I found the news of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto incredibly sad.

She was such an inspiring woman.

There is an enormous hunger in the world today for powerful female role models. I know from my work for international women’s organisations that that is what women need most.

Working for peace in a country torn apart by violence requires a lot of understanding and compassion. Seeing that done by someone as strong as Benazir Bhutto has given me a lot of hope.

I read on Al Jazeera that Benazir Bhutto’s father (Zulfikar Ali Bhutto) had encouraged her from a young age to make a difference. He told her once that she will be more popular than Indira Gandhi - and even more successful.”

Benazir went on to become the first woman prime minister of a Muslim country.

This shows the power of inspiration.

Benazir Bhutto will continue to be a powerful symbol for women in the Middle East and beyond.

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.

‘Can you switch it off?’

‘What!?’ My puzzled look made it across the lush prawn salad I was eating.

‘Your accent!’

I was sitting in a restaurant in Napa in September having an interesting conversation with my friend Natasha’s daughter, Lana.

I seem to have this effect on kids. When my godson’s sister found out that I am not really Austrian, she almost cried.

As I wrote in a previous post, I have spent a large part of my life discussing accents. I have grown used to the topic and I am beginning to find it fascinating.

The years I spent in different countries have managed to make me sound different no matter what language I speak.

You should see the looks, when I meet my family’s acquaintances in Italy. Behind their perplexed silence, you can read in big letters:

‘Who is she?’ Is she really their daughter or did they get her from a Romanian orphanage. (I am taller than my parents, which doesn’t help.)

After several adventures of this kind, all concerning my different accents, I have come to view the whole thing in a relaxed way.

And I have started to pay attention to my friend’s voices. Their accents and the things they have said to me over the years are like the soundtrack of my life.

I am so grateful that I have some many friends from so many different places. Their accents are the essence of who they are.

Every time I miss one of them, I replay their voices in my mind and, by some magic, they become incredibly present.

There are people who seem to find comfort in the fact that those surrounding them sound exactly as they do.

I have not had this in years and it is extremely liberating.

I admit I have always been a big fan.

And I am not talking about a hunky Hollywood star.

No.

I am talking about a mouthless white cat.

There is something about Hello Kitty, the character created by the Japanese Sanrio Company that speaks to me in a perplexing way.

Yuko Shimizu designed Hello Kitty in the 70s as an expression of the Japanese ‘kawaii’ (cute-) culture. There are all sorts of products with Hello Kitty on them: toasters, bags, computer keyboards, slippers, scales, etc.

I have a purple shower-cap with lots of Hello Kittys on it. The sight of it in the morning cheers me up. (I need it, as I am not really a morning person!) I bought it last month in Italy in a shop that had all kinds of up-market Hello Kitty handbags. An Italian friend was telling me that, while years ago Hello Kitty used to be only for girls, it has now captured a more mature market.

I was relieved to hear that.

Apparently, I am not the only one to be strangely fascinated by a mouthless cat with a pink flower on its head. It is a worldwide craze. My friend Robyn is South Africa absolutely loves it. And I spent hours in a store in Dubai that had everything possible in silver tones sporting the Hello Kitty logo.

I read on Pop Cult that Sanrio’s founder, Shintaro Tsuji, was creating lines of products for young (I like that!) women, who wanted in some small way to hang on to their childhood. (This I find disturbing!)

There must be another reasons why I am so attracted to Hello Kitty.

The same site calls the little cat ‘Buddha-like’. I have always felt something calm, clear and comforting about Kitty. It gives me a feeling of home.

Hello Kitty alone accounts for half of Sanrio’ s world-wide one-billion-dollar turnover. What I find fascinating is that a product of something as Japanese as the ‘kawaii’ culture has managed to enchant so many women in different parts of the world.

Hello Kitty is such a cross-cultural icon.

I am on the look-out for other cross-cultural icons as part of the research for my book.

I watched the Wizard of Oz over the weekend.

It is getting dark and cold in London. And yes, I do have the winter blues. So at the moment I am trying to put up as many Christmas lights as possible and to watch as many cheerful movies as I can.

However, watching Dorothy make her way into the Emerald Palace reminded me of my years in Brussels when I used to work with the European Union.

I am a great supporter of multilateral institutions and the role they play in guaranteeing peace.

But there is something strange about them. The more acquainted you become with their inner workings, the more they remind you of the Emerald Palace.

People like Dorothy and her friends come from far away asking for decisions that would make a big difference in their daily lives. But what they often get are empty speeches sprinkled with byzantine terms that would have made the Wizard of Oz jealous.

And all the time while I was working in Brussels I had the feeling that real life was waiting for me at the doors of the Emerald Palace.

Like in the case of the Wicked Witch of the West, real life was writing in big letters in the sky ‘Surrender Silvia’.

The Wizard of Oz has a happy ending. Like Dorothy, I survived and I am now in London. I guess it pays to follow the yellow brick road.

I know it sounds strange but I don’t recall ever feeling homesick.

