Monday 28th July 2025
Blog Page 288

Arrogant, Offensive Truth Twisters: Don’t cry for me, Britannia

Fionn McFadden
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Arrogant, Offensive Truth Twisters: Don’t cry for me, Britannia

“Right guys, place your bets, how long do you think it’ll take Fiónn to become a Tory?”

It was a cold January morning in my year 13 Spanish class. My Sixth Form was buzzing as it was the fateful day that Oxford decisions were being released, and I was one of the lucky ones. My Spanish teacher allowed for a gleeful five minutes at the start to break the good news- that was when my friend jokingly piped up with the proposition that attending the alma mater of our incumbent Prime Minister would drive me to abandon my long-held reputation in my school as the local commie. My teacher even joined in, giving it two terms. 

Anyone who knows me knows that you can’t get through a conversation without a mention of my ingrained dislike of the Conservative Party. It’s something that is so entrenched inside of my philosophy, influenced by both my upbringing and my own personal experiences. Growing up with two Northern Irish Catholic parents who worked in universities under the coalition, combined with a large extended family full of doctors, academics and public servants, socialist principles were always prominent. I don’t think I could have turned out any other way. 

Hence why it is no surprise that I’ve proudly held Labour Party membership since the age of fourteen. Whilst it is by no means a perfect party, I joined in the belief that it was the party which truly wanted to make Britain a country that worked for everyone. It is the party that passed the Race Relations Act, the Abortion Act, the Equal Pay Act, that decriminalised homosexuality, repealed Section 28 and pioneered devolution. It is a party that has always aspired to create a better Britain, one with the interests of ordinary people at its heart.

And I was reminded of these reasons when tuning in to a highly anticipated round of Prime Minister’s Questions on the 5th January 2022, straight off the back of the energy crisis and the discovery of a series of lockdown parties that took place on the property of the British executive. With Keir Starmer in isolation, a ferocious Angela Rayner stepped up and rightly tore into Boris Johnson, laying out his government’s myriad of failures, lies and incompetence in a spectacular fashion. You could hear it in her voice: she wasn’t doing this to grab headlines, promote corporate interests, or secure support from some self-indulgent, merciless autocrat. Her anger came from her care for the British people: how their own government was stabbing them in their backs whilst laughing in their face. As she said in a tweet, her responses showed the benchmark of a good politician: integrity, honesty and decency. Antithetical to the practises, ideology and visions of the Conservatives. That is a fact. 

Widespread, bi-partisan fury at the string of scandals gripping Downing Street in the last few months is evidently justified. NHS staff doing exhausting 12 hour shifts, people having to say goodbye to their loved ones over Zoom, small business owners watching their life’s work crumble before their very eyes, all whilst those who set their rules laughed, drank and danced the night away, trampling the British peoples’ trust and sacrifices whilst doing so. They continued laughing as they attempted to cover them up, jousting amongst themselves as if they were the administrators of some sup-par university meme page. It’s infuriating. It’s disgusting. It’s a national disgrace. But one thing it certainly isn’t, is a surprise. 

Let’s focus on the Crony-in-Chief himself, Boris Johnson. It’s no secret that the man in charge of making the most important decisions in this country has a somewhat loose relationship not just with the truth, but with standards of decent human behaviour. As a journalist and editor for the Spectator, he repeatedly lied, and not only permitted grotesquely offensive material to be published, such as the racism of Taki Theodoracopulos, but actually authored a good chunk of it himself. I wonder what he would think of the ‘tank topped bum boy’ writing this article, breathing the same Balliol air that he so mightily did all those years ago? Of course, too, who could forget that £350 million lie plastered on the side of the red bus that drove Britain off of the Brexit cliff, with him in the driver’s seat? His branding of Muslim women wearing the burqa as ‘letterboxes’? His referral to Emily Thornberry as “Lady Nugee”? His grand proclamation that inequality is “essential”? His description of a salary of £250,000 per annum as ‘chicken feed’? And more recently, on top of his apparently forgetful parties, his awarding of PPE contracts to his close mates, and his call to let the bodies ‘pile high in their thousands’? I forgive you if you in fact forgot all of this, since it seems Johnson himself has a hard time doing so. The worst thing is, I could go on, though I don’t think the good editors of Cherwell deserve that. 

