Natural Born Killer: Abu Salem

(Photo by Aijaz Rahi/Associated Press)

Abu Salem, the guy in the yellow shirt above, was recently turned over to the custody of Indian authorities. He's been one of India's most wanted criminals, ever since the early 1990s, when he was involved in a terrorist attack that killed around 250 people, and injured thousands. He remained active in Bombay throughout the 1990s, and became particularly notorious for his widespread extortion and assasination of Bollywood personalities. Since 2002 he's been in jail in Portugal, while India has pursued his extradition.

There's something particularly pathological about targeting movie stars for extortion and assasination. The extortion part of it is fairly predictable -- I suspect anyone who's either rich or glamorous poses an obvious target. But what's unique about Abu Salem is how ready he was to murder people in the prime of their creative success. (Fortunately, two of his most prominent targets, Rakesh Roshan and Rajiv Rai, survived his attacks. Gulshan Kumar was not so lucky. See Rediff's charge-sheet here)

It reminds me a little of the Oliver Stone film Natural Born Killers, which plays with the cult of the serial killer, implying that in the U.S., flamboyant murderers become impromptu movie stars through the media storm they produce.

Abu Salem was in some sense the opposite -- someone who seems to have been drawn to glamorous and successful people, and who had the means and the will (perhaps tied to a psychotic personality) to destroy them.

It's strange; he has such baby-boy looks. In another life he might have been a movie star himself.

Hullabaloo at the Berkeley Theater

A bit of a blog kerfluffle has sprung up around the recent production of Manjula Padmanabhan's play Harvest at the Berkeley theater. It's the first time since 1914 that an Indian play has been performed at the Berkeley main stage, so this is a big deal in more than one respect.

The two sentence summary of the play is as follows:

A brilliantly comic exploration of the complex relations between developing and developed countries, Harvest stages a grisly pact between the first and third worlds. Set in India in the near future, a desperate man decides to sell his body parts to a wealthy client in exchange for a "Western" lifestyle for his family.

Sounds promising, doesn't it? I'm always up for black comedy. And there's more from this Hindustan Times article:

Chatterjee next will move to the future by directing on campus in November his West Coast premiere of "Harvest," a darkly comic and unsettling tale of globalism and organ harvesting in India written by playwright Manjula Padmanabhan, who will be on campus during the play's run. The Center for South Asia Studies also will host an exhibition on campus of Padmanabhan's graphic art.

After reading a copy of "Harvest" sent to him by a colleague in Australia a few years ago, Chatterjee said he was "totally stunned." The play won the Onassis Award in Athens when it was first performed in the late '90s and was an instant success in academic circles.

"The play is set in the future, at a time when multinational companies have gone to the Third World not for software, minerals or fabric, but to harvest organs for their rich customers in America," Chatterjee said. "It's about India and the gritty Third World reality."

In "Harvest," Om, a just-laid-off breadwinner for a struggling Indian family living in a cramped Bombay tenement, decides to sell his organs to a shadowy company called Interplanta in hopes of reversing his financial plight. Om's family is monitored around the clock, receiving frequent video phone-type inquiries and directives from the supposed organ recipient, an icy young blonde named Ginni. Om's mother falls into a stupor, constantly absorbed by programmes on the TV provided by Interplanta. The family's lives continue to go awry.

William Worthen, chair of UC Berkeley's Department of Theater, Dance & Performance, said he included it in The Wadsworth Anthology of Drama, one of the most widely used books of its kind in the United States.

So far, so good. But apparently Manjula Padmanabhan (aka Marginalien) wasn't thrilled by the production; she posted the following at her blog:

The play was -- alas! Yet again! -- NOT what I'd like it to be. However, one great relief for me was that I was able to express my views to Sudipto; and he took it very well -- because I had also, at the same moment that I told him what I thought, also decided that I would NOT interfere with his interpretation. I told him that too.

He has added at least an hour of performance time to the play, including lines, movements and moods that are in no way part of the original. For instance, he has permitted his actors to use a number of Hindi-isms such as "arre", "beta" etc -- which I find very hard to accept because (a) I am not a Hindi-speaker and specifically resisted falling back on ethnic touches of that sort while writing the play (b) the use of Hindi is a reminder that the family would never normally be speaking English and besides the actual words and terms are cliches, utterly colourless in themselves. I far prefer the play to inhabit a language-neutral space by remaining in ONE language, rather than attempting to balance uneasily between two.

Yet, for all that I disliked -- and it was/is a real dislike -- I recognized that this production, being fuelled by students and their youthful energy, had a kind of vulgar logic. The four principal characters were played by South Asians . . . and it seemed very important to them to explore the specific ethnic identities of their characters. It's hard for me to express what I want clearly, but it's something like this: since I don't feel the need to underline the fact that I'm Indian/SouthAsian, it is utterly unimportant -- no, more than unimportant, actually unattractive -- for me to make a big deal about that identity. I want to go the other way -- I want to universalize the experience of being whatever -- Asian/Indian/whatever -- and to explore the notion of sameness-in-otherness. Whereas for this production, what seems to have overwhelmed the tone is the heavy spice of Indianness.

She starts off questioning the director's decision to add a fair amount of material that she herself hadn't scripted. But then she gets into what seems to me to be an ABCD vs. desi-from-desh distinction. But I'm a little confused about what exactly the problem is on the second point; to some extent it sounds as if she might have just been happier to see non-Indians cast in the primary roles, since they would have been less invested in being "ethnic," either in the sense of the actors' self-consciousness or the reception of the play by the audience.

(Here is where I remind the reader that, since I haven't read the script, or seen the play, everything I've said should be taken with a grain of salt.)

Things gets a little anxious when the mother of one of the actresses, and then the actress herself, show up in the comments to protest Padmanabhan's reference to her background.