At the age of ten, my parents sent me to a Kinderheim on the Adriatic cost for the summer. I packed my favourite doll, Leopolda (my grandfather bought it the day I was born), and off I was.

I usually get quite puzzled when I am asked at dinner parties:

‘So where is home for you?’

I blank out for a couple of seconds and just stare. By the end of the two seconds my dinner companion will already have started feeling uncomfortable, suspecting some tearful story.

But my silence has more to do with the fact that the answer to this questions is a difficult one.

My home is in London where I live now. It is also in northern Italy where my family still lives. The home of my memories is in the Austrian Alps where I spent my student years. And the home of my spirit is in Prague.

I have tried to simplify my answer but it is not easy.

I have thought about my evident inability to feel homesick.

It must have something to do with the fact that I deal with so many people in different parts of the world and home for me is made up of different places.

This might mean that you are in many places at the same time, so that when you travel they are always following you.

This makes me think of the quantum theory of multiple universes developed by Hugh Everett. I just read an article about it in the Scientific American.

According to Everett, the world tends to split into many universes, one universe for each different possibility. The universe you find yourself in depends on the choice you have made.

It reminds me of my friend Christine who worked with me in Prague. She would often get confused and disoriented and thought that it was because, if you lived in Prague, you were able to feel the existence of the parallel universes and you were suddenly aware of all the choices.

I promise I will not go into this at the next dinner party.

Photo: thanks to hshpgraphics.com

I believe I saw Mozart’s ghost one night in Prague.

It was in a little street off the road that connects Wenceslas Square with the Old Town Square. He was wearing a long, dark cape and one of those 18th century hats. There was a comforting lightness about him.

I remembered this the other day when I was interviewing soprano Anna-Maria Rincon.

Anna-Maria was telling me how much she loves Vivaldi and the spirit of Venice expressed in his music.

I feel the same about Mozart and Prague.

Close your eyes and listen to Mozart’s ‘Prager’ symphony. You can see the hills of South Bohemia stretch in front of you. And you feel as if you were in an 18th century carriage, looking through a velvet curtain at the fields, the apple threes. All that beauty makes your heart ache.

But my favourite piece in the whole wide world is the first movement of Mozart’s Requiem, Introitus: Requiem aeternam.

It is as if it had been written for my soul.

Sometimes when I am really stressed, I listen to it and in a second I have forgotten where I am. I am back in Prague.

My spirit is free to soar higher and higher. Like curling incense smoke, it follows the shape of Prague’s thousand spires and disappears high up in the snowy Bohemian sky.

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

I was watching ‘Das Leben der Anderen’ (The lives of others) over the weekend.

This story set in former GDR is a masterpiece of German cinema. So powerful that it brought me back to my first years in Czechoslovakia.

The film is permeated by a feeling of fear and lingering mistrust that I can remember from the early 90s in Prague. The Berlin Wall had come down but trust remained a rare commodity.

I remember how I spent innumerable hours drinking Turkish coffee (the only kind you would get in Prague in those days) and talking to people off the record before I could conduct a real interview with them. They needed to figure out who I really was before they could decide whether to trust me or not.

I know this must sound like the most time-consuming form of journalism you’ve ever come across. But those very different times. And it really was the best school if you wanted to learn how to relate to people from another culture.

Watching “Das Leben der Anderen” got me thinking again about the issue of trust.

The problem is that trust means different things to different people. Your relationship with trust as a value depends on the experiences you have had over the years, on the way you have been treated by other people.

My years in Eastern Europe have made me very aware of the traumas societies and groups of individuals go through. And this awareness keeps coming in handy every time I have to conduct seminars in situations connected with corporate restructurings, mergers and other traumatic corporate experiences.

I do believe that learning how to gain trust is an important starting point in cross-cultural communications.

It was a survivor of the Bosnian war who taught me this. It is a lesson I will never forget. I have shared this story with my listeners at the Brand New World Telesummit.

I struggled for years with Slavic languages (Czech in my case) and I can really feel for Tony Henry.

The British opera singer opened the Euro 2008 qualifier (England against Croatia) by singing the Croat national anthem ‘Lijepa Nasa Domovino’ (Our beautiful homeland).

However, instead of singing ‘Mila kuda si planina’ (You know my dear how we love your mountains), he sang ‘Mila kura si planina’ translated as ‘My dear, my penis is a mountain’.

The Croat footballers were grinning of course. And poor Tony Henry is now being blamed by British fans for helping the enemy to relax and win the game!

Slavic languages aren’t easy, Tony. Believe me. I know how you feel.

And so does Jimmy Carter.

On one of his visit to Poland, the former US president was assigned an interpreter who spoke fluent Russian but little Polish. He promptly turned Carter’s ‘I am happy to be back in Poland’ into something a bit too warm even for the Slavic soul: ‘I have great lust for the Polish people’.

On her visits to Prague in the 90s, former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright always made a point of correcting her Czech interpreters (she spoke Czech as a child).

I used to find this a bit extreme, but hey, who can blame her?