September 2004

The Archives

• straw polls

  Time Out

  09.18.04 | Permalink | 1 Comment

  I needed to breathe. I think I gave up last Sunday. If you scroll down, you can see my post. All week, I have not read the newsites, haven’t gone to dailyKos or Atrios or TPM or, even, Juan Cole. I didn’t read that Musharraf is keeping the vardi. I didn’t follow Putin or the [...]

• univerCity

  Oprahism

  09.16.04 | Permalink | 1 Comment

  In class, we are tackling the life of the Prophet. The framework that I have applied is to ground the sira in the context of Holy Men in Late Antiquity. Basically, we read selections from Peter Brown, Averill Cameron and some primary Desert Father texts. I wanted to give the students a sense of the, [...]

• homistan

  Anarkali

  09.15.04 | Permalink | 13 Comments

  Every single trip I took to Old Anarkali bazaar in Lahore as a youth had one hidden motive: Try to guess which wall is Anarkali, the nautch-girl who dared love the Emperor’s son, cemented in. I used to think she was still alive and peeking through little holes in the wall, observing the world. A [...]

• optical character recognition

  East is Blue

  09.14.04 | Permalink | 5 Comments

  Salman Rushdie is great. If you want to know how to work it after a fatwa, look to this man. He hangs around celebs, marries a model he picks out on the telly, writes op-eds supporting other authors and perennially remains the Occident’s only interlocutor with the Orient.
  His latest “controversy” is porn. Yes, that cutting [...]

• talkies

  Hero

  09.13.04 | Permalink | 8 Comments

  Hero(2002) is playing everywhere and making some good money. I am happy. It was one of the movies that I was really, really looking forward to. Gerry would read monkeypeaches on a biweekly basis, keeping us abreast of this coolness being directed by Zhang Yimou and starring Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung (anyone who knows [...]

• optical character recognition

  Sunday Reading for the Terrorized

  09.12.04 | Permalink | 3 Comments

  Just wanted to highlight a few things to ruin a nice Sunday. It happened to me. It could happen to you:

  From Chicago Tribune [r.r], comes the profile of Muhammad Atta. It is a chilling piece and one that shows the risk we run by de-humanizing those murderers.
  The Independent says that the risk is [...]

• optical character recognition, talkies

  Coraline

  09.10.04 | Permalink | 2 Comments

  Some happy news on the movie front. I am a huge fan of Neil Gaiman - author of Sandman graphic novels. He is an amazing storyteller or myth-maker, as I like to call him. His 2002 children’s-book-for-adults, Coraline, is on top of the charts at the sepoy household having gone through innumerable readings. It is [...]

• homistan

  The Lion of Panjshir

  09.10.04 | Permalink | 12 Comments

  There were times when “freedom fighter” had a romantic tinge to it. Ahmad Shah Massoud also known as “Amer Sahib” or “The Lion of Panjshir” was a “freedom fighter” in those times. He defended his home, the Panjshir Valley, from the Red Army and from the Taliban. Like Che, he became an icon and a [...]

• univerCity

  Deconstruct my bitter laughter

  09.09.04 | Permalink | Comment?

  Compare your significant other to the British Empire, declare yourself a deconstructive reader of Empire, write a 200-page thesis on your significant other’s hegemonic tendencies using quotes from Lacan, publish in a midsize journal, go on to a respectable career…$50,000 plus 4 years indentured servitude
  No, paul. that’s priceless.

• homistan

  Ashfaq Ahmed

  09.08.04 | Permalink | 82 Comments

  It is with great sadness that I learned that a great Urdu dramatist, novelist and intellectual, Ashfaq Ahmed has passed away. I always thought of him and his wife, Banu Qudsia, as the gentle, wise uncle and aunt of Urdu. I met him on a few occasions and remember, with great fondness, his kindness.
  I used [...]