It’s been a minute—I’ve been quietly recovering from Sizdeh Bedar, the thirteenth day of Norouz when you’re meant to go outside and shake off bad luck. I chose to take it literally: less screen, more sky.
To be fair I did go for two consecutive daily outdoors runs, which I haven’t properly done since the late pandemic but instead of the customary picnic; I went to the Afghan restaurant, Helmand, which was excellent- Afghani cuisine is truly the dark horse of the Indo-Persianate world.
In the meantime, Razib’s dropped two excellent posts—one on Tibetans, the other on Great Men: is Trump the product of his age, or did he make the age what it is? It’s the kind of question that haunts our era, especially as 2024/25 starts to feel historically charged.
Meanwhile, the above is courtesy of Anand on our Global Politics chat & over on Twitter, a post’s been circulating about how South Asians are desperate to leave the desh, but the moment they do—they long for it obsessively.
It’s complicated. I love the homeland (Chennai is my vibe), but I’m 1.5 generation: I migrated at 14, but had spent meaningful time in the West beforehand. So what am I? Not quite immigrant, not quite native. That liminal space is familiar to many of us. It’s a tension you carry everywhere—between passport and memory, practicality and nostalgia.
On cue, our resident Pundit is once again being spammed by Pakistanis “discovering” they are the last Gandharans and telling a Kashmiri Pandit to back to the “Ganges” (the last Kashmiri Pandits who did come from the Ganges founded South Asia’s most prominent and enduring political dynasty so I guess that’s a wish for us to be under good Brahmin rule again).
I don’t care much about “native inhabitants” of anywhere. Nativism is overrated & such claims don’t impress me. And I’m not “from the Ganges” (whatever that means).
Antagonists in MBh were the kaurava-s (ablaut of kuru). Calling them gāndhāra-s is like calling Jahangir a Rajput. https://t.co/oZiohynazL
— उद्ररुहैन्वीय (@kaeshour) April 3, 2025
Now, as a rule, you should never intellectually duel with a thrice-born. It rarely ends well. But here we are: Pakistan, in search of yet another usable identity, this time reaching deep into the vault and pulling out Gandhara. Continue reading Sizdeh Bedar, Identity Whiplash & the Gandharan Delusion
Aamina Ahmed is an expatriate Pakistani (born in the UK, currently teaches in the USA) who has written a novel set in the intersection of the Red Light area of Lahore and the rich and powerful of the state, around the time of Yahya Khan’s martial law. The story is well crafted and the book is well written and has a “message” about inequality, oppression, patriarchy and fascism, but unfortunately her lack of direct experience of Pakistan does show. The plot is more or less believable, but the details and dialogues are off. Anyone with some familiarity with the Punjab police and the way people actually talk or react in Lahore will feel that this is a foreigner writing about Pakistan. Certainly there are books written by foreigners that sound and feel very authentic (Memoirs of a geisha comes to mind), but unfortunately this is not one of those books. Part of the problem is not Aaminah Ahmed’s fault, as any writer in English has to deal with the fact that most of the dialog actually happens in Punjabi or Urdu, but her foreign-ness goes a little beyond that.