Category: Biography
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BBC Documentary on Gandhi
A three-hour BBC documentary on Gandhi (2009) is now on YouTube. It does a reasonable job of covering Gandhi’s life: basic biographical details, historical events, key influences, lucky breaks, setbacks, etc. Based on mainstream scholarship, it avoids many notable controversies and critiques while still conveying a sense of this immensely bold, complex, and strangely charismatic man who, despite his significant flaws, errors of judgment, and idiosyncrasies, still captivates people worldwide and has become an icon for non-violent resistance. It includes some rare historical footage as well.
Click here to watch all video clips consecutively on YouTube. The three episodes are: The Making of the Mahatma, The Rise to Fame, and The Road to Freedom. (Whoever posted the video has curiously inserted “British Propaganda” in the name! Is that merited you think?)
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The Absence of Ambedkar
Hartosh Singh Bal, political editor of Open Magazine, has a good essay in 3QD. Here is an excerpt:
One of the arguments I have heard over and over again explaining the success of Indian democracy is the invocation of a civilizational ethos, our tolerance, the claim goes, is rooted in the traditions of Hinduism. While it is not entirely untrue, this idea is given too much credit. The dailts are a huge counterargument, tolerance for oppression is as much a part of Hinduism as a tolerance of other faiths.If today revolutionary groups such as the Maoists seek recruits and fail to find them in large numbers among the untouchables it is largely because of Ambedkar. At the same time Ambedkar as much as Nehru is responsible for the calm rationalism of the Indian Constitution. Gandhi lends himself to every new age anti-science fad, Ambedkar is one of our key antidotes. Far more than the Ganga or Gandhi, if writers and academics needs to make sense of India they need to spend time on Ambedkar.
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Lelyveld’s Gandhi
In the NYRB, Anita Desai reviews Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India by Joseph Lelyveld.
Even in his lifetime the legend of Mahatma Gandhi had grown to such proportions that the man himself can be said to have disappeared as if into a dust storm. Joseph Lelyveld’s new biography sets out to find him. His subtitle alerts us that this is not a conventional biography in that he does not repeat the well-documented story of Gandhi’s struggle for India but rather his struggle with India, the country that exasperated, infuriated, and dismayed him, notwithstanding his love for it.
…One might think that Gandhi’s legacy on the whole has been depicted negatively [by Lelyveld] and yet there is no denying Lelyveld’s deep sympathy with the man. The picture that emerges is of someone intensely human, with all the defects and weaknesses that suggests, but also a visionary with a profound social conscience and courage who gave the world a model for nonviolent revolution that is still inspiring. It was a model for revolution both on the vast political level and on the personal and domestic one: nothing was unimportant in Gandhi’s eyes, and nothing impossible. He set an almost impossibly high standard and struggled personally to meet it. So if it is all seen as ending in tragedy, it was, Lelyveld writes,
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3 Quarks Daily 2011 Arts & Literature Prize
I am delighted. I wish more of my Monday mornings began like this. 🙂Yours truly has won the 3 Quarks Daily 2011 Arts & Literature Prize, which includes $1000.
I would like to thank the editors of 3QD for hosting this contest and for running an amazing site that has certainly turned me into an addict. It never ceases to amaze me how they can find such high quality content day after day. No wonder 3QD has attracted such a smart audience. Thanks also to Laila Lalami for judging the final round of the contest. If you have not visited her beautiful website, please do so now. While there, check out a video of her talk and book reading at Google. Here is what she said about my review.
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An Arab Bearing Gifts?
Here are two interesting articles about Steve Jobs. The first introduces his biological father who is from Syria, and the circumstances that led his biological parents to put him up for adoption in the U.S. (via 3QD).
Steve Jobs, arguably the most influential CEO in the world, is the biological son of an Arab American who was born in Homs, Syria, and studied [in] Beirut. … Abdul Fattah “John” Jandali emigrated to the United States in the early 1950s to pursue his university studies. Most media outlets have published little about Jandali, other than to say he was an outstanding professor of political science, that he married his girlfriend (Steve’s mother) and by whom he also had a daughter, and that he slipped from view following his separation from his wife … The 79-year-old Jandali has deliberately kept his distance from the media [until now].The second is a view into the mind of the amazing inventor he later became. It comes from an ex-colleague and the former CEO of Apple, John Sculley. Below is a random excerpt:
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Joothan: A Dalit’s Life
A review of a memoir by an ‘untouchable’ starting in the 1950s in rural Uttar Pradesh.
(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily. This review won the top award in the 3 Quarks Daily 2011 Arts & Literature Contest. Read more about it here.)
