Jaws Music Theme: Now Playing on Loop in Lahore.

Bombs away.

I want all the bombs away from here. Preferably stuck in Satan’s left hoof-crack, making him run around in cocentric circles, with the Legion chasing after him in a terrified fit, crying out forgive us Father for we have done a good deed!

If any time is right for confessions, it is right now. 

Because bombs don’t go away. They go off. 

By John Jeremiah Sullivan | Lapham’s Quarterly 

These are stimulating times for anyone interested in questions of animal consciousness. On what seems like a monthly basis, scientific teams announce the results of new experiments, adding to a preponderance of evidence that we’ve been underestimating animal minds, even those of us who have rated them fairly highly. New animal behaviors and capacities are observed in the wild, often involving tool use—or at least object manipulation—the very kinds of activity that led the distinguished zoologist Donald R. Griffin to found the field of cognitive ethology (animal thinking) in 1978: octopuses piling stones in front of their hideyholes, to name one recent example; or dolphins fitting marine sponges to their beaks in order to dig for food on the seabed; or wasps using small stones to smooth the sand around their egg chambers, concealing them from predators. At the same time neurobiologists have been finding that the physical structures in our own brains most commonly held responsible for consciousness are not as rare in the animal kingdom as had been assumed. Indeed they are common. All of this work and discovery appeared to reach a kind of crescendo last summer, when an international group of prominent neuroscientists meeting at the University of Cambridge issued “The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness in Non-Human Animals,” a document stating that “humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness.” It goes further to conclude that numerous documented animal behaviors must be considered “consistent with experienced feeling states.”

That is technical language, but it speaks to a riddle age-old and instinctive. These thoughts begin, for most of us, typically, in childhood, when we are making eye contact with a pet or wild animal. I go back to our first family dog, a preternaturally intelligent-seeming Labrador mix, the kind of dog who herds playing children away from the street at birthday parties, an animal who could sense if you were down and would nuzzle against you for hours, as if actually sharing your pain. I can still hear people, guests and relatives, talking about how smart she was. “Smarter than some people I know!” But when you looked into her eyes—mahogany discs set back in the grizzled black of her face—what was there? I remember the question forming in my mind: can she think? The way my own brain felt to me, the sensation of existing inside a consciousness, was it like that in there?

For most of the history of our species, we seem to have assumed it was. Trying to recapture the thought life of prehistoric peoples is a game wise heads tend to leave alone, but if there’s a consistent motif in the artwork made between four thousand and forty thousand years ago, it’s animal-human hybrids, drawings and carvings and statuettes showing part man or woman and part something else—lion or bird or bear. Animals knew things, possessed their forms of wisdom. They were beings in a world of countless beings. Taking their lives was a meaningful act, to be prayed for beforehand and atoned for afterward, suggesting that beasts were allowed some kind of right. We used our power over them constantly and violently, but stopped short of telling ourselves that creatures of alien biology could not be sentient or that they were incapable oftrue suffering and pleasure. Needing their bodies, we killed them in spite of those things.

Only with the Greeks does there enter the notion of a formal divide between our species, our animal, and every other on earth. Today in Greece you can walk by a field and hear two farmers talking about an alogo, a horse. An a-logos. No logos, no language. That’s where one of their words for horse comes from. The animal has no speech; it has no reason. It has no reason because it has no speech. Plato and Aristotle were clear on that. Admire animals aesthetically, perhaps, or sentimentally; otherwise they’re here to be used. Mute equaled brute. As time went by, the word for speech became the very word for rationality, the logos, an identification taken up by the early Christians, with fateful results. For them the matter was even simpler. The animals lack souls. They are all animal, whereas we are part divine.

And yet, if you put aside church dogma, and lean in to look at the Bible itself, or at the Christian tradition, the picture is more complicated. In the Book of Isaiah, God says that the day will come when the beasts of the field will “honor” Him. If there’s a characteristic of personal identity more defining than the capacity to honor, it’s hard to come up with. We remember St. Francis, going aside to preach to the little birds, his “sisters.” Needless to say he represented a radical extreme, conclusions of which regarding the right way of being in the world would not seem reasonable to most of the people who have his statue in their gardens. In one of his salutations, that of virtues, he goes as far as to say that human beings desiring true holiness should make themselves “subject” to the animals, “and not to men alone, but also to all beasts.” If God grants that wild animals eat you, lie down, let them do “whatsoever they will,” it’s what He wanted.

