The Rise of Juan Cole, and Other Stories, by Farrell and Drezner

Henry Farrell and Daniel Drezner have co-authored another essay on blogging, this one for Foreign Policy, on the role of blogging in shaping (surprise, surprise) foreign policy debates.

These guys are machines. Farrell's contributions to Crooked Timber are excellent, and Drezner's blog is always edifying. Both are, I understand untenured professors (at George Washington and Chicago, respectively), so their output (combined with their more serious, "scholarly" publication record) is definitely something for slackers like me to envy. I referred to their first co-authored essay on blogging a little while ago, with my response here. They make a couple of new points in the new essay that I think enrich the first.

The most compelling example of a blogger's success in influencing in foreign policy is probably Juan Cole, who went from an unknown middle east specialist in 2002 to one of the most widely respected (in the mass-media) critics/experts on Iraq pretty quickly -- all through his blog.

Fellow bloggers took an interest in his writings, especially because he expressed a skepticism about the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq that stood apart from the often optimistic mainstream media coverage following the successful overthrow of the Baathist regime. Writing in the summer of 2003, Cole noted: “The Sunni Arabs north, east and west of Baghdad from all accounts hate the U.S. and hate U.S. troops being there. This hatred is the key recruiting tool for the resistance, and it is not lessened by U.S. troops storming towns. I wish [the counterinsurgency operation] well; maybe it will work, militarily. Politically, I don't think it addresses the real problems, of winning hearts and minds."

As a prominent expert on the modern history of Shiite Islam, Cole became widely read among bloggers—and ultimately journalists—following the outbreak of Iraqi Shiite unrest in early 2004. With his blog attracting 250,000 readers per month, Cole began appearing on media outlets such as National Public Radio (NPR) and CNN to provide expert commentary. He also testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “As a result of my weblog, the Middle East Journal invited me to contribute for the Fall 2003 issue,” he recalls. “When the Senate staff of the Foreign Relations Committee did a literature search on Moktada al-Sadr and his movement, mine was the only article that came up. Senate staff and some of the senators themselves read it and were eager to have my views on the situation."

Good for Juan Cole. (Also: thank you, Juan Cole, for the tireless effort.) But is this essay really yet another compilation of 'blog success stories'? Didn't I just read about five such articles in the New York Times last week? Hello, blog triumphalism, my old friend... (D & F do try to inoculate themselves against vanity by commenting, self-reflexively perhaps, on the rise of blog triumphalism as a phenomenon).

What is new here has to do, again, with the economics of big blogs and small blogs, but not so much for the in-link and out-link statistical analysis that was the subject of the earlier essay, mentioned above. Rather, their interest here is in the economics of information, in which both big blogs and small blogs are essential to the productivity of the system:

Consequently, even as the blogosphere continues to expand, only a few blogs are likely to emerge as focal points. These prominent blogs serve as a mechanism for filtering interesting blog posts from mundane ones. When less renowned bloggers write posts with new information or a new slant, they will contact one or more of the large focal point blogs to publicize their posts. In this manner, poor blogs function as fire alarms for rich blogs, alerting them to new information and links. This self-perpetuating, symbiotic relationship allows interesting arguments and information to make their way to the top of the blogosphere.

All good so far -- I think symbiosis makes the big blogs/little blogs dynamic more interesting. And I think it is probably true. That said, I think the following might be a little off:

The skewed network of the blogosphere makes it less time-consuming for outside observers to acquire information. The media only need to look at elite blogs to obtain a summary of the distribution of opinions on a given political issue. The mainstream political media can therefore act as a conduit between the blogosphere and politically powerful actors. The comparative advantage of blogs in political discourse, as compared to traditional media, is their low cost of real-time publication. Bloggers can post their immediate reactions to important political events before other forms of media can respond. Speed also helps bloggers overcome their own inaccuracies. When confronted with a factual error, they can quickly correct or update their post. Through these interactions, the blogosphere distills complex issues into key themes, providing cues for how the media should frame and report a foreign-policy question.

