tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1312972591114298092024-03-05T02:31:07.194-05:00Splendid Cities"Et à l'aurore, armés d'une ardente patience, nous entrerons aux splendides villes." [And at dawn, armed with a burning patience, we shall enter the splendid cities.] —RimbaudArthurhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10540615722160931984noreply@blogger.comBlogger55125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-131297259111429809.post-84665348914643350622023-03-30T17:30:00.001-04:002023-03-30T17:30:17.844-04:00Migrating to Substack<p>I haven't been active here for five years and I'm looking for a new home for my article-length pieces. I've got a Substack now: <a href="http://arthurdudney.substack.com">arthurdudney.substack.com</a></p>Arthurhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10540615722160931984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-131297259111429809.post-13806178771010960262018-11-14T12:47:00.002-05:002018-11-14T12:48:44.206-05:00Political correctness, politeness, and the Persianate concept of "adab"<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I've got another <a href="http://slate.com/human-interest/2018/11/political-correctness-american-politics-solution.html">article</a> in <i>Slate</i>. I argue that Americans fear so-called "political correctness" because they imagine it as a system of thought control that harshly punishes people who get their words wrong. In fact, the idea behind what I would instead call "inclusive language" because that's a more neutral term is that if you want to be polite you have to learn about people's preferences in communication and so get to know who they are. Showing this kind of respect is an affirmation that the people having the conversation are part of the same community, e.g. a nation. Because I couldn't help myself, I brought in the Persianate idea of <i>adab</i> ("good manners"), which has at its core the idea that respectful words and deeds are important because they connect everyone in society.</div>
Arthurhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10540615722160931984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-131297259111429809.post-32725206695532997762018-09-10T06:55:00.000-04:002018-09-10T16:25:01.767-04:00Where the Indian Penal Code Comes From<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
The Indian Penal Code, which (with many amendments) is still the basis for criminal law in India, started as a utopian project that was intended to create law that would be neither British nor Indian but universal. Utilitarian thinkers, notably James Mill and Jeremy Bentham, were disillusioned with common law, the haphazard body of legal precedents in Britain. Utilitarian political philosophy required a legal code that spelled out what acts were criminal and what the penalties for committing them were. Everything would be rationally justified and explained.<br />
<br />
Such a root and branch reform was too radical to try out in Britain so they used India as their laboratory. (This is not unlike how the modern civil service was developed in British India and later "brought home" to Britain.) Whatever the shortcomings of common law in early nineteenth-century Britain, jurisprudence in colonial India at the time was even more of a mess: The British ran eight different court systems and they all were based on disparate legal principles. If the law was meant to produce consistent results, even colonial officials admitted that things were going very wrong on their watch.<br />
<br />
Mill proposed that his <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/55902/55902-h/55902-h.htm#link2H_4_0004">frenemy</a> Lord Macaulay chair the drafting committee for the code. Macaulay is a famous villain in Indian history for, among other things, writing a snippy <a href="http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00generallinks/macaulay/txt_minute_education_1835.html">memo</a> proposing that Indians learn English and that the East India Company should stop funding "useless" traditional Indian educational institutions. The committee released its draft code in 1837 and nothing happened for two decades. It took a major rebellion in 1857 and a complete reorganization of colonial government to make legal reform a priority. The Penal Code finally came into force in 1862.<br />
<br />
The problem with Section 377 of the code, which criminalized same-sex relations, is not that Lord Macaulay was a racist (he was) or that the penal code was foisted on a colonial population by foreigners (it was). Rather the issue is that it was written at a particular historical moment by people with particular predilections, and we—or at least right-thinking people and as of last week the Indian Supreme Court—disagree with the drafters of the code that “carnal intercourse against the order of nature” is a meaningful phrase. In fact, Macaulay was far more of a prude than Bentham, who <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jun/26/sexual-irregularities-morality-jeremy-bentham-review">argued</a> the surprisingly modern position that consensual sex couldn’t be a crime because there was no injury to anyone and people enjoyed it.<br />
<br />
Never significantly amended, Section 377 endured as a Victorian artifact, when the Penal Code as a whole remained fit for purpose as the criminal law of India and other former colonies that adopted it, and has been amended many times. Detaching the Code from the broader evils of colonialism, it is a remarkable achievement. Although the prejudices of the drafters of any law mean that there is no such thing as a "universal" law, the draft code really does not <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Q_pBAAAAYAAJ&dq=%22penal+code+prepared+by+the+indian+law%22&source=gbs_navlinks_s">reference</a> any existing legal system in depth except for the <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=YfcdAAAAMAAJ&dq=code+for+louisiana&source=gbs_navlinks_s">Code for Louisiana</a>, which was a similarly idealistic project from the decade before. The Utilitarians got their utopia.<br />
<br />
[This is extra historical context for an <a href="https://slate.com/human-interest/2018/09/india-supreme-court-sodomy-colonialism.html">article</a> I wrote for <i>Slate</i>.]</div>
Arthurhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10540615722160931984noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-131297259111429809.post-85523079344514085232018-05-10T08:34:00.003-04:002018-09-22T08:00:15.477-04:00What I was thinking about a year ago<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
5 June 2017 - It is Monday, the day after the day after. I am alone in a gallery in the British Museum with the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II. It is late afternoon and rain is battering the glass panels in the ceiling. The fine weather of the past week is already a distant memory, but that’s how summer works in England. The cuneiform inscription around the king reads, among other things “I am important; I am magnificent” before describing how brutally he used to kill his enemies. He has the best brutality, everybody says so.<br />
<br />
Before coming to the museum, I had spent the day up the road at the British Library reading eighteenth-century manuscripts. On Saturday night, three terrorists had driven a van into pedestrians at London Bridge and attacked people with knives at the nearby Borough Market. As I went about my day, reading in the library and meeting with colleagues also going about their day, I followed the thread updating on <i>The Guardian</i>’s website, learning more details as the authorities released them. Mostly though I was concerned with honing an argument about whether comical poetry written in Delhi three hundred years ago was a social critique or just harmless fun. Armed police had shot the terrorists dead in eight minutes. I am not a callow, out of touch academic. I am fighting back.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>For a few months, I lived two roads down from Borough Market. I walked through the market often, even though soon after we moved in my partner forbade me from shopping there. It was a punnet of organic raspberries or cherries that did it, I don’t remember which. “You paid how much for those?!” I live an hour away in Cambridge now but I am still within London’s gravitational pull. The places we’ve lived tend to draw us back but London has an exceptionally tight grasp on people in the UK because capital, talent and so much else pour into it, deadening the rest of the country more than people like to admit.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
London is not a friendly place—it proverbial that a Londoner’s greatest fear is the thought of making accidental eye-contact on the tube or being greeted by a stranger on the bus—but like gas molecules bouncing around, proximity means interaction. And we do interact. Even today, on the day after the day after. It’s a fine thing if people around the world want to stand with us but most of us here are unafraid of everything except making conversation. By contrast, whenever I checked the US media, I discovered that in Britain we were “under siege” or “reeling” or something. People elsewhere want to use our experience to channel their own fear, which is understandable but not helpful. It’s not <i>for </i>us that they’re standing <i>with </i>us. The reality was that it was normal Monday here. A man who had been at a restaurant near Borough Market when the attack happened went back today to pay his bill and tip the staff. Beggars begged and workers worked. Yesterday I watched a BBC programme on Crossrail, a new east-west link under Central London. Ten thousand people are involved in building a tunnel for a rail service called the Elizabeth Line that is so badly needed that it is expected to have full-capacity ridership as soon as it opens next year. If we can build that then surely three men with knives can’t bring us down. <br />
<br />
Today the only reason anyone remembers Ashnursirpal II is because they encountered him, twice life-size and carved in gypsum, on the way to the toilets in the British Museum. Anyone who reads the label to the stela knows, even at the remove of three millennia, that the king thought a bit too highly of himself. When I left him and made my way in the indifferent rain to King’s Cross to catch my train home, I listened to an interview with people connected with the space shuttle Challenger. I intensely felt that moment they recounted of the buzz of “they’re going to space” turning into a “they’re all dead” numbness. And then it happened again with the Columbia disaster seventeen years later. Our time on this earth is fleeting. We can all agree on that, whether we believe that after death comes oblivion, a trip to heaven or hell, or a stop-off in the bardo awaiting the next life. “Only connect.” Or “eat drink and be merry”. Or some other aphorism that has become cliché. That is our responsibility when faced with our mortality.<br />
<br />
I was also thinking about <i>takfir</i>. <i>Takfir</i>, or declaring someone not a Muslim, is usually the refuge of scoundrels. Islamic fundamentalist terrorists, for example, justify killing Muslims by claiming that the Muslims they kill do X or don’t do Y and are ipso facto not Muslims. I am not personally qualified to pronounce someone not a Muslim. But it felt right that so many British imams made a public declaration that they would not perform the Islamic funeral ritual for the terrorists. That was, essentially, an act of <i>takfir</i>. The Muslim Council of Britain and other groups released statements condemning the attacks in the strongest possible terms. They must have these things drafted and ready to send with just place names and details as blanks to fill in. It’s not that they don’t believe the words but if these organisations don’t manage to have a message out within minutes then Muslims are collectively blamed. There is a politics to this, a churn that proves that as a society we are racists and Islamophobes at the worst of times as we are at the best of times.<br />
<br />
The only person whose words personally hurt me today was the President of the United States. He deliberately misinterpreted a statement by the Mayor of London so that he could settle a score. Interpretation of words is fundamental to being human—it’s how we empathise, how we remember, and how we show respect to one another. That’s why my professional life in part involves looking at crumbly old manuscripts. Trump lacks the decency, or maybe the capacity, to use words in the ways I’ve mentioned. For him, what someone says is just leverage, a cache of material that can be used to make his enemies into losers. I thought of the invocation of “American carnage” in his inaugural address and it is clear that he wants us to be afraid. Fear is not the right emotion under such circumstances because all it does is crowd out the will to live. To put this into context, more people died from <a href="http://www.gunviolencearchive.org/reports/mass-shooting">mass shootings</a> in the US in the same period that we suffered our most recent three terrorist attacks. Last week a gunman killed eight people in Mississippi. Just seven people were thought to have died in the London Bridge attack (an eighth body was later found). Comparing body counts is unfair but what other tools do we have to remind ourselves that we collectively <i>choose </i>how to frame the moments when horror tears through the fabric of normality?<br />
<br />
I am often asked what the solution to terrorism might be. (Having to field this question is an occupational hazard for someone like me who teaches Middle Eastern Studies.) A lot of things could be said about how international affairs could be conducted differently. But I often focus on the domestic because we have more influence on that front, even as relatively apolitical citizens: Terrorism isn’t black magic. It’s a criminal conspiracy. We psychoanalyse terrorists in a way that we do not other criminals, and that is a mistake. To point this out is not political correctness gone awry or excusing terrorism, but simply putting things in their proper perspective. The police response to this particular attack was exemplary but they should have been able to stop it. One of the attackers had literally been on television, featured in a Channel 4 show called “The Jihadis Next Door”. He had also been kicked out of two mosques for causing a ruckus and telling people that it was unislamic to vote. Both of the other attackers were also known to police. Rather than asking ourselves “why do the terrorists hate our freedom?” our questions should be more along the lines of “why did the police not notice the warning signs?” The policing problem was made worse by cuts supported by the current Prime Minister when she was Home Secretary. I am not a British citizen so I can’t vote in the election in three days. I think they’ll choose poorly and return this government, with its damaging policies, to power. [In fact, the Conservatives did win the June 2017 election but humiliatingly lost their overall majority in Parliament, requiring them to make a dirty deal with the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), a band of Northern Irish kooks.]<br />
<br />
Terrorism, broadly defined as it is, cannot be eliminated any more than murder or tax evasion can. We need instead to keep it in perspective, and to live our lives to the fullest extent. We can only hope that when we are dead, our monument will not be put next to the toilets. Poor Ashurnasirpal II.</div>
Arthurhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10540615722160931984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-131297259111429809.post-47145983932487538702016-01-24T08:44:00.000-05:002016-01-24T08:54:29.221-05:00Eighteenth-century Hindi sayings<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">In a <a href="http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/asian-and-african/2016/01/a-dictionary-packed-with-stories-from-eighteenth-century-delhi.html">post</a> on the British Library's Asian and African Studies blog, I discussed a Persian dictionary by the eighteenth-century bureaucrat and connoisseu</span>r Ānand Rām Mukhliṣ. <span style="font-family: inherit;">The dictionary, </span><i>Mirʾāt al-iṣt̤ilāḥ</i> <span style="font-family: inherit;">(ʻMirror of Expressionsʼ) completed in 1158/1745, is a strange work because it's less a dictionary and more a miscellany describing people and things that interested its author. At the end of each chapter, it gives some Persian sayings</span> [<i>muḥāwārāt</i>] <span style="font-family: inherit;">sometimes with Hindi equivalents. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I quoted one of my favourites, <i>dar jang ḥalvā bakhsh nimīkunand</i> [During war they don't hand out sweets], which is rendered in Hindi as <i>laṛāʾī meṁ koʾī laḍḍū nahīṁ baṭte. </i>It's a charming example in part because Persianate halwa has been replaced by Indian laddus. People asked for more examples of Hindi sayings quoted in the text, so here are few:</span><br />
<a name='more'></a></div>
<div>
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li><i>Dūr kī ḍhol suhāwanī</i> [A faraway drum is pleasant; Persian: <i>āwāz-i duhul
shinīdan az dūr ḳhūsh ast</i>], i.e. it's good to hear news rather than having to see for one's self.</li>
<li><i>Akhāyā</i> [i.e. <i>khāyā</i>?] <i>kyā jānne bhūke kā ḥāl</i> [How would a person who has eaten know a starving person's situation?; Persian: <i>ser rā
chih gham-i gurusnah ast</i>]</li>
<li><i>Sūm saḳhī kā baras pīchhe lekhā</i> [The miser sends a bill after the generous man's ceremony; Persian: <i>karīm rā ṣad dīnār ḳharaj mī shawad wa baḳhīl rā hāzār dīnār</i>]; The Persian literally means "One spends a hundred dinars on a generous person, and a thousand on a miser." I'm not sure if I have the Hindi translation right.</li>
<li><i>Khūnṭe ke bal bail nāchtā hai </i>[A bullock dances as far as its tether goes; Persian: <i>gosālah bah zor-i mīḳh mī nahad</i>]</li>
<li><i>Miyān rāẓī bībī rāẓī kyā karegā qāẓī </i>[If the bloke's ready and so's the lady, then what can the <i>qāẓī </i>(judge tasked with keeping morality)<i> </i>do?; Persian: <i>man rāẓī wa to rāẓī gūz bar rīsh-i qāẓī</i>]; What's interesting here is that the Hindi has a sexual subtext for the saying (with some manuscripts calling the <i>qāẓī </i>a <i>bhaṛwā</i>, meaning cuckold or pimp) whereas the Persian has just "you and I" in place of the man and lady. On the other hand, in the Persian text disregarding the <i>qāẓī</i>'s authority<i> </i>is literally "farting on the <i>qāẓī</i>'s beard".</li>
