From The Paris Review:

“I was born in a house with the television always on.” The lyric comes from “Love For Sale,” a song penned by David Byrne and recorded on the Talking Heads album True Stories, but the same could be said for where I grew up, in suburban Philadelphia. My dad watched television even when cooking dinner, which seemed crazy to me: minding an open flame while keeping one eye on some “reality” courtroom drama—not sure you can rightfully call those staged screamfests real. Judge Judy was such a constant presence, she feels like a family friend. I hear her gravelly voice chewing some idiot out and smell Dad’s stir-fry.

Our house was small enough that, unless I played music, I couldn’t escape the tube’s empty murmuring, not even in my room, which abutted my parents’. As a teenager, then, it made sense that I’d fall in love with the Talking Heads song “Found a Job,” from their 1978 album More Songs About Buildings and Food. David Byrne, the band’s vocalist, guitarist, and songwriter, doesn’t so much sing as sing-narrate the story of a couple, Bob and Judy, who are frustrated while watching television because “nothing’s on tonight.” Byrne as narrator intrudes upon this domestic scene like one of those omniscient charlatans on infomercials—But wait! There’s a solution to their problem!—suggesting they “might be better off … making up their own shows, which might be better than TV.”

More here.

Raghu Karnad in n+1:

There’s no picture more traumatic to the Indian imagination than that of thousands of people crammed into trains, fleeing for their lives. Flash back to 1947, when trains crossing between West Pakistan and north India steamed out of their stations filled with refugees and arrived at their destinations filled with corpses. The migrating dead were Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims who—stranded on the wrong side of the religious partition of British India, learning that it was now open season on their community and property—took flight for the border. About a million never made it. So (sixty-five years ago to the day), as India awoke to sovereignty and democracy, the sight before its eyes was a snarl of minority terror, slaughter, and trains.

This was the image that much of India had to suppress, and a few provocateurs predictably stoked, on August 15 this year. It should have been another drowsy Independence Day, a mid-week chance to sleep in while the monsoon shook the last drops out of its watering-can. Instead, at Bangalore’s City Station, thousands of people pressed into emergency trains leaving for distant Guwahati, the latter a transport hub for the seven small states in India’s out-flung northeastern limb.

Most of the indigenous groups in that region (“Northeasterners” to the rest of us) have facial features and skin-tones that make them look more like South-East Asians than what we think of as Indians—a matter they’re rarely allowed to forget when they live away from home. In recent weeks, two situations had set the dismal categories of “Muslims” and “Northeasterners” (or in the nasty demotic, “chinkies”) against each other. First, there was a spike in the decades-old persecution of Muslim Rohingyas by the Burmese-majority state of Myanmar. Shortly afterward, violence flared up between indigenous Bodo and migrant Muslim communities in Assam, the largest of the northeastern states, which led to Muslim groups agitating in cities like Bombay. Eventually, in Bangalore, tales of Muslim rage quivered with hyperbole. Skull-capped goons were banging on doors, warning that when Ramadan ended, the blood of Northeasterners would mingle in the streets with blood of the goats. By Independence Day, thousands were crammed into trains, apparently fleeing for their lives.

In the American vision of urban apocalypse, Hope and Doom ride in cars: orders to evacuate lead to a grid-lock on the interstate (in one car, the hero’s wife and daughter are in danger). India doesn’t have enough highway to serve widespread terror; our Horsemen ride the trains.

From Natuure:

Ewan Birney would like to create a printout of all the genomic data that he and his collaborators have been collecting for the past five years as part of ENCODE, the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements. Finding a place to put it would be a challenge, however. Even if it contained 1,000 base pairs per square centimetre, the printout would stretch 16 metres high and at least 30 kilometres long. ENCODE was designed to pick up where the Human Genome Project left off. Although that massive effort revealed the blueprint of human biology, it quickly became clear that the instruction manual for reading the blueprint was sketchy at best. Researchers could identify in its 3 billion letters many of the regions that code for proteins, but those make up little more than 1% of the genome, contained in around 20,000 genes — a few familiar objects in an otherwise stark and unrecognizable landscape. Many biologists suspected that the information responsible for the wondrous complexity of humans lay somewhere in the ‘deserts’ between the genes. ENCODE, which started in 2003, is a massive data-collection effort designed to populate this terrain. The aim is to catalogue the ‘functional’ DNA sequences that lurk there, learn when and in which cells they are active and trace their effects on how the genome is packaged, regulated and read.

