synchroni-cities - new york/elsewhere

Sarai in Meybod, Iran, June 2010

2011-06-17T02:55:00.000-07:00

that which was named delhi

2011-03-29T09:58:00.000-07:00

This is a translation of the opening page and a half of Urdu writer Intizar Hussain's literary memoir of Delhi, “Dilli Tha Jiska Naam”, published by Sang-e-Meel Publishers, Lahore, 2003.

No settlement shows its [true] self easily. And then Delhi is a settlement about which Mir had warned us that it's not any other town, this is Delhi. You and I are in a small numbered queue, the queue of those who have swallowed so much of the dust of Delhi's street and alleys that we have become the stones of Delhi's roads, but even to us, how much of its selfhood has this city shown? It has hidden away far more than it has ever shown. So know this attempt of mine as merely a useless fancy. To tell the truth, it's just one of Delhi's evenings which has made me crazy, obsessed. This melancholy monsoon evening revealed itself to me for the space of a breath, and then vanished. To relate it again is not my intention. When was I able to tell of it before? I am merely gesturing towards it.

This was an evening two or three years after Partition. I had reached Delhi after a lot of effort. When we set foot in that celebrated passage that is called the dargah of Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya, the two times were meeting[1]. But the crowds that were usually present, with the scraping of shoulder against shoulder, were missing. Outside the dargah, the usual crowd around the shops selling roses, incense and candles was also nowhere to be seen. Silence had spread its encampment. From some direction a group of three qawwals appeared, harmoniums around their necks. They put the harmoniums down, and began singing immediately –

In every house sadness has spread, Shabbir has gone and left Madina.

We listened to them for a little while and then came outside. We being me and my old friends Rewati and Singh, whose guest I was. Rewati said, Did you know that Ghalib's mazaar is here as well? Let's go there as well, and so we got off the narrow path and started walking amidst tall grass. Janamashtami had passed, and the grass had grown green and tall from the showers of [the months of] Sawan and Bhadon. In the middle of this grass a ruined platform came into view. Around it was a tumbledown enclosure wall. Inside, three graves in a ruinous condition. One of them was Ghalib's grave. I read the fatiha. Then we started walking through the tall grass again. Silence was all around. Only a peacock's call coming from afar broke this silence. After which the silence deepened even further. A couplet of Amir Khusrau's which I had just read at his tomb started whirling in my head –

The fair one sleeps upon the bed, her hair veiling her face

Khusrau leave for your own home, it is dark now in this country.

After this I had to wait for thirty years to go to Delhi. Then somehow an opportunity to make a trip to this settlement presented itself. One trip. Then a second trip. Then a third trip. On every trip I made sure I visited the street of Nizamuddin Auliya. But now the whole map of the place had changed. Crowds. Shoulder scraping against shoulder. In every shop heap after heap of rose petals. Pushing and shoving to cross the threshold of the shrine to reach the tombs. And oh, the platform with Ghalib's grave vanished. The grass extinct. Now there was a wide platform of marble here. Beautiful filigree screens all around it. Inside, a grave made of marble. Right next to it, an imposing Ghalib Hall. On every visit the crowds seemed denser than the last time. And every time I badly missed that monsoon evening and that ruined grave falling apart amidst the tall grass. Oh Lord, where did that evening go and hide and where did that grave disappear to? Where should I look for it?

[1] It was dusk.

the faded colours of delhi

2011-03-12T15:55:00.000-08:00

Aaj rang hai ri ma, rang hai ri. Mere mehboob ke ghar rang hai ri…

There is colour in the beloved’s house today. These lines are attributed to Hazrat Amir Khusrau Dehlavi. Some say it is a song about Holi. Some say it describes his first meeting with Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya. Perhaps it is about both. But what was the rang of the mehboob ka ghar? What colours did Khusrau and Nizamuddin (and everyone else) live amidst in fourteenth century Delhi? Much of what remains from the 14^th century (and later) is dark and somber and unadorned now. But so much of Khusrau’s Hindavi poetry is about colour and brightness. Jag ujiyaro, jagat ujiyaro. This is the poetry of a bright, lit up,world. Surely it was not all metaphysical, metaphorical?

More here

the ethnographer in his youth

2011-02-11T10:44:00.000-08:00

S’adat Yar Khan “Rangin” (1755-1835), true to his takhallus or nom-de-plume, was a “Colorful” character; “A mercenary, a horse trader, and a poet (Kidwai & Vanita 2000, 221),” he lived and worked and traveled extensively in late-Mughal India. He could also be said to be the first ethnographer-poet, preceding Val Daniel by about two hundred years. He gave the name Rekhti to a genre of poetry that purports to be “women’s speech”, and dwells on women’s lives and concerns (Vanita 2004, 12). While similar poetry had been written before him (Naim 2001, 5), Rangin not only names but also invents, as it were, a new genre of poetry; which is an almost obsessive ethnographic documentation of women’s speech, rituals, beliefs, emotions and sexual practices, written with tenderness, sarcasm, irony and occasionally undisguised wickedness. His introduction to his Rekhti Divan [collection of poetry] describes a decidedly participant observatory approach. In the days of his youth, he declares, he used to spend a lot of time with khangis [married women from respectable households who surreptitiously practiced prostitution], and he used to pay almost voyeuristic attention to them and “pay close attention to the speech of the eloquent ones in that community.” [tamashbini khangiyon ki hi karta tha aur is qaum meN har ek fasih taqrir par dhyan dharta tha]. And due to this, he got much information about their idioms, language and phrases [un ki istilahoN, zabaan aur muhavaroN se bahut si khabar hui], which he then merely set in verse. He then gives the reason for including the Farhang-e Muhavarat-e Begamat, the Glossary of Ladies’ Idioms, in the preface to his book – his friends could not understand what he was writing, for there were words and phrases that they could not comprehend [lekin divan meN lughat aur muhavarat aise aise nazm hu’e the jo aksar yaroN se samjhe na jate]. And so, “Inevitably in this preface this slave has written descriptions of these subtle words in such a fashion that their meaning does not escape those who see and read this book.” [Nachareh jo daqiqi alfaz the in ko bande ne is dibacheh meN taur shar’a kar ke likh diya ke kisi lafz ke m’ani paRhne aur dekhne waloN se reh na ja’eN.]

open city

2011-02-09T02:44:00.000-08:00

My friend Teju Cole's book is out. Here's a glowing review of Open City.
Buy it. Beg, borrow, steal it. Most importantly, read it.

beeta saal

2011-01-20T15:42:00.000-08:00

Over a year went by in which I wrote nothing on the blog. It wasn't that I wasn't writing, but I was in Delhi, doing research, and it all seemed a little unbloggable, as it were. I worked on the city, and the city worked on me, and it was all a little more fraught and sad and bruising and transformative and enlightening and melancholy and deep and rich with both tears and laughter than the chatty, snippet-y style of (my) blogging could do justice to.

Now that I'm back in New York, and about to go off Facebook so that I can write the damn dissertation instead of looking at everyone's status updates, I think I'll return to the blog; in the form I like it best -- a repository of writing and ideas and works in progress, open to comment and conversation. So in that spirit, here's links to some of the stuff I did write last year.

To begin with, the city overwhelmed me. I couldn't stop looking and listening, my Delhi-wallah armour was off. I gave a talk at my alma mater, Ramjas College, early in my wide-eared sojourn in Delhi, and on Shivam Vij's insistence, posted a snippet of it about overheard conversations on Kafila. Continuing to be often overwhelmed by the city, I left it a lot. I went to Haridwar, to Spiti and to Iran; the latter being a particularly special journey.

When I was in the city, I ended up being involved in two art-projects. One, Beam Me Up (curated by Gitanjali Dang), for which I wrote an essay for/about a public art-project by Vishal Rawlley, involving a floating sculpture, a medieval reservoir, and skype. The other was a photo-essay on Delhi that I put together for the Delhi Commons website, curated by Iram Ghufran.

Also, while in the city, some experiments in trying to make my research/academic work popularly accessible, mostly thanks to Raghu Karnad at TimeOut Delhi. On tracing the forgotten biography of an early 16th century saint at Bijay Mandal; and a piece on what the first decade of New Delhi felt like to those in the newly "Old" City. (There was a tranlsation of a page and a half of Intezar Husain too, but I can't seem to find a link).

While in Delhi I cried and bemoaned the city more than I have ever done; but it also became for me, more strongly than ever before, shehr-i yaran, the city of friends. And for that no thanks is enough.

Alhamdulillah.

universal ethnic. or, this happens to me a lot.

2009-12-09T12:14:00.000-08:00

Two carpenters are tearing down the front door of my apartment.
One of them looks at me in the hallway, and asks, Are you Greek?
The other turns around, looks at my beard, and says, No, he's Egyptian.
I'm Indian, I say.
You're Jewish? asks Carpenter 2.
No, Indian.
Ah.

A version of this phenomenon previously noted here.

faiz on the d train/ tere gham ko jaan ki talaash thi

2009-11-01T09:47:00.000-08:00

तेरे ग़म को जाँ की तलाश थी तेरे जाँ निसार चले गए
तेरी रह में करते थे सर तलब, सर-ए रहगुज़ार चले गए

तेरी कज-अदाई से हार के शब-ए इंतज़ार चली गयी
मेरे ज़ब्त-ए हाल से रूठ कर मेरे ग़मगुसार चले गए

न सवाल-ए वस्ल, न अर्ज़-ए ग़म, न हिकायतें न शिकायतें
तेरे अहद में दिल-ए ज़ार के सभी इख़तियार चले गए

यह हमीं थे जिन के लिबास पर सर-ए रह सयाही लिखी गयी
यही दाग़ थे जो सजा के हम सर-ए बज़्म यार चले गए

न रहा जूनून-ए रुख़-ए वफ़ा, यह रसन यह दार करोगे क्या
जिन्हें जुर्म-ए इश्क़ पे नाज़ था वह गुनाहगार चले गए

-- Faiz Ahmad "Faiz", July 1959

In Roman --

Tere gham ko jaaN ki talaash thi, tere jaN nisaar chale gaye
Teri rah meiN karte the sar talab, sar-e rahguzaar chale gaye

Teri kaj adaaee se haar kar shab-e intazaar chali gayee
Mere zabt-e haal se rooTh kar mere ghamgusaar chale gaye

Na sawaal-e vasl, na arz-e gham, na hikayateN na shikayateN
Tere ehed maIn dil-e zaar ke bhi ikhteyaar chale gaye

Yeh hameeN the jin ke libaas par sar-e rah syaahi likhi gayee
Yahi daagh the jo sajaa ke ham sar-e bazm yaar chale gaye

Na raha junoon-e rukh-e wafa, ya rasan ye dar karoge kya?
JinheiN jurm-e ishq pe naaz tha voh gunaahgar chale gaye

In (as usual) crappy, too literal translation --

Your sorrow searched for life, those ready to give life for you are gone
Those who clamoured to be at the head of your path, have gone to the beginning of another road

Defeated by your twisted gestures the night of waiting went away
Upset by the restraint of my condition, my would-be consolers went away

No question of union, no declaration of grief, neither anecdotes nor complaints
In your era the rights of this wounded heart also went away

It is us on whose clothing blackness was written at the beginning of the road
These were the scars we adorned when we went to the start of the beloved's banquet

The madness of the face of fidelity does not remain, what will you do with this rope, these gallows
They who were proud of the crime of love, those sinners have gone away

you are (not)

2009-10-28T01:38:00.000-07:00

This post is dedicated to my friend at Buoyantville, whose generosity introduced me to the work of Antonio Munoz Molina, which I quote here.

You are not an isolated person and do not have an isolated story, and neither your face nor your profession nor the other circumstances of your past or present life are cast in stone. The past shifts and reforms, and mirrors are unpredictable. Every morning you wake up thinking you are the same person you were the night before, recognizing an identical face in the mirror, but sometimes in your sleep you've been disoriented by cruel shards of sadness or ancient passions that cast a muddy, somber light on the dawn, and the face is different, changed by time, like a seashell ground by the sand and the pounding of and salt of the sea...

You are every one of the different people you have been, the ones you imagined you would be, the ones you never were, and the ones you hoped to become and now are thankful you didn't.

And your room is different, the city or the countryside you see from the window, the house you live in, the street where you walk, all of it growing more distant, disappearing as quickly as it's seen through the glass, there one moment, gone forever. Cities where it seemed you would live forever but left, never to return, cities where you spent a few days only to preserve them in memory like a clutter of old postcards in bitter colours...

Perhaps what changes least, through so many places and times, is the room you take refuge in, the room that according to Pascal one should never leave if one is to avoid disaster. "Being alone in a room is perhaps a necessary condition of life," Franz Kafka wrote Milena...

All human miseries derive from not being able to sit quietly in a room alone. I saw Lorca's room, and I wanted to live sometime in a room like that. The white walls, the floor or large flat stones like the ones in my boyhood home, the wood table, the austere but comfortable bed of white-painted iron, the large balcony open to the Vega, to the sweep of groves dotted with white houses, to the bluish or mauve silhouette of the sierra with its snowy peaks, tinted rose in the sunset. I remember van Gogh's room in Arles, just as sheltering and austere, but with its beautiful geometry already twisted by anguish...

I wonder what the room in Amsterdam was like where Baruch Spinoza, a descendant of Jews expelled from Spain and later Portugal, he himself expelled from the Jewish community, edited his lucid philosophical treatises and polished the lenses from which he earned a livelihood. I imagine it with a window that lets in a clear grey light like that in the paintings of Vermeer....

-- From Sepharad

Not entirely disconnected, this poem by my friend at Buoyantville, first revealed in the middle of a raucous party, on a Blackberry --

... This homesickness for the other, where
Does it begin? And why do we value
The familiar comfort of a quite room

So little? What answer to your question
What would have been the content
Of our fates hadn't the path forked?

We say to ourselves this stranger will
Lead us back to paradise that we have lost...

more here

the small voice of history, uncannily present

2009-10-25T18:06:00.000-07:00

This is an extract from a paper I gave last week at the South Asia Graduate Student Forum at Columbia.

... Nanhe Miyan is the name of the first jinn which is encountered on entering Firoz Shah Kotla. His place is a small alcove just off what would have been a large entry gate to the citadel... Nanhe Miyan was a name known in eighteenth century Delhi and Lucknow, as Intizar Husain tells us in his literary memoir of Delhi, Dilli Tha Jiska Naam[That Which Was Named Delhi].

“There were some special named jinns who had achieved a lot of fame among the ladies. They were Shah Dariya, Shah Sikandar, Zain KhaN, Sadar e JahaN, Nanhe Miyan, Chahaltan; but the most fame was achieved by Shaikh Saddu. Mention of this can be found in the satire of Sauda [1713-1781]. Rangeen [1755-1835] has also given a reference to this –

Kisi ko ji se hai iKhlas Shaikh Saddu se
Kahe hai aap ko Nanhe Miyan ki haram koi

Someone is sincerely devoted to Shaikh Saddu with their life
Someone calls themselves the sanctuary of Nanhe Miyan

It seems that the celebrity of Shaikh Saddu and Nanhe Miyan was from Delhi to Lucknow (Husain 2005, 115-116).” What might have been the subject of satire in late Mughal Delhi and Lucknow, and later, a subject of censure for the reformist Hali in the 19th century (see Minault 1984), is a source of wonder to me. In a city destroyed repeatedly, the name of a jinn survives. And what an apt name it is too. Nanhe MiyaN. Little Mister. The small voice of history. The presence of the jinn makes possible an archive of the disquiet of the contemporary city, the stories of grief and loss and longing, the stories of the everyday injustices of working class life, which never make it to the newspapers...

i must be a car

2009-10-12T19:29:00.000-07:00

While looking through a notebook from summer two years ago, looking for field-notes, I found this small piece written as a writing exercise. It's whimsical, hence here, over two years later...

I failed to notice the children. Latr, while drinking tea, he told me -- there were children there. In their mother's arms. Underweight. Too quiet. Bandaged.
I saw the photos stuck on the soot blackened walls. I saw the bats. I failed to notice the children.

"You have to be a father for that."

I did not see the birds today, sitting on the shimmering wires, reflected with clouds in the roadside pools. I did not notice them flying off when footsteps rippled the water.

Maybe you have to be a bird for that.

I did see, while passing in a car, a battered wheelbarrow and a broken jeep, standing together in the rain against a peeling wall. Rahat Nusrat was playing on the radio.

I must be a car. I must have a heart of rusting gears.

undone by each

2009-09-16T12:52:00.000-07:00

Perhaps, rather, one mourns when one accepts that by the loss one undergoes one will be changed, possibly for ever. Perhaps mourning has to do with agreeing to undergo a transformation (perhaps one should say submitting to a transformation) the full result of which one cannot know in advance. There is losing, as we know, but there is the transformative effect of loss, and this latter cannot be charted or planned... Let's face it. We're undone by each other. And if we're not, we're missing something.

-- Judith Butler, Precarious Life

on beginning to understand the task of the translator.

2009-09-09T08:25:00.000-07:00

कुछ क़फ़स की तीलियों से छन रहा है नूर सा
कुछ फ़ज़ा, कुछ हसरत-ए- परवाज़ की बातें करो

Kuchh qafas ki teeliyoN se chhan raha hai noor sa
Kuchh fazaa kuchh hasrat-e parvaaz ki baateiN karo

Bare bones translation --
Some(thing like) light filters through the bars of the cage
Talk some of spaciousness, some of the grievous longing for flight

Can one translate poetry from Urdu to English? NN and I were talking about this one evening. The consensus: of course, but it is bloody hard. I came down hard on Agha Shahid Ali whose ghazals in English I love, but whose translations of Faiz (while occasionally exquisite) I mostly find problematic in their too-muchness. There is often a sense of being overwhelmed by the untranslatability of Urdu in his English renderings, trying desperately to throw as many meanings and nuances out of a terse phrase as possible, a lifeline to save the reader from the wicked sea of his ignorance and lack of context.

In my hubris, I indicated my preference for the bare bones translation, like the one above. Write as literally, as sparingly, as possible, and let the reader make the meanings that s/he will. Two days later, I met my nemesis. In the form of this sh'er from Firaq Gorakhpuri, while listening to Kahkashan online.

Something like light does indeed filter through the bars of the cage, but it barely pierces the gloom in/of English.
"qafas", according to Platts, قفس qafas, s.m. A bird's cage, a cage; a coop; a lattice, grate; network; (met.) the body; the skeleton of the thorax. And my mind races, and thinks, wow, this is just like in "Indic" Hindi - where पिंजड़ा (cage) and पिंजर (skeleton) share the same etymological root. As Benjamin says, "... languages are not strangers to one another, but are , a priori and apart from all historical relationships, interrelated in what they want to express..." And so here in English too, we're trapped in the cage of a skeleton ship...

The body is a cage, and the soul then a bird, and I begin to understand Agha Shahid Ali's inability to be economical with words. Something like light shines through, the skin stretched tight turns translucent. But it is still only something like light, and not the light. Trapped in the cage of the body, the soul yearns for the space to fly, and my translation falls like a stone. "Hasrat" is both grief and desire, and just one of them won't do. I remember Reading Plato, and just for a moment there, something like the light brightens.

...as now, when Socrates describes
the lover's wings spreading through the soul

like flames on a horizon, it isn't so much light
I think about, but the back's skin cracking
to let each wing's nub break through,

the surprise of the first pain and the eventual
lightening, the blood on the feathers drying
as you begin to sense the use for them.

prescience. or a ghazal, london, july 2008.

2009-09-03T09:06:00.000-07:00

तुम्हारा नाम लेते हैं, तुम्हीं को याद करते हैं
गुज़रे जनाज़ा तुम्हारा यह फरियाद करते हैं

तुम न हो तो कैसे हो बहारों का यहाँ इम्काँ?
तुम्हारे जश्न-ए मय्यत में जहाँ बरबाद करते हैं

वो माशूक़ कैसा जो काँटों का ताज न पहने?
मोहब्बत ऐसी होती है, जैसी जल्लाद करते हैं

बस्ती वीरां होने की ख़बर तो जल्द मिलती है
रस्म-ए-अश्क रवानी कई दिन बाद करते हैं

दुनिया होती जाती है दिन-ब-दिन और संगीन
दिल मुन्तज़िम शिकस्त, जिगर फौलाद करते हैं

In Roman --

Tumhaara naam lete haiN, tumhi ko yaad karte haiN
Guzre janaaza tumhaara, yeh fariyaad karte haiN

Tum na ho to kaise ho bahaaroN ka yahaaN imkaaN?
Tumhare Jashn-e mayyat meiN jahaaN barbaad karte haiN

Woh mashooq kaisa jo kaanton ka taj na pehne?
Mohabbat aisi hoti hai, jaisi jallaad karte haiN

Basti veeraN hone ki Khabar to jald milti hai
Rasm-e ashk ravaani kai din baad karte haiN

Duniya hoti jaati hain din-ba-din aur sangeen
Dil muntazim shikast, jigar faulaad karte haiN

Bad, bald, extremely literal translation --

We take your name, only you do we remember
We pray for the passing of your funeral procession

Without you, how can there be the possibility of spring?
In the celebration of your death, we destroy the world

What kind of beloved does not wear a crown of thorns?
Love is done this way, the way torturers do it

News of the settlement being ruined comes soon
We do the rite of flowing tears many days later

The world becomes harder and stonier day by day
We prepare the heart for defeat/breaking, and turn the liver to steel

In Search of Lost (Units of) Time

2009-08-28T20:50:00.000-07:00

This one's for Arun Uncle, who as I just found out, is a fan of Proust. It's also something I've been wanting to write on for years now, and had forgotten about, till it all came back to me now...

I always thought a "pal", as in Aane waala pal jaane waala hai, was the Hindi equivalent of a moment. I was gobsmacked when I found out, several years ago, that a pal is actually a unit of measurement, measuring the passing of time. A pal is thus closer to being a second than a moment. A second and a moment are often interchangeable -- "Just a moment", "Just a sec". Our conception of what a moment is, the time of the ephemeral (momentary) but also the time in which something of significance (momentous) can happen, is linked to the second. It takes a second to say goodbye...

But what if we indexed our idea of a moment to another unit of measurement? What if our idea of the ephemeral (and the significant) was not the second but the pal, that forgotten unit of time? What if our idea of the moment, like the pal, was twenty four seconds long?

A pal is twenty four seconds long? Are you as gobsmacked as I was when you found out? Are you as gobsmacked as Babur, suddenly master of a strange, strange land; where the hours and minutes he was used to didn't work; there was a whole other system of keeping time (or letting it flow) time which he wrote about in his memoirs -- a pal is twenty four seconds long, sixty pals make a ghadi [24 minutes], sixty ghadis make a full day. the terms, pal and ghadi continued in everyday parlance, but their meanings were forgotten. Your tongue remembers but you do not. A pal doesn't seem all that different from a second now. The past is more a foreign country to us than India was to Babur.

Main pal do pal ka shaayar hoon... A moment twenty four seconds long entirely changes our idea of the ephemeral, blasts it apart like Walter Benjamin's "dynamite of 1/24th of a second"[I'm paraphrasing here] once burst the prison world of our perception apart with the technology of the moving picture (films are/were shot and projected at 24 frames per second). Usain Bolt could run two hundred metres in that time,with a few seconds to spare. A gaze held across a crowded room for even half those twenty four seconds, a single wave rolling onto a beach and receding, a high note held long and defiant in a song's dying breath -- with that kind of moment the ephemeral becomes eternal. Ek pal ko amar, ek pal mein dhuaN, as Faiz wrote. Eternity one moment and smoke the next...

Zindagi ki na toote ladi, pyaar kar le ghadi do ghadi... While the video I've linked to is outrageously (and unintentionally) campy; a ghadi, or twenty four minutes seems to be about the right length of time for doing love, for making love. Or for concentrated high intensity work time. Or the length a good refreshing "power nap" needs to be. A twenty ghadi weekday sounds like it might be a better deal than an eight hour workday, even if they are both exactly the same length of time. But are they the same length of time? If our seconds were pals and our hours were ghadis; if our seconds were longer but our hours were shorter, wouldn't time itself be different?

extract from the archive -- the palomides poems, march 2008

2009-08-17T20:57:00.000-07:00

warning -- EXTREMELY derivative

Palomides is that most forlorn thing, the footnote to a love story.

-Altair McIolar, Who loved 'em and they left him

So, Palomides. The Saracen Knight of the Round Table. The Muslim at King Arthur's Court.

Holy fuck, right? And you thought the Connecticut Yankee was a wild idea, huh?

I see him sometimes, wandering lonely as a cloud over the green and pleasant hills around Camelot, the damp air chilling his chain mail and clouding his sighs. He misses the creak of water wheels, the heat of the sun on his back, the completely inadequate shade of the date palms. How many years has it been since a call to prayer washed over him while he was making sleepy love at dawn, while the sky turned, ever so briefly, to liquid gold? How many years has it been since he made love?

