tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-66296642008-05-11T20:48:55.224-05:00Amardeephttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11408720639556886665noreply@blogger.comBlogger1148125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6629664.post-69033579840640191832008-05-07T09:40:00.002-05:002008-05-07T09:42:33.371-05:00

Though I've often disagreed with Fareed Zakaria on specific policy questions, I've always been challenged and interested by his way of thinking about big issues. I found Zakaria's earlier book The Future of Freedom stimulating, if imperfect. Zakaria seems to be especially good at synthesizing complex issues under the umbrella of a signature "big idea," without choking off qualifications or

Amardeephttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11408720639556886665noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6629664.post-24950381184183709472008-05-05T07:55:00.005-05:002008-05-06T06:29:13.433-05:00

I was surprised by how much the others in my book group didn't like Manil Suri's The Age of Shiva. The biggest complaint was from the mothers in the group (including my better half), who didn't like Suri's use of a first/second person narrative method (the novel is written in the voice of a woman named Meera, addressed to her son, Ashvin). Several people said they didn't think Suri really pulled

Amardeephttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11408720639556886665noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6629664.post-55540218420980236632008-04-28T16:31:00.002-05:002008-04-28T16:36:52.766-05:00

I was recently in cool Vancouver to give a talk at a conference on Modern Punjabi Literature. The conference was at the University of British Columbia, and it was hosted by the Asian Studies department (which has a strong program in Punjabi language instruction, part of which includes the study of literature). The community was invited in, and they most definitely came -- including a number of

Amardeephttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11408720639556886665noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6629664.post-17369387333200788152008-04-11T14:34:00.002-05:002008-04-11T14:40:36.535-05:00

In the next couple of weeks, I'm going to start uploading photos to Flickr again -- after a long pause. (Expect some new photos of the little one. Also, hopefully I can get some of the cherry blossoms before they fall from the trees...)

Amardeephttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11408720639556886665noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6629664.post-38289330116844936092008-04-11T09:55:00.000-05:002008-04-11T09:56:40.752-05:00

The New York Times has a behind-the-scenes look at a new version of Phillip Glass's modernist opera, "Satyagraha," which is playing at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York until May 1. There is also a companion video piece, which I could watch but not listen to from the computer I'm working on this morning. The libretto uses the Bhagavad-Gita as a source, and the opera as a whole aims to

Amardeephttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11408720639556886665noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6629664.post-16146335718852279642008-03-28T15:18:00.001-05:002008-03-28T15:18:48.864-05:00

Start with William Deresiewicz in The Nation, for what ails the English department, according to him (via English @ Emory). It's been said many times that English enrollments have declined nationally because of "theory," but that's been shown, I think conclusively, not to be true. (A starting point might be this 2003 ADE report (PDF), which shows that the biggest decline in the number of

Amardeephttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11408720639556886665noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6629664.post-38046425166900603392008-03-27T08:40:00.003-05:002008-03-27T08:50:50.736-05:00

There's a profile in the New York Times of Chetan Bhagat (thanks, Pocobrat), author of One Night @ The Call Center, which was released in the U.S. on paperback last year. Bhagat, an author few in the west will have heard of, has now become the biggest English-language author in Indian history: But he has also become the biggest-selling English-language novelist in India’s history, according to

Amardeephttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11408720639556886665noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6629664.post-2782655035438815872008-03-25T13:13:00.000-05:002008-03-25T13:14:31.388-05:00

The New York Times has an article on Sranan Tongo, the creole language that is spoken by a majority of people in Suriname, in South America. Suriname, like Guyana and Trinidad, has a large Indian diaspora population from the 19th century, people who came across originally as indentured laborers. For a country of just 470,000 people, the linguistic and cultural diversity is truly astonishing:

Amardeephttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11408720639556886665noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6629664.post-23257457294185122752008-03-20T12:21:00.000-05:002008-03-20T12:22:40.483-05:00

Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke died earlier this week, at the age of 91. He was one of the best-known sci-fi writers of the 20th century, the author behind 2001: A Space Odyssey, among many others. As is well-known, Clarke moved to Ceylon/Sri Lanka in 1956 -- in large part for the year-around access to diving -- and remained there until his death. The locale inspired at least one of

Amardeephttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11408720639556886665noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6629664.post-53895916158271557772008-03-14T15:16:00.001-05:002008-03-14T15:18:08.048-05:00

Via 3QD, I came across an article in the Washington Post about a 10 year research project, based in Delhi but funded by the Ford Foundation, to interview thousands of survivors of the 1947 Partition. The story begins with a powerful anecdote: Every year in March, Bir Bahadur Singh goes to the local Sikh shrine and narrates the grim events of the long night six decades ago when 26 women in his

Amardeephttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11408720639556886665noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6629664.post-13748830438667004612008-03-12T14:05:00.005-05:002008-03-13T13:00:57.710-05:00

I first learned about Alan Shapiro’s poetry a couple of years ago, when someone suggested I read his book Song & Dance. I loved it, and then when a colleague suggested Tantalus in Love, I ate that up as well. This spring, I decided try and teach Tantalus in Love in my “Introduction to the English Major” course at Lehigh, along with a couple of essays by Shapiro (including this moving memoir-like

Amardeephttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11408720639556886665noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6629664.post-49658156052368326672008-03-07T11:34:00.003-05:002008-03-07T12:03:07.945-05:00

A friend gave me a copy of A Golden Age, by Tahmima Anam, as a present a couple of months ago, and I finally got around to reading it this week. A Golden Age, it turns out, is a very strong first novel, written in a direct, natural style, and I wholeheartedly recommend it. Anam's is the first novel put out by a western publisher that I know of to have Bangladesh's war for independence as its

Amardeephttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11408720639556886665noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6629664.post-84727543180674530812008-03-05T16:22:00.002-05:002008-03-05T16:29:40.954-05:00

This past Sunday I went down to the University of Pennsylvania for a rare, open Q&A session with Kal Penn. As readers may remember from Anna's earlier post on the subject, Penn is at Penn this spring, teaching a class on representations of Asian Americans in the Media. He's also shooting episodes of "House" (go, House), and stumping for Obama in his free time, though with that schedule I'm not

Amardeephttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11408720639556886665noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6629664.post-58990568030963357572008-02-29T10:44:00.002-05:002008-02-29T10:49:21.926-05:00

Via Crooked Timber (and also 3QD), there is a learned critique by Pratap Bhanu Mehta in Indian Express, of the recent "engineering" of independence for Kosovo by western European powers and the U.S. The key paragraph in the argument for our purposes (i.e., with South Asia in mind) might be the following: In the 19th century, there was a memorable debate between John Stuart Mill and Lord Acton.

Amardeephttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11408720639556886665noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6629664.post-34827867642999011662008-02-26T10:29:00.003-05:002008-02-26T10:35:31.199-05:00

SAMAR Magazine has a new issue up on its website on elections -- both within South Asia and here in the U.S. They have essays on the recent election in Gujarat, the Parliamentary elections in Pakistan, the upcoming elections in Nepal, a piece by an SAFO member, and a piece on the Desi vote in New York. There's also a short essay by myself, on "Skinny Candidates With Funny Names," which brings

Amardeephttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11408720639556886665noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6629664.post-60065566000466996652008-02-26T09:44:00.003-05:002008-02-26T09:55:20.578-05:00

There is a new book of general interest literary criticism by John Mullan out, called Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature. It's getting great reviews in the British papers, and I wish I could have assigned it back when I was teaching "Secrecy and Authorship." (Better yet, I wish I had written it myself!) Here are two snippets from the Guardian review. First, some arguments on why

Amardeephttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11408720639556886665noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6629664.post-44191091309891148372008-02-23T08:16:00.008-05:002008-02-26T12:24:44.909-05:00

I've had Dora Ahmad's anthology, Rotten English on the shelf for some months, but didn't get around to reading the introduction and sampling some of the stories and poems it contains until now. The introduction is in fact posted in its entirety at Amitava Kumar's "Politics & Culture" online journal here. Also, a brief review of the anthology, by Mandakini Dubey, is here. The introduction is

Amardeephttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11408720639556886665noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6629664.post-44414091431137485842008-02-15T11:16:00.002-05:002008-02-15T11:58:55.820-05:00

There have been quite a few stories in the past couple of weeks about the issue of translation in Indian literature, most of them stemming, I think, from the annual Jaipur Literary Festival which took place last month. (Incidentally, I've been keeping up with these stories through The Literary Saloon, by far the best blog for world literature out there right now. All the links below come from

Amardeephttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11408720639556886665noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6629664.post-42179340277257603222008-02-14T11:01:00.000-05:002008-02-14T11:02:10.663-05:00

Via Chapati Mystery, a fifteen minute short film called "The Little Terrorist," which was nominated for an Oscar for best short in 2005. If you have fifteen minutes, you can watch it here (the first 30 seconds or so are black; be patient): The video appears to have been posted by the production company itself, so you can watch in good conscience. According to the film's website, it was filmed

Amardeephttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11408720639556886665noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6629664.post-51687261299130834862008-02-07T16:54:00.000-05:002008-02-07T16:57:28.206-05:00

Hi folks, I have been on a bit of a hiatus to meet some writing deadlines. Hopefully I will be back blogging somewhat regularly next week. I find that whenever I'm finishing difficult projects -- going all the way back to my dissertation days, in 1999-2000 -- I end up listening to one particular song by Everything But The Girl. It's not a conscious thing; I just seem to always find it in my MP3

Amardeephttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11408720639556886665noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6629664.post-62441690356507243342008-01-25T11:34:00.000-05:002008-01-25T11:35:24.159-05:00

There's an article in the January/February issue of The Atlantic about Bangladesh. Authored by Robert D. Kaplan, it's called "Waterworld," and it starts out with a long, perhaps sensationalist account of what Bangladesh might have to look forward to because of global warming -- a scenario which wasn't very surprising to me at least. (This much we knew from Al Gore.) There is also a bit about the

Amardeephttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11408720639556886665noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6629664.post-74999148322553040682008-01-24T11:13:00.000-05:002008-01-24T11:16:14.785-05:00

In the January 22 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Jeffrey Young writes about an experiment being conducted by Noah Wardrip-Fruin, a Communications professor at UC-San Diego. Wardrip-Fruin is publishing segments of his book, Expressive Processing, on a blog, with the hope that feedback from commenters might be as effective as traditional peer-review. The book is to be formally

Amardeephttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11408720639556886665noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6629664.post-48815320003757336412008-01-22T16:11:00.000-05:002008-01-22T16:12:48.359-05:00

Via the Literary Saloon, an article in the Economic Times on the upcoming formal distribution of Harlequin Mills & Boon romance novels in India. These novels have of course been available in South Asia for many years -- but mostly via redistribution and consignment. It's only now that Harlequin is planning to start distributing its books in India directly: For most Indian readers, it will come

Amardeephttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11408720639556886665noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6629664.post-64274612530051059872008-01-22T13:47:00.000-05:002008-01-22T13:55:16.893-05:00

My co-editor and I are finally wrapping up the issue of of South Asian Review we've been guest-editing. The essays are in good shape, and we're now working on the introduction. I wanted to make some comments on the "state of South Asian literary studies," but as I've been writing, it's occurred to me that I don't know a great deal about how widespread "South Asian literature" really is in the

Amardeephttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11408720639556886665noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6629664.post-87845072871840539892008-01-17T10:50:00.000-05:002008-01-17T10:55:32.570-05:00

From a recent New York Times article on India's public education system, is a public school in Lahtora, which I believe is in the state of Bihar: Ouch. (Click on the photo to see the original, larger version at the Times.) Interestingly, the article (again by Somini Sengupta), shows that the problems in the system aren't necessarily simply created by a lack of funds. Quite a bit of money is

Amardeephttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11408720639556886665noreply@blogger.com