Because Tarof isnât about numerical formulae. Itâs not just âno means yes after the third try.â Itâs not a knock-knock joke.
Onunchi, Taâarof, and High-Context Societies
Read More Here
Because Tarof isnât about numerical formulae. Itâs not just âno means yes after the third try.â Itâs not a knock-knock joke.
Onunchi, Taâarof, and High-Context Societies
Read More Here
âBetween Scripts, Beyond Borders: What It Means to Be a Punjabi Hindu-Sikh Sufi Poet in Urduâ
By Manav Sachdeva urf Maasoom Shah
What is my being as a Punjabi Hindu-Sikh writer of Sufi Poetry in Urdu while living between Ludhiana, New Delhi, and New York? What does it mean to me, mean for me, and mean to other people as they look at me with equal parts wonder and disdain as I embrace Farsi and Urdu as my own as did my ancestors prior to partition when Urdu was a language of our regions, as Javed Akhtar once said about language being of regions rather than religions?
To be a Punjabi Hindu-Sikh writing Sufi poetry in Urdu is to carry the weight of centuries in my breath and the burden of a border in my bones. It means returning to a home I never leftâand was never allowed to fully claim.
It means that when I write in Nastaliq script or even Roman or Hindi script but in Urdu, or quote Hafiz or write in Naskh in Farsi, I am not converting, betraying, or straying. I am completing a circle. One my ancestors began long before Partition redrew maps and mistrust into the fabric of everyday language.
As Javed Akhtar once reminded us, âLanguages belong to regions, not religions.â I write in Urdu not because I am Muslim though I don’t deny that label for myself either, but specifically, because I am Punjabi. Because I am from a land where Heer ran through the fields, where Bulleh Shah danced with defiance, where Shah Hussain stitched poetry into the shawls of the soul.
It means I am watchedâsometimes with wonder, sometimes with suspicion. Some marvel at the fusion: the New York poet invoking Mir and Ghalib in Brooklyn cafĂ©s, speaking of ishq-e-haqiqi in the same breath as trauma therapy and diasporic longing. Others look on with narrowed eyes, askingâsilently or aloudââWhose side are you on?â
To that, I say: I am on the side of poetry. Of shared breath across centuries. Of the tongue that trembles with truth regardless of script. Of the language that fed my grandfatherâs soul in Amritsar and now finds voice again in mine in Washington Square or Connaught Place.
It means I translate myself dailyâbetween identities, continents, alphabets. Sometimes I write Mohabbat in Devnagari. Sometimes I whisper shukr where others expect dhanyavaad. I live between the ik onkar and the bismillah, between naan and bagel, between Sufi silences and the American chaos of self-invention.
And what does it mean for me? It means freedom. It means rebellion. It means healing.
It means to remember that before Urdu became politicized, it was loved. Before it was feared, it was sung. It was the shared heritage of Lahore and Ludhiana–the cities of my father’s and my birth, Delhi and Dera Ghazi Khan–cities of ancestry, further and present.
I do not ask permission to write in Urdu. I write to reclaim what was always mine.
And what might it mean to others?
Maybe discomfort. Maybe curiosity. Maybe a slow awakening to the lie that language must belong to creed. Maybe the beginning of a reckoning: that art refuses to stay in its box, that love poems donât ask for passports, and that faith is sometimes just the belief that what was broken can be made whole.
So I will continue.
To write qawwalis and qasidas and sehras and ghazals and nazms in cafĂ©s. To quote Baba Farid beside Rumi. To live as a bridgeânot between East and West, but between the false walls weâve built within ourselves. And if some still look on with disdain, let them. I am writing in the voice of my ancestors.
And they are no longer silent.
Thatâs a sharp observation, and worth expanding. The truth is, in the West, all immigrants eventually become âwhiteâânot in phenotype, but in assimilation, in aesthetic, in aspiration. Continue reading Everyone Western Becomes White Eventually
Pulse: The Threads We Weave â
Lately Iâve wondered whether I over-curated the threads. Things feel quieter. Maybe too quiet. But perhaps thatâs the cost of raising the barâof asking for dialogue instead of dopamine. Still, this lull has me reflecting not just on moderation but on why some arguments no longer move me.
