Brown Pundits exists to test ideas against evidence. That is not happening consistently. Four contributors have split into two camps. Threads are filling with video links and recycled assertions. Serious readers are leaving. This post explains what changes and why.
Effective immediately, all four authors have been moved to commentator status until each individually promises they can maintain the same standard in comments as in posts; high signal, evidence-based, no exceptions.
Eighteen months after the youth uprising that resulted in former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s fleeing to India, Bangladesh has a new government headed by the BNP’s Tarique Rahman who is looking to reset ties with India. A US court has accepted the guilty plea of Nikhil Gupta, the Indian charged in the trans national plot to kill Sikh separatist Gurpatwant Singh Pannun. AI Summit in Delhi made headlines for chaos, mismanagement and Chinese robot being passed off as India. Impact of the Epstein Files meanwhile has reached the British monarchy with former Prince Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the younger brother of King Charles III arrested. The Wire’s Sravasti Dasgupta is joined by Siddharth Varadarajan, founding editor, The Wire and Sreeradha Datta, professor, international affairs at the O.P. Jindal Global University.
*XTM edit what does India have to do with the Epstein files? Hence why I edited the subject. Also I don’t know what this post adds per se?
A small administrative note that matters more than it sounds. Brown Pundits now has 3,920 posts. Every single one is categorised. There are no uncategorised posts left. The entire archive is structured.
That is not glamorous work. It does not trend. It does not go viral. But it is the difference between a website and a timeline. Writing is not just producing new content. It is tending an intellectual garden. Adding categories, refining tags, standardising slugs, back-tagging fifteen years of material; this is not clerical labour. It is editorial discipline. It forces you to reread your own history. It reveals patterns. It exposes gaps. It shows where the site has been narrow and where it has been expansive.
Substack has made everyone an author. It has not made everyone an editor. Most platforms reward velocity and outrage. The incentive is to post faster and louder than the next person. Community becomes an audience. Conversation becomes branding. Writers become marketers. We are structured differently.
RecoveringNewsJunkie · February 20, 2026 · 9 comments
Usman Tariq Image from CricTracker
The last few days have really been dominated by a cacophony of ….tu, tu, mai, mai in the BP comment threads with competitive “patriotism” flying thick and fast. Amidst all the noise generated by …certain hostility focused agendas, its easy to lose sight of the fact that for all the problems and challenges faced by the 2 nation-states, the people that inhabit the subcontinent, still continue to have a bunch of things in common.
So allow me this …palette cleanser of a post. The ICC T20 Cricket World Cup is in progress, and the teams of both India and Pakistan have managed to qualify for the “Super 8” stage. Usman Tariq, is a rising star who has recently joined the Pakistani team, as a bowler who serves up ‘mystery spin’ from a unique bowling action, enabled slightly in part due to an anatomically exceptional elbow which has elicited some allegations of chucking (throwing). He has undergone test and has been cleared of this allegations already.
What I found notable about Usman, apart from his repertoire of unique googlies and arm angles, is him sharing the fact that watching an Indian movie inspired him to pursue his dream – a career in cricket. M.S. Dhoni a former India captain, had a biopic made about him a few years ago, which was a massive hit in India and beyond. Usman, as we know, is hardly an exception when it comes to Pakistanis consuming Indian content including movies. Pakistanis, in some ways, are arguably even more ardent consumers and fans of ‘Bollywood’ than Indians. As an Indian listener to Pakistani podcasts, you can’t help but notice how movie and song quotes from Indian films and pop culture, are seamlessly used by Pakistanis as metaphors to describe situations. Even more so than is common for Indians to do so.
On the flip side, Indians are enthusiastic consumers of Pakistani music – the popularity and opinions on the ‘quality’ of Pakistani Coke Studio abound, so does a sizeable number of fans for Pakistani soap operas.
