Remembering Kashmir

by Majid Maqbool

ScreenHunter_09 Aug. 06 12.29On days when I’m alone at home some vivid images and memories of my childhood rush back. They arrange themselves in disturbing ways, unsettling previous memories. Sometimes these memories write themselves in solitude. Sometimes they are forgotten, only to return later from the oblivion: in the middle of some conversation, for example, while travelling, or at night, in the dreams. Sometimes it’s too painful to write down compelling memories. Sometimes remembering them is the only way of making peace with them. And all these memories are unforgettable, lingering in some corner of mind, waiting to be summoned.

I write because I remember. Because what I remember makes me who I am.

I remember, for example, those military crackdowns that loomed large over my childhood like black clouds: people ordered out of their homes early in the morning by the Indian troops, and assembled in open fields and playgrounds. And then that fearful wait for the next order of the troops. The troops lining up people, one frightened person after another, in front of that dreaded army gypsy. And whenever a masked mukbir (informer) seated inside the guarded army vehicle made a particularly shrill signal or a coded gesture, the person paraded in front of him was immediately frisked away by the troops. Often, he never returned home.

In my school days I remember the Indian army convoys driving past our school bus made us to wait till all the army trucks drove ahead, first, always. Often that meant waiting for hours, and getting late for school. To pass those uneasy hours, I remember counting the army trucks that made up that long and uninterrupted line of that dreaded army convoy. I remember the games we would play in the school bus: How many military trucks went past us today? 50? 100? 150, 200….? We would often challenge each other with the count. I remember the small bets we had kept for successfully predicting the number of army trucks that drove past our school bus. Quite often, I lost count of them…

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Monday, July 30, 2012

The Immutable, Dusty Path

by Gautam Pemmaraju

He felt closer to dust, he said, than to light, air or water. There was nothing he found so unbearable as a well-dusted house, and he never felt more at home than in places where things remained undisturbed, muted under the grey, velvety sinter left when matter dissolved, little by little, into nothingness.

6a00d83451bcff69e2012875a9ed93970c-300wiThe narrator of WG Sebald’s The Emigrants informs us that the lonesome painter Max Ferber, worked in a studio in a block of ‘seemingly deserted buildings’ located near the docks of Manchester. His easel, placed in the centre of the room, was illuminated by “the grey light that entered through a high north-facing window layered with the dust of decades”. The floor, the narrator observes, was thickly encrusted by deposits of dried up paint that fell from his canvas as he worked, which in turn mixed up with coal dust, and came to resemble lava in some places. Thinking inwardly that “his prime concern was to increase the dust”, the narrator watches Ferber over the weeks working on a portrait, ‘excavating’ the features of the posing model. The melancholic painter’s tenebrous kinship with the accumulative debris of his days strikes him as profoundly central to the artist’s very existence, for as Ferber says to him, the dust itself “was the true product of his continuing endeavours and the most palpable proof of his failure”. Ferber had come to love the dust ‘more than anything else in the world’, and wished everything to remain unchanged, as it was. In the neon light of the transport café bearing the unlikely name of Wadi Halfa, Ferber’s haunt, and where the two often met after the day’s gloomy exertions in the ‘curious light’ of the studio that made everything seem ‘impenetrable to the gaze’, the narrator observes the dark metallic sheen of Ferber’s skin, particularly due to the fine powdery dust of charcoal. Commenting on his darkened skin, Ferber informs his companion that silver poisoning was not uncommon amongst professional photographers and that there was even an extreme case recorded in the British Medical Association’s archives:

In the 1930s there was a photographic lab assistant in Manchester whose body had absorbed so much silver in the course of a lengthy professional life that he had become a kind of photographic plate, which was apparent in the fact (as Ferber solemnly informed me) that the man’s face and hands turned blue in strong light, or, as one might say, developed.

