Husain Naqvi is a lecturer in literature and creative writing at Boston University. Before his incarnation as an academic, he was an investment-banker who worked on Wall Street and I.I. Chundrigar Road. During his undergraduate career, he was the recipient of the Lannan Fellowship, the Phelam Prize and served as editor-in-chief of the Georgetown Journal. He has read his poems on National Public Radio, and at Lollapalooza and the Nuyorican Poets Café. Husain fancies himself a renaissance man who has his finger on the pulse of the great global dialectic. He smokes Dunhills. Email: greatglobaldialectic@hotmail.com
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, Since our incarnation as a destitute and sometimes diligent academic, we haven’t possessed a TV, much less cable. We lead a wonderfully Spartan life here in Cambridge, reading, writing, braving the Massachusetts winter. Like hermits, ascetics, Eskimos, or those lost natives of the Amazon with dangling members, it seems…
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, Last month, we packed our bags and headed to Delhi. We flew on a cheap ticket, got in at an ungodly hour, bleary-eyed but excited. Indira Gandhi International airport is typically third-world, featuring ramshackle transit busses, greasy walls, dull immigration officials, who, because we hail from across the border,…
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, Recently in town for the British tour, cricket reporter Andrew Miller observes, “One of the first things you notice about Karachi, so long as you’re not being hot-boxed in a rickshaw as the morning traffic crawls to a halt, is the improbable clarity of the air. Despite being home…
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, After being attacked for a number of years by a new generation of literary critics – indeed, sucker-punched, phantom-punched, even body-slammed – “contemporary” (or “postmodern”) prose has hit back: in this month’s Harper’s, one of our favorite publications (less than $10.99 for an annual subscription), one Ben Marcus has…
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, After sojourning in Tuscany and Karachi for the summer, we have returned to the East Coast, to Cambridge, for the fall. Upon arrival, we spent the afternoon under the pigeon infested trees outside Au Bon Pain, leafing through the Boston Phoenix and the Weekly Dig. We overheard a woman…
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, We got a tattoo on our back the other day – a serpent wrapped around a large Gothic cross. Then we dropped by the barber’s down the street for a blond Mohawk. In the afternoon, we pumped some iron and went shopping and in the evening, we jacked a…
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, Last night we watched a glamorous cross-dresser in a sari hosting a TV talk-show in which he asked Amin Fahim, Benazir Bhutto’s the right hand man, about love. Fahim – a stolid, mustachioed man with the charisma of Dick Cheney – smiled, and said something like love is a…
Ladies and gentlemen, Naipaul is brilliant. Indeed, he is one of the finest writers the 20th century has produced. His book covers are often embellished with the following blandishment: “For sheer abundance of talent there can hardly be a writer alive who surpasses V.S. Naipaul.” We agree. His early comedies – Suffrage of Elvira, Miguel…
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, We have touched down in Karachi and are reacquainting ourselves with the city through rituals that we religiously repeat every six months: in the afternoon, we get into our ‘97 Corolla, turn up the AC, turn on FM 89 (that plays Duran Duran’s “Wild Boys” and “Taste of Summer”…
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, Perusing the bargain shelf at the Harvard Bookstore this weekend, we picked up a bruised copy of the Kenneth Peacock Tynan’s biography and found ourselves charmed yet again by the man, his persona, and the caliber of his critical output. Hailed as “the greatest theater critic since Shaw,” Tynan…