Month: December 2012

Wolf Road

Posted on by Morgan Meis

by Morgan Meis

St+Francis+and+WolfWe were speaking of wolves. I don’t remember how the conversation started. Maybe the thought of wolves comes naturally when you look out across the Hudson River and see the tree line of Shodack Island. There are no people on Shodack Island, no structures. On Shodack Island, the trees and the plants and the animals get to do it however they like. When you look out at the tree line of Shodack Island you think, “There could be anything on the other side of those trees.” In fact, there are no wolves on Shodack Island. There are no wolves to be found for thousands of miles from here, here being twenty miles south of Albany. The wolves were killed off long ago. It was one of the top priorities on the civilizational list. Kill the wolves. It has to be done. For the wolves are terror.

***

Driving out to Albany Airport (a regional airport if there ever was one) to put Shuffy on a plane to visit her mother in Las Vegas you exit the NY State Throughway and get onto Wolf Road. There is a Hampton Inn on Wolf Road. There is a Holiday Inn on Wolf Road. There is a Moe’s Southwest Grill on Wolf Road. The Cheesecake Factory can be found just off of Wolf Road at the Colonie Center Shopping Mall. There are, needless to say, no wolves on Wolf Road. But there must have been once. Albany was founded in the 17th century. It is a very old city by American standards. On the Department of Environmental Conservation website can be found the sentence, “The Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies waged war on wolves in 1631.” It was a successful war. Now, there aren’t even any memories. The wolves were eradicated so quickly that they are not part of the story.

That is something Shuffy brought up one morning while we were sitting on the deck of the second floor of my sister’s house in New Baltimore. The sun was coming up over the trees across the water on Shodack Island. We were drinking coffee from steamy cups. Steam was lifting off the surface of the Hudson River too. Or mist. Physics that morning was acting on the coffee and the river water in the same way. I was musing about how wolves seem to haunt the European imagination. It goes way back, I was speculating. All those old forests. The wolves were always lingering there at the edge of civilization, nipping at its heels. When European civilization wasn’t doing so well, when its defenses were down, it would be time for the wolves again. They could get the taste for human flesh. A frenzy is begun, wolves eating men and men killing wolves. That’s probably where the idea for werewolves got started, I was thinking aloud. There is a line in time and space where the margins of human living and the margins of wolf living overlap. That overlap marks a spot for violence. The distinction between wolf and man blurs and everything collapses into a mutual killing. Is there repressed guilt about that killing in the stories of werewolves? Man kills wolf just as mercilessly as wolf kills man. Does the lingering guilt come back in the idea of the wolfman, the human creature who becomes wolf in order to balance the scales, to do the work of the absent wolf?

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Revisiting the Idea of India — Part 1

Posted on by Namit Arora

By Namit Arora

A two-part review of The Indian Ideology, October 2012, by Perry Anderson. Part 2 appeared on April 22.

Cover‘Nations without a past are contradictions in terms,’ wrote Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm. Precursors to every modern nation are stories about its past and the present — stories full of invention, exclusion, and exaggeration — which help forge a ‘national consciousness’. Historians, wrote Hobsbawm, have ‘always been mixed up in politics’ and are ‘an essential component of nationalism’. They participate in shaping a nation’s mythos and self-perception. In his vivid analogy, ‘Historians are to nationalism what poppy-growers in Pakistan are to heroin addicts: we supply the essential raw material for the market.’ The more nationalist a historian, he held, the weaker his bid to be taken seriously as a historian.

But not all historians are equally complicit. Some are deeply skeptical of the dominant national histories and claims of nationhood. ‘Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation,’ wrote the scholar Ernst Renan. The skeptical historian may even see positive value in certain aspects of nationalism—its potential to bind diverse groups and inspire collective action, for instance—but she always sees a pressing need to inspect and critique its claims, assumptions, omissions, myths, and heroes. Scrutiny may reveal that a ‘cherished tradition’ is neither cherished, nor a tradition; likewise for supposedly ‘ancient’ origins and customs, traits and virtues, arts and culture, and other qualities of life and mind said to define the essence of a nation and its people. This approach is especially common among Marxist historians (their analytical orientation defines the genre, not their views on communism). The best of them know that there is no ultimately objective history, but who yet seek to write history from below and attempt to expose the actual conditions of social life, including the divisions, conflicts and oppressions that plague any nation.