Atmazagaon1In Carloyn Steedman’s Dust (2001), an intriguing collection of essays on a most curious set of concerns, she writes that in the early 19th century “a range of occupational hazards was understood to be attendant on the activity of scholarship”. She makes clear the distinctions between Derrida’s seminal meditations on Archive Fever (see some interesting entries here, here & here), the febrile “desire to recover moments of inception; to find and possess all sorts of beginnings”, from Archive Fever Proper. There was a specific attention to dust and the ill effects it had on artisans and factory workers, during the 19th century and the early 20th century. She points to Charles Thackrah’s investigations into the occupational diseases arising from various trades, particularly in the textile industry, wherein the employments produced ‘a dust or vapour decidedly injurious’. In John Forbes’ Cyclopeadia of Practical Medicine of 1833, Steedman writes, there was also an entry on ‘the diseases of literary men’, a subject of interest among investigators, albeit, for a short thirty year period between 1820 to 1850. In Forbes’ view, the ‘brain fever’, no mere figure of speech as Steedman points out, was a malaise of scholars caused predominantly “‘from want of exercise, very frequently from breathing the same atmosphere too long, from the curved position of the body, and from too ardent exercise of the brain.’”

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Monday Poem

There is no defense for a man who, in the excess of his wealth,
has kicked the great altar of Justice out of sight. —
Aeschylus


Drought

3974135479_9fbc4386efHaving done their green work
the grasses say to the sky,
We thirst

The sky is blue and silent,
clouds tease. They slide
silently under a brilliant sun
hoarding their wealth

they are the Himalayas of heaven
cold and distant,
imperious,
proud of their majesty,
their volume,
joining and unjoining their vapors
among their kind alone
holding it to themselves

they are vacant
as an empty page
void
while the grasses
need psalms of moisture

they billow above dry prairies
counting their vaulted droplets
saving whole seas for their own
rainy day

by Jim Culleny
7/29/12

America Must Lead

by Akim Reinhardt

Hillary ClintonI had come to suspect that Hillary Clinton was betraying us. That she was in fact a foreign agent, in service of a rival power.

And those poor fools who think Barack Obama was born in Kenya? It’s a red herring! Why couldn’t they see that? Clinton herself was probably behind it, a brilliant ploy to throw us off her tracks. It was all part of her master plan.

No doubt she sandbagged the 2008 primary, which was obviously hers for the taking. Come on now. Do you really think some skinny, inexperienced black kid could beat her if she didn’t let him?

But why did she do it? Wouldn’t a foreign agent like Hillary Clinton be in a position to destroy America after achieving the presidency? Maybe.

Maybe.

But she’s smarter than that.

By deftly placing her stooge Obama in the White House, the controversy of his foreign birth, which she herself had manufactured, would soak up the spotlight while she went about her nefarious business of taking down America by trotting the globe and hatching her evil scheme with various world leaders.

It was diabolical. It was brilliant. And the evidence seemed so convincing. After all, “Barack Obama” just isn’t an American sounding name. And, you know, there’s that whole thing about him not being white.

Well, his mother was white, and he largely was raised by white people, but they were just a sleeper cell. That’s all you need to know, really. The best conspiracies are the simplest ones, and the rest of that story just kind of writes itself.

And we all bought it, fools that we were. God-fearing, hard-working, America-loving fools. But damn us all to hell, I thought. Clinton was the rogue all along. And I had stumbled upon the evidence by chance, while doing something that rarely yields any new information: reading.

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The Gaffe that roused Blighty

by Sarah Firisen

With the Olympics coming to town London-Olympic-Logo
The British started to frown
The construction, the cost
The traffic lane lost
Our economy's already so down

You know it'll just get rained out
They've done what with the cycling route?
And the summer looks glum
Because tourists won't come
It's a fiasco without a doubt

Just as the grumbling built to its peak
And national spirits seemed bleak
The Olympics were given a lift
A real PR gift
An external, unwelcome critique

Yes, Mitt landed on Blighty's shore
With concerns and questions galore
“Is Britain prepared?”
The Romney declared
“How dare he!” the populace swore

And suddenly the people united
Everyone of them thrilled and excited
And they made clear to Mitt
We're all proud to be Brits
And the whole nation feels we've been slighted

As the sounds of Jerusalem swell
We're so proud of the land where we dwell
Just look at our Queen
And we love Mr Bean
Such a great show should all doubt dispel

Yes the Olympics have now come to town
And nothing will get the Brits down
It may rain, it may pour
But we know shore to shore
British pride never will drown

Cosmopolitanism and the Colonial Imagination

by Leanne Ogasawara

6a00d834535cc569e2016768d6e2fb970b-320wiThe other day on Facebook, I posted an article from the Atlantic, A Land Without Guns: How Japan Has Virtually Eliminated Shooting Deaths.

