Reading Kabirâs thoughtful post on the âsoft Hindutvaâ bias at Brown Pundits, I found myself both agreeing with parts of his argument and diverging from its framing. My own journey with BP goes back to its inception. The blog was born in Twixmas December 2010; 10 days after I had met Dr. Lalchand, whose presence has profoundly shaped my civilizational views.
I say this not as a biographical aside but because BP, at its best, is where the personal and civilizational collide. We bring who we are; our marriages, our migrations, our contradictions, into this messy, brilliant conversation.
At the time, like many Pakistanis, I held a deep-seated assumption: that Hindus were fundamentally âother.â It wasnât overt hatred; just a civilizational distance, internalized from birth. But Dr. V & Brown Pundits challenged that.
A Forum With Bias? Yes. But Which One?
The heart of BP is not neutrality; itâs the willingness to host contradiction. That is its genius, and it must be protected.
A few of us authors have been actively discussing the future of Brown Pundits;Â the space, the tone, and the deeper ideas weâre engaging. It started informally on our WhatsApp group, but the questions are foundational: What kind of platform is BP becoming? What should it strive to be? And what kinds of ideas does it host best?
At its best, Brown Pundits is a bridge; across nations, faiths, ideologies, and lived experiences. Itâs a space where one can be deeply Indian, wholly Pakistani, broadly Bangladeshi, or diasporic and disillusioned but still belong. But like any bridge, it needs conscious upkeep. If a conversation leans too far in one direction, it doesnât stretch, it collapses inward.
Some contributors feel the platform has become overly shaped by one ideological current. Others argue that the real problem isnât dominance, but disengagement ; those who want plurality must also show up. And both perspectives can be true.
Iâve been following the usual commentary, the BP quadrant: Indosauras, Nivedita, Kabir. And I read Kabirâs offhand remark that the Ramayana âdidnât resonateâ the way the Iliad or Odyssey did. That casual dismissal is telling.
The Ramayana is not just literature, Â it is scripture, memory, and civilization encoded in verse. It has shaped the moral and cultural landscape of over a billion people for millennia. To compare it, then downplay it and to do so so glibly reveals less about the text and more about oneâs own civilizational estrangement.
Letâs be honest: that kind of language would never be used for the Quran or Islamic texts. And the fact that it is used for Hindu epics by brown intellectuals raised in the shadows of colonial categories says everything about how deeply colonized the Pakistani mind remains. Pakistan is, in truth, an Urdufied Punjab insufficiently imagined, a fragment that lost its civilizational compass in the act of imagining itself apart. The fact that the Ramayan being Pakistani heritage is such a novelty speaks volumes.
Today I sat at Stratford Westfield, eating Dubai Hot Chocolate ice cream, and the man next to me clearly Pakistani asked me, in Urdu, âif I was in the queue?â His wife spoke Punjabi-inflected Urdu. It struck me how London has become the real unifying Punjab. Ten percent of Britain is now Desi. And outside of the subcontinent, the fractures of 1947 heal in ways that remain impossible back home.
We speak of South Asia. But the term is bureaucratic; no one identifies with it. India is real. Bharat is civilizational. Aryavarta stretches from the Hindu Kush to the Indian Ocean â just as France is the Hexagon, Bharat is the Triangle. Partition clipped its wings, but its soul remains intact.
And look at the reality today: Indian Muslims are thriving in the mainstream. The title song of the upcoming film Sarai â written, composed, and directed by three Muslims: Ishaq, Fahim, and Arsalan. The leading lyricist is Javed Akhtar. This is a country that refused bitterness. A country whose largest minority chose Partition, and yet was never cast out, a unique precedent and testament the pluralism of Dharma.
Bharat needs no validation. It doesnât need the approval of its neighbours or the heirs of partitioned imagination. It only needs to walk â and it is flying. Toward its own authenticity, on its own terms. And the world is watching.
When producer Namit Malhotra began explaining the Ramayana to Hans Zimmer, the legendary composer cut him off:
âYou donât have to explain it to me. Something that has lasted thousands of years clearly has meaning. Letâs just do our best. Itâs beyond us.â
Malhotra took this as reverence. In fact, it was erasure.
No serious Western artist would score The Ten Commandments or Schindlerâs List without knowing the story. Imagine a composer saying, âDonât explain the Illiad to me, itâs beyond me.â Theyâd be fired. But when it comes to Indian epics? The bar is subterranean. Thatâs not reverence.
Thatâs: Iâm Western, Iâm famous, Iâm here for the cheque; not the history. The tragedy isnât Zimmerâs line. Itâs Malhotraâs awe. A Westerner shrugs off our most sacred text, and we call it wisdom. Thatâs not cultural pride. Thatâs civilizational confusion. Itâs a pattern. Many elite Indians are fluent in the language of Islamic grievance; but tone-deaf to Western condescension.
