I discovered that Thailand was one of those countries, like Sri Lanka and India, where memory of past lives used to be commonplace. Go back a few generations, and you find people talking about earlier lives with total certainty.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I arrived in Bangkok in 1980: I was 23 years old, and it changed my life.
Whether we live in Sri Lanka or Malaysia or India, the U.K. or the U.S., we face similar issues of understanding, remembering the past that has made us and seeing the future we want.
Just studying Buddhism, then meditating and going to Buddhist monasteries, talking to Buddhist monks, combined with the Thai people themselves, changed the way I look at the world.
That past is still within our living memory, a time when neighbour helped neighbour, sharing what little they had out of necessity, as well as decency.
I tend to live in the past because most of my life is there.
For a long time, I've been interested in cultural memory and historical erasure.
People don't know the past, even though we live in literate societies, because they don't trust the sources of the past.
I would say as a journalist, I would envision travelling to other countries that have had to reckon with their past and see how they've done it: what worked, what didn't work, finding characters that would tell the story of how that process was done.
I think my attitudes about the past are very traditional. You can't ignore history; you can't escape it even if you want to. You might as well know where you come from, and you might as well know that everything has been done in some shape or form.
People can remember their childhood, but events from four or five years ago are in a never-never land.