Now, I know what you’re thinking. Bourgeois Milton Friedman economists will wag their graphs and declare full employment an economic impossibility. Let them. We at the FEP assure you, dear reader, that we will achieve 100% employment in this country. And when that glorious day arrives, those same economists will be the only ones left unemployed. But we will round off figures, and achieve a perfect, unblemished 100% employment rate.

How, you ask? Here are our five key promises:

1. Ministry Of Job Creation: This is our flagship scheme. Normally, governments have to launch schemes like MGNREGA where the poor people pretend to dig a ditch and fill it so that they can keep receiving wages much above market rate. We have a better plan. Create a Ministry whose sole purpose is to hire people to hire other people who can hire some more people. We will keep hiring until the employment rate hits 100%. Once it gets cent percent, then what do they produce you ask? You just asked a question that makes you sound like a Milton Friedman economist. Watch out, you’re inching closer to unemployment yourself. Anyways, they produce nothing. We want to empower our society so radically that they won’t even have to pretend to work.

2. Expansion Of RTI: The best part about living in a democratic nation is to have access to vast unuseful information. The Right to Information Act of 2005 ensured this. But it is not enough. We propose that the Act be amended to mention that all unemployed people (round off errors) be officially designated as RTI activists. Moreover, we will vastly expand the scope of RTI applications. For a nominal fee of 10 rupees, the masses should be able to know the password of Amit Shah’s Instagram account. If we are paying taxes, we deserve to see his DMs. Why should the National Security Advisor have secrets either? If he has nothing to hide, why hide it? We propose that even the NSA’s office should be brought under RTI. Even if the enemy knows our missile codes, at least we will know it too.

3. The Right To Everything: Policy changes are hard and they need a long time to reflect on the ground. The youth is simply too busy and lacks such a long attention span. Instead, we propose bringing legislative changes as a substitute for that. We have a long illustrious history of such legislations in the Right to Food, Right to Education, Right to health, Right to Housing, Right to Safe Drinking Water & Sanitation among others. But why stop at the bare minimum? Every demand of the population should be met with an equal legislation. If the poor still complains about food then we expand the Right to Food to include the Right to a Crisp, Charcoal-Infused Pastry Shell Layered with Buttery Sea Urchin (Uni), Topped with Gleaming White Snail Caviar Pearls, and Finished with a Warm Drizzle of Whipped Bone-Marrow Emulsion. If the poor of India cannot have this for breakfast, are they truly free? Only the Milton Friedman economists would deny the starving masses their Uni-bone-marrow tartlets.

4. Press Conference Over Everything: We cannot fix everything. But we can hold a press conference about everything. Our Prime Minister, if elected, will host a daily three-hour Instagram Live at 9 PM, answering questions ranging from agrarian distress to his favourite colour. We will replace GDP with GPC (Gross Press Conference count). Every pothole will be met with a high-definition, sombre briefing in which the citizens can ask questions about its history, geographical location and analyse it through sociological concepts. I mean the pothole will stay, but at least we all will feel heard.

5. Replace Journalists with Content Creators: India has long chanted Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan. But the contemporary jawan* and kisan have evolved; both are now on Instagram making reels. It is therefore vital that the nation subsidise this new vanguard. We will phase out journalists and replace them with content creators who turn news into carousels and reels. A dedicated ministry will provide them a monthly stipend, Canva Pro subscription, ring lights, and a pension once their peak days are past after some months. Press freedom will finally mean freedom from the press, and the fourth pillar of the society will stand strong.

I hope that I was convincing enough. But if you still have any concerns, you can mail them to me at aditya@fep.in The email might not reach me but at least it will make you feel that you can raise questions.

But something strange has happened in the past few days. Rather than its anticipated fall, CJP has actually captured the national attention. On 20 July, CJP carried out a “Sansad Chalo” march towards Parliament. Even apolitical folks who never gave a flying fuck about anything political have joined the bandwagon. They are creating and sharing reels, posting stories and calling everyone who has distanced themselves from protests a traitor. So, how did this happen?

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CJP as a party is dead

To be fair, I wasn’t actually wrong when I said that CJP had no base, no ideology or even power ambitions and due to which, it will crumble down in no time. CJP — as a party — is dead now. What remains is CJP as an anti-Government grievances platform sustained by charisma of Sonam Wangchuk.

If you think I’m bullshitting then do you even remember when was the last time any CJP member raised any of their manifesto promises in the public? Do you - among India’s top 5% politically aware person - remember even one of their manifesto demands? Just one?

Their much-hyped five-point manifesto — with its demands for 50% reservations for women in Parliament, cancelling of licenses of Adani and Ambani owned media houses — has vanished from public discourse. So have its more outlandish promises: banning post-retirement Rajya Sabha seats for Chief Justices, arresting the Chief Election Commissioner under UAPA, and ban on defecting MLAs and MPs.

Nobody is talking about them anymore. You should not be blamed. Actually, not a single CJP member has raised these demands in any public forum when the movement hit the streets. Not even their Chief Spokesperson Saurav Das who recently met the Health Minister JP Nadda. The truth is that CJP’s manifesto was never a political programme; it was always an Instagram post designed to go viral. And like all viral content, its shelf life expired with the news cycle.

In CJP, what we have now is not a political party with a governing vision. We have a grievance aggregation platform — a clearinghouse for every conceivable anti-government sentiment, held together not by ideology or organisation but by the moral authority of one man: Sonam Wangchuk. The CJP as a party is dead. Long live the @cockroachjanataparty.

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CJP as a movement exists — but it will be dead soon

The 20 July protests were sustained primarily through Instagram where they were successful in catering to the disgruntled youth. People sympathetic to the movement were posting reels, stories, GRWMs, and all sorts of other vanities. It worked because the ruling party is so competent that they have "fixed" all mainstream channels of opposition like TV News or other social media platforms like WhatsApp and Facebook. So the youth had to participate through the only channel remaining to vent their frustrations. Instagram.

This entire saga reminded me of Gil Scott-Heron’s 1971 song “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” and I criticise CJP protests on the same grounds - commodification of resistance. Against the idea that revolutionary change could be consumed through a mobile screen. That digital participation was the same as acting. That spectacle could substitute for substance. I find the CJP’s Instagram-fueled protest as the 2026 update of that same delusion.

According to protestors, the revolution will not be televised, but apparently, it will be Instagrammed — with reels, stories, and carefully curated aesthetics of defiance. The CJP might have amassed over 20 million followers on Instagram. But a follower count does not a political movement make; it makes a popular page. The medium became the message, and the message was: look at us, we are protesting. But what, exactly, are we protesting for?

In reality, the aim of the opposition through CJP movement is to channel all sorts of anti-Govt grievances with short-term goal of uninstalling Dharmendra Pradhan and then, eventually, Narendra Modi? But it is going to be a massive failure. Why? Because it is too practical.

When Lenin carried out the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, his aim was not to make the Tsar resign but rather to bring about a total change in society. Or at least, that was the utopia he sold to the masses. Revolutions — even failed ones — are sustained by the promise of a radically different world. They ask people to sacrifice their present comforts for a future that does not yet exist. The CJP's utopia, by contrast, is a world where India still has 2700 USD PCI, the same mixed economy, the same societal structure, even the same ruling party. Just that Dharmendra Pradhan would not be the Education Minister and Sonam Wangchuk would be having Biryani with Diet Coke in Ladakh. Am I the only one who can sense the “smallness” of this utopia?

What kind of revolution asks for a cabinet reshuffle and calls it victory? What kind of movement dreams of a world where nothing changes except the nameplate on a minister's door? The CJP's demands are so modest, so practical, so utterly short-sighted without any long-term vision that they cannot possibly sustain the kind of emotional investment required for a real mass movement over a long period of time which can actually bring about some real changes. You cannot ask people to face lathi charges, tear gas, and police brutality for years in exchange for validation from Instagram mutuals - even which might not one get after everyone gets bored.

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Which brings me to the second point: CJP even as a movement will die because it has no ideological underpinnings. It does not have a world view. You can't sustain a movement for longer if the people participating in it are not ready to sacrifice their present day comforts for an upcoming utopia.

Consider the evidence. When the march turned violent and protesters were injured, what did we see? Viral videos of a CJP spokesperson Vijeta Dahiya eating a Burger King burger while the protest raged outside. CJP founder Abhijeet Dipke not being able to sustain a hunger strike for more than two days. Earlier, CJP Spokesperson Saurav Das bringing domestic help to the protest ground to fan him while he sips some drink. This is not the stuff of revolutionary sacrifice. This is the spectacle of participation without commitment — the performance of protest without the willingness to bear its costs.

The CJP's strategy, insofar as it has one, is to channel anti-government grievances into a single, manageable demand: the resignation of one minister. But here's the problem: the opposition parties that use this strategy have something the CJP lacks — an organisational apparatus, a core voter base, a reason to survive beyond the next news cycle. The CJP has none of these. It is a movement that exists only insofar as Instagram's algorithm promotes it. And algorithms, as we know, are fickle.

Eventually, the algorithm moves on. The reels stop trending. The stories expire. And the protesters go back to their lives, having achieved nothing except the fleeting satisfaction of having been seen.

And here's the thing about revolutions: they don't happen in a burst. They might catch fire overnight, sure, a spark here, a viral video there, and suddenly the whole country is paying attention. But that spark is nothing without fuel. And fuel, in politics, is ideology. It's the slow, unglamorous work of building a worldview, of convincing people that the world could be fundamentally different, and that they should be willing to give up their present comforts for that future.

Hindutva, whatever your views on it, spent decades building a cultural and political infrastructure before it became the dominant force it is today—through shakhas, ideological training, toiling over winning even Municipal elections and a patient, generational project of norm-shifting. The Indian freedom movement simmered for decades before it boiled over. The CJP, by contrast, has no pamphlets worth arguing over, no worldview to defend, no futures to promise.

The revolution will not be Instagrammed. It will not be live-streamed, story-posted, or reel-shared. It will not be reduced to a follower count or measured in likes. A real revolution requires sacrifice — the willingness to give up not just your comfort but your present, your future, and sometimes your life, for a vision of something better. The CJP asks for none of this. It asks for a resignation. It promises a Diet Coke to someone and the ability to share that on Instagram stories to you. And in doing so, it reveals itself for what it always was: a spectacle without substance, a movement without a mission, a revolution that never really was.

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The revolution will not go better with Coke
The revolution will not fight germs that may cause bad breath
The revolution will put you in the driver’s seat

The revolution will not be televised
Will not be televised
Will not be televised
Will not be televised
The revolution will be no re-run, brothers
The revolution will be live

- The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, Gil Scott-Heron (1971)

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This essay did not benefit from any insights of .

There begins our enquiry about why do Indians so readily construct identities out of the very things they believe have victimised them? This is not an attempt to deny that injustice, discrimination, or historical wrongs exist. Rather, it is an attempt to understand why grievance has become such a powerful organising principle of identity. Why are we more inclined to define ourselves by the injuries we have suffered than by the values we hold, the ideas we believe in, or the lives we have built? At what point did suffering cease to be a condition to overcome and become an identity to inhabit?

Ever since the last century, the average Indian has increasingly come to see himself as a mere cog in the wheel in all important respects such as politics, economics, society, family, or culture. The underlying belief is somewhat a template of sorts that keeps circling around whatever has gone wrong in one’s life is ultimately the fault of the systems one inhabits. The scariest consequence of this worldview is that it has evolved into the perfect masquerade for incompetence, poor judgement, coping mechanisms, and an almost complete absence of personal accountability. Victimhood has become the easiest refuge from self-reflection because it is far easier to blame a system than to confront one’s own failures.

Consider the NEET student who arrived late to her examination centre. Within minutes, she is filmed, posted on Instagram with sad music, and presented as the latest victim of an uncaring society. Scroll through the comments, and you will find thousands rushing to offer excuses: traffic, poor public transport, bad infrastructure, as if these were some shocking revelations rather than everyday realities of Indian life. Sympathy is understandable, of course, but surprise is not. The same scene repeats when ticketless passengers are asked to leave trains. Once again, emotional videos surface, and commentators invoke poverty and empathy as blanket justifications of lazy behaviour. These arguments are intellectually lazy because they refuse to ask the only questions that matter.

Why did the NEET student not plan her commute a day in advance for the most important exam of her life? Why did the passenger board a train without a ticket? Why must every act of carelessness be reframed as oppression? We have become so obsessed with manufacturing victims that we have forgotten how to question them. Every excuse offered in the name of empathy chips away at a culture of accountability until irresponsibility itself begins to masquerade as injustice.

The more interesting question, however, is not whether Indians construct victim identities. By now, the phenomenon is self-evident and to us the real question is more about why. Why does victimhood possess such extraordinary staying power in the Indian imagination? Why are we so reluctant to outgrow it?

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Why Victimhood Has Become So Attractive

Part of the answer lies in what Thomas Sowell repeatedly warns against i.e the substitution of agency with systems. Sowell argues that modern societies increasingly explain every undesirable outcome through institutions rather than individuals. Systems undoubtedly matter as they can create opportunities, erect barriers, and perpetuate injustice. But they become intellectually corrosive when they become the default explanation for every failure. India appears to have embraced this instinct with unusual enthusiasm. Bureaucracy, colonialism, caste, capitalism, politicians, reservation, education, family - someone else is almost always summoned into the dock before the individual who made the decision. We have become remarkably adept at explaining failure and increasingly uncomfortable assigning responsibility.

Canadian-American Psychologist and Professor, Albert Bandura’s theory of moral disengagement also helps explain the psychology behind this. Human beings possess a remarkable ability to reinterpret their own actions in ways that preserve their moral self-image. Behaviour remains unchanged but interestingly the narrative surrounding it is rewritten. Personal failures are gradually reinterpreted until negligence resembles misfortune, poor judgement appears structurally determined, and failure is understood primarily as a consequence of societal unfairness. The emotionally edited Instagram reel is moral disengagement packaged for public consumption. Sympathy arrives instantly, scrutiny disappears, and explanations gradually acquire the force of exoneration.

Victimhood sells well on social media because one can generate high impressions, likes and comments that are centred around sympathy. Another less explored aspect is of the moral grandstanding that is more about individuals using public moral talk primarily to enhance one’s own status, reputation, or self-image rather than to help the people involved. It is merely the digital expression of a much older civic habit. Offline too, we are remarkably adept at occupying the role of aggrieved spectator rather than accountable participant. We evade taxes because “the government wastes money anyway” and later complain that public services are inadequate. We pay bribes to avoid traffic challans while declaring corruption to be India’s greatest disease. We ride without helmets, ignore traffic rules, and then hold only infrastructure responsible when tragedy strikes. The pattern is the same. Every explanation offered for irresponsible behaviour subtly chips away at the expectation that individuals ought to be accountable for their choices. Gradually, explanations cease to clarify behaviour and begin to excuse it. India has perfected the art of converting explanations into exonerations.

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Types of Victim Identities in India

If V.S. Naipaul were to return to India today, he would not write “India: A Million Mutinies Now”. He would write something far more fitting: “India: A Million Victim Identities Now” and it could win, quite deservedly, the Nobel Prize in Grievance on social media platforms. The book could be a satirical tour de force, documenting how a nation of a billion has turned every slight, every inconvenience, every historical wound into a permanent identity badge. And indeed, the book would find no shortage of chapters because India’s genius for victimhood is remarkably democratic.

Indeed, India’s genius for victimhood is remarkably democratic. It accommodates everyone, from the Dalit to the Brahmin, the beggar to the billionaire. Almost every conceivable social category has, at some point, presented itself as the aggrieved party in the national drama.

Gen Z has popularized a specific genre of Instagram Reels and TikToks where they present themselves as victims of “emotionally unstable moms” and “emotionally unavailable dads.” Therapy-speak (“trauma,” “toxic,” “narcissistic,” “generational trauma”) is used to explain personal struggles with relationships, mental health, or motivation. The narrative is - “I am the way I am because my parents failed me emotionally.” This turns normal (or even flawed) parenting into a permanent identity shield but fails to ask what the individual can do differently in adulthood.

Another very specific and visible form exists among civil services (UPSC) aspirants. Many who have given 8–11 attempts and still not cleared create emotional reels, long Instagram posts, and YouTube videos about their “struggle,” “mental health,” “sacrifices,” and how the system is unfair. The failure itself becomes part of their identity - “I am a warrior who fought 11 attempts.”

It is used as a shield against criticism or self-reflection (“You don’t know what I’ve been through”). The narrative never seriously examines preparation quality, strategy, alternative career paths, or personal accountability. Instead, the suffering is romanticized and monetized through content.

Coming to an interesting new-found victim identity in India. The ordeal of “situationships”, undefined romantic or sexual arrangements. Instead of viewing these as personal choices, many reframe the resulting confusion and pain as trauma inflicted by “modern dating culture” or emotionally unavailable partners. Instagram Reels filled with lines like “I got led on again” or “Healing from situationships” turn ambiguity into identity. Accountability is avoided by blaming the other person or the times, while rarely examining one’s own role in tolerating unclear boundaries or staying for validation. Like the “emotionally unavailable parents” narrative, this form of victimhood is amplified because social media rewards emotional suffering and relational grievance content.

