A large portion of the way I view my journey through life has been informed the movie Sliding Doors. It begins with a late-nineties Gwyneth Paltrow (as did most movies at the time, come to think of it) breathlessly running to catch a train when the doors are just about to close. The movie then splits into two timelines; one in which the character makes it into the train and goes home to find her life altered, and the other in which she gets stuck on the tracks and her life continues to suck. Eventually the timelines merge but it’s a clever metaphor for that big question that is often the root cause of existential crises in us all: What if…?
This week I came very close to “what if…?”. I was visiting Philadelphia for work and was meant to catch a train back to NY on Sunday morning when I decided to change my plans. In the tragicomic feel-good fat-loss movie that is my life, this is where the screen would split. In one screen, I don’t get on the train and instead have a nice day at a museum. In the other one, I die an ignoble death on a low-end train seat surrounded by angry commuters and pre-packed hotdogs. The train I was meant to take from Philly to New York eventually derailed mid-journey, killing some people and injuring the rest. I feel really lucky to have avoided it, and find myself with a new zest for life, smiling at the flowers on the trees and enjoying the sunshine. This mood, in my experience, lasts for about 4 days, and I’m making the most of the natural high.
The train I was meant to take from Philly to New York got derailed, killing some people and injuring the rest
I’d never been to Philadelphia before. I’d always thought of it as a grey city from the Rocky movies but it is really rather nice. Well, the parts of it I saw were. I was staying in the Old City, the historic part of town where the first American constitution was signed, the first American flag was sewn and they have something called a “Liberty Bell”, which sounds like something at a Trump rally but is actually much older. On one of my days there, I went to the History of Philadelphia museum, mainly because I thought that Tom Hanks with AIDS shouldn’t be my only association with the city. It’s a small place, not more than five or six rooms, and takes you through the development of the city from colonial days till now with a display of objects, paintings, maps and publicly funded videos. The language of the displays was quite PC (apologetic even), making sure that visitors know that when the constitution says “liberty for all men”, it really meant “liberty for rich white men” but no one else. There are some disturbing objects there, like slave-collars and shackles, rusted and grimy but still evil-looking.
Gwyneth Paltrow in the film 'Sliding Doors'
Honestly, the city didn’t have much to recommend it from the thirties onwards, which is about when its relevance in American history began to wane, and the museum kind of glosses over the last four decades by saying “Well, things got really bad but we’re now building lofts now so…here’s hoping!” There are new developments all over the city and lots of construction going on so they may well be right. It is also the only place so far that I’ve seen “Vote for Trump” posters and bumper stickers. I tried to go to the Philadelphia Museum of Art on my last day (one of the great collections in the U.S., thanks to gilded age collectors) and I made it as far the armory on the first floor when the whole museum was evacuated for unknown reasons. With that (and the news of the derailment) I decided Philadelphia was giving me a sign that out short-lived dalliance was at an end.
That was also the day that news of the Panama Papers hit the interwebs. The name is a title an ambitious journalist came up with (you can just imagine them hoping that a movie is going to be made in the near future), that refers to millions of documents that were leaked by a whistleblower at an offshore law firm that has helped lots and lots of world leaders move money through tax havens in Panama. The scale is incredible and has been a joint effort by investigative journalists from over 40 countries and involves over 70 current or former world leaders and their dubious asset portfolios. Our own PM Sharif is one of those leaders (and the docs refer to his kids too), who apparently leased a number of properties in London through companies registered offshore. I’m not gonna lie: I’m barely able to comprehend regular tax forms let alone offshore tax havens that go into billions, but I have figured out that the news is not confirmation of corruption as much as it is confirmation of the existence of funds. To prove corruption, there would have to be evidence that the money was meant to be paid in taxes in Pakistan but was sent abroad instead. Speaking for us all, let me just say it doesn’t surprise me that most of the world’s leaders are moving funds through what the BBC calls the world’s premier money laundering firm. Just as it doesn’t surprise me that the British papers have reported that vast chunks of the over 400 million pounds that goes to Punjab for education (yup, all that just for Punjab) has been siphoned off by higher-ups. I can imagine a bunch of the world’s richest are wondering “What if?” themselves this week. Chin up guys. Look on the bright side. You could have been hit by a train.
