my name is khan, and it sucks to be me

You know its going to be a bundle when a man who sells skin whitening cream in real life is playing the role of a racially profiled autistic man in america.  But how big of a fiasco "My name is khan" is can only be fathomed if you sit through this preposterous and idiotic film.  Made by a chubby Bombay kid called Karan Jauhar who has little or no sense of  post 9-11 racial and imperialist politics of america, this film is an exercise in chootiapa.


I once watched shahrukh for the kitsch factor.  I watched him in St. Louis and then again in California.  Yes Boss and Pardes were cute films. Shahrukh had a kick to him.  An underdog who is not handsome and at the brink of either making it or failing.  Agitated by a constant  self loathing, he chases heroines, stalks them (Kiran in Darr), and pimps them for his superiors (Juhi in Yes Boss, and Mahima in Pardes).  But his falling from grace was the ominous (and potent) song written for him by Javed Akhtar.


Mein Ban Jaoon sab se Bada, bas itna sa khawab hai.


Somewhere the gods of wrath were listening.  Now Shahrukh is basking in the wealth of endorsement - he owns an IPL team. (And as Huma informs us) he sold his soul for magic beans when he played a young Vajpayee in the backdrop of the Gujarat massacres.

http://pulsemedia.org/2010/04/16/the-king-is-out-his-name-is-khan-long-live-the-king-part-i/

But the short of it is: It is not believable when a rich bastard like him plays the role of a disabled man thrown into jail in an incident of racial profiling.  A man who is innately good and literal, patriotic, law abiding and head bobbing.  Khan's real life persona is so overwhelming, his poor acting skills are hardly able to mask. 





Much futile fanfare about his chemistry with Kajol.  It is a transitory funny moment in the film when autistic Shahrukh asks Kajol as she is preparing a meal, "Can we have sex?"  You don't believe him for a moment - the diva that he is.  The more rich and famous and powerful people get, the less capable they are of normal sex.  The humor was Kajol's reaction.  She grins and runs into the bedroom after him.  Now, he is autistic and conversation is not his forte  So we know Kajol ain't in it for the mental stimulation.  


A brief assertion of female sexuality. 


I wished Kajol was not so set and framed in the film.  Audiences are past (or ought to be) past seeing yellow light shone on flawlessly made up faces - big blue eyes and hair - staring vacuously past the lens.  Nevertheless, her scenes were okay.  She is Mandira.  She loses a son to a hate crime.  She walks onto the soccer field with poster demanding justice.  She ends a relationship so she may bereave on a wave of hate and separation.  All believable - except for the Hindu-Muslim undercurrent.


Its unavoidable that the Hindu woman is punished for lusting for and marrying a Muslim man - the punishment being that she loses her son - a son whom she had (ironically) Muslimized by giving him a Muslim last name.  And now as she grieves she must also forgo all pleasure and shun her Muslim husband.

She is chastised for her sexuality -- until the Muslim proves himself worthy (in a miscegenated Indian american patriotism.)


The problem with the film from start to finish is Sharukh and its politics.  So fake were the racial politics, I averted my eyes at the disingenuous depiction of power when his mouth is pulled open in an intimate search by the police.  I hope the actors got to wash the foundation cream off their hands right after the scene.


Its disingenuous because ultimately it is a story about the american justice system working.  Racially profiled people doing their time, and coming out the other side of the metal fence, celebrating america, and in a quest to meet the president.  Ultimately the message Khan has for the president is meaningless.  What shrieks forth is a belief that the establishment is forgiving, and we shall overcome.  And truth shall see the (yellow) light of day.   


Never mind that you were illegally detained for several days, and subjected to degrading treatment.  Its a sado masochistic enactment of the personal role plays of imperialism and military-prison-industrial.  It reminded me of the racially grotesque film "Monster Ball" where Halle Belle's character sleeps with the very (white) man who executes the father of her son, a black man.


Attempting to critique the politically destructive instinct of how in the aftermath of 9-11, Hindus and Sikhs sought to be distinguished from Muslims, the real suspects and conspirators, the film ends up reinforcing it.  That secular Muslims (ones who Muslim-ness is limited to occasional intrusive salams and epiglottis rehearsals of the "kh" sound in urdu) must be set apart from the ones in basement mosques inciting young believers into plots to blow up subways.