Divide and rule still works:
Hindus thank the British for âfreeingâ them from Muslim rule
Muslims thank the British for âprotectingâ them from Hindu majoritarianism
Meanwhile, the West shrugs at our stories and we applaud.
On July 14, I wrote about Taâarof ; the millennia-old Persian art of flattery, refusal, and ritualised courtesy. Itâs often misunderstood in the West as âsaying no three times,â but itâs really about emotional high-context negotiation, reading the room before the room speaks.
The next day, on July 15, Sharghzadeh posted a powerful video, calling it Iranian Diaspora Fatigue. A searing takedown of the Iranian Diaspora’s toxic racial insecurities, internalised Islamophobia, misogyny masked as modernity, and cultural denialism. Heâs mostly right.
What he calls fatigue, Iâd call poisoned flattery turned inward. Because Tehranglos are no longer performing Taâarof to honour guests or elders. They’re doing it to whiteness itself. Hoping if they refuse our own identity long enough, maybe the West will say: âYes, come in.â
Thatâs not assimilation. Thatâs exhaustion. And the worst part? Even the racism feels borrowed; against Arabs, against Afghans, against Iranians back home. Itâs not even Iranian. This isnât just about cringe TikToks or awkward panel guests. Itâs about who gets to narrate Persian culture. And what gets flattened when tradition becomes product. I was stunned when Zachary Newman â one of the most prominent Persian-Jewish American chefs â endorsed Netanyahuâs strikes on Iran. That moment crystallised something.
Sharghzadeh and I are saying the same thing: Persian culture is being gentrified by its own children. What survives isnât tradition. Itâs content. Itâs vibes. If Iran is an unreadable poem, diaspora is turning it into a slogan. If Iran is lived, diaspora is increasingly just captioned. And they wonder why they’re tired. Is the Persian diaspora preserving a culture, or just performing it for the algorithm?
As I board my flight back to the UK after a brief but productive trip, I find myself reflecting on a language that continues to haunt and inspire me: Urdu.
It is a tongue caught between paradoxes. The language of courtesans and qawwals, of sacred supplication and sly seduction. It carries within it the scent of jasmine and blood, of Delhiâs dusk and Lahoreâs lingering grief.
The Beloved Guardian of the Bahaâi Faith once noted that while most Bahaâi texts should be translated from English, Urdu alone is trusted for direct translation from Persian and Arabic. That proximity, that spiritual siblinghood with Persian, the language of kings, and Arabic, the language of God, renders Urdu magical.
Sanskrit, of course, is the language of gods, but Urdu, its stepdaughter of sorts, captures the longing of poet to partisan.
Thereâs a reason the BahĂĄâĂ prayer I share below is so piercing in Urdu. So here, before I cross back into another timezone, I offer this prayerâwithout commentary, without translation. Just Urdu, as it was meant to be heard.
And I wonder: perhaps this is what Pakistan truly isâa project in transcending the local. Not rooted in soil, but in sentiment. A place where Punjabis, Pathans, and Muhajirs are asked to shed skin and commune in Urdu. Where Pakistaniyat, for all its fractures, has succeeded in producing a common idiom: of piety, pride, and pain. Continue reading Pakistaniat & Urdu from Qasim to Quaid
I recently saw a cringeworthy clip of Rainn Wilson, yes that Rainn Wilson, earnestly trying to explain Taâarof (while not even being able to pronounce Tahdig). The famed Iranian art of polite refusal was reduced, predictably, to the idea of âsaying no three times.â A charming simplification, perhaps, but a misleading one.
The Ritual of Misunderstanding
Taâarof is a millennia-old Persian artform; rooted perhaps as far back as the Achaemenid Empire. It is centered on flattery, politeness, and ritualised courtesy and is not merely etiquette; it is the performance and ritualisation of it.
Because Tarof isnât about numerical formulae. Itâs not just âno means yes after the third try.â Itâs not a knock-knock joke.
Onunchi, Taâarof, and High-Context Societies
Tarof is best understood as high-context negotiation within deeply hierarchical and emotionally attuned societies; a kind of cultural Onunchi (ě¨ëěš), for those familiar with Korean sociolinguistics. Itâs the art of reading the room before the room speaks. More than etiquette, Tarof is a performance of dignity through flattery, deferral, and intuition.
And thatâs precisely whatâs being lost; not just in Rainnâs version, but in the Westernisation of diasporic Persian culture more broadly.
In the aftermath of the extremely tragic plane crash in Ahmedabad (the photo features the late Ali family, may they rest in the Highest Heaven), one tiny detail stood out; not the cause of the disaster (still contested), but who was being heard. Many of the victimsâ families interviewed by the BBC were of Muslim origin(it was also during the Eid Holiday break). And while that may seem incidental, it reveals a subtle, recurring pattern in Indiaâs public discourse.
