I try not to say much when I am a little overwhelmed. Agha Shahid Ali overwhelmed me a while ago – when I started to seriously read his collected works. Over the years, I have mentioned him many times here, or quoted his Faiz translations or highlighted writings on him. But when I began to [...]
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Bilal Tanweer is a writer and translator. His fiction, poetry and translations have appeared in various international magazines including Granta, Vallum, Caravan, and Words Without Borders. He was one of Granta’s New Voices for 2011 and one of the eleven recipients of the 2010 PEN Translation Fund Grant. He teaches literature and fiction writing at LUMS, Lahore. He’s [...]
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I like to think I wrote a fair amount this year – maybe not as much as last year but still, a fair amount. But I also have a bunch of posts stuck in the “Draft” view. Gonna delete them, but here are the snippets for what-might-have-beens. Objects Yesterday, I went to see Schätzes des [...]
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The recent hissy fit thrown by historian Niall Ferguson (racist! imperialist!) because Pankaj Mishra wrote a scathing review in the LRB deserves comment. Mishra’s review of Ferguson’s TV-Book Civilisation, Watch This Man, led with drawing attention to White supremacists like Theodore Stoddard and the twin peaks of their insanity – the inherent belief in their [...]
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Nandini Ramachandran reviews WTWFA for the Sunday Guardian: The size of its betrayal would’ve forced Manto into asking his fellow citizens what he once asked Uncle Sam — my country is poor, but why is it ignorant? This is a query that haunts Manan Ahmed as much as Manto, and his book is an antidote [...]
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Below the fold, a twitter-based debate on a review essay in NYT.
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(A version of this review essay ran in The Friday Times, Vol. XXIII, No. 41) Review Essay by C.M. Naim In May 1962, when the first groups of America’s newly established Peace Corps were flying out to various “underdeveloped” countries to help them along the road of “progress”, a twenty-eight years old woman set off [...]
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Naim Sahib, one of my teachers at Chicago, has a must-must-must read “rant” (as he puts it) in Outlook India. I really think it is one of his best and critically lays bare a key disconnect between the intellectual engagements within Urdu and English presses when it comes to matters of Muslims and Islam. I [...]
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Taste the war paint on my tongue/as it’s dripping with my sweat/place my gaze in the futures path/seeing things that ain’t come yet Many years ago, a different me was in a car driving down a highway I had travelled many hundreds of time to a destination I was intimate with, and from a base [...]
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Some more important readings for you in terms of the DU/Ramanujan. – Shahid Amin (Professor, History, Delhi University), When a Department Let a University Down, The Hindu, Nov. 3, 2011 At the first sign of trouble, in a letter written in September 2008, OUP decided to thank those who felt aggrieved by it, “for pointing [...]
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Some Indian Uses of History on a Rainy Day 1935. Professor of Sanskrit on cultural exchange; passing through; lost in Berlin; reduced to a literal, turbaned child, spelling German signs on door, bus, and shop, trying to guess go from stop; desperate for a way of telling apart a familiar street from a strange, or [...]
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I loved the space and the wonderful people at the Asian Writers’ Workshop who were kind enough to host my book launch a month ago. Magical! So, I pass on, with enthusiasm, a festival of awesomeness for their 20th anniversary! They feature Teju Cole, Amitava Kumar and some other people (ok some of the other [...]
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#OccupyMadisonConcourseHotel2011!! Ahem. It is the Annual Awesomeness that is the Madison conference – this is the 40th one! Big times now. I will be on two panels – giving a paper on something I am quite excited about and discussing a set of papers elsewhere. I wish there was a way to link to my [...]
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We were just talking about the scholastic and the imaginative that underpins some gems of scholarship – such as Ramanujan’s work on the Ramayana (and his work on poetry, in poetry), and here comes another deeply inspiring articulation. Nauman Naqvi, anthropologist, delivers a wonderfully framed, evocative,(and beautifully filmed) lecture ruminating on the art, the poetics [...]
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The First out of the four experts termed the text as “appropriate” for the syllabus, second expert congratulated the History Department for including the essay, third expert opined that the contents of the essay are “unexceptional”. Only the fourth expert proposed to incorporate other texts in lieu of Ramanujan’s text, as “anything that goes against” [...]
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I did a segment with Jerome MacDonald for Worldview at WBEZ. Please to listen and enjoy. And comment, etc.
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Gentle Readers, The book was launched last week. It was lovely, lovely, lovely, to have so many of my dearest friends there. Lovely to talk with new friends and lovelier still to be bathed in so much love. Have I used the word “love” enough yet? But that is the thing which remains with me [...]
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When ships are launched, they pour water or more bubbly stuff to ask the gods to bless it. When Books are launched, the gods are less likely to be pleased if water is poured on it. On Monday, Aug 26th, at 7pm, we will be launching Where The Wild Frontiers Are at The Asian American [...]
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Holy Jesus, Moses and Muhammad. The power-points, I urge you to drop everything and just stare at them, are amazing. They really are. They show, quite clearly, the mental acuity of a 12 year old child when confronted with a newspaper. There is reading comprehension, of course, and even retention and maybe some kind of [...]
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I am rather stuck on the fliegender Teppich in the NPD ad. I want to continue the link I made between Hans Schweitzer’s anti-Semitic cartoons and the NPD flying-carpet by focusing on this particular relationship between orientalism and anti-Semitism. The 1926 Lotte Reiniger movie Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed was one of the first “animated” [...]
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