Tag: XTM

At Negombo, the Indian subcontinent meets where it still can

The photograph above was taken on the 11th of May in Negombo, on the western coast of Sri Lanka. The caption records the occasion plainly: friends from Pakistan, from Tamil Nadu, and from Sri Lanka, gathered with members of the International Teaching Centre and the Counsellors serving in the Indian subcontinent, at an Institutional Gathering convened by the Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of Lanka.

We want to say something about what this image makes possible, and where.

Indians & Pakistanis cannot meet any longer

The hard fact first. There is no longer any practical way for an ordinary Indian and an ordinary Pakistani to sit in the same room inside either of their own countries. Visa regimes have hardened to the point of farce. The land border is sealed in spirit if not in law. What remains are the smaller states of the subcontinent and the wider diaspora. Of the smaller states, Sri Lanka is the one that handles the meeting most gracefully: visa-on-arrival to both passports, no overland complication, no political theatre, and a civic culture that does not ask either side to perform a position.

Which brings us to the older question, whether Sri Lanka belongs to our civilisational space at all. Some friends north of the Palk Strait still treat the island as adjacent rather than constitutive. We think this is wrong, and the reasons are not sentimental.

Sri Lanka is Dharmic? Continue reading At Negombo, the Indian subcontinent meets where it still can

She carried an entire civilization in her hands

We have just landed back in the United States, and since we have been writing about gender all week, we wanted to share this sweet Mother’s Day note from the Hindu American Foundation here on BP.

She didn’t pack much. Maybe a small murti of Ganesha wrapped carefully in the folds of a sari. A handwritten copy of the Hanuman Chalisa. A few photos of her parents and siblings. And yet, she carried everything.

The full note is below but we wanted to share a few short thoughts as well. Q posted a tweet on the parallel thread arguing that Islam is the last holdout against total Westernisation. It is a serious claim and worth answering. Superficially he is right. The visible global resistance to Western moral universalism is largely Muslim, and the Manosphere is paying heed.

But the deeper claim is more complex, and the Hindu American Foundation’s letter illustrates why.

Continue reading She carried an entire civilization in her hands

On Safety and Hinduphobia

Bombay Badshah is on vanvas. He earned it. He posted, in passing, personal details of another commenter, which he should never have been examining. He was warned, apologised, and is now serving his time in the forest. Lord Ram took Sita and Lakshman with him for fourteen years. BB is taking the IPL and Dhurandhar reruns for ten days. The proportions are different. The principle is the same. You leave the city when you have offended its order.

This is not a defence of him. It is the opposite. BP must be a safe space for reader, commenter and author. Privacy is the precondition of opinion. If a person cannot post under a handle without a hostile interlocutor looking them up, the room collapses into a lower kind of theatre. We do not run that kind of room.

Engrained Hinduphobia

But his exile is also the moment to say the thing we have been postponing. Hindus on this site have a real grievance, and it has accumulated because the language of liberal discourse equips one side of the argument with a vocabulary the other side does not have. Islamophobia is an institutional word. Hinduphobia is still scratching at the door. The asymmetry shapes every thread:

The Brahmins behind April’s Traffic

One post earns sixteen percent of all our organic traffic. Written in February 2019. Titled The Five Great Brahmin Castes and Their Proclivities. Seven years on, still the engine.

That is the centre of the site, whether we planned it or not.

What people are searching for

top 5 caste in india. brahman caste. brahmin last names. aryan indians. pakistani hindu. is hinduism pagan.

People are searching caste, ancestry, and religious lineage. We rank for it. Some readers are working out what they are. Some are arguing with relatives. Some are looking up a surname before a marriage call. We do not need to romanticise them. The search bar tells the truth.

The 2019 post answered a question hundreds of thousands of people have asked since. It still answers it.

What sits below it

Four other posts share the next 22% of organic traffic between them.

Continue reading The Brahmins behind April’s Traffic

Open Thread: Pakistan’s Demons are The Daughters of God

Q writes on Pakistani source confirms US, Iran closing in on one-page memo to end war:

  1. Total Pakistani victory. If Pakistan pulls off the mediation, this will its greatest diplomatic victory ever. Lifting of Iranian sanctions will allow cheaper Iranian oil to flow directly to Pakistan, and the oil pipeline can be finally completed. Complete eradication of Indian influence from Iran is now achieved, and this will also eliminate any support to BLA from across the border.

Pakistan post Sindoor is on a winning streak. The mediation is real, the memo is real, and if it holds, the diplomatic ledger for the year goes firmly into Rawalpindi’s column. Iranian oil at the door, IP pipeline thinkable for the first time in fifteen years, BLA lifelines into Sistan throttled, Chabahar quietly demoted. A Victorious month?

But the question is whether she can conquer her demons. And the demons are not in the foreign ministry. They are in the drama studios.

Q again, on Pakistani dramas:

Women low-key love abusive behaviour from attractive men. Pretty much all women fantasy porn is about this. (What they don’t love is abusive aggressive behaviour from ugly or poor men) Since females are the primary target audience of these dramas, they tend to show this because that’s what the market demands. I would not read too much into this. What’s more concering was that foreign funded NGOs were trying implement anti-family messaging in the last 15 years – and that messaging has suddenly dried up after their funding dried up.

Fantasy is not preference. A woman reading a brooding-billionaire romance is not auditioning for one. To collapse the two is to flatten the female imagination into a market signal, which is exactly what the Pakistani dramas do and exactly why they rot the culture that consumes them.

Daughters of God Continue reading Open Thread: Pakistan’s Demons are The Daughters of God

Pakistani Diversity

Q’s comment, on Kabir’s excellent post, deserves to be reproduced in full.