Deeper than that, though, in the New Testament, in the Gospel According to Luke, there’s that exquisite verse, one of the most beautiful in the Bible, the one that says if God cares deeply about sparrows, don’t you think He cares about you? One is so accustomed to dwelling on the second, human, half of the equation, the comforting part, but when you put your hand over that and consider only the first, it’s a little startling: God cares deeply about the sparrows. Not just that, He cares about them individually. “Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies?” Jesus says. “Yet not one of them is forgotten in God’s sight.” Sparrows are an important animal for Jesus. In the so-calledInfancy Gospel of Thomas, a boy Jesus, playing in mud by the river, fashions twelve sparrows out of clay—again the number is mentioned—until a fellow Jew, happening to pass, rebukes him for breaking the Sabbath laws (against “smoothing,” perhaps), at which point Jesus claps and says, “Go!”, and the sparrows fly away chirping. They are not, He says, forgotten. So Godremembers them, bears them in mind. Stranger still, He cares about their deaths. In the Gospel According to Matthew we’re told, “Not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father.” Think about that. If the bird dies on the branch, and the bird has no immortal soul, and is from that moment only inanimate matter, already basically dust, how can it be “with” God as it’s falling? And not in some abstract all-of-creation sense but in the very way that we are with Him, the explicit point of the verse: the line right before it is “fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul.” If sparrows lack souls, if the logos liveth not in them, Jesus isn’t making any sense in Matthew 10:28-29. The passage may make no sense anyway. The sparrow population shows little sign of divine ministrations: two years ago the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds placed house sparrows on its “Red List” of globally threatened species. Charles Darwin supposedly said that the suffering of the lower animals throughout time was more than he could bear to think of. That feels, if slightly neurotic, more scrupulously observed.

The modern conversation on animal consciousness proceeds, with the rest of the Enlightenment, from the mind of René Descartes, whose take on animals was vividly (and approvingly) paraphrased by the French philosopher Nicolas Malebranche: they “eat without pleasure, cry without pain, grow without knowing it; they desire nothing, fear nothing, know nothing.” Descartes’ term for them was automata—windup toys, like the Renaissance protorobots he’d seen as a boy in the gardens at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, “hydraulic statues” that moved and made music and even appeared to speak as they sprinkled the plants. This is how it was with animals, Descartes held. We look at them—they seem so full of depth, so like us, but it’s an illusion. Everything they do can be attached by causal chain to some process, some natural event. Picture two kittens next to each other, watching a cat toy fly around, their heads making precisely the same movements at precisely the same time, as if choreographed, two little fleshy machines made of nerves and electricity, obeying their mechanical mandate.

Descartes’ view drew immediate controversy. Writers such as the naturalist John Ray, in The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation(1691), protested on behalf of “the common sense of mankind” that if “beasts were automata or machines, they could have no sense, or perception of pleasure, or pain…which is contrary to the doleful significations they make when beaten, or tormented.” A view with which most of us can sympathize, but one that rests to a regrettable extent on naked anthropomorphism—their screams sound like ours, and so must mean the same thing.

Thomas Hobbes, writing soon after Descartes’ death, proposed more philosophically salient qualifications to Descartes’ theory. First, he points out, there is more overlap between us and the beasts than Descartes allowed. Beasts have memory (they can learn sequences of events, avoiding negative outcomes), and they can at least engage with speech (dogs learn our commands). Hobbes even claims—somewhat vaguely—that beasts possess a form of imagination brought about “by words or other voluntary signs,” one that we “generally call understanding.” What they don’t have, he says, is an understanding of their own “conceptions and thoughts.” They are not self-conscious. They are not, as we might put it today, “meta.” Hobbes identifies this self-consciousness as the divine spark.

