by Hartosh Singh Bal

Lost to history, a number of cities of classical antiquity once existed along the banks of the river Narmada in central India. Many of these cities date back to the 3^rd century BC, to the time of the emperor Ashoka, who united the subcontinent into an empire whose extent was never again to be matched in the history of India. The emperor ruled from Patliputra (modern day Patna) in the heart of Magadh in the Indo-Gangetic plain but the spread of his empire made it inevitable that there would be other centers of administration. It was carved into four provinces, after Magadh the most important of these was Avanti with its capital Ujjain. Along the highway connecting the two capitals a number of cities came up and prospered, including some on the banks of the Narmada.

A coup by a Brahmin commander-in-chief who in all likelihood could not tolerate the ascendance of Buddhism brought down the Mauryan Empire. In the aftermath Patliputra could no longer exercise control over the unwieldy empire, the cities soon went their own way. One of the most important of these was Mahismati. Despite several references that crop up in classical Sanskrit literature, today it is difficult to pin down its exact location. This has given rise to a host of claimants along the Narmada, residents of modern day towns such as Mandla and Maheshwar still wage a fevered battle – leaving nothing aside, myths, fanciful notions, borrowings from questionable sources, notions that historians of repute would never touch.

There remains one authentic source for delving into the history of these cities. Coins dating back as far as the third century BC have been recovered in such abundance from the Narmada valley that the subject now forms a separate field of study. Borrowing symbols used on coins once struck at the Ujjain mint, we can guess at the existence of cities such as Bhagila, Kurara and Madavika only through the markings on their coins.

The coins do not differ much in size from the modern coin, though square shapes seemed to have been preferred. They are often crowded with symbols. A single square coin, no larger than the modern 25paisa coin, could accommodate as many as five symbols on each face. Some of these symbols were in use across the subcontinent, such as the swastika; others such as the Ujjain symbol resembling the iron cross demarcated a region.

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by Namit Arora

Some travel impressions prompted by the living and the dead of Varanasi, India.

In early 2006, I was on a train to Varanasi when my mother called from Jaipur. Terrorists had just hit Varanasi with explosions at multiple sites, including at the train station; many had died. Since I was going there as a tourist, she urged me to postpone the trip and get off earlier. I was traveling with my partner and two white American friends, both on their first visit to India. They seemed rattled enough and I worried about their safety. What if Hindu-Muslim riots broke out? We were ten nighttime hours away from Varanasi, so we had to decide fast.

The reality of the event sunk in further when an NDTV reporter and her camera crew got on the train. With time to kill, she began quizzing tired and bemused passengers about their take on the news. And she did so in an overexcited style that seemed to dominate live reporting in India. When she thrust the mic at me, I could only mutter something about my worry for my companions.

I persuaded my fellow travelers to continue. The terrorists had already done their deed; Varanasi was likely the safest place to visit now. Worst case, we could stay holed up in our hotel. Truth be told, I was also drawn to this unbidden frisson of travel. When we arrived in the morning, we found a part of the train station cordoned off by the police. I could see blotches of red on the ground. The driver of the taxi we took into town had witnessed the explosions: flying body parts, screams, the ensuing melee. He had helped take the injured to the hospital. But our decision to not abort our journey turned out to be a good one—the city remained calm and we moved around freely. I felt proud of my fellow citizens for being so mature about the situation. It was my first time in Varanasi as an adult, and the place did not disappoint.

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Geography

Where are you from? I’m often asked.
Kashmir, I answer.

Is that where wool comes from?
Sometimes, I play it straight: 1-95

Exit 16. Hang a left. In the Himalayas
My roads diverged.

Outsider in a land of outsiders
Occupy all. Not, where are you from

But, where are we going
Together?

