Degrees of desperation

Published on May 6, 2013 in Education. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Ramachandra Guha in Hindustan Times:

Among public universities in India, the University of Delhi stands out, and for at least seven reasons:

First, it has an integrated campus, with undergraduate colleges and graduate faculties in the sciences, the humanities, the social sciences, law, and even fine arts;

Second, it has an all-India catchment, with students coming in large numbers from Bihar and Orissa, from the south, and from the North-east;

Third, it has consistently had some of the best colleges and postgraduate faculties in India and even Asia;

Fourth, the campus has always been hospitable to all political tendencies. Unlike some other Indian universities, it has not been a Marxist or Hindutva stronghold;

Fifth, this pluralism is intellectual as well as ideological. In the departments I myself know best, such as history and economics, students are not force-fed a single way of studying the subject (as they would in some other universities), but acquainted with diverse theories and approaches;

Sixth, although women students and faculty are still not fully free or equal, compared to other universities in India DU has more consistently encouraged women to excel in scholarly pursuits;

Seventh, although it is a residential university, it is closely integrated with the city, since it has a large number of day scholars. Unlike the IITs and IIMs, here students can get a good education without being distanced from Indian society as a whole. More:

Academic excellence and St. Stephen’s College

Published on May 6, 2013 in Education. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

A guest post by Thane Richard in Kafila:

 I recently read an article in Kafila – more like an angry, reflective rant – written by some students from St. Stephen’s College in Delhi. To quickly summarize, the piece criticized the draconian views of the Principal of St. Stephen’s College regarding curfews on women’s dormitories and his stymying of his students’ democratic ideals of discussion, protest, and open criticism. More broadly, though, the article’s writers seemed to be speaking about the larger stagnant institution of Indian higher education, overseen by a class of rigid administrators represented by this sexist and bigoted Principal, as described by the students. The students’ frustration was palpable in the text and their story felt to me like a perfect example of what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object. Except Indian students are not an unstoppable force. Not even close.

In 2007 I was a student at St. Stephen’s College for seven months as part of a study abroad program offered by my home institution, Brown University. In as many ways as possible, I tried to become a Stephanian: I joined the football (soccer) team, acted in a school play written and directed by an Indian peer, performed in the school talent show, was a member of the Honors Economics Society, and went to several student events on and off campus. More importantly, though, I was a frequenter of the school’s cafe and enjoyed endless chai’s and butter toasts with my Indian peers under the monotonous relief of the fans spinning overhead. Most of my friends were 3rd years, like me, and all of them were obviously very bright. I was curious about what their plans were after they graduated. With only a few exceptions, they were planning on pursuing second undergraduate degrees at foreign universities.

“Wait, what?! You are studying here for three years just so you can go do it again for four more years?” I could not grasp the logic of this. What changed my understanding was when I started taking classes at St. Stephen’s College. Except for one, they were horrible.  More:

Everest rage

Published on May 4, 2013 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .
Graphic: Nepali Times

Graphic: Nepali Times

Kunda Dixit in Nepali Times:

On the month that Nepal is preparing to mark the 60th anniversary of the first ascent of the world’s highest mountain by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Sherpa, the news of a gangland-style fight on Mt Everest has come as a disturbing reminder of how much climbing has changed.

The partnership between Hillary and Tenzing marked the beginning of a long tradition of teamwork between Sherpas and their mountaineer employers who valued their stamina, endurance, and sure-footedness at high altitude. But the undercurrent of resentment between the ‘sahibs’ and their hired porter-guides had been growing. It reached boiling point last Saturday on the Western Cwm.

The incident on 27 April on the Lhotse Face below Camp 3 has shaken the climbing fraternity, and divided the tourism fraternity into distinct camps depending on whose version of events they believe more. But the bottomline is that the publicity has hurt the reputation of both sides in the mountain fight. More:

In the National Geographic:

The weekend scuffle between a group of Sherpas and a small band of Western climbers high on Everest has raised some basic questions about the nature of the Sherpa-climber social contract, and about the culture of Sherpas. Although the term “Sherpa” has long been a part of the popular lexicon, outsiders generally know little about the role they play in Himalayan climbing.

The Sherpas are a small ethnic group that share many cultural, racial, and linguistic features with Tibetans, who live to their immediate north. About 3,000 Sherpas reside in the drainage areas immediately below Everest; a population of 20,000 or more live in villages to the south.

