Thoughts that Shape Power 

Once upon a time I worked in a defense think tank in New Delhi. It was a fun, fresh-out-of-college job. The pay sucked, but the conversation was always rich, and we had tea time twice a day. 

Every Friday morning we were encouraged to sit through a Research Briefing by one of our colleagues. Presentations lasted an hour and were divided into two parts – the presentation itself, and the question/critique period. Everyone — from fresh-faced interns (myself) to retired professionals — was encouraged to present their research or some other topic of interest and receive audience feedback. The variety of personal backgrounds at the institute guaranteed a range of quality for the presentations. What was most shocking to me, as an intern, was that senior researchers were often the sources of tremendous bullshit. 

One Friday, a scholar — whose name I will not mention — gave a presentation on the Indo-Bangladesh border. They offered detailed recommendations for securing the region, including drones, CCTV cameras, electrified fencing, checkposts, watchtowers, and more. The presentation lasted a full 30 minutes; the question period, which had been allotted the same amount of time, lasted only five. 

A retired army colonel simply asked, “What will all this cost?” The scholar was unable to provide a straightforward answer, and hemmed and hawed for a few more minutes before the moderator broke early for tea. 

I went back to my office and looked up the scholar’s research presentation, which was usually uploaded onto the institute website before the sessions. Her presentation had tickled something in the back of my mind — a sense of familiarity. Upon looking up her work and running a few Google searches, I realized that her presentation was essentially a copy-paste of a policy proposal about the US-Mexico border that was being debated in the United States. The price tag for the proposal was around $15 billion, without adjusting for the radically different geography of the Indo-Bangladesh border region. To put that in context, India’s military budget in 2011 was $36 billion, and this researcher was casually proposing that the country find half that amount to secure the Indo-Bangladesh border. 

Copy-pasting ideas isn’t particularly exceptional in Indian academia, but I didn’t realize how prevalent and brazen it was until that session. I knew that the Indian university system was notorious for lax ethical standards — plagiarism, data massaging, poor logic, and outright fabrication are all rampant. I did not realize until years later that the laxity was by design. 

You see, universities aren’t primarily places dedicated to the pursuit of truth and knowledge, although that is how they advertise themselves. They actually exist to train (read: indoctrinate) a country’s intellectuals across a broad spectrum of disciplines and allow them to network. They cultivate each generation of elite professionals to manage their country’s economy, security, education, and cultural institutions. Elite education systems freely circulate diverse ideas to maximize the possibility of students being exposed to useful ones, but are also supposed to provide students with tools to contextualize ideas. One eye gives you exposure, two gives you depth (three gives you insight, but that’s a whole different story). When properly supported with strong ethical standards that punish lying, plagiarism, and laziness, and professional standards that control egotism, status-seeking, gatekeeping, tribalism, and other antisocial behaviors, graduates from “finishing” institutes enter civic life and promote and develop ideas that are essential for a country’s prosperity and security. 

Indian universities successfully expose their students to the world’s diversity, but fail at contextualization, ethical, and professional standardization. Teaching students to keep one eye closed is intentional. Understand that all elite networks consolidate their power around a very narrow range of ideas — first principles that govern their behavior and unite them. Unfortunately, the very system of education that trains the elite also gives people the skills to totally reformulate the fundamental logic that allows the elite to remain united, and thus powerful. 

Since independence, powerful elite factions in India consolidated their power using first principles that were formulated by British and other Western intellectuals, who wanted to exploit the country and prevent the formation of political opposition. Their first principles were formulated to advance this agenda. Individuals who study and enter the workforce in environments where the paths to success are controlled by ideologues — and alternatives are, to put it diplomatically, disincentivized — have little reason to develop and gain support for new theories and models of understanding. Even when people do create new theoretical frameworks, they must then gain sufficient financial and social support from established patron networks. Thus senior researchers, students, or anyone else can lazily or maliciously promote bad ideas without worrying about unsettling established patrons. 

Instead of being the heralds of progress, instead of helping create an intellectual culture that could build an independent India, the higher education system reinforced colonial control systems. The rules and personal relationships that form the body of India’s intellectual institutions are being reformed, but the first principles that are the foundation of intellectual life are much more difficult to change. 

Limited Perspective 

An optometrist’s client barges into his clinic. The client is covered in mud, his clothes are torn, and he has cuts and bruises all over himself. He puts his brand-new glasses on the counter and says, “These glasses don’t work! I just got hit by a cart while crossing the street! I demand a refund!” 

The optometrist looks stunned and asks, “You couldn’t see the cart with your new glasses?” 

The client responds, “How could I? It hit me from behind!” 

Or as the old saying goes: you can only see what you look at, and you can’t look at everything at once. 

