4th surge and counting, and the rocks, ragers, and Ivermectinists are out in full force. Omicrons are not as severe as Deltas, but the sheer quantity of the former makes up for it.
I have been put through so much misery because of the abject incompetence of this country.
Have you seen this? I’m surprised at how low the MCAT averages are for some elite specialities. The STEP1 scores tell a different story. I think it just goes to show how NOT gloaded the selection process for residency is, when it comes to objective metrics. Granted, clinical medicine, is less gloaded than many people would expect. The way tech selects candidates with direct interview logical reasoning tests or how law’s gatekeeping is via the logic heavy LSAT, points to at least the gatekeepers’ views.
If you don’t mind saying, what’s the typical profile of a Covid patient you see these days? Old and/or comorbidity and who willfully refused to get vaccinated? Or something else? Also, are you required to give them a bed, or can you triage the mild cases back home with pain-relieving medication?
Yes, exactly that. Old, fat, has comorbidities, and either didn’t care to get vaccinated or willfully opposed it. Because I work in a small Trumpist city, more of the latter.
As for sending them home, that is the decision that a Emergency Doctor makes. I (hospitalist) see them after the decision has been made to admit.
Pandit Brown
2 years ago
Any bets on Kohli being reinstated as captain after the team goes through a long losing streak?
Latter’s probably true, but I think there’s a real risk of the former. The middle order batting is highly brittle, which is tolerable in T20 but poses too high a risk in ODIs and Tests. Almost all recent victories I can recall involved the top order and/or bowlers doing really well, but we can’t rely on them to bail us out every time.
Today’s ODI match should shed some light on the trajectory of the team.
Everyone’s batting order is shaky these days. I think this has a lot to do with the sheer amount of video available for analysis of batting techniques, as well as far better bowler and fielder fitness.
Unbelievable ignorance of the most significant sentences on this site in our living memory which resolve both, ‘Aryan’ and ‘IE Urheimat’ issues.
RK: “The origins of Indo-Iranians in Poland and Byelorussia explain why upper-caste Indians today display genetic affinities with Europeans. These connections are the result of a migration of Indo-Iranians from the lands to the south of the Baltic Sea thousands of years ago all the way to India’s Gangetic plains, a 3,000-mile migration that took over 1,500 years.”
Good piece on India’s employment puzzles/challenges.
Pandit Brown
2 years ago
Have people seen the Netflix show “Decoupled”, and if so, what did you think of it?
I’m seeing chatter on Twitter about Netflix not being relatable to Indians because its shows are mostly woke (which is true; even shows that had strong first seasons went completely woke by the third).
Also, it’s apparently elitist, with “Decoupled” given as an example. At one level, they are, because the dialogues are mostly in English. But I wonder if they’d still feel elitist if they were redone in Hindi, or some other Indian language. “Decoupled” itself may have the rich and the famous as its setting, but it continuously pokes fun at the same people, which is the long-time shtick of the writer (Manu Joseph). So I did enjoy it, though I don’t rave about it. The late Jaspal Bhatti did something similar, though his characters were very relatable.
On the matter of shows being woke, I saw Chandigarh Kare Ashiqui (also on Netflix) and thought it was super-woke, though not in an off-putting way. (I had similar reactions to Brokeback Mountain when that came out.) I’m not sure if it was promoting the concept of gender-fluidity or just arguing for some understanding and tolerance of the transgender. For my part, as a male, I’d be freaked out in a similar situation and run for my life! I guess I’m not that liberal.
I watched a few Indian Netflix shows. It’s kinda obvious why it doesn’t have much traction.
Saw one featuring a male-female roommate pair (it was ambiguous if they ever were a “couple”), they’d go to wine tastings and debauched parties and talk about Game of Thrones.
I have a feeling that these people are aiming for a very specific cultural milieu.
The total addressable market for paid streaming services is relatively small in India.
Netflix, Hotstar, Amazon Prime are all competing for the 30 million odd English speaking population. Out of these, Netflix had the highest fees and no particular USP.
Hotstar has cricket, Marvel, english premier league etc. to attract a diverse family audience. Amazon has well … amazon.
Netflix mostly has content made for and by South Bombay/Delhi type yuppies. Might or might not be woke.
The rest of the country has its own set of free apps like MX Player that most of the folks here wouldn’t even have heard of. Additionally, Jio provides a lot of content for free as well.
Netflix will grow slowly in India alongside the aspirational upper middle class. Lately it has reduced its fees and also had some experiments where people could view its catalogue without logging in.
Yeah, unless you want international content, Netflix really isn’t value for money in India. I used Netflix in its oldest incarnation when I lived in the States: where it used to mail movie CDs and DVDs to our homes, in effect replacing the video stores like Blockbuster. So I have a connection to it that most Indians (who aren’t returned NRIs like me) don’t, which is why I subscribe to it. There’s ample content produced by Indians within India to keep everyone here happy.
I saw it with my parents lmfao. I am shocked my Dad sat through it. He even surprisingly was upset with the mistreatment of the transgender character. But it was just not believable on one level. They needed a transgender actress not some classic Bollywoodoid khatri model
Could any transgender actress have pulled this off though? That is: be feminine and attractive enough that the audience doesn’t suspect anything and is rooting for her until the point when the secret is revealed?
That’s really what I found the least believable part of the story: the notion that being trans can be hidden so effectively. I think it can work the other way: women cutting their hair, and wearing clothes than men typically wear more than women, and do things that men typically do more than women. Like Winona Ryder in Boys Don’t Cry.
About Decoupled, its ok. Its different, but in a very self aware way. Doesnt reach anywhere near the heights of ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’, but a decent try.
Regarding Netflix’s lack of success in India. I dont think it is in Netflix’s interest to create content that will be successful in India.
A successful entertainment product is a psychological service which serves a combination of:
1) A fantasy (Eg. : Iranian/Pakistani looking females pining for South Indian type dude – pretty much all of Indian cinema now).
2) A bias (Eg. : Attractive, independent women are evil and slutty – pretty much all of Indian tv)
3) A memory (Eg. : Religious/historical/mythological shows which tell us stories/ideas we already know)
This applies to woke, right wing, liberal, apathetic in equal measure. Its just that the fantasies, biases and memories are different.
In India the audience is dominated by apathetic folks, followed by right wing. Woke and liberal content has no audience, so no chance for Netflix to succeed. Unless Netflix wants to make Pushpa like stuff for streaming.
The burgeoning Indian middle class is fat on two things – satiation on the economic front and the fecundity of a nativist political expression – Hindutva. Both of these were denied to them by the socialist state for close to 60 years. Yet Netflix does not appeal to them!! Strange…..
Netflix is only gaining traction among the real Indian wokes – the liberals, the Nehru-spawn – a small fraction of the Indian population.
For those who pretend that Hindutva is Woke, even this data-point will not illuminate them.
I’ve said this before and i’ll say it again, Hindutva lacks the intellectual mettle to stand on its feet as an alternative worldview to Liberalism. Most Middle Class Indians are milktoast liberals and the Upper Middle Class Indians are limousine liberals AKA Woke.
Now, i’m just guessing here but i think the Hindtuva loving Middle Class will accept the woke garbage as long its not Pro-Muslim.
This is not a mystery. Netflix is a global company headquartered in woke California. Neither nationalism nor bourgeois economic values hold much favor with the honchos. They are not Ramanand Sagar or B. R. Chopra.
For those who pretend that Hindutva is Woke
Those of us who compare Hindutva to Wokeness (like me) are saying that the activists in both groups have created a model for what everyone in society should believe and how they should behave, and brook no disobedience (the consequences of which are “cancellation”). The nature of the model is different (national identity tied to religion and an exaggerated past glory in Hindutva vs permanent racial/sexist/genderist oppression in Wokeness). The Hindutva slur of “anti-national” can alienate one from their families and neighbors, and in some cases, land one in jail. The Woke slur of “racist/sexist/transphobe” can get one fired from academic, industry, or government jobs.
These similarities may seem too abstract or meta to you, but they make sense to me.
Waiting for you to start calling Jacobins and Girondins as Woke! After all why not? It fits whatever high-level proxy you have described….Perhaps even Hitler was woke? And Goebbels was the German version of AOC!
@Enigma
Your purity certificates are endlessly entertaining. If you could somehow make money out of it, then you are even better than Netflix!
Indians rotlu/dramebaaz toh hain, bakchod bhi hain, goron ki chaat-te bhi hain (in this case vocabulary), mauke pe socialist/communist bhi ban jaate hain, aur intellectually middle-east level ke chutiye hai (as in incapable of honest fact-finding/debate)
So it is easy to conflate being rotlu + bakchod + identity_politics + socialist + noisy with being woke. But I don’t think Indians are woke because Indians are a chatte-hue-makkar, pragmatic people mostly because India is too poor, people have better things to do and engaging in dramas like being woke costs money.
And about being cancelled: Sannu ki? Jab dahhad dahhad ke chikhte ho ki I am Amreeki, I am so thankul to be in Amreeka, I was fala-dhikana, toh tum jaano tumhara kaam jaane. Ho jao cancel humein kya? Humaari bala se, what have Americans in general and American of Indian origin have done for Indians to deserve open street muscle level support from Sanghis? Itni seva ka itna hi milega, namaskar, tata-bye-bye.
There are two kinds of smarts at work here:
1) The professor-wannabe, good at solving regression problem with a neural network, elaborate vocabulary, recycled-regurgitated-repackaged ideas, takes pride in hanging out with the ‘giants’ of fala-dhikana. Will pick up arguments or arguments sake, tries hard to sound cool and ‘educated’ in ever more elaborate schemes.
2) The 2+2=4 brain, cares about law and order, food, health, road, water,…
Indians have great propensity or (1) but the weight corresponding to (2) is too high.
Janamejaya
2 years ago
Why are wokes in academia so mad at Razib?
What’s he done to piss them off so much?
Seems like biology departments across USA have been completely “conquered” by wokes just as the liberal arts departments. Just hope they are kept off the other hard sciences and engineering departments for some more time.
BTW here is one of the comments from Razib’s article protesting the Sci American profile of Wilson.
“””
How about the fact that Wilson was a big supporter of Philippe Rushton, and argued that Rushton was being persecuted for promoting studies that showed Blacks are inferior to Whites? How does that fit your narrative?
Specifically, Rushton (if you don’t know who he was, just google him) was trying to get a paper published arguing that r/k selection differences apply to human “races,” ultimately trying to prove that Blacks care less for their offspring and have more babies. This was not a subtle argument. Wilson championed the paper, and after it was (correctly) rejected for publication, commiserated with Rushton by observing that he (Wilson) would like to be outspoken like Rushton (a Canadian), but would be “attacked” if he did.
And Wilson wrote a letter of support for Rushton when Rushton’s university was attempting to discipline him for, among other things, publishing a paper that argued that IQ is inversely correlated with penis size (again attributing these differences to “racial” populations).
I knew Wilson and I don’t think he was intentionally racist. But science–and biology, particularly–has a lot to answer for in the way it has turned a blind eye to enabling racism, sexism, and other forms of bias. This kind of sneering dismissal doesn’t help the cause of reckoning with bias in our society, nor does it “set the record straight.”
I agree that the essay in question could have had more detail and nuance, but the basic points it raises are worth engaging with, not dismissing. Nobody is immune from examination, and the constant stream of outrage every time someone critiques Wilson is disingenuous. Wilson campaigned for and engineered a lot of this outrage, from the moment the critiques of Sociobiology appeared, privately referring to his colleague Dick Lewontin as a “psychopath,” dismissing all criticism of his ideas as “Marxist,” and generally acting as if it was impossible to criticize his ideas on anything other than biased, ideological grounds.
Anticipating that the immediate response to this will be “what’s your evidence,” I can tell you that I have copies of the letters in question that I obtained at several openly accessible archives. I have an established track record as a historian of biology and am not making this shit up. Dismiss me if you want, but don’t pretend that nobody’s offered any substance
“””
Naipaul’s line “Hate oppression, but fear the oppressed” comes to mind. Certain Black folks are so angry that they would like nothing but to bring down the edifice of American institutions and society. An emotion also seen in certain Indian Dalits.
It’s simply not possible to accept HBD in a liberal and diverse democracy. That’s true also in India. If it were shown that “upper” castes had a genetic advantage over e.g. adivasis then likely that researcher would have been fired/cancelled in India too.
Ultimately all systems care for social stability. Very big, messy democracies care more about taming the passions of the majority than the minority. Even in India, the raitas are celebrating as trads are getting thrown off Twitter with a nominal RW govt in place.
Razib got cancelled long ago btw, remember when he got hired by NYT and liberals got him fired barely before he started?
Under the age of 18, the US is already looking like Brazil demographically. Conservatism in Brazil is race-blind but pre-occupied with abortion, transgenders, religion etc. I think the same pattern will hold in the US. Racialists like Rushton will be gently swept under the carpet and forgotten forever.
Siddharth
2 years ago
The way I see it, the Indian content on Netflix and Prime can be split into two major types, both of which are insufferable for many including myself and might explain why they haven’t caught on at large:
(1) On one hand are the urban shows that copy-paste US wokeness onto India, as if Indian society is a blank canvas with no cultural nuance to take into account; (2) on the other hand are the ‘hinterland’ shows that pander to very undergrad tastes with heaps of sex, violence and rough language. This got old soon after the GoW films, but this dead horse keeps getting flogged.
