Month: August 2025

Open Thread: Pakistan Floods – Let’s Talk

Massive floods have hit Pakistan’s Punjab province after record-breaking monsoon rains and the overflow of major rivers. Officials report nearly 300,000 people displaced from the province alone and more than a million affected as the Ravi, Sutlej, and Chenab overflowed their banks. Over 1,400 villages are underwater, and there are growing fears of disease outbreaks and food shortages.

👉 ‘The water left nothing’: Pakistan’s Punjab province reels from deadly floods (The Guardian)

This thread is for everyone to share thoughts, updates, and questions about what’s happening.

Jump in and share your perspective.

Why Travelogues?

For me, the logic is simple: if you’re someone like me who prefers the comfort of a room over venturing out, travelogues are the perfect gateway. They let you seep into panoramas you’ve never explored, experience cultures without packing a bag, and even gather cross-cultural insights before you actually travel.

My recent read, “COMING BACK: The Odyssey of a Pakistani Through India” by Shueyb Gandapur, is a true tour de force. It chronicles a chartered accountant’s journey through India in 2017 – two and a half weeks, four cities, and countless encounters. The narrative beautifully captures the essence of shared histories and nuanced differences, making it more than just a travel diary; it’s an exploration of identity, culture, and connection.

Have you read any travelogues recently? Which ones would you recommend?

PS: Despite my dislike for traveling, the picture was taken while traveling from Mansehra to Islamabad. 😅

The Aryan Cleft: Pakistan as the Cradle and Cusp of Indo-Iranian Civilisation

The traditional Mercator worldview slices our imagination. It distorts the unity of the Indo-Iranian zone; a civilizational belt that has resisted rupture, even across millennia of empire, religion, and state.

May be a graphic of map and text

And yet, if you look again, linguistically, genetically, geographically, the facts are harder to ignore. Pakistan sits at the inflection point. Continue reading The Aryan Cleft: Pakistan as the Cradle and Cusp of Indo-Iranian Civilisation

The Long Defeat: How Hinduphobia Hollowed Out Pakistan

I lost an entire post earlier, but perhaps it’s for the best. I’ve had the time now to clarify my thoughts and this is better to make clear the new policy of just junking comments that don’t “smell right.”

What prompted me to write again was a small but telling excerpt from a recent Dawn article. It wasn’t just that they misspelled “Brahman”; they wrote “Barhaman,” a word that doesn’t exist in any linguistic tradition. It was also the order in which they listed religions. They wrote:

“
revered for not only the followers of the world’s three major religions — Buddhism, Sikhism and Hinduism
”

Hinduism, the oldest and most foundational of the three, was placed last. This is not trivial. Both Buddhism and Sikhism evolved from Hinduism. Yet in Pakistani discourse, so marked by dislocation and disavowal, Hinduism is routinely treated as a junior or fringe faith. This is what endemic Hinduphobia looks like: not explicit violence, but civilizational misordering, semantic erasure, and the subtle, continuous downgrading of Hindu memory.

It’s barely recognized. And that’s the point. Continue reading The Long Defeat: How Hinduphobia Hollowed Out Pakistan

Why does the West get Immigrants and not Indigenous

A post as a result of discussion I had with a classmate, now an Aussie for about 30 years

Classmate: As for Australia and need for immigrants…. insufficient labor supply for the growing economy!

My reply::Plenty of Labor, the Indigenous Aborigines.
Why are they (First Aussies) not being educated, Racism ??

Classmate:  Barr…you are clearly unaware of the reality..there is no simple solution to the barriers faced by Aborigines in integrating into the Australian economy.

My long reply, the crux of this Post
There are parallels of why Immigrants are preferred over Aus Aborigines and why the Brits got Indentured South Indian Labor for the Estates in Ceylon  (Same as why Immigrants are preferred  over African Americans in US too)

Indenture Estate Labor in Ceylon was essentially undocumented, i.e. not given any legal status (Residency ) or even Birth not recorded, The reason was simple, residency or similar would have meant Ceylon Labor Laws would have been applicable. Ceylon Labor Laws were pretty decent and reasonable for those times. So it was easier to control undocumented South Indian Labor. Sinhalese were notorious for NOT being docile and prone to Litigation. Just keep in mind only a select few Ceylonese got a decent education. Universal literacy (and Life Expectancy) only happened after Independence. Tamil were more prone to violent crime, but among themselves. Oppressed rarely fight the oppressor in this caste the high caste Tamils.

Continue reading Why does the West get Immigrants and not Indigenous

India’s sugar was bitter, until her first female scientist made it sweet

The Untold Story of E.K. Janaki Ammal

via X

She was born in 1897 in Tellicherry, Kerala, the daughter of a high court sub-judge and one of nineteen children in a large, liberal household called Edam. Her family belonged to the Thiyya community, considered “socially backward” under the Hindu caste system. But within Edam, caste meant little. There was music, a sprawling library, a cultivated garden, and a quiet expectation of excellence.

Her sisters married. She did not. Instead, Janaki Ammal chose plants.

She trained first at Queen Mary’s and Presidency Colleges in Madras, then left colonial India in 1924 on a Barbour Scholarship to the University of Michigan, where she would become the first Indian woman to earn a doctorate in botanical science. She lived in an all-women’s dorm, smuggled a squirrel in her sari for company, and worked under renowned botanist Harley Harris Bartlett.

She returned to India and joined the Sugarcane Breeding Station in Coimbatore, where she changed the course of Indian agriculture. The country’s native sugarcane was hardy but lacked sweetness; imported varieties were sweeter but weak. Janaki crossbred both into something stronger, higher-yielding, and perfectly suited for Indian soil.

