大象传媒

Nabokov gave a group of Kazakhs a book and they went off to the seashore.

He leaned over to another pile of books and pulled out a perfectly splendid copy of his Selected Works. It had just been published in Russia.

The book was printed on the best quality glossy paper and the page edges had been artificially burnt off.

I flipped through the book, and told him "I have all these novels in my library".

He handed me another of his books: his saddest: "Take this one then. This is the last thing I wrote". He passes the book onto me, and leaves the room.

At that moment, we are served all sorts of dishes. "Taste the strawberries ..." he says.

Still sitting among the piles of books, my wife and I try the fruit without ceremony.

Nabokov returns and sits at the head of the table.

He pulls a bottle of ruby-red wine out of an ice bucket - not a bottle of Champagne - and begins to eat. How the wine suits him!

A dream headline

You may be thinking what a lucky man this Hamid Ismailov must be if he met the author of the novel Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov.

Alas, I haven't met him, but everything above is true.

I dreamt it.

Once I dreamt that TS Elliot was reciting from his epic poem The Waste Land: "Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves Waited for rain..." .

The sacred river Ganges was sunken and drained? I took the dream to be prophetic. Eliot was trying to tell me that something disturbing was happening in India.

When I woke up, I learnt that Indira Ghandi had been assassinated that day.

I guess dreams play the same role for many of us - we are preoccupied with our daily events.

This is certainly so for me. By day I am a journalist, in the evenings I am a poet and an author and at night my mind combines the two.

For a long time I've thought about compiling a 'Nightly Express': a one-off newspaper that captures the hopes, concerns and anxieties of people which sit deep inside the soul.

And so I asked you to send me your dreams from all over the world.

Dreams... dreams... dreams...

You can see The Nightly Express for yourself: a compilation of dreams from around the world.

I've slotted the dreams into real newspaper layouts from the 1960s.

Looking through what you have sent me, I can see that the themes of the dreams may be different, but there's something which unites all of them - a sense of surprise.

In a dream it's as if we see ourselves and our surrounding in a different, unexpected light.

Not so much as a journalist but as a poet I'm struck by the entertainment value of dreams.

Among the dreams I have received, I have been able to see the fanciful pictures inside people's heads.

The contributions contain vivid mental images that use language that is grammatically correct, but makes no sense "The earth is covered in half-digested tomatoes" or "I gave him my easel to hold up his body".

It's like a bizarre game of consequences where events begin normally and then take a giant leap off on a tangent somewhere unpredictable.

As a poet, I can see some great, if surreal, literary ideas.

There are wonderful protagonists: babies with old faces, an old lady speaking a language you can't understand.

The plot triggers I can see are mostly about inaction - prevarication, helplessness, and misplaced clothes.

Locations are also fluid - one dream takes place in another dimension where there are only smells in another the scene is set in a chaos-cosmic merry go round.

I'm satisfied on the journalistic level too.

It's interesting that among the contributions hardly anyone has offered interpretations - all have just reported "facts" - there's very little analysis.

But one of the contributors did say "not unlike going on holiday, no-one wants to hear your travelogues".

Except that the dreams that I have received are more interesting than travelogues.

And more than just dreams

Nightly Express has also connected people with each other.

One contributor wrote to me:

A friend posted a link to your 大象传媒 article on Facebook.

As a result of reading your article, I spoke about it with friends and acquaintances in Berlin.

What resulted was a wonderful exchange - personal stories - people talking about their dreams, and their intuitions and reactions to current local events with each other.

Although most of my friends and acquaintances remain sceptical about the internet, and even articles such as yours (ie, what can you trust on the internet these days?), the result was a multiplication of shared experience "on the ground" between people.

This, to me, is worth more than gold.

It is the stuff of life.

And we must preserve this ability to talk to one another on a personal level.

This is SO important, especially when living "in exile", as I do, as many immigrants do.

Thank you so much for your intuitive initiative.

I wish you well with your project.

So Nabokov's table invites everyone...

One of the tasks as writer in residence for 大象传媒 World service is to bring attention to the culture of our headquarters Bush House.

I wrote in my last blog post that when I joined the World Service there were 44 language services and our canteen was a real Noah's Ark of different languages, cultures, and costumes.

But this world of mine has shrunk.

In 2006 10 language services were closed and over the next couple of weeks five more services will stop broadcasting: Portuguese for Africa, Caribbean, Serbian, Macedonian and Albanian.

I have many good memories about each one of these teams.

When I joined the Central Asian service in 1994, a calm, grey-haired man was introduced to me.

His name was Aleksej Zoric.

In our journalistic life, when the Soviet Union was crumbling, when the first Chechen war and many other post-Soviet conflicts were taking place, Aleksej used to guide us through Scylla and Charybdis of editorial choices, based on his own - not easy - experience of the war-torn Balkans.

He is still running the Serbian service.

When I ask him what he is most proud of, he modestly says: "It would be difficult to identify a single programme or event, but I think that the accurate and balanced reporting we did during the 1998 Milosevic military operations against the Kosovo Albanians as well as during the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999 were moments that are unavoidable when speaking of the 大象传媒 Serbian Service".

But I look at him and recall the words of the Dagestani poet Rasul Gamzatov: "Ask never melting snow on my head what I lived through".

The modest words of Aleksej could be applied to any of the services.

I worked closely with the Portuguese for Africa service when I worked for the African Region in 2002.

As for the Albanians I would rather recall a football match in 1996.

Along with the European Cup, hosted by the UK at the time, we had a World Service tournament and on a misty pitch somewhere in Twickenham, the Albanians trashed us with something like 4:0.

