10/5/8 -- Amitav Ghosh, author of In an Antique Land (IAAL), 1992, was recently in Cairo for an Arab Writers Union conference, where I interviewed him. Ghosh's second novel, The Shadow Lines, in 1988, won the Sahitya Akademi Award, India's most prestigious literary award. Since then, he has published The Calcutta Chromosome (1997), The Glass Palace (2000), The Imam and the Indian (2002), and done fieldwork in Cambodia. Ghosh's latest work of fiction, The Hungry Tide (2004) is a story of adventure and unlikely love, identity and history, set in the Sundarban Islands in the Bay of Bengal. He was awarded the Padma Shri Award by the Indian government in 2007. He currently lives in New York and teaches at Columbia University.
Culture and Religion
Ghosh: The quest for the Other
- Written by Eric Walberg Эрик Вальберг/ Уолберг إيريك والبرغ
The "Good Guys" Lost the Cold War
- Written by Eric Walberg Эрик Вальберг/ Уолберг إيريك والبرغ
Reflections from Tashkent circa 2003
When the West was forced to drop its Cold War (CW) campaign (during WWII, and to some extent during the early 60s and mid-70s, due to the invigorated peace struggles of the time) there was a slight breathing space which gave hope to the possibility of detente, i.e., respect of each system for the other's right to exist. More precisely: respect by capitalism of the right to exist of a social system diametrically opposed to capitalism. As opposed to Thatcher's TINA (There Is No Alternative) -- There Was An Alternative (TWAA)! Fear of this ‘enemy’ quickly evaporated among intelligent mainstream people in the West. These brief respites were tactical retreats in the long-term fight by imperialism, biding its time. Imperialism was always ready to provoke a new CW crisis, and did so on many occasions. I was able to slip through the ideological door during the flowering of detente in the mid-70s.
Pages from a checkered past
- Written by Eric Walberg Эрик Вальберг/ Уолберг إيريك والبرغ
The Bible: Colonising a metaphor
- Written by Eric Walberg Эрик Вальберг/ Уолберг إيريك والبرغ
For more than a century, archaeologists and historians have attempted to confirm beliefs of both Christians and Jews about their common past using the Old Testament (OT) and New Testaments (NT) as starting points. Christians, while embracing the OT as a harmless precursor of the NT, insist that the combined texts prove the truth of Judaic monotheism, with its covenant with God, a covenant that was renewed with the resurrection of Jesus as the Christ. Jews, of course, stick with the basic OT texts, insisting they alone prove their role as God's Chosen People and their right to create a Jewish state, Israel, in the Holy Land.
The attraction of Islam: Finding the inner Muslim prince
- Written by Eric Walberg Эрик Вальберг/ Уолберг إيريك والبرغ
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