If you ever doubted the power of words, read the words in the executive order signed by Donald Trump on January 27th, the words that restricted immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries, the words that suspended the immigration of all refugees for 120 days, and the words that barred all Syrian refugees indefinitely.  Just a few words on a page, but enough to spread confusion, hatred and fear within the US and far beyond its borders.

Let’s be clear.  Words matter.  Facts matter.  Truth matters.  We have a duty, not just to use words precisely, but to deploy them for what’s right, to use their undeniable power for those who have no power and for those whose words go unheard and ignored.

I’ve spent my entire working life in publishing, the world of words.  That work has taken me all over the Muslim world, to Iran, Iraq, United Arab Emirates, Oman, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and many other countries.  It has been a privilege, a privilege underpinned by a basic human right, to travel freely regardless of my beliefs and nationality.

Let’s use the right words to call this executive order what it is: racist, immoral, hateful, wrong.  Let’s keep shouting these simple words as loudly and as often as we can.

It was one of my New Year reading resolutions to find more new voices.  Stories grown in different cultures and fresh perspectives, young writers, experimental sounds. The Story of a Brief Marriage is the debut novel of a young writer from Sri Lanka, Anuk Arudpragasam, and is set during the civil war that ravaged that country for more than 20 years and claimed tens of thousands of lives.

The story centers on a temporary camp for those displaced by the civil war.  It’s a place that offers neither refuge, security, nor peace, in fact nothing more than flimsy shelter from the near-constant bombardment.  Here lives Dinesh, completely alone until a fellow refugee proposes that he marry his daughter, Ganga.  It’s the ultimate marriage of convenience, completed in the shadow of imminent death and in the hope that the bride will be spared if the occupying forces take control of the camp.  The setting is the kind of living hell that war creates every day for millions of people around the world.

The writing here is tightly packed, slow-paced, occasionally poetic.  There are many flashes of beauty.  It’s unmistakably the work of a young novelist, with flourishes and indulgences that a writer more mature or with a better editor would have expunged.  These are minor and certainly did nothing to diminish the impact of a very moving story, one that stayed with me long after I finished it.  It’s a novel that seems to offer a vision that’s both bleak and uplifting at the same time.  A novel that speaks to us of the impossibility of understanding another person’s deepest feelings (in this case grief and loneliness), but asserts the essential importance of art that tries to do so.

Here are two simple, unarguable travel truths.  If you want to know a city, walk.  If you want to have an encounter with a city and its people, walk without a purpose or a destination. (This latter truth is my re-working of Lao Tzu’s well-known dictum “Meandering leads to perfection“).  Some of my most memorable travel experiences have come from simply wandering around, walking from one street to the next, turning one corner after another, with no goal in mind other than seeing where they lead me.  I think I learned this first from my father who liked to take me along on Saturday walks in London that seemed to have little purpose other than exercise and a delight in unfamiliar streets.

A city is so much more than a list of sights.  Unless you’re very short of time, forget those websites and guidebooks that point you to the “Top 10 Things To See in …”  Leave the maps and GPS behind.  Lose the guides.  Get out and walk.  Look, listen, taste, and smell.  A city you breathe, ingest, digest, and absorb becomes part of you, unforgettable.  It changes you.  That’s true for every city and perhaps especially so for a place such as Delhi.

Exploring Delhi’s streets on foot isn’t always easy and it’s rarely comfortable.  Crossing from one sidewalk to another demands patience and nerves of steel.  This isn’t the place for the fainthearted.  You have to summon all your courage and dive in.  No one driving a car or rickshaw, or riding a motorbike, would ever consider stopping for you on a walkway.  Forget all the rules and the etiquette you learned elsewhere; this is a competitive sport in which the bravest and fittest prevail.  Drivers apparently determined to speed you to your next cycle of reincarnation are only the beginning of your problems.  There’s the crumbling, garbage-strewn pavements, the constant obstacles, the over-curious, bug-ridden street dogs (not to mention the occasional cow), the crowds, the calls of the rickshaw drivers and street vendors, and the endless stares of the locals (“Why is that white guy walking when he can afford a taxi?”).

Why, indeed?  Why bother?  Simply because the rewards far outweigh the mostly minor hassles.  I walked a couple of miles there recently.  The early morning sun was fighting to make itself felt through the dust, mist and smog, but Lodi Gardens looked gorgeous, no different from how they looked nearly forty years ago when I first saw them. I had a friendly chat with a very impressive-looking Sikh rickshaw driver keen to complain about the government and the recent demonetization policies. I had a mug of steaming hot chai in one of the scores of casual street cafes that have sprung up in recent years, enduring the stares and enjoying the questions of office workers, delivery boys, and taxi drivers, keen to know where I lived, what I thought of India, why I was awake so early, and much more.  A special couple of hours that added to my trove of India memories and deepened even further my affection for that amazing country and its people.

It puzzles me how two people can collaborate to write a novel.  How does that work in practice?  Do they divide the chapters or sections between them and, if so, how do they manage to create a uniform, cohesive style?  Nicci French, the “author” of Saturday Requiem, is the pseudonym of the husband-and-wife writing team, Nicci Gerrard and Sean French.  The novel is the latest in the series (Blue Monday, Tuesday’s Gone etc.) featuring psychotherapist-turned-sleuth, Frieda Klein.

Having read all five previous books in the series, I was keen to read what I thought (rightly, as it turned out) would be good fodder for my winter vacation.  Although Saturday Requiem was no less absorbing than the others, I think it’ll soon be time to draw this series to a close.  The books are becoming repetitive and more and more implausible.  I have a hunch that the authors will take the opportunity to “wrap up the week” with a Sunday novel in which Dr. Klein will meet her nemesis, Dean Reeve.  The question is who will prevail?

I’ve loved looking at photographs for as long as I can remember.  Glancing along my bookshelves I find collections of pictures by many of the great photographers, mostly exhibition catalogs and monographs that I started to buy while I was still in my teens and have been buying ever since.  The artists represented – Don McCullin, Fay Godwin, Henri Cartier- Bresson, Bill Brandt,  Dorothea Lange, Horst, and Gordon Parks, among many others – are those I find I go back to time and time again, often just to look at a single image.

The Radical Eye is an exhibition at Tate Modern of modernist photography from the collection of Elton John.  The period covered in the show is roughly 1920 to 1950, the time in which photography came into its own as a medium and, arguably, one of the most exciting in its short history as an art form.  The show’s selection of beautiful pictures is extraordinary and features not only celebrated artists such as Man Ray, Stieglitz, Weston, Arbus, and Lange, but also lesser-known figures such as Josef Breitenbach and Herbert Bayer.

I found this show fascinating at so many levels.  It captured the conoisseurship, excitement and impulses of a single collector.  It revealed how a single print (in this case mostly vintage, but occasionally modern) can alter your perception of an image that you thought you knew well.  Best of all, it showed me a handful of stunning photographs I’d never seen before, such as Steichen’s portrait of Gloria Swanson from 1924.  Of course, I bought the catalog, knowing that I’ll be dipping into it for years to come.