http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com Reading Writing Teaching Wed, 08 Jun 2011 13:22:20 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Thanks for visiting. This site has not been in use for quite some time. It has moved to AmitavaKumar.com. http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2011/06/08/moved/ The theme of this year’s Wisconsin Book Festival is “Changing Places.” What does that phrase mean to you? It means to me something about travel and migration. And displacement, as in become an exile or a refugee. But, more profoundly still, it suggests to me a quality that is at the ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/09/29/wisconsin-book-festival/ By Clive James The book of my enemy has been remaindered And I am pleased. In vast quantities it has been remaindered Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized And sits in piles in a police warehouse, My enemy’s much-prized effort sits in piles In the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs. Great, square stacks of ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/09/28/clive-james/ For all those who found the debate uninteresting, here’s a delectable memo on McCain’s refusal to make eye contact with Obama. Among other things, the memo notes McCain’s status as a “low-ranking monkey”: Here’s one comment we got from TPM Reader EO … As a psychotherapist and someone ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/09/27/prez-debate-memo/ Ali Mir, Professor of Business at Wayne Paterson and acclaimed lyricist for films like “Dor,” has produced a quick guide to the financial mess we are in: If you don’t understand the financial crisis on Wall Street, don’t fret. No one does, least of all the experts. What we do know ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/09/24/current-crisis-for-dummies/ Mark Sarvas, author of the debut novel Harry, Revised, will be reading tomorrow, Wednesday, at 5.30 PM. The reading will take place in the Class of ‘51 Reading Room in the library. Here are more details. About the novel, the LA Times wrote: “Self-loathing was never so funny, and Sarvas’s ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/09/23/harry-in-the-house/ And when, in the city in which I love you, even my most excellent song goes unanswered, andI mount the scabbed streets, the long shouts of avenues, and tunnel sunken night in search of you… That I negotiate fog, bituminous rain rining like teeth into the beggar’s tin, or two men jackaling a third in ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/09/22/li-young-lee/ Click here to say no on the PBS vote on Palin. http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/09/22/no-to-palin/ One of the very best: a rejection note sent by the writer Stefan Merken to an editor who had rejected one of his short stories. “Please forgive me for not accepting your rejection letter,” wrote Merken. “At this time I cannot accept a rejection of my short story. I accept ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/09/19/rejection-letter/ People should stop picking on vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin because she hired a high school classmate to oversee the state agriculture division, a woman who said she was qualified for the job because she liked cows when she was a kid. And they should lay off the governor for choosing ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/09/18/crony-capitalism/ David Foster Wallace at Kenyon: If anybody feels like perspiring [cough], I’d advise you to go ahead, because I’m sure going to. In fact I’m gonna [mumbles while pulling up his gown and taking out a handkerchief from his pocket].) Greetings [”parents”?] and congratulations to Kenyon’s graduating class of 2005. There ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/09/17/2005-commencement-speech/ Tomorrow, at 4 PM, at Princeton University, I will be delivering a talk entitled “The United States vs. Shahawar Matin Siraj.” The talk will be built around the details of a case I discuss in my forthcoming book. Here is a bit about the case: On the evening of January 8, ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/09/14/two-talks/ Just heard this horrible news from Maya Kovskaya: CLAREMONT, Calif. (AP) — David Foster Wallace, the author best known for his 1996 novel “Infinite Jest,” was found dead in his home, according to police. He was 46. Wallace’s wife found her husband had hanged himself when she returned home about 9:30 p.m. ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/09/13/david-foster-wallace-rip/ By Charles Bukowski poetry readings have to be some of the saddest damned things ever, the gathering of the clansmen and clanladies, week after week, month after month, year after year, getting old together, reading on to tiny gatherings, still hoping their genius will be discovered, making tapes together, discs together, sweating for applause they read basically to and for each other, they can’t ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/09/12/poetry-readings/ Nadeem Aslam’s enthralling new novel, The Wasted Vigil, is about remembering the past. His characters find themselves in a house in ruins but fragrant with memories and humanity. At one level, they are stand-ins for the forces that have shaped modern Afghanistan - an English doctor, a Russian woman, an ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/09/12/nadeem-aslam-2/ WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne on Thursday said he was “outraged” by department workers who had sex, used drugs and took gifts from employees at regulated oil companies, while one senator called for a Bush administration official to resign over the scandal. The Interior Department’s inspector general issued ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/09/12/sex-drugs-and-oily-republicans/ Check out this video that attacks Barack Obama as a secret Muslim fanatic. Among the questions it poses is this one: “When we are at war with Islamic terrorism, can Americans elect a man with not one, not two, but three Islamic names?” While watching it, I thought of the ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/09/11/nasty-brutish-and-at-13-minutes-not-short-enough/ Some years ago, the novelist David Foster Wallace submitted himself to a long television interview with Charlie Rose, the PBS chat-show host. It was a terrific performance, and in it Wallace talked about why, in much of his work, narrative is split into body-text and footnotes: There’s a way, it seems ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/09/09/your-name-here/ Obama and Biden should also create a “master sound bite sentence” and repeat it hundreds of times. It should be so true that even the corporations can’t screw with it when it makes the airwaves. Here’s my attempt: “Katrina, four dollar gas, a trillion dollar war, rising unemployment, deregulated ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/09/08/were-gonna-frickin-lose-this-thing/ A young delegate from New York tells the writer, “Politics is property.” And this becomes Mailer’s mantra. In those three words resides the magic that will release the secret of the convention. Those words confirm a system of exchange governed by property holders. Mailer writes, “A delegate’s vote is his ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/09/07/mailer/ Watching the Republican National Convention was a little like being lost in an Alaskan snowstorm: I was blinded by the unbearable whiteness of being a Republican delegate. It was surprising, therefore, to find out that the delegates were even whiter than they appeared on TV. It seems the camera not ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/09/05/left-vs-white/ REPUBLICAN NATIONAL CONVENTION | THE 2008 ELECTION Cindy McCain’s $300,000 Outfit by Vanity Fair September 4, 2008, 10:29 am One of the persistent memes in the Republican line of attack against Barack Obama is the notion that he is an elitist, whereas the G.O.P. represent real working Americans like Levi “F-in’ Redneck” Johnston. It caught ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/09/04/critical-cultural-studies-at-the-rnc/ “Who listens to us? Nobody. Biharis keep dying due to floods, but nation doesn’t take notice of them. I know so many families in north Bihar who have lost their homes 14 times due to floods after Independence. Then, so what? Does anybody care for them? Do you know last ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/09/04/bihar-floods/ In 1965 Yash Pal Suri left India for the U.K. The first thing he does on his arrival in England is to buy 2 Super 8 cameras, 2 projectors and 2 reel to reel recorders. One set of equipment he sends to his family in India, the other he keeps ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/09/04/i-for-india-2/ Arundhati Roy, who, like Arun Shourie, needs a lot of space to have her say, argues over seven pages in Outlook that the continued military occupation of Kashmir must stop, and that we have there a State whose younger generation ha s been “raised in a playground of army camps, ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/08/31/reporting-kashmir-2/ By Sridala Swami 113° Fahrenheit on the third day of May. In Guntur, every red chilli in the market as if by concert bursts into sharp-tongued flames and the air breaks into loud applause. “Red Chillies” from Pratilipi. (Via) Also, in the same new issue, a short story by Sumana Roy entitled “My Mother’s Lover,” and, for readers of Hindi, an interpretation of ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/08/30/red-chillies/ At the Invesco Field at Mile High, I asked the Nation Magazine columnist and poet Katha Pollitt to tell me if there had been any moments of poetry at this Democratic convention. We were in the press box overlooking the rows filling-up with more than 75,000 Democratic faithful. On the ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/08/29/denver-diary-day-4/ Such sweet folksy music is present in the ritual of the roll-call, when the different states that make up the United States of America address the Chair and offer their electoral votes to each nominee. “Madam Secretary, Maine, the sun comes out in Maine the first in the nation….” ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/08/28/denver-diary-day-3/ Near the end of his book The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama recalls a phone conversation with his wife Michelle after getting elected to the U.S. Senate, a conversation during which he began to tell her about a significant piece of legislation that he was fighting to get passed. But ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/08/27/denver-diary-day-2/ “It is Michelle’s blackness that has deeply disturbed many Americans and much of the press, and it is that same blackness that has endeared her to many, but not all, black Americans. For those of us who share her race, gender and generation, the negative reaction she has inspired is ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/08/27/farah-on-michelle/ The snow-tipped peaks of the Rockies are visible in the distance toward the West, and a raging tornado touched down within a mile of my hotel soon after my arrival, but the most startling sight of the Democratic convention so far has belonged to George Bush’s idea of good government. ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/08/26/denver-diary-day-1/ Classy, cool, hip, glamorous, even sexy—all these words have been used to describe the presumptive Democratic nominee. He has excited the young, the disenfranchised, the traditionally cynical and apathetic: even I, for the first time in my life, had given money to a campaign—his. Outside Obama events you can buy ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/08/26/claire-messud-on-obama/ I’m leaving early tomorrow, making my slow way to the Democratic Convention. Once the tamasha is underway, do check out my reports. I’ll be filing daily stories for the Indian Express, and a commentary at the end for the Hindu. http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/08/22/denver/ For an Englishman as impressionable, and as imaginatively dim, as Entwistle, feeling the surprising heft of the Colt in his palm and the ease of dispatching a bullet on its trajectory with a gentle squeeze of the finger – like clicking on a mouse – was likely to have been ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/08/22/just-two-clicks/ A wonderful song, based on a Habib Jalib poem, by the Pakistani group Laal. (Via) Pankaj Mishra also points out some plain truths (hello, Fareed Zakaria!) in a piece in the Guardian. (Via) And Sourabh sends me these links (here and here) to sites that present the lives of Indian workers in ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/08/19/the-ten-crore-donkeys-that-are-the-masses/ Jewish-Americans did something in American literature that no other culture has done— they created world-class literature out of the immigrant experience. And that’s the only thing that mattered in Jewish-American writing. Had Roth and Bellow not been major talents, you wouldn’t have Jewish-American writing. It wouldn’t mean anything. It would ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/08/19/jewish-writing-is-over/ Walter Kirn says he has no hidden agendas, he only gives honest reactions to a book. So what? Even if you’re honest, does that mean you are right? A while ago, Kirn had owned up to the pleasures to be had from forming opinions of writers one had never read. ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/08/17/how-reviewing-works/ Click here to get a sense of the settings/voices for the projects put together for Manifesta 7, the European Biennial of Contemporary Art, in Trentino-South Tyrol, Italy. My friends at Raqs Media Collective were one of the curators. The scenarios “focus on sound and voice: Ten writers were invited to ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/08/16/manifesta-7/ (From Fewer Roses, 1986) The last train has stopped at the last platform. No one is there to save the roses, no doves to alight on a woman made of words. Time has ended. The ode fares no better than the foam. Don’t put faith in our trains, love. Don’t wait for anyone in ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/08/15/the-last-train-has-stopped/ “Of course, there are times when there is pleasure,” Rani Bai said. “Who does not like to make love? A handsome young man, one who is gentle …” She paused for a moment, looking out over the lake, smiling to herself. Then her face clouded over. “But mostly it is horrible. ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/08/14/letters/ …I’m going to give you the highlights of what Kal Penn said about his favorite contender for the potentially-soon-to-be-not-White House. Penn got personal, as he speeched at us with tales of his grandfather’s involvement in the struggle for India’s freedom and a more recent influential event in his life— a phone ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/08/13/kal-penn/ Graduating from St Xavier’s College in the late eighties was particularly traumatic for my generation. The tentacles of old world political idealism were still firmly curled around our necks, but we could easily see the shining spectre of globalised India waiting to explode. There were two small factories of political idealism ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/08/13/who-moved-my-idealism/ Cristiane’s bicycle kick goal brought tears to my eyes. So amazing, so perfect - she was surrounded by defenders and still got a controlling touch and just sent it over her own body and into the net. I was rooting for Nigeria, but I’m a fan of the beautiful game, ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/08/13/womens-soccer-in-beijing/ Like scheming courtiers, Wood’s essays and reviews, while going about the business of scrupulously attending to other talents, have always quietly aspired themselves to the state of literary permanence. Indeed, his prose is so consistently burnished and habit-forming, always liable to blossom into metaphor at the most unseasonable moment, that ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/08/11/more-praise-for-wood/ Your repeated use of the phrase at the end of emails convinced me that we had a future until I noticed that BBC news readers and weather reporters say it to sign themselves off secure in the knowledge that some percentage of the population will still be there later on even for the World Weatherview at one o’clock in the ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/08/09/bye-for-now/ On the night of July 13, 2001, tens of thousands of people poured into Tiananmen Square to celebrate the International Olympic Committee’s decision to award the 2008 Olympic Games to Beijing. Firecrackers exploded, flags flew high, and cars honked wildly. It was a moment to be savored. Chinese President Jiang ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/08/07/beijing/ Some people look at Coney Island and see a paradise of carefree entertainment. Others see a cesspool of gritty squalor. Few are those who gaze upon its shrieking kids, grizzled wanderers and fast-talking flimflam artists and see an opportunity for engaged political discourse. A visitor to Coney Island steps right up ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/08/06/new-at-coney-island/ Himal Magazine has gathered the opinions of 75 people on the question of whether South Asia exists. Here are the opening lines of my contribution: When I speak English, I am regarded as an educated Indian. When I speak Hindi, Indians always know that I am Bihari. When I use constructions ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/08/03/south-asian/ TPM provides a link to a new McCain ad that compares Obama to clueless celebrities like Britney and Paris Hilton–and 3QD’s Robin Varghese links the analysis by Craig Calhoun where he asks to what extent is Obama’s appeal a result of his charisma. [Update: Carl Bromley has sent this link ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/08/02/obama-not-celebrity-but-charisma/ Lampedusa, Italy: Thousands of migrants continue to arrive in Italy, crossing the Mediterranean Sea by boat and risking their lives to reach Europe. In the last three years, more than 50,000 people have arrived on more than 700 boats. Around 60% come from the Maghreb, 18% from east Africa, 15% ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/08/02/migrant-bodies/ What a headache Amit Chaudhuri must be for his publishers. He puts out four novels to praise and awards - then breaks off to work on music. An unusual diversion for any writer - Woody Allen may dabble with the clarinet, but he sticks to the day job - and, ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/08/02/what-a-headache-amit-chaudhuri-must-be/ This isn’t to say that the pogrom of 2002, where Muslims were massacred in public view in the presence of policemen, wasn’t on the minds of the bombers. It may well have been. But it’s hard to believe that anyone who had been directly affected by the killings would have ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/07/31/mukul-kesavan-on-gujarat-bombings/ In a 2004 piece by the Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang, recently exhibited at the Guggenheim, a pack of life-size tigers writhe in midair, bristling with scores of arrows. They should be dead, with all those wounds. Yet they still live–or appear to. There is no more perfect emblem of China, ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/07/29/beijing-coma/ Tulsi Badrinath, Melting Love Hans Billimoria, Ugly Tree Ian Rosales Casocot, Sugar Land Han Dong, Banished! Anjum Hasan, Neti, Neti Daisy Hasan, The To-Let House Abdullah Hussein, The ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/07/25/man-asian-long-list/ This collection is named after its final image, at the end of Mahmoud Darwish’s sprawling poem, “With the Mist So Dense on the Bridge.” A female soldier on patrol pleads to her lover across the night sky, “Promise me nothing, / do not send me a rose from Jericho!” The ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/07/25/a-rose-from-jericho/ “Days with my father” is a loving meditation on the relationship that a photographer, Philip Toledano, has with his 98-year-old father who is without any short-term memory. Thanks for sending me the link, Filmiholic. (Talking of fathers, here’s a link to my little daughter’s new blog, Ila.) http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/07/23/days-with-my-father/ Shoot the freak Cold wind, boardwalk nearly empty You know you wanna / A cluster of hip-hop Lubavitch punks, shirt tails out, talking tough You shoot him / he don’t shoot back / Keeper-flatties thrashing in buckets, out there on the pier / Shoot the freakin’ freak ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/07/21/shoot-the-freak/ It must be rather shocking for Shyamalan, but his latest movie, The Happening, is one of the most interesting movies of the year, despite being one of the worst. It offers a study in what happens to the mind of a talented moviemaker when he is caught between commercial hysteria ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/07/19/when-films-go-nutty/ Julia, who sits at an outdoor table with a sign that says PSYCHIC READING AND PALMISTRY, has been watching me each day as I walk past her to the subway in this Brooklyn neighborhood. When I finally stop at her table, she tightens her head scarf and gives me a ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/07/18/mystical-mischief-in-new-york/ Faiz Ahmed Faiz recites his poem “Aaj Bazaar Mein” and, later in the video, Nayyara Noor’s rendition of the poem is set against disturbing images from Zia’s Pakistan. Via http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/07/15/p843/ Kafka frantically pursued Felice, and then he tried to escape her, Begley writes, “with the single-minded purpose and passion of a fox biting off his own leg to free himself from a trap”— a line with more than a little Kafka spirit in it. “Women are snares,” Kafka said once, ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/07/15/kafka/ Gasp, horror! Banksy isn’t a fictional character. His cover has been blown. He’s an actual person who makes art. Worse than that, according to the Mail on Sunday, he went to public school. He’s middle class! He lived in suburbia! What did people expect? That just because he started with ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/07/14/who-is-banksy/ An 81-year-old Hindu nationalist who wants to become India’s next prime minister has chosen an unlikely model for his election efforts, the Internet-based campaign of Sen. Barack Obama. For a few months, a small team of political strategists, computer specialists and management graduates in New Delhi has been studying Obama’s speeches ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/07/11/advani-and-obama/ Where is Matt? What would Fred Jameson say about this order of being in the world? http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/07/11/839/ Come when you find the time. Come even if you can’t find the time. Come like the strength in hands like blood flowing through arteries. Come like the slow silent flames in stoves. Come. More The translation by Alok Bhalla is competent but I’m so grateful to have the Hindi version presented on the same page: “Jaise dhamaniyon mein / aata hai rakt, / jaise ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/07/10/come-when-you-find-the-time/ “We knew the gas incident took place,” he said. “We never thought the contaminated water would come all the way to our house.” The stories repeat themselves in the nearby slums. In Blue Moon, Muskan, a 2-year-old girl, cannot walk, speak or understand what is happening around her. Her father, Anwar, ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/07/08/toxic-bhopal/ I’m living in New Orleans, although I’m at Yaddo right now, working on a novel. After the storm I lived out of a suitcase for six months, all last fall and winter; it took that long for the landlord to do the repairs on the house. As soon as ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/07/06/writing-about-new-orleans/ Click here for a link to a video on YouTube about how the children of Bhopal are paying for Dow Chemicals. dow-chemicals-bhopal-hush-baby http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/07/04/the-children-of-bhopal/ How prolific is the average pulp fiction writer? Tamil author Rajesh Kumar has over 1,250 novels and 2,000 short stories to his credit. Surender Mohan Pathak has over 250 novels to his credit: one, in a premonitory echo of the Naina Sahni case, featured a victim whose remains were disposed ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/07/04/the-asli-paperback-writers/ How the “The West Wing” Predicted the 2008 Presidential Campaign Via http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/07/04/barack-obama-played-by-matt-santos/ The express bus from Hyderabad to Dantewada takes fifteen hours on a good day. As the suburbs of the software hub are left behind, and then the wrought-iron gates of Ramoji Film City, the smooth pavement falls apart. But the sweep of paddy fields and palms—a facsimile of the INCREDIBLE ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/07/03/maoists-in-the-forest/ For 80 seconds yesterday morning, Mohammad Sidique Khan, the ringleader of the July 7 suicide bombers who killed 52 people, was seen as a loving father, cradling his daughter as he bids her farewell. The previously unseen footage, shown at Kingston Crown Court, depicts Khan gently stroking baby Maryam’s hair, expressing ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/06/29/he-is-a-father/ A royal personage was making a tour through his provinces and noticed a man in the crowd who bore a striking resemblance to his own exalted person. He beckoned to him and asked: “Was your mother at one time in service in the Palace?” “No, your Highness,” was the reply, ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/06/29/via-freud/ It’s obvious by now that Barack Obama is treating black Americans like one treats a demented uncle, brought out from his room to be ridiculed and scolded before company from time to time, the old Clinton Sistah Souljah strategy borrowed from Clinton’s first presidential campaign when he traveled the ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/06/26/ishmael-reed-on-obama/ Day 15 of the hunger strike - June 24, 2008 Jantar Mantar, New Delhi When your body starts producing ketones (and it will after 15 days without food), a peculiar smell gets emitted in your breath, very much like over-ripe pears. If it wasn’t for the pollution in Delhi, in particular in ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/06/25/bhopal-2/ Amitav Ghosh, author of the recently published Sea of Poppies, tells Jabberwock about lascars, the sailors who were the forerunners of today’s globalized work-force: [L]ascars – they were absolute pioneers, in that they were the first Asians to work in a western industrial process. The sailing ship was an extremely complex ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/06/25/lascarnama/ The downside of conference life is that you’re expected to say something intelligent. I spend most of the sessions constructing sentences in my head and then swallowing them for fear of sounding stupid. There is much talk of birdsong, the nightingale’s in particular Because I never have any original thoughts, because ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/06/23/geoff-dyer-meets-and-inspires-jm-coetzee/ ON RESERVE AT THE LIBRARY Miss Hilton’s jail time journals may be read in this syllabus along with the Diary of Anne Frank and human landscapes described on cigarette papers by Turkish poet Nazim, not to mention U’s… More From a poem by Indran Amirthanayagam http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/06/23/paris-hilton-writer/ Yesterday, Scott McLemee blogged on Critical Mass in favor of a certain Amazon reviewer who writes under the moniker “Jonathan Swift.” His (or her) witty reviews are boastful of their ignorance, more original humor than criticism, and, thus, routinely removed by Amazon quality control. Take, for example, Swift’s reply to ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/06/22/diamonds-in-the-amazon/ From the machine that cuts ice to the machine that cuts human beings against the bright, inhuman glamour my poetry passes through the middle of burning villages with rapid fire and sharp shrieks near the burnt woman it is my poetry that reaches first; when while doing this my poetry gets burnt in different places. And there ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/06/20/alokdhanwas-poetry/ As in the past years, I’ll be conducting a workshop on long-form writing at the SAJA convention. This year, I intend to use a 1958 report on a stoning to death in Jeddah and, to contrast with it, a 2001 report from Afghanistan by John Sifton; a brief foray into ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/06/18/saja-2008/ The authorities’ handling of the high-profile case – Aarushi’s father, Rajesh Talwar, a dentist, is currently the police’s latest suspect – resulted in angry demonstrations by Nepali labourers, outraged that one of their countrymen had been blamed unfairly for such a horrible crime. But the case has focused fresh attention ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/06/17/masters-and-servants/ Recovering Gujarat from its urban middle class will not be easy. The class has found in militant religious nationalism a new self- respect and a new virtual identity as a martial community, the way Bengali babus, Maharashtrian Brahmins and Kashmiri Muslims at different times have sought salvation in violence. In ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/06/16/revenge-of-the-middle-class/ Just enough of rain To bring the smell of silk From the umbrellas The haiku is by Richard Wright whose books are being reissued by HarperCollins. From an article by James Campbell in the TLS. http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/06/14/rain/ This is what I found in the toilet of my friends’ apartment this weekend. A copy of the TLS , with a piece entitled “Laughing at Lenin,” that begins thus: One thing got better in the Soviet Union under Communism: the humour. In the days just after the Revolution, they used ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/06/14/toilet-humor/ Late one evening in March, I sat in Haandi, a Pakistani restaurant on Lexington Avenue, and watched the swearing in of the new Prime Minister of Pakistan, Yousaf Raza Gillani. Gillani is a loyalist of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), which since its founding in 1967 has been led by ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/06/13/the-long-life-of-the-frontier-mullah/ I have been asked to speak at the ICA, in Boston, which is hosting the Anish Kapoor show. Here’s a glimpse into what I’m talking about, namely, the difficulty of framing my subject: As a writer, you are interested in narrative. Point A to Point B. As an immigrant, you embody ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/06/10/anish-kapoor-in-boston/ Filmmaker Tony Hill took his friend Sally Goode, who was born blind, to a place she’d never been before, then taped her trying to figure out where she was. We first heard Hill’s story care of our colleagues at the Third Coast International Audio Festival. They got it from the ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/06/09/dark-cinemas/ These enclaves have emerged on the outskirts of prospering, overburdened cities, from this frontier town next to the capital to the edges of seam-splitting Bangalore. They allow their residents to buy their way out of the hardships that afflict vast multitudes in this country of more than one billion. And ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/06/09/the-lucky-class/ I’m reading Arun Kolatkar’s Jejuri that has been reissued as a classic by New York Review of Books and comes with an introduction by Amit Chaudhuri. I had first read Jejuri in my first or second year in college, copying down almost each poem in a notebook from the book ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/06/08/kolatkars-jejuri/ Today I can finally update my résumé to include “Writer, The New Yorker.” Yes, I won The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest, and I’m going to tell you how I did it. These observations have been culled from months of research and are guaranteed to help you win, too. (Note ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/06/07/how-to-write-a-cartoon-caption/ Depravity, drink, drug addiction and abuse are hardly the most uplifting subjects for a leisurely read. But for years, misery memoirs have been the toast of the book world, with stories of human suffering generating huge sales. But new figures suggest readers have reached their pain threshold and the mis ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/06/05/suffering-isnt-selling-so-well/ 1. In 1869, Flaubert publishes A Sentimental Education, the mother of all modern novels. As workers erect barricades for the revolution of 1848, the character Frédéric Moreau waits anxiously for the married Madame Arnoux in a seedy hotel room. She doesn’t come, he never makes love to her, he misses ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/06/04/revolution-or-adultery/ I was putting my child to bed tonight when she heard laughter outside her window and got scared, and began to say that I needed to lie down next to her. Selfish me, I told her I’d get my iPod. I had never done this before, but do recommend it ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/06/03/louise-erdrich-reads-lorrie-moore/ I was 16 or 17 when I watched the performance of “Giddh”, a Hindi adaptation of Tendulkar’s play “Gidhade” (The Vultures). The abuse that I saw being exchanged between a father and his sons was shocking. So was the naked language of the marketplace, and even the brothel, being used ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/05/31/vijay-tendulkar-2/ Act! Organize. It’s boring but do it, the world ends if you don’t. And as long as I have slipped and am offering advice, here’s some more: Don’t smoke, are you crazy? Don’t take drugs, aren’t there enough chemicals in your shampoo and your apples and your air and your antihistamine, ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/05/30/so-commence-already/ Hay-on-Wye police station is a modest, friendly, 1960s bungalow. A notice stuck to the reception desk invites visitors to a charity car boot sale; notices inform the curious about Peregrine Watch and warn the reckless off drink-driving. It was into these peaceful environs that Guardian columnist George Monbiot materialised, politely ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/05/30/hay-festival-war-criminal/ Of readers’ inquiries about the relationship between autobiography and invention in his work, Kureishi said: “It’s such a dull question. And then people always want to know what time you get up, or whether you write with the window closed, or what your desk looks like.” My man Hanif Kureishi cuts ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/05/28/questions-for-writers/ And this comes live from Fox news! (I want a teleprompter in my class.) (H/t, Babu Subramaniam) http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/05/27/do-it-live/ For a special culinary journey into–burp!