Finally, another of the actors in the play, Asanwate, has a thorough and, in my view, compelling defense of both the director's choices and the overall approach to the play at the blog Ergodicity. One of the best moments is when he (?) quotes passages from the screenplay, such as the following:

The DONORS and RECEIVERs should take on the racial identities, names, costumes, and accents most suited to the location of the production. It matters only that there be a highly recognisable distinction between the two groups, reflected in speech, clothing, and appearance.

I gather that Padmanabhan's objection is that the director chose to cast along racially appropriate lines, which seems questionable given that she is evidently underlining the "difference" between the "donor" and "receiver" groups. Elsewhere Asanwate makes several other good rebuttals to Padmanabhan's post, including the salient objection that the Hindi-isms she isn't happy about can be justified because the script states that the play is set in Bombay.

Are there lessons here? I'm not sure. On a basic level, I think it's great that a prominent university like Berkeley chose to put on this play. And I also admire Manjula Padmanabhan as an up-and-coming writer to watch.

But a lot of that accomplishment has unfortunately been a bit dampened by this sour blog debate: who needs critics when we tear ourselves to pieces on our blogs?

* * * *
(Incidentally, Harvest still playing this weekend, in case any readers are in the Bay Area, and want to get in on the "drama.")

Fairy Tales and the Religious Imagination: Adam Gopnik on C.S. Lewis

I've tried and failed to get into C.S. Lewis's writings on religion. I read Surprised by Joy as a grad student, and a grad student I'm working with now recently gave me The Abolition of Man. While the latter work didn't do much for me at all, I found Surprised by Joy quite readable, if occasionally puzzling. Needless to say, despite my disappointment with Lewis's essays for grown-ups, the name C.S. Lewis still brings up happy memories, from when I devoured the Narnia books as a child -- completely oblivious to the Christian allegory I was supposed to be imbibing.

This other C.S. Lewis has been a mystery to me -- an avowedly Christian writer whose account of his religious beliefs isn't even especially convincing. In Surprised by Joy, one sees a writer whose imaginative life is apparently animated primarily by fairy tales, but who turns to religion as a way to amplify and order the joy his imaginative worlds give him. One finds passages like the following:

I also developed a great taste for all the fiction I could get about the ancient world: Quo Vadis, Darkness and Dawn, The Gladiators, Ben Hur. It might be expected that this arose out of my new concern for my religion, but I think not. Early Christians came into many of these stories, but they were not what I was after. I simply wanted sandals, temples, togas, slaves, emperors, galleys, amphitheaters; the attraction, as I now see, was erotic, and erotic in rather a morbid way. . . . The idea of other planets exercised upon me then a peculiar, heady attraction, which was quite different from any other of my literary interests. Most emphatically it was not the romantic spell of Das Ferne. "Joy" (in my technical sense) never darted from Mars or the Moon. This was something coarser and stronger. The interest, when the fit was upon me, was ravenous, like lust.

Lewis' account of the role of literature in the development of his religious imagination seems confused. For one thing, since the passion for science fiction and fantasy was so intense, why worry about "Joy" altogether? And since his own imagination is so often the story of Surprised by Joy, why not design his own religion based on the fantastic alternate worlds that had already created and populated by him in his own mind? Why the Anglican framework exactly?

Adam Gopnik's long piece on Lewis in this week's New Yorker clears up many questions. The whole piece is worth reading to people interested in Lewis, but perhaps the final two paragraphs are especially intriguing, as Gopnik bridges the gap between a secular reader's passion for fairy tales (or more generally, for the otherworldly) with the religious believer's investment in them (generally as a stimulant to spiritual growth).

Here is Gopnik from the New Yorker:

For poetry and fantasy aren’t stimulants to a deeper spiritual appetite; they are what we have to fill the appetite. The experience of magic conveyed by poetry, landscape, light, and ritual, is . . . an experience of magic conveyed by poetry, landscape, light, and ritual. To hope that the conveyance will turn out to bring another message, beyond itself, is the futile hope of the mystic. Fairy stories are not rich because they are true, and they lose none of their light because someone lit the candle. It is here that the atheist and the believer meet, exactly in the realm of made-up magic. Atheists need ghosts and kings and magical uncles and strange coincidences, living fairies and thriving Lilliputians, just as much as the believers do, to register their understanding that a narrow material world, unlit by imagination, is inadequate to our experience, much less to our hopes.

The religious believer finds consolation, and relief, too, in the world of magic exactly because it is at odds with the necessarily straitened and punitive morality of organized worship, even if the believer is, like Lewis, reluctant to admit it. The irrational images—the street lamp in the snow and the silver chair and the speaking horse—are as much an escape for the Christian imagination as for the rationalist, and we sense a deeper joy in Lewis’s prose as it escapes from the demands of Christian belief into the darker realm of magic. As for faith, well, a handful of images is as good as an armful of arguments, as the old apostles always knew.

Clearly Gopnik sees Lewis as a talented fantasist first, and a Christian distantly second. But what I think is helpful about Gopnik's review essay is the way it links the two rather different modes of writing and thinking about the imaginative world. Secular readers (and readers from outside the Christian tradition) can indeed appreciate Narnia (well, most of the series) as an involving fantasy world, completely separate from its allegorical meaning. And their need for such stories is not very different from the need of religious believers to imagine spiritual significance overlaying material reality. While huge gaps remain between the two kinds of readers, someone like Lewis can act, at his best, as a bridge over the epistemological divide.

[Cross-posted to The Valve]

Rushdie on the Flagging Earthquake Relief Effort

Rushdie has a piece in the November 8 Toronto Star on Pakistan earthquake relief. He makes what I see as a particularly important point about the need to separate the humanitarian effort from ongoing political strife as much as possible:

[T]he people of Kashmir deserve better than they are getting. They certainly do not deserve to be subjected to a kind of "political test" of aid-worthiness. Yet, ever since the day of the earthquake, people in the United States and Europe have been asking me and many others the same politically loaded question:

Will the disaster "help?" Will it enable India and Pakistan to sink their differences and, at long last, to make an end of their long Kashmiri quarrel?