In the wake of Aurora, I thought there was a lot that was of interest in the article. But almost immediately the first comment I got was the old “same-old” about how “different” the Japanese are and that, “Holding up Japan as an example of how the US should handle guns is quixotic in the extreme, as nice as it may sound.” He explained, “Japanese are raised to be docile subjects of their government while America is based on the idea that the citizens can rise up against a tyrannical government and overthrow it. Distrust of the government is as American as apple pie. To do that, you need weapons.”

Setting aside what I think is a really unfair characterization of Japan, I wondered why people are always so quick to think that there is nothing that could be learned from other countries. I am not speaking about my friend on Facebook but rather about a pattern that I have seen again and again after returning from two decades overseas. Granting that there are indeed different cultural approaches to issues of authority that would make passing gun laws more difficult here than say in Japan; but let’s face it; the right to bear arms doesn’t include the right to bear grenades, military drones or anti-aircraft, so why couldn’t assault weapons also be regulated? Of course, they can and to wit, they already have been regulated in the past by law. But perhaps more to the point, I think the Japanese case does have much to offer in terms of gun license procedures and accountability that we could learn from—different culture and history notwithstanding.

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What A Country: After Wall Street Screws Us, 45% Of Americans Want A Wall Street Guy To Be Our Next President

by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash

RomneybainHere comes Mister One Percent. Mitt the Twit Romney. He used to be a leveraged buyout specialist, which was what these private equity guys were called before they got ashamed of the name.

Leveraged buyout means you put a company in debt, and use the money you extract from it to partly buy the company. You also use this debt to pay yourself huge fees and get tax benefits. Basically you're looting the company, which is why many leveraged buyouts end in bankruptcies. The excuse these guys use for what they do is that they bring “efficiency” — one of those meaningless hide-my-hypocrisy phrases like “free market” and “collateral damage.”

So Mitt Romney is a dyed-in-the-wool Wall Streeter, engaged in one of its most egregious practices. He also has money stashed away in the Cayman Islands, may still have a Swiss bank account, has helped export jobs overseas, and is building an elevator for his cars. His wife drives a couple of Cadillacs, and he pays 15% in taxes.

He is what one may safely call a caricature of a Wall Street fraudster. The perfect plutocrat. So obviously slumming among us hoi polloi that he comes off as awkward. And he also happens to be a serious serial liar.

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Monday, July 23, 2012

The Argument from Ugliness

by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

Kinkade Disney BambiThe theistic argument from beauty is an instance of a broader class of arguments for God’s existence known as teleological arguments. The basic form of this kind of argument is as follows:

1. The universe (or parts of it) exhibit property X.

2. Property X is usually (if not always) brought about by the purposive actions of those who created objects for them to be X.

3. The cases mentioned in Premise 1 are not explained (or fully explained) by human action or non-intentional events internal to the universe.

4. Therefore: The universe is (likely) the product of a purposive agent who created it to be X, namely God.

The variety of teleological arguments is as broad the range of properties one can reasonably substitute for X. Traditional teleological arguments plug in for X the claim that some feature of the universe is fine-tuned for life, or that the universe has whatever is required in order to support creatures capable of consciousness, or moral responsibility. The argument from beauty, by contrast, begins from the premise that the universe exhibits beauty. This, the argument runs, entails that the universe must have been created by God, and thus that God exists. But teleological arguments have what we call evil twins. These are arguments that are teleological in structure, but proceed from premises concerning the imperfection or nastiness of the universe to the conclusion that there is no God. The universe, after all, is a mixed bag. Thus, for every theistic argument from, say, fine-tuning, there’s an atheistic challenge beginning from the observation that precious little of the universe is inhabitable and that living creatures are actually poorly designed. Similarly, for every theistic argument from consciousness, there’s an opposing atheistic argument that contends that consciousness deeply flawed and in any case not much of a boon. And for every theistic argument from the fact of moral responsibility, there’s an atheistic argument from immorality. This is what we call the evil twin problem: if theists contend that teleological arguments are valid in their logical form, then they must confront the atheist versions.

Here we will pose the evil twin problem for the argument from beauty: the argument from ugliness.

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The Hungry Games

by Misha Lepetic

Success comprises in itself the seeds of its own decline
and sport is not spared by this law.
~Pierre de Coubertin

Tae_kwon_do-AthensAs we helplessly hurtle towards the next inflammation of the Olympic Games, some notes on the effects of the Games on the built environment might be in order.

