Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Monday, May 19, 2008
Sunday, May 4, 2008
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Monday, April 7, 2008
Imperfect Heroes
Becoming a doctor, I hoped, would bring me back into the real world,” Sandeep Jauhar writes in “Intern,” his fine memoir of his training in a New York City hospital. “It would make me into a man.” The story he tells here is antiheroic, full of uncertainty, doubt and frank disgust, aimed at both himself and, sometimes, his patients. “Intern” succeeds as an unusually transparent portrait of an imperfect human being trying to do his best at a tough job.
Jauhar’s journey into medicine is driven by a swirling mix of half-reasons. Disillusioned with graduate studies in particle physics, jarred by the illness of a girlfriend and seeking a profession of tangible purpose, he entered medical school in his mid-20s with considerable ambivalence. Jauhar had always eyed doctoring suspiciously, as a “cookbook” discipline, “with little room for creativity.” His father, a plant geneticist from India who felt his own advancement was stifled by racism, had derided medicine as intellectually inferior to pure science even as he encouraged both his sons to become doctors for the sake of income and prestige.
Jauhar arrives at his residency as a sensitive and standoffish observer, though he begins to see order in the chaos. “Life on the wards was like the plasmons I had studied in condensed matter physics,” he writes, “where individual electrons, moving randomly, coalesced into something greater than the sum of their parts. There was a sort of synchronized buzz. ... In the midst of this collective excitation, I kept thinking, Why am I so lonely?”
He’s keenly aware of the emotional assaults medicine mounts on patients and practitioners alike. In one characteristically blunt account, Jauhar, who began contributing articles on medicine to The New York Times during his training, describes his horror at realizing that he had failed to check a routine lab test on a patient who developed seizures, which may have contributed to the man’s death. Seeking comfort, he called his older brother, Rajiv, a brash cardiology resident several years ahead of him who serves as both a foil to Jauhar’s wide-eyed observations and a foreshadowing of his own emotional destination. “I know you love to beat yourself up, but don’t do it here,” Rajiv says, cutting off the conversation.
There is no perfect heroism here. Describing a senior resident he admired, Jauhar writes: “The only thing I would fault him on is his tendency to denigrate patients in conversations with other doctors. But that’s hardly unique to him.” Jauhar freely admits his own doubts. “Do doctors care?” he writes in one of the journal entries he quotes throughout the memoir. “I don’t know. I don’t see a lot of caring. Maybe I myself don’t care, or care selectively, which is hypocrisy, which I despise.”
In addition to telling Jauhar’s own story, “Intern” delivers a vivid portrait of the culture of a New York City hospital, with its demanding hierarchy and sometimes indifferent cruelty. Evocative street sketches bring relief from the claustrophobic wards while echoing the medical inhumanity inside. Jauhar depicts a city rich in energy and youthful beauty, which manhandles its own citizens once illness renders them foul smelling and inarticulate. In a typically unflinching passage, he describes a patient coughing phlegm that is “thick and green and coagulated” “with a pinkish tinge,” sticking to the sheets “like a thick gob of glue.” “Nobody wants to bother with you when you’re like this,” the patient tells him. “They go on past you, they don’t care.”
A culture of conflict floods in from the streets. The doctors and patients fight with the health care system, the doctors fight to retain their humanity, and the patients fight to retain their dignity and their health.
“Look at Mr. Fisher,” Jauhar writes. “Successful lawyer, Goldberg patient. Now look at him. Sick, febrile, dying of who knows what? ... It could make all of life seem unworthwhile if, in the end, we end up dying in the hospital, awakened at 4 a.m. by a stupid intern trying to draw another set of blood cultures.”
In the book’s most moving passage, Jauhar recalls a home visit to a terminally ill patient. All he could do was stroke the patient’s hand and listen. Years later, the family wrote to thank him for his kindness. Yet from his current perspective as a practicing cardiologist, Jauhar admits, “In some ways, I probably ended up becoming the kind of doctor I never thought I’d be: impatient with alternative hypotheses, ... sometimes indifferent (hard-edged, emotionless), occasionally paternalistic.”
The medical system ultimately wore down Jauhar’s most idealistic impulses, and yet allowed him to find a certain peace. “Medicine, I learned, is a good profession, not a perfect one — and there are many ways it could change for the better,” he writes. “But most of its practitioners ... were fundamentally good people trying to do good every day.”
Vincent Lam, a physician, is author of the story collection “Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures.”
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Luigi Boccherini
Luigi Rodolfo Boccherini (February 19, 1743 – May 28, 1805) was a classical era composer and cellist from Italy naturalized Spanish, whose music retained a courtly and galante style while he matured somewhat apart from the major European musical centers. Boccherini is mostly known for one particular minuet from his String Quintet in E, Op. 13, No. 5, and the Cello Concerto in B flat major (G 482). This last work was long known in the heavily altered version by German cellist and prolific arranger Friedrich Grützmacher, but has recently been restored to its original version.
Biography
Boccherini was born in Lucca, Italy, in a musical family. At a young age his father, a cellist and double bass player, sent Luigi to study in Rome. In 1757 he went to Vienna with his son where the two of them were employed by the court as musicians in the Burgtheater. In 1761 Boccherini went to Madrid, where he was employed by Don Luis, the younger brother of King Charles III. There he flourished under royal patronage, until one day when the King expressed his disapproval at a passage in a new trio, and ordered Boccherini to change it. The composer, no doubt irritated with this intrusion into his art, doubled the passage instead, leading to his immediate dismissal. Then he accompanied Don Luis to Arenas de San Pedro a little town at the Gredos mountains, there and in the closest town of Candeleda Boccherini wrote many of his most brilliant works.
Among his late patrons was the French consul Lucien Bonaparte, as well as King Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia, himself an amateur cellist, flutist, and avid supporter of the arts. Boccherini fell on hard times following the deaths of his Spanish patron, two wives, and two daughters, and he died almost in poverty in 1805, being survived by two sons. His blood line continues to this day in Spain.
Much of his chamber music follows models established by Joseph Haydn; however, Boccherini is often credited with improving Haydn's model of the string quartet by bringing the cello to prominence, whereas Haydn had always relegated it to an accompaniment role. Rather, some sources for Boccherini's style are in the works of a famous Italian cellist, Giovanni Battista Cirri, who was born before Boccherini and before Haydn and the Spanish popular music.
