Shangri-la and pear-shaped Pakistan..........

And so we go on, in our Thai Shangri-la. We are very lucky to be able to spend virtually the whole winter here. The Cupids is a boutique hotel of only 12 bedrooms, but the owners’ house is pressed into service for some lucky folk if the main building is full. We had a honeymoon couple from the US staying there a few weeks ago; the main bedroom has the lot – Jacuzzi and all. It’s not so much a hotel but a more running family house party.

There are no ‘sirs’ or ‘madams’; it’s all first-names or ‘darling’! There are no receptionists, porters, cooks or cleaners; only ‘the girls’ who multi task. Jan the Manager does all the office work, cooks, gardens (I have a photo of her swinging a pick-axe to install a new garden fence) and as she lent us her welding mask to observe the total eclipse of the sun last year goodness knows what else she does.

The only men on the staff are the handymen and gardeners. The food is terrific, the air-conditioned rooms are all enormous suites with everything including free wi-fi, and the service is five-star. The gardens are beautiful and the birds prolific.

At any given time we know most of the guests because so many return every year from all over; we counted 9 nationalities in our first few days. We have 2 old friends returning next week who let their house while they are away from England which more than pays all their costs here, so reasonable is the tariff.

And to top it all, the winter weather in Northern Thailand is perfection; cool mornings and evenings and warm days with hardly a cloud in the sky. The Cupids is 15 kms from downtown, so it is cooler and far less polluted by traffic in its village location.

It is as near perfection as one will get in this wicked world; if only home commitments allowed us to stay longer than our usual three months!

Trip Advisor ranks the Golden Cupids as 13th out of over 300 hotels and against some pretty stiff competition. It does not take cost into account but when this is factored in, the Cupids comes out at number 2.

To more serious matters.

The situation in Pakistan scares me.

The murder of a moderate and able politician by his bodyguard as the others stood by and did nothing is a step down the road to complete anarchy. The sight of people showering the murderer with rose petals is a clear indication of the moral turpitude of a large part of the population. That the men with beards have gained enormously in strength since Musharaff left is self-evident.

How did it come to this pass? It was not intended to be so; when Ali Jinnah led Pakistan to independence he intended it to be a secular and democratic country where the Muslim religion was obviously dominant but where other faiths would be respected.

The rot started with the ghastly Zia who began to turn Pakistan into a fundamental Islamic state arising, I believe, from a promise to Allah if his son recovered from a life-threatening illness. Then the even more ghastly Sharif introduced the death penalty for blasphemy in between looting the treasury. Then the Afghanistan situation over many years brought the Taliban and the Islamic extremists.

But I believe that the present situation is not only rooted in the rise of aggressive Islam. It is likely that political, social and economic evils are behind the semi-chaos that is today’s Pakistan.

Some years ago, when I was involved in the election that brought Sharif to power, a senior retired Army officer told me that unless the ruling elite changed its ways, the people would rise up and there would be a bloodbath. It’s getting there quickly.

Politics has always been not only hopelessly corrupt but also incompetent in every respect, despite the fact that Pakistan has some very able civil servants. It is said that in reality Pakistan is ‘owned’ by about 400 families – the Qureshi, the Khans, the Bhuttos etc. It seemed to me that life in the rural areas, which I visited extensively in the Punjab and Sindh, was basically feudal. There is, for example, the indenture system; if a man has to borrow a bride-price from his landlord, the deal will that he makes a given number of, say, bricks in return. The borrower is disadvantaged in two possible ways. The first is that the lender might attempt to raise the quantity before the debt is discharged. The second is that the debt can be sold-on.

I have seen worse rural poverty in Pakistan than in all my travels throughout Africa. The peasantry is ground down. The landlord may charge for water taken from ‘his’ river so that children often suffer from skin diseases because they can’t afford to wash.

It is reported that the flooding was as a result of landlords diverting the Indus to the east when previously it was diverted to the west in times of threatened flood, so that their land would be unscathed when the waters started to rise. I have no idea whether the reports are accurate, but I would not be surprised. On BBC World I saw the police in charge of food-aid distribution demanding bribes before they would release any food at all, so the poorest suffer all over again

And so here we are, with chaos looming in a nuclear-armed country. I predict that the Army will soon take over again in the absence of an alternative, but the country might also effectively disintegrate, with parts under the control of the Taliban, especially in the FATA and other areas bordering Afghanistan. I cannot see India standing idly by if Pakistan goes Taliban.

Now we have Tunisia falling apart. Will there be a domino effect? Hillary clearly sees the danger, judging from her recent berating of corrupt Arab autocrats for failing to move with the times.

And what sort of revolution are we seeing? It does not seem Islamist at this time. Its causes are more to do with lack of jobs, repression, poor educational opportunities, and other social and economic ills.

Let us see how it all pans out.