Society, caste and identity
Caste, ethnicity, gender, family and community.
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Pakistan, India – culture, music, movies
RecoveringNewsJunkie offers a palate cleanser from comment-thread hostility, noting the shared culture of India and Pakistan. He points to cricketer Usman Tariq’s inspiration from an Indian film, and to Pakistanis’…
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Pakistan’s dramatic drop in fertility
X.T.M argues that Pakistan’s fertility fall from 3.61 to 3.19 children per woman reflects urbanisation, education, female work and social media rather than ideology or theology. He says religious societies…
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Not All Our Ancestors Were “Just Hindu”
X.T.M rejects the claim in Aslan Pahari’s videos that Pakistanis’ pre-Islamic ancestors were uniformly Hindu. He argues the pre-8th-century Indus region was layered and regional, with Buddhists in Sindh, later…
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Pan-Sindhi Cross-Border Virality
X.T.M uses a viral Sindhi song to argue that Islam is native to Sindh after 13 centuries. He says Hindus stayed around 30 per cent while Buddhism vanished, because social…
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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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Why It Is Still Acceptable to Insult India
A chance encounter in Cambridge exposes how casually India remains a socially acceptable target of disdain in Western conversation—revealing the link between microaggression, diasporic self-erasure, and the discomfort provoked by…
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A Pakistani Wedding That Refused Not to Be Indian
X.T.M reads the wedding of Nawaz Sharif’s grandson, with Indian designers and Indic styling, as evidence of Indic soft power. He argues that Pakistani weddings show continuity of a subcontinental…
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South Asia Is an Ugly Postcolonial Euphemism
X.T.M argues that South Asia is a bureaucratic euphemism from American area studies, not a neutral term. He holds that India is the old name for the whole subcontinent and…
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Greenland, Trump, and the Comfort of White Intermediaries
X.T.M argues the Greenland debate is really about a pattern across settler-colonial societies, where Indigenous political power is mediated by white-presenting figures who are legible and safe to Western capitals,…
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Bollywood, Brahmins, Parsis & WASPs:
X.T.M argues that elites are reproduced by property, institutions and networks rather than blood, so intermarriage is usually a merger, not a threat, citing English aristocrats and American heiresses, Parsis,…