A virtuoso cellist of the first caliber (possibly the most accomplished cellist in history), Boccherini often played violin repertoire on the cello, at pitch, a skill he developed by substituting for ailing violinists while touring. This supreme command of the instrument brought him much praise from his contemporaries (notably Baillot, Rode, and Romberg), and is evident in the cello parts of his compositions (particularly in the quintets for two cellos, treated often as cello concertos with string quartet accompaniment).
He wrote a large amount of chamber music, including over one hundred string quintets for two violins, viola and two cellos (a type which he pioneered, in contrast with the then common scoring for two violins, two violas and one cello), a dozen guitar quintets, not all of which have survived, nearly a hundred string quartets, and a number of string trios and sonatas (including at least 19 for the cello). His orchestral music includes around 30 symphonies and 12 virtuoso cello concertos.
Boccherini's works have been catalogued by the French musicologist Yves Gérard (born 1932) in the Gérard catalog, published in London (1969), hence the "G" numbers for his output.
Boccherini's style is characterized by the typical Rococo charm, lightness, and optimism, and exhibits much melodic and rhythmic invention, coupled with frequent influences from the guitar tradition of his adopted country, Spain. Neglected after his death—the dismissive sobriquet "Haydn's wife" dates from the nineteenth century— his works have been gaining more recognition lately, in print, record, and concert hall. His famous "Musica notturna delle strade di Madrid" (String Quintet in C Major, Op. 30), has recently been popularised through the Peter Weir film Master and Commander: the Far Side of the World.
Please see his two pieces that are my favourites below:
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Friday, January 25, 2008
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
How Islamic inventors changed the world !
(thanks IR !!!)
How Islamic inventors changed the world
From coffee to cheques and the three-course meal, the Muslim world has given us many innovations that we take for granted in daily life. As a new exhibition opens, Paul Vallely nominates 20 of the most influential- and identifies the men of genius behind them :
1 The story goes that an Arab named Khalid was tending his goats in the Kaffa region of southern Ethiopia, when he noticed his animals became livelier after eating a certain berry. He boiled the berries to make the first coffee. Certainly the first record of the drink is of beans exported from Ethiopia to Yemen where Sufis drank it to stay awake all night to pray on special occasions. By the late 15th century it had arrived in Mecca and Turkey from where it made its way to Venice in 1645. It was brought to England in 1650 by a Turk named Pasqua Rosee who opened the first coffee house in Lombard Street in the City of London. The Arabic qahwa became the Turkish kahve then the Italian caffé and then English coffee.
2 The ancient Greeks thought our eyes emitted rays, like a laser, which enabled us to see. The first person to realise that light enters the eye, rather than leaving it, was the 10th-century Muslim mathematician, astronomer and physicist Ibn al-Haitham. He invented the first pin-hole camera after noticing the way light came through a hole in window shutters. The smaller the hole, the better the picture, he worked out, and set up the first Camera Obscura (from the Arab word qamara for a dark or private room). He is also credited with being the first man to shift physics from a philosophical activity to an experimental one.
3 A form of chess was played in ancient India but the game was developed into the form we know it today in Persia. From there it spread westward to Europe - where it was introduced by the Moors in Spain in the 10th century - and eastward as far as Japan. The word rook comes from the Persian rukh, which means chariot.
4 A thousand years before the Wright brothers a Muslim poet, astronomer, musician and engineer named Abbas ibn Firnas made several attempts to construct a flying machine. In 852 he jumped from the minaret of the Grand Mosque in Cordoba using a loose cloak stiffened with wooden struts. He hoped to glide like a bird. He didn't. But the cloak slowed his fall, creating what is thought to be the first parachute, and leaving him with only minor injuries. In 875, aged 70, having perfected a machine of silk and eagles' feathers he tried again, jumping from a mountain. He flew to a significant height and stayed aloft for ten minutes but crashed on landing - concluding, correctly, that it was because he had not given his device a tail so it would stall on landing. Baghdad international airport and a crater on the Moon are named after him.
5 Washing and bathing are religious requirements for Muslims, which is perhaps why they perfected the recipe for soap which we still use today. The ancient Egyptians had soap of a kind, as did the Romans who used it more as a pomade. But it was the Arabs who combined vegetable oils with sodium hydroxide and aromatics such as thyme oil. One of the Crusaders' most striking characteristics, to Arab nostrils, was that they did not wash. Shampoo was introduced to England by a Muslim who opened Mahomed's Indian Vapour Baths on Brighton seafront in 1759 and was appointed Shampooing Surgeon to Kings George IV and William IV.
6 Distillation, the means of separating liquids through differences in their boiling points, was invented around the year 800 by Islam's foremost scientist, Jabir ibn Hayyan, who transformed alchemy into chemistry, inventing many of the basic processes and apparatus still in use today - liquefaction, crystallisation, distillation, purification, oxidisation, evaporation and filtration. As well as discovering sulphuric and nitric acid, he invented the alembic still, giving the world intense rosewater and other perfumes and alcoholic spirits (although drinking them is haram, or forbidden, in Islam). Ibn Hayyan emphasised systematic experimentation and was the founder of modern chemistry.
7 The crank-shaft is a device which translates rotary into linear motion and is central to much of the machinery in the modern world, not least the internal combustion engine. One of the most important mechanical inventions in the history of humankind, it was created by an ingenious Muslim engineer called al-Jazari to raise water for irrigation. His 1206 Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices shows he also invented or refined the use of valves and pistons, devised some of the first mechanical clocks driven by water and weights, and was the father of robotics. Among his 50 other inventions was the combination lock.
8 Quilting is a method of sewing or tying two layers of cloth with a layer of insulating material in between. It is not clear whether it was invented in the Muslim world or whether it was imported there from India or China. But it certainly came to the West via the Crusaders. They saw it used by Saracen warriors, who wore straw-filled quilted canvas shirts instead of armour. As well as a form of protection, it proved an effective guard against the chafing of the Crusaders' metal armour and was an effective form of insulation - so much so that it became a cottage industry back home in colder climates such as Britain and Holland.
9 The pointed arch so characteristic of Europe's Gothic cathedrals was an invention borrowed from Islamic architecture. It was much stronger than the rounded arch used by the Romans and Normans, thus allowing the building of bigger, higher, more complex and grander buildings. Other borrowings from Muslim genius included ribbed vaulting, rose windows and dome-building techniques. Europe's castles were also adapted to copy the Islamic world's - with arrow slits, battlements, a barbican and parapets. Square towers and keeps gave way to more easily defended round ones. Henry V's castle architect was a Muslim.
