Moments of Tranquility

Favorite Musical Masterpieces: Thankgiving Edition (D.V. Paluskar, Faiyyaz Khan, Bade Ghulam Ali/ Barkat Ali, Salamat Ali Khan)

2011-11-25T17:29:00.000-08:00

Ustad Faiyyaz Khan

Here in the United States this is the week of the Thanksgiving holiday. It is one of the more relaxing times of the year and with a four day weekend, I have had plenty of time to re-listen to some great Hindustani classical music. Since its been a while that I posted the sublime Jhinjhoti thumri by Ustad Abdul Karim Khan here are a few more gems that will surely accompany me to the proverbial desert island. Some may notice that these are all by male singers but a post is brewing in my head which will focus on some favorite pieces by female classical singers (Begum Akhtar, Kajjan Begum, Roshan Ara Begum, Girija Devi).
First up is D.V. Paluskar. I have always loved the purity of D.V. Paluskar's sur and the clarity of his singing. What a tragedy that this extraordinary talent died in 1955 when he was only 34. His father, Pandit Vishnu Digambar Paluskar was a singer and teacher of some renown and founded the premier classical music institute called "Gandharva Mahavidyalaya" in Lahore in 1901.

Here is D.V. Paluskar singing "Piyu Palan Laage More AkhiyaN" in Raga Gaud Sarang:

Next is a little nugget from the emperor of the Agra Gharana, Ustad Faiyyaz Khan. Known as Aftab-e-Mauseeqi (a title given to him by the Maharaja of Mysore), Faiyyaz Khan's mastery and his distinctive, booming voice leaves one mesmerized. Faiyyaz Khan was a towering figure of his time; a court musician for the Maharaja of Baroda for many years, a close friend of the Sarangi-maestro Ustad Bundu Khan and a much sought after "Mehfil ka Baadshah" for musical concerts and conferences. Professor Daud Rahbar (Zia Mohyeddin's first cousin) has written a charming book about music called "Kuchh BateiN Sureeli See" which is dedicated to Ustad Faiyyaz Khan ("Jinn kay gaane meiN mohabbat aur himmat kee goonj thhee").

This is Ustad Faiyyaz Khan's "Pawan Chalat" in Raga Chhayanat:

Ustad Bade Ghulam Ali Khan and his brother Ustad Barkat Ali Khan were great exponents of the Patiala Gharana. Their long association with Lahore makes me think of them even more fondly. Barkat Ali Khan (1908 - 1963) was born and died in Lahore and is buried in the Miani Sahib cemetery. Bade Ghulam Ali Khan moved to India a couple of years after partition but learned much of his music in Lahore with Akhtar Hussain Khan and Aashiq Ali Khan. All these Patiala scions practiced and performed often at "Takia MeerasiaN" near Gawalmandi bazaar.

The two pieces I have selected here are in Raga Pahari so one can contrast the singing of the two brothers side by side in similar light genre performances. Barkat Ali Khan had a gentler voice more suited to semi-classical singing but Bade Ghulam Ali Khan had greater range. His resonant voice and vocal mastery felt equally at home in Thumri/Daadra or Khayaal.

Barkat Ali Khan sings his famous maahiya,"BaaghoN MeiN Parre Jhoole"(written by Chiragh Hasan Hasrat): (unfortunately there is a bit of background crackling noise in this version)

Bade Ghulam Ali Khan sings "Qurbaan So Maariye".

When I reflect on the Hindustani classical music tradition and its evolution, there is no doubt in my mind that it is now a shadow of its former self. Pakistan inherited the likes of Salamat Ali/ Nazakat Ali, Fateh Ali/Amanat Ali, Ghulam Hassan Shaggan and Aashiq Ali Khan but the art form died quickly in the culturally hostile terrain despite the best effort of those greats. Their disciples kept up somewhat but almost entirely abandoned the more demanding, long classical forms like Khayaal. Even in India, where there is a much more robust music education infrastructure and far greater number of organized public concerts, the quality of the performers is generally mediocre. Bade Ghulam Ali Khan, Abdul Karim Khan, Omkarnath Thakur or D.V. Paluskar are in a different league but amongst under-50 performers one would be hard pressed to find more than a few that are of even Ustad Rashid Khan's quality. The genuinely first rate, even in India, have either passed away or are quite aged (Kishori Amonkar, Girija Devi).

Lastly, we have a heavenly performance by Ustad Salamat Ali Khan with a bandish that seems particuarly apt as one remembers all these vocalists who are no longer with us.

Salamat Ali Khan sings "Daiyya, KahaN Gaye Woh Log" in Raga Allahiya Bilawal.

A Vanished Cultural Landscape - A Reverie Inspired by Alamgir

2011-11-05T22:54:00.000-07:00

Flipping channels this morning I stumbled on to a live phone interview with the 80's pop icon Alamgir on Pakistan's Hum TV channel. Listening to the conversation with him took me down a nostalgic spiral into the Pakistani music of my teens. He sang his signature toe-tapping and melodious numbers like "MeiN Ne Tumhari Gaagar Se" and "Dekha Na Tha". He was the bridge between the lively film music singers like Ahmed Rushdi and the future pop phenomenon of Nazia and Zoheb Hasan. Alamgir's Urdu pop songs with their western beats are justly considered the progenitors of Pakistani pop music. I have always particularly loved an enchanting Bengali song which he first sang on PTV in the mid-80's in a benefit concert raising money for typhoon victims in Bangladesh. I was watching that concert at the time and immediately fell in love with "Aamay Bhashaili Rey, Aamay Dubaili Rey".

Then surfing on YouTube I found this gem "Soona Soona Jeevan Apna":

This is Alamgir singing as a guest star on Anwar Maqsood's late 80's television drama serial "Aangan Terha". I have watched this video many times since the morning and find it unbearably sad for it represents a cultural landscape that has likely vanished forever. Surrounding Alamgir you see a group of actors, who in retrospect seem to me the last survivors of the disintegrating urbane old world of the shurafaa of U.P.

Transplanted to their new abode in Karachi after partition, the migrants couldn't help but bring a slice of U.P. (and Delhi, Hyderabad, Bihar and Bhopal) to this alien commercial city far from their ancestral imaginations. (Na woh saawan, na woh hariyaali, na woh jhoola, na woh sakhiyaan, na woh maanjhe ka jora, na woh thumri, na woh kabootar-bazi, na woh mushaira, na woh soz-khwani!). As they settled down, they naturally kept the flame of old traditions alive and enriched their adopted home. If you want to experience some sublime echoes of the Karachi phase of these traditions of the Urdu heartland, here are some personal favorites:
- Album of wedding songs called "Yeh Hari Hari Chooriyan" released in 1978
- Zehra Nigah's tarannum renditions of Faiz ("Jis Roz Qaza Aayegi") and Nasir Kazmi ("Gaye DinoN Ka Suragh Le Kar Kidhar Se Aaya Kidhar Gaya Woh"),
- Kajjan Begum's divine thumris "Sanwari Sooratiya Pe MeiN JaaooN Waari" and "Meherwa Ras Boondan Barse" and a Moharram Noha ("Run MeiN Jab Bano-e-Bekas Ki Sawaari Aayee")
- Mushtaq Ahmed Yusufi's uncategorizable masterpiece "Aab-e-Gum". (Yusufi Sahib is Urdu's greatest living writer in my opinion. How I wish he would publish something more. It has been almost 22 years.) "Haveli", the first essay in the book is one of the best pieces of writing chronicling the manners and mores of that old Muslim U.P.(in this instance Kanpur) which in 1947 was already being upended by the steady march of time but whose demise was virtually assured by the consequences of partition. The phrase "Yeh chhorr kar aaye haiN" at the end so poignantly illustrates the grand tragedy of human existence on a miniature scale that it is hard to choke back tears whenever I read it.

But this long-winded reverie orginated with Alamgir's song and the actors in the video. It is because several of the actors in this clip like Shakeel, Mahmood Ali and Salim Nasir along with playrights like Anwar Maqsood were amongst those who familiarized the rest of Pakistan to that old country Urdu-speaking culture. To a child like me sitting in Lahore, turning the television set on and watching the Karachi dramas of Haseena Moin, Fatima Surayya Bajia, Anwar Maqsood, Khawaja Moinuddin and Athar Shah Khan opened the window to another world of refined culture, proper diction and humor steeped in an almost impossible command of spoken literary idiom. Even the street patois of the less literate characters seemed somehow more sweet. Today, when I picture Qurban Jilani, Jamshed Ansari or Azra Sherwani in Uncle Urfi, Salim Nasir in Aangan Terha, Mahmood Ali in Taleem-e-BaalighaN and Shakeel and Neelofer Aleem in Shehzori I imagine them as the last unknowing flag-bearers of the Muslim Urdu culture of Delhi, Lucknow, Kanpur, Aligarh and countless smaller U.P. cities that produced their own leading lights. Both Salim Nasir and Mahmood Ali have passed away. So have Subhani BaYounas, Jamshed Ansari, Azra Sherwani, Ishrat Hashmi, Arsh-e-Munir, Qurban Jilani and Begum Khurshid Mirza. Shakeel, Talat Hussain and Qazi Wajid continue to work along with some of the writers like Anwar Maqsood and occasionally Haseena Moin. But in Karachi too, once the original generation of Urdu-speaking migrants passes from the scene we will increasingly look back at the golden period of PTV dramas from the late 60's to the late 80's as the dying flicker of a culture that has long ceased to exist in the Indian cities of its birth but was not able to take root in its new home either.

Perhaps that was never a realistic expectation but many children and grandchildren of the U.P. migrants are barely aware of what has been lost and the state's general deterioration will ensure that the original legacy will almost completely peter out in another generation. Even though as an ethnic Punjabi I am not a direct cultural descendant of the Urdu-speaking Muslims, no one interested in the cultural history of Urdu and of Muslims in India can be indifferent to this tragic loss.

The Magic of Qawwali

2011-06-22T13:56:00.000-07:00

For the last few weeks I have been immersed in listening to traditional Qawwali music and what a transporting experience it has been! The initial impetus was a couple of divine Coke Studio Pakistan performances this season by the scions of the "Qawwal Bachhay" gharana: Farid Ayaz and Abu Muhammad's "Kangna" (Raga Malkauns) in episode 2 and Ustad Naseeruddin Saami's "Mundari" (Raga Adana) in episode 3. Additionally, I have drawn endless inspiration from Musab's blog "Tangled up in Blue" which has become my home destination when I want to learn about qawwali and its traditions and savor the offerings of the great qawwals. (Musab is someone I have gotten to know only in the blogosphere but this 24 year old in Pakistan genuinely makes me optimistic that our rich cultural heritage will survive and maybe even thrive for many more generations!)

For me, a large part of the pleasure in the arts comes from sharing treasures with others who also love the diversity and ingenuity of human creativity. So here are a few qawwalis I have been enjoying by some of the masters of this genre.

Let me start with the most famous practitioner of all: Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. He recorded so much and experimented with so many things during his final few years that some of his music started to lose its sufi / qawwali essence. Poorly done fusion tracks, thumping incongruous beats and amateurish videos of the Ustad singing "Afreen, Afreen" can only be described as regrettable. For, he was indeed a great qawwal! You have to listen to his traditional qawwalis to remember his magic and to recall the great tradition of qawwali in Punjab to which he was an heir. (We are fortunate that with his father Fateh Ali Khan, uncle Mubarak Ali Khan, cousin Badar Miandad and nephew Rahat Fateh Ali we have access to three generations of this family's qawwali music.) Here's Amir Khusrau's famous kalaam, "Mun Kunto Maula" in a wonderful live rendition in London in 1989:

The next piece is by the lesser known Javed Taufiq Niazi and party from the Khurji Noharbani gharana of Bulundshehr, U.P. Along with Punjab, Delhi and U.P. are the other great centers of qawwali tradition in the sub-continent. Niazi sahib and party are based in Karachi. I hope that they gain more public prominence as their style of singing still feels beautifully rooted in the soil of U.P. and retains a great charm. (Zak, maybe you folks can invite them to T2F!). I have listened to the qawwali "Aaya bana aaya, haryala bana aaya" below at least a couple of dozen times in the last few days. The imagery of Hazrat Imam Hussain (visualized as a bridegroom) transformed to the U.P. landscape mixes the spiritual and the local in a manner unique to the syncretistic culture of the region.

Haider ka poot aaya, Zainab ka jaaya aaya
Haider ka poot aaya, Zehra ka jaaya aaya
Hoor-o-malak nay gaaya
Haryala bana aaya, dulara bana aaya

The last piece is a well-known qawwali (among the afficionado) but what makes it quite unusual is that it is a bhajan with lyrics by Nawab Hilm of Hyderabad. This version below is by Farid Ayaz and Abu Muhammad Qawwal, the worthy current flag bearers (along with Naseeruddin Saami) of the longest line of qawwali singers originating in Delhi at the time of Amir Khusrau. Just the "Qawwal Bachhay" generation ahead of them boasted the great Munshi Raziuddin, Manzoor Niazi and Bahauddin/Qutbuddin Qawwals. I understand that recently the sons of Farid Ayaz and Abu Muhammad had their initiation and gave their first public performance in Karachi inaugurating the next generation of the 750 year old tradition. I wish them the very best in keeping alive the illustrious family tradition. Here is "Kanhaiya yaad hai kuch bhi hamari".

Favorite Musical Masterpieces: #1 - Abdul Karim Khan ("Piya Bin NaahiN Aavat Chain")

2011-03-20T23:29:00.000-07:00

I heard music in my house for as long as I can remember. There was my father's record collection and his spools of taped recordings from which he would sometimes play his favorite pieces for us (K.L Saigal, Mehdi Hassan, Begum Akhtar). There too was my mother's ubiquitous transistor radio, with a brown leather covering, on which over the years I listened to untold hours of music broadcasts from Radio Pakistan Lahore and All India Radio's (AIR) Urdu service. There was the twice weekly doses of 'Chitrahaar" on Doordarshan. My love of old film songs owes much to AIR's program "Aawaz de kahaN hai".
This may just be a personal peculiarity but I have always felt an urge to share with others whatever music, art and literature moves me. More often than not it has been my wife on the firing line but many others have received my enthusiastic "gifts". I now intend to use this 'safe' space to introduce some of the pieces that have deeply moved me over the years. (No chance here of holding people forcibly hostage). I have listened to many of these recordings dozens of times and the few people who periodically hit this page may chance upon something that they otherwise may not have experienced.

My first selection is Ustad Abdul Karim Khan's famous 1925/26 thumri "Piya bin naahiN aavat chain" in Raga Jhinjhoti. Abdul Karim Khan was the doyen of the Kirana Gharana and fittingly its is his bust that sits in the main entrance of the All India Radio headquarters. This thumri is revered by many fans of Hindustani semi-classical music. This is marvellously effortless singing and Abdul Karim Khan's mastery of 'sur' is breathtaking. Virtually all Kirana musicians (including Malika-e-Mauseeqi Roshan Ara Begum) at one time or the other have performed this thumri but Abdul Karim Khan's original recording remains in a league of its own.

My Pakistan Photo Journal (Part 2) - The Walled City

2011-03-09T18:17:00.000-08:00

February 15th - Inside the Walled City, Lahore:

Went with a friend on a walking tour inside the walled city ('androon shehr'). We entered via Masti Gate from the Minar-e-Pakistan / Badami Bagh side of Circular road and eventually exited from Delhi Gate after going through numerous alleyways and bazaars of the inner city. We stopped along the way to see some mosques and historic buildings and enjoyed a Kulcha/Chhole lunch at the stepped entrance of Sonehri Masjid.

The front courtyard and facade of Begum Shahi Mosque

Entering Masti Gate our first stop was the oldest extant Mughal mosque in Lahore, the Maryam Zamani or Begum Shahi Mosque (above) built in 1614. This beautiful mosque close to the Akbari Gateway entrance of the Lahore Fort was built by Emperor Jahangir's mother who was known as Maryam-uz-zamani (Mary of her age). This wife of Emperor Akbar and mother of Jahangir was a Rajput princess, the daughter of Raja Bihari Mal of Amber (now Jaipur). She was born Rajkumari Hira Kunwari.

In her Lahore Travel Guide, Yasmeen Lari writes: "Comparatively small in size, its present exterior hardly provides the foretaste of the wealth of decoration in the prayer hall. ---The central dome rises above the remaining domes and is carried on a drum; while those on the flanking bays are rather flat hemispherical cupolas. The treatment of the enormous dome itself is remarkable in its muqarnas (stalactite squinches) and elegantly painted fresco network."

The beautiful interior of the dome of Begum Shahi Mosque with its painted frescoes

From the Begum Shahi mosque we stepped into the Masti Gate bazaar and walked south past the dense rows of shops toward Moti bazaar. Many of the bazaars inside the walled city tend to specialize in specific product categories interspersed with food shops. For example, Masti Gate and Moti Bazaar have dozens of footwear shops. Arriving at Chowk Surjan Singh from Moti bazaar we took a left turn onto Hatta bazaar. Continuing on Hatta bazaar we arrived at the junction of Shahalmi bazaar heading south and Dabbi bazaar heading east. At this junction slightly south east is the Kasaira (utensils) bazaar and hidden amongst shops full of shiny pots, pans and pressure cookers is a very narrow entrance to a hidden historic garden called Baoli Ranjit Singh Bagh. This now dilapidated garden once had a stepped well (baoli) where people bathed in the summer months. The baoli marked the residence of Sikhism's fifth guru, Guru Arjun Dev (1563 - 1606). Yasmeen Lari informs us that "later, the well was filled with the debris of Guru Arjun's demolished house and lay uncared for many years. It was restored when an ailing Maharaja Ranjit Singh dreamt that he would recover only after he had taken a bath in the waters of the baoli." The abandoned bagh today with a few young kids playing cricket awaits a modern savior.

Baoli Ranjit Singh Bagh near the junction of Shahalmi and Dabbi Bazaars

There are homes and buildings that surround the Baoli Ranjit Singh Bagh. Standing inside the garden I saw the fascinating facade of the building below ("Gobind Ram Kahan Chand, Estd. 1805, Hindustan Commercial Bank Ltd."). It was puzzling to me how this facade has survived in its current condition because it looks freshly restored. (A bit of Googling revealed that Gobind Ram Kahan Chand was the founder of a company in Lahore in 1805 focused on spreading Ayurveda and its benefits. The company moved to Delhi after partition and is still in business today as GK Herbals.)

Facade of an old building visible from Baoli Ranjit SIngh Bagh

Exiting the bagh we continued our walk east into Dabbi bazaar which is a shopping area popular with women of the walled city with its shops full of crockery, kitchenware and sewing and knitting supplies. It is from Dabbi bazaar near the Kashmiri bazaar chowk that one enters the famous, elevated Sonehri Masjid with its golden domes. This mid-18th century mosque was built by Nawab Bhikari Khan, Governor of Lahore during the time that Mir Mannu was the Mughal ruler of Punjab. Mir Mannu had defeated Ahmad Shah Durrani in 1748 in a battle in Sirhind and remained the Governor of Punjab until his death in 1753.

A view of Sonehri Masjid from the front entrance

Sonehri Masjid was elevated above the shops in Dabbi bazaar with the intention that the rent from the shops below the mosque would provide a steady source of revenue for the mosque's maintenance. For a short while during the reign of Ranjit Singh, the mosque was shut down due to the complaints about disturbance caused by the azan by local Sikhs who had placed the Garanth Sahib in the adjacent baoli mentioned above. The intervention by the Fakir family of Bhati Gate, who had good relations with Ranjit Singh, resulted in the Sikh ruler reversing his decision.

The streets of the walled city were decorated extensively for Eid Milad-un-Nabi (Prophet's birth anniversary)

After enjoying an impromptu lunch from the street vendor at the entrance of Sonehri masjid we continued east through Kashmiri bazaar shops past Chowk Kotwali to the grand Masjid Wazir Khan. Perhaps the finest inner city mosque, Masjid Wazir Khan built in 1634 is an architectural and cultural treasure. It has been extensively photographed and is an oasis of calm in the midst of the bustling walled city. Flocks of pigeons perched on the domes and minarets of the mosque frequently fly over the courtyard from one side of the mosque to the other creating a surreally beautiful environment with the sound of their fluttering wings. Most of the surrounding buildings looking onto the mosque courtyard are residential and fit in seamlessly with the mosque's architecture unlike some other parts of the walled city where ugly new developments sometimes sit in jarring conflict next to sublime monuments.

Entrance gateway and minarets of Wazir Khan mosque as viewed from outside the prayer area entrance

Hakim Aliuddin, the trusted aide of Emperor Shahjahan was granted the title of Wazir Khan in 1620. He became the governor of Punjab in 1632 and left a legacy of numerous monuments, the most famous of which is the Wazir Khan mosque. He also established the town of Wazirabad located 100 km north of Lahore in Gujranwala district.

Single aisle prayer chamber of Masjid Wazir Khan

After spending some time in the peaceful Wazir Khan mosque we walked south east past the Delhi gate bazaar exiting the walled city via Delhi gate where our car was waiting to transport us back home to a more spacious, amenity-filled but less enchanting Lahore.

To Follow:

Part 3 - Shahdara Monuments

Part 4 - A Visit to Multan

Part 5 - Snapshots of Personal History

Trip to Pakistan - A Photo Journal with Random Musings (Part 1)

2011-03-05T18:25:00.000-08:00

February 12th & 13th - Alhamra Arts Council, Lahore:

The renowned Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz was born on February 13th, 1911 and his birth centenary is being celebrated this year both in Pakistan as well as in many other cities all over the world. Faiz's family spearheaded the efforts to organize numerous events in Lahore to mark the occasion. This included an exhibition of photographs at Faiz Ghar in Model Town, release of some new books on Faiz, a colloquium on his life and work at LUMS, a session of readings and reminiscences by some of Faiz's friends and family and an evening of music with Tina Sani singing Faiz.

No photography was allowed at the performance events but I sneaked in a badly lit, badly taken photo just for the record.

On February 12th, I attended the session of readings and recollections at the Alhamra Arts Council. The primary attraction for many attendees was the Indian contingent led by Shabana Azmi and her poet husband Javed Akhtar. (Shabana Azmi's father, the progressive poet Kaifi Azmi, was a close friend of Faiz and she had known "Faiz chacha" since she was a young girl). The Rajasthani singer Ila Arun also accompanied the celebrated filmi pair. The evening was a bit of a hodge podge. There were some sublime moments like Ila Arun's highly unusual and powerful rendition of Faiz's poem "Africa Come Back" with its haunting refrain of "Aa jao Afreeka". Also, the novelist Ali Sethi, whose vocals have been a big hit for a couple of years at the Jaipur Literature Festival, did a nice job singing Noor Jehan's famous "Mujh se pehli si mohabbat" and Farida Khanum's lesser known gem "Sab qatl ho kay teray muqabil say aaye haiN". Javed Akhtar is a natural storyteller and his narration of interactions with Faiz during the poet's visits to India had the crowd in stitches. Shabana Azmi was quite overshadowed by her husband's deft public performance. The rest of the evening was mostly a miss with Arshad Mehmood's pathetic introduction of Indian visitor and Faiz family friend Shama Zaidi ranking as the low point.

The musical evening with Tina Sani on February 13th was more uniformly enjoyable. The playlist had a good mix of the well-known ("Bahar aayee") and the new ("Kuch pehlay inn aankhoN aagay", "Woh butoN nay daalay heiN waswase") with the traditional finale "Hum dekheiN gay". Tina Sani also sang the beautiful number from the Shabana Azmi / Muzaffar Ali film "Anjuman" written by Faiz and composed by Khaiyyam ("Kab yaad meiN tera saath nahiN") and courageously dedicated a verse in that ghazal to Salmaan Taseer.

Jis dhaj say koyee maqtal meiN gaya woh shaan salamat rehti hai
Yeh jaan to aani jaani hai, iss jaaN ki to koyee baat nahiN

February 14th - Garden Town, Lahore:

Visited the Chughtai Museum. Abdul Rahman Chughtai (1899-1975) was the famous national artist known for his large watercolors as well as a distinctive style influenced by Islamic calligraphy and miniature painting. The museum has been established in the residence where the artist died and is owned and run by Abdul Rahman Chughtai's son, Arif Chughtai. Interestingly, Abdul Rahman Chughtai is buried on the property alongside his brother.

February 15th - Allama Iqbal Road, Garhi Shahu, Lahore:

Visited the Allama Iqbal Museum in the morning. This museum was established in 1977 in the house where the philosopher poet spent the last three years of his life and died in 1938. The government bought the property from Iqbal's son Justice Javed Iqbal. Iqbal himself named the house "Javed Manzil" and had bequeathed this property to Javed Iqbal in his own life even though his son was only a six year old boy. This was Iqbal's fourth house in Lahore. (His first house was inside Bhati Gate before he went to Europe for his education, second was in Anarkali and the third was on McLeod Road). This land and house cost him a princely sum of 42,000 rupees in 1935.

