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Browncast: Hussein Ibish on Middle East

Another Browncast is up. You can listen on Libsyn, Apple, Spotify (and a variety of other platforms). Probably the easiest way to keep up the podcast since we don’t have a regular schedule is to subscribe to one of the links above!
Another Browncast is up. You can listen on Libsyn, Apple, Spotify (and a variety of other platforms). Probably the easiest way to keep up the podcast since we don’t have a regular schedule is to subscribe to one of the links above!

In this episode, Omar and Mukunda talk to Hussein Ibish about the recent events in Syria and their impact on the Middle east. Interestingly, Hussein mentions India as a potential host for Iranian uranium if a new deal is to be made..

 

US Elections 2024

The US national election is a week away. It is likely that there are near-zero undecided folks left now, but the race is close, so no one will know for sure until the (inefficient) American electoral system counts the votes. And of course, given his past shenanigans, it is very likely that Trump at least will not easily accept a defeat and this time, the establishment may resist as well. But hopefully there is enough juice left in the system to eventually decide a winner and for that winner to eventually take power on January 20th.

So who should one vote for? and who is likely to win? 

Both questions seem to be hard to answer right now. Kamala is clearly the establishment candidate and the deep state is pulling out all the stops to get her elected. But it is still a democracy, so votes do get cast and do get counted, so it is not just up to them. Still, if you approve of how the USA establishment is doing, then you have to vote for Kamala. But what if you have been blackpilled by one of several potential blackpill possibilities in the current environment? for example, my personal pros and cons list would look like this:

Pro-establishment:

  1. This is the system that has delivered economic abundance,  functional democracy and freedom of speech and association to its people. That the elites game the system and get away with tax fraud, Epsteinism and other corruptions is a given, but compared to peer competitors, this remains a rich country and a democracy; and the competitors are neither.
  2. Even where they are total and utter failures (eg in fighting corrupt wars in the “Muslim world”), the establishment is the system. If you throw the baby out with the bathwater you will not have a more competent establishment, you may have chaos.
  3. The Gender nonsense and the elite’s relentless promotion of racism (presented as “anti-racism”) as a tool of politics is a long term danger to the health of society, but some of these things are niche concerns and some can be countered with “but the other side is even worse”.  Or it can be argued that these are some side effects of increasing freedom from past cultural rules (that felt oppressive to a lot of people too) and are not some sort of plan to destroy society; their overuse was something the elite tried but is now backing away from. Shit happens, but self-correction also happens.

Anti-establishment:

  1. These SOBs stole a couple of trillion dollars and killed tens of thousands of people and STILL lost 2 wars and have not solved a single problem since then either. Their specialty is kicking the can down the road. People like General Milley are not dumb in some IQ sense, but clearly they operate in a system that rewards bullshit and suppresses common sense. An outsider like Trump is needed to shit on these people and flush them out with his giant turds.
  2. The foreign policy area that most interests me (India, Pakistan etc) will almost certainly do better under Trump (mostly because he is not wedded to the Indian regime change hopes of left-liberal westerners). Even the middle-east may be better off under him because he asks common sense questions and is so full of himself that he can easily tell these elite bullshitters to go take a hike. That may work better than whatever Blinken  and company are up to.

But its Trump. And he is frequently an undisciplined clown who either has no idea what it is good to say in a functional democracy and what is beyond the pale, or just does not care. Either way, not a good thing. The system will likely survive him, but it will be endless drama and blatant attempts to use the power of the state against his opponents in ways that would never be admitted by a more disciplined candidate.

Pick your poison. 

Hydronyms don’t contradict Aryan migration: a European comparison

An increasingly popular argument amongst Out-of-India-Theory (OIT) advocates (Koenraad Elst for example) is that is that the Indo-Aryan etymologies of rivers in the Rig Veda disprove an Aryan migration into India. They claim that native river names would have survived post-migration.

Some of the proffered etymologies for Vedic rivers are rather flimsy, but no matter. There is a much more fundamental issue with this line of argument: the evidence shows that migrants often do not adopt indigenous river names. In fact, Indo-European migrants to Western Europe used names with clear Indo-European etymology for most major rivers.

