Published in the Kathmandu Post , 12 Jun 2011 To the traveller’s eye, Chiang Mai is a gracious little city. It is cut through at the centre with a medieval brick wall, reminding the traveller that this city, unlike Bangkok, has an architectural heritage. Bangkok’s bold and brash embrace of modernity and capitalism has made it a city of dreary concrete skyscrapers. Chiang Mai, on the other hand, shows off its Thai architectural heritage with verve, although their wooden houses and sloping roofs may soon vanish in a sea of concrete and glass condominiums and malls. Running next to this great wall is a canal, filled with water and fountains. The water is clean. The fountains twinkle with rainbows in the summer rain. On the roadsides, which still roar with Vespas but driven by less manic drivers than those in Bangkok, there are green trees. “Bangkok no good!” says my tuk-tuk driver. This is a term I’ll hear echoed over and over, not just in Chiang Mai but Bangkok itself, by edgy taxi dri...
The civil wars of the twenty-first century: Sushma Joshi's slightly twisted perspective of the universe.