by Madhu Kaza

At a Christmas gathering at a cousin's house in Maryland I mentioned to my five-year-old nephew that I don't own a television. I was sitting on a couch with him paging through a book about whales and dolphins for the sixth or seventh time. The men in the family were playing gin rummy around the coffee table; the other children were playing video games on their parents' cell phones, and the women were in the open kitchen off to the side making a succession of meals. At that moment and the whole weekend long the flat screen TV that hung above the fireplace was lit and muted. Images of CNN commentators discussing the murder of two NYPD officers, Red Wing hockey and young men singing love songs in music videos formed the backdrop of the holiday. “What's that?” my nephew asked. I looked down at the creature on the page and said, “Some kind of dolphin, I'm not exactly sure.” But I had misunderstood the question. He spoke again: “What's television?”

*

*

“Look at this. This looks like a city. Like a little model of a city. And all the houses, which are here. And streets. This is maybe an elevator to go up, up there. And here are all the wires. These wires, they really take care of all the electrons when they come through there. They take care that they are powerful enough to get all the way through to here.” This is how the musician Björk, describes the circuit board and wires of a television in an old video. She has opened the back of the television, she says, because it's Christmas time and she's been watching lots of television and is curious about how it works to cast its spell on her. She sits at a kitchen table affectionately close to “the beautiful television” and says she wants to understand “how it can put me in all sorts of situations.”

In her quest to understand how television works Björk posits a tongue-in-cheek cultural battle between her native Iceland and its former colonizer, Denmark, framed as a battle between poetry and science. She describes how an Icelandic poet explained to her that television was different from film: “This is millions and millions of little screens that send light, some sort of electric light, I'm not really sure. But because there are so many of them, in fact you are watching very many frames when you are watching TV. Your head is very busy all the time to calculate and put it all together into one picture. And then because you're so busy doing that, you don't watch very carefully what the program you are watching is really about. So you become hypnotized. So all that's on TV, it just goes directly into your brain and you stop judging if it's right or not. You just swallow and swallow.” Björk says that the Icelandic poet's explanation caused her to become so frightened of television that she began to get headaches while watching it.

The cure for poet-induced headaches, she suggests, trying to remain deadpan, is science: “Later on, when I got my Danish book on television, I stopped being afraid because I read the truth, and that's the scientifical truth, which is much better.”

She concludes,”You shouldn't let poets lie to you.”

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by Aditya Dev Sood

This is the fourth in a series of brief pieces written from the deep and dark of Startup Tunnel, a new incubator based in New Delhi. You might also want to read dispatches one, two, and three.

We’re fully in the fog of it now. It’s not only the startups that are stumbling and searching and feeling their way forward. The tunnel metaphor would seem to apply to me and the rest of my team as well. Where once we felt clarity and purpose, we’re now lost in detail. Every startup is different, at a different point along the path, and with such different needs. We’re scrambling to serve them all in ways that do them justice.

The initial shock of arrival and feedback taking is over for startup teams. They now have real work to do in building out their product or in making it better. This is a multivariate problem solving process that can overwhelm founders if they don’t have the tools to organize and isolate the challenges they face. It’s with a view to supporting and enhancing their ability to conceptualize, articulate and prototype their product that we led them through two exercises: First a ‘product tour’ and then a ‘customer journey map.’

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by Ahmed Humayun

Is there a method to the madness of Islamist extremism? Yes, if a voluminous literature produced by militants in Arabic and other languages is to be believed. One example of the genre is the militant manual, the Management of Savagery, a text highly influential among Islamist radicals, and translated from Arabic into English by the combating terrorism center at West Point. It is a curious amalgamation of geopolitical analysis, religious propaganda, social psychology, and military tactics. The work has some literary pretensions but it is of uneven quality and gives the impression of being pasted together from disparate sources.

Yet it also outlines a clear, coherent worldview, a theory of geopolitical change, and, when it is not recycling superficial clichés about Western decadence, offers penetrating insight into how terrorist tactics can succeed, even when they appear to fail. It is a call to action that outlines a series of concrete, often diabolically clever steps that have been followed by a wide range of militant groups. There is a striking parallel between the prescriptions in the text and the actions of ISIS, the militant group that now controls a vast chunk of territory in the Arab heartland.

