Monthly Archives: July 2008

My dear friend Salman Chishty is holding an exhibition at the death anniversary (Urs=Union) celebrations of Khawaja Muinuddin Chishty. This is such an innovative tribute to the great Chishty saint. I recall seeing some of these works that he was collecting in Ajmer earlier this year.

This story from the Times of India came as a pleasant surprise …

AJMER: The Sufi message of peace and harmony is being propagated through an exhibition of paintings called ‘Sufi art exhibition’ organized by Salman Chishti, a Sufi Scholar and a curator of art paintings.

He is displaying his collection of 100 paintings on handmade khadi paper at the Chishti Manzil here. The theme of exhibition revolves around calligraphy and paintings depicting Sufi values.

At the exhibition, the Sufi paintings of Najmul Hasan Chishti, a khadim of the Khwaja and a calligraphy artist. The unique feature of this exhibition is the representation of the saying of Sufis in calligraphy, along with its meaning illustrated through a painting in the background.

The principal essence of Najmul’s works is portraying life in ‘Sufi Islam’ and especially on ‘Sama, a form of mediation, widely practiced by the Sufi ‘dervish’. One can observe Rumi poetry in many of his paintings. He had beautifully portrayed the whirling ‘dervishes’ in ecstasy. (more…)

My bright, young friend Imaduddin (left) has written this excellent, terse review of the engaging book White Mughals.

Yesterday when he emailed me this text, I was intrigued by his views as well as envious of his ability to say a lot in so few words. I enjoyed the book for the era it evoked with such craftsmanship and tenderness. However, Imaduddin says it all:

Quick and dirty impressions of White Mughals by William Dalrymple

Beautiful prose with a significant point brought out: that the British DID integrate in India prior to their discriminatory laws against mixed race progeny of the 1780s, the policy that East India Company servants would be older when they arrived in India, the arrival of white memsahibs and the arrival of condescending, colonial attitudes. Dalrymple finds that a third of Company servant wills bequeathed property to native wives, concubines and children until the afore mentioned advents, after which wills including native family dropped to almost none.

Vivid depictions of the court life and society of perhaps India’s most cultured city, Hyderabad, are brought out in this book, as are the enlightened, seeking attitudes of early British Company servants who integrated beautifully into Mughal society, as had the Portugese into Indian society earlier – as had every other foreigner invader into India, an India which had turned rugged Mughal warriors into artsy Rennaisance men.

The love story of Khair un Nissa, cousin to an ambitious minister in the Nizam’s court, and James Kirkpatrick, the Company’s Resident in Hyderabad, is the thread that brings all these themes together, but is unnecessarily long. If I were Dalyrymple’s editor, I’d have cut this 500 page book by a fifth – there is much repitition.

If you don’t have time to read love stories and are interested in historical commentary on India, read the first 57 pages. That will be enough.

This is a great song from a brilliant, but less known film Zakhm (wound). The film dealt with the thorny issue of communalism during the Bombay riots of 1990s; and how the protagonists’ concurrently bear Hindu and Muslim identities making it difficult for them to side with one particular group. In the final analysis, the film turns the whole subject around and articulates a strong yet subtle message of humanism.

Galli mein aaj chand nikla (The moon has re-appeared in my lane) has an old-world feel about it; the composition invokes the age of early Bollywood music and the lyrics are quite moving as well.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WARrIXDf_4Y]

The captioned article of mine appeared in News on Sunday a week ago. I was quite glad to note that the NEWS wrote an editorial on this subject and picked up a few concerns highlighted in my longer piece. I have reproduced it at the end of this post.

A little news item that appeared a few weeks ago was ignored by our all-knowing analysts and TV channels. Reportedly, the Federal Public Service Commission failed to recruit all the vacancies that were advertised for the CSS competitive examination held in 2007. Out of 290 available posts, the number of successful candidates in the 2007 CSS competition was merely 190, leaving almost 100 vacancies unoccupied.

