Having grown up in perennially polluted New Delhi, smoggy skies were so unremarkable to me that I didn’t even notice anything was awry in Beijing for years after moving there. Till a spring morning in 2006. It was an ordinary start to the day in most respects. I ate a quick breakfast of jian bing,…
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Moving between Beijing and Brussels, “Choked” draws parallels for Delhi
A month after the Olympic Games, our baby boy was born in a Beijing hospital. First-time parenthood engendered a siege mentality in us. We moved out of the charming but less-than-hygienic hutong neighbourhoods we had lived in for six years, and bunkered down in the double-glazed safety of the Diplomatic Compound. We began to navigate…
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Japan’s reborn ceramics welding past to present.
A kintsugi-repaired artifact is what it is because of -- not in spite of -- its fissures. And it is this that takes the art beyond the technicalities of ceramic repair, lending it the metaphorical power to describe the human condition. We have all been broken at some point. And the essence of who we are is not located in some flawless image we might present, but along the fault-lines of our biographies.
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Babies and Bylines in a Globalised World
When I read Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children as a teenager, there was a phrase on the first page of the book that has stuck in my mind. The protagonist Saleem says that he was “handcuffed to history.” As I inched past my mid-30s towards middle age, this truth was looming larger. I had gone to…
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A plane ride away from a broader mind
Travel for pleasure or out of curiosity has historically been the preserve of elites in privileged nations. For much of the colonial and post-colonial periods, most Asians who traveled did not belong to this group of tourists. They were "immigrants," fleeing political persecution or economic hardship. Does this matter? Isn't leisure travel a mere luxury,…
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Why women aren’t empowered just because they can choose
Even though I’d said little, I had felt let down by my cousin and I had disapproved of her decision. I knew it was politically correct to believe that every woman should have the right to choose what was best for her, but deep down in my soul, where it was so dark that political…
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Being Mohammad in Brussels
A few months into my first year in Brussels, I met for lunch with a young Taiwanese academic who was spending some months in the city to research EU-China relations. His wife who had recently joined him from Taipei had come along as well. As we took a post-lunch stroll in the streets that criss-crossed…
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Indonesia’s Rain makers
Babey’s face is gnarled, yet implacable, like an aged banyan tree. He smokes compulsively through a wracking cough, putting down his cigarette only occasionally to wipe the sweat off his brow. When we met, the heat was stifling. The rains were late this year, a fact that weighed on paunchy, 65-year-old Babey’s mind even more…
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