Bilal Tanweer in Chapati Mystery:

There are no billboards on the streets. For the last four years, a week or so before the new season of Coke Studio is launched, most of the important billboards in major Pakistani cities are taken up by snazzy advertisements announcing the featured artists of the season. It’s the biggest annual ad campaign for any TV program and this is Season 5. It’s being touted by many to be the mother of all seasons, mainly on the basis of a wildly circulating promotional video of Episode 1 of the new season. The first artist on the promo video is a rapper: Bohemia. The video shows him in a hoodie and dark glasses, slamming out a rap number in Punjabi. ‘This is an opportunity for me to tell you what rap is—it’s poetry, it’s a message,’ he says in a close-up shot of his 3-second interview. The video cuts back to the song. By his side are the Viccaji sisters – Zoe and Rachel – who do backing vocals and harmonies but they appear to be in a more prominent role for this number.[sepoy notes: Bohemia was featured on CM a long time before “Coke Studio”]

The clip is followed by Hadiqa Kiyani, among Pakistan’s leading female vocalists, singing what sounds like the hard rock version of an AR Rahman’s composition. She is singing the Sufi poetry of Bulleh Shah. She’s followed by Atif Aslam, arguably Pakistan’s biggest rock star, also a sensation in India for the last four years. He has teamed up with ‘Qayaas’, an underground band, to do a version of a Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan qawwali. The last singer on the promo is of Humayun Khan’s who is singing Larsha Pekhawar Ta, a popular Pushto folk song. The absence of billboards is unexpected. For the last three years or so, Coke Studio is the soft drink brand’s main marketing strategy in the country. In fact, the entire marketing campaign of Coca Cola Pakistan is designed around Coke Studio: artists featured in the program are on Coke bottles, cans, television adverts, newspapers, television, radio and billboards. But there is no visual clue of it this year. Maybe it is a scaling back by the soft drink company. But the other interesting thing I notice is that on Coke Studio’s Season 5 website there is no ‘About’ tab either – meaning nothing to introduce a newcomer to Coke Studio. Taken together, these could mean a number of things, but they unmistakably do mean that no one needs to be told What Coke Studio Is and What It Does; and second, nobody needs reminding that Coke Studio will start airing on May 13. It’s common knowledge.

In other words, if there is a confirmation of Coke Studio’s status as a cultural behemoth in Pakistan, this is it.

More here.

Jemima Khan in New Statesman:

Aisha (not her real name), a divorced single mother with two children, recently chose to become a second wife. She was introduced to her husband by a friend. She says that at first she was hesitant. “I was like, ‘No, I can’t do it. I’m too jealous as a person. I wouldn’t be able to do it.’ But the more that time went on and I started thinking about it, especially more maturely, I saw the beauty of it.” They agreed on the terms of the marriage by email, covering details such as “how many days he’d spend with me and how many days he’d spend with his other wife, and money and living arrangements”. They then met twice, liked each other, set a date and were married. Her husband now spends three days with Aisha and her two children from her previous marriage and then three days with his other family, unless one of them is ill, in which case he stays to help but has to make up the missed time to his other wife. She confesses that “if he was to stay all the time I’d love it”, but says that having time off “is definitely beneficial in some ways as well”. She has “more freedom” to see her friends and her family, and it is a relief “not having a man in your face half the time, when you are cranky, and he can go somewhere else and you can manage the kids on your own”.

As a divorcee, bringing up children on her own for three years before remarrying, she built up an independent life for herself: “It’s hard to let your goals go for a man all over again.” Although she concedes they have had a “few teething problems” and that it took his first wife “some time to come to terms with it”, now, she says, they “have come to an understanding . . . We are finding our feet.” Both sets of children are aware of the new situation and have accepted it. In fact, she says that her husband’s daughter from his first marriage “can’t wait to meet second Mummy” and her own son, who now has a father figure and “role model” that he was previously lacking, is “really happy with it”. They have yet to experience “a big family get-together”, but Aisha says she is “hopeful that will happen soon . . . I’ve spoken to her [the first wife] a couple of times. She seems really lovely. I would really like for us to become good friends . . . for there to be that kind of bond of sisterhood between us.”

