Both the Greek and Indian epic poems were both originally orally transmitted, since at the time of their composition there was no writing system in use¹. The oral transmission of the epics creates a problem because we have no record of the development of the text. So instead, scholars turned to linguistic analysis and the archaeological record to try and separate the original core of the epics from later accretions. However neither of these methods proved effective.

While the language of Homer is (like classical Sanskrit) a literary one that was never used colloquially, under the “light patina of Attic forms” there is “an indissoluble mixture of two different dialects, Aeolic and Ionic. But the attempts of the linguists to use this criterion for early (Aeolic) and late (Ionic) ran into the dilemma that Aeolic and Ionic forms sometimes appear inextricably tangled in the same line or half line” (The Iliad, introduction by Bernard Knox, Penguin 1990 p13).

Analysis based on the archaeological record fared no better. Although the events of The Iliad would have occurred in the Bronze age and the majority of the epic describes weapons made of bronze, “in the fourth book the Trojan archer Pandarus has an iron arrowhead, mentioned quite casually as if that were normal… in this passage iron is obviously cheap… elsewhere we meet proverbial phrases like ‘heart hard as iron,’ which indicate complete familiarity with the metal. It certainly looks as if these are different historical layers, but once again, there is no way to extract them.” (ibid)

This problem was solved by an American scholar named Milman Parry. He noted the insight of German analytical scholars that there were certain ornamental epithets used to describe the characters in The Iliad which made it easy to meet the demands of the metre of Greek heroic poetry, the dactylic hexameter. For example, “Achilles is ‘brilliant,’ ‘godlike,’ or ‘swift-footed,’ Apollo is ‘one who shoots from afar,’ the Achaeans are ‘strong-greaved,’ or ‘bronze-cloaked,’ Hera is ‘white-armed’ and ships are ‘black,’ ’round,’ ‘hollow’ or ‘swift’” (ibid). There are also a set of stock formulaic phrases padding out the text.

Parry’s breakthrough was to demonstrate that “the system was more extensive and highly organized than anyone had dreamed, and he also realized what it meant. It meant that the system had been developed by and for the use of poets who improvised… The oral bard who uses such formulaic language is not… a poet reciting from memory a fixed text. He is improvising, along known lines, relying on a huge stock of formulaic phrases, lines and even whole scenes; but he is improvising. And every time he sings the poem, he does it differently. The outline remains the same but the text, the oral text, is flexible. The poem is new every time it is performed” (ibid, p17). Exactly the same process can be seen at work today in performances of Indian classical music.

This theory explains the lack of consistency in the archaeological record and the linguistic tone of the Greek epics. Epithets which include references to diverse material cultures and use vocabulary from different dialects are chosen because of their fit with the metre. Indeed it renders the epics virtually useless as a detailed guide to the culture and society of the people represented; it tells us rather more about that of the poet.

The same theory can also be applied to Indian epics such as the Rāmāyaṇa², of which books two to six of the canonical form are almost certainly the work of a single bard (sūta) known as Vālmīki. It is widely accepted that the story of the Rāmāyaṇa existed long before Vālmīki composed it, and since Vālmīki there have been innumerable retellings of the story. Like the Greek epics, it contains “iteration, formulaic composition, simple metrical forms preferably subject to musical or quasi-musical recitation, copiousness, heavy use of epigrams and sententia, hyperbole and tales of wonder.”³ Like Homer, Vālmīki was drawing on a tradition of learned patterns to create his work.