In the photo above Founder of Pakistan Mohammad Ali Jinnah is seen talking to Pakistani Civil Servants (circa 1947)

Last year, too, the government could not get enough number of successful CSS candidates to fill in the available posts and 47 vacancies could not be filled. Such instances have occurred before but given the state of unemployment this is, to put it mildly, shocking.

The truth of the matter is that entering the civil service is no longer an alluring career option for the talented young men and women of this country. Perhaps, the greatest damage to the attractiveness of the civil service came in the wake of the devolution plan that rendered the most coveted service group — District Management Group – unpalatable. Within days, the district administrators had no prescribed career-paths and that they had to be subservient to small time political cronies of the central political elites. (more…)

Guardian has compiled an interesting list of writers and their rooms here. Here’s a detailed account of Kureishi’s room:

“The garden gnome with his bottom showing on the desk was given to me by my son. I’ve got three sons – 13-year-old twins and an eight year old – and almost all the objects you see on the shelves are to do with them: they are of no intrinsic value but they remind me in some way of my boys.

The photographs are also mainly of my kids. And above the desk there’s a very sexy picture of Kate Moss. I think every writer needs a picture of Kate Moss in their room as an inspiration. Kate is from South London like me, and, indeed, like my girlfriend, also a Croydon girl.

I’ve got thousands of CDs because I always listen to music when I’m writing. I’ve done it since I was a teenager, when I first started writing in my bedroom in Bromley. Silence makes me feel rather uncomfortable, nervous. (more…)

South Asian Cooperation and the Role of the Punjabs. Tridivesh Singh Maini. New Delhi: Siddharth Publications , 2007 

South Asian Cooperation and the Role of the Punjabs is a book that approaches the topic of conflict resolution with a difference. Trividesh Singh Maini’s book does not approach peaceful cooperation from the normative security framework. Nor, for that matter, does the author take the increasingly emergent economic approach to conflict resolution despite the fact that the book’s content deals with the subject of regional cooperation. Alternatively, Maini’s book helps its reader understand the dynamics of cooperation and peace among members of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation or SAARC (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Afghanistan and the island nations of Sri Lanka and Maldives) by presenting a cultural analysis.

This use of culture is persuasive. The author posits himself and his book as scholarship that thinks outside the bureaucratic box of normal research on South Asia with its vested interests in the region to reveal the “emotional” trajectory of cooperation that is occurring in this region. Using culture to support his thesis, Maini illustrates for the reader various cultural exchanges between two cities, Amritsar in East Punjab in India and Lahore in West Punjab in Pakistan. These include visits to religious shrines, literary exchanges and especially recent transportation events such as the initiation of bus services to help people meet their relatives on the other side of the border. (more…)

My op-ed piece that was published in the NEWS, Pakistan 

On these erudite pages, and elsewhere, there has been much ado about the fact that now the ruling coalition should split in response to the great betrayals perpetrated by Asif Ali Zardari. In classic machismo laden bravado, the honorific narratives have been urging Nawaz Sharif and his party to take the bold step and stick to their “principled” stand. What is interesting about these exhortations is the brazen rendering of political discourse in black or white terms.

Many a former ambassador, the recent cohort to jump into the fray of political activism, has found a great post-retirement vocation. Once the plush tenures are over and all that could be extracted from the holy state cow, now is the time to speak the truth and condemn military dictatorships. Convenient and most opportune! This low-risk strategy is paying its dividends: a great whitewashing of all that they were a party to, and all that they let happen in front of their red-taped offices. The ex-servicemen whose record is even more dismal are even more vociferous in their advocacy for a democratic Pakistan.

