Showing 1 - 4 of 4
Deep trouble
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 25/06/2018
» He got up close with a 13m whale shark near the Galapagos and swam with a curious hunchback whale in Tonga. "She was larger than a bus," he said, "the largest animal I've ever seen." At Burma Banks in the Indian Ocean, he drifted with sharks and at Similan Islands he realised that the coral reefs in the Thai seas were among the most beautiful in the world.
Into the sublime
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 27/11/2014
» Swami Yoganand twists his rubbery legs and crosses them behind his neck in a geometric composition. Boneless? Shape-shifter? Of course not, it’s just that his lithe, 106-year-old body — the centenarian yogi is a vegetarian and his food is always uncooked — has reached the level of physical suppleness that most of us stiff-jointed urbanites can’t even imagine. The swami, an honorific for a religious teacher, has taught yoga for 86 years, and he’s still doing it almost every morning at a school in Rishikesh, a northern Indian town by the Ganges.
The old(ish) man and the sea
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 07/02/2014
» JC Chandor's All Is Lost is a taut maritime drama about a man who struggles to survive in the Indian Ocean after his yacht is holed and slowly starts to sink. The entire film has only one character, an unnamed man played by Robert Redford, and we're stuck with him on his vessel and later on a life raft, watching him calmly struggling against the waves, the storm, the disorientation, the hopelessness. We don't know who this man is (he's merely described as "Our Man" in the credits) or why he's there, and the film doesn't have any flashback or any cutaway to, say, his family anxiously waiting for news of him. There are no other external perspectives. We're stranded with him. We are, literally, in the same boat with him and we see everything as he sees it; it's almost an hour into the movie before there's a long shot from above showing him surrounded by a vast body of water. Our Man, his radio inoperative after the yacht gets flooded, speaks only twice during this 105-minute film. The third time he opens his mouth is the only time the film allows him a howl of despair.
Rohingya cast out of fire, into the frying pan
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 19/01/2013
» When Hussein cooks, the whole community rubs its stomach and rejoices. The Rohingya's kitchen repertoire of Burmese, Bangladeshi, Pakistani and northern Indian hybrids - it's hard to classify the origin of his menu of dry-fried ribs, complexly spiced curries, mutton biryani and other marvels - is a feast at Islamic functions and wedding ceremonies in a Bang Rak soi.