1. SriLanka : USD 4516 
2. India : USD 3051
3. Bangladesh : USD 2960 
4. Pakistan : USD 1710
5. Nepal : USD 1550
6. Afghanistan : USD 417 

Many people assume that these numbers measure how poor or rich a country is. In particular, the average Sri Lankan is 50 percent wealthier than the average Indian, and the average Bangladeshi is 70 percent wealthier than the average Pakistani. This is not really true. The nominal GDP accurately measures the real wealth of a country only in an utopian world where there are no taxes or other barriers on tradable goods, and transportation costs are completely absent. In reality, Americans can not instantly transport themselves to India to get cheap haircuts, and South Asian countries often impose huge taxes on imported goods. So nominal GDP is a flawed yardstick if we want to compare different countries.

Here’s a simple puzzle based on this idea : What steps should the Indian government take if they want to increase the country’s per capita nominal GDP from USD 3000 to USD 6000 within this year?

At first glance, achieving this may seem unattainable, given that India’s economy is currently growing at a rate of 6-7 percent annually. However, once we realize that nominal GDP also depends on trade policies, it is easy to come up with strategies to make this happen. For instance, the Indian government could implement an extra import duty of Rs 45 per dollar on all imported goods while simultaneously offering a Rs 45 per dollar subsidy (through tax incentives, free land, etc.) for all exported products. This will reduce the price of the dollar from Rs 90 to Rs 45 and double India’s nominal GDP. It’s also easy to see that this will have no impact on the real economy. Since the USD isn’t utilized in local transactions, the domestic market will stay the same. The extra tax imposed on imports will be balanced by the decrease in the dollar’s value. Likewise, the lower dollar rate will be offset by subsidies provided in the export sector.

A thousand visits a day, give or take a bit more. The old 1% rule says one in a hundred will actually say something; which means for every BB, RNJ, Kabir or Sbarr in the comments, there are ninety-nine people reading in silence and agreeing with “either camp”. We find that thought rather beautiful.

Prior to February, Pakistan had never cracked the top five. Now it’s sitting at number one.

Bharatstan, indeed.

Commentariat = Saffroniate?

We have been having conversations in the comments recently about the make-up of this blog, who reads it, who comments, what the signal-to-noise ratio looks like, and where we want to take it. These are good conversations to have in the open, so we are having them here.

The honest answer is that Brown Pundits has always been in waves. There are peaks and troughs, surges and dips. We had a significant dip last Fall when the commentariat fractured in a way that took time to recover from. The Saffroniate split, certain voices departed, certain energies dissipated. It happens. Weblogs are living things.

As good as Girmit

What we can say now is that we feel the recovery is real. The commentariat is repopulating. The quality of engagement, when it is good, is as good as it has ever been. Voices like Girmit remind us why we bother. The long-timers who read without commenting remind us that the lurkers are often the most thoughtful of all.

On the question of editorial standards: we have tightened up. We have issued to the commentariat about what we expect. We are not trying to kill the golden goose. Free speech is the oxygen of this place. But there is a difference between free speech and low-signal rage-bait, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

The goal is the high-signal phase. We think (hope) we are in it, or entering it.

The Royal “We”

We have also moved from “I” to “we“, not because we have suddenly become a committee, but because the amount of work that goes into running BP deserves that acknowledgement. The editing, the moderating, the writing, the managing of a commentariat that ranges from world-class to occasionally maddening, it is a collective effort even when it does not look like one. The “we” is an honest accounting.

Back to Pakistan.

The Pakistan readership spike almost certainly reflects the post-Pahalgam moment and what followed, Operation Sindoor, the ceasefire, the diplomatic reshuffling. Pakistani readers came to BP, we suspect, because they wanted analysis that was neither Indian nationalist cheerleading nor Pakistani state media spin. Whether we delivered on that is for them to judge.

What it tells us about BP’s position is interesting. We are read across the Subcontinent, across the diaspora, and clearly across the divides that are supposed to make that impossible. That is not nothing. That is, in fact, rather the whole point. The waves will keep coming. We intend to keep surfing them.

The Eleventh Hour is a collection of five stories, two of which were previously published in The New Yorker. For the purposes of this review, I will focus on “The Musician of Kahani” and “Late”.