The fall of the Ottoman Caliphate, and the partition of the Middle East by European powers has long been a preoccupation of radicals in their diagnosis of the ills plaguing Arab societies. The text takes the same stance, rejecting not just the current governments that prevail in the Middle East, but the global order as a whole. It sees a world in which major powers in the center – the United States, above all – ally with tyrannies in the periphery, imposing through them a foreign, 'apostate' order in Muslim majority societies.

This historical moment is not unprecedented, it is argued. After the breakdown of political order such as that occurred in the early 20th century there is always a period of transition before a new settled order comes into being. Such a transitional state prevails in the Muslim world today. Militant groups should therefore seek to 'vex' and 'exhaust' the enemy- the regimes ruling their societies, or their Western allies. This will catalyze the breakout of chaos – the weakening of political authority across the land, creating opportunities for militants to 'manage the savagery' successfully, so that the ultimate goal, an Islamic state, may be realized.

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$hip of $tate

I'm on a big boat
(which the nautically savvy call ship)

if this ship's a cocoon of light atmosphere
its steel will float, but it will tip
if its load’s unbalanced—
if its equilibrium is off
it will start to list,
if not corrected
it will end a sacrificial goat
sucked to bottom
as Neptune's universal laws
will have directed

and insist
.

by Jim Culleny
1/13/15

…………..
.
.

by Maniza Naqvi

Flogging newspapers with hate drawn up as free speech is a cheap self serving marketing trick. Nothing new there. Hate sells war. It sells weapons. It sells newspapers. Hate sells.

Floggings and cartoons to caricature Muslims as the newest kid on the block to hate, well that's relatively new in the scheme of history and things. And who does that? The House Saud for one, which has condemned a citizen blogger to a thousand lashes in 20 batches of 50 lashes each for his speech. Public floggings, though this one has been postponed, are routine in the Kingdom of the House Saud. The House Hebdo flogs Muslims too. Both flog and lash Muslims. And neither of them protests or caricatures war. A funny thing happened while the wars were being waged in these last fourteen years—Mecca was transformed into a strip Mall by the House of Saud. Charlie Hebdo and the House of Saud have another thing in common they couldn't give two hoots about the Prophet. They both sneer at him. And both probably consider their own versions of caricatures in the name of the Prophet their most sustainable profit making enterprise.

And both are supported by the so called leaders of freedom of speech. Witness how free speech and freedom were caricatured when those great defenders of human rights and freedom of speech, the Saudi foreign minister, Netanyahu and the President of Gabon formed the frontline at the march in Paris on January 11, 2015. Witness the eulogizing of the chief financier of extremism this week in Riyadh by all these leaders of freedom of speech–sellers of weapons, guzzlers of oil.

But lashes, words and caricatures can be survived. You cannot survive bombs and bullets. The House Saud and stunts like the House Hebdo sell hate and ensure that bombs and bullets will continue to be produced and used without question. France is the largest seller of weapons to Saudi Arabia, followed by the UK and Germany and Sweden and the US. Germany has announced its decision yesterday to stop selling weapons to Saudi Arabia. The majority of the Germans want Germany to stop all trade with Saudi Arabia. That is a good step.

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by Rishidev Chaudhuri

Fish stews occupy a wonderful middle ground between delicacy and robustness, suggesting sun and warmth and brine, and yet also being mouth-filling and meaty and deeply flavorful. They’re happy at simple weeknight dinners and at parties, and can be dressed up with more varied sets of ingredients (crabs, mussels and clams, shrimp/prawn). And they’re good for the imagination, encouraging the mind to wander through seaside towns and small fishing villages strung along the coasts (looping along the Atlantic, detouring through the Mediterranean, encircling Africa and heading up the Arabian Sea, along India, then getting briefly distracted by the thousands of south-east Asian islands before encountering the grand Pacific).

The basic route to making a fish stew is simple and similar to many other soups and stews: sauté aromatics (like garlic, onions, fennel, ginger) until translucent, add some herbs/spices and stock or wine or coconut milk, simmer for a while to let the flavors blend, and then add the seafood and cook till done. Two templates I use frequently are a vaguely Mediterranean seafood stew built around fennel, anchovies, olive oil and white wine, and an Indian Ocean mixture of ginger, chilli, coconut milk, fish sauce, and tamarind.

