Sri Lanka’s situation makes me sad. They were doing so well and then all went to hell.
“You don’t score until you score.”
– Steve Stifler, American Pie Series
Beta house was the best one
Russia now makes more oil revenues than it did before the start of the Ukraine war. This essentially means that it is a “reverse swing producer”…. where it reaps the benefits of punitive actions against it. In other words, a punishment is distorted into a reward.
It is also drawing out the conflict to make it reach the autumn/winter (4 months away) where it can enormously increase its leverage at negotiation. This is the same playbook for more than 2 centuries (Napolean/Hitler). This time Germany (and others) will suffer from rising energy prices without a substitute.
Russia is basically the Eurasian Taliban – but with a petro-state and a nuclear armoury – high pain thresholds and staying power. Good luck to all the galaxy-brains who thought a couple of drones would tilt a land war.
Ukraine is turning out to be the East European Pakistan – endless demands for money, weapons and sympathies. Isko bhi istamal karke phek denge!
There is a new 2000 to 1800 year old sample from Cambodia with Indian ancestry.
regarding situation in sri lanka:
i) can jaffna tamils get their elam?
ii) can india be of any help in lanka so as to get a permanent foot in the island?
Just waiting for SL to sign the Instrument of Accession so that I can buy some beach properties while they are still cheap.
such things seem funny, but it often rubs the wrong way to a lot of these smaller countries around us and makes them hate us.
@phyecho1
You have the Amartya Sen syndrome – just last year, he was expounding that Sri Lanka was doing better (LOL) than India (higher HDI, GDP per capita, happiness index – all true btw).
Tells you about 2 disparate topics –
1. the shittiness of perfectly well constructed economic indicators in relation to the real world.
2. the willingness of immigrant Indians in the West to grovel before lesser developed entities in order to gain their approval.
Call a spade a spade. You will lose your “respectability” but might gain something else.
I don’t know who said it but it is applicable broadly to our neighborhood
“Grab them by the balls. Hearts and Minds will soon follow”
Well considering how the things are between the state govt and center , there is a higher chance of india giving away Tamil Nadu to Sri Lanka, then vice versa 😂😂
Better to give Bihar or UP to Bangladesh, they figured out a way to educate the masses and grow them out of poverty from that part of the world.
Why not go the full hog, and just make Lanka an Union territory already 😛
Crisis in Pakistan isn’t abating any time soon either. Despite breathless assurances that an IMF deal is just around the corner… it has been many weeks since negotiations first began.
Moreover, it will still take ~a month to approve everything because the IMF governing board has to review any initial deal being signed. At this pace, even if an agreement was struck tomorrow, they wouldn’t get any money until August.
SBP (their central bank) breaks down FX reserves by the week. The latest release showed they were losing $0.5 billion in a single week. Just to be clear, the IMF loan would only be for $1 billion in the first tranche. So unless my math fails me, they need to find lots of more loans – and fast!
It gets worse. Pakistan has issued 10 tenders for LNG imports between July and September. They didn’t even get a single offer. Loadshedding is set to get even worse than it is, which is deleterious for exports since industry obviously needs power to function. Already there are textile businessmen saying they are losing orders to India, Bangladesh because they can’t keep promises due to frequent power cuts.
Looks like the only two countries in the subcontinent with anything going for them is India and Bangladesh.
New UK PM favorite is Rishi Sunak. The fact that nobody seems to care much about the prospect is interesting to me. I’m old enough to remember the endless media hype about Obama. Why doesn’t Sunak inspire the same coverage?
Maybe it’s because he’s a conservative that the media is less enthused about his rise? Or maybe desis are not seen as such a big breakthrough, given how successful they are in business and STEM/academia? Perhaps him not being a moslem works against him. Hindus are seen – rightfully so – as an assimilated minority, and so his elevation would be less unexpected. Or maybe it is his middle-class background that makes him “boring”?
Whatever the cause, weird to see such lackluster coverage from a media otherwise obsessed with idpol. Given the historical relationship between the Indian subcontinent and the UK, you’d think they would analyse the prospect more than they are.
P.S. I saw some liberal Indian woman lament on Twitter that while desis can have a decent shot at becoming PM in the UK, nobody non-Indian can become PM in India. This seems like a very stupid point; India is simply a net exporter of people and has a low median age. It’s simply not in a position to take in large amounts of immigrants, so the question should be moot. But some people just can’t resist taking potshots at India.
“nobody non-Indian can become PM in India”
Sonia Gandhi is full Italian. She was most powerful person in India during Manmohan Singh era (could easily have become PM herself if she was Indian born – there is some legal ambiguity as far a i understand).
No legal ambiguity. You don’t need to be indian born to be indian PM. Just need to be naturalised indian citizen – same requirements for being an MP, which she is.
How Jewish Is the War Against Russia?
“It all sounds like deja vu all over again, particularly as many of the perpetrators are still around, like Nuland, priming the pump to go to war yet again for no reason. And they are joined by journalists like Bret Stephens at the New York Times, Wolf Blitzer and Jake Tapper at CNN, and also Max Boot at the Washington Post, all of whom are Jewish and can be counted on to write regular pieces both damning and demonizing Russia and its head of state Vladimir Putin, which means it is not only about the Middle East anymore. ” https://www.unz.com/pgiraldi/how-jewish-is-the-war-against-russia/
Most American Jews are descended from Russian Jewish immigrants/refugees and they carry that historical animosity. Probably because they see Putin’s Russia as heir to Tsarist Russia and not USSR(American Jews were quite positive towards the Soviets). However, modern Russian Jews are doing very well. Many members of Putin’s inner circle such as oligarchs Roman Abramovich, Arkady Rotenberg, Petr Aven etc. are actually Jewish. So Jewish Americans need not be so antagonistic towards Russia!
The American Jewish elite is hostile to the idea of a multipolar world because the end of American hegemony would mean the end of Israel’s ability to bully and brutalize the Arab world.
Russia is helping Israel bombing Syria with impunity as I write this. So I am not sure if that story holds.
Interesting research essentially claiming Indian Govt post Independence had a Caste-Biased Emigration to UK/West policy.
Can tell if this is a serious paper or troll nonsense?
gotobaya went!!!
just saw print interviewing some lankans. well, nobody wants/likes india. i feel india should secure its defence interests and let sri lanka drift away as they wish.
“United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind
Associate Justice George Sutherland found that, while Thind, an Asian Indian, may claim to have “purity of Aryan blood” due to being “born in Village Taragarh Talawa near Jandiala Guru, Amritsar, Punjab” and having “high caste” status; he was not Caucasian in the “common understanding”, so he could not be included in the “statutory category as white persons”.
Ironically, the 1910 Encyclopedia Britannica entry on Hinduism that Justice Sutherland cites as his sole source for this history actually contradicts his conclusion about the Aryan invaders of Thinds birthplace in the Punjab and explicitly refers to the Aryan invaders of India as part of the white race.[4] The Court nonetheless also concluded that “the term ‘Aryan’ has to do with linguistic, and not necessarily with physical characteristics, and it would seem quite reasonable that mere resemblance in language, indicating a common linguistic root buried in remotely ancient soil, is altogether inadequate to prove common racial origin.”
According to the Court, “the Aryan theory, as a racial basis, seems to be discredited by most, if not all, modern writers on the subject of ethnology,” and it noted that “the Caucasic division of the human family is ‘in point of fact the most debatable field in the whole range of anthropological studies.'”
This Act reversed the Thind decision by explicitly extending racial eligibility for naturalization to natives of India, and set a token quota for their immigration at 100 per year.
In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Hart-Celler Immigration Act, which phased out the national origins quota system first instituted in 1921.”
How much and how little have changed.
Some Biradri sons of the Indus not doing so well in the UK. Really despicable. What must dwarf these numbers is the sex abuse of women of that community in their own homes. But don’t worry. They will brag about halfie Zayn Malik and their “aryan features” superiority over “Gangus.” Just pathetic
I feel most badly for the victims. But these despicable men are also ruining the name of Pak community overall abroad.
I know a lot of Pak American doctors, mostly Mohajirs for whatever reason. Lovely people. But these actions are really a stain on their diaspora, as are the ongoing issues in Turkey.
Maybe the community in America is extremely unrepresentative and the ones who emigrated to the UK are more so? Might explain a lot of why the two groups act so differently.
At least during the initial waves of emigration to the UK, you probably got a more “average” Pakistani migrant type. My sense is that selectivity has risen for Pak migrants in recent years and these days the ones coming into the UK aren’t very average anymore. The sole exception might be family visas, which still presumably has a significant share of proles living in places like Telford importing compliant wives from the Pak hinterland.
70% of UK Pakistanis are Mirpuris. UK wanted cheap labor to work in their factories in 60s and 70s and invited Mirpuris displaced by the construction of the Mangla dam to fill those low skilled jobs. Entire villages moved to the UK. Combine that with general racist environment in Europe, they never assimilated and now the result is segregated communities that came from a rural ancestral background. Something similar happened in France with Maghrebis.
US in contrast only attracted skilled labor, doctors, engineers, accountants, IT professionals etc, these immigrants came from urban Pakistan (mostly from Karachi or Lahore), and were more upward mobile. US is also a more accepting place for immigrants compared to Europe and opportunities are available to everyone willing to work.
This is the cause of why Pakistani diaspora in North America and UK are so different from each other. They had very little in common in the first place.
“29 year old Pakistani American girl #SaniaKhan murdered by her ex husband in Chicago. Sania used to make TikTok videos about the stigma of divorce in South Asian communities.”
Some thoughts:
a) Pakistanis are ~2% of UK’s population, .7% of Canada’s, and .17% of the US.
b) All the shitty bits Pakistanis will claim are ‘South Asian’, the good bits are ‘Pakistani’. No deal.
Same game in Khalistan gang. Frankly,same game among Taiwanese with Chinese. If people can do it feasibly, they do it.
Pakistan’s top startup, Airlift, closed today. It had raised $ 85 million of Amreeki money over the years.
It was never a good business, they were trying to pivot from Uber rideshare (with Vans) to the even harder Doordash (i.e. Ola and Zomato in one for Indian bhai logg).
—
Most start-ups in the subcontinent are vapid fintech/gig economy scams funded by gullible investors.
India does have serious “deep tech” companies, and I hope they get more funding even if they lose money because at least there is progress for humanity. They also increase the national security of India. What does these feudal gig economy companies do? They just exploit labourers and add to the laziness of already too fat office workers.
The CCP made the right choice by cutting off these scams and only giving funding to companies doing stuff like quantum computing, chip engineering etc. Actual engineering, in other words.
internal migration into south india:
in recent days we all have seen/ heard/read about the migration to south india from other parts of india. this is mainly to cater to the labour shortage. of course there are better educated lo who come for software jobs and marwadi traders, but these are a minority as compared to construction labour. many of these labourers strike root here, they mainly bring their brides from home towns and put their children into local schools. kerala is seeing such children win ranks.
the main result of such migration is being seen on politics, the main beneficiary being bjp. also the ‘hindu deficit’ of these regions are getting corrected to a small extent!!.
“ also the ‘hindu deficit’ of these regions are getting corrected to a small extent!!.“
Are u talking about the less Hindu- more Hindu region theory , kind sir ? 😉
sort of, if it pleases you!!!
kerala has 40 lakh migrants!!!, that is almost 10% of population. even if 70% of these are hindus(?), it adds to a reasonable number.
recently, prof.vaidyanathan was voicing similar concerns about tamil nadu.
well!!!
Do not worry. We will make proper Hindus out of these states. 😉
We made Christians&Muslims Celebrate Makar Sankratni, you guys can’t even make them say Vande Mataram.
Yes , the celebrated Makar Sankratni, and then fooled u folks and became your political leaders
At least in our case the power still remains with us.
On Indian internal migration: get ready for more. A *lot* more.
By 2036, a mere 14 years from now, states like Tamil Nadu will have more elderly than youth as a share of its population. Same is true for a bunch of other states.
Tamil Nadu’s GDP per capita is only $3600. For comparison, Ukraine had $4800 before the war.
What will TN have by 2036? Probably higher than what Ukraine had but probably lower than what Brazil has today. So Tamil Nadu will need immigrants because it won’t be rich by then and plenty of labour will still be needed. The only thing worse than being rich and old like Japan is being old and poor like many post-Soviet countries.
i am puzzled by rapidly declining birth rates in places like india which remain quite poor.
israel seems like an outlier in so far as being relatively wealthy and having above replacement fertility.
The reproductive rate of a society is decided by – the perception by current genes of the ability of offspring to propagate genes to the next generation.
As such,in countries which are okaish and fairly safe, women have lower tfr – around 1.2 is the base rate. See low rate in bangladesh even though it was lower for many years than india. The rates went lower as child mortality rates went lower.
Israel has higher rates cause women there perceive the danger and just having 1 child isn’t enough to guarantee the propagation of your genes, even if that child won’t die of diseases.
India needs to deal with the secular issue or with changing demography things will only get difficult. It will be economy vs demography that shall decide the future of India’s direction.
what projections do people make of India in next 50 to 100 yrs. economy/ demography, technology, military power etc.
Bangladeshi economy is not in as good condition as it is made out to be. I had noticed that about 2-3 months ago when the BDT was trading at 80-85, the black market rates were already about ~100-102. Now that currency is depreciating, it would be worse. I don’t understand why developing countries spend USD to bolster their currency. It is almost always useless.
I don’t understand why developing countries spend USD to bolster their currency. It is almost always useless.
National pride. A strong currency becomes a political football so the ruling party wants to avoid cheap shots by the opposition. Modi attacked Congress during the 2013 “taper tantrum” for the weakening rupee and now the oppo is doing the same to Modi.
Of course, in REER terms, the rupee hasn’t really depreciated but most people don’t know what REER or NEER means and politics is all about optics anyway.
Remember Amy Wax? The racist Upenn law professor who had a grudge against Indian women?
It’s now a high probability that she gets sanctioned, which is a nice way of saying she gets fired and loses her tenure. For BP readers, this is an interesting tidbit:
2022 Penn Law graduate Apratim Vidyarthi, who has spearheaded student efforts to fire Wax.
After Wax claimed that “the United States is better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration” in December, Vidyarthi and other Penn Law students created a petition that garnered over 2,500 signatures from Penn Law students, Penn community members, and students from other law schools.
I am generally in favor of free speech but she repeatedly crossed the line into outright bigotry and racism. Good on ABCDs for fighting back. Too many Asians are passive.
Wax has of course started a “gofundme” for suckers to fund her legal fight. Let’s be clear: if she gets fired she will get a very comfortable pension and she’s at her end of her career anyway. And she’s asking for 300K! Not just a racist but a grifter to boot. The Chutzpah!
I suspect that if she does get fired, she will probably double and triple down on the racism. Any last remaining barriers will be gone.
owaisi has opened his account in madhya pradesh. the spread of pfi/sdpi is widespread. there appears to be a fierce competition for the muslim vote among these parties. congress is loosing this vote as it is balancing its ‘soft’ hindutva. looks like muslim representation will comedown as hindus will never vote for these parties and muslims cannot win only on their votes. there are muslim voices in congress who have started opposing ‘extremist’ tendencies in muslims. makes the scene very interesting.
Hey Razib, a few questions in mind I hope you’ll answer.
Q. Is it possible that AASI with whom Iran_HG admixed to form IVCp wasn’t pure AASI but had little bit of WEu ancestry, considering presence of Y-dna haplogroup H among lower castes and which is also found in Europe, though it’s totally restricted to India?
Q. Is it true average North Indian is 30-50% southern eurasian, while average South India is 40-60% southern eurasian?
Q. Are Black Sea Turks originally turkified Caucasians, given they score a lot of CHG?
Q. Do modern Maghrebis from northern part of North Africa really have 30-40% ancestry from bronze age southern Europe?
Q. Was CHG lighter than Natufians?
Q. What modern population has highest Natufian ancestry?
Q. Is it possible that AASI with whom Iran_HG admixed to form IVCp wasn’t pure AASI but had little bit of WEu ancestry, considering presence of Y-dna haplogroup H among lower castes and which is also found in Europe, though it’s totally restricted to India?
i think this is possible
Q. Is it true average North Indian is 30-50% southern eurasian, while average South India is 40-60% southern eurasian?
seems about right, though the difference is exaggerated by the oversampling of upper castes in the north and dalits in the south in the academic studies. generic reddy peasants and generic UP peasants are not as different. close to 50% both.
Q. Are Black Sea Turks originally turkified Caucasians, given they score a lot of CHG?
i mean they have some of that, but greek and Armenian took. also possible kurdish? (the safavids were all this)
Q. Do modern Maghrebis from northern part of North Africa really have 30-40% ancestry from bronze age southern Europe?
this seems way too high.
Q. Was CHG lighter than Natufians?
no idea. probably but not much
Q. What modern population has highest Natufian ancestry?
probably arabians without African admix
Hey Razib,
Do you mind commenting on my contentions from the araingang S Asian map thread?
Looks like he purposely used fits that underestimated steppe by a bit for several non NW groups. The populations he used have way worse fit scores in G25 than the conventional ones used lately for modeling. It seems potentially agenda driven.
honestly didn’t care enough to read in detail, but my exp. with him is that his priors/biases do effect how he samples/interprets things some. otoh, he doesn’t concoct stuff out of whole cloth, and in his defense he tends to be more straightfwd with his bias than a lot of the hindu nationalists who try th show how the aryans actually came form haryana…
i think the map is a good start. up to others to improve?
Thats fair. I will look into making a more accurate map that better reflects much closer average map distances.
Thanks for your answers, Razib. I forgot to add one and last question.
What modern South Asian population is closest to Rakhigarhi woman? Baloch or Gujjar or other(if so, who is it)?
As per Shinde et al, Rakhigarhi woman was 73% Iran_HG+ 27%(AHG and WSHG); whereas, as per model of Davidski from Eurogene blog, she was 71.1% Iran_Ganj_Dareh+ 23.2% Onge+ 05.7% RUS_Tyumen?
‘ A more potent form of racism is in worship—like how resident Indians look up to the West. In return, the West does not spend much time thinking about India or Indians. So there is an unequal relationship between Westerners of Indian origin and their resident Indian admirers. Westerners of Indian origin do not appear to be as proud of India as India is of them, nor do they consider themselves Indians in the first place. But when it suits them, they do play the India card. For instance, every now and then, I would see a writer or academic “of Indian origin” make a decent living out of interpreting India, and even Asia, to the West. But if some Trump supporter asks him to “go back to your home country”, he would say that marvellous thing, “I was born in Houston.”
Maybe, in our subterranean consciousness, we know that logical reasoning will deny us the sensation of collective pride; so we take care not to let reason interfere with our quest to appropriate a foreigner’s success as our own.”
A few valid points, writing a point by point reply to this would suck up so much energy and time.
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IMO Indian diaspora really loves the motherland back.
All Indians wish they were a gora. Becoming a coconut and gagging on gora dick is a top-tier life goal for Indians.
I think physical infrastructure will give a lot of self confidence to Indian. Awe inspiring rail, big-ass bridges, roads, industry… These are what will rejuvenate India’s body, mind, and heart.
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Something that effects me personally is this :
“In a helpful generalization, the everyday US-bound Indian reaches there after a rigged race, as a consequence of his social fairness or wealth, and due to this fact on account of an enormous head begin over most Indians. This migration may be very completely different from what the West understands as migration.”
What advantage? Gajab ka chutiyapa hai yeh non-engineer Indian logon ka to shit on H1B-wale launde.
There are no elites in India. IT has generated the first true middle class. Almost everyone from our parent’s generation was poor and were upselling their true status.
Koi Hero ki CD Dawn chalayega toh usse elite bolenge, kisi ka baap bank chapraasi hai usse bhi elite bolenge, koi saala 5 logon ke saath kamra share kare woh bhi elite hai. Jabtak BC slumdog millionaire wale bhikhari na bano tabtak koi credit hi nai hai. Aur yeh sociology wale bakait logg kaun hai jo humein judge karenge?
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Millions of Indians were dying of hunger mere 80 years ago. Things take time.
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RuPay, the domestic alternative to the Visa/Mastercard cartel, went from having 0.3% marketshare to over 60% in just nine years.
Great thread detailing the journey of how India did it.
The big challenge is now overseas expansion. Visa/Mastercard is controlled by America and it wants to keep its monopoly on payments for obvious geopolitical reasons.
RuPay’s internationalisation would undermine this hegemony, so expect USA to sabotage RuPay’s overseas expansion efforts.
Anti-IK crowd in Pakistan had predicted his demise after falling out with the army getting booted out of government, now they are afraid of IK coming back with 2/3rd majority even when he is the anti-establishment candidate- something which I already predicted more than 3 months ago when he was ousted. The cuck-vs-chad theory plays out again with expected results.
Regional stability is better with him there in general.
I think assassination attempt will be final push for Bajwa.
An Indian, and that too a female, in top 15 for all time hall of fame. Team USA mostly Chinese origin as usual. One Indian origin this year. he scored the lowest on the team.
Lookin at Indian teams istorically. Someone will complain about Bramin Bania oppression lol
Already pointed out in a comment that the long term trajectories of Indian math olympiad competitors are much better than those from China and Russia.
“An Indian, and that too a female, in top 15 for all time hall of fame. ”
Lol, Pranjal Srivastava is a boy not female hahaha @warlock.
For Chinese
Not only 4/6 of US
6/6 of Canada 🍁
3/6 of UK
5/6 of Malaysia
5/6 of Australia
And finally
16/44 gold medalists
6/10 with perfect score (42)
With brains like this, the West doesn’t stand a chance. The Chinese just need to reproduce, and they will rule the world for the next century at minimum.
Chinese ethnics are kings of Math Olympiad. Unbeatable.
Eastern Euros really good too.
for the PRC team 6 out of 6 scores are 42 (perfect)
Apparently they had a similar problem to the problem number 3 and 6 which gave most teams issues. This was by hapstance at some of their recent national tournaments. Nonetheless, they will regardless. But this was extra domination because of that
Interesting map of percentage of people in poverty by state.