–postcolonial mirth, click here. (H/t: Asad Haider) http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/05/27/mountbattens-restaurant/ [Hillary Clinton’s] most crippling blindness has been to networks, national and global, the threads that bind and have changed society. As David Singh Grewal writes in his excellent new book, “Network Power,” a core tension in the world is that: “Everything is being globalized except politics.” Grewal continues: “We live in ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/05/27/network-power/ As you might have heard by now, Obama says his sensibility was partially shaped by the writings of Philip Roth. Jeffrey Goldberg, who heard it first, had set up a reader-contest: “In a couple of pithy sentences, tell us what the first 100 days of a Roth-influenced Obama presidency would ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/05/26/obama-roth/ A poem by Jeanne Marie Beaumont Is it starting to rain? Did the check bounce? Are we out of coffee? Is this going to hurt? Could you lose your job? Did the glass break? Was the baggage misrouted? Will this go on my record? Are you missing much money? Was anyone injured? Is the traffic heavy? Do I have to remove my ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/05/24/afraid-so/ Watch a video reporting on the exploitation and protest of Indian immigrant workers Support the Indian Guest Workers on Day 8 of Hunger Strike! After Hurricane Katrina, billions of dollars poured into the Gulf Coast region to rebuild. Signal International used these funds to enrich themselves by using the exploitive ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/05/22/indian-guest-workers-strike/ And so, when Franzen and Wood fielded questions at the end of their hour, I asked the following: “The desire for a writer to find readers is perfectly understandable, just as it is for a writer to fear judgment. Some contemporary writers, among them David Foster Wallace, [say they don’t] ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/05/22/writers-and-critics/ Is this nation really ready to elect a black man as President? The answer is no, if you make the mistake of reading the following piece, whose writer uses Saul Bellow to parade his own pathological construction–no, fear–of blackness: The novel’s personification of all that crime is a tall, powerfully built ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/05/21/mr-giulianis-planet/ He writes about it with casual grace, describing, for example, the cricket batsman’s array of potential strokes: “the glance, the hook, the cut, the sweep, the cover drive, the pull and all those other offspring of technique conceived to send the cricket ball rolling and rolling, as if by magic, ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/05/20/new-york-cricket-club/ One of India’s most powerful writers, the Marathi playwright Vijay Tendulkar is dead. News reports here, here, and here. His plays, and arguably his film-scripts for Shyam Benegal and Govind Nihalani, made him the angriest voice in India in the seventies and the eighties. I’m working on an obit and will ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/05/19/vijay-tendulkar/ In his new novel, Something to Tell You, Kureishi describes Goldhawk Road with deadpan humour: “Hijabed Middle Eastern women shopped in the market, where you could buy massive bolts of vivid cloth, crocodile-skin shoes, scratchy underwear and jewellery, “snide” CDs and DVDs, parrots and luggage, as well as illuminated 3-D ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/05/17/something-to-tell-you/ Pablo Bartholomew’s beautiful photo-show Outside In opened in Manhattan a few evenings ago. The exhibition is being held at Bodhi Art in Chelsea. Black-and-white photographs from the seventies and the eighties—reflecting Bartholomew’s engagement with people and places in Delhi, Bombay, and Calcutta. These are not the pictures that made Bartholomew famous. ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/05/14/one-chai-and-a-wills-navy-cut/ So, once again we are told that literary criticism is ready to kick the bucket. But wait, Jonathan Gottschall has a cure! Literary studies should become more like the sciences. Literature professors should apply science’s research methods, its theories, its statistical tools, and its insistence on hypothesis and proof. Instead ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/05/12/literary-studies/ Staged reading of a new play, Sangeet, by Ranbir Sidhu Sunday, May 18, 5-7 pm Engelman Recital Hall, Baruch College, NYC 25th street between Lexington and Third (closer to Lex, on the south side of the street) It’s London in the early 80s and Hrpreet Arora and Vicki Peckham wanna get married. The ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/05/12/ranbir-sidhus-sangeet/ Obama’s top ten choices are likely to include: Kathleen Sebelius Sebelius’s name has been cropping up more and more frequently. The two-term Governor of Kansas fills in many of the gaps in Obama’s support base. She may not have much foreign policy experience but she’ll bring a red state with her. And ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/05/11/obamas-vp/ …but you can paint the colors in with a broom! Nacche baliye! Via http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/05/09/there-aint-no-black-in-the-union-jack/ Do you regret referring to Bill Clinton as the first black President? People misunderstood that phrase. I was deploring the way in which President Clinton was being treated, vis-à-vis the sex scandal that was surrounding him. I said he was being treated like a black on the street, already guilty, ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/05/08/toni-morrison-explains-her-clinton-comment/ Outside In 70s & 80s A Tale of 3 Cities Photographs by Pablo Bartholomew 8th May - 14th June, 2008 at Bodhi Art, New York A visual diary of Pablo’s earlier days, Outside In 70s & 80s A Tale of 3 cities… comprises of resonant photographs of people whose youth is variously evoked and celebrated. ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/05/07/pablo-bartholomew/ There was nothing neutral about watching fellow white southern Africans – one who lives in the U.S. and one who lives in South Africa – talk about their powerful, groundbreaking memoirs (Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, Scribbling the Cat and Rian Malan’s My Traitor’s Heart). It ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/05/06/south-african-memoirs/ I walk along the beach, on the hot sand, until I reach one of the piers. Long and thin, it stretches into the ocean, like some menacing reptilian claw. The beach is chewed away here. I can see the hard red sediment that was once compressed several layers below the ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/05/04/granta-101/ Click here for a 2006 lecture “Primo Levi for the Present” by Judith Butler. What is on view here is a characteristic ability to make important philosophical distinctions which allow a case to be made for progressive politics. Also, in the same series of lectures from the European Graduate School, you ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/05/03/judith-butler-on-primo-levi/ “The reviews tend to be repetitive and tend to be so filled with error that they’re kind of unbearable to read, even the nice ones,” Franzen said. “The most upsetting thing nowadays is the feeling that there’s no one out there responding intelligently to the text,” he said. “So few ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/05/02/public-lives-etc/ “If you’re so smart, how come you’re not rich?” are the first words you read in Jeffrey Eugenides’s short-story “Great Experiment.” (I know, I know, blogs are supposed to report on breaking news and things of the moment, and here I am, providing a link to an ancient New Yorker ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/05/01/early-evening-late-capitalist-light/ Click here to watch the Mission Accomplished ad. I thought of the ad because of the AP news item today that the White House admits fault over the Mission Accomplished banner. http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/04/30/candles-for-john-mccain/ This just in a man has begun writing a poem in a small room in Brooklyn. His curtains are apparently blowing in the breeze. We go now to our man Harry on the scene, what’s the story down there Harry? “Well Chuck he has begun the second stanza and seems to be doing fine, he’s using ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/04/29/man-writes-poem/ Made in 1973, it is easily among the best films produced in post-Independence India. So much pain, so much waiting, each exchange rendered with enormous delicacy, as if one more harsh word or gesture would make everything absolutely unbearable. When I posted the above note on this blog about Garam Hawa ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/04/27/garam-hawa/ One evening last fall I joined a small crowd in a dusty room off busy Qasr-Al-Nil street in Cairo, facing a banner that read, “Welcome to the Cultural Salon of Dr. Alaa Al Aswany.” Many of those seated around me seemed to be simple celebrity spotters, there to see in ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/04/27/mr-mishra-reports-from-cairo/ Studio 360 has a special on film and terror (Morris, Abu Ghraib, Film Club). And, of course, Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay. Like Kumar Barve in the radio segment linked above, talking about the first film, I’m very glad to see the name Kumar in a movie marquee. ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/04/25/harold-and-kumar/ This is music for a (stirring) non-denominational funeral, or, 10 (not unconventional) songs to play at a service where you don’t know who’s coming: 1) The Garden, Van Morrison. 2) The Vigil (the sea), Jane Siberry. 3) Are We the Waiting, Green Day. 4) The Face of Love, Jewel. 5) Hoppipolla, Sigur Ros. 6) A Case ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/04/24/picos-picks/ Click here for Mohsin Hamid’s story “The (Former) General In His Labyrinth.” When Mohsin was here at Vassar the other day, he was telling my students that what his novel meant–what could be concluded as happening in its final pages, for instance–would very much depend on what the reader brought to ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/04/23/tell-me-my-dear-shaan-azaad/ In the 1940s, the Lackawanna steel mills employed over 20,000 people. It was the world’s largest steel factory. The company mostly hired immigrants – people from Ireland and Poland and also Yemen. It brought in Arabs to stoke the vast furnaces, whose heat, the company surmised, they would be able ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/04/22/jihad-next-door/ JUDGE DISMISSES MAIL FRAUD CASE AGAINST BIO-ARTIST KURTZ Buffalo, NY—A process that has taken nearly four years may be coming to an end. On Monday, April 21, Federal Judge Richard J. Arcara ruled to dismiss the indictment against University at Buffalo Professor of Visual Studies Dr. Steven Kurtz. In June 2004, Professor ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/04/22/steve-kurtz-hurrah/ While preparing for class, I came across this 1991 interview with Don DeLillo, conducted by Vince Passaro: DELILLO’S BOOKS ARE not friendly; they don’t “flatter the reader’s prejudices,” as Howard puts it. But if there is any comfort to be found in them, it is in that “moral force” of sentences ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/04/21/dangerous-delillo/ This is doing the rounds in Karachi. My sister-in-law Saima sent it to me: I was depressed last night so I called Lifeline. Got a call center in Pakistan. I told them I was suicidal. They got all excited and asked if I could drive a truck. http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/04/20/depressed/ For the readers of this blog in the subcontinent, this week’s NYT Book Review has the following news: Jhumpa Lahiri, With a Bullet By Dwight Garner Unaccustomed Earth There are not a lot of surprises, week in and week out, at the upper reaches of the Times fiction bestseller list. But occasionally a comet ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/04/20/jhumpa-lahiri-with-a-bullet/ George Monbiot writes in the Guardian that he isn’t about to turn vegan because “he cannot help noticing that in most cases their skin has turned a fascinating pearl grey.” Nevertheless, he wants everyone to know that eating meat is a crime against humanity. Here are some quotes from his ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/04/18/try-the-tilapia/ Some time ago, when I was six or seven or eight years old, it would occasionally happen that I’d walk into a room and certain people would begin to cry. The rooms in which this happened were located, more often not, in Miami Beach, Florida, and the people on whom ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/04/16/esters-legs/ Notes from Philip Roth: A 75th Birthday Tribute, Columbia University. The line this afternoon outside the Miller Theatre on Broadway stretched down the long block, and Judith Thurman, moderating the first panel, said that it was great to see a crowd like this for something other than the Prada Warehouse ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/04/11/you-are-america-yes-you-are-my-wicked-boy/ Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100 by Martín Espada for the 43 members of Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Local 100, working at the Windows on the World restaurant, who lost their lives in the attack on the World Trade Center Alabanza. Praise the cook with the shaven head and a tattoo on ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/04/10/windows-on-the-world/ The novel is just a conversation between two men, one of whom we never hear, and yet many people have said it feels like a thriller. The reason for that is we are already afraid. We have been led to believe that we live in a world where terrorism is ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/04/08/hamid-in-the-house-2/ Taslima Nasreen has been forced to leave India. This might have brought a sense of relief, and even a degree of triumphalism, to the West Bengal and the Central governments. This is also a cause of deep frustration for all those like us who have been trying to defend her ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/04/07/taslima-nasreen-forced-out-of-india/ But his rallies, galling as they must be to the Clinton campaign, convey a misleading impression of his political skills. Better to eavesdrop on him, via unedited video on the internet, at dinner with four constituents in a DC restaurant or answering questions from the editorial board of a local ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/04/06/im-for-obama/ I had said in this column once that, “Michael Dirda has been America’s most engaging, energetic book critic.” A few days later Amitava Kumar emailed me to say, “I disagree slightly with your assessment of Dirda; I’d give that honour to the British-born, New York-based James Wood, who pushes up ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/04/05/michael-dirda-vs-james-wood/ BIDEN: Based on what you’ve said, there’s really no hope — we really should get the hell out of there right now. I mean, there’s nothing to do. Nothing. ROSEN: As a journalist, I’m uncomfortable advising an imperialist power about how to be a more efficient imperialist ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/04/05/exit-strategy/ Jhumpa Lahiri’s characters tend to be immigrants from India and their American-reared children, exiles who straddle two countries, two cultures, and belong to neither: too used to freedom to accept the rituals and conventions of home, and yet too steeped in tradition to embrace American mores fully. More At this time, this ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/04/05/wonder-bread-and-curry/ Last November, a couple of weeks after the Dalai Lama received a Congressional Gold Medal from President Bush, his old Land Rover went on sale on eBay. Sharon Stone, who once introduced the Tibetan leader at a fundraiser as “Mr. Please, Please, Please Let Me Back Into China!” (she meant ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/04/03/the-dalai-lama/ Britain has a revered tradition of Indian restaurants, with perhaps the first opened by Din Muhammad in 1811 (the Hindostanee Coffee House in Portman Square). An explosion of restaurants occurred during London’s swinging 1960s, as a considerable number of Sylhetis set up restaurants to attract the newly adventurous palate ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/04/02/the-dhaba-and-the-diner/ I have come home from a long stay in Mexico to find - because of the presidential campaign, and especially because of the Obama-Clinton race for the Democratic nomination - a new country existing alongside the old. Alice Walker writes that we are the ones we have been waiting ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/04/02/alice-walker-on-obama/ I am the propinquity of heart to darkness. I am umbilical discord. I am the haemorrhage of memory uncoiling the night in you. I am as dirty as a secret, brave as a matador, powerful as sin. I am as wicked as you think I am. The only thing I fear is The above are the closing lines of a poem ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/04/01/sharanya-manivannan/ This kind of vulgarity, which has always been characteristic of Mr. Amis’s attempts to come to grips with serious themes, also helps to explain why the two pieces of fiction in “The Second Plane” miscarry. “The Last Days of Muhammad Atta,” which traces the terrorist’s thoughts in the hours before ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/03/31/muhammad-atta/ “As growth under globalization fails to alleviate the physical miseries of people around the country and voices of dissent grow, such cowardly state actions are only to be expected, a sure sign of illegitimacy and insecurity on the part of ruling cliques.” The above in a note from my friend Aseem ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/03/30/the-war-against-sympathy/ Two women I don’t recognize are sitting outside our lodging when I first wake up. I assume they live or work here until several hours later, when the EMTs start scrambling and saying we have our first patient. The excitement is palpable. The women are taken inside to the sofa in ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/03/30/from-uganda-rx/ From the sea of stories our master fisherman has brought up two gleaming, intertwining prizes - a tale about three boys from Florence in the age of Lorenzo de’ Medici, and a story of Akbar, greatest of the Mughal emperors, who established both the wondrous and shortlived city Fatehpur Sikri ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/03/29/real-uses-of-enchantment/ Optically scanning the shelves wakes up dormant nodes in my memory. Picking up a copy of Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller or George Ade’s Fables in Slang or Chester Himes’s Blind Man With a Pistol and leafing through it for five minutes helps restore my writing style when it has ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/03/26/pulp-fiction/ In a city of 100,000 people, you can call 300 each night. You’ll talk to a dozen. Maybe one will commit to voting for your guy. The people of this city will grow to hate your voice, and there isn’t a damn thing you can do about it. The thing about ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/03/25/senior-calls/ After receiving notes from friends, I checked out the extract from the Naipaul biography by Patrick French at The Telegraph (UK). The extract has an easy narrative flow and answers many questions that people had about Paul Theroux’s bilious but entertaining Sir Vidia’s Shadow. French finds out that Theroux ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/03/24/patrick-french/ Why is there such a proliferation of economic discourses in literary theory, cultural studies, anti-sweatshop debates, popular music, and other areas outside the official discipline of economics? How is the economy represented in different ways by economists and non-economists? In this volume, scholars from a wide variety of disciplines and countries, ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/03/24/its-the-economy/ Lumpenprof finds out what can be done at faculty meetings to make them bearable. Also, in the comments to the above posting at Lumpenprofessoriat a link to a post about political music videos on YouTube. http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/03/23/at-faculty-meetings/ If you have ever wondered what a former External Affairs Minister is reading in retirement, you now have an answer. K. Natwar Singh reviews in Tehelka the last book by a reader of this blog. natwar-singh-tehelka-vijay-prashad-darker-nations http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/03/23/darker-nations/ The little girl that you saw in Hillary Clinton’s 3 A.M. ad has a rather cutting response for the candidate. My dear colleague Bill Hoynes is going to want Casey Knowles in his media criticism class. (Hat-tip, Manish) 3A.M.-hillary-casey-knowles http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/03/21/the-3-am-ad/ Kumar: Richard Burton was reviled by some of his contemporaries because they thought he had “gone native,” right? Trojanow: Jungle-y. Kumar: “Going native” is a term that today appears anachronistic. But people like William Dalrymple, say, who has written White Mughals, and you, too, have gone native. You did so with a ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/03/21/pen-america-8/ In the New York Review of Books, birthday-boy William Dalrymple describes the recent elections in Pakistan as the triumph of the secular middle-class over the conservative feudal landlords. He writes: “To widespread surprise, the elections in Pakistan were free and fair; and Pakistanis voted heavily in favor of liberal centrist ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/03/20/william-dalrymple-in-pakistan/ The German playwright Heinrich Heine wrote in his 1821 play, Almansor: “Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen.” (Where they burn books, in the end they will also burn people.) In less than a decade, in towns such as Buchenwald and Auschwitz, the Nazis burnt ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/03/19/books-are-not-for-burning/ Maud Newton in the Boston Globe (thanks for the tip, TEV, who’s beginning a glorious run toward the release of his first novel) reminds us in her reading of Lush Life by Richard Price that noir novels are all about the mapping of city space during its phase of anxious ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/03/19/lush-life/ At the time, were you aware of people being killed while at Abu Ghraib? One of them was the guy they called “The Iceman”. Yeah, I heard about it. Actually, I was there the night the Iceman was killed. I went to Tier One and someone said this guy had been ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/03/18/lynndie-england/ “It never even dawned on me that people might look askance,” she says. “Anybody who knows me knows that I’m not some ivory-tower-working-two-days-a-week kind of person.” Amitava Kumar, an English professor at Vassar College, is similarly frank. Every day he takes a short walk home from the campus, closes the blinds ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/03/18/do-you-nap/ The millions of people of Indian origin living in North America and Europe face a conundrum this holiday season: what to take, or send home, to relatives in India? Thanks to India’s increasingly open economy, no one there seems to want much from the West any more. How things have changed. ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/03/18/present-tension/ Down at the boathouse it was dark and the town’s lights were reflected in the black ripples of the river. Al Zimmerman, another of John’s teachers, showed me the boat that was named after John and the memorial plaque. Mr Zimmerman used to teach Latin and Greek at the school ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/03/17/andrew-o-hagan/ According to this cool site, Eliot Spitzer’s real crime was selling-out to Bollywood. (Hat-tip, my friend at Nation Books, Carl Bromley) http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/03/17/spitzer-and-big-b/ For millennia, great and not-so-great leaders have celebrated themselves in monuments. The ziggurats of Mesopotamia, the pyramids, the Forbidden City, the Louvre, and Monticello all convey their builders’ legacies, as did the many lavish palaces of Saddam Hussein. Modern U.S. presidents have only their presidential libraries. Now that the George W. ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/03/16/the-george-w-bush-library/ Taxi to the Dark Side is showing at Upstate Films in nearby Rhinebeck. Alex Gibney, the director of this Academy Award winner for best documentary feature, will be at the Upstate tomorrow, March 16, at 1.00 PM. The film offers an important and often painful-to-watch report about the torture and ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/03/15/the-dark-side/ Andrew Ross explains the Global U phenomenon and also why talk about “corporate university” is a lazy shorthand: In all likelihood, we are living through the formative stages of a mode of production marked by a quasi-convergence of the academy and the knowledge corporation. Neither is what it used to be; ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/03/14/offshore-university/ You don’t hear very much about gout any more. None of the meat-eating drinkers I know seems to suffer from it, you don’t read about it in the papers, and, unlike consumption or the pox, it doesn’t now appear under another name. You might almost think it vanished along with ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/03/13/global-conrad/ PEN President, Francine Prose has sent this letter to the membership. I urge the readers of this blog to participate in this drive. I am writing to ask each and every one of you to stand up and be counted in support of our campaign to free 38 writers and journalists ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/03/11/write-to-china/ Friday, April 11, 2008 4.00 pm-6.00 pm Columbia University Miller Theater Broadway at 116th St. Participants include: Joel Conarroe Charles D’Ambrosio Nathan Englander Hermione Lee Joanthan Lethem Ross Miller Claudia Roth Pierpont Ross Posnock Ben Taylor Judith Thurman Remarks by Philip Roth Admission is free, but seating is limited. Please register before April 4th by contacting rothtribute@columbia.edu with your name and email address. http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/03/10/philip-roth-a-75th-birthday-tribute/ Siddharth Chowdhury in Time Out Delhi, the Books Issue, (25 January-7 Feb): Here are my three commandments for young writers. 1) ‘Writing Fiction is not for the faint-hearted. The mortality rate is higher than that of Test pilots.’ A then 40-year-old enfant terrible of Indo-Anglian writing, in his cups, told me this once ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/03/09/writing-advisory-for-young-writers/ In the Boston Review, Colin Dayan asks whether prisoners have a right to read what they want: On June 29, 2006, in the case of Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the U.S. Supreme Court granted habeas corpus protection to prisoners held by the American military at Guantánamo Bay. The court ruled that the ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/03/07/prison-reading/ Hari Kunzru’s short-story “Raj, Bohemian” appears in the latest New Yorker (Hat-tip, Ultrabrown): I spent the next couple of days squatting on my haunches in a corner of my empty flat. Something in me had snapped, was broken beyond repair. My taste had been central to my identity. I’d cultivated it, ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/03/06/sponsored-by/ A new issue of dark matter which asks: A materialist turn in the humanities and social sciences has revitalized work in feminism, science and technology studies, critical social theory and phenomenology. Nonetheless, we want to ask what’s at stake when ‘race’ is grasped from a materialist standpoint? Is the focus on ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/03/03/dark-matter/ The Madrid Connection Directed by Justin Webster Documentary Screening and Discussion (Film length: 90 minutes) March 3, 2008, 3pm-6pm John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Room 1311 - North Hall 899 10th Avenue, New York City NY 10019 The film explores the lives and stories of the two men who became the leaders of the terrorist ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/03/02/the-madrid-connection/ Michael Dirda was speaking at Vassar this evening. He is a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic. When he started working at the Post, Dirda had various literary heroes but he didn’t want to meet them, fearing that if he became friends with a writer he couldn’t be fair in his reviewing. (He ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/02/28/if-you-must-hate-a-book/ A people’s doctor is put behind bars by the state in India. Click here for the Tehelka story on Dr Binayak Sen. The jailed man says, “You must understand, there is a Malthusian process of exclusion going on in the country. You cannot create two categories of human beings. Everybody ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/02/27/prescribed-by-the-state/ “Archive Fever–Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art” is the name of a thoughtful, critical exhibition at the International Center of Photography in NYC. The exhibition brings into the foreground a new engagement with the “archive”–not as a place where old documents lie awaiting discovery but as an active critical ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/02/23/archive-fever/ “A Moment of Hope” in TIME magazine by Mohsin Hamid It has been some time since I was as happy as I was on the night afterPakistan’s Feb. 18 general election. Mine was perhaps a reckless joy, temporarily distracting me from the very real troubles that Pakistan faces. But as I ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/02/22/pakistan-elections/ From an article in the Chronicle: They found that in a variety of ways, conservative students were less interested than liberals in subject matter that often leads to doctoral degrees, and less interested in doing the kinds of things that professors spend their time doing. For example, liberal students reported valuing intellectual ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/02/19/liberals-more-likely-to-pursue-phds/ Achal Prabhala writes that “the ideal South Indian Brahmin achieves his perfect body not by lifting weights or cutting carbs, but by acquiring vast reserves of inner power. He is soft, not taut; lean, but never muscular. Most crucially, he understands that the greatest glory is renunciation, that the best-lived ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/02/18/lean-but-soft/ “I lost my son to a war I oppose. We were both doing our duty,” wrote Andrew J. Bacevich in the Washington Post last year. Parents who lose children, whether through accident or illness, inevitably wonder what they could have done to prevent their loss. When my son was killed ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/02/17/andrew-j-bacevich/ Thanks to Romola Sanyal and Renu Desai, organizers of the Cities and Citizenship symposium at UC-Berkeley, I spent Valentine’s Day in sun-drenched California. My keynote talk was titled “Dispatches from Dark Places,” a report on impoverished towns and also conditions in a prison-state, but, as far as I was concerned, ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/02/16/cities-and-citizenship/ It may be in English: but often it is in an English which is like a howl, or a shout or a machine-gun or the wind or a wave. — Kamau Brathwaite Please check out the latest Politics and Culture–a special issue that I’ve put together on “Rotten English.” The contributors ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/02/11/rotten-english-2/ I’m recently back from a wonderful visit to Buffalo and, while clearing my desk of accumulated materials, found the January 17 issue of the New York Review of Books–in which I took great pleasure in reading Ian Buruma’s tribute to Berlin Alexanderplatz , Alfred Döblin’s 1929 novel as well as ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/02/10/the-genius-of-berlin/ It is J.M. Coetzee’s birthday today. In the evening, in his honor, I’ll read a few pages of Dostoyevsky. In the meantime, here is William Deresiewicz’s recent Nation review of Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year: At the top of the page, an argument is being pursued. It is a political ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/02/09/happy-birthday-jc/ In class today we discussed Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children. This was in my “Literature of 9/11″ course. My students wanted to know why I had begun the course with this book in particular. I think the answer lay partly in this interview where Messud had offered the following: “People ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/02/05/literature-of-911-2/ Karan Mahajan interviews Suketu Mehta for the Believer. Here is the introduction: Writing a novel “about” Bombay is undeniably a preposterous project. One could safely brick a house with recent Bombay tomes. But to set out to interview the city—as Suketu Mehta did for his book Maximum City—is its own kind ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/02/04/suketu-mehta-believer-interview/ Starting early next week, Lydia Davis will be spending nearly three weeks on Vassar campus as our writer-in-residence. Her public reading is on Feb 6, at 5.30 PM, in the Sanders Auditorium. Here’s one of her stories in her collection, Samuel Johnson is Indignant: Happiest Moment If you ask her what ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/02/01/lydia-davis/ The Martin H. Crego Lecture in Economics will be delivered by Ha-Joon Chang tomorrow at 8PM, Taylor Hall 203, Vassar College. Chang is a Cambridge economist and author of Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism. Here’s a review from Bookforum which offers the ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/01/30/ha-joon-chang/ From my article about going back to India to do research, in the Chronicle dated February 1, 2008: The tourist in India is expected to complain of the heat and the dust. I suffer terribly from the infernal conditions in which I sometimes work, but worry that to notice it would ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/01/28/from-the-chronicle-of-higher-ed/ SAJA Forum reports that Arun Gandhi, the South African-born grandson of Mahatma Gandhi and the founder of the MK Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence, has resigned from the institute following charges of anti-Semitism. The uproar arose over his remarks in the Washington Post’s “On Faith” section online, in a Jan. ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/01/28/arun-gandhi/ Outlook has published an abridged version of a lecture delivered by Arundhati Roy in Istanbul on January 18, 2008, to commemorate the first anniversary of the assassination of Hrant Dink, editor of the Turkish-Armenian paper, Agos. The battle with the cap-wearers of Istanbul, of Turkey, is not my battle, it’s yours. ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/01/26/arundhati-roy-on-genocide/ Soon after I posted the link yesterday to Roberto Bolaño’s “Dance Card,” I got an email from Carl Bromley from Nation Books leading me to the latest issue of Bookforum where we get “The Fabulous Schiaffino Boys” by Roberto Bolaño from his Nazi Literature in the Americas. (In his note, ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/01/24/football-and-literature/ PEN American Center A Tribute to Chinua Achebe When: Tuesday, February 26 Where: Town Hall: 123 West 43rd Street, NYC What time: 8 p.m. PEN American Center If you visit the PEN website, check out the link to Roberto Bolaño’s “Dance Card” from Last Evenings on Earth & Other Stories, by Roberto Bolaño (New Directions, 2006). ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/01/23/chinua-achebe-event-announced/ Vijay Prashad has a review of the new book by Mike Davis. Excerpt: After 911, a shocking incident in each of its meanings, the US government pledged not only to go after those who had conducted the event (endless war), but also to better protect the American people. The government now ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/01/21/are-we-safe-yet/ Yes! Why I went to sleep late last night and then woke up again only an hour later and stayed up till four…. http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/01/19/the-news-from-perth/ Elizabeth at Verbal Privilege presents this wonderful poem by Nazim Hikmet that begins: In the Istanbul Detention House yard on a sunny winter day after rain, as clouds, red tiles, walls, and my face trembled in puddles on the ground, I–with all ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/01/19/in-the-istanbul-detention-house-yard/ For readers of this blog in the subcontinent, here’s a report by Somini Sengupta in today’s New York Times about education in rural Bihar. The accompanying photos by Ruth Fremson. The school’s drinking-water tap had stopped working long ago, like 30 percent of schools nationwide, according to the Pratham survey. Despite ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/01/18/savage-inequalities/ On a hot summer day in 1989, Sudhir Venkatesh, a callow sociology student with a ponytail and tie-dyed T-shirt, walked into one of Chicago’s toughest housing projects, clipboard in hand, ready to ask residents about their lives. Sample question: “How does it feel to be black and poor?” Suggested answers: ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/01/16/the-chicago-gangsta-school-of-sociology/ In the TLS, Vikram Seth offers three of his poems, from a group of six, that were inspired by George Herbert. The poems were set as a song-cycle (”Shared Ground”) and performed at the Salisbury, Chelsea and Lichfield Festivals. In a note, Seth explains his attraction to Herbert: When I was ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/01/15/love-bade-me-welcome/ Five or six years ago, when I had gone to meet him at the Granta office in London, Ian Jack had told me the story of his sickness and his stay at the Holy Kurji Family Hospital. As it happens, I passed by the hospital in a boat just ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/01/15/a-bihar-story/ Naresh Fernandes pays tribute to P. Sainath for reminding us that India is still a poor country. Even as a young journo, a valuable lesson that he picked up from Sainath, Naresh writes, was “that poverty needed to be reported as a process, not as a series of glaring events, ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/01/12/the-bull-of-development/ Tunku Varadarajan, writing in the London Times, sheds some light on the reasons why the “monkey” episode in the recent match in Sydney has ignited passions in India and elsewhere: The Indians, and, more commonly, the Pakistanis, are seen as people with fewer principles who cut corners and play footsie with ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/01/11/fairdinkum-fellas-v-dodgy-dealers/ Just got back today from India and found in the mailbox this wonderful card from my artist-friend Martha Rosler. martha-rosler-2008-no-war-no-torture http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2008/01/09/2008/ From Mint: Siddhartha Deb’s recommendations for the year: When I discovered the Chilean writer Roberto Bolano last year, I was astonished by the power of his fiction. This year saw the publication of his novel, The Savage Detectives, in English and I found it to be a genuine Third World epic: ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/12/26/reading-recommendations/ I’m off to India in a few short hours. I’m going to be lazy and use Maud’s post on James Wood and Coetzee’s latest. Miss Maud has also provided links to previous reviews that Wood has done of Coetzee’s work–and, more surprising treats, two other texts, one by Peter Brooks ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/12/19/confessions/ Vijay Prashad pays tribute to Bela Malik: Last year, I wrote an essay for CounterPunch about the Indo-US agreement. It began with the bravery of my friends Bela Malik and Tommy Mathew, whose protest in Jangpura drew the might of the US secret service and the Delhi police. Bela, an editor ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/12/18/bela-malik-rip/ Carl Bromley from Nation Books tells me that these podcasts have been giving him “hours of pleasure.” Here’s a way to learn a language–or is it a culture?–from seventies-era Hindi films. The podcasts are offered by Arun Krishnan who has a novel coming out soon. A few years ago I bought ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/12/14/learning-hindi-from-bollywood-films/ Jai Arjun Singh decides against the eye-roll when reading Rishi Reddi’s book of stories about Indians in America. Here’s an interview with Rishi. Via Manish. I read with Rishi at a literary festival last month and agree with the New Yorker’s assessment that her “understated prose and her choice of ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/12/14/rishi-reddi/ A wonderful report on This American Life about Indian workers outsourced to Oklahoma. The details are sad and infuriating, but the story is partially redeemed by–what exactly?–human kindness, or a radical interpretation of the Bible, or our need to forget the price paid in suffering and remember only what came ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/12/13/cowboys-and-indians/ THIS WEEK: STRANGE CULTURE on Sundance Channel! (The winner of the Marlon Riggs prize) 12/11 @ 9:35pm EST/PST * 12/13 @ 12:35am EST/PST * 12/14 @ 10:35am EST/PST * 12/16 @ 3:35pm EST/PST * * Central & Mountain Times vary by as much as 2 hours - Check local listings. STRANGE CULTURE, selected to open both ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/12/11/watch-this/ Paul Chan’s 1st Light. (2005) Via Sughra Raza More here and here I’m posting this as a farewell to my students in ENG 207 who are turning in their final papers tomorrow on the art of 9/11. http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/12/10/paul-chan/ George Saunders on Daniil Kharms, the Soviet absurdist writer who died during the siege of Leningrad: Kharms’s stories are truly odd, as in: at first you think they’re defective. They seem to cower at the suggestion of rising action, to blush at the heightened causality that makes a story a story. ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/12/08/absurdistan/ In the London Review of Books, Jeremy Harding writes about a “gripping little book” entitled Reporting Iraq. I’ve ordered the book this morning, drawn by the idea of this being an oral history offered by the journalists, about the work they were doing and also, of course, about the place ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/12/07/embedded-in-iraq/ I’ve taught Joe Sacco in my “War” class, his graphic reports from Bosnia and the Middle East. But I’m considering using him in a course on travel-writing. In his comic-book Palestine, Sacco portrays life under military occupation. He even has jokes. Three secret service agents are walking along the edge ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/12/05/going-out/ This weekend I got around to reading the latest Bookforum. Two reviews pleased me in particular: COLM TÓIBÍN ON A BIOGRAPHY OF THE MATURE JAMES for its stylish plea for subtlety: Novick’s James is, in certain ways, as with most subjects of a biographer, a strange reflection of the biographer himself. James ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/12/03/bookforum/ A night ride on the subway through New York City. It is beautiful and haunting. A breath passing through the body of a man standing alone in a crowd. Click here for Part II. The rhythm is different here. More color and movement. Inevitably, you see the lights above ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/12/01/all-souls-2/ Dwight Garner, our man at the Times, recommends Stacey Kent singing Kazuo Ishiguro lyrics. Check this out. Fine charm. Even better with bourbon. With or without ice, a great listen. http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/11/30/ice-hotel/ In all my experience, I have not met with anything quite like it. — T. S. Eliot I didn’t read many books while writing Augie. One I did read and love was All About H. Hatterr…. So, what about All About? I hate to be siding with T.S. Eliot… but what can ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/11/29/all-about-gv-desani/ Please consider contributing to the Sidr Compensation Fund. P.S. A reader of the blog also sends the following links to another organization, Global Giving. Thanks. http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/11/28/bangladesh-appeal/ An extract from Wyatt Mason’s review of John Updike’s Due Considerations in Harper’s: In Picked-up Pieces (1975), Updike’s second collection of essays, he lists his rules for reviewing: 1. Try to understand what the author wishes to do, and do not blame him for not ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/11/27/kinder-gentler-reviewing/ A Patna street painting. By my old school-friend Anunaya Chaubey. I like the recognizable aspects of the chai-wala’s face and figure. And the pink gamcchha. The peeling blue wall. The brightness of the yellow that is of course also smirched. There is a fine surprise here too. The ring-marks all ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/11/25/patna-ke-rang/ It is always a pleasure to read Mukul Kesavan on cricket. Here he reports from the ongoing India-Pakistan match at Delhi’s Feroze Shah Kotla ground, speaking up once again not only on behalf of the ever-elegant play of V.V.S. Laxman but also the more discriminating demands of Test cricket. What ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/11/23/the-achievement-of-style/ I was sent this link to an interview with Pankaj Mishra. It appeared in The Believer magazine. I liked the interview because of exchanges like the one below–but am posting it mostly because I dig it very much when an Indian writer is introduced thusly: “X who has very dark ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/11/22/the-believer-interview/ From The Hindu: To Our Friends in Bengal News travels to us that events in West Bengal have overtaken the optimism that some of us have experienced during trips to the state. We are concerned about the rancour that has divided the public space, created what appear to be unbridgeable gaps between ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/11/21/chomsky-co-on-nandigram/ Two students were absent today; another one picked up her bag in the middle of the class and left. Safe trip to your Thanksgiving dinners everyone! Here’s a picture of Duane Hanson’s bronze sculpture “The Traveller” (1986). http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/11/21/airport/ By Tom Gauld Via Maud http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/11/19/beginning-middle-end/ “The classic British public school prepares its inmates expertly for taking on (or over) the world, and not at all for that half of the world known as the opposite sex.” So begins the Pico Iyer review of Judith Freeman’s The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/11/18/the-knight-of-sunset-boulevard/ Five or six years ago, I was driving with my wife from State College, PA to Washington, D.C. We had the radio on. A woman’s voice was reading out the self-descriptions provided by young, college-aged sperm donors. Then, the road cut between mountains and we lost the radio signal. And ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/11/16/missing-parents/ Denis Johnson, winner of this year’s National Book Award for Tree of Smoke, offers his readers these bits of hard, fragrant supari during an interview: Q: What drew you to the story? DJ: I have no idea. Q: How does the book compare to other prose you’ve written? DJ: It’s longer and, despite what ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/11/15/chew-on-this/ This morning my friend Linta wrote to say that Paris Hilton was concerned about elephants in northeastern India that had gone on a rampage and died after getting drunk on the rice beer made by farmers. But now I learn from Huffington Post that AP or someone else has killed ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/11/14/good-news/ A bit unfair to hijras, no doubt, but angry and resolute. (Thanks, dearest S.A. in Karachi) ek-general-sala-musharraf-pakistan http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/11/13/ek-general-sala-ek-general/ In the photo above, “Loins of Punjab Presents” director Manish Acharya I wrote this the other day for India Uncut’s Rave Out column: I’m coming to the party late—last weekend, for the first but not the last time, I watched Manish Acharya’s comedy, “Loins of Punjab Presents.” Behan____, what a film! ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/11/12/brown-is-the-new-black/ Patrick French has a fine piece of reportage on the Islamic Rage Boy, Shakeel Ahmad Bhat — the young man whose own name doesn’t appear in most reports and who was declared a “religious nut bag” full of “yells and gibberings” by no less an authority than Christopher Hitchens. We ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/11/11/rage-boy/ Counterpunch has published a longer, even more entertaining version of the op-ed piece by Mohammed Hanif that had appeared in the New York Times a few days ago. An excerpt from this account of General Musharraf’s speech on Pakistan TV: I have been accused of punctuation abuse often enough to take ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/11/09/a-case-of-a-drunk-uncle/ Asma Jahangir writes in today’s Washington Post: LAHORE, Pakistan — It was close to midnight last Saturday when Gen. Pervez Musharraf finally appeared on state-run television. That’s when police vans surrounded my house. I was warned not to leave, and hours later I learned I would be detained for 90 days. At ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/11/09/asma-jahangir/ To become a writer, says Picador’s Andrew Kidd, you must become a reader first. And if your book fails, you can also aim to be a reader last. It is a noble thing to be. (The argument is sound, of course, but it leaves a small stain, a bit like ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/11/09/the-novel-inside-you/ I’m listening right now to the live webcast on the turmoil in Pakistan. Go here. Asia Society Emergency Town Hall Meeting November 8, 8:00 - 10:00 am Join the Asia Society on November 8 to discuss the ongoing crisis with leading experts recently returned from Pakistan—Daniel Markey (CFR), Robert Templer (ICG), and Saeed ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/11/08/emergency-town-meeting/ Mohammed Hanif, the author of a forthcoming novel A Case of Exploding Mangoes, has this brilliant op-ed in today’s New York Times: For those who have never had to live under his regime, the general/president can come across as a rakish, daredevil figure. His résumé is impressive: here’s a man who ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/11/07/the-general-topples-the-president/ An old and dear friend from Karachi has just sent me this message: I was released from Central Prison earlier this morning at 4 a.m. However, hundreds of young lawyers have been imprisoned. Their families have no access to the detainees. We are under serious pressure. Everything is being monitored. Therefore, please ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/11/06/a-call-from-karachi/ Dear Friends, The situation in the country is uncertain. There is a strong crackdown on the press and lawyers. Majority of the judges of the Supreme Court and four High Courts have not taken oath. The Chief Justice is under house arrest (unofficially). The President of the Supreme Court Bar ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/11/05/asma-musharraf/ Among those in the Pakistani judiciary who have been sacked by Musharraf is Sindh’s Chief Justice, Sabihuddin Ahmed. Asked by a reporter whether he was under house arrest, he said: “They haven’t given me any order to that effect. But when I started for my office, they told me I ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/11/05/musharrafs-many-betrayals/ “Loins of Punjab Presents” kick-starts this year’s South Asian Literary and Theater Arts Festival. I’ll be there. Freer Auditorium, National Museum of Asian Art at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. November 3, 10.30 AM. Admission free. Later in the afternoon, readings by Madhur Jaffrey, Rishi Reddi, Thrity Umrigar, and yours ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/10/31/saltaf/ This afternoon, I joined Dev Benegal, Ram Rahman, Marina Budhos, and Aseem Chhabra in a discussion about Indian photography at the Newark Museum. “India: Public Places/Private Spaces” is the name of the splendid exhibition on display there. I read out brief pieces I had written about the work of Raghubir ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/10/28/newark-museum/ M U T I N Y 10 Year Anniversary Saturday Nov. 3 With Special Guest: TALVIN SINGH (DJ set) And reuniting for the first time in four years, the full MUTINY crew: ANJU - NAVDEEP - REKHA - SIRAIKI - ZAKHM Also featuring a live set by: SHAA’IR + FUNC Visuals by VJ FULL STEALTH 27 West 24th Street (btwn 5th ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/10/26/mutiny/ Michael Ondaatje spoke this afternoon to a small group of students in a Vassar classroom; he said he missed teaching, and that though he had been a good teacher, he was a bad marker. He hated marking. “A for teaching, C for marking.” The students had come prepared with questions. ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/10/24/ondaatje-in-the-classroom/ My review of Naipaul’s latest appeared in the Sunday Indian (Oct 15-21). An excerpt: In [A Writer’s People], Naipaul is reading and writing only in the way a novelist can. In two brief but beautiful paragraphs, he presents a portrait of contrasting ambitions. First, Balzac’s Rastignac on a hill at evening ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/10/24/a-writers-people/ I just finished reading James Wood’s review of Philip Roth’s latest. At first the quick attention to sentences, in that alert and intelligent way that Wood always has, and then the more magisterial moves toward the end, assuming a larger form in order to seemingly cover the world in ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/10/21/real-fictions/ Here is a quick interview I gave to my friends at Tehelka: A book that means a lot to you? JM Coetzee’s Disgrace. A pure assessment of power. How many books do you own? Five thousand, limited by the size of the bookshelves that, at great risk to my health, I put together ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/10/19/moby-dick-etc/ By Monica Narula Also see Raqs Media Collective http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/10/19/in-the-line-of-sight/ A photo from our holiday–Ila enjoying her tea. It tasted a lot like apple juice. However, for the real tea-drinkers here are George Orwell’s eleven golden rules. http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/10/17/time-for-tea/ Luc Tuymans Maypole 2000, Oil on Canvas 224 x 116cm I owe this discovery to Okwui Enwezor via this excellent review of the Istanbul Biennial. If media images inadequately depict the horrors of reality, then Tuymans’ paintings are even more disturbingly detached. Often taking his imagery from published photos (of war, violence, subjugation), the paintings ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/10/12/luc-tuymans/ More http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/10/12/matchbox-art/ Simon Armitage, poet from the North Country, read tonight at Vassar. Great reading, delightful poems, doing what a colleague, quoting from an Armitage poem, called “testing the range / of the human voice.” He grew up wanting to read more, and Ted Hughes, who lived in the next valley, was ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/10/10/simon-armitage/ “Three Painters” (1996) by Atul Dodiya From an article in the NY Times on “the new India.” Also mentioned in the article, this, and this, and this. http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/10/10/three-painters/ Ramu Ramanthan’s Jazz opens on Novembver 7: “The best things in life are a fluke,” says Ramu Ramanathan, the award winning playwright whose plays include Mahadevbhai, 3 Sakina Manzil and Cotton 56 Polyester 84. “I was attending a sombre playwrights’ session at Prithvi, and as luck would have it, actor and ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/10/07/bandra/ Salil Tripathi on the cultural discovery of Srinivasa Ramanujan: As the lights come on the stage, a woman writes complicated equations furiously on a board, taking her students into the deep waters of complex numbers. The symbols appear like ancient hieroglyphs to the uninitiated — which includes many at the Barbican ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/10/06/a-beautiful-mind/ Christian Lemmerz’ Abu Ghraib (2006) at Leo Koenig When I saw the above image this morning I thought of a book I read this summer, Stephen Eisenman’s The Abu Ghraib Effect, in which the author writes that the photographs made by the American soldiers and civilians at the Iraq prison ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/10/05/the-abu-ghraib-effect/ Chirodeep Chaudhuri, whose photos I used to admire in Time Out Mumbai, has several wonderful images of pay-phones in this week’s India Abroad. The photographer introduces the project thus: “The one-rupee entrepreneur: this series of photographs looks at the phenomenon of the one-rupee pay phones as a metaphor for the ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/10/03/chirodeep-chaudhuri/ In my Freshman class today, we read Ann Hodgman’s essay “No Wonder They Call Me a Bitch.” The prose is sharp and funny but I guess I wanted my students to think a bit about how to get their material: I’ve always wondered about dog food. Is a Gaines-burger really like ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/10/02/no-wonder-they-call-me-a-bitch/ Ila attends to the ritual aspects of kite-flying by overdressing like a Lahori. http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/09/29/how-to-dress-for-kite-flying/ Sylvia Plachy’s New York slide show here. The photo above, “Lulu, Budapest, 1976,” is from Plachy’s country of birth. Here’s a link to an interview with the photographer. http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/09/27/sylvia-plachy/ Via Paper Cuts who writes: This thing is almost entirely about Roth’s grim assessment of the current state of American and world politics. “I’ve never heard people so despairing,” he says. Also: When Roth is asked about Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, he replies: “If anybody can lose 50 states for the Democrats, I ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/09/25/philip-roths-state-of-the-union-interview-2/ Very excited about the India-Pakistan finals on Monday. And here’s looking back with displeasure. Update: Congratulations to Dhoni and crew. On another note, here Rahul Bhattacharya imagines Dhoni with grey hair. http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/09/23/coming-up-monday/ Entry From Backside Only, refers to a phrase commonly used on signposts to indicate the rear entrance of a building. Binoo John, the author, said young Indians had embraced the variant of the language as a charming offspring of the mingling of English and Hindi, rather than an embarrassing mongrel. “Economic ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/09/21/hazaar-fundas-of-indian-english/ Alan Bennett, whose diaries from the LRB I’ve used in my classes, was on National Public Radio. He was being interviewed about his new book The Uncommon Reader in which Queen Elizabeth “gets so absorbed in reading that even while riding in a carriage, she is reading a book with ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/09/19/uncommon-reader/ My college buddy George Saunders (on Letterman) shows that he is funny all the time. george-saunders-david-letterman http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/09/19/hard-working-limited-means-lots-of-fun/ Ghost: Transmemoir Bose Krishnamachari Mixed media installation | 480″ x 84″ | 2006 Gallery ArtsIndia (Hat-tip, the inestimable Brian Lukacher) http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/09/16/ghost-transmemoir/ Anil Kalhan asks what happened to Pakistan’s Charter of Democracy: The period of civilian rule in the 1990s was therefore one in which the army was able to “divide and rule” the civilian political leadership to a significant extent. And in this context, the agreement of Sharif and Bhutto to the ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/09/16/military-rule-by-other-means/ Here is William Dalrymple on V.S. Naipaul’s new book of essays: A Writer’s People is an indulgent grand old man’s book: meandering, ponderous and pedantic, full of narcissism and touchy self-regard; it is as if Naipaul’s famous Olympian disdain has finally left him exhausted—the acidity of his own derision now makes ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/09/15/naipauls-a-writers-people/ Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People, short-listed for the Booker Prize, is dedicated to a Bhopal survivor, Sunil Kumar. I was very moved by Sinha’s tribute to this man who struggled for a long time and then killed himself. In the latest Tehelka, Salil Tripathi has profiled Sinha, who is a ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/09/14/bhopal/ In 1965 Yash Pal Suri left India for the U.K. The first thing he does on his arrival in England is to buy 2 Super 8 cameras, 2 projectors and 2 reel to reel recorders. One set of equipment he sends to his family in India, the other he keeps ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/09/13/i-for-india/ India: Public Places/Private Spaces Exhibition of Contemporary Photography and Video Art, September 19 2007–January 6 2008. Newark Museum http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/09/13/public-placesprivate-spaces/ I pay tribute to Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land in the MLA radio show “What’s the Word?” The show will be available at the MLA site later and also will be broadcast from other stations. You can listen to the show tonight on the internet when WBGO in Newark, ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/09/12/libraries/ (H-T, Robin Khundkar) http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/09/11/american-war/ How far would you go to stop a war? “The Camden 28″ recalls a 1971 raid on a Camden, New Jersey draft board office by “Catholic Left” activists protesting the Vietnam War and its effects on urban America. Arrested on site in a clearly planned sting, the protesters included four ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/09/10/camden-28/ After an active afternoon in Saya’s company, Ila went to the nearby lake and fed bread to a big turtle. When we returned home, she was giving her father trouble as he tried to get her ready for bed. Hearing him sigh volubly, she asked, “Dad, are you tired of ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/09/10/ila-and-saya/ The Shock Doctrine by Alfonso Cuarón and Naomi Klein. This brief video was put on YouTube two days ago and was sent my way by Liz Blum. We start with electroshock therapy and a connection is revealed between that form of treatment and CIA experiments on torture; and then, the ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/09/09/shock-doctrine/ Here’s a report on the rejection letters sent out by Knopf editors (I suspect writers will take heart from it, but so can editors, I think, because we are told in the article that they’ve mostly made the right call): For almost a century, Knopf has been the gold standard in ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/09/08/rejection-letters/ My Revolutions is a significant departure from his earlier work. Where his debut, The Impressionist, was a meandering, satirical romp through the ridiculousness of Imperial India and his follow-up, Transmission, a pacy, three-track saga about how the internet connects all of us whether we like it or not, My Revolutions ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/09/05/hari-kunzru/ Christopher Hitchens in Newsweek: Aug. 29, 2007 - The publication of Mother Teresa’s letters, concerning her personal crisis of faith, can be seen either as an act of considerable honesty or of extraordinary cynicism (or perhaps both of the above). These scrawled, desperate documents came to light as part of ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/09/02/mother-teresas-crisis/ WHY WE OPPOSE THE INDO-U.S. MILITARY TIES Since the 1990s, the U.S. government made overtures to the Indian Government for a military alliance. When the Bush administration came to power it wanted India to be a part of its missile defence shield. Since 9/11, the Indian and U.S. navies ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/09/02/no-to-ind0-us-nuclear-deal/ How to Tell If You’re a Participant or a Staff (A Handy Guide for Day Programs) by David Moreau If you have a bowel movement at work and no one records it in a communication book — you’re a staff person. If someone shouts at you from the other side of the room, Did ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/09/01/david-moreau/ It was the first day of class and to honor Grace Paley’s memory I gave the students copies of “A Conversation with My Father.” The writer tells a story to her dying father; he wants a different story, and in light of his comments, the daughter changes her story. (For ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/08/30/fathers-and-daughters/ The Guardian has a piece by V.S. Naipaul looking back more than fifty years when, as a young Caribbean writer, he discovered the success of another writer who was only a few years older than him. The story of the discovery is affecting, as are the cutting remarks at the ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/08/28/naipauls-walcott/ “The station wagons arrived at noon, a long shining line that coursed through the west campus. In single file they eased around the orange I-beam sculpture and moved toward the dormitories. The roofs of the station wagons were loaded down with carefully secured suitcases full of light and heavy clothing; ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/08/26/station-wagons/ Quarratulain Hyder, author of Aag Ka Darya, which she herself translated as River of Fire, has passed away. Uma at Indian Writing has provided a link to a Kumkum Sangari article on Hyder. And Outlook magazine has linked its obituary to a piece by C.M. Naim. Photo by Prashant Panjiar. http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/08/24/qurratulain-hyder-bhi-nahin-rahin/ Grace Paley has died. More. Hear her read from her work. And this obituary with this wonderful line: “In a sense, her work was about what happened to the women that Roth and Bellow and Malamud’s men had loved and left behind.” Here are the opening lines from a Paley story called ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/08/22/grace-paley/ Thanks to Robin Varghese’s recommendation, I’ve been watching Ray’s documentary on Tagore. I’m no fan of dramatized documentary, but there is no simple illustrative function being performed here. All the poetry of Ray’s film-making is present in these frames! Elsewhere, Kamila Shamsie has been wordering why Pakistani writers haven’t kept pace ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/08/20/august-opinion/ I found this review of a book of poems by Guantanamo detainees a real pleasure to read–at every turn, the reviewer Dan Chiasson asks the right questions and in the right tone. Bravo. All of which is to say, reading “Poems From Guantánamo” is a bizarre experience. “The Detainees Speak” ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/08/19/guantanamo-poets/ (Photo: India-Pakistan bus) Here’s what I wrote for Rave Out on India Uncut yesterday: I’m writing this on August 15. It is our Independence Day. A young Kashmiri Muslim told me in Srinagar a few months ago that this is the day on which everyone there tries to stay indoors. This is ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/08/16/independence-day/ Station Road, by Sudhir Patwardhan Read Ram Guha in today’s NY Times, and also Mohsin Hamid http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/08/15/happy-birthday-india/ Or death. http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/08/14/derrida-on-love-or-death/ “Untitled” (watercolor) by Akbar Padamsee Outside by Mangalesh Dabral I closed the door and sat down to write a poem outside a breeze was blowing there was a little light a bicycle stood in the rain a child was coming home I wrote a poem which had no breeze no light no bicycle no child and no door. (Translated by the poet) Go here for ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/08/11/manglesh-dabral/ Gilles Peress, Street, Azerbaijan The fact that each person is looking in different directions makes this claustrophobic street, packed with people and vehicles, even more menacing. As viewers, we naturally follow the gazes of the people in picture as they criss-cross through the scene. The cloaked woman moving toward us in ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/08/08/get-the-picture/ Workers rise before dawn, work six days a week and return to camps, where they have time to do little but eat or sleep. They are under close watch, with no right to unionize and no chance at citizenship. Who would have thought — but the New York Times had a ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/08/06/dubai/ The verdicts have finally been delivered in the Bombay blasts case. Most of the guilty are in jail. But the bombings had been in response to the earlier riots, in which three times more people were killed. Why have those who were guilty of inciting violence and murder during the ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/08/03/meanwhile-in-mumbai/ “My father came toward me with the rifle.” Why he wrote the last line: This last line is in fact the first line of the novel I’m working on, The Wilding. Every time I boot up my computer and hunch over the keyboard for a long, bloody stretch of writing, I review ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/08/03/first-lines/ Claire Pentecost See also left-art-books-street-l.a.-after-uprising-claire-pentecost http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/07/31/streetfill/ David Thomson
, Film critic, in an obit in the Guardian Long before the end, Ingmar Bergman elected to live on a small island off the coast of Sweden. It was a way of saying he was alone with his work and his lovers - and probably no one knew the loneliness ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/07/31/bergman/ A couple of weeks ago, I was drawing up a list of books to assign for the coming semester, and, by chance, I came across an old piece on Slate about the most influential books some folks had read in college. Which book would I offer from my own past? ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/07/30/first-literary-crush/ Sanjay Kak’s documentary about Kashmir, “Jashn-e-Azadi” (How We Celebrate Freedom), was not allowed to be screened in Mumbai. Here’s a report at Mumbai Mirror. Also see here, here and here. Ranjit Hoskote from PEN-India has this statement: We write to bring to your notice yet another violation of the freedom of ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/07/28/jashn-e-azadi/ If Bush vetoes the bill designed to provide state health insurance coverage for children, Barbara Ehrenreich proposes that we demand that he “open up pet health insurance to all American children now!” This year, Americans will spend about $9.8 billion on healthcare for their pets, up from $7.2 billion five years ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/07/28/barbara-ehrenreich/ 1. Nobody gets hurt. 2. Nobody fights. 3. Nobody doesn’t be mean to each other. 4. Nobody can drop nobody else’s pictures. 5. Nobody gets drained. [She looks at the drain in her bathtub.] 6. Nobody lies down [in the bath]. 7. Nobody when you’re eating bubblegum swallows it. 8. Put on your seatbelt. 9. Nobody stays up ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/07/27/ila/ “Have you ever been stung by a bee?” Anjali asked. “Sure, a couple of times,” Rahul said. “Back in the village, papa built a big open tank next to the tube well in the field. We called it the hamam, and it was a lot of fun bathing in it during ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/07/24/lunch-with-uday-prakash/ Barkha Dutt on the outrage–and the hypocrisy–over the detention of the bombing suspect in Australia: Our schizophrenia as a people is astounding. Right now we are consumed with self-righteous indignation over how Mohammed Haneef, an Indian citizen and an initial suspect in the Glasgow bomb blast, is being treated by the ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/07/22/589/ Artist Wayne Gonzales at the Paula Cooper Gallery http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/07/22/thats-the-ticket/ New Directions is re-issuing the collection of Mahatma Gandhi’s writings which had been selected by the Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton. I’m the happy recipient of the galleys as well as a New Directions t-shirt with their cool, classic logo in the front (see below). Gandhi On Non-Violence, in its ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/07/20/mertons-gandhi/ Did we invade or just move forward?” Martinez asked. “Can’t tell,” Harper said. There were two radios in the front, and they both crackled with orders, voices overlapping. “Well, are we in Iraq or not?” Jimmy said. “I said, I can’t tell. The GPS is on the fritz. But I don’t think so.” “Wasn’t ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/07/17/stumbling-through-iraq/ Pervez Hoodbhoy on the fiasco in Pakistan: The Lal Masjid battle is part of the wider civil war within the Islamic world waged by totalitarian forces that seek redemption through violence. Their cancerous radicalism pits Muslims against Muslims, and the world at large. It is only peripherally directed against the excesses ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/07/17/lal-masjid/ Jeanette Chávez Paredón (Nobody knows who’s behind the firing squad) dimensions variable, bronze rifles, 2006 At the Heather Marx Gallery San Francisco, July 14 – August 18, 2007 http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/07/16/ominous-atmosphere/ Salil Tripathi on the unwelcome tumult that the brothers have caused in London and Glasgow: “India has over 140 million Muslims, and it has the second-highest Muslim population in the world, and yet you will not find even one Muslim joining international terror networks.” It was Kapil Sibal, the Union Minister ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/07/15/indian-muslims/ Today Ila brought back her first project–in image and text–from Dutchess Art Camp. http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/07/13/art-camp/ I am leading a workshop tomorrow on long-form writing at the SAJA convention and plan to use Robert Boynton’s New New Journalism as a point of entry into our conversation: The New New Journalists bring a distinct set of cultural and social concerns to their work. Neither frustrated novelists nor wayward ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/07/13/new-new-journalism/ Say there’s a group of five people standing on a train track, and you’re on a train coming toward them. You can save the whole group by pulling a lever and switching to another track, but the catch is that you’ll kill another person who’s standing on that other track. ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/07/12/choices-choices/ In time for London Mela, Eklavya Gupte writes on new Indian writing in Time Out London : In the past decade, India has produced a clutch of distinctive new writers… These new writers are from diverse backgrounds and their work explores all the different realms of India. Many shun the themes ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/07/11/time-out-london/ This recording was made at a Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan performance. We don’t hear him, but we do get to listen to the harmonium and tabla–and then, a little over a minute into the recording, the action begins… (Thanks, TV) P.S. Here’s a recent piece by Kamila Shamsie about growing up under ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/07/10/578/ If you missed this in the Guardian: From coast to coast, from white-wine sipping yuppies to real life mobsters, The Sopranos has had Americans talking - even those of us not familiar with the difficulty of illegal interstate trucking or how to bury a body in packed snow. While the ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/07/09/no-closure-on-the-novel-question-either/ Maud Newton talks to Shalom Auslander about God and religion (Auslander tells Maud, “The only thing that seems that different about religions are the nouns. The verbs are all the same. God is going to kill ______, but he loves ______.”). Auslander is the author of Beware of God and ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/07/07/foreskins-lament/ Via Ultrabrown For a different understanding of the use of language or at least of the users of the language, see the new book edited by Dohra Ahmad. http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/07/06/rotten-english/ ila-kumar http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/07/05/this-is-not-fusion-3/ Vijay Prashad wrings out all the water (though he often makes it seem like wine) from the dirty laundry that had been hung out to dry. vijay-prashad-documentary-dirty-laundry-amitava-kumar http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/07/03/dirty-laundry-2/ This is a stunning film. A visually rich report on the costs of development that is effective because Edward Burtynsky’s photographs, which serve as the focus of this documentary by Jennifer Baichwal, reveal that industry can be as monumental and awe-inspiring as the Grand Canyon. In fact, the point of ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/07/02/manufactured-landscapes/ Recommended So Yong Kim’s debut film about the struggle with language and love. I watched it this evening at the IFC–small theater, plush seats, bar downstairs–and called my buddy Heesok immediately afterwards, urging him to watch it. Here’s a review by Nathan Lee: Written and directed by So Yong Kim, a multimedia ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/06/30/in-between-days/ Orly, Sunday. Parents used to take their children there to watch the departing planes. http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/06/29/la-jetee/ The Presidential race. Who’s running, who’s not, who cares, etc. Here’s a passage from Jonathan Raban’s Surveillance: For company, she’d bought the bonus double Arts and Leisure sections of the Friday edition of The New York Times. She liked reading reviews of plays she’d never see, recitals she’d never hear, ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/06/28/memo-regarding-the-race/ Austin Merrill and Anderson Tepper at Vanity Fair provide a list notable non-fiction books and novels from Africa in recent years. Here’s a brief sampling of the fiction: Dinaw Mengestu, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (Riverhead). Ethiopian-born writer Mengestu’s debut novel is an eloquent and wise portrait of African-immigrant life ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/06/28/african-lit/ The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) released two sets of previously classified historical documents. “The CIA fully understands that it has an obligation to protect the nation’s secrets, but it also has a responsibility to be as open as possible,” said CIA Director Michael V. Hayden. “I’ve often spoken about our social ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/06/27/family-jewels/ I realize that this blog, perhaps unfairly, has paid too much attention in the past to prisoners in Guantanamo and Iraq. So, here’s a note from the news of Paris Hilton’s release from jail this morning: Hilton, with her blond hair pulled back in a braided ponytail, strutted past throngs of ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/06/26/release/ Why are we not seeing more photographs from Iraq of dead and wounded soldiers? Ashley Gilbertson gives you the answer to that and other questions–including, for instance, what Iraqis with sensitive skin are deeply allergic to. The next day, Ziad and Mustafa were blindfolded, handcuffed, and put under guard on a cot ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/06/23/a-photographer-in-iraq/ Shepard Fairey Thanks, Lauren Cerand http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/06/20/e-pluribus-venom/ Mark Sarvas has learned from the NY Times that India is among the most researched keywords on the newspaper’s site. Which seemed as good a reason as any to read Siddhartha Deb’s review-essay in the Nation about the opposed ways in which India is viewed: There is a fundamental dissonance between ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/06/20/india-is-flat/ Via Paper Cuts http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/06/20/i-am-rachel-carson/ The Unknown As we know, There are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know There are known unknowns. That is to say We know there are some things We do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, The ones we don’t know We don’t know. —Donald Rumsfeld, Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing More P.S. And ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/06/19/rumsfeld-poem/ Here’s Priya Gopal on Rushdie’s knighthood: Driven underground and into despair by zealotry, Rushdie finally emerged blinking into New York sunshine shortly before the towers came tumbling down. Those formidable literary powers would now be deployed not against, but in the service of, an American regime that had declared its own ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/06/19/sir-ahmed-salman-rushdie/ Gift Abdulaziz al-Swidi’s attorneys purchased for his mother at his request; translation: “Don’t despair, someone in the sky is taking care.” Courtesy of Collection of Through the Walls/Margot Herster ©2007. From guantanamo-al-swidi-margot-hester http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/06/17/dont-despair/ Andrew O’Hagan’s review of DeLillo’s Falling Man makes a writer’s syntax the measure of success: “Good prose in a novel depends on its ability to exhale a secret knowledge, to have the exact weight of magic in relation to the material, the true moral rhythm.” Yes, rhythm, and as ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/06/14/keeping-it-real/ Strange Culture, a new film by Lynn Hershman Leeson, will open the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival at Lincolm Center on June 15, 2007. The film stars Tilda Swinton, Peter Coyote, Thomas Jay Ryan, Josh Kornbluth and Steve Kurtz. The surreal nightmare of internationally-acclaimed artist and professor Steve Kurtz began ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/06/12/strange-culture/ Listen to Episode #331 of This American Life. The interviews conducted by Jack Hitt with two former Guantanamo detainees are particularly wonderful and affecting. The right of habeas corpus has been a part of our country’s legal tradition longer than we’ve actually been a country. It means that our government has ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/06/11/habeas-schmabeas/ Peter Carey has a sublime piece, filled with light, about the struggle of writing–when you’re in debt, not only to creditors, but, in a different way, to talents you can only hope to admire from a distance–and the experience of teaching students how to write. He begins with a bit ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/06/07/the-roar-of-literature/ Late last year, historian Papiya Ghosh and her domestic help Malti Devi were murdered in Patna. Please visit the website established in Papiya’s memory, and, if you can, find ways to express support for an investigation that will result in justice. Here is Kumkum Sangari’s tribute to Papiya. http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/06/07/papiya-ghosh/ It isn’t surprising that a world living under the current American administration should find great meaning in fiction about war and bare life. Karen Connelly has won the Orange Prize For New Writers for The Lizard Cage. (Thanks, Lorna) Read what the NYTBR had to say about the novel: Amoebic dysentery, maggots, ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/06/06/karen-connelly-wins-the-orange-prize/ I’ve always discussed the writing process on my blog, which I’ve had for some years now. Actually, I did wind up pulling back from it because there’s a level on which you… not exactly put too much effort into it, but find that you’re using in the blog raw proto-material ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/06/06/neal-gaiman-how-i-write/ Flower girls prepare for our friends’ June wedding. ila-and-saya http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/06/05/flower-girls/ Jonathan Lethem’s fine review of Ian McEwan’s new novel in past Sunday’s NYTBR sent me searching among my files for the brilliant (brilliant in its argument as well as design: I was going to say original, but who the hell cares) essay on plagiarism that Lethem had written some months ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/06/05/art-is-sourced/ With this picture, my friend Irfan has revived memories of my first watching M.S. Sathyu’s “Garm Hawa.” Made in 1973, it is easily among the best films produced in post-Independence India. So much pain, so much waiting, each exchange rendered with enormous delicacy, as if one more harsh word or ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/06/04/garm-hawa/ On her new blog, Pakistani writer Moni Mohsin announces the publication of the paperback edition of her debut novel The End of Innocence. (Thanks, Carl Bromley) http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/06/04/the-end-of-innocence/ Salil Tripathi reports on the Indian art scene where the “art nets record prices even as its makers suffer threats to their freedom of expression.” Tripathi also provides notice of a sale at Bonhams and Asia House in London this month that will include 85 works by major Indian ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/06/01/new-statesman-this-week/ The good folks at SAJA draw attention to this Benetton ad in which the color of the bruises matches that of the sweater (which, in turn, matches the color of money). Here, again thanks to SAJA, is a list of organizations that provide help against domestic violence. Also see this. benetton-domestic-violence-SAJA-SAKHI http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/05/29/colors-of-domestic-violence/ Who said Republicans are incapable of constructive thinking? “I would like to suggest…that maybe we give Paul Wolfowitz a new job and send him over [to Iraq] as mayor since the neocons got us in over there.” Rep. WALTER JONES (R-N.C.), following Wolfowitz’s resignation as president of the World Bank TIME Magazine http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/05/29/543/ The discussion around Shonali Bose’s film “Amu” reminded me of Amitav Ghosh’s remarkable essay “The Ghosts of Mrs Gandhi” which begins: Nowhere else in the world did the year 1984 fulfill its apocalyptic portents as it did in India. Separatist violence in the Punjab, the military attack on the great Sikh ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/05/28/amu/ Siddhartha Deb explains something crucial about Lydia Davis’s fiction: Sometimes, a title can be nearly as long as the story, as in “Mother’s Reaction to My Travel Plans,” whose entire text reads: “Gainsville! It’s too bad your cousin is dead!” We could almost text-message it, but then we wouldn’t get the ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/05/26/missing/ Summer has started. No school any more. ila-kumar-school-out http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/05/25/schools-out/ A poem by Mahmoud Darwish in a recent New Yorker; the image above is a Banksy trompe-l’oeil painting on a security fence in the West Bank. Remainder of a Life by Mahmoud Darwish May 14, 2007 If I were told: By evening you will die, so what will you do until then? I would look at ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/05/25/mahmoud-darwish/ Is the FBI interested in you? Make your life an open book. Offer by-the-minute self-surveillance! Hasan Elahi whips out his Samsung Pocket PC phone and shows me how he’s keeping himself out of Guantanamo. He swivels the camera lens around and snaps a picture of the Manhattan Starbucks where we’re drinking ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/05/24/putting-big-brother-out-of-business/ Christopher Hitchens asks in Vanity Fair : “How did a nation move from cricket and fish-and-chips to burkas and shoe-bombers in a single generation?” The question isn’t answered in the article. Nor do we get to learn anything at all about why young Brits with more melanin in their skin than ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/05/23/re-burkas-and-shoe-bombers/ Zarina Bhimji “Howling Like Dogs, I Swallowed Solid Air” (From “Love 1998-2006″) 2003, Transparency in light box P.S. I am very much looking forward to Bhimji’s “Out of Blue,” last recommended to me by Okwui Enwezor. http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/05/19/zarina-bhimji/ I watched yesterday Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s “The Lives of Others.” One of the main reasons I wanted to see the film was the following paragraph from Anthony Lane’s eloquent review: One of the marvels of Ulrich Mühe’s performance—in its seething stillness, its quality not just of self-denial but of self-haunting—is ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/05/18/the-lives-of-others/ Emily Jacir * 1970, lives in Ramallah (Palestine) and New York. Bank Mirror, Ramallah, April 22, 2002 C-print, 40 x 50 cm, Edition of 7 Contemporary Art from the Islamic World http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/05/17/emily-jacir/ The interior and exterior space of the writer is blown up in Giancarlo Neri’s 30ft table and chair made from six tons of steel, plated with wood and painted brown. Placed deliberately in Hampstead Heath (London, UK) in 2005, an area with a historical concentration of canonized writers (Keats, Freud, ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/05/16/darkmatter/ I have been taking great pleasure in listening again and again to the writer Amit Chaudhuri’s collaborative album “This Is Not Fusion.” There’s conceptual seriousness here and also play; a fine mix of experimentation and wit. The sounds and phrases stay in the mind long after you have finished listening ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/05/14/this-is-not-fusion-2/ Show your love by washing your Ma’s feet. At a kindergarten in China’s Zhejiang province on Mother’s Day. (Reuters Photo) From TOI. http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/05/13/mothers-day/ Looking through a stack of old New Yorkers, while waiting for wife and child, I read David Foster Wallace’s short-story “Good People.” I admit I began reading the story because it looked really short. But when it became clear that it was a deliberate riff on Hemingway’s “Hills Like White ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/05/13/good-people/ Outside our house is a tree whose pink flowers have carpeted the grass. On way to preschool, and then again when she returns, Ila picks up flowers for everyone she knows. (Those teeth look good but later this month someone is going to the pediatric dentist in nearby Kingston. Oh-oh.) ila-kumar http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/05/11/few-days-of-spring/ I have been reading Lore Segal’s stories in the new collection, Shakespeare’s Kitchen. These are delicate stories, subtle and fine, and what interests me most is the way in which they resist the customary blandishments of plotting. I’m not saying anything original here; at least two reviewers have noticed this ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/05/09/shakespeares-kitchen/ My brief article on British Asian cinema published this week in Tehelka–it was originally written for a film-festival catalog edited by Sukhdev Sandhu: The film is East is East. We are watching Damien O’Donnell’s 2000 recreation of scenes of England in the early 1970s. The Khan family — half-Pakistani, half-British, with ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/05/07/what-about-the-queen/ Bird Trapping Station (Vogelfangstation), 1998-99. Metal, wood and nets - 21 parts, Dimensions variable. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Commissioned by Deutsche Bank AG in consultation with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation for the Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin. 2005. Andreas Slominski. Okwui Enwezor delivered the Claflin lecture at Vassar tonight. The title of ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/05/07/okwui-enwezor/ Following a comment made on this site by a friend of mine who many years ago was a student in several of my classes, I’ll be screening a part of Abbas Kiarostami’s “Taste of Cherry” during the last meeting of my “City” course. We’ll watch Mr Badii driving around the ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/05/07/taste-of-cherry/ My review of Mihir Bose’s Bollywood: A History in Outlook magazine: In the closing pages of his book, Mihir Bose tells the story of being taken by a publicist to meet Karan Johar. The publicist, we’re told, was a young and pretty female. Upon hearing that Bose was writing a history ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/05/06/follywood/ Watched a student-performance this evening of Martin McDonagh’s keenly down-beat play The Pillowman. It was directed with a fair bit of elan by Peter Gaffney who’s an English major at Vassar. Here’s an exchange that will bring back memories, for those who’ve read or watched it earlier, the play’s sharpness ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/05/05/the-pillowman/ … if you’ve found any nuclear stuff, do call. Here’s the report from the BBC: Pakistan’s nuclear authority has said there is no cause for concern after it published press adverts for information on “lost” radioactive material. (Thanks, Haniya Mir) http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/05/05/and-oh/ The semester is ending. In the “Work” seminar today, we’re reading George Saunders. CivilWarLand in Bad Decline and this brilliant, heartbreak of a piece, “Chicago Christmas, 1984″: The gambling began. One by one, the guys lost what they felt they could lose and drifted back to stand against the worktable and ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/05/03/capital/ At the end of a long day doing other stuff, I came across an article in today’s NY Timesabout the shrinking pages for books: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, meanwhile, has recently eliminated the job of its book editor, leading many fans to worry that book coverage will soon be provided mostly by ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/05/03/disappearing-book-reviews/ Writer and teacher Alexander Chee reads a story by the killer and interprets it as if it were a dream: The story was overdetermined, in other words, and I might have tried to engage him in why. Things happened in a way that told you it was like a dream ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/04/29/reading-cho-seung-hui/ In my “Work” seminar today, we discussed Andrew Ross’s Fast Boat to China and Isabel Hilton’s report “Made in China” from the Granta special issue “The Factory.” Here’s a brief excerpt from the latter: There are some sights in China I shall always remember: the young women from a battery factory, ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/04/26/work/ Because of my recycling, the bomb squad came, then the state police. Because of my recycling, buildings were evacuated, classes were canceled, the campus was closed. No. Not because of my recycling. Because of my dark body. No. Not even that. Because of his fear. Because of the way he ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/04/26/because-of-his-fear/ A shot of Ila getting ready for a dance in distant Mumbai. (For Elizabeth.) http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/04/26/ashs-wedding/ Ilija Trojanow and I will be reading and conversing at the Goethe-Institut in New York tomorrow. The event is part of the PEN World Voices 2007. Ilija Trojanow’s novel, Der Weltensammler (The Collector of Worlds), won rave reviews and the Fiction Award at the Leipzig Book Fair. Told from multiple ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/04/24/ilija-trojanow/ Amit Chaudhuri provides several good reasons for why we must read Ramachandra Guha’s history of modern India, but it is his assertion that Guha explains the settled complacency of the Indian middle class that is going to make me buy the book: And yet, despite Kashmir, and various forms of ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/04/24/ram-guhas-history/ Photo by Chris Steele-Perkins. From Slate. http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/04/23/for-mishu-in-dc/ Just as I was settling down to write a review of a book on Bollywood films, I came across this post about the great actor Balraj Sahni, among the last of the leftists in modern Hindi cinema. (You can count the names of the living radicals in Bollywood today on ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/04/22/balraj-sahni/ Last night, at NYU’s Cantor Film Center, Hanif Kureishi didn’t want to sit through his film “My Son the Fanatic” and went for a beer and oysters at the nearby Knickerbocker Bar and Grill. Returning five minutes before the movie ended, all he saw was the conversation between Parvez, the ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/04/21/senior-sexuality/ Uma at Indian Writing provides a link to a rediff story about girl-children in Bihar. Mintu Kumari, age 11, Class VI (in picture above): I always wanted to go to school but my mother told me I had to go sweep leaves and gather them for building ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/04/20/bihar-ki-betiyan/ Tomorrow, Hanif Kureishi at the “EMERGENCES AND EMERGENCIES: NEW SOUTH ASIAN FILM-MAKING FROM BRITAIN” festival curated by Sukhdev Sandhu from NYU. “My Son The Fanatic” Kick-off screening (Featuring a Q&A with Hanif Kureishi). CANTOR FILM CENTER, 36 EAST 8TH STREET. FRIDAY, APRIL 20, 7pm-10pm in Theater 200. Seating is first-come/first-serve; ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/04/19/hanif-kureishi-2/ I heard the 86-year-old French journalist Henri Alleg speak last night. His talk was about the circumstances under which he wrote The Question. Here’s a brief synopsis of the book: At the time of his arrest by French paratroopers during the Battle of Algiers in June of 1957, Henri Alleg was ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/04/18/henri-alleg/ From the Guardian: They are calling it the “Bloomberg Gun GiveAway”. On Thursday two gun shops in the state of Virginia will stage a prize draw. Anyone spending more than $100 in either Bob Moates’ stores or Old Dominion Guns and Tackle will be entered, and the first prize a free ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/04/17/gun-giveaway/ James Wood writes a sentence. But first this sentence from Roberto Bolaño’s By Night in Chile, about the killer falcons employed by the church to kill pigeons: “Ta Gueule appeared again like a lightning bolt, or the abstract idea of a lightning bolt, and stooped on the huge flocks of ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/04/16/james-wood-writes-a-sentence/ Miranda July turns book-promotion into a wonderful online performance, says Maud Newton. Books should get all the readers they deserve, and I hope that all those who love invention and play flock to July’s collection of stories. On the subject of readers, let me also share Jenny Diski’s recent ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/04/15/in-search-of-readers/ John Leonard at the Nation unearths this priceless story about Kurt Vonnegut: When they were inducted into the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1973, Kurt Vonnegut said of Allen Ginsberg: “I like ‘Howl’ a lot. Who wouldn’t? It just doesn’t have much to do with me or what happened ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/04/14/best-minds/ You can sign up for the Spencer Tunick experience (if you’re in Amsterdam or Mexico and can indicate your skin tone). http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/04/14/spencer-tunick/ The current New Yorker presents travel accounts by several well-regarded writers. Pankaj Mishra describes a train-trip to Tibet. The article is not available online, but here’s a taste: Once, a herd of antelope skipped beside the tracks. Looking for more of them, I saw black nomad tents on a distant hillside. ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/04/13/pankaj-mishra-in-tibet/ From an interview with Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller: PLAYBOY: What are you working on, Kurt? VONNEGUT: On a divorce. Which is a full-time job. Didn’t you find it a full-time job? HELLER: Oh, it’s more than a full-time job. You ought to go back and read that section in No Laughing Matter ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/04/13/kurt-vonnegut/ Mama’s Saris arrived in the mail yesterday–and since then I have had to read the book to my daughter about a dozen times. The story by Pooja Makhijani is simple and filled with small details that inspire wonder in a little girl’s mind. And the drawings by Elena Gomez are ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/04/13/dress-up/ Vivian Gornick did a reading at Vassar last night. The pieces that she read drew upon her early discovery of feminism. Listening to her I thought about the number of times people invoke the mantra of “the personal is political,” and how often it means nothing, unless you have the ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/04/12/vivian-gornick/ The BBC reports that “women civil servants in India have expressed shock at new appraisal rules which require them to reveal details of their menstrual cycles.” The questions at the root of the controversy are on page 58 of the new appraisal forms for the current year issued by the federal ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/04/11/489/ In Patna, my nephew Avi has just taken the IIT-JEE exams. Hope he succeeds! I was thinking of him when I sent the following piece to Amit Varma at India Uncut: Is it possible to review a book after having read only the first chapter? While waiting for your answer, a quick ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/04/09/above-average/ “All this week, Americans have been waking up to an extraordinary story about the Ganges,” writes Sree. This is the series on National Public Radio. (But look also at the CNN-IBN story “The Ganga is Dying.”) The caption for the photo above reads: “A woman collects water at one of the ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/04/06/the-ganges-on-npr/ I was reading this morning for the class I have to teach next week–Orhan Pamuk’s book Istanbul. “To see the city in black and white is to see it through the tarnish of history: the patina of what is old and faded no longer matters to the rest of ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/04/03/how-we-celebrate-freedom/ This morning I got news from my editor in Delhi that Shakti Bhatt had passed away. Shakti was a young editor, and full of plans. I had met her just the other day, for the first time, in New Delhi. She was also my friend Jeet Thayil’s wife. Read ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/04/02/shakti-bhatt/ Don’t ask the astrologer. Don’t keep a journal when you’re unable to write. And step out of the hotel to try and divine who it is among the people you meet who will take your story forward. All this and more from V.S. Naipaul’s account of the writing of India: ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/04/02/naipaul-in-bombay/ Manoj Bajpai and Sudhir Mishra talk about Home Products. http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/04/02/manoj-bajpai-and-sudhir-mishra/ John Freeman reports on an evening with George Saunders (above) and Jonathan Lethem. Freeman writes: Just yesterday, the New York Times reported that the income disparity in America grew significantly, with the top 1 percent receiving their largest share of the national income since 1928(!) Average gains in income in this ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/04/01/a-furious-book/ [Hisham] Matar’s novel abounds in unusual emotional situations. Certainly few of its readers are likely to live next door to people who face torture and execution. Yet in his account there is no moral grandstanding, no glamour of victimhood. He seems to know that life goes on in the most ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/03/29/muslims-in-a-national-setting/ Ila has been working hard on her dancing, along with her best friend Saya who loves pink. ila-kumar http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/03/22/while-her-father-is-away/ Here’s a picture from today’s Mumbai Mirror showing the happy author with the actor Manoj Bajpai. Alas, they cut out from the picture the wonderful film-maker Sudhir Mishra who did the honors at the Mumbai release. sudhir-mishra-manoj-bajpai-book-launch http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/03/22/mumbai-ka-news/ This is a torn poster on a Delhi wall. I took this picture on my way to lunch with Jai Arjun Singh whose report about that afternoon appeared in the Business Standard today: In the preface to his celebrated literary memoir Bombay-London-New York (2002), Amitava wrote: “This book bears witness to ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/03/20/lunch-in-new-delhi/ Here’s Manjula Padmanbhan in the pages of Outlook: On the very first page of Amitava Kumar’s Home Products, there’s a scene which exemplifies what I liked so much about this first novel. An elderly woman opens her front door to the protagonist, a journalist called Binod. As she did so, ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/03/18/first-review/ I arrived in Delhi last night and woke up before dawn to the sound of crows, doves, and, on a tree outside my window, a very persistent koel repeating its call. The simul is still in bloom. And around the corner, a dhak tree, its petals covering the pavement. The ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/03/11/the-great-indian-rape-flick/ Filmiholic has interviews with Mira Nair and Kal Penn. And also Jhumpa Lahiri who has this to say about the film version of her novel: I saw it for the first time privately in November 2005. I didn’t feel anxiety in the making of the film. I felt relaxed ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/03/08/the-namesake/ When I began to get more time to write, maybe an hour or two each day, I’d start by reading a few pages of A House for Mr. Biswas. I wanted to be reminded again and again of the comedy that informs V.S. Naipaul’s writing about failure. And every time ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/03/04/how-to-write-a-novel/ I had liked the new Nike cricket commercial–the World Cup starts in a few days!–because in a place where nothing seems to be in a condition to move everything is in combined motion. The game is now ours. We’re far away from England’s green fields and in the middle of ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/03/02/cricket-in-a-crowded-nation/ James Yee came to Vassar today and spoke about his work, till his arrest in 2003, as a military chaplain in the prison at Guantanamo Bay. Yee’s visit provided the occasion for me to cajole my Urban Studies colleague Lisa Brawley to come to my class and share with us ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/02/28/james-yee/ Jeff Wall, whom I had linked on this site before, after reading Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others, has an article devoted to him in last Sunday’s New York Times Sunday Magazine. These are MOMA images by Wall: “A Sudden Gust of Wind (After Hokusai)” (above) and “After ‘Invisible ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/02/26/the-luminist/ I’ve just been sent the cover for Home Products. Andy and Shruti worked hard on it. It also had to be approved by Raj and Sujata. Here’s the jacket-copy: A film director asks Binod, who is a journalist in Bombay, to produce a portrait of a murdered girl, a poet killed ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/02/23/home-products-cover/ Just out from the New Press. The much-awaited work of our own Frantz Fanon. Only sweeter. “Europe” is morally, spiritually indefensible. And today the indictment is brought against it . . . by tens and tens of thousands of millions of men who, from the depths of slavery, set themselves up ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/02/23/from-the-viewpoint-of-the-poor/ As the Kitab Book Festival gets underway in Mumbai, Time Out carries a piece by me on the city and its literature. Here’s an excerpt: All I knew of Bombay during those early years were the Juhu hotels and drunken Goans shown in Hindi films – and the beginning chapter of ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/02/22/kitab-book-festival/ Colson Whitehead read from Apex Hides the Hurt at Vassar today. He also came to my non-fiction class earlier in the afternoon. We had read The Colossus of New York. For forty minutes or so Colson spoke about how the book came to be written and he answered questions about ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/02/20/colson-whitehead/ At least sixty-six people died today when two cars of the train running between India and Pakistan caught fire. This train has never run on time; in fact, sometimes it doesn’t run for months and years. It has followed another sense of time or history altogether, its movements charting the ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/02/19/when-it-is-only-a-train-ride-away/ My friend and colleague Joshua Harmon has a book out soon! May he be blessed–nay, kissed–by the goddess of first novels! Set in a region of northern New Hampshire that for several years in the 1830s declared itself an independent nation, Joshua Harmon’s debut novel traces the real and imagined travels ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/02/19/quinnehtukqut/ I have a piece in today’s Business Standard about my hometown in literature and Hindi film. An excerpt: In recent decades several films have been made which cast light on Bihar’s poverty or corruption (Damul, Mrityudand, Shool, Paar, Calcutta Mail, Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi) but none moved me as much as Rituparno ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/02/18/patna/ Untitled Video on Lynne Stewart and Her Conviction, The Law and Poetry (2006) By Paul Chan | Running time 17:30 On February 10, 2005, Lynne Stewart was convicted of providing material support for a terrorist conspiracy. She is the first lawyer to be convicted of aiding terrorism in the United States. ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/02/17/charged/ Michael Orbach at the Knight News had interviewed the folks behind the New York Times Book Review. Orbach’s intro says: “The New York Times Book Review is considered by many to be the gold standard in book reviews (to quote a nameless author we interviewed: ‘You only know you made it ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/02/16/behind-the-times/ From the Guardian: Kiran Desai’s Booker-winning novel The Inheritance of Loss has been a bestseller in India for weeks now. It is displayed proudly in upmarket bookshops. Bootleg copies are brandished by boys, weaving in and out of traffic light fumes. These boys can’t read, but they know what everyone wants: ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/02/15/subcontinental-shift/ Comments? (Thanks, Linta and Robin.) http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/02/11/gm-robot-ad/ For some time now, I have been wanting to write about Mohsin Hamid’s new novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist. I had posted an announcement about the book’s imminent publication, and my inbox had filled up with messages from various folk wondering what exactly I had meant to say about the dilemmas ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/02/09/the-talented-mr-hamid/ Writer Amit Chaudhuri (about whom my views here and here) has a new music album coming out. Salil Tripathi has a report in the Asian edition of the Wall Street Journal. An excerpt: The new album, “This is Not Fusion,” performed in London, Lille, Brussels and Kolkata, will be ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/02/09/this-is-not-fusion/ I had blogged about “Babel” earlier but am returning to the subject because of Michael Wood’s review of the film which intelligently focuses on two related aspects–the multiple plots and the non-linear narrative. Wood was initially sceptical of both features; they suggested a formulaic, familiar tic on the part of ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/02/08/timeline/ Earlier today, I posted a self-promotional link to an interview I had given about my forthcoming book, Home Products. But, less selfishly, may I instead present to you another book which has the word “Home” in its title? I refer, of course, to The Enemy At Home by Dinesh D’Souza. ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/02/06/dinesh-dsouza/ In this week’s Tehelka an interview about my forthcoming book and about the place where the book is set, Bihar: There is a stereotype in India that Bihar, despite its history, is currently at the nadir of civilisation. How, if at all, will this book change perceptions of Bihar? Well, in some ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/02/05/bihar-is-indias-future/ Ryszard Kapuscinski passed away recently. One obituary notes: With prose that was punchy and lyrical, and in which he was often a central figure amid the action, he became a foremost chronicler of the developing world in his books. Likened to a modern-day nomad, he carried only a camera, a clean ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/02/05/ryszard-kapuscinski/ A friend has sent me a book by John Berger that is made up of dialogues on drawing. I have been reading a few pages at random. Here is a paragraph from one of the pages I read–I will return to the book in the future and offer you more ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/02/04/berger-on-drawing/ I’ve begun teaching a writing class on “the city” and a senior seminar on “work.” Here are the reading requirements for the two courses: City: Mike Davis’s book on L.A. entitled City of Quartz, Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul, a World War Two memoir A Woman in Berlin by an anonymous female journalist, and ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/02/02/new-semester/ I think one of the most masturbatory discussions in the art world is about whether art criticism is dead. (Translation: Is anyone reading me?) More. And, is “snark” a verb? More. And, on the subject of art criticsm, Mia Fineman’s recent essay on Robert Hughes as the outsider-critic. http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/01/31/art-criticism/ Renowned Hindi writer and Padmabushan awardee Kamleshwar died of a massive heart attack at the age of 75. Born in Mainpuri, Uttar Pradesh, in 1932, Kamleshwar perhaps attained national popularity as the Additional Director General.for Doordarshan when he used to appear in a popular weekly programme Parikrama, and received a ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/01/29/kamleshwar-alvida/ LONDON: Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty has won Channel 4’s reality TV show Celebrity Big Brother and bagged an estimated 100,000 pounds in prize money. More. Before I got bored by the chain of events, I was puzzled that one of the first riots over the insults against ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/01/29/shilpa-shetty/ Then and now. ila-kumar http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/01/28/a-visitor-in-my-study/ The Nation reports that the actor Sean Penn told thousands of anti-war protesters in the U.S. capital earlier today, “In a democracy we are the deciders.” ABC News offers this snapshot: Standing on her toes to reach the microphone, 12-year-old Moriah Arnold told the crowd: “Now we know our leaders either lied ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/01/28/we-are-the-deciders/ The latest Bookforum has a cover piece by Vivian Gornick on Susan Sontag’s late writings. Here is a link to another piece in the same issue, “What Writers Talk About When They Talk About Writing.” The essay is by Albert Mobilio, and, although this is not available in the web ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/01/26/writers-on-writing/ Watched Guru in NYC yesterday. Here are some links to what other people thought of it. I’m sure there are about 300 million better reasons for watching the film than the one I had: a character in my forthcoming novel explains that a film should be made about Dhirubhai Ambani, ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/01/25/polyester-guru/ Art-work by Subodh Gupta http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/01/23/migrant-worker/ Illustration: Outlook On 13 December 2001, the Indian Parliament was attacked by five—some say six—heavily armed men. Why have 13 Indian intellectuals now written about the attack? Naresh Fernandes explains in Time Out Mumbai: In their landmark book Manufacturing Consent, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky in 1988 described a “propaganda model” ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/01/22/notes-from-an-overheated-economy/ “Some years ago, I had written that the West’s political paradigm was no longer the city state, but the concentration camp, and that we had passed from Athens to Auschwitz. It was obviously a philosophical thesis, and not historic recital….” ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/01/21/guantanamo-special/ Bhupen Khakhar, Untitled, Water color Saffron Art http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/01/20/bhupen-khakhar/ LONDON, Jan. 17 — He is known as an author of dark and tangled tales in which love sometimes endures and sometimes does not. But Ian McEwan, one of Britain’s best-known novelists, has now found himself as a player in a true story that might have sprung from his own ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/01/18/complete-surrender/ My post about Henry Perowne’s Fish-Stew (as I said before, I liked the dish, but I should now add, because Perowne’s mother is afflicted with Alzheimer’s, he should be eating more curry instead) has elicited several email queries regarding the book itself. What do I think of Saturday? Is it ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/01/17/demanding-novels/ Maud Newton had posted a tomato soup recipe last week. When I made that soup over the weekend it was a hit with the ladies in the house. And when Maud urged me today to post a recipe of my own, I thought of the fish stew that I had ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/01/16/fish-stew/ Arpita Singh, Untitled, Water Color http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/01/13/arpita-singh/ On the fifth anniversary of the first detentions at Guantanamo Bay, there have been worldwide protests demanding due process for the captives. Check out the reports here and the profiles here. Next week, I will provide a link to the special issue of Politics and Culture that I’m editing on this ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/01/11/guantanamo/ Vijay Prashad writes in the latest Himal: With Anthems of Resistance, Ali Husain Mir and Raza Mir, two brothers hailing from Hyderabad, in the Deccan, come bearing a substantial gift. Archaeologists of a lost sensibility, they tear the wild foliage of communal hatred aside and take us to a promised ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/01/07/anthems-of-resistance/ In his earlier film Amores Perros, Alejandro González Iñárritu had provided us a sense of the way in which individual lives collide at the crossroads of life. That belief is still present in his new film Babel. Lives can, and do, in a split second, hurtle towards disaster. But by ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/01/02/lost-in-the-desert-of-the-world/ I recently watched Sedika Mojadidi’s new documentary “Motherland Afghanistan.” The broadcast premiere is scheduled for Tuesday, February 13, 2007 on PBS. Here’s the brief synopsis of the film as presented by the New York Times: In a country where once in seven women dies during childbirth, a filmmaker whose compassionate father ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2007/01/01/the-good-doctor/ Looking forward to 2007. Happy holidays everyone. Model: Ila Kumar P.S. I’ll be gone for the next ten days or so. http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/12/23/the-future-is-bright/ A couple of weeks ago, I was interviewed about my forthcoming novel by Business Standard, and this morning, while reading Maud’s blog, I found out that the interview has been published: Tell us something about Home Products. Okay. This is the first time I’m doing a synopsis, so let me take a ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/12/19/home-products/ Now that the winter break is here, I’ve been browsing among the archives of my favorite radio show, This American Life. Yesterday, I enjoyed listening to a segment of the show from 18 November 2005. Act Two. Johnny Get Your Mouse. Lots of soldiers in Iraq are writing about ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/12/19/killing-time-in-iraq/ Walter Benn Michaels writes that the emphasis on race on diversity-conscious American campuses has swept issues of class under the carpet: Michael Rogin once brilliantly described the use of blackface in Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer as a device through which the immigrant Jew first becomes American by identifying himself with ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/12/16/diversity/ Journalists love yoga because it fits perfectly into the narratives of everyday life. “Yoga Joins the Treatments for Kids with Disabilities,” reported the Evansville Courier & Press this summer. “Yoga Helps Pregnant Women Prepare for Delivery,” according to WNCN in North Carolina, an NBC affiliate, which recently broadcast a report ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/12/15/yoga-for-those-who-only-want-to-read-about-it/ From our man in Mumbai http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/12/14/speak-english/ Wyatt Mason in the New Yorker celebrates the new editions of four of R.K. Narayan’s books. I’m looking forward to the winter break because I want to read what Michael Gorra, Monica Ali, Pankaj Mishra, and Jhumpa Lahiri have to say in their respective forewords to the books: Malgudi Days, ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/12/13/rk-narayan/ Relax, honey—everybody gets buyer’s remorse. Winning caption: Anisha S. Dasgupta, New Haven, Conn. Drawing by Tom Cheney From here Ever since the New Yorker started its cartoon caption contest, I thought democracy had at last arrived in America. Everyone could be funny ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/12/11/new-yorker-cartoons/ According to WYNC: NEW YORK, NY December 08, 2006 —Sometimes there’s a handy phrase to describe a cultural movement, like punk rock, or hip-hop, or grunge. Sometimes there isn’t, and you have to see a performance or hear an album to decide for yourself what’s going on. “Still Life with ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/12/08/still-life-with-commentator/ Pankaj Mishra’s excellent report from Shanghai: There are still more poor people in India and China than in all of Africa. But the leaders of both countries, having promised to usher their huge populations into a Western-style consumer society, now make claims on the world’s resources as confidently as their American ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/12/08/shanghai/ A cartoon by Mr. Fish. Hat-tip, Lisa Brawley. http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/12/08/laura-bush-first-reader-part-ii/ Thomas Pynchon defends Ian McEwan’s use of details from a war-time memoir in his novel. I like the fact that Pynchon’s argument rests not so much on the indispensability of borrowing, and the use of the acknowledgments page by a writer for the purpose of recording such debt, but on ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/12/06/pynchon-mcewan/ Last day of class today and, in my “War” course, we finished with a reading of Tony Kushner’s terrifying play “Only We Who Guard The Mystery Shall Be Unhappy.” These are the playwright’s stage directions: “Three children in pajamas and bathrobes sit in small chairs in a neat row. Behind ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/12/05/laura-bush/ With the aid of three different translations Umberto Eco proves that headscarf wearing was never recommended in the Koran. He refers to Sura 24 (presumably verse 31) which deals with covering the chest. Head covering was a Christian idea. “The vicar general of the Italian Sufi brotherhood Jerrahi Halveti, Gabriele ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/12/05/umberto-eco/ The problem with Orientalism is that you get into it and discover that even the things you liked (because they were your own, or just because they were so bad) actually have connections to those across the dividing line. When you watch the above clip from a film by Fritz ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/12/04/orientalism-101/ This evening I participated in a beautiful Christmas ceremony at the Vassar Chapel; led by my friend Sam Speers, the service was very much a homage to a God who, as Thomas Merton has written, is out of place in this world. “His place is with those who don’t belong, ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/12/04/lessons-and-carol/ “If I could do something for you, anywhere in Palestine, what would it be?” This is the question that photographer Emily Jacir asked Palestinians from around the world. Holland Cotter has this to say about Jacir’s exhibition of photographs: “An art of cool Conceptual surfaces and ardent, intimate gestures, intensely ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/12/03/where-we-come-from/ Siddhartha Deb has a fine article in a special on India in the Observer. I found the concluding lines especially thoughtful: This other India, complex, mutinous and often counter-intuitive to simple notions of progress, is likely to remain obscure even as affluent India dominates the headlines with its dream of global ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/12/01/were-all-indians-now/ Alexander Masters is the author of Stuart: A Life Backwards. The book is about Stuart Shorter whom Masters had first met while the former was begging on the street in his hometown in England. This description captures nothing of the tension and the wit present on each page of this ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/11/29/a-life-backwards/ Fahamu Pecou The Tipping Point, 2006 acrylic and oil stick on canvas, 72″ x 54″ Via http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/11/27/artitude/ Robin Varghese on the trial of Saddam Hussein. He writes that the self-delusions of the deposed Iraqi dictator as well as the self-deception of the coalition forces “do offer lessons … but these seem hard to articulate”: Maybe it was the constant invocation of the Nazis as an analog for Saddam, ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/11/27/evil-of-banality/ Last week, when I had blogged about child soldiers I had also meant to provide a link to the very wonderful Jenny Diski’s thoughts entitled “Jungle Clearings” (thanks to Maud Newton for discovering Diski’s website; this way, one gets to read Diski more often than the LRB allows access to ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/11/27/jungle-clearings/ Have a Happy Thanksgiving. I’m off till Sunday. Taking my daughter to the National Zoo. To meet the panda, Tai Shan. http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/11/21/happy-thanksgiving/ Two books: Johnny Mad Dog by Emmanuel Dongala, and Beasts of No Nation by Uzodinma Iweala. We discussed both books in class today. Here’s Anderson Tepper in the Washington Post: Though very different, both these books confront head-on a harsh reality in Africa today: children raised in — and raised by — ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/11/21/sozaboys/ My recent Nation review-essay about Eqbal Ahmad has been linked to the Outlook website. Here’s a link to Ahmad’s celebrated essay “Terrorism: Theirs and Ours.” eqbal-ahmad-civilizing-mission http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/11/21/civilizing-mission/ Iqbal Ahmed in the Independent on a writer’s best friend: Without independent bookshops, London would be for me what Baudelaire calls “a desert without oasis”. My love affair with bookshops began 25 years ago in Srinagar. The Kashmir Bookshop, run by a long-bearded Sikh philanthropist, was the only one selling general ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/11/20/independent-booksellers/ Mary Henderson Dinner Table, 2006 gouache on paper, image size 8″ x 6.5″ Via Lyons Weir.Ortt Contemporary Art. And Harper’s. mary-henderson-dinner-table http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/11/18/painting-lit-by-a-camera-flash/ Can global conflicts be settled by rock, paper, scissors? Maybe not. But organizers of a RPS tournament in Toronto this weekend want the centuries-old children’s game applied more often to settle lesser fights. (World RPS Society) . Also on NPR. Photo: REUTERS/Mark Blinch (CANADA). Two contestants compete in the 2006 International ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/11/18/rock-paper-scissors/ At the launch of the IT industry’s first trade union in Kolkata, the Centre for Indian Trade Union alleged that labour laws were being routinely flouted by several BPO firms in India. Firebrand leaders also went to the extent of naming half-a-dozen errant companies violating labour laws. “There, it was actually very ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/11/16/call-center-workers-form-union/ Tibetan writer Tenzin Tsundue who has written “I am more of an Indian.
 Except for my chinky Tibetan face” has been put under house arrest in India. In this prize-winning essay, he wrote: Ask me where I’m from and I won’t have an answer. I feel I never really belonged anywhere. Never ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/11/16/political-refugee/ GERMANY—The staff exercise children at a Nazi baby farm, 1945. © Cornell Capa Photos by Robert Capa © 2001 / Magnum Photos Via http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/11/15/kids/ I read the news a few days ago that Indian Congress party leader Sonia Gandhi paid homage to Indian soldiers who died in Belgium during the First World War: In a gesture that will go well with millions of Indian soldiers back home, United Progressive Alliance chairperson Sonia Gandhi laid ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/11/15/english-patient/ “I need someone to protect me from all the measures they take in order to protect me.” See Banksy. Via. http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/11/14/protect-me/ Modal Minority on the silence before and after the other shoe drops. http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/11/13/modal-minority/ Himal South Asian has a special issue this month on food. (The editors say “It is clear that Southasians write much better on food than they do on geopolitics, veg or non-veg.”) In his essay, Ashis Nandy writes about the “creeping crypto-nationalist cuisine” in India and elsewhere. He also observes that ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/11/13/home-cooking/ Aarati at the cattle-fair in Pushkar, India. Photo by Rajesh Kumar Singh, AP. http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/11/11/aarati/ My review of The Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad has appeared in the Nation. Among anticolonial intellectuals, Pakistani scholar and activist Eqbal Ahmad (1933-99), who toward the end of his life spent fifteen years teaching at Hampshire College in Massachusetts, holds a special place. He never published a classic text on ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/11/10/eqbal-ahmad/ (a) Anthropology (b) Document (c) Stereotype (d) Kitsch Thanks, Lalarukh Jamil http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/11/10/what-do-you-see/ Rummy said while resigning that the war in Iraq was complex, and that history would give Bush credit, but Sidney Blumenthal writes that it’s all really kitsch and delusional self-flattery: Kitsch is imitative, cheap, sentimental, mawkish and incoherent, and derives its appeal by demeaning and degrading genuine standards and values, especially ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/11/09/kitsch-warriors/ Manish Vij informs us that Democrat Jim Webb has declared victory against the racist George ‘Macaca’ Allen. The 8,359-vote margin is less than half a percent, which lets Allen request a recount after the vote is certified. Absentee and provisional ballots still remain. Allen will probably try to subvert the ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/11/08/desis-senate/ The Democrats have scored early wins. John Nichols writes: Here’s what is interesting to me at this point: Anti-war candidates appear to be doing exceptionally well. In Ohio, Sherrod Brown, the most clearly anti-war candidate in a competitive Senate race, has upset Republican Senator Mike DeWine. In New Jersey, Democratic Senator Bob ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/11/07/election-news/ Taught Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others in one of my classes today. I’ve used this book before and each time I try to get my students to explain to me Sontag’s appreciation for Goya. There are a few pages from John Berger’s About Looking that I also find ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/11/07/jeff-wall/ It seems it is necessary to get rid of Bush–from your novel. Nancy Huston’s Lignes de faille will need to have the parts about Bush and the war in Iraq excised from its English language edition to be published in the US. Huston has said that “contemporary America is reproducing ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/11/06/getting-rid-of-bush/ The photo above has the following caption: Surekha Bhotmange, 45: raped, murdered Priyanka Bhotmange, 17: raped, murdered Roshan Bhotmange, 23: murdered Sudhir Bhotmange, 21: murdered Surekha and Priyanka were stripped, paraded naked, beaten with bicycle chains, axes and bullock-cart pokers. They were gang-raped until they died. Some raped them even after that. Shivam Vij has sent ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/11/06/dalits/ “The Last Drop” by Michael Specter in the New Yorker is one of the most important, terrifying articles I have read in recent months: Most mornings, the line begins to form at dawn: scores of silent women with babies strapped to their backs, buckets balanced on their heads, and in each ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/11/05/the-politics-of-water/ Edward Burtynsky, Old Factories #4, Shenyang Heavy Machinery Group, Tiexi District, Shenyang City, Liaoning Province, China Courtesy Charles Cowles Gallery, 2005 Sandra Senn, Untitled (from the series “Places”), Courtesy J.J. Heckenhauer Gallery, 2005 Erwin Wurm, Fuck the 3rd world, 2003, Anne de Villepoix [I admit I included this photo only because of the ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/11/03/paris-photo/ Even a Republican can be right. Here is Andrew Sullivan: George W. Bush just gave the most powerful reason for voting Democratic next Tuesday. He has reiterated unconditional support for the two architects of the chaos in Iraq, Cheney and Rumsfeld. He intends to keep Rumsfeld in his job until ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/11/03/the-republican-vote/ Copyright Steve Bell stuck-in-iraq-steve-bell http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/11/02/stuck-in-iraq/ When she became the youngest ever winner of the Booker prize Kiran Desai inadvertently lifted the town of Kalimpong out of the shadows of the Himalayas and into the glare of the media spotlight. But few in the town are now thanking her for setting her novel, The Inheritance of Loss, ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/11/01/readers-rites/ In one of my classes tomorrow, we take up Michael Herr’s classic about the Vietnam War, Dispatches. And to come at it from a certain angle, we’re also reading Tobias Wolff’s recent short-story from the New Yorker, “Awaiting Orders.” There are many moments of meanness and humanity in this magnificent ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/10/31/awaiting-orders/ Imperial History in Ninety Seconds Who has controlled the Middle East over the course of history? Pretty much everyone. Egyptians, Turks, Jews, Romans, Arabs, Persians, Europeans…the list goes on. Who will control the Middle East today? That is a much bigger question. Go here. Via Freddy Deknatel. http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/10/30/who-has-controlled-the-middle-east/ Last night I came across an old piece from the VLS on literary blogging, and since it mentions several of the blogs that I read regularly, I thought I’d link it here. (There was a time in my life, just after I had got my first job, when all I ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/10/28/new-reading/ Want to be the President of the United States? Go on a book tour. An article on Slate.com argues something like that. (Or so I think. Here are other views from a book tour.) To quote the article from Slate: Political assumptions can remain constant for long periods and then change ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/10/28/barack-obama/ Here is a report from my birthplace, Ara: Bhojpur (Bihar): A farmer in Bihar’s Bhojpur district has been under trial for 33 years and is still waiting for justice, while all those originally involved in the case are not even alive. Back in 1973, Suraj Nath Yadav, a landless labourer, was accused ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/10/27/on-trial-for-33-years/ Mohsin Hamid has a new novel coming out. I learned about it this morning via Manish, who is the Knight Harbinger of all that is new in the world. I want to read Mohsin Hamid’s book to see what he’s got over John Updike and Martin Amis. Manish’s post has ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/10/25/mohsin-hamid/ Subodh Gupta’s fabulously titled “Two Cows” subodh-gupta-two-cows http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/10/24/doodhwala/ William Dalrymple’s new book The Last Mughal has just been released. Here is an excerpt from his recent piece in the New Statesman: One of the causes of unrest, according to a Delhi source, was that “the British had closed the madrasas”. These words had no resonance to the Marxist historians ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/10/23/william-dalrymple/ Arundhati Roy writes in a cover-story in Outlook magazine: If opinion polls, letters-to-the-editor and the reactions of live audiences in TV studios are a correct gauge of public opinion in India, then the lynch mob is expanding by the hour. It looks as though an overwhelming majority of Indian citizens would ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/10/21/afzal/ Jeffrey Williams, who teaches at CMU, has a write-up on Terry Eagleton in the Chronicle: Terry Eagleton has been a quintessential wanderer. Eagleton is probably the most well-known literary critic in Britain and the most frequently read expositor of literary theory in the world. His greatest influence in the United States ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/10/19/terry-eagleton/ Tunku Varadarajan reviews Pervez Musharraf’s autobiography: Toward the end of “In the Line of Fire” — in a chapter on the emancipation of women that has all the passion of a government circular — Pervez Musharraf writes that “rape, no matter where it happens in the world, is a tragedy and ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/10/19/tunku-musharraf/ Nick Tosches is a man after my own heart. After providing a quick history of the word “blurb,” he lays out his delicious principle on the matter of blurbing: I myself haven’t been so giving or so kind when it comes to blurbs. I’ve often given blurbs to friends, and occasionally ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/10/18/blurbs/ Collective conscience of the nation–my foot! Look at the picture above of Shiv Sena goons. Nationalism as a murderous mob mentality is more like it. Afzal Guru has been accused of helping terrorists in the attack on the Indian Parliament. In delivering the death sentence, the Supreme Court in Delhi ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/10/17/afzal-guru-2/ The members of the high-tech workforce in China interviewed by Andrew Ross repeatedly described the country’s aggressive globalization as “a win-win situation for both China and the West.” The question that Ross asks in response is this: “But surely there must be some losers?” I’m just back from the American Studies ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/10/16/china/ Kiran Desai has won the Booker Prize! When The Inheritance of Loss was first published, the fact that was most widely noted was that the novel, Desai’s second, was coming out after a gap of several years. But a truer yardstick by which to measure Desai’s talent is to note the ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/10/10/kiran-desai-booker-prize/ “I wish Indian writing in English were less triumphant,” says Amit Chaudhuri. I think that in the West the interest in Indian writing in English has to do with the interest in the role of English in India and the role of India itself increasingly in the globalized world. But ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/10/09/amit-chaudhuri/ Addressing the resurfacing of Henry Kissinger, Christopher Hitchens asks, “Will we never be free of the malign effect of this little gargoyle?” Bob Woodward’s disclosure of the influence of Henry Kissinger on the Bush administration’s Iraq policy both is and is not a surprise. After all, we have known for ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/10/09/henry-kissinger/ “Imagine,” said Senator Patrick Leahy on the Senate floor last last month, “you are a law-abiding, lawful permanent resident. . . . You do charitable fundraising for international relief agencies. . . . You do not discriminate on the grounds of religion. Then one day there is a knock on ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/10/09/346/ The above picture shows some political workers from the ruling Congress Party burning an effigy of a Kashmiri man Afzal Guru who has been condemned to death by hanging for his alleged involvement in the attack on the Indian Parliament. Here is the letter written by his wife, Tabassum, republished on ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/10/07/afzal-guru/ Calling all those who will be watching this tomorrow at their schools–Guantanomo: How Should We Respond?–please do find time to post comments. I will too. http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/10/04/how-should-we-respond/ A still from the documentary “Dirty Laundry” Director: Sanjeev Chatterjee Written and Narrated by Amitava Kumar Duration: 42 mins Synopsis: This film explores questions of race, nationality, home, belonging and justice through the lens of an Indian visiting South Africa and meeting those people of Indian origin who have been involved in the anti-apartheid struggle . ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/10/04/dirty-laundry/ While discussing the arrests made in connection with the Bombay blasts, Siddhartha Mitter at Sepia Mutiny has provided a link to an old Slate story about “truth serums” being used in the interrogations after September 11: Four suspected terrorists refuse to talk about what they know about Sept. 11 and Al ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/10/01/black-sites/ Rob Nixon writes about Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun: Both “Half of a Yellow Sun” and Adichie’s first novel, “Purple Hibiscus” (which won a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize), explore the gap between the public performances of male heroes and their private irresponsibilities. And both novels shrewdly observe the women ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/10/01/half-of-a-yellow-sun/ With more than 200 schools in at least 44 states already participating, “Guantánamo: How Should We Respond?” is an unprecedented collaborative effort of academia, journalism, religion, medicine and even the military in exploring the Government’s detention policy and practices in the “war on terror.” On October 5th, Seton Hall will ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/09/28/guantanamo-teach-in/ The jihad ad has been pulled. The one shown above is the leaked newspaper ad. jihad-car-ad http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/09/26/jihad-car-ad/ Laila Lalami at Moorishgirl alerts us to a Washington Post op-ed on torture by the Haitian writer Edwidge Danticat. The Bush administration has beaten down the Congressional opposition and there’s very little hope for the detainees in the CIA’s “black” prisons. It is in that pressing context that Danticat’s piece ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/09/25/a-chance-to-plot-torture/ Vikram Seth has been in the news lately for being one of the principal signatories to a campaign launched by Siddharth Dube. The petition says: “We, concerned Indian citizens, support the overturning of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, a colonial-era law dating to 1861, which punitively criminalizes romantic ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/09/24/questions-for-vikram-seth/ The amazing Ami Vitale saw this in Kashmir. ami-vitale-kashmir http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/09/24/kashmir/ Salman Rushdie came to Vassar College earlier this week to deliver a lecture to the Class of 2010–but he made it clear to the organizers that he would cancel if I was involved in his visit. I had earlier been asked to introduce him, and then, well, I was disinvited. ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/09/22/salman-rushdie/ …“Train to Pakistan,” Mr. [Khushwant] Singh’s slim, seminal 1956 novel whose opening paragraphs contain one of its most unsettling lines: “The fact is, both sides killed.” An estimated one million people were killed during the partition, and more than 10 million fled their homes: Hindus and Sikhs pouring into India, ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/09/21/train-to-pakistan/ Atul Dodiya’s “Mirage” (2002), enamel paint on a metal shutter. More. http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/09/20/atul-dodiya/ When I put up this post yesterday, I was thinking of the terrifying power of Raj Kamal Jha’s reportage from Gujarat: A child’s English workbook: Learning to Communicate, by S K Ram and J A Mason (Oxford University Press, 124 pages). This book was on the balcony of an empty house in ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/09/18/raj-kamal-jha/ Raj Kamal Jha is a writer whose imaginative talent can light up the night sky. Fireproof, his new novel, his third, is soon to be released at the Frankfurt Book Fair. The German edition is published by Goldmann of Verlagsgruppe Random House. They are publishing this very important book — ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/09/17/our-man-in-frankfurt/ Here’s Liza Featherstone of the Nation on the news that you can take your copy of James Frey’s book to the store and get a complete reimbursement: Back when watching Bill O’Reilly was still fun — before he became a creepy, obsessive nativist — I enjoyed a feature called “The Most ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/09/14/james-frey/ Five years after 9/11, there has been a narrowing of cognitive and emotional range all around. The global culture of common sense has concluded that hard-headed, interest-based terror—favoured by mainstream international relations and exemplified by the CIA’s repeated attempts to assassinate recalcitrant rulers hostile to the US—is now not terror. ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/09/13/ashis-nandy/ NEW DELHI, Sept. 12 — A new bird species has been found in India, the first such discovery here in more than 50 years, the amateur ornithologist who first spotted the bird said Tuesday. The multicolored bird, Liocichla bugunorum, was first sighted in May in the remote Eaglenest Wildlife Sanctuary in ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/09/13/liocichla-bugunorum/ Rob Nixon, who has long inspired me as a teacher and a writer, posted a commentin response to my last post–and here are the opening paragraphs from the piece that Rob recommends, “Leap” by Brian Doyle: A couple leaped from the south tower, hand in hand. They reached for each other ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/09/12/leap/ In the picture, he departs from this earth like an arrow. Although he has not chosen his fate, he appears to have, in his last instants of life, embraced it. If he were not falling, he might very well be flying. He appears relaxed, hurtling through the air. He appears ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/09/11/september-11-falling-man/ For a report on the recent September 11 movies, “United 93″ and “World Trade Center,” please read Daniel Mendelsohn in the NYRB–for the simple reason that he is once again thoughtful and, well, the movie-makers aren’t. Here’s a paragraph almost at random which will indicate to you that way in ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/09/10/literature-of-911-part-ii/ To mark the fifth anniversary of 9/11, Slate asked novelists, artists, journalists, and other thoughtful people a question: What work of art or literature has helped you make sense of the attacks and the world after them? Harold Bloom, author, American Religious Poems: An Anthology, and cantankerous critic, said: “I’ve seen ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/09/08/literature-of-911/ Hitler visits a lunatic asylum. The patients give the Hitler salute. As he passes down the line he comes across a man who isn’t saluting. “Why aren’t you saluting like the others?” Hitler barks. “Mein Führer, I’m the nurse,” comes the answer. “I’m not crazy!” That joke may not be a screamer, but ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/09/07/did-you-hear-the-one-about-hitler/ Mr. Sarkar told the new arrivals that, having spent a year in Raleigh, he was seriously considering staying on for a doctorate at N.C. State. The decision was momentous. “If you go for a Ph.D.,” a former boss in India had told him, “you won’t come back.” In the winter, ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/09/07/bombay-nyc-raleigh/ In 1992, a year after the first Gulf War, I heard Dick Cheney, then secretary of defense, say that the US had been wise not to invade Baghdad and get ‘bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq’. I heard him say: ‘The question in ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/09/05/eliot-weinberger/ Hail to the Church of Garrison Keillor. The Church of “the Politely Depressed.” Following Teju Cole’s comment on this post some time back, I looked up August Kleinzahler’s piece on Garrison Keillor. Read it. Partly for the attack on Keillor: If it were up to me, I’d suggest we borrow the U.S. military’s ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/09/04/garrison-keillor/ Go to Lenin’s Tomb for clips from the new Spike Lee documentary. Via American Samizdat. spike-lee-when-the-levees-broke http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/09/02/spike-lee/ Marine Eye’s View of Iraq War Photographed in Occupation. 