Highlights
Because of his blurry uncertainty about the location of the truth-lie frontier, and his personal charm and pleasant manner, he inspired confidence and came across as the perfect promoter of his cousin’s wares.
Yes, the name on the books veiled his ethnic identity, just as Freddie Mercury veiled the Parsi Indian singer Farrokh Bulsara. This was not because the Queen front man was ashamed of his race but because he did not want to be prejudged, did not want to be ghettoed inside an ethnic-music pigeonhole surrounded by the bars of white attitudes.
This is what he said when he was questioned: that he was not rootless, not uprooted but transplanted. Or, even better, multiply rooted, like an old banyan tree putting down “prop roots” as it spread, which thickened and in time became indistinguishable from the original trunk. Too many roots! It meant his stories had a broader canopy beneath which to shelter from the scorching, hostile sun. It meant they could be planted in many different locations, in different kinds of soil. This is a gift, he said, but he knew that such optimism was a lie.
When she was asked, as she often was, why she sold this improbable combination of products, she would answer simply, “Because these are the things I love.”
She loved her hometown and her life in it. And yet she left. There were those who said that her relationship with home had soured after her mother’s death. There were voices that blamed her “unfettered ambition and greed” and even more spiteful voices that called her “a deracinated, self-hating, Westoxicated no-talent” and called for her Indian films to be banned.
Maybe there was something in her that wanted to test itself against the challenges of a wider world. Maybe she doubted her own worth and would not be able to think of herself as valuable if she did not pick up this gauntlet. Maybe she really was a gambler at heart and this was her spinning wheel.
An interjection, kind reader,
so many of today’s stories are and must be of this plural, sprawling kind, because a kind of nuclear fission has taken place in human lives and relations, families have been divided, millions upon millions of us have traveled to the four corners of the (admittedly spherical, and therefore cornerless) globe, whether by necessity or choice. Such broken families may be our best available lenses through which to view this broken world
we, the broken people!—
She had decisively moved on and made her own life. Or so, most of the time, she told herself. But the truth was that she still felt the past moving like a thrombosis in the blood. It might reach her heart and kill her one of these days.
Our life here today is a good life. But so many of us still believe our roots are in the past. This is not true. Our old places are gone, our old customs are not the American ways, our old languages are not spoken. Only we carry these things within us. Our roots are in ourselves and in each other. In our bodies and minds we preserve our identity. Because of this we can move, we can go out and conquer the world.”
There are people who need to impose a shape upon the shapelessness of life. For such people the quest narrative is always attractive. It prevents them from suffering the agony of feeling what’s the word. Incoherent.
“Oh, that’s right, money,” the young fellow said, snapping his fingers. “Can I get a bank account? That’s important. A debit card is important. An overdraft is important. If you’re not buying stuff, if you’re not making repayments, the system doesn’t recognize that you exist.”
A man with his head in a bag being shot by a man without a shirt on. A fat man in a red hat screaming at men and women also fat also in red hats about victory, We’re undereducated and overfed. We’re full of pride over who the f*ck knows. We drive to the emergency room and send Granny to get our guns and cigarettes. We don’t need no stinkin’ allies cause we’re stupid and you can suck our dicks. We are Beavis and Butt-Head on ’roids. We drink Roundup from the can. Our president looks like a Christmas ham and talks like Chucky. We’re America, bitch. Zap. Immigrants raping our women every day. We need Space Force because Space ISIS. Zap. Normal is Upside-Down Land. Our old friends are our enemies now and our old enemy is our pal. Zap, zap. Men and men, women and women in love. The purple mountains’ majesty. A man with an oil painting of himself with Jesus hanging in his living room. Dead schoolkids. Hurricanes. Beauty. Lies. Zap, zap, zap.
Garbage out there, and great stuff out there, too, and they both coexist at the same level of reality, both give off the same air of authority. How’s a young person supposed to tell them apart? How to discriminate? Every show on every network tells you the same thing: based upon a true story. But that’s not true either. The true story is there’s no true story anymore. There’s no true anymore that anyone can agree on. There’s a headache beginning in here.
When I wake up in the morning and open the door of the motel room I can’t be sure of which town I’ll find outside, or what day of the week or what month of the year. I can’t even be sure of which state we’ll be in, although I’m in a great state about it, thank you very much. It’s as if we’re standing still and the world is traveling past us.
“In Europe,” Quichotte airily remarked, “the colors of political affiliation are reversed, and so blue is the color of conservatives, reactionaries, and capitalists, while red stands for communism, socialism, democratic socialism, and social democracy. I ask myself sometimes: what is the color of love? It’s hard to find one that isn’t used up already. Saffron is the color of Hindu nationalism, green is the color of Islam, except for one or two places where they prefer red, and black is the preferred color of Islamic fanatics. Pink is now associated with women’s protests and the whole rainbow is the sign of gay pride. White, I don’t think of as a color, except in the racial context. So maybe brown. Brown, like us. That must be the color of love.”
Because of his blurry uncertainty about the location of the truth-lie frontier, and his personal charm and pleasant manner, he inspired confidence and came across as the perfect promoter of his cousin’s wares.
Yes, the name on the books veiled his ethnic identity, just as Freddie Mercury veiled the Parsi Indian singer Farrokh Bulsara. This was not because the Queen front man was ashamed of his race but because he did not want to be prejudged, did not want to be ghettoed inside an ethnic-music pigeonhole surrounded by the bars of white attitudes.
This is what he said when he was questioned: that he was not rootless, not uprooted but transplanted. Or, even better, multiply rooted, like an old banyan tree putting down “prop roots” as it spread, which thickened and in time became indistinguishable from the original trunk. Too many roots! It meant his stories had a broader canopy beneath which to shelter from the scorching, hostile sun. It meant they could be planted in many different locations, in different kinds of soil. This is a gift, he said, but he knew that such optimism was a lie.
When she was asked, as she often was, why she sold this improbable combination of products, she would answer simply, “Because these are the things I love.”
She loved her hometown and her life in it. And yet she left. There were those who said that her relationship with home had soured after her mother’s death. There were voices that blamed her “unfettered ambition and greed” and even more spiteful voices that called her “a deracinated, self-hating, Westoxicated no-talent” and called for her Indian films to be banned.
Maybe there was something in her that wanted to test itself against the challenges of a wider world. Maybe she doubted her own worth and would not be able to think of herself as valuable if she did not pick up this gauntlet. Maybe she really was a gambler at heart and this was her spinning wheel.
An interjection, kind reader,
so many of today’s stories are and must be of this plural, sprawling kind, because a kind of nuclear fission has taken place in human lives and relations, families have been divided, millions upon millions of us have traveled to the four corners of the (admittedly spherical, and therefore cornerless) globe, whether by necessity or choice. Such broken families may be our best available lenses through which to view this broken world
we, the broken people!—
She had decisively moved on and made her own life. Or so, most of the time, she told herself. But the truth was that she still felt the past moving like a thrombosis in the blood. It might reach her heart and kill her one of these days.
Our life here today is a good life. But so many of us still believe our roots are in the past. This is not true. Our old places are gone, our old customs are not the American ways, our old languages are not spoken. Only we carry these things within us. Our roots are in ourselves and in each other. In our bodies and minds we preserve our identity. Because of this we can move, we can go out and conquer the world.”
There are people who need to impose a shape upon the shapelessness of life. For such people the quest narrative is always attractive. It prevents them from suffering the agony of feeling what’s the word. Incoherent.
“Oh, that’s right, money,” the young fellow said, snapping his fingers. “Can I get a bank account? That’s important. A debit card is important. An overdraft is important. If you’re not buying stuff, if you’re not making repayments, the system doesn’t recognize that you exist.”
A man with his head in a bag being shot by a man without a shirt on. A fat man in a red hat screaming at men and women also fat also in red hats about victory, We’re undereducated and overfed. We’re full of pride over who the f*ck knows. We drive to the emergency room and send Granny to get our guns and cigarettes. We don’t need no stinkin’ allies cause we’re stupid and you can suck our dicks. We are Beavis and Butt-Head on ’roids. We drink Roundup from the can. Our president looks like a Christmas ham and talks like Chucky. We’re America, bitch. Zap. Immigrants raping our women every day. We need Space Force because Space ISIS. Zap. Normal is Upside-Down Land. Our old friends are our enemies now and our old enemy is our pal. Zap, zap. Men and men, women and women in love. The purple mountains’ majesty. A man with an oil painting of himself with Jesus hanging in his living room. Dead schoolkids. Hurricanes. Beauty. Lies. Zap, zap, zap.
Garbage out there, and great stuff out there, too, and they both coexist at the same level of reality, both give off the same air of authority. How’s a young person supposed to tell them apart? How to discriminate? Every show on every network tells you the same thing: based upon a true story. But that’s not true either. The true story is there’s no true story anymore. There’s no true anymore that anyone can agree on. There’s a headache beginning in here.
When I wake up in the morning and open the door of the motel room I can’t be sure of which town I’ll find outside, or what day of the week or what month of the year. I can’t even be sure of which state we’ll be in, although I’m in a great state about it, thank you very much. It’s as if we’re standing still and the world is traveling past us.
“In Europe,” Quichotte airily remarked, “the colors of political affiliation are reversed, and so blue is the color of conservatives, reactionaries, and capitalists, while red stands for communism, socialism, democratic socialism, and social democracy. I ask myself sometimes: what is the color of love? It’s hard to find one that isn’t used up already. Saffron is the color of Hindu nationalism, green is the color of Islam, except for one or two places where they prefer red, and black is the preferred color of Islamic fanatics. Pink is now associated with women’s protests and the whole rainbow is the sign of gay pride. White, I don’t think of as a color, except in the racial context. So maybe brown. Brown, like us. That must be the color of love.”
get wishes? How many? Three?” ^ref-57628 “That is not the way it works,” the cricket said. “The way it works, you ask what you wish, e poi, vedremo. Let’s see if it can be done. There are limits.” “So,” Sancho said, taking a deep breath, “a driving license, a bank account, a card for the ATM, and money in the bank.” “Banking is only susceptible to magic at the level of the grande frode, the major fraud,” the cricket said. “Billionaires, politicians, mafiosi
Another day, on Madison Avenue among all the clothing stores, he saw three figures dressed all in white including white pointed hoods. That was impossible. This was New York. The Klan wasn’t here at all, let alone wearing couture hoods on Madison. He crossed the avenue to get a closer look but the well-dressed crowd merged briefly ahead of him and then parted again and they were gone. This was insane, Sancho thought. It created in him a kind of ontological dread.
Cyberwar was the attack on truth by lies. It was the pollution of the real by the unreal, of fact by fiction. It was the erosion and devaluation of the empirical intellect and its replacement by confirmations of previously held prejudices.
One of the things Son wanted to attack his father about was belonging to the great Indian diaspora. Son had gone to India to discover authenticity. Only Indians from India had any claim to being authentic. The diaspora was full of phony Indians, people who had been uprooted so long that their souls were dying of thirst, people who didn’t know what language to speak or what gods to worship, people who pathetically bought Indian art so they could hang their identity on their walls
We walk unknowing amid the shadows of our past and, forgetting our history, are ignorant of ourselves.
“Remorse and forgiveness are obviously related,” she said, “but it’s not a cause-and-effect relationship. The connection between them is the act.
The decision of the person acted upon is not contingent upon the decision of the actor. One may genuinely feel remorse and make a genuine apology, and still not be forgiven, if the person acted upon is not ready to forgive. Alternatively, one may not feel ready to apologize, and still be forgiven, if the forgiver is ready to let bygones be bygones.
these young women these days who describe the veil as a signifier of their identity. I tell them they are suffering from what that presently unfashionable philosopher Karl Marx would have called false consciousness. In most of the world the veil is not a free choice. Women are forced into invisibility by men. These girls in the West making their quote-unquote free choices are legitimizing the oppression of their sisters in the parts of the world where the choice is not free
ALL AIRPORT CUSTOMS HALLS were designed to make even the innocent feel guilty. NOTHING TO DECLARE: the sign might as well have read DEAD MAN WALKING.
The deterioration, he declared with great emphasis on all available media, was not taking place in the eyesight of the human race, but in the world. Not in the seeing thing but in the thing seen. He quoted, very often, the old sixties graffito, Do not adjust your mind, there is a fault in reality.
Ever since he began his quest he had known that preparing himself for love, making himself worthy of the Beloved, also necessitated readying oneself for an ending, because after perfection was attained there was only oblivion to look forward to.
And as to the rumored imminent end of the world, he didn’t give that much credence. For him, the world had only just begun. If it was faulty, if bits were falling off it as if it were an old house in need of repairs, then it was because perfection was an illusion.
“All of us are in two stories at the same time,” said the sandwich lady. “Life and Times. There is our own personal story, and the bigger story of what’s happening around us. When both are in trouble simultaneously, when the crisis inside you intersects with the crisis outside you, things get a little crazy.”
Another day, on Madison Avenue among all the clothing stores, he saw three figures dressed all in white including white pointed hoods. That was impossible. This was New York. The Klan wasn’t here at all, let alone wearing couture hoods on Madison. He crossed the avenue to get a closer look but the well-dressed crowd merged briefly ahead of him and then parted again and they were gone. This was insane, Sancho thought. It created in him a kind of ontological dread.
Cyberwar was the attack on truth by lies. It was the pollution of the real by the unreal, of fact by fiction. It was the erosion and devaluation of the empirical intellect and its replacement by confirmations of previously held prejudices.
One of the things Son wanted to attack his father about was belonging to the great Indian diaspora. Son had gone to India to discover authenticity. Only Indians from India had any claim to being authentic. The diaspora was full of phony Indians, people who had been uprooted so long that their souls were dying of thirst, people who didn’t know what language to speak or what gods to worship, people who pathetically bought Indian art so they could hang their identity on their walls
We walk unknowing amid the shadows of our past and, forgetting our history, are ignorant of ourselves.
“Remorse and forgiveness are obviously related,” she said, “but it’s not a cause-and-effect relationship. The connection between them is the act.
The decision of the person acted upon is not contingent upon the decision of the actor. One may genuinely feel remorse and make a genuine apology, and still not be forgiven, if the person acted upon is not ready to forgive. Alternatively, one may not feel ready to apologize, and still be forgiven, if the forgiver is ready to let bygones be bygones.
these young women these days who describe the veil as a signifier of their identity. I tell them they are suffering from what that presently unfashionable philosopher Karl Marx would have called false consciousness. In most of the world the veil is not a free choice. Women are forced into invisibility by men. These girls in the West making their quote-unquote free choices are legitimizing the oppression of their sisters in the parts of the world where the choice is not free
ALL AIRPORT CUSTOMS HALLS were designed to make even the innocent feel guilty. NOTHING TO DECLARE: the sign might as well have read DEAD MAN WALKING.
The deterioration, he declared with great emphasis on all available media, was not taking place in the eyesight of the human race, but in the world. Not in the seeing thing but in the thing seen. He quoted, very often, the old sixties graffito, Do not adjust your mind, there is a fault in reality.
Ever since he began his quest he had known that preparing himself for love, making himself worthy of the Beloved, also necessitated readying oneself for an ending, because after perfection was attained there was only oblivion to look forward to.
And as to the rumored imminent end of the world, he didn’t give that much credence. For him, the world had only just begun. If it was faulty, if bits were falling off it as if it were an old house in need of repairs, then it was because perfection was an illusion.
“All of us are in two stories at the same time,” said the sandwich lady. “Life and Times. There is our own personal story, and the bigger story of what’s happening around us. When both are in trouble simultaneously, when the crisis inside you intersects with the crisis outside you, things get a little crazy.”
There was an article in the Times a few months ago describing an operation pretty much like Anthill. I thought, if it’s so hush-hush, how is it in the paper? But it wasn’t called Anthill. It was called Hivemind.” ^ref-4840 “So let me explain,” said Agent Oshima. “When we are obliged to allow outside personnel to be brought into the covert operation—a parent, for example, like yourself—we give them certain information, but we don’t give any two people the same information. Then if the information enters the public domain we know who put it there.”
Maybe I should go home. I miss Bombay. But the Bombay I miss isn’t there to go home to anymore. This is who we are. We sail away from the place we love and then because we aren’t there to love it people go with axes and burning torches and smash and burn and then we say, Oh, too sad. But we abandoned it, left it to our barbarian successors to destroy.
Maybe I should go home. I miss Bombay. But the Bombay I miss isn’t there to go home to anymore. This is who we are. We sail away from the place we love and then because we aren’t there to love it people go with axes and burning torches and smash and burn and then we say, Oh, too sad. But we abandoned it, left it to our barbarian successors to destroy.