Take the Indo-Pak conflict: once electric, now strangely inert. That shift reflects my own evolution over two decades. I no longer inhabit that binary. I carry a layered identityâa South Asian BahĂĄâĂ sensibility shaped by Persian aesthetics, grounded in British institutions, and fluently navigated through English. That complexity is my compass. Itâs why I care less about flags and more about forces.
And the real force that shapes our lives? The elite. Not as a pejorative, but as a structural reality. I see it as nested tiers: Continue reading On Moderation, Minoritization, and the Elite
I’m writing this article because a) I feel quite strongly about it, b) it has been largely ignored in the foreign press.
Protocol in India is a hidebound affair, I would imagine the current system possibly has its origins in the Mughal courts, but it was the British who codified it to the extreme : designating the number of bows, whether one could sit or stand, who took order of precedence, what adornments were allowed. There are whole volumes dedicated to the subject, which I will happily continue to avoid.
The Indian state inherited a lot of this barely updated pageantry and continues to enforce these rules at every level of government. At the top of the protocol list, replacing the king is the President, the nominated monarch of the republic. This brings us to the slightly delayed point of the article, our current President. Droupadi Murmu.
Wikipedia will list her myriad achievements and milestone accomplishments, they speak for themselves. This isn’t about that (not to dismiss them, they’re just superfluous to the point I am trying to make). It is about the optics. A tribal woman is nominated the Queen. Protocol demands that every citizen gives her precedence over all others. In a country with a preference for fair skin above all else, for European features in their actresses, a tribal woman can never win a beauty contest. But she can far surpass it. She is the projected face of the country at foreign events, at international forums. It gives me great pride and joy to see her representing us everywhere, at royal events, at the Pope’s funeral.
As I write this from Dublin, waiting to board my connecting flightâIâd nearly missed it in Newark, too absorbed in writing to hear the gate callâIâm struck by how a Euro sign or EU flag can alter oneâs sense of place. Technically, Iâm still in the British Isles. But culturallyâunmistakablyâIâm on the Continent. A sensation I never quite feel in England.
Itâs a strange feeling, this flicker of European belonging. In the early millennium, I was a passionate Brexiteerâyoung, angry, seeking change. By the time of the referendum, a decade later, I found myself morally conflicted. I knew the EU was not a good fit but as a BahĂĄâĂ, I knew I could never advocate for disunity, of any sort. I abstained. Ironically, Commonwealth citizens could vote, but EU nationals couldnâtâa bit of imperial gatekeeping that deeply irritated my liberal British-Irish friend. (âWhy can Indians vote, but not the French?â he asked.)
Today, standing in Europe, I feel the contrast sharply. The Continent is genteel, even decadent, locked into postwar consensus. Meanwhile, the English-speaking world feels like itâs on fireâpolitically, culturally, psychologically. Itâs not just the UK or the US. India, too, belongs to this hot zone of rhetoric and reinvention. Pakistan, by contrast, while elite-driven in English, remains emotionally and socially an Urdu republic. Continue reading The Elder Race and the English-Speaking Heat
On Faizan Zaki, Spelling Bees, and Civilizational Osmosis
Another year, another Spelling Bee crown for an Indian American. But this one, the 100th Scripps tournament, Â is different.
Faizan Zakiâyoung, brilliant, and by name Muslimâjust became the latest in a long line of Indian-origin champions of Americaâs most idiosyncratic intellectual ritual. Faizan is the 32nd Indian American to winâmeaning theyâve claimed 32 out of the last 40 Spelling Bees. But he is very likely the first Muslim American to do so.
Which raises an old but essential question: Continue reading Is It Indian Culture or Hindu (Brahmin) Culture that creates excellence?
Vice President JD Vance recently declared that America doesnât need to âimport a foreign class of servantsâ to remain competitive. âWe did it in the â50s and â60s,â he said. âWe put a man on the moon with American talent. Some German and Jewish scientists who had come over during World War two, but mostly by American citizens.â
The line is memorableânot for its nationalism, but for its breathtaking amnesia.
