Andrei Platonov's novel Happy Moscow (Schastlivaia Moskva) was long in the writing: from 1932 his notebooks were to be filled with fitful ideas of plot and characterisation for a work that was to obsess him for several more years, and in 1933, he finished the first six chapters. What we now know as Happy Moscow may, in fact, have been intended as part of a longer work, Journey from Leningrad to Moscow in 1937 (Puteshestvie iz Leningrada v Moskvu v 1937 godu), yet despite contracts with leading publishers, he never fulfilled his plans; in the end, only the second chapter of Happy Moscow was published, in the form of a short story. Whether the novel's ambitious conception was ultimately beyond realisation (unlikely from the author of Chevengur (Chevengur)), whether other projects (such as Takyr (Takyr) and Soul (Dzhan), the works relating to Platonov's visits to Turkmenistan in 1934 and 1935) took priority, or whether aesthetic considerations rendered the work obsolete and even dangerous (the stories collected in the 1937 volume The River Potudan (Reka Potudan') are altogether more deferential to Socialist Realism), by the time Platonov's son was arrested in 1938, work on the novel had been resolutely abandoned. Eventually published for the first time only in 1991, Happy Moscow has since become one of Platonov's most commented-upon works.

Economic Structure and External Orientation

Pakistan, like many other developing economies, is actively pursuing a policy of enhancing regional economic cooperation. Of particular interest to Pakistan are the South and East Asian economies. Pakistan is a signatory to the South Asian Free Trade Area (SAFTA), which came into force in July 2006. Pakistan developed its Strategic Vision East Asia initiative in 2003, which aims to stimulate trade and investment ties with South and East Asia. These ties are currently weak but have considerable potential for growth.

In view of the growing trend toward regionalism, it is imperative for Pakistan to solidify its economic relations especially with the South Asian and East Asian countries. The South Asian developing economies are opening up with a view to accelerating their economic growth through greater trade and investment. Against this backdrop, this country paper provides a comprehensive review of economic structure in Pakistan with particular emphasis on trade, investment, and potential for regional cooperation. The rest of this chapter reviews the economic structure and external orientation of Pakistan's economy. This paper (i) discusses Pakistan's foreign direct investment (FDI) regime and policies; (ii) discusses and analyses merchandise trade policies with emphasis on East and South Asia; (iii) highlights infrastructure and trade administration issues; (iv) describes the service sector trade; and (v) concludes the discussion and spells out some policy implications.

1

Soviet ‘Great Style’ is primarily associated with the ‘grand’ genre forms. In painting, this means ceremonial portraits and battle scenes; in music, it means opera, oratorios, cantatas, symphonies; in city planning, architectural complexes; in prose, novels; and in poetry, the epic poem. As a sort of narrative in verse, the epic poem, like operas and programmatic music, was narrative in form, and the connection to heroic style made it the embodiment of ‘epic thinking’, and made it especially close to the Socialist Realist aesthetic-much closer than lyric poetry, and it was no coincidence that the first glimmers of the thaw in Soviet literature were connected precisely to the ‘discussion about lyric poetry’. The genre hierarchy in Stalinism can infallibly be reconstructed according to the preferences in awarding the Stalin Prizes (Stalin, as is well known, personally participated in distributing these prizes). Thus, in the period spanning 1934 to 1952, there was not a single year in which a Stalin Prize for poetry was not conferred on an epic poem (the others were for poem cycles, anthologies of poetry, lyrics of popular songs, and translations of poetry).

Arun Kumar Das Gupta was born in Kolkata on 14 June 1932. After attending the Scottish Church Collegiate School, he proceeded to Presidency College, Kolkata, and graduated with first class Honours in English in 1951. As an exceptionally gifted and committed student, protégé of the legendary Professor Tarak Nath Sen, he had already made his entrée into the academic circle that would virtually be identified with him one day.

After passing through Calcutta University and Wadham College, Oxford, the young Arun Kumar took up employment under the West Bengal Government and was sent to teach English at the Bengal Engineering College, Shibpur. But he soon found his way to Presidency College, to start a career matched by few others even in that venerable institution.

For Presidency, it was the best of all times that soon became the worst of all times. Never, perhaps, had it boasted more august faculty, greater social recognition or, as the future would show, a more brilliant body of students. It was a lively, dedicated, empowering, but demanding, exclusive, even forbidding world. This may not be unrelated to the turmoil that descended on it from the mid-1960s, when it became a seed-bed of violent leftist politics. The Naxalite movement was itself the outcome of decades of unrest and deprivation, whose epicentre was the partition of Bengal at the time of India's independence.

