Ishtiaq Ahmed Shauq

|Sufism, 'Religion', Poetry and Politics| JMI Alumnus| Research Scholar, CPS, JNU| Civil Servant, J&K|
Likes/RTs ≠ endorsements

[Ali Khan Mahmudabad @Mahmudabad]

The past year has been life altering for @OnaizaD and I in many ways but despite everything she has published this beautiful Big Book of Kashmiri Literature with @PenguinIndia and poured her heart and soul into it.

1/n

[Aman Rai @amankrai28]

My wife (Ria) went to AIIMS. I went to IIT Delhi.

We watched 'Hello Bachhon' on Netflix this weekend. One kid in the show breaks down walls in his village to sell bricks so he can afford coaching fees. A girl hides her textbooks because her parents want her married off.

Throughout the show, Ria and I realized that we never had to fight for any of that.

We had access to coaching. Good coaching. Neither of us ever worried about whether we'd get to prepare.

The IIT-AIIMS crowd loves talking about the grind. # of hours of self-study per day, the pressure, and sleepless nights. I've done it too. But that grind starts after you already have access. Most of us skipped the actual hard part and don't even know it because the people who are capable but can't afford access are invisible. They're not in your coaching batch. They're not in your college. You never compete against them because they never got the chance to show up.

We credit hard work more than it deserves. Sometimes the biggest advantage was just being born in the right city to the right family.

'Hello Bachhon' made this truth hard to ignore. Great watch.

[Nirupama Menon Rao 🇮🇳 @NMenonRao]

Shiraz. The city of Saadi and Hafez.
A place where Tagore once lingered and wrote, drawn by the fragrance of Persian poetry and memory.
Persian wisdom carries a sombre proverb: when the fire spreads, the dry wood and the green wood burn together. The innocent and the guilty perish in the same blaze.
I think of Persepolis — the great capital of the Achaemenids — burned by Alexander more than two thousand years ago. Empires rise, destroy, and pass. Yet Persian civilisation endured: in poetry, language, music, and memory.
From Babylonia and Mesopotamia to the Indus, these lands carry humanity’s earliest chapters. They are not merely territory. They are the archives of civilisation.
Saadi wrote that humanity is “one body.”
Hafez warned that the pride of kings passes like dust.
And Yeats, in another age of turmoil, sensed the widening gyre — a moment when the centre struggles to hold.
Powerful states speak today of deterrence and strategy. History speaks in a quieter, sobering voice.
It reminds us that when war spreads across landscapes layered with millennia of memory, the flames do not distinguish between soldiers and children, between stone and story.
And so the old Persian warning returns:
when the fire spreads, the dry and the wet burn together.

#WestAsia #Civilisation #History #Iran

[Samyak Ghosh 🌈 @GhoshSamyak]

Many of you might have seen this painting. Mughal historians have written about it and there’s a consensus that the subject maybe the seventeenth-century Mughal Empress Nur Jahan. But today I’m going to talk about some minor details from the painted image. Here’s a thread 🧵

[punnu - پُنّوں @punnu__khan]

in a rare sight, a female vocalist named Noreen Afzal leads a qawwal party & performs a Kafi "ki jaana main kaun" of Hazrat Bulleh Shah. Miss Noreen hails from Gujranwala; started from reciting naats, manqabats, marsiyas before eventually focusing on qawwali.
📷 @tribalgulabo

[Iceland Cricket @icelandcricket]

Dear @ICC,

It is with a heavy heart that we now announce our unavailability to replace Pakistan in the upcoming T20 World Cup. Regardless of whether they now withdraw, the short timescales ensure it is impossible for our squad to prepare in the professional manner necessary to compete effectively in this global cricketing spectacle. We are not like Scotland and able to turn up on a whim, with no kit sponsor.

Our players are from all walks of life and cannot simply drop their occupations to fly halfway around the world to experience temperatures only normally felt in Finnish saunas. Our captain, a professional baker, needs to attend to his oven, our ship captain needs to steer his vessel, and our bankers need to go bankrupt (again). This is the harsh reality of cricket at the amateur level of the game.

This news will be extremely disappointing to our fans. Despite being the most peaceful nation on Earth, we maintain an army of online followers, and are the world's 14th most followed national board on X. We were ready to give the Dutch the biggest shock they have experienced since William of Orange lost the Battle of Landen in 1693. And the Americans were looking forward to taking on Greenland, or so their orange-dyed leader thought.

Our loss is likely Uganda's gain. We wish them well. Their kits cannot be missed unless you have epilepsy, in which case they are probably best avoided.

The future is always ice, until it isn't.

Yours sincerely,

Icelandic Cricket Association

[Seema Chishti @seemay]

Prof Romila Thapar and @NamitArora0 kill it in a conversation about history, what constitutes a shared idea of India, good sense, rationality and the ability to see the past for what it is, not to propel narrow ideas of exclusion today
Do watch.
https://t.co/B04lv2OPvE

[Stanly Johny @johnstanly]

No analysis of #Iran is complete if you reduce what's unfolding in the country into a simplistic binary of an oppressive regime vs a freedom-loving people. That's a liberal trap. I have serious disagreements with the character of the Iranian state (which I have with a lot of regimes), but that doesn't stop me from trying to understand the broader picture. Iran has lived under crippling sanctions for decades--and those who imposed the sanctions wanted to make everyday life miserable in the hope that the public would rise against the regime which would open a window for the liberal interventionists. Why is Iran under sanctions? Mainly because of its nuclear programme. Iran exists in a very hostile region. Just look at the map -- Iran is the only Persian Gulf country that doesn't host an American military base. It sits in a region where Israel is the only nuclear power. The mistake Iran did -- as I have always argued -- was that it did not make the bomb. They thought they could leverage a nuclear threshold status for both security and economic relief. That was a blunder in a world of jungle. Tehran signed the nuclear deal in 2015. Trump demolished it in 2018 and reimposed sanctions. Europe just follows the line given from Washington.

