BOMBAY NOIR
In Vikram Chandra’s new novel, “Sacred Games” (HarperCollins; $27.95), Ganesh Gaitonde, a sort of Bombay Al Capone, expresses his contempt for the English-speaking classes, people oblivious of the...
View ArticleThe Train to Tibet
On an evening in late December, amid the chaos of Beijing West Railway Station, I stood in line for a train that looked little different from any of the other long-distance services shuffling into the...
View ArticleExit Wounds
Sixty years ago, on the evening of August 14, 1947, a few hours before Britain’s Indian Empire was formally divided into the nation-states of India and Pakistan, Lord Louis Mountbatten and his wife,...
View ArticleHoly Man
Last November, a couple of weeks after the Dalai Lama received a Congressional Gold Medal from President Bush, his old Land Rover went on sale on eBay. Sharon Stone, who once introduced the Tibetan...
View ArticleTiananmen’s Wake
It is still not clear how many unarmed civilians the People’s Liberation Army (P.L.A.) killed in Beijing on the night of June 3, 1989, as it sought to expel protestors from Tiananmen Square. The names...
View ArticleIslamismism
Was the prophet Muhammad a pervert and a tyrant? Does Islam promote terrorism and enslave women? Does Islam oblige its followers to wage jihad on Westerners whose roots lie in the secular...
View ArticleStaying Power
“A revolution is not a dinner party,” Mao Zedong declared. Rather, as he helpfully clarified in 1927, it is “an insurrection, an act of violence.” He might have warned that nation building is no...
View ArticleThe Inner Voice
Mohandas Gandhi was the twentieth century’s most famous advocate of nonviolent politics. But was he also its most spectacular political failure? The possibility is usually overshadowed by his immense...
View ArticleThe Hungry Years
Between 1876 and 1879, in North China, as many as thirteen million people died in what came to be called the Incredible Famine. It was one of many calamities around the world during that decade which...
View ArticleUnholy Alliances
“Did you read today about what America is doing?” one of the Indian characters in Rohinton Mistry’s “Such a Long Journey” asks. “CIA bastards are up to their usual anus-fingering tactics.” The novel is...
View ArticleLand And Blood
“We’ll have a war all of our very own,” W. H. Auden promised Christopher Isherwood as they sailed for Hong Kong in January, 1938, to write a book about Japan’s invasion of China. Whereas the Spanish...
View ArticleThe Places in Between
After India and China, Indonesia was the biggest new nation-state to emerge in the mid-twentieth century. Consisting of thousands of islands large and small, it sprawls roughly the same distance as...
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