My first teacher in Beijing made me repeat ‘jerk’ and ‘church’ several times until I could growl the Mandarin Rrrr. After a gap, I’m now back to school where a 26-year-old Song laoshi (Teacher Song) stares at me wide-eyed and orders: angry, I want more angry!’ Read more

I remember the thrill a windy day last March, when I first set eyes on what was then the world’s most controversial skyscraper being built. It still draws China’s biggest buzz about a building. Read more

Most of the bureaucrats and politicians from Bangalore were vegetarian and could tell you a story or two about suspecting every dish placed before them since they had landed in Beijing. But to be investor-friendly in China, they gamely sat at round tables laden with plates of fillet duck and mandarin fish in a five-star banquet hall in Beijing last week. Read more

Just when I began to think that Beijing was bored of swine flu, (H1N1) I met an Indian parent ordered to check his son’s temperature every morning and note it on a school form.

A nanny on the school bus checks the card. Any student with a temperature above 37.5 degrees Celsius and/or a cough, runny nose and headache, may be offloaded. Everybody — students, parents and visitors— must disinfect their hands at the school entrance. Read more

Your Chinese is good. Which country are you from?
India.
Ah. I don’t feel friendly toward India.

My Chinese friend and I were practising how to say ‘let’s stay in touch’ in Mandarin, when the taxi driver glanced behind to ask about my nationality and retort that he did not feel friendly toward India. Read more

Friday: Wake up and check if the sky is blue. The sky is ash grey.
 
Start checking pending emails. The next Bollywood screening at the Indian Embassy culture centre is Hum Saath Saath Hain (We are united, 1999). Stop checking emails. Read more

In small towns with big wide roads and markets flaunting fake Armani as street fashion, who would notice the acquisition of a refrigerator? But this humble appliance could be China’s most curious household asset sold for the sake of the recession. Read more

It’s Sunday morning in Beijing and too early to wake up local friends. But I know my friend in New Delhi is up early, sipping chai and posting a status message I want to read. We would catch up for a few minutes on Facebook before starting the day’s work — until the Chinese censors began poking it. Read more

A developer in Shanghai is building a replica of Michael Jackson’s Neverland ranch on an island off the city’s coast. The news made a splash in the government-run China Daily newspaper this week, and set me thinking.

Where do I live? Read more

“…and he had once famously dined with a warlord in Yantai while the blood of his recently executed enemies dripped from the floor above into his noodles and shredded beef’’ _ Through the Looking Glass: China’s Foreign Journalists from Opium Wars to Mao, by Paul French. Read more