The recent Ambani wedding has undoubtedly captured the attention of those within the Indian community. The extravagant details, such as the staggering cost exceeding $100 million and Nita Ambani’s necklace possibly valued at around $50 million, have been widely discussed.
These exorbitant figures represent a level of opulence unparalleled in many other cultures. Reflecting on this with Dr. Lalchand, I pondered whether Hindu culture, having endured centuries of conquest, finds solace in displays of wealth and material abundance.
This stands in stark contrast to the Persianate tradition, where luxury is revered but with a strong emphasis on restraint. In my own Baháʼí upbringing, luxury has typically been met with guilt.
Without significant historical political power, mainstream Hindu society often sees wealth and its ostentatious display as a form of security. The Ambanis, with their immense wealth, power, and fame, have become emblematic figures within the Desi community, and to some extent, beyond.
Yet, I can’t help but feel that the Ambanis could redirect their resources towards bolstering India’s STEM legacy or preserving its architectural heritage. Eventually, excessive opulence may lose its allure and succumb to hedonic inflation.
A very nice collection of short Sanskrit poems (and a few short prose pieces) about love, longing, separation, etc. The originals are all in in the footnotes, so those who know sanskrit can comment on the translation. Translations are generally very contemporary (even cell phones make an appearance), but the originals are available if you want to see how they have captured (or failed to capture) the essence of the original. Since I do not know sanskrit, I cannot comment on that, but the collection is a lot of fun and worth a read. As india rises, so will the market for such works (which is a good thing).
Check it out.
The histories of Armenia and Georgia are intricately intertwined with Greater Iran, as evidenced by several dynasties with Iranian origins. Georgia shares a similar historical profile, indicating close ties between the two regions (I won’t even touch on Azerbaijan, which to my mind is simply Russified Iran). With regards to the North Caucasus, notwithstanding Russian ethnic cleansing & genocide (apparently what inspired Dune), there is heavy Persian-Iranian influence (though of course I don’t know nearly enough of the history of the region).
All three of the Great Houses of the Kingdom of Armenia (331 BC to 428 AD) were Iranian origin.
Orontid Dynasty (potential ancestral ties to the Achaemenians): Dating back to the 6th century BCE, the Orontids were influential rulers in ancient Armenia during the Achaemenid Persian Empire’s reign.
Artaxiad Dynasty (descendants of the previous Orontids, the clue is in the Iranian-loaded name Arta): Succeeding the Orontids, the Artaxiads governed the Kingdom of Armenia from the 2nd century BCE to the 1st century CE, overseeing its territorial expansion and cultural flourishing.
Arsacid Dynasty (Armenia): A branch of the Parthian Arsacid dynasty in Iran, the Armenian Arsacids ruled from the 1st to the 4th century CE, with periods of Roman influence interspersed with periods of independence.
There are many other dynasties like the Chosroid, Mihranids, Bagratid (the clues are so obvious in the names) and then even in the Kingdom of Cilician Armenian (the region & inhabitants suffered genocide under the Young Turks) the Rubenid–Hethumid Dynasty had Iranian-links even in the Middle Ages. There is an exotic dynasty, the Mamikonians, who apparently had Chinese-origins but even they intermarried with Iranian nobility eventually.
However, the case of St. Shushanik (pictured above & below) highlights the tension between Christianity in the Caucasus, with its Eastern roots but “West-facing” orientation, and Iranianism, particularly Zoroastrianism.
There are figures in the paper that make the overlap clearer. The main difference is more variance in the West Bengalis, and a greater East Asian shift among Bangladeshis. But the latter is clearly just geography; those whose ancestry is from the east of the Padma (like me) always have more East Asian ancestry than those from the west, while those in the north also seem to have more.
The variance in West Bengal is probably driven by caste. You can see Brahmins, and probably what are Bengali-speaking scheduled castes and tribes. In the Bangladesh Muslim population everyone eventually intermarried.
The Assamese are even more East Asian shifted than the Bangaldeshis. As I said in a previous post, these Indo-Aryan groups look like they mixed with a Khasi-like population at some point.
