All that’s spice can’t be nice
‘It gets especially out of hand in the evenings when at 10 pm at night, a bus arrives on the street and twenty people stand outside it, including children talking and laughing loudly carrying bags of rice. It’s not New Delhi on the Amstel’! For a (Dutch) resident of Westwijk in Amstelveen, this strange behaviour…
‘We came from far’
My friend Sara commented ‘I feel like I’m on holiday’ as we walked through the city centre. She had travelled from Olst, near Deventer to Breda, and I from Oegstgeest. She’d never been to Breda and I once before.’ But you’ve lived your whole life in the Netherlands!’ I said. To which she and her…
Is India safe for women?
‘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…
Reason
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.…
Blue Match
‘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 –…