We had some discussion on Twitter about Sikhs and I mentioned that my Punjabi Nationalist dad once said that he had thought about converting to Sikhism, but after he spent time with some Khalistani Sikhs in America, he decided their priests are as bad as ours, so he dropped the idea. Continue reading Are Sikhs Exceptional?
China’s demographic disaster impacts Pakistan
The AP has a long and sad story out, Pakistani Christian girls trafficked to China as brides. One must be careful of sensational stories that hit a lot of our emotional buttons, but it seems deeply reported, and names names.
Because of the surplus of men in China, there has been a recent tendency of “importing” girls and women from poorer East Asian countries. A milder form of this has occurred in South Korea, and earlier Japan. Generally, the men and families who have to make recourse to this are poorer and less attractive on the Chinese marriage market. Some of the same has occurred, to a lesser extent, in South Asia, with Punjabi farmers obtaining wives from eastern India and Bangladesh.
The fact that Chinese men are seeking wives from Pakistan is probably a function of the reality that Vietnam is getting too prosperous, and Laos is not particularly populous (I don’t know the situation in North Korea, though with the nationalistic nature of that regime I don’t see that as being a sustainable option). And obviously, Pakistan’s alliance with China matters a great deal.
The fact that these are poor Christian women helps as well. To be frank, I suspect that the Pakistani elite does not see their traffic as a matter of honor due to a lack of identification for reasons of class and religion. Additionally, it is far more plausible for a Chinese groom to contend that they are converts to Christianity than they are converts to Islam (there are much stronger cultural conflicts between being Han and Muslim than being Han and Christian).
With 1.4 billion people, it is hard for Chinese matters not to impact its neighbors…
What is in a Name? Al Qadir University
Dear leader (aka Imran Khan) was in Sohawa laying the foundation stone of “Al-Qadir University” and he gave a speech that is a good summary of his (childish, Aitchison college and Pakistan studies) worldview. The guy introducing him mangles one of Iqbal’s finest urdu poems and then Imran Khan takes it from there.. He manages to mangle Ahle suffa, Roohaniyat, history, sufism and science in this speech.. worth a listen.
But today I am not concerned with his worldview (which at least has a certain childish sincerity about it), I am just concerned about the name “Al Qadir University”. We are told that this university is named after Abdul Qadir Jilani. Supposedly Imran Khan and his wife Bushra Maneka came up with this name. But why? Why the “Al”? Al-Qadir just means “THE Qadir”. If it is named after Abdul Qadir Jilani then there is no reason to call him “THE Qadir”. Why not “Abdul Qadir Jilani University”? or just “Qadir University”?
Al-Qadir is one of the names of Allah. It would make sense if the university was named for Allah, but dear leader himself says it is named for Abdul Qadir Jilani. Hence the confusion.
I suspect that this name is an example of the neo-Punjabi tendency to add “Al” to anything they want to Islamize or make attractive by making it sound Arabic. Hence we have “Al-Bakistan”, Al-Mashhoor Fried Chicken and Al-Sultan Shoes and suchlike. It looks like the name of this university is another example of this (unfortunate) practice.
This short blog post is my personal contribution to improving the naming traditions in neo-Punjab. May Allah bless our efforts with success.
Pearls of Nonsense About Drones
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See It/Shoot It: The Secret History of the CIA’s Lethal Drone Program. by
Book Review from Major Agha Humayun Amin.
This is an interesting endeavor by a self-styled expert on drones from the University of Southampton in United Kingdom.
I first read about this great expert on drones in a review by one Mr. Phillip O Warlick II of Air Command and Staff College who elevated the book and its author to prophetic heights.
Having witnessed some drone strikes personally and having extensively travelled in the area affected by the so called US drone program I decided to buy this book which was quite a blunder as I now reflect in retrospect.
Blunder in the sense that I learnt nothing additional about the drone program. Continue reading Pearls of Nonsense About Drones
Pleistocene rock art in Maharashtra
In the evening breeze on a stony hilltop a day’s drive south of Mumbai, Sudhir Risbud tramped from one rock carving to another, pointing out the hull of a boat, birds, a shark, human figures and two life-size tigers.
“They’re male,” he said with a smile, noting that the carver had taken pains to make the genitalia too obvious to ignore. He was doing a brief tour of about two dozen figures, a sampling of 100 or so all etched into a hard, pitted rock called laterite that is common on the coastal plain that borders the Arabian Sea.
The carvings are only a sample of 1,200 figures that Mr. Risbud and Dhananjay Marathe, engineers and dedicated naturalists, have uncovered since they set out on a quest in 2012. The two men are part of a long tradition of amateur archaeologists, according to Tejas Garge, the head of the Directorate of Archaeology and Museums for the state of Maharashtra, and the petroglyphs they have uncovered amount to a trove of international significance.
There are no depictions of bulls, so it is pre-agricultural. Additionally, some of the animals depicted disappeared from the area in the later Pleistocene. That means the carvings could date to people who lived in the area between 40,000 and 20,000 years ago, right up to the Last Glacial Maximum.
2019 Brown Pundits Reader survey
“I am human, and I think nothing human is alien to me.”
-Terrence
One of the strange things is the comments on this weblog make it seem like many more of the readers are South Asian than is really case (or care about the India-Pakistan conflict). I wish more of you would speak. I’m brown, but I speak on Chinese history. It’s my history too. In a cosmopolitan post-national world the global chattering class should consider Terrence’s insights and be less bashful.
British Asians getting (much) taller?
Whenever I’m with a group of Asians I’m usually among the taller bracket (5’9). In Britain I’m tall for an Asian, tallish for a Persian and decent in comparison for white height.
However at last night’s Bollywood dance (I was a bit rusty but I managed to keep up – we did the routine for Kar Gayi chull) virtually everyone was an undergrad (I imagined it would be the Desi postgrads).
What immediately struck me was that I was shorter than a fair few of them. I’m imagining that this generation of British Asians (born in the 90’s) are far more Westernised in their diet and upbringing, than their parents and grandparents. Continue reading British Asians getting (much) taller?
Is BP the alternative Brownosphere?
C’est moi and I prefer Social Justice Ghazi if you please 😂😂😂
Also technically I’m High Tory ..— Zac X (@XerxestheMagian) May 4, 2019
Should the Pakistani elite revive Sab-ki-Hindi (the Farsi of India).
I was overlooking Vidhi’s screen at the gym and saw the dance. Initially I thought Bharatanatyam (it didn’t have a title) is so elegant and mesmerising and I asked Vidhi, what it was.
She replied that it was a Kathak and I made a mini-rant about how India ignores Islamicate culture etc. Incidentally I only just learnt Vidhi had studied Katak and, surprisingly for someone from Chennai, not Bharatanatyam. Her mother (a Sindhi from the North) made the choice and chose accordingly. I’m trying to convince her to pick up Kathak again to offset the intensity of her research.
My point being is that while Kathak has distinctly Hindu/Indian origins; it is ultimately (like Hindustani music) a culmination of the Indo-Islamic culture (apparently Wajid Ali Shah was its finest patron).
My post is about another suggestion that I’ve been dwelling upon this am. I’m convinced that the noblest thing that Pakistani elites could do is resurrect the medieval Persian dialect of India. Continue reading Should the Pakistani elite revive Sab-ki-Hindi (the Farsi of India).
Open Thread – Brown Pundits
Please keep the other posts on topic. Use this for talking about whatever you want to talk about.