Nury Vittachi's Blog

The legendary British newspaper editor, who died this week, had a significant effect on journalism in Asia���and vice versa

HARRY EVANS, an assistant editor from the British city of Manchester, stared at the newspaper and sighed. It was 1961 and the young newspaperman���he was in his early 30s���had flown to India to help train a group of 30 Asian journalists to create world class newspaper that readers would want to read.

But looking at the local papers, he realized his work was cut out for him. It was filled with blocks of grey text topped with unreadable headlines such as: ���Fissiparous Tendencies Remarked in State Government Report���.

He didn���t know it at the time, but that visit, 60 years ago, was the beginning of a wave of change which would alter Asian journalism for ever���and make a stir in Western journalism too.

Harry Evans��� specialty was page design, and he wanted to teach Asian editors how to write catchy headlines and lay them next to startling pictures, turning newspapers into enjoyable���and hopefully essential���experiences for readers.

At the first talk, organized by Jim Rose of a Zurich-based group called the International Press Institute, Harry Evans discussed the quintessential catchy headline:

���Man Bites Dog���.

TEACHER BECOMES STUDENT

As is often the case, people who sign up to teach end up learning.

Harry Evans had a great time, and was struck in particular by meeting two journalists, both South Asians with an interest in Hong Kong.

One was Amitabha Chowdhury, a pioneering investigative journalist who rose to fame at a Bengali language newspaper but went on to be a business news publisher in Hong Kong. Chowdhury uncovered fake government statistics used to justify a tramway fare increase triggering violent riots in Calcutta.

FORGED DOCUMENTS

The other person who struck him was a man of such humor and color that when he arrived on the scene, Evans wrote: ���Lightning struck the subcontinent.��� The man���s name was Tarzie Vittachi, father of the present writer. ���Tarzie burst into our Delhi discussions with the fire of a revivalist preacher,��� the Englishman later recalled. The iconoclastic reporter managed to be deeply spiritual yet ���also Rabelaisian, vastly entertained by life, and a champion deflator of pomp.���

Where was he from, this man who used humor and was never scared to take on unpopular causes? Harry Evans was stunned to discovered that Vittachi travelled with forged documents of a fictitious ���Republic of Amnesia���. When he needed visas showing he had the required immunizations, Vittachi created his own, with a stamp of approval by ���Dr. Portly Rumbel of the Quarantine Department.���

FIRM FRIENDS

Evans became firm friends with Vittachi, who had fled Sri Lanka after exposing the role of the government in inciting race riots.

On his part, the Asian journalist bonded with Evans immediately and recognized his extraordinary level of skill in taking a block of information and turning it into something that everyone wanted to read, no, HAD to read.

TRAVELLING CIRCUS

Under the leadership of IPI head Jim Rose, Evans joined Vittachi, Chowdhury and others to become a ���travelling circus���, going from India to Malaysia to Korea to Japan to the Philippines and elsewhere, giving Asian journalists the tools they needed to give voice to the people of Asia.

The East-West recipe worked. To take just one example, KM Mathew, editor of the Kerala-based Malayala Manorama put what he���d learned into practice, and circulation doubled, with the paper becoming the foundation of a media empire which included numerous magazines and television stations.

In the following years, media grew all over Asia, from the South China Morning Post and the Standard in Hong Kong, to the Manila Times in the Philippines, and so on.

Evans was known as the god of newspaper design. The daily mock-up sheets drawn up to guide compositors were known as ���vittachis���.

NEWS BLACKOUT

In January of 1966, Harry Evans was hired as an assistant to C. Denis Hamilton, editor of the venerable Sunday Times in London. Among his tasks was the redesigning of the sports pages.

Shortly afterwards, he learned that Tarzie Vittachi was in London and arranged to have breakfast with him. Over eggs, the Asian journalist told him an incredible story of what was going on in Asia. During a total news blackout in Indonesia, the Communists tried to engender a coup by murdering the army generals, then the surviving generals on the side of leader Sukarno murdered the Communists, and finally a radicalized Muslim group began murdering infidels���altogether 300,000 people died.

Evans took the story to his boss, and the Sunday Times turned Vittachi���s report into a two-part exclusive on the front of the features pages, known as the Review.

WORLD CLASS

With Evans��� contributions to design and reportage deemed excellent, he became editor of the Sunday Times in 1967.

His aim was to make the paper the world���s best designed paper with the finest investigative journalism.

And he did it well until the early 1980s���which was when he had a fierce argument with owner Rupert Murdoch and was sacked.

 

NEW YORK GLAMOR

Evans moved to New York, where he continued to work in publishing, but never received as much attention as his glamorous second wife, Tina Brown, editor of Vanity Fair, then the New Yorker, then the Daily Beast.

Not fully comfortable as a socialite, Harry Evans stayed in touch with Tarzie Vittachi, who had also moved to New York, and whose office was just one block away from Harry���s home. To complete the circle, Evans��� first wife, Enid, became firm friends with Vittachi���s first wife, Sunetra, both of whom lived in London.

DEADLINES

When Tarzie Vittachi died in 1993 aged 71, Harry Evans wrote his obituary for the Times.