</ul>
<div>
I might try to post some more of these later on. For more on Mukhliṣ and this Indo-Persian culture in general, see my book <i><a href="http://splendidcities.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/my-delhi-book-is-out.html">Delhi: Pages from a Forgotten History</a></i>.<br />
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--<br />
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NOTES: These have been taken from the selections of adages (<i>amsāl</i>)
at the end of each section so there is a lot more Hindi material in the book,
usually in the form of single words mentioned as equivalent in meaning to a
Persian word, that I have left out. Every single one of these adages was
introduced by a formula like “in Hindi they likewise say…” and I’ve looked for
those formulaic introductions to pick a few examples. I’ve left out about two dozen other idioms with a Hindi equivalent and hundreds of interesting and
culturally-relevant Persian adages for which Mukhlis gives no Hindi equivalent.<br />
<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
Arthurhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10540615722160931984noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-131297259111429809.post-3353862464452048342016-01-22T08:49:00.003-05:002016-01-22T08:49:56.349-05:00Persian food words<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I was featured in a NPR food piece by Nina Martyris, "<a href="http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/01/19/463583428/from-candy-to-juleps-persians-left-imprint-on-many-edible-delights">From Candy To Juleps, Persians Left Imprint On Many Edible Delights</a>". A lot of common English names for foods have a Persian or an Indo-Persian connection.</div>
Arthurhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10540615722160931984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-131297259111429809.post-21632994813674855442015-02-17T09:54:00.000-05:002016-03-02T14:01:27.049-05:00My Delhi book is out<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfttXP_QNJEEOV4AhFVKEawni-j-8XPyxtiYgTPAiUPuf3rWqXPRZyeWY-i3yuncPqNshN21ngCdYH37AnKWPS_eoMHpweeJi1sUrJd1vfUWzQgXaDvSrI-VEbCy1iDqyubJQTJX3RSIk/s1600/Arthur+book+cover+(small).jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img alt="Delhi Pages from a Forgotten History cover" border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfttXP_QNJEEOV4AhFVKEawni-j-8XPyxtiYgTPAiUPuf3rWqXPRZyeWY-i3yuncPqNshN21ngCdYH37AnKWPS_eoMHpweeJi1sUrJd1vfUWzQgXaDvSrI-VEbCy1iDqyubJQTJX3RSIk/s1600/Arthur+book+cover+(small).jpg" title="Delhi Pages from a Forgotten History cover" width="207" /></a></div>
My new book, <a href="http://hayhouse.co.in/BookDetails.aspx?Id=uMKsi9V02sc="><i>Delhi: Pages from a Forgotten History</i></a>, is out from Hay House India:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The megacity that is today’s Delhi is built upon thick layers of history. For a millennium, Delhi has been at the crossroads of trade, culture, and politics. The stories of its buildings and great historical personalities have been told many times, but this book approaches the past of India’s capital through its literary culture. By focusing on writers and thinkers, we meet a colourful cast of characters only glancingly mentioned in political histories.<br />
<br />
Many Delhiites are surprised to learn that the language of their city’s cultural heyday was Persian. Despite first being brought to India by invaders, it eventually became an authentically Indian language used in both administration and literature. Although it was cultivated by an elite, it was also a widely available language of aspiration and opportunity, like English today. It connected India to the wider world, and the Indian Subcontinent, particularly Delhi, was once a place where talented poets and scholars from the whole Persian cultural world – from Turkey to eastern China – came to make their fortunes. Its traces remain everywhere but Persian is effectively a dead language in India today.</blockquote>
<i>Scroll.in</i> ran an <a href="http://scroll.in/article/705770/Delhi:-a-forgotten-history-of-same-sex-love">excerpt</a> from chapter two on same-sex love in Persian literature.<br />
<h3 style="text-align: left;">
Purchase information:</h3>
The publisher's page for the book is <a href="http://www.hayhouse.co.in/books/delhi-pages-from-a-forgotten-history/">here</a>. It is for sale on <a href="http://www.amazon.in/Delhi-Forgotten-History-Arthur-Dudney/dp/938139878X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1424184592&sr=8-1&keywords=arthur+dudney">Amazon.in</a> and <a href="http://www.flipkart.com/delhi-pages-forgotten-history-english/p/itme2t3mfdjrzt7w?pid=9789381398784&otracker=from-search&srno=p_1&query=arthur+dudney&ref=8e916761-a626-426a-8c06-a11aba4e7ba5">Flipkart.com</a>, and in some bookshops. <strike>It is not unfortunately yet available outside of India.</strike> You can now get it shipped outside of India at <a href="http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=Arthur+Dudney&sts=t&tn=Delhi">Abebooks.com</a> or <a href="http://www.abebooks.co.uk/servlet/SearchResults?an=Arthur+Dudney&sts=t&tn=Delhi">Abebooks.co.uk</a>, or from <a href="http://www.dkagencies.com/doc/from/1063/to/1123/bkId/DK3762331483055848262031731371/details.html">DK Agencies</a>.</div>
Arthurhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10540615722160931984noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-131297259111429809.post-71821166805560274512015-01-09T16:17:00.002-05:002015-01-09T16:18:27.641-05:00"This light and darkness in our chaos join'd"<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I re-read Alexander Pope's longish poem <i>An Essay on Man</i> after a decade and a half. I know the world hasn't stopped long enough for us to give poetry its due (<a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/01/charlie_hebdo_the_french_satirical_magazine_is_heroic_it_is_also_racist.html">murdered</a> <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2015/jan/09/joe-sacco-on-satire-a-response-to-the-attacks?view=mobile">cartoonists</a> in particular are weighing on my mind though I could choose from half a dozen other world events that make sitting down with a poem feel wrong). But let me quote the <a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174166">second section</a>, which begins:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;<br />
The proper study of mankind is man.<br />
Plac'd on this isthmus of a middle state,<br />
A being darkly wise, and rudely great</blockquote>
They don't write like that anymore. The critic Harold Bloom <a href="http://books.google.co.in/books?id=klqFEFXnk0wC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA1#v=onepage&q&f=false">hated</a> <i>An Essay on Man</i> (calling it "a poetic disaster"), which is probably in itself a good reason to have a read. Various other great thinkers through the centuries have either adored or hated the poem.<br />
<br />
Didactic poetry, whether the underlying philosophy is solidly formed or shaky, is a genre I have always loved. Pope's expressive power is at its peak ("darkly wise" and "rudely great" are phenomenal turns of phrase), and yet he is presuming to think through the meaning of being human. We haven't solved that one yet, but would someone dare to write a poem of that scope today with such a direct engagement with philosophy? Literary fashions have changed, of course, but the reason is deeper: Our thought is too compartmentalized. </div>
Arthurhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10540615722160931984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-131297259111429809.post-39951184235425680762015-01-08T13:53:00.001-05:002017-08-24T06:31:34.266-04:00Noor Inayat Khan (1914-44), code-name Madeleine<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
The BBC has a <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02fwl80">radio documentary</a> on my favourite spy, Noor Inayat Khan. She's probably the only spy who was also a harpist and a Sufi. (Her father was the Sufi teacher <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inayat_Khan">Inayat Khan</a> and her mother was his American wife who had taken the name Ameena Begum.)<br />
<br />
She spent her tragically brief career working for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) in occupied France, relaying information to and from London and aiding the French resistance. She kept her cool after the collapse of the SOE's network in Paris but was betrayed, tortured, and eventually shot in Dachau.<br />
<br />
On nice days, I visit Noor in Bloomsbury. In 2012, a bust of her was installed in Gordon Square. As it happens, I've also spent a lot of time at her father's dargah in Nizamuddin in Delhi.<br />
<br />
--<br />
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The recent BBC documentary on the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02f8kpj">Kinshasa Symphony Orchestra</a> was also great.</div>
Arthurhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10540615722160931984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-131297259111429809.post-78279306935280577482012-06-06T09:24:00.003-04:002018-04-29T15:34:42.174-04:00Things that Only Happen to Other People<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
The evening we came back to Berlin from Poland, there was a new lock on the door, a no-frills standard-issue lever that no one would have chosen if given a choice. A notice from the police did its best to be warm and friendly (signed, “Ihre Berliner Polizei”—Your Berlin Police), but the fingerprinting dust smeared all over the door suggested otherwise. We walked into the apartment tracking more of the sooty dust down the hallway into the other hallway and into our room. My friend held back because while it was a given that my computer, which I had left sitting on the desk, would be gone, she could only guess at the fate of her viola. (She had taken all of her valuables—camera, computer and iPod—to Poland with her.)<br />
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<a name='more'></a>I spotted the viola case on the ground and started unzipping it because I couldn’t tell by its weight whether it was empty or not—she said, “Nobody takes an instrument without its case.” Then she burst into tears of joy. My computer was a tool whose backed up data could fit just as easily in another, but her viola was practically a person to her. In their unknowing kindness, the robbers had been exceptionally foolish: At roughly $10,000, the viola was the single most valuable item in the whole apartment. They had presumably spent a while casing the place to find out that all three roommates were on vacation, but what they got (a couple of cameras, a couple of computers, and some costume jewellery) would be pretty much worthless to them after expenses. To all would-be thieves, some advice: Always steal the musical instrument.<br />
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A few minutes before I had been sitting in a cafe drinking a hot chocolate and eating a tuna sandwich so that low blood sugar wouldn’t figure into the tension. We had just received a text from my friend’s roommate and seen the notice from the police. My friend had gone to the police station to pick up the key to the new lock. It was a loud cafe, though it was not crowded. I sat, my umbrella and damp suitcase at my feet, at a table with the backs of chairs crammed into it. The scene was unremarkable, as was the hot chocolate. I was aware of the oil stain on my jeans from a first ill-judged bite of the sandwich. That was the most pressing issue for me at the moment and I dabbed at it impotently with a napkin. I started pouring out my woes to my iPad. But it occurred to me that I had no woes. The computer was gone or it wasn’t, and I was numbly prepared to accept either. The data was, after all, safely backed up. I just now reread what I had written in the cafe to check whether I had misremembered my frame of mind, but all I found was clinical description. The one discordant note was the sentence “you can’t write a dissertation on an iPad”. I went back to reading a book by Daniel Kahneman on the iPad—basically the topic was "rational choice theory for dummies"—and thinking about my friend who was no doubt having a heated argument at the police station. In Germany, leases are very strict and she was a subletter potentially having no right to a key. (A few years ago when I lived in Germany I once lost my house key and my roommate said, “take my key and go to Switzerland to get it copied”—it was only her serious tone that kept me from bursting out laughing. What could be more German than fleeing the country to avoid a bureaucracy that even tracks your keys?) Luckily, my friend’s name appeared on the list of “people affected” by the crime and so the police finally gave her the key. We dragged the suitcase out into the gloomy drizzle and plodded home.<br />
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After that we had some Thai food, asked each other how we were feeling and decided to put off cleaning until the morning. We woke up, googled how to clean off fingerprinting dust, and listened to Wilco and The Weakerthans, two bands we have in common and whose music seemed right for the occasion. It was still impossible for me to feel anything, even if I had wanted to. For the first time in my life, my subconscious was telling me something useful: Money comes and goes. The absurdity of wiping away sooty grime (first dry then wet, says the Internet) from a crime scene for a crime that has effectively no chance of being solved ensured that that lesson would stay in my mind. The last time I was robbed I was eighteen or nineteen, and it was one of my first visits to New York. A kindly, if somewhat tweaked out, man suggested I leave the snaking taxi line at Penn Station and follow him to “Sector A” or “Section B” or whatever he called it. Sure enough, he found me a taxi in less than two minutes and said that he didn’t expect payment or a tip because he worked for the city. But he did want a favour: Could I give him $100 in 20s so that he could exchange it for a $100 bill from the driver. It didn’t make any sense but of course it happened quickly enough that it didn’t need to. The man pretended to exchange words with the driver and hobbled away spryly. I asked the driver if he had the money and he had no idea what I was talking about. I said, “Oh, then I’ve just been scammed.” The driver replied, “Yes, you have.” And that was it. I was enraged but mostly embarrassed, so embarrassed that I didn’t mention the incident for years. Even after I had moved to New York, memories of this incident darkened my day whenever I was reminded of it. <br />
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But how did it come to this? As I sit in Delhi, writing at a friend’s computer that I am borrowing for the summer, I don’t even feel the numbness I felt before. I always expected to be robbed in India and not Europe, especially not in fusty, well-ordered Germany. But the theft was as unpredictable as a tsunami or a tornado, so I was like a very lucky victim of a natural disaster. I had expected that being robbed would bring on the combination of rage and shame that the taxi scam had. Instead I had a delightful three more days of museum-going, coffee-drinking and eating in Berlin that capped what was one of the best trips of my life. It is impossible to succinctly explain why the trip was so wonderful but our adventures in Poland and Germany were filled in part with yelling funny sounding Polish words, singing showtunes, photographing Muslim villages, observing prostitutes near the Belarus border, driving through unspoilt countryside, talking like Werner Herzog, watching <i>the</i> Orient Express pull out of a station, and so on. At some point during those good times, the thieves were rummaging around in our apartment hundreds of kilometres away. The choice, in retrospect, would have been between all of that and still having my clunky computer. The only thing I would have done differently would have been to have not said, “What could go wrong now? This trip was a complete success” on the train a few minutes before we arrived in Berlin. That was tempting fate.<br />
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Arthurhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10540615722160931984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-131297259111429809.post-39648971556809500442012-03-21T15:50:00.002-04:002012-06-07T08:03:53.887-04:00Plane Language<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Air travel is now unpleasant in so many ways that you can hardly list them. In economy class, the romance has been drained out of the experience by a couple of decades of cost-cutting. The horror has a precise starting date, according to <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/business/airlines-studying-the-science-of-better-in-flight-meals.html"><i>The New York Times</i></a>, and it’s earlier than you might think: <br />
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“Industry experts trace the problem back to 1987, when American Airlines removed a single olive from its salads to save a little money.”</blockquote>
I take the comedian Louis C.K.’s <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk">point</a> that we complain too much about air travel, which is really a marvel if you think about it (“you’re sitting in a chair in the sky”). The one indignity that I’m becoming less and less tolerant of is the language of the airport and the skies. Lots of communication happens—from the fine print telling us whether our tickets are refundable to the flight attendant’s cheery “would you like a beverage, sir?”—but very little at a human level. The language used by airlines and the Transportation Security Administration is often distorted, plastic, unidiomatic, excessive and generally frustrating.<br />