After an initial pilot phase, ENCODE scientists started applying their methods to the entire genome in 2007. Now that phase has come to a close, signalled by the publication of 30 papers, in Nature, Genome Research and Genome Biology. The consortium has assigned some sort of function to roughly 80% of the genome, including more than 70,000 ‘promoter’ regions — the sites, just upstream of genes, where proteins bind to control gene expression — and nearly 400,000 ‘enhancer’ regions that regulate expression of distant genes (see page 57)¹. But the job is far from done, says Birney, a computational biologist at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory’s European Bioinformatics Institute in Hinxton, UK, who coordinated the data analysis for ENCODE. He says that some of the mapping efforts are about halfway to completion, and that deeper characterization of everything the genome is doing is probably only 10% finished. A third phase, now getting under way, will fill out the human instruction manual and provide much more detail.

More here.

Ramin Jahanbegloo in Eurozine:

It has been three years since the Iranian Spring, yet its aftershocks are still strongly reverberating in Iran and in the world. With hindsight, the Iranian civic movement of June 2009 stands out as a pivotal moment in modern Iranian history. What started as an uprising against the rigged presidential elections and the re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad turned into a mass struggle for civil liberties and the removal of the theocratic regime in Iran. The demonstrations were not simply a reaction to the unfair election but were based on years of built up frustration, dissatisfaction and anger at the repressive rule of the Islamic Republic. As a young, nonviolent and civil movement for change within Iranian society, the Green Movement was an historic battle for the establishment of an accountable and lawful government. As the movement developed, it became increasingly clear that the fraudulent elections had given the Iranian people an opportunity not only to defend what few democratic rights they had, but also to attempt to lay the new foundations for a truly democratic Iran. The more the Green Movement grew and gained momentum, the closer the Islamic Republic seemed to crumbling and coming to an abrupt end.

It is important to highlight that the Green Movement, specifically with regard to its democratic beliefs, did not suddenly materialize in the aftermath of the fraudulent elections. Over the past 20 years Iran has been going through a major political and societal evolution, as its increasingly young population became more educated, secular and liberal. This generational gap has divided Iranian society between essentially conservative and reformist groups and brought liberal ideals to the forefront of political discussions. The Green Movement was arguably a manifestation of the changing political, social and cultural attitudes that have been slowly emerging among Iran's intellectuals, students, women activists and its young population generally.

Kelly Candaele interviews John Heilemann in the LA Review of Books:

KC: You say that Obama doesn’t like needing people. Other than a normal feeling that many people have of not liking to ask for things, what is that about?

JH: Obama is an unusual politician. There are very few people in American politics who achieve something — not to mention the Presidency —in which the following two conditions are true: one, they don’t like people. And two, they don’t like politics.

KC: Obama doesn’t like people?

JH: I don’t think he doesn’t like people. I know he doesn’t like people. He’s not an extrovert; he’s an introvert. I’ve known the guy since 1988. He’s not someone who has a wide circle of friends. He’s not a backslapper and he’s not an arm-twister. He’s a more or less solitary figure who has extraordinary communicative capacities. He’s incredibly intelligent, but he’s not a guy who’s ever had a Bill Clinton-like network around him. He’s not the guy up late at night working the speed dial calling mayors, calling governors, calling CEOs. People say about Obama that it’s a mistake that he hasn’t reached out more to Republicans on Capitol Hill. I say that may be a mistake, but he also hasn’t reached out to Democrats on Capitol Hill. If you walk around [the convention] and button-hole any Democratic Senator you find on the street and ask them how many times they have received a call [from the President] to talk about politics, to talk about legislative strategy, I guarantee you won’t find a lot of people who have gotten one phone call in the last two and a half years. And many of them have never been called.

A photo essay by Vaqar Ahmed in Dawn (photo, “Symbols of national pride with the sea in the background.” – by Vaqar Ahmed):

Whether you live in the most expensive area of Karachi or in the slums, piles of garbage are there to remind you that you are in Pakistan. It promotes kinship and national unity.

Also, it is an open invitation to recycling and it is nature friendly as birds and beasts alike come and feast on it. A large number of humans also use it for profit through recycling. I am convinced that as soon as plastic “shappar”-bag-eating crows evolve we will be declared the most environmentally friendly country in the world. I therefore recommend that Pakistan’s national symbol should be a pile of garbage.

