We are travelling at the moment but (South) Indians are crushing it at Chess.

As we quipped right now, “India dominates when it comes to the letter, C. C

Chess, cricket, cuisine, culture & perhaps even conversation (Desis are loud & loquacious)..

Don’t forget to fill in the survey which ends tomorrow.

Budget season is here. Everyone is presenting their two cents on the way out of the IMF’s vicious trap (with the latest iteration imposing 105 compliance requirements, including 75 ‘structural conditionalities’), solutions to kill all tax ills, a panacea for the power sector miscarriages, a lethal shovel for the trade deficit serpent, development-centric economic prescriptions to counter pro-cyclical meandering and whatnot.

And thanks to ChatGPT and Google NotebookLM, Facebook and LinkedIn are brimming with macroeconomic commentaries and infographics. Resplendent seminars are being organised, with the same slides but for the new fiscal year, to gauge the impending behemoth. Newspapers, especially oped sections, are the sweet spot for policymakers and even ex-ministers. One may wonder where the magical healing potion was when they were orchestrating the national financial (mis)management. Maybe it is only after defenestration that one gets hold of the knowledge that the job required in the first place.

The typical approach in the prevailing discourse is to perform horizontal and vertical analyses. The former is a trend analysis; for instance, since 2007-08, current and development expenditures of our governments have increased by 1007 per cent and 937 per cent, respectively. The latter works by dividing a certain expenditure, let’s say military expense, by the total budget; this works as a classifier, with an ideological baggage, either accepting or rejecting the line item. And then, the cliche sermon ends with ‘the way forward’, presenting obvious things: cut tax rates, grow the tax base, cut current expenditure, boost development expenditure, rationalise subsidies, produce more, import less, and so on.

At the moment, I am sick and tired of these mantras. And it’s not that I am a sadist who wants Pakistan to fail economically. Rather, what irks is simple: if we know the deliverance already, why are we not implementing it? Either those in power don’t read newspapers or the roadmaps, which are often presented by think tanks to incumbent ministers by hand, or don’t scroll through social media, which of course is almost impossible in this day and age – or they are well versed in all this, but they don’t want to follow it due to the absence of incentives for such tiring endeavours.

Then, what we should focus on, rather than debating constantly sans dialogue, is to, somehow, cure the infamous phenomena of elite capture, which, according to PIDE, works both as a situation in which the elites shape development processes according to their own priorities and as a process in which the powerful elites skim resources intended for the bottom and define policies in a way that protects their own interests. This translates into the financial morass reflected in our budgets and reports, and a development deficit that is borne with excruciating pain by paupers.

Our economy revolves around rents and rent-seekers; this is a colonial way of governance, institutionalised through bureaucratic controls, legal frameworks and economic policies designed to serve colonial interests. Unfortunately, even today, this remains the modus operandi of our governments. Some features of the prevailing economic edifice include: regulatory capture and political control: policy configured by powerful groups who sustain discretionary influence over institutions and economic rules; rent-seeking and distorted incentives: access-based gains dominate, making lobbying and connections more rewarding than productivity; selective taxation: offering exemptions, evasions, and ineffective rates; trade protection and favourable prices: subsidies that do not promote efficiency and instead sustain protected sectors through repeated support.

This involves, on the one hand, favourable pricing formulas, strong protective barriers and conditions that allow cartels and monopolies to operate easily, and, on the other hand, convenient access to cheaper inputs; and debt dependence and property-led accumulation: external financing smooths the BOP crises while domestic wealth concentrates in land and low-productivity assets rather than productive investment.

Now, one may assess exactly how the hackneyed roadmaps fix this, ad capite ad calcem. In the short run, because of lender-imposed fiscal austerity, numbers may improve, but the very economic structure – the incentive structure that promotes the capture of capital (economic, political, cultural) by those in positions of authority – remains the same. And so, this status quo will inevitably lead to social inequity, laggard governance, widespread corruption, the proliferation of patronage networks and the limitation of mobility of the marginalised, again and again.

Lastly, considering the foregoing, some reflections are indispensable: what exactly is the point of fudging the figures, visualising infographics, commencing dazzling seminars and writing all these commentaries, opeds and reports without questioning the very fundamental axis of the political economy? Is there any foundational rethinking of economics year on year, apart from the updated numbers? Does it make sense to exude analyses to those who have permanent employees, graduated from top economic schools, and who, unequivocally, don’t care?

Are we really that stupid to assume that a leopard will change its spots while we continue to feed it?

