Go And Cover India

Ryszard Kapuscinski is great.  A Polish journalist who’s beat was the continent of Africa during the seventies, the eighties, the nineties, a friend of my sister who’d lived in Senegal and Guinea Bissau for years suggested to author to me on a call, not long ago when we were discussing the Congo.  I took down the name and later when I through it into Amazon, the title that caught my eye, was “Travels with Herodotus.  Faithful readers will recall that I'd been in the middle of a maiden voyage with Herodotus myself very recently.  I ordered this work by Kapuscinski and determined it would be the first thing I read, once I’d finished “The Histories.”

I hadn’t expected that we’d be commencing with our travels all the way back in the late fifties.  Kapuscinski begins his tale as a young Polish journalist who had never left his home country when he is given an assignment to go and cover India.  Before he sets off, his editor, if memory serves, hands him a copy of “The Histories.”  And suddenly this young Pole with not much English and no understanding of India to speak of, is confronting the smells and colors of the tropics and the rail station in Kolkata and its surfeit of hapless humanity.

The trip overwhelms the young Ryszard, as one can only imagine would be the case.  And shortly after he is flown to China, where he arrives right before the Anti Rightest Movement, right before the Great Leap Forward, right before the Sino-Soviet split.  Here, on such familiar soil, I was frustrated, by his, to my eyes, shallow reduction of Chinese humanity.  But the writers’ obligation is to be honest, and not politically correct and he is very young and China is in a revolutionary full-tilt.  And besides, Herodotus never made it to India, and didn’t even know that China existed. 

Later he’s in Iran, at Persepolis.  Herodotus never visited Cyrus and Xerxes' capital either, but he certainly had lots of insightful things to say about Persia, as if understanding the place were of the utmost importance.  And by now one realizes that this book has less to do with considering the contemporary circumstances of any of the places Kapuscinski is writing about, a luxury we'll afford a journalist who was presumably writing about day to day occurrences for all his professional life, and rather than a contemplation of what was happening two and a half millennium ago.  The oldest historian is a traveling companion for Kapuscinski, when he travels on a tip to Algiers  or when he sipping coffee and swatting insects in Dakar.  Through the progression, the author does a very thoughtful job of parsing Herodotus narrative, so that major trends, key human moments and the excruciating near-misses, all thoughtfully explained, and analyzed in a in a pithy and insightful manner.  I'll read more of Kapuscinski.

Sunday, 3/29/20