Caste remains the granddaddy of victim identities and for good historical reason. But somewhere along the way, what began as a legitimate claim for justice has mutated into a permanent moral credential. Today, every caste wants to be the most oppressed, whether it is the Dalit demanding reservation, the OBC demanding more reservation, or the upper-caste demanding, you guessed it, reservation for the “poor among them.” The system has become a zero-sum game where the prize is not equality but the most convincing grievance. Concurrently, the authentic sufferers of caste-based discrimination are submerged within an environment of competitive victimhood, wherein political expediency, rather than actual lived experience, serves as the metric for evaluating hardship.

Class, too, has discovered its victimhood. The poor, naturally, are victims of an exploitative system. Some of them love to be perpetual victims since it gives them free ration and occasional handouts when the elections are nearby. The middle class, despite possessing smartphones, cars, and the ability to afford international holidays, has perfected the art of portraying itself as the most beleaguered creature on earth, crushed by taxes, betrayed by politicians, and abandoned by a Government that only cares about, you guessed it again, the poor. The rich, too, are victims of the “unfair” tax system. Every income bracket has its own cross to bear, and the burden of being wealthy is, apparently, heavier than the burden of being impoverished.

Regionalism contributes richly to the buffet of victimhood. The North believes the South gets all the money; the South believes the North gets all the power. The East mourns its historical neglect; the West, despite being India’s economic engine, somehow feels underrepresented. Every state board produces films about its marginalisation, every politician invokes regional pride as a shield against criticism. One might conclude that India is a nation of aggrieved geographies, each convinced that the map is biased against it.

Linguistic identity marches alongside, equally aggrieved. Every regional language speaker despairs that Hindi (or English if you speak Hindi) is erasing their culture. Tamil speakers believe North Indians don’t care; Bengali speakers are convinced no one reads their literature anymore; and the speakers of smaller languages wonder if anyone remembers they exist. Another fashionable grievance of the moment is the narrative that Hindi is cannibalising “rich” regional languages like Bhojpuri, Awadhi, and Maithili, gobbling them up like some linguistic monster. The multilingual chaos of India, which should be a celebration of diversity, is instead a cacophony of linguistic grievances. Every language, apparently, is dying, and every language speaker feels persecuted by every other.

If these were not serious enough, even IPL fans are the victims of the victimhood complex. Here, you have grown adults, otherwise rational and at times productive citizens, who genuinely believe that the umpires are biased against their franchise, that the scheduling is rigged to favour certain teams. A team loses, and videos of some “unfair” moment with the hashtag #Cheating begins trending within minutes. A player is traded, and it is treated as a betrayal of Shakespearean proportions.

Caste, class, region, language, even cricket, every Indian has at least one group to blame. The result is a population that can identify its oppressor faster than it can identify its own agency. We have turned the nation into a vast amphitheatre of grievances, where everyone performs their victimhood and no one dares to applaud personal responsibility.

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Compassion Without Surrendering Accountability

But if you ask me if this is an argument against empathy, my answer would be - It is not. A society incapable of compassion is no civilization at all. But compassion and accountability are not opposing virtues. In fact, compassion without accountability eventually degenerates into indulgence. A victimhood experience deserves empathy. A victimhood identity deserves scrutiny. A healthy civilization treats victimhood as a transitional state that must be overcome rather than a permanent state. Justice has fulfilled its purpose when yesterday’s victim no longer needs victimhood to explain who they are. There is a profound difference between being a victim and becoming a victim identity. The former deserves support; the latter demands introspection. A society matures when it learns to ask two questions simultaneously: What happened to you? and What could you have done differently? India has become exceptionally good at asking the first question. Until we recover the courage to ask the second, we will continue producing generations that inherit not merely grievances, but identities built upon them.

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From Victims to Citizens

Every civilization must decide what it chooses to reward. Some celebrate excellence while others celebrate resilience. India, increasingly, appears to reward grievance because we have built a public culture that instinctively recognises victimhood, validates it, amplifies it, and, all too often, encourages people to organise their identities around it. In doing so, we inadvertently create incentives to preserve suffering long after the suffering itself has passed.

There is nothing dishonourable about being a victim. Injustice, tragedy, discrimination, and misfortune are unavoidable features of the human condition. Yet victimhood was never meant to become an identity that one inhabits for life. Its purpose is to be overcome. The role of justice is to restore agency. The role of empathy is to help people recover and the purpose of society is to ensure that yesterday’s victim possesses every opportunity to become tomorrow’s citizen, creator, entrepreneur, artist, parent, leader, or thinker. India’s cultural instinct must therefore shift. We should admire those who transcend adversity more than those who continually invoke it. We should ask what people have built alongside what they have endured. We should extend compassion without suspending accountability. Most importantly, we should encourage individuals to leave behind the identities forged by their suffering instead of carrying them as permanent badges of moral legitimacy.

A victim is someone to whom something unfortunate happened. A victim identity emerges when that event becomes the primary way a person understands and presents themselves to the world. A confident civilization cannot be built by people whose strongest attachment is to their grievances. It is built by people who refuse to let yesterday’s suffering dictate tomorrow’s identity.

This essay benefitted immensely from the gracious inputs of .

His family, while initially shocked, soon adapts by relegating Gregor to a dark, filthy room, throwing scraps at him when convenient, and ultimately finding his existence an impediment to their own petty aspirations. Kafka uses the metaphor of a bug for a disgusting and ultimately useless object. He remains trapped in his room, scuttling across the floor while the world outside moves on. That image now seems eerily close to what the so-called Cockroach Janata Party has become in India’s political landscape. But where Gregor’s tragedy was that he lost his human voice, this movement had none to begin with. It is a spectacle without any substance.

Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) is a satirical political movement that emerged as a reaction to Chief Justice Surya Kant’s en passant remarks during a hearing concerning fraudulent professional credentials. He said that unemployed young people drifting into journalism and activism resembled cockroaches. Soon enough, the youth started identifying as cockroaches and started assembling en masse virtually on CJP’s Instagram page. As of now, the Instagram page has above 22 million followers. It’s a huge number if you contrast it with traditional parties. BJP has 9.4 million followers (less than half of CJP), Congress has 13.7 million followers and AAP has 1.9 million. That number is constantly waved around as proof of a mass political awakening. It is not. A follower count does not a political party make, it makes a popular page.

There were also some arguments that CJP bought paid followers but those are just corporate political workers working overtime awaiting the next appraisal cycle. The CJP has captured the imagination of the youth and anyone who claims otherwise needs to touch grass in Mukherjee Nagar. However, it is also not the case that CJP is going to lead India’s Bolshevik Revolution either. It has zero political direction.

Its manifesto, if you can call it that, lists five demands, and I want to examine each because they reveal the emptiness at the movement’s core. A genuine manifesto articulates a coherent vision rooted in an analysis of society. The CJP’s list reads like a handful of disconnected, often authoritarian fantasies that have little to do with the unemployment and hopelessness that birthed the movement.

The first demand of banning post-retirement Rajya Sabha seats for Chief Justices is a classic case of personalising a systemic rot. I can not use this platform to criticise the Judiciary because my lords might be lurking somewhere but this does nothing to address the opaque collegium system.

The second demand is outright dangerous: arrest the Chief Election Commissioner under the draconian UAPA if “legitimate votes” are deleted. Leaving aside the legal absurdity of applying an anti-terror law to an election official, this demand imagines democratic accountability as a police state threat. It doesn’t seek to strengthen electoral safeguards; it merely offers the spectacle of a powerful figure being hauled away Gaddafi-style to satiate the masses.

The third demand, 50 per cent women’s reservation in Parliament and Cabinet, sounds ironic given that there is zero representation of women in CJP. The party is founded by Abhijeet Dipke and has Saurav Das, Vijeta Dahiya and Ashutosh Ranka as Spokespersons. All of them men, unless someone identifies as a woman. When asked about it, CJP Spokesperson argued that they don’t have any female spokesperson because putting a woman in such a position increases her chances of receiving death and rape threats.

This is such a horseshit logic given that the same argument can be made for women’s non-representation in the Parliament. Anyways, this demand of 50% reservations is parachuted in without any roadmap, no constitutional amendment strategy or any plan for delimitation. At its core, it functions merely as a moral garnish to appeal to women.

The fourth demand of cancelling the licences of Adani and Ambani media houses is precisely the kind of state overreach that democrats should fear. Do I believe media ownership in India is dangerously concentrated? Absolutely. But the answer to oligarch-controlled media is not to hand the government a button that shuts down outlets it dislikes. It is such a slippery slope that anyone with half a brain will be repulsed by such a demand.

The fifth demand imposes a twenty-year election ban on defecting legislators. This is just a reactionary demand against Raghav Chaddha’s party hopping from AAP to BJP. I share the disgust with horse-trading of MPs and MLAs, but this is a knee-jerk punishment that is almost certainly unconstitutional. The existing anti-defection law already provides disqualification; a two-decade ban is disproportionate vengeance.

There is also a contemporary demand to make Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan resign over the NEET fiasco. But if rumors are to be believed, he is going to be replaced in the next cabinet reshuffle anyway. Sure, accountability matters, but what does this fix in the longer run?

None of these demands are a long-term solution to the concerns which birthed the movement. They are, in Guy Debord’s terms, images of politics meant to be consumed, shared, and forgotten. In The Society of the Spectacle (1967), Debord argues that social life under modern capitalism is no longer experienced directly but mediated through images. The spectacle is “a social relation between people that is mediated by images,” a perfected form of alienation in which the appearance of participation replaces participation itself. The CJP is one of the purest Indian expressions of this logic.

The cockroach itself has been transformed from a lived symbol of resilient survival in filth into a consumable visual commodity: emojis, AI-generated posters, costumes for the camera. The social relation among India’s alienated youth is mediated almost entirely through the platform economy. The act of joining is reduced to putting a cockroach emoji in one’s bio, a protest at Jantar Mantar becomes a photogenic event where participants carry cockroach props and hand flowers to the police, generating content for the next cycle of Instagram stories.

The feeling of participation replaces actual participation. Real grievances of unemployment and economic anxiety are spectacularised, turned into a consumable commodity that the existing order can easily absorb. The system does not need to crush dissent when it can offer platforms on which dissent becomes entertainment and swiftly dissipates.

This is why the CJP’s lack of party registration matters. It has no legal recognition, no internal democracy, no ground-level organization, and no elected office-bearers. It exists primarily as a brand on a social media platform, sustained by engagement metrics rather than collective action. Without the burden of legal recognition, it never has to face the messy, non-spectacular work of grassroot work, contesting elections in the realpolitik of India.

This is a good example of what Debord diagnosed. The CJP’s own self-description is remarkably candid about the spectator’s condition: “a political front of the youth, by the youth, for the youth — Secular, Socialist, Democratic, and Lazy,” “Voice of the Lazy & Unemployed,” with membership criteria that celebrate being “chronically online” and able to “rant professionally.” The ideal participant is not the active citizen but the isolated individual scrolling from “wherever the wifi works,” consuming representations of resistance while remaining physically and politically passive.

The protest at Jantar Mantar today illustrates the problem with painful clarity. In Debord’s framework, such events are typically pseudo-events: dramatised confrontations organised for the media and for further image production rather than for the transformation of material conditions. Participants arrive with flowers for the police and cockroach props, generating content that will circulate online as proof that “The youth are rising.” The demands function less as a programme to be fought for through real power and more as provocative text-images optimised for virality. The spectacle, Debord notes, “aims at nothing other than itself.” Here the goal is the circulation of the image of radical youth politics, not the construction of the capacities that could actually alter the relations of production or the distribution of social power.

This “movement” is popular on social media because the attention economy rewards the very patterns that the CJP exploits: the rapid consumption of images and the quick dissipation of emotion. Deep engagement with structural alternatives, such as building durable organisations, developing economic programmes to address unemployment at scale, or creating forms of direct democracy, requires sustained commitment and lived participation. These are precisely the conditions that spectacle erodes. In their place, the CJP offers a representation of agency: the feeling of belonging to something large and rebellious without the effort, risk, or responsibility of exercising collective power.

Debord insisted that the spectacle’s ultimate expression is “the nightmare of imprisoned modern society which ultimately expresses nothing more than its desire to sleep.” The CJP allows a generation to feel awake through memes, outrage cycles, and the occasional photogenic protest, while keeping it asleep to the possibilities of direct, non-mediated action.

I believe a genuine alternative must break this loop. The spectacle needs to die, and here I think of Kafka’s Gregor Samsa again. In the end, the family discovers Gregor’s lifeless, dried-up body and feels not grief but relief. The charwoman sweeps his corpse away with the trash, and the family takes a tram ride into the sunshine, already planning their brighter, bug-free future. This will be the fate of a movement that lives only as an image. It does not disrupt or changes anything it scuttles through; it is eventually discarded when the spectacle moves on to something else. Abhijit Dipke and his spokespersons will have their 15 minutes of fame but the structures of inefficiency might be left intact and the problems of the unemployed precisely as they were before.

helped with the structure of the essay.

Our ancestors had religion. Boomers had politics. Poor millennials had astrology, rich ones had MBTI tests. Gen Z has disorders. The DSM-5 has quietly become a personality catalogue from which you pick a mental condition around which to revolve your life.

Today, mental conditions like ADHD, autism, anxiety, OCD, or depression are no longer discussed merely as medical realities. Increasingly, they function as identities — ways of presenting oneself to the world.

Likewise, ordinary sexual preferences and temperaments are elevated into elaborate identity categories. The point is not that these conditions are fake. ADHD and autism are real. So are genuine variations in sexuality. The point is that modern culture has transformed them into identity frameworks. People no longer merely have these traits, they increasingly become them.

Why has this happened?

Because modernity destroyed older forms of identity, and human beings rushed to replace them. And in that rush, a very specific kind of confusion set in: the belief that being a minority, whether neurological or sexual, automatically makes you an oppressed identity around which a life can be organised.

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The Collapse of Traditional Identity

For most of history, identity came pre-installed.

A person knew who he was because society told him. Religion, nation, language, ethnicity, family, caste, region, and community gave individuals a ready-made sense of belonging. In Philosophy, we call this Essentialism. You were Indian or Bangladeshi, Hindu or Muslim, Tamil or Punjabi, villager or aristocrat. These identities were larger than the individual and came with a sense of meaning, but also with a sense of responsibility. You did not curate a self, the self was delivered to you upon birth.

Modernity gradually dissolved these structures.

Industrialisation uprooted people from communities. Globalisation weakened regional cultures. Liberalism prioritised the individual over tradition. The internet flattened all local identities into one giant digital soup. Meanwhile, elite culture increasingly portrayed strong attachment to religion, nation, or ethnicity as backward, embarrassing, or even dangerous to the conception of modern society.

Today, openly identifying too strongly with traditional identities often gets labelled “cringe.”

I am not a Conservative myself but I find it problematic when a deeply religious young man is mocked as regressive. A person strongly attached to his region is derogatorily called provincial. Or when patriotism is treated with suspicion unless packaged under five layers of irony.

The result is a civilisation filled with people who are materially connected but spiritually uprooted. And uprooted people desperately search for new ways to define themselves.

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The Rise of Diagnostic Identities

Now, into this vacuum entered the language of therapy.

Earlier generations used softer identity systems. People obsessively shared zodiac signs or MBTI types because these offered ready-made templates for personality. They were ways of turning oneself into a recognisable character. Calling yourself an ISFP suggested you have an artistic impulse and are emotionally complex, blaming your toxic behaviour on being a Scorpio was astrology with legal immunity. People socialised, befriended and dated others on the basis of their “sign” compatibility.

But modern identity culture needed something more encompassing. Something which can be used in more aspects of life.

Psychological labels offered exactly that.

Unlike astrology, disorders come with scientific legitimacy. Unlike religion, they also require no moral or ritual obligations. Unlike nationality, they cannot be dismissed as parochial without sounding insensitive. A diagnosis gives people something incredibly valuable in the modern world: an explanation for their behaviours and identity.

Suddenly, every awkwardness, failure, habit, or eccentricity becomes narratively meaningful.

Can’t focus because you have fucked up your attention-span by watching too many reels? ADHD.

Socially withdrawn because of emotionally-distant parents in childhood? Autism.

Horrible human being? Trauma.

What previous generations might have described as temperament or personality is now increasingly medicalised or identity-ised.

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Why People Want Labels?

Under the conditions of modernity, Human beings have become hyper-individualised and narcissistic. They want stories about themselves.

A diagnostic label does three powerful things simultaneously:

First, it explains suffering. Instead of “I struggle socially,” a person can say, “I am neurodivergent.” The struggle now feels objective and external rather than personal.

Second, it creates community. The internet allows millions of strangers with the same label to gather instantly into support groups, subcultures, and fandom-like communities.

Third, it provides individuality. In a mass society where everyone feels interchangeable (because tbf most of us don’t have personalities), labels help people feel distinct.

This is why people increasingly cling to ever more specific identities. Modern culture simultaneously tells people they are unique and makes them feel lost without any purpose. Diagnostic identities solve this contradiction. They turn existential crisis into marketable identity markers.

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Social Media and the Performance of Identity

The internet accelerated this process dramatically.

Social media rewards identities that are emotionally charged, visually recognisable, and endlessly discussable. Nobody builds an online persona around being psychologically ordinary. But “autistic genius,” “trauma humour,” or “queer” are good are creating content. They create instant communities and content.