Hour-long monsoon walk across an aqueduct in the outskirts of Aluva, a community within the Kochi metropolitan area. So green and relaxing. Parts of Kerala feel a lot like Ubud in Bali.
Nice, verdant area. But Malayalis have to reflect on Sri Lanka, without the rest of India, Kerala would be in a similar or worse economic situation.
Simply, no desire to make things.
and if my aunt had balls…
Damn how do you guys make an account on this site? I tried to register, and cannot login. I have been lurking for over 2 years and finally decide to comment and this -_-
generic reddy peasants and generic UP peasants are not as different. close to 50% both.
Razib, I would say that Northern Peasantry masses as a whole are different from Southern Peasantry masses. Though I
do agree that many of them can be quite similar (for instance large groups such as Kurmis and Reddys, barring the slight, non trivial steppe. the ‘steppe’ upto a certain amount is obviously noise/ indicator of some other component)
Meanwhile, Letters of Credit (LCs) are being quoted at 242 per dollar. That’s what banks use as compensation for importers. The LCs that are being completed today are for oil imports in June.
As you may remember, I’ve pointed out that Pakistan has failed to win a single LNG cargo for the entire July-September period. There are already long blackouts and they are set to get worse.
At this point I fear there is a significant risk we are headed to a humanitarian disaster in many emerging market countries.
My gut feeling is that Sri Lanka is possibly just the first domino. It has made investors quite fearful of emerging markets which then increases risk of default and creates a bit of a feedback loop.
I am not sure if the people in power in the global financial systems are sufficiently worried about these effects or just how easily things can spiral out of control.
Lot of Middle East and North Africa only exists due to foreign handouts. Particularly Egypt. That country should not have anywhere close 100 million people. The only reason it does so is because of cheap grain from Russia and Ukraine and American bribe money. If either stops, it is fucked and its millions of refugees will all go to Europe. Will the Europeans welcome them at train stations or will they be manning machine guns? Only time will tell!
Even BD is apparently staring down the barrel. Tough situation for IN with collapsing neighbors. Apart from refugee flows from SL and BD, curious if there are any macro economic risks for IN? FPI withdrawal?
Surprising(perhaps not so much) that there is a anti India current in the ongoing protests in SL inspite of IN helping with ~4B worth of aid. Resentiment perhaps.
As long as there is India, there will be an anti India current in all the neighboring states.
Well there are macro-economic risks for everyone India is pretty well positioned relative to other emerging markets from a first principles type analysis.
Basically it makes its own food and has decently high economic complexity relative to other poor countries. The biggest import is petroleum / natural gas, but here it benefits from the Russia sanctions imposed by the West.
That said the Rupee falling relative to USD like any other emerging market currency. I think this is part of the cascade effect of people panicking about emerging markets. Not sure how this will lead to other follow on effects, as a whole it is too chaotic to predict. So I think this unknown is the biggest risk factor.
If world leaders get their shit together to a reasonable extent, possibly some buying opportunities in INR denominated assets, that is a big if.
Not investment advice, just rambling thoughts.
mamata decides to abstain in vice president polls. shows that gujjus are real good deal makers!!!
would she have taken the same stance if a muslim was the opposition’s vp candidate? may not have happened. ignoring congress and its christian candidate is ok.!!
I actually think the opposite.
The VP candidate of BJP (Dhankar) is pretty meh. The VP position itself has less symbolic value, plus Dhankar wont get any extra votes for BJP, which Murmu (being President) can. The only reason Dhankar was selected i can see, is that he has to preside over the upper house from time to time, and that needs someone with political nous.
The reason TMC didn’t support Congress VP candidate, is exactly because she is a minority. And nothing to do with BJP deal making. The TMC wants the Congress space and supporting a minority Congress candidate, would mean ceding the minority vote back to Congress. I don’t they would have supported even if the Congress candidate was Muslim. Because at the end of the day, its a Congress candidate.
Hot take but I don’t think the average Indian wearing a T-shirt and jeans walking down the street looks all that great. Watching old YouTube videos, the people in them wearing traditional clothes, though poorer, still look sharper. Idk maybe those clothes just fit the Indian physique better than western clothing.
Indians who can afford Western clothing tend to be richer. Fitness culture has not fully permeated rich and middle class,though it is constantly making good inroads.
Poor Indians in traditional wear are skinny from underfed or lightly muscled with less bloated faces.
Middle class and rich ones are either pot bellied with skinny limbs aka skinny fat or obese. Younger gen has better body comp for sure.
Western clothing is horseshit for warm/hot climates.
nothing wrong with a pair of shorts and a hawaiian shirt if you can pull it off. agreed that many Indian men in India don’t have a great fashion sense when it comes to Western clothing. Interestingly in walking videos I’ve seen in Pakistan, the men there are more likely to wear traditional clothing. Which I think comes off looking better, although sometimes it also comes off as drab and dull (all men wearing beige/grey loose shalwar kameez, in an often dry-ish urban environment that also has much beige/grey).
Indian women still seem to wear traditional clothing more than men, and it looks great on them.
India’s only aircraft carrier caught fire… again. Will be out of service for months.
It was built by the Soviet Union back in the day. Let’s not forget that Russia’s only carrier also caught fire pretty recently. Likely a quality issue.
In hindsight, was a mistake to lean so much on Soviets and later Russia for arms, at least outside of jets and anti-aircraft systems like S-400.
few stray thoughts:
i) social media activism is stinging higher judiciary. after pardiwala’s complaint, cji ramana is asking for regulation of social and electronic media. it is time to bring some oversight into judiciary’s appointments and conduct.
ii) after getting the mandate, ranil wikramasinghe’s govt. removes all protesters. if only our centre was half as this strong in caa and farmer’s agitation…..!!!
There is element of UP elections, especially holding Western UP. But another element:
It turned into a pan Jat protest with intermittent rioting. It was getting to the point of potentially compromising the army and national security. When a community is that entrenched into the security infrastructure, is that proximal to the capital, and is that dominant in food production, the state doesn’t have many options. Basically the community has massive subsidization of army and agricultural support. Opening these areas up to others will be very slow because blackmail can be used easily if it is too fast. Basically, there isn’t meritocracy or anything close to open competition with these things,to the extent that there should be. Dominance of certain communities will not go away so quickly in such essential things.
Agniveer protests, though mainly was many groups in North just upset about lost guaranteed jobs in a tough econ climate, was also many “martial groups” just angry about integrated divisions. Basically, these tend to be land owning plurality groups with a lot of street power in their respective states. They don’t want to give up guarantees government jobs and income at all costs because they, reasonably to an extent, do not trust the job creation environment of India. That being said, there is also an element of fear of giving up a guaranteed thing.
In some ways, this isn’t just classic demonized brahmin bania against dominant land owning castes. This is about subaltern OBCs against dominant land owning castes. The big argument the land owning castes use is that Bania Brahmin hegemony is using the veil of neoliberalism and will just exploit everyone.
Here is the thing. Indian agriculture is ultra unproductive, for global yield standards, and military spending on pensions is unsustainable. Money has to go towards modernization. Will there be some industrialists getting a bit too rich and exploiting things with more open market rules. Of course. But look at all Asian Tigers and how they rose. Key industrialist classes, even if corrupt, were instrumental. So there has to be checks and balances but the state must take some risks and be willing to alienate some self interested groups at some points.
Modi-Shah is way too focused on elections. The way they won in UP probably made them think they should have pushed harder because their numbers reflect that Western UP vote wasn’t even necessarily super essential for a majority. Some of it is also socialist RSS stepping in.
Reforms are just very tough in India. Everyone knows what needs to happen. But vested interests play a lot of games. Tribalism, the Indian variant, casteism, runs too deep.
“Money has to go towards modernization.”
Indian people are not children, 99% of them are just haramkhor. They understand what is right and wrong for the country, but they want the neighbor’s son to be Bhagat Singh while their ladla becomes civil servant.
I have written many times on BP on how almost every single government servant I know is a slacker and a thief. Government primary teachers employ fake teachers to do their jobs in villages, government office clerks work 3 hours a day, public sector research lab, or defence lab folks don’t do even one hour of work, professors don’t publish papers,…
Indians are just a haramkhor people. This happens when ‘becoming something’ is more important than ‘doing something’.
Now I understand all the nautanki about personal statements and volunteering etc that American med students have to do. All that is to try and find if someone is even interested in doing this.
—-
Government servants are overpaid but Indians.
You will never win an argument or get a concession from anyone in India, they will muddle it, throw random points, point to nuance, raise their voice, this-that, … They are just an evil-deceitful people fit to stand in visa lines and beg for visas. You see this in the quality of the roads, of houses, of human bodies, and economy in general. Lying only takes one so far.
—-
Till ~2005 people used to think and investigate before marrying off their daughters to someone employed in a private insurance or banking company. People love government jobs. They just want government to dole out money to them for no reason.
—-
“Will there be some industrialists getting a bit too rich and exploiting things with more open market rules. Of course.”
This is a lie. People keep running these ‘rich sahukar’, ‘lalchi bania’ tropes. So many marwari businesses failed in places like Jharkhand when mazdur andolan, fala-dhikana happpened. Now after being de-industrialized those places suck even worse. Then the ‘poor man’ will squat on his residential quarter for 30 years and ask for his job back or some made up severance pay demand.
Indians are just haramkhor. Remember this when dealing with them (i.e. us).
*Government servants are overpaid but Indians who have government jobs will never admit it. They will make up some sob stories and lie to your face.
Rent seekers are not happy about losing to what they perceive to be crony capitalists. Frankly, even if not so crony, as you imply, they would still be mad. Rent seeking and its preservation seem to be the default goal.
Half of India ills will be taken care if there is an Agneepath schemes for Indian govt servants
“ Indians are just haramkhor.”
The movie “white tiger” drilled this in for me. (Every character in the movie is a haram khor, the guy wins by becoming the biggest haram khor)
I think 2nd gen are fed an idealized version of India by parents and cultural enrichment activities.
Once you realize most are haramkhor virtue signalling along whatever religious / political lines they support things become easier to understand.
Sack of the Hindu caravan, and future of Indian secularism
###
Every 3 months Gupta ji makes an episode on how can opposition remove the BJP. A few months ago it was the (possibly) American funded campaign on regionalism, India is a union of states…, now it is this.
Shekhar Gupta is a sly man, I remember his ‘walk the talk’ interviews pre 2012-13 when he used to bare his fangs for Modi.
###
@Sumit
“I think 2nd gen are fed an idealized version of India by parents and cultural enrichment activities.”
+1
Indians are a morally and spiritually corrupt people.
I had a junior colleague, Gujju ABCD raised in Austin, his family were serious followers of Sivananda-Yoga/Divine Life Society with some BAPS culture thrown in, could play the tabla well. The guy was very articulate about Hindu religion, fit, well groomed, had a graduate engineering degree, and a well paying job. I would say his parents did a great job raising him. I root for such ABCDs, they are connected to India, ancestral spiritual traditions, and are honest human beings unlike their brethren in India. Looking at them makes me happy about what Indians can be if we had some money.
@ surav,
Half of India ills will be taken care if there is an Agneepath schemes for Indian govt servants
modi in a way is doing it for ias, by reducing or rather not increasing their numbers. their quarter service reviews will have to start to weed out some of them.
in southern states, the govt offices are full of contract workers. the system cannot afford on rolls employees.
Though I don’t hold the Indian armed forces in very high regard, atleast they are still better than the useless sarkari babus, who are the bane of India. Everything they touch turns to dust.
Now they have got one up on army by pushing them into accepting agnipath scheme.
I wouldnt underestimate the sarkari babu power though. That’s y whatever modi is doing can be reversed quite quickly by next govt in power. What these jokers really need is total push out from the system which the agnipath scheme really is.
after seeing liz truss on youtube, rishi rich looks like a maha rishi. i still feel that boris was a better candidate!!
S Asians at World Track Championship 2022 Javelin
2. Neeraj Chopra
5. Arshad Nadeem
10. Rohit Yadav
First off, wonderful work by S Asian brudas. Inb4 Indus gang/steppe supremacist commentary from Mr. agang. Full on gangetic plainsmen (never mind indo- ganetic plain is one, with haryana at center, but lets play game for a second) from UP also cracked top 10 at only 21. Potential is superb
Every Khalistani hates the UPHar/ उपहार (UP and Bihar Et. Al. and or also known as Gangetic Plains) labourer as it freshens up the wound of Anglo Sikh wars. Voices of Bhojpuri mercenaries resonates and and freshens up the deep pains inflicted by Purbiyas ransacking their land.
Present day Khalistanis find it hard to believe that forefathers of these slave labourers defeated us on battlefields at the peak of our empire.
Thus, the deep rooted abhorrence towards them.
Good news is tides are slowly but surely turning now.
Wow, another Saurav from UP, on the blog. What were the odds?
The migrant Gangetic laborers are likely lower caste, so their ancestors are not the same ancestors of Purbiyas who were mostly upper caste. Big difference.
There is an element of racialized hatred. A big part of Khalistan is fueled by it. This 15% or so extra steppe in lieu of AASI seems to be causing a ton of downstream effects in racialized perceptions and treatment.
But there are groups like Yadavs who migrate and cluster with upper castes as well. So it isn’t as straightforward as that. Also gangetic Rajputs aren’t as far from OBC gangetics as say Jats are. Basically not all upper castes of gangetics are even THAT far from these laborers. So yeah, some of it is phenotype. But some of it is also low caste status/lower socioeconomics as well.
Khalistanis have a ton of hatred of all gangetic btw. Hatred Brahmin-Bania is a rallying cry for many. It isn’t just lower caste. There is an almost visceral response to these groups which they feel exploit the hardworking, humble Sikh yeoman-warrior that they see themselves as. They also shit on Rajputs as bitches of the Mughals and bring up that they were the true army against “oppression” and saviors of the downtrodden of the subcontinent, very ironic given how there are separate Gurudwaras for lower castes. Nonetheless, it helps them in the context of their leftist alliances in the West.
Indians are overly obsessed about caste, skincolor, ancestry etc. Migrants are primarily hated by the host population because they are seen as taking away jobs from the locals. The issue limits itself to economics if the migrants are from an upper socio economic background, because then they are higher in the pecking order than the general host population. However if the migrants are from a rural socioeconomic background, the migrants are also hated for their ‘backward’ culture and racialized slurs are used to denigrate the migrant’s places of origin as well. Nobody likes poor people swarming their places of abode (cities/countries) even if it is economically beneficial to the host.
The entire model you speak of is inverted in Pakistan, where migration happens from West to East or North to South, so you have fairer skinned Western shifted groups at the bottom of the socio economic ladder, yet there is no difference in how the host population sees them.
Small correction.
Indians are overly obsessed about caste, South Asian region is obsessed about skin color as whole, and NRIs are mostly obsessed about ancestry and DNA.
Also, warrior image is not how Biradri supremacists exactly stereotype any of gangetic plain at all. They view these mercenaries as agents of the British, that’s is. They have this tendency to view even there 5-10% extra steppe compared to gangetic upper castes as something that makes them part of some special warrior elite lineage compared to the more AASI “mongrelized” indo genetics to the East. They literally use this verbiage to describe gangetic peoples. And I know you downplay it but rural Punjab even in Pak has ugly racial views about gangetic Mohajirs, whether based on empirically stereotypes or not.
Urban Punjab on both sides is different. But that’s a different story. How race is perceived is a massive part of Biradri supremacist mindset. Hindu hatred is there among Khalistanis and Islamists alike. But the race element is definitely part of it.
Bengal genocide was just as much about race, if not even more, than religion.
Funny part is that 30-35% of Punjab is lower castes who cluster with middle/upper castes of gangetic plain and even a decent portion of dalits with lower castes elsewhere. But caste and race is definitely big. Pak not giving much of a shit of trafficking of lower caste mostly convers of Pak Christian girls is another example of it.
Regardless, another example is Marathas. Khalistanis have little respect for even martial demonstrated groups who are about as steppe as the migrant Biharis and UP people study. Marathas cluster with shudra groups like Patel of Western India. A huge portion of the army is modern day groups with little steppe. So Punjab has memories of even these types in their lands. That won’t save anyone from discrimination. Biradri ethnonationalism doesn’t care about history. It cares about building a narrative of separateness, which is just actually one for thinly veiled supremacy, at all costs.
If you see a lot of Pak biradri supremacist posters, they say they only respect the Jat and Sikh regiments of Indian army. Gangetic based regiments are seen as inferior. There is little rationality from any angle here. But their type of hatred is rarely about rationality.
Nobody cares about the so-called Pakistani biradari supremacists because they are a minority and a significantly less annoying portion of the community of bigots. It is the extremely loud and overly emotional Out-of-India morons who are considered, rightly so, to be the most toxic of all. Their toxicity is not merely due to their relative intensity of anger at not being believed by rational people but also due to the fact that they pretty much dominate the actual Indian political landscape.
Most so-called Pak biraderi supremacists are irrelevant American citizens of Pakistani origin with a secular orientation. In Pakistan, nobody really cares about steppe ancestry or how Aryan or how Harappan they are. Actual Pakistanis are more concerned about how Arabic they are, which they aren’t.
When it was revealed that the Rakhigarhi sample had no r1a, nobody in Pakistan cared or even knew. It was the Indians who totally lost their minds and were raging across every genetics-related blog with foam slipping out of their mouths.
The viewpoint of the Pakistani biraderi supremacists is far closer to the actual reality and truth compared to that of Indian Vedic supremacists, since the Paki biraderi people have accepted that the Aryans have come from Europe and conquered the region and thus spread their genes and most of their “other” views are spicy variants of this truth. The spice is often half-truths like they are the true descendants of IVC and that they taught the invading violent Aryans culture and thus so-called Brahmanism is actually an invention of ancient Pakistanis, who later migrated to India in large numbers but the origin “of all that is good about Vedic civilization” was in Pakistan since they taught the violent Aryans how to behave like proper terracotta-loving people, this may be atleast 30% or 45% true but it atleast has some truth. On the other hand, 100% of what the Indian Vedic supremacists claim is false. Indian vedic supremacists are also far more relevant since they pretty much dominate India politically and socially and are a far greater presence on the internet.
@Former Gangetic
Probably exposure bias on my part. I think I pretty much never interact with them online. Most OOT people are laughed out the places I tend to frequent.
“It is the extremely loud and overly emotional Out-of-India morons who are considered, rightly so, to be the most toxic of all.”
Annoying yes, bigoted and toxic obviously no.
“Their toxicity is not merely due to their relative intensity of anger at not being believed by rational people but also due to the fact that they pretty much dominate the actual Indian political landscape.”
Again, this is false. I have never seen a angry OIT person, they sound stupid and argue a lot but they are far better behaved than the NW Khalistani or Pakistani folks.
“When it was revealed that the Rakhigarhi sample had no r1a, nobody in Pakistan cared or even knew. It was the Indians who totally lost their minds and were raging across every genetics-related blog with foam slipping out of their mouths.”
On the contrary, the ones outright denying AIT (Aryan migration? whatever) are considered stupid by almost everyone. The nitty gritty details of how Aryans came in can vary, but the basic theme was clear to everyone long before genetic evidence was available.
“The spice … has some truth.”
‘ancient Pakistan’, ‘Brahmanism’, LoL! Are you a Pakistani?
“On the other hand, 100% of what the Indian Vedic supremacists claim is false. Indian vedic supremacists are also far more relevant since they pretty much dominate India politically and socially and are a far greater presence on the internet.”
There are no vedic supremacists. Do you mean trads?
Trads are basically Baman-Thakurs who are pissed about caste based reservations. Maybe call them caste supremacists as they do talk about IQ and SC-ST pupil scores.
I have not seen trads be too much into OIT, one of their main point is that they are different (not genetically, genetics is only an important issue for US based Indians) from the SC-STs.
OIT folks are the nicer ones who want to fabricate a better sounding story that in their minds makes India stronger.
@Bhimrao
I agree. OIT people and modern Hindutuva (not all are OIT,most frankly believe in AMT) are subalteran positive movements. They believe in a civilizational dharmic identity to unify groups of subcontinent.
Trads, NW Khalistani types, and Pak Birardri nationalists are the ones who are truly in love with genetics to justify some inherent genetic superiority narrative. One group wants to promote brotherhood. The other is into hierarchy. Funnily enough, by islamic standards, if one buys the narrative of islam promoting egalitarianism, in this narrow context, the Hindu Nats are closer. And no one is saying Hindu Nats are into same2same. But they do not see the level of diversity as a barrier to common civilizational identity bonds.
On the other hand, the aforementioned supremacist groups have literal disgust for darker skin and more tropical features, for which AASI is a proxy. Not saying others are not biased in this way. S Asia has issues with it in general. But the specified groups take the cake by far.
Diaspora likes genetics because it is objective. DNA can be use to quantify differences. That is why they like it. If you can quantify, it increases rigor and robustness of arguments and theoretical models.
Look at Twitter btw. It’s funny how Khalistanis, Pak Punjabiyat Chauvanist types, and Trads (esp. Hindu Rajput supremacists) all follow one another. Nice group united by one thing in common. Racial hatred.
What ‘former gangetic supremacist’ said is true. There are no real Pak Biradari nationalists in Pakistan, the dynamics of Pakistani Punjab is completely different to that of Indian Punjab. Indian Punjabis have a superiority complex, because rest of the Indians fetishize them due to their comparatively lighter skin, western shifted features. Sikhs themselves had an empire so they also think highly of themselves, and their egos are boosted by notions amongst Hindus like being the sword arm of Hinduism. Muslim Punjabis do not have any such delusions, they don’t own the Punjabi Sikh empire. Their elite rather prefers learning Urdu and English and considers Punjabi backwards and rural. Other ethnic groups don’t fetishize them, rather actually dislike them for their majoritarianism. Most resident Pak Punjabis have taken up Muslim nationalism rather than ethnic chauvinism as a cause. (Even Araingang himself in one of the podcasts said he was into Muslim nationalism before he got into crafting that Indus narrative). The biradari supremacists warlock keeps talking about are nowhere to be found inside Pakistan, they are American or Canadian diaspora looking for a strong ethnic identity, especially when they face off in online debates with Indian or Afghan diaspora nationalists, all of whom seem to be facing the same idenitity crises living in the west.
