By Susan Jacoby

NEARLY everyone now takes for granted the wisdom, constitutionality and inevitability of some form of federal financing for community social services run by religious groups. Who anymore can imagine that the United States managed to exist for over 200 years without the government providing any direct aid to faith and its works?
It is truly dismaying that amid all the discussion about President Obama’s version of faith-based community initiatives, there has been such a widespread reluctance to question the basic assumption that government can spend money on religiously based enterprises without violating the First Amendment. The debate has instead focused on whether proselytizing or religious hiring discrimination should be permitted when church groups take public money. This shows how easy it is to institutionalize a bad idea based on unexamined assumptions about service to a greater good.

In 1996, President Bill Clinton started down the slippery slope toward a constitutionally questionable form of faith-based aid when he signed a welfare reform bill that included a “charitable choice” provision allowing religious groups to compete for grants. Under President George W. Bush, a separate White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives was established — a significant expansion of “charitable choice.” Mr. Bush, who instituted his faith-based program through executive orders rather than trying to get a bill establishing the office through Congress, quickly put the money to political use.
The administration provided large grants for projects favored by the Christian right, like Charles Colson’s Prison Fellowship Ministries and Teen Challenge, a drug rehabilitation program that openly pushed religious conversion (even using the phrase “completed Jews” to describe teenage converts from Judaism) as a way of overcoming addiction. John J. DiIulio Jr., the first director of Mr. Bush’s faith-based office, resigned after only eight months and later complained about the politicization of the program.

Throughout Mr. Bush’s second term, the Democratic Party’s “religious left” maintained that the party needed to shed its secular image to attract more religious voters. As far as these Democrats were concerned, the only problem with faith-based programs was that most of the money was going to religious and political conservatives.
Enter Barack Obama, who spoke the language of both faith and secularism — and who promised during the campaign to expand faith-based aid while, at the same time, prohibiting proselytizing and religious hiring discrimination in federally financed programs. Yet earlier this month when the president announced his new faith-based team, headed by a Pentecostal minister, Josh DuBois, Mr. Obama left the Bush orders in place and Mr. DuBois later announced that hiring practices would be vetted by the Justice Department “case by case.”

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Oxford University’s former Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, Richard Dawkins, is one of the world’s staunchest defenders of the theory of evolution. He is the author of The Selfish Gene and a well known atheist tract, The God Delusion. So how does he assess Darwin’s ideas on the 200th anniversary of his birth?

The BBC World Service’s Owen Bennett Jones spoke to Professor Dawkins.

RD: “Charles Darwin really solved the problem of existence, the problem of the existence of all living things – humans, animals, plants, fungi, bacteria. Everything we know about life, Darwin essentially explained.”

OBJ: “Did he make any mistakes in your view?”

RD: “Yes he made some mistakes. He lived in the middle of the 19th Century, and, obviously, we know a lot more now than he knew. In particular, he got genetics all wrong. Nobody in the 19th Century knew much about genetics, and so naturally Darwin got that wrong. But given that, it’s remarkable how much he got right.”

OBJ: “But people say modern discoveries in genetics, actually confirm what Darwin was saying…?”

RD: “Very much so, yes, and it’s amazing how far ahead of his time he was.”

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Dear Friends,

It should be amazing festival. I’m teaching and reading. Hope to see you there.

Bushra

The South Asian Women’s Creative Collective presents:

Stranger Love: SAWCC’s 6th Annual Literary Festival
March 6–7, 2009

A two-day series of readings, panel discussions, and writing workshops featuring South Asian writing that explores love between strangers and love that is strange.

This year’s festival, Stranger Love, calls to mind accidental encounters and provocative attractions that defy the boundaries of social expectation. From guerilla movements in Sri Lanka to the suburbs of New Jersey, South Asian women examine journey and memory, war and conflict, and race and sexuality, spanning the genres of poetry, memoir, travelogue, and fiction.

Friday, March 6th, 7pm
Reading and Conversation

Featuring Pulitzer Prize–winning author Jhumpa Lahiri (Unaccustomed Earth, Knopf 2008), with author V.V. Ganeshananthan (Love Marriage, Random House 2008).
Tickets are $15 and must be purchased in advance at http://sawcc.org/events. No door sales.

at Wollman Hall
The New School
65 West 11th Street, 5th Floor
New York, NY

Saturday, March 7th, 10am–5:30pm
Panel Discussions and Writing Workshops

Day-long series of panel discussions with Fawzia Afzal-Khan, Meena Alexander, Abha Dawesar, Farzana Doctor, Minal Hajratwala, S. Mitra Kalita, Pooja Makhijani, Suketu Mehta, Chandra Prasad, Zohra Saed, and Svati Shah. See http://sawcc.org/events for full schedule.