The museum houses many of his personal effects such as suits, shoes, bow ties, watch etc. It also has photographs, letters written by him to his family and contemporaries and his various books and educational degrees. There is also the room in which he received guests with its original furniture in place including the bed on which he breathed his last.

Looking for Refuge in Poetry - "In Memoriam" by Tennyson

2011-01-05T14:03:00.000-08:00

In grim times, there is always solace to be found in good poetry. Whatever the tribulations of the present it is always wise to regain a modicum of optimism without which life can become quite unbearable. Lord Alfred Tennyson's new year excerpt from his great poem "In Memoriam" is particularly apposite for the occasion even though I am a few days delayed in ringing it in. Perhaps this poem can usher in the new year afresh.

"In Memoriam" [Ring out, wild bells] -
Lord Alfred Tennyson

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind
For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

(Slow) Death of a Nation

2011-01-04T23:53:00.000-08:00

The governor of Pakistan's Punjab province, Salman Taseer, was assasinated today in Islamabad by one of his security guards. The motivation for the cold-blooded killing seems to be Governor Taseer's vocal advocacy for the reform of Pakistan's notorious blasphemy laws which are often abused to persecute minorities and frequently exploited to exact personal vendettas. I was not much of an admirer of Mr. Taseer's political style but in a nation cowed with fear of extremists I had enormous respect for his courageous opposition to the dark forces of religious obscurantism that are devouring Pakistan. He had the great virtue of standing up unabashedly in public for his liberal beliefs which were quite evidently not shared by a vast majority of his compatriots. He knew that there were threats to his life but he did not shy away from expressing his views unlike dozens of other politicians who maintain cowardly ambiguity or even worse kow tow to reactionary forces.

Even though I follow South Asian politics closely, I don't much comment on the sorry state of Pakistani state and society on this blog. There are many inside and outside the country who are chronicling the country's tragic downward spiral. I have instead preferred to focus in this space on the historical and cultural richness of the place where I spent my formative years. However, there are times that it is not possible to maintain the hope that the ship of state will one day be righted and that the perenially suffering ordinary citizens will some day find relief from their unending misery. Today is one of those dark days which signal a steadily accelerating slide into the abyss.

There are many complex reasons why Pakistan today stands at the precipice of catastrophe. Perhaps the most important is the unrelenting exploitation of the country by its ruling elites (military, political, feudal and bureaucratic) since the country's independence. From 1951 onwards Pakistan has been a rentier state whose rulers utterly ignored investment in their own citizens but mastered the art of monetizing their geopolitical location by selling their alliance to imperial patrons. They were first put on the payroll for an extended period by the U.S. during the cold war to join the anti-communist camp which also happened to fit perfectly with the military's obsessively anti-India view of the world. Along with the founding ideology of a religiously-based state, disregard for the needs of its own citizens and military emasculaton of democratic institutions, this uncritical alliance with the likes of the medieval Saudis and the cynical Americans against the "godless" Russians continued to push the population toward creeping intolerance and fanaticism.

The straw that finally broke the camel's back was the disastrous military rule of Zia-ul-Haq and the country's frontline role in the decade long war after the Russians invaded Afghanstan in 1979. Pakistan became both a major conduit and destination for drugs, guns, refugees, mujahideen and mullahs with billions of dollars channeled through the Pakistani military to turn Afghanistan into Russia's Vietnam. The seeds of fanaticism and systemic rent-seeking by the ruling elite were now firmly planted. After the Russian departure and the end of the cold war, the U.S. lost interest in Pakistan in the 90's and the ruling establishment was temporarily set adrift without an imperial sponsor. The establishment knew no other way of how to run the country and the patterns of empowering intolerance, financial mismanagement and ignoring the needs of the populace continued unabated. The state had temporarily lost any reliable rental income and turned to arms deals with rogue regimes to finance its unsustainable policies but the post-9/11 "war on terror" brought the country back in the limelight. Suddenly, the U.S needed the former client state yet again for a new mission but with the added twist that the ally was also the source of much of the trouble. Also, by now too much had changed for the relationship to return to the former coziness as the population had been radicalized dramatically having been reminded repeatedly of the former friend's treacherous abadonment. More ominously, the children of the Zia years had now grown up and the malignancy initiated in those years had metastasized in every nook and corner of society.

This leads us to the Pakistan of today: a poverty stricken population with a dangerously radicalized youth that lacks education and opportunity and is susceptible to all manner of conspiracies and angry paranoias; a nuclear country living beyond its means hurtling toward anarchy. The country may be past the point of no return with the society now tipped permanently toward the religious fanatics and their sympathisers which includes significant sections of the urban middles classes. Only a very concerted effort by the ruling establishment to unequivocally change direction may have a chance of arresting the slide. However, the ruling elites have demonstrated scant understanding of the existential crisis facing Pakistan let alone showing the willingness and capability to take on the challenge. If things continue as they are, the assasination of even flawed liberals like Salman Taseer and of Benazir Bhutto before her will be seen as signal events hastening the rapidly extinguishing hopes for a moderate, democratic state that can provide opportunities for its people.

A coda: There has always been a deep confusion about Pakistan's identity and the question of what sort of state its founder intended to establish has never been resolved. It is a topic that can be debated for a long time but Pakistan's example makes one thing plain. Modern nation states cannot thrive when their ideological basis is exclusionary. A state based on primacy of religion or ethnicity will, in a pinch, always relegate minority citizens to an inferior status. In the contest between equality before the law and ideological purity the state's ideological reason for existence will always trump the facade of supposed legal protections for the weak. This is as true of Pakistan as it is of Israel and post-revolution Iran. A state based on principles of absolute equality of all citizens under the law is a prerequisite for a modern nation state. Even when states fail to live up to their principles in practice sound constitutional principles make it possible for individuals to defend their rights and liberites from a position of moral strength. The history of the United States is a gradual march in the direction of greater individual liberty and equality before the law. American minorities won these freedoms by arguments and struggle based on the virtuous founding principles of the constitution even when in practice the principles were not always upheld. The struggle for equal rights in the U.S. is a ongoing process but the principles enunciated by the founding fathers always provide intellectual, legal and moral support for those seeking equal rights under the law.

Faiz's 26th Death Anniversary - A Noor Jehan Tribute

2010-11-21T23:02:00.000-08:00

Faiz Ahmed Faiz died 26 years ago yesterday (November 20th, 1984) aged 73. Over the years, regardless of whether governments tried to suppress his poetry or to promote it, his hold on the Pakistani literary culture has never flagged. In addition to the seemingly eternal relevance of his poetry to the Pakistani masses, Faiz was also fortunate to have had his works performed by the greatest Pakistani vocalists of the twentieth century. Malika Pukhraj, Farida Khanum, Mehdi Hassan, Amanat Ali Khan and of course Iqbal Bano all have signature recordings of Faiz's kalam.

However, starting with "Mujh Se Pehli Si Mohabbat Meray Mehboob Na Maang", Noor Jehan came to be identified as the voice of the revolutionary poet in captivity. Faiz is said to have heard Noor Jehan's rendition in prison and permanently dedicated the ghazal to her. With the possible exception of Iqbal Bano's "Hum DekheiN Ge", Noor Jehan's original version of "Mujh Se Pehli Si Mohabbat" is the ghazal that most reverberates in the Pakistani popular imagination.

As a tribute on Faiz's anniversary, here is a version of Noor Jehan singing this ghazal live. The video is old but I love the quintessential Noor Jehan you see in this performance.

Here is another personal favorite of Noor Jehan singing Faiz: "Tum aaye ho na shab-e-intezaar guzri hai"

Woh Baat Saare Fasane MeiN Jis Ka Zikr Na Tha
Woh Baat Unko Bohat Na Gawaar Guzri Hai

Photo: Faiz with the Chilean 1971 Nobel Laureate poet, Pablo Neruda

Granta 112: The Pakistan Issue

2010-11-21T21:59:00.000-08:00

"Right now there is a collision of interesting times and terrific talent of writing about Pakistan and writing coming from Pakistan. --- Its a thrilling moment literarily but obviously there are some serious themes at work here." (John Freeman, Granta editor)

"I cannot subscribe to the notion that Pakistan will fall apart; it might but I am not going to begin from that point. I can't. I love that place." (Novelist Nadeem Aslam in an interview with Carol Zall of "PRI's The World" radio program)

Granta's Pakistan issue published this fall is a major literary event for the country. Even as it highlights the quality and breadth of modern "Pakistani" art and writing it would be foolish to believe that the boom in good English writing coming from Pakistani-origin authors, by itself, is the primary reason for this literary focus on the country. The "interesting times" that Freeman refers to are, of course, a major contributing factor. Even so, this prominence on a global platform for the literary and artistic voices of the country is an unqualified boon for those who wish to have Pakistan seen from a perspective other than the prennial lens of "security".

The issue has been reviewed widely in both the British and American media: Isaac Chotiner in the The New York Times, Ben East in The National, Mustafa Qadri in The Guardian, Arifa Akbar in The Independent and Mira Sethi in The Wall Street Journal. On November 15th, Public Radio International's program The World and its host Lisa Mullins devoted half of the radio show to a discussion of Granta's Pakistan issue including interviews with Declan Walsh, Kamila Shamise and Nadeem Aslam.

Granta's issue will reach only a tiny slice of the country's English speaking elite plus a few curious foreigners but it will introduce readers to the richness of current English writing by Pakistanis. They may be surprised by what they find. Some of the most exciting voices on the South Asian literary scene are Pakistani. Mohammad Hanif, Nadeem Aslam and Daniyal Mueenuddin are easily distinguished from many of their Indian fiction writing counterparts in style as well as choice of subject matter. Mueenuddin, in particular, with his characters and stories set in a rural milieu is plying unique territory.

Jafar Panahi - In Defense of Tolerance & Free Speech

2010-11-17T15:30:00.000-08:00

Jafar Panahi, the internationally acclaimed Iranian film director was arrested earlier this year by the authorities on charges of making an "anti-state" film. He was held in detention without trial for 3 months and released on $200,000 bail only after his compatriot filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami circulated an open letter petition to the Iranian government that was signed by the likes of Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese.

Robert Mackey in the New York Times today has the details of the story including the English translation of the full text of the passionate statement that Panahi made to the court last week in defense of artistic freedom and tolerance. It is a plea that must be heard by repressive governments and authoritarian groups all over the world. This is an eloquent defense of the most basic of human rights: the freedom to think and speak one's conscience without private or public coercion. It is convenient to talk only of Iran in this context but these are values periodically under threat in many parts of the world. Sadly, it is the so-called Islamic world where most restrictions exist on this fundamental human freedom with many western allies like Saudi Arabia and Egypt being the worst offenders.

Here's the second half of Panahi's courageous statement which is patriotic in the best sense of that much abused word:

History testifies that an artist’s mind is the analytical mind of his society. By learning about the culture and history of his country, by observing the events that occur in his surroundings, he sees, analyzes and presents issues of the day through his art form to the society.

How can anyone be accused of any crime because of his mind and what passes through the mind?

The assassination of ideas and sterilizing artists of a society has only one result: killing the roots of art and creativity. Arresting my colleagues and I while shooting an unfinished film is nothing but an attack by those in power on all the artists of this land. It drives this crystal clear however sad message home: “You will repent if you don’t think like us.”

I would like to remind the court of yet an other ironic fact about my imprisonment: the space given to Jafar Panahi’s festival awards in Tehran’s Museum of Cinema is much larger than his cell in prison.

All said, despite all the injustice done to me, I, Jafar Panahi, declare once again that I am an Iranian, I am staying in my country and I like to work in my own country. I love my country, I have paid a price for this love too, and I am willing to pay again if necessary. I have yet another declaration to add to the first one. As shown in my films, I declare that I believe in the right of “the other” to be different, I believe in mutual understanding and respect, as well as in tolerance; the tolerance that forbid me from judgment and hatred. I don’t hate anybody, not even my interrogators.

I recognize my responsibilities toward the future generations that will inherit this country from us.

History is patient. Insignificant stories happen without even acknowledging their insignificance. I, myself, am worried about the future generations.

Our country is quite vulnerable; it is only through the [guarantee] of the state of law for all, regardless of any ethnic, religious or political consideration, that we can avoid the very real danger of a chaotic and fatal future. I truly believe that tolerance represents the only realistic and honorable solution to this imminent danger.

Respectfully,
Jafar Panahi
An Iranian filmmaker

UPDATE: December 20th, 2010

Jafar Panahi was jailed by the Iranian authorities for 6 years for working on a film which was judged "anti-regime". He has also been restricted from traveling abroad or speaking to foreigners for 20 years. Here's the story in The Times.

Iran is a particularly noxious regime but defenders of individual liberty and freedom of speech need to be vigilant everywhere. From religious zealots who advocate murder against offensive expression to the Western governments bearing down on Julian Assange to dissuade people from exposing their wretched power games, individual freedoms need consistent defense everywhere on the globe.

Stray Thoughts - I

2010-10-03T16:29:00.000-07:00

1) I was listening this afternoon to Jonathan Franzen's interview on KQED's "City Arts & Lectures" series. His recent novel "Freedom" has received almost unprecedented literary attention a decade after the blockbuster success of "The Corrections". An audience member asked him what kind of people read serious fiction about unhappy people to which Franzen responded that literary research shows that fiction readers are typically "socially isolated" which doesn't imply that they don't have friends or semi-normal lives. It just means that these "readers" often feel a closer kinship to books and authors than they do to people around them.

2) Pankaj Mishra mentions in his op-ed piece in the New York Times today that the private wealth of 49 Indians on the Forbes list is nearly 31 percent of India’s gross domestic product. Most poor countries are likely to have similar statistics and the wealth gap is rising alarmingly even in the wealthy countries, particularly in the United Sates.When I see the images or read of the unending depredations of the wretched of the earth I often wonder how it is that the rich and the powerful are able to sustain such a patently unjust status quo. Why are the far more numerous poor and oppressed unable to mount any significant challenge to the ugly conditions they are doomed to endure because of unhappy accidents of birth?

Here's one answer via Lev Tolstoy in Tony Judt's brilliant last book "Ill Fares the Land":

"There are no conditions of life to which a man cannot get accustomed, especially if he sees them accepted by everyone around him." (Anna Karenina)

Jose Saramago - The Notebook

2010-09-26T19:38:00.000-07:00

Jose Saramago, the Nobel-laureate Portuguese novelist, died earlier this summer at the age of 87. Fernanda Eberstadt wrote an obituary in The New York Times which also does a good job of surveying his major works. I have not read "The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis" and "The Gospel According to Jesus Christ", the two works that are considered his masterpieces but did read the more recent "Death with Interruptions" which continued the trend of his later, more allegorical writings. In "Death with Interruptions" he imagines a country where Death decides to take a break and give humans an idea of what it would mean to have eternal life. After the initial euphoria the unbearableness of unending life and the desirability of death begins to dawn on people for reasons big and small. James Wood wrote a typically perceptive review in The New Yorker called "Death Takes a Holiday". As Wood writes in his review:

“awkwardnesses”—metaphysical, political, pragmatic—soon reënter. The Catholic Church is the first institution to sense a danger. The Cardinal phones the Prime Minister to point out that “without death there is no resurrection, and without resurrection there is no church.” For the Cardinal, life without death is tantamount to God’s willing His own demise. Life without death abolishes the soul. A panel of philosophers and clergymen is convened, and both sides agree that religion needs death “as much as we need bread to eat.” Life without death is like life without God, one churchman says, because “if human beings do not die then everything will be permissible.” (This is a version of the Dostoyevskian fear that without God everything is permitted.) One philosopher, sounding like the slyly secular Saramago, suggests that since death was “clearly the only agricultural implement god possessed with which to plough the roads that would lead to his kingdom, the obvious, irrefutable conclusion is that the entire holy story ends, inevitably, in a cul-de-sac.”

However what prompted this blog entry is that I am currently reading Saramago's collection of blog / journal entries that he wrote for a year between September 2008 and August 2009 and were published this year under the title "The Notebook". These small pieces reveal a man of luminous intelligence, acute perception, deep commitment to fairness, justice and left-wing politics and a visceral disgust for power that tramples on the dignity of human beings. Saramago never forgot the dirt poor, rural background that shaped him. Even at 86, the fire burned brightly for the man who was a member of the communist party in the darkest days of Portugal's fascist government and chose exile to the Canary Islands in 1992 on principle when his novel was blocked for a European prize by the Portuguese government under pressure from the Catholic Church.

Here are some excerpts from "The Notebook". I couldn't help read many of his observations and relate them to my own obsessions. His love letter to Lisbon would resonate with anyone who feels a similar connection to their personal Lisbon. (I substitute "Lahore" for "Lisbon" in this essay)

September 15th, 2008: Words for a City

"But in 1147, when the Moors were defeated after a three-month siege, the name of the city wasn't changed right away;---When did Lisboa start being Lisboa in law and in effect?---
One might think these historical minutiae uninteresting, but they interest me a great deal: not just knowing but seeing - in the precise meaning of the word - how Lisbon has been changing since those days. If cinema had existed at the time, if the old chroniclers had been cameramen, if the thousand and one changes through which Lisbon has passed over the centuries had been recorded, we would have been able to see Lisbon growing and moving like a living thing across eight centuries, like those flowers that we see on television opening up in just a few seconds, from a still, closed bud to a final splendor of shapes and colors. I think I would love that Lisbon above all else.

In physical terms we inhabit space, but in emotional terms we are inhabited, by memory. A memory composed of a space and a time, a memory inside which we live, like an island between two oceans - one the past, the other the future. We can navigate the ocean of the recent past thanks to personal memory, which retains the recollection of the routes it has traveled, but to navigate the distant past we have to use memories that time has accumulated, memories of a space that is continually changing, as fleeting as time itself. This film of Lisbon, compressing time and expanding space, would be the perfect memory of the city.

What we know of places is how we coincide with them over a certain period of time in the spaces they occupy. The place was there, the person appeared, then the person left, the place continued, the place having made the person, the person having transformed the place.

October 9th, 2008: God and Ratzinger

As I once wrote during a spell of vain metaphysical inquiry, a good fifteen years ago, God is the silence of the universe and man is the cry that gives meaning to that silence.

October 23rd, 2008: Do Torturers Have Souls?

Through my will I can determine to do or not to do something, and liberty renders me free to determine mysef one way or another. Since language has accustomed us to consider the will and liberty as inherently positive concepts, we are suddenly aware of an instinctive fear that the sparkling medals that we call liberty and will can show the complete and utter opposite on their reverse sides. It was through the use of his freedom (shocking though the use of this word might seem to us in such a context) that General Videla became, through his own will - I insist on that, through his own will - one of the most loathsome participants in the bloody and seemingly unending world history of torture and murder.--

Knowing whether or not they have souls does not matter much. In fact, the person who should know most about this subject is the Argentine Catholic priest Christian von Vernich, who a few months ago was sentenced to life imprisonment for genocide. His service record shows six murders, the torture of thirty-four people, and forty-two cases of kidnapping. And if I might be allowed a tragic irony, it is even possible that at some point he gave one of his victims the last rites....

November 7th, 2008: Words

Just as kindness should not be ashamed of being kindness, so justice should never forget that above all it is restitution, the restitution of rights. All of them, beginning with the basic right to live in dignity. If I were asked to put charity, kindness, and justice in order of precedence, I would give first place to kindness, second to justice and third to charity. Because kindness already dispenses justice and charity of its own accord, and because a fair system of justice already contains sufficient charity within it. Charity is what is left when there is neither kindness nor justice. (emphasis mine)

The Dark Clouds Over Pakistani Cricket

2010-08-31T22:19:00.000-07:00

The cricket spot fixing scandal has created a deep sense of despondency amongst supporters of Pakistani cricket at home and abroad. That it comes in the midst of one of the worst natural disasters in Pakistan’s history compounds the sense of national betrayal. It is indeed fair to ask that all allegations need to be fully investigated and any guilt firmly established before any disciplinary steps are contemplated. However, most fair observers have seen enough early evidence in the “News of the World” videos and the subsequent predicted no-balls bowled by the fast bowlers to conclude that something is rotten with Pakistani cricket. This is not the first instance where Pakistan’s cricket has come under the cloud of match fixing. After the initial anger and feelings of betrayal virtually everyone is asking the question of what should be done. No observer of Pakistani cricket can have an iota of faith in PCB and its current leadership to deal with this issue in the sage and firm manner that it requires. In fact, one cannot even be sure that members of management are not themselves tainted. Nothing less than the future of Pakistan cricket is at stake.

I strongly believe that the rest of the tour should be suspended and Pakistan should voluntarily put a temporary moratorium on itself from playing international cricket until it sorts out the mess. The current PCB should be disbanded and a fully empowered investigation commission should be appointed to work through this episode expeditiously and without interference. My candidates would be respected jurists like Justice Saeed-u-Zaman Siddiqui, Fakhruddin G Ebrahim etc. along with former cricketers like Majid Khan and Zaheer Abbas. This commission should first and foremost establish facts by examining all evidence and interviewing players, coaches and management in collaboration with ACSU and ICC. It should then clearly lay out the facts in a public report as soon as possible. The report should be accompanied with clear recommendations of lifetime bans for anyone found to have involvement in spot or match fixing.

If Pakistan does not tackle this seriously and establish undiluted integrity to its cricket this cancer will never go away. For too long in Pakistani cricket all inconvenient facts have been swept under the rug, the best performers shielded from the consequences of their actions (Wasim Akram, Saeed Anwar, Waqar Younis) and even diluted Qayyum report recommendations not implemented. The result has been an ever spiraling institutional rot and rampant corruption and indiscipline. The current state of affairs is particularly terrible for those players who have resisted what seem to be ever present illegal temptations. To have any chance that players, present and future, would not have their integrity in perpetual doubt is for Pakistan’s cricket to clean the stables ruthlessly. Half-hearted measures will ensure that Pakistan cricket will always remain suspect, even if allowed into the international fold. There will be no no-ball, wide, dropped catch and loss that will escape the suspicion of corruption. Like almost everybody I feel the most sympathy for the 18-year old Mohammad Amir and I think the strongest case exists for him to get a mitigated sentence but we should remember that these are exactly the excuses that were made for Mohammad Asif in the past. We were told that he was “young, poor and uneducated” but he has demonstrated even before this episode his non-stop penchant for making mischief.

Additionally, some people have argued that spot fixing is a lesser evil than match fixing but this statement completely misunderstands the tremendous destructive effect of any illegal activity. Firstly, if there are players who have gone down the route of taking money to alter the game in a small way there is no reason for them not to keep pushing the boundary by increments if the pay-off is larger. Secondly, the distorting lens of corruption affects every decision you make as a player. If you are inside the corrupt mafia you will systematically punish people outside the circle or more likely try to exclude them from the team entirely (Rashid Latif and Basit Ali in the past, perhaps Mohammad Yousuf recently who Salman Butt did not want back in the team). You will also potentially rebel against a clean captain including underperforming to get him out (like what seems to have happened to Younis Khan in New Zealand). These are only examples. The entire behavior pattern is affected by the dynamic of illegality.

As a passionate Pakistan cricket fan, I will not be following the rest of the series if it goes ahead. I will not watch Pakistan play cricket again until I have some assurance that I am watching a clean contest. I will be waiting on the sidelines with a heavy heart until there is reasonable belief that justice has been done to those players who upheld their integrity and that the crooks have been permanently thrown out of the game.

"Vay MeiN Chori Chori" - ReshmaN, Meesha Shafi & Lata Mangeshkar

2010-07-14T23:16:00.000-07:00

Coke Studio is Rohail Hyatt's innovative and extremely popular music program on Pakistani TV. Since his days as one of the original band members of Vital Signs in the early 90's he has come a long way as a highly respected and sought-after music producer who is creatively showcasing the breadth of Pakistan's indigenous music talent from well-known veterans to unfamiliar but promising young performers. Coke Studio is in the midst of its third season this summer and amongst several excellent performances thus far, Meesha Shafi's "ambient and trippy" revival of "Vay meiN chori chori" has been widely admired both for her deep, resonant voice and the quality of the vocals. In part the popularity of the song owes something to the young, attractive and charismatic presence of Meesha Shafi and the anticipation that behind the raw talent she is a potential star in the making. As the daughter of TV actress Saba Pervaiz, her performing arts pedigree is an additional marketing boon. "Vay meiN chori chori" is a revival of a song that was first performed by the virtuosic folk singer ReshmaN several decades ago. Here is Meesha Shafi's version:

ReshmaN, the popular Pakistani folk singer with a stentorian voice, is best known for her raw, almost primal renditions of Punjabi and Rajasthani folk songs. She was born in Loha village in Rajasthan in 1947 in a gypsy family which moved to the Pakistani side of that desert terrain after partition. She is often reverently referred to as the "Voice of the Desert". Here is ReshmaN's version of "Chori, Chori":

While listening to Meesha Shafi's version, I felt right away that I had heard the melody before in an Indian film song. Finally, after humming a few bars I recalled that Lata Mangeshkar's wonderful song "Yara sili sili" from the film "Lekin" is the exact same composition. That 1991 film starring Vinod Khanna and Dimple Kapadia is set in Rajasthan so it is not surprising that a Rajasthani folk melody would be used. Once I went to YouTube to look at a video of "Yara sili sili" all sorts of hostile comments from internet Indians and Pakistanis unpleasantly confirmed that it is indeed the same "dhun". Personally, I think it takes nothing away from the masterful and atmospherically different song sung by Lata. The added bonus are Gulzar's lyrics. Here is Lata singing "Yara sili sili" behind Dimple Kapadia's moving lips:

Photo: A young ReshmaN

Excerpts from Saul Bellow's Letters

2010-04-25T11:44:00.000-07:00

In the New Yorker's April 26th, 2010 issue there is a selection of Saul Bellow's letters to other authors of his acquaintance entitled "Among Writers". I found many of Bellow's observations on life and letters thought provoking. Here are some excerpts:

"You were engaged, as a writer should be, in transforming yourself. When I read your collected stories I was moved to see the transformation taking place on the printed page. There's nothing that counts really except this transforming action of the soul. ---

Up and down on these rough American seas we've navigated for so many decades; we've had our bad trips too-unavoidable absurdities, dirty weather, but that doesn't count really. I've been trying to say what does count...."
(To John Cheever: December 9th, 1981)

"...losing a parent is something like driving through a plate-glass window. You didn't know it was there until it shattered, and then for years to come you're picking up the pieces-down to the last glassy splinter.

