https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDrRkDmoET0
Camille Paglia says (as Jordan Peterson nods along) that Post Modernism is a rejection of:
What are everyone’s thoughts on the psychological basis of Post Modernism?
Please keep the other posts on topic. Use this for talking about whatever you want to talk about.
Vidhi observed a minute’s silence, as she mentioned at Friday’s dinner, the Pakistani attack on India on 26.11 was when India & Indians forever distrusted Pakistan.
When police asked Kasab what he understood about jihad, Kasab told the interrogators “it Jihad is about killing and getting killed and becoming famous.” “Come, kill and die after a killing spree. By this one will become famous and will also make God proud.”[79]
“We were told that our big brother India is so rich and we are dying of poverty and hunger. My father sells dahi wada in a stall in Lahore and we did not even get enough food to eat from his earnings. I was promised that once they knew that I was successful in my operation, they would give 150,000 rupees (around US$3,352), to my family,” said Kasab.[79]
Police said they were shocked by his readiness to switch loyalties after he was apprehended.[79] “If you give me regular meals and money I will do the same for you that I did for them,” he said.[79]
Young Moshe is a living symbol of an eternal Indo-Israeli friendship:
“Time Heals, They Say, But…”: Baby Moshe’s Grandfather On 26/11
Netflix now has Arjun: The Warrior Prince on its stream. I watched most of it to get a feel for some of the details of the story. I know the general outline of the Mahabharata, but I know the Bible or the Iliad far better (in case you can’t be bothered to follow the link, it’s only a small part of Arjun’s early life).
Depending on the sources you trust, the events of the Mahabharata date to around ~1000 BC. They were probably refined at a later date, perhaps around 500 years later.
I watched a fair amount of Arjun: The Warrior Prince. In some ways, it reminded me a lot of the Iliad and the Odyssey. These two works are a melange of influences and time periods, synthesizing true recollections of the large polities with highly stratified social systems and literacy of the Bronze Age, with the simple chiefdoms of the Dark Age Greece. The issue is disentangling the different periods.
One assumes the same is true of the Mahabharata and Ramayana.
The “wild card” here is that the most recent work has now likely confirmed the arrival of agro-pastoralists from the steppe in the period between 1500 and 1000 BC. By the time the historical analogs of the Pandavas were settled in the Gangetic plain, they’d likely been there for many centuries.
Zach, Omar, and myself will do a podcast on Indian genetics next week. I already did one on this topic for my main podcast, so I’m curious what readers of this weblog want to hear about. We can’t guarantee we’ll use the questions, but it’s possible. I think the format will mostly involve Zach and Omar leading the conversation and I’ll try to talk as fast and concisely as possible.
Also, we got our first review on iTunes. Would still like to get some on Stitcher. And in case people want to hear more from me, I was a guest on the Two for Tea podcast. My episode should drop in the next day or so.
Last night V & I hosted Pakistani potluck. It turned out to be a rather intimate affair with a few Pakistani friends of ours. After the last few weeks of intense Indian & Kashmiri events I thought it would be nice to have a light-hearted evening of biryani, nihari and haleem especially before we go meat-free at home.
As an aside I’ve begun to believe that the meat consumption we are having is simply far in excess of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Industrial farming is a blight and my hack is simply to eat meat outside of the home.
Toward the end of the evening the talk drifted towards politics and V mentioned some of her opinions about Pakistan. It rapidly became a bit more intense since at the root of it V has deep misgivings about the Pakistani state. Her contention is that all Indians, of whatever hue, couldn’t forgive Pakistan for what happened on 26-11 and that in a way it was India’s 9-11. Continue reading Pakistani potluck with a dash of politics
After the jump is a thread on the brief history of the North Sentinelese by “Respectable Lawyer.” This thread appeared in my Moments Page. His bio reads as “Anti-corporate pirate who gains access to courthouses with foolproof cosplay of a Respectable White Lawyer.”
There are three actors in this recent Missionary saga:
(1.) The (part) Chinese American missionary, John Allen Chau, who is technically a PoC.
(2.) The Sentinelese themselves who are the pristine natives.
(3.) The Indian government, which is not Western.
