Just as I had convinced myself that I knew everything, The Week proved me wrong. I like to read the “what to watch” column since I rarely watch television. In it, was the description of an upcoming A&E mystery wherein “a fed up husband finally plans to get rid of his termagant wife”. termagant? A [...]
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We were seniors or juniors, I cannot remember. The sun had baked the earth of Lahore into clay even in early March. I was a new convert to cricket. Having been raised on the mean streets of Doha, the game was as foreign to me as Gulli-Danda [also a source of shame]. However, in any [...]
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Rex Reed writes film reviews for the NY Observer. He wrote a short review for Park Chan-Wook’s Old Boy. Damn thing is SERIOUSLY offensive to me. I am half-korean [on my dad's side]. All Pakistanis are. It is one of those nationalist pipe-dreams. Legend goes that under Ayub’s dictatorship, we were so advanced that the [...]
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I am back, gentle readers. While the image of me running naked down the streets of Ohio gave glee to some, I must defend my honor by declaring that farangi’s orientalist fantasies are terribly out of date. He forgot to put a writhing python around my neck. Still, I want to thank him for taking [...]
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[Editor's Note: Sepoy has escaped; however, he is completely nude and wandering the mean streets of Dayton, Ohio. I say this not to frighten, but to warn. He is crazed on absinthe (one of my favorite interrogation methods) and, as he crawled from my front porch, he was muttering somethings dark about "Said's thesis," The [...]
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[Editor's note: I admit it. I have Sepoy. He is safe, for now. Leave $20m Euros on my porch, or I will read Camille Paglia to him and force feed him instant grits.] Assured poor folk will be able to get meds cheap, Indian parliamentary “leftists” unchained themselves from the proverbial redwood and, at last, [...]
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[Editor's note: Sepoy is at an undisclosed location. He's working overtime on strategies to Keep Our Children Safe. He will return next week.] Yesterday I took a case for a fellow whom a major lender claims “owes” them several thousand dollars in “lost interest” on a repossessed vehicle the lender has since resold, again at [...]
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One more thing. Wanderer kindly send in a BBC link to Narendra Modi, the chief minister of the state of Gujarat, being denied visa by US of A. I criticized the US for preventing Tariq Ramadan entry and called it censorship. This is just the same. Modi was complicit, at the very least for his [...]
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There are some throwaway lines that I chuckle over for days. Some weird stories that replay in my head as episodes from a long lost Xena season. Some insane character that could step out of the pages of the text right onto a Jerry Springer set. None of it can ever make it into the [...]
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In a move apparently designed to give instant aneurysm to anarchists everywhere, The Chosen One announced that Wolfowitz shall head the World Bank. There are many ways to read this development. The first, and most obvious, reading is that this is a deliberate road-block thrown to subvert the pre-ordained beatification of Bono. The White House [...]
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Outlook India has a rather breathless piece, When Veer Met Zaara, on the Pakistani cricket fans visiting India. The Pakistanis are discovering that “‘their hated neighbour’ is a more developed, easy-going, and less suffocating place” and now, “they don’t want to return”. To make matters worse, The General has been extended an invite to come [...]
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I am starting to hate the New Yorker. I am weeks behind. They pile up, mercilessly mocking my inability to read them. Do I need this pressure in my life? And people ask me whether I read this or that. I will soon, I say. All Cretans Pakistanis are liars. All that to draw your [...]
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Spanish cleric Mansur Escudero, Secretary General of the Islamic Commission of Spain, issued a fatwa against UBL today [thanks, tsk]. I can’t find the text of the fatwa listed anywhere. Not that my Spanish is all that. Most reports say that it declares UBL outside of Islam based on his killing of innocent civilians on [...]
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Imagine a young, vibrant, clean-cut scholar of Islam who starts a tv show Aalim Online for GeoTV in Pakistan. On this program, he invites Shi’a and Sunni clerics and Christians and Hindus and Parsis and takes on controversial topics head-on. He even tackles suicide bombings and earns praise from The General himself. Imagine that being [...]
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Zein, Rakan, Aya and Jalila are Middle Eastern superheroes. Rob beat me to the punch on this but what is blogging if not shameless recycling? So none of these heroes is wearing a galabeya which makes them look “white” to Rob. I wouldn’t say “white” – but def. teutonic. The endeavor is headed by Ayman [...]
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The Barmakid Yahya b. Khalid [d. 805] sent an envoy to India to draw up a report on religions of al-Hind. The Arabic geographer, Ibn Khurdadhbih [d. 912] used this report on al-Hind in his Kitab al-Masalik wa’l Mamalik. His longer work, in turn lost, exists in Persian historian al-Gardizi’s, Zayn al-Akhbar. Until al-Biruni, this [...]
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A bit curious, historically, is the lack of interest the Muslims rulers of India took in Hinduism. If one compares the translation projects of Greek and Armaic sources into Arabic during the 9th-11th centuries in Damascus and Baghdad with the projects undertaken for Sanskrit, one realizes that there were no projects undertaken for Sanskrit. Not [...]
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Thing about being a South Asian historian is that I am so clueless about South Asia. Like about Kalarippayattu. Did I even have an inkling about this mother of Kung Fu? How could I have not known about this bucket-of-oily-goodness South Indian Martial Art? I knew about pehlwani and silambam but nothing about this? How [...]
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As you may or may not recall, I applied for some jobs this year. So yeah. Moving on from that subject, my glorious university has some openings in my department this year. For the past 6 weeks we have been hearing the job candidates. These are all good people who, I know, are on many [...]
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The idea of doing a conference on Orientalism wasn’t really appealing. The hoopla over HR3077 last year – especially on our campus – was too much even for me [HR 509, this year]. However, we did have some methodological questions. Literary critics have had their day in the sun with the text, and more power [...]
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