Category: Politics/History
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Divine Malarkey
The Hindu sense of time is intense; the importance of time as an agency for change, the sense that things that happen come to fruition at a particular moment- now- pervades the great history called the Mahabharata Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternate History SouthAsia emerges from prehistory in the grip of two equally frustrating…
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Robbing Women and Robing Brides
I was miserably sick this past week, for those of you who noticed the blog silence. Antibiotics are being consumed, the appetite is yet to revive, but migraines and blistered eyes no longer conspire to keep the laptop and I at odds. I even read a book last night and it wasn’t shady bed reading.…
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Of Nativity
I, too, am a native. Saying this aloud, a mere whisper lost to the the deep night, is terrifying. The quick phrase feels like the slow stripping of all agency, a rape of my right to speak of the world and its concerns, forced to leave them to ‘better men’. To be native is to…
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Pitching SpaceTime
A pitch for the combined reading of Ranajit Guha, History at the Limit of World-History and Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject. In two interlocking review-essays. was roundly rejected. for it featured most alarming graphs. Limits, in math, are a clever, offside approach to concrete integers. If you apply them to functions, they can illuminate indeterminate…
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Via Media
I was once asked to comment on a paper called “How to Subvert Democracy: Montesinos in Peru” in law school. Montesinos was the Head of Intelligence in Peru in the ‘90s, when Fujimori was in power. Via SIN (how’s that for evocative language?), he bribed his bosses’ way into power. He paid off parliament members, judges,…