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We are travelling at the moment but (South) Indians are crushing it at Chess.
As we quipped right now, “India dominates when it comes to the letter, C. C
Chess, cricket, cuisine, culture & perhaps even conversation (Desis are loud & loquacious)..
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Our 2026 reader survey is open until 7 June – anonymous, roughly five minutes. Please take a moment.
This piece is published recently in The News International.
Budget season is here. Everyone is presenting their two cents on the way out of the IMF’s vicious trap (with the latest iteration imposing 105 compliance requirements, including 75 ‘structural conditionalities’), solutions to kill all tax ills, a panacea for the power sector miscarriages, a lethal shovel for the trade deficit serpent, development-centric economic prescriptions to counter pro-cyclical meandering and whatnot.
And thanks to ChatGPT and Google NotebookLM, Facebook and LinkedIn are brimming with macroeconomic commentaries and infographics. Resplendent seminars are being organised, with the same slides but for the new fiscal year, to gauge the impending behemoth. Newspapers, especially oped sections, are the sweet spot for policymakers and even ex-ministers. One may wonder where the magical healing potion was when they were orchestrating the national financial (mis)management. Maybe it is only after defenestration that one gets hold of the knowledge that the job required in the first place.
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Since there has been some recent discussion of Hyderabad Deccan here, I am sharing this book review from DAWN of Arslan Athar’s debut novel Forty Days of Mourning.
Note: Like everyone else these days, Arslan also has a Substack. He is a Lahore-based writer.
Hyderabad Deccan is not merely a setting in this novel. It is a living, breathing presence that shapes the people who inhabit it and the events that unfold. Once a princely state rich in terms of material wealth and cultural plurality, Hyderabad carried a distinct identity that rarely finds adequate representation in narratives of colonial India. Discussions around the British Raj and Partition often reduce history to binaries, and Hyderabad’s nuanced past is frequently overlooked. Athar’s novel resists this erasure with care and precision.
And:
As pressure from the newly formed Indian state increases, Hyderabad’s fragile independence begins to crack. The story follows this slow unravelling, moving from hope and denial to violence, loss and reckoning, ending with the state’s forced integration and the collective grief of a world that disappears almost overnight.
As the wife of a high-ranking army officer, Saleema moves through the city’s elite circles, aware of every whisper of political tension, every shifting alliance. But as the Nizam’s Hyderabad faces the inevitability of annexation, Saleema realises that neither status nor cunning can fully shield her, and the choices she makes ripple through both her personal life and the crumbling world around her.
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Some random points:
1) annamalai has quit BJP. Three strands are coming through :
a) he was not accommodated properly, was not given more freedom, party did not listen to him on avoiding aidmk alliance and hence was sidelined.
B) was never a BJP man ideologically, was an opportunist, impatient and hence good riddance.
c) since BJP cannot play any shade of Dravidian game, it is better that annamalai be a silent b team of BJP.
2) Vijay has become a honorary family member and now mothers and aunties are worrying about his health, long working hours, and lack of good lunch!
They want him to eat better and go to office on alternate days.
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The Comment thread is afire with the usual (and senseless) India-Pakistan arguments (essentially which of the two is poorer). Q waves the whole question away by pointing at the figure, unimpressed by “an average Indian producing only $2,800 in GDP every year,” and asks what the point even is. There is a point, two in fact.
First: per capita and scale measure different things. Per capita describes the life of a citizen. Scale describes the weight of a state. A single integrated market of 1.4 billion people generates agglomeration, economies of scale, and a pull on capital and talent that no small rich economy can match (India’s ascent in the world of cricket is an extremely interesting meditation). That is why India passed Japan in 2025 to become the world’s fourth-largest economy, why it is the fastest-growing major one, and why it is on course to take third from Germany by around 2028. The market no exporter can ignore, the trade terms a four-trillion-dollar base can lean on, the air defence and roads it can fund: that is concrete power, and it is not nothing. Much of the gain is siphoned by a clutch of oligarchic houses, but the dynamism is real.
Second: however that same wealth does not buy what BB imagines it buys. India outweighs Pakistan in GDP by something close to eleven to one. It has still not turned Pakistan into its East Germany, a dependent satellite drawn quietly into its orbit and, in time, absorbed. Pakistan remains sovereign, armed, and unbought. Pakistanis are not running across the Punjabi wall to their ethnic kin.
In May 2025, after Pahalgam, the larger economy did not dictate terms: Operation Sindoor ended not in surrender but in a ceasefire announced, awkwardly, from Washington, with both capitals claiming the win.
Look West. Iran is a fraction of the wealth of the United States and Israel, yet it has absorbed the most advanced air forces on earth, kept its regime, and kept the knowledge to rebuild what was struck. The guns fell silent at a ceasefire, not a capitulation. Wealth buys reach. It does not buy outcomes.