Until the early 1950s, no high Himalayan peak in Nepal had ever been climbed—at least by mortals, the Sherpas say. Then, as now, they saw the Himalayan peaks and foothills as the realm of a cavorting pantheon of gods. Presciently, a prominent Sherpa Buddhist lama predicted 80 years ago that much attention would come to be focused on Everest, and that people would “suffer hardship as a result of negative deeds generated in her vicinity.” More

Lesson from an unsettled boundary

Published on May 3, 2013 in China and India. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Manoj Joshi on the back story to the India-China standoff: In The Hindu:

In 1950, the Survey of India issued a map of India showing the political divisions of the new republic. While the border with Pakistan was defined as it is now, including the Pakistan-occupied Kashmir area, the borders with China were depicted differently. In the east, the McMahon Line was shown as the border, except in its eastern extremity, the Tirap subdivision, where the border was shown as “undefined.” In the Central sector of what is now Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh and the eastern part of Jammu & Kashmir, including Aksai Chin, the boundary was depicted merely by a colour wash and denoted as “boundary undefined.”

In March 1954, the Union Cabinet met and decided to unilaterally define the border of India with China. The colour wash was replaced by a hard line, and the Survey of India issued a new map, which depicts the borders as we know them today. All the old maps were withdrawn and the depiction of Indian boundaries in the old way became illegal. Indeed, if you seek out the White Paper on Indian States of 1948 and 1950 in the Parliament library, you will find that the maps have been removed because they too showed the border as being “undefined” in the Central and Western sectors.

What was the government up to? Did it seriously think it could get away with such a sleight of hand? Or was there a design that will become apparent when the papers of the period are declassified? Not surprisingly, the other party, the People’s Republic of China, was not amused and, in any case, there are enough copies of the old documents and maps across the world today to bring out the uncomfortable truth that the boundaries of India in these regions were unilaterally defined by the Government of India, rather than through negotiation and discussions with China. More:

Disappearing foods

Published on May 2, 2013 in Food. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

A collection of recipes that are fading from the Southasian palette. In Himal:

Sol kadhai with teppal

Jackfruit with teppal

Millet with ghalho

Roasted sorghum with black sesame

Korra dosa

Korra bajji

Korra vada

Sama pasham (kheer)

Jonna pelala laddu

Maldivian fresh tuna curry

Mas huni

Sishnu soup

Eat, drink, write

Published on May 2, 2013 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments Tags: , .

A food writer dishes on the ins and outs of her profession. Suman Bolar in Himal:

When I tell people that I write about food, I unfailingly receive one of three responses (and sometimes, all three): a) “Oh! You’re a food critic”; b) “You’re so lucky!”; and c) “You’re a foodie! So am I!”

Wrong on all three counts.

First, I am a food writer, not a food critic. Food is meant to nourish and enrich our lives; it exists for our sustenance and pleasure. Food is perfect in and of itself and does not need to be criticised. Cooks, chefs, and restaurants – now those are a different matter entirely. So restaurant critic, yes; food critic, no.

Second, I am not ‘lucky’. Like any other professional, I have worked hard and spent big to be able to do what I do – I have travelled the world and sampled various cuisines on my own dime, spent time and money tracking down interesting foodstuffs and experiences, attended writing and food-related classes and workshops, and often gone out on a limb with an unpopular opinion and paid the price for my candour. More:

The Bangladesh Liberation War through Raghu Rai’s lens

Published on May 2, 2013 in Art. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Salil Tripathi in The Caravan:

FOR A PHOTOGRAPHER, what sets apart a war zone from other locations is the imminence of danger. Raghu Rai had gone along with the first column of Indian troops entering what was still officially East Pakistan from the Khulna border in early December 1971. Pakistani forces had retreated to defend the capital, Dacca, as it was then known. But after they had travelled about 50 km, Pakistanis attacked with artillery fire. Rai shot photographs of wounded soldiers being taken away. After the situation subsided, Rai was relieved to find a teashop and decided to have a moment’s respite, although the Indian army major told him to be careful. Just as Rai ordered tea and biscuits, a bullet whizzed past him. “The major shouted for me to lie down,” Rai wrote. “I did, and another bullet went past me. I crawled back to the shop and was told by the shopkeeper that the Pakistani army was on the other side of the railtrack, just half a kilometer away.” Photographers are meant to be impartial observers, or witnesses. But to the Pakistani sniper, Rai was a participant, entering enemy territory, accompanied by a foreign army. He was a target, fair game. He may have come to record, but he was intervening.

