Bad News for Flatbreads

Digitally Devisive

Definitely digital, definitely divisive, but I'm not sure it's quite what digital divide usually means. I started going through the different wikipedia languages' pages for Mohammed to see which ones use the images in questions. I'm not sure if you can judge much by most of them. The Arabic one, of course, is quite image-free (except for a nifty inline graphic of the oft-used (in this context) phrase-cum-glyph "Mohammed, Peace Be Upon Him"

Meanwhile, I'll paste in the entire corresponding Scots-language entry:

Muhammad (Arab:محمد) is believed tae be a prophet o God bi Muslims. He stairtit the releegion o Islam. He wis an Arab leader an aw.

Mumbai Manga

First, a history-vocab lesson, from the great old Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases:

And now a present usage, a truncated story from the oft-cited Mumbai daily DNA:

This brings up a long-standing question for me: how do you represent a generic, anonymous criminal without reorting to sketchy cliches about what a "representative" criminal looks like? The ingenious DNA answer: just use an anime-character silhouette!


(I couldn't find the exact stance, but here's, perhaps, our dacoit's tourist girlfriend, as seen on the animenano podcast)

L'Inde sans Cashmere

I saw this once a couple of years back, and again this week: a map of India on France 2's Le 20 Heures newscast, with the disputed (but largely, and longly Indian-administered) state of Jammu and Kashmir omitted. More than a little odd-looking. Is this obvious cartographic siding with Pakistan a sort of French payback for the loss of their colony at Pondicherry?

Retiring on One String

I'm fascinated by this bank ad that ran on the front page of DNA India:
First, the suggestion that comfy retirement offers the chance to finally play the violin—a worthy goal, though I wonder how often arthritis might get in the way. But what really struck me was the non-Stradivarius-copy features of the fiddle: the slightly larger f-holes, and, above all, the fact that there's only one string! Was this just an error on the part of the props department, or a subcontinental adaption? A few quick searches turned up references to a one-stringed Indian viol called a riti, so perhaps it's that. Though I think in India classical music, the violin tends to be held in a pretty different posture. So who knows? Maybe you!

In any case, I was reminded of the 19th-century Italian virtuoso Niccolò Paganini:

In performance Paganini enjoyed playing tricks, like tuning one of his strings a semitone high, or playing the majority of a piece on one string after breaking the other three.

VIPs and VVIPs

I'll break the celebrity-gossip silence of this blog with the following article, from the Mumbai daily DNA India:

HYDERABAD: It would have been the ideal film script except that nobody is in a mood to oblige. Last week’s elopement by Telugu megastar Chiranjeevi’s daughter Srija has set the film industry and the elite of Hyderabad on alert to the likely dangers from their rebellious offspring. The star, though, said that all was forgiven and extended his blessings to the young couple.

Despite the olive branch from dad, the next day the same paper reported that Srija was seeking police protection from Delhi for her husband, who was still threatened by angry family members. It's easy to focus on the silly side, but I should note that the sense of threat (and, for the "aggrieved" family, shame/dishonor) presumably make a lot more sense in a non-Western, less-individualistic cultural context (though the role of Indian film stars in adapting Western-style stardom adds some shades of irony). In any case—and back to silly—if Chiranjeevi's film roles are any indicator, he's not someone you want on your bad side:

The DNA article continues:

Film producers, directors and financiers in the city have tightened security arrangements and cut short holiday trips of their children. They have now sent them to closely guarded resorts and bungalows around the city where their contact with “friends” and associates is restricted.
The city police have also been considering a special cell to keep a tab on children of VIPS and VVIPS as a matter of routine exercise.
...
Hyderabad is home to nearly 1,275 powerful families of industrialists, politicians and settlers from West Bengal, UP and Delhi. There are 27 private security agencies of which seven specialise in personal security for children of the rich and famous.

It took me a second or two to figure out what VVIPs meant (think Very, Very). I guess in a country the size of India you need the distinction. I wonder what the cutoff is to garner the extra V? Also I love the humble specificity of "nearly 1,275".

All this brought to mind—and this will be no comfort for the concerned powerful families in Hyderabad—this catchy song, by the androgynous (and on multiple other counts bizarre) French pop artist Katerine:

Take a Sad Song and Make it Better?

I'd remembered Gandhi's last words, after he was shot by his asassin, were "He Ram!", which was translated, perhaps a little too universal-ifyingly, as "Oh God!" Though it may be that's what Gandhi would have intended.