“The Musician of Kahani” is set in the fictional city of Kahani (Urdu/Hindi for “story”) though the setting is clearly modeled on Bombay–where Rushdie was born and brought up. The story revolves around Chandni Contractor (the titular musician) who marries into a prominent business family. After she suffers a stillbirth while her in-laws are throwing party after party celebrating the arrival of the baby, Chandni decides to take revenge on them through her music. Rushdie describes the scene as follows:

The day came when Chandni’s fingers began to move once more in their particular fashion. She was back in her own room in her family’s residence in Breach Candy. She had not thought, since her return, of sitting at her piano or picking up her sitar–both of which had been quietly returned to her–but this time when her fingers moved Meena was in no doubt that she heard music. First Meena heard it, then Raheem. It was music of a kind they had never heard before, and the instruments on which it was being played were unknown to them, It rose above their home like a pillar of smoke, like a column of fire, like the weapon of an invading alien species, and then it rushed across the city and the country to do its deadly work… (Rushdie 96)

As a musician myself, I was particularly intrigued by the supernatural power of music in this story.

“Late” is set at Cambridge University in 1971. The story begins with the Honorary Fellow S.M. Arthur waking up and realizing he is dead. His ghost is seen by an Indian student called Rosa and Arthur eventually gets her to help him take revenge on those who tormented him in life.

The character of Arthur combines elements from the lives of E.M. Forster and Alan Turing. Like Forster, he wrote a famous novel set in India. Like Turing, he was involved in code breaking during World War II and–it is later revealed– had to undergo chemical castration because of his sexuality. The person responsible for forcing him to undergo this chemical castration was Lord Emmemm, the college provost, and it is Emmemm upon whom Arthur is determined to exact his revenge.

“Late” is an intriguing ghost story. It also evokes a time when homosexuals were persecuted in England.

Overall, I would recommend The Eleventh Hour to those who are fans of Salman Rushdie. While it is not among Rushdie’s strongest work, it is certainly an enjoyable reading experience.

We had a real dip. In September and October we were running at roughly 55–65k monthly readers. Then we fell hard, to around 33k. This month, we have bounced back to roughly 53k. That is a 60% jump on the trough. A lot of it is mobile. A lot of it is casual readership rather than the old-school desktop cohort. But it is still real people arriving, reading, and sharing.

The geographical pattern is also telling. India and the United States remain the main pillars, as you would expect. But Bangladesh has surged in a way we did not anticipate. That matters because it suggests we are not only a niche diaspora salon. We are also being read inside the region, by people who do not need South Asia explained to them.

This is the part that tends to get missed in the meta-discussion. Brown Pundits is not a “publication” in the institutional sense. It is a platform and a habit. When we try to over-manage it, it becomes brittle. When we let it run with a light hand, open threads, short posts, occasional longer essays, it often does better. The site seems to punish fussing and reward steadiness.

There is also a more basic point, and it is not flattering to pundits. Punditry is a luxury good. You need time, energy, and a certain mental slack to opine in public. Most people do not have it. Even many smart people do not have it. So when someone says “the commentariat is thinning,” part of the answer is simply that life is expensive, work is exhausting, and attention is finite. This is not a moral failure. It is the normal distribution of privilege.

Meanwhile the world keeps handing us material. Iran has reportedly been pushed into another internet blackout as protests intensify, which is the state’s oldest trick in the modern toolkit: cut the wires, then control the story.  In the United States, the killing of Renée Good by an ICE agent has already become a national political object, with video and counter-video doing what they always do: inflaming everyone and clarifying nothing.  Trump is again floating tariff escalation, including punitive measures linked to Russian oil purchases, which is the sort of policy that sounds clean in a slogan and then detonates across supply chains in practice. 

We do not list these as “content opportunities.” We list them because they remind me what BP is for. We exist to notice what is happening, to frame it in language that is not PR, and to argue in public without pretending we are neutral machines. Sometimes that means a long essay. Often it means a short post that says, plainly, “this is strange, this is important, and I do not yet know what it means.”