Of course you are your father, and he is you. I have often felt this about my own father, whom I half expect to see when I die. But I believe I do know how your father must have felt, sitting at his typewriter with an unfinished novel. Just as I understand your saying that you are your dad. With a fair degree of accuracy I can see this in my own father. He and I never seemed to be in rapport: our basic assumptions were very different. But that now looks superficial. I treat my sons much as he treated me: out of breath with impatience, and then a long inhalation of affection."
(To Martin Amis: March 13th, 1996)

"I don't do much of anything these days and I spend much of my time indoors. By far my pleasantest diversion is to play with Rosie, now four years old. It now seems to me that my parents wanted me to grow up in a hurry and that I resisted, dragging my feet. They (my parents, not my feet) needed all the help they could get. --- We often stopped before a display of children's shoes. My mother coveted for me a pair of patent-leather sandals with an elegantissimo strap. I finally got them - I rubbed them with butter to preserve the leather. This is when I was six or seven years old, a little older than Rosie is now. Amazing how it all boils down to a pair of patent-leather sandals."
(To Eugene Kennedy: February 19th, 2004)

Allama Iqbal in Heidelberg

2010-04-09T23:42:00.000-07:00

For a few years now I have worked for a European company headquartered near Heidelberg in Germany so I have had an opportunity to visit this lovely, historic city several times. Heidelberg is a beautiful town located on the banks of the river Neckar which originates in the Black Forest and flows into the river Rhine only 12 miles northwest of the city.

But before I had ever been to Heidelberg, the city was associated in my mind with the great poet-philosopher Allama Muhammad Iqbal. Iqbal left Bombay for London by ship in September 1905 to attend Cambridge University. He enrolled at Trinity College and eventually received a B.A degree. From Cambridge, Iqbal went to Germany to pursue a Ph.D in Philosophy and studied in Heidelberg and Munich. It seems amazing but the exact chronology of Iqbal's stay in Germany has not been established. Most likely he was in Germany during 1906 and 1907. Sometime in 1907, under the supervision of Professor Dr. Friedrich Hommel, Iqbal submitted his Ph.D thesis titled "The Development of Metaphysics in Persia" to the Ludwig Maximilians University at Munich and was granted a doctorate.

There is a fascinating piece written by M.A.H. Hobohm called "Muhammad Iqbal and Germany" in which he provides some wonderful details of Iqbal's stay in Heidelberg. This essay is worth reading in its entirety. Iqbal stayed for some time in the "Pension Scherer" which was a boarding house for foreign students. At this boarding house Miss Emma Wegenast was Iqbal's German language tutor. Iqbal corresponded with Fraulein Wegenast for several years after returning to Lahore. Hobohm has copies of 27 such letters which includes 2 postcards and this collection reveals Iqbal's fondness for his former tutor but also his love for German literary culture and his affection for Heidelberg. Hobohm provides some wonderful quotes from the letters:

"Here it is: Fraulein Wegenast, that is Goethe, Heine, Kant and Schopenhauer, it is Heidelberg, the Neckar, Germany —it is those happy days!"

"It is impossible for me to forget your beautiful country where I have learned so much. My stay in Heidelberg is nothing now but a beautiful dream. How I’d wish I could repeat it!"

"I’d wish I could see you once more at Heidelberg or Heilbronn whence we shall together make a pilgrimage to the sacred grave of the great master Goethe."

This brings me back to my own visits to Heidelberg where I have occasionally tried to retrace Iqbal's steps. I have wandered the halls of the philosophy department at the University of Heidelberg where he studied. Normally I stay at the Marriott Hotel in Heidelberg and "Iqbal Ufer", the street honoring the great poet, is right across from that hotel and a constant reminder of the philosopher-poet's years of association with this city. "Ufer" means river bank in German and this location is right on the river Neckar. All Things Pakistan has done a post about this location in the past. However a colleague of mine, knowing my interest in Iqbal, just sent me a couple of rare photographs of the house where Iqbal lived in Heidelberg and where a sandstone plaque from 1966 acknowledges the historic landmark.

The plaque reads:

Mohammad Iqbal
1877 – 1938

National Philosopher, Poet

and Spiritual Father of Pakistan

lived here in the year 1907.

This honorary plaque was displayed on September 16th, 1966 by the minister of cultural affairs of the state of Baden Wuerttemberg Prof. Dr. Wilhelm Hahn in the presence of His Excellency the Ambassador of Pakistan Abdurrahman Khan and the 1st mayor of the city of Heidelberg, Georg Klemm.

Picture of the house with the plaque on the brick wall

As with all great literary voices it is always most fitting to end with their own words. After my first visit to Heidelberg I searched Kuliyat-e-Iqbal to see if there was any lasting trace of Heidelberg in Iqbal's poetry. I found the nazm "Aik Shaam" in "Bang-e-Dara". The sub-heading says, "Darya-e-Neckar (Heidelberg) ke kinare par". This is a poem of ambience and conjures a lovely atmosphere in which the poet standing at the edge of the river at night experiences a calm and peaceful communion with nature. It is not until the powerful last verse when an inner turmoil and sadness is suddenly hinted at, revealing the heart of the poet at odds with his serene surroundings.

Aik Shaam
(Darya-e-Neckar (Heidelberg) ke kinare par)

Khamosh hai chandni qamar ki
ShaakheiN haiN khmosh har shajar ki

Waadi ke nawa farosh khamosh
Kohsaar ke sabz posh khamosh

Fitrat behosh ho gai hai
Aaghosh maiN shab ke so gayee hai

Kuch aisa sakoot ka fasooN hai
Neckar ka kharam bhi sakooN hai

TaaroN ka khmosh kaarvaaN hai
Yeh kafila be dara rawaN hai

Khamosh haiN koh-o-dasht-o-darya
Qudrat hai muraqbe maiN goya

Aye dil! tu bhi khmosh ho ja
Aaghosh maiN gham ko lay ke so ja

Tony Judt's Reflections - "Death be not Proud"

2010-04-07T12:07:00.000-07:00

With a short essay entitled "Night" in the January 14th, 2010 issue of the New York Review of Books Tony Judt, the British, Jewish NYU historian and prominent public intellectual, began writing a series of short reflections that he likely expects to be a coda to his remarkable intellectual life. I have blogged about Tony Judt before here and here and have long admired him for his intellectual acuity and moral courage. But these series of memoirs are a startling revelation even for a long time fan.

In 2008 Tony Judt was diagnosed with ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) or Lou Gehrig's disease. This deadly motor neuron disease causes the nervous system to degenerate overtime with patients eventually losing their ability to move their bodies even as their mind continues to function normally. Since October 2009, Judt has been paralyzed from the neck down and breathing through a respirator. His voice is now so weak that he can be heard only through an amplifier. In "Night", he vividly describes the experience of losing control over his body and he continues to write with the help of an assistant who transcribes his dictation. As he comes to terms with his approaching mortality, Judt's equanimity, thoughtfulness and his luminous intellect are inspirational.

Since the initial discussion of his illness in "Night", Tony Judt's short reflective essays have been entitled "Joe" , "Bedder" , "Kibbutz" , "Revolutionaries" , "Food" , "The Green Line" , "Saved by Czech" , "Paris was Yesterday" , "In Love with Trains" , "Edge People" , "Lord Warden" and "Work". (Only Kibbutz, Food and Edge People have links to the full essays on the NYRB site.) I particularly identify with "Edge People" as I count myself among them.

Excerpts from "Edge People":

As an English-born student of European history teaching in the US; as a Jew somewhat uncomfortable with much that passes for "Jewishness" in contemporary America; as a social democrat frequently at odds with my self-described radical colleagues, I suppose I should seek comfort in the familiar insult of "rootless cosmopolitan." But that seems to me too imprecise, too deliberately universal in its ambitions. Far from being rootless, I am all too well rooted in a variety of contrasting heritages.

In any event, all such labels make me uneasy. We know enough of ideological and political movements to be wary of exclusive solidarity in all its forms. One should keep one's distance not only from the obviously unappealing "-isms"—fascism, jingoism, chauvinism—but also from the more seductive variety: communism, to be sure, but nationalism and Zionism too ---

I prefer the edge: the place where countries, communities, allegiances, affinities, and roots bump uncomfortably up against one another—where cosmopolitanism is not so much an identity as the normal condition of life. Such places once abounded. Well into the twentieth century there were many cities comprising multiple communities and languages—often mutually antagonistic, occasionally clashing, but somehow coexisting. Sarajevo was one, Alexandria another. Tangiers, Salonica, Odessa, Beirut, and Istanbul all qualified—as did smaller towns like Chernovitz and Uzhhorod.

Unlike the late Edward Said, I believe I can understand and even empathize with those who know what it means to love a country. I don't regard such sentiments as incomprehensible; I just don't share them. But over the years these fierce unconditional loyalties—to a country, a God, an idea, or a man—have come to terrify me. The thin veneer of civilization rests upon what may well be an illusory faith in our common humanity. But illusory or not, we would do well to cling to it. Certainly, it is that faith—and the constraints it places upon human misbehavior—that is the first to go in times of war or civil unrest.

On March 29th, 2010 Terry Gross interviewed Judt on her NPR program Fresh Air. I highly recommend listening to this 39 minute interview. I can only wish that more of us possessed Judt's vivid powers of observation and language and his contemplative grace in the face of extreme adversity.

Interview Excerpts:

On his religious views:

"I don't believe in an afterlife. I don't believe in a single or multiple godhead. I respect people who do, but I don't believe it myself. But there's a big 'but' which enters in here. I am much more conscious than I ever was — for obvious reasons — on what it will mean to people left behind once I'm dead. It won't mean anything for me. But it will mean a lot to them. It's important to them — by which I mean my children or my wife or my very close friends — that some spirit of me is in a positive way present in their lives, in their heads, in their imaginations and so on. So [in] one curious way I've come to believe in the afterlife — as a place where I still have moral responsibilities, just as I do in this life — except that I can only exercise them before I get there. Once I get there, it will be too late. So, no God. No organized religion. But a developing sense that there's something bigger than the world we live in, including after we die, and we have responsibilities in that world."

On how living with ALS makes him feel:

"You mustn't focus on what you can't do. If you sit around and think, 'I wish I could walk,' then you'll just be miserable. But if you sit and turn around and think, 'What's the next piece I'm going to write?' then you may not be happy, but you certainly won't wallow in misery. So it's an active choice every day to renew my interest in something that my head can do, so I don't think about the body."

"Toomba" and "Aik Alif" - The Brilliant SaieeN Zahoor at the Coke Studio

2010-04-04T19:16:00.000-07:00

SaieeN Zahoor is a Pakistani Sufi musician who has spent his life singing at Sufi shrines in Punjab and Sindh. He has become a household name relatively recently thanks to Rohail Hyatt's brilliantly produced program of fusion music called "Coke Studio". Here are two wonderful "Coke Studio" performances by SaieeN Zahoor; "Toomba" is a solo performance and "Aik Alif" is with the talented duo Noori (Ali Noor and Ali Hamza).

Farida Khanum Singing Raga Kamod - Manna for the Soul

2010-01-17T12:16:00.000-08:00

The internet is a remarkable treasure trove and I continue to marvel at the doors of culture, information and connectivity that it has opened. My recent discovery is a wonderful collection of Hindustani Classical music on the file sharing site esnips. I have been spending hours listening to pieces I love and discovering unknown treasures of the sub-continent's greatest vocalists.

Here's my selection of the day; Farida Khanum singing Raga Kamod. This is unfortunately the kind of performance by the the sister of Mukhtar Begum and a disciple of Ustad Ashiq Ali Khan (son of the founder of the Patiala Gharana Ustad Fateh Ali Khan, one half of the legendary duo Aliya Fattu) that Pakistani audiences have witnessed only rarely. In a country with almost no appetite for classical music she shifted her focus to lighter forms of singing decades ago.

Raga Kamod by Farida Khanum:

Get this widget

Track details

eSnips Social DNA

P.S. Here is an excellent article on Ustad Ashiq Ali Khan in the online classical music magazine Sadarang. There is also a wonderful personal recollection by Mr. M.A. Sheikh of Ustad Bade Ghulam Ali Khan's "shakkar" ceremony at Takia Meerasian in Lahore in 1932/33. At this event Bade Ghulam Ali Khan honored his two Patiala Gharana gurus, Ustad Ashiq Ali Khan and Ustad Akhtar Hussain Khan (father of Fateh Ali/Amanat Ali).

Bruce Springsteen Tribute at "The 32nd Annual Kennedy Center Honors"

2009-12-30T12:03:00.000-08:00

The Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., which opened in September 1971, is one of America's premier arts facility and features thousands of performances by the greatest artists from America and across the world every year.

It is best known for its recognition of the lifetime contribution of some of America's greatest artists through the prestigious Kennedy Center Honors. This year for the 32nd Annual Kennedy Center Honors the Center honored Mel Brooks (actor, writer, director), Dave Brubeck (pianist, composer), Grace Bumbry (opera singer), Robert DeNiro (actor, director) and Bruce Springsteen (singer, songwriter). The honorees come to the Center and are presented by many of their peers with heartfelt tributes honoring their life's work. This event is televised and this year's event was shown on CBS on December 29th.

I was particularly moved this year by the wonderful tribute performances of legendary Bruce Springsteen songs by some exceptional artists : John Mellencamp ("Born in the USA"), Ben Harper / Jennifer Nettles ("I'm on Fire"), Melissa Etheridge ("Born to Run"), Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam ("My City of Ruins") and Sting ("The Rising"). Here are the performances in two separate exceptionally good quality video clips:

Part 1:

Part 2:

"TitliyaN" - Strings

2009-12-21T12:00:00.000-08:00

The Karachi-based pop duo, 'Strings' is one of my favorite Pakistani music bands. Faisal Kapadia (son of television actor Lateef Kapadia) is the vocalist and Bilal Maqsood (son of talk show host, poet, painter, dramatist, music lover Anwar Maqsood) is the lead guitarist with supporting vocals.

Strings have recently released a video of their song "TitliyaN" from their 2008 album "Koi Aane Wala Hai". The video is conceptually wonderful and it delighted me that, with this video, Strings have paid tribute to so many Pakistani cultural icons who are being lost in the mists of time. For the younger generations who likely constitute a majority of Strings fans, the video may introduce many of them for the first time to the rich cultural legacy to which they are heirs. The selection of the 'legends' is excellent and other than some quibbles I had with omissions (such as Khawaja Khurshid Anwar, Patras Bokhari or Noon Meem Rashid for example) the chosen list is uniformly worthy of recognition.

The romantic lyrics gently tinged with memories of loss are quintessential Anwar Maqsood and form the perfect backdrop for this tribute.

Dil tha khilauna
Chalo toot gaya, kya kaheiN
Koi saathi tha, jisse chaha tha
Wohi loot gaya, kya kaheiN

TitliyaN yaadoN ki urti jaayeiN
RangoN meiN mujhse kuch kehti jaayeiN

Ek jheel thi, kayee phool thay
Sub mit gaye, kya kaheiN

Chaha tha kehna, na kaha, chup rahay
RahoN meiN tanha chalte hi hum rahay

TitliyaN yaadoN ki urti jaayeiN
RangoN meiN mujhse kuch kehti jaayeiN

Girti kirneiN, tera aanchal
Kaise bhooleiN, kya kaheiN
Gaati koyel, mehka aangan
Kaise bhooleiN, kya kaheiN

TitliyaN yaadoN ki urti jaayeiN
RangoN meiN mujhse kuch kehti jaayeiN

Teri chaah thi meri roshni
Abh bujh gayee, kya kaheiN
Dil tha khilauna
Chalo toot gaya, kya kaheiN
Kya kaheiN

Here's Strings' performance of "TitliyaN" in the wonderful new innovative music TV programme Coke Studio. Here's a link to Coke Studio's YouTube Channel.

"Khan Sahib" Mehdi Hassan - Some Immortal Pieces by the Legendary Musician

2009-11-15T12:52:00.000-08:00

Writing about some of the cultural influences of my childhood and adolescence was one of the reasons I started writing this blog a couple of years ago. In part, it is an exercise in nostalgia but it is also a desire to share the treasures that I feel I was unusually fortunate to be exposed to from an early age.

One such indelible influence has been the sublime singing of Mehdi Hassan. I have long wanted to write something about his life and craft but have not found myself equal to the task. A performer of his caliber, I have long believed, needs an in-depth and first rate evaluation. Sadly, to my knowledge, no such effort has emerged, at least in English or on the internet. Finally, a recent conversation with Adil Najam has prompted me to at least share some of my favorite Mehdi Hassan pieces in this post. These can at least be my humble personal tribute to one of the greatest sub-continental singers of the post-partition era.

It is deeply sad that even though his music still has many passionate devotees only the bare bones of Mehdi Hassan's biography are documented. The most comprehensive facts on the internet have been collected by Mr. Anis Shakur whose biographical sketches (even if somewhat unsystematic) of many Pakistani artists and musicians are an invaluable contribution for the preservation of Pakistani cultural memory.

Mehdi Hassan was born in 1927 in the town of Luna, district Jhunjhunu in Rajasthan. Luna is about 100 miles from Jaipur. He was born in a family of musicians and his father Ustad Azeem Khan and uncle ('chacha') Ustad Ismail Khan were notable classical singers of their time. Mehdi Hassan started learning at a very young age from his father. It is said that his first public performance was at age eight at the palace of Maharaja of Baroda. Mehdi Hassan moved to District Khushab in the Sargodha region in Pakistan after partition and worked as an automobile mechanic for some time. Eventually, to pursue his life's calling and seeking a career in music he moved to Karachi. Here he debuted from Radio Pakistan in 1952 singing one of his best known ghazals (by Faiz Ahmed Faiz), "GuloN meiN rang bhare baad-e-nau bahar chale". The composition is by Pandit Ghulam Qadir, who was Mehdi Hassan's older brother and an exceptionally talented composer. I have not been able to find even rudimentary information on Ghulam Qadir other than Mehdi Hassan's statement in a TV program that his older brother was also the composer of two other masterpieces; Hafeez Hoshiarpuri's ghazal "Mohabbat karne waale kum na hoNge" and Razi Tirmizi's "Bhooli bisri chand umeedeiN".

And now for my selection of five personal favorites. For the embedded videos below, with one exception, I have tried to choose some of the lesser known gems in the Mehdi Hassan oeuvre. The last video is the only non-ghazal piece I have included. That semi-classical composition in Raga Tilak Kamod demonstrates Khan Sahib's virtuosic brilliance like few other performances. The effortless beauty of the vocals are mesmerizing and for those who enjoy Hindustani classical music this is the piece de resistance of my selection.

First off the most well known of my selections is Ahmed Faraz's "Ranjish hi sahi":
Ik umr se hooN lazzat-e-girya se bhi mehroom
Aye rahat-e-jaaN mujh ko rulane ke liye aa

Next is Aziz Hamid Madani's ghazal "Taaza hawa bahaar ki":
Taaza hawa bahaar ki dil ka malaal lay gayee
Paa-e-junooN se halka-e-gardish-e-haal le gayee

A ghazal by Hakeem Momin Khan Momin, "Navak andaaz jidhar deeda-e-janaaN"
Phir bahaar aayee wohi dasht nawardi hogee
Phir wohi paaoN wohi khaar-e-mugheelaN hoNge

Khan Sahib's divine singing of Razi Tirmizi's ghazal "Bhooli bisri chand umeedeiN" mentioned above:
Bhooli bisri chand umeedeiN chand fasanay yaad aaye
Tum yaad aaye aur tumhare saath zamaane yaad aaye

and finally the marvelously executed semi-classical number, "Dukhwa meiN kaase kahooN moray sajni" in Raga Tilak Kamod:

The Security of Pakistan's Nuclear Weapons

2009-11-12T21:10:00.000-08:00

In the cloak and dagger world of military affairs and espionage it is particularly difficult for journalists to penetrate the surface and to get to the essence of a story when it is in every side's interest to obfuscate or even lie. On this tough beat I have always had tremendous respect for Seymour Hersh, who has broken more than his fair share of explosive stories which have been extremely embarrassing to the powers that be (e.g. My Lai Massacre, Abu Ghraib prison abuses).

His latest story in this week's New Yorker titled "Defending the Arsenal" on the security of Pakistan's nuclear weapons is incredibly illuminating. It exposes the profound lack of trust in the relationship and how both sides clearly do not believe a word of what they say to each other. The relationship is fundamentally transactional; the rest is rhetoric.

Today, Hersh did an interview with Terry Gross on her NPR program Fresh Air discussing this topic. I thought the interview was excellent and clarified some things that are not in the New Yorker article. For anybody interested in the US-Pakistan relationship and the nuclear issue this interview is a must-listen.

The link to the Terry Gross interview is here.

Some (Morbid) Fragments After a Hiatus

2009-11-01T11:56:00.000-08:00

Several months have passed since I wrote something in this space. There was nothing in particular that held me back other than the routine, ordinary distractions of life but often it is a work of literature or art that, as the Quakers say, "moves one to speak".

Recently a friend and a colleague died at a young age and I had the subject of death on my mind when I came across W.H. Auden's poem "At the Grave of Henry James". How well it expresses the finality of death, the utter despair that even the "great and talkative" Master will forever dwell in eternal silence! A unique mind and his particular novelty gone forever just like all those others under those "rocks named after singular spaces" in that Cambridge municipal cemetery.

While rocks, named after singular spaces
Within which images wandered once that caused
All to tremble and offend,
Stand here in an innocent stillness, each marking
the spot
Where one more series of errors lost its uniqueness
And novelty came to an end.

To whose real advantage were such transactions,
When worlds of reflection were exchanged for trees?
What living occasion can
Be just to the absent? Noon but reflects on itself,
And the small taciturn stone, that is the only witness
To a great and talkative man,

Has no more judgement than my ignorant shadow
(excerpt from "At the Grave of Henry James" by Wystan Hugh Auden)

While on the subject of death, I recently revisited one of my favorite Phillip Larkin poems and I would be remiss if I did not share his great but terrifyingly dark poem "Aubade" (pronounced 'o-baad').

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
- The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anasthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small, unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape,
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

This past summer's great pop culture anthem has been the Black Eyed Peas' wonderful song "I Gotta Feeling". The catchy track is in their latest album titled "The E.N.D. (Energy Never Dies)". Every time I see the title of that album I think to myself: "But it does, it inevitably does".

Photograph: Phillip Larkin

Pakistan are T20 World Champions!

2009-06-21T13:43:00.001-07:00

The Evolution of a "Third Culture"

2009-05-23T20:56:00.000-07:00

In a blog entry I wrote early last year on the Harvard evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker and his essay "The Moral Instinct", I expressed my great admiration for a whole generation of world class scientists who have ably taken on the task of speaking not just to their peers but also the wider audience of curious non-specialists. We increasingly live in an age where serious study of the social sciences and even the humanities have to account for the findings of cutting edge neuroscience, cognitive biology, cosmology and other scientific disciplines if they are to be taken seriously.

Edge Foundation has an excellent website devoted to the promotion of the "Third Culture" which in their own words "consists of those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are." What recently took me to the site were six video interviews posted there with eminent intellectuals asking them about the progress of the Third Culture (the term is derived from a 50 year old lecture titled "The Two Cultures" by the English physicist C. P. Snow who bemoaned the serious gulf between scientists and literary intellectuals).

