I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not the biggest fan of Christmas; I loathe the commercialisation and exploitation purely because it’s so tacky. I do, however, hold Christmas day itself very dearly. My annual routine consists of nursing my hangover with a large black coffee, hair of the dog and some sort of grilled [...]
Since the Chinese communist takeover of Tibet in 1949, an estimated over 1.2 million of the population have died through brutal repression and forced starvation (although the Chinese Communist Party disputes this). More than 250,00 Tibetan refugees have fled their homeland over hundreds of miles of treacherous Himalayan terrain to seek sanctuary, under the leadership [...]
In the space of a day we’ve traveled from the desert dunes of Pushkar to the freezing mountain slopes of Himalaya in the northern region of Himachel Pradesh. I’m tempted to deviate from flowing prose here to express my excitement at being in the Himalayas, one of my lifelong dreams; albeit not the desired crystal [...]
When I was around five or six years old I accompanied my dad to pick up an Indian takeaway from a place just outside of Dukinfield, where we lived at the time. I don’t believe I first ate Indian food till my teens so I suppose, retrospectively, that I just went along for the ride. [...]
As my taxi trundled south from the city of Delhi to it’s smaller neighbour Gurgaon, giant concrete edifices, skeletons of apartment blocks, malls and miniature cities yet to be born loomed out of the dust like some Balardian nightmare. The smog and pollution hung thick over the land, a veil of dirty mucus coating everything [...]