Finally, the West Bengal population had admixture from an East Asian group between 500 and 600 AD. This is the same date as for the Bangladeshis, meaning they are both the same population with the same origin. The major difference seems likely to be the proportion of East Asian ancestry and lack of caste structure within eastern Bengal.
Author’s Note: This is not an academic or objective essay; rather a personalised opinion on the recent Bharat Ratna awardee.
Lets begin with two excerpts:
First one:
Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the Gate:
“To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his Gods.”
From Horatius by Thomas Babington Macaulay.
Second:
“Mardania! eh Ajudhia nagari Sri Ramchandra Ji ki hai. So, chal, iska darshan kari ”, which translates to: “Mardana! This Ayodhya city belongs to Sri Ramchandra Ji. So let us go for his darshan.”
From Bhai Man Singh’s Janam Sakhi which states that Guru Nanak visited Ayodhya.
Considering the aforementioned excerpts it is perhaps unsurprising that it was a Nanakapanthi Macaulayputra who charioted the movement to reclaim the birthplace of Lord Ram in Ayodhya and rebuild the Ram Temple. Additionally it was his organisational and political manoeuvring skills that shifted the political balance of India from the dominant secular leadership of the Congress party to the widely popular and ascendant Bharatiya Janata Party. It was for all that and many other activities that the current regime awarded him the land’s highest honour the Bharat Ratna. What made the moment more momentous was that it came days after the consecration of the Ram Templein Ayodhya.
Though currently, the immensely popular Prime Minister Narendra Modi is synonymous with the BJP’s dominance across India’s political landscape, it was the Lal Krishna Advani who acted as one of the chief characters to shift the political levers of the country. Before proceeding further, it is necessary to give the reason behind his moniker – Nanakapanthi Macaulayputra.
LK Advani belonged to a Sindhi Amil Nanakpanthi family whose religious tradition “used to be Sikh rituals”, the holy book at his home being the Sri Guru Granth Sahib. He was educated at St. Patrick’s High School, Karachi, and by his own admission was unfamiliar with Hindi, preferring to speak his mother tongue Sindhi at home, while preferring English as functional language. Even his introduction to the so-called dreaded Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh was for lack of a better word, bourgeois one, in his own words:
During my vacation and before joining college, I started playing tennis. One of my regular partners on the tennis court was a friend, Murli Mukhi. One day, right in the middle of the game, he said, ‘I am going’. Utterly surprised, I asked him, ‘How can you go like this, without even completing the set?’ He replied, ‘I have joined the RSS a few days ago. I cannot be late for the shakha because punctuality is very important in that organisation’.
A contextual point to mention here would be the view that the RSS also had certain inspirations behind it. Many scholars quote contemporary accounts about how senior political figures of the early 20th Century like Madan Mohan Malviya and Dr Moonje wanted an organisation fashioned after the British boy scout and army, including but not limited to their marching songs. The RSS march as seen today was inspired by that of British voluntary forces in areas of trouble to warn citizens. Supposedly Sangh leaders borrowed English tunes to train the RSS band. The aforementioned figures, besides celebrating native heroic legends like Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj and Peshwa Baji Rao, also stated that Indians had to develop patriotism the way the British developed theirs. Important wars fought by the British like the Battle of Waterloo and Trafalgar were given as examples.
Considering this scenario, it is not strange for a moderate Macaulayputra like LK Advani to familiarise himself with the organisation. Thus he joined the RSS in 1942 besides attending discourses on the Bhagavad Gita by Swami Ranganathananda the president of the Karachi centre of Ramakrishna Mission. This shows Advani to be the recipient of the Indian, rather Indo-Anglian renaissance that swept British India from 1850’s to 1930’s. Couple that with his Amil Nanakpanthi family roots which is the recipient of Bhakti movement.
Also lesser known is the fact that he was related to famed Sufi poetess Dadi Ganga , in fact Advani mentions in his memoirs that his wife Kamla along with her sister Sarla published Dadi Ganga’s Sufi poetry. All these make him the ideal reformist as opposed to the Hindu hardliner the media likes to portray him as; or would it be a leap of faith to say in certain cases, Hindu hardliner is the ideal reformist.
