Category: Diversity in the Netherlands

‘Stop smiling and showing everyone around you how friendly and approachable you are.’ This is one of the tips I have sometimes given to a European woman who was due to travel to India on work, in the course of a ‘Doing Business in India Training’. It came as no surprise to me when a…

There aren’t many surprises for me through four hours of screen time as I sit through the documentary ‘Reason’. I imagine this also holds true for all of us who have been watching with great dread how those, following the ideology of the killers of Gandhi have taken upon themselves the task of ‘Hinduising’ India.…

‘We’d like less smoke. We’d like our eyes to burn less when we cook’. These are Vandana Radhakrishnan’s words, repeating what rural women in Hoskote in South India have told her. And there on the screen before me, the huge irony of other words in Dutch come home to me: ‘absolutely a man’s work –…

My fingers, clutch a piece of dosa, with its aaloo filling just dipped into warm sambhar and cool coconut chutney and do manage to make it into my mouth, and mmmmm, mmmmm. MMMMMMMM. The taste of home. “It’s this stupid; this is the main reason that I, and I suspect many thousands of others have…