Soon, conditions stop being private struggles and become personal branding.

ADHD becomes associated with quirky creativity and colourful disorganisation. Depression becomes self-depraciating humour. Autism becomes intellectual eccentricity. Anxiety becomes relatability content because who among us has not felt anxious time to time. Even therapy language becomes social currency: “triggered,” “gaslighting,” “attachment style,” “safe space.”

The trouble is, this identity model trivialises those with genuinely severe conditions. Schizophrenia, severe bipolar disorder, crippling OCD — these are not fun brands. They are often devastating.

When the label “neurodivergent” stretches to encompass anyone who finds parties socially draining or women scary, it saps the term of its descriptive force. The student whose mild inattention earns them a self-claimed ADHD identity blunts the urgency with which society should respond to someone who cannot hold a conversation because of disorganised thought. Moreover, the identity model absolves the individual of the difficult work of self-improvement.

Being chronically late is no longer a discourtesy you might work to correct but “time-blindness,” a protected trait against which any criticism is ableist.

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The Real Rainbow and Its Hijackers

The same logic plays out, with even greater theatrical flair, in the domain of sexual orientation. It would be a slander of history to pretend that gay and transgender people have not suffered discrimination, violence, and exclusion. For generations, they fought merely to exist openly; their identities were forged in real struggle against a hostile majority. But the contemporary landscape has bolted a great many more identities onto that framework, many of them so elastic and mundane that they stretch the concept of “queer” to breaking point — and in the process, they threaten to trivialise the very oppression the rainbow alliance was built to fight.

Consider the rise of “asexuality” or “demisexuality” as queer identities. A disinterest in casual sex, a need for emotional connection before physical intimacy, a naturally low libido — these are not pathologies, nor are they historically persecuted statuses. They are normal, if statistically minority, variations in human desire. For most of history, a man who rarely thought about sex was simply a man with a low drive; a woman who can’t sleep around with everything that moves without emotional commitment just another person, not demisexual.

Today, those same people can announce themselves as members of the LGBTQIA+ family, don a flag, and narrate their entire romantic lives through the lens of marginalisation.

By rebranding an ordinary experience of the human sexual spectrum as “queer,” one buys an immediate identity, a community, a set of villains (the allosexual majority), and the moral glow of the oppressed.

To see the absurdity, run a simple thought experiment. Say, there exists a gentleman who happens to possess a penis of 5.61 inches in length. This puts him, statistically, in a sexual minority given that most men are smaller, and in extremely rare cases, are larger. But what happens if this gentleman call his condition “FivePointSexuality,” raise a flag, participates in pride parades, dons a Palestinian keffiyeh, and claim the status of a persecuted minority?

Would you grant him?

Of course not — because there is no history of discrimination against FivePointSexuality. Simply being in a minority does not make you oppressed. Yet the modern logic of identity treats every departure from the libidinal mean as a political category, not because the world has hurt those people, but because the machinery of queer identity runs on a fusion of rarity and grievance, and both are now in demand.

The cost is borne by those who fought the real fight. When the rainbow coalition expands to include anyone who prefers cuddling to intercourse, it becomes harder to take seriously the genuine horrors that trans or gay people have faced. The word “queer” loses its edge, its historical weight, dissolving into a lifestyle brand rather than a marker of a shared struggle.

Something has curdled here. Just as casual self-diagnosis of ADHD weakens the case for severe mental illness, casual orientation inflation weakens the case for sexual minorities who actually need protection.

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The Death of the “Normal Person”

Most people who adopt these labels are not consciously lying; they are sincere. But modern culture quietly nudges them toward narrating their lives through pathology because pathology now carries social meaning.

In previous centuries, people sought status primarily through their achievements. Today, many seek visibility through their vulnerability. One striking consequence is that being normal has lost all prestige.

Earlier societies treated normalcy as something desirable: stability, marriage, routine, moderation, and self-control were considered virtues. Contemporary culture, by contrast, treats normality as boring and psychologically unsophisticated.

Everyone must now possess an identity, a struggle, or a condition. The ordinary person barely exists in the cultural imagination anymore.

This leaves us with a choice. We can keep treating every shortcoming as a permanent identity, or we can start rebuilding our capacity to overcome them.

The way forward begins with a simple, almost boring distinction: a problem is not an identity unless you choose to make it one. If your attention span is wrecked, that is not a neurotype to embrace; it is a skill to rebuild. If you are socially awkward, that is not a permanent badge of autism to hide behind; it is a difficulty you practise your way out of, one uncomfortable conversation at a time.

Change is dull, unglamorous work. It earns you no flags and no victimhood points. But it remains the only honest response to a shortcoming.

In the end, the world does not owe you a label to hide behind. It owes you the dignity of telling you to wash your own ass, and the respect of believing you are capable of doing it.

My posts will forever remain out of paywall. But if they made you laugh, pushed you to think about something or added value to your life in any possible measure, then please consider buying me a chai.

This hysteria is absolutely unjustified. Take this argument by constitutional law scholar Gautam Bhatia complaining that people are using AI to submit posts for his blog. But the mere presence of an algorithm in the writing process says nothing about a text’s value.

And what exactly is being detected? If a guest post is well‑argued, original in thought, and stylistically competent, why should its origin - whether human or machine - matter? The reader’s experience of a text is independent of its provenance.

The insistence on detection is a form of literary essentialism — a belief that something sacred resides in human‑authored text that no machine can replicate. But that sacred quality, if it exists (I think it does though but coming on that later), would manifest in the text’s effect on the reader. If the effect is indistinguishable, the distinction is meaningless.

What Machines Actually Do (And Why It Doesn’t Matter for Writing)

To understand why the anti-AI panic is misguided, we must first understand what large language models like ChatGPT actually do. Philosophers have long wrestled with the question of whether machines can think.

In 1950, Alan Turing famously proposed his eponymous test called the Turing Test. The idea is: if a machine can fool a human into thinking it is another human during a text conversation, we should consider it intelligent. Last year, GPT-4.5 passed the Turing Test as it was able to convince humans 73% of the times that its output was human-like.

But American Philosopher John Searle, in the 1980s, pointed out a fatal flaw in this line of argument by distinguishing between syntax and semantics. Computers operate at the level of syntax, manipulating symbols (ultimately 1’s and 0’s) according to formal rules. They have no understanding of the meaning of those symbols in physical, causal reality. A calculator can perform superhuman arithmetic, but nobody believes the calculator understands mathematics. It is just running numbers.

Searle’s Chinese Room argument drives the point home. Imagine you are locked in a room with a giant rulebook written in English. People slide slips of paper with Chinese characters under the door. You do not know a word of Chinese, but the rulebook tells you exactly which symbols to write in response. You slide your responses back out. To the people outside, your responses are indistinguishable from those of a native Chinese speaker. Yet you understand nothing.

Searle’s conclusion is that the Turing test does not prove intelligence. A computer can produce intelligent-seeming responses without any understanding whatsoever. Syntax does not magically become semantics, no matter how powerful the processor.

Now, a defender of AI might object: “That was 1985. ChatGPT is different. It uses machine learning, trained on billions of parameters. It finds patterns in massive data and predicts the next word probabilistically. Surely this is knocking on the door of real intelligence. But isn’t most of what we do just pattern recognition?”

This is where Noam Chomsky enters. In a New York Times article titled “The False Promise of ChatGPT,” Chomsky, along with his co-authors argued that large language models are not on the path to AGI. They are, at best, feats of engineering, useful for transcription, translation, and other tasks, but not feats of science. Science seeks explanations, not mere correlations.

The human mind, Chomsky writes, “is not a lumbering statistical engine for pattern matching, gorging on hundreds of terabytes of data… On the contrary, the human mind is a surprisingly efficient and even elegant system that operates with small amounts of information; it seeks not to infer brute correlations among data points but to create explanations.”

Scientific progress often requires improbable, counterintuitive leaps. An AI trained on Aristotle’s data would never predict Einstein’s curvature of spacetime because that explanation was nowhere in the training data. Chomsky calls this undergeneration: the model cannot generate responses that are not already common in its training data. Conversely, models overgenerate: they produce confident nonsense.

Ask ChatGPT to map the periodic table, and it will include unobtanium from science fiction because it has no conception of the underlying laws of chemistry. It cannot distinguish the possible from the impossible.

So What? Why This Defends AI Writing

At first glance, all of this seems to support the anti-AI crowd. “See!” they might say. “AI doesn’t really understand. It’s just glorified autocomplete. High-tech plagiarism. So we should reject its output.” But this conclusion does not follow. The fact that AI lacks understanding, intentionality, or genuine intelligence is irrelevant to the question of whether its writing can be useful, clear, or even beautiful.

A calculator does not understand mathematics, yet we trust its arithmetic. A spellchecker does not understand grammar, yet we appreciate its corrections. A GPS does not understand geography, yet we follow its directions. In each case, the tool produces valuable output without any inner experience of meaning.

The puritanical objection to AI writing often rests on a romantic notion of authorship that genuine writing must emerge from a graphite powder mixed with a clay binder pencil sizzling against the waxy notebook with caramel-coloured paper with fine, milky feint-ruled lines. But this is an aesthetic preference, not a logical necessity.

If a machine can arrange words into a coherent, insightful, or moving sequence, the reader gains just as much as if a human had written it. The meaning is not in the author’s head; it is in the reader’s interpretation of the text.

Consider Chomsky’s own critique: AI cannot produce novel scientific theories because it cannot make the leap from pattern-matching to explanation. That is true. But most writing is not novel scientific theorising. Most writing is routine communication: emails, memos, reports, blog posts, instructional guides, even first drafts of essays. For these tasks, pattern-matching is perfectly adequate.

In fact, it is often superior to human effort because it is faster, more consistent, and less prone to certain errors. The fact that ChatGPT cannot discover general relativity does not mean it cannot write a decent shopping list or a clear summary of a meeting.

Moreover, the philosophical critique cuts both ways. If AI does not understand, then it cannot be accused of deception or bad faith. It is not “pretending” to be human any more than a calculator pretends to be a mathematician. It is a tool. The responsibility for how it is used lies with the human operator.

The “unpleasant conversation” that Gautam Bhatia dread presumably accuses the guest writer of dishonesty. But if the writer has used AI as an aid, then where is the dishonesty? The writer still bears responsibility for the content. The AI is just a fancy pen.

Bad Writing, Not AI Writing

The rational critique of AI-generated text is not about its origin but about its quality. Much current AI output is indeed mediocre, verbose, repetitive, shallow in analysis, reliant on clichés. One unintended consequence of LLMs’ pervasiveness is that the average length of text has been multiplied, adjusted with fluff that serves no meaning at all.

I have a friend whose University banned ChatGPT from its Wi-Fi primarily because the emails were getting too long. This is a legitimate criticism. But it is a criticism of craft, not of essence.

Human writers produce equally bad prose every day. If you do not trust me, just pick a book published by a non-mainstream Indian publisher. Take, for example, this paragraph from Shubham Deore’s book “Decolonising Hinduism”.

I’ve reviewed it too:

But, coming to the point, the difference is that we do not ban human-written garbage from Wi-Fi networks or subject it to multiple detectors. We simply reject it as poor work.

The proper editorial response to a good piece is acceptance, regardless of how it was produced. The proper response to a bad piece is rejection, whether it was written by a Nobel laureate or a neural network. The obsession with detection is a symptom of having abandoned judgment in favour of technological paranoia.

The only AI detector one should use is oneself. If you cannot differentiate between AI writing and human writing by reading it, then you have no right to outrage over it.

The Accessibility Argument

The most powerful defense of AI writing, however, is democratic. The anti-AI position assumes that using a language model is “cheating” because it outsources the essential labor of writing to a machine. But this assumption is ableist and elitist. It presumes that everyone who has something worth saying is also a competent writer. Which is absolutely false.

Consider an Indian non-native English speaker with a brilliant insight of regional politics but can’t express himself/herself fully in writing. Or a technical expert whose ideas are luminous but whose sentence structure is abrupt. Consider the elderly expert whose knowledge about local culture is vast but whose manual dexterity makes typing painful.

For all these people, AI is a prosthesis. It lowers the barrier to entry for public discourse. It allows ideas to be judged on their merits rather than on the writer’s facility with subordinate clauses.

The puritanical editor who rejects AI-assisted writing is enforcing a gatekeeping regime that privileges the already literate. The goal of publishing, whether a blog, a journal, or any other forum, should be to share good ideas expressed clearly. If AI helps a contributor achieve that, the editor should celebrate that.

Confession

This essay was written by a large language model. You, the reader, have reached this sentence. That means you have read the entire piece, or at least skipped to the end. Either way, you have engaged with the text. The question you must now ask yourself is not “Who wrote this?” but “Did I gain anything from reading it?” Did it clarify your thinking? Did it introduce you to new arguments or perspectives? Did it make you reconsider a position? If the answer to any of these is yes, then the essay has fulfilled the only legitimate purpose of writing: to provide value to its reader.

That should be the only criterion. Not the presence or absence of a neural network in the composition process. Not the results of a fallible AI detector. Just value. A bad essay written by a human is still bad. A good essay written by a machine is still good. The puritanism that demands we root out every trace of algorithmic assistance is a distraction from the real work of a piece of writing to provide value to its readers.

Once a sharp tool of political dissent, irony has metastasized into a pervasive cultural mood, a nihilistic shield that prevents sincere engagement with the world. Our culture is overfilled with it, and in its excess, it promotes a quiet malcontent, reducing human suffering to edgy entertainment. We have reached a point where the question has to be asked about its saturation point: how much irony is too much irony?

Consider the case of Aladin, the "craziest rapper from the streets of Delhi." On 6th February, 2026, my favourite irony-maxxer YouTuber, Samdish Bhatia, posted a video featuring him. True to his channel’s name, Samdish engages in an “unfiltered” conversation with Aladin, traversing a 360-degree range of topics, from the role of religion to the kind of porn he watches.

The spectacle begins with the aesthetic: Aladin wears a hoodie with “Stop raising Studio Hoes” written. When asked about it, he explains that the word “Raand” simply matched his vibe.

Further in the interview, Aladin mentions starting smoking bidi in early childhood and moved to other substances by the 7th or 8th grade. His moral detachment extends to his view of human life; he discusses the murder of people nearby with a chilling nonchalance, suggesting a world where violence is mundane.

Perhaps most troubling is his overt objectification of women, whom he dismisses as mere sexual objects while bypassing any semblance of human connection or respect. By his own admission, he views the world through a lens of transactional gratification and street-level survival, creating a persona that is “edgy” for urban upper middle-class audience, but one that actively reinforces the most destructive cycles of society.

In another — a more sincere world — Aladin would be a deeply troubling figure. He would be a subject of concern for social workers, a statistic in a report on urban decay, or at least a cautionary tale. He would certainly not be a source of bourgeoisie entertainment. Yet, in our current cultural landscape, his interview is framed as compelling content. He is curated as a spectacle for an upper-middle-class audience that can afford to flirt with his darkness from the safe distance of a screen.

For them, his nihilism is not a tragedy but a "vibe," an edgy aesthetic to be consumed and discarded. Aladin, along with other "ironic" characters like the ubiquitous Puneet Superstar and countless others, are made to perform a kind of monkey dance for the amusement of the classes that live securely above them. They are the jesters in the court of postmodernism, with their antics repackaged as entertainment.

This ironic gaze does not spare the political class either. Figures like Tej Pratap Yadav and Ananth Singh in Bihar have become staple content for urban audiences, their raw, unfiltered antics repackaged as comedy gold.

The audience watches them the same way it watches Aladin — as characters in a live-action comedy. What gets lost in this ironic framing is that these men hold actual power, that their words affect real people. In one interview, Ananth Singh threatens Newspinch journalist Abhinav Pandey during the interview that if he is killed in this very instant, then what will the Government do? The audience makes a reel out of it and posts it with “Lord Anant Singh” on top (over 3 lakh ironical likes btw).

They are humanized in the worst way: made relatable, even lovable, precisely because they seem ridiculous. The irony allows viewers to feel superior to politics itself, to dismiss the whole messy business as a circus, while the clowns keep running the ring.

This dynamic represents a profound corruption of what irony was meant to be. Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein believed that the most serious and profound questions could be discussed only in the form of jokes. Historically, irony was a tool of the persecuted, a method of writing and speaking under the shadow of power.

As the political philosopher Leo Strauss explored in his book “Persecution and the Art of Writing”, thinkers facing censorship would embed their true meanings between the lines, accessible only to the discerning few. For an intellectual in a hostile environment, or a dissident under an authoritarian regime, irony was a shield and a sword. It was a way to communicate truth while protecting oneself from the consequences. It required a sincere belief in the truth that was being hidden; the irony was a vessel for a message, not the message itself.

Today’s irony is different. It is not a shield for a deeper truth, but an end in itself. When an upper-middle-class viewer watches Aladin, they are not searching for a hidden critique of the system that created him. They are not learning about the failures of education, the cycle of poverty, or the lack of opportunity. They are simply enjoying the spectacle of his unvarnished reality, framed as entertainment.

The irony lies in the gap between the viewer’s life and the subject’s, a gap that is acknowledged with a smirk but never bridged with understanding. This is nihilistic because it denies the humanity of the subject and the responsibility of the viewer. It posits that nothing is serious, that every human experience is just another piece of content to be consumed.

