The air there is full of unasked questions. But their smell is faint, and the flowers in the many maturing gardens, the trees lining the avenues, the perfumes worn by the beautiful soignee ladies of the neighbourhood quite overpower this other, too-abstract odour.
You can get anywhere in Pakistan if you know people, even into jail.
Shame is like everything else; live with it for long enough and it becomes part of the furniture.
Shame: a short word, but one containing encyclopaedias of nuance. It was not only shame that his mothers forbade him to feel, but also embarrassment, discomfiture, decency, modesty, shyness, the sense of having an ordained place in the world, and other dialects of emotion for which English has no counterparts. (查看原文)
Roots, I sometimes think, are a conservative myth, designed to keep us in our places.
When individuals come unstuck from their native land, they are called migrants. When nations do the same thing (Bangladesh), the act is called secession. What is the best thing about migrant people and seceded nations? I think it is their hopefulness. Look into the eyes of such fold in old photographs. Hope blazes undimmed through the fading sepia tints. And what's the worst thing? It is the emptiness of one's luggage. I'm speaking of invisible suitcases, not the physical, perhaps cardboard, variety containing a few meaning-drained mementoes: we have come unstuck from more than land. We have floated upwards from history, from memory, from Time.
I may be such a person. Pakistan may be such a country.
Term ... (查看原文)
Informed sources opine, closer observers claim, many of our viewers in the West would say, how would you refute the argument, have you a point of view about the allegation that your institution of such Islamic punishments as flogging and cutting-off hands might be seen in certain quarters as being, arguably, according to certain definitions, so to speak, barbaric? (查看原文)
Autocratic regimes find it useful to espouse the rhetoric of faith, because people respect that language, are reluctant to oppose it. This is how religions shore up dictators; by encircling them with words of power, words which the people are reluctant to see discredited, disenfranchised, mocked.
But the ramming-down-the-throat point stands. In the end you get sick of it, you lose faith in the faith, if not qua faith then certainly as the basis for a state. And then the dictator falls, and it is discovered that he has brought God down with him, that the justifying myth of the nation has been unmade. This leaves only two options: disintegration, or a new dictatorship... no, there is a third, and I shall not be so pessimistic as to deny possibility. The third option is the substitution of a ... (查看原文)
