New Mandala

Upon telling a nephew that I had just returned from Nagaland, he laughed because it didn’t seem that I was coming from abroad. The only “lands” he knew were Finland, Poland, Thailand and Holland. His school never told him anything about Nagaland.
- Extracted from Abhay Vaidya, “Travelling the distance to Nagaland”, The Morung Express, 15 [...]

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Over the years I have sometimes mentioned the social and economic chaos that occurs in certain parts of mainland Southeast Asia after the flowering of bamboo forests.  Apocalyptic rat plagues can descend on villages, particularly in northeast India and western Burma, destroying lives and livelihoods as they go.
Until now there have only been scraps of information about the ecological [...]

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Further to yesterday’s post about the Burmese generals and their reputed lack of intelligence I would like to introduce another slightly contrarian perspective.  Thanks to everyone who has already weighed in with their comments.
I have sometimes wondered out loud whether the exceptionalism that underpins many analyses of the Burmese generals is built on another slight [...]

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I love black hip-hop and the NBL [National Basketball League] is my life. I don’t know why. Maybe we look to black American culture because we are so much darker than the Chinese
- Quote from Cheryl, aged, 20, the daughter of a senior Wa official in Shan State Special Region 2.  These lines comes from [...]

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Some years back I posted brief reflections on the sporadic “rat plagues” that have devastating implications for people in northern Burma, particularly in areas near the Indian border.  Parts of the Chin and Kachin States, and Sagaing Division, and perhaps other places too, are the hotspots for these rodent rampages.  Adjacent areas of northeast India [...]

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This small selection of images highlights the role of two Arunachal Pradesh government ministers at the recent Singpho Manau festival held in northeast India.  The ministers flew in by helicopter and were driven to the festival (via the local circuit house) in a convoy of substantial four-wheel drives.
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- The ministers arrive on the morning of the first [...]

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Writing slogans for a tourism campaign is not, I imagine, ever an easy task.  In Arunachal Pradesh the government has long used “Arunachal Pradesh: Gateway to Serenity” as its core message.  Apparently there is a controversial history behind it.�
Slogans aside - for better or for worse the tourist industry has never really taken off in the state.  Of [...]

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- The menu for the Singpho food stall at the recent Dehing Patkai Festival held on northeast India’s Assam plain.  The prices are in Indian rupees.  As far as I am aware there are two well-known Singpho (or Kachin) restaurants in India (one in Assam and one in Goa).�
Readers who come across any unusual menus in other parts of the region [...]

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These photos were taken earlier in February near Miao in the eastern part of India’s Arunachal Pradesh.  The Burmese border is not that far away (see this official map to get a sense of the geography).  The river that stars in these shots is the Dehing.  It starts high in the mountains and, as the huge riverbed [...]

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Over the last couple of years I have been fortunate to travel widely throughout the borderlands where Burma, China and India come together.  In this time I have spent many hours bumping along the trans-regional connection, now often called the Stilwell Road, that was constructed by allied forces during World War II.  As many readers know, the road from [...]

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