Priya's Passport of Peculiar Politics: A Diplomatic Comedy in Ten Countries

Ambassador Priya Sharma has negotiated
fisheries disputes, survived three-hundred-
slide presentations, and once sat through
a six-hour summit in which the sandwiches
were the most interesting thing said.

She thought she understood the world. She
had not yet been to High Wycombe.

Priya's Passport of Peculiar Politics
follows India's Ambassador-at-Large for
Cultural Diplomacy across ten countries
and ten utterly inexplicable, completely
logical, surprisingly moving customs. She
will bow in Seoul (at the wrong angle),
share breath in Wellington (at some
velocity), negotiate in a Finnish sauna
(professionally unimpressed by the heat),
eat from ten houses in Kuala Lumpur
(adaptively), and stand in a town square
in England while three hundred people boo
a mayor for gaining four pounds.

Along the way, she discovers what no
briefing document ever quite explains:
that every culture's strangest custom is,
at its root, an answer to the same
question - how do we show each other
that we matter?

The answers are elaborate. They are
sincere. They are occasionally very loud.
And every single one of them, it turns
out, makes perfect sense.