by Raji Jayaraman and Gayatri Jayaraman*

Embarking on a road trip destined for a deserted strip of land on India’s southern coastline had never been on our radar. Neither had we imagined making such a trip in order to consecrate our mother’s ashes to the sea. After her death in September 2019, we had fully intended to do something but going through a religious ritual was not necessarily top of mind. For starters, neither of us is religious. Our brother is a proselytizing atheist and we are both agnostic, on optimistic days. Ironically enough our mother, though deeply religious, had not expressed a wish for rituals. A compulsive altruist till the bitter end, she had wanted to donate her body to science, but this option was not viable so her body was cremated instead. Then Covid intervened. 

For two and a half years, our mother’s ashes sat in a box in Toronto. And during this time we attempted, with mixed success, to cope with the depth of our loss. Our mother was a force of nature, a remarkable woman. She was vivacious, filling each room she entered with her contagious laugh. She listened without judgment, she gave without expectation, she loved fully and unconditionally. True to her nature, she accepted her stage 4 ovarian cancer diagnosis with grace but tried to hold it at bay for as long as she could. Two years after her initial diagnosis she died peacefully, surrounded by her family. We cremated her body the next day. She didn’t want a public service and frankly, neither did we. The loss was too personal. We sent an obituary out to her friends and extended family and published a death announcement in a few Indian newspapers, but we didn’t hold a funeral. Read more »

Leandro Erlich. “BÂTIMENT”, 2004, La Nuit Blanche, Paris, France.

More here, here, and here.

by Michael Abraham

Take a star of anise and a pinch of lavender in either hand. Hold these to the chest and whisper out a little prayer. Splash clean water on the face. Brush the teeth. Fret over little details in the bedroom, whether the paintings are hung straight, whether the posters are in the right places. Shift the vase so it catches the morning sunlight. Light a candle. Pray again. Take three deep breaths and press your palms together, hard, in the way your therapist taught you. Give up on this and smoke a cigarette instead. Feel the smoke as it passes your teeth and scratches your throat. Turn your body to face the wind. Take in the wind—the dirty, city wind—and pretend it is lovely. Put in your headphones and play “Mama Said” by The Shirelles. Mama said there’d be days like this, there’d be days like this, my mama said.

***

The moment you realize you’re in pain may not be the moment in which you begin to hurt. You may hurt for days, months, years before you ever notice. But the moment you notice is essential. It is the defining moment of this season of your life. The moment you notice you’re in pain, you suddenly have agency; you suddenly have choices to make. Staring up at the ceiling of this little room in Brooklyn where I live now, I realize I have been hurting for years. The knowledge of this descends upon me like a great weight, and then, in the next moment, the weight recedes like a wave is pulled back out to sea. The weight recedes, leaving only the knowledge, like beach foam, something weightless but apparent, obvious, easy to spot. The knowledge glitters in the sun. Consider the glitter, the cruelty of it, the obviousness. Pain is so obvious except for when it is so routine that it disappears from notice. But, eventually, sooner or later, like the wave foam, pain will come forward in the mind; irrepressibly, it will make itself known. Read more »

by Claire Chambers

Language has an important role to play in national identity. One only has to think about the Shaheed Minar in Dhaka. As its name suggests, this monument commemorates what many Bangladeshis view as the shaheeds or martyrs of the Bengali language movement who were killed in Bengal in 1952. The history of West Pakistan’s linguistic imperialism contributed significantly to the 1971 War and the creation of Bangladesh out of Pakistan’s former East Wing. 

However, in the context of present-day Pakistan and the Indian subcontinent more broadly, the relationship between language and nation is a complex and contested question. The English language continues to exert a tenacious hold over the subcontinent. In the decades immediately before and after Partition, the majority of South Asians, especially leftists, rejected the use of English for creative purposes, positioning it as an elitist, colonial tongue. For instance, article 4 of the Manifesto of the Progressive Writers Association (1936), sets out the radical authors’ goal ‘to strive for the acceptance of a common language (Hindustani) and a common script (Indo-Roman) for India’. Tellingly, though, this manifesto was drafted in the Nanking Restaurant off Charing Cross Road in London, signalling the inescapable hold of the English language despite the group’s grassroots aims.

Far from making a political choice to write in English, many writers who were educated in the ‘English-medium’ system in Pakistan or Anglo-American countries up to the present have English as their strongest language. As a character in Aamer Hussein’s Another Gulmohar Tree remarks, ‘You don’t choose the language you write in, it chooses you’. The continuing power of English also arises because in the subcontinent there is no single language that has universal support. I do not forget the possible exception of Bangladesh already discussed, but even in that Bengali-dominant country, Urdu speakers are a beleaguered minority upsetting the linguistic equilibrium. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Joseph Shieber

Suppose that you were in charge of a large government agency responsible for dealing with public health emergencies. Suppose furthermore the country is in the midst of just such an emergency, and that there is a particular action that, if a large enough percentage of the public performs that action, will alleviate a significant amount of the ill-effects of the current public health emergency. Let’s say that the large enough percentage of participation is 70%. The action is one that requires ongoing participation: even if a member of the public is currently performing the action, they have to KEEP performing it in order for the benefits to accrue.

