Missives from Central Asia

While we have historically been familiar with Afghanistan and Pakistan, Central Asian wonders like Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan etc., began permeating common parlance only since the break-up of USSR in 1991.

Despite spending 20 years at the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and visiting over 60 countries, I missed the chance of witnessing Central Asia. That was when, recovering from a surgery, I decided to travel through three Central Asian republics – it seemed perfect for a short post-surgery repose. For, like those old Amul Chocolate ads, these countries are close enough to be reached with a short flight but far enough to be foreign and exotic.

That is how I found myself on an Air Astana flight from Delhi to Almaty in Kazakhstan. Air Astana is the official carrier of Kazakhstan and is named after Kazakhstan's eponymous capital city, Astana. But Astana does not exist anymore. Much like we see in India, about four months ago, the Kazakh government decided to change the name of Astana. However, contrary to our practice of delving into the past to find new names, Kazakhs chose to rename their capital by flattering a contemporaneous politician, Noor Sultan Nazarbayev, the long-ruling Kazakh President who just gave way to his Vice-President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev.

In India, we have not yet come to naming our cities and towns on our politicians; we do rename roads with the name of politicians though. Thus, we have an MG Road in every other city in India. We never call any of these roads by their full names. We call them just MG Road, short and succinct, that helps us pay obeisance to the Mahatma without really remembering him.

Kazakhstan could be a model for us in many ways. First, the many spontaneous protests that Astana witnessed when its name was peremptorily changed to Nur-Sultan were remarkable though they did not dent the determination of its rulers who went ahead with renaming it. Sounds familiar, except that in India, lately, protests have become a rarity. Who knows, in the new India that is being quickly built, protests might just become completely extinct.

Kazakhstan is a huge country, almost three-fourth the size of India; and, it is developing faster than our economy because of its blessed oil reserves. It has an estimated 30 billion barrels of oil reserves and 172 oilfields, possessing 3 per cent of global oil reserves – this puts it at among the world's top 15 countries in terms of oil reserves. Today, the country is rich and development is being bankrolled at a quick pace with all those precious petrodollars.

As I did not know much about Kazakhstan, I decided to read before leaving for Almaty. I picked up the renowned novel, Khasakkhinte Ithihasam, by the Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. The novel has been reprinted 50 times with translations in a number of languages and is rated as among the bestselling novels of South Asia. The title translates to, 'The History of Kazhak', and its English version translated by O V Vijayan himself, was titled, The Legends of Khasak. No doubt the book would lend an exciting overview of Kazakhstan.

It is a rambling, unstructured, storyless, plotless, philosophical novel. Even though most of its tortuous and incoherent metaphysical narrative eluded my simple mind, I plodded through the book with the determination of a post-surgery convalescent, who could not do much else but read. But, only after nearly finished the book, did I realise that O V Vijayan was not writing about Kazakhstan at all but about an imaginary village named Kazhak in Palakkad in Kerala!

I should have known it though; we Malayalees have this penchant for copying names associated with Communism. So, we are rarely short on our Lenins here and Stalins; with fistfuls of Castros and Che Guevaras too. But I had hardly anticipated that a novelist would transplant Kazakhstan, then a part of Soviet Russia, to rural Palakkad.

I then asked a good batchmate of mine, who had once been our Ambassador in Astana – it was still Astana when he was Ambassador – about Kazakhstan. Busy as he was, he had filled me in with a few details, but I must confess, I was not much the brighter about the country.

So, when I finally landed in Almaty on a flight from Delhi that had taken over six hours to fly the 1,600 km from the capital, as it had to fly around Pakistan who had closed its air space, I was completely taken aback.

As you descend in that Air Astana flight, you will see miles and miles of brown shrubland all around. But suddenly, like a huge oasis in a desert, the land below turns green. The green gets greener and greener and gives way to isolated houses, then to small clusters of buildings, and soon to suburban townships, on to high-rises, office buildings, apartments, stadiums, and miles and miles of wide roads of the city itself.

Though Astana, now Nur-Sultan, is its capital, Almaty is the biggest city in Kazakhstan and its main port of entry into the country. The city sits on a vast plain, a part of the Central Asian Steppes, which as you move further northwards turns into a full-blown desert.

What gives the city its character is the range of mountains that almost surround it. In the midst of the flatlands of the Steppes, the mountains crop up out of nowhere. It was early July when I was in Almaty, and summer had set in. But you could see the snowcapped tips atop those mountains from almost anywhere in the city and especially from the seventh-floor window of my hotel room. Those white mountains, they give an unreal silvery backdrop to the city. It is ethereal.

Almaty was unexpectedly beautiful and charming. It was an elegant city with beautiful people. With chic tree-lined boulevards, it seemed to be so very European. There was nothing evidently Central Asian – or at least with respect to my ideas about Central Asia – about it.

Though the Kazakhs are overwhelmingly Muslim, the city could have been straight out of Europe. With cafes, bars, coffee shops and smart restaurants lining the streets, it has a very European flavour. It reminded me of Paris in summer. There was a romance about it, a je ne sais quoi.

It was to me the Paris of Central Asia. Women in smart dark office suits getting back to their homes, late though the hour was. A group of stylishly dressed young women – in short tops and skirts – in a restaurant sipping wine, a family group celebrating a four-year old's birthday, a young couple exchanging sweet nothings over a shared glass of juice in a kerb-side restaurant, young lovers – occasionally, only occasionally, the woman in a headscarf, holding hands, their eyes expressing all that they had to say. These are vignettes from Kazakhstan that I cannot forget.

What I will especially never forget are those two huge burly men in dirty overalls, bathed in and smelling of sweat, digging the road with pick-axes, who – realising that I was lost and trying to find my way to the cable car station that would take me to Kok Tobe, a mountain top recreation centre – dropped everything they were doing and walked with me for over half a kilometre to simply show me the cable car station. And then, putting their right palm over their heart, they bowed their heads and said, 'Salaam Alaikum'!

Beautiful people in a beautiful city.

(The author is a retired civil servant, belonging to the 1978 batch of IAS. He has worked with ILO in India abroad for 20 years. The views expressed are strictly personal)