Amitav Ghosh's Blog, page 28

Zoroastrian Hong Kong

  Parsis have played an important role in the Hong Kong's history since the time of its founding (the Treaty of Nanking, which ceded Hong Kong to the British, was signed on a ship called the Cornwallis which was built in a Parsi-owned shipyard in Mumbai). Eve. Today, reminders of this aspect of the city's [...]

Hong Kong People

  Hong Kong                         is home to many interesting people, like the novelist Xu Xi       whose book, Habit of a Foreign Sky was shortlisted for the inaugural Man Asian literary prize last year. It is a terrific book, about a successful [...]

Tristful Trieste

  A few kilometres from the Castello di Miramare                           is the city of Trieste.                       For me the word 'Trieste' has always had a faintly melancholy sound, possibly because it evokes the [...]

Castello di Miramare and Anakin Skywalker's Idyll

    Some place names are  attractive enough to be claimed by the whole world. 'Copacabana' is one such; 'Tivoli' is another (as a child I thought 'Tivoli' was a Bengali coinage, invented by the residents of a well-known apartment building in Calcutta). Miramar is another such name. The word, which means 'sea-view',  is apparently of [...]

Some links

    On Feb 23, N.P. Ashley, who teaches English Literature in Delhi University, wrote: ' I found your experiential account of the Sikh Riots of 1984 an extremely powerful and more importantly, tellingly effective piece in documenting communal carnage. As a Malayalee, I do know that the tales of the 1984 carnage, which give [...]

Rilke's Castle

    One morning, in Ljubljana, I wake and remember a line: 'To stay is to be nowhere …'   Between southern Slovenia and eastern Italy lie the Dinaric Alps and a region (Kras) that has lent its name to a kind of rock: Karst, which is typically associated with chalky soils and underground limestone [...]

Ljubljana: Lyric City

        Among the younger generation of Slovenian poets, Aleš Šteger           is one of the best-known.                 His recent collection The Book of Things† was translated into English by Brian Henry and won a PEN prize for the best translated book [...]

Zorastrian Kabul

    Shernaz Italia,       who is, along with Freny Khodaiji, one of the producers of the film of The Hungry Tide writes:   Apropos your post dated March 3rd Mountains and Riverfront: Navroze is indeed celebrated in Afghanistan today, the amazing thing is that they don't quite know why or what the [...]

Mountaintops and Riverfront, Kabul

      Kabul is a city of dramatic vistas.       These shots were taken from the summit           of a hill called Bibi Mahro, which is at the centre of the city. The hill is topped by a forlorn swimming pool               [...]

Kabul, the National Gallery of Art

    The National Gallery in Kabul doesn't have many visitors     especially in winter, when the unheated galleries are bitterly cold.                           But the building, which is overlooked by one of Kabul's many hills, is a fine one       [...]