A dancing Gandhi
Gandhi dancing with unidentified lady. Source: http://redd.it/m7ebw
World History and freedom
A response to Vinay Lal
The Economic and Political Weekly just published a new article by Vinay Lal titled World History and its Politics [PDF] critiquing world history, which he claims to be a relatively new development within American academia. The big claim, I suppose, is that in the aftermath of post-colonialism, “Big History” (read Eurocentrism) has found new ways of expressing itself, and world history is the primary mode of this expression. I have a continuing interest in the subject, but perhaps for different reasons that I will try to outline below. But first, a more detailed look at Lal.
Tattoo of Indian Gods
Here is a good base design for a stylish tattoo of an Indian God for anyone considering getting one. The image is from Samuel Boyse’s The Pantheon, or, Fabulous History of the Heathen Gods, Goddesses, Heroes, &c., (1792 / 7th edition) and available on archive.org or in your local library.
I recommend the removal of the Sanskrit text and its surrounding commemorative plaque. The wreath with the header text should stay. Don’t forget to comment (and send me pictures!) if you end up getting it done.
An Early Communist: Muzaffar Ahmad in Calcutta
An Early Communist: Muzaffar Ahmad in Calcutta 1913-1929
I just started reading Suchetana Chattopadhyay’s new book An Early Communist: Muzaffar Ahmad in Calcutta 1913-1929. I hope to review it here (and elsewhere?) soon, 
[The] transformation [of Bengal's Muslim intelligentsia into communists] involved a rejection of mainstream politics based on the identities of ‘nation’ and ‘community’ - a process that has been little investigated. (p. 1) (Emphasis mine).
Blast from the past: Communist Manifesto
I have been re-reading the Communist Manifesto to prepare for a teach-in next week at MassArt (and perhaps at a later point at Harvard?) and this video from long ago fits right in. It would be fun to screen it.
Writing tools – a possible candidate?
Ulysses: keep writing
As promised in my previous post, I have been spending the last couple of weeks trying out a few different writing tools to begin this great leap into prospectus fine-tuning that will evolve into a good proposal that may develop into a good dissertation, which in turn might be a readable book one day. What software should a history graduate student use to write a dissertation? I had a few requirements:
- No linear word processor like Microsoft Word. For my reasons, see the graph in my previous post. This also means that other clones/replacements like Mellel, Nisus Writer Pro, Pages and so forth were out of the question.
- The flip side of #1, which is that writing could be sporadic, in pieces and disconnected. A place for ideas to develop into full articles and so forth.
- Great integration with bibliographic software.
- Features like sections in word processors are good ideas, but I never really use them. This means that I can never auto-generate a table of contents. Likewise, I can’t get myself to format each sentence of text I type as body, heading, sub-heading etc., and most of my text is all in body text, manually formatted. I have tried to use this feature of formatting that usually is available in some tucked-away floating toolbar in Word and Pages numerous times, but it is always a hindrance to writing itself. This means that I have absolutely no control over changing any of the formatting after I am done writing, especially for texts that are over 20-30 pages, because it is just too much work. I need a way around this problem.
Lytro: cameras for cats?
From the MIT Technology Review comes the news of these awesome cameras.
Lytro cameras include an innovative new light field sensor that captures the color, intensity and vector direction of light […] make use of the pixels you would traditionally throw away […] use those pixels to retain the depth information of the scene.” What this translates into is a photo that you can “Shoot First and Refocus Later.”
Go ahead and click into the photo below to change the focus on the second cat, or anywhere else for that matter.
Vote for everyone!
Enthusiastic signage in the neighborhood
If I knew what I was writing about, would I have the perfect software to write it in?
Whale Writer. Zachary Kanin in The New Yorker 10/20/2008 www.cartoonbank.com/2008/whale-writer/invt/132245/
Previously, I may have mentioned how I like things to be just so when I have to get anything done. Quite obviously, this is just a pretense to avoid work altogether. However, there is some truth to the statement that I have a very low threshold of irritability when it comes to software. Since word processing is all I do these days, I like to think that I deserve some great software to get work done. What software does a historian use to write? Over the next few posts, I plan to look into this question. I will consider writing and citation, and perhaps layout, although that is not a current concern.
Uneasy blogging
Kuropatkin takes the offensive at last. “Writing speeches to crush the Russo-Jap war. For some time no speeches have been made in Manchuria. Now General Kuropatkin has decided to put forth a tremendous effort to crush the Japanese armies. This is how he sets about the task.” W.K. Haselden. Daily Mirror, Oct 11, 1904.
I am a blogging “veteran” — I have had numerous blogs over the last decade. However, I don’t remember writing anything on any of those blogs for at least the last five years. Instead, I used my multiple blogs and domains to learn coding. After this period of being an autodidact, I find myself with some knowledge of five CMS, in addition to your usual HTML/CSS/some Javascript and such other things that an amateur web designer might know. An unfortunate side effect, however, has been that I can’t write for blogs any more.