I had my first Twinterview the other day.

Angelo Fernando of Hoi Polloi interviewed me and Yang-May on Twitter about the book.

What an interesting experience…. You feel suspended in cyberspace. You know there are people out there following you… but all you can see are your interviewer’s Tweets.

The fact that you have to limit your answers to 140 characters is a great discipline. It helps to organise your thoughts.

I have been converted…. I believe Twinterviews are great training for podcast and video interviews. Think of a 140-character answer first and then elaborate on that.

The toughest question, as ever, was about the reasons that lead me to write the book: “Was there a book inside your head?”

In order to answer that, you need to put your life in perspective.

Luckily, I am reading a book that has helped me to do just that.

If you began your career in journalism, you have to read Oracle Bones by Peter Hessler.

It’s a wonderful example of how journalism and writing helps you to understand complex realities and relate to people in cultures so different from your own.

It was a sentence in the book that brought it all home to me. Hessler describes his years in Beijing like a “floating life in a floating city”.

When I lived in Prague in the early 1990s, I often had the feeling of floating…. Oracle Bones made me realise that I wasn’t  lost… Prague was floating towards a new future and was taking me along. While doing this, it was also writing my future book in my head.

Never underestimate the power of floating…

My co-author Yang-May and I talked to podcasting guru Neville Hobson on Friday about the story behind our book.

I was asked how I came up with the original idea behind International Communications Strategy. To answer that, I had to dig quite deep into my memory.

It all happened when I was living in Prague 20 years ago. What they used to call the Golden City was such a great cultural centre before WWII thanks of the different ethnic groups represented there. The war and the madness that followed did away with all that.

I could never understand this terrible loss. When I left Prague in the mid 1990s, I embarked on a quest. I wanted to find a way that would help people from different cultural backgrounds to communicate and bond.

After that came my passion for understanding emerging economies and their communication models.

If you’d like to find out more about how Yang-May and I got to writ
e the book, you can listen to the podcast .

Thanks, Neville. And we hope we’ll get to meet your cat some day…

I believe that if you live long enough in a place, it becomes part of you.

This is why I was really excited to hear about an interesting experiment with citizen journalism in the Czech Republic.

I spent the first half of the 1990s in Prague working as a reporter. What made the job so interesting was not only the historic time (only two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall) but also the stories ordinary people would tell me when I was researching my articles.

Czechs have a unique way to relay facts. A fascinating mixture of magical realism and sobering analysis.

These are ideal components for the new venture launched by PPF Media. The group has set up a network of cafés in a number of Czech towns where people can go to surf the web, drink coffee and chat about local events with journalists who work there. The product is new type of reporting, which mixes the skills of professional journalists with those of the readers.

The network is coordinated by the “Futuroom” based in Prague, where seasoned editors work, adding national and international content to the local stories. The “Futuroom” also serves as a multi-media training centre and has already attracted the support of partners like Google  and the World Association of Newspapers. 

If I close my eyes and think back of the days when I was working at the English desk of a Czech news agency, I can see myself typing on a keyboard in the early morning in a semi-dark room with the snow silently falling outside.

Were we all working at an experiment? Did we contribute a least a little to the amazing progress that Czech journalism has made in the past 20 years?

I am humbly hoping for the answer to be “yes”….

Whenever I tell people than my mentor was a city not a person, I get funny looks.

From now on, I will be able to use the speech Obama gave last weekend in Prague to prove that I am right.

I was amazed that the US president and his speechwriter understood it so well … that feeling that makes Prague a very special experience:

“For over 1,000 years Prague has set itself apart from any other city or any other place. You have known war and peace. You have seen empires rise and fall. Through it all, the people of Prague have persisted in pursuing their own path and defining their own destiny”.

That’s exactly how it is. I don’t know how it works.

But after you have lived in Prague for a number of years, you get this feeling that, no matter what comes at you, you will always make it.

It is like an aura surrounding you (I don’t know how else to describe it). And you know you will always be able to face any audience or any vicious committee meeting because of this certainty that has come down to you.

Does it happen by osmosis? Do you get it by walking through the streets of the Old Town at night as I loved to do?

I don’t know but I was certainly thrilled to hear Obama call Prague the “golden city which is both ancient and youthful and stands as a living monument to an unconquerable spirit”.

“I don’t have a village. I am a floating person”

I simply adore this line.

I went to listen to a talk by Lord Meghnad Desai last night at the Ismaili Centre about diasporas and migration.