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I grew up in the central Indian city of Gwalior until I left home for college. This was the 70s and 80s. My father worked as a textile engineer in a company town owned by the Birla Group, where we lived in a middle class residential quarter for the professional staff and their families. Our 3-BR house had a small front lawn and a vegetable patch behind. Domestic helpers, such as a washerwoman and a dishwashing woman, entered our house via the front door—all except one, who came in via the rear door. This was the latrine cleaning woman, or her husband at times. As in most traditional homes, our squat toilet was near the rear door, across an open courtyard. She also brought along a couple of scrawny kids, who waited by the vegetable patch while their mother worked. -
The New Dalit Consciousness
Laura Brueck on the emerging complexity of Dalit consciousness in Himal Southasian:
Hindi Dalit literature’s moment has arrived.
After years of obscurity and unflattering comparisons to the maturity
and expressiveness of Dalit literature in languages such as Marathi and
Tamil, creative Dalit writing in Hindi is finally reaching a more
visible level of popular recognition. Hindi Dalit novels,
autobiographies, short-story and poetry anthologies, as well as volumes
of literary criticism, are today being regularly published by Delhi’s
top Hindi-language publishing houses, Rajkamal and Radhakrishna
Prakashan. Dalit writers infuse the pages of Delhi’s top Hindi literary
magazines, such as Hans and Katha Desh, with their
poetry, prose and political perspectives….With the growing shift of Hindi
Dalit literary voices from marginalised spheres of ‘alternative’ social
discourse to more mainstream platforms, Hindi Dalit literature is
quickly becoming deeply embedded in the changing cultural politics of
modern India. But it is wrong to think of Dalit literature as speaking
in a single voice in the Hindi literary and political landscapes. In
what might be best categorised as the Hindi Dalit literary sphere, there
exists a plurality of people, life experiences, literary voices and
perspectives that often find themselves at odds with one another when
trying to fulfil the demands of a mainstream audience for a
recognisable, ‘authentic’ and even ‘digestible’ Dalit literary voice.
There are fissures within the Dalit literary sphere, situated along the
fault-lines of gender, geography (urban and rural) and class, which
create a vibrant and vital field of debate over the strategies of
‘writing resistance’. -
Early Islam, Part 4: The Mystic Tide
Part 1: The Rise of Islam / Part 2: The Golden Age of Islam / Part 3: The Path of Reason
(This five-part series on early Islamic history begins with the
rise of Islam, shifts to its golden age, examines two major currents of
early Islamic thought—rationalism and Sufi mysticism—and concludes with
an epilogue. It builds on precursor essays I wrote at Stanford’s Green
Library during a summer sabbatical years ago, and on subsequent travels
in Islamic lands of the Middle East and beyond.)
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‘Mysticism is ultimately rooted in the original matrix of religious experience, which grows in turn out of man’s overwhelming awareness of God and his sense of nothingness without Him, and of the urgent need to subordinate reason and emotion to this experience.’ [1] -
Early Islam, Part 3: The Path of Reason
Part 1: The Rise of Islam / Part 2: The Golden Age of Islam
(This five-part series on early Islamic history begins with the rise of Islam, shifts to its golden age, examines two key currents of early Islamic thought—rationalism and Sufi mysticism—and concludes with an epilogue. It builds on precursor essays I wrote at Stanford’s Green Library during a summer sabbatical years ago, and on subsequent travels in Islamic lands of the Middle East and beyond.)
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Islamic scholars during the golden age of Islam (roughly 9th-12th centuries) widely referred to Aristotle as the ‘First Teacher,’ evidence of the high regard in which they held the ancient Greek philosopher. The man ranked by them as second only to Aristotle was a tenth-century Muslim thinker by the name of Abu Nasr al-Farabi (870-950 CE). [1] Perhaps a good way to illustrate the rational current of early Islam is through the life and times of this important thinker. In the words of Muhsin Mahdi, a modern scholar of Islamic studies, -
Champion of the Green Revolution Dies at 95
Who has heard of Norman Borlaug? I had not heard of him until now, after his death, when the Wall Street Journal calls him “arguably the greatest American of the 20th century”.
Borlaug’s life work, the Green Revolution, is the reason the world is not starving today as it was half a century ago. As the individual responsible for spreading high-yield agricultural practices through the hungriest parts of the world, beginning with South Asia in the 1960s, he was honored with the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 and the Padma Vibhushan in 2006. He changed the world, as much as did Louis Pasteur or the Wright Brothers, yet his name is commonly unknown outside the Developing World. And his contribution is today seen as controversial.
In Light of Nalanda
(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments.)
