India’s lost decades: A failure of discourse
Plot of world gdp growth versus Indian gdp growth
There is much historical work on the Indian economy under British rule. The top line summary is indicated in the graph above, while the world grew quickly from 1800 to 1950 (per capita gdp more than tripling), India stayed exactly where it was. Plenty of reasons have been offered, but India’s troubles in this time come down to two reasons:
- A lack of natural resources necessary for industrial growth.
- British racial attitudes that deemed Indians unworthy of human investment.
The period I am more interested is the time between 1965 and 1982. The world experienced a surge in output in this time. South Korea went from around the same GDP per capita as India, to 7 times India’s output.
Swastika: Good Fortune? or Nazi Hate Symbol?
Amish Tripathi is an author who also has a popular youtube channel where he regularly posts videos about aspects of Hinduism/Dharma. I happened to run across the above video and wanted to start a discussion about the topic, and about how “pro-Hindu” (or if you prefer, pro-Indic) influencers tend to address this question and if that approach can be improved.
An Election in Pakistan
Thuglaq turns 54 and The Forgotten art of Dialectic!
Iranian if by land, Indian if by sea
Brigadier Malik Mohammed Aslam
Talking points re: caste
The “caste in America” issue just isn’t going away, and I keep having to resurface on social media. This post will be placeholder until I can set aside time to publish something more thorough and polished (between my startup and substack I can’t spare the marginal cycles on a piece about caste).
First, why do I care about caste? Though I have an intellectual interest in the topic, mostly it’s just that I get asked about it, a lot. Mostly this is driven by Indian American journalists writing about the pervasiveness of caste in tech, which I think is pretty much manufactured mostly out of a few incidents. If you are a subcontinental-looking person in the US in professional class situations you will be asked. This is why I have started to refer to myself as a Dalit online. Why not? Who is going to know? Some online Indian Leftists do accuse me of being an “upper caste Muslim,” but despite my origin from eastern Bengal’s rural landholder class my “lived experience” is that of a brown American.
Second,
Was Madhya Pradesh Designed to Dilute Muslim Concentration?
A Post-Partition Theory of State Formation in the Hindi Belt
India鈥檚 state formations have often been explained as products of linguistic reorganization (1956), administrative convenience, or colonial inheritance鈥攂ut what if there was an unspoken demographic dimension shaping the boundaries of certain states?
Madhya Pradesh, the so-called *heart of India*, presents an interesting case: it was deliberately constructed to dilute the political and demographic influence of its historically significant Muslim populations, particularly in Bhopal, Malwa, and Nimar. If this theory holds for MP, could the same logic apply to the entire Hindi belt?
As a side note, this idea originally stemmed from a Brown Pundit commentator many moons ago, who suggested that Uttar Pradesh was structured to dilute Muslim concentrations around Delhi and Rohilkhand.
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