10 Many modern surgical instruments are of exactly the same design as those devised in the 10th century by a Muslim surgeon called al-Zahrawi. His scalpels, bone saws, forceps, fine scissors for eye surgery and many of the 200 instruments he devised are recognisable to a modern surgeon. It was he who discovered that catgut used for internal stitches dissolves away naturally (a discovery he made when his monkey ate his lute strings) and that it can be also used to make medicine capsules. In the 13th century, another Muslim medic named Ibn Nafis described the circulation of the blood, 300 years before William Harvey discovered it. Muslims doctors also invented anaesthetics of opium and alcohol mixes and developed hollow needles to suck cataracts from eyes in a technique still used today.
11 The windmill was invented in 634 for a Persian caliph and was used to grind corn and draw up water for irrigation. In the vast deserts of Arabia, when the seasonal streams ran dry, the only source of power was the wind which blew steadily from one direction for months. Mills had six or 12 sails covered in fabric or palm leaves. It was 500 years before the first windmill was seen in Europe.
12 The technique of inoculation was not invented by Jenner and Pasteur but was devised in the Muslim world and brought to Europe from Turkey by the wife of the English ambassador to Istanbul in 1724. Children in Turkey were vaccinated with cowpox to fight the deadly smallpox at least 50 years before the West discovered it.
13 The fountain pen was invented for the Sultan of Egypt in 953 after he demanded a pen which would not stain his hands or clothes. It held ink in a reservoir and, as with modern pens, fed ink to the nib by a combination of gravity and capillary action.
14 The system of numbering in use all round the world is probably Indian in origin but the style of the numerals is Arabic and first appears in print in the work of the Muslim mathematicians al-Khwarizmi and al-Kindi around 825. Algebra was named after al-Khwarizmi's book, Al-Jabr wa-al-Muqabilah, much of whose contents are still in use. The work of Muslim maths scholars was imported into Europe 300 years later by the Italian mathematician Fibonacci. Algorithms and much of the theory of trigonometry came from the Muslim world. And Al-Kindi's discovery of frequency analysis rendered all the codes of the ancient world soluble and created the basis of modern cryptology.
15 Ali ibn Nafi, known by his nickname of Ziryab (Blackbird) came from Iraq to Cordoba in the 9th century and brought with him the concept of the three-course meal - soup, followed by fish or meat, then fruit and nuts. He also introduced crystal glasses (which had been invented after experiments with rock crystal by Abbas ibn Firnas - see No 4).
16 Carpets were regarded as part of Paradise by medieval Muslims, thanks to their advanced weaving techniques, new tinctures from Islamic chemistry and highly developed sense of pattern and arabesque which were the basis of Islam's non-representational art. In contrast, Europe's floors were distinctly earthly, not to say earthy, until Arabian and Persian carpets were introduced. In England, as Erasmus recorded, floors were "covered in rushes, occasionally renewed, but so imperfectly that the bottom layer is left undisturbed, sometimes for 20 years, harbouring expectoration, vomiting, the leakage of dogs and men, ale droppings, scraps of fish, and other abominations not fit to be mentioned". Carpets, unsurprisingly, caught on quickly.
17 The modern cheque comes from the Arabic saqq, a written vow to pay for goods when they were delivered, to avoid money having to be transported across dangerous terrain. In the 9th century, a Muslim businessman could cash a cheque in China drawn on his bank in Baghdad.
18 By the 9th century, many Muslim scholars took it for granted that the Earth was a sphere. The proof, said astronomer Ibn Hazm, "is that the Sun is always vertical to a particular spot on Earth". It was 500 years before that realisation dawned on Galileo. The calculations of Muslim astronomers were so accurate that in the 9th century they reckoned the Earth's circumference to be 40,253.4km - less than 200km out. The scholar al-Idrisi took a globe depicting the world to the court of King Roger of Sicily in 1139.
19 Though the Chinese invented saltpetre gunpowder, and used it in their fireworks, it was the Arabs who worked out that it could be purified using potassium nitrate for military use. Muslim incendiary devices terrified the Crusaders. By the 15th century they had invented both a rocket, which they called a "self-moving and combusting egg", and a torpedo - a self-propelled pear-shaped bomb with a spear at the front which impaled itself in enemy ships and then blew up.
20 Medieval Europe had kitchen and herb gardens, but it was the Arabs who developed the idea of the garden as a place of beauty and meditation. The first royal pleasure gardens in Europe were opened in 11th-century Muslim Spain. Flowers which originated in Muslim gardens include the carnation and the tulip.
Saturday, January 19, 2008
Fulgurites
Fulgurites (from the Latin fulgur meaning thunderbolt) are natural hollow carrot-shaped glass tubes formed in quartzose sand or soil by lightning strikes. In the right kind of sand the extreme heat generated will form silica glass shapes that trace the path of the lightning. These structures are also sometimes referred to as petrified lightning. The glass formed is called lechatelierite which may also be formed by meteorite impact and volcanic explosions. As it is amorphous it is classified as a mineraloid.
The tubes can be up to a couple of centimeters in diameter, and meters long. Their colour varies depending on the composition of the sand they formed in, ranging from black or tan to green or a translucent white. The interior is normally very smooth or lined with fine bubbles; the exterior is generally coated with rough sand particles. They are rootlike in appearance and often show branching or small holes. Fulgurites occasionally form as glazing on solid rocks (sometimes referred to as an exogenic fulgurite[1]).
Fulgurites are a very rare phenomenon. A very large one was found in South Amboy, New Jersey. This was roughly nine feet long with a diameter of three inches (7.6 cm) near the surface of the ground, and tapered to roughly three sixteenths of an inch (5 mm) in diameter at the deepest point recovered. As is often the case due to the fragile nature of fulgurites, scientists were unable to extract it in one piece and the largest recovered fragment was a mere six inches (15.2 cm) long.
Fulgurites are notably found high on Mount Thielsen ("the lightning rod of the Cascade Range") where they form a brownish-green glaze on rocks (especially on the final five or ten feet of the summit pinnacle) and on the shores of the Great Lakes.
Possibly the finest fulgurite sample on display can be seen in Philadelphia, USA, at the Academy of Natural Sciences. It was discovered in 1940.
The largest fulgurite known is at the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University, which has on display a 13-foot (4 m) long fulgurite from the shores of Lake Congamond in northern Connecticut. The fulgurite has been on display at the Museum since the 1950s, and is viewable in the new Hall of Minerals, Earth and Space as of May, 2006.
A specimen of fulgurite over 3 metres long is in the Natural History Museum in London. It is preserved in sections of over 50cm.