Neither ‘Pak Biradari nationalists’, nor ‘Indian Vedic supremacists’ exist in a world outside the internet.
But then i have been saying this for the longest time.
The barely veiled reality is that Washington is politically interfering in the internal affairs of Sri Lanka to bring about a political class which will be 100% loyal to the geopolitical interests of Wall Street, as part of its ongoing hybrid war against the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
Yet the Western media amplified the contrived cries of the foreign funded NGOs in attempting to blame the PRC for fuel shortages and its alleged “debt trap diplomacy”. Yet only 10% of Sri Lanka’s foreign debt was owed to China, whereas the remaining 90% was owed to financial institutions in the US, the EU, Japan and India. In fact, some of the largest foreign debt holders in the form of international sovereign bonds include the notorious US firm BlackRock, alongside JP Morgan Chase, as well as the UK firms HSBC and the Ashmore Group
Nothing new to me, known months ago and I wrote below.
Zelensky came into power by the Maiden 2014 color revolution, coup orchestrated by Victoria Nuland*.
Victoria Nuland visited South Asia a few months back . A few weeks after her visit Imran Khan was ousted as he was leaning toward China and Russia. He accused the the US and Nuland of orchestrating his ouster. A few weeks later, the Aragalaya protests started to oust another Russia and China leaning heads of SL. Coincidence or conspiracy theory.
*Note: Nulannd admitted under oath, the US had funded bio labs in Ukraine and was worried it would fall into Russian control.
I am no fan of the US foreign policy establishment but this crisis seems to be Sri Lanka’s own making.
No question, much of it is of Sri Lankas doing, living beyond our means on borrowed foreign exchange Even the staples of the village folk, wheat flour and lentils are imported.
That said collapse of Tourism and triple price of oil due to US sanctions was economic knock out.
However, social instability and protests with a regime change motive was due to US involvement making use of economic issues.
No different from Indira Gandhi training of the LTTE terrorists. She used existing issues to create chaos and preventing SL about turn to the US in 1977.
That comes to the chap hoping for Eelam. Not if the current Govt of India has a say. They probably see Eelam as stepping stone for the US and ultimately ballistic missiles aimed at India.
The economic Front; Sorry no one is starving specially in rural (80%) Sri Lanka. Yes, prices are three times what it was 6 months ago. Long lines for petrol. Buses and trains are now India level crowded, i.e people travelling on the roof. Why, less buses and trains, people have stopped using vehicles because of fuel shortages
However no feel of desperation. People are leaving the country to work in mid-east, south korea, Romania (yes Romania), Cypress, Syria. long lines at the passport office The govt hs offered two years sabbatical for govt workers.
The downside, most are now using the blackmarket Undial and Halwa to send money into the country So SL does not get foreign exchange.
On the food front, in rural started living off the land. Catching fish in the rivers and reservoirs (we have clean water). Increased hunting (illegal, but police turning a blind eye) Wild boar and peacocks have become pest and hopefully this will reduce the numbers I wish Sri Lankans eat monkeys, huge numbers and pests.
Unhappily with all these people leaving and sending money dont see our chaps changing to a more austere life style.
Anyway more will get their dream of a small house with verandah, tiled indoor bathroom and three wheeler. All mean more imports, fuel to construction material.
Life goes on the Sri Lankan way.
In all seriousness, that’s good to hear. I’m glad that people are still getting by. Interestingly SL at its worst still seems better when looking at large swathes of Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
Lay off the monkeys though. They are intelligent creatures. And monkeypox? Are you lot still upset about Sri Hanuman?
monkeys are huge pests they eat all the agri produce, including coconut and mangoes. Also invade kitchens and dining area Worse the Hanuman Langurs remove tiles, jump up and down break asbestos roofing They should all be collected and put in the National park as food for leopards.
Ramayana has no religious significance in SL. Just nice to know story. The exception being the Tea Estate Indian Tamils. They have temples for Sita and Hanuman. The is a place in Hill Country, near Nuwara Eliya, called Seetha (=cold) Eliya (open area). The Indian Tamils call it Sita Eliya and temple for Sita and Hanuman Some enterprising chaps market tours to Indians called Ravana/Ramayana Trail and Tours.
I think there are less speculative reasons for SL’s situation
– reduction of international tourism due to COVID-19 and Islamic terrorism, and limited population to draw from for domestic tourism
– banning the import of chemical fertilizers
– rising costs of fuel and food due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, as well as supply chain issues arising from COVID-19 and its fallout
– nepotism; one family being in control of most key political and ministerial positions
– heavy expenditure on the militarization of the north and east
– brutally alienating and marginalizing a significant minority, thereby limiting that group’s ability to contribute to the country’s development
– severe crackdown on dissent and criticism of the government, making responsible government a challenge
But ultimately the biggest reason is karma.
Tamil Eelam Vaalga!
USDPKR is now 232. Was 160 a year ago. No sign of Pak rupee slowing down its descent. Toyota announced today it’s leaving the country due to the economic paralysis.
It’s not just Toyota, the entire sector is in a deep crisis:
Anyone who thinks a few IMF billions will suddenly fix this mess is delusional. This will be a protracted crisis. Pak’s best bet is to stave off default for the time being, by hook or by crook. I think they have a decent shot, but nothing will change until and unless GoP launches reforms like India did in 1991. That’s the kind of Big Bang that the country needs now.
It doesn’t help that the ruling PDM are unpopular but desperate to cling to power at all costs. They were hammered in the Punjab by-elections but essentially bribed PTI MLAs to join their team anyway and re-instate the CM.
Political chaos in an already fragile situation is only making matters worse.
To reform the economy, political stability and public security is required. And any reforms undertaken shouldn’t be undone by the next government. Can Pakistanis do that? I don’t think so. This is a country where more than half the population wanted to ban French goods because Macron said that no one should be beheaded for drawing a religious figure. No sane person would invest in that country. At best the Americans or the Chinese might offer some loans/investments to keep the country on life support.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNg81-VnCsc
biologist anand ranganathan, who is now a public popular historian in his above recent talk (towards the end) says that the aryan invasion/ migration theory is almost dead and buried.he also ridicules it.
but the view of geneticists in this blog is quite the contrary. if he is wrong, then his views should be challenged, otherwise the ‘aam janata’ will go with this ‘popular version’.
interestingly, the high priest of out of india theory, conrad elst , maintains in his other talks that the a i t is still not conclusively defeated.
So lame. India will never improve with this type of crap.
Rayta Hindutva has no ability to deal with this sort of thing. The Rajput body’s statement has more of a feel of the sentiments of the average conservative Hindu of any caste than the rayta BJP leaders do here.
Ultimately liberal democracy and capitalism will never eradicate caste. Only a bloody socialist revolution could ever stand a chance against the sentiments of traditionalist Hindus.
It would be not the first time that Hindu right power to assimilate has been underestimated. And won’t by the last.
They might not have the perfect answers to everything. But they have better answers than most.
The Hindu right depends on these same dumb UC trads as their core voter base. That’s their fundamental problem, to win in a democracy they have to pander to the LC majority using this “Hindu unity”/”We Indians are all sem2sem” claptrap, but at the same time they also want to keep their UC base which is motivated by Hindutva’s perceived ability to preserve Brahminical/Manuvadi Hindu religion and culture.
Hinduism cannot unite its followers because its idea of social order is explicitly based on the premise of strict social hierarchy and separation. “Hindu unity” is like “feminist Islam”, it’s a contradiction in terms.
Whatever power the Hindu right does have to assimilate Indics into a homogeneous Hindu identity is almost entirely based on reactionary anti-Muslim/Abrahamic sentiments stemming from continued resentment over the Muslim and European conquests of the subcontinent.
There is only a certain extent to which people can be united based on what they are NOT rather than on what they actually are.
Wrong. Pakistan”s history is proof that one can endlessly unite people on what they are not. AKA not Indians. So I don’t get why the trick wouldn’t work.
Actually the reason why Hindus are not even MORE united, because they are a majority in the country. So yeah there is no internal dynamics to push for more unity , since regardless of unity or not, the levers of power stays with them.
Questions for Razib (and maybe others too)
1) What is the original Dravidian homeland, where did the proto Dravidian languages and culture come from? Someone mentioned it as present day Cambodia/Austroasiatic peoples, making them “invaders” too, or is it the original Indus valley civilization people group(s) (Indus_Periphery) who migrated south after the drying up of Sarasvati while Brahui remained there?
2) I always had this question which even OIT proponents put forth (I don’t believe in OIT btw). The question that how would the aryans/steppe people revere the Sarasvati river as this great, fast flowing river and revere it the most among all the other rivers in the Rg Veda if they arrived after the Sarasvati dried up, how? If this is true, shouldn’t this put the arrival of the steppe earlier, like before 2000BCE or even as earlier as 2600BCE during the peak of IVC?
@bodhiyar
FC Southworth proposed the Lower Godavari basin as the candidate for Proto-Dravidian. This is based on the Neolithic archaeological complex in South India and crop packages. Kolipakam 2018 conducted a Bayesian phylogenetic study on the South Indian languages and have confirmed support for the Southworth model. The centroid for Proto Dravidian remains in the Godavari basin and not in IVC, as many suppose.
The IVC remains a linguistic orphan in the AIT framework. Between OIT and AIT, there exists a perfect middle ground which insists that IVC was IE speaking (nothing more, nothing less). This is a very parsimonious approach.
AIT suffers from bad anthropological design and OIT suffers from over-reach.
WordPress doesn’t publish this comment so I am trying something different.
@Ugra @Dathang
Any reason why we make the assumption that language extinction isn’t the norm over long periods of time? Why not weigh he probability that the IVC languages (there could have been multiple and perhaps of different families, a north/south split?) have no successors in the same way that the Sumerian, Elamite, and Minoan do not? Apart from China, did bronze age cultures leave successors at all?
Yeah that is a possibility as I mentioned a totally different language family as distinct as Burushaski could have been spoken (not literally Burushaski ofc).
@DaThang @girmit
A language isolate is pronounced as a language isolate only after phylogenetic verification. From a process perspective, they are the rejects that cannot be sieved into a specific family. Language isolates are not assumed apriori.
It is a question of probability. Out of 7000 existing languages in the world, only about 60 are isolates. From a logical perspective, it is not parsimony.
@Ugra
Yes, but we are talking about an old language, not extant ones. Like I mentioned, if you look at the other bronze age cultures, few seem to have direct descendants. Even the Semitic languages like Akkadian are dead ends. Egyptian is afro-asiatic with a quasi successor in Coptic. Hurrian, Sumerian, Minoan, Elamite are all extinct families. If IVC has any cultural relatives and similar crop packages, I’d look to the immediate west for comparative study. And when we see bronze age language extinction as the norm, i wouldn’t consider it parsimonious to assume survival. If anything it provokes deeper questions about the transitivity of meme complexes, and whether in preliterate cultures, languages shifts occurred for reasons other than political subordination.
@Ugra
Methinks that comparing it to extent as opposed to many dead languages and cultures betrays a wishful tendency towards to a certain conclusion.
@girmit
Whatever you say is logical…..yet you seem to suspend such logic when it comes to the Steppes……. confirmation bias??
Look at all the points you made….crop packages, cultures, language extinction…..all of them apply to the Steppes more than the IVC.
No crop domestication (not a Vavilov centre), did not domesticate cattle or start dairying, did not invent wheeled wagons.
So the probability that Steppes cultures spoke language isolates is far higher than that of the IVC….
@DaThang
Both sides suffer from confirmation bias. It’s the degree of bias.
Some people still theorize that the steppe people spoke non-IE languages like Uralic. Could be so if you tried to string together material and cultural concepts.
IDK about that but my point about the IVC in particular covers both bases in the form of 2 hypotheses: 1. IVC language could be linked to the modern Dravifian language tree due to being para-dravidian. 2. IVC language could be an isolated not related to any modern language or bronze language outside of itself.
You can hypothesize about it being IE if you want but in my view I have covered the question of what it spoke in the light of the dravidian origin being outside it and it doesn’t suffer from the problem you outlined in your first post about parsimoniousness.
So Ranveer Singh did a nude photoshoot and now some desi busybody is losing their marbles and filing a FIR to the police for “indecency”.
Although Bangladesh has 5 months of imports in FX reserves.
Pakistan only has 5 *weeks*. So they are taking precautions rather than being on the brink as Pakistan is.
Indian liberals need to find new neighborhood countries (Sharmaji ka Beta) to compare.
“NRIs are mostly obsessed about ancestry and DNA”
I think this obsession peaks in American diaspora.
Could be, I think Americans in general are more interested in ancestry than any other nationality. Its perfect combination of factors. Most have immigrant ancestry in the last 100-200 years, have access to very good church/government records and the US had the first mover advantage when it comes to personal genomic technology. So this general interest percolates into the desi community as well.
I dont even get Indian-American obsession with ancestry and such. At least the white folks obsession i get.
The latter perhaps takes pride in being half-Irish or half-German etc, which would mean they perhaps feel proud of being part of that ethnicity’s past or whatever. Doesn’t make much sense, but still..
What did your ‘steppe-shifted Reddy’ really achieve ? That you are really that concerned how much Dravidian/Aryan etc. Makes no sense at all.
Anthropology and linguistics are inherently intresting as background to historical and even contemporary issues. Being indifferent to it would be an outlier tendency among civilized societies. Indian historiography has been so piss poor, along with the simplistic fables that passed for pre-history and anthropology, that any of us with a basic curiosity needed to explore the subject. This is why is takes a Razib to facilitate a lucid conversation, because among genuine subcontinentals everything devolves quickly into facile mythology.
Oh please!!!
Pretty orientalist take. Apparently Americans are more interested in Indian history than Indians.
Americans have their biases. But for old enough stuff (modern era stuff, there will be a ton of bias and there are exceptions like Trushcke), the level approaches the limit of indifference,when compared to the perpetual games of hyperbole and fantastical story telling of subcontinental groups. Genetics gives a literal reality check.
‘perpetual games of hyperbole and fantastical story telling’
‘Thotha-chana baje ghana’
Americans (white ones) make stuff, they made the airplane! discovered and invented substantial (>50% ?) of all of modern math, engineering, and sciences. They have better things to do. Indians talk, India sucks.
Baniyas are the only Indian group in touch with the real world and can hold their own on global level. They don’t claim divine ancestry.
+1 On the Baniya thing.
Also what exactly does whole ancestry DNA add to ur lineage? What does this extra 0.5 ASI in ur genetics add? Does it goes into ur SAT scores or something. LOL.
Plus you are Indian Americans, half of the lineage bunkums have to do with stuff back in India, things which do not affect you is US. Its not like you will get one up against other Indian Americans if you are ‘steppe shifted’ or whatever.
Obsession over genetics, AIT/AMT, OIT, Dravidian/Aryan/AASI/steppe, etc. is just one particular modernized form of jaativaad and caste/racial consciousness that South Asians always had. People back in the subcontinent are probably just more likely to satisfy these impulses by watching some TV serial about a Rajput king instead of getting into the nitty-gritty of the fine-grained genetic details. It’s just a product of the academic culture in the West, nothing more.
Google Street View, after a 11-year long wait, has finally launched in India. More details:
BJP it cell workers mass resign. Did not expect this, but then again, its the ordinary workers getting murdered and leadership looks the other way. workers have skin in the game.
Subject of large changes in the world. deglobalisation and population demographic slowing down. Recent chinese population stats suggest, china’s rise is exaggerated. They have serious problems ahead, so do others as well. All this puts a lot of questions.
some karnataka notes:
i) motor mouth m l a zamir ahmed staked muslim’s bid for power as they are more numerous than the powerful vokkaligas, who are making a bid for c m’s seat this time. this will raise ripples as all hindu factions will feel cheated for following family planning.
ii) a b j p activist has been killed yesterday in coastal karnataka, and the b j p cadres are furious and some protest resignations are happening. b j p has maxed out on the hindutva vote harvest in karnataka. it is facing entrenched caste barriers in south karnataka and is not easy to overcome.
hardcore hindutva forces will soon either form a militant ginger group inside b j p or an attempt to create a clone appears inevitable.
Feel sad for the state which gave me so much. Kannadigas are genuinely the most chilled out folks i have ever met.
For some reason my comment, posted twice hasn’t gone through.
30 min 4K drive through the city center of Chennai
Lacks the wow factor of Mumbai or Delhi, or even Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Kolkata. But still, it looks nice and better than it ever has. I like how they’ve preserved the greenery in many areas.
No city in India has a wow factor apart from Mumbai.
@Hoju
All the coastal cities have one leg above the inland ones.
Nothing from Delhi, Hyderabad or Bengaluru will ever beat the aesthetics of a beach. Go to the beach and you will enter a different spatial dimension.
I wonder if we can have Freedom of Movement between Sri Lanka and India, just like we have between India and Nepal, Indian and Bhutan.
Would such an arrangement could have prevented the economic crisis in Sri Lanka ? Stronger business linkages.
Don’t know if that would prevented the crisis , but pretty sure it would have led to something else.
The return of anti india hate in Sri Lanka of the 90s. The more we keep our distance from Lanka ( and not taken for a ride by Ealam-wallahs) , the better. For both countries.
they are scared of the virile and populous Hindu men and women of Tamil Nadu. they have PTSD of Chola kings swooping through.
Tamil Eelam Vaalga!
There are Hindus in Tamil Nadu ?
A “Hindu” is just a fancy way of saying “Non-Abrahamic S-Asian”. The British classified everyone not Abrahamic in India as “Hindu” in their census and the Indian Govt continues to use this questionable metric to define a Hindu.
The Good News is, Tamil Asabiyyah is strong enough to function as an Ethno-Religious identity. Thanks to this, Tamils can celebrate their spiritual traditions while steering clear of the Hindu Idpol.
Though I doubt it, but still it would be interesting to see Tamils “celebrate” their spiritual traditions sans Hinduism.
Though the higher probability is, the longer The Hindu right stays in power , the higher chances of Tamils being made better “Hindus.”
although stalin is only 2 years younger than modi, he looks far younger and dashing with his lush natural black hair and glowing skin. well done.
Stalin is notorious for doctoring photography for propaganda purposes.
Interesting hour-and-a-half walk through Lahore.
Feels in some ways a bit alien to me. But for northerners perhaps this feels more at home than the south.
It is nice to see a good chunk of Pakistani guys wearing traditional clothes. In India it is mostly women that wear traditional clothes.
On the flip side barely any women in public spaces in Pakistan.
I was curious so looked up Srinagar, Kashmir and it seems it more closely follows Indian norms in with regards to clothing choices for men and public sphere involvement for women.
Men mostly wearing western clothes, even at the mosque. Women dressed equally conservatively but more engaged in the public sphere than in Pakistan. eg You see can see a few kashmiri women driving those 2 wheeled scooters and stuff. I didn’t see any in the Lahore video.
So can’t say this is a Hindu / Muslim thing.
wow, you’re right, there’s a marked difference in terms of women in the public space when you compare Lahore to Srinagar. Good idea to look at Srinagar given religious demographics.
I too like that men in Pak wear traditional clothing, but at times it’s a bit drab and dull, just so much grey and beige (taking the urban environment into account as well).
So Sunak’s not going be to the British Prime Minister? Shame, I guess the old adage, “he who wields the knife never wears the crown” still holds true.
Some interesting patterns I have noticed when looking at the racial composition of Anglosphere cabinets wrt to Indians and other minorities.
Australia: Left wing government. Surprisingly mostly White. Only one half-East Asian. Indians and other minorities don’t seem to have much presence in Australian politics.
Canada: Left wing government. I would say proportional representation of South Asians. However, I remember there being a lot more Indians in the Trudeau Cabinet a few years ago.
New Zealand: Left wing government. Proportional representation of the country’s demographics, so mostly White and some Maori/Pacific Islander. One Indian. Again, Indians don’t seem to have much influence in New Zealand politics either.
UK: Right wing government. Mostly Whites and South Asians. South Asians punching well above their weight. Surprisingly, the Labour shadow cabinet is mostly White.
USA: Left wing government. Over representation of minorities. Not a single straight white male Protestant. Other than Kamala, no Indian but I have read that Indians are overrepresented in the Administration and Democratic Party apparatus.
Australia and New Zealand are surprising. Both countries have left wing governments and like to portray themselves as racial utopias compared to the US but in the levers of powers, there are few or no minorities. Not that I think having them is inherently good. I think a country’s government should roughly match its demographics. Overrepresentation of minorities and underrepresentation of the majority is not good for the long term viability of a country.
For Canada I don’t know if it’s proportional representation. It’s mostly a bunch of Khalistanis to get the Brampton and Surrey votes.
Immigration to Aus and NZ is also relatively new so I am assuming the immigrants are younger compared to politicians who tend to skew older.
Migration to Canada, Uk and usa has been happening since the 60s so there is a pool. I assume we’ll start seeing lots of minorities in aus and nz politics in 20-30 years.
Australia has long had a reputation of being the most racist Anglosphere country so your results tally doesn’t surprise me in the least.
I think South Asians in general are more driven by politics than East Asians. Fairly or unfairly, East Asians are stereotyped as docile and more passive. I recall razib bringing attention to the fact that South Asians are promoted at 2X the rates their general competency would indicate (East Asians are *underpromoted*). Whites are promoted about in line with their credentials.
This seems to suggest a hunger for promotion, influence as well as being socially more extroverted. Extroversion is strongly correlated with promotion or advancement in socity.
Since Australia’s Asians are much more East Asian than South Asian (although this is slowly changing), that could be another factor.
Desi cultural elites are now complaining about “lack of art in public spaces” in South Asia. Apparently Mexico City is far ahead.
(A minor note of contention: her description of the Mexico City as “not European” can be debatable, given that the elites of Mexico have been overwhelmingly of Southern European descent in the past few centuries – and continue to be).