Chowdhury worked in Hong Kong for about 20 years but retired to India where he died in Kolkata in 2015 aged 87.

Harry Evans died this week, on September 23, 2020, aged 92.

Evans, Vittachi and Chowdhury all had children who went into journalism.

The story of the "Prince Edward Station Murders" upsets many people in Hong Kong to this day. But what really happened on August 31, 2019? Consider the details below and make up your own mind.

 

 

THERE ARE TWO main stories about what happened at Prince Edward Station in Kowloon, late on the night of August 31. 

In the one version, a brutal squad of out-of-control police officers attacked innocent members of the public on a pair of stationary trains, injuring many of them seriously and killing six people.

They then ordered all journalists and photographers out of the station to cover up their crime, and prevented ambulance staff from reaching the wounded or dying.

TRAIN OF DEATH

Once dead, the corpses were whisked away in a special MTR ���train of death��� and have not been seen since.

To this day, funeral flowers are laid at the station on the last day of each month, with the mourners supported by opposition politicians.

In the UK, right wing politician David Alton later co-wrote a letter to the Queen, which said, in part: ���There are numerous unexplained deaths with credible allegations of police responsibility.���

That version is a horrific story by any standards.

In that version of the story, the protesters make no appearance at all.

But the fact is, they were there. The second version of the story is provided below, and is longer, with more detail. Read the facts and then make up your own minds.

 

CREATING MAYHEM

Hong Kong's peaceful protesters are some of the best people I know. 

They should never be confused with the violent anti-China radicals, who were creating mayhem across the city on August 31. Radicalized men lit fires, sprayed anti-China graffiti on walls, and smashed or burned shops or restaurants that were perceived to have a connection with mainland China.

I was moving with a group on Hong Kong Island, while other contacts and colleagues were with groups elsewhere. ALL my peaceful protester friends were wise enough to stay well away. 

 

FIREBOMBS IN TST

At about 10:05 pm, radical protesters with petrol bombs retreated north from Tsim Sha Tsui along Nathan Road to Mong Kok, where they moved onto the middle of the main road to create a blockage. 

One group broke away and entered Mong Kong MTR station with the aim of destroying the machinery. They used a hammer and an iron pole.

They then located the control room and smashed the main glass panel.

Within minutes, the vandals had attracted supporters, and there were soon more than 100 people in black at the station.

MTR staff called the police, but the protesters ran for the shadows. Police arrived minutes later, but the trouble appeared to have evaporated.

By 10.30 pm, the station was quiet again, with staff emerging to sweep up the debris.

 

WHERE HAD THEY GONE?

What rail staff didn���t know is that some or all of the members of the violent group hadn���t left���they had simply moved down the escalators and slipped onto a train.

For passengers already on the trains, the radical protesters were easy to spot, exhilarated young people dressed in black with masks and helmets and backpacks filled with clinking objects.

But there was soon simmering tension between the members of the public and the protesters.

At 10:42 pm, members of the Hong Kong public got into a verbal altercation with the protesters on one particular train in the tunnel approaching Prince Edward Station.

A SLAPPED FACE

A young male protester slapped the face of a middle-aged man who had scolded him. This incident was caught on camera by someone else in the carriage.

A few other passengers in the train remonstrated with the radical protesters, who responded angrily. This quickly devolved into a physical brawl in that carriage.

A group of four men and a woman surrounded an elderly man and fought with him (above). The woman, wearing a black mask and green gloves saw they were being filmed and broke away from the group to place her hand across the camera lens.

Other passengers, horrified by the violence, could be seen quickly leaving the train as soon as it had arrived at platform number three at Prince Edward Station.

Normally, train stops are very short���but the driver found himself unable to close the doors. 

Witnesses saw that some protesters had left the carriage but were holding the doors open while continuing the fight they had had with the passengers.

WAVING A HAMMER

Several protesters re-entered the carriage to hit passengers with umbrellas. They also used iron poles and fire extinguishers. One was photographed waving a hammer���perhaps the same one used to smash the control room window.

They then stepped out of the carriage a second time, but turned to throw water bottles and umbrellas into the train at the passengers inside.

The verbal dispute continued, with the doors still being jammed open, and the driver frantically calling his colleagues on his intercom for help.

At this time, some protesters again entered the carriage, focusing their attention specifically on the middle-aged passenger they had slapped earlier in the fighting. He fought back, but most other passengers had fled by this time.

 

FIRE EXTINGUISHER

After administering this punishment, the protesters left the carriage yet again.

One person was seen taking a fire extinguisher and standing on the platform, discharging the contents behind him into the train compartment, filling the carriage with a thick fog.

At this time they noticed a woman standing on the platform recording what was happening on a mobile phone. A group of them grabbed her.

She resisted but was outnumbered and her camera phone taken from her. Many passengers dialed 999---more than 50 calls were received by emergency telephone operators calling for police to come to Prince Edward Station.

 

CHANGING INTO REGULAR CLOTHES        

The protesters, after some discussion, moved to the far corner of the platform, stripped off their black clothes, and put on ordinary clothing, some dressing in white tops or other colors to appear as regular passengers.

 They did this behind a makeshift wall of umbrellas. However the scene was partly captured by video cameras.

