"This is our last night, so we thought we would brave the city and brave it is."

Fiongal and Jamie on their "last night" — in Ahmedabad, India:

"After a long night of talks mediated by the United States, I am pleased to announce that India and Pakistan have agreed to a FULL AND IMMEDIATE CEASEFIRE."

"Congratulations to both Countries on using Common Sense and Great Intelligence. Thank you for your attention to this matter!"

Writes President Trump, on Truth Social.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

AND: Here's Marco Rubio at the State Department website: "Over the past 48 hours, Vice President Vance and I have engaged with senior Indian and Pakistani officials, including Prime Ministers Narendra Modi and Shehbaz Sharif, External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, Chief of Army Staff Asim Munir, and National Security Advisors Ajit Doval and Asim Malik. I am pleased to announce the Governments of India and Pakistan have agreed to an immediate ceasefire and to start talks on a broad set of issues at a neutral site. We commend Prime Ministers Modi and Sharif on their wisdom, prudence, and statesmanship in choosing the path of peace."

"More than 300 years after the death of Aurangzeb, whose full name was Abul Muzaffar Muhi-ud-Din Mohammad Aurangzeb..."

"... allies of India’s Hindu nationalist prime minister, Narendra Modi, have demanded his grave be removed. For Modi and his allies, the legacy of the Mughals, who ruled India for some six centuries, is a byword for the subjugation of Hindus by a foreign occupier. Udayanraje Bhosale, MP for Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Maharashtra, the state where Aurangzeb is buried, urged the authorities to 'send a bulldozer and raze his grave … he was a thief and looter'....For many Hindus, Aurangzeb was cruelty incarnate. Under his reign, from 1658 to 1707, Hindus were raped, butchered and forcibly converted by the Muslim dynasty. Aurangzeb was a devout Muslim and chose an austere lifestyle, unlike other Mughals.... Aurangzeb... specifically instructed that it should be plain and unmarked, unlike the monumental tombs of Akbar, Humayun and Jahangir, as well as the Taj Mahal — commissioned by Aurangzeb’s father, Shah Jahan, to house the resting place of his wife Mumtaz Mahal...."

From "Modi’s nationalists demand destruction of ‘thief’ emperor’s tomb/An MP from the ruling BJP party called for bulldozers to be sent to the grave of Aurangzeb, a move seen as part of the erasure of Islam from Indian history" (London Times).

"In a chilling tale of revenge, a 30-year-old man mowed down his father's murderer in Ahmedabad's Bodakdev locality after waiting 22 years for an opportune moment."

"The accused, who was eight years old when his father was crushed to death in a similar manner, grew up hearing stories about the killers, and nursed a deep grudge and an intense desire to avenge the murder. On Tuesday afternoon, Nakhat Singh Bhati (50)... was riding his bicycle when he was run over by a pickup truck...."

From "After 22-year wait, 30-year-old mows down father's murderer" (Times of India).

"To pay for the journey, he said, he had sold an acre of land for $30,000 and raised $6,000 more by mortgaging two other acres..."

"... and borrowing money from relatives. On a recent day back home in India’s Haryana state, he opened Snapchat on his phone. It was filled with images of friends who have reached the United States, dancing at the Mexican border while their families back home set off fireworks and cut a cake in the shape of an American flag. 'I feel, let me go, too,' he said."

From "Ever more undocumented Indian migrants follow ‘donkey’ route to America" (WaPo)(free access link).

I just want to say that "a cake in the shape of an American flag" is a rectangular cake. That cake was in the shape of every country's flag (save Nepal's). Perhaps the icing nailed it down as a U.S. flag. 

Anyway, I'm a bit touched at the celebrations displaying the Indian's idea of America. It's a terrible shame that we've allowed the process of immigration to become so degraded that people this enthusiastic about our beautiful country can't pursue a legal option.

"I hope the government will not be so foolish as to completely dispense with India, which has incalculable brand value built up over centuries."