Writing workshops include a poetry workshop with Purvi Shah and fiction writing with Bushra Rehman. See http://sawcc.org/events for sign-up information.

at The New School
6 East 16th Street (at 5th Ave), 9th Floor
New York, NY

Saturday, March 7th, 7pm
Closing Night Reading

From dating on Craigslist to undiscovered family histories, South Asian women share their own writing on the theme of “stranger love,” featuring Fawzia Afzal-Khan, Meena Alexander, Abha Dawesar, Farzana Doctor, Minal Hajratwala, S. Mitra Kalita, Yesha Naik, Amy Paul, Bushra Rehman, Zohra Saed, and Purvi Shah.

at Bar 13
35 East 13th Street
New York, NY
$5 at the door

For full schedule and detailed ticket/venue information, visit http://sawcc.org/events
Questions? Email litfest@sawcc.org

Stranger Love is cosponsored by the New School’s South Asia Forum, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and Sholay Productions. This event was funded in part by Poets & Writers, Inc. through public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs; and by the New York Council for the Humanities.

Here is BUshra Rehman’s website http://www.bushrarehman.com/

Here is a hilarious piece by her on lotas or the containers used in toilets by many people to clean themselves after the daily nature-ritual is done—that is, watering your own garden.

Our Little Secrets

By Bushra Rehman

We were in the kitchen, my mother and I, when she turned to me and said, “Did you know Amreekans keep medicine in the bathroom?”
I waited, not quite sure where she was going with this. She looked at me as if I was slow and then continued, “They keep it in the bathroom, and then they eat it.” There was triumph in her voice when she added, “And they say we’re dirty.”

I was surprised, not by the information, or that my mother had just found this out after living in the United States for 30 years. I was surprised that she, a proud woman who spent most of her time with people in our Pakistani community, had internalized the stereotype that we immigrants, Pakistanis, were considered dirty.

It was this conversation with my mother that I remembered when my sister Sa’dia, a visual artist, and I were discussing ideas for an art installation in the bathroom of the Queens Museum of Art in New York. Sa’dia was writing a proposal for an upcoming show and had just discovered that one of the only places left for an emerging artist like herself to exhibit was the bathroom.

In her last exhibition, “More Milk, Lighter Skin, Better Wife,” at the Gallery ArtsIndia in Manhattan, Sa’dia had created an installation using teacups. Each cup was handmade and branded with comments like: “You’ll look beautiful in gold,” or “First comes marriage then comes love.” They were the kind of remarks made by aunties to young women over tea.

Sa’dia realized, however, that teacups were not going to work in the bathroom. I suggested that instead of teacups, she use lotahs. Sa’dia laughed, thinking I was making another one of my bad jokes, but when I spoke to her again, she had developed the idea into the installation “Lotah Stories.” Both of us had no clue at the time that we were about to discover an underground world.

Hiding From Roommates, Even Lovers

A Hindustani word, lotahs are water containers used to clean yourself after using the toilet. They look like teapots without covers and are made of metal or plastic. With one hand, you pour the water and with the other, you wash yourself clean. Lotahs are commonplace throughout South Asia, and in many Muslim countries they are used for cleansing yourself before prayer. However, once South Asian and Muslim immigrants come to the United States, the pressure to assimilate forces many of us to make the transition from lotah to toilet paper. But there are some South Asians who refuse to cross over. Instead, they find themselves living double lives, using lotahs-in-disguise.

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Women’s Day is an important celebration for the achievements and gains made by women around the world and is a major day of global celebration for the economic, political and social achievements of women.

To mark this day, South Asian Women in Media (SAWM) in association with Lahore Film and Literary Club (LFLC) invite you to the screening of film:
“Search for freedom” directed by Munizae Jehangir
Followed by panel discussion by the director

Search for Freedom portrays how the conflicts of Afghanistan affected the lives of four Afghan women, from the 1920’s to the present day. The film was amongst sixteen films chosen from around the world to be screened at Amnesty International’s USA film festivals around the US.

Munizae Jehangir is a documentary filmmaker and the country correspondent for India’s NDTV (New Delhi TV) in Pakistan. She has produced and directed a number of films including, Search for Freedom and Baloch Battlefield.

