#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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Ich bin ein Ausländer doch Berlin ist mein zu Hause meine Heimat meine stadt hier kriegst du auch mal auf die Schnauze – Alpa Gun There is a recessed walkway leading up to the side entrance of a building which bears the plaque that Albert Einstein worked here after moving to Berlin in 1914. Ehrenbergstraße [...]
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The wind blows cold outside your door/it whispers words I’ve tried before But you don’t hear me anymore/your pride’s just too demanding The end is coming soon, it’s plain/a warm bed just ain’t worth the pain – Tower Song, Townes van Zandt Two things I know about Houston – my Babu hails from that town [...]
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Jacob Silverman, Where the Wild Frontiers Are: America comes up short in South Asia, Sep 2, 2011, The National: A worthwhile political blogger doesn’t have to always be right, but he or she should be able to remain sober in the emotional maelstrom of politics or amidst national trauma. Ahmed repeatedly does this, particularly when [...]
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A few weeks ago, I visited Hamburg’s vast harbors and storage houses. There, I saw the faded signs of an old network of traders from Iran, Afghanistan and Kashmir who came to Hamburg in the 1880s and 1890s bearing carpets and artifacts. I loved that part of Hamburg, and I wished I had had more [...]
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The New York Police Department is doing everything it can to make sure there’s not another 9/11 here and that more innocent New Yorkers are not killed by terrorists,” NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said. “And we have nothing to apologize for in that regard.” – “With CIA help, NYPD built secret effort to monitor mosques, [...]
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I have a more detailed review of Maleeha Lodhi’s edited volume Pakistan: Beyond ‘The Crisis State’ in Dawn’s Books & Authors: All is Well… or is it? I had briefly discussed it in my previous review essay, but this is special care: Pakistan, as a subject of critical analysis, is ill-served when realities are ignored [...]
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The saying goes that we all have rituals – and the sayer points, often times metaphorically, to baseball players. The raise, the pinch, the shuffle, the swing, the dust-off, the spit, the spit, the spit. Ritual seems a bad word, suddenly. Habit? Superstitious habit? Let us stick with ritual for a second. I don’t think [...]
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I have a new piece up at The National, Pakistan: why the US must think outside the ‘military’ box: A decade after the events of September 11, we continue to know little and understand even less of Pakistan. This despite the fact that we are entering a golden age of production of knowledge on that [...]
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I recently visited Hamburg and decided, on a lark, to only photograph street typography. The results are here. Enjoy. Some of the photos document the Iranian traders of carpets who came to Hamburg in the 1870s and 80s. There is also one photo of love, scream.
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I was asked, by Murtaza Vali, to write for a “Manual of Treason” which dealt with the notion of treason and affiliation in the colonial and postcolonial settings. I offered to write on the case of Seth Naomul Hotchand (1804-1878) and the annexation of Sindh in 1843 by the East India Company. The essay was [...]
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Studies in Classic American Literature (1923) by D. H. Lawrence BENJAMIN FRANKLIN had a specious little equation in providential mathematics: Rum + Savage = 0. Awfully nice! You might add up the universe to nought, if you kept on. Rum plus Savage may equal a dead savage. But is a dead savage nought? Can you [...]
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