Some pics from my recent trip. I have like 3 times more but I got tired of uploading them to Flickr.

Enjoy.

By the end of the 7th inning, it was clear to everyone that Gavin Floyd was pitching a no-hitter. A no-hitter with a run, no less.

At the top of the ninth, he took the mound to a standing ovation. And stood there, alone, throwing pitches.

See, earlier that day, I had wanted to go to my first ball game of this season. So, I emailed the usual suspects and lo and behold raver comes up with these awesome free tickets. Providence, you know. It was utterly beautiful at the park. The sky cleared up - the breeze - the game. After months in the darkness of Chicago’s coldest winter, I felt as if I had lungs to breathe.

And suddenly this good, nay pretty great night, was about to enter legendary status. I could witness a no-hitter.

The human mind is a funny thing. Well, mine is. I stood there, clapping and hollering, and wishing, wishing more than anything I have wished for, that Gavin would get this no-hitter. I wanted it for him. I wanted it because if it happened, it would be a sign. A clear indication that the impossibilities amassed on my shoulders could dissipate. Hope, right.

That moment, at the top of the ninth, with one out - that was a great moment. That’s what sports can do for you - give you air for your lungs.

My grandfather’s huqqa held unbelievable degree of fascination for me. I would often request that he smoke it - if only to hear the gurrhgurrhgurrh of the water. He often obliged. When he died, I was in the States. On my next trip, I asked what became of his huqqa - and no one seemed to know. Someone must have it. Things we lose.

The following pictures were harvested from the Daily Waqt over the last month or so. They show you something.

Courtesy of Samip.

From Dawn: Pakistan judges to be reinstated May 12: Nawaz Sharif LAHORE, May 2 (AFP) - Former Pakistani premier Nawaz Sharif announced at a televised Press conference on Friday that the ruling coalition will reinstate judges sacked by Pervez Musharraf on May 12. The chief of the Pakistn Muslim League (Nawaz) said the government will introduce a parliamentary resolution to restore some 60 judges, including the country’s chief justice, whom Musharraf deposed under a state of emergency in November. The two-time ex-premier made the announcement a day after holding talks in Dubai with coalition partner Asif Ali Zardari to resolve a deadlock over the issue that threatened their fragile alliance. “God willing, all the deposed judges will be restored on May 12,” Sharif said after meeting with senior party members. “The national assembly will approve a resolution the same day followed by the issuance of notification of the restoration of judges sacked unconstitutionally on November 3,” he said. Zardari, the co-chairman of the PPP, and Sharif had agreed at a summit in the hill resort of Murree in March to restore the judges, but a 30-day deadline that they also gave at the time expired on Wednesday. The PPP had insisted that judicial reforms also be part of the package that brings back the judges. But Sharif, the head of the PML-N party, wanted them to be reinstated without conditions. (First Posted @ 18:38 PST Updated @ 19:12 PST)

See the Tick Tock Series … XI, X, IX, VIII, VII, VI, V, IV, III, II, I for our journey so far.

I will be in Berlin and Copenhagen next week. Any gentle readers in continental Europe are urged to make arrangements for a proper sitdown with this provincial, liberal sectarian. Rest can go about their own business.

This just made my day.

a long long time ago, a palmist told me that everything in my life will be hard, but i will achieve whatever it is that I wanted. just nothing will come easy. and then another person told me the same thing. No wonder I used to day dream about being a station manager of a railway station that was the last stop of a train into the himalayas.

that would be the easy life that i can never have.

in my day dream, i had two rooms in the railway station. and here, i do not embellish my young self. one room would be filled with books. the other room would be filled with mangos.

during that phase, i would often sneak out of the house at night. and hop trains. i know, it was dangerous and insane. but i was in thrall with the sound of the train as it rolls over the gap in the rail.
and the night.

i wanted that clanking silence.

if that makes any sense.