Since there has been some recent discussion of Hyderabad Deccan here, I am sharing this book review from DAWN of Arslan Athar’s debut novel Forty Days of Mourning. 

Note: Like everyone else these days, Arslan also has a Substack.   He is a Lahore-based writer. 

Hyderabad Deccan is not merely a setting in this novel. It is a living, breathing presence that shapes the people who inhabit it and the events that unfold. Once a princely state rich in terms of material wealth and cultural plurality, Hyderabad carried a distinct identity that rarely finds adequate representation in narratives of colonial India. Discussions around the British Raj and Partition often reduce history to binaries, and Hyderabad’s nuanced past is frequently overlooked. Athar’s novel resists this erasure with care and precision.

And:

As pressure from the newly formed Indian state increases, Hyderabad’s fragile independence begins to crack. The story follows this slow unravelling, moving from hope and denial to violence, loss and reckoning, ending with the state’s forced integration and the collective grief of a world that disappears almost overnight.

As the wife of a high-ranking army officer, Saleema moves through the city’s elite circles, aware of every whisper of political tension, every shifting alliance. But as the Nizam’s Hyderabad faces the inevitability of annexation, Saleema realises that neither status nor cunning can fully shield her, and the choices she makes ripple through both her personal life and the crumbling world around her.

In an interview with newinbooks.com, Athar notes:

My father’s family is originally from Hyderabad Deccan. However, at the time of the Partition of the Indian Subcontinent and the subsequent annexation of the Princely State of Hyderabad, the family moved. In their new home, Pakistan, they never really talked about that time of turmoil. I only found out about it because of an assignment, and learning about the annexation became the impetus for this novel. From all the research about the time, the character of Saleema was born, and the story blossomed from there!

Some random points:
1) annamalai has quit BJP. Three strands are coming through :
a) he was not accommodated properly, was not given more freedom, party did not listen to him on avoiding aidmk alliance and hence was sidelined.
B) was never a BJP man ideologically, was an opportunist, impatient and hence good riddance.
c) since BJP cannot play any shade of Dravidian game, it is better that annamalai be a silent b team of BJP.

2) Vijay has become a honorary family member and now mothers and aunties are worrying about his health, long working hours, and lack of good lunch!
They want him to eat better and go to office on alternate days.

The Comment thread is afire with the usual (and senseless) India-Pakistan arguments (essentially which of the two is poorer). Q waves the whole question away by pointing at the figure, unimpressed by “an average Indian producing only $2,800 in GDP every year,” and asks what the point even is. There is a point, two in fact.

First: per capita and scale measure different things. Per capita describes the life of a citizen. Scale describes the weight of a state. A single integrated market of 1.4 billion people generates agglomeration, economies of scale, and a pull on capital and talent that no small rich economy can match (India’s ascent in the world of cricket is an extremely interesting meditation). That is why India passed Japan in 2025 to become the world’s fourth-largest economy, why it is the fastest-growing major one, and why it is on course to take third from Germany by around 2028. The market no exporter can ignore, the trade terms a four-trillion-dollar base can lean on, the air defence and roads it can fund: that is concrete power, and it is not nothing. Much of the gain is siphoned by a clutch of oligarchic houses, but the dynamism is real.

Second: however that same wealth does not buy what BB imagines it buys. India outweighs Pakistan in GDP by something close to eleven to one. It has still not turned Pakistan into its East Germany, a dependent satellite drawn quietly into its orbit and, in time, absorbed. Pakistan remains sovereign, armed, and unbought. Pakistanis are not running across the Punjabi wall to their ethnic kin.

In May 2025, after Pahalgam, the larger economy did not dictate terms: Operation Sindoor ended not in surrender but in a ceasefire announced, awkwardly, from Washington, with both capitals claiming the win.

Look West. Iran is a fraction of the wealth of the United States and Israel, yet it has absorbed the most advanced air forces on earth, kept its regime, and kept the knowledge to rebuild what was struck. The guns fell silent at a ceasefire, not a capitulation. Wealth buys reach. It does not buy outcomes.

BB treats the GDP gap as a deed of ownership over Kashmir, and assumes Kashmiris will swallow their pride for a higher income per head, that prosperity purchases consent. It misreads the Islamicate moral economy entirely. In that ledger ‘Izzat and Deen, dignity and faith, are not line items to be outbid. The Hyderabadi Harvard PhD still sings the song of his lost people.

Peoples who set independence above comfort have done so across the whole anti-colonial century, and no balance sheet has ever talked them out of it. Money may buy luxury but not loyalty.

What price will any Indian or Pakistani nationalist accept for their love and loyalty to their homeland?

