The biggest event on CM was the publishing of “Where the Wild Frontiers Are: Pakistan and the American Imagination – “a curated, edited collection” of sepoy’s posts in book form, with foreword from Amitava Kumar, launched with much fanfare, and earning rave reviews (here, here).

Meanwhile, commentaries and reflections on happenings in Homistan continued to grace CM: Ramanujan’s transformative texts, Salmaan Taseer’s murder and an exploration of the “emergence of the Prophet as a centralising and orienting raison d’etre for Pakistan,” Pakistan’s fugue state and “the notion of treason and affiliation in the colonial and postcolonial setting,” the state of Pakistan’s ways of seeing, and the forgotten “memory of East Pakistan and the sins of West Pakistan.”

Sepoy continued his essays on the frontier in imperial imagination, experts and policy prescriptions that aid the myopia of empire.  Reflections on the 10 years since 9/11 by Sepoy, Farangi, and Lapata delighted CM readers, as did discussions of Imperialism and racism (I, II, III).

Lapata was busy holding art-shows and winning awards for her writing , but found time to hold a flash fiction contest with Kuzhali Manickavel as judge, which Amitava Kumar won. The Best Writer of 2010 brought us insightful review essays of Aag ka Dariya, Teju Cole’s Open City, Dictator literature, “Yashpal’s great Partition novel, Jhootha Sach,” and a reflection on the interior landscapes in early Indian novels (and an adda post!). Lapata also interviewed some “prominent Blaft personages” including the “illustrious flash fictionista Kuzhali Manickavel,” and reviewed a host of Tamil pulp fiction.

PS. Naim Sahib contributed a characteristically brilliant review of Deborah Baker’s “The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism.”

PPS. Jassasa’s Goat Spy won the internets (here, here, here, here).

PPPS. See Lapata on OBL, and dental care.

PPPPS. More pics! (here, here, here).

PPPPPS. See yours truly’s humble attempt at an essay.

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 people are also very cool, but really, we only have eyes for TC and AK {though, appearance by Jennifer 8. Lee!!!}).

Please do go.

And.

Here is the deal.

If you provide a dishy/photo-filled festival diary to CM of the event, I will buy your ticket. Email me. (those who promise photos of CM loved ones will clearly have an unseeming advantage here, but um, whatever)

Deets:

PAGE TURNER FESTIVAL

http://pageturnerfest.org/#festival

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 29, 2011, 11AM-7PM
POWERHOUSE ARENA, 37 MAIN STREET, BROOKLYN
$5 PER EVENT / $20 ALL-DAY PASS / $30 ALL-DAY PASS (W/ AFTERWORD PARTY)

Come rub elbows and knock knees with your favorite writers at one of Brooklyn’s best alternative literary festivals: the third annual PAGE TURNER: The Asian American Literary Festival. Celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, the festival features a Korean taco trunk, two stand-up comedians, five National Book Award finalists, seven Guggenheim Fellows, a killer afterparty with the best playlist of all time, and you!

An all-star line-up featuring: Junot Díaz, Amitav Ghosh, Jessica Hagedorn, Kimiko Hahn, Hari Kunzru, Jayne Anne Phillips, Suketu Mehta, Min Jin Lee, Mark Nowak, Amitava Kumar, Granta editor John Freeman, and Guernica editor Joel Whitney.

Your favorite new voices: Teju Cole (author of Open City), Danielle Evans (NBA 5 Under 35 winner), Booker finalist Hisham Matar, Pen Faulkner winner Sabina Murray, Whiting Award winner Alexander Chee, Brooklyn Poet Laureate Tina Chang, National Book Award finalist Monica Youn, and NBCC finalist Brenda Shaughnessy.

Multi-dimensional program includes: a staged reading directed by Ralph Peña; artist Wangechi Mutu (MOMA, Guggenheim) talking about immigration; an open mic featuring Jen Kwok (Date an Asian), Negin Farsad (Nerdcore Rising) and others; stories from twenty years of the Workshop; and hard-hitting conversations about Occupy Wall Street, Islam and the West, the rise of China and India, and the national crackdown on immigration.

