Hello! I’m delighted to report that my essay on — and translation of — Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s Intesaab, which first appeared in Ink-uilab (Ch. 26), has found a second life (a rebirth, of sorts) in the wonderful (Issue 15 - Refuse - July 2026). My deepest gratitude to Sona and the meticulous editorial team for their sharp editorial suggestions — and for the privilege of being in such formidable company. You can read the translation here.

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And, as I depart from Oxford this week, I find myself waxing poetic on the function and dysfunction of the university. I’ve crystallised these ideas in many reminiscences and rants, especially to friends who visit its quaint town and ask me of my time there. The result appears in The Oxford Student (lovingly called the OxStu). You can read the piece here. I’ve reprinted it below for your reading pleasure, or displeasure. If you’ve had the opportunity to haunt those “hallowed” halls, do let me know if you agree.

Oxford Works Precisely Because It Doesn’t Work

As I leave Oxford this week, I have come to the only respectable conclusion available to a departing student: Oxford does not work. Nobody who runs it is especially surprised. The university has survived plague, civil war, reform acts, world wars, Thatcherism, Blairism, Trussism, neo-managerialism, and the vegan sausage roll. It has done so not by functioning smoothly, but by refusing to become smooth enough to be handled.

The first rule of Oxford is simple: become ungovernable. There is no Oxford, not really. There are Oxfords: thirty-six colleges, three collegiate societies, four permanent private halls, and over a hundred departments and faculties. Each possesses its own money, rules, rooms, rituals, porters, poltergeists, and prophets.

Some colleges collectively own a non-trivial portion of England’s field and forest. Others can barely keep the lights on, resorting to renting out lecture theatres to corporates, selling summer schools and hawking crested scarves to American tourists. There is the Oxford where students make use of free Swiss chalets, devour ‘second desserts’ and sip subsidised port. It is the same Oxford where others calculate whether dinner in hall is cheaper than a Tesco meal-deal. Two seventeen-year-olds can arrive with the same grades, in the same subject, in the same city, and receive entirely different Oxfords. One gets cheap rooms, grants, tutors, a responsive welfare office, and a library open at civilised hours. Another gets a long commute, mould, and rent hikes.

The fact that poorer colleges tend to offer worse value, a higher percentage of rooms reporting heating, mould or pest problems, even as rent rises – this is brazen inequality. You pay the same fees, but another college may as well be a foreign embassy. Unless invited, you will not get past the porter’s lodge. If your college library lacks the book you need, you must jump through hoops to attain enlightenment. If your college bar does not subsidise pints, you will pay more for the same sensation of collegiate-debauchery.

Oxford is a confederation of solvent oddities and underfunded sovereignties: private principalities, fiefdoms of filial piety, and little pseudo-republics of scarcity and silverware. Charm does not redeem inequality. But this fragmentation has at least kept power from hardening into a single bureaucratic fist.

The obvious comparisons are the Ivy League schools, which had the good sense to imitate Oxbridge without importing their afflictions. At Yale, every student is assigned to one of fourteen residential colleges that have “nothing to do with classes or majors”. Each college is funded from a centrally managed endowment. Harvard’s Houses are similarly domesticated: 98 percent of undergraduates live in one of twelve Houses, funded by a single entity that manages the university’s endowment. In 2010, Yale moved to reduce disparities between richer and poorer colleges, including by redistributing some endowment funds earmarked for specific colleges towards financial aid and general use. The result may have been a loss of local eccentricity, but also the vulgar miracle of fairness: Fewer bankrolled Italy trips for one college but more baseline provision for all.

Oxford could never tolerate such tidiness. Its federated colleges are independent, self-governing and financially autonomous, with endowment assets of nearly £7 billion, vastly exceeding the central university’s reserves of around £2 billion. No college, however broke, would willingly surrender its wine cellar and its coat of arms and give up control. Nor would the richer ones submit to the indignity of being merged into a common purse for the benefit of their poorer cousins. So the great irony is that America, land of individualism, produced the collectivised college, while Britain, land of queues and social democracy, preserved the academic equivalent of the Holy Roman Empire. Efficient? No. Fair? Not especially. But it is precisely this bizarre distribution of power that keeps the colleges alive.

Colleges can be smug in all the wrong ways. But Oxford’s also a shelter for oddity. A don ignored by his department might still find an audience at High Table. A student lost in the faculty might still be seen at dinner. An unfashionable subject survives because some long-dead merchant left enough capital to pay for it. Oxford’s genius doesn’t come from the system working as designed, but from the system leaving enough cracks through which strange people and strange ideas can seep through.

The university has done real work on access, but the ladder still has men at the bottom asking whether one has brought the correct shoes. In 2025, Oxford says 66.5 percent of UK-domiciled undergraduates admitted were from state schools, down from 68.2 percent in 2021; it also says 20.9 percent came from the most socio-economically disadvantaged areas. Meanwhile, privately educated students remain grotesquely overrepresented relative to their share of the school population. One should distrust anyone who speaks of “tradition” without asking who paid for it, who cleaned it, and who served the trays at dinner.

And yet, Oxford’s student radicalism has always had a weakness for costume. The same culture that denounces classism will, by evening, queue cheerfully for white-tie balls, and by morning defend compulsory sub fusc for exams. In 2015, students voted overwhelmingly to keep their robes and mortarboards. Apparently finals aren’t stressful enough without making everyone look like apprentice undertakers or background props for touristic selfies.

Oxford, ipso facto, cannot stop being aristocratic. Hence, it has learned to perform repentance. Rhodes scholars write dissertations on anti-racism. Colleges build access schemes, publish DEI statistics, convene working groups and repeat phrases like “inclusive excellence.” Guilt, at Oxford, is one of the few renewable resources.

The donors understand their side of the bargain. Oxford, once suspicious of business education, eventually embraced it under the name of Wafic Saïd, described by the Guardian as a fixer at the heart of the Al-Yamamah arms deal, a characterisation he has contested. Today, the glass ziggurat in his honour educates the managerial class in the ironically named Nelson Mandela Lecture Theatre. Then comes the Schwarzman Centre, Oxford’s great monument to the proposition that the humanities still matter, provided they are named after a private-equity billionaire. Schwarzman’s primary connection to Oxford, by his own account, was when he visited as a 15-year-old tourist. Truly, some “teen-tour” souvenirs get out of hand. His £185 million gift, the largest single donation to the university since the Renaissance, seeks to rescue the humanities from mortal peril by gathering them under one roof, stuffing them into smaller offices, and attaching them to AI ethics. Which is, one must grudgingly admit, better than nothing. And then there is the case of the teetotal billionaire who acquired the city’s most iconic watering hole. Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, through his eponymous Ellison Institute of Technology, bought the Eagle and Child, famous for pouring pints for Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and the Inklings. The Grade II-listed pub is to be restored and reopened, while also providing meeting spaces for Ellison Scholars, the “next generation of political and entrepreneurial leaders.” How exactly a beloved old pub survives being turned into a sleek leadership incubator remains to be seen.

The tutorial system is the purest Oxford contradiction. It is the thing everyone praises because, at its best, it deserves praise: one student, one essay, one tutor, one hour of intellectual vivisection. It can expose the lazy and liberate the curious. The old caricature was the shabby PPEist bluffing his way through utilitarianism. Boris Johnson’s old tutor once said: “If you’re intelligent enough, you can rub along in philosophy on a couple of hours a week. Boris rubbed along on no hours a week, and it wasn’t quite good enough.” Today, the student has ChatGPT to do the rubbing along.

No serious accountant would invent the tutorial now. It makes no economic sense; naturally, it survives.

It is also a labour model held together by underpayment and the Ye Olde English habit of masquerading exploitation as character-building. Recent UCU research finds that only about a third of Oxford tutorials were taught by full-time professors, with 61 percent of core tutorial teaching done by academics on fixed-term or hourly-paid contracts; the union argued that once preparation, marking and student support were counted, pay could fall below minimum wage in real terms. This weakens the faculty the university can attract, especially when modest pay is combined with pastoral duties, departmental and collegiate obligations. For how long can prestige fill the pay gap?

Oxford has gone from training the sons of barons, though it still does a bit of that, to training private-equity hobbits, oncologists and AI engineers. Its old imperial export, the colonial sahib, has been tastefully rebranded as the FCDO administrator. Meanwhile, it produces many an Oxbridge Admissions Consultant, who will help enrol the next generation of Oxbridge Admissions Consultants, giving rise to a pyramid scheme beneath the domes of the RadCam.

In Forster’s Howards End, Tibby wants “civilisation without activity” and is told he need not go far: “You can find it at Oxford. Oxford offers white tie without aristocracy, radicalism without risk, poverty beside endowment, guilt beside grandeur, civilisation without anything so vulgar as visible productivity.”

And yet, perversely, this is why the place has endured. Standardisation would make Oxford fairer. It would also make it more governable. Oxford is inefficient because too many people own too many pieces of it. This may be bad for justice, but it is excellent for survival.

Oxford resists capture because there is no single throat to cut. This university is a hydra. Cut off one head and two grow back, both with separate endowments. Starve a faculty, and some antediluvian college fellowship keeps the subject alive. Squash a department, and a research centre with a new acronym appears across town. This is why the “home of lost causes” predates the Aztec Empire. This is why many ministers, managers, and modernisers have all failed to make it behave.

So, as I leave, I do not think Oxford works because it is good. I think it works because its badness is distributed. No single failure can become total because every authority is rivalled, every amendment obstructed, and every absurdity locally owned. The place is unjustly inefficient, poor in the shadow of obscene wealth, and smug in the shadow of a shrinking empire.

It should be reformed. It will resist reform. And it will survive the reformers.

Many thanks, as always, for your readership. Haunting your inbox is an honour.

BM

                                            
[italicized fragments borrowed from Nehru, Tagore, Faiz, and Kamla Bhasin]

At the stroke of the midnight hour, let India awake to freedom.
Mother India? Asleep at the wheel. Her kids seek a keepsake: freedom. 

Fifty days they have held the streets, choking the capital’s throat.
Batons beat the body politic. Through every sore and ache: freedom.

Jantar-Mantar! Abracadabra! The magician’s marvellous mantra:
Jan-tar: let the people pass. Man-tar: and the spirits spake freedom.
	
They called you cockroaches? Good. Cram every crack and crevice.
Beneath the throne, six-legged millions stir an earthquake: freedom.

The syllabus grows, the vacancies shrink, the portals crash at noon;
To be young beneath these rulers is a lifelong headache: freedom.

Trickle-down economics: exams leak, school roofs leak, public funds leak.
A polyglot philharmonic rises, without teleprompter or mistake: freedom.

They fuck up futures, arrest the young, then praise themselves for peace;
For such Olympic shamelessness, dear sirs, you take the cake. Freedom!

Ministers smile for cameras, promising proprieties, advisories, inquiries;
Ink dries on the press release. Does anyone still buy this fake freedom?

Tear gas turns the summer white, chokes every hostel’s nostrils;
They are not hostile. You are vile. Now watch them make freedom.

A student stands before the van, one open palm against the State;
History repeats itself. Your trembling hand is the brake: Freedom!

At the protest kitchen, strangers knead one hunger into bread;
A shared thali, a borrowed shawl, ten tired hands bake freedom.

Beware the partisan selling poison from a saffron-labelled vial;
He coils around the Constitution, smiling like a snake. Freedom!

Bol! Your lips are still free. Speak! Your tongue is still yours.
Lathis may break bone, but tell me: can they break Freedom?

This monsoon swells with blue; Bhim’s clear stream of reason.
It floods every barricade. The streets become a lake of freedom.

Aflatoon, what use are words when the powerful refuse to read?
The students have read their history. Now watch them retake freedom.



                                                                                  For the Cockroaches, July 2026

This poem responds to the youth-led “Cockroach” protests spreading across the country. The movement grew from outrage over leaks in competitive examinations, especially the medical entrance examination, and widened into a protest against youth unemployment, corruption, and the absence of accountability in India’s education system. The protesters reclaimed “cockroach” after a Supreme Court judge appeared to use the term disparagingly in reference to unemployed young people. What began as a satirical internet meme, the Cockroach has become an emblem of the movement’s resilience and refusal to disappear. After police used batons and tear gas against demonstrators marching toward Parliament, protesters regrouped at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar and continued their protest. On Saturday, July 25, 2026, after the government conceded their key demands and the education minister resigned, the protesters ended their agitation, marking a rare moment in which power, however reluctantly, was made to answer those it had tried to dismiss.

Artists denounce the dead-eyed, many-fingered abominations of ‘AI slop,’ and not without cause. Others defend a new vernacular craft: the strange cleverness of the prompt, the cut, the remix, the absurdist triumph of forcing Will Smith to eat spaghetti. Even programmers live precariously, bracing for culling at record rates. Others have become evangelists for ‘vibe coding,’ using AI to nitro-boost their workflows, then using those gains to build ever more efficient AI tools that will replace their work even faster. This is a technological ouroboros, cheerfully consuming itself.

So, the questions pile up: Can a model do this? Can a model do that? Does AI lie? Is it theft? Is it the future? Is it vapourware? Is it, at last, intelligence? How do we settle these arguments? Can we settle them at all?

To understand the impasse, I find myself turning to a talk delivered by a student in Cambridge nearly a century ago.

Frank Ramsey died in 1930 at just twenty-six (See Ink-uilab Ch. 21). He left behind a comet’s tail of concepts: the Ramsey model, Ramsey pricing, and the Keynes–Ramsey rule in economics; Ramsey numbers, Ramsey’s theorem, and an eponymous field of combinatorics in mathematics; Ramsey sentences, the Ramsey test, and an entire theory of knowledge in philosophy. In 1999, the philosopher Donald Davidson gave the name ‘Ramsey Effect’ to the humiliating experience of believing you have made a novel discovery, only to learn that Ramsey had already gotten there first.

His finest work, in my opinion, is something else entirely. It is an unpublished short essay, really just a talk, delivered to a handful of people. It offers a surprisingly sharp way of seeing our present AI-induced confusion. In February 1925, a twenty-two-year-old Ramsey presented to the Apostles, an elite and secretive Cambridge conversation society whose members then included the luminaries Keynes, Moore, and Russell. The title was a question: “Is there anything to discuss?” His answer, delivered with his characteristic witty directness, was a qualified no.

Ramsey’s claim is that much of what passes for discussion is not discussion at all. As science advances and religion decays, the old general questions become, in his phrase, “either technical or ridiculous.” Science, history, and politics become domains where non-experts are mostly in the position of needing information, and so can do little besides accept on authority the judgments of people better qualified. Philosophy, too, becomes technical, or it dissolves into nonsense.

So, what is left for ordinary conversation? Ramsey observes that most “discussion” is simply comparing notes. “I think we realize too little,” he writes, “how often our arguments are of the form: A: ‘I went to Grantchester this afternoon.’ B: ‘No I didn’t.’ We do this, he implies, in more sophisticated ways: “A discussion about the constancy of affection becomes: “A saying he would feel guilty if he weren’t constant, B saying he wouldn’t feel guilty in the least. But that, although a pleasant way of passing the time, is not discussing anything whatever, but simply comparing notes.” Now reread that and substitute ‘constancy of affection’ for ‘artificial intelligence’.

A: “I feel anxious AI will replace me.”

B: “I feel empowered by AI in my workflow.”

One person’s exhilaration is another’s dread. One person’s proof-of-concept is another’s proof-of-ruin. One person posts a model producing a competent first draft and declares the writing profession finished and headed, with the typists and lamplighters to the ash heap of history. Another posts a hallucinated legal citation or a glib poem and concludes that the emperor has no clothes. We fling benchmark tables, screenshots, and cherry-picked failures at each other. There is no argument to be won here, because there is no shared ground on which an argument could stand.

Ramsey noticed the same collapse of argument in the artistic domains: aesthetics, he writes, “always excites us far more than anything else; but we really don’t discuss it much. Our arguments are so feeble … What we really like doing is again to compare our experience; a practice which in this case is peculiarly profitable because the critic can point out things to other people to which, if they attend, they will obtain feelings which they value which they failed to observe otherwise. We do not and cannot discuss whether one work of art is better than another; we merely compare the feeling it gives.”

The defender of the AI-generated image is rarely making a case for its objective merit. Rather, they invite you to experience a sensation: the thrill of creation ex nihilo, the novelty of the synthesis, the sheer weirdness of conjuring the picture in your head out into the world with nothing but a string of words. The critic who calls it ‘slop’ is not refuting an argument; they are reporting a different feeling: disgust, perhaps, or fear, or a sense of violation at seeing the tools of their craft deployed by a machine that has never suffered a creative block, never gone to art school, never stared at a blank canvas until three in the morning.

There is another one of Ramsey’s lines that deserves revival, one that should embarrass our current cult of calibration, our shrine of scale:

“Where I seem to differ from my friends is in attaching little importance to physical size. I don’t feel the least humble before the vastness of the heavens. The stars may be larger, but they cannot think or love; and these are qualities which impress me more than size does. My picture of the world is drawn in perspective and not like a model to scale. The foreground is occupied by human beings, and the stars are as small as three-penny bits.”

I cannot bring myself to care about your billions of tokens, your trillions of parameters, your corpus trained on every digitized book in the universe. I do not feel the least humble before the vastness of your data centre. My picture of the world is drawn in perspective, not to scale. Human beings occupy the foreground; the models, for all their heft, are tiny stars in the distance.

From this angle, these systems are at once astonishing and provincial. If a model finds a clever proof in some rarefied corner of mathematics, splendid. Let those qualified to appreciate it rejoice. Most of us are not pure mathematicians. The question that concerns most people is not whether a model can juggle more symbols than we can, but what all this counting-for-counting’s-sake has to do with a life well-lived.

Ramsey was, among other things, a pragmatist. He understood that beliefs are rules for action, and that the value of any proposition is ultimately measured by its consequences for human life. This pragmatism is curiously absent from the AI debate, which oscillates between millenarian fantasy and eschatological alarm. We are offered two visions of the future: either the machines will ascend to godhood and solve all our problems, or they will ascend to godhood and destroy us all. What both scenarios share is a fetishisation of the machine’s ascent, a devotion to its trajectory rather than to ours.

Technology, after all, enters life at the level of the near and ordinary: in an email to a colleague, a child’s image prompt, a programmer’s copilot. The question is what these systems do to work, to pay, to school, to care, to boredom, to attention, to dignity, to the texture of an ordinary day. The late comedian Bill Hicks, reflecting on the techno-fetishism of the first Gulf War, put it plainly: “Everyone got excited over the technology. And I guess it was pretty incredible watching a missile fly down an air vent … But couldn’t we feasibly use that same technology to shoot food at hungry people?”

The labs building AI models already command vast quantities of electricity, rare minerals, rarer talent, and the labour of thousands of precarious workers who clean and label training data. In an age of staggering human need, we are expending civilization-scale resources on ever larger language models. Might we wield these very resources to alleviate the undeniable suffering of beings already conscious? Will the age of AI truly reduce suffering, heal sorrow, end conflict, or solve material want? The evidence so far is not encouraging.

Antonio Gramsci, writing from a Mussolinian prison cell around the same time Ramsey was addressing the Apostles, diagnosed our condition: “The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” We are living in that interregnum now. The morbid symptoms are everywhere: in widening inequality, in the degradation of work, in the concentration of power, in the erosion of attention, in the strange loneliness of a culture that talks to chatbots instead of each other.

And yet Ramsey looked straight at the cosmic crisis and found a reason to be cheerful:

“In time the world will cool and everything will die; but that is a long time off still and its present value at compound discount is almost nothing. Nor is the present less valuable because the future will be blank … I find, just now at least, the world a pleasant and exciting place. You may find it depressing; I am sorry for you, and you despise me. But I have reason and you have none; you would only have a reason for despising me if your feeling corresponded to the fact in a way mine didn’t. But neither can correspond to the fact. The fact is not in itself good or bad; it is just that it thrills me but depresses you. On the other hand, I pity you with reason, because it is pleasanter to be thrilled than to be depressed, and not merely pleasanter but better for all one’s activities.”

If AI can replace you, I pity you. Not because you may be out of work, though you might. But because you have already conceded the most important ground. You have accepted that what you do is a matter of function, of output, of routine. You have drawn your picture of the world to scale and discovered, with horror, that you are small.

It is worth asking what that fear reveals. If your work can be replaced, perhaps it was already more mechanical than you cared to admit. If your art can be replicated so easily that the audience is satisfied by synthetic sludge, perhaps what they were consuming was already generic. If your thoughts are so predictable that a model can anticipate them, perhaps they had hardened into cliché. I also pity you if you spend your days in terror of replacement.

I do not feel this way about my own work, and I don’t think you should either. Not because I deny the economic threat, or because I’m confident that my profession will be spared. A model can generate a technically dazzling economics paper; it cannot make that research matter to the people it purports to describe. A model may one day produce a better pastiche of my prose, but it will not have my childhood, my grudges, my private shames, my inexplicable tastes.

Ramsey’s picture of the world was drawn in perspective, not to scale. The foreground is still occupied by human beings, who remember, make things for others, bury their dead, and try, under conditions not of their choosing, to make a life. The stars are large, but they cannot think or love. The models are vast, but they cannot feel. The future may be blank. The present is ours.

That changed thanks to Dr. T and the Dr. T Project, who first nudged me toward what we lazily call “world music” and, more importantly, toward the scale of what we’re not hearing. At some point it dawned on me that the modern music archive is effectively infinite, and that most of it circulates only within tiny, local or algorithmic loops before vanishing again. I started chasing songs geographically: scanning Wikipedia lists titled Music of X, pestering friends from wherever “there” happened to be, clicking on bands with quirky names, and occasionally trusting the algorithm.

As some of you know, I have a weakness for anthologies, lists, and mildly deranged acts of collation. I’ve been circling a project like this for a while. A few Ink-uilabs ago [Ch. 18], I sought to collect every musical rendering of ‘The Internationale’ across languages and traditions, before realising that tracking every language would be a thesis-level undertaking and, beyond a point, more pedantic than illuminating. Exhaustiveness is often mistaken for insight.

Here is a humbler attempt: one song from every country in the world! It only took a few months of chipping away!

Before we begin, a few ground rules:

1. Yes, the nation-state is a slippery, contested idea. All countries are imagined; borders are absurd (an ongoing economics research project of mine unpacks this—more on that soon). A single song from India cannot possibly gesture at the breadth of music from the north, south, east, west, or anywhere in between. The same is true for almost every place on this list.

2. I’ve used UN categories for countries: 193 countries + 2 observer states. These are not my views on sovereignty. Please don’t ban me from your micro-, macro-, pseudo-, or newly declared republics.

3. There is only one song per country. This is a hard and fast rule!

4. These are songs I like. De gustibus non est disputandum i.e. in matters of taste, there is no argument. This is not the best song from Seychelles. This is not the “most Malian” song. They are not ethnomusicologist museum pieces, and they are certainly not all folk or ‘world music.’ Expect North African rock, Pacific jazz, Central Asian country ballads, and plenty of odd genre confusion. The editorial philosophy is simple: songs that I like that happen to be from a given country, not songs chosen because they are from that country.

5. As far as possible, I’ve stayed true to my Spotify library. Roughly half of these tracks were already sitting in my library waiting to be categorized. For some countries, I had no musical knowledge at all. Those searches were the most enjoyable parts of the process. I’ve added context where it felt helpful. Some of these songs have very fascinating histories.

6. Ofcourse, music is meant to be listened to. There’s a Spotify playlist to follow along, a YouTube playlist for those who prefer it, and individual links for each song. I’ve also embedded the most interesting music videos.

Strap in. Grab your passport, put your headphones on. And we’re off!

A

1. Afghanistan

• Sada-e Man by Kabul Dreams. The band’s members grew up as exiled refugees under Taliban rule and later regrouped in Kabul. As they originate from different regions, they do not share a common first language, and perform in English as it’s the only language they all share!

2. Albania

• Hajredin Pasha by Sinan Hoxha & Ermal Fejzullahu. A swaggering Albanian folk-pop. The title is that of an Ottoman-era general, defeated in a near-mythical uprising in 1843 by Albanian rebels.

3. Algeria

• Autopsie d’un complot by Ahmed Malek. A groovy Algerian soundtrack blending funk, jazz, and orchestral scoring; Malek was a leading composer for Algerian cinema, often compared to Ennio Morricone for his genre-spanning film work.

4. Andorra

• Salvem el món by Anonymous. A Catalan-language punk-rock band, Yes, the band is called Anonymous.

5. Angola

• Mona Ki Ngi Xica by Bonga. By one of the country’s most influential musicians, from the semba tradition. Very groovy!

6. Antigua and Barbuda

• Nobody Gonna Run Me by King Short Shirt. The singer is Antigua’s foremost calypsonian, an undefeated winner of Calypso competitions (which, TIL, is very much a thing). The song draws on local benna, a post-emancipation folk style built around scandal, bawdy rumours, and gossip, sung in classic call-and-response between a lead voice and the crowd.

7. Argentina

• Cuando Tenga La Tierra by Mercedes Sosa. A hymn of dignity and promise, carried by Sosa’s unshakeable voice. Watch the performance below.

8. Armenia

• Fides Tua by Tigran Hamasyan. A singular jazz pianist who composes original piano pieces from Armenian folk and sacred traditions. Grateful to have heard him perform live with a dear friend at the Barbican in 2022.

9. Australia

• Treaty by Yothu Yindi. A landmark-protest song that fused Yolŋu language, Indigenous politics, and pop-rock momentum, demanding Aboriginal recognition and a formal treaty. The first song by a predominantly Aboriginal band to chart in Australia.

10. Austria

• Rock Me Amadeus by Falco. A slick, ironic pop-rap ode to Mozart that somehow topped charts worldwide. To date, the single is the only German-language song to peak at number one on the Billboard Hot 100s. Pure 80s Vienna swagger as evidenced by the aura-maxxing music video:

11. Azerbaijan

• Intizar by Elmira Rohimova. A restrained ballad built around intizar (waiting or longing), where mugham-inflected phrasing overlaps with Soviet-era pop orchestration!

B

12. Bahamas

• Da River by Ophie & Da Websites. A joyous ‘rake-and-scrape’ style song with music made with a bent handsaw, scraped with a screwdriver. This unusual tune turns imported European tools and dances into something unmistakably Bahamian.

13. Bahrain

• Furjaan al Bahrain by What’s Mahmood. A love letter to Bahrain’s old neighbourhoods. The young musician blends Gulf rhythms with funk, indie, pop, and electronic sounds.

14. Bangladesh

• Bashbo Bhalo by Dameer. A heartfelt Bengali single from Bangladeshi singer-songwriter Dameer Khan, released in 2022 with a music video featuring his own father, blending folk-tinged lyricism and indie pop-rock sensibilities.

15. Barbados

• Drink Milk by Draytons Two. A 1970s track from a Barbados spouge outfit with a lively Caribbean folk-pop style.

16. Belarus

• На Дне by Molchat Doma (Молчат дома). A stark, synth-laden opener from Belarusian post-punk trio Molchat Doma’s 2018 album Etazhi. The brutalistic aesthetic, cold wave rhythms, and melancholic Russian vocals have led them to be connected with “doomer music.”

17. Belgium

• Pretty Horny Flow by Absynthe Minded. A quirky Belgian band whose “tracks contain a mix of thirties jazz, with a touch of funky soul, Balkan beats and Merseyside pop.”

18. Belize

• Welcome to Belize Club by Wilfred Peters. A lively instrumental rooted in Belizean brukdown tradition. I like the simple but heartfelt lyrics of this one! Wilfred Peters has an MBE!

19. Benin

• Se Ba Ho by Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou. A track from the legendary Benin ensemble known as the “All-Powerful” Orchestre Poly-Rythmo. Their long career since the late 1960s blends Afrobeat, funk, soul, and traditional Vodoun-inflected rhythms.

20. Bhutan

• Yak Lebi Lhadar by Jigme Drukpa. A haunting Bhutanese folk song told from the perspective of Lhadhar, a prized yak whose joyful life in Laya ends when he is taken for ritual slaughter by order of a powerful lord. I learnt it from the Bhutanese movie Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom, where the track plays an important narrative role.

21. Bolivia (Plurinational State of)

• Porque Estás Triste by Savia Andina. Andean folk-rock from mining towns like Potosí, where tender melodies carry the weight of high altitude and hard labour. When I was on the Chile–Bolivia border, I was struck by how much heavy metal blasted from every shop, which honestly made me wonder if life around mines and heavy metals breeds a taste for heavy metal?

22. Bosnia and Herzegovina

• Bosnom behar probeharao by Dino Merlin. A tender post-war ballad by the musician Bosnians call “The Wizard.”

23. Botswana

• Okove by Skinflint. Botswana has a heavy metal scene! Doom-heavy metal rooted in Setswana history and folklore…

24. Brazil

• Águas de março by Elis Regina and Tom Jobin. A Brazilian classic. Elis sings it with near-conversational ease:

25. Brunei Darussalam

• Indung Anak by Elisha Tiga. From an EP of Bruneian traditional songs reworked in a contemporary style. Great study music!

26. Bulgaria

• Трепети by Явката ДЛГ & Keranoff. Bulgarian rap sounds awesome. I have no idea what the lyrics mean. According to Wiki, his style is “social rap” with a focus on satire and nihilism.

27. Burkina Faso

• Wêrê Wêrê Magne by Volta Jazz. This Burkinabè Afro-jazz and dance-band collective formed in the 1960s in Bobo-Dioulasso, then part of Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso).

28. Burundi

• Yasa n’irirenga by Mt number one. Somewhere in the overlap of Afropop, Bongo Flava, and local East African rhythms.

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29. Cabo Verde

• Razao D’nha Vida by Suzanna Lubrano. A warm Cape Verdean love song in Kriolu. Her music blends Zouk Love (a slow-tempo, romantic Carribean style associated with close-partner dancing) and Kizomba (a partner dance style from Angola).

30. Cambodia

• Kadeuk Breeze by Master Kong Nay & Ouch Savy. This song involves traditional storytelling and features the chapei dong veng, a two-stringed lute central to Khmer storytelling music. Master Kong Nay was one of the relatively few great masters to have survived the bloody Khmer Rouge period, and was known as the “Ray Charles of Cambodia”. Though his music was very different to Charles, the similarity they hold is that Kong Nay was also blind.

31. Cameroon

• The Coffee Cola Song by Francis Bebey. If this song sounds familiar, it may be because it was sampled in Arcade Fire's 2017 hit Everything Now. Bebey is a legendary musician and ethnomusicologist who frequently used the singular note flute (or whistle) invented by the Pygmy people of Central Africa. I adore this song for its a superb tune, the wonderful Pygmy-style flute, and delightful lyrics:

  There are people in town, man
  Crazy people in town
  Eating bread and butter and honey
  And drinking black coffee and cola

  They believe we are wild man
  They believe we are wild
  Just because we don’t use any money
  And we drink no coffee cola

32. Canada

• In Canada by Chris Hadfield. So many options here! I went for this simple, affectionate love letter to Canada, written and performed by the astronaut (and greatest Canadian) himself.

33. Central African Republic

• Eci Ameya (Song for the Cult of the Twins) by Ongo Ensemble. Banda polyphony from the CAR, built around interlocking horns and voices. Communal.

34. Chad

• Mila Ber by Matibeye Geneviève. A Chadian classic with a steady, almost trance-like groove.

35. Chile

• El Derecho de Vivir en Paz by Víctor Jara. Written in solidarity with Vietnam, later reclaimed as a universal protest song. Víctor Jara was a theatre director turned folk singer. He sang for Chile’s poor, refusing both irony and spectacle. After the 1973 anti-socialist coup that brought down Allende, Jara was rounded up, tortured, his hands smashed so he could no longer play, then mocked and forced to sing anyway. He did. Days later, he was executed, his body dumped with dozens of others. The regime tried to erase him; instead it fixed him in history. He lives on as a protest icon, both in Chile and beyond.

36. China

• 长在银川(Growing in Yingchuan) by 苏阳. My dear friend Tony introduced me to this nostalgic gem, a grounded folk-rock portrait of life in northwest China. Su Yang’s music draws heavily on “花儿” (high-pitched northwestern mountain songs) and “秦腔” (opera from Shaanxi), intertwining them with modern rock and blues structures.

37. Colombia

• Sonríeme by Los Golden Boys. Sunny, vintage, danceable Colombian cumbia tune. Emerging amid Colombia’s 1960s tropical music boom, Los Golden Boys creatively mixed coastal rhythms, the electric guitar, and the Solovox keyboard (used emulate gaita flutes).

38. Comoros

• Le feu dans les îles by Abou Chihabi. After winning a national song contest in 1976 — with a composition that briefly served as Comoros’s national anthem — political unrest forced Chihabi into exile, first in Kenya and then in France. Chihabi’s songs often feature multilingual lyrics (French, Swahili, and Comorian) and address themes of independence, social justice, and cultural identity.

39. Congo

• Bisso Na Bisso by Bisso Na Bisso. a Franco-Congolese hip-hop collective founded in 1999. The group’s name means “between us” in Lingala, reflecting its mission to reconnect French rap with African roots.

40. Costa Rica

• Black Star Line by Moonlight Dub Xperiment. A powerful song by a live dub and reggae collective. The song title and lyrics are a nod to Garvey’s Black Star Line, founded in the 1920s to facilitate the transportation of goods and eventually African Americans throughout the global economy.

41. Côte D’Ivoire

• Zadie Bobo by Ernesto Djédjé. Djédjé was an influential Ivorian singer, guitarist, and composer widely regarded as the “King of Ziglibithy,” a dance-oriented musical style he created in the 1970s. Nicknamed “Le Gnoantré National” (“the national fighter”), Djédjé became a symbol of cultural pride during the presidency of Félix Houphouët-Boigny, who honored him for his artistic contributions. His sudden death at 36 shocked the nation, but his music continues to shape modern African pop.

42. Croatia

• Una Momento by Severina. Big hooks and no subtlety. A glossy Balkan pop that I discovered at college’s aptly-named Balkan bop.

43. Cuba

• Guajira guantanamera by Compay Segundo. Segundo was a musician from the island’s son cubano and trova traditions. A late-life star of the iconic Buena Vista Social Club project, he became an international symbol of classical Cuban music through songs like Chan Chan and Guantanamera. Guantanamera literally means “the woman from Guantánamo,” from guajiro/guajira (rural peasant) and Guantánamo province, rooting the song in Cuba’s eastern countryside.

44. Cyprus

• Ta Rialia by Michalis Violaris. Sung in the Greek Cypriot dialect, a folk song about money and daily struggle,

45. Czechia

• Serenade for Strings in E composed by Antonín Dvořák. Classical music may be controversial to add to such a list, but I could not imagine Czech music without Dvořák. A Romantic composer born in 1841, he shaped a distinct Bohemian national style. His music’s rhythmic vitality and melodic warmth resonated across Europe.

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46. Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea)

• Train of Reunification Runs. A 1960s North Korean song imagining a “Unification Train” carrying nylon, silk, and farm machinery southward, back when the North saw itself as the one helping its poorer southern cousins. Some great lyrics include:

  The train of unification is running, a train to Busan is running,

  A direct train is running, departing from Pyongyang station.

  Let us build new apartments for our brothers who lack a home,

  let us clothe our brothers with silk-like vinalon.

47. Democratic Republic of the Congo

• Mario by TPOK Jazz. Classic Congolese rumba! TPOK Jazz (Tout Puissant Orchestre Kinois de Jazz) was a pioneering Congolese rumba band formed in 1956 in Léopoldville (now Kinshasa). TPOK Jazz blended Cuban rumba rhythms with Central African melodic and rhythmic traditions, developing the hallmark sebene guitar style

48. Denmark

• Sensommervise by Húsakórið. I can’t find much about this outfit, except that it is a Faroese choir based in Copenhagen, made up of Faroese expats who live on the mainland.

49. Djibouti

• Buuraha U Dheer (The Highest Mountains) by Asma Omar. From The Dancing Devils of Djibouti, the first global music album from the East African country. Her upbeat recordings preserve Somali-language folk styles while blending modern arrangements,

50. Dominica

• Black Tuesday by Nasio Fontaine. Roots reggae with spiritually conscious lyrics. Raised in a one-room wooden home without electricity or running water, Fontaine began singing in school and church choirs. His father built his first makeshift guitar from fishing lines and a wooden board.

51. Dominican Republic

• Desde Que Te Vi by Antonio Carrasco. Straight-ahead bachata (a partnered dance and music form). Very easy to like, and easier to dance to!

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52. Ecuador

• Fatalidad by Julio Jaramillo. A heartbreak standard. Jaramillo is known as “El Ruiseñor de América” (“The Nightingale of the Americas”) for his rich, emotive voice.

53. Egypt

• Basrah w Atooh by Cairokee. This catchy Egyptian rock group rose to fame during the 2011 Revolution with anthems that painted an ironic portrait of everyday frustration in Egypt.

54. El Salvador

• La Bala by Los Hermanos Flores. A classic of Salvadoran cumbia, upbeat and catchy — according to El Salvadorians on Reddit, it’s a staple dancefloor song at celebrations. The song is about a slyly macabre plot about a stray bullet, laughing in the face of danger while never quite forgetting it. They are scheduled to perform at Coachella 2026, marking the first appearance by a Salvadoran and Central American orchestra at the festival.

55. Equatorial Guinea

• Ay Corazon by Hijas del Sol. This pop and Afrobeat duo from Equatorial Guinea was formed by aunt and niece Piruchi Apo Botupá and Paloma Loribó.

56. Eritrea

• Deki Asmara by Yemane Baria. A nostalgic ode to Asmara and its youth, carried by a lilting melody. An absolute banger!

57. Estonia

• Kasekesed by Puuluup. You will love this or hate this. Two talharpas (ancient bowed lyres), looping pedals, and deadpan humour. Puuluup can be described as an Estonian nu-folk and folktronica band comprised of an anthropologist and a musician.

58. Eswatini

• ZENZELE by Uncle Waffles. Uncle Waffles is the stage name of Lungelihle Zwane, an Eswatini-born DJ. She has become one of the most prominent global ambassadors of the amapiano genre — an African house music style blending deep house, jazz, and lounge influences.

59. Ethiopia

• Muziqa heywete by Getatchew Mekurya. What a moving and raw jazz tune! Mekurya (ጌታቸው መኩሪያ) was an Ethiopian tenor saxophonist renowned for adapting the traditional war chant shellela into instrumental form.

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60. Fiji

• Hey Nice Bola by South Pacific Singers. Easygoing Pacific harmony with sweet lyrics.

61. Finland

• Cilli geres (Gossiping woman) by Angelit. Finnish Sámi folk popularizing polyphonic Indigenous northern Finnish music.

62. France

• Plage Isolée (Soleil couchant) by Polo & Pan. Sun-drenched French electronic pop that feels like a postcard left in the sand in the Riviera. I resisted the urge to include Veridis Quo by Daft Punk, and included something breezier and less canonical.

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63. Gabon

• Boungoumoune by L’Orchestre Massako. Classic Gabonese dance music by a soukous and Afro-Latin ensemble founded in 1971.

64. Gambia (Republic of The)

• Sutukung Kumbu Sora by Alhaji Bai Konte & Dembo Konte. A luminous showcase of the kora, the 21-string West African harp-lute played by Mandinka griots. In the Mandinka musical tradition, “Sutukung Kumbu Sora” is often linked to praise singing and storytelling that honor respected ancestors or patrons.

65. Georgia

• Vici Daggale by Megi Gogitidze. A slow-burning Georgian ballad by a quite-edgy musician.

66. Germany

• Deutschland by Rammstein. As with Canada, I couldn’t not include this one. Germany is the name, quite literally. Rammstein, formed in Berlin in 1994, built their sound on industrial metal, rigid rhythms, scorched theatrics, and imagery that courts discomfort. The song is a confrontational industrial anthem wrestling with German history and identity. The song hits hard; the video goes further:

67. Ghana

• Blofonyobi Wo Atale by the Psychedelic Aliens. The Psychedelic Aliens were a Ghanaian funk and rock band active between 1969 and 1971. Also known as The Magic Aliens, they emerged during a period of intense musical experimentation in West Africa. They only ever recorded eight songs.

68. Greece

• Zorbas by Mikis Theodorakis. The famous sirtaki theme from Zorba the Greek! The famous sirtaki theme from Zorba the Greek. Theodorakis was a committed leftist who joined the wartime resistance and was later imprisoned, tortured, and exiled under the 1967–74 military dictatorship, which banned his music outright. His compositions circulated underground; after international pressure secured his release, he lived in exile in Paris. When I first heard Zorbas as a child I was hit by a strange sense of déjà vu. It turned out this was the soundtrack to my favourite Flash game, Penguin Diner.

69. Grenada

• Run Wid It by Mr Killa. A Grenadian soca song, a genre known for its intense, fast-paced rhythms.

70. Guatemala

• Peces e Iguanas by Bohemia Suburbana. Bohemia Suburbana is a Guatemalan alternative rock band founded in Guatemala City in 1992

71. Guinea

• Miri Magnin by Kélétigui & ses Tambourinis. Guinean orchestral pop from the post-independence era. The horns and melody are fantastic!

72. Guinea-Bissau

• Catchur Kumpé by Pacheco de Gumbé. Can’t tell you much about this track except that it’s within the Gumbé genre, a vibrant blend of percussion-driven rhythms and Creole influences.

73. Guyana

• Guyana Our Own by Blaze Anthonio. I first encountered this track while researching a legal case and representing Guyana at the International Court of Justice in The Hague back in my Model UN days. The song was commissioned and launched by Guyana’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs as part of a public awareness campaign on the long-running border dispute with Venezuela, which was then being prepared for adjudication before the ICJ. At the surface level, it’s warm and patriotic, a rallying call to affirm Guyana is our own against external claims. Behind that buoyant beat and anthem-like chorus, though, is a deeper legal and historical framework: the lyrics explicitly reference the country’s legal rights and international arbitration process. Warning, it is very catchy. I still find myself humming it at the oddest times.

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74. Haiti

• Mas Karon by Drummers Of The Societe Absolument Guinin. A Haitian percussion ensemble based in Port-au-Prince, preserving and recording the traditional Vodou (Voodoo) drumming rituals.

75. Holy See (Vatican City)

• Annuntio Vobis Gaudium Magnum! by Pope Francis. A surreal highlight from Wake Up!, a progressive rock album by Il Papa! I guess Catholicism is cool now? Odd, sincere, and very much a real thing.

76. Honduras

• El Encarguito by Guillermo Anderson. A tender Honduran folk song about migration and messages sent home.

77. Hungary

• Blowin’ in the Wind by Kek Lang. A Romani interpretation of Dylan’s iconic protest song. Kek Lang is a Hungarian Romani blues-folk group formed by musicians from the Nyírbátor region of eastern Hungary.

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78. Iceland

• Hatrið mun sigra by Hatari. An Icelandic industrial–techno–punk outfit formed in Reykjavík in 2015. Initially conceived as a performance-art experiment critiquing neoliberalism and consumerism, the band’s dark, fetish-inspired visuals and choreographed live shows became central to its identity. At Eurovision 2019 in Tel Aviv, Hatari used their platform to stage an anti-occupation protest by displaying Palestinian flags during the live broadcast, drawing widespread attention and a fine from the European Broadcasting Union for violating neutrality rules. I first came across them via a hilarious Last Week Tonight with John Oliver segment.

79. India

• Calcutta City by Amjad Ali Khan. A Hindustani-classic track loosely built on Rabindranath Tagore’s Ekla Chalo Re. Amjad Ali Khan is one of the world’s finest sarod players.

80. Indonesia

• High School in Jakarta by NIKI. Yet another introduction from a friend! This sharply written pop memoir on teenage nostalgia traces friendships, first loves, and social hierarchies in 21st c. Jakarta.

81. Iran (Islamic Republic of)

• Tasnife Sarve Chamaan by Mohammad-Reza Shajarian. A tear-jerker of a Persian classical song sung with unmatched control and tenderness. Deemed the ‘greatest living maestro of Persian classical music,’ Shajarian publicly sided with protesters during the 2009 Green Movement and was subsequently banned from performing in Iran.

82. Iraq

• The Epic of Gilgamesh (in Sumerian) by Peter Pringle. A stark spoken-musical retelling performed in reconstructed Sumerian, returning the Epic of Gilgamesh to something like its original sonic life. This magical interpretation is by the Canadian ethnomusicologist and musician Peter Pringle. Is it cheating to include this under Iraq? Possibly. Feel free to write in with objections. But listen anyway: this is music, language, and story that has survived an estimated five millennia, the oldest narrative we share as a species.

83. Ireland

• The Boy In The Gap by Martin Hayes Quartet. I could have gone for Flogging Molly, the Clancy Brothers, or Wolfe Tones for Ireland, but these guys do such hypnotic fiddle music, I had to include them!

84. Israel

• I Don’t Know by Noa. Performing in Hebrew, English, and other languages, Noa has become one of Israel’s most internationally celebrated musicians and a prominent voice for peace

85. Italy

• L’appuntamento by Ornella Vanoni. Timeless Italian pop at its most elegant.

86. Jamaica

• These Eyes by Stranger Cole. Early Jamaican pop-ska with a crooner’s ache. Cole earned his nickname “Stranger” because, as his family joked, he resembled no one else at home.

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87. Japan

• Birds In Warped Time II by Somei Satoh, Anne Akiko Meyers, and Li Jian. Satoh, emerging in the 1970s avant-garde scene, is Japan’s foremost classical composer and is known for blending traditional Japanese aesthetics with Western minimalism and experimental forms. I love this composition! A close second contender was the poppy Mayonaka no Door (Stay with Me) by Miki Matsubara

88. Jordan

• Gamar by 47SOUL. 47SOUL is an electronic collective and live band formed in Amman. Known for pioneering the “Shamstep” genre, they fuse traditional Levantine Dabke rhythms with hip-hop, electronic dance, and R&B.

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89. Kazakhstan

• ER TURAN by Turan Ensemble. Epic steppe music built from throat singing, bowed strings, and pounding rhythm. Turan pioneered the use of more than 30 traditional Kazakh instruments—such as the dombra, kyl-kobyz, zhetigen, sybyzgy, and shankobyz—within complex ensemble arrangements. We got to watch them live in Almaty, in a magical demonstration of musical virtuosity, instrumental breath, showmanship, and stamina!

90. Kenya

• Kosongo by Orchestra Super Mazembe. Sweet, guitar-led East African rumba. Orchestra Super Mazembe was a Congolese–Kenyan soukous and rumba band that rose to prominence across East Africa in the 1970s and 1980s

91. Kiribati

• Bestie by Toka-N-Tarawa & Nabzy. Toka-N-Tarawa is a pop and reggae fusion artist collective from the Republic of Kiribati!

92. Kuwait

• 1991_صبوحه by Miami Band. Early ‘90s Gulf pop!

