These are 40-tweets-in-20-minutes kind of days for me. I have only really become a tweeter after my beloved #Cairo started burning on #Jan25. The preceding hash-tags are testimony to my inability to think beyond tweeting this revolution, this uprising. I love twitter and I love facebook-for the last few days...

Cairo is burning. So is Egypt. Twitter is exploding. Everyone seems to have an opinion -- many who have never even been to Egypt, but feel a strong sense of solidarity with the most remarkable revolution in a generation, perhaps. A revolution that importantly is not really caused by Twitter...

Hosni Mubarak is 82-years-old. He has been Egypt's absolute ruler for three decades. He is America's biggest ally in the Middle East. He has probably never really figured out how to use a computer. I cannot imagine that he tweets or even fully comprehends how this most omnipresent of social...

I have a breaking news kind of update from a chat with Negma a few minutes ago. This below is our exact conversation on Skypechat (12:08 pm Eastern on Jan 27) The main story follows below this update.

This Sunday morning, like most mornings, I opened -- from years of habit -- the home page of The New York Times. Peering at the lead story without my glasses, I was horrified to find the image of Muslim men praying near Mecca next to a cable excerpt from (the...

Sita is gone. Delhi is shining, as is Gurgaon. Sita, like my uncle's family, lives in Malibu Towne in Gurgaon, 212 acres of a middle-class heaven where the upper-middle-class inhabitants of the tower apartments enjoy a life of "no load-shedding" -- meaning the towers are run by external generators so...

A shorter version of this article appeared in The Guardian newspaper.

As the fate of the Commonwealth Games hangs in balance, India's risible Bollywood elite are still probably hung over from a 60th birthday bash at a lounge in Western Bombay's Juhu area on Saturday night, where...

Seventy two hours ago I returned from Beirut, Lebanon where there is a promise of fresh violence, ready to erupt soon after the month of Ramadan ends tomorrow.

A synagogue in this predominantly Muslim and Christian city is being lovingly restored in a frantic process of re-building following decades...

I had always been taught to believe in the homogeneity of the pious. But a year after September 11, as I snuck into a Thursday afternoon zikr at the Masjid al-Farah twelve blocks from the still smoldering Ground Zero, I was not so sure. It was Ramadan and the tradition...

Just a few thoughts on the cable news media here in the US (and the delightful possibility of its extinction after the dust settles on all of this).

Please stop claiming the brave young men and women whose videos and images you are broadcasting as your "iReporters."

Please stop saying...

But first. Important Updates.
I was just on Fox News (of all places) with Shepard Smith (rumors are that he is "liberal"). I was reporting on what I have been reporting all along here and on DB.
Arash has sent a very powerful memo again today from Tehran-

Please read this amazing account I have put on the Daily Beast from Arash Aryan-his second in two days. It will break your hearts. He is a powerful voice coming out of there.

On Friday, through the night, primarily through intermittent internet connection, I have been able to talk...

As promised I continue to try and update with blogs coming out of Tehran. This is a powerful first person account from my friend Arash Aryan, a 40 year old poet who sent his writing in bits and pieces through intermittent internet access. It is reproduced entirely on the...

PLEASE READ THE NEW POST "FROM TEHRANGELES TO TEHRAN: NOISE AND STATIC" BY CLICKING ON THIS LINK

Suddenly there is no dearth of Iranian punditry on cable television, with "academics" and "Iran experts" languishing in the dank closets of academia, brought out to air on every US network. Unfortunately...

As the most animated (and violent) protests in Tehran in a decade and in the thirtieth year after the Revolution unfold, my mailbox is inundated with emails from friends, many also reporting with anger and fear on gmail chat. Text messages were abandoned a few days ago when the blackout...

As a proud member of the Indian diaspora, I used to think that the world's largest democracy was also its most sophisticated. Now, I'm not so certain.

India just voted for its fifteenth Lok Sabha or "People's House." If there is anything to be learned from this largest exercise of...

The Facebook Universe is remarkable. After my recent post "Poor, Israel? Sure, and I am Barack Obama" I got a flurry of immediate responses. I had blogged hastily, still shaking with anger at the events that unfolded yesterday on a panel organized by UN Watch, an organization with a...

On this Eid-al-Adha, the Muslim festival of the sacrifice, I wonder what aspect of my identity troubles me more: the Indian, the Muslim, or both. And is there more to those troublesome questions as well--perhaps willingly being away from the homeland?

For at least a year now, I have very...

Just briefly- for a moment I feel is important to record, for this site I blog for sometimes.
At around 9:53 on Tuesday night (less than an hour ago) I realized that Barack Hussein Obama will be the President Elect of the United States of America. (If I am...

"Michelle Obama scares me. Have you ever worked with a 'professional' black female?"

"Can you imagine those Negro girls running around in the White House?"

The first observation is thoughtfully supplied to me by a part-"Native American" friend of mine in DC, an avowed Democrat. The second is whispered from...