Here I think they might be getting a little ahead of where blogging actually is, even big-time "focal point" blogging. I'm not sure what a policy-maker would get in terms of information from a bunch of (even major) blogs that they wouldn't get just by carefully reading The New York Times and the BBC. The big blog takedowns, like Rather-gate or Trent Lott's paean to racial segregation, were not policy events but rather more on the order of exposing media mistakes and omissions.

Also, it's an oversimplification that large blogs provide a representative (and therefore time-efficient) source for mainstream journalists and policy-makers to sample a distribution of available opinions. One missing factor is probably Google, which equalizes the big-blog/small-blog equation, especially on the question of obscure or emerging topics. Another missing aspect of the analysis is the chaos (still) of any attempt at serious blog-reading, which inevitably entails a good deal of digging and rooting around for leads. Some of my friends and colleagues have started to take an interest in blogging (partly because of my endless raving about it, but I find it very difficult to explain to them how one actually scans through 15-20 blogs at a session, with no guarantee of coming across anything interesting.

Blogs are certainly a source of opinions -- and this, one gathers, is primarily what Drezner and Farrell read them for. But I think they are also interesting as independent sources of distributed information (along the Wiki model). Here, I'm thinking of blogs not so much as entities that have regular readers, loyal and continuous commentors (though naturally one is profoundly grateful for regular readers), but rather as offering potential nuggests of 'small' information, inside scoop, and micro-reporting. And this becomes relevant to everyone else through search engines, which for whatever reason ranks blogs quite highly.

Blogs -- as social networks -- are also interesting as information themselves. That is to say, small-scale blog discussions, which are even sometimes (shock!) on topics other than foreign policy, can and should be studied sociologically. Blogging is exciting because it is producing a new invigoration of public debate and disagreement, new forms of networking, and the emergence of new forms of loose and shifting social affiliation. I haven't seen this talked about much by the sociology blogs (though maybe soon... or maybe I've missed it).

Finally, any good article on blogging must complete with some fresh links, and Drezner and Farrell do offer a few good ones, this time to blogs outside of the U.S. that have been the subject of controversy:

Iran is a good example. The Iranian blogosphere has exploded. According to the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education’s Blog Census, Farsi is the fourth most widely used language among blogs worldwide. One service provider alone (“Persian Blog”) hosts some 60,000 active blogs. The weblogs allow young secular and religious Iranians to interact, partially taking the place of reformist newspapers that have been censored or shut down. Government efforts to impose filters on the Internet have been sporadic and only partially successful. Some reformist politicians have embraced blogs, including the president, who celebrated the number of Iranian bloggers at the World Summit on the Information Society, and Vice President Muhammad Ali Abtahi, who is a blogger himself. Elite Iranian blogs such as “Editor: Myself” have established links with the English-speaking blogosphere. When Sina Motallebi, a prominent Iranian blogger, was imprisoned for “undermining national security through ‘cultural activity,’” prominent Iranian bloggers were able to join forces with well-known English-language bloggers including Jeff Jarvis (“BuzzMachine”), Dan Gillmor (“Silicon Valley”), and Patrick Belton (“OxBlog”) to create an online coalition that attracted media coverage, leading to Motallebi’s release.

Other Farrell/Drezner links that were new to me:
Marginal Revolution
Harry's Place
Slugger O'Toole
Blog Africa
Joi Ito's Web

The Rise and Fall of the Bilingual Intellectual

In case you were wondering what's so great about Ram Guha (the Indian historian recently refused entry to the U.S.), read his recent piece in The Hindu on the decline of India's bilingual intellectuals. [Via Kitabkhana]

He argues that early and mid-20th century Indian intellectuals -- people like Tagore, Gandhi, Ambedkar, Anatha Murthy, and R.K. Narayan -- were "effortlessly" bilingual. Many of them wrote extensively in both English and their native languages, depending on context and intended audience. What's interesting about this is not so much that they were able to do this, it's what they chose to write in a given language. Also interesting is that the key centers of bilingual intellectualism were in Bengal and Maharashtra:

Arguably the most developed of these bilingual cultures were located in Bengal and Maharashtra. This is where the most sophisticated conversations were taking place, simultaneously in two languages. Here, the scholar had a real choice as to which language to use for what purpose. Thus the Bengali anthropologist Nirmal Kumar Bose wrote his important works on Gandhism in English, but published his pioneering analysis of the structure of Hindu society in Bengali. His Marathi counterpart Iravati Karve chose to print her landmark studies of kinship and caste in English, yet wrote marvellous, and equally enduring, essays on myth and pilgrimage in her own tongue.

Between 1920 and 1980, or thereabouts, Bengali and Marathi were the only bilingual intellectual cultures in the world. The French write, think and speak exclusively in French; the English, in English. Yet in Pune and Calcutta, original works of scholarship were being written and discussed both in English and in the language of the bazaar.

A couple of objections. First, in South Asia, what about Madras? What about Colombo?

Secondly, in Europe, I think someone like Samuel Beckett, who wrote both in French and in English, might challenge Guha's thesis. Other challengers might be people like Jacques Derrida, who spoke (and often interviewed) in English, though he only wrote in French. Also worth considering are Latin American writers like Ariel Dorfman, who write literature in Spanish, but journalism in English. And there is a large number of scholars whose first language is not English, who are currently located in the United States. They write scholarship in English, but more than a few of them send Spanish-language Op-Eds and such home to Argentina, Chile, Colombia, etc. for publication 'at home'. Globalization has, perhaps, opened a new window on bilingualism.

That said, Guha is surely right that within India, the only serious thinkers writing today are writing in English.

But Guha does make a good point about some of the great modernist writers -- Conrad, Nabokov -- from non-English backgrounds who moved to English, and didn't go back:

The historian and social scientist can make best use of this bilingualism — he, and she, can operate simultaneously in more than one tongue. The creative writer, however, is forced to choose one language over the other. With the historian or critic, it is the message that is more important; for the novelist or poet, it is the medium. Creative writing calls for an attention to language that is total. Thus Tagore never wrote fiction or poetry in any language other than Bengali. Likewise, when they switched to writing in English, Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov were compelled to discard their mother tongue. Theirs was a choice forced upon them by exile and migration. The choice facing the creative writer in mid-20th Century India, however, was a voluntary one. R.K. Narayan could have written in Tamil; he preferred to write in English. His fellow Mysore novelist U.R. Anantha Murty taught English literature, and even had a Ph.D from a British university; yet he chose to write in Kannada.

Great piece, well worth reading and discussing (maybe with one's students!).

The Obsession with the President's Religion

Joseph Knippenberg of the Claremont Review of Books reviews three books on the subject [via Arts & Letters Daily]:

A review of A Man of Faith: The Spiritual Journey of George W. Bush by David Aikman

The Faith of George W. Bush by Stephen Mansfield

George W. Bush on God and Country edited by Thomas M. Freiling

I certainly don't plan to read the books anytime soon. And the quotes in the Knippenberg review are mostly familiar ones; I blogged a little about them in April. The question we should be asking, it seems to me, isn't about what George W. Bush believes, but about how he justifies what he says and does politically.

When he says his faith guides him, it doesn't bother me. But when he describes the American War on Terror as an extension of God's judgment, I do worry. ("The course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain. Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them.")

New Biography of Faulkner--RLB

Christopher Benfey reviews Jay Parini's new biography of Faulkner in The New Republic. The biography is called One Matchless Time: The Life and Work of William Faulkner.

The review -- like most good Reviews of Literary Biographies (RLBs) -- is worth reading partly because of how much it has to say about its twice-deferred subject, William Faulkner. Though I usually rush to read these in the newspaper, and in magazines like The New Yorker, they are in some small sense counter-productive. I read the review, think "Oh, now I know 4 things about Faulkner I didn't know before," and am, strangely, less inclined to actually buy the book.