While on this topic I must mention the delightful profile of the pioneering Univ. of California, San Diego behavioral neurologist, Vilayanur Ramachandran in the May 11th, 2009 issue of The New Yorker. It is frustrating that this excellent profile by John Colapinto is not available online to non-subscribers so I cannot link to the full article. Suffice to say that I would highly recommend finding the article and reading it. Ramachandran comes across as a brilliantly innovative scientist with a fascinating biography, a warm and quirky personality and a passion for problem solving and the communication of ideas. The profile describes his ingenious solution to the problem of pain in phantom limbs using a simple mirror therapy. In a blog on the New Yorker site, Colapinto provides a fascinating description (including photos) of how the mirror therapy works by tricking the mind. Atul Gawande also wrote about this therapy in his New Yorker article called "The Itch" which I blogged about here.

To get a first hand flavor of Ramachandran's genius and his engaging lecture style here is his talk entitled "A journey to the center of your mind". He gives several extremely interesting examples of how the brain works (including the phenomenon of phantom limb pain).

Photo: Vilayanur S. Ramachandran (from the TED website)

November 1st, 2009 update:

Ramachandran dazzles in this video interview below hypothesizing how the problem of consciousness is likely to be explained. He believes that the potential explanation lies in some unique trajectory of human neurological evolution and that qualia (conscious knowledge of a sensation) and awareness of self are linked phenomena.

Justice Souter Retires

2009-05-03T11:45:00.000-07:00

After 19 years, Justice David Souter has decided to leave the bench at age 69. Linda Greenhouse in today's Sunday Times, has an admiring portrait of the somewhat eccentric, reclusive and scholarly New Hampshire jurist who even as he was ill at ease in the public aspects of his office was intellectually very well equipped to be an associate justice.

For years now, Justice Souter had come to be seen as a reliable vote on the side of the court's liberal justices and despite being acknowledged as a keen intellect, his tenure on the court will likely be seen as unexceptional. Unlike a Scalia, he was not an icon for any particularly staunch philosophical view of constitutional interpretation. He did not occupy a pragmatic (sometimes indecipherable) middle in the way of Kennedy which makes him the obsessive focus of court watchers in every close case. And unlike Justice Brennan (whom he replaced) he was not a coalition builder with any penchant for shaping close opinions that could garner a majority for his preferred outcomes. Instead, Justice Souter will most likely be remembered as an independent-minded elder Bush appointee who upset Republican expectations of a reliable conservative vote for Scalia and surprisingly reaffirmed the constitutionality of the court's previous abortion decisions in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992).

An excerpt:

This pattern gave rise to a widespread view of Justice Souter as a misfit or a loner, not quite in touch with modern life. But to focus on his eccentricities — his daily lunch of yogurt and an apple, core and all; the absence of a computer in his personal office — is to miss the essence of a man who in fact is perfectly suited to his job, just not to its trappings. His polite but persistent questioning of lawyers who appear before the court displays his meticulous preparation and his mastery of the case at hand and the cases relevant to it. Far from being out of touch with the modern world, he has simply refused to surrender to it control over aspects of his own life that give him deep contentment: hiking, sailing, time with old friends, reading history.

National Poetry Month - "Moment" by Wislawa Szymborska & "Account" by Czeslaw Milosz

2009-04-30T10:06:00.000-07:00

April is National Poetry Month and the New York Review of Books has been posting a poem every day this month to celebrate the, I suspect, not widely recognized occasion. Even though I can only read them in translation, I have always had a particular affinity for twentieth century Eastern European writers and poets (Brodsky, Milosz, Szymborska, Kundera and of course Kafka). They seem to capture the twentieth century zeitgeist in deeply intimate ways, perhaps because so many of the century's defining struggles and human tragedies played out on their soils.

Here are two poems by two Polish Noble Laureates that NYRB picked for April 28th and 30th respectively. The poem "Account" is by Czeslaw Milosz (pronounced chess-wahf mee-wosh) who was the recipient of the Nobel in 1980 and "Moment" is by the 1996 honoree Wislawa Szymborska.

I have posted Szymborska's wonderful poem " A Few Words on the Soul" in a previous post. In this poem "Moment", she evokes the serene, timeless harmony of nature's beauty. These beautifully contemplative descriptions of nature are a popular theme in her poetry. However, the subtext is the ephemeral human observer, with or without whom nature would continue on oblivious of being observed and indifferent to history's events unfolding around it.

"Moment" - Wislawa Szymborska

I walk on the slope of a hill gone green.
Grass, little flowers in the grass,
as in a children's illustration.
The misty sky's already turning blue.
A view of other hills unfolds in silence.

As if there'd never been any Cambrians, Silurians,
rocks snarling at crags,
upturned abysses,
no nights in flames
and days in clouds of darkness.

As if plains hadn't pushed their way here
in malignant fevers,
icy shivers.

As if seas had seethed only elsewhere,
shredding the shores of the horizons.

It's nine-thirty local time.
Everything's in its place and in polite agreement.
In the valley a little brook cast as a little brook.
A path in the role of a path from always to ever.
Woods disguised as woods alive without end,
and above them birds in flight play birds in flight.

This moment reigns as far as the eye can reach.
One of those earthly moments
invited to linger.

Translated from the Polish by Joanna Trzeciak
------------------------------------------------------------------------

The second poem here by Milosz is considerably darker. As is to be expected from the author of "The Captive Mind", this is a powerful poem of intellectual introspection.

"Account" - Czeslaw Milosz

The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.

Some would be devoted to acting against consciousness,
Like the flight of a moth which, had it known,
Would have tended nevertheless toward the candle's flame.

Others would deal with ways to silence anxiety,
The little whisper which, though it is a warning, is ignored.

I would deal separately with satisfaction and pride,
The time when I was among their adherents
Who strut victoriously, unsuspecting.

But all of them would have one subject, desire,
If only my own—but no, not at all; alas,
I was driven because I wanted to be like others.
I was afraid of what was wild and indecent in me.

The history of my stupidity will not be written.
For one thing, it's late. And the truth is laborious.

(Berkeley, 1979)

Translated from the Polish by Robert Haas & Robert Pinsky

In Memoriam - The Great Iqbal Bano (1935-2009)

2009-04-21T10:00:00.000-07:00

Iqbal Bano, one of the great exponents of semi-classical ghazal singing in the sub-continent, passed away in Lahore at the age of 74. I have recounted a reverie precipitated by her beautiful rendition of Faiz's ghazal "Yeh mausam-e-gul" in a previous post.

The Pakistani newspaper Dawn has a good obituary of Iqbal Bano here and some great photos of the icon in their media gallery. She was born in Delhi in 1935 and was the pupil of Ustad Chaand Khan of the Delhi Gharana. She moved to Pakistan in 1952 at the age of 17 and had her first public concert at the Lahore Art Center in 1957. She was awarded the "Pride of Performance" by the government in 1974.

Even though in the popular imagination her singing is eternally connected with the poetry of Faiz Ahmed Faiz and in particular with the anthem "Hum dekheiN ge", which she performed in virtually every public concert, Iqbal Bano was a versatile singer. She sang some very popular numbers for films in the 1950's. However, along with Ustad Amanat Ali Khan, Farida Khanum and the maestro Mehdi Hassan her real distinction was to be a part of that august group of vocalists in Pakistan who revolutionized post-partition ghazal singing by transforming it into a semi-classical form like thumri and dadra. If you listen to pre-partition ghazals, even by eminences such as K.L Saigal, the ghazal was performed like a light film song. As Pakistani audiences were more hospitable to Urdu poetry rather than the arachaic lyrics of traditional semi-classical forms, the classically trained musicians such as Iqbal Bano adopted ghazal as their medium for classical musical expression. The effect was exhilarating for fans of both Urdu poetry and the Hindustani classical vocal tradition. In the next generation there are few who have the stature and skill of the first-generation of pioneering icons with the possible exception of Abida Parveen and to a lesser extent (in my opinion) Ghulam Ali.

But for any artist it is always the work that speaks most clearly so here is some sampling of Iqbal Bano's singing. I have selected, as embedded videos, a few of my favorite ghazals/geets by Iqbal Bano. Some are slightly lesser known but I have also provided some youtube links to her most popular music below.

Iqbal Bano singing Faiz's wonderful ghazal "Na gaNwaao navak-e-neem kush":

Here is a personal favorite semi-classical piece with traditional lyrics "Ab kay Saawan ghar aaja": (her live image starts at 1:52):

The semi-classical piece above was adapted as a "zippier" song version for the 1959 film 'Nagin' and here Iqbal Bano is singing that version on PTV:

For the last sample let's go out with perhaps Iqbal Bano's most popular geet "Payal meiN geet haiN cham cham ke" originally sung for the 1954 film 'Gumnaam":

And as promised links to some of her best known pieces: "Dasht-e-tanhai meiN" (Faiz) ; "Yeh mausam-e-gul garche tarab khez bohat hai" (Faiz); "Ulfat ki nai manzil ko chala" (Qatil Shifai); an unusual foray into Punjabi folk music "MeiN kamli da dhola hai raat" ; and the perennial "Hum dekheiN ge" (Faiz) which is inseparable from Iqbal Bano's persona in the Pakistani imagination.

Photo Courtesy: Dawn

Exploring the Paths to Happiness - To the Best of Our Knowledge

2009-04-12T20:40:00.000-07:00

I am an unabashed fan of National Public Radio. I listen to the radio only in my car so driving this Easter Sunday evening to pick up a prescription from the pharmacy I was pleasantly reminded once again of the variety of excellent public radio programming.

Wisconsin Public Radio produces a two hour weekly radio show called "To the Best of Our Knowledge". This Peabody award winning show calls itself an audio magazine of ideas and that description is as good as any. Each hour of the show is centered around a theme which is explored through intelligent thought provoking interviews.

The theme of today's first hour was "Our Peace of Mind" and had a series of wonderful conversations illuminating the idea of happiness and the persistent human quest for peace of mind. Conversations are with people as diverse as Jill Bolte-Taylor (a brain scientist who has written an interesting book about insights developed from her own stroke), Richard Davidson (a neuro-psychologist who has studied the effects of meditation on human brain by working with Buddhist monks), Satish Kumar (a former Jain monk) and a particularly interesting conversation with cultural historian Richard Schoch who is the author of "The Secrets of Happiness: Three Thousand Years of Searching for the Good Life".

You can listen to this segment of the show and see information on the various books and music in this piece here. I highly recommend it.

"Laal" - Anthems of a Different Pakistan

2009-03-21T15:02:00.000-07:00

Few musical voices are more emblematic of the rise of Pakistan's civil society in the last couple of years than the group that goes by the name "Laal". The day after the restoration of the Chief Justice on March 16th, 2009 they headlined a concert on Geo Television Network celebrating this hopeful moment in Pakistan's history. I love the spirit and music of these young men who, unlike many in their elite ranks, are embracing the struggle for a just society. Here is a relatively old interview with them.

"Laal" in Urdu means the color red and fittingly the members of the group are passionate left wing activists. Supporters of democratic freedoms they wish to highlight the wretched class divisions of Pakistani society and struggle against them. Shahram Azhar, the vocalist and Taimur Rahman who has composed most of the songs met at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) where Taimur was a lecturer and Shahram a young student. They have only released a few songs but the lyrics they have chosen to sing are overtly political anthems by the leading socialist and liberal voices of Pakistan like Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Habib Jalib. Shahram's Facebook page lists people as diverse as Evo Morales, Rosa Luxemburg and Bhagat Singh as influences.

My personal favorite is "Umeed-e-Sehar" ("The Promise of Dawn") by Faiz Ahmed Faiz. It is a wonderful composition, the video is simple but powerful and the impact of Faiz's beautiful poetry is enhanced by skillful vocals. Surprisingly, the English subtitles are not clumsy literal translations but actually convey something of the power of the original.

Their biggest hit so far was the first track they released called "MeiN ne us se yeh kaha". This is Habib Jalib's famous poem called "Musheer" or "Advisor" which lampoons the obsequious advisors who seem to surround everyone who attains power in Pakistan. Thanks to Zakintosh, I have a 1960's recording of Habib Jalib singing his own poem a cappella. The melody is exactly the same as Laal's version with instruments. Unfortunately this video does not have subtitles.

Here is a link to a blog that has videos of some other performances by "Laal".

And, now, for something completely different -- Pakistani Women Cricketers

2009-03-14T13:39:00.000-07:00

Even as I follow the twists and turns of the political and security situation in Pakistan with grave concern, observe the myopia of the country's governing leadership and witness its hapless citizens experience the steady erosion of state institutions, I have chosen not to write much about it on this blog. Instead I have stayed engaged in that ever evolving discussion on a separate online political forum so as not to inundate this blog with minutiae of Pakistani politics.

However, I was disappointed but not surprised that amongst all the political hullabaloo a wonderful Pakistani story went under-reported. The ICC Women's Cricket World Cup is currently being played in Australia and the Pakistan Women's team is not only ably representing their under-siege country but has performed significantly better than expectations. On March 9th, they beat Sri Lanka Women by 57 runs in Canberra to win their first ever World Cup match after six previous losses. This was also the team's first ever win against Sri Lanka in 19 ODIs. The team lost their next two matches against India and the favorites, England. However, the victory against Sri Lanka allowed the Pakistanis to move into the Super Six round where they were ranked at the bottom. Even as they were always unlikely to make the semi-finals they demonstrated some fighting spirit once again by defeating the West Indies Women by four wickets in the Super Six round match on March 14th in Sydney. They now face Australia on March 16th and New Zealand on March 19th for their final two Super Six games in Sydney.

The star performers with the bat have been the captain Urooj Mumtaz, the opener Nain Abdi and Armaan Khan, who in partnership with Urooj led the successful fight back in the chase against the West Indies. The fast bowler Qanita Jalil has been the main strike bowler but has been assisted strongly by the allrounder Sana Mir and the captain herself. Sana's steady performances both with the bat and the ball have been the critical contributors to the team's success.

This World Cup seems to be a turning point for the team as they will gain tremendous confidence from their victories on foreign soil and against better fancied opposition. If only they got some steady support from the Cricket Board and the people of Pakistan, perhaps one day these women would win Pakistan the World Cup that the men have not been able to win since 1992. The courage of these young women to play competitive sport in a culture that hardly encourages it and their heroic performance without much support from any corner deserves rich tributes and is particularly poignant in the wake of the Talibanization of parts of the country and the dastardly terrorist attack on the visiting Sri Lankan national team in Lahore. I hope that Pakistanis will make an effort to recognize and reward the marvellous contributions of this band of pioneering cricketers.

Photos: 1) Urooj Mumtaz lifted up in celebration 2) Naila Nazir, Qanita Jalil & Urooj Mumtaz; 3) Nain Abdi playing a square cut 4) Qanita Jalil running in to bowl 5) Sana Mir playing an off drive (Courtesy Cricinfo)

A Divine Musical Collaboration - Noor Jehan & Khurshid Anwar

2009-02-22T09:22:00.000-08:00

In the wake of Khalid Hasan's death, the great Pakistani songstress Noor Jehan (Wikipedia) has been much on my mind. Khalid Hasan was a great admirer of the late Madam and wrote a much quoted tribute essay on Noor Jehan. Perhaps more importantly he translated Saadat Hasan Manto's great portrait of Noor Jehan's early years as a rising diva in pre-partition Bombay under the title "Nur Jehan: One in a Million" (unfortunately this link is to a scan of the essay and hard to read but the essay is included in the collection "Stars from Another Sky"). "Stars from Another Sky" includes other translations of Manto's brilliant Urdu sketches published in "Ganjay Farishtay" and "Loudspeaker" on film industry icons like Ashok Kumar, Nargis, Naseem Bano (Dilip Kumar's wife, Saira Bano's mother) and Shyam.

I have been listening to many of Noor Jehan's great songs from the 1950's. Listening to this music when she was at the pinnacle of her singing powers is a magical experience but one thing stands out. She was at her greatest when teamed up with that other giant of Pakistani film music: the virtuosic scholar composer Khawaja Khurshid Anwar. After he moved to Lahore in 1955, his music in films like Mirza SahibaaN" (1955), "Intezaar" (1956), Zehr-e-Ishq (1958), "Koel" (1959) and as late as 1970 in "Heer Ranjha" provided the perfect platform to showcase Noor Jehan's vocal talent. Khawaja Khurshid Anwar needs a separate blog post all his own but one of my treasured possessions is the recordings he arranged in Pakistan under the title "GharanoN ki Gayaki" to help capture and preserve the various styles of classical singing of several of the "Hindustani" schools of gayaki.

Now for my choice of the brilliant collaboration between Khurshid Anwar and Noor Jehan. Here is the song "Tere Bina Suni Suni Lage Re, Chaandni Raat" from the film "Koel". I love listening to this over and over again much to the chagrin of my family.

and here is the beautiful "Aa Bhi Ja, Aa Bhi Ja" from the film "Intezaar":
Ghazab kia tere waade pe aitbaar kiya
Tamam raat qayamat ka intezaar kiya

Top Photo: Noor Jehan and Pran in Lahore fimmaker Dilsukh Pancholi's film "Khandaan" (1942) - This was Noor Jehan's first film in Urdu (she had previously starred in four Punjabi films). The music was by Master Ghulam Haider.

Bottom Photo: Khawaja Khurshid Anwar in 1957 holding the President's Award for Best Story and Best Music for the film "Intezaar".

Khalid Hasan (1934 - 2009) - Rest in Peace

2009-02-07T09:43:00.000-08:00

Khalid Hasan, a giant of Pakistani journalism, died on February 6th in Northern Virginia of prostate cancer at the age of 74. In him, Pakistan and the sub-continent have lost a remarkable journalist, a talented translator, an acute cultural critic and an inside chronicler of people and events on the Pakistani cultural scene, particularly of the times before the barrenness of the Zia years set in.

There has been an outpouring of appreciations of Khalid Hasan as a man and a journalist. Here is a message from his son and an appreciation by Afzal Khan. For a flavoring of his lifetime of writings the best resource is his own site Khalid Hasan Online. This site has an extensive collection of his journalistic writings but I would direct people to some of the "Longer Pieces" such as "Nur Jehan" or "Sialkot" to fully experience his fine social sensibility and the infectious warmth for people that shines through.

On this blog, one of the most read entries is on the child prodigy Master Madan. That piece had derived inspiration in part from Khalid Hasan's column on Master Madan's lost recordings in Dawn. We never met in person but at the time I reached out to Khalid Hasan Sahib to express my appreciation for his contributions to Pakistani letters. He was extremely generous in his response and I will cherish that brief exchange with him.

In memoriam, here is the e-mail tribute I had written to him on October 2nd, 2006 and his warm acknowledgment of it.

Khalid Hasan Sahib,

I have been a fan of your journalistic writing for years. Although, on many occasions I have meant to reach out and express my gratitude for your writings on Pakistani (& sub-continental) culture, somehow I never got around to actually doing it. An important part of your contribution is your choice of writing in the English language. In doing so, you are helping preserve the memory of precious bits of our culture, both for the Pakistani diaspora and the young Pakistani elite, which even if it cares about our heritage, no longer considers knowledge of literary Urdu an important component of its identity.

There are so many forgotten corners of our cultural history that you have illuminated, its hard to know where to start. Your writings on Government College, Lahore and the many illustrious people associated with it have always brought back wonderful memories and revealed wonderful tidbits about those luminaries. My father, Khawaja Muhammad Zakariya studied there, taught Urdu there for a year in 1962 before spending the rest of his career at Punjab University, so I grew up hearing stories about legends like Patras, Dr. Nazeer, Taseer, Sufi Tabassum and countless others. I also particularly enjoy your writings on Lahore and your profiles of distinguised people (statesmen, writers, musicians, poets, film and radio-wallahs). I have been delighted that you have been translating much of A. Hameed's personal recollections of Lahore as they capture so many little details of a Lahore that no longer exists (even if some details of A. Hameed's accounts have been disputed by others, but then again that is the nature of memory) .

Cultural history, memoir and biographical essay remain much neglected areas in our country and you are helping capture so much of what is being lost. At least in Urdu there are many more volumes but one wishes more of those were translated as well. Manto's biographic sketches are, of course, pure genius. Ashiq Hussain Batalvi ("Chand yadeiN chand taasurat"), Daud Rahbar ("Paraganda tab'aa log", "Nuskha hai wafa", "Chand bateiN sureeli see"), Intizar Hussain ("CharaghoN ka dhuaN", "Dilli tha jis ka naam"), Lutfullah Khan ("Sur ki talash", Hijraton ke silisile") and Manzoor Ilahi's "Silsila-e-roz-o-shab" have given me great pleasure over the last few years. Perhaps other talented and prolific people like you will take the cudgels one day and bring these works to an English-speaking audience.

I apologize for this impolitely long communication. What finally prompted this e-mail was an essay I just read by Pran Neville on Master Madan. It took me back to your illuminating article on Master Madan published in Dawn in 2001 (from which his seems to be derived) and your account of the discovery of his lost recordings by M. Rafiq. I had heard the two Saghir Nizami ghazals growing up as my father played those recordings for us but I am fortunate enough to have listened to the other six recordings on the internet as well. Pran Neville's essay prompted me to write a brief entry on my blog which I thought you might find mildly interesting(http://writtenencounters.blogspot.com/)

Please carry on your wonderful work. There aren't too many people left who can shine such a bright light on the hidden corners of our rich and beautiful cultural heritage.

Kind Regards,
------------------------------------------------------------
My dear Fawad Zakariya Sahib,
I am overwhelmed by your letter (which is what emails can be but seldom are). I really had no idea I have done all that you credit me with. I take it you are able to access The Friday Times for which I write the "memorabilia" pieces every week. I should add that I have translated almost all of Manto's Ganjay Frishtay which was first published by Penguin in New Delhi as Stars from Another Sky. Those translations were later included in the omnibus volume A Wet Afternoon, published by Alhamra in Islamabad. You will be pleased to know that I have translated a lot more of Manto (including his only stage play, the little-read 'Iss Manjhdaar Mein' and many stories I had left out, plus some of his sketches) which is now under publication by Penguin in New Delhi. I hope the book is in print by the next Spring.

By the way, I studied at Murray College and though I joined Government College for a few months for MA (English) but (is that heresy?), I preferred to return to Sialkot where we still had wonderful British teachers like Prof A. W. Mowat. That being so, I cannot (and have not) called myself a Ravian. Prof. Zakariya Sahib of course I know of but as far as I can recall I have never met him. Our son lives close to ___ and next time I am in that part of the world, perhaps we can meet.

All the best and thank you for your most heart-warming message.

Khalid Hasan

Photograph: Khalid Hasan with Ahmed Faraz (seated)

At the Inauguration

2009-01-25T19:10:00.000-08:00

I wrote a very brief note in Washington DC on the day of Obama's inauguration on January 20th which I sent to some friends. Here it is below with some photographs I took that day:

"It was freezing cold today in Washington DC and I have never experienced this kind of chaos in event management in any developed country. However, I was extremely fortunate to get in to the gates and to witness a palpably historic event. Cold and lack of organization was simply not enough to dampen anybody's enthusiasm.

From the moment I got onto the metro at 7am to head to the Capitol Building to the time that I walked out of the venue at 1pm I was surrounded by an extraordinary bonhomie between people. There were stories on every street corner and I felt lucky to be around it all. As I walked up the escalator on the stop at Judiciary Square there was a girl behind me singing a surreally beautiful Negro Spiritual. The pride of African Americans in particular was clearly evident. The experience seemed to have brought people together and there was a warmth and friendliness amongst strangers that alas is not our normal demeanor. I had a marvellous day on the National Mall today. I hope that the promise of Obama's leadership is realized, even if only in part. He, perhaps unfairly, is the repository of tremendous hopes and expectations. This is a unique point in Amercian history and he carries an immense burden of history on his shoulders.We will have to see if he is up to the task.

I want to thank my Haverford friend Gendi who wrote to me while I was waiting in line to get in after seeing my Status Update on FB. His father was on the same flight as Obama's father when they both came to study in the US under a program sponsored by Senator John F Kennedy for Kenyan students to study in the US."

Debating Economics - What to Read if you Expect Intellectual Rigor

2009-01-13T10:55:00.000-08:00

Mainstream US media is a vacuous echo chamber where conventional wisdom is endlessly repeated with a sprinkling of semi-relevant insider quotes and anecdotes to provide a veneer of credibility. Reading the popular press on economic and financial matters is a particularly frustrating experience. The more specialized a field the greater the propensity of journalists to rely on a few easy to reach sources of authority and pass half-digested opinion on to readers as information. To expect intellectually rigorous original thinking from economic journalists seems to be asking too much.

The global economy in general and the U.S. economy in particular is experiencing economic conditions unlike any other since the Great Depression. With the incoming Obama administration fully cognizant of the scale of the problem the urgent debate in the United States right now is focused on the best means to extract the economy out of its current morass. The nature of the problems and the debate about the potential approaches to ameliorate these problems can be staggeringly complex and given that we are in uncharted economic waters it is difficult to get a concise, consistent and fact-based discussion of the issues.

Most people are starved for time so they have to rely on a few easily accessible news sources to get the relevant facts. They will default to The New York Times (WSJ, FT etc.) or if they have a more serious appetite they will read The Economist. These are of course generally good sources but the richness and the quality of the debate on the internet can no longer be surpassed.

