Monty’s Indian Outlook

The Nepalese Supreme Court has finally upheld the murder verdict on Charles Sobhraj, the Asian serial-killer known as The Serpent, for the murder of a young woman he committed in 1975. It was a surprise decision because the case seems to rest on blurred photocopies and books and films, neither of which are permissible as [...]

Later this morning I will be strangled by a Hindi gangster called Mr Biscuit and thrown onto a steel conveyor-belt and into an incinerator. As might be surmised from the paragraph above my role as a Russian drug dealer in the movie Dum Maro Dum is coming to an end and unlike James Bond in [...]

It was when I saw my sugar cane juice man closing down his stall I knew that the monsoon would to be early and India’s economic growth this year would be extraordinary. The monsoon in India is the juice that gives the country its vitamins and the early arrival this year makes up for 2009 [...]

Football is a game that divides and obsesses, but Dharamsala’s Sharsaman bar for the midnight kick-off of the Champions’ League Final last week was a mighty fine place to be. Thanks to some terrific marketing by the bar that had advertised the game between Inter Milan and Bayern Munich as starting at 10.30pm the place [...]

I was stuck in an internet cafe between two patchouli-stinking raving hippies and I bitterly regretted spilling that cup of coffee over my lovely laptop. There was nothing worse than listening to their banal Skype conversations about revision and Glastonbury tickets, as well as other shrieks in Hebrew and Anglo-Indian to deal with, so please [...]

The Indian education system rarely spares the rod and a bizarre incident at a Surat private where schoolchildren were made to walk barefoot on fire and glass pieces only underscores this medieval system. The schoolchildren between the ages of 10 and 14 at the Rivervale School were paraded IN FRONT OF THEIR PARENTS to ‘help [...]

It’s been 16 years since I slept for two nights in the Golden Temple in Amritsar and it’s going to have to wait until tomorrow because I’m knackered and I want room service. Furthermore, I have shown the manager of this hotel a picture of me with my new Bollywood mates and I am playing [...]

The Jharkhand Government’s idea to give free mobile phones to 200 village leaders to send tip-offs about Maoist terrorists has backfired somewhat. The security forces have correctly pointed out that not only is it hard to distinguish between village mavens and Maoists, it also makes those leaders become immediate targets for the rebels, who steal [...]

The Bollywood film crew had left six lines of cocaine on the breakfast table in my friends’ house as they prepared their two children for school. Not really the example you want to set for your kids even though you’re being paid a fortune to rent out your house for a movie, but fortunately the [...]