Keep coming back as we update our full schedule at http://www.pageturnerfest.org/schedule. Co-sponsored by powerHouse Arena, Verso Books, MTV, Guernica, and Granta.

THE AFTERWORD PARTY

http://pageturnerfest.org/#afterword

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 29, 2011, 8PM-11PM
VERSO PRESS
20 JAY STREET, SUITE 1010, BROOKLYN
$10; $30 FOR 4; $30 WITH FESTIVAL DAY PASS

The Saturday before Halloween join us for music, drinks, dancing, and fine company for the raucous afterparty for the Page Turner Literary Festival. We’ll have a stunning view of the Manhattan skyline at night, a killer playlist for your dancing shoes, cake, noisemakers, glitter, a giant piñata, and infinite quantities of beer and wine. Special guests include former New York Times reporter Jennifer 8. Lee and celebrity chef Eddie Huang of Baohaus, who will DJ part of the night’s festivities.

Additional playlist selected by some of New York’s hottest cultural figures: Kris Chen (head of XL Recordings in America, the label of Vampire Weekend, the XX, Sigur Ros), hip hop trio Das Racist, sports blogger Nathaniel Friedman (The Classical, Free Darko), literary enfant terrible Tao Lin, Jefferson “Chairman” Mao (Ego Trip NYC), writer Luc Sante (author of Low Life, Factory of Facts), novelist Lynne Tillman, music journalist Dave Tompkins (author of How to Wreck a Nice Beach), Michael Vazquez (Senior Editor, Bidoun magazine), music critic and DJ Oliver “O-Dub” Wang (soul-sides.com). Before the dancing starts, we’ll also honor the winners of the Fourteenth Annual Asian American Literary Awards: AMITAVA KUMAR, winner of our nonfiction award which will be presented by past honoree Suketu Mehta, and KIMIKO HAHN, our poetry award-winner. The Asian American Writers’ Workshop, one of the country’s premiere literary arts spaces, is throwing the party to end all parties. We want you there. Celebrate our twentieth anniversary and reserve your space today. Co-sponsored by MTV World, Verso, Granta, Guernica, Beerlao, NoveRoma wines.
–
Executive Director, The Asian American Writers’ Workshop

http://www.aaww.org

110-112 W. 27th Street, Sixth Floor, NY, NY 10001
212.494.0061 tel.
212.494.0062 fax
kchen@aaww.org

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.

Where the Wild Frontiers Are (Title contributed by Lapata)

It has come to this. On or about May 31, 2011 you will be able to purchase Where the Wild Frontiers Are: Pakistan and the American Imagination – a curated, edited collection of my posts from CM and elsewhere. Some fine folks have contributed immense amount of their time and talent to make this happen and I am still a bit unsettled about it.

CM was a space invented for an imaginary audience by a frustrated (and easily distracted) graduate student. From its beginning, it was consciously an “academic blog” and I participated in many forums (online and offline) about the meaning, the mode, the future and past of “academic blogging” [curious folks can look up this and this as two early examples]. One part of this engagement was my insistence that “blogs” were a publishing venue which democratized a certain aspect of academic speech. Another part of this engagement was my deep unhappiness in the way it handled archives. They vanished – relying solely on the Search box or the vagaries of Google. Back then, Google was good.

Helena Cobban, at Just World Books, had a brilliant idea in producing curated books from blogs covering timely subject-material. Joshua Foust, of Registan, was the one who introduced me to Cobban and she was enthusiastic about the possibility of CM existing as a published archive. After some massive help – the first foray into the archive jungle was done by Farangi and SalmaanH and, put together by Sabrina S. – I was able to put together a somewhat thematic coherence to the book. Another round (or was it two) of editing happened.

My dearest friend and co-blogger Lapata, then contributed her art for the book (and the cover). Amitava Kumar generously agreed to write the foreword (which is humbling!) and some other people who have way more things to do than time to do it in, agreed to blurb it.