First principles are the ideologies that dictate how we look at the world; they are rules to which all other rules must adhere. The laws of thermodynamics, for example, are first principles in the material sciences. In modern politics, first principles are often defined in constitutions and describe a society’s ideals and aspirations, the boundaries of legitimate power, and the rights that society grants its people. Not all first principles are written; some are simply unquestioned social norms people follow. The foundational logic of a society is its culture, a word whose root literally means “to cultivate” — in this case, to cultivate a way of thinking and a way of doing. 

Societies express first principles through fashion, conventions of communication, and taboos. They mark the boundaries of acceptable behavior — often the boundaries of acceptable thought — in power exchanges, and are enforced by violence or exclusion. Access to elite networks, and all the privileges and material advantages that confers, depends on outwardly expressing and supporting those principles. 

In social studies and history, Indian scholars purposefully underemphasized the upheaval caused by British rule as a fundamental cause of rampant inequality in the country. Indian scholars, at the behest of the Indian National Congress, instead created a narrative based on caste dynamics, and then linked pre-colonial inequality to present-day inequality, neatly skipping over a hundred and fifty years of social engineering and misgovernance by the British. A deeper examination of their foundations quickly exposes the shallowness of this hypothesis. Yet this interpretation is used in Indian economic jurisprudence. 

Similar faulty logic, shaped by political ideology, is found in every field of the humanities. For example, India’s political divisions are studied as a left-right binary, despite the diversity of the political ideological ecosystem. The BJP is painted as a right-wing authoritarian party and compared to other autocratic parties in the West (namely Nazi Germany), while its opposition, the Congress, is viewed as a bastion of liberal democratic values. An actual analysis of positions would show a much more complex landscape, with both parties representing liberal, autocratic, and conservative positions under different circumstances. 

India’s economic policy, meanwhile, was trapped in a 75-year experiment with socialism based on economic theories borrowed from the Soviet Union and fringe Western intellectuals. Unquestioning adherence to these theories left India with deep and vicious poverty among the worst in the world. Once the economy was liberalized, the bureaucracy under the UPA I regime decided that India would not rebuild its manufacturing capability, but would instead focus on developing its service sector with the IT industry, based on theories proposed by the World Bank and several Western universities. 

The Indian elite adopted English as the language of business, scholarship, and power. They justified this decision by linking speaking English with access to international markets dominated by the United States and England. Don’t speak English? Good luck getting a decent-paying job, entrance to a top university, or access to elite social networks. Belief that English is the language of access is so deeply rooted that ethno-linguistic nationalists consider it more acceptable to speak than a different native language. For example, Hindi speakers are viciously attacked by Tamil and Kannada linguistic chauvinists. 

Where India’s post-colonial elite couldn’t assert direct control over the country’s intellectual spaces, they flooded them with misinformation — fabricated research, rumormongering, and propaganda — following Lenin’s tactic of “every idea being worth a thousand pages of writing.” In a battle for narrative control, quantity is always better than quality. 

Parroting ideas from the West is the easiest way to gain legitimacy among old elite circles in India, because the supremacy of the West was established during the colonial era. “The West is Best” is the first principle of their power, and mirroring Western language and ideas allows aspirants to access guarded avenues of prosperity. Curiously, it also allows the elite to access international elite networks and capital streams to support their local projects, but that is a tangent to explore later. First principles, at least on sociological levels, establish a standard that people use to determine affiliation — a single idea that doesn’t necessarily need to be articulated, but delineates the legitimate from the illegitimate. 

The Mission 

Although the British were motivated by profit to subjugate India, theft was only part of the project. A significant portion of the British elite also wanted to civilize Indians through religious conversion and Europeanization. Missionaries were given authority to establish schools to deracinate and convert Hindus. Communist writer Frantz Fanon described this phenomenon in his book The Wretched of the Earth, where he argued that the goal of European education in the colonial world was to create natives who were at their core European — they wore the skin of the native, but held faith in the mission of their oppressors. Fanon further explained that even after independence, the post-colonial elite continued to rule as their European masters had ruled, by exploiting the native population for their own benefit. 

If one only looks at the colonial era through a Marxist lens — that the era was purely about material gains — then Fanon’s theory is exactly what happened in India. The Indian National Congress was effectively created by the English to manage revolutionary activity and ensure a transition to an independent India ruled by people who held English values: in other words, an English-educated minority led by Nehru and his clique. However, when one looks past Fanon’s analysis, one sees the political environment was much more complicated. A Muslim elite who believed it was their mission to complete the Islamic expansion into the Indian subcontinent (under the Islamic revival/caliphate movement), and a communist elite who believed it was their responsibility to turn India into a communist paradise, also competed for power. Christianity, Islam, communism, and Euro-centrist Nehruvians all established power bases in India, drew resources from international capital, and pursued policies that were hostile to native political power. Strangely, the goal of these post-colonial factions was not primarily to extract resources, but to pursue what the British saw as their secondary mission — civilizing the country. 

