Tag: open thread

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

June 6, 2026 25 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 🙂

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Open Thread: BP Survey

June 1, 2026 80 Comments filed under Open Thread, Precedent, X.T.M

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

Update – from the thread: More reading reccys. Furqan flagged Dr Naazir Mahmood’s The assassination that changed India, along with his own book review on Duniya Digital and a related op-ed, Stupidity or strategy, on the political economy of the subcontinent’s borrowed democratic forms. Kabir marked the passing of playback singer Suman Kalyanpur with two recordings: an unreleased Pakeeza song, introduced by Meena Kumari, and a Rafi duet. And from our own pages, the latest BRAHM newsletter: The Sky Above São Paulo.

Update, 1 June 2026 – links from the thread: The Peshawar Review has a new issue out, including Professor Harbans Mukhia’s reminiscences of Kirori Mal College (College Days) and Shan-e-Ahmed reading an Urdu transcreation of T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (Prufrock in Pakistan). On the Tata Sons listing question, Agni flagged a cluster of commentary: the Indian Express “to list or not to list” column, The New Indian Express on the boardroom fight, Soonawala on why an IPO may not appeal to investors, and Business Standard on the 12 June board meeting. Survey responses are at 18 and counting; please add yours if you haven’t.

Editor’s note, 1 June: This Survey thread will sit on the front page through the week, until Sunday the 7th June, while we are travelling Eastbound, so we have made it an Open Thread. What strikes us, watching the comment threads, is that for all the constant bickering, BP is a community, and a recognisably Desi one.

It has the hue of a Hindu joint family (to be of the Indian subcontinent is, almost by definition, to have Hindu ancestors; “Hindu” is simply what the Persians called the people beyond the Indus) that has built a wall down the middle of the house and still cannot get over each other. The wall is real. So is the fact that nobody moves out.

Original Post: Every few years BP runs a reader survey. Razib began the tradition in 2019, and the responses then told us things the comments alone never could.

Seven years on, with a substantially different commentariat, we are running the 2026 edition. The prompt to revive it came from Kabir, whose recent post on what BP is and is not raised exactly the kind of question a survey can help answer, and we are grateful for it.

Nineteen questions, anonymous, roughly five minutes. The core spine is demographic in Razib’s tradition: age, sex, country, mother tongue, ethnic background, religion, caste, education, political ideology, and views on Hindu and Pakistani nationalism. A few behavioural questions follow on how often you visit, how long you have been reading, how you first found BP, and which topics you would like to see more of, with optional fields at the end for handle, newsletter signup, and anything else you would like the editors to know.

Please take the time to fill in this survey. Thank you for your engagement.

Why Mohammad Hanif uses satire to write about Pakistan|Scroll Adda (Open Thread)

May 31, 2026 9 Comments filed under Kabir

Based on the 1988 aircraft crash that killed Zia-ul-Haq, the military dictator of Pakistan, A Case of Exploding Mangoes made a big splash in the South Asian literary world when it was released in 2008. Readers loved that a desi writer was nailing political satire. Since then Mohammed Hanif has written three more novels, masterfully blending politics and the absurdities of life. He’s so captured the genre that some say he’s the Pakistani Joseph Heller. Hanif has a new book out, The Rebel English Academy. On Scroll Adda, he talks about why he uses satire, his relationship with three languages – Punjabi, Urdu and English – how Operation Sindoor ended up strengthening army rule in Pakistan as well as describing Imran Khan as a political prisoner.

Incidentally, I keep meaning to review Rebel English Academy.  I have a copy autographed by Hanif.

2) Muhammadi Begum in Oxford 

Although many young women are studying abroad and living alone these days, this wasn’t the case for Indian women in the 1930s. But, as they say, there are always exceptions to a rule, and one of them was Muhammadi Begum, who went to study at Oxford University during the 1930s.

