6. Being in the UAE at the time also let me experience India in a different way.

From Singapore it was very easy for me to get to the south. So that’s what I did.

From the UAE there were many easy ways to get to the north, so I did more of that than ever.

Then the financial crisis hit. The famous abandoned cars in Dubai: at first it was one, then it was hundreds. It was an eerie ghost town.

I wasn’t planning to stay long anyway. I saw the writing on the wall. I was thankful to have had a few good years in journalism. But the industry was being decimated and I didn’t see a future.

Unsure what to do, I went to London to be with my first serious partner (the person who got me Cookie). We hung out there through to the end of her expat assignment there then decided to move to (her) home, Kuala Lumpur.

#India #Travel

5. ‘What do you want to do after college?’ People kept asking me that. As if expecting me to slow down once I graduated, and to eventually conform.

I had no idea. I knew what I did not want: I did not want to have to wear formal office clothes and go to one place every day 9 to 5 for the rest of my life.

That’s as far as my planning went.

As with many things, being on the road answered that for me. The first of many questions and answers.

On one such trip, I met a photojournalist at a bar in Mumbai. He needed a writer to go with him to Cherrapunjee, in Meghlaya. His writer had visa issues and couldn’t come. I volunteered.

We went. I wrote a story. It was the cover story of a major environmental magazine. I made some British pounds and it was more money than I’d made standing on my feet in retail, working jobs to make money to go live on the road.

I spent the rest of my time in college doing this.

As I was about to graduate, someone offered me a job in Dubai, to write and photograph around MENA. I took it. I didn’t have to wear a formal shirt and go anywhere 9-5.

That year in Dubai let me spend time around Syria, Turkey, Lebanon, Yemen, and many other places. This was pre-2008 financial crisis, pre Arab spring.

#India #Travel

4. This life wasn’t all fun and roses.

I was a young adult at the time. I was trying to live two lives: one as a college student, the other as an adventurer.

Obviously, there weren’t many other people my age around me who led a similar life.

I dated a variety of women of various ages who couldn’t deal with my frequent disappearances. I dated a variety of women on the road on my travels. It was fun, but it was also immensely difficult to build any semblance of a ‘normal life’.

I didn’t do that until much later. I don’t think that’s what I wanted anyway.

A few weeks ago, the first woman I ever loved sent me a screenshot of her contact page for me, on her phone: it had 20 phone numbers over 20 years. 10 different countries.

I wouldn’t have dated me too :)

#India #Travel

3. If you know anything about Singapore at all, you’ll know how unusual this was.

Most people did not simply go on multi-month backpacking trips. Girls certainly did not do that solo.

But I was not brought up to consider that I can’t do anything, so it simply never crossed my mind. I believed (and I was told) that I can, indeed, do whatever I wanted to do.

So I did. I wrote about this on my blog at the time. Not everything lives on there, but some remain: popagandhi.com/tags/india/

I was never one for analytics so I had no idea who was reading or how many.

Many years later I heard from many Asian women that reading that, at that time, inspired them to see the world and they believed they could, because I did.

I was very honored but to this day I don’t feel that I did anything particularly brave.

That’s because I never, and still don’t, see the world as an especially dangerous place. I see the world as a place full of interesting people who I want to meet.

#India #Travel

2. I was 19 years old when I did my first 55 day trip around India.

I worked three jobs while going to school, to make the money I needed to do this.

I traveled by train (series of trains) from Singapore to Bangkok, then i went to Khaosan Road and bought a $80 one way ticket to Kolkata via Bhutan.

It was terribly exciting to me at the time.

That summer I traveled all over, meeting folks I knew online in each city; I learned how to travel across the country cheaply (by going in indian railways sleeper class, and by staying in 100 rupee hotel rooms).

Many of the people I met on those adventures are still friends today. Some of them gave me jobs (including the job that took me to California), 15 years or more later.

I was in a season of my life where I wanted to do everything, meet everyone. In some regards I’m not sure that I ever really stopped.

