You have some nerve. You couldn’t be one of those years in the late 70s or mid 80s who all blend into each other. You couldn’t be like the late 80s when status quo dictated solid pacing, good character development and adversity that is conquered through hard work and dedication. I didn’t expect you to [...]
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What she said. Look for me in the new year [except for one special post scheduled for dec. 24]. I wish all my readers a warm and bubbly break and I hope that 2005 knocks your socks off.
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Been a bit slow here lately. ‘Tis the holiday season after all. There are some exciting things happening lately in India though. This whole MMS [multi media service - trans. sending and storing video clips on your cell phone] mess, for example. Some Delhi school kid recorded a tryst with his girlfriend back in November [...]
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It is absolutely freezing outside but we went to get a xmas tree. What is with the tree? Really. This pagan wants to know. Maybe I should put in a request to the great Sharon Howard. In the NYT, Curtis Sittenfeld wonders aloud about the sexual magnetism of writers and their prose. Jhumpa Lahiri is [...]
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I have not read any of the Series of Unfortunate Events books but there are certain members in the sepoy household that hold them very near and dear. I have been toiling away in hopes to buy winter solstice presents for those individuals and not having much luck. Graphic novels? Why can’t Neil Gaiman be [...]
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Via Cliopatria I learned of Google’s partnership with libraries at Stanford, Harvard & c. to digitize their entire holdings. Copyrighted materials will only be available in selections and out-of-copyright texts (manuscripts!?) in their entirety. Here is the NYT piece and here is more information about Google Print (beta). Rob has a good post on similair [...]
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Iraq is not over yet but with the Jan 30 election approaching, the administration can bolt with a straight face. But, where to go? I mean, we have half-a million soldiers waiting to kick some ass, general. Let us revisit Jan 29, 2002′s SOTU address: Our second goal is to prevent regimes that sponsor terror [...]
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Class over. There were days when I imagined it would never be over. And days when I cursed myself for holding down a full time job, preparing to go on the academic cattle-call and attempting to narrate 12 centuries of Islamic history in 1.5 hour digestable bites. And days when the discussion really was fruitful [...]
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Yesterday I linked to an essay by Imran Khan. Something has bothered me for a while and I think I will hash it out here. Why has Imran Khan failed in Pakistani politics? Imran Khan, from ’85-’95, was Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky and Joe Montana rolled into one. He retired from Cricket (after winning the [...]
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Nitin, at The Acorn, recently had a discussion over the EU-ization of South Asia. While I agree more or less with his views in the debate, I believe that there are certain trends that point towards a markedly different South Asia in the next 10-25 years. Look at the world around you: Corporations have no [...]
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Caleb inaugurates the Good Writing Contest to prove that “for every sentence of ‘bad writing’ one can point to in a journal of the humanities, someone else could produce countless counterexamples of ‘good writing.’” As if his blog alone doesn’t prove that thesis, he has more details on the contest. Since my masthead holds one [...]
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CM is upgraded to MT 3.1.2 [pending WordPress 1.3]. I just was getting overwhelmed by spammers. They are a particularly loathsome lot, aren’t they? MT Blacklist is integrated within MT, so I went with it. The install was easy enough but something is screwy in the extlib. I think I left some MT 2.6 entrails. [...]
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Mosques are in the news lately. With a big DENIED sign for women or US ambassadors. The second case happened in Peshawar. The brand-spanking new US Ambassador to Pakistan, Ryan Crooker, thought it would be nice to go see the Mohabat Khan Mosque in Peshawar. But, the imam of the mosque, Maulana Qasim Yousufi, is [...]
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I do not use Microsoft Office for anything more than a work letter or something. But, to keep Murphy’s Law from collapsing, I started my diss. description a few weeks ago on a PC in Word. Snicker. Sunday afternoon, as if on command, the PC’s hard drive died (hi gerry) taking the document with it. [...]
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Blogs being passé, college kids have turned towards high brow erotica to express themselves in their ivy covered, gothic chapels of knowledge. By Google’s account, Vassar’s Squirm was first out of the gate. Followed by Harvard’s ridiculously titled H Bomb and BU’s even more puerilely titled Boink. So this week debuted U of C’s version [...]
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