I had a nice post planned about what I have been doing for the past 6 months which culminated on saturday. but. i am a sick, sick, sick man. so, hang on tight, gentle readers. I will be back. ps. farangi can chime in with an entry anytime. that slacker. feel free to bash him [...]
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Women+Islam is hot, she said. If those were your keywords, then you would be getting job talks all over the place. Yeah!? Well, who in heck decides what is hot? I retorted. Is it a dark room filled with greying sanskritists flashing one word cards for responses? Globalization. Flash. Terrorism. Flash. Muslim Historiography in India. [...]
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I have been horribly remiss in not pointing out to my readers the History Carnivals: #1, #2, and now, #3. Erroneously, I assume that everyone reads the same blogs I do and, hence, knows all these bits. What a dunce I am. If you like this sort of stuff, and I have been accused of [...]
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I don’t like the word Islamist – not one bit. Today, I would like to take a skewed opinion poll from my lagging readership. What do you think about that word? In a headline today, NYT writes, “Shiites in Iraq Back Islamist to Be Premier”. Islamist is referenced in the very first sentence: ” Ibrahim [...]
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I have been reading kottke for a long time and always liked him esp. the tone and cadence of his writing. Today, he declared that he is going pro: “blogging for blogging’s sake”. He has quit his job and will attempt to write the blog only for a year. I, for one, am psyched for [...]
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[Sepoy notes: Gentle Readers, my good friend farangi shares his thoughts about HST. If HST lives on in anyone's soul - I point squarely to farangi and his upcoming saga of rocking in Jerusalem.] Rumor holds that Hunter Thompson has been temporarily dead several times already; each round of scuttlebutt credited those lapses into the [...]
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Some people will tell you that slow is good – and it may be, on some days – but I am here to tell you that fast is better. I’ve always believed this, in spite of the trouble it’s caused me. Being shot out of a cannon will always be better than being squeezed [...]
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Snow blanketed the streets last night. It looks pretty. Yesterday, though, was nice and sunny. Chicago and weather. What can you even say? In NY Review, Pankaj Mishra, spends some time in the Real Afghanistan where he finds that “the new mansions with the architectural adventurousness of Los Angeles belonged to corrupt government officials, often [...]
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Just to follow up with some more thoughts on the Yemeni link I posted yesterday. The story is kinda old but looks like the CSJ piece is getting kicked around the ole watering holes. Brian Whitaker wrote about this last year when Hamoud Abdulhamid al-Hitar was asked by British counter-terrorism folks to come and give [...]
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It is not very often that the Qur’an gets good press. So, when I saw the curious headline on the BBC, “Koran saves turtles”, I was intrigued and, momentarily perplexed. Upon reading the article, I remembered that I had heard about this project a while ago. CARE wanted to save the coral reefs and the [...]
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The best, ok only but the adjective will stand, panel I attended was Trends in Computing for Human Development. The panel primarily consisted of Berkeley CS grad students who were working on, and had been involved with, developing sustainable techonolgies for India and Brazil. First of all, the fact that they were CS made them [...]
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I wasn’t going to post today, mainly, to hold Ms. Howard to her promise. But, it is impolite to make a friend pay for a transatlantic flight. So, a snippet from the DNB about George Grenville Malet [1804-1856] who “narrowly escaped death in 1839 when his head was trapped in a tiger’s mouth at the [...]
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I was on IM with nathaniel and we started trading weird searches that led people to our sites. He insisted that I share it with all of you. Immortalize them, he said. Since Early Modern Notes had some fun with spam yesterday, I figured I would put some fun searches up as well. I had [...]
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On Saturday, I have to present my latest masterpiece entitled Sindh, Imagined: Writing the History of Sindh from the Colonial to the Post-National. Not sure what it means, yet. I fly to Berkeley in a couple of days and am really looking forward to it. Not the paper-presentation part, though. Thought I’d throw a snippet [...]
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Haroon Paryani came to the US in 1971 to attend college. He dropped out after one semester and started working to support his family back home. At some point, roughly 20 years ago, he started to drive a cab in Chicago. He brought his family from Karachi over as well. On Feb 5, 2005, a [...]
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TV is on and volume set low. I am bustling for beds and bedtimestories. The Chosen One drones in and out. Ovations. Boos? Did I overhear grumbles? The dems have balls now? “…fill jobs Americans will not take” – go Brown Revolution. Personal Accounts. 2018. 2027. 2033. If he says 2046, I will take a [...]
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Basant is all about the party. Families dress up, put their boom-boxes on the rooftops (and I do mean BOOM boxes), bring out the bhangra remixes, lots of food, tons of kites and strings, and every person you know – young and old. On adjacent rooftops are your neighbors and rivals. Afternoons start off amicably [...]
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One confession. All I know about Basant and kites and strings, I learned from Aamir on the back of his ancient honda. We would be trolling the byways of Lahore, ditching classes and committments, and Aamir would grind the bike to a halt, point to some mid-distance in the sky and explain to me the [...]
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