Irreverent, informed and downright eclectic crime fiction and reportage from Southeast Asia and beyond
Thailand based James Austin Farrell writes about the recent Delhi gang rape and violence against women in more general terms in the Chiang Mai City News. It’s the first time a journalist has quoted something I posted on facebook. Not sure there should be any greater meaning attached to it. Grim reading ahead. Hurting women
The Orissa Post, the largest English language newspaper in Orissa, India, has republished On the Tea Trail, the story of Makaibari Tea Estates near Darjeeling and the world’s most expensive cuppa.
Everyone has a good book in them so they say, Asia’s first English-language crime publishing house looks set to put that adage to the test. Mark Bibby Jackson interviews me about all things Crime Wave Press in this month’s ASIA LIFE Magazine, both in the Thailand and Cambodia edition. I get to talk about crime [...]
I have been interviewed in the October edition of Esquire Magazine (Thai edition) about my worst travel experience ever. Bit of a dilemma as I have encountered quite a few disastrous scenarios in the past 25 years on the road. But my failure to rescue a severely injured men in Zanskar (northwestern India), the subject [...]
Many Asian governments don’t like their citizen to discuss their country’s history, culture, politics or current affairs. Severe restrictions, both in the form of laws as well as unwritten rules, suppress civil society entering into a dialogue with itself. Powerful elites introduce taboos of expression that one may cross only at one’s peril. In China, [...]
In 2004, I traveled to Hubli in Karnataka, India to investigate a temple which allegedly still had devadasi, traditional temple dancers cum prostitutes. The Indian government had already made moves to ban the practice of enslaving young girls in Brahmin temples but old tradition tend to linger in India. I think this story has never [...]
Gone are the days when these kind of stories could finance a trip across India. This particular story Hampi: Ruins Forgotten in Time appeared in Lifestyle + Travel in a special segment on India in around 2005 and was republished several more times in travel magazines across Asia. Here is the entire pdf, also featuring [...]
Floating somewhere between the Hooghly River and Massive Attack, Tritha is a music ensemble from Kolkata. The band played a couple of shows at The Space in Bangkok last month and performed an exalted mix of Indian ragas and folk-ways shuffled around sensuously, with a dash of trip hop thrown in. Shades of Bjork and [...]
British newspaper The Guardian reports that the Jarawa, a tribe of Andaman Islanders who number just a few hundred, have been coerced by Indian police to dance naked for tourist ‘safaris’. Unfortunately, this has been going on for many, many years. When I visited the Andamans in 1997 and 2000, Indian VIPs, speak politicians and [...]
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