“Alexander Hamilton: The Man Who Made Modern America” is an exhibit at the New York Historical Society. I haven’t seen this exhibit, nor do I intend to. Mike Wallace’s scathing review in the NY Review of Books was enough to convince me that it isn’t worth the time of day. And not for ideological reasons, [...]
Up till now I’ve resisted putting a “donate” button on my site. But the fact is that I now have over 500 people a day visiting the site and if out of all those readers I got $11 a month the site would be self-supporting. As an added incentive to give even more money, I [...]
Robert Dwan, who directed the show “You Bet Your Life,” with Groucho Marx, on both the radio and television, died last Friday at the age of 89. I learned about it from his daughter, the documentary filmmaker Judith Dwan Hallet, who is a family friend. It is clear from both the obituary, and this interview [...]
Here is a selection of my photos from my time in Ahmedabad (my Ahmedabad post): And here are some from Dehradun (my Dehradun post): See all my photos from this trip (that I’ve uploaded so far). {India, photos, photography}
In my last post I wrote about India’s Adivasis, or “Scheduled Tribes.” Accounting for over 85 million people, they account for the bulk of India’s indigenous population. There are 697 tribes “scheduled” or recognized as such by the central government. Some of these belong to a subcategory known as “Denotified and Nomadic Tribes” or DNTs. [...]
India is a settler state, like Australia, the United States, South Africa, Israel, Canada, Taiwan, and many other states where the indigenous population was displaced by later migrations. The difference is that the initial migrations which displaced India’s native populations happened in prehistoric times. With so many thousands of years of history you would think [...]
I find myself hesitant to write this post because it touches on two issues that are often harped upon in the Western press when writing about India: the caste system and the status of Indian women. These are both important issues that deserve attention, but the way they are usually discussed in the West is [...]
David Gergen is the director of the Center for Public Leadership in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He has served in the White House as an adviser to presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton. The following is taken from an interview he did with Rolling Stone, along with Ruy Teixeira and Peter [...]
Drew Beck brings my attention to this Žižek essay (also here) on the book everyone has been talking about since even before election day: Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas?. What I like about Žižek’s essay is that, perhaps because he is an outsider, he is able to express the contradictions inherent in red-state [...]
To the right is Karim Khan Zand, the guy I was named after – in honor of being born on a holiday trip to Tehran. My parents chose the Turkish spelling because Atatürk’s reforms had already provided a Latin spelling for the name. Little did they know at the time that this would result in [...]