Meltdown BhāáčŁya: Verse 1.1.1 (Part 1.1)

Arkacandra Jayasimha · August 13, 2025 · 1 comment

This post is a continuation of my Introduction to Accelerationism. The goal of this project is to explore Accelerationist Philosophy (with an emphasis on the work of Nick Land) and explain it from a Hindu perspective with an exegetical and comparative focus on the Vedas, Itihāsas, and Tantras, among other traditional Hindu texts.

Technocapital Singularity & A Brief History of Capitalism, Commoditization & Production, and Primordial Desire

Originally Published: January 26, 2025

[1].[1].[1] The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalitization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off.

“Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman, as it rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities, and hacks through security apparatuses, tracking a soulless tropism to zero control. This is because what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy’s resources. Digitocommodification is the index of a cyberpositively escalating technovirus, of the planetary technocapital singularity: a self-organizing insidious traumatism, virtually guiding the entire biological desiring-complex towards post-carbon replicator usurpation.”— Machinic Desire (Land, 1993)

Continue reading Meltdown BhāáčŁya: Verse 1.1.1 (Part 1.1)

Review: Desertion by Abdulrazak Gurnah

Kabir · August 13, 2025 · 1 comment

From my Substack: 

When Abdulrazak Gurnah won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2021, he was comparatively little-known. I must confess that I had never heard of him. This is despite the fact that I am an ardent fan of English literature and am also deeply interested in issues of colonialism. I have read most of the fiction concerned with British colonialism in South Asia including Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Scott’s The Raj Quartet and Forster’s A Passage to India. Perhaps part of the reason that I was not familiar with Gurnah’s work was that I have not focused much on Africa as a region (except for North Africa, which can be said to be more of an extension of the Arab world than the African continent proper). However, even within the domain of African fiction, Gurnah is an author that is unfamiliar to most readers. For example, school curricula in the US often include Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country. I very much doubt that any curricula so far has included Gurnah’s works. Hopefully, that will change now that he has received the Nobel Prize.

Gurnah is a British citizen of Zanzibari origin. He grew up at a time when Zanzibar was a British protectorate separate from the colony of Tanganyika. After both colonies achieved independence, a revolution overthrew the Arab elite in Zanzibar and the region later merged with Tanganyika to form Tanzania. Gurnah had left to study in the UK before this revolution broke out and he describes himself as a refugee. He completed his Phd in Literature and served as a Professor at the University of Kent, from which he recently retired. His academic work deals with postcolonial literature, including that of Rushdie. Continue reading Review: Desertion by Abdulrazak Gurnah

Browncast: Trump, Tariffs, Hurt Feelings, and India..

Omar Ali · August 11, 2025 · 4 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 I talk to Kushal Mehra (Host of the Carvaka podcast) and regular Brownpundit Amey Chaugle about the tariff kerfuffle… the public (and on Trump’s side, frequently intemperate) war of words between the USA and India that is partly about India’s protectionist tariff regime but maybe mostly about other things (such as Donald’s ego and his desire to get that Nobel Peace Prize)..
Dig in and add your comments. We too don’t know exactly why this is going on and where it will end..  🙂

Trump Imposes Total 50% Tariff On Indian Goods, India Hits Back

Review: The Music Room by Namita Devidayal

Kabir · August 11, 2025 · 1 comment

From my Substack:

Namita Devidayal’s memoir The Music Room is a chronicle of her relationship with her guru Dhondutai Kulkarni (1927-2014). The book describes Devidayal’s initiation into Hindustani classical music as a reluctant ten-year-old from Bombay’s upper-middle class. Along with describing her growing appreciation for Dhondutai and the music that she imparts to her, the narrative also tells the story of two other important figures in Hindustani music: Ustad Alladiya Khan (1855-1946)–the founder of the Jaipur-Atrauli gharana–and Keserbai Kerkar (1892-1977)–one of the most famous khayal singers of the 20th century. Through telling the stories of these individuals, Devidayal elucidates several important themes such as communalism and “Hinduization” of music as well as the place of women in classical music.