In Indian oral tradition in particular, the use of stock phrases serves another important purpose: memorisation. This is especially important in works like the Rāmāyaṇa which have religious importance. Probably the most extreme example of this can be found in the Pali canon, the massive collection of the Buddha’s sermons preserved for more than four centuries by recitation. This was no doubt partly due to the Buddha’s pedagogical style. But the frequent, long repetitions of stock phrases found in the canon also served another purpose: they served as a mnemonic aid to memorisation. Although the intention was “to preserve the Master’s words as accurately as possible… it should also be remembered that it was not all a mere matter of mechanical repetition, though this undoubtedly occurred occasionally too.” (Dīgha Nikāya, trans. Maurice Walshe, Wisdom 1987)

Oral epics are still alive in India today. In “the Singer of Epics”, William Dalrymple tells of his experiences researching Rajasthani performers of local epics, known as bhopas. These illiterate villagers still perform epics thousands of stanzas long, each taking several nights to play out. Because these epics are sacred, they are performed rote. Dalrymple reports that during a performance

I asked another guest, who understood Mewari … if he could check Mohan Bhopa’s rendition against a transcription by John D. Smith, of Cambridge University, of a version performed in a different part of Rajasthan in the 1980s. Give or take a couple of turns of phrase, and the occasional omitted verse, the two versions were nearly identical, he said. And there was nothing homespun about Mohan Bhopa’s language, he added. It was delivered in incredibly fine if slightly archaic courtly Mewari diction. (Nine Lives, Bloomsbury 2009, p97)

Socrates, in his work Phaedrus, reports the King of Egypt saying of Thoth’s gift of writing: “it will set forgetfulness in the minds of learners for lack of practice in memory.” This is exactly what happened to the Serbian poets and is happening to their Indian cousins: “Just as the blind can develop a heightened sense of hearing, smell and touch to compensate for their loss of vision, so it seems that the illiterate have a capacity to remember in a way that the literate simply do not. It was not lack of interest, but literacy itself, that was killing the oral epic” (Dalrymple, idem, p95). However the techniques used to create them—the use of rote-learned patterns to enable memorisation and improvisation—can be seen throughout the creative arts, martial arts, and science (including computer programming).

This points to the hypothesis that this mechanism, the chunking up of memorized patterns in order to create larger scale works, is fundamental to human creativity. I’ll be exploring this hypothesis in future posts.

¹In the case of the Greeks, the only native alphabet, Linear B, was developed by the Mycenaeans for administrative purposes, and fell out of use in the twelfth century BC with the destruction of the Mycenaean civilisation. The adaptation of the Phoenician alphabet by the Greeks only shows up in the archaeological record by the eighth century BC. Sanskrit was also originally a purely oral language. The oldest evidence of written Sanskrit turns up in about the first century BC using the Brahmi script, which at that time had already been used in India to write Asoka’s rock edicts. The most widely accepted hypothesis is that Brahmi is also descended from the Phoenician alphabet (as is almost every script currently in use, from Arabic to Thai), and indeed some early Brahmi inscriptions are written from right to left.

²The Mahābhārata is considered itihāsi, or history (although its historicity is not its most compelling attribute), rather than kāvya or poetry, and its structure is rather more complex and heterogeneous. It is relatively straightforward to decompose this work into strata (the Bhagavad Gitā, for example, in the form that exists today, is composed in a style of Sanskrit that can be dated to around the 3^rd century CE), and doing so reveals fascinating insights into the development of Indian society.

³There is an additional constraint imposed on Indian epics due to their being subject to the rules of Nātyā, which can be roughly understood as the dramatic arts. As a result, the stock epithets, metaphors and figures of speech must evoke the correct rasa or mood, of which one of the most important in kāvyais viraha or love in separation—in this case Rāma’s feelings for his abducted wife, Sītā, which are the subject of some of the most evocative verses in the work.

UPDATE: India’s environment ministry has rejected Vedanta’s application to mine aluminium ore in the Niyamgiri Hills in Orissa (the site shown in the picture on the left). Vedanta can appeal, so this particular battle is far from over, but it shows that resistance is not futile.

The outsourcing revolution gets arbitraged

Outsourcing is by far the most common context in which the Indian and Chinese IT sectors appear in the press. This is only to be expected since outsourcing is perceived as a threat to the interests of the middle classes in Northern societies. In fact this is to some extent a myth. Clearly outsourcing has had some kind of moderating influence on the salaries of IT workers in the USA and Europe. However it’s still easy to get a visa to come to Northern countries if you have IT experience, and you can still earn good money as an IT professional.

