Whether it’s a long-haul transatlantic flight or a regional short hop, or even just a trip out on a local bus, the process of meeting and eventually talking to strangers, can lead one to use quick heuristics in sizing them up. Perhaps it’s our automatic mechanism to do so in order to pass the time, [...]
postcard from Banten I never learn. If there are two items you must not forget when travelling, they are your universal travel adapter and your watch. I keep forgetting either one but that is seldom a problem. Forgetting just a travel adapter means you can tell time with the other essential item, the watch; forgetting [...]
Where I dig into my archives and repost stuff I like. This one’s from August 2006, when I’d spent some time in both sides of Bengal. Nine in the morning, every morning — a chef in Sirajgonj district’s “only acceptable hotel”, the Hotel Anik (Residential), cooks me a breakfast of two parathas and two eggs. [...]
What I have noticed about being away, and still can’t shake off, is how mornings in each foreign place are so strikingly different from what one is used to; how different they are from each other — how foreign the word foreign sounds after a while. I like to believe it never hits you you [...]
Where I dig through my archives and repost the stuff I like. This is from 2007. Ask me again a year, three, or five from now and all I will remember is driving up, around, up, around, up, around, in the swirling clouds as the rain lashed at my windows and I feared for my [...]
Reposting stuff I like from the archives. This is from 2007. At the stroke of eight each morning, I awoke. All my days in India have always had purpose, and it was especially purposeful in Calcutta, my crazy, lovely, chaotic, I hate you I love you Calcutta. This was a luxurious hole in the wall, [...]
Reposting stuff from the past. This one’s from 2007. I’m a horrendously bad sightseer and tourist, that much is true. You have no idea how bad I am. I almost never manage to visit any of the attractions of the city — unless they’re glaringly obvious and utterly compelling, like, say, the Taj Mahal — [...]
I came to the Middle East to do just one thing: see a part of the world that I felt I needed to learn more about. Its language was alien, but familiar – many Malay and Hindi words have roots in Arabic. Its customs and food strange, but not dissimilar – much of the Indian [...]
My city is often made out to be a boring business city, sterile and lifeless. Not entirely. No amount of protestation at how we’re really unique, though, is effective in driving home the truth about (some parts of) my city — how there are bits you can really love, if you look hard enough. My [...]