u/Background-Injury952

Hello! I recently stumbled upon this tape by the renowned Sindhi folk singer Allan Faqir. There's no information on its release date or track listing that I know of (a brief introduction in Urdu says it was recorded for AA (Altaf and Ali's Productions) but no info online exists on the studio) but my assumption is that the songs are Sufi kalams (possibly kafis?) in Sindhi. I really enjoyed this album even as someone who doesn't speak Sindhi (I'm Indian Punjabi) and would like to find more info on whether anyone here remembers any of these songs featured.

Hello, I'm a BA undergrad student of history looking to further my knowledge on Chinese history. I'm Indian and have read a lot about my own country's history, quite a bit about Europe and Africa but very little about Chinese history beyond some specialised periods like the warlord era (and even then, to only a cursory extent). I'm interested in how a "Chinese" imperial identity emerged from various distinct states and ethnicities and am also intrigued by the systems of social organisation within the post-Qin period and how they evolved. I'm also somewhat interested in Chinese folk religion and its development. But I feel kind of intimidated by big volumes (ie the Cambridge series) and would like to go with individual books period by period instead. Do you guys have any recommendations on individual books to begin with? I'm looking for non-pop/dumbed down stuff.

I recently discovered the music of maestro Ustad Naseeruddin Saami. He's from the Qawwal Bachchon ka Gharana of Delhi (but based out of Karachi) and is known as being the only vocalist (along with his 3 sons) to perform in the surti scale which is microtonal and divides the 12-tone octave into 49 pitches. Unfortunately, finding info on this online is basically impossible and the Western record labels redistributing his music have given rather poor liner notes. One of them claims it is a precursor to qawwali which seems believable but I do want to know more. Is there any good info?

I just noticed that there are like 3 separate restaurants specialising in it in Oxford (where I'm studying). I hear about it all the time and it's seemingly one of the most popular dishes nowadays. Gansu is not a famous province and doesn't have much emigration, so how did this dish from northwestern China (and not the southeast/south as most popular Chinese restaurant dishes are) get so popular? Does it have to do with it being halal?

So I'm from India and here we have a similar system to PIX in Brazil called UPI (Universal Payments Interface). UPI has expanded a lot outside India recently to Nepal, Sri Lanka, as well as the UAE which has a reasonably large Indian migrant community, and it's a pretty big success so far. I was reading about PIX, which looked quite cool as well, and noticed that despite its success in Brazil it so far seems to be limited to only Brazil and not the rest of LatAm and was wondering whether there has been a push to develop such systems in other countries in the region.

Earlier would be fine as well, I've seen some on archive.org but I'm wondering if they're all in one place somewhere.

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IIRC some British historical accounts mentioned that Tukaji Angre (the father of the famous sailor Kanhoji Angre) was an African man. While this is probably not true it seems like it's reasonable to assume the Marathas like other Deccan polities had the ability to recruit African soldiers, but do we have any historical accounts of it?

Hi, I recently remembered that in the film *Y tú mama tambien*, the main character (who is very much whitexican and upper class) is named Tenoch, which is said to be because of his father's nationalism. I've heard of a couple of other Mexicans who are not indigenous but have Aztec-derived names (Cuahtémoc Cárdenas springs to mind) which does make sense to me given the importance of the Aztecs to Mexican national identity, but I was wondering if there are any such popular names derived from indigenous languages outside Mexico.

This has been a fixture among music nerds online for some time but is still relatively obscure by music standards. So probably counts here.

There's a wiki article on it - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet\_cuisine - which seems to describe "Soviet cuisine" as if it was not food that happened to be eaten in the USSR or part of the Soviet republics (which we'd still call Russian, Georgian, Uzbek etc. cuisine) but food that was distinctly "Soviet"? The Russian wiki page talks a bit about certain dishes which came about specifically in the Soviet context ie as products of industrialisation or migration, but was it enough to call a "cuisine"?

I'm Punjabi but I don't understand the language fluently. Since Jhulelal is venerated in both Sindh and Punjab and the two languages are related I can't be fully sure of what language this song is in; moreover I can't find the lyrics online. Can anyone help me? I would also appreciate if you could tell me what this qawwali is called :).