If OIT advocates believe that Indo-Aryan etymologies for rivers in North India prove the Indo-European languages originated in India, then they must explain why nearly all the major rivers of Europe have such solid Indo-European etymologies:

Thames: Old English Temes, from PIE *tm̥Hes, cognate with Sanskrit támas

Loire: Gaulish *liga, from PIE *legʰ

Seine: Latin Sequana, from PIE *seykʷ, cognate with Sanskrit siñcáti

Rhine: Gaulish Rēnos, from PIE *h₃reyH, cognate with Sanskrit riṇā́ti

Po: Latin Padus, from PIE *bʰudʰmḗn, cognate with Sanskrit budhná

Elbe: Old German *albī, from PIE *h₂elbʰós, cognate with Sanskrit ṛbhú

Danube: Celtic *Dānowyos, from PIE *déh₂nu, cognate with Sanskrit dā́nu

Dnieper: Sarmatian *dānu *apara, from PIE *déh₂nu + *h₂epero, cognate with Sanskrit dā́nu + ápara

Dniester: Sarmatian *dānu *nazdya, from PIE *déh₂nu + *nésdyos, cognate with Sanskrit dā́nu + nédīyas

Don: Sarmatian *dānu, from PIE *déh₂nu, cognate with Sanskrit dā́nu

Vistula: Latin Vistula, from PIE *weys

Anandibai Joshi goes to America-1883

This is an interesting snippet from the book “To Raise a Fallen People”.

This excerpt was written by Dr Anandibai Joshi, the first Hindu lady to qualify as a doctor in America. It is her explanation of why she is going to America, and is a window into a very different time. What a clear headed thinker!

The book (to raise a fallen people) is well worth reading (you can ignore the editorial elements, just read the original texts from the 19th century). It is always good to have an idea of where things were… makes it easier to understand where they are..

My Future Visit to America, 1883

— Anandibai Joshi

. . . Our subject to-day is, “My future visit to America, and public inquiries regarding it.” I am asked hundreds of questions about my going to America. I take this opportunity to answer some of them. . . Continue reading Anandibai Joshi goes to America-1883

Thoughts on the “Model Minority Myth” Discourse

Reproducing a recent (slightly edited) tweet in full, originally written in response this article:

Yes, I read your piece, and I’ve read countless others like it over the last decade. That Indian Americans are a “model minority” is not a myth, it’s a statement of fact that is apparent to anyone who has taken even a cursory look at the community’s social/economic outcomes in recent decades as measured by any reasonable metric. It’s not culturally chauvinistic or triumphalist to point this out. There is an important conversation to be had about the structural factors that enabled this including, e.g., inequities in Indian society and American immigration policy (so-called “double selection”), but it is also apparent that our success as a community in recent decades has been a product of both the openness and economic dynamism of American society and the Indian community’s emphasis on financial success, educational attainment, and family stability. That this picture doesn’t capture the diaspora community as a whole is obvious, but it doesn’t have to. That’s why we use averages.

The assertion that the model minority is a “myth” is not an empirical argument, but an ideological one, and in my view it reflects an underlying anxiety among Indian Americans regarding their position in the elite left/democratic coalition. On the one hand, Indian Americans enjoy socio-economic outcomes that surpass those of the average white American, but on the other hand we are from a post-colonial country, are brown, largely non-Christian, etc. and therefore have a natural affinity to the “POC” coalition. It’s a tenuous position to be sure, and the result is an emergent elite that feels the need to apologize for the community’s success, to be embarrassed of it, or to attribute it to wholly structural factors. Even more pernicious is the characterization of certain cultural values that enabled our success in the first place as “White, Christian” measures of success. This is nonsensical and dismissive of the struggles of first generation immigrants who escaped destitution and successfully created a better life for themselves and their families.

The success of Indian Americans in recent decades throws a wrench in the American racial binary (in fact this has been the case since Bhagat Singh Thind), but it also casts doubt on the prevailing ideological shibboleths of the left, namely that America is a white supremacist country, that we are all victims of structural racism, etc. Look, these critiques of American society might have some truth to them, but Indian Americans are not convincing spokespeople for a view that is so at odds with our own experience. To pretend otherwise is to try and fit a square peg in a round hole. So when someone holds up Indian Americans as “ideal” or “model” immigrants, this aggravates the anxiety, because it reveals the truth that our community’s success has been enabled by a political and social culture that many Indian Americans are ideologically compelled to condemn as fundamentally inequitable.