I do end up buying the biographies anyway, but later, and sometimes used. They are in the category of "invaluable reference," not so much "must get right away."

Tidbits about Faulkner from the Benfey review:
1. He worked in a post-office for three years, before being fired (so the story goes) for reading other people's magazines. And for being an all-around slacker.
2. He sort of pretended to have fought in the First World War for a few years. He volunteered, but was turned down for being too short.
3. He may have fathered a mulatto child, and certainly had, once he had achieved some success, a plantation in Mississippi with black servants who were not paid in money.
4. He wrote nearly all of his great works between 1928 and 1942:

And then, like some act of God along the Mississippi, the floodgates of genius burst. Between 1928 and 1942--the period Faulkner called "one matchless time"--he wrote a stunning succession of masterpieces, almost one a year: The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Sanctuary (1931), and Light in August (1932). Then came a fallow interlude of a couple of years, during which he bought an airplane and finally learned to fly, wasted some time working for good pay in Hollywood on mediocre film scripts, and wasted more time on an affair with the secretary of his sometime boss Howard Hawks. (Parini pardons the affair, the first of several, on the grounds that Estelle, who had lost one daughter in infancy and gave birth to another, Jill, in 1933, refused to have sex with her husband thereafter.) Faulkner then resumed the scarcely credible run of invention with Pylon (1935), his underrated novel about barnstorming pilots aloft and in love; Absalom, Absalom! (1936); The Wild Palms (1939); The Hamlet (1940); and Go Down, Moses (1942), in addition to assorted short stories, essays, and oddities in between.

Read the whole review.

Eminent Historian Ramachandra Guha denied entry to US

I've been blogging way too much this weekend (my spouse is on a business trip -- nothing much else to do but work on my book, and I wouldn't want to do that, now would I?).

But this is too outrageous to pass up. Ramachandra Guha had the right visa (B1), and he had the letters of invitation from Oberlin and Berkeley, but Immigration officials in Vancouver still wouldn't let him in. Apparently part of the problem was that the invitation letters were offering him too much money! The officer couldn't fathom they would be paying him so much "for teaching history."

Apparently Immigration hasn't heard of making a phone call to the university -- or checking the university schedule on the internet to see if his lecture is listed. Or any reason whatsoever.

Argh.
[Via Kaushik]

A Century of NYC Subway

I guess with the elections the national media paid virtually no attention to the fact that the centennial for the NYC subway just happened (on October 27).

I realized it when surfing NYCSubway.org, which I found through the Librarians' Index.

The Subway is a cultural fixture that is, if you think about it, hugely important. It is 1) an engineering marvel, 2) an economic powerhouse, 3) one of a very small number of non-commercial public spaces left in the city, and 4) an iconic space in countless works of art, literature, music, and cinema. Rap music, for instance, would probably not exist without it. And that's just a few things that come straight to mind. (Can people think of other classic subway moments?)

Someone should have a party in one of the abandoned stations (maybe the one at 18th St). Or maybe: an exhibit of subway-related art at a gallery? Or a PBS special? (Or were these things going on and I just didn't hear about them?)

Three random cultural references.

1. Two memorable stanzas from the punk band Unwound's "Natural Disasters" come to mind:

I'm on a subway train
To a place
I can't pronounce
But at least
I didn't pay

Train of thought
For a movie plot
Starring me and you insane

Not only is this a subway reference in a song, it is, via a little modernist lyrical impressionism, a subway reference alluding to movie references to subways.

2. In The Years Virginia Woolf had some very interesting stuff about the transformative effects of the London Underground on the concept of space and location in the city. [Have to find the quote...]

3. And the unforgettable 1980s pop song by the group Berlin, "Riding on the Metro":

I remember searching for the perfect words
I was hoping you might change your mind
I remember a soldier sleeping next to me
riding on the Metro

We Need a Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy

Here's my version of the 'where do we go from here' essay.

