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Nation answers rising demand for outsourced call centres India’s call centres employ up to 250,000 people.
The world’s second most populous nation is picking up the phone for British and US companies seeking cost savings
THE TAJ MAHAL, the Golden Temple of Amritsar, and the high-altitude paradise of Ladakh are just a few of the cultural wonders that lure travellers to India’s distant shores. read more…

Fan Wu’s debut novel February Flowers is a deeply compelling coming of age story, centred around two female university students in Guangzhou, China.

Narrated by protagonist Chen Ming, which means “Morning Bright”, readers are introduced to a nation and a people in flux. China in 1991 was caught up in the tensions and conflicts between its past and future. The paranoid control-freakish legacy of Mao and the Cultural Revolution was replaced with the vision of a new China, where economic reforms spurred on by the belief that “to be rich is glorious” created schisms between the nation’s former proletarian ideology and its newfound lust for capitalist individualism. read more…

Kay Danes’ Nightmare in Laos: The True Story of a Woman Imprisoned in a Communist Gulag is her harrowing personal account of being locked up for a crime she didn’t commit, in a country where human rights are pure fiction.

Danes and her husband Kerry, a former Australian SAS officer, established Lao Securicor Company in 1999, which provided protection to some 75 mainly-foreign companies operating in the small Southeast Asian country. All was going well, until the one fateful day that would change the course of the Australian family’s history.

On December 23, 2000, a contingent of the Lao secret police, headed by Colonel Bounmaly Vilayvong, turned up at the company’s office. Bounmaly wanted to “talk” with them about one of their clients, Gem Mining Laos. The Danes’ refusal to do so spurred him to use different tactics. Kerry was arrested, and a couple of days later Bounmaly came for Kay. Their three young children were handed over to the Australian embassy, while the couple were sent to Phontong prison in Vientiane. read more..

In 1967, as the insanity of the Cultural Revolution surged through China, Sirin Pathanothai was hauled up in front of the Red Guards and the Thai Patriotic Front and denounced for being a bourgeois diehard, a capitalist “roader,” and an imperialist lackey.

She could not reveal the fact that both she and her elder brother Wan were special envoys from Thailand, who had secretly been living in China for the previous decade under the protection of Premier Zhou Enlai, with the aim of providing a “living bridge” between the two countries.

Wan was expelled from China, and in order to survive, Sirin had to denounce her father Sang Pathanothai on the radio, and to escape further “struggle meetings,” persecution and psychological torture, she fled to the countryside, where she joined the People’s Liberation Army. read more…

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In 1997, Debbie Singh received a phone call from her mother that would change her life forever. It concerned a letter from Debbie’s adopted brother John, who was in Thailand.

“Dear Mum, Sorry it’s taken so long to write but I’ve been putting it off until it had been so long I didn’t know where to begin. I’m in prison…Sorry if it’s a bit of a shock…”

Despite his claims that he had been set up, it transpired that John had been collared in Bangkok trying to fence a traveler’s check for the sum of AUD$1,000, and was on remand awaiting trial. For this relatively petty crime he was sentenced to 10 years in prison, to be served at Bangkok’s notorious Klong Prem prison, aka the “Bangkok Hilton. ” read more…