Accidental Blogger

Taslima Nasrin: Author in exile (Sujatha)

A few weeks ago, Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasrin was spirited away from Delhi, India to a destination unknown. Controversial and banned in the country of her birth, she was denounced and subject of a fatwa in Bangladesh in 1993, leading to her fleeing to Europe and later India.

In the wee hours of Wednesday, exiled Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasreen slipped out of her "safe house" in New Delhi and boarded the flight to London.

    Home Ministry officials accompanied Taslima and put her up in the business class of the British Airways that left Delhi at 3:30 am on Wednesday.

Never one to keep out of controversy even after going into exile,  her 2003 memoir Dwikhandito (Split Apart) was banned by the Indian state government of West Bengal on the charge of hurting religious feelings. The ban was lifted by the Kolkata High Court in 2005.

Of late, she had been living in Delhi under a virtual form of house arrest, due to fundamentalist- sponsored outrage against her even in West Bengal, which she had hoped to make her permanent home. But it was not to be. Citing failing health and intolerable stress, she is now on the run again, moving into another exile from an exile.

In a lecture given in Tuft University in 2003, she made a powerful case for the freedom of speech vs. the freedom of religion ( or rather constraints of religion in the name of secularism.) There were critics aplenty in the audience , but she silenced them with this reading of a translation of her poem.

Nasrin countered rather effectively by reading out her poem entitled, Noorjahan, based on actual events (Noorjahan was stoned to death by fundamentalists in Bangladesh).

They have made Noorjahan stand in a hole in the courtyard
There she stands submerged to her waist, her head hanging
They're throwing stones at Noorjahan
Stones that are striking my body
I feel them on my head, forehead, chest, back
And I hear laughing, shouts of abuse

Noorjahan's fractured forehead pours out blood, mine also
Noorjahan's eyes have burst, mine also
Noorjahan's nose has been smashed, mine also
Noorjahan's torn breast and heart have been pierced, mine also

Are these stones not striking you?

They laugh aloud, stroking their beards
Their tupis [caps] shaking with jubilation
As they swing their walking sticks
They with quivering and cruel eyes speed to pierce her body, mine too

Are these arrows not piercing your body?

The controversy may have overtaken the literary merits of her work, but she has become a cause celebre, much like Salman Rushdie and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, threatened with death just for daring to speak her mind.

The pity of it is that even in exile, she is not allowed a modicum of peace, being hounded into wandering the earth in search of a place to call home.

"The Bosnian Killing Fields" - From the Left and the Right

The most troublesome point in a politician's career is where the opposition's criticism coincides with the suspicions of one's own party loyalists.  That the narrative about Hillary and Bill Clinton emanating from both the left and the right are merging, should say something about the couple whether or not their supporters recognize it. More often than not, the area of agreement on both sides seems to be the astonishment at the Clintons' overarching quest for power and the depths of deception they are willing to stoop to in order to realize that ambition.  "I did not have sex with that woman," uttered with finger wagging emphasis; "I remember landing under sniper-fire. There was supposed to be some kind of greeting ceremony at the airport but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base," described in a tone of self deprecatory valor. The declarations remain, suspended in the public perception until a 12 year old video or a stained blue dress makes its appearance.  Such casual disregard for truth point to a mindset that views politics as war whose spoils are personal power. Lying routinely as a way of self aggrandizement and demonizing one's detractors come naturally to Mr. and Mrs. Clinton.

It began almost a year ago. To my astonishment, I grudgingly started to find common ground with Republicans in my assessment of the "Clinton character." It was as if some unpleasant repressed memories surfaced with the prospect of the Clintons getting back in the White House. When the Democratic presidential race took off in earnest, I expressed my unease with a possible Clinton presidency early on in this blog.  As time has gone by, almost all left leaning bloggers and columnists as well as several of Hillary Clinton's senate and elected party colleagues have deserted her side due to similar discontent over the unsavory nature of the Clintonian myths and drama that seem to unfold daily on the national stage. So, it did not surprise me when I read a column by Peggy Noonan, the grande dame of the intellectual wing of the GOP and found myself nodding in agreement.  Noonan herself doesn't say anything that we don't already know. But she quotes from an pseudonymous poster named GI Joe whose satirical riff on Hillary Clinton dodging bullets in Bosnia, though exaggerated, perfectly captures the tenor of a Clinton lie.

