March 2005

The Archives

• optical character recognition

  Word of the Day: Termagant

  03.30.05 | Permalink | 10 Comments

  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 [...]

• not baseball

  Bangalore High

  03.29.05 | Permalink | 4 Comments

  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 [...]

• talkies

  Noxious Reed

  03.28.05 | Permalink | 5 Comments

  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 [...]

• optical character recognition

  Sunday Reading for Nationalists

  03.27.05 | Permalink | 4 Comments

  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of Ohio gave glee to some, I must defend my honor by declaring that farangi’s orientalist fantasies are terribly out of date.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 [...]

• purple people

  Hit Me Back Y’all

  03.25.05 | Permalink | 4 Comments

  [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 [...]

• homistan

  Spoonful of Sugar

  03.23.05 | Permalink | 6 Comments

  [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, 20 [...]

• imperial watch

  Two for Me

  03.21.05 | Permalink | 2 Comments

  [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 interest. [...]

• imperial watch

  Get the Modi Out

  03.18.05 | Permalink | 19 Comments

  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 [...]

• univerCity

  Flotsam and Jetsam

  03.18.05 | Permalink | 1 Comment

  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 [...]

• imperial watch

  As the Wolfowitz Turns

  03.16.05 | Permalink | 16 Comments

  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 [...]

• homistan

  We Don’t Want to Return

  03.14.05 | Permalink | 9 Comments

  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 [...]

• optical character recognition

  Sunday Reading for The New Yorker

  03.13.05 | Permalink | 5 Comments

  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 [...]

• homistan

  Fatwa

  03.11.05 | Permalink | 1 Comment

  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 [...]

• homistan

  Charlatans for Islam

  03.10.05 | Permalink | 82 Comments

  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 [...]

• optical character recognition

  Galabeya Woman

  03.09.05 | Permalink | 4 Comments

  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 [...]