playground

Morning for Mrs. Anne Syke is always the same, 5 O’clock. The bedtime is also fixed, 9 pm. At nine in Berlin you can talk to shiny sun or can start planning for evening out, children are still in parks. However, shops like Aldi, Kaiser down their shutters, but if you need something, still you have 1 hour buffer time at Turkish shops. However, for Frau Syke, nine is the time to tell everybody gutten nacht.

This Anglo-German good looking, octogenarian is nice to talk to. Discipline apart, she lives in a tiny little garden of African music, childhood nostalgia of London, feeble memory of Hitler, Indian Yoga, Chinese Tai chi, Japanese Kido and herbs in the balcony.

I liked her. Because, I usually like to talk to elderly people, they allow you, always, to read all yellowish pages of diaries. They talk about what they could have done, sense and sensible experiences of them are usually streams of flow, and they try to show the world they saw through their hazy glasses. The world they have gone through is the different world of history books.
However, I believe that there is no such thing exists called “real history”, all depend on the glass you wear. The told history is personal account and stories of personal time.

I never forget the real story of my grandma, Asharani Devi. She told me how she suffered political torment, it was one rainy night of August 1947 India got freedom and India divided. The great partition of Bengal uprooted her. Some days before the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, she was cooking in the kitchen. News came. Muslim rioters attacked Bikrampur, houses and temples are set on fire, Dhaka, Noakhali and several other places were burning, rioters were killing Hindu men, and raping women on the streets. By force they were snatching money, jewelry, lands, religion even women and forced people to leave the newborn country called Pakistan.
So she fled, with her 5 children and esoteric husband. However, they did not know where to go, only they had few clues, like addresses in hand, all the jewelry, cash, money, golden mohar left behind. They thrown out destitute, refugee in own land.My father was the youngest son, and just a baby of few months. Due to malnutrition and poverty he lost his vision, one of my uncle lost right hand due to vitamin deficiency. Thank god! Elder daughter of my Grandma was already married to a Government employee in India, so she initiated to bring them to her place, and they survived.

Story of Frau Syke has no connection with my granny’s; except her story of migration. Except her story of struggle, and struggle for survival, she said, that she is a migratory bird. She likes to describe herself a bird who twittered for love and flown from England to Germany, Germany to Africa and to Japan, few years in China. Some time to try luck, to live descent enterprising life; she traveled places like Uganda, Kenya, Zimbabwe and Nigeria. Unfortunately her white British skin did not let her gel up with the natives of those countries.
Syke said that the first time when she left London it was love and war behind the story.
The day she murmured good bye to London Bridge, she was a lady of twenties. Just the news came, that her fiancé Henry was killed and buried in Berlin. Henry was killed by German intelligence agents. Utterly clueless Syke flown to Berlin, but she did not know where in Berlin, her fiancé’s grave was, somebody said that Henry’s grave is lying in Düsseldorf, or in Essen. Still she does not know where it is actually. As she does not know how and why he was killed.
When she came to Berlin, the town was rumbling, groaning with trauma and living in debris of ruins, whole city was dismantled, humiliated. She assimilated herself with Berlin. She said that she saw Hitler just once, but when, where, she can not remember. She only remembers that after seeing the man, she spitted with hatred.
In the later half of her life she married a German guy, and divorced, however she has two children, both of them are living abroad, and for 30 years she is left lonely in a flat of Bruessler Strasse. This eye witness of Second World War and the Third Reich, believes in nonviolence, live on vegetarian diet, utterly disciplined, silent, little feeble but always happy. Because she knows mornings in her garden are charming than dark nights of despair and trauma.
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Thank you IJP. Thanks for not just providing euros to travel and live in beautiful places of Germany, but more effectively giving opportunities to experience the great nation and all its facets like polity, economy and the social life of Deutschland. Political spirit of Germany always fascinates me as do the literature, art and culture. I always admired German punctuality, sense of discipline and the tremendous urge of rebuilding nation. From even childhood all these good impressions melted in mind, and constructed a flowery figure of German virtues.

Being a journalist I had an opportunity to stay in Berlin, to cover General Election in 2005, and also 3 months for an online journalism course conducted by InWent. In those days I rechecked my notion about this great nation. And I fell in love with all good qualities of German people.

I am, neither, saying that all German people are saintly honest, never deceive, never peep into other’s bank account or email accounts, rather there are certain instances of these sorts of indiscipline to take place, but surely the level of honesty and transparency is notably high than other people I have encountered yet.

Regarding this I was seriously talking to Christian Bartolf of Gandhi Zentrum in Berlin, and he, the peace activist, humbly refused to take this generalized complement. His explanation for my short cut generalization has some socio psychological value.

According to him, the people of this great nation has encountered several fatal blows of history, heinous untruth of Third Reich haunting the psyche of the nation, generations after generation people of Germany is sentimentally shocked and ignited to stand against all untruth and violence. From general schools children gets inspiration to grow acceptance about foreigners. They are taught to hate all vices, Hitler had.

However that is not all, not all people of Germany is out of racism, few Indian friends of mine who live in Magdeburg says that sometime they have faced violent attacks from neo Nazis. So, racist violence and hatred are not obliterated from the land. They are still dangerous disease. Forces to destroy green serenity of Deutschland exist like lethal virus. However, the Merkel administration and civil society agencies are trying hard to wipe them out or rectify them.

The best way they find, which I must appreciate, to cope with all historical stigmas is exhibiting the fact as it is. I find it as honesty the best policy.

In India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar or in other countries of south East Asia we saw organized effort to hide historical facts and distort the history, some time this is done by political people, some time the power itself does the crime. During this fellowship we came across two Chinese journalist friends, they explained the Chinese art of hush-hush governance.

Shi feike, one of fellow IJPians from China described how democracy is denied, free speech chocked in China, as we all knew, but when he tries to describe, overcoming the linguistic barrier, the political injustice to the people of China, it became vivid and evoked reminiscence of all injustices to the humanity, I have seen in countries like Tunisia, Libya, Sudan and Zimbabwe. The trouble to tell the truth is more difficult than to live in those countries and do business. Journalists are threatened to death. Newspaper houses are forced to down shutter, and people undoubtedly denied justice.

In almost all cases in South East Asia the freedom for media are farces. Even India, which is known and admired for providing the solemn right like freedom of speech as fundamental right and carries honor of being the largest democracy, media is also under scanner, Government itself supervises the media, there is the ministerial berth to scrutinize it. Not only that, political bias is the other hazard for Indian journalism.

IJP fellowship provided opportunity to sit, for one month, in a German Media house. I was offered by DWTV, in Voltastrasse, Berlin. Under the kind supervision of Mr. Max Hoffman. Some of our friends said that one month is not enough to observe and understand how German Media performs. But my experience in Deutsche Welle is satisfactory. Candidly speaking I could not get any opportunity to make any project properly executed, but surely tremendous friendly people around in Deutsche Welle helped me a to feel the pulp of their operations.

I had to gone through training of software they use, the trainer showed me all nuts and bolts of DW production unit. Editing rooms, studios are highly professional, but the best place I have ever found is the always busy news room. I had a seat in the Economics News desk. I must appreciate colleagues and their cordial cooperation to make me understand actual scene of Economic crisis in Germany. Karstadt issue was unfolding, export declined, but during my stay in Deutsche Welle I found economic indexes to go up. Especially the Cesifo index grew which has significance in the recessive weather. Also it dangled positive signal to the investors. CESifo brought back confidence among industrialists. Germany and France two big brothers of European economy was coming out from the crisis, slowly and positively. Sitting among brilliant business journalists of DWTV, it was easy for me to figure out.