The recipes described below are neither of these (those templates are easily found elsewhere on the Internet), though they are closer to the second and reflect the flavors of South India. The two recipes are fun to contrast: both use very similar ingredients and derive from the same culinary vocabulary, but they employ two different strategies. The first is lightly flavored and clean, a simple mix of vegetables and fish simmered in a delicate white coconut milk broth, and lives at the same Indo-Western intersection that produces the spiced versions of European roasts and stews that dot the colonial and post-colonial South Asian landscape. The second is sharper, richer, and more aromatic, and is distinguished by its use and treatment of whole spices and by the browning of the aromatics.

Both recipes are for about 1 pound or 500 grams of seafood (a good size for 2 or 3 people), with the first described using fish, and the second with prawn/shrimp. But both go well with other seafood, and are excellent with a mixture of fish, prawns and mussels/clams. If you’re using a mixture, you could add the thicker fish pieces first and the thinner pieces and shellfish a little later, so as to make sure they don’t overcook.

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A RESURRECTION

My mother tells this story
about her childhood in Kashmir
years before she married my father.

“I remember our horse Burak,
hoofs scuffing snow, nostrils fuming,
hitched to an open cart. Relatives,

showering rice and rose petals
on Mohammed’s shrouded body—
the son my father always wanted

to whom I was betrothed—
wailed not for a soul departed
but sang of a bride waiting

for an intended groom
who succumbed
to the Mother Of All Chills.”

Four score and three years later
Mother rises from the bright
Ethan Allen tightback couch

at her son’s home in New Rochelle
to do what now she does best
—merging time past and time present—

whispers across Long Island Sound,
Mohammed,
have they given you a transfusion

By Rafiq Kathwari, whose first book of poems is forthcoming in September 2015 from
Doire Press, Ireland. More work here.

This is the 3rd of a series of brief weekly pieces on the unfolding journey of a new incubator based in New Delhi: www.startuptunnel.com, @StTnL. Checkout earlier pieces in the series: Entering Startup Tunnel and What Makes an Incubator Tick?

by Aditya Dev Sood

Prashant and Ishita came to see me on Monday afternoon. We’re a bit uncertain at this point about our startup concept, Ishita began… Maybe you can tell that we don’t perfectly align on the idea anymore…? I could tell no such thing, so I just looked intently back at them as they continued. Basically, I would like to use the remainder of the incubation program to pursue another idea, said Prashant, having to do with music, which is what I’m really about. Ishita has several ideas up her sleeve that she’s considering, including the one we came in with.

And so it begins, I thought. We’d accepted eleven startups to the program. Ten got back to us saying they would join but then we realized with had a conflict between two of them who were both working in the social health space. We withdrew our offer to one of them, bringing the cohort down to nine teams. One cofounder bailed when he finally got around to reading the fine print of our contract, leaving us with eight. Or perhaps we’re back up to nine given that Prashant and Ishita now represent two startups? Or perhaps, more realistically speaking, we’re actually down to seven?

It’s really hard for me to tell you guys what to do, I finally said.

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by Charlie Huenemann

(Image from “AhtheMacabre” on Etsy)

As I'm closer to death than birth, I think from time to time about what to do with my dead body. Of course, in the main I don't really care. I'll be done with it, and it will be nothing other than Other People's Problem, in the deepest existential sense of those words. But sometimes I try to imagine what would be most meaningful to my surviving friends and family. For the most part, I come up empty.

My own parents are buried alongside their relatives far away in a country churchyard – and that sounds nice! – but the fact is that none of their descendants visit it with any regularity. I do think often of my parents, whom I loved and miss. But I don't know what further emotional or spiritual charge I would get by looking at a stone with their names on it and reflecting on the fact that, six feet down, there are some organic materials that once constituted their bodies. My father-in-law's ashes are in a simple wooden box which I see from time to time, and when I see them I say to myself, “Alas, poor Gerald! I knew him!” – but the experience doesn't amount to much. At best the box serves as a momento mori, and at worst it poses the problem of who's going to care for this box for the rest of time. So I don't have any good examples to follow.

