Monday 11 June 2012

Sublime Insights of Imran Shahid Bhinder as attested by Prof C.M. Naim

Prof. Naim, an eminent, that is very old, Professor of Urdu, has been generous enough to draw our attention to a rising star in the field of post-modern literary theory.
Endorsing a charge of plagiarism against another eminent, that is completely senile, Urdu savant, Gopichand Narang, Prof. Naim writes-
.'.a young scholar Imran Shahid Bhinder, a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at the University of Birmingham, U.K., has made a much more serious charge. Bhinder published in 2006 in the annual issue of Nairang-i-Khayal, a Pakistani journal, an essay entitled “Gopi Chand Narang is a Translator, not an Author.”
Leaving aside the obvious point, that Post Modernism admits no author, what is salient here is that Narang's book was published in 1993- back when every fuckwit under the Sun- like Prof. Akbar Ahmed- published books titled 'Post Modernism & Something or Other' on the basis of an impartial ignorance of both subjects.
'...In summary, Bhinder has most convincingly established that Dr Narang’s achievement in that award-winning book is not that of an author but only of a translator, and that too of a reprehensible kind. (why reprehensible? The fuckwit is a Professor. Not a Professor of Physics or Biology or something worthwhile but a Professor of Urdu. The job of this sort of Professor is to pretend to be smart. In this case, Narang had managed to get away with the imposture while mouthing whatever modish Leftie nonsense that was required of him without crossing the line into being a rabid out-and-out paranoid nutjob.)
But, before going any further let us hear from this great scholar, this Doctoral Candidate in the English Dept. of Birmingham City University, I.S Bhinder, to whom Prof. Naim is so deeply indebted.
''... A group of Narang’s well-wishers has come forward so quickly to criticise Dr Khan, (presumably A.Q. Khan, father of the Pakistani Atom bomb) It seems to me an act of extreme disappointment. Did Khan plagiarise the words? He had an in-depth comprehension of the formula. If you do not believe, ask Mr. Bush or Mr. Mush (presumably Gen. Musharraf) about the importance of the man. First, he conceived and then logically utilised the theoretical material and emerged as one of the most important scientist in the history of Pakistan. It is not a right attitude to criticise Dr Khan and ignore all subsequent Christianised scientists. Should we spare Jewish hardliner Einstein who has been a sole ruthless mind behind the terrorizing invention? If the Christian terrorists or Jewish terrorists sell the product to Christian nations or their fellow of the book then these hooligans have no objections. In order to defend a third rate plagiarist how could they go to such an extent? '
Wow! Birmingham Uni sure does a swell job teaching English! But is it really that shit?
I.S. Bhinder proudly confirms, indeed, it is. This is his resume-
Imran Shahid Bhinder 
Birthplace: Gujranwala Pakistan 
(Advocate High Court, Lahore Pakistan) 
MA in International Broadcast Journalism, Birmingham City University England 
MA in English Literature, Birmingham City University, England 
Certificate in Teaching, Solihull College, Birmingham, England 
Certificate in Information Technology, City College Birmingham England 
(References are available on request) 
This is the man Naim quotes as an authority-
'According to Bhinder, Dr Narang did not read the original authors—Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude LeviStrauss, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, and others. Naim knows this is untrue. Narang did read that shite because the fuckwit was a fuckwit with a great regard for himself and self-regarding fuckwits back then read that sort of shite coz it chimed so well with their  fuckwitted intuition of their own sublimity. He read only their well-known interpreters- no, Narang paraphrased those careerists who were most plausible in making the case that that pile of worthless shite had some sort of sense to it, and, to his credit, was reasonably judicious in his selections. - and then transferred the latter’s analyses and interpretations into Urdu, doing so verbatim and without giving the reader any indication of what he was doing.' Yes, but these 'readers' were fuckwit careerists who, quite properly, didn't give a shit for that worthless pile of shite.