In fact to make cheese cheesier, in an audacious display of (we're the Indian state and we are anxious to prove ourselves in the international war against Muslim terror) Sharukh's character is deeply "hinduized" - he may get to keep his prayer mat - but he is steeped in an acceptance of the Indian State's choreographed criminalization of Muslim men.  (For e,g the trial of Mohammad Afzal where he was unfairly sentenced to hanging for his role in the attacks on the Indian parliament - a sentence that was more to appease some imagined, some constructed middle class, public sentiment.)


Thus he (Khan) calls the FBI and rats out a suspect in a prayer cap. (An actor who looks surprisingly like a lovechild of Fareed Zakaria and Steve Colbert)


It isn't a surprise then that India got itself a POTA when the US got itself a Patriot act. Other racial  stumbles.


The black woman from Georgia is portrayed as some white fantasy of an aunt Jemima type figure.  A universal mother.  She opens her heart, her home, her kitchen, to this autistic stranger  -- and her wardrobe.  Khan's clothes are soaked so he wears a dress of hers. Why is this moment so utterly not heart warming?


And if its a secret nod to Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie (where he dresses in drag) and in Rainman (where he is autistic) then I hope, for their sake, it was intentional.


Khan rescues a small Georgian town and many of its residents.  The brown man saves the day, from a flood that is reminiscent of Katrina, proving that even coconuts have burdens.


I just wish they weren't unburdening them on us.  What with multi billions and Fox Searchlight promoting such sappy drama.

love me love love I'm a liberal (reposted)

darlings, I am at a serious writer's blog.  So I am reposting.  This post is kind of sophomoric. But not without cause.  I am in the midst of following the worlds' longest email clash between liberals and lefties.  Ever since college days, to be called a "liberal" has been an insult of the highest order.  Infinitely worse than being called a sibling lover.  So who are these liberals and why do we hate them so? Liberals are reformists who prefer individual  rights over systemic change.  Who do not challenge the divides of class, as long as slums are painted from the outside.  Who do not mind that our military maims babies as long as they do so in the confines of their barracks.  Who do not think challenging the system is an imperative because they are protected by industry or land or because they are part of the highly paid professional class serving banks and firms.


so here it is.


Inspired by Phil Ochs's I am a Liberal


I went for the judiciary rallies
And I cried for the dead in Gojra
I long marched to the capital
I murmured ameen to the tarana
But any talk of changing the status quo
Well that’s just not practical
So love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberal

I protested against the Hudood
I got hit with a baton on my shin
Now I give all my money to the TCF
Cause change, they say, is in the citizen
But don’t tell me to question democracy
Dynasty is still better than the boot
So love me, love me, love me I’m a liberal

The military and Musharaff I abhor
I fought in the mountains of Baluchistan
But I tell you, they finally got it right
So don’t ask me to join in your protests
Don’t show me dead babies in Bajour
They hosted the militants alright
So love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberal

I embrace the ancient civilizations
I celebrate Diwali, Navroze, Eid, and Christmas
I rant wild on our sufi traditions
I burned with the statues of Bamiyan
But workers and people and women
Have to know that privatization ain’t ALL bad
So love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberal

I go nuts for the people in jail
I love the Hindus and the Dalits of Thar
I revere home based workers and queers
But I believe that hanging is humane
Cleaning latrines a chore, but a job
And I wrote a report on rights just last year
So love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberal

I buy tickets to Kara, I play jazz
I own an original Sadequain
I treasure the artwork on trucks
I have a picture with Malik el Shabaz
And its gotten me a few dozen fucks
‘Cause it’s really ALL about me
So love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberal


The flogging Swat video made me cry
Mukhtaran and Hillary give me a high
The Taj of Mumbai is a banner of hope
But with these filthy TeT I just cannot cope
Don't tell me there are women in Waziristan
or children, or poor, like in the rest of Pakistan
My NGO's grant just got through, uff jaan!
So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal 


last stanza by Huma Dar

soha ali khan reveals all

on activism
we held a  protest against civilian casualties in Khyber, at the press club, and there happened to be a dentists's protest scheduled for the same slot. Apparently a dentist from Islamabad was abducted in Dubai. And even weirder I this ran into my own dentist in the midst of pumping fists and chanting anti army slogans, yeh jo zulm ki mauj hai  And he, this money focused rotund man, handed me a flyer.  Since when did dentists arrive in political activism and fight for other dentists? A person who does root canals should stay off the streets. Period. (ontal).