If you are not resistant to some minor wonkishness I would recommend two blogs for their excellent information content and relevant discussion of economic issues. Intelligently arguing a traditionally Keynesian view for an aggressively interventionist government role, informed by knowledge of depression-era economics and the Japanese "lost decade", is Krugman's popular blog "Conscience of a Liberal". Krugman does an excellent job of educating and informing while at the same time cutting through the fog of popular coverage. For an intelligent counter view, skeptical of government's capacity and ability to cure the economy's ills is Greg Mankiw's blog. Mankiw is a professor at Harvard and was the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors under Bush (do not write him off because of that). He was the youngest tenured professor of economics in Harvard's history (beating Larry Summers' prior record) and is an intellectual leading light on the conservative scene. However, the drawback of Mankiw's blog is that is fairly terse and not pedagogical enough when compared to Krugman. If you want to explore even more I would recommend the more frequently updated blog by Brad Delong (Berkeley) and the relatively new blog on Finance topics by the illustrious Eugene Fama and Ken French (U. Chicago).

The Magical Trio - Kabir, Abida Parveen & Gulzar

2009-01-11T20:42:00.000-08:00

Bhagat Kabir Das is a revered 15th century Indian saint poet much loved for his mystic verses that beautifully embrace a simple, non-sectarian and egalitarian spirituality. Sikhism's holy book Guru Garanth Sahib includes almost 500 verses by Kabir. Gulzar (born Sampooran Singh Kalra in 1936 in Jehlum District in pre-partition Punjab) is a modern Indian poet and lyricist best known for his sublime poetic contributions to Indian cinema. Abida Parveen has been mentioned on this blog a number of times. Hailing from Larkana, Sindh (born in 1954) she is one of the finest performers of sufi classical music and is justly referred to as the Queen of Sufi Music.

Below is a soul-stirring rendition of Kabir's "Mann Laago Yaar Faqiri MeiN" by Abida Parveen. In the introduction in Urdu, Gulzar pays rich tributes to Abida's divine talent. Here's a poor translation of Gulzar's beautiful words: "Her voice sounds like the voice of all worship. When she calls out to the divine you think yes, this voice must reach him; he too must be listening to this deeply sincere, truthful voice."

Here's Part 2 of the video.

Mann Laago Yaar Faqiri MeiN

Bura Bhala Sub Ko Sun Leejo

Kar Guzraan Gharibi MeiN

Mera Mujh MeiN Kuch NahiN

Jo Kuch Hai So Tera

Tera Tujh Ko Saunp de

Kya Laage Hai Mera

Mann Laago Yaar Faqiri MeiN

Aakhir Yeh Tun Khak Mile Ga

KyuN Phirta Maghroori MeiN

Sufi Islam in South Asia – “A Staggering Multicultural Achievement”

2009-01-03T14:29:00.000-08:00

Every year, The Economist magazine prints a delightful ‘special holiday double issue” around Christmas. It is filled with unfailingly interesting essays on an amazingly wide array of subjects. This year’s piece de resistance is the essay on South Asian Sufi Islam titled “Of Saints and Sinners”.

The essay is a wonderfully reported depiction of popular Islam as practiced by the millions of devotees of Sufi saints whose tombs and shrines are dotted all across India and Pakistan. These adherents range from the more serious-minded who seek self knowledge as a path to knowing God through contemplation, meditation and Quranic recitations to the far more numerous who flock to these shrines to beseech the saints to answer their prayers, leave offerings of gratitude and to celebrate the popular festivals centered around the urs (death anniversary) of their respective saint. An urs is a festive celebration because the word literally means wedding night to signify the saint's union with God after death.

The Economist essay is focused in large part on the celebration of the urs of the sufi saint Lal Shahbaz Qalandar in Sehwan Sharif in Sindh, Pakistan where almost a million people congregate for this 3-day event. (2008 was the 734th anniversary of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar's death.) The descriptions of the throngs of devotees, their diversity and tolerance, the ubiquitous scenes of dancing and celebration with non-stop performances of beautiful music and sufi poetry are joyous and heart-warming.

The Economist does not acknowledge it but it would be unfair not to give credit here to Declan Walsh of "The Guardian" who first reported in the Western press on this great gathering in Sehwan Sharif last year and where I first learnt of this incredible festival in rich detail. His two pieces in 2007 called "Devotees go for a whirl at the country's biggest party" and "The greatest party on earth?" are well worth reading. In particular there is a fantastic audio slideshow that I highly recommend. It has several wonderful photographs from the festival and a very traditional qawwali performance at the shrine in the background.

We cannot move on without sampling some music deeply associated with Sehwan and Lal Shahbaz Qalandar. The signature performance honoring Qalandar (also affectionately known as Jhuley Lal because devotees believe that he fulfils the fertility wishes of childless mothers) is "Lal Meri Pat Rakhio Bhala Jhule Lalan". Every major Sufi musician or Qawwal performs this regularly and it is not unusual to end the program with this as a finale as it tends to bring the house down. Here are distinctly different versions of this piece from two of the greatest sufi singers of the last half century. Here is Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan who is in superb form here:

and here is the inimitable Abida Parveen:

There has been a relentless onslaught in Pakistan against this popular and syncretic form of religion for the last 30 years. Since the beginning of the Russo-Afghan war in 1979, the Pakistani military state, Saudi Wahhabi zeal fueled with petrodollars and American cold war myopia all conspired to promote an intolerant and jihadi Islam that has done tremendous damage to the fabric of mostly tolerant South Asian Islam practiced in much of Punjab and Sindh for centuries. Mercifully, it has still survived in very large pockets because it has roots in the people. Yes, it is superstitious but it is also remarkably generous, tolerant and joyful.

Lahore, where I grew up, is a city full of shrines and mausoleums of saints with each of these hundreds of sites tended to by dedicated keepers and visited in large numbers by devotees, particularly for the annual urs celebration. Each saint has their own legend and mythology and locals keep these traditions alive primarily through oral story-telling. Even when you move beyond the large and well known destinations, like the tomb ('mazar') of Data Ganj Baksh Ali Hajveri (the 11th century sufi who is virtually the patron saint of Lahore) or that of Hazrat Mian Mir (the 16th century saint deeply venerated by Jahangir and Shahjehan and whose tomb was constructed by Shahjehan's son, the poet-prince Dara Shikoh), there is an endless stream of people who visit lesser known but no less fascinating shrines of saints whose stories read like something out of Arabian nights.

There is the shrine of Madho Lal Hussain (which is actually two separate people, the Hindu boy Madho and the saint Lal Hussain, who legend has it were inseparable), the site of the annual Mela ChiraghaN (Festival of Lamps) and a place revered by both Hindus and Muslims. There is the remarkable 16th century mazar of the child saint Ghoray Shah (who died when he was 5) and who, it is believed, loved toy horses so a gift of a toy horse from his followers would result in their prayers being answered. This mazar is crowded with people and you can see the many toy horses that devotees continue to bring for Ghoray Shah. There is also Bibi Pak Daman (Chaste Lady), one of the most popular shrines in the city (not far from Queen Mary's College) which is reputed to be the sepulchre of Ruqqaiya or Bibi Haj and her five virgin sisters. Again, according to local legend Bibi Haj was from Hazrat Ali's family and came to the sub-continent in the early 8th century several years after the battle of Karbala. However, the earth opened up and buried her alive after she had been asked to appear in front of the local ruler which the chaste lady did not wish to do. (Historians date this grave instead to the 12th century and surmise that the daughters buried here were those of Syed Ahmed Tokhta Tirmizi). And hundreds of these Shehrzad-like stories go on and on in a muddled but tolerant, rich and captivating mix of religion and superstition.

Credits: Information about Lahore's shrines are sourced from Yasmeen Lari's excellent Heritage Guidebook on Lahore.

Gotham Book Mart's Collection Goes to Penn

2009-01-02T10:59:00.000-08:00

Having whiled away many pleasurable hours in antiquarian bookstores, this story about New York's historic Gotham Book Mart caught my eye. The precious collection of books from this bookstore, founded in 1920, will now belong to the University of Pennsylvania thanks to an anonymous benefactor. It is amazing that the entire inventory valued at several million dollars was bought up for a mere $400,000 at auction.

Here's a little excerpt and a photograph from the news story that gives a sense of the bookstore's history:

The Gotham Book Mart was founded on West 45th Street in 1920 by Frances Steloff. It was the haunt of literary figures like Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, H. L. Mencken, Arthur Miller, John Updike, J. D. Salinger and Eugene O’Neill. It exhibited the works of the artist Edward Gorey. Its customers included George and Ira Gershwin, Charlie Chaplin, Alexander Calder, Stephen Spender, Woody Allen, Saul Bellow, John Guare, Katharine Hepburn and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. At various points, Allen Ginsberg, LeRoi Jones and Tennessee Williams (for a day) worked as clerks there.

The Gotham Book Mart was famous for its literary eminences. A December 1948 party for Osbert and Edith Sitwell (seated, center) drew a roomful of brightlights to the Gotham Book Mart: clockwise from W. H. Auden, on the ladder at top right, were Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, Charles Henri Ford (cross-legged, on the floor), William Rose Benét, Stephen Spender, Marya Zaturenska, Horace Gregory, Tennessee Williams, Richard Eberhart,Gore Vidal and José Garcia Villa. (Photo: Gotham Book Mart)

Zbigniew Brzezinski is Right

2008-12-31T10:11:00.000-08:00

The massive Israeli attacks on Gaza are cruel, inhumane and disproportionate to the threat from Hamas. They are causing terrible and unjustified suffering for ordinary civilians and they must be condemned.

However, each separate escalation and the attendant bout of violence only serves to obscure the real problem: the lack of an energetic, sustained and fair peace process led by the U.S with visible results and a clear timeline and milestones for a two state solution. The Bush administration abandoned all pretense of even-handedness in the region after Clinton had at least engaged the two sides constructively toward a workable solution at Taba in his waning days. However, Ariel Sharon then came to power in Israel along with Bush in the U.S. putting an end to the peace process with the resulting despondency triggering the second intifada.

Even though the abject failure of the Bush administration in the Middle East is one major reason for the lasting damage done to American interests, moral standing and credibility in the world, Israel remains the third rail of Amercian politics. No administration (or mainstream media outlet) can be seen as anything less than 200% supportive of even self-destructive Israeli policies. This remains true even as there are more Amercian Jewish groups working to advance the cause of peace who (rightly) believe that Israel's long term security will be best served by making a just peace with its neighbors and isolating the extremist fringe with political action not bombings and blockades. The Obama administration will not be much different in its timidity to responsibly engage with the Palestinian-Israeli question for fear of political landmines but he should listen to Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski's advice.

Dr. Brzezinski (National Security Advisor in the Carter Administration) outlined the case for American involvement and as a bonus took Joe Scarborough (a media talking head) to task. Joe was mouthing the standard mainstream media cliches but Brzezinski was having none of it. Watch the exchange below:

"You know, you have such a stunningly superficial knowledge of what went on that it's almost embarrassing to listen to you." (Brzezinski to Scarborough)

On the First Day of Newton, My True Love Gave to Me

2008-12-24T11:46:00.001-08:00

There is a delightful column yesterday by Olivia Judson in the New York Times called "The Ten Days of Newton". (Browsers of this blog are familiar with her column "The Wild Side" and some of her writings on evolution in that forum.)

In this column, other than her light-hearted advocacy for the celebration of 10 days of Newton around Christmas and a very cogent summary of Newton's mind-boggling contributions to science, she has a wonderfully informative discussion on the development of our calendar which has continually had to account for the fact that the earth's orbit around the sun is not an exact number of days. I found her discussion of the earth's gradual slowing down and the impact on adjustment of calendars absolutely fascinating.

And for all those who come across this blog I wish you all a happy holiday season and a happy new year. I, for one, would certainly second Olivia Judson's call for a celebration of the achievements of Newton. Her song (sung to the tune of 12 days of Christmas) is not likely to catch on in the same way but it is good fun anyway.

On the tenth day of Newton,

My true love gave to me,

Ten drops of genius,

Nine silver co-oins,

Eight circling planets,

Seven shades of li-ight,

Six counterfeiters,

Cal-Cu-Lus!

Four telescopes,

Three Laws of Motion,

Two awful feuds,

And the discovery of gravity!

Excerpt:

The reason the interval became necessary is that the Earth, inconveniently, does not orbit the sun in an exact number of days. Instead, the Earth’s orbit is 365 days and a bit. The “bit” is just under a quarter of a day.

It wasn’t always thus. Some 530 million years ago, when animals like the trilobites were skittering around, days had less time. Back then, a day was only 21 hours, and a year was about 420 days. In another 500 million years, perhaps a day will be 27 hours, and a year fewer than 300 days. Because of the friction exerted by the moon, the Earth is slowing down. Indeed, already the days are a tiny bit longer than they were 100 years ago.

Because the orbit isn’t an exact number of days, our calendars get out of sync with the seasons unless we correct for the fractional day. The Julian calendar, which was put in place by Julius Caesar in 45 B.C., was the Romans’ best effort at making a systematic correction. Before that, the Roman calendar gave 355 days to the basic year, and every other year was supposed to include an extra month of 22 or 23 days.

But over a period of 24 years, that gave too many days; so in some years, the extra month was supposed to be skipped. This didn’t always happen. By the time the Julian calendar was introduced, the Roman calendar was so far out of sync with the seasons that the year before the first Julian year had to include a massive correction; that year, referred to as “the last year of confusion,” was 445 days. Talk about a long year.

"Me and Bobby McGee" - Kris Kristofferson

2008-12-21T15:22:00.000-08:00

Kris Kristofferson, now 72 years old, is a great American singer songwriter who was inducted into the "Songwriters Hall of Fame" in 1985 and the "Country Music Hall of Fame" in 2004. However, that headline description doesn't begin to capture Kristofferson's remarkably eclectic life. A military brat, Kristofferson graduated from Pomona college in 1958 and then attended Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar before joining the U.S. army in the 60's as a helicopter pilot and achieving the rank of captain before resigning his army commission in 1965.

Thereafter started an incredible performing career as a singer, songwriter and actor after he moved to Nashville initially as a janitor at the Columbia Records office in Nashville and caught the attention of Johnny Cash by landing a helicopter in his backyard. He had many hits as a songwriter and his songs were performed by many leading musicians. He won a Golden Globe as an actor in the film "A Star is Born" opposite Barbara Streisand.

For me, his great song "Me and Bobby McGee" will always remain his signature track. It has been made famous by several great performers like Johnny Cash and Janis Joplin (who dated Kristofferson until her death in 1970) but his own version below is my personal favorite. Listening to the line "Well I'd trade all my tomorrows for a single yesterday" still sends tingles down my spine. This line with its expression of an aching desire to relive the past even for a single day and the desperate longing to recover or perhaps redo what has already happened is a powefully tragic motif in art. The past, to me, is infinitely more fascinating than the future and nobody has better articulated my feelings on this than the great German writer W.G. Sebald. (If you have not read any Sebald I would highly recommend reading "The Emigrants"). Sebald said:

"It's that sensation, if you turn the opera glass around----Curiously, although its further removed, the image seems much more precise. It's like looking down a well shaft. Looking in the past has always given me that vertiginous sense. It's the desire, almost, or the temptation that you might throw yourself into it, as it were, over the parapets and down. There is something terribly alluring to me about the past. I'm hardly interested in the future. I don't think it will hold many good things. But at least about the past you can have certain illusions."

Here's "Me and Bobby McGee":

The Mumbai Tragedy - A Perspective

2008-11-28T09:32:00.000-08:00

The terrible terrorist tragedy is still unfolding in Mumbai with over a 140 dead and more than 300 injured. The attacks are despicable and should be unequivocally condemned by any sane person. However, the world (India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, UK, Spain, Middle East, Russia) has now been witness to an endless stream of these gruesome attacks. All pleas to attack this global problem not through the lens of a simplistic "war on terror" but instead at its political roots evokes a hostile response from national security establishments.

Engaging complex global political problems and draining some of the world's worst infected political wounds is not "action-oriented" enough and does not satisfy the immediate justified rage of the affected populations. However, it is the only imperfect long term solution to isolate the dead-ender ideological terrorists who must be defeated by force from the far more numerous sympathizing recruits they find amongst people who feel that they are victims of prolonged injustice at the hands of powerful governments (others and their own as in many Muslim countries). In India, for example, since the Babri mosque incident in 1992 there have been a plethora of tragedies creating a communal tinderbox; the Mumbai serial blasts, Mumbai train bombings, Godhra, Gujarat riots, Hyderabad blasts, Akshardham attack, Samjhota Express attack, Delhi bombings, Malegaon not to mention the festering Kashmir problem with the recent flaring of the situation due to the Amarnath yatra land dispute. Whoever invokes tackling the political dimensions of the causes of terrorism is instantly accused of the specious "moral equivalency" argument. It has now been clear for years that a security strategy alone is simply not sufficient to deter any suicidal armed group from inflicting harrowing damage on soft targets. A global rethinking is required to fight terrorism smartly and to dramatically reduce the number of people susceptible to this siren call of nihilism and anarchy. These sentiments often sound to people as if they are soft-headed "can't we all just live together" pleas but a hard-headed and realistic strategy of political engagement must be pursued in addition to robust police, intelligence and military action to reduce the threat of terrorism and asymmetric violence.

Deepak Chopra (whose mystical mumbo jumbo I have little appetite for) was on CNN commenting on the Mumbai attacks and even though his thoughts are meandering and not fully coherent (in my view) he makes some valid points that are not represented much in the mainstream media.

Why Don't We Celebrate New Species?

2008-11-19T11:28:00.000-08:00

I have previously linked to Olivia Judson's New York Times column called "The Wild Side". Her column is always illuminating and written with an infectious enthusiasm for the incredible variety of life on our planet. It is unfailingly lucid in explaining concepts in evolutionary biology in clear and concise prose. The column today is called "All Hail the Apple Maggot" and discusses a wonderful example of how a new species gets created from an existing one (including a great little primer on the definition of species). She also reflects on why we tend to more easily focus on lamenting extinction of species as opposed to celebrating the creation of new ones.

There is an unending stream of misinformation and outright lies being churned out on the topic of evolution and natural selection (see Zakintosh's blog post on November 17th called "The CREaTIoNist" for another unfortunate example; a supposedly scientific book by the Turkish author Harun Yahya). Given the constant hostility toward this scientifically sound but revolutionary principle I always like to link to good writing on evolution for laypeople so that at least anyone reading this blog can gain access to credible writing on the subject.

The appearance of a new species is not so dramatic. The first members of a new species will typically be indistinguishable — to us — from the species they have evolved from. And while extinction has a clear final moment — the last member of a species dies — the formation of a new species does not usually happen in a single recognizable instant. Which is why we haven’t yet raised our glasses to celebrate, say, Rhagoletis pomonella, the apple maggot fly.
---

The most common way to define a species is a group of individuals that breed with each other successfully. For example, dogs, despite their vastly different looks, can breed with each other, so they are are considered one species. Horses and donkeys are counted as different species because their offspring (mules and hinnies) are sterile. For individuals to be considered as belonging to separate species thus means that they are “reproductively isolated”: they can’t, won’t, or don’t breed with each other.
---

I can sense your excitement. And perhaps that’s the real reason we don’t celebrate apple maggots, or any of the other new species (and there are many we know about) that are in the process of evolving. For when a new species does appear, it’s just not that different from the old species. To evolve the flamboyant differences that distinguish a swan from a duck, or a human from a chimpanzee — that takes thousands, even millions, of years.
That is what we lose with extinction.

Photograph: Rhagoletis pomonella, the apple maggot fly. (Wikimedia
Commons)

Tufail Niazi – Pakistan’s Greatest Folk Singer

2008-11-08T11:28:00.000-08:00

It was in my teens, almost 25 years ago, when I first heard Tufail Niazi singing "MeiN naiN jaaNa Kherian de naal" from Heer Waris Shah in that uniquely rustic and melodious but exceptionally virtuosic voice that has brought tears to my eyes many times over the years. Of all the wonderful music I grew up with (mostly because it was what my parents played in the house) this song by Tufail Niazi alongwith K.L Saigal’s “Ik raje ka beta le kar urne wala ghora” and Begum Akhtar’s “Chaa rahi kali ghata, jiya mora lehrae hai” have a special place in my imagination. (The youtube link above does not include it but Saigal's cackling laugh at the end of this recorded song on the LP is an enduring childhood memory). Every time I hear these pieces again they conjure up the same mesmerising effect they had on me when I first heard them huddled around my father's turntable or in later years, his various cassette players.

Piecing together Tufail Niazi's biography, his marvellously syncretic Punjabi life struck me as unusual even in pre-1947 Punjab but his life story is no longer even possible. He was born in 1916 in the only Muslim family in the Sikh village of MadairaN in Jallandhar district. MadairaN was only a short distance from Sham Chaurasi, famous birthplace of the musical gharana of that name (Ustad Salamat Ali Khan, arguably Pakistan's finest classical vocalist, hailed from this gharana). Tufail's family and ancestors were "Pakhawajis". (Pakhawaj is a tabla-like percussion instrument traditionally used as accompaniment in Dhrupad singing, the much older and temple-rooted form of Hindustani classical vocal music than the newer, more popular Mughal-era creation Khayal.) Historically, some of his family members were "Rubabis" who sang Gurbanis (songs in praise of the gurus) in Gurdwaras. Tufail followed this family tradition and started singing Guru Nanak's bani at the Gurdwara in the village of Pumba near Amritsar where his maternal grandfather was employed as a rubabi. After three years in Pumba he lost interest and his father, Haji Raheem Buksh took him to a Gaushala (house of cow protection) in Gondwal near the town of Taran Taaran. Here he joined the Gaushala singing party that went from village to village to spread the message of cow protection. Imagining a traveling Muslim rubabi preaching, in song, the protection of the sacred cow in his mellifluous voice brings a smile to my face.

Tufail lived in Gondwal for four years and would have likely moved sooner if it was not for the attraction of listening to great performers at the "chhota mela of Harballabh" held in that town every year (the main Harballabh Mela used to be in Jallandhar which attracted India's greatest musicians). After leaving the Gaushala, Tufail first became a "Raasdhari", street performers who just congregated impromptu audiences anywhere and performed an amalgam of theater, narrative and song often based on episodes of Lord Rama's life (Ramlila). He then joined a traveling theater ("Nautanki") and honed his theatrical and storytelling skills playing a hero in productions of famous Punjabi folktales like Heer Ranjha, Sohni MahiNwal, Sassi PunnooN and Pooran Bhagat. Most of this pre-partition part of Tufail's life today reads like a page not from 20th century history but a much older epoch that we can no longer even imagine.

At the time of partition, like all East Punjabi Muslims, Tufail too had to move from his ancestral lands and he ended up in Multan. To survive in this new unknown place where he hardly knew anybody, he opened up a milk shop. It was fortuitous that in 1949 a police inspector who had known him in East Punjab and had been a fan saw him and, on learning that Tufail had abandoned his music because he had no instruments and no other way to make a living, intervened. He got him instruments from the state coffers and organized a mehfil for Tufail introducing him to the people in Multan. It is unbearable to imagine that Tufail Niazi's voice could have been lost forever were it not for the effort of an ordinary fan who saved him from potential obscurity. We owe that unknown police officer a deep debt of gratitude.

Tufail soon became well known in the cultural circles of Multan after which there was no looking back. He started singing for Radio Pakistan and had the honor to be the first singer who performed on Pakistan Television, the day of its inauguration on November 26th, 1964. He sang his famous song "Laai beqadaraN naal yaari te tut gai tarak kar ke" that day. It was at that time that PTV's senior producer Aslam Azhar gave him the name Tufail Niazi because Tufail had told him that his pir was Hazrat Pir Niaz Ali Shah. Before this he had been just Tufail, Master Tufail, Mian Tufail and lastly Tufail Multani. Later, under Uxi Mufti he worked with great dedication to help set up and sustain the National Institute of Folk Heritage (Lok Virsa) in Islamabad. He received the Presidential Pride of Performance Award in 1983 and died on September 21st, 1990. A stroke had left him debilitated and unable to perform and he died in poverty with a wounded sense of official and unofficial neglect which has been the lot of so many Pakistani artists. He is buried in the graveyard in Islamabad.

Here is a performance of "Laai beqadaraN naal yaari te tut gai tarak kar ke" from PTV:

Tufail Niazi was a folk musician deeply influenced by classical forms and it is the mastery of his classically trained vocals combined with a soulfully melodic voice that mesmerized his audiences. The wonderful Punjabi sufi storytelling of his repertoire as he stood singing energetically in his lacha and a silk kurta created the total effect of a performer who was involved in something that was inseparable from the rest of his existence. His singing is often intensely moving as he sings about episodes in the lives of Punjabi epic lovers most notably Heer Ranjha (this is a link to an excellent post on this Punjabi folk masterpiece on Pakistaniat) richly evoking their anguish set in a beautifully sketched Punjabi rural social milieu.