Of course, it may really be true that some mischievous librarian gave Dr. Narang nice volumes of Enid Blyton under the pretense that these books were actually by Ferdinand de Soo-soo and Levi Strauss 501, and Roland-kindly-take-more-regular-Baths, and La-con and Derider and Fuckall- but, if this is the case, then Dr.Narang is to be congratulated because all them smelly dead French dudes are actually brain eating zombies spawned by the Umbrella Corp. in the Resident Evil films.
Bhinder, on the other hand, has read all these great intellectuals and, in consequence, can say brilliant and insightful things like this-
'My main concern has always been to unearth the facts about Narang’s plagiarism. No, your main concern has been to be shit higher than your asshole (Wittgenstein). I undertook a difficult task of comparing several books by the Western interpreters of structuralist theory with Narang’s award-winning (as an author not translator) Sakhtiyat Pas e Sakhtiyat aur Mashriqi Sheriyat. It was not such an easy task that anybody can undertake by ordering a book today and exactly after few hours pronounce an ‘objectivist’ fatwa Here's an objectivist fatwa for you- you were swindled by the University of Birmingham. Ask for your money back. Better yet, take them to Court. They must be made to pay exemplary damages  for playing this dirty trick on you of pretending to teach you English to a Post Graduate level. . It is not even a matter of following the principles of any subjective idealist philosophy. It never is. 'Subjective idealist philosophy' is Marxist jargon for some fuckwittery which died out a long time ago.  We could not even take advantage of some transcendental principle that could only be revealed to an Indian mystic who has been following Nagarjuna, Sankara or Aurobin do,There can't be a transcendental principle in either Nagarjuna or Sankara. That type of fuckwittery wasn't invented till much later. No In addition, if the pursuer of some ‘Reality’ says, after some meditation, that he has viewed the Ultimate Reality he is not required to produce some evidence to prove his experience. Actually, a guy who says he's seen Ultimate Reality has to  evidence some siddhi, karamat or ilm-e-ghaybi- i.e. he must possess supernatural or oracular powers. That's the acid test. Everybody should believe that what he says is correct. Neither is it related to some sort of twentieth century Saussurean abstract objectivism that means to believe what the proponents of Narang attempt to construct. 'That means to believe what the proponents of Nararang attempt to construct?' Is that Birmingham M.A. English? Fuck is wrong with those brummies? Why are they swindling this nice Pakistani lawyer under the pretense of teaching him M.A. level English? Unfortunately, I am not a great admirer of Derrida, Saussure, Nagarjuna or Aurobindo (?!). I still need to examine the actual nature of the subject based rationalism, logocentrism or ‘metaphysical’ reference, which is gravely rejected by these so-called postmodernists and their interpreters. This is garbled nonsense. There is no ideological school in which this cacophony isn't simply a string of non sequiturs.That led the human subject to construct meaning while referring to the signified or concept.
'Certainly, we do not live in language, we live in a real world where billions of people are exploited and brutally murdered by the champions of Western capitalism, or I would say to these Urdu jokers who indirectly support Zionist’s terrorism and the acts of terrorism by the Western terrorists indirectly. However, the point I need to bring forward is to challenge Narang’s and his exponents to produce references to negate my claim, not a plethora of articles by some mentally incapable people in Narang’s favour is required, who needs promotion or award by an academy or ten rupee pay rise as a lecturer. Have they something rational to say so far about Narang’s plagiarism as they have been repeating themselves since the very beginning of this plagiarist controversy three years back?'

Clearly, Bhinder is the only person from the Sub continent who has fully engaged with and digested all that Post Modern stuff. See how easily he is able to connect Prof. Narang's cribbing from standard textbooks- dealing with that septic pile of shite- with the evil plot to defame the Daddy of the Pakistani, and North Korean, and anybody else who had money-to-pay, A-bomb. 


We owe Prof. Naim, Emeritus Professor at Chicago University, a heartfelt vote of thanks for his endorsement of the scholarship and ratocinative powers of  'Doctoral Candidate Imran Shahid Bhinder', because he and he alone, having mastered Post Modern Literary theory, has been able to discern the occult manner in which 'billions of people are being murdered'- i.e at least two billion people have been murdered- by terrorist Western Capitalists and SHAME ON US, we haven't noticed!
Furthermore, we we were blissfully unaware that these Urdu Professors are tacitly supporting Western Zionist terrorism which is butchering at least  20 to 30 percent of the World population! Furthermore these old fogeys are critical of Dr. A.Q. Khan for stealing and selling Nuclear secrets to all and sundry. This is very bad because Einstein was a Jewish hardliner.

The odd thing about Prof. C.M Naim is that he must have read these comments of Bhinder's on his Outlook essay 'Plagiarize & Prosper' before he published his next essay- in which, quite bizarrely, he continues to quote Bhinder in respectful terms- 


