Who To Root For?

I grew up in Washington, DC, but now I live in Philadelphia. Who to root for? I don't know; it's hard to leave behind one's regional pride (Washington), and this year it isn't really very rewarding to root for the Eagles, who had a major meltdown about two months ago. Still, the pressure one feels from constant media bombardment in Philadelphia is hard to withstand: radio, television, and newspapers cover football nonstop, and it's hard to ignore that steady temptation to 'convert'. (Who says America is a secular country?)

So who knows who to root for? And can anyone explain how Sourav Ganguly is back on the Indian Cricket team again? People are saying it has more to do with politics (i.e., Somnath Chatterjee) than Ganguly's likely contribution to the team. Aren't we glad that American politicians generally stay out of sports controversies? (Oh, wait!)

Look at the above image again: notice the Sikh fan in the middle of the picture: we know who he's rooting for, at least, with a burgundy pagri to match the Redskins' jerseys...

It's notable, because the image above is blown up large on the front page of today's Washington Post -- not something you see every day. The player in the picture, incidentally, is Santana Moss.

Intriguing Films, Mostly French

(Oy, a tough week for writing: we're trying to buy a house, I'm in the midst of a huge stack of grading, and I'm in the middle of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. The first two things are hellish, while the third is immensely enjoyable -- but all three have been distracting me from blogging...)

Over the past couple of weeks I've caught part or all of the following films, mostly on the Sundance Channel.

Paris Blues. This cross-racial jazz buddy film doesn't have the greatest script, but it has great music (the score is by Duke Ellington, and Louis Armstrong shows up as a character and musician in the film itself). It also introduced me to Diahann Caroll, one of the few black actresses who had a successful career in Hollywood in the 1960s and 70s. (See images of her in a series of roles at this fansite). Somewhere on the Internets (I can't find the link) I discovered that Caroll and Sydney Poitier (both married to other people) had had a raging affair before this film was shot, which threatened to undo their respective marriages. But they agreed to work with each other anyways, mainly because their roles in the film are progressive and quite natural (i.e., they are playing people who are more or less ordinary, not criminals or servants). So alongside the (slightly boring) didactic progressivism of the film and its brilliant music, there is a nice gossip element to Paris Blues. One other thing: the shots of Paris are stunning, especially Montmartre and the Seine.

8 Women. This is a very funny French murder-mystery with an ensemble, all-female cast, including Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert, and Emmanuelle Beart (to name only the three I had heard of). The best parts were the periodic eruptions into song by each of the 8 characters. Francis Ozon seems to have borrowed a page from Bollywood here, though the campy, ironic feel of this film as a whole is very un-Bolly. (Still, it might be interesting to imagine a slightly tweaked Bolly-version of this film... I know Rekha would be up for it...)

The Housekeeper. This is an unapologetic middle-aged man's (misogynistic) fantasy universe: a guy, divorced by his wife, hires a young, attractive housekeeper -- who subsequently throws herself at him. It's a little degoutante as a story, but the film has good performances from both leads and takes an understated, intelligent approach to its subject: they really want to convince you of the plausibility of this affair. Both S. and I were carried along by the film, but annoyed at it as well: just because it's a sophisticated French art movie doesn't mean the premise isn't fundamentally sexist! (Why aren't there more women screenwriters in French cinema?)

The Hairdresser's Husband. This film is a really just a trifle, but it's worth watching chiefly for Jean Rochefort's strange, manic dances to Arabic songs inside his wife's hair salon. You've never seen anything quite like it...

Diamonds and Rust. This Israeli film seems like an unlikely topic for an interesting documentary: the crew of a diamond trawler off the coast of Namibia. But it's all in the material, and these filmmakers have really good stuff. This is worthwhile viewing to anyone interested in how race, language/culture, and money collide in a small space. It's also just interesting to see how a diamond trawler works. (Click on the link for a good summary of the film)

Torture: The Dirty Business. Andrew Gilligan is a controversial figure in British journalism, mainly for his involvement in an Iraq pre-war intelligence scandal that led to the suicide of a government informant (see the full story at Wikipedia). He's also a ferocious left-leaning critic of the British and American governments. This documentary does feel biased at times, but it also has first-hand interviews with numerous victims of the U.S. government's "Extraordinary Rendition" program -- whereby people suspected of involvement in terrorism are flown on private Gulfstream airplanes to places like Syria and Egypt, where they are tortured. The most damning example is Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen who was tortured by the Syrians, kept in a brutal kind of solitary confinement, and then released after a year without charge.

Incidentally, the director of the film, Sarah MacDonald, has an interesting connection to India.

Amrik Badnaam Goes To The Library (a short story)

Inspired by Laura's post at The Valve

----------------------
Amrik Badnaam Goes To the Library

Professor Amrik Badnaam liked to spend his days during the long semester breaks in the libraries of other universities. His own university's library was somewhat distant from home, and was at any rate a rather dismal space: something undefinable was off about the library, which made it an unpleasant place to work. Many of his students felt the same way, and tended to avoid the place.

Since Amrik and his wife had recently moved to a new town within driving distance of the university, there was now a need to find a new library to haunt while he continued to work on his schlarly project, on the function of quoted dialogue in early novels. Amrik didn't need much in the way of resources from the library itself; for several years he had had in his own personal collection all the texts he required. But owing to certain changes he had made in the methodology of the project Amriknow found himself mired in an exhausting re-reading of most of his primary materials. Amrik's primary task this winter would be to skim through about 30 volumes by a prolific French writer named Marcel Broodthaers (a Victorian ancestor of the well-known contemporary artist of the same name), scanning for irregularities in the use of quotation-marks.

In truth, it was boring work, and the professor often wandered the stacks of the local library for interesting books to sample during breaks. Sometimes it might be a volume on the Peloponnesian Wars; on other days it might be a radically hostile biography of Mohandas Gandhi. In the past two years of work at various university libraries, such random sampling had come to occupy more and more of Amrik's time.

The new library he had selected was the main library at Blue Bough County Community College (also known as "BB3C"). Though he quickly ascertained that the library's primary selection was limited (Pamela, but no Shamela), he noted with satisfaction the congenial design of the library after a quick walk-through: this was a space in which he could actually get some work done. It was generally bright and spacious, and had a pleasing contemporary roundedness to it. Clearly a great deal of money and thought had gone into the construction of the building, much more than one might expect from a community college.

On the first day of work during what would turn out to be his last winter break as a faculty member at Prussian State University in eastern Pennsylvania, Amrik sat down at a suitable carrel near the Pxxxx section of the stacks at BB3C, opened his materials, and began to work. But he was only able to focus on Broodthaers for about half an hour before he found his mind wandering a bit. Amrik decided to browse the BB3C literature stacks a little, just to see what was there.

The Collected Works of Randall Jarrell caught Amrik's eye, and he thumbed through to find his favorite poem from his undergraduate days, "The Snow-Leopard." But the poem did not seem as exciting to him now as it had in college; indeed, it seemed curiously limp and certainly devoid of magic, as did many of the other bits and pieces of Jarrell poems he glanced at while standing in the book stacks. Next, Amrik picked up a volume of Amy Lowell, Pictures of the Floating World, of which the BB3C library copy was, surprisingly, a first edition from 1919 (how could this little community college even have existed in 1919?). Though the volume was handsome, the poems, Amrik quickly realized, were quite odd.

Amrik glanced back at his carrel but felt he needed to do a little more browsing before sitting down again to work.

That was when it happened: while browsing the literature shelves, he saw a small volume with an impossible title, Amrik Badnaam Goes To The Library. It was a slender volume with white binding and gold-embossed lettering on the spine. Upon opening the book, Amrik was shocked to find the following title page, written (rather than printed) in ink calligraphy:

Amrik Badnaam Goes To The Library

By Kalla Jadoorani

Wassahickon, PA: Blue Bough County Community College Press
December, 2005

The text that followed was, like the title page, written in ink rather than printed. The paper was a heavy bond, not often used in printed books, and seemed to be cut somewhat irregularly. The handwriting was a smooth and regular cursive script, quite legible but obviously made by an actual human being.

That the story narrated in Amrik Badnaam Goes To the Library appeared to be identical to his own life story was somewhat frightening to Amrik, but also in a certain way thrilling. Who is Kalla Jadoorani, and why has she hand-written an entire book (even a slim volume) consisting of my life story? After reading the first few pages in astonishment, Amrik quickly flipped to the back of the book to see where this Kalla Jadoorani had decided to end the story. Nearly the entire second half of the book was blank; the last written paragraph was on page 53, and read as follows:

That the story narrated in Amrik Badnaam Goes To the Library was his story was somewhat frightening to Amrik, but also in a certain way thrilling. Who is Kalla Jadoorani, and why has she hand-written an entire book (even a slim volume) consisting of my life story? After reading a letter-perfect account of his birth in Queens and his first years of life (including the blizzard of '77 and his early surgery), Amrik quickly flipped to the back of the book to see where this Kalla Jadoorani had ended things. He noticed that nearly the entire second half of the book was blank; the last written paragraph was on page 53 . . .

Amrik stood there, astounded and just a little bit annoyed that the book had ended at exactly the present moment. If this were some kind of trick, it wasn't especially original!

That was when he noticed a small Indian woman dressed entirely in black staring at him. She was standing at the far end of the stacks, and the only very noticeable thing about her were her thickly-rimmed, oddly shaped spectacles, which were either extremely out of fashion or extremely fashionable -- depending on how current one happens to be in the latest phase of retro fashion recycling. She seemed to be about forty, though that was in fact somewhat hard to establish in the middling light of this particular location in the stacks.

"Yes?" he finally said. She didn't say anything, or move. Indeed, she continued to stare at him with the same intense look.

"Wait, are you---?"

"Yes," she said, quickly. Then: "Listen, I haven't got a lot of time. Go back to your carrel and read the book, now, from beginnning to end exactly in sequence, and without skipping, skimming, or pausing for any reason. If you do it right, and the book works, you'll come back here and put it back on the shelf where you found it. Also, don't worry about the ending. I haven't finished writing it yet, obviously. I'll take it home and finish it tonight; it's important that I write the ending for everything to work. As for everything else, I'll explain what you need to know tomorrow." And before he could say anything, she was gone.


To be continued

The Conspiracy Against Ganguly (and other brief notes)

There are protests in Kolkata about the sacking of Sourav Ganguly from the Indian cricket team. Ganguly is a Bengali; some left politicians in Bengal have also complained of a dark political conspiracy against the cricketer.

I think we should send ex-Eagles running back wide receiver Terrell Owens to India to see if he can learn the ins and outs of cricket. And maybe invite Ganguly to Philadelphia? The Eagles could use a new running back...

* * *
Express India also has a piece about a new book that has come out, exploring the status of women in India's IT sector. It seems women are doing well in this industry overall; there is a disproportionate representation of women in IT, and the women interviewed for the study report being satisfied with the work as well as the power it gives them. The book is called Gender and the Digital Economy - Perspectives from the Developing World, edited by Cecilia Ng and Swasti Mitter,

* * *
There's been a lot of publicity this week about a recent case of a forged Wikipedia article, but in fact Wikipedia is pretty accurate -- as accurate as the Encyclopedia Britannica, according to Nature. An article in the Washington Post on the subject.

I must say I've been using Wikipedia quite a bit as a 'first' reference. Sometimes if I need to check something quickly before class -- say, the different Arabic meanings of the word 'Jihad' -- Wikipedia can be a quick way to bone up.

* * *
Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk's trial for speaking against the Turkish state is starting this week in Istanbul. There's a story about it in the BBC. There was also a brief statement on the impending trial in this week's New Yorker, though I 'm not finding a link to that statement online.

* * *
Salam Pax on voting in Baghdad, for the third time in 11 months. The Guardian suggests this may be the last in his series for the paper.

* * *
In the New Yorker, a review of a new biography of Lawrence by a writer who published a three-volume bio of him in the 1980s. I dunno, though I find certain of Lawrence's novels fascinating, stories about his life are a bit depressing: everything he tried to do (outside of writing novels) was a disaster.

Two Odd Crime-Related Stories

Last week, a Lehigh university sophomore decided to rob a Wachovia in north Bethlehem. He issued the bank teller a note claiming that he had a weapon (it's not clear that he had one), and walked off with about $3000. But he didn't do a great job with the getaway car: someone caught the license plate of his SUV, and within a few hours the police showed up at his fraternity with handcuffs. The icing on the cake? The student in question is the Sophomore Class President, and the guy who drove him to the bank is the University Student Senate President! (The latter student, a senior, says he didn't know what his friend was going to do at the bank.)

I was somewhere between a- and be-mused by this news last weekend, with the story in The Morning Call (the local paper). But yesterday CNN picked up the story, giving Lehigh national exposure for all the wrong reasons.

* * * *
Also in the Morning Call last weekend, police caught up with a robber in Lansdale when they followed his footprints in the snow straight to his house.

Note to robbers: when committing robberies in fresh snow, remember to first walk to someone else's house before going home with the loot!

Aniruddha Bahal Strikes Again: Question-Gate (updated)

All over today's news: A pair of Cobrapost and Aaj Tak TV reporters secretly taped 11 Indian MPs taking bribes in exchange for asking questions in Parliament. There is detailed information on how the meetings were conducted, and what, specifically, the MPs agreed to do here.

It's unusual that parties not in power get seriously corrupt, but six of the 11 MPs are members of the BJP, already on the outs. One member was from the Congress party, while others were from the BSP and RJD parties. (The RJD, Lalu Prasad Yadav's party, is an ally of the Congress; the BSP is a caste-based party that had been involved with the BJP government.)

The six BJP MPs, 3 BSP MPs, and the Congress MP have already been suspended by their respective parties. No word on the fate of the RJD member.

The moral: corruption does not follow party lines.

The other moral: the BJP is a glutton for punishment. You would expect these MPs to think twice before taking bribes from people in places where there could be video cameras rolling!

Does India have an equivalent of a Pulitzer Prize? I would nominate Aniruddha Bahal and Aaj Tak TV.
* * * * *
Update: Apparently, blogging has played a part in the scandal, as one of the Cobrapost writers planted the following blog-related question in an MP's mouth for 35,000 Rupees:

"Is it true that while NRI firms such as India Uncut of USA, Sepia Mutiny of Britain and AnarCap Lib of Netherlands have been allowed to invest in Indian SSIs, the reputed German investment firm Desipundit has been denied permission? If so, the reasons thereof? Is the Union Government of India planning to make automatic the long procedure of permission for SSIs to import new technologies such as Trackbacks, Pingbacks, Blogrolls, Splogs and Hitcounters?"

Check out the details at Sepia Mutiny. Also of course, Cobrapost.
And certainly the 'firms' involved are thrilled to be a hilarious footnote in the unfolding story of this scandal (see Desipundit and India Uncut).

Three Naive Statements About "The Snow Man"

In honor of the snow, end of the semester office hours, and the endless winter of the mind, here are some very brief observations on Wallace Stevens' "The Snow Man." These are naive responses, because, well, it's a blog. And of course, the many intimidatingly good close readings of this poem (several of which are excerpted at UIUC) threaten to leave one with nothing of one's own to say. The trick is to write first (naively), then compare notes with the published critics.

The Snow Man
by Wallace Stevens

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

1. Verbs: For a poem that is essentially about standing still, there are quite a number of active verbs, suggesting a play between activity and passivity. Through his verbs, Stevens makes the visual and aural perception of nature (which might well be understood as passive) into a highly intentional act. The poem opens with the observer in the snow, taking in the sharp visuals of a snowy winter day. But there is a shift after the semi-colon in the third stanza (the poem’s grammatical and conceptual hinge), first towards the land, and then back to the speaker. The last stanza has two verbs, one associated with sound (“listens in the snow”), and the second with sight (“beholds”), even as it negates (twice) the object on view (“nothing that is not there and the nothing that is”).

2. Nature described: There are parallels running throughout the poem in the descriptions of nature, which are first positive if remote (“crusted with snow”; “shagged with ice”), and then associative and negative (“sound of the wind”; “sound of a few leaves”; “sound of the land”; “same wind”; “same place”). The “sound of…” and “same…” phrases in the third and fourth stanzas are all in some sense echoes or reverberations of events that are never directly described in the poem. They are like pronouns without an antecedent, and they are all versions of one another (the “sound of the land” must logically also be the sound of the wind, since nothing else in nature on a still winter day would make noise).

3. Human mood/being/nothingness: As is relatively common in some of Stevens’ more famous poems, there is a play in “The Snow Man” between a feeling human consciousness (who experiences winter as “misery”), and a purely abstract perceiving entity that is utterly free of any emotional distortion (i.e., that sees "nothing that is not there"). The perceiving self and nature in its bareness and remoteness reflect each other directly: both as stillness and “nothingness.”

There is a grammatical trick of the poem in its double-negatives, and a conceptual trick involving a doubling of the observer (especially in the second half of the poem). One must have a “mind of winter . . . not to think/ of any misery . . . in the sound” of the snow and the nothingness of winter. The poem has so many subordinate clauses that it’s a little unclear whether listener in the last stanza is the same as the observer who first appears in the first. But of course they are – they must be – one and the same “snow man.” (Incidentally, it makes little sense to me to read the "snow man" in the poem as literally a snow man made of three big balls of snow. The snow man is a sentient being cogitating on the snow. I read the title of the poem as a comment on the human imaginative tendency to anthropomorphism, our tendency to populate the nothingness of winter with crude sculptural images of ourselves.)

* * * *
Those are the naive statements. As mentioned above, UIUC has excerpts from about a dozen relevant critical takes on "The Snow Man," many of which cover similar ground. Check them out; I was impressed by Anthony Whiting and Kenneth Lincoln. The opening of the Lincoln excerpt is especially sharp and compelling:

"The Snow Man" is one long sentence in five oddly rhymed tercets, crystallized as verse. Like Frost's image of ice melting on a stove, the poem reveals itself as it slides along, warmed dangerously by human touch. The lesson is clear: leave a snow man alone, and it exists for itself, unchanged; touch the snow, and the artifice goes away, as it goes along. An object measures differently in motion than at rest, variously cold and hot: watch it disappear. Instead of the expected iambic opening ("I placed a jar"), the poem begins impersonally, with a tentative trochee, almost spondaic, "One must have a mind of winter." Right away, reverse field, the poem catches us in metric crux ("the trochee's heave," Pound said). A leveling cold serves to brace entry and numb stresses into anapests, even spondaic trochees: "and the boughs / Of the pine-trees crusted with snow."

And it just goes from there, all good.

[Cross-posted at The Valve]

Lehigh in the Snow

Yes, I did too make it into work this morning. I'm glad I did; the first decent snow of the year is always a spectacle.

A larger size version of the above is on Flickr.

Anjali Gupta vs. Indian Air Force

Don't even think about claiming sexual harassment if you're a woman in the Indian Air Force. First, your charges will be dismissed. Then, you'll be put in jail, "for your own protection." And finally, you'll be court-martialled on trivial charges, and convicted by a jury that, to add insult to injury, includes two senior women officers (one of whom is Air Marshal Padmavati Bandyopadhyay, the highest-ranking female officer in the Indian military).

Here's the back-story from Mumbai's Mid-Day:

“She refused to play ball with senior officers who wanted her to ‘co-operate’ with them in various ways including participating in collecting bribes for recruitment of cooks and others. (Apparently the going rate for a cook in the force is Rs two lakh),” he reveals.

Jitender claims Gupta was forever being harassed for illegal favours. “The more she refused to join them at parties in the night, the more she was harassed.

In fact, Anjali had earlier complained to her seniors about the drunken behavior of Sq Ldr Choudhary who was even issued a Form10 by the IAF.

Every time she complained to higher authorities about malpractices in her department, she would be moved to another department. She was moved around 6-7 times in the last one year,” he states.(Mid-Day)

And here's today's news:

An Indian Air Force court martial has recommended that Flying Officer Anjali Gupta be cashiered from service. Gupta and her family contend that she is being framed because she brought charges of sexual harassment against superior officers and because she blew the whistle on corrupt deals.

In armed forces’ parlance, “cashiering” is a more severe punishment than “dismissal”. A cashiered officer is denied the privileges of rank and post-service benefits. The five-member jury’s proposal in the court martial headed by Group Captain Ganesh in Bangalore has to be confirmed by Air Chief Marshal S.P. Tyagi.

The court martial has found Gupta guilty of five of seven charges brought against her. She was charged on five counts of financial embezzlement (amounting to Rs 1,080), insubordination, indiscipline, irregularity and conduct unbecoming of an officer. (Calcutta Telegraph)

Oh no, she embezzled 1080 Rupees! (approx. US $25). And let's see, insubordination (because she says her superior officers were hitting on her?) and indiscipline (because she refused to go along?).

If the Air Force can explain why they found her sexual harassment charges to be false, they really need to do so ASAP. Otherwise, this case case stinks to the high heavens.

Sami Al-Arian: quick thoughts

Sometimes it seems there are an awful lot of "terrorists" but not a lot of convictions. Sami Al-Arian and his co-defendants join the ranks of the acquitted.

The basics of the case are these:

The trial, lasting more than five months, hinged on the question of whether Mr. Arian's years of work in the Tampa area in support of Palestinian independence crossed the threshold from protected free speech and political advocacy to illegal support for terrorists.

Prosecutors, who had been building a case against Mr. Arian for 10 years, relied on some 20,000 hours of taped conversations culled from wiretaps on Mr. Arian and his associates. Officials said he had helped finance and direct terrorist attacks in Israel, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, while using his faculty position teaching computer engineering at the University of South Florida as a cover for his terrorist activities.

20,000 hours of conversations -- and not a single guilty verdict! It seems that the guy is not a terrorist.

The Times has also made the text of the indictment available (PDF), and I've been reading through it. The government makes many specific accusations against Al-Arian and his colleagues, but the broadest one is that he was the U.S. head of an organization called Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), which engaged in a conspiracy to support people committing acts of terrorism.

Over the course of the indictment, the government describes its version of what the PIJ was doing between 1991 and 2002. Interestingly, the longest indictment by far is a charge of conspiracy to commit racketeering, not terrorism. This charge mostly reads like committee meeting minutes for what could be any small activist group, punctuated occasionally by references to suicide bombers overseas (notably: no specific references to any direct involvement in a bombing). And Counts 5-44 are "Travel in Interstate or Foreign Commerce or Use of the Mail in Any Facility in Foreign Commerce." The actual "material support for terrorism" indictments are relatively brief, though the government does claim significant evidence in each case.

For the government's case to fall through with this much evidence, there really must be substantial doubt about their basic version of what the PIJ was doing, who it was associated with, and when. Are they making it up?

Read it and see. Perhaps it all is, as Al-Arian's defense lawyer has said, "a work of fiction." But the indictment is specific enough to seem more than plausible to me.

The next question is, will he be deported? Will he try to get his job at the University of South Florida back?

"Whitelists" and "Snail-Mail": Analogical Formations

Didn't William Safire retire? Oh well, I guess not: his latest piece at the New York Times Magazine delves into a class of words referred to by linguists as analogical formations. These are terms, generally involved with technology, that come into being as a logical necessity after a given term in widespread usage demands an opposite term. For example, once the word "blacklist" became a relatively common way of describing a function to stop unwanted emails or software applications, the word "whitelist" was coined to describe senders or applications that are, if you will, pre-approved.

Other examples he gives:

underwhelming
software (the word "hardware" came first)
hotfix
copyleft
blamestorming
multislacking (from "multitasking")
rightsizing (management)
dumbsizing (labor)

I might add "snail-mail" for conventional mail, which only became commonplace after email became the standard method of written communication.

Another rather crude analogical formation is "meatspace," which refers to the flesh-and-blood world, as opposed to "cyberspace." It was coined after "cyberspace" became a widespread term. I should add that while I've never actually heard "meatspace" spoken aloud, Google turns up 326,000 hits for it, so I gather it has started to stick.

Like snow... Or egg?

Any other analogical formations you can think of?

Upcoming Conference: Secularism in South Asian Literature

This year I am co-chairing the South Asian Literary Association's annual conference with Anuradha Dingwaney-Needham, of Oberlin College. The topic is "Secularism in South Asian Literature: Possibilities and Limits." I was invited to co-chair in large part because the topic directly coincides with my research interests. SALA picked the basic topic, and invited the two of us on board. Anuradha and I wrote up a call for papers, selected from among the many proposals that came in, raised funds to support the conference (thank you, Lehigh!), and produced the following schedule.

SALA is the main academic group for the study of South Asian literature in the U.S. It has been around for a decade, and has about 80 members. This year's conference will be held in Washington, DC, in parallel with the annual convention of the Modern Language Association. The tone of the conference tends to be somewhat informal compared to the MLA, and the emphasis is on young scholars. Quite a number of grad students (who might have a hard time getting their papers accepted by MLA) give talks at SALA.

If you're going to be in DC at the end of December and have an interest in attending, contact me via the email address on the sidebar to get some further information. Also contact me if you're interested in becoming a member of SALA more generally (membership is inexpensive, and comes, I believe, with subscrption to the organization's journal, the South Asian Review).

Below is the schedule for the conference. Any comments or questions are welcome; needless to say, I'm pretty proud of the diversity of topics and authors on our schedule!

Monday December 26

Session 1: 5:00-6:30

1A. Secularism and Fiction I

a. Saiyeda Khatun, Johnson and Wales University, “The Humanist Agenda in Shaukat Osman’s Janani.”
b. Rajender Kaur, Rhode Island College, “Beyond ‘Aitch(Indus)es and Em(uslims)’ to I-Thou: Interrogating Secularism in Mariam Karim’s My Little Boat and Gita Hariharan’s In Times of Siege.”
c. Nyla Khan, University of Nebraska at Kearney, “Nationalism vs. Universalism: Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines.”
d. John Hawley, Santa Clara University, “Tariq Ali’s Islam Quintet and the Role of the Secular in Islam.”

IB. Secularism in Bollywood and Contemporary ‘Art’ Cinema

a. Kerry Luck and Bonnie Zare, University of Wyoming, “Secular Isn’t Sexy: The Promotion of Pan-Hinduism in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai.”
b. Prabhjot Parmar, University of Western Ontario, “Dharamputra and Gadar: Two Outposts of Secularism in Hindi Cinema.”
c. Blair Orfall, University of Oregon, “Secularism via the Hollywood/Bollywood Adaptation.”
d. Parvinder Mehta, Wayne State University, “Viewing the (Secular) Other: Interstitial Spaces and Liminal Hybridities in Mr. and Mrs. Iyer.”

Tuesday, December 27
9:00-10:30: Session 2

2A. Secularism and Fiction II

a. Cara Cilano, University of North Carolina at Wilmington, “The Fissures of Pakistan: Bangladesh as/and Secularity in Recent Pakistani Fiction.”
b. Kamal Verma, University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, “Intersections of Marxism, Humanism, Secularism, and Indian Thought in ‘An Apology for Heroism.’”
c. Brewster E. Fitz, Oklahoma State University, “R.K. Narayan’s ‘The Gateman’s Gift’ and ‘Such Perfection’: Ironic Allegories of the Secular and the Religious in Cultural and Political Institutions.”

2B. Secularism and/from the Position of the Minority

a. Rochelle Almeida, New York University, “Secularism and Contemporary Art: M.F. Husain and his Mother Teresa Series.”
b. Revathi Krishnaswamy, San Jose State University, “Secularism and the Shifting Category of Caste.”
c. Robert McNamara, Loyola University of Chicago, “Racial Minorities and Secular Modernities.”
d. Anushiya Sivanarayanan, Southern Illinois University, “Hindutva and Tamil Literature.”

10:45-12:15 Session 3

3A Gender and Secularism: Alternative Politics

a. Rashmi Bhatnagar, Boise State University, “Meera’s Poetics as an Instance of Secularism in South Asia.”
b. Nandini Dhar, University of Oregon, “The ‘Sacred’ and the ‘Secular’: Gender and Resistance in Rashsundari Devi’s Amar Jiban.”
c. Kellie Holzer, University of Washington, “Producing the Grhalakshmi: Religious Nationalism and Colonial Modernity.”
d. Kanika Batra, Loyola University of Chicago, “Redefining Secularism: A People’s Theatre from New Delhi in Alliance with the Women’s Movement.”

3B. Postcolonial Secularism and Diaspora I

a. Summer Pervez, University of Ottawa, “‘Deleuzian Secularism in Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album.”
b. Prathim Anandan, Wolfson College, Oxford University, U.K, “REMIX! Negotiating Assimilation, Identity, Secularism and Otherness the Second Time Around: the Subculture of Desi Music.”
c. Moumin Quazi, Lamar University, “Teaching Diaspora Literature in a Non-Secular Setting.”


1:30-3:00: Session 4

4A Partition Violence and Contemporary Communalism

a. Karni Bhati, Furman University, “Woman, Quam, Nation in Qurratulain Hyder’s Fiction.”
b. Maya Sharma, Eugenio Maria de Hostos Community College/CUNY, “Losing a Village to Make a Nation in Shauna Singh Baldwin’s What the Body Remembers.”
c. Sangeeta Ray, University of Maryland, “Rage, Riots, and Religion: Witnessing Films and Films as Witness.”

4B. Postcolonial Secularism and Diaspora II

a. Hema Chari, California State University, “Believers/Skeptics/Fundamentalists, and the Limits of Secularism.”
b. Bed Giri, Dartmouth College, “Religious Absolutism and Secularist Polemic in Rushdie, Kureishi, and Smith.”
c. Manav Ratti, Linacre College, Oxford University, U.K, “Holy Trinities, Satanic Verses: the Postcolonial, the Postmodern, and the Post-Secular.”

3:30-4:30: Keynote Speaker: Suvir Kaul, Professor of English and South Asian Studies, University of Pennsylvania, “The Secular Imagination.”

Incidentally, I posted information on last year's conference here.

Quadrilaterals

Amy Waldman is doing a series of articles in the New York Times on India's rapidly growing superhighway system, the "golden quadrilaterial." The first one alone packs quite a punch; Waldman is a practiced observer of India, and is able to give a balanced and realistic picture.

There are some great touches here, including the (predictable) Indian bureaucrat bemoaning the hurdles to progress posed by "Democracy," the Korean engineer who's taught his Indian cook to make Kimchee, as well as the women hired by the highway project, who carry wet cement on their heads from the mixer to the road. All in all Waldman makes a compelling case that the project is "going to change the face of India," while also acknowledging that it produces as many problems as it solves. (Though in the end, there can be no question that the highway is needed)

In terms of the writing, my favorite bit comes near the end:

The face of West Bengal, home to 28 years of Communist rule and acres of green rice paddies, was already changing. Three satellite townships were being built near the town of Bardwan, which would be only an hour from Calcutta when the new highway was complete. Residents would commute, as they did from suburbs across America.

If the highway was enabling the middle class to migrate out of cities, it was also encouraging the poor to migrate in. Beneath a crosshatch of elevated highways on the edge of Calcutta, thousands of rural Indians had burrowed in, constructing homes, creating businesses. Dung patties dried on the highway's underpinnings. Yellow taxis sat in rows. A whole civilization within, or beneath, a civilization, had hatched.

Dal bubbled over a wood fire in the single room, constructed from wood and jute bags, that eight men shared. Bal Dev Rai, a 40-year-old from the state of Jharkhand, had called the room home for five years. He drove a bicycle handcart, sending money to his wife and daughters, returning to his village at harvest time. For him and his fellow bottom-dwellers, the improved highway meant a nicer roof over their heads.

Read the whole article (and look at the multimedia feature), here.

Update: Part 2 of the series -- on the booming Indian auto industry -- is here. Interesting tidbit: 800,000 personal automobiles were sold in India in 2004, with the number for 2005 expected to cross 1 million. At that rate of growth, and given that Waldman states that there are 23 million autos on the roads currently in India, the number of cars jamming Indian highways and city streets will double in the next 10 years!

Update 2: Part 3 of the series here; Part 4 of the series here.

Streaming Poetry @ The Poetry Archive

The Poetry Archive is fully operational, with a pretty extensive collection of audio files from 80 poets, present and past. (Andrew Motion introduces the project in the Times of London, here.) If you've never heard Yeats or Tennyson reading in their own voices (on wax cylinder recordings), now you can for free. Each of the contemporary poets has some free streaming audio files available, but you can buy CDs of the contemporary people doing more of their poems.

In terms of Indian poets, Sujata Bhatt has three poems available. I'm not a huge fan of Sujata Bhatt's work on the whole, though I do find the following lines from "A Different History" provoking:

Which language
has not been the oppressor's tongue?
Which language
truly meant to murder someone?
And how does it happen
that after the torture
after the soul has been cropped out
of the conqueror's face--
the unborn grandchildren
grow to love that strange language?

I like the drift of these lines, though I find the way it ends a shade too obvious.

I prefer the Brit-Iranian poet Mimi Khalvati. Listen to her "Ghazal" -- very clever!

Or try the Jamaican Jean 'Binta' Breeze. Even within the three poems online she uses different dialects and voices. "Could it be?" is in standard English, while "The Arrival of Brighteye" is in Jamaican Patois. With Breeze's poetry especially, you get something out of hearing her do it that you simply wouldn't get on the page.

[Thanks for the tip, Ed]

Meltdowns in the BJP and Shiv Sena. A Trend?

First, Vajpayee retired. Then L.K. Advani got himself in hot water over his comments on Jinnah, and will probably be out by the end of the year. Before he goes, however, he's made sure to get Uma Bharti out of it, and that seems to have stuck. Bharti, I understand, is going to form her own regional party in Madhya Pradesh. Also look for her to do a Ayodhya-bound "Ram-Roti Yatra."

On the Shiv Sena side, the meltdown is even more extensive. Most recently, Raj Thackeray quit the party, and openly questioned his brother Uddhav's leadership. Before that, it was Narayan Rane. What exactly Raj's defection means, and where he will go is still a matter of some speculation (he will probably not go to the Congress). DNA Mumbai speculates as follows:

No more can Narayan Rane be sure of disgruntled Shiv Sena leaders making a beeline for his camp. The Sena corporators, MPs and MLAs, who had been keen on joining Rane, now have an option - a Raj-sponsored Sena.

The possibility of Raj Thackeray floating a separate organisation may put the brakes on the exodus of disgruntled Sainiks looking for an alternative political platform to Rane's Congress.

A senior official in the Congress said, "The vertical split in the Shiv Sena will upset the horizontal growth of Rane." Majority of the leaders, pushed into a corner by Uddhav, had sought refuge with Raj. Rane wanted to tap such elements, which felt slighted or isolated in the Uddhav sena.

Horizontal? Vertical? Kya, kya? I'm not sure what they're talking about. Anyone have a guess?

All the troubles in the BJP and Shiv Sena parties may suggest the end of an era -- both parties are struggling to find new momentum for their respective agendas. Are they finished? Probably not: we said the same thing about the Congress Party in the spring of 2004, when the NDA government looked unbeatable. There was considerable infighting there too, along with many questions about who could really lead the party into the next era (the Sonia-Manmohan solution deftly solved all the political problems presented by Sonia Gandhi's leadership of the party). Whether or not we will see another Babri Masjid type event, it seems hard for me to imagine that the era of Hindutva is really behind us.

Nothing lasts forever, so it's dangerous to gloat in politics (as in everything else in life). As soon as Congress hits a rough patch (or the Communists finally quit in frustration), will the Sangh Parivar be back at the center? Or are we headed towards a future of even more localized politics, held together by some vaguely centrist, currently nonexistent party?