I don’t know many books in which ‘Go west, young man!’ would be a call to go to India. One such book is Journey to the West, ‘China’s most beloved novel of religious quest and picaresque adventure,’ published in the 1590s in the waning years of the Ming dynasty. The novel’s hero, ‘a mischievous monkey with human traits … accompanies the monk-hero on his action-filled travels to India in search of Buddhist scripture.’ [1] It allegorically presents pilgrims journeying toward India as individuals journeying toward enlightenment. [2]
The inspiration for this novel was a journey made by a 7th cent. CE Chinese man, Xuanzang. [3] Though raised in a conservative Confucian family near Chang’an (modern Xian), Xuanzang, at 13, followed his brother into the Buddhist monastic life (Buddhism had come to China around 2nd cent. CE). A precocious boy, he mastered his material so well that he was ordained a full monk when only 20. Disenchanted with the quality of Buddhist texts and teachers available to him, he decided to go west to India, to the cradle and thriving center of Buddhism itself. After a yearlong journey full of peril and adventure, across deserts and mountains, via Tashkent and Samarkand, meeting robbers and kings, debating Buddhists on the Silk Road and in Afghanistan—where he saw the majestic Bamiyan Buddhas—he reached what is now Pakistan.This Way for the Gas, Ladies & Gentlemen
Tadeusz Borowski was 21 years old when he was deported to the cluster of concentration camps in southern Poland, collectively known as Auschwitz, in 1943. His fiancée had mysteriously disappeared one night; when he went to look for her, he was befallen by her same fate: entrapment by the Nazis, arrest, and deportation for participation in the Polish resistance.
Until that night, young Borowski had been a student of literature in the underground university of Warsaw. Since it was the Nazis’ intention to enslave the Poles, secondary school and university were forbidden to them during the occupation. Still, thousands risked death and deportation, meeting in small groups in private homes in order to pursue their studies. (This was a system revived from an earlier time, as similar restrictions had been resisted by Poles under the Russian occupation some decades earlier, when Marie Curie had studied in the underground “Floating University” of Warsaw.)
A Journey to the West
Journey to the West, “China’s most beloved novel of religious quest and picaresque adventure,” was published in the 1590s in the waning years of the Ming dynasty. The novel’s hero, “a mischievous monkey with human traits … accompanies the monk-hero on his action-filled travels to India in search of Buddhist scripture.” * It is “an extended allegory in which … pilgrims journeying toward India stands for the individual journeying toward enlightenment.” * Indeed there aren’t many books in which “go west, young man” would be a call to go to India.
The inspiration for this novel was a journey made by a 7th century CE Chinese man, Xuan Zang (or Hieun Tsang). Though raised in a conservative Confucian family near Chang’an (modern Xi’an), Hieun Tsang followed his brother into a Buddhist monastic life (Buddhism had come to China after the collapse of the Han dynasty in 220 CE). A precocious boy, he mastered his material so well that he was ordained a full monk when only 20. Disenchanted with the quality of Buddhist texts available to him, he decided to go west to India, to the cradle and thriving center of Buddhism itself. After a year-long journey full of peril and adventure, crossing deserts and mountains, meeting robbers and kings, debating Buddhists on the Silk Road and in Afghanistan (where he saw the Bamiyan Buddhas, recently destroyed by the Taliban), he reached what is now Pakistan.
He spent 17 years in India, traveling, visiting places associated with the Buddha’s life, learning Sanskrit, and studying with Buddhist masters, most notably at the famous Nalanda University. His erudition seems to have brought him fame and royal patronage in India when in a religious convocation “in Harsha’s capital of Kannauj during the first week of the year 643 … Hieun Tsang allegedly defeated five hundred Brahmins, Jains, and heterodox Buddhists in spirited debate.” *Death of a Colonel
Col. Vasanth V, commanding officer of the 9th Maratha light infantry battalion, died on Tuesday, July 31st. He was injured while battling a group of militants who were trying to cross the India-Pakistan Line of Control (LOC) in the Uri sector in Kashmir.I had met Col. Vasanth briefly in 1991 when I was on vacation in India. He was a soft-spoken man with a good sense of humor. He had surprised me with his knowledge of obscure things by asking whether the culture of the Cajuns in Louisiana was still alive. I hadn’t known about the Cajuns before coming to the US, and hadn’t expected that someone in India would know about them. So I naturally asked him how he even knew of their existence. Though he couldn’t recall exactly where he had read about them, he brushed off my surprise by saying “We used to read a lot of things, including the newspaper the samosas came wrapped in”! I could immediately sense a kindred soul, having been book and library-starved during my childhood. For some reason, that moment of resonance came back to me today, when I heard about his death.
I have often wondered if the chaos of the world of political violence, either within countries or between them, is going to affect me directly. There are so many conflicts in the world that I must count myself incredibly fortunate never to have come within sniffing distance of any. This time though, the violence has come quite close. Col. Vasanth and I had only one degree of separation. He was a long-time colleague and a good friend of my brother.
