Month: May 2019

Should the Pakistani elite revive Sab-ki-Hindi (the Farsi of India).

I was overlooking Vidhi’s screen at the gym and saw the dance. Initially I thought Bharatanatyam (it didn’t have a title) is so elegant and mesmerising and I asked Vidhi, what it was.

She replied that it was a Kathak and I made a mini-rant about how India ignores Islamicate culture etc. Incidentally I only just learnt Vidhi had studied Katak and, surprisingly for someone from Chennai, not Bharatanatyam. Her mother (a Sindhi from the North) made the choice and chose accordingly. I’m trying to convince her to pick up Kathak again to offset the intensity of her research.

My point being is that while Kathak has distinctly Hindu/Indian origins; it is ultimately (like Hindustani music) a culmination of the Indo-Islamic culture (apparently Wajid Ali Shah was its finest patron).

My post is about another suggestion that I’ve been dwelling upon this am. I’m convinced that the noblest thing that Pakistani elites could do is resurrect the medieval Persian dialect of India. Continue reading Should the Pakistani elite revive Sab-ki-Hindi (the Farsi of India).

Statistics on Asian American interracial marriage statistics

I really don’t know what to make of some of the contentions in Zach’s post below, What’s wrong with fetishizing white men? (also, posting videos which Hindi means I have no idea specifically what is going on in the video) Some of this is probably due to differences between the UK and the USA. But there are some statistics from the 2010 USA Census.

The website Asian Nation has tabulated the outmarriage rates by generation (foreign-born vs. US-raised) and various Asian American ethnicities. You can see the results below as I’ve repackaged them to focus on inmarriage of various subgroups, stratified by sex.

Some notes

1) “Asian Indian” only includes people who are Indian nationals or whose ancestors were from the Republic of India. It excludes other South Asian nationalities (I am not “Asian Indian” for example). But since other South Asian nationalities are a very small number in the USA I think that’s fine.

2) The statistics are generated from subsamples of the Census. I would be a bit cautious on outmarriage rates for groups like Asian Indians and Koreans where in 2010 the number of those born or raised in the USA was still rather small compared to the foreign-born/raised population. One reason Indian Americans showed extremely low outmarriage rates in the early 2000 Census results is that there was a massive swell of immigration in the Clinton era from Indians, so the foreign-born immigrants overwhelmed the signal.

3) Both the Japanese and Chinese have multi-generational communities in the United States. There are large numbers of highly assimilated Japanese and Chinese Americans whose roots in East Asia are as far back as their grandparents, or even earlier. I think it is noticeable that there is sex balance here.

4) I know a lot of you like bullshitting. I will be doing other things for a while so not monitoring comments much. But if I come back and have to see 1,0000-word personal thoughts which are factless and emotional I will just delete them, even if you are a long-time commenter.

Continue reading Statistics on Asian American interracial marriage statistics

What’s wrong with fetishisizing white men?

IndThings writes an interesting comment:

I would be careful of trying to ride this tiger however, lest Desis/Muslims end up like East-Asian men. Completely forced out of the sexual market-place by white-men basically, as what may have once been an earnest attempt at disenfranchising misogynistic Asian-male attitudes, has turned into a shameless fetish for white-men for no other reason than they are white.

Continue reading What’s wrong with fetishisizing white men?

The Post-White World

As I was scoffing down my lunch (I jest; I actually eat really healthy food) a thought came into my mind that a good book title would be “The Post-White World.”

Since 1492 (when Granada fell and Columbus set off) there has been an increasing consolidation of the West. It reached its apogee in the Victorian Era, where it was unabashed racial hegemony, and it took two World Wars to really shake it off. It’s interesting that Islam experienced so much “innovation” in the 19th century simply because the incursion of the West was finally being internalised. Continue reading The Post-White World

What is a “Brown Pundits” podcast?

One of the interesting things about asking people whether they would come on this blog’s podcast is that they often say “I don’t know if I’d be that interesting to the audience….” More specifically, there isn’t always a South Asian “hook” to some of the episodes.