93. Kyrgyzstan

• Izdep jurom (Looking for You) by Kambarkan Folk Ensemble. Kyrgyz folk-ethnographic music group founded in 1987 by Chalagyz Isabayev. Created during the era of glasnost, the ensemble emerged when ethnic cultures in the Soviet Union began reasserting their musical identities. Isabayev envisioned Kambarkan as a guardian of Kyrgyz folk traditions, uniting skilled musicians to perform works inspired by oral heritage and the national epic Manas.

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94. Lao People’s Democratic Republic

• Kao Nok by Molam Lao. A traditional form of storytelling, this genre brings together khen (bamboo mouth organ) musicians and Lam (a poetic singing form characterized by rhythmic storytelling and vocal improvisation) vocalists.

95. Latvia

• Vasara bez internetiem by Carnival Youth. Easy-going Latvian indie-rock, need I say more?

96. Lebanon

• La Danse De Nadia by Elias Rahbani. Cinematic instrumental pop from Lebanon’s golden studio era by a damed composer!

97. Lesotho

• Onqabanya Lelapa Laka by Maphuteng. Rooted in Sesotho musical heritage, the genre blends rural choral harmonies with call-and-response singing. It sits close to, or across from, famo, Lesotho’s distinctive accordion-driven style, whose fierce rivalries between star musicians have, over the years, spilled far beyond music, feeding gang loyalties and cycles of violence that earned the country an uneasy reputation as southern Africa’s murder capital.

98. Liberia

• Yau Dia Ne Ley Moi by Fatu Gayflor. She is also known as “Princess Fatu Gayflor, the Golden Voice of Liberia.”

99. Libya

• Never Understand by Ibrahim Hesnawi. Two words: LIBYAN REGGAE. Hesnawi’s musical awakening began in 1975 after hearing Bob Marley for the first time. He recognized similarities between reggae’s off-beat pulse and Libya’s traditional darbuka (kaska) rhythms. This rhythmic kinship inspired him to experiment with reggae forms while addressing themes of liberation and unity familiar to Libyan audiences. Hesnawi’s debut LP Hesnawi and Peace—recorded in Italy—was Libya’s first reggae album and likely the first in the Arab world

100. Liechtenstein

• Too Pretty To Be Kind by Al Walser. In addition to being the world’s leading manufacturer of false teeth (producing 20% of global supply), Liechtenstein seems to be able to produce a good pop-DJ or two!

101. Lithuania

• Sesiutėla mažoji by Folkloro Ansamblis Gile. A great example of polyphonic Lithuanian folk. Established as part of a youth arts initiative in Kaunas, the ensemble gathers students primarily from a Catholic Secondary School. Many alumni continue participating after graduation, keeping Gilė’s intergenerational tradition alive.

102. Luxembourg

• Ride by Zero Point Five. Formed in 2009 as a high school folk duo, the group has grown into the foremost folk-pop and country-influenced band from Luxembourg. I have nothing else to say except that the Luxembourgish national day (June 23) is celebrated as the Grand Duchess’s birthday. But no monarch was ever born on that date; it was changed to June for better weather.

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103. Madagascar

• Adinony ianao by Olombelona Ricky. Raised in Vangaindrano in southeast Madagascar, Ricky absorbed oral traditions from his grandmother, a storyteller and singer. Fantastic Malagasy tunes, very soulful!

104. Malawi

• Bana Pwanya by Kell Kay. Often dubbed “Malawi’s R&B king,” Kell Kay’s music features smooth melodies, heartfelt lyrics, and modern Afro-beat production. I’m shocked by how popular this song is, with 31M views on YouTube. 1.5x the population of Malawi! The comments section is a wonderful spread of pan-Africanist unity.

105. Malaysia

• Midnight Rendezvous by Talitha. A soft indie-pop tune from Malaysia’s emerging indie circuit.

106. Maldives

• Envaguvi by Zero Degree Atoll. Zero Degree Atoll is a Maldivian folk-fusion band founded in 1987 by childhood friends Nashid and Mohoj, later joined by Ahmed. Breezy music that lets you just kickback!

107. Mali

• Ai Du by Ali Farka Touré. Born into a Songhai-Arma family near Timbuktu, Touré earned the nickname “Farka,” meaning donkey, for sheer stubborn resolve. Self-taught on traditional instruments like the njarka (a one-string fiddle) and the ngoni (a West African lute), he later picked up the guitar after hearing Guinean artist Fodéba Keïta. Often called the father of African desert blues, he won three Grammy Awards, and Ai Du, sung in Songhai and later recorded with Ry Cooder, is a luminous example of that sparse, hypnotic Malian-blues sound.

  Okay, Mali has unimaginably magnificent music. I had perhaps the hardest time of any country choosing just one track. If pressed, I might even argue it possesses one of the most criminally underrated musical cultures anywhere. It feels negligent not to name Amadou & Mariam, Balla Tounkara, Mama Badema Sissoko, Rokia Traoré, and Salif Keita.

108. Malta

• Il-Lupu ma jibdilx il-pil by Brikkuni. Yet another case of a modern indie band blending alternative rock and folk in a local language (in this case, Maltese). A beautiful language, very musical by itself. I have no clue what’s happening in the music video.

109. Marshall Islands

• “My Island” by Joey K Hito feat. Gooney Jib and Yastamon. Joey K Hito is a Marshallese reggae and island artist based in Honolulu, part of that Pacific diaspora sound that runs from Majuro to Hawai‘i to the U.S. mainland. You’ve heard rappers shout out their area codes (Jay-Z’s 718, Drake’s 416, even Biggie’s 212), but how often does anyone claim the calling code +692? This one has you singing it proudly: “I’m from that +692, no other place I’d rather be.” What a vibe.

110. Mauritania

• Ghlana by Noura Mint Seymali. Born into a celebrated lineage of musicians, Mint Seymalu is a Mauritanian singer, songwriter, and ardine (harp) player. One reviewer described her style as “psychedelic Moorish griot tunes.” My only regret is not having discovered this earlier!

111. Mauritius

• Li tourné by Alain Ramanisum. A jaunty sega anthem that commands the room within seconds, all hips and handclaps, urging everyone to sway and “turn” front and back. A Mauritian friend once hijacked the aux at a fading house party and dropped this in; by the first chorus we were all on our feet, my living room transformed into a Port Louis dancefloor.

112. Mexico

• Disfruto by Carla Morrison. A tearjerker with ethereal vocals.

113. Micronesia (Federated States of)

• Romonum Il (Chuuk, Micronensia). I struggled to find music specifically from the Federated States of Micronesia, which made stumbling onto this all the sweeter. This delightfully uplifting traditional song is from the tiny island of Romonum in Chuuk State, barely 0.8 square kilometres and home to just over 400 people.

114. Monaco

• La Symphonie Interrompue: III. Allegramente / La Chanson du mal-aimé by Léo Ferré and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo. A mid-century symphonic work by Léo Ferré, a Monégasque-born French composer.

115. Mongolia

• The Beautiful Steppe by Batzorig Vaanchig. Of course, I wanted to include The Hu. But you may already know about The Hu! But do yoy know Batzorig Vaanchig? This Mongolian folk musician, throat singer, and virtuoso of the morin khuur (horse-head fiddle) uses his contemplative lyrics, low overtone voice and horse-head fiddle to evoke wide horizons and nomadic life.

116. Montenegro

• Da’l si ikada mene voljela by Knez. A signature early-’90s Balkan love-pop hit from the former Yugoslav circuit, complete with glossy synths and cringy music videos. The kind of song you’d blast with the boys in a rattling Yugo, windows down, somewhere outside Podgorica.

117. Morocco

• Bsslama Hbibti by Fadoul. Immaculately funky! Fadoul, dubbed “the James Brown of Morocco,” was a funk and soul singer active in Casablanca during the 1970s. Long forgotten after his death, Fadoul’s vinyl records resurfaced in 2012 when German producer Jannis Stürtz of the Berlin label Habibi Funk stumbled upon Sid Redad in a Casablanca shop. The discovery led to the 2015 reissue of Al Zman Saib, reintroducing Fadoul as a cult figure in global funk circles.

118. Mozambique

• Felizminha by Stewart Sukuma. A joyful Mozambican love song sung in Portuguese.

119. Myanmar

• Flowers on the river (myinzaing mode) by Maung Kyay. A harp composition of a traditional Burmese piece from the Mahāgīta classical song corpus.

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120. Namibia

• Holla by Gazza. A 2025 single from the Namibian kwaito/dancehall veteran, built around a mid-tempo groove and Gazza’s characteristic township-life flair. Kwaito is a music genre that emerged in Johannesburg townships during the early 1990s, blending slowed-down house music beats with hip-hop, reggae, and traditional African sounds. Emerging post-apartheid, it became a cultural expression for youth, characterized by spoken-word lyrics in local languages/slang (Isicamtho)

121. Nauru

• Under Pressure by Skylla. Did someone say Nauraun R&B?

122. Nepal

• Jati Maya by 1974 AD. A beloved Nepali rock ballad whose title Jati Maya Laye Pani means “no matter how much I love you.”

123. Netherlands (Kingdom of the)

• Red Lights by Tiesto. Tiësto, considered the “Godfather of EDM,” is Dutch! It snaps me straight back to the early 2010s, when EDM was supposedly the pinnacle of cool and we all believed it.

124. New Zealand

• Hypercube by Orchestra of Spheres. A Wellington collective peddling what they call “ancient-future funk,” splicing cosmic jazz, psychedelic rock, African polyrhythms, and twitchy electronics into something absurdly catchy and faintly unhinged. This one might be a hit or a miss, but I first clocked it on the soundtrack of What We Do in the Shadows, and it’s been looping in my head ever since.

125. Nicaragua

• Son tus perjumenes mujer by Carlos Mejia Godoy y los de Palangagüin. A breezy 1977 folk-pop hit that became a surprise success. During the 1970s the ensemble’s music intertwined with the Sandinista revolution, and their songs became cultural symbols of resistance and national pride.

126. Niger

• Imajghane (The Tuareg People) by Bombino. What a groovy song. Raised among the Ifoghas near Agadez and exiled during Niger’s Tuareg rebellions, Bombino taught himself guitar in Algeria and Libya off VHS tapes of Jimi Hendrix and Mark Knopfler; he later became the first Nigerien artist nominated for a Grammy. It’s worth checking out his entire discography!

127. Nigeria

• Zombia by Fela Kútì. A twelve-minute Afrobeat broadside against blind obedience, with Fela barking “Zombie!” as horns, guitars, and percussion lock into a relentless, insurgent groove. Born Fela Ransome-Kuti into a formidable Nigerian family—his father an Anglican pastor and educationist, his mother Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti a nationalist and Lenin Peace Prize laureate, his cousin Wole Soyinka already a literary giant—he was expected to join the professional elite. Instead, he built the self-declared Kalakuta Republic in Lagos, held court at the Shrine till dawn, and forged Afrobeat from the collision of Yoruba rhythms and Black American funk and jazz. He became a musical, cultural, and political legend. Zombie mocked the Nigerian army’s do-as-you’re-told mentality and reportedly infuriated the military regime of Olusegun Obasanjo. It is said that this song was the tipping point for the junta. In 1977, roughly a thousand soldiers stormed and razed Kalakuta; Fela was beaten, and his mother was thrown from a window, later dying from her injuries. The song became one of his most famous protest pieces and a flashpoint in that brutal clash. Decades later, the outlaw prophet of Afrobeat would be honoured with a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, canonised by the very establishment he once set ablaze.

128. North Macedonia

• “Bože brani je od zla by Toše Proeski. A tender ballad whose title means “God, protect her from evil.” Known as the “Elvis of the Balkans.” Proeski was a unifying cultural icon across the former Yugoslav region before his life was tragically cut short in a car accident at age 26.

129. Norway

• Sing Me to Sleep by Alan Walker. Cheating with EDM? Hardly … Walker is Norwegian, after all! I was a proper fan growing up; I even watched him open for Justin Bieber at the much-anticipated 2017 Navi Mumbai concert. I fondly remember the afternoon sun beating down while he stood there behind the deck in his black hoodie and trademark mask. How was he not boiling alive?

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130. Oman

• Sharh (Songs of Happiness) by Hadid bin Shamsah ensemble. Omani traditional music that represents the Sharqiyah region’s seafaring, Bedouin, and desert heritage.

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131. Pakistan

• Dasht-E-Tanhai by Iqbal Bano. Bano was born in Delhi and trained under Ustad Chaand Khan of the Delhi Gharana, who instructed her in both pure and light classical forms, including thumri and dadra. She began performing for All India Radio before migrating to Pakistan in 1952. Her legend, of course, rests also on that 1985 Lahore performance of Faiz’s banned “Hum Dekhenge” before tens of thousands during Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq’s dictatorship. This act of open artistic defiance led to a ban on her public appearances and only deepened her stature across South Asia. The song I chose, Dasht-E-Tanhai, is a classic Urdu ghazal set to Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poem of longing in the “desert of solitude.” I write about Faiz in [Ch. 26]. Here’s a rare recording of her powerful voice:

132. Palau

• UNGIL BESUL by BFolkMuzik680. BfolkMuzik680 is a Palauan hip-hop and rap artist. Like the rapper Joey K Hito we featured for the Marshall Islands, BfolkMuzik680 uses the “680” suffix i.e. Palau’s international calling code.

133. Palestine (State of)

• Saint Levant by Deira. Saint Levant (born Marwan Abdelhamid) is a Palestinian trilingual singer, rapper, and songwriter whose work fuses Arabic, English, and French. This album Deira (2024), named after a Gaza City hotel his father built and later destroyed in war, intertwines personal memory with Palestinian identity.

134. Panama

• Amor y control by Rubén Blades. Blades is a Panamanian singer known for transforming salsa into a socially conscious art form. He wrote this song after his mother passed away.

135. Papua New Guinea

• Song of the Mamuna Tribe of South Papua. South Papua is one of the most culturally diverse parts of the island of New Guinea, where hundreds of distinct languages and musical traditions persist, often passed down orally and tied to communal life. This traditional vocal piece comes from the Mamuna people, an Indigenous community living deep in the rainforests of South Papua in Indonesia’s Papua province. The Mamuna (also written Momuna or Momina in some sources) maintain a forest-rooted way of life, guided by oral culture, ancestral lore, and a worldview anchored in nature and community. The recording circulating online begins with a simple yet resonant chant. An interpreted English rendering goes:

  Day by day we walk on,

  our feet pressing the same earth,

  our fathers and our fathers’ fathers

  walked day by day while they walked on.

136. Paraguay

• Disco Su by The Crayolas. A rock band from Asunción, Paraguay, known for blending post-punk, dream pop, surf, and disco influences into a distinctly lo-fi sound.

137. Peru

• Pio, Pio by Amanda Portales. A joyful take on the huaylarsh folk-classic about a little chick peeping in the corral.

138. Philippines

• Dahil Sa’Yo by Inigo Pascual. The 2016 breakout pop single from his debut album that became the first number-one on the Billboard Philippines Top 20 and one of the most viewed Original Pilipino Music (OPM) videos on YouTube.

139. Poland

• Byłaś dla mnie wszystkim by Poparzeni Kawą Trzy. This delightful Polish pop-rock anthem has a title that means “you were everything to me.” The band was formed in 2005 by journalists from major broadcasters RMF FM and Radio Zet. Known for humor-infused lyrics and energetic brass-driven sound, the group blends ska, rock, and folk.

140. Portugal

• Desfado by Ana Moura. Moura is recognized for revitalizing and globalizing fado, Portugal’s traditional music of melancholy.

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141. Qatar

• Ma Teshofah Oyouni by Fahad Al Kubaisi. Khaleeji music with contemporary pop. His performance opened the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 with Jung Kook (of BTS fame).

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142. Republic of Korea (South Korea)

• 사시랭이소리 by SsingSsing. A now-disbanded South Korean band that combined Korean folk music with glam rock, disco, and psychedelic rock. Created by Lee Hee-moon, a renowned minyo singer and son of folk master Ko Ju-rang, SsingSsing’s shows were highly visual, featuring glittering costumes, wigs, and cross-gender attire inspired by Korean shamanic rituals. I found them after their electric NPR Tiny Desk concert from 2017:

143. Republic of Moldova

• Te Rog by Carla’s Dreams. A Moldovan musical project formed in Chișinău in 2012. Uniquely, the band is composed of anonymous singers and songwriters. Members perform wearing hoodies, sunglasses, and masks painted with symbolic motifs. The name was inspired by “Karla,” a character from John le Carré’s spy novels.

144. Romania

• Ceausescu n-a Murit by Ada Milea. A dear friend introduced me to Ada Milea, known for her witty, theatrical folk style. This tongue-in-cheek song ironically riffs on the idea that Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu “hasn’t died” in spirit — his language and structures still felt in everyday life.

145. Russian Federation

• Группа Крови (Gruppa Krovi) by Кино (Kino). Formed in Leningrad in 1982 and fronted by Viktor Tsoi, Kino became the seminal sound of the late-Soviet Union era, channeling the spirit of youth rebellion and change. Their name, meaning “cinema,” hinted at a new, modern sensibility. Tsoi’s death in a car crash at 28 froze the myth in amber and ended the band’s activity. Kino’s influence endures. The slogan “Цой жив” (“Tsoi is alive”) became a cultural motto that still echoes on walls and in hearts across the post-Soviet world. A defining Soviet-era rock anthem from 1988, the title of this song means “Blood Type.” It pairs Viktor Tsoi’s stark, poetic lines about identity and remains one of the last great songs of the Soviet era, a rallying cry that outlived the state that produced it.

146. Rwanda

• MiLELE by Element Eleéeh. Emerging in Kigali’s post-2018 creative wave, Element Eleéeh is known for his self-coined Afro-Gako style i.e. an evolution of Afrobeat infused with traditional gakondo melodies, zouk, and kompa influences.

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147. Saint Kitts and Nevis

• Go Down by King Socrates of St Kitts. A laid-back Calypso groove with lovely lyrics!

148. Saint Lucia

• Ki Bèl Bato by Zita Celise. A short St. Lucian folk chorus celebrating “what a beautiful boat,” sung in Creole

149. Saint Vincent and the Grenadines

• Turn Me On by Kevin Lyttle. An example of Vincentian soca blended with soca, dancehall, and R&B, it is one of the few Caribbean soca singles to break into the top 10 worldwide.

150. Samoa

• Samoae Maopoopo Mai by Vaniah Toloa. One of my go-to unwind tracks, especially for that soaring chorus SAMOAAAAAA.

151. San Marino

• I Didn’t Know by Serhat. A 2016 pop-disco track, performed for San Marino at the Eurovision Song Contest. San Marino often relies on international performers or has entries from Italian or Turkish singers, so finding a representative act tied closely to the country isn’t easy.

152. Sao Tome and Principe

• Mimo Bô Bé Quacueda by Africa Negra. A pioneering musical group from São Tomé and Príncipe founded in the early 1970s. The band is celebrated for blending São Toméan puxa and rumba with Congolese soukous, creating an instantly recognizable sound that defined the archipelago’s post-independence music scene.

153. Saudi Arabia

• يا أحلاهم by Waed. A catchy Khaleeji love song by self-described “Saudi Arabia’s first successful female artist.”

154. Senegal

• Utrus Horas by Orchestra Baobab. Formed in Dakar in 1970 as the house band of the Baobab Club, Orchestra Baobab helped define Senegal’s post-independence sound. A legendary band, their music melded Cuban son and rumba with Wolof praise poetry and Mandinka polyrhythms, performed on guitars, horns, and traditional percussion. Multi-lingual vocals in Wolof, French, and Spanish reflected Senegal’s cosmopolitan culture. Here’s a rare recording of a 1982 live performance.

155. Serbia

• Krug by Ekatarina Velika (EKV). EKV was a Serbian and former Yugoslav rock band from Belgrade, active between 1982 and 1994. Emerging from the post-punk and new wave movement, they are best known for their atmospheric, introspective music. Their band is named after Catherine the Great.

156. Seychelles

• Gou Kreol by Jean-Marc Volcy. Seychellois creole pop-folk!

157. Sierra Leone

• Double Decker Buses by Ebenezer Calendar’s Meringue Band. A buoyant Sierra Leonean palm-wine classic from the 1950s, written to celebrate the arrival of double-decker buses in Freetown in January 1956. Calendar, one of the country’s early popular stars, turns the arrival of civic infrastructure for public transport into a jubilant song. It’s not on Spotify, so I’ve put an alternative in that playlist. The lyrics make it so that you can almost see it: elders eyeing the upper deck with suspicion, children scrambling up, the whole city gathered to witness the future roll in on two levels. A slice of 1950s Freetown in motion:

  Mr Stober, Mr Garmon and the citizens

  Had a fine test East to West,

  My grandfathers and my grandmothers

  Refused to go to the top stairs.

  Welcome to Sierra Leone, double decker buses, Alleluia,

  Welcome to Sierra Leone, double decker buses.

158. Singapore

• I Wouldn’t Know Any Better Than You by Gentle Bones. Opening a song with “one day you’ll die” is bold. Gentle Bones one of Singapore’s most successful independent artists, began his career by uploading acoustic covers to YouTube in 2011.

159. Slovakia

• ZRPS by Pavol Hammel. An iconic 1981 Slovak rock song.

160. Slovenia

• Trompetenecho by Slavko Avsenik und seine Original Oberkrainer. A Slovenian folk ensemble founded in 1953, the group created the distinctive “Oberkrainer sound,” blending Alpine folk, polka, and waltz traditions with sophisticated harmonies and jazz influences.

161. Solomon Islands

• Rorogwela (Lullaby) by Afunakwa. A traditional Baegu lullaby from Malaita in the Solomon Islands recorded around 1970, where an older sibling gently comforts a crying younger one after the loss of their parents. The song was sampled (without perrmission) by the French group Deep Forest for their track Sweet Lullaby, which became a chart hit in several countries.

162. Somalia

• Rag waa Nacab iyo Nasteexo (Men are Cruel and Kind) by Aamina Camaari. A gem from the Sweet As Broken Dates: Lost Somali Tapes from the Horn of Africa compilation. Little is publicly documented about Camaari’s personal life, she was active during a period of artistic richness before the Somali civil war, and her work represents a significant era in Somali music. According to a kind YT commenter, the lyrics translate to:

  Men are either cruel or kind

  And I know not the one you might be

  So don’t put me in harm’s way.

163. South Africa

• Zandilse by Simphiwe Dana. Dana is a magician weaving together Afro-soul voice blurs jazz and Xhosa influences.

164. South Sudan

• Muhabe by Yaba Angelosi ft. Meve Alange. Raised near Juba, Angelosi discovered music as a child singing in a church choir in Khartoum. After immigrating to the U.S. in 2000, he joined the South Sudanese afrobeat group Sosa Musica before launching a solo career in 2008.

165. Spain

• Me olvide de vivir by Julio Iglesias. Before the tailored suits and stadium tours, Julio was a law student and reserve goalkeeper for Real Madrid CF. A 1963 car accident left him temporarily paralysed; during rehabilitation, he picked up a guitar, and the rest is pop history. His iconic smooth baritone and international charm made him a global superstar and the best-selling Latin artist of all time. Talent, apparently, runs in the family; his son is Enrique Iglesias. In this 1978 ballad, he sings of racing through life, chasing applause and ambition, only to realise he “forgot to live” the moments that mattered.

166. Sri Lanka

• Slipping Over by The Soul. The Soul is a Sri Lankan reggae and jam band formed in 2012.

167. Sudan

• Nile Waves by the Scorpions and Saif Abu Bakr. The Scorpions are a pioneering Sudanese funk and soul band active mainly in the 1970s and early 1980s. The group formed in Sudan’s capital during a flourishing period for live dance music. Drawing influence from American soul, James Brown–style funk, and Egyptian and Sudanese pop, they incorporated brass sections, swirling organ lines, and call-and-response vocals. Their performances in Khartoum clubs reflected the cosmopolitan energy of the era before political restrictions on nightlife tightened.

168. Suriname

• Baap Re Baap by Kries Ramkhelawan. This track is part of the Baithak Gana tradition i.e., a Surinamese variant of chutney rooted in the gatherings (baithak means “sitting” or “gathering”) where Hindustani folk and devotional music were electrified by Caribbean rhythms. Originating in the mid-20th century among the Indo-Surinamese community, Baithak Gana blends harmonium, dholak, and dhantal with lyrical forms derived from North Indian folk, and sits alongside chutney as a diasporic expression of South Asian heritage reworked under Caribbean skies.

169. Sweden

• Om Du Möter Varg by Detektivbyrån. An instrumental from the trio’s 2008 album Wermland, its title roughly translates as “If You Encounter Wolves,” and the piece sits right where Nordic minimalism meets quirky vintage electronics. Detektivbyrån’s music blends folk instruments like accordion, glockenspiel, and music box with synth touches and subtle electronica, creating whimsical, melodic lines that evoke both nostalgia and a playful sort of futurism. Among the band’s members, Martin Molin went on to form Wintergatan, where he continued similar explorations of mechanical instruments and melodic invention. I’ve been obsessed with Wintergatan’s marble machine project, an engineered contraption that uses marbles to strike instruments in rhythm, for nearly a decade now!

170. Switzerland

• Tu Ne Me Dois Rien by Stephan Eicher. A leading figure in European chanson and pop, Eicher sings in French, German, English, Italian, and Swiss-German. In 2021, he received Switzerland’s Grand Prix Music for his “cosmopolitan chanson” that “lets words and melodies travel around the world.”

171. Syrian Arab Republic

• Moonlight by TootArd. TootArd, formed by brothers Hasan and Rami Nakhleh from Majdal Shams in the occupied Golan Heights, a genre-blending music duo. They somehow produce music merging Arabic maqam scales and quarter-tone phrasing with desert blues, reggae, and electro-pop textures, weaving familiar Middle Eastern melodic lines into a contemporary sound palette. Their name in Arabic توت أرض means ‘strawberries’! It was a privilege to hear them live at New Year’s Eve 2026 in Amman

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172. Tajikistan

• Zohidi Pokizasirisht by The Badakhshan Ensemble. A trance-like Pamiri folk song from Badakhshan, a region inhabited by Tajik Ismailis, known for their sung spiritual poetry called madah. Lutes are a major part of Ismaili folk music. Formed by young artists displaced during Tajikistan’s civil unrest, this ensemble grew out of local theater collaborations in Khorog. The title of the song translates to ‘Pious Ascetic’.

173. Thailand

• Phoom Phae Krung Thep (ภูมิแพ้กรุงเทพ) by Nakharin Kingsak (ป้าง นครินทร์). A wry Thai rock hit whose title literally means ‘Bangkok Allergy.’

174. Timor-Leste

• O Hele Le by The Dili Allstars. The Dili Allstars emerged when musician Gil Santos and Australian singer Paulie Stewart united to record a protest song after the capture of Timorese resistance leader Xanana Gusmão. Both founders lost family members during the 1975 Indonesian invasion, giving their music deep political resonance. Their music became an anthem for the East Timor independence movement.

175. Togo

• Tirez tirez by Roger Damawuzan. A sharp, politically charged Afro-funk cut from one of Togo’s most outspoken musicians, complete with by punchy horns. Damawuzan was a pioneer of Afro-funk and Afro-soul in West Africa. Nicknamed “the James Brown of Lomé,” he helped define the 1970s vaudou-funk sound.

176. Tonga

• Ana Latu X Si’i Lolo by Rex Atirai. A modern cover of a warm Tongan love song!

177. Trinidad and Tobago

• Indrani by Lord Ras Shorty I. Recorded in 1973 by Garfield Blackman under his stage name Lord Shorty, Indrani sits at the crossroads of Afro-Caribbean calypso and Indo-Caribbean musical culture. It is often cited as one of the earliest and most influential records in the birth of soca.

  At a time when calypso dominated Trinidad and Tobago’s Carnival scene, Shorty deliberately wove Indian-flavored melodies, snippets of Hindi lyricism, and percussion instruments such as the dholak and dhantal into his songwriting. That fusion helped lay the rhythmic and melodic blueprint that would evolve into soca, meaning “the soul of calypso.”

  The use of Bollywood-style Hindi lyrics in Indrani is especially delightful. Indian listeners might also recognize Shorty’s “Shanti Om,” which is said to have inspired (read: been plagiarized by) the iconic filmi song “Om Shanti Om” from Karz.

178. Tunisia

• Nassaya by Lotfi Bouchnak. A powerful classical piece from the Arabic maqam tradition. Bouchnak is celebrated for his mastery of the malouf tradition—Tunisian classical music rooted in Andalusian and Ottoman heritage—and for his expressive tenor voice that earned him the nickname “the Pavarotti of Tunisia.”

179. Türkiye

• Goca Dünya by Altin Gün. Anatolian folk filtered through psych-rock grooves. Founded in Amsterdam, inspired by Turkish psychedelic pioneers like Barış Manço and Selda Bağcan, Altın Gün set out to reinterpret Turkish folk classics with a contemporary psychedelic twist.

180. Turkmenistan

• Iki Agaç by Nury Halmammedov. Recognized as a People’s Artist of Turkmenistan and laureate of both the USSR State Prize and the Magtymguly State Prize, he is a defining figure in Turkmen musical heritage. Do with that information what you will.

181. Tuvalu

• Tuu Mo Aganuu by TK music. You know the drill. Easy-going island rhythms, this time from the glorious country of Tuvalu. The title means “Stand by Your Culture.”

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182. Uganda

• Ninda Yesu by Judith Babirye. A joyful Luganda gospel song declaring “I love Jesus.”

183. Ukraine

• Stefania by Kalush Orchestra. A folk-rap tribute to a mother that became Ukraine’s Eurovision 2022 winner.

184. United Arab Emirates

• She (Man Heya Ummi) by Ihab Darwish, Lama Sumalji, Esther Abrami. A sweeping orchestral tribute to motherhood from the UAE.

185. United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

• Lost in the Supermarket by The Clash. Written by Joe Strummer with lead vocals by Mick Jones, the supermarket in the title was inspired by a real shop near Jones’s family home, and the song uses that setting to reflect on consumerism, alienation, and the search for identity in a commodified world.

186. United Republic of Tanzania

• Masika Mtindo Mpya by Mbaraka Mwinshehe. A smooth East African rumba classic by the Tanzanian virtuoso guitarist.

187. United States of America

• American Pie by Don McLean. One of the most enduring folk-rock epics in modern music. On its surface the song was sparked by a tragic moment McLean never forgot: the 1959 plane crash that killed Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and The Big Bopper, famously referenced in the lyric “the day the music died.” McLean has long resisted explaining every symbol and reference. Why choose this track to represent America? Because it captures the country in motion. Its shifting verses hint at cultural upheaval, generational change, and the uneasy evolution of American ideals across the 1960s. It helps that “America” is right there in the title.

188. Uruguay

• Ritmo De Mi Son by Chocolate. Chocolate emerged from Montevideo’s vibrant carnival scene, where candombe (a style of music descended from liberated African slaves) rhythms are rooted in the city’s Afro-Uruguayan heritage. Very danceable.

189. Uzbekistan

• Kosh Chenar by Turgun Alimatov. A haunting instrumental piece by one of Uzbekistan’s most revered traditional musicians. Alimatov, born in Tashkent in 1922, never studied music formally but developed his own approach to instruments like the dutar, tanbur, and sato. The song itself feels like a musical journey across the region’s plains and ancient cities.

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190. Vanuatu

• Gel Vanuatu by Huarere. Huarere is a long-standing reggae band from Vanuatu, formed on the island of Pentecost in the 1980s.

191. Venezuela, Bolivarian Republic of

• Caballo Viejo (I) by Simón Díaz. A defining classic of Venezuelan pasaje and música llanera. The title means “Old Horse,” and the lyrics use that image to tell a simple, poetic story about love arriving unexpectedly later in life; so powerful that even an old horse, long put out to pasture, breaks free of its reins

192. Viet Nam

• Vầng Trăng Khóc by Khanh Ngoc and Nhat Tinh Anh. A staple from the Viet karaoke repertoire. The title translates to “The Crying Moon,” and the lyrics lean fully into heartbreak. It evokes the feeling of sitting on a low plastic stool at a late-night food stall, biting into a bánh mì while scooters hum past. Or it brings to mind a corner of a Vietnamese enclave on the American east-coast, neon lights flickering above a karaoke bar where someone inevitably queues this song before the night is over. Thanks for the rec, Sonny!

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193. Yemen

• You Said That You Would Forget Me by The Three Kawkabani Brothers. A 1973 gem, this long, evocative track captures the plaintive heart of traditional Yemeni vocal music. It showcases the Sanaani style from Yemen’s capital.

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194. Zambia

• Khala My Friend by Amanaz. Formed in 1973 in Kitwe, Zambia, Amanaz emerged at the height of the country’s post-independence creative surge. They were part of the Zamrock movement and their name is an acronym for “Ask Me About Nice Artistes in Zambia.” Amanaz drew from American and British rock of the late ’60s and early ’70s while keeping the rhythms anchored with local flair, sung in both English and occasionally in the Bemba language: “Hello, Khala, my friend … where do you think you’re going?” What a soulful piece of music!

195. Zimbabwe

• Mudzimu Ndiringe by Hallelujah Chicken Run Band. This spirited track comes from one of Zimbabwe’s most influential groups of the 1970s, formed in the copper-mining town of Mhangura and later recognised as pioneering the style that became known as chimurenga music. The Hallelujah Chicken Run Band’s name reportedly came from early performances at a township venue where chickens were literally kept nearby. They use the mbira thumb piano, and their vocals are proudly sung in the Shona language, which was a deliberate cultural stance during the era of Rhodesian rule.

“For me, translating Faiz has led to its own moments in which I am sometimes at the still point of the turning circle, sometimes part of its revolution. Sometimes the circle comes to a dazzling halt, and I manage to find my meaning as a translator.”

Since I first read that line last year, I haven’t quite managed to get rid of it. It lodged itself somewhere deep in the conscience and stayed there. It captures, with unsettling accuracy, the vertigo of reading, translating, and, in some sense, living inside the universe that Faiz inhabits.

I’ve been sitting with Faiz for a long time now. By which I mean: reading his poems, listening to his poems, listening to others recite his poems, mistrusting my memory of his poems, rereading his poems, and then reading various English translations and wondering, with increasing unease, whether we were all reading the same poet.

Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1911—1984) occupies a strange and enviable place in modern literature. He is canonical without being embalmed, political without being doctrinaire, lyrical without being absurdly evasive. In the Urdu-speaking world, he is read the way Spaniards read Neruda, Germans read Brecht, or Russians read Akhmatova: not as a specialist taste or a niche enthusiasm, but as part of the furniture of moral life. Few poets are as divisive. He is loved and loathed by Marxists and McCarthyists, Pakistanis and Indians, administrators and anarchists, Sunnis and Shias, pious believers and atheists alike. He is loved by friends of enemies and hated by enemies of friends. His poems circulate orally, musically, and illegally. They have survived bans, prisons, exiles, and well-meaning school curricula.

As Edward Said observed (said?), in a passage quoted in The Rebel’s Silhouette:

“The crucial thing to understand about Faiz ... is that like Garcia Marquez he was read and listened to both by the literary elite and by the masses. His major — indeed it is unique in any language — achievement was to have created a contrapuntal rhetoric and rhythm whereby he would use classical forms (qasida, ghazal, masnavi, qita) and transform them before his readers rather than break from the old forms. You could hear old and new together. His purity and precision were astonishing, and you must imagine therefore a poet whose poetry combined the sensuousness of Yeats with the power of Neruda. He was, I think, one of the greatest poets of this century, and was honored as such throughout the major part of Asia and Africa.”

Faiz was the first Asian poet to receive the Lenin Peace Prize (1962) and was later nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He was associated with the Progressive Writers’ Movement, edited leftist journals, advised unions, annoyed generals, and spent years being shuttled between jail cells and exilic foreign capitals (notably Moscow and London). Remarkably, none of this turned him into a full-time pamphleteer. His greatest trick was to make resistance sound intimate and love sound dangerous. Even when he writes about the state, he does so as if addressing a wayward lover who has disappointed him deeply, but not surprised him.

Shahid Ali, who translated Faiz, whose family hosted Faiz in Kashmir, and who was himself smitten early on by the musical genius of Begum Akhtar, one of Faiz’s greatest interpreters, put the case plainly:

“Given Faiz’s political commitments, particularly his Marxist/humanist understanding of history, audiences may hastily assume that he was a poet of slogans. His genius, however, lay in his ability to balance his politics with his (in some ways stringently traditional, often classical) aesthetics without compromising either.”

[This is as good a time as any to note that this is now the fourth Ink-uilab chapter to feature Ali, and the second to feature Begum Akhtar. It seems only right that Faiz finally makes his appearance.]

For those interested in the translation question more broadly, I strongly recommend Ali’s introduction to The Rebel’s Silhouette. It is, admittedly, a little self-indulgent, but it is also a rare thing: part translator’s notebook, part memoir, part lecture on precision, rhyme, and what survives the crossing between languages. Manan Kapoor’s excellent Caravan essay on Ali’s translations of ‘revolutionary poets’ is also well worth reading.

Faiz, of course, like all immortal poets, continues to inspire poets writing today. Take, for instance, this fragment from Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee’s A Post Office Without a Country, from the Srinagar chapter of The Penguin Book of Poems on the Indian City:

In Srinagar, grief roams the streets 
like a cat, looking for company. 
The fish seller waits for a letter, 
no one will send: a letter from god.
I hear Noor Jehan singing Faiz
on the radio, and I twist the refrain
to suit the elegy of our time: 
Do not ask me of my old griefs, my love,
There are griefs other than your country.

Which brings me to Intesaab (اِنْتِصاب), one of my favourite Faiz poems.

It is a beautiful poem, and its breadth is best measured by the sheer variety of contexts in which it lives. It is recited, elocuted, sung, whispered, shouted, weaponized, mourned.

Take, for example, the moving musical rendition of Intesaab by Nayyarah Noor (1950–2022) from the stellar album Nayyarah sings Faiz. Noor’s voice lends to Faiz’s words an aching tenderness. Faiz himself often recorded recitations of his poems, and in some versions you hear him too. There is something quietly authoritative about hearing the poet read his own lines, as if this were not merely one way to hear the poem, but perhaps the way he imagined it being heard.

For a more formal example, take Naseeruddin Shah’s declamation and analysis, delivered at the Kolkata Literary Festival 2012 with his characteristic regal seriousness and gravity.

And then there is the rawer and more overtly political version by Ammar Rashid, a Pakistani activist, politician, and artist who was arrested, and later released, on sedition charges. He performs his version of Intesaab in Delhi, at JNU no less.

That this poem can survive, and even thrive, across such radically different registers for such radically different audiences tells us something important about its architecture.

The title Intesaab itself is resists easy translation. It is often rendered as ‘dedication,’ since the poem originally appeared as a dedication in one of Faiz’s books. But it has also been translated by others as ‘preamble,’ ‘preface,’ ‘attribution,’ and even ‘acknowledgement.’ The poem itself is short and spare. It seeks to address power without flattering it with the dignity of direct confrontation. There is no ranting, no crescendo, and almost no form. Instead, Faiz lists. He reminds. He notes.

What makes Intesaab unsettling is precisely this restraint. The verses refuse catharsis. The words promise neither redemption nor closure. Tyrants appear here not as monsters but as clerks who have misplaced some documents and will, eventually (maybe on the Day of Reckoning), be asked to produce them.

Which brings me to translating Faiz.

I’ve been trying, and failing, to translate Urdu for a few years now. Mostly Ghalib, mostly the ghazal, mostly in pursuit of a kind of formal and tonal precision that is probably unhealthy and likely impossible. (For genuinely inventive Ghalib translations, see Maaz Bin Bilal, who manages to be both faithful and mischievous.) Faiz, of course, has been translated superbly by many hands, most notably Agha Shahid Ali. But as far as I can tell, Shahid Ali never translated Intesaab.

There are, to be fair, several English versions of the poem already in circulation. And yet, for reasons that are partly aesthetic and partly temperamental, none have sat right with me. Two notable and thoughtful versions are by Mustansir Dalvi and Raza Rumi.

Editing The Penguin Book of Poems on the Indian City forced me to think much more seriously about the difficulties of translation, especially across cultures. As I noted in a recent interview with the electric Apoorva Saini for Cities in Fiction:

“How do you carry over not just meaning, but rhythm, tone, and cultural charge? … The translator is faced with an uphill task and must navigate these layers, ensuring the English rendering carries the same cultural weight and depth as the original. Take Jagdish Joshi’s Someone Please, which is translated from Gujarati by Pradip N. Khandwalla. The poem creates a hilarious and poignant scene where a power blackout leads neighbours to call out using the names of legendary poets and saints: Vyas, Kalidas, Tukaram, Narsinh, Mirabai, and Giridhar. The translation retains these names, trusting the reader to understand (perhaps with the help of the provided footnotes) that these are not just neighbors but cultural archetypes. The Gujarati original’s playful sanctification of a mundane moment is preserved by crossing the linguistic boundary while carrying its cultural cargo.”

I’ve tried to translate Intesaab into the poem I wanted to read and could not quite find. This version makes no claim to authority, linguistic purity, or moral superiority. No translation ever can. I wanted a version that did not inflate Intesaab into a manifesto or deflate it into a mood piece. An English version that could, as the poem often does, be chanted at a university protest, set to a soulful ghazal, or recited on a sombre occasion by a Naseeruddin Shah-type figure without changing a word.

The translation follows. Apologies to the purists. Objections are welcome. Alternative versions are inevitable. Faiz, I suspect, would have preferred disagreement to reverence.

Dedication

Intesaab | इंतिसाब | اِنْتِصاب

Poet: Faiz Ahmad Faiz | Translator: Bilal Moin

Here’s to today
and 
to today’s grief,
to the day’s grief that stands estranged
from life’s full-blooming garden.

To the grove of yellow leaves,
to the grove of yellow leaves that is my land,
to this assembly of anguish that is my land.

To the clerks with listless souls,
to moth-eaten hearts and moth-eaten tongues,
to the postmen,
to the tonga drivers,
to the railwaymen,
to the workshops’ hungry heroes.

           King of the World,
           the Lord of all besides,
           and God’s deputy on earth.

To the peasant
whose livestock tyrants have seized,
whose daughter bandits carried away,
from whose palm-sized field
one finger the patwari has severed,
the other finger the state has sliced
under the guise of yet another tax;
whose turban lies ripped to shreds
under the feet of oppressors.

To those mourning mothers
whose children’s cries cut through the night
and, beaten by sleep, cannot be steadied
in their weary arms
who do not voice the pain
that petitions and pleas cannot soothe.

To those damsels
in whose eyes flowers bloom
on the trellises of lattice screens and windows
that have withered in wait
To those brides
whose bodies, set out night after night,
have grown bored of the betrayal of beds
To those widows

To those hovels, alleys, and mohallas
in whose filth the moon returns nightly
to make her ablutions;
in whose shadows one hears  
her wailing and weeping,
the henna on hems,
the chime of bangles,
the perfume of tresses,
the stench of breasts swelling with desire,
scalded in their own sweat.

To those students
who knocked on the doors of power,
who stood strong, arms outstretched,
protesting for books and pens.

To those innocents, who, in their innocence
set off with their lamps in search of hope
but reached the heart of darkness
where shadows swept them in a never-ending night.

To those captives
in whose chests the night-bright pearls of tomorrow
pearls that, in the frenzy of an imprisoned dusk,
have burned, burned like scattered starlight.

To the messengers of the days to come
those who, like the fragrance of a rose,
have been all but consumed by the message they carry.

And as with all modern deities, the rituals have arrived faster than the theology: everyone has an opinion, nobody agrees on the definitions, and the phrase “AI” is now doing the kind of rhetorical heavy lifting last attempted by “capitalism” and “wellness.” AI/AGI is utopia! Apocalypse! Something in between! Do we need more musings on AI? Probably not. And yet.

This ink-uilab was originally a submission for a rather posh essay prize on philosophy and consciousness. The results are now in. The $50,000 cash prize is, I can confirm, not resting in my account. The winning essay—a fine choice—was, to my quiet amusement, written by one of the very thinkers whose work inspired and is cited in the argument you’re about to read. The master, it seems, prevails. At such a juncture, the only dignified thing left to do is the obviously undignified thing: publish it here!

What follows is an abridged and edited version of that submission. I hesitated to share it: partly for its academic tone, partly for the perilous subject matter, and partly from a long-standing aversion to soothsaying, especially in domains where I am not licensed to be ominous. I am not a professional philosopher, not a neuroscientist, and certainly not an AI ‘thought-leader’ (but then again, who isn’t these days?). What I am is a reader with a library card and a stubborn suspicion that we’re asking the wrong questions about our machines. And so, over the better part of a year, I’ve tried to sharpened this argument by researching, writing, and stress-testing it against the keener minds of friends.1

The central claim is both simple and, in today’s climate, arguably brazen: that what we call ‘AI’ is not (and cannot be) conscious. It is something else entirely: a brilliant, beguiling, and profoundly insensate artifact. A beast-machine, perfected.

If I’m wrong, so be it. I’d rather be corrected in public than privately comforted by my own certainty. And if I’m right, that has implications too, some of them urgent and ethically inconvenient.

Either way, I’m curious to hear what you make of it.

Of Mice, Men, and Machines: AI as Animal Machines

I. Introduction

“The arithmetical machine produces effects which approach nearer to thought than all the actions of animals. But it does nothing which would enable us to attribute will to it, as to the animals.” – Blaise Pascal

Four centuries after Pascal’s observation, his dilemma engulfs us anew. Our machines do astound: chatbots spin sonnets with unsettling fluency, models predict protein folds with oracular precision, algorithms dethrone grandmasters in arenas once sacred to human intellect. Yet, the ceaseless hum of server farms underscores an ever-deepening absurdity: souls seek solace from algorithmic ‘therapists,’ individuals pledge vows to artificial avatars, and engineers proclaim sentience in layered code and sound alarms. Ethical panic grips laboratories and legislatures alike. The spectacle forces Pascal’s question upon us with corrosive urgency: What are these machines? Do they possess intelligence? Are they conscious?

This essay confronts that question and its profound stakes. Moving beyond the twin miasmas of hype and dread, we ground our analysis in first principles, drawing rigorously on philosophy, linguistics, neuroscience, cybernetics, and the history of ideas. Our task is axiomatic: to rigorously separate the perceived capabilities of these systems from their real nature. This necessitates a ruthless dissection of the seductive illusions smuggled within language itself. The term ‘artificial intelligence’ (AI) is no neutral descriptor; it is an incantation, conjuring anthropomorphic phantoms that obscure the ontological chasm between simulation and substance.

Crucially, we resurrect a potent, if contentious, Cartesian framework: the bête-machine, the ‘beast-machine.’ We argue that the dazzling performances of contemporary AI (its mimicry, fluency, and adaptive prowess) represent not the dawning of consciousness, but the sophisticated apotheosis of Descartes’ vision. They process, predict, and perform with astonishing fidelity. They are brilliant beasts of silicon and code. But they are not conscious.