This, then, is the vantage point of Marxist historian Perry Anderson’s magnificent and lucid new work, The Indian Ideology. What does the title refer to? In his own words, it ‘is another way of describing what is more popularly known as “The Idea of India”, which celebrates the democratic stability, multi-cultural unity, and impartial secularity of the Indian state as a national miracle.’ Anderson offers a critique of this idea.

Nationalism in India arose in the 19th century. A native elite, responding to British colonialism, began articulating a consciousness based on a new idea of India. Until then, despite civilizational continuities, the Subcontinent had no sense of itself as ‘India’, no national feeling based on political unity or a shared identity. Rival political units and ethnic groups abounded, divided by language, faith, caste, geography, history, and more. There was no historical awareness of the ancient empires of Mauryas or Guptas, or that the Buddha was Indian. This and much more of the Indian past would emerge via European scholarship, profoundly shaping ‘Hinduism’ and Hindu self-knowledge. Anderson surveys the rise of Indian nationalism and offers sharp vignettes of the minds and matters that drove Gandhi, Jinnah, Nehru, Bose, Ambedkar, Mountbatten and others. His analysis of the forces that led to Partition is astute and provocative. He assesses the performance of the independent nation-state and subjects Indian intellectuals to a withering critique for what he diagnoses as their comfort with ‘the Indian ideology’. Though not without shortcomings, Anderson has given us a masterwork of critical synthesis — trenchant, original, and bold — that should fuel discussion and debate for years ahead.

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Apprehending Art Vandalism: An Interview with Alexandra Chasin, Author of “Brief”

Posted on by Elatia Harris

By Elatia Harris

CHASIN BRIEF COVER 72dpi BRIEF-IMAGE-14

Cover photo of Brief, snow globe and screenshots from Brief, courtesy of Jaded Ibis Press

Alexandra Chasin is a Brooklyn-based writer who turned to fiction with her acclaimed collection, Kissed By (FC2, 2007). Her new work, Brief (Jaded Ibis Press, 2012), is an app novel for the iPad — the first-ever literary novel to take the form of an app. She is an Associate Professor of Literary Studies at Lang College, The New School.

ELATIA HARRIS: Alex, chance and probability are intimately involved in the experience of reading Brief, as well as a truly embodied participation by the reader. You can turn the page, for instance, but you can't turn back to the last page you just read and flipped away from. Its words and images would not be distributed that way again for an interval that it would almost take the 10,000 year clock to reckon. This not being able to go back seems to play with the idea of the personal history of the narrator, about whom we start finding out before personhood was achieved. The narrator has an unusual take on motivation, for someone who grew up and turned art vandal — wouldn't you say?

Chasin-1ALEXANDRA CHASIN: The initial impetus for writing Brief was to experiment with an anti-psychoanalytic account of individual personality and action. I wanted to extend, in the direction of absurdum, the proposition that we under-value historical and cultural forces as determinants of behavior. What if we are more formed by those forces than by the domestic and familial forces that psychoanalysis loves so much?

EH: The narrator is certainly at pains to establish that nothing exceptional occurred at home. Just TV, playdates, the Cold War, and the occasional crewcut — that sort of thing.

AC: The narrator's birthdate is, in effect, the starting point of Brief, and its location in time — that moment of cold-war psychosis, in which televisions made their way into every household, in which pop culture began to achieve truly mass proportions and to infiltrate the bastions of high-art. The nine months prior to the narrator's birthdate and the two years after, are effectively the time of the piece, their developments linked to — shown to be determining of — the development of an art vandal.

EH: The images speak to that era. They are furiously torn up, not to mention randomized, but they're evocative.

AC: Yes, I imagined the images having an evocative relation to the text and era, and also of the atmosphere in the courtroom where the narrative is set. The images are almost all manipulated — either fragmented or composited or abstracted — to exaggerate their oblique relation to the text. Maybe there is a similar obliquity in the relation of image and text in certain books by W.G. Sebald — Austerlitz and The Rings of Saturn.