Many of my favorite songs by Tufail Niazi are rooted deeply in classical music. I can listen to them over and over again and they possess the power to stir the most potent emotions. Here at APNA's site are some great Tufail Niazi songs for which I cannot find youtube videos. Two of my favorites (in addition to "MeiN naiN jaaNa Kherian de naal") that never fail to move me are "MeiN vi jaaNa jhok Ranjhan di" and "We tooN neRe neRe was we dholan yaar" (in Raga Tilak Kamod). In addition, I love a tappa-like song in Raga Khamaj called "Jhuk RaiyyaN meiN to" which I have been unable to find on the internet.

Remarkably and sadly, I was not able to find any decent photograph of Tufail Niazi on the internet to include in this post. To end this piece, here is a youtube audio of the above mentioned "MeiN naiN jaaNa Kherian de naal" which is inspired by Raga Bilawal.

Credits: This post owes several biographical and other details to the book “Tufail Niazi”, compiled and edited by S.M Shahid as a tribute to this great performer. In addition to informative pieces in Urdu (Mumtaz Mufti, Chanan Gobindpuri, Bakhtiar Ahmad, Akhtar Imam Rizvi, Shahbaz Ali) and English (S.M Shahid, Sarwat Ali, Mushahid Hussain, Saeed Malik), the book comes with 2 excellent CDs of Tufail Niazi’s unforgettable folk songs.

Obama is the 44th President of the United States

2008-11-04T23:58:00.000-08:00

My reflections on this momentous event will come at some later date but for now I just want to acknowledge this remarkable historic day.

Update: Bob Herbert in the New York Times comes closest to my feelings post-election so here they are even though I must say that I am already in the mode of anticipation of evaluating Obama's Presidency based on its actions. There has never been this much hope and promise but his approach in the first six months, more than anything else, will help me understand better if the tenor and the ultimate outcome of this Presidency will be noticably different from those in history.

Arthur Miller liked to say that the essence of America was its promise. In the darkest of the dark times, in wartime and drastic economic downturns, in the crucible of witch hunts or racial strife, in the traumatic aftermath of a terror attack, that promise lights the way forward.
---
We still have two wars to deal with and an economic crisis as severe as any in decades. But we should take a moment to recognize the stunning significance of this moment in history. It’s worth a smile, a toast, a sigh, a tear.

Waiting for History!

2008-11-03T19:56:00.000-08:00

“And I swore I’d be in Chicago tomorrow, and made sure of that, taking a bus to Chicago, spending most of my money, and didn’t give a damn, just as long as I’d be in Chicago tomorrow.”– Jack Kerouac, “On the Road”

(Hat Tip for the quote: Sean Quinn at fivethirtyeight.com)

Christopher Hitchens Debates Religion with Rabbi Wolpe

2008-11-03T12:05:00.000-08:00

In one of the world's largest synagogues, Temple Emanu-El in New York City, Christopher Hitchens today debated Rabbi Wolpe on whether "religion is good for the world".

I have followed Hitchens' writings for many years (starting with his edited collection "Blaming the Victims" about the Palestinian issue), well before he became nationally known for his outspoken and deliberately provocative views on everything from Mother Teresa, "Islamo-Fascism", Iraq war and God. He is relentessly polemical and has a penchant for contrariness to the point where one can't always be sure whether he is taking a particular position because he really believes in it or just indulging his pugilistic instincts. He can be outrageously demeaning and dismissive of his opponents and as is typical of debaters rarely acknowledges any validity in counter arguments.

But there is no question that he posseses an extremely sharp intellect, a rare articulate eloquence and an impressive command of language. He is a voracious and remarkably intelligent reader of catholic (no pun intended) taste and is an enviably prolific writer. For some of his best, most thoughtful long pieces I would suggest reading his contributions in the "Atlantic Monthly" archived here. Much to my disappointment over the years he has displayed an unsympathetic view of Pakistan and seems to have a visceral dislike for the country (probably in no small part due to its religion-based founding ideology). Even so, his March 2003 piece in these archives called "The Perils of Partition" is well worth reading. Just glancing at these pieces gives you a sense of his incredible critical range.

Now let's come back to his debate with Rabbi Wolpe today. Here is a summary of the debate in the New York Times. My sense from the reported exchange is that Hitchens comes out on top and that Rabbi Wolpe could not quite match the intellectual firepower and verbal nimbleness of Hitchens. Let me know via your comments if you think otherwise.

Christopher Hitchens:

It attacks us in our deepest integrity, in the core of our self-respect. Religion says that we would not know right from wrong, we would not know an evil, wicked act from a decent human act without divine permission, without divine authority or without, even worse, either the fear of a divine punishment or the hope of a divine reward. It strips us of the right to make our own determination, as all humans always have, about what is and what is not a right human action.

Rabbi Wolpe:

If you read the beginning of the Bible, which I strongly advise, you will find that Cain is condemned for killing Abel. Now why is he condemned, if the Bible doesn’t assume that you don’t learn that murder is bad until you get to Sinai? After all, Cain is long before Sinai. Of course, the Bible knows that human beings recognize that murder is bad. But the Bible also knows that they do it anyway, and that without a divine sanction against murder, people will think that it is a humanly invented sanction. And if they will violate it even when it’s God’s dictate how much more will it prove to be … a fragile rule when it’s the rule of human beings?
And so at Sinai, what you get is not a series of moral rules that you couldn’t have imagined for yourself — ‘Oh, I thought it was fine to kill before I got there’ — but the knowledge that it is built into the moral structure of the universe. It’s not a personal preference. It’s not a societal rule. It’s a mandate from God to all human beings. And if you think that mandate doesn’t matter, all I can say is you haven’t paid much attention to the 20th century.

Obama's Unprecedented Crowds

2008-10-26T19:23:00.000-07:00

The election is still eight days away and despite a substantial Obama lead in most polls it is still true that elections are only won after the polls close. However, the crowds that Obama has drawn throughout the primary and general election campaigns are absolutely astounding. It compares with nothing I have ever seen in my own twenty years of following American presidential politics. Today over a 100,000 people showed up to his rally in Denver, Colorado and this is a state that George W. Bush won twice.

Krugman Wins the Economics Nobel

2008-10-13T09:16:00.000-07:00

It was announced today that Paul Krugman, Princeton professor and a New York Times op ed columnist won the 2008 Economics Nobel Prize for his work on international trade. Harvard economist Edward Glaeser explains in this piece why Krugman was honored. As an undergraduate Economics major who was headed to a PhD program before getting diverted to investment banking years ago, I have followed Krugman's career admiringly for at least 15 years. In my "International Economics" class with Professor Noel Farley at Bryn Mawr we used Krugman/Obstfeld which is the standard textbook on the subject.

Krugman is that rare combination of an economist who not only writes well for a popular audience but is highly respected by his peers as a first rate intellect who has made tremendous contributions to the understanding of international trade. As a columnist he is a prolific, reliably liberal and relentless critic of the follies of the Bush administration and its ideological acolytes. As an economist, Krugman is a true empiricist Keynesian, fastidious about facts and evidence and fiercely independent in his judgment. Krugman got his PhD from MIT under Rudi Dornbusch's guidance and that department has produced some of the best non-ideological economists of the last half century (From that group, Larry Summers now rises further up in the list to be honored next). To some degree the awarding of the prize to Krugman this year reflects a tacit recognition by the Nobel committee that market fundamentalism has run its course. This may signal the end of the era of the Chicago school's intellectual ascendancy. The recent spectacular financial market failures indicate the extent to which governments are needed to regulate and stabilize markets. During the current financial crisis Krugman's commentary on his blog "Conscience of a Liberal" has consistently been the "go to" opinion to understand the causes of the crisis and to look for sensible policy prescriptions to stem the rot.

Here are a few interesting Krugman-related links: BBC news announcement of his Nobel here; a comprehensive archive of writings by Krugman here; two of my own prior blog entries that reference Krugman here and here and his Wikipedia entry here.

Sequoia Capital Meeting - Economic Downturn & Startups

2008-10-11T16:19:00.001-07:00

Last week Sequoia Capital, Silicon Valley's premier venture capital firm and backers of the likes of Apple, Cisco, Oracle and Google to name a few, held an extraordinary all-hands meeting of all the CEOs of their portfolio companies. Sequoia's partners and invited guests presented to the audience. These facts are known to many but it is an excellent presentation that lays out the facts of how we got here with great clarity and emphasizes the key to startup survival and longer term success in these environments.

You can find the slideshow presentation here .

Running with Jerry - Jerry Rice that is!

2008-10-09T23:21:00.000-07:00

I live a few miles from Stanford University's campus. Often I use Stanford's track for my leisurely evening 5K runs. Sometimes I take my kids with me who like to play on the infield or on the bleachers around the track. Yesterday as I started my run I ran past a lanky, athletic figure stretching on the running strip. I noticed that it was none other than the legendary Jerry Rice. A few minutes later Rice ran past me but he seemed to be merely limbering and warming up and not involved in any rigorous workout. He stayed on the track for another 20 or so minutes and it gave me a great thrill to be running in the same lanes with the "niner" whose enshrinement in football's hall of fame in another three years (when he becomes eligible for induction) is a mere formality.

Anton Chekhov in "Gooseberries"

2008-10-05T16:45:00.000-07:00

"There ought to be behind the door of every happy, contented man some one standing with a hammer continually reminding him with a tap that there are unhappy people; that however happy he may be, life will show him her laws sooner or later, trouble will come for him - disease, poverty, losses, and no one will see or hear, just as now he neither sees nor hears others."

Recently reading the excerpt from Anton Chekhov (1860 -1904) above, I was moved by the great Russian writer’s grimly tragic but deeply wise view of life’s essence. Charles Simic quotes this passage from Chekhov’s story “Gooseberries” at the beginning of his New York Review of Books piece on Philip Roth's new novel, Indignation.

You can read the whole, generally laudatory, Simic review of Roth’s novel here.

"The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" - Bob Dylan

2008-10-05T10:05:00.000-07:00

On February 9th 1963, a 51 year old black barmaid named Hattie Carroll was murdered at the Emerson Hotel in Baltimore, Maryland by Billy Zantzinger, a young wealthy white tobacco farmer from Charles County. Billy had used a cane to assault Hattie who died 8 hours after the assault possibly from a brain hemorrhage. Billy was eventually found guilty of manslaughter (not murder) and sentenced to 6 months in jail.

It was in the backdrop of this deep injustice that Bob Dylan wrote "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll", considered one of his best songs in a repertory consisting of countless brilliant ones. It was released as part of the 1964 album, "The Times They Are A-Changin". This song is widely admired by critics and Christopher Ricks, the Boston University Professor of Humanities, devotes an entire chapter in his book "Dylan's Vision of Sin" to this song in his chapter on Justice. In an interview on NPR, Ricks described the song as "perfect".

Here's the best version that I found on YouTube:

Below are the complete lyrics of this song. Listen to the song while reading the lyrics and a chill runs down your spine. Also, notice the brilliant repetition of "now ain't the time for your tears" until the very end. Throughout the song, the heartrending images of Hattie's difficult life and the murder itself arouse deep moral indignation but also a simultaneous will to fight for justice. It is only at the end when the struggle for justice for Hattie Carroll is lost that it is "time for your tears".

"The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll"

William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll
With a cane that he twirled around his diamond ring finger
At a Baltimore hotel society gath'rin'
And the cops were called in and his weapon took from him
As they rode him in custody down to the station
And booked William Zanzinger for first-degree murder
And you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears
Take the rag away from your face
Now ain't the time for your tears.

William Zanzinger who at twenty-four years
Owns a tobacco farm of six hundred acres
With rich wealthy parents who provide and protect him
And high office relations in the government of Maryland
Reacted to his deed with a shrug of his shoulders
And swear words and sneering and his tongue it was snarling
In a matter of minutes on bail was out walking
And you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears
Take the rag away from your face
Now ain't the time for your tears.

Hattie Carroll was a maid in the kitchen
She was fifty-one years old and gave birth to ten children
Who carried the dishes and hauled out the garbage
And never sat once at the head of the table
And didn't even speak to the people at the table
Who just cleaned up all the food from the table
And emptied the ashtrays on a whole other level
Got killed by a blow, lay slain by a cane
That sailed through the air and came down through the room
Doomed and determined to destroy all the gentle
And she never done nothing to William Zanzinger
And you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears
Take the rag away from your face
Now ain't the time for your tears.

In the courtroom of honor, the judge pounded his gavel
To show that all's equal and that the courts are on the level
And that the strings in the books ain't pulled and persuaded
And that even the nobles get properly handled
Once that the cops have chased after and caught 'em
And that ladder of law has no top and no bottom
Stared at the person who killed for no reason
Who just happened to be feelin' that way without warnin'
And he spoke through his cloak, most deep and distinguished
And handed out strongly, for penalty and repentance
William Zanzinger with a six-month sentence
And you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears
Bury the rag most deep in your face
For now's the time for your tears.

"Come In" by Robert Frost

2008-09-13T16:24:00.000-07:00

Robert Frost (1874-1963) is perhaps America's best loved poet. In popular perception he is the poet of the countryside and his poetry is indeed full of serene, bucolic imagery of strolls in woods, singing birds and majestic night skies. I too, long enjoyed Frost as a quintessential "nature" poet who evoked in me all the charm and beauty of the timeless New England landscape.

But that was until Joseph Brodsky opened my eyes to a completely different Frost, one who Brodsky quotes Lionel Trilling describe as a "terrifying poet". Joseph Brodsky was a Russian poet and essayist who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987. I have mentioned his collection of critical essays titled "On Grief and Reason" in a post before. The title essay is a discussion of two of Frost's well-known poems,"Come In" and "Home Burial". In this essay Brodsky persuasively shows Frost's remarkably dark vision and his contention that "nature for this poet is neither friend nor foe, nor is it the backdrop for human drama; it is this poet's terrifying self-portrait." I wish I could link to the entire essay as it is the best piece on Frost I have ever read but unfortunately it does not seem to be available on the web. I would encourage all those interested in Frost or poetry to find a printed copy of Brodsky's essay. It is well worth a read.

Here is the poem, "Come In", which appeared in the 1942 collection "A Witness Tree":

"Come In"

As I came to the edge of the woods,
Thrush music -- hark!
Now if it was dusk outside,
Inside it was dark.

Too dark in the woods for a bird
By sleight of wing
To better its perch for the night,
Though it still could sing.

The last of the light of the sun
That had died in the west
Still lived for one song more
In a thrush's breast.

Far in the pillared dark
Thrush music went --
Almost like a call to come in
To the dark and lament.

But no, I was out for stars;
I would not come in.
I meant not even if asked;
And I hadn't been.

And here are some fragments of commentary by Brodsky about this poem:

When a twentieth century poet starts a poem with finding himself at the edge of the woods there is a reasonable element of danger -or, at least a faint suggestion of it. The edge, in its very self, is sufficiently sharp.
---
In "Too dark in the woods for a bird," a bird, alias bard, scrutinizes "the woods" and finds them too dark. "Too" here echoes-no! harks back to - Dante's opening lines in The Divine Comedy: our bird/bard's assessment of that selva differs from the great Italian's. To put it plainly, the afterlife is darker for Frost than it is for Dante. The question is why, and the answer is either because he disbelieves in the whole thing or because his notion of himself makes him, in his mind, slated for damnation.
---
Still, should you choose to read "Come In" as a nature poem, you are perfectly welcome to it. I suggest, though, that you take a longer look at the title. The twenty lines of the poem constitute, as it were, the title's translation. And in this translation, I am afraid, the expression "come in" means "die".

Relentless Republican Hypocrisy Gets the Jon Stewart Treatment

2008-09-05T11:46:00.000-07:00

Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert can't change ugly politics in this country but at least they make it fun to watch.

Ahmed Faraz Dies in Islamabad

2008-09-01T12:30:00.000-07:00

On August 25th, the celebrated Urdu poet Ahmed Faraz died in Islamabad at age 77 after a protracted illness. In Faraz Sahib not only have we lost an excellent ghazal poet but a courageous and honorable man whose consistent stance against Pakistani dictatorships will never be forgotten. He opposed military rule whether it came in the guise of a ruthless Islamist like Zia-ul-Haq or a self proclaimed "moderate" like Musharraf. To his credit he saw through veneers and opposed authoritarianism which has been the scourge of the Pakistani state since independence. As a poet he has long been acknowledged as one of the masters of modern Urdu ghazal but his return of the Hilal-e-Imtiaz in 2006 (Pakistan's highest civilian honor) as a protest against Musharraf's authoritarian rule once again demonstrated his lifelong commitment to the primacy of human rights and dignity.

Rest in peace Faraz Sahib.

Ranjish hi sahi dil hi dukhaane ke liye aa
Aa phir se mujhe chor ke jaane ke liye aa

Ik umr se hooN lazzat-e-girya se bhi mehroom
Aye rahat-e-jaaN mujh ko rulaane ke liye aa

Dawn had an obituary on Faraz Sahib the day after his death written by Mushir Anwar which sadly lifted several passages directly from Wikipedia (hat tip: Abbas Raza). However, today's New York Times also has an obituary by Haresh Pandya which despite some elemantary errors does a good job of suveying Faraz Sahib's life (e.g. Urdu poets whose work is both read and sung are not rare). I can always count on 3quarksdaily and the Raza family for wonderfully original content on Urdu literati. Today, there is a simple but lovely remembrance by Atiya Batool Khan on Faraz Sahib. (Azra Raza's appreciation of Qurratulain Hyder that appeared on 3QD in August last year is one of the best personal pieces written about Aini Apa in English that I can find.)

To remember Faraz Sahib what better way than to listen to the above mentioned "Ranjish hi sahi" beautifully sung by the inimitable Mehdi Hasan Sahib, the virtual creator of modern semi-classical ghazal singing.

The Police Reunion Tour - Shoreline Amphitheater Concert

2008-08-30T18:55:00.001-07:00

Starting on the 28th of May 2007, "The Police" embarked on a year and a half reunion tour (this wikipedia link has a listing of all the shows and the set lists) to mark the 30th anniversary of their beginning. The tour ended with a concert in New York's Madison Square Garden on August 7th, 2008.

This is the nostalgia-inducing music of our younger days so for our 12th wedding anniversary, my wife bought tickets for us to go see the show on July 14th of this year. The concert we attended was at the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, California about 15 minutes from where we live. It is a nice outdoor venue surrounded by the San Francisco Bay on one side and the sprawling Google campus on the other. The theater has seats in the front close to the stage but most ticket holders find space on the grassy hill behind the seats where they find room for their own chairs and blankets and picnic in the nice California evening for a few hours before the performance.

Elvis Costello and the Imposters opened for the band and were heartily cheered by the 12,000 strong crowd but the venue erupted when Sting (in a beard), Stewart Copeland (drummer) and Andy Summers (guitarist) strolled on to the stage. I suspect that in Sting's older bearded visage many in that audience saw a reflection of their own aging. The performance was excellent and Sting's voice was strong and energetic. The reviews I saw later in the regional press compared this show very favorably to the earlier concert on this tour they had played in East Bay.

I also found a nice YouTube clip that has spliced together the sights and sounds from that July 14th concert in Mountain View:

The Tragedy on K-2

2008-08-03T14:38:00.000-07:00

At least nine climbers seem to have perished in a tragedy still unfolding on the majestic but treacherous K-2 mountain in Northern Pakistan near the border with China. New York Times has the unfolding story here and here. In the group trying to reach the summit were Norwegian, Dutch, French, Italian, Serbian, Korean, Pakistani and Nepalese climbers. The accident seems to have occured after an avalanche struck on a steep gully at 27,000 feet near the most dangerous part of the mountain known as the "bottleneck".

Update I: 11 climbers are feared dead now but 3 men were rescued including 2 frostbitten Dutchmen who were plucked by Pakistani military helicopters. One of the Dutch survivors, Wilco Van Rooijen who is now in a military hospital in Skardu describes here the conditions and mistakes in preparation that contributed to the disaster.

Before his death, 61-year-old Frenchman Hugues d'Aubarede gave an account of the climb -with freezing temperatures, bad weather and beautiful vistas - via a blog. On the eve of his death, his last message from the foot of The Bottleneck was: "I would love it if everyone could contemplate this ocean of mountains and glaciers. They put me through the wringer, but it's so beautiful. The night will be long but beautiful."

Update II: Today on August 6th, New York Times has a story titled "Tragic Toll After Chaos on Mountain" summing up what is now known about how the tragedy unfolded.

K2 is known as the world’s hardest and most dangerous mountain for climbers, more challenging even than Everest. Farther north and 1,500 miles from Everest, it collects heavy snow and storms, and climbers have only a few days each year when they can try for the peak, usually in early August. “For a professional, seasoned mountaineer it’s more of the holy grail than Everest,” said the veteran American climber Ed Viesturs. “There is no easy way to climb K2.”
In a message sent back to friends, three South Koreans from the Flying Jump K2 Expedition expressed their awe about “the mountain of the mountains” and “the mountain that invites death.”

Yeh Hum NaheeN

2008-08-02T13:14:00.000-07:00

The Wait for the Beijing Olympics

2008-08-02T11:17:00.000-07:00

I cannot remember any recent Summer Olympic games for which I have been waiting with as much anticipation as this year's edition in Beijing which will kickoff with the opening ceremony on 8/8/08 at 8:08pm Beijing time. The combination of Beijing as the venue with its political overtones of a rising, still partly closed and environmentally vulnerable China mixed with the compelling narrative around some exceptional athletes in the traditional Olympic powerhouse events of swimming and track and field is adding to the excitement.

In Track & Field, there are three matchups that I am particularly looking forward to watching. The 100m competition between the American Tyson Gay and the two phenomenal Jamaicans Asafa Powell and Usain Bolt, will be a race to watch; perhaps one of the strongest 100m line ups ever to race at the Olympics. The 200m women's race should also be a great rematch between the American Allyson Felix who won the silver in Athens and Veronica Campbell Brown, the Jamaican who won the gold.

And then there is the 110m hurdles! 110m hurdles this year will likely be the most anticipated event pitting the Chinese phenomenon and Athens gold medal winner Liu Xiang against the awesome Cuban, Dayron Robles, who recently broke Liu's 110m hurdle world record. Robles has the potential to single-handedly to dash the hopes of 1.3 billion people who will be cheering for Liu with all their hearts. The Liu Xiang phenomenon in China is indeed amazing and he stands at the center of China's hopes for this Olympics. The New York Times has a special "Play Magazine" out this Sunday which has some very interesting stories on Olympic athletes. There is a piece on Liu titled "The State Requests That Citizen Liu Win Gold" that provides a window into the special place of Liu Xiang in China's government built sports machine.

In swimming, the eyes of the world will be focused on Michael Phelps. Will he manage to get the eight Olympic golds this year and pass Mark Spitz who since 1972 has held that record when he won seven golds in Munich? The same issue of Play Magazine mentioned above has a story called "Out There" which deconstructs Phelps swimming technique in trying to explain his magic. Our family is certainly rooting for Phelps, particularly my four year old who only a few weeks ago matter of factly informed his swim camp director that he is going to be Michael Phelps.

Happy Watching!!!

Joseph O'Neill's "Brooklyn Dream Game"

2008-06-29T17:07:00.000-07:00

"Netherland": A Novel by Joseph O'Neill

Glancing through the May 26th issue of the New Yorker I came across James Wood's book review titled "Beyond a Boundary". What caught my attention was the accompanying photograph of men in white playing cricket under a bright blue sky with this tantalizing caption: "In Joseph O'Neill's "Netherland" cricket is at once an immigrant's imagined community, an emblem of foreignness, and, most poignantly, a dream of America." Intrigued, I quickly read Wood's review and felt an instant urge to head to a bookstore. Within days I had finished the novel and found that Wood's effusive characterization of the novel as "a large fictional achievement, and one of the most remarkable post-colonial books I have ever read" was indeed deserved.

James Wood is an English critic and has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since August 2007. It is hard to improve on Wood's excellent review of the novel which I would urge you to read (link above). It is easy to understand why he has been called "the best literary critic of his generation" and earned plaudits from even the most curmudgeonly of literary critics like Harold Bloom. Recently Wood has published a new work of criticism called "How Fiction Works" and two recent reviews by Delia Falconer in The Australian and Gideon Lewis-Kraus in the LA Times intelligently discuss Wood's influence and approach to criticism.

Right around the time Wood's review of "Netherland"was published there was a veritable flood of laudatory reviews and O'Neill profiles. New York Times had three different pieces within 3 days including a review by Michiko Kakutani, a Dwight Garner review in the Sunday Times Book Review and a profile of the author and the Staten Island Cricket Club where Joseph O'Neill plays his cricket. The Sunday Observer had back to back pieces by Will Buckley and Peter Beaumont and not to be left behind, Cricinfo Magazine published Andrew Miller's interview with the author. To top it all off, "Netherland" was just included on the longlist for this year's Man Booker prize and is favored to win by William Hill (a British bookmaker) with 7/2 odds. It is remarkable that fiction by a relatively little known author has received this kind of lavish attention but "Netherland" richly deserves it.

