Ben Welsher | Writings

Day 120 - Kuala Lumpur Which animal would you be? The people round the table sip their beer, pass the joint and give their answers, A dragon I say. A goat she says. I the dragon, she the goat. If anything it feels the opposite right now. The next question comes, What makes you cry? It's turned into a an ice-breaker session at her hostel, People that want to be together but can't be My answers have gone from silly to soppy in a single bound but it was a reflexive answer, true and without guile. The irony of it hit me later. I'm going to bed she says. Pity, I think, I enjoy her company just that bit too much. Room 302 she says. In case it's easier to stay. Easier? Christ, I would find it very easy to stay. She has a boyfriend, I reluctantly know that. How easy would it be to know that and go anyway? I have another beer to consider my options and really, truly, to stop myself haring up the stairs after her. I sip and rationalise. It's probably nothing, j...

Day 80 - Ha Giang We speed along our narrow path cutting through the great waves of history. They crash around us, breaking surf tumbles down inclines into oblivion and timelessness. Monolithic yet fragile. We sweep along the grand banks of time. These waves of rock seem frozen in their act of creation and destruction but they move, as all things do, to the unwavering beat of the world. We specks of dust twirl with furious energy and burn brightly, briefly. This stone will see many more of us before it too is gone. But we see something it cannot. We see the beauty of it all. There is no intrinsic beauty here, it only exists because we perceive it. The only meaning this place has is the one we give it. Whatever destruction we wreak, and that is plenty, we are also the only things that create meaning. There is no beauty without us. I could say I was humbled by this landscape, by this nature, but really we are nature. Sprung from the same well as the simplest amoeba, the biggest mountain...

Day 4 - Mount Sinai and Suez After an hour of increasingly intemperate battle reason lay bloodied and exhausted on the floor and rules had triumphed. I'm not familiar with countries that have a culture of mistrust in individual decision-making. It seems strange to me that the authorities in these countries think that multitudinous overlapping and sometimes contradictory rules are the key to maintaining control. As if the whole thing will spiral into chaos if a person is empowered to assess a situation and determine the appropriate course of action by themselves. The rules-based order probably coincides with patriarchal, elder-venerating societies for whom top-down control is the only control. But what do I know? I've never used a successful military career as a springboard to start a coup against the first democratically elected government in my country in 50 years, only through lack of opportunity though. My unfamiliarity does in no way reduce the blinding frustration when yo...

Day 95 - Machu Picchu To look at Machu Picchu is to see a dream. I cannot say for sure it was the dream of those who built it, no-one can. But to me it is a dream of isolation, of insulation, even of inoculation from the cruelties of the wider world. At the absolute least it is my dream of a simple life not crazed by the fever of progress. Not a life where all too often my actions seem to lack purpose, all too often are wracked by doubt and despair. I want to eat, to sleep, to love without the unremitting analysis. A dream of switching off whatever part of my twisted consciousness floated up all those years ago to hover above me like some departing soul in a hospital ward. I used to disdain stasis feeling those who lacked ambition, had not the desire to drive themselves onwards and upwards were unworthy of my time or my employ. But perhaps they saw, even unconsciously, what I did not. That all we truly need in this life is something to do, something to love and something to hope for....

The Apollo Hospital in New Delhi employs a multitude of staff in various different roles. To aid in their visual differentiation they usually wear different coloured uniforms. I have described the types below according to my experience of them and identified possible roles where I can. Blue Shirts - Generally unpossessed of English or alternatively forbidden from talking to patients. Quite lowly, frequent surly look may indicate dissatisfaction and possibly plans of uprising against superiors. Known wheelchair thieves, always be sat in yours or have hidden it in toilet when a Blue Shirt is around. Attendant and Blue Shirt captured in same picture - Red Shirts - Housekeeping. English also tends to be limited but is given freer rein than that of the Blue Shirts. If something should be picked up from the floor then these people must be called, no-one else is qualified. Sometimes employed as limb support during bandage changes with varying degrees of efficacy. Yellow Shirts - Rarer ...