November 10, 2002 Welcome to a generous selection of articles from DAWN's Weekly Books & Authors. This page is updated every Sunday. For current issue Click here Strange neutrality, there NEHRU saw India as essentially a big power recovering from bad times and needing only a little help and understanding from rich and powerful friends to get back on its feet and play its legitimate part in the senior league. He seems to have assumed that such help.... Excerpts: The pioneers CULTURE is a public pattern and language is one of the essentialities that attractively complete this pattern. Languages are living, throbbing entities. Their symbols and codes take birth, grow, get matured with usage; some die out... Excerpts: Partitioned lives BADRUDDIN Umar’s father [Abul Hashem, secretary of the Bengal Muslim League] had always wanted to stay in India. So after partition he had built a new house in Burdwan. Though he was a Muslim Leaguer... ARTICLES: The many faces of English IN 1582 Richard Mulcaster, headmaster of Merchant Taylor School in England, wrote, “The English tongue is of small reach, stretching no further than this island of ours.” At that time English... ARTICLES: Priceless relics in decay THE once internationally renowned Faqir Khana Museum of Lahore, one of the biggest in the private sector (and perhaps the richest in terms of the number of its priceless relics), is... ARTICLES: One book, one Chicago LIKE Atlas, Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago — nicknamed the “City of the big shoulders and the windy city” — is in the midst of shrugging, and consolidating a truly fitting... AUTHOR: For freedom & literature YASHPAL, whose birth centenary India will celebrate in 2003, was twenty-eight years old when he was caught, tried and sentenced to fourteen years to life at hard labour. There was little... SYNDICATED: When slavers ruled the seas THROUGHOUT the seventeenth century, the relatives of captives held as slaves in North Africa regularly petitioned parliament to intervene on behalf of their loved ones who had been seized by Barbary... SYNDICATED: A dictator damned out WHEN the Balkan wars broke out, western journalists, politicians, soldiers, peacemakers, mercenaries and various do-gooders quickly discovered they had a problem. Their first stop on the way to the war zones... REVIEW: Storms within and without OWEN Bennett Jones, BBC correspondent in Pakistan between 1998 and 2001, is right. For a country as important as Pakistan with such a turbulent history since its creation in 1947, remarkably... REVIEW: From the other side TERRORISM is the most talked about topic these days. Television, radio and newspapers give it extensive coverage. Terrorism is not restricted to any one region. It has become a worldwide phenomenon... REVIEW: In quest of truth PHILOSOPHY is the quest of truth in pursuit of wisdom. A philosopher, like Byron, may deny nothing, but he doubts everything. Plato loves philosophy because it facilitates a man “to think... REVIEW: Shedding outdated notions IT is not unusual to hear statements such as “we work as a team” or “you should work as a team” when actually the distinction between a “group” and a “team”... REVIEW: Dialogue with the west IN his preface, Amitava Kumar ponders the way in which books stand apart from the world and also return one to it. It is precisely the flow of reflection from his... REVIEW: What is wrong? THE state of the social sciences has been a subject of much concern among the few social scientists of Pakistan. In 1988 a conference was arranged on the subject by the Quaid-i-Azam University. The papers read out in this conference were collected together in one volume entitled The state of social sciences in Pakistan (1989).... REVIEW: On the fringes READING Asad Muhammad Khan often reminds one of Urdu’s greatest short story writer, the sardonic Saadat Hasan Manto. Essentially because like Manto, Khan writes about the lives of the underbelly of... In brief IN a climate of hatred and intolerance, the appearance of a journal disseminating liberal ideas should be regarded as a great boon. Liberal Pakistan intends to serve as a forum for exchange of ideas, views and opinions on matters of vital concern to those who continue.... REVIEW: Land of paradoxes THE book under review has an unusual beginning. Doing away with the conventional foreword, preface or introduction by a renowned writer or critic, the book takes off with the first chapter...

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