Accidental Blogger

A general interest blog

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Category: History

  • Pakistan: the narrative comes home to roost (Omar Ali)

    Initially posted at 3 Quarks Daily. Most countries that exist above the banana-republic level of existence have an identifiable (even if always contested and malleable) national narrative that most (though not all) members of the ruling elite share and to which they contribute.  Pakistan is clearly not a banana-republic; it is a populous country with…

  • Teeth of Tyrants

    A wonderful article at 3 Quarks Daily by Ryan Sayre. Enjoy.

  • Disasters – natural and man-made

    Post tsunami Japan, 2011 & Nagasaki, 1945: (image via Dean)  

  • A Question of Lineage (Sujatha)

    A simple, almost off-hand comment in this article (via 3QD), describing an interview with the estimable William Dalrymple: "It was during the writing of White Mughals that Dalrymple discovered something about his own family: His maternal great-great-grandmother Sophia Pattle was the daughter of "a Hindu Bengali woman . . . who converted to Catholicism and…

  • Lovers tiff, impending divorce or trial separation? (Omar Ali)

    On the 27th of January, while driving through Mozang (an extremely crowded section of Lahore city) in a rented Honda Civic, American citizen RaymondDavis shot two men who were riding a motorcycle.  Soon afterwards, another vehicle that was racing to (presumably) rescue Mr. Davis, ran over a third person and killed him too. These seem to be…

  • AMETRALLADORA (narayan)

    I am a sucker for words with too many syllables that evoke memories of first encounters with them. There's 'propinquity' which I met in an article bemoaning the location of Canada, which like Mexico (setting a distant God aside) has the US too close for comfort. 'Proparoxytone' – I think I'll save that for another…

  • Invincible till pushed?…(omar)

    Professor Razi Azmi has an op-ed in Pakistan's Daily Times today.  The situation described by Dr. Azmi highlights one of the major failures of Islamicate thought in the last millennium: their inability to evolve a political theory beyond hereditary kingship or rule by strongman.

  • A Thousand Year Writer’s Block..(omar)

    One Thousand Year Writer’s Block? William Burroughs famously remarked that Islam had hit a one thousand year writer’s block. Is this assessment justified?  First things first: obviously we are not talking about all writing or all creative work. Thousands of talented writers have churned out countless works of literature, from the poems of Hafiz and…

  • A piece of history..(Omar)

    A wonderful essay about the time of the Ummayads by the erudite (and always polite) Ali Minai. A recent piece in the Wall Street Journal touched on this period in a less detailed but still interesting article.. 

  • Colonel Nadir Ali; Bangladesh 1971 (omar)

    This is an expanded version of an earlier note from my father about his experiences in 1971. I think it is an important document and others like this need to be written if we (especially Pakistanis) are to recover some truth about that terrible year… Revisionism, meanwhile, is in full flow..

  • I Have Egg on My Face! (by Norman Costa)

    I Have Egg on My Face! by Norman Costa No joke! I misread the text of an article which contained an image of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres' painting, L'Odalisque à l'esclave. The article referred to a gift made to John Kenneth Galbraith by the country of India. The generous gift was bestowed upon Galbraith, father…

  • Darwin contra Diamond on Domesticability (prasad)

    I’ve been reading the Origin of Species this week, because I’ve often found pre-20th Century physics unreadable (notationally), and it’s enjoyable to engage with great science in the original from time to time. Just finished the first chapter, where Darwin makes his famous case for the analogy between artificial and natural selection. This bit caught…

  • Evolution Foreshadowed (Sujatha)

    Arcane as this might be, I thought an old, old song that I had been listening to was foreshadowing the theory of evolution and the Tree of Life concept. It was a Malayalam poem, composed by Poonthanam Namboodiri of whom little is known, beyond a few barebones biographical details. The singer was a well-known playback…