potpurri

[We thank Professor Jyotsna Singh for contributing her Kurdistan Diary to CM, along with photos and captions. ] A Musafir in Iraqi Kurdistan, May 2012 The murmuring mass of an unknown language constitutes a delicious protection, envelops the foreigner (provided the country is not hostile to him) in an auditory film which halts at his ears all the [...]

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Last year it was Sepoy’s essays that were collected in a book, and this year, a collection of Lapata’s essays and art, the second CM book, The Little Book of Terror, was published by Farangi’s Foxhead Books. You can read some reviews of TLBT at the new CM page, CM Books. We had some terrific [...]

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Barkha Dutt has expressed incredulity on Twitter at being included in my essay “Bal Thackeray’s Poisonous Legacies” as an example of those in the worlds of media, celebrity, and politics who were soft-pedaling Bal Thackeray’s legacy. Dutt’s argument, expressed here and here, is that (a) it was sloppy and careless to include her in this [...]

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The Indian elite’s reaction to Bal Thackeray’s death raises profoundly disturbing question, argues Rohit Chopra. With news breaking earlier this evening of Bal Thackeray’s death, the movers and shakers of Indian society have been in overdrive as have been their lesser-known followers, minions, and acolytes on Twitter. The event is being milked for all it [...]

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Rohit Chopra continues the series on South Asia with a reflection on the anti-Sikh riots that followed the assassination of Indira Gandhi on October 31, 1984. Close to three decades after the pogroms, most of those responsible for the violence have not been brought to justice. In 1984 after the assassination of Indira Gandhi by [...]

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CM announces a series of writings on political life and public culture in South Asia, guest curated, gathered, and edited by Sanyasi. The idea is to present here a range of perspectives –by writers, journalists, academics, artists, and others–on the entanglements of culture, public life, and the political in and about the vast swath of [...]

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A snippet from my new Bookslut column by me in which I review Marina Warner’s Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights: Said’s thesis has unfortunately made little effect in the US outside of the academy. The greatest ostensible change seems to be on the use of the term “oriental” for persons of Asian [...]

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[Editor's note: This is the first part of M. Neelika Jayawardane's two-part essay on South African Desis. A longer version of this essay appeared in Transition 107] In my return to Southern Africa as an adult, I was delighted to find a space in which “Indianness” was engaged in a different conversation. It was only then, almost [...]

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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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I have a review of Granta’s ten years post-9/11 issue up on The Sunday Guardian (New Delhi). When I first wrote my draft, I sent it to Sepoy, because I was worried it was too much of a screed. Sepoy, upon reading it, was disappointed in the lack of screedishness of the review. He had [...]

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I have a new piece up at Caravan on Yashpal’s great Partition novel, Jhootha Sach. It’s very nicely reproduced, though I seem to have missed the weird new title during the editing process (“Night Smudged Light”). My title, “Late for the Party,” must have seemed too cavalier. Here’s an excerpt: Jhootha Sach, first published in [...]

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