Said Shashi Tharoor of the opposition Congress party, quoted in "India or Bharat? Invites fuel speculation that the country could change its name" (CNBC)("Invites" refers to an invitation to a dinner reception at the G20 summit that came from the "President of Bharat").

"Many people in southern India, and especially those who toil outside, begin their workday around 4 a.m. and work until no later than noon."

"The afternoon often includes a nap. Work then resumes at 4 or 5 p.m. for a few more hours.... [T]raditional homes manage to stay cool... open windows early in the day and close them before it begins to warm up. Heavy, dark curtains block light and heat from entering the house, and ceiling fans circulate the cool air trapped inside. My family home had curtains made of khus, a native Indian grass, which we sprayed with water every couple of hours. The curtains transformed hot gusts into cool, fragrant breezes. Many traditional Indian homes have verandas, high ceilings and walls of mud that keep the interior cool...."

From "Bring Back the Parasol/And other time-tested ways to cope with extreme heat from cultures around the world" (NYT).

If you can do it, beginning your workday — or your exerciseday — at 4 a.m. is a very effective way of structuring your waking hours to avoid summer heat.

"[T]he incident once again highlighted the increasing man-animal conflict in India."

Economic Times reports on this viral video:

On Dehradun-Rishikesh Highway....
Both are lucky ☺️☺️ pic.twitter.com/NNyE4ssP19

— Susanta Nanda IFS (@susantananda3) September 21, 2022

"This Biennale, which runs through Sept. 18, is serious. Very serious. It verges on humorless...."

"[The curator's] statement notes that today’s 'profusion of sprawling, monumental exhibitions' mirrors 'the material excesses' of global capitalism, and asks: 'So why add yet another exhibition to this?' The answer he reaches is that art — perhaps uniquely — can reclaim our attention from algorithmically enforced social control.... Mai Nguyen-Long’s 'Vomit Girl' and 'Specimen' sculpture series... grapple with the aftermath of Agent Orange bombings in Vietnam.... Even blunter are Mayuri Chari’s vulvas sculpted from cow dung... address the shaming of women’s bodies in India amid conservative Hinduism’s obsession with purity.... This Biennale is... all over the place — one must study the scatter in an attempt to understand the collision that produced it. Its contradictions, I suspect, reflect those of the 'decolonial'.... Whereas decolonization in the classic sense was a political, territorial project with no inherent grievance against modernity, today’s 'decolonial practice' is about changing systems of knowledge — a woolier, potentially endless project. This Biennale is presented as a gathering of 'decolonial strategies.' The task... is tending 'all of the wounds accumulated throughout the history of Western modernity.'... This Berlin Biennale feels... overloaded by its own conceptual apparatus...."

From "Berlin Biennale Wrestles With Big Issues (and Itself)/A powerful and relentlessly political exhibition takes on all the world’s crises — at the risk of conceptual overload" by Siddhartha Mitter (NYT).

"I have now read several reports on the subject of this 'slight to Islam' and not one of the articles have told me what was said or what the insulting words actually were."

"Why? Are we so afraid of offending Muslims that the words cannot be repeated even in a news article? This is not the way of modern western countries. If this were about a perceived insult to the Catholic Church or a Pentecostal Church, I have no doubt we would have been given the bald facts - including what was actually said that caused offence. We should stop tip-toeing around Islam."

That's the top comment on the Washington Post article, "Muslim nations slam India over insulting remarks about Islam." I read that comment after reading the article, paragraph by paragraph, getting more and more exasperated by the lack of any quote of the "insulting remarks."

"Though prostitution is legal in India, those who practice it have long faced marginalization, violence and police harassment..."

"[T]he Indian Supreme Court... identified two categories: consenting adults voluntarily employed in prostitution; and minors, trafficking victims and those eager to leave the industry. For consenting adults, the court said, the police must refrain from arrests and other forms of harassment.... 'It is as if they are a class whose rights are not recognized,' the court [wrote]. 'The police and other law enforcement agencies should be sensitized to the rights of sex workers who also enjoy all basic human rights and other rights guaranteed in the Constitution to all citizens. Police should treat all sex workers with dignity.'... Rights groups estimate that India has about 900,000 prostitutes. Most, they say, have been pushed into the work by crushing poverty and sometimes forced into it by human traffickers. Others have chosen it over other informal employment opportunities, researchers have found.... [D]ecriminalizing sex work is, alone, not enough to improve conditions for workers in the industry."