Why these factions pursued ideological goals instead of focusing on purely material gains is a story unto itself, but suffice to say that their first principles are logically consistent. Indian elites whose worldview is defined by native first principles do exist and have gained power. However, the commanding heights of the narrative economy — namely the universities and media, where mass culture is shaped — are still largely controlled by non-native ideological forces. 

I’ve come to the realization, after many years of reflection, that the senior scholar at the think tank plagiarized US border policy because it was a very loud debate in the United States. Not only was the research publicly available, but potential political patrons would have heard about the debate. She could have just as easily chosen another country, but promoting something that was popular in the US was more likely to get her noticed. She advanced her career by publishing work from the West, and also served the interests of the elite by adding more noise to intellectual spaces and preventing actual border security reforms from being taken seriously. Useful idiots like her are common in Indian academia — not by accident, but by design. 

He was the youngest full prof @ 37 ever for the university. A meteoric career rise through 4-5 other prestigious universities. Hired for his dissertation on critical race theory. According to his backstory – non verbal till 11, illiterate @ 18, phd @ 31. Ran 600 miles in 6 days through will power. There is also the epilepsy due to a race attack & magnanimity in forgiving his attackers.

These are just the highlights, there is so much more. Sounds too good to be true? It really is a crazy story and most parts are quite unverifiable or inconsistent.

What was provable was his rampant plagiarism in his papers and dissertation. The people who pointed it out (on substack) – Nathan Cofnas, got fired from Cambridge. David Harris, the original whistle blower, got dropped from his college in plymouth. A journalist who reported it, got investigated by the met police on a complaint by Arday.

Arday has now resigned, the met police has apologised, Cofnas is crowing on substack and David Harris has been reinstated.

Questions are now being asked as to why Arday’s ludicrous claims were never challenged by the various universities, he was given uk govt work, for race related curriculum matters, a book deal (claimed million $ + advances).

This scandal, though far more explosive, mirrors the ousting of Harvard president Claudine Gay for plagiarism.

Are people progressive abroad and conservative at home? Do Indians and Pakistanis identify with progressive movements abroad, to make common causes amongst people of colour, then make a hard right turn on the plane back home? Statistically I would say, this seems to be the case. Indians being to the Right of Pakistanis abroad (due to higher income & religion?). But is this sensible, internally consistent, and should people abide by it?

Where do brown people feature in critical race theory?

Addendum: There are some errors, many thx to A for pointing them out.

• Arday was not the youngest full professor at Cambridge, only the youngest Black professor. For instance, Isaac Newton was younger when appointed a professor at Cambridge.
• Cofnas was not fired for his (in) famous substack post commenting on Arday’s alleged plagiarism. That came recently. He was fired a couple of years ago for an article on differential academic abilities among different groups (sometimes called “ races”).
• Ditto for Harris. He was dismissed for his critique of Critical Race Theory. He was then reinstated by Plymouth after a public backlash from various quarters.

Over the last month, in order not to be Islamophobic, a line was surreptiously moved. The proposition that women should be confined to the home and kept out of higher education stopped being an outrage to be dismantled in public and became a “perspective” to be weighed.

Silence on the right of a woman to leave her own house, and called the silence respect. A space loud for one liberty and mute on another has not been even-handed; it has been captured. That is the moment the emperor lost his clothes and the courtiers agreed not to mention it.

How a country starts eating halal

RNJ consistently brings up Nassim Taleb’s seminal piece on “The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority.”

A society does not turn to halal or kosher food because the majority converts. It turns because a small, inflexible minority will eat only one way, the flexible majority does not greatly mind, and it is cheaper for the caterer to feed everyone the strict diet than to run two kitchens. The intolerant minority sets the menu for all. Taleb called it the dictatorship of the small minority, and he was right that the most intolerant party, not the most numerous, decides the rule.

This is what happened to our comment section, and it is the smaller copy of what happened to Pakistan. A vocal faction that will not bend establishes the terms and to object to it is to be rude to your hosts.

Restricting a woman’s right to pursue higher education

Are we are tarring a nation with one man’s words? Q did not call for banning women from education. He called for severely restricting it, through quotas and the withdrawal of public funding, on the reasoning that most women in lecture halls are squandering a fertility they owe to children.

It is the drawing-room translation of an arrangement already in force across much of Pakistan. His opinion is the polite, exportable form of a structure that tens of millions of women already live inside.

Elites will continue educating their womenfolk

The Ashraf families would never accept for their own daughters what they prescribe for everyone else’s.

We sat beside one such table a moment ago. The Pakistani elite, in Karachi and in London alike, has done something that earns a cold sort of admiration: it has persuaded a population to feel the confiscation of its women’s liberty as devotion, and to hear the naming of that confiscation as blasphemy.