Essentially in a rather amusing way it involves the three great non-white colours of mankind (black, brown and yellow). Also to make the matter even more tantalising when we think “remote Indian tribes” we don’t usually think of India but rather Native American or Amerindian peoples. So the story involves Christianity, missionaries, colonialism and native people trying to fight back; a real life Desi version of Avatar.
https://twitter.com/kaeshour/status/1065545714485403648?s=20
Also when the NY Times did profile an Indian anthropologist (with the helpful name T.N Pandit), they had to throw in these lovely lines (cue eye-roll for helpful mention of caste and colour):
Mr. Pandit, the pale-skinned son of a Kashmiri professor, reaches to pass a coconut to a group of naked, dark-skinned young men who have waded waist-deep in water to greet him. He sits companionably beside a dark-skinned young woman, whose hand rests casually on his thigh. Film shot in 1974 shows him — a reserved Brahmin — dancing exuberantly with a bare-breasted Jarawa woman.
Continue reading White people will still define the non-white age..
The Shanghai event was supposed to be the biggest fashion show in Dolce & Gabbana’s 33 year history.
Speaking to journalists during Monday evening’s fittings, Dolce said: “All my team is so nervous because we spent too much money on this." https://t.co/6XSEHxk01Y
— Bibek Bhandari (@bibekbhandari) November 21, 2018
It’s using “woke SJWism” to punish Dolce & Gabana. Shanghai was meant to be their biggest fashion show in 35 years.
The ads were racist (a Chinese model struggling with pasta) and China is now making full use of that faux-pas to drive in a lesson in National Honour. As one e-retailer said “the Motherland is more important than anything else.”
I don’t know what to make of the article below.
https://www.facebook.com/551630878316505/posts/1646998772113038/
The Abrahamicisation of Hinduism is one thing but is it worth projecting those values? I know that copulating deities are on temple walls so I’m just asking how do Hindu deities need to be treated.
A funny story last night; V asked me if I knew what the Shiva Lingam was. Apparently she had just found out what it actually was since she had been told throughout Hindu school that it was one of Shiva “limbs.” The Victorian legacy in India is fascinating to observe.
Also this moved me greatly:
My nana went to nankana sahib, Pakistan and sent me this😂 this was their welcome pic.twitter.com/Ixpi5aImnK
— Hindi and urdu are kusra langauges (@dmvbanda) November 22, 2018
I showed up at the Institute of Peace and Secular Studies (IPSS) a few days after the rally. The person who had called the meeting was running late so I just loitered around. It was a two-room apartment that had been modified into a makeshift office space with some spare area for sitting, with floor cushions etc. There was a book rack full of books in one corner. The lady who managed the place was present there and said Hello. A few minutes after I had arrived, two boys a few years younger than me showed up as well. We started chit-chatting and it turned out that one of them was a student at LUMS and the other went to another private school. We were talking about democracy when they revealed that they were not in favor of democracy at all and then spent the next hour arguing why they thought so. They were under the influence of Hizb-ut-Tehrir, an Islamist organization that wanted to establish a caliphate. I tried to argue with them using rationality and logic but they were not willing to listen to a counter-argument and eventually stormed off. I discovered that IPSS was offering a short course in Political Economy and History and all I had to pay for was a copy of their syllabus.
Salmaan Taseer (ST) was a larger than life person. He grew up in a literary family, with his father passing away at an early age but the familial ties and his family’s social standing in the Lahori society gave him a footing in the tightly-knit hierarchy of Lahore’s elite circles. He was an active member of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) during its heyday, starting in 1968 and through Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s rule (1972-77). After Mr. Bhutto was hanged (1979) and PPP was under threat by Dictator Zia’s government, ST wrote a biography of Mr. Bhutto. I attended a talk by one of the fact checkers on ST’s book (at the cafe, Books n Beans, a small liberal enclave for such events) and she remembered how hard she had to work to meet ST’s standards. ST was instrumental in arranging for Benazir Bhutto’s arrival in Lahore in 1986 and the grand reception that ensued. He was elected in the PPP wave that swept most of Pakistan during the 1988 elections. He didn’t win another election in during the rest of his political life. However, he was considered PPP’s man in Lahore, someone who could take on the Sharif’s of PML(N). ST started an English daily in the early 2000s, called Daily Times (DT) which started with much fanfare and even had an Urdu counterpart. Continue reading Aasia Bibi case comes full circle (part 2)