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One language-breaking imperative is making some customers feel more special than others. There are so many different status levels and privileges that even someone who studies these things on an almost hermeneutical level as I do is left confused. Dividing customers into ever narrower bands of worth has led to a proliferation of essentially meaningless terms, some related to precious metals (“Silver,” “Gold,” “Platinum”), perception of privilege (“Elite”), and the idea that the world is one’s oyster (“Global Services”). Lest we forget, these status levels have nothing to do with the classes of service on the actual airplanes (First, Business, Economy and now even BusinessFirst). I, for example, am a Silver Elite on United Airlines, which entitles me to Premier Access, which means I board through the same lane as First and Business Class passengers, but in Boarding Group 4. This is designed to make me feel special, but instead I get the sense I should have a prisoner number or at least a barcode. United recently changed their boarding procedure and not even the airline’s own employees yet understand what the eight group numbers signify. While boarding a flight in Toronto—polite, mild-mannered Toronto!—I watched passengers almost riot when the gate agent made a misleading announcement about the boarding order.<br />
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I was delighted to find that I qualified for Premier check-in at Newark airport on a recent trip and an agent regally waved me between the stanchions into the lines reserved for special people. But the experience was tarnished when I reached a fork in the road and a second agent started shouting something at me: “Gorbatnum! Gorbatnum!” I heard. I was surprised that my first encounter with a Martian should take place at an airport in New Jersey. I told her that I didn’t understand, and instead of “take me to your leader!” she said as to an idiot child, “Gold or Platinum?” Confusingly, I was neither precious metal but had a (free) First Class upgrade. In that situation where logic and language both broke down, I became honorary gold and she directed me to step to the right instead of to the left. The check-in kiosks on the right and left were, of course, identical.<br />
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Kingfisher Airways in India brings “personal service” to a comical extreme. On every flight, the company’s flamboyant chairman, the liquor magnate Vijay Mallya, appears on the television screen at each seat before the plane takes off and personally welcomes you. He suggests that you are like guests in his own home—what kind of a house does he run?!—and that the flight attendants have been “personally selected” by him. No American carrier that I know of has yet reached this level of gaucheness. For me, at least, it has the opposite of the intended effect: I know Mallya doesn’t know who I am and if he wants to pretend that he does, he can go f*** himself.<br />
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Another major problem is the mechanistic nature of the communication. Flight attendants repeat the same spiel day in and day out, and so it is no wonder that they are not concerned with whether the niceties of human communication (tone, cadence, etc.) are present in their speech about seat belts. Flight attendants sometimes say “please stow all your <i>carrion </i>items” as though dead animals were the same as “carry-on”. They can’t be bothered to make the distinction. Security checkpoints are another place where thousands of people must be given the same message. Usually a human being stands next to the sad mass of humanity waiting to take off shoes and remove laptops from bags, and he or she intones ominously what the procedure du jour is. A simple recording would suffice but that would be too Orwellian. Here’s an idea: Make the procedures simpler.<br />
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For decades, airline pilots apparently tried to sound like Air Force pilots (which many of them had been) and Air Force pilots apparently tried to sound like Chuck Yeager. Yeager was the first man to break the sound barrier (in 1947) and had a recognizable drawl. I don’t think pilots aspire to this anymore but flight attendants still have some strange tics in their English that must go back to some mythical uber-flight attendant from the days when they were called stewards and stewardesses. One of them is a liberal use of the demonstrative pronoun “that”: They say things like “we’re going to begin <i>that </i>boarding process” or “make sure <i>that </i>carry-on is in the over-head bin or underneath the seat in front of you.” There is also a weird tendency to use pompous language like calling a magazine a “periodical” or offering passengers a “beverage.” Is that meant to remind us of a time when air travel actually called for such high-flown language?<br />
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The Legalese is also a problem because it means striving for a false precision. Why do they announce that it is a crime to “tamper with, disable or destroy lavatory smoke detectors”? No one except a member of Congress would believe that that says anything more than “tamper with lavatory smoke detectors” and yet those are the exact words of federal regulation FAR Sec. 135.127 (e). How can you destroy or disable anything without first tampering with it? (Arguably though the one universally good thing that’s happened to the in-flight experience in the last twenty years has been the ban on in-flight smoking put into effect nationally in the United States in 1999 but started in 1988. I distinctly remember in the early 2000s when planes finally stopped smelling like ashtrays.) Likewise the term “fully upright and locked positions” (which doesn’t even sound right when one is talking about both tray-tables and seats or rather “seat-backs” as they insist on calling them). Worse, I often hear “full, upright and locked” which makes absolutely no sense. Often we are reminded about FAA regulations, such as “obeying all lighted signs, placards and crew-member instructions” which is frankly not a refresher course I need. Why is everyone treated as though he/she had never been on a plane before? What if we could opt out? (I don’t just mean reading a magazine during the announcement—I find it jarring to receive a direct instruction to pay attention and then disobey it.)<br />
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What bothers me about flying is this break-down of language. It’s a bit like a police state where words don’t have quite the meaning they should. On a couple of recent flights my urge to correct was almost overwhelming—this is definitely an occupational hazard of grading undergraduate essays. The regimented procedures (which you generally can’t negotiate, unlike in much of life where appealing to people's sense of rationality makes a difference) lead to regimented, forced language. But I can amuse myself by thinking about the Monty Python <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaFQKnQ-PvU">sketch</a> in which a pilot’s entire announcement is “There is absolutely no cause for alarm.” The passengers of course panic even though there really is no cause for alarm. At least that is a good, clear use of the English language.<br />
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BONUS:<br />
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It is easy to forget that the people who work for the airlines have more interesting lives than the safety announcements they make would suggest. To get their perspective, I regularly read Patrick Smith’s <a href="http://www.salon.com/topic/ask_the_pilot/">Ask the Pilot</a> series (although he occasionally misses, as in his rather shallow recent post on India) and the podcast <a href="http://betty.libsyn.com/">Betty in the Sky with a Suitcase</a>.<br />
<br /></div>Arthurhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10540615722160931984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-131297259111429809.post-35959540415335532682012-02-07T18:50:00.001-05:002012-02-10T20:54:22.932-05:00Perspective, Lego-men and skulls<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">In the early fifteenth century, the painter Masaccio did something amazing: He painted frescos that made use of linear and aerial perspective. (Regrettably he died at age 27, like the singer Jim Morrison--now that I am 28, I find myself keeping lists of "people who died younger than my current age who did important things" and that's probably not healthy.) Scientific perspective, which was perfected by painters in the later decades of the fifteenth century, changed the way art could represent the world. As if by magic--though really through a better understanding of optics--things on a two-dimensional surface could appear to be in three dimensions. I am not an art historian so I am not sure how this was received historically, but it was probably akin to when someone in our time sees a 3-D film for the first time. I vividly remember myself as a ten year old at my first IMAX film almost shrieking as a salmon seemed to swim through the head of someone seated a few rows in front of me.<br />
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The most amazing perspectival drawing I have come across recently is not a canvas at all but a painting on a road in Florida. It is (or "was" since it must be erased by now) the entry by Leon Keer, a Dutch artist, and his team in the Sarasota Chalk Festival. Inspired by the Qin-dynasty Terracotta Army, the drawing <a href="https://secure.flickr.com/photos/dufois/6320944911/in/set-72157628022408395/">represents</a> Lego-men marching in the pavement. It has to be seen to be believed. But there is a problem that I had never really considered but which must always be a problem with perspectival drawing to a greater or lesser degree: From <a href="https://secure.flickr.com/photos/dufois/6321468152/in/set-72157628022408395/">another angle</a> the Lego-men look strange and elongated. The deeper and richer the perspective, the more restricted the viewing angle for the 3-d effect to work. Even stranger than the lanky Lego soldiers is a painting by Hans Holbein the Younger called <a href="http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/hans-holbein-the-younger-the-ambassadors">The Ambassadors</a>. All looks well with the two elegantly dressed young men and their assortment of allegorical objects, but then one notices the highly distorted skull in the foreground. It looks like a crudely done Photoshop project and yet is actually an experiment in perspective. The skull only looks natural if you view the picture from far to the right. I was never able to get it to work on the computer screen but the next time I am in London I'll pay a visit to the National Gallery to approach the painting from awkward angles. </div>Arthurhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10540615722160931984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-131297259111429809.post-46802184033481261342012-01-10T01:26:00.000-05:002012-01-10T01:26:59.912-05:00The Scourge of Internet comments<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">Prof Geoffrey Pullum at Language Log (one of the blogs I read the most) has a fantastic <a href="http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3690#more-3690">explanation</a> of why he usually disables comments on his posts. Vogon poetry is invoked. Passive voice is explained. And so on. I don't bother closing the comments on this blog because, luckily, not enough people read it to leave soul-sappingly stupid comments.</div>Arthurhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10540615722160931984noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-131297259111429809.post-10957807163346310042012-01-09T02:36:00.001-05:002015-01-08T15:02:23.044-05:00History Through a Glass, Darkly<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>On my grandfather, E. Jarosław Semianów </b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>[This is a true sketch of my grandfather's life, and a meditation on how hard it is to establish even the most basic facts in history. It's more than five thousand words--far too long for a blog post--but here it is.] </b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">One summer in the mid-1990s, I was standing in the closet-sized vestibule in my grandfather’s stuffy apartment in a village in southeastern Poland. His cheeks flushed and his breath slightly off, my grandfather grasped both my shoulders tightly and said something to me, something important. After this laying on of hands, the old soldier shuffled away, his rounded back receding into another dim and faded room.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">He died in 2005 after a decade-long struggle with depression. I knew him less well than I should have, and the later memories—senility and deafness increasingly robbing him of his ability to perceive the world around him—have fogged happier recollections from childhood. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">Like the dead in Hades in the ancient epics, our deceased forebears can be brought back but only as shadows of their living selves. In our time, they are not lured by the promise of sips from a bowl of sacrificial blood but by the rustling of papers in an archive or the whirr of data being retrieved electronically. I am looking at two pages of typescript, which draw the contour lines of a place in history but populate it very sparsely. It is factually detailed — dates, places and even sections of the Soviet-imposed penal code are cited precisely — but beyond the facts there is no self-reflection, no outward emotion. I am not sure whether this ritual will work. I feel guilty because the time to have done this research was years ago when interviews would have allowed me to capture these intangible details. Time flows swiftly in only one direction and swimming against the current is possible for just a little until you grow tired, having nothing to hold on to, and you are dragged downstream again. Most of history is written in the rushing water and the howling wind.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">I realized just how strong time’s eddies could be when I discovered after reading this document that I had never known my grandfather’s first name: Eliasz. I was humbled to learn that I had not known the most basic fact about him, that Jarosław, the name he had used his entire life, was not actually his first name. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">In a sense I have no right to tell this story. I was born in America and not in Poland. I am overeducated, openly gay and almost oppressively comfortable in life. Any of these would give pause to the ghosts of the dramatis personae of this story. Even my language is borrowed: I may speak Polish fluently (if sometimes ungrammatically) but even with effort my third-generation American children won’t. Still I feel, perhaps unduly, that despite these circumstances I — and not my younger Polish cousins or my younger sister — get to be my grandfather’s spiritual heir. Perhaps because I claim it, it is my due. Despite the fact that only a few sentences of the story I will tell here refer to the time after my birth in 1983, I am everywhere in this story because if the smallest detail had turned out differently then I would not exist.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">▫▫▫</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">Eliasz Jarosław Semianów was born to Antoni and Zuzanna Semianów on 16 July 1911 into captivity, being a Pole in a time when there had been no Polish state since the Partition of 1795. He was born in a town called Bohorodczany near the city known then as Stanisłwów, which was on the periphery of the regional center, Lwów. Lwów was the Polish name by which he knew the city most intimately, but it was called Lviv in Ukrainian and Lemberg in German. German was the official language in this occupied city, which was then the administrative capital of the Territory of Galicia and Lodomeria. But these details are almost as meaningless to me as they must be to you because they are just names floating freely, unmoored from any tangible reality. The culture of this once multi-ethnic, ostentatiously cosmopolitan city has been nonexistent for many years because of depredations of the Second World War, including the Holocaust, which obliterated the Jewish presence, and the Soviet occupation, which forcibly resettled the ethnic Poles in the formerly German territory that became western Poland after the war. Lwów is now the monoethnic, monocultural Ukrainian city of Lviv, just as Stanisłwów has become Ivano-Frankivs’k. They have been divided from Poland by an iron curtain behind the Iron Curtain, namely the border separating the USSR-proper from the rest of the Eastern Bloc. This was recently reinstated as the border between the European Union and its eastern neighbor Ukraine. As far as I know, after his deportation in 1946, my grandfather never again saw the places of his youth. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">My family is connected to the Polish aristocracy, which is to say that at the top of the document, my grandfather listed his date of birth, parents’ names and notes that his mother was “of the House of Sobolewski.” The story of my great-grandparents’ forbidden love has been related to me often if vaguely by my mother. Antoni, my commoner great-grandfather, fell in love with Zuzanna, who was “of the House of Sobolewski,” and incurring the wrath of her parents had to settle for membership among the title-less petty bourgeoisie.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">Except as a bit of family trivia, our noble origins have no significance. My only first-hand knowledge of the Polish upperclass was my mother’s friendship with a real princess (“of the House of Radziwiłł”),<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=131297259111429809#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[1]</span></span></span></a> who lived in a modest bungalow in the suburban sprawl of our town among the pines on the California coast. At a party I was brought to as a child, where most of the aged guests were as brittle and pale as willow bark, Her Serene Highness Princess Krystyna of the House of Radziwiłł (by marriage, not by birth, as she took pains to remind me) told me pointedly that a young gentleman does not put his hands in his pockets. Beyond the walls of the non-descript house where she held court lived an entire nation of people who regularly put their hands in their pockets.