It has been hard to avoid the conclusion that Western attitudes toward aiding Kashmir depend to some degree on the answer to this question being "yes." Alas, the answer is "no."

India and Pakistan are still mired in mutual suspicion, as the saga of the Indian helicopters reveals: India offered them, but Pakistan refused to accept them unless they were flown by Pakistani pilots, which India in turn refused to accept. Meanwhile the quake victims went right on dying.

Moreover, as the recent murder of a moderate Kashmiri politician showed, and as the bombs in Delhi would seem to confirm, there are Islamist groups who remain determined to sabotage any improvement in Indo-Pakistani relations.

As long as those groups find sanctuary in Pakistan, a peace settlement will be impossible.

All of which should be irrelevant to the matter at hand.

Yes. It doesn't matter if it doesn't help the peace process one bit. Our obligation to those in need remains the same whether peace is imminent or war is about to break out.

Up From The Comments: Vikash Singh on Tsunami Relief

Vikash Singh (also see his photos here) recently left quite a comment in response to a post I did last week on my various speaking gigs on campus. I thought I would bring it up to the front for people to peruse:

On the politics of Tsunami Relief

I recently came back from a 5 week Tsunami Relief work in Galle, Sri Lanka. I gave out prescription eyeglasses and looked for cataracts (which was followed by a paid operation upon diagnosis) with the tsunami victims as well as the local population. I cannot speak for other Tsunami affected regions, but in the case of Sri Lanka the following is true:

(1) Unlike other Tsunami affected countries, Sri Lanka had no financial nor numerical limit on the amount of money and the number of NGOs, respectively, which could come into Sri Lanka to give aid in the affected regions.
(2) What followed were numerous NGOs. An NGO works in the following manner: first find an area which needs your help and resources, go to that area, help out and take pictures of such actions, and finally go back to your home country and use the pictures to further fund yourself.
(3) These NGOs, upon entering Sri Lanka, found themselves in areas with numerous other NGOs. There was a lack of coordination by the government and poor organization led to numerous problems.
(4) First the government taxed all goods, even if they were NOT COMPETING with the local produced Sri Lankan goods just to make money. The NGOs when distributing these goods such as sewing machines and boats, due to the language barrier and lack of governmental organization, ended up distributing the goods into the wrong hands. The goods as a result never reached the tsunami victims and instead made their way into the black market via other persons.

In the case of Sri Lanka, I blame the government for the lack of organization which has led to little or no improvement in the situation of the tsunami victims. In other countries where there was a limit on the amount of financial help, like Indonesia, the situation has forced a truce with the separatists and brought about peace. On the contrary, In Sri Lanka situations have remained the same between the separatists Tamil Tigers and the majority Singhala people. Although the creation of the Tamil Tigers can be attributed to a certain Indian political demigod named Indira Gandhi (nee Nehru)....well that's another story.

The Two Movers and the Savvy Sadhu (a short story)

It was a spectacularly large head, nice enough to admire, but rather a liability when moving.

Able and Cable had been struggling to fit it through the door of the apartment for nearly twenty minutes. It had become that dreaded thing, an Ordeal, probably the single greatest challenge to their moving efforts since the day they had been asked to move a giant flying saucer covered with a mysterious viscous fluid. They had finally solved that problem (funny what you can do with a hairdryer!), but moving this head into the apartment posed an almost insurmountable problem.

They had tried half a dozen angles of attack as well as various diagonals. They had tried rotating the head. They had even tried inserting the body first and pulling the appendages, though that turned out not to work either. No matter what they did, the head got stuck, either at the massive, protuberant ears, or the bulbous nose.

It truly was an extraordinarily large head. It occurred to them that the tenant would have a hard time ever leaving the apartment with the head, and they thought about cautioning him about this likely issue. But Able refrained from saying anything (and Cable followed suit), mainly along the lines that it was their job to move the tenant and his possessions into an apartment. After that it was the tenant's business. This particular tenant apparently owned a kind of brace that enabled the head to move around, so perhaps he also owned other contraptions that might make it a bit easier to enter and leave buildings. But if that were the case, why not use the device now?

After they had exhausted every conceivable position, Able and Cable tried using sheer force to get the head through. A shove and a grunt -- but nothing doing. They either ended up damaging the paint in the door-frame, or damaging the head itself. There was already a mark on the left ear and the forehead that they would have to explain later to their boss's boss.

They debated whether the ears were removable; after all, they did seem a little wobbly. But a little tweaking put that idea to rest -- it appeared the ears could only be removed from the inside of the head, and that would be another operation altogether.

Finally, with the hour growing late and their arms nearly exhausted, they decided to remove the muzzle that the tenant had instructed them to place on the head. But they weren't able to get any useful information out of the mouth, only curses and howls of pain.

They replaced the muzzle, and put the head on the ground and stood over it, contemplating. It would be a failure of their mission if they were unable to get the head through the door, would it not? It might even be the end of Able and Cable Movers.

Just then, a wandering Sadhu walked past, and chortled when he saw the massive head at their feet.

"Good sirs, I see you are trying to fit a head through a door! I wish you the very best of luck."

"Well, Mr. Sadhu, actually we are having a great deal of difficulty getting the head through the door. Have you any guidance to offer us?"

The Sadhu approached, and inspected the head and the door frame more closely. Noting the marks on the paint as well as the bruises on the head, he said, "Yes, I see that all too well. Have you tried geometry?"

"Geometry?" Able said. "As in a protratctor and a compass?"

"Yes, exactly. Fundamentally you see, the problem of the massive head in the door is a problem of geometry. First you have to survey the head as precisely as possible, including the relative width from all endpoints. Then, identify the angles of attack that allow you to maximize the use of the door's inherent diagonals. Also, consider the possibility of removing the door from its hinge -- it may give you an additional 3 centimeters. After measuring the necessary angles, you will find the range of angles of incidence that will enable you to get the head through the door."

