New Mandala

Stir-fried or grilled, Vietnamese can’t seem to get enough of Cambodian rat meat, and the global influenza outbreak as well as recent heavy rains have proven a boon for both consumers and exporters.
- Extracted from Ek Madra, “Flu fears, rains buoy Cambodia rat exports to Vietnam”, Reuters India, 18 May 2009.
Long-time readers will know that [...]

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Dipping into old ethnographies is sometimes good fun. William Carlson Smith’s The Ao Naga Tribe of Assam (1925) is one of those mostly-forgotten books that take a while to find. Smith went from Christian missionary work to sociology/anthropology, and his book carries over some interesting ambivalence about his former line of work. He suggests that [...]

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Long-term readers will know that the New Mandala brief often ranges far and wide.  For some time now we have sporadically posted material on the “rat explosions” that occur in certain parts of northern and western Burma, and in northeastern India.
Today New Mandala reader Aiontay has pointed me towards a new PBS documentary that explains [...]

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Upon telling a nephew that I had just returned from Nagaland, he laughed because it didn’t seem that I was coming from abroad. The only “lands” he knew were Finland, Poland, Thailand and Holland. His school never told him anything about Nagaland.
- Extracted from Abhay Vaidya, “Travelling the distance to Nagaland”, The Morung Express, 15 [...]

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Over the years I have sometimes mentioned the social and economic chaos that occurs in certain parts of mainland Southeast Asia after the flowering of bamboo forests.  Apocalyptic rat plagues can descend on villages, particularly in northeast India and western Burma, destroying lives and livelihoods as they go.
Until now there have only been scraps of information about the ecological [...]

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Further to yesterday’s post about the Burmese generals and their reputed lack of intelligence I would like to introduce another slightly contrarian perspective.  Thanks to everyone who has already weighed in with their comments.
I have sometimes wondered out loud whether the exceptionalism that underpins many analyses of the Burmese generals is built on another slight [...]

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I love black hip-hop and the NBL [National Basketball League] is my life. I don’t know why. Maybe we look to black American culture because we are so much darker than the Chinese
- Quote from Cheryl, aged, 20, the daughter of a senior Wa official in Shan State Special Region 2.  These lines comes from [...]

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Some years back I posted brief reflections on the sporadic “rat plagues” that have devastating implications for people in northern Burma, particularly in areas near the Indian border.  Parts of the Chin and Kachin States, and Sagaing Division, and perhaps other places too, are the hotspots for these rodent rampages.  Adjacent areas of northeast India [...]

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This small selection of images highlights the role of two Arunachal Pradesh government ministers at the recent Singpho Manau festival held in northeast India.  The ministers flew in by helicopter and were driven to the festival (via the local circuit house) in a convoy of substantial four-wheel drives.
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- The ministers arrive on the morning of the first [...]

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Writing slogans for a tourism campaign is not, I imagine, ever an easy task.  In Arunachal Pradesh the government has long used “Arunachal Pradesh: Gateway to Serenity” as its core message.  Apparently there is a controversial history behind it.�
Slogans aside - for better or for worse the tourist industry has never really taken off in the state.  Of [...]

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