Pan-Sindhi Cross-Border Virality

X.T.M · February 10, 2026 · 4 comments

 

A Pakistani Sindhi song, Paiso Aa, has crossed the border and gone viral among Indian Sindhis. It is light, playful, and unselfconscious. And it exposes something we repeatedly forget.

Sindh has been Muslim for over thirteen centuries.

The region was conquered in 711 CE by Muhammad bin Qasim, the teenage governor of Fars—thirteen when he entered Sindh, dead by nineteen. Almost an Alexander figure in miniature. Since then, Sindh and Multan have known uninterrupted Muslim rule longer than many parts of the Islamic world itself.

That matters, because it complicates a habit of thought that treats Islam in the Indian Subcontinent as permanently “foreign.”

In Sindh, it is not. Continue reading Pan-Sindhi Cross-Border Virality

After the Begums: Bangladesh searches for a new order

X.T.M · February 10, 2026 · No comments

In the tea stalls of Bangladesh, where politics is consumed with the same sugary intensity as the cha, the mood is one of jittery anticipation. For 18 months the country has been a state in parenthesis.

On 12 February that parenthesis would close. Voters will go to the polls in a unique double act: casting one ballot for a new parliament and another in a referendum on the “July Charter,” a package of constitutional reforms designed to prevent the rise of another autocrat.

The election is framed as the culmination of a “Second Liberation,” born of the student-led uprising that ousted Awami League in August 2024 after 15 consecutive years in power.

Observers from the Commonwealth, the EU and other nations are in place; the ballot boxes are ready.

Continue reading After the Begums: Bangladesh searches for a new order

Pakistan Is Not Yugoslavia

X.T.M · February 9, 2026 · 82 comments

There is a recurring Saffroniate habit, when it comes to Pakistan, that deserves to be named plainly. It assumes collapse. It treats Pakistan as a Yugoslavia-in-waiting, a state held together only by force and denial. This is not analysis. It is projection, reinforced by confirmation bias.

Pakistan is not Yugoslavia. It is, in many ways, the opposite.

Yugoslavia fractured once the external logic binding it disappeared. Pakistan was born under siege and continues to organise itself around that fact. Whatever one thinks of this psychology, it has consequences. States that internalise permanent vulnerability do not casually dissolve. They centralise, harden, and adapt. That is not a moral defence. It is an empirical observation.

Continue reading Pakistan Is Not Yugoslavia

Mother in the Jamun Tree

Kabir · February 7, 2026 · No comments

This short story by Dr. Samia Altaf was originally published in The Peshawar Review. 

Samia Altaf is a physician specialising in Integrative Medicine. She is the author of So Much Aid, So Little Development: Stories from Pakistan (2011, 2015, 2025) and of tamasha-e ahley karam: aalami bank ki naakaam imdaad aur Pakistan ka nizaam-e sehat (2025).

Just as we finished breakfast — halwa-poori, cholay and cheese omelette washed down with mango lassi — on a bright Sunday morning, mother announced that from tomorrow, Monday morning — she did new things on Monday mornings — she would not live in the house anymore. She would live in the old jamun tree in the beautiful Bagh-e-Jinnah. There, from its top branches, she could observe the Mall Road, look through the windows of our second-floor lounge and see us as we lounged around, our faces in our phones. And she could hear us too, especially big brother as he did his daily riyaz. She loved the darbari bandish he was working on these days — anokha ladla-aaaa — and didn’t want to miss out on.

Why?

She was tired of it all. This life. The government lying, the people dying, on land and in sea; people actually killing each other for praying this way or that; the useless, selfish leaders constantly yelling, only jostling for “kursi.” The begging, the begging, the constant begging for oil, for food, for electricity, water; and no one listening, caring, or paying attention. And the children! She’s heartbroken to see girls and boys, unable to read or write, especially the little girls, so tiny, so skinny with their heads covered, scarcely able to breathe. All this suffering, so unnecessary. Sure, life is difficult; as a doctor she had seen people die, authorities lie, and no one pay attention — remember the Covid days? But now it is too much. She was teary as she ate the piping hot puris that the cook placed on her plate. She was so tired, she said, of the need to be so alert all the goddamn time; to pay attention and yet be dragged into a deeper hole. She feels she is on a treadmill that goes faster and faster, its speed controlled by some sadistic demon. She needed “out.” Interrupting the trajectory of her fork, she recited:

What is this life, if full of care.
We have no time to stand and stare.

No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.

She had decided that instead of standing beneath the boughs, she would live amongst them. Continue reading Mother in the Jamun Tree

Review: The Eleventh Hour by Salman Rushdie

Kabir · February 4, 2026 · No comments

From my Substack:

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”. Continue reading Review: The Eleventh Hour by Salman Rushdie

When Even Jainism Becomes a Hack

X.T.M · February 4, 2026 · No comments

And so, some students I know claim to be devout members of the Jain faith, which rejects any food that may cause harm to all living creatures — including small insects and root vegetables. The students I know who claim to be Jain (but aren’t) spend their meal money at Whole Foods instead and enjoy freshly made salads and other yummy dishes, while the rest of us are stuck with college meals, like burgers made partly from “mushroom mix”.

I was reading about Stanford’s accommodation culture when one detail stopped me cold. Some students, the article noted, claim to be devout Jains in order to escape the mandatory meal plan. Jainism, one of India’s oldest religions, forbids harm to living beings. That includes insects. In many traditions it excludes root vegetables, because uprooting a plant kills it. It is an ethic of extreme restraint, discipline, and care. The students claiming it, by the author’s own admission, are not Jain. They are optimisers. This is not a small lie. It is a revealing one. Continue reading When Even Jainism Becomes a Hack

Pakistan, 1971, and the Misuse of the Holocaust Analogy

X.T.M · February 4, 2026 · 60 comments

“Pakistan army remains the only one after WW2 to have carried out a large scale genocide. The comparison to the Nazis is a fact-based one. Mentioning this simple historical fact isn’t “anti-Pakistan”. RNJ

The events of 1971 in East Pakistan involved large-scale violence, mass civilian deaths, displacement, and grave violations of humanitarian norms. These facts are not contested. What remains contested is classification. Continue reading Pakistan, 1971, and the Misuse of the Holocaust Analogy

Open Thread Modi and Drumpf announce US-IND Trade deal

RecoveringNewsJunkie · February 2, 2026 · 43 comments

https://x.com/narendramodi/status/2018377090840830101

With typical bluster, the Donald declares victory and claims that India will ‘stop buying Russian oil (eventually’, and buy ‘$500 billion’ in US goods (no timeline given). Modi’s announcement doesn’t even mention those vague commitments notably.

18% is lower than Vietnam, lower than China, and also lower than Pakistan’s tariff rates, in spite of the ….abject genuflection given to the Drumpf Administration by Pakistani elites over the last few months.

Brown Pundits