Pankaj Mishra in Tibet
The current New Yorker presents travel accounts by several well-regarded writers. Pankaj Mishra describes a train-trip to Tibet. The article is not available online, but here’s a taste:
Once, a herd of antelope skipped beside the tracks. Looking for more of them, I saw black nomad tents on a distant hillside. Yaks with white stripes on their backs appeared in the dank yellow grass. The train whizzed past empty stations; on the rare occasion that we stopped, there were hardly any Tibetans to be seen. This seemed the strangest aspect of a rail service designed to benefit local people: their meagre presence outside as well as inside the train.