A good few, it is my suspicion. I mean, as if it's not enough that the man has set himself up for a gross of Comp. Litt. PhDs about the Muslim/Other in Medieval European Literature, he then has to go and set a dozen conference halls afire by falling in love with Isolde. No, that can't be, you say. For Isolde's story is sad enough already. In love with Tristan, she is married to his uncle, King Mark of Cornwall. And guess who brought her there? Why Tristan himself, Sir Tristan Born-In-Sorrow, sailing in on the Ship of Fools. She stayed below decks the whole voyage. He stood at the helm through wind and storm.

Love requited but unconsummated. But there are still sadder things. Like Palomides, in love with a woman whose heart is already given to one man, and her body pledged to another. Palomides without a hope in hell. Palomides who vents his grief and fury and rage at the unfairness of love and fate by charging full tilt at Tristan in jousts. Tristan his best friend, his worst enemy, the only one who comes close to understanding his pain. Tristan with whom he drinks at night till they are either giggling or crying in each other's arms. Tristan who wins their jousts more often; but always hugs Palomides after.

But Palomides is still the more perfect knight. For his love is a constant flame, he burns with a passion for which lust is not a fuel, for he has no hope of EVER getting the girl. And yet he loves her. So he is the ultimate realization of the chivalric ideal, of the purity of desire, without hope of return.

Yes brother, that is some fucked up shit. I feel for the man, you know? I feel for him when he stops by the bank of one of those little burbling brooks in that faraway green fairytale toyland country, and dismounts his horse; the pain in his heart so sharp he can't breathe properly anymore, let alone ride. Off comes the helmet and you see the turban squashed underneath, but still defiantly worn, shining crumpled and white against the wrinkled walnut of his skin, the still-black of his geometric beard. As he washes his hands and feet and behind his ears with the brook's chill waters, as his breath becomes less ragged, as he unfolds a rug to pray by the side of his grazing horse, the peasants gather to watch. His backside in the air, his forehead on the ground, his eyes closed, muttering incantations under his breath – do they envy him his freedom, the open sky for his church? Do they envy, do they fear, his armour and horse and his lance; the conditions of their oppression? Do they envy his stranger-ness, his having known lands they will never know, for they can never leave? Or is not envy at all, but something else altogether?

For when he opens his eyes and rises, they keep standing. No one moves, no one waves a pitchfork, no one smiles. They keep standing and staring and he rides up to them, and says, 'I seek for a place called Dasht-e Tanhaii. Do you know where I could find it?'

They shake their heads. He rides north. He will ride till the pain grows unbearable again, and he has to stop to soothe his mind and heart with prayer. Better to face dragons than to live with this pain.

Which is why he quests for the Beast. The Beast they say dwells in the Wilderness of Solitude, The Desert of Loneliness, the Dasht-e Tanhai; speaking Persian to Wordsworth's daffodils.

XXX

Some days I feel like Palomides, and there is no escape. On some others, I feel like Ibn Batuta. Every city ahead is filled with gold and opportunity, new women to love and leave and complain about and forget.

But most days I'm just me. I sit out by my tent in the Dasht-e Tanhai, counting the sunsets. The days are warm yes, but happy, immersed in heat and toil. But at night the constellations wheel overhead, each a smile I will never wake up next to again. The ache is so much clearer in the desert night.

I wait for him. For I am 'The Beast' he is searching for, the one who's been writing poems in his name, The Palomides Poems. I need him to find me. We have so much to talk about.

a morning prayer

2009-08-14T10:55:00.000-07:00

Bahut kathin hai dagar panghat ki
Kaise maiN bhar laooN Jamna se matki?

The path to the water is very difficult
How do I bring water from the Jamuna?

I begin most mornings with these lines now, attributed to Amir Khusrau (d. 1325) disciple and companion of the famous Sufi saint, Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya of Delhi. (On Khusrau and Nijam, more here.) I seem to have heard various recensions of these lines all my life (including this bizarre and disturbing variant), but never thought about them, never thought through them till one morning, when I felt I needed prayer like I had never needed prayer before, these were the lines that came to mind --

Bahut Kathin hai dagar panghat ki
Kaise maiN bhar laooN Jamna se matki?
Paniya bharan ko maiN jo gayee thee
Daud-jhapat mori matki patki
Khusrau Nijam pe bal bal jaooN
Laaj rakho more ghoonghat pat ki

The path to the water is very difficult
How do i bring water from the Jamna?
When I had gone to fill water
In the melee my pot fell and smashed
Khusrau gives his life to Nijam
Keep the honour of my veil

These brief six lines contain so much in the tripping staccato cadences of old Hindi/Hindavi. Like much of the Hindavi poetry attributed to Khusrau, this poetry is "anti-communal", non-sectarian, not identifiably Muslim or Hindu at all. Like in much the petry attributed to Khusrau, the world depicted here is a woman's world; for it is they who would traditionally bring water from the wells. The lines make me imagine the banks of the Yamuna, steep and slippery with mud, treacherously worn by the tracks of buffaloes and boats, and a dawn traffic jam of women fetching water for their households. Melees could ensue, particularly in summer, with the Yamuna a slow muddy trickle, and much tramping in swampy mud involved.

And yet, the image we have of women drawing water from wells and river-banks is that of perfect poise and balance. Women managing to walk gracefully straight-backed with many pots of water balanced on their heads, and still managing to keep their faces covered, veils demurely held between their teeth.

Like Khusrau once dressing as a woman to cheer a mourning Nijam, it is the image of those women, and this prayer, that brings peace to my mornings. In the shit-storm that is the world, I pray to be given the strength to carry my burdens with some measure of grace, to live in the world without the veil of my honour slipping; without succumbing to the anger and the lust often boiling underneath.

irony and power

2009-08-12T09:07:00.000-07:00

Friend NN told me a story about the Emperor Jahangir. Once Jahangir was passing through the streets of Lahore on his elephant, when he saw a few children playing in the dust by the side of the road. He asked the mahout to stop the elephant, and got down and talked to the kids,asked them what they were doing. Then he started weeping, got on his elephant, and left.

I told him a story in return. Not a story, really, but a fact. On the Buland Darwaza, in Fatehpur Sikri, that aptly named massive gateway, Akbar, Jahangir's father, had this inscribed --

Jesus son of Mary, on whom be peace, said, "The world is a bridge, pass over it but build no house upon it."

While later commentators have found it remarkable that on on the massive ceremonial entrance to one of the biggest and most important mosques in his capital city, Akbar should have a quotation from Jesus; WD here indicates how much this is very much part of the Muslim tradition, and not all attributable to Jesuit influence. However, I'm more intrigued by where the inscription is.

On one of the most massive and permanent structures built in sixteenth century India, the inscription talks about the finitude and transience of human life -- The world is a bridge, pass over it, but build no house upon it. This is such exquisite, finely wrought irony.

What does it tell you about the world we've lost that Emperors could once have such an ironic relation to their worldly power? Crying at their fate at being emperors when seeing the carefree play of children in the dust. Building the biggest gateway on the subcontinent and almost mockingly writing atop it, the world is a bridge build no house upon it. Perhaps Mayawati needs to pay attention :)

not entirely unrelated

Ya mujhe afsar-e shaha na banaya hota
Ya mera taaj gadaaya na banaya hota...

muslimness in hindi cinema

2009-08-07T10:42:00.000-07:00

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'Muslimness' in Hindi Cinema: The Ambiguity of the (Anti)National Self.

Anand Vivek Taneja

I saw this scene many times when I was a kid. In some darkened movie theatre, my hand smelling of stale potato chips, Paradise or Roxy in Calutta or Regal in Ahmedabad, Dharmendra reaching out to Asha Parekh, Rajendra Kumar in Palkhi reaching out to Saira Banu, tears glycerining from eyes...

… In the cinema, the girl would snatch away her arm, turn and sprint, shaking with her grief. Or the wronged man would turn away and, voice traffic jamming with emotion, bravely grit out, 'Aapki... aapki suhaag ki zindagi … aapko … aapkomubarakhobegum,' before walking away, never running, always walking away quickly. As the music rose I would feel Minakshibehn begin convulsing next to me...

Ruchir Joshi, The Last Jet Engine Laugh, 167

Consider Palki, as the film begins. The year is 1967, two years after a war with Pakistan. The man singing poetry into the mic wears a black achkan, an article of clothing associated with the students of Aligarh Muslim University, who spearheaded the Pakistan movement in the 1940's. The man's name is Rajinder Kumar. He is a Punjabi Hindu born in Sialkot, Punjab (now in Pakistan); and made his debut in the Bombay film industry in 1950, three years after Partition and Independence. He is known as “Jubilee” Kumar, for there have been times in the fifites and sixties when six or seven of his movies have been running simultaneously, each of them doing over twenty five weeks of solid collections at the box-office all over India. The phenomenon of Jubilee Kumar is linked to his playing tragic characters, often poets, in films known as “Muslim Socials” – films in which the speech, dress, mannerisms and milieu of the principal characters are all “Muslim.” We saw him just now singing a ghazal in Urdu, surrounded by other poets dressed in 18^th century Lucknowi attire, all of which metonymically evoke what we can now only recognize as “Muslimness” – as a brief prelude to a monumental cityscape that viewers of Hindi cinema in the 50s and 60s would have found very familiar. As the camera pans over and tracks through ornate but crumbling gateways and mosques built in the 18^th century, Jubilee Kumar sings the praises of the city of Lucknow, the capital of Avadh, the glorious successor state to the Mughal Empire, and compares it to heaven on earth, in the present tense –

Ae shehr e Lucknow tujhko mera salaam hai O City of Lucknow, I salute you

Tera hi naam doosra jannat ka naam hai. Your name is the other name for heaven.

As the credits roll over this paean to Lucknow, a heaven which looks distinctly worn and shabby, once doesn't see exclusively Lucknowi or Muslim names, but rather the astonishing diversity of the Bombay film industry – a Punjabi leading man, a lead actress from Hyderabad, Goan-Christian assistants, a Kashmiri Pandit co-director, a Marwari financier, a Parsi principal photographer. Why did this genuinely multicultural industry, located in city with a very different ethos and histories, make so many movies like this one – celebrating the idealized life of the Muslim community and the culture of a city far away not just in space, but also, it would seem, in time (but still, as the microphone and cars indicate, somewhat anachronistically present)? Why did “Urdu, Avadh (which is to say Lucknow) and the Tawaif” become, “the spiritual home of Indian cinema (Kesavan 1994)”?

more here

on the misrecognitions bestowed by facial hair

2009-07-29T09:05:00.001-07:00

And we're back! ... rather sheepishly, having bid such a grandiose farewell (refer last post, from eight months ago).

Well, the mind is a change-able thing, and there is much left to say.

Here's something I wrote for Time Out Delhi maybe six months ago; the last thing I wrote for them --

“Alhamdullilah” says the man pan-handling in the subway as I give him a dollar. It's Harlem. He's black. I'm brown and have a beard.

“Salaam Aleikum.”Another day, another man trying to catch my eye, hustling on 125^th Street. “W'alaikum Salaam,” I mutter, and move on. It only happens in Harlem, this taking me for Muslim in New York. South of Harlem, and north of it, people speak to me in Spanish. Sometimes friendly, sometimes pissoff, like the WASP bartender somewhere Midtown, who counts out my change Un Dos Tres...

I've had a beard for over five years now. It's mostly short, never more than a few weeks growth. Occasionally I shave it off altogether. Sometimes I sculpt and trim it, what in traditional nai and hajjam speak is called “qat nikalna” and which I've also had to ask for as 'Sanjay Dutt' style in Delhi. While Sanjay Dutt's beard (from forgettable films from a couple of years ago) was actually mimicking Latino/Black “ghetto” styles from New York that you see on the subways all the time; to an Israeli acquaintance, I look like a member of Hamas. I don't get harassed at airports though (I haven't been to Israel yet), maybe because it would be too obvious a case of racial profiling, maybe because my facial hair and my and passport send such contradictory messages (and push comes to shove the passport wins).

Apart from the occasional relative, no one in Delhi thinks I look like a terrorist, or even Muslim. Not even the cops. To the more progressive among my azeez from Delhi University, I (sometimes) look like Fidel Castro. Despite all my intellectual pretensions, the circles I hang out in (and the fact that I went to film-school), no one ever mistakes me for a documentary film-maker, the male of which species are often marked by their genteel hirsuteness. According to my sister, I look like a Punjabi taxi driver. Which probably explains my general, easy anonymity in the city. In most parts of the city, I'm your everyday cut-surd/mauna sardar. Strange to think that the ubiquity of the “cut surd” taxi driver in Delhi might be a direct legacy of '84; when a lot of Sikhs needed to mask their identities and make them ambiguous.

The only place in the city I've not been asked, “Aap sardar hain?” is Turkman Gate. I was taking a friends' wedding guests for a walk through Old Delhi last January. Since they were mostly academics, I strayed off the beaten tourist path, and took them south of the Jama Masjid into Dujana House and Turkman Gate – the places in the old city hit worst by the Emergency. Here were tourists/firangs are rarely seen, the hustling and wheedling of the Jama Masjid touts gave way to a humorous, hospitable curiosity. At a tea shop where we stopped to ask for directions, I was asked who we were, and I explained. They were trying to figure us, figure me out. Ten foreigners and one bearded Indian, who insisted he wasn't a guide but a gharati, spoke decent Urdu, wasn't from the area but had brought foreigners to a place where they are almost never brought. The mix of intimacy and strangeness (and skin pale from a New York winter) makes the question seem inevitable, in retrospect – “Are you Kashmiri?”

I am taken for Muslim in Turkman Gate and Harlem. You tell me what that says. Khuda Hafiz.

khuda hafiz

2008-12-11T14:05:00.000-08:00

This blog has been dead for a while now. It was dying for a while before that, ten posts in six months, before the trickle died up completely, no posts for eight months.
Mostly because the things I want to say now, and the things I have said before on this blog, the things I used to write, seem too different. Incommensurable.

So Khuda Hafiz and Goodbye. So long, and thanks for all the fish. If you know what you're looking for, you will still find me.

Two Lines

2008-02-28T05:12:00.000-08:00

हम कुछ ऐसे तेरे दीदार में खो जाते हैं
जैसे बच्चे भरे बाज़ार में खो जाते हैं

Ham kuchh aise tere deedar maiN kho jaate haiN
Jaise bachche bhare bazaar maiN kho jaate haiN

- Munawwar Rana

I am as lost, in looking at you
As a child lost in a crowded bazaar

(I know the translation is slightly inaccurate, but it sounds better....)

confessions for the new year - the fake quiz

2008-01-14T22:02:00.000-08:00

I write this a few days before I return to Delhi for a few days. It’s a confession a few months too late. It’s about a quiz that just before my leaving Delhi in end-August, K and Gogo and I jointly conducted at a small auditorium at IIT Delhi. This was courtesy the Kutub Quizzers, and some of the details of the quiz and its questions can be found on their blog. For all of you who enthusiastically participated in the quiz, (and even for all of you who don’t give a shit about the nerdy sub-culture that is the Delhi quizzing scene), here’s the confession – every single question in the quiz was a fake, a tall tale, a doozy. Yes, every single one. All the ninety odd of them in the prelims and finals.

Well, some of you might have figured that out already (the quiz was called 'Pornobgraphy'. Some of you have already been told. But in the shocked silence I imagine among the rest, however brief, let me intervene (before you start gathering the lynch mob, Bhatta) and try and tell you why we did it.

Honestly, I don’t quite know. It started as an idea after an impressive drinking spree. One of those when you wake up the morning and start drinking again, and continue into lunch. Over lunch, suddenly -

- Let’s do a quiz before you leave Delhi.

- Cool.

- Let’s do a Pornob tribute round and see if anyone notices.

- Why not?

(For those who don’t know about Parnab/Porno da, further reading is suggested. For those who don’t care enough to do that, a brief summary – Parnab Mukherjee is widely reputed to have a far more flexible and relativistic relation to what are generally called ‘facts’ – far more so even than the election manifestos of India’s major political parties. This is a bit of a problem because he is/was one of delhi’s most popular/notorious quiz masters, a profession which (supposedly) derives its legitimacy primarily from the mastery of facts, and nothing much else. [Though it could be argued that in the case of Derek O’Brien it comes from his collection of designer kurtas]. Parnab, of course, brings his flexible relationship to fact to his own biography/CV, and audacious barefaced lying in front of audiences full of impressionable young adults… you can tell I adore and idolize the man, can’t you?)

So while drinking and eating, over terrible kababs, we make a few ‘Pornob’ special questions. And nearly die laughing in the process. Our ‘facts’ were so much cooler than reality (whatever that is after eighteen hours of drinking). The idea doesn’t take too long to form. A whole ‘Pornob’ quiz? Why not?

The idea survives into sobriety. There’s three weeks to go before I leave Delhi. Calls are made. The venue is booked. The participants are enthused. No one (except us and a very few non quizzers, and the man who isn’t there) knows what’s coming. The quiz is to happen the day before I leave Delhi. In the middle of jobs, books and research, we met on a few frantic evenings to put together the quiz, for which the lion’s share of work is done by K. And then finally the quiz happens, and we have a getaway car waiting…

Why did we do it?

Partly because we could.

Partly because it was so much fun. Not just in the making fools out of people (which was part of the agenda) but in the construction of alternate universes.

For those of you who are beginning to think I’m sounding a little weird – a quiz question, a good quiz question always entails the creation of a little world. The elements of this little world are ‘facts’, usually pulled out of the real world. These facts are arranged in a narrative, like a micro ‘whodunit’, clues arranged to point towards an answer… a good quiz question has a certain elegance and beauty and narrative economy which points you towards the right answer even if you don’t ‘know’ it. If a quiz question doesn’t do this, it invites the insults of ‘Random’ and ‘Auction’… (Here are some more thoughts on quizzing, narrative and facts after the last quiz I had conducted before this).

In our quiz, the histories of the ‘real world’, its pasts were fictionalized – the facts from which one deduced the ‘answer’ were shifted and changed. I don’t know if our world was better than the real world, but it was certainly more psychedelic, more interesting. In this world, the Hindi phrase lakeer ka fakeer comes from a 16^th century Sufi geometer exiled to Mughal India from Ottoman Istanbul because of his belief that lines of perspective should be employed in contemporary painting. The ticker tape parades in New York started because the New York Stock exchange was trying to get rid of the excess paper strewn all over the trading floor at the same time as the Statue of Liberty was being inaugurated/dedicated. All Parveen Babi’s personal travails could be linked back to the fact that her father, the Nawab of Junagarh abandoned her mother, and flew his dogs to Pakistan instead.

Parveen Babi’s father was part of the Junagadh nobility, in real life, but wasn’t the Nawab, who did indeed leave his wives behind and flew off with the dogs. But bending the facts a little made the world more interesting, didn’t it? As did, for example the ‘fact’ that the immortal phrase tatti aur maut kisi ko bhi kisi waqt aa sakti hai (shit and death can happen to anyone at anytime) comes from a Vijaydan Detha story about a Rajput commander who falls from one of those weird Rajasthani dry-latrines hanging out high over the walls of desert forts, along with his shit. And yes, people did answer these questions, occasionally amidst much laughter, because the slightly fantastical world of our questions was made intelligible by the construction of the questions – pointing towards real world answers.

And so what? You might ask. Well, at one level, it was insane amounts of fun, and that’s all it needs to be, and we didn’t get lynched. So there. At another, well, we broke the tyranny of ‘facts’, drilled into us since Kindergarten. The sort that makes you feel ‘world capital games’ and feel studly for knowing that Antannarivo is the capital of Madagascar. (So maybe Pornob was always ahead of his time. Damn.)

At yet another, one might think that giving up on ‘facts’ might be kind of dangerous given how much the ‘invention of the past’ feeds into all sorts of dangerous, reactionary politics. Yes, the BJP. But I’m not so sure anymore. I’ve seen a lot of re-invention of the past happening, that’s part of what I work on as an anthropologist. Much of these re-inventions and the politics behind them I’m in sympathy with. All of these views of the past, unlike the BJP/Sangh Parivar’s, are quite complex. The BJP’s view of the past, on the other hand, is outrageously simplistic. Muslims=Bad, Hindus=Good, Myth=History. All of these histories, like the best ‘professional’ histories, do something we did a very poor approximation of as drunk quiz-makers - you change (reinterpret) the past to make the present more hopeful, or at least, more entertaining…

Maybe that’s too much fun for three lads having fun, being cheeky, and getting away with it, unapologetically.

Maybe that’s what it was all about.

Maybe we’re just full of shit. And tatti aur maut kisi ko bhi kisi bhi waqt aa sakti hai.

Aasamaan dekhi Dilli/Delhi seen from the sky

2007-12-15T16:37:00.000-08:00

People do strange things when they miss cities. Kalidasa's Yaksha, exiled from fair Alkapuri and his love who lives there, asks a cloud to take his message to her. And perhaps to make the prospect attractive to the cloud, he tells him of diversions, fair cities to float over along the way. Go West over Ujjain, the yaksha tells the cloud, even though it's not quite on the way. It is a strange and lovely whimsy – though the yaksha is surely eager to get his message to his beloved, he does not want the cloud to miss the sight of the palace roofs of Ujjain.

Like the cloud messenger, I soar and swoop over Delhi, and look down at its rooftops and markets, its parks and gardens. I have Wikimapia, which makes my computer screen the window to home, while snow is falling outside my 'real' window here. How can I send these strange cold clouds over Delhi? But I can participate in another magic, no less wonderful – the transformation of surveillance technology into people's complex, multi-layered maps of home and longing.

Delhi on Wikimapia, seen by satellite, is sometimes strange. I never realized Delhi had so many swimming pools, reflecting blue back to the sky. I never realized Delhi had so many graveyards. Like the one at ITO, behind the Sales Tax office building. It's hard to make out even from top. A green space covered with trees, I would have thought it was a park, if Mohd Rashid hadn't marked it. Clicking on the bounded box with which he has marked the kabristan, you get to this poignant note, 'My all expired relatives are here. One day I will be also here... Rashid'. There are other graveyards too, that you may not see even when you pass them everyday, because they are hidden away behind modern buildings, with narrow, ill-marked paths leading to them. Like the Kabristan Kalu Sarai, behind Azad Apartments and Mother's International School. Or the one in Civil Lines, between Rajpur Road and Underhill Road. Wikimapia makes me ask, why is Delhi a city of reticent graveyards, keeping its dead hidden away?

But in Wikimapia's Delhi, the dead find their place in the city, along with the 'Patli Gali' in Begampur marked by Naresh and Atal; The 'Walia's (Canada, USA) Haweli' in Jangpura Extension and its wonderful K Block which 'is encircles a beautiful park where children and elgery have great fun'(this is true); and 'Rama Madam Office' in Chandni Chowk where 'U FIND THE WILLIAM HANDLER ACCOUNTS AND RUNING SCHOOL MAN IS SUPERCOMPUTER'. Delhi seen from Wikimapia, this Delhi of overlapping, intersecting boundaries of home and intimacy, seen from the sky, makes me smile, and makes me ache.

The most striking sight of Delhi I've seen on Wikimapia, is undoubtedly the Khirki Masjid,in Khirki Village off Press Enclave Road. Seen from the sky, this large fourteenth century mosque still has exquisitely perfect symmetry, its square courtyards and clusters of domes comparable to nothing else, really, except maybe a Pachisi board. Across the road rises the gigantic mall cluster of the Saket District Centre, ugly as only a group of malls can be. In Delhi seen from the sky, the irony is even starker.

manhole covers part 3

2007-11-27T19:27:00.000-08:00

Manhole covers part 1, and part 2. So the meditation on manholes is still incomplete but now I guess is the time to put some more of the incomplete meditations (this part written back in May) out here on the blog... after this story carried by NYT, and forwarded to me by Elizabeth, Sashi and ES.

Manhole. Such a strange word. Almost as if it was an opening inviting men to fall into the netherworld. Like the urban legend of Calcutta streets in the monsoon, knee deep in water, where unsuspecting waders are said to suddenly vanish in a trail of bubbles because of careless workers forgetting to replace the covers.

But who are them men who use these holes? How many people have you met recently who have climbed down one into the land of shit and alligators? Except perhaps by accident, like Alice down the rabbit hole, like the hapless waders of Calcutta? Manholes are round and could seem inviting, like the doors of hobbit dwellings, but they are entrances to a forbidden world, a world driven deep underground, a world of shit and miasma.

"Paris has another Paris under herself," Victor Hugo wrote in Les Miserables, 182, "a Paris of sewers, which has its streets, its crossings, its squares, its blind alleys, its arteries, and its traffic, which is slime." Sewers, he added, were "the conscience of the city" - they tell all: "no more false appearances, no plastering over ... filth removes its shirt ... there is nothing more except what really exists." The modern metropolis, like Jean Valjean's Paris, is based on the separation of the world of shit and the world of men. This was not always the case.