This history is germane to an account of Professor Das Gupta's career, as it meant he had to reorient his approach to literature and his identity as an academic.

Enemies of the early modern theatre never tired of recalling that the Greeks called stage actors hypocrites. One especially truculent reminder came from Isaac Bargrave, chaplain to Prince Charles and pastor of St Margaret's at Westminster. In A Sermon against Selfe Policy, Preached at Whitehall in Lent 1621, Bargrave declared:

Radical Protestant polemics of early modern England routinely likened the hypocrisy of stage players to the mummery of the Catholic priest, the disguises and forged miracles of the Jesuit, and the Machiavellian dissimulation of the politic Spaniard. It was even suggested in one pamphlet that the Jesuits' investment in hypocrisy did not make market sense. This was John Gee in New Shreds of the Old Snare (1624):

The only Welshman to occupy 10 Downing Street, David Lloyd George, stood well above his contemporaries as the most dominant figure in British politics in the first quarter of the twentieth century. He was unconventional in behavior for he did not fit in any obvious category. One biographer described him as a “rogue elephant among British prime ministers” and there was undoubtedly a highly adventuresome, almost buccaneering quality about him. He seemed larger than life, with political abilities that entranced and dazzled as well as deep failings that aroused controversy and outrage. No one, it seems, can be entirely neutral on the subject of Lloyd George. He is, as sometimes happens, a historical character who polarizes opinion. Regardless of how he is viewed, he is undeniably one of the most interesting and colorful politicians of the last century. In comparing the two best-known war leaders of his era, Lord Beaverbrook remarked that “Churchill was perhaps the greater man but Lloyd George was more fun.”

The length, diversity and controversial nature of Lloyd George's political career explains why he continues to be the object of scrutiny and review. The number of biographies or monographs dealing with aspects of his political career are so numerous that they would easily fill a volume. Yet, curiously enough, his work between 1916 and 1918, although invariably praised by recent scholars, has generally received only superficial investigation.

Asia, a pivotal region in the world economy, is at an important cross-road in its development path. Having successfully integrated into the global economy over the last five decades through outward-oriented development strategies, the region has embarked on a process of closer regional cooperation and integration. Several factors–the spread of production networks, improvements in infrastructure, falling trade barriers, and technological progress–have spurred the process. One key challenge for an interdependent Asia remains how to strengthen and spread the benefits of the process of regional cooperation and integration. An essential element is effective national strategies for regional cooperation and integration.

The way Asian economies develop and implement effective approaches to regional cooperation and integration is insufficiently understood. Using a set of country cases based on a similar framework, the study examines how each country's integration with its neighbors and more distant regional economies might be improved. Five of these cases are from South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka) and three are from East Asia (the People's Republic of China, Thailand, and Singapore). The country cases illustrate the diversity of Asian development experience and offer lessons for other countries and regions interested in developing national strategies to foster regional integration.

The study indicates four important lessons: (i) integrate with a large neighboring economy, (ii) emphasize market orientation in regional strategy, (iii) tailor the policy mix to fit national circumstances, and (iv) involve the private sector in developing regional strategy.

Born into a wealthy Edinburgh family, Fraser travelled in the East for both business and pleasure. Connected with India through his brother who was an employee of the East India Company, in 1821 he visited Persia on the way home to England. Arriving in Isfahan he proceeded to Meshed with the intention of continuing to Bukhara, but was prevented from doing so by the political situation in Central Asia. Instead he journeyed along the Caspian shores, thence from Tabriz to Baghdad via Kurdistan. These journeys provided material for two books of travel: Narrative of a Journey into Khorasan in the Years 1821 and 1822 (1825) and Travels and Adventures in the Persian Provinces on the Southern Banks of the Caspian Sea (1826). Fraser returned to Persia a decade later to gather political intelligence, publishing A Winter's Journey from Constantinople to Tehran in 1838, and Travels in Kurdistan, Mesopotamia etc in 1840. George. N. Curzon praised Fraser for his ‘admirable books of travel’ that displayed ‘broad acquaintance with and faithful portraiture of every aspect of modern Persian life’ (1892: 1. 22, 24). However, in pointing out the critical view he took of the Qajars, especially the Princes he met on his journeys through the Caspian region, Denis Wright counts Fraser an early exponent of the ‘jaundiced view of the Persians [which] helped to sow seeds of resentment and misunderstanding between the two countries’ (1977: 154).

