Neelum Saran Gour’s novel Requiem in Raga Janki (Penguin Random House India, 2018) is a fictionalized biography of Janki Bai Ilahabadi (1880-1934), one of the most famous Hindustani classical singers of the early twentieth century. Janki Bai was an extremely successful gramophone artist in the early days of recording. She performed at the Grand Delhi Darbar in December 1911, where George V was crowned as Emperor of India. She also wrote Urdu poetry, most famously the Diwan-e-Janki.

Gour begins the novel by describing one of the most famous stories associated with Janki Bai, when she was stabbed by a jealous lover (depending on the version of the story, the man was either her lover or the lover of her father’s mistress). Janki received 56 stab wounds, which led to her receiving the nickname “Chappan Churi” (56 knives). After the stabbing, her father’s mistress, Lakshmi, ran away and Janki’s father abandoned his wife and children to go searching for her. Janki and her mother Manki Bai were then sold to a brothel in Allahabad. In order to protect her daughter from becoming an ordinary sex worker, Manki Bai arranged for her to recieve a high level of musical training from Ustad Hassu Khan of the Gwalior gharana (school) of Hindustani classical singing. Her success at this art is what made Janki a bai or courtesan– a highly valued female entertainer.

The rest of the review can be read on Substack 

Indus Waters Treaty was signed in 19 Sept 1960 between India and Pakistan under mediation provided by the World Bank. As a political compromise between Pakistan and India seemed improbable the US and UK decided to pressure both into signing onto a technical treaty which could outline the claims and limits of both nations on the flow of the water. Over the years it was touted at the most successful and unequal water sharing agreement where the upper riparian nation only made claim to a minor portion of the river’s waters.

The Indus basin was categorized into two groups of rivers. With the Eastern Rivers (Beas, Ravi, and Sutlej) being controlled by India and the Western Rivers (Indus, Chenab and Jhelum) being controlled by Pakistan.

Many still blame Nehru for this treaty in India for only allowing India to control less than 20% of the Indus’ waters, while many in Pakistan still decry the unequal nature of the treaty in directly awarding a set of rivers to India as that may eventually cause droughts in the parts of Pakistan which are mainly fed by the Eastern rivers. However, the main calls for renegotiations of the treaty have originated in India which at this point has put it into ‘abeyance’. In this post we will go through the main areas of dispute in the treaty and what the possible solutions for the current impasse may be.

Points of Dispute

Hierarchy of Dispute Resolution

One of the major points of contention between India and Pakistan in the Indus Waters Treaty is which method of dispute resolution should be utilized. India opines that a neutral expert is best equipped to provide a judgement on any dispute as the treaty was created as a technical document divvying up the river system. As the technological leaps which have occurred since the signing of the treaty are such that only a technical expert could decipher which portions of a dam project are adhering to the spirit of the treaty and which are not. Pakistan opines that the court of arbitration remains the best method for the settlement of any dispute as it ensures both parties adhere to the limitations set on dam construction and that water use in the upper riparian are limited to irrigation, power production and no excessive storage occurs at any dam project.

India claims that the entire treaty has been used by Pakistan as a tool to delay and alter any project on the Indus. To the point that even the Eastern Rivers which India has had complete claims over remains underutilized. This had gotten to a point in 2016 where over a dam project both the neutral expert and the court of arbitrations were consulted with both providing contradicting verdicts.

Distribution of Water

The Indus Waters Treaty remains the most unequal treaty in terms of water distribution. The main claim on the Indian side has been that due to a change in population on their side of the border their requirements for water have risen but the treaty remains largely in the past. The water flowing through the Indus River Systems has only declined as times goes on. Therefore, a new bargain needs to be struck to make the treaty viable for the future for either sides.

Pakistan affirms that population has risen more significantly across their side of the border, therefore their claims over the waters are more important now. Furthermore, they claim that giving over the entire claim over the Eastern Rivers to India was a massive failure of their predecessors. Pakistan therefore also asks claims over a portion of the Eastern Rivers to ensure that there isn’t any drought caused on their side due to a complete redirection of the Eastern Rivers as stated in certain claims by Indian politicians.

Colonial Nature of the Treaty

Perhaps the least commented on portion of this treaty is its inherently colonial nature. The treaty was negotiated in the good offices of the World Bank an American Institution, it was clearly an objective of the USA and UK’s governments to ensure the viability of their client states in Pakistan. Even today the governments of the US and UK are deeply involved in the selection Engineer Members, and Legal Members which are involved in the dispute resolution portion of the treaty. It would future proof the treaty further if these positions were devolved to the main participants of the treaty.

