大象传媒

In my last blog post "Legends of Bush House" I promised that I would attempt to write an interview with George Orwell - inspired by Orwell's fictional interview with the satirist and author Johnathan Swift.

So without further ado, imagine that George Orwell himself is here, back in in Bush House today, and has kindly granted me an interview...

Ismailov: Welcome back Mr Orwell! You hated so-called 'dying metaphors' but just to tease you to life (and please make allowances to my non-native English), 'without further ado' how do you find your country, coming back from the hereafter?

Orwell: When you come back to England from any foreign country, you have immediately the sensation of breathing a different air. Even in the first few minutes dozens of small things conspire to give you this feeling. The beer is bitterer, the coins are heavier, the grass is greener, the advertisements are more blatant. The crowds in the big towns, with their mild knobby faces, their bad teeth and gentle manners, are different from a European crowd. Then the vastness of England swallows you up, and you lose for a while your feeling that the whole nation has a single identifiable character. Are there really such things as nations?

Ismailov: That was in fact my question. I don't know how the post works in your current home or whether you have wireless access there, but here in Britain we just had a General Election and naturally the issue of national identity or 'devolution' (what you have called 'Pretentious Diction') was widely discussed. So what's your take on that?

Orwell: One gets a better view of this question if one considers the minor point first. It is quite true that the so-called races of Britain feel themselves to be very different from one another. A Scotsman, for instance, does not thank you if you call him an Englishman. You can see the hesitation we feel on this point by the fact that we call our islands by no less than six different names, England, Britain, Great Britain, the British Isles, the United Kingdom and, in very exalted moments, Albion. Even the differences between north and south England loom large in our own eyes. But somehow these differences fade away the moment that any two Britons are confronted by a European.

Ismailov: Yes one party in particular would echo those sentiments... But since you've brought the issue of Europe and other nationalities into our conversation, the issue of immigration (be it by Eastern Europeans, or Muslims, or others) was one of the hottest items during the elections. Some parties were ready to wage war against it...

Orwell: In England all the boasting and flag-wagging, the 'Rule Britannia' stuff, is done by small minorities. The patriotism of the common people is not vocal or even conscious. They do not retain among their historical memories the name of a single military victory. English literature, like other literatures, is full of battle-poems, but it is worth noticing that the ones that have won for themselves a kind of popularity are always a tale of disasters and retreats. There is no popular poem about Trafalgar or Waterloo, for instance. The most stirring battle-poem in English is about a brigade of cavalry which charged in the wrong direction.

Ismailov: As you are talking about wrong direction, I feel somehow that you are following what happens not just in Hereafter, but also in "Herenow" and dare I say in "Herebefore". So let's talk about the expenses scandal, which many say cost Labour their government. Any thoughts on why voters felt so strongly about this particular issue?

Orwell: Here one comes upon an all-important English trait: the respect for constitutionalism and legality, the belief in 'the law' as something above the State and above the individual, something which is cruel and stupid, of course, but at any rate incorruptible. It is not that anyone imagines the law to be just. Everyone knows that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor. But no one accepts the implications of this, everyone takes it for granted that the law, such as it is, will be respected, and feels a sense of outrage when it is not. Remarks like 'They can't run me in; I haven't done anything wrong', or 'They can't do that; it's against the law', are part of the atmosphere of England... Everyone believes in his heart that the law can be, ought to be, and, on the whole, will be impartially administered.

Ismailov: I won't be asking you about economy - you spirits don't carry wallets, do you? Similarly I won't ask about the NHS, or education. Let's turn to civil liberties, your great area of concern. You might've heard that as a result of our elections we have a coalition government of Tories and Lib Dems, and they promise to scrap Labour's plan to introduce ID cards. But I guess that in Hereafter you are also registered, numbered, labelled... What are your thoughts on the British people's most important civil liberties?

Orwell: It is the liberty to have a home of your own, to do what you like in your spare time, to choose your own amusements instead of having them chosen for you from above. The most hateful of all names in an English ear is Nosey Parker. It is obvious, of course, that even this purely private liberty is a lost cause. Like all other modern people, the English are in process of being numbered, labelled, conscripted, 'co-ordinated'. But the pull of their impulses is in the other direction, and the kind of regimentation that can be imposed on them will be modified in consequence.
Ismailov: Now I know for sure that you guys there are aware of what we do here. And I feel you might've heard several words buzzing in the air, one of them definitely being 'change'. So are there any predictions (God, the same 'Pretentious Diction'!) which we can use here?

Orwell: Meanwhile England, together with the rest of the world, is changing. And like everything else it can change only in certain directions, which up to a point can be foreseen. That is not to say that the future is fixed, merely that certain alternatives are possible and others not. A seed may grow or not grow, but at any rate a turnip seed never grows into a parsnip. [Orwell's voice fades away]

For those of you with an agnostic or skeptical disposition: George Orwell's answers are taken from his 1941 'England Your England' essay...

