Some blurry snaps of the night….

via Babu…

Wallace Stevens, “The Man with the Blue Guitar” (excerpts)

I

The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, “You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.”

The man replied, “Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.”

And they said then, “But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are.”

II

I cannot bring a world quite round,
Although I patch it as I can.

I sing a hero’s head, large eye
And bearded bronze, but not a man,

Although I patch him as I can
And reach through him almost to man.

If to serenade almost to man
Is to miss, by that, things as they are,

Say it is the serenade
Of a man that plays a blue guitar.

III

Ah, but to play man number one,
To drive the dagger in his heart,

To lay his brain upon the board
And pick the acrid colors out,

To nail his thought across the door,
Its wings spread wide to rain and snow,

To strike his living hi and ho,
To tick it, tock it, turn it true,

To bang from it a savage blue,
Jangling the metal of the strings

IV

So that’s life, then: things as they are?
It picks its way on the blue guitar.

A million people on one string?
And all their manner in the thing,

And all their manner, right and wrong,
And all their manner, weak and strong?

The feelings crazily, craftily call,
Like a buzzing of flies in autumn air,

And that’s life, then: things as they are,
This buzzing of the blue guitar.

V

Do not speak to us of the greatness of poetry,
Of the torches wisping in the underground,

Of the structure of vaults upon a point of light.
There are no shadows in our sun,

Day is desire and night is sleep.
There are no shadows anywhere.

The earth, for us, is flat and bare.
There are no shadows. Poetry

Exceeding music must take the place
Of empty heaven and its hymns,

Ourselves in poetry must take their place,
Even in the chattering of your guitar.

VI

A tune beyond us as we are,
Yet nothing changed by the blue guitar;

Ourselves in the tune as if in space,
Yet nothing changed, except the place

Of things as they are and only the place
As you play them, on the blue guitar,

Placed, so, beyond the compass of change,
Perceived in a final atmosphere;

For a moment final, in the way
The thinking of art seems final when

The thinking of god is smoky dew.
The tune is space. The blue guitar

Becomes the place of things as they are,
A composing of senses of the guitar.

VII

It is the sun that shares our works.
The moon shares nothing. It is a sea.

When shall I come to say of the sun,
It is a sea; it shares nothing;

The sun no longer shares our works
And the earth is alive with creeping men,

Mechanical beetles never quite warm?
And shall I then stand in the sun, as now

I stand in the moon, and call it good,
The immaculate, the merciful good,

Detached from us, from things as they are?
Not to be part of the sun? To stand

Remote and call it merciful?
The strings are cold on the blue guitar.

VIII

The vivid, florid, turgid sky,
The drenching thunder rolling by,

The morning deluged still by night,
The clouds tumultuously bright

And the feeling heavy in cold chords
Struggling toward impassioned choirs,

Crying among the clouds, enraged
By gold antagonists in air–

I know my lazy, leaden twang
Is like the reason in a storm;

And yet it brings the storm to bear.
I twang it out and leave it there.

IX

And the color, the overcast blue
Of the air, in which the blue guitar

Is a form, described but difficult,
And I am merely a shadow hunched

Above the arrowy, still strings,
The maker of a thing yet to be made;

The color like a thought that grows
Out of a mood, the tragic robe

Of the actor, half his gesture, half
His speech, the dress of his meaning, silk

Sodden with his melancholy words,
The weather of his stage, himself.

XXX

From this I shall evolve a man.
This is his essence: the old fantoche

Hanging his shawl upon the wind,
Like something on the stage, puffed out,

His strutting studied through centuries.
At last, in spite of his manner, his eye

A-cock at the cross-piece on a pole
Supporting heavy cables, slung

Through Oxidia, banal suburb,
One-half of all its installments paid.

Dew-dapper clapper-traps, blazing
From crusty stacks above machines.

Ecce, Oxidia is the seed
Dropped out of this amber-ember pod,

Oxidia is the soot of fire,
Oxidia is Olympia.