The men defending the arrangement here are not defending a constraint they themselves endure. They are defending a culture, upheld by women, whom they will never meet.

Patheticstan?

Barely half of Pakistani women can read and write. In the tribal areas the figure for women falls below ten percent. Pakistan carries the second largest population of out-of-school children on earth, after Nigeria, and keeps its girls out at a higher rate than its boys.

Across much of the country a woman cannot move from one place to another without a male relative to transport her, not as a courtesy but as a condition of her safety and her name.

None of this is a slander against Pakistani women. It is the footprint of a structure pressed onto them. We are describing what is done to people, not what they are.

Islam?

Then comes the defence that absorbs all the others: this is simply Islam, and a Muslim society is bound to arrive here.

Take Iran. It is more clerical than Pakistan, governed by jurists, and it enforces a veil Pakistan has never imposed. By the Islam theory it should sit at or below Pakistan on every measure of a woman’s life. It does the reverse. Iranian women are the majority of the country’s university students and outscore the men on entry and in the hall, and female youth literacy runs near ninety-nine percent against Pakistan’s barely-half.

The detail that closes the case is this. The Iranian clergy grew so alarmed at women out-graduating men that they imposed quotas and barred women from whole faculties to hold them back, and the women stayed the majority regardless.

Hold the religion constant and vary only the policy, and the outcomes part completely. The variable was never piety. It is whether the state and the family will let a woman build a self they cannot later repossess. Iran spent decades trying to cap a rising tide of educated women and could not reverse it. Pakistan arranged matters so the tide never came in.

The verdict

We will use the word K warned us was colonial. A structure that confiscates the liberty of half its members at birth, by choice and not by necessity, and trains them to call the theft holiness, is primitive. The word falls on the arrangement, not on the people held inside it, and the arrangement has earned it. Conservative, traditional, devout: these are the camouflage the structure wears, and we decline to hand it the camouflage.

Kabir’s closing defence is that a country cannot be so backward if a woman may run it, and he offers Benazir Bhutto and Maryam Nawaz. They prove the reverse. They are daughters of dynasties, and a structure that crowns a Bhutto’s daughter while leaving half its women unlettered has not raised women. It has raised a handful of surnames, which purchase their own women an exemption from the rule that still binds the rest. That is the engine of our last essay restated, the few ruling the many, in a sari this time.

Mera Jism, Meri Marzi

One slogan gathers the rest. The Aurat March marches under “mera jism, meri marzi,” my body, my choice, and K clarified, that the Urdu jism carries a sexual charge the English “body” lacks, so the country hears a demand for licence where the marchers make a claim to selfhood. Grant the mistranslation entire.

It changes nothing, because even were a woman demanding the right to sleep with whomever she chooses, she is owed it. An adult answers for their sexual life to herself and to her maker, to no committee, absent a marriage or a contract they entered freely of their own accord.

A culture is not weighed by its skyline or its arsenal. It is weighed by whether it lets its adults govern their own destinies & bodies.

How to deal with an Ugly Idea

We let Q’s argument stand in the thread, because a space that cannot look an ugly idea in the face cannot defeat it, and the Commentariat took it apart far more thoroughly than deletion would have. But letting an argument stand is not the same as letting it set the tone.

We spent two months so careful not to wound the faith that we forgot to defend the women, and the Female Admin Team now holds the gender threads for exactly that reason: so that the next time the intolerant minority reaches for the menu, the pen is in the hand of someone with skin in the question.

The patriarchy survives empires. We said so ourselves. Let us at least make certain it does not survive on our good manners.

We’re struggling a lot. Universities are mushrooming (95 in 2002 to 269 in 2024) without any meaningful output, just producing PhDs like rabbits (177 in 2002 to 3489 in 2024). Result: not a single Pakistani university ranks in the global top 350.

I’ve visited different universities. (inter-alia):

Riphah International University, Islamabad – a private HEI. The I-8 campus is small, but with multiple campuses they cater to around 30,000 students. What’s interesting is how deeply Islamic morality is embedded in their institutional values. It’s the only university (out of the 8–9 I’ve visited so far) whose vision and mission are explicitly integrated with Islamic principles. They even have around 10 credit hours dedicated to teaching morality. Quite remarkable in this era of modernity and expediency.

University of Haripur – a “big whale” kind of university with stunning views. In the public sector, it stands out for its lush green terrain. The guest house? Phenomenal and all pro bono, of course. 😊

Pak-Austria Fachhochschule Institute of Applied Sciences and Technology – based on the German Fachhochschule model (industry + theoretical study). Students are required to complete around 500 hours of industry experience to graduate. Perhaps the only university in Pakistan operating on this model. Their guest house was phenomenal too.