The only substantive point Naim is able to make- the mere repetition of or an otherwise unsupported charge of suggestio falsi being conjecture merely- is as follows
'Rereading Bhinder’s first article in the special issue of ‘Akkas Intrnational and checking its accuracy, I stumbled upon something else. On pages 29 and 30 of the journal, Bhinder states that Dr. Narang had extensively translated passages from Catherine Belsey’s introductory textbook, Critical Practice. One of the examples he cites is this passage in Belsey’s book: 
    Saussure’s argument depends on the different division of the chain of meaning in different languages. ‘If words stood for pre-existing concepts they would all have exact equivalents in meaning from one language to the next; but this is not true’ (Saussure, 1974: 116). The truth is that different languages divide or articulate the world in different [ways]. Saussure gives a number of examples. For instance, where French has the single word mouton, English differentiates between mutton, which we eat, and sheep, which roams the hills. (pp. 36–37.) 
I compared it with the passage he mentions in the Urdu book (p. 68). The Urdu is a meticulous translation of the English—it even includes the page number in Saussure’s book, which, as Bhinder points out, creates the false impression that Dr. Narang was quoting directly from Saussure. As I compared Dr. Narang’s page 68 with Catherine Belsey’s page 39 (a different edition from what Bhinder used), I realized that Dr. Narang had twice done the same injustice earlier. In support of Saussure’s argument Belsey had quoted more examples as given by Jonathan Culler and Louis Hjelmslev in their separate books—properly acknowledged by Belsey. Dr. Narang has translated those examples, without mentioning Belsey, and then cited the page numbers given by her as if he were quoting directly from Culler and Hjelmslev.  
But what really surprised me was on the opposite page (p. 69), where Dr. Narang, leaving the safety of translation, offers his own examples for Saussure’s contention. “If we wish to see,” Dr. Narang begins, “there is no lack of such examples even in Urdu where words are similar but meanings are different. Just take [the terms for] kinship. Baba is used in Urdu for ‘father,’ the same as Abba, while in Hindi it is used for ‘grandfather.’” He then goes on in that vein for the next 13 lines, citing how some words mean one thing in Urdu but quite another in Arabic, from which Urdu borrowed them. Apparently, Dr. Narang totally failed to comprehend (afham) Saussure’s radical notion that different languages divide the world differently—even after Belsey further explained it by citing examples given by Culler and Hjelmslev. (A correct example for Urdu readers would have been how Urdu divides the world of “parents’ siblings” into chacha,phuphi, mamun, and khala, while English divides the same world into “Uncle” and “Aunt.”) 


Does English divide the world of 'parent's siblings' into just 'Uncle' and 'Aunt'? Old English didn't. Some local dialects don't. Under primogeniture, there was a sharp distinction between paternal and maternal siblings. Uncle, with its additional meaning of a kindly and disinterested benefactor, derived from maternal Uncle. One did not address the head of one's paternal family as 'Uncle'. It was too familiar and intimate. The cadet branch referred to the head of the family by his territorial Title or other honorific. The word Aunt was originally for the father's sister and has a suggestion of authority rather than intimate friendliness. Aunts, in P.G. Woodhouse or Saki, are figures of barely disguised terror and arbitrary authority. These sorts of distinction tended to get erased only when more and more people either postponed marriage or remained celibate- thus both inheritance and affectionate intimacy from either paternal or the maternal side became increasingly likely. Interestingly, in urbanized India many people of my generation and, certainly, our grown up children, never learned all the vernacular kinship terms. Everybody is just Uncleji or Auntyji. This does not mean that the concept underlying older kinship terms has faded. If someone you know is influential and  you mention 'he is my Uncle' you will be quick to add the exact blood relationship and even take care to translate into Hindi or Bengali or whatever so that the other person gets the point. Unless, of course, you are already very successful in which case you just smile and leave it at that.
Similarly, both French and English had a way of distinguishing  between the animal and its meat. There were different words for the two different concepts. The shepherd never uses the same word for the animal he looks after and its meat. In England, at a certain point, the sheep was reared for its wool and so the distinction had economic importance whereas this was not the case in France.

My point here is that Ferdinand de Soo-Soo did not have 'a radical notion that different languages divide the world differently'. Soo-Soo had a stupid notion. Well, to be fair, a lot of smart people say stupid things from time to time. Nevertheless, Structuralism is stupid. Post Structuralism is stupidity piled on stupidity.
Narang, as a Professor, was obliged to touch base with that shite because it was fashionable shite twenty or thirty years ago. He invokes 'faux amis' in the wrong context but every word, every sentence in Post Modern lit crit shite is a sort of false friend of something which does have meaning and even a sort of rigour and intellectual integrity in another context. Bhinder has truly fed on that shite. Naim refuses to admit that he is championing an illiterate, IslamoTrotskyite, nutjob with a bizarre world-view, simply so as to get in a dig at a fellow academic as over-rated and intellectually vacuous as himself.