EH: Being an app helps this along, of course…

AC: What the app does is constantly change the relationship of text to image, which reinforces visually a question the text raises about the radically changing status of the image in the early 1960s. The text argues that the convergence of a paranoid Cold-War psychology, the invasion of television into almost all U.S. households, and the turn from abstraction to pop and op art in the high-culture zone, would absolutely require a renegotiation of the status of the image. The operation of the app represents those historical changes in virtually every screen.

I'm always concerned with that kind of correspondence between form and content, or between content and medium. A great example is Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves, in which the book's typography and formatting serve the content of the narrative, often tracing the footsteps of the protagonist.

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Shias and their future in Pakistan

Posted on by Omar Ali

by Omar Ali

Shias (mostly Twelver Shias, but also including smaller groups of Ismailis and Dawoodi Bohras, etc.) make up between 5 and 25% of Pakistan’s population. The exact number is not known because the census does not count them separately and pro and anti-Shia groups routinely exaggerate or downgrade the number of Shias in Pakistan (thus the most militant Sunni group, the Sipah e Sahaba, routinely uses the figure of 2% Shia, which is too low, while Shias sometimes claim they are 30% of the Muslim population, which is clearly too high).

Shias were not historically a “minority group” in the sense in which modern identity politics talks about “minorities” (a definition that, sometimes unconsciously, includes some sense of being oppressed/marginalized by the majority). Shias were part and parcel of the Pakistan movement and the “great leader” himself was at least nominally Shia. He was not a conventionally observant Muslim (e.g. he regularly drank alcohol and may have eaten pork) and was for the most part a fairly typical upper-class “Brown sahib”, English in dress and manners, but Indian in origin. Jinnah with wadia He was born Ismaili Khoja but switched to the more mainstream Twelver sect; a conversion that he attested to in a written affidavit in some court. His conversion was said to be due to the Khoja Ismaili sect excommunicating his sisters for marrying non-Khojas.

In short, his position as a Shia was not a significant problem for him as he led the Muslim League’s movement for a separate Muslim state. Twelver Shias were well integrated into the Muslim elite, and in opposition to Hindus they were all fellow Muslims. The question of whether Jinnah was Shia or Sunni was occasionally asked but Jinnah always parried it with the fatuous stock reply “was the holy prophet Shia or Sunni?” This irrelevant (and in some ways, irreverent) reply generally worked because theologial fine print was not a priority for the superficially Anglicized North Indian Muslim elite. Their Muslim identity distinguished them from Hindus (and especially in North India, it was mixed with a certain anti-Indian racism, the assumption being that they themselves were “superior” Afghans, Turks, Persians, etc.). But foreshadowing the problems that would come later as the ideology of Pakistan matured, a Shia-Sunni distinction did arise when Jinnah died; his sister arranged a hurried Shia funeral inside the house, while the state arranged a larger Sunni funeral (led by an anti-shia cleric) in public. Funeral of jinnah This event and his own studied avoidance of any specifically Shia observance in his life, has led to claims by anti-Shia activists that Jinnah was in fact Sunni. But years later, a court did get to rule on this issue and they ruled that he was Shia (property was involved). By the time his sister died in 1967, matters had become uglier and even an orderly Sunni funeral was not easily arranged.
Since then, things have become much worse. The leaders of the Muslim league in general and the great leader in particular seem to have thought that once a Muslim state had been founded, it would function as a kind of Muslimized version of British India. The same commissioners and deputy commissioners, selected by the same civil service examinations, would rule over the “common people” while a thin (and thinly educated) crust of Muslim landlords and other “Ashraaf” lorded it over them.

Having used Islam to separate themselves from their Hindu and Sikh neighbors, they might occasionally use it to strengthen the spirit of Jihad in Kashmir or carry out other nation-building projects but it was not seen as a potential problem. Some of them probably thought there would be something called Islamic law in Islamic Pakistan, but most of the push for sharia law came from mullahs who had strongly opposed Jinnah’s project on the logical grounds that no one as ignorant of Islam as Jinnah could possibly create an Islamic state…but they soon realized that this pork-eating, whisky drinking Shia had indeed done so, and they were then quick to move in and try to take ownership).