The photographs Rai took during that two-week war, when the Indian army marched to what is now Dhaka and defeated General AAK Niazi’s Pakistani army, are now published in a glossy volume by Niyogi Books, one which commemorates Bangladeshi bravery, and Indian support and generosity, and documents the Pakistani army’s brutality towards civilians.

Having stored away the images for safekeeping, Rai seemed to have forgotten their whereabouts. Two years ago, he excitedly called his friend Shahidul Alam, the gifted Bangladeshi photographer, to say that the lost negatives had been found. This was a huge discovery; Bangladesh was turning 40 in 2011, and the generation that fought for its freedom was fading. Alam, who has made it the mission of his life to document the Bangladeshi saga in all its manifestations by promoting visual culture through his agency, Drik, was himself compiling the works of photographers from Bangladesh and abroad for the book he published in 2011, The Birth Pangs of A Nation. That book includes some of Rai’s photographs and went on to win an Asia Publishing Award last year. (I wrote the sole essay in that book.) More:

The most hated Bangladeshi, toppled from a shady empire

Published on May 1, 2013 in Bangladesh and Crime. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Sohel Rana is under arrest after the collapse of his factory building last week left nearly 400 people dead, but until now he has been a powerful figure, trailed by his own biker gang. Jim Yardley from Savar, Bangladesh, in NYT:

Barely 20 miles from the national capital, this gritty suburb is now a dusty, chaotic industrial center littered with factories that produce clothes for leading Western brands. Building codes are often unenforced, regulatory oversight is flimsy and the men wielding power often travel with armed guards.

And perhaps no one wielded power more brazenly than Sohel Rana. He traveled by motorcycle, as untouchable as a mafia don, trailed by his own biker gang. Local officials and the Bangladeshi news media say he was involved in illegal drugs and guns, but he also had a building, Rana Plaza, that housed five factories.

Upstairs, workers earned as little as $40 a month making clothes for retailers like J. C. Penney. Downstairs, Mr. Rana hosted local politicians, playing pool, drinking and, the officials say, indulging in drugs. More:

The Indian who discovered Ella

Published on April 27, 2013 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

Naresh Fernandes / Taj Mahal Foxtrot:

“Boss, this girl has something,” drummer Chick Webb’s male singer (seated on the left) told him. “You must hear her.” Webb couldn’t see the need for that. Though he cut one of the strangest sights in jazz – a drummer bent over by spinal tuberculosis, with partially paralysed legs – Webb was one of the earliest legends of swing. In 1931, by the time he was 26, he was leading the house band at the famous Savoy Ballroom in Harlem and was, in the words of his contemporaries, “the daddy of them all”. He simply couldn’t see why he needed a girl singer.

But his front man was persistent and brought over a singer he’d heard at the Harlem Opera House. The drummer was, of course, bowled over by the 16-year-old Ella Fitzgerald and she spurred the Chick Webb band on to even greater success. Young Bardu Ali, who had discovered Fitzgerald, didn’t do badly either. He would go on to lead his own band, the Bardu Ali Orchestra, and eventually open a rhythm and blues club in Los Angeles. No one could quite have predicted this for the boy who had been born Bahadour Ali, the son of an adventurous embroidery trader from the Hoogly region in India.

I discovered the existence of Bardu Ali last month as I devoured Vivek Bald’s fascinating Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asia, a rigorous, captivating study of early Indian immigrants to the US, More:

Delhi (1938)

Published on April 27, 2013 in Heritage. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Shot by the legendary Jack Cardiff – the Oscar-winning cinematographer of ‘Black Narcissus’ – this is one of a number of short films that he made in India in the late 1930s.

Porn OK, please

Published on April 21, 2013 in India. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Anup Kutty in The Times of India:

Like most men from my generation, I did not learn about sex from my parents or teachers. It was my neighbourhood video rental man who was responsible. I believe he is no more. God bless his soul.

All those years ago, when he was alive, my friends and I would troop into his parlour every week. After some pointless nudge-nudge-winkwink we would be rewarded with a videotape that contained the secrets of adulthood. My first porn movie was a ’70s classic featuring the mature Kay Parker who, with her chipped tooth and ample breasts, seduced teenage boys. Like most first times, it wasn’t a pleasant experience. I threw up during the money shot and swore never to watch porn again.

It took me just a couple of days to be back at the video rental store. By then a whole new world had opened up along with fresh facial hair and a change of voice. My new teachers — the brunette Racquel Darrian, the oriental Asia Carrera and the blonde Jill Kelly — taught me that a woman’s genitalia looked nothing like a cow with horns and that it was capable of far more than just “receiving the spermatozoa discharged from the male organ”. With cable TV came the secret 11.30pm slots for “double X” flicks. If one was in a mood for local flavour there was always Surya TV’s late night Malayalam and Tamil porn. My schooling was now complete. More:

What’s porn got to do with it?