Solving a Riddle Wrapped in a Mystery Inside a Cookie
Solving a Riddle Wrapped in a Mystery Inside a Cookie
By JENNIFER 8. LEE
Published: January 16, 2008
Some 3 billion fortune cookies are made each year, almost all in the United States. But the crisp cookies wrapped around enigmatic sayings have spread around the world. They are served in Chinese restaurants in Britain, Mexico, Italy, France and elsewhere. In India, they taste more like butter cookies. A surprisingly high number of winning tickets in Brazil's national lottery in 2004 were traced to lucky numbers from fortune cookies distributed by a Chinese restaurant chain called Chinatown.
But there is one place where fortune cookies are conspicuously absent: China.
Now a researcher in Japan believes she can explain the disconnect, which has long perplexed American tourists in China. Fortune cookies, Yasuko Nakamachi says, are almost certainly originally from Japan.
Her prime pieces of evidence are the generations-old small family bakeries making obscure fortune cookie-shaped crackers by hand near a temple outside Kyoto. She has also turned up many references to the cookies in Japanese literature and history, including an 1878 image of a man making them in a bakery - decades before the first reports of American fortune cookies.
The idea that fortune cookies come from Japan is counterintuitive, to say the least. "I am surprised," said Derrick Wong, the vice president of the largest fortune cookie manufacturer in the world, Wonton Food, based in Brooklyn. “People see it and think of it as a Chinese food dessert, not a Japanese food dessert,” he said. But, he conceded, “The weakest part of the Chinese menu is dessert.”
Ms. Nakamachi, a folklore and history graduate student at Kanagawa University outside Tokyo, has spent more than six years trying to establish the Japanese origin of the fortune cookie, much of that at National Diet Library (the Japanese equivalent of the Library of Congress). She has sifted through thousands of old documents and drawings. She has also traveled to temples and shrines across the country, conducting interviews to piece together the history of fortune-telling within Japanese desserts.
Ms. Nakamachi, who has long had an interest in the history of sweets and snacks, saw her first fortune cookie in the 1980s in a New York City Chinese restaurant. At that time she was merely impressed with Chinese ingenuity, finding the cookies an amusing and clever idea.
It was only in the late 1990s, outside Kyoto near one of the most popular Shinto shrines in Japan, that she saw that familiar shape at a family bakery called Sohonke Hogyokudo.
“These were exactly like fortune cookies,” she said. “They were shaped exactly the same and there were fortunes.”
The cookies were made by hand by a young man who held black grills over a flame. The grills contain round molds into which batter is poured, something like a small waffle iron. Little pieces of paper were folded into the cookies while they were still warm. With that sighting, Ms. Nakamachi’s long research mission began.
A visit to the Hogyokudo shop revealed that the Japanese fortune cookies Ms. Nakamachi found there and at a handful of nearby bakers differ in some ways from the ones that Americans receive at the end of a meal with the check and a handful of orange wedges. They are bigger and browner, as their batter contains sesame and miso rather than vanilla and butter. The fortunes are not stuffed inside, but are pinched in the cookie’s fold. (Think of the cookie as a Pac-Man: the paper is tucked into Pac-Man’s mouth rather than inside his body.) Still, the family resemblance is undeniable.
“People don’t realize this is the real thing because American fortune cookies are popular right now,” said Takeshi Matsuhisa as he deftly folded the hot wafers into the familiar curved shape.
His family has owned the bakery for three generations, although the local tradition of making the cookies predates their store. Decades ago, many confectioneries and candies came with little fortunes inside, Mr. Matsuhisa said.
“Then, the companies realized it wasn’t such a good idea to put pieces of paper in candy, so then they all disappeared,” he added. The fear that people would accidentally eat the fortune is one reason his family now puts the paper outside the cookie.
The bakery has used the same 23 fortunes for decades. (In contrast, Wonton Food has a database of well over 10,000 fortunes.) Hogyokudo’s fortunes are more poetic than prophetic, although some nearby bakeries use newer fortunes that give advice or make predictions. One from Inariya, a shop across from the Shinto shrine, contains the advice, “To ward off lower back pain or joint problems, undertake some at-home measures like yoga.”
As she researched the cookie’s Japanese origins, among the most persuasive pieces of evidence Ms. Nakamachi found was an illustration from a 19th-century book of stories, “Moshiogusa Kinsei Kidan.”
A character in one of the tales is an apprentice in a senbei store. In Japan, the cookies are called, variously, tsujiura senbei (“fortune crackers”), omikuji senbei (“written fortune crackers”), and suzu senbei (“bell crackers”).
The apprentice appears to be grilling wafers in black irons over coals, the same way they are made in Hogyokudo and other present-day bakeries. A sign above him reads “tsujiura senbei” and next to him are tubs filled with little round shapes — the tsujiura senbei themselves.
The book, story and illustration are all dated 1878. The families of Japanese or Chinese immigrants in California that claim to have invented or popularized fortune cookies all date the cookie’s appearance between 1907 and 1914.
The illustration was the kind of needle in a haystack discovery academics yearn for. “It’s very rare to see artwork of a thing being made,” Ms. Nakamachi said. “You just don’t see that.”
She found other historical traces of the cookies as well. In a work of fiction by Tamenaga Shunsui, who lived between 1790 and 1843, a woman tries to placate two other women with tsujiura senbei that contain fortunes.
Ms. Nakamachi’s work, originally published in 2004 as part of a Kanagawa University report, has been picked up by some publications in Japan. A few customers have bought senbei from Hogyokudo, the Matsuhisa family said. But otherwise, the paper has drawn limited attention, perhaps because fortune cookies are not well known in Japan.
If fortune cookies are Japanese in origin, how did they become a mainstay of American Chinese restaurants? To understand this, Ms. Nakamachi has made two trips to the United States, focusing on San Francisco and Los Angeles, where she interviewed the descendants of Japanese and Chinese immigrant families who made fortune cookies.
The cookie’s path is relatively easy to trace back to World War II. At that time they were a regional specialty, served in California Chinese restaurants, where they were known as “fortune tea cakes.” There, according to later interviews with fortune cookie makers, they were encountered by military personnel on the way back from the Pacific Theater. When these veterans returned home, they would ask their local Chinese restaurants why they didn’t serve fortune cookies as the San Francisco restaurants did.
The cookies rapidly spread across the country. By the late 1950s, an estimated 250 million fortune cookies were being produced each year by dozens of small Chinese bakeries and fortune cookie companies. One of the larger outfits was Lotus Fortune in San Francisco, whose founder, Edward Louie, invented an automatic fortune cookie machine. By 1960, fortune cookies had become such a mainstay of American culture that they were used in two presidential campaigns: Adlai Stevenson’s and Stuart Symington’s.