Suppose finally that your agency is the only agency with access to accurate information about the participation rate, and your tracking data suggests that the participation rate is at 50%. At a press conference, a reporter asks you a question about the current participation rate. 

So far, this imagined example has none of the farfetched qualities that people associate with philosophical thought-experiments. Indeed, most of the example will involve the sorts of situations that could very plausibly emerge. However, there is one aspect of the example that WILL be fantastical, but not in a way that should affect our judgments about the questions that I want to raise – in fact, this aspect should just serve to sharpen those questions. Read more »

by Derek Neal 

I’m not sure anyone has ever figured out how to write about music. This is a dangerous statement to make, and I’m sure readers will be quick to point out writers who have been able to capture something as intangible as sound via the written word. This would be a happy result of this article, and I welcome any and all suggestions. I should also say that I don’t mean there are no good music writers; there are, and I have certain writers I follow and read. But the question of how to write about music remains a tricky one.

As far as I can tell, most writing about music is built on analogies and cliches. This is understandable; you can’t describe music literally because it wouldn’t give an accurate representation of what it is you’re hearing. What use is it to say that a song is written in the key of A minor, has a tempo of 110 beats per minute, and follows a 4/4 time signature? These facts don’t add up to much. On the other hand, using analogies to describe music is meant, I suppose, not to state the objective facts of a song but to capture the experience of listening to a song and the subjective emotional response created within the listener. Perhaps, in combining technical, factual description of a song with figurative language, a song can be captured via text and the reader can hear the song in their head without ever actually having heard it out loud. This seems to be the goal of most music reviews.

I was put in mind of all this when I read an article in this month’s issue of Harper’s about the transition from the pre-internet world to the digital world of today. The author, Hari Kunzru, was writing about how he would read descriptions of music in magazines and try to imagine what the music sounded like, which does bring up the question: when we can listen to any song instantly, is it even necessary to attempt to put music into words? Perhaps the genre of the music review is simply a historical anomaly that has run its course. This may be true, but the same could be said and has been said for the novel, the essay, and many other forms of traditional composition. And yet here I am, writing these words, so I’ll continue to explore the description of music and attempt to achieve its goal of transmitting sound via written language. Read more »

Trees in Vahrn, South Tyrol, last week.

by Dick Edelstein

I got an incredible break when I was thirteen. We moved to Seattle and I entered public school in the sixth grade, after five years of Catholic education. The impact of the change in fortune was all the greater since I had no particular expectations, a good example of the principle that you can never know when things are about to change for the better. It was not just that my least favorite subject, religion, was no longer on the curriculum–that was the least of it. My new school exuded a different mood, much more open, so different to the reform school atmosphere I had become accustomed to. My life began to feel truly blessed.

My first day in class was unforgettable. At the start of class, the teacher introduced me and asked if they could call me Dick. To my surprise, I answered in the affirmative even though I had always been called Richard. In a single haphazard stroke of unaccustomed boldness, I had named myself. My dad took it with a grain of salt and my mom was appalled.

There was more. The school year was already in progress and this was election day. Every month a new class president was elected. Owing solely to the fleeting popularity of being a new boy, I was elected. The other candidate had expected to win but took it with good grace. His name was Ike like the former US president. That very day he began to initiate me into his world. One of his chief interests was electronics. Since this field of knowledge was not covered in the curriculum at this early age, I was able to glean what I needed to know about it from magazines and the public library. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

All of the articles in this series can be found here.

The interest of both Masahiko Aoki and Gérard Roland in institutional economics easily shaded into comparative analysis of economic systems, including different varieties of capitalism and socialism. Since my student days I have been acutely interested in comparative systems and their political economy. In this context like Aoki and Roland I have closely followed developments in China. When I was growing up in Kolkata the leftists around me used to say that the Chinese were better socialists than us, now in the last three decades I have heard in all quarters that the Chinese are better capitalists than us. To reconcile the two I sometimes tell people that if the Chinese are better capitalists now this is partly because they were better socialists then. This is not an entirely flippant comment. By the end of the Mao regime in middle 1970’s, before Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms started, Chinese performance indicators in basic health, education and rural electrification showed levels unattained by India even by two decades later. This gave China a head start in providing the basis of capitalist industrialization.