London, 1858. The Houses of Parliament had to be closed because the stench from the river, receiving all the waste of the city from all the cesspits and open drains flowing into it. This was the London stalked by miasma, the foul reek and bad vapours present pretty much everywhere that were supposed to cause cholera, and a death rate unheard of since the Black Death.

The foul, killing reek of miasma was countered by Joseph Balzagette's building London's modern sewer system by laying 83 miles of brick lined tunnels. This was system of tunnels which enclosed the the ordure of the city, and flushed it far below the city and away downriver. The miasma was banned to the netherworld. One of Joseph Balzagette's main supporters was the engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, whose father built the famous (and still used) tunnel under the Thames. It worked, though for all the wrong reasons. The brick line tunnels separated the shit from the water supply, and prevented further massive outbreaks of cholera.

Once the cholera bacillus was discovered in 1876 (11 years after the opening of the London sewer systems) cities without sewers, without the separation of shit and men, became unimaginable. In India, in Delhi, a city without a major history of epidemics, which functioned through a system of shallow, covered, sub-surface drains and 'nightsoil' collectors, the first sewer systems built in the late 1890's, proved to be inefficient and prone to clogging. Meanwhile in the Presidency Town of Calcutta, the capital of British India, its populace expanding rapidly as impoverished peasants came to work in the jute mills; a sewer sytem of tunnels with unprecedentedly large diameters, made with a technology for curving bricks which was later used (along with cast iron and concrete) in the digging of the 'deep cover' (as opposed to the cut and cover) lines of the London Underground.

Sewers were modernity. The collection of nightsoil, people carrying shit on their heads, became anathema. Gandhi campaigned against it systematically, considering it violative of human dignity; especially because those who carried the shit were of the lowest castes. But the sewers have not liberated the untouchables from dealing with shit. It's just that now no one else has to. In India, they are the ones whose lot it is, de facto, to go down the manholes and clear the sewers. One of the rarely told stories of Partition is how the Hindu sweepers of the city were not allowed to leave Karachi – even when the riots started. For who else would clean the sewers, running then with blood and God knows what else?

... The generalized miasma of the nineteenth century city exists in the sewers in concentrated form. Sewer gas is methane and sulphides and other inflammable and noxious gases, under pressure. Only those who have to enter the manholes now have to deal with the miasma. But sometimes on hot days, strange alchemy brews in those deep tunnels – sewer gas is known to occasionally blow off even the considerable weight of manhole covers. Passing by Lexington and 58th, I have seen liquid nitrogen being pumped into manholes.

Most of the iron for the manhole covers in New York now come from Durgapur, two hours to the west of Calcutta.

puns. winter.

2007-11-19T07:11:00.000-08:00

Dasht-e Tanhai. The Wilderness of Solitude. Watching the leaves fall under a grey sky, eating my breakfast alone among the tops of trees, a branch fell on me today. New York, the New York of last night's forced gaiety and diffident lust so far away. Alone on a park bench, in the wind and under the sky, in the middle of Manhattan I might as well be in a Robert Frost poem. Or in that other cityscape of loneliness; the crumbling ruins of Mehrauli lost in thorn scrub and plastic bags, across the road from the radio playing the latest Hindi film song hits.

Dust-e Tanhai. Or what accumulates in a room not vacuumed, cause no one is expected. Books and papers strewn all over the desk, the rug, the bed, the floor. Books and quarters. Antidote to too wistful a gaze across the bar after a beer too many. The memory of a blazing afternoon at the Pyramids, as the wind from the desert blew sand into my eyes at the same moment as all the mosques in Giza began their afternoon azaan; rising into the wind the dust the sky. If only I could believe.

Dast-e Tanhai. The loose motions of loneliness. That dis-ease that makes me say too much, and always at the wrong time...

coincidental cities

2007-11-03T16:14:00.000-07:00

'Everybody in Delhi seems to know everyone else.' I hear this often from people in New York when I tell them where I'm from. Among those who've been there, or know expat Dilliwallahs, it's said with a sense of awe. In the stories I'm told, Dilliwallahs meet not randomly, but are drawn to each other like magnets, lines of force that intersect, say on the corner of Bleecker and Sullivan. Then, to the consternation of their non desi friends who happen to be along; they meet like long lost friends (which they are), discover at least ten people they know in common currently in the city, and ....

Well, you know the rest. It probably happens to you in Delhi all the time. I know it happens to me. I've run into a friend at Humayun's Tomb, perched atop a ruined gateway. I've met friends while wandering in aimless circles in CP. In Def Col and Khan Markets, I am virtually assured of meeting people out of my little black book. And as my friend AK says, 'Manhattan is like Khan Market for five hundred blocks.'

It's a little disconcerting how easily the Khan Market janta (me included) fits into rapidly gentrifying Manhattan. Manhattan seems nearer than the back of Khan Market, where other Dilliwallas, other in all the valences of that term, live their lives in slums and shoddy government allotments. For a city of fourteen plus million people, Delhi is a very small place. If you're reading this issue of Time Out, I'll wager you're connected to every other reader by a maximum of say, two degrees of separation. That's how small the English speaking Delhi educated upper to upper-middle class elite is. Is it a wonder then, that it's the same few hundred people who keep meeting each other over and over again in Delhi, and at the same places? At book launches, at bars, in protest marches; occasionally even when slumming it in Nizamuddin or the Old City (but only after the Metro)? No wonder Delhi is the world capital of coincidence, but what is the value of the coincidence if it is not chance, but almost, in a sense, pre-ordained?

New York is a city of eight million, almost half Delhi, but the chances of meeting the same person twice, in just wandering the city, are infinitesimally less. Yes, that makes New York a lonely city, a city of 'missed connections' on Craigslist. But then the value of meeting someone again, on a subway line you wouldn't normally take, for example, feels like a sign from God.

One evening recently I was in Washington Square Park after many months, waiting for a friend, listening to wafting music and conversations being made by hundreds of strangers. Someone called my name, and it was another friend, a Nigerian writer I'd met only a week ago. He had no idea that I'd be there, or that I was meeting S, who we both knew. An evening of two then became and evening of four, and carried on well past midnight, and then into further evenings. At some point I remember saying, happy but disbelieving, 'This is just like being in Delhi.'

Written for Time Out, Delhi.

New York is always a film set

2007-10-23T17:10:00.000-07:00

In New York, sunlight comes from strange directions. New York is always a film set, reflectors bouncing natural light at contrary angles. Except here the angles are random, not designed (unless, of course, there is a greater design than human agency); the sunlight bouncing off the mirrored surfaces of skyscrapers and the chrome of cars onto buses and people moving and the grime and the smoke of grilling kababs; all caught in the crossfire of ricocheting light.

When the sun sets behind the buildings of Central Park West, casting the trees in shadow, an October ray turns a window to flame (irrespective of the darkness of the life behind), and then finds its way onto one solitary branch amidst the deep green gloom, and in the gold light I can see the leaves, gold green, beginning to turn gold.

New York is always a film set and at moments like these, I wish to be with all my being a 70mm Panavision camera loaded with endless Ektachrome stock; running, running, running...

leaving delhi

2007-10-16T13:14:00.000-07:00

This makes an interesting pair with this post. Both were written for the back page of Time Out Delhi. One, shortly after returning to Delhi(late June), one shortly after leaving again (late August). The events described herein are rather tame compared to the actual occurences.

Friday. Three days left to leave Delhi. I wake up at seven after three hours of sleep on a friend's sofa in Hauz Khas. Last evening rewinds. I had left people praying in a fourteenth century ruin with cordless microphones to go to an open mic featuring a reggae rapper also known as 'Delhi Sultanate', followed by drinks at a cheap bar with nineteen seventies mirrored glitz, followed by a wild midnight auto ride (by meter, even!) and a night of further drinking and dancing and conversation followed by passing out on the sofa at four in the morning. Guiltily, i feel glad about returning to New York. It will be relaxing.

I have a shoot to reach at eight. It's for an documentary series on Delhi's history. But instead of the usual trite and cliched take on the 'seven cities of Delhi'; the director has got pretty much much everyone working now on various aspects of historical Delhi to talk to her, and get them to them to re-visit the sites of their work on camera, setting up an interesting dialogue between contemporary Delhi and its myriad pasts. This morning I am walking with Sunil Kumar, historian of medieval Delhi, as we follow the path of an important stream/naala which begins from the Hauz-e Shamsi at Mehrauli and finally meets the Yamuna.

Along the way, the stream forms part of the moats of Qila Rai Pithora/Dehli Kohna and Siri; passes through the fourteenth century barrage known as Satpula; and passes by the sufi settlements of Chiragh Dehli and Nizamuddin which came up along its banks. We start at the weed-choked, shrunken Hauz-e Shamsi, which was once the most significant sources of water for the people of Delhi, but around which people now need tankers to bring their water in. It's a depressing place to start, and sort of apt, for the stream we're following on from the Hauz-e Shamsi is for most of its length now the dirtiest of Dilli's ganda naalas. But walking with Sunil Kumar, and his intimate knowledge of the history and geography of Sultanate Delhi, makes the past come alive. It's as if we're walking through two times at once; a stereoscopic photograph, or maybe a double exposure; the thirteenth and twenty first centuries visible simultaneously. Only in Delhi, I think.

And only in Delhi, what happened next. We walked into A Block, Golf View Apartments, Saket, to get a view of the Budayun Gate of the old city wall behind. One of the camera-people, away from the rest of the crew, was pounced on by an old Punjabi couple. They were getting some construction done to their house. His camera was snatched from him, and returned after a few minutes, but now the tape was gone. They denied all knowledge of any tape, of ever having touched the camera, accused us of being thieves and worse. The RWA and the police arrived, and a four hour standoff ensued. Finally, when the couple realized that they'd got into more shit than they could handle, the tape was thrown out of the back door.

bat-cheet

2007-09-05T10:00:00.000-07:00

Two bats hung upside down from the soot blackened vaulted ceiling of a dark underground chamber, waiting for their weekly fix of incense and sweat and sorrow to waft up. There were over a hundred bats around them hanging from the stone and crumbling mortar, but due to the limitations of the too human narrator of this tale, we shall hear of only these two, among the hundreds of bats in one chamber, among the thousands of bats in one ruin, among the millions of bats in one city.

Oh, to be a bat. To fly in an ocean of sound when the world is blind. To hang in an echoing old dome, with a hundred, a thousand of your kin and participate in a mass conversation which everyone can hear, from the highest-pitched squeak to the lowest rumble. No one is ever alone in a crowd of bats. Everyone is adrift in a sea of stories. Except the poor humans who sometimes stumble in, and look aghast at the ominous high-pitched murmuring and massed wings unfolding over their heads. But then humans are so limited – they can seldom hear even those who speak to them face to face, asking them to listen, really listen for a change, even when the entire conversation happens within the limited range of human audio frequencies.

To bats, human beings are the ones who’re upside down.

What shall we call our two bats? Let’s say they are Changu Chamgadar and Mangu Chamgadar. Or as they have hiply started referring to themselves, Chang and Mang, or when they’re not into the whole brevity thing, dude, Sardar Changu Singh Balla and Sardar Mangu Singh Balla. Their latest thing is gate crashing international film festivals at the cavernous, ill-air conditioned auditoriums of Siri Fort, and flying figures of the eight through the projector beam, casting great flying fox shadows on the sad but stoic faces of the art house actors, etched in moody chiaroscuro.

Much to their disappointment, none of the humans has ever responded to this signal by rising in the darkness, rushing to the loo, and hurrying back in a cape and hood to save the audience.

Wrong City, says Changu , As I keep telling you.
Gotham isn’t a geographical entity, says Mangu, It’s an idea.

The idea that when a human city becomes Gotham, when it becomes too large to truly comprehend on a human scale, when it seems fey and menacing and yet seductive to those who live there – they go a little bats and turn to bats for succour.

Our bats, as you would have gathered by now, are a little obsessed with human beings, and their cultural peculiarities. You could say that they are anthropologically curious....

This is the first part of an extremely whimsical story about bats in a ruin doing an anthropology of human beings, written a couple of weeks before leaving Delhi. If you want the full text, write to me. The picture is taken by my friend Abeer, and is from an afternoon spent ruin hopping in late August Dilli.

returning to delhi

2007-08-10T07:44:00.000-07:00

A slightly edited version of this appeared in Time Out, Delhi in July. Minus the photos, of course. funny to be posting this after returning to New York.

- When did you leave the country?
- 16th August last year.
And then I was through passport control at IGI, back in the country after ten months, as easy as that. Returning to the city was a slightly different matter. Ten months in twenty first century Delhi, waiting impatiently for its tryst with the Commonwealth Games, might as well have been ten years in another city, another time. In my absence, Metro construction has advanced into the far reaches of Noida, the rickshaws have disappeared from Chandni Chowk, a glass pyramid has grown in Vasant Kunj . Much has disappeared, including homes I had visited; the slum clearances creating disorienting holes in my remembered landscape.

Prices have gone up ten to fifteen percent. Drinks, autos, movies are all more expensive; even the 50 p glass of water is now 1 rupee some places. That, plus converting from the diminished dollar to the rising rupee, and I almost ready to agree with Thomas Friedman – I am supposed to feel the pecuniary pinch in New York, not in Delhi, but it’s the other way around. It ain’t easy moving back to boomtown, kid.

But then again, it is. Apologies for sounding like a gushing hippie, but Delhi is a truly warm and friendly city. Yes, even when negotiating with its public transport. I wouldn’t have said this last year, but apparently living abroad has made me soft, and now I’m dealing with people minus the aggression that Dilliwallahs wear like armour, and the city smiles back. Even in the crush on a rush hour Blueline, I find myself marveling at the sindoori sunlight slanting in on people’s faces, and chuckling at the banter.

Conductor to old passenger – Aa ja tau, main tera khayaal rakhoonga.
Passenger to conductor – Tu bas bus ka khayaal rakh, chhora. Mujhe rehn de.

Wandering around Connaught Place for the first time in a year, I am in love with the city all over again. After ten months of firangland, the jhataak colours of the clothes hung up on Janpath catching the rainwashed evening sun is sheer poetry. As is the mocha cold coffee at De Paul’s. In the subway between Jeevan Bharti and N-Block, the flute seller wonders where I have been. When I tell him New York, he asks if there are musicians like him there. When I say hundreds, he smiles and says, ‘You must take some of my CDs when you go.’

I spend a quiet hour reading, barely a hundred metres away from the bustle of KG Road, in a fourteenth century stepwell. For company, I have pigeons and the rustle of leaves. I walk back into the Inner Circle, and the new green of Central Park catches my eye, the transformation from industrial warzone to (literal) urban oasis. Like the families and couples around me, I take off my sandals, and walk in the water of the channel running down to the fountains. Delhi has caught me by surprise again.
An hour later, I am at The Attic, for a packed show of dastangoi, the art of epic storytelling which had died out nearly a century ago, and is now being revived. The show is amazing, and free. Something Dilliwallahs tend to take for granted; but it needs to be said – with all that is wrong with it, Delhi, in some ways, is the most generous of cities.

fehrist/wishlist

2007-07-15T18:41:00.000-07:00

Long Explanatory Note - Some of my best friends and I have the strange habit of listening to songs in one language, and hearing the lyrics in our head in another. We occasionally subject other people to these strange personal linguistically confused earworms (distant cousins of the babelfish, no doubt) which don't get out of our ears and our heads. Witness Marcus and me in Times Square, singing (the no doubt hauntingly familiar) हम सब रहते हैं पीली पनडुब्बी मॆं।
Sometimes, the lyrics don't come in direct translation, but as something else, a riff on the original, if you wish. Like the first two lines of a poem/song in Hindustani which came into my head while humming 'Wishlist' by Pearl Jam. Wishlist is a wistful, lovely song (lyrics here, music video here), and this Hindustani not-quite-version shares the quality of being a wistful list of wishes, but is, I think, much darker, and perhaps, funnier. In my moments of hubris, I would love to hear this sung by a band. Any takers? :)

फेहरिस्त ( to be sung to the music of 'Wishlist' by Pearl Jam)

ऐ काश के मैं दरिया होता और तुम होते तूफ़ान
ऐ काश के मैं भड़वा होता, तुम कोठे के महमान
ऐ काश के मैं निठल्ला चोर और तुम पुलिस का डंडा
ऐ काश के तुम थे साहुकार और मैं एक चौपट धंदा

ऐ काश के तुम सत्ता होते और मैं एक भ्रष्ट नेता
झूठे ही सही, नामुमकिन भी, पर वादे तो कर देता
ऐ काश के तुम थे powercut और मैं गर्मी की लू
तुम मुफ़लिस कि अन्तिम उम्मीद और मैं टोना जादू

ऐ काश के मैं एक पैगम्बर और तुम कोरे शैतान
ऐ काश के तुम्हरे दामों पे बिकता मोरा ईमान
मैं एक डूबे गाँव की याद तुम बड़े शहर की झुग्गी
तुम बंदरिया की लिपस्टिक मैं मदारी की डुग्डुगी

मैं बढ़ता बहरापन होता तुम हर चीज़ का दोहराना
मैं टूटा हुआ रेकॉर्ड होता तुम भूला बिसरा गाना
ऐ काश के मैं एक कटी पतंग और तुम सारा आकाश
ऐ काश के कुछ तो हो सकता, ऐ काश ऐ kaash ae काश....

strictly, it should be 'ऐ kaash ki...' rather than 'ae kaash ke', but this sounds right and I am following convention; for example, the song 'Ae kaash ke ham hosh main ab aane na paayeN...', and even the immortal 'Laazim hai ke ham bhi dekhenge...'

Update - since many people are complaining about the Hindi font, here is the damn thing in Roman Hindustani as well... (in the internet cafe I am sitting in right now, the Hindi isn't even showing up. Lots of gitches still to be worked out, blogger!)

Fehrist (to be sung to the music of 'Wishlist' by Pearl Jam)

Ae kaash ke tum dariya hote aur maiN hota toofan
Ae kaash ke maiN bhadwa hota, tum kothe ke mehmaan
Ae kaash ke maiN nithalla chor aur tum police ka danda
Ae kaash ke tum the sahukar aur main ek chaupat dhanda

Ae kaash ke tum satta hote aur maiN ek bhrasht neta
Jhoote hi sahi, namumkin bhi, par vaade to kar deta
Ae kaash ke maiN ek powercut aur tum garmi ki loo
Main muflis ki antim ummeed aur tum tona jaadu

Ae kaash ke main ek paigambar aur tum kore shaitan
Ae kaash ke tumhre daamoN pe bikta mora eemaan
Main ek doobe gaoN ki Yaad tum bade sheher ki jhuggi
Tum bandariya ki lipstick maiN madaari ki dugdugi

Main badhta behraapan hota tum har cheez ka dohrana
Main toote hua record hota tum bhoola bisra gaana
Ae kaash ke main ek kati patang aur tum saara aakash
Ae kassh ke kuchh to ho sakta, ae kaash ae kaash ae kaash

the may travels 4 - toledo

2007-06-24T20:58:00.000-07:00

'The streets of Toledo are desolate, ghosts of what they had once been. A man has come in from the countryside, looking for a book, a book whose name he doesn't yet know but which he is sure will have a lost history in it.... he knows the best place to hunt such things is down is the former Jewish quarter, though now Jews have lived there for a hundred years.

'... the man is wandering down the streets because it is now the neighbourhood of the rag sellers. The old neighbourhood of books and them men who wrote books and the men who translated books for the world has become a place where the books no one is supposed to read anymore are turned into pulp. The man sees a boy with a pile of papers he is trying to sell to an old silk merchant, and he can see they are written in Arabic....

' "... I pressed him to read the beginning , and when he did so, making an extempre translation from the Arabic into Castilian, he said that the heading was: History of Don Quixote de la Mancha, written by Cide Hamete benengeli, Arabic historian." ' - from The Ornament of The World, Maria Rosa Menocal

the may travels 3 - cordoba

2007-06-23T20:57:00.000-07:00

to paraphrase Faisal from Lawrence of Arabia -
'You are a desert loving Englishman... but I dream of the vanished gardens of Cordoba.'

I walked through the vanished gardens of Cordoba; the ruined palace city of Madinat Al-Zahra. In Cordoba itself, I wandered through the huge Cathedral known locally as the Mezquita (mosque), stared at water-wheels, and wondered at the sign advertising Judah Halevi Helados (ice-cream). In a sense this was all a pilgrimage to a world first glimpsed in this book, three years ago.

the may travels 2 - granada

2007-06-22T19:32:00.000-07:00

Granada is a town i want to visit again. A town full of history, and historical ironies; where Gypsy musicians, Morrocan immigrants, punks and American students cross paths in its medieval streets, covered with modern graffiti. And arguably, the most beautiful Coca Cola sign in the world.

the may travels 1 - madrid

2007-06-21T19:53:00.001-07:00

Bhowanipore Cemetery, 1907

2007-06-15T01:28:00.000-07:00

On my first day in Calcutta, my mother took me to the Bhowanipore Cemetery. She'd been waiting for me to arrive so we could explore the cemetery together. It's heartening to know that I'm the sort of guy people wait to go to graveyards with.

Where they make a desolation they call it peace.
We walk past the gravestones, Mother and I
Reading inscriptions, strange names who died
At 23, 24. Younger than I. Mother shakes her head.

The birds sit on crosses. Seeming peace and calm.
Whenever the war was, the war is long gone.
The sunlight is golden. His T-shirt is red.
He talks on his hands-free, sitting on a grave.

23? 24? Boys knock fruit out of a tree.
Where they make a desolation they call it peace.

Hiatus. Explained.

2007-06-13T02:13:00.000-07:00

I am typing this in Calcutta, on the computer in my parents’ lovely apartment in Calcutta, which I am visiting for the first time. Torrential rain has knocked out the Internet, so who knows when this will be up on the blog. While driving back home with the parents at 7.30 this morning, the sky turned so dark with the impeding rain that headlights had to be turned on. The crows flying helter skelter were almost indistinguishable against the sky.

The monsoons have arrived in Calcutta, and so have I. I left New York on the 13th of May, so it’s been a month of being ‘of no fixed address’; and, of course, no regular internet access; which explains the hiatus from blogging. The month has seen me passing through eight airports (JFK, Dublin, Madrid Barajas, Athens, Cairo, Bahrain, Delhi IGI, Calcutta); and hanging out in ten cities, towns and islands (Madrid, Granada, Cordoba, Toledo, Athens, Aegina Island, Mycenae, Naphlion, Cairo, Alexandria) before arriving in Delhi.

But the travels didn’t stop in Delhi. Having been away for only ten months, I could sense the city having changed. Having no home to call my own in the city that feels most like home, I continued living out of a backpack, wandering the city in its intense oven heat, spending nights in friends’ apartments, catching up with conversations.

And now it’s time to catch up with the blog. Soon to come, accounts of the travels - including pictures of the most beautiful Coca Cola sign ever; the cohort’s adventures in Greece, and why the 4S Beach Bar in the Anupam Complex (PVR Saket) has the best dance music on four continents; imho.

Against the City of Djinns

2007-05-11T07:10:00.000-07:00

This was published earlier this week in Delhi City Limits. It's not online on the Outlook site yet, so read it here!

The theatrical adaptation, currently playing in Delhi, made me, in New York, return to the book. This is how William Dalrymple's, 'City of Djinns' begins – 'It was in the citadel of Feroz Shah Kotla that... Pir Sadr-ud-din... sat me down on a carpet and told me about the djinns.'

Thus begins a book which over the past decade or so has become the definitive account of Delhi, a book read by visitors and Dilli-wallahs alike, a book which has since inspired a photo-exhibition, now a play, and innumerable cocktail conversations. But I find myself increasingly puzzled. For though the book begins with Feroz Shah Kotla, it never mentions it again. Which is sort of shocking, given the book's title. The Pir and his carpet are long gone, but every Thursday, there are thousands of people thronging these ruins, and depositing letters in the many alcoves and crevices, letters addressed to jinns.

Why would this most strange and relevant phenomenon be absent in a book which begins at Firoz Shah Kotla and has jinns as a thematic? In answer, let us begin to see what the narrative would look like if these letters had been written about. If while talking about the jinns that haunt and love Delhi, Dalrymple had also talked about the petitions addressed to them, petitions which form an archive of the disquiet of the city - loveless marriages, alcoholism, smack addiction, disease uncured, love unrequited, loans unpaid, work unfinished?

As soon as the letters enter the narrative, it becomes very hard to romanticize the city, to think of it as one 'whose different ages lay suspended side by side as in aspic'. We are forced to ask, why do people write these letters? Since when have they been doing this? What do they have to do with the vanished Pir and his carpet? When did he start living in an ASI controlled ruin? And rather than being a 'timeless' practise, our answers begin to point back to the distressingly close past, to the demolitions and dispossesions and terrors of the Emergency as they visited themselves upon the people of Delhi. There is no room here to go into those histories, alas, except to say that the jinns and the everyday violence of the city are inextricably mixed up, on beginning to research these letters.