Through Indian eyes this treaty is almost written by a colonial master on unequal terms. Now, that India is no longer in a state of Ship-to-mouth existence it needs to shed these clearly colonial features of the treaty. Pakistan might find this portion of the treaty not as excusable due to the fact that the member states with these influence have often been close allies of theirs through formal treaties such as (SEATO, CENTO or the Baghdad Pact) and both the powers sent aircraft carriers (HMS Eagle and USS Enterprise) to intimidate India in 1971.

Possible Future Scenarios

At this point the chances of an Amended treaty are going to require deft negotiations from the Pakistani side as many projects on the Western Rivers in Indian territory have already begun to spring up. Therefore, the chances for a “Permanent Abeyance” or “Total Disregard” remain most likely.

Indus Waters Treaty Amended

This is an ideal scenario in which all that track-2 level diplomacy leads to fruitful results. Where the treaty is examined by both sides and amended to ensure that the points of conflicts that led to its abeyance are sufficiently allayed such that they won’t lead to any future suspension or abeyance.

In this scenario the water distribution either changes nominally (giving both sides minor claims to waters from both set of rivers while maintain a similar distribution of water) or remains the same. However, the main dispute is resolved which is the hierarchy of dispute resolution. In a scenario where Pakistan has the upper hand it would ensure the court of arbitration is the highest, in the case where India holds all the cards as the upper riparian it will be the neutral expert.

If the amendments are ambitious it could even tackle the colonial nature of the treaty excising any influence of former colonial powers from the treaty. Making it not just future proof but even more closely aligned to the Indian policy affirmed in the Shimla Agreement.

Permanent Abeyance

The Indian government finds this scenario particularly enticing. As it isn’t directly suspending the treaty while side stepping all its cumbersome dispute resolution mechanism. It can easily ignore any rulings from International Courts as they have little to no jurisdiction over the country. It allows the state to have a good level of ambiguity in decision-making which many bureaucrats appreciate. It leaves a card up their sleeve which they can use to entice Pakistan during a future crisis.

On the Pakistani side this is a dreaded option as it removes any influence they might’ve had over the construction on the Indian side. Projects which previously might’ve been delayed and altered for decades will be suddenly out of their influence. But the most devastating will be the lack of data sharing which would affect the planning of crop seasons. This uncertainty could’ve been reduced to a degree if a larger number of dams were to be constructed on the Indus however as a “hard” state Pakistan rarely has any resources to spare for non-military projects of this magnitude.

Total Disregard

The most extreme of all options would be a total disregard for the treaty. Instead of acting like the treaty is only in abeyance which means the claims over the Rivers remain static in principle. Meaning India has limited influence over the Western Rivers. In this scenario a large build up of projects begins on both the set of Rivers. A number of river connection, dams, and reservoir projects spring up to capture water from the Indus. Large tunnels of 30-40kms are built up to join river water of the Indus towards Uttarakhand and Rajasthan through canals ensuring that more than 20% of the waters from the Indus River System never reach across the border.

Any construction of dams or reservoirs on the Western Rivers would tilt the world towards this scenario. As once the construction is complete no incumbent government will ever have any incentive to adhere to the old treaty ever again. Meaning once a project is constructed it will become a permanent fixture, Once a river is redirected to a canal it cannot be turned off, because anyone who turns it off will commit political suicide.

Projects like the Chenab-Beas link tunnel are inching up towards this reality. Where Pakistan’s claims over the Western Rivers are diluted through rather small and insignificant projects over long periods of time. In its current state the link tunnel doesn’t even transport 1 MAF of water from the Chenab to the Beas, however, it demonstrates a principle that Pakistan holds no influence over Indian construction on its claimed river waters.

Conclusion

Every day that passes without any open negotiation between the governments of India and Pakistan on the issue of the Indus Waters Treaty is a day where we move closer towards the scenario of “Total Disregard”. Personally, I wouldn’t want this issue to get to a point where Indian leaders jockey to claim larger and larger portions of Pakistan’s waters for the sake of their local constituencies and jingoistic sentiments. The effect this treaty’s abeyance has over Pakistan isn’t as large as most would assume due to a short-to-medium term effects on the Indus’ waters however in the long term it might reduce millions into poverty due to the rising cost of water.

I’d love to know your thoughts on this! What real talking points do you think we can pull from this issue? Also, let me know if there’s a blind spot I completely missed that needs to be addressed.