Armed with this new found awareness and respect for this national symbol I decided to step out from my “next to the garbage dump” apartment and headed out to see how this symbol of national unity was doing in and around Clifton Block III (that, in addition to my humble abode, boasts the presence of Bilawal House, home to the president of Pakistan.)

After crossing the two aforementioned piles of garbage and admiring the birds and cats peacefully sharing nature’s bounty, I headed towards the sea. I was greatly encouraged to see that there was a huge garbage dump right adjacent to the shore. This one was certainly designed as a model garbage dump complete with Pakistan’s national flag proudly flying over it!

On a more detailed inspection of the model garbage dump I discovered that it was also meant to be a picnic spot. Part of the surrounding was lush green and a peaceful ravine carrying garbage was curving towards the sea like a long lost lover meeting with the beloved. This was clearly intended as a vision of paradise.

Hero Sleeps

Blackberry sweet your little clustered head,
My little stranger son, my share of life,
Welcome here, and settle in my heart.
Welcome under the rafters of this house,
Morning star, come from afar.

What a boon is new blood!
See my small thulking bullman,
Head him off in the doorway,
Or wedge him in a tub – tight as a trout,
I declare! Each limb perfection,
Its beauty a gloss on strength –

Your colouring you took from Autumn,
And from the dark rose. You light
All yellows at your approach.
Look, Conor, our son,
Not made to our design but planned
By destinies above.

Come here till I hold you, my barley-chick darling.
Lamps are lighting as night draws in.
The red fox is prowling the road.
May no cat from the sea
Send him snapping towards you,
Who are the lighted candle of this house.

Enthroned on your sconce of gold,
As you sleep beneath my breast
My love is a wall around you –
Out there in the world
You are beyond my care.

What will you bring to protect you?
A charm? A talisman? A taboo?
‘Never trust the white,’
Is the prayer of your people by right.

As mothers must, I worry all angles,
Lost in thought, and then,
With a wooden spoon in your fist,
Hero moon flashing above you,
I see coming towards me,
The houndboy from Eamhain
Cúchulainn of the Feats.
.

by Máire Mhac an tSaoi
from The Miraculous Parish / An Paróiste Míorúilteach
O'Brien Press / Cló Iar-Chonnacht, Dublin, 2011

Dan Nexon in New Books in Science Fiction and Fantasy (listen to the podcast, here):

I met Ken MacLeod when we participated in a sequence of “Science Fiction and International Orders” panels at the London School of Economics in the winter of 2011. Ken is an important figure in his own right, as well as someone who has contributed a great deal to the Speculative-Ficiton community through, among other things, cultivating the talents of other writers. He’s also an incredibly nice guy. All of these traits explain why he was one of the first people I approached about doing an interview for the channel, and the first to agree.

As I hope comes through in the interview, I found The Night Sessions (Pyr, 2012) both fun to read and intellectually stimulating. It centers on DI Adam Ferguson as he investigates the murder of a priest in a near-future Edinburgh. Following the “Faith Wars” of the early twenty-first century the world has experienced a “Second Enlightenment” and aggressive secularism enjoys intellectual and political hegemony. But not every soul, whether organic or mechanical, is happy with this state of affairs….

Ken has an Honours and Masters degree in biological subjects and worked for some years in the information-technology industry. Since 1997 he has been a full-time writer, and in 2009 was Writer in Residence at the ESRC Genomics Policy and Research Forum at Edinburgh University. He is the author of thirteen novels, from The Star Fraction (1995) to Intrusion (Orbit, 2012), and many articles and short stories. His novels and stories have received three BSFA awards and three Prometheus Awards, and several have been short-listed for the Clarke and Hugo Awards.

Paul Krugman pointed to this provocative paper by Robert Gordon:

This paper raises basic questions about the process of economic growth. It questions the assumption, nearly universal since Solow’s seminal contributions of the 1950s, that economic growth is a continuous process that will persist forever. There was virtually no growth before 1750, and thus there is no guarantee that growth will continue indefinitely. Rather, the paper suggests that the rapid progress made over the past 250 years could well turn out to be a unique episode in human history. The paper is only about the United States and views the future from 2007 while pretending that the financial crisis did not happen. Its point of departure is growth in per-capita real GDP in the frontier country since 1300, the U.K. until 1906 and the U.S. afterwards. Growth in this frontier gradually accelerated after 1750, reached a peak in the middle of the 20th century, and has been slowing down since. The paper is about “how much further could the frontier growth rate decline?”

