Brown Pundits – Page 2 – Ideas off the Indus

Everyone Western Becomes White Eventually

June 11, 2025June 11, 2025X.T.MAmerica, Blog, Civilisation, Culture, Politics, RaceAfrican-American resistance, America, Assimilation, Bhutan Lhotshampa, Blog, Civilisation, Cultural integration, Culture, diaspora dynamics, Ethnic enclaves, Global migration, Immigration, Indian diaspora, Individualism, Intergenerational change, Jewish assimilation, Politics, Race, Racial identity, Second-generation immigrants, Western civilisation, Whiteness18 Comments

brown: if the fresh inputs from india is reduced ( because of immigration laws and raising prosperity back home), how long can ‘indians in u s a’ remain an effective group? i feel that they will dissolve in next 20 years.

Nivedita: That is such an interesting take! I agree actually. Indians are pretty much white adjacent and are intermarrying with whites, so in all probability what you predict might actually happen.

That’s a sharp observation, and worth expanding. The truth is, in the West, all immigrants eventually become “white”—not in phenotype, but in assimilation, in aesthetic, in aspiration. Continue reading Everyone Western Becomes White Eventually

🕯️ Saving Adam

June 11, 2025June 11, 2025X.T.MBlog, Geopolitics, Politics, ReligionAdam al-Najjar, Alaa al-Najjar, Blog, civilian casualties, Genocide, Geopolitics Gaza, humanitarian crisis, Israel-Palestine, Israeli airstrike, Italy evacuation, Khan Younis, Middle East crisis, moral clarity, Najjar children, names of the victims, pediatrician, Politics, refugee trauma, Religion, Saving Private Ryan, war and children9 Comments

I don’t often comment on the Israel–Palestine conflict, and I try not to be reactive. But there comes a point where neutrality becomes its own kind of indulgence.

Alaa al-Najjar, a pediatrician, lost nine of her ten children, and her husband, in an airstrike on their home in Khan Younis. Her surviving son, Adam, 11, had his hand amputated and was flown out of Gaza to Italy, where he says he hopes to live in “a beautiful place… where houses are not broken and nobody dies.”

The children killed were: Sidar (7 months), Luqman (2), Sadeen (3), Rifan (5), Raslan (7), Jubran (8), Eve (9), Rakan (10), and Yahya (12). May they rest in the Highest Heaven. Continue reading 🕯️ Saving Adam

🧵Quick Moderation Note

June 11, 2025June 11, 2025X.T.MBlog, Open Thread, PoliticsBlog, Brown Pundits comments, Comment Policy, Community guidelines, Discourse norms, free speech, India-Pakistan, moderation, Moderation policy, Online discussion, Open Thread, Open threads, Podcast, Politics, Thread managementLeave a comment

Just a heads-up for everyone:

India–Pakistan threads are totally fine when the post is about India–Pakistan, or if it’s an Open Thread. Let the sparks fly there.
But on other posts—please avoid steering every conversation back to India–Pakistan. It’s not always relevant and derails useful discussion.

I won’t be actively moderating every thread. If something is genuinely offensive or disruptive, feel free to flag it—I’ll step in only if needed. Continue reading 🧵Quick Moderation Note

🇮🇳Op Sindoor: A Podcast on Pahalgam, Pakistan, and the Limits of Peace

June 10, 2025June 10, 2025X.T.MGeopolitics, History, India, Pakistan, Podcast, PoliticsBalakot, BrownCast, Civ-mil tensions, Geopolitics, Geopolitics & Security, history, History & Memory, India, India-Pakistan conflict, Indo-Pak Relations, Indus Waters Treaty, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Media & Narrative, Modi foreign policy, Nawaz Sharif, Pahalgam, Pakistan, Pakistan military, Pathankot attack, Podcast, Politics, Pulwama, South Asia, Surgical strikes, Terrorism & Militancy, Terrorism in Kashmir, TRF Kashmir101 Comments

I’ve just listened to the first half-hour of Op Sindoor, the latest Brown Pundits Browncast featuring Amey, Poulasta, and Omar. The full episode runs over 90 minutes; I’ll be reflecting on the rest in due course. For now, some thoughts on the opening segment, which focuses on the recent terror attack in Pahalgam and its aftermath.