But the fault isn’t with Netflix, it’s with the Indian content creators who’s shows they finance. These folks based in Mumbai or Delhi are worlds removed from the Indian hinterland, they might as well be based in California.
Enigma – “Most Middle Class Indians are milktoast liberals and the Upper Middle Class Indians are limousine liberals AKA Woke.”
Gotta agree with that. Most middle class Indians are ones that are just 1-2 generations removed from real poverty or extremely humble family backgrounds, with many of the womenfolk in the older generations of their families having possibly been forced to sacrifice their educations or careers. Poverty and deprivation still lurk around the corner even in the most upscale areas of all cities, it’s only natural that social justice occupies some of the mindspace of many well meaning middle class folk. And since there isn’t a genuine Indian/Hindu social justice alternative to western wokism, no wonder this gets lapped up with all its attendant rubbish. Now if there were a Hindu version of zakat or kibbutzim that brings together all social classes and build social solidarity, things might be different…
There is plenty of Indian language YouTube content that needs a lot of creativity to compensate for low production budget.
It doesn’t help Netflix that there are many local streaming channels from Zee 5 to Aha that cater to local tastes with original content.
Don’t know why Netflix thinks they won’t have stiff competition in entertainment from one of the world’s largest entertainment industries. (e.g. Aha owners)
Indeed, in financial and market share terms it would appear Netflix’s growth is constrained by local competition. Regarding local tastes, Netflix is a company which has succeeded in multiple non-Anglo markets such as Brazil and Korea. Therefore, I dont think lack of adaptability is the problem here.
The Indian audience is passionate, but more loyal than demanding. Also, our best brains go into engineering and more engineering, barely any smart teenager thinks of becoming a writer.
I haven’t seen Netflix succeed in well-established local entertainment markets. Not sure about Netflix adaptability instead of first mover advantage. Also half a decade ago Netflix looked like it would succeed in India too.
Let’s agree to disagree about creativity in independent creators in India. Your YouTube algorithm recommendations must be very limited.
Another perspective is that, even at similar levels of material prosperity, the amount of alone time available to folks in India is relatively less. There is just too much activity or social life going on to be able to withdraw into a cocoon.
Regarding Hindutva and wokeness, the latter is no match for the former in terms of its level of organization, political strategy and street power. Right wing Hindus wanted a temple in Ayodhya, they go it. They wanted Kashmir’s special status gone, they got it. They wanted triple talaq criminalized, they got it. And all this was done via established legal process.
Wokeness, on the other hand resembles a poorly run mafia. Random outrages, derision from the mainstream and no real political cachet. If the US did not have a two party system, woke collective would have virtually no valence, much like Communists in India.
One of them is a young anarchist movement seeking to tear down all the normative aesthetic standards (gender, sexual) of a intensely capitalist society. Seeking to disrupt power that has been thoroughly captured by elites of a racial majority.
The other is a five-decade old political mobilisation that has already captured power from a socialist comprador elite that sought to center minoritarian and caste appeasement. They seek to restore the normative standards with respect to cultural aesthetics.
How on earth are both the same? No self-respecting political observer will ever do such inane comparisons.
Miffed mesolithic forager
2 years ago
Hey Razib, just couple of questions as follows:
Q. Why do Kashmiris look slightly different from North Indians on average(they have pseudo Pashtun appearance) and more exotic looking people(light eyes and light hair), compared to Jaat people, who look typical North Indians on average, despite having highest Steppe ancestry and lowest AASI in India?
Q. Was there any ANE rich population (deriving 60-70% of its ancestry from ANE) living in periphery of northern most part of South Asia?
Q. Is CHG basically Iran_HG that lived in Caucasus, mixed with ANE/EHG related population there and acclimatized itself to Caucasus?
Q. Is it true Baloch and Brahui derive 60-65% of their ancestry from Iran_N or Iran_HG of Holcene?
Q. What was the frequency of light eyes and hair in EEF[WHG+Anatolia_N] and CHG?
Q. Is the western Eurasian ancestry in Ethiopians from Natufian related population?
Q. How much EEF related ancestry do North African groups like North Algerians, North Moroccans and Tunisians have?
the supreme court judgement regarding reservations sounds too woke. it will be atleast 50 more years before reservations are undone. in the mean while either the number of seats will be increased or private colleges will get permissions liberally to absorb the ‘ general merit’ candidates. thus the upper caste’s angst will be managed.
interestingly the 10% e w s reservation stays and will probably be agreed by the court.
ages ago when i was getting into an engineering course in karnataka there was lot of angst against reservation. now every year 40,000 engineering seats are going a begging, and ‘engineers’ coming out are joining all sorts of jobs. yesterday karnataka govt. has amended rules wherein engineers can be middle and high school teachers!!
Ugra
2 years ago
Indian Liberals on Odd Days – Hindutva is Woke
Indian Liberals on Even Days – Hindutva is fascist
Indian-American Tunku Varadarajan has a meltdown over Modi Goverment’s decision to put Subash Chandra Bose’s statue at India Gate
This, in a nutshell, is a perfect encapsulation of the world of the Indian deracine – the Western civilizational enemies must be our enemies. Their allies, our allies. Compradors waiting for scraps.
Indian Liberals on Odd Days – Hindutva is Woke
Indian Liberals on Even Days – Hindutva is fascist
Well, the right-wing American author Jonah Goldberg did write a book titled “Liberal Fascism”, so that must blow your mind too.
Those of us who protest wokeness in the West while simultaneously protesting Hindutva in India just desire a more heterodox environment in which people are free to express different points of view without being labeled either racists or traitors. If this goal (or the abstract thinking that led to it) doesn’t appeal to you, that’s fine, but don’t accuse us of inconsistency or hypocrisy where there is none.
About Subhash Bose: yes, he had admirable qualities (patriotism and courage), and yes, we have no need to pick the same friends and enemies that the West does. But if people come away reading about what Hitler (or the Japanese) was responsible for and still applaud Bose’s misguided decision to forge an alliance with him (which, by the way, Hitler himself didn’t really want; he always preferred the British master race to the inferior Indians), then there is something wrong with us.
At the very least, think about the practical consequences to our budding friendship with Israel (the Bengali commies won’t mind these consequences). Not saying we should condemn or ignore Bose; I think we should celebrate him in a way, but also have public acknowledgment of the mistakes he made.
FYI you seem to be out of sync with US politics if you are still categorizing jonah Goldberg or for that matter anyone from the Bristol cabal as right wing. They are not even considered RINO.
Re Bose, mannerheim in Finland was much more aligned with nazis operationally and possibly aware of atrocities in Europe than Bose ever was. Mannerheim is still celebrated/ respected in Finland and wider west because they rightly recognize him as fighting to keep Finland free. Bose is also celebrated/respected for his efforts to free India by force, not for the choice of partners. Liberal Indians seem to be unique in preemptively purging our heroes based on what west thinks. 🤦♂️. Have the courage to at least contextualize Bose and his actions before throwing him under the bus.
Don’t teach me US politics, pal. I’m well aware of what’s going on there, likely much much more than you.
My standard for right or left is determined more by ideology than by partisan passions. And the ideological and policy positions Goldberg holds are still very much “right wing” in any sense of the term. Almost nothing the left (or the Democratic Party) is advocating today would meet the approval of someone like him, other than the practical matter of opposing Trump and Trumpism.
I used to think of myself as right wing in India before Modi too (even probably up until demonetization). But I can’t any more because I abhor the cultism around him and consider what passes for right-wing discourse in India today to be execrable. I consider most of the things that animate BJP partisans to be irrelevant to India’s future.
Re Bose, mannerheim in Finland was much more aligned with nazis operationally and possibly aware of atrocities in Europe than Bose ever was. Mannerheim is still celebrated/ respected in Finland and wider west because they rightly recognize him as fighting to keep Finland free.
Super LOL at comparing Mannerheim’s position to Bose’s. Finland had been invaded by the USSR after WW2 officially began. And the alliance with Hitler (which Finland needed for its own protection) didn’t even come into effect until Barbarossa. India, on the other hand, had been occupied by Britain for 100-200 years, and we were already well on the way toward Independence at the time; it’s not like there was an imminent threat that Bose was trying to thwart that required him to seek support from a monster like Hitler.
Bose is also celebrated/respected for his efforts to free India by force, not for the choice of partners.
Not sure why you have a fascination for the “force” part. We did get free quite quickly after WW2 ended, didn’t we? And that was after our colonial masters won the damn war! Have you read the history of this period properly (i.e., the politics in India and in Britain)? It’s not like the British were seeking a thousand-year Reich in India in 1939 and suddenly changed their minds after 1945.
Liberal Indians seem to be unique in preemptively purging our heroes based on what west thinks.
I explicitly said the opposite of this. You have reading comprehension issues.
Have the courage to at least contextualize Bose and his actions before throwing him under the bus.
> India, on the other hand, had been occupied by Britain for 100-200 years, and we were already well on the way toward Independence at the time; it’s not like there was an imminent threat that Bose was trying to thwart that required him to seek support from a monster like Hitler.
>> You are assuming Bose knew of ongoing holocaust at the time he allied with Hitler. Absent that knowledge, he was just playing my enemy’s enemy is my friend to hasten demise of british rule on our own terms.
>Not sure why you have a fascination for the “force” part.
>> Yeah its like the difference between earning one’s meal through hard work vs compared to someone’s charity.
>We did get free quite quickly after WW2 ended, didn’t we? And that was after our colonial masters won the damn war! Have you read the history of this period properly (i.e., the politics in India and in Britain)? It’s not like the British were seeking a thousand-year Reich in India in 1939 and suddenly changed their minds after 1945.
>> Bose’s efforts + armed forces mutiny + independence movement contributed to british public’s growing weariness with empire. Churchill, who was committed to preserving the empire and openly racist towards Indians did win re-election in 1950. Britain finally gave up on empire only after the ’56 suez fiasco.
>I explicitly said the opposite of this. You have reading comprehension issues.
>> Yeah you admitted Bose’s admirable qualities but ultimately implied opposition to his veneration at India gate. As I said before, during the war, the holocaust was not public.
P.S. my FYI about Jonah was good faith effort. For someone so touchy about being schooled, you definitely jump at any opportunity to put on superior airs.
Ugra is right, Indian Libs have been imprinted with the moralizing perspectives of the West, they put the Western values&narratives on a pedestal and judge the entire world using that as a barometer..
Pandit Brown-public acknowledgment of the mistakes he made.
Did the Nazis cause Bengal Famine? Did the SS Army open fire at the innocents in jaliawallah bagh? Bose allying with Hitler was realpolitik, nothing else. Everyone also looks the other way when USA goes around making deals with warlords&dictators but how dare Bose shake hands with hitler, right?
“there was an imminent threat that Bose was trying to thwart that required him to seek support from a monster like Hitler”
Does the U.K condemn Churchill for causing Bengal famine&for his racial Bigotry towards Indians? No, they celebrate him as a Hero. All this pearl clutching when it comes to Bose’s “Mistake” and yet i don’t see any liberals asking U.K to formally apologize for its crimes against India.
Where’s the Indian Liberal Outrage for stolen Indian artifacts being displayed at the British museum? but muh Nathzees waaaa! Give me a break, i’ll accept that Bose made a “mistake” when the brits accept that Churchill was a racist parasite, Fair enough?
Informative thread for Churchill Stans. https://twitter.com/AbhinavAgarwal/status/1485677375774146560
Churchill’s own Secretary of State compared Churchill to Hitler with regards to his attitude to India. Again Churchill was re-elected in 1950. Making one’s own Sovereignty conditional on the tender mercies of a faraway electorate is no Sovereignty at all. To paraphrase, those who give up self-respect/sovereignty for western approval/acceptance, end up losing both. Most recent example is afghanistan.
There is nothing wrong with us. Bose didn’t say anything about the Jews or the Poles. Why be so introspective and meek all the time? First do a proper war/genocide/… then preach peace like Americans and Australians.
The West has no problem siding with genocidal dictators if it suits their goals. Off the top of my head they sided with Stalin led Soviet Russia against the Germans, Mao led Communist China against the USSR and Yahya Khan led Pakistan against India during the 1971 Bangladesh genocide.
Both Mao and Stalin easily killed more people than Hitler and what Yahya Khan did in Bangladesh with the full support of the US was no less brutal than what Hitler did in Europe. They have no leg to stand on in their critisim of Bose.
In Realpolitik you do what is best for your country even if you have to side with the devil to do so.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: affirmative action’s hidden beneficiaries are privileged Whites (legacy admits + children of donors) and Jews. The losers are poor but bright Whites and Asians.
So that is why the system is unlikely to change. It benefits the offspring of the rich and the powerful, though this is masked behind the more politically acceptable reservations for blacks/latinx.
Would love to see an online clash between him and the commenters on his blog on one side, and Indians advocating OIT on the other. Convince Davidski that he has “Indian” genes.
Incredible singeing anger coursing through Indian twitter today….
A bunch of White Europeans and Americans tweeted out that the Modi Government’s act of putting up the statue of Subhash Chandra Bose at India Gate was a “step too far”. Many of these people were joined by their Indian liberal underlings in their derision of SC Bose.
