Thai Tales

Parliament voted yesterday to make Somchai Wongsawat Thailand’s new PM, pending royal endorsement and he has an uphill task ahead of him– the first of which is how to get into his office at Government House which has turned swampy from the three week long PAD occupation. The protesters there have already said no to any PPP candidate and the fact that Mr Somchai is Mr Thaksin’s brother-in-law is certainly not winning any hearts and minds…but what has captured my attention is the characterisation of Mr Somchai by fellow politicians from both sides of the political spectrum.

The world “gentle” has been used over and over and it’s just not an adjective too often applied to politicians. However, in the Thai context, this notion of “gentleness” connotes an ability to reconcile differences– a great contrast to the well worn idea that a politician must be tough talking or acting to get things done. Perhaps because Mr Somchai’s personality is the polar opposite of the man he replaced–Samak Sundaravej–the comparison is especially interesting. Mr Samak was someone who was brash, outspoken and considered by many to be rude–quite contrary to the Thai ideal of “gentleness,” especially when it comes to speech and etiquette.

I wonder how the adjective “gentle” as applied to a leader would go down in other political contests around the world? Positively or negatively? I can imagine some interesting responses…and maybe a “Gentle-gate” scandal!

And for those of you wondering about any legal skeletons in the new PM’s closet–there likely aren’t any as Mr Somchai was formerly a judge and is well versed in the letter of the law. I feel the need to highlight it since Mr Samak was disqualified for hosting a cooking show while in office–which has to be one of the more bizarre reasons for the resignation of a sitting PM in the annals of history.

It also spawned a thousand puns–this kind of world play makes us news people crack a smile.

So we can say that Mr Samak stirred the pot, landed in hot water, found himself in a soup and eventually got burned.

Yesterday I was shooting in Pattaya, about 165 km southeast of Bangkok. I was trying to find out more about the repercussions on the tourism industry from the political turmoil in Bangkok. There are fears that cancellations will severely hurt the sector this year, which makes up about 6 percent of the Kingdom’s GDP. And Pattaya was a nearby place where I thought I could get a sense of the effects of the ongoing crisis.

And no doubt, anyone with a baseline familiarity with Thailand knows that Pattaya is famous as an anything-goes-free-for-all place. It’s easy to laugh at the headlines in the local English tabloids which sometimes read like a police blotter. Organised crime, random crime, the sex industry, drugs–   you name it, Pattaya has a rep for it, though recent efforts have been made to make the place more family-friendly and certainly I saw the same kinds of tourist I would see in any other Thai resort towns–   families, vacationing couples and friends.

But what I wasn’t prepared for was the sight of something that is fairly common in Pattaya. In fact, locals say they hardly blink anymore when they hear of it….Stuff like this is an everyday occurrence apparently.

My crew and I had just finished an interview with a travel agent and we stepped out on to the side street when an ambulance drove up to a bar about 100 metres in front of us. The girls were standing outside and a crowd had begun to gather. A man had slashed his wrists in the bar. Suicide attempts like this and also leaping off balconies are run of the mill in Sin City. I stood back to let the EMTs do their job and also to avoid rubbernecking. My cameraman, who has been to Pattaya dozens of times and has seen events like this before, went forward to find out what happened. A bystander seeing his camera and thinking him local TV just said, “Wow, you got here so fast today!”