Meanwhile, a brief I authored is out: Pakistan’s Venture Capital Landscape: Navigating Challenges, Seizing Opportunities. In it, I chart the problems in Pakistan’s VC ecosystem and possible ways forward. Read here

I also met a fellow “dead poet” from my community—the Dead Poets Society of Pakistan—Abdullah, a.k.a. Nuwanda, at a cafe called Shugf (translated as “devotion” or “infatuation”). We tried a coffee variant that had been scaled up to intensify its flavor. And of course, given my addiction, it didn’t disturb my sleep.

On the way back to my hometown, Peshawar, I penned a poem. I hope readers might like it.

While talking of the moon, this line keeps echoing in me: Mein Jo Shair Kabhi Hota (song by Mehdi Hassan).

a silly moon that i was unable to see because of the angle of my seat [1]

i was traveling

to my precious and treasured

city

a typical bus

nothing new

nothing interesting

a person quarreling—

he thought this vehicle

was going towards Lahore

and in silence,

oranges turn up

in your hands with henna patterns everywhere,

tattoos of libido

when i think of you

i want to cry

(maybe due to alignment

of zodiac)

i am fish

it won’t pester anyway

can’t we just go in the deep

iced coffee (not Shireen’s [2] stream but ours)

in the buff and never come back—

by this, we will be

fossilized into another folklore

they would call us

“panic-lovers of the pure land”

a silly moon is saying something to me

but i cannot see it

due to the angle of the seat i am sitting upon

let it enjoy the ephemeral glory

the sunshine would kill it

i am so honored

i am penetrated by a fever

that is insurmountable by any medicine

in this state, i am a slave

and king

at the same time

Note: Please don’t consider this my final version. I’m unable to fully express my feelings right now.

[1] A lovely friend suggested that I look at the moon, but I couldn’t for obvious stated reasons. That sparked the idea to write this.

[2] “Shireen’s stream” comes from the Persian legend Khosrow and Shireen, where Farhad, in love with Shireen, carves a channel through a mountain to bring her water (or milk). It symbolizes devotion, sacrifice, and love that overcomes obstacles.

By X.T.M | Acting Editor, Brown Pundits

I lost my train of thought earlier, but I’m back now, writing this from Newark Airport, awaiting a flight back to the United Kingdom—then onward, as they say, to the old, old world.

What I’d begun to reflect on was social mobility—and how drastically it’s shifted over the past few decades. In much of the Global South, the idea of a working-class avant-garde—those who rose through grit, communal aspiration, and sacrifice—still retains cultural force. But in the Global North, that current has largely dissipated. Class structures have ossified. The ladder still exists, but the rungs are brittle.

I’ve been mapping that reality onto the commentariat, especially the highly educated, striving upper-middle-class Hindus who have, for the most part, embraced the system—IITs, IIMs, Oxbridge, the Ivies. These are not just institutions; they’re rites of passage. For many, the peak came at the point of entry. Twenty years on, what remains is not expansion, but a formula—one track, one ceiling.

Writers like Rob Henderson have spoken compellingly about this phenomenon in the West—of an educated elite that is credentialed but constrained. They are given just enough visibility to feel elite, but not enough leverage to transform their lives—or society’s structure.

So when I see some of these same voices now turning their frustration outward, I pause. It feels, to me, like a deflection from a quieter grief—that the system they devoted their lives to is underdelivering. That decades of discipline, compliance, and sacrifice have not yielded the sovereignty they were promised, but rather a precarious status, intellectual fatigue, and cultural dissonance.

This is not a critique of individuals. Far from it. I wish everyone the best—materially, intellectually, spiritually. But I don’t believe the answer lies in externalizing blame. The very system many of them defend is the one that quietly contains them. And that system—especially in elite professions—rarely rewards risk, originality, or interior growth.

In contrast, Kabir is different. For all his faults—and I’ve called them out—he operates with diasporic and class privilege. His provocations are idiosyncratic, even eccentric, but they come from a place of safety. That doesn’t make them better, but it does mean they don’t arise from the same pressure cooker. He doesn’t carry the same invisible load.

Letter-Writing as Form

What I find striking about Brown Pundits—and perhaps what I’ve only just now realized—is that this space has evolved into something closer to a collective letter-writing salon than a typical blog. Dr. Lalchand asked me what our readership was. I told her, honestly: I don’t know. And truthfully, I’m not very interested.

Because what is interesting is this: we have, at any given time, around 10 to 15 active contributors, each with strong voices, historical memory, and enduring disagreements. And what we’ve built is not a trending page—it’s a correspondence of minds, a place for missives rather than metrics. Some of the best intellectual work in history has emerged from letters.

As I write this, my Aer Lingus flight is beginning to board. There’s something about airports that crystallizes movement. The modern world flattens complexity; writing re-inflates it. I think of Edward FitzGerald—master of the letter form, translator of the Rubáiyát, and found solace in his own Suffolk cottages. Perhaps that’s what we’re doing here too?

