Almost the first thing you have to do when you step outside Seoul’s Incheon international airport is to learn how to bow. Your hosts bow to you, you bow to them. You hand out your visiting card, with the left hand holding the elbow of the right and then you bow again. You bow to anyone who is even a year older than you. I had not taken any visiting cards with me when I had visited the city last year and had ended up feeling almost naked. Koreans are fiercely dedicated to dishing out visiting cards to any Tom, Dick or Lee.

Seoul (pronounced “Soul”) is a developed city. It’s the headquarters of Daewoo, Samsung and Hyundai: names Indians had rarely heard of till mass consumer electronics and the Santro became a way of life. The city plays host to one third the population of the country. Surprisingly, Seoul does not bear any significant scars from the economic trauma that came in the form of the exchange crisis. The effect of the crisis was similar to that of a neutron bomb – it killed only human beings, but left the massive structures, mammoth malls and office buildings intact. The Koreans have not only recouped with a vengeance, they have pushed the dollar even further back than it was in 1997 when the won collapsed. Apart from the traffic jams, Korea now boasts the highest number of suicides among all OECD countries: approximately 12,000 or 24.7 per 100,000 a year. (Japan comes a close second, with 30,000 suicides or 20.3 per 100,000 a year: that’s the equivalent of a small town evaporating from the face of the earth every year!)

The main tourist exhibit, believe it or not, is the 4 km-wide De-Militarized Zone (DMZ) that separates the two Koreas. This has become a big money-making machine and I don’t think the South Koreans are going to let it go so easily. Never thought you could get thousands of tourists to enjoy themselves gawking at a depopulated stretch of land enclosed within a barb wire fence. How come India’s tourism managers have not yet woken up to the millions of dollars concealed in the India-Pak Line of Control? It’s true that an LOC is not a DMZ, but tourists will look at anything, even if it does not exist, provided you just point it out to them.

At the DMZ, we were taken to see one of a series of 22 underground tunnels constructed by the North Koreans about 45 metres below the ground. Apparently, these tunnels – through which hundreds of commandos could easily pass – were North Korea’s way of clandestinely achieving reunification without Seoul’s consent.

Though the North Koreans are held to be without a trace of humour, they got the South Koreans on this one: the underground tunnels are to be found only on the South Korean side! The North Koreans have been claiming this is proof the tunnels were constructed by the South Koreans. The South Koreans are hard put to explain how we are unable to see any tunnels on the North Korean side: they claim these were dynamited by the North Koreans when the underground passageways were first discovered. But no one has access to the truth, since it is easier to visit the moon than get into North K.

During our visit, the DMZ was sold across to us as an ecological wonder by the military brass in control of the area. With nature left undisturbed by the human presence, and therefore back to its evolutionary pathway, the DMZ sported several unusual species that had found shelter there. Paradoxically, the zone’s borders are heavily mined so environmentalists who wish to commune with nature risk getting shredded into a thousand pieces if they even step on the grass. The propaganda machine is relentless from both sides. The yearning for re-unification is drowned in the propaganda cross-fire. “We have to love them and yet be on our guard,” says our tour guide. Fat chance love will prevail in such circumstances.

A more impressive – and less depressing – story worth relating is about the recovery of public open spaces in Seoul from the fatal embrace of the automobile. The present mayor promised he would, if elected, remove an entire flyover and restore a water body that had once flowed down through the city. Having heard about this, I was curious to see the actual results. I was completely amazed! A flyover of a couple of kilometres length right in the midst of the city had been demolished and removed; so was the concrete roofing that had covered the drain from public view. The drain – which we would call a nullah – had been converted into a permanent garden-lined brook. Around 30,000 city dwellers descended down to the brook every week to get their feet wet or to have a picnic. We did too.

One evening we moved to the flat of a Korean friend, Lee Seung-hwan, who is also assistant secretary-general of UNESCO Korea. He told us that every day in their huge colony, all the families themselves bring down their food wastes to the building’s parking lot where it is put into garbage containers for composting. Every week, the recyclables are similarly brought down and segregated and a recycler comes in and pays for them. The Koreans are successful simply because they have no servants and the people who generate waste handle its disposal themselves, howsoever important they may be in the city. I am now convinced the Koreans have something far better to offer us than the Santro.