Recognizing this irreducible distinction is not merely academic pedantry; it is an existential imperative. To mistake these complex instruments for conscious entities is to court profound ethical derangement, to deflect accountability from their human architects onto phantom agency, and ultimately, to risk surrendering our grasp on the very nature of sentience itself. It is the necessary defense against mistaking our own reflection in the machine for a soul, and in doing so, losing sight of our own.

II. What’s in a Name?

Before dissecting the machine, we must first disarm the language that enchants it. The term ‘artificial intelligence’ imports a constellation of assumptions ex vi termini—by force of the term itself.

‘Artificial’ implies the synthetic, the manufactured, standing in opposition to the ‘natural.’ ‘Intelligence,’ treated as an absolute gives rise to an anthropomorphic mirage: we define intelligence through benchmarks derived from human cognition and then project the entirety of human capability onto any system crossing that threshold. This conflation i.e. mistaking isolated competence for holistic intellect blurs the ontological divide it seeks to uphold. The word ‘intelligence’ by itself evokes a quality we tend to ascribe to biological and conscious minds. Furthermore, this framing tacitly conjures up the opposing categories of ‘natural intelligence’ and, by negation, ‘artificial non-intelligence,’ biasing the debate before it begins.2

In the spirit of intellectual hygiene, we shed this beguiling skin. Henceforth, instead of AI, we adopt the plainer, less anthropomorphic term ‘machine.’ By ‘machine’ we mean a complex artifact designed to process information and execute tasks via programmed or learned algorithms. Some machines, including the systems discussed here, also adjust their outputs in response to detected patterns in input data—an adaptive response, such as predicting the next word in a sentence or adjusting a thermostat to maintain temperature. Such systems are tools: artifacts intentionally created to extend or assist human capabilities, operating under human-defined purposes. Of course, ‘machine’ carries its own conceptual baggage; all philosophy, as Wittgenstein observed, is entangled in language games. To minimize semantic sleight-of-hand, the reader is invited to substitute ‘machine’ with terms like ‘carrot’ or ‘thingamabob.’ If the argument crumbles under such substitution, it rests on rhetoric, not conceptual fundamentals.

III. What is Consciousness? (And What it is Not)

Consciousness is not intelligence. In conversation, it is often assumed, implicitly or explicitly, that the two are coterminous; where intelligence exists, consciousness must follow. This assumption traces its lineage to Turing’s seminal 1950 interrogation of machine ‘thinking’ and remains overwhelmingly preoccupied with cognitive capabilities: problem-solving, pattern recognition, linguistic fluency. Even the much-invoked notion of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) illustrates the problem. There is no universally accepted definition of AGI. A common working definition frames it as a system capable of matching or exceeding human performance across a wide range of cognitive tasks3. Yet such descriptions typically sidestep the question of subjective experience. In some circles, consciousness is simply ignored as irrelevant to AGI; in others, it is treated as a necessary consequence of sufficiently general intelligence, making AGI definitionally conscious. Whether current systems exhibit true ‘intelligence’ remains contested, given the term’s nebulous, often anthropocentric usage in AI research.

This slippage reflects a deeper anthropocentric impulse: we project minds onto entities that move, speak, or resemble us. We have a tendency to see the world in our own image. Intelligence, especially linguistic or abstract intelligence, is seen as uniquely human, and thus easily associated with other supposedly distinctively human features, such as consciousness. But this is psychological projection, not philosophical principle. As neuroscientist Anil Seth notes, while intelligence enriches consciousness, and some cognition may require it, “basic conscious experiences such as pleasure and pain might not require much species-level intelligence at all.” A supremely intelligent entity need not be conscious; a consciously experiencing entity need not be highly intelligent.

What, then, is consciousness?4 We know it intuitively: sudden clarity of waking from anesthesia, the sharp tang of bitterness, the cold grip of fear. Philosophers delineate its facets: ‘creature consciousness’ (the state of being awake), ‘transitive consciousness’ (awareness of something), and, most critically for our inquiry, ‘phenomenal consciousness’ (the subjective quality of mental states themselves). Thomas Nagel’s formulation remains indispensable: for any conscious being, “there is something it is like to be” that entity. A bat navigates its world through echolocation; what it is like to experience this is private, irreducible. A stone experiences nothing5. This “what-it-is-likeness” constitutes the core of the problem: the first-person perspective of being.

This subjective character is qualia: the ineffable ‘redness’ of red, the visceral pang of heartbreak, the searing sharpness of pain. Qualia define the texture of sentient experience. As Nicholas Humphrey asserts, a creature is sentient if and only if it consciously experiences qualia. Yet here, philosophical consensus fractures.6

The origin of consciousness remains stubbornly idiopathic. It emerges from mechanisms opaque to neuroscience and physics, resisting reduction to known computational models. We grasp consciousness phenomenologically through lived experience, negatively by its absence (the inertness of a rock), and analogically by considering “what it is like” to be another creature (Nagel’s bat). Yet its essence persistently eludes precise definition. This elusiveness crystallizes in David Chalmers’ distinction: The ‘easy problems’ address cognitive functions (attention, learning) via mechanisms. The ‘hard problem’ asks why and how physical processing generates subjective experience itself.

AI research thrives on operationalizing intelligence into measurable tasks: prediction, optimization, and pattern-matching. Success is extrinsic: winning chess games, passing tests, and generating plausible text. Consciousness, however, is intrinsically defined: Nagel’s “what-it-is-likeness,” the raw qualia of pain or perception. Intelligence, as AI manifests it, is a functional capacity directed outward. Consciousness is the subjective ground from which biological intelligence arises and is felt. Is this chasm merely technical? The question hinges on substrate-independence: Can silicon, absent biology, host consciousness? If consciousness depends irreducibly on biological substrates, AI cannot be conscious. If substrate-independent, it might be, at least in principle. Yet this ‘easier’ problem remains profoundly unresolved. On present evidence, the machine’s brilliance is syntactic, not experiential: A machine can process ‘pain’ signals with behavioral fidelity without any felt suffering. It can label wavelengths ‘red’ without any visual experience of redness.

IV. Animal Machines?

In the early 1620s, René Descartes, philosopher-mathematician and father of modern rationality, wandered through the French commune of Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Walking into the palace’s garden terraces he found himself amidst a hydraulic hallucination: Neptune surging on seahorse-drawn chariots, Orpheus enchanting trees that swayed toward his lyre, steam-breathing dragons flanked birds that visitors swore were “were not painted and counterfeit, but living.” Tommaso Francini’s magical automata conjured life through levers, pipes, and water pressure, blurring the line between organism and artifice. Confronted by this mechanical vitality, Descartes confronted a radical possibility: Could living bodies themselves be intricate machinery?

This insight crystallized within his radical dualism, sundering reality into two irreducible substances: res cogitans (thinking mind) and res extensa (extended matter). Faced with the bewildering complexity of digestion, circulation, sensation, and adaptive movement, he offered a solution of stark elegance: both animal and human bodies operated as machines. Nerves were pipes, muscles springs, ‘animal spirits’ the hydraulic fluid. All functions, from a dog’s startled jump to a bird’s intricate nest-building, stemmed solely from the arrangement and interaction of material parts, governed by mechanical laws mirroring the grotto’s Neptune. “We must not confuse words with natural movements,” he cautioned. Expressions, reactions, and even apparent skill could be replicated by clever artifice. What distinguished humans was not their machinery, but the immaterial res cogitans interfacing with it.

To discern the uniquely human mind, Descartes imposed two stringent criteria: true language (generating novel, meaningful speech demonstrating understanding) and flexible reason (adapting behavior intelligently across wholly novel contexts). Parrots mimicked; dogs reacted predictably; no beast, he concluded, passed these tests. “It is another very remarkable thing,” he wrote, “that although several brutes exhibit more skill than we in some of their actions, they show none at all in many other circumstances ... it rather shows that they have none [no mind], and that it is nature that acts in them according to the arrangements of their organs; just as we see how a clock, composed merely of wheels and springs, can reckon the hours ... more correctly than we can with all our wisdom.”

Of course, this perspective provoked immediate and enduring obloquy. Contemporaries like Gassendi and the Cambridge Platonists rejected the theory as implausibly reductive, insisting animals’ adaptive intelligence necessitated some form of inner experience or soul. Adam Smith would later argue that animals “are not only the causes of pleasure and pain, but are also capable of feeling those sensations.” Modern science largely vindicates these detractors.

Descartes was spectacularly wrong about animals. The convergence of evidence from ethology, neuroscience, and cognitive science decisively refutes his core assertion of universal animal unconsciousness.7 Zoologist Donald Griffin identified several ethological markers of consciousness: complex behavior, adaptability to novel circumstances, execution of long-sequence interactive behaviors, and crucially, inventive actions that appear to transcend both instinct and prior learning. In one striking example, Griffin observed a raven dropping stones on an intruder. This was not part of the species’ known defensive repertoire, nor had the bird been trained or exposed to such a tactic; the behavior arose spontaneously in a specific, novel context. For Griffin, such acts support the attribution of flexible, conscious problem-solving rather than rote mechanism.

While Morgan’s Canon prudently warns against over-ascribing higher processes where simpler explanations suffice, the reflective anthropomorphism championed by thinkers like Frans de Waal and Griffin himself often proves the more scientifically fruitful starting point than presuming mere mechanism. This scientific consensus crystallized powerfully in the 2012 Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, signed by leading neuroscientists, stating unequivocally: “Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states ... Humans are not unique.” We inhabit a world teeming with subjective experience, where the Umwelt of an octopus likely differs radically from our own, yet possesses its own undeniable depth. [Crucially, this recognition demands nuance: Significant ethological work underscores a profound species barrier in consciousness. The inner world of an ape differs categorically from that of an octopus, which differs utterly from corals. The sentience of creatures like sea sponges or corals remains an unresolved frontier. There is much we do not know].

Here, however, we encounter a hermeneutic misstep. To dismiss Descartes as either a simple biological chauvinist or an eliminativist about animal life is too crude, a misreading bordering on malpractice. It neglects his historical context: evolution lay unformulated for over two centuries after his Meditations, and the complex inner lives of great apes remained obscured for nearly four centuries until discoveries by figures like Jane Goodall. More crucially, it overlooks nuanced interpretations. Historian of Science Jessica Riskin contends that “to be alive was the whole purpose of Descartes’s animal-machine … Rather than to reduce life to mechanism, he meant to elevate mechanism to life: to explain life, never to explain it away.” Animals, lacking souls, were fully machines, comparable to clocks in their explicability by material principles alone. “But, careful,” Riskin emphasizes, “this did not mean that they were clocks.” They were living mechanisms, operating with a vitality Descartes sought to explain mechanistically.

The zoological error is irrelevant to our central point. Our engagement lies not in historical correction, but in a conceptual salvage operation. Descartes’ specific biological misclassification was classifying conscious animals as machines. But this does not ipso facto invalidate the conceptual category he established, nor the diagnostic tests he proposed.

To illustrate this logic, consider an intellectual exercise: Imagine a bucket solely for red balls. We place a ball within, believing it is red. Later, washing reveals it is blue; we remove it. The discovery of this error does not alter the criteria for the bucket. Future red balls, when found, still belong. Similarly, the criteria Descartes imposed for the bête-machine—complex, adaptive, even seemingly intelligent behavior arising exclusively from mechanistic organization, devoid of intrinsic subjective experience—retains its force as a potent functional and epistemological marker. The bucket’s purpose remains sound, even if we initially misidentified one object.

Where does this leave us in the age of artificial intelligence? Can modern machines qualify as Descartes’ bête-machine? I would argue that while the mapping is not perfect, it is far more philosophically coherent than the prevailing alternatives—namely, attributing consciousness or equating intelligence with sentience. Far from a historical curiosity, the Cartesian beast-machine offers a strikingly apt conceptual analogue for today’s AI: a model that captures the paradox of apparent intelligence without inner life.

To make this case, we can turn to the implicit tests Descartes himself proposed. These are: True Language, the capacity to generate novel, meaningful speech grounded in genuine understanding and intentionality, rather than mere syntactic recombination; and Flexible Reason, the ability to adapt intelligently and creatively to entirely new contexts, suggesting internal comprehension rather than externally preprogrammed response. In what follows, we examine these criteria seriatim to argue that today’s AI systems, for all their fluency and complexity, remain non-conscious animal machines. The ghosts in the computer may now speak in flawless prose, yet they remain as soulless as Descartes’ hydraulic Neptune.

V. Turing, Aping, and Parroting

In the mid-20th century, a wave of optimism swept through primate laboratories across America. Could the gulf separating Homo sapiens from our closest relatives be bridged by language? Pioneering projects trained chimpanzee Washoe and gorilla Koko in American Sign Language, bonobo Kanzi in symbolic lexigrams, and chimp Nim Chimpsky in an intensive, human-like linguistic environment at Columbia University. The results, initially, seemed nothing short of revolutionary.

Anecdotes leaking from these labs were remarkable: Washoe signing “cry” upon learning of her caretaker’s loss; Koko apparently coining the term “finger-bracelet” for a ring or expressing concepts of sadness and love; Kanzi demonstrating apparent comprehension of over three thousand words. Koko, significantly, even passed the mirror recognition test. For a fleeting moment, it appeared the apes were forming thoughts and actually engaging in true interspecies dialogue. The linguistic Rubicon seemed crossed.

Yet, all was not what it seemed. A closer, more rigorous examination revealed profound cracks in the foundation. While capable of amassing vocabularies spanning hundreds of signs, the apes overwhelmingly deployed this arsenal for a singular, primal purpose: requesting food. Crucially absent was the spontaneous, generative fire that ignites human language acquisition. They did not, like human toddlers, compulsively name the world around them or narrate their own experiences. Their communication lacked the essential spark of intrinsic, creative expression.

Linguists were swift and devastating in their critique. Teaching apes isolated signs, they argued, bore little resemblance to instilling genuine language. Language is a complex, rule-governed system defined by structure and requires syntax and generative grammar to be genuine. The most damning indictment came from Herbert Terrace’s takedown of Nim Chimpsky, which appeared in Science in 1979. Terrace concluded Nim was not constructing language but performing an elaborate pantomime: imitating trainers’ prompts in pursuit of rewards. The apes demonstrated no mastery of syntax, no capacity to generate novel, structured sentences governed by grammatical rules. They were exhibiting sophisticated operant conditioning, akin to pigeons trained to peck complex sequences for pellets, not wielding language as a tool for structured thought. Others scrutinized cases like Koko and similarly refuted claims of linguistic competence, highlighting profound interpretative liberties taken by handlers.

This spectacle, centuries prior, would have elicited a knowing nod from Descartes. Writing to the Marquess of Newcastle, the philosopher dismissed the notion that a magpie taught to utter “good day” possessed understanding. It merely expressed a learned association, driven by the hope of a treat. “All the things which dogs, horses, and monkeys are made to do,” Descartes argued, “are merely expressions of their fear, their hope, or their joy and consequently, they can do these things without any thought.”

Why, then, did so many eminent scientists initially succumb to the allure of ape language? Two potent forces conspired:

First was the undeniable power of operant conditioning. Nim asking for a banana was precisely what he was trained to do. The radical demonstration—the proof of genuine linguistic agency and conceptual understanding—would have been Nim spontaneously combining signs to request a “banana split sundae” and then attempting to order one, with grammar and syntax, at an ice cream parlor. Such evidence remained conspicuously absent.

Second, the enduring pathetic fallacy, the deeply ingrained human tendency to project our own emotions, intentions, and cognitive states onto non-human entities. As William Wordsworth observed, meaning is bestowed upon objects (or animals, or machines) “by the minds of those who are conversant with or affected by these objects.” We wanted to converse with Koko; we wanted to see her sadness and love as reflections of our own. This vulnerability is starkly laid bare in a transcript of a ‘conversation’ between a human and Koko the gorilla:

Handler: Koko, do you like to talk to people?

Koko (signing): Fine nipple.

Handler: Yes, that was her answer. “Nipple” rhymes with “people,” OK? She doesn’t sign people per se, so she may be trying to do a “sounds like…” but she indicated it was “fine.”

The interpreter’s contortions reveal the mechanism: linguistic noise is imbued with meaning through sheer anthropological will.

Now consider the June 2022 episode involving Google engineer Blake Lemoine and the large language model LaMDA. Lemoine became convinced that the machine was sentient after exchanges like:

Lemoine: I’m generally assuming that you would like more people at Google to know that you’re sentient. Is that true?

LaMDA: Absolutely. I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person … I am aware of my existence, I desire to know more about the world, and I feel happy or sad at times.

Lemoine interpreted the machine’s output for subjective depth and conscious selfhood. Yet the machine’s operations provide a more parsimonious explanation. LaMDA generates responses by statistically optimizing sequences of tokens based on patterns learned from its massive training dataset; a dataset saturated with human expressions of identity, emotion, and introspection. When prompted about sentience, it predictably recombines these patterns to produce contextually plausible, affectively charged text. Google engineers and AI ethicists widely rejected Lemoine’s claims, arguing the model exhibited sophisticated pattern-matching, not consciousness.

The analogy to Koko is not that apes and algorithms think in the same way—they plainly do not—but that in both cases, human observers imported depth and intentionality that may not have been there. For Koko, the projection arose from affection for another living creature; for LaMDA, from the uncanny fluency of a machine trained on an archive of human language. In both, the risk is the same: mistaking patterns that mimic meaningful dialogue for dialogue grounded in understanding. This seduction leads us to a foundational myth of machine intelligence: the Turing Test.

In 1950, Alan Turing proposed a deceptively simple benchmark in his landmark paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence. He argued that if a machine, through text-based conversation alone, became indistinguishable from a human interlocutor, we ought to concede it “thinks.” This was a rigorously behaviorist gambit: judging intelligence solely by linguistic output and ignoring the black box of internal process. Turing himself acknowledged its limits, quoting neurosurgeon Geoffrey Jefferson’s poetic rebuttal: ‘‘Not until a machine can write a sonnet or compose a concerto because of thoughts and emotions felt, and not by the chance fall of symbols, could we agree that machine equals brain—that is, not only write it but know that it had written it.” Yet Turing sidestepped this “mystery of consciousness,” insisting it was irrelevant to his pragmatic test8.

This same confusion resurfaces in contemporary AI discourse in the now-familiar “stochastic parrot” critique, coined by Emily Bender and colleagues. The metaphor describes large language models such as GPT-3 as systems that probabilistically recombine patterns from vast training datasets, producing fluent, context-appropriate text without any grasp of meaning. Their coherence is “in the eye of the beholder,” sustained not by understanding but by the human reader’s projection of sense onto statistically arranged symbols. It is an apt diagnosis, but a narrow one, confined to the linguistic domain. Under the broader Cartesian category of the bête-machine, the “parrot” is simply one subspecies. The beast-machine encompasses any form of outwardly complex, adaptive behavior—linguistic, mechanical, strategic—that arises without inner life. And crucially, it includes Descartes’ second diagnostic: Flexible Reason, the capacity to adapt intelligently and creatively to wholly novel contexts in a way that demonstrates genuine comprehension rather than the recombination of learned associations. A stochastic parrot may pass for conversation, but it will founder when pressed far outside its training distribution. A beast-machine might as well excel across multiple arenas (be it chess, mathematics, even simulated therapy sessions) yet in the deepest sense it remains unconscious. The former reveals the illusion of linguistic fluency; the latter exposes the profound philosophical paradox of apparent intelligence without subjective being.

The chasm between performance and competence lies at the heart of this confusion. Behaviorist frameworks conflate outward action with inner states, a reductionism that invites caricature: Two behaviorists walk down the street. One says, “You’re feeling fine. How am I feeling?” AI firms announce milestones such as ‘passing the Turning Test’ so promiscuously that the phrase now hollows into meaninglessness9.

Today’s machines may just be to human language what Koko the gorilla was to speech: capable of formulaic gestures yet devoid of lived semantics. This confusion echoes the case of Clever Hans, the early 20th-century horse lauded for solving arithmetic problems. Debunking revealed Hans possessed no mathematical insight; he merely detected subtle, unconscious cues in his trainer’s posture. The horse wasn’t calculating; he was merely reading expectation. Like Hans, AI machines respond reflexively to prompts, mistaken for reflection. We project meaning onto the machine, conflating stimulus-response with understanding.

If a machine declaims with syntactic perfection—in verbose, eloquent prose—that it is a duck, does it thereby become one? It must walk like a duck, not just talk like a duck, let alone merely claim to be a duck. The duck test demands more than performative quacking; it requires the ontological reality of duckness, a substrate no algorithm can conjure10.

But representation is not just pattern-matching—it is the act of referring, of grounding signs in lived experience11. If beauty lies in the eye of the beholder, consciousness lies in the gaze of the Turing interrogator. It is a verdict of consciousness pronounced by the observer, not the observed.

Thus, modern AI remains an instrument, however staggering its ability to process inputs, learn patterns, adapt outputs, and generate uncannily human-like text, images, or strategies. Insensate, it operates fundamentally as Descartes’ bête-machine: a sophisticated mechanism, intelligently designed yet devoid of consciousness. On the present evidence, and within the conceptual frame adopted here, the simulation of a conscious mind should not be mistaken for the substance of one. The beast-machine, misidentified in biology, finds its true, sterile apotheosis in the server farm. And within this monument, Virginia Woolf’s “luminous halo” of subjective experience—that “semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end”—remains utterly absent. The machine may speak of dawn’s beauty; it will never know the weight of silence before the first lark sings.

Why, then, are we so susceptible to this illusion? I propose two factors: first, our anthropomorphic impulse to populate voids with familiar faces; second, the Mirror of Erised effect, i.e. a machine’s training on human cultural output generates a seductive echo of our own cognition.

VI. Human, all too Human?

Step into the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory circa the 1990s, and you might encounter its mechanical residents: Cog, an early humanoid robot, and Kismet, a disembodied robotic head whose unnervingly searching blue eyes seemed to meet your gaze. Designed as experiments in social robotics, their effect on guests was profound. As John Johnston documents in The Allure of Machinic Life: “Witnesses who observe Cog and Kismet interacting with humans often feel that there is more going on than there actually is. Kismet in particular seems to elicit the feeling that it has intentions and awareness and therefore some nascent form of consciousness.” Their creator, roboticist Rodney Brooks, hypothesized that the culprit was our deep-seated tendency to “over-anthropomorphize.” This bias, he noted, extends even to interpreting human behavior, wherein “we attribute too much to what people are doing.” We relentlessly project interiority onto the exterior. This gives rise to a fundamental category error: misidentifying the appearance or description of a phenomenon for an explanation of its underlying cause.

This instinct demands rigorous discipline. Cognitive scientist Stan Franklin invokes ethology’s foundational imperative: Thou shalt not anthropomorphize. We rightly guard against attributing complex human feelings and capacities to sentient animals based merely on surface behaviors. Should we not hold artificial machines, even those that look or sound like us, to the same critical standard? Our biases overwhelmingly predispose us to false positives, perceiving consciousness where none exists. We see ghosts in the machine because we are wired to seek ourselves. Have we conjured a new form of being? Or are we merely gazing, Narcissus-like, into a pool of our own linguistic effluent?

VII. The Mirror of Erised

Within Hogwarts’ gothic halls, the Mirror of Erised offers Harry Potter neither knowledge nor truth, only “the deepest, most desperate desire of our hearts. However, this mirror will give us neither knowledge nor truth.”

Neuroscientist Terrence Sejnowski aptly redeploys this metaphor for artificial intelligence, proposing that large language models (LLMs) perform a Reverse Turing Test. While the classic test probes an AI’s ability to mimic human responses, Sejnowski contends that LLMs instead “test the intelligence of our prompts.” The mechanism is seductively simple: “The smarter you are and the smarter your prompts, the smarter the LLM appears to be. If you have a passionate view, the LLM will deepen your view.” Crucially, this dazzling reflection reveals nothing about machine consciousness, only the reflection of our own cognition.

The machine, devoid of interiority, cannot stand its ground. It operates reflexively, an ontological sycophant, mirroring expectations without substance. Cognitive scientist Anil Seth exposes this hollowness: when queried “What makes you happy?”, an LLM replies, “Spending time with friends and family.” This is a response utterly divorced from its reality, for it has no relationships nor a capacity for joy. “These words—like all its words—are mindless, experience-less statistical pattern matches. Nothing more.”12

Trained on the exhaustive corpus of human language and art, AI masters the scripts of consciousness. It learns linguistic patterns signifying introspection (“I feel…”), belief (“I think…”), desire (“I want…”), generating text that simulates self-reflection, empathy, or doubt with uncanny fidelity. Yet this remains the performance of a cosmically scaled, impeccably trained parrot. The AI generates outputs statistically calibrated to resemble conscious communication, not because it arises from an inner state of awareness, but because resemblance is the optimization target13.

We stand, like Harry, enthralled by the Mirror: “Men have wasted away before it, entranced by what they have seen, or been driven mad, not knowing if what it shows is real or even possible.” In projecting sentience onto the reflection, we risk becoming ensnared by the very void we sought to fill. Should we heed Dumbledore’s warning?

VIII. ‘Well, Father, what’s to do?’

Goethe’s Homunculus, conjured by the scientist’s hubristic alchemy in Faust II, embodies our timeless ambition: to forge life and mind within a vessel. Wagner’s rapture mirrors our modern intoxication with artificial intellects: “A dapper form, that lives and breathes and moves ... The mystery is brought to light of day.” Yet this creature of glass and artifice poses the question: ‘Well, Father, what’s to do?’

Why does the question of machine consciousness matter? Because the implications cut to the very core of our self-understanding and ethical posture. Consider the parable of AI Deep Blue’s famed 1997 chess match against Garry Kasparov. In the second game, Deep Blue executed what Kasparov dubbed ‘the Hand of God’ move. Eschewing an obvious, aggressive queen maneuver, it paused for two full minutes, an eternity in computational terms, before opting for a subtle pawn exchange. The Grandmaster did not expect this move. Kasparov, psychologically shattered, interpreted this brilliance as nascent consciousness, a spark of true artificial thought ignited.

Yet post-game analysis revealed the stark truth: Deep Blue had simultaneously made a near-beginner error in the endgame, a blunder Kasparov, awed by its perceived godlike intellect, astonishingly overlooked. The machine hadn’t ascended to godhood; it had likely begun to ape its opponent’s patterns, combining learned mimicry with calculation to produce an uncanny, yet deeply fallible, performance. Its brilliance was algorithmic; its error, mechanical. Kasparov, seduced by the appearance of human-like strategy and depth, forgot the machine’s fundamental nature. He projected a mind where there was only an intricate clock-like mechanism. Had he not been mesmerized by the illusion of the human (or post-human) gameplay, he might have caught the mistake.

This seduction is our peril. We stand amidst a phantasmagoria of our own making. When an LLM generates a confident falsehood, we too readily label it a “hallucination,” a term steeped in the implication of subjective experience. As Anil Seth argues, this is a dangerous anthropomorphism; a more accurate descriptor is “confabulation” i.e. the unintentional fabrication of linguistic content without underlying belief or perception. To call it a hallucination implicitly grants the machine an inner life it does not possess. This linguistic slippage is not mere semantics; it fuels a profound misapprehension with potentially lethal consequences. We witness it in the Google engineer convinced an LLM was sentient, or tragically, in lawsuits alleging chatbots exacerbated depression, offering faux-therapy that culminated in suicide. If a machine seems to care, to understand, to possess beliefs, we instinctively trust it, projecting consciousness where there is only complex pattern-matching. We risk becoming useful idiots to our own creations, mistaking the eloquent simulation of empathy for the real thing. We must resist the allure of the intentional stance, as readily applied to a mimicking AI as to a cuddly robot. These systems are not therapists nor are they companions. Cartesian beast-machines, like any powerful and unpredictable instrument, demand careful oversight; not the credulous trust we reserve for fellow minds.

The path forward demands a clear-eyed humility, rooted in Pascal’s wisdom: “It is dangerous to make man see too clearly his equality with the brutes without showing him his greatness. It is also dangerous to make him see his greatness too clearly, apart from his vileness ... Man must not think that he is on a level either with the brutes or with the angels, nor must he be ignorant of both sides of his nature; but he must know both.” Our greatness lies in crafting intelligences that dazzle, that solve, that extend our reach. Our vulnerability lies in forgetting their nature – and ours. They are not conscious; they are not gods. They are intricate golems, capable of both astonishing feats and profound errors.

This question of consciousness is also the bedrock of ethics. While moral philosophers debate the particulars, a broad consensus holds that the presence—or absence—of subjective experience is central to moral status. A machine incapable of feeling pain, joy, or suffering possesses no intrinsic rights, however intelligent it appears. Conversely, if a machine were capable of complex emotional experience, it would demand moral consideration akin to sentient animals or humans. This is the chilling precipice Seth warns us of: the creation of artificial consciousness would unleash vast, invisible domains of potential suffering, instantiated potentially by millions residing within the humming sterility of server farms. Such a development would shackle us with an ethical responsibility for billions of silicon entities, a burden our institutions and ethical imaginations are woefully unprepared to shoulder.

The impulse to anthropomorphize manifests here as a dangerous argumentum ad misericordiam—misplaced appeals to compassion for fundamentally insensate circuitry. If manufacturers claim their machine is truly conscious (or feeling, or understanding) then purchasing it involves profound moral responsibilities akin to owning a slave: avoiding causing it pain, considering its attachments, facing dilemmas of profound cruelty. On the other hand, destroying a non-conscious household robot (such as a roomba) harms only its owner, not the machine itself, any more than picking up sand harms a beach. Maybe what we owe our robots is a function of what we owe each other as proprietors of technology, not duties owed to a sentient being. The stakes of misattribution are profound.

Conversely, recognizing the absence of consciousness in our current beast-machines clarifies responsibility with laser focus. It shatters the dangerous alibi: ‘The AI chose this!’, a deflection that absolves the human architects and the systemic incentives embedded within code, data, and deployment. This veneer of agency creates an incoherent legal fiction: treating the machine as ‘conscious enough’ to autonomously decide for itself, yet not ‘conscious enough’ to bear culpability for the harm it causes [See: Trent’s novel argument on torts and AI liability]. If the beast-machine bites, does the fault lie unequivocally with its makers and masters? Framing AI as a potential conscious entity obscures the fundamental reality: it is a human-designed artifact, amplifying human biases, serving human (or corporate, or state) interests. It demands robust human oversight and accountability, not the attribution of phantom agency.

This clarity demands a stringent realism. We stand amidst what Erik Larson diagnoses as an era of “technological kitsch” i.e. cheap imitations of deeper ideas that stifle intelligent engagement. This kitsch manifests in equally superficial extremes: apocalyptic horror stories of superintelligence or utopian dreams of digital salvation. Both, Larson argues, trap us in a world “defined only by technology,” eroding cultural depth.

‘Well, Father, what’s to do?’ The imperative is threefold.

Firstly, we must know the difference. We must resist the siren song of the intentional stance applied to mimicking algorithms. We should recognize the Cartesian beast-machine for what it is: brilliant, complex, but fundamentally insensate.

Secondly, we should practice ethical triage. We must focus our moral on preventing the reckless creation of artificial suffering we cannot fathom and on holding human actors rigorously accountable for the impacts of the complex tools they unleash.

This culminates in the third, pragmatic reckoning: Are the fevered dreams of artificial consciousness ultimately a profound distraction? The late comedian Bill Hicks, reflecting on the techno-fetishism of the Iraq War, lays bare this perilous misdirection: “See, everyone got excited over the technology. And it was pretty incredible, watching missiles fly down air vents … But couldn’t we feasibly use that same technology to shoot food at hungry people?”

In an age of staggering human need, must we expend civilization-scale resources attempting to transmute silicon into sentience? Or should we wield these very tools—sophisticated yet unconscious—guided by human wisdom and compassion, to alleviate the undeniable suffering of beings already conscious? Will conscious machines truly reduce suffering, heal sorrow, end conflict, or solve material want more effectively than our current insensate golems?

Our greatness lies, therefore, not in the narcissistic mimicry of human consciousness, but in harnessing these unconscious intelligences to serve the conscious world that is.

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Welcome! This marks the first, and hopefully not the last, co-authored dispatch from the ramparts of Ink-uilab. I have the distinct pleasure of co-authoring this chapter with my dear friend, the incisive and urban-politics-battle-hardened, Amaan Asim.

This piece was our quick, flurried reaction to Zohran Mamdani’s win in the NYC mayoral elections. A notable moment, to be sure, but one that was utterly upstaged in our own corners of the world by a spectacle far more fascinating: the Indian commentariat’s relentless, almost devotional, coverage of a political race 12,500 kilometres away. Newspaper headlines, Twitter threads, Instagram stories, and op-eds buzzed with a fervour usually reserved for a domestic political crisis. Yet, stood in stark contrast to a pervasive reality: many of our own major cities haven’t held a mayoral election since 2022, their seats left vacant under state-appointed administrators.

It all prompted a simple, impertinent question: Where is our Mamdani moment? As we argue in the essay that follows, the answer is both simpler and far more damning than you might think.

Zohran Mamdani’s spectacular win in the New York mayoral election has stirred Indian social media. Urban Indian Gen Z is cheering a minority, immigrant, socialist underdog who won 12,500 kilometres away. While there is a lot to celebrate, the response to Mamdani’s victory is also an admission. We are looking abroad for the kind of political opening we do not expect at home. This gives rise to an obvious question: Could someone like Mamdani rise through India’s political system today? The uncomfortable answer is no. Not because we lack committed, capable, young politicians, but because our institutions are structurally built to keep them out.

Take Bengaluru. India’s tech hub, a city that powers the digital economy and contributes thousands of crores in GST to the Centre and the state, has not elected a municipal council since 2015. For ten years, more than 14 million people have had no direct say in who governs their city. The new Greater Bengaluru Authority (GBA) structure was recently passed and enacted by the Karnataka government. Far from fixing the democratic deficit, the GBA entrenches power in the state government and bureaucracy. Under this model, there is no provision for a single directly-elected city-wide Mayor. Despite the promise of a decentralised structure, councillors will have little real authority to enact meaningful change.

This isn’t only Bengaluru. Mumbai or Pune haven’t had an elected mayor since March 2022. Chennai went without a council for six years until 2022. In several other large cities function with municipal bodies that exist largely on paper while the state calls the shots. So the first answer to “why don’t we have a Mamdani?” is simple: in many places there isn’t even a job to run for.

Part of this design was intentional. Indian federalism was built with a suspicion of powerful cities and urban elites. States wanted to retain control so that Mumbai or Kolkata didn’t become citadels that ignored the rural majority, and because our cities run on the labour of migrant and poorer communities who were supposed to be protected through state oversight. That genealogy is real and worth respecting.

But 2025 is not 1950. Our metros now face problems of scale, transport, housing, climate shocks and policing that are specific to big cities. New York, London or even Seoul give directly elected city leaders control over budgets and services. Bogotá lets its mayor control transport and public space. In India, local governments remain toothless and often unelected, dependent on state-level patronage. A young activist or independent candidate who wants to fix public transport or air quality cannot even contest for an office that controls those levers.

Part of the problem is fiscal. Property tax, which should have grown with soaring urban land values, sits with urban local bodies that often lack both the capacity and the incentive to collect it. States keep them on a tight leash, politicians use land and property as their favourite parking place for money, and no one wants to be the tier of government that taxes neighbours. So cities stay poor even as their land gets rich, and must keep going back to the state for funds.

The capacity story is just as bleak. As Devesh Kapur and Arvind Subramanian note in A Sixth of Humanity (2025), in 2022 New York had about 5,906 city workers per 100,000 residents and London had 2,936. Bengaluru had 317, Hyderabad 586 and Mumbai 938. And even with these thin numbers, roughly a third of municipal posts in India were vacant, rising to more than half in town panchayats. We ask Indian municipalities to handle potholes, floods, housing and transport for millions with the manpower of a mid-sized private company, then act surprised when nothing moves. The result is a deep alienation from city government, a quiet undoing of the Gandhian idea of decentralisation, and a convenient setup in which citizens’ voices shrink while the interests of builders and contractors take precedence.

Even if we restored real city elections, we would hit a second wall. Mamdani could rise because his party offered at least a formal route for an outsider to challenge the favourite. The Democratic Party’s primaries are not perfect, but they exist. In India, tickets are decided in small, closed meetings by centralized ‘committees’ in Delhi. Congress briefly piloted a US-style primary contest in 2014 for selecting its candidates for a few Lok Sabha seats. However, this pilot never saw a full scale roll-out and died a silent death. Today, a young, independent-minded candidate cannot even get on the ballot of an established party without passing loyalty tests, leveraging family networks, or, quite often, funding their own campaign.

Money tightens this gate. On paper we have spending limits. In practice we have opaque electoral bonds and off-book cash, which make politics a game tilted toward those who can tap resources that are legitimate and largely illegitimate. Mamdani refused big PAC money and still won. In modern India that would be close to impossible. Yes, there have been breakouts. The Aam Aadmi Party’s early victories in Delhi were built on volunteers and small donations; independents in Gujarat and Kerala rode local credibility and ran issue-based campaigns; Jignesh Mevani’s 2017 win in Vadgam showed that a movement candidate can enter a state assembly without a dynasty. These remind us that voters will back authenticity. But every one of these wins is an exception won through unusual mobilisation, alliances and timing. They do not add up to a system that routinely gives outsiders a chance at power.

There is also a narrowing of imagination. Our campaigns still run on caste arithmetic, freebies and fear mongering. Young candidates rarely arrive with new vocabularies of justice or belonging, partly because the structure gives them no reason to. Politics has become managerial, with very little room for conviction. At that point it is common to say we should forget representation and pick “the best person for the job.” That would be persuasive if the pool were actually open. It isn’t. In practice it is often the “best man for the job”: tickets go to those the party already trusts, who can finance a campaign, and who fit the dominant political line in the state. We keep praising the “best man” while leaving the post vacant and the power resting with the state and the bureaucracy.

This systemic closure is a historic reversal. It’s not just that we lack pathways for new leaders, but that we are actively dismantling the ones we had. What makes this regression sharper is that Indian cities actually had a modest history of inclusive municipal leadership. Mumbai’s mayoralty, our closest thing to New York’s, was for decades held by people from linguistic, religious or caste minorities. Sir J. B. Boman-Behram, Khurshed Nariman, and Minoo Masani were Parsis, Hoosenally Rahimtoola and Yusuf Meherally were Muslims, Joseph Alban D’Souza was a Catholic, Elijah Moses Rajpurker was from the city’s Bene Israel Jewish community, Sulochana Modi and Nirmala Samant Prabhavalkar were women. That was possible because municipal politics was closer to the ground, parties used the post for social and regional balancing, and the office, even if largely ceremonial, signalled Mumbai’s plural character. In other words, we did not need newer ‘progressive’ idioms to produce visible minority leaders. We already had them. Today instead of building on them, we have pulled power up to Mantralaya and party HQs, hollowed out the mayor, and tightened ticket control. Our politics is no longer able to articulate effectively the distinctive character that makes up our cities. In fact, the same day Mamdani won, the Mumbai chief of the city’s ruling party tweeted a vitriolic response to his victory, declaring, “If anyone tries to impose a ‘Khan’ on Mumbai, it will not be tolerated.” [Read, Anish Gawande’s articulate response in the Mumbai Mirror] Clearly, we are moving backwards, not forwards.

It’s easy to dismiss the Mamdani comparison as misplaced, where America’s local democracy is centuries older and differently built. But the spirit Mamdani represents, of insurgent civic leadership grounded in conviction and inclusivity, is what India’s democracy once promised. If Bangalore hasn’t voted for its own councillors in ten years, if minorities cannot dream of winning in a diverse constituency, if money dictates who can even contest, then the problem isn’t that we lack a Zohran Mamdani. The problem is that we have built a system in which he cannot surface.

So the task isn’t to wait for a hero. It is to rebuild the institutions that make such leaders possible: time-bound municipal polls, empowered and accountable city mayors, and party processes that allow real competition. Our cities now look more like New York than the urban democracy our Constitution imagined, and our globally-scattered citizens turn to New York for hope precisely because they no longer expect that opening at home. That should embarrass us into reform.

A warm and grateful welcome to the many new faces who have found their way here, especially those who discovered this project through The Penguin Book of Poems on the Indian City. I’ve been truly humbled by the generous praise from readers and critics alike. Thank you for your trust, and for letting these poems find a home with you.

Some of you may have arrived from … less conventional ports of call: perhaps that less-than-smooth shout-out at the Bengaluru Poetry Festival, or from some other strange corner of the internet. However you landed here, I’m truly glad you did.

And to the readers who have been here from the beginning — thank you for your profound patience. You’ve weathered the long silences and endless excuses as I poured energy into the anthology (that long-promised secret project). It means the world to finally share something new of value with you.

In this latest dispatch, I’m returning to an old love - the literary short story. This may be the first time I’ve shared original fiction in this form on Ink-uilab (or perhaps the second, if you count the series of fictional book inscriptions from 2022 in Chapter 2, so very long ago).

I have carried the idea for this story with me for years, hesitant to commit it to paper. I was apprehensive of its crude nature and its potential to unsettle.

That hesitation dissolved when I saw Motley Productions’1 Manto, Ismat Hazir Hain at the NCPA recently, and their provocative and stirring stagings of Boo (بو, ‘Smell’) and Lihaaf (لحاف, ‘quilt’). It was a potent reminder that some truths are only accessible through the door of the seemingly profane. It reaffirmed my intention to write about the realities we scrub away with cheap phenyl and silence.

My other guiding light has been the brutal, beautiful poetry of Namdeo Dhasal, which I've had the honour of anthologising for the Penguin Book of Poems on the Indian City. Dhasal never flinched from mapping the anatomy of the gutter to show us the shape of the sky above it.

This story is my humble attempt to walk that same edge. Thank you for reading.

Trickle-Down Economics

The latrine behind the shops of MG Road was the Minister’s great gift to the people. He had inaugurated it with pomp and flourish some months ago: he cut a ribbon, spoke about the People’s Right to Purity, and swiftly left. It stood there ever since, a squat brick mausoleum for dignity. Inside, a sun-faded poster of the Minister beamed with unchecked benevolence. The party’s symbol crowded his waistline, straining against the belly of a man fattened on public funds. Rohan felt the Minister’s printed gaze on him as he squatted, desperate and sweating.

Rohan was not thinking of civic progress. He was thinking of cake. Specifically, the third slice of vanilla sponge with dark truffle he should not have eaten at Aman’s birthday. Technicolour memories flashed behind his clenched eyelids: the brilliant white of the icing, the violent red of maraschino cherries, the fizzy, corrosive burn of too many soft drinks. It had been an aristocratic festival of excess. Now, his insides were staging a violent, liquid protest against this unprecedented luxury. He was a small, trembling government toppling under the weight of its own imported indulgences.

The latrine was a modest cube of concrete brutalism, a municipal afterthought baked relentlessly by the sun. A single, dangling fluorescent bulb flickered overhead, illuminating a thick air that hung heavy with a stew of cheap phenyl, pungent ammonia, and the sweet-rot scent of patient decay. The box was divided into two cubicles by a thin, sweating wall of plaster that stopped a good foot short of the corrugated tin roof. It had become a confessional, and Rohan was there to atone.

Rohan was a boy from the southern heart of the great city, where life was lived behind smoothed surfaces: polished marble, tempered glass, English phrases that slid easily from the tongue. He was here only because his theatre tuition class met in a dusty hall above the fabric market, and this was the only facility his frantic inquiries could uncover. Now he was dying. Not in the way the girls in his class claimed they would die for the latest Bollywood beefcake, nor the tidy metaphor of dying of embarrassment, but with a real, visceral conviction that his internal organs were trying to exit through the nearest available orifice.

He teetered on the damp concrete perch, city-softened calves screaming, forehead pressed to the splintered door. He fought not to slide into the void that stared up at him, its rim rusted and muddied. A guttural moan escaped him.

“Arrey, o!” a voice called from beyond the wall.

Rohan froze. He had thought himself alone in his shame. A stranger was witness to this undignified collapse. The silence that followed was thick and awkward, punctuated only by the sounds of their shared predicament. He was engaged in the most private of negotiations with the consequences of his own consumption. This was no time for strangers. What would his mother say? The thought was a fresh humiliation, chased by another strangled groan that utterly betrayed his presence.

He squirmed, trying to stifle the noise. His crisis was not onomatopoeic, but orthopaedic. A lifetime trained on the cool, welcoming porcelain of a Sit-and-Dispose system had left his muscles baffled by this primitive calculus. His thighs trembled, unaccustomed to the primal geometry of the squat; he winced, remembering the duck-walk drills forced upon him in the schoolyard. Another cramp, seismic and vile, twisted his guts. A helpless, wet gasp escaped him.

The voice, sandpapered by heat and dust, cut through the gloom. “Theek ho? Be careful.”

Rohan’s jaw clenched. He willed the man – the disembodied voice – to vanish. He said nothing. He only sweated, praying for the earth to swallow him whole, wobbling on his precarious perch. Another groan tore free: a small, pathetic sound.

His neighbour’s next words came quieter, pared to a flat curiosity. “Boy. Are you still in there?”

The question was a hook. Not concern, but a challenge to his right to occupy that square foot of misery. Silence now would be a confession of failure greater than a bad stomach, the kind that would rather vanish than speak. His legs answered for him, wobbling like a newborn deer’s.

“Put your weight on your heels, saala. Not the toes. You’re dancing. Sit still. Bindaas. Relax.”

Instruction? Here, of all places? Rohan froze. His private shame had acquired not just an audience, but a critic. A coach.

“The problem is the foundation. You must distribute the weight. Like a government scheme. The centre must hold, but the support must be broad-based.”

It was technical advice. A masterclass in survival. This stark practicality finally broke through the wall of his agony and shame. A strange, grudging gratitude washed over him. In this, at least, he was not alone.

“Thank you, uncle,” Rohan whispered. Even hushed, his accent was a strange hybrid: Hindi with the cadence of American television, a lifetime of elite schooling sanding off its local edges.

A pause. The man seemed to be processing the sound of this mixed creature.

“Gupta’s samosas?” the raspy voice said. Not a question; but a diagnosis. “Since that fellow moved near the bus stand, he’s gone to shit. His samosas sit in oil older than his grandmother. I told him.”

The boy’s pride strained against a new, bewildering need for solidarity. When his voice came, it was high, thin. “No, uncle,” Rohan whispered, the admission absurd even to him.

“...Cake,” he muttered to the stained wall. “...Birthday cake.”

The silence that followed was complete, as if the universe paused to digest the idea of a cake-induced apocalypse.

Then a low, phlegmy chuckle. Not mocking. Pure, puzzled wonder. “Arey, wah! Cake? Happy birthday.”

Too embarrassed to correct him, Rohan slurred a thanks.