Having been a “foreigner” for most of my life, I have a strong interest in phenomena that turn people into strangers.

Lord Desai was talking about migration being at the core of human history. “We all came from East Africa. We all descend from Lucy”.

It was really in the 20th century that people began to insist on national identities. “By thinking in terms of citizens and foreigners, we have created barriers for ourselves”.

According to Lord Desai, before the rise of national identities people used to think in terms of clusters of households. But in the 20th century, “our imagination stopped to see individuals and families and began to see only nations”.

While I was listening to this, my mind wandered back to Prague. I heard the voice of a Jewish friend of mine saying how much he hates nations. And he does have a strong point.

Prague’s cultural and social life was much richer before WWII when they had a Czech, a Jewish and a German community.

All this is gone for ever. Thanks to people chasing national identities and turning neighbours into strangers.

Lord Desai also spoke about the urge that people have to create “locals and foreigners”.

That puzzles me. It does exist. I have often been called a “foreigner” and I have always found it intriguing.

I don’t really know what a foreigner is. May be it is because I cannot really identify with a specific country or a particular place.
I have always thought that nations create distance between people. Or may be it is because of what I have seen in Easter Europe.

No, I don’t particularly like the word “foreigner”.

I went home last weekend. To Prague that is, the home of my spirit.

Prague is the place where my spirit can roam free …tourists allowing.

I could not believe the masses of tourists on the Charles Bridge…and this in April.

So, I decided to wait until after midnight for my usual walk. No people in sight, just a half moon in the sky and the glorious might of the Prague Castle in the distance.

I began walking on the bridge and… it was like entering a cosmic cathedral. The beauty of the city is so overwhelming that I felt like a visitor from another planet discovering the shapes of a primordial world.

The statues on the Charles Bridge, dark and austere, blended into the night sky. They take my breath away. They look like silent mementos.

When I walk through Prague, the streets speak to me. I tune into the aura of the city. I observe the details on the facades of the Art Deco buildings and empty my mind. After a couple of minutes I have become part of Prague.

I am so good at it that every time I do this …a local comes up to me and asks for directions….

Like on Sunday morning, when I was waiting for the underground at Mustek station. I was a little bored so I did my tune-into-the-spirit-of-Prague exercise.

Less than five minutes later, a guy came up to me and asked in Czech how to get to Cerny Most. I remembered that it was at the end of the B line so I told him. I don’t look Czech and I definitely sound like a foreigner when I speak Czech, but that man was absolutely certain I could help him…

Mysteries of Prague…

Frank Kafka wrote in a letter to a friend in 1902: “Prague doesn’t let go of you. It doesn’t let go of us two. This little mother with claws. You have to adjust to it or else…You would have to set it on fire in two places, Vysehrad and Hradcani and this would set you free….”

I don’t want Prague to let go of me and… it never will.

photo: thanks to angelfire.com

My friend Daneeta’s feature documentary Tokyo Cowboys is about to premiere at the Japan Film Festival in Los Angeles.

I am so excited!

Tokyo Cowboys tells the stories of a group of westerners who gave up their jobs, homes and countries to pursue their dreams in the cut throat world of Tokyo. The film’s delicate and humorous portrait illuminates the price some pay for a taste of Tokyo’s success. It follows the trial and errors of its heroes’ quest for opportunity on this post-modern urban frontier.

The documentary reminds me so much of my years in Eastern Europe.

Some of its characters are like the confused expats I used to meet at parties in Prague and Bratislava.

It was all so surreal. History had just turned a major corner and we were not sure of the role we were going to play in it, if any.

Watching Tokyo Cowboys brought back to me that old feeling of being suspended in time.

So intriguing….so liberating.

The documentary will be shown at the Japan Film Festival in Los Angeles on April 14th. It is the only film in the festival directed by a non-Asian and the only documentary to deal with the subject of gaijin experience in Japan.

The weather in London was so miserable over the weekend that I felt like checking out how it must feel to travel to another planet.

So I watched 2001: Space Odyssey.

I was surprised to see that it has become much easier for me to sit through the final part of the movie, the one about “Jupiter and beyond the Infinite”.

That is when, to quote Wikipedia, astronaut Dave Bowman “appears to travel across vast distances of space and time through a ‘Star Gate’, a tunnel of colorful light and imagery and sound”.

I always had problems with these scenes when I was younger. I didn’t get them. They would unsettle me. I just wanted someone to tell me where Dave Bowman was going. Full stop.

On Friday, I discovered that they no longer unsettle me. Why is this happening?