The Olympics may pretend to be the premier competition among nation-states, but their physical manifestation is always sited within the city. Given that cities are, by their very nature, already crowded places, something must give when, to paraphrase Joseph Conrad, the immovable object of the city meets the irresistible force that is the Olympic Games. Furthermore, once the Olympic hurricane blows through town, what are the long-term consequences?

This can be divided into three fairly discreet phenomena: the forced relocation of populations that suddenly find themselves “in the way” of breathlessly ambitious master plans; the design, construction and fetishization of dozens of state-of-the-art facilities for a few days’ worth of competitions; and the long, drawn-out consequences of deciding (or, more accurately, not deciding) what to do with these facilities once the athletes, media and sponsors have moved on to pastures greener.

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Stripped chinar and charred roof: a requiem for Ziarat Dastgir Sahibun

by Vivek Menezes

You won’t find the Truth
By crossing your legs and holding your breath.
Daydreams won’t take you through the gateway of release.
You can stir as much salt as you like in water,
It won’t become the sea.

(by Lal Ded, translated by Ranjit Hoskote)

3q9My journey to Ziarat Dastgir Sahibun in Sringar began on a cool, cloudy afternoon in Goa last December at the annual Arts + Literary Festival, when Ranjit Hoskote finally released a master-work after two decades of labour, ‘I Lalla: The Poems of Lal Ded”.

Like many here, no doubt, I’d encountered the writings of this revolutionary fourteenth-century mystic earlier. But the preternaturally brilliant Hoskote has completely re-cast her in a new light. I dare say most of those present when he talked about Kashmir (with Bilal Tanweer and Jerry Pinto) became as immediately hooked as I was. This is when I started to seek out more information about the unique, confluential Sufism that came to prevail in Kashmir, without much effacing the Shaivism, Buddhism, and indigenous nature-worship that preceded it.

And so a family trip to Kashmir this May, which readers of 3QD already know about.

As described in that purposefully touristic post made from Srinagar itself, there is a bizarre gulf between Kashmir’s very real status as a tourism destination with near-limitless appeal (and demand to match), and the quality and quantity of reliable information available to travelers.

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Ultrasound Technology Can Impede Informed Consent

by Evan Selinger

UltrasoundEarlier this year, controversy surrounded ultrasound legislation in Texas, Virginia, North Carolina, Texas, and Idaho. Lost in the critical commentaries on abuses of patients’ and physicians’ rights was concern over a fundamental violation of liberty. This issue hasn’t gone away, even though sonogram coverage isn’t currently grabbing headlines.

Medical experts routinely use ultrasound technology in ways that favor the Right to the Life agenda, even in states that don't have mandatory ultrasound laws. This problem goes unnoticed because the potential harm caused by the medical community is not the result of political ideology. Rather, it arises from inadvertent exploitation of patients’ natural human weaknesses and cognitive tendencies. To understand why, we need to grasp how typical conversations about ultrasound images can impede rather than foster informed consent.

In cases where advocates pushed for mandatory ultrasound, proponents insisted that women considering abortion should be subject to robust informed consent policy. From this perspective, ultrasound technology looks like a perfect tool for ensuring women understand the profound ramifications of using surgery to terminate a pregnancy. Unfortunately, discussions of what ultrasound images reveal isn’t limited to objective medical facts.

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Burmese Days

by Maniza Naqvi

“… How does our affair progress? I hope that, as dear Mr. Macgregor would say—U Po Kyin broke into English—eet ees making perceptible progress?”

Burmese-Days-3Burmese Days by George Orwell remains relentlessly relevant and a touchstone for cynics eight decades after it was written. The novel opens with U Po Kyin at age 56 thinking of his achievements with satisfaction—and plotting intrigue to further his interests. He thinks back to his first memory of the British troops with their weapons entering victoriously into Mandalay in 1885. “To fight on the side of the British, to become a parasite upon them, had been his ruling ambition even as a child. He does this by playing one side against the other, planting intrigues and solving them, always putting himself in the position of the problem solver, the loyalist to all—taking bribes and ruthlessly controlling everyone.” U Po Kyin's memory of British troops marching into town is set in the moment in which the oil company Burmah Oil is born in 1886 and when Burma became a province of Imperial India. (here, and here and here.)