"But sir, we are just movers! We do not have the necessary tools to calculate the size of object as precisely as your Geometry would demand."

"No problem at all!" cried the Sadhu. He then produced a precise laser measuring device, and a TI-92 graphing calculator. Somehow he had managed to stow both items in the folds of his white cotton dhoti.

Over the course of the next half hour, the two movers and the savvy sadhu measured both the head and the doorway with great precision.

They determined that, indeed, the head should fit through the door if its nose were flattened just a little and the door removed from its hinges, and the head initially inserted at an eighteen degree angle, subsequently to be rotated to 37 degrees after the nose was inside the door (the rotation would solve the problem of the chin). Their calculations complete, Able instructed Cable to squish the nose with his hand, while Able manipulated the head to the exact angle through which it could pass through the door.

It worked! The head was inside the door, and inside the apartment. The only problem was, the nose was a little bloody from the squishing, and the hinges to the door now seemed broken. But neither the bloody nose nor the broken door were the business of Able and Cable. After all, they were only movers; their boss's boss took care of these kinds of trivial details. Their job finished, they thanked the Sadhu and left, planning to celebrate their triumph over beers as the County Line Pub.

The Sadhu stayed a little longer at the doorway of the apartment, looking in. After some time contemplating the door and the head (now disappeared into the darkness of the apartment), he picked up the useless, broken door, and carried it off with him as a tribute to the miraculous power of geometry.

* * * * *

You might be able to tell from this that I spent my weekend moving. We did have help -- both professional and from friends -- loading up the rental truck in New Jersey. But while unloading, it was just my brother, S., and myself. The inspiration for this story was our struggle to get our large-ish couch (41' X 92' X 28') into the new apartment. Our success was indeed a miracle of geometry.

Incidentally, in case you were wondering, no furniture -- or people -- were damaged during our move.

Are Male Feminists Necessary?

I have to say, I like Maureen Dowd.

She's received such a torrent of criticism in the past two weeks by feminist bloggers and academics (see Uma's post) that I'm not really sure I should get into this at all. But I do consider myself a "male feminist" -- though I am sure the jury is out as to whether I (or my feminism) is "necessary."

But here's what I like about Dowd's approach in Are Men Necessary?, beginning with the excerpt at the NYT Magazine, and continuing with her interview on NPR's Fresh Air this past Wednesday.

Her main goal, it seems to me, is to restart a national (even international) conversation about gender relations, careers, dating, and families that has kind of slipped away a little bit in the mainstream media in recent years. Many of the classic problems facing women balancing careers and families in the 1960s and 70s are still there. It used to be a manichean choice -- kids or career -- and while there's less 'tsk tsk' applied to working mothers these days, I gather from friends and colleagues who have kids that it's still quite hard to do as a practical matter.

We may not all agree on the answers to those problems, and we may never agree. (And that may be just fine: these days it seems to me important to respect individual choices on many matters, rather than to prescribe directives that everyone must adhere to, to be feminism-approved.) But whether or not we can actually solve anything, I think we still need to 'go there'.

So as far as encouraging frank discussion, Dowd succeeds. People may quibble with her questionable personal anecdotes (i.e., her own single status), her glamorous upper-crusty life ("gold-lamé gowns cut along the bias"), and some of her data. But if her point is to remind people that the work of feminism isn't over, are we really saying we disagree with that? And while Dowd is generally dismissive of third-wave feminism or postfeminism, her approach is different from classic, second-wave feminism in that it encourages us to address the problems in the context of today's social and economic realities, not some idealized socialist Herland. In that context, anecdotes about dating etiquette, shopping, and so on are in fact pretty relevant.

"The personal is not always political": people say that a lot nowadays, and I tend to agree (I came across it most recently in Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran, where it is part of Nafisi's compelling argument against the "politicization of everything" during and after the Iranian revolution). I don't find it useful in my day-to-day life to discuss personal choices -- such as friends who've decided to take a little time off for kids -- in terms of broad ideologies that few women or men can live up to. But I believe we need to continue to approach those choices (and relations between men and women in general), if not with rigid doctrines, at least with an interest in fairness and respect -- to always question whether or not we are doing it right, and whether it might not be possible to do some things better.

* * * * *
As for some of the particular issues. One comes up in Uma's post itself. Uma quotes the following sentence, and describes it as "cringe-inducing":

"Little did I realize that the feminist revolution would have the unexpected consequence of intensifying the confusion between the sexes, leaving women in a tangle of dependence and independence as they entered the 21st century."

But wait, what's cringe-inducing about that? Isn't the confusion Dowd talks about real? She's not saying that she likes the confusion, or that she prefers a condition of inequality. But what I think her article points to again and again are the many situations that come up where "equality" isn't a sufficient term to describe the complex ways in which men and women find themselves playing different social roles. Those different roles, like the male and female roles in the Tango, are not in themselves inequalities, though they might come to seem that way if we adhered to them too rigidly or used them as stereotypes or formulas.

And Katie Roiphe's critique in Slate has moments where I flat-out disagree:

One of the failures of the feminist movement in the first place was a reliance on easy aphorisms, and the schematic worldview that such aphorisms implied. The famous line, "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle" did not prove to be a constructive or realistic contribution to the feminist cause. Replacing one set of rigid gender stereotypes with another did not allow women the full range of their desires and ended up sabotaging the movement. Dowd herself criticizes the feminists of the 1970s for imagining a sea of identical, sexless women in navy blazers descending on the workplace. Though she appears to be arguing for a new, more rigorous feminism, she is guilty of precisely the same intellectual fault—starting with the catchy, meaningless title of her book, Are Men Necessary?, Dowd's aphorisms, amusing and pithy in the morning paper along with a cup of coffee, are precisely what the conversation about sexual politics does not need.