One of them, Myra MacDonald, who calls herself a “South Asian Specialist” was warned off by Sadanand Dhume, telling her that SC Bose had one of the widest following among the Indian masses. Reminder – Dhume’s sole income comes from gaslighting Hindutva for foreign journals. Many neutral observers even went on to write paeans to SC Bose.
Many serious commenters on Hindutva Twitter are pointing out that this is what “decoloniality” means in practice – the ability to pick your heroes – without having to be measured by some irrelevant European standard. One Twitter user wrote a fantastic thread –
Main moves are political power plays via vote bank which would have been there sans affirmative action. The political power play and education of all, including non dalits, is what led to some of the marginal gains in status. Affirmative action itself hasn’t done much. The winners tend to be dalits who were already high status and OBCs who use it as a tool to secure greater power and control. The latter is actually more dangerous in India. The idea of any quotas in India are especially harmful because of the tribal nature of the politics. They end up just being dominated by powerful OBC groups to gain even more outsized influence, often with aggressive rioting as black mail. If reservations were off the table from the start and out of the political culture of India, it would be a benefit.
I don’t think affirmative action led to much less destestment. Other factors were at play there. But it did lead to a lot of resentment on top of the detestment already there.
I’ve been warning for years that India is sleepwalking into a beartrap by embracing the US. The US wants to completely remold the internal social structure of all its allies to ensure maximum compliance.
It seems most Indians are only just now waking up to realise this:
China may be a competitor but it has zero cultural influence in India. USA+West has massive influence on Indian elites and that’s why deeper engagement, allowing Western firms to buy up and colonise tech+media, is dangerous for cultural reasons. Raitas don’t understand this. Trads do.
Prats
2 years ago
I am part of a science fiction reading group. Some person in there has recently discovered fascism, resistance etc.
It’s become insufferable having a discussion.
A pretty interesting real time view of how turning ‘political’ is now a status symbol for the young metropolitan English speaking Indian.
@prats
Is there a flipside in that leftist idealism is waning among the working class? Political awareness/ performative empathy as a status game has now arrived among the urban middle class. No longer as fringe as the “jholawala” were to their parents generation
@girmit Is there a flipside in that leftist idealism is waning among the working class?
I don’t know if there was ever working class leftist idealism outside of certain pockets like Bengal or Kerala to begin with. There is just caste/religion or roti/kapda/makaan.
A friend of mine who works at ITC used to tell me that the workers at his factory carried copies of communist manifesto and would read it during breaks. So there might be a some small section.
Political awareness/ performative empathy as a status game has now arrived among the urban middle class.
When I was in college, the middle class’s favourite boogeyman used to be “corruption”. It seemed that if we fixed corruption everything would work well.
One generation of relative prosperity means kids are more sophisticated in their idiocy. Exposure to the west has contributed to it.
Btw the guy I was originally talking about is in his 40s. So this is like a born again Christian or something.
No longer as fringe as the “jholawala” were to their parents generation
One of grandparents’ acquaintances was a moderately famous poetess in Lucknow/Patna and an old-timey Congress person. The last time I met her a few years ago before she passed away during covid, she was chiding me for not shaving my beard.
nilakant mishra is one of the most precise economists india has produced in recent times. y.p rajesh , a quintessential kanndiga is a good low profile foil for him. in general a nice programme.
‘Dr Kasliwal writes that Bose had the military mind of Shivaji, the catholicity of Akbar and the intellectual genius of Vivekananda.
But actually Bose knew little about how to manage an army and, as I have said, the INA could not fight without the Japanese. Dr Kasliwal’s descriptions of how this happened are almost comic, so poorly run was the INA. Netaji’s interest, going by this book, was mainly in inspecting parades, which were a serious and time-consuming ritual for Bose, himself neither trained nor particularly fit. And the other activity was making daily speeches, two hours long, on the radio, which exhausted him.
This play-acting of soldier-soldier was the primary aspect of Bose’s militarism. For a man enamoured of Adolf Hitler, imperial Japan and a believer in totalitarianism, he is awfully revered in India. Why? That is the puzzle. I am as quick to bow to the good and great as the rest of us, and as my mother insists I do, but in this instance I need a little more convincing.”
Most of it has to do with Indians search for a ‘martial’ hero in the independence movement. Bit like Bhagat Singh. We like the idea of being martial rather than do martial stuff. Studies for my kids, revolution for neighbors child.
So we have finalized unto someone who tried to act as one at least. We were so desperate that we finally put a pot-belied, half balding , (perhaps asthmatic) Bengali as our ‘martial’ hero.
Did not expect anything better from Aakaar Patel. He is a grade A moron who can be relied upon to consistently spew bullshit.
Churchill was a fat fuck whose harebrained military ideas all led to disasters (Gallipoli campaign in WW1) if not nipped in the bud by his military commanders. In WW2 he was obsessed with attacking Axis powers from the mediterranean (what he called the soft underbelly of Germany) not realizing that the Alps stood in between Italy and Germany. The only useful thing he did in WW2 was make a bunch of motivational speeches until the USA and the Soviet Union defeated Germany and saved Britain’s ass.
Leaders don’t have to fight wars themselves in the modern world. They don’t need to be Genghiz Khan. Motivating a people to fight and rallying a nation is often the most critical aspect of modern nationalist wars. Which is what Churchill did, and for which he is remembered as a great leader in the west.
That was what Bose did as well. Bose’s significance was that he inspired large numbers of British Indian Army PoWs to sign up for INA. No mean feat for Pathans, Sikhs, Rajputs, Bengalis and Tamils to come together as one army under Indian officers. Many Indians finally started seeing the larger picture and realized that self-rule should be aspired to and British interlopers should be shooed away.
The INA may have sucked militarily. It does not matter. What matters is that Indians in the British Indian Army could no longer be relied upon to serve their British officers. They could turn at any moment against their commanders.
As they did. Soon after WW2 there were mutinies in the army as well as the Naval ratings. Even in units which did not mutiny, NCOs started ignoring their officers. Garhwali soldiers refused to anti-govt shoot protestors in Peshawar.
The British realized that they could no longer rely upon their army to control India. They could have tried heavy handed techniques to prolong their rule but it would not have worked.
Bose and the INA had a great role to play in creating the right conditions for self-rule.
Dont know man. I feel most of our Independence time leaders role were exaggerated, and they have become larger than life subsequently. A bit like how emergency of 75 made leaders out of the whole Indian opposition.
Plus the whole India army mutiny thing is a whole chicken and egg situation. It was no 1857. Plus, did the mutineers mutiny because they knew Independence was round the corner? Or did their acts really have a profound effect on British decision. Profound being the operative word here.
As an outsider, I feel like the hitler thing is a red herring and kind of irrelevant. More importantly, did Bose accomplish anything? Did his plan even make sense? Like Mongolia has a giant statue of Ghengis Khan–and however you feel about him–no one can deny he accomplished something. OTOH, the American south is filled with statues of losers (Robert E. Lee, Stone Wall Jackson, etc). It’s kind of embarrassing when you think about it to fill your country with statues to men are known for losing (especially when the cause was so dumb). No one can deny that men like Shivaji, Ashoka, Chandragupta Maurya, or the Cholas accomplished something.
More importantly, did Bose accomplish anything? Did his plan even make sense?
Yeah, people get caught up in moral judgments, but the practicality of what these leaders did is far more important. I’m not sure Bose completely thought through the consequences of allying with the Germans or the Japanese (on the assumption that they would win the war). My position is that people underestimate how close to Independence India already was even before WW2 broke out, so there was no need for him to bet on a British defeat (unlike the Finns).
I think people don’t find the politics being played out both in India and in Britain during that period interesting, and the average Indian is immersed in the nationalist narrative that we were perennially in a struggle with the oppressive British and then suddenly got Independence in 1947 (this was basically the narrative I got from my history books in school, which gave short shrift to the politics and focused instead on Congress leaders’ gimmicks).
Regarding the American South, their period of true defeat lasted only 15 years from 1865-80. They were then basically allowed to resurrect their hegemony over their states sans slavery. So the narrative of the South struggling for independence and states’ rights replaced the narrative of the South’s struggle to preserve slavery (this lasted till the 1960s). And people like Lee and Jackson then became heroes in a righteous war, rather than losers in battle.
This discussion thread is running on pure ignorance and hindsight. Bose was not a Army General or a military strategist and the INA was a product of his genius only in the last 5 years of his life.
Literally there seems to be no clue of what he did in the first 20 years of his public life. Do you guys even read anything or what?
Bose represented an unique amalgamation of two opposing popular schools in the Indian public arena in the 1920s to 1940s – religiosity and communism. He was the first to propose a Indic hybrid of Authoritarianism and the mysticism of Ram Rajya.
One reason why he rose so high in the Indian National Congress was that, in later years, Gandhi saw in him a perfect foil to oppose the deracinated liberalism of Nehru (who never turned his back on the Anglophilic education he received).
Gandhi (though firmly pacifist and disapproving of Bose) was his firm backer all the way from the first time he met him. Bose was then just 25 and Gandhi was 50.
A lot of people in the 1920s thought that they could combine the Left with the Indian Mystic and Spiritual. Satyabhakta, the organizer of the first Indian Communist Conference in Kanpur said that “the purpose of Indian Communism should be Ram Rajya”.
If you guys still don’t understand – the current Modi Government is close to achieving what Bose wanted – a firm and strong socialist state with a focus on the religious/cultural aesthete – basically a “Hindu Left”. This is the most original and enduring contribution of Subhash Chandra Bose to Indian politics.
Yes, Bose did do a lot of things in a long career as you point out, but I wasn’t trying to write a history of that; I was dwelling on his final act, which is how he will be remembered (for good or ill).
Overall, my feelings toward him are positive, though less so than when I was a teenager (he was numero uno among freedom fighters at the time to me). Reading about different historical topics (outside of the Indian nationalist narrative) changed my views. I believe his actions and his goals during the war were mistaken, plus I believe we have sorely neglected the hundreds of thousands of Indian soldiers who fought for the Allies in a good cause (and, often, against Bose and the INA). At the same time, I don’t believe he was a fascist lackey; clearly his sole focus was freeing India from the Empire.
As I have commented time and again on this blog, I’m quite anti-socialist, so neither Modi’s achievements nor Bose’s putative inclinations in that respect (semi-authoritarian state socialism) appeal to me.
“Yeah, people get caught up in moral judgments, but the practicality of what these leaders did is far more important.”
I think it’s also the more interesting question too.
“Regarding the American South, their period of true defeat lasted only 15 years from 1865-80. They were then basically allowed to resurrect their hegemony over their states sans slavery. So the narrative of the South struggling for independence and states’ rights replaced the narrative of the South’s struggle to preserve slavery (this lasted till the 1960s). And people like Lee and Jackson then became heroes in a righteous war, rather than losers in battle.”
This is correct but I think the best way to attack the statues is to point out they are to people that lost and traitors. Put the supporters on the defensive and bypass the whole lost cause narrative. Present a nationalist narrative for why having a statue to Lee is not the position of a patriot. I think that argument would have more appeal to neutral parties and persuadables than the current one does.
The US civil war is like the Mahabharat for southerners (with Shelby Foote as Vyasa) . The “losers” argument won’t work because they believe they knowingly fought an unwinnable war, persisted to near annihilation, thereby upholding their honor. The “traitors” argument fails because a basic redneck can distinguish between patriotism and statism, and being rebels is their whole schtick. Reddit-level burns don’t work with normal people.
I believe we have sorely neglected the hundreds of thousands of Indian soldiers who fought for the Allies in a good cause
A “Good Cause”? WW2 was a war between racist imperialists, Indians has no business being in that War.
We have not neglected Indian Soldiers that died in WW2, there is a memorial for them. If you referring to the fact that we gloss over them in history books, its because there’s no honour in being the cannon fodder for the Evil Imperial British Army.
Being a loyal British Solider is analogous to being a “Loyal Nazi Solider” to Indians. Shameful at best and Willfully engaged in evil at worst.
No, everything you believe is wrong. Read more about World War 2: from real sources, not social media.
Up to WW1, I’d agree with you. WW2 was a different story. And if you believe that India was already headed toward independence then (as you should, because that is accurate), then it made sense for Indians to volunteer to fight for the Allies rather than allow the Axis to win, and worse replace the Brits in India (they would have been worse masters than the British.)
Also, this was part of the nation-building exercise. Savarkar understood this. So did almost all of the Congress; they were just ticked off by the British not having consulted with them first (which is understandable). Apart from the two Boses (Subhash Chandra and Rash Behari), I can’t think of anyone significant who disagreed with this position then. (Even the Commies came around to it, after Hitler invaded the USSR.)
Everything i believe is correct according to my India-Centric narrative. You’re just slavishly loyal to West-Centric Narratives on WW2.
“then it made sense for Indians to volunteer to fight for the Allies”
“Volunteer”? They were forced to. If you can’t tell me why Indians serving as British foot soldiers was a “GOOD Cause”, don’t tell me to “get educated” like some wokester on twitter. How is it honorable to be a slave solider working against the interests of your own race? Is this the hill you want to die on?
they would have been worse masters than the British.
That’s a big “WHAT If”, what if after the conquest of UK, Indians declare independence and become an ally of the Axis? Without the help of USSR, the allies were gonna lose anyway.
