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People in India are very easily ashamed, disgraced, annoyed, angered and outraged by dirty streets, overflowing garbage, mountains of landfills that grow mound by mound over a pond, a lake, a river, and turn what could have been sites of repose and proximity to the natural world into hellscapes that remind us of our banishment from paradise here on earth. Imagine my surprise, then, on finding no trash cans on the streets of Taipei. Intuition leads us to believe that the absen

Urban apartments are modular prisons where we incarcerate ourselves for most of our lives. In search of livelihood, a roof over our heads, a sense of security and a bed to fall asleep on, there is much that a city-zen gives up. When our homes lack a window into the world, a balcony that sits somewhere on the edges of inside and outside, and the glimpses of trees whose branches dapple with light and sway in trance with the dance of the breeze, our sense of incarceration produc

Empires come armed with explorers, geographers, map-makers, ethnologists and anthropologists, or should I say, the latter arrive first as harbingers of empire to follow in their wake: empires of guns, germs, and steel, yes, but more so, the empires of mind. Japanese ethnographers who scouted the plains and mountains of Taiwan divided the people they met, the tribes they encountered, into the “raw” and the “cooked”. Those who were willing to work with the new arrivals, learn t

At Beitou, the past is as radioactive as the hot springs.

Lost in the alleys and teahouses of Jiufen, sipping tea and watching the day's light become a quiet night of red lanterns.

Summers, rains, winters, springs, mornings, evenings, afternoons, every hour of every season, I go into the lap of the Forest Part in the middle of Da’an to be cradled like a babe.

Insomniac nights can be a doorway into mornings of revelation. One such sleepless night, I gaze until the stars shimmer briefly in the morning twilight before slowly fading away in the brilliance of the rising Sun. When the mind runs a riot, my limbs take over. Footsteps carry me out of my cell, eyes smart gently in the chill of a winter morning, and through the underground mazes where colored MRT lines crisscross, I arrive at the doorsteps of Longshan Temple. In the corridor

Among the many things that my student ID unlocks, topped up with a monthly MRT transit pass for which I pay NT$1280, are unlimited 30-minute rides on the ubiquitous yellow frame YouBikes available on so many stands littered all over Taipei city. All I need to do is press the green button on the bike's console. It prompts me to tap my card, and given I have enough balance or a pass, the bike unlocks. All societies have a vision of a good life, and a host of ideologies that are

Outside gate number 5 of Guting MRT station, I see a monk dressed in gray robes with a bowl in her folded palms tucked close to her belly. I notice her in passing. I am always in a hurry to be somewhere else. She is never in a hurry. She is where she is, gently treading the ground beneath her feet, eyes gazing vaguely in the distance, and her mind turned inwards. If there are landmarks and places that anchor our ships, floating on the vast cosmic ocean without a lighthouse in

Class over, and the elevator free-falls one floor at a time down to the ground, and I step out into the September sun. Opposite the Mandarin Training Center lies the road to Shida Night Market, where I meet Tashi, the man for all seasons. He runs an Indian kitchen, aptly named Namaste Taiwan, selling chickpea and chicken curry, naan, and special mutton or kidney bean curry on Fridays and some weekends. I have heard of Indian scholars who visited the Island or mainland to lea

Kaohsiung faces the strait, and cranes crisscross the mostly blue skies with paint-coated metal bars. Boats, ships, ferries, and the occasional coast guard patrol rip through the waters that have been the site of much staring down between will, fate, and destiny. Since the late seventeen hundreds, many from the eastern seaboard have made the journey across rough seas and dire straits. Some have come from Fujian, yet others from many other places on the long shore and the deep

Just as I land in Taipei, a friend from college arrives in Kaohsiung. On the first weekend out of Quarantine, I travel to meet her. Taipei Main Station is a maze of concrete tunnels and metal tracks, underground platforms, and a multistory depot with gates for arrivals and departures, housing the MRT, the bus stop, the local railway station, as well as the High-Speed Rail. Used to the meanderingly long journeys of the Indian Railways, prone to such delays where arrival become

Those who are familiar with the geography of Delhi, and the many cities built, abandoned, and re-inhabited over millennia by different empires and dynasties, can think of Taipei City as the older town around which an enveloping cordon of New Taipei rises and falls with the topography of the mountains that allure a hiker through the Taipei grand trail. New Delhi is the newest city, so is New Taipei. Established by the British to house the capital of their empire in India which

From the Quarantine Hotel Balcony I was living out of a room on the third floor of a building that housed a construction materials shop in a village called Munirka. On three-wheeled trolleys, weather and work-hardened bodies loaded bricks, bags of cement and sand to deliver to the construction sites where the narrow width of streets and by lanes forbade a motor vehicle. Even if it did allow trucks, some economies love to work human bodies like machines and price their sweat a

There was a time when I could read. Now, even though I read subtitles on films, captions on photographs, slogans on adverts, more slogans...

There is no end in sight for the dark night of the soul in this world for those who are scattered all over the earth, carried hither and...

Words in other languages can acquire an exotic allure. Since we do not encounter them often, there is little opportunity to interact with...