First of all, why not breakfast? Why can't the conversation about sexual politics start with some light bon mots over coffee? Why does it always have to be heavy-duty sociology and outraged polemical tomes? I would certainly agree that a book like Dowd's isn't sufficient by itself, but then, I'm not sure whether any one book could be.

Secondly, I don't see Dowd presenting her book as a "new, more rigorous feminism" at all. If anything, she seems to punching holes in the illusion that the original goals of feminism have in fact been achieved. And while she does offer many aphorisms along the way, I don't think she would suggest that any of them can stand, by themselves, for thorough analysis. Aphorisms work best as triggers to get people thinking, not as independent arguments. But isn't it Dowd's goal to get people thinking?

An Open Letter to President Bush Concerning The Treatment of Detainees

Dear Mr. President,

I am writing to express my bewilderment at the White House's plans to veto a bill recently passed by the U.S. Senate concerning the treatment of foreign nationals in U.S. custody.

You recently said, "There's an enemy that lurks and plots and plans and wants to hurt America again. . . . So you bet we will aggressively pursue them, but we will do so under the law." This seemed right to me, and it seems important to me that you use the words "under the law." The Senate bill, introduced by Republican John McCain, promotes exactly that, as it requires making the U.S. Army Field Manual's guidelines for interrogation of prisoners standard for all agencies associated with the U.S. government.

So why are you opposed to it? Mr. President, why are you threatening to apply your first veto on a bill that simply aims to require the application of the law?

The only explanation I can muster is, you are finessing the word "torture." When you said "we do not torture" a couple of days ago, what you meant was, "we do not do things to detainees that we consider to be torture." Presumably you mean to say you wish to allow the CIA an exemption to use stress interrogation methods, including those involving humiliation and the infliction discomfort as well as non-scarring and non-invasive pain.

So why not just say it? Mr. President, the gap between your statements and policies has never been wider than at this very moment. Have you read George Orwell's novel 1984? It appears to me that what you are engaged in currently with the word "torture" is certainly a form of "doublespeak," as egregious as that engaged in by Bill Clinton when he attempted to finesse the phrase "sexual relations" seven years ago. And when you say, "Any activity we conduct is within the law," cynics might say that that is so because you feel you can define what is the law.

Just recently the Washington Post reported that for the past three years the CIA has operated covert detention facilities in various parts of the world, including eastern Europe and Thailand. These facilities were initially meant to hold high-value Al-Qaeda targets such as Abu Zubaida, possibly indefinitely. Mr. President, I cannot understand why the CIA thought these would be either legal or a good idea. You must be aware of the old saying that "Absolute power corrupts, absolutely." That holds true for Americans as much as for anyone else in the world; it is an extremely bad idea to maintain detention facilities where the administrators have no obligation whatsoever to treat their inmates with dignity.

Relatedly, I cannot comprehend why your office is so resistant to granting alleged terrorists the right to defend themselves openly in a U.S. Court of Law. You recently said, "We are finding terrorists and bringing them to justice." Why not give them the opportunity to have "justice" the way justice is normally delivered -- through a fair trial, with the presumption of innocence? Holding individuals in detention indefinitely is not justice at all, but a kind of crime, similar to kidnapping.

Mr. President, I'm disappointed that you do not appear to be aware of the fallout from your policies abroad. Your advocacy of methods of interrogation that at least some people would describe as inhumane looks especially bad considering that the image of the U.S. remains deeply tarnished by the disturbing and graphic pictures that came out of the Abu Ghraib prison facility last year, pictures which we now know were only the tip of the iceberg regarding the mistreatment of detainees. Your position also perpetuates the myth that the U.S. uses torture, which virtually ensures that captured American troops will have such methods used on them in the future.

Finally, it appears to many observers around the world that you either do not mean what you say when you use words like "liberty" and "freedom," or you simply do not know what those words mean. Torture and associated practices are absolutely inconsistent with any fair understanding of human rights in the modern world.

I sincerely hope you will rethink your position. If you genuinely do not mean to advocate any practice that a reasonable person could call inhumane, you ought to support McCain's bill.

Sincerely,

Amardeep Singh

Tsunami and Earthquake: Educational Materials

Yesterday I was the guest lecturer/moderator in a 1-credit Environmental Science seminar being taught this fall by a colleague at Lehigh. The topic was the social and geopolitical fall-out from the Tsunami, particularly concerning India's changing role as a regional power. I referred to the following articles:

On the prospect of a regional alert system

On the UN's response

The Indonesian Government's suppression of the Guerilla movement in Aceh

More on Aceh

Ashutosh Sheshabalaya, on India's overlooked role in providing immediate military aid in Sri Lanka

I know I'm not particularly qualified to talk about these things, but it's an interesting challenge (and a nice change) to do this kind of thing every so often. The students asked good, and difficult questions, many of which involve the structure of disaster relief funding at the UN. For instance, how much do they have budgeted for this annually? What are the prospects of creating a permanent UN "Rapid response team" that is specialized for natural disasters?

It's difficult to have a discussion of the Tsunami this fall without thinking of the South Asian Earthquake, so we talked about that too -- with emphasis on the insufficient aid response. We even got into a bit of discussion on the Avian Flu vaccine issue (containing any outbreak of human to human transmissible Avian Flu would require massive international coordination).

* * * *
And I'm participating in a public seminar at Lehigh on the Earthquake at lunch today (yes -- a busy week!). For that, I'm not going to present an argument (hard to think of anything original to say), but I am offering a slideshow of photos culled from the web, some of them from News sources, and some from amateur photos Flickr.

A working draft of the slideshow is here (6 MB Powerpoint file). Educational use only, please (I will be taking the PPT file down after a few days.)