Rafiq Kathwari is a guest poet at 3QD.

by Omar Ali

The Ahmediya movement was started in Punjab in 19th century British India, by Mirza Ghulam Ahmed of Qadiyan. He seems to have been a somewhat stereotypical prophet; a quiet, religious loner who brooded about the challenges faced by his faith and his people. The decisive military and economic superiority of Western civilization over the Islamicate world had produced a variety of efforts at reform and revitalization. They ranged from the Wahabi-influenced puritanical Jihadism of Syed Ahmed Barelvi (who led an extremely fanatical jihadist movement in what is now Khyber Pakhtunkhwah, until he was defeated by superior Sikh firepower and a reaction to his extreme views among the local Muslims) to the anglophile reformism of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan (founder of Aligarh Muslim University). Mirza Ghulam Ahmed’s response was to start a movement of religious revival that was built around his own charismatic claims. Though he contradicted some mainstream Islamist claims about the finality of prophet-hood and the absolute necessity of military Jihad (military jihad as a Muslim duty is now so widely downplayed that it is hard for Westerners and even Westernized Muslims to figure out why his claim was considered so controversial), his movement was socially conservative and even puritanical. He found some support among modestly educated middle class Punjabi Muslims (including Islamist icon Allama Mohammed Iqbal, who either flirted with joining the movement or actually joined for a few years, depending on what version you believe). As his movement (and his claims regarding his own status as prophet or messiah) grew, it drew more and more orthodox opposition, especially from the dominant Sufi-oriented Barelvi Sunni sect. Ironically this branch of local Islam enjoyed some American (and world media) attention as “moderate and tolerant Muslims” in contrast to their Deobandi/Wahhabi brethren in the aftermath of 9-11 (though this attempt to fight Wahabi/Deobandi fire with Sufi-Barelvi water seems to have run into some trouble recently).

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by Mara Jebson

My stepfather had always wanted twins. In his culture, having twins was lucky, and a sign of more luck to come. In parts of Togo it is customary to give both twins names beginning with the same letter. One would hear about Afi and Abla, Joseph and Jonathan, or Elise and Esmee.

Although my stepfather never did have twins, he gave the three children he had with my mother names beginning with the letter “V”. He never explained about the “V”. A disciplined man, rigid in his habits, he was weird about names. Family lore holds that he was once charged with taking his baby brother’s birth certificate to the official bureau for naming. Along the dusty road he must have gotten inspired. In any case, most people in Togo have French or Togolese names, but his youngest brother would go through life as Martino, the O courtesy of his brother.

His own name, Kodjo, was really quite boring. In the years after Colonialism, there were a few Africanist measures taken to try to revolt against the pervasive French influence. Togolese citizens christened with European names were required to go re-name themselves with African names. These names were easy to choose, as all Ewe also have the name that is determined by the weekday of their birth. Kodjo merely means, “born on a Monday.”

When my mother met Kodjo in graduate school in America, he used this official name, and it was his American name. When we three, along with my new sister, left Philadelphia to move to Togo in the early nineties, among the many astonishments we had in store was the fact that no one else called him Kodjo. In Togo he went by “Johnny.”

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by Randolyn Zinn

Last week on a cold afternoon in New York City, Helen Schulman and I met at a café for a bracing talk about her new book. You may have seen that The New York Times chose This Beautiful Life as one of their Notable Books of 2011 or perhaps you've read her other novels, which include A Day at the Beach, P. S., The Revisionist, and Out of Time, as well as the short story collection Not a Free Show. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Vanity Fair, Time, Vogue, GQ, the Paris Review, and the New York Times Book Review. She is also an associate professor of writing at The New School.

RZ: Could you give 3QD readers a brief summary of This Beautiful Life?

Helen Schulman: Sure. It’s the story of a family that’s come newly to New York from a place where they were happy. Father has come for a new job opportunity and the two kids are placed in a fancy private school. One night the teenage boy goes to an unchaperoned party and hooks up with a younger girl, who wants to take the relationship further, but he says no. When he gets home, he finds a video in his in-box that the girl has made of herself performing a sexual act and it’s so white hot, before he thinks twice, he presses forward and send, flinging it to his friend. His friend looks at it, presses forward and send, the video goes viral, and the family’s world explodes.

RZ: It’s a gutsy story lyrically told. I couldn’t put it down.