The revelation was Chee Malabar. I know, and knew, that Yogi B will be global. They are way too talented and ferocious, live - to not force themselves into every iPod on the block. They are also incredibly genuine and warm. But, it is Chee, for whom I must evangelize. Though, I had heard a few tracks before, read a profile or two - I had never talked to him. And now I have all the zeal of the newly converted. Read these lyrics and discover it too - this is one poet, artist, writer and rapper who needs your support. In fact, all my gentle readers need to go buy the albums - himalayan project and oblique brown - and then seek him out when he comes to your neck of the woods or better still, invite him to your neck of the wood. Ok go.

• First off, a sunday reading link to myself! Nathanael Robinson and Manan Ahmed had a conversation about memory and history and they put it up for you to read. It is not anything special (if only to see how badly I write when I write ‘academic’).
• However, I can spot excellent writing from a mile away. Wendy Doniger’s essay in the LRB, The Land East of the Asterik is profound, funny, comprehensive and just an all around must-read on IE, PIE and horses. She really is a beacon of shining light in our dim academic world.
• Also in the LRB is Zizek’s rather merde-y letter on China and Tibet. He seems to be ill-informed about a lot of things in there - including Fareed Zakaria’s brilliance.
• A nice overview of Palestinian cinema by Nicholas Blincoe in the Guardian.
• MQM must be stopped from terrorizing the citizens of Karachi.
• Finally, it appears that bloggers and netizens can now link directly to Encyclopedia Brittanica. Let’s test it: al-Ḥajjāj al-Ḥajjāj ibn Yūsuf ath-Thaqafī

Below the fold, another number from Yogi B and Natchatra from Hiphopistan.
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The rhymes were flowing and beat was strong. And I had a big, huge, grin through the whole night. It was the first night of Hiphopistan. I skipped the panel - as each panel skipped, adds 10 weeks to my life span - and showed up in the middle of Kabir’s set. I got to meet Yogi B and Natchatra - what great, genuine, and nice guys. Che Malabar was superb - and his Postcards from Paradise was the highlight for me. Things were political, things were tight. At one point, the taste at the back of my mouth and the incessant beat in my left ear, and I was transported to another place, long ago, in East L.A. when I went to my first hiphop concert. Ice Cube, who began the set with Assalamalaikum, mfers. Respect. Tonight, I will take pictures, and update this post. I am just happy. Long Live Desi Hiphop!

update: We will talk soon about this. Until then, enjoy the pictures and, below the fold, a couple of videos in crappy youtube (I will put up nicer streaming verisons on the hiphopistan website):
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The Winter 2008 issue of Public Culture covers “The Public Life of History” and has an intriguing piece by Dipesh Chakrabarty on the practice of history writing and the lessons from India. It is something that I will want to return, in the near future, for a thorough discussion. But, right now, I want to vent a bit about Faisal Devji’s Red Mosque, also appearing in the same issue. Faisal Devji has a thought-provoking style of “speculative scholarship” that hints and highlights ways of getting out of the discursive box that hems in every other analyst of our various pre and post postcolonial conundrums. I happen to mostly disagree with what he writes, but I always appreciate his unique sensibilities. One of these days, I will try and underline my entanglements with his Landscapes of Jihad: Militancy, Morality, Modernity. But, for now, let’s look at his piece in PC.

There are a string of factual mis-readings, the most egregious one being that the Red Mosque was a “co-ed” compound which “not only included large numbers of women but also put them in close proximity to men,” and that in this unique madrassah, there was “the militarization of women…and their deployment shoulder to shoulder with men.” Let me answer this, briefly: No, wrong, Nope, and Absolutely off-the-wall. And, I just got off the phone with an erstwhile female student at the seminary, just to make sure I wasn’t all confused and wrong. Jami’a Hafsa, the female seminary, was completely separate from Jam’ia Faridia, the male seminary. They had separate buildings. They were never in contact with each other; no combined rallies; no annual picnic; no campus sports day. Do you remember seeing the pictures of the ninja-warriors-for-islam? Um, did you see any men next to them? Check out this GIS and let me know when you find them fighting shoulder to shoulder. In addition, Devji argues, based on a few last interviews of Abdul Rashid, that the madrassah was not ‘conservative’, nor explicitly anti-Shi’a. Again, if one has any, even remote, understanding of the history of Jami’a Hafsa/Faridia and the connection with Darul Ifta Jamia Benori, Karachi, or if one visits the forums of the Jamia with threads such as Shia Exposed, one wouldn’t make such claims. These are not simple errors since the “mixing of gender and geneologies,” is more or less the fulcrum on which Devji’s entire argument rests. Hence, the classic blunder of “speculative scholarship” - facts are constructed after the “theory” has been solidly established - facts be damned, in fact. I will focus, some other day, in some other venue, on an examination of the “expert on jihad” phenomenon which is currently sweeping the field of South Asian history and political theory. For now, let us disentagle Devji’s convoluted logic a bit more.