XXXI

How long and late the pheasant sleeps
The employer and employee contend,

Combat, compose their droll affair.
The bubbling sun will bubble up,

Spring sparkle and the cock-bird shriek.
The employer and employee will hear

And continue their affair. The shriek
Will rack the thickets. There is no place,

Here, for the lark fixed in the mind,
In the museum of the sky. The cock

Will claw sleep. Morning is not sun,
It is this posture of the nerves,

As if a blunted player clutched
The nuances of the blue guitar.

It must be this rhapsody or none,
The rhapsody of things as they are.

XXXII

Throw away the lights, the definitions,
And say of what you see in the dark

That it is this or that it is that,
But do not use the rotted names.

How should you walk in that space and know
Nothing of the madness of space,

Nothing of its jocular procreations?
Throw the lights away. Nothing must stand

Between you and the shapes you take
When the crust of shape has been destroyed.

You as you are? You are yourself.
The blue guitar surprises you.

XXXIII

That generation’s dream, aviled
In the mud, in Monday’s dirty light,

That’s it, the only dream they knew,
Time in its final block, not time

To come, a wrangling of two dreams.
Here is the bread of time to come,

Here is its actual stone. The bread
Will be our bread, the stone will be

Our bed and we shall sleep by night.
We shall forget by day, except

The moments when we choose to play
The imagined pine, the imagined jay.

I failed to note Gandhiji’s birthday yesterday. Or note these great photos:

(Pawan Kumar/Reuters)

(Narinder Nanu/AFP/Getty Images)

Over at Big Picture, my favorite blog if you care, is a wonderful series, Observing Ramadan.

Our friend Lapata is having an exhibition at Counter Pulse and I failed, miserably, to notify you. More importantly, I wasn’t able to attend in person.

She has put the works featured in the show on her flickr page: Dhoom Dhamaka! Show. 

I think some of her strongest work, to date, is being featured in this show – specifically, the Rasa series. Since she has portrayed generals and kings, she immediately got how a true theocratic-juristical Leader, such as me, should be captured. After a lengthy, exhaustive, and exhausting series of photo-shoots – scattered around the globe – she finally was able to capture the sprite that lurks behind my twinkling eyes. That iridescent smile.

Karuna
Bhayanak
Bibhatsa
Shanta
Adbhut
Raudra
Veer
Hasya
Shringar

In all seriousness, go see her show:

1. Dhoom Dhamaka!

Sept. 4 – Oct. 1

Opening reception: Sept. 4 at 6-8 PM.

CounterPulse
1310 Mission Street, San Francisco, CA 94103

The show will be held in conjunction with a performance by Joti Singh’s Duniya Dance Company. Performances will take place Sept. 11-13 at 8 PM.

The theme? The War on Terror! Paintings are shown in the lobby and can be seen from 12-6 Tues-Fri, at the opening, and during the performance (where they will be projected onto the stage). For more information about purchasing tickets ($12-$20) for the performance and directions to the venue, visit CounterPulse .

originally posted September 13, 2007

Jagtay Raho was the ever-contradictory yell uttered at regular intervals by the night watchman in our neighborhood. He was a wizened old man, at least I think he was old, who carried a heavy stick and sometimes a M1 Carbine. Jagtay Raho, he would dramatically intone right as he passed by our house. Stay Awake. As far as I could tell, the man served no purpose beside making me furious. Except during Ramadan. That is when he would switch his 3 a.m. cry to Uth Jao. Sahri ka Waqt Hai, Wake Up, it is time to eat before the fast.

In Ramadan, Lahore lit up like one of those trick candles. Bright and shimmery. The usual rhythms of the city reversed themselves. Streets became navigable. Cranky butchers threw in an extra chop. Aunties bargained but with lips muttering silent prayers. There was less noise. More genialness. The blast of the anti-aircraft guns to signal the breaking of the fast. The mounds and mounds of dates. The fried foods and fresh fruits piled on the same table. The 7Up in Milk cold drink. The pakoras. The uncle sneaking a cigarette smoke behind the tree. The unexplained weight gain on certain people. The never-ending taraveeh. Qur’an on a loop on the telly. The fetishization of color. And an ever-growing sense of invincibility in my 14 year old self.

