Author: Josh Philip Ross

So it looks like the Nepali people have done it: after weeks of ongoing protests and at least 14 needless deaths, King Gyanendra is reinstating parliament.

But, as one student said, “The people have done their part. Now it is the leaders who need to do theirs.” There is much to be done. First of all, reinstatement of parliament is not the same thing as democracy, nor has it been decided what will become of King Gyanendra or the institution of the monarchy. For another, the Maoist rebels have rejected the king’s move, promising to continue their blockade of Kathmandu, although reports say the city is returning to normal, with taxis running, shops open and cell phone service restored.

The Maoists want a complete end to the monarchy, and when they made a deal last November with seven opposition parties, they all agreed on holding elections and ending the monarchy as their ultimate goals. The split now is over tactics as much as anything: the Maoists wanted the protests to go on until the king abdicated, while the opposition parties were willing to form a constituent assembly while the king retained nominal power.

The constituent assembly will rewrite the constitution, and it remains an open question whether the king will retain a ceremonial role or have no official status. The Maoists obviously want the latter, and the people generally want to do what is needed to get the Maoists to lay down their arms, but there is also a great deal of affection for the institution of the monarchy, if not for this particular monarch. But for the first time in quite a while, there is genuine hope that Nepal can achieve sustainable peace and democracy.

In case you were wondering why throwing a couple of tactical nukes at Iran would be not just politically and tactically foolish but also an act of evil and madness on an astonishing scale, take a look at this devastating devastating photo essay on Chernobyl’s children 20 years later (pop-up).

Radiation is a strange and horrible poison that “curls into the circle of birth,” to quote Paul Simon’s phrase. Its effects last for thousands of years, and they can be contained no more easily than the wind that carries them.

So I’ve just discovered Google Calendar, still in beta (big surprise) but fully capable of kicking the crap out of Yahoo Calendar, previously the best available online option, and as a web-based application, obviously holding a huge advantage over Outlook.

As with Yahoo, it’s possible to make your Google Calendar public, which will be useful for organizations that want to put their schedules where people can see them. Even better, you can import public calendars into your own. I’ve got calendars of Indian, Islamic, Jewish, Korean and US holidays, as well as a calendar that shows UN annual days, all plugged into my own calendar. And I can show or hide the events from each calendar with a check-box, so I don’t have to worry that my own calendar will be cluttered with pointless junk like Week of Solidarity with the Peoples Struggling against Racism and Racial Discrimination when what I really want to know is what time I need to be at the dentist.

Another nice touch is that you can set your alerts to go to your cell phone, so you don’t even have to be at your computer to be reminded of your schedule.

Like other Google products, it’s fast, intuitive and useful. Nice work!

DKNY emailed me today to point me to an article by Good ol’ Tomasky in the American Prospect, about which he had this to say:

It’s another long “wither the Democrats” piece, but as usual, Tomasky brings something extra to conventional wisdom — in this case, while a lot of people have said that Dems need to ressurrect the idea of active, competent government, Tomasky has some idea of why — that is, of what the larger principle at stake is, and how it can be recaptured.

As for the article itself, here’s the key:

Liberalism was built around the idea — the philosophical principle — that citizens should be called upon to look beyond their own self-interest and work for a greater common interest. This, historically, is the moral basis of liberal governance — not justice, not equality, not rights, not diversity, not government, and not even prosperity or opportunity. Liberal governance is about demanding of citizens that they balance self-interest with common interest. Any rank-and-file liberal is a liberal because she or he somehow or another, through reading or experience or both, came to believe in this principle. And every leading Democrat became a Democrat because on some level, she or he believes this, too.

Tomasky argues that this principle was superceded in the 1960s by an emphasis on diversity and rights — a necessary shift, considering where the old liberalism had left blacks, gays, women and other minorities. His solution?

The Democrats need to become the party of the common good. They need a simple organizing principle that is distinct from Republicans and that isn’t a reaction to the Republicans. They need to remember what made liberalism so successful from 1933 to 1966, that reciprocal arrangement of trust between state and nation. And they need to take the best parts of the rights tradition of liberalism and the best parts of the more recent responsibilities tradition and fuse them into a new philosophy that is both civic-republican and liberal … Democrats can stand for an idea: the idea that we’re all in this — post-industrial America, the globalized world, and especially the post–9-11 world in which free peoples have to unite to fight new threats — together, and that we have to pull together, make some sacrifices, and, just sometimes, look beyond our own interests to solve our problems and create the future.

The article is full of ideas like these — ideas toward which I’ve been groping for some time in my own efforts to rethink Democratic politics — and he backs them with historical analysis, recent polls and worthwhile practical advice.

Definitely worth a read.

Politics is a lofty subject, I don’t understand it. I am sure the king knows what he should do for the people. I can’t make a suggestion, I have no idea.