“(A minor note of contention: her description of the Mexico City as “not European” can be debatable, given that the elites of Mexico have been overwhelmingly of Southern European descent in the past few centuries – and continue to be).”
Indeed. Any serious civilizational definition places Latin America firmly in the Western world.
The fact that Latin America’s inhabitants are predominantly of mixed European and indigenous descent is immaterial to what we are discussing here – namely, their cultural and civilizational essence. Due to the larger numbers of indigenous peoples in South and Central America compared to North America, the Spanish and Portuguese assimilated and intermingled with indigenous peoples (and Africans) rather than ethnically cleansing/segregating them wholesale like the Anglos did.
This created an interesting situation where, although unmixed Europeans make up only a small proportion of the overall population, it is their cultural and ethnic identity that forms the primary identity for most Latin Americans, with indigenous culture certainly present but relegated to the background.
I think Latin America is its own thing. And it’s not just me, when most people in Northern America talk about “the West”, they’re not thinking Mexico and Guatemala and Venezuela. They’re thinking United States, European Union, and CANZUK. With honorary status sometimes given to Israel.
I don’t think you’re giving adequate consideration to the Indigenous influences in Latin American culture.
Although maybe there’s an exception for Southern Cone countries.
Latinx America is certainly “Western-adjacent” but I agree that they aren’t quite there. Still, their elites are very Western, as in, quite literally Europeans by blood. And it is elite taste and preferences that sets the tone for the rest of the society.
It’s indeed its own thing. The closest analogy I could think of are countries like Armenia or Georgia. Both have Western-oriented elites even if the people there are more Middle-Eastern by temperament and appearance (Armenians in the US are often quite mixed already, so phenotypically they no longer resemble those in the homeland to the same extent).
Fair enough. Latin American culture seems too derivative to me to be considered a distinct civilization in its own right, but I can see an argument for considering it a sort of intermediate cultural region between Western Christendom and the pre-existing indigenous civilizations of South and Central America. Still think they generally lean more Western though, at the very least.
To put it another way, I don’t think Latin Americans in the US is analogous to Muslims in Europe.
To put it another way, I don’t think Latin Americans in the US is analogous to Muslims in Europe.
This is very true, and I wish more Americans would remember this whenever they feel to sanctimoniously lecture Europeans about tolerance. The US has two giant oceans that select the most educated and westernised from non-Western cultures and the “lowborn” they get are already from heavily Westernised Latinx America.
Europe’s immigrants are of a substantially lower quality and also much more removed culturally. If America had that profile, I suspect that we’d see someone like Trump in the 1980s already and he’d be a lot more explicit.
They didn’t have ethnic cleansing? More locals were killed there than in the north and as for segregation, they had their own caste system.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that the Spanish conquest was somehow benign or its body count lower.
The Spanish certainly did kill plenty of natives in South and Central America; however, the indigenous population was simply astronomical in comparison to the tiny populations in the North. So while the total body count in the North was of course much lower, the natives there were wiped out much more effectively by the Anglos simply because it was a much easier task.
The Spanish killings tended to be of the sort more conventional in conquest, generally gendered (males killed, females taken as spoils of conquest). Meaning that the native populations tended to be exterminated culturally but not physically in the way that North American native populations were.
The Spaniards did create a racial caste system, albeit more fluid than the Anglo one. Instead of implementing a one-drop rule, mixing was tolerated but mixed offspring were simply slotted into intermediate rungs of the hierarchy. Phenotype was emphasized over strict genetic “purity”. You could also change your identity to a certain degree based on social class and adoption of certain cultural habits. I would probably still go ahead and call this “race”, but it is a little bit different from the Anglo-American understanding of the term.
Anyway all of this still seems to me support my original point – Latin America fundamentally is a European-derived culture. Its racial makeup vis-a-vis North America is a product of the two societies’ pre-existing demographic situations and the resultant approaches that their respective European colonizers found practical to take given the two very different sets of circumstances.
Do you have numbers of the percentage decline of native populations in North America vs central America to show the percentage decline was greater?
Another difference is that in Central America the interactions were state directed while in north America it started off with decentralized settler conflicts before manifest destiny.
A big difference was that Anglo women migrated in about equal numbers as men to North America, while it was mostly only men who migrated to Latin America. Hence the lack of mixing and strict one drop rule in Anglo America.
Yes I have heard about that especially in the case of New England.
Mexico is gap per capita is 4 or 5x that of Pakistan.
It is not a developed country but still very rich so her comparison is a bit unfair.
Desi ‘cultural elites’ often forget their ‘aukat’, and complain about 1st world problems type stuff.
With the recent PKR devaluation its like 10x.
India is more than 2x Pakistan.
I mean it would take Pakistan around 15-20 years to get to India’s current level (their 2019 HDI is similar to India’s 2007 and the gap has widened even more since 2007).
For Pakistan to get to current day Mexico would take 40-50 years.
u s a bows to china by cancelling pelosi’s visit to taiwan. well!!!
Seems like she is going to Taiwan. I don’t think the Chinese will do a whole lot about it other than throw a tantrum. On the other hand, if they have the balls to invade some of the small Taiwanese islands near the Chinese coast in response, I will be very impressed.
On the other hand, if they have the balls to invade some of the small Taiwanese islands near the Chinese coast in response, I will be very impressed.
Impressed by their stupidity? China’s rise has been remarkable but the cold fact remains that they are still substantially weaker than the US. Especially when you consider America’s very wide alliance (colonial?) network. China has nothing like it, and probably never will.
Their own self-sabotage with “Zero Covid” isn’t helping matters and they have deep issues with demography and debt. I am not a “China Collapse” guy, but I think the US and the West in general are a lot stronger than people on the right give it credit for.
Sometimes I get the feeling people on the right want the US to be weak because of its negative cultural influence. It’s an understandable impulse, but it can cloud one’s judgement.
The Chinese are ultimate pragmatists and they understand that their hand is still quite weak. So they will huff and puff but do nothing substantial (if they’re smart) and I think they’re smart.
By publicly humiliating China like this, the US is sending a message that the Chinese aren’t as strong as many think they are, including some deluded Han nationalists. And they aren’t.
It’s not a nice thing to do, but then again, when has the US empire ever been nice? Only when China is self-sufficient in the entire chip supply-chain (which includes DUV/EUV machines) as well as having completed the new pipeline from Russia can a serious conflagration over Taiwan occur. To play into the hands of the US and rush a confrontation where they have the weaker hand would be utterly foolish.
Yeah thats fair
I think the USA is still the nicest of the imperial powers to ever exist.
The mercantilist European empires would never have allowed the rise of China. They would not have given the market access to allow that kind of export led industrialization and they were more than willing to intervene militarily to correct an undesirable trade balance.
Most of the earlier imperial powers were not any better. I don’t think anyone fondly remembers Pax Mongolica except the Mongolians. Similarly I doubt the Koreans or Japanese have particularly fond memories of the Chinese Imperial System compared to the current American system.
However much people complain about Pax Americana, it is much better than anything that came before and likely better than anything that might come after. I much rather the current American dominated order than any Chinese dominated order that may follow it.
The Americans at least want to see themselves as the good guys.
+1
As I have said india has benefited from pac American and it’s in its interest to see to it that it continues.
Population before the LGM from the Manvir Singh episode: from archaeological papers, it seems that there were no more than a few tens of thousands of people in pre-LGM Western + Central Europe at most (even fewer in the Aurignacian period in particular). Idk about WHGs and where they came from but there wasn’t much of a population to crash in Western + Central Europe. Then again, the Gravettians of the pre-LGM are probably not ancestral to WHGs, so maybe they lived in a higher population number elsewhere.
Regarding the East Asian coronavirus selection 20,000 years ago: the oldest modern East Asian-like individual on record is 19,000 years old. East Asian samples from 40,000 and 33,000 years ago are quite different from modern day East Asians. So maybe this sweep was because of a bottleneck, the same one that created the background ancestors of modern East Asians at least 19,000 years ago.
Also the lesser amount of discussion on the change of genes for mental traits over the Neolithic was a little disappointing, I get that people were different back then and they are different now (kind of broadly an HBD thing). All in all, what I got from this sounded similar to what I have thought for some time: there is a correct theory or description of something, but just because someone has a theory or description doesn’t mean it is the correct one. Don’t stick to a just-so story and don’t discard something out of a just-so coincidence either.
@Saurav
I thought subcontinentals weren’t into genetic stuff. You see a ton of it here.
There are at least 10 natives who are into serious qpAdm modelling and providing feedback to preprint papers. And they hold day jobs like banking, sales, IT education etc.
I hardly know any kind of profession that is not 20% Indian already – marine engineers, math tutors, nurses, Michelin starred chefs, international criminals – even the unusual suspects!
Balaji just tweeted out to his followers to start boning up on Indian popular culture – he expects Indians to absolutely dominate Anglo-Twitter in the coming years.
Wow weird to see an Indian use the term “Pajeet” as a slur against other “non-Rajput” Indians.
I have read Pakistanis use it before arguing that Pakistanis aren’t Pajeets. Which is like Indians arguing they aren’t Pakis to some EDL skinhead.
Déclassé tool.
What kind of alcohol was consumed by the masses in pre-modern India? Was it as widespread as beer/wine in Europe or the various rice wines in East Asia
There are widespread religious prohibitions on alcohol (Islam, Vaishnava Hinduism, Jainism, etc).
But overall alcohol consumption is common and has a rich history in India and presently about 30% of the alcohol consumed in India is Indian style alcohol (mostly associated with poor people, but with some attempts by brands to create a higher end image see the youtube video at the end)
There is a description of a strong distilled alcohol drink made from Sugarcane in the Atharvaveda for used in medical procedures in Ayurvedic medicine as an anesthetic (called Sura). Ayurveda also would prescribe it as an aphrodisiac.
In South India there are ‘castes’ involved in traditional alcohol production for making traditional palm wine (Toddy) and a culture of Toddy shops. Every part of India more or less has a local tradition of making alcohol with local ingredients (so in Bengal they have sorgum / bajara liquor called bangla, in Goa cashew fruit liquor called Fenni etc), rice wine (in north east), mauha (a flower alcohol) from tribal India, Palm liquors in south india, cane liquors in gangetic plains.
I just learned ArainGang harbors is strong prejudice against Indians. Given his acumen, it’s pretty disappointing to find one your favorite bloggers is actually a hardcore bigot.
He seems to be desperate to prove that Pakistanis have absolutely nothing in common with groups eastward. Perhaps his strong prejudices have prompted him to embark on such a vain endeavor.
Read my responses in the recent thread that critique his most recent proposed ancestral map
30-min walk through T. Nagar, a major market in Chennai.
A lot less chaotic and crowded than when I visited 15 years ago.
Lots of women in public spaces for South Asian standards.
Congrats to my cousin who got into IIT Delhi. Have some family who are alumni of BITs but not IIT. Our clan is doing well with engineering admissions
Congrats. Jains are just weirdo Baniyas. Baniyas are usually good at this game.
—
Q. How do you know someone is from IIT?
A. They will tell you.
Q. How do you know someone is from BITS?
A. They will tell you why they actually ‘chose’ BITS over IIT.
—
IIT D is one of the nicer places to get a degree in India.
I personally just can’t live in Delhi due to pollution.
—
He is originally from Kanpur, so it is an upgrade
That is an upgrade. Kanpur sucks but not as much as Varanasi or Agra. IIT K is a nice place.
The only big cities in UP-Bihar, outside of NCR, that do not suck are Lucknow, and Allahabad.
Looks like SL is going ahead and allowing the chinese spy ship to dock at Hambantota for a week or so despite strong objections from IN.
Looks like IN got played by SL. It is indeed grating that emergency fuel supplies by IN should be end up refueling CN Navy ships (~3.5B $ in total aid). Curious what is the thinking on SL side? Do they expect the recent crisis to be a one time thing and CN to be their long time benefactor? If so why did CN not come to their aid in time in recent fuel/food crisis?
China has outplayed India in the whole neighborhood. String of pearls is going well. India has a lot of hate from neighbors. China is seen as a better long term sugar daddy.
If so why did CN not come to their aid in time in recent fuel/food crisis?,
Probably waiting to see what kind of stable govt would be formed. I am sure china had plenty of info on regime change/color revolution efforts of the US instigated by Victoria Nuland.
@warlock. India has a lot of hate from neighbors. China is seen as a better long term sugar daddy.
Sure, China has deeper pockets than India.
The other big factor is China has not invaded SL or funded and trained LTTE terrorists. India does have a history of interfering with its neighbors, and that breeds suspicions of its motives.
Another great analysis from the fake news website, zerohedge. To repeat ZeroHedge is a Wall Street Traders news site, with news that can influence trades. This article is probably indicative of possible price fluctuations in credit default swaps written against emerging markets.
——
some Excerpts
Sri Lanka has been dragged into the U.S.-imposed hybrid war against China, whose investments have been exaggerated to shift the blame for the country’s debt crisis away from Sri Lanka’s leaders and the IMF.
Official data indicates that only 10 percent of Sri Lanka’s external debt is owed to Chinese entities, whereas 47 percent is held by Western banks and investment companies such as BlackRock, JP Morgan Chase, and Prudential (United States), as well as Ashmore Group and HSBC (Britain) and UBS (Switzerland).
In 1977, elites liberalised the economy by curtailing price controls and food subsidies and letting in foreign banks and foreign direct investment to operate largely without regulations.
They set up the Greater Colombo Economic Commission in 1978 to effectively take over the economic management of the country outside of democratic control. A consequence of these neoliberal arrangements was ballooning national debt, which has oscillated but never entered safe territory.
Sri Lanka’s ruling class has been unable, or perhaps unwilling, to reduce its dependency on foreign buyers of its low-value products as well as the foreign lenders that subsidize its debt.
125kg commonwealth wrestling are from 4 different countries, but I think all Punjabi Jatt (not 100% sure about the pakistani guy)
I have worked out with and observed a ton of S Asians in diaspora, where nutrition is better.
Bigger bones. More steppe= more robust frame. Also massive cultural emphasis. Most Indians cannot even get to 125kg and not be morbidly obese. These guys are big enough framed to get there.
Average frame in these groups,when controlling for food and culture, is not THAT much bigger than that of other S Asian groups. However, the median is shifted and thus the tails are certainly larger. So this dominance will be pronounced. On a global stage however, these guys are still shown up by Caucus people, Slavs, and Iranians. Let’s see how long that lasts. For now, they only dominate lower weight classes. And countries in West Africa will also pose a major threat on the mat. Places like Senegal have a rich tradition of wrestling and enough genetic advantages with stuff like greater frequency of myostatin mutation and androgen receptor high sensitivity.
>Iranians
Don’t have the bigger frames you mentioned. Check the source I posted. For that matter I am not even sure about the Caucasus frame size. But they (Caucasus) have plenty of power per pound among non-high end sizes to cover middle and lower ranges just as well as the higher ranges.
Pak guy is Kashmiri butt, also Arshad nadeem become first south asian or even asian to cross 90m in throw, he is punjabi , I think that belt from Fata to haryana has good talent when it comes to such sports.
Sinhala Buddhist supremacist Sri Lanka’s policies against minority Tamil Hindus reminds one of what their partners in crime China have done to Tibetans and Uyghurs.
Unfortunately, there is no one who will come to the aid of Sri Lankan Tamils, other than a handful of Western countries in the form of accepting refugees. India will continue giving fuel and food to Sri Lanka so that they can keep the Sinhala forces well fed and fueled up to help them with their ongoing crimes against humanity against Tamil Hindus.
Excerpts from this excellent report from the Oakland Institute.
“Whereas land colonization and Sinhalese settlements have taken place in Sri Lanka under the guise of development since independence, this new research points to an increase in land grabbing in recent years. Thousands of acres of land have been confiscated to allow the settlement of Sinhalese in traditional Tamil areas.”
“The main objective of this colonization is to increase the number of Sinhalese population in the North and East to change the demographics of the regions. One clear tactic has been to divide the geographically and ethnically connected Northern and Eastern Provinces and erase the homeland doctrine of the Tamil people.”
“The government’s intention to eradicate the history and culture of the Tamil people is made clear by the activities conducted through different departments. The state machinery is in full swing to convert historic lands, monuments and places of worship of the Tamil people to Buddhist temples, Buddhist culture, and practice – at a greater pace than it was in 2015.”
“Since the end of the war in 2009, 67 Buddhist temples (viharas) have been set up in the Mullaitivu District alone under the Archaeological Department. The cemeteries of the LTTE cadres have been levelled; military camps have been set up and war victory symbols erected.”
“Five of the seven Sri Lankan Army’s Regional Headquarters are located in the North and Eastern Provinces. According to our estimates, there is a ratio of one soldier for every six civilians in the North and East. While the Sri Lankan government has repeatedly stated that the LTTE poses no more threat to national
security, the massive military presence provides security for Sinhalese settlements while facilitating the Buddhization process and keeping the population in the North and East under constant repression and intimidation.”
“This report demonstrates that the government’s activities align with the characteristics of an ethnocratic state aiming to maintain the supremacy of the Sinhalese nation across Sri Lanka. Activities to create this ethnocratic state have gained momentum since the Rajapaksa regime took office in 2019, thereby creating a situation that is detrimental to the country’s stability, reconciliation, human rights, and peace.”
“Meanwhile, the Archeological Department is accelerating land grabbing operations in various parts of the Northern Province. On January 18, 2021, Vidura Wickramanayaka, Sri Lanka’s State Minister for “National Heritage,” accompanied by Army soldiers and Archaeology Department officers – placed a Buddha statue on the site of an ancient Hindu temple (Athi Aiyanar temple), located at Kurunthoormalai in Mullaithivu District.”
Hoju,
I would suggest India has much more racist policies towards its Muslim populations, specially in places like Kashmir.
You know destroying Mosques,with the claim that they are ancient sites of Hindu temples.
I am sure if I scour the Internet i can find plenty of articles on Indias, racist policies against muslims, and skihs for that matter.
Anyway, keep in mind 35% of the Tamils or North and East live among the Sinhalese in the south. (In comparison less than 1% Sinhalese live in Tamil majority regions.) Even better, some the largest companies are owned by Sri Lankan Tamils, eg Maharaja Organization, John Keels. Sirasa one of the biggest TV and media company is a subsidiary of the Maharaja Organization
I just find it impressive, an Hoju an Tamil whose compatriots still shit on the street, have the highest illiteracy in the world claim the Tamils in Sri Lanka are discriminated. Just keep in mind despite all the economic problems, Sri Lankans especially the Tamils have highest standard of living in South Asia, specially better sanitation, twice that of India.
a) The highest illiteracy in the world, child labor/slavery, infant mortality, child abuse, lack of sanitation for more than half the population is a humanitarian disaster of epic proportions.
b) These humanitarian crisis targets the Sudra and Dalit population and result in deaths of children in genocidal rates (2 million per year).
c) The government of India has had 60 years to rectify this humanitarian crisis and genocide.
d) There should be a UN resolution, and independent observers to ensure Indian govt compliance to control the humanitarian crisis and genocide of the Sudra and Dalit populations. https://sbarrkum.blogspot.com/2013/04/humanitarian-crisis-and-genocide-in.html
with nitish on verge of breaking away from b j p, the importance of yogi and hemanta in b j p, will increase even further. this time nitish might not come out as a winner.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhgOeraxa9Y
Sri Lanka’s situation makes me sad. They were doing so well and then all went to hell.
“You don’t score until you score.”
– Steve Stifler, American Pie Series
Beta house was the best one
Russia now makes more oil revenues than it did before the start of the Ukraine war. This essentially means that it is a “reverse swing producer”…. where it reaps the benefits of punitive actions against it. In other words, a punishment is distorted into a reward.
It is also drawing out the conflict to make it reach the autumn/winter (4 months away) where it can enormously increase its leverage at negotiation. This is the same playbook for more than 2 centuries (Napolean/Hitler). This time Germany (and others) will suffer from rising energy prices without a substitute.
Russia is basically the Eurasian Taliban – but with a petro-state and a nuclear armoury – high pain thresholds and staying power. Good luck to all the galaxy-brains who thought a couple of drones would tilt a land war.
Ukraine is turning out to be the East European Pakistan – endless demands for money, weapons and sympathies. Isko bhi istamal karke phek denge!
There is a new 2000 to 1800 year old sample from Cambodia with Indian ancestry.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.06.30.498315v1
regarding situation in sri lanka:
i) can jaffna tamils get their elam?
ii) can india be of any help in lanka so as to get a permanent foot in the island?
Just waiting for SL to sign the Instrument of Accession so that I can buy some beach properties while they are still cheap.
such things seem funny, but it often rubs the wrong way to a lot of these smaller countries around us and makes them hate us.
@phyecho1
You have the Amartya Sen syndrome – just last year, he was expounding that Sri Lanka was doing better (LOL) than India (higher HDI, GDP per capita, happiness index – all true btw).
Tells you about 2 disparate topics –
1. the shittiness of perfectly well constructed economic indicators in relation to the real world.
2. the willingness of immigrant Indians in the West to grovel before lesser developed entities in order to gain their approval.
Call a spade a spade. You will lose your “respectability” but might gain something else.
I don’t know who said it but it is applicable broadly to our neighborhood
“Grab them by the balls. Hearts and Minds will soon follow”
Well considering how the things are between the state govt and center , there is a higher chance of india giving away Tamil Nadu to Sri Lanka, then vice versa 😂😂
Better to give Bihar or UP to Bangladesh, they figured out a way to educate the masses and grow them out of poverty from that part of the world.
Why not go the full hog, and just make Lanka an Union territory already 😛
Crisis in Pakistan isn’t abating any time soon either. Despite breathless assurances that an IMF deal is just around the corner… it has been many weeks since negotiations first began.
Moreover, it will still take ~a month to approve everything because the IMF governing board has to review any initial deal being signed. At this pace, even if an agreement was struck tomorrow, they wouldn’t get any money until August.
SBP (their central bank) breaks down FX reserves by the week. The latest release showed they were losing $0.5 billion in a single week. Just to be clear, the IMF loan would only be for $1 billion in the first tranche. So unless my math fails me, they need to find lots of more loans – and fast!