Listening to Ira Glass's interviews with undecided voters in red states on This American Life gave me an idea. Due to months and months of attack ads, negative impressions of Bush's opponent were so widespread, and so reflexive, that they became like breathing. Many people thought of Kerry -- without realizing where the impression came from -- as at once "the most liberal Democrat in the Senate" (far from true), and a terrible flip-flopping, bin-Laden loving Frenchman with ketchup in his veins instead of Bush's blue blood.

Kerry's considerable advantages, as well as Bush's serious deficiencies, were completely nullified by the targeted sliming of Kerry for so long and in such a widespread way.

So for next time, I nominate the creation of a dummy candidate to draw Republican fire. What he'll do: first, break publicly with the Democratic party -- on live TV, during the primary debates. He'll be a populist, gun-toting, anti-Seinfeldian hero. He'll be rigorously anti-outsourcing and pro-American labor. Maybe he's also a soft libertarian ("I believe people should be able to smoke in bars, have as many rifles as they want, and marry whoever they damn well please"). He's in favor of "bringing every one of our boys home on January 23, 2009."

I'm not thinking Howard Dean, I'm thinking Jesse Ventura.

He immediately becomes wildly popular, third in the polls, and only a little behind the Democratic candidate. He draws equally from Republican and Democratic bases. The Dems, with Hilary Clinton as their sanest option, seem to despair. The Republican candidate John McCain -- who is using Karl Rove as his chief election advisor -- is extremely worried. The Republicans don't know how to attack someone like this. John McCain's own history as a "straight-talker" and a "maverick" are by 2008 distant memories, as 8 years of smiling next to Bush on camera have taken their toll.

Still, once our sneaky third-party candidate gets above 30% in the polls (and passes Hilary) the attack ads fly. And the attack ads against Hilary, who is seen as less of a threat, do not. By October, our independent candidate seems to be running a bit ragged, after being attacked for his 1982 DUI, his Vietnam draft-dodging, his two divorces, and his hunting accident (to add a little spice). His supporters, somehow, cannot shake the negative impressions created by the McCain team, despite the fact that Bush too had a DUI hiding somewhere, and a very shabby service record of his own. John McCain, of course, is a decorated war hero.

When the scandal of Bush's steamy affair with Karen Hughes breaks (it took place in the summer of 2001, in Crawford! phone transcripts on Smokinggun.com!) in the middle of the spring of 2008, neither the dems nor our independent candidate can find a way to make damage from the allegations stick. After all, "John McCain is not George Bush."

And then... and then... 20 days before the elections in 2008, our mystery candidate disappears. To be exact, he appears at a press-conference blind drunk to announce his immediate withdrawal from the race. He puts a rant on his website against politics, where he scorns the very idea of ever holding public office. And he heaps scorn on his main opponent, John McCain, and especially the Republican party. The language is extremely over-the-top; the document soon becomes a cultural monument. College students print it out and post it on dorm room walls. People at "water coolers" recite the most damning phrases incredulously, jokingly. But over time, they set in.

Then our dummy candidate, his service completed, flies in a jet furnished by MoveOn PAC to a small Caribbean island owned by Joe Trippi (now an internet billionaire), where he lives happily ever after. His name gets pulled off voter rolls.

The McCain team, shocked and exhausted, has no time to redirect its energies.

Hilary Clinton, who suddenly seems like an angel sent from heaven, wins the election in a landslide, bringing a democratic congress with her.

Republicans, distraught, worry for the future of their party.

RocketPost Test

Courtesy of Manish, I’m testing a beta of RocketPost, which is fully compatible with Blogger — minus the infuriating flakiness!!!!

Women's Review of Books

URL: WROB (from The Reading Experience)

Nice reviews of the new Judith Butler reader, a review of a recently published book by H.D.'s friend Bryher, as well as reviews of Gish Jen and Cynthia Ozick.