But prior to World War II, the history is murky. A number of immigrant families in California, mostly Japanese, have laid claim to introducing or popularizing the fortune cookie. Among them are the descendants of Makoto Hagiwara, a Japanese immigrant who oversaw the Japanese Tea Garden built in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park in the 1890s. Visitors to the garden were served fortune cookies made by a San Francisco bakery, Benkyodo.
A few Los Angeles-based businesses also made fortune cookies in the same era: Fugetsudo, a family bakery that has operated in Japantown for over a century, except during World War II; Umeya, one of the earliest mass-producers of fortune cookies in Southern California, and the Hong Kong Noodle company, a Chinese-owned business. Fugetsudo and Benkyodo both have discovered their original “kata” black iron grills, almost identical to the ones that are used today in the Kyoto bakery.
“Maybe the packaging of fortune cookie must say ‘Japanese fortune cookie — made in Japan,’ ” said Gary Ono, whose grandfather founded Benkyodo.
Ms. Nakamachi is still unsure how exactly fortune cookies made the jump to Chinese restaurants. But during the 1920s and 1930s, many Japanese immigrants in California owned chop suey restaurants, which served Americanized Chinese cuisine. The Umeya bakery distributed fortune cookies to well over 100 such restaurants in southern and central California.
“At one point the Japanese must have said, fish head and rice and pickles must not go over well with the American population,” said Mr. Ono, who has made a campaign of documenting the history of the fortune cookie through interviews with his relatives and by publicizing the discovery of the kata grills.
Early on, Chinese-owned restaurants discovered the cookies, too. Ms. Nakamachi speculates that Chinese-owned manufacturers began to take over fortune cookie production during World War II, when Japanese bakeries all over the West Coast closed as Japanese-Americans were rounded up and sent to internment camps.
Mr. Wong pointed out: “The Japanese may have invented the fortune cookie. But the Chinese people really explored the potential of the fortune cookie. It’s Chinese-American culture. It only happens here, not in China.”
That sentiment is echoed among some descendants of the Japanese immigrants who played an early role in fortune cookies. “If the family had decided to sell fortune cookies, they would have never done it as successfully as the Chinese have,” said Douglas Dawkins, the great-great-grandson of Makoto Hagiwara. “I think it’s great. I really don’t think the fortune cookie would have taken off if it hadn’t been popularized in such a wide venue.”
View the video HERE
Thursday, January 17, 2008
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Amazing Islamic Discoveries
I recently saw an AMAZING documentary on islamic discoveries.
Alot of you have asked me to put it online (!!!?) so here it is (posted above), in 7 parts from youtube! Enjoy!
Alot of you have asked me to put it online (!!!?) so here it is (posted above), in 7 parts from youtube! Enjoy!
What is an Astrolabe ?
A Brief History
The astrolabe was invented in the Hellenistic world in either the first or second centuries BCE and is often attributed to Hipparchus. A marriage of the planisphere and dioptra, the astrolabe was effectively an analog calculator capable of working out several different kinds of problems in spherical astronomy. Theon of Alexandria wrote a detailed treatise on the astrolabe, and Lewis (2001) argues that Ptolemy used an astrolabe to make the astronomical observations recorded in the Tetrabiblos.
Brass astrolabes (Persian: اسطرلاب asterlab, ostorlab) were developed in the Islamic world, chiefly as an aid to navigation and as a way of finding the qibla, the direction of Mecca. The first person credited with building the astrolabe in the Islamic world is reportedly the 8th century Persian mathematician al-Fazari. The mathematical background was established by the Arab astronomer al-Battani in his treatise Kitab az-Zij (ca. 920 CE), which was translated into Latin by Plato Tiburtinus. The earliest surviving astrolabe is dated AH 315 (927/8 CE). In the Islamic world, astrolabes were used to find the times of sunrise and the rising of fixed stars, to help schedule morning prayers (salat). In the 10th century, al-Sufi first described over 1,000 different uses of an astrolabe, in areas as diverse as astronomy, astrology, horoscopes, navigation, surveying, timekeeping, prayer, Salah, Qibla, etc.
Arzachel (al-Zarqali) of al-Andalus constructed the first universal astrolabe instrument which, unlike its predecessors, did not depend on the latitude of the observer, and could be used from anywhere on the Earth. This instrument became known in Europe as the "Saphaea". The astrolabe was introduced to other parts of Europe via Islamic Spain in the 11th century. Early Christian recipients of Arab astronomy included Gerbert of Aurillac and Hermannus Contractus.
The English author Geoffrey Chaucer (ca. 1343–1400) compiled a treatise on the astrolabe for his son, mainly based on Messahalla. The same source was translated by the French astronomer and astrologer Pelerin de Prusse and others. The first printed book on the astrolabe was Composition and Use of Astrolabe by Cristannus de Prachaticz, also using Messahalla, but relatively original.
In 1370, the first Indian treatise on the astrolabe was written by the Jain astronomer Mahendra Suri.
The first known European metal astrolabe was developed in the 15th century by Rabbi Abraham Zacuto in Lisbon. Metal astrolabes improved on the accuracy of their wooden precursors. In the 15th century, the French instrument-maker Jean Fusoris (ca. 1365–1436) also started selling astrolabes in his shop in Paris, along with portable sundials and other popular scientific gadgets of the day.
In the 16th century, Johannes Stöffler published Elucidatio fabricae ususque astrolabii, a manual of the construction and use of the astrolabe. Four identical 16th century astrolabes made by Georg Hartmann provide some of the earliest evidence for batch production by division of labor.
At first mechanical astronomical clocks were influenced by the astrolabe; in many ways they could be seen as clockwork astrolabes designed to produce a continual display of the current position of the sun, stars, and planets. For example, Richard of Wallingford's clock (c. 1330) consisted essentially of a star map rotating behind a fixed rete.
Many astronomical clocks, such as the famous clock at Prague, use an astrolabe-style display, adopting a stereographic projection of the ecliptic plane.
In 1985 Swiss watchmaker Dr. Ludwig Oechslin designed and built an astrolabe wristwatch in conjunction with Ulysse Nardin.
The Hartmann astrolabe in Yale's collection. This beautiful instrument shows its rete and rule.An astrolabe consists of a hollow disk, called the mater (mother), which is deep enough to hold one or more flat plates called tympans, or climates. A tympan is made for a specific latitude and is engraved with a stereographic projection of circular lines of equal azimuth and altitude representing the portion of the celestial sphere which is above the local horizon. The rim of the mater is typically graduated into hours of time, or degrees of arc, or both. Above the mater and tympan, the rete, a framework bearing a projection of the ecliptic plane and several pointers indicating the positions of the brightest stars, is free to rotate. Some astrolabes have a narrow rule or label which rotates over the rete, and may be marked with a scale of declinations.
