Open Thread: Bharat wins at Norway Chess, but something is off with Bollywood

June 6, 2026 X.T.M 44 Comments filed under Open Thread, X.T.M

Our 2026 reader survey is open until 7 June – anonymous, roughly five minutes. Please take a moment.

We are travelling, but South Indians, Tamilians?, are crushing it at chess. Praggnanandhaa took Norway Chess in Oslo this week with four straight classical wins to close, past Wesley So and over Gukesh on the way.

Which confirms the theory we have been quipping all trip: India, that is Bharat, owns the letter C. Chess, plainly. Cricket, obviously. Cuisine, beyond dispute. Culture, increasingly. Conversation, certainly (Desis are loud and loquacious). Caste, come to think of it..

However there is one C that has curdled: Cinema.

We caught the otherwise excellent Vadh 2 on the road. One scene was so gratuitously disturbing that we can’t shake it out of our minds.

Since Sacred Games, the sex and gore on Netflix India have not been there to serve a story. They are there to stimulate, and the audience being titillated are India’s masses. A young, idle, frustrated population is easiest to hold with sensation, so that is what is fed. This is not film-making. It is sedation at scale, and a restless country kept watching is silenced from increasing inequity (the largess of the Oligarchics) but perhaps deepening in rage (the constant ire at minorities)?

Ps: The Commentariat may also enjoy our newsletter piece on Mission Chandrayaan (Aug’23) witten prior to our re-engagement with BP, which we essentially inaugurated with Telugu being the Italian of the East (Sep’24).

The Newsletter and BP both started to kick off at roughly the same time; we decided to focus on BP since Substack is full of individual Auteurs but BP has a very venerable community, which we wanted to honour. The survey results are trickling through but what is astonishing is how sticky readers have been over this long decade and a half (BP will be 16 years in December; probably the oldest continuing Brown Blog on the internet).

Pps: Last call on the survey before it closes tomorrow.

Look closely and you may “see” what we have done throughout this post 🙂

Open Thread: Pakistan’s Demons are The Daughters of God

May 7, 2026 X.T.M 326 Comments filed under Open Thread, Popular, Precedent, X.T.M

Q writes on Pakistani source confirms US, Iran closing in on one-page memo to end war:

Total Pakistani victory. If Pakistan pulls off the mediation, this will its greatest diplomatic victory ever. Lifting of Iranian sanctions will allow cheaper Iranian oil to flow directly to Pakistan, and the oil pipeline can be finally completed. Complete eradication of Indian influence from Iran is now achieved, and this will also eliminate any support to BLA from across the border.

Pakistan post Sindoor is on a winning streak. The mediation is real, the memo is real, and if it holds, the diplomatic ledger for the year goes firmly into Rawalpindi’s column. Iranian oil at the door, IP pipeline thinkable for the first time in fifteen years, BLA lifelines into Sistan throttled, Chabahar quietly demoted. A Victorious month?

But the question is whether she can conquer her demons. And the demons are not in the foreign ministry. They are in the drama studios.

Q again, on Pakistani dramas:

Women low-key love abusive behaviour from attractive men. Pretty much all women fantasy porn is about this. (What they don’t love is abusive aggressive behaviour from ugly or poor men) Since females are the primary target audience of these dramas, they tend to show this because that’s what the market demands. I would not read too much into this. What’s more concering was that foreign funded NGOs were trying implement anti-family messaging in the last 15 years – and that messaging has suddenly dried up after their funding dried up.

Fantasy is not preference. A woman reading a brooding-billionaire romance is not auditioning for one. To collapse the two is to flatten the female imagination into a market signal, which is exactly what the Pakistani dramas do and exactly why they rot the culture that consumes them.

Daughters of God Continue reading Open Thread: Pakistan’s Demons are The Daughters of God

Open Thread; The Archive, The Lynching, and Humanity First

April 15, 2026 X.T.M 22 Comments filed under Open Thread, X.T.M

Open Thread — The Archive, The Lynching, and Humanity First

A note: we are currently backtagging the entire BP archive — all 3,987 posts. The comment boards may show cross-linked notifications as the system processes older threads. We will update when complete.

Gaurav Lele’s post today asks serious questions about asymmetric condemnation. It is worth reading carefully.

But one comment in the thread deserves to be elevated. Calvin wrote:

https://article-14.com/post/even-after-their-son-was-lynched-the-khan-family-did-not-leave-the-hindu-village-3-months-later-they-fled-694f49ba99322The fact is that the people caught in TCS case will be tried and spend years in jail. That is where the fundamental difference in response comes from, we know when the perpetrators are muslim not only them but even their family will suffer, this is not guaranteed when the muslim may be the victim.

Calvin is right. And the story he linked proves it.

Continue reading Open Thread; The Archive, The Lynching, and Humanity First