Amitav Ghosh's Blog, page 11

Countdown Interviews – Asma Jahangir: 5

      AG:“Would you say Kashmir is the principal problem between India and Pakistan or would you say that problems would remain even without Kashmir?” Asma Jahangir:“I think if the Kashmir issue is solved tomorrow we would still have problems:           we would have problems on our water disputes; we [...]

Countdown Interviews – Asma Jahangir: 4

    AG:“To come to Kashmir, how do you think this issue could be settled between India and Pakistan?” Asma Jahangir:“Frankly, I don’t think the two governments are sincere about settling the issue. On the one hand, it’s a complicated issue whether Pakistan should be interfering or not. Pakistan gives the example of Bangladesh where [...]

Countdown Interviews – Asma Jahangir: 3

    Shortly before August 29, 1998, when I interviewed Asma Jahangir   in Lahore, a Constitutional Amendment was introduced in Pakistan’s Parliament, the Majlis-e-Shoora, proposing the establishment of sharia’a law in Pakistan. Over several days, there were protests by lawyers and other related groups. I asked Asma Jahangir what she thought of the proposed [...]

Countdown Interviews – Asma Jahangir: 2

      [This is part 2 of an interview with the Pakistani lawyer and human rights activist, Asma Jahangir. It was conducted in Lahore on August 29, 1998, f0r my essay Countdown, which was published as a book by my Indian publisher, Ravi Dayal, in 1999.]                 AG: [...]

Countdown Interviews – Asma Jahangir: 1

      My essay Countdown,  was written against the background of  the Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests of  May 1998. It appeared in The New Yorker  of October 19, 1998.   In 1999 my Indian publisher Ravi Dayal issued an expanded version as a short book, under the same title (Countdown, Ravi Dayal, New [...]

Agha Shahid Ali Journals – ‘Bearer of Arms’

    [This is an excerpt from the journal on which my essay on Agha Shahid Ali is based. Shahid was under treatment for cancer at the time when it was written.]                         May 5, 2001 Strange irony that Shahid only recently got his [...]

A Laskari Lexicon – 2

        There are several striking differences between the Laskari dictionary of Lt Thomas Roebuck[i] and Anthony Vaz’s Vocabulary Of Nautical Terms[ii]. The most important perhaps is that Roebuck was attempting to make the case that ‘Laskari’ was, if not a language, then certainly a dialect in its own right, created out of [...]

A Laskari Lexicon – 1

    [This is a slightly extended version of a piece I wrotein 2010 for the anthology Inside/Out: New Writing from Goa.][i]         I have long been fascinated by nautical dictionaries, especially those that relate to Asian seafarers (or ‘lascars’ as they were once known). Elsewhere I have written at some length [...]

My review of Abdulrazak Gurnah’s novel of Zanzibar

  [This review was published in Kirkus Reviews, 2002]    By The Sea begins with a prospective refugee presenting his passport to an officer at an immigration counter in a British airport.   At desks such as these, every day, thousands of supplicants discover whether or not the stories of their lives match the exacting [...]

Real and Fictional characters: The case of Neel Rattan Halder

    In my post of Nov 12, 2012, I wrote about a letter that revealed to me that Benjam Burnham, a character in Sea of Poppies and River of Smoke, had a real life counterpart (the letter was actually from one of his descendants). Even stranger, I later found out that my wife had [...]