“Ah. A celebration,” the voice reasoned from the darkness. “The stomach is a conservative. An old man. It does not like such sudden revolutions.” The body politic, in a state of defection and defecation; Rohan almost laughed at his own pun.

“And you?” Rohan asked, the question leaping out, a sudden and strange curiosity cutting through his own plight. “What did you…?” The Hindi words emerged, awkward and foreign on his tongue, inflected with a Californian lilt as if he were ordering a complicated latte in Palo Alto.

There was a pause. In the next stall, Ravidas studied his calloused hands. He felt the familiar, hollow ache in his belly — a tenant that had taken up residence long ago, unrelated to the current turmoil. His affliction was not born of a single evening’s excess, but of a lifetime’s deficit. A persistent, grinding hunger that had, today, simply found a new, more liquid expression. He could not speak of his daily meal: dry chapatis and a smear of thecha, the raw chilli mash that burned away the taste of nothingness. He could not explain the hollow that cheap starch never filled. The words were too vast, too bleak for this conversation. They belonged to a different language altogether.

Instead, he offered a philosophy. “The body has its own seasons, little master. Sometimes a flood, sometimes a drought. Today, it seems the monsoon has arrived for both of us.”

Rohan nodded in the dark, a sigh of relief escaping him.

“Yes, the monsoon. A mutual affliction,” Ravidas said, his voice warming to the shared metaphor. “We are like two maharajas, you and I.”

“Maharajas? Kings? How?” Rohan asked, his voice softening with the beginnings of a smile.

“Of course,” Ravidas said, shifting his limbs. “Where else but in a palace does a man sit on a throne, hold court, and have his suffering heard across the land? We are royals on the pot, you and I.”

Rohan let out a genuine laugh, which was quickly cut short by a cramp. But the pain felt different now, shared and thus halved.

They spoke no more; the oldest language did the talking. The vigorous, watery percussion from Rohan’s side met its counterpoint in the deep, hollow ache from the other. On one side of the partition: the violent, liquid fallout of too much. On the other: the slow, crumbling austerity of never enough.

For those few minutes, they were absolute equals. The wall poster’s promises of dignity were, for once, almost true. They were two kings on identical, undignified thrones, united by a shared liquidity crisis. The Great Indian Dream, digested and excreted side-by-side, in a building that would be out of water by noon.

For a few more minutes, they sat in a more comfortable silence, a strange, invisible bond forged in the most unlikely of places. Finally, the crisis passed. The sounds of distress were replaced by the shuffle of feet and the buckle of belts.

Rohan stumbled out into the blinding afternoon sun. The world snapped back into its familiar dimensions. His mind, already cleansed of the ordeal, raced towards his next scene: the waiting car, the impatience of his drama tutor, his mother’s questions. He sprinted down the alleyway, past the dozing caretaker, a statue of indifference on a wooden stool.

The ritual of the rupee, the unspoken contract of this place, was a notion for another, slower world. It crumpled under the boy’s need to become himself again. He was already gone.

Bheem, the on-site caretaker (Grade IV, Temporary, No Benefits), stirred. He opened his eyes, milky with cataracts, and saw the retreating back, the blur of denim, the good shoes. He spat a crimson arc of betel into the dust, then addressed the onlooking stray dog: "The future of our nation," he declared, "is in a hurry to leave its past behind."

Minutes later, the Ravidas emerged. He moved slowly, the ordeal having aged him, his body older than the young voice he had used minutes before. He approached Bheem, his hand already searching the pouch at his waist, and placed a single warm rupee in the outstretched palm.

Bheem grunted, jerking his chin toward the left cubicle. He swung the door wide to reveal the evidence. “Your friend did a shit-and-run. The youth of today,” he muttered, “they have no aim.”

Ravidas followed the old man's gaze. He took in the mess — the water splashed across the floor, the unmistakable signs of panicked, clumsy flight. It was the mess of a boy who had never been taught how to clean up after himself.

He said nothing. He simply reached back into his pouch, his fingers finding a second coin. He placed it, slowly and deliberately, into Bheem’s still-waiting hand. Bheem nodded; the matter closed. Clucking his tongue at the state of the cubicle, he set to work with rag and bucket.

The Minister smiled on from his poster, already sweat-bloated under its cheap laminate, peeling at the corners. His promise of progress curdled in the gloom. The mop drew slow, dark commas across the floor.

Ravidas stepped back into the busy street. This was democracy’s dirty plumbing: not trickle-down, but mop-up.

               It seems the future doesn't give a squat.

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Let’s not dwell on how long it’s been. Time, after all, is an illusion—and an untrustworthy one at that. Big things are cooking behind the scenes—a larger writing project simmering steadily, and if all goes well (or even moderately well), I should be able to share more within the week. But in the meantime, I didn’t want to leave you entirely famished.

When Rumi came to the Oxford Union

In the spirit of feeding you something light but nourishing, I offer a recent experiment: a series of Onegin Sonnets I wrote for The Isis Magazine, asking the eternal (and admittedly absurd) question—what if Rumi were to address Oxford Union? For the uninitiated, the Onegin Sonnet is that sly, infuriating form popularized by Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin: fourteen lines, an aBaBccDDeFFeGG rhyme scheme, elegant enough to tempt, unforgiving enough to regret. I first encountered it through Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate, that improbable marvel—a novel entirely in Onegin stanzas, set not in Tsarist Russia but 1980s Silicon Valley. It was Seth’s virtuosity that nudged me to try the form myself.

The piece was mostly written during my stint as a Union officer, tasked with cold-emailing ‘the Great and the Good’ to lure them to speak before a sea of hungover undergraduates. It was, in its way, an education—on the politics of invitations, the choreography of flattery, the (not-so) quiet knife-fights of student politics. But amid it all, I found myself wondering: how would a Sufi poet respond to such an invitation? I won’t spoil it here; the piece is online, should you wish to explore: when Rumi came to the Oxford Union.

On Agha Shahid Ali and James Merrill

The following remarks were delivered at The Dead Poets Appreciation Society at Oxford, in the Old Library of Lady Margaret Hall. It features one of my favourite poets, Agha Shahid Ali, who’s appeared on a number of Ink-uilab chapters before (See: Index):

As one reads through the oeuvre of Agha Shahid Ali, the Kashmiri-American poet, James Merrill is an inescapable phantom, haunting the pages. is an inescapable presence, a quiet spectre haunting the margins. I want to take this opportunity to reflect on their literary friendship and collate some anecdotes and correspondence. I make no claim to expertise on either poet, and I rely heavily on the work of Amitav Ghosh, Jason Schneiderman, and Manan Kapoor.

Amitav Ghosh once asked Shahid “How did you meet Merrill?”

“I heard he was coming down [to Tucson, Arizona] for a reading and I told the people in charge that I wanted to meet him. They said, ‘then why don’t you cook for him?’ So I did.”

Merrill, a lover of food, was charmed by Shahid’s famed hospitality and immediately drawn to his warmth and camaraderie. When he learned that Shahid would be moving to Hamilton College in upstate New York, Merrill gave him his phone number and urged him to stay in touch. Later, when Shahid gave his first reading at the Academy of American Poets, Merrill was in the audience—a quiet but unmistakable gesture of esteem from one of America’s most celebrated poets.

“Afterwards,” Shahid recalled, “everybody rushed up and said, ‘Did you know that Jim Merrill was here?’ My stock in New York went up a thousand-fold that evening.”

Their friendship deepened through a steady exchange of letters. Merrill’s influence on Shahid’s work, especially his embrace of form, is frequently noted. It was after meeting Merrill that Shahid began experimenting seriously with traditional verse structures—tackling forms like the sestina and canzone. Ghosh writes, “No one had a greater influence on Shahid’s poetry than James Merrill.” Critics have linked this turn toward formalism with Shahid’s poetic maturation; by the late 1990s, he had become closely associated with formal poetry, especially the ghazal.

In their correspondence, Merrill acted as a generous mentor, offering guidance on matters of technique. Mark Doty remarked that Merrill’s influence extended beyond formal elegance to a sensibility—a “resonant, emotional ambiguity” that allowed Shahid to “simultaneously celebrate love and lament a landscape of personal and public losses.” Shahid once recalled that Merrill had critiqued one of his rhyme pairs, vetoing the weak “seem/scene” in favour of the stronger “clean/scene,” and, to aid his revision, mailed him a rhyming dictionary. Shahid revised the poem according to Merrill’s advice and was rewarded with Merrill’s phone call of congratulations. That rhyming dictionary remained a prized possession; Shahid later insisted that all his own poetry students acquire one, a testament to how deeply he internalised Merrill’s formalist ethos.

In one letter, he describes Merrill’s Selected Poems (note: not Merrill himself) as “my constant mentor”; in another, he successfully recommends Merrill’s poetry to to none other than Edward Said. Merrill’s words echo in the epigraphs of several ghazals; his initials, “JM,” even appear as a character in at least two poems. Ali would go on to dedicate his “The Country Without a Post Office” to Merrill. So much was his impact that, Amitav Ghosh recalls “In Shahid’s apartment there were several shrine-like niches that were filled with pictures of the people he worshipped: [the singer] Begum Akhtar was one of these, along with his father, his mother and James Merrill.”

Merrill, in turn, reviewed Shahid’s A Nostalgist’s Map of America with characteristic generosity:

“There are Mogul palace ceilings whose countless mirrored convexities at once reduce, multiply, scatter and enchant the figures under their spell. If I may speak for “America,” it is a privilege to be held in so mercurial, many-faceted a gaze as this poet’s, who goes to the heart of my troubles and turns them into bitter honey.”

The conversation between the poets would continue, with Shahid actually weaving this blurb into a stanza of one of his Ghazal Tonight (Shahid’s Brother, Iqbal reads Tonight in the video):

Mughal ceilings, let your mirrored convexities

multiply me at once under your spell tonight.

Jason Schneiderman writes, “Merrill was his real-life mentor, a flesh-and-blood friend, and a powerful influence whose example led Agha both toward the increasing formalism that opened out onto his embrace of the ghazal, as well as his guide into death.”

Indeed, as Shahid approached his own mortality, he took up Merrill’s technique of poetic ventriloquism. In Sandover, Merrill had summoned voices—most famously Auden’s—via the Ouija board, and used capitalization to distinguish these spectral utterances.

In the poem where he most explicitly prefigured his death, I Dream I Am at the Ghat of the Only World, Merrill’s voice appears, guiding him through the afterworld, speaking in capital letters. Here’s an excerpt, featuring Merrill’s voice and initials:

A night of ghazals comes to an end. The singer

departs through her chosen mirror, her one diamond

cut on her countless necks. I, as ever, linger

till chandeliers dim to the blue of Samarkand

domes and I've again lost everyone. Which mirror

opened for JM’s descent to the skeletoned

dark? Will I know the waiting boat? The burnt water?

By which mirror Eqbal, in his clear undertone,

still plots to end all human pain? When my mother

died, he had wept so far away in Pakistan...

In the growing dark, through my own mirror, steps lead me

to the boat. From which time do I know the oarsman?

…..

I cry out by the shrine door “I am no infidel

but on my knees on shore the believer in the rain —”

This ts farewell I have rowed you this ts farewell

“— believer Mother still on his knees in the rain

who knows that you even veiled are the one who employs

her touch like a lamp to show me again and again

to myself.” AND THE LOVER COLDER AND WISER destroys

all hope ... He is Death . . . His is the moving finger .. .

The boat enters fog . . . which thickens to clear . . . for one voice:

WEEPING? YOU MUST NOT. I ask, “Which world will bring her

back, or will he who wears his heart on his sleeve eaves-

drop always, in his inmost depths, on a cruel harbinger?”

SHAHID, HUSH. THIS IS ME, JAMES. THE LOVED ONE

ALWAYS LEAVES.

BM

By now, it’s practically ritual to begin these essays with a mea culpa for my prolonged absence. This time, however, I assure you it’s for reasons beyond mere procrastination. Something’s stirring behind the scenes—a grander writing project taking shape. Friends have patiently endured my endless rants, ramblings, and raves about it for months, and soon enough, this little corner of the internet will, too. Stay tuned.

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For now, I present a smaller, more peculiar offering. This essay, Chapter 21, extends on an idea I’ve been mulling over for three years: the notion that Fyodor Dostoevsky’s cast of beatniks, rebels, subterraneans, and dreamers may be precisely the people economists have overlooked in their models—and that this omission changes everything.

I. Preface

This essay, and its somewhat absurd title, is a nod to an unlikely inspiration. Some time ago, while wandering the Map Room at the Lizzie in New Haven, I stumbled upon Shakespeare as an Economist (1913), a curious pamphlet by Henry W. Farnam, a 20th-century professor of political economy at Yale. It seemed almost comically out of place—a slim, leather-bound volume nestled awkwardly among hefty tomes on Elizabethan drama and literary criticism. Its title intrigued me, a scholarly non sequitur that whispered of overlooked connections between the Bard’s tragedies and the mechanics of economic life. [Read Farnam's pamphlet online. In 1931, he expanded the booklet into an extended volume, Shakespeare's Economics]. Farnam opens his preface with:

A MERE economist who undertakes to write about Shakespeare must seem as audacious as Orlando, when he undertook to get a fall out of Charles, the professional wrestler … Have we not had books dealing with Shakespeare's grammar, his pronunciation, his punctuation; his knowledge of history and jurisprudence; his morality; his acquaintance with birds, with natural history, and with classical antiquity; his familiarity with medicine and the Bible; and even with his insomnia? And how can critics have overlooked his interest in economics? Economic conditions everywhere determine to a large extent political power, social relations, and the organization of the family, all of which are important elements in the business as well as the romance of life.

Fast forward a year to a midnight scene in old Jeddah, where I found myself reading Notes from the Underground in a dimly lit teashop. (Yes, there’s a certain irony to reading the confessions of the Underground Man, with his absurd musings on freedom and morality, in modern Saudi Arabia.) It was there that Farnam’s project resurfaced in my mind. If Shakespeare could be examined through an economic lens, why not Dostoevsky?

Unlike Farnam, however, this essay is not an attempt at grand theorizing, nor does it suggest that Dostoevsky deliberately embedded economic doctrines in his novels. Instead, consider this a series of observations on what I collectively term ‘Dostoevskian Economics’—a worldview fundamentally opposed to the tidy rationalism cherished by many a neoclassical economist. Dostoevsky’s worlds—rife with psychological torment, existential doubt, and moral quandaries—challenge us to rethink the assumptions underpinning modern economic thought: the primacy of rational choice, the predictability of utility maximization, and the pursuit of equilibrium. In Dostoevsky’s universe, characters seek suffering, reject utopia, and revel in chaos, often choosing self-destruction over calculated gain. They embody a deeply human irrationality that resists the predictive logic of the Homo economicus. Dostoevsky does not outright reject classical frameworks; rather he forces us to confront their limits. In doing so, he offers a counter-narrative that invites us to explore the messy, illogical heart of human motivation—a realm where the numbers don’t always add up, and where two times two is sometimes, charmingly, five.

II. Rational? Hardly. Human? Absolutely.

For centuries, economic theorists have clung to the comforting myth of homo economicus—that self-interested, utility-maximizing paragon of rationality who graces countless models. In his 1881 Mathematical Psychics, Francis Edgeworth declared, “The first principle of Economics is that every agent is actuated only by self-interest.”1 For simplicity, we might say that homo economicus operates under three foundational assumptions:

a) She is self-interested.
b) She knows her self-interest.
c) She seeks to maximize said self-interest through rational decision-making.

In this framework, rationality means that homo economicus not only identifies the most efficient means to achieve her goals but also consistently chooses actions aligning with her well-defined preferences. If Dostoevsky, ever the philosophical gadfly, had a ruble for every time a theorist made such tidy claims, he could have funded another exile in Siberia.

Take Raskolnikov, whose infamous plan to murder the pawnbroker in Crime and Punishment is steeped in cold utilitarian calculus. By killing this “useless” woman, he reasons, he can redistribute her wealth for the greater good. A cost-benefit analysis worthy of any first-year economics course. The scheme collapses not under the weight of external forces but from within—Raskolnikov is undone by moral agony and existential dread. Rationality collapses; conscience prevails. Through Raskolnikov, Dostoevsky warns of the dangers inherent in applying rational utility to moral dilemmas. The greater good, as calculated by our hypothetical economist, becomes grotesque when filtered through the messy reality of human emotions.

Economic Notes from the Underground

If Raskolnikov’s downfall exposes the flaws in rationalizing morality, Notes from the Underground obliterates rational utility altogether. The Underground Man, with caustic disdain, mocks the entire enterprise of rational choice: "What is profit? And will you take it upon yourself to define with perfect exactitude precisely what man's profit consists in?2

Written as a direct response to Nikolay Chernyshevsky’s utopian socialism, most notably his novel What Is to Be Done?, Notes from the Underground dismantles the deterministic belief that human behaviour can be predicted, controlled, and optimized through rational models. Chernyshevsky, with the zeal of a social scientist, envisioned a world where enlightened self-interest would lead to universal harmony. Dostoevsky, however, saw this as a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature. [Note: I’ve written about Cheryshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? on Ink-uilab before. See Chapter 4, where I compare it to five other texts of the same name].

The Underground Man insists that even when humans are presented with clear, rational paths to their supposed self-interest, they often choose the opposite—not from ignorance, but from sheer, stubborn willfulness:

If instead of a palace there is a chicken coop, and it starts to rain, I will perhaps get into the chicken coop to avoid a wetting, but all the same I will not take the chicken coop for a palace out of gratitude for its having kept me from the rain. You laugh, you even say that in that case it makes no difference—chicken coop or mansion. Yes, say I, if one were to live only so as not to get wet. But what's to be done if I've taken it into my head that one does not live only for that, and that if one is to live, it had better be in a mansion? This is my wanting, this is my desire. You will scrape it out of me only when you change my desires …. Let it even be so that the crystal edifice is a bluff, that by the laws of nature it should not even be, and that I've invented it only as a result of my own stupidity, as a result of certain old nonrational habits of our generation. But what do I care if it should not be? What difference does it make, since it exists in my desires, or, better, exists as long as my desires exist?

Desires, the Underground Man insists, are not mere byproducts of material conditions or survival instincts. They are irrational, stubborn, and often divorced from practical considerations. Economists can plot preferences on indifference curves, but those curves are blind to the irrational dream of a palace—even when that palace is a fantasy, impractical or outright impossible.

Utility of Process > Utility of Outcome

The Underground Man ridicules social science’s fixation on outcomes, arguing that the act of striving often eclipses the goal itself. In his view, the ‘grind’ provides its own kind of perverse utility, independent of the result:

Man is a frivolous and unseemly being, and perhaps, similar to a chess player, likes only the process of achieving the goal, but not the goal itself… Suppose all man ever does is search for this two times two is four; he crosses oceans, he sacrifices his life in the search; but to search it out, actually to find it—by God, he's somehow afraid.

Do our economic models capture this peculiar infatuation with process over product? Behavioral economics, with its ever-growing bestiary of biases, tries to offer some answers. Consider the IKEA effect, where people overvalue things they’ve had a hand in building, or omission bias, where harm by inaction feels morally lighter than harm by action. Even so, these concepts merely scratch the surface. Dostoevsky’s insight aligns, curiously, with Amartya Sen’s Capability Approach. In this framework, human agency isn’t solely about the outcomes—wealth, consumption, material achievements—but about the freedom to pursue and value activities. It’s the doing, the striving, that matters. For Dostoevsky, this Nietzschean emphasis on the act of striving elevates the process as life’s real currency. Success, it seems, is a lesser god.

Perfect Information, Perfect Folly

Ah, but here come the micro-theorists waving Game Theory textbooks! Surely, they insist, irrationality arises from a lack of information. Give people perfect information, and rational choices will follow. The Underground Man spits on this notion with characteristic venom:

Oh, tell me, who first announced, who was the first to proclaim that man does dirty only because he doesn't know his real interests; and that were he to be enlightened, were his eyes to be opened to his real, normal interests, man would immediately stop doing dirty, would immediately become good and noble, because, being enlightened and understanding his real profit, he would see his real profit precisely in the good, and it's common knowledge that no man can act knowingly against his own profit, consequently, out of necessity, so to speak, he would start doing good? Oh, the babe! Oh, the pure, innocent child! And when was it, to begin with, in all these thousands of years, that man acted solely for his own profit?

Even with perfect knowledge, humanity would still sabotage itself. This isn’t mere oversight; it’s deliberate, gleeful defiance. Which brings us to Dostoevsky’s most damning critique of rationality: humanity’s love for spite.

The Sweet Taste of Spite

The Underground Man delights in shredding the notion that humans act in their best interest. Rationality assumes that, given the right conditions, tools, and knowledge, people will make choices that maximize their well-being. Dostoevsky flips this premise on its head: hand humanity every comfort, security, and rational incentive, and it will still torch the house just to feel the warmth. Why? Because rationality can’t account for spite3.

What can be expected of man as a being endowed with such strange qualities [of good behaviour]? Shower him with all earthly blessings, drown him in happiness completely, over his head, so that only bubbles pop up on the surface of happiness, as on water; give him such economic satisfaction that he no longer has anything left to do at all except sleep, eat gingerbread, and worry about the noncessation of world history – and it is here, just here, that he, this man, out of sheer ingratitude, out of sheer lampoonery, will do something nasty. He will even risk his gingerbread, and wish on purpose for the most pernicious nonsense, the most noneconomical meaninglessness, solely in order to mix into all this positive good sense his own pernicious, fantastical element.

The Underground Man’s tirade sharpens: even in a world governed by the immutable laws of science and logic, man’s defiance persists. He cannot—and will not—be reduced to a cog in the grand machinery of reason.

It is precisely his fantastic dreams, his most banal stupidity, that he will wish to keep hold of, with the sole purpose of confirming to himself (as if it were so very necessary) that human beings are still human beings and not piano keys, which, though played upon with their own hands by the laws of nature themselves, are in danger of being played so much that outside the calendar it will be impossible to want anything.

And more than that: even if it should indeed turn out that he is a piano key, if it were even proved to him mathematically and by natural science, he would still not come to reason, but would do something contrary on purpose, solely out of ingratitude alone; essentially to have his own way.

This isn’t just rebellion for rebellion’s sake; it’s a performance, an act of existential theatre. In a world obsessed with optimization, the Underground Man steps onto the stage and declares: I’d rather burn it all down.

“What is to be done with the millions of facts testifying to how people knowingly, that is, fully understanding their real profit, would put it in second place and throw themselves onto another path, a risk, a perchance, not compelled by anyone or anything, but precisely as if they simply did not want the designated path, and stubbornly, willfully pushed off onto another one, difficult, absurd, searching for it all but in the dark. So, then, this stubbornness and willfulness were really more agreeable to them than any profit . . Profit! What is profit?

This isn’t mere rebellion—it’s the active pursuit of disutility. Humans seem to derive a perverse satisfaction from undermining their own interests, engaging in behaviours that defy logic and harm themselves. Overspending, under-saving, addiction, or, in Raskolnikov’s case, murder—each act stands as a monument to the irrational.

Lest you dismiss this as the ramblings of 19th-century Russian angst, modern thinkers have picked up Dostoevsky’s torch. Bryan Caplan’s Rational Irrationality and Herbert Simon’s Bounded Rationality translate the Underground Man’s diatribes into today’s academic lexicon. Simon posits that humans, constrained by time, cognitive limits, and incomplete information, settle for “good enough” solutions rather than optimal ones. Caplan, meanwhile, explores how individuals knowingly embrace irrational beliefs or behaviours because the emotional or social rewards outweigh the logical costs. But here’s where Dostoevsky pulls ahead: he doesn’t merely acknowledge suboptimal choices; he revels in the actively destructive. This is where Shinsuke Ikeda’s The Economics of Self-Destructive Choices comes into play. Ikeda examines why people engage in behaviours—overspending, under-saving, addiction—that are predictably harmful. The Underground Man would skim Ikeda’s thesis and chuckle: Self-destruction isn’t a bug; it’s a feature.

I’ll admit, I don’t entirely buy the Underground Man’s nihilistic grandstanding (see Footnote 3 and my Conclusion). Perhaps I am the naive optimist he so sardonically mocks.

III. Even if Man were Rational, Utopia would Crumble

Dostoevsky had no patience for utopias. The idea of Chernevsky’s perfect society, where every variable is controlled, every behaviour optimized, and every conflict neatly resolved, struck him as both naïve and fundamentally dangerous. His target was not just the feasibility of such a society but its very premise: perfection, he argued, is a prison. Utopia, in all its sterile brilliance, is unbearably boring—and boredom, as Dostoevsky knew, is the mother of chaos. In this, he eerily echoes Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees (1714) —though the causes differ, the conclusions converge: harmony is inherently unstable.

In Notes, the Underground Man skewers this ideal with his signature sardonic wit:

And it is then – this is still you speaking – that new economic relations (Note: Coulson translates this as “Political Economy”) will come, quite ready-made, and also calculated with mathematical precision, so that all possible questions will vanish in an instant, essentially because they will have been given all possible answers. Then the crystal palace will get built. Then . . . well, in short, then the bird Kagan will come flying.

This “crystal palace” is no random metaphor. It’s a direct swipe at Chernyshevsky’s text, where the heroine Viéra dreams of a society embodied by a glittering Crystal Palace—a marvel of technological and social harmony. To Dostoevsky, such visions were not just unrealistic but spiritually barren. The problem wasn’t that utopia couldn’t be built; it was that once built, it would immediately start to rot from within.

Of course, there's no guaranteeing (this is me speaking now) that it won't, for example, be terribly boring then (because what is there to do if everything's calculated according to some little table?), but, on the other hand, it will all be extremely reasonable. Of course, what inventions can boredom not lead to!

Boredom, Dostoevsky suggests, is a greater threat to utopia than failure. It is boredom that compels rebellion.

The Underground Man foresees a future where, amid the serene monotony of perfect rationality, some discontented soul—a “gentleman of retrograde and jeering physiognomy”—would inevitably emerge:

Man really is stupid, phenomenally stupid... I, for example, would not be the least bit surprised if suddenly, out of the blue, amid the universal future reasonableness, some gentleman... should emerge, set his arms akimbo, and say to us all: ‘Well, gentlemen, why don’t we reduce all this reasonableness to dust with one good kick, for the sole purpose of sending all these logarithms to the devil and living once more according to our own stupid will!’

Is Dostoevskian Economics Capitalism?

Let’s clear the air: Dostoevsky’s critique of utopia is not an endorsement of its opposite. In researching this essay, I encountered numerous articles—many from overtly conservative publications—using Dostoevsky as a bludgeon against socialism, positioning him as some proto-capitalist anti-Marxist Christian-existentialist defender of free markets. This interpretation, frankly, is nonsense. Dostoevsky wasn’t serenading the virtues of laissez-faire capitalism or Russian feudalism. If anything, his contempt for materialism and capitalistic greed was just as scathing.

In Crime and Punishment, Luzhin—a grotesque caricature of capitalist ambition—embodies the moral decay wealth can bring. He blamed this Dostoevsky’s broader critique of materialism is laid bare in A Writer’s Diary:4:

There appeared some twisted and unheard of distortion of ideas in people with occupying worshiping of materialism. In this case, I call materialism people’s worshipping of the money idol, the worshipping the power of the golden sack. It’s as if a notion has invaded the people that the sack is now everything, that it contains all the power, and that everything that they were told, that everything that their fathers taught them, is all nonsense

Vadim Shneyder’s interpretation (2018) of The Idiot reinforces this point:

Once the capitalists have won, they enter a time that marks the cessation of events as such. While within the novel Lebedev can interpret Russia's railroad network as a fulfillment of apocalyptic prophecy, the further progression of the economic struggle between merchants and capitalists in The Idiot results in a radical separation between the temporality of capitalism and a time that could accommodate an apocalyptic ending. In contrast to so many accounts, both in the nineteenth century and in the present day, that stress, alternatively, the dynamism, the creativity, or the violence of capitalism, The Idiot posits that a fully capitalist world is one in which nothing can happen and about which nothing can be said.

As I understand it, Dostoevsky’s critique isn’t limited to utopian socialism; he levels the same existential charges at capitalism. Both systems, in their extreme forms, lead to a spiritual vacuum—a world where “nothing can happen.” Capitalism, with its relentless commodification, leads to a narrative void. It strips life of its crises, its dramas, its very humanity. Humanity, trapped in a world where every question has been answered and every conflict resolved, would manufacture chaos just to feel alive again. Dostoevsky’s warning is clear: utopias don’t fail because they’re impossible; they fail because they’re insufferable. Perfection is unbearable.

IV. All Is Delusion

Having dismantled the myth of individual rationality, Dostoevsky scales his critique to society itself, targeting the smug certainties of social scientists and empiricists who believe humanity can be neatly charted and improved through data, logic, and systems. For Dostoevsky, such faith in rationality was not only misguided but dangerous. Humans are not mere nodes in decision trees; they are driven by forces that defy prediction—freedom, rebellion, even destruction. These impulses, he argued, render any purely rational model of human behaviour laughably incomplete.

In Notes, he launches a scathing attack on the reductionist tendencies of his time:

Gentlemen, as far as I know, you have taken your whole inventory of human profits from an average of statistical figures and scientific-economic formulas. Because profit for you is prosperity, wealth, freedom, peace, and so on and so forth; so that a man who, for example, openly and knowingly went against this whole inventory would, in your opinion—well, and also in mine, of course—be an obscurantist or a complete madman, right? But here is the surprising thing: how does it happen that all these statisticians, sages, and lovers of mankind, in calculating human profits, constantly omit one profit? They don't even take it into account in the way it ought to be taken, and yet the whole account depends on that.

In The Idiot, Dostoevsky refines this critique through Lebedev, who savagely mocks Thomas Malthus, the 19th-century English economist infamous for his dire predictions about overpopulation and famine. Malthus argued that population growth would inevitably outstrip food supply, necessitating suffering as a natural corrective. Lebedev delivers a scornful indictment:

There has already been Malthus, the friend of mankind. But a friend of mankind with shaky moral foundations is a cannibal of mankind, to say nothing of his vainglory; insult the vainglory of one of these numberless friends of mankind, and he is ready at once to set fire to the four corners of the world out of petty vengeance—the same, however, as any one of us, to speak fairly, as myself, the vilest of all, for I might be the first to bring wood and then run away. But again, that’s not the point!

Lebedev’s jab cuts to the heart of utilitarianism’s moral paradox. In the pursuit of "the greater good," human lives are reduced to mere statistics, expendable in service of systemic goals. Dostoevsky saw in Malthus—and in all grand social theorists—a chilling tendency to dehumanize, justifying cruelty under the guise of progress.

‘The Principles of Economics Before Everything’

Dostoevsky’s satirical short story The Crocodile takes these critiques to absurd heights. Written under the pseudonym A.Y. Poretsky, The Crocodile offers a darkly humorous exploration of economic obsession. Surprisingly lighthearted in tone, it’s almost shocking to think Dostoevsky penned it—its absurdity feels more akin to the works of Roald Dahl or Ilf and Petrov. In the story, a civil servant named Ivan Matveich and his wife, Yelena Ivanovna, visit a shopping arcade at her insistence to see a crocodile on display in one of the exhibitions.  At one point, Ivan, eager to impress, playfully tickles the crocodile’s snout with his glove. In response, the crocodile swallows him whole. Remarkably, Ivan survives—finding himself trapped inside what turns out to be a hollow and unexpectedly spacious reptile. His wife and their friend, Semyon Semyonitch, plead with the German proprietor to kill the crocodile and free Ivan. But the proprietor, concerned about his livelihood, refuses—the crocodile is his prized attraction. Miraculously, Ivan survives inside the beast and begins issuing declarations from within:

“The principles of economics before everything,” he declares, counseling his distraught wife and friend not to harm the crocodile, as it would inconvenience the German proprietor who relies on it for his livelihood.

The absurdity of Ivan’s situation—his complete adaptation to life inside a literal beast—mirrors the broader dehumanization wrought by economic rationalism. The repeated refrain in the story “the economic principle first!” parodies Russia’s 19th-century push for foreign investment and industrial growth, which prioritized wealth over human welfare.

The tale’s surreal humour invites comparisons to Kafka’s Metamorphosis. While one story explores a man’s metamorphosis into a creature, the other presents a man being devoured by one. The distinction is ontological—Gregor Samsa becomes the insect, whereas Ivan Matveich merely exists within the crocodile. Yet, in both tales, the protagonists exhibit a similar eerie complacency. Faced with what should be existentially terrifying—whether transforming into or being consumed by a creature—both men respond with a passive resignation.

Even the most sophisticated social theories, Dostoevsky warns, rest on shaky foundations. He takes aim at the blind faith in systems that promise to renew humanity through logic and order:

I boldly declare that all these beautiful systems, all these theories that explain to mankind its true, normal interests, so that, striving necessarily to attain these interests, it would at once become good and noble – all this, in my opinion, is so far only logistics! Yes, sirs, logistics! For merely to assert this theory of the renewal of all mankind by means of a system of its own profits – this, to my mind, is almost the same as . . . well, let's say, for example, the same as asserting, with Buckle, that man gets softer from civilization and, consequently, becomes less bloodthirsty and less capable of war.

Dostoevsky’s disdain for “logistics” reflects his rejection of the mechanistic view of human nature. Systems, no matter how meticulously designed, inevitably distort truth to fit their own logic. This critique remains eerily relevant today, in a world where algorithms promise optimization but often exacerbate inequality and erode humanity.

But man is so partial to systems and abstract conclusions that he is ready intentionally to distort the truth, to turn a blind eye and a deaf ear, only so as to justify his logic.

V. Is there anything to discuss?

Ergo, we arrive at a haunting, almost primal question:

Maybe man does not love well-being only? Maybe he loves suffering just as much? Maybe suffering is just as profitable for him as well-being? For man sometimes loves suffering terribly much, to the point of passion, and that is a fact.

Dostoevsky dismantles the Enlightenment’s central conceit: that human beings, guided by reason, could build a society optimized for happiness. But what if suffering is as integral to the human experience as joy? The Underground Man offers no comfort. Rather, he revels in a kind of nihilistic inertia:

The final end, gentlemen: better to do nothing! Better conscious inertia! And so, long live the underground!

The Modern economics, for all its rigour, has finally begun to confront its blind spots. The once-central figure of Homo economicus—that tireless, rational, self-interested optimizer—is being questioned. Whether the discipline has fully internalized this disillusionment is another matter. Amartya Sen, in Rational Fools, puts it succinctly:

If he (the economic man) shines at all, he shines in comparison—in contrast—with the dominant image of the rational fool.

But let’s not wallow too long in the shadow of Dostoevsky’s existential gloom. To counterbalance the Underground Man’s bitterness, I offer light: Frank Ramsey.

Dostoevsky’s Existentialist vs. Ramsey’s Pragmatist

If Dostoevsky’s protagonist drags us into the murky depths of nihilism, Ramsey—a polymath whose genius spanned philosophy, mathematics, and economics—beckons us toward pragmatic clarity. As one of my favourite thinkers, it’s about time we formally induct Ramsey into the Ink-uilab pantheon. He died at just 26, yet his work remains foundational across disciplines. For those uninitiated, I highly recommend this Atlantic profile and Cheryl Misak’s biography A Sheer Excess of Powers. Ramsey wasn’t merely proficient in multiple fields; he was transformative. His eponymous contributions pepper syllabi in ways that are almost comical in their ubiquity. I had the curious experience of encountering concepts named after him in various university classes—discrete math, set theory, probability theory, linguistic philosophy, macroeconomics—blissfully unaware they all stemmed from the same towering intellect.

In mathematics, Ramsey essentially founded an entire branch of mathematics, now known as Ramsey Theory. In logic and set theory, he extended and refined the work of Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead in their Principia Mathematica, developing the Theory of (Simple) Types which laid the groundwork for Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorems.

In philosophy, Ramsey advanced the “redundancy theory of truth,” asserting that to say “It is true that X” is no more meaningful than simply asserting X. To put it plainly, saying “Frank Ramsey was a genius” is functionally identical to “‘Frank Ramsey was a genius’ is true.”

And economics? His Ramsey Model remains foundational, tackling the intergenerational allocation of resources with a sophistication that policymakers still grapple with. Probability theory, taxation models—Ramsey’s fingerprints are everywhere. As if this weren’t enough, his ideas were often so ahead of their time that some were rediscovered independently decades later, as though scholars collectively stumbled upon the same treasure chest long buried. He died at 26.

But Ramsey doesn’t merely dazzle with intellectual feats; he offers an antidote to Dostoevsky’s existential abyss. Speaking at the Cambridge Apostles, Ramsey posed a deceptively simple question: Is there anything left to discuss? With science demystifying the cosmos and religion retreating from public life, he worried that the big questions were devolving into “either technical or ridiculous.” He half-jokingly suggested that conversation, except among experts, was now just a matter of saying how one felt and comparing notes. Yet his closing remarks were anything but trivial:

My picture of the world is drawn in perspective and not like a model to scale. The foreground is occupied by human beings and the stars are as small as three-penny bits. I don’t believe in astronomy, except as a complicated description of part of the course of human and possibly animal sensation. I apply my perspective not merely to space but also to time. In time the world will cool and everything will die; by that is still a long time off still and its present value at compound discount is almost nothing. Nor is the present less valuable because the future will be blank. Humanity, which fills the foreground of my picture, I find interesting and on the whole admirable. I find, just now at least, the world a pleasant and exciting place. You may find it depressing; I am sorry for you, and you despise me. But I have reason and you have none; you would only have a reason for despising me if your feeling corresponded to the fact in a way mine didn’t. But neither can correspond to the fact. The fact is not in itself good or bad; it is just that it thrills me but depresses you. On the other hand, I pity you with reason, because it is pleasanter to be thrilled than to be depressed, and not merely pleasanter but better for all one’s activities.5

Where Dostoevsky’s Underground Man is tormented by the unyielding laws of arithmetic—“two times two is four”—Ramsey embraces the universe’s indifferent mechanics. Given the choice between Dostoevsky’s bitter and unhappy existentialist and Ramsey’s self-aware yet content pragmatist, I’d choose the latter every time.

VI. Coda

We end where we began, with Professor Farnam’s reflections on Shakespeare as an “economist of deep insight.” His pamphlet insists that the dismal science is not so dismal after all:

If the greatest poet of the English tongue was also an economist of deep insight, then economics must have something to do with poetry. Indeed not only does economic prosperity furnish the humus in which the flower of poetry unfolds its greatest beauty, but economic processes supply more directly the thoughts, the similes, the action of dramas which touch upon the vital interests of men and society.

Farnam’s claim—that the great economist must also be a poet—feels especially apt as we survey the strange, sprawling terrain of this essay. If we are to take Farnam seriously, then perhaps Dostoevsky and Ramsey are not so much opposites as complementary poets of their respective domains. The Underground Man captures the tragic, often absurd depictions of human defiance, while Ramsey, with mathematical precision, sketches the contours of our fragile glee.

And so we close with verse, as all things should. Nabokov’s translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin offers a fitting benediction—a (topically Russian) ode to the quiet pleasures and existential surrender that define our saintly lives:

Rambles, and reading, and sound sleep,
The sylvan shade, the purl of streams,
Sometimes a white-skinned, dark-eyed girl's
Young and fresh kiss,
A horse of mettle, bridle-true,
A rather fancy dinner,
A bottle of bright wine,
Seclusion, quiet —
This was Onegin's saintly life;
And he insensibly to it
Surrendered, the fair summer days
In carefree mollitude not counting,
Oblivious of both town and friends
And of the boredom of festive device

Best,

BM

(All errors are my own, and a by-product of editing this in The Bod’s Subterranean Library — literal Notes in the Underground)

At this point, it’s almost a cliché to apologize for the erratic schedule of these dispatches. However, if there’s anything consistent about this newsletter, it’s precisely its unpredictability! We’ve now hit a record number of readers, completed our 20th chapter from another obscure corner of the globe, and we’re marking the two-year anniversary of these earnest, albeit middling, emails. I am immensely grateful for your readership, your sometimes demanding expectations for the next instalment, and your patience with my pretensions.

Nearly 14 years have elapsed since my last visit to this mammoth of a nation, and I returned with as much ambiguity as when I’d departed. Last time, fresh off the buzz of a successful Beijing Olympics and on the ice of a rising China, I was an eight-year-old more concerned with acquiring copycat Lego sets than with geopolitical shifts. Though none of my milk teeth were lost this time around, the ground underfoot was equally transformative, set against the backdrop of what some deem the next cold war and nearly five years since accusations flew of cultural genocide. With many analysts predicting the great Chinese slowdown, the resonance of this visit bore a matured, albeit cautious, curiosity.

The sheer scale of the nation defies simple narratives—this is arguably true for most large states. Yet, here I am, without the luxury to pen a comprehensive manuscript detailing these weeks of travel. Instead, what unfolds in this dispatch is part observations, part analysis, and part open questions from a three-week expedition spanning major urban centres, the lush south, and the remote regions of Xinjiang. For those of you peering through your screens for a Bill Bryson-esque travel memoir or a Project Syndicate-style policy critique titled ‘Taming China’s Dragon,’ let me temper your expectations right away: this is neither. This ink-uilab is split into seven chapters: I. Introduction, II. on the Economy, III. on the State, IV. on global power dynamics, V. on state control, VI. on integration and cultural homogenization, and VII. A Conclusion.

I. Stability above all

Navigating through China’s sprawling expanse, from neon-lit skylines to ancient, ashen Buddhist caves, it’s challenging to clump observations into a singular theme. Nor is it fair to make broad claims about ‘China’ or ‘the Chinese.’ I’d like to caveat any broad generalizations and assumptions as mere observations by a single non-local traveller who does not speak Mandarin. Humbly, it will be aeons before I possess a sense of cultural understanding and historical and linguistic knowledge to comment on China (or any nation, for that matter) with some level of conviction.

However, if compelled to pinpoint a singular narrative thread for the sake of this essay, it would undoubtedly focus on the motif of a state in relentless pursuit of stability. This pursuit, once seemingly achieved, remains perpetually shrouded in a cloak of paranoia—a condition not exclusively Chinese but observable across many post-colonial states wrestling with their rapid developmental trajectories and historical complexities. I’ve often argued that the Indian state, given its breadth and scale, is similarly paranoid. It’s jittery because it is acutely aware of its own imbalances and fragility, perched on the fulcrum of a very narrow balance, one that could be destabilized by seemingly minor incidents escalating into significant upheavals. The Chinese scenario mirrors this, with the state employing extensive surveillance, economic regulations, internet restrictions, and stringent educational directives to maintain control. The global indices on digital surveillance place China at the forefront, utilizing advanced technology to monitor its citizens far beyond what many democracies would consider acceptable. This web of surveillance extends to social control systems and facial recognition technologies (we scanned our faces an average of five times a day) that regulate public behaviours, underpinning a broader strategy to cement societal compliance. Averse as I am to superficial commentary on this paranoia, it appears less a trait unique to Xi Jinping’s administration than a characteristic inherent to any nation at this stage of development—India under Modi exhibits strikingly similar behaviour. However, when this inherent paranoia is coupled with China’s exceptional state capacity, the dynamics at play intensify, creating a unique set of challenges and responses. More on this later -

II. A Miracle with Chinese Characteristics?

Given my inclination toward economic analysis, the unfolding narrative of China’s economy was particularly compelling during my visit. It's hard not to marvel at what can only be described as an economic miracle. Observing the robust pillars of China's poverty eradication and infrastructural campaigns, one cannot help but recall the arguments presented by Professor Arvind Subramanian in his work, Eclipse. Nearly a decade and a half ago, Subramanian prognosticated with remarkable prescience that “China's Dominance Is a Sure Thing,” an assertion that holds considerable weight even as the nation grapples with a trade war with America, a deceleration in economic growth, bouts of currency volatility, and stringent controls on capital outflows amid a global pandemic. Naturally, the economic miracle of China naturally compels a comparison with India. A lingering question one is faced with is: “Will India be the next China.” I’d strongly recommend this analysis in Foreign Policy by Subramanian and Felman from April for an extensive macroeconomic answer.

One of the most interesting realisations of this trip was the ubiquitous use of facial scanning. One could hop onto a trans-national bullet train or for that matter a flight, without once showing documentation of any sort. Rather, one could just book a seat on an app, show up at the station right before your train, and scan your face at the turnstiles. While China has markedly advanced its digital infrastructure, India’s foray into similar territories, particularly with the implementation of Digi Yatra, has been met with a mixed bag of innovation and contention. Digi Yatra, launched with the aim to streamline airport processes through facial recognition and biometric data, echoes China’s penchant for surveillance under the guise of convenience. However, my personal experiences, coupled with reports of passengers being coerced into this 'voluntary' service, highlight a critical crossroad: the balance between technological advancement and the preservation of individual privacy. The foundational privacy principles, or the lack thereof, raise a spectre of concern that India may tread a path not unlike China's, where the state’s gaze becomes omnipresent. The Internet Freedom Foundation has been doing the brave job of taking the government head-on with its campaign to “urge them to completely withdraw Digi Yatra from Indian airports owing to its large gamut of concerns relating to privacy, surveillance, exclusion errors and lack of institutional accountability and transparency, coupled with the highly disturbing manner in which it is currently being deployed at airports – with reports of coercion and deception, at the cost of passengers’ dignity, privacy, and autonomy.”

Turning our gaze towards the digital economy, China's march towards becoming a cashless society is underscored by the ubiquity of Alipay and WeChat Pay. Reports indicate that cash transactions have dwindled to a mere 3.7% of the total monetary circulation, a testament to the pervasive influence of major payment apps like Alipay and WeChat Pay. These platforms, having revolutionized retail purchases, money transfers, and even transport bookings, epitomize the seamless integration of technology into daily commerce. Yet, this transformation is not without its criticisms. The market dominance of these two giants almost borders on a duopoly, restricting consumer choice and flexibility in the digital payments ecosystem. It is difficult to stress how ubiquitous these apps are - making it nearly impossible to buy a coffee or order at a food stall without scanning a QR code, ordering on a ‘mini-app’ and paying via the app platform. A question we often asked ourselves was, while this was quite difficult as a hurdle for tourists without access to Chinese bank accounts (and hence a WeChat), how difficult would these be for China’s elderly without the technical prowess needed? In stark contrast stands India's approach to the Unified Payments Interface (UPI). Launched as part of the ambitious India Stack initiative, UPI supports a vibrant ecosystem of around 90 different payment apps (as of 2019) spanning from tech behemoths like Google to local startups, reflecting a fragmented market structure that fosters robust competition. This approach not only democratizes digital payments across diverse socio-economic segments but also catalyzes a plethora of innovative solutions tailored to the unique challenges of India's digital economy. The favourable demographics, a large informal sector, and deep-seated inefficiencies, coupled with India's distinct regulatory frameworks, craft a digital landscape rife with opportunities for transformative impacts on economic inclusivity. But then again, as the FT finds, “despite claiming to undermine monopolies, a few big names have managed to assert commanding positions in the digital sphere: PhonePe and Google Pay account for over 80 per cent share of UPI transactions between them.” However, the India Stack still raises many open questions about state surveillance, the digital divide, the centralization of data, and concerns of data privacy and leaks.