I have never faced such a well organised and such a determined team and when I used to hear about their radio or television successes, I knew, where it had come from.

I have written already about the indispensable place of the Caribbean service in the literary history of Bush House.

Two Nobel Prize winners VS Naipaul and Derek Walcott either worked or co-operated with the Caribbean service as well as other acclaimed writers and poets.

What amazed me was their boundless creativity and innovation.

When the earthquake happened in Haiti, in the space of a week or so the Caribbean service had started to broadcast in Creole.

To me that demonstrated the agility of the World Service: being able to set up a broadcast operation quickly where information was critical in a disaster zone - a model that could be replicated as needed.

I think I should finish my tribute with a jingle, which was broadcasted over the last years by 大象传媒 Macedonian.

It says: "袘懈袘懈小懈, 胁懈 谐芯 薪芯褋懈 褋胁械褌芯褌 写芯屑邪", which means "大象传媒 brings the world to your home".

And though I'm immensely proud of my friends and colleagues in the services which are going to close, I understand that from now on for nearly 30 million people around the globe, their lives will be the same, but they will be without a world in their homes.

It's time for a new project.

We have nearly finished , which can .

Our Nulla Dies Sine Linea project continues, but I'm also now thinking about 'otherness'.

I'll tell you where it comes from.

I have a strange person inside of me, who is so fluid, that sometimes he wants to be an Englishman among English people, or a Chinese person among the Chinese: at other times I would like to be Russian, Jewish or Swahili.

Strangely enough, nobody accepts me as one of their own.

Though ethnically I belong to the Uzbeks, very often even Uzbeks don't recognise me as one of their own and say to each other when referring to me: "Ask that beard, whoever he is".

It's exactly the opposite with my wife: in Paris everyone speaks French to her, in Berlin they think that she's a German, in Russia she gets treated as a Russian lady and in Georgia for a Georgian.

Once, when we came to a maternity ward in the UK a nurse asked her: "What's your ethnic origin?"

She replied: "I'm an Uzbek".

The lady wrote on her form: "Uzbek, Caucasian".

"And you are, darling?" she said to me.

"I'm also an Uzbek", I said. She scribbled down: "Uzbek, Asian" - once and forever separating us in her classification.

When I joined the World Service there was a happy time when there were 44 language services and our canteen was a real Noah's Arch of speech, culture, and even costume.

That world of mine has substantially shrank, but what worries me most is the discourse of the world which is changing.

Nationalism is becoming more vocal and appears to be becoming a mainstream topic - not just in the third world, but in many Western countries, too.

Leaders sombrely preside over the wake of the multiculturalism.

The description of the world is becoming more and more black and white.

Over the last few years I have had an optimistic thought about what I like to call the Google generation.

When I have seen kids in London or in Accra, or in Tashkent or in Islamabad playing the same games on the net, I can see that they are sharing the same outlook and somehow valuing the same things.

I know exactly what my son is talking about with his coevals in Oviedo or Bishkek, or Burgas.

But if you followed for instance the nationalistic riots in December in the centre of Moscow what was frightening was that the faces of people taking part in these riots were not faces of skinhead thugs - the majority of them were normal people, young people sharing with you the Facebook or Vkontakte.

Are we becoming less and less perceptive of the otherness, are we becoming less tolerant to others? What I would like to ask you is to tell me your story of encountering otherness, be it cultural, national, racial, religious or else. What was shocking, what was strange, what was different, what was enriching in your encounter?

Revolutions begin with idealistically wonderful slogans such as "Libert茅, 茅galit茅 and fraternit茅".

But then the revolutionaries end up replicating the systems which they fought against.

The French revolution, which swept away the Bourbonnes dynasty was replaced with the Napoleon dynasty.

The Russian socialist revolution got rid of Tsarism but gave birth to the dictatorship of Stalin - a man who was much more dictatorial than the Tsar Nicolay the Second.

The Cuban Revolution which sought to overthrow the Batista (remember how romantic the young and bearded Che and Fidel appeared to be) ultimately brought a life of poverty, a lack of liberties to many who have withstood the lengthy regime of Castro a man who has beaten all records for staying in power.

These might have been historic facts, but in my lifetime I have seen and reported on popular revolutions in Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan.

Each uprising has followed the same pattern.

It doesn't mean that I'm for or against the revolutions.

Karl Marx famously said that "revolutions are locomotives of the history".

But Marx also alluded to the fact that history tends to repeat itself in farcical forms.

Watching and reading what is happening now in the Arabic world - Tunisia, Egypt and Jordan, I can't help wondering what will be the shape of these countries in 10 to 15 years' time?

Will another autocrat rise to power behind the popular wave?

Will political Islam, which is so vocal and strong on the street level, become the reigning state ideology across the region, changing the whole dynamics of the Middle East?

Or will there be another, third way, which hasn't been experienced in the region yet?

But there's an element which was missing from previous pre-internet revolutions - the ever increasing role of social media - and its ability to gather people en masse and co-ordinate their acts.

Its role was unequivocally shown in the post-election uprising in Iran and similar patterns of on the street protest are noticeable in the ongoing uprisings in the Arab world.

Now you can protest and watch the same demonstration on your smart-phone.

You can appeal to your allies, to the outside world, you can easily duplicate your effort, your impetus, your momentum.

But what about the revolution's aftermath?

Could the same tools change the tendency to go from revolution to autocracy so resolutely?

Could the social media and internet serve as vox populi in maintaining real libert茅, 茅galit茅 and fraternit茅, when people are back at home having protested on the street?

This is the question I would like to ask you. What do you think? Can social media keep revolution truly revolutionary - and change the status quo for the better?