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">Lwów and its environs were a melting pot in part because the city was situated in an region long contested among greedy empires. In my grandfather’s early childhood, Europe erupted into war and Lwów was an important transit point to the Eastern Front. My mother tells me that as a boy he spoke with the soldiers in their different languages as they passed through the city. As a young man, he joined the reserve corps and in 1935 was promoted to Second Lieutenant (<i>Podporucznik</i>).<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=131297259111429809#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[2]</span></span></span></a> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">He grew up in the tumult of the Second Polish Republic of the interwar period. Having trained as a forestry engineer he took a job as a trainee forester (third class). He was then accepted to the polytechnic university and pursued an engineering degree until war broke out. He would later design bridges in Kazakhstan for his Soviet captors, according to my mother. Of course the uneasy calm after the signing the Treaty of Versailles on the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1919 would soon be shattered. During the equivalent years in my life (my grandfather was eight when WWI ended and twenty-eight when WWII began) the Soviet Union collapsed, the World Trade Center was attacked, Iraq was invaded twice, several genocides occurred and many people made another sort of killing on Wall Street while others lost their assets in financial meltdowns. Despite these events, each of them traumatic in its own distant way, life has never been anything but business as usual for me.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">Before dawn on the first of September 1939, an air assault on targets across Poland marked the beginning of Germany’s invasion. There was some previous hint of a threat because towards the end of August my grandfather had already received orders to mobilize in the town of Dederkały, near the Soviet border, where he was to be part of the <i>Korpus Ochrony Pogranicza</i> (KOP), the Territorial Defense Corps. As his unit mustered, the German army was flattening western Poland and had surrounded Warsaw by the sixteenth (though the besieged remnants of the army there did not surrender until the twenty-eighth, which is still a point of great pride among Poles). </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">On the seventeenth, Soviet forces invaded from the East as part of the greatest sucker punch in the history of war, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact that carved up Poland and fed it into the maws of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Two days later my grandfather found his unit surrounded. The Polish forces surrendered. As is documented in all the histories of what would later be called the Katyń Massacre, the Soviets promised to send all the enlisted men home and to put the officers into an internment camp until the end of hostilities. My grandfather and a few dozen other skeptical officers escaped. He set off with just one of his friends, Apolinary Skrocki, with whom he was planning to make a run for the Romanian border to the south, but Skrocki decided that he needed to see to his family and the two parted ways.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=131297259111429809#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn3;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[3]</span></span></span></a> He notes carefully that the men fled with the permission of higher officers; I assume this statement is meant to preempt the accusation that he and his colleagues simply deserted. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">My family’s oral history has embellished the story so that my grandfather and his friends broke out of the cattle-car that was conveying them to certain death in the dark woods near Katyń (which I had always assumed was in eastern Poland but is actually in Smolensk Oblast in western Russia). The timeline for the cattle-car story is wrong. My grandfather’s document states that he and his friends “did not surrender” meaning that they probably escaped on the nineteenth of September or the next day. Their less fortunate colleagues would not be herded onto trains until a few days later.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=131297259111429809#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn4;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[4]</span></span></span></a> The Polish troops spent some time in prisoner of war camps prepared specially for them in western Russia and then on 5 March 1940 Lavrenty Beria, head of internal security of the USSR, sent his infamous memo to Stalin proposing their mass execution. During March and April, more than 22,000 prisoners were taken into a sound-proof room one by one and shot in the back of the head as loud machinery was run for no purpose except to blanket out the sound of lives being ended. I doubt that at the time my grandfather imagined that he had narrowly escaped a human abattoir.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">I have been told from an early age that my grandfather had been a member of the Polish Resistance. This conjures up images of blowing up railroad tracks and other daring acts of sabotage. Inexplicably, the document before me is entirely silent on this period except to say that my grandfather worked in the Eastern Carpathians in a forest in a technical capacity and was not caught by the Soviet security forces, which were presumably trawling for any Polish officers who had escaped the fate of their comrades. The German occupation began in June 1941 and he stayed at his job, where he was promoted in 1944, by which time the region had come back under Soviet control. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">This dry paper trail, the one which he himself left for posterity, could not be more different from the family legends that affect to explain this period of his life. What does it mean that my mother relates to me the story that he hid his Jewish housekeeper between mattresses as the Germans ransacked the neighborhood? What can we make of the legend that he played a game of chess with the German commander of his district during the occupation — the plot is almost Borgesian — and what was wagered on the outcome of the match was the fate of local Jewry? As the story is told, my grandfather wins, of course. “What happened then?” I asked breathlessly. The Germans came for the Jews anyway a few weeks later because, even in myth, no amount of honey around the rim of a glass can sweeten the bitter facts of history. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">In January 1946, he started working as a “forestry specialist” based in Kosów (now Kosiv) near the city formerly known as Stanisławów in what is now southwestern Ukraine. Just two months later he would be arrested leaving a meeting of former army officers. At times I have naively felt that because there is no evidence that he smuggled people to safety or blew up bridges he was not the hero I had been led to believe he was. The fact is that even if he was not on the frontlines, his very existence was heroic. Simply being who he was was a cause for immediate arrest.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">He was detained for treason on the 26<sup>th</sup> of March 1946 and was held in several local prisons until that October when he was tried. He records that he was convicted in accordance with Paragraph 54, sections 1a and 11 of the Ukrainian Penal Code, which prescribes the following penalties: “Forfeiting one’s freedom for 10 years, forfeiting one’s rights as citizen for 5 years and total confiscation of one’s property.” Words have a chillingly direct power when they are part of the law. <i>Majątek</i> (which I translate as “property”) is related to the verb <i>mać</i> (“to have”) so it somehow feels more immediate than the English word property. The state had exercised its power to negate his ability “to have.” </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">When I was growing up, I was told that my grandparents had spent time in a Siberian gulag. This is apparently not true. My grandfather’s incarceration began in the western Soviet Union, in Ukraine, and he was gradually moved eastward but never into Siberia. He records that in 1946 he was taken to a “concentration camp”—that is an exact translation of his words—then called “Tiemnikovsky Camp” in the Mordovian A.S.S.R, some 200 km south-east of Moscow. In 1948 the name was changed to “Dubrovlag”—or perhaps, because within the Gulag Archipelago each camp was not a single entity but rather a small island chain, he was moved to another part of the camp with its own name. He correctly notes that the camp complexes in this region date from the forced labor regime under the Czars, known as the <i>katorga</i>. He writes (in another document) that although every camp by necessity had a cemetery nearby, this brutal place had three.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=131297259111429809#_ftn5" name="_ftnref5" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn5;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[5]</span></span></span></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">In December of 1949 he was taken to a gulag in Saran, a town in the province of Karaganda in north-east-central Kazakhstan. It is some 200 km south east of the present-day capital, Astana, but during the Soviet era it was so far off the beaten track that an old Russian joke asks “Where is it?” with the reply “In Karaganda” which sounds obscene in Russian. The closest English equivalent is saying that something is in “Bumblefuck.” For some reason, my grandfather calls the region the “Soviet Socialist Republic of Karaganda” even though it was just one of over a dozen provinces of the erstwhile Soviet Socialist Republic of Kazakhstan. Perhaps behind the physical and mental barriers of the labor camp, the desolate region seemed incomparably huge. He witnessed its hugeness from behind a barbed-wire fence on a barren steppe but I have seen it only in the context of maps, where it is a mere speck on the underside of the vast cadaver of the Soviet Union. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">The camp complex was known as KARLAG, the acronym for “Karagandy Corrective Labor Camp.”<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=131297259111429809#_ftn6" name="_ftnref6" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn6;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[6]</span></span></span></a> Its administrative “seat” (my grandfather himself uses the quotation marks with apparent scorn) was at Dolinko, which was also the name of the main camp. The building still stands, albeit in very poor condition, with a dramatic neoclassical façade facing out over what used to be a broad garden with a fountain. Like any colonial state, the Soviet Union spared no expense in building an administrative building whose grand scale was a justification of its power over the unfortunates it ruled. Today it is, of course, in ruins with the gardens once tended by prisoners overgrown with scraggly shrubs. The wide-brimmed fountain is in no better shape than Ozymandias’s statue. Presumably the vast administration building and the local officers’ club made life bearable for the many guards needed to run such a sprawling complex of prisons and factories. Because the city of Karagandy had only been built in the 1930s as an appendage to the camp complex, the streets were laid out on a perfect grid, suited for control, and “quarters” of the city were actually fenced in areas where prisoners lived.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=131297259111429809#_ftn7" name="_ftnref7" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn7;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[7]</span></span></span></a> I imagine that because the guards themselves were so far from civilization, they felt imprisoned themselves and that could engender nothing but viciousness towards the official inmates. My grandfather estimates that some 120,000 people were incarcerated there along with him. Each with their own stories, their own families, their own destinies…</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">His experience must have been typical. He had lost contact with his immediate family when most of the ethnic Poles were forced from Ukraine to western Poland in 1944. Because he was allowed to write a letter only once every three months, he would not get a reply from them until 1955. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">Only a fevered, Dantean imagination could have invented a more naturally punishing place to incarcerate enemies of the state. The high steppes are brutally cold in winter (down to 58°C below freezing) and blistering hot in summer (up to 53°C).<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=131297259111429809#_ftn8" name="_ftnref8" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn8;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[8]</span></span></span></a> The entire area was built up by slave labor employed to work the mines and man the mineral processing plants, including Uranium extraction operations where prisoners worked with dangerous chemicals without protection. Over the whole of Kazakhstan, there were at one time 89 camps and 10 prisons.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=131297259111429809#_ftn9" name="_ftnref9" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn9;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[9]</span></span></span></a> So many European slaves were transported there during the Soviet era that even today Kazakhstan’s demographics reflect large numbers of blond-haired, blue-eyed inhabitants, many of them descended from German prisoners of war. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">The experience of living in a labor camp defies any explanation or rationalization. The prisoners knew that slogans at the camps like “Through Labor—Freedom,” a formula horrifyingly reminiscent of “Arbeit Macht Frei” on the gates of Auschwitz, were by definition lies. Anything you did except staying alive, and perhaps not even that, was pointless. It was a matter of repeating the familiar processes of being alive without expecting any tangible result except clinging to life. I imagine it like the lines from T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">Shape without form, shade without color</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">Paralyzed force, gesture without motion.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">And yet despite this cerebrotonic reaction on my part, I know that I will never understand my grandfather’s experience just as I will never know what throwing a grenade feels like. I don’t know what torturing someone is like and I don’t know what it feels like to be tortured. I have no sense of the difference between simple imprisonment and incarceration in a labor camp because I have never been held anywhere against my will. To confront such suffering is not something that comes easily to a middle-class American who has never pointed a gun at anything but a paper target or a clay pigeon at summer camp. Only my imagination, aided by a surfeit of media, have allowed me to share in the experience, albeit momentarily. Of course suffering by mimesis is not real suffering, and yet there is no other way for me to come to terms with my family’s experience.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">Still my attempts at a deeper understanding have by necessity been a series of facile comparisons. I considered a standard prison ration against what I usually eat and was astounded by the fact that my daily food intake is roughly three times the amount included in the most generous ration available for prisoners.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=131297259111429809#_ftn10" name="_ftnref10" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn10;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[10]</span></span></span></a> The protein bar I ate after going to the gym is more nutritious than what was—theoretically—on offer every day in the mess halls of the gulags. Since there is a vast body of correspondence between camps and the central authority complaining about a lack of food supplies, it is doubtful that more than a few prisoners received the full measure of their allotted rations. The results of such delusional planning and the science of nourishing someone at subsistence levels but no more were writ upon my grandfather’s body: I am only a few centimeters taller than he is and about 70 kilograms but when he was released, he weighed less than 40. I cannot bring myself to imagine what that number would mean inscribed in my own flesh. Furthermore, when I started writing this, I had a bad cold and had to take time off from my usual activities (working, attending class, exercising) to recover. Presumably such exceptions were never made in the gulags and I wonder whether I would even have been physically capable of going about my day in my condition. Furthermore, since food and accommodation were distributed with heart-rending precision according to quality of labor (e.g. workers not meeting 75% of quota were given 50g of bread less per day and those not meeting 50% received 100g less than those meeting their quotas), it seems that prisoners who faltered, for example, those who fell ill as I did, were driven towards their own deaths by the official apparatus. How my grandfather survived is unclear. Was it by being a model prisoner, earning better accommodation and extra rations, or did he attempt to resist, or did he survive by being nondescript? Because he does not tell us, we can never know how his story is different from or the same as that of the hundreds of thousands of others at Karagandy. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">On the twenty-sixth of May 1953, having spent (by his own reckoning) exactly nine years, two months and three days in Soviet prisons, he was released as part of the liberalization that followed Josef Stalin’s death in March 1953. But how bittersweet it was! The only freedom he knew was permission to live in a local administrative center, Dobovka, under the watchful eye of the Soviet security service.