Please keep the other posts on topic. Use this for talking about whatever you want to talk about.
Many types of India prepare to Vote
My friend MJ has an interesting piece on Why we need National Continuity.
I was also reading an article about the lack of a “national party in India” (Modi versus 20 states) but I found the comment to the post excerpted below to be very interesting and well-written.
A paen to a very different type of India. As in all things the labels Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan are very muddled because they are ultimately foreign labels. But that is not the point of the post or the comment below but rather that there are many many types of Indias not just Modi’s Bharat.
I was a bit surprised that Telangana is divided up between Rao and Reddy, to India’s credit it has funnelled the caste divides into a democratic framework (casteocracy can work). In some forms of culture South Asia is probably the most conservative region on earth since culture is essentially distributed into each caste and clan. The family networks haven’t nuclearised yet and without atomisation, Westernisation is somewhat harder to achieve.
Mr Guptaās articulation is absolutely in line with what India is. I only hope he believes in the India that is and articulates more strongly and more often about this India. Not the India that is being projected to us by āpretending to be independentā darbari (but really sarkari channels and papers) channels but who depend on the government for advertisement money.Ā
We are a country where the language/dialect varies by district in many cases. If we try distinguishing regions based on multiple factors, India is a combination of few hundred states. We have multiple new years. Some of us revolve our lives around the sun and others around the moon. That itself tell us, how diverse we are. We have common festivals but they are celebrated for different reasons ā sometimes very different reasons. How can then our politics be led by one fellow, who thinks of himself no less than God or who is positioned by the darbaris as the reincarnation of God. Given that the God has created us to be different, what business does a self-serving politician or the darbaris have to tell us how to live our life? We are largely independent thinking and that is why no effort at assimilation in the past has succeeded. What does it tell us about who we are? Not to mention that our geography is that of a continent and our economic opportunities vary significantly.Ā
Not everyone can or has to become one kind of citizen ā thinking the same way.Ā Continue reading Many types of India prepare to Vote
Ilish bhaja
India Election 2019 Thread
Lately, we have been talking a lot of things about South Asia but not much on what is supposed to be the biggest event in the calendar for 2019, India General Elections 2019 scheduled to start 11th April and continue till May. Looking at the Opinion PollsĀ it seems that BJP’s election fortune has become much brighter since the dustup with Pakistan. Although foreign issues do not dominate Indian elections that much. Domestically, general Indian people still seem to regard Modi as a better steward for the Indian economy than Rahul or any other alternatives. I have no opinion on the probable results as I have little knowledge and expertise. Let those who are more informed opine here freely on the elections. Not just probable outcomes but also about social, economic and political directions that this elections may bring about.
19th March : ” Times Now and VMR survey is back with yet another batch of poll-related data and analysis. In the current survey, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) is predicted to grabĀ 283 out of 543 Lok Sabha seats, UPA –Ā 135 and Others – 125.
In the last survey, the Times Now-VMR poll had shown that the NDA would have been 21 seats short of the half-way mark had 2019 Lok Sabha Elections been held in January.”
James Brown: Video + Bootsy Collins
I get a little tired of Aryan, Sudra, Islam. Pakistan, Hindu diatribes.
So a James Brown video
a) Look to the end, its FBI etc keeping a eye on James Brown
b)Ā The tall guy behind JB playing bass in a sort of dark shirt with small cross is Bootsy Collins.
Bootsy became one of the first to be Gay friendly on stage, this is probably early 1980’s
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Don’t you know that it’s true
That for me and for you
The world is a ghetto
That for me and for you
The world is a ghetto
Wonder when I’ll find paradise
Somewhere there’s a home, sweet and nice
Wonder if I’ll find happiness
Never give it up now I guess
Somewhere there’s a home, sweet and nice
Wonder if I’ll find happiness
Never give it up now I guess
Misunderstanding Ta’arof
I think Ta’arof translates into Takaluf in the Urdu speaking world but I can’t be sure.
I find it rather amusing that while India is being dissed on the world’s most popular youtube channel; a Jewish American travelloger is extolling Pakistan to the skies.
If Vidhi wasn’t Indian then I can take some schadenfraude but considering she is a daughter of the Indus, and her tribe are exiles from Pakistan, they are the best type of Pakistanis; those that are entirely free from the taint of Islam. Continue reading Misunderstanding Ta’arof
PewDiePie is Coloniser Trash
PewDiePie Concedes YouTube Defeat to T-Series, Takes a Dig at India
Maybe he should do us all a favour and do what his fellow countryman Avici did a year back (and seems to be a Scandinavian trait).
- “Guess to beat one Swedish boy you need a billion Asians.”
- “All it took was a massive corporate entity with every song in Bollywood.”