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Poetry in Translation: Coal to a Diamond

Posted on by Rafiq Kathwari

by Rafiq Kathwari

After Iqbal via Nietzsche

My stuff is so vile. I am less than dust.
Your gleam rends the heart’s mirror.
My darkness lights the chafing dish
Before I am incinerated. A miner’s boot
Tramples my head, covering me with ashes.

Do you know the gist of my life?
A condensed sliver of smoke, transformed
Into a single spark, in feature and nature
Starlike, your every facet a splendor,
Light of the king’s eye, the dagger’s jewel.

Friend, be wise, the diamond replied, assume
A bezel’s dignity. Loam strives to harden
To fill my bosom with radiance. Burn
Because you are soft. Banish fear and grief.
Be hard as stone. Be diamond.

Rafiq Kathwari is a guest poet at 3Quarks Daily.

On the Wisdom of Roald Dahl, and Other Nordic Monsters

Posted on by Mara Jebsen

by Mara Jebsen

DownloadedFile“Its disgusterous!”the BFG gurgled. “It's sickable. It's rotsome! It's maggotwise! Try it yourself, this foulsome snozzcumber!”

'No thank you' Sophie said, backing away.—Roald Dahl

Readers of contemporary fiction might do well, from time to time, to dip back through the bookshelves of their childhoods to see what un-boring and un-foolish stuff is patiently waiting there. In my own shelves, there's magic, magic and grimness. Also, adventure. And beneath the magic and the adventure, a dark sort of wisdom that lurks enticingly. It is something like the sea–a blue and salt at the edge of consciousness that pulls–as if all children had the weak, seducible souls of sailors.

One such wisdom: the love between a very young person and a very old person is strange, unsentimental, prickly thing. In the old “Charlie and The Chocolate Factory” film, funny-faced Charlie and his sweet grandpa make a poignant pair, but Roald Dahl really explored this dynamic to its most comic and satisfying effect in the Big Friendly Giant. In it, a little bespectacled orphan, Sophie, and a giant hundreds of years old and dozens of feet tall befriend one another. “You mean you don't even know how old you are?” Sophie asks, early in the story. “No giant is knowing that,'the BFG said. 'All I is knowing about myself is that I is very old, very very old and crumply. Perhaps as old as the earth.”

Orphan and giant are two of the loneliest souls, each at the far reaches of life, and of no real use to anyone (though the giant, like Dahl, has elected to amuse himself by blowing dreams through a trumpet into the minds of sleeping children.) Otherwise, each is living a life simply awash in unkindnesses. The girl marks time in a cruel orphanage; the giant bears daily punishment as the 'runt' of a group of human-eating giants who crunch bones and slobber and tease (and seem like mythologized versions of bullies in a boys' boarding school.) Sophie and the giant bark at one another, arguing over proper English, eating filthsome snozzcumbers, and drinking delicious frobscottle that makes them fart until they float.

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A term paper assignment from Kurt Vonnegut

Posted on by S. Abbas Raza

From Slate:

1212_SBR_LETTERS_Vonnegut.jpg.CROP.article250-mediumThis course began as Form and Theory of Fiction, became Form of Fiction, then Form and Texture of Fiction, then Surface Criticism, or How to Talk out of the Corner of Your Mouth Like a Real Tough Pro. It will probably be Animal Husbandry 108 by the time Black February rolls around. As was said to me years ago by a dear, dear friend, “Keep your hat on. We may end up miles from here.”

As for your term papers, I should like them to be both cynical and religious. I want you to adore the Universe, to be easily delighted, but to be prompt as well with impatience with those artists who offend your own deep notions of what the Universe is or should be. “This above all …”

I invite you to read the fifteen tales in Masters of the Modern Short Story (W. Havighurst, editor, 1955, Harcourt, Brace, $14.95 in paperback). Read them for pleasure and satisfaction, beginning each as though, only seven minutes before, you had swallowed two ounces of very good booze. “Except ye be as little children …”

Then reproduce on a single sheet of clean, white paper the table of contents of the book, omitting the page numbers, and substituting for each number a grade from A to F. The grades should be childishly selfish and impudent measures of your own joy or lack of it. I don’t care what grades you give. I do insist that you like some stories better than others.

More here.