I can’t think of anyone significant who disagreed with this position then
How about the millions of Indians who were starving due to British stockpiling all the food for the war? I bet they disagreed! I don’t care what these “leaders” thought, Gandhi also supported the khilafat movement, leaders like Gandhi were a controlled opposition. Gandhi gave Indians the illusion of a revolution while opposing actual revolutionaries who wanted to kick out the Brits.
Also, this was part of the nation-building exercise.
Let me get this straight, Indians being Starved&Forcibly drafted to fight a War in foreign lands, for the benefit of their Colonial Masters, was a “Nation building Exercise”!?
Thousands of Hindus were Mughal soliders as well, should we honour them too? I’ve heard many libs say that if Genghis Khan decided to invade India(which was under Islamic rule at that time), it would’ve been 100 times more bloody than Islamic Conquests. It’s almost like Indians have developed a Stockholm syndrome for their Foreign Rulers. “The Brits were evil but, the Nazis were super evil!!”, sure but i prefer to watch them kill eachother from a distance and then fight whoever is left standing.
I don’t give a fuck about narratives. There are facts you can get about WW2. Either take the trouble to get them or don’t bother to talk about it at all.
I’d have no problem with us standing at a distance, letting the Brits duke it out with the Axis powers, if that were an option. It wasn’t, which you would know if you were more concerned about facts than about narratives.
Did Rana Pratap accomplish anything? Did his plan make any sense?
Yes and Yes.
###
“Gimmicks of Congress leaders” are what saved India from the routine dramas that take place in Pakistan/Bangladesh/Nepal/Burma. Right-or-wrong Congress had done it’s homework on constitution, civil-discourse, mass-engagement, socialism, federalism, education, industrialization, health,… given the circumstances, limited resources, and poor outcomes of their peers, Congress did quite well.
Prats
2 years ago
Came across this interesting app called Kutumb.
It let’s you register your community (mainly caste but also other kinds) so people can connect with each other. Basically like Reddit but hugely Indianified. IMO this is a brilliant idea.
People might call it regressive. But the truth is that social capital in India resides primarily at the caste level, especially for the poor. So better have tools to leverage that.
Kutumb is equivalent almost to Biradri in Gujarati. It is a little more subclassification than that but it roughly means subcaste within a caste. For example: in Gujarat, a specific group of Patels within the broader Patel frame work would refer to themselves as a Kutumb.
Razib just posted about noticing Khalistani racism. Someone replied with a misleading araingang chart with Punjabi vs gangetic vs dravidians. The chart ignores the 30% dalit population if Punjab clustering well with even S Indian non Brahmins. The chart also ignores all upper castes who cluster well often within steppe range of Biradri groups. Basically, a lot of motivated reasoning goes into crafting graphics that emphasize differences,even if done so misleadingly. This is an attempt to justify Pakistani identity more strongly on ethnic grounds.
But the when critiquing caste, he will post how a S Indian Brahmin (a group even I cluster with) is closer to a Pashtun genetically than a tamil dalit. So the framing of that is very specific. Other misleading stuff includes using old stats for open defecation or ignoring Gujarat is fully within the IVC and that groups like modern day Patels are will within an extreme of the IVC cline, etc. But he has provided good material for racialist radicalislamoapologist propagandists online.
Lol. Seems tamilians are having one of those bengali phase. Glut of economists without the economy. Though, tbh tamil nadu has a economy to speak of, unlike bong-dom
It’s not that there’s a glut of Tamil economists. All the Tamil scientists and engineers are in the US of A. People specializing in quasi-scientific subjects (like economics) or something else stay back in India and get appointed to high political positions if they develop political skills and connections.
Unnecessary shock to the system. Incentivized laggard states over productive states. And this comes from someone who is from a laggard state. The only reason it could pass through is productive states were bought by paying over the odds money by the center to the states ( including laggard ones). Or they were BJP ruled.
Net net more disruption then required. Didn’t affect overall since center was footing the bill. But once the mandate runs out in 2022 , will see how the states and the union react.
My family’s (and their friend’s) businesses who never used to pay any taxes have started to pay up. People have been forced to register companies and businesses to file GST as their suppliers and buyers all jostle to pass tax burden, ten fold increase in record keeping, even medium sized businesses now consults a CS and a tax-lawyer. The trickle down effect of registered companies is them coming under eye of company/labor laws thereby PF/insurance are being given, further this means protective equipment are being used more. Big shock but just like demonetization has built India’s digital payment scene, GST has done the same for bringing things under tax umbrella.
Saurav and other folks would have a better macro picture.
Anecdotes aside, GST doesnt seem to have raised our tax to GDP ratios, nor our direct tax buoyancy. But it is a bad idea to begin with, quite foolish to subject a continent sized country to a single tax regimen. It makes our economic system less flexible and decreases our resilience to changes and shocks.
I think I posted it week back. Both BJP and SP have reached their threshold. Unless the core vote bank of BSP/Congress breaks for SP, it’s tough for them to unseat BJP.
Plus Modi has yet to enter the picture. And if the campaigning goes virtual it will play to BJPs strength.
Hahahahaha!! @Pandit Brown, this is why I mock your (not sure she is Tam Bram but would be some sort of Madraasi UC) folks. What a bunch of loser rotlus, their forefathers (like those of Bhadraloks) sucked gora balls the hardest to become sarkaari peons and clerks, running to the west and becoming coconuts is the defining quality of their ‘culture’ and due to the resulting salaried-‘wealth’ they believe they have some higher ground to lecture the rest of us.
Never does a Jain, Marwari or Gujju self flagellate like these loser bamans. Rotlu sudamas once, melodramatic sudamas forever.
This is not some ethnic or gender specific issues. This group just has political capital, so it comes in the news like this.
People of all groups and both genders have left to richer lands and abandoned their spouses. Human nature is flawed. It is a wrong thing. But little can be done. It is what it is. It isn’t a matter for government interference.
Not specific to Punjab’s peasantry, but markedly more pronounced in that community. There are some reasons that make the Punjabi peasantry uniquely exposed to East Europe type depopulation pressures:
1) Relatively more exposure and linkages to the West due to a history of recruitment in the British Army and immigration.
2) Loss of optimism in the wake of the Sikh insurgency.
3) Perhaps most importantly, the failure to develop a cosmopolitan culture and a booming metropolis. I think this has something to do with racial identity formations in the Jat peasantry.
No, not both genders. Women have a hypergamous instinct, and are more susceptible to abandoning their husbands behind when they feel their status is higher than that of her husband. This seems to be what is happening here.
Bro. Sure, women are more hypergamous. But men abandon women all the time. I know of such cases. Men get Visa. Come to America and abandon wife back in India, esp if no kids.
“One woman, currently based in Canada said: “I am the one with aptitude, I am the one who is from a lower caste, treated poorly by upper caste men all my life. I’ve struggled all my life to be here. I cracked the IELTS, can’t I enjoy a little bit of freedom? If I bring him here he’ll start monitoring my movements,” she said. “I haven’t abandoned my husband. I’m busy, that’s why I can’t talk to him. I can’t handle bringing him here, and that’s all he talks about, so I pick his calls infrequently.”
‘Lower’ caste high aptitude woman married to an ‘upper’ caste low apptitude man based on this comment smart enough to play caste card with regards to abandoning her husband.
i want to ask Razib about this staement ” Paternal lineage of most of the North Indians are aryan origin which is east European, south indians are different”. how correct is this ? and to what extent are we sure about this ? and what pitfalls are in this ? i got this from youtube comment
Does anyone have a good hypothesis as to why India, almost uniquely seems to have an aversion to gaming ? We are on the opposite side of the curve to East Asia on this one.
There is a 10x difference in the revenue from gaming expected and whats actually realized. Piracy has been cited as a factor, but it cant explain such a massive shortfall and is probably a factor in other countries as well.
My feeling is that Indians tend to be more likely to watch streaming videos and hang out with friends, but that might just be observation bias.
Lack of privacy? American teenagers get their own rooms, Indian teens hardly do (I didn’t when I was growing up.)
Money? When I was growing up, we’d have to scavenge for old balls (for whatever sport) and keep fixing them because it was very hard to pry money for these (frivolous) things from our parents’ hands. Perhaps this is still true for the majority of Indians? And video games cost a lot more than physical sporting goods.
I know guys in their 20s who are avid gamers though; they live on their own and earn salaries, so… I personally got into multiplayer gaming in college and grad school but solitary gaming used to bore me. I guess it’s something you have to catch on to at a young age or it passes you by.
Lack of privacy and money is bound to be an issue in other Asian countries too, right ? India is pretty much the only country off the curve (in the down direction).
I sense a cultural aversion to animated characters in India. Even anime has a minuscule presence. I am not sure where this is coming from though. None of my cousins game as adults, some of them did do PC and console gaming as children.
I don’t know about anime but Disney and other comic genres have always been very popular with Indian kids. The only Western TV shows I’d watched until my early teens (when cable started emerging) were animations: Mickey Mouse, Tom & Jerry, Spiderman, etc. So I’m not sure about your thesis. But perhaps tastes are changing?
I think there are richer Asian countries like Japan and Singapore where kids do get privacy, but on second thoughts, that may not have much to do with your question. I believe much of the gaming activity in Japan happens in arcades? (Never been to Japan, so I can’t be sure.)
The answer may be similar to why Netflix isn’t making much money in India. Our kids probably have enough desi (indigenous) diversions for them to be attracted to video gaming.
Yeah, I honestly dont have a good explanation myself. Perhaps the lead characters in most video games are not relatable for Indians ? Typically white male, same as Hollywood, which has historically not done well in India as well.
principia
2 years ago
A trad sets out a “common minimum programme” proposal. What do you say, gentlemen of BP? Are his demands reasonable?
At first I thought this was a CMP proposed between trads and raytas, did not realize it was between trads and “blackpillers” LOL 🙂
Anyway, it has a very People’s front of Judea vibe to it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WboggjN_G-4.
4th surge and counting, and the rocks, ragers, and Ivermectinists are out in full force. Omicrons are not as severe as Deltas, but the sheer quantity of the former makes up for it.
I have been put through so much misery because of the abject incompetence of this country.
You should be on a teaching team. Then minions like me can make your life a little bit easier lol
https://www.aamc.org/data-reports/students-residents/interactive-data/table-b1-test-scores-and-experiences-first-year-residents-specialty
Have you seen this? I’m surprised at how low the MCAT averages are for some elite specialities. The STEP1 scores tell a different story. I think it just goes to show how NOT gloaded the selection process for residency is, when it comes to objective metrics. Granted, clinical medicine, is less gloaded than many people would expect. The way tech selects candidates with direct interview logical reasoning tests or how law’s gatekeeping is via the logic heavy LSAT, points to at least the gatekeepers’ views.
If you don’t mind saying, what’s the typical profile of a Covid patient you see these days? Old and/or comorbidity and who willfully refused to get vaccinated? Or something else? Also, are you required to give them a bed, or can you triage the mild cases back home with pain-relieving medication?
Yes, exactly that. Old, fat, has comorbidities, and either didn’t care to get vaccinated or willfully opposed it. Because I work in a small Trumpist city, more of the latter.
As for sending them home, that is the decision that a Emergency Doctor makes. I (hospitalist) see them after the decision has been made to admit.
Any bets on Kohli being reinstated as captain after the team goes through a long losing streak?
will not happen. this time it will be a madrasi.
I dont think team will go through a losing streak, also Kohli probably wont accept the captaincy again.
Latter’s probably true, but I think there’s a real risk of the former. The middle order batting is highly brittle, which is tolerable in T20 but poses too high a risk in ODIs and Tests. Almost all recent victories I can recall involved the top order and/or bowlers doing really well, but we can’t rely on them to bail us out every time.
Today’s ODI match should shed some light on the trajectory of the team.
Everyone’s batting order is shaky these days. I think this has a lot to do with the sheer amount of video available for analysis of batting techniques, as well as far better bowler and fielder fitness.
@ Saurav
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/indiahome/indianews/article-3943620/How-anti-Hindu-fashionable-India-s-middle-class.html
https://www.outlookindia.com/national/targeted-cyber-attack-on-bangladeshi-atheists-shows-them-dead-on-facebook-news-44625
really strange.
Unbelievable ignorance of the most significant sentences on this site in our living memory which resolve both, ‘Aryan’ and ‘IE Urheimat’ issues.
RK: “The origins of Indo-Iranians in Poland and Byelorussia explain why upper-caste Indians today display genetic affinities with Europeans. These connections are the result of a migration of Indo-Iranians from the lands to the south of the Baltic Sea thousands of years ago all the way to India’s Gangetic plains, a 3,000-mile migration that took over 1,500 years.”
Your comment seems incomplete. What are you reacting to exactly?
RK says in previous OT.
https://cmie.com/kommon/bin/sr.php?kall=warticle&dt=20220117133530&msec=060
Good piece on India’s employment puzzles/challenges.
Have people seen the Netflix show “Decoupled”, and if so, what did you think of it?
I’m seeing chatter on Twitter about Netflix not being relatable to Indians because its shows are mostly woke (which is true; even shows that had strong first seasons went completely woke by the third).
