The king returns from his vanvaas, refreshed and with a mind filled with clarity.
Before my self-imposed exile X.T.M said something which I have pondered upon during my time away.
Pakistan has anyway lost to India alas; thus the Pakistanis have to constantly deprecate India and everything she stands for.
I don’t need to be getting into mud fights in the comments sections writing essays.
The victor doesn’t need to proclaim his victory. The defeated know.
And as the winner, I possess an asymmetric array of “tools” to do my “Dhurandharing”. Far more civil and high-signal and in a way, more wounding.
Of course, that does not mean I won’t participate in the comments, but it will be in a more “support” role. There are many Dhurandhars here with some springing up in my absence so I need not play as active a role.
I have also changed my profile picture to reflect that change. While my earlier picture was from when Hamza was actively involved in street fights, my current one is from the later part of the movie where he takes a bit of a back seat to co-ordinate other guys. Of course just like in the movie, I won’t hesitate to personally participate if necessary.
India’s GDP grew at 7.6% in the financial year 2024-2025 making it one of the fastest growing economies in the world.
It is also home to a vibrant capital market. The market capitalization of its listed companies at the end of 2025 stood at 4.75 trillion US Dollars.
India is also a young country. 65% of its population of 1.4 billion is below the age of 35.
The trifecta of economic growth, world class capital markets and a young population with access to technology has enabled breakneck growth, in the number of Indians investing in Indian equity markets via mutual funds and stock purchases.
The number of mutual fund investors in India was 2.08 crores at the end of year 2020. This number stood at 5.9 crores at the end of year 2025.
The number of Demat accounts in India stood at 4.98 crores at the end of year 2020 this number had grown to 21.59 crores by the end of year 2025.
In April 2026, Indians invested Rs 38.4 thousand crores in Indian equity markets through mutual funds.
I have been an investment adviser to individuals and institutional investors for almost 17 years now and have had front row seats as this growth has played out.
I have also had the chance to interact with investors in tier 2, tier 3 towns in India and I am also witness to the phenomenon of ‘fin-influencers’.
Fin-influencers are freelance financial advisers offering easy money schemes and ways of attaining Financial Independence and Retiring Early (FIRE) through their YouTube channels and Instagram handles.
Their channels have millions of subscribers and their videos and reels get tens of millions of views.
Viewers of these channels take home answers to the holy grail of all questions -How much money is enough to retire?
How much is enough for you to leave your job, move to a small town and spend your time tendering to your kitchen garden?
How much money do you need for you to leave your job, pack your bags and open a cafe in Dharmashala/Goa/Cochin or Tuticorin?
If you don’t like the figure, help is at hand. Viewers are given formulas to arrive at their own answers.
I have no data to prove how successful or unsuccessful fin-influencers have been in helping people achieve FIRE.
However we do have data on how Indians are investing in the derivative segment of Indian stock markets faring!
Derivative instruments are used by investors to manage risk and by speculators to make quick money.
If I want to run a cafe in Dehradun before I turn forty, my salaried job wouldn’t do.
I need to make money fast.
Enter a digital stack that lets me do derivative trades as easily as ordering a pizza online, an oversupply of ‘trade strategies’ and access to cheapest cellular data in the world.
I can now watch YouTube videos all day and ‘hone my trading skills’.
SEBI, regulator of capital markets in India, conducted a study and published a note in 2024.
The study revealed 93% of individual traders incurred losses in equity derivatives between financial years 2022 and 2024.
The aggregate losses of these traders for this three year period exceeded Rs 1.8 lakh crores.
To put the figure in perspective, the Government of India’s budgetary allocation to its Ministry of Health and Family Welfare in FY 2024 was Rs 80.5 thousand crores.
As part of my job, I am often asked- what is the rate of return one should expect from a growth oriented portfolio? My answer invariably disappoints because it does not augment dreams of early retirement.
I learnt, from some of the best investors and fund managers-investing is like watching paint dry.
My job and my experience of investing my own money have convinced me that is the only way.
There are no short cuts to financial freedom.
This book is my attempt at conveying a framework that has stood the test of time and helped people live better.
The book has no magic formulas and final figures.
No silver bullets that will ease the path to a cake and coffee shop in Almora.
If the world is watching YouTube, why write a book ?