More here.

Their Lonely Betters
.
As I listened from a beach-chair in the shade
To all the noises that my garden made,
It seemed to me only proper that words
Should be withheld from vegetables and birds

A robin with no Christian name ran through
The Robin-Anthem which was all it knew,
And rustling flowers for some third party waited
To say which pairs, if any, should get mated.

Not one of them was capable of lying,
There was not one which knew that it was dying
Or could have with a rhythm or a rhyme
Assumed responsibility for time.

Let them leave language to their lonely betters
Who count some days and long for certain letters;
We, too, make noises when we laugh or weep:
Words are for those with promises to keep.
.

by W.H. Auden
publisher, Curtis Brown

Stephen Sparks in 3AM Magazine:

Historian and biographer Pierre Champion once characterized French writer Marcel Schwob (1867-1905) as “a man of the future.” It seems an odd assessment of a man who insistently looked to the past. Born into a family of rabbis and doctors, Schwob’s life was strongly marked by an obsessive fascination with bygone historical epochs: he studied Sanskrit; translated Catullus, Defoe, and Shakespeare; he spent his brief adult years studying, with the intention of publishing the definitive study of, fifteenth century outlaw poet Francois Villon. His stories, when not set in antiquity or the Middle Ages, are ripe with allusions to legends, lost customs, nearly forgotten mythologies and characters from the fringes of empire and art. Under the aegis of his uncle, Leon Cahun (great-uncle of the artistClaude Cahun), the curator and librarian of the famous Bibliothèque Mazarine, Marcel spent his formative years surrounded by a rich collection of books and manuscripts, including the Mazarine Bible, printed by Gutenberg himself. When he was sixteen, he wrote and abandoned a novel set in ancient Rome. It could be said that Schwob grew up at the end of the 19th century, but came of age in antiquity.

Champion’s insight may have been less a characterization of Schwob’s gaze than his destiny. In the century following his premature death, Schwob appears to have been all but forgotten. This despite numbering among his admirers Jules Renard, Mallarmé, Paul Valéry and Alfred Jarry (who both dedicated books to Schwob), Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde, Borges, and Roberto Bolaño. Despite periodic dustings off—Solar Books published a translation, by “Lady Jane Orgasmo,” of his secretly influential Imaginary Lives a few years ago that is already out-of-print and difficult to find—there seems to be little reason to revise Roger Shattuck’s claim, made in 1955, that Schwob is a “singularly neglected figure.”

The history of literature is, of course, strewn with the neglected, the misunderstood, the forgotten, the never fully realized, and minor figures more influential than renowned. If one were to draw a Venn diagram comprised of each of these categories, Marcel Schwob, along with a handful of others, would be at the heart of their intersections. But how, one despairs, can a man praised so highly during his own life fall completely by the wayside posthumously, as if it was his vitality alone that kept him from obscurity?

Fuchsia Dunlop in Lucky Peach (via The Browser):

The first time I visited London’s Chinatown was in the late 1980s, when a Singaporean family friend, Li-Er, took my cousin and me there for dim sum. To a Chinese-food virgin, as I was at the time, it was daring and exotic. We passed pillars wreathed in dragons on our way into the cavernous Chuen Cheng Ku, where we sat among the roaming trolleys, eating strange tidbits made with unfathomable ingredients. The textures of the food were unlike anything I’d encountered before: flabby, glutinous, taut, and slippery.

I was still in my teens, already a keen cook and adventurous eater, and I’d acquired from my mother a habit of analyzing new dishes, trying to guess how and with what they’d been made. But until that Sunday lunchtime, the nearest I’d got to tasting real Chinese food was the occasional takeaway of deep-fried pork balls with a slick of bright red sweet-and-sour sauce, chicken with tinned bamboo shoots, and egg-fried rice (which, incidentally, I adored). In Chuen Cheng Ku, I was thrilled and baffled in equal measure. I was game for eating anything, so I tried my first chicken’s foot, steamed in black bean sauce, and scoffed down mysterious, slithery rolls stuffed with prawns and slabs of something white and pasty. I couldn’t have guessed what went into most of the snacks and had no yardstick with which to judge them. Without Li-Er, I doubt that I’d have ventured into that kind of restaurant at all. Our dim sum lunch was just an isolated adventure. I had no idea then Chinese food was going to become an obsession that would take over my life.