Renaissance Florence was a period of great artistic ferment. Under the patronage of the Medici family, artists such as Donatello, Michelangelo and Leonardo produced great works of painting and sculpture. Among the best known of these works are the sculptures of David produced by Donatello (c. 1440s) and Michelangelo ( 1501-1504).

John L’Heureux’s novel The Medici Boy focuses on the creation of Donatello’s David (the titular “Medici boy”). The story is narrated by Luca Mattei, a former monk who works as Donatello’s apprentice. Luca becomes jealous of his foster brother, Agnolo, who serves as Donatello’s inspiration for David and later becomes his lover. Donatello’s relationship with Agnolo serves as the major plot complication since Agnolo is repeatedly denounced as a sodomite. His illegal activities also threaten to bring down Donatello and through him his patron and friend, Cosimo de’ Medici.

The rest of the review can be read on Substack.  For a woman’s perspective on the Medici, see this review of Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait, which is inspired by the marriage and possible murder of Lucrezia de’Medici (1545-1561) at the hands of her husband Alfonso II d’Este, Duke of Ferrara. This alleged murder also served as the inspiration for Robert Browning’s poem “My Last Duchess“–itself a classic of English Literature.

Note: Modern historians believe that Lucrezia died of pulmonary tuberculosis

As I write this, he has been selected for the Ireland and England tours in late June-July, becoming the youngest Indian to get an international callup ever, surpassing the great Sachin Tendulkar. He also won the IPL MVP award along with the Emerging Player Award (usually people win them years apart, not in the same year) along with a variety of other awards. This follows the U-19 World Cup in February where he was Man of the Match in the final as well as Man of the Tournament.

And it is not just me, but the entire cricketing world which has been set aflutter by his exploits. His extremely fast pace of play (even compared to some of the fastest players in the world) plus his insane shot making and bat swing have made him a fan favourite already.

U-19 Exploits

Vaibhav came into the limelight when he debuted for Bihar U-19 as a 12 year.

He had multiple exploits at the U-19 level which is where his hype built up. 

There was a 104 (62) in a Youth Test vs Australia U-19 in Chennai and then a 113 (86) in the return tour in Brisbane. In his first tour to England he hit a 143 (78) and then in South Africa he had 127 (74).

But he saved the best for his last ever U-19 knock. In the 2026 U-19 WC Vaibhav had been doing well in India’s unbeaten run to the final with scores of 72, 40, 52, 30, 68 but none of them were big innings. Fast starts in the powerplay which the rest of the batting could consolidate upon but not the kind of knock people knew he could play where he single-handedly ends the game.

He saved the best for the last and played the greatest knock in U-19 history. His 175 (80) led India to a record score of 411 and India ended up winning by 100 runs. He started out slow but at a point switched on and turned on “video game” mode and started hitting sixes all over for fun. And this was against a pretty strong England side who themselves had come through unbeaten. As someone who watched it live, I was amazed at some of the shots he played – the best of which was a tennis swat for six (attached below).

Because India has a policy of one U-19 WC per player even if they are eligible for more, that is the end of his U-19 career (Also he is too good for this level). And what a way to sign off.

IPL Glory

Vaibhav is the youngest player to get an IPL contract at 13 when he was signed by Rajasthan Royals. It was the period when his hype was building up so most people thought it to be an interesting curiosity. Most people thought he would show some potential but seem extremely out of sorts at a higher level (normal for that age).

What happened when he did play was something different. He had a decent debut hitting 34 (20) (with a six off the first ball) and this was what was in line with most people’s expectations. In his third match he hit the 2nd fastest IPL century ever of 35 balls helping Rajasthan Royals chase down 210 in 15.5 overs. Now the opposition were Gujarat Titans who were champions in 2022 and finalists in 2023 (and again finalists this year) so they are a pretty strong side and their bowling attack had the likes of Siraj who was a WC winner from 2024 as well as Rashid Khan who is seen as the greatest T20 spinner. To flay this attack in this matter was when the world realized what they were watching.

And while his initial IPL season was good, it was this year’s IPL which really cemented the craze for him in the Indian public. Fresh off his U-19 WC exploits, Vaibhav set the IPL on fire – scoring 776 runs in 16 innings at a strike rate of 237.30 and winning the MVP, Orange Cup (for most runs) and Best Emerging Player in the process.

Now the thing about this Indian T20 team is that it is one of the greatest teams in sport. Since 2024, India has a 52-7 record (49 outright wins, 3 super over wins). They have won everything they have played in that period including two World Cups, one of which was unbeaten, an Asia Cup unbeaten as well as every bilateral series, home or away.