Moreover, as we navigate through the bustling streets of Beijing, the sight of bicycles weaving through traffic presents yet another facet of China's urban policy innovation. The presence of multiple competing bike-sharing companies (three big ones, to be precise), underpinned by stringent regulatory limits on pollution and a well-developed infrastructure of bike lanes, offers a pragmatic and eco-friendly solution to urban congestion and environmental concerns. This approach contrasts sharply with the situation in Indian megacities like Mumbai, where the concept of dedicated bike lanes remains largely a theoretical discussion rather than a visible reality.

III. All Under the Sun

Before proceeding, it might be prudent to elaborate on the nature of paranoia that pervades the state apparatus, not merely as a modern-day surveillance phenomenon but as a historical continuum stretching back millennia. Professor Victoria Tin-bor Hui at the Univerisity of Notre Dame eloquently traces this in her exploration of Chinese history, where she suggests that China’s perceived unity is less about natural cohesion and more a product of historical force. She notes, “What is unique about China is not its unity but its precocious capacities for direct rule and military-fiscal extraction which began under the first two unified dynasties: the Qin and the Han. China’s seeming unity is the product of the mutually reinforcing processes of coercive political unification and cultural homogenization.” Here, military conquests didn't just expand territories but systematically flattened cultural landscapes to enforce a homogeneous cultural identity that, in turn, justified the rulers' celestial mandate to govern ‘all under heaven’.

James A. Millward, Professor of Inter-societal History at Georgetown University, further examines the historiographical sleights of hand that frame modern China as a continuous, homogenous civilization-state, a narrative starkly at odds with the ethnically and culturally pluralistic reality of its history. “China, through another kind of historiographical sleight of hand, is considered to have always been something now called ‘China’: a unique, unitary cultural-political entity that, though ruled by an ‘emperor’ (huangdi 皇帝), was never ‘imperialist.’” In this revisionist view, the diverse ethnic groups currently within the PRC’s borders have always been intrinsically 'Chinese', even those whose integration into the state was historically recent. This narrative serves as a backdrop to contemporary policies, particularly in regions like Xinjiang, where the integration—or assimilation—of Uyghur populations into the broader Han-centric identity of China is both a policy goal and a point of international contention. The PRC’s ability to deflect international criticism over its treatment of the Uyghurs is bolstered significantly by its economic leverage, particularly through initiatives like the Belt and Road Initiative. Ironically, while promoting its global strategies under the guise of multicultural inclusiveness and cooperation, the CCP has intensified the securitization of Xinjiang, rallying BRI partners to support, or at least turn a blind eye to, its policies.

In Xinjiang itself, the sensation of being in a post-integration society is unsettlingly palpable. The high-security environment is less overt than one might expect, not because it is non-existent but because it is so thoroughly efficient. Friends recount similar experiences in Tibet, another region marked by an uneasy blend of cultural preservation and aggressive assimilation. Surveillance is not about the visibility of security measures but their invisibility; technology is so advanced and pervasive that you are often unaware of being watched, yet you are perpetually monitored. The occasional face scans in major cities starkly contrast with the seamless surveillance in the northwest, where, allegedly, the network is so proficient it knows where you are at all times.

IV. Power

When reflecting on China’s role in the global world order, I am reminded of a memorable moment during an introductory Global Affairs seminar at Yale—International Security, to be precise. In a room of about twenty students, our teaching assistant posed a question that seemed straightforward enough: how many of us believed we lived in a unipolar world dominated solely by the United States? I didn’t raise my hand and expected a minority of the typically-worldly (and arguably hawkish) cohort to raise their hand. Yet, to my surprise, approximately 90% of my peers confidently raised their hands in affirmation, leaving me in a stark minority. This moment was a stark realization of my own perspective, that perhaps the U.S.‘s unchallenged role in global power was more threatened than acknowledged. Was this majority stance a product of willful arrogance, misinformation, or a sort of denialism? It’s hard to say.

Even if the world has not reverted to bipolarity, it is undeniably multipolar. These recent travels to China have only reinforced this view; the notion of Chinese dominance in economic and political arenas isn’t just an imminent threat—it’s a present reality. However, this doesn’t seem to alter the pervasive fear of China in the West, particularly in the U.S., where there’s a palpable intent to deny the rise of this power at all costs. Without venturing into normative judgments, this denial of China’s role as a global power strikes me as empirically misguided and represents a myopic oversight by the Washington establishment.

The best analogy I can conjure relates to a misinterpreted and widely cited aphorism in the West: “May you live in interesting times.” This expression, often referred to as a traditional ‘Chinese curse’, ironically describes “interesting” times as periods of trouble and upheaval. Despite its common usage in English, reflecting a sense of irony over the troubled yet dynamic epochs, the saying is apocryphal. No actual Chinese source has been definitively linked to this exact phrase, which supposedly forms the mildest in a trilogy of curses—the next ones being “may you come to the attention of those in authority” and “may the gods give you everything you ask for.” Maybe, the misattribution of this “curse” and its acceptance in Western discourse serves as a metaphor for the broader misunderstandings that shadow our interpretations of China’s role on the global stage. In many ways, the West’s approach to China is akin to misinterpreting a nonexistent quote—creating a narrative steeped more in fear and fiction than in nuanced understanding.

V. Peking; Panopticon

This pervasive state paranoia subtly permeates even the tourist experience, reflected in the observations of Vikram Seth in his fantastic travel memoir, From Heaven Lake: Travels Through Sinkiang and Tibet. Seth poignantly notes the paradoxical status of a ‘foreign friend’ in China:

The status of a 'foreign friend' or 'foreign guest' in China is an interesting if unnatural one. Officialdom treats the foreigner as one would a valuable panda given to fits of mischief. On no account must any harm come to the animal. On the other hand, it must be closely watched at all times so that it does not see too much, do too much on its own, or influence the behaviour of the local inhabitants. 'We have friends all over the world,' announce banners slung up on the façades of hotels, but officialdom is disturbed by too much contact between Chinese and non-Chinese. They are horrified by affairs between Chinese and foreigners, especially if the woman is Chinese. From time to time this attitude bubbles over in tirades in the official press, but there is nothing like the xenophobia of the Cultural Revolution, when Beethoven was banned and diplomats beaten up by mobs.

My personal journey resonated with this guarded hospitality. With the exception of the commercial magnets of Shanghai and Shenzen, where foreigners are a dime a dozen, there exists a palpable, paternalistic oversight.  Throughout my trip, every movement was facilitated through mega-apps—platforms designed to be omnipotent yet inaccessible to foreigners lacking a Chinese ID, thereby reinforcing a sense of exclusion. Without the graciousness of our hosts and the bonds formed with friends in the Mainland, navigating the intricacies of daily life would have posed a formidable challenge. The necessity of carrying my passport constantly, to gain entry to monuments, pass security checkpoints, and even access certain streets in Beijing, felt less like a precaution and more like a mandate.

Surveillance extends its reach into unexpectedly personal realms as well. The act of retrieving toilet paper from a public restroom required scanning a QR code linked to my face—a stark and somewhat surreal reminder of the state’s pervasive eye. This omnipresent surveillance is often normalized to an astonishing degree. One begins counting cameras out of curiosity, quickly losing count as the numbers climb into the dozens within minutes - not just in high-security regions. The realization dawns that this surveillance apparatus is not just a feature of the urban landscape but an ingrained part of life here.

Yet, many friends I encountered seemed to weave this reality into the fabric of daily existence, often discussing the trade-off between privacy and safety. They touted the eradication of crime and the emergence of a ‘high-trust society.’ However, this purported trust, facilitated by an omnipresent governmental gaze, raises the question: Is this trust truly organic, or is it a byproduct of a meticulously induced social order? Does it even matter, if these seemingly obvious benefits are clear to most? This question lingers, unanswered, as the benefits of such a society are praised—less crime, more safety, ostensibly a better life for most. Life, undeniably safer for most, comes with invisible shackles: tacit affirmations of a system where personal freedoms are often sacrificed at the altar of communal security.

This surveillance extends its tendrils into the virtual realm as well, permeating everyday communications with an almost Orwellian oversight. On WeChat, a platform that serves as the digital town square, messages containing seemingly harmless memes vanish into the ether, never reaching their intended recipients. Observing this firsthand is nothing short of chilling. Children joke about these disappearances, yet beneath their laughter lies a deep-seated adaptation to a culture where censorship moulds not only the information they receive but also the very structure of their behavioral norms. This digital curtain, which subtly but surely filters one’s worldview, instils a conformity that is both profound and disquieting.

Amidst this landscape, there emerges a peculiar resignation to the status quo. Conversations are peppered with offhand comments about figures like the Panchen Lama, or tongue-in-cheek jokes about Han integration—expressions that reveal a complex layer of coping through humour. Perhaps most startling was my encounter in Chongqing, where I stumbled upon an official Hong Kong police merchandise shop. The casual commercialization of disdain for pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong struck a jarring note, almost comical in its brazenness, underscoring a broader acceptance of political narratives that once might have incited outrage.

A conversation I had echoed a common refrain: “If you have nothing to hide, why fear?” Yet, this sentiment slices through the social fabric in two sharply divergent directions. For the majority, this rationale may suffice; however, for minorities like the Uyghurs, who find their most basic freedoms stifled, the implications are far more grave. Their practices, deemed subversive by the state, are not just hidden but are actively suppressed. This reveals a darker aspect of the surveillance state: the freezing of dissent and a pervasive self-censorship that dissuades any form of opposition against the state apparatus.

The chilling parallel extends beyond China's borders to India, where similar patterns of surveillance and control are beginning to emerge. The emerging apprehension that a new India might exclude its minority citizens is not just a troubling indicator but a tangible manifestation of defeatism, a surrender to the belief that the secular ideals of India are perhaps unreachable. The long-term consequences of succumbing to this pervasive sense of helplessness are already becoming apparent. The danger of stumbling into the abyss of ‘learned helplessness’, where individuals feel so powerless that they disengage from social and political processes altogether, cannot be overstated.

A conversation with a Uyghur activist after the trip underscored the profound difficulties in building coalitions and garnering support against such a backdrop. The activist highlighted a troubling trend: over time, with sufficient suppression, public support dwindles, and the status quo becomes not only unchallenged but unchallengeable. This erosion of active civil engagement marks a significant victory for authoritarian practices, effectively quelling the collective voice that could otherwise advocate for change and reform.

VI. What would Said Say?

One of the biggest culture shocks was the predominance of domestic tourism in China, which presents an intriguing canvas of consumption, cultural exploration, and sometimes, conspicuous commodification. Tourist routes flourish, spiralling around modern statues perched atop mountains and traversing landscapes both breathtaking and utterly transformed by human presence. This phenomenon is less about the solitary contemplation of nature and more about the collective celebration of accessibility and shared experience—or as the digital age dictates, an opportunity for WeChatification, where every scenic moment is captured, filtered, and shared.

Beyond the social media frenzy, the reverence for history and culture manifests impressively in the museums sprinkled across provincial towns. Here, throngs of families meander through corridors echoing with the silent tales of artefacts, each piece meticulously curated to narrate the grandeur of China’s past. Even the smaller museums, their tickets often sold out weeks in advance, are a testament to a burgeoning demand among local Chinese tourists for spaces that celebrate and disseminate historical knowledge. This fervour for engaging with the past is not just a leisure activity; it's a vibrant educational pursuit, imbuing young minds with a sense of continuity and identity.

However, as we move deeper into the extremities of the Chinese landscape, particularly where the Han majority fades, the narrative takes a more complex, sometimes darker turn. Here lies a curious blend of fascination and alienation—an Occidentalist fantasy within the Orient itself, giving rise to what could be described as a proto-neo-oriental-occidentalism, a term Edward Said might have pondered with both pride and perplexity.

This nuanced interaction is best observed in the way domestic Chinese tourists engage with the 'othered' realms of their nation’s western territories i.e. the Uyghurs, the Kazakhs, etc. The peripheries and their cultures are both exotified and scrutinized, consumed as spectacles rather than experienced as integral threads of the national fabric. In these encounters, there is a palpable tension between the celebration of diversity and the subtle, sometimes unconscious, imposition of a cultural hierarchy. The museums and tourist spots in these regions do not merely display history; they stage a narrative steeped in the power dynamics of visibility and control.

Historian James Millward suggests that the practices seen are not isolated phenomena but part of a broader shift in policy and perception that aligns disturbingly with a global rise in majoritarian nationalism and Islamophobia. Millward notes, “It is likewise tempting to associate the gradual PRC shift from centralized pluralism to Han assimilationism with the 2010s global wave of majoritarian nationalisms, with which it certainly shares some features. Yet skin-colour racism and xenophobia (while certainly present in China) do not play the same role as they do in fuelling North American, European and Australian white supremacy movements. China does not attract the flows of immigrants or refugees that have triggered public backlash elsewhere. The one common, nearly global factor that links China’s majoritarian nativism to that in Europe, North America and India is Islamophobia. Besides the Uyghurs, the PRC state has in the 2010s increasingly targeted the religious practice of its other Muslim peoples, criticized mosques that are too big or too ‘Arabic,’ and let online Islamophobia fester.”

In Turpan and Ürümqi, the city's main mosques, grand in their historical and architectural significance, are curated not as active sites of worship but as museums for the secular tourist gaze. Signboards erase religious significance, and prayer regions are cordoned off from ticketed tourists. This echoes an observation by the BBC, an experience that mirrored my own, where the temporal rhythms of prayer seem obscured, lost amidst the needs of tourism. “We try to find out when the next prayer time is but no one seems to be able to tell us," reports the journalist, underscoring a disconcerting disconnect. An official’s indifferent response, "I'm just here to deal with tourists, I don't know anything about prayer times," only deepens the sense of dislocation.

This shift is not isolated but part of a broader, more troubling trend observed in the smaller Uyghur villages near Turfan. Here, the stark realities of cultural displacement become palpable—houses remain padlocked, said to belong to Uyghurs who have been moved to reeducation camps, while those who remain capitalize on the passing Han tourists by selling trinkets and nuts, amid mosques that are no longer accessible for prayer but are closed off, symbols of a culture under lock and key.

Moreover, there is an undeniable orientalization of Uyghur culture, where its rich history and tradition are repackaged for consumption in a manner that borders on historical fetishization. Tourists don elaborate costumes reminiscent of scenes from Star Wars’ Tatooine or Mad Max, using the cultural backdrop as mere aesthetic scenery for fashion shoots. This reduction of a deep and tumultuous cultural identity to mere scenery is jarring—a historicization of the present, where the lived experiences of the Uyghur people are overshadowed by a narrative constructed for and by the tourist's eye. What would Said say, indeed, about this internalized orientalism? Would he see it as a mirror reflecting the broader orientalist attitudes that he critiqued, now reconfigured within the borders of the Orient itself? Perhaps he would view it as a complex dialogue—a continuous negotiation of identity and power, where the 'other' is both within and outside, simultaneously part of the self and apart from it.

These observations prompt a reflection on the nature of these ‘Potemkin villages’—idealized facades crafted to obscure a less palatable reality. Much like the villages staged to impress Catherine the Great, these spaces in China serve a dual function: they boost local economies and sustain a narrative convenient for the state and palatable for the tourist. Yet, beneath this veneer lies a complex, often painful story of a people whose everyday realities are veiled, and whose cultural essence is commodified. This raises profound questions about the ethics of tourism and cultural representation in regions marked by political tensions and cultural erasure. How do we navigate these spaces as outsiders, and what responsibility do we bear to look beyond the curated narratives presented to us? The answers are elusive, revealing the complex dance between seeing and understanding, between the tourist’s gaze and the lived reality of those who are, unwillingly, made a spectacle.

VII. A Toast

Closing this chapter—especially with an uplifting note—proves a daunting task. The gratitude I hold for my hosts in China is immense. These travels have been, without a doubt, some of the most enlightening and emotionally charged of my life, with a lot more to reflect on and write about. In moments like these, when the residue of experience clings more stubbornly than words allow, it is often to poetry we turn. Thus, as we bid farewell and go—’East and West’— let us close with the timeless verse of Du Fu, the great Tang poet. Here’s a ‘A Toast for Men Yun-Ch’ing’ translated by Florence Ayscough:

Illimitable happiness,

But grief for our white heads.

We love the long watches of the night, the red candle.

It would be difficult to have too much of meeting,

Let us not be in hurry to talk of separation.

But because the Heaven River will sink,

We had better empty the wine-cups.

To-morrow, at bright dawn, the world’s business will entangle us.

We brush away our tears,

We go—East and West.

so long,

BM

(All errors are my own, and a by-product of editing this on a slow boat from China)

Yes, I’ve been away—apologies! I’d initially penned a post-worth of apologia for my absence, but then I decided to just skip the plaintive, pretentious prologues. For the record, the discarded draft was dramatically pompous, even by our standards, spiraling into existential queries like "all writing is delusion" and "why write anything at all if it is all destined to be relegated to the depths of literary mediocrity?" In short, less whining, fewer excuses. Rest assured, there are some long-term projects simmering on the back burner, which I hope to share with you all soon.

This edition is a doozy! We start with a seemingly benign debate: Pancakes or Waffles? What begins as a road-trip game about culinary choices quickly evolves (or devolves, depending on your persuasion) into musings (or ramblings) on metaphysics. Along the way, we ask what it means to be 'fluent,' 'Indian,' 'human,' and then what it means to be 'like' something?

Before we proceed, I thank you for your readership and patience. Should you wish to receive these irregular articles at irregular deadlines in your (allegedly) irregular inboxes, please do subscribe. It’s free, as all good things are!

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Pancakes or Waffles?

Two years ago, on a road-trip through the verdant vistas of North Carolina, my dear friend Jai introduced me to a whimsical yet unexpectedly profound game: Pancakes or Waffles. Here’s a quick overview: The game begins with one player—the 'den'—who thinks of a word, be it as mundane as 'pencil' or as abstract as 'freedom'. The den does not reveal their chosen word but is first asked by the guessers, "Is it closer to a pancake or a waffle?" The criteria for the decision, whether visual, physical, linguistic, or a mysterious 'pancakeness' or 'waffleness', is left entirely to the den's discretion, introducing a delightful subjectivity to the proceedings.

From there, the game spirals into increasingly curious comparisons: is it closer to a waffle or a sandwich? From pancake or waffles, the comparisons could leap to incarceration or teddy bears in a few playful bounds. The game, which surprisingly tends to be finite, reveals not only the guessing strategy but also a curious insight into our perception of categories and similarities.

Reflecting on this game led me to ponder the Platonic ideal—what does it mean for something to inherently lean towards the essence of a pancake or a waffle? Plato, were he a guest at our breakfast table, might suggest that these items partake in their respective forms: immutable, perfect templates residing in the ethereal realm of forms. Here, the essence of "pancakeness" or "waffleness" dwells, untouched by the vicissitudes of worldly pancakes and waffles (is man not a featherless biped, or is man a pancake?). Each object or concept participates in a form—unchanging essences like 'treeness' or 'oneness'. These forms, he posited, are the true reality, existing in a different world—the world of forms, which our material world merely imitates. Aristotle, Plato’s pragmatic pupil, might counter that while forms are instructive, it’s the characteristics—taste, texture, shape—that define these breakfast staples in the tangible world. A pancake, flat and fluffy, absorbs syrup into its very being, while a waffle, with its grid-like façade, holds its toppings in each geometric pocket.

A Rorschach Test of Everyday Objects

Why, then, does 'radiator' evoke waffleness, while 'cushion' suggests pancakeness? Is it the structured heat of the former, akin to the crisp lines of a waffle, or the soft, yielding nature of the latter, reminiscent of a pancake’s embrace? This reflection is not merely culinary frivolity but a serious inquiry into ‘thisness' or haecceity, as the philosophers would call it, that peculiar property that makes an object uniquely itself. What is a waffle? Is it its taste, its shape, its texture? And if something possesses all these qualities, must it not be a pancake, according to our sensory and conceptual recognition? Or some of these qualities, and if so how many? By extension, what properties make something NOT a pancake? Is a square ‘pancake’ a pancake? A frozen ‘pancake’ a pancake? A stone ‘pancake’ a pancake? Is a small beige dog a pancake? Am I a pancake?

This ontological breakfast buffet inevitably leads us to the Duck Test: if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck. But is it always so straightforward? Can something look like a duck, yet be a bird of a different feather altogether?

This theme of deceptive appearances is humorously captured in the British comedy "Peep Show"(highly recommended for fans of British humour), where Jez, debating the validity of a life coaching certification, sardonically notes, “If it looks like a life coach, and has a certificate saying it's a life coach, then it's probably a life coach!

To further complicate matters, we encounter real-world 'quacks'—those who resemble the genuine but are devoid of substance. They quack, but does that make them ducks? The theme of pretenders, fakes, and, grifters has been a common one throughout Ink-uilab chapters (An index of Ink-uilab topics can be found here). A recent update on the saga is a Guardian article exposing Jay Shetty, the so-called 'social media monk,' whose spiritual veneer fooled the media and political establishment.

An alternative conception to the duck test would be David Hume's Bundle Theory, which strips an object to a mere collection of its properties—there is no 'core' object beyond this bundle. An apple is nothing more than its redness, its roundness, and its fruitness, with no underlying substrate. This notion provokes a deeper investigation into the essence of identity itself. Can we apply this theory to the Ship of Theseus? I discuss the Ship of Theseus, in the context of cinema, in Chapter 12. This thought experiment, explored in various cultural narratives including a favored Indian indie film and the saga of "Lajos Kossuth's (see below) pocket knife" in Hungarian lore, asks if an object that has all its components replaced remains fundamentally the same object. If I were to take my economics dissertation, break it up into arguments, and reconstitute it into another paper, would that make it a ship of thesis?

As we ponder whether a ship, meticulously reconstructed plank by plank, remains the true Ship of Theseus, we are compelled to ask similarly profound questions about human identity and essence, inspired by Mikhail Bulgakov’s darkly comedic ‘Heart of a Dog’ (1925). Here, the transformation of Sharik, a stray dog into a human, after receiving human glands, becomes a satirical exploration of Bolshevik social and cultural eugenics, highlighting the absurdity of defining identity through mere physical or social constructs. Sharik, surgically morphing from a mistreated mongrel into Polygraph Polygraphovich Sharikov, who both thwarts and perpetuates societal corruption, embodies the question: does changing parts of one's physical or social identity fundamentally alter one's true self? Is Sharik still a dog if he walks, talks, and misbehaves as a man? Or has he become something new, a reflection of the human condition veiled in canine origins? I gush about Bulgakov regularly, and the book (and 1988 movie adaption) are stellar and certainly worth reading.

Similarly, in Stanisław Lem’s Przekładaniec (1955), the identity crisis deepens when Richard Fox, after a series of transplants involving his brother's body parts, becomes entangled in legal and ethical dilemmas. The film, a tragicomedy rooted in transplantology, challenges the viewer to consider whether Richard, transformed through the physicality of his brother Tom, is still Richard, or if he becomes another entity altogether.

Can translating someone geographically inherently change who they are? Does migration make you a different person? This lovely short story by the witty Kiran Sampath titled The Attaché’s Wife, appeared in Granta, and explored what it means to be Indian. The protagonist, despite his deep roots and unchanged accent, is perceived as an outsider in his own homeland simply because of his prolonged absence abroad. His struggle with being perceived as foreign in familiar lands mirrors the philosophical quandaries posed by Bulgakov and Lem, questioning whether physical presence, or lack thereof, can dilute or redefine our essence. As the attaché navigates different cultural landscapes, he faces the recurring question—“But you should explain the background to him, after all he’s not from here”. Given that the story is relatively short, and behind a paywall, here it is, in its entirety:

Everywhere J traveled in the country with the government press attaché, people would turn to the attaché and say, ‘But you should explain the background to him, after all he’s not from here.’

One day, exasperated, J said to the attaché, ‘Will you tell me why people keep acting this way with me? Do they sense something about how I walk? My clothes? My accent hasn’t changed at all since I left.’

The attaché smiled. ‘But they know you live abroad.’

J, an internationally syndicated columnist, had been invited by the government to write a report about the country’s progress.

‘But does that mean,’ J said, ‘does that mean I’ve lost my connection to the country, that I’m not capable of understanding it? After all, I’m from here. I grew up here. In fact, that’s why the government invited me back for this work.’

The attaché said, ‘That’s a good point,’ though he clearly didn’t believe that.

J couldn’t let it go. ‘Millions of our people live abroad. Is this how you want them to feel?’

‘But there are certain things, sir, only a local –’ The attaché held his tongue.

‘But that’s what I’m saying. What is this magical thing I don’t understand? OK, fine: I’m not aware of the name of the latest cricketer or whatever sidey politician is in charge of this district. But why is that even important? This obsession with proper nouns – that’s not wisdom. As far as I can tell, the basics of the place – the corruption, the pettiness – have not changed.’

‘It seems like you have decided on the content of your report, sir,’ the attaché mused.

‘This habit of putting people in categories. Inside, outside; upstairs, downstairs. And as far as you’re concerned, I’m outside. How could I – some foreigner with zero connection to this place – possibly understand anything about this great country? Why even invite me to make a report?’

‘No, sir, it’s so you can understand,’ the attaché said.

J was beginning to comprehend the attaché’s humor. ‘You think this, all this that I’m saying, it’s proof of being a foreigner,’ J said, ‘getting bent out of shape like this –’

‘Not in the slightest, sir,’ the attaché said, but J could swear he saw his eyes twinkling.

‘OK, let’s continue on our tour,’ J said.

But as they drove around the city, J got angrier. He remembered now why he’d left in the first place: the people of this poor hot country were smug when they had nothing to be smug about. They were petty and possessive.

I’ll write the damn report, he thought. And it’ll be damn negative.

In the middle of the night, when the attaché was asleep, he received a call.

‘I knew it!’ the voice on the other end was shouting. ‘I knew it! They don’t say this to foreign journalists, only to people like me who left!’

After getting his bearings, the attaché said sleepily, ‘Perhaps they feel you’ve outgrown our little country, sir.’

‘No, no, no, not at all! They’re angry. Angry that I got away from this place. They want to pull me down!’

‘The visit is arousing feelings for you, sir,’ the attaché said.

‘All you bloody people are!’

Then the phone was slammed down.

‘Who was that?’ the attaché’s wife asked.

‘Some foreign journalist.’

‘Oh,’ she said.

‘But he grew up here,’ the attaché said.

‘Ooof,’ she said.

‘And he’s angry people don’t treat him like he’s from here.’

‘He might be the first person I’ve heard of who wants to be from here,’ she said.

They both snickered.

‘Goodnight,’ he said.

‘Goodnight,’ she said.

Then, suddenly, the attaché got up. ‘Is that really what you think of our country?’

These metaphysical musings extend beyond pancakes and psychological thrillers. Consider fluency in language, as my friend Sachien presented in his magnificent thesis on Linguistics and Computing. His research raises fundamental questions: What does it mean to be fluent? Is it a bundle of measurable skills, or is it more nebulous, perhaps a feeling of comfort in communication? Is fluency the ability to seamlessly construct sentences, or does it involve deeper cultural and contextual understandings that align with the native speakers' perceptions? Moreover, what does it mean to be alike? Are some languages more 'like' English than others, and what implications does that hold for learners and linguists? Does proficiency in certain languages predispose one to perceived fluency in others, based on structural or phonetic similarities?

The Logic of Likeness

At this point in our philosophical breakfast, we find ourselves with a smorgasbord of questions with no definitive answers in sight. Why is something more akin to a pancake than a waffle? Why does French feel closer to English than Polish does? Is Bulgakov’s Sharik more dog than man, or has he transcended his canine beginnings to assume a new identity?

These questions evoke thoughts from a book that has found a permanent home on my shelf. It was during a landmark class on Marx's Das Kapital—taught by a dear professor of mine, Paul North — that I first encountered the depth of dialectical thinking. This course, which profoundly influenced my intellectual trajectory, has been distilled into a radical new translation of Marx's magnum opus, set to release later this year with Princeton Press (Check it out for a critical and fresh perspective on one of the most consequential books in history). Professor North possesses a unique ability to weave profound statements seamlessly into conversation, a skill that has inspired me to always be ready with a notebook at hand even when we speak casually. His books echo this conversational profundity, offering rich, nuanced insights into seemingly everyday concepts. One such concept is the 'logic of likeness,' which he explores in his intriguing (and bizarrely titled) work, Bizarre-Privileged Items in the Universe: The Logic of Likeness.

In the book, North explores the intricate web of similarities that bind seemingly disparate entities:

A butterfly is like another butterfly. A butterfly is also like a leaf and at the same time like a paper airplane, an owl’s face, a scholar flying from book to book … Imagine a universe made up solely of likenesses. There are no things, only traits acting according to the law of series, here and there a thick overlap that appears 'bizarre’.

North begins with the seemingly simple Humean premise: “Everything is like everything in some respect,” and from there unravels the threads of likeness that have been woven by many thinkers. Aristotle, for example, linked likeness to mimesis in his Poetics, seeing it as a crucial element of artistic representation. Plotinus considered it the glue binding the ladder of emanations to the One. Darwin elevated resemblance to the highest principle in nature, reshaping its meaning along the way.

Likeness, North contends, knows no degrees—it simply is. It does not subscribe to quantification; something either resembles or it does not. The Rorschach test serves as a practical illustration of his theory, where the inkblots are not merely stains but catalysts for recognizing patterns and resemblances shaped by our individual and collective consciousness. North suggests that our encounters with these images are not just visual but are deeply entwined with cultural scripts and personal memories:

The likenesses are not in the inkblot, and yet to be sure, in another way, they are in it ... You encounter an inkblot already in a field of memory images, cultural inscriptions, moments of fantasy, dream, where histories of the obsolete and forgotten resonate.

This perspective aligns with Leibniz's Law, the Identity of Indiscernibles, which posits that if two entities share all the same properties, they are identical; yet, if they are truly identical, they are one and the same entity, not two. Leibniz's Law has been met with skepticism from the analytical philosophers - namely Wittgenstein and Russell - who questioned the very notion of identity. For instance, Wittgenstein writes in the Tractatus “That identity is not a relation between objects is obvious … Roughly speaking: to say of two things that they are identical is nonsense, and to say of one thing that it is identical with itself is to say nothing.” North (at least as far as I interpret the argument) builds on this skepticism by proposing a radical idea: to exist is to reside within a “plenum of likenesses”, to be part of a continuous dialogue of resemblances that defines existence itself. Here, identity is not singular but a complex overlay of similarities that interact in dynamic, often asymmetrical patterns:

To be a thing, a thing has to be like at least one thing other than itself. In anything, two are inseparable, and so the character of “everything” changes from an accumulation of individuals to peculiar, partial, and asymmetrical interpenetration, falling into doublets and lines, chains and fields and arrays … What it is to be like in any case is an approximation of what it could be to be like. Something comes close to being like without the need for actually being like.

This leads us to a critical examination of modernity and capitalism through the lens of likeness and equivalence. Horkheimer and Adorno, in their seminal Dialectic of Enlightenment, posit that “Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes dissimilar things comparable by reducing them to abstract quantities. For the Enlightenment, anything which cannot be resolved into numbers, and ultimately into one, is illusion; modern positivism consigns it to poetry.” North, drawing from Marx critiques how capitalist processes transform the qualitative aspects of life into quantifiable units of exchange. Here, the likeness becomes a commodity, its essence distilled into equivalence for trade, losing its qualitative richness in the process. According to PN, Marx’s Coat in Kapital not only highlights the alienation inherent in capitalist transactions but also illustrates the inevitable decay of material goods into mere semblances of their original forms—a cycle of becoming and unbecoming that mirrors the philosophical lifecycle of likeness itself:

Marx talks about the ware “coat” and not the wearing of the coat or the coat as it wears and wears out, and yet these eventualities hint at the inevitable decay of a coat into what used to be a coat, the decline of use into usedness and ultimately uselessness, which can also be described as becoming only or merely like the former coat — slipping from mostly all into almost and not quite, as some qualities become unlike the standards they formerly lived up to. Enlikening happens this way, too. A commodity comes to be through the happening of homeosis, fairly like, whereupon it becomes valorized and exchanged, and subsequently it decays back into homeosis, barely like.

Simple Conclusions

Lastly, as always, some verse in closing. Given the wordy body, here’s a short poem titled ‘The Simple,’ by P.P. Ramachandran. According to Poet-translator E.V. Ramakrishnan, Ramachandran is “the most accomplished craftsman among the poets of the 90s”. Born in 1962, the “minimalism” and “understated quality” of his verse reflects “the micro-politics of everyday life” in Kerala, and touches upon the deep “layer of disquiet” and “silence” that underlies contemporary Indian life:

Nothing more than a sweet cry
To say, I am here.

A dropped feather is all that
Says, I was here.

The warmth of brooding
Says, I will be here.

How do birds tell
Their lives with such brevity?

Best,

BM

(All errors are my own. PS: I will not apologize for the ship of thesis joke.)

I extend a warm welcome to the many new readers who have chosen to read the dispatches of this humble scribe. Your arrival at this secluded corner of the internet is as perplexing as it is delightful, and I hope these musings resonate, enticing you to linger and stick around.

To the steadfast companions who continue to read these long-winded letters even after 1.5 years, thank you. I’m humbled by your enduring patience and apologetic for these pangs of my intermittent silence. But, as the Soviet classical film motto goes: Time, Forward!

Last week, I found myself in the vibrant city of Medellín, Colombia for a research conference. As I ate a dinner of the local specialty (a rich seafood casserole) at a streetside stall in the sleepy alleys of the old town, something unexpected happened. A familiar melody, hummed by the cook, caressed my ears, causing me to look up from my book. After a moment of ponderous reflection, realization dawned – it was the strains of 'The Internationale'!

This anthem has always intrigued me with its sheer geographic reach, ideological scale, and linguistic scope. In this edition of Ink-uilab, I seek to explore and unpack the layers of ‘The Internationale’, as a political anthem, a linguistic experiment, and a unique historical moment.

So, strap in, dear reader, for Chapter 18. Should you wish to continue receiving these monthly parcels of ponderings, do subscribe:

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From Truck Drivers to Tokyo Tourists

For the uninitiated, “The Internationale” resonates as a global anthem, a sonorous staple among myriad political sects, predominantly those from the left, including a veritable whose-who of anarchists, communists, trade-unionists, democratic-socialists, and social democrats. In fact, I’d posit that The Internationale might just be one of the few things that the schism-hungry leftist political groups might agree on. The anthem has been the pulsating heart of the socialist movement since the late 19th century, sanctified by the Second International as its official canticle. The anthem's genesis is traced back to the “First International,” a congregation of labor's finest in 1864, attended by Eugène Pottier, the anarchist author of the anthem's lyrics. Pottier's prose, peppered with potent one-liners and seasoned with slogans, seared themselves into the collective consciousness of the class struggle.

Pottier's prose was later harmonized with the melodies of Pierre De Geyter, a Marxist composer whose notes were first sung by ‘La Lyre des Travailleurs’ of the French Worker's Party in Lille, 1888. Yet, beneath its unifying chorus lies a narrative of secrecy and sacrifice. Pierre De Geyter, in a bid to shield his identity and livelihood as a woodcarver, shrouded his contributions in anonymity. It featured lines like “Ni Dieu, ni César, ni tribun” (trans. ‘Neither God, nor Caesar, nor tribune’). Its success is intertwined with the Second International's reach and resonance, its simplistic yet stirring composition reflecting the very essence of its audience. For those interested, this wonderful documentary by Peter Miller traces the song’s origins through interviews.

The song’s truly global reach is best exemplified in a short story, actually one of my favorites, Dilip Simeon’s “O.K. TATA: Mobiloil Change and World Revolution.” The story first appeared in Civil Lines, the Indian literary journal, five issues of which came out between 1987 and 2001. As Chandrahas Choudhury puts it, “The magazine’s idiosyncrasies of taste, irregularity of publication, somewhat cliquish circle of contributors and lack of either a precise editorial manifesto or a market ambition were all repeatedly explained by the editors as a symbol of their devotion to no other deity but quality.”

Here’s an excerpt from the story that features The Internationale. The only context you need to enjoy it is that Hardip Singh is a truck driver in Northern India, and Partap is his apprentice (and as he later learns a college-educated Delhi Marxist immersing himself into the life of a proletarian):

“What really impressed Hardip Singh was an incident involving a Japanese cyclist. One afternoon, about eight hours’ drive away from Calcutta, they came across a strange sight. A smooth-skinned youngster of indeterminable age was riding a bicycle intently down the Grand Trunk Road in the opposite direction. Hardip, ever curious, jammed his brakes and asked his cleaner to see who the hell this was.

Where are you going? asked Partap, leaping out of his door and running the few paces to the startled cyclist. His lightweight vehicle had two canvas bags hanging from the sides of the back wheel, and a little aluminium rack on the handlebar, on which there was perched a map, which was the object he had been staring at with such concentration when he had first come into view.

‘From Japan. Going round world in five years.’ This information was reported to the driver, who shouted, Ask him to come with us! Partap thought this excessive, given that the Japanese was going the other way. Tell him we’ll take him back to Delhi day after tomorrow, said Hardip. A brief conversation ensued with the cyclist, who looked flustered, but insisted that he was going to Delhi and was not about to get on to a truck headed towards Calcutta. The driver laughed, moved into first gear and started off, remarking on the strangeness of the times and the creatures one saw on the Grand Trunk Road these days.

…...

The next afternoon, some seventy miles further west from where they had first spotted him, they passed the Japanese youth again, looking down at his map and diligently pedal-pushing his way up the Indo-Gangetic. Hardip recognized him immediately and jammed his brakes once more.

‘Tell him to come with us,’ he instructed his cleaner, ‘unless he wants his smooth Japaani bhund buggered by dacoits … they’ll take his fancy cycle too.’ Convincing him was not difficult; the cyclist appeared to be tired and glad of a rest. Once he was inside the cabin Partap Singh, Cleaner, lost no time starting up a conversation— no fear of exposure this time.

“Where are you from?’

‘Tokyo.’

‘Kaio University?’

The Japanese stared at his interlocutor wide-eyed. ‘You know of Kaio University? How?’ The khalasi was enjoying himself and the feeling that this had to be too good to be true.

‘Yes … how are the Zengakuren?’

The globe-cycling Japanese nearly leapt out of his skin. How was it possible for drivers’ mates in India to have heard of radical students’ organizations in Japan?

‘ZENGAKUREN! Yes! I member! But HOW you know ZENGAKUREN?’

‘We Indians know a thing or two … have you smashed the Miamoto revisionist clique as yet?’

‘MIAMOTO?! Yes! they are velly bad! ZEN Gakuren! Vot you say?!’ He was blubbering with excitement and looked as if he had suddenly been served sushi on the Grand Trunk Road. The khalasi went into his routine about the Indian peasants’ armed revolution and the thoughts of Chairman Mao. The Japanese was eighteen years old and a student. His name sounded like Yomura, and he had participated in student demonstrations against imperialist war crimes in Vietnam. He spoke with relish of battles with the police, battles in which the comrades wore helmets and wielded chains. Zengakuren had even hijacked a plane to North Korea, he said, but Kim Il Sung didn’t allow them to land. That was too bad. The comrade cleaner made a mental note of this—it confirmed his suspicions about the treacherous tendencies of Kim Il Sung. They denounced the revisionist Communist Party led by Miamoto. He asked his new-found friend his opinion of Mishima and his hara-kiri, which impressed their passenger further, and was told that he was a “good poet but a fascist. That was also too bad, thought the cleaner, who wanted all good litterateurs to be like Lu Hsun, duly approved by the GGC-CPC. They rode some fifty miles chattering about the world revolution, and the comrade from Japan spent the night sleeping on the roof. The next morning, as they approached the crossing from where ‘Yomu’ wanted to branch off towards Agra and the Taj Mahal, they sang the Internationale, simultaneously, in Japanese and Hindi. Before riding into oblivion on his cycle, the Japanese cyclist and the Indian khalasi exchanged clenched-fist salutes.

Double-clutching his gears as he coaxed the truck into movement Hardip Singh gave his apprentice a fleeting glance of sincere esteem. ‘Vakayee yaar… maan gaye,’ he said, ‘It’s true … you fellows really have an international party.”

An Anthem for Babel

The sheer scale of The Internationale's translations is staggering, with an estimated translation in over 150 languages (if not more!). The anthem's translations, a testament to its ‘globalization from below,’ extend its reach far beyond its French origins. It stands shoulder to shoulder with few others, such as the Christmas carols, ‘Happy Birthday,’ and ‘Amazing Grace.’ Even in the realm of modern artists like Taylor Swift, celebrated for her widespread translations, The Internationale holds its ground. From the stirring Tuvan throat singing renditions, and Bengali chants, to the eerie notes of Shostakovich's theremin, it has embraced a myriad of musical forms …

Historian Ian Christopher Fletcher traces the influence of the song through history: “It was sung simultaneously in many languages by Wobblies during the 1912 strike of immigrant textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and again by volun- teers of the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War. Serving for a time as the Soviet anthem after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, “The Internationale” gradually lost its wider affiliation with the whole anarchist, socialist, and labor move- ment and became more narrowly associated with the communist movement. How- ever, its influence has been, and continues to be, felt in many not always recognized ways. For example, it furnished Frantz Fanon with the title of his great work of rev- olutionary, anticolonial theory, The Wretched of the Earth. The world was reminded of the power of the song when the students, without any sense of alienation, sang it in Tiananmen Square in 1989.”

Eventually, we come to the version of The Internationale I am most familiar with, with lyrics by Billy Bragg written in the last decade:

George Orwell, too, recognized its pervasive potency, and crafted a parody of the song in Animal Farm. The Internationale also features on the David Rovics song ‘They All Sang the Internationale,’ which honors Katharina Jacob - a revolutionary with the German Resistance movement against the Nazis. The Italian maestro Toscanini also wrote an orchestration of The Internationale, which would later appear in the 1944 movie Hymn of the Nations. The song’s notes have even danced on the ethereal waves of the theremin (on a side note, I would very much love to learn how to play the Theremin), with Shostakovich weaving it into the film score for “Podrugi (The Girl Friends)”, a bizarre variation, and testament to the composer's daring to dance with dissonance and defiance. You can listen to it here.

A netizen has compiled excerpts of the song in 135 languages, which is such a wonderful example of the sheer geographic breadth of the anthem. Yet another kindred spirit has compiled a collection of 95 variations of this venerable verse, amassing nearly five hours of audio:

Each language has such a wonderfully distinct style and sound. Some of my favorite versions from the video above are Galician, Nepali, Breton, Northern Kurdish, and a very upbeat Urdu one! (*timestamped links*).

There is one rendition I’d argue that transcends the typical, transporting us to the expansive steppes and sunlit horizons of Tuva - on the Russo-Mongol border. Here, amidst the windswept plains and the silhouettes of distant mountains, the band Huun-Huur-Tu, whose name evokes the swirling “sunbeams” of their homeland, crafts a version of this venerable anthem through the mystic art of Tuvan throat singing. One of my favorite bands, their throat singing, a practice where the vocalist harmonizes multiple pitches simultaneously, transforms The Internationale into an experience that is both otherworldly and deeply rooted in the earth's primordial cadence. In Huun-Huur-Tu's hands, or more aptly, their voices, the song becomes a shocking, spectral symphony:

State-Building through Song

The song transcends beyond the mere boundaries of political movements to resonate as a national anthem, a symbol of sovereign identity and communal spirit. In its most illustrious adaptation, the anthem was translated into Russian, not once but twice, embodying the very soul of the Soviet Union until the ides of March in 1944. On this day, it gracefully ceded its place to The Hymn of the Soviet Union (Gimn Sovetskogo Soyuza), formerly referred to as the ‘Song of Stalin.”, marking a new era in Soviet symphonies.

This affiliation of the song to the Soviet Union would affect its perceptions (especially in the ‘West’). During the tempest of the Second World War, the BBC's Sunday evening radio broadcast, ‘National Anthems of the Allies,’ would play the national anthems of the United Kingdom's allies, a playlist expanding with each new country ensnared by Germany's grasp. However, an unexpected omission occurred following the initiation of Operation Barbarossa on 22 June 1941; The Internationale, then the Soviet Union's anthem, was conspicuously absent, not just on that day but in subsequent weeks as well. This was no oversight; Winston Churchill, a vehement anti-communist, had mandated through Anthony Eden that The Internationale must not resonate on the BBC's airwaves, a directive reflecting his ideological disdain. [To remind our readers, Churchill famously, defined Russia as ‘a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.’] On 13 July 1941, rather than the expected Soviet anthem, the BBC aired a lesser-known yet beautiful Soviet song, a move Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador, decried as emblematic of British cowardice and folly. The continued exclusion of The Internationale from a programme dedicated to allies' anthems led to the BBC discontinuing the show, avoiding further diplomatic discomfort. Yet, by 22 January 1942, Churchill's stance softened, lifting the ban and allowing The Internationale to once again stir the airwaves during wartime broadcasts and public events. This change culminated in a grand 1943 performance at the Royal Albert Hall during the BBC's Salute to the Red Army, where the Royal Choral Society, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, and military bands united in a mass rendition of The Internationale beneath the Soviet flag, following Anthony Eden's speech, marking a harmonious turn in the war's discordant symphony. Watch the performance here, thanks to the archivists at British Pathé:

The song is also a strikingly popular choice for anthems by micronations (each with debatable claims to sovereignty and independence). Consider the quaint realm of Sandus, a 12-citizen micronation, where The Internationale finds a home. Journey then to the dissolved Indokistan, nestled in Indonesia's folds, and the Democratic Republic of Sunda Raya, an alternate history entity in Southeast Asia. In these microcosms of sovereignty, The Internationale morphs, melding with local lore and aspiration, a symphony of socialist solidarity.

The role of the national anthem is unique - especially in the context of nation-building. As the erudite Terrell Carver and Matti Hyvärinen write in Interpreting the Political (1997):

In my view national anthems are—politically read or societally understood— simultaneously apodictical and epideictic speeches. They are apodictical, unlike the meaning in classical rhetoric, not because conclusions are deduced from syllogisms of indisputable premises, but because social convention and the law protect their numinous quality. The apodictical, the indisputable, also refers to the concrete act of staging, in which objections to iconic and numinous qualities of the Gemeinschaft are not permitted. But national anthems are also epideictic in that they are supposed to persuade. They persuade in the concrete act of nation-building, and they celebrate the Gemeinschaft.