The book under review, Deccan Say Duur, Oxford Ke Roz-o-Shab: Aik Naujawan Taliba Ka 1935 Ka Roznamcha, is a reproduction of the diary entries Muhammadi Begum wrote while at Oxford. She was born in Hyderabad Deccan, and graduated from Osmania University. As she secured the first position there, she was awarded a scholarship by the Government of Hyderabad Deccan to study at the University of Oxford, making her one of the few women to receive such an opportunity.

In 1934, she went to the UK with her husband, who took a year’s leave from his job to accompany her. To prepare for admission to the University of Oxford, she had to pass certain exams, for which she studied for a year. Although she wanted admission in Lady Margaret Hall, she had to settle for Saint Hugh’s College, which offered her a space.

The review goes on to note that Muhammadi Begum was part of the organizing committee for the women’s jalsa that the Quaid-e-Azam attended in 1945. Her family migrated to Pakistan in 1950.

Open Thread: Mother Indus is on Fire

May 24, 2026 139 Comments filed under Open Thread, Popular, X.T.M

The Commentariat on the “Long Night” has been busy. The Saffroniate counts Hindu babies, the Crescentiate counts Muslim babies, both sides argue with conviction over a future neither seems to have read the Weather Report for.

A heatwave advisory graphic maps much of Pakistan’s plains into extreme-risk zones for the final week of May 2026. Jacobabad, Multan, Bahawalpur, Sukkur, D.G. Khan and Sargodha sit in an extreme zone marked 47 to 50°C. Lahore, Faisalabad, Rawalpindi, Peshawar and Islamabad sit in a high zone at 42 to 45°C. Karachi, sea-cooled, stays at a relatively merciful 35 to 38.

The Indus does not read Radcliffe. The Punjab that cooks at 45°C on the Lahore side is the same alluvial plain that sears the Amritsar side. The Thar runs through both Sindh and Rajasthan. The Gangetic plain inherits the same dome of heat a fortnight later. The cradle of Desidom that the Commentariat are fighting over, will soon turn into a Heat Dome. Conversations on who fills it faster, who outbreeds whom, ultimately elide that Radcliffe drew a paper line. The thermometer does not pause at Wagah.

What It's Like Living in One of the Hottest Cities on Earth—Where It May Soon Be Uninhabitable

Continue reading Open Thread: Mother Indus is on Fire

US-Iran War

April 21, 2026 15 Comments filed under Kabir

1) Trump says truce expires ‘Wednesday evening Washington time’. 

US President Donald Trump has signalled an extension in the ceasefire with Iran, which was set to end on April 21 8pm ET.

He told Bloomberg in a phone interview that the truce expires on “Wednesday evening Washington time”.

But the president also said it’s “highly unlikely that I’d extend it” if no deal is reached before then, the report said.

It seemed that a second round of talks was going to happen.  Islamabad’s Red Zone is locked down in anticipation of the arrival of the American delegation.  JD Vance was supposedly returning to Islamabad.  But the US seizure of an Iran-flagged ship and Iran’s closing of the Strait of Hormuz once again seems to have changed things.

2) Basharat Peer on Kashmir, Haider, Homebound, Iran, Modi, Erdogan & Why Democracies Break

[Note: Basharat Peer’s Curfewed Night is one of the classic books about growing up as a Kashmiri Muslim in Indian-Administered Kashmir in the 1990s.

I’ve met Basharat Peer when he spoke at LUMS some years ago. He signed my copy of his book. ]

3) Remembering Asha Bhosle: A View From Pakistan 

Both countries’ polities remain locked in an unending war and demonise each other in all forms of despicable ways and continue to pull up walls and disinformation through propaganda, movies and fake news about one another. Still, can you stop me from loving Amir Khan, Shah Rukh Khan, or Ranbir Kapoor? And Asha ji’s voice?

There is a generation or two who remember better times and continue to love our classical and Bollywood film phases. You can’t erase our experiences. Pakistanis have grown up loving Indian movies and their singers and actors.

Looking at the comments under the Geo TV notice by PEMRA is a testament of the sanity that foundationally prevails in Pakistani society.

We might rally around our government when it is under attack from outside forces, but we will not deny our shared love and admiration of iconic artists of the subcontinent. That would be denying our own culture.

 

 

 

 

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