So says Buddhiman Gandharva (pictured), identified by the BBC as a musician but obviously one of the poor Nepalis who come down from the foothills to Kathmandu to sell homemade sarangis to tourists in order to feed their families. (Here is an MP3 recording by Quiet American of the typical sales pitch.)

Gandharva’s quiet bafflement is the real tragedy of the ongoing crisis in Nepal, where security forces killed at least two protesters today after two weeks of ongoing protests and strikes against the king. The protesters are wholly right to demand democracy and insist that their unpopular, autocratic king return power to the people. But it’s worth remembering that when King Gyanendra first seized power, his pretext was the inability of the parliament to hold elections as scheduled. For most Nepalis, especially away from the major cities, the government is utterly remote and ineffectual, and this was the case throughout the democratic period in the late nineties as well.

There is no excuse for Gyanendra to hold power any longer. The people should be heard in a democratic system, and elections should be held. Getting from here to there, however, is no simple matter.

Meanwhile, the people of Nepal are suffering. Already poor, Nepalis are now coping with the evaporation of their tourism industry — previously the source of roughly a third of foreign capital — and with disruptions caused by the ongoing strikes. I don’t know what to do or what should be done, but the whole situation makes me very sad for this beautiful, welcoming country.

DKNY has pointed me to two articles (1, 2) at Whiskey Bar that provide a plausible analysis of what’s happening between the US and Iran, arguing that both sides are stumbling forward in a game of brinksmanship that neither can afford to back out of.

According to the first piece, “What we are witnessing … may be an example of what the Germans call the flucht nach vorne – the ‘flight forward.’ This refers to a situation in which an individual or institution seeks a way out of a crisis by becoming ever more daring and aggressive … Classic historical examples of the flucht nach vornes include Napoleon’s attempt to break the long stalemate with Britain by invading Russia, the decision of the Deep South slaveholding states to secede from the Union after Lincoln’s election, and Milosevic’s bid to create a ‘greater Serbia’ after Yugoslavia fell apart.”

I would agree that this may be what is happening, but I think there’s a selection bias when one tries to think of historical flucht nach vornes situations, because those that spill over the brink become wars that make their mark on history, while that don’t are usually forgotten. One unusually memorable case of an aborted flucht nach vornes is the Cuban Missile Crisis, in which the parties involved ultimately stepped back from the brink. The Berlin Blockade is another such situation, and indeed, the Cold War was full of these kinds of crises. India and Pakistan have similarly come to the brink of war repeatedly, but stepped back. The Great Game, another simmering conflict between major powers, nearly erupted into full-fledged war between Britain and Russia in 1884 as a result of the Panjdeh Incident.

For obvious reasons, the Panjdeh Incident and the Berlin Blockade are less familiar than the Crimean War (the largest Great Game-related conflict by far) or World War I, which is pretty much the granddaddy of flucht nach vornes disasters. I remember a comedian making fun of the BBC back in its staid, state-controlled days: “In the Mediterranean today,” he soothingly intoned, “two ships nearly collided. No one was injured.” The point, of course, is that near misses are dead boring and hardly qualify as news. Thus we forget them in the onrush of history, focusing on those moments when disaster was not averted and thousands or millions died.

None of this tells us which way America and Iran are going at the moment. We are charging toward the brink of a horrific war of aggression, while the Iranians seem to be doing everything they can to appear as unacceptably dangerous as possible. Will we step back, or will we tumble into disaster? History can’t tell us the answer, but it can tell us that running toward the brink is not the same as falling over the edge.

Le mode ahiri-lalita by Ravi Shankar (Musiques d’Asie: Chine, Indie, Indonesie, Japon)

Ghara-Dadra by Pandit Shivkumar Sharma (santoor), Pandit Brijbhushan Kabra (guitar) and Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia (bansuri flute) (Call of the Valley)

Mathar (Discovery of India Mix) by Indian Vibes (Remixes)

Each year, an All Night Concert of Indian Music is held in the Synod Hall of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City — this year’s will be on May 13. The concert mirrors a North Indian tradition for the insufferably hot spring season that precedes the monsoon rains, when sleeping all day and staying up all night is a survival tactic.

I attended the concert once, several years ago, and made it to about 5 a.m. before I began seeing spots and decided I’d better make for the subway before I passed out completely. It was an extraordinary experience, not unlike my stay at Kopan, a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in Nepal: meditative, challenging, illuminating and baffling and humbling. I wondered who would attend such an event and was surprised to find a majority of Indians, many with books of ragas in which they followed along with the musicians, evincing a sophisticated level of appreciation that makes the season-ticket holders at Avery Fisher seem like dabblers.

Though European classical music has been known to go for the extended composition, the very idea of an all-night concert of it is nonsensical. The temporal structures are too crucial to the music, and the concentration demanded of the audience is considerable. Even abstract classical works tend to have architecture and a kind of narrative propulsion that reward close listening from beginning to end. They tell stories and express passions.