The leap can be taken considering how he organised the political networks connecting the BJP to figures stretching from fiery socialist George Fernandes to Shiv Sena supremo Balasaheb Thackeray.
Besides political networking, what is less spoken about Advani (maybe intentionally) is his penchant for films and the filmmakers. As stated by Vidhu Vinod Chopra whose An Encounter with Faces was nominated for the Academy Award under Best Documentary Short Film in 1979:
“When I got nominated for an Oscar I had no money, I had nothing and I read in the paper that I was nominated. He gave me an Air India ticket and $ 20 a day and that I owe it to Mr LK Advani. I want the world to know why he is so special to me. Not because he is a politician but because he is the man who sent me to the Oscars.”
On multiple occasions other Hindutva icons like Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Balasaheb Thackeray have been lauded as poets and artists, but Advani as the admiring film buff has been less talked of. Be that as it may, 2024 can be now seen as honouring a Nanakpanthi Macaulayputra who charioted a saffron trail across India’s political landscape and who also liked going to the movies.
The essay has been published in the following blog as well.
I highly recommend checking out this podcast as it delves into gender equality advancements deep in rural India (Bihar- site of an upcoming temple). It sheds light on grassroots efforts, including how the birth of a girl child is perceived differently from a boy child, and the barriers girls and women face in education and beyond. Continue reading Podcast explores advances in gender equality in India
As everybody knows by now, Pakistan held a general election on February 8th and the results (such as they are, rigging is still going on as we write, so not all the results are here) are a shock for the army and the parties it had roped in to remove their own creation (Imran Khan).
Imran Khan was brought into power in 2018 as part of a longstanding army project to get rid of bothersome civilian politicians. To arrange that victory the army had used its various levers (pliant judges, ISI pressure, pliant media etc) to remove Mian Nawaz Sharif from power and when the numbers still seemed uncertain after the voting, they delayed results and arranged “positive results”. But Imran Khan proved a disaster at governance and by 2021 the army chief (Bajwa) had lost faith in Khan and in typical army fashion now “arranged” a vote of no confidence against Khan. Somewhat to their surprise, Khan refused to go gentle into that good night and launched a campaign of defiance. Since Bajwa himself was playing double games (probably in the hope of getting another extension as army chief) and was a rank incompetent in any case, the entire saga was shambolic even by Pak army standards. Khan was especially successful in turning the army’s own mildly jihadi paknationalist narrative against them. And he MUST get credit for having the guts to do so. It is not like it was not available to other parties, but outside of fringe leftist or Islamist groups, no major party ever dared to attack the pak army as traitors and american agents. Khan had no such hesitation, he made it the main plank of his resistance, and it worked, spectacularly. He also had the benefit of Bajwa’s rank incompetence and all round goofiness and the terrible economic performance of the coalition the army had put together to overthrow him was the icing on the cake.
When the army finally arrested Khan, his supporters tried to incite a coup against the new army chief (Hafiz Asim Munir) and may have had the sympathy of a couple of senior generals, but the attempt failed and when you go at the king, you best not miss.. once they missed, Hafiz was able to launch a massive crackdown against the PTI and it seemed like they had no future left. But continuing economic crisis meant the public remained unhappy and the caretaker regime’s blatant authoritarian and undemocratic maneuvers REALLY turned off the new educated youth, who were more idealistic than their elders; every unfair means used against Khan increased his support in that demographic.
I have never been a fan of Khan sahib but even I could see that PTI is more popular than anyone in the establishment camp. And being in the establishment camp really hurt the PMLN, who had themselves been victims of establishment shenanigans in the past but now sacrificed their anti-establishment narrative for a short chance to rule followed by establishment support in the election. That proved to be a game changer. Their lethargic campaign and mixed and confused messaging added to their woes. Still, many people (including yours truly) thought that all the pre-poll rigging by the army and the fact that PTI had been denied the chance to run as a single party would be enough to squeeze out a PMLN win (though I also thought the army prefers a hung parliament, so they wont let them win big either). But paradoxically the state’s oppression of PTI removed all the opportunists and charlatans the army itself had gifted to them in 2018 and the young idealists who were left proved up to the task. They managed to get a candidate on almost every seat (running as independents as the party was kept out of the running via undemocratic means) and they managed to use social media to let their voters know who the candidate is in every constituency. This is a major achievement and they deserve FULL credit for doing that.
