Paul Theroux - The Great Railway Bazaar

(I did not realise that train-based travel literature was a thing. How have I not realised it?)

I read The Great Railway Bazaar while recovering from Covid. It was wonderful. Maybe one of my favourite books of all time. 

Reading this book really is like taking the train. That sense of moving while sitting still, butt spreading until it fuses with the seat, while you watch the world go by in miniature, either through your mind's eye or the window. You don't really believe you're travelling, and that makes you complacent, relaxed, and (ironically) more open to interaction.

For your enjoyment I will copy some selections from Singapore. It is thrilling to see my private thoughts on Singapore appear almost word for word in print! 

Singapore is a small island, 227 square miles at low tide, and though the government refers to it grandly as 'the Republic', in Asian terms it is little more than a sand bank - but a sand bank that has been enriched by foreign investment (Singaporeans are great assemblers of appliances) and the Vietnam War.

And: 

Singapore thinks of itself as an island of modernity in a backward part of Asia, and many people who visit confirm this by snapping pictures of new hotels and apartment houses, which look like juke boxes and filing cabinets respectively. Politically, Singapore is as primitive as Burundi, with repressive laws, paid informers, a dictatorial government, and jails full of political prisoners. Socially, it is like rural India, with households dependent on washerwomen, amahs, gardeners, cooks, and lackeys.

I especially like these comments on the news. Yes, they are sort of lazy potshots, but news headlines do leave an impression about national obsessions.  

The police in Singapore are assigned to the oddest tasks; the courts are filled with the unlikeliest criminals. In what other country on earth would one see such items in the paper?

Eleven contractors, three householders and a petrol-kiosk proprietor, were fined a total of $6,035 yesterday for breeding mosquitoes.

Tan Teck Sen, 20, unemployed, was fined $20 for shouting in the lobby of the Cockpit Hotel yesterday.

Four people were fined $750 yesterday under the Destruction of Disease-Bearing Insects Act for allowing insects to breed.

Sulaimen Mohammed was fined $30 yesterday for throwing a piece of paper into a drain at the 15 1/2 mile, Woodlands Road.

There's also a chillingly prescient passage about our beloved Smart Nation:

This is the Singaporeans’ idea of technological advance:

How would you like to live in a futuristic Singapore where mail and newspapers arrive at your home electronically by facsimile ‘print-out’? 

Sounds like science fiction, but to the Acting General Manager of the Singapore Telephone Board, Mr Frank Loh, they could ‘become reality before long’. 

He said, 'Developments in telecommunications have already done much to change the pattern of our lives. Concepts such as the "wired city" in which a single cable to each home or office would handle all communication needs could soon be put into practice.' 

Mr Loh, who was speaking on 'Telephone Communication' at the convention of the Singapore-Malaysia Institutes of Engineers, gave more details of such exciting developments which the future holds. 

Imagine,' he said, 'at your home communication centre, both mail and newspapers might arrive electronically delivered by facsimile "print-out".' 

(Straits Times, 20 November 1973)

It struck me as a kind of technology that reduced freedom, and in a society that was basically an assembly plant for Western business interests, depending on the goodwill of washerwomen and the cowardice of students, this technology was useful for all sorts of programmes and campaigns. In a 'wired city' you wouldn't need wall space for SINGAPORE WANTS SMALL FAMILIES and PUT YOUR HEART INTO SPORTS and REPORT ANYTHING SUSPICIOUS: you would simply stuff it into the wire and send it into every home.

With the SingPass app and Life SG app, his predictions have come to pass...