On Civility and Free Speech

I’ve been reflecting lately on civility—and why I insist on it, even when provoked. It’s not about politeness. It’s about protecting the conditions for thought. I’ve had to endure comments calling Iran “uncivilized,” which, apart from being glib, overlook the profound refinement of Persian tarof, which may be one of the most intricate systems of dignity and etiquette ever created—on par, perhaps, with Kyoto or the British aristocracy at its best (and not, admittedly, as vulgar the drawing rooms of the great English country houses).

So no, this isn’t about being overly precious. It’s about preserving the possibility of nuance. Qureshi, for example, has functioned in a deeply grey zone—pseudonymous, agenda-laden, increasingly insistent on shaping the space to his liking. That’s not discussion. That’s quiet capture.

Which is why I struck hard today—not just on Honey Singh, but also on phyecho and other commentators. It wasn’t personal. It was about restoring the conditions for dispassionate conversation. That’s the point of this platform.

You may find something offensive. Flag it. I will look at it. But don’t meet offense with escalation. We’re not here to reenact a Twitter thread. We’re here to think.

A Shah, but Constitutional

At times I joke that I’m the Shah of Brown Pundits—constitutionally minded, of course. I don’t seek power, but I do hold responsibility. We are not a democracy here—but we are not a tyranny either. We are a salon. That requires discretion. And of course from time to time we have King Khan and the good Doctor visit us; so BP remains a triumvirate of sorts.

So, as I leave the United States for a time—heading toward the old world, toward contemplation, rest, and a slower rhythm—I leave you with this unfolding truth:

Let us not confuse provocation with principle. Let us not mistake anger for insight. And let us not externalize the failures of systems we ourselves have chosen. The ceiling is not where we thought it was. The game is not what we were told it would be. Somewhere in that recognition, I think, lies the beginning of truth.

— X.T.M

Acting Editor, Brown Pundits

Related Posts: Denial Isn’t Just a River in Egypt—It’s a Dammed Indus Too | Flame Thread Protocols: Honey Kabir | Jet Lag: India, Pakistan, and the Theatre of the Air | Flame Thread Warning | Open Thread — On Foundational Clefts and Brown Pundits’ raison d’être | BP Ground Rules for Commenters

Dr. V had to give a talk at Princeton, and I tagged along. We expected an elite university (our milieu for the last decade). What we didn’t expect was how stunningly beautiful the town would be.

Everything felt curated: the neoclassical facades, the quiet wealth (it has a Hermes store for Heaven’s sake), the perfectly measured charm of a place that knows exactly what it is.

It made me think of how different America’s internal geography is from the UK or France. In Europe, the capital is the cultural and intellectual heart—London, Paris. In the US, it’s more like Germany or Italy: multiple regional power centers—city-states in all but name.

And Princeton is one of them. Unlike either of the Cambridges:

• Cambridge, Massachusetts is a behemoth, flowing into the urban sprawl of Boston, powered by MIT and Harvard.

• Cambridge, UK is insular, its 31 colleges often more concerned with their individual legacy than the town around them.

But Princeton, somehow, has achieved a kind of graceful middle ground. It’s not sprawling, but it breathes. It doesn’t dominate, but it defines.

Gated Ideas in a Gated Town

That evening, we were invited to an extraordinary dinner party hosted by a Princeton professor. The kind of gathering where you’re surrounded by brilliance, good wine, and the conviction that ideas still matter.

But I couldn’t help noticing something else: college professors in places like Princeton are granted the luxury of their ideals, in large part because the entire ecosystem is so structurally exclusionary.

Princeton, for all intents and purposes, is a gated community.

As of 2024, the median home price in Princeton, NJ is over $1.1 million—nearly five times the U.S. national average. Rental prices are similarly astronomical. It is demographically filtered, spatially curated, and intellectually fortified.

Within that bubble, you’ll hear eloquent defenses of democratic socialism, but it’s hard to ignore that tenure-track positions are harder to land than an Ivy League admit—and perhaps just as arbitrary.

And as much as no one wants to say it aloud:

Anti-Asian bias in academic hiring is very real.

Numerous studies have shown that Asian Americans are underrepresented in elite faculty positions relative to their qualifications—particularly in the humanities and social sciences, where subjectivity in hiring runs highest.

It’s not a pipeline problem. It’s a selection problem, compounded by cultural bias and institutional inertia.

In the US, you can preach equality—so long as your postcode guarantees you never have to live it.

America in Microcosm

Just a few minutes away from this curated idyll are Trenton and New Brunswick—working-class, immigrant-heavy, racially diverse. Princeton, by contrast, is gorgeous, white, and model minority.

The contrast isn’t just economic—it’s institutional.

The capital of New Jersey is Trenton, but since 1945, the official residence of the governor has been in Princeton.