Several points are wrong here:

I have never actually met a Pakistani who thinks they are Arab or Turk ethnically. Claiming lineage is not ethnicity, not even the Syeds identify with Arabs although they will try to flex their Syed status occassionally. Many Syeds in the family, never heard anyone claim they were ethnically Arab.

Ergutral did not make people in Pakistan think they were Turks, what they identified with was the Islamic history and mannerisms being portrayed. A pasthun guy told me that it portrayed ‘our history’ and while I completely understdood the ‘our’ part because he was using it in an Islamic context (because he is a proud Pasthun, not Arab or Turk), but I did correct him that it was mostly fiction. Continue reading Pakistani Diversity

Honour and Acid: The Great Indus Split

We published on the virginity economy yesterday. In the thread, we remembered a very line to us we could not leave alone. Honour killing is what Pakistan took from Indus culture. Acid throwing is what the Indian side took. The data is messier than the line. The line is still broadly right.

The Honour Killing Skew

Between 2018 and 2022, Punjab alone booked 841 incidents with 1,058 victims, 799 of them women. UNFPA’s working estimate is up to 5,000 deaths per year once karo-kari, siyahkari, and “natural cause” burials are folded back in.

India’s NCRB figures for honour killing sit in the low tens per year. This is an undercount so severe it is a category error. Most Indian cases are filed under IPC Section 302 as ordinary murder. The same is true in Pakistan. The difference is that Pakistan’s press, HRCP, and Dawn keep the score. India’s hotspots are Haryana, western UP, and Tamil Nadu (caste-coded).

Adjusted for population, Pakistan’s honour killing intensity is roughly an order of magnitude higher than India’s.

The Acid Attack Skew Continue reading Honour and Acid: The Great Indus Split

The Iran That 1979 Erased: What If Khomeini Had Lost?

A Counterfactual Iran, 1979–2026

This is a thought experiment, not a manifesto. The Shah was finished by 1978. SAVAK, the Rastakhiz one-party state, the inflationary shock of the 1973–74 oil windfall, the rural migration dumped into an unready Tehran. The question is not whether Mohammad Reza Pahlavi survived. The question is what replaced him, and what that Iran looked like in 2026.

Start with the baseline the Islamic Republic inherited and dismantled.

Between 1960 and 1979, the Iranian economy grew at 9.1% per year. That is the Central Bank of Iran’s own figure. By 1977, Iran was the world’s 18th largest economy, ahead of Turkey at 20th and South Korea at 28th. Real per capita income had tripled in three decades. The White Revolution, launched in 1963, had already delivered universal suffrage for women, mass university expansion, the Literacy Corps, the Health Corps, land reform that turned roughly 90% of Iranian sharecroppers into landowners, and a domestic industrial base that was exporting motor vehicles to Egypt and Yugoslavia by the early 1970s. The regime was brutal. The development was real. Both things are true.

Then compound the counterfactual. Central Bank data shows Iranian GDP growth collapsed to 1.9% per year between 1979 and 2020, a near-fivefold reduction sustained over four decades. In 1980, Iran’s nominal GDP per capita was $2,374, higher than Turkey’s $2,169, Korea’s $1,711 and Vietnam’s $514. By 2024, Iran sits around $5,000 per capita, Turkey around $15,000, Korea above $33,000, Vietnam around $4,500 and rising fast. Every comparator with a functioning state has overtaken Iran. Iran has been lapped by a country (Vietnam) that fought a twenty-year war with the United States, lost it, and rebuilt from rubble.

Now run the counterfactual forward.

The Transition

Continue reading The Iran That 1979 Erased: What If Khomeini Had Lost?

The Chess Masters Who Weren’t

The presumption behind the grand-strategist mythos is always the same. Trump, Milei, Netanyahu, Modi and Orbán are playing three moves ahead, and the other side is stupid. Strip the second half of that sentence and the first collapses.

Look at the scoreboard.

Op Sindoor. India’s post-operation strategic environment does not favour India. Whatever the tactical ledger reads, the diplomatic map around South Asia has tightened against Delhi, not loosened. Delhi has learned. The region has taken notes.

Pakistan. The surprise winner of Op Sindoor is not India. Rawalpindi has played the post-operation hand better than anyone expected and is now cashing cheques in Washington, the Persian Gulf and Beijing in the same quarter. On the current scoreboard, Pakistan is the diplomatic champion of the world.

Iran.* Tehran has pushed back harder than the MAGA-Likud axis priced in. Hormuz did not close on Washington’s schedule. The Islamic Republic has not folded on Washington’s terms. The deterrence calculus is running the wrong way.

Lebanon. Netanyahu was ordered to stop. Not persuaded, not incentivised. Ordered. That is a tell about who holds the leash, and it is not Jerusalem.

Hungary. Orbán conceded on 12 April 2026. Sixteen years, gone in a single parliamentary cycle, to Péter Magyar’s Tisza on a two-thirds supermajority. Some say it was thanks to JD’s Kiss of Death. The flagship of illiberal democracy in Europe was voted out by the electorate it was supposed to have captured.

Continue reading The Chess Masters Who Weren’t

Pakistanis = Indian Muslims With Sovereignty?

Part 1: Who Can Speak for the Muslims of India

Part 2

BB has made a comment calling Pakistanis “strayed Muslim Indians“; which does not quite make sense, because Pakistanis are both Indic & Islamic, uniquely so. One cannot deny the highly syncretic and distinct Muslim subculture that has come about from a very long and deep history in India. It cannot be subsumed into an Indian identity in any meaningful way without acknowledging that distinctiveness.

But the phrasing opens a useful equation.

Pakistanis = Indian Muslims with sovereignty.

Continue reading Pakistanis = Indian Muslims With Sovereignty?

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