Date: Friday, 6th March 2009
Time: 6 pm
Venue: South Asian Media Centre, 177-A, Shadman2.
Phone# (011-92-42) 7555621-8

For details contact:

From outside Pakistan call
Sarah Tareen: 011-92-21-300-459-1184
Zebunissa Burki: 011-92-21-303-444-5165
Bushra Sultana: 011-92-21-3008430333

From within Pakistan call
Sarah Tareen:03004591184
Zebunissa Burki:03034445165
Bushra Sultana:03008430333

Ms Sarah Tareen
Coordinator
Lahore Film and Literary Club
177-A, Shadman-2, Lahore, Pakistan
South Asian Media Centre.
(011-92-42) 7555621-8

Her website

By Benjamin Dangl

Reviewed: Mexico Unconquered: Chronicles of Power and Revolt, by John Gibler, 356 Pages, City Lights Publishers, (January, 2009).

Carlos Slim, the second richest man in the world, calls Mexico home, as do millions of impoverished citizens. From Spanish colonization to today’s state and corporate repression, Mexico Unconquered: Chronicles of Power and Revolt, by John Gibler, is written from the street barricades, against the Slims of the world, and alongside “the underdogs and rebels” of an unconquered country. The book offers a gripping account of the ongoing attempts to colonize Mexico, and the hopeful grassroots movements that have resisted this conquest.

Gibler, a Global Exchange Media Fellow, has been reporting from Mexico since 2006. While writing for dozens of media outlets, he has covered events such as the Zapatistas’ Other Campaign, the teachers’ revolt in Oaxaca and other stories of police repression and popular resistance. These reports form the basis for much of the book. (His articles are collected at the Global Exchange website.)

In the prologue, Gibler writes of Mexico Unconquered: “each chapter bleeds into all the others: they all share the same blood.” It’s true: the chapters flow together smoothly, bonded by Gibler’s steady class analysis and excellent story-telling skills. He breathes poetry and anecdotes into the history, and empathy and prose into the reporting, so these stories can be understood and felt, not just read.
Mexico Unconquered starts off with an engaging people’s history of Mexico. Gibler guides the reader through the country’s various presidencies and popular uprisings. From Oaxaca, Gibler offers a first hand account of the incredible teachers’ revolt, with unbelievable reports on police brutality and people’s solidarity. From Chiapas, Gibler provides a concise overview of the Zapatistas’ history, contextualized with background information on indigenous autonomy and reports on the Other Campaign. The book also tells stories from Mexico’s ghost towns, with numerous interviews with families that bear the burden of immigration to the US.

But the book is more than just an account of neoliberal nightmares and grassroots revolts. It cuts to the heart of the problems ravaging Mexico today, dissecting the roots of the country’s corruption, state repression, drug wars and poverty. In this respect, the book’s approach reflects what the late folk singer Utah Phillips once said: “The Earth is not dying it is being killed. And those who are killing it have names and addresses.” Well, Gibler offers the names and addresses of the people – and companies and ideologies – that are still trying to conquer Mexico.

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By NADIA HIJAB

Watching Ari Folman’s Waltz With Bashir inevitably reminded me of Eran Riklis’ Cup Final, also an Israeli film about its 1982 invasion of Lebanon.
When Cup Final came out in 1992, it made me think that a common future for Israelis and Palestinians was possible. I had expected the same of Waltz. Both films deal with the story of young soldiers during Israel’s horror-filled 1982 war. Both won critical acclaim, though Cup Final won just one award compared to the 10 Waltz scooped up before it hit the Oscars (but lost to another foreign film, Departures).

But there the resemblance ends. By contrast to Waltz, Cup Final gives voice not just to Israeli soldiers but also to the Palestinian guerrillas then based in Southern Lebanon.
It starts with an soldier bemoaning his fate: He has to fight instead of going to watch the World Cup matches in Spain for which he’s got tickets. Serves him right for voting for the rightwing Likud, his friend retorts.

The two soldiers are captured by Palestinian guerrillas, led by the handsome Palestinian actor Muhamad Bacri, and taken from South Lebanon to Beirut so they can be exchanged for Palestinian prisoners. On the way, an unlikely friendship develops, rooted in a shared passion for football — and in the Israelis’ growing understanding of what the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is really about.

For me, the funniest — and saddest — moment of the film comes when the Israeli soldier speaks passionately of his love for Jerusalem. One of his Palestinian captors is from Jerusalem and he says how much he longs to see his hometown again. Why, the Israeli wonders, doesn’t he just go back to visit?