The two largest countries of the world with ancient agrarian civilizations, with many centuries of dominance in the world economy in the past (up to about 1800) and with impressive economic growth achievements in recent decades though with different political and economic systems, draw obvious comparison, but since 1990 the Chinese economic performance has been far superior. My first piece of comparative study of Chinese and Indian agriculture came out in the Journal of Asian Studies in 1970. Fifty years later, I was still at it, with my piece on a comparison of the economic governance systems of the two countries coming out in China Economic Review in 2020. Meanwhile in 2011 I published a book titled Awakening Giants, Feet of Clay: Assessing the Economic Rise of China and India. One abiding theme in my recent work has been that China-India comparison is not a simple matter of authoritarianism vs. democracy. While there are some undoubtedly positive features of the Chinese governance system, authoritarianism is neither necessary nor sufficient for those features. On the other hand, there are some ugly features of the Chinese system that are inherent in authoritarianism. Read more »

[This is the eighteenth in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. All the articles in this series can be read here.]

Early in the story of The Walking Dead — the enormously popular, post-apocalyptic, television series — sharpshooting everyman, Rick Grimes, finds himself cast as leader to a group of beleaguered survivors, who must navigate the malignant chaos of a world suddenly overtaken by zombies. Every comfort, convenience, and civic structure of modern American life has collapsed. The threat of death lurks beyond every hillock or behind any tree. Ordinary people are left to fend for themselves against overwhelming forces, with nothing but guns (and the odd pickaxe or crossbow) for aid. And sentimental attachments to other people only leave individuals more vulnerable to attack. In this world that has slipped the grip of civilization, Grimes works to keep a strain of justice and mercy aloft within his desperate band.

But torn away from the cogency of his ordinary, 21st-century life, and cast into unrelenting danger and uncertainty, even Grimes’s kinder impulses are slowly ground away by his unabating experiences of horror and loss. His moral compass spins erratically. By the fifth season of The Walking Dead, the line separating Grimes from the threats he’s fought for years to hold at bay has worn distressingly thin. In fact, much before this, the show’s storylines and characters have already notably shifted their attention from the horrors of the zombies to the horrors of relying upon one’s fellow dislocated human beings for refuge and assistance in an ongoing crisis. Confronting the atrocities committed by the living profoundly changes Grimes and every member of his crew, as they also become more adept killers. Yet, uncannily, the social world they inhabit together doesn’t change much at all.¹ Read more »

War & Weekends

I’m writing from a list of prompts
in an exercise for loosening the tight grip
of uncertainty of mind in an effort
to knock the chocks from under its
big wheels to let the thing roll

yesterday’s was war, which I skipped,
never having been there but in books
and other vicarious means, safe
for the time being in my bubble—
yet there it is today, in news, on screen, its horror,
its devastation, its grief, its incendiary reality,
its cyclical road to nowhere
lined with corpses —immediate.

but today the prompt is: weekends,
two days arbitrarily set aside
as if they were, literally, the end of weeks
which themselves are inventions,
yet we love them so, respite as they are
from the famous dictum of Eden
at the moment of our eviction that: we
shall, henceforth, labor by sweat of brow

—at least until robots are conceived
further down the road and AI comes along
to relieve us from the ache of work
and thought, and knowing— and,

we shall sweat in sorrow, no less—

which brings us back to war and other
misapprehensions and monkey-wrenches
of thought and mind concocted by beings
who wage war and write poems

.Jim Culleny, 4/23/22

by Rafaël Newman

You’ve heard the story before. The poet Orpheus, celebrated for the enchanting quality of his voice, is grieving the sudden death of his young wife Eurydice. In his despair he resolves to harrow the Underworld, where he so impresses the god Hades with his singing that he is permitted to retrieve the shade of his bride and return with her, newly embodied, into the light—on one condition: that he not look back at Eurydice until they have attained the realm of the living. All is proceeding according to plan, and the pair have nearly made it to the world above, when Orpheus, overcome by the suspicion that he has been swindled, turns to assure himself that his silent wife is still following him—only to see her flee away, this time forever, back into the shadows.

Boy meets girl.
Boy loses girl.
Boy finds girl.
Boy loses girl again.
Boy founds enduring aesthetic tradition.

For the theme of the beautiful, irretrievable, now permanently dead woman and her endlessly grieving, magically gifted male lover, who nobly commemorates her in works of art, has been recycled time and again in the millennia since its mythical origins, in story, song, and the visual media, from the Roman elegists through the earliest Venetian opera pioneers to the Romantic poets, from the painters of the Renaissance through the Pre-Raphaelites to the Surrealists. Read more »

Małgorzata Mirga-Tas. Out of Egypt. 2021

Patchwork.

More here, here, and here.

by Brooks Riley