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Morley’s: How a Tamil-Owned Chicken Shop Became Part of Britain’s Cultural Fabric

A prominent feature of British urban life is the chicken shop. Found on nearly every corner, particularly in South London, it has become the quintessential go-to for late night munchies, an affordable meal after work, and a space to reconnect or share a laugh with a friend. However, behind the red tiled floors, bright fluorescent lights, and steel chairs lies a deeper history, one of immense sacrifice, innovation, and cultural significance.

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The Man Who Fought an Empire With a Newspaper

The story of Moulvi Muhammad Baqir, widely remembered as the first martyr of Indian journalism.

By the second half of September 1857, Shahjahanabad, known today as Old Delhi, had stopped being a city and became a crime scene. The British had spent days grinding back through its lanes house by house, and now the punishment phase was underway: men hanged in public squares, some were shot outright, entire mohallas cleared out. The names remembered from that year are the ones you might expect: the exiled emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar II; the sepoy Mangal Pandey; and the sword-wielding queen, Rani Lakshmibai.

One name that has never received the attention it deserves belongs to a seventy-seven-year-old man who never carried a weapon. His weapon was a printing press, which proved dangerous enough. The colonial state executed him within three days of his arrest, without a trial.

His name was Moulvi Muhammad Baqir, and he ran a newspaper out of a building near Kashmiri Gate.

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The Sunday Matrimonial Pages:

What Do Newspaper Classifieds Reveal About South Asian Concepts of Love, Marriage, and Tradition?

I sit with the Sunday newspaper splayed out on the couch, hunch over it, and skim through the headlines. Amongst the devastating news, international affairs, sports, and op-eds, there is a whole separate section dedicated to matrimonial advertisements. Two sprawling 33 cm x 52 cm pages are filled with rows of tiny squares that distill an individual’s identity on the basis of their caste, religion, profession, weight, height, and complexion. Each block reads less like a search for a potential life partner, and more like an elevator pitch:

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Waiting for the State: The Hidden History of Queues in South Asia

It begins before the doors even open.

Outside a passport office, people clutch transparent folders swollen with photocopies and identity documents. At a government hospital, patients who arrived before sunrise quietly watch the queue lengthen behind them. A student refreshes a university admissions portal for the hundredth time. A family waits years for a court hearing. An elderly woman sits outside a ration shop, hoping today’s stock will last until her turn. Across South Asia, waiting is so deeply woven into everyday life that it rarely invites curiosity. We complain about delays, overcrowding, or inefficiency, but almost never ask a more fundamental question: how did waiting become such a familiar way of encountering the state?

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Aunties Without Husbands, Children, or Regrets

While for the boys in my family, my parents found male examples in our community to appreciate and point out as sources of inspiration, for myself and my sisters, women were used as examples to discourage us. It could have been the unmarried aunt, the divorcee cousin who refused to marry again, or the widow who never allowed her grief to prevent her from enjoying life. She could have had her own apartment, a travel passport stuffed with stamps, an expensive collection of handbags, or even the sheer audacity of using an entire Sunday afternoon for herself, however, that was never referred to as freedom; it was always a warning.

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More is More is More: South Asian Maximalism in the Backdrop of an Increasingly Colorless World

Quiet luxury, capsule wardrobes, beige babies, clean girl aesthetic, and emphatically bland celebrity mansions. We have seen these trends float to the top of our social media algorithms, dominating Western palettes and informing the collective understanding of what it means to have ‘good taste’. But following this mandate of minimalism is not just a matter of personal preference or individual choice. Wearing the two thousand-dollar neutral-toned Loro Piana cardigan or decorating a multi-million dollar mansion to look like an endless white void is a means of signaling. These aesthetic decisions are a coded visual language to signal sophistication, superiority, and class, attributes that rely on an out-group or an ‘other’ to maintain any meaning. While these social media trends may seem like the styles of today, destined to cycle in and out and in again, the reality is that these terms are the modern repackaging of ideas that have been circulating since the very beginnings of Western political thought. Yes, stay with me, there is a through line between the modern-day clean girl and Aristotle. For the West to successfully construct a singular identity around taste, one that elevates minimalism to a gold (or in this case beige) standard, the maximalist sensibilities of the East have to be systematically devalued.