on kids
I took A and M to a birthday party.  That was not so strange, except the part when I noticed they were the only two children in the party running around shoeless.  As you may already know that A has a decided attachment to princesses, but lately he has expressed a desire to ride in tractors, diggers and trains.  So there is hope he will enjoy Disney and other corporate marketing of gender for both boys and girls.  M took S's homegrown cherry tomatoes for her beautiful Aunty F in nursery school, and spoke about how dinos went extinct.


on films
Marisa Tomei and John Cusack were very cute and very verbal in "War Inc."  How sweet to have Irish Catholic John and Italian Tomei tell it like it is to the american people.  Saw a Mahesh Bhatt relationship film, "Tum Mile."  Ordinary relationship fare -where the 1995 Bombay floods reignite lost love.  Soha Ali Khan was worth it.  She is toned and tan, and totally believable as the level headed, emotionally capable girlfriend of a self obsessed artist - realizing and disliking that she might be a muse, choosing principles over the man.  


Abhishek is an improvement on Amitabh, Ranbhir on Rishi, and yes Soha on Sharmila.  So take that Apu Trilogy!


sharmila



soha





on teaching
I have discovered at least one good use of students.  They have a penchant for edibles sold on thelas.  Thus a status update recently announced the arrival of falsa season, and one ex student even gave a recipe - slightly crushed falsa with sugar and masala.  Rs. 80 a pao.  I didn't buy though.


I pretended like I knew what the hell this kid was talking about when she kept saying jigar which is teen speak for, not liver, but best friend.  I finally got it in context.  Why are some kids so goddamed cool.  They really are.  Earnest faces, yet headed nowhere yet.  Dead Poets with no society.  Rebels without a cause.  To them loyalty to a classmate is more  important than their future.  They are willing to put studying in abeyance in order to get justice for a wrongfully discipled classmate.  We will die for him.  We will fail for him.  And here I am thinking, hell, I wish this guy had vandalized an embassy rather than (allegedly) violate the rather uninteresting "no outside tutoring" rule.


(And soon I must go and feed Whiskers jigar, although he scored two nuggets earlier).  


A student actually misspelled the "but for" test for factual causation as "butt for."  A student actually wrote in his exam paper:  "This question involves suicide pact, which is not in our syllabus."


S
S is sowing.  S helped me with excel.  S has been angry because he's been in the sun a lot.  I had abandoned this entry, but for him.

zong ad - pretty whorish

Been subjected to this awful ad and song sung by Ali Hamza.  


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xL7rnZvyaJs

Ok, what's wrong with the picture?

Get it? 

All the women are spineless retards who wait to be rescued and breathlessly follow husbands, from one continent to another  

Wife

You (the man) do not need to discuss your resignation or your immigration with her.  You tell her when you are ready for the next big move.  You glare at her when she walks in behind you, and glancing at your computer screen, she realizes for the first time that you are quitting your job, moving countries, leaving your family, and setting up a project for the deaf in Pakistan.

And do you have a discussion with her at that moment?  No.  She returns to bed, and acquiesces to the quiet, moral power of your decision.  Once you return to and are settled in a laughing village of your nostalgia, you make a quick phone call and instruct her to return.  Firmly.

Now as someone who has moved countries, with kids  -- at the very least it requires:

packing boxes

lots of paper cuts

seventeen trips to goodwill

big donation bags

renting mailboxes

selling furniture

finding friends who will store

sitting at U-haul

six months pregnant, and wide

lots of cheap chinese food
and Gatorade

  

But hell, he's made his money.  She can do it alone.  Or She can hire some hispanic movers, right.

Sister

He returns to the innocent memory of his deaf sister and they sign to each other in mirrors.  She is cute and childlike, coy and virginal like a Zia era school girl.  She is the inspiration for this project.  Yet its her father, this brother, and a male friend who examine maps and plans for the new project. 

(While she braids her hair in ribbons?)

I hope for her sake she finds some bumkin to bang in the chanay ka kheth.

Mother

Looks up from her prayer and finds her son there. Amen, my lord!  "I can now spend the rest of my miserable days not lamenting my son's absence, but feasting upon his sight."