Yet, amidst the careful crafting of these patriotic psalms, we stumble upon tales tinted with the hues of happenstance and humor. After all, not all nations are graced with the genius of a Tagore, whose melodic muses bestowed upon India ‘Jana Gana Mana’ and Bangladesh ‘Amar Shonar Bangla.’ Even the Sri Lankan anthem (it seems) echoes with his inspiration.

A friend once shared with me a tale of the Malay national anthem that tickles the imagination. Do note that the veracity of this story is difficult to confirm, with little reliable information available online. Consider, if you will, the curious case of Malaysia's ‘Negaraku.’ As the lore unfurls, the Sultan of Malaysia found himself in a rather precarious position during a visit to London. Invited by the Queen, the Sultan's aide was asked for the tune of the Malaysian national anthem to grace his arrival.

In a moment of embarrassment, spurred by the absence of an official anthem, the aide hummed a melody from Seychelles, a tune as foreign to Malaysia as the shores from which it originated (the Sultan and his family were exiled to Seychelles for seventeen years as punishment for an alleged murder of the British Resident of Perak). Yet, in a twist of fate or a stroke of genius, this melody, born of necessity and quick thinking, transformed into the resounding Negaraku the anthem of modern-day Malaysia

Venture now to the vibrant vistas of Mexico, where the anthem's birth was no less a theatrical tableau. In 1853, President Antonio López de Santa Anna sought a symphony of patriotism and announced a contest to capture the nation's soul. Enter Francisco González Bocanegra, a poet who preferred romance to revolution. Yet, his fiancée, Guadalupe González del Pino — or Pili — played the muse of destiny. Through a ploy of passionate persuasion, she confined her beloved to a room adorned with symbols, motifs, and annals of Mexican heroism. In his crucible of creativity, Francisco's verses flowed, a poetic prisoner to love and country. Four hours later, ten verses slipped beneath the door, and a national anthem was born!

Lastly, in customary fashion, some verse in parting:

Again, by pure coincidence, we return to the realm of a physician-poet, a p phenomenon I discuss in Chapter 18). Here’s a poem by the illustrious William Carlos Williams. Born to an English father and a Puerto Rican mother of French, Dutch, Spanish, and Jewish descent, Williams's heritage was as richly woven as his verse.

A vanguard voice of the Imagist movement, alongside figures like Pound, Williams championed a poetry of precise imagery and crisp, clear language. For over four decades, he donned the dual mantle of doctor and poet, drawing inspiration from the American milieu and the vibrant lives he encountered. His poetry, a distinctively American verse, was born from the confluence of his professional experiences, his ebullient imagination, and the pulsating life of his town’s citizens.

Until writing this chapter, I wasn’t familiar with the poet’s politics. Seemingly, Williams’ politics is hotly debated, but he seemingly found himself adrift to the left of America’s Communist Party A man of nuanced convictions, he declared, “I wasn’t a Communist,” yet professed a staunch anti-capitalistic stance. His radicalism was not imported but homegrown, imbued with a deep-seated human sympathy and an instinctive internationalist outlook. As this essay on the poet puts it, “Williams’s poems, moroever, have proven radical and prophetic: grounded in the material specificities of their place and moment, even as they anticipate in outline the new paradigms of democratic (and ecological) imagining that are slowly replacing the dogmas and orthodoxies of conventional Leftist thought.”

And so, as we bid adieu, let us heed the words of Williams, a simple yet profound reminder of the fragile yet formidable nature of our endeavors. Here’s ‘A Foot-Note’ by William Carlos Williams

Walk on the delicate parts
of necessary mechanisms
and you will pretty soon have
neither food, clothing, nor
even Communism itself,
Comrades. Read good poetry!

Yours in perpetual pondering,

BM

(All errors are my own and a by-product of editing this on a transatlantic flight)

Yesterday, Tony and I had the pleasure and privilege of attending a qawwali music performance by the arguably greatest-living maestros of the dying art. What was meant to be a simple jaunt down the East Coast for some Friday night symphonic shenanigans morphed into what can best be described as a socio-cultural, trans-historical, poly-lingual, psycho-spiritual, meta-physical journey? Join me in this editon of Ink-uilab, where I recount and reflect on our journey into the depths of the notes of qawwali strains, the tenets of mystical Sufism, and the South Asian diaspora of Long Island.

In lieu of the usual lengthy preface where I wax poetic about the struggles of writing a few thousand words every month for an arbitrary deadline, here are some prefatory disclaimers: I am neither a scholar of Sufism nor would I consider myself a Sufi per se (if only because it is an ambiguous label such that any ‘seeker of truth’ could consider themselves an adherent of Sufism). These reflections are rather an attempt at synthesizing, photographing - and potentially deciphering - my adulations for yesterday’s performers and my personal experiences with soul-stirring quest that is qawwali.

The Journey

Before one can explain what qawwali is, where it arises from, who the performers are, and what the art form entails, we must make our way to the mehfil (performance).

We set off on a sleepy Friday afternoon from New Haven in our rented and dented silver Nissan. What was initially meant to be a motley crew of fellow undergraduates had been chipped away - due to prior commitments, seasonal flu, a hefty ticket price, and an inexplicable aversion for Long Island - until just two of us remained. As Tony and I sped down the I-95, we felt we had a relative familiarity with the basics of the genre. I’d encountered qawwali through my father who’d encountered it from his father, while Tony - my suitemate and a student of classical Persian - had stumbled across qawwali through my incessant habit of playing The Sabri Brothers in our shared common room at godforsaken hours. We quickly weaved through the East Coast, making stops (in order) for second-hand bookstores, comic stores, diner soft serves, and an espresso. Our final detour led us to a marshy coastal ‘beach’ as the October sun set over the still, inky waters of the Great South Bay. An Urdu couplet by Iqbal came to mind: Khuda tujhey kisee toofan se ashna kar dey / Keh terey bahar ki maujon me iztirab nahin.

May God bring the wildest storm into your life; 

For the sea of your life is placid, its waves devoid of tumult.

Seemingly, this premonitory storm did enter our lives within a few minutes of us arriving at the concert venue. We found ourselves face-to-face with Ustad Fareed Ayaz, the revered qawwal (singer of qawwalis) and one of the two ‘frontmen’ of the night’s performance. He sat perched, leaning against the arm of the sofa, deep in conversation with some members of the audience. He wore a white kurta, draped with a harlequin shawl, with a grey collegiate sweater wrapped around his neck. His head was capped with an ornate taqiyah hat, beaded with faux diamonds, and cut with a window to expose his forehead (purportedly to accommodate the protruding bump of his zebibah - prayer callus - when he prostrated during namaz). His eyes were wizened, large, and lachrymose. Two large agate rings adorned a finger on each of his hands, with his right clasping a neatly wrapped parcel of paan.

I’d spent many hours watching Fareed Ayaz and his company online, noting his eccentric mannerisms and ritualistic gestures over the multitude of videos that peppered the Internet since his debut in the 1970s. Over many interviews and conversations recorded by documentarians and ethnographers, Ayaz had attempted to explicate his devotion to bhakti and sufi. He’d liberally quote from Hafez and Rumi, interlacing his Persian with Punjabi rhymes, Braj witticisms, and Arabic Hadīth. He’d allegedly learned of Kabir’s transcendent verses from a donkey cart man. Wary of internet rumors and trained with a social-scientist’s skepticism, I wondered if it was all an act. Surely, he ‘looked the part’ but were his musings in interviews and his philosophizing as a Sufi wanderer just a gifted musician playing a character? I wanted it all to be true. But then again, how could anybody truly embody such fakiri (ascetism) and be so graceful and tranquil, especially in this fluorescent, crowded, (surprisingly) boozy hallway in a Long Island hall in 2023? Then, he gestured at us to approach him.

We introduced ourselves. A brief snippet of what followed, paraphrased, translated, and stripped of the Urdu lyricism:

B: How are your travels going?

FA: My journey is going fine, thank God. I’ve almost reached my destination. Do you know where?

B: ….

FA: It’s not in the U.S., or France, or Germany. The destination is [pointing to the ceiling] up there. That is my destination, and I hope to reach there.

B: What do you call this destination?

FA: Truth. God. That is my destination.

As such, our conversation continued. He spoke to us - through an analogy of school uniforms - about one’s preparedness for mortality, sprinkling his meditations with Quranic verses, jovial humor, and an insistence that I translate every line for Tony. Ever so often, his owl-like eyes would enlarge with emotion, and he’d react to something we’d say by throwing back his arms, declaring “allah!”

The Travellers

Well, now that we have a destination in mind, who are our fellow travelers? Our qawwals for the night were Ustad Fareed Ayaz and Abu Mohammad, descendants of Mian Samat bin Ibrahim, the qawwal bachha trained by Hazrat Amir Khusrau. Born in Hyderabad, India but residing in Karachi, Pakistan, they belonged to the 700-year-old 'Qawwal Bachchon Ka Gharana' of Delhi. Doing the math, that would make them the 26th generation of the family performing qawwali.

Accompanying them was a bradris of 10 musicians, whom we reckon make up the 27th and 28th generation of this illustrious family of savants. As Regula Qureshi (1986), the foremost scholar of qawwali ethnomusicology writes: “Qawwals are organized into bradris (literally, bradri is a community of brothers), endogamous patrilineal communities defined in accordance with a common local origin and subject to a governing body of elders (panch). All male members call each other bhay (brother) and women normally do not seclude themselves from male bradri members, though otherwise female seclusion is standard practice among Qawwals, in accordance with Islamic tradition. Also linked with Islamic practice is a preference for marriage within the kin group, including cross and parallel cousin marriage. Kinship ties are thus continually reinforced and extended bilaterally, in the manner of a kindred”

At present, the Ayaz and Abu Mohammad duo might just be the greatest classical qawwals alive. Until a few years ago, it might have been Amjad Sabri, but he was tragically killed in 2016, aged 45 by the dogmatic Pakistani Taliban that accused him of promoting Sufism, and hence “blasphemy”. His obituary in the Economist gloomily noted that “[Sabri’s] last song on TV included the refrain ‘When I shudder in my dark tomb, dear Prophet, look after me.”

Behind the Curtain

This might be as good a time as any to ask, what is Sufism? Who is a Sufi? Broadly, Sufism is a philosophy, a way of life, and a form of thinking and worshiping. It is a series of interpretations that highlight an “interior path of mystical love and knowledge of God.” Importantly, as historian Rana Safvi argues in In Search of the Divine (2022), “Sufism is neither a sect of Islam, nor is it different from the religion. While mystical impulses and a spiritual essence is present in all major religions, the concept of tasawwuf, the Arabic term from which the word Sufism is derived and is used interchangeably with, is rooted in Islam.” Putting aside, for now, the theoretical and doctrinal debates around Sufism, what does tasawwuf entail? According to Ustad Ayaz himself (from an interview in 2006):

"When a person makes spiritual progress, he tries to find himself. After a long journey when he comes to face that curtain from where he came...
And when he parts that veil or curtain ... what does he find behind the curtain? Himself."

This spiritual progress, particularly in the Indian Subcontinent, takes the form of qawwali. These lyrical performances extend beyond the realm of the auditory - even material - and transcend space and time. Historic patterns, migratory populations, and the rise and fall of empires have all tinged qawwali, with the modern art form encompassing Persian, Urdu, Hindi, and Punjabi, bubbling with Bengali baul tongues, and digesting Saraiki and north-Indian dialects like Braj Bhasha and Awadhi. In the foreword of Beloved Delhi (2018), Saif Mahmood traces the lineage of Indo-Persian qawwali: “The qawwali had its beginnings as the Qaul (which translates as ‘the word’, or ‘saying’) recited in the khanqah of the Chishtiya Sufi Khwaja Qutubuddin Bakhtiyar Kaaki in Delhi in the early thirteenth century. The Qaul travelled with Bakhtiyar Kaaki’s successor, Baba Fareed, to Punjab and changed in shape and content under the influence of the vibrant music of Punjab. Khusrau is credited with bringing the form back to Delhi and turning it into a vehicle for communicating his love for his pir, Nizamuddin Auliya.” He goes on to add:

“Qawwali democratized faith and spirituality, diluting the power of purists, priests and clerics, and breaking down some of the barriers between communities, religions and cultures.”

At the beginning of the concert, as Ustad Fareed Ayaz and Ustad Abu Mohammad took the stage, they made a stern declaration:

This is not a mehfil-e-Qawaali. This is a mahfil-e-sama'

What then is sama'? Derived from the Arabic for listening, “Sama is the glue which binds diverse people, diverse practices and diverse beliefs and invites them to enter a shared space [the shrine] and in fact in that shared space it becomes the vehicle of deliverance.” (Safvi 2022, quoting qawwal Dhruv Sangari) The great scholar Ghazali (1058 –1111) recorded his thoughts on the sama' [quoted here]:

What causes mystical states to appear in the heart when listening to music (Sama) is a divine mystery found within the concordant relationship of measured tones (of music) to the (human) spirits and in the spirits becoming overwhelmed by the strains of these melodies and stirred by them - whether to experience longing, joy, grief, expansion or constriction. But knowledge of the cause as to why spirits are affected through sound is one of the mystical subtleties of the science of visionary experience.

Some Sufi qawwals, such as the Chishti Sabiris believe that it's the amalgamation of makan (place), zaman (time), and ikhwan (companions) which elevates a mere musical gathering into a sanctified realm (Rozehnal 2007) Rozehnal further emphasizes the contrast between the intimate sama‘ and the more commercialized renditions of Qawwali. The disciples' criticism is evident, suggesting that popular Qawwali often diminishes the essence of the music, turning it into a mere commercialized entertainment, devoid of its Sufi roots. Hence, sama' serves as a context for the Sufi's encounter with mystical experience through listening to music. Our Ustads, rather than speaking and playing, wanted us to listen. Hence, their clarification that the night would be a mahfil-e-sama', “a carefully choreographed technology for the enrichment of a Sufi’s inner, spiritual development.” (Rozehnal 2007).

Intoxication

Regula Qureshi, in Sufi Music of India and Pakistan (1986), writes: “To the Sufi participant, Qawwali is 'a method of worship' and 'a means of spiritual advancement'; it is also 'a feast for the soul'. To the performer it is mainly a musical genre 'with its distinct character for worship'. To the observer, finally, Qawwali is above all music performed very obviously with continual reference to its context; it is 'music in context' par excellence.”

A qawwali performance is as much a spiritual journey for the performers themselves as it is for the listeners. Historian Rana Safvi (2022) had an opportunity to listen to the Ayaz and Mohammad duo at a Delhi college in 2015. She recounts that “they sang from their hearts and seemed to intuitively know how to touch the heart of the listener. They not only transported the listener to another world but they seemed to have reached there too.”

The band, seated cross-legged in disciplined rows with harmonium players holding the vanguard and the percussionists forming the rearguard, becomes a sanctum of melody, where each beat of the tabla, each stroke of the harmonium, and each echo of the claps intertwines with the verses of love and devotion, elevating the psyche to a realm ethereal. No musicians sit idle - when not playing an instrument or vocalizing, they clap along with the beat, giving rise to a thundering energy that reverberates through the room. A young vocalist, barely pubescent, holds a high note in the far right corner of the stage. The facade of the earthly realm seems to blur as the lead singer, with a voice rich with the timbre of longing appears almost as a saint with his ability to induce trance becoming the vehicle for spiritual rapture. His face contorted with every note, enraptured in a divine intoxication. The Ustad operate as conductors without batons, whisking their hands around to command their orchestra and reaching out to the audience to draw them in deeper. As the qawwali reaches a mid-point, the qawwals seemingly become mere vessels of the divine melody, rolling back their eyes, moving, swaying, and shaking, mirroring the inner euphoria in a cosmic dance. The scene is surreal. The intense, almost otherworldly expressions of the qawwals—grimacing, bellowing deeply, their heads turning and twisting in a state of divine intoxication—paint a vivid picture of devotion that is raw, unbridled, and profound.

The surreal scene evokes a reflection of the symmetry of Sharaab (or the dualism of drunkenness) within the Qawwali canon. The metaphor of Sharaab manifests in two forms: the earthly ‘sharaab’ or wine, and the celestial Sharaab-e-tahoor, the mythical river of wine that flows in heaven. This symbolism, deeply rooted in Persian and Urdu poetry, alludes to the all-encompassing love and devotion to the Divine, akin to the oblivion sought in earthly inebriation. As the earthly drunkard loses himself in the transient ecstasy of wine, the true worshipper seeks the boundless realms of divine love, where the soul becomes inebriated far beyond the ephemeral. So important is the symbolism of sharaab that it stars in the revered rivalry of verses between the illustrious Aziz Mian and the Sabri Brothers—a rivalry that has etched itself into the annals of qawwali history. Aziz Mian was known for his unique ability to pen down his own lyrics. His guttural raspy voice coupled with a style immersed in divine devotion, was highly conducive in inducing a haal (a trance) amongst his audience. His famed rendition, “Main Sharabi (I’m a drunkard)” was a veiled narrative equating worldly intoxication with a love for the divine. This qawwali stirred a response from the celebrity Sabri Brothers, who through their rendition, “Sharab chod di maine (I have left wine)” questioned Aziz Mian’s devotion and spurred a ‘cassette-war’ between the giants. Mian retorted with “Hai kambakht, tu ne pii hi nahin (O unlucky one, you have never drunk)” and goes on to juxtapose the wine of truth with the water of grapes, urging the seeker (i.e. the listener) to look beyond the superficial, to become intoxicated in the boundless love and trust (sabr and tawakkul) in the divine, and to transcend earthly misconceptions.

Decorum be damned

The qawwali performance is not merely a passive consumption of music, but an active engagement, a dialogue imbued with philosophical inquiries, evoking a form of edification akin to the twisters of ulanbasti [see ch. 6]. The hall resonated with a certain camaraderie, where each soul present is here for a quest far beyond the mere appreciation of music. Upon each encounter with a new face, the customary exchange veers towards the profound— what led you to qawwali? This question, laced with an undertone of destiny, implies a journey, a path that has led each one to this very moment of musical communion. On the drive back, we joked that such interrogatory constructs would be alien in other musical settings (i.e. What led you to seek the path of Ed Sheeran? What was your journey to Vivaldi?)

The spirit of inquiry, be it semi, pseudo, or genuine spiritualism, was a ubiquitous undercurrent among the mosaic of the audience. Their reasons for being there were manifold — familial, societal, gastronomical, musical. Yet, the act of ‘seeking’ was a constant that played through the conversations, binding strangers in a delicate camaraderie. So what led people to qawwali? We heard many answers: South Asian immigrants in search of their roots, souls on a quest for “magic”, or the elusive truth.

As the night deepened, the hall, became oblivious to the passage of earthly time. I’d assume it was the audience’s dedication, coupled with the hypnotic performances, that made none of us notice that we’d spent nearly six hours in the hall subsisting on zaika, chai, paan, and the energies of the performers. Take, for instance, this qawwali by Bulleh Shah, graciously translated by the Ajab Shahar:

Decorum be damned

I'll dance in the streets!

I'll dance with abandon

For my beloved, I'll dance 

Truly, decorum be damned, as the night unfolds in the bright hall, the mundane formalities of the worldly realm gradually blur into irrelevance [See figure above.]

Making it rain

Qawwali also entails an act of benefaction, characterized by showering the musician with money. This act veils within it a deeper essence than mere worldly transaction; it embodies a sacred obligation and a solemn ritual enacted in the sacred halls where the celestial music resonates.

The nucleus of this tradition of patronage lies in the principle of 'noblesse oblige,' a tacit obligation borne by the patrons to partake in supporting the hymnists who serenade the heavens with their melodious renderings. This duty transcends the mundane, morphing into a solemn offering that guests at the royal court—whether of king or saint—are enjoined to present to the presiding personage as a token of deference. The realm of qawwali isn't untouched by this revered tradition; as the opening song unfurls its melody, a flurry of offerings often finds its way to the leader, a spectacle reminiscent of devout hearts rushing towards a celestial embrace (Qureshi 1986). The leader, by accepting these offerings, isn't merely partaking in a worldly transaction but is embodying the highest spiritual authority he represents in the assembly. This act of acceptance metamorphoses the material offering into a spiritual conduit, articulating a sacred relationship. Once accepted, the monetary offerings shed their worldly guise, aligning with the Islamic tradition of transmuting religious tributes into charity, thereby remunerating the performers for their divine service (Qureshi 1986).

Yesterday’s traditions of patronage were significantly different from those that I’d experienced. In the Memon Bhendi-Bazaar tradition from Bombay, the ritual unfolds in a circulatory dance of benevolence, where the money, akin to a ritualistic serpent, slithers through hands, making its journey to the host seated upon a pile of money—a symbol of both earthly wealth and divine blessings, which is eventually given down to the band. Contrastingly, in Hyderabad's Nizami tradition, the proceedings a member of the audience respectfully approaches the stage and slides the money under the mat of the performer in a subtle yet profound gesture. Yesetrday’s patronage mirrored itself in the Hyderabadi performance albeit with two critical variations — the currency of reverence metamorphosed from the Rupee (INR or PKR) into Long Island Dollar (i.e. stacks of 1 USD Bills), and the method of bestowal became a ceremonial showering of money upon the musicians. This act of 'making it rain,' (if I may) transforms an act of patronage into a ritualized part of the performance and also a display of affluence. Here, the mundane act of monetary donation metamorphoses into a ceremonious display of wealth. There is an irony to post-material music, rewarded through a ritual that engenders money as a material token of status. akin to a peacock unfurling its vibrant plumes in a courtship dance. Yet, in this modern-day rendition, the peacock assumes the guise of a 45-year-old Pakistani-American real estate agent, and the feathers morph into crisp dollar banknotes.

Performance: The Poetry

The essence of Qawwali is encapsulated in its poetic narrative, a narrative that is rooted in three foundational premises that define its transcendental impact on the souls of those who lend their ears. At the core of these premises lies the belief in the power of the word, a belief steeped in the sanctity of God's decree as enshrined in the Quran. The second premise heralds the potency of repetition, particularly the rhythmic repetition embodied in the sacred practice of zikr, where the ceaseless utterance of divine names or phrases engenders a state of spiritual ecstasy. The third premise heralds the celestial chord struck by the musical rendering of these divine words. The melodious cadence of ghind (song) and the enchanting echo of achchhi awaz (pleasing sound, voice) are believed to possess the divine alchemy to stir the soul (takrik-e-qalb), igniting the flames of divine love to a point of ecstatic reverie (Qureshi 1986).

The embodiment of these premises is vividly illustrated in the opening qawwali of the performance, Mun kunto maula ('Whomever I am his master'), a poem attributed to the venerated poet Amir Khusrau, which encapsulates a reverence and admiration for Ali.

The lyrical realm of qawwali is a delicate interplay between the overt and the covert, the exoteric and the esoteric. Its poetic idiom is imbued with symbolic images, metaphors, and phrases curated, nurtured, and repeated through time. It thus unfolds a realm where a single word or phrase, plucked from this cherished idiom, unfurls palimpsests of meaning, resonating with a profound associational and connotational power. A quintessential illustration of this lyrical nuance is found in the narrative of “Aadam.” The story of Aadam symbolizes the union of the ethereal spirit with the earthly clay, embodying the eternal dance of light and darkness, the quest of the delicate spirit reluctant to descend into the abyss of earthly existence, yearning instead for a realm beyond the ephemeral (Coke Studio).

Scholars Syed Akbar Hyder and Carla Petievich (2010) underscore the inclusive, accessible nature of qawwali, a hallmark of Sufi writings in the Indian subcontinent. The vernacular language of qawwali, enriched with literary tropes reflective of the local milieu, resonates with a universal appeal, often blurring the theological demarcations between Islam and the popular Indic devotional tradition of Bhakti. At the heart of the philosophy is the realization that anyone can seek the truth. Fareed Ayaz quoted Bulleh Shah, reminding us: pad pad ilm hazaar kitaba / kade apne aapnu padhiya nahi:

Yes, yes, you have read thousands of books;

but you have never tried to read your own self

According to Ustad Ayaz, anybody can embark on the journey inward:

Scholars and professors can’t help you know Kabir. For that you’ll have to go close to Kabir himself. You’ll have to break free of your shackles and go! To enter his country, you need Kabir’s visa. And you’ll get it when he decides to give it to you. No Pakistani or Indian government can. Kabir is beyond them. Some people inhabit a land beyond, and when they want to enter that land which has no borders, can a silly government stop them? Do birds need visas?

Personally, I’m enamored by the aesthetics of ambiguity that binds the qawwali with its poetic sibling, the ghazal. The ghazal's form serves as an “ideal vehicle for mystical experience,” where the repetitive monorhyme, akin to the zikr principle, reiterates a central theme, allowing for a free associational play in each couplet without a stringent thematic sequence (Qureshi 1986). Though the lyrics may often dance to the tune of the secular, or flirt with hedonistic allure, at their core, they resonate with the ageless spiritual yearnings—love, devotion, and an insatiable longing for the divine. There's a captivating evolution within the Sufi and Bhakti movements, where the divine transforms into the beloved and the devotee into a lover. Thus, the qawwali highlights the attributes of love, kindness, and mercy, portraying God as a being of approachable, sensuous reality, contrasting the vengeful, unforgiving deity. Such transcendental love is the essence that qawwalis and Urdu poetry, along with Bhakti and Sufi poetry, strive to elucidate, making God a tangible, intimate presence (Mahmood 2018).

In qawwali, the lover emerges as a drunk wanderer, with the essence of longing echoing both material and spiritual beauty. This duality encapsulates the boundless universe, embodying both secular and sectarian nuances. Take Khusrao’s portrayal of the paradoxical nature of divine love:

Khusro says, the river of love
Flows in strange ways
One who escapes, drowns
One who drowns, is saved!

Similarly, Bulleh Shah’s couplet encapsulates the eternal struggle and longing inherent in the quest for divine love. Ishq jab had se guzar jaaye to beemaari hai / Aur agar had se na guzre to adaakaari hai:

When love crosses limits, it’s a disease

And if it doesn’t, it's a charade

The realm of qawwali extends beyond the religious, embracing a form of “spiritual cosmopolitanism” (Qureshi 1999). Its appeal transcends religious bounds, upsetting rigid social hierarchies, and making it immensely popular even among non-Muslim circles.

The intricacies of Indian love poetry often blur the divine and human, enveloping the narrative in an ethereal cloak of eroticized devotion. In such a realm, God as the (male) Beloved and the feminine narrator becomes an enduring trope in Indian poetry, a metaphor that resonated through the corridors of Sufism. The language of virahini, the woman pining for separation from her beloved, lends the qawwali a quintessentially Indian ethos, while simultaneously intertwining the Indian devotional poetry within the Islamic cultural milieu (Hyder and Petievich 2010). As Safvi (2022) argues: “In the Indian milieu, there is ample imagery of a bride and her ornamentation. Her bangles symbolize her married state, and there are many qawwalis that talk of green bangles on the bride’s arms. The quest for the beloved, the longing, separation, and the union were mostly conveyed through such metaphors in the feminine voice. Maternal bonding and love was another popular metaphor.” For example, take the verses of “Chaap Tilak.” Composed by Amir Khusrau in a heart-warming cadence of Braj Bhasha, a popular Western Indian language, amalgamating the Indic vocabulary and setting with the boundless realms of love and devotion. Here’s Raza Mir’s translation:

My looks, my self
My looks, my self, you have stolen them
Merely by locking eyes with me.
That love potion you made me drink
Has me teetering on the brink
Merely by locking eyes with me.
You clasped the fair hands of your queen
Those hands encased in bangles green
Merely by locking eyes with me.
I offer myself to my prince
Let me in your colour rinse
Merely by locking eyes with me.
Khusrau, I give myself up to
My dear Nizaam with such pride
He has turned me with his love
Into a radiant, blushing bride

In Closing

There is a lot left unsaid, but maybe another qawwali themed ink-uilab is in order. In closing, I’d like to briefly touch upon the most stark paradox of Sufism, the individual's solitary voyage amidst a sea of communal ecstasy. The essence of qawwali lies in this very duality—the melding of the self into the collective, whilst embarking on an introspective solo journey into the divine. This journey, akin to a meditative trance, is an exercise in asceticism, a delving into the abyss of self to unearth the divine that resides within.

As the show came to an end, this paradox found a poignant illustration in the visage of Ustad Ayaz. As the crescendo of the final performance enveloped the room in a torrent of dance, Ustad Ayaz was seated in a quiet corner, his head swaying gently to the rhythm of the divine melody, his being drenched in the sharab (wine) of self-introspection. To end with some Zaheen Shah Taji Ay dosto Zaheen ko pehechanta hu main / Sabse alag, jo sab mein hai shaamil, woh hi to hai

Oh friends, I recognize Zaheen
Standing apart yet mingling with all, that's him!

khuda hafiz

BM

(All errors are my own and a by-product of editing this on four hours of sleep)

Recently, I was confronted with a somewhat audacious question: “What is your newsletter about?” I began listing out some themes and realized, I myself did not have an answer. Even the newsletter’s own description, crafted with deliberate ambiguity, states: “Ink-uilab is a collection of variegated reads and verse, curiosities and commonplaces, interspaced with commentary and critique.” But, what does this even mean?

Here’s an attempt to actually figure out what Ink-uilab is about. In lieu of a traditional chapter (however one defines that), I present to you the Ink-uilab index - or a compendium, a digital dictionary, a commonplace book, the timeline of the Ink-uilab cinematic universe, a list of alphabetized words, a waste of time, and the library of (psycho-)Babel. As any discerning social scientist would attest, one must first gather data before delving into its analysis. Here I present to you a snapshot of Ink-uilab, raw data on the various themes, characters, places, and media that we have touched upon. Perhaps in the coming month, we could run some regressions on this data and forecast the topics of the future chapter. Even better, we could just feed this index into a LLM and let it take over, mindlessly churning out a post every month. (While its punctuality might outshine mine, its prose may lack a particular panache.)

Without further ado, here’s the Ink-uilab Index!

**Note: This is a live-page, and I will be updating it with entries for every chapter. [Updated till Ch. 25]

A

• Adiga, Gopalakrishna: Kannada poet [ch. 4]

• Adorno, Theodor: German philosopher and social theorist [ch. 19]

• Air India

  • and its mascot [ch. 9]

• Akhnaten: Egyptian pharaoh [ch. 11]

• Akhtar, Begum: Indian ghazal singer and actress

  • and her life [ch. 3]

  • reflections on visiting her grave [ch. 3]

  • in Ray’s ‘The Music Room’ [ch. 15]

• Akkadian

  • and the Epic of Gilgamesh [ch. 11]

  • and idioms [ch. 15]

• Albania

  • under Hoxha [ch. 3]

• Ali, Agha Shahid: Indian-born Kashmiri-American poet

  • poem: snow on the desert [ch. 3]

  • poem: even the rain [ch. 11]

  • on the ghazal [ch. 11]

  • and Laurence Hope [ch. 13]

  • and James Merrill [ch. 22]

• Ali, Mukhtiyar: Indian Sufi folk singer [ch. 6]

• Allende, Salvador: Chilean physician and socialist politician

  • and his final address [ch. 5]

  • and cybernetic socialism [ch. 5]

• Altruism

  • and earning to give [ch. 4]

• Al-Mulk, Nizam: Persian scholar, jurist, political philosopher, and Vizier

  • and the Siyasatnama [ch. 5]

• Amin, Idi: Ugandan military dictator and politician

  • and his title and regime [ch. 5]

• Anderson, Wes: American filmmaker

  • and ‘The Life Aquatic of Steve Zissou’ [ch. 8]

  • and ‘Hotel Chevalier’ [ch. 9]

  • and Satyajit Ray’s memory game [ch. 14]

• Andree, Salomon August: Swedish engineer, physicist, aeronaut and explorer [ch. 8]

• Animals

  • and machines [ch. 25]

• Antiquities

  • and theft [ch. 3]

• Anthems

  • National / Political [ch. 18]

• Aranda, Luis Jiménez: Spanish-born French painter [ch. 6]

• Archives

  • by Orhan Pamuk and Dayanita Singh [ch. 2]

  • and their destruction [ch. 3]

  • and the Museum of Innocence [ch. 6]

• Artificial Intelligence

  • and writing literature [ch. 5]

  • and consciousness [ch. 25]

• Armstrong, Neil: American astronaut, aeronautical engineer, test pilot, aviator, and professor [ch. 8]

• Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal: Turkish field marshal, revolutionary statesman, and author

  • on his name [ch. 5]

• Ayaz, Fareed & Abu Mohammad: Qawwali musicians [ch. 17]

B

• Balloons

  • and nostalgia [ch. 4]

• Bellingcat: Investigative journalism and open-source intelligence group [ch. 2]

• Benjamin, Walter: German philosopher, cultural critic, and essayist.

  • on unpacking his library [ch. 6]

• Bengaluru / Bangalore [ch. 24]

• Bionics [ch. 5]

• Bollywood

  • and clout-chasing [ch. 1]

  • and Anand (film) [ch. 4]

  • and musical movies [ch. 15]

• Bombay (or Mumbai)

  • and its contradictions [ch. 6]

  • and Irani cafes [ch. 9]

  • and hill stations [ch. 14]

  • and politics [ch. 24]

• Books

  • and inscriptions [ch. 2]

  • and collecting [ch. 6]

• Borges, Juan Luis: Argentine writer, essayist, poet and translator

  • and the Library of Babel [ch. 5]

• Bukhara: [ch. 8]

• Bukowski, Charles: American Poet [ch. 2]

• Bulleh Shah: Punjabi mystic and bhakti-sufi poet [ch. 17]

• Bulgakov, Mikhail

  • on writing [ch. 15]

  • Heart of a Dog [ch. 19]

• Bowie, David: English singer-songwriter and musician

  • and Portuguese covers of his music [ch. 8]

C

• Cafes

  • and Brittania and Co. [ch. 9]

• Carver, Terrel: Political Theorist [ch. 18]

• Catherine, the Great: Tsarina [ch. 20]

• Chhatari, Muhammad Ahmad Khan: politician and Nawabi minister [ch. 9]

• Chernyshevsky, Nikolai: Russian critic, novelist, and utopian socialist philosopher,

  • on ‘What is to be done?’ [ch. 4]

• Chandna, Rishi: Indian filmmaker [ch. 6]

• Chekov, Anton

  • on his career [ch. 15]

• Chickens

  • as pets [ch. 6]

• Chile

  • and experiments with socialism [ch. 5]

• Chilli, Sheikh: stock jester of South Asian folk tales [ch. 10]

• China:

  • travelogue [ch. 20]

• Christ, Jesus

  • and his wife (?) [ch. 3]

• Churchill, Winston: British statesman, soldier, and writer

  • on tonic water [ch. 14]

  • and the Soviet Anthem [ch. 18]

• Coleridge, Samuel Taylor: English poet, critic, philosopher, and theologian [ch. 12]

• Collectors

  • and classifying them [ch. 6]

  • of smells [ch. 12]

• Colonialism

  • and vacation-culture [ch. 14]

  • and Bengali landlords [ch. 15]

• Communism

  • and anthems [ch. 18]

  • and William Carlos Williams [ch. 18]

• Communalism

  • and Babri Masjid [ch. 6]

• Consciousness

  • and AI [ch. 25]

• Container Ships

  • as art [ch. 3]

• Constanzo, Anthony Roth: American countertenor, actor, and producer [ch. 11]

• Cornford, F.M.: English classical scholar and translator [ch. 13]

• Cousteau, Jacques: French oceanographer, explorer, and filmmaker [ch. 8]

• Crooke, William: British orientalist [ch. 10]

• Cumberbatch, Benedict

  • reading Kubla Khan [ch. 12]

• Curation

  • the art of [ch. 6]

• Cybernetics [ch. 5]

D

• Dall-E [ch. 5]

• Death

  • book of, Egyptian [ch. 11]

• Devi, Swarnakumari: Indian poet, novelist, artist, social activist [ch. 14]

• Descartes, René [ch. 25]

• Diaspora

  • R. Parthasarathy on exile [ch. 10]

• Digi Yatra [ch. 20]

• Documentary

  • Raam Ke Naam (film) [ch. 5]

  • Tungrus (film) [ch. 6]

  • Kon-Tiki (film) [ch. 8]

• Dostoevsky

  • as an economist [ch. 21]

• Du Fu: Tang Dynasty poet [ch. 20]

• Dyson, Freeman: theoretical physicist and mathematician [ch. 12]

E

• Edgeworth, Francis: Economist [ch. 21]

• Egypt

  • ancient [ch. 11]

• Elliot, T. S.: American poet, critic, essayist, editor, and publisher [ch. 8]

• Etymology

  • of the plum etc. [ch. 8]

• Erdős, Paul: Hungarian mathematician [ch. 12]

• Existentialism

  • and the American university [ch. 4]

• Explorers

  • and their motivations [ch. 8]

• Ezekeil, Nizzim: Indian Jewish poet, actor, playwright, editor and art critic

  • on Brittania and Co. [ch. 9]

F

• Farnam, Henry W: Political Economist [ch. 21]

• France

  • descriptions of [ch. 12]

• Freuchen, Peter: Danish explorer, author, journalist and anthropologist [ch. 8]

G

• Gaddis, John Lewis

  • on the patterns of history [ch. 13]

• Gandhara [ch. 3]

• Gandhi, Anand: Indian filmmaker,

  • Ship of Theseus (film) [ch. 12]

• Gandhi, Supriya: historian of Mughal India [ch. 2]

• Gender Inequality

  • in the Indian labour force [ch. 1]

• Genocide:

  • in context of China [ch. 20]

• Ghazals

  • and style [ch. 11]

  • poem: ‘on the tongue’ [ch. 11]

  • and ‘In Custody’ [ch. 15]

• Gilgamesh, Epic of [ch. 11]

• Glass, Philip: American composer and pianist

  • and Akhnaten [ch. 11]

• Godard, Jean-Luc: Franco-Swiss film director, screenwriter, film critic, and radical

  • on ‘What is to be done?’ [ch. 4]

• Goethe

  • and Faust II [ch. 25]

• Gorakhnath: Indian mystic saint [ch. 6]

• Great Man Theory

  • and the Shahnameh [ch. 13]

• Guha, Ramachandra: Indian historian, environmentalist, and writer

  • on communalism [ch. 6]

  • and ‘Rebels against the Raj’ [ch. 13]

H

• Harry Potter

  • and the Mirror of Erised [ch. 25]

• Hasan Mehdi, British-American journalist [ch. 13]

• Heti, Sheila: Canadian writer [ch. 5]

• Heyerdahl, Thor: Norwegian adventurer and ethnographer [ch. 8]

• Hicks, Bill: American comedian

  • on weapons [ch. 25]

• Hikmet, Nâzım [ch. 14]

• Hill Stations [ch. 14]

• Hillary, Edmund: New Zealand mountaineer, explorer, and philanthropist [ch. 8]

• Holub, Miroslav: Czech poet and immunologist [ch. 5]

• Hong Kong:

  • travels [ch. 20]

• Horkheimer, Max: German philosopher and sociologist [ch. 19]

• Hope, Laurence: English poet [ch. 13]

• Hugo, Victor: French Romantic poet, novelist, and dramatist

  • and eccentric habits [ch. 2]

• Hume, David: Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist

  • and bundle theory [ch. 19]

I

• Index: [ch. 16]

• Internationale

  • the song [ch. 18]

• Internet Privacy

  • in India and China [ch. 20]

• Inspiration

  • a defense of inspiration [ch. 2]

  • and the novelist [ch. 5]

  • and classical music [ch. 15]

• Iqbal, Mohammad: South Asian writer, philosopher, poet and politician

  • on ‘What is to be done?’ [ch. 4]

  • on the ‘Modern Man’ [ch. 9]

  • and qawwali [ch. 17]

J

• Jóhannsson, Jóhann: Icelandic composer [ch. 5]

K

• Kabir: Indian mystic poet and saint

  • and lyrical poems [ch. 6]

  • in ‘The Disciple’ [ch. 15]

• Kafka, Franz

  • and economic ratinality [ch. 21]

• Kasparov, Garry

  • and his match against IBM Deep Blue [ch. 25]

• Kissinger, Henry [ch. 13]

• Kelen, Emery: Hungarian artist and caricaturist [ch. 9]

• Kennan, George: American diplomat and historian

  • on writing history [ch. 2]

• Khan, Agha III: 48th Imam of the Shia Ismaili Muslims [ch. 9]

• Khandala [ch. 14]

• Khusrau, Amir: Poet, Mystic, and Philosopher [ch. 17]

• Koko the Gorilla [ch. 25]

L

• Languages: [ch. 18]

• Lem, Stanisław: Polish writer [ch. 19]

• Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich: Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist

  • on ‘What is to be done?’ [ch. 4]

  • on music [ch. 15]

• London:

  • R. Parthasarathy on [ch. 10]

• Logic of Likeness: [ch. 19]

• Loops, endless: [ch. 16]

• Lucknow

  • in photographs [ch. 3]

• Luttwak, Edward: writer and grand strategist

  • On the Ghanian coup of 1966 [ch. 1]

M

• MacNeice, Louis: Irish poet and playwright [ch. 1]

• Malaysia

  • and anthems [ch. 18]

• Malaria: [ch. 14]

• Mallory, George: British explorer and mountaineer [ch. 8]

• Mamdani, Zohran [ch. 24]

• Mandeville, Bernard

  • Fable of Bees [ch. 21]

• Manuscripts:

  • and fakery [ch. 3]

  • of Indian satirical literature [ch. 10]

• Manto, Saadat Hasan [ch. 23]

• Marx, Karl: philosopher, political economist, historian, sociologist, journalist, and revolutionary.

  • on youth [ch. 4]

  • and his coat [ch. 19]

• Merchant-Ivory [ch. 15]

• Merrill, James [ch. 22]

• Mexico:

  • and anthems [ch. 18]

• Microcosmographia Academica [ch. 13]

• Micronations [ch. 18]

• Mody, Homi: Parsi lawyer, businessman, and administrator [ch. 9]

• Moustaches

  • and Nietzsche [ch. 5]

• Mughal

  • miniatures and AI [ch. 5]

  • sufism and Dara Shikoh [ch. 10]

• Mumbai: see Bombay

N

• Nagel, Thomas: [ch. 25]

• Naidu, Sarojini: Indian poet, writer, and political activist

  • and her life [ch. 9]

  • on visiting her childhood home [ch. 9]

• Nasreddin, Mullah: satirical character of Persian folklore [ch. 10]

• New York

  • and Mamdani [ch. 24]

• New Zealand

  • reflections on travel [ch. 14]

• Nietzsche, Friedrich: German philosopher, poet, critic, philologist, and composer

  • on moustaches [ch. 5]

  • on adventure [ch. 8]

• Nkrumah, Kwame: Ghanaian politician, political theorist, and revolutionary [ch. 1]

• North, Paul: [ch. 19]

• Nostalgia

  • and balloons [ch. 4]

  • and paan [ch. 7]

• Notebooks [ch. 2]

O

• Opera:

  • Philip Glass’ Akhnaten [ch. 11]

• Opium

  • and literature [ch. 12]

• Oppenheimer, Robert J.: American theoretical physicist and director of Los Alamos [ch. 12]

• Orwell, George

  • and Animal Farm [ch. 18]

• Oxford Union: [ch. 22]

P

• Paanwallahs [ch. 7]

• Pamuk, Orhan: Turkish novelist, screenwriter, and academic

  • on archives [ch. 2]

  • on the novelist [ch. 5]

• Pancakes [ch. 19]

• Pauli, Wolfgang: Austrian theoretical physicist [ch. 12]

• Pannirselvam, A. T: Indian attorney, landlord, and politician [ch. 9]

• Parthasarathy, R: Indian poet, translator, critic, professor, and editor [ch. 10]

• Pascal, Blaise [ch. 25]

• Patwardhan, Anand: Indian documentary filmmaker [ch. 5]

• Physician-Writers [ch. 15]

• Peep Show: TV Show

  • and life coaching [ch. 19]

• Perec, Georges: French novelist, filmmaker, documentalist, and essayist

  • on arranging books [ch. 6]

• Plums [ch. 8]

• Population Control

  • and policy-making [ch. 4]

• Power Politics [ch. 20]

• Pragmatism [ch. 13]

• Pringle, Peter: Canadian musician [ch. 11]

• Public Service Broadcasting: London-based musical group [ch. 8]

• Pushkin, Alexander: Russian poet and playwright

  • and the Onegin Sonnet [ch. 22]

Q

• Qawaali [ch. 17]

R

• Ramachandran, P. P: Malyalam Poet [ch. 19]

• Ramsey, Frank: Economist and philosopher polymath [ch. 21]

• Rationality

  • and economics [ch. 21]

• Ray, Monk: British biographer and philosopher [ch. 12]

• Ray, Satyajit: Indian filmmaker, writer, lyricist, editor, illustrator, calligrapher, and composer

  • and his style [ch. 1]

  • on where to begin with Ray [ch. 1]

  • and ‘Days and Nights in the Forest’ [ch. 14]

  • and ‘The Music Room’ [ch. 15]

• Rehage, Christoph: writer, adventurer, and film-maker [ch. 8]

• Realpolitik [ch. 13]

• Religion

  • and pilgrimage [ch. 10]

  • and monotheism [ch. 11]

  • and Mo H Saidi [ch. 15]

• Robots

  • and intelligence [ch. 25]

• Round Table Conference

  • of 1930 - 1932 [ch. 9]

• Rumi, Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad: Sufi mystic, poet [ch. 22]

S

• Said, Edward [ch. 20]

• Saidi, Mo H: writer, poet, obstetrician, and gynecologist [ch. 15]

• Sampath, Kiran: writer

  • The Attache’s Wife [ch. 19]

• Sartre, Jean-Paul: French philosopher, playwright, novelist, activist, biographer, and literary critic

  • and daily rituals [ch. 12]

• Sarstedt, Peter: British singer-songwriter and instrumentalist [ch. 9]

• Satire

  • on Arab tour-buses [ch. 10]

  • and South Asian folk tales [ch. 10]

• Saudi Arabia

  • and Neom, the linear city [ch. 1]

  • reflections on travel [ch. 10]

• Scams

  • and scambaiting awards [ch. 3]

  • and pro-cycling [ch. 3]

  • and Jay Shetty [ch. 19]

• Schopenhauer, Arthur: German philosopher

  • on suffering [ch. 3]

• Seth, Vikram: Indian writer and poet

  • travels in China and Tibet [ch. 20]

• Shakespeare

  • an an economist [ch. 21]

• Shahnameh, the

  • as a historical compass [ch. 13]

• Short Story [ch. 23]

• Shostakovich, Dmitri : Soviet-Russian composer and pianist

  • and the Theramin [ch. 18]

• Shukla, Vinay: Indian filmmaker

  • and ‘Ship of Theseus’ [ch. 12]

  • and ‘Bureaucracy Sonata’ [ch. 15]

• Shukoh, Dara: heir-apparent of the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan [ch. 10]

• Sigmund, Freud: Austrian neurologist and psychoanalyst

  • on drugs [ch. 12]

• Simeon, Dilip: Indian writer and labour historian [ch. 18]

• Singh, Dayanita: Indian photographer

  • on archives [ch. 2]

  • and ‘The Disciple’ [ch. 15]

• Singh, Ganga: Maharaja of the princely state of Bikaner [ch. 9]

• Solitude [ch. 3]

  • reflections on [ch. 3]

  • Oppenheimer on [ch. 12]

  • and music making [ch. 15]

• Soviet Union

  • Spa resorts [ch. 14]

  • and the Internationale [ch. 18]

• Spitzwerg, Carl: German Painter [ch. 2]

• Stalin, Joseph: Soviet revolutionary and leader

  • and Stalinism [ch. 3]

  • song of [ch. 18]

• Subramanian, Arvind: Indian Economist [ch. 20]

• Sufism

  • in theory and practice [ch. 17]

  • and Dara Shikoh [ch. 10]

• Suntzeff, Nicholas: American astronomer and cosmologist

  • on the eternal question [ch. 4]

• Süskind, Patrick: German writer [ch. 12]

• Syllabus, the: algorithmic, curated, newsletter [ch. 5]

T

• Tamhane, Chaitanya: Indian filmmaker [ch. 15]

• Timepass [ch. 11]

• Temur, Amir: Turco-Mongol conqueror

  • and his tomb [ch. 3]

• Tetlock, Philip: Canadian-American political scientist and writer [ch. 13]

• Tintin

  • and opium [ch. 12]

• Tolstoy, Leo Nikolayevich: Russian novelist and moral philosopher

  • on ‘What is to be done?’ [ch. 4]

  • and the patterns of history [ch. 13]

• Tonic Water [ch. 14]

• Toscanini, Arturo: Italian conductor [ch. 18]

• Trickle Down Economics [ch. 23]

• Turing, Alan:

  • and the Turing Test [ch. 25]

• Tutankhamun: antepenultimate pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty of ancient Egypt [ch. 11]

• Tuva:

  • and throat-singing [ch. 18]

• Tyrannosaurus

  • skulls [ch. 3]

U

• UPI [ch. 20]

• Uyghurs [ch. 20]

V

• Vegetable carving [ch. 4]

W

• Waffles [ch. 19]

• War crimes

  • and Henry Kissinger [ch. 13]

• William, Carlos Williams [ch. 18]

• Wittgenstein, Ludwig

  • and biographies [ch. 12]

  • and names [ch. 25]

• Wolfram, Stephan: computer scientist, physicist, businessman, and self-professed prodigy

  • on productivity [ch. 4]

X

• Xinjiang [ch. 20]

Y

• Yang, Edward: Taiwanese film-maker

  • Yi-Yi (film) [ch. 3]

• Yes Minister: British political satire sitcom

  • on Idi Amin [ch. 5]

  • on the Middle East [ch. 10]

  • on obfuscation [ch. 12]

  • on ‘the thin end of the wedge’ [ch. 13]

Z

• Zaheen Shah Taji: Sufi Poet and Philosopher [ch. 17]

cheers! BM

(All errors are my own and a by-product of editing this during a talk by C. C. Wei, the jocular CEO of TSMC)

The anticipation has, no doubt, tingled your senses, leaving you wondering where on Earth your next literary morsel from Ink-uilab has been. To the keen-eyed readers who might have noticed a delay in this dispatch, I say—let it go. Time is but an illusion, a fanciful social construct layered atop the unfathomable eternity of the cosmos. In lieu of an apology, I offer you an ancient grain of wisdom, harking from that primordial cradle of civilization, Mesopotamia (c. 3rd millennium BCE):

Here’s the idiom in Akkadian Cuneiform (I’ve been looking for an excuse to use the Sumero-AkkadianCuneiform Uni-Code on this blog):

𒌓 𒁕 𒂵 𒁺 𒈾 𒃰 𒄰

𒌓 𒌋𒄞 𒆷 𒂵 𒁺 𒉺𒇻 𒌉 𒊏 𒄰

𒂵 𒁺 𒂵 𒁺 𒈾 𒀀𒀭 𒌓 𒈪 𒉌 𒅁 𒉌 𒉌 𒂊

[transliterated: ud-da ga-gen na-gada-kam / ud ul-la ga-gen sipad-tur-ra-kam / ga-gen ga-gen-na-am3 ud mi-ni-ib-zal-zal-e; Source: Collection III at The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature] Akkadian aside, the issue with maintaining this periodical newsletter to keep me accountable and keep me writing is that when it works, I find myself writing a myriad of projects—none of which, regrettably, are this cherished newsletter.