I don’t know about spiritual blessings but Ramadan was solely a time for me to flex my muscles. I could fast – exalted in the complete mastery over my own flesh – all day, and still play a game of cricket or squash, run countless errands, and bike to school and back. All this in the oppressive heat and humidity of July and August. Tough, doesn’t even begin to describe me.

Look Ma, no food.

The glories of keeping full fast – for a whole month – while patiently waiting the last excruciating hours of the sinking sun were too many to describe: One would get trotted out to the company of adults and praised for one’s dedication and stamina; one would get to brag and lord over one’s peers and friends who only managed to fast for 24 or 29 days; one would strain to remember the last Ramadan – was I three, I wonder? – when one didn’t hold an entire month’s fast.

But all that glory paled, at least in my eyes, to the pitch black night bicycle ride to the market. To get fresh yogurt. I mean, not only are you awake when the world is supposed to be asleep. But everyone is awake. Except no cars are on the street. I would zig and zag on my bike all the way to the kulcha and yogurt shop, whizzing through the night mist, thrilled to be out there before the false dawn.

My rosy nostalgia aside, Ramadan Mubarak to all of you gentle readers.

Pakistan is in dire straits. It is a nation at a crossroads. Extremism is around the corner. The politicians are corrupt. The nukes could end up in the hands of bin Laden.

Pakistan is in dire straits. Its people demand accountability. Those who claim to protect it and make it prosperous seem busy keeping themselves in power. There is no hope for change since the people have no power. They are stuck under a dictator. If the citizens of Pakistan are to be real agents of change, they need a way forward. They need democracy.

In March of 2007, when lawyers came out on the streets, there were only two available narratives. Those who held a results-based approach argued that Musharraf’s dictatorial regime was the best case scenario, the lesser of the two evils. The evil being, of course, justice, accountability and democracy. They raised the specter of rampant jihadism spreading through the populations. They pointed towards the economic development that had occurred on Musharraf’s watch. They warned that Pakistan had some amazingly corrupt politicians. And that US needed a stable ally, a dependable ally, in our war against terror(ism).

Then there were those of us who trusted the people of Pakistan. We knew that jihadism is not some air-borne virus that people can contract by simply inhaling. We knew that it wasn’t Musharraf who had brought about economic development but the people themselves. We knew that politicians are corrupt everywhere – including the US – so why the exception of dictator for Pakistan? We knew that a partnership can only be among equals. And the will of the people needed to be heard.

Ah. But this so-called Lawyer’s Movement was a big sham, we were told. These are just elites. Where are the “people”? Why can’t the Lawyers bring out the masses? Why do they insist on democracy and justice when the people are more concerned with food and security.

Well. Pakistan just had a slow-burning, people-powered, secular revolution and they forced a sitting dictator – who had the complete confidence and support of the only superpower in the world – out. Peacefully. Without any bloodshed. Without any crazy mullah grabbing the nukes and blowing up the world. Without inflation hitting 10,000,000%. Without any riots. With suicide bombings in Lahore. With two regions embroiled in near civil-war. With the same corrupt politicians in charge. With the unshakeable faith, the belief, that they deserved justice. That they deserved the right to have the power to act. That they were citizens of their country, not keeps.

This is unprecedented. This is historic. This is a momentous time in the history of this nation. It has successfully forced accountability – through peaceful and legal means – on its leaders. The people of Pakistan – lawyers and all – have exercised their agency.

And like every other such exercise – be it the election of 2000 or the upcoming election of 2008 in the US – the outcome is up in the air. And hence, the hope is not in the fate of this particular dictator, it is in the accountability to the Pakistani publics, of their representative. If we really want a secure ally in Pakistan, we would do our best to strengthen the people of Pakistan.

