Another crack appears in our world as we currently know it. The build up was frightful: troops sent to the region, then tourists and pilgrims made to leave, then political leaders put under house arrest, then rumours spreading, then a blackout and curfew and then a constitutional travesty. I don’t see how this will not […]
New normal
I have been watching, appalled, the most recent Brexit antics by all that miserable gaggle of deplorables in Westminster. What seems to me absolutely shameful, and it is something that the way the media is structured to react to the current-shiniest object, is how it has moved the spectrum of possibility from Leave vs Remain […]
Unconscionable
An unconscionably late post. (Soon I will run out of embarrassed titles for late posts and then there will be a reckoning). Not much has happened in the past week. I have been going for my lessons and finding out a little more about Colombian history and life in Laureles from my teacher. It’s a […]
Two gods
A verse by the Punjab poet Ustad Daman, written in honour of General Zia and quoted in a very good article about him in Dawn: mery mulk de do khuda la elah te martial la ik rehnda a arshan utthay duja rehnda farshan uttay Even if you don’t know Punjabi, if you know the first […]
Troubled and concerned
Day after day I get amazed at the passivity of Americans. It seems particularly noticeable at the moment, with mass protests in Sudan and Hong Kong, with even Brexit bringing hundreds of thousands onto the street. Even as Americans are troubled and concerned about everything – from the concentration camps on the border to the […]
On the fritz
I’ve been on the fritz for a couple of days, throwing mini strops, mostly silently, like a well-bottled beverage. One little eruption actually took place on Metafilter, where there has been a longrunning pair of threads on the site’s white middleclass American orientation and the moderators having only one solution: applying copious amounts of goodwill. […]
Light relief
Fearing a difficult day, but there was something to cheer me up. Possibly fictitious, but the government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province had a live stream on Facebook of a press conference to announce something or other, and apparently forgot to turn off the cat filter first. To think satire is banned in Pakistan.
Chauri Chaura
Nearly twenty years ago, I took a course on South Asian history at a large university in the United States, as part of my undergraduate degree. It was a mid-sized lecture course and had weekly sections, smaller discussion groups. In my section I was the only one from Pakistan, the only Muslim. Most of the […]
Disentangling
The end of our second-last day in Cholula, and while the excitement about Oaxaca is building, so is sadness at leaving. One settles so easily into little routines and habits that then disappear entirely, from knowing exactly which point on the dial of the stove to prepare my tea in the morning, to the habit […]
Clinging on
The European election results are in, with no surprises and will be interpreted by everyone as they think best. I voted for the Greens as the Remainer party that also had a coherent EU manifesto that I largely agreed with. I’d hoped they’d pick up a third London seat, but oh well. All in all, […]