Check out Beyond Skin, a blog by a desi woman in Bangkok. I’ve been diggin’ the archives. Here’s Pooj’s reaction to the Koyal Dark book cover:

As a teenager, it was important to me to feel part of some greater collective of diasporic South Asian 15 year old girls all wondering why they weren’t allowed to go to sleepovers (to this day, the greatest mystery of my life.) … while this cover makes me want to claw my eyeballs out with henna-covered fingertips, I am actually, deep in my gut, grateful for their existence. [Link]

She elegizes lost youth, echoing a friend speaking about adda at Coffee House in Calcutta. We all miss the political gupshup of college:

Friday nights throughout high school were spent in an alley lined with crappy bars in various states of dilapidation. In the darkness and in your drunken state, you could not see the rats or the cockroaches but if you wore a skirt you’d feel them scurry past. Over endless jugs of frozen Kamikaze, we managed to solve all the world’s problems week after week. We debated foreign policy and explored what the hell it meant to be a socialist, a feminist, a nationalist; to be an outsider in every city you’ve ever lived…

Here in this dark bar at the end of an alley full of vice, we endlessly quoted T. S. Eliot and Arundhati Roy, ripping apart literature as if we’d written the Booker of Bookers. Here, we fell in love and got broken-hearted. Here, we acted a fool. Here, we grew up. We were united by our jug of icy blue intoxicant.

Now we are older…. We have new haircuts, new partners, new homes… Today the alley is different, with garish flourescent lights in technicolour, renovated urban design with bouncers at the entrance and lady-boys who are offended by my cleavage. But the Kamikaze jug stills waits, just as before… [Link]

Snarking about the recent Thailand coup:If you want to know the reality of a country, ask a taxi driver

This coup is every Khao Saan traveller’s wet dream. I will rename it “Coup d’Etat Lite, 2006″. They get the tanks, soldiers and headlines minus the bullets, conflict and fear. So in the morning they pose with a soldier, in the afternoon they do a boat trip down the river and at night they get pissed on piss-tasting Thai beer. Brilliant packaged deal. Thailand should really consider making these peaceful military takeovers a seasonal thing…

2 out of 3 of my taxi drivers yesterday approved of the coup and said Thaksin had to be taken out any means necessary, the third driver did not care what happened to the government as each administration is as corrupt as the other… I am reminded of that scene in Taxi Driver when De Niro is asked by a politician what he thinks of New York and De Niro reponds something along the lines of “fuckshitpiss, skanks n’ hos, pushers n’ addicts”. If you want to know the realities of a country - ask a taxi driver. Do not ask a 15 year old soldier who is acting on orders given by his superiors, as a BBC corresspondant did this morning. The kid was like “yes, coup is good.” [Link]

This is the most crisp maiden post I’ve read yet:

Blog.

Unemployed. [Link]

This blogger is not paid by the word