Noam Chomsky: Palestine 2012 — Gaza and the UN resolution

Posted on by S. Abbas Raza

Noam Chomsky at his own website:

You-take-my-water2An old man in Gaza held a placard that reads: “You take my water, burn my olive trees, destroy my house, take my job, steal my land, imprison my father, kill my mother, bombard my country, starve us all, humiliate us all but I am to blame: I shot a rocket back.” [1]

The old man’s message provides the proper context for the timelines on the latest episode in the savage punishment of Gaza. They are useful, but any effort to establish a “beginning” cannot help but be misleading. The crimes trace back to 1948, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled in terror or were expelled to Gaza by conquering Israeli forces, who continued to truck them over the border for years after the official cease-fire. The persecution of Gazans took new forms when Israel conquered the Strip in 1967. From recent Israeli scholarship we learn that the goal of the government was to drive the refugees into the Sinai, and if feasible the rest of the population too.

Expulsions from Gaza were carried out under the direct orders of General Yeshayahu Gavish, commander of the Southern Command. Expulsions from the West Bank were far more extreme, and Israel resorted to devious means to prevent the return of those expelled, in direct violation of Security Council orders. The reasons were made clear in internal discussion immediately after the war. Golda Meir, later Prime Minister, informed her Labor colleagues that Israel should keep the Gaza Strip while “getting rid of its Arabs.” Defense Minister Dayan and others agreed. Prime Minister Eshkol explained that those expelled cannot be allowed to return because “We cannot increase the Arab population in Israel” — referring to the newly occupied territories, already tacitly considered part of Israel. In accord with this conception, all of Israel’s maps were changed, expunging the Green Line (the internationally recognized borders), though publication was delayed to permit UN Ambassador Abba Eban to attain what he called “favorable impasse” at the General Assembly, by concealing Israel’s intentions. [2]

More here.

Is God Happy?

Posted on by Robin Varghese

Kolakowski_1-122012_jpg_493x500_crop_q85A old piece by Leszek Kołakowski in the NYRB:

The question is not absurd. Our conventional view of happiness is as an emotional state of mind. But is God subject to emotion? Certainly, we are told that God loves His creatures, and love, at least in the human world, is an emotion. But love is a source of happiness when it is reciprocated, and God’s love is reciprocated only by some of His subjects, by no means all: some do not believe that He exists, some do not care whether He exists or not, and others hate Him, accusing Him of indifference in the face of human pain and misery. If He is not indifferent, but subject to emotion like us, He must live in a constant state of sorrow when He witnesses human suffering. He did not cause it or want it, but He is helpless in the face of all the misery, the horrors and atrocities that nature brings down on people or people inflict on each other.

If, on the other hand, He is perfectly immutable, He cannot be perturbed by our misery; He must therefore be indifferent. But if He is indifferent, how can He be a loving father? And if He is not immutable, then He takes part in our suffering, and feels sorrow. In either case, God is not happy in any sense we can understand.

We are forced to admit that we cannot understand the divine being—omnipotent, omniscient, knowing everything in Himself and through Himself, not as something external to Him, and unaffected by pain and evil.

The true God of the Christians, Jesus Christ, was not happy in any recognizable sense. He was embodied and suffered pain, he shared the suffering of his fellow men, and he died on the cross.

In short, the word “happiness” does not seem applicable to divine life. But nor is it applicable to human beings. This is not just because we experience suffering. It is also because, even if we are not suffering at a given moment, even if we are able to experience physical and spiritual pleasure and moments beyond time, in the “eternal present” of love, we can never forget the existence of evil and the misery of the human condition.

Contrary to Common Belief, Female Porn Stars have Great Self Esteem

Posted on by Robin Varghese

Original

Or so claims so new research: Robert Gonzalez in io9:

Pornographic actresses are probably having more sex than you. No surprise there. But a newly published study suggests there's a good chance many of them have better self esteem, to boot — not to mention more enjoyable sex lives, better body images, and more positive outlooks on life. As for the widely held belief that female porn actresses share a history of sexual abuse (commonly known as the Damaged Goods Hypothesis), the researchers found the actresses were no more “damaged” than their non-pornographic counterparts.

