July 2014

Eye in the Sky. US, Pakistan, U2 etc

Hamid Hussain’s long essay on US-Pakistan reconnaissance cooperation in the Cold War, tracing high-altitude U-2 flights and signal interception, with Zia’s quip about friendship with the United States being like…

Brown Pundits Archive31 July 20140 comments
Culture and Open Defecation

Links the debate over a New York Times story on open defecation and malnutrition in India, including rebuttals and Hinduphobia allegations, and urges focus on the fact that a third…

Brown Pundits Archive31 July 20140 comments
Communalism pays in votes [Data Stories Update]

Presents maps showing that voting in western Uttar Pradesh, near Muzaffarnagar, was far more polarised in 2014 than elsewhere in the state, with a toilet map of social groups.

Brown Pundits Archive31 July 20140 comments
Nepal Left Behind

Energy use per capita figures for South Asia in 1971 and 2011 show Nepal stagnating and being overtaken by India, with a note on India’s falling subjective well-being.

Brown Pundits Archive31 July 20140 comments
Lokayata as a “primitive” Indian folk belief?!

Quotes a Chinese-language source describing Lokayata as an ancient philosophy tied to ‘primitive Indian folk belief’, with a few odd passages that the poster finds astonishing.

Brown Pundits Archive30 July 20140 comments
Some charts from Human Development Report 2014

A set of charts from the 2014 Human Development Report, with captions on South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa lagging and the role of manufacturing.

Brown Pundits Archive30 July 20140 comments
Indians as Over-cooked Rotis

Quotes a Radhakrishnan anecdote about God cooking the English, Africans and Indians as under-baked and perfect rotis, which appears in Gujarat education-department books accused of teaching students to look down…

Brown Pundits Archive30 July 20140 comments
180, 900, 180,000

The site celebrates 180 days, 900 posts and 180,000 page views since it restarted, thanks reviewers and invites more women to join as it heads for Mission 1000.

Brown Pundits Archive30 July 20140 comments
Xinjiang (again)

The author sees fresh violence in Xinjiang as part of an Islamist asymmetric war against Israel and China, argues that sympathy for the Uighurs and Palestinians rests on their being…

Brown Pundits Archive29 July 20140 comments
Aakar Patel: Kabaddi made esay

A reposted Aakar Patel piece on professional kabaddi, with the poster’s own remarks on the sport’s Dravidian origins, its status in Bangladesh and the pleasures of playing it.

Brown Pundits Archive29 July 20140 comments