By and large, outsourcing has not put really talented people permanently out of work, although it has certainly got rid of some of the chaff. Why is this? There are two reasons. The first is that outsourcing is really much harder than people might think. It is always less effective to distribute IT work than to do it on-site due to the inefficiencies introduced through not being able to communicate face-to-face. Secondly, IT professionals are not fungible, and it is as hard to find good IT workers in places like India and China as it is to find them anywhere else. Although the populations of India and China are huge, the number of people in those countries with a good enough education and sufficiently fluent English to work effectively in outsourcing isn’t actually that great.

The fact that demand is exceeding supply is reflected in the fact that salaries for IT professionals in Bangalore are rising at between 10% and 20% per year. The market is tight as a drum. What you’re seeing is the effect of arbitrage — eventually IT salaries in India will peak at a level where the difference in the salary of an Indian IT worker and that of a Northern IT worker will represent precisely the cost of the inefficiency introduced through effects such as the communication overhead. Indeed this arbitrage has already had the interesting effect of creating an outsourcing market within the US, with companies creating divisions in places like Montana and Virginia. The amount of IT work to be done in Northern countries certainly isn’t decreasing, and there isn’t a proportionate increase in the availability of skilled IT professionals in India. The Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), India’s premier engineering universities, admit only 4,000 people per year.

Long term, unless there is a significant change in the Indian educational system that creates a step change in the number of available skilled graduates, we won’t see outsourcing increasing significantly. Indeed if demand for IT work continues to increase in Northern countries, we’ll see even more demand for IT professionals. Things aren’t really any different in China since although the education system is superior it is relatively hard to find people with sufficiently good fluency in European languages.

Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child initiative is one way in which such a step change could happen. But society itself needs to change in order for projects like this to succeed — in India, in particular, discrimination against the lower castes is still so firmly entrenched that they are simply not able to participate in India’s economic growth by and large. None of the simple fixes have worked, and there is no agreement on what to do next, let alone the political will to implement a complex solution.

The domestic market

The above analysis entirely ignores the effect of the domestic market for IT services in India and China. In fact, both of these markets are relatively immature. It is hard to get local work in China, which many amateur Sinologists put down to the need to establish guanxi — the network of contacts through which work and favours are procured. However the root cause of the difficulty in finding work is simply that the demand that exists is either for huge projects or for start-ups. Although the government is forging ahead with IT projects, private enterprise in China is only just beginning to become computerised. As the IT revolution begins to work its way through the Chinese economy, demand will increase exponentially, and guanxi will simply not be sufficient as a means of procuring IT services. It is already the case when negotiating with large companies that they typically want to know how many thousands of developers we can supply. This in itself is a sign of the immaturity of the market, but it demonstrates its scale.

India arguably has a lead on China in terms of penetration of IT in business. If it indeed it has, given the blistering pace of change in China, it won’t last. We observed one interesting difference between the two countries in the way our offices were constructed. The Indian construction company had twice the number of workers as the Chinese one — but the Chinese team were equipped with modern power tools which made them far more efficient. Whatever the reasons behind this, it shows how determined China is to be at the forefront of technology adoption, and in general Chinese infrastructure is years ahead of India’s. As Indian and Chinese businesses get computerised in order to gain competitive advantage, the demand for skilled workers will also increase — and the only supply will be people without the necessary language skills to participate in the outsourcing sector. The number of such people will be large, but still a long way from being able to satisfy demand.

Silver bullets?

Writing software is still far from being an engineering discipline. Although some common pieces of software are commoditised (operating systems, web servers, content management systems), every business will require some level of customisation in order to cater to its peculiar needs. The more revolutionary the business model, the more customisation. Custom application development is labour intensive, risky, and expensive. The company I work for, ThoughtWorks, makes money from reducing the risks involved with application development through applying lean methodologies, aggressively adopting newly maturing technologies such as Ruby on Rails and Erlang, and having people who are smart enough to know the right technology and approach to use in a given situation. We’re also working on products to enable teams to deliver better software with less risk.