The rete, representing the sky, has the function of a star chart. When it is rotated, the stars and the ecliptic move over the projection of the coordinates on the tympan. A complete rotation represents the passage of one day. The astrolabe is therefore a predecessor of the modern planisphere.
On the back of the mater there will often be engraved a number of scales which are useful in the astrolabe's various applications; these will vary from designer to designer, but might include curves for time conversions, a calendar for converting the day of the month to the sun's position on the ecliptic, trigonometric scales, and a graduation of 360 degrees around the back edge. The alidade is attached to the back face. When the astrolabe is held vertically, the alidade can be rotated and a star sighted along its length, so that the star's altitude in degrees can be read ("taken") from the graduated edge of the astrolabe; hence "astro" = star + "labe" = to take.
Mosques and Maths
Medieval Mosque Shows Amazing Math Discovery
The never-repeating geometry of quasi crystals, revealed 500 years early
by John Bohannon
The mosques of the medieval Islamic world are artistic wonders and perhaps mathematical wonders as well. A study of patterns in 12th- to 17th-century mosaics suggests that Muslim scholars made a geometric breakthrough 500 years before mathematicians in the West.
Peter J. Lu, a physics graduate student at Harvard University, noticed a striking similarity between certain medieval mosque mosaics and a geometric pattern known as a quasi crystal—an infinite tiling pattern that doesn’t regularly repeat itself and has symmetries not found in normal crystals. Lu teamed up with physicist Paul Steinhardt of Princeton University to test the similarity: If the patterns repeated when extended infinitely, they couldn’t be true quasi crystals.
Most of the patterns examined failed the test, but one passed: a pattern found in the Darb-i Imam shrine (seen in the first video above), built in 1453 in Isfahan, Iran. Not only does it never repeat when infinitely extended, its pattern maps onto Penrose tiles—components for making quasi crystals discovered by Oxford University mathematician Roger Penrose in the 1970s—in a way that is consistent with the quasi crystal pattern.
Among the 3,700 tiles Lu and Steinhardt mapped, there are only 11 tiny flaws, tiles placed in the wrong orientation. Lu argues that these are accidents possibly introduced during centuries of repair. “Art historians always suspected there must be something more to these patterns,” says Tom Lentz, director of Harvard University Art Museums, but they were never examined with “this kind of scientific rigor.”
Must view the videos HERE
Building a New Heart From Old Tissue
Building a New Heart From Old Tissue
By Steve Mitchell
ScienceNOW Daily News
14 January 2008
Donated hearts for lifesaving transplants are scarce, but now researchers may have hit upon a way to generate the blood-pumping organs in the lab--at least in rats. The approach, which involves transplanting cells from a newborn rat onto the framework of an adult heart, produced an organ that could beat and pump fluid. Further refinement will be necessary before the technique is ready for people, but it could also generate other organs.
Approximately 3000 patients in the United States are on the waiting list for a heart transplant, but only about 2000 donor organs become available each year. Stem cells, which can give rise to heart tissue, offer a potential solution. But to form an entire heart, the cells require a framework, or scaffolding, to grow on, and finding an adequate structure has proven difficult. Now, a team led by bioengineer Doris Taylor of the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, has shown that old hearts stripped of their cells may provide a fix for the scaffolding problem.
Taylor's team started with a heart removed from an adult rat. The researchers soaked it in chemicals to remove the living cells, leaving behind a "skeleton" composed of the heart's nonliving structural tissues, which are made of proteins and other molecules. Onto this scaffolding the researchers placed heart cells from a newborn rat, which are not stem cells but can give rise to multiple types of tissue. The cells took to their new home and after 8 days had assembled into a functioning heart that beat and pumped fluid, the researchers reported online 13 January in Nature Medicine. The new organ had only 2% of the pumping force of an adult heart, but Taylor says that she and her colleagues have since repeated the procedure with about 40 hearts and found that they can produce a stronger organ by adding more cells and giving them more time to grow.
To apply this method to people, the heart scaffolding could come from either human cadavers or pigs, Taylor says. Adult stem cells, such as those found in bone marrow, could be taken from patients awaiting transplants and used to grow the new heart.
Wolfram Zimmermann, a tissue engineer at the University Hospital in Hamburg, Germany, calls the approach exciting but cautions that it's a long way from being ready for use in people. Researchers still have to address several issues, such as identifying an appropriate stem cell that can give rise to heart tissue and working out ways to optimize the growth of the cells so that they ultimately produce a functional heart.
Clyde Yancy, a cardiologist at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas, Texas, says pig hearts may not be suitable scaffolding because the body could reject them, even with the use of medications to suppress the immune system. Pig heart valves are currently implanted into humans, but Yancy says that an entire heart could prove to be too much for the body to tolerate.
Thursday, January 10, 2008
My Favourite from Faiz Ahmed Faiz
raat yun dil mein teri khoyi hui yaad aayi
By Faiz Ahmed Faiz
raat yun dil mein teri khoyi hui yaad aayi,
jaise veeraane mein chupke se bahaar aa jaye,
jaise sehraaon mein haulay se chale baad-e-naseem,
jaise beemaar ko be-wajah qaraar aa jaaye.
Translation by Vikram Seth, from Mappings:
Last night your faded memory came to me
As in the wilderness spring comes quietly,
As, slowly, in the desert, moves the breeze,
As, to a sick man, without cause, comes peace.
Click HERE to download the mp3 version of this song !
By Faiz Ahmed Faiz
raat yun dil mein teri khoyi hui yaad aayi,
jaise veeraane mein chupke se bahaar aa jaye,
jaise sehraaon mein haulay se chale baad-e-naseem,
jaise beemaar ko be-wajah qaraar aa jaaye.
Translation by Vikram Seth, from Mappings:
Last night your faded memory came to me
As in the wilderness spring comes quietly,
As, slowly, in the desert, moves the breeze,
As, to a sick man, without cause, comes peace.
Click HERE to download the mp3 version of this song !
Two different points of view..........
The Clod and the Pebble
William Blake
"Love seeketh not itself to please
Nor for itself hath any care,
But for another gives its ease,
And builds Heaven in Hell's despair."