Palestinian and Israeli stare at each other for a long, long moment. I could sense the Palestinian character’s thoughts as clearly as if they were my own. Should he start by explaining about the expulsion and flight of 700,000 Palestinians in 1948, which is how his family ended up as refugees in Lebanon in the first place? Should he take a dip in history, back to the founding of Zionism in 1897, or the British promise to hand Palestine over to Zionist Jews in 1917 and the waves of Jewish immigration that followed?
Finally the Palestinian simply says, “It’s a long story.”

It is indeed a long story, but a simple one. That simplicity is captured in all its complexity by Cup Final director Riklis. The ending is tragically inevitable.

Waltz too leaves the viewer shaken. But its absence of context is problematic because it produces not just an incomplete story but also a distorted history. The distortion is deliberately fed by the film’s publicity materials and by the many Israeli and international Zionist organizations that have embraced it, some going so far as to issue a viewer’s guide to the film.

This one sentence from the film’s website — echoed in the viewer’s guide — illustrates the missing context: “In June 1982, the Israeli army invaded South Lebanon after Israel’s northern towns had been bombarded for years from the Lebanese territory.”

No mention is made of the fact that an informal ceasefire between Israel and the PLO had kept the border quiet for nine whole months. Then Defence Minister Ariel Sharon used the excuse of an attack on the Israeli ambassador to London by a renegade Palestinian group — one that was also anti-PLO — to launch his Lebanon invasion.

Does any of this sound familiar? In December 2008, Sharon’s political heirs launched a hellish assault on Gaza ostensibly to stop the rockets against Israel’s southern towns. Yet an informal ceasefire between Israel and Hamas that began in June 2008 had brought quiet to those towns — until an Israeli incursion on November 4 killed six Hamas fighters and led to a resumption of rockets, providing the excuse for the assault.

Waltz does not question the reasons for the Lebanon war, or even Israel’s role beyond its “indirect responsibility,” as an Israeli inquiry put it, for the massacre at Sabra and Shatila at the end of the war. But some 18,000 Lebanese and Palestinians were killed during the 3-month war for which Israel was directly responsible.

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By Peerzada Salman

Showering encomiums on Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib’s poetry is like employing rich epithets to describe William Shakespeare’s tragedies or Salvador Dali’s surrealistic strokes. Ghalib’s couplets are what he is. He is Urdu poetry. That is all you know, that is all you need to know.

Ghalib’s death anniversary falls on Feb 15. Should it be marked? If yes, then why is it important to mark creative individuals’ birthdays and death anniversaries? Perhaps to remember them? If recalling the important days in their lives makes a difference with respect to carrying out research on them, and exploring hitherto unravelled facets to their works and lives, then why not?

But sadly, despite Ghalib’s undisputed stature as a literary colossus, we’ve yet to decide whether he was an Indian or defied geographical boundaries.

In Pakistan we don’t seem to ‘own’ him as we own Allama Iqbal, Faiz Ahmed Faiz or Josh Malihabadi. Yes, scholars have undertaken tasks of ‘understanding’ his works or of Ghalib shanasi (which means getting acquainted with him), but one feels that the vital ‘ownership’ factor is amiss.

So why is Ghalib important to be considered as one of our own? Answers: (1) he enriched the Urdu language by almost exhausting the possibilities of linguistic inventiveness and creative ingenuity; (2) he had the temerity to explore undiscovered lands in the realm of poetry that prior to him weren’t even thought of as plausible literary subjects; (3) he blazed a trail for many a creative man to indulge in ghazal-writing like never before… and the list goes on.

To Ghalib composing poetry wasn’t a leisurely pastime or a part-time job. He was dealing with existence, warts and all. He was just 13 when he got hitched to an 11-year-old girl, Umrao Begum. They had seven children, none of whom survived, and passed away in their infancy. It was but natural that Ghalib was crestfallen. But he never turned bitter or vitriolic. He had seen life eyeball to eyeball. And was an admirer of nature and all that is beautiful.

That is precisely why his verses brim with love for the sensual and the intangible, coupled with the bare truths of being. He knew half-baked measures would make him a run-of-the-mill poet. Yes, he was an iconoclast. Yes, he was alcoholic. Yes, he was a gambler. But these social evils (if they are that) have nothing to do with his extraordinary skill or perceptiveness. He was every inch a poet, top-notch at that. As Intizar Husain enthused about Jaun Elia, Ghalib’s personality had become an extension of his poetry.