I believe a reader gets more out of the content than a viewer.
Physical and financial health are keys to our sense of well being and confidence. They make our world go around. The book is my attempt at making investing accessible and relatable.
If you end up reading the book, please let me know if I got it right.
TVK ‘s Vijay and his secularism: A commentator had argued that whilst, other Hindu secularists need to criticize and some need to bad mouth (udayanidhi)Hinduism to be called progressive and secular, Vijay with his ‘Joseph ‘ name can be a secular just by being himself. If he goes the Dravidian way critizing hinduism, all hell will break loose.
Ironically non Hindu leaders, go all the way out by going to temples, wearing kumkum, vibhiti. So does Vijay , and yet claim to be secular.
So he does whatever he knows best, going to places of worship, do token good things in jayalalitha fashion.
2) Tata’s events: A naukar should be one and too much power to him in a closely held family enterprise appears to be the main essence of the tata problem. I feel that the family should regroup and take voting rights of non family members.
“Pahalgam took place because the PTI anti-military agitation had genuinely shaken the ‘roots’ of Pakistani military’s unquestioned supremacy and popularity domestically. Given Munir’s rapid roll up and consolidation of power, field marshal for life, lifetime immunity, constitutional authority beyond his base tenure, for now the cost-benefit equation even for PakMil does not indicate them risking a round 2. But that calculus can and unfortunately likely will change at some point.”
RNJ’s very incisive comment above is correct on the mechanism but rather conservative on the implication. India still runs Pakistan as a state on the verge of dissolution. However the strategic class has long since moved to “durable but dangerous,” but the public conversation has not caught up.
What Munir has built is not a pause before collapse. It is the consolidation of something more durable, the Prussia of the Ummah, governing through a hybrid in which the boiler vents and the bayonet holds.
Munir’s Compromise
Field marshal for life with constitutional immunity removes the standard succession variable in Pakistani politics. Every previous chief was a hostage to his retirement, every handover a season of conspiracy. Munir has now exited that game. The cost was heavy. PTI agitation in 2023 genuinely shook the army’s domestic legitimacy, the May 9 attacks on cantonments were the most serious internal challenge since 1971, and the suppression has been ugly. But the suppression worked. Imran Khan remains popular and remains in prison. PTI remains the largest party by vote share and remains shut out of power. The constitutional system absorbs the grievance into electoral form, which is to say it diffuses the steam without releasing the pressure.
Factional alignment inside GHQ, the perpetual Punjab-Sindh-KP-Balochistan imbalance, elite exhaustion under chronic fiscal stress, the Baluch insurgency, TTP, all remain live. Munir has fixed the variable he could fix. The others he has merely deferred.
The clip is short and damning. Alia Bhatt walks the Cannes red carpet as L’Oréal’s global face, waving at a thicket of photographers who never quite lift their cameras.
Sanam Saeed arrives in a white peacock couture by Hussain Rehar, fifty artisans and 2,354 hours, a tribute to Shamim Ara that the photographers actually shoot. Rehar’s accompanying showcase at Château St George is titled Lahore: A Knot in South Asia’s Loom, sitting one cabinet over from Gucci and Roberto Cavalli. The title is doing the work.
Cannes 2026 was supposed to be Bollywood’s annual export ritual. Instead, Pakistanis slid past the L’Oréal machinery and produced the festival’s most discussed South Asian image.
The following article is the original work of the author – Dr Rajorshi Datta. As such its views should be taken to be the opinion of the author and does not represent the opinion of Brown Pundits. If you find this article controversial the author invites you to post a respectful comment below to voice your arguments and perspectives.
I’ve gone back to 2014 looking at articles and podcasts posted about caste. There is information on the social and religious origins of caste within sacred texts like the Vedas and Dharmasutras. For the astute reader there are accounts from Megasthenes, Fa Hien and Xuanzhang whose writings present oblique perspectives on how caste or varna and jati was viewed by contemporary people living within or visiting the system. There’s a lot been said about the fact it exists strongly in India compared to China and Europe, and the genetic evidence to support this.
But there’s not so much about why this phenomena was so strong and strict in the Indian subcontinent and nowhere else. Here I present my thesis as to why it wasn’t luck but structural predisposition which sent India down its unique path of strict caste endogamy.
A controversial topic – why did the caste system form in India?
