India
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Izzat Maxing
X.T.M answers Q’s claim that India–Pakistan wars will stay short, arguing that allies matter only for the fifth day. He tests this against 1971, Kargil, Operation Sindoor and the Gulf…
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The iPhone, Babur & are sons sold in shops?
A Dalit with an iPhone 16 has purchasing power, not the end of caste. And a Turkic sword at the birth of Indo-Islam is not a claim over South Asian…
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IIT Bombay Says It Followed Procedure. A Student Is Dead.
Sahil Wakode was caught with his phone in a midterm at IIT Bombay and was dead by evening. The institute says he was counselled and reassured; the family alleges threats…
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FlyDie, Volume Two
Nineteen more FlyDie comments across six threads: the three pillars of caste, what the Mughals took from the land, how the Rig Veda got written, Kerala’s three-cornered trade, and Bollywood…
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Pakistan Punches Above Its Weight. Blame Aligarh.
X.T.M asks how Pakistan produces so much culture for its income, crediting Lucknow and Aligarh rather than Bollywood. In his account the Urdu-speaking salariat carried that culture west in 1947,…
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Pakistan Has a Dosa and Nobody Told You
“We Saraiki people make dosa,” my Urdu teacher told me. “We have a name for it: chilla.” A rice batter spread on a tawa and eaten with winter saag, in…
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In Remembrance of Shaheed Lt. Ashfaqus Samad, Bir Uttam (My Cousin Nishat Bhai):
A tribute, headed “by Shawkat”, to Lt. Ashfaqus Samad, a Dhaka University student who became one of the first guerrillas in Dhaka and was killed in action in the 1971…
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How Pakistan Became South Asia’s Reference Muslims
X.T.M argues that Partition cut one Muslim political world into three, and that Pakistan, having taken Urdu, now supplies the default picture of a South Asian Muslim. He calls this…
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Wild Tamil Nadu: An ode to the Tamil Nadus rich biodiversity
Calvin D’Souza reviews the documentary Wild Tamil Nadu, which follows the Sangam landscape classification from shola grasslands to coastal estuaries. He praises its new footage, including the Madras hedgehog and…
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Xi, Putin and Pezeshkian Walk Into Delhi
X.T.M reads the BRICS summit in Delhi, with Xi, Putin and Pezeshkian present during a US blockade of Iran, as the West’s non-Western partners rerouting around it. He sees BRICS…