PS. Catch me on Worldview with Jerome McDonnell.

PPS. CM friend TSK finally found a picture of Mush’s departure.

Not that I have been burning up the internets lately, but I am officially on a break for the next six or so weeks.

Guest posts, should they arrive, will be a welcome contribution.

If you write, or read, something cool, post it in comments below for all of us. 

I wish you all, my gentle readers, a wonderful summer.

AP: Racial Profiling Eyed for Terror Probes: Terrorist Profile Could Single Out Muslims, Arabs, or Other Racial and Ethnic Groups.

Know Your Rights produced by the excellent Muslim Advocates.

PS: Happy Birthday Baba! And Happy Birthday, America.

The only thing better than the meals I had in SF, was the company. More photography of the culinary set below the fold.

There are more pics of SF and WWDC and whatnot…at the Flickr site

I will be in Sanfranchisco next week – attending Apple’s annual orgy of technology and hype. But also hanging out with me dear friends. I might live-blog Jobs address but I have a feeling my CM audience will not really care. So, I will IM-blog it instead. It goes without saying that posting will be slight. But, look forward to more pics!

Some pics from my recent trip. I have like 3 times more but I got tired of uploading them to Flickr.

Enjoy.

Wow, I totally missed CM’s 4th anniversary. Four years, 1095 posts, 98667 comments and 207,778 spams have passed since the beginning. A lot has changed in me, and in my approach to blogging, and in the tone of CM over the years. I don’t really know if besides Zack and Nitin and Sin, I have any of the earliest readers still around (excluding my prior meat-world fellows, sorry morcy). Internets are fickle friends. Except for lapata and farangi neé steve marlowe. Those two are legit.

There are some visions of the future. I want to bring the academic world more squarely into CM. Discuss journal articles, do more history posts, be snarky and caustic, again. There are talks of publishing some books. Starting a e-magazine with some friends & c. But, of course, nothing until we get Obama elected, eh?

This much though is true, nothing would be possible without you, my gentle readers. Thank you for continuing to show up, for reading, commenting, emailing, sharing. Spread the Love.

And now, Announcements:

1. Hiphopistan – Yogi B and Chee Malabar! & others. The brain-child of man-genius Samip Mallick, this incredible event will shake the cobwebs off Foster Hall. I am going to insist that they turn it up to 11. April 17-19th. The linkages betwixt desi academics, desi hiphop and my hood need to be far stronger than they are. Hiphopistan is a step in the right direction. Do Come!

2. Speaking of desi academia and popular culture: Interjunction – an edited multiblog aimed at facilitating conversations between the media and academia has recently launched. It is something that I will be reading and you should too. Check out their mission statements, as well.

His caramel baritone is singular. Like those of us at CM, you probably thought he was black, before you saw the video; not that it mattered, because his being a tiny, tiny, little, elfin Englishman, with a singing voice that dissolves panties on contact, made it even more amusing when he mounted and thrust himself into worldwide singles charts in 1987. And now he’s sodding your web-browser. Or, at least, he’s the knob with which your browser gets rogered.

I remember watching the video hundreds of times that summer, because MTV refused to play much of anything else, and for whatever reason I thought the blonde girl who appears occasionally was hot, in a sweetly flawed, Rosanna Arquette, Desperately-Seeking-Susan sort of way.

It’s twenty years gone, and I’ve a quarter of a life’s academic conditioning and pop-culture dung stinking up my skull. Three times already today, on this, April 1st, 2008, I have been rick-rolled. Here we are then, reunited. The man and his big-one have become a meme and internets phenomenon. And I didn’t believe him when he claimed he was never gonna give me up. The video, unpacked:

The man-meme appears first, outside. He is wearing sunglasses to hide his eyes–his true intentions–from others. Shadows play off lit concrete. Black/white. Black bartenders in Daisy Duke shorts bounce off fences. Inside, at a rehearsal for a banquet or wedding reception, black and white are again separated by a bar. Of course, the black bartender is at work, while tiny-dancer stands elevated, with two hot white chicks.

