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With my stay in Kashmir now approaching its end, I wandered down to the town’s rugby pitch to see one of the beginners girls’ squads at practice. As Waheed Para had promised, it was a great story: a ray of
The worst thing I ever did on Twitter was follow Shehla Rashid. From the moment I did so—or at least from the moment she first retweeted me—I have had a front-row seat at the shitshow that is Hindutva, or Hindu
The day after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Srinagar, the city remained in a state of suspended animation. It was the anniversary of Molvi Farooq’s assassination, the one-time Mirwaiz of Kashmir and separatist leader having been murdered 18
In the end, I was probably lucky that the dog bite was the worst thing that happened to me. Not that I felt very lucky at the time. What I felt at the time was a pain in my leg.
Well, that went quickly, didn’t it? Today, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day and all that, we marked a hundred years since the guns fell silent on the battlefields of WWI. This year, for obvious reasons, the commemorations
This is a piece I wrote for Spook Magazine upon the centenary of the Gallipoli landings back in 2015. Unfortunately, Spook went bust and vanished from the web. The piece — indeed, the magazine’s entire online archive—vanished with it. I’m resurrecting it
The Vietnam War begins like so many Ken Burns films before it: by listing, in the inimitable voice of Burns’ go-to narrator Peter Coyote, a series of dichotomies that the ten-part, eighteen-hour behemoth will inevitably toggle between, and struggle with, for the
It was in the canteen car of the late-night service that the Vietnam veteran finally told me his story. We’d been friends for months, regulars at a Louisiana-themed bar off Saigon’s Bùi Viện backpacker strip, but his time in-country was,