By Ravi Chawla, Editor
Today, world media is highlighting news of the moon landing on July 20, 1969.
One giant step.... I remember that day very vividly. I had travelled overland from Kathmandu, Nepal on a transcontinental bus from Australia, and we arrived early morning in the Indian capital Delhi. The group continued its road journey through Pakistan. My Aussie mates left me behind in Delhi. My Indian nationality prevented me from voyaging with them through the territory where I was born exactly thirty three years earlier.
I took a rickety ride on a small Ariana Afghan Airlines aircraft on my first international flight Delhi to Kabul.
1969 was the year Afghanistan had begun to express a public resentment against the massive Russian presence. The common man in the back streets was still walking tall. That majestic man was the Afghan I admire to this day.
It was called the Pul-e Khisti protest, after blue mosque in the center of Kabul. 20th July 1969
Man landed on moon. Ravi Chawla, 33, landed in Kabul and began a fresh phase of discovery of life and the world through languishing stopovers in Afghanistan, then Iran, Turkey and on to Europe.....Years later I was able to retrack the overland journey under not so pleasant conditions. Afghanistan was under Russian occupation, Iran was no longer under the rule of the Pehlvi dynasty. Life and people in Turkey, Greece, Yugoslavia, had been through phenomenal transformation. One could no longer camp open air under the shadow of the blue sky and mountain in Herat. The US Airforce base in Trabzon on the Black Sea was no longer as calm because of its proximity to the Russian border....
Changed were the smiles of peasants in rural Isfahan. The clerics had already sown mistrust of foreigners, even if he was a Hindi. The next visit to my friends in Shiraz Persipolis was nothing to write home about - very little communication with the real Iranians...Worse still, I could not even bring out my Hasselblad kit. Today, Monday, 20th of July 2009, forty years after man stepped on the moon and the day I was booking a jalopy journey to the Buddhist monuments in Bamiyan in Afghanistan, I record my angst at the tragic violence in many of lands I first visited in happier times.
Forty years ago I had sent a lengthy despatch from Kabul to Bombay's FREE PRESS JOURNAL: "Let's back the Pakhtoons." Yesterday's suspicion-filled newspaper headlines in India featured Baluchistan. I ask myself: Where have all the good news gone? For now, let me seek out something positive happening somewhere in the Seniors World. There's plenty of that, fortunately. One has to only seek it out and Chronicle it.
Ravi Chawla E:mail: ravichawlaofbombay@gmail.com