Suddenly, because the Rollmaster’s voice is possessed of bottomless funk, the spunky, no-nonsense, black bartender finds his equilibrium straight-up hijacked. He begins bobbing. Eventually, he’s doing the running-man. Then the bartender actually vaults over the bar, breaking the symbolic barrier between himself and the UberFunk Astmaster.

Next, we find ourselves in the night-time raincoat train station of the human soul, where the whitest white guy superego engages in very lame knee-dancing before the blondest blonde personification of the Universal ho, whose position in the Archetypes has since been usurped by Paris Hilton. Now the black fellow makes an appearance; no longer held back by the bar or the fence, he turns flips off the walls–liberated, free, at last, loose in the unconscious.

Ultimately, the video is an expression of the yearnings of white men of good will to be considered, weighed and accepted by minority communities with whom they sympathize, if not empathize, and whose cultures they appreciate. Herein barriers fall, opposites unite, taboos are transgressed, and new syntheses emerge.

Every honky wants a nod and dance from the bruthas. Some even write for Chapati Mystery, own hookahs, and are just now realizing how deeply the badly expressed hopes for racial and cultural harmonies during their late adolescence may have affected the places they hang out now.

Thanks to Sepoy, my new website is up and running. The website currently displays only the work that will be in the show; my Flickr site will continue to display all my pictures. Some new paintings are not yet posted anywhere, as they will make their debut at the opening on Feb. 7. For those of you who have been asking about buying paintings or prints of paintings, the price list for the show is posted on the website. In a couple of weeks I will post information about purchasing signed, high-quality (giclée), limited edition prints of some of the paintings in the show, for those interested in that option.

I have been waiting, patiently and with bated breath, for this moment for a while now. Those close to me can attest that I am not a patient man, so this has been a rather Amir Hamzaish effort on my part.

Lapata is having a show!

Let me state that a bit more emphatically:
Lapata is having a show!

This being the First CM Event of The Century, everyone on the West Coast and on the East Coast and Around the World must join us, introduce themselves, and buy lapata a martini.

If you are new to the game, you can view Lapata’s work at her flickr site.

_______________________________________________________________________

A Happy Eid (and xmas, hannukah, kwanzaa, festivus) to all CM readers – may your bakras look better than Fidel.

Eid Mubarak.

To all my gentle readers, a very delightful and happy Eid ul-Fitr. It is either today or Saturday across the Muslim world … it is fun everywhere.

I will try and get some Maamool and some firni. Good Stuff.

Oh, and Congratulations to Al Gore!

Today, on Bapu’s birthday, here is a talkie:

and a silence:

And so we wait, and see monks with prayers on their lips, and students with hopes in their hearts, marching towards pagodas, as soldiers armed by the Chinese beat them. And the world’s largest democracy, India, does nothing. [thx Rohit]

As a birthday gift (contestable) to you, my gentle reader, I will post all the things that have been looming in my head for the past week. All. Watch this space.

I.

India vs. Pakistan in the World Cup Twenty20 Finals. I am sure this is big news in the subcontinent. Yuvraj Singh and Mahendra Dhoni. Imran Nazir and Shahid Afridi. There is a solid defense of the Twenty20 format by Osman Samiuddin from the Pakistani [and Indian, as well] perspective:

About right, too, for the format is one the average Pakistani, fan and player, easily recognises and feels comfortable with. England may have been responsible for institutionalising and selling the concept, but its informal, Asian cousin, played out on streets with apartments as spectators and on grounds with cement pitches and dangerous outfields has long been Pakistan cricket’s lifeline.