Hobbes’ contemporary, the Dutch Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza, hesitated to make even that kind of essential distinction between us and them. The difference was rather one of degree, or more than that, one of kind. He writes in Ethics,

Hence it follows that the emotions of the animals which are called irrational…only differ from man’s emotions to the extent that brute nature differs from human nature. Horse and man are alike carried away by the desire of procreation, but the desire of the former is equine, the desire of the latter is human…Thus, although each individual lives content and rejoices in that nature belonging to him wherein he has his being, yet the life, wherein each is content and rejoices, is nothing else but the idea, or soul, of the said individual…It follows from the foregoing proposition that there is no small difference between the joy which actuates, say, a drunkard, and the joy possessed by a philosopher.

Apart from the general point—horses feel horse joy, cats feel cat joy, etc.—Spinoza makes two less familiar but equally significant claims. The first is his lovely definition of the soul: that it is in some way wrapped up with, coextensive with, the “essence” of the creature possessing it. The particular nature in which every creature is able to rejoice precisely by being most entirely itself is the soul. That settles the matter of whether animals have souls. Of course they do. The horse has a horse soul, the fish has a fish soul. The second claim is Spinoza’s radical—but instantly persuasive— statement that one human being’s essence could be unintelligible to another. The drunkard is a different type of human being than the philosopher, but he is also a different creature, full stop. Are we so sure that species identification is proof against the canyons of misapprehension that separate us from, say, the monkey spider? This could be a frightening thought: accepting that no two consciousnesses can ever have transparency, or at any rate can never have certainty about it, leaves us on some level cosmically alone. Spinoza takes the notion in stride. He’d be more prone to say, Well, no doubt we sometimes understand each other.

Suprisingly, perhaps, these thoughts did not lead Spinoza to a recommendation of total empathy with the animal kingdom, as the animal-rights activist in us would hope. He is fairly cold-eyed, even cold-hearted, writing,

It is plain that the law against the slaughtering of animals is founded rather on vain superstition and womanish pity than on sound reason. The rational quest of what is useful to us further teaches us the necessity of associating ourselves with our fellow men, but not with beasts, or things, whose nature is different from our own; we have the same rights in respect to them as they have in respect to us. Nay, as everyone’s right is defined by his virtue, or power, men have far greater rights over beasts than beasts have over men. Still I do not deny that beasts feel: what I deny is that we may not consult our own advantage and use them as we please, treating them in the way which best suits us; for their nature is not like ours.

In order to understand this, we have to know something about Spinoza’s definition of fundamental or natural right, which comes very close to meaning, simply, power. We have the right to do with them “as we please,” just as they have the “right” to eat us, if the meeting happens on ground more favorable to them. Spinoza isn’t trying to argue that we shouldn’t act kindly toward them, when we can, but he does imply that we needn’t feel guilty about it, when we treat them violently. It’s our right. It suits us.

The whole “animal consciousness” problem remained more or less static for the next two hundred years. Which is to say, it remained philosophical, and retained more or less the contours of the dispute as it had existed among Descartes and his contemporaries, one side arguing that animals did not possess reason or the capacity for meaningful self-awareness, the other countering that we really have no idea what they think, and given that they often seem to undergo states equivalent to our own, why shouldn’t we assume that they do? After all, absence of proof isn’t proof of absence. But it isn’t proof of presence, either, and that’s what science wants.

There were flashes. Scattered experiments on animal behavior began to occur around the 1780s, and, of course, throughout the nineteenth century an enormous amount of direct observation was taking place—people were bumping up against the question more than ever. But mostly it was like arguing about the existence of life on other planets, or some other topic considered inescapably mysterious.

In On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin made the intriguing claim that among the naturalists he knew it was consistently the case that the better a researcher got to know a certain species, the more each individual animal’s actions appeared attributable to “reason and the less to unlearnt instinct.” The more you knew, the more you suspected that they were rational. That marks an important pivot, that thought, insofar as it took place in the mind of someone devoted to extremely close and meticulous study of living animals, a mind that had trained itself not to sentimentalize. Even at so intimate a range of scrutiny, looking not just at apes and dogs but also at birds and worms, Darwin rediscovered that feeling, which even children know. Or which children believe, as a mechanist might say.