So sang a little Clod of Clay
Trodden with the cattle's feet,
But a pebble of the brook
Warbled out these metres meet:
"Love seeketh only Self to please,
To bind another to its delight,
Joys in another loss of ease,
And builds a Hell in Heaven's despite."
India unveils 'world's cheapest car' - 10 Jan 08
Tata Motors today took the covers off the world’s cheapest car — the Nano.
Over the past year, Tata has been building hype for a car that would cost a mere 100,000 rupees (roughly $2,500) and bring automotive transportation to the mainstream Indian population. It has been nicknamed the “People’s Car.” Over the course of the New Delhi Auto Expo, which began this week, anticipation had grown to fever pitch.
With the theme from “2001: A Space Odyssey” playing, Ratan Tata, chairman of Tata Motors drove the small white bubble car onto Tata’s show stage, where it joined two others.
They are not concept cars, they are not prototypes,” Mr. Tata announced when he got out of the car. “They are the production cars that will roll out of the Singur plant later this year.”
The four-door Nano is a little over 10 feet long and nearly 5 feet wide. It is powered by a 623cc two-cylinder engine at the back of the car. With 33 horsepower, the Nano is capable of 65 miles an hour. Its four small wheels are at the absolute corners of the car to improve handling. There is a small trunk, big enough for a duffel bag.
Tuesday, January 8, 2008
The Bhutto Dynasty Must End Now
The Bhutto Dynasty Must End Now
S. Abbas Raza | January 3, 2008
Editor: Miriam Pemberton
Foreign Policy In Focus www.fpif.org
What becomes ever more clear in the aftermath of the tragic killing of Benazir Bhutto is that there is little if any internal democratic structure left in the Pakistan People’s Party, the one political party in Pakistan which was built on a populist grassroots foundation by Bhutto’s father in the late 60s.
Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was an intellectual who brought Western-style electioneering to Pakistan, campaigning up and down the country, holding political rallies in small villages and towns. But it was not all just fiery oratory and sloganeering (“Roti, kapra, aur Makan!”--Bread, clothing, and shelter!); there was a well-structured platform for poverty reduction, education, medical care, housing. And while campaigning, Bhutto also laid out his vision for an independent non-aligned foreign policy for Pakistan in his 1969 book The Myth of Independence. Though somewhat autocratic and manipulative, Bhutto showed himself as president and then prime minister from 1971-1977 to be the most effective civilian leader in Pakistan’s history.
Living up to his campaign promises, he changed labor policy to strengthen trade unions and increase workers’ rights. Despite severe opposition from powerful feudal landlords (of whom he himself was one), he managed to push through limits on land ownership. A proper constitution was adopted by the parliament under his leadership. He negotiated important treaties with India and China, particularly strengthening Sino-Pak relations and industrial cooperation. And he stepped up Pakistan’s nuclear program, foreseeing Pakistan’s need to counter a nuclear threat from India. But most importantly, by basing the foundation of his party on the poor and the illiterate, on farmers and peasants and laborers and the youth, he gave these groups not only a voice, but a dignity and hope they had never enjoyed.
Though it must be admitted that not everything he did turned out well--his nationalization of large parts of Pakistan’s industry resulted in a severe slowdown of the economy in the 70s--his was overall a record of remarkable efficacy. Despite her personal bravery and fortitude in the face of imprisonment and exile, Benazir Bhutto’s two eventual stints as Prime Minister were marked by a completely opposite inefficacy. No significant legislation was passed. No reforms were enacted. Political action was replaced by a weak and empty rhetoric, and the energies of the party her father had started were squandered on desperate efforts to stay in power. The prime minister’s office was weakened to the point that when Benazir Bhutto asked to be given a tour of Pakistan’s nuclear facilities, the army brass simply refused. The army did not even consult with her when implementing its ruinous policy of support for the Taliban in Afghanistan. Disastrous political compromises were made and the leadership of the Pakistan People’s Party was purged of intellectuals and filled instead with feudal landowning thugs who had to be appeased in exchange for their support. And all the while, the Prime Minister’s husband was raiding the treasury, eventually being indicted for his crimes in at least four countries.
Despite all this, Benazir Bhutto would probably have won the upcoming elections, because the desperate people of Pakistan were willing to give her one more chance, a measure of how severely limited their choices are. She seemed even to have distanced herself from her disgraced husband. And she was bravely opposing the Jihadi forces of Islamic extremism, by far the greatest present threat to the security and integrity of the nation. People thought that with a team of the moderate Musharraf as President and the equally anti-fundamentalist Benazir Bhutto as Prime Minister, there was a chance that law and order could be restored to the country. Those hopes are now dashed. (Suggestions that Musharraf was behind her killing are ludicrous. Musharraf needed Benazir Bhutto desperately to give his own regime legitimacy and stability, and is now in a much shakier situation than when she was alive.)
And now, in a final, tragic, coup de grace for democracy in Pakistan, it has been announced that Benazir Bhutto’s 19-year-old son Bilawal Bhutto will eventually become chairman-for-life of the PPP, and worse, while we wait for him to grow up, the party will be co-chaired by Asif Zardari, Benazir Bhutto’s corrupt playboy husband who still faces charges in several countries. What hope can there be for democracy in the country when its largest, most populist political party completely lacks even a semblance of internal democracy, choosing instead a cult of personality in its abhorrent, dynastic succession? This foul decision cannot--it must not--stand.
Poor 19 year old !
See full conference HERE Or by clicking post heading.
Stephen Bates
Tuesday January 8, 2008
Guardian Unlimited
When he went down from Oxford five weeks ago for the Christmas holidays, Bilawal Bhutto was just another undergraduate freshman, with friends, as students will, posting his picture at a Halloween party on Facebook.
Today, on his return to Britain, the chairman of the Pakistan People's Party was mobbed by journalists and camera crews at a heaving London press conference, subjected to the ineffable sneers of Jeremy Paxman, and found himself answering questions about his and his country's future with the best composure and self-assurance that a 19 year old could muster.
In the last fortnight he has been catapulted from obscurity and a winter holiday in Dubai to become proclaimed leader of his murdered mother's party and, inevitably, a key player in the future of Pakistan, a country he hardly knows at first hand and whose languages he can scarcely speak.
In such dynastic politics, the son also rises.
What a difference an assassination makes to the fate of individuals, as well as countries. On the day that his mother, Benazir, might in other circumstances have been elected to government in Pakistan, her son and anointed political heir emerged blinking into the London limelight to face a barrage of cameras, rattling like machine-gun fire every time he lifted his head.