The consequence of this pervasive irony is a societal malcontent. It breeds a cynicism that disdains any attempt at sincerity. To care too much, to be earnest, is to be naive, to be uncool. This cultural mood paralyses action. If everything is a joke, then nothing can be changed. The problems Aladin represents — poverty, addiction, nihilism — are real, but the ironic gaze prevents them from being addressed. They are simply consumed as a means of entertainment.

Years ago, someone on twitter had said that we are living in the nightmare David Foster Wallace had in 1993. In his essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction”, DFW saw that irony began as something valuable. It was a way for writers and artists to expose hypocrisy — to show the gap between how America pretended to be and how it actually was.

When television in the 1960s showed us perfect families and noble heroes while the real world had assassinations, war, and corruption, irony became a tool of truth-tellers. It hurt, but it helped. As Wallace puts it, irony was “a grim diagnosis of a long-denied disease,” and the people using it believed that exposing the problem could lead to a cure.

But then something strange happened. Television, the very thing irony was mocking, learned to mock itself. Commercials started making fun of commercials. Sitcoms built their laughs around clueless authority figures getting roasted by hip kids. Pepsi ran ads that were really about how successfully Pepsi had been advertised. Irony stopped being a weapon against the system and became the system’s favourite costume. Wallace argues that when irony becomes permanent — when everyone is always winking, always nudging, always refusing to mean what they say — it stops being useful and starts being a cage. “Irony has only emergency use,” he writes. “Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.”

The real damage, for Wallace, is that irony makes sincerity impossible. If you always speak with a smirk, you can never be pinned down. Ask an ironist what they actually believe, and you look like a fool for even asking. “The ability to interdict the question without attending to its content is tyranny,” he says. The very thing that once helped us see through lies now protects itself from any challenge. Against this, Wallace predicts that the next real rebels will be the ones willing to be sincere — the ones who risk looking naive, who dare to care, who treat real human troubles with actual reverence instead of cool detachment.

My posts will forever remain out of paywall. But if they made you laugh, pushed you to think about something or added value to your life in any possible measure, then please consider buying me a chai.

The book’s first move is to tell a longer story of how caste became what it is. Teltumbde traces caste from earlier, more fluid social forms to a hardened system — one that was steadily “standardised” and frozen in place under colonial rule. A key point in this history is that caste is not held up only by belief or ritual. It survives because it is built into material life: land, labour, occupations, and power. That is why, in his telling, moral or spiritual reforms like Bhakti movement have repeatedly failed to break it.

Teltumbde contends that counting castes does not diminish caste; rather, it crystallises fluid social identities into rigid, measurable categories that the state can monitor and control. The more caste is enumerated, the more real it becomes as a state-recognised category. His historical lens traces how colonial administrators, after the shock of the 1857 Rebellion, deliberately weaponised caste through census machinery to maintain control.

Rather than treating castes as natural social units, the British carved them into discrete, observable segments (divide-and-rule strategy). From there, he turns to the heart of the argument: why a nationwide caste census can become a “con”. The irony, as Teltumbde notes, is that modern progressive advocates for a caste census may inadvertently walk into the same colonial trap: using state machinery to harden caste categories rather than weaken them.

His fear is not just that the state will “count badly” (though he worries about that too), but that the very act of enumeration can deepen caste identity by turning it into an official, administrative fact. He argues that the Indian state has often preserved caste for governance and politics, not abolished it. And he is especially critical of a BJP-led exercise, warning that it can be used for symbolic inclusion without real reform.

The final section tries to avoid an easy “no” by offering an alternative way of thinking about affirmative action itself. Teltumbde accepts that reservations matter, but argues that benefits can concentrate within a few families or sub-groups over time. So he proposes a more “weighted” design that would account for how much a family has already gained from reservation benefits, so that opportunity is spread more evenly within oppressed communities. In his proposed case, each case of reservation based academic or employment achievement in the family of a candidate represents his/her Reservation Usage Score (RUS) which will be used to determine their eligibility for further reservations.

On its own terms, the book is strongest when it refuses dominant ideas, especially in the leftist circles. It is fair and sharp on how caste reproduces itself, how “data” can become politics by other means, and why a census is not automatically emancipatory. It also deserves credit for its style. This is heavy material, but Teltumbde writes with clarity and pace, without hiding behind jargon. The book feels so much of a breeze that I finished it in two days only (meant to be a boast given how terrible my attention span has become).

Where the book can feel narrower is in its political emphasis. The critique of the caste census often leans heavily on a critique of the BJP, sometimes to the point where the argument can read like it depends on one party’s bad faith more than on the deeper institutional problem. In fact, the author dedicates an entire chapter discussing how and why BJP manipulates data for its political ends which I think is a bit unnecessary and overstretching. Also, the book carries a strong ultra-socialist (read: communist) undertone in its preferred solutions — universal welfare, redistribution, and a near-total suspicion of “managerial” fixes.

This is where it gets very ironic. If we look at where caste’s everyday grip has weakened most visibly, it is in cities through messy, uneven neoliberal change via mass migration, urbanisation and a partial exit from village life. Cities might not end caste in its entirety, but they can loosen its grip to a large extent — by making people become less legible by caste and weakening old ritual hierarchy. Contrary to the argument of Teltumbde, the only viable solution to the social problem of caste is a purely economic one. More Market and less Government is what will ultimately lead to the “Annihilation of Caste”.

In the seven years between 2004–05 and 2011–12, the all-India poverty ratio declined by 15.7 percentage points. But the poverty ratio of dalits declined much faster, by 21.5 percentage points, while that of scheduled tribes fell 17.0 percentage points. Record GDP growth averaging 8.5 percent per year produced record poverty reduction at the national level, and even faster rates of reduction for the two lowest strata of Indian society, dalits and tribes. The same study shows that poverty also fell significantly in the previous decade, between 1993–94 and 2004–05, when GDP growth had improved to a bit more than 6 percent per year. In this period, all-India poverty declined by 8.0 percentage points, but dalit poverty declined faster, by 9.6 percentage points. In sum, the years after the 1991 economic reforms were unambiguously good for India overall, and especially good for dalits. (Capitalism’s Assault on the Indian Caste System, Cato Institute)

Instead of merely describing the impact of the British colonial project on the subjects’ reasoning abilities, he demonstrates it through live action: by penning what might genuinely be the worst English-language book in recorded history. It is performance art disguised as scholarship.

The book's assault on Western notions of "knowledge" announces itself right from Chapter One. Rather than falling in line before the Western idol of structured, coherent argumentation, Shubham throws that rulebook out the window. In a book about "Decolonising Hinduism," the author clarifies in the preface that his actual purpose is to "eliminate all doubts and confusion about religion, secularism, communism, capitalism, spirituality, economy, society, ecology, festivals, and philosophy." In other words, this isn't a narrowly-focused critique of colonisation — it's a sprawling, everything-under-the-sun treatise on Hinduism itself. Perhaps it aspires to function the status of a Shruti, the ancient oral scriptures. The clue can be found in the writing style. Shubham writes precisely as one would speak, colloquially, without the pretense of formal written English. One suspects you're not supposed to read this book so much as hear it.

The book’s demolition of Western “rationality” is achieved through a set of brilliant, avant-garde tools:

1. Not Underestimating the Audience: The book does not even bothers to explain what is decolonialism. It assumes that the reader is already familiar with the topic in depth. Otherwise, why would anyone pick up a book on decolonialism, if they are not an expert on the subject already. Unlike other average authors, Shubham Deore does not assumes his readers to be fools and instead uses the opportunity to explain other interesting ideas, like North and South divide in India. To further surprise the reader, he goes on to espouse more weird ideas like:

   a. Dravidians practising untouchability with Hinduism
   b. Pakistan as a Right-Wing nation
   c. Associates Southern Indians with : Dark skin, lower caste, Non-veg, labour class, etc.1

   

2. Prose That Defies Convention. To match his unorthodox logic, the author delivers prose equally hostile to readability. Sentences fracture mid-thought, punctuation becomes optional, and occasionally verbosity is weaponised in lieu of clarity. The writing reads as the opposite of concise. It’s the literary equivalent of throwing colours at the wall, letting it stick wherever it lands and calling it a painting.

3. Formatting as a Political Statement. If the language weren't enough, the book's formatting mirrors the chaos. The text in tables leans to the page corner, citations include sources like history-is-mystery.com (the website is gone), with a map which has very casual markings.

   

   

   As someone who has to occasionally deal with interns, this book has genuinely moved me to treat them with basic human dignity.

4. The Comedic Relief: The author recognises that after subjecting readers to such an intellectual ordeal, they might need a palate cleanser. So, he puts in a joke or two. I am yet to get the joke but maybe the other readers will get it.

   

I end up becoming so convinced by Shubham that I stopped reading after the first chapter. I have become thoroughly decolonised and not going to pick up an English-language book ever again. I’ll wait for the author to release a Prakrit language version of the book — the language our ancestors spoke before the invasions begun.

Meanwhile, I’m on a Christmas break with my family to boycott the same Christian festival. We are celebrating Tulsi Pujan Diwas, a Hindu festival which also falls every year on the 25th of December of the Roman Calender. Anyways, for those colonial creatures who are yet to get decolonised after reading such discourse, Happy New Year!

1. Everybody’s Guy: The convenient evasions of Rajdeep Sardesai

Amrita Singh, Caravan Magazine

Amrita Singh’s Caravan profile argues how connections made Rajdeep Sardesai, and limited him. His entry into NDTV, the channel that would define his career, came through his marriage to Sagarika Ghose, daughter of senior bureaucrat Bhaskar Ghose, who had been handpicked by Rajiv Gandhi to expand Indian television. When Sardesai met news entrepreneurs Prannoy and Radhika Roy, it was through this family tie. Beyond this initial advantage, Sardesai systematically cultivated relationships with the country’s most powerful figures: Modi (whom he met during the 1990 Ayodhya rath yatra and helped gain national visibility on television), Arun Jaitley (with whom he took regular walks in Delhi’s Lodhi Gardens), and leaders like Kamal Nath and Jyotiraditya Scindia. These friendships became his greatest asset, ensuring him access to top politicians for his shows and providing him with exclusive stories and insider knowledge that made him one of India’s biggest journalists.

“Access is a double-edged sword,” Sardesai finally conceded. “At one level, access can lead to a blurring of lines. At another level, access is critical for you to know what’s happening.”

However, these same connections became chains that compromised his editorial independence and prevented him from holding his powerful friends accountable. NDTV failed to provide enough room to reporters to report freely about Congress.

While filming a 2005 live show from Sonia Gandhi’s residence, Bhushan recalls, Sardesai “wanted me to change a report that showed up blatant constitutional violations by party loyalist and then Jharkhand governor, Syed Sibtey Razi. Sardesai stood before me and ensured that I followed the editorial line spelled out by him. But this was the channel’s requirement.” He laid the blame for the editorial weakness at the feet of the Roys, who had control over every story at the channel. But Sardesai was happy to comply, Bhushan told me.

At CNN-IBN, which Sardesai founded in 2005, the channel killed a story about liquor baron Vijay Mallya’s family jewels being sold after Mallya, whom Sardesai considered a friend, made a call to him. When reporter Sidhartha Gautam conducted a cash-for-votes sting in 2008, Sardesai and the channel withheld inconclusive footage for two weeks. There are allegations that Rajdeep did this to save his relationship with Congress party. In each instance, he chose to protect his relationships with the powerful rather than pursue stories that might anger them.

Interestingly being true to The Caravan’s brand, the article also goes on to criticise Rajdeep for being too balanced. Paranjoy Guha Thukarta complains that he balanced Centre-Left guests in his show with Centre-Right guests, which is not surprising given that it is coming from the former editor of Economic and Political Weekly.

The article can be read here (without paywall).

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2. On Bakaiti

Snake Oil Salesman

The essay explores “bakaiti” - speaking confidently about things one doesn’t genuinely understand.

A person engages in bakaiti when he produces talk whose primary function is not to describe his experience or justify his beliefs, but to sustain the appearance of knowing.

It is a phenomenon far more pervasive and corrosive than simple lying. Unlike Harry Frankfurt’s concept of bullshit, which is indifferent to truth, bakaiti is performative social competence: the speaker genuinely believes they’re engaging seriously while actually obscuring their actual relationship to the facts. It thrives in contexts where you’re expected to have “takes” on Israel-Palestine war, America’s growing debt and elections in Bihar - as a signal of being educated and aware. The author distinguishes between harmless bakaiti (uncles discussing China’s foreign policy at a carrom board) and destructive bakaiti, where the habit metastasizes into self-knowledge. Once you lose the ability to distinguish between what you think and what you’ve absorbed from media and discourse, your self-understanding becomes third-person; you explain yourself using abstract frameworks (”I have burnout” “I’ve ADHD”) while losing touch with the actual texture of your experience. This creates a peculiar modern stupidity: you become eloquent about catastrophe while actually miserable in your own life, maintaining beliefs even when your lived experience contradicts them, because those beliefs exist in a different ontological space than your concrete reality. The result is a collapse in perceived agency. You feel anxious or lonely but can’t pinpoint the specific insecurity or fear causing it, so you can’t change it either.

Bakaiti institutions - the UN, NITI Aayog, think tanks, parts of academia - are similarly divorced from reality.

A bakait institution is an institution whose performative macro-language has drifted so far from its micro-capacity that speech becomes its primary product.

They operate at scales they cannot touch, speaking about “global peace efforts” and “sustainable development” while producing only language: frameworks, declarations, white papers, and reports about reports. They cannot fail because they never commit; a UN spokesperson saying “all parties must exercise maximum restraint” requires no follow-through and cannot be proven wrong. The key difference between a bakait organization and a functional one is skin in the game and rapid feedback from reality. SpaceX’s rockets either reach orbit or explode; a restaurant’s food is either good or customers leave. But bakait organisations thrive in domains where feedback is slow, diffuse, or nonexistent. Social media has amplified this at scale: language has decoupled from experience, and platforms reward the legible, repeatable, alliance-friendly take over the specific observation. The moral panic around smartphones and AI is itself bakaiti—it offers villains (tech CEOs), victims (us), and a narrative requiring no self-examination. But the truth is simpler and more uncomfortable: you’re bored, you have no intense interests, your life is mostly fine but empty, and the phone fills the gap. The only antidote is radical honesty about your own lived experience, which requires abandoning the safety of generalized narratives and the status that comes with sounding deep. This is terrifying because it means seeing yourself clearly, but it’s the only way to actually adjust your life rather than endlessly perform understanding about everything except yourself.

Read here

3. Four Ways To Enjoy the Culture War

Robert Wyllie, The Lamp

The essay argues that the assassination of Charlie Kirk revealed a fundamental shift in American political behaviour. We have transformed political violence and its aftermath into a form of mass entertainment - a massive multiplayer online role-playing game (M.M.O.R.P.G.) where millions of people participate as spectators and co-creators rather than as engaged citizens. Following the assassination, Wyllie observed the immediate flood of reflexive, identical responses on social media: “I don’t agree with everything he said, but political violence is always wrong” - clichéd utterances that sounded like “personal press releases” rather than genuine reactions. He draws on Drawing on Kierkegaard’s warning about newspapers turning people into spectators, tracing how algorithmic amplification has accelerated political response cycles from hours to minutes, allowing millions to perform their political identity simultaneously.

Kierkegaard warns in Two Ages, “eventually human speech will become just like the public: pure abstraction—there will no longer be someone who speaks, but an objective reflection will gradually deposit a kind of atmosphere, an abstract noise that will render human speech superfluous, just as machines make workers superfluous.”

Wyllie identifies four distinct ways people enjoy the culture war:

1. The earnest role-players who lose themselves in apocalyptic narratives, imagining they face life-or-death struggles

2. The trolls who mock these earnest players with ironic know-nothingism and shocking statements

3. The self-appointed brand ambassadors who feel compelled to post appropriate responses

4. The competitive pundits (including Wyllie himself) who enjoy showing off their cleverness and proving their political perspective superior.

What unites all four modes is what Wyllie calls “hyperpolitics”—politics that is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, present in our emotions and conversations but absent from actual collective action or policy influence. It describes how Americans experience a politicised atmosphere while wielding virtually no influence over governance; politics has become pure self-expression and entertainment. Remarkably, both the assassin and Kirk himself were masters of hyperpolitics - the assassin carved cryptic messages on bullets hoping they’d be read on Fox News; Kirk built a multimillion-dollar platform through online outreach. Wyllie’s ultimate point is : unlike traditional circuses that distract passive citizens, this culture war game allows three hundred million people with deeply personal problems to play for fun while remaining fundamentally detached from real political stakes.

Read here

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In Other News

1. Podcast (Know Your Enemy) - The Furious Minds of MAGA

2. YouTube (Paul Kingsnorth (author of Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity) interview on Interesting Times) - This Is the War Against Human Nature

   He is an Orthodox Christian and a sceptic of technological progress, makes for an interesting perspective.

