Mosquitoes

All those tiny, hard to ignore, incommodious, pestiferous, vexatious actions that people commit in Vietnam stay in your mind long after the event – like earworms, hard to forget – and keep coming back and horribly haunting. Bugbears are for most of us are personal, where you put your toothbrush, body odors – all those ‘I hate when people… (do something)’ moments that trip up your day. The stuff that sometimes gets you called ‘small-minded’. Here’s an example; I go to my morning coffee shop early around sixish only to find two Vietnamese motorbikes parked diagonally next to the front steps. This covers the space of four motorbikes and prevents me parking my bike facing the street so I can make a quick, smooth getaway. It’s the same two guys each time, sniggering and pointing at me as I enter muttering insults at them. I hate the parking inconsideration towards others however the parking area is not crowded at that time in the morning so from their point of view; so what? Have I … [Read more...] about Vietnamese bugbears

Mohammed Azhar holds his baby niece next to a storm drain full of plastic and stinking black sludge, testament to India's failure to treat nearly two-thirds of its urban sewage. In this photograph taken on April 26, 2023, people walk along a street next to a sewage canal filled with garbage at Seelampur neighbourhood in New Delhi. "We stay inside our homes. We fall sick if we go out," the 21-year-old told AFP in the Delhi neighbourhood of Seelampur, where open gutters packed with plastic and sickly greyish water flow alongside the narrow lanes. "It stinks. It attracts mosquitoes. We catch diseases and the kids keep falling sick," he added. "There is no one to clean the filth." India at the end of April was projected to have overtaken China as the world's most populous country, according to the United Nations, with almost 1.43 billion people. Its urban population is predicted to explode in the coming decades, with over 270 million more people forecast to live … [Read more...] about Dead rivers, flaming lakes: India’s sewage failure