The analysis links periods of slow and rapid growth to the timing of the three industrial revolutions (IR’s), that is, IR #1 (steam, railroads) from 1750 to 1830; IR #2 (electricity, internal combustion engine, running water, indoor toilets, communications, entertainment, chemicals, petroleum) from 1870 to 1900; and IR #3 (computers, the web, mobile phones) from 1960 to present. It provides evidence that IR #2 was more important than the others and was largely responsible for 80 years of relatively rapid productivity growth between 1890 and 1972. Once the spin-off inventions from IR #2 (airplanes, air conditioning, interstate highways) had run their course, productivity growth during 1972-96 was much slower than before. In contrast, IR #3 created only a short-lived growth revival between 1996 and 2004. Many of the original and spin-off inventions of IR #2 could happen only once – urbanization, transportation speed, the freedom of females from the drudgery of carrying tons of water per year, and the role of central heating and air conditioning in achieving a year-round constant temperature.

Even if innovation were to continue into the future at the rate of the two decades before 2007, the U.S. faces six headwinds that are in the process of dragging long-term growth to half or less of the 1.9 percent annual rate experienced between 1860 and 2007. These include demography, education, inequality, globalization, energy/environment, and the overhang of consumer and government debt. A provocative “exercise in subtraction” suggests that future growth in consumption per capita for the bottom 99 percent of the income distribution could fall below 0.5 percent per year for an extended period of decades.

Matias Vernengo comments over at Triple Crisis on Gordon.

In light of the DAG-3QD Symposium, the Secretary General of the UN [h/t: Fred Abrahams]:

This year, we focus on timely and decisive response – on what we, as a community of conscience sworn to uphold the UN Charter, should do when a State manifestly fails to protect its people.

This is the ultimate test of the responsibility to protect.

We all agree that sovereignty must not be a shield behind which States commit grave crimes against their people. But achieving prevention and protection can be difficult.

In recent years, we have shown how good offices, preventive diplomacy, mediation, commissions of inquiry and other peaceful means can help pull countries back from the brink of mass violence.

My earlier reports, as well as my own five-year action agenda, place a strong emphasis on early warning, early action, a preventive approach to human rights and efforts to strengthen the rule of law.

However, when non-coercive measures fail or are considered inadequate, enforcement under Chapter VII of the Charter will need to be considered by the appropriate intergovernmental bodies. This includes carefully crafted sanctions and, in extreme circumstances, the use of force.

There are understandable concerns related to selectivity – why political organs have invoked the concept in some instances and not in others.

There have been disagreements on the oversight of implementation measures, differences over the interpretation of Security Council resolutions, and dismay at the loss of innocent lives in operations undertaken to protect populations.

The concept of “responsibility while protecting” introduced by the Government of Brazil is thus a welcome initiative.

Jefferson’s sharp-edged Bible study hardly makes him unique in the annals of skeptical investigations of Christianity or any other religion, for critically engaged belief has always left a deep imprint on the content of religious texts. But was Jefferson’s scissor work a profound act of faith or an assault on the very notion of divinity? This question lies at the heart of Brad Gregory’s passionate and polemical book, The Unintended Reformation. Gregory, a history professor at the University of Notre Dame and a well-known scholar of the European Reformation, seeks to upend longstanding assumptions about the process by which Western secularism, capitalism and individualism have emerged since the Reformation. In his formulation, Jefferson is one of the key architects of what Gregory labels the great “Kingdom of Whatever,” a society indelibly shaped by religious pluralism and scientific naturalism, and ruled more by the demands of the marketplace and individual rights than by communitarian ethics and the search for the common good. The apotheosis of the unintended Reformation is the diverse, indeed hyper-pluralist and anything-goes society of the United States.

more from Paula Findlen at The Nation here.