Dalyrmple's book does not flinch from recording violence. The Emergency gets short shrift, but 1984, and Partition, and the excesses of Mohammad bin Tughlak are all well chronicled. But these are all spectacular events of violence; and by focusing on them one ignores the humdrum violence that is visited upon the less elite denizens of this city everyday, and with increasing frequency, and has been done so for a very long time. The uniqueness of Delhi is not that, to paraphrase Dalrymple, different centuries have been preserved intact, but that the past is constantly charged and transformed by the traumas of the present – that 'Tughlakshahi' becomes a metaphor for government arbitrariness and cruelty during the industrial closures of 2000.

Dalrymple is an engaging and important writer, and obviously loves the city. But to celebrate his romantic vision of a 'timeless' Delhi at the precise moment when the city is being transformed most brutally and rapidly, when the count of demolitions of homes and shops in the past year has gone insane, reeks of criminal callousness and cretinity among the city's elite. In the story that the Pir tells Dalrymple, Delhi is rebuilt again and again because the jinns love it too much to see it deserted. But all the jinns can do is to bear mute witness and read the letters deposited in their name, as those in power screw the city's denizens yet again, while we go and applaud the 'City of Jinns'.

Remembering 1857: 10th and 11th May, New York

2007-05-05T00:39:00.000-07:00

Two events to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the The Great Rebellion in India. Spread the word.

1) Rebellion: History, Music, Poetry
featuring musicians Achyut Joshi, Dave Sharma and Samita Sinha; and narratives, poetry and folksongs from 1857
Alwan For the Arts, 16, Beaver Street
Thursday, May 10, 7pm

2)The Uprising: Reflections on 1857
A panel discussion with Janaki Bakhle, Faisal Devji, Salahuddin Malik and Veena Oldenburg
602 Hamilton, Columbia University
Friday, May 11, 6.30pm

1857 – A defining moment in the history of South Asia and British colonialism.

May 10th, 2007 will mark the 150th anniversary of the Rebellion of 1857. As the largest anti-colonial uprising of the 19th century, the Rebellion marks a watershed moment in history at multiple levels: the end of the East India Company's rule and beginning of direct British government rule and the Raj; the completion of the loss of Mughal sovereignty in India; and a sea change in North Indian life, culture and politics.

1) Rebellion: History, Music, Poetry

To mark the 150th anniversary, we are revisiting 1857 through multiple narratives of the event - narratives of revenge, lament and lost possibilities - through history, music, poetry, and images. The program will integrate live performances of ghazals and various Indian musical forms, readings of selected poetry and historical prose, and images of the uprising and its aftermath.

May 10, 2007. 7pm
Alwan for the Arts, 16 Beaver St.

Music - Achyut Joshi, Dave Sharma, Samita Sinha

Poetry/Narrative/Images - "The 'Wheat-ish' Log Collective" - Sajid Huq, Prashant Keshavmurthy, Daanish Masood, Haroon Moghul, Anand V Taneja

About Achyut Joshi - Achyut Joshi has trained in Hindustani Classical Music as a student of Raghunandan Panshikar of the Jaipur Gharana. In 2005 he was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study music in India. He teaches high school math in New York City.

About Samita Sinha - Though trained primarily in classical Hindustani music, Samita Sinha's repertoire spans a range of styles in several different languages. She experiments in synthesizing elements of Hindustani music with jazz, electronic music, and theater. In 2002 she was awarded the Fulbright Scholarship to study in the guru-shishya tradition in India with Dr. Alka Deo Marulkar. Since returning to New York City her main projects have included KAASH, Sunny Jain Collective, and Sekou Sundiata's the 51st(dream)state.
More at http://www.samitasinha.com/

From Dave Sharma's Myspace page - Sharmaji creates a bass-heavy, post-desi sound that is as consistently powerful as it is diverse in background-- and completely NYC. As a DJ and percussionist he's brought his riddims to artists as diverse as Karsh Kale, Ming & FS, Tina Sugandh, JUNGLI, and Timbaland's hookstress RajeSwari, as well as for NYC's 9-years-strong Basment Bhangra party...
In 2004 he started a long-term relationship with AR Rahman's Broadway musical "Bombay Dreams"
More at http://www.myspace.com/davesharma

The 'Wheat-ish' Log Collective - Came up over chai one rainy New York afternoon as a bunch of impecunious desi graduate students and NGO types realized that the state sponsored 'celebrations' of 1857 in India were going to entirely painted in black and white, and that even if sitting in NYC, we needed to do something to change the tints of the picture.

2) The Uprising: Reflections on 1857

To mark the 150th anniversary of the rebellion of 1857, we will come together for brief reflections on the event, its lasting repercussions in the 90 years of the Raj that followed, and its relevance to current Indian identity and politics. Professors Janaki Bakhle, Faisal Devji, Salahuddin Malik, and Veena Oldenburg will offer brief remarks on 1857 and after. This will be followed by an intra panel discussion and an interactive Q&A session with the audience.

May 11, 2007. 6.30pm
602 Hamilton, Columbia University.

- Janaki Bakhle teaches History at Columbia University. Prof. Bakhle has recently published Two Men and Music: Nationalism in the Making of an Indian Classical Tradition (New York: Oxford, 2005). She is currently researching Marathi Revolutionaries in the early twentieth century. Bakhle is working to situate their activities within a specifically Marathi discourse.

- Faisal Devji teaches History at the New School. He is interested in the political thought of modern Islam as well as in the transformation of liberal categories and democratic practice in South Asia. His broader concerns are with ethics and violence in a globalized world. Prof. Devji has recently published Landscapes of the Jihad: Militancy, Morality, Modernity.

- Salahuddin Malik, a professor of history, earned his PhD at McGill University in Montreal. He is a widely-published specialist on 19th century British India and Islam. He teaches Ancient World and upper-level courses on Islam and South Asia.

-Veena Oldenburg teaches at Baruch College, CUNY. Among her publications is her work on British colonial urbanization, The Making of Colonial Lucknow, 1856-77 (Princeton University Press, 1984), "Life Style as Resistance: The Case of the Courtesans of Lucknow" (Feminist Studies , 1990) and Dowry Murder: The Imperial Origins of a Cultural Crime (Oxford University Press, 2002).

वापसी के इंतज़ार मेँ

2007-05-04T13:30:00.000-07:00

बस कुछ दिन और, और फिर घर की ओर सफ़र।
कल रात को एक पुराना खयाल लौटा। के इस शहर में मेरी जिंदगी बहुत हसीं है, पर इसका मेरी हकीकी जिंदगी से कोई वासता नहीं।
मैं तरजुमे मेँ जीने से थोड़ा थक सा गया हूँ। और ब्लॉगर की ऊट-पटांग मात्राओं से भी।

kalenda maya (the first of may)

2007-05-01T07:10:00.000-07:00

Kalenda maya	the first of May
Ni fuels de faya	neither leaf of beech
Ni chanz d'auzelh	nor song of bird
Ni flors de glaya	nor flower of sword lily
Non es que'm playa	pleases me
Pros domna guaya	lady noble and gay
Tro qu'un ysnelh	until I receive
Messatgier aya	a speedy messenger
Del vostre belh	from your fair self
Cors, que'm retraya	who will tell me
Plazer novelh	the new delight
Qu'Amors m'atraya	which love brings me

Things haven't changed that much from 12th century Provence.
or, my setiments exactly, or something. :) More here...

on diaspora. or something.

2007-04-29T06:06:00.000-07:00

I consider myself lucky. My heart and my passport almost agree.

(This came up in the middle of a conversation with Sashi. His translation of the ghazal from last post is here.)

rainy day ghazal (with bad translation)

2007-04-27T11:54:00.000-07:00

(This one is dedicated to whoever took my bag at the Brooklyn Inn last night. It was an old bag, there was nothing particularly valuable inside - no laptop, no passport - but the loss that hurts the most is a beloved Moleskine notebook, full of ideas jotted on the subway, poems and plans and all those other things that come into your head sideways in the middle of doing something else. It was a gift from a friend, a 'substitute for napkins'. In the absence of the notebook, this ghazal was written on the backs of bills and visiting cards scrounged from my wallet.)

Arsa ho gaya hai ke basti se muhajir hooN
Itna ho gaya hai ke hasti se muhajir hooN

Jazeera-e shehr-e sang maiN kahaaN dhoondoN sanam
Ke itne barsoN but-parasti se muhajir hooN

Dil ki jebeN khaali hain magar kya kijiye
Ke aaj to maiN tang-dasti se muhajir hooN

NukkaD ke sharaabkhaane meN khaata khul chuka
YaaroN maiN mae ki masti se muhajir hooN

Is dauDte bhaagte sheher ki sadkeN haiN aalishaan
Par kya karooN ke matargashti se muhajir hooN

and the same in blogger devnagari (it's all over the place at this point, but it's good to know that at some point, i can compose and post stuff in devnagari. now waiting for the nastaliq.)-

अरसा हो गया है के बस्ती से मुहाजिर हूँ
इतना हो गया है के हस्ती से मुहाजिर हूँ

जजीरा-ए शेह्र-ए संग मैन कहाँ धून्दों सनम
के इतने बरसों बुत-परस्ती से मुहाजिर हूँ

दिल कि जेबें खाली हैं मगर क्या कीजिये
के आज तो मैन तंग-दस्ती से मुहाजिर हूँ

नुक्कड़ के शराबखाने में खाता खुल चूका
यारों मैन मे कि मस्ती से मुहाजिर हूँ

इस दौड़ते भागते शेहेर कि सड़कें हैं आलिशान
पर क्या करूं के मटरगश्ती से मुहाजिर हूँ

Update -
Since there are readers of this blog unfamiliar with Hindustani/Urdu, I am going to do the belated (and difficult) job of translating; with the given that everything will sound much cheesier (and even more hyperbolic) in English. And of course, it won't rhyme.
Muhajir, which is at the heart of the refrain throughout the ghazal, can be translated as wanderer/migrant/exile. For the sake of convenience, as well as the spirit in which I wrote this, I am going to use 'exile', but take the other meanings as implicit.

It has been ages since I've been an exile from home
So long that I'm an exile from/by (my) being

On this island city of stone, where do I look for the image of the beloved?
It's been years since I've been an exile from idol worship

The pockets of the heart are empty, but what to do
For I am an exile from/by tight-fistedness today

There's a tab now open at the corner tavern
Friends, I'm an exile from wine's intoxication

The streets of this hustle-bustle city are magnificient
But what do I do as an exile from aimless wandering?

two conversations on wearing a faded einstein t-shirt

2007-04-25T23:15:00.000-07:00

saturday night. in a beer bar on bleeker street -
- did you celebrate 3/14?
- 3/14?
- you know, 3.14, pi day? aren't you a mathematician?
- no.
- well, i am.

a while later -
- einstein was also born on 3/14.
- no he wasn't. he was born on feb 24th.
- march 14th.
- feb 24th.
- wanna bet?
- sure, i'll buy you a drink if i'm wrong. now find someone with a blackberry.

the blackberry was never found. the mathematician left. and after a while, so did i.
while walking along washington square south, i was stopped -
- hey man, is that einstein on your t-shirt?
- yes.
- tell me, then. wasn't he an expert on love?
- no.
he turned around to his friends, who'd stopped to listen, and said, see? i told you.
the friend came up to me and asked -
- what did einstein know about love?
- shit.

the answer seemed to make them happy. they laughed as they walked away, telling me to have a great night.

But i was wrong both times. einstein was born on 3/14, but i had been convinced otherwise many years ago by Mr. James, who claims/claimed to share a birthday with him. and it was wrong to say that he didn't know about love. he knew about love, as a human being among and a human being like other human beings, but it could also be argued that the sort of physics he did would be impossible for a deep love for the beauty of the world, the underlying harmony of things which made him believe in Spinoza's God. but also, in his politics, a deep and abiding love for humanity.

so einstein knew his stuff. wish it would rub off from the t-shirt.

59th street chasm songs. (not feeling groovy)

2007-04-25T09:05:00.000-07:00

Tuesday morning. 59th and Park Avenue. The plaza next to the Apple Store. Hordes of screaming teenage girls, many white balanced floodlights, some sort of shoot. The crowds part for an instant, and i see the streaked hair of Sanjay Malakar, signing autographs gamely as he rises and rises to fame, despite/because of being booted off American Idol, despite not being able to sing to save his life.

Fifteen minutes later. Waiting for the 1 train under 59th and 8th. An old black man plays The Magic Flute, on a well, magic flute. The 3 thunders by and drowns him out. Everyone ignores him. When the 1 Train stops and I get on, he's playing Ode to Joy, and it's beautiful enough to be very, very sad.

And what would have happened if the man was Joshua Bell? Probably the same.

twice tagged

2007-04-20T18:06:00.000-07:00

I have been tagged twice in the past month and have done nothing about either, so now's time to start.

First, a belated nod to the fact that the good folks at First City nominated me for a Thinking Blogger award. And I'm supposed to tag five other folk whose blogs make me think. Since this is going to be an unjust rollcall at the best of times (only five?) I'm just going to go with the top of my head. And the nominees are -
Chapati Mystery, now on Facebook
Horror Vacui, with his cheerful thoughts on melancholia, soon to be joining us in Noo Yawk
Known Turf, the lady with the conscience that (unlike mine) hasn't been numbed
Within/Without, for understanding about the ruins, and about es muss sein, and about red earth and pouring rain.
Buoyantville, for turning the everyday into aching poetry.
XXX

Speaking of thinking, I had two thought provoking conversations last weekend, both of them, sort-of, in Punjabi.

The first - in the front seat of a cab heading to Brooklyn. The cab driver gets a call from his family in Sialkot. Apparently, people have been being infected by a 'virus' after answering calls on their cellphones from unknown numbers. They're calling to check if he's ok. There's no problem here, he says. Then he asks me if anything similar has happened in India. No one's called me, I say.

The next conversation a few hours later, after a night of sweaty dancing and Bhangra 101, is even weirder, if possible.

- What are you doing here? asks very pretty girl, in Punjabi.
- I just came dancing with my friends, you know, we love this place...
- Tusi hijde naee ho? she asks. You are not an eunuch?
I am momentarily struck dumb. By hijda/eunuch her reference was obviously to being gay, a very misplaced reference that would not fly during polite conversation in a queer space in Delhi or Bombay. I think. Ah, the diaspora and the shit they get away with...
- err, no, i'm sort of straight...

Then she introduces me to her partner as her bibi (wife), and another woman present as her saas (mother in law).
Pairi pauna pabiji, I say to the partner. In the middle of a lesbian bar in Brooklyn, we've just completely redefined Punjabi familial relationships.
I'm still getting over it.
XXX

Elizabeth tagged me with 'five things that you may not know about me' (and were probably better off not knowing). This is a hard one, given that so much of my life is already out in the public domain :)

- I have once jumped off a moving train to rescue a snatched purse. (The jump was successful in recovering the purse, but not in the ways you would imagine.)

- I am the king of abandoned literary projects. (Which is probably why I started blogging). As of now, I have one finished but unpublished novella (set in Delhi during the Kandahar hijacking of 1999, narrated from the pov of a guy who sees aeroplanes in his head all the time - yes this was written way before 9/11); the first draft of the first half of a dystopic science fiction novel set in future Delhi, abandoned after the beginning of the Iraq war); and the scattered beginnings of a collection of pieces on Delhi. Some of this stuff is good, if I may say so myself, and needs to be rescued from my constantly-moving-on-to-other-things.

- I recite poetry, aloud, when walking in the rain. The usual suspects - Ghalib, Nida Fazli, Faiz, Robert Frost.

- I am very, very neurotic about paperwork. Particularly filling out visa forms. It gives me the screaming heebie jeebies, whatever those are.

- I am terrified about losing my accent and sounding American. To the point that when someone compliments me on my English, i take it as an insult (which it is, of course, even if unintended), and start getting very, very frantic indeed.

a poem heard in chicago

2007-04-09T12:37:00.000-07:00

Chicago was a wonderful three days. More on which later, including finally meeting the Sepoy in real life.
But for now, just a poem I heard, and liked so much, that I actually borrowed the poet's (single) copy and wrote it down in my notebook. Like an old fashioned tazkira/tazkirah.

Srikanth Reddy, the poet, prefaced this reading by saying something like (and I am paraphrasing very broadly here) - The usual story goes that you will meet the perfect someone, whether halfway across the world, or in the next street. This poem is about a more probable love story, when the perfect couple never meet.

Everything

She was watching the solar eclipse
through a piece of broken bottle

when he left home.
He found a blue kite in the forest

on the day she lay down
with a sailor. When his name changed,

she stitched a cloud to a quilt
made of rags. They did not meet,

so they never could be parted.
So she finished her prayer,

& he folded his map of the sea.

- from Facts for Visitors, Srikanth Reddy

(And I could not help wondering, at the end of the poem - But what about those who have met, and failed to recognize each other, like Majnu unheeding as Laila passed him in the desert? ... But that's a poem written often enough. Too often.)

shakti

2007-04-04T08:01:00.000-07:00

Sitting in front of my computer on a Monday afternoon, here in New York, at first I refused to believe it. The timing was just right enough to believe that it was a sick April Fool joke. Unfortunately, it wasn't.

Shakti Bhatt passed away in Delhi last Saturday night after a sudden and brief and completely unexpected illness. A talented writer, a gifted editor, and a well loved friend, the unfairness of her loss is felt by many. This entry on Samit's blog, a few days before her death, just makes it more poignant. She was so full of plans and dreams and hopes and ideas.

Shakti and her husband Jeet Thayil moved to Delhi two years ago, from New York. One of my most wonderful memories from Delhi is the first evening spent at their place, in April 2005; a night which could only have ended in spontaneous ghazal-ification. There were so many other wonderful evenings. They were such an amazing couple. (The Editor-Poets, as they appeared on eM's blog). Shakti was also the first person to call, as an editor, and put the idea of 'the Delhi book' into my head. As an editor she was enthusiastic, pushy, and most importantly believed in a moody and erratic writer. Then the erratic writer moved to New York, and grad school...

Perhaps it was premonition that last week I found myself thinking of Jeet and Shakti. They were the first New Yorkers I had known. This was the city where they met. I found myself imagining conversations with them back in Delhi -
- And did you go to... ?
- Err...no

... And now, in their city, I feel so far away. My thoughts, like everyone else's, are with Jeet.

well, that just about says it all

2007-03-31T08:30:00.001-07:00

Sometimes bad 'tukbandi' is so damn cool. Or maybe I'm just being silly. This brought a smile today :

Unki gali se guzre, ajab ittefaq tha
UnhoneN phool phenka, gamla bhi saath tha

Found while looking for Ghalib. From here.

two pictures from st. patrick's day

2007-03-26T20:02:00.000-07:00

the peacock throne

2007-03-26T16:12:00.000-07:00

My review of Sujit Saraf's book, as it appeared in Tehelka.

Too many things to blog about, not enough time to blog.
And only seven weeks to go before leaving New York for the summer and too much shit to do.
Taxes, Tickets, Visas, Subletting Apartment...
Not to mention books to read, papers to write, museums to visit, boulders to hop, and...

holi. not holy.

2007-03-05T10:38:00.000-08:00

I guess the moment that will stay the most from my first Holi in New York was the lady who walked up to where a bunch of us were throwing colours around on a day that had turned suddenly gray, on the usually very sedate Morningside Drive.
- What's happening here? she asked.
Holi, I explained. That's with an 'i', not a 'y'. Indian festival. Spring. Colours.
- Could I have some? she asked. Just on my face. I feel like I need a little colour today.

As k said, you don't realise how much black people wear here till you walk around with pink and green and yellow all over you.

Colours are infectious. Especially when they're in the fragrant, powdery form of gulal. Observe this rather short video. (Rather short because I was missing too much of the fun.) Most of them had never played Holi before. From the video, you can't tell. The soundtrack is non-stop laughter. Colours do things to people. Good things.

Not entirely unconnected - What colour is the sacred?

Minareh Zarreen

2007-03-02T06:30:00.000-08:00

This was originally written as a presentation for a course on Thing Theory (you might have to scroll down a little after clicking the link to see the course description). It was so much fun that it didn't feel like course work, and hence is up here.

A few translations from the Persian text, the Sirat-i-Firozshahi, composed in 1370 AD (772 AH) -

'O God! How did they lift this heavy mountain; and in what did they fix it that it does not move from its place? How did they carry it to the top of the building which almost touches the heavens and place it there in an upright position? How could they paint it all over with gold, that it appears to people like the golden morning'?

I wish I had better pictures to show you. These pictures do no justice to the pillar which is the subject matter of the above lines. For even now, if you stand next to the pillar and look up at its truncated but still impressive height, framed by the sky, some of its smooth polished surface glinting in the sun, its lustre relatively undimmed by the passing of at least two thousand three hundred years, wonderment/bewilderment is still an immediate reaction. How did they do this? How was it made? How the hell did they get this up here atop this pyramid? Gell's ideas of the enchantment of technology, and the technology of enchantment come to mind. Gell argues that an object acts as an agent when the artist's skill is so great that the viewer simply cannot comprehend it and is therefore captivated by the image. Gell defines captivation as the 'demoralization produced by the spectacle of unimaginable virtuosity', an effect created by our being unable to figure out how an object came into being.

Let us return to the Persian text, describing an event in perhaps 1365, when Sultan Firoz Shah Tughlak, having recently built a new capital, having commenced a new capital, returns with his retinue to the foothills two hundred kilometres north of Delhi, to show them what he had once seen on a hunting trip. This is the first 'eyewitness' account we have of people encountering the pillar -

'... in the village of Topra, by the banks of the Jatan, stood the stone pillar, the like of which in height and circumference had not been seen by anyone... The sages and wise men of the time were simply astonished at the sight, and though they dived deep into the sea of thought they succeeded not in bringing out the pearl of the solution of these secrets – namely whence and how this heavy and lofty stone monolith was brought to this place and what were the exact engineering methods employed in its erection here. Verily such an achievement could hardly have been accomplished by human beings for the simple reason that it is beyond the power of Man.'

There were inscriptions on the Minar, and learned men were brought forward to read them. They could only read the latest ones, in Sanskrit. 'On the pillar is an inscription, the characters of which are unintelligible to the men of this period; but the historians have a tradition to the effect that four thousand odd years have passed since this pillar and a temple were erected at this place. Another inscription on this pillar is only 249 years old and is said to mention that Bisal Dev, Chohan, Rai of Sambhal, who came to worship certain idols on the banks of the Sarasvati River, found this pillar in its present position.'

But the earlier inscriptions incised on the pillar remained bafflingly unreadable. Not only were the viewers dazzled by the 'unimaginable virtuosity' of the sheer being of the pillar, it contained, visible and yet unreadable, the undecipherable mystery of its own origin. Perhaps we could think of it in Godelier's terms as 'sacred'. For as Godelier says, 'ultimately, the sacred must always remain secret, indecipherable, must only hint at a meaning which lies beyond all possibility of expression and representation.'

But to say that something is sacred is also to say that people cease being curious about it, if they were ever curious to begin with. The sacred is unquestionable. But the sacred, I would argue, is only one register of feeling that the pillar invoked, only one form of its 'agency' on people. The other, I would argue, was a feeling of of exasperation, of piqued curiosity. If we go back to that day in 1354, the pillar was not just 'sacred' (and hence transcendent and not to be messed with) but probably seemed to be smirking in smug mockery, at the exasperated Sultan and his retinue, glowing magical, and golden, and baffling in the sunlight. (It had already had a similarly exasperating effect on the Mongol Tarmishrin, who when he raided northern India in 1328, tried to crack the pillar by burning a huge fire around its base. Mercifully, it didn't work.)

Many theories were come up with, stressing the magical (of course) nature of the minar, and its transcendent, mythic origins. The commonly held belief was that the minar was one of the walking sticks of Bhim, one of the five brothers who are the heroes of the epic Mahabharat. There were others. 'Some of the learned infidels, on the authority of their Hindi books, said that the pillars had grown out of their earth and reached the heavens; while others said that underneath the pillar was a magical talisman, and that nobody could remove the pillar.'

The Sultan was having none of it. As we know, the bafflement of the work of art does not stop the collector from desiring to posess it. Captivated by the singularity of the unique object, the antique out of the time, he desires to make it his captive. 'Such were the things the King heard; but as he was determined to remove the pillar he said; “by the grace of the Creator... we shall remove this lofty Pillar and make a Minar of it in the Jumah Mosque of Firozabad, where, God willing, it shall stand as long as the world endures.'

The pillar displayed the paradoxical characteristics of collectible objects, following Baudrillard, of both absolute singularity and infinite seriality. A similar pillar (said to be one of the pair of the Bheem's walking sticks) was also brought to Delhi from near Meerut, 65 kilometres away to the East. There were more such pillars, further to the East and the South, but at some point, logistics probably won over lust.

