Rob Henderson – Brown Pundits

As I write this from Dublin, waiting to board my connecting flight—I’d nearly missed it in Newark, too absorbed in writing to hear the gate call—I’m struck by how a Euro sign or EU flag can alter one’s sense of place. Technically, I’m still in the British Isles. But culturally—unmistakably—I’m on the Continent. A sensation I never quite feel in England.

It’s a strange feeling, this flicker of European belonging. In the early millennium, I was a passionate Brexiteer—young, angry, seeking change. By the time of the referendum, a decade later, I found myself morally conflicted. I knew the EU was not a good fit but as a Bahá’í, I knew I could never advocate for disunity, of any sort. I abstained. Ironically, Commonwealth citizens could vote, but EU nationals couldn’t—a bit of imperial gatekeeping that deeply irritated my liberal British-Irish friend. (“Why can Indians vote, but not the French?” he asked.)

Today, standing in Europe, I feel the contrast sharply. The Continent is genteel, even decadent, locked into postwar consensus. Meanwhile, the English-speaking world feels like it’s on fire—politically, culturally, psychologically. It’s not just the UK or the US. India, too, belongs to this hot zone of rhetoric and reinvention. Pakistan, by contrast, while elite-driven in English, remains emotionally and socially an Urdu republic. Continue reading The Elder Race and the English-Speaking Heat

Dispatch from Newark Airport

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. Continue reading Merit, Class, and the Ossified Dream