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1. László Krasznahorkai wins the Nobel Prize

Last week was quite an eventful for the literature enthusiasts (all 74 of them globally). László Krasznahorkai (pronounced as Laslo CRAS-now-hoar-kay), a Hungarian author, was announced as the winner of Nobel Prize of Literature 2025. He is known for his dystopian themes and singular prose style (his latest book “Herscht 07769” is written in a single sentence). His early career was marked by his inability to travel (the secret police confiscated his passport), and his then novels, such as Satantango and The Melancholy of Resistance, convey an almost unbearable sense of suffocation. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, he found a lightness that expressed itself in work such as Seiobo There Below, which engages profoundly with Asian art and philosophy, particularly Buddhism. His recent novel Herscht 07769 counterpoints Bach with German neo-Nazism.1

I have not read any of his books so far which I am going to do in this Diwali break. I am going to start with War and War mostly because I like the cover most among his other works. It is about a suicidal clerk and an antique manuscript. Others can follow the reading list for his works by the Academy.

If you want to get familiar with the novelist and his work, here is a nice essay on him from 2011 by The New Yorker.

Krasznahorkai is clearly fascinated by apocalypse, by broken revelation, indecipherable messages. To be always “on the threshold of some decisive perception” is as natural to a Krasznahorkai character as thinking about God is to a Dostoyevsky character; the Krasznahorkai world is a Dostoyevskian one from which God has been removed.

2. Nick Land vs. Aleksandr Dugin Debate

Auron MacIntyre, YouTube

Tucker Carlson, Arnab Goswami of the West, discussed Nick Land in front of his almost 5 million subscribers in his latest episode (The Occult, Kabbalah, the Antichrist’s Newest Manifestation, and How to Avoid the Mark of the Beast). This is insane because esoteric thinkers like him were relegated to some fringe corners of the internet populated by fairly intelligent but unemployed people not so long back.

Equally remarkable was a discussion between Nick Land and Russian Philosopher Alexander Dugin hosted by Auron MacIntyre on his Youtube Channel. This was like two of the total five thinkers on the right-Wing side. They discussed (while the host remained silent) the nature of liberalism and an ethnic manifestation of the Anglo-Saxon spirit, the nature of time, and what lies beyond postmodernism.

Tablet Magazine has also published an essay on Nick Land recently. I can’t access it but I have been told (I have read posts of strangers) that it is a good explainer of the person and his philosophy.

Read here

3. Peter Thiel and Anti-Christ

Peter Thiel, Venture Capitalist known for investing early in Paypal, Facebook and JD Vance, was on a closed-door, four-part, eight-hour lecture series which he delivered during the past month in San Francisco. Tickets for the series went for $200, selling out within hours. Attenders were told that the lectures were strictly off the record and that they were forbidden from taking photos, videos or audio recordings.

His main concern has been that an Antichrist will emerge who will create a one-world government on the promise of something like stopping nuclear, AI or climate-induced disaster. Antichrist is a biblical figure who will rise before the Last Judgment and attempt to turn people against Jesus. According to Thiel, in our times that figure would curtail individual freedoms and halt humanity’s shot at a future innovation that would avoid Armageddon.

In the lectures, Thiel described Antichrist as “an evil king or tyrant or anti-messiah who appears in the end times”. Thiel has been thinking publicly about Anti-christ publicly for quite some time. The earliest I can remember is from this interview with Peter Robinson2 for Uncommon Knowledge in December 2024. Thiel discusses that his idea of Anti-christ is something like a World Government.

But the entire Anti-Christ issue became a thing after Thiel’s interview with Ross Douthat for the latter’s podcast Interesting Times in June 2025.

We don’t have the exact text of the lectures delivered by Peter Thiel because participants were not allowed to share their notes. But someone did, until Twitter took that down. However, fortunately, we have an archived version of that which can be accessed here. The Guardian also published some excerpts.

My thesis is that in the 17th, 18th century, the antichrist would have been a Dr Strangelove, a scientist who did all this sort of evil crazy science. In the 21st century, the antichrist is a luddite who wants to stop all science. It’s someone like Greta or Eliezer. It’s not Andreessen, by the way. I think Andreessen is not the antichrist. Because you know, the antichrist is popular. I’m trying to say some good things about Andreessen here, come on.

After this, Peter Thiel published an article in First Things with Sam Wolfe on the topic titled “Voyages to the end of the world”. It’s a more sanitised version of his argument without him calling Bill Gates an awful person. It can be accessed here. (H/T: Palash)

4. US researchers uncover the pigments in traditional Indian paintings

Vijaysree Venkatraman, Scroll

Harvard’s Mapping Color in History project reveals how traditional Indian paintings encode stories of global trade and local craft. By analysing 200+ Indian paintings, researchers traced materials like Prussian blue (invented in Europe c.1706 and exported to Asia) alongside Indian yellow (once made in Bihar) blending to form greens in Rajasthani miniatures, which is an evidence of vibrant 18th–19th century exchange between India and Europe. A “cobalt puzzle” in a 15th-century Jain manuscript, initially assumed to be later European retouching, was resolved by geochemical signatures pointing to Asian smalt (from Kashan, Iran), while other works did contain European smalt. It shows how pigment flows ran both ways. The project’s open database lets users search by pigment, place, and period, effectively reading history through colour. It can be accessed here.

There has been a lot of chatter about Performative Men in news columns recently. If you have been living under a rock, here are some pieces. So, who is he? He is someone who doesn’t just read books, he performs having read them. He wields literature like a peacock displays its feathers to woo the potential mate. As someone who was a performative man myself, I put together this list after years of my expertise in the field. And, now, I must pass the torch to you, dear aspiring performative man. You must carry around these books in public, for you never know when an ovulating woman is nearby.

Level 1: White Nights by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

This is where it all begins. If you are still a first-year college student, this entry-level Russian literature will make you feel like you’ve unlocked the secrets of the human condition. It’s short enough to actually finish, melancholy enough to seem profound, and Russian enough to drop casually in conversation. “I really connect with the underground man’s existential loneliness,” you must say, while posting Instagram stories of the book cover next to chai or cigarettes. This book makes you seem mysterious for barely adult women.

Level 2: Palace of Illusions by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Having discovered that women appreciate men who read female authors, you must ventures into feminist retellings of ancient texts. Palace of Illusions offers the perfect combo: it’s the Mahabharata from Draupadi’s perspective, which sounds incredibly sophisticated at college parties, plus it shows you cares about women’s voices in literature.

Level 3: Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

Welcome to the Haruki Murakami phase, where every Performative Man must make his pilgrimage. It used to be quite popular in the past, but I don’t see that much enthusiasm anymore. But it is an important phase anyways. You must start talking about “magical realism” and begin describing everyday situations as “very Murakami-esque.” Posting about whiskey and cats is a plus.

Level 4: Normal People by Sally Rooney

Now, I’m assuming you must be in final-years of your college. So, you must become a bit more sophisticated with your approach. Normal People should become your entry into discussions about millennial dating culture, toxic masculinity, and the Irish literary renaissance. Bonus points if you mention about reading it during lockdown and really “relating to the isolation themes.”

Level 5: All About Love by bell hooks

This is where you should discover bell hooks and suddenly becomes an expert on radical love, systemic oppression, and emotional intelligence. You should quote this book in conversations with baddies about why capitalism is destroying authentic connection, all while working as a Consultant and ordering dinner from some app which wouldn’t exist without exploiting cheap labour. “bell hooks really opened my eyes to how patriarchy hurts men too” type stuff.

Level 6: My Brilliant Friend (or any Elena Ferrante)

Entering the Neapolitan Novels signals a new level of commitment to performative intellectualism. These books are long, they’re about female friendship, and they’re literary as hell. I’ve noticed that the most aesthetic upper-middle class women read Elena Ferrante, so its a good target audience. While you are at it, you can also spend considerable time discussing the “mystery of Elena Ferrante’s identity”.

Level 7: The Year of Magical Thinking (or any Joan Didion)

Joan Didion represents the apex of literary sophistication and personal style. While you discover her work, you should also develop opinions about California, grief, and the decline of American culture. Bonus point if you start wearing minimalist clothing.

Level 8: Orientalism by Edward Said

Welcome to the big leagues. Once I read (about) Orientalism so that I could talk to a girl who was big-time into Said. It was worth it. This is not merely a book, it’s a theoretical framework that you must apply to everything from Marvel movies to restaurant reviews. You must become insufferable about Western representation of the East, which is actually important and necessary, but you must manages to make it sound condescending somehow.

Level 9: Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

This is it. The penultimate boss of literary performativity. Infinite Jest is a lifestyle choice, a personality trait, a way of announcing to the world that you are intellectually superior to 99% of the population. At 1,079 pages, it’s less a novel and more a test of endurance. You should carry it around like a prop for it helps with muscle-building too, leave it strategically placed during video calls, and drop references to “DFW” like you were personal friends.

Level 10: Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

Congratulations, this is your final form. Gravity’s Rainbow is the ultimate flex – a book so dense, complex, and deliberately obscure that finishing it becomes a superhuman achievement worthy of its own LinkedIn post. You must speak in Pynchonian sentences, make references to entropy and paranoia, and develop conspiracy theories about everything from postal systems to banana distribution networks. This book marks the end of your journey from someone who reads books to someone who IS books. You must become one with the literature. Advaita Vedanta. Brahmananda. Supreme Bliss.

My posts will forever remain out of paywall. But if they made you laugh, pushed you to think about something or added value to your life in any possible measure, then please consider buying me a chai.

In his 1932 book “The Concept of the Political”, German Political Theorist Carl Schmitt famously introduced a “friend-enemy distinction” in politics. He argued that the essence of the political lies in the ability to distinguish between “friend” and “enemy”, which is to say that groups define themselves through exclusion. The enemy does not necessarily have to be morally wicked, but must represent a negation of the group’s way of life. For him, politics reaches its peak intensity precisely at the point where a community recognises another group as existentially alien, different, and potentially threatening to their way of life. The political realm, Schmitt insisted, is about the formation of identity through opposition, where the possibility of conflict serves as the ultimate test of group solidarity. The friend is “one of us,” a member of the civic body, while the enemy, by definition, stands as the “other,” a public adversary who can unite the community in opposition.

Though never explicitly acknowledged by Pankaj Saxena, Svayambodha and Shatrubodha resonates strongly with this Schmittian logic. His categories of Svayambodha (sense of the self) and Shatrubodha (awareness of the enemy) echo Schmitt’s friend-enemy lens by delineating how civilizations recognize themselves and define outsiders. In both Schmitt’s and Saxena’s models, (religio)-political cohesion is achieved through a clear sense of group belonging and a sharp awareness of those positioned outside.

Svayambodha can be defined as “the knowledge of our own dharma, culture, and civilization”. It is “to know our centre , our roots, our fundamentals, from which the sense of ‘us’ - our own sense of identity - emerges.” It encompasses the consciousness of cultural origins, core values, and the dharmic worldview, including concepts such as ṛta (cosmic rhythm), satya (truth), karma (action), and punarjanma (rebirth). Svayambodha, in the author’s framework, is about grasping the essence of the Hindu civilizational identity, knowing the fundamentals that differentiate it from other ways of life, and embodying the practices and customs that sustain this identity.

Shatrubodha, on the other hand, is defined as the awareness of the “other” or the adversary. It “is to know the other, to know where the boundaries lie, where the limits of our culture and civilization end, and where the outsider, the other, begins… It is to know the peripheries and what lies beyond the peripheries of our civilization.” For the author, it is a conscious, hierarchical awareness of external threats and inimical forces that endanger the Hindu society. In essence, Shatrubodha involves identifying who or what constitutes a civilizational enemy, studying the ideology or systems that pose existential threats, and fostering a collective sense of vigilance to defend the boundaries of the civilizational self.

According to the author, a healthy civilization requires both Svayambodha and Shatrubodha in balance, that is to know one’s own essence and simultaneously being acutely aware of external threats. He likens these to two wheels of a chariot, both equally essential for civilizational vitality and defense: without Svayambodha, there is nothing worth defending; without Shatrubodha, one cannot properly defend. Together, they form the philosophical and strategic axis of Hindu civilizational consciousness.

This book is a breather in the otherwise stale marketplace of Indian Right-Wing ideas. Other than the major theme, the reader comes across many gems of knowledge which Pankaj Saxena has spread across the book. For instance:
and this:

Among many others. However, these bits of knowledge add little to the core argument, which is a problem throughout the book. This book could have been made much more enjoyable if the editor had shown more Svayambodh by removing irrelevant portions. Other than such operational issues, there are some concerns with the book's main argument too.

It is harder to define Svayambodha for Hindus because it is not a “religion” unlike say, Christianity or Islam, the way we generally understand the term. The Supreme Court calls Hinduism a “way of life”. Savarkar is a bit less abstract when he calls one Hindu

“who looks upon the land that extends from Sindhu to Sindhu-from the Indus to the seas-as the land of his forefathers-his fatherland (Pitribhu), who inherits the blood of that race whose first discernible source could be traced to the Vedic Saptasindhus and which on its outward march, assimilating much that was incorporated and enabling much that was assimilated”

“who has inherited and claims as his own the culture of that race as expressed chiefly in their common classical language, Sanskrit and represented by a common history, a common literature, art and architecture, law and jurisprudence, rites and rituals, ceremonies and sacraments, fairs and festivals; and above all addresses this land, this Sindhustan as his holyland (Punyabhu), as the land of the prophets and sees his godman and gurus, the land of piety and pilgrimage.” (Essential of Hindutva, VD Savarkar)

The reader would expect the author to define who is a Hindu first before describing the sense of self for Hindus. However, the reader ends up disappointed. Pankaj Saxena, to twist his own words, uses theological solutions for socio-political questions. His definition of a Hindu, one who follows rta cycles, Pancha rnas, believes in Karma and Punarjanma, falls short of pragmatism. Does a majority of Hindu population even know, let alone follow, Pancha rnas? I am afraid the answer is no.

Borrowing from Sita Ram Goel, the author names Islamism, Christianism, Macaulayism, Communism and Modernism as forces that “besiege Hindu society in an attempt to destroy it eventually” (Page 136). While Islam, Christianity and Communism are easier to point out, the author does not define Macaulayism and Modernism. Does a person who uses English as a mode of communication a Macaulayist? Is a Cultural Atheist Modernist? In what proportion should we allow them in our society? Or shun them completely? Shatrubodh will be a muddled concept unless we clearly define such boundaries.

Moreover, the author’s delineation of Svayambodh and Shatrubodh primarily in religious terms (i.e., Indic vs Abrahamic religions) feels a bit outdated. Modernity has diluted religious identities. A Hindu Conservative feels more closer to a Christian Conservative than a Hindu Woke. In fact, the Western Right has assembled themselves along these lines, rather than purely religious ones. For example, JD Vance, the Vice-President of the USA, defines the other for them as “Islamists, gender studies majors, socially liberal white urbanites” in his recent remarks for the Claremont Institute’s 2025 Statesmanship Award. The Hindu society faces a similar set of enemies.

Svayambodh and Shatrubodh does an excellent job of reminding Hindus the need for developing a sense of self and others. The book is intellectually stimulating and rich with cultural insights offering readers genuine gems of civilizational knowledge. Yet the book's greatest contribution may lie not in the specific strategic framework it proposes, but in highlighting the urgent need for a more pragmatic approach to cultural conflicts. In today's world, it would make more sense for Hindu society to align with conservatives across the world, who often share similar traditional values, rather than isolate itself from all non-Indic religions. This is especially important given that other Indic religions represent only a small portion of the global population. By building alliances with like-minded conservative movements across religious lines, Hindu civilization could more effectively defend its core principles against the “secular-liberal” forces that pose the real threat to traditional societies everywhere.

1. GPT-5: It Just Does Stuff

Ethan Mollick, One Useful Thing

After much fanfare, OpenAI introduced GPT-5 on 7th August, 2025 which is said to be much better at writing, researching and problem-solving.

Ethan Mollick is a Professor and Researcher at Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania studying Artificial Intelligence. He wrote this essay while having early access to GPT-5. He argues that GPT-5 solves two major problems which people had with LLMs:

First, it eliminates the confusion around model selection and “thinking effort.” Instead of users having to choose between fast/simple and slow/reasoning models (like GPT-4o vs. previous “reasoner” variants), GPT-5 acts as a unified system. It automatically decides which version to deploy and how much reasoning to apply for your specific question removing the need for manual switching.

Second, GPT-5 is highly proactive, solving the issue that most users don’t know what AIs can do or what to ask for. GPT-5 doesn’t just wait for instructions—it actively suggests next steps, generates creative ideas, and even begins executing multi-step tasks with minimal prompting.

If previous generations of AI needed careful prompting, GPT-5 has started the era of simply “just doing stuff.”

One Useful Thing

GPT-5: It Just Does Stuff

I have had early access to GPT-5, and I wanted to give you some impressions of what it is and what it means. But the answer to the first question everyone will have is: Yes, this is a big deal. I asked GPT-5 to show you why by pasting this intro paragraph, exactly as you’re reading it, into ChatGPT, including the phrase: “you are GPT-5, do something ver…

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a year ago · 840 likes · 64 comments · Ethan Mollick

2. Human Reproduction as Prisoner's Dilemma

Arctotherium, Not with a bang

Arctotherium frames the challenge of human reproduction—raising children over nearly two decades—as a version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma: both parents are best off if they commit (“cooperate”), but each also has evolutionary incentives to “defect” (pursue their own interests), potentially at great cost to the other. He describes how, throughout history, different societies have developed various “solutions” to this dilemma:

• In some societies (“defect/cooperate”), men secured their own interests with little concern for women’s wellbeing—think Meiji Japan, where men held divorce power and women suffered enormously from marital breakdowns.