Thanks to Agni for bringing this to our attention.  I remember reading Persepolis years ago and it definitely does provide a different perspective on the Iranian Revolution. 

From CNN:

French-Iranian artist and activist Marjane Satrapi, whose graphic novel “Persepolis” brought home the struggle of the Iranian people to millions around the world, has died. She was 56.

A statement from the Élysée Palace announcing her death Thursday lauded Satrapi’s work, saying her work “captivated a global audience.”

“Her passing marks the loss of a leading figure in French culture and an artist deeply committed to freedom, whose work carried a universal message and earned her immense international acclaim,” the Élysée said.

And:

Satrapi’s work spanned numerous graphic novels – which she preferred to call “comic books” and films. In 2019, she directed “Radioactive,” a British biographical drama film starring Rosamund Pike as Marie Curie.

But she was also an outspoken critic of Iran’s ruling establishment and a prominent supporter of the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement that emerged after the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in police custody in 2022.

Iranian women human rights group, the Narges Foundation described Satrapi as “a fearless advocate for feminism, women’s rights” and as someone who “champion(ed) the struggles and resilience of Iranian women.”

I’m sharing this review that was originally published in 2020. After the victorious Taliban takeover of Kabul on August 15, 2021 and President Ghani’s flight from the country, Dalrymple’s prediction that the American Occupation would end up handing power to the same regime they set out to destroy seems eerily prescient.  This type of book would make a good possibility for BP Book Club. 

Early in Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan (Bloomsbury 2013), William Dalrymple quotes Mehrab Khan’s (the Khan of Kalat) remark to the British diplomat and adventurer Alexander Burnes: “You have brought an army into [Afghanistan] but how do you propose to take it out again?” (Dalrymple 161). As the British and subsequent foreign powers would find out, it is extremely difficult to successfully withdraw from Afghanistan. It has now been nearly two decades since the current US-led invasion began in 2001 and President Trump is promising to extensively draw down the presence of US troops, after having signed a deal with the Taliban–the regime that the US went to war to remove. In such a context, Dalrymple’s account of the First Anglo-Afghan War remains extremely relevant.

Return of a King takes its title from the attempt of the British to put Shah Shuja—the grandson of Ahmad Shah Abdali, the founder of modern Afghanistan — back on the throne after an exile of over thirty years in British India. This attempt took place in the context of the Great Game–the British-Russian rivalry for control over Central Asia. The British feared that Dost Mohammad Khan, who had usurped power from Shah Shuja, was pro-Russian and hence decided that he needed to be replaced with Shuja, whom they would use as a puppet leader. While they succeeded in removing Dost Mohammad and giving the crown to Shuja, they could not have anticipated the resistance that they would face.

The bulk of the book describes the war in an extremely detailed fashion. Dalrymple’s style is novelistic and makes the reader feel that they are actually a witness to events as they occur. For example, here is the description of the only survivor of the disastrous retreat from Kabul to Jalalabad:

That night lamps were raised on the gates of Jalalabad and bugles blown to guide in any last stragglers, but none limped in. ‘ A strong wind was blowing from the south, which sent the sound of the bugles all over the town,’ remembered Captain Thomas Seaton, ‘The terrible wailing sound of those bugles I will never forget. It was a dirge for our slaughtered soldiers and, heard all through the night, it had an inexpressibly mournful and depressing effect. Dr Brydon’s tale struck horror into the hearts of all who heard it… The whole army had been destroyed, one man alone escaping to tell the fearful tale ( 387).

The retreat from Kabul was followed by an Army of Retribution which set out to punish the Afghans. After retaking Kabul, this army burned large parts of the city. Dalrymple writes:

… as well as destroying the empty shops and houses of their supposed enemies, the marauding British troops also committed what today would be classified as war crimes against their Qizilbash and Hindu allies. Indeed the peaceable Kabul Hindu trading community that had for centuries survived arbitrary arrests and torture by a whole variety of Afghan rulers bent on extorting their money was wiped out in just forty-eight hours by the depredations of the British, as an official inquiry later acknowledged (460)

As for Shah Shuja, he not only lost his throne but ended up assassinated, not for any fault of his own but due to his loyalty to the British. Dalrymple writes:

Shuja was always unusual for his honourable loyalty to his allies and his faithfulness to his agreements, in a region not known for either… He saw himself as the true heir to a highly cultured Persian-speaking Safavid and Timurid civilisation, and as well as writing fine verse and prose himself was a generous patron to poets and scholars… His vision of his kingdom was one which saw it not as an isolated and mountainous backwater but instead as tied by alliances to a wider world, and which through the common Persianate civilisation was diplomatically, culturally and economically integrated with the other countries of the region. It was sadly not a vision that shows much sign, even today, of being realised, though the idea has never completely died (422-23).