It’s Darwin who finally wrenches these questions away from the salon and into the lab, where they’ve mostly stayed. We stand now at the end of a century’s intense scientific research on the interiors of animal minds—it’s been roughly a hundred years since the publication of Edward L. Thorndike’s Animal Intelligence (1911). Thorndike, a psychologist at Columbia University, designed the famous “puzzle boxes,” from which he challenged poor cats to escape, concluding that they possessed a kind of reward-and-repeat mechanism but not what he called “insight” (suggesting among other things that vagueness of terms has been a hereditary pitfall of the field).

The sheer number and variety of experiments carried out in the twentieth century—and with, if anything, a renewed intensity in the twenty-first—exceeds summary. Reasoning, language, neurology, the science of emotions—every chamber where “consciousness” is thought to hide has been probed. Birds and chimps and dolphins have been made to look at themselves in mirrors—to observe whether, on the basis of what they see, they groom or preen (a measure, if somewhat arbitrary, of self-awareness). Dolphins have been found to grieve. Primates have learned symbolic or sign languages and then been interrogated with them. Their answers show thinking but have proved stubbornly open to interpretation on the issue of “consciousness,” with critics warning, as always, about the dangers of anthropomorphism, animal-rights bias, etc.

Regardless, though, of whether they can talk to us, we’ve learned more and more about the complex ways in which they talk to each other. Entomologists mastered the dance code of the bees and spoke it to them, using a tiny bee-puppet. (For the bees it may have been as if the puppet had a strange accent). In more recent years the numerous calls that elephants make to one another across 150-mile distances have been recorded and decoded. Evidently the individual animals can tell each other apart. So there are conversations of some kind taking place. Zoologists have observed elephants having, for instance, a “departure conversation” at a watering hole, rustling their great heads together in a “rumbling,” communicating about the decision to leave; the water is no good here, we should move on. Who knows what they’re saying. Ludwig Wittgenstein said that if a lion could talk, we wouldn’t understand it. It may, as it turns out, be truer to say that we wouldn’t understand it very well.

If we put aside the self-awareness standard—and really, how arbitrary and arrogant is that, to take the attribute of consciousness we happen to possess over all creatures and set it atop the hierarchy, proclaiming it the very definition of consciousness (Georg Christoph Lichtenberg wrote something wise in his notebooks, to the effect of: only a man can draw a self-portrait, but only a man wants to)—it becomes possible to say at least the following: the overwhelming tendency of all this scientific work, of its results, has been toward more consciousness. More species having it, and species having more of it than assumed. This was made boldly clear when the “Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness” pointed out that those “neurological substrates” necessary for consciousness (whatever “consciousness” is) belong to “all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses.” The animal kingdom is symphonic with mental activity, and of its millions of wavelengths, we’re born able to understand the minutest sliver. The least we can do is have a proper respect for our ignorance.

The philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote an essay in 1974 titled, “What Is It Like To Be a Bat?”, in which he put forward perhaps the least overweening, most useful definition of “animal consciousness” ever written, one that channels Spinoza’s phrase about “that nature belonging to him wherein he has his being.” Animal consciousness occurs, Nagel wrote, when “there is something that it is to be that organism—something it is like for the organism.” The strangeness of his syntax carries the genuine texture of the problem. We’ll probably never be able to step far enough outside of our species-reality to say much about what is going on with them, beyond saying how like or unlike us they are. Many things are conscious on the earth, and we are one, and our consciousness feels like this; one of the things it causes us to do is doubt the existence of the consciousness of the other millions of species. But it also allows us to imagine a time when we might stop doing that.

In Michel de Montaigne’s excellent passage on animal minds in the “Apology for Raymond Sebond”, in which he writes about playing with his cat and wonders who is playing with whom, there is a funny and deceptively profound final sentence: “We divert each other with monkey tricks,” he writes. Meaning he and the cat. Both human being and cat are compared with a third animal. They are monkeys to each other, strange animals to each other. (The man is all but literally a monkey to the cat.) All three creatures involved in Montaigne’s metaphor are revealed as points on a continuum, and none of them understands the others very well. This is what the study of animal consciousness can teach us, finally—that we possess an animal consciousness.