Also by this time, members of the public were hurrying to the escalators to get as far away as possible, while others moved to the opposite end of the train from the protesters.

Someone entered the train on the opposite platform (number four) and pulled the emergency alarm.

 

SMOKE SEEN

MTR staff noticed smoke or gas of some sort coming out of a carriage and again called the police and fire service. (All this took place in a chaotic eight-minute period between 10:42 and 10:50 pm.)

By 10:50 pm, riot officers in the vicinity were heading to Prince Edward Station. They had been told to go down to platform three-four to arrest the radicals, and render whatever assistance was needed to passengers who had been beaten or robbed.

 

CLOSING THE STATION

At about this time, a police officer suggested to MTR executives that the service, despite it being one of Hong Kong���s busiest lines, should be halted.

But staff were reluctant to do so, and instead said they would prefer to maintain service on the line but get trains to bypass Prince Edward Station, so no innocent passengers could end up at risk.

The station could be closed, but with trains allowed to pass through without stopped.

 

ALL PASSENGERS ASKED TO LEAVE

At 10:53 pm, the MTR staff used the public address system to ask any remaining passengers to leave the trains and the station immediately.

A number of travellers disembarked at this time and headed to the escalators that would lead to the surface.

Minutes later, once  the passengers were out, station gates were locked and or guarded to prevent people entering or re-entering. The place was quickly secured.

Inside the station, police moved rapidly down the escalator. Three minutes later, at 10:56 pm, they reached platforms three and four.

Protesters, some of whom had not fully changed clothes, spotted them arriving and started running, some along the platform, and others moving into and through the trains, which were stationary on both sides.

Officers used foam weapons and batons to try to catch the fleeing protesters.

Some would later complain that officers grabbed them roughly, but there is really no other way to seize someone running away from you.

Officers succeeded in detaining a number of protesters, and assembled them seated on the ground.

One young man in a black t-shirt leapt to his feet and ran along the platform. Police tried to give chase, but a young man in green (see above) attacked them with an umbrella, distracting them just long enough for the youth to jump over the side of an escalator (picture below) and run up it.

From the train that was stationary on platform four, at least ten protesters attacked police with ���sharp objects��� and umbrellas.

Police ordered protesters out of the trains on both platforms.

While some protesters were now in regular clothing, appearing to be normal passengers, officers could see a number still dressed in black clothes, with the telltale masks, helmets and backpacks.

Some of the protesters flatly refused to leave the trains and altercations followed, in which officers used batons and pepper spray.

In some cases, police had to enter the carriages to pull the protesters out.

Some politicians would later say that the police did not limit their actions to people dressed as protesters and may have hurt innocent passengers. This may well be true, and in hindsight, mistakes may well have been made. It was not easy to differentiate between protesters who had changed clothes, and regular passengers who may have chosen to remain.

However, other people have pointed out that the shared videos show that a number of the "passengers attacked" were young people hiding masks and other protester equipment in their bags.

But whether all the people subdued were protesters or not, it is  important to remember that no live guns were used. Police used batons and one pointed a rubber or sponge projectile-launcher at protesters on the train at platform four.

One famous image/ video clip (below) would be widely distributed by opposition politicians as "passengers being brutally attacked", while other observers pointed out that the individuals may have been radical protesters resisting arrest, given the equipment they dropped--masks, umbrella, and helmet. 

 

Police succeeded in detaining all the remaining protesters. Given the amount of fighting that had taken place, and the potential for injury, officers decided to declare platforms three and four to be a crime scene, and asked reporters to leave. They also called for ambulances, in case anyone needed medical help.

 

FIREFIGHTERS ARRIVE

At 11:06 pm, fire service officers arrived in response to calls about the smoke seen on the platforms. They arrived at Exit B1, which was locked, and, having cutters with them, simply broke in.

At 11:10 pm, MTR chiefs made the decision to suspend all train services on both the Kwun Tong Line and the Tsuen Wan Line.

Two minutes after that, fire officers reported back to their headquarters that they were satisfied that there was no fire at Prince Edward Station.

Ambulance workers arrived at Exit B1 at 11:14 pm, but the police officer guarding the gates said that he believed that no one had been injured inside the station. This turned out to be incorrect.

Separately, another ambulance crew responding to calls from passengers who had seen protesters beating people on the train, also arrived at the station���reaching Exit E at 11:17 pm.

MTR staff were guarding that gate, but allowed the ambulance staff to slip inside.

Down on the two platforms, there was continued lack of clarity for some time about the number of injured people. At first, emergency workers thought it was seven, but then added two, taking the total to nine.

Soon after midnight, fire service officers, police, ambulance staff, and MTR staff met for a discussion near the gate.

A probationary ambulance officer wrote down that the number of individuals needing attention was 10.

 

CROWD GATHERS ABOVE

Meanwhile, above ground, a large crowd of protesters had gathered outside Prince Edward Station, having read on the LIHKG online bulletin board about problems on the train.

The post did not mention the presence of protesters at all, painting the incident as a repeat of the ���gangster attack��� on innocent passengers at Yuen Long MTR station on July 21.

���Crazy, after getting into Prince Edward Station, police officers hit whoever they saw,��� an LIHKG user wrote.

