Diary
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Afghanistan – since I had to…
I volunteered to work for the polio programme in Afghanistan in 2008, fresh from my first international assignment in Nigeria. It was only in 2010 that this materialised. I spent half a year with UNICEF working on eradicating polio, a job that came quite naturally to me since I wrote my book, but nothing had prepared me for the complexities that came with working in a country that had only known conflict. At the end of six months, I was weary and weatherbeaten. But Afghanistan was a drug that was hard to shake. So I returned. This time, I transitioned from polio (and public health) to regional integration and from…
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Finding Joy(a)
At three, my little brother was an irresistible cutie. He was playing in a sandpit beside a construction site one hot June afternoon when a little girl joined him. She was called Joya and was looking for friends. Her parents were visiting from Bombay and living in an enormous whitewashed bungalow beside our grandfather’s newly built house in Allahabad. She was a few years older to him and since his conversation skills were limited, he brought her over to meet his older sisters. And since friendships formed quite spontaneously without much profiling those days, we all became friends, accessing open fields and each other’s compounds freely. My grandmother didn’t like…
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Claiming the Earth
Several decades ago, during my first trip to Ladakh, long before Indian tourists “discovered” their own Shangri-la, I met a man perched on a boulder in the midst of the colourful bazaar. He didn’t fit into the boxes I had neatly organised in my head (this was long before I liberated myself from the boxes), so I asked him where he came from. “I am a citizen of the universe,” he said mockingly. I considered him with disdain and wondered if that was indeed the required dress code for someone who wished to inhabit a realm beyond time and space. Today, I may have moved several countries away, but a…