What is most ironic, however, is that the result is often not considered reflection on these ideological axioms, but rather the construction of a “model minority” of their own. The dutiful, hard-working immigrant who is grateful to their adopted country and a model for other immigrants is rejected as a normative ideal in favor of the committed ally who recognizes their privilege and dutifully subordinates the lessons of their own experience and culture to the demands of the coalition. Those who dissent from this model are increasingly condemned as some sort of traitors to the “culture” or, increasingly, “hindu supremacists.” I’d like to think there’s a third path, one that unabashedly celebrates Indian American success and the society and culture that enabled it, while also thinking critically about how Indian Americans can leverage that success to contribute to the national fabric in a way that does not require ritual self-flagellation as a demonstration of political and ideological loyalty.

Blasphemy in Pakistan; NOT a Colonial Era Problem

There is an old post about blasphemy laws from 2015 that i revised in 2021. It is on the site, but not well written and hard to search for, so i decided to repost it because blasphemy is in the news again and I cannot count the number of times someone has managed to say “colonial era blasphemy laws in Pakistan” in a misleading manner. I wanted to have a post handy where I could direct them, so here it is, a quick overview of the blasphemy issue in Pakistan

A blasphemy law was part of the 19th century Indian Penal code as section 295.. It was not a bad law at all and the lazy habit of blaming it for later blasphemy law crap in the Indian subcontinent is just that: a lazy habit (mostly promoted by LeLi Indians and Pakistanis desperate to find someone else to blame)

Here is section 295 of the Indian Penal Code of 1860:

 Injuring or defiling place of worship with intent to insult the religion of any class.—Whoever destroys, damages or defiles any place of worship, or any object held sacred by any class of persons with the intention of thereby insulting the religion of any class of persons or with the knowledge that any class of persons is likely to consider such destruction, damage or defile­ment as an insult to their religion, shall be punishable with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to two years, or with fine, or with both.

The aim of the law was to prevent/punish things like someone throwing a dead pig into a mosque or a cow’s head into a temple. An actual physical desecration is to be punished. This seems like an eminently sensible law  and cannot really be blamed for all the evils that came later.

But in the 1920s there was a famous case in Lahore where a Hindu publisher was arrested by the colonial authorities after Muslims agitated against him for having published a book called Rangila Rasul (“merry prophet”). The British colonial authorities tried to prosecute him for hurting the religious sentiments of Muslims, but the high court in Lahore (quite properly) found him innocent because there was no law on the books against just publishing a book, no matter how offensive it may be to some religious group. Fearing future communal discord from such provocations, the British then had the legislative assembly add section 295A to the law in order to criminalize deliberate attempts to “outrage the religious feelings of any community”. This section states:

Whoever, with deliberate and malicious intention of outraging the religious feelings of any class of citizens of India, by words, either spoken or written, or by signs or by visible representations or otherwise], insults or attempts to insult the religion or the religious beliefs of that class, shall be punished with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to 4[three years], or with fine, or with both. 

But even with this new and expanded article 295A in place, prosecutions for blasphemy were few and far between until, in the 1980s, General Zia added two new sections to the law in Pakistan and really set the ball rolling.  These infamous sections are labelled 295B and 295C.

295-B:  Defiling the copy of Holy Qur’an. Whoever wilfully defiles, damages or desecrates a copy of the Holy Qur’an or of an extract there from or uses it in any derogatory manner for any unlawful purpose shall be punishable with imprisonment for life.

295-C: use of derogatory remarks etc., in respect of the Holy Prophet: – who ever by words, either spoken or written, or by visible representation, or by any imputation innuendo, or insinuation, directly, defiles the sacred name of the Holy Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) shall be punished with death, or imprisonment for life and shall also be liable for fine.

Punishment was later upgraded to the death penalty.

Note that the law no longer requires that the offense be malicious in intent. Intent is no longer an issue. Insulting the Quran or the prophet, even unintentionally, is now punishable by death. To seal the deal, in 1991 the Federal Shariat Court of Pakistan struck down the option of life imprisonment and made the death penalty obligatory. 
And of course, the new amendments only apply to blasphemy against Islam, not against all religions (in this sense, the new laws are more “rational” and internally coherent, since all religions blaspheme against all other religions as a matter of course, so the original law was not coherent in principle, though still workable in practice). Between 1984 to 2004, 5,000 cases of blasphemy were registered in Pakistan and 964 people were charged and accused of blasphemy; 479 Muslims, 340 Ahmadis, 119 Christians, 14 Hindus and 10 others. Thirty-two people charged with blasphemy were killed extra-judicially during that time. More have died since. Eighty-six percent of all the cases were reported in Punjab.