It wasn’t until a few years later, in 1992, that I made the first of many trips to China. I backpacked my way around the country, from Guangzhou to Yangshuo, Chongqing, and Beijing. Like many foreign travelers, I was stymied by my lack of knowledge and my inability to speak or read the language. Aside from a few famous delicacies like Peking duck, I didn’t know what I should eat or where to find it. Once inside a restaurant, I didn’t have a clue how to order. My gastronomic experiences on the trip were random and haphazard.

Jeffrey Frank in the NYT's The Stone:

For years, visitors to the Copenhagen City Museum wandered into a modest room that contains a few artifacts from the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard’s life: portraits, meerschaum pipes, first editions and, best of all, the desk where he stood and produced with preternatural speed a series of original and difficult works, many of them written pseudonymously and published in editions that numbered in the hundreds — among them “Either-Or,” “Fear and Trembling,” “The Concept of Dread” and “Repetition.” The exhibit has been refreshed to mark Kierkegaard’s 200th birthday on May 5th. His belongings — a large library, furniture, paintings, and knickknacks —were pretty well dispersed after his death in 1855, but the expanded version will add an “outer circle” of relevant material. Manuscripts and papers from the Kierkegaard archives will be on display at the Royal Library.

The philosopher’s grave is fairly close by, in Assistens Kirkegaard—his forbidding name is a variation of the Danish word for cemetery — in the Norrebro district, which is also the burial ground of many other notable figures, including Hans Christian Andersen, Niels Bohr and the American tenor saxophonist Ben Webster.

Though in death he rests in this distinguished company, Kierkegaard was markedly less revered in life. His contemporaries saw him as a troublesome, quarrelsome figure. He was a familiar sight, strolling about the Old City, where he created the illusion that he was merely an underemployed gentleman. The satirical weekly Corsair published nasty caricatures of him and mocked his writing and pseudonymous disguises. He was gossiped about when he broke his engagement to the 18-year-old Regine Olsen, and was feared by his targets, among them, Hans Christian Andersen, whose early novels Kierkegaard eviscerated in his 1838 debut, “From the Papers of One Still Living.” Shortly before he died at age 42, he began a bitter ground war with the state Lutheran church. For his biographers and interpreters, his private life remains a nest of secrets.

Marina Petrova on Jim Holt's book, in the LA Review of Books:

JIM HOLT IS AN EXPERT AT NOTHING. He has gone on a world tour of modern philosophers, physicists, theologians, and writers, and asked them a question that is, he writes, “so profound it would occur only to a metaphysician, yet so simple it would occur only to a child.” Why is there something rather than nothing? Holt visited esteemed thinkers — Richard Swinburne, Steven Weinberg, Adolf Grünbaum, and John Updike — in their natural habitats, places like Oxford or Café de Flore in Paris. Holt presents their theories in Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story in a manner a layperson could grasp, and with wit and dry humor a cynic can appreciate. A philosopher, author, and essayist, Holt gives these great minds physical bodies, allowing his readers a glimpse into the lives of our own endangered species — humans that think for a living.

Holt grew up in a religious family, but he “had begun to develop an interest in existentialism” in high school, he writes, because it was “a philosophy that seemed to hold out hope for resolving my adolescent insecurities, or at least elevating them to a grander plain.” His parents and the nuns in his elementary school initially taught him that the world existed because God created it out of nothing. That answer didn’t quite jive with him, but that the world might exist for no reason at all seemed a bit unnerving. So Holt decided to play detective and attempt to make the universe answer for its existence.