But the name of the podcast is “Brown Pundits” because this podcast was started by a few brown guys. Not because we discuss purely “brown” things.

Our most popular categories

I’ve given myself the thankless task of “tagging” all my past posts. I noticed that we don’t have a tag on “Kashmir” (the only sub-region we do have is NWFP). It sparked a thought that for a Desi blog we really don’t discuss Kashmir all that much (even though it was going to drag the region into war earlier this year).

This mirrors the larger discourse on Kashmir where Indians & Pakistanis don’t seem as animated or defined by it as before. Two reason comes to mind: Continue reading Our most popular categories

Is the social justice exterior overwhelming the Indian nationalist interior?

One of the most interesting things I have experienced over the past 15 years or so interacting with young Indian Americans, usually of Hindu background, is the disjunction between the scripts that they are inculcated with in their education in broader society, and the quite nationalistic/parochial perspectives that are imparted to them by their parents.

You can say many things about me, but there isn’t much of a disjunction in what I will say you to privately about controversial topics and what I will say in public about controversial topics (the main skeptics of this view are some Hindu nationalists and Zionists, who are convinced that I’m an Islamic supremacist sleeper agent).

So, I when I began to spend some time around Indian Americans one of the peculiar things I was a bit surprised by his how different their extremely social justice Left external presentation could be from what they might say privately over some drinks, or if they perceived you to be an intimate acquaintance. Since my views on Islam were well known many of them felt quite free to openly state their privately skeptical views on the religion of Islam and the practices of Muslims, which reflected what their parents had told them, while in public these people might still denounce Islamophobia. People who would criticize caste privilege in public forums might still be privately smugly proud of their family’s caste background. And, the same people who might perceive American patriotism as to be jingoistic and declasse would express Indian nationalism that they had absorbed with their mother’s milk in private in the crassest of terms.

But there does come a time when you leave your parents’ home, and their influence. And I don’t interact much with Indian Americans on a day to day basis, but I do wonder if many progressive Indian Americans are bringing their two aspects into alignment, and shedding their private chauvinistic reflexes?

An analogy here might be young American Jews, who until recently were quite liberal in the American context, but might align with more ethnonationalist views in relation to Israel (even if they supported the Left parties in Israel, those parties are still more nationalistic than similar parties in the United States). Today the two views are coming into coherence, as most younger American Jews who are not orthodox are starting to distance themselves from Israel.

Review: Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate: Covert Action and Internal Operations

Book Review sent in by Maj Agha Amin. Unfortunately the pictures in the original are low quality and I was unable to fix that problem. Still, you will get the gist of it. 

This is a very interesting book by a Montana University (adjunct) Professor (Owen Sirrs).

The author explains that the  genesis of this book was his:– (page-9)

“Two- month stay at the Counterinsurgency Training Center in Kabul, Afghanistan during the summer of 2009. It was there that I learned a great deal more about Afghanistan–Pakistan relations in general and ISI operations in Afghanistan in particular.”

The book examines the following issues in the writers own words:–

  1. How has ISI evolved as an institution exercising intelligence and security responsibilities at home and abroad? What were the driving forces behind that evolutionary process?
  2. How does ISI fit into the larger Pakistani Intelligence Community?
  3. What does the decades- old relationship between ISI and the CIA tell us about the larger US–Pakistan security relationship?
  4. What is ISI’s record in providing accurate and timely early warning intelligence to decision- makers?
  5. To what extent has ISI disrupted and abused Pakistan’s democratic processes? 
  6. Is ISI a rogue agency or a state within a state? 
  7. Can ISI be reined in and the PIC (Pakistani Intelligence community) reformed? 
  8. How has ISI employed UW (Unconventional warfare) in support of the state’s national security objectives? To what extent has UW been a successful strategy for Pakistan?

 These are the very interesting question that the writer has formulated as stated in the books beginning and has attempted to answer in this most interesting book. Continue reading Review: Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate: Covert Action and Internal Operations

Brown Pundits