Devidayal describes the process through which Hindustani music became communalized and “Hinduized”. Though Dhondutai is extremely proud of the musical legacy passed on to her by Alladiya Khan Sahib’s family, she still expresses some bigoted views about Muslims. When pressed on this by Devidayal, Dhondutai attempts to square the circle by telling her that Ustad Alladiya Khan was not a real Muslim since he was (allegedly) descended from a Brahmin singer who had been forced to convert to Islam by a Muslim king. She also notes that he always wore the caste thread usually worn by Brahmins. This story allows Dhondutai to hold the belief that Hindustani classical music is essentially Hindu despite the fact that many of the most prominent gharanas had Muslim founders. Dhondutai’s prejudices connect back to the broader process through which–during the colonial period– Hindustani music was “Hinduized” by reformers such as Pandit Bhatkhande and Pandit Paluskar. Bhatkhande wanted to create a “national music” and believed that Hindustani music had been degraded by Muslims and dancing girls and needed to be rescued from both. This process has been extensively discussed by Janaki Bakhle in her book Two Men and Music: Nationalism in the Making of an Indian Classical Tradition. Unfortunately, while most ethnomusicologists agree that Hindustani music is a syncretic tradition, many (on both sides of the India-Pakistan border) persist in claiming it for one or the other religion. Continue reading Review: The Music Room by Namita Devidayal

Ghalib for Gen Z

Furqan Ali · August 10, 2025 · 3 comments
This review was originally published at The Friday Times.

Publisher: Folio Books

Publishing date: 2021

Authors:  Anjum Altaf & Amit Basole

“For Ghalib, life is an unending search. Neither the holy of holies in Mecca nor even the attainment of paradise is the end of it.” ~Ralph Russell

We’ve all heard of that crooked genius, Mirza Asadullah Beg Khan Ghalib — whether through our school Urdu courses (unfortunately encountered at an age when our consciousness is still unripe) or through pop culture. Sometimes it’s his well-known fantasy for mangoes; other times it’s when someone shares a couplet whose slightly convoluted vocabulary immediately earns it the label of “a Ghalib shayr”; and other times, his destitution and scrambling for a pension.

As a Gen Z myself, I can say that most of today’s youth are largely alienated from the Urdu language, let alone Persian. And of course, this doesn’t mean we’re reading Byron or Eliot instead; rather, it’s the excess of TikTok. Decoding Ghalib feels like a Herculean task for us. This dilemma not only distances us from a rich poetic tradition but also from the timeless lessons it has nurtured.

Continue reading Ghalib for Gen Z

Why Indian English Loves Long Sentences

X.T.M · August 10, 2025 · 4 comments

If China endured a century of humiliation, India has lived through a thousand years of it. Invasions and exploitation left it poor in wealth but rich in culture; intricate, adaptive, and resilient. That depth shows in Desi English, which often favours long, ornate sentences over plain ones.

This habit echoes Persian’s former role in the subcontinent: a prestige language whose mastery signalled rank. Even Ghalib’s vast Persian verse drew less love than his Urdu. In India, Persian was the colonial language of power; today, English plays that part.

In Iran, Persian changes fast. Slang, borrowed terms, and foreign tones reshape it so quickly that many in their forties struggle with teenage speech. My own Persian, kept alive in Kuwait and India, is closer to Shirazi and Tehrani standards than to the language my ancestors spoke. I’m self-conscious with Iranians, but with diaspora Persians, I speak freely; we share a looser, accented form of speech. Continue reading Why Indian English Loves Long Sentences

Review: A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile by Aatish Taseer

Kabir · August 9, 2025 · 16 comments

From my Substack:

Aatish Taseer begins his new essay collection A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile (Catapult 2025) by recounting the Indian government’s 2019 cancellation of his Overseas Citizenship of India (OCI). The pretext for this decision was that Taseer had concealed the Pakistani origin of his father (the late Salman Taseer, a former Governor of Punjab who was assassinated by his own bodyguard after calling for Pakistan’s blasphemy laws to be amended). However, Taseer believes that the real reason that his OCI was canceled was that he had written a critical article about Prime Minister Modi entitled “India’s Divider in Chief”. He writes: “In one stroke, Modi’s government cut me off from the country I had written and thought about my whole life, and where all the people I grew up with still lived.”