Rumors of our civilization’s collapse have been somewhat exaggerated. When the National Society of Film Critics announced its awards for the year 2011, the top two films — Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, in first place, and Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, in second — were separated by a single vote. It is fitting that they should vie so closely: they are opposite and in some ways equal attempts to show the essential nature of reality and the best way to live in it — openly flouting the au courant truism that art is fit chiefly to interrogate, unsettle, and subvert. Both films debuted at Cannes. If there had been any separation between their release dates, it would seem certain that one was made as a rebuttal to the other, for while the symmetry of the two films is striking, there is a deep philosophical quarrel between them. Von Trier and Malick can’t both be right: Melancholia argues that reality, including life, is best understood in the light of death; The Tree of Life argues that reality, including death, is best understood in the light of life. These propositions are familiar enough; more surprising and important are the force and grandeur with which the two films substantiate them.

more from Ian Marcus Corbin at The New Atlantis here.

A specter is haunting the Republican National Convention—the specter of ideology. The novelist Ayn Rand (1905–1982) and the economist Friedrich von Hayek (1899–1992) are the house deities of many American libertarians, much of the Tea Party, and Paul Ryan in particular. The two thinkers were quite different, subject to much misunderstanding, and, in Hayek’s case, more often cited than read. Yet, in popularized form, their arguments together provide the intellectual touchstone for Ryan and many others on the right wing of the Republican Party, people whose enthusiasm Mitt Romney needs. The irony of today is that these two thinkers, in their struggle against the Marxist left of the mid-twentieth century, relied on some of the same underlying assumptions as Marxism itself: that politics is a matter of one simple truth, that the state will eventually cease to matter, and that a vanguard of intellectuals is needed to bring about a utopia that can be known in advance.

more from Timothy Snyder at the NYRB here.

It is I Who Must Begin

It is I who must begin.
Once I begin, once I try —
here and now,
right where I am,
not excusing myself
by saying things
would be easier elsewhere,
without grand speeches and
ostentatious gestures,
but all the more persistently
— to live in harmony
with the “voice of Being,” as I
understand it within myself
— as soon as I begin that,
I suddenly discover,
to my surprise, that
I am neither the only one,
nor the first,
nor the most important one
to have set out
upon that road.

Whether all is really lost
or not depends entirely on
whether or not I am lost.

by Vaclav Havel
from Teaching With Fire

From The New Yorker:

It was powerful stuff:

We learned about dignity and decency—that how hard you work matters more than how much you make…. That helping others means more than just getting ahead yourself. We learned about honesty and integrity—that the truth matters…. That you don’t take shortcuts or play by your own set of rules … and success doesn’t count unless you earn it fair and square. We learned about gratitude and humility—that so many people had a hand in our success, from the teachers who inspired us to the janitors who kept our school clean…. And we were taught to value everyone’s contribution and treat everyone with respect. Those are the values Barack and I—and so many of you—are trying to pass on to our own children. That’s who we are.

In the final part of the speech, she drew the threads together, insisting that her husband, in fighting for things like equal pay for women, universal health care, and a thriving auto industry, was simply doing what he had always done.

Barack knows the American Dream because he’s lived it … and he wants everyone in this country to have that same opportunity, no matter who we are, or where we’re from, or what we look like, or who we love. And he believes that when you’ve worked hard, and done well, and walked through that doorway of opportunity…you do not slam it shut behind you…. You reach back, and you give other folks the same chances that helped you succeed. So when people ask me whether being in the White House has changed my husband, I can honestly say that when it comes to his character, and his convictions, and his heart, Barack Obama is still the same man I fell in love with all those years ago. He’s the same man who started his career by turning down high paying jobs and instead working in struggling neighborhoods where a steel plant had shut down, fighting to rebuild those communities and get folks back to work…. Because for Barack, success isn’t about how much money you make, it’s about the difference you make in people’s lives.

If that last line was an indirect jab at her husband’s opponent, it was about the only one in the speech. Rather than trying to tear down Romney and the G.O.P., she tried to elevate her husband and his works, assuring disappointed Democrats and independents that, she, for one, still had faith in him. Obviously, it was a one-sided speech. She glossed over Obama’s comfortable upbringing in Hawaii, failed to mention his role in bailing out Wall Street banks, and didn’t mention the housing crisis, the soaring deficit, or the fall in median income. But that was hardly her role. She came to bolster Obama, and in doing so she demonstrated that effective speeches don’t have to be full of attack lines. Direct statements, sincere expressions of personal feeling, and a bit of poetry can do the job just as well. So, let us praise Michelle Obama, a tall, glamorous, intelligent, and strong-minded daughter of the Windy City who finally came into her own, without any apologies or histrionics. She may well be sincere when she says that she has no political ambitions of her own. But after Tuesday evening, the option will always be there.