Bush House, which has been the home of the 大象传媒 World Service since 1940, is a legendary place and I'm going to tell you about the biggest of its legends.

It was a rainy day in May, 15 years ago, when I - an Uzbek, a product of the Soviet system - slipped quickly through the massive doors of Bush House, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of wet air from entering along with me. After the freshness of the outside world, the reception area smelled of attic dust and old indoor carpets, but the fluffy warmth insulating the building swallowed the whirl and I shivered one last time before noticing a young lady, who was waiting for me with a pack of welcoming papers. She moved swiftly towards the receptionist and said 'He is a newcomer. The time is 13:00. Room 101. North East'.

Room 101

In this semi-automatically delivered tirade there was something both enigmatic and frightfully familiar. In the silence broken only by our steps, we passed a long and empty corridor, came to a mezzanine, entered another building and then she overtook me to open the door into Room 101.

She gave me plenty of paperwork to sign, and then left me to myself for a while. I looked around and noticed a thick dusty Oxford Dictionary of English. I gazed: it was the XI-th edition.

Then she returned and took me through many seemingly endless corridors and stairs to the Russian Service. Why the Russian service? I had nothing to do with Russia, apart from being from the former Soviet bloc. But I didn't ask questions, I just followed her, and entered a room with thin wooden walls littered with windows, where she introduced me to a bold, tall man, who said: 'Brayne' and seeing a strange fear in my face, added: 'Mark Brayne... You can call me just Mark... I'm a Deputy Head of the Service... '

Then I knew exactly what my anxiety had been about and where it had come from, Orwell! 1984! How on earth couldn't I have worked it out any quicker?! Yes, everything was a step by step recollection of George Orwell's book: the entrance, Room 101, the XI-th edition, O'Brien (to my non English ears 'Brayne' had sounded exactly like 'O'Brien'... I subconsciously looked around for a poster with the infamous 'Big Brother is watching you', and saw with an inexplicable horror, the drilling eyes and pointing finger of a Red Army soldier right the opposite of O'Brien, silently asking: '孝褘 蟹邪锌懈褋邪谢褋褟 写芯斜褉芯胁芯谢褜褑械屑?!' - 'Have you conscripted yourself as a voluntary soldier?!'

Later I learned that shortly before he wrote his masterpiece about totalitarianism, George Orwell had worked here, at the 大象传媒 World Service.

Orwell - 'unsuited to the microphone'

George Orwell didn't actually work in Bush House, but in a building situated at 200 Oxford Street, though by all indications he came here from time to time, since the Hindi Service of which he was a part was situated in Bush House. The 大象传媒 World Service archives in Caversham has lots of documents about him. One in particular, signed by Controller of Overseas Services Mr JB Clark on 19 January, 1943, says:

'I listened rather carefully to one of George Orwell's English talks in the Eastern Service on, I think, Saturday last. I found the talk itself interesting, and I am not critical of its content, but I was struck by the basic unsuitability of Orwell's voice.

'I realise, of course, that his name is of some value in quite important Indian circles, but his voice struck me as both unattractive and really unsuited to the microphone... I am quite seriously worried about the situation and about the wisdom of our keeping Orwell personally on the air.'

So as a result George Orwell was taken off the air because of his squeaky voice - a consequence of an old wound from the Spanish Civil War, when he was shot in his throat. But this wasn't the main tension that preoccupied George Orwell during his time at the World Service. In one of his letters he wrote:

'Re. cynicism, you'd be cynical yourself if you were in this job. However, I'm definitely leaving in abt. 3 months. Then by some time in 1944 I might be near-human again & able to write something serious. At present I'm just an orange that's been trodden on, by a very dirty boot'.

Though working during the World War II, when 'everyone is putting a 'case' with deliberate suppression of his opponent's view' - in Orwell's own words, he himself was trying to keep 'our little corner of it fairly clean'.

Orwell interviews Jonathan Swift

In his weekly radio talks Orwell was trying to raise the level of war-time narrative from propaganda to literature, and the best example of this is his imaginary 'interview' with the 18th century satirist Jonathan Swift.

It went a little like this:

Swift: When a true Genius appears in the world, you may know him by this infallible sign: that all Dunces are in Confederacy against him.

Orwell: So you did wear a wig, Dr. Swift, I've often wondered.

And so the conversation between George Orwell and Jonathan Swift starts. The themes of that conversation are progress and humanity, war and Englishness. Here's another part of it:

Orwell: That was 200 years ago. Surely you must admit that we have made a certain progress since then?

