X.T.M
X.T.M is a writer, editor, and investor working between Cambridge and the Persian Gulf. He is a co-founder of Brown Pundits, Senior Partner at BRAHM Collection, a platform for Indian handmade art and heritage, and Principal at Raef Capital.
He writes longform essays on civilisation and power, with a focus on the Persianate and South Asian worlds, and has shaped Brown Pundits since its early years. His work explores the intersection of history, identity, and state formation, particularly the unresolved cultural consequences of Partition.
His interests include Bahá’í philosophy, Iranian and Mughal history, and the long arc of civilisational continuity across Eurasia.
He writes under the X.T.M byline and can be found on X at @XerxestheMagian.
Most popular · Most recent
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Live Blogging – Brahmin Identity in Modern India
Live notes from a Cambridge lecture on Brahmin identity. Points include Brahmins as a traditional elite like samurai, social capital aiding adaptation, and a ‘Brahmin double’ by which Tamil Brahmins…
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British Asians getting (much) taller?
Noticing that young British Asians at a Cambridge dance class are taller than him, the author links it to Westernised diets, and describes the split between British-born undergraduates and India-born…
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The Advice of the Childfree
Defending his criticism of Bollywood men who leave wives for younger partners, the author argues rich and powerful men must be held to account, that their daughters bear the pain,…
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I stand with Sajid on Pakistani Pedophilia
Backing Home Secretary Sajid Javid against Kamila Shamsie’s questioning, the author argues Pakistan’s lack of a sex offender register is not Britain’s problem. He asserts that most paedophiles in Britain…
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Brahmins really need to stop caste-dropping; seriously!
A short complaint that Brahmins on social media often humble-brag their caste, which the author calls poor taste, with links to two tweets.
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Let Shiva’s Holy Lingam come back to Mecca before we talk of syncretism
Writing as a Pakistani, the author argues that real decolonisation of the Subcontinent requires syncretism on both sides, with Hindu gods and rituals returning to Muslim holy sites, after an…
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Sons of Pakistani Bus Drivers
Reading a piece on Sajid Javid as favourite to succeed Theresa May, the author expects a contest between two sons of Pakistani bus drivers in British politics, finds Sadiq Khan…
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Mein Kashmiri Brahmin hoon
X.T.M comments on a video of an Australian man speaking as a Kashmiri Brahmin, finding the ‘coloniser privilege’ overdone, and wonders what Prince Harry’s marriage to Meghan Markle means for…
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Accents of Leaders
X.T.M laments that South Asian leaders no longer speak English as Nehru, Jinnah and Bandaranaike did, and adds a news item on the last Mughal heiress in a Calcutta slum…
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The Sun that Rose From the Earth
Kabir Altaf reviews Shamsur Rahman Faruqi’s The Sun That Rose From the Earth, novellas about the lives and works of Urdu poets such as Mir and Ghalib in the late…
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Fair & Lovely
X.T.M criticises the choice of a white egg donor for a Bollywood director’s children, arguing it sends a ‘white is right’ message in a colour-conscious society and contrasts with Hindutva’s…
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Rest in Peace Dear Sereno
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India Won the World Cup. Now the Hard Part.
X.T.M accepts that India’s T20 World Cup win reflects cricket’s new money, but pushes back on a purely linear “wealth means dominance” story. He argues sport, like war, stays unpredictable,…
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Kleptocratic Pakistan versus Oligarchic India
X.T.M examines whether “kleptocracy” fairly describes Pakistan, after Kabir objected to the word. He documents military business holdings and concedes that institutional capture may be a better label, while arguing…
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Islam the religion of Peace
X.T.M notes that Malaysia’s Anwar Ibrahim brokered a ceasefire between Thailand and Cambodia, and argues that this was a case of Dharmic civilisation being helped by an Abrahamic one, adding…
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Hindutva jumped the shark
The author reacts with shock to a man who claims to speak for Muslims because his children’s nanny is one, comparing it to the film The Help and arguing that…
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The Post-White World
The author suggests ‘The Post-White World’ as a book title, tracing Western consolidation from 1492 to Victorian racial hegemony and its unravelling through two World Wars, decolonisation and the Cold…
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Raj Koothrapali is a shame on all Brown Men
Zach agrees with a commenter that the Big Bang Theory’s Raj Koothrapali harms the image of brown men, adding observations about caste, Hindu insensitivity to Pakistanis, and Pakistan’s brand versus…
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Demonetisation will lead to DeModisation-
Citing estimates of demonetisation’s cost, the author says that despite admiring Modi he is upset that it hit the middle class while oligarchs and their lavish excess were untouched, and…
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Padmavat banned in Malaysia
X.T.M shares a comment on Alauddin Khilji after the Padmavat ban in Malaysia, saying he has not seen the film but has heard it is anti-Alauddin.
