Reflections

Mark Kitto has lived in China for the past 16 years. Now he is leaving. In this article from Prospect magazine, he tells us why . The original article can be read here . Death and taxes. You know how the saying goes. I’d like to add a third certainty: you’ll never become Chinese, no matter how hard you try, or want to, or think you ought to. I wanted to be Chinese, once. I don’t mean I wanted to wear a silk jacket and cotton slippers, or a Mao suit and cap and dye my hair black and proclaim that blowing your nose in a handkerchief is disgusting. I wanted China to be the place where I made a career and lived my life. For the past 16 years it has been precisely that. But now I will be leaving. I won’t be rushing back either. I have fallen out of love, woken from my China Dream. “But China is an economic miracle: record number of people lifted out of poverty in record time… year on year ten per cent growth… exports… imports… infrastructure… investment…saved the world during the 200...

I just got back from a trip to China. When I say trip it was not a two month travel of discovery but just a two city visit to Beijing and Xi An. Lasting over a week, this was my first trip to the Middle Kingdom. These are my first impressions of the world’s second power. Please bear in mind that these are very subjective impressions gathered during a vacation. I did not go anywhere except the tourist areas and met nobody but the tourist industry people. I could not communicate with anybody else because of the language barrier. Thus the impressions are obviously biased. So here goes: a) There is an obsession with bigness. The airport is huge, unnecessarily so, because so many of the gates are vacant and unused. The Tiananmen Square is the largest in the world, the National Centre for the Performing Arts must be one of the biggest in the world. And nor is this obsession recent. The Great Wall is a huge structure. The Forbidden City , the Summer Place and many of the old imperial buil...

One remembers many friends from the schooldays. Not flesh and blood friends, but those that we met in the pages of comic books. They became part of our childhood and one or two of them have remained with us to this day. We Bengali children had Batul the great, and Nontey Phontey who were great favourites. But in the more cosmospolitan atmosphere where we were brought up, American comic book characters ruled the roost. Casper the friendly Ghost, the Archie family and of course Superman and Batman , who have now received afresh lease of life because of the movie franchises were some of the favorites. However none of them have remained my close friend as has the five year old from Elm Street, Wichita Kansas. I speak of course of Dennis the Menace. In our school life we knew of two Denises. One was the one from America, but occasionally we also came across his British counterpart, Dennis with his dog, the Gnasher. However his exploits never tugged the heartstrings the way The America...

This is an excerpt from a speech by Ms. Geralyn R Spollett, American Diabetes Association (ADA,)President of healthcare and education, during ADA’s 72nd scientific sessions held recently in Philadelpshia, Pennsylvania, US. I felt that this is something that we really should think a lot about . One person is diagnosed with diabetes every 17 seconds. This one person could be your family member, your child, or the man that rides next to you on the train to work each morning. For many of us, diabetes has been our lives’ work. Unfortunately, there is enough work in this field to last for generations to come. My fondest dream is to hold high the vial of a miraculous serum as Jonas Salk did when he announced the polio vaccine, and tell you that I and my colleagues have found a cure for diabetes and our mission is fulfilled: a life free of diabetes and all its burdens! However, lately I have been having two recurring nightmares. In one, there are lines and lines of people,...

Tasik Bera is Malaysia’s largest freshwater lake. It is claimed to be about 35 km long and 20 km wide. The stretch that we can see is dotted with reed beds and the water is calm and quiet, a few ripples testifying to the presence of the more than 200 species of fish that are said to reside in its waters. Semmelai, a local tribe has inhabited the area for more than half a millennium and they still live in pockets around the lake. The forests around the lake are home to many species of birds and animals including mouse deer and wild pigs, not to speak of many snake species including the python. The locals still trap these for food and other uses. We check in to the hotel and go to our room. The room is just at the edge of the lake, tucked away from the restaurant and we can see nothing but the lake and the forests beyond. There si verandah where you can sit and contemplate the absolute or alternatively use your binoculars to check out the birdlife. It is a little perplexing to see that...