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‘Empire,’‘Self-Government,’ and ‘Religious Conflict’
In The Colors of Violence, an attempt to contribute ‘a depth-psychological dimension to the understanding of religious conflict, especially the tensions between Hindus and Muslims [in India]‘, Sudhir...
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Children and Nostalgia
I often find myself talking or writing about nostalgia. As I said here a little while ago: I’m an immigrant; nostalgia and homesickness are supposed to be my perennial conditions. In that same post, I...
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Fearful Reveries, Penal Colonies and Death in the Dark Ocean
In Everyman (Vintage, 2006), Philip Roth writes of his central protagonist’s fears that intrude into an otherwise idyllic sojourn by the sea: The only unsettling moments were at night, when they walked...
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RIP Nelson Mandela
I must have been an extraordinarily ignorant teenager because the first time I heard of Nelson Mandela came only when I saw The Specials perform ‘Free Nelson Mandela‘ on the BBC’s Top of the Pops. Who...
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Language and Identity: The Case of Punjabi
My last name is a giveaway: I’m a Punjabi. But I’ve never lived in the Punjab and I have yet to master its language. The story of my attempts to do so reveals familiar struggles—by people like you and...
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Lessius and the Fear Theory of Atheism
The ‘fear theory’ of the origin of religion is sometimes traced back to Democritus and Lucretius; it may be found too, in David Hume‘s Natural History of Religion. In its most general form, mankind...
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Book Release Announcement: Eagles Over Bangladesh
Some readers of this blog might remember that I write on military aviation history; more specifically, the history of the Indian Air Force (IAF), and especially its role in India’s post-independence...
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From ‘Filling the Sky’ to ‘Sharing the Earth’
In On the Town: One Hundred Years of Spectacle in Times Square (Random House, New York, 2006), Marshall Berman, in the chapter ‘The Street Splits and Twists’, which, among other things, describes the...
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The Cade Rebellion and the Republican Party
Jack Cade, the leader of the Cade Rebellion, is an entertaining Shakespearean character (Henry VI, Part 2), well equipped by the Bard with many memorable lines. So are his followers, one of whom utters...
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The American Tragedy of Willie Bosket
The story of Willie Bosket, now serving a life sentence, due only to be released from solitary confinement in 2062, and once described as New York state’s most dangerous prison inmate, is the kind of...
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The New York State Assembly is First Amendment-Illiterate
Earlier this morning, on both my Facebook and Twitter pages, I wondered aloud Is the Empire State particularly hostile to academic freedom? Is it particularly illiterate about the First Amendment? The...
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A Professional Businessman, Not a Professional Pakistani
Hanif Kureishi and Stephen Frears‘ My Beautiful Laundrette makes most of its viewers laugh a lot. My personal favorite of its many rib-ticklingly subversive moments came–as it seemingly did for many...
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An “Orphan’s Sense of History”
Today I plunder Divisadero again, for a personal note: Those who have an orphan’s sense of history love history. And my voice has become that of an orphan. Perhaps it was the unknown life of my mother,...
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Hagiography as Biography: Turning Writers into Saints
Tim Parks wonders why biographies of writers flirt with hagiograpy, why they are so blind to their subjects’ faults: With only the rarest of exceptions…each author is presented as simply the most...
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History as Chronicle of the Inevitable
From Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America: [A]s Lindbergh’s election couldn’t have made clearer to me, the unfolding of the unforeseen was everything. Turned wrong way round, the relentless...
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Social Media From Beyond the Grave
Charles Simic describes an ingenious and profitable aspiration for immortality: [The] poet Mark Strand…told me excitedly one day that he had invented a new kind of gravestone that….would include…a slot...
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Aristophanes’ Sausage-Seller and the Tea Partier
I have just finished writing a draft review of Lee Fang‘s The Machine: A Field Guide to the Resurgent Right (New York: The New Press, 2013); it will appear shortly in The Washington Spectator. As I...
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Losing and Gaining Citizenships
I became an American citizen more than fourteen years ago. Ironically, my decision to do so was prompted by my leaving the US–for what was supposed to be a two-year stint as a post-doctoral fellow in...
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The Black Absence in Academic Philosophy
Jason Stanley recently posted the following interesting status message on his Facebook page: The first sentence of this article is “Nationwide, just over 5 percent of all full-time faculty members at...
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The Empire State Building: From Picture to Window View
I’m writing this post on the second floor of the CUNY Graduate Center (to be more precise, in the library). My desk is by a window, and looking out from it, I can see the intersection of Fifth Avenue...
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