Recent Comments

1. 11 days ago on Luann

   I understand that in the Luanniverse, the ratio is actually 1 month in-strip = 1 year in real-time

2. 19 days ago on Rudy Park

   The name you’re looking for is probably Mahavira

3. 19 days ago on The Academia Waltz

   As I said before, there’s an answer to why the Indian culture became “obsessed” with “sculptured erotica”.

   It’s in the Kama Sutra – literally “love teachings”.

   A sutra is a text used in worship or teaching, and Kama was the god of love in Hinduism – love not only of a romantic or sexual nature, but love in its platonic, filial, and fraternal forms as well. It’s why his “bosom companion” Basant, the god of spring, is mentioned and featured besides Rati, his female consort. India had been accepting of gender fluidity long before it became a contemporary thing – Hindu mythology is full of instances of gods and goddesses assuming forms of different genders.

   To Hindus – proper Hindus, old-school Hindus, not the fanatical reactionary Hindutva conservatives or any pseudo-Hindus of modern India – nudity was not considered vulgar. It was an early example of body positivity, coupled with a celebration of plumpness evocative of the once semi-revered British idiom “well-fed”.

   Nudity and its depiction were treated as body positivity, as worship of the divine within each human soul. The positions described in the Kama Sutra talk about each partner worshiping their partner in turn, caring for each other’s sensitivities and the sensations they experience. The physical act of love was treated as a ritual involving the communing of each other’s souls.

   The puritanism associated with Hindus today actually came about as a result of the British invasion, through the social-climbing processes of Sanskritization and early Westernization. In his essay “Decolonizing the Indian Mind”, Namvar Singh details the process in a far more meticulous manner than a comment board will usually allow.

   But the bottom line is, nudity was not vulgar in Hinduism, and gender fluidity was not taboo. Every concept the LGBTQ community strives to defend, include, and inhabit – the Hindus had it first. They just forgot it all after centuries under British heels, and aren’t ready to find their way back yet.

4. 2 months ago on Garfield

   And yet one solitary 17th-century Sufi saint plaited seven beans in his beard and brought them to the hills of Karnataka, performing a fragrant act before Allah by carrying only seven, allowing him to break the Arab monopoly on coffee without fear of persecution. His name lives on in the hills where he is entombed today.

   (Of course, the Mopla-dominated merchant class in Kerala attempted to do the same by slipping raw cherries in with the roasted coffee beans they were allowed to sell. I don’t know whether any of those ever took, though…)

5. 2 months ago on Garfield

   Kaldi and the goats only chewed the cherries. It was the holy man Kaldi took them to who first began using the cherries in a brew. Whether the holy man was a “pir” (a mendicant, a wandering saint) or an “imam” (a formal priest in a mosque) is still up for debate.

6. 2 months ago on Garfield

   The saddest thing is that if anyone attempts to discuss the history of just who exactly gave coffee to the world and how it became what it is, the McCarthyists, Tories, Hindutvas, and other establishmentarians cry “fake” if anyone dares say the truth…

   …and if this space is a safe one to say so, ilah khair kare, I might just explain how one Indian saint and a whole battalion of conquistadores dared to break the Arab monopoly on this bean.

7. 2 months ago on F Minus

   I’d make a joke about “Un chien andalou”, but the search engine would take it completely in the wrong direction…

8. 3 months ago on Ink Pen

   The Shinkai romances are better.

   Even “A Silent Voice” trumps that.

9. 3 months ago on Rudy Park

   @BE THIS GUY

   The Indians had done that already by the time the British invaded.

   The caste system evolved out of a severely misguided interpretation of the older ‘varna’ system – originally analogous to the Western world’s tradition of guilds.

   The caste system was not uniformly Indian. In the South, in places like Kerala and Tamil Nadu, caste restrictions were frequently flouted and there was plenty more intermarrying than in the North. “Duties” associated with “lower” castes would often grant those members temporary passes, and the Brahmin or priestly castes – which technically outranked the nobility, even if the brahmins were in penury – were not all the same.

10. 4 months ago on Rudy Park

    And this is how the economy got so bad and how fascism rose anew.