Sunetra Choudhury in DNA:

It’s an encounter I’ll never forget. I was going around Khajuraho a few years ago and there, among the teeming French tourists and the tour guides who keep trying to push you towards the `sex’ temples, were these two middle-class, middle-India couples. Unlike us, who’d made our way all the way from Delhi, these two couples looked like they weren’t from very far. The reason I say that, is because as soon as we entered the temple complex, the two men instantly sat down on the lawns as if the famed sculptures were like a boring history lecture and they’d much rather soak in the sun.

But it’s not them, but the reactions of the women accompanying them, that became an eye-opener for me. While the depictions at the temple made our jaws drop, made us giggle at times like school girls and sometimes even embarrassed to look, these two women went about their exploration in a calm, inquisitive way. More:

Should India ban Internet porn?

The PIL in the court

 

“No Pakistanis”: The racial satire the Beatles don’t want you to hear

Published on April 14, 2013 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Alex Sayf Cummings in Salon:

The strange story of “Get Back,” its politics, and its bootlegs tells us much about the limits of what musicians, even hugely popular and politically engaged ones, can say in popular music — and what’s at stake in the battle over file-sharing and free culture today.

An early version of the song, known to bootleggers as “No Pakistanis,” began with Paul McCartney muttering, “Don’t dig no Pakistanis taking all the people’s jobs.” Many Americans have heard similar complaints, having listened to the anti-immigrant invective of Joe Arpaio and Tom Tancredo for years. Brits are also familiar with such rhetoric, seeing the British Nationalist Party ride their slogan of “British jobs for British workers” to prominence in the last decade.

Many who hear the song today are startled to hear this sort of cranky posturing from the Beatles, the lovable moptops who told us that “All You Need Is Love.” Bootleg versions of “No Pakistanis” have even won the hearts of neo-Nazi groups like Stormfront, who believe that the Beatles were really on the side of the white man’s cause all along. (The white supremacist band Battlecry even recorded its own clueless version of the tune.) If released today, a similar song would likely ignite controversy, regardless of the songwriter’s intentions.

The year, of course, was 1968 – a time of race riots, political assassinations, and social ferment. Into this heady atmosphere walked a British M.P. named Enoch Powell – the Tancredo of his day. More:

New giant tarantula discovered in Sri Lanka

Published on April 10, 2013 in Sri Lanka and Wildlife. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

From Wired:

A new type of tarantula about the size of your face has been found in northern Sri Lanka. Scientists found the spiders — with a leg span up to 8 inches across — living in trees and the old doctor’s quarters of a hospital in Mankulam.

Covered in beautiful, ornate markings, the spiders belong to the genus Poecilotheria, known as “Pokies” for short. These are the tiger spiders, an arboreal group indigenous to India and Sri Lanka that are known for being colorful, fast, and venomous. As a group, the spiders are related to a class of South American tarantula that includes the Goliath bird-eater, the world’s largest.

The new spider, named Poecilotheria rajaei after a local police inspector who helped the team navigate post-civil war northern Sri Lanka, differs from similar species primarily in the markings on its legs and underside, which bears a pink abdominal band. More:

How a single spy helped turn Pakistan against the US

Published on April 10, 2013 in Books and Pakistan. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

What really happened after Raymond Davis killed two men in the street in Lahore. Mark Mazetti in The New York Times Magazine:

The burly American was escorted by Pakistani policemen into a crowded interrogation room. Amid a clatter of ringing mobile phones and cross talk among the cops speaking a mishmash of Urdu, Punjabi and English, the investigator tried to decipher the facts of the case.

“America, you from America?”

“Yes.”

“You’re from America, and you belong to the American Embassy?”

“Yes,” the American voice said loudly above the chatter. “My passport — at the site I showed the police officer. . . . It’s somewhere. It’s lost.”

On the jumpy video footage of the interrogation, he reached beneath his checkered flannel shirt and produced a jumble of identification badges hanging around his neck. “This is an old badge. This is Islamabad.” He showed the badge to the man across the desk and then flipped to a more recent one proving his employment in the American Consulate in Lahore.

“You are working at the consulate general in Lahore?” the policeman asked.

“Yes.”

“As a . . . ?”

“I, I just work as a consultant there.”