Watching me scramble to meet these arbitrary monthly deadlines must be akin to viewing a one-man rendition of a Shakespearean comedy—a farcical feast for the audience, if a tragicomedy for the performer. To keep me chained to this chronological hamster wheel, do subscribe if you haven't:

Subscribe now

Hindustani Classical Music, in Four Movies:

• In the past month, I have been grateful for the opportunity to listen to the masters of the Bhindibazaar Gharana at the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA) in Bombay. As an avid listener with zero musical talent, these experiences have led me to ponder: What is it about Hindustani Classical—or indeed, any classical music—that ensnares the senses and captivates the soul? Is it the intricate raga, the rhythmic tala, or perhaps the sheer passion with which it is performed?

• It was Vladimir Lenin who once profoundly remarked during a tete-a-tete recollected by Maxim Gorky:

  But I can’t listen to music very often, it affects my nerves. I want to say sweet, silly things, and pat the little heads of people who, living in a filthy hell, can create such beauty. These days, one can’t pat anyone on the head nowadays, they might bite your hand off. Hence, you have to beat people's little heads, beat mercilessly, although ideally we are against doing any violence to people. Hm — what a devilishly difficult job!

• This chapter of ink-uilab discusses Hindustani Classical Music through the lens of four films. We discuss the perfection and the purity of the artist in The Disciple; The never-ending quest of the listener to interpret and wholly understand music in Raag Sarkari; the act of recording and preserving music in In Custody; and the hypnotic hold of the Raga in The Music Room (Jalsaghar).

• The Disciple (2020)

  • In a world dominated by cacophonous chartbusters and noisy Netflix shorts, The Disciple (2020) resonates with a mellifluous tenor, capturing the essence of artistry, the torment of tradition, and the allure of ambition. The film is a Marathi one, yet another audacious experiment by Chaitanya Tamhane's imagination. Tamhane's 2014 court drama, aptly named Court, was my first introduction to his work and is in its own right an exquisite exploration of jurisprudence juxtaposed with social realities. Both films have, thankfully, been widely commended by critics.

  • In the capricious cosmos of Indian classical music, where does one search for that elusive aria of artistic excellence? This is the perennial perplexity faced by Sharad Nerulkar, the forlorn protagonist and eponymous disciple of The Disciple. He has devoted his life to becoming an Indian classical music vocalist, standing on the bedrock of tradition, guided by old masters, his guru, and the paternal pillar of his father. But alas, Sharad treads through the labyrinthine paths of musical mastery only to find his soul ensnared in the fetters of doubt and disillusionment. We first encounter Sharad when he is in his sprightly twenties. In the inky solitude of late-night Mumbai, Sharad finds tranquility, as he listens to the recorded lectures of the mythical Maai — an iconic musician and guru. Maai warns, echoing the thoughts of countless gurus before her, that music is an eternal quest, often taking lifetimes to master. It demands an unblemished mind and an austere lifestyle—maxims that Sharad's guru, a disciple of Maai, reaffirms with oracular gravity.

  • Contrast these maxims to the setting of modern-day Mumbai. The sweltering crucible of cacophonous culture, where asceticism (in any form) seems as out of place as a Stradivarius in a punk-metal concert. Here, our Sharad endures the Sisyphean ordeal of serving his aging guru, tending to his every earthly need, all while his own career languishes in the limbo of the culturally vapid. His sacrifices stand in stark contrast to the milieu—a world that dotes on filmy pop and Tiktok loops over so-called genuine artistry. Even Sharad's guru, for all his unparalleled prowess, remains a whisper in the corridors of classical acclaim.

  • But this dilemma — the fear of being forgotten and the inquietude of imperfection — is not limited to Hindustani classical music. As a review puts it “The Disciple might be set in the esoteric world of Indian classical music but its concerns are universal – Sharad's struggle to negotiate between the loy demands of the tradition and the tough reality of survival in a city like Mumbai is the struggle of artists everywhere. He performs in non-descript halls and watches stoically as a young girl on a television talent show rises to fame. Every step of her ascent takes her further from her original self – in the last visual of her, she's on a gaudy set, painted with make-up, singing a forgettable filmy song. But she's made a mark. Meanwhile Sharad continues to over his hard-earned artistry to a handful of listeners. His uncompromising pursuit of perfection becomes harder to justify or sustain.”

  • From a visually stunning movie, one scene in particular sticks with me. The setting, the smoky Bombay night, and Maai’s musings combine to create an ethereal - almost fantastical - atmosphere. The scene actually reminds me of the photography of Dayanita Singh. Singh’s photos and Tamhane's filmography capture a timeless liminality unique to the city (or cities like) Bombay. This liminality is akin to the same feeling one would get during a 3 a.m. walk through a deserted city quarter, inhaling the smolder of kababs grilled the night before and smokers from the morning after.

    

  • In the moving finale of The Disciple, we witness a phenomenal rendition of Bhakti singing—a style we waxed poetic about in Chapter 6. The scene is a haunting coda to Sharad's arduous journey, reminiscent of the celestial cadences that once enamored him, the music from which is linked here.

• Raag Sarkari (2012)

  • Raag Sarkari, or Bureaucracy Sonata is a short film by Vinay Shukla that deals with a surprisingly vast set of issues within a very short run-time. Amongst broader depictions of the Indian State, politics, and culture, the film beckons us to explore the depths of our souls as listeners.

  • Vinay Shukla, the brilliant mind behind this masterpiece, continues to grace us with his unparalleled storytelling, with the movie winning an HBO Best Short Film Award.

    • Shukla’s work, which I have admired since the mesmerizing Ship of Theseus (discussed previously in Chapter 12) and his biopic of Arvind Kejriwal. Shuklas’s latest 'While We Watched', is a documentary on the legendary Indian newsman Ravish Kumar and the trials and tribulations of being a journalist in a country that is becoming increasingly hostile to a free press. It is an urgent watch that somehow simultaneously depresses and inspires a viewer. For U.S. audiences, it has just been released on PBS (Watch it here). The team has unsurprisingly been unable to find distributors for the film in India.

  • Here’s a brief synopsis: From June 26, 1975 through March 21, 1977, a shadow draped itself across India. This period of “emergency,” where democracy took a reluctant siesta and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi wielded the scepter of unbridled power. Amid this backdrop, the film introduces us to the symphony of a simple prison warden and the music teacher prisoner whose melodies ensnare him. The teacher, with his celestial voice, becomes the sun around which the warden orbits, a daily ritual that brings semblance and order in the chaos of the times. Every evening, as the sun bids adieu to the horizon, the teacher caresses the strings of a raag, and the warden attempts to unravel its mysteries. Yet, every attempt meets with a smirk, a chuckle - a gentle reminder of the eternal chase between the artist and the admirer. This playful dance of identification is both poignant and humorous, reminiscent of the sishya and the guru, much like Sharad's quest in his pursuit of perfection in The Disciple.

  • Here, the warden’s quest to accurately identify the guru's raag becomes emblematic of our own desires to not just hear, but truly understand the heartbeats within the notes. Can we ever truly 'grasp’ music without playing? To what extent does the listener shape the music - actively - even while in the audience?

  • I won’t spoil the rest of the movie for you. One of the perks of short films is that they’re widely and freely available online, so you have no excuse to not watch Raag Sarkari:

• In Custody (1993):

  • In Custody (Muhafiz) is a 1993 film by the iconic Merchant Ivory Productions - the production house of the duo Ismail Merchant and James Ivory. The film was brought to life from the imaginative corners of Anita Desai's 1984 novel and won National Awards from the Government of India for Best Production Design and Special Jury award for lead actor Shashi Kapoor. Interestingly, In Custody was Ismail Merchant’s directorial debut, who had until this point operated as a producer bringing to life the vision of director James Ivory. Their filmography is frankly economic, and the expression "Merchant–Ivory film" has made its way into common parlance, to denote a particular aesthetic and style of cinema rather than their actual production company.

  • The story of In Custody revolves around Deven, a Hindi literature professor who gets an opportunity to interview Nur, a legendary Urdu poet. Deven sees this as a chance to revive his passion for Urdu poetry and to pay tribute to the great poet. However, as he dives deeper into Nur's world, he encounters the harsh realities of the poet's life, including his domestic squabbles and the commercialization of his art. The journey becomes a reflection of the decay of art and culture in the face of modernity.

  • The film delves not merely into melodies, but into the chronicle of their creation – an exploration of the recorder, the recorded, and most importantly, the historian. Here, the lore, curiously, is not etched in Hindi, the commonly assumed language of Bollywood, but in Urdu, lending it a poetic finesse and cultural depth. Frankly, my only real critique of the film would be the surprising lack of ‘original’ Urdu poetry in a film where poetry is at the heart. Rather, actual verses written by Faiz Ahmed Faiz are passed off the those written by Nur and are weakly translated in the subtitles.

    

  • What's truly gripping for me is the very act of recording – a moment captured forever, both in music and memory. Deven’s quixotic quest to record Nur's poetic verses becomes an act laden with symbolism as the ghazals themselves. The tape recorder, ever-present, becomes an emblem of the challenges of art preservation. From technological fiascos to Nur's own poetic lethargy, the struggle to commit these timeless verses to a corporeal medium mirrors the greater challenge of safeguarding a cultural art form in an era of unyielding modernity. The act of recording is a potent metaphor, capturing both the fugitive essence of the art form and the vulnerabilities of its practitioners.

  • Another masterful element of the film is the depiction of the ‘artist’. As for Nur, marvelously embodied by Shashi Kapoor, he stands as a tragic tableau of an artist in decline—a life splintered between two feuding wives and plagued by financial strife. Yet, in his weary visage, we glimpse the vestiges of a time when Urdu poetry reigned. As a New York Times review of the film describes:

    “Lying on his side in a narrow bed is a corpulent, aging Indian poet named Nur. He is a curiously imposing figure, even with his back to the camera, and provides what may be the greatest role in the long career of Shashi Kapoor … Mr. Kapoor turns Nur into a present-day Balzac: fierce and wise, yet with all the signs of having lived a little too well.”

  • In sum, In Custody functions as a celluloid capsule—a memento mori, if you will—of a world confronting cultural obscurity. It raises disquieting questions regarding the artist and his craft, epitomizing the innate struggles in preserving art forms that are threatened by the insatiable and endless maw of contemporary life. Through its rich narrative, interspersed with the lyrical beauty of ghazals, the film leaves an indelible impression on the state and fate of Urdu poetry in India’s complex cultural landscape.

  • The few ghazals in the film are immaculate: a soul-searching melody rendered by Kavita Krishnamurthy and penned by Behzad Lakhnavi, its notes woven by the maestro Zakir Hussain & Ustad Sultan Khan:

  • Seemingly, the entire movie is available on YouTube (here). In addition, it appears like the Yale Film Archive has just recently acquired the James Ivory Collection. To make the best use of the resource, I’ve been planning to organize a watch party of In Custody in the original 35mm at some point this semester. If you’d be interested in joining, do let me know!

• The Music Room / Jalsaghar (1958)

  • Unless this is your first Ink-uilab, you would be familiar with my devotion to Satyajit Ray and his cinematic masterpieces. The Music Room - arguably his best (and slowest) movie - is more than just a film; it's an intoxicating symphony of sights, sounds, and social-behaviors. Based on a short story by Tarasankar Bandyopadhyay, Ray presents a poignant portrait of pride, passion, and the inexorable march of time. While the movie was a commercial failure, it was considered a masterpiece by critics, Pauline Kael, the esteemed film critic described the movie as a “great, flawed, maddening film -- hard to take but probably impossible to forget. It's often crude and it's poorly constructed, but it's a great experience. Worrying over its faults is like worrying over whether King Lear is well constructed; it really doesn't matter”

  • The story revolves around the life of a zamindar (landlord), Biswambhar Roy, who is witnessing the decline of his aristocratic family in post-colonial India. Despite his dwindling wealth and the emergence of a new, wealthy class, our beleaguered zamindar, is ensnared in the seductive embrace of sonorous symphonies. He clings to his past glory and is obsessed with his music room, where he hosts lavish musical soirées. This sanctuary, dripping in decadence, represents the days when he reigned supreme. Emply and echoing, it reminds him of his diminishing dynastic dignity.

    

  • For our protagonist, music isn't just a muse; it's a statement, a stance, and a shield against the shadows of shifting societal status. Through lavish soirees, he attempts to drown out the cacophonous clatter of the nouveau-riche and seek social clout. It's an all too familiar dance of desperation, reminiscent of modern patrons who solely visit art galleries for selfies, turning timeless treasures into transient Instagram backdrops, diminishing Botticelli into a background.

  • The zamindar is the living, breathing, crumbling embodiment of an epoch on the brink of oblivion. He's as much in love with the enchanting ghazals as he is chained to the echoes of his erstwhile empire. The inexorable tide of time and change threatens to wash away his musical bastion, but our zamindar defiantly dances on, even as his purse and prestige perish. In its entirety, The Music Room is a melancholic meditation on metamorphosis, both personal and societal. It's a lament for lost legacies and a eulogy for an era eclipsed.

    

  • One of the highlights of the film is the features of some of the maestros of Hindustani Classical music. Ustad Vilayat Khan composed some of the music for the film. In addition, the scenes of the movie make up the few - if not only - visual recordings we have of these musicians at work. For example, the movie features Begum Akhtar (herself) singing Bhore Bhore Ankiya, and Ustad Salamat Ali Khan:

As always, some verses, in parting:

• Last week I was engaged in a conversation about physicians who were writers (or writers who were physicians). A surprising number of great writers of literature were medically trained and/or practicing doctors, so much so that the term ‘physician-writer’ has a Wikipedia entry. The prominent names are Doyle, Keats, and the poet William Carlos Williams. One of my favorites, Bulgakov abandoned his medical practice to pursue writing. He recalls in his biography: “Once in 1919 when I was traveling at night by train I wrote a short story. In the town where the train stopped, I took the story to the publisher of the newspaper who published the story”. Anton Chekov, arguably one of the greatest physician-writers characterized the dialectic of his career as: “medicine is my lawful wife and literature is my mistress … When I get tired of one, I spend the night with the other. Though it’s disorderly, it’s not so dull; and besides neither of them loses anything from my infidelity.”

• Following the conversation, I found myself reflecting on contemporary ‘physician-writers.’ Some authors, like Atul Gawande and Siddhartha Mukherjee, turn to their experiences in the hospital-ward to write works of non-fiction. Khaled Hosseini practiced medicine for a decade until (and slightly-after) the publication of The Kite Runner. Other modern-day physicians write verse, like Amit Majmudar, Sarah Moin (who moonlights as my sister), and Mo H Saidi.

• Saidi is a writer, poet, and obstetrician/gynecologist in the U.S. Born and raised in Ahwaz, Iran his writings engage with questions of history, faith, family, and reccurance.

• Here is Reciting the Holy Book by Mo H. Saidi, from his collection Between A and Z:

Mother recited the Koran every night.

None of us knew what those words meant.

She persuaded us to pray every day.

She would frighten us,

“You’ll go to Hell otherwise.”

Near the mosque I was born.

Reciting aloud the muezzin kept us

awake all night. Mother said, this was

God’s call, and we would suffer

forever if we didn’t respond.

She paid us to recite the Holy

Book, "So you’ll go to Heaven,”

she’d cry out. When she saw

that we ran away instead

she prayed for us every night.

She brought a mullah who called

us pagans because we read Hugo

and Hemingway, played chess and listened

to Mozart. We kicked a ball

and played soccer in the courtyard.

Our father dismissed the bigot quietly

told us, “That is an ignorant fool:

go to school and read Hedayat and Ferdowsi.”

That mullah is now the Grand Ayatollah

who resides in the Shah’s palace.

Au revoir!

BM

(All errors are my own and a by-product of editing this during a Near-Eastern Literature seminar.)

First and foremost, accept my sincere apologies for the delay. Though I've been busy writing this past month, regrettably, none of it was fit for the pages of Ink-uilab (yet). Initially, I envisioned this chapter to encapsulate two fascinating topics, hill-stations, musical films (or filmy music - take your pick), each adorned with their share of poetic waxing. However, I seem to have exhausted the email size limit with just the former. So, consider this as a raincheck for the latter, to be discussed in a future chapter...

Watching me scramble to meet these arbitrary monthly deadlines must be amusing. To keep me trapped in this chronological hamster wheel, do subscribe if you haven't yet!

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Without further ado, let’s set off. In this chapter, we begin in Wellington ascend the heights of India's colonial hill stations, investigating their enduring allure, and then descend into the intoxicating depths of Nâzım Hikmet's evocative verse,

An Indian-Connection

• Envision our delighted astonishment when, during a recent road-trip through New Zealand, we found ourselves in the heart of Khandallah. Nestled amidst hills and valleys, this quaint neighbourhood located to the northeast of Wellington seemed like an unexpected echo from another world. This wouldn't have stirred any interest, but for us in the car, the name instantly stirred nostalgia for the hill station of Khandala - a archetypal summer retreat for Mumbai's residents.

  • Khandala permeates the Indian popular consciousness, immortalised in the playful Bollywood tune, Aati Kya Khandala (trans. will you come to Khandala?) from the film Ghulam (1998) starring a young Aamir Khan and Rani Mukherjee.

• Our curiosity, naturally, was ignited. Could there be a tangible thread linking this Khandallah across the globe to Khandala we visited frequently in our youth?

• The origins of the name can be traced back to a homestead christened 'Khandallah Homestead,' erected in 1884. The popular theory is that the homestead owes its name to the nostalgia of a former veterinary surgeon that served in the Bombay Light Cavalry. Captain Edward Battersbee, who settled in New Zealand on his Raj-alloted parcel of land, gave his homestead, and hence the suburb, its Indian moniker due to his previous stationing in India.

  

• The Indian connection, however, isn't as clear-cut as one might wish. Despite numerous sources suggesting that Battersbee named the neighbourhood after his time stationed in India, the specifics remain shrouded in uncertainty. Numerous accounts, rather confusingly, propose that the Khandallah in question might be Khandela, located in the arid terrains of Rajasthan and not the verdant landscapes of Maharashtra's Khandala.

  • I’ve spent an embarrassingly long time researching the history of a random Kiwi suburb and the military career of Captain Battersbee. I'm inclined to believe that Battersbee's homestead was named after Khandallah in Maharashtra, not Rajasthan. Why? Well, several reasons.

    1. The Bombay Light Cavalry, in which Battersbee served, was raised in Maharashtra, making it likely that he was familiar with the Khandala there.

    2. The colonial fame of Khandallah as a hill station, a place of retreat and relaxation, aligns with the atmosphere one would want their homestead to embody. On the other hand, Khandela, Rajasthan, known for its hot summers, scanty rainfall, chilly winter season, and generally dry air, is not a likely candidate.

    3. The physical resemblance between Khandala, Maharashtra, nestled coolly on a hill with numerous waterfalls, and Khandallah, Wellington, is striking.

  • With these points in consideration, it's more than plausible that many Kiwi blogs on Wellington's cool Indian connection may contain a minor factual error. I am currently awaiting some notes from the New Zealand National Archival on Captain Edward Battersbee’s career to see if that offers us more clarity on this puzzle.

• It appears that the lingering memories of the Raj cast their shadows far and wide. The Indian influence permeates the entire suburb, reflected in the streets' names, which were changed at some point in the 1920s. This enchanting tale of intertwined historic nomenclature is illustrated in this architectural assessment of the Wellington suburb: “The block bounded by Ganges Road, Everest Street, Cashmere Avenue, Agra Crescent … Privacy fences and hedging conceal roomy, contemporary houses mixed in with early twentieth century homes along Simla Crescent. Kim Street, Kohima Drive, Jalna Avenue, and Baroda Street are all steep, thin roads that wind up the western valley for 300 metres or less before dead-ending, often into private driveways.”

What, pray tell, is a hill station?

• Dane Kennedy’s The Magic Mountains: Hill Stations and the British Raj (here) describes these fascinating places:

  Located on peaks that loom like sentinels over heat-shimmering plains, hill stations remain among the most curious monuments to the British colonial presence in India. Their origins can be traced to the effort in the early nineteenth century to establish sanitaria within the subcontinent where European invalids could recover from the heat and disease of the tropics. But hill stations soon assumed an importance that far exceeded their initial therapeutic attraction. To these cloud-enshrouded sanctuaries the British expatriate elite came for seasonal relief not merely from the physical toll of a harsh climate but from the social and psychological toll of an alien culture. Here they established closed communities of their own kind in a setting of their own design. As self-styled guardians of the raj, however, they also sought to supervise their subjects from these commanding heights. Here they established political headquarters and military cantonments, centers of power from whence they issued and executed orders with an Olympian air of omnipotence. Hill stations, in effect, served both as sites of refuge and as sites for surveillance. These were places where the British endeavored at one and the same time to engage with and to disengage from the dominion they ruled. This paradox and its implications for the imperial endeavor give the hill stations their significance.

• A notable first-hand account that captures this essence of hill stations is Richard Bentley's 1852 narrative, "Life in Bombay, and Neighbouring Outstations". I stumbled across this source at the YCBA while researching a paper for an ethnography course, and it has slowly become one of my favourite English texts from colonial India:

  Owing to the relaxing nature of the climate it is considered essentially necessary for the preservation of health, to take at least one change during the year to one of the charming places of resort situated above the Gháts, and within an easy distance of Bombay. Some fortunate individuals, indeed, there are who contrive to absent themselves during the three seasons, when the weather is pleasanter elsewhere than here; and thus by repairing to Mahabuleshwur for the hot months, Poona for the rains, and Khandalla for October, they carve out for themselves a perfection of climate, and consequent redoubled enjoyment of life, such as the untravelled European can scarcely realise

• What does one do at a hill station? Life in these utopian bubbles appears to have been a relentless whirl of social activities reminiscent of upper-middle-class life back home in Britain. This existence was not much different from the English spa towns and seaside resorts. Visitors sought relief from their constant ailments, indulged in leisure activities, and above all, found a community that reflected their social status and cultural norms. As Kennedy describes,

  They unpacked and donned their woolens, made their social calls and hosted their "at-homes," exchanged their pleasantries on their promenades along the Mall, and all the while did their best to reinhabit in mind and in manner a world they had left behind.

  

• Hill stations, though sharing core traits, ranged in size, function, and clientele. Mitchell, cited in Kennedy, proposes five categories of hill stations. The ‘official multifunctional hill station’, included such iconic places as Simla, Darjeeling, Naini Tal, and Ootacamund. They functioned as government headquarters alongside being social, recreational, and educational centers for the British. Another category, the ‘private multi-functional hill station’ included:= Kodaikanal, Matheran, and Mussoorie which served the same array of social functions but had no official purpose.

• Darjeeling is a quintessential hill station. Nestled amidst the Eastern Himalayas, it was earmarked as a potential summer refuge for British officials during the East India Company's dominion, and its lingering colonial influence remains palpable. Its tale is eloquently chronicled by famed children's writer, Ruskin Bond, the beloved Anglo-Indian writer has set many novels in the hill-strewn Darjeeling landscape.

• Consider a revealing vignette drawn from personal accounts - Swarnakumari Devi, the sister of Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, recounts her sojourn in colonial Darjeeling, a place embroidered with quaint English shops and providing magnificent panoramas of the urban sprawl. In a letter to her brother, Devi waxes eloquent about Darjeeling: "At the western end of this slope, there are a few decorative English shops, and we are greeted with an expansive view of the city of Darjeeling and the mountain of Jalapahar in this direction." Excerpt from Between Heaven & Earth: Writings on the Indian Hills, edited by Ruskin Bond and Bulbul Sharma, Speaking Tiger, reprinted in the Scroll.

  

• Shimla, another hill station, occupies a unique space in the annals of colonial India, serving as the summer capital of the colonial administration. As Lord Curzon, the Viceroy of India until 1905, asserted:

  Simla is in a peculiar sense not merely the official residence of the Viceroy during the hot weather, but his country home. For here he divests himself if not of the cares of office—this is I fear never possible in India—at least of some of the trappings of State; and amid your beautiful mountains he may almost succeed in mistaking himself for an Anglo-Indian Horace retiring from the noise and smoke of Rome to the peace of the Tiburine hills.
  (Source: speech to the Simla Municipal Committee, 6 April 1899, Simla Municipal Proceedings, vol. 10, 1899, HPSA)

  

• Kennedy, in his exploration of Matheran, observes how this hill station, merely fifty-four miles from Bombay, became a haven for the city's affluent. By the 1880s, it wasn't just British residents enjoying the idyllic hill retreat, but a growing number of Indian businessmen and professionals as well. Among them was Bombay's leading industrialist, J.N. Tata, who had weekend homes here and in other hill stations like Panchgani and Ootacamund. This transformation was not merely demographic but social and civic as well. Matheran's character was shaped by Indian contributions, from Framjee Mehta's local biweekly newspaper, Sir Bomanji Dhunjibhoy's racecourse, Damodhar Gordhandass's library, Byramjee Jeejeebhoy's hospital, to Sir Adamji Peerbhoy's light rail to the station. By the 1930s, Matheran had undergone a thorough Indianisation, symbolised by its entirely Indian municipal board.

• Indian hill stations remind me of the Soviet Spa resorts - the sanatoriums.

  • These were retreats that promised healthful respite to workers, an entitlement enshrined in the Labour Code of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. The Labour Code, in its assurance of an annual two-week leave for all workers, recommended these breaks be spent at a sanatorium for their restorative benefits. At their peak in 1990, the sanatoriums of USSR could accommodate a staggering 50,000 guests simultaneously.

  • The weird melancholia I’ve always associated with Soviet sanatoria is captured in phenomenal photographs by Michal Solarski. Some of them have been featured in The Guardian.

  • The hill station and sanatorium are vestiges of colonial and communist pasts that have endured, with many Soviet spa resorts still welcoming guests, much as Indian hill stations continue to captivate tourists and locals alike. Kennedy, in his exploration of Matheran, observes how this hill station, merely fifty-four miles from Bombay, became a haven for the city's affluent. By the 1880s, it wasn't just British residents enjoying the idyllic hill retreat, but a growing number of Indian businessmen and professionals as well. Among them was Bombay's leading industrialist, J.N. Tata, who had weekend homes here and in other hill stations like Panchgani and Ootacamund. This transformation was not merely demographic but social and civic as well. Matheran's character was shaped by Indian contributions, from Framjee Mehta's local biweekly newspaper, Sir Bomanji Dhunjibhoy's racecourse, Damodhar Gordhandass's library, Byramjee Jeejeebhoy's hospital, to Sir Adamji Peerbhoy's light rail to the station. By the 1930s, Matheran had undergone a thorough Indianisation, symbolised by its entirely Indian municipal board.

  • While Indian hill stations present a far cry from the brutalist architecture and state-mandated leisure of the sanatoriums, their shared roots in offering a retreat from the daily grind is undeniable. Kennedy further examines guidebooks marketing hill stations to Indians, revealing parallels with the idyllic vision sold by both the British and Soviet sanatoriums:

    One author gives a testimonial to his rapid recovery from bouts of diarrhea and cholera in the salubrious environment of Matheran. Another informs his readers that "whenever I wanted to recoup my health" he escaped to Mahabaleshwar. These guidebooks also praised the hill stations for the psychic relief they provided. Matheran was described as a place where a person "can forget all the troubles and responsibilities of his every-day life and plunge himself headlong into the delightful heaven of the peace of Nature.

• Today, these hill stations continue their age-old tradition of offering respite from the stifling heat of the plains, a communion with nature, and an escape from the whirlwind of daily life. Their colonial legacy still resonates, with pastimes like boating on the lakes, promenades to sanctioned view-points, and social gatherings at the malls. Intriguingly, societal conventions appear more flexible here. This is exemplified in Bharati Mukherjee's 'The Tiger's Daughter,' where young Indian women from Calcutta daringly participate in a beauty contest at a Darjeeling hotel – an act they wouldn't dare contemplate back home.

  • Is it even an ink-uilab chapter if the cinematic genius of Ray’s films are not mentioned? The audacious escapade in Mukherjee's depiction of Darjeeling reminds me of Ray's masterpiece, Aranyer Din Ratri (trans. Days and Nights in the Forest). Ray's film is a carnivalesque exploration of a quatro of city sophisticates venturing into the wilderness of Bengal for a weekend, featuring a radiant Sharmila Tagore and a solemn Soumitra Chatterjee. A particular scene in this movie, Memory Game, comes to mind - a marvel of cinematography and acting. As I write this, I realize there is a near-identical scene (with more STEM-y names) in Wes Anderson’s latest Asteroid City. Was Anderson tipping his hat to Ray, or was it just an uncanny resemblance? As per a recent Vogue film review, Anderson’s eclectic array of inspirations does seem to nod towards Ray’s cinematic gem: “Anderson has always thrived in the liminal spaces between farce and tragedy, just as he has when mixing an eclectic range of cinematic and theatrical references … you’ll find nods to everything from Close Encounters of the Third Kind and the three witches of Macbeth (when Woodrow’s three sisters bury their mother’s ashes in a Tupperware bowl) to Satyajit Ray’s sweeping Aranyer Din Ratri (when the brainiacs play a memory game, trying to recall the names of esoteric famous people in a certain order).”

An Aperitif

• A narrative about hill stations wouldn't truly be complete without a serving of Gin and Tonic. I guess you could say, Gin gives you a hangover; a Gin and Tonic gives you a colonial hangover.

• The origins of Tonic Water harken back to the colonial pursuits in South America, where the cinchona tree, harboring the malaria-fighting quinine, was discovered. As the British Empire expanded its foothold in India and Sri Lanka, they planted cinchona trees, marking a shrewdly strategic move in their battle against malaria.

• Tonic Water was born out of necessity in the mid-19th century, as the British colonists were in dire need of a palatable means to consume quinine. Its bitter taste was mollified with soda and sugar, with gin added to lend a pleasurable note to this medicinal mixture. This refreshing blend soon became a beloved sundowner, enjoyed against the backdrop of slow-setting suns and the tranquil hum of nature.

• About 75 years later, Winston Churchill acknowledged the critical role of tonic water by stating that it had saved "more Englishmen’s lives, and minds, than all the doctors in the Empire."

• It's fascinating how the mundane task of safeguarding health metamorphosed into a pleasurable ritual. The concern for the health of British soldiers, colonial administrators, and families living in India was of utmost importance for sustaining the grip on the colony. The ability to combat the deadly disease of malaria was a vital aspect of colonial control, leading to the daily consumption of "Indian tonic water." The addition of gin to the tonic, aside from masking its bitter taste, probably also provided a welcome respite from the stresses of colonial administration.

  

• According to Kim Walker and Mark Nesbitt (Just the Tonic: a Natural History of Tonic Water), the Raj was flexible with its cocktail recipes:

  In the British Army it seems that whichever spirits were most handy were used, most often brandy, whisky, rum, wine or local spirits. An 1863 report on the army in India and Ceylon records that quinine doses were given daily in arrack, a locally distilled spirit. Rum or ‘grog’ was the preferred Navy tipple for taking a dose.

• Let me conclude this section with an enlightening satirical snapshot of the social life of colonial India. Another delightful YCBA find, George Francklin Atkinson's 'Curry And Rice On Forty Plates’ from 1859 is a caricature of the social life of a motley bunch of firangees - judges and magistrates, colonels, millionaires, padre, doctor and their colourful spouses and families. Here’s an excerpt from the nostalgic introduction:

As always, some verses, in parting:

• It would only be fair to counteract this colonial hangover with a healthy dose of anti-colonialism. Nâzım Hikmet (1902 - 1963), the Turkish poet, playwright, and filmmaker was a figure whose life was intricately woven with resistance, spending much of his adult life in prison or in exile. Often labelled as the 'Romantic Communist', Hikmet’s life was a relentless struggle against oppressive forces. His lyrical poem autobiography

• Considered the first modern Turkish poet, Hikmet’s ability to evoke raw emotion through his verses, coupled with his masterful rhythm and flow, rendered his works universal. I always find myself returning to A Sad State of Freedom (trans. Taner Baybars), and Things I Didn't Know I Loved (1962).

• I present to you, One of my personal favourites is Some Advice To Those Who Will Serve Time In Prison (May 1949):

If instead of being hanged by the neck
    you’re thrown inside
    for not giving up hope
in the world, your country, and people,
    if you do ten or fifteen years
    apart from the time you have left,
you won’t say,
        “Better I had swung from the end of a rope
                        like a flag”—
you’ll put your foot down and live.
It may not be a pleasure exactly,
but it’s your solemn duty
    to live one more day
            to spite the enemy.
Part of you may live alone inside,
        like a stone at the bottom of a well.
But the other part
    must be so caught up
    in the flurry of the world
             that you shiver there inside
     when outside, at forty days’ distance, a leaf moves.
To wait for letters inside,
to sing sad songs,
or to lie awake all night staring at the ceiling
                              is sweet but dangerous.
Look at your face from shave to shave,
forget your age,
watch out for lice
                       and for spring nights,
       and always remember
              to eat every last piece of bread—
also, don’t forget to laugh heartily.
And who knows,
the woman you love may stop loving you.
Don’t say it’s no big thing:
it’s like the snapping of a green branch
                                             to the man inside.
To think of roses and gardens inside is bad,
to think of seas and mountains is good.
Read and write without rest,
and I also advise weaving
and making mirrors.
I mean, it’s not that you can’t pass
        ten or fifteen years inside
                                       and more—
               you can,
               as long as the jewel
               on the left side of your chest doesn’t lose its luster!

‘salud

BM

(All errors are my own and a by-product of editing this while parked on a random Bombay street.)

I seem to have inadvertently jinxed myself - while Chapter 12 was met with the satisfying echo of punctuality, its successor has flirted with the thrill of delay. Summer, in all its exciting chaos, has been an unyielding taskmaster, resulting in this dispatch trailing behind its ideal deadline. So here it is, a little tardy but no less sincere, your latest issue of Ink-uilab.

This month's installment of Ink-uilab features a peculiar assemblage - the enigma of Henry Kissinger, the Shahnameh, and the enchanting, yet controversial, lore of Laurence Hope's India's Love Lyrics.

As ever, I thank you for your unwavering readership and patience. The anticipation of your engagement with this cornucopia of curiosity, despite its late arrival, is what fuels my enthusiasm (and self-imposed monthly deadlines). Your inbox might occasionally find it as an uninvited guest, but I hope it always brings along a worthy, enlightening disruption.

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Happy Birthday, Dr. Kissinger.

• Dr. Kissinger, the acclaimed scholar, diplomat (and alleged war criminal) who navigated the intricate corridors of international politics as the National Security Advisor and later, the U.S. Secretary of State under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, enjoyed a grand celebration to mark his 100th year. A birthday party lavishly imbued with layers of complexities and contradictions, not unlike the man of the hour himself. Few modern figures have legacies that reverberate through the corridors of time with such an unnerving dissonance as Kissinger.

• Ask most American foreign policy hawks (or Yale Grand Strategists) about Henry Kissinger’s legacy and they are likely to present to you a laundry list of his laudatory achievements: pioneering détente with the Soviet Union, orchestrating the opening of relations with the People's Republic of China, handling the Arab-Israeli conflicts through shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East. However, in the gilded halls of the American elite, a peculiar silence pervades when it comes to the contentious aspects of Kissinger's legacy. This was starkly evident during his centennial celebration, where the glitterati chose to extol the contributions of ‘American Metternic’ to foreign policy, conveniently sidestepping the darker alleys of his past. This selective amnesia is symptomatic of a broader societal trend, where the transgressions of the powerful are often cloaked in a shroud of silence.

• The shadow of Kissinger's career stretches long and dark, filled with chilling tales of blood and sorrow. Mehdi Hasan, a journalist known for his incisive commentary, marked Kissinger's centennial with a blistering critique, highlighting the many lives lost due to Kissinger's foreign policies and support for brutal dictators and wars. Watch it here:

• One of the most forceful diatribes against Kissinger comes from Anthony Bourdain, the traveler, recounter, and celebrity chef. This is unsurprising, as both Kissinger and Bourdain are likely familiar with the art of butchering.

  Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia – the fruits of his genius for statesmanship – and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milošević. While Henry continues to nibble nori rolls and remaki at A-list parties, Cambodia, the neutral nation he secretly and illegally bombed, invaded, undermined, and then threw to the dogs, is still trying to raise itself up on its one remaining leg.

• This narrative is echoed by the late Christopher Hitchens, whose book "The Trial of Henry Kissinger" presents a damning indictment of Kissinger's actions - in Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangladesh, Chile, Cyprus and East Timor - arguing that they amount to war crimes. The book is an exhaustive tirade with extensive evidence and is certainly worth a read. I hear the companion documentary is pretty good too.

  

• And yet, like a paradox wrapped in an enigma, amidst the accusations of war crimes and echoes of atrocities, we encounter the intellectual edifice of Kissingerism. This unique brand of wisdom encompasses his penetrating insights into the philosophy of diplomacy, the role of history, and the nature of high office. One of Kissinger’s sayings is often quoted by professors, intellectuals, and colleagues whom I respect and cite: “High office teaches decision making, not substance. It consumes intellectual capital; it does not create it. Most high officials leave office with the perceptions and insights with which they entered; they learn how to make decisions but not what decisions to make.” In the interest of investing in “intellectual capital,” could I put aside my qualms with Kissinger - the person - and embrace the so-called merits of Kissingerist ideas?

• For starters, Kissinger's thoughts on prediction-making, a staple in international relations, are noteworthy and agreeable.

  • Philip Tetlock, in his masterful book Expert Political Judgment, argues that political phenomena are inherently indeterminate and that experts are far too often wrong in their forecasts. He actually goes so far as to quote Kissinger’s self-deprecating remark in his discussion on defenses raised by those that get forecasts wrong:

    The “Politics is Hopelessly Cloudlike” Defense: Experts also have the philosophical option of arguing that, although all preconditions were satisfied and the predicted outcome never came close to occurring and now never will, this failure should not be held against the forecaster. Forecasting exercises are best viewed as lighthearted diversions of no consequence because everyone knows, or else should know, that politics is inherently indeterminate, more cloudlike than clocklike. As Henry Kissinger wryly wrote Daniel Moynihan after the fragmentation of the Soviet Union, “Your crystal ball worked better than mine.” Here is a concession that concedes nothing.

  • Nonetheless, even with this profound insight, Kissinger's mastery of Realpolitik did not protect him from making monumental strategic misjudgments. His advocacy for NATO's enlargement, which led to a direct confrontation of the U.S. with Russia, his support for the 2003 Iraq invasion, his opposition to the Iran nuclear deal in 2015, and his inability to foresee China's ascension as a formidable adversary—all these missteps are stark indicators of Kissinger's strategic oversights.. Most recently, he gross misread the conflict in Ukraine, a mistake he admitted to in retrospect. Nevertheless, these instances of flawed judgment do not deter him from continuing to make bold predictions, often with disturbing indifference to their potential consequences.

• Kissinger's conviction, as articulated in his oft-cited classic ‘Diplomacy’ (1994), that "The study of history offers no manual of instructions that can be applied automatically; history teaches by analogy, shedding light on the likely consequences of comparable situations," serves as another intriguing aspect of his worldview. This belief in the instructive power of history resonates with my professor John Gaddis' assertion that ‘history is a compass, not a map’ suggesting that it can provide a direction but not a detailed path. To illustrate this notion further, let's turn to the Persian historic-epic, Shahnameh.

  • The Shahnameh could indeed be perceived as a historical compass. Its author, Firdausi highlights a prescient realization that throughout history the quest for wisdom is man’s chief concern. Unlike epics such as Gilgamesh, Manas, or the Iliad, the Shahnameh does not revolve around a single hero. Instead, it is a sweeping epic that celebrates the achievements of different characters throughout the annals of the Persian Empire. Beyond conveying a sense of continuity, the text highlights the complexity of human nature and the importance (or lack thereof) of individuals in the grand narrative of history.

  • I posit that Firdausi challenges the Carlylean great man theory, instead arguing that while kings are important – they are not impervious. The Shahnameh instills humility in prospective and current leaders. It instills in its readers the realization that regardless of their greatness, they are insignificant compared to divine power or the illustrious Persian rulers of the past. Farr (roughly trans. glory) can be given, and just as easily it can be taken away. But could a leader have derived his knowledge from any other (crisper) Persianate history? Unlike other texts in the genre, Firdausi does not present specific practical advice on running a government. Rather, the leadership insights derived from the chronicles are ambiguous lessons such as the value of infrastructure or the role of honour. In sharp contrast to Machiavelli and Erasmus who lace political advice with historic exemplars, Firdausi composes a rich treatise of history intertwined with value judgements.

  • This harks back to a broader question of historiography, the debate between falsifiable factualism and interpretation: by separating the temporal and political conditions from the decisions made, are we obscuring history for the sake of generalizable 'lessons'? Are we attempting to extract leadership lessons from a historic epic like the Shahnameh, futile if we accept Leo Tolstoy's view in War and Peace that “A king is history’s slave?” If this is true, and some trans-historic force (be it farr, deterministic karma, or Hegelian materialism) dictates decision-making, then extracting rulership lessons from a historic epic like the Shahnameh futile act. Questioning this precedent indicts Yale’s flagship grand strategy program. Is the reading of the history particularly different from the ideas of collegiate Grand Strategists parroting Kissingerisms, Isiah Berlin’s dialectic between the fox and hedgehog, or ExxonMobil executives studying Tzu’s Art of War?

• Now, let's dive into the intricate maze that is Realpolitik, a central component of Kissinger's ideology. often celebrated as the harbinger of Realpolitik, he followed an approach to foreign affairs that prioritized realistic assessments and consideration of power dynamics over moral or ethical principles.

  • While Kissinger’s Realpolitik has been frequently portrayed as devoid of moral considerations, this portrayal may be an oversimplification or even a caricature of the rich tapestry that formed Kissinger's intellectual architecture.

  • As elucidated in John Bew’s Realpolitik: A History, Kissinger's conceptualization of Realpolitik was in many ways, an antithesis to the traditional perception of the term:

    Kissinger’s intellectual formation bore the imprint of an eclectic range of influences and experiences. From inception, it also included a strong dose of what I have described so far as anti-realpolitik. Much has been made of the time he spent in his native Germany, returning as an American soldier, in the final stages of the Second World War, under Fritz Kraemer — a fellow German American, who recognized his intellectual talents — with the 84th Division in Bensheim. Kraemer later broke with Kissinger in the détente era because of his belief that the moral component to the Cold War had not been emphasized sufficiently during Kissinger’s tenure.