Therefore, the confused citizens with a shred of historical sense are simply bewildered. Gen Chishti, the key player in toppling Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s government and unleashing of eleven years of mediaeval darkness, talking about resistance to army rule. Surely, the realisation took three decades of lasting damages and fissures within the body politic. Another retired Army chief, Gen Beg, is also at the forefront. His vitriole cannot hide the years when he actively sabotaged the democratic process, admitted before the Supreme Court that he had “advised” a bench not to restore Junejo’s government; and disbursed astronomical sums of money to undermine civilian government raised through another shady character heading a dubious financial institution. (more…)

Neena Jha and Shivnath Jha have launched a nationed wide movement to protect musicians, artists, academicians and others who have brought laurels and pride to India through book – Andolan Ek Pustak Se.

Sultana Begum

Raza Rumi

Fahmida Riaz is Pakistan’s premier female poet. She became a sensation in the early 1970s when her bold, feminist poetry created a stir in the convention ridden world of Urdu poetry. Riaz was expressive, sometimes explicit, and politically charged. She created a completely new genre in Urdu poetry with a post-modern sensibility. Later, she remained prominent with her defiance of General Zia’s martial law, her exile to India and the continuous evolution of her fiction and poetry.

Since the late 1990s, Fahmida Riaz has discovered Jalaluddin Rumi, the 12th century Turkish poet and jurist, and now an international celebrity. Her recent publication – Yeh Khana-e aab-o-gil – is a unique translation of Rumi’s ghazals in the same rhyme and meter. Since her navigation of the Rumi universe, she has explored another dimension of her individual and cultural consciousness, where the influence of Islamic scholars and Sufis is paramount.

Last winter, she read a letter by Hazrat Ali bin Abi Talib (AS), the fourth Caliph and son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed (PBUH), while browsing a translation of Nahaj ul Balagha (a collection of sermons, letters and sayings of the Caliph). Later, in an email, she related to her friends across the globe how angry she felt for not knowing about this letter all her life, and how the real jewels of Muslim history were concealed “generation after generation.” (more…)

I was introduced to Mahvish Khan’s daring work by Irfan. Her close work at the infamous Guantanamo Bay is remarkable for the insights and reversal of the dehumanisation that was until recently sanctioned by the state and corporate media.. An excerpt from her promising books – MY GUANTÁNAMO DIARY: The Detainees and the Stories They Told Me - is avaialble at her website. I am also posting a little introduction after the excerpt:

“Who exactly has America detained all these years at Guantanamo? The Worst of the Worst? Or the Wretched of the Earth?” From My Guantanamo Diary

It’s easy to mistreat something called No. 1154. It’s easy to shave its beard, to kick it around like an object, to spit on it, torture it, or make it cry. It’s harder to dole out such abuse when No. 1154 retains its identity: Dr. Ali Shah Mousovi, a pediatrician who fled the Taliban, worked for the United Nations encouraging Afghans to participate and vote in the new democracy. It’s harder to hate No. 1154 when you realize that he’s more like you than he is different. His wife, an economist by profession, waits month after month, year after year for the news that her husband is coming home; his two sons and young daughter grow up without him.

The numbers denied the humanity of those assigned to them:….

It’s easy to skim over the numbers. And there are hundreds like them.”

Mahvish Rukhsana Khan is an American lawyer, born to immigrant Pashtun parents in Michigan. While persuing a law degree at the University of Miami, she became enraged by the illegal detainment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. Having grown up listening to her mother tell her “Now is not the time to be complacent,” Khan felt compelled to help any way she could. With her fluency in Pashto and a familiarity with Afghan cultures and customs that no other “habeas” lawyer with security clearance had, she was quickly taken on as an interpreter for Afghan detainees. Six months later, in January 2006, Khan was on her way to Guantanamo Bay. Her role with the detainees quickly developed. She began providing supervised legal counsel and traveled to Afghanistan to find exonerating evidence for prisoners. (more…)

With every breath the sound
of love surrounds us,
and we are bound for the depths
of space, without distraction.

We’ve been in orbit before
and know the angels there.
Let’s go there again, Master,
for that is our land. (more…)