In a study recounted in the latest issue of the Journal of Sex Research, a team of investigators led by Shippensburg University psychologist James D. Griffith surveyed 177 porn actresses on “a variety of behavioral, social, and psychological dimensions,” namely: demographic information (age, ethnicity, etc), sexual behaviors and attitudes, self-esteem, quality of life and drug use.

“Some descriptions of actresses in pornography have included attributes such as drug addiction, homelessness, poverty, desperation, being pimped out, and being victims of sexual abuse,” write the researchers. “Some have made extreme assertions, such as claiming that all women in pornography were sexually abused as children.”

But studies on women in porn are lacking. And without data, argue Griffith and his colleagues, “claims regarding the attributes of pornography actresses lack support.”

She’s Got Some Big Ideas

Posted on by Robin Varghese

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A profile of Maria Popova, the person behind the very awesome Brain Pickings, by Bruce Feiler in the NYT:

SHE is the mastermind of the one of the faster growing literary empires on the Internet, yet she is virtually unknown. She is the champion of old-fashioned ideas, yet she is only 28 years old. She is a fierce defender of books, yet she insists she will never write one herself.

At precisely 9:30 on a chilly Saturday morning, Maria Popova slips out of her apartment in Brooklyn, scurries down a few stairs and enters a small basement gym. A former recreational bodybuilder from Bulgaria, Ms. Popova is the unlikely founder of the exploding online emporium of ideas known as Brain Pickings.

Her exhaustively assembled grab bag of scientific curiosities, forgotten photographs, snippets of old love letters and mash notes to creativity — imagine the high-mindedness of a TED talk mixed with the pop sensibility of P. T. Barnum — spans a blog (500,000 visitors a month), anewsletter (150,000 subscribers) and a Twitter feed(263,000 followers). Her output, which she calls a “human-powered discovery engine for interestingness,” has attracted an eclectic group of devotees including the novelist William Gibson, the singer Josh Groban, the comedian Drew Carey, the neuroscientist David Eagleman, the actress Mia Farrow and the Twitter founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams.

“She’s a celebrator,” said Anne-Marie Slaughter, a Princeton professor and former State Department official. “You feel the tremendous amount of pleasure she takes in finding these things and sharing them. It’s like walking into the Museum of Modern Art and having somebody give you a customized, guided tour.”

Unlearning liberty

Posted on by Azra Raza

From Spiked:

As you would expect from the president of FIRE, Unlearning Liberty teems with detailed examples of campus censorship. There’s Texas Southern University’s ban on ‘inappropriate jokes’ that cause ‘physical or emotional harm’; there’s Northeastern University’s prohibition on email messages that ‘in the sole judgement of the university’ are ‘annoying’ or ‘offensive’. There’s the absurd case of a mature student at Indiana Uni-Purdue ‘found guilty of racial harassment’… for reading a history book about the defeat of the Ku Klux Klan. And there are countless more from the annals of draconian farce that are FIRE’s case files. Indeed, just how inessential the idea of free and open debate has become to the academy is revealed by the fact that many American universities have created specific so-called free-speech zones, complete with designated opening hours and booking systems. Freedom of thought is no longer installed at the centre of the academy; it’s been relegated to the margins.

It is not just the students who are trained to believe that there are things of which they must never speak; faculty members are, too. In 2005, for instance, Harvard president Larry Summers gave a speech in which he speculated that, at the highest end of the IQ spectrum, men might be genetically predisposed towards being cleverer than women. He was forced to resign. ‘If the president of Harvard can’t start a meaty, thought-provoking, challenging discussion’, notes Lukianoff, ‘who on earth can?’ The result of three decades’ worth of campus censorship, from the politically correct speech codes of the 1980s and 1990s to the anti-harassment dictata of today, has been chilling. Lukianoff tells me of a recent survey conducted by the American Association of Colleges and Universities: ‘Out of 24,000 students who were asked the question, “Is it safe to hold unpopular positions on campus?”, only 35 per cent of students strongly agreed. But, when broken down, the stat indicates something even worse. Forty per cent of freshmen strongly agreed, but only 30 per cent of seniors.’ In other words, students unlearn freedom of speech during their studies. ‘Even worse, only 16 per cent of university faculty strongly agreed with this statement. It’s not even a particularly strong statement, and if we’ve reached a point where only 16 per cent of faculty strongly agree with it, then we’re doing something wrong.’

