Roots in Houston

So here I am, again. Back in H-town after quite the fun, fall term in Chicago. It's warm here, if a bit rainy. I've been spending my days watching movies (a lot) and reading (a little). In the literary queue this week are:

- Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye (which I've read three times already, but now it's going to be part of my thesis so I've got to read it like a philosophy text)
- Hegel's Phenomenolgie des Geistes (Phenomenology of Spirt)
- Frantz Fanon's Black Skin White Masks (just fantastic)

And the movies I've already seen are:
- The Sentinel, with Michael Douglas and Kieffer Sutherland (Mom's choice)
- Eight Below, the one about the huskies that get stranded in Antarctica (Bro's Choice)
- The Pursuit of Happyness (pretty good, though, it could have had a better social justice message, you know, the usual rags to riches tale)
- Plus a few Bollywood spectaculars.

Really, I've spent double the time in front of the tube than I have holding a book. But whatever. I don't have a TV in Chicago, so I've got to get my fill now! Time's a ticking! I mean, the books will be there when I haul them back to Chicago, right?

Next week, we head to sunny Phoneix! Where we are planning to have a blast. Then back to Houston to ring in the New Year with the entire crew. Woot!

I hope you all are each having a most excellent December thus far! I leave you with the salutation that the man at the movie theater gave us yesterday as he handed us our tickets and sent us off to enjoy our film:

"We hope you enjoy your seasonal holiday celebrations!"

Flashbacks

My current project is a paper on nationalism and gender in India. Since there's little, if any, space for the touchy-feeley emotional stuff in a philosophy paper, that stuff is going to have to come out here. Bear with me, please.

You know, there's something nice about interrogating events with a critical eye. Looking deeply at the links between unresolved issues and tensions that abound. All that is very intellectually satisfying. Something gets left out of that picture, though. Something equally, if not more, significant. Something you can't grasp via stats and theories. Memory, perhaps. Identity, certainly. Heartbreak, always.

The partition of India affected my family profoundly. My paternal grandfather's family was from Lahore (now in Pakistan) and was made to move to Delhi. My maternal grandfather was a Colonel in the Indian Army during Partition and the wars that followed. Both my maternal and paternal grandmothers were the reasons that their families made it out alive.

So, I live on the faultlines of the very events I am interrogating intellectually.
The tensions that abound? I'm steeped in those.
The anger that Indians and Pakistanis have toward each other? I've seen it firsthand.
The ways that we are almost exactly the same? I've seen those firsthand, too.

Then, when I read the recapitulations and pithy theories that try, and try and inevitably fail to capture the horror of a thing like Partition, I'm not really surprised. Strangely, even though my family left India right before the violence exploded again in '84, I have flashbacks. When I read accounts of women jumping into (or being thrown into) wells to prevent capture by "other side's men" and when I hear of the lorries piled up high with people and their life's belongings as they made their way from one side of the border to the other, somehow, I feel like I know how it might have been. Maybe it's the stories of migration and violence I've heard from elders. Maybe it's something else, but somehow, I find myself there, too.

There's been so much violence since then. Wars, famines, bombs: year after year. And then this happened, in Gujarat, just a few years ago.

"On 27 February [2002] , at approximately ten minutes to eight in the morning, the Sabarmati Express pulled out of the Godhra railway station on the last leg of what was to be the most catastrophic rail journeys of post-Partition India. As it left, the train was stoned by an irate mob and some twenty minutes later, a coach had been burned to cinder along with fifty-eight helpless passengers. Who the attackers were and what prompted them to such cruelty are unknown, but the rulers of Gujarat promptly decided all Muslims had to be taught a lesson. 'Retaliation' was swift and merciless, some would even say clinical. Over the next few days, several hundred Muslims were killed in a state-wide carnage that is certain to become a part of our 'past that will not pass.'"
- From, Gujarat: The Making of Tragedy

There are moments in every day, where we could just let the past, pass. Where we could recognize our collective history and not feel anger and hatred. Instead, we could locate our collective suffering. Suffering that crosses every single inch of that man-made border. Of course, we don't do that - we'd have to see each other's humanity. We'd have to see our own humanity.

Instead, I'll keep writing a philosophy paper, and having flashbacks.

On missing old friends and making new ones

I've made some very dear buddies this quarter. It's true, the saying that going through traumatic events makes people closer. We went through these past few months wracked with insecurity about our academic chops and about whether we've got it in us to be serious scholars. We trudged to class through weeks and weeks of cold, rainy weather with tomes strapped to our backs. We celebrated the small things, because we needed to seek out joy (seeing that it certainly wasn't about to seek US out). We reckoned with words and pages like we couldn't possibly have imagined it was possible to do. We spent hours going over every sentence of a paper, just trying to say something worth saying. We met and fell in love with Chicago. We took comfort in our family, solace in old friends and heart in our new ones.

Last week my dearest UChicago buddies, M and C, and I locked up our bagel-eating, pizza-scarfing, coffee-chugging collegiate selves in our messy closets. Then we dressed up, put on our shiny faces and polished shoes and went to dinner. We ate a four course meal that was indescribably divine. (Pear salad, butternut squash soup, pumpkin risotto, creme brulee.) Here are some photos of our divine dining destination:





Lovely, no? The photos don't do it complete justice. There were orchids in the loo. And freshly crushed mint in the mojito. It was so great to NOT be a student so obiviously exhausted from paper writing exertions. We talked about our biggest hopes for 2007 and our heartfelt accomplishments in 2006. We didn't dwell on the fears. We reveled in possibility. Just what the philosopher ordered.

On the way to dinner, we strolled through Chicago's theater district, right then vowing to make the city a bigger part of our lives next quarter. Maybe not as big a part as the library, but certainly a stronger character in the plot of our UChicago experience.

And let it be known, that though I've made some new buddies. I've never been more greatful to have all of you than I was this year. Yes, that means you. I couldn't have made it even this far without all those "check-in" phone calls, 2-hour instant messaging sessions and just as long late night laments about the pathetic state of academic philosophy. Also to those of you that reminded me that I'm lucky to be here, doing what I love even though it's hard, and that there's nothing I'd rather be doing: thanks. It's just what I needed to hear.

Hugs to you all.

New Gig

I have a new job - as a writer for the website www.RHRealityCheck.org. I'll be posting once a week on relevant and sundry reproductive rights issues. The aim of the website is to serve as a "reality check" against all the (mis)information that abounds in mainstream media on the topics of reproductive rights and health.

I'm pretty excited about the chance to think and write about non-theoretical issues tied and bound to the real, manifest universe at large. You all know that I love philosophy and political theory. It is, after all, the way that I make sense of the world and cope with the traumas inflicted by the newsfeeds that bring devastating images and uncritical thinking into my apartment every day. But sometimes, it feels damn good to see something particularly vile in the news portrayal of an issue and have a legitimate setting in which I can call it out for the shoddy research and reporting that it really is.

Somehow, I think that this new gig is going to bring some much needed balance to my intellectual life, which is currently veering from philosophy into psychoanalytical theory of consciousness. This week the paper du jour is about reason and practical rationality. Next week, gender and violence in India. How the heck did I get myself into this mess? Anyway, that's a question for another day and a different blog post.

My very first post is up here. Check it out and please tell me what you think.