More annoyances

I’m in a rather annoyed frame of mind today, easy to take offence and feeling persecuted by everything. At one of my work places, I got very prickly about a proposed piece related to Eid being shot down (Islamophobia! I growled to myself), and felt my experience and expertise was being undervalued. Not something that […]

Just Wednesday

Wednesday is a full working day and I had to send an academic article in a hurry, so I didn’t do very much. The morning was spent on the article, which was about Ethiopian Christianity. I am quite the expert on Ethiopia having edited two monographs and countless articles on various aspects. Dashed out to […]

Bangkok new year

It is blessedly quiet here after Hanoi, and even my last stay in Bangkok where the sound of traffic was relentless, except at dawn and dusk when all the dogs in the neighbourhood howl for about 5 minutes. I arrived in the middle of Thai new year, Songkran, which includes, aside from visits to monks […]

Small things

A day of small things yesterday. Well, one big thing, which is a book I have been struggling to edit and is going very slowly and I would very much like to finish it and never think about it again. Then, an approach from an organization I’d worked for in the past for a small […]

Rat race

The rats are diving off the sides of the Boris barge like lemmings. What a happy sight. It has been a shameful few years, and while I daresay the shame is far from over, any more than Trump’s election loss made a real difference in the US or Imran’s deposition did in Pakistan, it’s still […]

Government by WhatsApp uncle

Maybe I’ve lived outside the country too long, but Pakistan seems to be increasingly governed by WhatsApp uncle, with a distinctive mixture of victimization, prejudice and victim-blaming, conspiracy theorising, self-congratulatory realpolitik based on ignorance, naivete and imagined sophistication, and a drawing room mob mentality. The current government exemplifies this. Imran Khan’s visit to Russia on […]

Stormy weather

This morning Russia invaded Ukraine. Is this the start of something new? In the past years of growing fragility and certainties shaken, it has felt as though we are ratchetting up to catastrophic breakdown. It this it? Or is it a story and actually history just keeps going and there is no cataclysmic moment? Two […]

American obcenity

The day after I read the impassioned, clear and very rational testimony from David Miliband and Graeme Smith at the US Senate about the necessity of allowing Afghanistan’s economy to restart, not least by releasing its central bank funds with appropriate conditionalities, I saw the news that the White House had decided to release its […]