I could donate my body to medical science, and I see clearly the virtue of doing so. Let the dead teach the living! But I can't quite commit myself to the idea. This raggedy donkey has been my good and true companion, for the most part, and I feel like I owe it some respect. I know it's irrational, but the thought of giving it over to medical students to cut open and explore strikes me as ingratitude. (I lived with a med student many years ago, and wasn't much reassured by the experience.)

What I would like best, of course, is for my body to be laid out on a wooden Viking ship and sent into the middle of the lake as a flaming arrow arcs overhead into the sky and delivers the fire to the pyre. But goodness knows what health and safety officers would have to say about this, and I'd hate to bequeath to my children the labors of such paperwork and legal expense – let alone the trouble of finding a builder of Viking ships. The myriad hassles and expenses would suck all the meaning and fun out of it.

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by Brooks Riley

Remember the winter scarf? A long strip of knitted wool, the two ends knotted, crossed, or wrapped around the neck. I’ve worn them all my life, struggling to keep the ends from unwinding in a cold wind, or retrieving a loose end from my latte as I reach across a table to shake someone’s hand. A shroud would be an improvement, long and fulsome, but it too comes with loose ends, to be saved for later.

Loose ends, the obvious metaphor for a life in limbo, is simplistic. And just what are those ends anyway? Bookends to the main event, the Alpha and Omega of existence, birth and death—useless but inevitable.

Recently, in search of a new scarf, I came across a woolen loop, slightly elasticized so that it could be wrapped twice around my neck. Look, Ma, no ends! It’s nothing special these days, but for me it was a revelation: I was liberated from the struggle to make ends meet or stay put. Now I felt safe, in more ways than one: A woven furnace caressing my carotid arteries, I was wrapped in a security blanket without issues, clearing the way for worries of the endogenous sort, the kind that don’t come bundled with small physical irritations.

Delighted with this new-millennial improvement on age-old warmers, I shopped for another one. My second scarf went the first one even better: a brilliant woolen Möbius strip that didn’t even have to be doubled—a fat Möbius which sits firmly on the shoulders, its twist neatly snuggled at the nape of the neck, allowing the fullness of the rest to fortify the shoulders and throat. While others might be drooling over the latest wearable tech, my needs were answered by a 5 € purchase, made possible by two 19^th century mathematicians, August Ferdinand Möbius and Johann Benedict Listing, who came to the same conclusion simultaneously in 1858 in their land of Zeitgeist or the zeitgleich. (Poor Herr Doktor Listing: Möbius won the posterity game.)

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Fundamental Misunderstanding
…. — thoughts on Charlie Hebdo, etc.

everything ever written or said
everything drawn or played or sung
every headline that cried or bled
every fresco, every poem
everything wrung from our cranial sponge
every inky insult flung
every instrument ever made
every expletive blasted from lungs
every face on a canvas hung
every righteous canto prayed
…. that pounded the planks of heaven’s floor
every school Kalashnikov-sprayed
every smartass quote with bite
every thought of rich or poor
every Icarus grasping at height
…. whose waxy wings soon came apart
every joke and laugh and snort
every misbegotten poison dart
every sentiment or thing
…. that burst from brain’s well-tensioned spring
every surah, gospel or verse
every prayer that followed a hearse
every love, lost or won
every song and every hum

every murmuring merciful must
that reached the sky or bit the dust
are not of a glad or angry God
……………….but of life that thrusts
from inner to outer the stuff of us
.

by Jim Culleny
1/16/14

by Mathangi Krishnamurthy

It's 2015. The year has begun clandestinely, as have I. The days suddenly feel lighter, and full of possibility. Even as I say this, I feel performative. After all, how can the beginning of a year be anything but full of possibility? Beginnings are where we take a measure of ourselves, and our world, and speak aloud of all the things we will accomplish in the year and the ways in which we will not end December on a note of things we could have done, a list of 'almosts'.

I almost wrote a book once, I might say.