So no: the demise of Brown Pundits is not imminent. Like any small, reader-supported corner of the internet, we will have waves; strong months, weak months, stretches where the authors are quiet and stretches where everyone posts at once. But right now the site looks more like it is finding an even keel than drifting toward extinction. And the less we melodramatise it, the better it seems to run.

brownpundit(s). brownguru(s). brownsmarts. brownfolks. brownidiots.

The instinct was already there: reclaim brown without asking permission, and refuse the performance of respectability that so often polices minority intellectual spaces. The reply came quickly and decisively.

Brownpundits.

The first post, Hello World, went live on 30 December 2010. Fifteen years later, what matters is not that a blog survived. Many do. What matters is how it survived: without institutional backing, without funding, without ideological capture, and without deference to credentials masquerading as truth. Brown Pundits was never designed as a platform for prestige. It was designed as an intellectual retreat; a place where arguments stand or fall on substance, not accent; where brownness is neither explained nor apologised for; where disagreement is not heresy. That posture, upright, unbought, unafraid, is why Brown Pundits still exists.

A Discipline, Not a Brand

Brown Pundits began with a simple wager: that the English-language internet still had room for a South Asian intellectual space that did not need permission. No institutional sponsor. No ideology police. No professional incentives. Just writers who believed that brown questions, Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, diasporic, could be argued in public with rigor and dignity. Fifteen years on, Brown Pundits remains. That endurance is not luck. It is structure. We lasted because we never built this as a brand. We built it as a discipline.

The point has never been agreement. The point has been posture: stand upright, test claims, correct errors, refuse theatre. Independent platforms fail for predictable reasons. They chase virality. They harden into faction. Or they monetize attention until thought becomes marketing. Brown Pundits avoided those traps by being unusually boring in the right ways: we publish, we argue, we edit, we keep the record. Nobody here is paid to write. That is not moral vanity. It is why we remain unpurchasable.

Five Years of Solidarity

Over the last five years, some of the most important work has not been online at all. It has been the steady, unglamorous work of civic seriousness: reading dense documents, tracking deadlines, understanding procedure, and watching institutions scramble when they assume nobody is paying attention. During this period, there has also been sustained dialogue with a small circle of intellectually serious allies; quiet, exacting minds with a gift for clarity under pressure and an instinct for how power hides behind process. Not public figures. Not brands. Just adults: difficult to gaslight, uninterested in theatrics, precise about the record.

That kind of solidarity resets the baseline. You stop mistaking polish for integrity. You stop confusing titles with truth. You learn to clock everything. You learn that the record is not drama; it is protection. That discipline carries back into Brown Pundits. It shows in how disputes are handled, how errors are named, and how authority is tested rather than absorbed.

The SD Episode as Proof

The recent SD exchange was not, in the end, about architecture. It was about authority: who is allowed to explain, who is expected to absorb, and what happens when the subject speaks back. We engaged the way Brown Pundits always has. We read closely. We identified the errors. We insisted on precision. We treated the exchange as part of the record, not as outrage content. What mattered was not that corrections were made; corrections are normal and welcome.

What mattered was the instinct that surfaced at the start: revise quietly, respond pedagogically, assume the critique will not notice the shift. That instinct is older than any one writer. It is a patterned behaviour in how authority manages challenge in brown-facing spaces. And yet, precisely because Brown Pundits exists, the record held. The language moved. The posture changed. This was not a “victory.” It was proof of concept. The platform did what it is meant to do.

“Brown” Is Not an Ethnicity; It Is a Civilizational Composite

The deeper reason Brown Pundits still matters is that brown is not a neat identity. It is not a single bloodline, doctrine, or grievance. It is a civilizational composite with a long memory and a hard geography. The Indian subcontinent is layering, not essence:

• ancient coastal and inland populations

• Dravidian continuities and transformations

• Aryan synthesis and institutionalisation

• Islamicate overlays that became native in texture, not merely foreign in rule

• British power, whose administrative afterlife still structures class and accent

And beyond this lie the East, the Northeast, the mountain corridors, the sea routes. This is why Brown Pundits resists simplification. The subcontinent is not a monoculture, a single trauma, or a single pride. It cannot be narrated by those who treat it as a site for extraction; political, academic, or aesthetic.

