Monday Cup Of Links #28 - Wet Towels in Space, Ottoman Heirs in Basic Instinct, Neanderthal Rope, Guns and Gandhi
Day 60 indoors
Happy Monday!
It’s been two months sheltering in place, and we’re good to go for another month in the Bay Area. It greatly soothes my paranoid little soul that I don’t have to unnecessarily come in contact with anything or anyone that might be carrying a mysterious virus. The necessary contact still freaks me out, though.
It’s good news for my novel India House, though. It currently stands at approximately 25,000 words, which feels great. I’m a little over a third of the way through, and this is the perfect time to take a week’s pause to audit my events, characters and plots.
In particular, I’m not sure if I have my story’s emotional core figured out. Another annoying bit is that Lala Hardayal, who is going to be the main character in the sequel, Gadar, isn’t getting much focus in this book. I ought to fix this by reading his biography.
It’s also a little difficult keeping the order of events straight. My sources don’t really care much for timelines, preferring instead to focus on personalities and the things they did. Which works for biographies, but doesn’t really work for a novel. Everyone keeps going in and out of India House, so just trying to determine who were present during a certain set of events is challenging. I’m putting all the events on Google Calendar and seeing what pans out. It’s trippy to see my calendar full of events in 1906.
Anyway, onto our links!
The Last Ottoman Princesses. This has been intriguing me for a while. So when the Turkish deposed the Ottoman sultan, he was exiled to France. He had a daughter, the princess Durrushehvar. He was convinced that the future of an Islamic empire lay in kingdoms like Hyderabad, who were acceptable to Western powers, and endeavored to marry his daughter off to the son of the Nizam. And he married his niece, Niloufer to the younger prince as well. The Nizams of Hyderabad were the richest in the world at that point, though their people lived in abject poverty. Niloufer in particular had an unhappy marriage with a husband who busied himself with art and concubines, and she couldn’t produce heirs. So she divorced her husband in the ‘50s and moved back to France where she remarried and led the life of a former royal. In the ‘90s, after her death, her husband donated a collection of her sarees to New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology, where it’s studied as a great example of the blending of Indian and European fashions. As for the rest of the Nizamate, between royal mismanagement of finances and alimony payments to multiple ex-wives, they are a chill lot who divide their time between Turkey and Europe. The current heir, Azmet Jah was a cinematographer for Indiana Jones and Basic Instinct, and lives in London. This is in stark contrast to the descendants of the Royal family of Mysore, who still live in their old palaces and work on being the cultural vanguards of Karnataka, and have been active in politics.
The Neanderthals knew how to make cords from twisted fibers! It’s a tiny fragment of cord that had been embedded in a rock-based tool to use as a handle or something. I somehow find it to be incredibly basic, but apparently it shows they knew about seasons and trees, because the cord was from the inside-bark of a tree, and that tree’s bark can only be harvested easily in spring and summer. Either way, apparently the prevalent wisdom was that neanderthals were stupid, but apparently that’s getting harder and harder to say with newer discoveries.
Living in the era of COVID-19 is ideal for all sorts of experiments that would be impossible otherwise. danah boyd (she spells her name so), noted human-computer interaction researcher, has been conducting research on teens and their interactions with technology for years. Now, she has a great post on how teens are addicted not to social media, but to socializing. Apparently, they are increasingly frustrated at having to interact through Zoom instead of face to face.
ICYMI: Guns and Gandhi - Excerpts from India House. My piece a couple of weeks ago, where I shared excerpts from my work-in-progress novel. It lives up to the title, and dare I say, exceeds expectations.
It’s Time to Build. This piece by Marc Andreessen has been shared widely all over social media over the past month. In case you haven’t read it yet.
GIF of the week: What happens when you wring a wet towel in space? Chris Hadfield demonstrates.