Based on his spurious reading, Devji makes two theoretical points, one about Lal Masjid itself and the other about Islamic militancy:
1. Red Mosque folks were motivated by the desire to “occupy the arena of antigovernment struggle in Pakistan’s civil society” and that the “Red Mosque was linked more to the everyday and even secular practices of modern life in the region than to any religious or cult behavior.”
and
2. Red Mosque, particularly the case of Abdul Rashid Ghazi, is “an example of the gradual transformation or at least flattening out of Islamic militancy, which has in many parts of the world been weaned off its dependence on highly organized or institutional forms to become yet another kind of voluntary association that individuals join for their own reasons, often as part-time members rather than full time radicals”.

Devji misreads a lot of things - most importantly, he misreads the fact that the Red Mosque contingent knew P.R. and media relations; that they realized the power of spectacle. The somber force of rows upon rows of burqa-clad seminarians as an image of considerable impact does, in fact, mean that they were keyed-in to the global arena of anti-state, anti-secular, fundamentalist propaganda. But, it is a mistake to read their awareness of message politics with their fundamental cry: “Shariah or Shahadat” (Rule of Islamic Law or Martyrdom). The Message is the Message.

Red Mosque is, of course, a part of Pakistani civil society. To argue that they have “evolved” into a civil social organization is again a misreading. The operational context of any of the religious groups that have cropped up since Jamaluddin Afghani traveled down these roads is always social and civil. They don’t form a civil society organization, they are conceived in civil social terms - hence, the schooling component. Devji’s assertion that Red Mosque is a “mutation of Sunni militancy into the kind of mobilization that is neither nationalist nor in fact militant in any professional way but perhaps nongovernmental” is patently absurd. I don’t even know what and where to begin disputing that because the statement rests on his already factually inaccurate reading of Red Mosque’s history, ideology and operational structures.

However, leaving aside Red Mosque, I want to see if Devji does highlight a new development when he speaks about the “flattening out of Islamic militancy”. Devji, uses as evidence the failed suicide attacks in Glasgow and London in 2007. He believes that since these professional doctors¹ concocted this scheme during their private time, hence, it must mean that they are absolutely amateurs engaging in “extracurricular” activity. This “amateurism” speaks to Devji of Islamic militancy entering a “pluralistic kind of civil society activism.” Well, now. The scholarship that I have read on Al Qaeda (admittedly not much, not my cup of tea) has always highlighted the fact that it operates on the distributed computing model with a host of quasi-independent functionaries operating in rigid, hierarchical organizations. Which is why, unlike other historical examples of anarchists and terrorists, AQ relies so heavily on coded but publicly accessible rhetoric. Their aims and ideologies aren’t “secret” but are disseminated as far as possible. Hence, the teams of experts on our end, trying to find the hidden messages in this or that released video from these terrorists. These videos get abundant airplay, easily discoverable on youtube; forums proliferate wherein folks can divine secret strengths from their sheikh. What I see is, then, the easy availability of mediating messages that functional, yet disturbed, individuals can glom onto and attempt their own interventions into global injustices against their perceived community. This points out only that there exist structural inequalities in societies that permit individuals to “disappear” and “re-emerge” in a new form. Or it may point towards major psychological damage. I don’t know. Was Seung-Hui Cho a case in Devji’s point?