The point is, as much as the interactions of India and Pakistan is dominated by the disproportionate shadow cast by the history of conflict between the two states, and especially the untenable history of PakMil sponsored multi-decade history of terrorism and “non-state actor” violence, we still see a common culture interwoven through the day-to-day existence of the …awaam
“No one wants a strong India. But PM Modi opened doors. He strengthened the military, advanced the economy, maintained balanced relations with the West, Russia, and China. That is serious statecraft” –Aleksandar Vučić, President of Serbia
India is richer
Strip away the noise and a simple asymmetry remains. India will almost certainly remain richer than Pakistan for the foreseeable future. The gap in GDP, fiscal depth, technology, and demographic scale is widening, not narrowing. On material indicators, India has the advantage. Yet material advantage does not always translate into strategic dominance.
India is louder
India is a mass democracy. It is electorally accountable, media-saturated, and sensitive to public opinion. Governments must justify escalation. Markets react to instability. Voters punish miscalculation. This imposes restraint.
Pakistan is tighter
Pakistan is structured differently. Power is narrower. Decision-making is concentrated within a smaller elite, with the military as the central institution. That creates rigidity in some domains but flexibility in others. Strategic continuity does not reset every five years. Public opinion matters, but it does not directly determine policy in the same way it does across the border.
Structural Differences
This structural difference shapes behaviour. India must think about global markets, coalition politics, and reputational cost. Pakistan can absorb economic stress more easily because its political system is already insulated from full electoral volatility. That insulation produces durability, even under strain.
Kohrra is a police procedural series set in Punjab whose second season is now available now on Netflix which I highly recommend.
Some relatively spoiler free thoughts. I am skipping plot details etc because I don’t want to spoil anything plus there are many reviews already available on the internet.
Indian directors/writers have really mastered this sort of police procedural – usually has two police partners and the story jumps between the case (new case per season) and the personal lives of the protagonists. Add in some social commentary as well in a gritty package. Others of this ilk are Pataal Lok (2 seasons, Amazon Prime) and Dahaad (1 season, Amazon Prime). Those are also highly recommended.
Because this is a new season, it’s a completely new case. Also only one of the officers from the first season returns. Watching the first season is not necessary but ideal to get an idea of the personal life of the returning character.
The plot this time is a lot more twisty with multiple threads leaving you guessing, compared to the first one where I guessed the plot a few episodes in.
Also a lot more technically accomplished. The few action set pieces are really well done. The cinematography is great and the acting is great across the board (the first season had some iffy acting by some actors).
Love the fact that like most Indian OTT shows, it is not monolingual (like movies) and is multilingual and characters speak in the language that they would actually speak. So predominantly Punjabi with a bit of Hindi.
Salman Rushdie is one of the world’s most prominent English language writers and certainly among the most famous writers of Indian origin. His second novel, Midnight’s Children won the 1981 Booker Prize as well as the “Best of the Bookers”. Other well-known novels include Shame–one of the great novels about Pakistan– and The Satanic Verses.
The Eleventh Hour is a collection of five stories, two of which were previously published in The New Yorker. For the purposes of this review, I will focus on “The Musician of Kahani” and “Late”.
“The Musician of Kahani” is set in the fictional city of Kahani (Urdu/Hindi for “story”) though the setting is clearly modeled on Bombay–where Rushdie was born and brought up. The story revolves around Chandni Contractor (the titular musician) who marries into a prominent business family. After she suffers a stillbirth while her in-laws are throwing party after party celebrating the arrival of the baby, Chandni decides to take revenge on them through her music. Rushdie describes the scene as follows:
The day came when Chandni’s fingers began to move once more in their particular fashion. She was back in her own room in her family’s residence in Breach Candy. She had not thought, since her return, of sitting at her piano or picking up her sitar–both of which had been quietly returned to her–but this time when her fingers moved Meena was in no doubt that she heard music. First Meena heard it, then Raheem. It was music of a kind they had never heard before, and the instruments on which it was being played were unknown to them, It rose above their home like a pillar of smoke, like a column of fire, like the weapon of an invading alien species, and then it rushed across the city and the country to do its deadly work… (Rushdie 96)
Six unmarked police cars carrying plainclothes officers arrived at the Sandringham estate while the former prince was celebrating his 66th birthday on Thursday. Officers searched the Norfolk property as well as Mountbatten-Windsor’s former home at the Royal Lodge in Great Windsor Park. Lucy Hough speaks to the Guardian journalist David Pegg.
