Category: Zachary

Has anyone seen Raazi or planning to do so? I’ll share my thoughts later on but for now I’m excerpting the Deccan Chronicle.

Does anyone at BP actually watch Bollywood or follow South Asia pop culture?

The two-nation theory has had far too many ramifications than the leaders would ever have imagined. For over 60 years, both India and Pakistan have remained sworn enemies despite them sharing history and having the commonalities that their people would not find anywhere else in the world. Meghna Gulzar’s Raazi, based on Harinder Sikka’s book Calling Sehmat, gives us a taut espionage thriller that doesn’t take sides, although in many ways Pakistan’s intelligence seems to be failing and the officers made to look gullible. But what Gulzar emphasises most on is citizens of both sides of the border displaying their own brand of patriotism that indicates loyalty to their nation. In turbulent times like the one we are all going through now, when one word (or, a portrait!) of praise of the enemy camp leader could trigger a belligerent reaction from both sides, her standpoint is extremely relevant. She also manages to weave many humane and emotive characteristics of real men and women into the narrative that may border on the unlikelihood of the very premise itself, but never strays into jingoistic flavour.

Yeah, yeah, we all recognize the lady on the right. But, while most people would be able to guess that the woman on the left is Isabelle Kaif, if you saw her alone, we bet you wouldn’t have been able to. But right now, we’re going to make sure you never forget her.

There was a rumour spread around that Katrina Kaif was in fact fully English and that Kaif was a made up Kashmiri name.

Katrina is with her half sister Isabelle Turcquotte, who is fully English (they share the same mother). The difference is as clear as between night and day (no pun intended).

Isabelle won’t make it in Bollywood since of course the Desi ideal doesn’t map exactly onto the Western aesthetic. She screams foreigner in a way KK 1, KK 2 (Kalki Koechlin) and Sonia Gandhi do not..

Katrina Kaif has a bit of that Kim Kardashian exotic ness (I can’t believe I just wrote that).

I have read 3 articles/posts in the the past 2 weeks of woke white men decrying their “privilege.” It was in the most random of places; the first was Instagram (the artist), the second was a week or so later when I was messing around with Medium (the techie) and the third today was in a London magazine (the editor’s piece).

One is a famous artist, the other is an editor of a magazine and the final is a tech millionaire.

I have a pretty solid bullshit detector and these statements of guilt just set it off.

The hypocrisy in our public discourse has now become so intense that the privileged are learning how to twist it in ever more imaginative ways.

Like all of us I was born with an array of advantages and disadvantages. I recognise I’m Munafiq (a hypocrite) and I contain a ton of contradictions. I won’t make public statement feeling guilty about my privileges, which is simply a convoluted way to show off.

If I really felt bad about my privilege I would resign from my job and give it to the underprivileged. The fact that I don’t do that means I’m pretty ambivalent about my “privilege” (whatever it is) and I should stfu about it.

It’s ok to show, I do it too, but it’s in poor taste to show off and be morally sanctimonious about it.

Only the truly great are truly humble; Shah Rukh and Prince William have no need to show off because they are the Kings of East & West..

Vidhi & I were having a discussion whether Anand Piramal (Mukesh’s future son-in-law) was a Sindhi. We made the observation that while there are many Sindhi millionaires there just aren’t as many billionaires.

Sindhis are a “fast community”; they love to spend what they have. It might be because they are rootless cosmopolitans but that’s not the thrust of the post.

The peculiar pedigree of the business class

India’s particular nexus of politicians, cricketers, Bollywood and billionaire industrialists is creating an elite that’s unlike any other in the world. The American elite seems much more segregated (Zuck didn’t marry an actress) since it’s also divided into different cities (Manhattan, LA, SF etc).

Bombay is becoming a billionaires playground and all eyes on it as flit from funeral to wedding (within the same family – Anand Ahuja seems a fascinating character and an intriguing choice for Sonam Kapoor).

As an aside I wanted to say that Dalrymple is a joke and an appropriator. Even though I am a Mughalist I do not wish to be lectured on my history by a coloniser, who somehow claims distant Indian+Persian ancestry. If you coast on White Privilege then don’t expect to be an authority on Colored Topics. That’s appropriation simple as!

Now back to my original post. Bharata wrote:

“Right after british conquest, whose real victory was over marathas, it removed them, their soldiers had no employment, they became the thugee cult.”

I may not be an expert in Indian history but I think it is a bit of a stretch to claim the British won India from the Marathas or from Ranjit Singh.

Sometimes traditional history does make sense and while there is an element of “history being written by the conquerors” we must also avoid extreme revision.

