Indian Matchmaking
The Juggernaut has the usual predictable take. Racist, classist, colorist, heterosexist, etc. Myself, I don’t take these shows as illustrations of how the world should be, but how it is. Anthropology. When I was younger I was very opposed to an arranged marriage. My parents had an arranged marriage, and I found it to be …
Life is a great test
Being Asian American is often about tests. Doing well on tests. That’s what Asian Americans are supposed to do. Two conventionally liberal (“woke”) publications have stories about test-prep, testing, and Asian American academic life. First, in The Juggernaut, Why Test Scores Can Be a “Proxy for Privilege”. To be franky, I did not like this …
HDI by region in South Asia
Data courtesy a reader.
The food of yore
Two things related to food which I suspect readers are going to enjoy (though perhaps not on an empty stomach!):
– Curry Before Columbus
– A Bengali Meal: 16th century
Check them out!
Asian American kids in the 1970s and 1980s the WEIRDest in the world?
Reading Joe Henrich’s newest book I realized some things about my own life, which led me to a weird hypothesis: the WEIRDest people in the USA could very well be the children of Asian immigrant professionals in the 1970s and 1980s. As I was growing up there was always a large cultural chasm between my […]
India before the binary
How Britain’s colonial past can be traced through to the transphobic feminism of today: The British Age of Enlightenment prized itself on scientific rationality, including with it strict taxonomies of racial and sex categorisation – i.e. your biology meant you were strictly male or female, and there was a rigid hierarchy of race superiority (with …
Pass the samosa, spare the postcolonialism
Edward Said’s Orientalism was a work of scholarship. I think it was a very mixed work of scholarship (better as a critique than a plausible interpretation of the facts, in keeping with the author’s expertise as a literary scholar than a historian). But it was one of the later 20th century works which ruminated on …
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Hindu racism against Muslims
On the TV show Parks & Recreation Aziz Asnari’s character, Darwish Ghani, changes his name to Tom Haverford. The joke is that as a brown-skinned man he can change his name all he wants, but he’ll always be Darwish Ghani to the fair citizens of Indiana. I thought of this while after I listened to …
Never Have I Ever
The new series on Netflix about a young Indian American teen is pretty good. Despite attempts to write about it in a political frame, I don’t see that it’s a political show really. There is also an element of verisimilitude to the show because the non-Indian love interests are of East Asian, Jewish, or …
Extraction!
I just watched a somewhat silly film Extraction on Netflix. There’s not much plot. But some of the background is subcontinental. Some comments * The translation of the Bengali elided quite a flit of flourish. For example, they didn’t translate “son of a bitch” from Bengali into English in the subtitles * The dominance and …
Hindus are the most authentic Indians
As someone who was raised in the United States as a person of brown complexion, I grew up as an “Indian.” This, despite the fact that the last time any of my ancestors were Indian nationals was before 1947. The main reason is that it is really hard to get people in 1980s America to …
The Elephant at the Dragon
This comment reflects in many ways important elements about how and why the Chinese view the Indians as they do: … your question has answers in two periods. The second and most recent was during the cold war, shaped by Chinese elite (diplomatic) interaction with their Indian counterparts during this period who came to see …
The culture war comes to you
Over the past few days, there has been a somewhat noticeable Twitter conflagration (when isn’t there?) over a tweet sent out by the Paris-based writer Thomas Chatterton Williams. The author most recently of Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race, Chatterton Williams is someone with whom I have been relatively friendly (I interviewed him for […]
Western civilization is Indo-Islamic under its skin
I’ve been in this game for a long time. Back in the middle of the 2000s, I observed that people of Muslim and Indian origin had sensitive and peculiar reactions to criticisms of their religion. Muslim cases are well known. Less well known is the violence and menace associated with the Birmingham Repertory Theatre play …
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South Asian Muslim ancestors were idolaters!
An argument that emerges now and then on this website has to do with the nature of the ancestors of Indian (South Asian) Muslims. Where they Hindus? Much hinges on semantics. The term “Hindu” after all simply meant Indian in the days of yore, so by definition, they were. On the other hand, Hindu today …
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The white liberal’s idea of an Asian American
In Vox, Asian American racism is the unfunny joke the comedy world needs to reckon with. The piece is ho-hum. It could have been written by some sort of software program, as it leverages every quasi-academic intellectual construct about Asian Americans. What I would like to see more in the media is the voice of …
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Ideas may matter in the aggregate, but not on the individual scale
Scott Atran’s In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion convinced me of many things. One of the things it convinced me is that aggregate espoused beliefs had a marginal consequence on the individual level. There were several reasons for this. Some of the elements of “higher religion” which were asserted by some beliefs, […]
Race and religion trump class
Another month, another “Asian” grooming gang scandal. “Asian” usually, but not exclusively, seems to mean Pakistani British men. A lot of the discussion around this issue centers on the perpetrators of the crimes. Their ethnoreligious distinctiveness. The cultural preconditions which allow for the development of these practices of abuse and exploitation as normative in certain …
What is it like being gay in India?
I would be curious about reader experiences. The reason I ask is that a white friend who visits India for business told me the story of being asked about letting new male acquaintances suck his dick repeatedly. Apparently, since he had no local roots/connections these men felt ‘safe’ making this inquiry (one of the men …