Also, it’s apparently elitist, with “Decoupled” given as an example. At one level, they are, because the dialogues are mostly in English. But I wonder if they’d still feel elitist if they were redone in Hindi, or some other Indian language. “Decoupled” itself may have the rich and the famous as its setting, but it continuously pokes fun at the same people, which is the long-time shtick of the writer (Manu Joseph). So I did enjoy it, though I don’t rave about it. The late Jaspal Bhatti did something similar, though his characters were very relatable.
On the matter of shows being woke, I saw Chandigarh Kare Ashiqui (also on Netflix) and thought it was super-woke, though not in an off-putting way. (I had similar reactions to Brokeback Mountain when that came out.) I’m not sure if it was promoting the concept of gender-fluidity or just arguing for some understanding and tolerance of the transgender. For my part, as a male, I’d be freaked out in a similar situation and run for my life! I guess I’m not that liberal.
I watched a few Indian Netflix shows. It’s kinda obvious why it doesn’t have much traction.
Saw one featuring a male-female roommate pair (it was ambiguous if they ever were a “couple”), they’d go to wine tastings and debauched parties and talk about Game of Thrones.
I have a feeling that these people are aiming for a very specific cultural milieu.
The total addressable market for paid streaming services is relatively small in India.
Netflix, Hotstar, Amazon Prime are all competing for the 30 million odd English speaking population. Out of these, Netflix had the highest fees and no particular USP.
Hotstar has cricket, Marvel, english premier league etc. to attract a diverse family audience. Amazon has well … amazon.
Netflix mostly has content made for and by South Bombay/Delhi type yuppies. Might or might not be woke.
The rest of the country has its own set of free apps like MX Player that most of the folks here wouldn’t even have heard of. Additionally, Jio provides a lot of content for free as well.
Netflix will grow slowly in India alongside the aspirational upper middle class. Lately it has reduced its fees and also had some experiments where people could view its catalogue without logging in.
I am yet to sign up for it, though.
https://sajithpai.medium.com/india2-english-tax-and-building-for-the-next-billion-users-198701f0a7a6
Yeah, unless you want international content, Netflix really isn’t value for money in India. I used Netflix in its oldest incarnation when I lived in the States: where it used to mail movie CDs and DVDs to our homes, in effect replacing the video stores like Blockbuster. So I have a connection to it that most Indians (who aren’t returned NRIs like me) don’t, which is why I subscribe to it. There’s ample content produced by Indians within India to keep everyone here happy.
I saw it with my parents lmfao. I am shocked my Dad sat through it. He even surprisingly was upset with the mistreatment of the transgender character. But it was just not believable on one level. They needed a transgender actress not some classic Bollywoodoid khatri model
Could any transgender actress have pulled this off though? That is: be feminine and attractive enough that the audience doesn’t suspect anything and is rooting for her until the point when the secret is revealed?
That’s really what I found the least believable part of the story: the notion that being trans can be hidden so effectively. I think it can work the other way: women cutting their hair, and wearing clothes than men typically wear more than women, and do things that men typically do more than women. Like Winona Ryder in Boys Don’t Cry.
They couldnt most likely. But that would make it more real and send the message the way it can apply more in real life
About Decoupled, its ok. Its different, but in a very self aware way. Doesnt reach anywhere near the heights of ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’, but a decent try.
Regarding Netflix’s lack of success in India. I dont think it is in Netflix’s interest to create content that will be successful in India.
A successful entertainment product is a psychological service which serves a combination of:
1) A fantasy (Eg. : Iranian/Pakistani looking females pining for South Indian type dude – pretty much all of Indian cinema now).
2) A bias (Eg. : Attractive, independent women are evil and slutty – pretty much all of Indian tv)
3) A memory (Eg. : Religious/historical/mythological shows which tell us stories/ideas we already know)
This applies to woke, right wing, liberal, apathetic in equal measure. Its just that the fantasies, biases and memories are different.
In India the audience is dominated by apathetic folks, followed by right wing. Woke and liberal content has no audience, so no chance for Netflix to succeed. Unless Netflix wants to make Pushpa like stuff for streaming.
Steppe to AASI explains so much. It is almost comical
Netflix co-founder grubs on about why Netflix is not finding traction with Indians…
https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/business/netflixs-lack-of-success-in-india-has-been-frustrating-cofounder-reed-hastings-7966621.html
The burgeoning Indian middle class is fat on two things – satiation on the economic front and the fecundity of a nativist political expression – Hindutva. Both of these were denied to them by the socialist state for close to 60 years. Yet Netflix does not appeal to them!! Strange…..
Netflix is only gaining traction among the real Indian wokes – the liberals, the Nehru-spawn – a small fraction of the Indian population.
For those who pretend that Hindutva is Woke, even this data-point will not illuminate them.
I’ve said this before and i’ll say it again, Hindutva lacks the intellectual mettle to stand on its feet as an alternative worldview to Liberalism. Most Middle Class Indians are milktoast liberals and the Upper Middle Class Indians are limousine liberals AKA Woke.
Now, i’m just guessing here but i think the Hindtuva loving Middle Class will accept the woke garbage as long its not Pro-Muslim.
Yet Netflix does not appeal to them!! Strange
This is not a mystery. Netflix is a global company headquartered in woke California. Neither nationalism nor bourgeois economic values hold much favor with the honchos. They are not Ramanand Sagar or B. R. Chopra.
For those who pretend that Hindutva is Woke
Those of us who compare Hindutva to Wokeness (like me) are saying that the activists in both groups have created a model for what everyone in society should believe and how they should behave, and brook no disobedience (the consequences of which are “cancellation”). The nature of the model is different (national identity tied to religion and an exaggerated past glory in Hindutva vs permanent racial/sexist/genderist oppression in Wokeness). The Hindutva slur of “anti-national” can alienate one from their families and neighbors, and in some cases, land one in jail. The Woke slur of “racist/sexist/transphobe” can get one fired from academic, industry, or government jobs.
These similarities may seem too abstract or meta to you, but they make sense to me.
@Pandit Brown
Waiting for you to start calling Jacobins and Girondins as Woke! After all why not? It fits whatever high-level proxy you have described….Perhaps even Hitler was woke? And Goebbels was the German version of AOC!
@Enigma
Your purity certificates are endlessly entertaining. If you could somehow make money out of it, then you are even better than Netflix!
Indians rotlu/dramebaaz toh hain, bakchod bhi hain, goron ki chaat-te bhi hain (in this case vocabulary), mauke pe socialist/communist bhi ban jaate hain, aur intellectually middle-east level ke chutiye hai (as in incapable of honest fact-finding/debate)
So it is easy to conflate being rotlu + bakchod + identity_politics + socialist + noisy with being woke. But I don’t think Indians are woke because Indians are a chatte-hue-makkar, pragmatic people mostly because India is too poor, people have better things to do and engaging in dramas like being woke costs money.
And about being cancelled: Sannu ki? Jab dahhad dahhad ke chikhte ho ki I am Amreeki, I am so thankul to be in Amreeka, I was fala-dhikana, toh tum jaano tumhara kaam jaane. Ho jao cancel humein kya? Humaari bala se, what have Americans in general and American of Indian origin have done for Indians to deserve open street muscle level support from Sanghis? Itni seva ka itna hi milega, namaskar, tata-bye-bye.
There are two kinds of smarts at work here:
1) The professor-wannabe, good at solving regression problem with a neural network, elaborate vocabulary, recycled-regurgitated-repackaged ideas, takes pride in hanging out with the ‘giants’ of fala-dhikana. Will pick up arguments or arguments sake, tries hard to sound cool and ‘educated’ in ever more elaborate schemes.
2) The 2+2=4 brain, cares about law and order, food, health, road, water,…
Indians have great propensity or (1) but the weight corresponding to (2) is too high.
Why are wokes in academia so mad at Razib?
What’s he done to piss them off so much?
Seems like biology departments across USA have been completely “conquered” by wokes just as the liberal arts departments. Just hope they are kept off the other hard sciences and engineering departments for some more time.
BTW here is one of the comments from Razib’s article protesting the Sci American profile of Wilson.
“””
How about the fact that Wilson was a big supporter of Philippe Rushton, and argued that Rushton was being persecuted for promoting studies that showed Blacks are inferior to Whites? How does that fit your narrative?
Specifically, Rushton (if you don’t know who he was, just google him) was trying to get a paper published arguing that r/k selection differences apply to human “races,” ultimately trying to prove that Blacks care less for their offspring and have more babies. This was not a subtle argument. Wilson championed the paper, and after it was (correctly) rejected for publication, commiserated with Rushton by observing that he (Wilson) would like to be outspoken like Rushton (a Canadian), but would be “attacked” if he did.
And Wilson wrote a letter of support for Rushton when Rushton’s university was attempting to discipline him for, among other things, publishing a paper that argued that IQ is inversely correlated with penis size (again attributing these differences to “racial” populations).
I knew Wilson and I don’t think he was intentionally racist. But science–and biology, particularly–has a lot to answer for in the way it has turned a blind eye to enabling racism, sexism, and other forms of bias. This kind of sneering dismissal doesn’t help the cause of reckoning with bias in our society, nor does it “set the record straight.”
I agree that the essay in question could have had more detail and nuance, but the basic points it raises are worth engaging with, not dismissing. Nobody is immune from examination, and the constant stream of outrage every time someone critiques Wilson is disingenuous. Wilson campaigned for and engineered a lot of this outrage, from the moment the critiques of Sociobiology appeared, privately referring to his colleague Dick Lewontin as a “psychopath,” dismissing all criticism of his ideas as “Marxist,” and generally acting as if it was impossible to criticize his ideas on anything other than biased, ideological grounds.
Anticipating that the immediate response to this will be “what’s your evidence,” I can tell you that I have copies of the letters in question that I obtained at several openly accessible archives. I have an established track record as a historian of biology and am not making this shit up. Dismiss me if you want, but don’t pretend that nobody’s offered any substance
“””
Naipaul’s line “Hate oppression, but fear the oppressed” comes to mind. Certain Black folks are so angry that they would like nothing but to bring down the edifice of American institutions and society. An emotion also seen in certain Indian Dalits.
@Janamejaya
It’s simply not possible to accept HBD in a liberal and diverse democracy. That’s true also in India. If it were shown that “upper” castes had a genetic advantage over e.g. adivasis then likely that researcher would have been fired/cancelled in India too.
Ultimately all systems care for social stability. Very big, messy democracies care more about taming the passions of the majority than the minority. Even in India, the raitas are celebrating as trads are getting thrown off Twitter with a nominal RW govt in place.
Razib got cancelled long ago btw, remember when he got hired by NYT and liberals got him fired barely before he started?
Under the age of 18, the US is already looking like Brazil demographically. Conservatism in Brazil is race-blind but pre-occupied with abortion, transgenders, religion etc. I think the same pattern will hold in the US. Racialists like Rushton will be gently swept under the carpet and forgotten forever.
The way I see it, the Indian content on Netflix and Prime can be split into two major types, both of which are insufferable for many including myself and might explain why they haven’t caught on at large:
(1) On one hand are the urban shows that copy-paste US wokeness onto India, as if Indian society is a blank canvas with no cultural nuance to take into account; (2) on the other hand are the ‘hinterland’ shows that pander to very undergrad tastes with heaps of sex, violence and rough language. This got old soon after the GoW films, but this dead horse keeps getting flogged.
But the fault isn’t with Netflix, it’s with the Indian content creators who’s shows they finance. These folks based in Mumbai or Delhi are worlds removed from the Indian hinterland, they might as well be based in California.
Enigma – “Most Middle Class Indians are milktoast liberals and the Upper Middle Class Indians are limousine liberals AKA Woke.”
Gotta agree with that. Most middle class Indians are ones that are just 1-2 generations removed from real poverty or extremely humble family backgrounds, with many of the womenfolk in the older generations of their families having possibly been forced to sacrifice their educations or careers. Poverty and deprivation still lurk around the corner even in the most upscale areas of all cities, it’s only natural that social justice occupies some of the mindspace of many well meaning middle class folk. And since there isn’t a genuine Indian/Hindu social justice alternative to western wokism, no wonder this gets lapped up with all its attendant rubbish. Now if there were a Hindu version of zakat or kibbutzim that brings together all social classes and build social solidarity, things might be different…
There simply arent enough creative writers. Our literature is practically dead. So all we have for visual media is soft porn, violence, etc.
You mean in English, who can pitch to Netflix?
There is plenty of Indian language YouTube content that needs a lot of creativity to compensate for low production budget.
It doesn’t help Netflix that there are many local streaming channels from Zee 5 to Aha that cater to local tastes with original content.
Don’t know why Netflix thinks they won’t have stiff competition in entertainment from one of the world’s largest entertainment industries. (e.g. Aha owners)
Indeed, in financial and market share terms it would appear Netflix’s growth is constrained by local competition. Regarding local tastes, Netflix is a company which has succeeded in multiple non-Anglo markets such as Brazil and Korea. Therefore, I dont think lack of adaptability is the problem here.
The Indian audience is passionate, but more loyal than demanding. Also, our best brains go into engineering and more engineering, barely any smart teenager thinks of becoming a writer.
I haven’t seen Netflix succeed in well-established local entertainment markets. Not sure about Netflix adaptability instead of first mover advantage. Also half a decade ago Netflix looked like it would succeed in India too.
Let’s agree to disagree about creativity in independent creators in India. Your YouTube algorithm recommendations must be very limited.