Later in the “Introduction”, Taseer describes the impact that this decision had on him and how it led to the essays contained in the book under review:

If these essays feel like a return to self, it is because they represent the return of my natural curiosities and, dare I say it, cosmopolitanism, after the long night of cutting away parts of myself in order to better fit back into Indian life. They are a response to the illusion of the idea of home. The strand of elation that runs through them is the simple joy of being out in the world, free of the pressures of belonging. Perhaps there could not have been any other response, given that my country, my material, my world in India,had been snatched from me. I grew up in what felt to me like the crucible of all anxieties related to belonging. Those anxieties run through these essays, but they are also a tribute to the individual. After all the wringing of wrists, the stewing over questions of place, of feeling myself forever betwixt and between, I woke up one day to find the bars of my prison had magically disappeared, and, far from being scared, I felt a new vein of intellectual curiosity had opened for me. With the idea of home gone, I stepped out into the world again.

Continue reading Review: A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile by Aatish Taseer

Quite Hectic Days

Furqan Ali · August 9, 2025 · 11 comments

Recently, I’ve been traveling a lot for my formal project: assessing the governance framework of 46 HEIs (universities) in Pakistan. We’re looking at the de jure autonomy of universities (in governance, finance, staffing, academics, and research) versus the de facto reality. Where, like many other sectors, higher education is overregulated.

We’re struggling a lot. Universities are mushrooming (95 in 2002 to 269 in 2024) without any meaningful output, just producing PhDs like rabbits (177 in 2002 to 3489 in 2024). Result: not a single Pakistani university ranks in the global top 350.

I’ve visited different universities. (inter-alia):

Riphah International University, Islamabad – a private HEI. The I-8 campus is small, but with multiple campuses they cater to around 30,000 students. What’s interesting is how deeply Islamic morality is embedded in their institutional values. It’s the only university (out of the 8–9 I’ve visited so far) whose vision and mission are explicitly integrated with Islamic principles. They even have around 10 credit hours dedicated to teaching morality. Quite remarkable in this era of modernity and expediency. Continue reading Quite Hectic Days

Madhuri is stronger than the Ambanis

X.T.M · August 8, 2025 · 10 comments

In the name of Pakistan, which is a beautiful poetic name, “Land of the Pure”, lies the tragedy of pathological purity. It is an addendum to the desire to stay pure. To remain untainted. But purity, when pursued absolutely, becomes brittle.

Madhuri Mahadevi

The Ambanis recently relocated Elephant Madhuri from Kolhapur’s Jain Math to the Vantara rehab centre, citing health concerns. But the move, though framed as rescue, triggered emotional protests, political pushback, and a national debate over animal welfare vs. sacred tradition.

Why did it explode? Because Madhuri wasn’t just a creature in need of savin; she was a living deity to those who loved her. Her departure wasn’t a routine animal welfare decision. It was a rupture in India’s civilizational relationship to the divine in nature. One of the most remarkable aspects of Hinduism is its seamless veneration of the natural world. The river is a mother. The cow, a guardian. The elephant, divine.

Few religions integrate reverence for nature into daily life with such tenderness and theological consistency. This story, of an elephant, a corporate empire, and a temple, speaks to a larger tension in India today: Who gets to define care? And when does “rescue” become removal? Continue reading Madhuri is stronger than the Ambanis

Brown Pundits