"Partition Dialogues: Memories of a Lost Home" book by Alok Bhalla

Alok Bhalla's new book interviews seven Indian and Pakistani writers about their depiction of 1947 partition in their fiction.

Keki Daruwalla's review in The Hindu

Alok Bhalla has taken the finest Indian and Pakistani novelists who portray the Partition — Krishna Sobti, Intizar Husain, Kamleshwar, Bapsi Sidhwa, Krishna Baldev Vaid and Bhisham Sahni. (I miss Chaman Nahal here.) Through detailed dialogues he jogs their memories, and how they crafted their fiction, wrestling with the Partition's moral, social and spiritual dimensions. For, the Partition spilled over into our souls.
read it here

Eating at Hitler's Cross

Who in their right mind thinks up a restaurant with a Nazi theme, and who in their right mind would want to enjoy a meal at such a place? Of all the absurdities people dredge up in the name of marketing, a resturant named Hitler's Cross will certainly garner publicity: So does it matter if it stamps on a lot of toes: Jewish toes and the toes of every person sensitive to what Hitler stands for. Insane.

new authors beware

Barry Turner asks if new authors get a raw deal and, no surprise here, concludes that they do. I would add that even after the elusive publishing deal, bigger disappointments follow with cursory editing and very little to no marketing. Something has got to change in this industry. Something.

Happy Birthday Pakistan

'Invisible Borders' Indian Muslims

In the wake of the recent Mumbai train bombings, Barkha Dutt asks what it means to be a Muslim in India and why radical Islam has entered India when Issue Kashmir was unable to do so.

Bombay's biggest icons may include Aamir Khan and Shahrukh Khan. But ask an ordinary Muslim in the city just how tough it is to rent a flat in a regular building; the glitzy acceptability of Bollywood makes no difference to his daily life. Our cities are collapsing into ghettos, with invisible borders dividing our people.

And the statistics tell their own sorry story. Less than four percent of India's police force is Muslim; no more than two percent of India's bureaucracy is Muslim; and Muslims are five percent behind the national literacy rate, making them the most educationally backward religious community. Yet if a government appointed committee attempts to gather data on just how representative our political and military institutions are, we accuse it of fomenting communalism.

read rest here.

Author Mohsin Hamid talks to Tehelka

Novelist Mohsin Hamid talks to Shoma Chaudry about India, Pakistan and all the politics that involves. One single lone question on the status of novel 2 might have been nice...

'Tough Day, Great Opportunity'

The audience of the Daily Show with Jon Stewart on Comedy Central has a rather awkward moment during the show on August 10th, 2006 as Jon interviews Aasif Maandvi for a skit-segment called Forced Perspectives on the carnage in Lebanon. It's akin to being caught laughing at a funeral.

'Sending cluster bombs to Israel'

The US is contemplating sending cluster bombs* to Israel with the caveat that they use them carefully in the siege against Hezbollah i.e. do not cause more civilian casualties. I don't think merely being careful is going to stall an addition to the already 900 and counting dead Lebanese civilians, not to mention the close to nine hunderd-thousand displaced citizens. Iran in the meantime supplies Hezbollah, I suppose because they are as 'civilized' in these matters as the US and Israel.
Makes one yearn for the days of civilized warfare where battle fields were places soldiers and only soliders fought it out. In the meantime desperately needed humanitarian aid faces a near impossible journey.

*A cluster bomb functions like a shotgun, covering a wider area with a spread of miniature bombs.The first cluster bomb used operationally was the German SD-2 commonly referred to as the Butterfly Bomb. It was used during World War II to attack both military and civilian targets.

Dalit writes to Laila and Laila writes back

Moorishgirl posts a letter she received from Dalit living in Tel Aviv Isreal asking some very poignant and pertinent questions, as well as her response.

Dear Laila
...I lived in Israel almost all my life. I am sorry to say that I can't remember a moment without a fear for my life (or any other lives). We are under a war condition for the last 57 years, threatened by Arab countries and by terror. Can you imagine the feeling sending your kids to school and feering the bus will explode? Going out to dinner knowing the restaurent is a terror target? Losing your freedom in day-to-day life just because human life is not important to a suicide-bomber??