"I am a bit nervous," he confided and "OK, wow", when confronted by a complicated three-part question from the BBC's diplomatic correspondent. It was perhaps a fusion of the cultures of his old life and his life in prospect: a wood-panelled room weakly imitating an Oxford common room, filled with raucous journalists, packed tighter than a Lahore street market.
The Gore Hotel in Kensington may not have seen anything like it since Dame Nellie Melba was a guest, and almost certainly not even then.
In the circumstances, the young man did well.
Chaperoned by Pakistani loyalists and shepherded by Simon Walker, a friend of his mother's from her Oxford Union days, formally the Queen's press officer and now a panjandrum in the City, Bilawal sat impassive, confronting the scrum.
"He's not entering public life or campaigning, he's entitled to some privacy, as has been given to other children of public figures," shouted Walker above the hubbub.
Bilawal announced modestly: "I was called and I have stepped up." He added: "Why have I become chairman of the Pakistan People's party, founded by my grandfather 40 years ago? The answer to this question is because it was recognised at this moment in crisis the party needed a close association with my mother through the bloodline.
"Also, it was important to give hope to the new generation of Pakistanis who are looking not just to these elections but beyond.
"Politics is also in my blood. Although I admit that my experience to date is limited, I intend to learn ... unless I can finish my education and develop enough maturity, I recognise that I will never be in a position to have sufficient wisdom to enter the political arena."
He pleaded for privacy while he completes his studies over the next two and a half years at Oxford, offering a swipe to unnamed journalists - which must include the Guardian - for trawling Facebook to uncover that Halloween photograph and other information. Future publicity will apparently be limited to a photocall later this week at his college, Christchurch.
Seeking to pre-empt the obvious question, he added: "To those of you who consider it odd that a 19 year old should assume such a position as the chairmanship of a political party, my response is [that] my position was based on the collective will of the party - unanimously endorsed by 50 to 60 members of our central executive committee and the federal council of the PPP.
"The precedent was set when my grandfather was executed. My grandmother, Begum Nusrat Bhutto, became chairperson; as you know my mother then assumed this role. Eventually I hope to complete the mission of my mother. I urge you to accept that, for the greater good of the party, the continuity of my family's involvement was considered best."
It did not stop the questions, of course. Using the incredulous tone he normally adopts with cabinet ministers, Paxman boomed a question about what on earth the young man thought he had to offer Pakistan.
It was like watching a bully kicking a kitten.
Bilawal answered politely that he had been asked to do it and had been raised to it by his mother. Asked by another questioner whether he feared for his life, he answered: "I fear more for my privacy."
He added: "If they don't want to vote for Bhuttos, they will not vote for them. It was not my choice to live outside Pakistan, it was made impossible when my mum went into exile."
And with that word - mum - the young man underlined just what he has lost this last fortnight.
Monday, January 7, 2008
The End of an Empire
The picture above shows Bahadur Shah Zafar in exile in Rangoon, where he died. According to Wikipedia, it is the only know photograph of a Mughal emperor.
Shah Zafar, a poet who understood his condition as a virtual prisoner of the British living out the end of a dynasty, wrote:
Who ever enters this gloomy palace,
Remains a prisoner for life in European captivity.
Although an expert marksman, Zafar was no warrior. He patronized the poets, musicians and intellectuals of Delhi. And focused his energy and effort on the intellectual and cultural life of the city. He was tolerant towards all faiths: refusing to bow to the conservative imam’s demand to change his doctor who converted to Christianity and wary of Muslims who insisted on converting Hindus or slaughtering cows to fulfill Islamic obligations. On non-religious occasions, Shah Zafar is known to have refrained from entering mosques, since he also could not enter temples. He was not very adroit at managing his complex and cumbersome harem of many wives and concubines. His “harem was notoriously lax as far as discipline and security were concerned.” And the punishments he meted to his concubines who crossed the line were lenient, if administered at all.
The mutiny of 1857 took not just the British, but also Shah Zafar by surprise. The Indian troops – Muslim and Hindu – rallied around him as the rightful ruler of India with the political objective of restoring the Mughal Empire. The pious old (he was 82 years at the time) Sufi poet Shah Zafar, suddenly became the reluctant head of a rebel army that rallied to Delhi as the last seat of Mughal sovereignty. He vacillated, not because he was timorous or weak, but because he was torn among knowledge of imminent failure and duty towards the troops rebelling in his name, and a desire to protect his subjects, the Delhi dwellers caught in between two contending armies.
The rebellion had powerful religious overtones to it. The divide was as much between British rulers and Indians ruled, as Christian versus Hindu and Muslim. The rebellion struck a chord, because it was responding to an imperial shift away from a religiously tolerant, even assimilationist form of British rule, to one that combined Christian evangelism with British power. British agents, who had once taken on Indian wives and ways, and even Muslim religion and Hindu rituals, refraining from eating pork and beef, now felt that they were there to remake native societies in their own image. The rebels spared Muslim Englishmen (yes there were some in Delhi) but not Christian Indians. There were atrocities committed against English men and women trapped in Delhi. But all of this paled in comparison with British reprisals after the rebellion collapsed. The British soldiers committed mass murder, rape and the wholesale destruction of one of the world’s most beautiful cities. Palaces, mosques and madrasas were destroyed in a misguided effort to punish a city for the rebellion.
Shah Zafar was exiled to Rangoon, shortly afterwards, and died there in 1862, at the age of 87. He led a sad and humiliating exile. And his chief wife and surviving sons were not allowed to return to India under British rule. Today Shah Zafar’s burial place is, fittingly for a man who loved poetry and was both religious and tolerant, a Sufi shrine where Muslims in Burma come to worship.
One of his poems:
Lagta naheen hai jee mera ujray diar mein
Kiss kee banee hai aalam-e-napaedar mein
Keh do in hasraton say kaheen aur ja basein
Itnee jagha kahaan hai dil-e-daghdar main
Umr-e-daraaz maang kay laey thay chaar din
Do arzoo mein kut gaey do intizaar mein
Bulbul ko baghban say na sayyaad say gila
Qismat mein qaid thee likhee fasl-e-bahaar mein
Kitna hai badnaseeb Zafar dafn kay leeay
Do gaz zameen bhi mil na sakee koo-e-yaar mein
Translation:
My heart does not settle in this landscape of ruin
Who can feel settled in this evanescent world?
Tell these longings to go live someplace else
This scarred heart no longer has space.
Asking for long life, I was given only days
Half I spent wanting, the other half waiting.
The nightingale complains against groundsman nor trapper
Being caged in springtime was a matter of fate.
How hapless is Zafar, that even for burial,
He could not get a sliver of land near his lover.
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