This isn’t enough though. Reaping productivity benefits through the techniques described above requires a high level of skill and understanding — and there just isn’t enough to go round. Servicing the huge domestic markets of China and India as they mature is going to require something really extraordinary. It is certain that companies in these countries will have business models that differ disruptively from established Western ones. This is already clear both from the unprecedented trade surplus and from the large number of companies that have seen their China strategies fail. The innovation in IT required to power these businesses is just beginning.

Conclusion

The market for IT services is bright, and its future is in India and China. As domestic markets mature in these countries, they will need a huge injection of IT expertise. This will enable them to beat the rest of the world in everything from financial services to manufacturing. Northern businesses will be caught short, and will need to innovate furiously in order to remain competitive. At the same time, IT’s wider adoption is changing the way societies function, and we can only expect these changes to accelerate. For many of us, the trick will be to find a way to use those changes to deliver social justice. I am looking forward to being a part of this paradigm shift along with my colleagues in our new Beijing office.

Credits

Some of these ideas come from discussions with Michael Robinson and Roy Singham (ThoughtWorks’ fearless leader). However they shouldn’t be held to blame for errors, omissions or stupidity.

However only twelve years ago these republics were at war.

Bosnia and Herzegovina still wears the scars of the Bosnian war openly on its sleeves. Mostar still has plenty of bombed-out buildings and bullet-holes visible everywhere. Sarajevo is almost completely reconstructed, but you can still see the impact of mortars on the streets. Where they caused casualties they have been painted red to make “Sarajevo roses” in remembrance of those who died. In addition to the museums, you can see a display of artifacts from the war just off a main street in the centre of town, and buy the Sarajevo Survival Guide in bookshops. We went on two tours of the city. Both of our guides (who would have been teenagers during the war) spent a lot of time discussing the siege of Sarajevo with visible but restrained anger, as well as unrestrained sarcasm towards the UN. Although the war ended and the siege was lifted nearly twelve years ago, it is still startlingly fresh in people’s minds.

The war in Bosnia and Herzegovina claimed around 100,000 lives, of which 66.5% were Bosniak Muslims. Although half of the Bosniaks who died were soldiers, they were poorly supplied — for instance they had no tanks or heavy weaponry — since a UN arms embargo prevented them from arming. The Serb and Croatian forces, on the other hand, had access to equipment from the JNA (Yugoslav People’s Army). Nevertheless the Bosnian army kept the Serbs out of Sarajevo for the duration of the war: the siege of Sarajevo was the longest siege in the history of modern warfare, lasting from 5 April 1992 to 29 February 1996. It is estimated that around 12,000 people were killed during the siege.

The UN failed to cover itself in honour during the war. In June 1992, two months after the start of the siege of Sarajevo, the UN negotiated an agreement which gave the UN Protection Force (UNPROFOR) control of Sarajevo’s airport. In September UNPROFOR began distributing humanitarian aid, which arrived in transport planes. Under the terms of the agreement, fifty percent of this went to the Serbs. The aid that actually got to the Bosnians was a bit of a mixed bag. Our guide remembers shipments of condoms, shipments of malaria medicine (there is no malaria in Bosnia), tins of pork (by the end of the war, Sarajevo was around 87% Muslim), and leftover rations from the Vietnam war.

Our Bosnian Muslim guides were also proud of the stories of people from different religions helping each other out during the war. Although most of the (mainly Orthodox) Serbs left Sarajevo during the siege a few signed up to serve in Bosnian army, knowing that if they were captured by Serbs they would be murdered. There is a story that a precious medieval copy of the Koran was kept in the synagogue during the siege to prevent its destruction in the event of Sarajevo being overrun. Finally there is Sarajevo’s status as a “little Jerusalem”, with a church, mosque and synagogue within one square kilometer of each other in the centre of town. There are plans to build a Buddhist temple.

