We climbed up the Thousand Turtle Mountain in the district of pastoral Liming, on a late and wet afternoon after several hours’ drive from Lijiang, Yunnan in late 2009. After our guide selected a live fowl for a home-cooked lunch (& dinner), we set off for this beautiful mountain the resembled the back of a thousand turtles at its peak.…
The mission and life work of the Catholic saint Mother Teresa of Calcutta can be summed up in a few succinct comments after reading her posthumous (‘unauthorized’) autobiography. It is not a book that one can simply put down once you have started. She started her mission for the poor, the dying and the infirmed, in…
This is the fish market at Tsukiji, Tokyo, the busiest fish market in the world. The highly specialised world of the fish traders and their chefs are also featured as a revealing side-story in the documentary on Jiro Ono (Jiro Dreams of Sushi, 2011, David Gelb, Magnolia). Here, there is the unmistakeable scent of the pride…
The Singapore Writer’s Festival in November 2014 was an interesting experience because one of my favourite travel writers, Paul Theroux was featured in a few of the programs. Here, at the National Museum, the panel forum was (nominally) on Humanitarian Missions and the Third World, and I was reintroduced to the work of Charles Dickens by Mr…
God, an elderly Jesuit once suggested to me, is something like an old carpenter in a small village in Vermont. If you ask the townspeople where to turn to for carpentry work or repairs, they will say, “There’s only one person to call. He does excellent work. He’s careful, he’s precise, he’s conscientious, he’s creative,…
This picture was taken through the windows of the staff lounge at the hospital where I worked in the burns intensive care unit in December 1993. The beauty of winter, seen through the placid landscape of white roofs and steamy chimneys, is savaged by Man’s need to keep warm and the terrible unexpected fires that sweep through homes with unattended kerosene…
Experience Music Project Museum, Seattle (2015)
The term ‘the road less travelled’ has its origins in the poem The Road Not Taken,written by the august American poet Robert Frost (1874-1963). TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could…