Here’s actor Allen McCullough reading a passage from Richard’s point of view.

Richard

HS: I didn’t want to write a story about a scandal. And I know there are people who take it that way and buy the book for this reason and are disappointed sometimes. I was trying to capture a moment in history. With my last couple of books, I looked at a large societal shift or cultural moment through the lens of an individual or a couple or a family in order to take in something very big in the world through a very small prism. In The Revisionist, it was the Holocaust and Holocaust denial. In A Day At the Beach, it was 9/11 and the hinge moment in the culture between then and now; what we could do and what we didn’t do.

With This Beautiful Life, it’s the Internet, which is changing everything about the way we live. When I was in grad school, I supported myself working as a neurological research assistant at Bellevue for a family friend, who was writing about brain death and brain birth. So I spent two years learning about neurology, and what’s so interesting is that the way we use computers is literally reshaping the structure of our brains: how we surf the net and shift attention constantly actually changes the physical structure of the brain. For good or for ill, I don’t know, but it’s an evolutionary shift that’s taking place about how we think and how we study and how we use time. It’s changing everything.

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by Jen Paton

There are, according to Randall Henderson, founding editor of Desert Magazine (1937-1985), two deserts in the American imagination. One is full of “venomous reptiles and unbearable heat…it is the desert visualized by those children of luxury to whom any environment is unbearable which does not provide all of the comforts and services of a pampering civilization.” This is “fostered by fiction writers who dramatize the tragedies of the Desert for [their own] profit.” By contrast, the real desert, as Henderson saw it, “offers rare gifts: health giving sunshine — a sky studded by diamonds — a breeze that bears no poison” to those who come “in friendliness and understanding.”

There is, of course, only one desert, equally full of comfort and danger, plenty and lack. Its gifts – that diamond sky is real – are for everyone, but its history shows all America's small scars.

Back in 1936, Henderson saw an opportunity to serve the culturally under-served citizens of the American Southwest. The people of the desert deserved a magazine of their own, he wrote in his first editor’s note – a note that reflects the cultural nervousness and occasional defensiveness that infects the Western mind:

Henderson hoped his magazine would “preserve a culture of arid…but virile…America.” An ad from the December 1964 issue describes the ways to enjoy the desert: as collector, traveller, adventurer, history buff, or nature lover.

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As dust and gas swirls around the black hole
matter compresses causing it to glow.
Scientists can only see the outline of the black
hole, also called its shadow. –Physorg.com
.

Seeing a Black Hole or Bouquet of Altroemeria

First you must know
that shadows glow

Circling the shade of nada
(the thing that can’t be seen)
the stuff of anything will gleam
incandescent as a candle
round the outline
of a vase upon a table

whose cache of blossoms tantalize
every eye that grasps:
these things of brilliant burgundy
are shades of shadows cast
which cast of blossoms tantalize
every eye that grasps:
these things of brilliant burgundy
are not the stuff that lasts
which passing blossoms tantalize
every eye that grasps:
these things of brilliant burgundy
will not be fastened fast
.

by Jim Culleny
1/17/12

by James McGirk

“The most masculine of cats,” tout defenders of the breed, and they are indeed rugged, solid creatures who look as if they ought to be de-mousing a lighthouse on the stormy coast of Maine rather than sprawling on the settee. That is, after all, what they were probably bred for. Picture a cat, a large one, with tufted ears and a lumbering gait and a cheerful disposition; a coat with an undercoat of insulation, and oversized paws fit for trampling snow or scurrying up a tree trunk. Drooping whiskers, a propensity to sprout extra toes on his feet, an unusually expressive tail, and a dour, owlish expression that is almost a pout complete the Maine Coon, a creature on the cusp of entering America’s national pantheon of icons.