The moon landing was not the product of some closed, white-bread meritocracy. It was powered by German engineers, Jewish refugees, and immigrant scientistsâmany quite literally âimported.â Wernher von Braun, the face of NASAâs rocket program, was a former Nazi, repurposed by America for its Cold War dreams.
Today, the immigrant pipeline Vance sneers at includes his own in-lawsâhis wifeâs parents, Indian-born academics. I’ve highlighted this problematic tendency before. They werenât servants. They were scholars. Like hundreds of thousands who have powered this countryâs universities, tech firms, hospitals, and labs. America doesnât run on pedigree. It runs on brains. And yes, those brains often have accents.
America First doesnât mean America stays first Continue reading âA Foreign Class of Servantsâ â JD Vance and the Great American Amnesia
Iâm writing this from a bakery-cafĂ© in Concord, Massachusettsâthe cradle of the American Revolution, where ideals like liberty and equality were born anew in the New World. The croissants are fresh, the espresso is bespoke (lavender), and the staff layout is eerily familiar.
At the front: white staffâstylish, aesthetic, articulateâhandling (bossing sometimes but in general everyone is exceptionally lovely & calm) model minority clientele with curated ease. In the kitchen: Mexican workersâefficient, invisible, foundational. Itâs the same setup across most of Americaâs cool, clean consumer spaces: the aesthetic and the labor silently segregated by race and language.
No one talks about it. Youâre not supposed to notice the subtle “Americanisation” at play (the American dream and its attendant complexities). But once you do, as a twice-immigrant (East to Britain, old England to New England), itâs hard to unsee. The roles arenât assigned by policy, but by a deeper algorithmâone that sorts people into place based on centuries of sedimented power: race, class, culture, even aesthetics. Continue reading CafĂ© Concord: A View from the Counter
BP-emeritus Zach posted this piece on Twitter, ‘I’m Bengali, my boyfriend was black – and my mum freaked out’. The piece highlights the reality that anti-black prejudice, in particular, is pervasive among South Asians (Indians, Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, etc.). I’m not super invested in the idea that this is due to colonialism, as I doubt it is. But we all know this is objectively a true prejudice. And the article highlights it in many ways.
But I want to point out another aspect of the piece: many of the warnings, whether racially motivated or not, by the young woman’s family, turned out to be true. In the piece, she notes she had already had one abortion at 18, and now was refusing to at 21. That’s obviously her choice, but her boyfriend had apparently impregnated another young woman at the same time. Finally, “She had another child with the same partner, who later walked out on her for good.”
So she’s left in her mid-20’s to be a single mother. This is almost certainly one of the major worries of the woman’s mother and her relatives, even if they were racist. In England, 24% of black families are single-parent households, while 8% of Asian families are. Asians in England (this means South Asian) may be antiblack as a culture, but black Briton culture is partly defined by a level of family instability which horrifies people from traditional Asian cultures.
I think this near the conclusion is important:
A few months ago there was an interesting development in the family – Salma’s brother started dating a black woman. And to Salma’s surprise, her mother accepted it without hesitation.
“That’s progress for a woman who had never recognised or challenged her anti-black attitudes before,” she says.
“I’m so proud of how far she’s come, although we still have more to go.
“I don’t blame her for thinking the way she did. But it was time I challenged it. It’s time we did as a community.”
One interpretation here is that Salma’s mother is no longer racist. But another interpretation is that Salma’s brother picked a far better person as a romantic partner than Salma did. Throughout the piece the father of Salma’s children is a stand-in for a race, but what if her relatives and her mother knew exactly the kind of man he was going to be? What if they were very worried about the decisions Salma was making in large part because they were worried about her?
I am willing to bet Salma’s brother’s girlfriend raises some eyebrows. I doubt the racism disappeared in a few years. That’s a real thing. But I strongly suspect she is just a much better potential match.
These sorts of stories mix personal stories and social issues. Honestly, I think this is the story less of racism and more of an irresponsible young man and woman. They got pregnant twice. She chose to keep the baby and tried to maintain a relationship with a man who was cheating on her the whole time, to the point of impregnating someone else. There’s more than just racism going on here.