My Malice and Bias

Punjabi Cuisine  It turns out we’ve been eating the spiced dish for a lot longer than anyone ever imagined. The Punjabi curry predates European presence in India by about 4,000 years. Villagers living at the height of the Indus civilization used three key curry ingredients—ginger, garlic, and turmeric—in their cooking. This proto-curry , in fact, was eaten long before Arab, Chinese, Indian, and European traders came in touch with India in the past thousand years. While the ancients left behind plenty of broken pots and mud-brick house foundations, they generally didn’t leave us their recipes. And foodstuffs, unlike pots, rapidly decay. But thanks to technological advances, scientists can identify minute quantities of plant remains left behind by meals cooked thousands of years ago. Serving Pot from Harappa They found additional supporting evidence of ginger and turmeric use on ancient cow teeth unearthed in Harappa , one of the largest Indus cities, located in the West Punjab nea...

Punjabi Ignorance We, the Punjabis historically have not been documenting our own history. The Muslim Punjabis have almost forgotten their genetic ancestry and now try to connect their gene pool to the Arab aristocracy of Sayeds and Qureshis. The Pakistan government ignorantly names its missiles after the Islamic invaders who dispossessed their ancestors from their land. The Hindu Punjabis have written off their own ancestors, warriors kings, and Gurus and relate more to the Middle-India heroes such as Rama, Krishna, and Shivaji, The Sikhs have done a better job in staying connected to their roots but their historical reach is limited just to the Sikh period. Punjab history has to be taken as a whole, and that includes, Adivasis, Indus valley, Aryan Khatris, Kushans, Rajputs, Gujjars, Jatts, Islamic invaders, Sikh period, British rule, and the post independence era. Trinity of Punjabi Pride What's the Problem? So what? The results of this ignorance is astounding. We never ...

Indus Valley Seals - Unicorn or Holy Cow? Unicorn Seal from Harrapa, Punjab I have been fascinated by the Indus Valley civilization ever since I studied the subject in my junior high school in India.  One of the unique identifier for the Indus Valley is the so called "Unicorn Seals". A number of variations of this seal has been found across various Indus Valley sites. But most of the characteristics are the same.  The seal from Mohenjo-daro measures 29 mm (1.14) inches on each side and is made of fired steatite. Steatite is an easily carved soft stone that becomes hard after firing. On the top are "pictographs" of an as yet undeciphered Indus script, one of the very first writing systems in history. Below is the well-known unicorn figure of Indus Valley culture. Whether it designates a real or mythical animal is also disputed. Beneath it is a "sacred object," which could have been anything from a tree, religious banner, an animal's trough, an ...