Prof. Naim- having, in an utterly cynical and self-serving manner, drawn so extensively on the ravings of the egregious Bhinder- concludes by saying- 'Dr. Gopi Chand Narang is presently a “Member, Advisory Committee on Culture, government of India,” which is symptomatic of the bigger, truly serious issue: the utterly cynical and self-serving attitude of a great many people who walk the corridors of power in New Delhi, wearing cloaks labelled “Culture” and “Education” and bartering favours among themselves. The big issue is not the individual, who did what he considered was necessary in order to prosper in Indian academia and win patronage from politicians. Let us also not forget that it was the literati of India who chose Dr. Narang (who is not the sort of Leftie nutjob who might suddenly endorse Narendra Modi) to preside at the Sahitya Akademi, over Mahashweta Devi, one of India’s most honest and courageous writers (who is the sort of Leftie nutjob who might suddenly endorse Narendra Modi). The rot has settled deep and at many places, and unless more people begin to protest, challenge, and condemn publicly what they shake their heads over privately, nothing much is going to change in Education and Culture.' But from whence stems this rot? Is it not from the ludicrous notion that Urdu is an Academic subject like Physics? Urdu Credentialism leads to Urdu Academic Careerism. Naturally, this leads to a corrupt nexus with the Govt. 

I have said this before and, because I too am a senile old coot, no doubt I will say this again
 Literature should not be taught in the Academy any more than Love should be sought in the Brothel.


Bhinder concludes his comment on Naim's article thus-  'I believe that not a single book of an international caliber has been written in Urdu for more than last eighty years (800 years surely? Why is this worthless language being taught at Uni?). If we have authentic writers to quote, why do we (what's with this we stuff? Not everybody is a Credentializing cretin. Some of us got real jobs, mate) still need to give a reference of Edward Said, Michel Foucault, Frantz Fanon, Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, and Louis Althusser and so on when a question of imperialism, criticism, culture and other social sciences is being answered? Because from the core of our heart we are certain there is no original writer in Urdu who could independently reflect upon the real situation (real? As in billions of people being killed and nobody noticing or real as in Dr. A.Q. Khan, not people like Abdus Salam, being the greatest Pakistani Scientist?) . As a representative and part of posterity I must resist these kinds of harmful tendencies to prosper any longer, literature serves the people not a single individual. Condemning such acts candidly, at present, it seems to me utterly rationale to eradicate all the unethical and unliterary approaches inherent in Urdu literature and criticism. I understand that the corruption in the Urdu literary world is just the super-structural expression of the underlying contradictions rooted deep in the ideological as well as corrupt capitalist structure that has besieged the literary world, where notorious desire are free to flourish. However, it is a time to explicitly condemn these kinds of absurdities showing some decency, rather than be a part of immoralities. Certainly, the future of Urdu language and literature cannot be left on the mercy of a hostile plagiarist or his dishonest supporters.'


The truth, Bhinder Sahib, is that Credentialism- the business of getting degrees and then higher degrees- not Capitalism, destroyed the Academy. Urdu is alive and well and continues to be nourished by Islamic thought as well as Spiritual, Humanitarian and Progressive Movements which have derived support and inspiration from Ethical and Empathic Religion. 

Naim and Narang have produced good quality- or at least widely available- textual work and if they make it available for free through the Internet then good luck to them. It is a shame that some Professors felt obliged to 'engage' with worthless witless Eurocentric drivel but the blame for that belongs to the prestige that once accrued to a Nineteenth Century philology which, however foolish its hermeneutics, did have a certain dogged quality which, in a narrow sense, amounted to a sort of diligence and integrity. Those days are long gone. Edward Said pointed out, in the late Sixties, that the steep fall in the caliber of Professors of Literature was both a product as well as the cause of the idiocy of the students. He  tells us that he felt increasingly obliged to point out to his Post Graduate Students that Jonathan Swift's 'Gulliver's travels' was a work of satire. Thus they should not eat shit. They would not get higher marks if they stirred a turd into their Coco Pops. They must not go complaining to Daddy and Mummy that the Professor made us read this, like, book? And the book said we should eat shit and then I did and it upset my tummy and now the Professor wont even give me an A minus even though I really did eat a whole heap of shit like what that author dude said. And like that author dude was a Doctor, yeah? That's his name Dr. Jonathan Swift and like he wrote in his book about how we should eat shit and  and and could we just sue the University already? I mean the Jury is bound to give me a real big settlement and like I'll open a for profit University with the money and call it something catchy like Apollo...'

Update-
This is a You Tube video of Bhinder. I guess I gave Birmingham Uni a bum rap. The guy is crazier in Urdu than English. Prof. Naim must be so proud.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Check out Bhinder's video on You Tube. He goes from Kant and Hegel to Jews and Christians are to blame for everything in five minutes flat.

windwheel said...

Thanks for the tip. This guy is seriously meshugganah. All he needs is a Hitler tache.

Anonymous said...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ft0sYRwBNIQ