What I was thinking about a year ago

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.

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 The Guardian’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.

Courageous Syrian blogger abducted (updated)

 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, reports The Guardian. 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.

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.


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 abducted two days ago and remains missing, according to two posts on her blog by her cousin. According to The Guardian, which profiled her in early May, she is a dual citizen of Syria and the United States. (Ironically, the Guardian 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?


I first learned of Amina when someone sent me a link to her post "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.


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.


Nothing remotely as dramatic happens on my blog--and I hope to keep it that way. My thoughts are with Amina.

The Politics of Meat in India

Everyone 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).

Gay Pride on the March in India

Across 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.

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.

[Photos and video here.]

In which I get quoted in a Yahoo! News India article whose premise I reject

A recent post in Yahoo! News India by Nitin Pai called "We Are Not South Asian" cites some research I did for SAJAforum about the origins of the term "South Asia." I wrote two years ago that its first modern usage recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1951 and that it was clearly invented to more-or-less cover "the nation-states created out of the former territories of British India" without saying that ungainly phrase every time.

The gist of Mr Pai's article is that "South Asia" is not only geographically misleading but more importantly that it creates a false identity, namely that it tricks us into thinking there are people called "South Asians" when there are really only Bangladeshis, Indians, Pakistanis, etc. I take exception to both lines of reasoning.

Strange Fruit: The "Ground Zero Mosque" thing is racism...

An incident at another protest (of the non-mosque which is not actually at the World Trade Center site) as described by The Record, a northern New Jersey newspaper:

At one point, a portion of the crowd menacingly surrounded two Egyptian men who were speaking Arabic and were thought to be Muslims.

"Go home," several shouted from the crowd.

"Get out," others shouted.

In fact, the two men – Joseph Nassralla and Karam El Masry — were not Muslims at all. They turned out to be Egyptian Coptic Christians who work for a California-based Christian satellite TV station called "The Way." Both said they had come to protest the mosque.

America the secular

People who invoke the Founding Fathers as evidence that our nation has slipped from an ideal sadly tend to be themselves more doctrinaire and closed-minded than the Founding Fathers were. It is an unfortunate reality that society allows people who are reactionaries to call themselves patriots, while people who think holistically about social and political problems are pushed from one unsatisfying label to another. “Liberal” went from being a positive identity to a slur and its preferred replacement, “progressive,” now too is more often employed as invective than not. Those who style themselves defenders of liberty, no matter how absurd their factual or ethical claims are shown to be, have been allowed to monopolize Americanness (which is a failure of both the Left and the Center in our politics). To my mind their narrow definitions of patriotism demean our nation because they require us to forget our history.

The abuse of history by people who should know better (Newt Gingrich, for example, has a PhD in history) warrants reflection. Consider the proposition that the United States was founded as “a Christian nation,” an erroneous assumption from which many others flow. Christianity has a privileged place in our society for legitimate historical and cultural reasons but a not insignificant minority of Americans believe our government today should be openly Christian even though the Founding Fathers explicitly rejected that option. If devout Christians feel under threat because of workplace emails explaining Yom Kippur and Ramadan (which incidentally begins today) that is only because we as a nation have forgotten our founding principles: Everyone's faith, whether familiar or unfamiliar to the majority of Americans, is equal.

I don't think this would ever happen in the US...

Jón Gnarr, the Mayor of Reykjavik, Iceland, came to the city's gay pride parade dressed in drag (he's straight and married). Here's the picture of the comedian-turned-politician. But maybe this isn't a surprise from the country whose Prime Minister, Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir, is the only openly-gay head of government in the world.

On a very different but still Icelandic topic, I just learned that Icelanders don't have surnames. I knew there are a lot of "X-sson" ["son of X"] and "X-dóttir" ["daughter of X"] names around but I figured that was a relic like "Johnson" in English. But no, it turns out that they are real patronymics: Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir actually is the daughter of Sigurður, and you have to call her by her full name or as "Jóhanna" rather than "Ms Sigurðardóttir," which doesn't make any sense. Phonebooks in Iceland are alphabetical by first name but apparently also list a person's profession in order to reduce confusion. Having found out all of this, I really want to take advantage of one of Icelandair's cheap flights.

Eerie silence from anti-same-sex marriage legal minds after Prop 8 ruling

Round one of the federal Prop 8 trial ended last Wednesday when Judge Vaughn Walker released his findings, handing the pro-same-sex marriage side a resounding victory. The trial was a historic event because for the first time in America history, homophobic people (who claimed repeatedly they were not homophobic) were forced to present evidence supporting their views in federal court and they failed spectacularly. Stripped of innuendo or recourse to religious doctrine, there was nothing for them to say. The lead anti-same-sex-marriage lawyer, Chuck Cooper, even let slip during closing arguments that felt he didn't need to offer evidence (ctd at p 10 in Walker's ruling). That won't fly anymore.