This team includes batsmen like Sanju Samson, Man of the Tournament of the World Cup who had the greatest run of three matches in the history of the format and Abhishek Sharma, the no 1 ranked T20 batter in the world, scorer of the fastest fifty in a T20 WC final and the Man of the Tournament in the recent Asia Cup. Plus there are other great batsmen like Ishan Kishan, no 2 ranked T20 batsman in the world who had a great World Cup in his own right.

All of these guys had great IPL seasons befitting their quality but Vaibhav surpassed even them.

In Cricinfo’s Impact metrics Vaibhav is 350 points away from the second best batsman.

Also another feature of his batting was how he went after the best bowlers in the world – many of them current or former World Cup winners. He made a habit of hitting the first ball he faced from these bowlers for a boundary – Cummins, Hazlewood and of course the T20 GOAT Bumrah.

Bumrah was recently crowned the greatest T20 bowler of the century by Cricinfo. He was the Man of the Tournament in the 2024 World Cup when he won India an unwinnable game in the final and then repeated his exploits in 2026 when he delivered a masterclass in a run fest of a semifinal which India won by 7 runs by bowling very economically (as well as taking out England’s captain and best batsman) before following it up with a Man of the Match performance in the final with figures of 4/15 off four overs.

Vaibhav didn’t even spare him, hitting a six off the first ball he ever faced by Bumrah.

In the KOs, Vaibhav was again his team’s best batsman hitting 97 (29) vs Hyderabad in the Eliminator and then a 96 (47) vs Gujarat in the Qualifier 2 which they lost.

Even in that final match, Sooryavanshi brought out his tennis shot.

The Future

Vaibhav has been selected for the T20 series vs Ireland and England in late June-July becoming the youngest player to get an India callup, breaking Sachin’s record.

His hype is at an all time high, with everyone cashing in on it. He has already made ads for Google Pay for minors as an example.

Currently he is touring Sri Lanka as part of an A side (the next match is in half an hour as I type this) and even SL Cricket is promoting the series using Vaibhav. In fact, this series is getting a live broadcast plus commentary simply because of Vaibhav’s hype and not relegated to a Youtube stream as most matches at this level are.

The only similar analogy to this craze would be when Sachin came up in the late 80s-early 90s. It is very interesting to see the contrast in Indian cricket’s fortunes during both eras.

When Sachin came of age, Indian cricket was not doing well on or off the field. Cricket was controlled by the English and the Australians and Indians were relegated to occasional tours of those countries. Even on field India were a mid level team at best. Now, India sits at the high chair of cricket, with Jay Shah as ICC chairman, getting the largest pie of the ICC revenue, dedicated two and half month window for the IPL, frequent five match test series, frequent ICC trophies hosting etc. Even on field, the Indian cricket team’s fortunes have changed a lot with India currently holding two ICC trophies and generally being a top team for most of the 21st century.

In a way, Sachin was responsible for India being where it is now in cricket. If we look at the bigger picture, India was not really doing well as a country when Sachin came into the frame. Poverty stricken country, communal/caste tensions, raging insurgencies in Kashmir and Punjab etc. For all of the doom-mongering some Indians do regarding India in the present day, India has come a long way from the dark days of the early 90s.

As India liberalized and Indians got access to televisions, watching Sachin on TV became a rite of passage. If there was a match on and India was playing, people would watch Sachin’s batting before turning it off once he got out. And in this way, India’s cricket broadcast rights started making money which led to the snowball effect of where India is now, both on and off the field.

Cricket now is at another precipice as it is on the verge of global expansion. T20 is the most marketable form of cricket due to its short duration and even the Olympics have included it for the first time in Los Angeles 2028. More and more new teams/leagues are mushrooming around the world with some like Afghanistan and USA gaining certain degrees of success.

Just like Sachin led to the rise of Indian cricket, will Vaibhav become a poster boy of cricket in general and like Michael Jordan in the 90s lead to greater global popularity of cricket, compounded by the Olympics? The IPL of course will keep expanding as India keeps growing. 10 teams for a country like India is too small.

Also because Sachin’s career was so long it coincided with India transforming from a impoverished third world country to a “middle power” on the verge of “second world” status (If you take the UN’s 0.7 “high” HDI threshold. India in 2023 is at 0.685 so a few years off at max).

If Vaibhav’s career and India’s economic growth both maintain momentum as hoped for, then by the late 2040s when he is ready to hang his boots (with plenty of silverware won on the way) India will have become a member of the “Global North” and one of the three superpowers of the world (with a greater population than the other two combined and younger too).