Come election day, the establishment allowed mostly free and fair voting. Somehow their own assessment was that this will produce a fractured mandate with PMLN in the lead, but still dependent on them for arranging turncoats and supporters for them to make it to the magic number. They allowed PTI to run all their independents (probably feeling that too much in the hands of PMLN will not be good for them either) (I say “let them run” because considering the undemocratic means at their disposal, they COULD have done more to suppress these people, it was not beyond their abilities) and waited for the voting to end.
The voters then delivered their verdict. PTI having no “ground game” proved irrelevant. The common people of Pakistan (at least in the “Pakistani” zones of Punjab and KPK) came out in droves to “vote out the scoundrels” and there was a PTI landslide in KPK and in many parts of Punjab. They may even have had a lot support in Karachi, but turnout was lower and (maybe with some rigging) they did not do as well there. They did not make a dent in rural Sindh (where sindhi identity is still strong and Sindhis know that PPP is the only Sindhi party in the game) and there has not been a real election in Balochistan for decades. STill, in most of Pakistan the “independent” candidates put up by the PTI won in large numbers. Having miscalculated and now with massive egg on their face, the establishment was forced to go back to its old shenanigans and they have delayed results on many constituencies, clearly trying to alter the result in close races (eg, i know for a fact that young lawyer Taimur Malik of the PTI upset ex-prime minister Yusuf Gilani in Multan, but that seat’s result was delayed and then announced in Gilani’s favor).
But even after this post-poll rigging, it is now clear that PTI has won KPK by a landslide and has won about half the seats in Punjab. That makes them the biggest single “party” but of course on paper they are not one party, they are 125 independent MNAs (members of the national assembly). That means there is still the possibility (really, probability) that the establishment will cobble together a coalition of some favored parties plus whatever independents they can buy or cajole. Ideally the army would like to make lemonade from the lemons they have gathered together, creating some kind of “national unity govt” that is run by GHQ from behind the scenes, but more likely they will end up with a useless and fractured govt and it will not last too long. Pakistan will have another election within two years (or less), or it will have a military coup. Same old, same old. And all other crises are still bubbling along. “Militancy”, separatist insurgency, economic crisis, poor governance. The show must go on.
Just to be clear, if you think like a democrat the obvious solution is to let PTI constitute its MNAs into one party and let them form governments where they can. But keep in mind that we are talking about Pakistan, where the army has ruled for decades, directly or indirectly, so this is more or less a pipe dream. The country is run by the army and the apparatus of the Raj (now rusted and decayed, but still the machinery that actually runs the country) and ALL parties are badly compromised. PTI itself runs on vibes and has no serious economic or foreign policy plan (if Khan stays in prison they could conceivably find a competent leader to run the govt but they are a personality based party and will not be able to keep khan on the side.. if they are in power, they have to have Khan in power and khan is an incompetent goof at that job, though one must give him credit for taking a clear stand and fighting back. And of course, FULL CREDIT to the young guns of the PTI who mananged, under very adverse circumstances, to fight back and win. A job well done. Young people in Pakistan are sick of the terrible governance and all the unfair means used by the establishment. They have spoken out against it in this election. Unfortunately, this is pakistan, so Allah will not give us any unalloyed good. Young uns are idealistic and are rejecting the authoritarian and oppressive establishment, but ideologically they are all over the place, the default narrative is PMA-level paknationalist (which is why they are extra angry now, because they think big bad America has kicked out their hero, who was trying to do the Islamic Paknationalist thing and was stopped by anti-islam and anti-pakistan forces). They have done a great thing on February 8th, but all the other realities remain unchanged.