From "India’s Supreme Court Orders Police to Respect Prostitutes’ Rights/Though sex work is legal in the country, those who practice it often endure harassment and abuse. The justices urged the authorities to employ a more nuanced and humane approach" (NYT).

"In Agra in Uttar Pradesh, members of right wing Hindu groups burned effigies of Santa Claus outside missionary-led schools...."

"'As December comes, the Christian missionaries become active in the name of Christmas, Santa Claus and New Year. They lure children by making Santa Claus distribute gifts to them and attract them towards Christianity,' said Ajju Chauhan regional general secretary of Bajrang Dal, one of the right wing Hindu outfits leading the protest.... 'Let only Christian celebrate Christmas,' said one of the men, in a video filmed during the disruption. 'We are against Hindu boys and girls participating in Christmas function … it hurts our sentiments. They dress up in church and everyone sings Merry Christmas. How will our religion survive?'...  A Christmas event that is held every year at Matridham Ashram in Uttar Pradesh was also targeted by a Hindu vigilante group who stood outside shouting slogans such as 'stop conversions' and 'missionary murdabad,' meaning 'death to missionaries.'"

From "Jesus statue smashed in spate of attacks on India’s Christian community/Amid growing intolerance to India’s Christian minority, several Christmas events were targeted by Hindu right wing groups" (The Guardian).

"I remember...."

I remember something made me read this old blog post of mine, from 2013, when I had a little project going where I'd take one sentence from "The Great Gatsby" and present it for discussion, not in the context of the book as a whole, but purely as a sentence. I like to read on a sentence level, and this book has the best sentences.

The sentence of the day was "I remember the fur coats of the girls returning from Miss This-or-That’s and the chatter of frozen breath and the hands waving overhead as we caught sight of old acquaintances, and the matchings of invitations: 'Are you going to the Ordways'? the Herseys'? the Schultzes'?' and the long green tickets clasped tight in our gloved hands."

I believe what took me back to that post was the "gloved hands." They reached out to me from the past! What happened was that within the course of 2 days — November 18, 2021 to November 20, 2021 — I'd written 2 posts that had the tag "gloves." One was about Facebook's virtual reality device, a haptic glove, and the other was about a legal decision in India that meant groping while wearing surgical gloves was not a crime.

I love tags that are specific and concrete but that link up disparate things, and "gloves" is a great example. This is one of the true joys of blogging. Most things on that level of specificity do not get a tag. Excited about "gloves," the tag, I fell into a reading spree and ended up in that "Gatsby" post.

What I wrote back then about that sentence:

"If tomorrow, a person wears a pair of surgical gloves and feels the entire body of a woman, he won't be punished for sexual assault as per this judgment."

Said Attorney General of India KK Venugopal, arguing against a court order that limited the crime of sexual assault to situations where there is "skin-to-skin contact," quoted in "No skin-to-skin contact: 'Outrageous' India sexual assault order struck down" (BBC).

"Either take the eye out, or she may not live"/"Allah is kind to have saved one of my eyes."

From "The deadly black fungus striking India’s recovering covid patients/Mucormycosis has killed hundreds in India and forced many to have an eye removed" (WaPo).

"Conspiracies at this scale often get exposed and ultimately it took the hasty tweet of Greta, who with other international celebrities suddenly turned sensitive towards farmer issues."

Said one Indian minister, VK Singh, quoted in "Greta Thunberg sparks criminal conspiracy probe in India with accidental tweet" (NY Post). The now-deleted tweet, per Singh, “revealed the real designs of a conspiracy at an international level against India.” 

