Notes on the Malayan Tiger

When visiting a new country, I like to read books set in that country – like A Room with a View before going to Florence, A Fez of the Heart before my Turkish holiday, and Independent People before visiting Iceland.

On a recent trip to Malaysia, I read The Night Tiger by Yangsze Choo – a novel set in the 1930s, when Malaysia (then called Malaya) was a British colony. I took this pic on my night flight to Kuala Lumpur.

I like when airplanes have this little folding table above the main table; it makes life easier for those of us who like to eat while reading. Yangsze Choo's author bio says she too "loves to eat and read (often at the same time)."

* * *

Soon after I moved to Singapore, I read an edited volume of essays called Eating Chilli Crab in the Anthropocene (for which, if I may brag, my friend Xiaoyun wrote the titular chapter). A subsequent chapter called 'Consuming Tigers' has this line which made a deep impression on me:

In 1930, the last wild tiger of Singapore was shot in Choa Chu Kang.

The story was reported in the Straits Times of October 27. Stuff like this is a powerful reminder of how quickly Singapore was transformed from an island which was mostly jungle, to the highly urbanised city-state that we see today.

* * *

Ng Xin, author of 'Consuming Tigers', says:

Since I began writing this chapter, I’ve started to notice tigers everywhere. They’re on beer cans and balm pots, on airplanes and bank facades, in the living room of Crazy Rich Asians and the Singapore state crest.

I had a similar experience after reading The Night Tiger, which features tigers as well as a character who may or may not be a weretiger.

Klang, which is near Kuala Lumpur, has some nice street art. This tiger is painted on a door, but the metal gate makes it look like it's in a cage.

I liked these tiles outside Cheah Kongsi, a temple in Penang:

...and I brought back this fridge magnet which now adorns my whiteboard:

* * *

In a previous post I wrote that I have a 19-inch monitor, but I recently got a 24.5-inch one (Acer EK251Q P6). The first film I watched on my new monitor was a documentary called Malaysia's Last Tigers.

It's on YouTube, but that version has a few minutes missing. You can watch the whole thing on Māori+ if you are in New Zealand (or use a VPN).

One of my favourite bits of the documentary is around 24:00 where they show footage of all the other animals which were captured by the National Tiger Survey's camera traps. They show lesser mouse deer, sunbear, wild dogs, binturong, yellow-throated marten, serow, pig-tailed macaques, Indian civet, crab-eating mongoose, Malayan tapir, Asian elephant, clouded leopard, marbled cat, leopard cat, golden cat, and my favourite, a black panther. And that's just the mammals.

Rainforests are really something.

This Is Going on My Resume

At the seaside temple of Tua Pek Kong at Tanjong Tokong, Penang.

2025 New Things List

Last year I wrote a post about a few first-time experiences and new things that I tried in 2024. This year I thought I'll do the same, but whether this will become an annual tradition remains to be seen. Some of the categories are repeats from last year (food, sports, videography) while others are new.

Black chicken

I had seen black chicken on sale in wet markets, but I hadn't tried it until my friend made this stew for me. Silkie chickens, as they are called, have white feathers, but their flesh and even their bones are black. They taste like regular chicken, just a bit gamier because they are usually free-range.

60 kg (132 lbs)

One time at a house party, my friend, who was a few drinks down, was describing the ideal body type that she aspires to. Legs like X, boobs like Y, and so forth (all celebrities, though I don't remember their names). After running through the list, she paused and added one more: "And Sroyon's metabolism."

All my life, I've been lucky enough to be able eat whatever I wanted and still be a healthy weight. I was underweight in college, but for the last ten years, I've been in the 57–59 kg range. But I always told myself that if I ever hit 60 kg, I'll do something about it.

In the last two months of 2025, I was socialising and therefore eating out a lot, and not playing sports as regularly as I did before. And sure enough, in December, I clocked in at 60.4 kg.

It's not concerning by any means – I did a body composition analysis recently, which said my recommended weight is around 63 kg – but if I do gain weight, it should ideally be muscle and not fat. So now I stopped taking sugar with coffee, eating fruit for breakfast, and exercising more. Nothing drastic, but this is the first time in my life that I am actively trying to lose weight. My metabolism is still fast, but alas, not what it used to be.

Badminton coaching

As kids, many of us went to classes for music, painting, etc., but it's less common for adults – at least the adults I grew up around. But the cool thing about being a grown-up, if you are fortunate enough to have some disposable income, is that if you want to learn a skill, you can just pay someone to teach you.