Thinking for a living is a luxury few have, and asking the big questions is rare once we leave college. How many of us regularly ponder the reasons for the world’s existence after a full day’s work, doing homework with the kids, paying bills, and arguing with the spouse over whose turn it is to buy groceries? At times, after a long day, nothingness doesn’t look so bad. While nothing is more human than to contemplate our own existence, we just often forget about it when we grow up, leaving it to the metaphysicians, philosophers, and children. To read Jim Holt’s book after our daily minutiae is to remember what it was like, when we were younger, to mull over the question of existence and nothingness.

In the Boston Review:

WA: Religion in South Asia has been characterized by extremism and intolerance: the Taliban in Pakistan, the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, and the continued prominence of Narendra Modi in India. What should the role of religion be in a purportedly democratic modern South Asia, and can religious extremism be removed from the political theater?

PM: I don’t think so. Your question assumes that religion in modern democracy is an anachronism, one that progressive secularization will eventually mitigate. But this is an idealized view of modern democracy and secularism, not even validated by the United States, where religion plays such a major role in politics. The problem is that religion becomes a basis for identity and community in electoral politics when other forms of association—trade unions, for instance, or peasant groups, or empowered local governments—are weak or nonexistent. So there will always be politicians making appeals to religious solidarity, and there will also be extremists seeking to channel militant disaffection, whether among the poor or, as in Modi’s case, among those in the middle class that consider the poor and religious minorities a nuisance.

The question is whether those opposed to extremists can creatively deploy South Asia’s religious and spiritual traditions in their quest for social and economic justice. The question arises because the old Western language of politics, too identified with the hypocrisy and venality of local elites, doesn’t seem persuasive anymore, even in the West itself. And the old binaries of secularism versus religion or democracy versus theocracy don’t clarify much. We need a fresh vocabulary to both describe our political dilemmas and to seek solutions to them.

More here.

Bruce Stone in Numéro Cinq:

On March 19, the literary marketplace welcomed a new title by the young Vladimir Nabokov, who hasn’t been greatly inconvenienced by his death in 1977. The Tragedy of Mister Morn, a verse drama written in Berlin in 1924 and never published during Nabokov’s lifetime, reads as a kind of retread of Othello, set among the Bolsheviks: the plot points to Leninism, but the artifice is all Shakespeare, and the play’s release is timely on both counts. Six days earlier (a near eclipse of Morn’s arrival), the Erarta Museum in St. Petersburg, then hosting a performance based on Nabokov’s Lolita, absorbed the latest attack by the Orthodox Cossacks, a band of Russian conservatives that has been campaigning against Nabokov, denouncing his masterwork, since the start of the new year. Among the more serious incursions, a theater producer was beaten in January, but perhaps the most emblematic gesture was the lobbing of a vodka bottle through a window of the Nabokov museum: tucked inside the bottle, a note condemned Nabokov as a pedophile and warned of the imminence of God’s wrath.

Viewed as domestic terrorism (even Cossacks have dreams), these acts seem comparatively tame, even quaint. As a more benign kind of vandalism (tell that to the producer), they make their point clearly enough, I suppose. But as literary criticism, they are an utter travesty, an intellectual obscenity that should make the Cossacks and their kin themselves the object of public and lasting derision (pillories and tomatoes or, at minimum, raspberries). A half century has passed since Lolita’s publication, yet here we are again—it seems inevitable—with the literal-minded and the simpletons, the well-meaning zealots and zombie mooncalves breaking out torches and pitchforks, vodka bottles and spray paint, to decry Lolita as the work of the devil.

More here.

Joseph S. Nye in Foreign Policy:

When Foreign Policy first published my essay “Soft Power” in 1990, who would have expected that someday the term would be used by the likes of Hu Jintao or Vladimir Putin? Yet Hu told the Chinese Communist Party in 2007 that China needed to increase its soft power, and Putin recently urged Russian diplomats to apply soft power more extensively. Neither leader, however, seems to have understood how to accomplish his goals.

