Listening to Iran

January 27, 2026 X.T.M 5 Comments filed under X.T.M

I was not reading reports. I was speaking to Iran. After weeks of silence, the internet briefly opened. Voices percolated through. What they described was not protest energy. It was systemic strain.

The figures circulating privately are severe. Tens of thousands dead, according to some accounts. Whether the numbers are precise is less important than where the pressure is concentrated. This is not confined to Tehran or large cities. It is acute in smaller towns and provincial centres.

The big urban areas remain relatively stable. It often is. But towns in the North and across the interior are absorbing the worst of the economic collapse. Inflation there is not political language. It is daily arithmetic.

This marks a shift. The Islamic Republic rested on a broad social base: provincial populations, lower-income groups, and religious constituencies. That base is now under strain. Discontent is no longer segmented. It is shared. Continue reading Listening to Iran

Tamil Islam Is Not a North Indian Story

January 27, 2026 X.T.M 10 Comments filed under X.T.M

Sbarr sent a simple reel: a female Tamil Muslim politiciann in Ranipet, near Vellore, waving an LTTE flag during an election campaign. What followed was not simple at all. The reaction treated the image as an ideological provocation rather than a local political act. Why is a Muslim woman waving a Tamil separatist symbol? What does this say about loyalty, religion, or the nation?

Islam in South India did not arrive through conquest. It arrived through trade. Arab merchants settled along the Malabar and Coromandel coasts centuries before the Delhi Sultanate existed. They married locally, learned the language, adopted food, dress, and social habits, and became Tamil, Malayali, or Konkani Muslims. Religion changed. Civilisation did not.

This is why South Indian Islam does not behave like a foreign layer imposed on a hostile society. It is woven into the local fabric. Tamil Muslims are Tamil first in language, culture, and political instinct. Their solidarities are shaped by region before theology. This is not syncretism as rebellion. It is indigeneity as habit.

Tamil identity in Tamil Nadu routinely transcends religion. I was reminded of this years ago in Chennai, asking my dentist, who was Christian,about her name. Like many South Indian Christians, it was a mix of Hindu and Christian forms. I asked whether they were also Tamil. She looked at me as if the question made no sense. Of course she was Tamil, “very Tamil.”

That response explains more than a thousand editorials.

In Tamil Nadu, religion is real but it is not totalising. Tamilness is older, deeper, and more organising. This applies to Hindus, Christians, and Muslims alike. Political expression follows that logic. A Tamil Muslim expressing Tamil nationalist sentiment is not a contradiction. It is normal.

This is what happens when South India is constantly interpreted through North Indian assumptions. Islam is assumed to be oppositional. Symbols are assumed to be exclusive. Politics is assumed to be communal by default. None of this holds in the Tamil world.

Tamil lands occupy a distinct face of Indian civilisation. Fully part of India, yet unmistakably their own. Deeply Indian, yet not reducible to Gangetic history or North Indian templates. This is not fragmentation. It is civilisational strength.

India has always had multiple faces. The Tamil one is maritime, linguistic, ancient, and self-assured. It absorbed religions without surrendering itself to them. That is why its Muslims do not behave like guests. They behave like natives.

The reel was never the problem. The inability to see India’s southernmost face was.

Report on Op-Sindoor

January 27, 2026 Nachiketa 21 Comments filed under Nachiketa

Link to the entire report.

Nevertheless, sufficient elements appear to indicate that, by the morning of 10 May 2025, the Indian Air Force had succeeded in achieving air superiority over a significant portion of Pakistan’s airspace. This in turn enabled it to continue long-range strikes against enemy infrastructure at will, at least for as long as it retained sufficient stocks of munitions such as BrahMos or SCALP-EG. At the same time, the Pakistan Air Force had lost the ability to repeat the operations it had conducted so successfully on 7 May 2025, owing to the loss of its forward air-surveillance radars and the threat posed by S-400 systems to its AWACS standoff weapons delivery platforms, while its own strikes conducted between 7 and
10 May 2025 had been largely thwarted by Indian defences.

Meanwhile, Islamabad demonstrated its manifest superiority in strategic communication, which notably benefitted from support within Chinese, and to some extent Western, information spheres. The destruction of one or more Rafales, for example, effectively masked the defeat of the adversary air force, which had reportedly suffered at least equivalent losses but had also proven incapable of defending its most important air bases or of delivering comparable, documented strikes against its adversary.

Operation Sindoor marked a significant evolution in Indian counter-terrorism doctrine, which now equates a terrorist attack to an act of war warranting a decisive response. It also eliminates the distinction between terrorist groups and their state sponsors, with the latter automatically becoming legitimate targets in the event of a renewed attack. Finally, it reaffirms New Delhi’s resolve, in such a case, not to be deterred by Islamabad’s nuclear arsenal. The potential for escalation on the Indian subcontinent therefore remains higher than ever, while developments since 1999 have constantly illustrated the stability/instability paradox

TL;DR take:
IAF won in air and the land after sustaining initial losses whereas PAF won in the media (which is not as trivial as it sounds).