However not everyone is in favour of tolerance. As well as the obvious examples of the Serb and Croatian aggressors, Wahabbi Sunni muslims are present in Sarajevo and Mostar, as are Shi’as affiliated with Hizbollah. Both provided financial and military assistance during the war, and the Saudis provided cash to rebuild mosques damaged during the war. Although they operate at the fringes of society, our guides were worried at the effect they could have on the disaffected. So far, the powerful memories of the war have inoculated most people against turning to extremism.

The Bosnian war is a reminder that UN intervention can be a good thing. Had the UN had the backing of the major powers to intervene more effectively in Bosnia, many lives could have been saved. The same is true of the genocide in Rwanda, which occurred at around the same time. Realpolitik prevents intervention in the internal affairs of the powerful nation states who have the capability to enforce their sovereignty². Nevertheless there are several clear example of countries where the UN could usefully intervene today if the political will existed: Sudan (still waiting for the implementation of UN security council resolution 1769), Burma and Somalia. In Sudan, over 200,000 people have already died in the Darfur region since 2003. Bosnia’s example shows that even in a region with ethnic divisions, it is possible to make peace (despite what Jonathan Steele will have you believe).

Two jokes from the siege of Sarajevo:

A woman slinks to and fro on the swing in her garden. Her friend comes up to her and asks, “why don’t you do something constructive?” The woman replies, “I am! I’m fucking with the snipers.”

Two Bosnian soldiers are digging a trench. One of them is digging an alarmingly deep hole. His friend asks, “why is your trench so deep?” He replies, “I’m trying to find oil. Then maybe someone will help us.”

² The principle of respect for state sovereignty is one major reason why Russia, China and India don’t want to get their hands dirty in Burma (along with lucrative energy contracts of course). It is interesting to note that the UN security council resolutions on Sudan all include in their preamble a paragraph “reaffirming [the Security Council's] strong commitment to the sovereignty, unity, independence and territorial integrity of Sudan…”. China in fact has five principles that govern its relations with other nations: the “five principles of peaceful coexistence” that were promulgated in meetings between Zhou Enlai and Jawaharlal Nehru in 1954 following China’s occupation of Tibet (these principles are known as the pānch shīl in India). The principles are:1) mutual respect for each other’s territorial integrity and sovereignty; 2) mutual non-aggression; 3) mutual non-interference in each other’s internal affairs; 4) equality and mutual benefit; 5) peaceful co-existence. These principles didn’t stop China and India going to war over Arunachal Pradesh (or “South Tibet” depending on whose claim you support) eight years later though.

It turns out that the UK’s Health and Safety Executive publish a great document called “Line management behaviour and stress at work — guidance for line managers”. It starts off well: “there is a clear distinction between pressure, which can be a motivating factor, and stress, which can occur when this pressure becomes excessive.” But it gets even better, because it contains a table which summarises research derived from “interviews from 320 managers and employees, and discussions held with over 50 HR professionals.” This table represents “a competency framework … which provide[s] behavioural indicators of what constitute[s] ‘healthy’ management”. The table below is reproduced under the terms of the Click-Use Licence.

I learned a lot from reading through this table. Here are some of my conclusions.

• You might think that following agile methodologies will solve your team problems. However it seems to me that they don’t cover line management in much detail at all.
• The table above seems to me to be (un-)surprisingly compatible with agile. For example, the positive behaviours in the “empowerment” section are precisely what you’d need to support a self-organising team. The “Process planning and organisation” section lays out how important it is to constantly review and adapt the team’s process.
• The table demonstrates to me that it is possible to model the skills and behaviours associated with being a line manager. It has obvious-in-retrospect but actually non-trivial bits of behaviour like “uses HR when dealing with a problem” and “knows when to consult employees and when to make a decision”.
• There are more things that are my responsibility than I thought. For example, I’m responsible for the health and safety of my team.
• I should be reviewing this list at least once a week to identify areas I’ve missed out on.
• Transparency and communication with your team and management are key. The best thing I’ve done since I became a project manager is to do regular (bi-weekly) one-to-ones with my team members. I use a Manager Tools template for this (thanks to Marco Abis for the link), which gives 10 minutes of time for your team member to talk and give you feedback, ten minutes for you to talk and give feedback to your team member, and ten minutes to define actions to be followed up at the next meeting.
• There’s more to project management than dealing with delivery issues such as managing risk, scope, time, cost and dependencies. People over process means taking line management seriously.

“Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death – ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: it is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us.” (The Fire Next Time, p123).

Vonnegut faced death both in the large, serving in the second world war where he was one of seven US POWs to survive the bombing of Dresden, and in the small, with the suicide of his mother and his sister’s death from cancer. He wrote about the conundrums of life with an unparalleled power of observation and a deceptively simple honesty. He cut through hypocrisy with an oxyacetylene satirical fire with which he wrought a delightfully light, achingly funny conversational style. This fire was no doubt powered in part by the debilitating depression that made him at times suicidal. Nevertheless he never invoked any of the fetishes of nationalism or religion which so many of us use to deaden the pain of the human condition. Kurt Vonnegut has earned his death.

He is in heaven now.

Kurt Vonnegut, 11 November 1922 – 11 April 2007.

This region has played host to a wide series of conficts over the last two hundred years. One of many was explained to us on the bus, when our neigbour went through our guide book’s maps of Syria, Iran, Iraq and Turkey patiently enumerating all the towns (“Qamishie: Kurd… Diyarbakır: Kurd… Mosul: Kurd…”) which would form Kurdistan had he been in command of Sykes and Picot’s magic pencil.

Our guide to the ancient Armenian town of Ani proceeded to give us an exhaustive history of the last two hundred years of Caucasus history during the hour long drive. This also turned out to be the history of his family, who have spent the last two hundred years on the run from the various conflicts that have sent waves of people chaotically backwards and forwards across the region.

The Caucasus is an incredibly diverse region, with more than forty languages spoken by the various ethnic groups. Our guide was keen to blame most of the region’s problems on Russia. Certainly the first disaster to befall the Caucasus in modern times was the Russian empire’s expansionism, which saw it annexe Georgia in 1801. By the end of the 19th Century Russia had won a series of battles with Persia and the Ottoman empire (including the Siege of Kars) which saw them control the entire region. The region’s Christians were pretty happy about this – the Muslims less so.

When the Russian Empire was dissolved in 1917, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan seceded, but were rapidly beset by war with Turkey and civil war, following which they were absorbed into the Soviet Union. The region was invaded by the Nazis during world war II for their oil reserves, but the Soviet Union prevailed.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan became independent states – but Russia still interferes heavily in their politics, mainly in order to control their oil resources. Indeed until recently, the Russian flag was visible next to the Armenian flag in the army bases visible from Ani. The Russians are not keen on attempts by Turkey to normalise relations with Armenia, which may help explain why the border between Turkey and Armenia is still closed.

Ten regions of the North Caucasus are still part of the Russian federation – including the republics of Ingushetia and North Ossetia (in which the town of Beslan is to be found), which border Chechnya and are currently facing significant unrest.

The small part of the Caucasus we saw was beautiful, both bleak and haunting in the snow. However the region, trapped between Turkey, Iran and Russia, cursed by oil, seems likely to be troubled by conflict for some time to come.

Although women are required to wear hijab (which roughly translates as modest dress, involving covering everything except your face, neck, hands and feet), they are otherwise relatively unconstrained. So they share taxis with men, sit next to men in Internet cafes, and generally are visible on the street in a way they aren’t even in places like Pakistan. Indeed following the abolition of the religious police by Khatami things used to be pretty relaxed, with men and women flirting openly in cafes.

This has been clamped down on a bit in the provinces, so for example in Esfahan the cafes are now unfortunately solely inhabited by single men, and the further away you go from Tehran the less you see women wandering around the place, and the higher the percentage of them that wear a chador (basically a large and inconvenient-to-wear sheet, usually black, that covers everything except the face). Despite this, girls and boys still find ways to meet up. For example in Esfahan we sat next to a couple in a dark internet cafe who were simply there to meet, hold hands and talk. Although they gazed at the screen, they didn’t touch the keyboard for the entire half-hour they were there.