For Firoz Shah Tughlak had to deal with logistical problems of a scale that very few collectors have to deal with, and which would still be challenging today. How do you take down, transport over two hundred kilometers, and re-erect a forty foot stone pillar weighing approximately twenty seven tons, and ensure that it stays in one piece? That this was in fact an unprecedented challenge to the mid fourteenth century technical imagination is made clear by the fact that we have a detailed technical account of the the entire procedure, with illustrations.

'... orders were issued to commanding the attendance of all the people in the neighbourhood, and all soldiers, both horse and foot. They were ordered to bring instruments and materials suitable for the work. Directions were issued for bringing parcels of the cotton of the silk cotton tree. Quantities of this silk cotton were placed around the column, and when the earth at its base was removed, it fell gently over on the bed prepared for it. The cotton was then removed by degrees and after some days the pillar lay safe on the ground... The pillar was then encased from top to bottom in reeds and raw skins, so that no damage might accrue to it.

'the felling and transporting of the pillar was accomplished with the help of divine inspiration, in accordance with human understanding... every detail of the work including the tying of ropes and the construction of masonry piers; pulling ropes in all directions and balancing the pillar with their help; the employment of elephants for dragging the pillar, and following on their failure the employment of longer ropes with 20,000 men and their success in carrying the pillar to the banks of the Jamna; then arranging well balanced boats for the pillar, loading the pillar on the boats and floating the same; its journey to Firozabad (Delhi); the making of all the arrangements over again for removing the pillar and carrying it in front of the Jum'ah Mosque, there constructing a large building, raising and placing the pillar thereon with the help of pulleys etc., and re-erecting the pillar according to the laws of wisdom – a gift of the most exalted God.... '

This might not seem remarkable coming from an age and context where victories and defeats, joys and sorrows and pretty much everything else was attributed (at least rhetorically) to the grace of God, but it is still, I would think, a rather rare phenomenon to see winches and pulleys and corvee labour and the mundanity of technical processes brought together with divine inspiration, and the collapse of the Durkheimian duality of the sacred and profane. The sense of wonder attached to the pillar itself is manifest in the (what we would think of as) completely mundane task of transporting and re-erecting it, with no easy separation between the two.

The Pillar, in its new position atop the pyramid adjacent to the Jama Masjid of Firozabad retained its sense of wonder for visitors for centuries to come. Timur (Tamerlane), who sacked other 'cities'/parts of Delhi in 1398, seems to have left Firozabad well enough alone, and declared that he had never seen any monuments in all the numerous lands he had traversed which were comparable to these monoliths. (The other monolith was and continues in the northern part of what is no longer known as Firozabad.) Tom Coryat, whose grand walking tour of Europe extended into India in about 1616, dazzled by the lustre of the pillar, thought that it was made of brass, and dated back to Alexander's invasion of India. A while later, the chaplain Edward Terry thought that it was of marble with a Greek inscription upon it.

The Islamic reception of these pillars from the pre-Islamic past, as highlighted by the responses of Firoz Shah Tughlak and Timur, is interesting because it is not as we would expect, a response of iconoclasm, or iconoclash. Instead, and here I am borrowing a phrase that the much later Mughal emperor (and noted/reviled iconoclast, in popular history) Aurangzeb, uses to describe the spectacular 9th century rock cut Kailash temple at Ellora; they saw them as the works of 'the true Transcendent artisan'. The pillars, pre-dating the coming of Islam to India, were still divine and sacred, outside of history. The Western accounts of the pillars, Tom Coryat's and Edward Terry's, linked the pillars to Alexander and the Greeks, the first moment when India comes into the ambit of 'Western' history, and hence an originary moment. The pillars, whichever way they were looked at before the nineteenth century, were outside of history or at its very beginning. Transcendent, in other words.

In 1838, James Prinsep deciphered the Brahmi script. This was a part of a long and wonderful Orientalist detective story which (re)discovered and (re)constructed the history of Ancient India, only a very small part of which is important to our story. One of the key elements in Prinsep's decipherment of Brahmi was a sawn off inscribed chunk of the Mathura Pillar, the twin 'walking stick' to the Minar-e-Zarreen, standing on the North Delhi ridge, being shipped to Calcutta. The Mathura Pillar had already been broken into five pieces by a gunpowder mishap in the late eighteenth century. The script was deciphered, the inscriptions were read. The Minar-e-Zarreen was one of a series of pillars dating at least to the time of the Mauryan Emperor Ashoka (regnal years 270 BC-232 BC), who converted to Buddhism, and had pillars and rocks located at important sites all over his kingdom inscribed with edicts eulogizing his support for Buddhism and his policy of dhamma. This might be stretching a point, but in these photographs from the 1860s onwards, the Minar looks diminished.

Some of the best works by later historian working/writing on the Mauryan Period, like DD Kosambi and Romila Thapar, speak of the pillars as well. They tell us that the smooth mirror polish of the pillars is a characteristic of Mauryan Art and that the stone from which these pillars are carved comes from Chunar near Varanasi. There is no sense of wonder in their matter of fact accounts as to how this mirror smooth polish which has lasted well over two thousand years was achieved in the third century BC. There is no sense of wonder at how the pillars, or even the unpolished stones from which they were subsequently carved, were transported from near Varanasi to Topra, over nine hundred kilometres away. A similar disenchantment is to be seen in the inscription put up by the Archaeological Survey of India in the early twentieth century near the ruined pyramid at Firoz Shah Kotla, which tells us very drily, the the statistics of the height and circumference of the pillar, and its possible date of origin, but omits the story of the pillar being transported down river in the fourteenth century, of it ever having been Bhimsen's Laat, of it being the Minar-e-Zarreen.

XXX

The ruins of Firoz Shah's palace complex, and the pillar, are now at the very centre of New Delhi. Though the ruins, and the pillar, are under the jurisdiction and control of the ASI (Archaeological Survey), popular perceptions of the pillar in contemporary Delhi are very different from the history that the ASI signboard tells. The pillar is now at the centre of a practise of writing letters to jinns who are supposed to reside here. (jinns, according to Islamic theo/cosmology, are spirits created by Allah out of smokeless fire, and are found in desolate places such as forests, graveyards and ruins.) From my initial fieldwork it would seem that the practise of writing to the jinns starts in the late 1970s, when a fakir named Laddoo Shah came and started living in these ruins at the end of the Emergency of 1975-77, a year after the demolitions at the nearby Turkman Gate locality, which had once been part of Firozabad. The chief of the djinns is addressed as Laat Waale Baba (the baba of the laat, or pillar) and is supposed to dwell in the pillar, the still lustrous Minar-e-Zarreen. Which leads to such seeming incongruities as seeing a young Muslim girl touching a third century BC pillar extolling the virtues of Buddhist dhamma and asking a spirit of flame to make her father give up alcohol and become a good regularly praying Muslim.

Now though this may seem a little incongrous and may be frowned upon by purists both within and outside Islam, theologically (apparently), there is nothing wrong with it. Djinns are recognised by Islam as created by God at the same time as humans, and having free will, and having powers that humans don't and vice versa. And as the maulvi of the still functioning Jama Masjid next to the pillar said to me, ' A djinn can dwell wherever he wants to.' In other words, the immanence of the spirit present in the pillar has nothing to do with the pillar itself. Or, following, the logic of the weChishanu in Zimbabwe that Matthew Engeleke discusses, the spirit could manifest in a peeble if it so chose, or in Alladin's Lamp; the material is irrelevant.

But the pillar has everything to do with it. Despite, or perhaps because, the history of Ashoka and of the pillars being connected with the historical personage of Ashoka is so well known (the national emblem of the Republic of India is taken from the capital of another Ashokan pillar), people deliberately ignore the historical facts as inscribed on the ASI slab at the base of the pyramid. (It is perhaps easier to ignore non-deliberately because the slab is in English, but I don't think this is the case). One of the wilder stories I've heard from people about the pillar is that it bears the secret alchemical formula of turning base metal into gold; a secret that will only be revealed when there is no evil in men's hearts. Why the desire for a transcendence beyond the 'magic' that the pillar already casts on the viewer in Gell's sense, why the need for it to be outside of history?

Perhaps because in the city of Delhi, the unfolding of history over the past few centuries has not been particularly kind to people. Many of those who petition the djinns at Firoz Shah Kotla are the victims of the history authorised by the Indian State, for example in the infamous demolitions of Turkman Gate. The only hope for escape lies in what is outside of history, unchanged by the passing of time, beautiful because it has survived; to borrow Baudrillard's phrase. And herein lies the paradox where the spirit can only be immanent in what is truly transcendent.

The pillar itself, to use a phrase I am increasingly fond of, is the slippery pole between Transcendence and Immanence.

Note- many of the archival images used here are via Frances Pritchett's awesome website.

still.life.fall.light

2007-02-26T20:48:00.000-08:00

By virtue of being too screwed this week to actually write anything decent; and having photo archives clogged up since sometime early in winter pretending to be autumn. From Park Slope, Brooklyn.

stranger to the snow

2007-02-16T23:23:00.000-08:00

The first time. Seven years ago.
The four of us. Two days up from the heat of Delhi in May.
Cutting steps in a wall of ice with a khukri to cross over to the Valley of Flowers.
A day later, climbing up a steep path through high banks of snow, breath freezing in the air, we reach a lake reflecting seven mountains, pilgrims stripping down to jump into its deep blue unfrozen waters, surrounded by snow at thirteen thousand feet.

Do things stop being magical just because they really happened? On our way down from the mountains, a sadhu gave us a matchbox full of weed, unasked for. We were young then, so young. Strangers to the exotica of love and snow.

XXX

The first real snowfall this year, snow that stayed on the ground, was on Valentine's Day.
Apt. The snow fell like love once used to be.
Long awaited but unexpected. Confused, the night before, about whether it was hail or sleet or snow.
But come morning a city soft and pure and white, and highly dysfunctional. Wheels going round and round but no traction anywhere. Lie back and make angels with your flailing limbs. All colours shine brighter against the snow.

It doesn't last. Churned by the wheels and the footsteps of the city, dirtied by its grime and exhaust and oil, the snow turns cement grey. Everyday. It piles up on the sidewalk like miniature mountain ranges. In the night, even colder, the mountain ranges ice over, the fluffiness of the fallen snow solidifying, like cement again. Kick it at the risk of hurting your big toe. But if you walk on those cement mountains they will bear your weight. Water will bear the weight of a man, and his water-proof boots, and the few pints he's drunk, and all the songs he remembers from a land without snow.

The landscape of love turned mundane, the mountains on the sidewalk, feels like it will last forever.

Sun and salt and shovel, it will all melt away.

- You make it sound so horrible, says my friend, pensive at the unseasonableness of love and snow.

But when we stood at a high window today, as the sun shone in a bright blue sky snow melted; and the window was a slow constant waterfall that we stood behind, and the rooftops of the city were white below us.

- Love is meant to flow, not to be frozen.
- I'm waiting for the spring.

I am no more a stranger to the snow. But in this city where snow turns to cement, love now feels strange.

only in new york...

2007-02-12T09:39:00.000-08:00

... could someone get away with writing this -

... In Olmsted's day Brooklyn was called the City of Churches, and today you need only to walk through its streets or rumble through its heart on the subway to know it has an old and deep soul, deeper at least than any other place in this world that I've ever been.
- Fred Goodman, The Secret City

I like Brooklyn, but this is ridiculous. Where else in the world have you been Mr. Goodman - not as a tourist, that is? Manhattan?

disagreement

2007-02-10T00:45:00.000-08:00

... this world should be overcome, this world in all its deep loves, in all its terrors, in all its countless ways of going wrong.
- St. Augustine

No, it shouldn't. Not when a quiet night with the cohort turns into a night of dancing at the Catty Shack. Not when Kishori Amonkar sings Aaj jaane ki zid na karo in the bathroom, not when the skies are so blue, not when the mind explodes with ideas, not when Stefano Bollani plays the innards of his piano. This world should not be overcome, but reveled in. Deep loves, terrors and all...

The manhole covers will be back soon.
Rukavat ke liye khed hai.

manhole covers and the round world -a meditation on new york sewers 2

2007-01-26T16:44:00.000-08:00

first part here.

About forty odd years ago, New York City started ordering its manhole cover inventories from foundries in India and China, rather than from companies within the United States.

Outsourcing, especially 'business process outsourcing' can seem like surreal science fiction. Time shifts. Night becomes day, cars carrying workers speed through the deserted cities chased by dogs, voices bounce off sattelites and span half the world in the blink of an eye. You enter a glass tower and are instantly transformed into someone else. A different accent, a different greeting; a different name. When you return, it is morning again, a city returns to its rhythms. But you are out of tune. You will sleep the day away, to awake again at the witching hour, to be possessed by another identity, become someone else. A shaman at the other end of a toll free phone.

There's nothing of this dizzying, dazzling ephemeral synchronicity in the humble manhole cover. It is a thing of (considerable) substance. Over fifty kilos of iron. Iron which had to be mined as ore, refined, melted, moulded. cooled, carried. Iron, which in every manhole cover, carries along with the visible impress of INDIA, the invisible impress of all the workers whose toil is embodied in it. A manhole cover is a heavy thing to move, it is human in its weight, so perfect is it a metaphor for congealed labour time.

And like that weighty thing, the pound coin, it is both flat and round. Like the world is not. The world is flat, say some, for the age of the fibre optic cable has obliterated the difference between night and day. The world is flat, for all its distances have shrunk, it no longer needs to be a sphere spinning on its axis, in and out of sun and shadow. The world is flat for it is equal now, there are no restrictions on the free competition of the open market. But no, the world is still round and it is still unequal, it still spins in and out of night and day. Ships still cross the oceans of this turning world, some of them carrying manhole covers. Take the amount of work that goes into making a manhole cover, its worth. Add to it the cost, the ludicrousness, of shipping tons of heavy steel discs piled in the hold of a slow moving boat across the oceans of half the world, at an order of magnitude not much faster than when Columbus sailed to the New World. Or when the first slaves did. (And this in a time when human voices and faces travel almost at the speed of light, and humans bodies almost at the speed of sound.)

Add all those costs. It is still cheaper, still worth less, to get manhole covers made in India than in America. The value of one human being's labour is less than another human being's labour for doing exactly the same work. The mysteries of economics are as real as the turning of the round world. And as taken for granted. The world turns, and money flows downwards. (Clockwise or anti-clockwise, trickling down to the sewers,depending on which side of the Equator you are - North or South.) A foundry closes in New Jersey. Manhole covers Made in India are unloaded in Brooklyn. The workers in India - the cost at which they sell their labor and estimate their worth, the price that is set on their life and skill - approximately twenty times cheaper.

The world is round, but it was once flat. People were afraid of falling off its edges. On the maps of the flat world, there were many gray areas near those edges, places of perpetual fog, where the ships did not go - for Here there be dragons.

But the world is now round, there are no edges and no fog. The dragons have moved off the maps of the flat world. They are now to be found in the sewers of the round world, masquerading as blind albino alligators.

to be continued...

Much influenced by the essays of Richard Rodriguez and by early explorations in Thing Theory.

manhole covers and crocodiles - a meditation on new york sewers 1

2007-01-21T19:52:00.000-08:00

This is the 200th post on this blog. (And my 27th Birthday!) Not to be formal or anything, but I guess I need to thank everyone who's visited and kept coming back. This blog has mutated much since it began. It's been an archive of ideas and writings, a great way of wasting time, a space for some emotional catharsis, a site of blatant exhibitionism; and will hopefully continue to be all of the above; but more importantly, it has also been a space for conversations and friendship with some great people across many sorts of boundaries. Something unimaginable before this blog, and deeply enriching. Thank you, everyone. You know who you are.

What follows is the beginning of a (hopefully) longer meditation on, well, large reptiles, large round discs, large cities and small histories.

The story goes thus. Rich New Yorkers on vacation in Florida bring back alligators as pets. The pets grow from being cute to frightening in a very short while. They are flushed down the toilet. Some survive in the vast fetid darkness of New York's sewer system. They grow, and they spawn. And now there is a breed of blind albino alligators, strangers to light and sun, occupying their own niche in the intestinal ecosystem of New York's sewers.

All kinds of immigrants flourish in New York.

In the 14 Street and 8 Avenue subway station, an alligator in a suit and tie reaches out from under a manhole cover and grabs a passerby. The passerby's head is a smooth, full sack of gold.

New York revels in its own legend.

If there were no albino alligators in the sewers, they would have to be invented.

On rainy nights in New York, the tops of the skyscrapers go blurry in the mist. The celebrated skyline becomes ghostly, unreal. Light bending through water. It is underground that the city feels real, vital. Busker music echoing in the long corridor, keeping time with the tramp of commuter footsteps, bouncing off the grimy walls, off the paint flaking from the roof. The fragrance of clean laundry lingers in the steam rising from the grates. The trains rumble underneath during the tense silences in the movie theatre.

So much of this city is subterranean. The black steel doors clang open. The meat and vegetable stocks, the mineral water bottles of the city's restaurants appear, hauled out into the new day. On the subway, seen through glass darkly, the lines diverge - twist and tunnel away to depths unguessed but graffiti sprayed. Trains pass in the always night, you see a fluorescent stranger in the car across for the few instants that your lives run parallel, she plunges away into the darkness, unconcernedly reading a book. In tunnels under the University, sealed since the end of the Manhattan Project, uranium decays.

Leatherhead, the humanoid crocodile, meets the teenage mutant ninja turtles in an abandoned subway station. A fifty kilo manhole grates back into place on my street. It is round and ridged and heavy and iron. In small neat letters near the rim it says MADE IN INDIA.

to be continued...

the western is an eminently localizable genre, said the dacoit

2007-01-19T07:51:00.000-08:00

"Life is a long and terrible sadness".
Yes, but in between you get to wear outrageously cool cowboy duds and float through bright pink lily ponds, so it can't be all that bad.
Watch 'Tears of the Black Tiger.'
This is even cooler than Mithunda. (And surprisingly moving too.)

Ah, life is a long and terrible sadness. :-)
Not completely unrelated - Susan Sontag's Notes on Camp.

notes from a too-enchanted city

2007-01-14T14:57:00.000-08:00

'What can I tell you about New York that you don't already know?'
That wanted to be the first line of a poem but couldn't.
No paths in this city are untrodden.

Poems have 'feet'. Walking is poetry.Each step, a syllable, a letter, an ideograph. Each Avenue, running up and down, north and south, a line in a Chinese poem. A million lines overlaid. And the streets - One Way left to right, east to west and occasionally even going both ways boustrophon; in Roman and Cyrillic and Nagari; Nastaliq and Shikasta. If words had weight, the ruts would be deeper than the subway tunnels.

New York as a grid of a million poems; all it contours mapped by words.
All its corners turned to song.
In which language in the world has New York not been written about?

In sonnets and villanelles. In dohas and nazms. In free verse. In (oh so apt) concrete poetry. But I try to write ghazals and I cannot.

For what can I tell you about New York that you don't already know?

XXX

I'm used to being the bard of uncelebrated places.

Delhi is many celebrated cities. First City. Boomtown. Tourist Trap. But also,hundreds of streets and ruins and 'urban villages'. uncelebrated, unrenowned. A city full of people too busy with hustling tourists, petitioning governments, selling goods, doing property deals, making 'Made in China' TVs, making a living; to bother with recording their lives as grand narrative, or celebrating where they lived.

A city with a bard shortage. Swathes of virgin mytho-poetic territory, waiting to be walked, chronicled, mapped, imaged, sung.

The ghazals came easy. As easy as reading them off the backs of autorickshaws.

XXX

I don't know how Agha Shahid Ali managed. Bringing the ghazal to New York. To Brooklyn.

In New York I stutter in all my tongues. For what can I say that hasn't been said before? And better? With more insight? Every place I find exciting here is already on Google. Every corner of this city can be found of Google Maps. There are fifty photo essays on abandoned bikes. Even the abandoned subway stations have been Mapped. Metaphorized. Mythologized.

New York feels like a Greek Tragedy. A self-fulfilling prophecy. The poets
come because it is New York. It is New York because the poets come.

What can I tell you of New York that you don't already know?
(For if you didn't know it, it wouldn't be New York.)

feeling unreasonable

2007-01-13T05:23:00.000-08:00

I have been meaning to write about a few things, but have been, in turns, too lazy, or too busy to do so.

I have been meaning to write about nearly setting off a bomb scare next to the Treasury Building in Washington DC. I left my bag in a bar. Can you imagine the scenario? Bar full of DC lawyers and government staffers - brown man, with a scruffy beard, and whispering conspiratorially in a strange foreign tongue just before he leaves, leaves a bag... oh my god!

I have been meaning to write about being completely pissed off (and occasionally approving) of the displays of 'culture' at the National Musuem of the American Indian in DC. 'This is the (pick your tribe) view of the universe divided into (pick your number) binaries.' Is. Culture exists in the timeless now, and has nothing to do with history. Indian culture, that is. Who would make such a claim for the 'West'?

I have been meaning to write about how extremely extremely distressed I was by watching 'Letters From Iwo Jima'. I haven't seen Apocalypto but with all that I have read around it i begin to see a pattern. A pattern tells me that when Hollywood starts making films in foreign tongues, something is rotten in the state of Denmark. Because it bestows a claim of authenticity like nothing else does. A claim of empathy, which makes people call "letters...' the best film of the year, and a heavyweight Oscar contender. And yet - I personally found the film to be slow, tiresome and hugely problematic. Though the film is in Japanese, and with mostly Japanese characters, the only two 'noble' Japanese commanders are both people who have spent time in America. All the other Japanese officers are either villainous and scheming or completely psychotic, or both. Not to mention, murderously inept. As is the Japanese soldiery, dying like flies. Betraying no instinct of self preservation in battle. Except for the Saigo character, who actually survives three major assaults, but who is a bumbling fool at everything but survival. Watching Letters... could make you wonder how the Japanese ever won anything in the Second World War?

Is there something common to all the three things I've been wanting to write about, but haven't? To my becoming a potential bomber in a DC bar, to the 'culture' displays of the Native American Museuem, to the 'authentic' portrayal of native violence and irrationality in Apocalypto and Letters? The assumption of superiority by 'the west' (much as i hate to use the term...!) on the basis of being calm, ordered and rational, is implicit in all of these.

Sorry, that's not the most original conclusion in the world, but it has been pissing me off a little. So am taking this opprtunity to post two extract from one of the last intelligent things I wrote for grad school, which is about magic/science and un/reason. Trust me, there are connections!

...But we have still not spoken of technology, of the material presence of modern science and its products and practices in the world. Let us consider, for example, the X-Ray, as Richard Panek does in his book 'The Invisible Century: Einstein, Freud and the Search for Hidden Universes'. Briefly, in 1895, working in his laboratory, Wilhelm Roentgen came across a new type of effect which he attributed to an unknown type of radiation (Hence X-ray). He worked on standardizing the production of this effect, though he still couldn't explain it, and then asked his wife to insert her hand between the Cathode Ray tube and a photographic plate. 'A substance passed between the tube and the plate – must have passed, because even though the subject itself was invisible, the effect was undeniable. An image of his wife's hand was slowly burning itself into existence.' This image, with the skeletal structure of the bones of the hand clearly visible, was published in newspapers worldwide in early 1896. No one knew what X-rays were, no one knew what the X-rays did, but they became a sensation, taking on a life of their own in the world. 'An early account cautioned readers who would fool themselves into thinking that if they “go inside the house and pull down the blinds and wait till its dark,” they might feel quite safe in sinning”: “There are the x-rays you know – and nobody knows what other invisible pencils may be registering all our actions or even thoughts -or what's worse, the desires that we don't dare think. They, too, must leave their mark somewhere.” '

This account has an 'uncanny' resemblance to Schelling's definition of the unheimlich as deployed by Freud – 'Everything is unheimlich that should have stayed hidden and secret but has come to light.'...

...The X-rays are an unusually resonant metaphor for the uncanny, for they brings to light all that has been covered up, hidden. Or rather, they promise to. No one, in 1896, is quite sure how they work, or what they do. But they has been brought into the world, they have strange effects that cannot be predicted, or controlled, or even understood. Prolonged exposure causes cancer. The X rays seem to have a will, and purification/repression here breaks down under bewilderment and terror and uncanniness, language ascribes agency to cells and rays - they can be malignant. That things can have agency, that they can have a life, is what purification/repression wants to keep hidden but which here comes to light.

'“ In telling a story, one of the most successful devices for easily creating uncanny effects is to leave the reader in uncertainty whether a particular figure in the story is a human being or an automaton, and to do it in such a way that his attention is not focused directly upon his uncertainty, so that he may not be led to go into the matter and clear it up...”' Freud quotes Jentsch at the beginning of his analysis of a story by E.T.A Hoffmann, but then he begs to disagree, arguing that this is a relatively unimportant element in the story. The main theme, according to Freud, is the theme of the Sandman who tears out children's eyes, which Freud links to repressed castration anxiety. Freud was, after all, a man of science.