What Fifteen Years Means

Fifteen years is long enough to know what this site is for. Not fame. Not power. Not money. Not outrage. Those are cheap forms of relevance. Brown Pundits exists to keep an alternative alive: an intellectual retreat on the open web where brown life can be examined with seriousness; where hierarchy is not mistaken for truth; where criticism is not treated as insolence; where the record matters. We are not untouchable, and we do not aim to be. But we are not easily compromised, because everyone here has a life outside the internet. That is our freedom. Fifteen years on, the mission remains unchanged:

Stand upright | Read closely | Correct what is wrong | Refuse permission structures | Keep the record |

That is why we are still here.

by Amb Manav Sachdeva

When Zohran Mamdani — the 34-year-old Indian-heritage, Muslim-American democratic socialist — clinched the victorius count for the mayoralty of New York City, it was more than an American political event. It was a global inflection point. For the first time in history, the world’s most influential city is poised to be led by a man who not only traces his lineage to India but proudly identifies himself as desi — as an inheritor of South Asian pluralism, Muslim humanism, and diasporic imagination.

For India, Mamdani’s win ought not to be filtered merely through the lenses of political affinity or ideological tension. Nor should it be reduced to whether he has praised or criticized Narendra Modi. It must be read as a civilizational opportunity — a chance to reflect on how India sees itself through the mirror of its far-flung children, and how it chooses to relate to a diaspora that has become not just prosperous, but powerful.

From Symbolism to Strategy

The Indian diaspora has long been a subject of sentimentality in New Delhi. Politicians across parties have invoked its success with pride, as proof of India’s global relevance. Yet this recognition has too often remained superficial — a politics of emotion and event management rather than of vision and strategy.

When Indian leaders speak of the diaspora, they frequently slip into the language of nostalgia or finance: remittances, investments, and photo opportunities at the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas. In the imagination of the state, the non-resident Indian has become either a donor or a decorative emblem. What India has not yet fully realized is that its diaspora — 35 million strong and embedded in the commanding heights of global technology, academia, culture, and policy — is a strategic asset, not a sentimental one.

Zohran Mamdani’s ascent dramatizes this new reality. He is not wiring money to his family in India; he is shaping budgets, social programs, and global perceptions in the world’s most interconnected metropolis. He represents the diaspora not as nostalgia but as agency — as the capacity to act, govern, and transform.

How China Understood What India Did Not

For decades, China has treated its diaspora as an extension of national strategy. From the 1980s onward, Beijing and provincial governments built structured mechanisms to engage overseas Chinese communities — not merely as investors but as conduits of ideas, technologies, and global legitimacy. Chinese entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, Hong Kong, and Singapore were mobilized as a distributed network of innovation and soft power.

India, meanwhile, continued to equate diaspora engagement with emotional diplomacy. Its outreach remained heavy on symbolism — the “Howdy Modi” rallies, the stadium events, the awards — and light on long-term strategy. It is a profound irony that while Indians abroad helped build Microsoft, Google, and NASA, India’s statecraft still treats them as occasional donors and convenient photo-ops.

The Chinese state viewed diaspora as a strategic frontier. The Indian state still often views diaspora as a distant relative. The difference explains why China translated its diaspora’s success into national advantage — technology transfers, supply-chain networks, global financing — while India has yet to systematize that potential.

If India wants to realize Vision 2050 — to become a $30 trillion economy and a civilizational leader by mid-century — it must move beyond the fallacy of “diaspora as dollars” and towards a vision of diaspora as destiny.

Mamdani as Mirror

Mamdani’s victory in New York is the mirror India did not expect but urgently needs. Here is a child of Indian heritage, Ugandan birth, and American upbringing, fluent in Urdu, progressive in politics, and proud of his mother’s Hindu roots and his father’s Islamic scholarship. His campaign spoke of housing, transit, and dignity for immigrants — the vocabulary of a global South Asian who carries his hyphenated identity with pride, not apology.

To the insecure observer, Mamdani’s politics might seem alien or even antagonistic. He has, after all, criticized Modi and the BJP’s domestic policies. But that is precisely the challenge India must rise above. The real test of a mature civilization is whether it can engage its diaspora beyond ideological alignment, seeing in them not threats but extensions of its global intellect.

