June 2019
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The Ideal and the Practical — the Practice
Posting a quote that did not fit a comment thread, the author reads Chuang Tzu’s cook story as showing that Lao Tzu’s ideal of emptiness leaves room for practical play,…
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Are all Arabs “honorary” Muslims?
Starting from whether Pakistanis treat all Arabs as honorary Muslims, the author argues that South Asian identities split along a Hindi-Urdu civilisational fault line, citing the choices made by Bengalis…
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BP Podcast episode 49: Hindi as the lingua franca
A BrownCast episode in which Shoaib, Abhisek and the host discuss the recent Tamil-Hindi controversy, limited to North India as the South Indian guest could not join, with a note…
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Urbanization in the 21st-century
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The world turned upside down
A short poem imagining people who are told it is the Kali Yuga and rejoice, treating the Dharma and the Dao as lessons in what not to do.
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Genetic change, cultural coherency, and social structure
The author rejects a commenter’s claim that high R1a frequency in South Asia reflects non-paternity events, citing jati endogamy and uniform autosomal ancestry, and compares the Hui, whose Y chromosomes…
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Why the Diaspora is not as interesting to me
The author explains why the diaspora interests him less than it once did: Indian-American identity now seems settled and assimilated, while the lives of 1.3 billion Indians, and 400 million…
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Live Blogging, China & the US; Destined for War
Live notes on a Forum on Geopolitics talk by Harvard’s Graham Allison, whose book argues that a rising China and established America can avoid war, while citing historical cases where…