The future is here. And it’s beautiful.

Is he right?

The Excuse for Failure

A people that can place the source of its troubles outside itself has bought something precious: a permanent excuse. The bribe demanded at the land-registration counter, the canal water that never reaches the tail-end farmer, the girl child wanted less than her brother, the stunted toddler in a country that exports grain, the sanitation worker still going down into the drain by hand in 2026. All of it can be referred outward, to a hostile neighbour and a treacherous minority, and so none of it need be referred inward. This is not an Indian disease alone. It is a human one.

So let us put the question to the only test that settles it, the counterfactual. Suppose Pakistan had never been cut out of the map in 1947. Suppose, harder, that there had never been a single Muslim in the subcontinent. Would caste dissolve? It would not. Caste predates Islam in India by more than a thousand years; it is ours, structural, home-grown, and it would outlive the disappearance of every mosque. Would the clerk return the bribe? Would the water reach the field? Would the daughter be wanted? Not one of these turns on the existence of a Muslim. To say otherwise is not analysis. It is an alibi dressed as an argument.

The Mythologisation against the Other

Here is the harder point, and Kabir’s critics will like it least. The unified Hindu identity that now speaks with such confidence is not as old as it believes itself to be. The civilisation is ancient, certainly: the temples, the Sanskrit and Tamil canons, the philosophical schools, the unbroken liturgies are the inheritance of millennia, and no one sensible disputes it. What is recent is something narrower and more political: the welding of a thousand jatis, sampradayas, languages and regions into a single bloc that votes as one, takes offence as one, and calls itself Hindu in the singular. That bloc is barely more than a century old, and it was assembled, in large part, against a foil.

A Bengali, a Tamil and a Marwari did not wake one morning feeling themselves one political people. They were made into one, and the making needed an other against whom the new self could be drawn. Precisely because the religion is old, people mistake the bloc for something equally old. The conflation is not an accident. It is the trick. Remove the foil and the construction sways. This is why the enemy can never be permitted to vanish. The enemy is not an obstacle to the project. The enemy is the essence of the project.

The Israel Parable

The exemplar is usually Israel: small, encircled, and rich. Asked to look inward, the nationalist looks outward yet again, this time for a model rather than a culprit. And even the model will not hold the weight he puts on it. Israel’s rise rested on a stack of external inputs no honest account omits: American underwriting on a scale extended to no other state, German reparations, a diaspora that arrived with capital and credentials already in hand, and successive waves of highly skilled immigration. Strip those away and the parable thins to very little. A nation may grow while defining itself against its neighbours. Whether it grows because of that stance, or in spite of it and on the back of other people’s money, is exactly the question the comparison is built to avoid. The dream, like the blame, has been outsourced.

The Saffron Liberal

We have never spared the Crescentiate here, and we will not start now: the regressive strain in that quarter is real, it is not a Western fabrication, and it has earned every word of criticism sent its way. But the Saffroniate liberal is a particular specimen, because his liberalism runs on a switch. It is summoned only when a Muslim is in the frame. The veil, the triple talaq, the treatment of women become matters of scalding principle. The same principle falls silent before the khap panchayat, the honour killing, the dowry death, the temple that still bars the menstruating woman at the door. A liberalism that activates only against the other is not liberalism. It is a stick that has been told it is a value.

The recent thread showed the mechanism with unusual clarity. A provocation was dangled, the bait was taken, and the comments filled. But watch what the inquiry then became. It became, entirely, an interrogation of how Islam treats its women.

Casting Stones

One does not expiate one’s own sins by casting stones at another’s. For a while it can feel like absolution: the stone is thrown and the crowd roars. But the sin sits exactly where it was, untouched, because nothing has been examined. A culture reforms only when it turns the interrogative eye inward, and inward is the one direction the externalising habit forbids.

Empire Comes for All

The Saffroniate, in its current form, has staked itself on Empire. It treats alignment with the great Western power as a kind of insurance, on the assumption that to stand beside the strong is to be kept safe by the strong. By a sharp irony, it is the traditionalist Muslim, the very figure paraded as the face of backwardness, who remains one of the last genuinely anti-imperial constituencies left standing, wary of the order the modern Hindu nationalist has chosen to embrace.

The arrangement is not new, and the historical rhyme is worth hearing. When George V came to India in 1911, the literary forms of the subcontinent were bent to receive him. A George-nameh was composed, the imperial monarch fitted into the mould of the Persian Book of Kings, Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, as though he were a late heir to Jamshid and to Bahram Gur the hunter. The Persianate epic had long lent kings a borrowed grandeur, from the Qajars’ Shahanshah-nameh onward; now it lent the loan to an Englishman. And the single ancient royal tradition this particular heir can be said to have honoured is recorded, with admirable economy, by the archive itself.