Let me spell out some facts here, which as we’ve seen is a concept with which Johnson is vehemently unfamiliar. He is not ‘Boris’, or ‘Bojo’, or the man who brought bikes to London.  He is not some asinine, harmless caricature of a bumbling yet loveable politician, who we can all raise a glass to at Port and Policy. He is a deeply insidious, dangerous, lying, incompetent, amoral, elitist, discriminatory crook, who does not deserve to lick the floors of Parliament, let alone command it. He is responsible for some of the biggest failures this country has seen in centuries, the COVID-19 pandemic serving as a prime example. And no, he did not do his best. Boris Johnson does not have a ‘best’. At every twist and turn in his shambolic career, he has proven himself as someone incapable and undeserving of representing the people of this nation. Nevertheless, they voted for him. They followed his lead in the Brexit referendum, and they voted for him as an MP, as Mayor of London, and as Prime Minister in a landslide majority in 2019. If you ticked blue for any of those elections, there’s a simple message for you too. You can’t get angry about a wholly predictable breach of COVID-19 regulations, when you were so comfortable with sexism, racism, islamophobia, homophobia, elitism and cronyism, and all the other acts he and his party have done. Reprehensible people tend to continue to do reprehensible things if they know they can get away with it. And that is why Johnson is not resigning- he knows he will get away with it. 

Luckily for me, my Spanish class or teacher won’t be seeing a penny, since every day I spend in the institution that has bred, and continues to breed, so many people like Boris Johnson confirms that I made the right decision aged fourteen, as did my parents and grandparents who have proudly never given a single penny or vote to the band of cronies. For all Labour’s downfalls, the one thing the party has today is decency and respect for the British people. I’m proud to say that I haven’t spent my days at University cosying up in the privileged bubble of OUCA, as I, like the government, dance and drink and laugh as the world crumbles for so many ordinary, decent people. Though No.10 must be proud, since it appears with the scandals of Michaelmas Term 2021 that disregard for the values of financial honesty and proper conduct is something which OUCA, too, appears to follow. 

So, Britain, spare me crocodile tears. Don’t act surprised and outraged when you knew this would happen. Next time, act. Or don’t! It’s your choice, but don’t you dare complain about the consequences. 

Image Credit: Annika Haas / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Hindi and Urdu: A language divided, or a shared history destroyed?

Krisha Hirani
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Hindi and Urdu: A language divided, or a shared history destroyed?

CW: Violence

I was in Tesco last week, looking at the tomatoes. A man to my right commented on the ripeness of the peppers. I made a good-humoured reply – the tomatoes weren’t pakka hua either. He told me my Urdu was good; I told him I was speaking Hindi.

With the regime of Hindutva and the increasing tension between India and Pakistan, it’s now more important than ever to examine the linguistic history of the two languages that embody one of the largest, bloodiest mass migrations of human history.

Hindustani is a Persian term meaning ‘land of the Indus (river)’. The term was used at certain points in history to refer to all of the Northern Indian subcontinent. It is also the name given to the Hindi-Urdu language. This is a pluri-centric language, meaning a single language of two different standard varieties, that arose from the Hindustani region. A native speaker will likely separate the two and assert whether they speak Hindi or Urdu based on their national identity; in India and Pakistan, language heavily denotes culture.

Hindustani, or Hindi, or Urdu, areis/are (an) Indo-Aryan language(s), descending from Sanskrit and its evolved Prakrit. Yes, the grammar in that sentence is as confused as I am.

Between the 7th and 13th centuries, the subcontinent was ruled heavily by Central Asian Turkish invaders, who brought with them the Persian language, religion, and literary traditions. The Persian language of the elite and the Arabic of religion influenced the lay-person’s Prakrit and Hindustani was born in Delhi.

When the Mughal Empire was established in 1526, uniting most of the subcontinent, Hindustani became the lingua franca. The degree of influence that Arabic and Persian had over the language varied between local areas. Muslim communities grew to write in the Perso-Arabic script, nastaliq, whilst Hindu communities favoured the devanagari, derived from Sanskrit. By the end of the Mughal rule in the 18th century, Hindustani had replaced Persian amongst the society’s elite.

This was the period in which the literary language flourished, with the emergence of revered writers like Amir Khusrow and Surdas. The Persian variety of Hindustani came to be associated with fine art and literature, and this still holds true in culture today.

When the British colonised India, the language of the East India Company was chosen to be English and Hindustani, of the Persian variety. They gave it the name ‘Zaban-e-Urdu’, the ‘language of the [army] camp’ because it is said to have been created through communication between the Persian soldiers and the native merchants.

When the British made the official script the nastaliq, they established religious and linguistic borders between the population through the Hindi-Urdu controversy of 1867. They enforced this segregation 80 years before establishing the hard country border.

And so, even before the country was split, the tongue was split.

Hindustani, alongside an estimated two million people, became caught in the crossfire of Partition. Nationalist ideologies encouraged linguistic purism, with India’s Hindi purging itself of Perso-Arabic influence and Pakistan’s Urdu purging itself of Sanskrit (in the standard written form at least).

In 1973, The New York Times wrote about how a ‘Decline of Urdu [is] Feared in India’, recognising the ‘political and religious ties’ of the language to an Islamic Pakistan. The article reported on the politicisation of the language in post-Partition India. It ends on a quote from Professor Anjum stating that the British “resorted to every device that could create a gulf between the Hindus and Muslims”, not even sparing language in their attack.