If Modi — or any Indian leader — can look past the campaign rhetoric and recognize in Mamdani an opportunity to build bridges between New York and Mumbai, it would mark a new level of diplomatic sophistication. Imagine a Mumbai–New York corridor for urban governance, fintech, education, and cultural exchange — linking two of the world’s most dynamic, plural, chaotic cities. Such a partnership could do for India what Silicon Valley once did for China.

From Healing Wounds to Building Futures

But to seize that opportunity, India must exorcise two ghosts: colonial envy and post-colonial grievance.

The colonial hangover makes India oscillate between seeking Western validation and resenting Western dominance. It turns diaspora achievements into occasions for either pride or suspicion — rarely into strategy. We celebrate the success of Indian-origin CEOs while secretly envying their Western stature, or we question their “Indianness” when their politics differ from ours. Both impulses betray insecurity.

The post-colonial grievance, meanwhile, manifests in the politics of historical hurt — the endless effort to avenge or “heal” perceived slights, whether from colonial powers or religious others. The Hindutva narrative that defines identity through grievance against Muslims is merely one form of this deeper malaise: a nation obsessed with its wounds rather than its possibilities.

To truly embrace a Vision 2050 mindset, India must evolve beyond both. It must learn to see itself — and its diaspora — not through the lens of what was taken, but through the imagination of what can be built.

The Energy of Non-Envy

Non-envy is not passivity; it is poise. It is the energy of a civilization that knows who it is, and therefore does not need to diminish others to affirm itself.

A non-envious India would not view a Mamdani in New York or a Rishi Sunak in London as curiosities or contradictions. It would view them as validations of its civilizational resilience — evidence that Indian identity can flourish anywhere without losing its moral texture.

Such an India would engage its diaspora not with the anxiety of ownership (“Are they Indian enough?”) or the opportunism of extraction (“Can they invest more?”), but with the confidence of collaboration. It would see every Indian-origin scientist, artist, or policymaker abroad as part of a distributed neural network of Indian genius — one that can be activated for mutual learning and global problem-solving.

This shift requires a cultural maturity India has long postponed: to celebrate without co-opting, to engage without controlling, and to recognize that the diaspora’s success is not a threat to the homeland’s identity but a continuation of it.

From Symbolism to Systems: Turning Mamdani’s Moment into Measurable Advantage

My connection to the Mamdani family is both intellectual and personal. As a graduate student at Columbia University, I studied under Professor Mahmood Mamdani — one of the most rigorous and generous minds I have ever encountered. I still recall the warmth of his office hours, where our discussions of Africa, empire, and justice would sometimes wander toward his young son Zohran — whose curiosity and civic engagement, even then, he spoke of with quiet pride. Years later, my wife would also study with Professor Mamdani, completing the circle of learning and affection that has touched all sides of our family. I would later share a literary festival as panelists, albeit on different panels, with Mira Nair at the Indian American Literary Festival in New York, where the conversation turned again to diasporic identity — that same matrix of belonging and boldness in which the Mamdanis have always lived. It is through those personal and intellectual connections that I see Zohran’s ascent not as coincidence, but as continuity — the flowering of a household where thought and action have always been intertwined.

If India wishes to translate the symbolism of Zohran Mamdani’s New York win into structural gain, it must act with scientific precision. A desi mayor in the world’s financial capital offers not merely prestige but a living test bed for deep cooperation between New York and Mumbai — between the laboratories of the North Atlantic and the laboratories of the Indian Ocean. What is required now is not sentiment but systems: city-to-city, lab-to-lab, code-to-code.

A practical beginning lies in joint science and technology corridors. New York’s AI institutes — NYU, Cornell Tech, Columbia — could twin with IIT Bombay and IISc to build bilingual, public-good large-language models for agriculture, logistics, and climate data. Quantum-materials research at Columbia could link to India’s semiconductor and advanced-packaging initiatives, creating shared fabrication lines where India supplies scale and New York supplies design. Cyber-range twins between the MTA and Mumbai Metro could run live red-team drills to harden both cities’ grids and ports against ransomware.

