About a week ago, I received an email from a travel company. Ordinarily, an occurrence such as this would elicit little reaction on my part, apart from looking for the delete button. However, this was not your standard-issue “Give up your life savings and shop like mad in Dubai!”; “Sell your first-born and go on a trip to London!!”; “Take off your clothes and go wild in Thailand” kind of mail. This particular travel company wanted to pack me off to Tashkent in Uzbekistan. This obviously made me wonder – why on earth would someone want to do that to me? Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for travel destinations that are off the beaten track – but Uzbekistan? That’s a bit like asking someone who’s expressed a fondness for food to eat that nasty chilli that can burn the inside of your stomach.
Maybe there is something to see in Tashkent, but all I could remember about Tashkent was that Lal Bahadur Shastri went there and he died. Tashkent sounded like just the sort of place where you’d go and never be heard from again. It’s the sort of place where one moment you’re walking down the by-lanes of a busy market and the next moment an unmarked car screeches to a halt by your side, the door is flung open and you’re knocked out cold and dragged inside. The next thing you know you’re right in the middle of an international arms-and-drugs smuggling racket run by an ex-Soviet army colonel. It’s the sort of place that would be teeming with shadowy terrorist groups affiliated with big-ticket terrorist groups, smuggling arms into Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and other strife-torn, unstable countries. It’s the sort of place that before you go, you’d be advised to leave behind some nice photographs of yours with your family, so that when news like “Argha went to Uzbekistan and was never heard from again…” appears, the accompanying article would talk about what a regular, happy-go-lucky fellow you were and have a smiling picture of you posing at a party with a drink in hand.
And then it struck me that I’ve never EVER read anything about Uzbekistan, leave alone go there or watch a TV show about the country – yet I had so many pre-conceived notions about the country. What if I was wrong? What if, after the dissolution of the USSR, Uzbekistan actually embarked upon a liberal economic policy that encouraged businesses to flourish, and was today a thriving, bustling economy striding progressively forward in the new millennium? What if Uzbekistan is not run by a despotic, tyrannical, egotistical dictator but instead has a free press and parliamentary democracy? What if Uzbekistan is not the sort of place your car got stolen the second you parked it? In short, what if Uzbekistan is not the sort of rubbish hellhole I imagine it to be? Just to see how right or wrong I was, I decided to list down my pre-conceived notions about Uzbekistan and then do a reality check on the internet to compare the results.
Pre-conceived notions about Uzbekistan (or any other Central Asian country with name that ends with -stan):
1. It is ruled by a tyrannical, ruthless dictator. Although he’s not THAT evil or ruthless or crazed that he’s made it to the news like Kim-Jong-Il of North Korea, but a relatively brutal dictator nonetheless, who’s been around since the Soviet dissolution.
2. It’s grey. I mean, like most Soviet/ex-Soviet countries I can think of, Uzbekistan seems very grey to me – grey skies, grey buildings, people dressed in grey or black, etc.
3. It has mountains. Not the pretty, alpine, tourist-y ones that people visit, but grim, ominous-looking mountains where only wolves go.
4. It’s lawless. It’s probably part of some nefarious network of international arms and drugs smugglers that start from Pakistan/Afghanistan, go across Central Asia, Middle East and then on to Eastern Europe; involving a rag-tag group of junkies, jihadis, ex-Soviet army men, al-Qaeda operatives and ex-ISI agents.
5. It’s barren. The geographical landscape of the country would be pretty barren – not much is grown there and there isn’t much of greenery.
6. Any important building/tourist attraction would be made of domes and minarets.
7. The economy survives on oil or natural gas – the sort of country India would try to hammer out a gas pipeline deal with that would subsequently be nixed by Pakistan.
Facts about Uzbekistan (as against pre-conceived notions, after some very basic Google work):
1. According to Wikipedia, Uzbekistan is ostensibly a democracy. In simple words, this means that Uzbekistan is not a democracy. Since its creation, Uzbekistan has been particularly clever about trying to appear like a democracy. Apparently there is a parliament but NO opposition. This is because political parties are allowed to be formed as long as they DON’T take part in the elections (go figure!). And a guy called Islam Karimov has been its first president since 1995 with his five-year term being extended each time it’s approaching the end of its tenure. So I was partially right about the first point.
2. From the images I came across, it isn’t particularly grey as a Romania or a Bulgaria might be, so I was wrong on that.
3. It has mountains – some ugly, desert-type mountains, others that look picturesque yet forbidding. So again, I’d say I’m partially right on this one!
4. Law & Order: Most countries have issued travel warnings to their citizens traveling to Uzbekistan, although lawless would be too extreme a word. But yes, terrorist presence is very much there and on the rise, and there’s a huge black market as well. Partially right again, I would think.
5. It’s barren – ABSOLUTELY so. The whole country is just mountains or desert, or both!
6. Spot on – any building of consequence in Uzbekistan follows the domes-and-minarets style of architecture (although I’m sure there’s a better, more official-sounding, architectural term for that).
7. While the biggest and most strategic resource for Uzbekistan is gold, energy comes second. This is because Uzbekistan is amongst the world’s largest producers of natural gas. However, agriculture, particularly cotton, also has a big role to play in the economy, so it would be wrong to say that it depends on oil and natural gas.
So there it is – out of seven pre-conceived notions, two are correct, three are partially correct, and two are wrong – that’s not too shabby now, is it? Perhaps pre-conceived notions are not such a bad thing after all, and I could pass off as an authority on Uzbekistan without having read much about the country, sort of like an MBA might do. However, all this relatively-extensive reading on Uzbekistan only deepens the original mystery – why on earth did that travel company want to send me there?