#India #Travel

A lifetime of adventures across India (and the rest of the world..):

1. When I was 18 years old, I joined a volunteer tourism program which was heavily subsidized by the Singapore government. I spent a month in Kolkata in the Sonagachi red light district working with the kids of sex workers, most of them trafficked. We worked with an organization that provided services to their kids.

Up till that point I’d led a fairly privileged life in Singapore as a middle class kid who wanted for nothing. But that experience showed me that I wanted to do more than volunteer tourism.

I also describe my month in Kolkata as ‘the trip where life suddenly made sense for me’, in that I developed a sense of how I wanted to live the rest of my life. Not in Singapore. Not as a corporate worker in the financial district.

I wanted to build deep relationships in that country and I loved everything about it.

Six months later I would come back on my own for my first 55-day solo trip around India.

#India #Travel

Cool painting of a squid done by Bhil (tribal) artists from Madhya Pradesh. I met the artist at the national crafts museum and he soon realized I liked all of his marine animal paintings (seahorse, turtle, eel, etc) and his transit ones (tribal people taking a bus)

#Delhi #Art #India

The world’s largest collection of bhuta sculptures at National Crafts Museum, New Delhi.

Bhuta is sculpture made from jackfruit timbre in coastal Karnataka, and can take the form of deity, spirits or animals

#India #Delhi #Art #Karnataka

Growing list of those born or died on September 28 in any year

Peter Finch
mastodon.social/@audubonballro…

#blackwomen #blackhistory #whitehistory #film #lgbtq #blackwomen #india #georgecarlin #blackmusic #blackmastodon

Audubon Ballroon (he/him)

2026-09-27 21:10:36

Frederick George Peter Ingle Finch (28 September 1916 – 14 January 1977) was an [english] and Australian actor. ...

Finch won five BAFTA Awards for Best Actor, and the Academy Award in the same category for his portrayal of crazed television

(1/8)

#film #lgbtq #blackwomen #india #georgecarlin

Frederick George Peter Ingle Finch (28 September 1916 – 14 January 1977) was an [english] and Australian actor. ...

Finch won five BAFTA Awards for Best Actor, and the Academy Award in the same category for his portrayal of crazed television

(1/8)

#film #lgbtq #blackwomen #india #georgecarlin

Fuck

"Huge #ElNiño projected to cause 450,000 deaths by February"

theguardian.com/environment/20…

#climatechange #climatecrisis #nigeria #indonesia #sudan #india #brazil

There is very little public discourse on tech policy in my native language. So I decided to translate one of my blog posts from English in the interest of public awareness and access. aarohini.medium.com/%E0%A4%A4%…

English version: aarohini.medium.com/policy-wor…

#techpolicy #marathi #socialpolicy #digitalpolicy #india

i always say to #wumao:

yes, it is time to right the wrongs of the #CenturyOfHumiliation

so rather than steal sandbars from the #philippines and glaciers from #india, how about actually reclaiming actual land of #china that was actually stolen by actual european colonizers:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Ma…

i haven't heard back from them

such a mystery as to why!

😆

Amid fuel shortages, Russia starts receiving gasoline from India

#Russia #FuelShortage #GlobalMarket #RussiaIndiaRelations #India

meduza.io/en/news/2026/08/12/a…

The last queen of Sikkim was.. a woman from San Francisco

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hope_Coo…

#India #Sikkim #SanFrancisco #History

Follow up:

mastodon.social/@benroyce/1167…

" #India’s #education minister resigns amid #Cockroach #youth movement #protests"

theguardian.com/world/2026/jul…

Something every people of every country need to learn (many know, many don't):

You fight for something, you win

You sit there in inert whiny #cynicism and fragile impotent #perfectionism: you're only aiding malice in your #learnedHelplessness. You've been psychologically conditioned

Especially you, lazy entitled Americans

#CJP #CockroachJanataParty

⏩︎VOTE⏪︎ ᶜʸⁿⁱᶜⁱˢᵐ⁼ᵃᶜᶜᵉᵖᵗᵃⁿᶜᵉ (Ben Royce)

2026-06-07 14:50:54

In #India in May, Chief Justice #SuryaKant compared #unemployed #youth to “cockroaches” and “parasites” in a hearing

Well there's an interesting thing that happens when you use a slur against a group of people:

#Reappropriation

A negative slur flipped to a statement of pride

Now mere frustration among young Indians over #education, #jobs and the #economy has morphed into large #protests and even a political movement:

#CJP

the #CockroachJanataParty

apnews.com/article/india-cockr…

#politics

Across the Plateau 2007

The extraordinary story of seven Chinese men and women, all of them retired, who embark on a 3,100 kilometre journey from Lanzhou, a smoggy industrial city in north west China, across the Tibetan plateau to Everest Base Camp.

imdb.com/title/tt13906582

#film #elderly #india

it's the kind of day for Dur Dur

youtube.com/watch?v=qDTnCTTkNh…

#Music #India #Bollywood #WorldMusic

Interesting video about the lives of different income classes in Bangalore

Has a disco Elysium / RPG style storytelling mode which is pretty cool

youtu.be/1lCoQi1IcQ0

#India

In #India in May, Chief Justice #SuryaKant compared #unemployed #youth to “cockroaches” and “parasites” in a hearing

Well there's an interesting thing that happens when you use a slur against a group of people:

#Reappropriation

A negative slur flipped to a statement of pride

Now mere frustration among young Indians over #education, #jobs and the #economy has morphed into large #protests and even a political movement:

#CJP

the #CockroachJanataParty

apnews.com/article/india-cockr…

#politics

Fun fact Europe doesn’t need the strait of Hormuz . Their oil came primarily by the Red Sea.

For Europe it is 3.8 % of the traffic of this region , for the UFA it is 2.5 %
Asians countries are more impacted . 89 % of the traffic.

But as prices are global , we can say that everybody is affected by their fucking idiocracy.

visualcapitalist.com/charted-o…

#europe #eu #boycottusa #china #southkorea #japan #india #iran

very desperately homesick for south and southeast asia this morning

thankfully we have music for that

youtube.com/watch?v=jDErhADhhm…

youtube.com/watch?v=l2mI4vL95k…

#Music #India #Indonesia #TootSea

India “has achieved over 50% of its installed electricity capacity from non-fossil sources —

reaching this milestone five years ahead of its 2030 Paris Agreement target.”

- (NB Generation will be much lower, but still!)

gulfnews.com/world/asia/india/…

#Climate #Energy #Renewables #Nuclear #India #Electricity

1st May 2026| Chennai - Delhi | Tamil Nadu Express

Train is 2:34 hrs late, revised ETA is 9:04.

Trains still do have a full fledged pantry. I had presumed that they had been done away with for safety reasons, that presumption was mistaken..lnHowever, the presence of the pantry has not made the food any better, it is
significantly worse that 2 - 3 decades ago.

The taste gap is being filled by food delivery services.

@skinnylatte i am nearly at the end of my journey.

#travel #trains #india

30th April 2026. Chennai - Delhi | Tamil Nadu Express

The washrooms are generally clean, & a few people come by every couple of hours to clean up.

I like that they have a separate shower / bathing space - not combined with a WC or IC loo. (Which are also in good shape)

So I risked a hot shower. Its
Sounds counter intiutive but it was luxury. Just one constant sun heated temperature of water, with not to harsh a force & volume.

#travel #trains #india #hotshower #TNexpress

Thanks to all 5 participants of the 28th OpenStreetMap Delhi Mapping Party!

During the party, 177 features were created across 20 changesets. These include -
45 shops
37 amenities
26 buildings
16 healthcare features
16 road-related features
10 man-made features
8 offices
5 landuse
5 tourism features
3 public transport features

And that's excluding the mapping on the way from Delhi to Meerut and back!

#OpenStreetMap #OSM #OsmNcr #Delhi #Meerut #India

The #OpenStreetMap community of #Delhi invites everyone to its 28th mapping party!

#Meerut needs our mapping help, and we're answering the call.

🗓️ Sunday, 12th of April
🕙 4 PM to 7 PM, followed by refreshments (sponsored by #TomTom)
📌 Haldiram's, Garh Road, Meerut

Learn more, register, and add the event to your calendar at - osmcal.org/event/4349/

#PleaseBoost #OsmNcr #OSM #India