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Kabir, the Anchor of the Crescent
Without Kabir, the Crescent faction disperses. A South Asian forum without a sustained Crescent voice is a drawing room pretending to be a commons. Three rulings on Author autonomy, Founder…
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Parsi Nanis Are Gujarati
X.T.M reads genetic studies of the Parsis, with Iranian paternal lines and roughly half South Asian maternal lines, to argue that Parsi Gujarati comes from founding Gujarati mothers. A Facebook…
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Brown Pandas: Rising Toward a Saffron Crescent.
X.T.M argues that India-Pakistan hostility, like that between Iran and Israel, has been generative but miscalibrated, and that Pakistan’s elite chose to dominate a poor country. The post doubts the…
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On Editorial Authority and Trust
X.T.M explains that he has removed Kabir’s editorial and authorship rights after comments were hard-deleted and posts rearranged beyond what was agreed. He sets out the editorial reset, says January…
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Why Brown Pundits Needs a Spine, Not a Consensus
X.T.M answers charges that BP leans one way, saying he moderates by the civilisational context of the speaker, not by politics. He blames lapsed editorial oversight for recent rows and…
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Everyone Western Becomes White Eventually
The author argues that in the West all immigrants eventually become ‘white’ in assimilation, aesthetics and aspiration, and expects Indian Americans to dissolve into the mainstream within a few generations,…
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“I’m not white, I’m Pakistani.”
Comments on a viral clip of a woman saying she is Pakistani, not white. The author reads it as showing how assimilated Muslims are in the English-speaking world, and argues…
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humblebragging History-
Mocks a tweet crediting the Greeks with the Ramayana, saying it reflects a subtle bias that inflates Greco-Roman achievement at other civilisations’ expense and justifies colonialism.
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How the RSS saved Srinagar?
A forwarded account, citing a book, claiming that RSS volunteers cleared snow from Srinagar airport overnight in wartime so that Indian troops could land and the airport stayed out of…
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Modi has failed us but at least he put the Muslims in their place
Extracts from Kapil Komireddi’s column on India’s 2019 election, which says Hindu voters tell him Modi has failed them but has at least put Muslims in their place, plus the…
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Azad(?) Kashmir
A brief remark that a travel vlogger checking in at ‘Azad Kashmir’ used politically loaded language, with an aside on PewDiePie and an embedded tweet by Sadanand Dhume mocking a…
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Trevor Noah disses India?
Zach comments on Trevor Noah’s joke on the India-Pakistan standoff, agreeing with Omar’s analysis but not his conclusion. He argues the joke elevated Pakistan, a bankrupt state, to equal footing…
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This is what won Brexit!
Posting a video of British Pakistanis chanting in an English airport, the author calls it shameful and argues such behaviour sets off native fears of being overwhelmed, which fed Brexit.…
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How have the English paid for imperialism/colonialism?
X.T.M disputes the view that the English did South Asia favours, arguing that English benefits the Anglosphere, railways were supply chains rather than gifts, and India was no net expense…
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India would have been a dump for crackpot science had Modi not Nehru been its first leader
X.T.M posts a ThePrint opinion piece arguing that India would have been a dump for crackpot science if Modi, not Nehru, had been its first leader, with Nehru’s scientific institutes…
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Return to BP
A reader’s message to the blog’s hosts, asking commenters to acknowledge the host-guest relationship and observe decorum towards named people, as a basis for Zach’s return.
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Tarek Fatah is a fu*king moron
X.T.M, a Bahá’í, argues that Tarek Fatah was foolish to assume the YouTube shooter was Muslim from her Persian name, apologises on behalf of his faith for a Bahá’í attacker,…
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10 Indians who have made a global marki
X.T.M posts his wife’s list of Indians and Pakistanis who have made a global impact, with his and Kabir’s additions, noting Pakistanis do not scale the same peaks as Indians.
