• i will miss this blog a bit – if anyone has trouble sleeping i recommend: cardio, (lots of miles) carbs and warm bovine milk (raw if possible) and just let your mind run free with happy thoughts – napping in the daytime sometimes helps one sleep at night as when one is overtired it can be impossible to sleep

The boy amazed her as he quoted poems by Rumi in Farsi.

The boy also speaks some Pashto, is fluent in Sindhi and Urdu, proficient in Baloch and Makrian (a language spoken in and around Karachi).

My aunt never wed, but she brought her son home to the States. In the local South Asian Muslim community, people did not know how to perceive the child. He was clearly South Asian culturally, but his appearance would mistaken him for being African American in Western attire.

The Muslim Brahmins of the subcontinents are those who claim lineage to the Prophet.

But in the Arab world, where family lineages are meticulously kept and preserved, few Arabs claim to be of Banu Hashim (the tribe of the Prophet Muhammad).

Skin color in my family varies widely, so you never know if your child will be fair skinned or dark skinned, it’s the luck of the straw.

But I find darker skinned South Asians have more attractive noses, I’m not big on prominent noses which tend to be common among lighter skinned South Asians. Thank God I have a decent size nose with an okay profile.

My family is from Afghanistan, but due to civil war and strife, many have been displaced to Pakistan.

My family speaks Farsi/Dari, “Persian” is our home language, therefore, growing up I was taught I was ethnic Persian. However, when you actually examine my family tree, we are a hodgepodge of various ethnic backgrounds that reside in Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan.

Not all Persians live in Iran. I know a number of Persians in India, Pakistan, Iraq, the Gulf Arab kingdoms, Turkey, Syria, etc.

My nephew is a chubby Afghan/Pushtun boy. He’s so cute but I was shocked by his fair complexion. His father is dark but my sister is fair. My mother has porcelain white skin.

But not all Pushtuns are light skinned. Some of us have intermarried with Desis in Pakistan.

Pakistanis I know consider Indians “black.” In general, Pakistan seems to have lighter skinned peeps from the Sindh to the Kashmir.

But color variation occurs within families.

For example, I’m not “brown” but “white” with most people assuming I’m white and something else. People never guess South Asian.

On a separate note..when will some one blog something positive and thought provoking about Punjabi?? It has been months…please please please…there are more writers than just Ajeet Cour

And that is why Indians, being overwhelmingly dark-skinned, are the world champions in racial self-loathing. The historical reasons for this paradigm shift from Shyama Sundara to Fair & Lovely should be studied, and the servile stupidity of the current desi obsession with light skin color needs to be ridiculed as often as necessary.

the sooner that the Western World realizes it, the easier it is for everyone.

What the heck do you mean by that? The racist West deliberatelyplayed the critical role in making desis loathe their own skins.

Actually, while baby Krishna may have been chubby he was certainly not light-skinned. He was shyama sundara, a beautiful black baby who grew up to be a handsome young man. You knew that didnt you?