How has this happened?

More here.

Starbucks vs the chai-wallah

Posted on by Azra Raza

Ritwik Deo in New Statesman:

ChaiThings are different in India. A blind lascivious beggar sings a bhojpuri ditty. Pregnant clouds over Bombay monsoon raindrops like the breasts of Khajuraho; heavy and laden. It is an overcast afternoon and the sun is no more. Humidity and sweat tugs at the will to go on. A long line of India’s young and trendy in Converse, in UCB, all Adidas and iPhonery wait for their turn at the recently opened Starbucks. Growing up in India, I remember queuing up outside the very first McDonalds in New Delhi for an hour to have a seven-rupee ice cream. KFC took us to giddy heights of rapture. A chicken wing in hand and a glass of frothy Coke in the other, we had arrived. We were no longer Indians any more. We were cosmopolitan Americans. It didn’t last that long. We fell out of love with the Golden Arches and the Colonel and reverted back to our cuisine. The scales fell and we realised that tandoori chicken, a bit of chilli and a pickled onion on the side was timeless. It was forever.

Similarly, this is still a nation of roadside and railway station chai-wallahs. City workers, students and manual labourers all frequent little shacks by the roadside for a spot of tea dust in hot milk. Corpulent politicians in spotless tunics, world-weary swamis and lecherous vagabonds squat under flimsy tarpaulins with a kulhad of cardamom chai and a slice of wheat rusk; a rare egalitarianism in a country riven by class and caste.The friendly chai-wallah with his muzzein-like call in the morning is a constant in an ever-changing India. Starbucks and a host other shiny coffee-wallahs will never equal the pavement camaraderie. For now, as the rainwater from the gutter turns from a trickle to a creek and then a river, eunuchs in garish red and green saris huddle together at the chai-wallah's not that far away from the new swish Starbucks in the fashionable Horniman’s Circle. Moments before the downpour they had been collecting bakshish, stopping motorbikes, manhandling pedestrians and molesting the office-wallahs A Sikh auto driver is filing his nails while a showman shares a biscuit with his pet monkey. Under his plastic sheet, the chai-wallah has a harem, his own court. He is a maharajah.

More here.

Sunday Poem

Posted on by Jim Culleny

Key

The keys again.
It's back to counting steps keeping lists and still
It's elusive, something
He can't remember the ingredients for.

Then it's nothing-
Or nothing to hang onto. Good.
But there you are.
“Oh, but it's not me, I am a declaration of invisibility.”

Look.
Drifting, floating, pulse of pure consciousness
Wishful thinking, fleeing the mortal coil
Somewhere around here.

Seeing all, feeling all, and at the same time.
Hope, requiring the ubiquity
A heartbeat of love
Nearby.

Mind's eye retraces diamond-like
Cut in countless fractures, rays
There.
Finger the key

Brilliant morning light
On the steps

by Walter Burnham
.

Hitler’s Strange Afterlife in India

Posted on by Robin Varghese

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Dilip D’Souza in The Daily Beast:

My wife teaches French to tenth-grade students at a private school here in Mumbai. During one recent class, she asked these mostly upper-middle-class kids to complete the sentence “J'admire …” with the name of the historical figure they most admired.

To say she was disturbed by the results would be to understate her reaction. Of 25 students in the class, 9 picked Adolf Hitler, making him easily the highest vote-getter in this particular exercise; a certain Mohandas Gandhi was the choice of precisely one student. Discussing the idea of courage with other students once, my wife was startled by the contempt they had for Gandhi. “He was a coward!” they said. And as far back as 2002, the Times of India reported a survey that found that 17 percent of students in elite Indian colleges “favored Adolf Hitler as the kind of leader India ought to have.”

In a place where Gandhi becomes a coward, perhaps Hitler becomes a hero.

Still, why Hitler? “He was a fantastic orator,” said the 10th-grade kids. “He loved his country; he was a great patriot. He gave back to Germany a sense of pride they had lost after the Treaty of Versailles,” they said.