The Western minimalist world order can only dominate public and private spheres if cultures, such as those of the Subcontinent, with a natural affinity for vibrance, excess and color, are degraded, creating a hierarchy of tastes. In his book Chromophobia, David Batchelor poses the questions: ‘If color is unimportant … Why is it so important to exclude it so forcefully? If color doesn’t matter, why does its abolition matter so much?’. As I step into the bleached, sterile insides of an Apple store or any of the countless ostentatiously vacant lobbies in New York City’s high-rises, I find myself asking similar questions. Through these queries, Batchelor sets up the thesis of his book: that color has been subjected to extreme prejudice in the West in one of two ways. It is either tied to a ‘foreign’ body’– deemed ‘savage’, ‘oriental’ and ‘primitive’–or dismissed as superficial, viewed as ‘supplementary’, ‘inessential’ and ‘cosmetic.’ In the case of South Asia, it is viewed as both: alien, and therefore sinister, as well as insignificant, and therefore unworthy.

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The Guilt of Spreading Your Wings

Long before I dreamed of simply moving out, I dreamed of moving to New York City. Growing up in the suburbs, the city represented everything that felt just beyond my reach: independence, possibility, interesting jobs, spontaneous nights out, and a life where something always seemed to be happening. Like many 90s kids, I also grew up obsessed with the sitcom Friends. Watching it gave my NYC fantasy a shape: my friends and I would live nearby, meet for coffee, share stories about bad dates, and turn every small hiccup into an adventure. Even the toughest days would end with laughter around a table and a lesson learned.

However, it wasn’t until I was much older that I realized that none of the TV characters ever spoke about feeling guilty for leaving their homes. They worried about careers, relationships, rent, and whether they’re “on a break,” but they rarely worried about how their independence might hurt their parents. In fact, most of their parents were busy pursuing their own happiness and adventures: dating, divorcing, traveling, remarrying, and starting new careers with surprising enthusiasm. Their children weren’t responsible for protecting them from loneliness, whereas my parents had not built their lives separate from their children. We were their great adventure. Our education, safety, careers, and futures became the plot around which their entire world revolved. Their happiness was tied so tightly to ours that choosing a life they didn’t understand felt like taking something away from them.

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Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Ruttie: An Unknown Bombay Story

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‘My Name Is Khan’ and the Burden of Explaining Yourself

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The Real Tragedy of Brown Guys Saying the N-Word

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The Famines We Inherited: The Colonial Famines We Were Never Taught About and Their Impact on South Asian Health

My father didn’t know. My relatives didn’t know. My medical colleagues didn’t know. My children didn’t learn about it in school in the United States or England. Until 2018, when I shared my research and started writing about South Asian famines and their effect on the health of modern South Asians, no one I asked knew that there had been at least 25 major famines in South Asian history, that they happened during the relatively short 190-year period of British Colonial rule. or that ancestors that survived, and we in later generations, may have adapted genetics that are in conflict with modern diets and lifestyles.

This historical revelation can be overwhelming; the impact of it today can be scary, but this knowledge is essential and it can ultimately be empowering. The sacrifice and survival of our ancestors are deeply moving and can inspire us to make informed health choices.

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When I was younger I’d describe my identity as mixed race, British and Indian. I’d be met with the response, so which side is Indian then? After scrambling to piece together a family tree I barely understood (ancestry DNA wasn’t a thing when I was 10), I usually end up admitting, “Actually, I’m not sure.”

For years, I couldn’t give a simple answer about my cultural background. Any small talk that included the inevitable “where are you from” either turned into an impossible attempt to condense centuries of colonial history into a thirty second explanation or ended with me simply saying, “I’m Indian.” There was no in between. The nuances of my identity disappeared because I was constantly trying to reduce it to an elevator pitch.

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The Curfew Was the Worst Thing to Happen to South Asian Daughters

The most insulting thing about a curfew was that it was always presented as love and protection. My parents never said, “We do not trust you.” They said, “We worry about you.” They never admitted, “The men in this family have more freedom because they are boys.” Instead, they said, “The world is different for girls.” And they certainly never said, “Your movements must be controlled to protect the family’s reputation.” No, no, they simply said, “Be home before it gets dark.”

