Tag: South Asian diaspora identity

Pakistan’s Ghost in the Indus

X.T.M · December 7, 2018 · No comments

Today a father and son walked into the shop. They were chattering in Hindustani and the son was being super deferential to his dad.

There was something about the father and son pair that screamed Pakistani. The father had the heavy-set ruddy gruff behaviour that characterises so many Punjabis middle aged men and his youngish son (who was interviewing at Cam for MechEng undergrad next year) just looked salt of the earth Pakistani. I had clocked the father’s gold bling but I disregarded it.

After a while I threw in an Urdu word just to signal I was Desi too. While in other parts of the country this would go unnoticed & rather unremarkable, Cambridge is defined by the white-Chinese dynamic. They were a bit startled and then I asked if they were Pakistanis. The father was like no we’re Indians. Furthermore that they were from Gujarat, which I was rather taken aback from since Gujaratis have such a different feel to them. Continue reading Pakistan’s Ghost in the Indus

Brown Pundits – Episode 3, genetics

Razib Khan · December 2, 2018 · 13 comments

The latest BP Podcast is up. You can listen on Libsyn, iTunes and Stitcher. Probably the easiest way to keep up the podcast since we don’t have a regular schedule is to subscribe at one of the links above.

Thanks to everyone who reviewed the podcast! Please leave more 5-star reviews. If this podcasts interests enough people I’ll be getting us on other platforms.

Zack In the Cambridge News

X.T.M · December 1, 2018 · 12 comments

https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.cambridge-news.co.uk/news/cambridge-news/bubble-tap-cambridge-lion-yard-15487114.amp

Cambridge News picked up (and sanitised) my blog post about the incident two days ago.

For somebody who lives the simple life in the shores – drama tends to follow me everywhere. The Zavidés are Dramatis Personae since the three of us are all characters in our own right (we have been trying to do an arranged rishta for our puppy).

Best performing story on the site so far ?

Is it impossible to be posh and Paki?

X.T.M · November 30, 2018 · 21 comments

For all my talk of poshness – an Irish customer just asked me if my father is a taxi driver as he met a taxi driver who is the spitting image of me and talks just like me

I love being coloured in Britain ?

Addendum I’m in the shires not Londonistan (our great capital) and Paki in this country means coloured/brown.

The problem is that we are becoming sophisticated as a people and the WWC (white working class) are not fans of that surge.

Addendum: incidentally it so happens that today is the 1yr anniversary of B.Tap (my dessert bar) and Winston Churchill’s birthday.

After the celebration dinner I convened an emergency late night chapter of the Sherbet Socialists ahead of the important Decolonisation Summit to discuss Taxi Driver incident. Considering these are some of the finest coloured minds in the Shire (disproportionately Stemmies) I asked them to deconstruct my feelings and the incident: Continue reading Is it impossible to be posh and Paki?

When my own kind robbed me of 50 quid

X.T.M · November 29, 2018 · 11 comments

I own Bubble Tap, which is a very popular desert shop in Cambridge, and today I lost 50 pounds because I was politically correct.

A young ethnic man walked into the store and my super-posh employee (the Etonian-lite rugby playing chap) mistook him for the Deliveroo driver.

I immediately felt bad for this young ethnic chap as it’s par for the course for us coloureds to be mistaken for taxi drivers, Uber drivers etc. I immediately warmed up to him and as he made his way to order; I personally stepped in to take it. Continue reading When my own kind robbed me of 50 quid

Pakistani potluck with a dash of politics

X.T.M · November 24, 2018 · 12 comments

Last night V & I hosted Pakistani potluck. It turned out to be a rather intimate affair with a few Pakistani friends of ours. After the last few weeks of intense Indian & Kashmiri events I thought it would be nice to have a light-hearted evening of biryani, nihari and haleem especially before we go meat-free at home.

As an aside I’ve begun to believe that the meat consumption we are having is simply far in excess of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Industrial farming is a blight and my hack is simply to eat meat outside of the home.