“And what about the millions he murdered?” asked my wife. “Oh, yes, that was bad,” said the kids. “But you know what, some of them were traitors.”

Admiring Hitler for his oratorical skills? Surreal enough. Add to that the easy condemnation of his millions of victims as traitors. Add to that the characterization of this man as a patriot. I mean, in a short dozen years, Hitler led Germany through a scarcely believable orgy of blood to utter shame and wholesale destruction. Even the mere thought of calling such a man a patriot profoundly corrupts—is violently antithetical to—the idea of patriotism.

But these are kids, you think, and kids say the darndest things. Except this is no easily written-off experience. The evidence is that Hitler has plenty of admirers in India, plenty of whom are by no means kids.

Consider Mein Kampf, Hitler’s autobiography. Reviled it might be in the much of the world, but Indians buy thousands of copies of it every month.

Questions Concerning the Murder of Benazir Bhutto

Posted on by S. Abbas Raza

Owen Bennett-Jones in the London Review of Books:

Benazir_bhutto_1448641cIn her posthumously published book, Reconciliation, Benazir Bhutto named a man whom she believed had tried to procure bombs for an unsuccessful attempt on her life in Karachi in October 2007:

I was informed of a meeting that had taken place in Lahore where the bomb blasts were planned … a bomb maker was needed for the bombs. Enter Qari Saifullah Akhtar, a wanted terrorist who had tried to overthrow my second government. He had been extradited by the United Arab Emirates and was languishing in the Karachi central jail … The officials in Lahore had turned to Akhtar for help. His liaison with elements in the government was a radical who was asked to make the bombs and he himself asked for a fatwa making it legitimate to oblige. He got one.

Akhtar’s story reveals much about modern Pakistan. Born in 1959, he spent two years of his boyhood learning the Quran by heart and left home at the age of 18, moving to the radical Jamia Binoria madrassah in Karachi. In 1980, he went on jihad, fighting first the Soviets in Afghanistan and later the Indians in Kashmir. In both conflicts he came into contact with Pakistani intelligence agents, who were there trying to find out what was going on and to influence events. Helped by the high attrition rate among jihadis, he rose through the ranks and by the mid-1990s, after an intense power struggle with a rival commander, emerged as the leader of Harkat ul Jihad al Islami or HUJI, once described by a liberal Pakistan weekly as ‘the biggest jihadi outfit we know nothing about’.

In 1995, Akhtar committed a crime that in many countries would have earned him a death sentence: he procured a cache of weapons to be used in a coup. Putsches in Pakistan generally take the form of the army chief moving against an elected government. This one was an attempt by disaffected Islamist officers to overthrow not only Bhutto’s government but also the army leadership.

The plot’s leader was Major General Zahir ul Islam Abbasi. In 1988, as Pakistan’s military attaché in Delhi, he acquired some sensitive security documents from an Indian contact. When the Indians found out, they beat him up and expelled him. He returned to Pakistan a national hero. Seven years later, disenchanted by the secularist tendencies of both Bhutto and the army leadership, he devised a plot to storm the GHQ and impose sharia. Akhtar’s role was to supply the weapons.

More here.

Why the Art World Is So Loathsome: Eight theories

Posted on by S. Abbas Raza

Simon Doonan in Slate:

134733125.jpg.CROP.rectangle3-large1. Art Basel Miami.

It’s baaa-ack, and I, for one, will not be attending. The overblown art fair in Miami—an offshoot of the original, held in Basel, Switzerland—has become a promo-party cheese-fest. All that craven socializing and trendy posing epitomize the worst aspects of today’s scene, provoking in me a strong desire to start a Thomas Kinkade collection. Whenever some hapless individual innocently asks me if I will be attending Art Basel—even though the shenanigans don’t start for another two weeks, I am already getting e-vites for pre-Basel parties—I invariably respond in Tourette’s mode:

“No. In fact, I would rather jump in a river of boiling snot, which is ironic since that could very well be the title of a faux-conceptual installation one might expect to see at Art Basel. Have you seen Svetlana’s new piece? It’s a river of boiling snot. No, I’m not kidding. And, guess what, Charles Saatchi wants to buy it and is duking it out with some Russian One Percent-er.”

More here.