This is, then, really the game that us desi kids played and play. The tennis ball version [taped ball or not], usually 10 or 12 overs; the hard ball version, 20 or 25 overs; on a cement pitch; front-foot, across the line batting; block hole, yorker bowling; aggressive fielding, running; uptempo and hurried pace. I have played this version of the game my entire life. Here is the rub, though. When we played this game, the goal was to get better, to learn to stay at the crease, to master the art of bowling according to a plan not as a reaction, to learn to keep control of the ball even after you have hit it. The goal, was to play a full game of cricket. There were/are tons of yuvrags, afridis … everyone had to have such players. They were called dharay (clobberers). I don’t remember any particular pride associated with such a designation.

Admit it. The odds are stacked against the bowler in cricket. The batsman is padded, and has a very thick stick and can catch a break by moving to the non-stricker’s end. The beauty of cricket is to make those odds even out – by pitch, by bowl, by field, by pace. And then ask the bat to rise to the occasion. 2020 makes a mockery of that balance and stacks everything to credit the bat. Smaller boundaries, hampered field placement, and the urge to “measure the distance of the Sixes”.

Sure it is fun comparing Yuvrag’s 6 in six balls performance, to Gibb’s 6 in six balls during WC 2007 and, further back, to Sir Gary Sobers’ 6 in six balls in 1968. But do these batsmen qualify as genus Britannicus, to quote CLR James? Judging from the Test career of Sir Gary Sobers, of course. Will we get a similar chance to judge the young Yuvraj Singh? I have no idea. And I fear that we will not find out. I fear that the 2020 will splinter a team into a perfectly natural division of skill-sets, of specialist dharays like Shahid Afridi never having to grow beyond what they played in their backyards. How will someone like Shane Warne or Abdul Qadir or Imran Khan emerge out of this format? Nathan Bracken? Pfft. That, in a nutshell, is the reason I remain unenthusiastic about this format.

II

This October 6 election is a sham and a joke. So are these noble sentiments from Benazir Bhutto. I also would like to call your attention to William Dalrymple’s contrarian take in Democracy, not terror, is the engine of political Islam. He has some good points but he ignores that the reason _only_ the religious parties have been able to make a popular appeal is that every other possible democratic voice has been brutally silenced in the last 50 years by repressive, dictatorial regimes. The stats of Muslim Brotherhood and MMA in Egypt or Pakistan do not, then, reveal a populist appeal of militant Islam but the lack of any option EXCEPT the dictatorial one or the Islamist one: whether in Cairo or Karachi. The Mosque is the only place left for political mobilization – after the living room and the street have been taken away by the State. Furthermore, it is rather simplistic to call every religious party “Islamist”. Dalrymple, I know, knows better. There is, of course, a place and role for religious belief in political sphere. Mark Lilla can talk all he wants about the American exceptionalism but we are all watching the saga of the Mormon Mitt Romney or the lack of Democratic appeal to the Sunday Crowd. Simply because an observant Muslim wants to run for the Parliament does not mean that country will become “Teh Axis of Evil!”. And Hamas/Palestine is symptomatic of the rest of the Islamicate world … since when? Of course, I won’t badger the point by pointing out that the only so-called “existing democracy” in the Middle East – Israel – has never been accused of being “secular”.

III.

The NYT opened up its archives. Did you hear? For us historians, it is an amazing tool. Here, for example, is an early analysis of 1857 [fearing the Mohammadans], an early description of Gandhi, an articulation of the American Empire and a critique, the threat of Islam … from Moor to Negro [which seemed a pandemic threat], Orientalism, and something about Harlem’s Hitler from 1935 that I am really curious about. Finally, I have really enjoyed this essay on Jesse James, so I found his original death notice.
IV.

Rarely do we see the work of Empire and Information as succinctly and clearly as in this discussion between Gen. Douglas M. Stone and Bloggers. I really, really recommend historians give this one a close read.

The fact that there still exist official titles in sub-continental bureaucracy as Tehsildar, Kanungo and Patwari makes me very, very happy. I want to be a Patwari.

Annemarie Schimmel on YouTube

V.

I am off, now, to watch The National at the Vic. Let us all hope that tonight is better than the last time I enjoyed a bday concert.