BitTorrent taking over the Internets

AP/Yahoo reports that 35% of all internet traffic right now is BitTorrent traffic!

That's a very high number, especially given that the technology has only been around for under a year (I myself only started hearing about it about six months ago). Still, it seems pretty likely that Hollywood and the RIAA will soon be sueing the makers of the various Torrent clients (like Suprnova). Will they also be able to sue people who participate in offering torrents?

This article is also useful because it points to some legal uses for BitTorrents:

-- Legal Torrents (http://www.legaltorrents.com/), which includes a wide selection of electronic music. It also has the Wired Magazine Creative Commons CD, which has songs from artists like the Beastie Boys who agreed to release some of their songs under a more permissive copyright that allows free distribution and remixing.

-- Torrentocracy (http://torrentocracy.com/torrents/) has videos of the U.S. presidential debates and other political materials.

-- File Soup (http://www.filesoup.com) offers open-source software and freeware, music from artists whose labels don't belong to the Recording Industry Association of America trade group, and programs from public television stations like PBS or the BBC.

-- Etree (http://bt.etree.org) is for devotees of "trade-friendly" bands like Phish and the Dead, who encourage fans to share live recordings, usually in the form of large files that have been minimally compressed to maintain sound quality.

(Side note: In all of these debates, I often wonder about when and whether Indian record companies and the Bombay film industry will start to take comparable legal action. Most Indians I know in the 18-30 age bracket are regular P2P downloaders. And if the level of activity on sites like Desitorrents is any indication, they are rapidly picking up on this latest -- and most efficient -- method of piracy as well.)

Arafat's legacy: pros and cons

A balanced accounting of Arafat's legacy in Slate.

On the one hand, he had good reasons for turning down the 2000 Camp David deal engineered by Clinton. And, contrary to what some right-wing politicians would have us believe, he is not a "terrorist."

On the other hand, his relationship with the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade is murky, and troubling. This Slate piece has lots of helpful links.

ALSO: the next big controversy will probably be over whether Israel accedes to his wish that he be buried at the Al-Aqsa mosque.

UPDATE: Moorish Girl has a nice timeline on him. Also see the picture of the studly Arafat from the 1970s.

No wedding food for you! And: the Freedom to be Frivolous

BBC says the Pakistani courts have reviewed and upheld a ban on food at weddings, on the grounds that it is anti-Islamic. Well, to be more exact:

The court ruled the ban was not against Islamic teachings and should remain in force as it discourages extravagant displays of wealth. The ban on serving food at wedding functions held in public places was imposed by the government in 1997. In practice, it is largely ignored as technically it only permits the serving of tea or soft drinks.

To be fair, they have a point that South Asians put an inordinate amount of money into weddings. But banning food "for your own good" seems like a parody of totalitarian thinking.

(A little like starting preemptive wars to "spread democracy.")

For Pakistan's Supreme Court, it's all part of de-Hinduization:

The Supreme Court also described the practice of giving dowry by the bride's family as an evil and exploitative custom, and said the state should do everything to stop it.

The court bench then went a step further to criticise some of the most popular customs linked to South Asian weddings, including the colourful rituals of mayun and mehndi (where the bride is decorated and prepared for the wedding) and baraat (a procession by the groom's friends and family to the bride's house), which are dominated by dance and music.

The bench said these customs and even the giving of large dowries were all of Hindu origin and have nothing to do with the Islamic concept of marriage.

I'm with them on Dowry. But Baraat? Mehndi? These are fun customs; people should be allowed to practice them if they want to. Pakistan is perilously close to banning enjoyment itself because of its possible contamination by Hindu "culture."

Maybe they get rid of some rubbish in the process of making all these restrictions. Wedding culture is sometimes pretty frivolous. For instance, it's a little ridic. to dance for six hours on the street celebrating the marriage of a distant cousin one (sometimes) barely knows, who is sitting uncomfortably on a horse, while a band of profoundly underpaid horn-players tries to do a very un-funky version of "Koi Kahe Kehta Rahe."

