I’ll add as I go along but this seems quite topical..
I do see the Persian Gulf States emerging as a hyper-conduit between capital, labour and technology. The West is raising up its walls.
Tag: South Asian diaspora identity
📊 Brown Pundits Hits 63,094 Visits in August (+156% Surge)
That’s more than 2,000 visitors a day. What’s driving it?
✅ Open Threads
✅ Honest takes
✅ And yes — argumentation.
But arguments only work if they spark thought, not just heat. Take Kabir; he’s a regular, and I’ve given him free rein. But his tendency to argue without reflection rubs people the wrong way. He blames his relative unpopularity on identity, but it’s more about tone than religion; highhandedness vs humility.
In my own recent disagreement: I paused, thought, reflected deeply. That’s the spirit of BP; a messy, open-minded search for truth.
🎭 Meanwhile, the real tamasha isn’t cricket 🏏 (India did trounce Pakistan) — it’s on X, and on the BP comment section.
X 🧵:
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Mohammed Shami’s viral Ramzan juice reel — “His religion lets him put his nation first”
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Indian media ad for INDvPAK — lynching for selling beef.
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A Malayalam film scene: Hindu girl eating beef — what are South Indian Hindu traditions on beef?
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Tallest structures in the subcontinent through the ages.
The stupas raises a deeper question:
How central was Buddhism to the Indian subcontinent — and how total was its erasure? In the heartlands, Brahmanism absorbed and displaced it; in the frontier zones, Islam swept away what remained. What we see today are ruins — but once, this was the dominant civilizational framework of the region.
Was its disappearance a slow assimilation, or a deliberate effacement?
What Kind of Space Is Brown Pundits
A few of us authors have been actively discussing the future of Brown Pundits; the space, the tone, and the deeper ideas we’re engaging. It started informally on our WhatsApp group, but the questions are foundational: What kind of platform is BP becoming? What should it strive to be? And what kinds of ideas does it host best?
At its best, Brown Pundits is a bridge; across nations, faiths, ideologies, and lived experiences. It’s a space where one can be deeply Indian, wholly Pakistani, broadly Bangladeshi, or diasporic and disillusioned but still belong. But like any bridge, it needs conscious upkeep. If a conversation leans too far in one direction, it doesn’t stretch, it collapses inward.
Some contributors feel the platform has become overly shaped by one ideological current. Others argue that the real problem isn’t dominance, but disengagement ; those who want plurality must also show up. And both perspectives can be true.
Open Thread: From Flattery to Fatigue — What the Iranian Diaspora Can’t Admit
On July 14, I wrote about Ta’arof ; the millennia-old Persian art of flattery, refusal, and ritualised courtesy. It’s often misunderstood in the West as “saying no three times,” but it’s really about emotional high-context negotiation, reading the room before the room speaks.
The next day, on July 15, Sharghzadeh posted a powerful video, calling it Iranian Diaspora Fatigue. A searing takedown of the Iranian Diaspora’s toxic racial insecurities, internalised Islamophobia, misogyny masked as modernity, and cultural denialism. He’s mostly right.
What he calls fatigue, I’d call poisoned flattery turned inward. Because Tehranglos are no longer performing Ta’arof to honour guests or elders. They’re doing it to whiteness itself. Hoping if they refuse our own identity long enough, maybe the West will say: “Yes, come in.”
That’s not assimilation. That’s exhaustion. And the worst part? Even the racism feels borrowed; against Arabs, against Afghans, against Iranians back home. It’s not even Iranian. This isn’t just about cringe TikToks or awkward panel guests. It’s about who gets to narrate Persian culture. And what gets flattened when tradition becomes product. I was stunned when Zachary Newman — one of the most prominent Persian-Jewish American chefs — endorsed Netanyahu’s strikes on Iran. That moment crystallised something.
Sharghzadeh and I are saying the same thing: Persian culture is being gentrified by its own children. What survives isn’t tradition. It’s content. It’s vibes. If Iran is an unreadable poem, diaspora is turning it into a slogan. If Iran is lived, diaspora is increasingly just captioned. And they wonder why they’re tired. Is the Persian diaspora preserving a culture, or just performing it for the algorithm?
The Gratitude Trap: On Escaping Asia but Staying Captive
In a recent video, a young Punjabi woman, likely Sikh, candidly shares her discomfort upon returning to India after living in Canada (this kind of echoes the Aussie influencer’s comments on chronic Indian inequality). The noise, the pollution, the density. Her frustration is raw, familiar, and deeply sincere.
But beneath her words lies something larger: the aesthetic asymmetry that defines the postcolonial condition. Wide roads, clean air, manicured parks; these are not just amenities. In the global South, they become symbols of escape, status, and salvation. And so, millions migrate. Or aspire to. Not just for jobs, but for dignity. For air that doesn’t burn. For order that doesn’t humiliate. For a feeling of being seen.