'Our analysis of instances of the uncanny has led us back to the old, animistic conception of the universe. ...by the subject's narcissistic over valuation of his own mental processes; by the belief in the omnipotence of thought and the and the technique of magic based on that belief; by the attribution to various outside persons and things of carefully graded magical powers, or 'mana'; as well as by all the other creations with the help of which man... strove to fend off the manifest prohibitions of reality.' Freud then gives us an evolutionary argument, saying that 'each of us has been through a phase of individual development corresponding to this animistic stage in primitive men, and that everything that now strikes us as 'uncanny' fulfills the condition of touching those residues of animistic mental activity...'

But these are not residues. Magical thought has never left the world. It only seems to have been banished by the repression of purification, the divide between nature and culture, subject and object, but it is there, just beneath the surface. To quote Latour, 'How could we be capable of disenchanting the world, when everyday our laboratories and our factories populate the world with hundreds of hybrids stranger than those of the day before? Is Boyle's air pump any less strange than the Arapesh spirit houses? ... How could we be chilled by the cold breath of the sciences, when the sciences are hot and fragile, human and controversial, full of thinking reeds and subjects who are themselves inhabited by things? '

a rabbit in the headlights?

2007-01-10T15:40:00.000-08:00

venkatesh-parvati-investment banking, or there's something the matter with TamBrams

2007-01-07T10:20:00.000-08:00

I like to think of myself as a non-bigot, someone who doesn't subscribe to ethnic-racial-religious-regional stereotypes - but there's something the matter with Tam Brams. (Tamilian Brahmins for the uninitiated. This site tells you everything you need to know. And let it be known, some of my best friends are Tam Brams - the wrong kind, of course.) And this has nothing to do with their love for bhindi. And everything to do with their plan of world domination.

World domination? Meek, bespectacled, vegetarian Tam Brams planning to take over the world? It might sound hard to believe, but consider my moment of revelation -

It's past 2.30am on the 1st of January, Houston Street is full of inebriated people celebrating the New Year, friends and I have just come out of an overpriced club after listening to some avant garde music and loads of unspeakable salsa - and then suddenly this bespectacled man with female companion passes us, declaiming earnestly, and the words we catch are 'Venkatesh, Parvati, Investment Banking'. At 3 in the morning, on New Year's Day, when the rest of the city, and the rest of the world was busy celebrating,and trying to get laid, this guy was earnestly talking business to the woman walking with him. And the most horrifying thing of all - he sounded stone cold SOBER. Scary, huh? We stopped dead in our tracks and didn't know whether to laugh or to cry. AA kept complaining that the man had ruined his pleasant sleepy buzz for the rest of the evening. We went and had some tea to recover from the experience. it goes without saying -the guy could only be a Tam Bram.

And then, I saw THIS on Youtube. Some three year old kid in Sunnyvale, CA who has learnt the names of all the US state capitals. All fifty of them. (And this, I am told, is a fairly widespread phenomenon; sprung on unsuspecting foreigners on South Indian trains. Proud Tam Bram parents making their children do the US state capitals performing monkey trick.) Not only that, this kid has been taught standard Spanish phrases as well, and the days of the week. And the spelling bee, where's he's learnt to spell 'GOOGLE'. Jesus F...ing Christ!

There are historical reasons for all of this of course. The Anti-Brahmin movement in Tamil Nadu has made it harder for Tam Brams to get jobs within TN. (And after watching the videos, you realize why there's an anti-Brahmin movement!) And hence they have become this globalized elite egghead diaspora,making their children learn languages and formulas of power and privilege wherever they go. BPO is the new Vedas. And since they can't have TN, the Tam Brams are just planning to take over the world. The Tam Bram version of the Leonard Cohen song would be, First we take Silicon Valley...

A Tam Bram preschooler is already being groomed to take over America. One of several thousand. Udupi is going to be the new McDonalds. It probably beats the world having to deal with a Texas village idiot, but it's still a scary thought.

2006, and all that

2007-01-04T14:21:00.000-08:00

This is a piece about the year gone by which I've been meaning to post for a long time, but didn't get around to, because the time was never right; and when the time was right (New Year's Day), I went haring off to Baltimore and DC (where I nearly set off a bomb-scare, but that's another blog post).

When 2006 rolled around, at the stroke of the midnight hour, I was huddled in a sleeping bag on the middle berth of a drafty sleeper coach on a train heading south from Delhi to Aurangabad. It was quite a departure from the usual ringing in of the new year with friends and inebriation and dancing. Unusual enough for me to be superstitious - if I have begun the year traveling, then the rest of the year will see much traveling, I believed.

That's been true. Last year, I spent time in many cities and towns I'd never been to before. Aurangabad , for starters (I had once stopped in the town for a few hours to catch a bus to Bombay, so I'm counting it anew); Meerut; Sardhana; Hyderabad; Calcutta (of which my memories before this year involved being a four year old stuck in a traffic jam on Howrah Bridge during a flood, so am counting that anew too); London; Nottingham (and Southwell); New York; Boston. For the first time in my life, I have traveled outside of Asia; and now my new home address is half the world away from the last one. Yes, it still feels like a big deal.

Returning from that particular New Year journey, flying out of warm and sunny Bombay after a week of Aurangabad, Daulatabad, Ellora, Khuldabad, Ajanta and Bombay; I landed in Delhi on its coldest night for a hundred years, the temperature at just above freezing. Which was freaky, but what was freakier was that the cold didn't last very long at all. February was the warmest recorded in many decades, with the temperatures already heading in to the thirties. The summer was even more of a bitch than usual. The rains flooded some parts of India; but were patchy and insipid in Delhi. But things didn't stop there - a week before I hit London and New York, they had blistering heat waves; and now it's January, and New York hasn't yet seen snow, and maybe two days when the temperatures were actually below freezing. No one is talking El Nino anymore. Last year it was hard to ignore Global Warming.

Ah, but if it was only external weather that was freakish, extreme and unpredictable. Last year my internal weather, the seasons of the heart, mirrored the turbulence of the outside seasons. It was a 'never before' year - never before have I been so violently angry, so deeply sad, and as consistently melancholy as I have been last year. I have never really known loss, and how it can tear up your insides, like I have known last year. But it's also been 'never before' in good ways. It would be hard to find a year in which I have met as many wonderful, interesting people; started as many fascinating conversations; laughed as much with friends. There were many moments (and some whole months!) last year which would count right out there on the happiness scale. And I haven't lost my temper once in the past six months or so (despite British customs trying its best). But sorrow can still sometimes come and catch me off guard, when everything seems to be going well, like a freak blizzard in summer.

This year my prayers are simple. Let the weather (internal and external) be moderate. Let the snow fall in its appointed time.

This new year was welcomed in waiting with friends for the F train, underground at 14th street station. The rest of the evening was much more exciting (yet another blogpost), but the New Year had begun standing still while wanting to be in transit. The next evening, as my friends and I waited endlessly at toll booth traffic jams on our way out of the city - they said, 'This is all your fault.'

The kites are from Aurangabad, January 1, 2006. The photo of the fog is from Delhi, January 1, 2007; taken from this post on Vaibhav's blog.

consider this picture, or my own private american religious denomination

2006-12-30T18:07:00.000-08:00

Completely unrelated - Roshan has recovered from his trip to New York, and posted a few good pictures.

Almost, but not quite completely unrelated - This post could be said to be (very tangentially) connected to Saddam's martyrdom, so here's my two bits before the main post starts. That's right. Imho, by hanging the man so speedily, he has been turned into a Sunni (versus Shiite) martyr. As if Iraq needed more 'good' news. Now I'm just waiting to read how Thomas Friedman gets it horrendously wrong.

And now, the post.

Consider this picture.

In the foreground, near the bottom right corner of the frame, is a small idol. A blue caped figure of a Black Madonna, with an infant Jesus in her arms. A white infant Jesus. She seems to be standing on a thick carpet of leaves. This path, off Riverside Drive, is infrequented. Near the top of the frame, stuck on to the iron fence that separates the path from the steep fall behind, are two more figures, looking skywards, representations of a Native American man and a woman. Perhaps they are/were supposed to be the Hiawatha and Minnehaha of Longfellow's famous poem. Behind the fence, almost blending into the undergrowth, are two more Indian figures. On the left, is the muscular hook-nosed figure of a warrior in a war bonnet, standing erect, with hand on knife, seeming to look down at the other figure in the background, the fallen bust of an Indian woman. Behind them, the leaf-less trees of December, and then, far below, the grey waters of the Hudson; and the thin dark band of New Jersey shore.

Not in the picture – a plastic gallon milk jug cut into a bird feeder, hanging from tree branches about ten feet above the figures. it was this last detail that convinced me that this strange array of mass produced figures, moulded plaster and plastic, was a shrine of sorts. That the coming together of four Indians, a bird feeder and a Black Madonna on a disused path by Riverside Drive is not random, but sacred for someone.

What sort of a shrine is this? What does it ask us to commemorate?

Consider the Black Madonna. Perhaps remembering the Italian immigrants to New York of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who revere Black Madonnas in their homeland. Perhaps remembering the Polish for ditto reasons. (Check out the Black Madonna of East 13th Street). Perhaps commemorating Afro-American traditions of art, in which the Madonna is, for obvious reasons, black. (Or maybe not so obvious -all the Virigin Mary figures in dominantly dark skinned Kerala are all shiny acrylic cream coloured.) After all, this shrine is only two blocks south of the boundary between genteel (and white/international elite) neighbourhood of Columbia and the rather poorer Black and Hispanic neighbourhood of Harlem. But the detail that completely trips me up is that baby Jesus is well, umm, sort of pasty. In all the images of the Black Madonna I have seen, whether European or African, the Madonna and the child are the same colour. so this new shiny black madonna, this Madonna for the twenty first century, is a sign of racial integration, perhaps. Or more cynically, a shrine to Mexican maids bringing up white yuppie kids, like in Babel.

Consider the Indians. Do these figures represent the Lenape Indians, the people who are popularly remembered as having done the worst ever real estate deal in history by 'selling' Manhattan to the Dutch for goods worth 60 guilders? (The Seminole Indians, who now own the Hard Rock Cafe business, have declared they will buy Manhattan back, 'one burger at a time.') Does it ask us to remember the decimation of the Indians first by diseases from the Europe, followed by the massacres, and the breaking of treaties, that marginalised them, that allowed the white settlers to pretend/believe that they were taking over a wilderness, rather than a heavily peopled continent that they were responsible for decimating? (Read Charles C. Mann on 1491 – America before Columbus). Or does it remember that despite the decimation, the Indians have had an important role to play in the building of modern New York, even if it is due to racial stereotyping? Does it ask us to remember that Mohawk Indians 'Skywalkers', were important in building skyscrapers (and clearing the debris of 9/11) because they are considered to be unafraid of heights?

And just what does it mean for these figures to come together? The Madonna and the Indians? Perhaps it is just homage to Longfellow's strange project of fixing (and distorting) Native American histories into the manifest destiny of white, Christian America? Consider this -

“The poem closes with the approach of a birch canoe to Hiawatha's village, containing "the Priest of Prayer, the Pale-face." Hiawatha welcomes him joyously and the "Black-Robe chief"

Told his message to the people,

Told the purport of his mission,

Told them of the Virgin Mary,

And her blessed Son, the Saviour.

Hiawatha and the chiefs accept their message. Hiawatha bids farewell to Nokomis, the warriors, and the young men, giving them this charge: "But my guests I leave behind me/Listen to their words of wisdom,/Listen to the truth they tell you." Having endorsed the Christian missionaries, he launches his canoe for the last time westward toward the sunset, and departs forever.”

Ah, I am being too cynical. What is not in the picture is that the high ground on which this shrine, and Columbia University are built, was the site of the Battle of Harlem Heights, one of the many battles of the New York Valley Campaign fought between the forces of George Washington and Lord Cornwallis during the American War of Independence. What is also not in the picture is that this campaign was pretty disastrous for the Americans versus the British forces, which kept pushing them back. Harlem Heights was one time when the Americans managed to hold their ground. (And not a victory, as is remembered at the Broadway entrance to Columbia.)

What is not in the picture is that the shrine is located equidistantly between two radically different memorials to the dead. One is the grand (and imho, soulless) Grant's tomb, built for Civil War Hero and President, Ulysses S. Grant. The shrine is also on the same path, and only about a hundred feet or so away is the 'Amiable Child Memorial', a small memorial erected for a child who died too young, and one which has been cared for for the past two centuries.

So here between the memorial to a small child who died too young, and is remarkable only for being remembered, and the massive tomb of a President (the epitome of the high and mighty with whose doings traditional history is concerned); at the site of a battle ground where 'America' (and what it stands/stood for) held out, rather than retreating against the forces of Empire, stands a shrine. In a time when America is Empire, when it has besieged itself, what does this shrine, this space on the side of the road mean?

For me, this shrine stands for all that America has lost, all the good that still tenuously is, and all the beleaguered possibilities that the idea of America still holds out. An America which will acknowledge not just what the American Indians have lost, but what they have contributed (including, as Robert Pirsig and Charles C. Mann have argued, the very ideas of political liberty and individual equality). An America where Sherman Alexie can be just another great writer rather than being sometimes having to be a 'Native American' great writer. An America where black and white (and Indian and everyone else) could truly come together. An America where all will be fed, by the land's abundant bounty, including the birds.

I will worship at this shrine. I will play music. Yesterday, in Brooklyn, I heard the music that I will play. The music of New Andalus.

***

There was an Indian at the blowout. Not a desi Indian, of which there were several, but an American Indian, who plays on one my roommate's soccer team. We got talking about various things, and told me that it was significant that Columbus sailed in the year that Granada was conquered. By expelling Muslims and hence formally severing ties with Spain's Musilm past and with the Muslim world, the Spanish throne and church wanted new routes, outside the control of the Arab world, to the goods and spices of India and the Far East.

1492. The year that Columbus tried to find the sea route to India and 'discovered' America instead. 1492. Also the year when after the decree expelling the Jews and Muslims from Spain were issued. 1492. The year the world started changing something crazy. In Spain, in the Middle East, in the Americas, in India. what do begin I say of the Portugese attack, beginning 1498, on the Indian ocean world?

Those who were exiled from Old Spain, from their world as it was before 1491, took the music of that world with them. The music that till date, in North Africa and on the Levantine coast, is known as Andalusi. Music of beautiful heartache and perpetual exile. Music that would make complete sense in the Americas, land of exiles; those who fled, and those who came as slaves, and those who became exiles in their own lands. Music of misrecognition; Andalusi music plays in the Arab world, Native Americans are 'Indians'.

Yesterday, at Bam Cafe, the Arab ensemble Turab played with the Spanish flamenco group Gazpacho Andalou. What had been sundered was made whole, and made anew. It was fun, crazy, insane, hand clapping, dance inducing sing along beautiful, and I understand neither Spanish nor Arabic. This is what the invite said -

North African rhythms and folk songs are fused with the spirit of Flamenco when Arab ensemble Tarab takes the stage with Flamenco group Gazpacho Andalú. With Andalusian, Sephardic, Islamic, and Gypsy influences, Tarab and Gazpacho Andalú strive to instate New York as New Andalucia.

New York as New Andalus, where the culture of tolerance (however romanticized) made Al-Andalus what it was (however romanticized) to be made anew in the New World, in New York, in the land which stood for, perhaps still stands for, new beginnings.

I will play the music of New Andalus at the leaf carpeted shrine of plaster and plastic figures, in that space on the side of the road. Call me an incurable optimist if you will, but in times like these, when the world has been going crazy all over again, sometimes all one can do is hope.

the post that wasn't

2006-12-28T21:35:00.000-08:00

was about bright lights in union square (videos here and here), christmas eve in newark with the grey reverend and the hindi blues (i can sing 'em), 'chinese food on christmas' in the upper east side. the post is gone, but the photos are here. enjoy.

aaaghhhh!

2006-12-28T12:48:00.000-08:00

or,
I just managed to erase a post I'd just wasted the past two hours writing.
Aaagghhhhh!

liberty

2006-12-25T07:29:00.000-08:00

She is Liberty
And she comes to rescue me
Hope, faith her vanity
The greatest gift is gold

U2 released In God's Country in 1987 (the link is to the video). In the 1999 film Three Kings, a sardonic look at American motives in the first Gulf War, this was the song on when the end credits rolled.

Having done the whole tourist thing with Roshan, having had to pass through cattle shed airport security just to get to see the Statue, the song kept playing in my head. Nearly twenty years later, unfortunately, it still makes perfect sense. (Even if U2 don't anymore).

Back at the South Ferry dock, the picture was fortitious, a decisive moment. Those cranes on the Jersey shore, they could be oil rigs. The sun sets sanguine. Those famous four lines of Emma Lazarus's sonnet sell on eight dollar mugs. You can't climb the statue anymore, since 9/11.

Naked flame
She stands with a naked flame

the blowout

2006-12-23T07:04:00.000-08:00

it happened. finally. the promise of the alcoholic reindeer was kept, becuase elizabeth baked some and brought 'em. no one threw up. the strategically placed mistletoe went underutilized. the booze ran out at 2 am, which is astounding, given the amount there was. the cohort didn't notice, because they'd discovered grappa. D got vinegar in his eye. A shirt caught fire (too many candles). the doorknob fell off and was fixed by art historians with butter knives. the desis only talked to each other. the philosopher danced to rhythm is a dancer, as requested. regula numero uno/rule number one/'don't shit where you sleep' showed much signs of abuse.

it was grand. the last blurry pictures are from nearly 4 in the morning. for those who missed the fun, check out this completely insane music video, and cheer at the sliding butter chickens!

Merry Christmas, all.

a hundred percent khichdi

2006-12-19T08:19:00.000-08:00

This post has been knocking about in my head for a little while, but know that I'm done with my Farsi exam, I'm relaxed enough to write about it. I'm still not back in the real world, though. This is, well, derivative from Farsi class.

I always thought that the expression used for percentage in news-channel and film Hindi (as in the expression sau fi sadi/a hundred percent) was derived from Persian. But it's not, or at least not all of it. The Persian expression of the same would be sad dar sad.

The 'fi' is from Arabic, as I discovered while having a drink with an Egyptian friend of mine after Farsi class. She speaks Arabic, I speak Hindustani/Urdu, so we both come to Farsi from divergent angles of bemused familiarity, which perhaps makes it a little more frustrating to learn that if it was completely foreign, which explains the drinks. 'Fi' is the the Arabic for 'in'.

Now 'sau fee sadi' is an (usually dramatic and declarative) expression of purity. And this little phrase is made up of a Hindi/Indic component (sau); an Arabic component (fi) and a Farsi component (sadi). So our desi expression of utmost purity is actually a khichdi, a mongrel, a hybrid. (Bruno Latour would love this!)

My friend shook her head and said, You guys are crazy.

Yes we are. Sometimes we're a little too crazy; but i miss the creative mish mash hodge podge over the top blend of life and language in Delhi. And reading Neha V's latest posts make me ache with missing Delhi in winter.

But in the inimitable words of Nida Fazli in that beloved mongrel tongue -

Naksha utha ke koi naya sheher dhoondiye
Is sheher main to sabse mulaqat ho gayee

Pick up a map and look for a new city
In this town everyone's already been met

So now I'm looking forward to nearly a month of quiet time, exploring New York. Last evening I was lent a copy of The AIA Guide to New York City. I have a feeling the blog is going to be rather active over the winter break. Stay tuned.

from nerdistan, with love

2006-12-16T10:46:00.000-08:00

Postings from the real world will start soon, once i finish writing these darned papers.

Meanwhile, feeling quite happy because I just finished wrassling with /orchestrating a conceptual monster of a paper in which the cast of character included, in order of appearance - Max Weber, Benjamin Franklin, Isaac Newton, Claude Levi-Strauss, Albert Einstein, Jules Henri Poincare, X-Rays, Sigmund Freud and the 'all time piece' (as we'd call him in Ramjas Hostel) Bruno Latour. And I managed to do all of this without even writing about The Prestige, which I really really wanted to. If from this you have a hint of what I was upto - you're an even bigger nerd than I am. Boo.

In the middle of writing papers, I've also developed a huge fascination with Youtube. (And one of my flatmates is having trouble writing his papers becuase he's discovered the Best of Craigslist) If you've ever tried to find this blog by googling synchroni-cities, you'll probably come to this before - The Pink Floyd Movie Synchronization Story. It's been circulating for a while on the internet. Someone (presumably while smoking lots of pot and trying not to write term papers), discovered that if you run The Wizard of Oz while playing the Dark Side of the Moon as soundtrack simultaneously, it has strange and wonderful effects. And of course, someone has uploaded the results, in seven parts, on Youtube, as the Dark Side of the Rainbow. Even without pot (and with loads of caffeine in the system at four in the morning, the results are, well strange and wonderful. Especially Part 3 (Great Gig in the Sky) and Part 7 (Brain Damage/Eclipse). Though just about any song by Radiohead to anything on tv turned to mute works just as well, imho. Here's proof.

Coming soon - 'the lost weekend' pictures

date palms and al-andalus 2

2006-12-06T06:32:00.000-08:00

One of the recurrent motifs in the 15th century mosques of Ahmedabad were date palms with vines growing entwined around them. Given the astounding syncretism of the architecture of these mosques, it wasn't too hard for me to read the motif as a symbol of a larger syncretism, of an actively encouraged coming together of Hindu and Turak in the times of the Sultans of Gujarat.

Given what Gujarat was like the last time i visited (two years after the riots/pogroms of 2002, in March 2004), living with that historical imagination can cause actual physical pain.

The most famous of these motifs is, of course, the jaali of the Sidi Saiyyid Mosque, built in the last years of the Sultanate, just before the Mughals came. The terrible, overwhelming frenzied beauty of the vines, overshadwoing the date palms, seems be the anxieties of the Sultanate, about to be overwhelmed by Empire, rendered in stone. (And today you could read it as an ominous foreshadowing of so much else.)

I remember the date palms today because it's the 6th of December, and I'm far from home. It's been fourteen years today since the Babri Masjid was destroyed. And in so many ways, it hasn't stopped happening, especially in Gujarat. (the link has a chronology of events). It's still an occasion being used to generate political mileage.

I was twelve years old when the mosque was detsroyed. Why do I keep rememebering it?

Because though I know it is a fantasy, an idealization, I do remember the world being a better, less fraught place before that date. And though it never was, really, I can't help but feel the sense of having lost something. And now my entire (not quite) intellectual project, the reason I'm here doing a PhD, is because I am still mourning my own personal Al-Andalus...

The rather ‘unmonumental’ monuments of South Delhi seem both out of place, and out of time; and for those who, like this writer, read too much Tolkien as children, they have a powerful affect, an evocative sense of worlds and times irrevocably lost. Add Tolkien and the destruction of the Babri Masjid in 1992, both of which happened to me at age twelve, and you can perhaps understand why my relationship to the Islamicate remains of South Delhi has been a highly Benjaminian one, both ‘historical materialist’ and ethically and emotionally charged. To paraphrase Walter Benjamin quoting Flaubert, I know the sadness it takes to resuscitate Carthage.

Date palms, or Sometimes we are all our own Andalus

2006-12-05T14:40:00.000-08:00

This post is actually remembered from a couple of weeks ago, when I was utterly utterly miserable; so miserable indeed, that I finally understood what Douglas Adams meant by the phrase/title 'The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul'.
Much of this had to do with my sheer disbelief at the fact that it was actually dark at teatime, once Daylight Saving Time came off. What do you mean 'good afternoon'? I felt like snapping at people. It's dark already. The day is over. What the f*** am I supposed to do?

I'd usually end up being miserable enough for my flatmate to look at my face and get worried, only to be reassured by the fact that I was still eating normally. And oh yes, reciting maudlin Urdu poetry to myself. Over breakfast.

Then I went to England for a few days. where, if anything, it gets darker sooner this time of the year, and the sky is a lowering gray overcast which makes you feel like sinking under its weight. 5 o' clock had never been more unbearable.

(Of course, one of those times I was saved by good friend KW's birthday party starting at 5.30, with us breaking out Belgian beer and calling our old college/film-school mates from London, one of whom happened to be shooting for a film in a town on the Jaipur Bikaner highway called, err, Chomu. The rest of the evening was a memorable blur of great cooking and great Sikkimese-Punjabi-Japanese-Nigerian-Nepali-American-British-Desi company; Mohammad Rafi and Regina Spektor and me, yet again, singing BC... but that's another blog post.)

My last English 5 o clock was at Heathrow, and this just had to be the worst ever. Douglas Adams was right about airports too.
"It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the phrase, 'as pretty as an airport.' Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort."
And my flight to New York, at the last minute, was announced as being two hours late.

It got so bad then it could only improve. And it has. Right now, despite the fact that it's end of term and the work has piled up something crazy, I'm enjoying the entirely new sensations of it being so cold that your ears hurt if uncovered for a few blocks and your eyes water in the wind... If you see a bearded guy in a black pea coat singing as he walks on the pavements of New York, it's probably me.

But while at the nadir of despair, I remembered this fragment of poetry, remembered from one of the most moving books I have ever read. A fragment written from a man far away from 'home', in exile, in a land that would, in due course of time, become in so many ways, a metaphor for loss and exile. A man writing from Al-Andalus.