Power is the ability to affect others to get the outcomes one wants, and that can be accomplished in three main ways — by coercion, payment, or attraction. If you can add the soft power of attraction to your toolkit, you can economize on carrots and sticks. For a rising power like China whose growing economic and military might frightens its neighbors into counter-balancing coalitions, a smart strategy includes soft power to make China look less frightening and the balancing coalitions less effective. For a declining power like Russia (or Britain before it), a residual soft power helps to cushion the fall.

The soft power of a country rests primarily on three resources: its culture (in places where it is attractive to others), its political values (when it lives up to them at home and abroad), and its foreign policies (when they are seen as legitimate and having moral authority). But combining these resources is not always easy.

More here.

From Lucaleordini.com:

Slingshot, the book by Gabor George Burt, opens in Florence, in front of Michelangelo's David, with a brief but thorough analysis of the figure’s state of mind right before his duel with Goliath. Florence, cradle of the Renaissance, was the site of an explosion of creativity unprecedented in human history – and a source of inspiration for me in illustrating two examples of meaningful innovation that took place just few hundred meters from Michelangelo's David. The protagonist in both examples is Roberto Benigni, the famous actor and director who won an Oscar for his 1998 film Life is Beautiful. In the first example, the scene is the Piazza Santa Croce in Florence, under the severe gaze of the statute of Dante mounted on the wall of the Basilica of Santa Croce. Here, Benigni explains, reads and recites the verses of the Divine Comedy. It is a singular, original, extraordinary event. His explanation is anything but academic: an interdisciplinary approach that relentlessly weaves together history, literature, theology, classical poetry, philosophy, morality, culture, and religion in an astonishing way that irresistibly engages the listener. His boundless passion for the subject brings his readings to elevated heights of spirituality, while at the same time entertaining with numerous reminders of and contextualizations into today’s Italy.

The second example follows in the footsteps of the first: this time Benigni presents, on television, the Constitution of the Italian Republic, the document that contains and inspires the principles upon which the democratic life of the country is founded, defining the rules and functioning of political life. In this case as well, Benigni's performance differs from the normal way of discussing legal matters. His visceral and uncontainable love for Italy, along with his gifts as an actor and comic, make such technical issues as law accessible, compelling, and fascinating. In both cases, the result was an extraordinary success in all respects, both as a televised event and for Benigni personally as an actor. In the first case, he reawakened in his audience the desire to re-read, to re-discover the Divine Comedy and become excited by the subject. In the second case, he reawakened patriotic pride in millions of people. He achieved success through stimulating and inspiring more engaging, interesting, and modern approaches to the teaching of the Divine Comedy and the Constitution.

…Dante, the opening of the Divine Comedy:

Midway upon the journey of our life, I found myself within a dark forest, for the straightforward path had been lost.

In the course of our existence, many of us are forced to face the dark woods of our problems, and to find a guide who can show us the way out. It could help us to consider that, because of Virgil’s guidance, Dante “went out to gaze at the stars” only after having passed through the fires of hell.

More here. (Note: I heard Benigni recite (perform?) the XXXIII canto from Paradiso in 2003 and it inspired me to commit it to memory and to make my 9 year old daughter do the same. He is truly brilliant)

From The New York Times:

Kurzweil, author of “The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology,” may be best known as a polymath inventor and futurist, but he’s really a cyborg sent back from the year 2029 to save humanity from the nature-nurture debate. His mission is not to provide a final score (nature 20 percent, nurture 80 percent!) but to reframe the dispute and the ancient anxieties that feed into it: What is the essence of identity? How do we slip the noose of determinism? Is our free will really free, and if it is free, is it really ours? These questions shift when you factor in technology and understand that the human future will be shaped by nature-­nurture-manufacture.