The sugar in Indian chai owes its taste to her. Continue reading India’s sugar was bitter, until her first female scientist made it sweet

Hinduphobia Exists, But Pakistan Was Not Born from It

I was riffling through the comments and my jaw dropped when Kabir claimed Hinduphobia doesn’t exist. It struck me as both historically and emotionally tone-deaf. I didn’t respond at the time, but I’ve been reflecting on it since.

Let me say upfront: Hinduphobia does exist. It may not always manifest in overt violence or systemic persecution (at least not today, and not in most places globally), but it does appear in more insidious, ideological forms; especially in academic and diasporic discourse.

Take, for instance, the backlash against H1B visa recipients. Much of that criticism is coded; targeting upper-caste Indians, especially Hindus, who are the primary beneficiaries of this brain-drain dynamic. It’s not just about class or meritocracy; there’s an unspoken discomfort with their presence and success, often couched in progressive rhetoric.

On the intellectual front, academics like Audrey Truschke and others within the left-liberal Western consensus have regularly challenged or dismissed Hindu identity altogether; reducing it to political nationalism or caste oppression. This refusal to acknowledge Hinduism as a living, plural, and spiritual tradition creates an environment where Hindu self-articulation is delegitimized. That too is a form of Hinduphobia.

Now, is this Hinduphobia the same as the systemic anti-Muslim, anti-Black, or anti-immigrant hatred we see elsewhere? No. Hinduphobia today is more dismissive than violent, more erasure than exclusion, but it is real and it needs to be acknowledged.

Pakistan Was Not Born from Hinduphobia Continue reading Hinduphobia Exists, But Pakistan Was Not Born from It

GST reform – go big Modiji, let the bizmen breathe

This post is published on behalf of Yajnavalkya – Medium

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A GST terror story

Modi has announced during his Independence Day speech that he would be going for sweeping reforms of GST by Diwali. The central piece of the reform would be reducing the number of rates from 4 to 2. A lot of people – both experts and non-experts – have been advocating a single/dual rate regime as a magic bullet for the GST mess.

But is it? Let me start by narrating a GST horror story. Some GST basics first: GST is a value-added tax. Assuming a product has 10% tax, Manufacturer A sells the product to wholesaler B for Rs. 1000 (pre-tax). B pays A Rs.1000 + Rs. 100. B then sells the goods to Retailer C for Rs. 1050 (pre-tax) and C pays B Rs. 1050+Rs. 105. Now since B has already paid Rs. 100 as tax to A, he is required to deposit only Rs.5 to the exchequer. The Rs.100 that he paid the manufacturer is termed as ‘Input Tax Credit’ or ITC.

There are some elaborate ways of defrauding the system of taxes involving ITC which is also facilitated by loopholes in the tax filing process – discussing that would require a 5000-word post, so I will desist. But for those interested, you can read up about bill trading. One of the ways in which the system combats this menace which potentially causes trillions in tax losses, is Rule 86-A, which empowers the taxman to block ITC of any businessman if he has “reasonable cause” to believe that the ITC was fraudulently availed.

Ok, now on to the story. A few months back, a bunch of businessmen operating in the steel sector in my city – including one of my personal acquaintances – were slapped with notices under this rule, blocking ITC aggregating to Rs.60 million, for transactions related to the period 2021 to 2024. The stated reason – Supplier X from whom these people had purchased goods (and taken ITC credit) was declared to be “non-existent” and hence all those purchase transactions were fake. But here is the thing – the supplier was very much “existing” during the said period. There was concrete evidence of the same – power bills for the factory running into tens of millions, his GST filings, company annual returns, income tax returns and so on. The supplier had closed down his business in early 2025, not in small part due to the pain of GST terror and compliance burden. The panicked recipients of the notices went to meet the taxman, taking along the supplier and with all the aforementioned evidence. The taxman was unmoved. So next they moved to the court but the latter dismissed the petition asking them to exhaust the appeals process via the department first. Before filing an appeal, 20% of the blocked ITC needs to be deposited. The legal costs in this case would have added another couple of million Rupees. Having figured out that legal process was not worth the effort, the group sent a message to the taxman requesting a deal. Initial demand-Rs.12 million. After lots of hard bargaining, it was finally settled for Rs.8 million.. Continue reading GST reform – go big Modiji, let the bizmen breathe

Come Fly with me to Far Bombay

I. Bombay: Between Beauty and Brutality
I’m writing from Bombay, where the monsoon floods are overwhelming; visually and viscerally. The rain hammers the city with a kind of sublime fury. From certain vantage points, it’s breathtaking. But it’s also undeniably brutal for those without scenic surroundings or structural shelter. It’s a reminder that Indian beauty is often doubled with burden.

II. Burden Burst: The Commentariat Awakens
Lately on Brown Pundits, I’ve noticed a revival. Old voices returning, new ones emerging, and many ideas worth engaging. But some themes have worn thin; for instance I’m in broad agreement with Indosaurus & I don’t want to waste too much breath on Audrey Truschke. And frankly, Aurangzeb is not a hill I want to die on. In fact, perhaps one of the key misreadings by Muslims in the subcontinent was turning every ideological disagreement into a hill to die on. Maybe it began with QeA-Jinnah and the Great Allama but it ossified into a pattern. Everything became a matter of principle, rather than pragmatism.

III. Concession Is Not Compromise
Compromise is seen as weakness, but I’m more interested in the capacity to concede especially when history clearly shows you’re wrong. The Mughals installed a two-tier system, subordinating Hindus and even native Muslims. Contrast that with the Suri dynasty, particularly Sher Shah Suri, who in just two decades built the Grand Trunk Road and reshaped governance without the alienation that marked the Mughals. If Hindutva attacked the Suri legacy, I’d call it pure bigotry. Sher Shah ruled with the land, not over it. Continue reading Come Fly with me to Far Bombay

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