It looks as though Thunberg passes things along without processing them through her own mind. You can see the deleted tweet here. She says "Here's a toolkit if you want to help" and gives a link to a document, which you can read. 

Apparently, somebody included her in the distribution of the document and she — or whoever does her Twitter posting — thought she could contribute by widely distributing the document instead of crafting an individual post using tips from the document. I'd argue that she's not part of a conspiracy because the sharing of the raw document is evidence that she didn't know what she was doing. She hurt whatever conspiracy there was. She exposed it.

This incident is interesting because it shows the mechanisms of shallow political activism and because India is taking such a strong position in response to the political speech of people outside their country:

Delhi police on Thursday confirmed that it had launched “a criminal case against the creators of the ‘Toolkit document'” that Thunberg shared. “The call was to wage economic, social, cultural and regional war against India,” police said of the plot supposedly taken up by the celebs.

"Women made rangoli and wrote, 'Congratulations Kamala Harris, pride of our village, Vanakkam (Greetings) America.'... Villagers... burst crackers..."

"But many of our relatives accused us of aping the West. They phoned us to ask what was the need for this? They said, have you forgotten our culture?"

Said the bride, from "A young Indian couple, whose intimate post-wedding photoshoot went viral on social media and attracted vicious trolling, have told the BBC they will not take down the pictures as it would mean giving in to their bullies" (BBC). 

If you put coy, posed photographs of yourself up on line and people make fun of you, are they "bullies"?

Click through to see the photographs. There's no nudity, just a couple acting playfully loving while swathed in big white comforters. Is that "aping the West"? Does anyone around here — this half of the globe — do wedding photos with giant expanses of comforter? 

"People thought I was a strange girl, because I was different. Pretty much as soon as I was born, people would tell my mother to get rid of me because nobody would marry a girl like this."

"No-one knew what the matter with me was. Disabilities were not understood in my village at the time, and nobody knew what cerebral palsy was. People in the village would tell my family that I was a punishment from a previous life.... I was too young to remember but my auntie who lived with us told me that my body was like a rag doll. A few villagers argued that she should be thrown into the river and left to drown. But I was literally saved by my father. He physically had to intervene to stop my body from being taken from our home and discarded like an object... I remember when families would come over to our house to check if I would be suitable for their son... I'd dress up in traditional clothes and sit in our small living room. When the families who came over saw my condition, they would say to my family, 'You expect our son to marry this?' And then leave."

From "'They wanted to drown me at birth - now I'm a poet'" (BBC).

"On social media, Indian politicians and commentators also exulted in the selection of Harris."

"The fact that someone of Indian origin could be 'a proverbial heartbeat away from the presidency is thrilling,' wrote Shashi Tharoor, a politician with the opposition Congress Party. Ram Madhav, a senior official in India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, saluted the history-making nature of the pick.... In Tamil Nadu, the south Indian state where Harris’s mother grew up, there was special pride. Kanimozhi Karunanidhi, a local politician, praised the 'inclusiveness' of the choice and wished Harris well in the election. Harris — whose first name means 'lotus' — has said that after her parents’ divorce, her mother raised her two daughters with an appreciation of their dual heritage. 'My Indian mother knew she was raising two black daughters,' Harris said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times in 2015. 'But that’s not to the exclusion of who I am in terms of my Indian heritage.'... Harris visited India regularly as a child and understands some Tamil, her relatives said."

From "Kamala Harris pick sparks delight in India and Jamaica" (WaPo).

There's something quite sad about saying "My Indian mother knew she was raising two black daughters." Why wasn't that mother — who did the work of raising the daughters and who contributed equally to their genetic makeup — allowed to feel pride in raising two Indian daughters? I know the stock answer. I just think it perversely gives power to the worst people.

ADDED: When Kamala Harris said "My Indian mother knew she was raising two black daughters," her mother had already died and was therefore in no position to speak for herself about how she conceived of her role as a mother. The mother,  Shyamala Gopalan "was an India born Tamil American cancer researcher and civil rights activist": "She insisted on giving her daughters names derived from Indian culture to help preserve their cultural identity."