8/27-9/16, 2006 POUGHKEEPSIE, NY — U.S. Marine Corps reservist and Vassar alumnus Major Benjamin Busch has attentively photographed his two tours of duty in the Iraq War, which have spanned the 2003 invasion, an early civil organization project, and a more recent ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/08/31/benjamin-busch/ Fast–paced and innovative, No God in Sight captures the seething multiplicity of Bombay through the first–person accounts of an abortionist, a convert, a pregnant refugee, a gangster in hiding, a butcher, and an apathetic CEO, among others. As the reader is hurtled from monologue to short story to anecdote, disparate lives ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/08/31/no-god-in-sight/ Naguib Mahfouz, the Egyptian playwright and screenwriter who won the 1988 Nobel Prize in Literature and was widely regarded as the Arab world’s foremost novelist, died today, Reuters and The Associated Press reported. He was 94. More. Read Edward Said on Mahfouz and “the cruelty of memory.” naguib-mahfouz-edward-said http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/08/30/naguib-mahfouz-rip/ (Thanks, Linta!) The crash-course in Islam is uniformly edifying, of course, as is this introductory bit of exchange in one of Paris Hilton’s closets: Paris: That is my If-I-ever-go-to-India outfit. Friend: Are you planning on going? Paris: Yes… But don’t you have to, like, cover-up everything?. Friend: You’re not allowed to show any of your ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/08/30/paris-in-pakistan/ Do all Indians look alike? No. But those who write do. Or that is what Stephen Thompson believes. His review of Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games begins with the following observation: Here are certain books that are so similar to one another they almost beg to be grouped together. This is largely ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/08/29/311/ A figurative painter with an understated touch, Liu Xiaodong (born 1963 in Liaoning province, China) is one of China’s leading and most passionate artists. He has found a way to chronicle—without cynicism—what might be called the psychic landscape of a society in transition. The Three Gorges Project: Paintings by Liu Xiaodong ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/08/28/liu-xiaodong/ Shekhar Gupta pays homage to Ustad Bismillah Khan who passed away recently. This is a tribute not only to Khan saheb’s art (”Khan Saheb’s was a talent worthy of Bharat Ratna and immortality”) and the kind of person he was (”You could touch his innocence with bare hands in the ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/08/27/ustad-bismillah-khan/ Vikram Chandra, the author of Sacred Games, in conversation with Jai Arjun Singh, tells the following story: Many of the supposedly bad people I met were actively religious, thoughtful about their lives and like anyone else they want to have a structured existence. There was this hitman, for instance, a highly ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/08/26/vikram-chandra/ August Kleinzahler writes in the London Review of Books about the coverage in the U.S. of the war in Lebanon. Here is what he says about the New York Times: There’s a poll in a recent New York Times, buried in the middle of section A, where nearly all of ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/08/24/reading-the-times/ This photograph of a smiling policeman, displaying for the press a cache of captured goods, appeared in our national newspapers on April 14, 1993. The man in this photograph is Tikaram S Bhal, who at that time was the superintendent of police, Alibaug. The Times of India said that an ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/08/24/war-on-terror/ Let me refer you first to Footnote #1 which begins “1) There’s a great deal that’s bad about having a body.” I have recently pulled a back muscle, and I appreciated that. But it’s not always that you encounter, in a footnote in an article in your Sunday newspaper, a ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/08/23/federer-with-footnotes/ In case you haven’t already seen it, here’s Jon Stewart on President Bush’s choice of summer reading–The Stranger by Albert Camus. Also Peter Brooks on Bush and Camus: Camus wrote The Fall during the Algerian War, when France was beginning to face a crisis of conscience over torture similar to what the ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/08/22/stranger-than-fiction/ Eleven British terror suspects were charged today. My friend Liz Blum, feisty citizen of Vermont, sends me this link to a commentary by Craig Murray on the charges. (On his website, Murray is interoduced in the following terms: As Britain’s outspoken Ambassador to the Central Asian Republic of Uzbekistan, Craig ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/08/21/british-terror/ How to look modern? Better still, how to look contemporary? As fresh as the daily newspaper. Ila wanted a tank-top to wear this evening. The laundry hadn’t been done. So, her father had to dress her up in the garb of theory. Thank you, Susan Sontag. And, of course, the New ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/08/20/notes-on-camp/ Siddhartha at Sepia Mutiny has posed a series of interesting links to the new Vikram Chandra novel, Sacred Games. The book is almost a thousand pages long but I must say I’m a little bit impatient with the complaints about the book being too long–of course it is! It is ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/08/20/sacred-games/ Kamila Shamsie writes in the Guardian: The civil war in Lebanon is, in fact, directly responsible for the existence of Saqi Books. In 1979, childhood friends André Gaspard and Mai Ghoussoub left a warring Beirut and came to London. Here, in Westbourne Grove, they started up Al-Saqi Bookshop, which quickly became ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/08/20/saqi-books-lebanon/ In Holland Cotter’s review of the Susan Sontag exhibition at the Met, the following lines: Action was Sontag’s thing. It is the essence of her best essays, with their magnetic drive. They are exhilarating performances. Young people in particular will long be drawn to them. “It’s the beginning mind I embrace,” ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/08/19/the-beginning-mind/ Rule # 1: In the Middle East, it is always the Arabs that attack first, and it’s always Israel who defends itself. This is called “retaliation”. Rule # 2: The Arabs, whether Palestinians or Lebanese, are not allowed to kill Israelis. This is called “terrorism”. Rule # 3: Israel has the ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/08/18/ground-rules/ Subodh Gupta, Sat Samundar Par (10) Via Saffronart subodh-gupta-sat-samundar-par http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/08/17/beyond-the-seven-seas/ An Indian publisher of textbooks has sent me a note saying that he is going to be using the following poem of mine (from Passport Photos) along with the attached annotations and questions: A Mother Writes In Her Letter When the bicycle bell rings twice at the door ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/08/16/a-mother-writes-in-her-letter/ The school building in Akkarbaid is a surprising contrast to the simple mud huts there. A squat concrete structure, it stands some distance from the huts. Surrounding it are a few trees and newly planted shrubs, wilting in the harsh sunlight the morning I visit. Two men are asleep on tarpaulins ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/08/15/gayatri-chakravorty-spivak-school/ The latest chapter of the conflict between Israel and Palestine began when Israeli forces abducted two civilians, a doctor and his brother, from Gaza. An incident scarcely reported anywhere, except in the Turkish press. The following day the Palestinians took an Israeli soldier prisoner–and proposed a negotiated exchange against prisoners ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/08/14/letter-from-writers/ http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/08/12/ground-reality/ Karim Makdisi writes in the London Review of Books: It is clear that Israeli and American foreign policy officials have not learned the lessons of the past couple of decades: namely, that it is their policies – and not some cultural or religious backlash – that make resistance certain and foster ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/08/11/how-the-war-will-end/ Reading about the news from Britain today, about the planned bombing plot at Heathrow, the question that returned to me was one that I had come across in a review recently: “Why do identity politics so often rest on hatreds that do as much damage to the aggressors as to ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/08/10/identity-and-violence/ And there, in the camps, the Biharis remain. Over half (600,000) accepted Bangladesh’s offer of citizenship in 1974, while 539,000 registered with the International Community of the Red Cross as refugees, to “return to their country of nationality – Pakistan”. Since 1972, Pakistan has accepted back around 175,000 Biharis. 300,000, ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/08/09/biharis-in-camps/ http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/08/08/naresh-fernandes/ NEW DELHI, Aug. 1 — Abandoned by her mother at 4, married off at 12 to an abusive husband, a mother herself at 13 — there is little in Baby Halder’s traumatic childhood to suggest that she would become an emerging star on India’s literary horizon. Baby Halder works for Prabodh ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/08/07/baby-halder/ Friends, I’m away from my desk. Will be gone two weeks. If I get the chance, I’ll post blogs, but if not, let’s meet again on August 8. The above photograph is of my daughter Ila, on a recent summer afternoon, pondering life’s big questions on the day after her third ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/07/26/away-from-my-desk/ Early this morning, I read Ben Macintyre’s weak review of Pankaj Mishra’s Temptations of the West. The prose is laudatory but bland. You wouldn’t know from the review that Mishra has written anything else, or that other brown folks have over the years wasted a lot of ink on the ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/07/24/subcontinental-drift/ They came from all over the country, Jews and Arabs, from the air-raid shelters of Haifa and Nazareth and the still safe neighborhoods of metropolitan Tel-Aviv. The third demonstration against the war in Lebanon attracted much greater numbers than the first ones. While the first had 100 participants and the second ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/07/23/tel-aviv/ More here. Holland Cotter begins his piece about the ongoing portrait exhibitions in Washington D.C. with an arresting image–about a city’s self-portrait based on an idea that it has of its own power and also its democratic ideals. What Cotter doesn’t mention about the portrait on display at the Arthur M. ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/07/21/facing-east/ My friend, Hanady Salman (editor at As-Safir newspaper in Beirut), wrote this today: “The fear is growing in Beirut. Beirut is sad, scared, wounded and … left alone. By yesterday morning, the UN said 150 000 people (foreigners and Lebanese holders of 2nd nationalities ) had already left Lebanon .Evacuations aresupposed ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/07/20/beirut-2/ Robin Khundkar sends this link to a video in German with English subtitles. http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/07/20/bush-pilot/ From Israel to Lebanon. On War Post, Freddy Deknatel writes, “When I was a child I never wrote a message on a bomb.” israel-lebanon-war-post http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/07/20/stuff-happens/ “Killing innocent civilians is NOT an act of self-defense. Destroying a sovereign nation is NOT a measured response.” Lebanese civilians have been under the constant attack of the state of Israel for several days. The State of Israel, in disregard to international law and the Geneva Convention, is launching a maritime ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/07/19/lebanon/ Ethan Zuckerman writes: Quick - what do India, Pakistan, China and Ethiopia have in common? It’s not a love of cricket. Or clandestine nuclear arms programs. Or even a fondness for flatbread. They’re all - apparently - blocking blogspot.com. India is the newcomer to this party, and it’s unclear just what blogs are ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/07/18/blocking-blogging/ Uma’s post about her driver NP’s journey back to Bihar by air is a very powerful and moving account of poor man’s travel to the world that he daily serves but rarely enters. What makes Uma’s record of events especially affecting is the way in which it builds on other ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/07/18/travel-to-bihar/ It looks like the SAJA Convention in NYC was pure gold. I was there only briefly to discuss long-form writing — but on the Sepia Mutiny site, Siddhartha Mitter has posted a report that, given Mr Mitter’s tastes and talents, happily sacrifices journalistic sobriety in favor of clever gyrations on ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/07/16/saja-convention/ Here is a link to an article by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Barry Bearak. A report on the massacre of 35 Sikh villagers in Chittisinghpora on the eve of Bill Clinton’s first visit to India, it appeared in the New York Times Sunday Magazine under the title “A Kashmiri Mystery.” ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/07/13/saja/ My friend and colleague Lisa Brawley, Professor of Urban Studies, writes in a note to me this morning: The New York Times reports today that the Mumbai bombings targeted “habitual first-class passengers.” The Independent (UK) elaborates: “All along the tracks, it was the poorest of Mumbai’s citizens, Hindu and Muslim, ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/07/13/mumbai-update/ Naresh Fernandes has an op-ed in the New York Times today: Despite the long history of sporadic violence, Mumbai has always picked itself up by its bootstraps and marched off to work as soon as the trains started working again. Our ability to jeer at misfortune is attributed in the Indian ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/07/12/mumbais-soul/ This is a picture not from Mumbai but from the train station at Ahmedabad just after the news of the blasts today. If you are Indian, you hear the news of bomb blasts in a city–and immediately think of the riots that will follow. Tragedy following tragedy with a certain ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/07/11/bomb-blasts/ ISLAMABAD, July 5: What discomforts our parliamentarians suffer in private in the Parliament Lodges became public on Wednesday when a plea by more than 100 MPs for Asian-style, floor-level commodes in their suites was turned down. The National Assembly standing committee on house and library ruled that the facility already existed ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/07/10/crappy-issue/ When I was a a schoolboy, I had read that the great Buddhist scholar Rahul Sankrityayan had one day left a message on his table. “To Tibet.” He was gone six months. Rahul returned with the art that is now displayed at the Patna Museum. I don’t know whether the ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/07/04/tibet/ The well-known photojournalist Eugene Richards, who is a Fellow at the Nation Institute, has been engaged in a documentary project on the effects of the Iraq War on the lives of young American soldiers and their families. Click here. Via Uma. Also Freddy Deknatel has posted another story about National Guardsmen ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/07/04/war-is-personal/ Bhaiyyas Rule! If you register as a user on Time Out Mumbai, you will find in the current issue this little nugget wrapped like a tasty supari in a green leaf: He’s probably the city’s most famous paanwala. It’s uncertain whether (as rumours suggest) he drives a Merc, but it’s clear for ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/07/04/paanwala/ Maud Newton, who is the Pauline Kael of the literary blogosphere and gets a lot of my affection and respect, wants to know “what’s the last book that made you skip work, or stay up half the night, or forget yourself at stoplights?” I’ll come to the books in a ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/07/02/summer-reading/ Ms. Ila Kumar, now nearly three, before leaving yesterday for a visit to the home of her maternal grandparents, asked her father many times, “Will you miss me?” The father says, “I do, I do, I do.” pda-ila-kumar http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/07/02/pda/ The World Cup in numbers 16 Number of hours German police officers in Dachau spent learning useful phrases in English for dealing with England fans, such as ‘you are under arrest’ and ‘I need to search you’. 50,000 Number of two-and-a-half pint glasses in the shape of the World Cup trophy bought ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/07/02/world-cup-after-england/ Akash Kapur comments in the NYT Book Review on the recent publication in the U.S. of Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English, August. The review is of particular interest because it frames Chatterjee’s novel, first published when we were a lot younger, in terms of a debate on authenticity. Here are the opening ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/07/02/upamanyu-chatterjee/ Here’s a nugget about Chinese capitalism. A businessman is selling World Cup air in China. With no official license as of now, the company has given four bags of the “auspicious air” to some football fans as present, the report said. “I will be giving out another 12 bags, on ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/06/29/selling-air-in-china/ Via Manish Vij, who uses each of his eight arms, nearly every Indian’s birthright, to make wonderful postings at this site. goodness-gracious-me-veranda-manish-vij http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/06/29/verandah-is-indian/ Or like hyenas, cougars, and yes, baboons. Read on. Then something magical happened. For a book I was writing about a school for exotic animal trainers, I started commuting from Maine to California, where I spent my days watching students do the seemingly impossible: teaching hyenas to pirouette on command, cougars ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/06/29/modern-love/ I was talking to Randy Martin about books to teach about politics and art, especially because I’m teaching a course next semester on war, and Randy suggested I check out this site and their book, A Brief History of Outrage. This book is the work of the visual-art/activism collective THINK ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/06/28/a-brief-history-of-outrage/ Time Out Mumbai is now available online. There is no excuse any longer for your not knowing what is happening in the maximum city. Time Out Mumbai is easily among the best Indian magazines, although very few none of the others attend so well to a city’s varied pasts or ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/06/27/time-out-mumbai/ A friend of mine received the following email over the weekend, and I forwarded it to Freddy Deknatel who asks whether there’s a poetential here for a sequel to “Three Kings.” (Freddy has been doing an excellent job presenting documents from Iraq on his blog–covering soliders’ experiences not only from ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/06/27/sequel-to-three-kings/ Dinesh never became a famous writer, but he did become a writer, and he published several novels. I translated one of these from the original Hindi into English and tried to get it published here, but I was told that the background was too unfamiliar to be of interest to ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/06/26/ruth-prawer-jhabvala/ An interview with the most excellent James Wood appears in the pages of the Kenyon Review. The interviewer Jesse Matz picks out all the questions that ought to be asked of Wood, and what makes the interview particularly interesting is that it is conducted in front of a college audience. ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/06/23/king-james/ WASHINGTON, DC—A team of leading historians and psychiatrists issued a report Wednesday claiming that the United States was likely the victim of abuse by its founding fathers and motherland when it was a young colony. More. u.s.-abused-the-onion http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/06/22/us-likely-abused-during-early-years/ PHOTOGRAPHS © MONIKA FISCHER/MATHIAS BRASCHLER My friend Andy Tepper writes in Vanity Fair: Has there ever been a greater stage for athletic heroics than the World Cup? Has there ever been a more improbable game face than the one worn by Ronaldinho [above], the wizard-like Brazilian midfielder who exudes an impish ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/06/21/world-cup-portraits/ Teju Cole reports on the World Cup from immigrant quarters in New York City–I’m always amazed at the stillness at the heart of his images, a part of their eloquence rising from the fact that the photographer always finds people among the crowds. Above, Korea fans on 32nd Street, and ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/06/21/world-cup-teju-cole/ No country has ever won a World Cup while committing genocide or gearing up to commit genocide. Germany and Yugoslavia both faltered on the eve of their mass murders. In 1938, Germany didn’t win a single game. The greatest Yugoslavian team of all time lost in the quarterfinals of the ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/06/21/world-cup/ Check out the video of the song “Blood Brothers.” Lyrics here. I’m told that this song is becoming a part of the immigration debate among desi youth. But I just watched the video and am not sure why this should be the case. I don’t quite like the strict opposition ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/06/20/karmacy/ Dear June Greetings from New Orleans. I stopped by Lafayette cemetary yesterday and put some flowers on Steven’s grave. It looked fairly unchanged since the funeral. Crumbling and moldy — just the way he’d have liked it. Every day for 4 years I’ve asked myself the same questions: How could ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/06/19/found-postcards/ noam-chomsky-west-point http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/06/19/noam-chomsky-goes-to-west-point/ Arundhati Roy speaks to Amy Goodman on the radio program Democracy Now. Roy’s discourse is characteristically in-your-face, as in the following exchange: AG:Thomas Friedman, the well-known, much-read New York Times columnist and author, talks about the call center being a perfect symbol of globalization in a very positive sense. AR: ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/06/18/arundhati-roy/ JAPAN. Tokyo. 1996. By Gueorgui Pinkhassov. What is close to the camera is blurry, what is sharp is too distant to see clearly. All that the eye registers, and registers so fiercely and lyrically, is the pattern of light. http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/06/16/i-like-this-photo/ In response to the song with Rajkumar, my friend Roop has sent us Hotel Mein Bottle. pardon-my-hindi http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/06/16/pardon-my-hindi/ I read a fine review by James Meek in the London Review of Books of a book entitled Enemy Combatant: A British Muslim’s Journey to Guantánamo and Back by Moazzam Begg and Victoria Brittain. Among other things Begg’s book presents a picture of genuine, lived complexity which defeats the black-and-white ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/06/15/enemy-combatant/ Christopher Hayes writes in In These Times: Progressives have an annoying habit when it comes to pop culture. Anytime they fall for a particular TV show, movie or Top 40 hit, they proceed to spend inordinate amounts of time and mental energy convincing themselves that while most of what the corporate ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/06/15/veronica-mars-class-warrior/ This is Rajkumar singing what sounds like “If you come today, it’s too early, If you come tomorrow, it’s too late! You pick the timeeeeeee… Tick, tick, tick, tick.” (Hat-tip, Swati at Ultrabrown, explaining at long last why Bangalore rioted when the man died.) http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/06/15/rajkumar/ Hamid Dabashi points out what Azar Nafisi got wrong, and why, in her book Reading Lolita in Tehran: The twist rests on the fact that the picture of these two teenagers on the cover of Reading Lolita in Tehran is in fact lifted from an entirely different context. The original picture ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/06/14/reading-lolita-in-tehran/ Sree has sent a mail about the website ultrabrown where I find this: ···God bless developing countries One of the things I love about developing countries is their work ethic. Countries like India and Iran have lots of women in science and engineering, whereas in leisure-centric developed countries, most women opt out. Witness: ultrabrown http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/06/14/ultrabrown/ A small news-item in today’s papers “Hindu temple in Lahore demolished”: “Islamabad, June 13: The only Hindu temple in the Pakistani city of Lahore has been demolished to pave the way for construction of a multi-storied commercial building.” It just so happened that earlier today I was watching the documentary “Stories ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/06/13/falling-buildings/ Hindi writer Uday Prakash pays tribute to Kumar Suresh Singh who died recently in Delhi. As the Director General of the Anthropological Survey of India, Singh compiled the monumental People of India, which, among its other virtues, makes it impossible for bigots to claim an essential India or to say ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/06/12/kumar-suresh-singh/ Jamil Naqsh, Pigeons I, 1989. Thanks to Sughra Raza at Three Quarks Daily. jamil-naqsh http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/06/12/jamil-naqsh/ In last week’s NYT Book Review, while writing about a new anthology titled American Movie Critics, Clive James provided the following observation: It quickly becomes obvious that those without theories write better. You already knew that your friend who’s so funny about the “Star Wars” tradition of frightful hairstyles ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/06/11/how-to-write-about-film/ Pankaj Mishra writes in the Guardian that the western view of the rise of India and China is a self-affirming fiction because both countries made their most impressive gains when they rejected the free market. This is a contentious claim because it overlooks the imbalances of the bureaucratic socialist state–we ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/06/10/how-to-be-modern/ Photo: Indian medical orderlies attending to wounded soldiers on stretchers outside a dressing station, Mesopotamia, 1914-1918. Frederick Deknatel, Vassar ‘08, has just started a blog called War Post. His primary interest in setting-up this blog is to archive the voices of soldiers serving in Iraq–soldiers fighting in the American forces in ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/06/09/war-post/ I have been re-reading S. Hussain Zaidi’s Black Friday, a fast-paced account of the 1993 Bombay blasts. Tomorrow, I’m interviewing Zaidi in connection with another story that I’m researching, and I have been wondering when we are going to get a chance to watch Anurag Kashyap’s film based on the ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/06/08/black-friday/ In today’s New York Times, Jonathan Allen reports from Delhi on his visit to the Swaminarayan Akshardham temple complex: “There is no doubt about it — we have taken the concept from Disneyland,” said Jyotindra Dave, the chief public relations officer for the organization that built the temple, which opened in ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/06/08/disney-helps-hindus/ I was in New York City today and went to see the War Image exhibition that I had mentioned in an earlier blog. The images that I am posting tonight are from that exhibition–the artist is Jon Haddock and I thought his work, Screenshots Series (2001), was a good example ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/06/07/war-image/ Michiko Kakutani finds very little of interest in John Updike’s new novel–the flatly-titled Terrorist. Kakutani writes: “Unfortunately, the would-be terrorist in this novel turns out to be a completely unbelievable individual: more robot than human being and such a cliché that the reader cannot help suspecting that Mr. Updike found ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/06/06/john-updike-terrorist/ Abhi at Sepia Mutiny has come up with this brilliant idea: For the past six months I have been mulling this idea over in my head. Photographs, even without any words or explanations, can convey a tremendous amount of information and history. Just look through these pictures of some of the ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/06/05/desi-dad-project/ In a clear-eyed appraisal of the acts and words of those who would seek to rescue Muslim women from — what exactly? — themselves, or from Muslim men, or from non-Muslim men, take your pick, Laila Lalami writes: In 1908 Lord Cromer, the British consul general in Egypt, declared that ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/06/05/laila-lalami/ BORDEAUX, France—A market in the St. Michel quarter, 2000. © Jean Gaumy / Magnum Photos For more on the series called “Cafe Life.” jean-gaumy http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/06/04/jean-gaumy/ How do you get someone who’s never been to the theater to try it out? In the case of Pillsbury House Theater, the answer is to put their children on stage. At the annual Chicago Avenue Project, Pillsbury House Theater in Minneapolis pairs professional actors with neighborhood kids, and they ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/06/03/arts-for-the-poor/ Last year a Dublin literary magazine sponsored an open competition for the best Seamus Heaney imitation. The winning poem began, Niall Fitzduff brought a jar of crab apple jelly made from crabs off the tree that grew at ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/06/02/victorias-secret/ Gogol is a Bengali name. We will believe it when we hear it spoken by Irfan, India’s answer to the mighty Samuel L. Jackson. (Thanks, Maud) mira-nair-namesake http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/06/02/namesake/ “Hell” The coffee house was on the roof of a five-storey building. They sat at a table facing each other, coffee cups between them. “He’s written a bunch of crap again,” one said to the other, looking at him. ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/05/31/uday-prakash/ Bihari, 1998. Subodh Gupta; born 1964, Khagaul, Bihar. Lives and works in Gurgaon and New Delhi. Handmade paper, acrylic, cow dung in PVA solution, LED lights with timer and transformer, 127 x 96 x 8cm, Private Collection I had learned about this amazing–because utterly varied–artist through the Edge of Desire exhibition ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/05/30/subodh-gupta/ A couple of days ago I got a note from my friend Rob. This is what he had written: Some utterly trivial–and therefore telling–information. Australia is now the only major cricket team not to boast a player with South Asian roots. Here’s the line up (beyond the obvious 4 SAsian sides): WI (Sarwan, ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/05/30/sepia-mutiny-2/ From the excellent Holland Cotter one learns today that Coco Fusco has a new video out, this time making interrogation the subject of performance art: The idea for the video began when Ms. Fusco, an interdisciplinary artist who teaches at Columbia University, was preparing a performance piece in which she assumed ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/05/30/art-of-torture/ Salil Tripathi has a piece entitled “The right to be offended” in today’s International Herald Tribune about the attacks on M.F. Husain: This month in London, Kamlesh Sharma, the Indian high commissioner, inaugurated an exhibition of his early work. Calling him India’s greatest modern artist, Sharma said, “Husain’s career and success ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/05/30/mf-husain/ As a public service, I thought one should put up on the Web a few paragraphs from the movie review of Da Vinci Code written by Anthony Lane in the May 29 issue of The New Yorker: There has been much debate over Dan Brown’s novel ever since it was ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/05/29/da-vinci-code-2/ Gilles Peress, 1980, Telex Iran. In 1979 and 1980, the American Embassy in Teheran, Iran was seized by Islamic fundamentalists and 52 people were held hostage. Gilles Peress traveled Iran for five weeks during the “hostage crisis,” taking pictures to understand a country and a people who were portrayed in the ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/05/29/gilles-peress-2/ A British woman who is homeless, but has been blogging about her experiences, has now got a book contract. Here’s the BBC report on the homeless writer. Below is an excerpt from the writer’s recent reflections on the book deal: Sorry, didn’t mean to drag it out — just wasn’t sure ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/05/28/wandering-scribe/ Kwame Anthony Appiah writes that he supports cultural expression over cultural preservation: I am all for festivals of Welsh bards in Llandudno financed by the Welsh arts council. Long live the Ghana National Cultural Centre in Kumasi, where you can go and learn traditional Akan dancing and drumming, especially since its ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/05/27/anthony-appiah/ Listen to Jeanette Winterson as she offers an articulate, faith-shifting account of what it means to discover books. And why one should commit them to memory, like prayers. Winterson: “My mother was terrifed that books would fall into my hands; but it never occurred to her that I might fall into ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/05/26/putting-faith-in-reading/ NYC exhibition of photographs of Bangladeshi ship-breakers by Robert Bailey. Here’s the text from Bailey’s website: A journey to the shipbreaking yards of Bangladesh is a journey back in time. It is an area where manual labor has yet to be replaced by machines or computers. Their massive work ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/05/25/bangladeshi-ship-breakers/ Uma at Indian Writing paints an evocative picture of a place in Bombay that I also adore. She writes: “I have discovered the meaning of life. It is a slow roundabout in the traffic around Crawford Market waiting for a place to park. It is a saucer of cut papaya. ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/05/25/crawford-market/ Allan deSouza, Fountain, from the series The Lost Pictures, 2004 © Allan deSouza, Courtesy the artist and Talwar Gallery, New York You can find the above work by deSouza at the Snap Judgments exhibition at the ICP in New York City. The exhibition ends on May 28. The Lost Pictures is by ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/05/23/allan-desouza/ A review of Wole Soyinka’s You Must Set Forth At Dawn in the Washington Post: In one of his more revealing chapters, Soyinka dissects early signs of tension within the leadership of South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC). He tells of a dinner in Paris with his longtime hero Nelson Mandela, ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/05/21/wole-soyinka/ 1. What does this book say to the man with the gun? 2. How is the work in conversation with an age dominated by movies? 3. The people who appear anomalous among the rich–the coal-miner in a cage, an unpaid ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/05/20/questions-for-reviews/ Re: the questions to be asked by any book reviewer on Amazon.com: In a piece in Atlantic Monthly last year, Rick Moody had shown a way out when he offered a list of questions in a different context. According to Moody, writing workshops usually pose questions like “Does the story have ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/05/18/rick-moodys-questions/ Is it enough to say that critics should match artists and achieve a certain performative brilliance? It seems to me as important to press that more and more critics should try to be as good as the best among them. A rather easy argument I wish to make here is ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/05/18/amazon-reviews-from-hell/ This is a reminder. (Also a correction: the KGB Bar is located on 84 West 4th St.) http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/05/17/said-talk/ Here’s an article about critics and blogs that I enjoyed reading this morning. The artists have finally gotten their revenge on us. The critics now have to perform. We have judged artists on their ability to excite, to innovate, to surprise, to engage, to inform. Now the world is demanding that of us, ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/05/16/critical-edge/ The semester has come to an end and I’m grading papers. In one of the classes, I decided that our last set of readings should focus on what writers were saying in the long aftermath of September 11. We read Orhan Pamuk’s “The Anger of the Damned,” Francis Fukuyama’s “The ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/05/15/end-of-the-semester/ “In 1998, Spiegelman portrayed a construction-worker mom sitting on a girder on a skyscraper, nursing her baby through an unbuttoned denim work shirt.” For more from the 2001 article click here. http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/05/14/art-spiegelman/ OK, fine. You try explaining to your little daughter that the caterpillars on a branch outside your door will one day soon turn into butterflies. http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/05/13/process-etc/ On the day before Suharto was forced to resign his presidency in 1998, after 32 years in power, you could see fire in the skies over Jakarta. I hopped on a bus, where two young Balinese men sitting opposite me were happily singing a hymn about Dasamuka. Dasamuka is another ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/05/12/pramoedya-ananta-toer/ If you look at this site, you discover that the largest number of people doing a search on Google for “sex” live in Pakistan. The list, in descending order, runs like this: Pakistan, Egypt, Iran, Viet Nam, India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Poland, and Romania. (This list, when arranged according to ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/05/12/sex/ All his life, which was blessed with publicity, Edward Said was often photographed. He had a knack for organizing the image, in which he typically appeared as a richly upholstered six-footer, his bold stripes and patterns from a Savile Row tailor, topped by a wavy stand of hair like black ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/05/11/the-influence-of-edward-said/ By Rod McKie. Hat-tip Booklust. http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/05/10/labyrinths/ Jenny Holzer was commissioned to produce an outdoor sculpture in honor of Vassar’s outgoing President, Fran Fergusson. Holzer produced twenty granite benches–twenty for each year of service by Fran–and inscribed on them lines from the poems of a Pulitzer Prize-winning Vassar alum, Elizabeth Bishop. One of Bishop’s poems that Holzer ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/05/09/jenny-holzer-again/ A long article in the Guardian this past weekend describes a young British woman’s visit to Bihar where a part of her family still lives. The writer is Raekha Prasad and she has produced a fine travelogue about a state that often defies expectations about just how many things can ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/05/09/bihar/ My daughter Ila, who will turn three in a couple of months, has just received her first paint-box. She wanted to paint the tulips that she had seen in the Vassar gardens; her father struggled to draw them, and then Ila applied the color. http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/05/09/ilas-first-paint-box/ Writer Nadeem Aslam, whose recent piece in Granta was widely circulated in the blogosphere, is the author of the prize-winning novel Maps for Lost Lovers. Nadeem took these photographs in Afghanistan. In one photograph in front of me, a rotting carcass of a train stands in front of a sprawling ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/05/07/nadeem-aslam/ I confess I have had nothing original to say on this issue. Kaavya Viswanathan has become a name for cheap opinion and also cheap humor–I began a reading yesterday by claiming that what I was going to read had really been written by me. Ugh! However, what I can say ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/05/06/kaavya-viswanathan/ The above photograph was taken by Neeraj Priyadarshi from the Indian Express. Readers of this blog familiar with Indian politics will recognize the faces of the BJP leadership. Others unfamiliar with those faces will nevertheless find in the clothes that the people are wearing, and also in their sombre expressions, ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/05/06/about-waiting/ Kamila Shamsie has reviewed Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani in today’s Guardian. Kamila makes a point which I hadn’t read in other reviews: “Ethnicity gives this narrative a particular context, but it is not a story about migrant communities, no matter what the hype might suggest. It is clear early on that gender ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/05/06/shamsie-on-malkani/ The right-wing outrage over M.F. Husain’s painting of a nude Mother India, or Bharat Mata, has now taken a new turn. According to today’s Hindustan Times, the government in Delhi has issued a “red alert”: Artist MF Husain’s apology for the nude painting, Bharatmata, has not helped. The Union Home Ministry ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/05/05/naked-nationalism/ Here’s an excerpt from a delectable review, written by Jai Arjun Singh, of the film The Mistress of Spices: Like I said, The Mistress of Spices takes its premise very seriously. It opens with a solemn title (presumably for the edification of the Western viewer) that states: “India is a land ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/05/05/the-mistress-of-spices/ “I can’t believe I bought these shoes”, exclaims the performance artist Miranda July in her hit indie film, Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005). “They’re exactly the same as my old shoes. Except they’re pink.” I had a similar feeling about her film. It is bright, cute and ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/05/05/me-and-you-and-everyone-we-know/ Jhumpa Lahiri’s short-story “Once In A Lifetime” in the latest New Yorker has a paragraph that describes the accident of two Bengali women coming together in Cambridge, a meeting that is remarkable not because it is accidental but because it would have been unlikely back in India: Our mothers had met ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/05/04/the-hush-around-jhumpa-lahiri/ The picture above is of Iqbal Ahmed, a Kashmiri living in London since 1993, who writes books by day and works as a hotel doorman by night. Ahmed’s book Empire of the Mind: A Journey Through Great Britain is just out in that country. My friend Kamila Shamsie in London ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/05/03/iqbal-ahmed/ The Zubaan Book of New Writing by Young Women Zubaan is planning to produce an anthology of short fiction showcasing new, young women writers from South Asia. • The focus of the book will be on young writers in the 20s and 30s. • The writers should be women of South Asian extraction, ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/05/03/new-writing-by-young-women/ Before she fell asleep last night, my wife handed over a page from a newspaper that she wanted me to read. On the top of the story it said “Modern Love” and then “Now for a Quick Lesson in International Relations.” This is how the report, written by Evan Ratliff, ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/05/02/hello-loneliness/ An alert editor at Outlook has remembered that Satyajit Ray would have been 85 today. Here’s a piece that Sandipan Deb, who has now moved to Indian Express, wrote in Ray’s memory a couple of summers ago. (If you don’t wish to register at the site, just follow the first ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/05/02/satyajit-ray/ Jorge the Church Janitor Finally Quits No one asks where I am from, I must be from the country of janitors, I have always mopped this floor. Honduras, you are a squatter’s camp outside the city of their understanding. No one can speak my name, I host the fiesta of the bathroom, stirring the toilet like a punchbowl. The Spanish music of my name is lost when ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/05/01/martin-espada/ “Corner Plot” by Sarah Sze will be open for view tomorrow on Doris C. Freedman Plaza at Fifth Avenue and 60th Street in Manhattan. (Photo by Hiroko Masuike.) Read more here. The photograph shows a piece of a white-brick building, like so many others in Manhattan, except that this one ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/05/01/public-art/ “Why do Asian writers have to be ‘authentic’ to succeed?” asks Sarfraz Manzoor in the Observer. (Thanks, Harpreet.) The immediate context for Manzoor’s article is the publication of Londonstani by Gautam Malkani. Manzoor writes that “the media hungers for a ‘noble savage’ who will reveal the hidden worlds that shine in ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/04/30/exceptional-writers/ Vinay Lal, historian at UCLA, has written a fine obituary for the 255 year-old tortoise Adwaitya that died last month in Calcutta. Adwaitya was reputed to have been the pet of Lord Clive, the man often credited for having won India for the British. In commenting on how Adwaitya outlasted ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/04/29/vinay-lal/ “Big Family” In my study this morning I found, folded in a copy of Granta 89, a New York Times article from last year about the Chinese artist Zhang Xiaogang. Here are a few lines from the article by way of introduction: “Mr Zhang, 47, is one of China’s best-known artists. ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/04/28/zhang-xiaogang/ End the war in Iraq — Bring all our troops home now! No war on Iran! Stand up for immigrant and women’s rights! New York City. Assemble: 22nd Street and Broadway, 10:30AM onward March: At noon down Broadway to Foley Square Grassroots action festival: 1:00-6:00PM, Foley Square For a brief film “Peace Takes Courage,” go here. (Hat-tip, ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/04/27/peace/ A couple of years ago, Seth Stevenson from Slate.com took a five-step approach to liking India. Like every good therapeutic self-help text, Stevenson’s piece begins with the soothing declaration: “It’s OK to hate a place.” That is followed by this little bit of exposition: Travel writers can be so afraid to ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/04/27/learning-to-like-india/ A recent review of Amartya Sen’s new book Identity and Violence has sparked some heated debate on Amardeep Singh’s website. The review has been written by Tunku Varadarajan who, if some reports are to be believed, has roamed the forests of journalism like a fierce bandit. At one point, with ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/04/27/seriously-good/ Today in class we’re reading Ian Frazier’s essay “Route 3″ which first appeared in the New Yorker. One of the most absorbing parts of the essay is Frazier’s description of the experience of walking on Route 3, on the stretch of the highway that extends from Montclair, New Jersey, to ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/04/25/freshman-english-again/ My main man Hanif Kureishi reflects on the twenty-five years that have passed since his play “Borderline” was staged. HK is on the money in his comments on the trap of radical Islam and the continuing relevance of radical rehearsals: By the 1990s, political theatre was dead. It had come to ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/04/25/hanif-kureishi/ “Can you buy me gum?” “Why?” “I want to eat it.” “Have you had gum before?” “No.” “It’s for big girls.” “I am a big girl.” (When she says this, she raises her arms.) “Okay… But do you know that you’re not supposed to swallow it?” “Why?” “You’re only supposed to chew it—like this.” (I imitate a cow moving ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/04/25/monday-rain/ Zhang Fan, “Resting,” 1998, Oil on Canvas For more. zhang-fan-chinese-art http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/04/24/sunday-rest/ “I was betraying Abigail fast and furious on the keyboard. Typing and typing and typing.” Chris Abani describes how he came to write his novella, Becoming Abigail. (Hat-tip, Elegant Variation.) I’m always a bit divided over fragmentary narratives, but in Abani’s account, we get brief, haunting stories: A few months later, waiting ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/04/24/chris-abani/ Documentary film-maker Sedika Mojadidi, who lives and works in New York City, visited my class yesterday. I know her back from my days in Gainesville, where she was my student. Sedika is an Afghan-American and the video-film she showed us was a short called “Zulaikha” about an Aghani grocery store-owner ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/04/22/sedika-mojadidi-kabul/ “The Last Days of Muhammad Atta,” a short-story by Martin Amis published in the latest New Yorker, fails as an act of imagination. It is an account of the last few hours in the life of the passenger in seat 8D of American Flight 11, and is limited by the ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/04/21/the-last-days-of-muhammad-atta/ Given that the Whitney Biennial 2006 has the title “Day for Night,” it should not surprise us that analyses of the show get caught in reflective mirrorings that would in all other contexts be called convoluted thinking. Arthur Danto’s review in the Nation enacts strange, speculative reversals too, but, and ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/04/21/whitney-biennial-2006/ …and listen to this song (Many thanks to my colleague and friend, Professor Judith Nichols.) I am me and Rummy’s he, Iraq is free and we are all together See the world run when Dick shoots his gun, see how I lie I’m Lying… Sitting on my own brain, waiting for the end of days Corporation ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/04/21/turn-up-your-speakers/ (Archival image of a watchtower of the Home Guard, a militia recruited among Kikuyu who were willing to oppose the Mau Mau movement.) The Pulitzer for non-fiction goes to Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya by Caroline Elkins. Elkins teaches history at Harvard. An excerpt from a ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/04/19/imperial-reckoning/ A poem entitled “In Antigua” by Kerri Webster, inspired by a travel ad in a magazine: “In Antigua I am famous. I am bathed in jasmine and pressed with warm stones.” —Carnival Cruise ad in The New Yorker In Albuquerque, on the other hand, I am infamous; children throw stones and the elderly whisper ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/04/19/in-antigua/ Nalini Malani. Reverse painting on mylar. 2005 For more. nalini-malani http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/04/18/nalini-malani/ That’s Gautam Malkani, homeboy from Hounslow, ready to take off with his new book, Londonstani. Here’s what he has to say about a runway decorating his neighborhood: With a plane roaring overhead every 60 seconds, it’s probably a good thing I decided to set ‘Londonstani’ in Hounslow rather than write it ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/04/18/londonstani/ The excellent James Wood has today published a review of a new biography of Flaubert. Wood finds much to admire both in Flaubert and in the biography by Fredrick Brown; and when you read the last line of the passage that I have quoted below, you know that Wood ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/04/17/james-wood/ While I was teaching my last class this past week, the fire-alarm went off. The whole lot of us dutifully trooped outside and, because it was a beautiful day, we kept sitting on the grass even when the bells had stopped ringing. But then other teachers had the same idea ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/04/16/david-hare/ For more. jenny-holzer http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/04/14/jenny-holzer/ I was going in to teach the other day when a message arrived in my inbox. The lady at the other end, a journalist, wanted me to respond to five questions that she had sent me. They were a part of a regular feature called “Just a Minute” (that ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/04/14/hindustan-times-interview/ In a Slate review of Michiko Kakutani’s practice of book-reviewing, Ben Yagoda begins with the argument that “whether a work is good or bad is just one of the many things to be said about it, and usually far from the most important or compelling.” Yagoda goes on: “Great critics’ ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/04/14/michiko-kakutani-2/ In a review-essay entitled Hope of the Web, Bill McKibben writes: When, less than a decade ago, the Internet emerged as a force in most of our lives, one of the questions people often asked was: Would it prove, like TV, to be a medium mainly for distraction and disengagement? Or ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/04/14/daily-kos/ Penguin-India has recently published Jerry Pinto’s book Helen: The Life and Times of an H-Bomb. Helen is a very good example of a book that is fun to read because you know that the writer is also having fun; in this particular case, the argument extends also to the book’s ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/04/13/indian-h-bomb/ The latest New York Review of Books carries a fine piece on Beckett, Happy Birthday, Sam!, by Colm Toibin. At one point, Toibin offers a quote from Beckett: ‘I realised that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more… He was always adding to ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/04/11/samuel-beckett-2/ Peter Doig’s Canoe-Lake, 1997-8, oil on canvas, 200 x 300cm peter-doig-canoe-lake http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/04/11/peter-doig/ Have you ever been enlightened by a single “customer-review” that you have read on Amazon? I find them ridiculous. And while I regularly buy books from Amazon, especially used ones, I have so far found the lists I’m supposed to peruse on the margins also a major burden. But last ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/04/11/amazons-listmania/ The Guardian carried an interview with Orhan Pamuk some days ago. (The above photo, by Eamonn McCabe, appeared in the same paper.) Here’s an excerpt from the interview: Snow, which he began writing two years before 9/11, is set in Kars in north-eastern Turkey and tackles the urgent issues of secularism ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/04/10/orhan-pamuk-snow/ George Saunders, who has a new collection of stories out, has been interviewed by Deborah Solomon in the New York Times Sunday Magazine. Many years ago, when I came to the US, George was a fellow grad student at Syracuse, and also my neighbor on Ackerman Avenue. But before he ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/04/09/capitalism-and-grace/ I had never been to a brown party. Who the hell would I talk to or even hang out with? This was stupid. I turned around and started to walk back to my car. “No,” I told myself, stopping. “This is why everyone thinks you’re a stuck-up oreo of a bitch. ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/04/08/sepia-mutiny-anna/ “Players of a Muslim team (in black) fight for the ball with players from a gay side (in white) during a soccer match in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, March 21, 2006. The soccer tournament was organised as part of a conference on fighting discrimination against immigrants who come out as gay ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/04/07/muslims-4-gays-0/ Anish Kapoor (British, b. Bombay, India, 1954) Untitled, 1985, (1985) Gouache, emulsion, and pencil on paper 11 11/16 x 17 7/8 in. (29.6. x 45.3 cm.) Joseph H. Hirshhorn Purchase Fund, 1991 (91.7 ) anish-kapoor http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/04/07/anish-kapoor/ Here is a report on Alain Badiou’s appearance in a bookstore in New York City: … [Alain Badiou] eschewed the political in favor of an explication of the philosophical work in Being and Event. But when the conversation was opened up to the audience, sparks flew about the implications of Mr. ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/04/06/alain-badiou/ Medha Patkar, on a hunger fast in Delhi, has been forcibly taken by the police to a hospital some hours ago. Here’s a report on the website of Outlook magazine: The Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) leader Medha Patkar had been on an indefinite hunger strike that had entered its eighth day. ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/04/06/activist-medha-patkar/ V.S. Naipaul’s latest statements, offered in an interview with Farrukh Dhondy in the pages of Literary Review, have been met with a storm of protest. I’m not sure what the fuss is about. I’m always surprised that academics who are able to discern all kinds of subversive possibilities in anything ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/04/05/vs-naipaul/ The recent New York Times story (from which the above illustration has been taken) raises the following question about blogging: “Might the invention of blogging, which gives everyone at least theoretical access to the whole wired world, threaten the very existence of an exclusive chattering class? One person who thinks, and hopes, ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/04/04/the-chattering-class/ As Alzheimer’s stole his mind, painter William Utermohlen documented the change with self-portraits, helping neurologists to understand the disease. (Thanks, Abbas Raza.) Susan Boni in the Philadelphia Inquirer: For a year, William Utermohlen hid his fears and tried to follow his normal routine, teaching art and painting in his ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/04/03/the-face-of-decline/ Siddharth Varadarajan writes that “the anti-monarchy protests planned for April 6-9 will be the first test of strength for the new partnership between Nepal’s Maoists and parliamentary parties. The King says the joint action will be treated as an act of terror and the U.S. is also opposed to the ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/04/02/kathmandu/ “The oft-repeated claim that Bush does not care about poor people, Black people, or anyone who did not vote for him misses the mark; the new face of power, manifested in Bush & Co. for the fleeting moment, is that the machinations of power do not care. Big Brother cared, ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/04/01/new-orleans-blogreport/ When I stepped out of my apartment this morning, I showed my daughter the flowers that had blossomed overnight near our wall. They were daffodils. What I cannot show my child here is dhak or “flame of the forest.” But here’s a photograph of that flower, from the foothills in ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/04/01/flame-of-the-forest/ Here is a link to a story by an Arab journalist, Abdullah Al-Mutairi, about the way in which foreign workers, especially South Asians, are treated in Saudi Arabia. (Thanks again, Robin Khundkar.) The writer asks his compatriots: “Why is there so much hate inside us?” I liked very much the ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/03/31/migrant-workers-in-saudi-arabia/ If you visit this site, you’ll discover a lot about toilets. I was there after my friend Robin Khundkar sent me a link to an article “Indian award not going down the toilet”: the government in India has been giving rural households a subsidy of 500 rupees (about 11 dollars) ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/03/31/toilets/ A student in my Freshman English class said yesterday that whenever he sits down to write he does two things about the subject he has been given: one, he tries to find a personal angle into the material, and second, he tries to think positive thoughts about it. The second ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/03/30/freshman-english-with-dale-peck/ Shibu Natesan, “At Kanyakumary,” 2006. Earlier this evening, I posted a blog about art in New York City, or at least, art about New York City. And then I remembered a painting on display at Gallery ArtsIndia. (The painting is in the city but it is not about the city at ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/03/29/a-fine-balance/ n+1 magazine asks you to consider writing about art, or, more precisely, about art that represents New York City. Here you have Roger White writing on the art of Marvin Gates: The simplifications in Gates’s paintings don’t exactly simplify things. Instead, the starkness provides a way for ordinary things to be ... http://amitavakumar.blogsome.com/2006/03/29/n-1/