“Consultant?” The man behind the desk paused for a moment and then shot a question in Urdu to another policeman. “And what’s the name?”

“Raymond Davis,” the officer responded.

“Raymond Davis,” the American confirmed. “Can I sit down?”

“Please do. Give you water?” the officer asked.

“Do you have a bottle? A bottle of water?” Davis asked.

Another officer in the room laughed. “You want water?” he asked. “No money, no water.”

Another policeman walked into the room and asked for an update. “Is he understanding everything? And he just killed two men?” More:

A better quality of agony

Published on April 10, 2013 in Books. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Teju Cole reviews Sonali Deraniyagala’s memoir Wave in The New Yorker:

Sorrow flattens her. Then sorrow gives way to anger and suicidal fury, and it takes a dedicated group of relatives and friends to lock away the knives and hide the pills and keep her from self-harm. There’s a period of alcoholism, and for a while she harasses, with demonic inventiveness, a Dutch couple who have rented her parents’ home. Grief is a frightening condition, and at its extreme is like the sun: impossible to look at directly. That Deraniyagala wrote down what happened is understandable. But why would some unconcerned individual, someone who has not been similarly shattered, wish to read this book? Yet read it we must, for it contains solemn and essential truths. I am reminded of what Anne Carson wrote in the introduction to “Grief Lessons,” her translation of four plays by Euripides:

Grief and rage—you need to contain that, to put a frame around it, where it can play itself out without you or your kin having to die. There is a theory that watching unbearable stories about other people lost in grief and rage is good for you—may cleanse you of darkness. Do you want to go down to the pits of yourself all alone? Not much. What if an actor could do it for you? Isn’t that why they are called actors? They act for you.

Carson is writing specifically about Greek tragedy, works of tragic fiction, and of course a book like “Wave” is only too real. There’s nothing put on about Deraniyagala’s suffering. But part of what Carson says applies. In witnessing something far-fetched, something brought out before us from the distant perimeter of human experience, we are in some way fortified for our own inevitable, if lesser, struggles. More:

Thatcher, Chandraswami and I

Published on April 9, 2013 in Books, Leaders and Obituaries. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

India’s former foreign minister K. Natwar Singh in The Hindu (Extracted from K. Natwar Singh’s new book “Walking with Lions — Tales from a Diplomatic Past,” HarperCollins):

India House is among the better known diplomatic establishments in London. I first set eyes on the imposing building in 1952, when I was a student at Cambridge University. Thirty years later I entered India House as Deputy High Commissioner. One of my less attractive duties was to meet the unreasonable demands of visitors from India. Not all were disagreeable but many were.

Early in the summer of 1975, Mr. Chandraswamy telephones me. He was in London. The late Yashpal Kapoor had asked him to contact me, Chandraswamy invited me to meet me at his place. I said if he wished to see me, he should come to India House. This he did the next day. At the time he was in his late twenties. He was in his “Sadhu” attire. He did not speak a word of English. Now he does.

At this, our first meeting, he dropped names. After a few days he again come to see me. He invited my wife and me to have dinner with him.

The food was delicious. After dinner he said to us, “I will show you something you have never seen”. He then produced a large sheet of white paper and drew lines from top to bottom and left to right. Next he produced three strips of paper asked my wife to write a question on each strip, make a ball and place each one on a square on the chess board. My wife wrote the questions in English. He closed his eyes and went into a trance. I was, by this time getting restless. Suddenly he asked my wife to pick up any of the paper balls. She did so. Opened it. Chandraswamy then told her what the question was. He was spot on. My wife, who is an amateur astrologer, was sceptical at this stage. When Chandraswamy got the next two questions right, she was amazed and interested. I was intrigued. I could not, as a rationalist, accept mumbo-jumbo. Neither could I dismiss Chandraswamy as a complete hoax. More:

U.S. scientist foresaw Indian nuclear test

Published on April 9, 2013 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

In The Hindu:

A year before India conducted its first nuclear test in 1974, a Bombay-based scientific representative of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission was quite certain it would do so ‘in the not too distant future.’ Concurring with his assessment, a senior U.S. diplomat felt Prime Minister Indira Gandhi would take the step to offset public disenchantment with her government and the country’s growing economic troubles.

The American scientist’s suspicions grew, according to a U.S. diplomatic cable obtained by WikiLeaks, when the Indian nuclear establishment shut its doors on him, afraid that he was being used by the U.S. government to spy on them and would find out too much.

