Everybody knows who Yara Sofia is in Puerto Rico. And if you don’t, then sorry darling, this is not your world. –One of Kuzhali Manickavel’s favorite quotes from Ru Paul’s Drag Race, Season 3. For the past few months I’ve been up to my earlobes in Blaft Publications. Last week (?) I posted an interview [...]
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Ki Muhammad se wafa tu nay to hum teray hain/ Yeh Jahan chiz hay kiya, Loh o Qalam teray hain Be faithful to Muhammad and I am yours/ This world is nothing, the Tablet and Pen are yours. I have a short piece in The Caravan India: Forfeiting the Future: Pakistan’s crisis can’t simply be [...]
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أيام الغضب Jan 25th. Jan 28th. It isn’t a domino effect.1 What happened in Tunisia, isn’t what is happening in Egypt and what is happening in Yemen and what is happening in Lebanon and what will happen in Oman. The internet or twitter or facebook is not behind this.2 Neither is al-Jazeera.3 Each of these [...]
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My review of a whole raft of Blaft publications comes out in the February issue of Bookslut. In the meantime, I’ll be posting some interviews with prominent Blaft personages. Here is the first: an interview with Rakesh Khanna, co-founder and editor of Blaft, and Pritham K. Chakravarthy, translator for The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp [...]
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The opening of Interpolation: the Safeway at Oracle and Ina: Absolutely, that was my turf. Less than a mile from the four or five houses and apartments where we took turns living. We did our shopping there. Not that you could tell this from a photograph; you would have to distinguish it from eighty other [...]
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The killer has been garlanded. Facebook fan pages, twitter clouds of praises. For his victim, Salmaan Taseer there are small candle-light vigils and columns bemoaning him for “going too far”. How far did he go? He visited a woman who is “accused” of blasphemy and he called the law which enables such prosecutions a “kala [...]
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Ralph Luker, at Cliopatria, announces the Annual Cliopatria Awards in the History blogosphere. Guess who won a 2010! Best Writer: Lapata @ Chapati Mystery Lapata’s essays are not so much written as they are assembled, careful collages of visuals, text, and quotations always cunningly integrated into architectural unities. Her style always serves her subject: in [...]
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My new column on translation, transcreation and Qurratulain Hyder’s two English renderings of her novels is up on Bookslut today. As you will see from the text, I decided to approach the two texts without reading the Urdu first, for reasons that should be clear in my discussion. Now I am reading Aag ka Dariya, [...]
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“Most people in this country – and I am not talking about the lunatic fringe – are moderate.” Those words echo; now that the one who uttered them, the Governor of Punjab (the most populous state in Pakistan), lies dead at the hands of his own guard. Salmaan Taseer was many things, but most recently, [...]
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This 6th year of CM will go down in the annals of Chapatism, first and foremost, as a year of the renaissance sprung by Lapata’s posts – for which readers have the bureaucratic morass of academy, “the insane rants of an inflamed tea-partier”, and Sepoy’s badgering to thank – illuminating the particularities of partition or [...]
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