How magical and adventurous my younger years would have been if the sun had respected my social life. Unfortunately, winter in Canada meant darkness arrived at four-thirty in the afternoon, around the same time school ended. Technically, I had broken curfew before I had even left the building.

For many South Asian daughters, the curfew was our first lesson in how gender, power, and society worked. We learned that freedom was not distributed according to maturity, intelligence, or good behavior, rather it was distributed according to whether the family believed you could become pregnant. A son could disappear for eight hours with a vague promise to “be around,” but a daughter had to submit the address, phone number, guest list, transportation plan and recent criminal history of everyone attending. Even then, the answer was probably no.

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How Shah Rukh Khan Became the Face of India’s Lost Future

One night, while doom-scrolling, I stumbled across a recent interview with Shah Rukh Khan. Charming as ever, he delivered yet another account of his struggles, ad nauseam: how hard work can overcome every disadvantage, whether social or economic. I have watched some version of this interview a hundred times over the past twenty-five years. I could have recited it along with him. However, this time, I felt a dissonance. It went beyond the tired familiarity of Khan, the classic Delhi middle-class boy turned global icon, selling his rags-to-riches story yet again. It was a growing discomfort with what his myth represents in today’s India, and how inextricably that myth is tied to the hopes and illusions of the Indian middle class.

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Who Sold Qawwali’s Aura?

Through the devotional vision of Amir Khusrau, the thirteenth-century Sufi poet, qawwali took root in the courtyards of Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya’s dargah in Delhi. It was sacred music, intended to express devotion to the Prophet and guide listeners towards sama, a state of spiritual ecstasy that only an accomplished qawwal could evoke. Centuries later, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan carried that tradition beyond Delhi’s gharanas and onto the world’s greatest stages. Through the extraordinary power and serenity of his voice, audiences across the globe found themselves drawn into the same collective trance.

So what changed after Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan? In the long history of qawwali, his era feels as though it ended only yesterday, yet since his passing, the essence of qawwali has undergone a profound transformation. Whether that change has been for better or for worse is open to debate, but there is little doubt that the tradition itself has changed.

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Is He Into Me, or Just Really Into Brown Women?

I’ve learned a lot from dating outside my culture. I’ve learned that some people consider black pepper spicy and that not all grown men take off their shoes when they enter their own homes. Most importantly, it has taught me that racism does not always arrive waving a flag or shouting a slur. Sometimes it arrives on time, pays for dinner, and tells you that you are “not like other Indian girls.”

The first time a white man called me exotic, I was twenty-two and still dumb enough to mistake discomfort for chemistry. We were sitting across from each other at a bar when he leaned closer and told me that he had “always had a thing for Brown girls.”

At the time, I took this as a compliment. Brown girls were beautiful, and I was a Brown girl, therefore I was beautiful; the logic appeared sound and in my defense, I was twenty-two and he was attractive. Only later did I wonder whether he had been attracted to me as an individual or whether I had simply walked into a fantasy that existed long before we met. This is the recurring question when you date outside your culture: does this person like me, or do they like what they imagine me to represent?

It would be easier if racism in dating were always that obvious. If a man showed up to a date up in a colonial costume, handed me a cricket bat, and announced in a British accent, “Teen guna lagaan dena padega” (“You’ll have to pay triple tax”), I’d know it was my time to leave. Unfortunately, modern prejudice is rarely that easy to spot, it tends to hide behind curiosity, personal preference, humor, and even admiration.

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Why are Indian Students Protesting?

On the morning of July 20th, New Delhi, India’s capital city, woke up to rallying cries of “Chalo Sansad” – Come, March to the Parliament. An over ten thousand-strong swell of protestors gathered at Jantar Mantar, a historical observatory that serves as a site for public demonstrations, setting out to march to the Indian National Parliament. The crowd was met with armed anti-riot police, barricades welded together, and threats of violence.