T.S. Eliot has given world literature an irrefutable dictum: poetry communicates before it is understood. Ghalib exactly achieved that. Even to those readers for whom Persianised Urdu or intricate phrasing is a tad knotty to comprehend, his couplets appear readily accessible.

For example, every reader of Urdu poetry is familiar with the following two lines:

A worthy picture doesn’t need description/

The paper on which it’s drawn is self-explanatory attire

Yet it is not a simple idea to grasp, but don’t we all love it truly, deeply and madly?

Or for that matter the couplet which is often ascribed to the death of one of his children:

———————–
Ghalib’s verses brim with love for the sensual and the intangible, coupled with the bare truths of being. He knew half-baked measures would make him a run-of-the-mill poet.
———————–
You say we’ll meet on Judgment Day/

Isn’t this gesture apocalyptic in itself?

This is the work of an artisan as well as of a genius. The couplet is fraught with etymological possibilities. It sounds personal. It has a mystic ring to it. It has an air of worldly wisdom about it. And seems easily identifiable.

Even when Ghalib tries to be a bit impish and light-hearted, compromising on contextual weightiness, he wins the reader over by virtue of his brilliant wordplay.

You don’t let me kiss but keep looking at my heart/

You think that having me for free would be a worthy bargain for you
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By Joanne Landy

WITH THE ELECTION OF BARACK OBAMA, millions in the United States and around the world are hoping for relief from the dangerous arrogance and destructiveness of George Bush’s foreign policy. President Obama is expected to take important positive initiatives — like closing Guantanamo and lifting the rule denying international organizations receiving U.S. aid the right to let women know about abortion. When the inevitable right-wing reaction to these initiatives comes, it will be crucial for us in the peace movement to defend them. On some broader questions, there is a chance that with strong continuing popular pressure — from both within and outside the United States — the pre-election hopes of many Obama supporters can be realized on issues such as an end to the war in Iraq or stepping back from Bush’s attempt to install “missile defense” in Poland and the Czech Republic.

The Obama administration will face a host of critical issues in foreign policy, such as how to relate to Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, Israel and Palestine, Cuba, Russia, China, Latin America, AFRICOM (the new Pentagon structure for Africa), North Korea, NATO expansion, weapons in space, nuclear and conventional weapons — and perhaps most important, the international economy and global warming. Popular movements can succeed in moving Obama to some degree on these questions, and that makes immediate mobilization imperative. But achieving a thoroughgoing and consistent progressive foreign policy will require a substantive, not just rhetorical, transformational politics in the United States that goes far beyond what we have reason to expect from Barack Obama’s presidency.

Obama’s foreign policy advisors and appointments, campaign speeches and website remind us that he has already shown his support for many of the central tenets of U.S. imperial policy. More fundamentally, given the corporate interests with which Obama and the Democratic Party are intertwined, there are limits to how far his administration can or will go in transforming U.S. relations with the rest of the world.
But people have been energized by the sweeping repudiation of Bush’s policies and the election of a candidate who has spoken broadly, albeit often vaguely, of the need for change. If movements in this country and abroad can build on popular hopes and show that what is needed is genuinely progressive change, they can push U.S. foreign policy to those limits, and place on the public agenda more profound challenges to the way the United States relates to its own people and the rest of the world. In so doing we can begin the process of forging the radical-democratic transformational politics this country requires.

A New U.S. Foreign Policy

THE PEACE MOVEMENT HAS LONG BEEN doing extremely valuable work opposing the many wars, interventions, and weapons systems of the U.S. government. But it is also necessary to step back from these day-to-day defensive battles and think in a broad, positive way about what a progressive U.S. foreign policy would look like. The New York-based Campaign for Peace and Democracy (of which I am a co-director) has contributed to the discussion of a new foreign policy, advocating a “détente from below” approach to resolving international conflict by forging an alternative to great power politics, an alternative based on movements for peace, social justice and democratic liberties across national boundaries.1 The Campaign calls for a new U.S. foreign policy that will:
• Renounce the use of military intervention to extend and consolidate U.S. imperial power. This would mean withdrawing all U.S. troops from around the world and closing down the more than 900 U.S. global military bases.
• End support for corrupt and authoritarian regimes.
• Oppose, and end U.S. complicity in, all forms of terrorism worldwide.
• Reject the notion that great powers have the right to “spheres of influence” that deny smaller nations their rights and autonomy. This means that Russia has no legitimate claim to hegemony over Georgia, Ukraine, or the rest of what it considers its “near abroad,” but likewise that the U.S. has no right to intimidate Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, or other countries in the Caribbean, Central America or Latin America.
• Support the right of national self-determination for all peoples; in the Middle East, this would include the Kurds, Palestinians and Israeli Jews.
• End one-sided support for Israel in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
• Take major unilateral steps toward renouncing weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons, and vigorously promote international disarmament treaties.
• End double standards whereby some countries are unjustly allowed to have nuclear weapons and others are not.
• Abandon and replace a global economic system that brings mass misery and insecurity to people around the world.

