My experience of the Third World, again, came to a head, as it were, when we first went to that village. We were invited to meet the headman. The village had a headman, and we were invited to meet the headman and the family in one of the huts in the village. He had his hut in the village. We were invited and we shook hands, and that... and they were... now, would they be Muslims or Hindus? That I can't remember. They must have been Muslims because Bangladesh is... but not necessarily. It's a mixture. I don't remember which they were. But anyway, when you met those people, for all the formalities, you know, we were welcomed in the traditional manner. We shook hands and we sat there and we joined a drink and we were offered sweetmeats and then we all went about our business. But just after... just from that one meeting it was perfectly obvious that there can be no real contact between a westerner and people like that unless you live with them for years. You're not about to understand what it means to be a fisherman in that area, and particularly an area...

The thing that struck me is that, if you live in an area which is regularly flooded and houses are regularly washed away and whole families are regularly washed away and killed, drowned, you develop a sort of fatalism. Because if you weren't fatalistic and you're in that situation, you can't get out of it and you know that sooner or later the floods will come and your house may be washed away, and your wife and your children may be drowned. If you haven't got a fatalistic attitude, you'd go mad. You and I put in that situation, we would go mad, because we couldn't get out of it and we couldn't accept it either. So you have to learn to accept it, that you're in that situation. So that taught me a kind of lesson as to the difficulties of meaningful contact between westerners and people in the Third World.