The dog ate my homework

There is only one thing that Londoners like to complain about more than the weather: the tube.  London has the most extensive public transport system in the Europe, and therefore probably in the world. It reaches everywhere. If you’ve got three and a half hours to kill on a Saturday afternoon, you can go from London’s further northwest corner to its furthest southeast corner all by public transport (I know because we’ve ventured to London’s southern netherlands by public transport from our West London home to see friends many times, and spent nearly as much time getting there as it would take to fly to Rome for lunch). But its expansiveness does not stop Londoners from complaining – often and bitterly – about the tube’s flaws: it’s hot, poorly ventilated, germy, ridiculously crowded at peak times,  bloody expensive (a day pass for London’s two most central zones costs £5.20) and frequently delayed.

Tube delays are particularly vexing for people who have their commute to work timed to arrive during the same half minute every morning, but on the flip side, tube delays (real or imagined) make a convenient excuse if your late to work (my nanny’s favourite excuse is that the Piccadilly Line was running slow). The reasons for tube delays are numerous, but the top one based on my unscientific recollections of 7 years riding the tube are “signal failures.” The second most likely reason seems to be “a person under a train.” Today, the Piccadilly line was running with severe delays because of “a person under the train at Earl’s Court.” The sad thing about this is that no one stops and gasps to process the horror of the announcement made over the loud-speaker, everyone just carries on with their journey with their neutral commuter face on.

For the past few days I’ve been listening to a series of convoluted excuses from MSc students about why they can’t get their essays turned in on time and need extensions, which got the cynic in me thinking that maybe the person under the train was like the proverbial homework-eating dog. Seeing as everyone complains about the train delay, and it’s simply inhumane to complain about a delay caused by a person’s death or near-death experience, perhaps London Underground uses the “person under a train” excuse as a cover for generally slow service, exaggerating the number of incidents (though this too would of course be inhumane, and a movie with this general premise caused protest in the UK last year).

So I decided to do some reasearch: how many people a year fall under an underground train, and therefore, how often is this likely to disrupt the average commuters tube journey? Statistics on this topic are harder to find that you might expect: the Transport for London website seems unwilling to give such information away, perhaps because they don’t want to give people any ideas. But I did some digging, and I came up with the following. 50 people commit suicide every year on the London Underground (a number that is quoted widely in a number of places) and a further 4 died accidentally (all 2004 statistics). Not accounting for people that attempt to kill themselves and fail, or fall and live, this averages out to one a week. And that is a lot.

So discounting the seasonal cycle of suicides and accidents, the average London Underground passenger should expect to have some tube delay occur once a week because of a person under the train, which is indeed very sad. Which made me wonder something slightly different: why does London Underground tell us this in such a matter a fact way when it happens? Maybe it would be better to under-emphasise the incidents, so commuters don’t become so desensitized. The reason must be to placate customer complaints about tube delays. And that’s almost as bad as exaggerating the number of incidents. Almost.

Mysteries of Ocean Island

Recently I learned that man is predisposed to imagine islands, to conjure small pieces of land that do not exist.  In the nineteenth century, maps of the sea drawn by the British Navy included more than 200 non-existent islands.  As the article I learned this in poetically described: “It’s easy to imagine how the mistakes were made. A dark band of sea fog is mistaken for an atoll. A distant alto-cumulus seen through heat is taken for a sea cliff, towering over a bronze sea. A hydrographer jots down the discovery, before the ship gets veered away by weather. The data is returned to Greenwich’s cartographers – and so the geological and the chimerical get mingled.”

Thanks to a family friend visiting London from the US via Fiji, I also recently learned about a very small equatorial island, moored in the South Pacific, 300km from the tiny country of Nauru, which itself is hundreds of kilometers from anything.  It’s history and present seem imagined as well: too complex to fit its tiny size – just 6.5 square kilometers.  The island has two names: Banaba and Ocean Island, the first meaning “stony” in the local language and the second (and contrasting) name given by the British.   Its remote location didn’t protect it or its people from the violent and material tendencies of the 20th century: the British discovered that it was rich in phosphate in the early 1900s and by 1980, 90% of its land surface stripped away through mining.  The Japanese colonised it during World War II, killing off a massive proportion of its population.  Those that survived were forcibly moved to a small island in Fiji, called Rabi, by the British at the end of the war.

So while the island is part of the nation of Kiribati (which my friend taught me is actually pronounced “Kiripas”), its people  live in Northern islands of Fiji, as an ethnic minority who enjoy limited political and economic rights.   Ocean Island sits there in the South Pacific, all but deserted, and with mountains of old mining equipment rusting on it.  The Banaban descendants in Rabi administer the island, and send money to support a population of about 200 people who still live there.  They spend an out-sized proportion of their limited income on Banaba because if they and their people leave the island completely, the government of Kiribati is likely to claim it as their own.

The question is why would Kiribati want a tiny, uninhabited, rocky island far from everything with no natural resources left to exploit? The answer is a side-effect of globalisation: climate change.  At 266ft above sea level, it is the highest island in the Gilbert Chain which forms Kiribati, a country which is at risk of being gobbled up by the Pacific if sea levels rise much more.  That makes Ocean Island an attractive place to imagine a Kiribati future, a place that is not at risk of becoming imaginary once again like the nation’s other atolls, dispersed over more than a million square miles of the South Pacific.

What it means to be modern

September 11th seems an appropriate day to open a new blog on globalisation, as it was the day that we all developed an interdependence complex.  Globalisation, which until then seemed to bring mostly good things to those of us in the developed world (who were insulated from negative side-effects of globalisation like financial crises), dragged something nasty through the door.   Terrorism on a globalised scale.

A book by John Gray, a political philosopher here at the London School of Economics, reflected on the relationship between September 11th and globalisation: “The suicide warriors who attacked Washington and New York on September 11th 2001, did more than kill thousands of civilians and demolish the World Trade Center.  They destroyed the West’s ruling myth.  Western societies are governed by the belief that modernity is a single condition, everywhere the same and always benign.  As societies become more modern, so they become more alike.  At the same time, they become better.  Being modern means realising our values – the values of the Enlightenment, as we like to think of them. No cliche is more stupefying than that which describes Al Qaeda as a throwback to medieval times.  It is a byproduct of globalisation.”

This, my new blog, which comes after a more than six month hiatus from the blogosphere, intends to explore globalisation in my life and the life of those around me.  I like globalisation because it is contradictory and imperfect: I write and teach on globalisation at the London School of Economics, the most globalised university in the world’s most globalised city, yet I had to queue and pay several hundred pounds to obtain a visa to work here because I hold an American passport.  My infant son needed a visa too, even though he’s only 9 months old, and an Italian citizen.  He was given 6 months to stay and put on a “watch list” when we came back to London from the US in April, when he was four months old.  At the time of course, he couldn’t even roll over much less crawl or walk, so there was really no chance that he was going to flee the country, but never mind.  He was on a watch list none the less.

So The Interdependence Complex is born, to reflect on and poke fun at the world of globalisation, today, September 11th 2008, 7 years after Al Qaeda, in John Gray’s words, taught us what it means to be modern.   I remember watching the events unfold that morning on the Bloomberg screen, and later live on the streets of downtown Manhattan as I walked against the tide of dusty humanity walking away from the ruins to get back home.  Who wouldn’t have developed an interdependence complex?