As part of the Year End Clearance®, below are posts that I started at some point in last year, never finished, and will never finish. I would like them to stop haunting my Write tab – so I am deleting these half-finished, half-started thoughts and giving them a public burial. Below are the dates, topic and reasons-why-I-never-finished-writing-them for all the posts.
Dedicated to Boudewijn Buckinx:
1.
Title: No Woolmer No Cry
Date Started: March 29, 2007
Topic: Bob Woolmer’s murder.
Reason: No Comment.
2.
Title: Hima
Date Started: March 26, 2007
Topic: Review of the documentary, Hima: The Life and Times of a Lady from Awadh
Reason: I got too busy.
3.
Title: With Apologies to Our Colonial Father: A Letter from Post-National Pakistan
Date Started: March 23, 2007
Topic: It was going to be one of those Orwell tricks of writing from the future about the present in the guise of speaking about the past.
Reason: You know what cures hangovers? A great breakfast at Valois.
4.
Title: Joy
Date Started: Feb 8, 2007
Topic: Some youtube clip.
Reason: I came to my senses. YouTube clips can only be inflicted on the dearest of friends – and then, only in emails.
5.
Title: Dirt and Fire
Date Started: Dec 22, 2006
Topic: An Urdu column I wanted to translate.
Reason: It was just all too much – unpacking, uncoding and explaining the translation.
6.
Title: Outram
Date Started: Nov 1, 2006
Topic: “Sir James Outram has the honor of having the first Equestrian statue in India.” Now, this would have made a good post. It had pictures. And historical details. And I had just written a paper on Outram.
Reason: I had just written a paper on Outram.
7.
Title: Teaching Postcoloniality
Date Started: Oct 8, 2006
Topic: A Roundtable I attended.
Reason: Hard to say, but I think mostly because I am _still_chewing it over.
8.
Title: Cricket, Interrupted.
Date Started: Aug 25, 2006
Topic: The abandoned Oval test and its echoes back into our colonial pasts.
Reason: This became a more personal post than I had intended – which made me stop writing. And then life interrupted.
9.
Title: The Outsider
Date Started: Jun 27, 2006
Topic: William Moorcroft (d. 1825) and his horse-trading, spying, adventuring ways across Afghanistan and Western Iran.
Reason: This ended up being an email send out to my Orientalist friends.
You can purchase, for delivery around the world,
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
sepoy … nice touch, though I’ll miss the post on postcoloniality roundtable … guess I’ll have to get offline and write to attend the roundtable myself in future.
Eager to read the Moorcroft bit. Will it be made public?
You can do that? I didn’t know you could do that. Can you do that?
Oh boy, my unfinished posts file.
Oooh, yes, do post the Moorcroft piece.
Actually I popped in to see what you had said about Woolmer. Even with that stunningly bad pun in the headline, please comment. An inquiring mind wants to know.
Will post the Moorcroft, ok.
Vincentina: That headline was designed specifically to deter anyone from ever asking my opinion on Woolmer.