univerCity

I’ll show you the life of the mind

February 10, 2010

This article has been making the rounds; I got it from a twittering Sepoy. I’ve been trying to figure out what exactly the motivation for the lie is. Is it exploitative? (if we don’t have graduate students, we will have to teach Intro to Whatever Studies ourselves!) Evil? (let’s take bright, naïve young people full [...]

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noted

Megan Fox has more Pakistani fans than Zaid Hamid

February 10, 2010

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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optical character recognition

Sunday Reading for the Saints

February 7, 2010

Most of my usual conversation (passing/commenting on links) has moved to twitter, so doing a sunday link post seems almost, well, retro.
Still, things I do for you, gentle readers, will always be en vogue. Because that is how awesome you are. Each and every single one of you.

Drake Bennett’s Changing History, Boston Globe, [...]

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univerCity

Academic Publishing

February 6, 2010

Dear Dr. Lapata
In an effort to speed up the publication schedule and work through our backlog, we are attempting to collect any remaining permissions from authors who are moving up in line for publication. Our records indicate that we still require permissions for the image(s) contained in your article, “(redacted).” Please return these permissions as [...]

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homistan

Reading Tea Leaves in Pakistan

February 2, 2010

Last week I gave a small talk to a group of Model UN students at Hildesheim U. Thought I’d archive the presentation – and share it here. Not much going on. My main concern was to show the difference between internal and external public/policy debates*. And maybe also to step away from (inter)national narratives. I [...]

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homistan

Thousands of Years

February 1, 2010

Doing some research, I came across an official Pakistan government publication celebrating the 5 year anniversary of its existence. I scanned a few of the adverts in the issue. The paper I am writing concerns the “long history” of Pakistan such that allowed Mortimer Wheeler’s Five Thousand Years of Pakistan: An Archaeological Outline (1950) to [...]

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homistan

Mirza Ghalib

January 30, 2010

With thanks to Francesca Orsini, Alok Rai and his family, and Fran Pritchett, we have a scan of the only photo portrait of Mirza Asadullah Ghalib. Incredible.

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imperial watch

On Worldview

January 27, 2010

I am slowly cooking some posts – in the meantime, I discussed Pakistan/US on Worldview yesterday. Have a listen, why doncha?

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univerCity

French Tales

January 19, 2010

Le Roi de Lahore (1877) was the second opera written by Jules Massenet (1842-1912). The tale depicts the romance of the King Alim and the temple girl Sita against the backdrop of Mahmoud Ghazni’s invasion of Lahore.1

Théodore Pavie (1811-1896) the French traveller and writer of exotica for Revue des Deux Mondes studied Sanskrit in Paris, [...]

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univerCity

Simon Digby, Historian

January 13, 2010

Via Naim Sahib comes the sad news that Simon Digby, 79, passed away in Delhi. Anyone who has touched any scholarly/popular work on medieval to colonial India – esp. aspects of religion and art – has seen the fruits of his amazing intellect reflected in those works.
I will try and find a full biography [...]

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imperial watch

A Message from Kathy Kelly

January 11, 2010

Speaking Truth to Power by Kathy Kelly
January 8, 2010
There’s a phrase originating with the peace activism of the American Quaker movement: “Speak Truth to Power.” One can hardly speak more directly to power than addressing the Presidential Administration of the United States. This past October, students at Islamabad’s Islamic International University had a message [...]

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imperial watch

`Critical Foreign Language’

January 4, 2010

And a bit behind the curve: S. 1010: National Foreign Language Coordination Act of 2009

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talkies

Obligatory Avatar Post

January 3, 2010

But the problem with my analysis is, you will say, that Cameron is not the Department of State or Labor nor is he the official mouthpiece of some quasi-empire. You would be right. Yet Avatar is consensus. It is the consensus of nearly $300 million dollars – pored over every lovingly rendered pixel flesh and [...]

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holydays

Oh, End It Already

December 22, 2009

Gentle Readers,
I wish you all a best of 2010. Posting will be sparse for a little while but I hope to pick it up in the new year with tons of exciting insight into celebrity lives.
yours,
sepoy.

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noted

More Failures

December 11, 2009

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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homistan

Once More With Feelings

December 8, 2009

“Yet the Army leadership is refusing to strike at the heart of the Taliban command in Baluchistan Province.” declares another editorial from NYT today. If only these Pakistanis would realize – why won’t they just realize – that this is their wars, not ours.
Think back to March 2009. Then, the Taliban were on a [...]

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holydays

The Sunday Paradigm

December 6, 2009

Sundays in Berlin are quiet affairs. The usual shops are all closed – groceries, pharmacies, booksellers, fruit vendors, bike shops, bakeries, discount stores. You get the picture. In some U-bahn stations, in some busy corners, there would be a lone bakery, a hold-out grocer. New Berliners, such as myself, collect these informational nugget, [...]

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imperial watch

The Seth Jones Experience

December 4, 2009

Seth G. Jones, the author of “In the Graveyard of Empires: America’s War in Afghanistan,” is a civilian adviser to the American military.
One of the brains behind President Obama’s Afghanistan policy Seth G. Jones, of RAND & McCrystal has a particularly unhinged op-ed in today’s NYT: Take the War to Pakistan.
The United States [...]

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not baseball

Imran Khan, Considered

December 4, 2009

In The Review, I have a review of Christopher Sanford’s Imran Khan in which I briefly consider the man. Below is what didn’t make it into the review – for fairly obvious reasons – but, I thought I’d spin it here. No pun.
Much has been written on Imran Khan’s transcendence from the game of [...]

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imperial watch

The War Must Go On

December 2, 2009

The safe havens must be eliminated. The corruption must be stopped. The infrastructures must be built. The people must be free. The allies must stand together. The nuclear arms must remain safe. The bombing must be stopped. The safe haven must be eliminated.
30,000 plus a exit date of June 2011. It’s a safe [...]

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