Image: Anguish (1880), by August Friedrich Schenck

maddierose:

Mamihlapinatapei (Yagan, an indigenous language of Tierra del Fuego): The wordless yet meaningful look shared by two people who desire to initiate something, but are both reluctant to start.
Yuanfen (Chinese): A relationship by fate or destiny. This is a complex concept. It draws on principles of predetermination in Chinese culture, which dictate relationships, encounters and affinities, mostly among lovers and friends.
Cafuné (Brazilian Portuguese): The act of tenderly running your fingers through someone’s hair.
Retrouvailles (French): The happiness of meeting again after a long time.
Ilunga (Bantu): A person who is willing to forgive abuse the first time; tolerate it the second time, but never a third time.
La Douleur Exquise (French): The heart-wrenching pain of wanting someone you can’t have.
Koi No Yokan (Japanese): The sense upon first meeting a person that the two of you are going to fall into love.
Ya’aburnee (Arabic): “You bury me.” It’s a declaration of one’s hope that they’ll die before another person, because of how difficult it would be to live without them.
Forelsket: (Norwegian): The euphoria you experience when you’re first falling in love.
Saudade (Portuguese): The feeling of longing for someone that you love and is lost. Another linguist describes it as a “vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist.”

So, so gorgeous. Remind me of a Richard Siken poem.

 I’ve had ONE bad experience with PIA. Only one. Other than that, I don’t know why everyone hates PIA. Well. We’re not talking about the biryani smelling cabins and the loos that don’t work and the ye olde planes.

I was taking a flight from Lahore to Karachi last year and two school groups (LGS girls and Beaconhouse boys) were also going to Karachi with their teachers for a declamation/debating competition. SAME competition. The purser told the captain, and during one of his updates on the PA system, the captain wished good luck and good sportsman spirit to both teams. Everyone cheered/clapped and the kids got such a wonderful kick out of it. During another flight, new air hostesses were going to Islamabad after finishing their training in Lahore and the crew of the flight congratulated them over the PA system, welcomed them to the PIA family and wished they’d serve all passengers with great care and integrity when they start active duty.

There were more than one wolf-whistles and whoops from the passengers. The air hostesses adjusted their PIA issued uniform scarves and blushed a pretty shade of pink. 

Today marks the 100th birthday of Universal Pictures, and Paramount Pictures celebrates its centennial this year as well. While Universal and Paramount are major Hollywood motion picture studios today, they started in 1912 as the ultimate “indies,” challenging the monopoly that had a chokehold on the film industry and taking on an American titan: Thomas Edison.

Carl Laemmle, founder of Universal Pictures. (Credit: Library of Congress)

Laemmle loved the movie business. He had quit his job in 1906 and sank his family’s $3,000 savings into opening a Chicago nickelodeon where he screened motion pictures for five cents a head. Nine months after his theater’s opening, Laemmle was making $6,000 a week. He expanded into film distribution and was living his dream, even earning enough to take his family on a four-month European vacation.

Not long after he returned, however, a sea change swept over the film industry, which for nearly a decade had been embroiled in litigation concerning patents on motion picture technology. At the center of the dispute was Edison, who had first filed a patent on a motion picture camera in 1891 and purchased related patents with his deep pockets. Seeking to end the ceaseless lawsuits, Edison brought the representatives of the biggest film companies in the United States together in December 1908 to form the Motion Picture Patents Company, also known as the Edison Trust, which collectively held 16 major film patents.

The cartel was the most powerful force in American film. In addition to requiring producers and exhibitors to use its patented equipment, the trust mandated that every theater owner pay $2 a week simply to hold a license to purchase and screen its films. The Edison Trust sued any “pirates” who screened or made films without its permission. It fixed a standard price of admission no matter how expensive or cheap a movie’s production, which meant studios had little incentive to produce quality films. Plus, the Edison Trust banned film credits for movie stars because it feared that actors gaining celebrity status would demand more money. The trust acted as de facto arbiter of what films were seen in the United States by blocking film imports and, believing Americans lacked attention spans for feature films, limiting movies to 20 minutes in length.

