This was written a little while ago, and with an eye to comment on a report on Pakistani higher education. I think it suffers a bit, thus decontextualized, but hey. The citation for the 2009 report I mention is (I don’t know why the footnote or hyper-link didn’t make it into the column): Athar Osama, [...]
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See previously, Our Wild Frontiers…
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C.M Naim sends along a world exclusive to the CM audience about a copy ad written by none other than the Muhammad Iqbal. This is big, folks. If Walt Whitman had endorsed a New England Clam Chowder company, it wouldn’t be as big: While looking around in a forgotten public library at Shimla I came [...]
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I know all of you are super-busy, so I won’t, like, write 3000 words on the 18th amendment’s passage or even 2000 words on what I think will forever be known as the Last Summer of Water in Pakistan. So, instead, here are the pictures which really, really deserve a lot of words. All were [...]
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I think my favorite part of Fatima Bhutto’s Songs of Blood and Sword is the conversation she has with the octogenarian Samuel Huntington at Harvard about her father who took a class with him. It is a brilliant little scene full of awkwardness and confusion. I don’t have the book here, else I would just [...]
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Philip Lutgendorf. Chai Why? The Triumph of Tea in India as Documented in the Priya Paul Collection. Tasveer Ghar, Priya. Yet the triumph of tea on the subcontinent (which continues, in the early twenty-first century, in some parts of South India that once exclusively favored coffee) was a slow and sometimes contested process, intertwined with [...]
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Feb 18, 2010. Aligarh Muslim University professor suspended for being gay. LUCKNOW: An Aligarh Muslim University professor, on the verge of retirement, was suspended after some students set up cameras to catch him having consensual sex with a rickshaw-puller in his campus home, and sent the video film to university authorities. Dr Shrinivas Ramchandra Siras, [...]
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Most years this date floats by, but thanks to the CM FAN PAGE ON FACEBOOK (!) I was reminded of that April afternoon six long years ago when I started to ruminate (ahem) on here. On an escalator at AAS, one wag stated out loud, oh dude, I was reading CM when in high school. [...]
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Recently, I have started reading again. Just finished Hans Fallada, Alone in Berlin – which was profoundly sad and completely human. An email prompted me to make a shortlist of books I would like to tackle next. The following list is of Arabic (largely Egypt-centric) literature in translation. Some I read a while back and [...]
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