It is generally thought that the world was taken by surprise when the ‘Buddha smiled’ in Pokhran on May 18, 1974. But the cable sent by the U.S. Consul General in Bombay on April 4, 1973, was quite certain that India was on the verge of testing a nuclear device. More:

The story of the turban

Published on April 6, 2013 in Faith and Religion. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Taliban in Karachi: the real story

Published on April 6, 2013 in Pakistan and Terrorism. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Fahim Zaman and Naziha Syed Ali in Dawn:

ON the evening of March 13, Director Orangi Pilot Project Perween Rahman was shot and killed by masked men half a kilometre from her office just off Manghopir Road in Karachi. The police were quick to point a finger at the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP).

In an “encounter” the very next day, they killed Qari Bilal who they claimed was a leader of the TTP and the mastermind behind Ms Rahman’s murder. Many in the development sector, however, believe she was targeted because she had fallen foul of the city’s land mafia because she was placing their activities on record. They may both well be right, even if Qari Bilal was falsely accused by law-enforcement agencies.

The latest players in Karachi’s land grab — for long the domain of those with close links to the major political parties and forces amongst the establishment here — are TTP elements who have been putting down their roots in various parts of the city over the past couple of years.

Large swathes of Pakhtun neighborhoods in districts west and east, as well as pockets in districts Malir, central and south are reported to be under the influence of the TTP. While all 30 or so of its factions have a presence in the city, the most influence is wielded by the Hakimullah Mehsud and Mullah Fazlullah factions.

According to local police and residents of the affected areas, elements belonging to the TTP have entrenched themselves in these areas after having terrorised the local Pakhtun population into submission, and driven out the ANP from most of its traditional strongholds. More:

Modi, the man and the message

Published on April 4, 2013 in India, Leaders and Politics. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Harish Khare in The Hindu:

During a recent three-week stay in the United States, I was often asked to explain the Indian media’s current obsession with Narendra Modi. The only reasonably cogent answer to give was the convergence between the corporate ownership of the electronic media and Mr. Modi’s corporate bank-rollers. The Gujarat Chief Minister’s induction in the Bharatiya Janata Party central set-up has been celebrated as if he has already been invited by the Rashtrapati to form the next government at the Centre.

Like most Indian political leaders, Mr. Modi is a non-biodegradable entity. He will not disappear. Machinations by the BJP central leadership may delay his storming the party headquarters, but he is not going to be talked out of his national ambitions. It is only the voters who can knock the stuffing out of him and his outsized pretensions.

Mr. Modi promises to do things differently and better than what is being done in New Delhi or even in the other BJP ruled States. Not only is he contemptuous of the Manmohan Singh style of consensus approach to resolving contentious issues, he is also derisive of his own party and its leadership. He believes the BJP has become too flabby as an organisation and that most of its impresarios are compromised and tired.More:

Silent Screams: India’s Fight Against Rape

Published on April 1, 2013 in Crime and Women. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

Miditech’s documentary on the Nirbhaya rape, and the fight against rape that followed in its brutal aftermath. Produced for Channel NewsAsia:

Here’s the link :

http://www.channelnewsasia.com/tv/tvshows/documentaries/silent-screams—-india-s-fight-against-rape/621796.html

 

The Judge’s Will — by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

Published on March 19, 2013 in Books. 0 Comments Tags: .

In The New Yorker:

After his second heart attack, the judge knew that he could no longer put off informing his wife about the contents of his will. He did this for the sake of the woman he had been keeping for twenty-five years, who, ever since his first attack, had been agitating about provisions for her future. These had long been in place in his will, known only to the lawyer who had drawn it up, but it was intolerable to the judge to think that their execution would be in the hands of his family; that is, his wife and son. Not because he expected them to make trouble but because they were both too impractical, too light-minded to carry out his wishes once he was not there to enforce them.

This suspicion was confirmed for him by the way Binny received his secret. Any normal wife, he thought, would have been aghast to learn of her husband’s long-standing adultery. But Binny reacted as though she had just heard some spicy piece of gossip. She was pouring his tea and, quivering with excitement, spilled some in the saucer. He turned his face from her. “Go away,” he told her, and then became more exasperated by the eagerness with which she hurried off to reveal the secret to their son. More:

An Intimate conversation with Padma Lakshmi

Published on March 18, 2013 in People. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Rebecca Suhrawardi in The Caravan:

caravan-PadmaPadma Lakshmi had asked me to meet her at a small Italian café on New York City’s Lower East Side, the neighborhood she calls home. The former model turned culinary icon of the hit US cooking show Top Chef has lived off-and-on in the city since she emigrated from India, nearly 40 years ago.