The Maine Coon is fast approaching the status of charismatic megafauna like orcas and eagles and howling white wolves. No other breed of cat has starred in so many viral videos, has inspired so many airbrushed t-shirts or so many wretched – and even a few not-so-wretched – tchotchkes as the Maine Coon. A search for “Maine Coon” returns 56.4 million search results, while its longhaired cousin the Persian returns only 8.1 million and the Abyssinian returns a mere 3.4 million. The Coon’s combination of rugged looks and an undeniably goofy disposition seem thoroughly plugged into that folksy vein of Americana that generated Paul Bunyan and his Blue Ox Babe. There is also an almost mystical air to the cat’s provenance.

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by Hasan Altaf

The set design of Mariano Pensotti's El pasado es un animal grotesco (“The Past is a Grotesque Animal” — the title comes, according to Pensotti, from a song by the band Of Montreal) seems at first just a conceit, one of those clever tricks that make a play experimental or avant-garde: The stage is occupied almost entirely by a large, circular platform, partitioned into four quarters, that revolves constantly throughout the performance. The scenes play out in one quarter at a time, for as long as it takes that sliver to disappear from view (the speed seemed variable). The platform works perfectly, even, once it becomes familiar, unobtrusively – the actors never seem dizzy, running from one section to the next without a pause; the sets of each room are changed, added to or subtracted from quickly, out of our sight – but, more importantly, the platform is not just a way of earning avant-garde brownie points: The audience realizes quickly that it is in fact a symbol that works on many levels to encapsulate and heighten the drama.

El pasado, which I saw at the Public Theater in New York, focuses on the lives of four young Argentinians from 1999 to 2009, as they move from their twenties into their thirties, from being very young to less so – in the playwright's words, El pasado depicts “the moment one stops being who one thinks one is to become the person one is.” The rotating platform is an obvious metaphor for time passing, both personally and globally: With each revolution, the characters move forward into the future, away from what they used to be and towards what they will become, and the world moves forward, too, away from the past and into the unknown. The partitions of the wheel also suggest a clock, the quarters of an hour, which works will with the format of the play – each scene, prefaced by the date, presents a discrete moment in the life of one of the characters. Credit for making this device work so smoothly belongs both to Pensotti, who wrote and directed the play, and particularly the actors, who seem completely at ease, as if the ground were not quite literally shifting beneath their feet.

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by Kevin Baldwin

About a year ago I began thinking about a host-parasite system that I could set up in a lab, that would be inexpensive to maintain and would provide opportunities for undergrads to get their fingernails dirty. I consider myself to be more of a field biologist, but with family obligations and the long winters and unpredictable weather in the midwest, I needed a lab system that would be available year round. After mucking about in the literature for a while, I decided to look at a group of parasites called gregarines that typically parasitize insects.

Gregarines belong to a group called the Apicomplexa that includes parasites of medical and veterinary importance like Plasmodium, the causative agent of malaria; coccidia, a cause of nasty diarrhea in vertebrates, and Toxoplasma, a mind-altering organism that can also have dire effects on fetal development. By virtue of relatedness, better understanding gregarines might give us insight into some of the greatest scourges of mankind.

Gregarines also infect worms, crustaceans (e.g., shrimp, crabs, barnacles, and krill) and molluscs. Their epidemiology could be important for aquaculture and mariculture of these organisms). Given the success of arthropods (which include insects and crustaceans) and mollusks as groups, it is probably worth understanding as much as possible about organisms that parasitize them. You could make a case for gregarines being the most successful group of organisms known. Of course this kind of success attracts attention and gregarines can in turn be hyper-parasitized by another group, the microsporidia (but that's another story,…).

As single-celled animals go, insect gregarines can be huge and are frequently visible to the naked eye. The first time I opened the gut of a roach, the gregarines spilled out like bowling pins (Strike!,… A good omen to find them on the first try. Talk about reading the entrails,..). The parasite's life stage in the host's upper gut is called the trophozoite or “troph” for short. They feed and grow here. When they mature, the trophs mate and produce an (American) football-shaped gametocyst, which is shed in the insect's feces. Additional rounds of reproduction occur inside the gametocyst and the results is that hundreds of spore-like oocysts are extruded into the environment (like beads on a string), that can in turn infect new hosts. The strands are barely visible to the naked eye, resembling very fine lint.

