noted

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Since moving to Berlin, I haven’t watched any Fox or gone to political websites or kept up with all that stuff. Guido keeps me up. Check this, though. Huma Imtiaz and Rahma are twittering across Sindh/Punjab and beyond (follow them here and here) and snapped this at a bazaar in Multan.
The reason it makes it [...]

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3 QUARKS DAILY PRIZE IN ARTS & LITERATURE:
We are now going to do the Arts and Literature Prizes, and here’s how it will work: we will soon begin accepting nominations for this prize. After the nominating period is over, there will be a round of voting by our readers which will narrow down the entries [...]

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Hasan demands that this headline exist somewhere, and so it does. Here is a statistical analysis of over 210 million facebook accounts which one can query by country etc. Pakistan’s lists of group likes are quite instructive: Vin Diesel, for example, beats out the Prophet Muhammad. “I really hate slow computers” tells you something [...]

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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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Who among us hasn’t dreamed of unearthing rare historical treasures in old cast-aside trunks? Ok, maybe you haven’t but I stay up all night dreaming such scenarios.
Jeremy Kahn, Kulwant Roy: Indian history in a yellow crate of negatives, NYT, Tuesday, June 17, 2008.
Also, some of the photos are on Outlook India. I especially loved [...]

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A german nursery rhyme, that I just found. I need coffee, desperately.
C-a-f-f-e-e / C-o-f-f-e-e
C-a-f-f-e-e / C-o-f-f-e-e
trink nicht so viel Caffee! / Don’t drink so much coffee
nicht für Kinder ist der Türkentrank / Not for children is this Turkish drink
schwächt die Nerven / Weakens your nerves
macht dich blaß lassen und krank / makes you pale [...]

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Charles Taylor, The philosopher-citizen:
In our time, we can almost fear that the public intellectual is an endangered species. On the one hand, the role can be trivialized by the proliferation of collective petitions for fashionable causes which it is very easy to sign. On the other, in the making of policy the intellectual is often [...]

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Yasmin Khan, whose Great Partition is highly recommended, has an excerpt up on Random House India site*, The Ghost of Udham Singh:
But the story of his life poses interesting challenges for the historian interested in ‘facts’ – for the stories about Singh are fragmented and seem sometimes only to take sustenance from their repetition. Some [...]

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This, for some strange reason, popped up from the archives of my email.
All of us, even when we think we have noted every tiny detail, resort to set pieces which have already been staged often enough by others. We try to reproduce the reality, but the harder we try, the more we find the [...]

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I recently picked up Hyderabad: A Biography by Narendra Luther but gave up a little too soon into it. I need to furnish a lot more context of the 19th c. city into a course I am planning for next term. A classic in the field is Margit Pernau’s The Passing of Patrimonialism: Politics and [...]

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There are probably no more readers left, but CM is exiting its long hiatus. Just to catch up, here are a few things I, um, failed to note properly.
1. On the Jaswant/Jinnah “Controversy”, one can begin with this op-ed by Sugata Bose, Why Jinnah Matters and then continue to Naim Sahib’s front-page corrective, Jaswant Not-So [...]

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Below the fold, two great events in NYC coming up. Do attend and support.

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is still a binding contract. A close friend of CM (farangi) has been going through some rough times lately. He contract was unlawfully terminated by his employers. You can read the sordid details in David Moltz, So Sue Me, July 6, 2009. You can drop him a line of support here or stevemarlowe at hotmail [...]

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Nina Bernstein, Piecing Together an Immigrant’s Life the U.S. Refused to See, New York Times, July 5, 2009:
In the end, his body went back in a box to his native village, to be buried by his Pakistani widow and their two children, conceived on his only two trips home in a dozen years. He had [...]

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I really don’t know what is going on here. or here. or here. or here. or here. or here. or here. or here.
But, I totally know what’s going on here.
Jack Wilkes for LIFE in India, 1945. There are some amazing shots of Jinnah, and perhaps the best visual depiction of the true colonial subaltern: [...]

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