When I arrived at the café shortly before our 4.30 pm appointment, I was surprised to find it had not yet opened for the day. Inside the intimate space, staff were slowly setting up the bar and wiping down surfaces. Most of the chairs were turned over on tables from the previous night’s cleaning. We were unexpected, so I took two spaces at the otherwise vacant counter.

Lakshmi soon appeared, dressed in the New York uniform of all black, and quickly warned against any physical contact: she was recovering from a bout of bronchitis. (“Still sick in my pajamas. But the meds are kicking in,” and “This is me now … Bronchitis and bed ridden!!! I hate being sick!!!” she had tweeted the previous week.) Despite the illness, she was radiant—skin dewy and smooth, her sculptural cheekbones even more striking atop the pedestal of her long, slim neck. With hardly any makeup on, fluttering black lashes, and her hair in two long braids, she was even more of natural beauty than I had expected. “Nothing makes me happier than an Indian girl who tweets at me, or somebody on the street who stops me and says, ‘Thank you so much, because I really didn’t have people who look like me, no other brown faces that love lipstick and literature too’,” Lakshmi told me. More:

Black and Bengali

Published on March 17, 2013 in Books and Culture. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Fatima Shaik at In These Times:

The federal census taker comes every 10 years and, for most people in the United States, this has little consequence. But not where I lived, in New Orleans, just outside the historic district of Tremé. There, people talked to each other about whether to lie to the census taker and which lie to tell, and that conversation produced stories about who had disappeared from us and who had stayed, and what was more important: loyalty or money.

That was the mentality in Creole New Orleans from as far back as I can remember—that is, the 1950s—until recently. The lying, the disappearing, the money and lack of it had everything to do with race.

We were part of a mixed-race community of immigrants and Louisiana natives, and there was no place for us in the data tables of the census or in the mind of a black-and-white America. And yet we existed, for generations. Now, in a thoroughly researched new book, Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America, Vivek Bald traces one vein of our lineage, from a most distant country.

Bald follows Muslim peddlers and, later, ship workers who journeyed from India to the United States at the turn of the 20th century. As local Indian markets for fabrics lost value in the 1880s, Muslim Bengali men began traveling abroad to find customers for “Oriental” wares—silk and cotton, handkerchiefs, bedspreads and tablecloths, and rugs. More:

“Wave”: A family vacation turns into the worst kind of nightmare

Published on March 8, 2013 in Books. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Economist Sonali Deraniyagala lost her husband, parents and two young sons in the terrifying Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004. They had been vacationing on the southern coast of her home country Sri Lanka when the wave struck. A review of her book “Wave” in Salon:

The first time Sonali Deraniyagala heard the word “tsunami,” she was shut up in a darkened bedroom in her aunt’s house in Colombo, Sri Lanka. It was 2004, and the wave had just taken her parents, her husband and her two young sons.

Deraniyagala had been vacationing with her family in a seaside hotel near a national park when, through a terrace window, she saw the sea rising rapidly past its familiar bounds. With her husband, Steve, she grabbed Vikram, 8, and Malli, 5, and rushed out the door and up the drive. They jumped in a passing jeep, but soon the wave overwhelmed even that. The last time Deraniyagala saw her husband’s face, he was looking in horror at something over her shoulder. Then the jeep overturned, and for Deraniyagala the next few hours were chaos, violence and filthy water, the tsunami tossing her miles inland and then sucking her out again. Just before she would have been swept out to sea, she grabbed an overhanging branch and felt the ground materialize under her feet. She never saw her family again.

“Wave” is Deraniyagala’s account of this nightmare, but the tsunami itself only takes up a handful of this spare, radiant book’s pages. The rest is what came after, months in that darkened room contemplating suicide, then a period of getting drunk every day and conducting a demented campaign of harassment against the Dutch family to whom her brother rented her parents’ house. Deraniyagala, an economist at the University of London and Columbia University, had been living with Steve and the boys in London, but she wasn’t able to set foot in their English house for two years. More:

And in NPR:

Sri Lanka, July – December 2005

Someone had removed the brass plate with my father’s name on it from the gray front wall. It had his name etched in black italics. I sat in the passenger seat of my friend Mary-Anne’s car, my eyes clinging to the holes in the wall where that brass plate was once nailed.