I tried to balance newsy/informative photos with more emotional photos showing people reacting to events. I was hoping to organize the photos to tell some kind of story, but there are just too many things going on at once, including: raw human suffering; rampant destruction of buildings, roads, and bridges; the large-scale relief effort; political shenanigans; as well as scenes of everyday life as it continues (and must continue) for the people in the affected region.

So the photos are a little chaotic (no single narrative), but perhaps the chaos might be useful in challenging the mass-media's approach to natural disaster -- which tends to emphasize sensationalism (look at these poor people!) at the expense of analysis.

Souad Massi

I don't know Arabic, but after hearing what Souad Massi does with the lanaguage I wouldn't mind learning.

I came across Massi's Deb by accident while browsing in the Jazz section at Borders. Massi is an Algerian folk singer -- in fact not Jazz at all -- with a light fusion touch (her songs here have a touch of flamenco). She's currently based in Paris, though she didn't move there until 1999. An interview in the Independent suggests that Massi moved to Paris after getting into a little trouble with militants in Algiers following the release of her first album. It's hard to understand why, since there are no political songs on Deb (the liner notes come with translations of the songs). But then, there's no arguing with these people, is there?

I don't want to wax too poetic about the music (you can listen to samples at Amazon or here), except to say that the production quality on Deb is simple and just about perfect, opening up space for Massi's voice. She's not trying to be a pop or cross-over hit, so she avoids the fate of singers like the Egyptian Natacha Atlas (who doesn't quite do it for me). Sometimes you just want a singer and an acoustic guitar.

This review wants to emphasize Massi's 'rebel' side, and compares her to Joan Baez and Tracy Chapman, neither of whom seem particularly similar.

And here is an interview at BBC, after she was nominated for a British World Music award in 2003. There Massi hints that life in Paris for a modern/secular Algerian woman isn't necessarily that simple either.

$100 Laptops for the Third World? (Guest Post from Suvendra Nath Dutta)

This blog's first guest post, from Suvendra Nath Dutta. Suvendra has been a frequent commentor here for some months, and emailed me with a tip on this $100 laptop initiative at the World Economic Forum.

I suggested he put it together in the form of a post, and the following is what he sent me last night (thanks, Suvendra).

Last week MIT media lab and Prof. Negroponte announced its $100 laptop initiative at the World Economic Forum at Davos. The actual initiative is called "One Laptop per Child" (OLPC). It should be noted that this is the same forum where in the year, 2000, Mr. Bill Gates announced "The world's poorest two billion people desperately need healthcare, not laptops". One presumes that those needs have not been met so dramatically as to make that observation obsolete. In fact a recent NPR program profiled just one problem facing third world children today, hookworm. One of several memorable lines in the program: "The problem is let's remember who gets hookworm: It's the poorest of the poor," says Hotez. "So although there's a huge market for a hookworm vaccine, the commercial market is zero." Putting money where his mouth is, Gates foundation is putting up $2.1 million to develop hookworm vaccines in Brazil.

So what response does the MIT media lab have to all this? As anyone who's heard Prof. Negroponte speak will attest to, it is risky to go take him on in a battle of wits. But his defense of the laptop program is nevertheless quite thin. For instance, this is all he has to say about questions like Mr. Gates statement: "Why do children in developing nations need laptops? Laptops are both a window and a tool: a window into the world and a tool with which to think. They are a wonderful way for all children to "learn learning" through independent interaction and exploration."

So lets try to visualize a use case shall we? While going through the local garbage dump in Kolkata, Sajal comes across an old watch. Unsure whether he should waste his time on it, he whips out his $100 laptop, signs on to the wide area wireless network spanning all of Kolkata (Oh, sorry, the "peer-to-peer network of these laptops cheaply connected to the internet backbone"), and searches Google images for watches. This leads him to a fascinating wikipedia article on watches. Another learning moment served up by OLPC.

Of course many people in India have thought about this at length. Dr. Sugata Mitra has been investigating community based computer access since 2001. He recently recieved the Dewang Mehta (pdf link) award in recognition of his work. Scientists at IISC (also recipients of the Dewang Mehta award), Bangalore have developed the Simputer following a conference on information technology and social development. The Bangalore Declaration that conference produced laid out their vision of where IT would fit into social development in the third world. They viewed IT as an arm in an efficient and egalitarian system of dissemination and cataloguing of information. IT is a critical part of infrastructure that would aid the local government and NGO's supply their services to the people and also allow the people to provide swift and relevant feedback to social providers. A lot of the emphasis was placed was on software that didn't rely on literacy and was regional language based. Given all this, it should be noted that the Simputer that can be bought is anything but IT for the poor people device. At $200 its hardly for the rag picker. In fact one of the items in its Amida's FAQ reads: "3. Isn't a Simputer for poor and illiterate people? It is true that the Amida Simputer is a very affordable computer, and that it is simple enough to be used by people who no prior experience with computers. However, Amida is meant for anyone who wants to work and play."

So what of the OLPC? Here's an answer from Maine. "In September 2002, middle schools in the State of Maine started an incredible journey providing every seventh grade student with his or her own laptop." Instead of the third world, perhaps the OLPC could make sure that every child in the US has a laptop. It could be one step to remove some of the segregation plaguing the US education system. Don't worry about the Third World. They've got the talent, education, technology and motivation to take care of their own. There is a desperate need in the US for a more egalitarian and universal education system. The OLPC could be a step in that direction.

I'll let Suvendra's post speak for itself, and invite readers to respond directly to him in comments. I'll add just one possibly relevant link, to a story about EBay founder Pierre Omidyar's recent endowment of $100 million to microlending programs in India and Bangladesh, which is a huge infusion of cash to a method of "social entrepeneurship" I personally support.

It's All Devanagari To Me (Language, Modernism, Culture, Chicago, Google)

I was briefly in Chicago this weekend for the Modernist Studies Association. I actually missed most of the conference, though I did catch some interesting talks, meet up with some friends, and see a solid keynote address from Hazel Carby. From amongst the panels, I particularly enjoyed Erin Carlston on W.H. Auden's connections to the "Cambridge Spies," Patricia Chu on Rebecca West, Christopher Wixson on J.M. Barrie and Noel Coward, Brian Holcomb on Anita Loos, and Dennis Allen on Ronald Firbank and the Camp tradition in modernism.

