Wonders
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India – Incredible and Intoxicating: A Week in The Golden Triangle
I don’t know if the phrase Stockholm Syndrome carries any weight in India but it describes my relationship with the country succinctly and accurately. It’s a part of the world that introduces you to norms entirely warped from an occidental orientation (such as the curious cruelty of the caste system) and surreptitiously swipes closely held luxuries upon entry, personal space being the most glaring example. And I can’t wait to go back. Not even the English language escapes distortion although there is precious little of it around. ‘Road’ no longer refers to lane adorned tarmac used by relatively homogeneous motor vehicles. Instead a ‘road’ is a disheveled morass of fumes, both…
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Vietnam, Vidi, Vici: From Ha Noi to the Hai Van Pass
Often, they carried each other, the wounded or weak. They carried infections. They carried chess sets, basketballs, Vietnamese-English dictionaries, insignia of rank, Bronze Stars and Purple Hearts….. They carried diseases, among them malaria and dysentery……… By daylight they took sniper fire, at night they were mortared, but it was not battle, it was just the endless march, village to village, without purpose, nothing won or lost.“ – Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried ‘The Things They Carried’ is one of the pre-eminent books about the Vietnam War. It is haunting and visceral in equal measure while affording the reader as comprehensive an understanding of war as can be gleaned from print.…
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Machu Pizza – Why is good local food so hard to find?
A ‘Curate’s Egg’ is one of the more bizarre idioms of the English language. Meant to describe something which has both good and bad qualities, it has its roots in a now defunct 19th Century British satirical magazine, although the phrase itself has shown remarkable staying power. It now crops up quite widely and I would submit that the tourism industry is one of the most rampant Curate’s Eggs that modern society affords us. Often bringing vast wealth to the area in question, tourism assuredly comes at a cost and even if loss of identity or authenticity are less easily assigned a price tag they are no less discernible. Economists…