You will, certainly, hear a lot more here about the book and I will certainly beg and plead (not now, though) you to buy a copy. It is launching in the US first, but there will be a e-book version and I am keen on getting it published in Pakistan/India (if you know someone who knows someone etc…)

Love and thanks,

Sepoy

April 8, 2004 is when CM was officially launched to an appreciative audience of well, a few. Here, I found the INITIAL EMAIL ANNOUNCEMENT! *BREAKING NEWS*

From: Manan Ahmed
Date: April 13, 2004 2:37:18 AM GMT+02:00
To: manan ahmed
Subject: Chapati Mystery

Dear all!

Pardon the mass email. It will be the last under the “cool” heading that most of you have been suffering from me in the past.
In that regard, I draw your attention to

http://www.chapatimystery.com

this will be my home for a while.
hope to hear from you there.

cheers,

manan
ps. i am sepoy.

Cute, no?

In the next day or so, I will be posting a HUGE HUGE ANNOUNCEMENT. I would make it now but I don’t have the necessary graphic and you know how it is, without fotos, life is just bland.

I love you all, I love Lapata and Farangi and Patwari and everyone who has ever read and commented and shared and liked and spread a word of CM. It really has been an amazing experience and I will write more gushy stuff on this in the MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT etc.

GO PARTY!

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 the reluctant feudalism of mango farmers, introducing CM readers to Naiyer Masud and Amitava Kumar, or providing a peep into Memon Sahib’s literary striptease, and culminating in The War and Peace of Hindi Literature!

Sepoy moved to Berlin but continued to bring readers reviews of the quality that they have come to expect from him; reviews such as that of William Dalrymple’s Nine Lives, Amitava Kumar’s A Foreigner, Fatima Bhutto’s Songs of Blood and Sword, and last but not the least, a takedown of a globe-trotter’s cartographic musings.

Some conversations that started in 2009 continued in 2010: amidst growing alienation, Faisal Shehzad became the face of a “Pakistan native;” Pakistan’s originary myth remained tied to spectacular events; Zaid Hamid was given thorough examination by a “so called Pakistani historian,” who also reflected upon the history of erasures and repressions that culminated in the horrific attack on an Ahmadi mosque in Lahore in “We Are All Ahmadi” series. In the year of catastrophic floods, the fires of hatred continued to burn (in) homistan, while the discussion amongst politicians remained focused on how to save the children.

Towards the end of the year, the major event at CM was Granta: Peccavistan (also reviewed by Lapata) and an exploration of the Cocoonistan from whence developmentalist discourse springs.

PS. Simon Digby and Tony Judt will be sorely missed.

PPS. Also see Syed Ahmed Khan and Urdu, and Basanti’s stellar review of Ishqiya.

This will be updated as events occur in real-life.

I shall be traveling, talking, giving papers for the next three weeks. Friends and lovers in Chicago, Boston, New York and Madison are urged to get in touch. Others are wished well. Kindly look forward to posts – like a bunch of ‘em! I promise.

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. This would not have disturbed me, had said wag not just informed me that he was now writing his dissertation chapters. I let the moment pass since a full-blown histrionic fit on abhi to main jawan hoon would have just been unseemly. Then.

You, gentle readers, need to understand my profound gratitude – you have enabled me to host a singular space for dialogue, for mockery, for exposition. So much of “community” aspects of blogging have moved to social networks (and all of the linking has moved to twitter) that this space is almost a throwback. My own commitments have kept the postings sparse, in the last year or two. Blog is dead, they say – ok, I say.

But I like being contrarian. So, hereby I pledge to further the amazing renaissance Lapata has generated on CM recently; to introduce you to more refined sophistry; to be quaint in all the right ways; to keep the internet cafe meme going for all eternity.

I thank you.

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.

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, knowing that we will never have purchased enough milk or shampoo or toilet paper or sandwich bags on Saturday.