Hindustani classical music, by contrast, is steeped in the meditative traditions of India. You’d be hard pressed to find anything like an Ode to Joy, much less the bellicosity of an 1812 Overture or the romantic passions of Ravel or Stravinsky. Instead, there are rises and falls of intensity as the musicians drift apart and come together again, unified by a raga but improvising within it. I was told once that the way to listen to Indian music is to wait patiently for something to happen — some moment when the musicians find a momentary spark or convergence — to be aware that this may happen only occasionally over the course of a performance of many minutes or hours, and to accept each moment of the music as complete in itself. (This is also a good way to listen to John Coltrane.)

In this, Hindustani classical music is indeed much like meditation, in which the mind wanders, is refocused, wanders again, achieves a few instants of fleeting clarity and peace, and then floats off once more. Rather than expressing our passions, Hindustani classical music expresses the emotional experience of mastering them.

The most famous Hindustani instrument is the sitar, and its most famous musician is Ravi Shankar. “Ahiri-Lalita” is a straightforward short sitar raga.

The next piece, “Ghara-Dadra,” contains no sitar at all, though I have had people listen to it and insist otherwise. The sitar-like instrument is a Hawaiian guitar, played by Pandit Brijbhushan Kabra, in this case on the album Call of the Valley, which was a sensation when it was released in India in 1968 and is widely considered to be the best-selling Indian classical album of all time.

And then we come to Indian Vibes, with Paul Weller of The Jam on electric sitar and acoustic and electric guitar, Gerard Farrel on sitar, session musician and Weller associate Marco Nelson on bass, and Crispin Taylor of Galliano on drums — or at least that’s the best information I can find. There is no group called Indian Vibes, and the album, simply entitled Remixes, consists of nothing but seven versions of the 1960s Krieger Volker composition “Mathar,” first performed by the Dave Pike Set in 1968. I first heard this appealing little artifact while riding in a taxi — actually a small blue hatchback — from the Nepali city of Pokhara to the trailhead for our Himalayan trek. It remains an obscurity, although you tended to hear it a lot in Nepali record shops — though not nearly as often as the dreaded Tibetan Incantations version of the Buddhist chant “Om Mani Padme Hum,” complete with grandiose Chinese orchestration and New Age synthesizery pablum. Put on that record — or better yet, put it on two competing boom-boxes, out of sync — light up a little Nag Champa incense, and you’ll get a good sense of the Kathmandu tourist experience.

Enjoy Dungeon Escape, in which you are a Zolaman-like stick figure in the fight of your life (via The Polenblog).

Bill McKibben gives us reason to hope in this article about the rising power of the Web to change Democratic politics, shake up the party and begin the hard work of restoring the roots and coming back to power.

The Chosunilbo today has an article on the centenary of the perm, an event with powerful cultural resonance in Korea.

Among older Korean women, plenty of younger ones, and sometimes even men, a perm is a necessary beauty treatment. And cutting your hair short and turning it into an afro seems to be a rite of passage for a woman who has ceased to be an agasshi (아가씨), or young woman, and become an ajumma (아줌마), which literally means “auntie.” And chances are she’ll tell you she did it to look younger.

The popularity of perms and dye jobs in Korea — even terrible ones — can be explained by two factors. First, nearly everyone in Korea has the same hair: black, straight and limp. A few folks have a bit of a wave, and some people’s hair grows thicker than others, but there’s nothing like the natural variety you find in most European countries or even China.

Second, most Koreans are today enjoying their first taste of wealth and freedom in modern history. (Korea was moderately well off during the Shilla dynasty, which ended in 935 CE, but that’s about it.) The twentieth century was a long stretch of political collapse, Japanese occupation, civil war, the desperate poverty of the reconstruction period, and then artificially repressed wages under military dictatorship.

According the the Chosunilbo article:

It was not until 1937 that the perm came to Korea, and it immediately became all the rage. The “early adopters” here had one thing in common: they were so-called new women – actresses, novelists and academics. Their perm cost them W5-6, which was enough to buy two 72kg bags of rice. In the early 1940s, the perm was banned under a prohibition order for all luxury goods on the grounds that the new hairstyle was a decadent trend imported from the West. But among women from wealthy families it remained in vogue….

But it was the 80s when the perm really came into its own in Korea. Women wanted waves, no matter if their hair was long or short. Hairstyling products such as mousse, gel and spray proliferated, and more and more women also started to dye their hair any color other than black.

Today, South Korea is both a poor country posing as a rich one, with shiny baubles everywhere to mask the shoddiness of the world they’ve built, and a rich country posing as a poor one, clinging to its developing status to maintain influence in the Third World even as it touts itself for being “the hub of Asia” and brags about its world-class Internet infrastructure. The bad ajumma perm — a symbol of luxury and defiance, an ugly stab at beautification, an attempt to look young that’s a mark of age — seems the perfect symbol of South Korea’s ambiguous transition.