Swift: Progress in quantity, yes. The buildings are taller and the vehicles move faster. Human beings are more numerous and commit greater follies. A battle kills a million where it used to kill a thousand. And in the matter of great man, as you still call them, I must admit that your age outdoes mine. Whereas previously some petty tyrant was considered to have reached the highest point of human fame if he laid waste a single province and pillaged half a dozen towns, your great men nowadays can devastate whole continents and condemn entire races of men to slavery...

Inspired by this exhange, in my next essay I'm going to have a go at interviewing a legendary writer too... George Orwell himself.

In his first post Hamid discussed the tensions between work and dreams - how do you balance daily work and personal creativity?

Click below to read some of our first responses - feel free to post your thoughts on work and creativity.

Read the rest of this entry

How do you strike the right balance between your daily work and personal creativity? Add your comments to this blog post or send an email to wir@bbc.co.uk.

I've been thinking about how we as humans reconcile our daily working lives with our natural urge to be creative - about the relationship between our work and our dreams.

I am an Uzbek writer, and we Uzbeks have a very particular view of the relationship between reality and imagination. Here's a typical Uzbek parable to illustrate this:

Once, the folkloric hero Mullah Nasreddin was in a neighbouring village. On the way home, he bought a watermelon. Eager to eat, he split it in half and ate one half, leaving the other on the road, saying to himself: "Let him who sees this watermelon think that here was a Nobleman."

He walked for a bit, then returned, picked up the abandoned half, ate it, and said to himself: "Let them think that the Nobleman was with a servant, who ate this half."

He walked a little more, and feeling sorry, went back and ate the crust, saying: "Let them think that the Nobleman had also a donkey."

So bluntly speaking, very often we think one thing, we say another and we act in a third manner.

Pragmatism

Naturally other nations are not the same. You know, I've got a friend. A very decent person. Extremely nice character. He lives in St Albans. We had a mutual friend, also a very decent person, extremely nice character, who lived in Potters Bar.

One day our mutual friend from Potters Bar fell seriously, terminally ill. We were trying our best to help, with all kinds of alternative medicine - a fungus of a Russian birch-tree, which cured Solzhenitsyn, or a yogurt from Tibetan monks.

Only our St Albans' friend wouldn't believe too much in our fussy activity and would say: "We better be ready for the eventuality."

One day he gathered us and over a fine supper announced that we must be ready: our mutual friend would die very soon. "I am in touch with a local church and booking the day for the funeral," he said solemnly.

A couple of weeks passed, but our ill friend was still alive. But the preparations, run by our St Albans' friend (a very decent person and extremely nice character) were underway: some were discussing the agenda of the funeral, some were printing invitations, and some were listing probable invitees. I even heard that the date of funeral was already agreed... I used to sit at the bedside of my terminally ill friend, and he would whisper with dry lips:

"I'm like a passenger, whose train has been announced, but is not coming on time... "

I used to dread thinking that he knew everything... but I dreaded even more seeing how nervous and agitated my St Albans' friend was becoming, tirelessly organising everything.

I had a feeling of a strange race between the inevitable but slowly coming death and the immutable deadline of the agreed date. No, my dear friend died, dare I say, on time, meeting the deadline, so to speak, and making my St Albans' friend a solemnly happy man, whose incredible efforts to organise a wonderful funeral party for our mutual friend weren't in vain...

Photosynthesis

These are two extremes of the Work and Dreams relationship; the first one being nearly daydreaming and the second, a triumph of pragmatism over everything else. You can ask how I make my way between those Scylla and Charybdis or how I wear my two hats - one of a writer and the second of the Head of the Central Asia and Caucasus service at the 大象传媒.

We report from - and to - one of the most volatile regions of the world: revolutions in Kyrgyzstan, instability in Afghanistan, disputes between Uzbekistan and Tajikistan and so on and so forth. Mentioning just headlines: energy hub of the future, potentially failed states, authoritarian rule, millions of migrants, the modern Great Drug Road, continuing torture in prisons, the most oppressed press - where is there a small space for dreams?

But as a biologist by training I say: look at the plants. During the day they take in toxic and poisonous carbon dioxide and with the help of energy from the sun they turn it, during the night, into life-giving oxygen. Isn't it the same with the creation of literature?

Throughout the course of my residency, I'll be exploring many different kinds of tensions - for example between journalism and literature, and between reporting and reflecting.

But for now, I would like to know how you strike the right balance between your daily work and the most human urge for creativity? Where do you place yourself between the folkloric hero Mullah Nasreddin and my pragmatic friend from St Albans?

Please write to me in 200 or less words. You can comment on this blog post or send an email to wir@bbc.co.uk.

And together, we'll try to reconcile this seemingly contradictory Work and Dreams relationship into a dream we all share, our Dream Work.