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Made in First year architecture 2012 or 13 - who was she -

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The New Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan (Divya reads Asia #13)

About the shifting back to older worlds, trans national financing, how dire it would be if a war situation happens - ah well. :/

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Walking with the Comrades by Arundathi Roy ( Divya reads Asia #12)

what am I even doing drawing temples, writing strategy language for government, supposed economic development, tiger safari, bamboo training centres - trivial -

the world around me so beyond me

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Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundathi Roy ( Divya reads Asia #11)

tough conditions , tough women , tough relationships

eerie to read about the kickass lives SPA led to and what am I even doing

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The museum in Chennai

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Haroun and the Sea of Stories (Divya reads Asia #10)

Desi alice in wonderland

Took so much time, still hard for me to concentrate on fantasy stuff

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stray thought-beings from a a set of work notebooks being retired

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The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui (Divya reads Asia #9)

A story of a family blown around a country and then across the world by the forces of history, colonial powers and politics. It is intense, it really puts the country of Vietnam in perspective.

I can’t imagine how from that war torn state, it turned to the aesthetic-vlog Vietnam of today..

It also made me think of more complex, more recent displacement stories than of my own - the push and the pull of starting lives, getting by - that intensity of purpose that people have to set up and care for families - that I simply don’t.

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She tried to be one of them travelling artists, kind of

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China Days: A Visual Journal from China's Wild West by Henrik Drescher (Divya reads Asia #8)

This is beautiful and so inspiring

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The Elsewhereans by Jeet Thayil (Divya reads Asia #7)

Can’t remember the first time I read a full physical novel in one day. It goes from a small village in Kerala to Mumbai to Bihar to Vietnam to Hong Kong to Germany to China to Paris to Morocco and around and back and around.

It made me ponder.

Such a mobile family, the one I would dream of having - they have a huge riverside house to go back to - whatever changes, it’s there

My family and families around me probably chose stability since it was snatched from us.

Something about the nomadic tribe tag we have, upon reading the restlessness of this family, realised I couldn’t relate to it. Is it just an outdated tag? ( But also, what am I thinking about? Every cousin is out there in different continents. I am the one at home. Delhi nana family seems like the closest to these people - probably equally fucked up the kids turned out there didn't they... don't judge, don't judge)

In any case, it’s fascinating, taught me about different times and places, I related to many experiences, and the hunger of wanting to move around - about being a migrant, not an immigrant; wanting to write but failing to, with the fear of ending things once they are on paper; being brown among white people, being cruel amongst brown people, wanting to know histories but also being used to the comfort of traditional silences.

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A month back in the UK

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Quarterlife: A Novel by Devika Rege (Divya reads Asia #6)

This is one hit close to home - in many ways. I can imagine myself in parts in multiple characters but also people and life around me in too many ways. If I were not intentionally isolated and apathetic in the last few years, and actually stayed friends with people I've encountered, built a life in cities I've been in and had continued to engage in situations I've put myself in - I can easily picture being an embedded part of the conversations and scenarios of the book. It made me uneasy because of how real it was, but I am so happy someone, relatable but more engaged, went through the effort of pulling this work together, putting it down and releasing it out.

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Shopping for Buddhas by Jeff Greenwald (Divya reads Asia #5)

Sometimes you pick up a book in a small Nepali store and then just have to finish reading a Jewish American man having his mind blown by tantrics, temples, crazy historic city lanes, "teachers", cows, complexity, statues, virtues, hashish, man servants and more

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Asian girls in Western worlds (Divya reads Asia #4)

Read/heard a set of novels - Asian females grappling with life and thoughts in the West - so relatable in some ways and not at all in others.

Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou is an academic coming to senses about the ridiculous racism around her. Funny and understandable, but also made me worry for the naivety of the character.

Yellowface by R.F. Kuang is a gossipy annoying white lady but you can tell it's the Asian origin author's frustrations written out.

The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş is a couple of migrants designing a life from scratch in a Western city, coming up with rituals and trying to forge community having left their original ones behind. I enjoyed it, captures the desperation of being in early 30s I see around me, to establish new roots and permanencies in a flux-full life.

But the Girl by Jessica Zhan Mei Yu, by contrast, is going to the west alone and figuring out where you've come from. Relatable int hat sense, in the ways the main character felt isolated yet exoticized (in some ways, not all.)

Activities of Daily Living by Lisa Hsiao Chen is the one I liked best - the aging of parents, the need for projects, the designing of time - all of it.

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The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan (Divya reads Asia #3)

Heard this over many days and nights on the BorrowBox app. The lost glory of Asia but the current residual richness of Europe that allows for nice public libraries.

Book was Enjoyable. Old English man reading in British accent was soothing until he would try to do an accent of the Asians and be annoying!

I didn’t start the book expecting to read about the birth of religions in the Middle East but it was good. Fascinating stuff, I knew vaguely about before but more colours filled in and more conceptual structures drawn around it now.

I wish all the places mentioned were as easy to visit; and peaceful like the European ones mentioned are. They won’t be that curated either. I like wondering what Uzbekistan and Baghdad and Mongolia would be like if the winds never changed direction and the bustling metropolises of the world were still somewhere here. Is that where people from India would travel for their masters?

I also wish that the second book by Frankpan was on Audio so I could continue listening.

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Black Ghosts: A Journey Into the Lives of Africans in China by Noo Saro-Wiwa (Divya reads Asia #2)

I stumbled upon the audiobook on Borrow Box. I spent the last week listening to a Rushdie novel that trudged on and on, but this I heard in a day! Very enjoyable.

Noo is very cool and I aspire to be like her. Have an idea for a project, move to an unknown place for 3 months, and write a book so cool - it's informative and illustrative, I have a real picture of these streets and places in my head, so honest, about what she sees and emotions while she does her interviews and about how these lonely creepy African men treat her. Her intrigue, amusement and discomfort comes across in the writing. The Guangzhou city's chaotic yet highly effective wholesale markets made me think of Chandni chowk and Nehru place and agglomerations in India. I imagine them at an exponential scale. I wonder how I'd be treated if I walk around those streets and shops. I liked her reading the audiobook herself too, with the adaptive accents and notes. I hate clubs, but when she described the non-white cosmopolitan nature of one in Wuhan, I felt like I want to be there to see that. It reminded me of spending that half day in Istanbul with mum, thinking about the sheet variety of brown people of the world - something we never actually think about. The book also reminded me that I want to read the book -Globalization from Below: The World's Other Economy - The stuff I came across during my masters or around that time, thoroughly intriguing but I never got back to. I will also read/listen to the history of Asia I think, I know nothing beyond India and Pakistan.

What a lovely coincidence too, when I had 20-30 mins left of the book a post-crossing card arrived for me from a man Guangzhou! What a great card too - a home-map of China - with that bear in the bathtub and that panda on his study table, like I was when it came.