• In others (“defect/defect”), neither sex reliably commits: paternal certainty is low, intrasexual competition is high, and society is extremely unstable and poor (as described among some pre-plow, horticultural groups).

• The "Western solution" (especially Western Europe) was unique: it fostered widespread monogamy, high marital commitment, mutual consent, premarital chastity (especially for women), and made divorce difficult. This created a stable environment where both men and women sacrificed some short-term desires in exchange for long-term benefits—security, parental investment, economic productivity, and higher fertility, all supporting the success of society as a whole.

From the mid‑20th century onwards, Arctotherium argues, key pillars of the Western system were dismantled by the sexual revolution, the introduction of unilateral no‑fault divorce, and welfare policies that weakened the economic incentives for marriage. The outcome has been a shift towards a “cooperate/defect” setup in which men are still expected to provide but can be easily replaced or lose access to their children—reducing the appeal and stability of marriage for both sexes. Over time, marriage rates, fertility, male workforce participation, and social cohesion have all declined, and norms that once encouraged long-term pair bonding have eroded with each generation.

The warning is that, if these trends continue, Western societies risk sliding further toward “defect/defect” dynamics—low commitment, high competition, low trust—similar to historically poor, unstable societies. The author links this potential future to economic stagnation, higher crime, population ageing, and weaker collective resilience, and suggests only by restoring the mutual sacrifices and incentives embedded in the older Western model can these trajectories be reversed.

3. Why are young adults in the English-speaking world so unhappy?

John Burn-Murdoch, Financial Times

John Murdoch starts with the premise that “marked worsening in young adult mental health over the past decade is primarily, if not exclusively, an Anglosphere phenomenon”.

He introduces one overlooked factor when we think about the issue: home ownership. Societies attach cultural and financial importance to owning a home. In the Anglosphere, house prices have increased far more sharply than continental Europe, and home ownership for 25-34-year-olds has plummeted by up to 50 percentage points over the past 30 years. Added to this are less generous welfare systems and fewer tenant protections, making housing not just a marker of “success,” but a primary source of security and wealth.

Young people have been raised on the promise that hard work will deliver stability and home ownership—a core social contract that’s been cruelly broken. As a result, many experience not just personal disappointment but a wider sense of social betrayal and diminishing faith in the system, fuelling anxiety, anger, and even nihilism. Burn-Murdoch cautions that this crisis, left unchecked, risks feeding zero-sum politics and anti-system sentiment among the young. Read more (Access here if behind a paywall)

4. What Is Western Civilization?

Ryan Hammill and Pavlos Papadopoulos, The American Mind

The essay warns that the current revival of “Western Civilization” in classical education will fail again if it’s defined vaguely as just an “idea” or a loose collection of great works. The authors argue it must be understood as a concrete historical and cultural reality with clear boundaries. In their view, Western Civilization is rooted in three unifying elements: a political lineage back to Rome (especially through Latin Christendom), a linguistic unity based on Latin and the Western Indo‑European language families (Italic, Germanic, Celtic), and a cultural habit of absorbing and synthesizing influences from outside traditions, such as Greek philosophy and Hebrew scripture, always mediated through Rome. This combination, they contend, makes the West a distinctive and continuous tradition rather than an arbitrary geographic grouping.

Using emblematic examples like Columbus, they trace how this Roman-Latin foundation expanded into the New World, carrying with it a shared cultural and linguistic heritage. For educators, the authors argue, this means a Western Civ curriculum should place the history of Rome, Greece, and Europe at its core; restore Latin to a place of prominence as the West’s unifying language; and instill in students a deep familiarity and appreciation for their own tradition before they engage with others. By defining Western Civilization in these concrete political, linguistic, and cultural terms, they believe classical education can confidently defend and hand down this heritage to new generations. Read here

5. How Social Media Shortens Your Life

Gurwinder, The Prism

Gurwinder’s essay exposes a hidden heist at the heart of our digital lives—the way social media is engineered to steal not just our attention, but our very sense of time. Platforms like Instagram and TikTok don’t just make hours disappear in the moment (30-minute ick factor1); they also rob us of memories, leaving our past a blur. Drawing on theories of time perception, Gurwinder explains how exciting or novel experiences normally deepen our sense of time, but social media’s endless, algorithm-driven feed quickly numbs us, turns shocking posts into routine, and speeds the clock both while we scroll and in reflection.

The design behind this time warp is no accident—it’s borrowed straight from casino and supermarket floorplans. By turning feeds into infinite, “curvilinear mazes” with no sharp turns or endings, tech platforms lull us into autopilot, strip away our intentions, and keep us passive.

In the early days of social media, it was possible to reach the end of a feed. These ends acted much like right-angle turns, snapping the scroller out of autopilot by forcing them to change course. Soon, however, the feeds were made “curvilinear” by the infinite scroll and autoplay function. We now know that these features impair awareness and memory by lulling people into passivity.

Further, just as Friedman’s casinos were made like mazes to maximise wandering and getting lost, so social media platforms have increasingly become labyrinthine to trap people in them. The Gruen effect is now commonly elicited online similarly to the real world: by continually placing distractions in people’s way. Every webpage is littered with links, each a path to another maze. And many of these links are deliberately placed where they don’t belong; search results are sneakily scattered with recommendations unrelated to your search, and personal notifications often have generic news links hiding among them. The goal is to alienate you from your own intentions, so you lose track of where you were, and when you were.

Unlike a story, which anchors memory and helps us make sense of time, social feeds jumble unrelated fragments, preventing any real narrative. The result: we not only forget what we scrolled through yesterday, but feel our days shrink and blur together.

The Prism

How Social Media Shortens Your Life

I. THE NORMALISATION OF AMNESIA…

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a year ago · 1446 likes · 107 comments · Gurwinder

1. How Sydney Sweeney Is Killing Wokeness?

Sydney Sweeney partnered with American Eagle, an American clothing company, to drop a series of advertisements with the tagline “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans”.

In one of these videos, Sydney is featured saying:

In another, she is standing in front of a poster of herself with text that reads “Sydney Sweeney has great genes”. In the video, the word “genes” gets crossed out and is replaced with the word “jeans”.

While I do not have a taste for bimbos1, it is understandable why zoomer Right-Wingers were elated. Even Boomer Right-Wingers like Ted Cruz came out in public support of Sydney Sweeney. However, the videos did not sit well with libtards who found a blue eyed, blonde, white woman discussing genes to be a dog whistle for eugenics and far-right agenda.

Here is a sample from MSNBC:

It isn’t just that far-right ideology is proliferating on the fringe; our entire cultural ethos has moved further right, allowing for this sort of content. Young women are being radicalized through so-called clean skin care and healthy eating, internet slang once used exclusively by women-hating incels is mainstream, and people are unabashedly self-identifying as fascist on public platforms.

Another one from The Indian Express:

The problem isn’t Sweeney’s sex appeal. A 27-year-old woman celebrating her sexuality can be liberating. The issue is when that sexuality is carefully curated, commodified, and used to reinforce the same narrow beauty standards that advertising has peddled and profited from for decades. When a campaign leans on innuendo and wordplay, all the while a conventionally attractive woman flirts with the language of genetics, it isn’t just trying to be clever. It’s reiterating, subtly, but persistently, who gets to be seen as desirable. And when that happens, the ad isn’t selling “great jeans”, but the body that wears them.

More importantly, while this entire issue might look like just another meaningless controversy, it feeds and shapes the Culture Wars ongoing in the West (which have repercussions in India). So, here are some good reads on the subject:

A. Wokeness is no match for Sydney Sweeney's undeniable beauty

Amy Hamm, National Post

We’ve spent years being chastised for desiring or admiring beauty — because beauty is rare and exclusionary, and to exclude is to hate — or so we’ve been scolded to accept by today’s diversity, equity, and inclusion fanatics. We aren’t supposed to admire Sweeney’s beauty; but we’ve done it anyways.

Beauty is now political. For this we can thank the tyrannical, woke, and (ironically) minority vanguard that has for years coerced our culture into pretending that unbeautiful things are beautiful.

We are all starting to envisage the death of woke. We’re seeing it everywhere, including in the breasts of young, beautiful women.

Read here (use this if there is a paywall).

B. Yes, Sydney Sweeney's Boobs Are Anti-Woke

Richard Hanania

Richard Hanania, the foremost American public intellectual, famously declared the death of Wokeism upon being exposed to Sydney Sweeney’s bosoms last year.

His essay could be seen as an extension of his tweet, and makes for a very interesting read:

Women’s bodies have always been political, and they must be, given how fundamental sexual selection and family formation are to human society.

The more attractive women around us are, whether in real life or fiction, the less one is able to maintain two important leftist delusions: that the sexes are or can be made interchangeable, and that sexual selection either is or can be made to be an unimportant part of human affairs.

To sum it up, I’ll borrow words from Lauren Smith of The European Conservative:

The age of forced diversity, rainbow capitalism, and the solo polyamorous, Hijabi amputee is over. Women are allowed to be blonde, busty, and beautiful again. Long may it last.

2. The Men Who Made Conservatism

Jason Sorens, Fusion

Jason Sorens argues that mid-20th-century American conservatism was shaped not by a single towering thinker, but by a rare combination of movement builders and theorists no less than Sydney Sweeney. William F. Buckley brought charisma, controversy, and media savvy, turning National Review into the intellectual heart of the conservative movement, while Frank Meyer developed the philosophical core, or “fusionism,” that synthesized traditionalist and libertarian strands into a coherent worldview. Sorens contends that, while the public image of conservatism once closely mirrored Buckley’s blend of erudite provocation and elite gatekeeping, today’s right has lost that intellectual authority structure, embracing populist energy and online polarization often detached from earlier standards of intellectual rigour.

To make his case, Sorens draws on two new biographies highlighting the differing backgrounds of Buckley (the privileged, pious iconoclast) and Meyer (the rebellious ex-Communist turned theorist), showing how their collaboration set the tone for decades of conservative thought. He reviews Meyer’s philosophical development—from Communist Party activism to the realization (inspired by Hayek) of the dangers of planned economies—leading to his influential doctrine that freedom and virtue must be fused as elements of natural law. Sorens details how National Review’s evolution—from supporting segregation to later revisions and gatekeeping—mirrored and influenced wider conservative debates. Ultimately, Sorens laments the decline of intellectual conservatism, warning that without the discipline of rigorous ideas and engagement with critics, the contemporary right risks prioritizing provocation over substance and losing sight of truth—a trend reflected in the shrinking presence of serious conservative intellectuals and the rise of shallow populist voices.

Read here

3. Monetizing Primacy

Karthik Sankaran, Phenomenal World

Karthik Sankaran argues that in Donald Trump’s second term, U.S. economic policy towards the dollar is deeply conflicted, driven by the desire to retain America’s global primacy while also seeking benefits that are often mutually exclusive. The administration wants a weak dollar to boost manufacturing, a strong dollar to fight inflation, low interest rates for cheap government borrowing, and above all, to keep the dollar central to the world’s financial system as a geopolitical lever. Yet, new Trump-era tariffs, erratic diplomacy, and volatile policymaking have triggered real doubts among global investors and allies—notably seen in a weaker dollar and rising Treasury yields after recent events like the US sovereign credit downgrade—raising fears of a wider flight from US assets.

Sankaran shows how these efforts to “monetize primacy”—to make the world pay more for the benefits of U.S. security and the dollar system—could backfire, eroding confidence in the dollar’s special status and driving other powers (especially Europe and China) to build up alternatives. He illustrates how stablecoin policy and pressure on allies are meant to deepen dollar demand, yet may provoke instability both abroad and at home, as dollar-based digital assets simplify capital flight and expose the US to new types of financial risk. Historically, the dollar’s dominance hasn’t always meant unbroken strength; what matters more are investors’ expectations about returns on American assets. Today’s aggressive use of financial weaponry (sanctions, controls) and calls for others to help finance US military and economic supremacy are nudging rivals to create their own financial and security infrastructures. The result could be a more multipolar global monetary system, where the euro (and, to a lesser extent, the renminbi) grow in influence—accelerated, ironically, by Washington’s insistence on cashing in on its primacy rather than quietly defending it. Sankaran’s conclusion: efforts to “monetize” dominance may end up hastening its constraints.

Read here

4. D. D. Kosambi Paved the Way for India’s Marxist Historians

Ananyo Chakraborty, Jacobin

The essay argues that D. D. Kosambi fundamentally transformed the writing of Indian history by creatively adapting Marxist methods to India’s ancient past. Rejecting both colonial and nationalist narratives that saw Indian society as static or shaped only by kings and empires, Kosambi used Marxist analysis to bring social structures, economic relations, and the material lives of ordinary people into the center of historical inquiry.

Chakraborty traces Kosambi’s intellectual journey—from a mathematics prodigy educated at Harvard, to mathematician and peace activist, to a pioneering historian blending rigorous statistical analysis (like his work on ancient coinage) with Marxist historiography. He also shows how Kosambi’s work laid the groundwork for later Marxist historians like Irfan Habib and Romila Thapar.

Read here

That’s all for this edition of Beyond the Feed. See you in the next one!

1. The Crescent and the Guillotine

Paul Friesen, Minority of One

Paul Friesen’s article warns that Western countries are becoming too tolerant — so tolerant that they are starting to tolerate even ideas and practices that are deeply against freedom and basic rights. He uses the Maldives as an example: from the outside, it looks like a holiday paradise, but in reality, it’s a strict religious state where no other religion is allowed and dissent is harshly punished. Friesen argues that if Western societies aren’t careful, they could slowly head in the same direction by failing to stand up for their own values.

The author backs up his case by giving examples of how, in the name of multiculturalism and not wanting to offend anyone, Western institutions sometimes accept or ignore illiberal practices. He cites things like sharia arbitration in Britain, schools with intolerant teachings, and the reluctance to criticize extremism because of fear of being called “racist” or “Islamophobic.” According to Friesen, this “tolerance” can actually lead to the erosion of freedom and safety for everyone.

Our courts allow sharia arbitration councils to function in British cities, adjudicating matters of family and inheritance with standards that would make a 12th-century canon lawyer flinch. Our schools include faith-based curricula that require hijabs for seven-year-olds and teach that homosexuality is satanic filth. Our public broadcasters will air a documentary about the importance of free speech, followed immediately by a segment about why cartoons of Muhammad are “unhelpful.”

This is not multiculturalism. It is masochism. It is the belief that liberalism must be so open-minded that its own brains are spilled onto the prayer mat. It is the fetishization of identity at the expense of liberty. It is the ideological pacifism of a society too terrified to assert its own values, lest it be accused of “racism” by those who mistake ideology for ethnicity.

He calls for the West to remember its core values: freedom of speech, true pluralism with boundaries, and the courage to speak out against repression, rather than surrendering these values out of guilt or fear. The central warning is clear: tolerance shouldn’t mean letting go of your own principles, or soon there will be nothing left to tolerate.

Minority of One

The Crescent and the Guillotine

CHAPTER I: THE MALDIVES PARADOX — PARADISE LOST IN PRAYER BEADS…

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a year ago · 103 likes · 25 comments · Paul Friesen

2. Understanding the Post-Internet Irony World Through Himesh Reshammiya

Anurag Minus Verma, The Culture Cafe

Anurag Minus Verma explores how the internet has transformed our relationship with pop culture, using Himesh Reshammiya as a lens. He reflects on the late 2000s, a time when openly enjoying Himesh’s music in middle-class circles came with social penalties and was considered a guilty pleasure at best. As Orkut faded and the internet’s influence exploded, Anurag observes that “taste” moved online, and so did the performance of irony.

He shows how the rise of meme pages, ironic fandoms, and internet humour blurred the lines between mocking, genuinely enjoying, and “performing” affection for things once dismissed as cringey or lowbrow. Bollywood B-films, “bad” music, and faded stars like Himesh, Bobby Deol, and Emraan Hashmi became online cult icons, not because fans suddenly rediscovered artistic merit, but because sharing, mocking, and ironically celebrating them became a bonding ritual. Pages like “Himesh Doing Things” and memes labeling celebrities as “Lord” were of course never about sincerity, but about the freedom to celebrate with detachment, to belong without real emotional labor.

So irony, followed by post-irony, becomes essential for survival. Especially in a time like ours, where meaning, logic, and coherence seem to be in permanent breakdown. Irony, in that sense, is also a form of ideology where it allows us to say everything while believing nothing.

Or perhaps Irony is our collective placebo. We know it’s fake, we know it doesn’t heal but without it, the pain might become visible.

According to Anurag, this irony-fueled culture is both liberating and unsettling. It allows people to enjoy “cringe” content without shame, but also makes it hard to distinguish real feelings from performative ones. Irony, he argues, is now a kind of internet spirituality — ritualistic, repetitive, sometimes comforting, but also hollow. The act of enjoying becomes secondary to the act of being seen enjoying. In the end, he suggests, this cheerful numbness — the e-feeling of always being in the loop and posting joy, real or not — is perfectly suited to the digital age, even if we forget where sincerity ends and performance begins.