Another perspective is that, even at similar levels of material prosperity, the amount of alone time available to folks in India is relatively less. There is just too much activity or social life going on to be able to withdraw into a cocoon.
I think we just lack the self confidence to be truly creative. Colonialism has left a deep psychological imprint.
Regarding Hindutva and wokeness, the latter is no match for the former in terms of its level of organization, political strategy and street power. Right wing Hindus wanted a temple in Ayodhya, they go it. They wanted Kashmir’s special status gone, they got it. They wanted triple talaq criminalized, they got it. And all this was done via established legal process.
Wokeness, on the other hand resembles a poorly run mafia. Random outrages, derision from the mainstream and no real political cachet. If the US did not have a two party system, woke collective would have virtually no valence, much like Communists in India.
One of them is a young anarchist movement seeking to tear down all the normative aesthetic standards (gender, sexual) of a intensely capitalist society. Seeking to disrupt power that has been thoroughly captured by elites of a racial majority.
The other is a five-decade old political mobilisation that has already captured power from a socialist comprador elite that sought to center minoritarian and caste appeasement. They seek to restore the normative standards with respect to cultural aesthetics.
How on earth are both the same? No self-respecting political observer will ever do such inane comparisons.
Hey Razib, just couple of questions as follows:
Q. Why do Kashmiris look slightly different from North Indians on average(they have pseudo Pashtun appearance) and more exotic looking people(light eyes and light hair), compared to Jaat people, who look typical North Indians on average, despite having highest Steppe ancestry and lowest AASI in India?
Q. Was there any ANE rich population (deriving 60-70% of its ancestry from ANE) living in periphery of northern most part of South Asia?
Q. Is CHG basically Iran_HG that lived in Caucasus, mixed with ANE/EHG related population there and acclimatized itself to Caucasus?
Q. Is it true Baloch and Brahui derive 60-65% of their ancestry from Iran_N or Iran_HG of Holcene?
Q. What was the frequency of light eyes and hair in EEF[WHG+Anatolia_N] and CHG?
Q. Is the western Eurasian ancestry in Ethiopians from Natufian related population?
Q. How much EEF related ancestry do North African groups like North Algerians, North Moroccans and Tunisians have?
Any info?
https://twitter.com/BeingTrickyy/status/1484382854943764482
Just another day in the raita regime.
the supreme court judgement regarding reservations sounds too woke. it will be atleast 50 more years before reservations are undone. in the mean while either the number of seats will be increased or private colleges will get permissions liberally to absorb the ‘ general merit’ candidates. thus the upper caste’s angst will be managed.
interestingly the 10% e w s reservation stays and will probably be agreed by the court.
ages ago when i was getting into an engineering course in karnataka there was lot of angst against reservation. now every year 40,000 engineering seats are going a begging, and ‘engineers’ coming out are joining all sorts of jobs. yesterday karnataka govt. has amended rules wherein engineers can be middle and high school teachers!!
Indian Liberals on Odd Days – Hindutva is Woke
Indian Liberals on Even Days – Hindutva is fascist
Indian-American Tunku Varadarajan has a meltdown over Modi Goverment’s decision to put Subash Chandra Bose’s statue at India Gate
https://twitter.com/tunkuv/status/1484742983975161858
This, in a nutshell, is a perfect encapsulation of the world of the Indian deracine – the Western civilizational enemies must be our enemies. Their allies, our allies. Compradors waiting for scraps.
Indian Liberals on Odd Days – Hindutva is Woke
Indian Liberals on Even Days – Hindutva is fascist
Well, the right-wing American author Jonah Goldberg did write a book titled “Liberal Fascism”, so that must blow your mind too.
Those of us who protest wokeness in the West while simultaneously protesting Hindutva in India just desire a more heterodox environment in which people are free to express different points of view without being labeled either racists or traitors. If this goal (or the abstract thinking that led to it) doesn’t appeal to you, that’s fine, but don’t accuse us of inconsistency or hypocrisy where there is none.
About Subhash Bose: yes, he had admirable qualities (patriotism and courage), and yes, we have no need to pick the same friends and enemies that the West does. But if people come away reading about what Hitler (or the Japanese) was responsible for and still applaud Bose’s misguided decision to forge an alliance with him (which, by the way, Hitler himself didn’t really want; he always preferred the British master race to the inferior Indians), then there is something wrong with us.
At the very least, think about the practical consequences to our budding friendship with Israel (the Bengali commies won’t mind these consequences). Not saying we should condemn or ignore Bose; I think we should celebrate him in a way, but also have public acknowledgment of the mistakes he made.
FYI you seem to be out of sync with US politics if you are still categorizing jonah Goldberg or for that matter anyone from the Bristol cabal as right wing. They are not even considered RINO.
Re Bose, mannerheim in Finland was much more aligned with nazis operationally and possibly aware of atrocities in Europe than Bose ever was. Mannerheim is still celebrated/ respected in Finland and wider west because they rightly recognize him as fighting to keep Finland free. Bose is also celebrated/respected for his efforts to free India by force, not for the choice of partners. Liberal Indians seem to be unique in preemptively purging our heroes based on what west thinks. 🤦♂️. Have the courage to at least contextualize Bose and his actions before throwing him under the bus.
Don’t teach me US politics, pal. I’m well aware of what’s going on there, likely much much more than you.
My standard for right or left is determined more by ideology than by partisan passions. And the ideological and policy positions Goldberg holds are still very much “right wing” in any sense of the term. Almost nothing the left (or the Democratic Party) is advocating today would meet the approval of someone like him, other than the practical matter of opposing Trump and Trumpism.
I used to think of myself as right wing in India before Modi too (even probably up until demonetization). But I can’t any more because I abhor the cultism around him and consider what passes for right-wing discourse in India today to be execrable. I consider most of the things that animate BJP partisans to be irrelevant to India’s future.
Re Bose, mannerheim in Finland was much more aligned with nazis operationally and possibly aware of atrocities in Europe than Bose ever was. Mannerheim is still celebrated/ respected in Finland and wider west because they rightly recognize him as fighting to keep Finland free.
Super LOL at comparing Mannerheim’s position to Bose’s. Finland had been invaded by the USSR after WW2 officially began. And the alliance with Hitler (which Finland needed for its own protection) didn’t even come into effect until Barbarossa. India, on the other hand, had been occupied by Britain for 100-200 years, and we were already well on the way toward Independence at the time; it’s not like there was an imminent threat that Bose was trying to thwart that required him to seek support from a monster like Hitler.
Bose is also celebrated/respected for his efforts to free India by force, not for the choice of partners.
Not sure why you have a fascination for the “force” part. We did get free quite quickly after WW2 ended, didn’t we? And that was after our colonial masters won the damn war! Have you read the history of this period properly (i.e., the politics in India and in Britain)? It’s not like the British were seeking a thousand-year Reich in India in 1939 and suddenly changed their minds after 1945.
Liberal Indians seem to be unique in preemptively purging our heroes based on what west thinks.
I explicitly said the opposite of this. You have reading comprehension issues.
Have the courage to at least contextualize Bose and his actions before throwing him under the bus.
You have severe reading comprehension issues.
> India, on the other hand, had been occupied by Britain for 100-200 years, and we were already well on the way toward Independence at the time; it’s not like there was an imminent threat that Bose was trying to thwart that required him to seek support from a monster like Hitler.
>> You are assuming Bose knew of ongoing holocaust at the time he allied with Hitler. Absent that knowledge, he was just playing my enemy’s enemy is my friend to hasten demise of british rule on our own terms.
>Not sure why you have a fascination for the “force” part.
>> Yeah its like the difference between earning one’s meal through hard work vs compared to someone’s charity.
>We did get free quite quickly after WW2 ended, didn’t we? And that was after our colonial masters won the damn war! Have you read the history of this period properly (i.e., the politics in India and in Britain)? It’s not like the British were seeking a thousand-year Reich in India in 1939 and suddenly changed their minds after 1945.
>> Bose’s efforts + armed forces mutiny + independence movement contributed to british public’s growing weariness with empire. Churchill, who was committed to preserving the empire and openly racist towards Indians did win re-election in 1950. Britain finally gave up on empire only after the ’56 suez fiasco.
>I explicitly said the opposite of this. You have reading comprehension issues.
>> Yeah you admitted Bose’s admirable qualities but ultimately implied opposition to his veneration at India gate. As I said before, during the war, the holocaust was not public.
P.S. my FYI about Jonah was good faith effort. For someone so touchy about being schooled, you definitely jump at any opportunity to put on superior airs.
Ugra is right, Indian Libs have been imprinted with the moralizing perspectives of the West, they put the Western values&narratives on a pedestal and judge the entire world using that as a barometer..
Pandit Brown-public acknowledgment of the mistakes he made.
Did the Nazis cause Bengal Famine? Did the SS Army open fire at the innocents in jaliawallah bagh? Bose allying with Hitler was realpolitik, nothing else. Everyone also looks the other way when USA goes around making deals with warlords&dictators but how dare Bose shake hands with hitler, right?
“there was an imminent threat that Bose was trying to thwart that required him to seek support from a monster like Hitler”
Does the U.K condemn Churchill for causing Bengal famine&for his racial Bigotry towards Indians? No, they celebrate him as a Hero. All this pearl clutching when it comes to Bose’s “Mistake” and yet i don’t see any liberals asking U.K to formally apologize for its crimes against India.
Where’s the Indian Liberal Outrage for stolen Indian artifacts being displayed at the British museum? but muh Nathzees waaaa! Give me a break, i’ll accept that Bose made a “mistake” when the brits accept that Churchill was a racist parasite, Fair enough?
Informative thread for Churchill Stans.
https://twitter.com/AbhinavAgarwal/status/1485677375774146560
Churchill’s own Secretary of State compared Churchill to Hitler with regards to his attitude to India. Again Churchill was re-elected in 1950. Making one’s own Sovereignty conditional on the tender mercies of a faraway electorate is no Sovereignty at all. To paraphrase, those who give up self-respect/sovereignty for western approval/acceptance, end up losing both. Most recent example is afghanistan.
….just desire a more heterodox environment in which people are free to express different points of view
LOL, every Indian Liberal ever –
1. Gaslight others (usually Godwin’s law)
2. Proclaim victimhood
Who is the Woke now?
‘then there is something wrong with us.’
There is nothing wrong with us. Bose didn’t say anything about the Jews or the Poles. Why be so introspective and meek all the time? First do a proper war/genocide/… then preach peace like Americans and Australians.
The West has no problem siding with genocidal dictators if it suits their goals. Off the top of my head they sided with Stalin led Soviet Russia against the Germans, Mao led Communist China against the USSR and Yahya Khan led Pakistan against India during the 1971 Bangladesh genocide.
Both Mao and Stalin easily killed more people than Hitler and what Yahya Khan did in Bangladesh with the full support of the US was no less brutal than what Hitler did in Europe. They have no leg to stand on in their critisim of Bose.
In Realpolitik you do what is best for your country even if you have to side with the devil to do so.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/nationalpost.com/opinion/arjun-singh-affirmative-action-is-anti-asian-racism/wcm/847eb0e2-5916-430c-a69f-063694cf74a0/amp/
@thewarlock
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: affirmative action’s hidden beneficiaries are privileged Whites (legacy admits + children of donors) and Jews. The losers are poor but bright Whites and Asians.
So that is why the system is unlikely to change. It benefits the offspring of the rich and the powerful, though this is masked behind the more politically acceptable reservations for blacks/latinx.
Yes absolutely
Out-of-India Theory partisans, meet Davidski, your mirror image when it comes to tendentious reasoning: https://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2022/01/yamnaya-is-from-europe-but-its-really.html.
Would love to see an online clash between him and the commenters on his blog on one side, and Indians advocating OIT on the other. Convince Davidski that he has “Indian” genes.
You must not have read enough of eurogenes comments section. Vasista is already around. Look up archeogenetics blog.
https://www.reddit.com/r/IndiaSpeaks/comments/sauneu/arun_pudur_this_is_how_dilshad_hussain_mocked_the/
Vigilante justice is wrong. But I understand
Incredible singeing anger coursing through Indian twitter today….
A bunch of White Europeans and Americans tweeted out that the Modi Government’s act of putting up the statue of Subhash Chandra Bose at India Gate was a “step too far”. Many of these people were joined by their Indian liberal underlings in their derision of SC Bose.
One of them, Myra MacDonald, who calls herself a “South Asian Specialist” was warned off by Sadanand Dhume, telling her that SC Bose had one of the widest following among the Indian masses. Reminder – Dhume’s sole income comes from gaslighting Hindutva for foreign journals. Many neutral observers even went on to write paeans to SC Bose.
Many serious commenters on Hindutva Twitter are pointing out that this is what “decoloniality” means in practice – the ability to pick your heroes – without having to be measured by some irrelevant European standard. One Twitter user wrote a fantastic thread –
https://twitter.com/Firezstarter1/status/1485257073244123137
Other more satiric handles are pointing out that the European and American use of “fascist” is just dog-whistle for de-humanisation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tclq3ISm0xA
Good video. Thomas Sowell on affirmative action in India
So Sowell thinks everyone else had resentment against the untouchables for ‘taking their jobs’..
Here I think ‘resentment’ is an upgrade when the default sentiment against untouchables is detestation.