Health collaboration offers equal dividends. Sloan Kettering, Mount Sinai, and Tata Memorial could jointly run oncology trials across populations, cutting start-up time and cost while generating genomic data for rare cancers. India could adopt New York’s wastewater-epidemiology model for pathogen early-warning, linking ten Mumbai treatment plants to a joint data hub within a year. Such projects create not just research outputs but life-saving infrastructure and shared standards for global health security.

On the climate front, an urban-twin partnership could integrate NOAA’s models with Mumbai’s climate-risk mapping to predict floods, heat waves, and air-quality spikes with granular accuracy. Wall Street could originate India-linked municipal green bonds, financing port protection and electric-bus depots at international cost of capital. Every avoided tonne of carbon, every dollar of coupon saved, would become measurable evidence of a desi dividend.

Culturally and financially, Mamdani’s New York could serve as an innovation embassy for Indian cities. A Diaspora Science Corps could enlist Indian-origin technologists and public-health experts for short-term service rotations in India — ten weeks a year solving national problems from antimicrobial resistance to water loss. A joint NYC–Mumbai Strategic Secretariat could coordinate these ventures with quarterly dashboards, treating city diplomacy as an engineering discipline, not an afterthought.

The metrics are not vague: three-year horizons, co-authored patents, trial throughput, heat-mortality reduction, emissions avoided, start-up creation. These are the tangible outputs of a civilization that has outgrown envy and grievance and chosen to convert identity into capacity.

If New York under Mamdani and Mumbai under Vision 2050 can synchronize at this level of granularity — fusing Indian ingenuity with global precision — the result will not be a photo-op but a prototype: proof that the Indian imagination can build systems as elegantly as it builds stories, and that the desi mayor in New York can be the first governor of a shared technological future.

The Mirror Test

Ultimately, Mamdani’s rise is a mirror — not of him, but of us. When we look at him, what do we see?

Do we see an Indian who left, or an Indian who expanded what India can mean?
Do we see a critic to be dismissed, or a partner to be engaged?
Do we see the residue of colonial envy, or the dawn of civilizational confidence?

If we choose the latter, India’s engagement with its diaspora could become one of the most profound strategic shifts of the 21st century — transforming diaspora from symbol to structure, from nostalgia to network, from remittance to renaissance.

From Hurt to Horizon

History has long confined India to the language of hurt — colonial hurt, communal hurt, caste hurt. The next chapter must be written in the language of horizon.

A nation that once gave the world the Upanishads, algebra, and Gandhi must now give itself permission to dream again — not in reaction to others, but in relation with them. The diaspora is not India’s loss; it is India’s expansion. Each Indian abroad is an embassy of possibility.

If India can see them that way — not as exiles or ATMs, but as strategic minds in a planetary network of Indian consciousness — then Vision 2050 will cease to be a bureaucratic slogan. It will become a lived reality.

The Covenant of Confidence

The covenant that must now bind India and its diaspora is simple: mutual respect without mutual envy. India must love its global children enough to learn from them, and they must love their motherland enough to challenge her with truth.

In that covenant lies the real test of maturity — the test of whether India can transcend the binaries of colonizer and colonized, Hindu and Muslim, East and West, self and other.

Zohran Mamdani’s victory is not an isolated episode in American politics. It is a mirror held up to India’s soul — asking whether the world’s oldest continuous civilization can finally see itself whole, global, and unafraid.

If India can answer yes — if it can see in Mamdani not the echo of old divisions but the promise of a shared horizon — then perhaps for the first time since independence, India will not just be free. It will be sovereign in spirit.

And that will be the true beginning of Vision 2050 — an India no longer defined by its wounds, but by its wonder.

Manav Sachdeva serves as Ambassador for President Zelenskyy’s Grain from Ukraine program. He has worked on all 5 continents in the international system with the UN and other bodies, and is also an award winning multilingual poet in English and Urdu.

Zohran gets his own Urdu pop song

Read the whole thing there..

I am posting this because I have often wondered why some Asian-American intellectuals (and more specifically, “South Asian” ones, since I am a little more familiar with them) are so committed to a model in which the model minority is a myth and Asian-Americans are “people of color”, standing shoulder to shoulder with African-Americans and Latinos in POC-solidarity against the oppressive rule of White privilege? I don’t mean to say that there is NO truth in any such model. But leaving the truth and untruth of the assertion aside for the moment.