George Orwell was in Burma in the Indian Imperial Police from 1922-1927 Eric Arthur Blair or George Orwell was born in India, on June 3, 1903 in Motihari Bihar (here). Orwell’s novel follows the trajectories of the ambitions and the psyches of Imperial administrators, their military officers, wives, concubines, their merchants and those who served them. The title of “U” has been bestowed on U Po Kyin for his services enroute his own trajectory from a lowly clerk to a minor official to a Sub divisional magistrate, through planting seditious activities and creating rebellions and quelling them himself so that he can demonstrate his loyalties to the Imperial masters by jailing adversaries while havig his fingers in every pot in his subdivision for personal gain and pleasure.

His good works of building Pagodas will ensure his next life. But in this life his most ardent desire is to be a member of the British Club:

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Absurd Wars?

by Edward B. Rackley

250px-Democratic_Republic_of_the_Congo_(orthographic_projection).svgTo remark on how seamless our online and natural worlds have become is ho-hum these days, but last week as I slurped morning coffee and chatted online with a former Mai Mai rebel (whom I’ll call ‘Dikembe’) in turbulent eastern DR Congo, I found new reason to pause. Exchanging views on our perennial topic—solutions to Congo’s problems—felt as natural as the morning paper, but his statements resisted their usual meaning and tugged at me the rest of day. The part that recycled in my mind went a bit like this:

Dikembe: Things are bad in EDRC, Kabila [the president] can’t manage the situation.
Me: What does he manage? Nothing new there.
D: That’s why we reject him.

[pause]

D: So how many Congolese have to die before the international community pays attention?
Me: The int'l community is impotent, you’ve seen that countless times. You have a government, ask them. You elected Kabila, why did you choose him? Or are you saying the elections were a fraud?
D: Aha, now you understand me perfectly. We are hearing that even his own security forces are moving against him. Only the international community can save us now.

In a previous episode of Congo’s tumult Dikembe and I worked together disarming combatants and reintegrating them into civilian life. Many were minors, Dikembe’s former subordinates from different local militias. Our program offered vocational training and the tools to start new businesses but few ex-combatants took it seriously. Most went along with the programs to kill time, selling the clothes and tools they received for cash. A lesson for us was that the adrenaline of pillage and the instant authority of the gun had become integral to their identity, defining them long after the firing stopped. Many ex-combatants, especially children, remained fiercely loyal to former commanders, rejecting their families and all forms of authority. Psychologically they were listless and volatile, preferring the bustle and relative anonymity of towns to the monotony and awkward familiarity of village life. Dikembe was no hero, but sage enough not to follow the herd. I watched him adapt to civilian life in wartime, a humbling series of privations, as he resisted the lure of easy money and influence through armed crime and extortion.

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Faster, higher, and stronger? We can do better.

by Quinn O'Neill

Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-S0611-0025,_Günter_AmbraßOlympic excitement is in the air as the world’s best athletes get ready to take the stage. Many of them have been preparing for this for most of their young lives. It’s a shot at a gold medal and the glory that comes with it, and a chance to test their mettle against the very best in the world.

Perhaps we should qualify the term “best in the world”, though, since a lot of potential competition is eliminated rather unfairly before the games begin. A champion’s win is really only a fair victory over those who've had the same opportunity to develop their talents. There are about a billion people in the world who can’t afford to eat let alone participate in sports, and a lot more who can only afford to participate at lower levels.

It’s a privilege to be able to dedicate your life to achieving extreme excellence in a sport, especially since Olympic sporting activities tend to be of little practical value. Sure, sprinting skills might come in handy when you're trying to outrun a predator, and I guess you never know when you might need to row backwards across a lake really fast, but by and large, the utility of such skills doesn't justify the effort it takes to develop them. Watching events like javelin and race walking, it would seem that human beings will compete at just about anything, just for the sake of competing.

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Yet Another Blog Post about Rape Jokes

by Hannah Green

Today I had the exact same argument that blog readers and comedy central watchers have been having all over the country, according to Louis CK. The argument about whether or not Daniel Tosh should have apologized for allegedly suggesting that it would be hilarious if a female heckler got raped by five guys right there in the club.* My position was that he should have (and he did, so good for him.)

