Tag: India

December 23, 2015

A moment is not intrinsically longer or shorter than a century, except in relation to an element of consciousness by which it is possible to establish its direction and measure its duration… Yet human time is the only unit of measure that we can understand.

– Alain Daniélou

November 30, 2014

That is when Brossard and I started losing our complicity. I was the student advisor’s favourite in the whole batch, for the entire year of 6th grade. But times changed. A couple years down the line, and I was spotted holding a girl’s hand, or caught on the school’s courtyard giving a surreptitious peck…

May 9, 2014
December 6, 2013

Justifying Corruption – Part 3
An agent who changes suits. We are not very far from the imagery of secret agents, of James Bonds and other Mata Haris. And there is an easy connection: the use of illegal means to obtain information. In a way, the diplomatic field of agents under cover is today at par with international public-private economies such as the aforementioned defence: in both cases, the ultimate means of the intermediary is information…

December 6, 2013
September 30, 2013

In The Jungle and the Aroma of Meats (1999), French structuralist Francis Zimmerman attempts a discussion of ancient practices and conceptions of health in India, framed on a speculated geographical representation of the concerned populations. He argues that in ancient Hindu medical texts the land and fauna classification was directly related to bodily function, disease classification and therapeutics…

May 10, 2013

Two Frenchmen in the Orient – Introduction

There was everywhere amongst Orientalists the ambition to formulate their discoveries, experiences, and insights…

– Edward Said, Orientalism

May 10, 2013

Two Frenchmen in the Orient – Part 1
The genesis of a diary. I did not even look for being a foreigner. The travel as coincidence. No need to repeat that I was not feeling ‘good in my own skin’, as the French formula says…

May 10, 2013

Two Frenchmen in the Orient – Part 3
Since I have been abroad, quite a few travelers have gotten in touch with me. Whether friends who had promised (often in vain) to pay me visit, or complete strangers, they show an enthusiasm that reminds me, not without nostalgia, of my early days here…

May 10, 2013

The Language of Foreignness – Introduction
“I could not live in India: I don’t know the language.” Foreign language is for many the first thing to which foreignness is synonymous. Being a foreigner would mean not just living in a foreign country, but more immediately, more stressfully, living in a different and foreign linguistic environment…