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=131297259111429809#_ftn11" name="_ftnref11" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn11;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[11]</span></span></span></a> He notes, for reasons that aren’t clear, that the security service’s office was in the nearby town of Aktas. But could he have known the extent to which politics in Moscow, a continent away, were being shaken up?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">Nikita Khrushchev, who had replaced Stalin as leader of the USSR, promised at the Twentieth Communist Party Congress in February 1956 to scale back the excessive brutality of Stalin’s tenure. Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” at the meeting specifically refers to the fact that Stalin’s mass deportations had been against the spirit of Communism. There was a laugh line in the speech to the effect that if there had not been so damn many Ukrainians then Stalin would have deported the entire nation to prison camps. Ha ha. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">My ethnically Ukrainian grandmother Anna (née Romaniuk) was one of the Ukrainians Stalin had got around to deporting. She was serving time in the KARLAG for being a student agitator but originally came from a place not far from where my grandfather grew up.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=131297259111429809#_ftn12" name="_ftnref12" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn12;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[12]</span></span></span></a> Born in 1924, she was thirteen years younger than he was. They were married by a priest on the 15<sup>th</sup> of June 1955 but did not receive the all-important civil marriage certificate until 12<sup>th</sup> April 1956, which they needed in order to leave together.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=131297259111429809#_ftn13" name="_ftnref13" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn13;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[13]</span></span></span></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">The most important document was issued on the 19<sup>th</sup> of March 1956, numbered 13923. The office of the public prosecutor of the USSR had granted my grandfather leave to depart Kazakhstan after the tenth of April 1956. He kept that bit of paper until the day he died. He regained contact with his mother, sister and brother, all of whom helped make arrangements to take his wife and their new-born daughter Zuzanna,<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=131297259111429809#_ftn14" name="_ftnref14" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn14;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[14]</span></span></span></a> named after his mother, out of Kazakhstan in October of that year. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">Of that 4,000 km journey I know nothing except that the baby Zuzanna was in constant danger of freezing in the unheated rail cars and spent much of the trip wrapped in a coat. My mother has also told me, tantalizingly, that the couple and their daughter were almost murdered by Chechens as they passed through Chechnya, which was apparently as unstable then as it is now. Not for nothing does the name of the Chechen capital, Grozny, happen to mean “cruel” and “harsh” in Polish. Meanwhile, thousands of kilometers away, my grandfather’s brother Julian was being prepared for a surgical procedure and never woke up from the </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">anaesthesia</span><span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">. That was the news that greeted my grandfather when he was reunited with his family.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">On the 1<sup>st</sup> of November 1956, he began working as a forest manager in a village called Ochodze, a few kilometers outside of the town of Opole in Lower Silesia. Silesia (Sląsk in Polish and </span><span lang="DE" style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">Schlesien</span><span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";"> in German) is in an odd way not unlike old Lwów. Although it is rural rather than cosmopolitan, the culture is a hybrid of Polish and German traditions, with the Polish inflected with German and the German bearing the stamp of Polish. Many of my grandfather’s friends from Lwów ended up here as refugees and many of them spent evenings in the toasty kitchen of the house at the edge of the forest at 44 Piastowska Street.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">In less than a year, in October 1957, my mother would be born. My grandfather lived in the house on the edge of the forest with my grandmother, my mother and my mother’s four sisters and worked for some twenty uneventful years until his retirement in 1976. My mother believes that it was the best job he could get because of his life-long refusal to join the Polish Communist Party, which had of course been complicit in his exile to the steppes, but the bulk of his education had been in forestry.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">He was present throughout my childhood, on visits to California or when my parents, my sister and I went to Poland. He seemed to me ancientness personified, the sole survivor from a lost time. In pictures from the period he manages to look both stern and goofy, with his forest-green, coarsely-woven Eastern Bloc suits and largeish ears. He once threatened me by brandishing a trowel when he thought I was uprooting the strawberries he was tenderly planting in our garden. I was both terrified and amused by the incident. Other people he met in California probably also did not know what to make of him. When he stayed with us, he would sometimes walk to the Safeway supermarket, the “Saf-e-vay” as he called it, and undeterred by his inability to speak English, would tell jokes in German. He was cosmopolitan in that dignified Old World manner, in which joviality and practical erudition formed a crust over old wounds.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">Towards the end of his life, he found an interest in recording his own history. The seams of his pain had been torn once again when his wife, my grandmother, died suddenly of an aneurysm in the early 1990s. In an instant he had lost the one person who was his co-sufferer, whose knowledge of his past came not from documents but from searing experience in Karagandy. He began to reach out, both to tell his story and to gather facts. He tracked down a woman whom he thought had known his old friend Apolinary Skrocki (see note 3). Her reply indicates that she has no idea who Skrocki was but did remember my grandfather from the time he took refuge in her parents’ house some fifty years before. He wrote letters to editors of publications, including one to an unknown recipient dated 5 October 1993. It is a strange document because it is written in elegant, old-fashioned Polish but breaking the flow of this self-assured prose are pitiful requests not to be dismissed as a </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">griping</span><span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";"> old geezer. He calls himself “a grey, average man” and he feels the need to assert that “despite my age I am not telling fantasies; I am not seeking renown or fame.” He began to have some of his memoirs typed out and yet the bulk of the text, some 80 handwritten pages which I have obtained in a poor photocopy, is worthless. What could those pages contain? The handwriting is illegible and awaits some kind of scholarly intervention, just as archaeologists used x-rays to decipher the fragments of ancient Greek verse on bits of burnt papyrus found in the Egyptian desert. Yet that day will never come because all that could be read in those pages are the recollections of a “grey, average man” who lived a life of enormous suffering. W.H. Auden famously wrote in his poem “Musée des Beaux Arts,” that it is all too human to ignore suffering, that it “takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.” It is the nature of suffering itself that ensured that my grandfather died an average man and that it has taken me years to understand that survival itself is heroic.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">I cling to my wispy memories of him because the historical record ends here. And yet what he said to me in his apartment that day, I just don’t know. Not because I did not understand Polish, even his dialect still peppered all those years later with obscure idioms from Lwów, and not because it was inarticulate. I simply cannot remember his words now without reinventing them to tell the story I want to tell. But I know it was approving, a comment on my strength and potential, precisely the strength that these pages prove I do not possess and in any case will never have the opportunity to test. If I had lived his life, I would likely have been buried on the steppes of Karagandy or in the blood-soaked forests of Katyń. Me they would have broken.</span></div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=131297259111429809#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">[1]</span></span></span></a> Christina Maria Dembinska (born Przysucha 7 Sep 1908 – died Monterey, California 8 Aug 2004) married Maciej Mikolaj Maria Radziwiłł (Cannes 24 Feb 1905 – Monterey, California 1994) at Przysucha on 3 Aug 1932 (from http://pages.prodigy.net/ptheroff/gotha/radziwill.html).</div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=131297259111429809#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">[2]</span></span></span></a> In 1990, he and some other officers were given honorary promotions by the Polish state and he became a Captain. In a similar promotion five year later, he became a Major.</div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=131297259111429809#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn3;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">[3]</span></span></span></a> In 1989, he wrote an account of this—which I have not been able to trace—for the Polish Anthropological Society in Wrocław (Polskie Towarzystwo Ludoznawcze w Wrocławiu) with the title “Why I did not Die at Katyń” (Dlaczego nie zginąłem w Katyniu). He attempted track down Skrocki when he first returned to Poland in 1956 and then again in 1993 but both times nothing came of it. He wonders in a letter from 1993 whether Skrocki’s name might actually have been Skrodzki. </div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=131297259111429809#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn4;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">[4]</span></span></span></a> Indeed, I now know that the story belongs to someone else. When my father stayed with an elderly couple in Warsaw in the late 1970s, the husband, Stanisław Polak, related the account of his breaking out of a railcar conveying him towards a German labor camp. In the dead of night, he and his fellow escapees half-crawled, half-swum through a muddy field. It was almost certainly this story that I somehow assigned to my grandfather’s experience.</div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=131297259111429809#_ftnref5" name="_ftn5" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn5;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">[5]</span></span></span></a> A letter to the editor of an unknown publication which he wrote on 5 October 1993. In <i>The First Guide Book to Prisons and Concentration Camps of the Soviet Union</i> by Avraham Shifrin (New York: Bantam, 1982), Dubrovlag appears in the section on “extermination camps” (34).</div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=131297259111429809#_ftnref6" name="_ftn6" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn6;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">[6]</span></span></span></a> Карагандинский исправительно-трудовой лагерь</div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=131297259111429809#_ftnref7" name="_ftn7" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn7;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">[7]</span></span></span></a> See Kate Brown “Gridded Lives: Why Kazakhstan and Montana are Nearly the Same Place” <i>The American Historical Review</i>, Vol. 106, No. 1 (Feb., 2001), pp. 17-48</div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=131297259111429809#_ftnref8" name="_ftn8" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn8;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">[8]</span></span></span></a> By way of comparison, the highest temperature ever recorded on earth is 58°C and the lowest temperature ever recorded outside of Antarctica is -68°C.</div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=131297259111429809#_ftnref9" name="_ftn9" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn9;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">[9]</span></span></span></a> Shifrin 146.</div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=131297259111429809#_ftnref10" name="_ftn10" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn10;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">[10]</span></span></span></a> These and other figures on prisoner rations are taken from Anne Applebaum’s <i>Gulag: A History</i> (New York: Doubleday, 2003), especially p 207.</div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=131297259111429809#_ftnref11" name="_ftn11" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn11;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">[11]</span></span></span></a> The document that entitles one to such limited mobility is known as a “wolf ticket” [волчий билет], and its stipulations make its bearer little better off than a prisoner.</div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=131297259111429809#_ftnref12" name="_ftn12" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn12;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">[12]</span></span></span></a> Their marriage document, which I have in a certified Polish translation from Russian, lists his birthplace as the town of Bohorodczany in the Stanisławów Voivodeship and hers as the village of Wołkowcy in Tarnopol, the voivodeship to the north of Stanisławów. The Lwów Voivodeship is located to the west of both of these.</div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=131297259111429809#_ftnref13" name="_ftn13" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn13;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">[13]</span></span></span></a> I learned from my parents that my grandmother was not my grandfather’s first wife. As a young man he had married a woman who later died during the Second World War, either of tuberculosis or because she was killed. We know nothing more about her. I hope that receiving a mention in a mere footnote is not disrespectful of the dead, and yet time has washed away even this woman’s name.</div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=131297259111429809#_ftnref14" name="_ftn14" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn14;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">[14]</span></span></span></a> Born 5 July 1956.</div>
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Arthurhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10540615722160931984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-131297259111429809.post-37011363336313826222011-06-08T12:23:00.002-04:002011-06-13T11:30:59.674-04:00Courageous Syrian blogger abducted (updated)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"> UPDATE: So it turns out that the "courageous Syrian blogger" was not a lesbian in Damascus but actually a married 40 year-old American man living in Scotland, <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jun/13/syrian-lesbian-blogger-tom-macmaster">reports</a> <i>The Guardian</i>. Sadly, this kind of fiction is drained of its meaning once it is revealed to be fiction. This literary experiment probably set back the cause of gay rights in the Middle East or the West's being able to understand Syria, and that's unforgivable when things are so bad. I sincerely hope he doesn't get a book deal. <br />
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<strike>The title of Amina A.'s blog says it all: "A Gay Girl in Damascus" The four-month old blog is easily one of the bravest on the Internet. It agitates both for gay rights and against the government in one of the most repressive societies on earth, Bashar al-Assad's Syria. There is little expectation of anonymity since the Assad regime monitors Internet communication. But that does not stop Amina from saying what she thinks so boldly that even those of us who live in societies where freedom of speech is a given might pause before posting such opinions.</strike><br />
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<strike>It seems that repression--in the form of one of the eighteen different state-run police forces or some militia--has caught up with her. She was <a href="http://damascusgaygirl.blogspot.com/2011/06/amina.html">abducted</a> two days ago and <a href="http://damascusgaygirl.blogspot.com/2011/06/update-on-amina.html">remains</a> missing, according to two posts on her blog by her cousin. According to <i>The Guardian</i>, which <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/06/gay-girl-damascus-syria-blog">profiled</a> her in early May, she is a dual citizen of Syria and the United States. (Ironically, the <i>Guardian </i>gives Amina's full name but the bylines of several articles about her are pseudonyms.) The question is what the US State Department will do now. Will Amina be another dual-citizen sacrificed to serve some larger strategic calculus?</strike><br />
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<strike>I first learned of Amina when someone sent me a link to her <a href="http://damascusgaygirl.blogspot.com/2011/04/my-father-hero.html">post</a> "My Father the Hero". She describes, in an account that manages to be both harrowing and uplifting, how her father spoke with the militiamen who came to take her away in the middle of the night and shamed them into leaving. It turns out only to have been a temporary victory.</strike><br />
