-
1 week ago | 
pallaviaiyar.substack.com | Pallavi Aiyar
Dear Global Jigsaw,A pause this week from the ongoing Mao Keji interview on India-China relations to focus on Spain’s Easter—my favorite time of year. While in many parts of the world it may be a festival associated with bunnies and chocolate covered eggs, in Spain, Semana Santa, or Holy Week, as the seven days between Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday are referred to, is something more elemental all together.
-
2 weeks ago | 
pallaviaiyar.substack.com | Pallavi Aiyar
Dear Gobal Jigsaw,Given the backdrop of a potential rapprochement between China and India at a time of what will surely be tectonic shifts in global alliances I am publishing a serialized interview with one of China’s leading India-focused scholars, Mao Keji. Today’s newsletter, the third in this series, will look at Mao’s answer to the question of whether he sees India’s democracy as having played a positive roe in the country’s development.
-
3 weeks ago | 
pallaviaiyar.substack.com | Pallavi Aiyar
Dear Global Jigsaw,Two thousand and twenty five will be critical for India-China relations. It marks the 75th anniversary of bilateral diplomatic ties and is a year that will unfold amidst a shifting global order, the attendant uncertainties of which appear to be helping a thaw in the ties between the Himalayan neighbors. This relationship has been in a deep freeze since military clashes along the nations’ disputed border in the Galwan Valley resulted in the deaths of soldiers on both sides.
-
1 month ago | 
pallaviaiyar.substack.com | Pallavi Aiyar
Dear Global Jigsaw,Some significant news on my end:In August, our family will be moving to China. For me, it will be a return to the country that I lived in between 2002-2009. I began my career as a foreign correspondent in Beijing, spending years following the Sino-Indian relationship through a series of peaks and troughs. The time I spent there was definitively the most formative.
-
1 month ago | 
pallaviaiyar.substack.com | Pallavi Aiyar
Hello Global Jigsaw Friends,In these days of constant motion, many of us cross borders more often than the sanitarily disinclined change socks. It can therefore become easy to feel disoriented and momentarily forget one’s whereabouts.
-
1 month ago | 
pallaviaiyar.substack.com | Pallavi Aiyar
Dear Global Jigsaw Family,I am just back from a trip with some of my Spanish girlfriends to Rajasthan and it reminded me of the last time I was there in 2022. That was a trip that had my family converted to the camel. As we had traveled west, deep into India’s Thar desert, our car increasingly had to share the road with this awkwardly shaped ungulate, all humps and joints and teeth. In Bikaner, we’d visited the National Camel Research Centre.
-
1 month ago | 
pallaviaiyar.substack.com | Pallavi Aiyar
Hola Global Jigsaw,I am off later today for my long-planned, two- week trip to India, accompanying five friends from Madrid. This is the trip that inspired the post that has had the biggest response to any edition of the newsletter thus far. See below: I will be back mid-March abuzz with ideas to write about. But in the meantime, here is a guest post by journalist and author (and old friend) Priya Malhotra. Priya recently moved back to India after several decades in New York.
-
2 months ago | 
pallaviaiyar.substack.com | Pallavi Aiyar
Dear Global Jigsaw,A few years ago I was approached by a start up who wanted to create an app for foreign tourists to India. My role was to write the text for the app’s “Cultural Quirks” section. This was the brief: “Our idea on this tour is to take head-on the FAQs that foreign visitors (especially first-timers) might have about India.
-
2 months ago | 
pallaviaiyar.substack.com | Pallavi Aiyar
Hola Global Jigsaw,It was 1996 in Oxford, and I was a curry-house virgin. Amid the honey-gold colleges, church steeples and pubs, these establishments punctuated the town like exclamation points. Students congregated here in the evenings performing spice-tolerance in ordering their curry of choice: Bhuna (mild), Madras (medium) or Vindaloo (fiery).[1] With a side of Bombay potatoes. And maybe some bindi baji. For an Indian student new to England, as I was, it was quite bewildering.
-
2 months ago | 
pallaviaiyar.substack.com | Pallavi Aiyar
Dear Global Jigsaw,I am just back in Madrid after a week in India to speak at the Jaipur literature festival, a gathering of the literati in numbers that only somewhere as demographically fecund as India can amass. It is billed as the largest such festival in the world, with half a million people in attendance. And is the kind of place where you end up sharing cars with Nobel prize winners.