3 Quarks Daily asked a number of scholars, academics, journalists, writers and others to give us brief reactions to the recent events in Egypt. Their responses are given below in the order in which they were received:

• Akeel Bilgrami
• Mohsin Hamid
• Mark Blyth
• Frans de Waal
• Pablo Policzer
• Ejaz Haider
• Mona El-Ghobashy
• Gerald Dworkin
• Ram Manikkalingam
• Jonathan Kramnick
• Amitava Kumar
• Alexander Cooley
• Suketu Mehta
• Justin E. H. Smith

Akeel Bilgrami:

It is far too early to write with any prognostic depth about the spontaneous and ongoing democratic movement in Egypt. But two immediate observations: First, it is interesting to see American pundits on television, despite their pious support for 'democracy', uniformly expressing a subdued anxiety about what worse and chaotic things might befall Egypt now. These very same pundits expressed no such anxiety about worse and more chaotic periods to follow the regime change that came with the American bombing and slaughter in Baghdad, Fallujah…. And second, it seems at the moment that the best thing for Egypt is for this popular movement to prolong itself on the streets for a measurably long time since real political deliberation and genuinely public education occurs (whether in democracies or in dictatorships) only on the site of popular movements, not hugger-mugger in round table negotiations and conferences among leaders and advisers, not in universities, not in the widely read or viewed media, not in editorials…. Even in a democracy like the United States, people got educated into civil rights on the site of popular movements through the sixties, not by the classroom and editorial commonplaces about 'racial equality'.

Akeel Bilgrami is the Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy and the Director of the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University.

Mohsin Hamid:

It's still possible that the old regime will find a way to cling on in Egypt, that the army will find a new front man. But what is clear is that beneath the ossified surface of the US-backed dictatorships and monarchies that span the Middle East, from Morocco to Saudi Arabia and from Jordan to Yemen, something profoundly different is waiting to be born. Turkey and Indonesia may already offer us a glimpse of that possible future: a future of modern, moderate, independent-minded democracies, pursuing their own interests, and no longer obsessively shaped by security concerns. If Egypt can do it, then maybe one day Saudi Arabia can follow, and if that happens, so much that is wrong in Muslim-majority countries today, so much that is inegalitarian, sectarian, and stifling, has the potential to be put right. Here, in Pakistan, such a possibility gives me much-needed hope.

Mohsin Hamid is a Pakistani novelist and the author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist.

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by Aditya Dev Sood

The plane shudders and groans, forcing me to look up. The rumble of the cabin has passed clear through my body, rattling my stomach. I give up trying to read, or even to think, allowing myself to acknowledge the inchoate signals emanating from deep in my bowels, rising up through layers of nervous networks up into the swirling bowl of consciousness that I carry around with me wherever I go. Yes, I hear you, I tell my mind-body, I hear you. No more cognitive demands — iPad off, eyes closed — let's breath deeply, unclench, and we’ll just ride this thing out.

The aerial maneuvers finally end, and the low rise of Nagpur city’s buildings begin to take shape. The airport is likely to be quite near the rest of the city, I imagine. The conference guys will be there with a sign, I’ll grab my luggage and soon we’ll be off and away. Still, something is happening inside of me that needs my attention. Am I just queasy from the hard flying? Is this maybe a fart? Or is this something more insistent? More certain of its peristaltic beat and rhythm, due to arrive, right on time, this Saturday morning at seven-thirty, as on every other good day? A lot rides on this, and I have to listen carefully to what my mind-body is saying.

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by Vivek Menezes

Our first glimpse of Lou Majaw comes just outside the Guwahati airport – his face is building-sized, emblazoned high above the multi-lane expressway to Meghalaya, on an advertisement for Star Cement. These billboards turn out to be ubiquitous along our route. By the time we’ve wound our way up from the Brahmaputra floodplains into the cloud-wreathed Khasi hills, the legendary rocker of the North-East seems a reassuringly familiar fixture of the landscape, even the toddler in our midst chortling with glee every time his flowing silver hair looms up ahead, instantly recognizable even in the fading light that slowly obliterates the thick pine forests that line the steep, curving road to Shillong.

But when we set out to find him the very next morning, the man seems as elusive as the fast-rising mists that are a permanent fixture of life in his hometown. We knew that Lou Majaw doesn’t go on the Internet, but now we learn that he doesn’t have a permanent contact number, or even a particularly fixed address. Then we discover that you can’t buy a copy of any of his albums in any of the music stores in Shillong either.

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by Namit Arora

On English in India and the linguistic hierarchies of colonized minds

(NB: an updated version of this essay is here.)

The modern era of European colonialism began in the Americas with bands of adventurers seeking El Dorado. Their early intrusions evolved into predatory monopolies like the East India Company and European states exerting direct control over the economic and political life of the colonies. The natives tended to not welcome and cooperate with the intruders, so alongside came great developments in the art of subjugating the natives, through military, political, and cultural means. In this essay, I’ll look at some cultural means of controlling the natives, particularly through language, and its effect on the psyche of the colonized, using examples from Africa and India.

