blog discourse – Brown Pundits

🕌 Reflections on Kabir, Afridi, and the Compact of Coexistence

The recent incident involving Kabir / Bombay Badshah / Honey Singh, and the orchestrated drama around his entrapment has, quite unexpectedly, become a catalyst for deeper discussion on Brown Pundits. While none have chosen to focus on analytics (“2,000 daily visitors”—thank you very much:-), the real story lies in how this drama has exposed, yet again, the deep ideological fissures within South Asian identity; especially in the India-Pakistan-Muslim triad.

Let’s begin by being honest: Brown Pundits, for all its digressions into Sri Lanka, Nepal, or Bangladesh, is still primarily a blog about India and Pakistan, and more crucially, about Indian and Pakistani Muslims. This is a feature, not a bug. The origins of the blog lie in the Sepia Mutiny, a scattered band of intellectually independent thinkers questioning dogma from every direction (which started in 2004 and if we are a “daughter blog” that we means have 20+yrs of intellectual antecedents on the Brownet), and it has now matured into one of the few platforms willing to wrestle with the ideological ambiguities at the heart of the subcontinent.

🧕 Kabir’s Point: Brotherhood, Boundaries, and the Big Choice

Kabir made an astute, if difficult, observation: that he views Indian Muslims as “brothers”, but does not feel the same about Pakistani non-Muslims.

This sounds contradictory until one understands the emotional exhaustion of watching Muslims oscillate between claiming ummah-hood when convenient, and weaponizing liberal values when needed. It’s a cognitive dissonance that creates what I can only call the moral coexistence trap: the idea that Muslims, especially in India, demand maximum accommodation, of their food (their nauseating right to murder Gau Mata on Bharat’s sacred soil itself), Faith, festivals, and foreign affiliations, while rarely extending the same pluralistic courtesy in return.

And then there’s that infamous Shahid Afridi clip, the one where he smashed his television after watching an Aarti, being performed. To many of us, that wasn’t just a cringe-inducing moment of bigotry; it begged a real question: Why do Indian cricketers continue to shake hands with Hinduphobes Hindu-hating men like Afridi and his ilk (the Pakistan cricket team)? At what point does tolerance become indulgence?

🚩 The Compact of Indian Minorities: Understand It or Leave It

Continue reading The Honey Trap of the Ummah:

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