Dear Dalit
...No, I cannot imagine what it is like to live the way that you do. By the same token, however, I cannot pretend to know what it's like to have lost a home in the Nakbah of 1948 and to become a refugee in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, and elsewhere in the world. I cannot imagine what it's like to be pregnant and die while giving birth at a roadblock. Or to be blown to smithereens by a 'precision-guided' bomb while having dinner inside my home. Or to be at the mercy of an eighteen-year-old soldier who just arrived in Israel two years before from Russia or Ethiopia or New York, and who now has power over whether or not I can get to work.

Update on Desi Reads for Kids and Teens

Pooja Makhijani gives a report on the youth literature panel at SAWCC's fourth annual literary festival, Mixed Messages, in Papertigers.org.

As I was growing up, I would search library shelves in the hopes of finding a character "like me". I never had much luck. One day, my elementary school librarian excitedly handed me a tattered copy of The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling. "It's set in India," she squealed. "It's the perfect book for you!"

"Um... OK," I stammered.

'TeenScreen'- drugging our kids for a better tomorrow.

Children as young as 9, who previously had not thought of the concept of suicide, are being asked invasive and leading questions by TeenScreen such as: Have you tried to kill yourself in the last year? Are you still thinking of killing yourself? Have you thought seriously about killing yourself? Have you often thought about killing yourself? Have you ever tried to kill yourself?" and kids are being lured into doing the suicide survey by TeenScreen's offers of free movie passes, food coupons, pizza parties and $50 mall gift certificates;

I couldn't believe I was reading this. It sounds like something out of Orwell's 1984. But TeenScreen is all-American, a series of tests administered to teenagers to check if they are mentally balanced i.e. normal. Teens are tested for mathematics disorder, reading disorder, disorder of written expression, general anxiety disorder, nightmare disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, and factious disorder all apparently in a bid to check if they are suicidal.
If results are positive they're then give drugs to correct them, or at any rate make them complacent. I would like to think that the Bush administration that backs programs like TeenScreen has only our kids' best interests at heart, but then I would like to think lots of things



link from SAWNET discussion list

Doublespeak

Beshara Doumani, a history professor at the University of California at Berkeley, has collected essays by scholars in Academic Freedom After September 11.

Neve Gordon reviewing for the Boston Globe writes

Immediately after Sept. 11, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), founded by Lynne Cheney and Senator Joseph Lieberman, published a report accusing universities of being the weak link in the war against terror and a potential fifth column. As if the general hint at treason were not enough, an appendix to the report listed the names of more than 100 ``un-American" professors, staff members, and students, and the offending statements they had made.

As Beshara Doumani, a University of California at Berkeley history professor, points out in his compelling introduction to ``Academic Freedom After September 11," Pipes and friends have cynically appropriated the liberal terminology of the New Deal and civil rights eras, employing code words such as balance, fairness, diversity, accountability, tolerance, and not least, academic freedom in order to justify the enforcement of a political orthodoxy that undermines these very values.

read the rest here

An interview with Professor Doumani in InsideHighered.com

Academic freedom is facing its most serious threats since the McCarthy era, according to essays in Academic Freedom After September 11, published this month by Zone Books. Essays in the book — which come from scholars such as Joel Beinin, Judith Butler and Robert Post — both focus on current issues and offer a historical perspective. Beshara Doumani, a professor of history at the University of California at Berkeley who edited the volume, recently responded to questions about its themes.
Q. How severe do you consider the attacks on academic freedom, post-9/11?
...This comes at a time when the academy is in the midst of an economic and institutional transformation driven by the increasing commercialization of knowledge. Buffeted between the forces of anti-liberal coercion and neo-liberal privatization, colleges and universities are more vulnerable than ever to the myriad ways in which outside government agencies and special interest groups are reshaping the landscape of intellectual production.
read the rest here