The AQ remains just as much, or as little, professional as it ever was. The recent spate of suicide bombings in Lahore and the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, in fact, point to the very meticulous and professional nature of such militancy. These were sophisticated operations. Not civil society activism. Which, by the way, is a particularly offensive way of categorizing terrorism that has claimed thousands of innocents lives across the world.

I know that there should be a space for such “academic” and “psycho-theoretical” discussions. But do we really need to muddy these waters, even more?

1. Devji writes, “Naturally some kind of relationship must have existed between the public and private lives of these doctors, perhaps based on the notions of altruism and self-sacrifice that are meant to inform medical as much as terrorist practices, but my point is that the latter remained distinctly amateurish in character”. I respond, “Huh??” [↩]

From Jane Kramer’s The Petition: Israel, Palestine, and a tenure battle at Barnard, New Yorker, April 21, 2008:

Hannah Temple, a MEALAC major who graduated last June, told me, “I left Columbia sorry to have had my academic experience in that department. You couldn’t get anything done; it was so bitterly divided. And then there was all the outside instigation, like the film. It didn’t resonate with me, but to some of my friends it did. I think now that it wasn’t really about Columbia, or even Massad. It was about Edward Said. It was as if all those forces had been waiting until he was gone to make a case against him.
[emphasis added]

See:
Irwin, Robert. Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents. London: Overlook Press, 2006

Ibn Warraq. Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism. Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2008

There was a news item in a Lahore daily, a few days ago. In the Daily Waqt, the un-named reporter, sought to highlight destruction and disappearance of the Lal Qila dungeons in Lahore. These dungeons, the article stated, had housed political prisoners and criminals for centuries - since Lodhi to Akbar to Shah Jahan to the British and down, most recently to Zia ul Haq (who put them to good use in the mass arrests in ‘84-’85). It had some renown as a ‘torture cell’ and ‘hanging depot’ among the locals. Barring a few noted prisoners, these dungeons had remained shuttered and ignored during Pervez Musharraf’s tenure and can now only be considered relics of the past. Will no one, wrote Daily Waqt, think of our Mughal history?

Since there has been no lack of prisoners - political or otherwise - in Pakistan during the last ten years, it is a good question: What did happen? Where are the political prisoners in Pakistan? The first response is surely: Vanished. The second response needs a broader view of what has happened in Pakistan. I would argue that the state of extra-constitutional constitutionality that has existed in the United States since early 2002 has had a frank implementation in Pakistan under Musharraf. There has been a “new” language of security and safety - subtly undercutting the language of rights and eschewing usual channels (legal or otherwise) - that the state claims supercedes all else. The dungeons under Lahore Fort may be an extreme case, but the “Prison” has had a long and noted history for those daring to speak up against tyranny. One need only think of a Faiz stewing in prison and writing letters and poems to see that discursive power. The state in Pakistan, following the United States, sought to declaim such memories for the current generations of Aitzaz Ahsans and Iftikhar Chaudhries.

I say post-2002 United States deliberately and precisely. The recent revelations of John Yoo’s memos arguing suspension of Geneva Convention, authorizing torture, suspending Fourth Amendment for domestic military operations; the State’s admission of wide snooping powers over US citizens; the gulag at Gitmo; the “state” media which unquestionably led us into the Iraq War; were all efforts that unfurled in early and mid 2002 and it was these practices that provided explicit and implicit templates to the likes of Pervez Musharraf.

It is perhaps the penultimate nail in irony’s coffin that, in his address, Musharraf quoted Lincoln as his idealogue while contemplating Emergency. The ultimate nail being that Musharraf found an inspirational quote from Lincoln in none-other-than Richard M. Nixon’s 1980 best-seller Leaders: Profiles and Reminiscences of Men Who Have Shaped the World - Musharraf’s self-proclaimed favorite book of all times. But, that was all show and tell for the American audience. The real inspiration was George W. Bush’s America not Lincoln’s.

