what is the vertiginous chapati saying to me?
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Most of my usual conversation (passing/commenting on links) has moved to twitter, so doing a sunday link post seems almost, well, retro.
Still, things I do for you, gentle readers, will always be en vogue. Because that is how awesome you are. Each and every single one of you.
Drake Bennett’s Changing History, Boston Globe, [...]
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Dear Dr. Lapata
In an effort to speed up the publication schedule and work through our backlog, we are attempting to collect any remaining permissions from authors who are moving up in line for publication. Our records indicate that we still require permissions for the image(s) contained in your article, “(redacted).” Please return these permissions as [...]
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Last week I gave a small talk to a group of Model UN students at Hildesheim U. Thought I’d archive the presentation – and share it here. Not much going on. My main concern was to show the difference between internal and external public/policy debates*. And maybe also to step away from (inter)national narratives. I [...]
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Doing some research, I came across an official Pakistan government publication celebrating the 5 year anniversary of its existence. I scanned a few of the adverts in the issue. The paper I am writing concerns the “long history” of Pakistan such that allowed Mortimer Wheeler’s Five Thousand Years of Pakistan: An Archaeological Outline (1950) to [...]
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With thanks to Francesca Orsini, Alok Rai and his family, and Fran Pritchett, we have a scan of the only photo portrait of Mirza Asadullah Ghalib. Incredible.
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I am slowly cooking some posts – in the meantime, I discussed Pakistan/US on Worldview yesterday. Have a listen, why doncha?
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Le Roi de Lahore (1877) was the second opera written by Jules Massenet (1842-1912). The tale depicts the romance of the King Alim and the temple girl Sita against the backdrop of Mahmoud Ghazni’s invasion of Lahore.1
Théodore Pavie (1811-1896) the French traveller and writer of exotica for Revue des Deux Mondes studied Sanskrit in Paris, [...]
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Via Naim Sahib comes the sad news that Simon Digby, 79, passed away in Delhi. Anyone who has touched any scholarly/popular work on medieval to colonial India – esp. aspects of religion and art – has seen the fruits of his amazing intellect reflected in those works.
I will try and find a full biography [...]
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Speaking Truth to Power by Kathy Kelly
January 8, 2010
There’s a phrase originating with the peace activism of the American Quaker movement: “Speak Truth to Power.” One can hardly speak more directly to power than addressing the Presidential Administration of the United States. This past October, students at Islamabad’s Islamic International University had a message [...]
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And a bit behind the curve: S. 1010: National Foreign Language Coordination Act of 2009
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But the problem with my analysis is, you will say, that Cameron is not the Department of State or Labor nor is he the official mouthpiece of some quasi-empire. You would be right. Yet Avatar is consensus. It is the consensus of nearly $300 million dollars – pored over every lovingly rendered pixel flesh and [...]
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Gentle Readers,
I wish you all a best of 2010. Posting will be sparse for a little while but I hope to pick it up in the new year with tons of exciting insight into celebrity lives.
yours,
sepoy.
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My friend Atiya Khan has a piece in The Platypus Review, The poverty of Pakistan’s politics (PPP), in which she takes me and Faisal Devji (finally, together!) to task for making “concessions to the Right” by not understanding, or not conceptualizing, or not realizing the “crypto-fascism” of the Taliban. This, accordingly, corresponds to the death [...]
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“Yet the Army leadership is refusing to strike at the heart of the Taliban command in Baluchistan Province.” declares another editorial from NYT today. If only these Pakistanis would realize – why won’t they just realize – that this is their wars, not ours.
Think back to March 2009. Then, the Taliban were on a [...]
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Sundays in Berlin are quiet affairs. The usual shops are all closed – groceries, pharmacies, booksellers, fruit vendors, bike shops, bakeries, discount stores. You get the picture. In some U-bahn stations, in some busy corners, there would be a lone bakery, a hold-out grocer. New Berliners, such as myself, collect these informational nugget, [...]
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Seth G. Jones, the author of “In the Graveyard of Empires: America’s War in Afghanistan,” is a civilian adviser to the American military.
One of the brains behind President Obama’s Afghanistan policy Seth G. Jones, of RAND & McCrystal has a particularly unhinged op-ed in today’s NYT: Take the War to Pakistan.
The United States [...]
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In The Review, I have a review of Christopher Sanford’s Imran Khan in which I briefly consider the man. Below is what didn’t make it into the review – for fairly obvious reasons – but, I thought I’d spin it here. No pun.
Much has been written on Imran Khan’s transcendence from the game of [...]
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The safe havens must be eliminated. The corruption must be stopped. The infrastructures must be built. The people must be free. The allies must stand together. The nuclear arms must remain safe. The bombing must be stopped. The safe haven must be eliminated.
30,000 plus a exit date of June 2011. It’s a safe [...]
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Why is the knowledge of history always the first casualty?
Richard J. H. Gottheil. “The Origin and History of the Minaret”. Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Mar., 1910): 152-4.
It is a well-known fact that the early Christian basilica had no towers attached or superposed. The same is true of the [...]
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I wonder what the world would be saying if this game had the bearded fella sporting peyots along with that sporty ’stache. But since Muslims are the new (old) Jews, this sort of pure islamophobia will skip by without comment from the cognoscenti.
Lest you think this is more generalized immigration phobia and not religiously [...]
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