Taipei

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

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