The protestors refused to relent, as the state shut down the internet in parts of the city and suspended train lines that would take others to the protest. Baton charges ensued, leaving scores injured. Tear gas was deployed to disperse the crowds. Protest leaders were rounded up, and social media televised it all. This clash has not erupted overnight. It has been brewing for weeks, and is a Molotov cocktail of frustration against a system that has left young people helpless.

So, how did we get here?

It’s not a simple answer, but an overlapping maze of political and civil agendas that have given fodder to one of the most significant, intersectional protests we have seen in recent times. Untangling these threads is tough, but crucial to understanding what’s at stake for India’s youth.

An Exam Paper Leaks

At its core, the protest is about the Indian government not taking accountability for a competitive examination paper leak. The “National Eligibility cum Entrance Test” or NEET is the single, standardized entrance examination for students who want to pursue medicine in India. Each year, over two million aspirants attempt the exam, competing against each other for 180,000 seats, which are further bifurcated into seats reserved for marginalized groups, those in private and state schools, and for tribal groups. Under 3% of those appearing for the exam manage to get accepted into a government college. Families often take loans to get their children coaching for these exams, and many students spend years working towards the bleak possibility of success.

This year, over 2.7 million students appeared for the exam on the 3rd of May. However, on the 12th of May, the National Testing Agency (NTA) retroactively cancelled the examination, saying that they had found overlaps between a pre-circulated “guess paper” and the actual question paper, confirming a leak. Students clamored in distress – demanding answers, and some accountability towards the corruption that had allowed for this leak in the first place.

While the Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan stated that this was a “breach in the chain of command,” no further responsibility was taken by the ministry or the body responsible for administering the exam. At the time of writing, a CBI (Central Bureau of Investigation) enquiry is in place relating to the leak, and ten accused have been arrested so far.

On the 21st of May, the first suicide related to the NEET re-examination stress was reported. Pradeep Manich, a twenty-three-year-old, took his own life in the coaching hub of Sikar, despondent that he was on his third attempt at the exam, with his family sinking deeper into debt. The exhaustion of yet another attempt at the NEET – completely out of his control – was the trigger following years of trying to succeed in a system designed to brutalize.

Once the re-examination had been conducted on 21 June, and results declared, there was further controversy that the mark sheets hadn’t been graded accurately. While the NTA dismissed these claims, this isn’t the first year this issue has surfaced. With the cancellation crisis already at hand, it exacerbated things, making an already tense situation worse.

Since then, the death toll caused by this debacle has only climbed. At the time of writing, 21 NEET-related suicides had been reported. Amongst the disheartened students and their families, a demand for the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan emerged, and that forms one piece of the protest puzzle.

The Cockroaches Emerge

While the NEET disaster was taking shape, another strange political movement gained ground in the country – starting as a meme, and becoming a fierce political force. On the 15th of May, the Chief Justice of India Surya Kant, remarked that young people who “don’t get any employment and don’t have any place in a profession” go on to become “cockroaches” and “parasites of society,” attacking institutions via media and RTI activism.

In a country that has seen a year-on-year growth of graduate unemployment (currently at 29.1%), this brash comment struck a nerve. The clip went viral, as young people mused on how out of touch institutional elites were. The unemployment crisis isn’t one of laziness, but one of infrastructural failure.

Taking advantage of this momentum, Abhijeet Dipke, a thirty-year-old political strategist, floated a Google Form with a titular graphic saying “Main Bhi Cockroach”: that is, “I am a Cockroach too.” That ballooned into the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), a satirical play on India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. The CJP’s social media following skyrocketed – crossing 10 million followers on Instagram within a week, surpassing the BJP’s 9.4 million followers. At the time of writing, the account had over 23.4 million followers.

The challenge for Dipke, a Boston University graduate who had previously designed political campaigns for Aam Aadmi Party, was to turn this momentum into actual ground-level change. The CJP organized its first protest on the 6th of June, pinning its cause to that of the NEET aspirants. The party’s spokesperson stated their demand was the Education Minister’s resignation, and that they would gather at Jantar Mantar for a peaceful, non-confrontational protest.

On the day of the protest, the turnout was mellower than expected. Despite the millions online, only hundreds showed up on the streets of Delhi. This didn’t deter the team, who instead launched a strategic mobilization across the capital – embedding itself within the existing student politics networks.