Digital ink was spilled across the web celebrating the eloquence and rational underpinnings of Judge Walker's decision, as well as its canny construction. It was designed to appeal to Justice Kennedy, who will be, as usual, the swing-vote when the case inevitably arrives at the Supreme Court in a year or two. (Dahlia Lithwick offers an excellent analysis in Slate). For me what was most interesting were the reactions from people opposed to same-sex marriage in the wake of this defeat.

Joel Stein's racism problem (sigh)

In next week's issue of Time (it's already up on the web and has been making the rounds of the blogosphere), there is a painfully unfunny observation column by Joel Stein called "My Own Private India." It's a comparison between the lilywhite Edison, NJ of his childhood and the much browner Edison of today. (According to the 2000 census, Edison has the highest concentration of Indian-Americans in the country at about 18%.)

I wanted to write a detailed post to explain what exactly makes me so uncomfortable about the piece but Sepia Mutiny beat me to it in a post that is as hilarious as Stein's article is cringe-worthy. My advice, seconded by SM, comes down to this: If you're going to toe the line between racism and comedy based on race, which is exactly what Stein is trying to do, then you have to have a point (or get a free pass by being a member of the ethnic group you're satirizing). That's what seems to be lacking in Stein's essay--no one on the web seems to be able to figure out why he would have written something like this except that the author thinks it's funny, which isn't enough when talking about race.

Ivy League follow-up

I argued a few days ago that the Ivy League is held to a very strange standard, which results in professions of love or hatred but nothing in between. Not surprisingly, politics often uses it for a bit of rhetorical point-scoring.

Rick Santorum, the hyper-conservative former Senator from Pennsylvania who regularly says completely insane things, also has a reflective side. He nicely sums up what he considers President Obama's detachment from "the American people" (all errors in the original):

Obama is detached form the American experience.  He just doesn’t identify with the average American because of his own background.  Indonesia and Hawaii.  His view is from the viewpoint of academics and the halls of the Ivy league schools that he went to and it’s not a love of this country and an understanding of the basic values and wants and desires of it’s people.  And as a result of that, he doesn’t connect with people at that level.

So in essence, if you've had anything to do with the State of Hawaii or an Ivy League university then you're not really American. (Unless of course you're Donald Rumsfeld, George W. Bush, Charles Krauthammer, John Ashcroft or one of the many, many other conservative bigwigs who darkened the halls of the Ivy League--then somehow your elite education does not cloud your judgment about the hoi polloi.) Last time I checked, that's not the way it works.

(Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan.)

UPDATE (29 September 2010): Amazingly, according to Newsweek, Christine O'Donnell, the batty Sarah Palin-backed Republican candidate for Senate in Delaware, has claimed to have studied at both Princeton and Oxford. Of course neither is true and she only got her bachelor's degree last year. The incident shows how even those who most vociferously oppose academic elitism are in thrall to it (in the same way that it cannot be coincidence that so many anti-gay preachers have been caught carrying on same-sex affairs with parishioners and rentboys).

Pruning the Ivy: Why I don't believe in the tyranny of elite universities

I’ve met plenty of arrogant, entitled people—and I make no apology for my cordial detestation of them—in the decade I’ve spent at two Ivy League universities (Princeton, Columbia). When people generalize about the Ivy League as an institution, it seems to me, they’re actually expressing their perceptions, right and wrong, of the people who have attended Ivy League universities. But when you consider the fact that there are nasty people in every walk of life and in every organization, blaming elite universities for having a percentage of unpleasant people is unfair. It cannot be an admissions office’s job to figure out whether someone is a nice person or not.

The conversation about the role of elite universities in American life yields no middle ground. On one side are the people who honestly believe that the universities in the Ivy League (eight old, private institutions on the East Coast that happened to have football teams in the 1930s) are the points of a golden compass keeping America on its bearings and producing the only people really worth talking to. The other side argues that the leafy campuses are bastions of privilege and represent the worst of our society, the preserve of a self-perpetuating elite that is responsible for American arrogance abroad, the collapse of our financial system at home and general mediocrity. Many of the fiercest critics themselves went to an Ivy League university and were horrified by some of their boorish classmates.

To have and have not

For months now, American politics has had the inertia of a banana republic's government with endless machinations that led to no real policy. So today healthcare has been voted on for what feels like the forty-seventh time, and finally, for better or for worse, our government has managed to accomplish something sweeping. I had a taste of two different political worlds today: one in first class on a flight from Los Angeles to Chicago and the second in a Chicago cab with a chatty driver.