Since arranged marriages and parallel-cousin marriage aren’t traditional in Iran, there has to be a way for men and women to meet up – and the internet has become massively popular as a way to do this. Yahoo messenger is open on every terminal in every internet cafe (or coffeenet as they’re called) in Iran. Teenage girls are also expert in delivering lascivious glances, as I discovered to my embarrassment and Rani’s mirth. Apparently slightly overweight thirty-something IT consultants are the in thing. Great.

Go to Tehran and you can see as many young women as you like with peroxided hair, fresh nose-jobs, and headscarf almost falling off the back of their heads mixing with men quite happily in up-market cafes and shopping malls. The amount of time and money spent by women on their face, hair and perfume is striking – since women can’t express themselves with clothing and accessories (with the exception of D&G headscarves and trainers), a great deal of effort is spent on make-up and plastic surgery. Curiously, even though men do not have the same restrictions, we also saw quite a few of them with bandaged noses that were obviously not the result of late-night fisticuffs.

Indeed violence seems pretty absent from Iranian society. In our whole two weeks there, we only once heard two people fighting. Other than that, people simply never raise their voices. This took a while to get used to after India, where high decibel debates with recalcitrant rickshaw-drivers are de rigueur. This doesn’t of course prevent taxi drivers from ripping you off – it just means you have to be much more polite about it when they do. Because people are so well-mannered and public spaces are kept clean and well-manicured, Iran feels like an incredibly safe place.

Even the police are terribly nice. When we went to renew our visa our first contact was with the commander of Esfahan’s tourist police, who fired off a volley of idioms at us that he had learned from other tourists. This backfired slightly when he asked if Rani was up the duff, but he rallied magnificently by doing an excellent impression of George Bush delivering a speech and then declaring that he had a jones for a pie. After asking us to post him a good book of commentaries on Shakespeare’s sonnets, he told us that he is basically pretty bored since there are only ever a few crimes involving tourists a year in Esfahan, Iran’s top tourist destination.

One of the other things that Khatami did was to liberalise the press (although this didn’t extend to foreign fiction, making everything except government-approved authors such as Jeffery Archer unobtainable). There are now a bewildering variety of newspapers, even in English. However you still have to be rather careful about criticising the government, with the result that a large proportion of newspapers are filled with international news culled from AP, AFP and websites of foreign newspapers. This means that most Iranians are intimately conversant with the nuances of international politics and economics. They are also very serious about education, although only about 10% of high school leavers can get a place at university.

Iranians are also incredible sociable, with the upshot that we spent an exhaustingly large amount of our time discussing the minutiae of international relations and comparitive religion. As we went for a walk in Park-e Shahr in Tehran on a fantastically sunny Friday afternoon, we were called over several times by families demanding we drink tea with them. It is impossible to sit down on a park bench for more than a few minutes without somebody sitting down next to you and talking, even if you don’t share a common language. Anybody that accosts you but doesn’t speak English will simply co-opt a passer-by who does, so that they can fire questions at you via a translator.

The main economic problem Iran has is unemployment. Even the low percentage of the population who are able to get a higher education are unable to get jobs. Combined with the inability of young people to enjoy themselves through the traditional outlets of drinking and partying, this has led to a rapid increase in drug use, with ecstasy and easy-to-manufacture crystal meth (ugh) proving particularly popular. If anything proves to be the current Iranian system’s undoing, I think it will be this, especially given that people under thirty form the vast majority of the population.

I’ll definitely be coming back to Iran, certainly to stock up on cheap handicrafts, and possibly for a nose job. For now though I’m off to Turkey, where my first task will be to get hold of a cold Efes, and Rani will be joyously throwing off her headscarf – ironically in a part of Turkey where the religious right has long fought for the right of women to wear one to work.