It gets worse. Pakistan has issued 10 tenders for LNG imports between July and September. They didn’t even get a single offer. Loadshedding is set to get even worse than it is, which is deleterious for exports since industry obviously needs power to function. Already there are textile businessmen saying they are losing orders to India, Bangladesh because they can’t keep promises due to frequent power cuts.
Looks like the only two countries in the subcontinent with anything going for them is India and Bangladesh.
New UK PM favorite is Rishi Sunak. The fact that nobody seems to care much about the prospect is interesting to me. I’m old enough to remember the endless media hype about Obama. Why doesn’t Sunak inspire the same coverage?
Maybe it’s because he’s a conservative that the media is less enthused about his rise? Or maybe desis are not seen as such a big breakthrough, given how successful they are in business and STEM/academia? Perhaps him not being a moslem works against him. Hindus are seen – rightfully so – as an assimilated minority, and so his elevation would be less unexpected. Or maybe it is his middle-class background that makes him “boring”?
Whatever the cause, weird to see such lackluster coverage from a media otherwise obsessed with idpol. Given the historical relationship between the Indian subcontinent and the UK, you’d think they would analyse the prospect more than they are.
P.S. I saw some liberal Indian woman lament on Twitter that while desis can have a decent shot at becoming PM in the UK, nobody non-Indian can become PM in India. This seems like a very stupid point; India is simply a net exporter of people and has a low median age. It’s simply not in a position to take in large amounts of immigrants, so the question should be moot. But some people just can’t resist taking potshots at India.
“nobody non-Indian can become PM in India”
Sonia Gandhi is full Italian. She was most powerful person in India during Manmohan Singh era (could easily have become PM herself if she was Indian born – there is some legal ambiguity as far a i understand).
No legal ambiguity. You don’t need to be indian born to be indian PM. Just need to be naturalised indian citizen – same requirements for being an MP, which she is.
How Jewish Is the War Against Russia?
“It all sounds like deja vu all over again, particularly as many of the perpetrators are still around, like Nuland, priming the pump to go to war yet again for no reason. And they are joined by journalists like Bret Stephens at the New York Times, Wolf Blitzer and Jake Tapper at CNN, and also Max Boot at the Washington Post, all of whom are Jewish and can be counted on to write regular pieces both damning and demonizing Russia and its head of state Vladimir Putin, which means it is not only about the Middle East anymore. ”
https://www.unz.com/pgiraldi/how-jewish-is-the-war-against-russia/
Most American Jews are descended from Russian Jewish immigrants/refugees and they carry that historical animosity. Probably because they see Putin’s Russia as heir to Tsarist Russia and not USSR(American Jews were quite positive towards the Soviets). However, modern Russian Jews are doing very well. Many members of Putin’s inner circle such as oligarchs Roman Abramovich, Arkady Rotenberg, Petr Aven etc. are actually Jewish. So Jewish Americans need not be so antagonistic towards Russia!
The American Jewish elite is hostile to the idea of a multipolar world because the end of American hegemony would mean the end of Israel’s ability to bully and brutalize the Arab world.
Russia is helping Israel bombing Syria with impunity as I write this. So I am not sure if that story holds.
Not many sites will allow to post this comment 🙂
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/modern-asian-studies/article/privilege-of-the-indian-passport-19471967-caste-class-and-the-afterlives-of-indenture-in-indian-diplomacy/FDC79CB96F09533606E43509F40A1ED4
Interesting research essentially claiming Indian Govt post Independence had a Caste-Biased Emigration to UK/West policy.
Can tell if this is a serious paper or troll nonsense?
gotobaya went!!!
just saw print interviewing some lankans. well, nobody wants/likes india. i feel india should secure its defence interests and let sri lanka drift away as they wish.
“United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind
Associate Justice George Sutherland found that, while Thind, an Asian Indian, may claim to have “purity of Aryan blood” due to being “born in Village Taragarh Talawa near Jandiala Guru, Amritsar, Punjab” and having “high caste” status; he was not Caucasian in the “common understanding”, so he could not be included in the “statutory category as white persons”.
Ironically, the 1910 Encyclopedia Britannica entry on Hinduism that Justice Sutherland cites as his sole source for this history actually contradicts his conclusion about the Aryan invaders of Thinds birthplace in the Punjab and explicitly refers to the Aryan invaders of India as part of the white race.[4] The Court nonetheless also concluded that “the term ‘Aryan’ has to do with linguistic, and not necessarily with physical characteristics, and it would seem quite reasonable that mere resemblance in language, indicating a common linguistic root buried in remotely ancient soil, is altogether inadequate to prove common racial origin.”
According to the Court, “the Aryan theory, as a racial basis, seems to be discredited by most, if not all, modern writers on the subject of ethnology,” and it noted that “the Caucasic division of the human family is ‘in point of fact the most debatable field in the whole range of anthropological studies.'”
This Act reversed the Thind decision by explicitly extending racial eligibility for naturalization to natives of India, and set a token quota for their immigration at 100 per year.
In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Hart-Celler Immigration Act, which phased out the national origins quota system first instituted in 1921.”
How much and how little have changed.
Some Biradri sons of the Indus not doing so well in the UK. Really despicable. What must dwarf these numbers is the sex abuse of women of that community in their own homes. But don’t worry. They will brag about halfie Zayn Malik and their “aryan features” superiority over “Gangus.” Just pathetic
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/jul/12/over-1000-children-telford-sexually-exploited-inquiry-finds
I feel most badly for the victims. But these despicable men are also ruining the name of Pak community overall abroad.
I know a lot of Pak American doctors, mostly Mohajirs for whatever reason. Lovely people. But these actions are really a stain on their diaspora, as are the ongoing issues in Turkey.
Maybe the community in America is extremely unrepresentative and the ones who emigrated to the UK are more so? Might explain a lot of why the two groups act so differently.
At least during the initial waves of emigration to the UK, you probably got a more “average” Pakistani migrant type. My sense is that selectivity has risen for Pak migrants in recent years and these days the ones coming into the UK aren’t very average anymore. The sole exception might be family visas, which still presumably has a significant share of proles living in places like Telford importing compliant wives from the Pak hinterland.
70% of UK Pakistanis are Mirpuris. UK wanted cheap labor to work in their factories in 60s and 70s and invited Mirpuris displaced by the construction of the Mangla dam to fill those low skilled jobs. Entire villages moved to the UK. Combine that with general racist environment in Europe, they never assimilated and now the result is segregated communities that came from a rural ancestral background. Something similar happened in France with Maghrebis.
US in contrast only attracted skilled labor, doctors, engineers, accountants, IT professionals etc, these immigrants came from urban Pakistan (mostly from Karachi or Lahore), and were more upward mobile. US is also a more accepting place for immigrants compared to Europe and opportunities are available to everyone willing to work.
This is the cause of why Pakistani diaspora in North America and UK are so different from each other. They had very little in common in the first place.
https://mobile.twitter.com/HamzaAzhrSalam/status/1550049128574582786?cxt=HHwWhIC80Yne8IIrAAAA
“29 year old Pakistani American girl #SaniaKhan murdered by her ex husband in Chicago. Sania used to make TikTok videos about the stigma of divorce in South Asian communities.”
Some thoughts:
a) Pakistanis are ~2% of UK’s population, .7% of Canada’s, and .17% of the US.
b) All the shitty bits Pakistanis will claim are ‘South Asian’, the good bits are ‘Pakistani’. No deal.
Same game in Khalistan gang. Frankly,same game among Taiwanese with Chinese. If people can do it feasibly, they do it.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/jul/12/over-1000-children-telford-sexually-exploited-inquiry-finds
Absolutely disturbing.
Absolutely sickening. No self-respecting nation should have to put up with this.
Agreed – https://twitter.com/InstaYatri/status/1545765520527351808
https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/12/airlift-shutdown/
Pakistan’s top startup, Airlift, closed today. It had raised $ 85 million of Amreeki money over the years.
It was never a good business, they were trying to pivot from Uber rideshare (with Vans) to the even harder Doordash (i.e. Ola and Zomato in one for Indian bhai logg).
—
Most start-ups in the subcontinent are vapid fintech/gig economy scams funded by gullible investors.
India does have serious “deep tech” companies, and I hope they get more funding even if they lose money because at least there is progress for humanity. They also increase the national security of India. What does these feudal gig economy companies do? They just exploit labourers and add to the laziness of already too fat office workers.
The CCP made the right choice by cutting off these scams and only giving funding to companies doing stuff like quantum computing, chip engineering etc. Actual engineering, in other words.
internal migration into south india:
in recent days we all have seen/ heard/read about the migration to south india from other parts of india. this is mainly to cater to the labour shortage. of course there are better educated lo who come for software jobs and marwadi traders, but these are a minority as compared to construction labour. many of these labourers strike root here, they mainly bring their brides from home towns and put their children into local schools. kerala is seeing such children win ranks.
the main result of such migration is being seen on politics, the main beneficiary being bjp. also the ‘hindu deficit’ of these regions are getting corrected to a small extent!!.
“ also the ‘hindu deficit’ of these regions are getting corrected to a small extent!!.“
Are u talking about the less Hindu- more Hindu region theory , kind sir ? 😉
sort of, if it pleases you!!!
kerala has 40 lakh migrants!!!, that is almost 10% of population. even if 70% of these are hindus(?), it adds to a reasonable number.
recently, prof.vaidyanathan was voicing similar concerns about tamil nadu.
well!!!
Do not worry. We will make proper Hindus out of these states. 😉
We made Christians&Muslims Celebrate Makar Sankratni, you guys can’t even make them say Vande Mataram.
Yes , the celebrated Makar Sankratni, and then fooled u folks and became your political leaders
At least in our case the power still remains with us.
On Indian internal migration: get ready for more. A *lot* more.
By 2036, a mere 14 years from now, states like Tamil Nadu will have more elderly than youth as a share of its population. Same is true for a bunch of other states.
Tamil Nadu’s GDP per capita is only $3600. For comparison, Ukraine had $4800 before the war.
What will TN have by 2036? Probably higher than what Ukraine had but probably lower than what Brazil has today. So Tamil Nadu will need immigrants because it won’t be rich by then and plenty of labour will still be needed. The only thing worse than being rich and old like Japan is being old and poor like many post-Soviet countries.
i am puzzled by rapidly declining birth rates in places like india which remain quite poor.
israel seems like an outlier in so far as being relatively wealthy and having above replacement fertility.
The reproductive rate of a society is decided by – the perception by current genes of the ability of offspring to propagate genes to the next generation.
As such,in countries which are okaish and fairly safe, women have lower tfr – around 1.2 is the base rate. See low rate in bangladesh even though it was lower for many years than india. The rates went lower as child mortality rates went lower.
Israel has higher rates cause women there perceive the danger and just having 1 child isn’t enough to guarantee the propagation of your genes, even if that child won’t die of diseases.
India needs to deal with the secular issue or with changing demography things will only get difficult. It will be economy vs demography that shall decide the future of India’s direction.
what projections do people make of India in next 50 to 100 yrs. economy/ demography, technology, military power etc.
https://twitter.com/PaliwalAvi/status/1547351518915051521
Bangladeshi economy is not in as good condition as it is made out to be. I had noticed that about 2-3 months ago when the BDT was trading at 80-85, the black market rates were already about ~100-102. Now that currency is depreciating, it would be worse. I don’t understand why developing countries spend USD to bolster their currency. It is almost always useless.
National pride. A strong currency becomes a political football so the ruling party wants to avoid cheap shots by the opposition. Modi attacked Congress during the 2013 “taper tantrum” for the weakening rupee and now the oppo is doing the same to Modi.
Of course, in REER terms, the rupee hasn’t really depreciated but most people don’t know what REER or NEER means and politics is all about optics anyway.
Remember Amy Wax? The racist Upenn law professor who had a grudge against Indian women?
https://www.thedp.com/article/2022/07/amy-wax-penn-law-dean-report-major-sanctions-faculty-senate
It’s now a high probability that she gets sanctioned, which is a nice way of saying she gets fired and loses her tenure. For BP readers, this is an interesting tidbit:
I am generally in favor of free speech but she repeatedly crossed the line into outright bigotry and racism. Good on ABCDs for fighting back. Too many Asians are passive.
Wax has of course started a “gofundme” for suckers to fund her legal fight. Let’s be clear: if she gets fired she will get a very comfortable pension and she’s at her end of her career anyway. And she’s asking for 300K! Not just a racist but a grifter to boot. The Chutzpah!
I suspect that if she does get fired, she will probably double and triple down on the racism. Any last remaining barriers will be gone.
https://theprint.in/india/why-modi-govt-has-erased-a-35-year-old-unofficial-blacklist-of-sikh-foreign-nationals/292207/
Hmm
owaisi has opened his account in madhya pradesh. the spread of pfi/sdpi is widespread. there appears to be a fierce competition for the muslim vote among these parties. congress is loosing this vote as it is balancing its ‘soft’ hindutva. looks like muslim representation will comedown as hindus will never vote for these parties and muslims cannot win only on their votes. there are muslim voices in congress who have started opposing ‘extremist’ tendencies in muslims. makes the scene very interesting.
Hey Razib, a few questions in mind I hope you’ll answer.
Q. Is it possible that AASI with whom Iran_HG admixed to form IVCp wasn’t pure AASI but had little bit of WEu ancestry, considering presence of Y-dna haplogroup H among lower castes and which is also found in Europe, though it’s totally restricted to India?
Q. Is it true average North Indian is 30-50% southern eurasian, while average South India is 40-60% southern eurasian?
Q. Are Black Sea Turks originally turkified Caucasians, given they score a lot of CHG?
Q. Do modern Maghrebis from northern part of North Africa really have 30-40% ancestry from bronze age southern Europe?
Q. Was CHG lighter than Natufians?
Q. What modern population has highest Natufian ancestry?
Q. Is it possible that AASI with whom Iran_HG admixed to form IVCp wasn’t pure AASI but had little bit of WEu ancestry, considering presence of Y-dna haplogroup H among lower castes and which is also found in Europe, though it’s totally restricted to India?
i think this is possible
Q. Is it true average North Indian is 30-50% southern eurasian, while average South India is 40-60% southern eurasian?
seems about right, though the difference is exaggerated by the oversampling of upper castes in the north and dalits in the south in the academic studies. generic reddy peasants and generic UP peasants are not as different. close to 50% both.
Q. Are Black Sea Turks originally turkified Caucasians, given they score a lot of CHG?
i mean they have some of that, but greek and Armenian took. also possible kurdish? (the safavids were all this)
Q. Do modern Maghrebis from northern part of North Africa really have 30-40% ancestry from bronze age southern Europe?
this seems way too high.
Q. Was CHG lighter than Natufians?
no idea. probably but not much
Q. What modern population has highest Natufian ancestry?
probably arabians without African admix
Hey Razib,
Do you mind commenting on my contentions from the araingang S Asian map thread?
Looks like he purposely used fits that underestimated steppe by a bit for several non NW groups. The populations he used have way worse fit scores in G25 than the conventional ones used lately for modeling. It seems potentially agenda driven.
honestly didn’t care enough to read in detail, but my exp. with him is that his priors/biases do effect how he samples/interprets things some. otoh, he doesn’t concoct stuff out of whole cloth, and in his defense he tends to be more straightfwd with his bias than a lot of the hindu nationalists who try th show how the aryans actually came form haryana…
i think the map is a good start. up to others to improve?
Thats fair. I will look into making a more accurate map that better reflects much closer average map distances.
Thanks for your answers, Razib. I forgot to add one and last question.
What modern South Asian population is closest to Rakhigarhi woman? Baloch or Gujjar or other(if so, who is it)?
As per Shinde et al, Rakhigarhi woman was 73% Iran_HG+ 27%(AHG and WSHG); whereas, as per model of Davidski from Eurogene blog, she was 71.1% Iran_Ganj_Dareh+ 23.2% Onge+ 05.7% RUS_Tyumen?
https://www.baaznews.org/p/rishi-sunak-pm-sikhs-dangerous
Khalistani sympathizers are afraid of Sunak moment. Tells you somethin…
https://www.livemint.com/opinion/columns/whats-most-dreadful-about-rishi-sunak-as-the-uk-s-pm-11658084193203.html
‘ A more potent form of racism is in worship—like how resident Indians look up to the West. In return, the West does not spend much time thinking about India or Indians. So there is an unequal relationship between Westerners of Indian origin and their resident Indian admirers. Westerners of Indian origin do not appear to be as proud of India as India is of them, nor do they consider themselves Indians in the first place. But when it suits them, they do play the India card. For instance, every now and then, I would see a writer or academic “of Indian origin” make a decent living out of interpreting India, and even Asia, to the West. But if some Trump supporter asks him to “go back to your home country”, he would say that marvellous thing, “I was born in Houston.”
Maybe, in our subterranean consciousness, we know that logical reasoning will deny us the sensation of collective pride; so we take care not to let reason interfere with our quest to appropriate a foreigner’s success as our own.”
A few valid points, writing a point by point reply to this would suck up so much energy and time.
###
IMO Indian diaspora really loves the motherland back.
All Indians wish they were a gora. Becoming a coconut and gagging on gora dick is a top-tier life goal for Indians.
I think physical infrastructure will give a lot of self confidence to Indian. Awe inspiring rail, big-ass bridges, roads, industry… These are what will rejuvenate India’s body, mind, and heart.
###
Something that effects me personally is this :
“In a helpful generalization, the everyday US-bound Indian reaches there after a rigged race, as a consequence of his social fairness or wealth, and due to this fact on account of an enormous head begin over most Indians. This migration may be very completely different from what the West understands as migration.”
What advantage? Gajab ka chutiyapa hai yeh non-engineer Indian logon ka to shit on H1B-wale launde.
There are no elites in India. IT has generated the first true middle class. Almost everyone from our parent’s generation was poor and were upselling their true status.
Koi Hero ki CD Dawn chalayega toh usse elite bolenge, kisi ka baap bank chapraasi hai usse bhi elite bolenge, koi saala 5 logon ke saath kamra share kare woh bhi elite hai. Jabtak BC slumdog millionaire wale bhikhari na bano tabtak koi credit hi nai hai. Aur yeh sociology wale bakait logg kaun hai jo humein judge karenge?
###
Millions of Indians were dying of hunger mere 80 years ago. Things take time.
###
RuPay, the domestic alternative to the Visa/Mastercard cartel, went from having 0.3% marketshare to over 60% in just nine years.
Great thread detailing the journey of how India did it.
https://twitter.com/anshgupta64/status/1548510319164604416
The big challenge is now overseas expansion. Visa/Mastercard is controlled by America and it wants to keep its monopoly on payments for obvious geopolitical reasons.
RuPay’s internationalisation would undermine this hegemony, so expect USA to sabotage RuPay’s overseas expansion efforts.
https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/why-west-is-so-uncomfortable-with-rising-india-and-happy-to-sponsor-its-enemies-10924161.html
Finally people are beginning to see the reality for what it is. What took you so long guys, for me its age and maturity. But for an entire country?.
This is easy to answer. No state/civilization wants a potential rival.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/18/world/asia/pakistan-imran-khan-punjab-elections.html?smid=tw-share
Hopefully he comes back to power.
Anti-IK crowd in Pakistan had predicted his demise after falling out with the army getting booted out of government, now they are afraid of IK coming back with 2/3rd majority even when he is the anti-establishment candidate- something which I already predicted more than 3 months ago when he was ousted. The cuck-vs-chad theory plays out again with expected results.
Regional stability is better with him there in general.
I think assassination attempt will be final push for Bajwa.
https://tribune.com.pk/story/2366664/rupee-hits-all-time-low-of-rs222-against-us-dollar
IMF deal is no panacea. Pak rupee was at 160 a year ago.
https://www.imo-official.org/hall.aspx
An Indian, and that too a female, in top 15 for all time hall of fame. Team USA mostly Chinese origin as usual. One Indian origin this year. he scored the lowest on the team.
Lookin at Indian teams istorically. Someone will complain about Bramin Bania oppression lol
Already pointed out in a comment that the long term trajectories of Indian math olympiad competitors are much better than those from China and Russia.
“An Indian, and that too a female, in top 15 for all time hall of fame. ”
Lol, Pranjal Srivastava is a boy not female hahaha @warlock.
oh wait. male actually.
https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/bangalore/bengaluru-students-win-laurels-at-maths-olympiad/article65650760.ece
For Chinese
Not only 4/6 of US
6/6 of Canada 🍁
3/6 of UK
5/6 of Malaysia
5/6 of Australia
And finally
16/44 gold medalists
6/10 with perfect score (42)
With brains like this, the West doesn’t stand a chance. The Chinese just need to reproduce, and they will rule the world for the next century at minimum.
Chinese ethnics are kings of Math Olympiad. Unbeatable.
Eastern Euros really good too.
for the PRC team 6 out of 6 scores are 42 (perfect)
Apparently they had a similar problem to the problem number 3 and 6 which gave most teams issues. This was by hapstance at some of their recent national tournaments. Nonetheless, they will regardless. But this was extra domination because of that
Interesting map of percentage of people in poverty by state.
https://twitter.com/Hoju89/status/1549245126052139009?s=20&t=XkIPna7xVCdBXq2BzYDZEw
https://old.reddit.com/r/IndiaSpeaks/comments/w2i848/state_wise_distribution_of_poverty_in_india/
Hour-long monsoon walk across an aqueduct in the outskirts of Aluva, a community within the Kochi metropolitan area. So green and relaxing. Parts of Kerala feel a lot like Ubud in Bali.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnv9pLM5NaA
Nice, verdant area. But Malayalis have to reflect on Sri Lanka, without the rest of India, Kerala would be in a similar or worse economic situation.
Simply, no desire to make things.
and if my aunt had balls…
Damn how do you guys make an account on this site? I tried to register, and cannot login. I have been lurking for over 2 years and finally decide to comment and this -_-
generic reddy peasants and generic UP peasants are not as different. close to 50% both.