🧨 The Attack Itself: Pahalgam as a National Trauma

The episode begins by recounting the massacre in Pahalgam, Kashmir—a tourist meadow turned execution ground. Twenty-six people, most of them honeymooning Hindus, were murdered after being identified through religious markers: circumcision, Kalma recitations, names. The hosts don’t shy away from calling it what it is: a targeted Islamist attack. The group responsible, the TRF (The Resistance Front), is introduced as a Lashkar-e-Taiba cutout, designed to launder Pakistan-backed militancy through a local Kashmiri lens.

There is a palpable sense of cumulative fatigue in how the Indian speakers describe it—not as an aberration, but as part of a 30-year continuum of such violence. The emotional register is high, but justified. The use of plain terms like terrorists over euphemisms such as militants or gunmen reflects a long-standing frustration with how such attacks are framed in international discourse.

🤝 Modi, Nawaz, and the Civ-Mil Waltz Continue reading 🇮🇳Op Sindoor: A Podcast on Pahalgam, Pakistan, and the Limits of Peace

On immigration, innovation and the American conundrum

June 10, 2025June 10, 2025NiveditaAmerica, Culture, EconomicsAmerica, American decline, American exceptionalism, American IP, Asian immigration, Capitalism, Caste system, corporate greed, Culture, David Brooks, economics, entrepreneurship, failure tolerance, family unit, Gates, higher education, immigration trends, innovation, Jobs, manufacturing crisis, Nadella, Pichai, Protestant work ethic, Scott Galloway, Tiger Mom43 Comments

This is an attempt to understand why the United States began its descent into a mediocracy from a meritocracy. This article was inspired by a series of conversations over a period of time between my husband and me based on collective intergenerational experiences across a cross-section of people. I would also like to just say that this is in no way an attempt to undermine the success of immigrants, but more of an academic exercise to understand the joint impact of corporate greed and immigration patterns on the state of innovation in the US.

On the principle of collegiality and individual contribution to society at large

The principle on which the US was founded is this: The individual citizen is the basic building block of the country, and the quality of the individual dictates the future of the country (Teddy Roosevelt, Citizenship in a Republic, Sorbonne, France, 1910). The average citizen must be a good citizen for the republic to succeed. Therefore, every effort was made to ensure that a citizen could fulfill one’s full potential. This freedom to pursue one’s dreams was naturally predicated by the foundation of a relatively stable society where the basic necessities of life were well taken care of. While this respect for the individual citizen was of paramount importance, the same was also counter-balanced by the Protestant Christian principle of collegiality, which ensured that while individual citizens worked towards a better life, they also by and large pursued activities that could ensure the larger good of their society as well.

While the first wave of immigrants all came from western societies that shared similar principles, the latest wave of immigrants have come from countries where the individual citizen is almost incidental and the quality of the rulers is paramount. Extreme examples of such countries are Singapore and China. India too belongs to such a type of a governmental system, where ultimately only the top few matter, to steer the country down the right path. These new immigrants naturally do not relate to the original social contract that formed the basis of the United States.

Capitalism and the destruction of the family unit Continue reading On immigration, innovation and the American conundrum

On Moderation, Minoritization, and the Elite

June 9, 2025X.T.MCulture, India, Pakistan, Politics, Race, X.T.MBahá’í, British institutions, Brown Pundits, Brown Pundits Meta, class hierarchy, digital discourse, elite theory, global elite, Hindustani Music, Identity & Belonging, Indo-Pak, Kabir, meaning-making, minoritization, moderation, Moderation & Civility, nuance vs noise, online communities, Persian aesthetics, Power & Elites, South Asia, South Asian identity21 Comments

Pulse: The Threads We Weave —

Lately I’ve wondered whether I over-curated the threads. Things feel quieter. Maybe too quiet. But perhaps that’s the cost of raising the bar—of 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 identity—a South Asian Bahá’í sensibility shaped by Persian aesthetics, grounded in British institutions, and fluently navigated through English. That complexity is my compass. It’s 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