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Shithole countries
Asks how wrong Trump was to call some countries ‘shitholes’, conceding as a half-Pakistani, half-Iranian writer that a large diaspora usually signals something wrong at home, though the remark is…
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A Pakistani Hindu is not content but is Content
X.T.M argues that social media rewards rarity: a Hindu in Pakistan or a Jew in Iran becomes a story, while the same people in India or Israel are absorbed into…
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The god of small comments
A reader’s reply on the assembly elections thread, reposted in full, explains how Kerala’s Christians divided into sectarian groups from the pre-colonial period, including the Knanaya and older communities, and…
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Borderline Bloodpressure
X.T.M describes borderline high blood pressure and a raised resting heart rate at 41, a nosebleed and his usual January check-up in India. He argues that health must become a…
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Lord Zoroaster’s Fire Still Burns
X.T.M uses a Molla Nasreddin cartoon of Zoroaster to argue that Persian customs survived Islamisation. He holds that Iran is a civilisation-state, not a regime problem, so Western pressure is…
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Chennai Is Not an Accident
X.T.M observes that Chennai retains a non-transactional social reflex, with strangers helping unasked, and attributes it to Tamil language, Dravidian suspicion of centralisation, unstaged religious pluralism and weak chain retail,…
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Macaulay, English, and the Myth of Colonial Liberation
X.T.M rebuts the claim that criticising Macaulay and English harms Dalit, Shudra and Adivasi mobility, arguing that adapting to a colonial system is not vindication of it and that Macaulay…
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Should Babri Masjid have been moved to Pakistan?
In a deliberately provocative piece, X.T.M proposes a rules-based doctrine for sacred-site disputes (excavation, relocation, compensation) given unequal sacred weight, and argues that standardising Hindi on Khari Boli rather than…
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This is Trump’s America: An Unprecedented Electoral Sweep
X.T.M calls the 2024 result a Trump triumph, citing a popular-vote win, flipped swing states and control of Congress, and asks whether it is rooted in white supremacy, anti-imperialism, populism,…
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Live Blogging: White noise, séances & colonial linguistics
Live notes on Professor Javed Majeed’s lecture on George Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India and its gramophone recordings, covering how the survey shaped the boundaries of regional languages and is…
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As India Saffronises, 9 Questions on her Za’faran sister (IranZamin) with Professor Foltz-
Starting from the etymology of saffron, the author laments the loss of India’s Islamicate and Persianate heritage as the country saffronises, with Urdu left to the Hindu majority’s mercy. He…
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The Belgian neutrality is over; India’s next steps on Kashmir
A collection of tweets and comments on the India-Pakistan crisis after the pilot’s capture, including Arfa Khanum Sherwani and Rahul Roushan, with the poster’s view that China is the only…
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Admin note- be polite
An admin note from Zack that he will delete a commenter’s future comments, and ban him if needed, until he apologises for a tactless remark about the blog’s quality and…
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Love is love
The author praises Priyanka Chopra’s wedding to Nick Jonas at Umaid Bhavan, with few Bollywood guests, as an emancipated Desi woman’s challenge to patriarchy and a proud choice to marry…
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Fascists on Hindu Twitter
A one-line reaction that Hindu Twitter is becoming disturbing, quoting a tweet that alleges a woman who converted to marry a Muslim man was killed by her husband and father-in-law.
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Can a white liberal call a black conservative, a “bigot”
After criticising Owen Jones for calling a black man a bigot, the author, who calls himself a High Tory, argues white liberals reserve their contempt for conservative minorities who do…
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Brown Pundit tour of Pakistan
X.T.M, who has visited India about ten times, urges commenters to visit Pakistan, noting a friend who disparaged the country until a trip to interior Sindh changed his mind.
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Counter factual
X.T.M poses a counterfactual: would a typical Shudra peasant in UP be better off today without British rule, without Turkish incursion, or if Ashoka had replaced Hinduism with Buddhism, noting…
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Were You Colonised or Not? The UN Slavery Vote That Split the World
X.T.M reads the UN General Assembly vote declaring the transatlantic slave trade the gravest crime against humanity as a West-versus-the-rest divide. With 123 in favour, the post argues the question…
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15 Years of Brown Pundits: A Platform, a Posture, a Proof
X.T.M marks Brown Pundits’ fifteenth anniversary, from the naming debate of December 2010 to the first post, arguing the site survived without funding or institutional backing because it was built…
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BP may have just jumped the shark
X.T.M mocks a claim that a Brahmin calling someone sub-human is casteist, arguing that an insult is an insult and that caste-specific moral disclaimers amount to moral policing.