Kurzweil examines the human brain and makes a case for its artificial enhancement, if not total replacement. Apparently, the trick to reverse-engineering a brain is wrestling with “many billions of cells and trillions of connections” in order to extract the simple operating principles. He discusses how evolution expanded the human neocortex, and its current constraints. We can’t squeeze much more neocortex into our skulls, but we can augment our frontal lobes with technology. He walks readers through breathtaking experiments, like an artificial replacement for a rat hippocampus, and he proposes a few tweaks to the classic brain design, like a digital module to root out and resolve cognitive dissonance. Kurzweil’s vision of our super-enhanced future is completely sane and calmly reasoned, and his book should nicely smooth the path for the earth’s robot overlords, who, it turns out, will be us.

More here.

One Car Garage

Alexander Nazaryan in The New Yorker:

On August 6, 2010, a computer scientist named Vinay Deolalikar published a paper with a name as concise as it was audacious: “P ≠ NP.” If Deolalikar was right, he had cut one of mathematics’ most tightly tied Gordian knots. In 2000, the P = NP problem was designated by the Clay Mathematics Institute as one of seven Millennium Problems—“important classic questions that have resisted solution for many years”—only one of which has been solved since. (The Poincaré Conjecture was vanquished in 2003 by the reclusive Russian mathematician Grigory Perelman, who refused the attached million-dollar prize.)

A few of the Clay problems are long-standing head-scratchers. The Reimann hypothesis, for example, made its debut in 1859. By contrast, P versus NP is relatively young, having been introduced by the University of Toronto mathematical theorist Stephen Cook in 1971, in a paper titled “The complexity of theorem-proving procedures,” though it had been touched upon two decades earlier in a letter by Kurt Gödel, whom David Foster Wallace branded “modern math’s absolute Prince of Darkness.” The question inherent in those three letters is a devilish one: Does P (problems that we can easily solve) equal NP (problems that we can easily check)?

Take your e-mail password as an analogy. Its veracity is checked within a nanosecond of your hitting the return key. But for someone to solve your password would probably be a fruitless pursuit, involving a near-infinite number of letter-number permutations—a trial and error lasting centuries upon centuries.

More here.

From The Talks:

Do you often have the feeling that people misunderstand you?

I feel that I am portrayed in the press as being this person who wears masks. But I feel that I am a completely transparent person and yet people seem to think that I am not. They are unable to deal with my candor and my honesty. I remember a girl, it was for this New York Magazine piece that came out a few months ago, that was very shocked when I talked about this cocaine mistake that I made.

That sounds interesting.

I tweeted drunkenly that I wanted some coke. And I said: I am going to tell you the whole story and you can print it. I don’t care. This is what really happened. She said: “I am really shocked that you are going to talk about this.” And I said, “What’s wrong about it? Why can’t you talk about it?” She thought I was playing a kind of game. Because I was so upfront in talking about it, that she was not able to believe that I was telling her the truth.

Well a lot of people wouldn’t be honest in a situation like that.

But those days are over. We don’t live in that world anymore. Some people still live in this shadow world of non-transparency and inauthenticity. I think that world is leaving us, because of – yawn! – technology, social media and the overabundance of sharing. You really can’t lie anymore.

More here.

Christian Parenti in The Nation:

It’s best not to dwell too much on Pakistan, or at least Ahmed Rashid’s description of it in Pakistan on the Brink, because the conclusions are so grim. Consider the variables: there are at least three civil wars being fought in the country, which has an arsenal of around 100 atomic weapons and is manufacturing more. Its military and intelligence services have cultivated religious extremists and terrorists as policy proxies for nearly sixty years, and have now lost control of some of them. The social capacities of the government’s civilian branches are minimal; its bureaucracies are largely unable or unwilling to do the economic planning and development necessary to meet the basic needs of the world’s sixth-most-populous nation. Its economic growth is only about half that of Bangladesh or Sri Lanka, and is generally well below half of the typical growth rates in India; consequently, its economy can’t create enough work for its “youth bulge” (35 percent of Pakistanis are below the age of 15). The country’s political class is composed mostly of reactionary landlords who steal from the public coffers and oppose meaningful social reform. In 2011, more than two-thirds of Pakistani lawmakers—rich men, mostly—did not even bother with the pretense of filing income taxes. The president, Asif Ali Zardari, was among them.

More here.