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Amit Verma reaches Peshawar, where he finally feels like he's in a foreign country.
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Western biologists visit a remote region in the Papua province of Indonesia, called the Foja Mountains. Apparently this area has had little or no human presence, though the Post doesn't explain how or why it's remained so pristine. The intrepid biologists hit a mother-lode of previously unknown flora and fauna. (I love reading about scientists having adventures... incidentally, check out the pictures from the expedition at the Post).
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There's a nice HTML edition of a Gutenberg Etext of Hindustani Lyrics, translated by Inayat Khan and Jessie Westbrook (1919). Snatches of verse from Amir, Ghalib, Hali, and many others. The translations aren't especially "useful" without the facing page of the original Urdu, but fans of Urdu Poetry might find this interesting nonetheless. Here's a snippet from Ghalib:
The high ambition of the drop of rain
Is to be merged in the unfettered sea;
My sorrow when it passed all bounds of pain,
Changing, became itself the remedy.
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With an intractable Maoist insurgency problem, Nepal's King Gyanendra is foundering. The Washington Post implies he is in danger of being overthrown by a military coup.
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The Indian Express reports that the government of Delhi is planning to "regularize" illegal construction in residential areas. I don't really know what to make of it. On the one hand, it seems ethical to grant people official rights over land they already effectively own, especially if the government doesn't have the power or the interest to kick them off. But of course this move might well encourage more illegal development, adding to the housing/development chaos. And things simply can't go on the way they are, with millions of people in legal limbo. (But I'll leave it to people who know the housing situation in Delhi better than I to judge this decision...)
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The Literary Saloon finds a damning instance of gender segregation in the assignment of reviews at the New York Times Book Review. Woman-oriented books get women reviewers, while books oriented to politics and war get male reviewers.
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The Literary Saloon also mentions an upcoming African-Asian literary festival to be held in Delhi starting February 14.
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And there's a story in the New York Times by a London local who was impressed by Woody Allen's choice of locales in Match Point.
We saw the film recently in Doylestown, and generally liked the dialogue and the style of the film through the first half. I obviously don't know London as well as a local, but I was challenged by Woody Allen's cultural references, specifically in this case the opera. His use of Italian opera in this case actually directly correlates with where he takes the film's plot (notice the uncanny parallels between the plot of La Traviata and that of Allen's film). Woody Allen's misogynistic streak is also present in much Opera, which gives the film a rather novel exculpatory claim: it can be cruel to its heroine because Verdi was, and how can we fault Verdi? Blame it on Verdi!
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Speaking of London, also check out Amitava Kumar, on Sukhdev Sandhu's ethos of the London street.