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<strike>The sort of people who come to take you in the middle of the night are trained to be impervious to reason and human emotion--my parents' descriptions of the precisely inflicted brutality of the Polish riot police, the spine-chillingly-named ZOMO, towards the end of Communist rule in Poland made wonder as a child whether the ZOMO-men had been Terminator-like robots. Even so, the brain-washed functionaries that prop up dictators can sometimes be reminded of their humanity. It seems Amina never got the chance to reason with the three young men who bundled her into a car. </strike><br />
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<strike>Nothing remotely as dramatic happens on my blog--and I hope to keep it that way. My thoughts are with Amina.</strike></div>Arthurhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10540615722160931984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-131297259111429809.post-81200053710114648972011-05-15T13:08:00.002-04:002018-04-29T15:44:08.767-04:00Indian Higher Education follow up<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
As I write this, there are forty-six online comments on my <i>Outlook </i><a href="http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?271696">article</a> on education and it’s time to reply. The comment I expected above all was a variation of what commentor Varun Garde declares,<br />
<blockquote>
Liberal arts education is about people who dont want to work hard or who dont have intelligence required to do real work. many of these lazy low IQ people become Politicians, Journalists, lawyers and even worst civil servants.</blockquote>
I think this is the greatest fallacy in the debate and I’ll refute that general claim in a moment. But let me discuss India specifically and put my cards on the table. I am asserting that what I would define as a “liberal arts education” does not exist in India today. This is not just my argument but one that I have heard echoed by dozens of friends and colleagues. The “Arts” stream in Indian higher education does not provide a liberal education but rather a narrow humanities education, which I am not advocating. It is a huge mistake to conflate the humanities and the liberal arts. Therefore, claims such as that stupid people in India get a liberal education while clever people become engineers cannot be sustained, because these so-called stupid people are not getting a liberal education in the first place.<br />
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One critical passage that I had to cut from the final article—as it went from 2,500 words to 1,700 words—was to define what a liberal education is and isn’t. It is “broad-based”, as I wrote in the article, but that does not mean unstructured. Let’s take as an example my alma mater, Princeton University. At Princeton all undergraduate students studying for an A.B. (bachelor of arts, what most universities call a B.A.) must take a writing seminar and a foreign language as well as classes chosen from seven categories. (Students in the sciences have a similar list.) This is the chart from Princeton’s website, which is worth <a href="http://www.princeton.edu/pub/ua/requirements/">visiting</a> to read in full:<br />
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<b>General Education Requirements for A.B. Students </b><br />
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li>Writing Seminar—one course</li>
<li>Foreign Language—one to four terms to complete, depending on the language students study and the level at which they start</li>
<li>Epistemology and Cognition (EC)—one course</li>
<li>Ethical Thought and Moral Values (EM)—one course</li>
<li>Historical Analysis (HA)—one course</li>
<li>Literature and the Arts (LA)—two courses</li>
<li>Quantitative Reasoning (QR)—one course</li>
<li>Science and Technology, with laboratory (ST)—two courses</li>
<li>Social Analysis (SA)—two courses</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
Now the names are misleadingly complicated (why did they have to choose a name like “epistemology and cognition”?), but the philosophy is clear: all students need to take a wide range of courses. Some of these count towards the requirements set down by a student’s department but others are for general knowledge. I got a degree from a literature department but I ended up taking Multivariate Calculus and two chemistry classes to satisfy the QR and ST requirements. These were challenging classes that tested my limits, and they changed my outlook on the world. One major success of the system is that I was able to take them and not fear for my marks: We were allowed to designate a certain number of classes as “pass/fail” courses, meaning that the course would appear on our transcripts but without a final mark. (I turned out to be a terrible mathematician so this was very good for me.) In India I’ve never come across a similar system to allow students to study things that they cannot be confident about mastering.<br />
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There are some other misconceptions about the liberal arts. Someone brought up the <a href="http://www.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Sokal_hoax">Sokal Hoax</a>, in which physics professor Alan Sokal sent a completely nonsensical article to a well-known humanities journal and it got published. That is not an argument for why the humanities are useless, but why a liberal education is important: If I were a journal editor, rest assured that I would not have printed that article because I’ve studied science and know its limits. Similarly, Santosh Gairola wonders “If I am correct now, ‘liberal education’ means, art and artistic subjects.” NO. This is “arts” in the old sense of "skills" rather than in the sense of “fine arts”.<br />
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And let us return to the assumption that liberal arts courses attract stupid people and engineering attracts clever people. Anshul writes<br />
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As someone else has commented it is very much necessary to liberate our civil services, politics, media and civil society from liberal arts type wallas who enjoy sprouting this or that ism and while living as parasite on public money castigate others for trying to make a decent living.</blockquote>
Let's pause to recognise the irony that engineers don’t feel the need to use evidence when discussing a question like this. The recent civil service examination results are out and engineers did very well. But do they make better civil service officers? Where is the evidence? One commenter went so far as to claim that when too many IIT students succeeded in the exam in 1995-6, the next year the marking system was doctored to favour humanities students. Let me call that what it is, a crazy conspiracy theory. Likewise, an MBA is not a liberal arts degree. One successful consultant recently wrote an <a href="http://www.blogger.com/">article</a> his thoughts on why a philosophy PhD was more useful for him than an MBA. Vivek Wadhwa's <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/21/engineering-vs-liberal-arts-who%E2%80%99s-right%E2%80%94bill-or-steve/">thoughts</a> on the matter are also useful. <br />
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One commenter, Sunil, wrote something that inadvertently helped prove my point and was also very moving:<br />
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Our vernacular literature is alive, active advanced and beyond compare - and is generally inaccessible to non-native language speakers like Dudney.</blockquote>
First of all, I do have access to Hindi and Urdu vernacular performance because I can read and understand both. I enjoy Rabindra Sangeet but because I don’t know Bengali except for the alphabet and Hindi/Urdu cognates, I depend on translations. The vibrance of India’s vernacular literary scenes is unquestionable but where does it find a place in the classroom? Indeed, my original title for the piece—before the editors replaced it with the pithier and more controversial “Beyond Techno-Coolies”—was “The Liberal Arts in India, Everywhere but in the University”. Many of the people who are arguing for opening the curriculum up to the liberal arts are just as keen on having the vernacular represented. This is what I hinted at in the last paragraph of my article.<br />
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Some people were far less nice than Sunil about my supposedly not getting India because I’m a foreigner, but it’s not an argument to point a finger at someone with a reasoned opinion and say “foreigner!” as if that settles it. Actually, I’ve been educated in the US system, the UK system and the Indian system so I can compare the three. In any case, complaining about the US is irrelevant. One commenter wrote,<br />
<blockquote>
also the assumption here is that the liberal American colleges have got it right. They may have good in the past, but average graduate of a liberal arts college in the USA is very poorly educated. And for this the colleges charge $40,000/yr. Its a money making racket just like India</blockquote>
But, respectfully, that is not the assumption. You can get a good education in America or a bad one. However, if you compare the best American institutions with the best Indian ones, it is clear that they are using very different educational models. In the U.S., there have been years of debate over whether liberal education works while in India there has not been any such a debate and top institutions don’t provide a liberal education. Nor do the economic arguments that a U.S. education is bad value for money really hold. In fact, because of the private education model (which incidentally India is rapidly adopting), the best universities in the U.S. tend to have the most money to give for scholarships and so it is often less expensive to attend one of the top universities than a middle-ranked university. Every year universities like Princeton and Harvard provide needy students with a free education, and on average more than half the undergraduate students receive some kind of scholarships. The question of whether it is fair that donations can influence admissions decisions is too complicated to get into here, but I can say that it is not particularly common.<br />
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Debotosh Chatterjee takes umbrage at my sentence "Liberal education is not some fusty notion about reading good books, but is rather an important investment in the future" which made him “wonder whether the writer is himself really convinced. There is nothing 'fusty' about reading good books.” This again leads us to the question of what a liberal arts education is. There is nothing wrong with reading good books but opponents of the liberal arts say that it’s just wasting time reading or “talking”. But the goal is to increase people's general knowledge and intellectual capabilities, which involves a lot of reading, writing and discussion. Part of it is learning the indispensable skill of expressing yourself well. It is true that every corner of the Internet is full of bad writing but one commenter deserves special mention: He pulls off the astonishing feat of misspelling “coolies” three different ways (“collies” which are fluffy dogs, “collis” which is an English surname or a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collis_(planetary_nomenclature)">hill on another planet</a>, and “colles” which is a kind of wrist fracture). I don't know what kind of education can explain that.</div>
Arthurhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10540615722160931984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-131297259111429809.post-11908214599158887822011-05-09T03:04:00.001-04:002011-05-09T03:05:01.496-04:00Indian higher educationI haven't posted since January for all sorts of reasons. Anyway, I'm back, and an <a href="http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?271696">essay</a> I wrote about the state of Indian higher education (and the role of the liberal arts) has been carried in <i>Outlook</i>, an Indian newsweekly. The editors chose the title "Beyond Techno-Coolies" (which is definitely not what I, as a White foreigner, would have called it) but I'm pleased that it will generate some controversy and hopefully some useful debate. I did get some flak for the title I didn't choose, and of course from the people for whom "Liberal Arts = Useless Nonsense" while "Engineering = All That is Good in the World". And so it goes...Arthurhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10540615722160931984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-131297259111429809.post-82292292350818216222011-01-25T00:34:00.001-05:002011-03-12T02:10:50.958-05:00Why people ridicule academics<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">It's definitely got something to do with the post-modern titles. I just received a call for papers for an interdisciplinary conference whose theme is "Dissemi(nations): Embedded Identities in Cultural Con/Texts."<br />
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The <a href="http://2011.confutati.org/">conference</a> will be held at the University of Utah and for all I know might be great. But does its theme really need two different examples of non-standard (but hackeneyed) punctuation? The conference "aims to examine various modes of expression that arise as cultures are located, isolated and relocated." A worthy goal, but not one that leaps to mind when I read "dissemi(nations)" or "con/texts". Because those terms aren't original, it feels like a pick from the smorgasbord of po-mo terminology rather than a meaningful intellectual intervention, no matter what the organizers' intentions. We scholars can't blame this on the barbarians at the gates—we do this to ourselves.</div>Arthurhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10540615722160931984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-131297259111429809.post-32047277206387290112011-01-15T00:50:00.001-05:002011-01-15T00:50:51.780-05:00Bad US Transit Infrastructure isn't Just PhysicalI went to check a train fare on njtransit.com this afternoon. NJ Transit is the largest state-wide public transit system in the United States so I was surprised when instead of their site, I reached a page asking if I wanted to renew the domain for njtransit.com. That's what happens when a company forgets to renew its web hosting contract or doesn't pay its bills. What a sad comment on the state of things.Arthurhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10540615722160931984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-131297259111429809.post-37118986261144444302011-01-09T11:54:00.004-05:002011-01-09T12:01:45.346-05:00The Politics of Meat in IndiaEveryone knows that Hindus don't eat beef and Muslims don't eat pork. At least that's how it goes in theory. A lot of my South Asian friends in the States will happily eat anything that moos, oinks, quacks, bleats or scuttles across the seafloor. In the Subcontinent, the entrenchment of cultural norms means that here you rarely get the opportunity to eat beef or pork (just as, for example, it's hard to find goat meat in the US).<br />
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Of course many Indians are vegetarian for religious reasons. The concept of <i>ahimsa </i>(non-violence), which is a part of Hindu and other Indian traditions, can be reasonably assumed to apply to killing animals to eat them. To avoid mistakes, a national labelling system has been in place since 2001. Every food product is marked with either a green dot in a green square or a brown dot in a brown square, the former for purely vegetarian items and the latter for ones containing meat. (Vegetarian for this purpose includes milk and eggs.)<br />
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The segregation of meat is taken very seriously, for example, at Subway. Each Subway restaurant has two queues, "Veg" and "Non-Veg." The rules are strict—I saw a customer bring his veg sandwich to the non-veg guy and ask him to cut it, and he told the man to go to the veg guy. Whatever misgivings I might have about eating meat, the setup itself has a funny way of driving me towards having chicken instead of tofu. Whenever I've stopped by for a sandwich, there's always been a six-foot tall, gym-bunny "Sandwich Artist" making non-veg sandwiches and a waifish guy making veg sandwiches. The message is clear if not scientifically sound. <br />
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The only places in India where you can get pork are Ruby Tuesday and very expensive grocery stores (as far as I know). Notices at Ruby Tuesday proclaim grandly that all of their pork is imported. The reason for this is pork's association with outcastes in India. You only see pigs near the shanties of very poor people, who are so low in the social hierarchy that they literally do not have a caste. The only cuisine in India that features pork is that of the far-flung states bordering Burma, like Nagaland. Nagaland is a region of formerly isolated mountain tribes who met the outside world only when they were attacked by the Burmese and later converted by Baptist missionaries (in fact, percentage-wise it might be the most Baptist state on Earth).<br />
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I am agnostic when it comes to meat. I don't think that killing animals is inherently wrong (my reasons are complicated—suffice it to say that they do not rest on the passage in Genesis giving mankind "dominion... over every living thing that moveth upon the earth"), but I don't think it is morally defensible to inflict unnecessary suffering on animals. That of course is the problem. When you eat a steak, how do you know that the cow was well-treated? Indeed, when you drink milk, how do you know that the cow was well-treated? The only unimpeachable position is veganism (that is, not eating any animal products whatsoever).<br />
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I started to become a vegetarian because I couldn't come up with a satisfactory logic to defend eating meat. I stopped eating pork, reasoning that I rarely ate it anyway. But I stopped my conversion there, calling an uneasy truce with my misgivings. Five years later, I still don't eat pork but for no deeper reason than my own choice to give it up. (Jokes of being a crypto-Muslim aside, there is no religious component.) I don't miss it though. Each year I give up alcohol for a month and I am desperate for a nice glass of lager or Merlot by the end of week two, but I don't find myself ever wanting a bacon sandwich. Living in India is nice because I never have to ask, "Is there pork in that?"Arthurhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10540615722160931984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-131297259111429809.post-16550948483187485822010-12-26T12:16:00.002-05:002018-04-27T12:08:52.996-04:00In which I find myself unexpectedly proud of Delhi University's library<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
