Popagandhi

After a long hiatus, we’re (finally) back with new Fortylove.tv videos.

This week: we go to Belgium in search of some of the best beers in the world at Brouwerij Westvleteren, where Trappist monks still produce beer according to ancient recipes.

Next week: we circle back to Dubai to feature Hiba Rasheed, the Sudanese spoken word poet (and sometimes rapper) about life in Dubai, displacement, and music.

For now, check out May Yee’s beer road trip across Belgium (with her hot blonde beer historian friend in tow)!

And if you haven’t heard, we’re giving away Creative Vados, Mandarina Duck bags and Wallpaper City Guides in our travel photo contest! You have two more weeks to hit us with your best shot.

It’s Friday morning, 8 am — the weekend for me. I haven’t slept, I haven’t left the office, which just means there’s a new eps on fortylove tv.

The premise was pure genius. Take an Indian auto-rickshaw. Put foreigner inside. Make foreigner drive 1000 kilometres to the southernmost tip of India in it. I had to do it.

For now, part 1 of my Chennai episodes (there are 3), Week 4: Baby, You Can Pimp My Shaw. I’ve wanted to do this for years, and a few weeks ago I managed to go hang out with the rickshaw crew. Tamil hiphop, a garage, dozens of rickshaws, and cans of pink and silver paint. What gives?

New episode on fortylove.tv: if every member of British royal family were to be a drink, what would they be? Our friend Mickael Perron, a champion mixologist — some of you may be a fan: he’s sometimes in Singapore’s cocktail institution, Klee, but mostly at various bars around London — shows us how guerrilla bar-tending is done around London’s key monarchy sites. He mixes them up on the spot and tells us how to make “The Queen E”.

A trailer:

This week and next, only at fortylove.tv.

Forty videos, twenty weeks. Begins now at fortylove.tv.

Is English food really bad? Is Dubai really all about malls, construction, and refrigerated beaches and indoor ski resorts? Who in their right mind would travel 1000 kilometres by auto rickshaw in India? (No one, except the 27 contestants of the Rickshaw Challenge.. and.. me, it seems.) What kind of drinks would world champion mixologists prescribe for every member of the British royal family? What on earth is Kollywood? Tollywood? Mollywood?

It’s not 100% if you’re nit-picky (and we are) since we’re writing, shooting, editing, doing marketing and PR and all that ourselves (in addition to travelling and having day jobs), but we’re as good as gold and so are our videos: in the first one, an intro, Z flaunts her Malay and Turkish, Steve tries to speak Tamil, my Malayali boss waves an Indian flag, and other unfortunate people speak an array of unrecognizable languages as we plucked them off the streets and parties in London and Dubai.

The real fun, however, begins in a few days. I’m off to spend my New Year weekend with the folks in Chennai to shoot an episode with the Rickshaw Challenge and Pimp My Shaw folks, and will take you on the set of a Tamil movie. M. has a similarly interesting schedule, so pardon us while we get off to a slow start and fix the not so fun bits before we take off.

For anyone who’s interested: the fortylove.tv site runs Wordpress 2.7 with a custom theme from Nathan Swartz. The man is a fantastic webdesigner who lives out of an RV with his family and road-schools his son, so I had a feel he would get the spirit of the project that M. and I dreamt up one night. And I couldn’t be happier with how this is all turning out.

But it’s not just about our travels. It’s yours too, so we invite you to show and tell. You can upload your videos to Show, and every week we’ll pick one to feature on the site. We understand not everyone’s into making videos (although we’re really expecting the whole gamut from phone cam footage to cleverly edited ones, we don’t care as long as it has something to do with travel, people and places), so you can also tell us what fortylove means to you in your city, or any one you happen to be in. We’re still in the process of setting up the nuts and bolts behind these, so while we’re talking to partners and sponsors (some of our favourite brands and people) about throwing their weight behind fortylove (all the better to give out prizes with), just feel free to fiddle about the site.

We’re all about the web. I truly believe we have come to a point where the web and social media have enabled us to do the sort of things you couldn’t before, not even as recently as a year ago. Using an array of blogs, Facebook and Twitter we’ve managed to get an incredible amount of attention and line up international press coverage. As we’re big fans of local music (where local is that week), instead of copyright music and beyond the Creative Commons we managed to line up a fantastic group of musicians from Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, the US and beyond to let us use their music. Some have even written good, original music specially for us.. because of messages we sent on Facebook.

Our artist friends have set to work designing custom postcards that we will soon begin selling on fortylove.tv. A large part of profits will go to them, because we love their work and more than anything else, wish the world could be full of better postcards. And you’ll be able to buy these custom made postcards from some of the most talented designers and artists from Singapore and Malaysia and beyond.

More on these later, it’s time to wrap up the year by shooting more, and travelling more.. and to go home. I don’t know what made me think I could stay away from India for so long, but I’m headed for Chennai and Pondicherry, and I’ve missed that country terribly.