According to the ancient Indian Hindu scriptures called the Puranas, the Earth is shaped like a disc and it rests upon different animals in different versions—the cobra, the elephant or the turtle. In her new book Terrestrial Lessons, historian Sumathi Ramaswamy says that in the process of signing treaties and carrying out diplomatic negotiations with…
Green buildings aren’t just the energy equivalent of a free lunch—they’re like a meal that users get paid for eating, to paraphrase energy guru Amory Lovins. They are so much cheaper to operate that they pay for themselves, and then some. They also are healthier and more pleasant places to live, work, and play.
The internet was supposed to have delivered China into freedom by now. But that optimistic consensus has been proven wrong so far. In their books, academics Rongbin Han and Margaret Roberts, attempt to explain why.
East is East, and West is West, but the twain did meet and influenced each other unpredictably. For instance, the post-colonial Asia encountered Christianity during its first interactions with the West. The fruit of such a meeting is the post-colonial religion that is practiced in different parts of the continent as Christianity. Jesus is a…
In 1934 Gendun Chopel, a former Tibetan monk, arrived in India in the company of an Indian scholar, Rahul Sankrityayan, just after giving up his monastic vows. He would remain there for some time before returning home in 1945 and getting himself arrested on a (probably) trumped-up charge of forging banknotes. While in India, he…
Now in her 10th decade, it would be understandable if Jan Morris could no longer cope with the amount of research she once so enjoyed. But she has not abandoned her craft. In her most recent work she has undertaken to memorialize the sinking of the Japanese battleship Yamato, a subject which she says has…
Janet Steele’s new book is a deep dive into five leading Malaysian and Indonesian news publications: Tempo, Malaysiakini, Harakah, Republika and Sabili.
A Village With My Name sounds unpromising as a title. Could this be one of those “finding my roots” tales of little interest to anyone beyond the author himself? It could have been, but happily Scott Tong uses the family tree that he uncovers to relate a worm’s-eye view of 20th century Chinese history.
It is so difficult to live in Mumbai, an old Bollywood song about Mumbai goes, for there is everything here—cars, trams, mills— everything except a heart. Perhaps it is because of this absence that the heart is invoked in so many ways in countless songs and love stories set in the city. Dil Dhadakne Do:…
It is worth periodically remembering—as the tsunami of news of China’s momentous economic and political developments rushes past—that China has not always been “Chinese” in the quite the way it is, or can be presented to be, today.
There is an old saw about advertising that only half of it works, but one never knows which half. And one suspects that despite all the data gathered and statistics generated, the online counterpart remains more art than science. Digital marketing involves navigating, in the words of Donald Rumsfeld, a number of known unknowns: things…
Contrary to popular belief, it is not, nor has it been, easy to adopt a child from China. Babies do not exit the country like cheap electronics and fast fashion. But there was one period when the doors were slightly ajar. It was during this period that Patti Waldmeir was able to adopt two baby…
The South China Sea, notes Bernard Cole, a former US Navy captain who also taught maritime strategy at the National War College, covers four million square kilometers, has significant energy resources, and contains trade arteries through which one-third of the world’s commerce transits. Its geographic location astride the Southeast Asian littoral makes it the maritime…
Americans have been present in the Pacific since the dawn of the Republic. At the time of George Washington’s inauguration in 1789, the country consisted of just 13 states huddled along the Atlantic seaboard, but in the geography of sail navigation Boston and New York were just as close to China as were London, Liverpool,…
The tsunami in question is of course the one generated by the 2011 Tohoku earthquake—the one which destroyed 650km of Japan’s coastline, killed about 18,500 and swamped the Fukushima power station. It was a disaster by any standard. But Parry has a rather different take. He emphasizes how well-prepared Japan was, and he certainly makes…