So now we’re backpacking. We decided to skip Pakistan, partly because it would be tough for Rani to get a visa, and partly because it’s just not that fun a place to slum it. The idea to go by ship instead came from Marc McNeill’s blog, where on the map of his planned but never executed journey from India back to Britain there’s a seabound arc from India to Iran. It turns out that it’s not that hard to get passage on a container ship – it’s just relativly expensive, and requires forward planning and a flexible schedule.

It was a relaxing and fascinating experience, partly appealing to my inner geek (the hardware is quite special), and partly to my inner lazy bastard – life simply doesn’t get more catatonic than being a passenger on a merchant vessel. Since I’m currently reading Moby-Dick, I had some rather romantic views about working in the merchant navy. It turns out that things have changed a great deal over the last fifteen years. Gone are the days when ships spent several days in port: the turnaround now is somewhere between a few hours and a day. The crew very rarely get to sleep when the vessel is at port, let alone go ashore, and so they often spend months at a time on the ship. As a result, tours of duty have been reduced to four months plus a month or two paid leave for the Northern European sailors who comprise most of the officers, and eight months with no paid leave for the Filipinos who do everything else on the ship.

Working in the merchant navy has become more unpleasant in two other ways: paperwork and customs. The captain reckons that the amount of paperwork he has to deal with has increased by a factor of seven since the nineteen-eighties. This is deeply depressing to hear for anyone working in IT, which is supposed to solve these problems. However you can see just by glancing around the bridge that the introduction of IT systems has led to the usual integration nightmares. The system which monitors and remotely controls the various systems on ship runs on Windows. However all the navigation systems run on UNIX. The automated system which allows ships to get each others’ status is updated manually via the radar control panel, rather than being hooked up to the ship’s controls. As a result, everybody still relies on radar, paper navigational charts, GPS, and the radio to get everything done. I thought I would never see another protractor and pair of compasses after leaving my GCSE maths exams: I was wrong.

Finally it was unsurprising to hear that as customs have become more and more powerful and autonomous, their demands have become correspondingly more rapacious. Pakistani customs require several cases of Whisky not to make any unpleasant “discoveries”, and India and the Suez Canal (nicknamed the Marlboro Canal) are not much better. After four days at sea we landed in Jebel Ali port, which has a sensible arrangement to prevent graft whereby customs don’t board the ship, and the crew don’t come ashore. Rather than spending a whole day taking a ferry to Bander Abbas in Iran followed by a ten hour train journey, we immediately broke our rule forbidding air travel and took the first plane to Shiraz.

Iran is just wonderful. The people are the most hospitable, helpful, generous, cultured and polite that I have met anywhere in the world. This is a pretty tough call having just come from China and India, and it puts the UK to hideous, demeaning shame. Tourists are still quite an unusual sight in Iran, and given the combination of the current spat over the British sailors with the somewhat hysterical propaganda outfit that passes for domestic news in Iran, we were expecting at least some raised eyebrows when we told people we were English (this is inevitably the first question that anybody asks, even if they don’t know any English). Instead, we have invariably received delighted cries of “Ingilish!” or “Inglistan!”, followed by “welcome to Iran”. When the conversation turns to politics, as it inevitably does when you talk for long enough with any of the surprisingly large number of people who speak English, both sides are able to bemoan rather eloquently the idiocy of our respective governments.

In addition to the people, there is of course the scenery. Spring is famous in Shiraz, and it’s easy to see why: the beautifully manicured public spaces are blushing with flowers of all varieties, and the lightly clouded spring skies produce a fabulously warm light that makes the 2500-year-old frescoes of Persepolis look like they were carved yesterday.

If you’re interested in travelling on a freigher ship, please visit freightertrips.com to find an agent. Our agent was SGV Reisezentrum Weggis in landlocked Switzerland. Apparently it’s very popular with businessmen who need to be out of touch so they can get their work done. If you want to visit Iran, and you should, be aware that you’ll need to start applying for your visa at least six weeks in advance.