Worst of all, it invokes patriotism in the most vulgar way - farmers harvesting fields of gold - carefree children tossing cricket balls.  Forget that most of the country is drowning in inflated prices, and food insecurity, scrambling for crumbs -- in a grotesque migration for city wages, and switching 3 buses to get to jobs.  

The song acknowledges that the country is poor and and disabled by illiteracy  -- yet advocates that solutions lie in individual, wealthy philanthropists.  It does not question the capitalist economy, and the politics of migration- but salutes the man who makes a killing in stock markets and business strategies in a wall street like venue.  And returns a portion of it to a good cause.

Indeed, just as Gandhi's silly comment about the affluent using a portion of their wealth for themselves, and holding the rest as trustees for the poor. (that Arundhati Mocks)

And for godssake, its an ad for a cell phone company. ZONG.  I am not exactly expecting a feminist anthem.  But is it too much to ask that women not be portrayed as whores?  


Please.....snap out of your patriarchal wet dream.

got acres?

An article by someone at Carnegie Mellon.

http://pakteahouse.wordpress.com/2010/04/09/food-for-future-pakistan-has-moved-from-being-an-exporter-to-an-importer-of-food/

I've been a little out of it, but the politics was brewing in me, just like the sounds are marinating in M, and suddenly at five, she will be reading.

Here's what the piece is about.

Big landlords are the biggest problem. (That and the exploitative aarthi system that S must write about.)  If you own more than 25 acres, then you are one.  And you are contributing significantly to food insecurity in Pakistan.  Because of you we have to export wheat, and face rising food prices.  Prices the majority can ill afford..You do not cultivate even arable land because there is not incentive for you to invest in such production.  You maintain landlessness and tenant insecurity, and prevent others from growing freely and productively.   This is criminal in times of  food shortages.   Its because of you, there is bonded labor.  It is because of you peasants migrate to cities to find work, escape poverty, and pay off debts.  Plus you look like a jinn  in that Chairman Latha.  The Chairman would not permit this.  So get off your stallion.  Step out of your tinted glass prado.  Face the music.  Give it up and put it to work.

Push for land reform.

today's events

In those dark and humorless corridors of power, I met you today.  You were beautiful.  You had just emerged from your swim, and over the corpse of a bluebottle or a blue shrimp, we spoke briefly, and agreed.  People raced motorcycles, and nearly ran us over.  The waves crashed to the dancing feet of a four year old.  Wrapped in an orange towel, there were shivers and quivers, and the slow after effects of cough syrup.  And yet, the air was viscous in those crumbling towers of power.  The men were lethargic from their endless chases of paper and golf balls. Banging prayer mats and gulping shots of vodka. The women were weary from the poisons in their skin; they fretted about bombs and ballet, and laughed.  When did girls become women and straighten their hair, and design huts made of rock and S. Abdullah? Lips luscious, skins taut, faces no longer able to even pretend.  Hostility.  You seem less pretty now with the sun in your eyes, and your necks melting.  You look not like the angel you once were.  Your child is eating sand.  She is slinging mud.  She is atop a white horse, and is awkward.  A six year old antagonist in a sleeping beauty swimsuit.   You scoop meatballs intently.  There is a tanginess in the chicken today.  A teenager mesmerized by the baboon's somersaults and the crass humor of the man over beast.   You eat dates from Mecca and Medina.   You eat pinenut desserts from Lebanon..

There is salt in my contact lenses.  The four year old wears a bindi of sand. The shivers.

A boy atop a public bus raises his arms and actions a throw with a ball.  He is Nepali, and wears a soccer uniform. A monkey showman approaches inspired by the excesses of philanthropists. Gluttonous.  A servility as if things were in order. In whispers and hushes, to the sound of waves.  There are hordes of people out today.  Some are throwing up in the sea.  Some are not even listening to the sound of metal.  I feel nostalgic for change.

strange encounters

I am disgruntled.  I am at the point before cynicism where nothing much matters.  I got myself into a meaningless debate about the military operation.  I changed no one's mind.  I was appalled by the coldness of liberals.  People who normally speak of civil rights and due process now acknowledge, with a heaviness in their hearts, that they must support the operation.

Ugh. Since when did mass murder become worthy of support?

But what material difference does it make if I am appalled.  We are not coming to the streets in masses to oppose the operation. We held protests and marches last year - we interviewed and collected data, but all that achieved was one night of detention for a bunch of activists. 