As a research scholar, I have to spend a lot of time in libraries. Until I tried to use university libraries in Delhi (to study Indian history, no less), I had no idea how easy I had it back at Columbia. My success rate for finding useful books here is pretty grim, but last week I discovered Delhi University's digital books projects—and it's nothing short of amazing.<br />
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The ambitions of librarians in India, many of whom have had excellent training, are hemmed in by outdated regulations, a lack of funding for the humanities, and of course the prejudices and lack of expertise of their own colleagues. One example of the bureaucratic mindset is that at both Delhi University (DU) and Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), students are not allowed to take personal books into the library. It makes about as much sense as excluding students wearing blue shirts from the library on Tuesdays.<br />
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The major libraries are pursuing various modernization projects, but these have come years too late to be useful for me. Universities have made it a priority to get bibliographic data into digital form, because at the moment the catalogues don't reflect what is actually in the collections. With digital bibliographical data, the online catalogues can be made more useful, and eventually it will be possible to make a union catalogue, meaning that you could search all the Indian university collections from one catalogue. But records are all still spotty, with card catalogues more common (and complete) than computerized ones.<br />
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Consider that I'm just talking about scholarly books in English. It's even worse for other kinds of materials. To get to the Persian section in DU's arts library, you walk past a metal staircase piled high with thousands of disintegrating Sanskrit and Hindi books. The mouldering wave of paper breaks onto the ground floor in geological slow motion. The Persian section itself apparently doesn't have a functioning catalogue, nor have any new Persian books been bought in decades. You locate a text by reading the spines, hoping that the decrepit book you want is actually in the subject section where it is supposed to be. Most of the books are filthy, but a few shelves have sunken into a special kind of squalor. They have been neglected for so long that the books are uniformly black with grime, as though charred. Once I stepped closer to see if I could make out any titles and a friend of mine yelled, "Don't touch those!" He joked that I would need to take a bath if I tried to read them. (By comparison, the Latin section—let's say that Latin in the US is roughly equivalent to Persian in India—at a university library in America might be a little dustier than the rest of the library, but the books are digitally catalogued, well-marked and useable.) <br />
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If the cataloging efforts are a glimmer of hope, then Delhi University's digital books project is a bright sunny day. Without leaving home, I've had access to thousands of pages from books that I would never be able to conveniently use if I trekked up to the university to find them.<br />
<br />
The library has adopted the open-source software DSpace to create <a href="http://library.du.ac.in/dspace/">DSpace@DelhiUniversity</a>, which has some 14,000 books available for download as PDFs. The project is sponsored by the national Department of Information Technology and the library is using a grant of Rs 6,300,000 (=$140,000), as described <a href="http://crl.du.ac.in/statusreport/Aug09-Jun10.pdf.pdf">here</a>. It was meant to have been wrapped up by now, but it seems to be ongoing—$140,000 goes a long way in India. <br />
<br />
Another advantage of DSpace@Delhi University is that Indian copyright law is laxer than US law. Basically any work published in India before 1950 is public domain, while in the US most works before 1923 are public domain. (I offer a fuller account of the differences in the bonus section below.) Because book scanning projects don't have the time or the legal expertise to make judgments about copyright, they use the public domain cut-off date. That means that Indian digital libraries can distribute books printed up to 1950 while an American service like Google Books will generally not show a full view for any book printed after 1923.<br />
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Digital libraries are a technological development that is perfectly suited for India. More people here are computer-saavy than able or willing to use a library. The dead-tree model of gathering knowledge constantly presents questions of access and bureaucratic annoyance (for example, it's not even clear if my affiliation to DU allows me to use DU's library without paying some fee). With digital books, anyone can easily find and obtain a relevant book. <br />
<br />
-- <br />
<b>BONUS: Copyright law in India and the US</b><br />
<br />
Indian copyright law is laxer than American copyright law. India's <a href="http://copyright.gov.in/Documents/CopyrightRules1957.pdf">Copyright Act of 1957</a> makes the span of copyright sixty years. In most cases, the clock starts when the author dies, but for institutional or anonymous works then it's from the year after first publication. By comparison, in the United States, it takes seventy years after the death of an author for a work to become public domain and a work for hire (that is to say, a work created on behalf of a corporation) is copyrighted for either 95 or 120 years. Suspiciously, this term seems to get <a href="https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Sonny_Bono_Copyright_Term_Extension_Act">extended</a> whenever Mickey Mouse, one of the most lucrative copyrights in history, is about to slip into the public domain. Furthermore, the date before which works are automatically public domain has been frozen in the US at 1923.<br />
<br />
There are other differences, such the "fair use" exemption, which is quite narrow in the US law but in Indian law actually allows someone to make three copies of a work.<br />
<br />
[Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. The information I've provided here is gleaned from the web and shouldn't be considered authoritative.]</div>
Arthurhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10540615722160931984noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-131297259111429809.post-12521998483751565772010-12-20T10:08:00.005-05:002010-12-21T00:00:42.847-05:00Gay Pride on the March in IndiaAcross most of the world, gay pride events are held during the summer. Here in Delhi, the third annual parade took place on 28 November. Apparently people fainted from the heat when it was held in June last year.<br />
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It's not just the date that's different in India. The progress of gay rights is moving at a dizzying speed since a Delhi High Court decision in July 2009 overturned the quaintly worded law banning "crimes against the order of nature." In just over a year, being gay has gone from a criminal act to something that can at least be discussed in the context of other rights guaranteed to Indian citizens. But like so many other things in this deeply contradictory country, there is no easy correspondence between gay identity here and in the West.<br />
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[Photos and video <a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/adudney/DelhiGayPride?feat=directlink">here</a>.] <br />
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<a name='more'></a><br />
Sexual orientation takes two very different forms in India. There is both a traditional "love that dare not speak its name" and a brash, demanding "we're here and we're queer" rhetoric. The former has been around since the dawn of time and tends to avoid labels, rather like being on the "<a href="https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Down-low_%28sexual_slang%29">Down Low</a>" in America. It is about attraction and action rather than identity. The latter, demanding attention, is a phenomenon of the last decade or so, and involves taking on a label (queer, gay, lesbian, etc) and using it to defend one's rights in society. I am including the political mobilization of the transgender people called <a href="https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Hijra_%28South_Asia%29"><i>hijra</i></a>s as part of this new identity movement. H<i>ijra</i>s have actually been a highly visible group for centuries and are so much a part of the culture that they are considered auspicious at weddings. They are, however, generally pushed far off into society's margins.<br />
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I am, of course, sketching the contours roughly, but the contrasts are borne out by experience and social science. These identities break along India's class divides and the huge rural/urban divide, but they are increasingly coming into contact. Those trying to make the gay cause more visible in India want to give a name to same-sex attraction that many people feel. (Remember that in the United States, this kind of conversation has been going on for around fifty years—and the long road still ahead for full acceptance of gay people there shows just how quickly things are moving in India.) It is a question of getting society's sense of itself to be more reflective of the reality of different sexualities. Just as when President Ahmadinejad declared at a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_3RUwAJ_MI">speech</a> at Columbia University that "we have no homosexuals in Iran," the denial didn't actually make it so. For people who are struggling with their sexuality, it can be tremendously empowering to realize that they are not alone. Hence the need for events like gay pride marches.<br />
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During the Pride march, which is of course the ultimate expression of gay visibility, the Indian terminology for gay identities was largely in English. The name's official event, "Delhi Queer Pride" had been translated into Hindi as "<i>dillī kwiyar garv</i>" ("<i>garv</i>" is the Hindi word for "pride"). The <a href="https://acrobat.com/#d=A2EVFnld9B7bHncawwyieA">handout</a> from the event is bilingual but the list of words for gay identities is the same in English and Hindi, meaning that a few indigenous Hindi terms like "Hijra" make it into English while quite a few English terms appear in Hindi. (I never cease to be amused by transliterated English words, like "<i>dāik</i>" for "dyke." Once I saw "Pawar Brek" (in Hindi letters) painted on the back of a truck and wondered what part of India such a strange name came from. Then I realized that it was "power brake.") Even people in India who can't speak fluent English use English words all the time, but in this context anti-gay campaigners claim that the English words prove that homosexuality is a Western import.* (Incidentally, <i>The Economist</i> has a great debate <a href="http://www.economist.com/debate/days/view/626">feature</a> right now that debunks the idea that "if the language doesn't have a word for it, people can't think it.")<br />
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The struggle for gay rights here has the remarkable—and perhaps unique quality—of causing virtually all of India’s religious leaders to agree on something. When the Delhi High Court struck down Section 377 of the colonial-era Indian Penal Code (which outlaws homosexuality with the flowery Victorian phrase “crimes against the order of nature”), their condemnation of the decision was nearly unanimous. And for them, of course, gay Indians only exist because of the evil, decadent West (and its Indian enablers). Let's be honest about how stupid an argument this is. Same-gender attraction exists in every society so get over it.<br />
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Since I used to write about gay issues for the South Asian Journalists Association, I was carefully following the media coverage of the parade. It was of course a day for the newspapers to compete for the worst punning headline. <i>The Times of India</i> managed both “Celebrating Life With Gay Abandon” and “Gay To Be Alive.”A few narratives crystalized around the event. Firstly, fewer members of the crowd of more than 2,000 people wore masks this year because technically they were no longer criminals. Secondly, the photogenic sixty-five year-old grandmother Rani Sharma was emblematic of Indian families' increasing acceptance of gay relatives (<a href="http://indiatoday.intoday.in/site/Story/121522/LATEST%20HEADLINES/gays-parade-their-pride-in-delhis-heart.html">here</a> and <a href="http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/Proud-family-members-too-march-along/articleshow/7007748.cms">here</a>). Thirdly, foreigners were prominent. There seemed to be an editorial rule that every photograph that ran had to have at least one white face in it (there were a few exceptions). The copy, such as <i>The Hindustan Times</i>'s wire piece from the Indo-Asian News Service, also reflected this. The article's tone is neutral and professional, but ends incongruously with “A large number of foreigners also took part in the parade.” Did they have two more lines of column space to fill or was there a need to subtly cast aspersions on the event as being "foreign"?<br />
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As I watched from the sidelines, I noticed the lack of facemasks compared to photographs of previous years, and Mrs Sharma was hard to miss. She was near the back of the marchers, smiling but a little diffident after being surrounded by reporters making her the media darling of the event. But the foreigners thing is inter<span style="background-color: white;">esting. It's true that there were more white people than you would see on an average street even in a touristy area like Paharganj or Connaught Place. But I managed to snap lots of pictures of Indians enjoying themselves with nary a foreigner in sight. </span><span style="background-color: yellow;"><span style="background-color: white;">The gay pride parade was not about some Europeans showing up for a good time but for Indian gays to prove that they in fact exist.</span></span><span style="background-color: yellow;"><span style="background-color: white;"> For touchy issues, like gay rights, perceived foreign influence is the kiss of death in a postcolonial society. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: yellow;"><span style="background-color: white;">There is unfortunately still a fascination with foreigners and their mores that can be very off-putting. I find that Indians, who are generally very proud of India, </span></span><span style="background-color: yellow;"><span style="background-color: white;">still </span></span><span style="background-color: yellow;"><span style="background-color: white;">pay an inordinate amount of attention to non-Indians</span></span><span style="background-color: yellow;"><span style="background-color: white;">.</span></span> For example, a few years ago, I was pacing through an exhibition at the Victoria Memorial in Calcutta after a long day. I had come for the historical displays but had wandered into a special exhibition of hundreds of paper fans from around the world. A camera crew ambushed me and asked me for my thoughts. I couldn't resist the possibility of being on television, but at the same time, I knew it wouldn't go well. "I didn't know that there were so many kinds of... fans," I stammered, and it only got worse from there. I didn't watch the news that night to see if my segment made the cut. (Just to be clear, India is not the only place where foreigners are regarded as an object of wonder: When I was living in Germany in 2005, I saw a group of old German ladies at a bus stop literally point and laugh at an African family dressed in their flowing, bright traditional clothes.) <br />
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But back to the debate over gay rights. One quick way of gauging opinion is by reading the comments on news sites on the Internet (I didn't have time this month to do any real reporting). As a media critic, I always had a troubled relationship with Internet comments. Far too much power seems to be concentrated in the hands of uniformed cranks. You feel duty-bound to respond because they are so obviously wrong, and yet you know that you time could be better spent.<br />
<br />
Predictably, the topic of gay rights generated a lot of all-caps, semi-literate back-and-forth between those who are adamantly opposed to seeing gays as human beings and those who are pro-gay rights. There isn't much there that's interesting. However, the revealing comments are the ones that fall in the middle: For example, Virender, who gives his place as <a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Kotdwara,+india&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Kotdwara,+Pauri+Garhwal,+Uttarakhand,+India&z=13">Kotdwara</a> (Google Maps tells me it is a tiny, tiny town in Uttarakhand state), writes:<br />
<blockquote>“gays were adjusted, accepted and given responsibility in the society of this nation. history speaks for it. but this western concepts of parades and open vulgar display will make things difficult for them in the long run specially in this country.”</blockquote>That perfectly captures what I mean by the two kinds of gay identity in India. Virender objects not to the idea that gay people should have rights but to what he thinks is decadent, Western gay "vulgarity." Another similarly interesting idea is that Muslims—whom the Hindu Right generally believe to be responsible for everything bad—are the real cause of intolerance. One commentator writes,<br />