First at Morven, and since 1982, at Drumthwacket—a colonial mansion tucked into the town’s leafy heart. Technically, not all governors have lived there. But still—the symbolism writes itself:

The governor rules from lily-white Princeton while the capital sits a few exits down the highway.

Only in America could the aesthetic of governance matter more than proximity to the governed. The wealth gap isn’t subtle—it’s spatial, architectural, and historical.

The U.S. is now the most unequal developed country in the world:

• In 1980, the top 1% held about 10% of national income.

• Today, they hold over 20%, while real wages for the bottom half have stagnated.

• By Gini coefficient, the U.S. ranks as the most unequal among G7 nations, and in the top 15 globally.

Yet you wouldn’t know it, sipping wine in a Princeton garden.

America in Microcosm (continued)

Princeton, for all its symmetry and charm, is a mirror—reflecting the best of American soft power and the worst of its structural imbalance.

It is a world unto itself. Beautiful. Immaculate. And bordered by realities it doesn’t have to touch.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Questions for the Curious:

• Is elite academic liberalism still credible when it’s practiced from within such enclaves?

• Can tenure-track academia survive as a serious pipeline for ideas if its selection processes remain this opaque?

• And for those excluded—by race, class, or ideology—where do real intellectual alternatives now come from?

The United Nations estimates that India has now surpassed China as the world’s most populous country — or, as we colloquially say, the world’s “largest” country.

Obviously, crossing this threshold doesn’t mean much in practical terms. Being a tiny bit bigger than China doesn’t really change anything, and India has just about as many people as it did a year ago. But the flurry of news stories accompanying the event is a wake-up call for the world: India has arrived on the world stage, in a big way.

What does that mean? Well, a whole lot of stuff. More stuff than I can summarize or even mention in a single blog post. There was a quote attributed to Napoleon two centuries ago: “Let China sleep, for when she wakes, she will shake the world.” Well, China did wake up, and the world has been shaken. The whole economic landscape of the planet, the geopolitical balance of power, and even the Earth’s environment have been irrevocably changed in the last three decades by the addition of 1.4 billion human beings to the ranks of the (more or less) developed world. Now India brings another 1.4 billion, eager to join those ranks. Get used to seeing a lot more graphs with this basic format…

It’s a long post, but I think the major takeaway from the viewpoint of an economist is agglomeration. The co-location of producers and consumers and resources at such massive scale nations like China, India and the USA, result in a level of synergistic economic growth and power that smaller nations cannot match structurally. This is probably one reason that Britain punches below its weight vis-a-vis the US, it cannot scale.

But Smith is aware of human capital concerns, and this is probably the a signifier of the number one issue: Worthless Degrees Are Creating an Unemployable Generation in India. Fake credentialing just means firms will have to re-train or do their own intake (the obsession with credentialing shows up in funny ways on even on this blog; I don’t care what your credential is if you are a moron, something is common-sense to Americans working in tech).

Another issue that is focused on in the post is that India needs to focus on productivity growth through manufacturing. I actually thought a bit about India when I read this long and excellent piece in Palladium on the century-long failure of the British ruling-class on updating their nation for the 20th century.

And India’s higher education system badly needs shaking up. Setting aside issues of quality (as if those can be set aside), India does not come close to providing sufficient seats to those aspiring to higher education — a glaring shortcoming as India’s burgeoning middle class strives to prepare their children for the opportunities of the future.

India’s system has its successes, of course, but they are narrow. Just nine Indian higher education institutions made the top 500 of the most recent QS World University Rankings. The top one — the Indian Institute of Science (at 155) — is a highly specialized institution focused on postgraduate studies and research in the sciences. The other eight are part of the well-known Indian Institutes of Technology, which specialize in engineering. The highest-ranked comprehensive university was the University of Delhi, falling in the 520s.

That is simply not good enough. All told, India has just over 1,000 institutions of higher learning. China, with a similar population, has three times that. The United States, with a much smaller population, has four times as many.

This all sounds find, but India will replicate some of the US’s pathologies in the education sector. The “consumer model” of higher education has been causing serious problems here over the past few decades. The op-ed even states that “Private universities, too, are overly regulated and cannot operate for profit. That deters the best entrepreneurs from entering the sector.” Entrepreneurs entering the sector was a disaster, and for-profit colleges were a way to absorb student loans from the public fisc.

But I wish India well.

While Apple is big, a more telling example of India’s potential is at the end of this post. But before that, how did India, a country that struggled to feed itself in the 1950s, get into the running for ‘factory of the world’ ?

In 1950, less than 1% of Indian college students studied science and engineering. By 2022, this number had risen to more than 30%. In fact, science and engineering have become so popular in India today, that a counter culture has arisen in the form of movies like 3 Idiots. Back in 1950, India’s best students were focused on subjects like law and social sciences, primed to manage the Empire. In fact, some have remarked that the independence movement was a result of the British producing too many lawyers in India.

