Paulo Coelho popularized the pilgrimage walk to Santiago de Compostela, so I didn’t do it. I did something else.
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Paulo Coelho popularized the pilgrimage walk to Santiago de Compostela, so I didn’t do it. I did something else.
Click here to read.
There don’t seem to be any skeletons left in sumo’s closet after the last string of scandals. In a disaster that has run parallel to Japan’s fallouts from the March 11 earthquake, sumo must now work just as hard to rebuild, in its case, a shattered image. Here is a short update, based on some of my previous reporting from Tokyo’s sumo world, published on CNNGo.
This is another interview, really more of a questionnaire, that I did for bringhomestories.com in Delhi before I left India earlier this year. It was a project where ferengis detailed the pluses and the perils of living in India’s capital. Travel guides: take note–and bring salt.
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I’d forgotten about this interview I did with a funky little Thai magazine following a design workshop I was a part of at Chiang Mai University. It’s a combination of the writer slipping in pro-Chiang Mai tourist industry propaganda, and me trying to sound smart. Good for a laugh, though.
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RIght, that’s the blog posts for published stories back up to date for the most part. Not a feature on the early career of Neil Young, this piece is about a neighbourhood in north Delhi, India, that continues to suffer from endemic pharmaceutical addiction, and there, in Jahangirpuri, it’s the pharmacists who are the dealers.
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The Tokyo sumo tournament is cancelled this year. And this is some serious shit for Japan’s national sport. It is the result of long percolating scandals in the sumo world concerning thrown matches, racketeering, illegal betting and more than casual mob ties. Before the tofu hit the fan, I had a rare opportunity to watch the Tokyo tournament from the good seats–free beer all day, dude–and a few days later, to visit a sumo stable and interview at length the stable master, who is one of the sport’s most well-known athletes. He didn’t shy away from hard topics, and at the end of the article he–well, best not spoil it–but suffice it to say, sumo’s shutdown has made me wonder about my visit with Akinoshima. At the time, my main concerns were whether or not he was saying certain things to star the eyes of what he may have seen as an orientalist, as well as the process of editing the long interview to only pull quotes that I and my faithful translator, the linguistic genius Miyuki Heagney, deemed wholly sincere. What unfolds with the sumo scandals over the next months will will either vindicate of vilify what Akinoshima lays out as his credo.
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Observing the lead-up to the Canadian elections (Harper’s a douche, Harper’s a douche, Harper’s a douche) from afar, as well as reading about the UK court ruling that the Met Police’s actions in London in 2009 were in fact illegal, gives perhaps some sort of hope that the stormtroopers that trounced hippies, students, amputees, etc and stuffed them into secret prisons in Toronto could be held to account. I f Harper is re-elected though, don’t expect that sort of thing anytime soon. He’s been quoted as praising the whole operation.
Here’s my take on the mess of the G20, published just after it ended last summer. As much as I’d like to see Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair strung up and every officer who closed the square at Queen and Spadina that day stuffed into a permanent prison, I felt at the time, and still feel now, that that entire approach to the protest was cliché and flawed, and we need to think up some alternatives. I think I may have one…
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Four years after the Thai coup in 2006, The red-shirt/yellow-shirt thing got way out of hand, Thaksin was said to have called in a that private militia, and a part of central Bangkok ended up looking like the set of a Siamese adaptation of Mad Max. Having lived in Thailand before, and having followed the politics after I left, I began to form an opinion about what kind of change is needed in the Kingdom to truly give the people a say in a democracy. My conclusion, if I were to express it in Thailand, would be punishable with a prison term–which is part of my point.
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On an all-expenses-paid press junket to Nepal, my hang-ups about religious organizations and advertorial journalism come to a head. Here’s the result, and no, the Drukpas were not at all happy with what I wrote.
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This short piece for the back-of-house of a Tehelka issue describes the night of the coup d’etat in Thailand in 2006. A longer, more elaborate account of my experience during that time is forthcoming, and I’ll be able to make the first part of that project official soon.
Click here to read (the short version, that is.)