These initiatives, taken together, would constitute a truly democratic foreign policy. Such a policy could begin to reverse the mistrust and outright hatred felt by so much of the world’s population toward the United States. At the same time, it would weaken the rationale for imperial interventions by other great powers, and undercut the appeal of terrorism and reactionary religious fundamentalism. Though nothing the United States can do would decisively undermine these elements right away — they were, after all, a long time in the making — over time a new U.S. foreign policy would drastically undercut their power and influence.

Obama’s Foreign Policy

PEOPLE AROUND THE WORLD ARE enormously relieved by the defeat of John McCain, and hope that it signals a rejection of eight years of the destructive policies of the Bush Administration. And indeed, we can expect that President Barack Obama will put an end to the macho cowboy style of George W. Bush, with his bellicose rhetoric of “If you’re not with us, you’re against us,” “Bring ’em on,” “Axis of Evil,” “Dead or Alive,” and “Global War on Terror.” But the end to such provocations, while extremely welcome, is not enough. And a review of some highlights of Obama’s foreign policy positions gives cause for concern, even alarm.2

(1) Afghanistan and Pakistan
PERHAPS THE MOST DISTURBING ELEMENT of Obama’s program, repeatedly stated during his campaign and afterwards, is his plan to increase the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan — above the 30,000 troops already there, and quite possibly above the 20,000 additional troops recently requested by the Pentagon. Obama is also expected to try to pressure NATO countries to increase their military forces in Afghanistan, though he is likely to encounter considerable resistance from governments facing voters unhappy with the prospect of sending their soldiers into what appears increasingly to be a dangerous and unwinnable war.

Obama has threatened to target Osama bin Laden and other “high value” al Qaeda figures in Pakistan, with or without the agreement of the Pakistani government. It is not yet clear whether Obama intends to continue Bush’s policy of using American military power to attack Taliban forces in Pakistan’s northern areas. In any case, U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan and Pakistan is doomed to fail, but beyond that, the U.S. ground and air wars routinely kill and wound large numbers of civilians, in the process recruiting waves of new supporters of terrorism and fundamentalism.

By Jawed Naqvi

WHEN unforgivable events happen in India such as the demolition of the Babri mosque in 1992 or the massacre of innocent Sikhs in 1984 and the Gujarat pogrom of Muslims in 2002, they fortify the ideological underpinnings behind religious separatism, which resulted, for example, in Pakistan. Of course Pakistan’s detractors in India, on the other hand, are only too happy to exude perverse glee at the catastrophic challenge it faces today from Muslim zealots. You wanted a country for Muslims, now take that, they say mockingly.

I want to put light on a clutch of events from last week, all involving women of amazing brilliance and grit which made me miss some of my Pakistani friends – in the sense that I wished they were here in Delhi to share and savour the pleasures, the insights and the hope that ever so often spring up from the deep recesses of India. Let me start with a lecture on history and heritage Prof Romila Thapar gave on Saturday. You don’t get to hear Prof Thapar often these days, so it was a rare treat. She began with what is almost an invocation with her: Since the present is rooted in the past, the most reliable way to understand the present is by a better understanding of the past. She must have been very young when Gandhi and Jinnah and Nehru, all influenced by the rudimentary if erratic historiography available to them, had embarked on the interpretation of their past to decide the future of the subcontinent. Apart from the colonial nonsense about India’s past the leaders had inherited, Allama Iqbal too had promoted a static view of Indian civilisation, which Indian leaders have been parroting ever since. Greece, Egypt and Rome the great civilisations that they were had disappeared with the passage of time, the learned poet mused. But India was different. It had survived centuries of adversities.

In a second Prof Thapar put the questioner at ease. The Harrappan civilisation had disappeared completely and so had others that once straddled southern or northern India. So what are we talking about? Moreover, the concept of civilisations is a relatively new entrant. I checked that out separately. Oddly enough the word ‘civilisation’ only came into existence in the 18th century.

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