I have been thinking and I believe that the fact that I finally got it, after so many years, has something to do with my living abroad for most of my adult life.

Moving around has felt like going through a “tunnel of colorful light”. You have to remain flexible. The places that accompanied you yesterday are not here to lead you into the next stage.

So you just watch the colors go by…

And every time I enter my old bed room in Italy, I feel a bit like Dave Bowman entering that surreal room with its Biedermeier furniture, so reassuring (for someone like me who spent so much time in Austria) but at the same time so alien.

And I do love Strauss’s An der schoenen blauen Donau . Like in the case of this movie, it has been the soundtrack of my life.

Listening to it gives me a sense of the time flowing, of an era that was better (but why did it lead to horrible things then?).

And I see myself dressed in a long pink gown attending a ball in another surreal setting, Prague’s Palac Kultury. It is the winter of 1991. I am leaving the ball and dancing in the snow on my way to the Nusle valley together with a friend…

Prague is awakening from a surreal dream only to find that it cannot go back to the time before it fell asleep. The Biedermeier room is gone. Only time travelling would help in this case…if only we knew how.

Well, I will be going back to Prague in April, for the first time in two years.

One never knows…

Photo: thanks to www.imdb.com

The Russian models at Jack’s parties were getting younger and younger.

Jack (not his real name) was a refugee. He had managed to escape to Prague from the wreckage of his American life and the many cousins who had lent him money over the years.

Jack’s parties were a good place to go to, if you were looking for oblivion.

Nikita had stretched out on the piano and was looking out of the window into the sultry night of a Prague summer that had arrived too early.

His blond hair was so fair, almost transparent. His pale blue eyes resembled ice-coated marbles. Nikita would have been at home in a Russian winter tale, next to vermillion birds with silvery feathers and ermine-clad snow queens.

Nikita and I were holding hands, without much conviction we were just holding on to the childhood we had never had.

From time to time, reality would intrude into Jack’s parties in a brutal way.

A portrait of the Czech prime minister was hanging on the wall overlooking Nikita and the piano. It stretched like a big yawn across the entire length of the living room. Jack had accompanied the prime minister on some of his travels.

Slumped in a chair on the other side of the room, Ben (not his real name) was nursing a piece of a creamy Bohemian cake.

He had returned from his exile to Canada and had launched the first talk-show ever shown on post-communist Czech TV. His mother had been a famous Czechoslovak actress of the 1930s. She had escaped after the war and had never been able to return.

‘Prazdne bity’, that’s what my mother used to repeat. Ben was talking to me through a layer of shattered dreams.

‘Prazdne bity’ means ‘empty flats’ and I imagined a beautiful woman elegantly dressed looking at Prague from the distance of her exile.

In my mind, she was so much like Libuse, Prague’s mythical founder.
Libuse had stood by the river Vltava one day and had had a vision of the glory of Prague.

But Ben’s mother had seen no splendour. Only empty rooms inhabited by disturbing memories populated by countless objects scattered across the floor by terrified hands with little time left.

Don’t let this memory follow you, my mouth recited as if an oracle was speaking through me. The time has come to forget.

I don’t know what made me say this with so much conviction.

Later on that evening, the reflection of my face in the window of a night tram didn’t look familiar.

Prague is the perfect place to go to, if you are looking for oblivion.

Photo: thanks to Suzanne Salvo and salvoatlarge.blogspot.com

Have you ever been so fascinated by an expression that you have become totally obsessed by it?

A combination of words has been growing in my brain like an inflated balloon.

I was reading a book by J.M. Coetzee. and came across the expression ‘body of journalism’.

I know it means all the articles a person has written throughout their career/lifetime. But to a writer, it means so much more.

It has something so physical to it.

Are my articles really an extension of my physical body?

Even if we use computers these days, writing is still such a physical act. You sit down in front of your screen and your entire body is concentrated on what is coming out of your mind.

When I worked in Prague, I used to write in the bedroom of my tiny apartment. In the winter, I would wear different layers of clothes to beat the cold my gas heater was too weak to fight. My entire body was struggling to stay warm and produce words.

Or I would write in the enormous news room of the Czech agency. Early in the morning, the darkness would embrace my body like a cocoon that helped me to go into my mind and dig for words.

I had a dream the other night after reading Coetzee.

Someone had given me a present: a silver broach in the shape of a bee. The bee’s body was a fountain pen made of glass, full of velvety blue ink.

It was so Kafkesk.

Photo: thanks to wikipedia.org