About me

Thank you for stopping by! My name is Anurag Korde (अनुराग कोरडे).

I’m from Nashik, Maharashtra, India, and I currently live in Delhi. I study at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), where I’m majoring in Chinese. I consider myself left-wing and agnostic. I’m into linguistics, anthropology, biology, etc., and my hobbies include reading, writing, learning languages, trekking, etc.

I know four languages, Marathi, English, Hindi-Urdu, and some Mandarin Chinese. I also kind of know some other languages like Nepali, Bengali, Spanish, Tamil, Korean, Japanese, Sanskrit, etc. Alongside languages, I also like to study linguistics and writing systems.

My profile picture is a photo of a coconut tree in Nashik I took in June 2025. Along with Tumblr, you can find me on Instagram, Quora and Medium. If you like my writings, please consider supporting me on Ko-fi.

I’m in Xi'an right now. This is my first time visiting China, and one of the many things that surprised me here is that the traditional characters are everywhere, even though the simplified characters are of course more common. I’ve seen characters like 國, 長, 華, 興, 馬, 門, and so on in logos and on gates, signs, etc. 中國 (中国 Zhōngguó, the Chinese name for China) and 長安 (长安 Cháng'ān, the old name for Xi'an 西安) are pretty common.

The gate at the entrance of Yongxingfang (永興房/永兴房), a popular food street in Xi'an

長安 written in the grass script; notice how the 安 resembles the Japanese hiragana あ

Hepingmen (和平門/和平门), one of the gates of the Xi'an City Wall

Oh my god thank you sooo much! That’s really very nice to hear :D

Cruelty-wise, there is little difference in milk and eggs. Neither milk nor unfertilised eggs are alive. Both are “taken” from cows and hens, not “given” by them. Both cows and hens are selectively bred to produce more milk and eggs throughout the year. Sometimes, they are illegally given hormones that make them do so. And though I’m not vegan, I’d also say that neither of them is vegan. So there is really no reason for milk to be considered sacred or eggs to be considered “impure.” It’s just a stupid Brahmanical double standard.

Aww, poor BJP supporters. No one understands what they’re going through. Apparently, they also want Dharmendra Pradhan to resign, but they aren’t brave enough to speak up to their masters. Instead, they go against those who do speak up to the government, just to hide their own cowardice. They are too scared to criticise the government, so they instead scrutinise those who do. Please be gentle with them, because for them, everyone who doesn’t sing praises for Modi and Dhurandhar is a godforsaken anti-national. They can’t yet comprehend the relations between different issues, so they are stuck on the childish notion that a protest for paper leaks should only focus on paper leaks. How dare we bring up other issues that affect us and are related to it? How dare we bring up privatisation and marginalisation? How dare we accept help from parties that support students and Sonam Wangchuk? How dare we politicise a totally political issue? BJP always deals with every issue without politics, doesn’t it? Don’t you realise all this makes sanghis feel lonely and misunderstood? But first and foremost, why are we even focusing on unnecessary issues like corruption in the Indian education system, or rather, the education industry? We must first focus on Important Things, like garlanding rapists, changing street names, trying to forcibly end reservations in a country riddled with caste, selling every last forest to Adani, making laser eyes edits, defeating Pakistan in comments sections, and asking that actor why they didn’t praise Dhurandhar. It’s time to self-introspect, comrades.

i really love charts of writing systems. and this chart of the modi script is so beautiful

I just learned that in Taiwanese Mandarin, brown is called 咖啡色 (kāfēisè), which means coffee colour. In Japanese, it is called 茶色 (chairo), which means tea colour!

The renaming of Port Blair to Sri Vijaya Puram in September 2024 was not an anti-colonial move; it was merely another instance of the government’s constant imposition of Sanskrit and Hindi. It just changed an English name to a Sanskrit one, in spite of the fact that neither English nor Sanskrit have ever been spoken natively by the indigenous peoples of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The indigenous languages of Andaman and Nicobar include the Nicobarese languages, Ongan languages, Great Andamanese languages, etc. If Port Blair had to be renamed, it could have been given a name from one of these languages. Worse, the people of Andaman and Nicobar (both indigenous and non-indigenous) didn’t even have a say in this matter; the decision was entirely taken by mainlanders. In the same way, the decision to destroy the Great Nicobar Island for pure economic benefit is being taken entirely by mainlanders, and the Shompen and Nicobarese, who have been living there for thousands of years, have no say in this matter.

Nepali, Chinese and Japanese are all spoken in cultures where politeness matters a lot, and something similar happened in them that shows this, but in the opposite ways. The Nepali word हजुर (hajur) (from Hindustani हुज़ूर /حضور (huzūr), “sir,” originally from Arabic via Persian) means different things in different contexts. It retains the original meaning, although it can mean both “sir” and “ma'am.” Moreover, it is also a polite way to say “yes” or “you.” The Japanese word 僕 (boku), meaning “servant,” is used informally by males (mostly boys) as a first-person pronoun (“I”). In Chinese too, 僕 (pú, the simplified form being 仆) means “servant” (僕人 / 仆人, púrén), and can be a polite or literary way for males to refer to themselves. So, in Nepali, a word for “sir/ma'am” also means “you,” and in Chinese and Japanese, a word for “servant” also means “I.”

One of those things about Hindi I find confusing is the word शेर (śēr). In Marathi, सिंह (siw̃hã) is a lion, and वाघ (vāgh) is a tiger. Hindi similarly has बाघ (bāgh), which means “tiger” as well. But apparently शेर can mean both lion and tiger in Hindi? When I read or hear शेर, I immediately think of lions, and I’m taken aback when I realise they’re talking about tigers.

If you say Aurangabad and some sanghi obnoxiously tells you it’s Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, you can tell them it’s actually Khadki (the original name of Aurangabad)

Will sanghis please do us a favour and use their brains for once? While the Parliament is indeed full of misogynists on both sides, the women’s reservation bill was rejected by the opposition because it was linked with the delimitation bill, which could have severely reduced the political power of the southern states. This is of course advantageous for the BJP, whose voterbase is mostly concentrated in the north. They claim to stand for Indian unity, and yet seek to weaken those who do not come from northern India. And do you really think the BJP, the party that regularly releases rapists from prison, stands for women’s rights? Au contraire, the women’s reservation bill could have been passed if the BJP hadn’t unnecessarily linked it with the undemocratic delimitation bill to their benefit; they did so because they did not want their male members to lose seats due to the 33% reservation for women in the existing seats. And now the BJP, misrepresenting everything as always, masquerades as a saviour of women’s rights. The party that allied with the likes of Prajwal Revanna in the 2024 election, the party that happily backs sexist godmen with rape allegations, the party whose members constantly pass sexist comments, the party that has not done ANYTHING for the women of Manipur, which has been burning for years, the party that constantly oppresses Muslim, Dalit, tribal and many other women, has the AUDACITY to claim to stand for women’s rights. But they are not fooling anyone for long. People are seeing through their lies.

I just (a while ago, actually) finished reading a complete research paper for the first time in my life! It was this one:

Western tankies support autocrats like Putin, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-un because it’s easier to believe there are powerful alternatives to Western imperialism than the fact that most of the world is ruled by oppressive leaders