Last Monday, besides being Constitution Day in Thailand, was also International Human Rights Day, and there’s irony for you.  

Despite the double booking by Chana Songkhram police that had given the same bit of road space to Hanukkah celebrations by the Jewish community, the human rights campaign on Khao San Road had been going quite well.  What are euphemistically termed ‘world travellers’ had been reasonably responsive in signing the petitions.  

But as the light began to fade, more and more of the passers-by were swigging out of bottles.  A couple of the more tipsy latched onto the prettiest campaigners and attempted to engage in long-winded and ill-informed discussions on human rights, which they obviously interpreted as the right to peer down cleavages.

Then the female guitarist launched on a rendition of ‘Imagine’.  The rights and royalties of Lennon’s music were donated to Amnesty International by Yoko Ono and ‘Imagine’ has become something of a human rights anthem.  But one Chang-clutching traveller mistook this human rights event for a karaoke performance.  

He decided to join in for the semi-falsetto you-ou-ou-ou-ou bits and the rumbling noise must have been Lennon’s body not so much turning in his grave but spinning at a fair rate of revs, so appallingly off-key was his singing.

And there was I thinking that this was just boorish self-indulgence by a section of the ‘developed’ world’s population who thinks that having the means and time to travel half-way round the world gives them the right to do whatever they effing feel like (a right that is somehow missing from Universal Declaration of Human Rights).

In fact I was wrong.  A restaurant owner on Soi Rambut called Janpen gives the correct interpretation in the Bangkok Post.  The article dealt with the imminent enforcement of a regulation banning the sale of alcoholic drinks on footpaths, in public parks, and in public areas.  Janpen opposes the regulation because, she believes, ‘most tourists look for alcohol on footpaths because it is part of the Asian cultural experience’.

(I should point out that Janpen is not perhaps the most unimpeachable source of wisdom.  She also says, ‘no one has come out to seek public opinion here before coming up with this regulation’, when in fact ABAC and Suan Dusit polls have found an 80% public approval rating.)  

But this ‘Asian cultural experience’ is one that somehow must have passed me by.  Perhaps I should get out more, but I can’t for the life of me recall droves of Thais walking down the street with culturally open bottles of beer in their hands.  

And if you want an ‘Asian cultural experience’, why on earth would you go to Khao San to look for it?  This is a place where every single widescreen TV is showing exclusively western films or Premier League football; where the computers in the internet cafes automatically load Facebook; and where, in a street devoted to pleasure, just about every Thai present is at work, from the cops to the hawkers to the heavily made-up young things of all genders walking hand-in-hand with the fat balding middle-aged men from Manchester.  

But sadly, I fear that Janpen’s view of ‘Asian culture’ is one that is shared by her drink-on-the-footpath clientele.  Most of them have had more educational opportunities than Janpen herself could have dreamed of (so that most can recognize a name like ‘Amnesty International’, which is a mystery to Janpen – and most Thai graduates).  

A fair few are on a ‘gap year’, a mind-broadening year of travel that is supposed to better equip school-leavers for the rigours of university, a chance to gain ‘real-life’ experience away from the cloistered world of the classroom and lecture hall.

So they get it from Khao San Road and the ‘Fuck My Buckets’ Full Moon parties on Haad Rin (when the electric’s on) and under-the-influence inner-tube drifting at Van Vieng.  A number of the more adventurous get so much Asian experience that it manages to kill them or permanently change their minds in a psychiatric rather than philosophical way.

And while a couple of hundred did sign the petitions, the greater number couldn’t be bothered.  I mean, who cares if a guy has sat on death row in Taiwan for 23 years on the strength of a confession obtained through torture for which the police involved are themselves now in prison?  Or that a woman in Arab Spring Cairo suffered 2 skull fractures at the hands of the military for daring to stop them ripping the clothes off another woman protestor?  Or that a community in Nigeria can no longer farm or fish after Shell’s pipeline ruptured 3 times in 4 years?

That’s not real life, man.  Go get yourself some kulture.  Costs less than a pound a bottle.