Festivals and Freedom
ChrestomatherI have never attended the Jaipur Literary Festival; nor does a visit loom in the foreseeable future. This is largely (but not wholly) because I have no taste for…
Mekong Journals: 30
The survey that Isabel is doing is a ‘direct count’ survey – which means that she is trying to physically count every member of the…
Mekong Journals; 29
Yesterday the ‘Pol Pot times’ burst upon us unexpectedly. We were in a taxi, driving to Sambok when Mr Seng Kim said, suddenly, that compared to…
Mekong Journals: 28
Mr Somany and I were talking earlier in the evening and he told me that his…
Mekong Journals: 27
January 10, 2003 Arrived in Stung Treng this afternoon. We left the village where we’d stayed at 7 a.m. The night was a horror: there…
Mekong Journals: 26
Do you ever wonder, I asked Isabel, what the world looks like to Orcaella? Yes, she said, sometimes. Why for example did the dolphin that was caught…
Jonathan Spence
Amitav GhoshThe historian Jonathan Spence is one of my literary heroes, not least because he has done more than any historian of the post-war era to restore history…
‘Chai’ and Dan dan noodles
As described in my last post, I recently received the following message from M.V. Ramana. Dear Amitav, Greetings from Princeton. I am enjoying River of Smoke, but a…
M.V. Ramana and Nuclear Sanity
I met M.V. Ramana in 1998 when I was writing Countdown, my essay on the nuclear situation in the Indian subcontinent. He was one of the most knowledgeable of…
Letter from Australia
Dear Jim I wrote to the email above but never heard back, so I don't know if you received my email. I just…