Between the 7th and 19th of June, CJP maintained a rolling protest. It ran a series of awareness drives, and actively began to collaborate with left-wing student groups such as the Students’ Federation of India, the All India Students’ Association, and the All India Students’ Federation. Propelled by this existing infrastructure, the CJP orchestrated a regroup on the 20th of June, and announced they would be occupying the site indefinitely – or rather until their demands were met.

On the day of the re-examination (June 21), Dipke issued a public appeal for aspirants to come straight to Jantar Mantar once done with the paper – managing to concretely amass support and mesh the two movements together.

Yet, this was not enough to build the momentum that would break through a month later with the attempted parliament march.

Fast and the Furious

On June 28, the sit-in at Jantar Mantar gained a celebrity activist. Sonam Wangchuk, a Ladhaki engineer and educational reformer, became the face of the protest. Wangchuk, known for his popular media representation (Phunsuk Wangdu in Three Idiots), is a Magsaysay Award winner (known as Asia’s Nobel Prize) and has previously thrown his weight behind movements for Ladakhi statehood, educational reform, and environmental protection.

At Jantar Mantar, he declared that he would be going on a hunger strike till the protesters’ demands were met. Student leaders from AISA joined the indefinite fast as well. This bolstered the protest and ushered in new allies. Social media influencers and Bollywood personalities joined in with presence or solidarity posts, as the government continued to turn a deaf ear.

About twenty days later, in the wee hours of 18th July, Delhi Police officers from the New Delhi district were told to assemble around 3 am, initially briefed only as a “security drill”. By 7 AM, police officers surrounded the protest site and, cloaked by white sheets, took custody of Wangchuk. On the 20th day of his fast, Wangchuk was admitted to Safdarjung Hospital. The Police cited a High Court order and stated they were acting in the interest of the activist’s health.

Dipke contradicted this account and alleged that Wangchuk had been assaulted, and so had he. He went as far as to call the police right-wing “goons”. The Police continued to make public appeals, asking the crowd to disperse. The reaction, given that a video clip of Wangchuk’s removal went viral, was immediate. This time, the protest managed to bring major political voices to lend support to their cause.

Rahul Gandhi condemned the action as the Modi government using force to suppress a student-led issue it had refused to negotiate with directly. Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge, AAP’s Arvind Kejriwal, and Samajwadi Party’s Akhilesh Yadav each separately called it a tyrannical crackdown and demanded judicial oversight of how Delhi Police had handled the hospitalization. AAP’s Manish Sisodia was sharper still, framing it as the government’s actual “solution” to paper leaks: send in men to remove whoever raises their voice, rather than address the underlying exam failures.

The next day, the fight over Wangchuk’s hospitalization moved from the street into the courts.. His wife, Gitanjali Angmo, petitioned the Delhi High Court for an urgent hearing, calling his continued stay at Safdarjung “illegal detention” and saying the hospital had refused repeated requests either to discharge him or transfer him to a private facility of the family’s choosing. Judge Mini Pushkarna rejected the plea the same day, ruling that doctors had administered only oral fluids and supplements with Wangchuk’s consent and that there was no evidence force was being used against him or that his bodily autonomy was being violated.

Separately, a public interest litigation was filed the same day alleging that Delhi Police had subjected protesters at Jantar Mantar to continuous photography and surveillance, creating what the petition called an “atmosphere of intimidation” that infringed their rights to privacy and peaceful assembly; the Delhi High Court admitted it for hearing, though it remains pending.

Neither ruling had the effect the state would have hoped for. Instead of deflating the protests, it set up the grounds for the larger march to Parliament as the crowd at the protest site reportedly grew swiftly.

What Now?

The sun has set in New Delhi, and protestors are left to make sense of a day that had no clear victors. Chaos was spurred by the use of police force and the violence that littered the two kilometer stretch between the protest site and the Parliament. The session in Parliament went on as standard, with heavy security deployment on all sides.

