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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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. [...]
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Seriously! In the list of horrible waste of tax-payer’s hard earned money exposed by Fox News, I saw this: $50,000 to build a computer model of an ancient city in Pakistan complete with “animated and interactive ‘inhabitants’. If history is our guide, it won’t be long before these inhabitants fall to radical ideologies and turn [...]
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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 [...]
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Below the fold, two great events in NYC coming up. Do attend and support.
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An event in Chicago. Friday, July 10th @ 6 at Mess Hall. Blurb below. Hope folks can make it. Even though Pakistan dominates the news cycle as a new front in Obama’s war, it remains a country strangely bereft of context – even history. We learn of radicalization of its population, of the march of [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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Iran 2009 = US 2000 or maybe Iran 2009 = US 2006 or maybe Iran 2009 = US 2008 or maybe Iran 2009 = Pakistan 2007. I grow weary of all the punditry but the images are arresting. I especially love the one above, which appeared on NYT. The banner states: Patience, Dawn is Near. [...]
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Well, the Chicago adventure has run its course. Off to Berlin, where I will be joining the Freie Universität faculty as a Juniorprofessur of South Asia history in the Department of History and Cultural Studies and the Berlin Graduate School of Muslim Cultures and Societies. Which means: Transitions! The good news, I presume, is that [...]
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I endorse both!
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After two years, Dr. Sen was finally released on bail by the Supreme Court. See Free Dr. Binayak Sen and, somewhat related, New Prisons for Old.
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You have so many interlocuters here, here, here and here that to respond to your answer to my earlier comment, I am afraid that I have to move it up here above the fold. We finally come to the nub of the matter. Your response makes it crystal clear that in your reading Taliban = [...]
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“(The New York Times put him on a retainer for several months after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, when he was working as a journalist, to help its correspondents better understand Pakistan.)” (emphasis mine.) Oh NYT, why do you always fall for those “silver-tongued interpreters“.
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