When it comes to colonial quests, military might is what breaches the metaphorical Gates of Damascus. Regime change follows. Thereafter, the most efficient and durable means of colonial control happens via culture. Culture holds the keys to how a group sees itself and knows its place in the world. As Ngugi wa Thiong’o—Kenyan novelist, professor, and author of Decolonizing the Mind—has pointed out, ‘Economic and political control can never be complete or effective without mental control. To control a people’s culture is to control their tools of self-definition in relationship to others.’ [1]

When done right, the native comes to elevate and mimic his master’s ways, to see his own culture as inferior, and to look down on his past as ‘a wasteland of non-achievement’. He begins to defer to the colonizer’s ideas on fundamental things like beauty, art, and politics. In time, writes Ngugi, he begins to understand himself and his culture through the eyes of the colonizer—using the latter’s concepts, categories, and judgments. Before too long, he turns into a proxy for his master: colonialism with a native face.

How does the colonizer gain such control? The easiest method, explains Ngugi, is to actively spread his language among the natives, and to simultaneously denigrate the language of the natives as crude and unfit for proper education. It is amazing how much mileage this delivers. Simply make the colonizer’s language the lingua franca of imperial administration, accord prestige and upward mobility to those who learn it in colonial schools, and before too long, there is a feeding frenzy among a native minority. This has been the way of the great colonialists of history, such as the Arabs in the 7-8th centuries, the British and the French in the 19th, and the Russians with the Baltic States in the 20th. Ngugi writes,

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by Michael Blim

With each stone thrown, each Molotov cocktail hurled from one side of Cairo’s Liberation Square to another, an Egyptian revolution appears being thrown further away. The Square is a symbolic space, first occupied by people envisioning revolutionary change, and now made a marker in a game of competition among elites for governance. The state is secure. No one has yet set upon storming Cairo’s Winter Palace. No one in the popular movements against the state has set upon taking the state.

It is puzzling. What are the immediate reasons? Perhaps all of the candidate revolutionary state-takers are dead or among the 17,000 political prisoners of the regime. Not to be under-estimated is the 59-year military rule and two generations of stop and go mixes of cooptation and repression. The figure of Omar Suleiman, the torturer, the renditioner, the Israel interlocutor, says much about the center of things in Egypt today. The sheer corruption of Egyptian state power scars his face. He is no Kerensky; he is evil incarnate.

Perhaps Egypt is better off without a Lenin. In any event, it does not have one. Must it forego revolution as well?

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by Rishidev Chaudhury

Five years ago I spent six months working on a farm about an hour outside Bangalore. To get to it I took a city bus thirty miles along the highway to a dusty crossing where it turned onto dirt roads and bounced along them for about twenty minutes before ending in the centre of a small village called Mukodlu. As we left the city behind, the occupants of the bus changed from office staff to farm workers, and eventually included goats and chickens. I once witnessed a heated altercation between the bus conductor and the owner of a goat that was soiling the bus floor. It was eventually resolved when the owner held the goat’s bottom out of the window for the rest of the journey.

The farm was only a few miles off the highway but was also only a few miles away from a game sanctuary. Twenty years ago, when Bangalore was just starting to grow, the area was entirely rural. Now it was an odd hybrid of small villages, smaller farms, urban overflow, the game sanctuary and numerous granite quarries (many of them illegal). Perhaps it was once good for farming, but now the soil was thin, stony and eroded. We grew rice, vegetables and herbs, and had a small shed for breeding silkworms. The farm also hosted an NGO that ran workshops on governance for women from village-level self-governance bodies (Panchayats) and workshops on low-cost herbal medicine for midwives and other community healers.

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by Steven Poole

Please tear your eyes away from this elegant and curiously seductive prose for a few seconds and look at what surrounds this webpage on your display. Unless you are browsing in full-screen “kiosk” mode or kicking it old-school with Lynx, chances are your browser program is designed to look like some sort of machine. It will have been crafted to resemble aluminium or translucent plastic of varying textures, with square or round or rhomboid buttons and widgets in delicate pseudo-3D gradients, so they look solid, and animate with a shadowed depth illusion when you click them. Me, I hate this stuff. I think it's not only useless but pernicious and sometimes actively misleading. Won't you please join me in declaring a War on Chrome?

By “chrome” I don't mean Google's browser of that name, but all the pseudo-solid, pseudo-3D visual cruft that infests user interfaces in modern computing. For an example of Chrome Gone Wild I need only turn to Apple, who have somehow acquired a reputation for elegant and minimalist user-interface design while perpetrating monstrosities like this:

Can you tell what that does, and how to work it? Me neither, and I've been using it for years. (It is the Ultrabeat drum machine in Logic.)

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