I changed the topic of my own paper to G.V. Desani's All About H. Hatterr so as to jumpstart the essay I should be writing on him (Desani also fit the topic of my panel -- Modernism and India -- just about perfectly). Though I definitely felt the (new) paper was a little rough around the edges, it was received positively (it was a small audience, and only one other person in the room had read the book).

I also got to have coffee with a couple of book-bloggers recently mentioned on this blog, Sam Jones and C. Max MaGee. Nice to hear a little about Chicago's (thriving) literary scene from these guys...

Meanwhile, the little corner of the blogosphere I keep my eye on has been quite productive -- interesting stuff on language and linguistics, postcolonial literature, etc. etc.

* * * * *

Let's start with linguistics, shall we?

You can see the reviewer's bubbling enthusiasm in this review of Nicholas Ostler's Empires of the Word (via A&L Daily). It looks like an excellent book; a passage that seemed particularly striking to me was the following:

Languages enlarge their numbers of speakers in various ways: through trade, conquest, migration, imperial consolidation, or religious proselytizing. The latter two — Spanish in the Americas and Sanskrit in Southeast Asia are instances — seem to be the most efficacious. Trade is an especially poor bet, as the examples of Phoenician, Sogdian (on the Silk Route), and Arabic (in the Indian Ocean) illustrate. Ostler comes to one of his few definitive conclusions on this point: “No community famous for specialization in trade has passed its language on permanently as a vernacular, or even as a lingua franca, to its customers.” The customer, you see, is always right, and the customer’s language is therefore to be preferred.

Aha -- that sort of explains why there's so little of Arabic on India's western coast, while traces of Portuguese are quite pronounced.

* * * * *

Devanagari. Speaking of language issues, Kerim asks a really interesting orthography question in a post on Devanagari at Keywords:

One of the cool things about the Devanagari script is that it is ordered phonologically. The sounds are listed in order of where in the mouth the sound is produced: gutturals (produced in the throat) first, and labials (produced by the lips) last, with a steady progression in between. . . I am curious when this ordering became standard. I know that the study of language and grammar has ancient roots in India, such as the famous fifth century scholar, Pāṇini, but the Devanagari script is actually much more recent, dating from the twelfth century. Some of its antecedents were the Siddham script, the Gupta script from the fourth to the eighth centuries and, ultimately, the 5th century BCE Brahmi. (I really like the way Brahmi looks!) Looking at these scripts I see that many of them listed in the same order as the Devanagari script, but it isn’t clear if this is a modern convention or if there are historical reasons for listing them this way.

Perhaps some of my erudite readers have more insight into this?

Wow, that is a really good question -- the kind of thing could easily turn into a Ph.D. Dissertation in Historical Linguistics. (Incidentally, if you click through to his blog, many of the obscure references in the paragraph have links.)

* * * * *

Google Print. Sepoy at Chapati Mystery links to a number of South Asia-related public domain texts that are online via the newly-launched Google Print service (which you have already heard all about if you read blogs). Highlights from his list from a literary perspective include Kipling's Out of India and Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's The Poison Tree.

There are many contemporary books available there (for searching) too. The overall functionality is along the lines of "Search Inside This Book" at Amazon, though the number of volumes indexed is already much higher (especially for public domain/out of print books).

I have to do a separate post (or even a series of posts) exploring the possible benefits of Google Print, but for now let me just link to the results of my search for "Hatterr," again from G.V. Desani's All About H. Hatterr. The list of sources there -- which took just a second to generate -- improved my Desani bibliography by about 1000 percent. (I probably should have run this search before doing a conference paper on the book!)

* * * * *

The Literary Saloon has also had a series of helpful posts on Indian and African literature over the past few days, including this post on the impact of Indian literature in English in Europe, a post on Pakistan's bizarre restriction on importing works of fiction from India, even when the authors are themselves Pakistani. The restriction doesn't extend to nonfiction.

And in African literature news, they also link to an interesting interview at the BBC with Chinua Achebe, where he suggests that he's not particularly concerned that the oral storytelling tradition in Africa is dying. He also speaks up for the importance of storytelling (literature) in African languages, including his own mother-tongue Igbo. Interesting, because early in his career Achebe was pretty outspoken in defending his writing in English (against the almost Stalinist condemnation of English as a language for sell-outs, expressed by critics like Chinweizu).

* * * * *

The cap to my weekend was a viewing of the cheesy/crappy/silly/entertaining Bollywood film Shaadi No. 1, a David Dhawan movie so outrageously stupid I ended up enjoying it quite a bit.

So Much For Relief Diplomacy: Delhi Blasts

Ahmed Rashid has an op-ed in the UK Telegraph that I would recommend.

He says in so many words something that occurred to me in passing when I first heard about these blasts last Saturday: so much for the thaw. Things had seemed particularly warm between India and Pakistan just a couple of weeks ago, following the earthquake in Kashmir. Then this:

On Sunday, Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, had invited the media to a press conference, followed by a jovial "Iftar" dinner in the garden of his home, for the closure of the day's fast in Ramadan.

He strongly condemned "the dastardly terrorist attack" in New Delhi and offered all help from Pakistan. At the end, he casually got up, saying he was going to ring India's prime minister, Manmohan Singh, to offer him Pakistan's condolences and support.

Instead of a grateful Singh on the other end of the line, the Indian prime minister dropped a bombshell, telling Musharraf that the terrorists who carried out the attacks were linked to Pakistan. In a well-orchestrated media blitz, Mr Singh's comments were on the news wires within 30 minutes, undermining Musharraf's entire press conference.