I generally like to learn stuff on my own – I'm doggedly sticking to self-study for Spanish, though I know I'd make faster progress if I had a teacher – but with badminton, which I play recreationally, I realised last year that I had hit a plateau.

My friend recommended a badminton coach, and after a few sessions with Anthony, my game has improved a lot. I have more to say about it, but maybe that's a topic for another day, and a standalone post.

I like the different flavours of shuttlecock motion-blur that you can see in the sequence below: an instant of stillness at the apex, slightly blurry as it drops, and a streak as it leaves my racquet.

MRT station video advert

I've had photos displayed in public spaces, but not video. Until last year, when my friend Emiri spotted – and reacted quickly enough to record – this advert at an MRT (subway) station. It features a clip from a video which I made for Sigma Contemporary Dance. Blink and you'll miss it!

Malaysia

I went to Malaysia for the first time last year, to play pickleball in the border town of Johor Bahru. In the older parts of town I saw some interesting signage and typography. Maybe I'll compile them in another post, but meanwhile I wanted to share this one which I particularly liked – a random metal plaque outside a Commissioner for Oaths office. The Chinese text, apparently, says the same thing.

Art Galleries and Beverages: London Photos

Some photos from my recent trip to London, as promised. Captions are below each photo.

Looking at art in 2024 (the National Gallery)

Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern

One-second exposure resting my camera on the railing. My friend who was with me saw the photo on my LCD and asked for a copy to hang on her wall :)

Camden Art Centre

Phone pic! I hadn't been to Camden Art Centre in all the years I lived in London. This time round, I met a friend here for coffee. I'm glad I went; it's a lovely space.

The Chandos, a pub near the National Gallery

Café in South Kensington

It would have been easy enough to straighten this in post, but I like the Dutch tilt.

* * *

Blog note: The text column of my blogposts is 580px wide. But if images are 580px wide, the image quality suffers on high-pixel-density displays like the one on my Asus Zenbook laptop. One solution is to upload 1500px-wide images, and edit the HTML code so that they are displayed at 580px. I've been doing this manually for a while, but Tommy kindly wrote some code for me which makes the process easier.

The Mirik Cormorant

When we were in Darjeeling, my friend and I went on a day trip to the nearby hill-town of Mirik to visit another friend, Gaurav. As we walked around Mirik lake, Gaurav pointed out a solitary cormorant.

These birds typically spend the summer months in Mirik, migrating to the plains in winter. Four summers ago, it seems that this particular bird got injured. Gaurav said he can still fly, but not for long distances. Unable to join his fellows in the winter migration, he stayed on at the lake.

Local people tried to catch him, hoping to nurse him back to health. But each time someone got close, he would dive into the lake and evade capture. After a while, they gave up trying.

The cormorant has now spent four years in Mirik, catching fish (of which there are plenty) and apparently not too bothered by the winter temperatures. Once a year, his friends fly back to the lake and he hangs out with them. Then they fly off again, and the Mirik cormorant is on his own.

Perhaps he likes it this way.

Caterpillar Rescue on the DHR

Fourteen years ago, I travelled by train from Siliguri (120 metres above sea level) to Darjeeling (2,045 m) – a seven-hour journey on the magnificent Darjeeling Himalayan Railway.

Last week, I took the DHR from Darjeeling down to Siliguri. (A separate trip. Don't worry, I haven't been stuck in Darjeeling all this while.)

The train, as you can see from this photo, passes alarmingly close to houses and shops.

Much of the route is forested, and the train also passes alarmingly close to trees, frequently brushing against leaves and branches.

One such branch had five caterpillars who were scooped onto the windowpane. We were worried that they would fall onto the road and get crushed by vehicles, so when the train stopped midway as it sometimes does, we decided to try and rescue them.

My friend picked them up with a boarding pass. I got off the train and ferried the caterpillars, one by one, to the trees on the other side of the road that runs alongside the tracks.

Another rescue-related anecdote, while we're at it. One of our university colleagues in Singapore is part of a food rescue initiative. Except sometimes, the food rescue team can't distribute all the food in time, so they request me and my friend T to help finish or distribute the food before it spoils.

T and I call ourselves: Team Food Rescue Rescue 😎

Travelling Light

I've written before about how I have few personal possessions. I recently moved to Singapore, and my luggage was within the airline's 30 kg limit.

The small suitcase (top right) is carry-on baggage; it fits all the clothes I brought with me. The big suitcase has my photography equipment: several cameras, film rolls, developing tanks and trays, and even my enlarger (a device for making darkroom prints). The rucksack has books, art supplies and miscellaneous stuff.

