissez-faire ideology than with proposing workable ways to regulate markets without strangling them. (Maybe we need a super-IMF, big enough to take on the Soroi of this world. Or maybe, horrors, we actually need to control capital movements.) But if Soros doesn’t have the answer, at least he asks the right question. Next time somebody tells you that the global capital market is our friend, that only economies that deserve it get punished, tell him to tell it to George Soros.
Three people in Athens
Tensions erupted in Athens during demonstrations against the economic measures that government needs to take in order receive financial assistance from the IMF and the EU. Three people have died in a bank that went on fire. Three people. Who is responsible for their deaths. The ones who attacked the bank and put it on fire? Yes, of course and they need to be found and secured to justice. But who else? The politicians who falsified the economic data to allow Greece into the Euro zone and loose therefore the possibility to devaluate their currency? or who else? The managers and partners of the funds who are attacking the Euro and have bet on its loss of value (which is actually happening) and will enjoy huge profits to be used in buying yet another house in the Alps, or a boat to be docked in Monaco, or what else? This is the result of Las Vegas economics
Girls in Bangkok
Silence, it is night
A soft summer wind outside shakes the huge mango trees and the palms in our garden. It is past midnight and I cannot remember last time I have been so late up working on a paper and writing now in this blog. Headphones throwing ambient music from my iTune radio. Familiar sounds that accompany my home based work. For a second a felt like being back at the university, more precisely in Glasgow. Working on the research at night and listening to the summer wind outside the half open window. Back late that evening and before entering my block, looking at all those windows of individual students rooms like a giant bee nest. Life stories and youth going on and me being one of them. One of those students and those room’s was Katja’s but we did not know back then. Now we are here, more than ten years later living in Dumaguete, our two daughter sleeping softly under their mosquito nets.
Buona notte, questa musica e’ per voi
Who is following me?
Who is following me from Staverton, UK?
H – Hotel Lobby
A Vietnamese woman in her mid thirty enters the lobby of the Horison Hotel in Ha Noi. She gives a quick glance to various groups of people gathered after breakfast. Most are men in dark gray suits, white shirts, laptop bags in their hands, ready for the day. She finds the people she has come to meet at the left corner of the lobby and moves towards them. A woman about her age walk towards here. They meet at the centre of the lobby. They take each other hands before speaking any words and start to cry. It is not the happy cry that sometimes bursts when people meet after a long time. This is a cry of grief and loss.
They hold hands for some minutes, unable to utter any words. They do not hug though. After some minutes, one of them takes a hand to dry her tears away from her cheeks. They move and reach a group of three older men who seems not to notice their tears, or if they do, they do show any emotion.
Around them, the life in the lobby continues untouched by the grief of the two women. Maybe other people have noticed them as I did and as in other times I feel a sense of isolation. Their grief and emotions isolated from the routine life of people like me who are here ready to start a day of work. Or maybe, it is our isolation, immerged as we are in a daily routine, from real emotions. I do not know.
I also wonder whether I should approach the two women and even though I am a perfect stranger, ask if I can be of help. Say a word. Press a hand on a shoulder. Express a feeling of empathy. Show with an action, and not just thoughts, that even though we do not know, we are not so distant.
A conversation starts in the group. The two women do not cry anymore. Then one of them look at the door, says something to the others and they all leave with some hurry. I take my bag and walk towards the door to take a taxi that will bring me to the office.
In the car I think about that day I travelled with the same grief and hurry from Cambodia to Portugal. My brother had died and I hurried back with a hidden hope that it was not true. I remember my agitation talking at airports to check-in staff to get into a plane. I remember the great help I got at the airport in Phnom Penh from staff telling me to sit, they would take care of it. The same kind help in Bangkok with a Thai Airways representative who advised on which ticket to buy and, as in Phnom Penh, asked me to sit down. They would take care of it. Wishing me all the best with a sad expression when I got my ticket. I remember when I burst in a loud cry in the airport restaurant in Bangkok. Other customers sitting to nearby table talking about their holidays in Thailand and their trips back home. Their table surrounded by souvenirs they were bringing to children, relatives, husbands, wives, parents, brothers and sisters.
The taxi is now managing the traffic jams on Kim Ma. Almost there. Remember also when I arrived in Rome and with the same agitated behavior but talking the language of my country, spoke to a young and pretty Alitalia desk assistant who grew more and more alarmed by the second at my agitation and my explanation as to why I needed to catch a flight to Lisbon, that I did not have a ticket but could maybe get on a TAP Portugal flight leaving after one hour. I could see her eyes turning ice cold and then telling me that this was a Alitalia desk and that I needed to speak to TAP at the desk behind me. I tuner and saw it was closed. ‘Can you please help me? I need to get on that flight.’ No, she could not. End of it. Welcome back home Arnaldo!
The taxi stops at 1 Lieu Giai. I pay the taxi driver. Give a little tip and ask for receipt. Move out of the car, glance at the 15 floor building where I will be working today. The two women of the hotel lobby are still crying in my mind. I rehearse the video clip of their meeting – holding hands – tears.
I did not do much for them. Actually nothing. They did more for me. They helped me to finally find the words to write this story which has been in me for five years now. Xin cam’on and all the best to you.
Day in the desert
Discovery
Night. Alone in my room in Dar es Salaam. Had nice dinner in the best Indian restaurant of the continent. Silence. The hooming of the a/c. Talk to myself. My mind in circles having conversations. My voice. The reply. The reply to the reply. Seeing myself running slowly at Oyster Bay at the sunset. Waves of the Indian Ocean. Philippines are in that direction. Silence. Only my voice talking to myself. I did not Skype home tonight and maybe the girls really wanted to talk to me. Again those voices, the conversation I am having in my mind and which I will bring into my dreams. What did I discover today? Anything new, also not necessarily useful? There is a underknown game park about three hours by car from here. Not famous as it is too close to Dar. The lodge where one can stay is very close a pond where elephants come to drink. Something to show to my girls.
I also discovered that somebody else has made a discovery but does not really know about what. Same with me, not sure yet what the real discovery will be.