So the actual story, which was that a lengthy fight between protesters and passengers had caused the police to be summoned, was changed into a different tale on LIHKG ��� police randomly attacked innocent travelling passengers.

 

UNSAFE ABOVE GROUND

But back to the scene at platforms 3 and 4. The presence of so many hostile people above ground meant that emergency service workers decided it would be unsafe to transfer any injured people by normal means from the station to ambulances.

So a decision was made to transport them to another station, where the ambulance crew could meet them and take them to hospital. Lai Chi Kok station was chosen for this purpose.

The ambulance officer inside the station did a recount and found that the final count of people needing medical attention was actually seven���which was the figure he put down on paper in the end.

The MTR staff did their part by organizing a special train to carry 45 arrested protesters away from Prince Edward Station, including the seven injured parties.

It arrived at Lai Chi Kok Station at 1:28 am.

Escorted by police and ambulance officers, the seven injured protesters were taken to Princess Margaret Hospital and Caritas Medical Centre, while the other 38 were taken to Kwai Chung Police Station.

LIHKG VOICES

But, in the description of events that was now circulating on LIHKG, the fight was no longer an altercation between protesters and the travelling public but  a spontaneous attack on the public by the police.

���Police officers assaulted and arrested civilians inside Mong Kok [sic] MTR Station, which was violent and an abuse of power,��� an LIHKG user reported.

���Police officers rushed into the train compartment to hit people vigorously, like what the people dressed in white had assaulted others in the 721 Yuen Long Incident,��� said another.

This version of the story was widely spread in minutes.

The distortion got worse. ���The Police launched terrorist attack in Prince Edward Station, must seek international assistance,��� said another post, widely shared.

That was bad enough. But the fake narrative was about to get much more dramatic.

 

DEATHS MENTIONED

At 2:21 am, a netizen wrote: ���People at the scene claimed that someone had been beaten to death. Haven���t fact checked yet!���

LIHKG allows anonymous posts making wild rumours, so it was impossible to locate who was planting these fake stories.

No one who was actually at the scene was pushing the story about a dead person. 

 

PRESS CONFERENCE

At 3:00 am, police held a stand-up press briefing at which they described the events of the evening.

There were no discussions about deaths, or even injuries, and no questions were asked by reporters about such subjects.

At that time, both police and reporters were focused on the original story: protesters smashed up Mongkok station and fought with passengers on a train at Prince Edward station until police arrived and made arrests.

 

���SECRET KILLINGS���

It wasn���t really until the next evening, at 5:15 pm (on Sunday, September 1) that the alternative story about secret killings started to take wing.

A LIHKG writer wrote: ���The reason for closing the station was that the Police had killed several citizens, so the Police had to tidy up the scene.���

His allegation continued: ���If the evidence could not be destroyed, the scene had to be tidied up to create an impression that the deceased died of their/ his own mistakes or attacks by protesters.���

This was pure fantasy, but it was posted as if it was an eyewitness report.

It was followed by many other comments and posts on the same lines, including this one, which appeared at 8:19 pm: ���Seriously suspecting that someone had died at Prince Edward last night��� The station ended up being closed for one day. Undoubtedly destroying evidence.���

The planted story worked, spreading into social media.

The ambulance workers' confusion over the estimates of how many people were injured was presented as ���evidence��� of skullduggery.

Within hours, there was a widespread belief among some radical protesters that six people had been murdered by police at Prince Edward MTR station. This was backed up by reports from hospitals and mortuaries "confirming" the story.

 

���NO DEATHS���

The following day, Monday, September 2, a reporter at the government press conference asked Chief Secretary Matthew Cheung to respond to the accusations of deaths inside the station on August 31.

Cheung blandly replied that there were no deaths at that place on that date. All sources present at the event ��� MTR staff, police, fire fighters, ambulance staff ��� were in full agreement on this point. No one was dead, or critically ill or even seriously hurt.

But the rumor was now soaring. Funeral flowers began to appear in huge piles at the station.

Opposition members of the Legislative Council took up the cry.

This would continue indefinitely, with video allegations of the ���murders��� receiving hundreds of thousands of views, month after month, most with a breathless tone of a dark conspiracy.

EVERY MONTH

Lord David Alton, a British peer with an astonishingly high gullibility level, decided that the reports that the Hong Kong police were murdering large numbers of people were ���credible���.

A Chinese language publication, EastWeek, did a comprehensive study showing that all of the people declared dead were alive and well.

But for many people, the story of the 'murders' cannot be shaken.

Still today, a year later, there are funeral services for the ���six killed by police��� at Prince Edward Station.

 

 

Someone showed me a random video in which people put cucumbers near cats, and the horrified cats leapt away in sheer terror, sometimes leaping out of windows.

Watching it, I re-lived my teenage attempts at dating. Cucumbers: I feel your pain.

***

Your columnist was further thrown back to childhood by an Indian newspaper report that police officers are using catapults to fire balls of chili powder as a crowd control technique.

Well I did the EXACT SAME THING as a kid and my teacher denounced me as a troublesome brat who would achieve nothing in life.

Okay, so her prediction was accurate, but I should STILL get royalties, right?

