Finding Soho

A bad habit Once I have finished reading an interesting, moving, insightful or informative book, I often search for conversations, reviews or commentary on the work. This happens almost involuntarily, without my intending to do so, and is a bad habit that refuses to die. Unfortunately for me, what I often find, especially if the book happens to touch on a politically sensitive topic (or, actually, not even so, as you will see shortly), is hypermodern intellectual nihilism of the kind that makes you despair of the future of writing and thinking.   Unfair critics In Act 2 of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot , the listless protagonists Vladimir and Estragon decide to kill time by hurling insults at one another. The jokey tirade continues for a while with the two men hurling the choicest abuses at each other until they reach climax with the biggest insult they can muster: “critic!” This article is about recent encounters with frustratingly bad reviews of books...

Channel 9's 60 Minutes special on the survivors of the Sydney Siege was distressing but necessary. Difficult as it would have been for the survivors to recount every moment of that nightmare, they did it with maturity, insight and fortitude. The documentary did justice to their harrowing tale. Their warmth, intelligence and courage shone through. Their bravery in the face of danger, their compassion for one another and their ability to remain composed under pressure struck me as extraordinary. What was most heartening and powerful was the fact that they completely understood and empathised with each other's predicaments. Confronted with the sheer impossibility of knowing what would unfold as that horrific situation progressed, those who saw an opportunity to escape had no alternative but to grab it. It was an impossible situation. As one of the survivors who remained trapped till the very end of the siege said, it was impossible not to feel gratitude for the good fortune of th...

US Secretary of State John Kerry visited the western Indian state of Gujarat on 11 January for a business summit and Islamabad on 12 January to lead a strategic dialogue with the Pakistani government and military. Kerry’s visit comes ahead of President Obama’s visit to India scheduled for 24 January. Ahead of these summits, Kerry announced that Pakistan had curtailed and “[taken] action against” terror groups Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM). This certification is necessary for the disbursement of civilian aid under the Enhanced Partnership with Pakistan Act of 2009, more often referred to as the Kerry-Lugar Bill, and came just before Kerry’s departure for the subcontinent. However, recent events and their aftermath in Pakistan indicate that state support for terror organisations has not ceased. On the contrary, the specific groups mentioned by Kerry appear to have become more active in recent weeks. In response to concerns from the Indian government, the US has tempor...

The movies that Richard Linklater-Ethan Hawke have done together have a special place in my heart. I absolutely love the Before series - Before Sunrise, Before Sunset and Before Midnight. Each of them has left me awestruck and breathless. They are so intensely realistic and so intensely simple that, in my view, they have a magical and ethereal quality. There's something truly, ineffably momentous about those movies. Momentous because they seem to capture really significant moments in time - moments that appear insignificant, mundane and prosaic but are teeming with joie de vivre and the joy of small things. My response to them, even though they are very 'intellectual' with dialogue taking precedence over action, is always very physical. (Besides, this caveat doesn't entirely apply here as I do actually like movies where dialogue is privileged over action.) The words, stories and destinies that these movies weave together always evoke a physical reaction. Immersion is t...

The Charlie Hebdo massacre was not an accident, not a stray act of horror and not an unanticipated calamity. It was the culmination and result of a noxious coming together of ever-increasing radicalisation and political paralysis in the face of radicalisation and violence. It was the outcome of a series of ‘provocative’ challenges to reigning orthodoxies and the violent backlash these challenges invited. But this is not to suggest that the challenges themselves caused the ‘retribution’, a deeply disturbing and pernicious argument that has been put forward in relation to Charlie Hebdo for some years in some quarters until now (and perhaps even now); in this case, retribution, a term that evokes such guttural revulsion, was fuelled by a politics of ‘la haine’ and vitriol and enabled by the reticence of the rational, secular public.  Political leaders and the news media of liberal democracies have played a significant role in this. As Michael Weiss argues in Foreign Policy and Emm...

  The recent independent inquiry by Prof. Alexis Jay, a former chief inspector of social work in Scotland, into the child sex abuse in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013 that shocked Britain’s conscience has led to a spate of articles and reports expressing outrage, anger and disbelief in the UK and Australia. New understandings of the purported link between 'cultural sensitivity' and state failure to tackle social problems have flooded British and Australian online portals. Examining media coverage and the commentary on online articles, one finds a palpable sense of betrayal, distrust of state and media institutions and frustration with what is perceived as a noxious regime of unofficial censorship. In Australia, the fact that one of the top bureaucrats responsible for Rotherham child services between 2005 and 2008 is now employed by the Victorian Education department has also prompted some debate. Prof. Jay’s inquiry report offers a stunning indictment of South Yorkshire...

You walk along the edge of a forest filled with the song of lyrebirds and the frantic laughter of kookaburras; you look at sunlight through canopies of green and squint as it makes patterns on your face; you saunter behind an old couple walking arm in arm and catch bits of their whispered conversation - 'And before you know it your lives are so entwined'; you're entranced as you shuffle past hordes of tourists milling around a flock of parakeets and cockatoos, feeding the trusting birds sunflower seeds and squealing in delight when one of them perches on their shoulder; you march deeper into the woods, the silence now deafening, the solitude overpowering. The sun overhead descends into clouds and the chatter of birds grows less frenetic, more cautious; you slip on moss-covered logs obstructing steep downward slopes and you climb again, further and further up until you've ascended all the thousand steps of the Kokoda Walk; you're n...