I almost saw a leopard once. This was at Yala National Park. We had been driving around for a few hours on a late December afternoon. The sun was going down. Much like other urban tourists, we were there in the hope of our big prize, a leopard sighting. Under the watchful eyes of a guide whose last name was Don, we scoured the grounds seeking signs of the famed park dweller. The sun went down, and we were almost ready to leave disappointed when Mr.Don signaled to indicate that all hope was not lost yet. We veered away from the other vehicles and turned onto a long stretch of road by a swamp to wait by a tree. Somewhere across the pond, we could hear the cries of deer. The cries came intermittently, growing louder, and then fainter. The guide, the driver, and my companion and I sat quietly as we were gradually enveloped by darkness. The quality of that waiting is difficult to capture. The leopard was at its prey, a few metres away even as we waited for it to emerge. Things were so quiet. Every now and then, a faint cry broke through dusk. We sat in silence, sharing the same hope, and I suppose, the same sorrow. A deer might be killed. The leopard might go hungry. Only one of two things would happen.

Of course, while everyone comes to Yala to see leopards, I had also wanted to come to see where the tsunami had swept away people. Having read Sonali Deraniyagala's incredibly brave memoir of loss and pain, “Wave”, I was drawn to this remote outpost that had witnessed the events she speaks so poignantly about. Many years ago, my graduate class and I survived an earthquake but had been far enough to feel its effects only perfunctorily. To this day, the only memory I have of this event is of feeling like perhaps the dog had hidden under my bed. That, and a faint visual memory of the earth heaving like waves.

So at the place that still bore signs of the giant wave, we waited for the leopard to show. I meditated on that uncanny quiet evening upon loss, and fear, and darkness. No leopard came. I'd like to think that the deer got away.

As I looked through my notes on Yala to remember the details of a year ago, I squinted at my diary and at my faint notes. I remember being at a hotel room outside Yala later that night playing with a black and white kitten that pulled at my hand as I tried unsuccessfully to write. Swatting it with one hand, I had grabbed a blunt pencil with the other and jotted down as much as I could recall from the day. This was why the notes were faint; first the kitten, and then the pencil.

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by Thomas Rodham Wells

A strange idea has taken over the social conscience so entirely that it is a taboo even to say what it is. Children have come to be seen as more valuable than adults not despite but because of their psychological immaturity, the thing that makes persons objectively valuable.

Consider the appearance of “baby on board” placards from the mid-1980s.

Nobody would have placed such a sign on a car if it were not already understood by society that the life of a human achieves its peak value at birth and declines thereafter. A toddler is almost as precious as a baby, but a teenager less so, and by the time that baby turns fifty, it seems that nobody cares much anymore if someone crashes into her car. You don't see a lot of vehicles with placards that read, “Middle-aged accountant on board.” (Danielle and Astro Teller)

We are the victims of a collective confusion.

I

Children are special in one particular, their extreme neediness. They have quite specific often urgent needs that only suitably motivated adults can meet, and the younger they are, the greater their neediness. That makes children's care and protection a moral priority in any civilised society – there are lots of things that aren't as important and should give rightly way to meeting children's needs. As a result, children create multiple obligations upon their care-givers, as well second-order obligations on society in general, to ensure those needs are met.

Yet the fact that you should give way to an ambulance attending an emergency doesn't mean that the person in the ambulance is more important than you; only that her needs right now are more important than you getting to work on time. Likewise, the immanence of children's neediness should often determine how we rank the priorities of actions we want to do, such as interrupting a movie to attend to a baby's cries. But such an action ranking is not a guide to the relative worth of children and adults, or of babies and teenagers. There will surely be times when something even more urgent occurs – such as someone having a heart-attack in front of you – that requires a baby's cries be neglected for the moment.

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by Gautam Pemmaraju

Auron par hasney ka anjaam jo hoga so hoga;

Lekin voh qaum nahin miththi jo apney aap par hansti hai.

The consequences of laughing at others will be what they are.

But the people who laugh at themselves will never be erased.

Last week, at a screening of my documentary film (a work in progress) on the humour-satire performance poetry traditions of Dakhani, the spoken vernacular Urdu of the Deccan region, one of the first to arrive was the eighty-six year old bright-eyed, warm and charming Ghouse Mohiuddin 'Khamakha'. The above couplet of his has remained with me over the years, and its current relevance is but obvious as we see the unfolding of several disturbing things.

As fleeting relief I offer some fine examples of Dakhani Mizahiya Shayri (humour-satire poetry) here. The richness of the vernacular, drawing largely from folk traditions and situated as it is further down the interrupted path of the glorious rise of the language till 1700 CE, is expressed amply in the humour-satire poetry in the Deccan. Stricken though it may be by the vicissitudes of time, the triumph of conquests, and the contempt of the elite, the tongue still remains spoken today across the Deccan plateau.