And when they do, when they arrive in Canada, the UK, Australia, something subtle happens: they become grateful. Not just for opportunity, but for escape. For the fact that the West “works.” That gratitude then curdles into deference.
They begin to believe that the world outside the West is meant to be chaotic, dirty, loud. That governance is a Western gift. That clean streets and quiet parks are civilizational rather than institutional. This is the gratitude trap; the soft power of asphalt, symmetry, and silence.
And it’s why postcolonial recovery is so difficult. Not because the global South lacks culture or potential, but because its own elites, shaped by extraction, not architecture, rarely build for elegance. Rarely build for pride. Rarely build for joy. What the West exported was not just railways or rule of law. It exported a built environment that still shames us. And until that is understood, until we take seriously the spatial dignity of our cities and the material form of our futures, the colonial spell will remain unbroken.
What Is Brown Pundits For?
Brown Pundits has always been an open tent—not a monolith, not a movement, and certainly not a megaphone. A forum. A space where ideas, arguments, and identities from across the Brown world are aired, examined, and sometimes clashed over—with the hope that we all leave a little sharper than we arrived. But with that openness comes tension. How do we balance quality and quantity? Principle and pluralism? Coherence and contradiction?
It’s something I’ve reflected on often in other matters of my life (like party-planning for instance). When I’m in the UK, time is tight. When I’m in the US, there’s more room for Brown Pundits. In that ebb, others—like Kabir—have stepped in, contributing with energy and range. And I’m grateful.
Some of Kabir’s posts may align politically with The Wire. That’s fine. Other Pundits lean toward a down-low Hindu Right. Also fine. This was never a place for orthodoxy. We aren’t here to gatekeep belief—we’re here to grow through encounter. The real question isn’t what side are you on? It’s why are you here?
If you’re here to dunk, to declare, to dominate—maybe this isn’t the right space. But if you’re here to engage, to learn, to argue in good faith—welcome. As authors, we don’t always agree. We shouldn’t. But how we disagree matters. To that end, I’d like to lay out four standing principles—not as commandments, but as shared norms that keep our house in order:
Rest in Peace
This is so incredibly heartbreaking; this beautiful family excited about a new life in the United Kingdom.
The picture was taken to celebrate ‘new beginnings’ as Komi Vyas, a doctor who worked in Udaipur, had quit her job and was moving to join her husband, Dr Prateek Joshi, in London, with their three children.
But, tragically, the family are among the at least 241 dead after the Gatwick-bound aircraft crashed moments after take-off from Ahmedabad Airport in the northwestern Indian state of Gujarat yesterday.
May they and the rest of the victims of the Air India crash rest in the Highest Heaven.
Everyone Western Becomes White Eventually
That’s a sharp observation, and worth expanding. The truth is, in the West, all immigrants eventually become “white”—not in phenotype, but in assimilation, in aesthetic, in aspiration. Continue reading Everyone Western Becomes White Eventually
On Moderation, Minoritization, and the Elite
Pulse: The Threads We Weave —
Lately I’ve wondered whether I over-curated the threads. Things feel quieter. Maybe too quiet. But perhaps that’s the cost of raising the bar—of asking for dialogue instead of dopamine. Still, this lull has me reflecting not just on moderation but on why some arguments no longer move me.
Take the Indo-Pak conflict: once electric, now strangely inert. That shift reflects my own evolution over two decades. I no longer inhabit that binary. I carry a layered identity—a South Asian Bahá’í sensibility shaped by Persian aesthetics, grounded in British institutions, and fluently navigated through English. That complexity is my compass. It’s why I care less about flags and more about forces.
And the real force that shapes our lives? The elite. Not as a pejorative, but as a structural reality. I see it as nested tiers: Continue reading On Moderation, Minoritization, and the Elite
“A Foreign Class of Servants” — JD Vance and the Great American Amnesia
Vice President JD Vance recently declared that America doesn’t need to “import a foreign class of servants” to remain competitive. “We did it in the ’50s and ’60s,” he said. “We put a man on the moon with American talent. Some German and Jewish scientists who had come over during World War two, but mostly by American citizens.”
The line is memorable—not for its nationalism, but for its breathtaking amnesia.
The moon landing was not the product of some closed, white-bread meritocracy. It was powered by German engineers, Jewish refugees, and immigrant scientists—many quite literally “imported.” Wernher von Braun, the face of NASA’s rocket program, was a former Nazi, repurposed by America for its Cold War dreams.
Today, the immigrant pipeline Vance sneers at includes his own in-laws—his wife’s parents, Indian-born academics. I’ve highlighted this problematic tendency before. They weren’t servants. They were scholars. Like hundreds of thousands who have powered this country’s universities, tech firms, hospitals, and labs. America doesn’t run on pedigree. It runs on brains. And yes, those brains often have accents.
America First doesn’t mean America stays first Continue reading “A Foreign Class of Servants” — JD Vance and the Great American Amnesia