Eclectic crime fiction & informed, irreverent non-fiction from Asia & beyond
My latest for The Nikkei Asian Review on the plight of the indigenous people of the Andaman Islands in India – The world should reconsider forced assimilation of isolated communities. In late November, an American missionary attempted to bring Christianity to the Sentinelese people, a remote community in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, an Indian […]
Continue ReadingTourism and climate change threaten way of life in scenic Himalayan valley. Laure Siegel and I report from Spiti in Himachal Pradesh, the Middle Kingdom, a remote valley between Tibet and the rest of India. KAZA, India — “There are more cars than potatoes now” sighs Chhering Angrup, slowly turning a prayer wheel below a […]
Continue ReadingFrom a punk rock collective in Borneo to European proto-colonies and ethnic minorities in India, rock stars and a circus from Cambodia, the scourge of development in Laos, female motorcycle taxi drivers in Thailand, Japanese entrepreneurs in France and my eye witness reports of the 2015 Nepal earthquake, the Asian Nikkei Review has published some […]
Continue ReadingMy latest story in The Nikkei Asian Review with photographs by Aroon Thaewchatturat. Life is chaos; the world is chaos, according to Rajah Banerjee. “The only constant is change. What are we doing here and where are we going? We need to answer these questions to be free, to find our way.” This is hardly […]
Continue ReadingLast story of 2017, first story of 2018, with Laure Siegel. The show stays on the road and the road takes me wherever. Home is anywhere I lay my head. In this instance, north of Kolkata, the world’s most beautiful city, along the banks for the river Hooghly. Really enjoyed researching this one and am […]
Continue ReadingMy latest travel feature with Laure Siegel on one of my favorite cities – Kolkata – for CNN Travel Mother Teresa did the same for this spendid city as Spielberg did for sharks. She ruined the West Bengal capital’s reputation for generations. But Teresa is dead, the city is on a bumpy rebound and its […]
Continue ReadingThe eastern India state of Odisha, stretching for more than 300 miles along the Bay of Bengal, bristles with architectural and cultural gems. Tropical, remote and home to some of the subcontinent’s most striking temples, much of the state was off-limits to foreign travel for some years because of Maoist unrest but reopened in 2016. […]
Continue ReadingA few words om the excellent art house movie PsycheDelhi by Surya Dash. If Godard and Tarkovsky had conceived an illegitimate child, with an anarchist bohemian Brahmin capturing the surrealist copulation on camera round the back of a chowk in the Indian capital, the offspring might look something like PsycheDelhi. Delhi is usually perceived […]
Continue ReadingThe brand new edition(#46) of Rise Tattoo, available at all good newsagents in France at present, features 16 pages on India by Laure Siegel and myself. We look at […]
Continue ReadingUsually a matter of choice, Indian state takes political tattoos to new level. Check out my new feature, with Laure Siegel, on one of India’s enduring personality cults. For decades, the followers of six times state minister and recently deceased Jayalalithaa Jayaram, have been wearing their political idol’s face on their skins, acquired in mass […]
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