Instead of feebly reviewing a book that Wood has discussed with such flair let me talk instead of my quest to try to meet the author. I was so moved by the book and felt such a kinship with the narrator, Hans, that I wished I could meet the author and discuss the book with him. On searching the web to see if O'Neill was doing a book tour that would bring him to the San Francisco Bay Area I discovered that he was scheduled to be in Northern California just for one day on Tuesday, June 24th for two readings at bookstores almost an hour and half drive from where I live. One of the readings was scheduled at 5pm at the Orinda Bookstore in Orinda, CA not far from Berkeley. This was the closer of the two bookstores and never having heard of Orinda I carefully mapped out the directions and left work early on the 24th to meet O'Neill and to listen to him talk about his novel.

I also took three books with me that I wanted autographed. First, of course, I had my copy of "Netherland" with its copious marginalia. Second was O'Neill's book on his family history called "Blood-Dark Track" which traces the lives of his maternal and paternal grandfathers who were Turkish and Irish respectively. The last book in my pile was the 1993 Duke University Press edition of "Beyond a Boundary", CLR James' masterpiece about cricket, society, color and class in colonial Trinidad. With cricket as the backdrop and the incongruous relationship between the white, upper class Dutch narrator Hans and the dodgy, disarming, new world cricket entrepreneur Chuck Ramkissoon at the narrative center of the novel, "Netherland" is, in part, an homage to James' wonderful book. It is no accident that "Beyond a Boundary" is also the title of Wood's New Yorker review. What I also found interesting was that in 2007, Joseph O'Neill himself wrote a piece on "Beyond a Boundary" for powells.com which was surprisingly published on 9/11 which seemed to me quite a coincidence given that day's importance in the novel's setting. (When I told Joseph O'Neill about this he told me he had missed this fact and expressed genuine surprise at this weird coincidence).

I was the first to arrive for the reading at this small bookstore in Orinda and was welcomed by a woman from England who was the store manager (her interest in cricket prompted her to say yes to the publisher for a reading by the obscure O'Neill at her bookstore). Soon Joseph O'Neill arrived and I introduced myself. We chatted a bit about playing cricket in the US (he had played at Haverford's Cope field where I played for four years as an undergrad) and I effusively praised his book. We had a brief discussion about Wood's review and some aspects of the book and he was very friendly and indulgent.

The reading was brief but in the follow up Q&A the author said a few things that I found interesting. He mentioned that all through the long process of writing the novel he was certain from the very beginning that he had a perfect name for his book. It was going to be called "The Brooklyn Dream Game". However, when he had almost completed the novel his friend, the Irish poet Paul Muldoon, asked him if he had a name for the book. On hearing the intended title he asked if Joseph had also thought of an alternative. This gentle rebuke by a friend eventually led him to the present title which cleverly links many strands of the novel (the Dutch narrator, New York's old name "New Netherland" and 'nether' land meaning low land possibly implying ground zero).

After the reading I lined up to get my books signed and asked O'Neill to also autograph my copy of "Beyond a Boundary". He said he would be happy to do it and generously invited me to contact him if I was ever on the East Coast and wanted to play a game of cricket at the Walker Park with the Staten Island Cricket Club. I loved the wonderfully kind inscriptions that he wrote in my books. In "Netherland" he wrote : "To Fawad - Bat on boy, bat on" and in "Beyond a Boundary" it reads "With best wishes from a fellow man in whole".

Annals of Medicine - Atul Gawande

2008-06-28T00:20:00.000-07:00

Atul Gawande is a Boston-based surgeon at the Brigham and Women's hospital and a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. His excellent essays on the practice of medicine have appeared in the magazine for several years and they have been the basis of his two published collections titled "Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science" and "Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance".

Gawande's penchant for meticulous scientific examination of his own professon yields many useful insights (even for non-practitioners) and provides laypeople an unusually clear view of the "imperfect science" of diagnosis and cure and the human element that often makes it so. Gawande's writing is precise and uncluttered and he manages to explain complex topics with an admirable clarity of thought in very readable prose.

Gawande is one of the more recent in a line of accomplished physicians who have written insightfully about their vocation and provided a much needed empathetic transparency into the seemingly impersonal workings of the American system of sickness and health. Dr. Jerome Groopman, Oliver Sacks and Sherwin Nuland particularly come to mind as I think of doctors who have contributed tremendously to American medicine and letters. (Even outside of his writings on medicine, Nuland's memoir, "Lost in America" is one of my all-time favorites with an exceptionally touching portrait of a father-son relationship).

This week Gawande has an essay in the New Yorker titled "The Itch". In this piece he investigates this poorly understood sensation, its scientific source and its function. In explaining the biological provenance of uncontrollable itching, Gawande surveys the current scientific understanding of "Perception" and this is a fascinating part of the essay.

Here are some excerpts:

Our assumption had been that the sensory data we receive from our eyes, ears, nose, fingers, and so on contain all the information that we need for perception, and that perception must work something like a radio. It’s hard to conceive that a Boston Symphony Orchestra concert is in a radio wave. But it is. So you might think that it’sthe same with the signals we receive—that if you hooked up someone’s nerves to a monitor you could watch what the person is experiencing as if it were a television show.

Yet, as scientists set about analyzing the signals, they found them to be radically impoverished. Suppose someone is viewing a tree in a clearing. Given simply the transmissions along the optic nerve from the light entering the eye, one would not be able to reconstruct the three-dimensionality, or the distance, or the detail of thebark—attributes that we perceive instantly.
----
The images in our mind are extraordinarily rich. We can tell if something is liquid or solid, heavy or light, dead or alive. But the information we work from is poor—a distorted, two-dimensional transmission with entire spots missing. So the mind fills in most of the picture. You can get a sense of this from brain-anatomy studies. If visual sensations were primarily received rather than constructed by the brain, you’d expect that most of the fibres going to the brain’s primary visual cortex would come from the retina. Instead, scientists have found that only twenty per cent do; eighty per cent come downward from regions of the brain governing functions like memory. Richard Gregory, a prominent British neuropsychologist, estimates that visual perception is more than ninety per cent memory and less than ten per cent sensory nerve signals.
----
The account of perception that’s starting to emerge is what we might call the “brain’s best guess” theory of perception: perception is the brain’s best guess about what is happening in the outside world. The mind integrates scattered, weak, rudimentary signals from a variety of sensory channels, information from past experiences, and hard-wired processes, and produces a sensory experience full of brain-provided color, sound, texture, and meaning. We see a friendly yellow Labrador bounding behind a picket fence not because that is the transmission we receive but because this is the perception our weaver-brain assembles as its best hypothesis of what is
out there from the slivers of information we get. Perception is inference.

Update: In today's New York Times (July 4th, 2008) Dr. Atul Gawande answers questions about "The Itch"that some readers had after reading the original article.

George Carlin is Dead (not lost, not passed away, dead)

2008-06-24T22:45:00.001-07:00

George Carlin, one of the greatest American stand up comedians, died on June 22nd, 2008 in Santa Monica, CA. The outpouring of appreciations and the gushing praise of his fellow comics testify to his deep influence on a generation of stand up comedians. Jerry Seinfeld has a tribute in today's New York Times.

Carlin was a unique talent who used wonderfully precise language for his acerbic social commentary. His merciless skewering of national shibboleths, political correctness and the modern American proclivity for euphemism-laced conversations was refreshing in a landscape of false pieties and a world of "manufactured consent".

Here's a piece by Carlin on "War' from the early 90's: (Hat Tip: 3QD)
Warning: Carlin is not for the squeamish and the faint of heart. This is very strong language.

"California" - Joni Mitchell

2008-06-18T23:45:00.000-07:00

Joni Mitchell is simply a wonderful singer and songwriter with a career that spans several productive decades. Just the other day I was listening to my iPod in the car when Joni's song "California" came on. I was mesmerized both by her inimitable folksy voice and the vivid lyrics of the song. California has been home to me for just under 4 years so it is hardly a land where I have any substantial roots but as I thought of all my years on the East Coast I could relate deeply to Joni crooning about a different "old and cold" place and contrasting it unfavorably with the sunny youthful spirit of the Golden State:

Still a lot of lands to see
But I wouldn't want to stay here
Its too old and cold and settled in its ways here
Oh, but California
California I'm coming home

Here's Joni performing "California":

Darwinmania!

2008-06-18T21:56:00.000-07:00

Olivia Judson is an evolutionary biologist at Imperial College London and writes an entertaining and informative online column called "The Wild Side" in the New York Times. Being a fan of all things Darwin I particularly enjoyed her column today titled "Darwinmania" that kicks off a 18 month celebration of Darwin and his ideas on July 1st, 2008 (150th anniversary of the announcement of his discovery of natural selection) leading into February 2009 (200th anniversary of Darwin's birth) and culminating in November 2009 (150th anniversary of the publication of the "Origin of Species").

Today's column also summarizes some of the well known history of the "origins" of explaining evolution and natural selection, arguably the most revolutionary scientific idea in human history. No matter how many times one reads the fascinating story of Wallace and Darwin competing to be "first to market" with this groundbreaking discovery, one can't help but reflect on the true nature of most scientific thought as a systematic and painstaking effort built on accumulated knowledge rather than "eureka" moments of isolated genius.

Some excerpts from Judson's column:

And the “Origin” changed everything. Before the “Origin,” the diversity of life could only be catalogued and described; afterwards, it could be explained and understood. Before the “Origin,” species were generally seen as fixed entities, the special creations of a deity; afterwards, they became connected together on a great family tree that stretches back, across billions of years, to the dawn of life. Perhaps most importantly, the “Origin” changed our view of ourselves. It made us as much a part of nature as hummingbirds and bumblebees (or humble-bees, as Darwin called them); we, too, acquired a family tree with a host of remarkable and distinguished ancestors.

The reason the “Origin” was so powerful, compelling and persuasive, the reason Darwin succeeded while his predecessors failed, is that in it he does not just describe how evolution by natural selection works. He presents an enormous body of evidence culled from every field of biology then known. He discusses subjects as diverse as pigeon breeding in Ancient Egypt, the rudimentary eyes of cave fish, the nest-building instincts of honeybees, the evolving size of gooseberries (they’ve been getting bigger), wingless beetles on the island of Madeira and algae in New Zealand. One moment, he’s considering fossil animals like brachiopods (which had hinged shells like clams, but with a different axis of symmetry); the next, he’s discussing the accessibility of nectar in clover flowers to different species of bee.

Update: Today (July 9th, 2008) Judson has Part II of the series celebrating Charles Darwin. An excerpt:

So, the difficulties notwithstanding, there are many reasons to tackle the “Origin.” Reasons above and beyond the fact that it is one of the most important books ever written, and central to our culture. But to me, perhaps the most important is that reading the “Origin” is a window into a mind. A rich and fertile mind, with a holistic view of nature. One that sees the interconnectedness of living beings — that cats can alter the number of flowers — long before ecology existed as a formal subject. A mind that sees the brutality of the natural world — the wasps that lay their eggs in the living bodies of caterpillars (the caterpillars are then eaten alive by the growing larvae), the stupendous death rates of most creatures — and sees that from the terrible slaughter, great beauty can arise:

"Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object of which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."

Obama's Father's Day Speech

2008-06-15T22:42:00.000-07:00

Today was Father's Day in the United States. Senator Barack Obama used the occasion to give an excellent speech about the destructive effect of absentee fathers on black families. The speech was delivered at the Apostolic Church of God, one of Chicago's largest black churches on the south side of the city. It has been at least 20 years since I have been following American Presidential politics and there has never been a candidate with Obama's preternatural ability to inspire.

Here's the speech:

Meeting Fareed Zakaria

2008-06-01T17:38:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday May 27th, The Commonwealth Club of California's guest speaker was Fareed Zakaria, speaking to the audience about his new book "The Post-American World". The event was held at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco and those who live in Northern California know that the Club's events are later broadcast on National Public Radio's KQED station. I had been invited to the talk by a family friend who had an extra ticket and I was curious enough about Zakaria and his new work to be eager to attend in person.

I have found Zakaria's comments on George Stephanopoulos's Sunday morning show to be frequently insightful even if a bit timid in straying from the mainstream foreign policy establishment. He seems to have a genuinely global understanding of US foreign policy challenges but sometimes seems to strain to keep his views in check to avoid being tagged as an "international" intellectual instead of an Amercian one. (I sympathize with this natural propensity of an immigrant to seek whole hearted acceptance of a host country's elite). Also, I was impressed by his 2003 book "The Future of Freedom" in which he argues that constitutional liberalism must precede electoral democracy and that nations lacking a rule of law will inevitably end up as illiberal democracies. This squares with my own long held belief that durable democratic regimes can only be built on a constitutional rule of law and convinces me even more that the lawyer's movement in Pakistan demonstrated powerfully the country's potential to be a functioning democracy.

The main theme of "The Post-American World" (contrary to the title) is not a simplistic view of imperial America's decline. It is not another in a line of now forgotten tomes from the 80's about the Asian takeover of America (with China & India now substituted for 80's Japan). Instead Zakaria argues that the story of the 21st century is the "rise of the rest" even as America maintains significant advantages in competing with these new powers for wealth and influence. His advice to Amercan governments and people seems to be to embrace and learn to adapt and thrive in this new world rather than resist it and vainly hope for the preservation of a vanishing status quo. Zakaria's talk on his new book was an overview of this thesis peppered with anecdotes illustrating his views. He is an engaging speaker and entertained the audience with his suave wit.

After the talk there was a book signing and a long line formed in front of the podium so people could get their books personalized. After approaching him I told him how often I get asked if I am related to him (which I am not) because of our shared last name. He was very gracious and remarkably down to earth and made small talk (some of it in Urdu) for a couple of minutes showing curiosity about my vocation and the Pakistani background. He said "Khuda Hafiz" and as I walked away looking at the personalized signature in the book I was pleasantly surprised to see that below his signature he had added the inscription, "P.S. We're practically related".

From "Sohrab and Rustum" by Matthew Arnold

2008-05-24T21:56:00.000-07:00

The story of Rustum and Sohrab is a beloved legend from Zoroastrian mythology popularized by the 11th century Persian poet Abolqasem Ferdowsi in his great epic Shahnameh. Growing up I read many of Shahnameh's stories written for children in Urdu. The names and adventures of the noble Persian kings, their Turani enemies and sundry heroic warriors made an indelible impression and even to this day the names of Afrasiab, Kai Qobad, Rustum, Sohrab and Jamshed resonate in my memory.

"Sohrab and Rustum" is a poem by the 19th century English poet and famous literary critic Matthew Arnold (1822-1888). It was written in 1853. I am currently reading "The Portable Matthew Arnold" edited by Lionel Trilling and below is Trilling's own outline of the epic story of Rustum and Sohrab followed by an excerpt from the poem. The poem is too long to reproduce in its entirety but the famous passages excerpted below are from the end of the poem. Most of the place names are locations in the valley of the River Oxus (now called Amu Darya), a Central Asian river which passes through Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan before emptying into the Aral Sea.

"Rustum is the Persian epic hero; Sohrab is his son by a princess whom he had loved in early youth. Sohrab knows the identity of his father and longs to find him, but Rustum does not even know that he has a son. When they meet in single combat between the Persian and the Tartar armies, Rustum as the champion of the former, Sohrab as the champion of the latter, Rustum fights under an assumed name. Yet Sohrab suspects that his antagonist is the great Rustum and begs him to say so; Rustum for his part is drawn to the the youth and urges him to retire from an unequal contest. But Sohrab will not withdraw and Rustum will not disclose his identity. They fight, and at the climax of the combat Rustum cries aloud his name to terrify his enemy; Sohrab, not terrified but astonished, lowers his shield and is exposed to Rustum's spear, which pierces his side. Dying, he threatens the revenge his father Rustum will take. When Rustum denies that he ever had a son, Sohrab shows the family insignia of Rustum pricked on his arm. The proof is indisputable and the father and son at last know each other. In his grief and despair Rustum wishes for his own death." - Lionel Trilling

From "Rustum and Sohrab"

So, on the bloody sand, Sohrab lay dead;
And the great Rustum drew his horseman's cloak
Down o'er his face, and sate by his dead son.
As those black granite pillars, once high-reared
By Jemshid in Persepolis,to bear
His house, now 'mid their broken flights of steps
Lie prone, enormous, down the mountain side —
So in the sand lay Rustum by his son.

And night came down over the solemn waste,
And the two gazing hosts, and that sole pair,
And darkened all; and a cold fog, with night,
Crept from the Oxus. Soon a hum arose,
As of a great assembly loosed, and fires
Began to twinkle through the fog; for now
Both armies moved to camp, and took their meal:
The Persians took it on the open sands
Southward; the Tartars by the river marge:
And Rustum and his son were left alone.

But the majestic River floated on,
Out of the mist and hum of that low land,
Into the frosty starlight, and there moved,
Rejoicing, through the hushed Chorasmian waste,
Under the solitary moon: — he flowed
Right for the polar star, past Orgunjè,
Brimming, and bright, and large: then sands begin
To hem his watery march, and dam his streams,
And split his currents; that for many a league
The shorn and parcelled Oxus strains along
Through beds of sand and matted rushy isles —
Oxus, forgetting the bright speed he had
In his high mountain-cradle in Pamere,
A foiled circuitous wanderer: — till at last
The longed-for dash of waves is heard, and wide
His luminous home of waters opens, bright
And tranquil, from whose floor the new-bathed stars
Emerge, and shine upon the Aral Sea.

You can read the full text of the poem here. The image is a sculpture of Ferdowsi by the Iranian sculptor Ustad Abolhassan Khan Sadighi known as Master Sadighi (1894-1995)

The Real John McCain

2008-05-23T14:15:00.000-07:00

Due to the lingering "straight talk" romance of John McCain's maverick 2000 campaign, the mainstream American press seems incapable of holding McCain to account for his numerous flip flops since he lined up behind George Bush's presidency. The internet has transformed information delivery and inevitably political campaigns have been altered. Information filtering is no longer possible for the MSM (mainstream media) and the implications of this information free-for-all are still not fully understood by modern day campaigns.

The following video titled The Real McCain 2 launched this past Sunday has been viewed by over 1 million people. It has been the #1 most viewed video on YouTube, #1 on the viral video chart, and the #2 story on the Digg Election 2008 page. This is an audience size that is significantly larger than most of the cable news shows.

Dalrymple on "The Arts of Kashmir"

2008-04-19T21:51:00.000-07:00

William Dalrymple has a good essay in this issue of the NYRB on Asia Society's exhibition catalog by Pratapaditya Pal on "The Arts of Kashmir".

The first part of the essay describes the sad devastation of the Kashmir Valley and the destruction of Kashmir's traditionally peace loving and syncretic culture. No matter where one places the blame for this long and deadly conflict, the clash of nationalisms that has played out in Kashmir has ravaged the Kashmiris with no end in sight for this strife torn people.

The exhibition catalog and Dalrymple's essay serves to remind the audience of the historic cultural vitality of Kashmir with its rich Hindu, Buddhist and Muslim past. I particularly enjoyed reading about the early Kashmiri Muslim ruler Zain-ul-Abidin "Budshah" (1420-1470) who was renowned for his artistic patronage and whose 50 year reign is still remembered fondly by Kashmiris despite the passage of 500 years:

Fluent in Kashmiri, his native tongue, and Persian, Sanskrit, and Tibetan, he was a great patron of the arts and architecture, of literature and music, and in the conservation and preservation of Kashmir's heritage, irrespective of his religious affiliation.... Indeed, the only other Muslim ruler on the subcontinent who can be compared to Zain-ul-Abidin for his liberality, his intellectual curiosity, his love of learning as well as music, and for introducing and nourishing a wide range of crafts and arts and architecture is the Mughal emperor Akbar (1556–1605).

One can only hope that Kashmiris and their land are spared further destruction and they gradually find a way back to a culture "of tolerance and syncretism so clearly exemplified in Kashmir's artistic traditions".

Photograph: Shiva and his consort Parvati (ca. 900 AD)

Lessons of the Twentieth Century - Tony Judt

2008-04-19T11:49:00.000-07:00

Tony Judt is a British Jewish historian specializing in European history. He is currently a professor at New York University and his most recent book was the critically acclaimed history of Europe since 1945 titled "Postwar". Not surprisingly for a historian interested in twentieth century Europe, Judt has reflected deeply and insightfully on war, genocide, occupation, empire and displacement of populations. He regularly writes for the New York Review of Books where many of his past essays are archived here.

His most recent essay titled "What have we Learned, if Anything" in the May 1st issue of the NY Review of Books is an eloquently argued plea to learn the right lessons from perhaps the bloodiest century in human history. Judt argues that, in America in particular, the more distant effects of 20th century suffering and the post cold war triumphalist view of the century's events have led to amnesia about the meaning of war. He calls war the "crucial antecedent condition for mass criminality in the modern era" and goes on to discuss the dangerous consequences for the republic of not learning this crucial lesson from the 20th century. He looks at America's war against terrorism and examines how it displays massive ignorance of the key lessons from the previous century; "the ease with which war and fear and dogma can bring us to demonize others, deny them a common humanity or the protection of our laws, and do unspeakable things to them".

It is always difficult to provide excerpts that would do justice to a well-argued, tight knit essay but here are some passages:

War, in short, prompted behavior that would have been unthinkable as well as dysfunctional in peacetime. It is war, not racism or ethnic antagonism or religious fervor, that leads to atrocity. War—total war—has been the crucial antecedent condition for mass criminality in the modern era. The first primitive concentration camps were set up by the British during the Boer War of 1899–1902. Without World War I there would have been no Armenian genocide and it is highly unlikely that either communism or fascism would have seized hold of modern states. Without World War II there would have been no Holocaust. Absent the forcible involvement of Cambodia in the Vietnam War, we would never have heard of Pol Pot. As for the brutalizing effect of war on ordinary soldiers themselves, this of course has been copiously documented.

The United States avoided almost all of that. Americans, perhaps alone in the world, experienced the twentieth century in a far more positive light. The US was not invaded. It did not lose vast numbers of citizens, or huge swathes of territory, as a result of occupation or dismemberment. Although humiliated in distant neocolonial wars (in Vietnam and now in Iraq), the US has never suffered the full consequences of defeat. Despite their ambivalence toward its recent undertakings, most Americans still feel that the wars their country has fought were mostly "good wars." The US was greatly enriched by its role in the two world wars and by their outcome, in which respect it has nothing in common with Britain, the only other major country to emerge unambiguously victorious from those struggles but at the cost of near bankruptcy and the loss of empire. And compared with other major twentieth-century combatants, the US lost relatively few soldiers in battle and suffered hardly any civilian casualties.
------
Ignorance of twentieth-century history does not just contribute to a regrettable enthusiasm for armed conflict. It also leads to a misidentification of the enemy. We have good reason to be taken up just now with terrorism and its challenge. But before setting out on a hundred-year war to eradicate terrorists from the face of the earth, let us consider the following. Terrorists are nothing new. Even if we exclude assassinations or attempted assassinations of presidents and monarchs and confine ourselves to men and women who kill random unarmed civilians in pursuit of a political objective, terrorists have been with us for well over a century.
------
This abstracting of foes and threats from their context—this ease with which we have talked ourselves into believing that we are at war with "Islamofascists," "extremists" from a strange culture, who dwell in some distant "Islamistan," who hate us for who we are and seek to destroy "our way of life"—is a sure sign that we have forgotten the lesson of the twentieth century: the ease with which war and fear and dogma can bring us to demonize others, deny them a common humanity or the protection of our laws, and do unspeakable things to them.
------
Far from escaping the twentieth century, we need, I think, to go back and look a bit more carefully. We need to learn again—or perhaps for the first time—how war brutalizes and degrades winners and losers alike and what happens to us when, having heedlessly waged war for no good reason, we are encouraged to inflate and demonize our enemies in order to justify that war's indefinite continuance. And perhaps, in this protracted electoral season, we could put a question to our aspirant leaders: Daddy (or, as it might be, Mommy), what did you do to prevent the war?

Update: Just after publishing this post I saw in the April 20th New York Times Book Review, Geoffrey Wheatcroft's review of "Reappraisals", Judt's new collection of essays.

Urdu in Delhi

2008-04-13T20:14:00.000-07:00

There is an interesting essay on the state of the Urdu language in Delhi titled "Urdu and the City" in this week's issue of Outlook India. There is some conflicting evidence presented about a mini-surge of interest in Urdu beyond the traditional Muslim readership (particularly those with the ability to read the script). What I found most interesting were the innovative performing art approaches to introduce Urdu to newer audiences. Anees Azmi's children's plays, his readings of "Ghalib Ke Khatoot" and Mahmood Faruqi's "Daastan Goi" seem to be genuinely creative efforts at a softer pedagogy. Zia Mohyuddin's readings have performed a similarly invigorating role in introducing classics of Urdu literature to the "English Medium" segment of younger Pakistanis. (Photograph is of Mahmood Farooqi during a performance. He performs the epic "Daastan-e-Ameer Hamza Sahibqiraan". I believe Mahmood is the son of the eminent Urdu critic Shamsur Rahman Faruqi.)