***

I was feeling stung about that when a reader sent in a news item about a guy in France who is suing his boss for boring him.

He claims that the four years he spent at one company were so stupefyingly dull that they caused him physical harm, damaging his joints and brain.

My high school history teacher Mr. Mohan was so boring that you could actually feel your brain fossilizing during the class.

Once he scheduled a history double-period and not even the brainy kids turned up, knowing he would induce comas and then brain death.

***

Yet it is only now, FINALLY, that society is seeing childhood episodes as things to take seriously.

Following the success of The Anger Room in Texas, several countries offer ���tantrum spaces��� where adults can scream and shout and smash up stuff.

They quote psychologists saying that destroying property is ���a vital outlet for emotional release blah blah blah���.

Well THANK YOU VERY MUCH, world, for realizing this DECADES after I spent my childhood being punished for doing what needed to be done.

At last modern kids have the terminology to argue their case.

TEACHER: You just burned down the school.

KID: Destruction is a vital outlet for emotional release blah blah blah.

TEACHER: Good point: here, have this gold merit star.

***

Readers may have seen the US news item about an incident in Colorado when police used pepper-spray to subdue an out-of-control kid aged eight.

Some people said they should have just reasoned with him, but that only makes sense to people who���ve never had to deal with eight-year-olds.

Pepper-spray is the MINIMUM force necessary.

A preferable option would be to approach the kid with a bomb disposal robot fitted with a speaker.

���Put down the axe and we will send an adult in a hazmat suit to read Winnie-the-Pooh book to you.���

***

I reckon Asian boys grow up with the trickiest challenges these days.

In China, the folk tradition called Fu-Ji requires children to use a Chinese ouija-board to summon a female evil spirit.

But Chinese law says males have to wait until they are at least 22 to get married.

So it���s fine for a boy to call up a demonic she-devil, but marrying an actual physical woman ��� whoah, guys, this might be dangerous, let���s wait at least ten more years.

(Not sure if that is bizarre or actually very smart.)

***

Whatever. Now excuse me while I go dig up my catapult. My kids are running amok and I need to do some crowd control.

THE KIDS WERE NOT really listening to me so I told them that Justin Bieber had just been outed as an alien from the Helix Nebula here to kidnap Taylor Swift.

Instant full attention.

***

Some folks disapprove of my methods, but the fact is, there���s no proof he isn���t.

And no one thinks that guy���s normal, right?

***

The extreme weirdness of life these days was brought home to me by a news report I just read that a woman named Tina Gorjanc is using DNA from her hero, late fashion designer Alexander McQueen, to grow his skin which she plans to turn into a jacket.

Imagine her wearing it to a posh restaurant.

Maitre��� d: ���May I hang up your jacket, madam?���

Gorjanc: ���Yes, but leave the cloakroom door open. Alex doesn���t like the dark.���

***

I wondered why she would make a McQueen-skin garment instead of growing a whole new McQueen?

I also wondered whether I could get some Taylor Swift to send me her DNA?

���Hi, Taylz, instead of a signed photo, could you scrape the inside of your cheek onto this medical spatula and return it to me? Thanks!���

***

I posted that first question onto one of those websites that provide answers, and some guy eventually wrote that scientists were not actively working on cloning human beings ���except in China���.

This makes no sense.

Do they not have enough people in China?

***

The high level of weirdness in modern life was reinforced by a reader who sent a recent news report about a UK man who ���identifies as a vampire���.

The 25-year-old has legally changed his name to Darkness and sleeps in a coffin every night.

���Everyone has their beliefs and I don���t believe I should be persecuted for following mine,��� Darkness told the Lancashire Telegraph newspaper.

Being British, Darkness is a bit too well-bred to bite his neighbours, so he orders packs of human blood substitute from medical suppliers.

***

Forgive my cynicism, but that���s not really the same, is it?

If the Dracula legend had been about a guy sitting waiting for an Amazon delivery, the whole vampire scene would never have taken off.

***

One of my colleagues has just told me that she once interviewed a self-proclaimed vampire who said that blood tastes metallic.

���When vampires need a snack, they suck coins,��� she said.

***

The reporter also said the vampire ���was a pain in the neck, and interviewing her really sucked���.

And now you know why journalists have bruises on they shins. Their addiction to corny puns makes them eminently kickable.

***

The really weird thing is that a financial reporter friend told me that science may support the vampire theory.

A US company named Ambrosia (which means ���food of the gods���) wants to inject young people���s blood into older folk.

They were inspired by a group of scientists who injected young mouse blood into older mice and got ���signs of a return to youthfulness���.

I assume this means the older mice instantly became addicted to sending impenetrable emoji-laden messages to each other on smartphones.

***          

Whatever. Anyway, if Taylor sends me a bit of her DNA, I���ll try to grow my own and report back on the results.

My office door may be locked for some time.

 

****

(Comment below on or any of the newspapers where this column is printed or on the Facebook version of this column -- www.facebook.com/nury.vittachi -- thank you)

 

ME: You slept 14 hours!

TEENAGE DAUGHTER: I���m up, I���m up, see?

* Moves from bedroom doorway to sofa and lies down*
***

I���m telling you, this kid has life SORTED.

