Moldova’s other choice

Posted on March 19, 2016 by Matei

Maia Sandu could be living proof that Moldovans don’t necessarily have to choose between handing their lives over to either oligarchs or communists.

A plane with the name of the country written across it. Creative commons license, Pieter van Marion, Flickr[dot] com

A plane with the name of the country written across it. Creative commons license,
Pieter van Marion, Flickr[dot] com

Much has changed for the better in Moldova in recent months — there is a new governor of the central bank after a much-publicized series of frauds which nearly bankrupted the government, a new interpretation of the constitution allows people to directly elect the president after about 15 years of only electing members of parliament, and a new voice championing reform, human rights, liberal democracy and the rule of law emerged from the chaos of winter: Maia Sandu, the former education minister.

Sources with inside knowledge of Maia Sandu’s fledgling political organization tell me she is going to formally register a new centrist political party some time in late April. They have so far signed up 6,000 members (population of Moldova: 3.5 million) and created six or seven regional offices. More are on the way. Chicanery from the current oligarch-controlled government is expected during the process of making the party eligible for elections, one source says.

To learn who Sandu is and what she wants, please read on.

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Another Brick Lane Tale

Posted on January 18, 2016 by Matei
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Brick Lane on a Sunday in August 2014. Personal archive

Much ink has been used on the topic of how the East End is now compared to the good ol’ days.

Of all the well-documented waves of immigrants that came here, Eastern Europeans like me are the newest. I was broke and friendless, having just been kicked out of a shared house in Stratford in February 2012 when a an old Bengali man gave me a room. Jakir, Hussain and other Bengalis from the neighbourhood often gave me work helping with their businesses when I found myself down and out. None of them ever complained about gentrification – on the contrary, they are better off for it. The value of their houses went up, the wealth of their customers as well, and E1, E2 and E3 became fashionable postcodes.

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The ‘silent secret’ app

Posted on September 13, 2015 by Matei

Before spending eight months as a night-shift delivery driver for a posh deli called Benugo, I distributed flyers advertising the Silent Secret app to children in Barking, East London, for a few hours in December 2014 as a means to some quick spare cash.

A few months after it was done, the creator of this app approached me to write him an article puffing his brainchild in one of the magazines I contribute to. This is how I got this story. Obligingly, I wrote an item and managed to sell it to a magazine like he asked.

Well, the magazine and the article weren’t quite like he asked. Private Eye kindly published the article in July, and I suspect the manager of the app now regrets calling me. If he hadn’t I wouldn’t have looked closely into what exactly his company does.

Now I’m glad I distributed those flyers, otherwise I’d never have known about this mess of an app.

While obviously not silent since it explicitly urges vulnerable children to “speak out”, the app turns out be not exactly secret either, since it does a poor job at preserving the anonymity of its contributors. The big question is why the Government put £157.9K of taxpayer money into it.

Here’s the Eye:

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Gentles’ Easter

Posted on July 5, 2015 by Matei 
-all pictures mine (full copy rights etc)

Celebrated the week after Easter, Gentles’ Easter is widely considered the most important holiday of the year by many Moldovans. This year it fell on the 19th and 20th of April, when cemeteries in all the towns, cities and villages of Moldova are coming alive with people laying tables and spending a full day with the family and the community eating and drinking among the graves.

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No Subject

Posted on June 18, 2015 by Matei

– Fluke Mafaldo

[cut up by D.C.H.P; from the deep drawer]

Before I had a chance
To know more, night left.
A mistake of madness
And long lost thought.

I simply got bored
Looking at time looming in.

Do you mind being strange?
So painfully sensitive?
Conscious of people.

Aware of chaos,
The universe looks
Little.

My whisper,
Words find me.

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Antisocial Behaviour…

Posted on May 8, 2015 by Matei
execution Anastasia CIupac. Full copyright

execution Anastasia CIupac. Full copyright

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I used #BBCAskThis…

Posted on April 10, 2015 by Matei

… to bring up issues I think have been as yet overlooked in the campaign leading up to the UK general elections. I have no idea whether the questions will be considered – I made them out in writing and the BBC said they should be in cute, video selfie format, which I don’t do.

Journalism is proving a harder addiction to shake off than I previously imagined.

I digress. Here they are, in case anyone’s wondering what a Romanian immigrant with no right to vote believes are important political issues:

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Clarkson bubbles

Posted on March 26, 2015 by Matei
The BBC is public sector, right? Original photo from Tony Harrison, via Flickr (creative commons).

The BBC is public sector, right? Original photo from Tony Harrison, via Flickr (creative commons). Cartoon by Matei Rosca

The dullard, out-of-touch communists from the BBC have saved my boss and most of my colleagues from an ass-whooping to end all whoopings today. But not for long, I suspect. There is something boiling in us all, just under the surface, and nobody will be able to hold us back much longer.

I was ready to go in tomorrow and unleash some country gumption on the snotty bastards back at the company where I work, in order to get a promotion. Now I can’t for lack of precedent.

I wish the BBC didn’t fire Clarkson. More, I wish there was widespread workplace violence across the board. A new dawn in labour dynamics. A new HR ethic, fit for the 21st Century.

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Profiling Guccifer

Posted on March 24, 2015 by Matei

Some more material and a few shreds of thought on the story and the hacker himself…

The other day Pando.com of San Francisco published my big feature on the Romanian hacker Guccifer, real name Marcel Lazar-Lehel. He is a fascinating character and a totally atypical hacker. This was a wonderful assignment. People seem to have liked it too, as it held the front page of the US edition of the Huffington Post for two days.

He hacked politicians and military brass, bureaucrats and executives, spies and diplomats, rich and powerful, actresses, footballers, singers – and sometimes their families and friends. In a twisted and inconsistent way he sought poetic justice against the NSA policies of mass surveillance, becoming a “vigilante of the Internet,” as his prosecutor Viorel Badea called him.

Anastasia Ciupac and I took these pictures of the penitentiary and of the village of Sambateni (see below). I think they evoke the hacker’s hopeless condition, his superstitions, and his misguided ambition to overcome his rural surroundings. Both his wife and him are spiritual but not necessarily in a Christian way. Many people from these parts hold faith in witchcraft, scarcely-defined divinity, astrology, the magic power of priests and combined forms of supernatural, mythology and folklore.

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No Land’s Man or How Not to Do an Election

Posted on March 17, 2015 by Matei

The 2014 presidential elections were a pyrrhic victory for Western values in post-Communist Romania.

Note: a Romanian language version of this article was published by Gazeta de Romania, a London-based newspaper for Romanian expats. Read it here.

Thousands of Romanians living abroad have been disenfranchised in the presidential elections in which the prime minister and candidate Victor Ponta first came in on a ten percent lead from the runner-up, Klaus Iohannis, who won by about the same margin after two rounds, meaning Ponta lost over twenty percent of the voting population in two weeks. Here’s what happened:

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