Category: X.T.M

What happened to South Asia’s leaders. The last one to have a decent accent in the English language was Benazir Bhutto. Bandaranaike, Nehru & Jinnah sound like Princes (via Anan).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1G-_FVjUX7E

In other sad news (this is a very old article from 2013) the last Mughal heiress lives in a Calcutta slum. How the Great have fallen..

And the last tragic news of the day, “Karachi becoming a killing field for new born girls.”

A few people found a baby at the door step of a mosque in Karachi and they handed the baby over to the prayer leader. The cleric decried that this is an illegitimate baby therefore he should be stoned. Resultantly the baby was stoned to death. I tried to register a case against the cleric but nothing happened”, narrated Kazmi.

I created a new handle (Dastan Aryamehr – Hero of the Aryans lol) to write more openly on matters with regards to the Faith but then I deleted it again.

It’s very difficult to maintain different handles but then that means I need to exercise judgement/restraint in what I write.

First BME to ascend to one of the Four Great Offices of the State.

as a friend quipped: Sons of Pakistani bus drivers are doing very well…with the London Mayor AND the Home Secretary!

As an aside it’s interesting to note just how conservative the British Asian community is compared to the Home Countries. Westernisation/Westoxification is the acid that burns through traditional culture (is it always a bad thing; I don’t know, no comment) but among the diasporic communities (which moved as families) they have been remarkably resilient against it.

It’s not a good thing as we have casteism and honour killings in Britain but it strikes that Bollywood has hauled India into the post-modern age while in Britain we have happily recreated 1970’s Jullundar/Gujarat

I would answer those feminists who find Humsafar regressive by pointing out that the serial shares many elements with Shakespeare’s Othello. Of course, Shakespeare’s tragedy takes place in the 16th Century, an era that was  much more patriarchal than our own, while Humsafar is set in contemporary times. However, one can account for this by pointing out that Pakistan is a deeply conservative and patriarchal society, which in many ways is comparable to the Europe of 400 years ago. Like Othello, Ashar is manipulated into believing that his wife has been unfaithful to him. In Othello’s case, the “proof” of his wife’s betrayal is the presence of her handkerchief in someone else’s room while in Ashar’s case the proof is his wife’s dupatta in the hands of another man. In both stories, the male lead does not question his suspicions and is driven into a jealous rage. The differences in the two plots lie in the motivations of the manipulator as well as the reactions of the innocent wife.

https://kabiraltaf.wordpress.com/2018/04/30/humsafar-and-shakespeare/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8aETK5pQR4

This woman, was the most respectable electoral choice India has ever made for PM. Just compare her to PM Modi who cannot hold a candle to her charisma, intellect and pedigree. Indian democracy has gone backward in 30 years, Modi cannot even express forget defend himself because he can’t speak English. ?

Vidhi asked me to contextualise my thoughts in addition to hers. I would hazard that Indira was India’s best PM; she basically destroyed Pakistan.

If it had been Nehru or Shastri or even Modi instead of Indira there would have been an East Pakistan Wing. It took Indira’s grit and steel to shatter India’s more persistent enemy once and for all.

Ps: I just finished the video and I found it thrilling. Indira reminds me of Benazir but an even grander more formidable figure; a living Mother India.

I love the way Indira, as Durga, dispatched the arrogant white male journalist.

“It’s a question of whether I want to be PM.”

“Unlike Britain, which is a tiny country India is not.”

“The future of India is for us to decide.”

Her pithy response at the end, “because I am not guilty.”

The poncy journalist thought he would be taking Indira to task but instead she smashed him and his pretensions to smithereens!!

Picking up from sbarrakum’s comment on Sinhalese.

First page of Beowulf in Old English

This guy, Qasim Rashid, is actually an “American citizen” but like Ms. Hoda Kateb brimes with bile about the US.

I feel we are in the decadent stage of the Roman Empire where traitors are applauded in the midst.

I decry colonialism but I would never disrespect Britain (I am British after all) the way Hoda and Qasim so gleefully do to the US when Islam/Muslims are attacked.

I’ve seen this time and time again and it almost does prompt the question then if the US/UK is so bad then why don’t you go back to where you came from.

These people don’t love America; you can’t attack something or write it in that tone and claim to be a patriot.

There is also a fundamental difference between a Native American or an African American (descendant of slaves) and an immigrant American. The former two are part of the American narrative from get-go and have an unimaginable historical experience.

Immigrant Americans have either chosen to come to the US or their parents have for the most part post 1960 (if they are non-white). It is in bad taste to hate the country that gives one freedom, opportunity and refuge.