Anyway, so it was the alternate transliteration of he that got my attention in this headline, from the Mumbai newspaper DNA:

The article raises a lot of issues from India's recent past, particularly the place, literally and figuratively, of the god Ram, and stories associated with him, in Hindu (and Indian) identities. In the 1990s the flashpoint was a mosque torn down in Ayodhya because it stood on a site associated by some with Ram (his birthplace? I forget). Now it's to do with plans to dredge a canal through Adam's Bridge, the shallow archipelago that links India and Sri Lanka, which has traditionally been linked with the bridge built by the monkey-god Hanuman in the the Ramayana. An atheist minister in Tamil Nadu made some comments about it being silly to think of the bridge as an architectural site worthy of protection (as some from the anti-canal camp were arguing), and then the argument got to be over whether said minister ought to have made those comments, whether it was an insult to Indian-ness/Hindu-ness.

Anyway, so Ram-awareness is on the upswing among Hindu nationalists, even to the point of coopting Gandhi's favorite Ram-hymn (despite the fact that the mahatma himself was quite at odds with the anticedants of today's Hindu nationalists—or at least the extreme ones. And they (witness the asassination) with him.

Serious and complex matters. But, a little pathetically, the main thing the headline made me think of was The Beatles' song "Hey, Jude". I'll hold off on deciding whether that song could, with the simple name substitution, be used to illustrate an episode or two from the Ramayana (and whether or not that'd be a good thing).

Laugh not, it's been done before: witness animator Nina Paley's mesmurizing, inspiring, and vaguely troubling Betty-Boop-meets-Busby-Berkley-meets-the-Delhi-Durbar series, The Sitayana, in which episodes from the Ramayana are given a feminist slant and set to the alluring melancholy music of 1920s jazz vocalist Annette Hanshaw:



If you liked that segment, head to the The Sitayana site proper, which has segments from several episodes/songs, in a slightly better quality form.

Urdu Desktop Publishing

The ever-stellar Language Hat linked to this refutation of a recently circulated story about the last hand-lettered newspaper in the world, an Urdu paper published in Chennai, India. Not so, says Iqag Notes:

The vast majority of “printed” Urdu works are hand written. That includes books, newspapers, magazines, posters, and so on. It’s true that there is at the moment an incredibly fast pace of change towards computerization amongst the major newspapers, and a slower pace for books, but this has been only over the last five years. In fact, one of the only things which are almost always computer composed are wedding invitations, because it’s cost effective for these small batches, and because the consumer bears the higher labor costs of DTP vs. caligraphy.

After which follows a fascinating history of efforts to render Urdu script in printed form - old-school typography, lithography (making a facsimile of a hand-lettered page), and desktop publishing.

Lithography was easier and cheaper than block type, and there was no particular reason to look back. That is, until the invention of computers and the various stages of mechanical and computerized typesetting. Still, developing the algorithm for proper rendering of nasta`liq was just not attracting the necessary investment. One factor may have been the fact that those kids from Urdu speaking families who went into computers in India - and even, to some extent Pakistan - were those least likely to be able to read Urdu. Even now, if you are Muslim and go to an English medium school, you take Arabic as your second language, and if you go to an Urdu medium school, the chances of you pursuing engineering are slim.

There's also a fascinating digression about printing the Qur'an:

As for the Qur’an, a trained Urdu calligrapher would be completely unqualified for that. Qur’an’s are written by teams of huffaz (people who’ve memorized the Qur’an) trained in Qur’anic calligraphy. They are repeatedly checked and certified by government bodies in multiple countries. Generally speaking, a publisher who prints a Qur’an with an error of a single diacritical mark can expect to be held responsible for recall and destruction of the entire issue. 95% of the Qur’ans you’ll run across in South Asia are reprints (mostly unauthorized) of the Taj Company edition of the 1930s. These are resized and recut to fit different editions. I watched someone spend two years cutting and pasting by hand to produce a new, large print multi-lingual interlinear edition which he hoped would become a marketplace sensation. Essentially, there are two visual styles in Qur’ans today, the Taj version, and that handed out by the Saudis. Everything else is a rarity. Many South Asians have trouble reading the Saudi version as it lacks visual cues they grew up with.

And this intriguing parenthetical:

(You must realize that most of the non-English publishing in India is done at the expense of the author or the author’s friends or students or disciples. This actually leads to very vibrant literary scenes about which people actually care quite a bit.)

Now let's see if I can do some script-comparisons—admittedly risky for scripts I can't read. Here's a headline from The Siasat Daily, rendered as a jpg with InPage's DTP software:


And here's an Urdu headline from BBC Urdu, which uses a Unicode font—it doesn't mimic the calligraphy as well—it's flatter, like standard Arabic type, but it's searchable:

سفر فیصل آباد، چیف جسٹس کا بھرپور استقبال

I'd like to find an image of a contemprary handwritten Urdu news article, but haven't figured out how to locate one yet.