When Laemmle heard the Edison Trust’s stipulations in a meeting of key distributors, he was one of the few to balk. He started the Independent Moving Pictures Company, or IMP, in 1909 and brazenly challenged the tyrannical monopoly by building his own studio. He lured actress Florence Lawrence, one of the first movie stars, away from the trust by giving her name top billing. Laemmle then exhorted nickelodeon owners to screen his films for a fraction of the cost of those produced by the Edison Trust. His advertisements in trade magazines touted his independence and asked theater owners: “Have you paid your $2.00 for a license to smoke your own pipe this week?”

Edison and his compatriots did not take kindly to the competition. The cartel came after Laemmle hard, suing him 289 times for intellectual property violations. Edison hired detectives to unearth non-licensed equipment on production sets, and the “Wizard of Menlo Park” also conjured up gangs of armed thugs to seize pirate films, evict audiences from outlaw theaters and smash production and exhibition equipment of rivals who defied him. In spite of the pressure, IMP survived, and on April 30, 1912, Laemmle consolidated it with a handful of other independent studios to form the Universal Film Manufacturing Company, the future Universal Pictures.

Adolph Zukor, founder of Paramount Pictures.

In response, Zukor, like Laemmle, went rogue. He premiered “Queen Elizabeth” on his own in New York City on July 12, 1912, and the first full-length drama shown in the United States was a hit. The success led Zukor that year to launch the Famous Players Film Company, the precursor to Paramount Pictures.

Audiences flocked to the longer, star-studded films produced by the upstart independents, who soon made an exodus from the film capital of the world—Fort Lee, New Jersey—to Hollywood, California. In 1912 Laemmle and William Fox, who would eventually launch the studio that became 20th Century Fox, both filed antitrust actions against the Edison Trust. In 1915 a federal district court ruled the trust was indeed a monopoly, and it was soon dissolved.

Also in 1915, Laemmle finished construction of his own California movie metropolis, Universal City, now home to a theme park and the largest film production facility in the world. A special guest ushered in a new chapter in American film by dedicating Universal’s state-of-the-art electric studio. It was Thomas Edison.

If there is one thing I have learned from trying to run a book club in Lahore, it is that people will not be able to decide which book they want to read. If they do decide, they won’t all be able to find a copy of that book. They will share and read one after the other, which is good for reading, but sort of kills the point of a book club. 

And other things. 

A book club needs to put everyone on even footing. And it should ideally remove the stigma attached with reading one genre only and avoiding everything else. It should encourage people to read out of their preferred circle of authors so that they discover new things without feeling like they are being belittled for their reading choice. More is good. More is merrier. 

So. I have decided to start a Bring-Your-Own-Book Book Club.

Here is how it will work.

1. You fill up a form to sign up to be a part of this book club.

2. You get an invitation to the first meeting of the book club.

3. You attend the meeting with the book you are currently reading. You introduce yourself, your book, the author of your book and preferably read your favourite passage from the book for everyone’s benefit.

4. You participate in a discussion sparked by your - and other people’s - readings. 

5. You enjoy good company and coffee et cetera in a brilliant creative space located on M.M. Alam Road where the meetings will be held.

6. You leave feeling inspired and ready to read more and discover new things in the world of the written word.

7. You stay connected through the Facebook page, Twitter account and email updates.

In the long run, my aim is to do the following with the book club: 

1. Partner with book stores to give us discount on our purchases.

2. Hold critical thinking sessions with academicians and scholars.

3. Invite guest speakers from the literary and publication world to hang out with and chat with us.

4. Creative writing sessions focusing on fiction, creative non-fiction, essays and poetry.

5. Tutoring sessions for kids who are interested in reading and writing.

6. Hold book bartering sessions.

7. Plan to collect and donate books to make libraries in under-privileged schools.

If you think you are ready to be a part of this awesomness, sign up HERE.

Thank you! This for people in Lahore for now. Please consider reblogging and spreading the word.

Bonus grainy picture of recent purchases:

I hit the ‘random article’ link on Wikipedia, as I often do, and landed on this page: 

Félix Biet (1838, Langres, Haute-Marne – 1901, Saint-Cyr-au-Mont-d’Or) was a French missionary and naturalist.