Conscious awareness is over-rated. No, really. It���s science.

Scientists just discovered a snail which can make decisions using only two brain cells, a report from the UK���s University of Sussex says.

***

I read that and I thought: So what? Male humans can make decisions after performing COMPLETE lobotomies on themselves using only cans of cold beer. (Mind you, the decisions tend to be uniformly bad ones, such as the ordering of more cans of cold beer.)

***

But that UK science report reminded me of the famous 2012 experiment when scientists taught a splodge of slime mold to navigate a tabletop maze despite having no brain, no eyes, no legs and no wi-fi access to Google Maps.

That also left me unimpressed: I can do mazes myself, usually. If I get one of the kids to help.

***

The scientists��� message is that conscious brain activity is not needed for most activities.

Welcome to real life, boffins. Any adult who has tried to get a child (or let���s be brutally honest, a husband) dressed and breakfasted and loaded onto a 7.15 a.m. bus knows that the absence of intelligent awareness is not a factor one way or the other.

***
All this is a blow to the materialist ���you are your brain��� school of thought and a bonus for the ���announcer is not in the radio��� school of thought, whose scientists say consciousness is a quantum phenomenon.

***

The piece of evidence that raised my eyebrows the highest was the recent discovery that plants have memories and can even count, despite having no brain of any kind.

Researchers confirmed that Venus fly traps know the difference between bits of tasteless dust and yummy visiting bugs by counting three footsteps before they snap shut.

Considering the astonishingly inability to count that staff at my local fruit and veg shop regularly demonstrate, I am tempted to suggest to the manager that he replace the somnambulant cashiers with a selection of plants.

The plants��� math will be better and the levels of politeness and conversation will surely rise too.

***
The findings also lend weight to scientists who say high IQs are an anti-evolutionary trait.

One of my evangelical atheist friends last week showed his spiritual sister a study ���proving��� that his type had higher IQs than her type.

She responded with a much bigger study showing that his type was more likely to be childless and die earlier.

Given his predilection for self-lobotomy-by-application-of-Carlsberg, that���s probably true.

A recent book by scientist Bob Nease explains why.

Humans process 10 million bits of information a second, but only 50 bits, which is 0.0005 percent, are devoted to logical thought.

In other words, hearts rule heads, and people who let this happen are more likely to survive and reproduce. Evolution, ironically, favors the sister.

***

SUDDENLY REALIZED THAT when I wash food by holding it under the horrible yellow water that comes out of my tap I am really just adding an extra dose of carcinogens.
Funny how we do things without thinking these days.

***

Case in point: A reader sent me a news report about an unobservant man who collected the wrong child from school. Joseph Fuller, 65, intended to pick up his grandson, but took an unrelated boy home instead.

The child, equally out of it, confirmed to school staff that the old man was his grandfather before going off with him.

Fuller���s wife made him take the child back to the school in the US state of South Carolina.

I think most guys would have just kept the boy and hoped nobody noticed. A kid is a kid, right? But I know women are really fussy about these things.

***

But the larger point is this: Thinking is no longer automatic.

Example: The day before writing this, this columnist was amazed to see ducks flying, having forgotten that it���s chickens which cannot fly, and (crucially) having failed to consult Google.

***

Correction. A colleague who grew up on a farm tells me that chickens CAN fly if you throw them in the air hard enough.

***
But then one could argue that ALL objects can fly if you throw them in the air hard enough, including pigs, elephants, statues, buildings, etc.

***

But anyway, the mental doziness epidemic is serious and it seems to be worldwide. At a court in Pakistan recently, a lawyer said that his dozy client, arrested on weapons charges, was not clever enough to know how to remove the pin from a grenade.

Even dozier was Constable Liquat Ali, who decided to demonstrate how easy it was by picking up the grenade in question and pulling the pin.

Fortunately he was not seriously injured in the ensuing explosion, although the judge was knocked off his chair.

***

You have to do things very carefully in court. A lawyer once told me he was in a court where people kept talking, so the judge said: ���The next person who speaks will be thrown out.���

���Hallelujah,��� shouted the prisoner.

***

Scientists say we have outsourced the work of the brain to our phones. Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone but refused to have one in his study. He was smart.

***

Social media makes us particularly stupid.

Every day we see people announcing that a Facebook quiz has determined that they are intelligent/ cool/ not a moron���without realizing that their decision to give credence to a Facebook quiz proves the opposite.

***

Last year Beatles drummer Ringo Starr did a Facebook quiz called Which Beatle Are You? And it told him he was John Lennon. Serves him right.

***

One day last week I had no phone for a whole day and walked through the world noticing all sorts of intriguing and curious things.

For example, why do soldiers on duty in airports wear green camouflage gear? Shouldn���t they disguise themselves as overpriced gift shops?

And why do we wash food in dirty water to clean it?

And is the girl I picked up from school really my daughter? She seems bigger than when I last really looked at her.

***

You can comment below, or send ideas and comments via the author���s Facebook page

Asia contains literally four billion people. So it���s kind of weird that every time I visit the West, people say: ���You���re from Asia? I met a guy from there once; I wonder if you know him?���

What���s even more weird is that I usually do.