A palm tree stands in the middle of Rusafa,
Born in the West, far from the land of palms.
I said to it: How like me you are, far away and in exile,
In long separation from family and friends.
You have sprung from the soil in which you are a stranger;
And I, like you, am far from home.

And in a quizzer logic chain of references this led to the thought/phrase
Aasman se gire, khajur main atke
(Fell from the sky, and got caught in the date palm.)

which of course, led to Kabir -

Bada hua to kya hua, jaise ped khajoor?

Panthi ko chhaya nahin, phal laage ati door.

So what if you're as tall as a date palm?

No shade for the traveller, and the fruits are too far.

Sometimes all you need to set you right is a little bit of self mockery.

(Actually, there was another reference too. Remembering the consciously syncretic motif of the vines growing around the trunk of the date palm, found in the beautiful mosques of 15th century Ahmedabad. But that's a lament that I will save for tomorrow, when it will make more sense.)

friday night

2006-12-03T13:21:00.000-08:00

- do you always carry the camera with you? - No, sometimes i forget. but otherwise, yes. - why? - it's my way of staying sane.

Because everywhere in the world is full of beauty and sadness.
Because having a camera makes me stop in my striding past, to try and look, and sometimes see this.
Because I could go on and on, but just look at the photos,for now.
More coming soon.

memories, like jinns...

2006-12-01T12:21:00.000-08:00

Verify your Idenity, originally uploaded by Anand VT.

The concluding part of the Nottingham talk, titled (a little too grandiosely), The Return of The King, or How Ghosts of the Medieval Are Resurrected in Contemporary Delhi'...

...The ‘out of timeness’ of the ruins of South Delhi turns out to be an erroneous notion. In a profoundly Benjaminian sense, these ruins exist not in an empty, homogenous time of all good monuments, away from the happening of history; but in time filled with the presence of the now.

I want to briefly talk of yet another role ruins play in Delhi, as repositories of memory, particularly of the memories of later trauma. Ruins may not be out of time, but theirs is a different order of time. Though the ruins may be disconnected from normative 'archival' histories, though the kings may no longer be able to return, they remain sites of memory; partly because of the policies of colonial and postcolonial archaeology and heritage preservation, which elevate these as sites worthy of remembrance, but also, I would like to think, because of an alternative sense of historicity, which I have briefly tried to indicate.

In the North Delhi ridge where much of the bloodiest fighting happened during the ghadar of 1857, stands a 14th century Tughlak hunting lodge. In current popular memory and practise, the lodge is associated not with Firoz Shah Tughlak, who built it, but with a saint who vanished without leaving a physical trace, the Pir Ghaib, for whom the ruins take their name. According to the retired tailor who takes charge of the offerings here every Thursday, it was his grandfather who first started coming here, returning from haj immediately after the tumult of 1857, and camping out here in what was then the wilds, communing with the vanished saint. What the grandson doesn’t say, but what surely is an important subtext to this story, is that Muslims expelled from Delhi by the British Army were not allowed to return for five years. The people who come to Pir Ghaib are largely non-Muslim Gujjars from the village of Chandrawal. The land of Chandrawal was expropriated and the village itself shifted from its traditional location closer to Pir Ghaib by the government after 1857, as punitive action for its role in the violence and the burning of the estate of Thomas Metcalfe.

In what is now very much the centre of the city stand the extensive ruins of a fourteenth century palace complex, also built by Firoz Shah Tughlak. Like Pir Ghaib, this is in the custody of the Archaeological Survey of India. But every Thursday, rather than sightseeing, people come here to deposit letters, and are admitted free of charge. These letters mirror the form of shikwas, letters of complaint and supplication addressed to rulers, a well-established normative mode of grievance redressal in the medieval Islamicate world. These letters echo the shikwas that Ibn Batuta tells us people threw into the palace of Muhammad bin Tughlak, which drove him to such a rage that he depopulated Delhi.

The letters at Firoz Shah Kotla are not addressed to any temporal authority, but to the jinns who are supposed to reside here. (jinns, according to Islamic theo/cosmology, are spirits created by Allah out of smokeless fire, and are found in desolate places such as forests, graveyards and ruins.) The form of the letter is a mixture of the religious and governmental. The supplicants, irrespective of religious affiliation, address the djinns ‘Salaam Aleikum baba’ and the phrase, Aapke darbar main haazir/present at your court, usually precedes the grievances for which the supplicant wishes the djinn to be interceding with Allah. At the end of each letter, the supplicant gives a name and address. Most of the letters deposited are not original handwritten manuscripts, but photocopies thereof. The medieval alcoves and arches of Firoz Shah Kotla, are in a sense, an alternate archive of the contemporary city, an archive of disquiet. From my initial fieldwork it would seem that the practise of writing to the jinns starts in the late 1970s, when a fakir named Laddoo Shah came and started living in these ruins at the end of the Emergency of 1975-77, a year after the demolitions at the nearby Turkman gate.

There are no memorials to the suffering of the people of Delhi during 1857, during 1947, or during the emergency. There will be no memorials to those displaced and victimized by the massive and violent upheavals that Delhi undergoes today, in the run up to the Commonwealth Games in 2010, in its transformation, as the campaign goes, ‘From Walled City to World City.’ Perhaps it is not surprising that like the djinns, the memories and disquiets that ‘Delhi’ has not time for can be found in its ruins.

best fortune cookie fortune ever

2006-11-27T14:27:00.000-08:00

You have tasted the bitterness as well as the sweetness of coffee.

At Xing Xing (?) Vietnamese Restaurant, Chinatown, Boston, lunchtime, the 15th of November, 2006.
Recovered from my wallet this jetlagged morning.

travelling month

2006-11-24T11:04:00.000-08:00

To Boston, via the Chinatown Bus; and to England, via British Airways.

In Boston, for a meeting of a group on urban history and culture at MIT convened by Shekhar Krishnan and Michael Fisher. And in Nottingham , as a speaker in the History and Heritage Seminar Series at Nottingham Trent University. What I presented at MIT was a highly disorganised mess of ideas, but it was more in the nature of a conversation between friends, so that was alright. For the public lecture nature of the Nottingham thing, Elizabeth graciously volunteered her formidable editing skills gratis and streamlined my waffling down to an acceptable 35 minute paper. To both places I took narratives from and speculations about Delhi; djinns, vanished saints, waqf grants and land grabs, urban villages and oral histories, Tolkien and the Babri Masjid, alternate historicities and relations to place... In Nottingham, I was unwittingly made a Doctor too (see pic of poster), which seems at least a few years too premature, but was thrilling neverthless.

From both occasions I have come back richer in ideas and conversations of where to take the work further. And of course, the conversation has moved beyond the paper, and the scope of my work, over much post-presentation convivial drinking. In Boston, this turned into a lot of scribbling in scripts on the back of a napkin, grad school types enjoying their basic literacy in strange foreign squibbles. This reminded me so much of the last two or so months in Delhi, drinking with friends in 4S, and writing everyone's names in my newly acquired Urdu on the backs of napkins... that I brought the napkin back to New York with me.

In Boston, was graciously hosted and taken for a great walk through downtown Boston by Dacoit, and met Buchu for dinner. (and wrote maudlin poetry surrounded by the outrageously pretty but 'epistemically violent' red brick buildings of Harvard.) In Notts, being hosted by S and J, noticing that even the telephone poles in England are ridiculously pretty/symmetrical, and that the croissants are as wonderful as I remember them from 3 months ago.

As I said to J's question at 2 in the morning when he picked me up at the station, to his query -

'So how's New York?'

'Great jazz. Shit croissants.'

fall poem

2006-11-16T20:55:00.000-08:00

Inspired by the Mountain Goats ('My love is like a cuban plane...'), and by feeling not quite satisified with the pastoralism of autumn sorrow, a la Robert Frost.

fall

My love for you is like a plastic bag
Stuck in a New York tree. Visible
Only after the leaves have fallen.
Whipping in the crosshatch canyon winds
Like the tattered flag of a pirate ship
Wrecked in a long forgotten B-film.

My love (for you) is non-biodegradable.

15th November, 2006, Cambridge, MA

brooklyn superhero supply company

2006-11-10T08:37:00.000-08:00

Yes, it really does exist. And is affiliated to 826 NYC, a 'nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting students ages 6-18 with their creative and expository writing skills, and to helping teachers inspire their students to write.'

Inspirational it is, almost at gunpoint; you have to have a superhero name and read a superhero vow before buy anything from the store, especially the gallon can of Omnipotence. Had a strong bout of missing the younger brother in the store. The whacky humour of the place woule be exactly up his alley.

Okay, so sometimes we don't speak the same language (particularly if Mughal-e-Azam is involved), but most of the time we are on the same page, as they say in these parts. Together we have renamed whole bastions in abandoned forts, wondered at sheep the size of 'junior llamas', been gloatingly nationalistic at cricket matches.

He has been among the first and most unflinching critics of my film-making, photography, writing and (invariably disastrous) love life. He has introduced me to the multiverses, to graphic novels, to Calvin and Hobbes; to good music, to robots called MUNDU, and home-made mag lev trains. It is humbling to watch the dexterity of his hands and mind at work. I have introduced him to Tolkien, to Douglas Adams, medieval ruins, photography, and other stuff.

If it hasn't been clear from the above, the dude is currently sixteen, and has, of course, been younger than that for much of my knowing him. I don't know many sixteen year olds; he might, in fact, be the only sixteen year old I know; but I get the feeling I might not enjoy their company as much as I do his.

Would they, for example, get my excitement about having heard the 'the best love song ever', (with the 'best title ever' -International Small Arm Traffic Blues by The Mountain Goats) when I read the lyrics out to them over the phone. He did. He does. He's the dude. He gets -

Our love is like the border between Greece and Albania
Our love is like the border between Greece and Albania
Trucks loaded down with weapons
Crossing over every night
Moon yellow and bright
There is a shortage in the blood supply
But there is no shortage of blood
The way I feel about you baby can't explain it
You got the best of my love

under the young feet of passersby

2006-11-08T09:53:00.000-08:00

Chatting with a friend back home this morning reminded me that the best poetry I know of leaf-fall/autumn is three lines in Urdu by Ali Sardar Jafri, part of a much longer poem called 'Mera Safar'/'My Journey' which is about death and reincarnation, immortality and return.

... rahroo key jawaaN qadmoN key taley sookhey huey pattoN sey merey hansney ki sadaayeiN aayeNgi
dharti ki sunhari sab nadiyaaN
aakash ki neeli sab jheeleiN
hasti sey meri bhar jaayeNgi
aur saraa zamaanaH dekhegaa
har qissaH mera afsaanaH hai
har aashiq hai sardaar yahaaN
har maashooqaH sultanaaH hai...

which I render, in very bare (leafless?) translation -
...From the crunch of dry leaves Under the young feet of passersby Will come the echoes of my laughter
All the golden rivers of the earth
All the blue lakes of the sky
Will be filled with my being
And the whole world/age will see
That every tale told is my story
Every lover here is 'Sardar'
And every beloved is 'Sultana'...

(The whole poem in Roman Urdu here. For a (not very good) English translation of all of it, scroll down on this page.)

Words remembered, wind and light and blue blue sky, and a long hoped for defeat; and watch the heart lift off, and careen like a string cut kite.

(ps - Today is wet and miserable and rainy, but who cares?)

Prospect Park. Fall.

2006-11-07T13:37:00.000-08:00

I haven't been to Vermont yet, but Prospect Park was enough to blow my mind.
And remind me of almost every Robert Frost poem ever. Especially this one, which I attempt to pay homage to in one of the photos -

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth...

new york graffiti

2006-11-06T21:35:00.000-08:00

The Jihad Rides the Subway, or Being Osama in New York

2006-11-05T16:53:00.000-08:00

It all starts with my friend B inviting me to this cool weekend-before-Halloween party downtown.

- But you have to have to have to be in costume, he said. And it can’t be lame.

- Sure. I’ll be in costume, man. No worries.

- What are you going to be?

- I’m going to be the jihad. All I need is a turban around my head.

XXX

I don’t end up going for the party, but the seed has been sown. I am going to dress up as ‘the jihad’ and go down to the Halloween Parade down in Greenwich Village.

Often asked question, as I broadcast my intentions to colleagues and friends - What does the jihad dress like?

Well, as far as I’m concerned, the Jihad wears a beard (which I do), and whatever else I can pull out of my cupboard. Military/combat style jacket worn over a kurta and combat/bigassmothafucka boots, and a turban. In fact, the jihad dresses exactly the mass media circulated images of Osama bin Laden.

Apart from the turban, I posess everything else. So what if the kurta is more adab than jihad, hedonistically translucent, and with exquisite chikan embroidery? And so what if the jacket is Levi’s (more on which later)? It’s the effect that matters.

The afternoon of the 31^st is spent franticlly calling my desi women friends, trying to find a white dupatta to turn into a turban, and some kaajal/surma to line my eyes with, like a good Pathan would. Both prove surprisingly elusive, but the dupatta does materialize and is better than could be asked for, and the lack of kaajal is made up for by mascara.

The jihad has never been quite this camp. But half an hour before heading downtown, as I finally complete the get up, dupatta wound around Afghan hat, mascara to lower lashes, green jacket over kurta – even I am surprised at how effective the transformation is. The bearded, turbaned, combat jacketed face staring back at me from the mirror is every visual cliché of what militant Islam looks like. I am the jihad, and at seven thirty the jihad meets a bunch of other people from Columbia and takes the 1 train downtown.

I feel the need to be surrounded by white people at this point, I tell my friends. It is true.

XXX

A black man in the crush on the platform at Christopher Street is the first. He laughs and says, You need some bombs to go with this.

- If you give me some, I’ll put them on.

Outside, in the mad carnival crowd of fairies (with and without wings), cops (real and otherwise), wizards and vampires, Jedi knights and strippers; two million or more packed around downtown Sixth Avenue, I stand out. On an average, there’s a comment every twenty steps.

- Give me a dollar, Osama, and I’ll dance for you.

- Everybody go boom.

- We found Osama!

- The Taleban is in town.

Head into a supermarket to grab a bite to eat, and the staff is all in splits, laughing and pointing.

- Do you guys want to search me before I get in?

- Come here, we’ll search you alright, and we’ll just keep your wallet.

Being completely lost in New York where the grid runs out, I ask a cop for directions to Jones Street.

- What are you supposed to be, Osama bin Laden?

- Something like that.

- I should be arresting you.

- As long as you give me directions first.

He does. With a smile. And doesn’t arrest me. The rest of the evening passes in a similar fashion. Friends are met, by coincidence and co-ordination. We walk on the streets, and in and out of shops and restaurants and bars of downtown Manhattan till long after midnight. Everywhere, the apparition of the jihad is treated with amusement and laughter. I am made to pose for photos. There’s maybe one ‘Fuck Osama’ shout the entire time.

At around eleven thirty, while at a pizza parlour with Elizabeth, Gautam and Psingh, a bunch of kids who couldn’t be older than fourteen walk in and one of them asks, Is that a Levi’s jacket?

I can’t get over this. No comments on the turban, or on the kurta, no Are you from Afghanistan? Just

- Is that a Levi’s jacket.

- Yes.

He turns around to his friend and says, I told you so, and turns back to me.

- How much did you pay for it?

- Thirty dollars, I say, rapidly converting in my head. I had bought it in Delhi less than a week before leaving.

- You got ripped off, he says, and they all walk out of the shop.

You just had an anthropological moment there, my friend, says Gautam.

At the end of the day, capitalism always trumps terrorism.

XXX

Excerpt from chat with friend and fellow Indian in New York

me: I walked the streets of new york yesterday, dressed as the embodiment of the jihad...

AT: dangerous

this is not DU anand

stop being stupid

you'll land up in jail

Since this echoes pretty much what a lot of other people also told me before Halloween, it started me thinking.

Was it stupid and tasteless, (apart from being potentially suicidal) to dress up as Osama bin Laden in the city to which 9/11 happened? Was it not, in a way, analogous to walking around Ahmedabad with a saffron headband and a crow bar in hand, shouting Jai Sri Ram? Was it not particularly tasteless to do so less than two months after visiting Ground Zero on the day before the 5^th anniversary of 9/11?

Did I have reasons beyond thrill seeking and crass exhibitionism in dressing up as a mujahiddeen in New York? And, Would I have done this in Delhi?

(That’s such a peculiarly forgotten word. One who fights the jihad is a mujahiddeen, and it’s surprising, given the worldwide concern with the ‘jihad’, that the term has been so forgotten. More specifically, it was associated with the Afghan warlords and troops fighting the Soviets with American money and guns. Back then, they used to be the good guys – especially Ahmed Shah Massoud).

I don’t know. I have been taken into police custody in Delhi for taking photos in Connaught Place, so I would be a bit more circumspect. But probably. For in Delhi, while at Delhi University (DU), I used to wear the pakul, Ahmed Shah Massoud style, and claim the identity of Khushzaheen Khan (Khushzaheen being a direct Persian translation of Anand Vivek). This was the exhibitionist external reflection of a profound internal ferment – for going to Pakistan was the first realization of how Hinduized the public culture of supposedly ‘secular’ India was, and how much of the Islamicate (as opposed to necessarily Islamic) heritage of Delhi, and of India, was ghettoized and feared and unacknowledged. It was only after visiting Lahore and Peshawar that I truly began to see Delhi, and tried to reclaim and make part of my being - a lost past and a culture and a register of language. (The current iteration of which project of identity is the gratuitous use and attempts to popularize the phrase inshallah, but more on that later.)

And all of this was way before the beard. The (sculpted, identified with Muslims, khat/qat nikli, ‘Shahjahani’)beard made its appearance three years ago, after class mates were taken into custody and harassed by the police while making their diploma film and shooting near the American Cultural Centre, for being Kashmiri, and Muslim. (I was also taken into custody in the same area, but let go after fifteen minutes with a cup of tea. They were kept in there for six hours, and only half the faculty having to rush to the Police Station with official letters and threats to go to the media that things were sorted out.) In the hysteria after 9/11 and then the Parliament Attack, India’s own specific histories of communalism and discrimination became conflated with the global hysteria against Islam and Muslims, the beard was my perhaps daft and totally inadequate move at dissimulation, my standing with the sons of Cain. I still keep the beard, mostly because it makes my face look better than it would otherwise. Or so I think.

But at the end of the day, in India I am an upper middle class, upper caste, English speaking male with a Hindu name. When push comes to shove, I am never going to get into any real trouble with the state/authorities. I will never have to feel personally wounded by this sort of everyday shit, which made Khushzaheen return for a little while. Things would be different if my name really was Khushzaheen. I definitely wouldn’t have the beard.

Things are different in the States. Here, I am a brown man with a beard. I’m on top of no hierarchies, I fit the racial profile of what terrorists are supposed to look like, and my name doesn’t necessarily mean anything, one way or the other. (I have been positively shocked at the amount of trouble people have pronouncing this simple a name). I could be arrested, like Indian film-maker Rakesh Sharma was, for using a camera in public spaces in New York (and I do). If I wore a T-Shirt with a message in Arabic, like Raed Jarrar did, I might be asked to leave a plane. And the day after Halloween, five Jewish teenagers beat up a Pakistani man in Brooklyn. For being Muslim. Things aren’t good with the world. Stereotypes need to be punctured, images and imaginaries of the ‘Other’ transgressed.

Did my dressing up as ‘the jihad’ on Halloween do any of this? I might be brown and bearded, but I am from a non Muslim ‘model minority’, and a grad student in an Ivy League school. (Did I say I am not on top of hierarchies here?) I can do this because I can get away with it. Maybe that’s all one can do, sometimes. Know what one can get away with, and exploit it. Push the limits of the possible, in whatever half assed fashion seems like a good idea at the point.

At the end of the day, as my father would say, people chose to laugh, rather than being angry or afraid of a brown man dressed as ‘Osama’, and in downtown New York, not so far from the WTC.

And if you really look at it, as my father would say, at the end of the day, the Levi’s jacket mattered more.

Inshallah, this augurs well for Tuesday’s elections.

TimePass(ing)

2006-11-03T15:52:00.000-08:00

Last week I found myself shocked by the realization that I’ve only been in New York for slightly over two months.

Already it feels like I’ve been here for a year or something. And it hasn’t even snowed yet. (But strange things happen to time anyway, when leaves fall. And they have been falling …)

Would you say that the opposite of ‘timeless’ is time-full? The ‘timeless’ East has never been that; but here in this city, my time has been full. Books and films and conversations and friends and sights and sounds and tastes. Looking back on months seems looking back at years. So much to read, think, see, experience. Way too much caffeine. The last time that felt so full of time was Delhi in the winter of 2000-01.

Last weekend I attended a conference on ruins. Jetztzeit was mentioned. Benjamin’s time of the now. History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogenous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now. [Jetztzeit].* Thus, to Robespierre ancient Rome was a past charged with the time of the now which he blasted out of the continuum of history. The French Revolution viewed itself as Rome incarnate. It evoked ancient Rome the way fashion evokes costumes of the past. Fashion has a flair for the topical, no matter where it stirs in the thickets of long ago; it is a tiger’s leap into the past.

On the 2 train heading uptown, an impromptu fashion show, catwalking and catcalling in the aisles by astoundingly beautiful young black people, one of them with Josephine Baker hair. They were the Jazz Age come back to life, as a friend said, we rode the 2 with the Harlem Renaissance.

I keep photographing stationary cycles. Locked and falling apart, abandoned. Out of time. Like the ruins of Delhi, that other photographic subject of mine, abandoned by history, outside the flow of recorded/recordable events, flotsam. To take a photograph is to already mourn a passing, a moment always past, always outside the flow of time. What does it mean to put a frame, to isolate what is already ‘timeless’, to return to that phrase. What sort of a double exposure is that? What strange desire to stop time?

The initial day of a calendar serves as a historical time-lapse camera. And, basically, it is the same day that keeps recurring in the guise of holidays, which are days of remembrance. Thus the calendars do no measure time as clocks do; they are monuments of a historical consciousness of which not the slightest trace has been apparent in Europe in the past hundred years. In the July revolution an incident occurred which showed this consciousness still alive. On the first evening of fighting it turned out that the clocks in towers were being fired on simultaneously and independently from several places in Paris. An eye-witness, who may have owed his insight to the rhyme, wrote as follows: Who would have believed it!
we are told that new Joshuas

at the foot of every tower, as though irritated with time itself, fired at the dials in order to stop the day.

Whether or not imbued with historical consiousness, they tried to stop time in Delhi too last week, the seemingly endless spate of demolitions and sealings that seek to alter the histories and geographies of the city. Schools and shops were closed for a three day bandh. The clocktowers are all defunct. But they threw stones at the Metro. As a symbol of progress, as a sign of the future having arrived, of the time of Delhi moving too fast for its people?

On the Q train from Brooklyn last Sunday morning, I noticed that my wristwatch was suddenly an hour ahead of the time on my mobile phone. Daylight Saving Time had ended, and I had unwittingly gained an hour while sleeping. Destinations were an hour further away, we laughed at this unexpected, precious fullness of time, a twenty fifth hour added to the day. An hour spent in Strand, browsing through books, and jumping with joy in the wind and light of a bracing cold fall day.

Back on my street at two in the morning, a taxi stood parked by the kerb. The driver had spread a small carpet on the pavement, facing East, towards a sun still many hours from rising, and in the cold and dark and silence, he prayed, towards Mecca. A single, silent worshipper on a near deserted, long past midnight street. A different order of time.

life

2006-11-02T17:29:00.000-08:00

Ten pages of some writing on wandering Delhi past midnight which I'd been commisioned to do, ten pages which took me three days to write, already 'in exile' of sorts of Calcutta, ten pages of some decent writing, are now being curtailed to a two page box.
Well, now I'm free to put some of it on the blog as sampler, so y'all know what you're going to miss out there in the public domain. If you want more, mail me.

Say you’re in NOIDA (Nyoda, Naveda), across the river and in another state, and it’s way past midnight and you can’t sleep and dancing the night away at Elevate is not your scene. Lose not hope.

Stand at the beginning of the DND flyway, the cows gently chewing plastic for company and in about five minutes a call centre Qualis will pull up, fresh from ferrying workers to their night shift jobs, keeping time with the American workday. The drivers earn some extra cash, and you’d be surprised to see how many hitchhiking souls are already in the cab, traveling past midnight to a city that was thought, not so long ago, to be an early sleeper. There are no cops, no speedguns on the road this hour (most of the time), the shining lights of the twisting tollbridge turn to psychedelic blurs looking up at this speed, Delhi will shine before you in the bright lit marble of the Lotus Temple and the dome of Humayun’s tomb, visions of a promised land.

It’s quite a ride for just ten rupees. Keep the change handy. Welcome to Delhi.

