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The slum is about the size of a basketball court. Hidden behind a wall of corrugated iron, it is easily mistaken for a vacant lot or construction site, consisting of a series of sweatboxes, also made of corrugated iron, no
As punishments go, it was cruel and unusual. Earlier this year, Kamala Girls’ School in Kolkata, West Bengal, forced ten of its students to sign a “confession letter” in which they “admitted” to being lesbians. The acting headmistress, Sikha Sarkar,
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
In the dying days of February, an audience gathered in the foyer of the Phu Sa Lab performing-arts space in Hanoi’s Tay Ho District. Representatives from the American embassy and other members of the diplomatic corps rubbed shoulders with activists,
Mai Khoi Do Nguyen has long been described as Vietnam’s Lady Gaga. In more recent years, as her political activism has come to the fore, her expressions of rude dissent, she has also been compared to Russia’s infamous protest band,
The smell hits you before anything else, about halfway between the bus station and the town centre, filling your nostrils and urging you onward. Then there’s the sight of it, a literal smoke signal, wafting upwards from street level before
It’s the end, as they say, of an era. Or at least it was meant to be. On Saturday last week, the RMS St Helena departed the South Atlantic island that gives it its name for what was supposed to
Every morning in Transnistria, the self-proclaimed Eastern European country that no other country recognises, there’s a run on the banks. You wouldn’t think there would be much demand for a currency like the Transnistrian ruble, which doesn’t have an ISO