Some disclosures:

•	In reality my luggage wasn't so neatly segregated; I rearranged it a bit for the photo. For example, I originally packed some cameras in my carry-on, and while the big suitcase mainly had photography stuff, it also had some clothes to serve as padding.
•	I bought some clothes (a few shorts and t-shirts) and household items here in Singapore. But my wardrobe is still quite minimal.
•	It helps that I don't have an immediate need for warm clothing (Singapore rarely gets colder than 24°C) or formals. Some of my clothes, e.g. jumpers, winter jacket and formal suit, are in Kolkata or Copenhagen. I will need to have some of these shipped (or brought) to me, for when I travel to colder climes or attend conferences.
•	Most of my books are also in Kolkata or Copenhagen. I bought a couple of books here, but otherwise I am relying heavily on Kindle and libraries.

Flangamingo

My friend told me she was reading her 3-year-old niece a bedtime story involving a flamingo, and the niece – and I quote – "assumed the flangamingo was a girl. I told her that there are boy flamingos too. She didn't believe me because they are pink."

Cute but also a bit sad; stereotypes catch us early and catch us hard.

Flangamingo was a typo in my friend's text message. Flamingo is already a great word, but flangamingo is even better.

In March my friend (different friend) and I went to the Thane Creek Flamingo Sanctuary in Mumbai. These migratory birds breed in Great Rann of Kutch, a salt marsh in Gujarat, but their feeding grounds are the wetlands of Mumbai. This year the Thane Sanctuary is playing host to a record number of flamingos – apparently some 54,000 greater flamingos and 65,000 lesser flamingos. A river of pink amidst the blue waters of the creek.

This was an impromptu trip; had I known, I would have brought my DSLR which I generally use for bird photography. In the event, I only had a little underwater digicam whose zoom lens tops out at 120mm (35mm equivalent). All this to say: I don't have a good photo of these magnificent birds in flight; this is the best I could do:

But oh my, it was just glorious to see them in real life. The photo doesn't really capture their vivid colours, nor their gangly grace as they run through the water and take flight.

If you're in Mumbai between November and March, go see the flangamingos.

Turnaround

With digital cameras, I can get a good sense of how a photo turned out just by looking at the LCD screen. Furthermore, taking out the SD card and copying files feels like a chore, so it is often days – or even weeks – before I get round to transferring the photos to my computer, and sharing them if I'm so inclined.

With film, once I finish a roll, I am desperate to see the photos. This month Anasua and I started developing black and white film at home, and I was persuaded to do this partly because of the faster turnaround time: photo labs in Copenhagen take 10 days or more.

Last weekend we were visiting friends in Munich. On Sunday they showed us around, and I took some photos. Tuesday we were back in Copenhagen, and that same night we developed the roll. By Wednesday morning I had scanned and shared them with some of my friends and family, and today, as you see below, one is on my blog. Of course with digital, in theory I could have shared them almost instantly, but in practice it often takes me longer than five days.*

I usually enjoy being shown around by locals, and Munich was no different: we got to see things like river-surfers on the Eisbach. Slow-speed film (Ilford FP4 Plus 125) is not ideal for action photos, but luckily it was a sunny day.

*	I present this merely as an interesting irony, not as an argument for film photography. Perhaps there is only one true justification (thanks Saha).

Curiouser and Curiouser

Thanks to my well-documented penchant for list-making, I have whole notebooks filled with lists of all kinds. Here is one I recently found, from a notebook I kept in my first year of college. It starts out like a regular to-do list, but then... well, see for yourself.

In case you're wondering, the list starts at 3; there is no 0, 1 or 2.

Three Views of the Milky Way

Three views of the Milky Way, shot over two nights in the Mojave Desert, California.

1. Still photo



Move your cursor over the image (or touch on mobile) to see labels: constellations are in blue and planets are in pink. Click on the image for a high-res version, where you can make out some of the amazing deep-sky objects in Sagittarius, including star clusters and nebulae (interstellar clouds of dust and gas hundreds of light years wide, where new stars are being born). Though it cannot be seen in the photo, the frame also includes the galactic centre – the theorised location of a supermassive black hole known as Sagittarius A*.

2. Star trails

These star trails were shot over 65 minutes. I like how it really brings out the variation in star colours. The stars moved from left to right, and the brightest streak is Jupiter.