Hence I am at that point before cynicism where I question everything, and nothing really matters.  Hence the tambourine man.

"I'm not sleepy, and there ain't no place I am going to."

I am a bhangi.  I am a chamar.  I used to be a panah-geer.  I would wear a Che Guevara t shirt, except, I care for it even less than I care for lawn prints.  I really do miss the karachi of yesteryear, the karachi of my father where he played soccer with the sheedis, and spoke in Baluchi phrases.  I remember the days when I took rickshaws and climbed into public buses, and walked miles because the car's petrol ran out.  I remember falling in a gutter and bleeding (and grinning) through my shalwar all the way home.   Thinking now that without the pashtuns, karachi would seem contourless. And thinking then that they stared so bad, those bastards, you could not get a proper look at their flawless features and Bond faces.

And I remember loving the freedom of the streets of saddar.  I had discovered, at 15, the mad liberation of walking through zaibunnisa street, by services club and trinity church, to the metropole area.  Nothing more aggravating than being stuck at Regal Chowk in traffic, waiting for zed 2 to pump its engines. Infinite intervals.

My favorite was gaping into the deep deep police colonies on Garden road, and fantasizing about the hundreds of families it held.  Same feeling, I got years later getting into NYC from Boston on a chinatown bus, and seeing a concrete jungle in Bronx.  Each balcony decorated in a different shade of Christmas.  Each family containing with its confines its own story of immigration, and loss. And graduations.  And I felt such a closeness with Trinidad and Haiti.

Now, back in Karachi, I see a sanitized showcase of a life.  Glowing with toxic consumerism.  Fashions that flow in vulgar dismissal of the choking poverty the rest of the city is mired in.  Of course, like any normal person who finds gross disparity fundamentally disconcerting, I want to reject too many things.

Facials, for example.  And eyebrows.  I want to fight with moms who take their kids to the best coach at beach luxury, the only ballet teacher in town.  Or order children's clothing from catalog.  When most people can not afford x-rays and pay Rs. 100 for schooling.

I told my students that by choosing to teach, I had taken the nun's path of obedience and poverty.  But not chastity.   Smiles.  (Relative poverty)

Then, inappropriately, one day, I referred to Adam and Eve's expulsion from heaven as deportation to a group of confused students.  And worse still, I said the story was in the Book of Genesis.  And then I made self conscious sweet hindu students who know neither Bible nor Quran.  And I wracked my brains for legal references to the Ramayana, but failed.

I spoke to a woman with a crumpled thousand rupee note in mcdonalds.  She wore a burqa and thick gloves and furtively sipped a Rs. 75 pepsi alone.  I asked her she was hot in the burqa.  And happily she talked, her eyes containing some great sadness.  You get used to the heat.

A man outside the park propositioned to me, and I told him I was not a professional.  He had pulled up behind me on a street where a few months ago, a few hookers would stand in full make up and tight jeans.  He acted surprised and said how could I imagine such a thing and he just wanted to walk with me and get to know me.  I told him I had two children.  Doesn't matter.  I said it does matter, I also have a cute husband and have no need for such a relationship.  That does not matter. I just want to get to know you.  I have been following you for quite a while, and find you pretty.  It does not matter that you have kids, can we meet in the park?

And at this point you are wondering, I must have slapped him or said Buzz off, crazy man. 

Quite the opposite,  I told him -- yes, yes, of course -- in great sarcasm (if I may add in my defence).  Great, he said.  And I walked off in a frightened rabbit's hurry.  Now here's the thing.  A few seconds later, I realized he thought I was serious.  Was I?

I wasn't.

I am not interested.  I will be avoiding the park religiously.  I am not even remotely intrigued by the idea of romance or promiscuity.  Been there.  Done that.

(I mean S is the real stuff  I am thoroughly co dependent and loving it; and have nightmares that he may have some  life threatening stomach illness.)

I am not looking to having my ego stroked, and compliments like this make me uncomfortable, not luscious.  I'm really not looking for confirmation.

But because nothing really matters, I am also at the point of questioning the very paradigm that requires that I be irrationally antagonistic in every interaction with a man.  Of course, practically, this was a stupid conversation to have.  It was dark.  I could have turned weird.

But at this age, and with kids, I have felt so confident about my sexuality - so palpably mature - so unaffected by the legendary predator male.  So unaffiliated with anything to do with street hormone.

That like a nun, I was kind in my response.  And to me he was no different from a burqa clad woman.
That perhaps we should all discover our inner jugni, a word I never understood until i read maya ganesh's blog.

Waiting for revolution, and being contained in the world.

shamelessly rooting for arundhati

One of two scathing criticism of arundhati's visit with maoists.


http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?264902


I find the above criticism by Sudhanva Deshpande trite, circular, and mean-spirited for the following reasons.


1. That her writing is superb - she picks up in ironies - and seduces you to side with her.


Yes, Arundhati surprises us with her irony, and makes us wonder why we hadn't thought of it.  Every writer has a style (or a trick if you may).  Yet, you make it seem as if it were some dirty secret of hers you have exposed, implying she is a charlatan and an impostor with an agenda.  This sets the tone for the rest of the article.


2. That Arundhati did not vomit in shock that a rebel was watching an Ambush video -- but was shocked at the videos of violence made by Hindutva goons in Gujarat.


You seem disinterested in the obvious distinctions between the videos (and this shows your fascist vision of some delusionary neutrality.)  One is live violence perpretrated by a state sponsored, powerful, criminal gang intent on committing a pogrom against a politically disempowered ethnic minority.  The other is someone watching (not filming nor killing in) a video in order to fight a state apparatus that has routinely used violence against a small, rural, tribal peoples to uproot them, eliminate them, subject them to collective punishment, take over their land, and fill it with business enterprises.   She does not have to vomit.  She is not a saint.  She is entitled to her ideological underpinning.  Not all violence is equal.  Some is sicker.


3. That she is an embedded journalist -- something she despises.
Would she report the same way if she were "embedded" with the Hezbollah or the Hamas?  Would she not have a feminist critique of them?  I bet she would.  If she were embedded with american soldiers in the war on Iraq, would she lose sight that the war was based on a false premise, and is likely illegal?  Is she that fickle about her life's safety that she takes on ideologies of any transient benefactors?  As if ideology  were a print tattoo.  We believe her because she speaks for those underrepresented by mainstream media, or even institutionalized leftists, and almost always speaks factually (even if she flourishes with pretty rhetoric).  Saying that she humanizes is cheapening it.  For some this rhetoric speaks to the multiple complexities of struggle. She is, if anything, unembedded..


4.  That she romanticizes, and falls prey to a fantasy of walking with rebels under moonlit skies.
By that logic, anyone who removes themselves from the daily existence of walks between the water cooler and the keyboard, classroom and the cafeteria, and visits slums, and idyllic towns, communities that have been stricken with famine, war, or poverty - is liable of romanticising the other.  And is tortious as charged. Yet reporting must be done.  Under moonlit skies with  rebels called Venu or not.  At least she is doing it -and not asking that she be applauded for her venture.


5. That she makes light of indefinite hunger strikes.
You have such high standards for her.  She is not allowed to laugh at herself.  How does her joke mock her own past peaceful protests against big dams?  How is she in anyway denouncing peaceful forms of resistance.  If anything, she is acknowledging the obviously vast rift between her past activism, and that of the young Maoists.  She is not necessarily endorsing it.  Perhaps, she is articulating the weak alliance leftists have with one other, and how we must continually review the work done - we may differ in tactics, but we understand the problems.


6.That Charu Mazumdar fetisizes violence, but AR says look at the beautiful dancing tribals.
If anything, AR dreaded the dance performance - but then observes how much of a break it was for the people.  And regarding Charu - she distances his ideology from the lived experiences of Maoists.  Almost each act of violence is in response to an act of repression.  Now the Maoists could be trained to brainwash journalists, but how many journalists visit them?  And if she is watching the dancing tribals - she is watching the dancing tribals as a sympathizer to their cause, and not the repugnant image of an Orientalist Englishman watching native rituals.  One can not de-link her politics from her viewership.  Must her entire visit be steeped in stern and constipated admonition of their means?


7. That all the criticisms of the Maoists that appeared in EPW are water off her back.
Look, someone got to tell the other side of the left.  Details and criticisms can be finessed later in an arbitration of sorts for each one of the incidents listed in her article and media- but at least allow space for this form of observation and expression.  Nobody has a lifetime warranty on truly left position.

And guess what, its okay to be smitten by the smitten.