At first, I was bemused by this state. Sundays are a day of rest, my native informants told me. Yes, they are. I like to read my week’s worth of NewYorkers, RSS feeds, and watch the Bears/Flash Gordon on cable. That used to be my usual Sunday as well. Not necessarily “rest” but mindful inactivity. But, this closed businesses rankled me, a bit. I wasn’t living in some religious state, right? This was the heart of secular, capitalist EU where I oughta be able to buy some snacks and/or wine on Sunday. Then I learned that during the Advent calendar (four Sundays before Xmas), Berlin shops are all open. Yes! See, I told my native informants – here is consumerist world I recognize and love (and avoid): sidewalks crawling with overstuffed shopping bags and attached arms and legs, the best medley Mandy Moore ever sang with Paul Anka and five times the amount of perfume than is ever necessary wafting on every breath.

The Federal Constitutional Court of Germany decided on Dec 1st, 2009 that the Berlin ordinance allowing for the shops to be opened during the Advent calendar was unconstitutional. The suit was brought by the Evangelical Church of Berlin-Brandenburg and the Archdioceses of Berlin and the Court accepted their argument that the abrogation of Sunday’s “restfulness” meant that the members of these churches could no longer have freedom of religious expression (ie. closed shops). Presumably, no other religion is laying a claim to a Sunday full of commercial activity. I really don’t understand the prezel logic.

The up-shot is that in another secular state, we the non-Christians, live under the tyranny (I know, too strong, but you catch my drift) of the theists.

Funnily enough, this is the same prezel logic that will have to define the implementation of the Swiss ban on minarets. After all, the might of the majority defining what constitutes proper architecture and what constitutes proper Sunday behavior are going to have to find similarly “secular” footholds in the Constitutions.

In a recent piece, Ian Buruma argues that the Swiss ban is less a sign of concern about Muslim religiosity and more a reflection on Europe’s own drift to socialist, atheist utopia:

Much has changed, thanks to global capitalism, European integration, the stigmatisation of national feeling by two catastrophic world wars, and, perhaps most importantly, the widespread loss of religious faith. Most of us live in a secular, liberal, disenchanted world. The lives of most Europeans are freer now than ever before. We are no longer told what to do or think by priests or our social superiors. When they try, we tend not to take any notice.

Hard to see where he gets that idea, isn’t it? Sure, the perception holds – and maybe those northies are indeed so free and disenchanted – but not here in Berlin, and certainly not in Switzerland.

It is time for the annual CM slumber. I may poke my nose here if something compels but, really, I have a move to plan and execute. In the meantime, you can satiate yourself on my (in)frequent shoutouts on twitter.

Gentle readers, I am off to beautiful SF. If you are in the area, I would love to see you there. Expect some food fotos next week. In the meantime be nice to swines and laborers on this fine May Day.

Today marks the fifth year anniversary of this here blog. Here be the first post.

Thank you, gentle readers, for being here, for reading, for participating, for sending me links and articles, for being supportive, for sharing. Let the chapatis “flourish”. Yeah? My puns are getting worse, as I age.

I failed to note holi here. But this set of big pictures and a fortuitous scan (courtesy of Alam Sahib) gives me an excellent excuse to post this Mughal painting from 1625 and widely credited to Govardhan. It shows, first of all, the various activities associated with Holi. And I love the drunk Jahangir being carried to the bed.

Folks, I will be in Lahore for the next couple of weeks. You can follow my adventures through immigration portals here. And look forward to lots of new fotos upon the return.

I am pretty sure that the Jaipur Literary Festival is a mela that I need to be at.

I can’t be, but please go and rub shoulders with the likes of the Rudolphs, Wendy, Dalrymple et. al. In fact, William Dalrymple & Namita Gokhale are the creative directors. The festival will be held from 21st to 25th January 2009, at the Diggi Palace in Jaipur.

Of special note, Junoon Unplugged- Salman Ahmad and the “Sufi Qawwali Experience Live”. It is heartening to see that even as bombs are breaking down habitations, we can tie new bonds in other places.

SMSes are running around saying that India has attacked.

To all my gentle readers, a merry end to 2008.

Some blurry snaps of the night….