Every time this shit hits the fan, many liberal people start hoping that this blasphemy law can be changed to finally stop or slow down this torrent of prosecutions and killings. Others have noted that the law is not the problem, free-lance enforcement of a broader blasphemy meme in the Muslim community is the problem and will likely persist even if the law is repealed. In my view the law is not the only problem, but it IS a very potent symbol of the surrender of state and society in front of the blasphemy meme. Repeal of the law will not kill that meme, but repeal of the law will be an equally powerful signal that things have changed and that state and society no longer approve of the killing of blasphemers. It will not end the problem, but it will be the beginning of the end. Repeal of the law is not a sufficient condition for this nightmare to end, but it is a very important necessary condition.

Unfortunately, I don’t think such repeal or amendment is actually likely in the foreseeable future. My predictions: Continue reading Blasphemy in Pakistan; NOT a Colonial Era Problem

Rajaji: Our forgotten hero

In the run up to Indian parliamentary elections in 2024, there is excitement in some sections of social media about “freemarket”  ideas espoused by C Rajagopalachari (Rajaji) and the Swantantra Party he helped found in 1959.

Sharing a piece here I wrote on Rajaji’s ideological relevance in contemporary politics. This was written after visiting and reporting from the many institutions he built pre and post 1947 for the now defunct Pragati Magazine in 2018.

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And the food-and-agriculture-focussed independent media platform called the ThePlate.in I run.

Here goes…

Rajaji: Our Forgotten Hero

Among the leaders in the front ranks of the freedom movement, and those counted as the makers of modern India, Chakravarthi Rajagopalachari (Rajaji) is perhaps the man most forgotten. Gandhi is the ‘Father of the nation’; the very existence of India as a modern democracy, and lately all its faults—from clogged drains to currency fluctuation—are credited to Jawaharlal Nehru’s side of the ledger; the race to usurp Vallabhbhai Patel’s legacy has given India a Guinness record for the world’s tallest statue; Bhimrao Ambedkar is not only a Moses-like lawgiver who framed the constitution but also the messiah of marginalized; Maulana Azad, now firmly located in Indian-Muslim politics, finds an occasional ode to his prescience about the fallacy of Pakistan and subsequent fate of subcontinental Muslims. Rajaji is less lucky than Azad. Continue reading Rajaji: Our forgotten hero

The young entrepreneur from Jharkhand who wants to simplify spiky jackfruit for India

Like most young people born and raised in Jharkhand, Aman Chhabra, 31, was determined to find the escape velocity required to pull out of the state’s dark gravitational forces that could ground even modest ambition.

Being a bright student, he managed to attend Delhi’s prestigious Shriram College of Commerce. Post graduation, when he was expected to become a part of the family business running a hotel in Ramgarh, a town in central Jharkhand, Chhabra chose a career in event management instead.

His small but profitable startup organized flashy weddings for the super-rich in Mumbai and Delhi where A-list artistes performed and fine wine flowed from faucets. But the business couldn’t survive the crippling effect of Covid-19 in 2020. The search for a business idea that could survive such unforeseen shocks, and in sync with his own newfound life-motto of minimalism drove him to seek shelter under the copious, cool canopy of the jackfruit tree.

Chhabra has joined the burgeoning corps of food entrepreneurs that wants to rekindle India’s love for the spiky, smelly, latex-laden sticky jackfruit.

His latest startup Kathalfy, seeks to simplify the consumption of jackfruit, called kathal in Hindi, in the form of ready-to-eat vegan packaged foods such as patties, keema masala, jackfruit makhni and assorted Indian curries.

Read the full story here 

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Ep. 71 Part 1 | Issues for Lok Sabha 2024 with Suraj | Modi, Rahul, BJP, INC, NDA, I.N.D.I.A.

I spoke to my friend Suraj Balakrishnan on the Issues that will Impact the Lok Sabha Elections, what makes PM Narendra Modi have such a high popularity despite two terms as incumbent as well as how the political dynamics would shape up in the country after 2024 Elections.

The Indic Explorer YouTube channel focusses on the interplay of Indic culture with modernity explored through different facets in the socio-cultural sphere.

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