Thailand - Land of Happiness-Kindness

Bangkok is comfortably Asia’s modernist cities, probably just behind Tokyo and Singapore. Founded almost 200 years ago on the banks of Chao Phraya river it consists of 3600 residents for every square kilometer. Whilst that might not be a lot by Indian standards, the style, grace and cleanliness with which Bangkok manages it is exemplary. The streets are clean of litter, even the poorest wear well laundried and pressed clothes, jasmine blossoms hang everywhere and with incense smoke from religious corners sat atop small pedestals, the ‘spirit houses’, you forget the fumes of vehicles. It boasts of a wonderful mass transit system as well as a waterway system that keeps Bangkokians on the move 24/7. Bangkok has over 250 art galleries and hundreds of pretty women and ‘ladyboys’, their version of transvestites and transsexuals, that adorn the street sidewalks, jostling for space next to a vendor selling deep-fried crunchy insects and beetles, and another selling caged birds of paradise. These sit in front of neon-lighted bars full of western tourists with young nubile Thai consorts. It’s a very modern city whose credentials unfold as you disembark at the Suvarnabhumi airport (the entire south-east Asia was given this name by Indians in medieval times, meaning ‘the golden land’), with its ultra-modern look that makes most European and American airports pale into insignificance. Thais approach everything with a sense of playfulness (although their rage at inequity and unfairness does spill over as the recent Red Shirt movement reveals) – ‘sanuk’. It’s a society where women have a lot of power and control – they control family finances, shops are almost always managed by women, they ply the massage and sex industries too. Traffic is a mayhem and everything is planned around the ebbs and flows of it. More later….