Belated Podcast: Operation Sindoor (and Bunyan al Marsoos)

June 9, 2025June 9, 2025Omar AliGeopolitics, History, India, Military History, Pakistan, Podcast, PoliticsAmey, BrownCast, Geopolitics, Historical Misunderstandings, history, India, India–Pakistan Relations, Indo-pak conflict, Military history, Omar Ali, Operation Bunyan Al Marsoos, Operation Sindoor, Pakistan, Partition, Podcast, Podcasts, Politics, Poulasta, South Asia, Subcontinental Politics3 Comments

Another Browncast is up. You can listen on Libsyn, Apple, Spotify, and Stitcher (and a variety of other platforms). Probably the easiest way to keep up the podcast since we don’t have a regular schedule is to subscribe to one of the links above!

In this episode Amey hosts myself (omar) and Poulasta (our resident Bengali expert) to talk about the recent India-Pakistan kerfuffle. Amey was ready for war, but we found common ground 😉 (as usual with India and Pakistan, a lot of the discussion is about partition and related misunderstandings)

US Economics and Theory of Collapse

June 8, 2025June 8, 2025sbarrkumAmerica, Blog, Civilisation, Economics, PoliticsAmerica, austerity, budget deficit, civilizational collapse, collapse theory, complexity theory, credit default swaps, debt crisis, diminishing returns, economic self-sufficiency, empire overstretch, energy independence, higher education crisis, infrastructure decay, Joseph Tainter, Korotayev, manufacturing revival, marginal returns, Moody’s downgrade, Planck principle, R&D decline, systemic risk, US decline, US defense budget, US economy, US trade deficit1 Comment

A Theory of Collapse (After a US Economic Synopsis)

Note: Italicized comments are from another Brown Pundits contributor

Unless the US falls hopelessly behind in tech, they are “built” to retain a perpetual competitive edge.

I don’t think you’ve looked closely enough at the economic fundamentals. Off the top of my head:

National Debt: $30+ trillion
Interest on Debt: $1 trillion
Budget Deficit (2024): $1.8 trillion
Trade Deficit: $140.5 billion (heavy reliance on imports)
Defense Budget: $1 trillion

Moody’s recently downgraded US debt from Aaa to Aa1, citing worsening risk indicators. This downgrade was hard to avoid—US sovereign CDS spreads are now wider than those of China and Greece, suggesting higher default risk. Continue reading US Economics and Theory of Collapse

Request for Calm and Civility

June 6, 2025June 7, 2025X.T.MIndia, Open Thread, Pakistan, X.T.Mcivility, commentariat, community norms, discourse culture, free speech, Indo-Pak discourse, moderation, platform standards18 Comments

Dear Punditeers,

A gentle reminder to take a breath and step back. Kabir is entitled to his views—there’s no obligation to counter every provocation point-by-point.

What’s troubling isn’t disagreement—it’s the sheer volume of rage replies. This doesn’t reflect the standard we aspire to. It’s neither civil nor intellectual. The only reason I’m stepping in is because, while I generally prefer light-touch moderation, the tone of these threads now reflects poorly on the broader community. It lowers the quality of both the commentariat and the platform.

We’ve seen this play out before—Sepia Mutiny is a cautionary tale. Let’s not replicate it.

So please: engage with ideas, not just identities. Let’s not derail into yet another endless Indo-Pak back-and-forth. We’re capable of better.

Warmly,

X.T.M

✉️ [Addendum]

On Nivedita’s query, I’ve finally re-created the Brown Pundits email account. It’s hosted on Gmail, but I’ve deliberately avoided posting the full address here to prevent spam harvesters. If you’d like to get in touch privately or share something offline, feel free to reach out via:

📧 brownpundits19 [@g]

The importance of being President

June 6, 2025June 6, 2025xperia2015Caste, Civilisation, Culture, India, Race, Uncategorizedcaste, India, Murmu, Optics, Politics, President, Representation, Social Justice, Tribal29 Comments

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.

Continue reading The importance of being President