Fantasy Feasts; or, The Divine Irreference of Images

In a review essay published several years ago in the London Review of Books, Sheila Fitzpatrick, the premier historian specialising in Stalinism, declared, ‘While the Soviet regime may be said to have discouraged consumerism by keeping goods scarce, it was not ideologically on the side of asceticism. On the contrary, future socialism was always conceived in terms of plenty; according to the regime's Socialist Realist perception of the world, the meager supply of goods in the present was only a harbinger of the abundance to come.’ Like the Utopia of universal egalitarian happiness, however, abundance remained in the ever-receding radiant future, rendering imposed asceticism an empirical reality for the overwhelming majority throughout the Soviet era. That prolonged deferral is eloquently signaled by the ubiquitous slogan K kommunizmu! as well as by K izobiliiu! (‘Towards Abundance!’), the title of the introduction to the 1953 edition of A Book of Tasty and Healthy Food/Kniga o vkusnoi i zdorovoi pishche, and countless other instances of ‘K + x’, which all invoked the Soviet rhetoric of ‘en route to’, ‘moving towards’, and similar circumlocutions that for more than six decades promised without delivering.

A strong and responsible opposition is a prerequisite to the viable functioning of parliamentary democracy, which is based on a party system. Benjamin Disraeli noted as far back as 1844 that ‘no government can be long secure without a formidable opposition’. The role of the opposition in a parliamentary system of government should be not just to act as a ‘government-in-waiting’, but also check any arbitrary tendencies of the government in power. An effective opposition performs a restraining role vis-à-vis the party in power, preventing it from transgressing its functional limits and simultaneously posing a constant challenge by promising a practical alternative. What should be emphasized is that the opposition should be a responsible one to be truly effective. In some well organized democracies, the role of the opposition is sometimes reduced to a mere tokenism as a result of long-term dominance by a single party. In others, particularly in post-colonial Third World states with long legacies of authoritarian rule, the opposition is deliberately kept weak by the dominant party, which perpetuates its power through unfair means while keeping up a semblance of electoral rule. Historically, parliamentary opposition has appeared to function better in systems where there are two major parties. In multiple party states, there may be more than one opposition party, and such parties may have little in common and therefore, a minimal desire to unite. When coalitions occur, these could prove fragile because of different aims and objectives of the constituent parties.

Thomas emerged from humble origins to become in 1930 the first Westerner to cross the Empty Quarter in Arabia. He fought on the Western Front in 1914–15 and survived. Transferred to Mesopotamia in the last two years of the war he caught the eye of Arnold Talbot Wilson, then acting civil commissioner in the Persian Gulf. Wilson – to whom he dedicated Arabia Felix – was the inspiration behind his later travels in Arabia. As a traveller Thomas acted on his own initiative, dressed like the locals, and spoke the native tongue. Working in the sultanate of Oman he was able to make his extensive journeys into the interior of Oman ‘that contributed substantially to the geographical and ethnological knowledge of the region’ (DNB). Thomas sustained a successful career as a colonial officer: he was later a public relations officer in Bahrain, 1942–3, and Director of the Middle East Centre for Arabic Studies.

From:

Arabia Felix (1938)

The issue as to who was the ‘real’ Bedouin and what his racial characteristics were exercised a number of European travellers such as Burton. The ethnological ‘research’ of skull-measuring which Thomas details in the following extract from Arabia Felix unfortunately cannot be disconnected from the practice of the pseudo-science pursued in Nazi Germany at almost the same time. But the piece also highlights interesting cultural differences between the African slaves and their Omani masters.

Stanley Cavell has repeatedly affirmed that in the example and teaching of John Austin he found his philosophical voice or “the track of it” and that this new-found voice was itself pitched toward “[bringing] the human voice back into philosophy.” Drawn down this path in his philosophical calling, Cavell soon found himself attracted to a body of romantic literature, in the breath of whose being he, in turn, heard an aspiration toward “the recovery of the (of my) (ordinary) (human) voice.” Cavell's “sense that the voice [had] become lost in thought” eventually led to his remarkable contention that the splendors of especially the female voice in opera perform a fervent act of thinking, whose provoking condition is the Emersonian difference between “the world I converse with in the city and the farms…[and] the world I think,” and whose plight is to be “stretched” between the (actual) world from which one is “to be seen” standing amid all our sad circumstance and the other (perfectionist) world “from which to be heard” and “to which one releases or abandons one's spirit.” On the strength of his long investment in the thinking Emerson preaches and practices as an “abandonment of and to language and the world,” Cavell dares to call opera an arena of thoughtful struggle where we “[stop] to think (say not for action but for passion), as if to let our needs recognize what they need,” and where “the most forbearing [and perhaps the “most thoughtful”] act of thinking…is to let true need, say desire be manifest and be obeyed.”