A week in Assam, India

The village of Charenghi Pathar has nothing to appeal to the average tourist. So effective was this deterrent that I turned out to be the first one they had ever seen there. Although its lack of appeal was motivation enough for me to want to see it, the same could be said of many places, so it was no random event that brought me there. It was the birth place of my dear friend J who had his first opportunity…

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The joys of Bengali haystacks

A shocking anomaly in the art world surely has to be the tragically overlooked form of the hay stack, where euro-centric critics have dismissed it as an agricultural craft discipline, devoid of true creative flair. If they only left their ivory towers long enough to travel to Bangladesh or eastern India they would surely realise the error in their ways and recognise that Bengali culture has devoted centuries to the perfection of hay stack construction as a higher art form….

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