The First Anglo-Afghan War ended with Dost Mohammad — the very ruler that the British had gone to war to depose — back on the throne. His descendants would continue to rule Afghanistan until the end of the monarchy in the 1970s. The war thus serves as a striking example of colonial hubris. In his “Author’s Note”, Dalrymple explicitly compares this British Occupation to the current American one:

Nevertheless due to the continuities of the region’s topography, economy, religious aspirations and social fabric, the failures of 170 years ago do still hold important warnings for us today. It is still not too late to learn some lessons from the mistakes of the British in 1842. Otherwise, the west’s fourth war in the country looks certain to end with as few political gains as the first three, and like them to terminate in an embarrassing withdrawal after a humiliating defeat, with Afghanistan yet again left in tribal chaos and quite possibly ruled by the same government which the war was originally fought to overthrow (493).

In 2020, as the US withdraws after making a deal with the Taliban and intra-Afghan negotiations are occurring on a new power-sharing arrangement which may herald a significant role for the Taliban, Dalrymple’s account of the First Anglo-Afghan War continues to hold important lessons for those of us in the region as well as for the wider international community. It is a deeply engaging and important work of historical research.

Our 2026 reader survey is open until 7 June – anonymous, roughly five minutes. Please take a moment.

Early in The Disciple, we hear a voiceover which states: “If you want to make money, sing film songs or love songs, don’t tread this path. If you want to tread this path, learn to be lonely and hungry.” This immediately identifies the theme of the movie: the arduous journey to make a career in Hindustani classical music (shastriya sangeet).

The Disciple–directed by Chaitanya Tamhane, known for Court (India’s official submission for the 88th Academy Awards)– is a Marathi-language drama that revolves around an aspiring Hindustani classical singer, Sharad Nerulkar (played by Aditya Modak–himself a classical singer). The film originally screened at the 77th Venice International Film Festival in September 2020–the first Indian film since 2001’s Monsoon Wedding to compete at the festival–where it won the International Critics Prize and the award for Best Screenplay. It was subsequently picked up by Netflix.

When the film begins, Sharad is twenty-four and aspiring to a career as a serious classical singer. He faces pressure from his mother who wants him to get a job. However, he states “I can either pursue my music or get a job–not both!” He does part time work for a company that remasters old recordings and transfers them to CDs. There is a short and poignant scene where he tries to convince customers to buy the recordings of relatively unknown artists, whom he states are just as good as the more renowned ones. This again emphasizes the struggle to become known in the field.

Sharad is extremely serious about his music. In an early scene, he complains about someone else’s performance “no matter what the raga, it’s the same gimmicks.” He is equally self-critical, expressing his frustration that his singing falls into repetitive patterns. His guru advises him to have patience and to keep on practicing. The narrative then jumps forward in time and we see Sharad teaching music to children. He shows a recording of his own singing to his guru who expresses that “the music has no life in it”. We also see him scrolling YouTube and social media to check up on his peers and see his (relatable) frustration that some of them are more successful than him. For example, one of his guru’s other students is touring the US.

Tamhane doesn’t shy away from showing the sometimes elitist attitude that classical musicians have towards other types of music. When one of Sharad’s students is invited to sing in a fusion band at his college, Sharad gives him permission to do so but then says that if he wants to sing fusion, there is no need to continue learning classical music from him. Though this reflects Sharad’s own seriousness and devotion to shastriya sangeet, this “my way or the highway” attitude and derision towards “lesser” forms of music is often counterproductive.

Aditya Modak gives an understated and restrained performance as Sharad. Additionally, he does all of his own singing (rare in Indian cinema, which normally relies on playback singers). Modak’s own background as a trained classical singer was clearly invaluable in understanding the devotion that Sharad feels towards the art.

As a student of Hindustani classical music, I found the scenes where the characters were either performing or practicing to be the highlights of the film. It was a treat to be able to identify ragas such as Jaunpuri and Bhimpalashree. I firmly hope that more movies and TV shows are made focusing on Hindustani music– 2020’s Bandish Bandits is one example as is Shayam Benegal’s Sardari Begum, released in 1996. Those not too familiar with Hindustani music may still relate to Sharad’s obsession with being the best in a difficult and challenging field– a common trope in movies about athletes and artists. Overall, The Disciple is a must-watch film for those interested in music or in intimate character dramas.