The December issue of Harper’s contains a short story called ‘Lost in Uttar Pradesh,’ more exoticized claptrap about oddness in India. One could pick a much less prosaic state than U.P. for the title; this is sort of like Louis Leakey traipsing around the mystical badlands of Cleveland.

This week’s New Yorker includes a cover story on the Pakistan quake aftermath:

Musharraf seized power in a coup, six years ago, and at the time he described the Army as… the only body disciplined enough to fix the country’s ills… yet, when the earthquake hit, the Army appeared neither efficient nor consumed by any sense of urgency… ten days after the earthquake struck, Musharraf’s government signed a billion-dollar contract for Swedish military surveillance aircraft, a bewildering priority… “If you were a Westerner asked to provide humanitarian financial assistance to a country led by a military government obsessed with the regional ‘military balance,’ what would you think?”…

“The villagers, when tensions run high, can’t even do free farming out on their terraces, because the Indians fire at them,” he said. “They and their animals are often wounded.” Half a mile up, a section of the gorge wall had collapsed. Small tombstones protruded at odd angles from a mound of dirt. A bloated corpse wrapped in a black shroud lay on top of the mound. Apparently, the person had been killed by a falling graveyard…

As we approached the Line of Control, Abbas lost his way. He made a U-turn in the gorge, swung right into another canyon, and then hurriedly made a second U-turn. A soldier assigned to spotter duty pointed down at a tricolor Indian flag flapping directly underneath the helicopter… It’s hard to imagine how the two militaries keep track of the line in any event. The border twists from side to side and up and down, as if tracing the fingers of a very thick hand. [Link]

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