All posts by andrew chilvers

Andrew Chilvers is a writer | editor | editorial director | digital project planner | digital publisher| social media planner | SEO specialist. Andrew develops content strategies using articles, blogs, videos, podcasts and social media for news and magazine websites, small businesses and large public sector websites.
Travel

Saddhus gather in their millions to bathe in the Ganges

When it comes to curious habits, Amar Bharti has perhaps one of the strangest. In 1970s he raised his right arm 90 degrees into the air and decades on it’s still up there. His fingers have long since withered through misuse and his knuckles are white with rot, while his nails have grown long, gnarled and twisted.

At 63 most men think of retirement, of taking up sedentary hobbies that fill their twilight years. Of DIY, pond fishing, even gardening. But not Bharti. Naked and smeared in wood ash, he coquettishly flicks back his long, white dreadlocks and takes another huge lungful of hash from his wooden chilum.

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A teenager using his mobile phone
Digital world

How texting is changing the way teenagers access healthcare

 School nurses have become the unlikely drivers of a communications revolution in Leicestershire with a mobile app aimed at children and young people.

When the NHS in Leicestershire launched a school students’ text messaging consultation service earlier this year, healthcare professionals were unprepared for what followed.

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Travel

Among the Montagnards and elephants of Vietnam’s Central Highlands

The ancient man in the long house high in the mountains above Dalat claimed he was 102 years old. He greeted me with both hands cupped and invited me into his house, shooing away chickens and stepping over indolent dogs. We then settled down to  drink the strong, sour rice wine, sucking through bamboo straws from an old gourd.

His home stood about 10 feet off the ground and was some 70 feet long, made of solid timber. The inside was dark with the only light shining through open shutters. The walls hung with an assortment of gourds, crossbows, flintlock guns and pictures of garish Vietnamese and Japanese landscapes ripped out of magazines.

Outside bare breasted women pounded rice or played with toddlers who stared wide eyed as I ambled into the village. The men toiled bent-backed in the fields nearby, while others hunted game illegally in the forest. It was a silent, peaceful scene. I felt relaxed here after hours of travelling  across the broken highland roads up from Nha Trang on the coast. First by a minibus so packed that passengers had to hang out of the doors, gripping on the side rails, and later by Minsk motorbike.

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A Flower Hmong woman in northern Vietnam
Travel

Flower Hmong and the love markets of Northern Vietnam

Thang was a sensitive young man. Probably the only Vietnamese I’d come across who admitted to liking the remote tribal people of Tonkin in northern Vietnam. “They have their own way, but most Vietnamese do not understand,” he grumbled.

Thang’s admission followed three days of bone-jarring agony in a Russian jeep, scuffing sheer mountain ledges and sliding down scree slopes. After a further 10-mile hike to sup tea with a tribal elder surrounded by children, pigs and chickens in a dusty, dark wattle and daub hut, Thang thoughtfully concluded: “These are good, simple people but Vietnamese and Chinese still think they are savages.”

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Digital world

Digital professionalism in the age of social networks

As Facebook communities go, this is one of the more unusual that I’ve recently come across: Benjyo Soujer.

It’s a network of virtual friends who meet up in real life, in real time to clean public toilets in Tokyo every Sunday. The group claims that disinfecting urinals, toilet bowls and sinks across Japan’s capital helps to bond them as a community, cleansing the soul at the same time. Unbelievably, for the more adventurous members the real challenge is to clean the toilets with their bare hands!

The Benjyo Soujer Facebook group is a peculiar tale of well meaning – although clearly odd – Tokyo 20 somethings. But I use it as an extreme example of the sheer variety of groups and communities now building a presence online.

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