I’m not personally invested either way; maybe the Mughal Empire had crumbled to that point of nothingness but to somehow constantly impugn it strikes me as somewhat undignified. If Indians/Hindus hate that aspect of their history so much, which we love so much; how can we really hope to bridge the divide.

In fact in that case it’s far easier for the two countries to look elsewhere because on the most basic existential issue we back different sides (we the Mughals, you the Marathas).

Somehow I don’t think history was that way; the Mughals had Hindu nobles and the Marathas had Muslim generals.

But I couldn’t give up on Akbar or even Aurangzeb; one can’t betray one’s ancestor and the Pakistani psychosis conditions us to see them as so regardless of the facts of the matter.

Unless there is true acceptance of the Mughals (look at the late 19th century butchery of the Urdu language) there will never ever be a United Subcontinent and the kernel of Muhajir Resistance (manifested in Pakistan – for what is Pakistan without the Muhajir but a collection of Muslim tribals on the Indus who have frankly and historically very little to do with Mughal majesty but with their own cute & folk traditions) will manifest itself somehow.

At Brown Pundits; the three main focuses are:

(1) India-Pak

(2) Hindu/Muslim

(3) Arya/Dravid

I would if there was a Black Pundits (or white or Yellow or Red) what the main topics would be. I think that much as the Hindu-Muslim debate defines the Brown identity; I imagine the Black-White dichotomy does so for those two races.

For Olive Pundits it would most likely be the Israel-Palestine issue (Arab & Jews etc). I can’t for the life of me know what Yellow Pundits would be about; in their case their entire intellectual focus isn’t random intellectualising but simply how to get ahead.

Maybe Brown Pundit’s propensity to discuss rather irrelevant minutiae is a relic of those ancient Brahmins (or Islamic jurists) discoursing on the trivial points of the Vedas. This was of course Allama Iqbal’s point as to why Hinduism survived but Zoroastrianism could not; the Vedas are a complete set of doctrine exhaustively discussed and understood among their adherents. The idle theorising provided an intellectual resilience to foreign domination of a millennia whereas Zoroastrian magi probably couldn’t mount a defence against empowered Islamic clergy, jurists and philosophers (especially after Caliph Omar’s depredations).

What happened to South Asia’s leaders. The last one to have a decent accent in the English language was Benazir Bhutto. Bandaranaike, Nehru & Jinnah sound like Princes (via Anan).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1G-_FVjUX7E

In other sad news (this is a very old article from 2013) the last Mughal heiress lives in a Calcutta slum. How the Great have fallen..

And the last tragic news of the day, “Karachi becoming a killing field for new born girls.”

A few people found a baby at the door step of a mosque in Karachi and they handed the baby over to the prayer leader. The cleric decried that this is an illegitimate baby therefore he should be stoned. Resultantly the baby was stoned to death. I tried to register a case against the cleric but nothing happened”, narrated Kazmi.

I created a new handle (Dastan Aryamehr – Hero of the Aryans lol) to write more openly on matters with regards to the Faith but then I deleted it again.

It’s very difficult to maintain different handles but then that means I need to exercise judgement/restraint in what I write.

First BME to ascend to one of the Four Great Offices of the State.

as a friend quipped: Sons of Pakistani bus drivers are doing very well…with the London Mayor AND the Home Secretary!

As an aside it’s interesting to note just how conservative the British Asian community is compared to the Home Countries. Westernisation/Westoxification is the acid that burns through traditional culture (is it always a bad thing; I don’t know, no comment) but among the diasporic communities (which moved as families) they have been remarkably resilient against it.

It’s not a good thing as we have casteism and honour killings in Britain but it strikes that Bollywood has hauled India into the post-modern age while in Britain we have happily recreated 1970’s Jullundar/Gujarat

I would answer those feminists who find Humsafar regressive by pointing out that the serial shares many elements with Shakespeare’s Othello. Of course, Shakespeare’s tragedy takes place in the 16th Century, an era that was  much more patriarchal than our own, while Humsafar is set in contemporary times. However, one can account for this by pointing out that Pakistan is a deeply conservative and patriarchal society, which in many ways is comparable to the Europe of 400 years ago. Like Othello, Ashar is manipulated into believing that his wife has been unfaithful to him. In Othello’s case, the “proof” of his wife’s betrayal is the presence of her handkerchief in someone else’s room while in Ashar’s case the proof is his wife’s dupatta in the hands of another man. In both stories, the male lead does not question his suspicions and is driven into a jealous rage. The differences in the two plots lie in the motivations of the manipulator as well as the reactions of the innocent wife.

https://kabiraltaf.wordpress.com/2018/04/30/humsafar-and-shakespeare/