Word: fakir
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Fakir tours with a version of the Four Tops that includes two Motown veterans and Payton's son Roquel
...things - pieces of magic I could put out not as illusions, but really doing it. Which is really in the tradition of Houdini, who was an escape artist but who was really doing things: training hard, keeping a serious regimen. For the coffin, I read about an Indian fakir who was buried alive for a month. I thought instead of burying myself under dirt, I'd bury myself under water so everybody could see that you're there. I got a coffin in Brooklyn and I started practicing sleeping in it. I stayed in it for four days...
...Khan was called the Fakir of Ipi, after the Wazir town where he was said to exercise divine powers-like turning sticks into guns and feeding multitudes with a few loaves of bread. Flying the banner of "Islam in Danger," his small lashkars, or war bands, ambushed convoys and raided prominent towns, killing Hindu traders and marching off with money and munitions. For colonial officials in London and New Delhi, this was no minor uprising of petty bandits. Intelligence estimates at the time counted 400,000 fighting men among the various Pashtun tribes, at least half of them armed with...
...Fakir tormented the British brigades, evading capture with only the aid of local informants and guides (not one fighter in his ranks possessed a radio). In response, the British imposed fines on Pashtuns who refused to cooperate with their search, bombed troublesome villages, burned the fields of unhelpful tribesmen and destroyed the houses of his ringleaders-a violent clampdown that only alienated the local population further. A London newspaper heralded Khan in a couplet as the Scarlet Pimpernel of the East: "They sought him here, they sought him there, those columns sought him everywhere." After independence and the partitioning...
...Decades later, the Fakir's stomping grounds are again ground zero in a war on terror. American, NATO and Pakistani troops face a hydra-like insurgency led by a string of shadowy extremist leaders who make expert use of the border's treacherous, land mine-riddled terrain, melting into the mountains only to resurface, ever stronger, from their myriad training camps and bases. "I doubt whether Washington in 2007 knows much more about what is happening in Waziristan than London did in 1937," says Alan Warren, a military historian and author of a book on Khan. If so, as with...