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vakibs Profile picture
vakibs
@vakibs
ॐ पूर्णमदः पूर्णमिदम् पूर्णात् पूर्णमुदच्यते | The first ∞ is Purusha. The second ∞ is Prakriti. From one, the other arises. But from which? Who knows.
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Nov 8 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
First, the state must be cut into manageable chunks. Each administrative division (or “state”) should be a city and its surrounding countryside. We can do with 100-150 such “states” in India. Then make long-term institutions in each state that protect local culture and identity. One simple way to do that is to assign a royal family as the nominal custodian of each state. When we want to maintain republican spirit, replace this with a similar long term office. Then make bureaucrats answerable to local concerns, in some type of direct democracy.
Aug 16 • 20 tweets • 4 min read
I highly recommend this discussion by @suryakane and @ruchirsharma_1 on the @bharatvaarta podcast. The topic up front is the regime change in Bangladesh, but ultimately the discussion was about the structural weaknesses of India.

The most serious problem facing India is that it has no utility for any of the greater superpowers, as @suryakane put it, and would serve these powers better when broken up into 5 or 6 manageable states. As @ruchirsharma_1 mentioned, the parallels with Yugoslavia are very strong.
Aug 15 • 12 tweets • 2 min read
Some thoughts on India’s Independence Day in this thread. Please feel free to comment. 😀

1) India’s territorial integrity is very hard to defend in its current borders. The partition of India denied us our natural borders and shot up the costs of our defense multiple folds. 2) The connections of Indian civilization to the Persian civilization on the west and to the extra-Gangetic Indic civilizations on the east (what we call “South East Asia” now) are cut off. This is a major loss of our self image. These must be rebuilt via land and sea routes.
Aug 7 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
You might be unaware, but Bangladesh had a law explicitly preventing Bangladeshi Hindus from seeking Indian residency or citizenship. In fact, they would be branded as enemies of the state and their property in Bangladesh seized if they did that.

So yes, they were being coerced. If India is giving citizenship to a large proportion of Bangladeshi citizens, it also has the right to lay claim on land and property which is rightfully theirs. This would be a destruction of the state of Bangladesh as it stands. Both Indira and Mujib ur Rehman were aware of it.
Jun 29 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Interesting formulation here: “built a nation from scratch”. So the “nation” didn’t exist before. Please note, the historian didn’t say “state”, he said “nation”.

This is the kind of historians we have for Indians as a nation. This is quite ridiculous for any nation, but particularly so for Indians - who are easily the most ancient nation attested, not only from native texts but also from other civilizations. Every external visitor to India - Greek, Chinese, Arab - saw Indians as a nation.
Aug 24, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
A hilarious article that whines about colonialism and western gaze, but fails to list one single scientific discovery made under the Mughal or Turkic rule!

The largest economic surplus in the world of that period failed to produce even one single unique scientific discovery! Apart from vacuously justifying Turkic rule, the article also contains a blanket assertion pushed forward as undisputed fact.