***

At a writers��� festival in Singapore recently, the authors��� panel and audience were given five minutes to answer a question: What topics should NEVER be covered in children���s books?

The Westerners in the room gave identical answers: Nothing should be banned! All censorship is evil! FREEEEEEDDDOMMM!!!

The Easterners in the room wrote long lists of unmentionables including cannibalism, violence, politics, religion, sex, kissing, underpants, democracy, feelings, and so on. I wanted a second sheet of paper to list individuals and inappropriate vegetables.

***
East and West are SO different.

A couple of days later, a reader sent me a viral Instagram video of a man in Sydney who spontaneously tried to run up an escalator which was moving down at a high speed. The crowd, most of whom were using the escalator at the time, raucously cheered him on as he risked their safety.

In Asia, he would have been severely tut-tutted by observers and arrested by the authorities, possibly even facing the death penalty for Incitement to Commit Emotions.

***
Further evidence of an East-West divide came from the announcement that the US national spelling contest was won by two boys, Nihar and Jairam, whose names are added to the winners��� list: Gokul, Vanya, Ansun, Sriram, Arvind, Snigdha, Sukanya, Anamika etc. Families with Indian roots make up less than one per cent of the US population but win the spelling contests every year.

As a South Asian, I can EXCLUSIVELY reveal that we���re good at spelling because of our unspellable names.

Our version of Scrabble says that if your tiles cannot make a word, you can still get 50 bonus points if you use the letters to name your child. How else do you think we end up with names like Snigdha?

***
At the same time, Google revealed that the most searched for ���how to spell��� request in the US state of Massachusetts was Massachusetts. Internet conversations must go something like this:

ASIAN: ���Hi, where are you from?���

MASSACHUSETTS RESIDENT: ���Hang on, let me just Google that.���

***

Not that Westerners aren���t smart: they are far ahead of Easterners in cultural mores. A hot NEW difference concerns gender. Asians think folk should use the toilets that match their biological gender, whereas my Western friends think that���s an outrageous demand.

For example, four-year-olds at a school in the British city of Brighton are told that they are not boys or girls but can CHOOSE their gender.

This strikes me as risky, as small children change their minds all the time.

9:00:05 ���Do you need to use the toilet, son?��� ���No, Dad.���

9:00: 25 [dancing as we get on the bus] ���DAD! I need to wee! NOW! And I���m a girl!���

***

But I quite like the idea of being ���gender-fluid���.

For example, it���s well known that lightning kills six times as many males as females. Thunderbolts seems to seek out males.

If all guys dressed as women on rainy days, many lives would be saved. I might write a children���s book about it: The Day Mr Lightning Found No One to Fry.

But as it would contain cross-dressing I would have to ban it from my home.

 

I NEVER USED TO be a risk-taker but then I had children who would play in the dirt and say things like: ���Daddy, close your eyes and open your mouth.��� Parents soon learn what true courage is.

I���ve been thinking about brave decisions after reading a news item: a couple who got top score on a farm-themed mobile phone game took home A LIVE COW as their prize.

Game-maker Digital Media gives winners the option of taking their award in the form of steaks, but the latest winners, from Tunisia, took the entire cow ���as is���.

���That way they get the cow as a pet, but also have the option of turning it in steaks later,��� said reader Bernard Betts, who sent me the news item.

***

Reading it reminded me of a solo sailor I once met who went on long sea voyages with a dog called Emergency Rations.

He assured me that the pooch had no idea what his name meant, but it kept making worried eyes at me.

***

Anyway, I like that the cow-winners chose the brave option. The same could be said for UK university students who this month elected a cat as honorary president, I heard from reader Sara Padilla.

I added that to my list of unbelievable-but-true election results.

In 1967 a tin of itchy foot powder was elected mayor of a town in Ecuador;

in 1988, a chimpanzee stood for election in Rio de Janeiro under the slogan ���Vote monkey, get monkey��� (possibly the only honest political slogan in the history of the world);

and in 2004 the US public re-elected George W Bush, when it was clear to everyone else in the world that a tin of itchy foot powder would make better decisions.

***

Of course, you can also make life interesting by making original decisions on a smaller scale.

Reader Rajiva Singhe forwarded me a news items about a US business traveller who noticed a box on his hotel booking form form labeled ���additional requests���.

So Sean Fitzsimons wrote something silly on it: ���If it's not too much trouble could you build a fort out of pillows?���

Hotel staff did.

Now he always puts in offbeat requests (���I would like a photo of a dog dressed as a sea captain���) purely to challenge hoteliers and increase the amount of fun in the world.

***

I immediately thought of ���additional requests��� I could make for some of the hotels I stay in around Asia:

1) ���A bed that doesn���t collapse in the night���;

2) ���Edible food���;

3) ���Staff which speak at least one of the top ten human languages���, etc.

That should challenge them!

***

Anyway, if I ever win a mobile phone farm-themed game, I���m definitely going for the live cow option, whatever trouble I get into.

WIFE: ���You said you wouldn���t bring home any more large useless items.���

ME (covering ears of cow): ���Shhh! She can hear you, darling.���

 

INTERVIEWER: ���And exactly how much leadership experience do you have?���

ME: ���Does being admin of a Whatsapp list count? Because I had 20 names on one before I accidentally deleted it.���

He wasn���t impressed by that or anything else I said. I guess some folk have the gift of the gab and some don���t.