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The Broken Compact
The author argues that the incremental Indian and American Dream, in which education and merit lead to mobility, has expired for a generation. He sees a new South Asian left…
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Indians assimilate a bit too well?
Remarks that two very different Indian-Americans are in a public fight, and wonders whether Indians have little asabiyyah, assimilating too well.
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J.E.M (Jeff, Elon & Mark); The Billionaire Glow-Up
Argues that extreme wealth reshapes identity, masculinity and racial presentation, citing Chamath Palihapitiya, Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg as examples of a “billionaire glow-up”. The author claims styling, media control and…
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Indian Americans “trump” Brit-Asians
Observes that Indian-Americans, though 1 per cent of the US, have seats at a business roundtable between the US President and the British PM, while British society stays invisibly white,…
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The lure of the Turanian triangle-
Zach follows a travel vlogger’s affection for Pakistan and Iran, hoping for a Turanian cultural connection across Iran, Iraq and the Stans, and observes that yogurt, linked with Iran, is…
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Does the nuclear arsenal “protect” Pakistan?
Zach poses questions rather than opinions: what India would have done had Pakistan not been nuclear, how strong India’s conventional forces are, whether China would intervene, and whether other states…
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Zack In the Cambridge News
A short post saying the Cambridge News picked up, in a sanitised version, the author’s earlier blog post about an incident at his shop.
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Pakistani potluck with a dash of politics
After a tense Pakistani potluck over 26/11 and Indian views of Pakistan, the author says he prefers diplomacy to ideology, and argues South Asia should focus on lifting its billion-plus…
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Persian Vs. Punjabi Vs. Urdu
Shares clips in which a speaker follows Persian words better in Urdu than in Punjabi mode, taking them as a sign of the divide between Punjabi popular culture and Urdu…
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Colonial Dravidian
X.T.M, picking up Vijay’s post, argues that the Aryan-Dravidian divide, caste and the Hindu-Muslim split were largely colonial constructions, quoting Lord Curzon that India’s natural boundaries are mountains and seas,…
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Bahá’ís & Pakistan
Responding to Omar Ali’s post on Pankaj Mishra, a Bahá’í writer notes the book’s passage on Jamal-ud-Din Afghani, the Babis and Bahá’í emigres to Bombay, and compares Urdu to the…
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Will the last Parsi to die please blow out the sacred fire?
Defending the Jiyo Parsi campaign to lift the Parsi birth rate against a liberal article likening it to a khap panchayat, the author argues descendants of Persia’s persecuted Zoroastrians should…
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Pakistan Has a Dosa and Nobody Told You
“We Saraiki people make dosa,” my Urdu teacher told me. “We have a name for it: chilla.” A rice batter spread on a tawa and eaten with winter saag, in…
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Restore the Princes?
Under one paramountcy, Swat built three colleges and over three hundred schools while the Nawabs of Dir kept education out. Same institution, same security, opposite outcomes. Whatever the case for…
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In Ruchira’s Honour
Ruchira’s daughter shared my tribute this week and called it amazing. She does not know me. Her mother did, through nearly two decades of this blog. In her honour the…
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Back from Vermont
After a week skiing in Vermont, X.T.M argues that the Karakoram, Himalaya and Hindu Kush have the terrain for a major winter sports economy. Militarisation, contested borders and weak infrastructure,…
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What Genetics Can, and Cannot, Explain About Caste
X.T.M summarises a WhatsApp exchange between two contributors over what ancestry data can show about caste, noting that no group maps cleanly onto caste or purity, and that the real…
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Pakistan Is Not About to Break Apart
X.T.M argues predictions of Pakistan’s imminent break-up are confirmation bias, since Pashtuns are integrated into the state and economy and states collapse only when elites defect, borders become porous and…
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Why we must talk about caste
X.T.M argues that a caste jibe set off a reader boycott on BP, and that controversial voices are what keep the comment threads alive. He concludes caste is the deep…
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Love Jihad Zohran
X.T.M jokes that Zohran Mamdani is a product of ‘Love Jihad’, citing an Indian Eye interview where Mamdani described growing up in an interfaith family.
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Caste, Civilisation, and the Courage to Own It
A short personal reply arguing that the author sees nothing wrong with Akhand Bharat or a broader Dharmic civilisation, that questioning caste identities should not be taboo, and that he…
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Brown Pundits: Broad Church or Narrow Canon?