If you disagree with me, this is where I’m coming from. Women in this country are taught to be scared of rape all the time, and it’s really annoying. We think about it when we decide what to wear, where to go, when to go there, who to go with, who to trust. While men can also be the victims of sexual assault, I find that in general their lives tend to be less restricted by the attempt to avoid it. Whether or not this is rational doesn’t change the fact that it’s inescapable because we’re socially programmed this way. And a lot of us have experienced situations where we really do feel directly threatened, and these are terrible. They make you afraid to even go out, and then they make you angry at yourself because you feel weak. I understand that my position and that of other women in this country is far from the worst in the world. But still, in this aspect of life my male friend and I, at least, are pretty unequal

So the first reason I got mad, while slightly unfair, I think is also understandable. I got mad because my friend, being a dude who’s spent his whole life living in the same safe place, never even had to think about this stuff. Not his fault, I guess, but also not fair. I told him this. He apologized sarcastically, “I’m so sorry you were born into a male dominated society,” he said, “I was born into it too, by the way. I didn’t choose it.” So the second reason I god mad, which I think is fair, is that when he hears about this woman and how she felt threatened at the suggestion that five guys rape her, and when I say that I know I would feel the same way, his first reaction is to talk about how irrational that woman was. I’m telling him all this stuff about my life that I would never have even thought about telling him, and he doesn’t even shut up to try to understand why, or reflect on the fact that his perspective comes from a place of privilege. He tells me he doesn’t believe I would really feel threatened, because that’s such an irrational idea. She was in a comedy club, obviously no one was going to rape her.

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Monday, July 16, 2012

Solanaceae: a family portrait

by Rishidev Chaudhuri

Like some eccentric prominent family, whose genius shades easily into the occult, the evil and the mad, Solanaceae, the family of the nightshade (so often prefixed by “deadly”), both contains several of our most ubiquitous food plants (typically of New World origin) and many of the multifarious toxins and deliriants beloved of witches, shamans and poisoners throughout history. The plants of Solanaceae are a dramatic-looking group, full of trumpet-like flowers that open at dusk and branches and stems that curl together like gnarled witches claws. They are also the source of eerie legends and origin myths, as exemplified by mandrake, said to grow from the ejaculate of a hanged man, and whose scream (when pulled out of the ground) will kill everyone in earshot. Mandrake

To anyone who has ever shuddered at or been baffled by the thought that for most of history the Italians have had no tomatoes, the South Asians have had no chillies and no one in the Old World (including the Irish, the Germans and the Russians) has had potatoes, the gifts of Solanaceae are apparent. These are the bounty of the New World, plants that were brought over from the Americas by European explorers, introduced into their home countries and then spread to the rest of the world (many of the sins of the Portuguese colonists should be offset by their introduction of the chilli to India). Traces of this recency exist on the linguistic map, and several cultures label tomatoes and potatoes as some sort of eggplant or apple1.

While the major Solanaceae food crops that we eat are from the New World, most of the family members used in the Old World were used as hallucinogens, medicines (in small doses) or as poisons (with the notable exception of eggplant). Both tomatoes and potatoes suffered from these associations, and it took a while before people became convinced that they were safe to eat. One is generally not responsible for one's relatives (except children), but there is some truth to this fear. The leaves and stems of tomato plants are mildly toxic, and potato sprouts can be quite dangerous (in reTomato flowercent years, much of this has been bred out of the plant varieties that we eat, though the same is probably not true for non-mass-market varieties). Once they broke through to acceptance, though, they spread widely and now both are cultivated widely all over the world. Potatoes in particular were an essential new source of cheap calories for the Industrial Revolution and were declared by Engels to be the equivalent of iron for their historically revolutionary role. They are thought to be responsible for a significant fraction of Old World population growth in the 18th and 19th centuries, with the downside that potato crop failures lead to severe famines.

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Poetry in Translation: A Couplet of Ghalib

by S. Abbas Raza

This post is dedicated to my wife, Margit Oberrauch.

A couple of weeks ago I came upon a Ghalib couplet in Urdu which evoked pangs of recognition in me. Ghalib captures so simply and so well a discomfort that I like to imagine nearly everyone has experienced: that of having to ask a favor from an enemy, a rival, a cruel person, a nemesis, or even the object of one's unrequited love. Reading (or hearing) it one immediately and viscerally and empathetically feels the immensity of Ghalib's effort in overcoming embarrassment and shame, having recognized the necessity of doing it, and this is complicated by other layers of agonizing sentiment generated by the imminent exposure of vulnerability, having to act obsequious, as well as the risk of further public insult if the person refuses to grant the favor. Having to ask for help is bad enough when the person being asked is not someone you hate (or hates you). (It reminded me a bit of Nabokov's Pnin.)