Category: BiographyWise Man Socrates
Socrates, like Jesus and the Buddha, never committed his ideas to writing.* Our main sources on him are Plato, his student, and Xenophon, the historian. The picture that emerges from their accounts make him perhaps the greatest man of Classical Greece. This is by no means an original insight, but one that I was able to convince myself of many years ago.Socrates is justly famous for declaring that the unexamined life is not worth living, and for his dialectic method of inquiry, the Socratic Method. With Socrates, the central problem of (Western) philosophy shifted from cosmology to the formulation of a rule of life through understanding, to a practical use of reason. He upheld self-knowledge and the supremacy of the intellect, insisting that one must work hard to discover the right and wrong. As the Apology relates, Socrates advocated the tending of one’s soul, to make it as good as possible – and not to ruin one’s life by putting care of the body and possessions before care for the soul.**
Socrates was no retiring ascetic but an urbane intellectual of aristocratic lineage, a man of the world, famed for his practical wisdom, modesty, self-control, generosity, alertness, and integrity. “There was no complacent self-righteousness of the Pharisee nor the angry bitterness of the satirist in his attitude toward the follies or even the crimes of his fellowmen. It was his deep and lifelong conviction that the improvement not only of himself but also of his countrymen was a task laid upon him by his God, not to be executed with a scowling face and an upbraiding voice. He frequented the society of promising young men, and talked freely to politicians, poets, and artisans about their various callings, their notions of right and wrong, the matters of familiar interest to them.”**
Percy Julian, Chemist Extraordinaire
The story I will tell you tonight is a story of wonder and amazement, almost a story of miracles. It is a story of laughter and tears. It is a story of human beings, therefore, a story of meanness, of stupidity, of kindness and nobility. —Percy Julian, 1899-1975
Percy Lavon Julian, born in Montgomery, Alabama in 1899, the grandson of slaves, was one of the most accomplished chemists of the 20th century. His work, especially in the field of steroid chemistry, positively affected countless millions of lives and did nothing less than to help change the world.In the Jim Crow South, libraries were closed to blacks and public schooling ended with 8th grade; teacher’s colleges were available for aspirants to the 10th grade. This education was seen as adequate to produce laborers for the larger economy and teachers for the black community. Though Percy’s parents had but a basic education themselves, they scraped together their coins to build a home library for their six children, all of whom would grow up to earn post-graduate degrees. Percy went first when at sixteen years he gained admission to DePauw University, a small liberal arts college in Indiana, as a “sub-freshman” who had not completed high school. DePauw would be life-changing for Julian, as he recalled, “On my first day in College, I remember walking in and a white fellow stuck out his hand and said ‘How are you?–Welcome!’ I had never shaken hands with a white boy before and did not know whether I should or not.”
Omar Khayyam of Persia
In his lifetime, Omar Khayyam (1048-1131) achieved great fame as a master of philosophy, jurisprudence, history, medicine, astronomy, and mathematics. The Great Seljuq Empire owed the reform of its calendar to him. The result was the Jalali era (named after Jalal-ud-din, one of the kings)—’a computation of time,’ wrote Gibbon, ‘which surpasses the Julian, and approaches the accuracy of the Gregorian [calendar].’ He measured the length of the year as 365.24219858156 days, a number improved to 365.242196 days only in the 19th century and the current measure is 365.242190 days.
He not only discovered a general method of extracting roots of an arbitrary high degree, but his Algebra contains the first complete treatment of the solution of cubic equations which he did by means of conic sections. He was also part of the Islamic tradition of investigating Euclid and his parallel postulate. Arguing that ratios should be regarded as ‘ideal numbers,’ he conceived a much broader system of numbers than used since Greek antiquity, that of the positive real numbers. In many such areas, he furthered the remarkable work of al-Beruni. Commissioned to build an observatory in the city of Esfahan, he led a team of astronomers to do so.
Al-Beruni’s India
The first significant intrusion of Islam into India was led by Mahmud of Ghazni who, quite justifiably, lives in Indian history as a cruel and bloodthirsty fanatic, destroyer of temples, and plunderer of their wealth, but in his own dominion he was known as a patron of the arts, literature, and science (not unlike Genghis Khan who is a great and beloved hero in Mongolia today, gracing its currency, plazas, airports, etc.). He assembled in his court and the university he established at Ghazni (in modern Afghanistan) the greatest scholars and writers of the age.
One such scholar was al-Beruni (973-1048; another was Firdausi), “commissioned” by Mahmud of Ghazni to produce his monumental commentary on Indian philosophy and culture – Kitab fi tahqiq ma li’l-hind. “In his search for pure knowledge he is undoubtedly one of the greatest minds in Islamic history.”* Romila Thapar calls him “perhaps the finest intellect of central Asia … His observations on Indian conditions, systems of knowledge, social norms, religion … are probably the most incisive made by any visitor to India.”
