From the North Kivu capital of Goma, it takes an hour by helicopter to reach Walikale, a town in eastern Congo’s largest and most troubled territory. With less than 2,000 miles of paved roads across the entire Democratic Republic, Walikale, like much of the North Kivu province it dominates, is virtually inaccessible by road, making frequent UN helicopter flights a necessity to resupply both the UN and Congolese troops stationed in the area. The view along the way is a montage of every image of equatorial beauty conceivable, from jagged volcanic tips to the neatly tended hillside farms that stretch for miles before giving way to a rolling, dense, green forest of trees through which an occasional stream or cluster of thatched-roof huts stands out.

Life for most villagers here consists of what profit they can glean from small trade, subsistence farming and the gruelling labour of the mineral mines for which the town is best known. But there is a natural abundance to the land that is evident to everyone; enough so that each conversation I have – with a soldier, with the owner of a small grocery store, with a group of teenage boys on the side of the road – includes both an acknowledgement of Walikale’s vast riches and the price the territory has had to pay for them. That price informs the fierce scepticism behind each of these conversations, every one of which ends in a request for money, not out of the supplicant’s greed or poverty, but out of the sense that I, like so many others, am profiting from their labour. This is a place as awash in natural wealth as it is in armed groups, from Rwandan rebels to domestic cadres, who, along with the Congolese military responsible for defeating them, have wreaked a collective havoc on a population living in what could be an Edenic corner of the earth.

The UN military base perched on Walikale’s highest hill is a sprawling single-storey brick compound rumoured to have been the former home of a Belgian colonist. From there, the few hundred wooden homes and stores, the football field and the town centre seem to have been conjured out of a need to stake human claim to the ground. It is as if the town, when compared to the jungle that surrounds it, was built in defiance of the trees and towering bush that stand ready to reclaim the sprawling acres of cleared land on which it sits.

When a Pakistani friend won a promotion to a powerful job in Peshawar I went to congratulate him on his new sinecure. He is a cultivated man with a beautiful home from the British colonial era and tentacles all across Pakistan’s tormented tribal region, where he once served as a political agent – the all-purpose government official who is supposed to act as lord and regent over the fractious tribes and the inexorably rising tide of the Taliban.

As always, my friend wore a starched and pressed white shalwar kameez. While we talked he carefully untied the green ribbons on stacks of well-worn cardboard folders, signed the government papers stacked inside with a fountain pen, and then tossed the retied folders on to the floor. Every half-hour, a clerk appeared and carried away the piles of completed paperwork.

Government offices are important symbols in Pakistan – size, furniture, scope of retinue. This one was handsome, a large room set off a broad veranda in the ersatz Moghul-era quadrangle of pink stucco. A white mantelpiece signalled the dignity of the office holder. Above it hung a portrait, more a sketch in dingy brown, of Pakistan’s founding father, Muhammad Ali Jinnah. The face was gaunt and elderly – an aquiline nose, sunken cheeks, unforgiving mouth. A peaked cap high off his forehead and a plain coat buttoned to the neck with a high collar gave the aura of a religious man. The picture reminded me of the first image I had ever seen of Jinnah: a mysterious, dark oil painting covered with glass hung high on a wall of the formal reception room at the Pakistani High Commission in London.

A few months later I returned to see my friend. Same signing of documents, same clerk, different portrait above the mantel. The new visage showed a serious young man with a full head of dark hair, an Edwardian white shirt, black jacket and tie, alert dark eyes. What happened? I asked.

On an early December morning in 2009, I was on a flight home to Kashmir. It doesn’t matter how many times I come back, the frequency of arrival never diminishes the joy of homecoming – even when home is the beautiful, troubled, war-torn city of Srinagar. Frozen crusts of snow on mountain peaks brought the first intimation of the valley. Silhouettes of village houses and barren walnut trees appeared amid a sea of fog. On the chilly tarmac, my breath formed rings of smoke.

The sense of siege outside the airport was familiar. Olive-green military trucks with machine guns on their turrets, barbed wire circling the bunkers and check posts. Solemn-faced soldiers in overcoats patrolled with assault rifles at the ready, subdued by the bitter chill of Kashmiri winter. The streets were quiet, the naked rain-washed brick houses lining them seemed shrunken. Men and women walked quietly on the pavements, their pale faces reddened by the cold draughts.

It all comes together on the roads.

Delhi is a segregated city; an impenetrable, wary city – a city with a fondness for barbed wire, armed guards and guest lists. Though its population now knocks up against 20 million, India’s capital remains curiously faithful to the spirit of the British administrative enclave with which it began: Delhiites admire social rank, name-dropping and exclusive clubs, and they snub strangers who turn up without a proper introduction. The Delhi newspapers pay tribute every morning to the hairstyles and parties of its rich, and it is they, with their high-walled compounds and tinted car windows, who define the city’s aspirations. Delhi’s millionaires are squeamish about public places, and they don’t like to go out unless there are sufficient valets and guards to make them feel at home, and prices exorbitant enough to keep undesirables out.

A murder story

The last time I saw Rod Hall, he bought me lunch at a Chinese restaurant in a basement just behind Oxford Street in the West End of London. This was early in 2004. He was my film agent and wanted me to write some pitches for him to sell to Hollywood. He was tetchy in the restaurant, although not with me. The service was poor and he apologized to me several times, explaining how much better the place was as a rule.

I can’t recall much about the projects we discussed. I didn’t want to write film pitches anyway. All I can remember about the meal is that when we’d finished patiently waiting for, and then swiftly eating, the stir-fry and silver cod and drinking the champagne, Rod had hurried to get his coat,while I went to the bathroom. He was rushing to make it to yet another of his meetings.

Pondicherry, India

When I was growing up in Pondicherry, a former French colony on the south-east coast of India, I would go with my family each Sunday to the beach. Everything about the beach seemed perfect back then: warm waters, yellow sand, swaying coconut trees, and lines of soft white surf that stretched across a green-blue horizon. It was like something from a postcard.

Why the Olympic city is set on demolishing its past

When I first came to Beijing, seven years ago, I lived next to a building site. When I returned a year later, I lived next to a building site. This time round, I’m living next to a building site, in an apartment on the seventeenth floor of an eighteen-floor development. My tower block doesn’t have a fourth floor, or a thirteenth floor, or a fourteenth floor, because four is an inauspicious number to the Chinese (it rhymes with death) and the management is also worried about putting off Western triskaidekaphobes. So the lift ticks superstitiously up past floors 3, 5, 5A…12, 12A, 15, 15A…

One cold evening in late November last year I left my flat in southern Paris, took the métro to Saint-Denis, a suburb to the north of the city, and then a bus to an outlying council estate, or cité, called Villiers-le-Bel. The journey took little more than an hour but marked a sharp transition between two worlds: the calm centre of the city and the troubled banlieue. Banlieue is often mistranslated into English as ‘suburb’ but this conveys nothing of the fear and contempt that many middle-class French people invest in the word. It first became widely used in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to describe the areas outside Paris, where city-dwellers came and settled and built houses with gardens on the English model. One of the paradoxes of life in the banlieue is that it was originally about hope and human dignity.

Some men live to fly, and Captain John Wilkinson was one of them. His wife Marie tells a story from early in their relationship when Johnny, as his friends knew him, was a young South African Air Force pilot learning to fly the Hercules cargo plane. ‘I love you,’ he told Marie, knowing that what he said next would hurt her, ‘but you have to remember that flying will always be my first love.’ Thirty years later they were still together, and had two daughters and a son, Hilton. Johnny was still flying the Hercules, but in Angola, in a war zone a long way from home.