This had been my parents’ home in Colombo for some thirty-five years, and my childhood home. For my sons it was their home in Sri Lanka. They were giddy with excitement when we visited every summer and Christmas. Vik took his first steps here, and Malli, when younger, called the house “Sri Lanka.” And in our last year, 2004, when Steve and I had sabbaticals from our jobs and the four of us spent nine months in Colombo until September, this house was the hub of our children’s lives. More:

Vagina Monologues challenges India’s taboos

Published on March 8, 2013 in Society. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

As the debate around the Delhi rape case has demonstrated, India is still a conservative country where sex is rarely discussed in the open. But, for the past 10 years, the Indian version of the worldwide play, The Vagina Monologues, has been trying to challenge some of those taboos. From BBC news.

As she takes to the stage, Mahabanoo Mody Kotwal has a question for the audience.

“How many of you feel comfortable saying the word vagina?” she asks as a ripple of embarrassed laughter erupts.

About two-thirds of the audience raise their hands, but there are some too shy to put their hands up, let alone join in a group chant of the word, which follows.

The show they have come to watch is The Vagina Monologues, which looks at the issue of a woman’s sexuality through a series of sketches.

Famous across the world, it was created by the American playwright Eve Ensler.

After seeing it performed in the United States, Ms Kotwal, a Mumbai-based actor-director, and her son Kaizaad Kotwal came up with the idea of adapting it for India. But that was not easy.

India is still a predominantly conservative country where kissing is rarely seen in films and sex is barely talked about. More

Our bodies, our selves

Published on March 8, 2013 in Women. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Nilanjana S. Roy in The Hindu:

The man who was my abuser was a fine host, a good husband, a caring father, a respected elder whose generosity and kindness were as genuine as the fact of the abuse. These qualities were important, because they helped him conceal the abuse he carried out over a period of four years.

As a much-loved older relative, a close friend of my parents, he had unrestricted access to our house, and we visited him often. It was only at 12 that I began to feel uncomfortable. I didn’t know the term “child sexual abuse,” and had no words with which to describe my discomfort with the “games” he played — but I sensed there was something wrong about the silence that he demanded. When I was 13, I left Delhi for Calcutta, to study in that city, and left my abuser behind. But he didn’t forget, and when I came back to Delhi as a 17-year-old, he was there.

At 17, I knew now that he had no right to do this to me. When he sent poems, said that despite the four decades that separated us, we were supposed to “be together,” I broke my own silence — but only partly. I told my mother and my sister, and they formed a fierce, protective barrier between me and my abuser.

But the man who had started his abuse when I was nine was still invited to my wedding, because we were all keeping secrets, trying to protect one family member or another. (He was married, with grown children of his own.) More:

The war Bangladesh can never forget

Published on February 24, 2013 in Bangladesh. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Philip Hensher from Dhaka in The Independent:

Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka is a noisy, exciting city, full of energy and argument. The massive chaos of its constantly stationary traffic is often riven by protests, strikes, marches. These can be on any number of grievances. But this is a country driven by a national agony at its creation which has never been fully addressed. The protest now happening outside the national museum is of an unprecedented nature, and on an unprecedented scale.

Since 5 February, Bangladesh has been transfixed by this ongoing, immense protest. Hundreds of thousands have occupied Shahbagh Square in protest at a verdict passed by the International Crimes Tribunal on war crimes committed during the genocide which preceded the founding of the country in 1971. One of those found guilty, Abdul Kalam Azad, was sentenced to death. Another, however, Abdul Quader Mollah, the assistant secretary general of a Muslim party which collaborated with the genocidaires, the Jamaat–e-Islami, was given life imprisonment. The protests which followed, and are still continuing, are led by intelligent and liberal people; they are, however, calling with great urgency for the death penalty to be passed on Mollah and other convicted war criminals. More:

To fight India, we fought ourselves: Mohsin Hamid

Published on February 24, 2013 in Pakistan. 0 Comments

In NYT:

ON Monday, my mother’s and sister’s eye doctor was assassinated. He was a Shiite. He was shot six times while driving to drop his son off at school. His son, age 12, was executed with a single shot to the head.

Tuesday, I attended a protest in front of the Governor’s House in Lahore demanding that more be done to protect Pakistan’s Shiites from sectarian extremists. These extremists are responsible for increasingly frequent attacks, including bombings this year that killed more than 200 people, most of them Hazara Shiites, in the city of Quetta.

As I stood in the anguished crowd in Lahore, similar protests were being held throughout Pakistan. Roads were shut. Demonstrators blocked access to airports. My father was trapped in one for the evening, yet he said most of his fellow travelers bore the delay without anger. They sympathized with the protesters’ objectives. More: