Hollywood Graduates to Sufism

Wanderer, idolater, worshiper of fire,
Come even though you have broken your vows a thousand times,
Come, and come yet again.
Ours is not a caravan of despair.
~Rumi

I am very excited about this.  Daniel Day-Lewis and Al Pacino to star in a Muzaffar Ali (of Umrao Jaan fame) biopic on the Great Master. Read here.

G-8 Sausage Party

Another Man’s Freedom Fighter

Just-released family fotos of the slain Tamil Tigers leader Prabhakaran. Hope it’s okay to be touched by these.

The Perfect Lounge

Outdoors, under a speckled sky, beside a gentle stream with a transparent floor over the water. Red lanterns and fireflies. Large wooden square tables surrounded by cushions in dark velvet. Bowls of freshly cut fruit and great big jars of colorful cocktails. Live musicians and performers. Cats lazying around… Open to all.

In Other Rooms, Other Stories

Because rooms are like nations.

Stealing Chocolates in Sinclair

I didn’t realize this, but there was a point when I think I used to judge people by the size of their apartments. I wasn’t particularly aware of such bigotry, so it went unexamined. It wasn’t until I stepped into that Sinclair apartment that I realized my prejudice, and more importantly, how quickly it could be overpowered.

That said, the apartment was really tiny. The distance between the rather basic but tidy kitchen and the living room was less than three feet. It could’ve even been about a foot and a six inches. The living room itself was sparse. There was a clutter of images on the right wall. They appeared to be European paintings, possibly Victorian. Miniatures mostly, and mounted. Almost all of them had a grayish background and were melancholic.

I caught a glimpse of a portrait of a young caucasian girl in a hat. My friend later told me that when she was little, she used to feel some sort of aesthetic connection with the girl in that painting. I remember smiling back, feeling slightly intrigued and indulgent.

I was intrigued at her ability to connect aesthetically with a blond caucasian girl, and wondering what the basis was for such a self-image. Growing up fair-skinned and light-eyed in South Asia, I suppose, and being brought up by a mother who spoke mostly English and played the piano. Well, sort of played the piano.

19 things that repeatedly surprise many people (over and over again)

1. Young, beautiful women sometimes marry old, ugly, rich men.

2. Journalists sometimes make things up and get things wrong.

3. The Pakistani state is in bed with terrorists. They often don’t think of them as terrorists.

4. You can never know the truth of anyone’s marriage, including your own.

5. Good desi girls also sleep around. No, they didn’t swim or go “horseback riding” when they were young.

6. Racism exists. Get your white roomie drunk, really drunk, and ask him what he thinks about black people. Philosophy/History/Anthro majors don’t count.

7. Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one.

Mahmoud’s Idiocy

 

Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmedinijad might well be, although this is a hard one, the dumbest statesman in the Muslim World.

He and Musharraf form quite the two sides of a coin. While Mushy is trying level best to appease the West, Mahmoud is trying to antagonize. While Mushy is going on tours to America, regaling John Stewart, Wolf Blitzer, and trying to sell copies of his James Bondesque autobiography (it climbed to number THREE on Amazon’s bestseller list) – Mahmoud is idiotically organizing conferences to deny the Holocaust.

Why on freakin’ earth would you organize this conference? Who in his right God-forsaken mind would actually deny the Holocaust?

Moreover, this was a conference well-attended by ACADEMICS.

WTH.

And embarassingly for those of us that take our craft seriously, HISTORIANS attended this ridiculous conference. (And people wonder why I claim to be a political scientist/anthropologist these days; THIS IS WHY).

See, revisionism is an extremely helpful and at the same time, a perverted desire that perhaps inhabits us all.

From Dhaka and Tehran

So I tend to like most things Persian – Kiarostami, miniature paintings, khoresht, the excessive use of nuts and saffron in “polow” – and almost all of whatever I have been exposed to – of Persian architecture, arts and literature. I also love how Farsi sounds.

I was once shooting the shit with a Professor of Islamic History and he pointed to me, how political Islam has had an uneasy relationship with both Iranian and Bengali society. Perhaps.

I suppose the presence of long secular cultures, very productive in the arts and literature, true for both Bengal and Persia, might create problems for certain kinds of Islamisms. Of course, the history of political Islam in any Muslim country is nothing if its not inconsistent and checkered. So it’s hard to generalize.

Another interesting analogy between Bangladeshi and Persian societies is the central role Dhaka and Tehran University have played in defining their states’ religio-political cultures.

Dhaka University, founded soon after the first Partition of Bengal, to uplift the Muslim masses of East Bengal, went from strength to strength and played a pivotal role in nationalist politics leading up to 1947. After 1947, the university changed character dramatically, as many Hindu Bengalis vacated faculty positions and were replaced by an expanding Bengali Muslim intelligentsia. An intelligentsia that was increasingly secular in the way it imagined a raison d’etre for East Pakistan, and if not that, at least culturally very proudly Bengali. In 1952, the University became a central hub of demonstrations against the Pakistani State. Again, in the ’60s, throwing their weight behind an increasingly outspoken Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the University students and faculty came under the radar of the Pakistani State. Little wonder then that many of the Pak Army’s worst atrocities were carried out on the campus during Operation Search Light.

Telling Tales, Some Reflections

As a historian, you are asked to think about the writing of history.

You are exposed to various intellectual traditions, “schools,” “camps,” and philosophies of history writing that have their own (sometimes overlapping) ways of explaining a present’s past. Marxism, feminism, structuralism, post-structuralism, and a whole variety of other -isms (islamism, nationalism even) to name a few. These “isms” can absorb a historian into its fold as she writes a present’s past. So much so that her writing of history, and her telling of a story, may be circumscribed by the tinsels of her ”isms” of choice.

So lately, I find myself reading and thinking about intellectual traditions with which I relate most intellectually (and perhaps, personally; biographically, even). As I try to figure out how to tell the story I will my dissertation to tell, I think of how different traditions understand human realities.

I was, once, quite taken by the long duree approach to writing histories. This is the approach that believes developments in human societies happen very gradually. Very slowly. Almost impercetibly. This approach explains human realities through “evolutions” and not “revolutions.” Braudel, a famous French thinker and historian, showcased this approach in a now-classic work called The Mediterranean. A now famous quote from Braudel:

the history of events was merely the history of surface disturbances, crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong backs.

In other words, one or two events don’t matter. They don’t change histories. They are simply the tips of icebergs or “crests of foam” on tides. They are mere bricks in vast edifices of very long histories.  

As I think about