The mosque’s brick-like silhouette was blurred in the downpour. The rain in East Java is heavy, which gives the land its sparkling, paddy-green hue and fills the villages with the scent of moist-earth. It was the hour of the maghrib prayer and all 4,000 of the students at Pondok Modern Darussalam Gontor were gathered inside…
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The Foreign Correspondent
My first foreign posting was in Beijing, for the Hindu. This was from 2002 to 2009, when the city was remorseless in its embrace of a glass and chrome version of modernity. A steady stream of friends from India used to visit. I’d pick them up at the airport and take them by cab down…
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Forget China, India Should Look to Indonesia
Indians rarely agree on much, but they do tend towards an uncommon consensus about the belief in Indian exceptionalism. Rightists, Leftists and Opportunists find themselves on the same page in espousing the idea that as a country and civilization, India is uniquely diverse, contradictory, large, tolerant, and complex. Having been educated into a strong emotional…
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Damming Spree
SANDWICHED between the towering Jade Dragon and Haba Snow Mountains in the northwestern part of China's Yunnan province, Tiger Leaping Gorge is one of the world's deepest river gorges. Here about 1,500 kilometres upstream from the Three Gorges Dam, the Jinsha river (as the Yangtze is known in its upper reaches) thunders its way through…
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