The decrease in the prevalence of Urdu persists to this day. Between 2001 and 2011, Indian census reports show a further decline in Urdu speakers with less than 4.2% claiming it as their mother tongue.

The article from The New York Times  fearing a rise in ‘intolerance’, for lack of a better word, still rings true. The Islamophobic shunning of the language is reflective of the political stance India takes towards its Muslim population and neighbours.

It is strange to think that there are fewer and fewer people in the Indian subcontinent who could read and understand the literature that traces India and Pakistan’s shared history. Take for example the Urdu poetry of Bismil Azimabadi, whose Sarfaroshi Ki Tamanna (1921) became a war cry for Independence. The poem reflects on the wake of British atrocities, one of the most painful of which was the Jallianwala Bhaga massacre of 1917. During the Jallianwala Bhaga massacre, Colonel Reginald Dyer emptied 1,600 rounds of ammunition into an unarmed congregation.

The poem is an ode to young freedom fighters, often associated with those belonging to the inter-war period, like Ram Prasad Bismil and Bhagat Singh. Indeed, Ram Prasad Bismil sung the poem in the gallows on 19 December 1927, before being hanged for mutiny. It is written as a gazal, a Persian poetic form, and uses heavily Persianized vocabulary, including the phrase ‘shaheed-e-mulk-o-millat’ to praise the country as a ‘nation of martyrs’.

I could not understand it without a translation.

I wonder whether India’s government, with its growing intolerance, would still claim it as a patriotic poem.

This said, it should be noted that language does not immediately correspond to religion. Not all Muslims in the subcontinent speak Urdu. Not all Hindus speak Hindi. But the variations of the language that is spoken does suggest the cultural and religious identity of the speaker. An Urdu speaker would identify more greatly with Islamic and Persian heritage and literary traditions than the Hindu Sanskrit traditions of Hindi.

Urdu is not the Pakistani language, nor is Hindi the Indian. Urdu and English are the official languages of Pakistan, but only 8% of the population claim to be native speakers of Urdu. In fact, Punjabi is much more widely spoken across the country. Hindi and English are the official languages of India, but each state and union territory is free to choose their own official language; eight have chosen Urdu.

What I hope to bring to the forefront here — and what I’ve been thinking about since meeting that man in Tesco — is how much Hindi and Urdu appear to me as conjoined twins. Neither would exist without this incredible fusion of Persian, Arabic, and Sanskrit. Both languages exist in a spectrum with the ‘shudh’ (pure) Hindi and Urdu existing on the extreme ends, and the colloquial in the mutually intelligible centre. They have the same beating heart. To separate the twins would be a major surgical operation, through which both countries would lose an incredible amount of their shared history.

In terms of script, what haunts me is that the middle ground might be the English transliteration. This would be one way that the Urdu and Hindi literate, with their different scripts, could communicate by the written word. Maybe even language cannot heal from colonial trauma.

I hope to meet that man again in Tesco. Maybe we will talk about the ripeness of the tomatoes and peppers again, but I know for sure that I will think twice about being so quick to assert my Hindi linguistic identity, as though it proves my Indian cultural identity.

As the smoke burns down to my fingers

Alex Bridges
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As the smoke burns down to my fingers

CW: mild references to self-harm and body horror

Cinders, smoulders, ruin on earth

Like throats that grab me by the – wait – 

And haul me slow through rough and tar 

And scratch me flying up and up,

(Easy now, cantabile)

Singing night.

Whirling day, birth of thought

That far outstretch this meagre meet

Of eyes that swim and fill with ash

To blink a bloodshot world away

And drink in rough, and burn, and heat

Until she comes to kiss the dark.

I’d go gladly, by the end.

Artwork: Ben Beechener

Reading for pleasure: Unrealistic expectations

Antara Singh
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Reading for pleasure: Unrealistic expectations

Since I started secondary school, reading for pleasure kept eluding me. Or maybe I was avoiding it. As a hobby, reading should be enjoyable. But for me, until very recently, reading was becoming less and less of a hobby. After always having to read for a purpose – the purpose of turning reading into something else (usually something useful or productive) – it has become so difficult to really sit down and get lost in a book. This realisation only came to me near the end of last year, when picking up a book became a chore because I could only associate it with work. 

There used to be three main reasons as to why I would read: firstly, for educational purposes, and as a historian, I can’t avoid this. I didn’t feel like I was even keeping up with the bare minimum of reading for my degree, and I was crossing off hardly any books on those ludicrously long reading lists. How could I allow myself the luxury of reading something for fun? 

Then there were the books I would read to fulfill the arbitrarily high Goodreads challenge that I would set for myself every year, often short, easy reads which I wouldn’t even digest properly. I read some books that, looking back on it, I might have really enjoyed, had I not zoomed through them in order to get my reading progress bar to move forwards (and for Goodreads to say ’12 books behind your goal’ rather than 13). 

