It's late in Delhi and the night is warm. The cool evenings of spring are behind us and soon the burning nights of summer will be upon the city, when the wind blows hot and bone dry. I'm thirsty, but the fridge is empty so I decide to walk over to the shops for some cold beers. Outside, I can feel the heat standing up off the road surface like a wall. There's a power cut in the next block and I find myself stumbling through the darkness. There are big potholes in the road … [Read more...]
News of the outrageous queues people have been forced to endure at passport control at London's Heathrow airport recently reminded me of the worst airport I ever flew into. Because, national disgrace though the UK Border Agency is, immigration at Heathrow still doesn't come close to arriving at Tajikistan's Dushanbe airport, where a customs official once asked me for $5,000 in cash to be allowed into the country. It was 2001, after 9/11, and The Independent sent me to Afghanistan to … [Read more...]
So, Boris or Ken? The elections for London mayor are upon us, and I'm tempted to say we should delay the whole thing a few months and let them wrestle each other for the job as an event at the Olympics. Except I don't think the sight of either Boris Johnson or Ken Livingstone semi-naked and oiled up would be particularly appealing for anyone -- although Boris does seem to have his share of female admirers. In many ways a wrestling contest would be the natural conclusion to an election … [Read more...]
Oh damn! Now I've done it. I can never go to Thailand again. I've just committed a serious crime under Thai law. Just for saying "the King of Thailand is wrong", I could go to prison for 15 years. Thankfully, I'm not in Thailand. Because this is not some anachronistic old law nobody cares about any more. Hundreds of people are jailed under the lese majeste law every year. And King Bhumibol Adulyadej is wrong, to allow his people to go to prison under this archaic, disgraceful law. They … [Read more...]
So, Delhi airport is to become the world's most expensive for airlines. It's one of those stories you barely notice, just another sign of India's booming economy -- until you stop to think: it doesn't make any sense at all. India's aviation sector is in crisis. Kingfisher Airlines, the toast of the industry a few years ago, is on the verge of collapse, unable to pay its pilots' salaries or its fuel bills, its international flights cancelled, its domestic operations pared back to … [Read more...]
Rupert Murdoch and Russell Brand do not, on the face of it, have much in common. But this week they were both giving evidence to the great and the good of the British Establishment -- Murdoch at the Leveson Enquiry, and Brand at a parliamentary Select Committee -- and I found myself undergoing the alarming vision of the two of them meeting up to celebrate their respective appearances with a night on the town. I saw them carousing the night away together in some of Soho's less salubrious … [Read more...]
She was married when she was one year old. She didn't get a say, she didn't even know how to speak. Her parents traded her like a piece of property, her life theirs to do with as they pleased. But Laxmi Sargara refused to go along with it. When, years later, her "husband" came to collect her, she told her parents she wasn't going. This week, aged 18, she became the first Indian woman to refuse the marriage she was entered into as a child and demand that it be annulled. She should be … [Read more...]
Bus lanes are the great levellers of our times. The rich man sits in traffic in his Mercedes, watching as the poor man sweeps past in the bus. But here in Delhi, they have come up with an even more egalitarian version. On the Delhi Bus Rapid Transit Corridor, nobody is getting anywhere. It used to be the quickest north-south route through the city, then the goverment decided it needed modernising. Now, the traffic is so bad it takes 20 minutes' wait just to get onto the road, because there's … [Read more...]
The wolves are circling Europe. The emerging economies of Asia and South America sense weakness. Day by day, they are pushing the boundaries, seeing how far they can go, testing a new world order. But inside the camp, the old European economies are too deafened by the din of their own internal squabbles to hear the approaching danger. This week it was Spain's turn, as Argentina nationalised the Spanish-owned majority stake in its largest oil company. The Spanish government warned of … [Read more...]
So, who invented the Kindle, the little electronic book that is transforming the way we read and laying waste to the traditional publishing industry? Rereading The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy the other day, I was suddenly struck by the thought that, in a way, it was Douglas Adams. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, for anyone who hasn't read it, is a satire in which the Earth is demolished by aliens to make way for a hyperspace bypass, and one human, Arthur Dent, is rescued by a … [Read more...]