01

It is truly masterful, a fragile gem of a couplet in Urdu, in the sense that not only can it not be improved, changing a single word anywhere destroys it. (Yes, I had the temerity to try.) But when I tried to explain the meaning of the couplet to my wife I found it near-impossible to translate into English in any straightforward way. I hemmed and hawed and went into a ten-minute lecture on what it is about but never managed to say in two decent lines of English what Ghalib has said so easily in Urdu.

Here is my transliteration into Roman Urdu:

Kaam uss say aa paraa hai keh jiss ka jahaan mein

Layvay nah koee naam sitamgar kahay baghair

And finally, here is the best I could do as an English translation, using three lines:

I am obliged to seek help from him

to whom no one in the world refers

without also referring to his cruelty

I invite you, if you speak Urdu, to suggest your own translation.

Poetry in Translation II: Iqbal

by Rafiq Kathwari

HIMALAYA

After Iqbal

O Himalaya, tell of that time when man first lay
in your lap. O let me imagine that dawn
unstained by red. Run backward, circle of
day and night, ancient eras a moment in your lifetime.
You are a poem whose first verse is the sky.
Your bright turbans dazzle the Pleiades.
Lightning across your peaks sends black tents wandering
above the valley. The wind polishes the trembling mirrors
at your hem. Streams cascade down your forehead,
your cheeks quiver. As morning air cradles intoxicated
roses and the leaves are silenced by the rose-gatherer's wrists,
so speech is silenced in the roar of falling water.

Mohammed Iqbal (1877 -1938) one of the two great South Asian poets of the 20th Century (the other was Faiz Ahmed Faiz) advocated ceaseless endeavor, writing with equal ease in Persian, Urdu, and English. He was knighted by the British but is rarely called Sir Mohammed.

Translated from the Urdu by Rafiq Kathwari, guest poet at 3Quarks Daily.

American Sketches

by Haider Shahbaz

(Note: The theme of one sketch was suggested by fellow 3 Quarks Daily columnist Rishidev Chaudhuri after a night of his delicious summer drinks. As always, I am grateful.)

I (Thirty five dollars and seventy two cents)

Once he nailed her to the floor he moved back assuredly. He briskly – yet noiselessly – moved his bulk from the kitchen to the common room. He stepped around the Ikea furniture. He was unfazed by her desperate gaze. She was beating her heels against the shiny hardwood floor. Her arms were stretched straight above her head. The palms of her hands were nailed into the shiny hardwood floor by a Stanley TRE550 Brad Nail Gun. It cost him twenty seven dollars on Amazon. The Stanley SWKBN625 nails cost him two dollars and eight cents. The blood was dripping and congealing. Never was life like this on the shiny hardwood floor. He had taped her mouth using Scotch 920-BLK-C 1.88-inch by 20 yards Duct Tape. The tape cost him four dollars and fifty three cents on Amazon. It had three out of five stars in the customer review section. When he returned from the common room, he was carrying a medium sized deep-blue bucket. The half a gallon of diesel that was sloshing inside the bucket cost him two dollars and twelve cents at Shell. He doused the diesel on her and around the kitchen. He took out matches from the back pocket of his brown khakis. The matches had a deep blue cover with a red stripe across the bottom and a shining diamond: diamond matches. The matches cost him nothing. He lit one, flicked it at her, and walked out. He walked through the neatly pruned garden towards his Prius. The pink house with a rectangular body and a triangular top painted against the taut canvas of a New England sky was slowly burning. He started his car and drove down to highway I-95 drinking Dunkin´ Donuts coffee. He gulped large amounts of air from the open window. He turned his car lights off. The sun was coming out behind the birch trees.

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Monday Poems

Time Loops
.

“I don’t think I ever was a child.”
……………. –Coleman Hawkins, top sax jazzman
Jazzman

I
don’t think
I ever was a child

Was
I a child?
I don’t think—

If
I ever was a child
I’d know. …..I
don’t.

I
don’t even know, jazzman said
if a child ever was

Child,
jazzman said,

I don’t just think
I play jazz man

Halberg's Rooster

Up the road Halberg’s rooster,
descendent of dinosuars,
croaks his 4 syllable hello to the sun

while mighty We
dumb as rooster ancestry
imagine we shall always be

Sad and Serene

Sad’s the man who says
on the day he ends,
I could have done more

Sad’s the man who
on that day says,
How come?

Sad’s the man who says
on the day he ends,
What’s the score?
.
Serene’s the man who
on that day says,
I think it was a worthy run

by Jim Culleny, 2008-2012