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by Hari Balasubramanian

It's hard to spot new birds during Massachusetts winters (I don't own a house with a yard or a bird feeder, which makes it doubly hard). The hundreds of species that make their home or pass through here are more easily observed in spring, summer and early fall. But last Tuesday – a bone chillingly cold but sunny day in Amherst – I ran into four species all at once. I had come out for a walk in a quiet part of town, a dead end street where an unpaved hiking trail leads to a pond. The unusually high levels of noise in the trees suggested that a lot of birds were active. The repeated deep thuds I was hearing indicated that woodpeckers were around, hammering on tree trunks.

So here are the species that I spotted, from left to right (picture assembled from Wikipedia images): the eastern blue bird; the black capped chickadee; the female downy woodpecker (the male has slight red marks on the head); the misleadingly named red-bellied woodpecker because the prominent red or orange patch is actually on the bird's curved head. The chickadee is the smallest of the four, and the red-bellied woodpecker the largest. Overall, nothing really surprising here – these are all common winter birds. But as an amateur bird watcher, I felt a special joy stumbling upon them; it felt, at least in those few moments, as if some special secret of nature had been unexpectedly revealed.

Some other things I've noticed this winter: (1) starlings, dozens of them somersaulting gracefully in the air in unison, literally a dance to avoid death, an attempt to disorient hawks that are hunting them (something similar to what's happening in this video. On a different note, the 150 million starlings in North America today are descended from the 60 odd European starlings that were deliberately introduced to New York's Central Park in 1890 by “a small group of people with a passion to introduce all of the animals mentioned in the works of William Shakespeare” — talk about literature influencing ecology!); (2) young wild turkey, moving black specks from a distance, foraging in a snow covered meadow (here's a previous piece on wild turkey); and (3) a few weeks ago, at twilight, the mysterious, round faced barred owl, the only owl I've ever seen, well camouflaged against the bark of a tree, very similar to this picture.

That will be it – a short post this time. A very happy new year to all at 3QD! My ten essays from last year are all collected here.

by Mara Naselli

Rembrandt in America, an exhibition shown at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts a couple years ago, displayed several portraits by Rembrandt as well as works painted by Rembrandt's students and contemporaries. Curators had posted labels that highlighted the provenance of the paintings, many of which have been collected in the United States over the last century or so by the super rich. One painting, Man with Arms Akimbo, is still for sale, for $45M by Otto Naumann, Ltd., though it isn't one of the better ones. When it comes to the art market, questions of authenticity dominate, and with Rembrandt, whose style was so wide ranging, it is hard to tell what was Rembrandt’s and what was painted in his studio. Early he mastered what they call a smooth style. Later he painted in a rough style, more impressionistic, long before Impressionism became a movement. But the style of technique is not always an obvious indicator. Was the painting by Rembrandt's hand? Was the painting painted in his workshop? If so, by whom? Was it supervised or corrected by Rembrandt? Was the painting painted by Rembrandt and overpainted by his students? Was the face painted by Rembrandt, the ruff painted by someone who specialized in collars, and the black cloak painted by someone who specialized in black fabric? These are the questions that occupy an appraiser or the auction house or the billionaire looking for a place to park $45M. The art economy is fascinating in its own way, in fact it was so preoccupying that I had to come back, on the last afternoon of the exhibit, to get a good look at the paintings themselves.

I scanned the galleries. Each room was full of people and I could see the tops of some of the larger pictures—all portraits, their heads gazing out from their frames just above the crowd. They seemed to look over us, we mere viewers. As if the sitters, the subjects of these portraits, were fixed with some higher purpose. How had I not seen this the first time? Some seemed almost alive. I don't mean to be facile about this—people spend entire careers assessing what was done by Rembrandt and what wasn't, using sophisticated instruments and technology—but certain portraits were simply arresting. Their faces glowed. The expression, the depth of field, the particular countenance of each portrait. The details were neither muted nor exaggerated. They expressed the distinctiveness of the sitter: creases around the eyes, the ridge in the brow, the gaze fixed or far off, the position of the shoulders, the shape of the mouth, the curve of the spine, the turn of the head, the color in the skin. These were traces of lives lived.

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