“No one can dispute that the caste system created Brahmanical hegemony over knowledge in India, which undoubtedly was an impediment to innovation.”
Mar 28, 2023 • 69 tweets • 11 min read
In this thread, I will discuss the nature of creative talent of AI models (such as LLMs like GPT-4 etc), from the perspective of अलङ्कारशास्त्र the Sanskrit aesthetic tradition. I will quote from the काव्यप्रकाश of the Kashmiri scholar मम्मट, from the first chapter (प्रथमोल्लास). An in-depth understanding of generative AI models from the perspective of Alankāra Śāstra is highly needed. But the subject is vast and requires study of many celebrated scholars like Ānandavardhana, Abhinavagupta, Rājaśēkhara etc. Hope AI researchers will do this at some point.
Mar 28, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
The question is will we see more frequent war and civil war in the future. All regions at the border zones of the great powers are at risk. We saw how European fault lines broke into war. Something similar might be brewing in Central or South America. A shrinking power like the USA that is behaving increasingly desperate and erratic does not bode well for global security. War or civil war will also be exported to Asia. They are trying hard. I am not sure if India can hold itself together and consolidate its geopolitical zone.
Feb 16, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I guess this is also how the port town of Masulipatnam (or MachilīpaTnam) in Andhra Pradesh got the name of “bandaru”. I think the Sanskrit word पट्टन / पत्तन originally meant a port and is still widely present on the Kalinga to Coramandel coast place names.
Feb 16, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
We can translate “data” as दत्तांश దత్తాంశాలు or more compactly as दत्त దత్తాలు. I am not sure if मुक्त ముక్త (liberated from responsibilities/bonds) is the right translation for “open”. I think विवृत వివృత is a better expression. Open data can be विवृत दत्तांश వివృత దత్తాంశాలు. I am not sure how to express the plural of दत्त in Hindi. Can someone who is a native Hindi speaker please comment?
Feb 15, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Gentleman wants the British Secret Service to play the role of the Indian opposition. One thing the Indian National Congress doesn’t seem to understand, is that arguing the foreign press is criticizing the ruling party (for whatever reason) is not going to earn them any favour with the Indian public. In fact, it will have exactly the opposite effect.
Feb 15, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
We see the same mistake being repeated by keeping India within the British Commonwealth. The reasons were also probably similar: the state institutions, civil servants, mechanisms etc tied up with the old power structures and hence difficult to overhaul. If we compare with the conquistadors of the missionary religions, they explicitly come with a mandate for genocide and repopulation, They thus violently uproot old institutions, sometimes by inflicted famine and forced displacement of people. Then a brand new state can be built.
Feb 9, 2023 • 45 tweets • 10 min read
In this thread, I will discuss the names of the numbers 1-10 from Sanskrit etymology. Many subsistence cultures don’t have any words for higher numbers. These words should have arose at a certain level of cultural sophistication and are thus rooted in a specific cultural history. I discussed this issue some 4 years ago, when I first wondered about it. But then, due to my ignorance, I thought the meaning behind the names for numbers interested no one before. I was wrong. Sanskrit grammarians did suggest derivations for these words.
Feb 8, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Mr. Mukarram Jah was raised to be a figurehead for the global Caliphate by Mr. Osman Alikhan, who was an Islamist as well as the richest Muslim on the planet. His ambitions laid far beyond the New Medina of Pakistan, they were comparable to ISIS: to re-establish the Caliphate. That Mr. Mukarram Jah turned out to be a dullard, a man “who had a lot to be modest about” in the words of Churchill, was a different story. The Indian state under Nehru encouraged losers like these, who didn’t see themselves as Indians, to scrounge off India’s wealth.
Nov 7, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
A lot of ailments in the Indian university system, its underperformance on international arena, its alienation from Indian languages and knowledge systems: all stem from Anglo (US) interference in the Indian academia since 1950s. Great lecture by Kapil Kapoor on how it happened. Prof. Kapil Kapoor remains one of the greatest intellectuals in Indian academia. Many activists have the fire, but don’t have the academic rigour. Some intellectuals are well read in the literature, but they don’t have the rootedness and insider understanding of Indian society.
Nov 5, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
What is Urdu in its “pure form” !? It is a Perso-Turkic pidgin of Hindi. Being a pidgin is its very origin and nature, of course it will keep getting more pidginized with English, or whatever is the current dominant language. Urdu is literally the language of the Bazaar. This is why the Perso-Turkic elite have never spoken Urdu in India, but Persian. Even in the late period of British Raj, writers like Iqbal wrote in Persian, because that is a bonafide “pure” language. The Islamic elite started using Urdu when they couldn’t speak Persian anymore.
Nov 4, 2022 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
Excellent discourse on the Hindu view of rivers by @halleyji, on the @AtharvaForum. A rooted Hindu perspective on environmentalism is needed in this age. How we see the Gangā is a good starting point for building that.

I have always felt that Hinduism as a religion is most easily expressed as those people who see rivers as divine. This one element distinguishes the Dharmic from the non-Dharmic religions, as well as unifies all the diverse Dharmic viewpoints into one coherent stream.
Nov 3, 2022 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
The road to hell is paved with.. Here is the hard truth. Basmati rice exports = exporting the ground water of Punjab. We need not export such water intensive crop, especially from a region with sinking water levels.
Sep 4, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
The sad truth is China in 2006 was so much stronger in fundamentals than India is today. Our greatest weaknesses are (in descending order of importance):

1) an inept colonial judiciary presiding over gigantic case logs, emboldening crime.
2) an Anglo-apartheid with most state and market services inaccessible to majority.
3) a broken (Anglified) education system.
Aug 29, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I disagree with this. The goal of language teaching should be first and foremost excellent capability in mother tongue. Everything else is secondary. So the order should be:

1) Mother tongue
2) Sanskrit (because this is where 90% vocabulary comes from)
3) Optional whatever! We have created useless cripples in native language expression by prioritizing the colonial language (for whatever bullshit reason), and then prioritizing Hindi in the model of colonial imposition, and dumped native expression to the dumpster, thereby creating brainless zombies.
Aug 28, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
An interesting thing with the annexation of Tibet by China was the timing. The constitution of India was adopted in January 1950. The Chinese waited until India stopped being a British dominion and then annexed Tibet, almost like waiting to avoid a war with the British Empire. The Nehruvian government’s tacit acceptance of the borders of partition, as decided by the British, was signal enough that India was a weak state and will not push back against the Chinese annexation of Tibet. This calculation proved to be correct.