And thirdly, and perhaps the most stupid category, were the books that I read to seem intellectual, when in reality I had absolutely no idea what Rousseau or Seneca or whoever were going on about. It felt like my time was limited by some abstract, unrealistic demands, and when I wanted to relax, reading would not be my preferred method because I no longer associated it with enjoyment. Of course, occasionally I enjoyed some of these reads, but enjoyment was never the primary purpose; either I read because I was obliged to, or for the sake of seeming ‘well-read’. 

So after having come to this rather depressing conclusion: that I was deriving virtually no pleasure from reading, I set myself a new challenge at the beginning of the holidays: to read books for fun. But given that this was not something I had done before, I wasn’t sure what I enjoyed (did I really enjoy that book or did I just say I did because that’s what I’m supposed to say?). And so, I turned to friends and family, hoping that we had similar enough taste for me to enjoy their recommendations. 

By reading such a diversity of literature, I discovered the genres that I actually enjoyed. In particular, I dived into a lot of foreign literature (foreign by English standards), and I read many works by foreign authors about foreign countries, transporting me through the ages and across the world. 

Two books I particularly enjoyed were A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth and Autumn Light by Pico Iyer. A Suitable Boy was terrifying at first because of how long it was (over 1500 pages) – the fear of thick books is very real for me. But somehow, I managed to read it in a week. I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly I read this book, but it was unputdownable, even when the most mundane details of each character were being described. Autumn Light was much shorter but was also a very slow book: a memoir about facing aging and the death of loved ones, but simultaneously an ode to autumn in Japan. 

Of course, I still turn to terrible Netflix TV shows when I want to relax a bit, but I’m slowly beginning to turn to literature too, because now I read books that I know I will enjoy. And a lucky bonus from all of this is that since I’m actually reading books I enjoy, I’m no longer embarrassingly behind on my Goodreads challenge.

Image Credit: CC0 Public Domain // Max Pixel

Campaigners question potential government sale of £200m Oxford vaccine centre

Humza Jilani
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Campaigners question potential government sale of £200m Oxford vaccine centre

A vaccine centre in Harwell, near Oxford, has been put up for sale by the government, prompting questions from MPs and observers about the implications of such a move. The Vaccine Manufacturing Innovation Centre (VMIC) was at the heart of the government’s efforts to respond to future pandemics.

Creation of the VMIC began in 2018, when the government, in concert with the University of Oxford and other university and industry partners, announced plans for a state-backed entity to produce vaccines and manage pandemics. It was planned for completion in 2023, but progress sped up for a Spring 2022 opening amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Some campaigners have referred to the centre as a “crown jewel” and worry that privatizing the vaccine centre will stymie future vaccine manufacturing efforts. Some that have worked closely with the VMIC have said that it greatly accelerated Oxford’s vaccine programme and contributed to saving lives.

Government officials in support of the sale have said that additional investment is needed to complete the VMIC, which can come from private buyers instead of public coffers. Furthermore, the need for a state-backed vaccine manufacturing centre has gone down, as the private sector has shown its ability to quickly develop and distribute vaccines to the wider public.

The Financial Times reported that at least four companies have placed bids for the VMIC, including biotechnology company Oxford BioMedica, a Swiss healthcare manufacturer, and a Japanese conglomerate.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson told the House of Commons: “I think what we’re doing is investing hundreds of millions to make sure we have a dynamic vaccine industry. Clearly government needs to work hand in glove with the private sector as we have done.”

Image: Daniel Schludi

EU watchdog claims possible link between AstraZeneca and rare spinal condition

Humza Jilani
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EU watchdog claims possible link between AstraZeneca and rare spinal condition

The European Medicines Agency (EMA) has recommended mentioning a rare spinal inflammation called transverse myelitis (TM) as a possible, but very rare side effect of the AstraZeneca vaccine.

The EMA, the European Union’s drug watchdog, is weighing a warning label mandate on AstraZeneca jabs, claiming that research suggests a “reasonable possibility” that the vaccine may have resulted in the spinal condition on rare occasions. It is weighing a similar warning for the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

According to the EMA, TM is a rare neurological condition, which can cause weakness in arms or legs, numbness, tingling, pain or loss of pain sensation and problems with bowel and bladder function.  

It concluded that “a causal relationship between these two vaccines and transverse myelitis is at least a reasonable possibility.” However, it said the “benefit-risk profile of both vaccines remains unchanged.”   

The EMA decision comes after AstraZeneca, the vaccine developed by research from the University of Oxford, has faced two years of setbacks in the European Union and the United States.  Production delays and lower efficacies than mRNA counterparts, left regulators in the United States, United Kingdom, and Europe hesitant to scale up its delivery.

