By Omar Kureishi

WHAT you gain on the swing, you lose on the roundabout. One of the roundabouts of modern air travel is that it has knocked the romance and mystique out of travel. There are no longer, far away places with strange sounding names. There is no place on this planet that cannot be reached in twentyfour hours. I remember my friend Ernest Steel in St Leonards-on-Sea in Sussex who was fascinated to know that a place called Chittagong actually existed. It sounded too remote, too musical, something out of The Wizard of Oz.

When Chittagong came up in conversation apropos my brother Achoo’s posting there when he worked for Burma Oil, Ernest Steel said that he preferred not to know that a place with a name like that existed. When I assured him that there was such a place, he said he would make it a point to remember it. He was a disciple of Stephen Potter and his Upmanship. “Good name to drop at the local,” he had said. I wonder what he would have made of Zanzibar, the enticing, scented isle, twenty miles off the coast of East Africa and near the Equator, and of the fact that I had played cricket there. Click to read the Full Article