3. Timelapse

The video above opens in a new window (I recommend setting the quality to 1080p as YouTube sometimes picks a lower resolution). 2.5 hours of diurnal motion are compressed into 20 seconds: an effective speed of 450x. The "star" rising around 0:08 is Mars. The sky lighting up at the end of the video is not daybreak, but the Moon rising in the east.

+ Show tech info

Nikon D-5200 digital SLR camera, Nikkor-NC f/2.8 24mm manual-focus lens
Still photo
f/2.8, 20 sec, ISO 4000
27 panoramic stills, stitched together with Image Composite Editor
Star trails
f/2.8, 30 sec, ISO 800
120 stills at 3-sec intervals, stacked using Startrails
Timelapse
f/2.8, 15 sec, ISO 4000
500 stills at 3-sec intervals, played at 25 fps (effective speed 450x), compiled using Shotcut

San Francisco, 8:07 pm

Cliché-shmliché.

Ice and Snow

While Europe went through an unusually cold spell, I happened to be reading – coincidentally, not out of any desire to be in tune with the seasons – two books about ice and snow.

I had no special interest in the Ice Age until I started following Professor Jamie Woodward on Twitter, but soon I was sufficiently hooked to buy his short introduction to the subject. Before reading this book, I knew in a vague sort of way that once upon a time the world was more icy than it is today, but I've only now started to get my head around it. For example, over seven years ago, I posted about camping in a cirque (and was duly censured for failing to use the word cwm). If you asked me, I could have told you, from high-school geography lessons, that cirques – or cwms – were formed by glacial erosion. But think about what that means. There was a time, during the last ice age, when a glacier filled that valley. I feel like I always knew but did not know that, somehow. Perhaps I am not explaining myself very well.

Before that, I read Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow. It's classic Nordic noir, but also a kind of Moby Dick of snow and ice. While Høeg never quite reaches Melvillean levels of digression – that chapter about rope! – or, for that matter, profundity, we do get meditations on glacial morphology, footprints in the snow, and the structure and properties of ice.

But what initially drew me to the book when I picked it up at the library is that it began with a map, and it was of a city I am now familiar with. The story begins in Copenhagen.

It is freezing, an extraordinary −18°C, and it's snowing, and in the language that is no longer mine, the snow is qanik – big, almost weightless crystals falling in stacks and covering the ground with a layer of pulverized white frost.

There is ice in the harbour, firm enough to walk on, at least for those who have "a good relationship with ice".

Some months ago, when Anasua moved to Copenhagen, I asked a Danish friend if the lakes freeze in winter. "It does happen," she said, "but I've only seen it three or four times in my life. So don't get your hopes up."

Sure enough, this year, the lakes froze over. And I can report that as of yesterday, there is ice in the harbour.

I consider myself lucky to have lived in cities where it snows. Going to a snowy place on holiday is not quite the same; to see the familiar transformed by snow can be quite an experience. Here is our balcony garden in London: in summer, and last week.

The Milky Way Over Teide National Park

If you were in one of the best stargazing locations in the world for just one night and could spend it either stargazing or doing astrophotography, which would you pick? Stargazing seems like the obvious choice, unless, like me, you've spent months dreaming up cool astrophotography projects, all the while stuck in a cloudy, light-polluted metropolis.

When Anasua and I went to the island of Tenerife last spring, we booked a parador (a government hotel halfway up Mount Teide, in the middle of the otherwise uninhabited Teide National Park) for not one but two nights, thereby avoiding this dilemma. Or so we thought.

We spent the first night stargazing. Orion set over the Roques de Garcia in a cloudless, moonless sky. At midnight, Jupiter, not long past opposition, shone like a miniature sun. A few straggling Lyrid meteors crisscrossed the heavens, like a curtain-raiser for the Milky Way which filled the southern sky before dawn.

The Milky Way, for my money, is by far the most dramatic naked-eye object in the night sky. But we were lucky enough to have the hotel's Dobsonian telescope all to ourselves, which gave us a closer look at Jupiter, Saturn and a couple of deep-sky objects.

The second night, which I had earmarked for astrophotography, turned out to be cloudy – something that's apparently uncommon in Tenerife, especially at high altitudes. I did not get a single good photo that night. But if I had to do it all over again, I think I would still spend the first night stargazing. Besides, just before we packed up and went to sleep at 6 am, I did sneakily take one single shot of the Milky Way.



Move your cursor over the image (or long-touch on mobile) to see labels: constellations are in blue; planets and deep-sky objects are in pink. Click for a high-res version.

Welcome

Last night I was reading a graphic novel – Just So Happens by Fumio Obata – which brought back a lot of memories about Japan.