"Actually Mrs. Clinton was too modest. I was there and saw it all. When Mrs. Clinton got off the plane the tarmac came under mortar and machine gun fire. I was blown off my tank and exposed to enemy fire. Mrs. Clinton without regard to her own safety dragged me to safety, jumped on the tank and opened fire, killing 50 of the enemy. Soon a suicide bomber appeared, but Mrs. Clinton stopped the guards from opening fire. She talked to the man in his own language and got him [to] surrender. She found that he had suffered terribly as a result of policies of George Bush. She defused the bomb vest herself. Then she turned to his wounds. She stopped my bleeding and saved my life. Chelsea donated the blood."

Hillary Clinton has taken Barack Obama to task for staying with Reverend Wright, the church pastor with a penchant for inflammatory rhetoric.  She huffily proclaimed that one cannot choose one's relatives (Obama's grandma, for example) but one certainly can choose a pastor.  News to Mrs. Clinton - one CAN choose one's relatives ... when the relative is a spouse who humiliates you time and again. But that she doesn't think so, is her business.  However, shouldn't she be a bit careful before carelessly casting stones at others?  As for keeping questionable company, see who was sitting beside Hillary Clinton when she sanctimoniously scolded her opponent.

More on Hillary's war stories, this time from the left - Frank Rich in NYT.

College Professors, Indoctrination, and Paranoid Conservatives (Joe)

David Bernstein thinks that the liberals are indoctrinating their students. And presumably, this is ruining the country, because otherwise how will his law school (George Mason, the least academically diverse in the country) keep finding new conservative law professors?

Professor Bernstein does have, I must admit, killer evidence. He "certainly knew some students at Brandeis" when he went to college there twenty years ago "who started as moderates" but "shifted at least somewhat leftward" before graduating.

Not to worry, though. "There were also some students who were driven to the right by some of what they encountered in politicized departments like Sociology and English." That is, one of his friends was annoyed by a teaching assistant asking the class about the absence of female characters in a book.

Like Bernstein, I also have only anecdotal evidence off the top of my head, but I trust it more than his because I'm not completely insane. And that is: In none of my English classes did any of my professors attempt to or in fact indoctrinate me or any of my classmates.

The thing that people like Bernstein and his buddy David Horowitz don't get is that political beliefs have nothing to do with what English professors and students actually do. You can want low taxes and more torture of Muslims and hate the poor and the gays all you like, and that will not affect (at all!) your analysis of the apocalypse as part of the Arthurian tradition, your explication of wound imagery in Richard Crashaw's Resurrectional poetry, or your thesis that Ben Jonson's oppositional poetics of architecture perform cultural work which subversively attacks the social order of his day.

I will admit that I can speculate, fairly confidently, that at least three of my English professors were liberal and at least two were conservative. There was still no indoctrination, and this had zero effect on class discussion, my work, or my grades. Sorry, but I can't speak for sociology. I might, however, also note that my philosophy professors tended, if anything, to be conservative (or other, but certainly not part of the liberal orthodoxy by which these besieged conservatives stupidly feel threatened). 

Although to be fair, I suppose it's possible that the physicists did indoctrinate their students on the liberal theory of "science."

March Madness

No, not on the basketball court - at the Texas Democratic convention to assign delegates to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. When I attended the caucus on the evening of March 4, things were a bit confused but not chaotic. See if you can figure out what happened today in Texas.

AUSTIN — Traffic jams, long lines, crowds, confusion and chaos marked Texas Democratic regional conventions Saturday as an unprecedented number of political activists turned out to help elect presidential nominating delegates for Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama.

There are 67 at-large delegates at stake, depending largely on the results of the state senatorial district and county conventions.

Obama was the caucus winner on primary night, but an Associated Press delegate count showed Obama might lose ground. However, Obama's campaign late Saturday said he would win, claiming he would receive 38 delegates to Clinton's 29. If accurate, that would give Obama a total five-delegate advantage over Clinton in the Texas primary/caucus contest.

Houston-area conventions often were marked by exasperation as thousands of people who had never participated in the process before gathered to show support for their candidate and try to win a slot to attend the state party convention in June.

"It's going very good," state Senate District 17 Chairman Bert Anson said in the midst of the convention in the Alief Elsik High School gymnasium. "I've only been yelled at and cursed twice. I've only lost my temper once. No. I've lost my temper twice."

Pondicherry: India's Gallic Connection

A few days ago I posted a Brazilian professor's impressions of India's erstwhile Portuguese colony of Goa on India's west coast. Today's New York Times travel section has an article on Pondicherry, a tiny town in south India on the Bay of Bengal which was once colonized by the French. 