BB treats the GDP gap as a deed of ownership over Kashmir, and assumes Kashmiris will swallow their pride for a higher income per head, that prosperity purchases consent. It misreads the Islamicate moral economy entirely. In that ledger ‘Izzat and Deen, dignity and faith, are not line items to be outbid. The Hyderabadi Harvard PhD still sings the song of his lost people.
Peoples who set independence above comfort have done so across the whole anti-colonial century, and no balance sheet has ever talked them out of it. Money may buy luxury but not loyalty.
What price will any Indian or Pakistani nationalist accept for their love and loyalty to their homeland?
Rest in Peace Marjane Satrapi – As an aside, our 2026 reader survey is open until 7 June – anonymous, roughly five minutes. Please take a moment.
Thanks to Agni for bringing this to our attention. I remember reading Persepolis years ago and it definitely does provide a different perspective on the Iranian Revolution.
From CNN:
French-Iranian artist and activist Marjane Satrapi, whose graphic novel “Persepolis” brought home the struggle of the Iranian people to millions around the world, has died. She was 56.
A statement from the Élysée Palace announcing her death Thursday lauded Satrapi’s work, saying her work “captivated a global audience.”
“Her passing marks the loss of a leading figure in French culture and an artist deeply committed to freedom, whose work carried a universal message and earned her immense international acclaim,” the Élysée said.
And:
Satrapi’s work spanned numerous graphic novels – which she preferred to call “comic books” and films. In 2019, she directed “Radioactive,” a British biographical drama film starring Rosamund Pike as Marie Curie.
But she was also an outspoken critic of Iran’s ruling establishment and a prominent supporter of the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement that emerged after the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in police custody in 2022.
Iranian women human rights group, the Narges Foundation described Satrapi as “a fearless advocate for feminism, women’s rights” and as someone who “champion(ed) the struggles and resilience of Iranian women.”
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I’m sharing this review that was originally published in 2020. After the victorious Taliban takeover of Kabul on August 15, 2021 and President Ghani’s flight from the country, Dalrymple’s prediction that the American Occupation would end up handing power to the same regime they set out to destroy seems eerily prescient. This type of book would make a good possibility for BP Book Club.
Early in Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan (Bloomsbury 2013), William Dalrymple quotes Mehrab Khan’s (the Khan of Kalat) remark to the British diplomat and adventurer Alexander Burnes: “You have brought an army into [Afghanistan] but how do you propose to take it out again?” (Dalrymple 161). As the British and subsequent foreign powers would find out, it is extremely difficult to successfully withdraw from Afghanistan. It has now been nearly two decades since the current US-led invasion began in 2001 and President Trump is promising to extensively draw down the presence of US troops, after having signed a deal with the Taliban–the regime that the US went to war to remove. In such a context, Dalrymple’s account of the First Anglo-Afghan War remains extremely relevant.
Return of a King takes its title from the attempt of the British to put Shah Shuja—the grandson of Ahmad Shah Abdali, the founder of modern Afghanistan — back on the throne after an exile of over thirty years in British India. This attempt took place in the context of the Great Game–the British-Russian rivalry for control over Central Asia. The British feared that Dost Mohammad Khan, who had usurped power from Shah Shuja, was pro-Russian and hence decided that he needed to be replaced with Shuja, whom they would use as a puppet leader. While they succeeded in removing Dost Mohammad and giving the crown to Shuja, they could not have anticipated the resistance that they would face. Continue reading Review: William Dalrymple’s Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan
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Hindu-Muslim violence is changing: till recently riots were instrumentalised to polarise the voters & help BJP win elections; today BJP is in office: pogroms, lynchings, bulldozers are the order of the day. A great special issue of CSA explains why and how tandfonline.com/doi/ful…
We may expand on this but we just noticed Substack, which we rarely read, is very Left-Liberal.
The Kirpan and its legality in the West.
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Since this is a slow week on BP, I am taking the liberty of sharing this film review of Chaitanya Tamhane’s The Disciple.
Early in The Disciple, we hear a voiceover which states: “If you want to make money, sing film songs or love songs, don’t tread this path. If you want to tread this path, learn to be lonely and hungry.” This immediately identifies the theme of the movie: the arduous journey to make a career in Hindustani classical music (shastriya sangeet).
The Disciple–directed by Chaitanya Tamhane, known for Court (India’s official submission for the 88th Academy Awards)– is a Marathi-language drama that revolves around an aspiring Hindustani classical singer, Sharad Nerulkar (played by Aditya Modak–himself a classical singer). The film originally screened at the 77th Venice International Film Festival in September 2020–the first Indian film since 2001’s Monsoon Wedding to compete at the festival–where it won the International Critics Prize and the award for Best Screenplay. It was subsequently picked up by Netflix. Continue reading Review: The Disciple
