At Samode Palace, as an absolutely insane Indian wedding gears up.

There’s so much, and I know so little.

Even if I knew somewhat more, I’d venture little, because there’s so much to know.

The main impression is the impossible city streets, whose cows motorbikes kiosks trucks pedestrians ruts and speedbumps our driver honks/slices through at an impossible speed. There are no traffic lights, no stop or speed signs. Small children on bikes carry in one hand whirls of cotton candy for sale. The other hand steers through the chaos. Piles of old tires, and piles of old garbage, line the road; half-built houses and mounds of stone lie with them. Everyone seems to be trying to mend the world one burdensome inch at a time – transferring this stone to that place, herding three goats some steps along the road, flicking a shop’s scarves to make them a little more noticeable. The view is at once frenzied and sisyphean.

… at our hotel in Fort Nagaur.

[New French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal] started [as Education Minister] last summer by declaring that “the abaya can no longer be worn in schools.”

His order, which applies to public middle and high schools, banished the loosefitting full-length robe worn by some Muslim students and ignited another storm over French identity. In line with the French commitment to “laïcité,” or roughly secularism, “You should not be able to distinguish or identify the students’ religion by looking at them,” Mr. Attal said.

I told this crowd of Indian students to flash the peace sign. They did that AND gave out a big group cheer.

In Jaisalmer. India continues making me love her.

… a swimming hole.

Blue City, Jodhpur.

… but UD had had enough climbing, so she sat in a dusty nook and watched this woman lug stones on her head. In seconds, she and two other women put down their work and excitedly gazed at UD and came over and talked to her, though she and the women shared not one word in any language.

Americans are attractive exotics round these parts, and UD was several times at the fort stopped by families who asked if they could take her picture. Whole families crammed into the picture, arms around UD…

Who is UD, she thought, as exuberant, curious people rushed her, that Indians art mindful of her?

To the three ladies’ manifest questionings, UD passed her hand against her forehead: I stopped walking because I am tired. Yes, yes, they signaled, and then talked with me some more. Eventually I closed my eyes and leaned against the pillar, and they went back to work.

A man seeing me with my eyes closed approached. “Are you ok?” “Just waiting for my husband; thank you for asking,” and he smiled the sweetest smile.

The acoustics were good, and one of the ladies was singing; so UD sang. She sang Ella Fitzgerald’s version of Mister Paganini; she sang Sarah Vaughan’s version of Speak Low. She sang – natch – Music For A While. The ladies seemed to like all of this, though it sounded not at all like their songs.

On our balcony.

… who look like they’ve stepped out of the pages of Vogue.

An understandable error! Most people cannot comprehend/believe that one university’s endowment is over fifty billion dollars; and Harvard will be at one hundred billion before you know it, which will be that much harder to assimilate as a reality.

Even a New York Times opinion writer (plus, UD assumes, a bunch of editors who reviewed her column) finds herself rendering a reasonably large endowment as an amount in the hundreds of millions, rather than as an amount exceeding the GDP of 120 nations.

Here’s a simple trick to help you remember: Just repeat aloud ten times FIFTY BILL FIFTY BILL with a stress on the b.

… on all of whose surfaces appear the very greatest art the world has ever known.

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La Kid and Mr UD gesticulate down the street from the museum.

 … Harvard, which compels its undergraduates to master expository writing in their freshman year, cannot find the language to defend itself [in its letter about Claudine Gray’s resignation]. The corporation does not apologize or explain. Instead, it throws up its hands in prayer: “May our community, with its long history of rising through change and through storm, find new ways to meet those challenges together, and to affirm Harvard’s commitment to generating knowledge, pursuing truth and contributing through scholarship and education to a better world.”

The clouds of mystification gather early. Can a nearly 400-year-old entity that began as a seminary for young Protestant men and grew into a global educational brand with a $50 billion endowment be said in any meaningful sense to constitute a community? The sentence then succumbs to a storm of clattering prose and conceptual incoherence. It’s hard to know just what or how many things Harvard is committed to, or what new ways of affirming that commitment might be found.

Even if one accepts that Gay’s transgressions are relatively trivial in themselves, the sheer number of citation errors is deeply troubling. As of this writing, dozens upon dozens of instances of “improper citation” across her published work indicate a systematic problem with the basics of academic writing. Perhaps this really does not rise to the level of research misconduct, but it constitutes strong evidence that the former president of Harvard struggles to cite properly.

Aleksandar Stević

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Click on this post’s category – PLAGIARISM – to see all of these observations, and more, expanded upon over many years.