Nobody who loves Urdu language and literature can be indifferent to the vigor of Urdu's health in the centers of its historical birth in Delhi and UP. Even though Urdu continues to be patronized at the higher education level by the Indian government, the state of the language at the grassroots is by all accounts unenviable. Urdu has suffered in post-partition India both by its exclusive association with Muslims and perhaps more grievously by not having any Indian state which could adopt it as its first and official language. The heart of Urdu's historic presence became the Hindi heartland in post-independence India and Urdu shrunk to a niche language of the Muslim lower middle classes. An essay by Syed Shahabuddin in the 2003 Annual of Urdu Studies titled "Urdu in India, Education and Muslims - A Trinity Without a Church" sheds some interesting light on this issue (even if you don't necessarily agree with his prescription). Fortunately, Urdu's rich literary heritage and its widely appreciated mellifluous cadences have helped it maintain a stubborn presence in the poetic and musical high culture of India.

The Sounds of Punjabi Music - Part 1 (Film Music)

2008-04-06T15:55:00.000-07:00

Having grown up in Lahore in the 70's and 80's, the strains of lilting Punjabi melodies were always a warm and familiar presence. Even though in middle class upwardly mobile urban families Punjabi had sadly come to be associated with rural backwardness, Punjabi music with its deep cultural roots continued to exert an influence. Even in homes where children were discouraged from all things Punjabi lest they give off a whiff of the "paindu" lower classes, times of celebration such as mehndis remained incomplete without the girls on the dholki singing a repertoire of Punjabi wedding songs. Traditional melodies such as "Mathe Te Chamkan Waal", "Saada Chiriyan Da Chamba Ve", "Raat De BaaraN Wajje Aape Meri Neendar Khule", "Mehndi TaaN Sajdi Je Nache Munde Di MaaN" sung at these functions at least familiarized young boys and girls with the music of their native soil.

I was particularly fortunate to grow up in a family where I was amply exposed to both the Punjabi language and music but many years abroad had served to obscure many of those fond memories. It is only after the internet revolution that I have rediscovered much of that music. In this post (and in future posts) I want to share some of my favorite Punjabi singers and their music and provide a guide to some excellent sources for further enjoyment for those who may want to explore further. This is the first in a series of three planned posts and here I will focus on Punjabi Film Music.

Few now remember that until the 1970's Pakistan had a fairly thriving film industry based in Lahore. Noor Jehan's masterful voice so dominated Pakistan's film music singing that it overshadowed other unjustly forgotten talents. I am particularly fond of Zubaida Khanum's singing. Here's a wonderful song by her composed by "Baba" G.A. Chishti from the 1957 film "Yakke Wali" in which Musarrat Nazir played the title role. The song is "Resham Da Lacha Lak We". These old black & white films evoke a simpler, more innocent time and place. I feel that in many of these songs the Punjabi film heroines are portrayed as less demure figures than their contemporaries in Bombay's films of that era. Many of these women seem to exude a rugged self confidence even within the confines of their traditionally assigned roles.

Zubaida Khanum sang some of the most popular Punjabi film songs of the 50's and 60's. Some of my other Zubaida Khanum favorites include "AssaN Jaan Ke Meet Lai Akh Way" from the 1955 film "Heer" and "Bundey Chandi Dey" from the film "Chan Mahi".

Inayat Hussain Bhatti who hailed from Gujrat is another forgotten name today but many of his songs in the two decades after partition were enormously popular. A glance at his biography shows Bhatti's impressively versatile personality which bucks any stereotype of a Punjabi film hero. The video below is one of my favorite Inayat Hussain Bhatti songs called "Bhagan Waleo" from the 1953 film "Shehri Babu". This song was composed by Rashid Attrey (who along with Master Inayat Hussain and Khawaja Khurshid Anwar comprises the holy trinity of Pakistani music directors). Bhatti himself is the actor in this clip:

Some other of my Inayat Hussain Bhatti favorties include "Chan Mere Makhna" (popularized more recently by Shazia Manzoor) and a nice duet with Zubaida Khanum called "Goray Goray Hath Kali Wang Mundaya".

No post on Punjabi film music can be concluded without including a sampling from Noor Jehan's legendary career in Punjabi film singing. Many of her songs (courtesy of singing at Mehndis) are so deeply rooted in West Punjab's culture that they are intimately familiar even to those who have never set foot in a Pakistani cinema. Here is a personal favorite titled "Chan Mahi Aa" from the 1970 film "Heer Ranjha" composed by the master tunesmith Khurshid Anwar.

"Heer Ranjha" had a phenomenal soundtrack and virtually all the songs were superhits including "Mein Cham Cham NachaN", "Wanjhli Walarea", "Rabba Wekh Laya", "Kadi Aa Mil Ranjhan We" and Irene Parveen's lovely, chirpy number "TooN Chor Mein Teri Chori".

Here are some other Noor Jehan songs I like: "Weh Sonay Deya Kangna Sauda Iko Jaya", (a wonderful song in which Anjuman truly makes Noor Jehan's voice come alive), Tere Mukhre Da Kala Kala Til We", (with Noor Jehan herself in the lead role) "Jadon Holi Jai" and countless more.

Coming in Part 2: Punjabi Sufi & Folk Music

Obama - The Inspirational Maternal Influence

2008-03-15T18:36:00.000-07:00

It is clear to most observers of the American political scene that the Democratic presidential choice between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton this year is not a choice between radically different policy or ideological positions. Obama's attractiveness as a candidate depends in large part on his inspirational biography and a sense amongst his supporters that he is a more authentic, less calculating figure who has demonstrated sound political judgment during his years in public service.

The wonderful biographical piece in the New York Times about Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro and this peripatetic, refreshingly open minded woman's influence on her son Barack uncovers many of the sources of Obama's comfort with diversity and his natural empathy for the disadvantaged.

Elections in Pakistan - The Day After

2008-02-19T12:54:00.000-08:00

Congratulations to the people of Pakistan for the successful exercise of their right to vote, defeating cynicism and affirming their desire to induce a positive and peaceful change in their society despite all the sordid history of manipulations of the perpetually corrupt establishment. The people have now given their verdict and displayed the kind of political maturity that the elites in Pakistan never even acknowledge let alone praise.

But these elections are only a beginning. It is now up to the elected representatives of the people and their leadership to forge a path that strengthens democratic institutions (parliament, judiciary, election commission, media) while eschewing political vendettas and protracted wrangling. Musharraf has a clear role to play in this by gracefully stepping aside and honoring the wishes of the people who voted "no-confidence" in him with an overwhelming majority. He now needs to let Pakistan's healing begin from the nightmare of the last 12 months. The country may then still manage to look back at the positives of the tumultuous last year which did , at least, produce a clear and more organized grassroots yearning for democracy and the rule of law.

There is indeed a brighter ray of hope after these elections. Let the leaders who have gained power learn from their worst mistakes of the past and start the process of re-building Pakistani institutions afresh. The problems are vast but at least today there is a palpable sense of hope. Let the newly elected leaders and Musharraf ensure that this moment does not slip away.

Election Day in Pakistan

2008-02-17T20:30:00.000-08:00

Today Pakistanis will go to the polls in perhaps one of the most important and fraught elections in the benighted nation's history (with the possible exception of the 1970 elections which eventually resulted in the creation of Bangladesh). The atmosphere is filled with uncertainty about the fairness of the election process. Benazir Bhutto's assasination has cast a pall over these elections. The threat of violence is omnipresent and large numbers of people are suffering unprecedented economic difficulties driven by wheat and energy shortages. If the elections are crudely rigged, then these elections could very well be the harbinger of significant violence and worsening political instability.

As apprehensive as I am about the outcome of the elections, there is also a small chance that this could be a first step toward stability. If the elections are broadly free and fair and the two large opposition parties accept the poll results, then chances are that it could lead to Musharraf's exit from the scene and the formation of a national government that will have the chance to start putting the pieces back together. Even with a national government, however, there are a lot of difficulties ahead and the cleaning up of the Musharrafian mess will take feats of statesmanship that the opposition leaders have not previously demonstrated. Tackling the immediate issues of judicial independence, media freedom, provincial harmony and economic relief while evolving an equitable sharing of power without vengeful targeting of opponents is a tall order. All this does not even mention the control of the rapidly speading menace of terrorism that will require political compromise, public mobilization and some deft distancing from Washington.

Here is to hoping that February 18th, 2008 brings some positive change for the suffering and burdened citizens of the Pakistani state.

"A Few Words on the Soul" by Wislawa Szymborska

2008-02-04T14:52:00.000-08:00

Taking the cue from one of my favorite destinations on the web, 3QD, I too have resolved to post more of my favorite poems this year. However, on this blog expect to see Urdu poetry as well as Western verse. Unlike my friend Raza Rumi I have no talent for poetry translation so, with regrets, Urdu poetry will be in the original (in Roman letters).

This poem is by the 1996 Polish Nobel Laureate, Wislawa Szymborska (b. 1923) and I just love the playful image of the soul, capable of being summoned only in moments when we are fully attuned to receiving its charms.

A Few Words on the Soul

We have a soul at times.

No one's got it non-stop,

for keeps.

Day after day,

year after year

may pass without it.

Sometimes

it will settle for awhile

only in childhood's fears and raptures

Sometimes only in astonishment

that we are old.

It rarely lends a hand

in uphill tasks,

like moving furniture,

or lifting luggage,

or going miles in shoes that pinch.

It usually steps out

whenever meat needs chopping

or forms have to be filled.

For every thousand conversations

it participates in one,

if even that,

since it prefers silence.

Just when our body goes from ache to pain,

it slips off-duty.

It's picky,

it doesn't like seeing us in crowds.

our hustling for a dubious advantage

and creaky machinations make it sick.

Joy and sorrow

aren't two different feelings for it.

It attends us

only when the two are joined.

We can count on it

when we're sure of nothing

and curious about everything.

Among the material objects

it favors clocks with pendulums

and mirrors, which keep on working

even when no one is looking.

It won't say where it comes from

or when it's taking off again,

though it's clearly expecting such questions.

We need it

but apparently

it needs us

for some reason too.

(Translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh)

Campaigning for Obama

2008-02-02T22:21:00.000-08:00

February 5th is Super Tuesday when 24 states, including California, will vote or caucus in the Democratic primary. I am supporting Barack Obama in this primary and would like to see him as the party's nominee against the Republicans in November. My reasons are simple: he is an inspirational figure with a preternatural ability to motivate people, has demonstrated independence and excellent judgment in opposing the Iraq war from the very beginning and possesses a healthy intelligence, policy acumen and intellectual curiosity necessary for the job. The historic prospect of an African-American President of the United States of America is also an important contributing factor. He does not have many years of experience in Washington but Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times has laid out the best argument on why this is not as important as is commonly believed(his lack of executive experience would be a more valid criticism). He made a blunder by sounding naively hawkish on Pakistan several months ago but demonstrated sound temperament by learning from the criticism that inevitably followed and fine tuned his views.

Julie is a mother of one of my daughter's schoolfriends and is a Palo Alto neighborhood precinct captain for Obama. Knowing that I had already cast my absentee ballot for Obama she called me last night to ask if I would be interested in volunteering for the campaign and doing some door to door canvassing. I agreed and this morning, along with another volunteer, walked the streets of Palo Alto. In our hands we had a printed list of targeted registered Democratic and Independent voters. Our job was to try to get people to vote on Tuesday but also to understand their leaning and indicate them on our list. This would help identify probable Obama voters for volunteers managing the phone banks on election day. They could then call these people on Tuesday to get them to vote or even drive them to the polling stations if required. It was an interesting experience as knocking on the doors of strangers is never pleasant but it was made easier by the camaraderie of the volunteers and because many of the people we talked to had either already voted for Obama or were strongly leaning toward him. It will be interesting to see where the race stands after "Tsunami Tuesday" but it already seems clear that unless there is a highly unexpected result, the Democratic race will continue for several more weeks.

Arundhati Roy & Tony Judt on Genocide

2008-02-01T21:58:00.000-08:00

On January 18th, Arundhati Roy spoke in Istanbul at the first death anniversary of Hrant Dink, the courageous Turkish-Armenian editor of the newspaper Agos, who was assasinated by a 17 year old Turkish nationalist. With more than 100,000 people marching silently through the streets of Istanbul at Dink's funeral last year, the assasination brought into focus, yet again, the deplorable official Turkish position of continued denial of the Armenian genocide of 1915. In this speech titled "Listening to Grasshoppers", (reprinted in abridged version by Outlook India) Roy does not have much to say about the Armenian tragedy specifically but reflects more generally on the nature of genocides ("Its an old human habit, genocide is").

To her, "Union" and "Progress" are code words that are the "twin coordinates of genocide". Notions of "Union" pitch their populist but exclusionary appeal on platforms of shared race, religion, ethnicity and nationality and "Progress" on the ideals of individual and national attainment of wealth. Both these ideas inevitably lead to the dehumanization of those who are a threat to the "union" project or are obstacles to "progress". In Roy's Indian examples these "twin coordinates" inevitably lead to the genocidal mindset of Narendra Modi's Gujarat ("Union") or to the brutalities of Nandigram in West Bengal ("Progress"). Into this argument she weaves the idea of the expansionist need for "Lebensraum" ("living space"); a notion that necessitates the displacement or even 'extermination' of those who occupy land and resources thwarting the "noble" goals of union and progress. This is a powerfully engaging piece and reminiscent of Hannah Arendt's work ("Eichmann in Jerusalem", "The Origins of Totalitarianism") to make sense of man's murderous instincts.

In the past, Roy's non-fiction has sometimes struck me as emotionally overwrought. Her relentless attacks on India's (unequal) growth, even when fair, have never even cursorily acknowledged that growth (even with all its terrible inequalities) has been effective in bringing millions out of poverty in places like East Asia where the process has gone on longer. In 1997, the American economist and now the famously liberal New York Times columnist, Paul Krugman wrote a classic piece called "In praise of cheap labor" that articulates a different point of view that, at the very least, requires honest intellectual acknowledgment. However, despite these reservations about Arundhati Roy, I have come to admire her fierce and passionate intellect. There is no shortage of people who will always be willing to promote the economic miracles of China or fuel the hype of a "Shining India" with pride. But it takes a peculiar combination of intellectual acumen, relentless courage and a deep commitment to the plight of the powerless to keep an uncompromising focus on "Narmada Bachao", farmer suicides, Nandigram and Gujarat in the shadow of a frequently unreflective triumphalism of the "New India". Even if one quarrels with some of her intellectual foibles the world needs more Arundhati Roys.

Co-incidentally, Tony Judt , the British historian, also has an interesting piece on the issue of genocide in the February 14th, 2008 issue of the New York Review of Books. The essay is titled "The 'Problem of Evil' in Postwar Europe". This piece too starts with a reference to Hannah Arendt's influential work. It goes on to state that Europe may be in danger of trivializing the lessons of its own genocidal past. The repetitive invocations of the Holocaust and its sometime political use as a defensive shield for Israel is desensitizing modern Europeans to the scale of these crimes.

"Meanwhile, we should all of us perhaps take care when we speak of the problem of evil. For there is more than one sort of banality. There is the notorious banality of which Arendt spoke —the unsettling, normal, neighborly, everyday evil in humans. But there is another banality: the banality of overuse—the flattening, desensitizing effect of seeing or saying or thinking the same thing too many times until we have numbed our audience and rendered them immune to the evil we are describing. And that is the banality— or "banalization"—that we face today."

The Cure at Troy - Seamus Heaney

2008-01-28T23:33:00.000-08:00

In the New York Times several days ago, in a piece about Barack Obama and the politics of hope, the writer Dave Eggers quoted an excerpt from a poem titled "The Cure at Troy" by the Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney. The poem has stayed with me partly because in that very first reading it made me think about the situation in Pakistan where even though optimism seems to be in short supply there is still the lingering sense of hope exemplifed by the courageous lawyers and judges in their struggle for law and justice.

from "The Cure at Troy"

Human beings suffer,

they torture one another,

they get hurt and get hard.

No poem or play or song

can fully right a wrong

inflicted or endured.

The innocent in gaols

beat on their bars together.

A hunger-striker's father

stands in the graveyard dumb.

The police widow in veils

faints at the funeral home.

History says, Don't hope

on this side of the grave.

But then, once in a lifetime

the longed for tidal wave

of justice can rise up,

and hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change

on the far side of revenge.

Believe that a further shore

is reachable from here.

Believe in miracles

and cures and healing wells.

Call the miracle self-healing:

The utter self-revealing

double-take of feeling.

If there's fire on the mountain

Or lightning and storm

And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing

the outcry and the birth-cry

of new life at its term.

Pakistan After Benazir Bhutto

2008-01-28T20:20:00.000-08:00

I was in Pakistan on December 27th, the day Benazir Bhutto was assasinated in the garrison city of Rawalpindi. I watched the television screen in utter disbelief as the initial news of the murderous attack on her was soon followed by the confirmation of her death. Those who have read any of my political musings know that I took a dim view of her time as Prime Minister, was not a fan of her frequently opportunistic politics and thought her murky dealings with Musharraf at Amercian behest were a singularly bad idea.

However, since her assasination I have felt no desire to write a political analysis, provide a prognosis or even comment on the tastelessly quick backlash against her that started in the wake of widespread sympathy after her death (e.g. Dalrymple's piece). I continue to feel that this event has such large scale repercussions for Pakistan's future that the punditry still does not fully comprehend its dimensions. Never having been a supporter of the People's Party, the unique place of such a national party led by an ethnic minority has become clearly evident to me only after Benazir's death. If PPP disintegrates as a party or retreats into the Sindhi heartland, the institutional harm to Pakistan will be incalculable. In the short term, like everybody else, I am awaiting the outcome of the February 18th elections to see how Pakistan may find a way out of the current Musharraf-engendered political paralysis. However, even after the inevitable day that Musharraf leaves office, I only see compounding problems for those who follow him. Musharraf, like all of Pakistan's military dictators before him, will leave his successors a country riven with far greater problems than he inherited in 1999.

Simon Jenkins' Lament for Lahore

2008-01-21T15:05:00.000-08:00

I love the city of Lahore. This sentiment is not an uncritical emotional attachment to my hometown but reflects a love for the incredible richness of Lahore's cultural history, the hospitality and generosity of its people and the inimitability of its cuisine. It is Pakistan's uniquely wonderful city. There are things to recommend places like Karachi (a Western-style cosmopolitanism) or Islamabad (an anodyne livability) but Lahore possesses a combination of charms that cannot be replicated elsewhere in Pakistan.

That Lahore has suffered as a city since partition is undeniable. The unfortunate cleansing of the Hindu and Sikh population at the time of independence robbed Lahore of much of its cultural diversity. The continuing neglect of its historic architectural heritage, the steady degradation of its environment and the erosion of many of its literary institutions have all contributed to a general sense of decline. Simon Jenkins writing in The Guardian is right to lament this downward slide even as he acknowledges the many wonders of the city. I am inclined to blame Musharraf for many of Pakistan's current ills but it is hard to pin the current state of Lahore on his malign neglect, as Jenkins asserts. To me the plight of modern day Lahore is simply a reflection of the general state of deterioration of the Pakistani polity.

The Brilliance of Steven Pinker's Mind

2008-01-20T14:05:00.000-08:00

Cosmologists, Quantum Physicists, Geneticists, Cognitive Scientists, Evolutionary Biologists and others are continuously working to advance human understanding from the macro (origins of the universe) to the micro (behavior of genes, functioning of the mind). All this knowledge has a profound influence on metaphysics, religion, ethics, economics, sociology and other fields of the humanities and social sciences. These areas of human study then have to contend with the onrush of scientific evidence about human behavior, its nature and its origins either by incorporating the evidence or by challenging it. It is therefore of the utmost importance that laypeople who care about these issues develop some understanding of the current state of scientific learning about these subjects.

In the modern world where experts know "more and more about less and less" the effort of many brilliant practitioners in highly specialized fields to engage laypeople with their complex ideas is worthy of great praise. To make these ideas digestible without dumbing them down requires not only an exceptional clarity of mind but great expositional skills. Fortunately there are many accomplished scientists who also possess a rare ability to educate the non-specialist. Richard Dawkins, E.O. Wilson, Ernst Mayr, Stephen Jay Gould, Carl Sagan, Paul Davies, Brian Greene and Richard Feynman are some of the examples of scientists who have succeeded to varying degrees in reaching beyond their rarefied peer group.

Steven Pinker, the hard to label Harvard Evolutionary Psycholgist is amongst one of the best examples of current scientists who can write well for a broader audience. This post was precipitated after reading his excellent essay titled "The Moral Instinct" in the January 13th, 2008 issue of The New York Times Sunday Magazine. It is hard to summarize the breadth of the essay's argument but in it Pinker explains the existing evidence for the biological (evolutionary) underpinnings of our morality. He examines many interesting examples about the universality of morals and tries to square them with the clearly observed differences across cultures. The essay is somewhat long but I couldn't recommend it any more strongly and urge people to read it. There are few popular pieces of writing that engage this deeply in reflecting on the sources of our deeply held moral beliefs.

Excerpts:

When anthropologists like Richard Shweder and Alan Fiske survey moral concerns across the globe, they find that a few themes keep popping up from amid the diversity. People everywhere, at least in some circumstances and with certain other folks in mind, think it’s bad to harm others and good to help them. They have a sense of fairness: that one should reciprocate favors, reward benefactors and punish cheaters. They value loyalty to a group, sharing and solidarity among its members and conformity to its norms. They believe that it is right to defer to legitimate authorities and to respect people with high status. And they exalt purity, cleanliness and sanctity while loathing defilement, contamination and carnality.
The exact number of themes depends on whether you’re a lumper or a splitter, but Haidt counts five — harm, fairness, community (or group loyalty), authority and purity — and suggests that they are the primary colors of our moral sense. Not only do they keep reappearing in cross-cultural surveys, but each one tugs on the moral intuitions of people in our own culture.
---------
All this brings us to a theory of how the moral sense can be universal and variable at the same time. The five moral spheres are universal, a legacy of evolution. But how they are ranked in importance, and which is brought in to moralize which area of social life — sex, government, commerce, religion, diet and so on — depends on the culture. Many of the flabbergasting practices in faraway places become more intelligible when you recognize that the same moralizing impulse that Western elites channel toward violations of harm and fairness (our moral obsessions) is channeled elsewhere to violations in the other spheres. Think of the Japanese fear of nonconformity (community), the holy ablutions and dietary restrictions of Hindus and Orthodox Jews (purity), the outrage at insulting the Prophet among Muslims (authority). In the West, we believe that in business and government, fairness should trump community and try to root out nepotism and cronyism. In other parts of the world this is incomprehensible — what heartless creep would favor a perfect stranger over his own brother?

Musharraf's "War on Terrorism"

2007-12-17T23:04:00.000-08:00

An Interview with Pankaj Mishra

2007-11-26T15:31:00.000-08:00

I have written here before about Pankaj Mishra. At that time, I had linked to his several years old three-part essay on Kashmir written for the NY Review of Books. In that piece I had been impressed by his evident passion to dig below the surface for truth and his caring and empathetic style. Over the years, he has had a special relationship with the NYRB as his non-fiction writing blossomed under the tutelage of that periodical's legendary editor Barbara Epstein.

Mishra continues to be one of the most thoughtful literary and journalistic voices in contemporary India. I enjoyed reading a detailed interview with him in "The Believer" magazine. (Thanks to Amitava Kumar's blog).

Excerpts:

"--- but I think the reporter or journalist is well served by having a responsibility to the powerless, to use a much-abused cliché. The voice of the powerless is in some danger of not being heard in the elite discourses we now have in the mainstream media. This is something that I’ve learned late. Obviously, I write for a very elite audience, but is there something else that I’m also responsible to? People who write about issues like poverty or terrorism are a part of the elite, and the distance between the elite and nonelite is growing very fast. You can move around the world but meet only people who speak your language, who share the same ideas, the same beliefs, and in doing so you can lose sight of the fact that the vast majority of the world does not think or believe in or speak the everyday discourse of the elite. Yet their lives are being shaped by these elites, by people like us. I don’t mean this in a pompous way, but we have a responsibility to articulate their sense of suffering."

"--- some of my students seem to want to be able to write without actually reading, which seems utterly bizarre. When I assign certain readings, they often say, “I can’t relate to this,” which means whatever story we’re reading is so far outside of their experience—which tends to be limited—that they will not make the effort to understand what it is about. I find this a crippling attitude to have toward literature, toward history, toward all sorts of things.
Some of my students don’t have a sense of whether their writing is any good or not. They think it’s good just because it comes out of them and it’s a part of their being. To criticize their writing is to criticize them in some profound way. It’s as if they’ve been taught far too much self-confidence—and maybe not much else."