Yet, the protests seemed to have had a domino effect. Solidarity sit-ins have sprung up across the country. The Mumbai Police has issued a mandate banning gatherings of five or more people for the next two weeks, after thousands gathered in a march echoing the one in Delhi. Something seems to have shaken the status quo loose, and we can’t pinpoint the single pressure point that switched up what had been an under-attended sit-in to a nation-wide demonstration.

At the time of writing, a two-member delegation of the CJP had met Union Minister JP Nadda, after the government was forced to open channels of communication with the protestors. Their demands are clear: release Wangchuk, get the Education Minister to resign, and give the families of the NEET aspirants who died by suicide INR 1 crore (USD 103,671.20) each. There was no word on how these demands were being taken, and if there was any hope for reconciliation. Wangchuk maintained he was still on his fast, and was strengthened in his resolve after seeing the brutality with which the police had dealt with protestors.

In some circles, the ambition is that these protests turn into something like the Gen-Z protests of Nepal. After all, young people are the best judges of what they want their country to look like, and the ones who stand to lose most in a broken system. There can be no fortune telling on whether this will hold true. So far, the current Indian government has an abysmal record of dealing with protestors. That does not inspire optimism .

But as the chant that powers these protests go: “Hum leke rahenge azadi - Tum kuch bhi kar lo Azadi,” : We will have freedom – whatever the cost may be - we will have freedom.

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The Types of South Asian Ghost Stories

Every South Asian family has at least one ghost story. You probably didn’t hear it around a campfire. You heard it from a grandmother after dinner, an uncle on a long drive home, or a parent who swore they weren’t superstitious before telling you about the woman in white they still refuse to talk about after dark. These stories travelled with us. They crossed oceans tucked between recipes, family photographs, and memories of places left behind. Even those of us who grew up thousands of miles from South Asia somehow inherited the same haunted roads, the same djinn, and the same warnings never to answer a voice calling your name at night.

I asked readers to send me South Asian ghost stories. My inbox quickly filled with tales from Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and beyond. They came from Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Christian, and Parsi families, as well as those of other religions and faiths. Some had been told for generations in villages, others in crowded cities, and many had found a second life in living rooms in Toronto, London, New York, Melbourne, and Dubai.

As I read through them, something unexpected emerged. Despite coming from different countries, languages, and faiths, many of the stories were almost identical; the same woman appeared on lonely roads, the same backwards feet exposed the supernatural, the same unexplained fever arrived the next morning. It was as though our ghosts had ignored Partition, borders, and passports long before we ever crossed them ourselves. That perhaps should not surprise us. If wee share histories, languages, foods, and folklore, we must have inherited many of the same fears, the same moral lessons, and the same ways of making sense of the unknown. Ghost stories are more than spooky entertainment, they preserve the anxieties that societies struggle to speak about openly. They reveal what we fear, what we repress, and what we choose to remember. As Stephen King once wrote, “We need ghost stories because we, in fact, are the ghosts.”

Reading through dozens of submissions, I realized I wasn’t collecting ghost stories as much as I was collecting evidence of a shared South Asian imagination. Here are some of the patterns that kept appearing.

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The Unspoken Culture of Educating Women, But Not Expecting Careers

Growing up, I genuinely believed education was the family religion. Before I learned multiplication, I learned that grades were a moral virtue. A ninety-five was respectable, a ninety-eight raised questions about the missing two percent, and anything lower required a family meeting and a forensic analysis worthy of a United Nations investigation.

Our parents raised us to believe that education was the great equalizer. It was something nobody could take away from us. Money could disappear, governments could change, homes could be left behind but degrees stayed with you forever. My mother repeated this so often I thought university handed out diplomas engraved on stone tablets. Good grades and university mattered, but when it came to a career, it occupied a far stranger place in the culture imagination. It was always discussed as something to prepare for, though never quite something to keep.

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Why Pakistanis Stayed in Britain

The history of British Pakistanis is not simply one of migration, but of belonging, adaptation, and community formation. It is also a story deeply embedded in the social, economic, and cultural development of modern Britain. Yet Pakistani migration to Britain is often framed primarily through statistics, labor market needs, and legislative change, reducing migration to matters of economics or policy. While these factors certainly shaped patterns of movement, they tell us little about a more fundamental question: how did temporary migration become permanent settlement?

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