Main moves are political power plays via vote bank which would have been there sans affirmative action. The political power play and education of all, including non dalits, is what led to some of the marginal gains in status. Affirmative action itself hasn’t done much. The winners tend to be dalits who were already high status and OBCs who use it as a tool to secure greater power and control. The latter is actually more dangerous in India. The idea of any quotas in India are especially harmful because of the tribal nature of the politics. They end up just being dominated by powerful OBC groups to gain even more outsized influence, often with aggressive rioting as black mail. If reservations were off the table from the start and out of the political culture of India, it would be a benefit.
I don’t think affirmative action led to much less destestment. Other factors were at play there. But it did lead to a lot of resentment on top of the detestment already there.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.thequint.com/amp/story/voices/opinion/the-green-revolution-is-turning-brown
Lmfao
On the Bose controversy:
I’ve been warning for years that India is sleepwalking into a beartrap by embracing the US. The US wants to completely remold the internal social structure of all its allies to ensure maximum compliance.
It seems most Indians are only just now waking up to realise this:
https://twitter.com/Abhina_Prakash/status/1485492881599365120
China may be a competitor but it has zero cultural influence in India. USA+West has massive influence on Indian elites and that’s why deeper engagement, allowing Western firms to buy up and colonise tech+media, is dangerous for cultural reasons. Raitas don’t understand this. Trads do.
I am part of a science fiction reading group. Some person in there has recently discovered fascism, resistance etc.
It’s become insufferable having a discussion.
A pretty interesting real time view of how turning ‘political’ is now a status symbol for the young metropolitan English speaking Indian.
@prats
Is there a flipside in that leftist idealism is waning among the working class? Political awareness/ performative empathy as a status game has now arrived among the urban middle class. No longer as fringe as the “jholawala” were to their parents generation
@girmit
Is there a flipside in that leftist idealism is waning among the working class?
I don’t know if there was ever working class leftist idealism outside of certain pockets like Bengal or Kerala to begin with. There is just caste/religion or roti/kapda/makaan.
A friend of mine who works at ITC used to tell me that the workers at his factory carried copies of communist manifesto and would read it during breaks. So there might be a some small section.
Political awareness/ performative empathy as a status game has now arrived among the urban middle class.
When I was in college, the middle class’s favourite boogeyman used to be “corruption”. It seemed that if we fixed corruption everything would work well.
One generation of relative prosperity means kids are more sophisticated in their idiocy. Exposure to the west has contributed to it.
Btw the guy I was originally talking about is in his 40s. So this is like a born again Christian or something.
No longer as fringe as the “jholawala” were to their parents generation
One of grandparents’ acquaintances was a moderately famous poetess in Lucknow/Patna and an old-timey Congress person. The last time I met her a few years ago before she passed away during covid, she was chiding me for not shaving my beard.
“Yeh kya JNU walon ki tarah daadhi uga rakhi hai”
I wonder what she would make of kids these days.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TvTV5TCuRw
Great presentation.
nilakant mishra is one of the most precise economists india has produced in recent times. y.p rajesh , a quintessential kanndiga is a good low profile foil for him. in general a nice programme.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/25/most-americans-say-colleges-should-not-consider-race-or-ethnicity-in-admissions/
Even most Americans don’t support affirmative action.
On Bose
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/aakarvani/is-our-revered-netaji-the-same-man-who-was-enamoured-by-hitler/
‘Dr Kasliwal writes that Bose had the military mind of Shivaji, the catholicity of Akbar and the intellectual genius of Vivekananda.
But actually Bose knew little about how to manage an army and, as I have said, the INA could not fight without the Japanese. Dr Kasliwal’s descriptions of how this happened are almost comic, so poorly run was the INA. Netaji’s interest, going by this book, was mainly in inspecting parades, which were a serious and time-consuming ritual for Bose, himself neither trained nor particularly fit. And the other activity was making daily speeches, two hours long, on the radio, which exhausted him.
This play-acting of soldier-soldier was the primary aspect of Bose’s militarism. For a man enamoured of Adolf Hitler, imperial Japan and a believer in totalitarianism, he is awfully revered in India. Why? That is the puzzle. I am as quick to bow to the good and great as the rest of us, and as my mother insists I do, but in this instance I need a little more convincing.”
Most of it has to do with Indians search for a ‘martial’ hero in the independence movement. Bit like Bhagat Singh. We like the idea of being martial rather than do martial stuff. Studies for my kids, revolution for neighbors child.
So we have finalized unto someone who tried to act as one at least. We were so desperate that we finally put a pot-belied, half balding , (perhaps asthmatic) Bengali as our ‘martial’ hero.
Did not expect anything better from Aakaar Patel. He is a grade A moron who can be relied upon to consistently spew bullshit.
Churchill was a fat fuck whose harebrained military ideas all led to disasters (Gallipoli campaign in WW1) if not nipped in the bud by his military commanders. In WW2 he was obsessed with attacking Axis powers from the mediterranean (what he called the soft underbelly of Germany) not realizing that the Alps stood in between Italy and Germany. The only useful thing he did in WW2 was make a bunch of motivational speeches until the USA and the Soviet Union defeated Germany and saved Britain’s ass.
Leaders don’t have to fight wars themselves in the modern world. They don’t need to be Genghiz Khan. Motivating a people to fight and rallying a nation is often the most critical aspect of modern nationalist wars. Which is what Churchill did, and for which he is remembered as a great leader in the west.
That was what Bose did as well. Bose’s significance was that he inspired large numbers of British Indian Army PoWs to sign up for INA. No mean feat for Pathans, Sikhs, Rajputs, Bengalis and Tamils to come together as one army under Indian officers. Many Indians finally started seeing the larger picture and realized that self-rule should be aspired to and British interlopers should be shooed away.
The INA may have sucked militarily. It does not matter. What matters is that Indians in the British Indian Army could no longer be relied upon to serve their British officers. They could turn at any moment against their commanders.
As they did. Soon after WW2 there were mutinies in the army as well as the Naval ratings. Even in units which did not mutiny, NCOs started ignoring their officers. Garhwali soldiers refused to anti-govt shoot protestors in Peshawar.
The British realized that they could no longer rely upon their army to control India. They could have tried heavy handed techniques to prolong their rule but it would not have worked.
Bose and the INA had a great role to play in creating the right conditions for self-rule.
Dont know man. I feel most of our Independence time leaders role were exaggerated, and they have become larger than life subsequently. A bit like how emergency of 75 made leaders out of the whole Indian opposition.
Plus the whole India army mutiny thing is a whole chicken and egg situation. It was no 1857. Plus, did the mutineers mutiny because they knew Independence was round the corner? Or did their acts really have a profound effect on British decision. Profound being the operative word here.
As an outsider, I feel like the hitler thing is a red herring and kind of irrelevant. More importantly, did Bose accomplish anything? Did his plan even make sense? Like Mongolia has a giant statue of Ghengis Khan–and however you feel about him–no one can deny he accomplished something. OTOH, the American south is filled with statues of losers (Robert E. Lee, Stone Wall Jackson, etc). It’s kind of embarrassing when you think about it to fill your country with statues to men are known for losing (especially when the cause was so dumb). No one can deny that men like Shivaji, Ashoka, Chandragupta Maurya, or the Cholas accomplished something.
More importantly, did Bose accomplish anything? Did his plan even make sense?
Yeah, people get caught up in moral judgments, but the practicality of what these leaders did is far more important. I’m not sure Bose completely thought through the consequences of allying with the Germans or the Japanese (on the assumption that they would win the war). My position is that people underestimate how close to Independence India already was even before WW2 broke out, so there was no need for him to bet on a British defeat (unlike the Finns).
I think people don’t find the politics being played out both in India and in Britain during that period interesting, and the average Indian is immersed in the nationalist narrative that we were perennially in a struggle with the oppressive British and then suddenly got Independence in 1947 (this was basically the narrative I got from my history books in school, which gave short shrift to the politics and focused instead on Congress leaders’ gimmicks).
Regarding the American South, their period of true defeat lasted only 15 years from 1865-80. They were then basically allowed to resurrect their hegemony over their states sans slavery. So the narrative of the South struggling for independence and states’ rights replaced the narrative of the South’s struggle to preserve slavery (this lasted till the 1960s). And people like Lee and Jackson then became heroes in a righteous war, rather than losers in battle.
TBH the American secessionists fought a war which they lost. I am not sure what Bose did, qualifies as ‘fighting’
@Saurav @aleithia @Pandit Brown
This discussion thread is running on pure ignorance and hindsight. Bose was not a Army General or a military strategist and the INA was a product of his genius only in the last 5 years of his life.
Literally there seems to be no clue of what he did in the first 20 years of his public life. Do you guys even read anything or what?
Bose represented an unique amalgamation of two opposing popular schools in the Indian public arena in the 1920s to 1940s – religiosity and communism. He was the first to propose a Indic hybrid of Authoritarianism and the mysticism of Ram Rajya.
One reason why he rose so high in the Indian National Congress was that, in later years, Gandhi saw in him a perfect foil to oppose the deracinated liberalism of Nehru (who never turned his back on the Anglophilic education he received).
Gandhi (though firmly pacifist and disapproving of Bose) was his firm backer all the way from the first time he met him. Bose was then just 25 and Gandhi was 50.
A lot of people in the 1920s thought that they could combine the Left with the Indian Mystic and Spiritual. Satyabhakta, the organizer of the first Indian Communist Conference in Kanpur said that “the purpose of Indian Communism should be Ram Rajya”.
If you guys still don’t understand – the current Modi Government is close to achieving what Bose wanted – a firm and strong socialist state with a focus on the religious/cultural aesthete – basically a “Hindu Left”. This is the most original and enduring contribution of Subhash Chandra Bose to Indian politics.
@Ugra:
Yes, Bose did do a lot of things in a long career as you point out, but I wasn’t trying to write a history of that; I was dwelling on his final act, which is how he will be remembered (for good or ill).
Overall, my feelings toward him are positive, though less so than when I was a teenager (he was numero uno among freedom fighters at the time to me). Reading about different historical topics (outside of the Indian nationalist narrative) changed my views. I believe his actions and his goals during the war were mistaken, plus I believe we have sorely neglected the hundreds of thousands of Indian soldiers who fought for the Allies in a good cause (and, often, against Bose and the INA). At the same time, I don’t believe he was a fascist lackey; clearly his sole focus was freeing India from the Empire.
As I have commented time and again on this blog, I’m quite anti-socialist, so neither Modi’s achievements nor Bose’s putative inclinations in that respect (semi-authoritarian state socialism) appeal to me.
“Yeah, people get caught up in moral judgments, but the practicality of what these leaders did is far more important.”
I think it’s also the more interesting question too.
“Regarding the American South, their period of true defeat lasted only 15 years from 1865-80. They were then basically allowed to resurrect their hegemony over their states sans slavery. So the narrative of the South struggling for independence and states’ rights replaced the narrative of the South’s struggle to preserve slavery (this lasted till the 1960s). And people like Lee and Jackson then became heroes in a righteous war, rather than losers in battle.”
This is correct but I think the best way to attack the statues is to point out they are to people that lost and traitors. Put the supporters on the defensive and bypass the whole lost cause narrative. Present a nationalist narrative for why having a statue to Lee is not the position of a patriot. I think that argument would have more appeal to neutral parties and persuadables than the current one does.
The US civil war is like the Mahabharat for southerners (with Shelby Foote as Vyasa) . The “losers” argument won’t work because they believe they knowingly fought an unwinnable war, persisted to near annihilation, thereby upholding their honor. The “traitors” argument fails because a basic redneck can distinguish between patriotism and statism, and being rebels is their whole schtick. Reddit-level burns don’t work with normal people.
I believe we have sorely neglected the hundreds of thousands of Indian soldiers who fought for the Allies in a good cause
A “Good Cause”? WW2 was a war between racist imperialists, Indians has no business being in that War.
We have not neglected Indian Soldiers that died in WW2, there is a memorial for them. If you referring to the fact that we gloss over them in history books, its because there’s no honour in being the cannon fodder for the Evil Imperial British Army.
Being a loyal British Solider is analogous to being a “Loyal Nazi Solider” to Indians. Shameful at best and Willfully engaged in evil at worst.
No, everything you believe is wrong. Read more about World War 2: from real sources, not social media.
Up to WW1, I’d agree with you. WW2 was a different story. And if you believe that India was already headed toward independence then (as you should, because that is accurate), then it made sense for Indians to volunteer to fight for the Allies rather than allow the Axis to win, and worse replace the Brits in India (they would have been worse masters than the British.)
Also, this was part of the nation-building exercise. Savarkar understood this. So did almost all of the Congress; they were just ticked off by the British not having consulted with them first (which is understandable). Apart from the two Boses (Subhash Chandra and Rash Behari), I can’t think of anyone significant who disagreed with this position then. (Even the Commies came around to it, after Hitler invaded the USSR.)
Everything i believe is correct according to my India-Centric narrative. You’re just slavishly loyal to West-Centric Narratives on WW2.
“then it made sense for Indians to volunteer to fight for the Allies”
“Volunteer”? They were forced to. If you can’t tell me why Indians serving as British foot soldiers was a “GOOD Cause”, don’t tell me to “get educated” like some wokester on twitter. How is it honorable to be a slave solider working against the interests of your own race? Is this the hill you want to die on?
they would have been worse masters than the British.