AS colonies go, Pondicherry was not exactly a success story. Almost immediately after the French set up this lovely nugget on the Bay of Bengal in 1674, it was captured by the Dutch, retaken by its founders, then sacked and destroyed by the British. And though the French kept rebuilding it, Pondicherry never became more than a stopover on the way to Indochina. Even after Pondy, as it is nicknamed, rejoined India — late, in 1956 — it languished, out of step with the rest of the nation. In other words, for most of its history, Pondicherry was a backwater, in decline.

No more. Today, Puducherry, as it is officially known but rarely called, is capitalizing on a glammed-up version of that history, and emerging as an artsy, design-savvy destination with a quasi-Gallic approach to eating, drinking, shopping and relaxing. It’s like India seen through a French lens, or maybe vice versa.

On the southeastern coast, about 150 miles south of Chennai, Pondicherry is, for an Indian city, tiny. Just about a million people live there, mostly in the types of charmless, three- and four-story concrete buildings erected all over the poorer parts of Asia. But near the Bay of Bengal, the cityscape changes drastically. Soon you see tile roofs and wooden shutters, balconies and colonnades, wide brick streets and pastel Catholic churches — the neighborhood once known as the Ville Blanche, or White Town, where the colonists lived.

Cat Quote

Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a purpose. - Garrison Keillor

Links: Dodging Bullets in Tibet, Bosnia and on the Gender Debate

Manoj Joshi on Tibet and China from India's perspective as shaped by history and the current state of geo-politics in the region.

A sharp commentary in Slate by Melinda Henneberger and Dahlia Lithwick on why Hillary Clinton cannot give a speech about gender as Obama did on race.

Roger Cohen in the NYT on the dangers of braggadocio in the White House (think of the current occupant's macho posturing) as it relates to Hillary's boasts of dodging imaginary sniper fire in Bosnia.

Hotel Hiroshima

Ron Rosenbaum ponders over Hiroshima in Slate:

My Amex itinerary listed my room in the Hotel Hiroshima this way: "1 KING BED SMOKING CITY." SMOKING CITY! Turns out "CITY" was shorthand for "city view." But do I need to spell out why I find the name Hotel Hiroshima so resonant? Sure, you hate the Eagles. It's practically a cultural requirement that you do (sometimes I think everybody but me does, but then again, the Eagles seem to sell a lot of music). Still—admit it—there are some lines that will last. Like the one from "Hotel California": "You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave."

So it is with the Hotel Hiroshima. We checked in to a metaphoric Hotel Hiroshima—"we" as a culture—on Aug. 6, 1945, when the 16-kiloton atomic weapon detonated about 800 meters over a hospital here. (The hospital wasn't the ostensible target; a nearby bridge was, but needless to say, the hospital and all those in it were vaporized.) Nearly 100,000 people died instantly or within hours from the original blast and the firestorms that followed (by the end of 1945, 140,000 were dead). Estimates of those who died over a longer period from radiation sicknesses, from radiation-induced cancers, and other disease sequela range far upward.

We checked in to the First Nuclear Age that day in 1945, and yes, sometimes we check out, in the sense of repressed memory, willed or unconscious denial, cultural amnesia. It's happened for prolonged periods after the end of the Cold War. That all-too-brief "holiday from history" some called it.

So yes, we've checked out, but it doesn't look like we're ever going to leave: The nuclear weapons are still there—thousands of them under the badlands of the Dakotas and the trans-Ural steppes and the sands of the Middle East, all still armed and ready. As they say in "Hotel California," in a phrase that never made sense to me until now, "We are all just prisoners here/ of our own device."

(I left the following comment at 3 QD in a post that links to Rosenbaum's essay)

This piece evoked kaleidoscopic memories of Hiroshima, of nuclear wars and hotels.

For some reason, I have visited Hiroshima several times - more than I have any other Japanese city. The very first time on a beautiful fall day, the visit to the Peace Memorial left me shaken. During subsequent visits I did note the clutter of memorials and tourist memorabilia that have sprouted. I see nothing wrong with that. The Peace Memorials in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Nagasaki got bombed under plan B because the skies over Fukuoka the original target, on August 9, 1945 were clouded) are beautiful, excruciatingly well chronicled and amazingly free of rancor. If these two cities choose to continue amidst their "normalcy," to remind the rest of the world what a nuclear powered war (with just two bombs lightheartedly named the "Little Boy" and the "Fat Man") can do to people's lives and possessions, it is a heroic endeavor.

Hiroshima is a busy but strangely peaceful and yes, "normal" industrial city. It does have some unusual hotels. I remember one well appointed business hotel which was as soul-less as the "All Night Kinkos of Hiroshima." Another hotel, enigmatically named "The Hiroshima Intelligent Hotel" is designed with maximum ergonomics in mind but has the atmosphere of a cozy Mediterranean outfit in the south of France. The Hiroshima pancakes (Okonomi-yaki) are indeed delicious and the best ones are to be found in a cramped, smoky cafeteria at the city's main railway station.