Culture Cafe by Anurag Minus Verma

Understanding the Post-Internet Irony World Through Himesh Reshammiya

A quick note before we begin…

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a year ago · 100 likes · 12 comments · Anurag Minus Verma

3. There's definitely something here

Palash, A Bigger SPalash

Palash reflects on his 15-year journey in Mumbai and develops a personal theory about “home.” For him, home isn’t about comfort or perfection, it’s about learning to accept and reconcile with its pain and flaws, which in turn makes it truly your own. He draws a parallel between this uneasy peace and the unique character of Mumbai: a city that constantly challenges, frustrates, and tests its residents, yet manages to inspire fierce loyalty and belonging.

Palash begins with stories of discomfort as a newcomer — stifling humidity, social prejudices while apartment-hunting, the relentless pressure of crowded roads and high rents. But even as the city makes life hard, he discovers the everyday kindness and helpfulness of ordinary people, especially migrants trying to make a life in Mumbai. It’s this “kindness by default,” he argues, that sets Mumbai apart and binds its people together across backgrounds.

I discovered a new aspect of the city - kindness by default. This is a very common experience for someone who moves into the city. Ask anyone. I have long wondered what the city has to do with it. Because it’s the same people everywhere - we, Indians. But for some reason, people behave differently here. Those autowallas, like most autowallas here, were not native Maharashtrians. They were migrants, as most autowallas in Mumbai are. So it’s not the people, it’s the city.

That was the first time I felt that there’s probably something here.

He explores how ambition and hard work form the backbone of the city’s culture, shared by both the old-money rich and new arrivals, all part of a cycle where struggle is valued rather than hidden. Despite the city’s endless obstacles and chaotic pace, striving and resilience become shared values, a kind of trauma-bonding that connects everyone. Ultimately, Palash says loving Mumbai, like loving home, means making peace with its hardships, not expecting comfort. The messy, noisy, damp arrival from the airport doesn’t feel inviting but it signals belonging. “There’s definitely something here,” he concludes, suggesting that Mumbai’s magic lies in this very process of reconciling with its pain and finding a deeper sense of home within it.

A Bigger SPalash

There's definitely something here

A lot has been written about the idea of Home. I have a somewhat radical theory. What we call Home has to be necessarily painful. It is an alcoholic father, a dead marriage between parents, a dirty dispute over property, or a hundred ways your mother tries to hide your actual social class through little home improvements. But it’s not the pain but its r…

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a year ago · 30 likes · 2 comments · Palash

4. On Being Fundamentally Unemployable

The Candid Clodhopper

The essay offers an interesting critique of modern work culture through the lens of those who simply cannot, or will not, conform to traditional employment. The author introduces the concept of being "fundamentally unemployable," not due to laziness or bad habits, but because something essential about who they are makes them incompatible with the demands of contemporary jobs. This isn't about people who struggle to find work; it's about those whose very nature rebels against the modern employment structure.

The author argues that modern jobs demand two fundamental sacrifices that some people cannot make: surrendering their time to employers regardless of actual productivity, and tolerating endless "bullshit"—meaningless, soul-crushing work that produces nothing of lasting value. Drawing contrasts with traditional craftsmanship (blacksmiths, architects, cathedral builders), the author mourns how modern employment has transformed dignified, creative work into corporate compliance and participation in what David Graeber famously called "bullshit jobs." Where previous generations built cathedrals and lasting structures, today's workers install drywall in chain restaurants.

It is no secret that most jobs are bullshit—indeed it’s been a meme for quite some time. At best, bullshit jobs are devoid of meaning and plagued by monotony and malaise; at their worst, they’re all of that in addition to being grossly immoral and deleterious in terms of their effect on individuals and society. Such jobs demand a sacrifice of human dignity, morality, creative potential, and time that could be spent much more meaningfully. Generally speaking, it doesn’t matter to employers what the best way of doing something is nor does it matter to them what the right thing to do is; rather, the company has policies for that and employees are expected to police themselves—or be policed by the “human resources” department—according to company policy. It doesn’t matter if the policies are bullshit, as bullshit is part of the job itself: they’re called “bullshit jobs” because the work itself is bullshit. Sometimes it’s bullshit to the extent that it is simply and completely unnecessary work, other times it is bullshit in terms of an ersatz or undignified quality. Most modern white-collar work is completely unnecessary; if they’re not outright scams like finance and insurance, they’re little more than adult daycares: HR departments staffed with women to keep them from becoming mothers, tech firms satiating nerds with six figure salaries to keep them from becoming men.

The Candid Clodhopper's central thesis is that our culture has conflated "work" with "jobs" and "career" with "climbing the corporate ladder," obscuring possibilities for meaningful work outside traditional employment. For those who refuse to dedicate half their waking hours to producing particle board mediocrity, the solution isn't despair but creativity — finding work that honours both their God-given talents and materials from Creation itself. The fundamentally unemployable, rather than being society's misfits, might actually be its most faithful guardians of human dignity and meaningful labor.

The Candid Clodhopper

On Being Fundamentally Unemployable

The first time I heard the phrase was from one of the trainers at my old gym. He’d been a union rep for many years and knew a thing or two about big companies and employment standards and such. The guy he cracked the joke about is a professional musician, but it was clear that there were a few of us to whom the designation applied. It conjured up memori…

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a year ago · 109 likes · 19 comments · The Candid Clodhopper

5. Scapegoating the Algorithm

Dan Williams, Asterisk

Dan Williams argues that the widespread belief that social media platforms have caused America’s deep epistemic crisis (marked by polarization, mistrust of institutions, misinformation, and conspiracy theories) is overstated and not well supported by evidence. He contends that many of these challenges existed long before social media, have deep historical roots, and are primarily driven by broader political realignments and cultural divisions, especially the “diploma divide” separating less-educated conservative voters from more-educated liberals. Williams emphasizes that social media, while not harmless, mostly reflects and sometimes accelerates existing divisions rather than causing them.

To make his case, Williams draws on a broad range of historical context, showing that political ignorance, conspiracy thinking, and elite disinformation have long plagued American society. He highlights that political polarization began increasing decades before social media’s rise due to party realignment and media fragmentation. He cites scientific research, including large randomized field experiments, demonstrating that altering people’s social media exposure has minimal effects on their political attitudes or behaviours. Williams also explains that people actively select information that fits their beliefs, meaning correlations between social media and misinformation often result from user choice, not platform algorithms. He concludes that focusing blame on social media oversimplifies a complex, multi-faceted crisis rooted in enduring social and political factors beyond any single platform or technology. Read here

The Death of the Post-Left

Oliver Bateman, Compact

Oliver Bateman’s “The Death of the Post-Left” examines how the short-lived “post-left” movement—born out of pandemic-era frustration with both mainstream liberalism and right-wing culture wars failed to become the real class-based populist force it aspired to be. Emerging from leftist disillusionment, especially following Bernie Sanders’s 2020 defeat, the post-left was composed of contrarian commentators and activists who rejected identity politics and sought to recenter economic class as the central issue. Drawing inspiration from Marxist critics of liberal diversity, the movement positioned itself as uniquely equipped to challenge elite power, but quickly found itself fragmented, drifting either rightwards or folding back into the liberal mainstream.

The post-left had valid structural critiques, but was unable to transform these into stable institutions or alliances, as the two-party system gave it no path to power. Instead, we got a dynamic of polarization. The left-liberal establishment dubbed anything outside mainstream identity talk as bigotry, fueling resentment that found a home on the right. The post-left’s contrarian energy became an identity of its own, but most of its members drifted steadily rightward under the gravitational pull of higher-profile conservative media. The resulting reconfiguration has left pre-existing partisan divides intact, give or take a few details. The system triumphed; the post-left lost.

Bateman argues that the post-left’s core weakness was its lack of robust institutional support or a true labor base: its rhetorical radicalism could not translate into organizational power or durable alliances. In practice, the movement was often a staging ground for leftists transitioning to the right, as the absence of labor institutions left them vulnerable to being absorbed into conservative media and culture wars. Attempts to forge alliances with populist right figures (including during Trump’s second term with overtures toward labor and tariffs) ultimately only reinforced old partisan divisions and GOP orthodoxy. Bateman concludes that, in the face of globalized capital and rigid two-party dynamics, the post-left’s lack of real organizational muscle meant its moment was fleeting — its valid critiques overwhelmed by entrenched polarization and economic structures that rhetorical subversion alone could not dent. Critiques of left hypocrisy, he suggests, became another waystation on America’s endless ideological journey, leaving the political landscape fundamentally unchanged. Read here

1. Peter Thiel on Transhumanism and the Antichrist

Michael Millerman (YouTube)

Peter Thiel gave an interview (link) to the New York Times’ Ross Douthat, which became viral for this particular moment.

In his video, Michael Millerman breaks down Peter Thiel’s provocative interview, unpacking why Thiel hesitated when asked if he’d simply want humanity to endure. Millerman explains that for Thiel, the question goes deeper than mere survival—it’s about whether we remain as we are, or aim for radical transformation through technology, possibly to the point of no longer being recognisably human. Thiel distinguishes between tech that corrects our natural flaws (like glasses or Neuralink for restoring movement) and tech that augments us past our limits—think dramatically longer lives, cognitive upgrades, or even steps toward immortality. Millerman highlights how Thiel sees this urge to overcome all limitation, including biological ones, as an ancient part of being human.

But the explainer also captures Thiel’s cautions: pursuing such grand ambitions can court both apocalyptic risk and new forms of tyranny. Millerman draws out Thiel’s use of theological terms like the "Antichrist," which he employs to warn against seductive but dangerous salvation projects—like a totalitarian one-world state that promises to save but actually centralises evil. Through references to political theology and the Bible’s "Katechon" (the restrainer), Millerman shows how Thiel is wary: sometimes the very forces created to protect humanity can become oppressive themselves. Watch here

2. Red Pill, Blue Pill: The Crisis in Political Theory

Joshua Mitchell, Cluny Journal

The essay uses the famous Matrix metaphor to capture the malaise in today’s academic political theory. Joshua argues that much of the field has chosen the ‘blue pill,’ operating on autopilot—churning out ever more research for ever smaller academic audiences, while resisting the uncomfortable, “red pill” questions about why we study politics in the first place. Mitchell laments the loss of intellectual courage, the sidelining of canonical texts, and the takeover of academic spaces by both bland managerial politics and a narrow identity-driven activism—all at the expense of genuine pluralism and big-picture thinking. Political theory, he says, used to grapple bravely with the “crisis of modernity,” drawing on figures like Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and others who each offered their own “red pill” insight—showing us that there’s so much more to our social and moral lives than the surface routines would suggest. To revive the discipline, Mitchell doesn’t call for a naïve return to old canons nor for activist sloganeering, but for a restoration of risky, courageous thinking that challenges both itself and its foundational assumptions—a willingness to step out of the academic comfort zone, face the shadows on the cave wall, and search for deeper truths about politics and human nature.

Cluny Journal

Red Pill, Blue Pill

§1. Like so much of what we contend with in everyday life, professional decorum is a mixed blessing. Political theory, like every other academic discipline, cannot proceed without the decorum of shared suppositions. And no academic discipline can sustain itself unless from time to time its practitioners raise…

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a year ago · 41 likes · 1 comment · Joshua Mitchell

3. The Cultural Decline of Literary Fiction

Owen Yingling, OY’s Substack

The issue of decline of literary culture among (young) men has been beaten to death by essayists (sample: The New York Times, The New Statesman, Compact, Chronicles). But Owen’s essay stands out. He argues that the sharp fall of literary fiction’s cultural clout in America isn’t just about the supposed sidelining of straight white male writers or the rise of identity politics—it’s a much broader collapse affecting all young literary writers. The key difference between “The Greats” (Mailer, Updike, McCarthy, DFW, Franzen, et al.) and today’s fellowship recipients is that the older icons were widely read and recognised, while most contemporary literary fiction flies under the cultural radar, barely selling and rarely breaking through to mainstream readers.

What Actually Changed?

• Supply Shock: The collapse of the magazine ecosystem—primarily due to the loss of print advertising revenue—destroyed the main platform that allowed emerging literary writers to be both published and paid. While stalwarts like The New Yorker persist, most magazines cut back on publishing fiction, thinning the pathways for new talent to emerge and be discovered.

• Academic Pipeline Collapse: Tenure-track jobs in English and Creative Writing have shrunk rapidly since the 1980s, just as the number of PhDs and MFA grads has soared. Most creative writers can no longer count on making a living in academia, let alone in magazines.

• Shift to Prestige TV: The rise of TV as a desirable venue for “serious” writing (think Mad Men or True Detective) siphoned some of the best talent away from novels, as screenwriting offers better pay and a wider audience.

On the Demand Side

• Commercial Failure & Alienation of the Reader: Beginning in the 1970s, literary fiction increasingly prioritised critical acclaim and internal prestige over popular appeal. Critics and awards incentivized writers to innovate or please niche tastes, with little concern for ordinary readers. This decoupling of “good writing” and commercial success launched a vicious cycle: books became more insider-focused, readers felt alienated, and the audience shrank—fueling even more self-conscious, insular writing.

• Readers Still Want Literary Fiction—But Not Contemporary: It’s not that Americans stopped reading books or literary classics. Modern surveys show people still love Pride and Prejudice or War and Peace; it’s contemporary literary fiction—especially the stuff chasing awards or critical praise—that struggles to find an audience.

• Myth of the “Distracted Masses”: Blaming the internet or smartphones for this collapse doesn’t hold up: the overall number of book readers hasn’t dramatically dropped, and Americans today are actually more likely to read at least one book a year than in the “golden age” of the 1950s and ’60s. Taste hasn’t changed so much as the connection between contemporary authors and mass audiences has eroded.

How Did This Cycle Start?

• Rise of “Critic-Optimized” Writing: From the 1970s onward, postmodern and MFA-driven styles rewarded experimentation and idiosyncratic voices, but often at the expense of readability and broad appeal. The decoupling of sales and critical success meant authors felt increasingly pressured to win over critics rather than readers, pushing literary fiction further into niche territory.

• Loss of Faith in the General Reader: Insiders in the lit world began to view “normal” readers as either uninterested in serious fiction or simply unreachable, further encouraging a turn inward.

Is There Hope?

Magazines overflowing with short stories are unlikely to return, and academic jobs will remain scarce. However, platforms like Substack might offer new avenues for writers to build audiences and foster more direct relationships with readers, possibly easing the current crisis.

Read here

4. Liberalism’s enemies are having second thoughts

Zack Beauchamp, Vox

For years, both right-wing postliberal thinkers and segments of the left proclaimed that liberal democracy was exhausted, offering moral or social critiques and, in some cases, alternatives. But as Trump 2.0 puts illiberalism into practice—stacking government with loyalists and eroding democratic norms—many of these anti-liberal figures are now reconsidering. Notable postliberals like Sohrab Ahmari have retreated from calls to tear down liberal order, citing the instability and extremism unleashed by actually implementing those dreams. Meanwhile, on the left, formerly strident critics such as Samuel Moyn now concede that earlier warnings about the fragility of democracy were more prescient than they’d realized, and that the radical left’s “anti-liberal” moment was mostly performative rather than a true philosophical threat.

This shift, Beauchamp argues, is less about liberals winning the debate on principle and more about the sobering real-world dangers of unchecked illiberalism. With both the postliberal right splintering—some veering into explicit authoritarianism, others returning to “critical patriotism”—and the radical left lacking any real systematic alternative, the intellectual tide is turning back toward liberalism as the necessary baseline for pluralistic, free societies. In this opening, new liberal movements like “abundance liberalism” are emerging, aiming to make democratic institutions deliver tangible results, not just defend old norms for their own sake. The crisis has, ironically, reminded even liberalism’s fiercest foes of its enduring value. Read here (Without paywall)

5. The death of the public intellectual

Bea, The Digital Meadow

The essay offers a witty, somewhat melancholic meditation on how our culture has shifted from valuing public intellectuals—think Baldwin, Sontag, Chomsky—to idolizing influencers whose power lies in aesthetics, not ideas. The essay opens with a reminiscence of the 1965 Baldwin-Buckley debate, a moment when thinkers challenged the public’s deepest convictions on national stages and genuinely moved the cultural needle. Bea traces how figures like Sontag once wielded immense influence but today, she argues, this role is fractured, diluted by an endlessly scrolling, attention-driven media environment. The internet, with its millions of micro-celebrities, has rendered deep, complex thought into content for consumption rather than public dialogue. The “public intellectual” is increasingly replaced by the influencer—Hailey Bieber or Kim Kardashian—whose cultural power comes through lifestyle curation and viral beauty trends, not challenging or changing how we think.

This shift, Bea argues, is not just a fluke but a reflection of the ascendancy of “public aestheticism” over public intellectualism. The few who do trade in “ideas” must now package them for maximum engagement—slick, snackable, and branded—in stark contrast to the debate halls and longform essays of the past. She notes how the intellectual sphere is not dead but rather mutated: podcasts, internet forums, and Substack newsletters may offer new hope for sustained thought, but the barrier remains the dominance of spectacle, short attention spans, and academic over-specialization that keeps thinkers siloed and less able to translate ideas for the broader public.

the digital meadow

The death of the public intellectual

In the winter of 1965, three days before the assassination of Malcom X and six months before the Voting Rights Act was passed, the Cambridge Union Debating Chamber was packed to over-capacity. 700 students and guests filled the grand chamber, hundreds of others packed into adjacent galleries for a live broadcast, and even more stood waiting outside, hop…

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a year ago · 8396 likes · 240 comments · bea

There is a silence that follows loss. A hush so absolute it feels like the world has been emptied of colour and sound.