That’s a big “WHAT If”, what if after the conquest of UK, Indians declare independence and become an ally of the Axis? Without the help of USSR, the allies were gonna lose anyway.
I can’t think of anyone significant who disagreed with this position then
How about the millions of Indians who were starving due to British stockpiling all the food for the war? I bet they disagreed! I don’t care what these “leaders” thought, Gandhi also supported the khilafat movement, leaders like Gandhi were a controlled opposition. Gandhi gave Indians the illusion of a revolution while opposing actual revolutionaries who wanted to kick out the Brits.
Also, this was part of the nation-building exercise.
Let me get this straight, Indians being Starved&Forcibly drafted to fight a War in foreign lands, for the benefit of their Colonial Masters, was a “Nation building Exercise”!?
Thousands of Hindus were Mughal soliders as well, should we honour them too? I’ve heard many libs say that if Genghis Khan decided to invade India(which was under Islamic rule at that time), it would’ve been 100 times more bloody than Islamic Conquests. It’s almost like Indians have developed a Stockholm syndrome for their Foreign Rulers. “The Brits were evil but, the Nazis were super evil!!”, sure but i prefer to watch them kill eachother from a distance and then fight whoever is left standing.
I don’t give a fuck about narratives. There are facts you can get about WW2. Either take the trouble to get them or don’t bother to talk about it at all.
I’d have no problem with us standing at a distance, letting the Brits duke it out with the Axis powers, if that were an option. It wasn’t, which you would know if you were more concerned about facts than about narratives.
Did Rana Pratap accomplish anything? Did his plan make any sense?
Yes and Yes.
###
“Gimmicks of Congress leaders” are what saved India from the routine dramas that take place in Pakistan/Bangladesh/Nepal/Burma. Right-or-wrong Congress had done it’s homework on constitution, civil-discourse, mass-engagement, socialism, federalism, education, industrialization, health,… given the circumstances, limited resources, and poor outcomes of their peers, Congress did quite well.
Came across this interesting app called Kutumb.
It let’s you register your community (mainly caste but also other kinds) so people can connect with each other. Basically like Reddit but hugely Indianified. IMO this is a brilliant idea.
People might call it regressive. But the truth is that social capital in India resides primarily at the caste level, especially for the poor. So better have tools to leverage that.
This is real digital India.
Kutumb is equivalent almost to Biradri in Gujarati. It is a little more subclassification than that but it roughly means subcaste within a caste. For example: in Gujarat, a specific group of Patels within the broader Patel frame work would refer to themselves as a Kutumb.
@Prats
Interesting! Thanks for posting this….would have never known about it otherwise. The Team are all ex-IITians and BITS.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUp0E5_J-ws&t=1s
just lol at comments section
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00125-020-05132-5
Good read
https://www.reddit.com/r/IndiaSpeaks/comments/sd5p4a/you_look_like_a_muslim_girlif_you_convert_to/
Just terrible
Razib just posted about noticing Khalistani racism. Someone replied with a misleading araingang chart with Punjabi vs gangetic vs dravidians. The chart ignores the 30% dalit population if Punjab clustering well with even S Indian non Brahmins. The chart also ignores all upper castes who cluster well often within steppe range of Biradri groups. Basically, a lot of motivated reasoning goes into crafting graphics that emphasize differences,even if done so misleadingly. This is an attempt to justify Pakistani identity more strongly on ethnic grounds.
But the when critiquing caste, he will post how a S Indian Brahmin (a group even I cluster with) is closer to a Pashtun genetically than a tamil dalit. So the framing of that is very specific. Other misleading stuff includes using old stats for open defecation or ignoring Gujarat is fully within the IVC and that groups like modern day Patels are will within an extreme of the IVC cline, etc. But he has provided good material for racialist radicalislamoapologist propagandists online.
https://www.sant.ox.ac.uk/events/two-day-conference-counting-caste-breaking-caste-census-deadlock
Very interesting set of speakers, especially if one goes by the ethnicity of the speakers.
https://www.indiatoday.in/elections/uttar-pradesh-assembly-polls-2022/story/bjp-amit-shah-jat-leaders-farmers-security-uttar-pradesh-election-1904806-2022-01-26
Lmfao
The “Hindutva fascist” grift is becoming ever-more profitable for desi upstarts trying to make it in the Western media.
https://time.com/6140574/muslim-women-india/
https://www.dailypioneer.com/2022/columnists/texas-crisis-exposes-pakistan—s-tentacles.html
True
https://www.google.com/amp/s/m.timesofindia.com/india/jats-bjp-share-legacy-of-fighting-mughals-says-amit-shah/amp_articleshow/89166495.cms
Lmfao
https://www.opindia.com/2022/01/kishan-boliya-dhandhuka-ahmedabad-blasphemy-murder/
Sad
one more madrasi chief economic adviser to the govt. this time they should have had a quiet kannadiga, sadly all kannadigas are engineers!!
Lol. Seems tamilians are having one of those bengali phase. Glut of economists without the economy. Though, tbh tamil nadu has a economy to speak of, unlike bong-dom
It’s not that there’s a glut of Tamil economists. All the Tamil scientists and engineers are in the US of A. People specializing in quasi-scientific subjects (like economics) or something else stay back in India and get appointed to high political positions if they develop political skills and connections.
https://twitter.com/ptrmadurai/status/1487620699321556992?s=21
Seems Dravidian are coming after the aryan colonizers pretty fast.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/woman-allegedly-gang-raped-tortured-165057738.html
Sad
https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/why-biden-restarting-trump-era-remain-mexico-program
Lmfao. He gonna learn
Learned people of BP.
How would you rate the success/failure of GST?
(Following from the PTR tweet)
Unnecessary shock to the system. Incentivized laggard states over productive states. And this comes from someone who is from a laggard state. The only reason it could pass through is productive states were bought by paying over the odds money by the center to the states ( including laggard ones). Or they were BJP ruled.
Net net more disruption then required. Didn’t affect overall since center was footing the bill. But once the mandate runs out in 2022 , will see how the states and the union react.
My family’s (and their friend’s) businesses who never used to pay any taxes have started to pay up. People have been forced to register companies and businesses to file GST as their suppliers and buyers all jostle to pass tax burden, ten fold increase in record keeping, even medium sized businesses now consults a CS and a tax-lawyer. The trickle down effect of registered companies is them coming under eye of company/labor laws thereby PF/insurance are being given, further this means protective equipment are being used more. Big shock but just like demonetization has built India’s digital payment scene, GST has done the same for bringing things under tax umbrella.
Saurav and other folks would have a better macro picture.
Anecdotes aside, GST doesnt seem to have raised our tax to GDP ratios, nor our direct tax buoyancy. But it is a bad idea to begin with, quite foolish to subject a continent sized country to a single tax regimen. It makes our economic system less flexible and decreases our resilience to changes and shocks.
@Vikram bhai, Thanks, noted these claims/facts. I was just giving my bystander 2-cents, seems like I was wrong.
https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/aam-aadmi-party-chief-arvind-kejriwal-law-should-definitely-be-made-against-religious-conversions-2736804
More Hindu region ☝️
https://www.firstpost.com/india/lavanya-episode-shows-how-deep-the-missionary-rot-is-in-tamil-nadu-and-andhra-pradesh-10328141.html
Less Hindu region ☝️
https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/jammu-kashmir-let-terrorists-jem-commander-zahid-wani-dual-encounters-pulwama-budgam-1906313-2022-01-30
Amazing
Can someone comment on UP election prediction?
@Saurav
@Bhimrao
Would check and get back.
I think I posted it week back. Both BJP and SP have reached their threshold. Unless the core vote bank of BSP/Congress breaks for SP, it’s tough for them to unseat BJP.
Plus Modi has yet to enter the picture. And if the campaigning goes virtual it will play to BJPs strength.
https://www.reddit.com/r/IndiaSpeaks/comments/8gg490/why_every_bowl_of_rasam_reminds_me_of_the_tyranny/
Hahahahaha!! @Pandit Brown, this is why I mock your (not sure she is Tam Bram but would be some sort of Madraasi UC) folks. What a bunch of loser rotlus, their forefathers (like those of Bhadraloks) sucked gora balls the hardest to become sarkaari peons and clerks, running to the west and becoming coconuts is the defining quality of their ‘culture’ and due to the resulting salaried-‘wealth’ they believe they have some higher ground to lecture the rest of us.
Never does a Jain, Marwari or Gujju self flagellate like these loser bamans. Rotlu sudamas once, melodramatic sudamas forever.
https://theprint.in/features/punjabi-men-are-being-abandoned-by-nri-wives/815104/
This is not some ethnic or gender specific issues. This group just has political capital, so it comes in the news like this.
People of all groups and both genders have left to richer lands and abandoned their spouses. Human nature is flawed. It is a wrong thing. But little can be done. It is what it is. It isn’t a matter for government interference.
Not specific to Punjab’s peasantry, but markedly more pronounced in that community. There are some reasons that make the Punjabi peasantry uniquely exposed to East Europe type depopulation pressures:
1) Relatively more exposure and linkages to the West due to a history of recruitment in the British Army and immigration.
2) Loss of optimism in the wake of the Sikh insurgency.
3) Perhaps most importantly, the failure to develop a cosmopolitan culture and a booming metropolis. I think this has something to do with racial identity formations in the Jat peasantry.
No, not both genders. Women have a hypergamous instinct, and are more susceptible to abandoning their husbands behind when they feel their status is higher than that of her husband. This seems to be what is happening here.
Bro. Sure, women are more hypergamous. But men abandon women all the time. I know of such cases. Men get Visa. Come to America and abandon wife back in India, esp if no kids.
A interesting comment from a the article…
“One woman, currently based in Canada said: “I am the one with aptitude, I am the one who is from a lower caste, treated poorly by upper caste men all my life. I’ve struggled all my life to be here. I cracked the IELTS, can’t I enjoy a little bit of freedom? If I bring him here he’ll start monitoring my movements,” she said. “I haven’t abandoned my husband. I’m busy, that’s why I can’t talk to him. I can’t handle bringing him here, and that’s all he talks about, so I pick his calls infrequently.”
‘Lower’ caste high aptitude woman married to an ‘upper’ caste low apptitude man based on this comment smart enough to play caste card with regards to abandoning her husband.
“I cracked the IELTS”
hahahaha!! 🤣
I had to google “IELTS”. Its an english language proficiency test not some professional exam. lol
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfoYXlSM0N8
Sad Stuff
i want to ask Razib about this staement ” Paternal lineage of most of the North Indians are aryan origin which is east European, south indians are different”. how correct is this ? and to what extent are we sure about this ? and what pitfalls are in this ? i got this from youtube comment
Does anyone have a good hypothesis as to why India, almost uniquely seems to have an aversion to gaming ? We are on the opposite side of the curve to East Asia on this one.
https://imgur.com/a/bFTXbUX
There is a 10x difference in the revenue from gaming expected and whats actually realized. Piracy has been cited as a factor, but it cant explain such a massive shortfall and is probably a factor in other countries as well.
My feeling is that Indians tend to be more likely to watch streaming videos and hang out with friends, but that might just be observation bias.
Lack of privacy? American teenagers get their own rooms, Indian teens hardly do (I didn’t when I was growing up.)
Money? When I was growing up, we’d have to scavenge for old balls (for whatever sport) and keep fixing them because it was very hard to pry money for these (frivolous) things from our parents’ hands. Perhaps this is still true for the majority of Indians? And video games cost a lot more than physical sporting goods.
I know guys in their 20s who are avid gamers though; they live on their own and earn salaries, so… I personally got into multiplayer gaming in college and grad school but solitary gaming used to bore me. I guess it’s something you have to catch on to at a young age or it passes you by.
Lack of privacy and money is bound to be an issue in other Asian countries too, right ? India is pretty much the only country off the curve (in the down direction).
I sense a cultural aversion to animated characters in India. Even anime has a minuscule presence. I am not sure where this is coming from though. None of my cousins game as adults, some of them did do PC and console gaming as children.
I don’t know about anime but Disney and other comic genres have always been very popular with Indian kids. The only Western TV shows I’d watched until my early teens (when cable started emerging) were animations: Mickey Mouse, Tom & Jerry, Spiderman, etc. So I’m not sure about your thesis. But perhaps tastes are changing?
I think there are richer Asian countries like Japan and Singapore where kids do get privacy, but on second thoughts, that may not have much to do with your question. I believe much of the gaming activity in Japan happens in arcades? (Never been to Japan, so I can’t be sure.)
The answer may be similar to why Netflix isn’t making much money in India. Our kids probably have enough desi (indigenous) diversions for them to be attracted to video gaming.
Yeah, I honestly dont have a good explanation myself. Perhaps the lead characters in most video games are not relatable for Indians ? Typically white male, same as Hollywood, which has historically not done well in India as well.
A trad sets out a “common minimum programme” proposal. What do you say, gentlemen of BP? Are his demands reasonable?
https://frontierindica.substack.com/p/common-minimum-programme-for-the
At first I thought this was a CMP proposed between trads and raytas, did not realize it was between trads and “blackpillers” LOL 🙂
Anyway, it has a very People’s front of Judea vibe to it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WboggjN_G-4.