In coming days, India will clearly try to pin the terrorist attacks on Pakistan-based extremist groups. Pakistan will demand proof. India will say the evidence is secret, and so things will steadily worsen. We will be back to the days of tensions, recriminations and shelling across the Line of Control.

I can't help but think that Rashid is right. It seems hard to imagine anyone other than a Pakistan-supported terrorist cell carrying out bombings of the size and sophistication of last week's attacks in Delhi.

I might also add (with the abject failure of the relief effort in Pakistan in mind), that it seems hard to imagine anyone more incompetent at running a country than Pervez Musharraf. (I know what you're going to say, and I agree: George W. Bush is a close second)

Reflections (and questions) on Amrita Pritam

Amrita Pritam passed away this past week. I must confess that I haven't read enough of her work to feel that I really know her oeuvre. But I have some thoughts, and questions for people who might know her stuff better.

Her most influential story -- at least in South Asian literature circles in the U.S. -- is Pinjar ("Skeleton"), a dark narrative of the cross-religious abductions of women that took place in the Partition. The protagonist, Pooro, is a Hindu woman who is abducted and forcibly married into a Muslim family. Importantly, in Pritam's novella Pooro doesn't simply become yet another female victim of religious violence. Though she remains scarred, Pooro (renamed Hamida) comes to accept her new identity, and prosper in a provisional, post-traumatic sort of way. She becomes an agent on behalf of other women whose lives are jeopardized, which is almost a happy ending.

It's a powerful basis for a narrative, and Khushwant Singh's English translation probably doesn't serve it as well as one might hope. But maybe the story doesn't quite carry us all the way. Pritam's story is somewhere between a realist (ethnographic and historical) account of a particularly nasty aspect of women's experiences of the partition, on the one hand, and a more internal psychological portrait where realism is only a secondary goal, on the other. In the end, I think the second, more psychological reading dominates (for realism, one usually goes to the real thing, and look at the testimony recorded by Urvashi Butalia in The Other Side of Silence).

Here's the opening of the novella (again, keep in mind that it's a possibly questionable translation):

The sky was a colorless grey. Pooro sat on her haunches with a sack spread beneath her feet. She was shelling peas. She pressed open a pod and pushed out the row of peas with her finger. A slimy little slug stuck to her thumb. She felt as if she had stepped into a cesspool; she ground her teeth, flicked off the slug and rubbed her hand between her knees.

Pooro stared at the three heaps in front of her: the empty husks, the pods, and the peas she had shelled. She put her hand on her heart and stared off into space. She felt as if her body was a pea-pod inside which she carried a slimy white caterpillar.

Again, it feels more like a psychological than a realistic portrait, and as such it somehow leaves me a little flat.

It might be just the translations. But I wonder if I'm simply not getting Pritam? Anyone have suggestions for Amrita Pritam stories that are real knock-outs?

I took a glance at some of the many links in Uma's comprehensive post on Pritam, but none of the stories or excerpts from stories I've read from those links really do much for me.

Perhaps Pritam is stronger as a poet? Here are some lines from "The Scar" (translated by Harbans Singh):

I am also of human kind
I am the sign of that injury,
The symbol of that accident,
Which, in the clash of changing times,
Inevitably hit my mother's forehead.

I am the curse
That lies upon man today.
I came into being
When the stars were falling
When the sun had been quenched
And the moon darkened.

. . .

Who can guess
How difficult it is
To nurse barbarity in one's belly
To consume the body and burn the bones?
I am the fruit of that season
When the berries of Independence came into blossom.

Guess who she's talking about. (Shouldn't be hard)

* * * *

One thing I did pick up on from Uma's links is an interesting biographical tidbit, from an article that describes her relationship with the Urdu poet Sahir Ludhianvi:

A bachelor to the end, Sahir fell in love with writer Amrita Pritam and singer Sudha Malhotra, relationships that never fructified in the conventional sense and left him sad. Ironically, the two ladies' fathers wouldn't accept Sahir, an atheist, because of his perceived religion. Had they seen the iconoclast in him, that would have been worse; being an atheist was worse than belonging to the 'other' religion. Sahir, perhaps, had an answer to such artificial barriers in these lines written for Naya Raasta (1970):

Nafraton ke jahan mein humko pyaar ki bastiyaan basaani hain
Door rehna koi kamaal nahin, paas aao to koi baat bane

A young Amrita Pritam, madly in love with Sahir, wrote his name hundreds of times on a sheet of paper while addressing a press conference. They would meet without exchanging a word, Sahir would puff away; after Sahir's departure, Amrita would smoke the cigarette butts left behind by him. After his death, Amrita said she hoped the air mixed with the smoke of the butts would travel to the other world and meet Sahir! Such was their obsession and intensity.

In reading this, one should probably keep in mind that Amrita Pritam (born in 1915!) was married at age 15 to her editor (she started writing young!). It's a little unclear how she could even have considered marrying Sahir Ludhianvi.

There is reference to a frustrated romantic interest of Ludhianvi's here, but it's unclear whether Amrita Pritam is the person mentioned. In fact, I don't think it's quite possible, as I gather she moved straight from Gujranwala (Pakistan) to New Delhi in 1947. As far as I know, she never lived in Ludhiana in the 1930s.

Anyone read Turkish?

A colleague in Lehigh's International Relations department stopped me in the hallway this morning and said, "Hey, you made the Turkish press!" He couldn't remember exactly what or where, but he said it was something to do with my comments on Orhan Pamuk.

I did my own restricted Google search, and I came up with this mention in Milliyet. It looks like a pretty straightforward account of what American academics are doing with Orhan Pamuk, but I still wouldn't mind knowing what it says. I think the word "Edebiyati" means literature, and the word "diyalog" is probably just dialogue. But the rest is Greek to me (and yes, the Turks would hate that euphemism).

If there are any people who read Turkish around today (that means you, Elizabeth!), I'd be grateful for a gloss.