Reddy_Telangana 0.329 0.581 0.091
Nadar 0.366 0.578 0.056
Panta_Kapu 0.274 0.651 0.075
Pattapu_Kapu 0.388 0.547 0.064
Yadav_UP 0.197 0.585 0.217
Kurmi_UP 0.312 0.526 0.162
Yadav_Rajasthan 0.163 0.611 0.226
Kurmi_MP3 0.322 0.520 0.159
Razib, I would say that Northern Peasantry masses as a whole are different from Southern Peasantry masses. Though I
do agree that many of them can be quite similar (for instance large groups such as Kurmis and Reddys, barring the slight, non trivial steppe. the ‘steppe’ upto a certain amount is obviously noise/ indicator of some other component)
https://tribune.com.pk/story/2367050/usd-crosses-rs229-in-interbank-market
Meanwhile, Letters of Credit (LCs) are being quoted at 242 per dollar. That’s what banks use as compensation for importers. The LCs that are being completed today are for oil imports in June.
As you may remember, I’ve pointed out that Pakistan has failed to win a single LNG cargo for the entire July-September period. There are already long blackouts and they are set to get worse.
At this point I fear there is a significant risk we are headed to a humanitarian disaster in many emerging market countries.
My gut feeling is that Sri Lanka is possibly just the first domino. It has made investors quite fearful of emerging markets which then increases risk of default and creates a bit of a feedback loop.
I am not sure if the people in power in the global financial systems are sufficiently worried about these effects or just how easily things can spiral out of control.
Lot of Middle East and North Africa only exists due to foreign handouts. Particularly Egypt. That country should not have anywhere close 100 million people. The only reason it does so is because of cheap grain from Russia and Ukraine and American bribe money. If either stops, it is fucked and its millions of refugees will all go to Europe. Will the Europeans welcome them at train stations or will they be manning machine guns? Only time will tell!
Even BD is apparently staring down the barrel. Tough situation for IN with collapsing neighbors. Apart from refugee flows from SL and BD, curious if there are any macro economic risks for IN? FPI withdrawal?
Surprising(perhaps not so much) that there is a anti India current in the ongoing protests in SL inspite of IN helping with ~4B worth of aid. Resentiment perhaps.
As long as there is India, there will be an anti India current in all the neighboring states.
Well there are macro-economic risks for everyone India is pretty well positioned relative to other emerging markets from a first principles type analysis.
Basically it makes its own food and has decently high economic complexity relative to other poor countries. The biggest import is petroleum / natural gas, but here it benefits from the Russia sanctions imposed by the West.
That said the Rupee falling relative to USD like any other emerging market currency. I think this is part of the cascade effect of people panicking about emerging markets. Not sure how this will lead to other follow on effects, as a whole it is too chaotic to predict. So I think this unknown is the biggest risk factor.
If world leaders get their shit together to a reasonable extent, possibly some buying opportunities in INR denominated assets, that is a big if.
Not investment advice, just rambling thoughts.
mamata decides to abstain in vice president polls. shows that gujjus are real good deal makers!!!
would she have taken the same stance if a muslim was the opposition’s vp candidate? may not have happened. ignoring congress and its christian candidate is ok.!!
I actually think the opposite.
The VP candidate of BJP (Dhankar) is pretty meh. The VP position itself has less symbolic value, plus Dhankar wont get any extra votes for BJP, which Murmu (being President) can. The only reason Dhankar was selected i can see, is that he has to preside over the upper house from time to time, and that needs someone with political nous.
The reason TMC didn’t support Congress VP candidate, is exactly because she is a minority. And nothing to do with BJP deal making. The TMC wants the Congress space and supporting a minority Congress candidate, would mean ceding the minority vote back to Congress. I don’t they would have supported even if the Congress candidate was Muslim. Because at the end of the day, its a Congress candidate.
https://www.quora.com/profile/Sher-Jatt-2?ch=10&oid=885970789&share=2ad7ce3f&srid=u6vS8&target_type=user
Fun reads from quora
20 min video showing village life in Tamil Nadu. Quaint.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqmIl6tdOds
Hot take but I don’t think the average Indian wearing a T-shirt and jeans walking down the street looks all that great. Watching old YouTube videos, the people in them wearing traditional clothes, though poorer, still look sharper. Idk maybe those clothes just fit the Indian physique better than western clothing.
Indians who can afford Western clothing tend to be richer. Fitness culture has not fully permeated rich and middle class,though it is constantly making good inroads.
Poor Indians in traditional wear are skinny from underfed or lightly muscled with less bloated faces.
Middle class and rich ones are either pot bellied with skinny limbs aka skinny fat or obese. Younger gen has better body comp for sure.
Western clothing is horseshit for warm/hot climates.
nothing wrong with a pair of shorts and a hawaiian shirt if you can pull it off. agreed that many Indian men in India don’t have a great fashion sense when it comes to Western clothing. Interestingly in walking videos I’ve seen in Pakistan, the men there are more likely to wear traditional clothing. Which I think comes off looking better, although sometimes it also comes off as drab and dull (all men wearing beige/grey loose shalwar kameez, in an often dry-ish urban environment that also has much beige/grey).
Indian women still seem to wear traditional clothing more than men, and it looks great on them.
India’s only aircraft carrier caught fire… again. Will be out of service for months.
https://indianexpress.com/article/india/fire-incident-aircraft-carrier-ins-vikramaditya-8042182/
It was built by the Soviet Union back in the day. Let’s not forget that Russia’s only carrier also caught fire pretty recently. Likely a quality issue.
In hindsight, was a mistake to lean so much on Soviets and later Russia for arms, at least outside of jets and anti-aircraft systems like S-400.
few stray thoughts:
i) social media activism is stinging higher judiciary. after pardiwala’s complaint, cji ramana is asking for regulation of social and electronic media. it is time to bring some oversight into judiciary’s appointments and conduct.
ii) after getting the mandate, ranil wikramasinghe’s govt. removes all protesters. if only our centre was half as this strong in caa and farmer’s agitation…..!!!
There is element of UP elections, especially holding Western UP. But another element:
It turned into a pan Jat protest with intermittent rioting. It was getting to the point of potentially compromising the army and national security. When a community is that entrenched into the security infrastructure, is that proximal to the capital, and is that dominant in food production, the state doesn’t have many options. Basically the community has massive subsidization of army and agricultural support. Opening these areas up to others will be very slow because blackmail can be used easily if it is too fast. Basically, there isn’t meritocracy or anything close to open competition with these things,to the extent that there should be. Dominance of certain communities will not go away so quickly in such essential things.
Agniveer protests, though mainly was many groups in North just upset about lost guaranteed jobs in a tough econ climate, was also many “martial groups” just angry about integrated divisions. Basically, these tend to be land owning plurality groups with a lot of street power in their respective states. They don’t want to give up guarantees government jobs and income at all costs because they, reasonably to an extent, do not trust the job creation environment of India. That being said, there is also an element of fear of giving up a guaranteed thing.
In some ways, this isn’t just classic demonized brahmin bania against dominant land owning castes. This is about subaltern OBCs against dominant land owning castes. The big argument the land owning castes use is that Bania Brahmin hegemony is using the veil of neoliberalism and will just exploit everyone.
Here is the thing. Indian agriculture is ultra unproductive, for global yield standards, and military spending on pensions is unsustainable. Money has to go towards modernization. Will there be some industrialists getting a bit too rich and exploiting things with more open market rules. Of course. But look at all Asian Tigers and how they rose. Key industrialist classes, even if corrupt, were instrumental. So there has to be checks and balances but the state must take some risks and be willing to alienate some self interested groups at some points.
Modi-Shah is way too focused on elections. The way they won in UP probably made them think they should have pushed harder because their numbers reflect that Western UP vote wasn’t even necessarily super essential for a majority. Some of it is also socialist RSS stepping in.
Reforms are just very tough in India. Everyone knows what needs to happen. But vested interests play a lot of games. Tribalism, the Indian variant, casteism, runs too deep.
“Money has to go towards modernization.”
Indian people are not children, 99% of them are just haramkhor. They understand what is right and wrong for the country, but they want the neighbor’s son to be Bhagat Singh while their ladla becomes civil servant.
I have written many times on BP on how almost every single government servant I know is a slacker and a thief. Government primary teachers employ fake teachers to do their jobs in villages, government office clerks work 3 hours a day, public sector research lab, or defence lab folks don’t do even one hour of work, professors don’t publish papers,…
Indians are just a haramkhor people. This happens when ‘becoming something’ is more important than ‘doing something’.
Now I understand all the nautanki about personal statements and volunteering etc that American med students have to do. All that is to try and find if someone is even interested in doing this.
—-
Government servants are overpaid but Indians.
You will never win an argument or get a concession from anyone in India, they will muddle it, throw random points, point to nuance, raise their voice, this-that, … They are just an evil-deceitful people fit to stand in visa lines and beg for visas. You see this in the quality of the roads, of houses, of human bodies, and economy in general. Lying only takes one so far.
—-
Till ~2005 people used to think and investigate before marrying off their daughters to someone employed in a private insurance or banking company. People love government jobs. They just want government to dole out money to them for no reason.
—-
“Will there be some industrialists getting a bit too rich and exploiting things with more open market rules. Of course.”
This is a lie. People keep running these ‘rich sahukar’, ‘lalchi bania’ tropes. So many marwari businesses failed in places like Jharkhand when mazdur andolan, fala-dhikana happpened. Now after being de-industrialized those places suck even worse. Then the ‘poor man’ will squat on his residential quarter for 30 years and ask for his job back or some made up severance pay demand.
Indians are just haramkhor. Remember this when dealing with them (i.e. us).
*Government servants are overpaid but Indians who have government jobs will never admit it. They will make up some sob stories and lie to your face.
Rent seekers are not happy about losing to what they perceive to be crony capitalists. Frankly, even if not so crony, as you imply, they would still be mad. Rent seeking and its preservation seem to be the default goal.
Half of India ills will be taken care if there is an Agneepath schemes for Indian govt servants
“ Indians are just haramkhor.”
The movie “white tiger” drilled this in for me. (Every character in the movie is a haram khor, the guy wins by becoming the biggest haram khor)
I think 2nd gen are fed an idealized version of India by parents and cultural enrichment activities.
Once you realize most are haramkhor virtue signalling along whatever religious / political lines they support things become easier to understand.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyL1_PldJBk
Sack of the Hindu caravan, and future of Indian secularism
###
Every 3 months Gupta ji makes an episode on how can opposition remove the BJP. A few months ago it was the (possibly) American funded campaign on regionalism, India is a union of states…, now it is this.
Shekhar Gupta is a sly man, I remember his ‘walk the talk’ interviews pre 2012-13 when he used to bare his fangs for Modi.
###
@Sumit
“I think 2nd gen are fed an idealized version of India by parents and cultural enrichment activities.”
+1
Indians are a morally and spiritually corrupt people.
I had a junior colleague, Gujju ABCD raised in Austin, his family were serious followers of Sivananda-Yoga/Divine Life Society with some BAPS culture thrown in, could play the tabla well. The guy was very articulate about Hindu religion, fit, well groomed, had a graduate engineering degree, and a well paying job. I would say his parents did a great job raising him. I root for such ABCDs, they are connected to India, ancestral spiritual traditions, and are honest human beings unlike their brethren in India. Looking at them makes me happy about what Indians can be if we had some money.
@ surav,
Half of India ills will be taken care if there is an Agneepath schemes for Indian govt servants
modi in a way is doing it for ias, by reducing or rather not increasing their numbers. their quarter service reviews will have to start to weed out some of them.
in southern states, the govt offices are full of contract workers. the system cannot afford on rolls employees.
Though I don’t hold the Indian armed forces in very high regard, atleast they are still better than the useless sarkari babus, who are the bane of India. Everything they touch turns to dust.
Now they have got one up on army by pushing them into accepting agnipath scheme.
I wouldnt underestimate the sarkari babu power though. That’s y whatever modi is doing can be reversed quite quickly by next govt in power. What these jokers really need is total push out from the system which the agnipath scheme really is.
after seeing liz truss on youtube, rishi rich looks like a maha rishi. i still feel that boris was a better candidate!!
S Asians at World Track Championship 2022 Javelin
2. Neeraj Chopra
5. Arshad Nadeem
10. Rohit Yadav
First off, wonderful work by S Asian brudas. Inb4 Indus gang/steppe supremacist commentary from Mr. agang. Full on gangetic plainsmen (never mind indo- ganetic plain is one, with haryana at center, but lets play game for a second) from UP also cracked top 10 at only 21. Potential is superb
@Bimrao
@Saurav
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDJXuSDRqbM
Every Khalistani hates the UPHar/ उपहार (UP and Bihar Et. Al. and or also known as Gangetic Plains) labourer as it freshens up the wound of Anglo Sikh wars. Voices of Bhojpuri mercenaries resonates and and freshens up the deep pains inflicted by Purbiyas ransacking their land.
Present day Khalistanis find it hard to believe that forefathers of these slave labourers defeated us on battlefields at the peak of our empire.
Thus, the deep rooted abhorrence towards them.
Good news is tides are slowly but surely turning now.
Wow, another Saurav from UP, on the blog. What were the odds?
The migrant Gangetic laborers are likely lower caste, so their ancestors are not the same ancestors of Purbiyas who were mostly upper caste. Big difference.
There is an element of racialized hatred. A big part of Khalistan is fueled by it. This 15% or so extra steppe in lieu of AASI seems to be causing a ton of downstream effects in racialized perceptions and treatment.
But there are groups like Yadavs who migrate and cluster with upper castes as well. So it isn’t as straightforward as that. Also gangetic Rajputs aren’t as far from OBC gangetics as say Jats are. Basically not all upper castes of gangetics are even THAT far from these laborers. So yeah, some of it is phenotype. But some of it is also low caste status/lower socioeconomics as well.
Khalistanis have a ton of hatred of all gangetic btw. Hatred Brahmin-Bania is a rallying cry for many. It isn’t just lower caste. There is an almost visceral response to these groups which they feel exploit the hardworking, humble Sikh yeoman-warrior that they see themselves as. They also shit on Rajputs as bitches of the Mughals and bring up that they were the true army against “oppression” and saviors of the downtrodden of the subcontinent, very ironic given how there are separate Gurudwaras for lower castes. Nonetheless, it helps them in the context of their leftist alliances in the West.
Indians are overly obsessed about caste, skincolor, ancestry etc. Migrants are primarily hated by the host population because they are seen as taking away jobs from the locals. The issue limits itself to economics if the migrants are from an upper socio economic background, because then they are higher in the pecking order than the general host population. However if the migrants are from a rural socioeconomic background, the migrants are also hated for their ‘backward’ culture and racialized slurs are used to denigrate the migrant’s places of origin as well. Nobody likes poor people swarming their places of abode (cities/countries) even if it is economically beneficial to the host.
The entire model you speak of is inverted in Pakistan, where migration happens from West to East or North to South, so you have fairer skinned Western shifted groups at the bottom of the socio economic ladder, yet there is no difference in how the host population sees them.
Small correction.
Indians are overly obsessed about caste, South Asian region is obsessed about skin color as whole, and NRIs are mostly obsessed about ancestry and DNA.
Also, warrior image is not how Biradri supremacists exactly stereotype any of gangetic plain at all. They view these mercenaries as agents of the British, that’s is. They have this tendency to view even there 5-10% extra steppe compared to gangetic upper castes as something that makes them part of some special warrior elite lineage compared to the more AASI “mongrelized” indo genetics to the East. They literally use this verbiage to describe gangetic peoples. And I know you downplay it but rural Punjab even in Pak has ugly racial views about gangetic Mohajirs, whether based on empirically stereotypes or not.
Urban Punjab on both sides is different. But that’s a different story. How race is perceived is a massive part of Biradri supremacist mindset. Hindu hatred is there among Khalistanis and Islamists alike. But the race element is definitely part of it.
Bengal genocide was just as much about race, if not even more, than religion.
Funny part is that 30-35% of Punjab is lower castes who cluster with middle/upper castes of gangetic plain and even a decent portion of dalits with lower castes elsewhere. But caste and race is definitely big. Pak not giving much of a shit of trafficking of lower caste mostly convers of Pak Christian girls is another example of it.
Regardless, another example is Marathas. Khalistanis have little respect for even martial demonstrated groups who are about as steppe as the migrant Biharis and UP people study. Marathas cluster with shudra groups like Patel of Western India. A huge portion of the army is modern day groups with little steppe. So Punjab has memories of even these types in their lands. That won’t save anyone from discrimination. Biradri ethnonationalism doesn’t care about history. It cares about building a narrative of separateness, which is just actually one for thinly veiled supremacy, at all costs.
If you see a lot of Pak biradri supremacist posters, they say they only respect the Jat and Sikh regiments of Indian army. Gangetic based regiments are seen as inferior. There is little rationality from any angle here. But their type of hatred is rarely about rationality.
Nobody cares about the so-called Pakistani biradari supremacists because they are a minority and a significantly less annoying portion of the community of bigots. It is the extremely loud and overly emotional Out-of-India morons who are considered, rightly so, to be the most toxic of all. Their toxicity is not merely due to their relative intensity of anger at not being believed by rational people but also due to the fact that they pretty much dominate the actual Indian political landscape.
Most so-called Pak biraderi supremacists are irrelevant American citizens of Pakistani origin with a secular orientation. In Pakistan, nobody really cares about steppe ancestry or how Aryan or how Harappan they are. Actual Pakistanis are more concerned about how Arabic they are, which they aren’t.
When it was revealed that the Rakhigarhi sample had no r1a, nobody in Pakistan cared or even knew. It was the Indians who totally lost their minds and were raging across every genetics-related blog with foam slipping out of their mouths.
The viewpoint of the Pakistani biraderi supremacists is far closer to the actual reality and truth compared to that of Indian Vedic supremacists, since the Paki biraderi people have accepted that the Aryans have come from Europe and conquered the region and thus spread their genes and most of their “other” views are spicy variants of this truth. The spice is often half-truths like they are the true descendants of IVC and that they taught the invading violent Aryans culture and thus so-called Brahmanism is actually an invention of ancient Pakistanis, who later migrated to India in large numbers but the origin “of all that is good about Vedic civilization” was in Pakistan since they taught the violent Aryans how to behave like proper terracotta-loving people, this may be atleast 30% or 45% true but it atleast has some truth. On the other hand, 100% of what the Indian Vedic supremacists claim is false. Indian vedic supremacists are also far more relevant since they pretty much dominate India politically and socially and are a far greater presence on the internet.
@Former Gangetic
Probably exposure bias on my part. I think I pretty much never interact with them online. Most OOT people are laughed out the places I tend to frequent.
“It is the extremely loud and overly emotional Out-of-India morons who are considered, rightly so, to be the most toxic of all.”
Annoying yes, bigoted and toxic obviously no.
“Their toxicity is not merely due to their relative intensity of anger at not being believed by rational people but also due to the fact that they pretty much dominate the actual Indian political landscape.”
Again, this is false. I have never seen a angry OIT person, they sound stupid and argue a lot but they are far better behaved than the NW Khalistani or Pakistani folks.
“When it was revealed that the Rakhigarhi sample had no r1a, nobody in Pakistan cared or even knew. It was the Indians who totally lost their minds and were raging across every genetics-related blog with foam slipping out of their mouths.”
On the contrary, the ones outright denying AIT (Aryan migration? whatever) are considered stupid by almost everyone. The nitty gritty details of how Aryans came in can vary, but the basic theme was clear to everyone long before genetic evidence was available.
“The spice … has some truth.”
‘ancient Pakistan’, ‘Brahmanism’, LoL! Are you a Pakistani?
“On the other hand, 100% of what the Indian Vedic supremacists claim is false. Indian vedic supremacists are also far more relevant since they pretty much dominate India politically and socially and are a far greater presence on the internet.”
There are no vedic supremacists. Do you mean trads?
Trads are basically Baman-Thakurs who are pissed about caste based reservations. Maybe call them caste supremacists as they do talk about IQ and SC-ST pupil scores.
I have not seen trads be too much into OIT, one of their main point is that they are different (not genetically, genetics is only an important issue for US based Indians) from the SC-STs.
OIT folks are the nicer ones who want to fabricate a better sounding story that in their minds makes India stronger.
@Bhimrao
I agree. OIT people and modern Hindutuva (not all are OIT,most frankly believe in AMT) are subalteran positive movements. They believe in a civilizational dharmic identity to unify groups of subcontinent.
Trads, NW Khalistani types, and Pak Birardri nationalists are the ones who are truly in love with genetics to justify some inherent genetic superiority narrative. One group wants to promote brotherhood. The other is into hierarchy. Funnily enough, by islamic standards, if one buys the narrative of islam promoting egalitarianism, in this narrow context, the Hindu Nats are closer. And no one is saying Hindu Nats are into same2same. But they do not see the level of diversity as a barrier to common civilizational identity bonds.
On the other hand, the aforementioned supremacist groups have literal disgust for darker skin and more tropical features, for which AASI is a proxy. Not saying others are not biased in this way. S Asia has issues with it in general. But the specified groups take the cake by far.
Diaspora likes genetics because it is objective. DNA can be use to quantify differences. That is why they like it. If you can quantify, it increases rigor and robustness of arguments and theoretical models.
Look at Twitter btw. It’s funny how Khalistanis, Pak Punjabiyat Chauvanist types, and Trads (esp. Hindu Rajput supremacists) all follow one another. Nice group united by one thing in common. Racial hatred.
What ‘former gangetic supremacist’ said is true. There are no real Pak Biradari nationalists in Pakistan, the dynamics of Pakistani Punjab is completely different to that of Indian Punjab. Indian Punjabis have a superiority complex, because rest of the Indians fetishize them due to their comparatively lighter skin, western shifted features. Sikhs themselves had an empire so they also think highly of themselves, and their egos are boosted by notions amongst Hindus like being the sword arm of Hinduism. Muslim Punjabis do not have any such delusions, they don’t own the Punjabi Sikh empire. Their elite rather prefers learning Urdu and English and considers Punjabi backwards and rural. Other ethnic groups don’t fetishize them, rather actually dislike them for their majoritarianism. Most resident Pak Punjabis have taken up Muslim nationalism rather than ethnic chauvinism as a cause. (Even Araingang himself in one of the podcasts said he was into Muslim nationalism before he got into crafting that Indus narrative). The biradari supremacists warlock keeps talking about are nowhere to be found inside Pakistan, they are American or Canadian diaspora looking for a strong ethnic identity, especially when they face off in online debates with Indian or Afghan diaspora nationalists, all of whom seem to be facing the same idenitity crises living in the west.