To make up for waning demand in the industrialized West, AstraZeneca looked overseas, at less wealthy countries otherwise relegated to the bottom of the global vaccine queue. AstraZeneca announced that the vaccine they jointly produced with researchers at the University of Oxford had reached its 2 billionth jab on 15 November 2021.

Image: Mufid Majnun

Europe Underground: Questioning Otherness

Jacob Grech
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Europe Underground: Questioning Otherness

The late Franco Battiato was one of Italy’s greatest, but also most improbable, music stars. After decades experimenting with avant-garde styles, Battiato achieved major commercial success in the 1980s with albums that offered a unique interpretation of the cantautore (singer-songwriter) tradition, crafting lyrics rich in esoteric, philosophical and religious imagery. 

His best-known song, 1981’s dance floor hit Centro di gravità permanente, begins with a reference to Matteo Ricci, a 16th-century Jesuit scholar who travelled to the court of the Ming dynasty emperors. In Voglio vederti danzare, he sings about dervishes, hinting at his interest in Sufism.  ­­

Battiato went on to participate, together with fellow artist Alice, in the Eurovision Song Contest as an established musician – mainstream, but uncomfortably so. Although Eurovision is intended as a celebration of a shared Europeanness, it is also associated in the minds of many with musical reenactments of long-running conflicts between countries. 

Battiato’s entry, I treni di Tozeur, does something quite different. It invokes the landscape and history of another continent altogether. Tozeur is a town in southwestern Tunisia, and the frontier referenced in the lyrics is the nearby Saharan border with Algeria. Although the song goes on to reference interstellar voyages and spaceships, setting a Eurovision entry in part on a North African railway seems more than whimsical or eccentric, although Battiato’s music celebrates both these qualities.

In all three songs I’ve mentioned, Battiato toys with the frontiers between the orient and the occident, but in so doing, questions how ‘natural’ they are. Beyond a fascination with their cultures, there is in his music a certain identification with people frequently labelled as ‘other’ than European. 

North Africa has had a particularly complicated relationship with Europeanness – from the insistence that Algeria was as French as Paris, to the many thousands of Italians, French, Spanish and Maltese who settled across the region in the nineteenth century. This history remains a painful one to address. Subtler influences, such as the role of Islamic philosophers like Ibn Sīnā in translating, interpreting and preserving Greek and Roman texts over the Middle Ages, are seldom acknowledged. 

One element has not changed: for the purposes of defence, Europe extends far into North Africa. In recent years, this has meant strengthening barriers against migrants; the Central Mediterranean route is increasingly the main concern. With the deal between the Turkish government and Brussels to hinder migrants from making the perilous journey across the Aegean or EU-Turkey land border, it is from Libya and Tunisia that migrants increasingly depart. This is a dramatic reversal from 2015, when nearly 900,000 made use of the eastern route, in comparison to just over 150,000 in the Central Mediterranean.

Over 650,000 refugees, primarily from Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, arrived in Sicily alone in the last decade. The ability of parties like Matteo Salvini’s Lega (formerly a party that advocated for the secession of Italy’s north) to make gains across Southern Italy indicates in part the power of hostility to migration.

However, there are important counter currents. Consider the NGOs maintaining search-and-rescue vessels. National governments, when they do not refuse outright to accept these ships into their ports, frequently delay and leave vulnerable people in limbo. COVID-19 has only made this more common – Maltese authorities, for instance, first closed their ports altogether and have continued to argue that they can offer no “safe place” because of domestic infection rates – and, being on the frontline, are “full up”. 

Frequently, those who have stepped in are leaders at the local level – mayors and the coalitions of citizens they are able to rally. Palermo’s mayor, Leoluca Orlando, frequently defied Salvini when he was interior minister to admit rescue vessels and has campaigned to abolish the residence permit that restricts the mobility and employment possibilities of many arrivals. The former mayor of Riace, a small town in Calabria, Domenico Lucano, revitalised his declining community by assigning empty properties to refugees – first Kurdish refugees in the late 1990s and later people from dozens of countries.  

Besides humanitarianism, what drives these projects is frequently a recognition of the perennial multiculturalism of their own homelands. Migrants can be a source of renewal, a springboard for critical thinking. As Orlando puts it, they “helped us question that idea of state, as Europe’s constituent fathers began to after the war”, not least because they provide an opportunity to reassert an identity that goes beyond current political borders – a cosmopolitan Mediterranean identity.

This means reinterpreting Palermo’s Arab history, which lives on in its geography and Moorish architecture, and asserting the city’s connections to Istanbul and Beirut as much as Paris or Berlin. This is a call for a cultural reimagining – a long-term project to alter people’s relationships with their past and, it is hoped, the demographic changes of their present. In often surprising ways, this is already happening, with migrants themselves in the lead. 

