Sticky Thinking; A Quick Note on Originality & Visibility

July 29, 2025 X.T.M No Comments filed under X.T.M

This is just a quick note inspired by Indosaurus’s excellent suggestion; which I’d like to add to. I’m pinning this post to give it visibility.

First, it’s great to see the voluminosity of posting lately. Some days the blog pulses with original thought; other days, the comments surge while posts remain sparse. Both are signs of life and I’m glad for that.

But as Indosaurus rightly observed:

“A lot of the posts over the past 2 weeks are reposts from old publications elsewhere / mass media publications… I see no real point in posting to BP if it is going to get submerged off the top page within a few hours… Would it be possible to pin 100% original unpublished content to the top of the page?”

I think that’s a very reasonable proposal. There’s value in resharing good content, but I agree we should prioritize original, unpublished writing, especially content that reflects the spirit of Brown Pundits. So here’s what we’ll trial:

* Original, unpublished pieces will be pinned where appropriate. I request Editors / Authors to use their judgement / “nous” to sense what is original and / or value-add.

Please continue to post, read, comment, and share. But also reflect on what sticks, and why. Let’s keep the signal high.

I cannot moderate as effectively as before so I’ll relying on the Editors, Nivedita & Furqan, for support. I hadn’t realised I had made Furqan an editor a few days back as I wanted him to add Dead Poetstanis to BP.

As again we aren’t going to get this perfectly right as we grow so apologies if I/we misstep.

The Fading Red

July 29, 2025 Furqan Ali No Comments filed under Archived Authors

The context of this poem is a bit complex. I wanted to experiment with some poetic gymnastics to venture into new terrain, like writing from the perspective of non-living things. So I chose The Communist Manifesto. Such a paradoxical choice, I must say in hindsight.

I first (and sadly, the last time) read it many years ago, sometime in 2019, when I was in my second (and final) year before university (though I never actually went to university, another detour we can explore some other time). I was at Edwardes College then (see the post “Against Platonic Love” for more details).

The idea for the poem surfaced after watching a dogfight — intellectually speaking — between the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek and Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson. If you haven’t already, I recommend watching their full debate.

Continue reading The Fading Red

What kind of nationalism is it to live in India and have an Arabic name?

July 29, 2025 X.T.M 3 Comments filed under X.T.M

I’d said to myself: Why don’t I do my own Bhartiya-karan, that is, Indianise myself, before someone else thinks of doing it? The first problem was my name. Perhaps you don’t know: my name is Iqbal Chand. It occurred to me that “Iqbal” is an Arabic word. What kind of nationalism is it to live in India and have an Arabic name? And so, I changed my name to Kangaal Chand. As it happens, this name is far better suited to my financial condition considering that “kangaal” means “poor”. And why just me, it suits the rest of my country too.

The second problem that arose was of the dress. There was no trace of Indianness in the pants, coat and tie that I wore. In fact, all three were a reflection of my slave mentality. I was amazed that I had worn them all this while. I decided to wear pajamas instead of pants. But then, a certain Persian person told me that the pajama had come to India from Iran. And so, I began to wear dhoti and kurta. But not a kameez, as the word “kameez”, too, is of Arabic origin and it reeks of the stench and stink of an Arab!

The third problem was of hair! After all, was it not treachery against the country, a blatant form of antinationalism, to keep one’s hair fashioned in the English style? I instructed the barber to keep only one lock of long hair at the back of my head and shave off the rest. He did exactly that. I had seen images from ancient India showing men with long and lush moustaches. Following their example, I began to grow my moustache. When my friends saw the large moustache on my somewhat small face, they assumed that I had put on a fake one, possibly because I was acting in some play. Forget my friends, when I saw myself in this new look, I began to feel that I had been created not by God, but Shankar, the cartoonist. But I did not lose heart. One has to do all manner of things to be Indian.

An excerpt from a story by Kanhaiyalal Kapoor in ‘Whose Urdu Is It Anyway?: Stories by Non-Muslim Urdu Writers’, edited and translated by Rakhshanda Jalil.

As the posting on BP (and the comments) are pretty fast and furious; my capacity to edit and moderate is getting pretty stretched..