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, […]
7th June 2016 Chennai, India
I know it’s been too long since a wrote a blog. It’s hard to think of subjects any readers might be interested in (as always, feedback welcome!) and to prioritise the time. But I’m very conscious that I’m halfway through my posting (sorry, you’re stuck with me to Summer 2018), which is a real driver […]
8th December 2015 Chennai, India
As I look outside at bright sunny skies, it’s almost impossible to recall what the last 3 weeks have been like. Chennai has been battered by the highest rains in over a century. The BDHC closed for 3 days when the electrical supply room flooded, and the power had to be switched off but this […]
27th November 2015 Chennai, India
Today I celebrate 20 years in the Foreign Office. I joined, like many others, because I wanted to see the world and be a part of something that mattered. I remember during the induction a colleague who was less awed by the surroundings asking how long it would take to get promoted (answer 12 years if […]
11th November 2015 Chennai, India
The tall bloke on the right is my best friend Ralph Chapman (obviously I’m not quite that short nor, unfortunately, that young). We’ve known each other since we were 3 and together at Nursery (when I spoke mostly Gujarati), and best mates since we were about 8 when I was forcibly separated from Michael Mowbray […]