A George-nameh was written for George V’s visit to India in 1911. The king honoured the ancient traditions of Persian rulers in at least one way: in several weeks his passion for hunting decimated the tiger population of Nepal.

Cambridge University Library, Royal Commonwealth Society Library, QM/21/67

The panegyric did its work, and the slaughter passed quietly beneath it. That is what glossing means in practice. The violence is not denied; it is dressed. A century on, tsubmission to the strong is presented as prudence, even as protection.

And then the order reminds everyone what it is. This week, enforcing its blockade of Iran, the United States put munitions into the engine room of a tanker in the Gulf of Oman. Three of the dead were Indians. Not soldiers, not combatants: merchant seamen, working men, killed by the very Empire whose favour the nationalist courts as a shield. India lodged its sharpest protest of the war and summoned the Americans. It will change nothing. The lesson, for anyone willing to take it, is plain. Empire does not pause to check the religion of the men in the engine room. Empire comes for us all, and it never asks whose side you imagined you were on.

The Beginning of the Cure

So Kabir is right, that the fixation is real. But it is not a bad habit to be scolded out of existence. It is a function, and it does real work. It supplies an enemy so that we need never supply an explanation, and it lends a young, assembled identity the solidity it cannot yet find from within.

The day this Commentariat can carry hundreds of comments on caste, or on water, or on the daughter who is not wanted, with not one of them reaching for Pakistan or Islam, is the day the patient has started to mend. We are not there. We are nowhere near. But to name the disease, as Kabir has done, is where every cure begins.

We take up the Shahnameh and its long afterlife, the George-nameh among its odder descendants, at greater length in a forthcoming BRAHM Newsletter.

The Carpet Weaver, Nemat Sadat’s debut novel, is the story of a young Afghan man coming to terms with his sexuality amid a backdrop of civil war and political unrest in 1970s and ‘80s Afghanistan.As one of the few South Asian novels featuring homosexuality as a central theme, it is an important book. However, the plot could fairly be called cliched. Certainly, readers of Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner would find much that is familiar in this novel.

The rest of the review can be found on Substack.  Also see my review of Khaled Alesmael’s novel Selamlik.

The diagnosis and the cure

Qureishi proposed, with complete seriousness, that the only solution to collapsing birth rates is to restrict female access to contraception, higher education, employment, and political representation. We disagree with every word of that cure. Restricting half of humanity from education and public life is functional enslavement, whatever euphemism of “policy” it travels under, and we said so in the thread.

The ecumene does not breed any longer

But we will not pretend the diagnosis is wrong merely because the doctor is. Birth rates are plunging everywhere, faster than any demographer predicted, and the $300 billion South Korea spent on subsidies did not move the needle. Q is right that this is not a money problem. He is wrong about what kind of problem it is.

The fashionable answer is that women got free and chose otherwise. Our answer is the opposite: everyone got less free, and women are simply the first to act on it. People are voting with their wombs. They are refusing to manufacture children for a world whose only offer is endless consumption, a working (waged?) life that begins at twenty-five and ends at sixty-five, and a retirement of warehoused loneliness. Marx called the failure to see one’s own condition false consciousness. The modern consumer is the Ye Olde Peasant with better teeth and a credit card, and somewhere the peasant knows it.

On the day of the trillionaire

We write this on the day the verdict came in. Yesterday SpaceX listed on the Nasdaq in the largest IPO in history, valued at nearly two trillion dollars against expected 2026 revenues of twenty-two to twenty-four billion, roughly ninety times revenue, for a company that lost 8.7 billion dollars between the start of 2025 and this March. Elon Musk became, on paper at least (he cannot sell a share for a year), history’s first trillionaire, worth more than the next four richest men combined.

Hold the two facts together. The same week the Philippines confirms its women have quietly gone on reproductive strike, the apex male of the species is crowned with a fortune larger than most national economies. Musk laments falling birth rates while embodying their cause, and this is a claim we can demonstrate, not merely assert. The man has fathered more than a dozen children by multiple mothers while ordinary men exit the reproductive market altogether, and the data on that market is now an economics literature.