But the outlook remains bleak – fortress Europe is institutionalised and deeply popular. Mayor Lucano was sentenced last year to thirteen years in prison for “aiding and abetting illegal immigration”. Among his offences, assigning garbage collection contracts to migrants’ cooperatives and helping a Nigerian mother gain a residency permit through marriage. Throughout much of Europe, activists operating in a similar spirit of internationalism face harassment and regular clampdowns from authorities, not to mention abuse fuelled in part by legacy media. 

It seems a truism to say that the arrival of migrants causes those already living somewhere to contemplate, however briefly, their own identity. The typical response is defensive; ‘the other’ can only dilute and threaten cultures understood as monoliths. But, as I hope this article will have suggested, perhaps it can also be genuinely inquisitive and creative, causing people to question who they were, and who they might be. 

Image: Afonso/CC BY-NC 2.0 via flickr.com

Balliol names building after first Oxford DPhil student

Hope Philpott
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Balliol names building after first Oxford DPhil student

Balliol College has named a new building after Dr Lakshman Sarup (1894–1946), the first student at Oxford to submit for a Doctor of Philosophy (DPhil) degree. Sarup was awarded the degree by Balliol in 1919 on the topic of Yaska’s Nirukta, the oldest Sanskrit treatise on etymology. Oxford began offering the DPhil degree in 1917, taking inspiration from research degrees in Germany, and Dr Sarup was one of two students to enrol for a doctoral degree in its inaugural year, the other being New Zealander James Gatenby.

Originally from Lahore, India, Sarup began his studies in his hometown, receiving an MA in Sanskrit from Lahore’s Oriental College. He travelled to Oxford on an Indian state scholarship in 1916, not leaving until 1919 when he completed his thesis.

The thesis itself examined the contribution of ancient India and ancient Greece to modern linguistics, establishing that the Nirukta was written between 700 and 500BCE and is still crucial to our understanding of modern linguistics. Arthur Macdonell, one of the foremost scholars of his day, as well as Boden Professor of Sanskrit and a fellow of Balliol, supervised Sarup’s thesis.

With the conclusion of his Oxford studies Dr Sarup’s trailblazing career continued. He travelled Europe for research after the end of the First World War, spending time in both Paris and Strasbourg.  Sarup’s interests varied, and as well as his work on Sanskrit, he also translated two of Molière’s plays into Hindi. For this, he was recognised by the Académie Française, the first Indian to receive that honour. In 1920, he was appointed Professor of Sanskrit Literature at Punjab University and later, in 1942, was appointed Principal of the Oriental College of the University of Punjab. He was the first Indian to hold that position and retained it until his death in 1946. As well as being a keen scholar, he was an accomplished sportsman, earning a Blue for captaining the University cricket team during his time at Balliol.

The building, block C1 of the Master’s Fields, is one of a number of new buildings named after Balliol ‘greats’. All of Balliol’s newest buildings have been named after historic Balliol alumni and academics who reflect the diversity, values and history of the College.

Other figures include: Lord Bingham of Cornwall, former lord chief justice; Baruch Blumberg, master of Balliol 1989–1994 and Nobel Prize for Medicine winner in 1976; Dr Carol Clark, the first woman to be appointed a fellow of Balliol, and the first woman to be a fellow of any of the formerly all-male Oxford colleges; Aldous Huxley, the writer of Brave New World, and Sir Sereste Khama, the first president of the Republic of Botswana and a crucial player in Botswana’s independence from imperial rule. 

Image: Vignesh Iyer

Oxford research finds sharp reduction in children’s hospital admissions

Charlotte Keys
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Oxford research finds sharp reduction in children’s hospital admissions

Research conducted at Oxford University has revealed that as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic there has been a dramatic reduction in hospital admissions for children. 

The study, published in the BMJ, analysed NHS hospital admissions in England for children aged 0-14 for 19 common and severe childhood infections between 1st March 2017 and 30th June 2021.

Common respiratory infections included tonsillitis and the flu, whilst the more severe infections included sepsis and meningitis. The study also looked at the effect on vaccine preventable diseases including measles, mumps and several other bacterial infections. This is of particular interest after childhood immunisation programmes were disrupted by Covid-19. In spring 2020 in the WHO European region, 22% of infants had their vaccination courses interrupted.

Researchers found that “after 1st March 2020, substantial and sustained reductions in hospital admissions were found for all but one of the 19 infective conditions studied”. The exception was kidney infections, which did not fall. 

On the other hand, meningitis admissions fell by nearly 50%, from an average of 3,917 annual cases before the pandemic to 1,964 in 2020/21. 

The greatest percentage reduction was found for influenza, which decreased by 94%, from 5,379 admissions to 304 in the twelve months after 1st March 2020. Similarly, for bronchiolitis, admissions decreased by over 80% from an average of 51,655 to 9,423 in 2020/21. 

These reductions were similar across “all geographical regions, deprivation and ethnic groups, as well as among children with existing conditions who are at greatest risk of severe illness and death from infection”.