- He then tries to allege corruption of T-Series (second 48-1.10). Usual coloniser tactic when they get jealous of Brown Success (as though they didn’t simply rape and conquer the world).
- He then calls Bangladesh, Indian, which of course is not an insult but is a deliberate ignorance (Bangladesh fought a long and bloody war to be considered it’s own 1971 nation).
- Minute 2:02 he refers to defecation assuming a joke on India’s open defecation rates.
- Then he dares to have the temerity to educate South Asians, who are probably the world’s greatest wordsmiths on the distinction between defamation and defecation. To paraphrase they were savages while we were busy composing the Vedas and the Avestas not to mention the Quran, which probably has no literary equivalent the world over (Muhammad may have been a sick pedo but he seemed a pretty decent poet).
- Did you know that Indians have poo-poo in their brains?
- Then some long orange haired junkie sings, How about next you figure out how to fix the caste system?
- Maybe all those ads will solve your crippling poverty.
How Islamicate culture will die?
Lovely video – I notice though that Kathak (this was Kathak right) has fallen out of favour in India for bharatnatyam. The irony Islamicate culture suffers for being āIslamicā in india and not Islamic enough in a Pakistan..
— Zac X (@XerxestheMagian) April 1, 2019
Islam will kill Islamicate culture in Pakistan unless Islam is neutered (we can always hope).
I enjoyed IndThingās comments on the Marathas, there is no doubt if the Mughals were āHinduā, the Bharat contingent would be adulating them.
We did some Persian events this weekend (one Bahaāi one non-BahĆ”āĆ). I remarked to Vidhi the paucity of Persian culture, Persians do Western food and fashion as a sign of their high culture. Continue reading How Islamicate culture will die?
BrownCast Podcast episode 25: Christoph, center-left edgelord on social justice, Islam, and cosmopolitanism
Another BP Podcast is up. You can listen onĀ Libsyn,Ā iTunes, Spotify,Ā and Stitcher. Probably the easiest way to keep up the podcast since we donāt have a regular schedule is toĀ subscribeĀ at one of the links above.
You can also support the podcast as aĀ patronĀ (the primary benefit now is that you get the podcasts considerably earlier than everyone elseā¦). Would appreciate moreĀ positiveĀ reviews.
Today I talk to Christoph, the erstwhile “Eurasian Sensation.” Long-time readers of this weblog will know that Christoph was an early contributor to this weblog. Over the past few years, he has gained prominence on Twitter as a verbal pugilist of sorts, punching Right and punching Left from the de facto center.
We talk about his own mixed-race identity, and cosmopolitan lifestyle choices and orientation. Both of us also talk about the interesting fact that we are regularly lectured about Islam by non-Muslim progressives.
Between Tariq and Columbus
I have long followed Brian Catlos’ more academic works, so I was excited to read Kingdoms of Faith: A New History of Islamic Spain. Aside from some strange contemporary allusions, this is a good introductory book. If you are curious about more detail, the author has written good monographs.
The reason that this work is interesting is that Al-Andalus is a frontier society that’s been well studied. Liminal to both Islam and Western Latin Christendom, for various political reasons it is of particular interest in modern times.
One of the themes is Catlos’ work is though that we tend to refract the history of the Iberian peninsula between 700 and 1500 in simple stark modern dichotomous terms, the reality was that confessional identities were simply one of many loyalties. And yet if you read his work you see the meta-ethnic/civilizational identities are what determine the long-term arc of history, the hinges around which it turns.
In the initial decades after the conquest, local Christian elites and power structures remained intact, and the Arab conquest elites utilized them as administrative intermediaries. But after 800 AD a combination of local Iberian converts and Muslims from other parts of the Islamic world were numerous enough that Christian society begins to be pushed to the margins, even if numerically they remained a majority in the 800s.
Additionally, Catlos emphasizes the deep ethnic divisions between old Arab families, who monopolized religious offices 300 years after the conquest, tribes of Berber origin who occupied a position between the indigenes and the Arabs, and finally, Arabicized converts and Christians, Mozarabs. While the high culture became Arab, Latin speech persisted among the rural peasantry. Even the remnant Christian elites within Al-Andalus were literate primarily in Arabic.
One of the major insights from Kingdoms of Faith is that the conversion of Latin elites, whether Basque, Visigoth, or post-Roman, to Islam, resulted in corrosion of Christianity within Iberia. That corrosion was reversed only with political reconquest, and migration of Christian peasants from the north and the gradual conversion of Muslims in the centuries before the final expulsion of the remnant Moriscos.
Kingdoms of Faith is a useful read, not because of what it tells us about the history of Spain, but how we can compare to other regions of the world….