Just as the US declared a new category of “enemy-combatants” for prisoners taken during a war who are not prisoners of war and sought to incarcerate them on “non-US” US territory, Musharraf called into being a new category of “enemies of the State” - a designation for whoever sought to criticize or work for the removal of this dictator. The enemies of the State being simply, the “enemies” of Musharraf (A biological necessity since he embodied the country: “This country lives in my heart. This country lives in my blood. And it lives in my soul.”) And for these special category of prisoners, the prison cell couldn’t be the prison which housed Gandhi, Nehru, Bhagat Singh and Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. The prison compound about which Faiz wrote: Sahn-e Zindan kay be-Watan Ashjar/Sar nigoun mahv hain bananay mein/Daman-e Asman pe Naksh-o Nigar.

That prison compound, Musharraf knew, would be used as a platform to build ever greater public support against his anarchy. Hence, his regime operated under the “Vanished” scenario wherein Military Intelligence simply erased a suspect from legal and geographical space. Such, though, couldn’t be the fate of Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry or Aitzaz Ahsan.

For our “new” political prisoners, the idea of House Arrest was enshrined as state practice. The houses were surrounded by military and police, the phones were audibly tapped and all ingress and egress rigidly controlled. In effect, the Pakistani state was able to create hundreds of miniature Guantanamo Bays wherein undesirables could be sequestered for the long dureé.

Sadly, Musharraf didn’t count on the power of “new” technologies to influence mass politics. SMS/TXT messages, viral cell phone videos, compiled and transmitted from within the houses of the CJ or Asma Jahangir spread to possibly every cell phone in the country, onto youtube and across the diaspora. The state efforts to curtail these modern day chapatis also failed: the ban on cell phone had to be lifted for the sake of global capital; the ban on youtube and blogspot had to be lifted for creating even worse publicity.

The language of liberal democracy and republic which enshrines basic rights and protects minorities is the very language that Musharraf used in his destruction of Pakistan’s Constitution. Similar is the case in India, where Dr. Binayak Sen continues to languish in prison for almost a year - claimed a terrorist by the same state that uses terror against its own people. In essence, a shared, global history of terror has been written around us, since 2002. It’s public manifestations are policies that govern our lives here and else-where. The global politics of Washington and Islamabad are the politics of un-restrained freedom of action - in the name of security and security, alone. These global politics need our firmest critiques and sustained analysis. These dungeons need some sunlight.

Wow, I totally missed CM’s 4th anniversary. Four years, 1095 posts, 98667 comments and 207,778 spams have passed since the beginning. A lot has changed in me, and in my approach to blogging, and in the tone of CM over the years. I don’t really know if besides Zack and Nitin and Sin, I have any of the earliest readers still around (excluding my prior meat-world fellows, sorry morcy). Internets are fickle friends. Except for lapata and farangi neé steve marlowe. Those two are legit.

There are some visions of the future. I want to bring the academic world more squarely into CM. Discuss journal articles, do more history posts, be snarky and caustic, again. There are talks of publishing some books. Starting a e-magazine with some friends & c. But, of course, nothing until we get Obama elected, eh?

This much though is true, nothing would be possible without you, my gentle readers. Thank you for continuing to show up, for reading, commenting, emailing, sharing. Spread the Love.

And now, Announcements:

1. Hiphopistan - Yogi B and Chee Malabar! & others. The brain-child of man-genius Samip Mallick, this incredible event will shake the cobwebs off Foster Hall. I am going to insist that they turn it up to 11. April 17-19th. The linkages betwixt desi academics, desi hiphop and my hood need to be far stronger than they are. Hiphopistan is a step in the right direction. Do Come!

2. Speaking of desi academia and popular culture: Interjunction - an edited multiblog aimed at facilitating conversations between the media and academia has recently launched. It is something that I will be reading and you should too. Check out their mission statements, as well.

There wasn’t much time to visit anyone or any place. I saw maybe a fraction of Lahore, and that maybe on two trips. Even if I had time, I had little inclination to go places. I am a nostalgic guy but I hate nostalgia. You feel me? Not to mention that Lahore was cordoned off under the bomb threats.

I did partake in a tiny bit of nostalgia. I went by my high school, Cathedral High School.

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