Toward the end of the evening the talk drifted towards politics and V mentioned some of her opinions about Pakistan. It rapidly became a bit more intense since at the root of it V has deep misgivings about the Pakistani state. Her contention is that all Indians, of whatever hue, couldn’t forgive Pakistan for what happened on 26-11 and that in a way it was India’s 9-11. Continue reading Pakistani potluck with a dash of politics

Why I love being Paki-

X.T.M · November 19, 2018 · 30 comments

https://twitter.com/janatzaf/status/1064008024459829249?s=12

This cracked me up to no end.

On a serious note I tend to follow a fair bit of Twitterstan. It’s a lot more fun than Twitterdesh.

Twitterdesh is a bit scary since a lot of the Bollywood celebs have fled to Instagram and we’re left with a bunch of intellectuals constantly griping about Hinduism losing out to Islam.

Twitterstan happens to have a lot of Pakistan’s glamorous politicians; Bakhtawar Bhutto has a pretty fascinating account. What I haven’t fathomed yet is why haven’t the PPP & PML-N made a Grand Democratic Coalition to punch back against Imran & the Army.

I picked up this piece (via Razib’s twitter) on the New York Times on China’s unique rise.

I think Pakistan is a fairly advanced and democratic country compared to the rest of the Muslim world (which is a fairly low bar). However the strong pull of the Raj’s legacy & an Indian cultural orientation mitigate the harsher aspects of Islam.

I was quite vocal in the last podcast with Razib; I ranted a fair bit since I’ve been so angry about the Aasia Bibi situation.

I’m actually not so angry with Pakistanis back home but our Diaspora abroad who cower behind the veil of the Woke & Social Justice Warriors.

If we are all meant to constantly check our Privileges then what about the rights of the most under-privileged person there is, Aasia B.

This is why I find the Left at the moment to have betrayed the legacy of liberalism whatsoever. It’s fighting for what is expedient rather than what is right. It doesn’t mean the Right is any better but the apostolic mantle that the Left has shrouded itself in means that it must be held to the same standards as religious authority. The Death of Christianity as a pervasive moral code has left a huge moral vacuum in large sections of society.

Skin color of South Asian groups

Razib Khan · November 13, 2018 · 28 comments

A massive new review, Shades of complexity: New perspectives on the evolution and genetic architecture of human skin, pointed me to another paper on South Asian skin color, The influences of genes, the environment, and social factors on the evolution of skin color diversity in India. I was very interested because South Asians have been telling me about complexion my whole life. Usually, it is to suggest that their group is lighter than some other group. So I thought it would be interesting to post some data.

Solomon Islanders

The figure at the top shows melanin indexes for a host of populations. The lower the value, the lighter the skin. So you see that Irish samples above have a melanin index of 26.5, while Italians have one of 31. East Asians in Canada have a melanin index of 38. Predominantly African ancestry populations have melanin indices >50, while the very dark Melanesian people of the Solomon Islands have a melanin index of about 90.

I’ve collected the Indian data from the paper:

Continue reading Skin color of South Asian groups

London(istan)

X.T.M · November 12, 2018 · 10 comments

I don’t have much to add to this. I do notice however that in the Shires (which are still very English); the English are much more guarded about the “demographic transformation.”

It’s almost like a silent invasion (the Home Counties have changed irreversibly in a generation) and even though the terminology is somewhat loaded, the English are unused to being a minority in their own country (understandably so).

Scotland is still demographically very white British and accordingly their main animus remains with the English as opposed to immigrants (who they want).

What is interesting however (and Razib touched on this in our podcast) South Asians almost always perceive themselves to be a minority. India is so diverse that no one caste dominates and in Pakistan the birdaderi clan caste identity is important in parts of the Punjab.

So in a way South Asians haven’t internalised homogeneity as Europeans have done in the past few centuries (Treaty of Westphalia for Germany, Treaty of Versailles for the East).

Brown Pundits