Tinder is more unequal than the Global South

A notorious quantitative study of Tinder computed a Gini coefficient of 0.58 for male desirability, more unequal than 95 percent of the world’s national economies, with the bottom 80 percent of men competing for the bottom 22 percent of women. Hinge’s own engineer found male attention concentrated far more steeply than female: a Gini of roughly 0.54 against 0.38. And economists at the St Louis Federal Reserve have shown that online sorting by education and wage has measurably widened household income inequality itself. The marriage market is not adjacent to the wealth market; they are the same market, and Musk sits atop both simultaneously, which is precisely the point.

Beware the Meritocracy

The divides within humanity are now of a scale not seen since hereditary aristocracy, except that the meritocracy is cleverer than the aristocracy ever was. It knows how to defuse revolution. It does not send in the cavalry; it sends in the algorithm, the subsidy, and the side hustle. The patriarchy was never really about all men ruling all women. It was always about a few men ruling everyone, with the rest of the male sex as its unpaid enforcers. Note what that sentence does, because we will hold it to account later: it defines patriarchy as concentration, the rule of the few, which is simply inequity wearing its most intimate face. The oligarchy of the boardroom and the oligarchy of the marriage bed are one structure observed at two scales.

A word to the Saffroniate

In the thread, our commenter 0M-3 argued that Islam is uniquely regressive towards women, and Kabir replied with sati, and the two of them re-litigated 1947 in miniature, as our Commentariat is contractually obliged to do at least once per fortnight. We pushed back on the Islam-is-uniquely-patriarchal line and we will state the reason here.

bell hooks

bell hooks observed that despite every gain of the feminist movement, patriarchy as a system remains intact, and she insisted that patriarchy had no exact culture or nation. We would extend her: it has no religion either.

It survived the transition from paganism to Christianity, from Christianity to secularism, from the Mughals to the Raj to the Republic. Religions change, empires change, languages change. The patriarchy survives everything, because it does not live in scripture. It lives in inequity.

Corporatism is Patriarchy on Steroids

This is the same thesis we stated at the trillionaire’s coronation, now at a global scale scale: the rule of the few over everyone is inequity in the bedroom, and inequity is the rule of the few.

One primal form, Empire & Patriarchy, and every ideology subsequent has been merely its tenant. Misogyny is downstream of disproportionate economic power, which is why the most feminist societies on earth are not the most pious or the most atheist but the most equal. To the Saffroniate using Q’s thread as ammunition against Muslims: it is simply an excuse to indulge in some good ole phobia.

Empire wins through severance

Why has no government anywhere reversed the decline? Because the disease is structural and the structure is imperial. Empire, in its modern corporate form, wins by severing people from land, kin, and continuity, and a severed people does not reproduce.

Consider the ledger of severance. In 1776 the United States declared independence and proceeded to entrench slavery and prosecute genocide on a continental scale; the public relations came later. The French Revolution, the Russian, the Iranian, the Chinese: each promised liberation and delivered mountains of corpses before delivering anything else. Indian independence arrived welded to Partition, and Partition to Bangladesh, each severance bloodier than the last.

The Celtic Case

Compare the two Celtic destinies. Ireland won independence the hard-nosed, bloodied way and is today a partitioned republic functioning as a holding pen for American corporations, Dublin a tax address with a parliament attached. Scotland never seceded, and by perpetually threatening to, converted its oil into autonomy and concession after concession. Nehru, had he taken Dominion status instead of demanding the clean break, might have spared the subcontinent its great wound, though we concede the British Empire judged its colonies by their whiteness and may never have offered India what it offered Ottawa and Canberra. Independence is a romance; leverage is a strategy. Empire understands this perfectly, which is why it always prefers that you secede, fragment, and start from zero.

Why does Africa grow cocoa while Switzerland grows chocolate brands? Because capital is permitted to migrate north and forbidden to settle south. The Global North hoards; the Global South remits. A species organised this way produces trillionaires and not children. That is the whole of it.

Releasing the ghost of Patriarchy from BP

The thread also taught us something about ourselves. Brown Pundits works because it is a community space with a light-touch admin team and a ferociously strong Commentariat, where Indians and Pakistanis who inherited the schism still sit at one table, observe the occasional ceasefire, and produce signal where the rest of the internet produces noise. We let Q’s comments stand, with an admin note, because a space that cannot examine an offensive argument cannot defeat it either. The Commentariat dismantled it in public view far more thoroughly than deletion ever could.

The Female Admin Team

But our 2026 reader survey told us the one thing the thread confirmed: women are badly underrepresented here. We are not in the business of growth; this has never been a paid-for enterprise. What we can do is this, and as of today it is policy. The Female Admin Team holds final adjudication over gender threads, with full authority to edit, note, or remove. And we will deliberately elevate, commission, and amplify our female contributors, because the best answer to a patriarchy that survives everything is a space that refuses to reproduce it.