Researchers also discovered that the number of deaths recorded within 60 days of hospital admissions for sepsis, meningitis, bronchiolitis, pneumonia, viral wheeze and upper respiratory tract infections also decreased. However, researchers highlight that the proportion of children admitted for pneumonia who died within 60 days increased. 

As an observational study, its authors were unable to highlight a cause, but researchers have concluded that a range of human behavioural changes, non-drug interventions, and governmental societal restrictions have not only reduced the transmission of Covid-19 but also for many other childhood infections. 

This highlights one of the positive side-effects of lockdown, protecting children from the spread of common and severe childhood infections in England. This comes as a result of social distancing measures and school closures. 

However, whilst school closures might have contributed to some of the reductions seen in the study, it is not possible to disentangle the evidence from standard physical distancing. Travel restrictions may have also contributed to this decrease with its associated reduced air pollution.  

Whilst such measures are unsustainable in life after the pandemic, researchers are encouraged by this decrease in childhood illness and call for a further evaluation of how this reduction in childhood infections can be sustained. 

They also acknowledge that “there will probably be an increase in the incidence of primarily, but not exclusively, viral infections” after measures to prevent the spread of Covid-19 are lifted. 

Image: Darko Stojanovic

In the belly of Jordan Peterson: Ambivalence in question with the ersatz journalist

Sophie Barshall
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In the belly of Jordan Peterson: Ambivalence in question with the ersatz journalist

I am sitting on the front bench in the Oxford Union chamber. Next to me, laptops are open.

‘Who do you write for?’, asks the boy on my left. This boy is my friend for the next hour. We shake our heads at the same things, he thinks my notes about lobsters are funny (he was looking at my laptop screen. Thank God I never broke character).

‘I’m independent’, I say.

‘Okay’.

I certainly am independent – independent from the world of amateur journalism entirely. The boy on my right is in on the whole thing – he saw me come in late and sneak onto the front bench.

‘Just open your laptop and do an essay or something’, says boy-on-the-right.

I oblige, and title a document: Professor Jordan Peterson – Oxford Union 25th November 2021. There is excitement in the room, and I am in the world of journalists now. It feels great.

The front rows of the benches ahead of me are for Peterson’s guests. This is what friend-on-the left and I infer, anyway, since they’re dressed much better than anyone else. Lots of shirts and brogues. I spy a fur hat. I spy… 

Jordan Peterson. There he is outside the glass door. We have all stood in the cold, in a line, for some considerable time to see this man. But why? A happy boy outside told me that Peterson ‘had been incredibly helpful for him’; in fact, I really had the sense that he might have changed his life. But otherwise, the Oxford ‘position’ seems to be one of curiosity garnished with scepticism. This is certainly my own. Perhaps being a Jordan Peterson ‘stan’ – an overzealous or obsessive fan – lacks the sort of nuance that these scholars might purport to possess. 

Peterson limps into the room. From the front, he is handsome and thin. His hair is dark grey at the forehead and fades into silver at the collar. He walks up to the platform and there is a standing ovation. I look around and can’t see any of the sceptics I met outside – they must have transformed into ‘stans’. Boy-on-the right joins them. Friend-on-the-left and I stay seated – besides, I committed to journalistic neutrality just five minutes ago. There are some ‘booers’ but they’re nowhere to be seen amongst the standing-stans. I feel very confused.

From the back, Peterson is an old man. At the pub that night someone will remind me of the First Rule for Life: ‘stand up straight with your shoulders back’ (see 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, 2018). His body is angled, and the way he hunches pushes his frame through his clothes. Something has changed. But, he moves with grace. Jordan Peterson is well dressed and dignified. There is a special elegance in the way he twists his hands as he speaks.

The title of the talk is Imitation of the Divine Ideal, he says, and he tells us about perception, truth, artificial intelligence, the problem of interpretation, cybernetics and robots. I try, but I really can’t follow. This isn’t the Jordan Peterson I (sort of) know. I’ve read the first few chapters of his book, I’ve seen the Žižek debate and I’ve watched him ‘own’ and be ‘owned’. I’m sure something is different, and this isn’t surprising: the Professor has recently overcome a clonazepam addiction and survived a coma, and he now lives by an all-meat diet. Peterson faces the room like a man talking to himself. His gaze hovers at floor-line; the upper chamber is all but invisible. There is an inwardness about the whole address. Richard Dawkins, who is sitting ahead of me, nods along. Some latecomers enter the hall and the bench opposite squeeze up. A girl with perfect hair sits down with the boys in boat shoes.

Peterson tells a story about a child who is scared when he sees a dog on his way to kindergarten. In the first version, he has a panic attack, spurring a lifetime of panic attacks, enabled by what Peterson calls the ‘Oedipal sacrifice of his mother’. In the second, the mother tells him to be brave and he walks past the dog to school, and he is fine. Here is some familiar Peterson-style argument I can follow. He talks about metafictional narratives, and I am reminded, with sadness, that I am not a real journalist after all. I make my pretend journalist notes anyway.