<blockquote>“Dont confuse ideologies borrowed from Islam with "Hindu culture". Hinduism never showed violent intolerance to homosexuals. You are shaming Hindus.”</blockquote>The fact that Hindu leaders use social issues like homosexuality are fodder for their mobs doesn't figure into that commentator's worldview. But it is oddly heartening that a flashpoint issue like this breaks down into the traditional if unfortunate pattern of Hindu versus Muslim. Gay rights have a chance in India in part because they rise above the toxic stew of religious politics.<br />
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After homosexuality was legalized, India has become a de facto member of a new sort of <a href="https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Non_Aligned_Movement">non-aligned movement</a>. If on the one hand western European countries are moving full-steam ahead with gay rights, and on the other a bloc of Arab, African and other countries are determined to keep homosexuality criminal, there is a group of countries in the middle making incremental progress. I count the US among these countries, because while 40% of Americans live in states that formally recognize gay relationships, there are still states where someone can lose his/her job for being gay. India is now by far the most populous of the middle nations.<br />
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The divide in the world was on display recently in two spheres of international politics. First, a UN resolution deploring extra-judicial killings was watered down. A bloc of Arab and African nations successfully <a href="http://www.blogger.com/">cut</a> a specific reference to sexual orientation and replaced it with something vague. (Showing uncharacteristic leadership, US diplomats went on the record <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/21/gay-rights-row-un-resolution">saying</a> they want to get the gay-specific language reinstated.) Second was the choice of Russia and Qatar, neither of which have particularly good records on human rights of any kind, to host the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. <i>The Guardian</i> <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2010/dec/14/blatter-gay-fans-qatar-world-cup">reports</a> that Sepp Blatter, the director of FIFA (the international governing body of professional football, i.e. soccer), gave a very awkward answer when asked about what gay fans should do when the World Cup comes to Qatar in 2022. The article says:<br />
<blockquote>When asked about the issues facing gay fans, Blatter, apparently joking, said: "I would say they should refrain from any sexual activities." He continued then on a more serious note, saying: "We are definitely living in a world of freedom and I'm sure when the World Cup will be in Qatar in 2022, there will be no problems. </blockquote>He went on to explain that FIFA believes in a world without discrimination, and so on. But the damage was done. John Amaechi, an Englishman who is the first openly gay NBA star, bitterly criticised Blatter, apparently taking his words at face value. (Blatter has since <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/football/9297497.stm">apologised</a>—but his apology was so convoluted that the situation has not been clarified.) <br />
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Being gay is illegal in Qatar because sodomy is criminalised in article 201 of the Qatari penal code with a penalty of up to five years in prison. (Just as in India before the sodomy law was struck down, expressing a gay identity is considered synonymous with committing an illegal sexual act.) Article 201 has in the past been used against foreigners, which was a major concern when Cornell University opened up a medical college in Doha, as the <i>Cornell Sun</i> <a href="http://cornellsun.com/node/7470">reported</a>. (Though I should note that the article is being a little Orientalist when it quotes H.A.R. Gibb on the immutability of shariah law since the issue here is the penal code, not Islamic law. The penal code came into force with independence in 1971 and so was presumably written by British colonial officers.)<br />
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So what will happen in Qatar? Or in Africa where American missionaries, starting to lose the battle on home territory, have taken their <a href="http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/01/american-christianism-in-africa.html">anti-gay crusade</a>? I don't know, but things are looking good in both India and America. As I write this, the United States has taken a major step towards recognizing gay rights nationally. The "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy that forced otherwise qualified soldiers out of the military merely for admitting to being gay has cleared the last major hurdle for repeal. Because a strong gay identity exists in Indian cultural history, hopefully the Western practice of self-labeling will merge seamlessly with the fact that India never really institutionalized homophobia until the British period. One day, perhaps soon, we will all see the oppression of gay people as the same kind of immorality as colonialism itself.<br />
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* Though if you read the books I mention in the bonus then it's clear that Indians have historically had plenty of words to refer to same-sex love.<br />
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-- <br />
BONUS<br />
<br />
Three important books of readings and analysis of LGBT cultural history in India are: <br />
<ul><li><i>Same-Sex Love in India: Readings From Literature and History</i>. Ed. Ruth Vanita & Saleem Kidwai (New York: Palgrave, 2001) [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Same-Sex-Love-India-Readings-Literature/dp/0312293240/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1292677472&sr=8-1">Amazon.com</a>] [Amazon]</li>
<li><i>Queering India: Same-Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian Culture and Society</i>. Ed. Ruth Vanita (New York: Routledge, 2002) [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Queering-India-Same-Sex-Eroticism-Culture/dp/0415929504/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1292677510&sr=1-1">Amazon.com</a>]</li>
<li><i>Queer: Despised Sexuality, Law and Social Change</i> by Arvind Narrain (Bangalore, 2004) [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Queer-Despised-Sexuality-Social-Change/dp/8187380918/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1292677552&sr=1-1-fkmr0">Amazon.com</a>]</li>
</ul>A sociological account of men-who-have-sex-with-men ("MSM," which is the preferred term in public health circles for men who do not necessarily self-identify as gay but sleep with other men) in Delhi:<br />
<ul><li><i>Love in a Different Climate: Men who have sex with men in India</i> by Jeremy Seabrook (London: Verso, 1999) [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Love-Different-Climate-Have-India/dp/1859848370/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1292678673&sr=8-1">Amazon.com</a>] </li>
</ul><ul></ul>Arthurhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10540615722160931984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-131297259111429809.post-17346954136088199202010-12-14T12:26:00.000-05:002010-12-14T12:26:36.778-05:00Conan in IndiaConan O'Brien's new show has been on the air for just over a month. I don't like Conan as a performer (though he is a superb writer), and I probably won't watch the show. Still, the AmEx <a href="http://creativity-online.com/work/american-express-conan-obrien-in-india/21780">commercial</a> that aired with the premiere caught my attention. It features Conan careering around Rajasthan in India, delightfully butchering Hindi as Indians call out "Ko-naan! Ko-naan!" The bright colors and stunning backdrops of Rajasthan are on display as Conan races around looking for silk. Of course you can read this as Orientalist blah blah blah, but because of Conan's self-deprecating demeanor, it's all in good fun. The people at Ogilvy & Mather, one of Madison Avenue's renowned firms, made something so elegant that it's jarring when the American Express logo finally appears.Arthurhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10540615722160931984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-131297259111429809.post-30699678149250629382010-11-29T06:23:00.014-05:002010-12-03T12:12:57.554-05:00Hanging out with Hazrat Nizamuddin AuliyaIt was a Thursday night so I could have gone to the movies or to a nice restaurant, but instead I spent the evening with Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya, the fourteenth-century Sufi saint. Every Thursday there is a performance of qawwali music in front of the <i>dargah </i>[shrine]. The musicians sit facing the <i>dargah </i>because technically they're not playing for the spectators but for the saint himself.<br />
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Hazrat Nizamuddin was the head of the Chishti order of Sufis in India and was a friend of the great poet Amir Khusrau, whose tomb is nearby in the same complex. Although in the West Islam has an aura of being against music (and against fun in general), Sufis have long embraced musical performance as part of their worship. It plays a role in <i>zikr</i>, the meditative remembrance of God. In South Asia, the act of remembering God often turns into a rollicking good time.<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a>The whole neighbourhood around the <i>dargah </i>complex is called Nizamuddin, and in some ways it feels like it has barely changed since the saint himself was roaming the narrow alleyways. There are goats tied up contentedly chewing on sticks (unaware that many of them were going to become that evening's <i>biryani</i>) and a couple of young men were tossing bits of food up to the circling crows as a hawk eyed them expectantly from a powerline. The smells from all the restaurants, which range from spacious multi-storey establishments to a guy on the street with a stove and a carton of eggs, mingled with a not unpleasant earthiness. It was crowded and busy, even by Indian standards, and there was an amazing diversity of Islamic clothes on display. People dressed in everything from Saudi robes to a tight but flowing Chinese (probably Uighur) shirt and a long pigtail. The only constant was that almost every man had his head covered.<br />
<br />
Of course some things have changed. Some monuments, like the courtyard around the tomb of the 19th-century poet Mirza Ghalib, have been refurbished with money from the Aga Khan Trust for Culture. The effort is appreciated and yet the place ended up looking a little too clean and generic, like a moorish-revival shopping mall in the States. Hazrat Nizamuddin's tomb itself is lit with blindingly bright lights.<br />
<br />
The way into the shrine complex is through a warren of narrow streets lined with tiny shops selling devotional offerings and places to store your shoes. There was one slightly out of place travel agency by the main gate, a reminder that besides being a tourist attraction this is a place where people like and work. We left our shoes with the official shoe-keeper at the main gate, who dutifully baled our group's footwear with a length of rope and gave my friend a token. (Leaving one's shoes outside is required at Muslim holy sites--violators, like one unfortunate boy who carried his family's shoes right up to Hazrat Nizamuddin's tomb itself, are driven out with dramatic verbal and physical abuse.)<br />
<br />
Inside the shrine was pandemonium. Dozens of beggars, many of them children or old or disabled either sat under painted signs saying things like "do not sit here without invitation" or mingling with the crowd. First we visited Amir Khusrau's tomb, which was stacked high with flowers and cloth. Very serious looking bearded men turned their palms up and prayed as others like myself tried to shuffle past them in the narrow space. Just about everything here was sacred. You could touch the doorway, touch the offerings on the cenotaph, take a bit of offerings which had been sanctified, give offerings and then touch your forehead to the feet of the saint. I took a petal and keep it on my desk for good luck. Nizamuddin's tomb, which was much bigger and brighter, presented the same experience, except here there was a metal bar to keep traffic flowing, which did not stop a man from zooming beneath the barrier and putting his head on the cenotaph for what seemed like a long time just as I was about to take my turn. Interesting that my friend, who is Hindu but also a <i>qawwal </i>(which is to say someone who sings Sufi music), stopped to pray in the tomb, apparently reciting in Arabic. Not just Muslims but Hindus and Sikhs also brought offerings.<br />
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By the time we reached, the performance had started and space was at a premium. My friend knew the old man who was in charge of crowd control as well as being a member of the troupe. In a lordly way, the old man made a place for us at the front, next to the two <a href="https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Harmonium">harmonium</a> players. He was gaunt but sprightly and managed to juggle his roles. He scolded people who blocked the way (people had to be able to circulate around the tomb but also there was meant to be a clear path between the singers and the tomb, because technically the songs are being addressed to the saint). When he did sing—it was more belting than singing, with grand sweeping gestures—it seemed as though he was having a conversation with the saint. Hazrat Nizamuddin didn't reply, but it was very moving. The technical quality of the music was less important than the abundance of feeling. One of the old man's other duties was collecting money that was offered, so he kept jumping up to collect notes being passed to him. He would sweep a note in the dust in front of the saint's tomb and if you were important, he would touch it to the tomb's threshold before dropping it in the money pile in front of the harmonium players. Sometimes he would make change for people, which struck me as funny even though it's perfectly reasonable.<br />
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Of course, this being India, someone started up a saw in the background and sparks flew across the crowd. (Because why not do your construction work in the middle of the most crowded time?) Also, behind a screen that was shaped like a zoo-cage some women were in ecstasy and making howling noises, literally like beasts. Their flowing black clothes made them like ominous shadows behind the white-latticework screen. Eventually they had to be told to shut up.<br />
<br />
The crowd of a few hundred people, which included maybe a half a dozen rather confused looking white people, was enjoying it although they made less noise than I would have expected. One youngish man with his iPhone out filming was rocking out to the music, and a few other people were keeping time with their fingers out. <br />
<br />
The music only went until seven-forty or so because it had to finish in time for the last of the five prayers of the day. The troupe were divided over whether to end the concert or play one more song. They did, finishing just a couple of minutes before the call for prayer sounded. The faithful went to pray, and we went to eat kebabs and tandoori chicken.<br />
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Here's a video of part of the performance. The building at the beginning is Hazrat Nizamuddin's tomb. The elderly usher/singer/money-collector features prominently. <br />
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BONUS: It's a very odd discovery but I've found that Duke Ellington's version of "Take the 'A' Train" (which features Ella Fitzgerald on vocals) is the perfect accompaniment to most walks down a not-very-busy Delhi street. I'm not sure why it works—the contrast between the slow start and the orgiastic trumpet solo maybe or the soothing effect of Ella's voice?—but I've tried it a few times and it, along with some Hindi film songs, is my travelling music here.Arthurhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10540615722160931984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-131297259111429809.post-92147442398127278612010-11-15T23:00:00.002-05:002010-12-01T00:32:35.416-05:00No, no, no. Islamic divorce in India gets strangerIn some interpretations of Sunni law—some 90% of Muslims worldwide are Sunnis rather than Shiites—it is permissible for a man to divorce his wife by saying "<i>talaaq</i>" (divorce) three times. There are various rules about how far apart the <i>talaaq</i>s have to be or how many witnesses there need to be, and there is considerable debate about whether triple <i>talaaq </i>has an sanction in the foundational texts of Islam. The practice is formally banned in a lot of majority Sunni countries, and is unrecognised by (secular) Indian courts, but every once in a while a case comes up that is equal measures tragic and hilarious.<br />
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<span class="content">In 2006, we had the <a href="http://www.blogger.com/goog_41299982">sleeping </a><i><a href="http://www.hindu.com/2006/03/28/stories/2006032814890500.htm">talaaq</a> </i>controversy, in which a man in Bengal happened to divorce his wife by mumbling <i>talaaq </i>in his sleep. Local religious leaders pronounced the marriage dissolved but national bodies like the All India Muslim Personal Law Board</span> argued for sense—as much sense as there can be under the risible circumstances of instant, one-sided divorce—in that saying <i>talaaq </i>has to be intentional.<br />
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Today <i>talaaq </i>is back in the news because a cleric in Deoband, a place in India famous for its conservative brand of Islamic thinking, issued a <a href="http://news.outlookindia.com/item.aspx?701269">fatwa</a> (a religious decision) that if a man divorces his wife by mobile phone and she doesn't hear <i>talaaq </i>three times because of network problems, the divorce is still valid. Yikes. Without entering into the moral or philosophical questions, I find this the worst kind of simplistic application of religious law to modern technology.Arthurhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10540615722160931984noreply@blogger.com0