Since independence, a concerted effort has been made by the Indian state to popularize science and engineering. This was done under the aegis of spreading a ‘scientific temper’, starting with the establishment of Vigyan Mandir in 1953. Subsequently, following in the legacy of medieval India’s Jantar Mantars, Nehru planetariums were established in major Indian cities. Further, the establishment of the IIT system gave a formal structure and high standard to engineering education. In 1976, the cultivation of scientific temper was included as a fundamental duty in the Constitution.

By the late 1970s, India’s growing pool of scientists and engineers had attracted attention from abroad, specifically Japanese automakers. This resulted in a dramatic increase in India’s automobile production, more than doubling from 700,000 to 2 million in the 1980s.An entire ecosystem of vendors producing automobile components came up around Suzuki’s Gurgaon factory. It is perhaps surprising that the Indian government did not think about replicating this success in the electronics sector. This oversight turned out to be an enormous missed opportunity.

The post 1990 period saw an acceleration in India’s economic growth, with the software and IT sector taking a prime position both in the export numbers and the economic narrative. However, India was a manufacturing star as well, particularly its pharma, petrochemical and automobile industries.

However, its potential in the wider manufacturing arena remained unrealized and indeed unrecognized. The late 2010s produced new exigencies in the global order, with Western countries trying to pivot away from their dependence on China. In this process, India has emerged as the only real alternative to achieve the technical complexity and economies of scale demanded by modern industry.

An equally important turn of events has been the precipitous decline in India-China relations. If Chinese support for Pakistan had made Indians wary of the CCP, its direct clashes with India on the border have made China enemy number one in the Indian public’s eye. There is a determination at the political and public level to not depend on Chinese manufacturing imports. This mark has already been achieved for toys, cell phones and PPE. Make no mistake, India wants to bring Chinese imports down to zero. This is what ‘Atma Nirbhar Bharat’ (self reliant India) really means.

On the other hand, Western business seems keen to move out of China. The LA Times describes the experience of one European manufacturer to move away from China,

In 2019, he began assessing the possibility of moving some manufacturing capabilities to Vietnam. But he abandoned the plan eight months later after price increases for about half of the company’s projects upset his customers. Product development also took longer — one prototype that would have been completed in three weeks in China required six months in Vietnam.

A review of other countries in Southeast Asia proved even less fruitful, he said.

By late 2020, Gaussorgues turned farther afield — to India. The local electronics and automotive ecosystem offered lower manufacturing costs and easy access to parts. With five employees so far, he aims to start assembly work next year, and hopes to host the majority of manufacturing there after five years.

What is important to note here is that India being able provide an alternative to China is not about the population. SE Asia, where the person in the article first when to has enormously populated countries, all with fantastic port access. India is able to provide an alternative because of the consistent emphasis on science and technology education over the past 70 years.

If you build it, they will come. Eventually.

First, in The Juggernaut, Why Test Scores Can Be a “Proxy for Privilege”. To be franky, I did not like this story, because the conclusions were already there to begin with, and the author was just figuring out how to buttressed the preexistent argument. For example:

Mettu, for example, is well aware of her advantages as the daughter of educated, middle-class Indian immigrants who could invest in her college preparation. She recognizes that few students enjoy such privilege. That is why Mettu sympathizes with efforts at higher education institutions across the country to downplay — or altogether eliminate — test scores as a criterion in admissions. “In terms of equal opportunity,” she said, “it is a good shift.”

That’s the general gist. “Actually, testing is bad for the underprivileged.” Even though standardized testing actually emerged as a way to get around the unfairness of recommendations.

Meanwhile, Refinery29 has a much better story, An Interview with an Asian student at Stuyvestant. Since it’s an interview, most of the talking is given over to the student. That results in more candor and less canned conclusions:

How do students talk about the lack of Black and Latinx students?

When the news came out, it just wasn’t a big thing in Stuy. No one cared about it. We saw it in a random newspaper and everyone was just like, okay. We’re used to places writing about us. I remember one time, one of the chairs broke during one of our theater productions, and that made headlines. Everyone was like why?

Honestly, we were more vocal about school shootings. There was a whole walkout, a lot of us missed class for it, and we went to city hall. We were way more vocal about guns. The reason that Stuy is Stuy is that we’re the smart kids who do well on tests. NYC has LaGuardia, which is for people who are good at dance or music or singing. We have other schools with different talents that anyone else with those talents can get into. I think that’s one of the reasons that everyone in Stuy thinks the SHSAT test should be there, because if the test wasn’t here, what’s the point of Stuy then? What’s the point of even being here?

One thing to note: well-off white New Yorkers send their kids to exclusive private schools like Dalton. Stuyvesant is populated by children of working-class immigrants by and large.