Long years ago, when Babur came to Delhi, he did a midnight peregrination on horseback, visiting the moonlit tombs of Sultans and saints, all the way from Nizamuddin to Mehrauli. Many of the memorials he visited are still around, and Delhi has nearly five hundred years more of building (and history) since, and is now a city of fourteen (eighteen?) million, not all of them inhabiting the same time zone. Your ride is likely to be far more interesting, and you don’t even need your own horse or contemporary personal transportation equivalent, though that’s preferable. You need to be good with haggling with autos, which are surprisingly plentiful and prowling for passengers at night on the main roads, and available in vulturine flocks near railways stations and bus terminals. The DTC even runs night buses on select routes. And there are always the taxis, expensive but reliable, and just a phone call away.

Head north from Ashram Chowk up Mathura Road to Nizamuddin. From here you could head east to the 24 hour dining comforts of Comesum Plaza at the Nizamuddin Railway Station, which verge from the merely stale to the outrageously inedible – like the Chinese samosas, stuffed with soya burnt chowmein. So unless you’re a gastric masochist or a late night railway station ethnographer, you’ll head west, to the basti around the dargah of Nizamuddin Auliya. It might seem deserted and empty when you enter, the restaurants on the outside close by around one in the morning, but if you head further in, the smaller tea shops and restaurants, closer to the dargah are open till two or three. The food is invariably delicious, if a trifle greasy, and definitely non vegetarian. The kababs and tikkas are long gone by this time, the charcoal grills shut down. But the handis of qormas and rumali rotis are going strong. Eat your fill, drink chai or Pepsi, and head in to the dargah to offer thanks to the man around whose dargah the settlement is built, as is the whole tourist-pilgrim economy centering on it which the restaurants cater to.

Nizamuddin Auliya, the most revered of Delhi’s Muslim saints, is also among the most famous of its insomniacs; it is said of him that he had flown from Delhi to Mecca and back in one night. His dargah is among the most important shrines in the sub-continent and is quite crowded during the days, but at midnight the marble courtyard around his mazaar is almost deserted. Sit here for a while, in contemplation, it is among the most restful places in Delhi. You will hear the faint strains of qawwali. The qawwals who live adjacent to the dargah practice at night, and sleep in the mornings to surface only in the afternoons, refreshed for evenings of performance. You can sit and listen to the faint strains of the their rehearsal, while sitting in the courtyard between the mazaars of Nizamuddin Auliya and Amir Khusrau, leaning on the marble filigree screen surrounding the grave of the Mughal princess Jahanara, and believe again that there is magic in the world. Or you could go up to their residence to ask permission to listen closer. They are hospitable folk, always glad for a friendly ear, you will be welcome. They live in the basement of a tomb.

Even if it’s summer you’re probably too late by now to catch much live action at India Gate, apart from the eternal flickering of the Amar Javan Jyoti under the arch. Till one in the morning though, it is a rather lively place to be. The Delhi family ritual of eating ice cream and sitting in the lawns of India Gate, cool after the heat of the night, has become quite extravagant in recent years. There are balloon sellers, chana jor garam and bhelpuri sellers, chai and coffee wallahs. You can lie on the lawns looking up at the imposing bulk of India Gate, and suddenly a bunch of balloons, ethereal and translucent in the floodlit night, will cross your vision, as fluorescent arrows rise into the sky and fall like shooting stars. Don’t make a wish though, they come from the catapults of the sellers of made in China toys, who have many other radium delights on offer to light up your nights. India Gate at midnight is spectacular in more ways than one. The Rajasthani mehendi waalis have become tourist attuned enough to offer you ‘temporary tattoos’ on the shoulder if you’re not obviously feminine and/or desi. The preferred design is a highly abstract and improbable fish. On days when the security detail is a tad relaxed, and there are some, children splash in the shallow pool at the base of the empty canopy where the statue of King George once stood. The sheer joy of splashing in cool water after a hot day is infectious, and it radiates outwards along with the shrieks of delight. On nights like this, the lawns of India Gate are the happiest place to be; a place of wonder. Wonder at the beautiful vista, the double line of lights that is Rajpath, an arrow straight two miles all the way to the dome of Rashtrapati Bhavan rising in the distance, framed by the Gate. Wonder at how a vista of imperial pomp has become a truly democratic space, where the awaam of Dilli come to have a jolly old time. The British Empire and its stiff upper lip traditions are forgotten anachronism, furthest from anybody’s minds in the laughing bustling nights at India Gate. Almost as much of an anachronism are the bioscopes with their screechy scratchy tunes and calendar art tableaus viewed through portholes. India Gate is among the last places in Delhi where you still see them, drawing curious audiences even past midnight...

eid mubarak

2006-10-25T07:45:00.000-07:00

Monday Morning. Phone call. Strange Number.
- Hello?
- Salaam Aleikum.
Strange voice. And Salaam Aleikum could be said by people speaking a whole variety of languages. But my instinctive, immediate reaction was to switch to Hindustani.
- Aap kaun bol rahe hain?
- Oh, this must be a wrong number, I thought you were my friend. Sorry for the mistake.
- No problem.
Then suddenly
- Aapka naam kya hai?
- Ji, mera naam Anand hai.
- Achcha Anand bhai, Eid Mubarak.
The voice was warm with laughter.
- Aapko bhi Eid Mubarak. Khuda Hafiz.

I kept the phone down, smiling. Diwali had luckily been on a weekend, but there was nothing here, at least in this part of town, to suggest Eid being celebrated. Except on Chapati Mystery. So the strange coincidence of a wrong number turning out to be a hamzabaan felt good, very good. Like the universe was conspiring to wish me or something, which is a good feeling.

Last Eid (and Diwali) were a few days after the Delhi bomb blasts, and what I wrote about Eid then never went on to the blog. Now seems to be a good time to do so. But before that, a link to Vikings meeting Arabs in the eight century world. Dude.

I’m excited. Excited enough to ask other people along for an insomniac evening. It’s a Thursday night AND its Chand Raat, the night the Eid ka Chand is finally sighted. Nizamuddin basti should be an endless sea of sensation, light and noise and grilling meat…

While walking in from Nizamuddin West, we pass a couple, blind beggar being led by semi blind wife. Behen ki Lund, he says, we should have stood near the dargah.

Business hasn’t been that good. On Chand Raat? That’s not very promising.

A little before midnight and it’s sort of quiet. Five minutes after we enter my favourite restaurant, Nasir Iqbal, we’re the only people there. Cops on the road outside.

- It’s chand raat today, right? Where is the raunaq?

- There were lots of people here till eleven, but now everyone’s gone home to prepare for tomorrow… and since the bombs there have been a lot of check posts put up here. That has made a big difference.

We walk in towards the dargah, with all the shops on the way winding down. There’s one person calling out to sell us rose petals, just one offer of sevaiyan. Inside the dargah it’s emptier than I have ever seen it. The sound of water dripping from a hose is the loudest sound, as the huge marble courtyard is cleaned for tomorrow’s prayers. A few people sitting around the mazaar praying. The cats out, prowling around the edges, looking for food, disappearing like ghosts through medieval crevices. We hear the faint strains of qawwali. We barge into the house of Nizami Bandhu, qawwals, and are graciously allowed to sit in on a late night riyaaz.

They live in the many arched basement of a sixteenth century tomb, with kickass acoustics. They’re practicing for an upcoming tour of the United States. The regular rhythm guy still hasn’t got his visa. The last session is played back on a mobile phone. The next qawwali is taken up.

- Let’s create some mahaul. Atmosphere.

Voices blend in soulful, sonorous, sorrow. Not good enough, apparently.

- It’s difficult to do after a haadsa like that. Incident. Happening.

I am haunted by the song but it feels like a paraphrase – Mujhe chain se jeene ki ijaazat de de… Allow me to live in peace… O Lord?

It’s a song about Madina. City, in Arabic. This city? All cities?

They sing Kabir. Practise winds down around one. Tea is called for, family gathers around. We’re part of it all. The laugther, the camaraderie, the fun. Of course you have to stay for tea, you can’t leave. No one’s going to sleep tonight anyway…

We finally leave after one thirty. The basti seems so much livelier than when we came in. We eat insanely tasty phirni at one forty five in the morning. Our Eid is already mubarak.

diwali

2006-10-24T12:51:00.000-07:00

This Diwali, like two Diwalis ago, was in a new apartment, living with new people, and with the brand new twist of being halfway across the world from Hindustan.
(So Gogo, Marcus and K met in Delhi after Diwali, and for once I'm the man who isn't there.)

And yet being here, halfway across the world, has been one of the easiest transitions in my life, apart from the initial homesickness and missing the sound of Hindi. Part of it being the ease of grad school bubble land, but even outside of that, this is an easy city to get along in. (Perhaps especially after coming from Delhi. Even easier after coming from Bombay I would say, where I have spent some of my most f***ed up moments, and my single most miserable day on record.) Part of it being the grad school grind (You don't have time to feel homesick). Part of it has been the ease of making new friends. Part of it the city itself, and everything it has to offer. No, it doesn't feel like home, but I'm not complaining. There are parked bikes as sculpture, there are movies every week, and there's always, worse comes to worse, St. Nicks on a Saturday night.

Part of making it feel more like home was celebrating Diwali in the apartment. The flatmates were all enthused by the idea. The house was spruced up, the room was done up, kaju ki barfi was bought from Jackson Heights. Fabio cleaned the kitchen like it's never been cleaned before, Ivor scrubbed the bathroom till it shone and Mark repaired the donated stereo system, making the eight hour 'sort of desi' playlist possible. We got by with a little help from our friends. There were the W deck playing cards, sadly unused, courtesy Joel. The candles were borrowed, tea lights in aluminium shells from Ikea serving as diyas - thanks Hester. 'My cook came all the way from Brooklyn,' as I remember saying early in the party, in a classic case of reverse outsourcing. (Yes, I must confess that I was a mere humble assistant on Saturday evening, chopper of onions, cooker of rice, occasional stirrer of ladles. The concept and execution of the chana masala were done by a paleface from Seattle, via Istanbul and Oxford.) Thanks Elizabeth.

Then the guests started trickling in, then they started flooding in. At some point in the evening there must have been between forty and fifty people in different parts of the apartment, talking to each other, not listening to the music, drinking, laughing. Early in the evening, a friend from Delhi said that there's nothing here like the conversations that we have in Delhi, jahaan log chaude hoke baat karte hain, where people in at least two parties I've been to have been so involved in their debates that they've kept talking long after the host has gone to bed. I tend to agree with him, but Diwali night felt different, it felt like being in Delhi. There were astronomers talking to artists, policy wallahs talking to art historians, physicists talking to photographers. At least five different languages were spoken in the course of the evening. There were some intense conversations that I only flitted through, playing the host. Maybe this is what happens when eighty percent of your guests are from grad school; maybe this is what happens in New York anyway; maybe we got a little bit of the spirit of Delhi going this Diwali.

Whatever it was, waving goodbye to the last of the guests at two thirty in the morning, I definitely felt right at home.
And there was a definite sense of deja vu in clearing out the mess the next morning...

Lets hear it for the dolphin
Lets hear it for the trees
Aint runnin out of nothin in my deep freeze
Its casual entertaining
We aim to please
At my parties...

parked bikes as sculpture.

2006-10-23T20:17:00.000-07:00

To me, these are iconic images of New York. And the beginning of a series.
I don't have words yet, but thinking almost entirely in a visual register, these tangential thought/image constellations -
Sculpture.
Ghost Bikes.
Junk/Abandonment.

I don't have the words, but trust Raqs to have them -
"there are no histories of residue, no atlases of abandonment, no memoirs of what a person was but could not be"

So much more to write on.
Diwali, Eid and Inshallah.
Soon, inshallah, if grad school allows.

ach, those germans...

2006-10-20T08:37:00.000-07:00

...the borderline at which the past must be forgotten if it is not to become the gravedigger of the present, we have to know precisely how great the plastic force of a person, a people, or a culture is. I mean that force of growing in a different way out of oneself, of reshaping and incorporating the past and the foreign, of healing wounds, compensating for what has been lost, rebuilding shattered forms out of one's self.
- Friedrich Nietzzche, from On the Use and Abuse of History for Life

A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

- Walter Benjamin, from On the Concept of History

Photographs -
- Abandoned mosque, Lado Sarai village, Delhi, October 2005
- Sculpture outside the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Morningside Heights, New York, October 2006

dilli ki sardi

2006-10-17T15:13:00.000-07:00

October, and it's already as cold as the worst of Delhi winters. Day time temperatures of 13-14 degrees, night time temperatures of 5-6. (Yeah I know Delhi went down to 0.7 degrees last January but that was one day, people.)

This fall weather/cold front/whatvever it is is brilliant. I could go on and on and on about the angled light, the turning colour of the leaves, and so on and so on, and I will, in another post. Right now, I'm just bothered about the temperature.

People die when it's this cold in Delhi. And it's going to get colder still, going down to -18 on real miserable days. How on earth do you bear cold like that when you're living out on the streets?

Some gullible third world part of me is still in shock about the number of homeless people you see in New York. The number of people living out on the streets , wheeling all their worldy goods in ex supermarket carts. (Apologies for the unsubtle irony of the first photo, but I couldn't resist the (cheap) shot - wheels look at wheels.) The number of people, on the streets, in the subway, asking you to help them out, asking you for money. And this is, shockingly, the total mindfuck for me - people begging in English.

(And then there's the other dilemma. Do you give? How much do you give? Especially when you're a grad student and you feel poor yourself?)

How long can you sleep out under the bridge on a piece of cardboard when it gets below freezing? Where do you go when it starts snowing? How do you survive the winter?

I really want to know.

sapnon ka sheher

2006-10-12T18:53:00.000-07:00

Watching The Science of Sleep was painfully funny, because through much of the film, my laughter was bittersweet, laughing not just at the antics of Gael Garcia Bernal, but also at myself; at how much that interior landscape of dreams resembled my own. And how much of my own life tends to get spent inside my own head. (Or up my own ass, as my more persipacious friends would say. Right, Ashley?)

And since coming to New York, my dreams have just got weirder. I thought it was just a reaction to being from away from 'home' (and hence unheimlich, unhomelike in the most obviously Freudian sense), but maybe it's just my bed. When Gaurav was here, he kept slipping in and out of weirder and weirder dreams (or so he said). Meanwhile I, for once, slept dreamless in the sleeping bag.

So, not only have suitcases run downhill and become cellos, but senile old women have dug up rose gardens at 3 in the moonlit morning in some strange country, warplanes have been shot out of the sky over what surely wasn't Nizamuddin by Stingers, and a childhood friend has been held captive on an island amid a sea of floating refrigerators, and all of this happens in vivid, precise detail, in landscapes I've never seen before, the newspapers have headlines I've never read before, and the light? The light seems to be from a different planet altogether; or maybe it's just the Dutch Light which has supposedly vanished from the real world, but shines forever on neverneverland.

Sapnon ka sheher. City of dreams. And yesterday a plane crashed into a building, again; on the Upper East Side. In what could have been a scene from Stefan's dreams. Or what could have been, a few years ago, a scene from mine.

… They come visiting at the oddest of times – when I am walking in Connaught Place, for example. All of a sudden an A-10 Thunderbolt appears, ten feet above the long façade of classical pillars fronting M block. Everything is silent and everything is stationary, and the Thunderbolt’s long wings and elevated engines make it look a bit like a silhouette of Mickey Mouse with an overlong, overstiff moustache painted on, in frontal perspective. But then the muzzle of the Avenger cannnon under its nose starts twinkling. Red tracers shoot forth, thirty millimetre shells, four thousand per minute, a thousand in the fifteen seconds the plane takes to pass over Central Park and Palika and vanish down Parliament Street.

The scene becomes a collection of erupting fountains. The rush hour crowds, the pavement trinket sellers, the couples hand in hand, the office goers briefcases in hand, the tourists handkerchiefs in hand held over their noses; all erupt out onto the road, vaulting over railings, the controlled chaos of rush hour goes completely out of hand. Blood spurts and gushes, dismembered appendages describe lazy spinning arcs towards the pavement, where the worn red flagstones are also erupting into fountains of sandstone chips.

The traffic has ground to a complete halt, which, in this part of the city, is slightly unusual. The tarmac on the road has been ploughed up marginally faster than it would otherwise have been. A couple of more cars have been FUBARed than the Blue Line buses generally manage to. There are gaping holes where some of the shimmering mirror panes of the Jeevan Bharti building used to be. Holes, once again. The reflection of the world is incomplete. Through one of the holes, a frightened face peeks out, a face whose desktop computer has been pulverised. He’d been asking for a faster processor and a bigger hard disk for months.

A wail rises from the pavement, into the rapidly darkening sky, its edges blurred with smog and smoke. It blends with the long drawn out, sonorous and slightly metallic sound of the amplified azaan being broadcast from the nearest mosque. Allah hu Akbar. God is great.

Angel nearly puked when I first told her about these bombings, strafings and general aerial mass butchery of the residents of Delhi that happens regularly inside my head. Too many Hollywood movies, was her first diagnosis. Anybody who can proudly boast of having seen Terminator 2 a dozen times is bound to have violence implanted in his brain, she concluded. When I stopped watching all movies and even playing the occasional game of Doom and Quake and Strike Commander, but the regular Pearl Harbours wherever I happened to be didn’t; she switched to subtler reasoning. Now she tells me to go see a shrink. She says the fighter planes are all a sign of the repressed violence in my pseudo-Gandhian psyche. She also talks of anarchic impulses, the bombings as a symbol of the destruction of the institutions of the repressive state, the necessity of destroying which I never hesitate from endorsing in public. Switching to Freud she talks of repressed sexuality too…

(excerpt from, ‘ Flight; aka A Short History of KLPD’, written by hand, Delhi, January 2000)

The Noo Yawk Zoom

2006-10-06T14:38:00.000-07:00

As photographers, is it the cities we live in that determine our aesthetic choices; or is it just the equipment we have at hand?

I've never been in New York before, and I've never had a camera with an optical zoom equivalent to 36-432 mm in 35 mm terms, so it's hard for me to say.

But this camera fits this city well, or so it seems. The pictures above are all examples of what I call the Noo Yawk Zoom, where the long focal length not just brings the (often vertically) distant closer; but also 'squeezes' the distance between the foreground and background, bringing disparate elements together in strange juxtapositions. Except that they're not strange in New York, they just exaggerate a logic already inherent in the city, celebrated in the city. As in the song 'Englishman in New York' by Sting, its opening apparently inspired by the diversity of sound in just walking down one street in this city.

So a baseball game, a mock Gothic castle, a forest and skyscapers in one zoom shot from Central Park, looking south. A green copper church steeple, a surveillance camera, a wooden water tower and a glass clad skyscraper in one zoom north up Amsterdam Avenue.
A thick forest of masts on the Hudson. And a smiling sculptural sun framed by road signs.

Delhi? Well, in Delhi juxtapositions get pretty wild without trying. A 40-80 lens works just fine.

Soon up on the flicker page - a series on 'parked bikes as sculpture', and the 'junk/abandonment' thematic continuing from India...

In bookstores and subway stations

2006-10-04T17:51:00.000-07:00

Riffing on Dylan, again -
In bookstores and subway stations People talk of situations Read books, repeat quotations And we're no further from war...

One photo, from the Canal Street Subway station. One, from the Columbia Bookstore.
The graffiti makes an iconic image into something even more disturbing; whereas the film (of which this is the poster) methinks, will work (or hope to work) towards problematizing it.

And even the liberals here have to be even-handed, equally representing both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
But how can you be 'even handed' when a 'situation' is unequal and unjust?
How can you be even handed when the subway graffiti conflates American military victories with Israel(yes, I know it's an eight pointed star, but what does it make you think of?), a logic too easily understood everywhere in the world today?

This country...

if dylan didn't go to grad school, how did he know?

2006-10-03T20:29:00.000-07:00

how did he know how it often feels?

Though I know that evenin's empire has returned into sand,
Vanished from my hand,
Left me blindly here to stand but still not sleeping. My weariness amazes me, I'm branded on my feet, I have no one to meet And the ancient empty street's too dead for dreaming.

I have also recently, and only partly in jest, been compared to Dean Moriarty.
Now this in itself would have been a matter of (some) pride not so many years ago. After all, there are chunks of On The Road I can recite, verbatim and breathless- The only people for me are the mad ones the ones who are mad to live mad to talk mad to be saved... and so on.

But now, well, let's just say that towards the end of the book, Dean Moriarty is going the holy goof way, he's tired and he's BEAT... and these days I know just how that feels.

Hence today a long ramble through the Upper East Side, Central Park (watch the video), and along the Hudson through Riverside Park.
Including an incident where sheer Delhi cussedness (minus anger) made Noo Yawk aggro back down with a 'You know what, I'm getting out of this situation.'
'You should'.
And they say this town is tough. But more on that later.

On a happier(?) note, here's why Douglas Adams is really important for linguistics -
Linguistic time is self-refrential, says Emile Beneveniste. Dan Streetmentioner agrees.

the blessing of the animals

2006-10-03T04:08:00.000-07:00

Mowgli should have been there, but it was a few months too late.
There were hundreds of dogs, only some of them seeming reluctant about the whole deal. Gaurav and I figured they were atheists. Or maybe they were just afraid of confessing where they'd buried the bones.

The eagles and the doves hung out together. And then there were the llamas.

Bless 'em all.

the calligraphic state, and the tourist trap

2006-10-02T06:30:00.000-07:00

Just finished reading Brinkley Messick's astounding book, The Calligraphic State.
Was reminded of, made to think about Delhi in immensely productive and complicated ways.
Any doubts as to why I am here have officially been dispelled.

...In Yemen, says Messick, in the absence of ‘colonial rupture’, it has appeared possible, as the preamble of the Constitution says, to “preserve… character, customs, and heritage”, while adapting to the standards of the community of “interlocked” nations. This seems, at first sight, to be too smooth, especially given the analytical depth of this book.

But then we all have subject positions. I come from a city, and a country where the ruptures with the past wreaked by colonialism, and then the specific ruptures from the Islamic(ate) past wreaked by the post-colonial state, are well known. Messick’s book is important to me in thinking about the strange survivals from those ruptures, of ‘texts loose in the world’, in order to place them again, and ‘embody’ them again, within evolving traditions of thought practice.

To give an example of a site/practise I am forced to think about. In India, ‘Islamic’ law and its practices have no legal standing, except in and as personal law. However, the process of shakwa (shikwa in Hindustani/Urdu), carries on in the strangest ways. In the ruins of a fourteenth century palace in Delhi, administered by the central Archaeological Survey, people write shikwas in the form of letters with standard salutations, and leave them in various alcoves and niches. These shakwas are not addressed to any temporal authority, but in the ruins of a ‘medieval’ polity, as it were, they are addressed to djinns, invisible spirits who are supposed to dwell here, with the standard form of ‘I/we are here in your court to ask for…’ However, like with all documents offered to government offices (Messick makes us aware of the ‘fragility’ of the original document and the necessity to have it in one’s possession) it is not the original handwritten letters that are offered, but photocopies. These are letters of intercession in a divine court, but the form not only remembers, the ‘pre modern’, as it were, but also current practice of approaching government offices. The practice, as far as I can ascertain, has a very recent history, dating back to the displacements of ‘The Emergency’, thirty years ago.

Meanwhile, older court records from the ‘princely states’ of what is now Rajasthan, in the Arabo-Persian Nastaliq script that very few read anymore, have become ‘loose in the world’. Those who make miniature paintings for tourists use these high quality papers to paint faux Mughal scenes over, keeping a few bands of calligraphy on top to simulate Mughal folios. It is not uncommon to discern the words ‘advocate’ and ‘appelant’ over amorous couples painted in an erotic register codified in the eighteenth century.

new camera

2006-10-01T07:32:00.000-07:00

Bought this Friday, a beautiful canon s2is.
Some photos from the 'hood -
The Hungarian Pastry Shop, where I sometimes read, and drink the most amazing Viennese coffee (except when I' obsessively taking photos with the new camera.)
Archangel Michael and the giraffes by the Cathedral of St. John the Unfinished.
Myself drinking chai on Columbia campus. Yes, despite all the sunshine, it's beginning to get cold.

More up soon, on the flickr page and maybe, shudder, shudder even ringo. Sorry if you got ringo spammed by me. But more on that later. The animals will be blessed today.

food for thought, chew well

2006-09-30T08:45:00.000-07:00

Seen in a copy of the New York Times, found on the 1 train at 3am -

Determined to make New Yorkers healthier, ..., the Bloomberg administration unveiled more regulations yesterday for restaurants and bars. ...

Under one recommendation, diners will be required to chew their food for at least 12 seconds before swallowing. ...
The officials acknowledged that enforcement of the 12-second rule - formally known as the Proper Mastication Initiative, or P.M.I would be diffifcult. ...
As psrt of the P.M.I, waiters would be ordered to pay special attention to how customers cut their food.
A piece of steak, for example, may not be ingested if it is more than half an inch thick or longer than three quarters of an inch on any side. Violators may be ordered to leave the restaurant. ...