Consider the darkness and the great coldIn this vale which resounds with misery. (Bertold Brecht, The Threepenny Opera) In 1975, at the insistence of his publisher, VS Naipaul travelled to India in the wake of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declaring a state of...
In the spring of 1943, as the Germans violently suppressed the Warsaw Uprising, Czes?aw Mi?osz recorded life beyond the ghetto’s wall. In ‘Campo dei Fiori’, he describes Polish gentiles riding the sky-carousel ‘to the strains of a carnival tune’: The...
Last month, 19-year-old Adil Ahmed Dar drove a Scorpio SUV packed with explosives into a convoy of more than 70 Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) vehicles in south Kashmir’s Pulwama district. When he detonated the car bomb, eyewitnesses said, it triggered an...
A bank? Why would I want to see a bank? I came here to see the birthplace of Christ! No, a Banksy. Do you want to go and see a Bansky? What in God’s name is a Banksy? – Bethlehem, May 2015. So it was that two American pilgrims — retirees, sotherners judging by...
Wandering through the rambling streets and markets of Lhasa, watched over by the majestic Potala Palace, I found myself preoccupied with the thought that there must be more fire extinguishes per capita here than in any other city in the world. Soldiers and security...