Neither ‘Pak Biradari nationalists’, nor ‘Indian Vedic supremacists’ exist in a world outside the internet.
But then i have been saying this for the longest time.
The barely veiled reality is that Washington is politically interfering in the internal affairs of Sri Lanka to bring about a political class which will be 100% loyal to the geopolitical interests of Wall Street, as part of its ongoing hybrid war against the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
Yet the Western media amplified the contrived cries of the foreign funded NGOs in attempting to blame the PRC for fuel shortages and its alleged “debt trap diplomacy”. Yet only 10% of Sri Lanka’s foreign debt was owed to China, whereas the remaining 90% was owed to financial institutions in the US, the EU, Japan and India. In fact, some of the largest foreign debt holders in the form of international sovereign bonds include the notorious US firm BlackRock, alongside JP Morgan Chase, as well as the UK firms HSBC and the Ashmore Group
Nothing new to me, known months ago and I wrote below.
Zelensky came into power by the Maiden 2014 color revolution, coup orchestrated by Victoria Nuland*.
Victoria Nuland visited South Asia a few months back . A few weeks after her visit Imran Khan was ousted as he was leaning toward China and Russia. He accused the the US and Nuland of orchestrating his ouster. A few weeks later, the Aragalaya protests started to oust another Russia and China leaning heads of SL. Coincidence or conspiracy theory.
*Note: Nulannd admitted under oath, the US had funded bio labs in Ukraine and was worried it would fall into Russian control.
https://redfireonline.com/2022/07/20/sri-lanka-us-backed-colour-revolution-in-colombo/
I am no fan of the US foreign policy establishment but this crisis seems to be Sri Lanka’s own making.
No question, much of it is of Sri Lankas doing, living beyond our means on borrowed foreign exchange Even the staples of the village folk, wheat flour and lentils are imported.
That said collapse of Tourism and triple price of oil due to US sanctions was economic knock out.
However, social instability and protests with a regime change motive was due to US involvement making use of economic issues.
No different from Indira Gandhi training of the LTTE terrorists. She used existing issues to create chaos and preventing SL about turn to the US in 1977.
That comes to the chap hoping for Eelam. Not if the current Govt of India has a say. They probably see Eelam as stepping stone for the US and ultimately ballistic missiles aimed at India.
The economic Front; Sorry no one is starving specially in rural (80%) Sri Lanka. Yes, prices are three times what it was 6 months ago. Long lines for petrol. Buses and trains are now India level crowded, i.e people travelling on the roof. Why, less buses and trains, people have stopped using vehicles because of fuel shortages
However no feel of desperation. People are leaving the country to work in mid-east, south korea, Romania (yes Romania), Cypress, Syria. long lines at the passport office The govt hs offered two years sabbatical for govt workers.
The downside, most are now using the blackmarket Undial and Halwa to send money into the country So SL does not get foreign exchange.
On the food front, in rural started living off the land. Catching fish in the rivers and reservoirs (we have clean water). Increased hunting (illegal, but police turning a blind eye) Wild boar and peacocks have become pest and hopefully this will reduce the numbers I wish Sri Lankans eat monkeys, huge numbers and pests.
Unhappily with all these people leaving and sending money dont see our chaps changing to a more austere life style.
Anyway more will get their dream of a small house with verandah, tiled indoor bathroom and three wheeler. All mean more imports, fuel to construction material.
Life goes on the Sri Lankan way.
In all seriousness, that’s good to hear. I’m glad that people are still getting by. Interestingly SL at its worst still seems better when looking at large swathes of Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
Lay off the monkeys though. They are intelligent creatures. And monkeypox? Are you lot still upset about Sri Hanuman?
monkeys are huge pests they eat all the agri produce, including coconut and mangoes. Also invade kitchens and dining area Worse the Hanuman Langurs remove tiles, jump up and down break asbestos roofing They should all be collected and put in the National park as food for leopards.
Ramayana has no religious significance in SL. Just nice to know story. The exception being the Tea Estate Indian Tamils. They have temples for Sita and Hanuman. The is a place in Hill Country, near Nuwara Eliya, called Seetha (=cold) Eliya (open area). The Indian Tamils call it Sita Eliya and temple for Sita and Hanuman Some enterprising chaps market tours to Indians called Ravana/Ramayana Trail and Tours.
https://www.talesofceylon.com/tour-packages/explore-the-ramayana-trail/
.
I think there are less speculative reasons for SL’s situation
– reduction of international tourism due to COVID-19 and Islamic terrorism, and limited population to draw from for domestic tourism
– banning the import of chemical fertilizers
– rising costs of fuel and food due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, as well as supply chain issues arising from COVID-19 and its fallout
– nepotism; one family being in control of most key political and ministerial positions
– heavy expenditure on the militarization of the north and east
– brutally alienating and marginalizing a significant minority, thereby limiting that group’s ability to contribute to the country’s development
– severe crackdown on dissent and criticism of the government, making responsible government a challenge
But ultimately the biggest reason is karma.
Tamil Eelam Vaalga!
USDPKR is now 232. Was 160 a year ago. No sign of Pak rupee slowing down its descent. Toyota announced today it’s leaving the country due to the economic paralysis.
It’s not just Toyota, the entire sector is in a deep crisis:
https://www.dawn.com/news/1701598/automakers-mull-production-shutdown-as-supply-of-parts-dries-out
Anyone who thinks a few IMF billions will suddenly fix this mess is delusional. This will be a protracted crisis. Pak’s best bet is to stave off default for the time being, by hook or by crook. I think they have a decent shot, but nothing will change until and unless GoP launches reforms like India did in 1991. That’s the kind of Big Bang that the country needs now.
It doesn’t help that the ruling PDM are unpopular but desperate to cling to power at all costs. They were hammered in the Punjab by-elections but essentially bribed PTI MLAs to join their team anyway and re-instate the CM.
Political chaos in an already fragile situation is only making matters worse.
Similar things are going on with Bangladesh.
For e.g. BDT 84 –> 112 in an year.
https://www.tbsnews.net/economy/dollar-price-soars-record-tk112-465350
To reform the economy, political stability and public security is required. And any reforms undertaken shouldn’t be undone by the next government. Can Pakistanis do that? I don’t think so. This is a country where more than half the population wanted to ban French goods because Macron said that no one should be beheaded for drawing a religious figure. No sane person would invest in that country. At best the Americans or the Chinese might offer some loans/investments to keep the country on life support.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNg81-VnCsc
biologist anand ranganathan, who is now a public popular historian in his above recent talk (towards the end) says that the aryan invasion/ migration theory is almost dead and buried.he also ridicules it.
but the view of geneticists in this blog is quite the contrary. if he is wrong, then his views should be challenged, otherwise the ‘aam janata’ will go with this ‘popular version’.
interestingly, the high priest of out of india theory, conrad elst , maintains in his other talks that the a i t is still not conclusively defeated.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.indiatoday.in/amp/india/story/rajput-body-writes-to-pm-modi-urges-him-to-stop-distortion-of-rajput-history-1921441-2022-03-06
So lame. India will never improve with this type of crap.
Rayta Hindutva has no ability to deal with this sort of thing. The Rajput body’s statement has more of a feel of the sentiments of the average conservative Hindu of any caste than the rayta BJP leaders do here.
Ultimately liberal democracy and capitalism will never eradicate caste. Only a bloody socialist revolution could ever stand a chance against the sentiments of traditionalist Hindus.
It would be not the first time that Hindu right power to assimilate has been underestimated. And won’t by the last.
They might not have the perfect answers to everything. But they have better answers than most.
The Hindu right depends on these same dumb UC trads as their core voter base. That’s their fundamental problem, to win in a democracy they have to pander to the LC majority using this “Hindu unity”/”We Indians are all sem2sem” claptrap, but at the same time they also want to keep their UC base which is motivated by Hindutva’s perceived ability to preserve Brahminical/Manuvadi Hindu religion and culture.
Hinduism cannot unite its followers because its idea of social order is explicitly based on the premise of strict social hierarchy and separation. “Hindu unity” is like “feminist Islam”, it’s a contradiction in terms.
Whatever power the Hindu right does have to assimilate Indics into a homogeneous Hindu identity is almost entirely based on reactionary anti-Muslim/Abrahamic sentiments stemming from continued resentment over the Muslim and European conquests of the subcontinent.
There is only a certain extent to which people can be united based on what they are NOT rather than on what they actually are.
Wrong. Pakistan”s history is proof that one can endlessly unite people on what they are not. AKA not Indians. So I don’t get why the trick wouldn’t work.
Actually the reason why Hindus are not even MORE united, because they are a majority in the country. So yeah there is no internal dynamics to push for more unity , since regardless of unity or not, the levers of power stays with them.
Questions for Razib (and maybe others too)
1) What is the original Dravidian homeland, where did the proto Dravidian languages and culture come from? Someone mentioned it as present day Cambodia/Austroasiatic peoples, making them “invaders” too, or is it the original Indus valley civilization people group(s) (Indus_Periphery) who migrated south after the drying up of Sarasvati while Brahui remained there?
2) I always had this question which even OIT proponents put forth (I don’t believe in OIT btw). The question that how would the aryans/steppe people revere the Sarasvati river as this great, fast flowing river and revere it the most among all the other rivers in the Rg Veda if they arrived after the Sarasvati dried up, how? If this is true, shouldn’t this put the arrival of the steppe earlier, like before 2000BCE or even as earlier as 2600BCE during the peak of IVC?
@bodhiyar
FC Southworth proposed the Lower Godavari basin as the candidate for Proto-Dravidian. This is based on the Neolithic archaeological complex in South India and crop packages. Kolipakam 2018 conducted a Bayesian phylogenetic study on the South Indian languages and have confirmed support for the Southworth model. The centroid for Proto Dravidian remains in the Godavari basin and not in IVC, as many suppose.
The IVC remains a linguistic orphan in the AIT framework. Between OIT and AIT, there exists a perfect middle ground which insists that IVC was IE speaking (nothing more, nothing less). This is a very parsimonious approach.
AIT suffers from bad anthropological design and OIT suffers from over-reach.
WordPress doesn’t publish this comment so I am trying something different.
https://shrib.com/#Lennox4NJo8Yy
@Ugra @Dathang
Any reason why we make the assumption that language extinction isn’t the norm over long periods of time? Why not weigh he probability that the IVC languages (there could have been multiple and perhaps of different families, a north/south split?) have no successors in the same way that the Sumerian, Elamite, and Minoan do not? Apart from China, did bronze age cultures leave successors at all?
Yeah that is a possibility as I mentioned a totally different language family as distinct as Burushaski could have been spoken (not literally Burushaski ofc).
@DaThang @girmit
A language isolate is pronounced as a language isolate only after phylogenetic verification. From a process perspective, they are the rejects that cannot be sieved into a specific family. Language isolates are not assumed apriori.
It is a question of probability. Out of 7000 existing languages in the world, only about 60 are isolates. From a logical perspective, it is not parsimony.
@Ugra
Yes, but we are talking about an old language, not extant ones. Like I mentioned, if you look at the other bronze age cultures, few seem to have direct descendants. Even the Semitic languages like Akkadian are dead ends. Egyptian is afro-asiatic with a quasi successor in Coptic. Hurrian, Sumerian, Minoan, Elamite are all extinct families. If IVC has any cultural relatives and similar crop packages, I’d look to the immediate west for comparative study. And when we see bronze age language extinction as the norm, i wouldn’t consider it parsimonious to assume survival. If anything it provokes deeper questions about the transitivity of meme complexes, and whether in preliterate cultures, languages shifts occurred for reasons other than political subordination.
@Ugra
Methinks that comparing it to extent as opposed to many dead languages and cultures betrays a wishful tendency towards to a certain conclusion.
@girmit
Whatever you say is logical…..yet you seem to suspend such logic when it comes to the Steppes……. confirmation bias??
Look at all the points you made….crop packages, cultures, language extinction…..all of them apply to the Steppes more than the IVC.
No crop domestication (not a Vavilov centre), did not domesticate cattle or start dairying, did not invent wheeled wagons.
So the probability that Steppes cultures spoke language isolates is far higher than that of the IVC….
@DaThang
Both sides suffer from confirmation bias. It’s the degree of bias.
Some people still theorize that the steppe people spoke non-IE languages like Uralic. Could be so if you tried to string together material and cultural concepts.
IDK about that but my point about the IVC in particular covers both bases in the form of 2 hypotheses: 1. IVC language could be linked to the modern Dravifian language tree due to being para-dravidian. 2. IVC language could be an isolated not related to any modern language or bronze language outside of itself.
You can hypothesize about it being IE if you want but in my view I have covered the question of what it spoke in the light of the dravidian origin being outside it and it doesn’t suffer from the problem you outlined in your first post about parsimoniousness.
So Ranveer Singh did a nude photoshoot and now some desi busybody is losing their marbles and filing a FIR to the police for “indecency”.
https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/explained-what-indias-laws-against-obscenity-ranveer-singh-allegedly-violated-8052620/
Seriously India, grow up.
Et tu, Bangladesh.
https://www.dawn.com/news/1701760/bangladesh-seeks-45bn-imf-loan-as-reserves-shrink
Although Bangladesh has 5 months of imports in FX reserves.
Pakistan only has 5 *weeks*. So they are taking precautions rather than being on the brink as Pakistan is.
Bangladesh knocks on IMF…..
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-26/bangladesh-is-said-to-seek-imf-bailout-as-its-fx-reserves-fall
Indian liberals need to find new neighborhood countries (Sharmaji ka Beta) to compare.
“NRIs are mostly obsessed about ancestry and DNA”
I think this obsession peaks in American diaspora.
Could be, I think Americans in general are more interested in ancestry than any other nationality. Its perfect combination of factors. Most have immigrant ancestry in the last 100-200 years, have access to very good church/government records and the US had the first mover advantage when it comes to personal genomic technology. So this general interest percolates into the desi community as well.
I dont even get Indian-American obsession with ancestry and such. At least the white folks obsession i get.
The latter perhaps takes pride in being half-Irish or half-German etc, which would mean they perhaps feel proud of being part of that ethnicity’s past or whatever. Doesn’t make much sense, but still..
What did your ‘steppe-shifted Reddy’ really achieve ? That you are really that concerned how much Dravidian/Aryan etc. Makes no sense at all.
Anthropology and linguistics are inherently intresting as background to historical and even contemporary issues. Being indifferent to it would be an outlier tendency among civilized societies. Indian historiography has been so piss poor, along with the simplistic fables that passed for pre-history and anthropology, that any of us with a basic curiosity needed to explore the subject. This is why is takes a Razib to facilitate a lucid conversation, because among genuine subcontinentals everything devolves quickly into facile mythology.
Oh please!!!
Pretty orientalist take. Apparently Americans are more interested in Indian history than Indians.
Americans have their biases. But for old enough stuff (modern era stuff, there will be a ton of bias and there are exceptions like Trushcke), the level approaches the limit of indifference,when compared to the perpetual games of hyperbole and fantastical story telling of subcontinental groups. Genetics gives a literal reality check.
‘perpetual games of hyperbole and fantastical story telling’
‘Thotha-chana baje ghana’
Americans (white ones) make stuff, they made the airplane! discovered and invented substantial (>50% ?) of all of modern math, engineering, and sciences. They have better things to do. Indians talk, India sucks.
Baniyas are the only Indian group in touch with the real world and can hold their own on global level. They don’t claim divine ancestry.
+1 On the Baniya thing.
Also what exactly does whole ancestry DNA add to ur lineage? What does this extra 0.5 ASI in ur genetics add? Does it goes into ur SAT scores or something. LOL.
Plus you are Indian Americans, half of the lineage bunkums have to do with stuff back in India, things which do not affect you is US. Its not like you will get one up against other Indian Americans if you are ‘steppe shifted’ or whatever.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/feminisminindia.com/2020/11/23/bania-caste-feminism-india/%3famp
Lmfao
Obsession over genetics, AIT/AMT, OIT, Dravidian/Aryan/AASI/steppe, etc. is just one particular modernized form of jaativaad and caste/racial consciousness that South Asians always had. People back in the subcontinent are probably just more likely to satisfy these impulses by watching some TV serial about a Rajput king instead of getting into the nitty-gritty of the fine-grained genetic details. It’s just a product of the academic culture in the West, nothing more.
Google Street View, after a 11-year long wait, has finally launched in India. More details:
https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/26/google-street-view-india/
I’ve been playing around a bit and I have to say I’m impressed by Chennai:
https://www.google.com/maps/@13.058643,80.2080226,3a,75y,5.56h,89.92t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1skfPclNcST6sK_ayLYgKzSw!2e0!7i13312!8i6656
Looks so comfy.
https://www.thequint.com/south-india/karnataka-bjp-in-crisis-as-it-cell-workers-resign-en-masse-over-bjym-leader-praveen-nettaru-murder#read-more
BJP it cell workers mass resign. Did not expect this, but then again, its the ordinary workers getting murdered and leadership looks the other way. workers have skin in the game.
https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/288-the-end-of-global-order
Subject of large changes in the world. deglobalisation and population demographic slowing down. Recent chinese population stats suggest, china’s rise is exaggerated. They have serious problems ahead, so do others as well. All this puts a lot of questions.
some karnataka notes:
i) motor mouth m l a zamir ahmed staked muslim’s bid for power as they are more numerous than the powerful vokkaligas, who are making a bid for c m’s seat this time. this will raise ripples as all hindu factions will feel cheated for following family planning.
ii) a b j p activist has been killed yesterday in coastal karnataka, and the b j p cadres are furious and some protest resignations are happening. b j p has maxed out on the hindutva vote harvest in karnataka. it is facing entrenched caste barriers in south karnataka and is not easy to overcome.
hardcore hindutva forces will soon either form a militant ginger group inside b j p or an attempt to create a clone appears inevitable.
Feel sad for the state which gave me so much. Kannadigas are genuinely the most chilled out folks i have ever met.
For some reason my comment, posted twice hasn’t gone through.
30 min 4K drive through the city center of Chennai
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uan36x3Rw4
Lacks the wow factor of Mumbai or Delhi, or even Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Kolkata. But still, it looks nice and better than it ever has. I like how they’ve preserved the greenery in many areas.
No city in India has a wow factor apart from Mumbai.
@Hoju
All the coastal cities have one leg above the inland ones.
Nothing from Delhi, Hyderabad or Bengaluru will ever beat the aesthetics of a beach. Go to the beach and you will enter a different spatial dimension.
I wonder if we can have Freedom of Movement between Sri Lanka and India, just like we have between India and Nepal, Indian and Bhutan.
Would such an arrangement could have prevented the economic crisis in Sri Lanka ? Stronger business linkages.
Don’t know if that would prevented the crisis , but pretty sure it would have led to something else.
The return of anti india hate in Sri Lanka of the 90s. The more we keep our distance from Lanka ( and not taken for a ride by Ealam-wallahs) , the better. For both countries.
they are scared of the virile and populous Hindu men and women of Tamil Nadu. they have PTSD of Chola kings swooping through.
Tamil Eelam Vaalga!
There are Hindus in Tamil Nadu ?
A “Hindu” is just a fancy way of saying “Non-Abrahamic S-Asian”. The British classified everyone not Abrahamic in India as “Hindu” in their census and the Indian Govt continues to use this questionable metric to define a Hindu.
The Good News is, Tamil Asabiyyah is strong enough to function as an Ethno-Religious identity. Thanks to this, Tamils can celebrate their spiritual traditions while steering clear of the Hindu Idpol.
Though I doubt it, but still it would be interesting to see Tamils “celebrate” their spiritual traditions sans Hinduism.
Though the higher probability is, the longer The Hindu right stays in power , the higher chances of Tamils being made better “Hindus.”
although stalin is only 2 years younger than modi, he looks far younger and dashing with his lush natural black hair and glowing skin. well done.
Stalin is notorious for doctoring photography for propaganda purposes.
Interesting hour-and-a-half walk through Lahore.
Feels in some ways a bit alien to me. But for northerners perhaps this feels more at home than the south.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1AQcFpPs04
Sadly there’s a notable absence (even more so than India) of women in the public space.
For comparison and contrast, here’s an hour-long walk through Bengaluru by the same walker who did the Lahore one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YJYJMtVTLc
It is nice to see a good chunk of Pakistani guys wearing traditional clothes. In India it is mostly women that wear traditional clothes.
On the flip side barely any women in public spaces in Pakistan.
I was curious so looked up Srinagar, Kashmir and it seems it more closely follows Indian norms in with regards to clothing choices for men and public sphere involvement for women.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lJ7s6YJ8yw
Men mostly wearing western clothes, even at the mosque. Women dressed equally conservatively but more engaged in the public sphere than in Pakistan. eg You see can see a few kashmiri women driving those 2 wheeled scooters and stuff. I didn’t see any in the Lahore video.
So can’t say this is a Hindu / Muslim thing.
wow, you’re right, there’s a marked difference in terms of women in the public space when you compare Lahore to Srinagar. Good idea to look at Srinagar given religious demographics.
I too like that men in Pak wear traditional clothing, but at times it’s a bit drab and dull, just so much grey and beige (taking the urban environment into account as well).
https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/delhi/sidhu-moosewala-murder-probe-bishnoi-gang-network-pakistan-8054595/
This runs deep
So Sunak’s not going be to the British Prime Minister? Shame, I guess the old adage, “he who wields the knife never wears the crown” still holds true.
Some interesting patterns I have noticed when looking at the racial composition of Anglosphere cabinets wrt to Indians and other minorities.
Australia: Left wing government. Surprisingly mostly White. Only one half-East Asian. Indians and other minorities don’t seem to have much presence in Australian politics.