He loses me again. Now Peterson is talking about chimpanzees, rats and dogs (lots of dogs). He hasn’t mentioned lobsters yet (friend-on-the-left laughs).

‘Do your controversies overshadow the subtler parts of your work?’, someone asks. Peterson pauses for a long second.

‘No’, he says. ‘People always hate when I tell them that, on average, women are shorter than men. That’s not a social construct, and it’s not controversial: it’s just a fact’.

Everyone laughs, including me. Boy-on-the-right looks up from his computer screen. He shakes his head in disgust. He’s researching for an assignment, and he hasn’t listened to a word of the talk. This is his first sign of engagement since the standing ovation (this, being at odds with the rest of his behaviour, leads me to believe that he is deeply confused).

‘Are you okay?’, he asks me.

‘Yes!’; 

he thinks I am crying.

I laugh even harder.

It’s not that funny, it’s just absurd.

I know how this goes: we, as (supposedly) rational thinkers, subscribe to the first step of Peterson’s argument. But now we are on board the Peterson train, and if we stay aboard, we will soon pass under rough skies.

But don’t be scared, boy-on-the-right! You should get on the train with us – what no one has told you yet is that you can get off wherever you like! Get on with me, and I’ll stay with you so long as the sky is flat.

I am not telepathising hard enough, and boy-on-the-right is still staring at his screen. Think about John Stuart Mill, boy-on-the-right! You just cannot be sure that a ‘silenced’ opinion doesn’t contain some element of the truth…

Nope.

We’re getting to the end of the talk, and finally! Peterson pushes me too far. I climb off the train with friend-on-the-left. We sigh and feel the sweet validation of arriving where we had expected.

‘What a total waste of an hour’, says a girl at the end of the bench. It’s true, Peterson was incoherent; but I know much more than I did before, and I am glad. I have been in the belly of the beast, and I have taken its temperature. 

I have learnt more about boy-on-the-right than the Imitation of the Divine Ideal: I have seen the people who truly won’t listen. Peterson is right about that. Even face-to-face with the enemy, he won’t look up from his screen. Why had he even come? He must have been curious like me; and then he must have been afraid. I imagine dead dogmas whizzing around his brain; they’re pastel pink and green because they’re actually Instagram infographics. I know I’m right! They are saying. I just don’t know why!

Jordan Peterson is burning in a fire of his own making – bowing under the pressure of the twenty-four rules he has stacked upon himself. It feels like his career will not continue as before. I think I understand why he believes in God, because he believes in big ideas, and because it all seems to be too much for this man. I do not hate him.

The talk finishes and there is another standing ovation. A head of bright red hair pops up and I recognise the Jordan-Peterson-changed-my-life boy from outside. 

I remember a Tweet by ‘bad-bitch’ Democrat A.O.C (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) from November 2020 –

“Is anyone archiving these Trump sycophants for when they try to downplay or deny their complicity in the future? I foresee decent probability of many deleted Tweets, writings [and] photos”

– and look again at the ‘ambivalent’ ones cheering all around me.

The students in this room are probably not Trump supporters, but this rhetoric of surveillance has filtered into their consciousness, nonetheless. If A.O.C doesn’t scare people out of the ‘wrong’ ideas, it seems like she just scares them out of expressing them: and I can see that all we have done is force ‘stans’ to adopt a façade of scepticism. The truth of their feelings has simply been pushed one layer deeper, and all it takes is a round of applause to lift it right up to the surface; the curtain raises for just a moment.

What happens when people are alone, or online? How does suppressed desire express itself then? And what will happen in the polling booth when no one is watching? Many in this room of young men (they make up ninety percent of us) will believe that they are subject to a culture of conformism and hyper-vigilance, and we should diffuse their fears by acknowledging them, not silencing them – lest we risk alienating people further (and even pushing them further to the Right). Listening more attentively, and even gently, could invalidate Peterson’s and A.O.C’s narratives of hostility, and we may find that this is a conflict that we no longer need, and that there is no Culture War without its student soldiers. In some ways, the Jordan-Peterson-spectacle is funny; and we can laugh. But we cannot dismiss these people. Perhaps instead we might look a hunched Professor in the face and ask ourselves: what’s it all about?

‘What do you think you’ll submit?’, asks friend-on-the-left as we close our laptops.

‘Probably a poem’, I say.

Bibliography

@AOC. 6th Nov 2020. Twitter.

Full tweet: “Is anyone archiving these Trump sycophants for when they try to downplay or deny their complicity in the future? I foresee decent probability of many deleted Tweets, writings, photos in the future”

URL: https://twitter.com/aoc/status/1324807776510595078?lang=en

Image Credit: artwork by Ben Beechener

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