You know you’re in India when a night at the cinema starts with three people – one of them a young child – being thrown from a motorbike in front of you, followed by a mêlée of bystanders arguing over what happened and who was responsible. The kid was okay, just a little scared at […]
February 4, 2009
The Indian propensity for bureaucracy is well-known: just ask anyone who has bought a rail ticket using Indian Railway’s arcane and Byzantine ticketing system that requires you to approach one counter to acquire a form to request your ticket, then another counter to pay (but that’s a story for another day). Take my current accommodation […]
January 18, 2009
We have a maid. In fact, at one point we had two – which, for a couple in a tiny, one-bedroom apartment, is sheer overkill. The thing is, I’m still not entirely sure how we ended up with one. It began with a buzz at the door one morning a few weeks after we moved […]
January 13, 2009
It was a cruel joke – sitting in gridlocked traffic on a steamy Bombay night two signs mocked me: “Reduce road congestion, travel BEST” implored one public transport ad; “AirTel” screamed the other. Air I was definitely lacking in the Bombay smog. Traffic congestion – I had that in spades. Taking another bite of Bombay’s […]
January 6, 2009
In India any action leads to a disproportionate reaction. Just as a pebble dropped into a calm pool of water produces increasingly large ripples of water at the edge, so any request here – no matter how simple – can generate an inordinate amount of fuss. I’m Western, I was brought up in a family […]
January 4, 2009
The shiny brass sign above the entrance to the Bangalore Club neatly sums up India’s information technology boomtown. Here amid the clipped lawns, billiards tables and peons in their green livery is Old India in a microcosm, a relic of the Raj where time seems to stand still and the air is thick with the […]
December 21, 2008
Locals talk wistfully of “old” Bandra; Bombay’s swanky northern seaside suburb that was once a quiet island of churches, bungalows, cottages and plantations. In short, a million miles from what is has become. While the Catholic churches remain and a few bungalows have avoided the attentions of rapacious developers, for the most part the so-called […]
December 15, 2008
The large bullet hole in the mirror and its spider’s web of cracks was a startling reminder of what happened here just two weeks ago when Leopold Cafe may well have been somewhere in downtown Kandahar or Basra. It was a scene of death and destruction as armed fanatics mowed down innocents – a scene […]
December 15, 2008
There was no real mystery as to why the passport wallah at Bombay airport was so perplexed. It was one o’clock in the morning in a stifling hot arrivals hall with wires hanging from the ceiling, his hands were covered in ink from the countless stamps he’d punched through that night. It may have been […]
December 1, 2008
Watching TV images of the Taj Palace burning as psychopaths run riot through Bombay leaves me with mixed feelings. Half of me is relieved that I’m in London, with the ability to delay our flight into the city until things calm down. But the other half – the journalist half – wants to bring the […]
February 10, 2009