Tag Archive for 'Ramachandra Guha'

Lahore stays linked to its past

Published
by
asianwindow
on April 20, 2009
in Pakistan and Travel
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Ramachandra Guha in the Financial Times:

Badshahi Masjid, Lahore [Image: Islamic Architecture]

Badshahi Masjid, Lahore. Image: Islamic Architecture

I first visited Lahore in 1995, illegally. I was attending a conference in Islamabad, and had a visa for that city alone. But I was determined to get to Lahore. I had grown up in a town in north India inundated with refugees from Pakistan’s Punjab. The fathers of my friends had all been educated in Lahore, and spoke in elegiac tones about its colleges, parks, theatres and shops. A book they passed lovingly from hand to hand was Pran Neville’s Lahore: A Sentimental Journey, an account of a sensuous and even sybaritic city, whose residents – at least in this telling – were preoccupied with the pleasures of clothes, food, music and sex.

Speaking of the 1930s, Neville wrote that “Lahore was famous for its sexologists, mostly [Hindu] vaids and [Muslim] hakims. They promised sexual prowess to all those who could afford their expensive formulations, which had ingredients like gold, silver, pearls and rare herbs.”

Neville’s memories were emblematic. Lahore is the Salonica of the east, a multicultural city in living memory that is now dominated by people of a single faith. Named after Luv, a son of the mythical God-King Ram, Lahore was governed by Hindus before coming under a succession of Muslim rulers.

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One writer, many hats

Published
by
asianwindow
on February 22, 2009
in Leaders, Media and Sport
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Ramachandra Guha is a polymath who happens to write superbly on cricket. Suresh Menon at Cricinfo:

ram-guhaWhen my son was graduating and looking into the future, a professor told him of the choices ahead: pure science, technology, public service, media, or, he said, “Ramachandra Guha”. This was the first I was hearing of Guha as a career option; the professor meant it as generic term for brilliance spread over a number of fields.

The challenge here is to write about Guha without dwelling on how he has been picked as one of the Top 100 public intellectuals in the world, or that he is the recipient of India’s third-highest civilian award, or that he is a historian, biographer, sociologist, environmentalist, anthropologist with profound, seminal works on each of these subjects. He is among the finest essayists and columnists around, with a range of interests that goes beyond even that list, and takes in music, science, literature, fiction, travel.

But this is about Guha the cricket writer, and – after acknowledging that his work in other fields must inform his writings on cricket, placing them in context and taking them into avenues others leave unexplored – we must descend from the general to the particular.

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Top 100 intellectuals

Published
by
asianwindow
on May 6, 2008
in Lists
. 0 Comments

The Prospect/Foreign Policy magazine’s list of the world’s top 100 “public intellectuals” — “the thinkers who are shaping the tenor of our time” — has nine from this part of the world.

The criteria to make the list, says FP, could not be more simple: Candidates must be living and still active in public life. They must have shown distinction in their particular field as well as an ability to influence wider debate, often far beyond the borders of their own country.

India:
1: Historian Ramachandra Guha
2: Political psychologist Ashis Nandy
3: Environmentalist Sunita Narain
4: Economist-Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen
5: Journalist author Fareed Zakaria
6: Novelist Salman Rushdie
7: San Diego-based neuroscientist VS Ramachandran

Pakistan: Lawyer-politician Aitzaz Ahsan

Bangladesh: Microfinance guru Mohammed Yunus

China has four.

Click here for the full list, to vote your selection or to add a candidate.