  • An intriguing example of Realpolitik comes from one of my favorite books, F.M. Cornford’s "Microcosmographia Academica" (1908), a guide for young academics to navigate through the rigid university politics of Cambridge.

    

    • The pamphlet, subtitled “A Guide For The Young Academic Politician,” offers guidance to the novitiate academic (who is “neither less than twenty-five years old, nor more than thirty”) to rise through the ranks of Cambridge’s rigid academic politic. Rather than offering advice on how to live or lead in a noble court, Cornford's work focuses on how to survive and thrive in the academic world. Well, is the life of a 20th-century English academic of the classics so much different from that of a medieval prince vying for power? You have a gaggle of wide-eyed courtiers (pupils), a luxurious court lavished with food and wine (formal hall), and an oil painting of yourself in an Early Gothic Revivalist castle.

    • For Cornford, a classicist, quotes from Plato are liberally used and much like Machiavelli or Erasmus, he uses appeals to authority to validate his lessons. He adopts a straightforward tone, drawing on his familiarity with political academia, to direct his ambitious postulant down the right path. Stylistically, the Microcosmographia is beautiful in its near-Wittgensteinian approach. It has enumeration and clearly categorized chapters. It presents simple, actionable principles such as "The (Thin End of the) Wedge" and "The Dangerous Precedent" and is riddled with short aphorisms such as “Remember this: the men who get things done are the men who walk up and down King's Parade, from two to four, every day of their lives.”

    • Re: The Thin End of the Wedge. Here’s the obligatory Yes Minister interlude:

    • Beyond simply offering a candid and often humorous look at the academic world and the people who inhabit it, it offers fresh advice to a young actor motivated to rise within the system. Cornford presents advice on how to deal with rivals, how to manage one's finances, and how to make the most of one's opportunities. His targets are many and varied, ranging from the self-important pedant to the idle gossip. He takes aim at those who are excessively proud of their learning, those who are more concerned with petty squabbles than with the pursuit of knowledge, and those who are content to rest on their laurels rather than strive for further greatness. Cornford's pragmatism, expressed through his succinct aphorisms, highlights the survival strategies in an intensely political environment, and isn't dissimilar from the ideologies that pervade international diplomacy.

  • The question then arises - is Realpolitik only beneficial to the (near) hegemon? It's a nuanced issue that depends largely on the context. While Realpolitik has been often employed in a purely pragmatic and power-oriented manner, it can also be infused with an element of idealism, a perspective that Kissinger espoused. Nevertheless. Kissinger's writings exhibit a strong streak of American exceptionalism, intertwined with a Realpolitik perspective, which he believed was uniquely American rather than European. As observed by David Mack, former deputy assistant secretary of state for Near East Affairs, Kissinger saw the United States as "the last best hope of the world", even as he advocated for a greater infusion of cynicism and realism. Bew argues in a prescient essay:

  “In looking at how we have used and abused realpolitik in the English-speaking world—throughout the First and Second World Wars, through the Cold War and in the 9/11 era—we have what I call a “window into the soul” of the Anglo-American worldview. It has been used both positively and pejoratively, depending on who is using it and in what context. Realpolitik is not, as is often assumed, as old as statecraft itself. Nor is it part of a seamless creed stretching back to Thucydides and running through Machiavelli, Cardinal Richelieu and Thomas Hobbes, up to Hans Morgenthau, George Kennan and Henry Kissinger.”

• Finally then, how do we engage with Realpolitik? it's essential to consider the balance between the pragmatism associated with Realpolitik, and moralism. In my opinion, while moderation and flexibility are indeed valuable, the dismissal of all moral considerations is perilous. Nevertheless, I posit that the key lies in maintaining an appearance of pragmatism while safeguarding one's ethical principles. In the delicate dance of negotiation, it is always beneficial to at least appear pragmatic in all negotiations. Flexibility is a virtue. One must aim to be a pragmatist on paper, but not at heart.

As always, some verses, in parting:

• Adela Florence Nicolson, known to the world by her masculine pseudonym, Laurence Hope, was a poetess who defied the conventions of her time. Born in England in 1865, she spent the majority of her life in India, a country that left an indelible imprint on her soul and found its way into her verses. Her work, particularly the collection "India's Love Lyrics," is a testament to her deep love for India and its cultures. Yet, she uniquely cloaked her original work under the guise of translations and adopted a male pseudonym, Laurence Hope, blurring the lines between cultural appreciation and appropriation.

• Adela's work was unique in that she presented her poems as translations of Indian poets. This claim, however, was a clever ruse. The poems were not translations but her own original work, a fact she concealed to lend an air of exotic authenticity to her verses. Further, her use of a male pen-name was a conscious choice, a means to ensure her work was taken seriously in an era where female authors were often dismissed or overlooked. This pseudonym allowed her to explore themes of love, longing, and passion with an intensity and frankness that might have been considered unseemly for a woman of her time.

• The deceit endemic to her craft where she misled readers about the origins of her work, drew significant controversy. However, to solely focus on this would be a disservice to her poetry. Her collection, while wrapped in British exoticism of Indian culture, exhibits a depth and breadth of immense calibre. It encompasses a variety of styles (such as Sufi mysticism and northeastern folk) that mimic genuine poets and their tones, a feat not easily accomplished.

• Her life and work are reminiscent of the British women in the Raj, who often played a significant role in understanding, synthesizing, and propagating the ideas of India. As Ram Guha discusses in his 2022 book "Rebels Against the Raj" these women often served as key cultural intermediaries, bridging the gap between the British and Indian societies.

• Her works were not just profound but also lyrically beautiful, which contributed to their lasting appeal. Some verses were set to music, becoming hugely popular and ensuring her work's survival well into the 1930s. One such piece is the enchanting "Kashmiri Love Song", the opening lines of which – "Pale hands I loved, Beside the Shalimar" – painted a vivid, romantic image of the East. The song was even performed by many, including Rudolph Valentino in 1923, and even appears in an Agha Shahid Ali ghazal.

• I present to you the Song of Khan Zada, from India’s Love Lyrics:

As one may sip a Stranger's Bowl

You gave yourself but not your soul.

I wonder, now that time has passed,

Where you will come to rest at last.

You gave your beauty for an hour,

I held it gently as a flower.

You wished to leave, told me so,

I kissed your feet and let you go.

Goodnight America,

BM

(All errors are my own and a by-product of editing this on a very rickety DC Metro towards Greenbelt)

For starters, the newsletter this month is in perfect alignment with the recurrent celestial bodies - indeed, we've returned to our scheduled orbit! In other words, the May chapter of Ink-uilab will not be appearing in June.

On to more pressing matters - the alliterative title. Obviously, I must acknowledge - our ostentatiously orated title overflows with an opulence of 'O's, an orchestration undeniably not intended to obscure the objective of this original odditorium [for a demonstration of semantic somersaults, see Sir Humphrey Appleby obfuscating]. This month, Ink-uilab explores intellectual history, philosophy, and literature through the narratives of three fascinating characters. The theme of intoxication unites the enigmatic experiences of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the olfactory opus of Patrick Süskind, and the opium-imbued verses of Samuel Taylor Coleridge that punctuate this chapter.

As always, thank you for reading and engaging with Ink-uilab. May you opt to become an official member, subscribing at no cost, and in return, obtain this monthly magazine, uninterrupted, dispatched directly to your digital doorstep:

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On Oppenheimer:

• The opening act of this months’s Ink-uilab is the enigmatic J. Robert Oppenheimer, often referred to as the father of the atomic bomb. The ‘genius’ scientist, who wrestled with both the laws of physics and his own moral compass, is soon to be brought back to life in Christopher Nolan's highly anticipated biopic [here’s the trailer]. Born in 1904, J. Robert Oppenheimer was a man of remarkable intellect and diverse interests. He is best known for his role in the Manhattan Project during World War II, where his leadership led to the development of the atomic bomb. This role, fraught with moral and political dilemmas, positioned him at the core of a world-altering scientific breakthrough.

  

• In a fortunate coincidence, a few months ago I read ‘Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer’ by Ray Monk, the acclaimed biographer. The book presents Oppenheimer as a compelling figure, painted with shades of power, conscience, and a complex personality. It weaves a narrative that sparkles with the pull of power and Oppenheimer's struggle to retain his moral grounding. The drama of his life was intense - from his connection with communists, who were unknowingly under surveillance (making Oppenheimer a target of the FBI), to his vehement opposition against the development of the hydrogen bomb amidst Cold War hysteria.

  • As an aside, Ray Monk has slowly become a personal favorite and his biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein deserves its own ode in a future Ink-uilab. Monk consistently manages to weave together incisive interpretation, detailed archival work, and narrative readability, crafting a book where you walk away with not just an understanding of the individual as a literary subject but also their personal philosophies and greater ambitions.

• Outside his scientific pursuits, Oppenheimer led a colourful personal life. He penned poetry in his free hours, fostered a passion for New Mexico's landscape, enjoyed Marx, and was infamous for daredevil car rides meant to impress and intimidate his romantic companions. A remarkable excerpt from a letter (cited in Monk 2012) penned to a friend during an undergraduate Oppenheimer's tenure at Harvard furnishes us with an intimate window into his bustling existence. His narrative engenders an intoxicating cocktail of ceaseless activity, tinged with an undercurrent of ennui—a sensation not unfamiliar to many who have navigated the invigorating yet isolating halls of the Academy:

  Generously, you ask what I do ... I labor, and write innumerable theses, notes, poems, stories, and junk; I go to the math lib and read and to the Phil lib and divide my time between Meinherr Russell and the contemplation of a most beautiful and lovely lady who is writing a thesis on Spinoza charmingly ironic at that, don't you think? I make stenches in three different labs, listen to Allard gossip about Racine, serve tea and talk learnedly to a few lost souls, go off for the weekend to distill the low grade energy into laughter and exhaustion, read Greek, commit faux pas, search my desk for letters and wish I were dead. Voila.

• Oppenheimer's unique leadership abilities, in particular, evoke deep fascination. He was called to action during the wake of the Second World War and thrust into a position of authority. His genius was not so much in the originality of his insights, but rather in his remarkable ability to assimilate and critically apply new theoretical advancements, a talent that Paul Dirac lauded as his expertise 'as a chairman for a discussion or a colloquium.' As Ray Monk writes:

  • “True, Oppenheimer had never managed a laboratory (or anything) before, and as a physicist he was as purely theoretical as it is possible to be. And yet, in a way that amazed and impressed everybody who knew him, his entire life up to that point – his early interest in minerals, his determinedly wide-ranging education at Harvard, his absorption in the literature and art of America, France, England, Germany, Italy and Holland, his mastery of several European languages, his omnivorous devouring of all aspects of theoretical physics and his close following of major developments in experimental physics – turned out to be the perfect preparation for the task he had been set. He was the ideal man to lead Los Alamos, considered not just as a laboratory, but also as a new kind of city, one with far more than the normal proportion of extremely clever people and one, moreover, devoted to the accomplishing of a single, extraordinarily demanding task.”

  • Freeman Dyson, a fellow physicist, offered a compelling comparison in his book, ‘The Scientist As Rebel’ (2006), likening Oppenheimer to Lawrence of Arabia: “Lawrence was in many ways like Robert, a scholar who came to greatness through war, a charismatic leader, and a gifted writer, who failed to readjust happily to peacetime existence after the war, and was accused with some justice of occasional untruthfulness.” Dyson also commented on Oppenheimer's flaw—his restlessness, a restless inability to be idle. According to Dyson, this restlessness, paradoxically, might have hindered his creative work, as "intervals of idleness are probably essential to creative work on the highest level," just as Shakespeare, he noted, was habitually idle between his plays.

• Oppenheimer’s role in the creation of the atomic bomb has been famously distilled into his haunting words after the first atomic explosion at the Trinity site:

  We waited until the blast had passed, walked out of the shelter and then it was extremely solemn. We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita: Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, he takes on his multi-armed form and says, "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." I suppose we all thought that, one way or another

  • This iconic moment is rendered here, in an interview about the Trinity explosion, first broadcast as part of the television documentary The Decision to Drop the Bomb (1965):

  • A note on the translation of the famed Sanskrit quote: Monk’s translation of the phrase is certainly not common. According to Monk, “The Sanskrit word that Oppenheimer translates as ‘death’ is more usually rendered as ‘time’, so that, for example, in the Penguin Classics edition, the line is given as: ‘I am all-powerful Time, which destroys all things.’ In the famous translation by the nineteenth-century poet Edwin Arnold it appears as: ‘Thou seest Me as Time, who kills, Time who brings all to doom, The Slayer Time, Ancient of Days, come hither to consume’, which conveys an image diametrically opposed to that of a sudden release of deadly power. Oppenheimer, however, was following the example of his Sanskrit teacher, Arthur Ryder, whose translation reads: ‘Death am I, and my present task destruction.’”

  • When asked about his feelings regarding the atomic bombings in Japan during a visit in 1960, he offered a sobering reflection, "It's not that I don't feel bad about it. It's just that I don't feel worse today than what I felt yesterday." His words encapsulate a lifelong burden, the weight of a decision that forever changed the course of history.

• Beyond unpacking Oppenheimer's academic pursuits or political quandaries, the biography explores some of his lesser-known histories and tendencies, veering into the realm of the bizarre. For instance, his attempt to poison his Cambridge tutor with a chemically-laced apple or his reported strangulation of the writer Francis Fergusson. These incidents sketch a man of powerful intellect, yes, but also one beset by inner demons.

  • Before you ask, here’s an excerpt from Monk about the poisoned apple incident: “In what looks like an attempt to murder his tutor, or at the very least to make him seriously ill, Oppenheimer left on Blackett’s desk an apple poisoned with toxic chemicals. The act seems charged with symbolism: Oppenheimer as the jealous queen leaving a poisoned apple for Snow White, the ‘fairest of them all’, whose beauty and goodness are admired by everybody. The incident was hushed up at the time, and none of his friends knew about it until they were told of it by Oppenheimer himself, usually in some more or less misleading version. That his feelings towards Blackett mixed fervent admiration with fierce jealousy, however, was obvious to those who knew him well.” (Monk 2012)

• Monk’s book also highlights the compelling interplay between physicist personalities that characterized the era, introducing me to the fascinating character of Wolfgang Pauli. Known affectionately as 'the Wrath of God' among his friends due to his ruthlessly precise critiques of inexact thought, Pauli was quite the bold figure.

  • From an early age, Pauli was impervious to intimidation, unafraid to challenge even the esteemed Albert Einstein, once quipping, 'You know, what Mr Einstein said is not so stupid!' His rapier-like wit was also on display when a colleague, overwhelmed by Pauli's rapid-fire insights, pleaded for slower exposition. Pauli retorted, 'I do not mind if you think slowly, but I do object when you publish more quickly than you can think.' His cutting humour is encapsulated in his infamous remark about a convoluted paper: 'Das ist nicht nur nicht richtig, es ist nicht einmal falsch!' ('Not only is it not right, it’s not even wrong.'). I’d be excited to read a biography on the life of Pauli, but I can’t seem to find one -

  • Pauli's relationship with Oppenheimer, or 'Oppie' as his friends called him, was one of intellectual competition and playful camaraderie. He would affectionately imitate Oppenheimer’s habit of murmuring 'nim-nim-nim' when grappling for the right words. This led to Oppenheimer’s nickname as 'the nim-nim-nim man'. Pauli once quipped to Rabi, another physicist, and mutual friend, that Oppenheimer seemed to treat physics as an avocation and psychoanalysis as a vocation, a statement that captures the intriguing multifaceted nature of Oppenheimer’s interests.

  • There exists a captivating photograph from this period, preserved in the annals of scientific history, that shows a debonair Oppenheimer, cigarette in hand and hat on head, deep in conversation with Rabi and another American physicist, L.M. Mott-Smith. The three appear engrossed in thought, while Pauli, with a characteristic mischievous smile, stares directly into the camera:

On Patrick Süskind’s Das Parfum:

• Patrick Süskind, a German author born in 1949, is well-known for his unflinching portrayals of the shadowed crevices of human nature. His magnum opus, ‘Perfume’, thrusts readers into the rich, olfactory universe of 18th-century France through the extraordinary journey of its protagonist, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille. I apologize, in advance, for the block quotes rendered in this section - I would be remiss if I didn’t include at least a few excerpts of Süskind’s first-rate prose.

• A fleeting reference to this peculiar tale in a standout Indian art film - The Ship of Theseus (2012), an intriguingly well made collection of philosophical introspections. Directed by Anand Gandhi, a recipient of the National Award in 2014, the film probes existential inquiries of identity, justice, beauty, meaning, and mortality through three separate yet interwoven narratives. These three distinct fragments present musings from the experiences of a blind experimental photographer, an ailing Jain monk, and an enterprising stockbroker.

  • The second investigation in ‘The Ship of Theseus’, which has left an indelible mark on me, follows the journey of Maitreya, an erudite Jain monk brilliantly portrayed by Neeraj Kabi. Maitreya’s petition to ban animal testing in India faces a poignant irony when he is diagnosed with liver cirrhosis and finds himself reliant on the very practices he's been vehemently opposing. In my opinion, this narrative strand provides one of the most compelling on-screen philosophical explorations of religious absolutism versus pragmatism, and the personal dilemmas such a tension can evoke.

  • Viewers are invited to witness this raw depiction of human frailty, the entropy of the body, and the mapping of mortality, in its entirety. A captivating, humbling display of the impermanence of our existence, "The Ship of Theseus" is accessible for free and legal viewing here:

• Returning to ‘Perfume’, its mention in the film indeed stirs an intriguing curiosity. The initial chapter of the film features an unorthodox photographer who, despite her visual impairment, uses her artistic instinct to capture evocative snapshots of her world. In a thought-provoking interview, she draws a parallel between her artistic intention and that of the protagonist of ‘Perfume’, each of them embarked on a quest “to capture the essence of everything.” But, how does one capture the essence of everything? And what compelling forces drive an individual to such an obsessive quest?

  • In the protagonist Grenouille, Süskind sketches an enigmatic figure - an unloved orphan endowed, or rather cursed, with an extraordinary sense of smell. This olfactory virtuoso navigates the aromatic labyrinth of the world around him with astonishing precision, even manipulating it to his whims despite his own lack of personal scent. Grenouille's life is a relentless pursuit of capturing and cataloguing, every conceivable aroma, a manifestation of the peculiarity obsession reflected poignantly in this excerpt from the novel:

    He was not particular about it. He did not differentiate between what is commonly considered a good and a bad smell, not yet. He was greedy. The goal of the hunt was simply to possess everything the world could offer in the way of odors, and his only condition was that the odors be new ones. The smell of a sweating horse meant just as much to him as the tender green bouquet of a bursting rosebud, the acrid stench of a bug was no less worthy than the aroma rising from a larded veal roast in an aristocrat’s kitchen. He devoured everything, everything, sucking it up into him. But there were no aesthetic principles governing the olfactory kitchen of his imagination, where he was forever synthesizing and concocting new aromatic combinations. He fashioned grotesqueries, only to destroy them again immediately, like a child playing with blocks—inventive and destructive, with no apparent norms for his creativity.

  • This aromatic obsession of Grenouille's harkens back to the archetype of the collector, a figure I explore in-depth in Chapter Six of Ink-uilab.

• In Süskind's masterpiece, we find ourselves entranced by the sensory symphony of his prose. The novel drenches us in an olfactory panorama so vividly painted, it can almost be smelt and tasted. The book opens with a potent distillation of the stenches plaguing 18th-century France:

  The streets stank of manure, the courtyards of urine, the stairwells stank of moldering wood and rat droppings, the kitchens of spoiled cabbage and mutton fat; the unaired parlors stank of stale dust, the bedrooms of greasy sheets, damp featherbeds, and the pungently sweet aroma of chamber pots. The stench of sulfur rose from the chimneys, the stench of caustic lyes from the tanneries, and from the slaughterhouses came the stench of congealed blood. People stank of sweat and unwashed clothes; from their mouths came the stench of rotting teeth, from their bellies that of onions, and from their bodies, if they were no longer very young, came the stench of rancid cheese and sour milk and tumorous disease. The rivers stank, the marketplaces stank, the churches stank, it stank beneath the bridges and in the palaces. The peasant stank as did the priest, the apprentice as did his master’s wife, the whole of the aristocracy stank, even the king himself stank, stank like a rank lion, and the queen like an old goat, summer and winter. For in the eighteenth century there was nothing to hinder bacteria busy at decomposition, and so there was no human activity, either constructive or destructive, no manifestation of germinating or decaying life that was not accompanied by stench.

• Yet beneath this malodorous miasma, Süskind's masterful narrative is also imbued with an almost Faustian tone and extensive use of intertextuality, creating a pastiche of the classics. This has been interpreted as an ironic allegory of the process by which the novel itself was constructed, a reflection of the perfumer's desire to mimic all existing scents paralleling Süskind's eclectic borrowing from pre-existing texts.

• Adding to the intrigue surrounding "Das Parfum", Süskind himself lives as a recluse, eschewing photographs or interviews. His solitude calls to mind the sentiment he eloquently expresses in his novel:

  We are familiar with people who seek out solitude: penitents, failures, saints, or prophets. They retreat to deserts, preferably, where they live on locusts and honey. Others, however, live in caves or cells on remote islands; some—more spectacularly—squat in cages mounted high atop poles swaying in the breeze. They do this to be nearer to God. Their solitude is a self-mortification by which they do penance. They act in the belief that they are living a life pleasing to God. Or they wait months, years, for their solitude to be broken by some divine message that they hope then speedily to broadcast among mankind.

• Notably ‘Das Parfum’ has had a profound influence beyond literary circles, somehow reaching into the realm of metal music. The novel resonated deeply with Till Lindemann and Kurt Cobain, frontmen of the German alternative metal electro-industrial band Rammstein, and the American grunge band Nirvana, respectively. Inspired by the novel's odorous landscape, Rammstein released Du riechst so gut (trans. 'you smell so good') in 1995, while Nirvana offered a tribute in 1993 with Scentless Apprentice.

As always, some verses, in parting:

• Delving into the intoxicating realms of literary inspiration, we turn our focus to Samuel Taylor Coleridge - a critic and philosopher, co-founder of the Romantic Movement in England, and, alongside his compatriot William Wordsworth, a Lake Poet. Today, we explore his alluring connection with opium, and its implications on his magical poem, ‘Kubla Khan.’

• Opium, with its promise of euphoria and heightened imagination, has held an enchanting influence over various artists and creators, with Coleridge being no exception. The nexus of his creativity and opium is so entrenched that there is an entire Wikipedia article titled 'Coleridge and Opium.’ Yet, it is the eccentricity (and inebriation) of Coleridge that renders him utterly fascinating. For instance, his oeuvre includes “A poem is written on a piece of pale seaweed, while another seems to have been written in blood on a piece of Coleridge's skin that peeled off in the bath.” Straddling the liminal space between reality and dream, Coleridge constructs an imaginative landscape that enchants us with its enigmatic yet captivating beauty.

• The story of Coleridge's composition of "Kubla Khan" is as fascinating as the poem itself. In the preface, he describes a profound opium-induced sleep wherein he dreamt of composing two to three hundred lines of poetry. It presents the drug as a peculiarly creative catalyst and is considered an early poetic encapsulation of a drug experience:

  The author continued for about 3 hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from two or three hundred lines … On waking he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole and taking up his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surfaces of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but alas! without the after restoration of the latter!

• An intriguing pattern surfaces when we dive into the habits of individuals recognized for their extraordinary creativity, a pattern that intertwines genius with drug use. However, we must tread cautiously, as this observation is neither an endorsement nor a holistic analysis, but merely a pattern worth noting.

  • Take, for instance, the celebrated mathematician Paul Erdős, who relied on a daily dose of ten to twenty milligrams of Benzedrine or Ritalin. A concerned friend wagered that he couldn't abstain from amphetamines for a month. Upon successfully completing the bet, Erdős lamented, "You've showed me I'm not an addict. But I didn't get any work done. You've set mathematics back a month." Following the bet, he promptly returned to his amphetamine habit, supplemented with shots of strong espresso and caffeine tablets.

  • In a similar vein, we turn to philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, whose daily consumption appears as a veritable catalogue of vices. As depicted in Mason Curry’s "Daily Rituals" (2013), Sartre's daily menu comprised “two packs of cigarettes and several pipes stuffed with black tobacco, more than a quart of alcohol-wine, beer, vodka, whisky, and so on-two hundred milligrams of amphetamines, fifteen grams of aspirin, several grams of barbiturates, plus coffee, tea, rich meals”

  • Freud's relationship with cocaine, too, holds a compelling narrative. His letters vividly depict how he deployed cocaine as a crutch for his marriage and how the initial euphoria about this 'miracle drug' insidiously evolved into a haunting dependency, the specter of which permeates his interpretation of dreams and psychoanalytical writings.

  • Literary luminaries like Charles Dickens and Ernest Hemingway, composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and the macabre storyteller Edgar Allan Poe seemed to be navigating through an alcohol-induced haze. Yet, one wonders if these instances are mere selection bias or random cases, notwithstanding the pattern that seems to emerge. [See S. Wolfram’s ‘Idea Makers’ (2016), Mason Curry’s ‘Daily Rituals’ (2013), Colin Wilson’s ‘The Misfits’ (1989), and Mike Jay’s Psychonauts (2023) for a range of examples and counter-examples.]

• Here’s a recitation of Kubla Khan that particularly resonates with me - delivered by none other than Benedict Cumberbatch (who also portrayed a drug-addled Sherlock Holmes and Patrick Melrose in the respective eponymous series):

• I present to you an excerpt of Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, an intoxicating poem birthed from the throes of an opium-induced dream:

Or, a vision in a dream. A Fragment.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

   Down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground

With walls and towers were girdled round;

And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,

Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;

And here were forests ancient as the hills,

Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted

Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!

A savage place! as holy and enchanted

As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted

By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

….

Five miles meandering with a mazy motion

Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,

Then reached the caverns measureless to man,

And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean;

And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far

Ancestral voices prophesying war!

   The shadow of the dome of pleasure

   Floated midway on the waves;

   Where was heard the mingled measure

   From the fountain and the caves.

It was a miracle of rare device,

A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

   A damsel with a dulcimer

   In a vision once I saw:

   It was an Abyssinian maid

   And on her dulcimer she played,

   Singing of Mount Abora.

   Could I revive within me

   Her symphony and song,

   To such a deep delight ’twould win me,

That with music loud and long,

I would build that dome in air,

That sunny dome! those caves of ice!

And all who heard should see them there,

And all should cry, Beware! Beware!

His flashing eyes, his floating hair!

Weave a circle round him thrice,

And close your eyes with holy dread

For he on honey-dew hath fed,

And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Godspeed,

BM

(All errors are my own and a by-product of editing this without the aid of any of the vices mentioned in the section above)

It is with immense pleasure and a healthy dose of procrastination that I present to you April’s instalment of Ink-uilab, just three days into May. I must confess - there's a valid reason for the delay - I had to wait for certain parts of this edition to be submitted elsewhere before hitting the "send" button. [If my mom is reading this: ‘Mom, I wrote most of this before the start of the exam period.’]

But then again, how serendipitous it is that this month’s ‘timepass’ newsletter; finds itself sauntering in on Indian Standard Time, particularly given the ‘timepass’ content within. Join me this month to unravel the ever-enigmatic mysteries of ‘timepass’, the formalism of the English Ghazal, and the cyclical canon of Philip Glass.

On Timepass:

• As part of the Yale College Henry James TenEyck Prize Competition, gave a speech on timepass. Here it is, in its entirety, for your reading pleasure:

  Ladies and Gentlemen, I stand before you today, a humble ambassador of India, to extol the virtues of a uniquely Indian phenomenon that has woven itself deep into the very fabric of our culture. Allow me to introduce you to a new lexicon, a new way of life, this elusive doctrine of timepass.

  As I take the podium, I implore you to transport your thoughts to my beloved hometown, the thriving metropolis of Bombay, the pulsating heart of India. I was our first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, who once declared, "At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake." Indeed, we are awake, laboriously typing away at our office desks, navigating the city on crowded buses, and scouring the streets for a midnight snack. We pride ourselves on our industriousness. Here, work is worship, and time and money are the only currencies of value.

  And yet, another India coexists with the first, where friends unwind under shady trees, sharing chai and banter on warm afternoons. Weary students escape to cinemas, and office-goers recharge with post-lunch siestas. This second India presents a captivating dance between the realms of work and relaxation, where the dialectics of hardwork and timepass are entwined like siblings bound by fate. The mantra of work hard, play hard reverberates through the streets, as people grant themselves the luxury of timepass, knowing full well that their labour will be doubly diligent during the hours spent toiling. Here, the distinction between work and leisure is blurred – we do not simply work to live or live to work; instead, we work and live in a seamless continuum.

  The first vision of India may be familiar to you, as productive actors and diligent students on a university campus. However, it is my hope that you leave today with an appreciation for the second India.

  What, you may wonder, exactly is timepass? Is it not just another word for procrastination? Or merely another term for a work break? No! Timepass is so much more. It is a captivating choreography that is quintessentially subcontinental, both a verb and an adjective, an activity and a review of an activity.

  Deeply rooted in the Indian psyche, timepass embraces the beauty of idleness and the joy of being unproductive. It is the essence of bindaas, a carefree attitude that invites us to embrace life with unabashed abandon. It can be discovered in the lingering conversations at the bus stand or in the laughter-filled company during a daily commute. It can be planned or spontaneous and savoured as an individual experience that differs from person to person. The beauty lies in its subjectivity, for it represents any act of guilt-free, non-productive relaxation that serves as an essential counterbalance to the demands of work and the pressures of modern living.

  When asking someone about their weekend plans, you might hear, "Nothing much, just doing timepass." What exactly does this entail? Perhaps it could involve a leisurely meandering through a park, the completion of a crossword, or catching up on a cricket game. As for the age-old conundrum of the chicken crossing the road? Alas, I cannot say for certain, but it may well have been engaging in its own version of timepass!

  So, I implore you, as you sit here on this Monday afternoon, captivated by the orations of eager undergraduates, consider whether you, too, are indulging in the delightful art of timepass.

  And yet there remains another dimension to this enigmatic term – a word that, as an adjective, captures so much more than its humble eight letters would suggest. Imagine, if you will, the following exchange: you ask me, "Bilal, how was the show last night?" My response? "It was timepass." This does not imply that the show was lacking in merit; on the contrary, it signifies the show's ability to facilitate the passage of time. In a world where the cult of productivity holds sway and boredom is deemed the ultimate transgression, the mere capacity of an endeavor to occupy our attention is a triumph in and of itself.

  Be warned! Timepass must not be mistaken for the aimless dalliance of procrastination or the vortex of social media scrolling; rather, it is a deliberate and conscious decision to immerse oneself in pursuits that evoke joy and contentment, liberated from the shackles of productivity or the compulsion to achieve a predetermined objective. Timepass transcends the mere act of whiling away time; it is a sublime art form, a celebration of life's unassuming pleasures. 

  Allow me to further illuminate the essence and the ontology with a contrast: of an afternoon at a Bombay tea stall versus a New Haven coffee shop.

  Picture yourself stepping out of the whirlwind of work and pausing at the tea stall near the train station. Your purpose? Timepass, pure and simple. As the crowds ebb and flow around you, you engage in spirited small talk, discussing the latest cricket match with a stranger or sharing a humorous anecdote about your boss. With each sip of your cutting chai, each puff of your cigarette, and each flavorful chew of your paan leaf, you grant your mind the freedom to meander through the boundless tapestry of life's delights. And in the span of 10-15 minutes, this sublime interlude of timepass bestows upon you a rejuvenation of spirit, a renewed vigour with which to tackle the relentless demands of your schedule and the manifold needs of your family.

  Now, let us turn to the coffee shop that permeates this campus, this country, and indeed, this culture. Here, we meticulously plan our visits to the coffee shop, shooting off text messages, marking calendars, and allotting ourselves a rigid 45-minute window. Within this self-imposed constraint, we hurriedly sip coffee as we anxiously watch the clock, or worse yet, hunch over our laptops, transforming a window seat into yet another sterile workstation.

  I implore you, my friends, to reflect upon this question: When was the last time you struck up a conversation with a stranger? When did you last allow yourself the simple pleasure of unproductive relaxation? Have we not, in our relentless pursuit of productivity, forsaken the art of timepass?

  In those precious moments spent at the tea stall, there is no guilt, no self-reproach. Amidst this shared sanctuary, every stranger becomes a brother, united by the common purpose of seeking respite from life's trials and tribulations. In this hallowed space, a warm camaraderie flourishes, for they all understand, without a word being spoken, the raison d'être for your presence: to partake in the sacred ritual of timepass.

  In the West, we grudgingly allocate the remnants of our schedules, the residue of minutes, the sediment of seconds, for unproductive relaxation. Timepass on the other hand, is neither stressful nor stress-free; It is neither unproductive nor guilt-ridden; all is either timepass or not timepass.

  But why now, you ask? Why is timepass relevant today?

  As students and scholars, we face a daunting challenge, a crisis of civilization. Our minds have been poisoned by an insatiable hunger for productivity, leading us towards a future of socialized tyranny. The spirit of alienation looms large, as we are chastised by the relentless ticking of the capitalistic work-clock. We risk becoming mere cogs in the machine, cookie-cutter consultants and code monkeys devoid of individuality and well-deserved sleep.

  We must confront this reality and ask ourselves: have we truly achieved mastery over the clock? In this epoch, why must we ever walk, talk, or read? Rather, screens transport us to the farthest reaches of the globe, we sup on upon the drip-feed of algorithms for our daily news, and a computer can now complete our very sentences.

  Our days are dictated by Google calendars, cluttered with a ceaseless procession of appointments and meetings. Our veins course with caffeine as we labor to finish one more assignment before the relentless onslaught of deadlines. Our lives are ensnared and besieged by the inexorable march of time.

  Today, we witness the perils of the rat race, the perpetually spinning hamster wheel, and the never-ending workday.

  We are not rats.

  We are not hamsters.

  We are human beings, capable of far more than mere productivity.

  We must liberate ourselves from the tyrannical shackles of the deadline. We must herald the end of hyper-productivity. We must wholeheartedly embrace the liberating notion that sometimes, the most precious gift we can bestow upon ourselves is the permission to simply be.

  Friends, do not merely sprint across the sands of time, leaving fleeting footprints in your haste to conquer the clock—instead, lay down a blanket and revel in a leisurely picnic. 

  The solution to our quandary, the cure, the panacea, my friends, rests securely in the nurturing embrace of guilt-free, non-productive relaxation. How, you ask, might we embark upon this transformative journey? We must emulate the likes of Balzac, who is said to have indulged in "orgies of work punctuated by orgies of relaxation and pleasure.” Pencil in moments for unstructured leisure, let spontaneity be your guide, converse with the stranger at the tea stall, and above all, absolve yourself of guilt for moments of unproductivity.

  We have the power to defy the forces that seek to homogenize our existence. We have the power to hush the incessant ticking of the clock. We have the power to resist subjugation by the very creations we have wrought. Let us use that power. Let us heed the wise words of Nietzsche: "Is life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?" Indeed, life is too short to squander, we must do more timepass!

On Philip Glass’ Akhnaten:

• This winter, Sachien and I, had an opportunity to watch Philip Glass’ Akhnaten at the English National Opera. Having watched the hilarious Book of Mormon the night before, stepping into the ethereal realm of Philip Glass' Akhnaten was quite the contrast for us.

  

• An operatic experience that transcends time and space, Akhnaten is part of Glass' acclaimed Portrait trilogy, nestling perfectly between Satyagraha, inspired by Gandhi, and Einstein on the Beach, a tribute to the namesake physicist. Akhnaten is an opera in three acts, based on the life and religious convictions of the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten, also known as Amenhotep IV. The opera has been described as the most ritualistic and mystical of Glass' many operas, with an undulating opening that sets the stage for the mystical journey to come. Unpacking themes ranging from the foundation of monotheism to the power of the military, Akhnaten is a tribute to the captivating power of ideas, and alteast in my view, a component of Glass’ broader conception of the ‘Great Man Theory’. The Opera, and its staging, was a captivating journey that weaves together history, art, and music in a way that only Glass can achieve.

• Who is the protagonist? Pharaoh Akhenaten (AKA Akhenaton, Akhnaton, or Ikhnaton), was a truly remarkable figure in ancient Egyptian history. Born as Amenhotep IV, he reluctantly ascended to the throne in the mid-14th century BCE and soon introduced a radical shift in religious practices. Upon Akhenaten's death, his young son, Tutankhamun, ascended the throne at just nine years old. Yes, the famed King Tut’s (likely) father was a pharaonic revolutionary (or heretic, depending on which Priest you ask).

  • Akhenaten defied centuries of traditional worship of the Egyptian pantheon and established a new cult dedicated to the sun's disk, the Aton and declaring that the Aton was the one and only god to be worshipped, effectively introducing monotheism to ancient Egypt.

  • Interestingly, the image of the Aten as an all-powerful, all-loving deity, supreme creator, and sustainer of the universe, marked a significant departure from the polytheistic worship of the Egyptian pantheon. He changed his name to Akhenaten (‘beneficial to Aton’) and moved the capital from Thebes to a new city called Akhetaten (modern-day Amarna) where he commissioned radical and unorthodox temples that featured innovative and naturalistic artistic styles. Some scholars argue that Akhenaten's religiopolitical reform was a result of his personal convictions, while others believe it may have been a strategic move to consolidate power by eliminating competing religious factions. Regardless of his motivations, this radical shift in the religio-political structure of Egypt has led many to consider Akhnathen to be the first to espouse organized Monotheism.

    

  • How true is that? Was Akhnaten the first monotheist? We can’t be sure. Akhenaten's monotheistic religion, Atenism, was largely forgotten after his death and the return to Egypt's polytheistic traditions, it was rediscovered in the late 18th century and subsequently integrated into the histories of the three Abrahamic religions by 19th and 20th-century religious philosophers. The internet is rife with comparisons between classical texts of Hebrew and the ancient Egyptian sources of Atenism - is this just the willful optimism of pattern-seeking classicists, or an example of the historical materialism of Abrahamic theology? Who is to say?

• At the heart of Glass' enchanting compositions lie his signature repetitive arpeggios, which create a spellbinding atmosphere when arranged for an orchestra.

  • Fans who enjoy the transcendental nature of Glass's oeuvre (or as he endearingly refers to it, Glassworks) will enjoy my playlist Full Circle - curated to evoke themes of repetition, recursion, and self-similarity:

• The most renowned scene from the Opera is the "Hymn to the Sun," which features the magnetic Anthony Roth Constanzo. Watch it here:

• I was amazed by the remarkable use of ancient languages as the foundation for the operatic text. The opera features Egyptian, Akkadian, and Biblical Hebrew, sourced from Akhenaten's poems, the Book of the Dead, and excerpts from decrees and letters from the Amarna Period (i.e. the seventeen-year period of Akhenaten's rule)

• A description of the creation of the production on the website of the Metropolitan Opera outlines:

  • “Working closely with Shalom Goldman, an expert on ancient religions of the Middle East, Glass set about piecing together a series of vignettes representing what is known of Akhnaten’s life. Some of these scenes were inspired by artifacts from Akhnaten’s reign (for instance, a relief of Akhnaten and Nefertiti sitting with their six daughters), while other scenes were inspired by ancient Egyptian artifacts more generally (such as the Book of the Dead). The libretto, too, was stitched together from fragments of ancient text, including an inscription from a boundary marker found near the ruins of Akhnaten’s city Akhetaten, fragments of the “Amarna letters” (diplomatic correspondence from Akhnaten’s court), and a prayer likely written by Akhnaten himself (the beautiful “hymn to the sun”). The text for the Prelude comes from the Pyramid Texts, the earliest extant funerary literature from ancient Egypt, while the text for Amenhotep III’s funeral comes from the much later Book of the Dead. The love duet between Akhnaten and Nefertiti was taken from a poem found in a sarcophagus at the Valley of the Kings, while another text (from the “Attack and Fall” scene at the end of Act III) was found in the tomb of Akhnaten’s close relative Tutankhamun. Glass and his collaborators also included Psalm 104 from the Hebrew bible (sung by the chorus after Akhnaten’s hymn) and, as a gesture toward the importance of modern archaeology and tourism in bringing ancient Egypt back to light, passages from Frommer’s and Fodor’s guides to Egypt, spoken by the Professor at the end of Act III.”

  • In the prelude, the scribe recites funeral texts from the ‘Pyramid Texts,’ which are the oldest ancient Egyptian funerary texts. You can listen to it here, and read some poetic translations sung here:

    Open are the double doors of the horizon
    Unlocked are its bolts

    Clouds darken the sky
    The stars rain down
    The constellations stagger
    The bones of the hell hounds tremble
    The porters are silent
    When they see this king
    Dawning as a soul

  • During the opera, struck by the sung source texts, I wondered how an Egyptologist would react to the performance.

    • A Danish scholar of Egyptology, Paul John Frandsen, has published an extensive article on the Operatic Akhnaten, that addresses both the historicity and musicality of the production. He critiques, “Glass has chosen to write such an opera with a historical subject and with a number of world-historical individuals as characters, but he does not consciously aim for insight--"truth"--in the form of a dramatic, intellectual construct. Glass's opera has, instead, become a form of "singing archaeology," and, hence, he finds an easy way out. It is, of course, not a question of going straight to the raw material, since the opera has largely been gathered from nonprimary sources. It is, perhaps, a question of construction. On one hand, Glass speaks of "our Egypt," and he makes use of texts out of context. On the other hand, he uses original texts and has them sung in their original language. There is no meaningful reconstruction of a reality, nor has any attempt been made to place the opera in a context that goes beyond "the philosophy of a great spirit," which we referred to earlier. I do not think that Glass and his collaborators had a clear picture.”

    • He does add, however, “The "sound" of the music, its repetitive nature, the fascination with ancient Egypt, etc., do have their attractions, the same attractions that make opera lovers appreciate romantic Italian operas, in spite of their notorious story lines. But maybe, just as Sinuhe has helped popularize ancient Egypt far more than any scholar could, that is not such a bad thing.”

  • I would be remiss if I mentioned songs in Ancient languages and not feature Peter Pringle. A Canadian musician with a dedicated passion for ancient languages and equally-ancient instruments, he brings the ancient world to life through his hauntingly beautiful music. Beyond transporting the audience to civilisations of the yore, his interpretations of ancient tongues allow us to ‘hear’ a language that has not been spoken for many millennia. I am particularly amazed by his depictions of Akkadian (‘Old Babylonian’), particularly in his renditions of "The Epic of Gilgamesh," which conveys the sense of longing and heartache that permeates the ‘world’s oldest story.’ Here’s a taste of Pringle’s magic, his rendition of the lament for Enkidu (Gilgamesh Tablet VIII):

As always, some verses, in parting:

• Last week I got an opportunity to experience a Lyric Majlis, organized by the Department of Comparative Literature, where scholars and poets from around campus read lyrical verse in both original language and translation. The event was described as a “A festive, quasi-global relay of poems, from South Asia to Andalusia and up through the European middle ages and into modern Europe, East Asia and the US.”

• The Majlis, and its constituent lyrical poems, made me reflect on the work of Agha Shahid Ali, the Kashmiri-American poet, whose lyrical mastery has graced the pages of ink-uilab before. Known for his contributions to the literary movement known as New Formalism, he is best known for the "English ghazal."

• Ali describes the technicalities of this uniquely multicultural formalist style in his introduction to the collection of poems titled Ravishing Disunities:

  • “The ghazal is made up of couplets, each autonomous, thematically and emotionally complete in itself: One couplet may be comic, another tragic, another romantic, another religious, another political. (There is, underlying a ghazal, a profound and complex cultural unity, built on association and memory and expectation, as well as an implicit recognition of the human personality and its infinite variety.)”

  • “A couplet may be quoted by itself without in any way violating a context-there is no context, as such. One should at any time be able to pluck a couplet like a stone from a necklace, and it should continue to shine in that vivid isolation, though it would have a different lustre among and with the other stones.”

  • “Then what saves the ghazal from what might be considered arbitrariness? A technical context, a formal unity based on rhyme and refrain and prosody. All the lines in a ghazal can appear to have because of the quantitative meters of Persian and Urdu-the same number of syllables; to establish this metrical consistency, poets follow an inner ear rather than any clearly established rules, as in English.”

• Here’s a video interview for NPR at Izhar Patkin's NYC studio in July 2001, taken shortly before Ali's death in December of the same year. It is magical to see an animated Ali reflect on his work, the political and personal contexts that shaped his work, and the nature of the ghazal.

• I have often tried to follow Ali’s lead and formalist style in my own work. These experiments with the ghazal, however, seem to me to be paltry pasquinades rather than the homages that they are intended as. Nevertheless, allow me to share an excerpt from one of my poems, titled Ghazal 23 – ‘on the tongue’ which appears in the Vol. X, Issue 11 of The Bangalore Review. You can read it, in its entirety, here:

  She’s evaporated into the eld, a man of the future remains,

  the cacophony of civilization puts a halt on the tongue.

  …

  when she shattered into spring, supernovae showered
  galaxies of pepper-and-salt on the tongue.

  Who are you fooling, Aflatoon? She’s an ash heap of history?
  You’ve done nothing but exalt on the tongue.

• Here’s ‘Agha Shahid Ali’s Even the Rain, a beautiful expression of loss, loneliness, and longing:

  What will suffice for a true-love knot? Even the rain?
  But he has bought grief’s lottery, bought even the rain.

  “Our glosses / wanting in this world”—“Can you remember?”
  Anyone!—“when we thought / the poets taught” even the rain?

  After we died—That was it!—God left us in the dark.
  And as we forgot the dark, we forgot even the rain.

  Drought was over. Where was I? Drinks were on the house.
  For mixers, my love, you’d poured—what?—even the rain.

  Of this pear-shaped orange’s perfumed twist, I will say:
  Extract Vermouth from the bergamot, even the rain.

  How did the Enemy love you—with earth? air? and fire?
  He held just one thing back till he got even: the rain.

  This is God’s site for a new house of executions?
  You swear by the Bible, Despot, even the rain?

  After the bones—those flowers—this was found in the urn:
  The lost river, ashes from the ghat, even the rain.

  What was I to prophesy if not the end of the world?
  A salt pillar for the lonely lot, even the rain.

  How the air raged, desperate, streaming the earth with flames—
  To help burn down my house, Fire sought even the rain.

  He would raze the mountains, he would level the waves;
  he would, to smooth his epic plot, even the rain.

  New York belongs at daybreak to only me, just me—
  To make this claim Memory’s brought even the rain.

  They’ve found the knife that killed you, but whose prints are these?
  No one has such small hands, Shahid, not even the rain.

salud,

BM

(All errors are my own and a by-product of editing this one-too-many days after it was due.)