This blog is officially retired. goodbye and goodnight. xo a

Thoughts on tonight.

Fareed Zakaria's interview on the newsweek website in really interesting. He says it would be a mistake to think this was an attack on foreigners, if anything at all, the Taj is a symbol of the affluence of indians. but aside from that, one of the other things that I thought was interesting was the idea of searching for the originary hate of this problem: who do we attack, where did this begin, who is to blame? Zakaria says, "These groups are now autonomous, self-supporting, and have gone beyond those origins." What kind of origin are we looking for? Are we looking for the beginning of hate? probably not, for the origin of the weapons, yes, where did the weapons originate. Are we looking for the origin of their money, yes. And in that sense I find it hard to believe that these groups are autonomous. Their war might be their own war. but responsibility goes beyond hate.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/171006/page/2

M

In a move that strangely reminds me of Fritz Lang's M, the police are using the ragpicker network to keep vigil all over the city.

“We aim to create an interface between the police and the ragpickers working in the area,” explains Sanjay Gupta, who heads the programme. “We have helped the police find things,” says eight-year-old Zaida, recalling how a boy had found a laptop wrapped in a plastic bag and given it the “police guard”. The laptop was apparently stolen and hidden in one of the dustbins.

In M, when the police is at a loss for how to find a child molesting murdered, the thieves form a nexus with the beggars who have an unbeatable network across the city and have the luxury on not being 'out of place' when 'loitering.'What struck me about the urban landscape in M (and forgive me for forgetting details, I watched it a couple of years ago in bangalore) was the intersection of completely different experiences of the city; that of children, of the police, of thieves and ofcourse that of beggars.

Here again we see a nexus between two completely different experiences of the city, the police: city as a landscape of crime, and the ragpickers, city as a rich wasteland.

But I guess what is more interestingly operative here is that in the face of a crisis, (bombs and terrorism) that experience that is usually considered marginal and invalid becomes crucial because of its marginal status. power structures completely rearrange.

Of course, that somehow children finding and handling bombs and thefts is ok I don't know how!
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Thesis

I started this blog in a convoluted attempt to talk about my thesis. Well here I am, four years later thinking about my thesis again, another thesis, another school, another time, of course I am thrilled that I have this blog as a space for this. In that sense this blog also traces the (rather major) changes in my intellectual and academic career from where they began to where they have arrived now, and this still is only a point of departure, with no specific trajectory just some ideas about where I want to go.

Brief logistical update: I came to Delhi with the imagination that I would locate some sort of archival material that would help with my thesis, I am now, two weeks into this endeavour more aware of the possibilities of data available and of the things required of me. So here in Delhi two weeks on:

The thing with archives is that one can map the administrative boundaries onto the archival categories somewhat congruently. As we administer thus we categorise. They are arranged state wise. Now this might seem like the most logical way to arrange any data, especially the kind that is produced by states themselves, Assam's PWD archives in Guwahati, Bengal's in cal and so on. The same state wise division of archives occurs in the national archive library. The problem is that the drawing of borders is more recent than the collection of data of those areas and so many documents might get confused about where they should be, effectively belonging to more than one place. The Assam provinces that encompassed a lot of what we now think of as the northeast was first under the Bengal administration. In the second half of the 1800s a separate Assam secretariat was established briefly in Guwahati, then in Shillong and then after that the all publications started coming out of there. Of course at this point, the Assam Provinces shared a rather large border with Bengal, the part that is now Bangladesh. Timber and tea being prominent industries in Assam I am still not completely sure how they moved about or where they were moved to, presumably Calcutta. What complicates the categorisation is the question of when the archive of the state starts collecting data regarding that state. So if Meghalaya was carved out of Assam, how does it share their documents? Or does one have to go to Guwahati for the previous documents and then Shillong for the contemporary ones?

But that being a separate issue, the problem that I am facing is that I want to look at the interface, the geographical interface between Bengal, Sikkim and Assam, the little tiny bit of territory squeezed between Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh. The problem is, where do I begin to look? When categorising and writing, history tends to be so state specific, that it is really hard to write about the confluence of three. Within the state narrative the road responsibility ends at the border but on the ground, nothing begins or ends, it is a continuous terrain marked by a checkpost. So where do I go? to Calcutta to find who built the road upto there, to Assam to find who took it over from than point, and then to Sikkim to figure out who was shortchanged in the connectivity process?

That is the problem.

Talking about Shakespeare....

Reading Hamlet in school saved my life.

When Shakespeare says something like, "Conscience doth make subjects of us all" you know the man (and Hamlet, in which is was uttered) was onto something.

amends: see comments below.
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