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by Julia Galef

You probably won’t be very surprised to hear that someone decided to reboot the classic 80’s My Little Pony cartoon based on a line of popular pony toys. After all, sequels and shout-outs to familiar brands have become the foundation of the entertainment industry. The new ‘n improved cartoon, called My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, follows a nerdy intellectual pony named Twilight Sparkle, who learns about the magic of friendship through her adventures with the other ponies in Ponyville.

But you might be surprised to learn that My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic’s biggest accolades have come not from its target audience of little girls and their families, but from a fervent adult fanbase. I first heard of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic from one of my favorite sources of intelligent pop culture criticism, The Onion's AV Club, which gave the show an enthusiastic review last year. (I had my suspicions at first that the AV Club’s enthusiasm was meant to be ironic, but they insisted the show wore down their defenses and that it was “legitimately entertaining and lots of fun.” So either their appreciation of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is genuine, or irony has gotten way more poker-faced than I realized.)

And you might be even more taken aback to learn that many, if not most, of those adult My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic fans are men and that they've even coined a name for themselves: “Bronies.” At least, I was taken aback. In fact, my curiosity was sufficiently piqued that I contacted Purple Tinker, the person in charge of organizing the bronies’ seasonal convention in New York City. Purple Tinker was friendly and helpful, saying that he had read about my work in the skeptic/rationalist communities, and commended me as only a brony could: “Bravo – that’s very Twilight Sparkle of you!”

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by Akim Reinhardt

When is role playing an innocent expression of playfulness, and when does it cross over into a form of unconscious catharsis that is born of and reinforces either personal psychological trauma or problematic social norms?

Role playing is something we do from a very early age. Pretending to be someone else, particularly an archetypal grown-up, is a staple of childhood play. Two common examples of childhood role playing show how it can be both innocent and highly loaded, even (or perhaps especially) among children too young to really understand what they are doing.

The first example is the classic kids’ game of Cops and Robbers. To me, this seems an obvious case of innocent role play. Has a parent ever worried that by playing the role of a criminal, their small child is prepping for a future as a career felon? There is an obvious social subtext to the game, ostensibly teaching children that crime is wrong, but only the squarest of nosey sticklers would become alarmed if the extemporaneous script developing in the backyard occasionally ends with the bandits getting away with it once in a while? After all, it’s just play.

But then there is the other classic role play game of American children: Cowboys and Indians. This one is much more problematic. Well, not for the kids, of course. To them this is no different than Cops and Robbers. It’s just two groups, one them highly favored, the other one an underdog and a bit of a scoundrel, and off they go to horse around in the summer sun. But the subtext of this game is far more insidious. It serves to reinforce the imperial mythologies that have dominated American culture since its inception. Regardless of which team wins one improvised fracas or another, this role play is reinforcing ideals just as much as Cops and Robbers. But instead of the innocuous lesson of “criminals are the bad guys,” Cowboys and Indians teaches children too young to really understand that America’s Indigenous peoples were supposed to “lose” to Europeans and their descendants.

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So we're two GOP primaries down
But don't worry, don't pout, snarl or frown
The fun won't end soon
Still so much to lampoon
South Carolina, the circus' in town!

Mitt, Newt, Ron, Rick one and Rick two
For today we bid Huntsman adieu
Who does God love more?
Well clearly no one who's poor
At least that's the creed of this crew

If God's summoned each one to this calling
Did he just want to laugh at their brawling?
I may doubt that he's real
But this atheist can feel
That if not, he'd find these guys appalling

Which one is the worst hypocrite?
Is it wetback-hiring Mitt?
Or thrice married Newt
Who really should have stayed mute
When Bill Clinton's infidelity hit

I confess that I do miss Herman Cain
That was sure just a wacky campaign
But I don't need to fret
Now it's Mitt's turn to sweat
As he tries to back pedal from Bain

So South Carolina as you go into vote
And decide on which of these fools to dote
Just remember this thought
Your vote's really for naught
“Big Money”, that's all she wrote!

by Sarah Firisen