False Dichotomies

I was told by a Kashmiri friend to exercise caution in Srinagar. “You’re from London,” he told me. “Not Israel.” I was disappointed. Despite the ongoing conflict with India, Kashmir  has always had a reputation as a tolerant place. True, there have been atrocities, some of which have been targeted at foreign tourists, but my understanding has always been that these were perpetrated by non-Kashmiris. In any case, since arriving I’ve exercised caution, judging each situation on its own merits, saying Israel where possible, and London when wanting to play it safe.

As I walked around the grounds of the magnificent Jamia Masjid, built in 1400 years ago by Sultan Sikandar, I was approached by a thin old man in a black sherwani. He asked me where I was from. I said London, to which he responded that he had an uncle in Manchester, before inviting me over to his house to talk some more. I politely took his number, but I didn’t give him mine, sensing that there was something not quite right about him.

As I crossed to the grass quad, a serious-looking young man in a white shirt came up to me, his head down and his voice muffled.”Don’t listen to him,” he said. “He’s a psycho.” He then invited me to sit with two of his friends. Each of them were students in their early twenties: Abdul, Rahman, and Showkat (I have changed their names). Showkat, the only one wearing traditional clothes, was their unofficial spokesman. “Where are you from?” he asked. “London,” I replied, without hesitation. Read more

Second time’s a charm, huh? But travelers speak like sexual predators, always concerned with finding new places “to do”, and return is viewed with suspicion. After all, life is short, and we are constantly exhorted to look to the future. Why would we go back to somewhere we have already been?

I am back in India, three years after my last visit. That first journey, narrated at wanderingsatlan.com, as a three month post-army whirlwind during the monsoon months, through that most difficult of jump-of points, north India. Now I’m back. Back in the apocalyptic summer heat of Delhi, back at the Golden Temple, and back on the Jammu-Srinagar road, where a driver must go about his business with the same intensity as a formula one driver, despite the narrow bends and the vertical drops. And right now I’m back on the stoop of a Dal Lake houseboat, in Srinagar, the capital of arguably India’s most troubled state (and arguably not even India’s at all), Kashmir. Read more

Gottfried* is outside history. His place is his balcony on a side-street in Ohrid. The lake is fifteen minutes walk away but there is no hint of its ancient splendour here; just a queue of roses and an impressive June stillness disturbed only by kids playing football opposite despite the fading light.

Gottfried appeared unexpectedly soon after I arrived. He produced a bottle of rakia, two thumbnail glasses, and insisted I drink. “Na Zdravje!” he says. To health. But Gottfried’s health is not good. He suffered a stroke ten years ago, leaving his left side paralysed. Now he carries himself around his home, a chubby bundle clambering in perpetual slow motion from the television to the computer to the balcony. Read more

Sadly, Yaacov Lozowick is ending his ruminations. We didn’t always see eye to eye, but who needs people to agree with them? Good luck at the state archives, and hopefully one of these days we’ll meet in person.

There won’t be many updates this week, as I’m getting everything ready for my trip to India (via the Balkans). Once I hit the road, you can expect plenty of updates. In the meantime, you can check out the Highbury Gaon on David Lynch’s love of Lodz, and Benjamin on the Heretic and the Philosopher.

Anti-circumcision activists, also known as ‘intactivists’, are celebrating on the west coast. In November, San Francisco residents will consider a proposal to ban the circumcision of male children. If the measure passes, circumcision will be banned among males under the age of 18, and will be punishable by a $1,000 fine or up to one year in jail. There will be no religious exemptions.

The bill has a minuscule chance of passing, but the intactivist movement should be taken seriously, for their arguments represent a particularly egregious form of liberalism, one that runs counter to pluralist values, and encourages a conformism that is more typical of totalitarian societies (it is no coincidence that circumcision for religious reasons, and infant baptism, was outlawed in the Soviet Union in 1924) than multicultural democracies. Read more

Favourite 30 Hip-Hop Albums here
30. Arab Strap – The Last RomanceFor its Kinsleyan sexuality and strident longings
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On a windy and rainy Friday last autumn, I participated in a Combatants for Peace protest in the northern West Bank, not far from Nablus. The aim was to help local villagers plant trees in an area that had previously been the target of settler attacks. Like all other Combatants for Peace actions, this was unarmed and non-violent (I hope the reason for this tautology will become apparent in the next paragraph). Unfortunately, violence broke out between some local teenagers and the IDF. Stones and tear-gas canisters were soon being swapped between the two (I would not be able to state with any confidence which group used violence first). Before long, some settlers approached, and one or two fired their guns into the air. CFP’s response was unequivocal: the demonstration was called off, and we all withdrew. After buying us knafeh at a local cafe, representatives from the village apologised for the descent into violence.

As Billy Bragg sang, “The only way to disarm is to disarm.” Non-violence means non-violence. Unarmed means unarmed. If you hurl stones, however pathetic and ineffective you claim them to be, you are armed. A protest where people throw stones is not an unarmed protest. This was my argument earlier this week in a Twitfight with Joseph Dana, an American-Israeli journalist who spends much of his time chronicling the protest movement in West Bank villages that have had their land stolen by the Separation Barrier. This is how Dana describes the protests at places like Bilin and Nabi Saleh: “I go to demos on a regular basis. Sometimes they are violent with stones and sometimes they are non-violent without stones. Always unarmed. To my suggestion that someone with a stone could be considered armed, he replied: “If you think a stone in the face of the world’s 4th strongest army is considered ‘armed’ having an honest discussion is out of the question.” Read more

“Ain’t no best,” Nas says, weighing in on the question of who’s the greatest rapper of all time. It’s a truism, of course, and one worth remembering when thinking about the soap opera provided by contemporary literary awards. 

The latest literary prize to cause controversy is the awarding of the 2011 International Man Booker (awarded bi-annually to a writer for their collective body of work, as opposed to the single novel award of the Commonwealth-based Booker Prize) to America’s finest, Philip Roth. Following the decision, author and publisher Carmen Callil withdrew from the judging panel, arguing that “he [Roth] goes on and on about the same subject in almost every book. It’s as though he’s sitting on your face and you can’t breathe.” The first charge seems rather banal, and could be levelled at most great authors, while the second seems to be a back-handed compliment, one that recalls the famous face-fuck scene in The Dying Animal. Finally Callil asks, “in 20 years time will anyone read him?” as if this is the sole measure of greatness. Taken together, it makes her seem rather churlish – with the decision taken collectively, there was always a possibility that she would be disappointed with the decision. But controversy sells, and literary prizes need all the publicity they can get. Read more

“What Israel lacks, though, is a robust culture of pluralism, and it is this that India has in abundance. During my first visit to India, in the summer of 2008, I was struck by the country’s religious diversity. I hiked with Sikhs to the pilgrimage site of Hemkund, sat with Muslims at the 13th century Sufi saint Nizamuddin Auliya’s shrine in Delhi, and walked with Hindus through the famous temple town of Khajuraho. This diversity characterises the entire country, whether it be the language, the food or the literature. Even though the majority of Indians are Hindus, the way each group practices their religion is remarkably diverse and pluralistic – and all this in a country with a robustly secular constitution.” Read the rest over at Common Ground News Service