2nd December 2016 Kolkata, India
There are about 123 million cattle in India, so the Kolkata based Telegraph newspaper informed me recently. The paper was citing India’s 2012 national cow census. That’s a lot of cattle, or roughly one for every ten Indians. The equivalent number in Britain is 1.9 million. This is the size of the total dairy herd […]
18th November 2016 Kolkata, India
I’ve been converted to a new way of thinking. I may have used this thinking before, but I wasn’t conscious of it. I’m now a proponent of ‘T-bar’ thinking and ‘T-bar’ learning. I’ve had a quick look on the Internet and can’t find any obvious gurus on the subject. Perhaps I could patent it … […]
28th October 2016 Kolkata, India
I hope it won’t have escaped readers’ attention that Britain will be this year’s partner nation for India’s annual TECH Summit on 7-9 November in Delhi. People like me have been talking, tweeting and explaining about TECH Summit – #TECHSmt if you are on Twitter – for some weeks now. Our efforts to disseminate the […]
21st October 2016 Kolkata, India
One of the surprises of Kolkata for me has been to discover how keen Kolkatans are on sport, and how many sports are played in and around the city. I knew that Kolkata is the home of one of the world’s great cricket grounds – Eden Gardens. As I expected, there is huge interest in […]
14th October 2016 Kolkata, India
I hosted my first adda last week. An adda is a very Bengali event – it’s a meeting of a group of people to talk about a particular subject. I attended one on my second day in Kolkata organised by the British Council colleagues for the British High Commissioner to India Dominic Asquith who was visiting […]
30th September 2016 Kolkata, India
I was sitting with a group of policemen and border officials in a police hut drinking sweet tea. The younger ones were looking at me anxiously as I started to ask them questions about their work and what they were doing. It was late morning and it was hot outside – around 35°C (or 95 […]
16th September 2016 Kolkata, India
It is a cracking first line for a novel: The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.* As a thought – that the past is somewhere different – the line sounds very appealing. The past is distant from us and we can’t access it immediately. But the idea is nonsense, of course, […]
9th September 2016 Kolkata, India
Last December, I flew in for the last time to Minsk, the city of my previous posting. As the aeroplane descended through the clouds, a pale whitish landscape emerged – there had been a light snow fall. Like many Britons, the sight of snow cheers me – I think it’s because we see it only […]