***

Amazing true story about someone who really, really did:

A handcuffed villain recently escaped from a police station and raced across town to another police station.

He persuaded them that he had escaped from kidnappers, so police from station two released him, received his grateful thanks and let him go���just before police from station one arrived to re-arrest him.

***

This happened recently in Taiwan, I heard from reader Steve Hyde, who was impressed at the man���s cool-headed powers of persuasion.

My colleagues agreed. ���People like that should not be locked up, but retrained to do something else, like work in public relations,��� said one, revealing herself to be an ing��nue who doesn���t realize that PR spokespeople are fashioned from animated slime like orcs in The Lord of the Rings.

***

The gift of persuasion was also displayed in a recent UK news item about a man whose shop was entered by a youth with used electronic appliances to sell.

The shopkeeper realized the stuff looked familiar but stayed cool and persuaded the seller to leave the goods with him for an hour ���for examination���.

He raced home to find his house burgled.

The unsuspecting thief returned to the shop later to walk into the tender loving arms of the law.

***

Cool talkers can achieve great things. People say the best salesman ever was a US guy called Joe Girard who sold 13,001 cars in a 15-year period. What was his secret?

He actually bought them all himself, cleverly hiding them in his garden.

***

No, he didn���t, but that���s what I would have had to do.

I knew I lacked persuasiveness when I was beaten in debates three times in a row by my daughter, who was three at the time.

***

Which is why I felt very sympathetic when I read recently about a UK man who cannot be even slightly sneaky with words���because he has a bionic heart valve which produces an audible tick-tick-tick sound, like a lie-detector.

WIFE: Did you remember it���s our wedding anniversary today?

HUSBAND: Tick. Tick. Tick. Of course I did, honey! Tickticktickticktickticktick.

***

I know one way of making an impression on people around you without saying a word.

When the barista at the coffee shop asks for your name, slide over a piece of paper with ���Voldemort��� on it.

Your coffee will be announced as belonging to ���He who cannot be named���, catching the attention of everyone around.

Note: This works best if you are have a striking appearance, for example if you are a tall, bald Immortal with no nose, or a piece of animated slime.

They are a lot of them around.

 

***

 

(Comment below or in the publications where this column is printed or, where most people comment, which is on Nury's Facebook page)

A WOMAN WAS SACKED for having short hair and wearing trousers to work recently. ���They said I was gay,��� she complained to an unsympathetic Labor Tribunal in the city of Guiyang, southwest China.

How could her employers get it so wrong? A pixie cut and skinny pants are what all the BABES wear these days. Only guys these days have long hair, handbags and Paisley pattern mini-dresses.

***

The growing gulf between modern and ancient attitudes became evident a few days ago when I witnessed a discussion on gender politics.

No one is born male or female, an American friend insisted. In evidence he offered a recent US court judgment saying, in an unmistakably skeptical tone, that the law should not give much credence to ���birth-assigned sex, or so-called ���biological sex���.���

This casual dismissal of science irked some of the nerdy Asians in the group, who pointed out that every strand of DNA in each of the 30 trillion cells in your body specifies male or female.

***

I could see both arguments but luckily avoided having to take sides by diverting attention to an astonishing gender-related news item which popped up on my email feed from reader Austen Au Yeung.

***

A wallaby in Sydney���s main zoo managed to make herself pregnant more than a year after her male partner had left, according to the Sydney Morning Herald.

***

The discovery followed soon after a report in New Scientist that virgin births are not only possible, but common, having been observed in snakes, fish, chickens and sharks. The belief that virgin births only produce sterile daughters was also disproved, the science journal said, and the findings ���overturn everything we knew about parthenogenesis���.

***

(The magazine���s letters page should expect a one-word email from a Jewish woman writing from a PO Box c/o Heaven: ���FINALLY.���)

***

I made a note to hide my copy of New Scientist from my daughters in case they got funny ideas���and then expanding mid-sections. (���Dad, you know you said we couldn���t have a puppy? Well������)

***

As for the ���trans debate���, I used to believe that anyone can use any toilet, until I stepped into a public restroom beside a wild nightclub in Pattaya, Thailand, and came out convinced that no human should be allowed to use any public toilets EVER.

***

So who can use them?

About a month ago, a US reader told me the true story of Ricky Hernandez of Phoenix, Arizona, who decided that he was really a transgender woman, and had a series of surgeries. After he had become Eva Tiamat Medusa, he decided that he���d made a mistake. He wasn���t a woman ��� he was a dragon. He���s recently had more surgeries to get scales, horns and a snout and describes himself as ���transspecies���.

***

The reader expected me to be shocked by this, but having grown up on The Sword in the Stone and the Animorphs novels, I could see the cool side.

***

If transspecies operations ever became available on welfare, I would wait until the next time someone called me ���a bear with a sore head��� and then sneak off to hospital and come back as one. RAWWRR!

***

Clearly skyscrapers of the future will consist of one small office and 95 floors of toilets, one per person. I can get over my Pattaya trauma.

FINALLY!