“He felt a measure of pride in delivering this vital news. Realized he missed playing this sort of role that was common in India. One’s involvement in other people’s lives gave one numerous small opportunities for importance.”
— from The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai
“He retreated into a solitude that grew in weight day by day. The solitude became a habit, the habit became the man, and it crushed him into a shadow.
But shadows, after all, create their own unease, and despite his attempts to hide, he merely emphasized something that unsettled others. For entire days nobody spoke to him at all, his throat jammed with words unuttered, his heart and mind turned into blunt aching things…”
— from The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai
“I think you have to go silent at a point. It is an effort of will, increasingly, because it’s so easy to get distracted and particularly at the early points of a novel where it’s painful and you don’t know what you’re doing. It quite literally is go offline and say no to everything.”
— Kamila Shamsie tells John Freeman of Granta
— Hilary Mantel in an interview with the New York Times
I report on a two-room school in a low-income part of Islamabad that is giving a second chance to women who dropped out of school as children. Tune in to the story for Deutsche Welle’s World in Progress, which was produced with support from the Pulitzer Center on Crises Reporting.
“Although violence and the emotional toll it takes can never be wholly accepted, it’s come to be expected in places like Peshawar. Insecurity is a shared experience for many in cities across the country; a part of the collective understanding of what it means to be Pakistani. Indeed, resilience has become sort of a national trait. Even as appalling instances of violence take place in America, they are still just that: instances of violence, each one isolated from the next, cast in individual molds. The Boston Marathon bombing is not the Aurora rampage or the Sandy Hook shooting. Indeed, American tragedies are held to American standards of individualism, distinct and rarefied. That’s precisely what gives their shockwaves such profound resonance, even in places where death and destruction have become a constant lull, ever-ready to erupt into mayhem.”
— from my story for The American Prospect on violence in Pakistan and America
I am normally not one to plug products, but this bracelet by Kate Spade sent my radio journalist heart aflutter!
Debbie Millman’s timeless advice on courage and the creative life, in a wonderful illustrated essay.
“…[Declan] Walsh had heard about a spree of disappearances and killings of rebels, activists, students, and lawyers by the Pakistani authorities in the province. It was a dangerous story for a foreign reporter to pursue, but he understood the moral import of the situation and was carefully investigating it. The Baloch man spoke with great emotion about horrors he had witnessed and heard about. Walsh listened carefully, asked detailed questions, and sought more names, references, and contacts who might make his visit to the province possible.
Four months later, the piece, “Pakistan’s Secret Dirty War,” appeared in the Guardian. The opening paragraph is worth quoting for the sheer force of its writing, for the way it conveys the tale of a people oppressed and forgotten, for the way it reminds one what a reporter must do:
The bodies surface quietly, like corks bobbing up in the dark. They come in twos and threes, few times a week, dumped on desolate mountains or empty city roads, bearing the scars of great cruelty. Arms and legs are snapped; faces are bruised and swollen. Flesh is sliced with knives or punctured with drills; genitals are singed with electric prods. In some cases the bodies are unrecognisable, sprinkled with lime or chewed by wild animals. All have a gunshot wound in the head.
The foreign correspondent’s job in countries like India and Pakistan, which have a significant English-speaking population, can be both easy and difficult. A good reporter is often welcomed by the cultural élite, and doors are opened. But an American or British correspondent in the subcontinent is also judged by a wide range of highly educated, well-trained people. Each story is discussed, the biases surgically examined, the writing debated. In this age of poorly paid freelancers, there are very few impressive foreign correspondents in South Asia. Until a few days ago, when the government decided to expel him, Declan Walsh was one of the few foreign reporters working in Pakistan whom everybody seemed to love and respect…”
— from “Declan Walsh, Expelled,” an article by Basharat Peer in the New Yorker which looks at the recent expulsion from Pakistan of New York Times’ reporter Declan Walsh
Nawaz Sharif — the man most likely to become Pakistan’s next prime minister has set two priorities: Boosting his country’s economy, and bringing peace for Pakistan. I talk to Marco Werman, host of PRI’s The World about Sharif’s policy agenda.
This beautiful illustration by Michela Buttiono accompanied a New York Times op-ed by Columbia University Professor Manan Ahmed Asif about the the “tyrannical majority” which has long suppressed minority rights in Pakistan.