In 2011, I spent six months working at a law firm in Tokyo. Almost from the first week, I felt an inexplicably strong affinity for the country and its people – the trains, the beaches, the language, the street maps, even their obsession with ranking. At the end of my stint, on my flight back to London, I was thinking back on the last few days – the staff at the café where I had breakfast every morning pooling together to buy me a hamper of Japanese souvenirs, one of the older secretaries in our office saying「また来てね。みなさん待っています。」("Please come back again. We're all waiting.") – and I realised I was trying (not very successfully) to hold back tears. I had not been this sad even when I left my hometown, Calcutta, to work in London – perhaps because I knew I could go back during holidays, and when I did, it would be (almost) like I'd never left. Whereas if I went back to Japan, it would almost certainly be as a tourist, which is not the same thing at all.

Anyway, back to the book. Just So Happens has a panel showing the protagonist coming home (a faithful reproduction of Narita airport).

When I first arrived in Japan in 2011, I couldn't read Japanese at all. By the end of my stay, I could read basic Japanese, and when I went back there on holiday two years ago, I noticed something interesting. While the English text simply says "Welcome to Japan", the Japanese text has a slightly different – and for me, rather heartwarming – message: okaerinasai or "Welcome home".

Class Consciousness

Yesterday on the train back from Cambridge I overheard some interesting conversations between a small boy and his grandfather.

I.

Boy (noticing the first class section of the compartment, just behind him): So there's a first class and a second class? Like the Titanic?

II.

Boy:	That hill would be great for cheese rolling.
Grandfather:	What's cheese rolling?
Boy:	It's a sport!
Grandfather:	Like, on PS3?
Boy:	No, in real life!

Law and Morality

I was in Lyon last weekend, and wandering around the Croix-Rousse district, we noticed this piece of graffiti:

Anasua:	I think they mean "what".
Me:	Ah. "Was" must be a misprint.
Philipp:	...because they don't know what is right.

The Third Sex

Sign at an upmarket store in Copenhagen:

The Little Mermaid

One of my happiest memories of my time in Copenhagen is of going to see the mermaid at dawn.

The first time I saw her was on a sunny afternoon. The waterfront was teeming with tourists, some of whom were clambering up to pose and take selfies with the statue. I kept my distance and resolved to come back at a quieter time.

Towards the end of my stay, I woke up one morning at 4 am. Unable to go back to sleep and having nothing better to do, I cycled across the city to the waterfront. On the way, I stopped on Dronning Louise's Bro (which some Copenhageners call hipsterbroen or 'the hipster bridge') to watch the dawn breaking over Sortedam Lake.

Some tourists were passing by. 'It looks like my asshole!' one of them shouted at me, for no apparent reason. 'Yours is redder,' I shouted back, and his friends went 'Ooooo.' I'm usually not good at spur-of-the-moment comebacks, so I was pleased with myself.

I reached the statue just before sunrise. There were only two other people there, and they – like me – quietly sat on a bench overlooking the statue and the sea.

Many visitors find the Little Mermaid underwhelming or kitschy, but I've grown quite fond of the statue (in any case, I have a soft spot for disappointing monuments). Even with crowds of tourists swarming around her, she seems dignified and aloof, her gazed fixed on some distant point on the shore; of course in the original fairy-tale, unlike in the Disney movie, the Little Mermaid suffers unbearable torments but does not get her man.

The two other people on the scene were 18-year-old guys from Belgium, returning home after a walking holiday in Sweden. Their ferry arrived the night before and their train was in the morning, so they spent the night on the beach. At one point, they said, it got really cold.

It struck me – not as a cause for regret, just as a fact – that this is the kind of thing I once used to do, but these days I'd be more likely to book a cheap hotel (except perhaps in the company of Bunty, with whom all bets are off).

I turned 30 last year, and it feels like a more significant threshold than turning 18. Lather was 30 years old when they took away all of his toys; his mother sent newspaper clippings to him about his old friends who'd stopped being boys. And the poet Brian Howard said, 'Anybody over the age of 30 seen in a bus has been a failure in life.' I cheerfully take buses and, like Lather, draw pictures of mountains that look like bumps, but I may be less likely to sleep under the stars in northern latitudes.

Copenhagen, 11:50 pm

Since I wrote about long summer days in Copenhagen, the days have grown ever-so-slightly shorter, but even so, twilight lasts from sunset to sunrise. This photo was taken just before midnight. The streaks of light are from an S-train speeding south through Frederiksberg.