Despite the hostility in the region, Iran enjoyed relative deterrence due its so-called axis of resistance. The US first killed Soleimani, one of the architects of the axis. And then Israel, post-Oct 7, with American help, chipped away at the axis. Because for both Israel and the US, Iran is the only revisionist power in West Asia. You take Syria out, Iran would be weakened. And you take Iran out, the whole region could be redrawn. Look at what happened. Hamas was pushed into the ruins of Gaza. Hezbollah has been degraded. Houthis are fighting their own battles. And the Syrian regime, Iran's only state ally in the region, collapsed. Russia is stuck in Ukraine. China remains too self-occupied. Iran suddenly lay vulnerable to external threats. And then the Israelis bombed Iran in June. Trump happily joined in.

Europe followed suit in the subsequent months by reimposing snapback sanctions--because Iran violated a deal that Trump killed in 2018! In the middle of all this, Iran had elected a reformist as its president in an election in which more than 30 million people voted. But the government’s hands were tied when it came to economic issues because of the sanctions. And there is genuine public resentment which was what triggered the shopkeepers' protests on January 1. But on Jan 2, after meeting Netanyahu in Florida, Trump said he was “locked and loaded”. Mossad started amplifying anti-regime messages in Farsi via social media. It even posted on X that “we are with you in the field” (I wrote here on X on the day the US attacked Venezuela and abducted President Maduro that Iran was next).

The protests started turning violent. Reza Pahlavi, son of the deposed monarch who is living in the US, suddenly emerged as the “Crown Prince”. Someone who hasn’t set foot in Iran for over four decades, emerged in western TV and press as the rightful voice of Iran’s opposition and he called for urgent American bombing of Iran! Garbage propaganda channels such as Iran International unleashed a firestorm of misinformation. Reports about the situation on the ground came from “rights groups” based in Oslo and Washington. The liberal mills, which were conspicuously silent during Israel’s genocide of Palestinians for two years, started firing on all cylinders. Iran, they said, wants freedom through American and Israeli bombings.
And now Trump is asking the “protesters” to take over institutions. #IranProtests

[Shuja ul haq @ShujaUH]

For all the wannabe heroes out there. A brilliant message by the @DelhiPolice

[N. Ram @nramind]

Celebrate the cricket, leadership, and character of one of the most likeable cricketers in international cricket, Temba Bavuma. Read this article by K. Sudarshan in The Hindu of November 18, 2025:

[Pratap Bhanu Mehta @pbmehta]

As India enters the New Year the most consequential contest it faces is not between parties, personalities or ideologies. It is between allure of fantasy and discipline of reality

[Ismat Ara @IsmatAraa]

India celebrates its youth but is getting older fast. By 2050, over 20% of India's population is projected to be elderly (60+), yet the country lacks a national dementia plan. Routine BP, Diabetes tests exist but hardly any mental health care for seniors.

[State Bank of India @TheOfficialSBI]

ALERT - PUBLIC CAUTION NOTICE

[Mohammed Zubair @zoo_bear]

@Tasnimnews_Fa Misinformation by Iranian News media. It's an old video of an oil tanker explosion in Dubai. Not related to the Indian Airbase in Gujarat.

[Mohammed Zubair @zoo_bear]

A small thread on Godi media Star Anchors using old videos from 2021 of Israel's Iron Dome. While playing this old video, Shweta Singh of @aajtak claimed that this is the video of the Pakistani air strike that took place a short while ago in Jaisalmer.

[PIB Fact Check @PIBFactCheck]

A news report by @ChinaDaily falsely claims that at least three Indian jets crashed in Kashmir.

#PIBFactCheck

✅ The image is from an earlier incident from 2019.

🔗Here is a news report from 2019: https://t.co/gHsMLwFZ0G

🔴 This is part of a coordinated propaganda campaign aimed at creating panic and misleading the public

#IndiaFightsPropaganda

[PIB Fact Check @PIBFactCheck]

Is NSA Ajit Doval on Facebook⁉️

#PIBFactCheck

🛑 This Facebook account is FAKE

✅ The National Security Advisor does NOT have an official Facebook account.

✅Citizens are advised to exercise caution and not engage with any impostor or fake profiles claiming to represent them.

✅Rely only on official sources for authentic information

#IndiaFightsPropaganda

[PIB Fact Check @PIBFactCheck]

⚠️Old Video Alert!

In an old video, it is being claimed that Indian soldiers are crying and abandoning their posts as the India-Pakistan war intensifies

#PIBFactCheck

✅ This video was posted on Instagram on April 27 and is NOT related to the Indian Army!

🔗https://t.co/uY2sTGQqwi

✅ The video depicts students from a private defense coaching institute celebrating their selection into the Indian Army. The youth in the video reportedly became emotional with joy upon receiving news of their successful recruitment.

#IndiaFightsPropaganda

[Ishtiaq Ahmed Shauq @IAShauq]

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

AE Housman

[James Lucas @JamesLucasIT]

3. Matthias Steiner lost his wife in a car accident, after promising her he would compete in the 2008 Olympics.

Honoring her memory, he pushed through grief, trained harder than ever, and won the Gold by lifting more than he had ever lifted before.