The patriarchy survives empires. Let us see if it survives an empowered Commentariat.

The Philippines has just recorded one of the fastest fertility declines in modern history, and almost nobody saw it coming.

In 1993 the average Filipino woman had 4.1 children. By 1998 it was 3.9, by 2013 around 3.0, and by 2017 it was 2.7. Then it fell off a cliff. The 2025 National Demographic and Health Survey put the figure at 1.7, well below the 2.1 a population needs to replace itself. That is a 37 percent drop in about eight years, the steepest the country has ever recorded. In the early 1950s, Filipino women were having more than seven children each.

At 1.7 the Philippines is not yet as low as East Asia. It still sits above Japan at 1.2 and well above South Korea at 0.8. What unsettles demographers is not the level but the speed, and the direction, which is the same one every developed Asian society has already taken.

Why nobody expected it

None of this was expected here. The Philippines is the largest Catholic country in Asia and one of only two places on earth, alongside the Vatican, where divorce is still illegal. It has one of the highest teenage pregnancy rates in the region and a young population that was supposed to power Southeast Asian growth for decades. By every standard expectation it should have stayed high.

The ordinary part

Some of the decline is ordinary. Every developing country passes through the same demographic transition: when most people farm and many children die young, families have many; as medicine improves and people move to cities, children become a cost rather than an asset. The Philippines urbanised fast from the 1950s, Metro Manila taking in around a million migrants every five years, and fertility slid from seven to roughly three by 2013. That much it shares with Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia.

Outcome of a no-divorce society

The collapse after 2013 is where the Asian Boss video reaches for reasons specific to the Philippines, and here a note of caution is needed. The video leans hard on relationships: men who cannot be trusted, women who stop trying, a dating market gone sour. That is part of the story, but it is told with more confidence than the evidence carries, and it crowds out causes a demographer would weigh just as heavily.

The first factor it names is the absence of divorce. A Filipino whose marriage fails has two options: legal separation, which bars remarriage, or annulment, which can cost over $10,000 and take two to four years, against a Manila minimum wage of about $11 a day. For most, neither is realistic, so men in failing marriages walk out and vanish. By 2024 there were over 15 million single parents, 95 percent of them mothers, and only about two thirds of young Filipinos had been raised by both parents. From this the video reasons that a generation of daughters learns early not to rely on men. It is a plausible chain, but a chain of inference, not a measured cause.

Schooling and work

Firmer ground is education and work. On the 2022 PISA tests, Filipino girls led boys by 14 points in maths and 35 in reading, and women have out-graduated men from college for over a decade. That edge met two booming sectors.

Outsourcing, which made the country the world’s call-centre capital by 2010, is about 54 percent female. Overseas work is bigger still: of 2.19 million Filipinos abroad in 2024, 57 percent were women, sending wages home as nurses, carers and domestic workers.

For the first time on a mass scale, Filipino women earned independently, and female-headed households are now roughly one in four. Wherever women gain schooling and income, fertility falls, with or without a divorce ban.

The weakest link

Social media is the video’s last factor, and its weakest. An old self-mocking phrase, NBSB, No Boyfriend Since Birth, flipped from an admission of failure into a badge of choice. But memes track changes in behaviour at least as often as they cause them, and a viral label is easier to film than the quiet facts beneath it: contraception, later marriage, the plain cost of a child in a city.

Old before rich

What makes the decline serious is timing. The Philippines is growing old before it has grown rich. It has no universal pension, a minimum wage of $11 a day, and by 2030 a rising weight of elderly to support. The outsourcing jobs that carried a generation are, by one estimate, 89 percent exposed to automation.

The last holdout

And here is the part the video never quite says. The Philippines is not an outlier. It is the last major Asian holdout to give way. China is near 1.0, South Korea 0.8, Japan 1.2, Thailand far below replacement, Vietnam recently under it. The same has happened across the subcontinent, under wholly different rules of marriage and family. India has dropped below replacement to 1.9. Bangladesh, poorer and more religious, is now there too. Sri Lanka and Nepal sit at the edge. Only Pakistan and Afghanistan still hold high. These countries share no divorce law, no meme, no dating culture. What they share is development: girls in school, women in work, children in cities. The Philippines was meant to be the exception that proved Catholic Asia could resist. It turned out to be the rule, only late. The question is no longer why the Filipino birth rate fell. It is why anyone expected it not to.

The video: Why Filipino Women Are Choosing to Stay Single Forever – Asian Boss