This post grew out of an exchange with EK, the kind that can only happen in a forum that has paid for its openness. Kabir, to his credit, has imposed the hard internal checks that keep the blog from collapsing into the views of its editors.
The high culture built by the three great gunpowder empires (Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal) is one of the supreme achievements of human civilisation. All three were Turkic in dynastic origin, Persianate in literary and aesthetic register, and Islamic in faith. The Blue Mosque in Istanbul, the Naqsh-e Jahan complex in Isfahan, the Taj Mahal at Agra: these are not regional artefacts. They are a single coherent civilisational signature, expressed in tilework, ghazal, miniature, garden, cuisine, and chancery prose, across a belt that ran from the Bosphorus to the Bay of Bengal.
The question this post is about is simpler than it sounds. Who inherits it?
Comments of late have drifted, as they sometimes do here, into territory where the Bahá’ís are invoked as a rhetorical chess piece by people who know very little about them. We believe in free speech, and on this blog more than most, in authorial autonomy; contributors and commenters speak for themselves, and we are not in the business of policing opinion. But because the question of Palestine sits adjacent to much of what has been said, we thought it worth setting down what the actual position is.
“Members of the National Spiritual Assembly who disappeared in August in 1980. All are presumed to have been killed” by Bahá’í Media Bank.
One caveat first. When we write or administer here, we do not speak for our Faith in any official capacity. We are members of it. That is the limit of our standing.
The clearest statement of the Bahá’í position comes from the pen of the Beloved Guardian of the Faith, Shoghi Effendi, who in July 1947 was asked directly by the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine to clarify the relationship of the Bahá’í community to the country and its political future. His reply, written from Haifa and reproduced in The Bahá’í World, Volume 11, is as close to a foundational text on this question as exists. We quote it at length, because paraphrase would not do it justice.
On July 9, 1947, Shoghi Effendi received a letter from the chairman of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine requesting a statement on the relationship, which the Baha’i Faith has to Palestine and the Baha’i attitude toward any future changes in the status of the country. From Shoghi Effendi’s reply, the following paragraphs are quoted in The Baha’i World, Volume 11 (1946-1950), pp.43-44.1
HAIFA, ISRAEL—15 July 1947
“The position of the Baha’is in this country is in a certain measure unique: Whereas Jerusalem is the spiritual center of Christendom it is not the administrative center of either the Church of Rome or any other Christian denomination. Likewise although it is regarded as the second most sacred shrine of Islam, the most Holy site of the Muhammadan Faith, and the center of its pilgrimages, are to be found in Arabia, not in Palestine. The Jews alone offer somewhat of a parallel to the attachment which the Baha’is have for this country, inasmuch as Jerusalem holds the remains of their Holy Temple and was the seat of both the religious and political institutions associated with their past history. But even their case differs in one respect from that of the Baha’is for it is in the soil of Palestine that the three central Figures of our Religion are buried and it is not only the center of Baha’i’ pilgrimages from all over the world but also the permanent seat of our Administrative Order, of which I have the honor to be the Head.”
“The Baha’i Faith is entirely nonpolitical and we neither take sides in the present tragic dispute going on over the future of the Holy Land and its people nor have we any statement to make or advice to give as to what the nature of the political future of this country should be. Our aim is the establishment of universal peace in this world and our desire to see justice prevail in every domain of human society, including the domain of politics. As many of the adherents of our Faith are of both Jewish and Moslem extraction, we have no prejudice towards either of these groups and are most anxious to reconcile them for their mutual good and for the good of the country.”
“What does concern us, however, in any decisions made affecting the future of Palestine, is that the fact be recognized by whoever exercises sovereignty over Haifa and Acre, that within this area exists the spiritual and administrative world center of a world Faith, and that the independence of that Faith, its right to manage its affairs from this source, the right of Baha’is from any and every country of the globe to visit it as pilgrims (enjoying the same privilege in this respect as Jews, Moslems and Christians do in regard to visiting Jerusalem), be acknowledged and permanently safeguarded.”
The following article is the original work of the author – Dr Rajorshi Datta. As such its views should be taken to be the opinion of the author and does not represent the opinion of Brown Pundits. If you find this article controversial the author invites you to post a respectful comment below to voice your arguments and perspectives.
