Why 2 States works.

I went to see 2 States last night and my friend & I were the only ones in the cinema (surprisingly for the large desi population in Kampala Bollywood doesn’t have long runs).

My fiancée is from Chennai but is a Sindhi while I’m a BritPak. Since Pakistan is essentially the Punjab writ large in our own convulated way we have a 2 States (albeit international) saga.
I feel that Two states could work only because it pits extremes against each other; for instance if the boy had been Bengali instead of Punjabi the alliance with a TamBran family wouldn’t have been so difficult.
Essentially the Indus ethnicities (Punjabi & Sindhi) seem to function as the de facto Pakistanis of India, loud, ostentatious & undeservedly arrogant. 2 states serves as a metaphor for the divides of the subcontinent; North/South Aryan/Dravidian, ANI/ASI, Indo Pakistan, Abrahamic/Dharmic and the duality of how they are resolved. Interestingly it echoes the age old paradigm male invaders from the north marrying the southern native females..

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Brown Pundits Archive

Razib Khan is a Bangladeshi-American geneticist and writer. He is co-founder of Brown Pundits and runs Unsupervised Learning, a Substack on population genetics, evolution, history, and politics with more than 55,000 subscribers, alongside the accompanying podcast. He has blogged at Gene Expression since the early 2000s. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Review, Slate, India Today, Quillette, and UnHerd. He is Director of Operations at FUTO in Austin, Texas, and co-founder of GenRAIT, a life-sciences platform company. Earlier in his career he developed ancestry algorithms for Gene by Gene, the Genographic Project, and Insitome, and was among the first employees at Embark Veterinary. Born in Dhaka and raised in upstate New York and eastern Oregon, he holds degrees in biochemistry (2000) and biology (2006) from the University of Oregon, and undertook doctoral work in genomics and genetics at UC Davis. He lives in Austin.

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Pratyush Sinha
12 years ago

You could watch 'Gori Tere Pyaar Me' for a north Indian female- south Indian male story. (Terrible movie. don't watch it)

ysv_rao
12 years ago

Sorry I cant get behind this dichotomy.

I dont subscribe to AIT firstly and those of Indus and Central Asian ethnicities these days tend to flatter themselves that they were always the elite but history proves otherwise
There had been pretty much just one major empire of Punjabi or rather Jat origin and that was Harshavardha. Poorbias who created Mauryas, Guptas, Palas and other Southerners such as Satavahanas,Chalukyas,Rashtrakutas and Kakatiyas used to be the top dogs and used to view the northwesterners with contempt

This changed with the Hun/Gurjar ,Kamboja and thier allies among some treacherous Brahmins and Kshatriyas who ousted power from the Poorbiyas and had been on top ever since( I included the Turk,Pathan and Persian Muslim nobles in the former category)

Punjabis are rather loud and aggressive but in really a harmless Levantine gesticulating kindof way. Sindhis are not really loud , indeed they are tad mousy but they are garish!

The Indian divide these days is more like the extroverted and entrepreunerial Arabian Sea-Gujjs,Sindhi,Punjabi,Keralites, Kannadigas,Bunts vs introspective, idealistic Bay of Bengal – Tamils, Telugus, Oriya, Bengal

(Marathas are an exception to the Arabian Sea type as they are essentially Andhras lost in the northwestern Deccan-ie Satavahanas) and Mumbai is really a Gujarati city

Asok
12 years ago

In Real Life, in my experience, most North-South alliances are Southern male, Northern female, and this is because of the unfortunate skin color preference in India.

Zach-X
12 years ago

Yes that's why I wrote "ancient."

I know aspirational South Indian men marry "fair." However anyway nice comments y'all!

Zach-X
12 years ago

I like the Arabian Sea vs. Bay of Bengal dichotomy..

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