Imagine a valley where orange trees nestle among gnarled, millennia-old olives; where figs, mulberries and pomegranates hang heavy with juice.

It had been billed as ‘Rebellion Day’ by the organisers, a group called Extinction Rebellion that no-one I knew had heard of. Now, after blocking off roads in four major locations in London for over a week, racking up more than 1,000 arrests in the process, lots of people have heard of them.

An estimated 12.7 million tons of plastic – everything from bottles and bags to microbeads – end up in our oceans each year. That’s a truck load of rubbish a minute.

A poem by Farid Bitar

Think of the word ‘refugee’. What kind of image surfaces in your mind?

When she was a young child, my mother, who is Belgian, developed a profound fascination with India and all things Indian.

It’s the fourth day of Ramadan in the month of May. It’s 10.30 in the morning and the temperature in Quetta, the provincial capital of Balochistan, is soaring at 27 °C.