Yet, we must recognize that Benazir Bhutto was immensely courageous. In an increasingly radicalized society, Bhutto held on to her moderate views and pursued her quest to restore political process in Pakistan. Her tragic death is a set back even to a country that has them all - public hangings, assassinations and coups.

Questions are being asked: “How can somebody who can shoot her get so close to her with all the so-called security?” Blamegame has begun, holding Musharraf responsible.

But for me Bhutto’s killing raises very serious questions on the use of political violence in South Asia. If political futures of nations are determined by means of assassinations, if political differences are settled through violent means alone, then only thugs and ruffians will remain in public life. This is not Pakistan’s challenge alone: regardless of the political system in place, all the countries in the region - Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Burma, Afghanistan and indeed, India too - face the same dilemma to differing degrees.

This evening, as I heard the news of David Halberstam’s death in a car crash (WAPO and NYT obituaries) in the Bay area, I began to wish we had more of his ilk in Baghdad and Washington. Journalists who raised questions and remained skeptical of facile explanations offered by those in power. Perhaps, David Halberstam did more to bring the American misadventure in Vietnam to light than any other reporter. Surely, his early reporting for the New York Times from Saigon, which fetched him a Pulitzer in 1964, raised more questions about the policies Kennedy-Johnson administrations pursued in Vietnam.

Halberstam didn’t remain a reporter. Instead, he became a chronicler of the biggest stories of the second half of the 20th century. He is rightly praised for his ‘Best and the Brightest‘, but I loved his two books on the fifties: The fifties and The Children. More on these two books soon. I also liked his two other massive works, The Powers that be, on the emergence of NYT, Washington Post, Time and LA Times as media gaints and The Reckoning, a history of automobile industry as told through the stories of Ford and Nissan.

Frankly, I just enjoyed reading everything he wrote.

In between his serious books, Halberstam wrote on sports. His books on Michael Jordan (Playing for Keeps) and Bill Belichick (The Education of a Coach) are among my favorite sports books of all time.

David Halberstam will be missed.

Being Kuvempu’s son wasn’t a burden. He was that rare famous son, who forged his own personality and strode the Kannada literary and cultural world as a giant in his own right. He could and did easily say no to worldly positions - from professorships to MLA/MP ticket offers from all the political parties and MLC nominations until very recently - from a very early age.

Much will be written in the coming days about Tejaswi’s accomplishments as a novelist as well as that rare and gifted Kannada writer of popular non-fiction works. Tejaswi’s friends and admirers will praise his wide ranging interests, forward looking nature and more significantly, his curiosity to explore the world both in his literary works and in life. His critics will point out that his later novels weren’t as impressive as his early works and strongly criticize his formulations on globalization. I certainly found his turn away from radical politics quite troubling. More on all that later.

But in my mind, there is no doubt that his ethical self was an equally compelling aspect of his personality.

Tejaswi was my role model when I was growing up. I saw him frequently in Mysore, read everything he wrote and hung on to each word he uttered. He was that mysterious figure who would periodically show up in Mysore, only to disappear quickly. Return he did regularly, whenever he could take a break from his other preoccupation, his coffee estate. In recent times, I saw him infrequently and to my regret, didn’t engage him as much as I should have.

K. P. Poornachandra Tejaswi is no more. I wish I had gone to see him in December, as he had asked me to.

We will all miss him. It’s a sad day in the Land of Lime.

I don’t want to butcher it by picking out a few paragraphs.

Please do read it.

Sainthood is a kind of legacy, but fiction writers tend to prefer devoted readers to ardent worshippers. To mark the occasion of Narayan’s centenary year, a range of reissues has recently appeared, introduced by a new generation of authors who see him not as a dated writer of historical consequence but as a timeless writer of aesthetic excellence. They focus less on his uncontested greatness than on his disputed goodness.

I have to think more about this concluding paragraph but Mason’s idea about the Indianness of Narayan’s novel is an interesting idea.

It is through this idea—that a self is not a private entity but a fixed, public one—that Narayan’s novels break most meaningfully with those of the West and establish their own tradition. Their significance derives less from the mere fact of being some of the first important Indian fiction in English than from being the first English writing to infuse the novel with an Eastern existential perspective. Though crammed with incident, Narayan’s novels do not—indeed, cannot—chart a progression toward the formation of character. His characters, “strangled by the contour of their land,” are doubly circumscribed: by their nation’s political fate and by the inexorable fate of Hindu cosmology. In Narayan’s world, no less than in his lived life, we do not become; rather, we become aware of that which, for good or ill, we cannot help being. Through the novel, a form long used to show how things change, Narayan mapped the movements of unchanging things.

Well, let us worry about the being and becoming conundrum some other time.

This sickness within us. I am not sure when we will get rid of it.

Richards had to see the black man in that heckler. He couldn’t simply be the heckler. He had to be the ‘nigger’, who fifty years ago would have been held “upside down with a [expletive] fork up your ass”, for such impertinence. He would have been lynched.

Ah, what memories do we retain! Scratch the surface and all the good stuff will pour forth.

Watch the video. As many times as you possibly can. I did, until I felt sick.

In a class I am teaching on racism and untouchability this semester, we discuss the psychological aspects of racism. I constantly remind my students of our prejudices and their memories, which remain just beneath the surface. It isn’t in Richards alone, but in us all.

Let no one assert racism is history in this country.

New York Times has a story on Fagles’ new Aeneid. There are two paragraphs which caught my attention. Speaking about the text, Fagles says:

The great challenge, he said, was to master the two voices of “The Aeneid”: the stately public voice, the one that critics of Virgil used to say was just propaganda for Augustus, and the private voice of Aeneas’s personal sorrow.

“The modern tendency is to hear one voice to the exclusion of the other,” he explained. “We generally think of the public voice as the voice of betrayal, and the private voice as the only place where truth resides. But the truth in Virgil is more complicated than that, and you need to hear both.”

Fagles also talked about the contemporary relevance of Aeneid:

It’s a poem about empire, he explained, and was commissioned by the emperor Augustus to celebrate the spread of Roman civilization.

“To begin with, it’s a cautionary tale,” Mr. Fagles said. “About the terrible ills that attend empire — its war-making capacity, the loss of blood and treasure both. But it’s all done in the name of the rule of law, which you’d have a hard time ascribing to what we’re doing in the Middle East today.

“It’s also a tale of exhortation. It says that if you depart from the civilized, then you become a murderer. The price of empire is very steep, but Virgil shows how it is to be earned, if it’s to be earned at all. The poem can be read as an exhortation for us to behave ourselves, which is a horse of relevance that ought to be ridden.”

Time to read Aeneid again.

Mahatma Gandhi - music video

Is any commentary necessary?