More here.

From Nature:

Gene therapy can fix a defective sense of smell in mice by repairing problems with the hair-like structures on their olfactory neurons, researchers report this week in Nature Medicine¹. The study suggests that abnormalities in these structures, called cilia, can be treated, but how the findings can be applied to other organs is unclear. Cilia are found on the surfaces of many types of cell, and they affect various functions, including sensory perception, movement and cell signaling. Damage to cilia as a result of genetic mutation can cause kidney and liver cysts, extra digits, obesity, blindness and hearing loss in mammals. The mutations and cellular mechanisms that contribute to such ciliopathies have been well studied, but “there's been very little work done in the area of therapeutics”, says study leader Jeffrey Martens, a pharmacologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Martens and his colleagues used mice in which a mutant protein causes effects similar to polycystic kidney disease in humans. Mutation of this protein, called intraflagellar transport 88 (IFT88), disrupts cilia expression and function, causing impaired growth, extra digits, blindness and brain abnormalities². These mice, called Oak Ridge polycystic kidney (ORPK) mice, die by early adulthood. Because olfactory dysfunction is a common effect of ciliopathy, the researchers examined the olfactory neurons of ORPK mice. In healthy mice, numerous cilia project from the olfactory neurons, but ORPK mice had fewer cilia, and those that remained were shortened and malformed. As expected, these mice also had a deficient sense of smell. To reverse this defect, the authors inserted a functional IFT88 protein into an adenovirus and then injected the virus into the noses of ORPK mice. The injection restored normal cilia number and structure as well as sense of smell.

More here.

The whole of the first book in E. L. James’s trilogy might be seen as one woman’s struggle against norms of “sexual health.” Anastasia Steele is not under the impression that there is something health giving about being repeatedly flogged for disrespecting a dominant man—or that being someone’s sex slave “encourages a dialogue.” But she does get off on the proximity to dissolution, the flirtation with violence. And so, for many tedious pages I imagine most of us skim, she worries about what is acceptably normal, until she mercifully returns to the playroom. Fifty Shades of Grey breaks none of the taboos listed on those Guidelines for Submission; it merely exists in a space where rules like “no weapons in dark places” become suddenly necessary. That the erotic moment can be cleaved so cleanly from chaos is a fantasy far more absurd than Anastasia Steele’s pursuit by “the richest, most elusive, most enigmatic bachelor in Washington State.” There are, it turns out, women who want to read stories in which protagonists get slapped around, have sex with tigers, and violate the nonvampire dead.

more from Kerry Howley at Bookforum here.

Wallace wrote and lived like someone who had become consumed by his own themes: media supersaturation (for Wallace it was television, though as Max points out he’s been posthumously claimed for the Internet generation); the scrambling of high and low culture; the moral imperative and extreme difficulty of paying close, continuous and loving attention to the right things amid a blizzard of distractions and addictions. Wallace’s recursive, doodling sentences, his self-consciousness, his goofy and sometimes childish pot-head humour, his emotional lability – all had about them a distinct and deliberate air of the teenage slacker. The images that survive of him – long-haired, wide-eyed, stubbly, wearing T-shirts, unlaced hiking boots, flannel shirts and the bandanna which he told a friend’s child was to prevent his head from exploding – cemented that image.

more from Sam Leith at Literary Review here.

There’s no picture more traumatic to the Indian imagination than that of thousands of people crammed into trains, fleeing for their lives. Flash back to 1947, when trains crossing between West Pakistan and north India steamed out of their stations filled with refugees and arrived at their destinations filled with corpses. The migrating dead were Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims who—stranded on the wrong side of the religious partition of British India, learning that it was now open season on their community and property—took flight for the border. About a million never made it. So (sixty-five years ago to the day), as India awoke to sovereignty and democracy, the sight before its eyes was a snarl of minority terror, slaughter, and trains. This was the image that much of India had to suppress, and a few provocateurs predictably stoked, on August 15 this year. It should have been another drowsy Independence Day, a mid-week chance to sleep in while the monsoon shook the last drops out of its watering-can. Instead, at Bangalore’s City Station, thousands of people pressed into emergency trains leaving for distant Guwahati, the latter a transport hub for the seven small states in India’s out-flung northeastern limb.

more from Raghu Karnad at n+1 here.