May 2025
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Café Concord: A View from the Counter
Writing from a café in Concord, Massachusetts, X.T.M argues that American service spaces sort people by race, class and aesthetics, with white front-of-house staff and Mexican kitchen workers, a pattern…
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Open Thread: From Murder to Mercy — The Midwives of Bihar
Open thread on BBC Eye’s The Midwife’s Confession, about rural midwives in Bihar who killed baby girls in the 1990s, and one survivor who returned.
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“I Will Never Speak Kannada”
Responding to a viral video of a bank manager refusing to speak Kannada, the post argues that the row exposes a wider tension over who accommodates whom in a multilingual…
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India’s Demographic Nervous System: Partition, Federalism, and the Fear of Muslim Majority Provinces
The author suggests that post-Partition India’s large states were calibrated to avoid creating new Muslim-majority provinces, and links that anxiety to Kashmir’s special status and the origins of its insurgency,…
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South India Makes British India Hindu?
The author argues that had South India separated in 1947, the rest of British India would today be a Muslim-majority bloc, citing population figures, and suggests the South’s inclusion kept…
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Open Thread: Rajiv Gandhi, 34 Years On
Open thread marking 34 years since Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination, inviting reflection on his legacy, plus moderation notes asking commenters to update handles.
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Southasia Is One Word
Zachary L. Zavidé reports on Pervez Hoodbhoy’s MIT talk, in which the Pakistani physicist set out the logic of nuclear annihilation in an India–Pakistan exchange and promoted his Black Hole…
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Flame Thread Warning
Moderation warning that stricter deletion of comments is coming. X.T.M also notes the killing of Ahmadi physician Dr Sheikh Mahmood Ahmad and argues Pakistan must rethink its treatment of minorities.
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“What You Hate is What You Love” — Reflections on the Indo-Pak Obsession
X.T.M argues that Indian reactions to Pakistan, especially in the Hindi–Hindu belt, show an intimate sibling rivalry rather than indifference, and that the divide of 1947 remains psychic as well…
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Open Thread — On Foundational Clefts and Brown Pundits’ raison d’être
Open thread in which X.T.M says Brown Pundits’ niche is excavating the Two-Nation Theory, the subcontinent’s foundational cleft, and asks whether South Asia is one civilisation or two.