It is what it is.
If you want to see my pre-election thoughts, i did a podcast:
My podcast when Imran Khan was arrested is here: https://www.brownpundits.com/2023/05/11/pakistan-crisis-the-arrest-of-imran-khan/
My article from 2011 about Imran Khan (I never liked him in politics).
Seat position per Dawn.com as I write this (a bit misleading because they are not showing many independents as PTI when they really are):
The following post is contributed by @saiarav from X or Yajnavalkya from Medium
I flooded the TL with tweets on the budget today. Putting it all together in one place for future reference.
1) The big takeaway — a stunningly non-populist budget in an election year
Unlike in 2019, when the government deliberately advanced the budget date by a month so they could announce a major welfare program (Kisan DBT) and tax cuts for middle class, which added up close to Rs.1 trillion of giveaways or roughly 0.5% of GDP, this budget had almost nothing at all for any section of the voters. This is even more remarkable because A) in the last few years, state elections have seen a strong trend of rampant freebie promises and B) the economic scenario is decidedly more mixed compared to 2019 with clear signs of K-shaped recovery and economic stress in the bottom half of the population. I would have thought Modi would go in for freebies at least comparable to 2019 (0.5% of GDP would be Rs.1.7 trillion), him choosing not to do so is a measure of the supreme confidence he has regarding 2024 elections.
Of course, Modi can still surprise all of us with an unexpected 8 PM announcement with a slew of welfare measures, in which case it will very likely include a large fuel price cut.
2) The fiscal glide path looks very promising; immense possibilities
The budget estimates for 2024–25 are extremely conservative, with some of it to the point of being ridiculous. Take the 2023–24 RE for corporate taxes for example — the underestimate of growth is silly, with just two months left for year-end, it kinda makes the budgeting exercise meaningless.
Overall, I see higher direct tax collections and divestments resulting in at least a 20–30 bps beat over the 5.1% fiscal deficit target for 2024–25. And then we get to 4.0% by 2025–26. This is all very important for the economy — a potential upgrade in our sovereign credit ratings amidst expectation of greater FII investments in the domestic bond market, in turn leading lower interest rates.
The fact that we appeared to have dodged a new freebie program which will be a permanent burden on the resources drives immense possibilities. As the fiscal deficit comes under control, the government will have much greater resources to fund new priorities, beyond road and rail.
The 2023–24 RE for capex spend came in lighter than BE but this is, in large part, because the government shelved the plan for equity infusion into oil OMCs.
The IEBR RE figures were sharply below estimates but this is due to FCI borrowing less funds for its operations (which is a good thing).
One sizeable miss was lower railway IEBR capex — much lower spend on the DFC…apparently because part of the project got shelved.
Meanwhile, Gadkari seems to have no problem handling any amount of capex thrown at his department, solid execution.
For 2024–25, the capex budget is a 10% increase which is pretty good considering its coming off a very strong capex allocation in 2023–24.
4) Huge capital infusion into BSNL — strategic or a waste of taxpayer’s money?
Close to Rs.2 trillion will be infused into BSNL between 2022–23 and 2024–25. This is on top the spectrum it will get for free which as an opportunity cost, if my understanding is right. My initial take was that this was a waste of money into a loss-making, inefficient PSU but then I was told …
…that the capital infusion had a major strategic objective.
5) Defense capex continues to be weak
6) Postal department — yet another case of a broken public sector biz
7) Railway finances continues to be in shambles
I wrote, perhaps two dozen tweets on railways, so I will put that up as a separate blogpost…but the key takeaway, railway finances continue to be in shambles.
8) The difficult job of fiscal management — limited spending discretion
Most of the spend is just completely non-discretionary, minimal ability to cut cost, either for political or administrative reasons.
9) Energy sector capex — disappointing
The IEBR spend by Oil PSUs or capex for atomic energy is modest — remember there was a recent announcement of significant expansion plans in nuclear capacity thru 2030. Well, the money is not forthcoming.
10) What is going on with defense pensions?!? — very low allocation
11) Hits and misses on government spending estimates for 2023–24