X.T.M answers Kabir’s charge of ‘soft Hindutva’ bias at Brown Pundits, arguing the forum’s bias is civilisational engagement rather than Hindutva, that Hindu introspection drives much of its energy, and…
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Why Iran Is Not Iraq
The author argues that Iran is not Iraq: a unified, largely Shia ‘fortress civilisation’ whose legitimacy lets it adapt under attack. He holds that foreign regime change or a Pahlavi…
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Cambridge Union Debate on 1971 War
A short note on the relaunch of the Cambridge Majlis after nearly thirty years, with a debate on the 1971 war, and a link on how its members helped end…
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Never forget – Comments of the Day
A reader comment of the day suggesting Western leftists think of caste, untouchability and sati whenever colonial atrocities against India are raised, and so excuse the coloniser.
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Happy Christmas from Chennai
Writing from Chennai at Christmas, the author argues that a secular India should keep only national holidays and make religious ones state-level or opt-in, and that it neglects its architectural…
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When my own kind robbed me of 50 quid
The shop owner recounts losing fifty pounds in a change-swapping trick, after he had warmed to the customer because staff had mistaken him for a delivery driver, and reflects on…
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Passing as Black
A reproduced account of Vijay Chokal-Ingam, who said in 2015 that he posed as a black man to benefit from race-conscious medical-school admissions, and who argues that affirmative action harms…
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Omg this is huge for all Pakis
X.T.M celebrates the first minority holder of a great office of state, noting London has a Pakistani-heritage mayor and Home Secretary, and observes that British Asian communities are more conservative…
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Hindu-Muslim violence is changing
X.T.M shares Christophe Jaffrelot’s summary of a journal special issue arguing that anti-Muslim violence in India has shifted from riots used to win votes to lynchings and bulldozers under a…
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Cholistan: The Desert at the Edge of Everything
X.T.M portrays Cholistan as a seam rather than a border region: Gulf royalty hunt there, Seraiki is its language, and the dry Hakra river runs through its past. The post…
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Tamil Islam Is Not a North Indian Story
X.T.M argues that a Tamil Muslim politician waving an LTTE flag is unremarkable, because Islam reached South India through trade and Tamilness outweighs religion. He says North Indian assumptions wrongly…
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I am back
X.T.M announces he is managing the blog more actively, has restored deleted comments, and will trash uncivil ones, with the same rule applying to authors and editors.
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Free Speech
X.T.M says free speech is inviolable on BP, that criticism of Pakistan or any country cannot be off-limits, and that a deleted thread cannot be restored.
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Co-Founders Confer
X.T.M shares an email to BP’s co-founders on traffic of roughly 50,000 to 60,000 monthly views, his aim to grow readership tenfold, Kabir’s return as an author and moderation problems…
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Madhuri is stronger than the Ambanis
X.T.M reads the Ambanis’ removal of the elephant Madhuri to Vantara as a clash between animal welfare and sacred tradition in Hindu veneration of nature, and contrasts a plural, absorbing…
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🪙 What’s in a Name? Mukesh, Not Mukash.
Prompted by a misspelling of Mukesh Ambani’s name, X.T.M argues that upper-caste Indians wrongly expect wealth to buy Western respect, describes a Brahmin–Baniya compact, and says China profits quietly from…
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“A Foreign Class of Servants” — JD Vance and the Great American Amnesia
X.T.M criticises JD Vance’s remark about importing ‘a foreign class of servants’, arguing that the moon landing relied on imported German, Jewish and immigrant talent, and that skilled migrants, including…
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The Battle for the Taj Mahal & India’s Sacred Lands: Waqf Boards Under Fire
X.T.M explains India’s waqf properties, about 900,000 holdings across 2.3 million acres, and the Waqf (Amendment) Bill 2024, which proposes around 40 changes including non-Muslim and women members on boards…
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The Ambani Wedding & the Modern Face of India
X.T.M wonders whether Hindu culture, after centuries of conquest, finds security in displays of wealth, contrasting this with Persianate restraint, and suggests the Ambanis could instead fund India’s STEM legacy…
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Unbelievable podcast with Prof. Devji
Reports recording a podcast with Professor Devji, praising his dense knowledge, and notes a friendly argument over calling Modi ‘Maharajah’, a royal habit Devji says Hindutva itself uses.