Félix Biet was ordained as a priest in 1864. He was next sent to Tatsienlu in Tibet as a missionary and he became a Bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Kangding in 1898. Félix Biet collected butterflies forCharles Oberthür who dedicated three new species (Thecla bieti, Pantoporia bieti and Anthocharis bieti) to him. Alphonse Milne-Edwards described the Chinese Mountain Cat and the Black Snub-nosed Monkeyfrom specimens collected by Biet and the Biet’s Laughingthrush a Chinese endemic species was another discovery, named by Émile Oustalet in 1897. His natural history collections from Tibet and China are in the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle in Paris.

I miss the days when men (and women) went searching in the great wide world for the mysteries of creation and through pain, strife, struggle and disease, unearthed things of breathtaking beauty.

Whatever happened to the age of innocent wonderment?

Any Pakistani fiction writer writing today who doesn’t about fundamentalists, bombs, drones, terrorism, mangoes, jalebis, and bloody motiyey kay phool is my hero. Why is our national melancholy based on, in and around a war on terror anyway? Surely our half of the world had stories, has stories and will continue to have stories, beyond this one point? Please. Tell me about something other than the tarnished Pakistani identity and the ensuing social, religious and moral crisis of upper middle class boys and girls living abroad, or even right here. Something other than something about the ISI or the army or the crisis of faith arising from the geopolitical structure of South East Asia. 

That is all. 

Musharraf Ali Farooqi’s simple yet effective ‘Between Clay & Dust’ has had me thinking about this. A few more dialogues in there would’ve helped, but the story is nostalgic and warm, told elegantly, without any whisper of politics involved. That is what we need today. Or at least I need today. Hopefully other writers will catch on. 

Nuclear tests and nuclear armament means little or nothing when: 

- You still haven’t been able to eradicate polio from your country.

- Your can’t produce enough electricity to meet the growing demand.

- The rich/poor divide is growing by the second.

- There are no adequate healthcare facilities for poor people outside big cities. 

- There is no inter-faith social dialogue to understand, accept and be proud of the country’s ethno-religious and linguistic plurality. 

- Your education system is flawed at the bottom and corrupt at the top. 

- Your judiciary is more fixated upon banning Shezan juice from its bar canteens instead of convicting, let’s say, people who rape and maim women. 

- Women are raped and maimed and law enforcement does little or nothing about it.

And other stuff.

Pakistan is a brilliant country, still full of potential and promises despite what the likes of Washington Post will have you believing. But celebrating Nuclear Armament is like celebrating your own eventual but certain doom.

The asteroids got the dinosaurs. We’ll get ourselves with our bombs.

Evolution was perhaps kinder to the giant lizards after all. 

I loathe Pakistan’s English fiction writers mentioning mangoes in their books to generally describe summers in Pakistan, but I also admit that summer is never complete without them.

Looking forward to making aam ki chutney, aam ka murrabba, aam ka achaar, aam ka squash, aam ki lassi and, well, some mango salsa.

The Time: 1907 to 1938

The Place: The Indian subcontinent

For a brief period in modern history (about 1907 to 1938), nature tried to stage one last hurrah against humanity by unleashing a bizarrely coordinated assault by the big cats of India. Among them were the Leopard of the Central Provinces, the Leopard of Rudraprayag, the Leopard of Panar, the Champawat Tiger, the Thak man-eater and the Tigers of Chowgarh. All of these predators went batshit banana sandwich crazy at roughly the same time, suggesting some cosmic alignment or contagious insanity or maybe just something in the freaking water. Whatever the cause, these cats all shared a sudden, mighty need for man flesh.

The Champawat Tiger alone was responsible for 436 documented deaths in Nepal and Himalayan India, which, for those of you keeping track, is more than any human serial killer in modern history.

This cat attacked during the day, while the Leopard of Rudraprayag attacked at night, sometimes busting down the doors of its victims like goddamned Leatherface and dragging them screaming into the darkness. All told, more than 1,200 men, women and children were killed by 33 big cats over the course of three decades, establishing a legacy of terror that has yet to be equaled.

The killings might have continued unabated were it not for this man:

Over those 30 years, Col. Jim Corbett of the British Indian Army was repeatedly dispatched to personally “resolve” the problem animals. He was able to bag all 33 of the murderous felines, starting with the Champawat Tiger. See, that was back in the days when any good project’s first step was “Kill a tiger.”