Coincidentally, we too have been pondering over hotels at our blog recently. Ron Rosenbaum says:

Sure, you hate the Eagles. It's practically a cultural requirement that you do (sometimes I think everybody but me does, but then again, the Eagles seem to sell a lot of music). Still—admit it—there are some lines that will last. Like the one from "Hotel California": "You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave."

So, everyone hates the Eagles? Well, everyone except Rosenbaum and Abbas Raza.

************************************************************************

Included here are a few photos from my trips to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Photo #1 and #3 show the Peace Memorials in Hiroshima and Nagasaki respectively. In the second photo you can see the light bulb factory shown above in its current condition. The factory was Ground Zero when the Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima. The original bombed out structure has been preserved to look like it did in August 1945. (click to enlarge)

"In pursuit of gross national happiness"

Democracy is all the rage these days (what's not to like?). We are into the sixth year of a war trying to impose democratic values on Iraqis; Pakistan is struggling to fashion itself as a democratic nation after years of military dictatorships and feudal kleptocracies; and in our own backyard, the workings of the democratic process is coming under nervous scrutiny in a hotly contested race to decide the presidential nominee of one of the major national parties.  The recent uprising in Tibet reminded the world that even an oppressive and militiarily powerful regime cannot fully suppress the desire for autonomy among its "subjects." While the world's attention has turned to the once fabled Tibetan Shangri-la (more a romantic notion in the western mind than reality) currently under the rule of Communist China, another mythical mountain kingdom in the region, impressively monikered "The Land of the Thunder Dragon," nestled amidst the Himalayan clouds has quietly gone about taking baby steps toward realizing the democratic dream.

The tiny nation of Bhutan, situated between southern China and eastern India, recently conducted its first popular election.  An 80% voter turnout was remarkable. That many voters showed up at the polls because the king asked them to, is less so. As the final votes were tallied suspicion arose in some minds whether the voters actually knew what they were voting for. The fact that there was very little separating the platforms of the two contesting political factions and one prevailed in a near complete landslide has confounded observers.  I suspect it had to do with the party names. The losing party has the Plain-Jane name of "People's Democratic Party" (in English, no less). The victor is named "Druk Phuensum Tshogpa" in Bhutanese, loosely translated to the "Bhutan Peace and Prosperity Party" whose English language motto is "In pursuit of gross national happiness." (Certainly beats "Hope and Change," "Ready on day one for the 3am phone call" or "100 years of war")

NEW DELHI: Orders from the palace sent the people of Bhutan rushing to the polls for their first national elections on Monday, as the once reclusive Land of the Thunder Dragon further opened its doors and joined the world's democracies.

While turnout was heavier than in many countries more experienced with voting — nearly 80 percent by the time polls closed at 5 p.m. — the results left some analysts wondering how democracy would actually function.

Of the 47 seats in Parliament, according to provisional results from the Election Commission of Bhutan, 44 went to Druk Phuensum Tshogpa, whose name can be translated as the Bhutan Peace and Prosperity Party. The rival People's Democratic Party (English is widely spoken among the Bhutanese elite), the only other party running, lost resoundingly. Its leader, Sangay Ngedup, lost his own constituency.

There were no striking differences between the platforms of the two parties, making the vastly uneven results hard to explain. "We are all caught completely off balance at this moment," Karma Ura, director of the Center for Bhutan Studies, a government-financed organization, said by telephone from Thimphu, the capital. "Functioning of democracy requires a good opposition. I don't know what will happen now. It's not an ideal situation."

The election was a step toward democracy, but the monarchy remains in place. King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck, 28, will remain head of state after the elections. Asked if voters understood the electoral process, the chief election commissioner, Kunzang Wangdi, said he had no doubt they did. "We have given the power to the voters to cast their secret ballot," he said by telephone. "They have exercised that right and duty. Everyone will have to respect that."

Not Exactly The Taj Mahal

Last night during a half hearted attempt at organizing a cluttered cabinet, I came across a couple of old roadside photographs taken during family trips to India.  They show two modest hotels with worthy names that caught our eyes. Both pictures were taken en route to more interesting places.

Hotel Kant was photographed by my daughter in 1999 when we were traveling to the Taj Mahal in Agra. The other (with several spelling mistakes) was spotted in 2001 on the way to Ajanta, the site of fabulous ancient Buddhist cave paintings in western India.