“You say you want to try, for several days perhaps.
Perhaps for several weeks.
Perhaps even for your whole life.
Try what? she asks.
Loving, you answer.”

- The Malady of Death, Marguerite Duras

I have never understood those words more than now. The days pass, but I remain, untouched by anything except the coldness that has settled in my bones.

Grief is not loud. It is not the wailing or the breaking of plates or the tearing of photographs. It is the quiet refusal of the world to mean anything. It is the way the morning light falls on the kitchen table, indifferent to your suffering. It is the way the air feels heavier, as if the universe has become water and you are slowly drowning in it.

“I’m not living, I’m just killing time.”
- True Love Waits, Radiohead

I play the song on repeat, as if the repetition could summon something. Remorse, redemption, or just a flicker of warmth. But nothing comes. The coldness is faithful. The coldness does not leave.

In Manchester by the Sea, Lee Chandler is told, “There’s nothing there.” Sometimes he stands on the shore, looking out at the vast, indifferent ocean. I know that ocean. I know that nothing. It is the place I return to every night, hoping to find a reason to keep breathing, and finding only the cold.

People say that time heals. They say the heart is resilient, that meaning can be found again. But what if meaning was a person, and that person is gone? What if love was the only thing that made the world bearable, and now the world is just. Cold?

So I pray, not to any god of comfort or hope, but to the coldness itself.
Dear coldness, be my God.
Wrap me in your blank, indifferent embrace. Teach me how to survive in a world that no longer cares. Let me worship at the altar of numbness, where nothing hurts because nothing matters. Let me forget the warmth, the love, the meaning. Let me become as empty as the world I now inhabit.

She asks you to say it clearly.
You say: I don’t love.
She says: Never?
She says: The wish to be about to kill a lover, to keep him for yourself, yourself alone, to take him, steal him in defiance of every law, every moral authority—you don’t know what that is, you’ve never experienced it?
You say: Never.
She looks at you, repeats: A dead man’s a strange thing.

- The Malady of Death, Marguerite Duras

The Aristophanes Theory: Love as Searching for Your Other Half

In Plato’s Symposium, Aristophanes presents us with perhaps the most enduring and poetic theory of love ever conceived. In his mythical account, he tells us that humans were originally spherical beings with four arms, four legs, and two faces. These powerful creatures were three in number, male, female, and androgynous descended respectively from the sun, earth, and moon. When they attempted to scale the heavens and challenge the Gods, Zeus decided to humble them by splitting each being in half.

This divine punishment condemned humanity to an eternal search for their missing half. Aristophanes explains that "love is born into every human being: it calls back the halves of our original nature together; it tries to make one out of two and heal the wound of human nature". What we call love, then, is nothing more than this "pursuit for wholeness", this desperate attempt to reunite with our other half and become complete once again.

The brilliance of Aristophanes' myth lies not in its literal truth which the scholars try to find, but in its psychological accuracy. When we fall in love, we do indeed feel we have found something essential that was missing from ourselves. The beloved appears to complete us, to make us whole in ways we never imagined possible. This is why lovers often speak of feeling "complete" when they find their partner.

Yet there lies one crucial thing that mainstream romantic culture consistently misses: you are not supposed to ever find your other half and happily settle after. The beauty of love lies precisely in its incompleteness, in the eternal search rather than the final discovery.

The False Utopia of Romantic Love

In contrast, mainstream discourse is dominated by romantic love, a 19th century enlightenment rationalist invention. Earlier, marrying for love was more of an exception and less of a norm. This modern conception, constantly hammered into the minds of the masses through popular culture, espouses that someday you'll marry the love of your life and achieve lasting happiness through this union.

But this is a false utopia, built on fundamentally flawed premises. I can do no better than to quote Oscar Wilde who said, "A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her". Marriage for love, as a cultural institution, is indeed a stupid idea when viewed through the lens of what love actually is: an eternal, restless search rather than a settled condition.

However, that does not mean that one should shy away from embracing romantic love. But one must approach it with the caution that it will not last forever. To quote, again, Oscar Wilde: "Always! That is a dreadful word. It makes me shudder when I hear it. Women are so fond of using it. They spoil every romance by trying to make it last forever".

The Beauty of Incompleteness: Majnu and Laila

The story of Majnu and Laila illuminates this principle perfectly. Osho observes:

"Majnu was very fortunate; he didn't get Laila. They were truly fortunate—not meeting each other. He kept calling, crying, yearning. The drums from afar always sound sweet. It is in the distance that all charm lies. The closer you get to things, the more their futility begins to reveal itself."

When a sympathetic king offered Majnu any of the most beautiful women from his royal family, having seen the "very plain, homely, very ordinary" Laila himself, he couldn't understand the young man's obsession. But the King missed the point entirely.

"Such poetry, such songs are born in the hearts of poets who have suffered, who have yearned and never received their beloved. If they were to get that beloved, suddenly their eyes would open. Because what you had thought was your imagination. It was your projection. You had imposed it. What Majnu sees in Laila is not in Laila; it is in Majnu's own eyes. It is through Majnu's eyes that Laila is imagined."

The point which the King misses is that when we love someone, we elevate them to the level of a God or Goddess. They exist as a flawless creature in our imaginations. Laila, the one which existed in the world and the one that existed in Majnu’s projection are two different beings. Majnu misses a completely different point: upon being more exposed to our beloved over time, we discover the fatal realisation that they have their own fair share of flaws too. They are mortals like us, fighting their demons. Thus, the pursuit of modern never-ending romantic love reduces such a potent emotion into just another wasteful human indulgence.

But what if we used love differently? What if we used it as a potent force to reach God?

When Love Transcends the Human

The story of Dante and Beatrice provides us with a perfect example of how earthly love can become a pathway to the divine. According to tradition, Dante met Beatrice only twice in his life. First when they were children, then nine years later when she greeted him on the street, after which he "ran away without saying a word." That was essentially the extent of their earthly interaction.

Beatrice married another man and died at twenty-four. Yet she served as an inspiration to Dante for the rest of his life. This is most apparent in the Divine Comedy, where Beatrice leads the pilgrim into heaven, her character serving as a metaphor for divine love and spiritual guidance.

Throughout his journey in the book, Dante is propelled forward by his longing to see Beatrice. This longing is the very engine of his pilgrimage through the realms of the afterlife. At the outset, Dante the pilgrim is told by Virgil that he must descend into the cold darkness of the Inferno, not as an end in itself, but as a necessary journey to ascend and ultimately behold Beatrice. The hope of reunion with Beatrice is what gives Dante the strength to endure the horrors of hell and the trials of purgatory. As he climbs the arduous slopes of Mount Purgatory, it is the anticipation of meeting Beatrice at the summit that keeps him moving forward. Again and again, it is the desire to see Beatrice that motivates Dante to continue his journey when it seems most difficult.

Dante's love for Beatrice was distinctively chivalric in character: "morally elevating, passionate, disciplined, and transcendent." By the end of the Divine Comedy, "Dante's love for Beatrice transcends mortal or courtly love, evolving into a divine and transcendent form. Beatrice becomes a symbol of salvation and divine guidance". The crucial point is that their lack of contact created this symbolic power. Had they lived as husband and wife, arguing over who will do the dishes tonight, she could never have served as his guide through Paradise.

This theme of transforming earthly love into spiritual aspiration finds a powerful parallel in the Indian tradition. According to legends, Kalidasa, one of India’s greatest poets and playwrights, began life as a simple and uneducated man. He got somehow married to a brilliant Princess Vidyottama who mistakenly thought that he could even surpass her in knowledge. But after the wedding, the truth emerged: Kalidasa was illiterate and incapable of intellectual discourse. Furious and humiliated, Vidyottama rejected him, mocking his ignorance and, in some versions, banishing him from her presence until he had gained true knowledge.

Heartbroken and ashamed, Kalidasa turned to the divine for solace. Seeking the goddess Kali, he prayed fervently for wisdom and redemption. Moved by his sincerity, Kali bestowed upon him a divine blessing: granting him extraordinary intellect, eloquence, and poetic genius. The once-ignorant man was transformed into a scholar and poet of unparalleled talent, forever known as "Kalidasa," the servant of Kali.

Kalidasa’s story beautifully illustrates how the pain of unfulfilled longing can ignite a profound spiritual awakening. The love and validation he sought from Vidyottama, denied and withdrawn, became the very fuel that propelled him toward divine grace.

Similarly, Meera's love for Krishna represents another supreme example of how romantic longing transforms into divine devotion. Born into a Rajput royal family in 1498, Meera developed an intense love for Lord Krishna from childhood. In her case, she was spared the tragedy of union with one’s beloved, as happens with us less fortunate ones. This distance, this impossibility of earthly union, allowed her love to transform into something transcendent.

The True Purpose of Love

What emerges from these examples is a profound truth about the nature of love that our culture has forgotten. Love, in its highest form, is not meant to be satisfied through human relationships but rather used as a force to reach the divine.

In the Platonic understanding, love begins with physical attraction but "transcends gradually to love for Supreme Beauty." This concept of Divine Eros became what we call platonic love. "With genuine platonic love, the beautiful or lovely other person inspires the mind and the soul and directs one's attention to spiritual things."

The examples of Majnu and Laila, Dante and Beatrice, and Meera and Krishna all demonstrate the same principle: love reaches its highest expression not through possession and consummation, but through eternal longing that points beyond the human toward the divine. The distance, the impossibility, the incompleteness, these are not obstacles to love but rather its very essence.

All you need is love, indeed. But not the kind that settles into domestic comfort. The kind that burns with eternal longing, that transforms the lover into a seeker of the divine, that uses the human beloved as a stepping stone toward God. This is platonic love in its truest sense, not the absence of passion, but passion purified and directed toward its ultimate object: the Divine Beloved who alone can satisfy the soul's infinite hunger for love.

1. What’s the Matter with India?

Nicholas Decker (Homo Economicus)

The article presents a damning case: India's crippled judicial system is bleeding the economy dry to the tune of 10% of GDP annually. At the heart of the crisis lies chronic underinvestment - India spends just 0.1% of GDP on its courts resulting in a weak judiciary. This underfunding creates a vicious cycle: at least 50 million pending cases clog the system, forcing businesses into inefficient family-run models (like 100% of Mumbai textile firms studied) and paralysing hiring decisions (some labor cases even take 20+ years). The proof is staggering - when researchers provided basic management training, firms saw 17% profit jumps they couldn't achieve alone because owners feared court disputes. With case backlogs now requiring 324 years to clear at current rates, India's path to economic modernisation hinges on one unavoidable fix: either invest in courts or keep paying the world's costliest dysfunction tax.

2. The Impossible Museum: How India's Most 'BIMARU' State Built Its Most Advanced Cultural Institution

Abhishek Kumar (Swarajya)

Against all odds and decades of "BIMARU" stereotypes, Bihar has quietly constructed one of India’s most groundbreaking cultural institutions: the Bihar Museum. Designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Fumihiko Maki, this 17.5-acre marvel blends cutting-edge sustainability (53% energy savings, GRIHA 5-star rating) with awe-inspiring artifacts like the 2,300-year-old Didarganj Yakshi. But the real story isn’t just about exhibits, it’s about bureaucratic audacity. When critics questioned spending ₹500 crore on a museum in a "backward" state, IAS officer Anjani Kumar Singh fought PILs and rallied teams to create experiential galleries (from 400,000 BC stone tools to Subodh Gupta installations) that now draw comparisons to London and New York. Read Part 1 of the detailed story here

3. India’s Western Front Problem

Aparna Pande, Vinay Kaura (The National Interest)

As India and Pakistan’s latest clash dominates headlines, security experts Aparna Pande and Vinay Kaura issue a stark warning: fixating on Pakistan plays directly into China’s long game. While border skirmishes with Pakistan stir nationalist fervor, they divert attention and military resources from the far graver challenge—China’s encirclement strategy via ports (Gwadar, Hambantota), alliances (Russia, Nepal), and economic coercion. The authors reveal how this myopia has strategic costs: every S-400 missile aimed west is one unavailable for northern borders; every diplomatic crisis with Pakistan delays India’s rise as a global power. With U.S. support under Trump growing transactional and Russia tilting toward Beijing, India faces a stark choice: remain trapped in subcontinental rivalries or break free to shape the Indo-Pacific order. Read here

4. How China co-opted the green movement

Joel Kotkin (UnHerd)

Joel Kotkin argues that China has skillfully co-opted the global green movement to advance its own economic and geopolitical interests, while Western nations, particularly the US, bear the brunt of economic sacrifice. Over the past decade, green activism has drawn billions from donors with ties to China, including funding to American universities and influential NGOs. California epitomises this dynamic, engaging deeply with China on climate initiatives while suffering deindustrialization and higher energy prices. Despite its promises, China continues to expand coal production, responsible for over 30% of global emissions. Meanwhile, Western green policies increasingly enrich China’s solar, EV, and rare earth industries, even as living standards in the West decline. But Kotkin ends on a hopeful note, pointing to growing recognition, even on the political Left, of the need for economic resilience and a renewed focus on domestic industry, potentially shifting the balance of power back to the West. Read here

5. Postliberalism’s Reluctant Godfather

Nathan Pinkoski (Compact Magazine)

Alasdair MacIntyre (1929-2025), probably the most important philosopher of the second half of the 20th Century, died this week at 95. His groundbreaking book After Virtue revealed a shocking truth: modern society has lost the ability to have real moral debates. Like people trying to play chess without knowing the rules, we throw around words like "rights" and "justice" without agreeing what they mean. A former Marxist who later turned to Aristotle and Catholicism, MacIntyre showed how liberalism's focus on individual choice left us morally empty - explaining everything from today's culture wars to why political arguments go nowhere. Though ignored by mainstream academia, his ideas secretly influenced both progressive critics of capitalism and the rising "postliberal" right. His solution - rebuilding small communities where people can rediscover shared values - remains as radical today as when he first proposed it. Read here

6. Cultural Nihilism and the Rise of The Grifter

Jarrett Moore (YouTube)

This one-hour long video presents a critique of the current entertainment landscape, arguing that the overwhelming focus on metrics like views, engagement, and profitability, driven by algorithms and corporate sponsorship, has diminished artistic value and led to a decline in content quality. It contends that this environment, symbolised by creators like Mr. Beast prioritising optimal YouTube performance over traditional artistic concerns, fosters cultural stagnation by favouring formulaic, user-friendly content and hindering the development of new talent, often replaced by personalities skilled primarily in marketing and leveraging attention. However, the video ultimately posits a hopeful counterpoint, asserting that great art is still being created, potentially more than ever, existing outside the mainstream algorithms, and suggests that individuals can find and support this meaningful work by actively seeking it out (which you are doing right now), supporting authentic artistic creation outside the mainstream. Watch here

7. American life was better in the 50s

Sebastian Jensen

Sebastian Jensen's analysis cuts through the usual nostalgia-versus-progress debate by revealing an uncomfortable truth: while today's Americans enjoy higher incomes (median household wealth up 25% since 1970, adjusted for transfers) and better technology, we've paid for it with our social fabric. The article's unique insight lies in exposing how modern systems incentivise empty competition - college applications have become 300% more competitive since 1990, dating pools have shrunk 40% due to demographic shifts, and education costs 10x more while delivering diminishing returns. Most strikingly, Jensen shows these aren't just "kids these days" complaints: the data proves the middle class now works harder for less social mobility (upward mobility has dropped 15% since 1980), while the supposed winners face endless credentialing races. The American experience suggests no nation gets rich without paying a social price, but does it also have to be the India story? I don’t know.

sebjenseb

American life was better in the 50s

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a year ago · 65 likes · 19 comments · Sebastian Jensen

8. Rub It In

Kerwin (Steam Calliope Scherzos)

In the last week’s episode of Beyond the Feed, I mentioned Kerwin’s article in which he highlighted the need for a “infrastructure of reception” for Right-Wing art. Kerwin has a follow-up on that piece, he reveals how art's political meaning isn't fixed at creation but shaped by who interprets it and who has the cultural power to make those interpretations stick. The article traces how feminist audiences transformed a 1943 Westinghouse morale poster into a feminist icon, how modern readers project Reformation critiques onto Chaucer's medieval tales, and how right-wing meme culture hijacked American Psycho's anti-capitalist satire. The key insight? Without an "infrastructure of reception", critics, journals, and communities to champion certain readings, even works with reactionary themes (like Ruben Östlund's Force Majeure) can't solidify as "right-wing art." Case in point: When right-wingers briefly embraced Joker, Hollywood scrambled to neuter its appeal with a woke sequel. The lesson? Cultural influence isn't about creating "right-wing art", it's about building the institutions that can declare it so.

Steam Calliope Scherzos

Rub It In

I. Last week’s post on the concept of “right-wing art” turned out to be pretty successful, and I thank everyone for reading and sharing it. Among such readers/sharers was the blogger Curtis Yarvin, whose recent debate with a Harvard professor is now available…

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a year ago · 8 likes · 1 comment · Kerwin