I was reading the article Vijay posted about the Search for Buddha:

In the 1680s, King Narai of Siam became interested in Christianity, and even more interested in European science, especially astronomy. Louis XIV dispatched two embassies to Siam, in 1685 and 1687, including a strong contingent of Jesuit scientists. Dolu was part of the 1687 group.

The rest of the article reads like a chick-lit detective story. However the above passage struck me.

End of History

The end of the Cold War, Star Trek, Francis Fuyukama assured us in the 90’s that History was coming to an end and very soon we would become an English speaking multi-racial world with a generic Americanised culture.

Of course Samuel Huntington saw things quite differently and he’s been proven right. All over the world there are these (last gasp?) rightist/populist push backs against globalisation.

Greco-Roman world

The last parallels I can think of is the Greco-Roman cultural ambit under initially the Macedonian (who brought Hellenism to the East) and the Romans (who later evolved into the Byzantines).

Ultimately a good marker to assess cultural hegemony is via language because language guides us in how we process the world and culture arounds us. I also see that language diffusion and adoption is usually a result of political hegemony rather than coolness factors.

Christianity & Latin

Western Europe became Latin speaking simply because it was under the Romans for as long as it was. There is no region in Europe that adopted a Vulgar Latin language that wasn’t under sustained Roman control (it never grafted onto Britain). The same goes for Christianity where it’s spread usually mirrored political control as well both in late antiquity and in the colonial era.

To fast forward there wasn’t a spontaneous adoption of Christianity in the colonial era when there were sophisticated local religious hierarchies. Christianity failed to make significant headway into Asia with the notable exception of Philippines.

Cultural Diffusion

So hard power usually precedes soft power. The third great diffuser of a civilisation beyond language and religion is culture. In yesteryear it was Shakespeare now it is Hollywood.

Bactria & Hollywood

An example of a good model of cultural diffusion vis a vis Hollywood in Asia is the spread of Hellenistic sculptural traditions into East via Bactria. The Sleeping Buddha statues are direct but unrecognisable descendants of the Classical Greek sculptures we see in the Louvre and other museums.

Hollywood is akin to this. Many good romantic and star cast films are mined for their ideas and remade in Bollywood possibly in other Asian, Arab and African cinemas (I can’t be certain). It’s interesting to see that Hollywood, as the leading hegemonic global Cinema, is moving away from “star power” to franchises (like the Avengers).

People around the world will watch Hollywood for movies like the Avengers but will watch their own cinemas for great romantic films (which ultimately is more relatable when it has local films). So Hollywood isn’t Anglicising/Americanising the world inasmuch as providing a generic platform to watch expensive action blockbusters.

What will the world look like in a millennia

Of course predicting tomorrow is hard enough but a millennia ago most of the great world civilisations were already set in place. When a culture or civilisation has planted roots into a particular geography it’s only an Act of God or sustained brutality that can evict it. Soft power has a role in blurring the boundaries between cultures but in never erasing those cultures.

Do we become American when use Facebook

We are of course all products (to varying degrees) of values of the Western Enlightenment but that in itself is now decoupling from being Western/Westernised as time wears itself on. A similar example would be that we all use Roman legal codes (to some extent) but that doesn’t make us Romanised. A more contemporary example would be that using Facebook doesn’t make us American.

Going back to the initial passage in 1680 King Narai was flirting with Christianity; in 2018 Thailand remains a staunchly Buddhist monarchy with an almost virulent (?) nationalist tradition.

https://www.facebook.com/JeremyMcLellanComedy/videos/1860109164030250/

Iranian-American Muslim fashion blogger Hoda Katebi was invited on the news to talk about her new fashion book. Naturally, they ask her about nuclear weapons and tell her she “doesn’t sound American.” I don’t think they were prepared for her answer.

Hoda is a doppelgänger for a Hijabj BritPak friend of a friend (that girl unfriended me on Facebook after my Facebook Lives last year). Ms. Katebi comes much more as Muslim American than Iranian American (she even calls herself a Muslim Iranian).

The above incident happened in Feb this year but I just learnt about it now (as always I’m slow on the uptake).

I just find the idea of an Iranian American defining themselves as Muslim (she defines herself as Muslim Iranian in America) to be a bit jarring; I’m very used to the Bahá’í or Jewish Iranian American communities being visibly and overtly religious. For the mainstream Iranian American community being Shiite and American is almost a contradiction when their two nations have had such strained relations for the past 3 decades.

Also Hoda doesn’t have an American accent; as the ethnic populations in the West grow larger, their interaction with the mainstream becomes more limited.

Even in lily-white Cambridge one gets the feeling is that there are simply less and less English people about every year. In the 80’s moving to the West meant assimilation into WASPY framework; these days moving to the West is swimming in one’s own sizeable ethnic diaspora. I miss California because one of the best Pakistani restaurants (Zareens); it’s like never leaving home.