Vikram

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Why not Persian for the pre-1971 Pakistan ?

Razib Khan asks why Pakistan took Urdu rather than Persian as its national language, arguing Persian would have reduced language conflict, tied Pakistan to the Iranic world, and offered a…

Vikram28 June 2018170 comments
India as a global factory: A project seventy years in the making

The author argues that Apple’s plan to make the iPhone 14 in India reflects a seventy-year project, from a country struggling to feed itself in the 1950s to state promotion…

Vikram9 October 202271 comments
Farmers vs Government: The Benefits and Limits of Democratic Redistribution

The author argues that India’s democracy let its large farming population keep a steady share of redistribution during globalisation-led growth, unlike one-party China and Vietnam, where farm incomes fell relative…

Vikram12 February 202156 comments
Dammed it you dont: The hydraulic origins of the divergence between the Raj, India and Pakistan

The author argues that attitudes to water explain the divergence of the Raj, India and Pakistan: the Gangetic plain needed no dams, peninsular India did, and India’s later dam building…

Vikram24 September 202055 comments
Moving out of India: The bigger picture

The author, who moved to the US two decades ago, offers young Indians a big-picture view of emigrating now that India’s growth has narrowed the material gap, weighing career and…

Vikram2 September 202047 comments
Structural Conflicts between Bharat and India

The author argues that India’s agrarian distress stems from a structural conflict between rural and urban India: farmers want better prices, urbanites cheap food, and the farmer needs protection from…

Vikram25 December 201846 comments
India Impressions

A visitor’s impressions after a month in India, describing it as distressing: reckless driving with 130 fatalities per 100,000 vehicles, uncollected trash, winter pollution and poor street lighting, which he…

Vikram19 January 202043 comments
Why Pakistan is Middle Eastern

Using Hofstede’s cultural dimensions, with Egypt as a control for rural, low-income societies, the author argues Pakistan scores like Egypt and unlike India on individualism, uncertainty avoidance and indulgence, and…

Vikram17 May 201941 comments
Indian CEOs in America are a knock on of India’s specific economic strengths

The author argues that the success of India-trained CEOs in the US reflects India’s economic strengths, not just ‘best and brightest’ or sheer population, citing the BSE’s roughly 10,000 per…

Vikram1 December 202139 comments
India and industrialization

Asking why China produces and exports so much more than India, the author answers demographics, distance and war: China’s larger, sharply peaking workforce, proximity to rich East Asian economies and…

Vikram26 April 202032 comments
The determinants of prosperity in South Asia

The author charts GDP per capita across South Asian states, provinces and countries to ask whether policy and state capacity or geography and history explain prosperity, and identifies roughly five…

Vikram4 July 202024 comments
Triumph of the Gujarati

The author argues that the 2019 election reflects the victory of the Gujarat model of caste as an economic union of merchants, contrasted with North Indian peasant caste identity built…

Vikram24 May 201923 comments
The Wani exception

The author asks why Kashmir’s Wani trading caste converted almost wholly to Islam, unlike mercantile castes elsewhere in the subcontinent, and conjectures that the lack of a Brahmin-Bania-style complex may…

Vikram30 September 201818 comments
An IPL for field hockey ?

The author argues a sport’s popularity reflects identity and class more than its qualities, and that India could lift field hockey into a global sport with an IPL-style league built…

Vikram7 August 202117 comments
Naya politics in South Asia

The author, an English-medium Indian, argues the upper-middle-class ‘great man’ narrative behind Modi and Imran Khan ignores that patronage drives politics in agrarian societies, that Modi has barely changed Congress-era…

Vikram27 July 201816 comments
How serious is the Hindu-Muslim conflict in India ?

Citing a scholar who finds continuity in BJP policy on minorities, the author argues Hindu-Muslim conflict is rather benign by the twentieth century’s standards, compared with Russia, China and Mexico,…

Vikram15 April 201914 comments
The tragedy of Pakistan

The author argues Pakistan has defined itself as an answer to an Indian fringe, at the cost of instability and weak growth, and urges it to follow the UAE, Saudi…

Vikram16 May 20230 comments
Of Indian Americans and American Indians

A short claim that second-generation Indian Americans are the only US ethnic group whose income falls relative to the first generation, and that art and media by Indian Americans tend…

Vikram1 February 20230 comments
Why the subcontinent is not a cultural continuum

Vikram27 January 20230 comments
India’s lost decades: A failure of discourse

Citing a graph of world and Indian GDP growth, the author says India stayed flat from 1800 to 1950 while world output tripled, and turns to 1965-1982, when South Korea…

Vikram24 December 20220 comments
Does Indian history matter ?

Asking whether Indian history matters, the author argues it matters less as a record of a civilisation that did not industrialise alone than where it responds creatively to the industrialised…

Vikram1 March 20210 comments
We were always colonized

A two-sentence remark that ‘we’ were always colonisers, and that the logic of decolonising replaces real conversations about the distribution of power with attempts to heal imaginary ethnic injuries.

Vikram15 February 20210 comments
Does the world need another factory ? Economic options for India.

Politically and strategically, economic decoupling from the PRC has become an imperative for India.

Vikram17 December 20200 comments
Jamshedpur and Pittsburgh, the difference a knowledge centre can make

Vikram31 May 20200 comments
Setting the ground straight on the Indian economy

Responding to commenters, the author proposes nominal industrial output as the best starting measure of a national economy, since goods prices vary little by place, and notes Germany’s output is…

Vikram7 February 20200 comments
Ayushmaan Khurana and the self image of North Indians

The author notes Ayushmann Khurrana’s run of low-cost hits as rooted, non-heroic characters, often named as UP Brahmins but played opposite actresses from outside UP, and explains this by UP…

Vikram15 September 20190 comments
A millennium of exits from India

The author argues that the Indian world has shrunk over a thousand years through three exits, to the Perso-Islamic world, from Southeast Asia and to the West, and that explaining…

Vikram10 September 20180 comments
The reorientation of Indian nationalism

A short opening observation that resistance to a common political actor shaped most nationalisms, as the wars against the French turned England into a nation.

Vikram1 September 20180 comments