But what else is freedom but the right to be as frivolous as one wants?

Thomas Frank is everywhere again

Thomas Frank, author (most recently) of What's the Matter With Kansas?, is suddenly everywhere. Both Daniel Drezner and Tim Burke have picked up on Frank's arguments (albeit still critically) on what ails the Democratic party in the past couple of days.

And Thomas Frank also has an Op-Ed in the Times today.

Solace in Bollywood: Mini-Reviews of Recent Film Soundtracks

1. Some of the Hindi top-ten box office film titles this week:

Dil Bechaara Pyaar Ka Maara (Kill the Wretched Heart With Love)
Popcorn Khao Mast Ho Jao (Eat Popcorn, have fun)
Let's Enjoy
Dance Like a Man

Fun titles. I particularly like "Dance Like a Man." What does that mean?!

Unfortunately none of these films is likely to be watchable, unless you fast-forward just to see what people are wearing in different scenes.

2. Soundtrack to Dhoom, which has a pronounced hip hop vibe, especially "Dhoom Machale," "Tata Young," and "Shikdum (The Bedroom Mix)". I'll be DJing another Desi party in New Haven on November 19, and songs off this soundtrack are sure to feature in my set.

3. Soundtrack to Veer-Zaara: actually not that great. This film -- a cross border (India/Pakistan Hindu/Muslim) love story -- is getting heavily promoted in the Indian media. Bollywood is hoping for a big Diwali-season hit (Diwali is next week!).

These songs, let us say, do not add much to the ticket. The one bright point is "Lodi," which is a traditional/Punjabi type of song.

4. Soundtrack to Swades. A.R. Rahman is back. This soundtrack is perhaps not quite up to greats like Taal or Dil Se..., but it has some beautiful melodies, nice ideas, and "uplifting" patriotism. If you're in an Indian grocery store, pick this up for sure.

5. Soundtrack to Bride and Prejudice. This adaptation of the Jane Austen classic has kind of flopped in India, and not done particularly well in England (something to do with Aishwariya Rai's acting...). Though my expectations are not very high, I'll still be in line on the opening day of its U.S. release to see it -- mainly out of loyalty to Gurinder Chadha. The soundtrack is just ok; I'm enjoying "Balle Balle (Punjabi Wedding Song)," "Dola Dola," and "Payal Bajake." The standout (in a way) is "No Life Without Wife": musically, it's a disaster, but the Hindi lyrics are amusing.

Interestingly, both Dhoom and Bride and Prejudice are using a new 'fusion' strategy. "Payal Bajake" and "Take me to India" on the B&P soundtrack have the same beat and melody, but "Take me to India" is partially in English. Similarly, on Dhoom, "Dhoom Machale" and "Tata Young" have the same beat. "Tata Young" is partly in English.

Maybe they are trying to anticipate the demand for "English" (read: UK/rap) remixes of Hindi songs? Or: maybe the producers are just recycling.

Laying Low

I've temporarily lost my taste for political analysis. So no big opinions to offer.

And I've also been completely (absurdly) swamped with work this week, so it's not like I have time to write down the thoughts that have been percolating.

I had a nice conversation with a small number of very subdued Swarthmore students yesterday about the role of women in the debate over secularism in India. Despite the fact that no one was much inclined to ponder the Uniform Civil Code, working on a totally unrelated subject for a couple of hours was good. They raised some objections that I think I need to consider more closely in my project... And I also came across some interesting/useful websites while preparing for the talk, so maybe there'll be a redacted form of my talk yesterday on the blog soon.

It was also nice to see Tim after a while, and also meet the rest of the Easily Distracted clan. (Tim, you should seriously think of marketing the "Chicken Busters" idea to Hollywood, or maybe Andy Warhol's estate.)

Incidentally, for one of the only compellingly soul-searching, left-leaning analyses of the mess we're in post-election, see Tim's latest.