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 🙂

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4. 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.

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

A theology that has no sovereign feminine cannot produce a culture that imagines one. What gets repressed at the level of the divine returns at the level of the drama. The serial heroine who is broken and remade by her tormentor is not a market accident. She is the only shape the feminine is permitted to take when the goddess has been cast out of the room.

This is why the Dharmic Subcontinent (Jambudvīpa) must centre Bharat Mata ki Jai and Vande Mataram. The unspeakably ancient Hindu civilisation kept its mothers as gods. The land is feminine, the river is feminine, the nation is feminine. Power runs through Shakti, not despite her. Where the goddess sits at the centre of the cosmology, the woman in the drama does not need to be broken to be loved. The civilisation has at least already imagined her Sovereign.

The Satanic Sirens

Islam at its founding made a different choice. Al-Lat, Al-Uzza and Al-Manat were the three goddesses of pre-Islamic Mecca, the Daughters of God. The Satanic Verses are the moment recorded by Tabari, Ibn Ishaq and Waqidi when their intercession was briefly admitted into the recitation and then revoked. The feminine divine was named, then exiled. The Kaaba kept the stone and lost the daughters.

This is the gap. A state can broker a US-Iran memo and still be civilisationally hollow. It can win the diplomatic round and lose the deeper one. The geopolitical ascent does not patch the cultural rot, because the rot is not a policy failure and it cannot be fixed by a ministry. It is the long downstream of an exile fourteen hundred years old, and it shows up in what a culture lets its women dream about, and what it lets its men say about those dreams in public.

Pakistan’s demons are not Indian. They are not American. They are her own daughters, cast out of the Kaaba and waiting at the door. The Satanic Verses are not so Satanic. Welcome back to Al-Lat, Al-Uzza and Al-Manat.