Canada: Left wing government. I would say proportional representation of South Asians. However, I remember there being a lot more Indians in the Trudeau Cabinet a few years ago.
New Zealand: Left wing government. Proportional representation of the country’s demographics, so mostly White and some Maori/Pacific Islander. One Indian. Again, Indians don’t seem to have much influence in New Zealand politics either.
UK: Right wing government. Mostly Whites and South Asians. South Asians punching well above their weight. Surprisingly, the Labour shadow cabinet is mostly White.
USA: Left wing government. Over representation of minorities. Not a single straight white male Protestant. Other than Kamala, no Indian but I have read that Indians are overrepresented in the Administration and Democratic Party apparatus.
Australia and New Zealand are surprising. Both countries have left wing governments and like to portray themselves as racial utopias compared to the US but in the levers of powers, there are few or no minorities. Not that I think having them is inherently good. I think a country’s government should roughly match its demographics. Overrepresentation of minorities and underrepresentation of the majority is not good for the long term viability of a country.
For Canada I don’t know if it’s proportional representation. It’s mostly a bunch of Khalistanis to get the Brampton and Surrey votes.
Immigration to Aus and NZ is also relatively new so I am assuming the immigrants are younger compared to politicians who tend to skew older.
Migration to Canada, Uk and usa has been happening since the 60s so there is a pool. I assume we’ll start seeing lots of minorities in aus and nz politics in 20-30 years.
Australia has long had a reputation of being the most racist Anglosphere country so your results tally doesn’t surprise me in the least.
I think South Asians in general are more driven by politics than East Asians. Fairly or unfairly, East Asians are stereotyped as docile and more passive. I recall razib bringing attention to the fact that South Asians are promoted at 2X the rates their general competency would indicate (East Asians are *underpromoted*). Whites are promoted about in line with their credentials.
This seems to suggest a hunger for promotion, influence as well as being socially more extroverted. Extroversion is strongly correlated with promotion or advancement in socity.
Since Australia’s Asians are much more East Asian than South Asian (although this is slowly changing), that could be another factor.
Desi cultural elites are now complaining about “lack of art in public spaces” in South Asia. Apparently Mexico City is far ahead.
https://twitter.com/sabizak/status/1552707014794657799/video/1
(A minor note of contention: her description of the Mexico City as “not European” can be debatable, given that the elites of Mexico have been overwhelmingly of Southern European descent in the past few centuries – and continue to be).
“(A minor note of contention: her description of the Mexico City as “not European” can be debatable, given that the elites of Mexico have been overwhelmingly of Southern European descent in the past few centuries – and continue to be).”
Indeed. Any serious civilizational definition places Latin America firmly in the Western world.
The fact that Latin America’s inhabitants are predominantly of mixed European and indigenous descent is immaterial to what we are discussing here – namely, their cultural and civilizational essence. Due to the larger numbers of indigenous peoples in South and Central America compared to North America, the Spanish and Portuguese assimilated and intermingled with indigenous peoples (and Africans) rather than ethnically cleansing/segregating them wholesale like the Anglos did.
This created an interesting situation where, although unmixed Europeans make up only a small proportion of the overall population, it is their cultural and ethnic identity that forms the primary identity for most Latin Americans, with indigenous culture certainly present but relegated to the background.
I think Latin America is its own thing. And it’s not just me, when most people in Northern America talk about “the West”, they’re not thinking Mexico and Guatemala and Venezuela. They’re thinking United States, European Union, and CANZUK. With honorary status sometimes given to Israel.
I don’t think you’re giving adequate consideration to the Indigenous influences in Latin American culture.
Although maybe there’s an exception for Southern Cone countries.
Latinx America is certainly “Western-adjacent” but I agree that they aren’t quite there. Still, their elites are very Western, as in, quite literally Europeans by blood. And it is elite taste and preferences that sets the tone for the rest of the society.
It’s indeed its own thing. The closest analogy I could think of are countries like Armenia or Georgia. Both have Western-oriented elites even if the people there are more Middle-Eastern by temperament and appearance (Armenians in the US are often quite mixed already, so phenotypically they no longer resemble those in the homeland to the same extent).
Fair enough. Latin American culture seems too derivative to me to be considered a distinct civilization in its own right, but I can see an argument for considering it a sort of intermediate cultural region between Western Christendom and the pre-existing indigenous civilizations of South and Central America. Still think they generally lean more Western though, at the very least.
To put it another way, I don’t think Latin Americans in the US is analogous to Muslims in Europe.
This is very true, and I wish more Americans would remember this whenever they feel to sanctimoniously lecture Europeans about tolerance. The US has two giant oceans that select the most educated and westernised from non-Western cultures and the “lowborn” they get are already from heavily Westernised Latinx America.
Europe’s immigrants are of a substantially lower quality and also much more removed culturally. If America had that profile, I suspect that we’d see someone like Trump in the 1980s already and he’d be a lot more explicit.
They didn’t have ethnic cleansing? More locals were killed there than in the north and as for segregation, they had their own caste system.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that the Spanish conquest was somehow benign or its body count lower.
The Spanish certainly did kill plenty of natives in South and Central America; however, the indigenous population was simply astronomical in comparison to the tiny populations in the North. So while the total body count in the North was of course much lower, the natives there were wiped out much more effectively by the Anglos simply because it was a much easier task.
The Spanish killings tended to be of the sort more conventional in conquest, generally gendered (males killed, females taken as spoils of conquest). Meaning that the native populations tended to be exterminated culturally but not physically in the way that North American native populations were.
The Spaniards did create a racial caste system, albeit more fluid than the Anglo one. Instead of implementing a one-drop rule, mixing was tolerated but mixed offspring were simply slotted into intermediate rungs of the hierarchy. Phenotype was emphasized over strict genetic “purity”. You could also change your identity to a certain degree based on social class and adoption of certain cultural habits. I would probably still go ahead and call this “race”, but it is a little bit different from the Anglo-American understanding of the term.
Anyway all of this still seems to me support my original point – Latin America fundamentally is a European-derived culture. Its racial makeup vis-a-vis North America is a product of the two societies’ pre-existing demographic situations and the resultant approaches that their respective European colonizers found practical to take given the two very different sets of circumstances.
Do you have numbers of the percentage decline of native populations in North America vs central America to show the percentage decline was greater?
Another difference is that in Central America the interactions were state directed while in north America it started off with decentralized settler conflicts before manifest destiny.
A big difference was that Anglo women migrated in about equal numbers as men to North America, while it was mostly only men who migrated to Latin America. Hence the lack of mixing and strict one drop rule in Anglo America.
Yes I have heard about that especially in the case of New England.
Mexico is gap per capita is 4 or 5x that of Pakistan.
It is not a developed country but still very rich so her comparison is a bit unfair.
Desi ‘cultural elites’ often forget their ‘aukat’, and complain about 1st world problems type stuff.
With the recent PKR devaluation its like 10x.
India is more than 2x Pakistan.
I mean it would take Pakistan around 15-20 years to get to India’s current level (their 2019 HDI is similar to India’s 2007 and the gap has widened even more since 2007).
For Pakistan to get to current day Mexico would take 40-50 years.
u s a bows to china by cancelling pelosi’s visit to taiwan. well!!!
Seems like she is going to Taiwan. I don’t think the Chinese will do a whole lot about it other than throw a tantrum. On the other hand, if they have the balls to invade some of the small Taiwanese islands near the Chinese coast in response, I will be very impressed.
Impressed by their stupidity? China’s rise has been remarkable but the cold fact remains that they are still substantially weaker than the US. Especially when you consider America’s very wide alliance (colonial?) network. China has nothing like it, and probably never will.
Their own self-sabotage with “Zero Covid” isn’t helping matters and they have deep issues with demography and debt. I am not a “China Collapse” guy, but I think the US and the West in general are a lot stronger than people on the right give it credit for.
Sometimes I get the feeling people on the right want the US to be weak because of its negative cultural influence. It’s an understandable impulse, but it can cloud one’s judgement.
The Chinese are ultimate pragmatists and they understand that their hand is still quite weak. So they will huff and puff but do nothing substantial (if they’re smart) and I think they’re smart.
By publicly humiliating China like this, the US is sending a message that the Chinese aren’t as strong as many think they are, including some deluded Han nationalists. And they aren’t.
It’s not a nice thing to do, but then again, when has the US empire ever been nice? Only when China is self-sufficient in the entire chip supply-chain (which includes DUV/EUV machines) as well as having completed the new pipeline from Russia can a serious conflagration over Taiwan occur. To play into the hands of the US and rush a confrontation where they have the weaker hand would be utterly foolish.
Yeah thats fair
I think the USA is still the nicest of the imperial powers to ever exist.
The mercantilist European empires would never have allowed the rise of China. They would not have given the market access to allow that kind of export led industrialization and they were more than willing to intervene militarily to correct an undesirable trade balance.
Most of the earlier imperial powers were not any better. I don’t think anyone fondly remembers Pax Mongolica except the Mongolians. Similarly I doubt the Koreans or Japanese have particularly fond memories of the Chinese Imperial System compared to the current American system.
However much people complain about Pax Americana, it is much better than anything that came before and likely better than anything that might come after. I much rather the current American dominated order than any Chinese dominated order that may follow it.
The Americans at least want to see themselves as the good guys.
+1
As I have said india has benefited from pac American and it’s in its interest to see to it that it continues.
Population before the LGM from the Manvir Singh episode: from archaeological papers, it seems that there were no more than a few tens of thousands of people in pre-LGM Western + Central Europe at most (even fewer in the Aurignacian period in particular). Idk about WHGs and where they came from but there wasn’t much of a population to crash in Western + Central Europe. Then again, the Gravettians of the pre-LGM are probably not ancestral to WHGs, so maybe they lived in a higher population number elsewhere.
Regarding the East Asian coronavirus selection 20,000 years ago: the oldest modern East Asian-like individual on record is 19,000 years old. East Asian samples from 40,000 and 33,000 years ago are quite different from modern day East Asians. So maybe this sweep was because of a bottleneck, the same one that created the background ancestors of modern East Asians at least 19,000 years ago.
Also the lesser amount of discussion on the change of genes for mental traits over the Neolithic was a little disappointing, I get that people were different back then and they are different now (kind of broadly an HBD thing). All in all, what I got from this sounded similar to what I have thought for some time: there is a correct theory or description of something, but just because someone has a theory or description doesn’t mean it is the correct one. Don’t stick to a just-so story and don’t discard something out of a just-so coincidence either.
@Saurav
I thought subcontinentals weren’t into genetic stuff. You see a ton of it here.
https://twitter.com/rudrabhoj
There are enough twitter handles like this one.
@ thewarlock
There are at least 10 natives who are into serious qpAdm modelling and providing feedback to preprint papers. And they hold day jobs like banking, sales, IT education etc.
I hardly know any kind of profession that is not 20% Indian already – marine engineers, math tutors, nurses, Michelin starred chefs, international criminals – even the unusual suspects!
Balaji just tweeted out to his followers to start boning up on Indian popular culture – he expects Indians to absolutely dominate Anglo-Twitter in the coming years.
Wow weird to see an Indian use the term “Pajeet” as a slur against other “non-Rajput” Indians.
I have read Pakistanis use it before arguing that Pakistanis aren’t Pajeets. Which is like Indians arguing they aren’t Pakis to some EDL skinhead.
Déclassé tool.
What kind of alcohol was consumed by the masses in pre-modern India? Was it as widespread as beer/wine in Europe or the various rice wines in East Asia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distillation#History
There are widespread religious prohibitions on alcohol (Islam, Vaishnava Hinduism, Jainism, etc).
But overall alcohol consumption is common and has a rich history in India and presently about 30% of the alcohol consumed in India is Indian style alcohol (mostly associated with poor people, but with some attempts by brands to create a higher end image see the youtube video at the end)
There is a description of a strong distilled alcohol drink made from Sugarcane in the Atharvaveda for used in medical procedures in Ayurvedic medicine as an anesthetic (called Sura). Ayurveda also would prescribe it as an aphrodisiac.
In South India there are ‘castes’ involved in traditional alcohol production for making traditional palm wine (Toddy) and a culture of Toddy shops. Every part of India more or less has a local tradition of making alcohol with local ingredients (so in Bengal they have sorgum / bajara liquor called bangla, in Goa cashew fruit liquor called Fenni etc), rice wine (in north east), mauha (a flower alcohol) from tribal India, Palm liquors in south india, cane liquors in gangetic plains.
Here is a documentary on Fenni (Goan cashew liquor)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0o65tMtoB8
I just learned ArainGang harbors is strong prejudice against Indians. Given his acumen, it’s pretty disappointing to find one your favorite bloggers is actually a hardcore bigot.
He seems to be desperate to prove that Pakistanis have absolutely nothing in common with groups eastward. Perhaps his strong prejudices have prompted him to embark on such a vain endeavor.
Read my responses in the recent thread that critique his most recent proposed ancestral map
30-min walk through T. Nagar, a major market in Chennai.
A lot less chaotic and crowded than when I visited 15 years ago.
Lots of women in public spaces for South Asian standards.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iN-OFbTZZqk
Congrats to my cousin who got into IIT Delhi. Have some family who are alumni of BITs but not IIT. Our clan is doing well with engineering admissions
Congrats. Jains are just weirdo Baniyas. Baniyas are usually good at this game.
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Q. How do you know someone is from IIT?
A. They will tell you.
Q. How do you know someone is from BITS?
A. They will tell you why they actually ‘chose’ BITS over IIT.
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IIT D is one of the nicer places to get a degree in India.
I personally just can’t live in Delhi due to pollution.
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He is originally from Kanpur, so it is an upgrade
That is an upgrade. Kanpur sucks but not as much as Varanasi or Agra. IIT K is a nice place.
The only big cities in UP-Bihar, outside of NCR, that do not suck are Lucknow, and Allahabad.
Looks like SL is going ahead and allowing the chinese spy ship to dock at Hambantota for a week or so despite strong objections from IN.
Looks like IN got played by SL. It is indeed grating that emergency fuel supplies by IN should be end up refueling CN Navy ships (~3.5B $ in total aid). Curious what is the thinking on SL side? Do they expect the recent crisis to be a one time thing and CN to be their long time benefactor? If so why did CN not come to their aid in time in recent fuel/food crisis?
China has outplayed India in the whole neighborhood. String of pearls is going well. India has a lot of hate from neighbors. China is seen as a better long term sugar daddy.
If so why did CN not come to their aid in time in recent fuel/food crisis?,
Probably waiting to see what kind of stable govt would be formed. I am sure china had plenty of info on regime change/color revolution efforts of the US instigated by Victoria Nuland.
@warlock.
India has a lot of hate from neighbors. China is seen as a better long term sugar daddy.
Sure, China has deeper pockets than India.
The other big factor is China has not invaded SL or funded and trained LTTE terrorists. India does have a history of interfering with its neighbors, and that breeds suspicions of its motives.
Another great analysis from the fake news website, zerohedge. To repeat ZeroHedge is a Wall Street Traders news site, with news that can influence trades. This article is probably indicative of possible price fluctuations in credit default swaps written against emerging markets.
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some Excerpts
Sri Lanka has been dragged into the U.S.-imposed hybrid war against China, whose investments have been exaggerated to shift the blame for the country’s debt crisis away from Sri Lanka’s leaders and the IMF.
Official data indicates that only 10 percent of Sri Lanka’s external debt is owed to Chinese entities, whereas 47 percent is held by Western banks and investment companies such as BlackRock, JP Morgan Chase, and Prudential (United States), as well as Ashmore Group and HSBC (Britain) and UBS (Switzerland).
In 1977, elites liberalised the economy by curtailing price controls and food subsidies and letting in foreign banks and foreign direct investment to operate largely without regulations.
They set up the Greater Colombo Economic Commission in 1978 to effectively take over the economic management of the country outside of democratic control. A consequence of these neoliberal arrangements was ballooning national debt, which has oscillated but never entered safe territory.
Sri Lanka’s ruling class has been unable, or perhaps unwilling, to reduce its dependency on foreign buyers of its low-value products as well as the foreign lenders that subsidize its debt.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/how-sri-lanka-being-dragged-us-china-conflict
125kg commonwealth wrestling are from 4 different countries, but I think all Punjabi Jatt (not 100% sure about the pakistani guy)
I have worked out with and observed a ton of S Asians in diaspora, where nutrition is better.
Bigger bones. More steppe= more robust frame. Also massive cultural emphasis. Most Indians cannot even get to 125kg and not be morbidly obese. These guys are big enough framed to get there.
Average frame in these groups,when controlling for food and culture, is not THAT much bigger than that of other S Asian groups. However, the median is shifted and thus the tails are certainly larger. So this dominance will be pronounced. On a global stage however, these guys are still shown up by Caucus people, Slavs, and Iranians. Let’s see how long that lasts. For now, they only dominate lower weight classes. And countries in West Africa will also pose a major threat on the mat. Places like Senegal have a rich tradition of wrestling and enough genetic advantages with stuff like greater frequency of myostatin mutation and androgen receptor high sensitivity.
>Iranians
Don’t have the bigger frames you mentioned. Check the source I posted. For that matter I am not even sure about the Caucasus frame size. But they (Caucasus) have plenty of power per pound among non-high end sizes to cover middle and lower ranges just as well as the higher ranges.
Pak guy is Kashmiri butt, also Arshad nadeem become first south asian or even asian to cross 90m in throw, he is punjabi , I think that belt from Fata to haryana has good talent when it comes to such sports.
Sinhala Buddhist supremacist Sri Lanka’s policies against minority Tamil Hindus reminds one of what their partners in crime China have done to Tibetans and Uyghurs.
Unfortunately, there is no one who will come to the aid of Sri Lankan Tamils, other than a handful of Western countries in the form of accepting refugees. India will continue giving fuel and food to Sri Lanka so that they can keep the Sinhala forces well fed and fueled up to help them with their ongoing crimes against humanity against Tamil Hindus.
Excerpts from this excellent report from the Oakland Institute.
https://www.oaklandinstitute.org/sites/oaklandinstitute.org/files/endless-war-web.pdf
“Whereas land colonization and Sinhalese settlements have taken place in Sri Lanka under the guise of development since independence, this new research points to an increase in land grabbing in recent years. Thousands of acres of land have been confiscated to allow the settlement of Sinhalese in traditional Tamil areas.”
“The main objective of this colonization is to increase the number of Sinhalese population in the North and East to change the demographics of the regions. One clear tactic has been to divide the geographically and ethnically connected Northern and Eastern Provinces and erase the homeland doctrine of the Tamil people.”
“The government’s intention to eradicate the history and culture of the Tamil people is made clear by the activities conducted through different departments. The state machinery is in full swing to convert historic lands, monuments and places of worship of the Tamil people to Buddhist temples, Buddhist culture, and practice – at a greater pace than it was in 2015.”
“Since the end of the war in 2009, 67 Buddhist temples (viharas) have been set up in the Mullaitivu District alone under the Archaeological Department. The cemeteries of the LTTE cadres have been levelled; military camps have been set up and war victory symbols erected.”
“Five of the seven Sri Lankan Army’s Regional Headquarters are located in the North and Eastern Provinces. According to our estimates, there is a ratio of one soldier for every six civilians in the North and East. While the Sri Lankan government has repeatedly stated that the LTTE poses no more threat to national
security, the massive military presence provides security for Sinhalese settlements while facilitating the Buddhization process and keeping the population in the North and East under constant repression and intimidation.”
“This report demonstrates that the government’s activities align with the characteristics of an ethnocratic state aiming to maintain the supremacy of the Sinhalese nation across Sri Lanka. Activities to create this ethnocratic state have gained momentum since the Rajapaksa regime took office in 2019, thereby creating a situation that is detrimental to the country’s stability, reconciliation, human rights, and peace.”
“Meanwhile, the Archeological Department is accelerating land grabbing operations in various parts of the Northern Province. On January 18, 2021, Vidura Wickramanayaka, Sri Lanka’s State Minister for “National Heritage,” accompanied by Army soldiers and Archaeology Department officers – placed a Buddha statue on the site of an ancient Hindu temple (Athi Aiyanar temple), located at Kurunthoormalai in Mullaithivu District.”
Hoju,
I would suggest India has much more racist policies towards its Muslim populations, specially in places like Kashmir.
You know destroying Mosques,with the claim that they are ancient sites of Hindu temples.
I am sure if I scour the Internet i can find plenty of articles on Indias, racist policies against muslims, and skihs for that matter.
Anyway, keep in mind 35% of the Tamils or North and East live among the Sinhalese in the south. (In comparison less than 1% Sinhalese live in Tamil majority regions.) Even better, some the largest companies are owned by Sri Lankan Tamils, eg Maharaja Organization, John Keels. Sirasa one of the biggest TV and media company is a subsidiary of the Maharaja Organization
I just find it impressive, an Hoju an Tamil whose compatriots still shit on the street, have the highest illiteracy in the world claim the Tamils in Sri Lanka are discriminated. Just keep in mind despite all the economic problems, Sri Lankans especially the Tamils have highest standard of living in South Asia, specially better sanitation, twice that of India.
https://sbarrkum.blogspot.com/2018/06/the-numbers-ethnic-cleansing-and.html
a) The highest illiteracy in the world, child labor/slavery, infant mortality, child abuse, lack of sanitation for more than half the population is a humanitarian disaster of epic proportions.
b) These humanitarian crisis targets the Sudra and Dalit population and result in deaths of children in genocidal rates (2 million per year).
c) The government of India has had 60 years to rectify this humanitarian crisis and genocide.
d) There should be a UN resolution, and independent observers to ensure Indian govt compliance to control the humanitarian crisis and genocide of the Sudra and Dalit populations.
https://sbarrkum.blogspot.com/2013/04/humanitarian-crisis-and-genocide-in.html
https://tribune.com.pk/story/2369843/pakistanis-in-italy-high-stakes-in-a-fashion-forward-world
with nitish on verge of breaking away from b j p, the importance of yogi and hemanta in b j p, will increase even further. this time nitish might not come out as a winner.