Once in a Blue Moon Academia (OBMA), a self-funded non-profit platform since 2021, enacts academic activism across financial collapse (DHFL and crony-capitalist markets), ecological catastrophe, neoliberal political economy, far-right authoritarianism, institutionalized education, proprietary knowledge, and epistemic monism, expanding into an interconnected praxis of Ecotopians of Alternity against climate denial and green-capitalist delay; Seize Dalal Street and Moneyless Commons against stock-market mystification and the sorcery of money; Partyless Communes, Democratic (Un)Freedom, and Bhagat Singh’s Socialist India against electoral autocracy and domesticated radicalism; না-ইস্কুল / Nice School, Counter-Academiocracy, and Copyleft Writers’ Forum against banking-model schooling, metricized universities, and enclosed authorship; and Anekānta and Derozio and Young Bengal for many-sided knowing and sceptical, anti-foundational pedagogy—together prefiguring commons, decentralization, and bahujana sukhaya, bahujanahitaya ca rather than mere reform.
THE ART OF RESISTANCE
Posted on: 18/09/2021 (IST 11: 15 hrs) Updated on: 22/09/2o23 (GMT 13.32 hrs) Posted On 19th September, 2021 DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.27687.68002 License: CC BY 4.0 DEBAPRASAD BANDYOPADHYAY AKHAR BANDYOPADHYAY “Suffering comes from three quarters: from our own body, which is destined to decay and dissolution, and cannot even dispense with anxiety and pain as danger-signals; fromContinue reading “THE ART OF RESISTANCE”
CONVERGENCE TO PRAXIS: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL ON SUFFERINGS: OBJECTIVES AND DESCRIPTION
This journal tries to demolish the administrative boundaries of academic disciplinary technology by amalgamating all the so-called “subjects” by condemning the objectification, subjectification and subjection. It strives to reach the vanishing point of theory and praxis. Thus, instead of so-called “inter-disciplinary studies”, it emphasizes on the convergence of earthian knowledges and praxiologies. The journal attemptsContinue reading “CONVERGENCE TO PRAXIS: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL ON SUFFERINGS: OBJECTIVES AND DESCRIPTION”
“False”(?!) allegations on the collusion among the BJP, Dawood-Mirchi and the DHFL: A Letter to the BJP President
The article refutes allegations of collusion between the BJP, Dawood Ibrahim, Iqbal Mirchi, and DHFL, claiming they are politically motivated and intended to tarnish the BJP’s image. It argues that these accusations are unfounded and part of a smear campaign. The author defends the BJP, suggesting that the party has no links to these figures or the alleged financial scandal.
Once in a Blue Moon Academia (OBMA): MOA
1. Name of the CommunityThe name of the Society shall be “Once In A Blue Moon Academia”, hereinafter referred to as “OBMA.” 2. Objects of the Society 2.1.To promote and protect human and animal rights in all parts of the world; to study and disseminate knowledge on international human rights issues and the convergences ofContinue reading “Once in a Blue Moon Academia (OBMA): MOA”
The Curious Case of 900 Amendments: India’s GST Grift
This essay argues that India’s Goods and Services Tax (GST) has ceased to be a tax imposed by the authority of law under Article 265 and has become an administered price set by the executive—an extraction the Leader of Opposition has named, with justification, Gabbar Singh Tax. Amended some nine hundred times by notification, its operative text is no longer reconstructible by the taxpayer; its constitutional forum has not met for the better part of a year; its appellate tribunal was withheld for eight years; and its retrospective amendments are validated after the fact. The States surrendered independent taxing power for a Council whose recommendations the Supreme Court has held are not binding, a compensation guarantee inverted into a debt of the States, and a simplicity that collapsed under continuous executive rewriting. Rate changes travel by notification, Money Bill, or retrospective deeming, never requiring an elected house to defend a particular decision. The schedule is arbitrary: its differentiations answer to no published governing rule. The same method that hollowed the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code through more than a hundred and twenty regulatory amendments and six statutes has been applied, at larger scale, to the GST. The levy is regressive, timed to electoral calendars, and accompanied by no contemporaneous statement of reasons. What was presented as a unified national tax has become a continuous, unaccountable repricing of ordinary consumption. The deepest charge is that the power to tax, reclassify, and declare that the reclassification was always the law has passed into a vacancy where reasons need not be given. The Chair that could have convened the forum, tabled the reasons, and unlocked the constitutional door has not done so. The demand is that it demit the office.
The Corridors of India’s “Shadow” Economy
India’s state lottery retains roughly 60 paise of every rupee staked while the satta it criminalises retains roughly 10. This inversion organises an analysis of interlocking systems—satta, sports betting, hawala, mandoli and chit funds, kitty parties, state lotteries, tin patti, flexi and surge fares, the copycat economy, sex work as an unorganised sector, and professional over-billing with police and party tolabaaji—as a single, class-differentiated apparatus of extraction. The heaviest take falls on the precariat; elite variants run at low margins under impunity. The systems interlock with organised crime, protection rents and political finance inside an Iron Triangle. “Legality as protection” is a fiction: the legal lottery out-extracts its outlawed rival, and the 2025 ban on online money games prohibits competitors while state draws continue. Official statistics do not merely miss these flows; the line between “economy” and “shadow” is drawn by measurement authority as a constitutive exclusion. The same systems are at once rational responses to the failures of formal finance and instruments of capitalist consolidation. Staging a dialogue between Pigou and Illich, the paper shows that each fails alone and synthesises them as accountable autonomy: decriminalise autonomous community systems that meet real needs, prosecute specific harms rather than whole systems, and attack the desperation that drives participation. Three extensions sharpen the thesis: the ticket tout’s rent has been subsumed by flexi fares and surge pricing that launder the identical scarcity premium into the national accounts as growth; the copy economy, read through Plato’s cave, separates a knowledge commons from counterfeit predation; and the homemaker’s kitchen, read through Illich, Engels and Marx, shows that the uncounted can still be subsumed—the kitchen is free not when it is unpaid, but when it is unprivatised. India’s extraction economy is offered as a test case for theories of peripheral capitalism, institutional predation and the political economy of knowledge production.
Chaosophy of the Stock Exchange: Seize Dalal Street!
India’s equity indices fell 13–15% in the first nine months of 2026 while official projections claimed growth above 7%, yet both figures emerge from the same statistical and political apparatus the essay refuses to treat as neutral: the growth number is an advance estimate that aggregates value-added already mixing surplus extraction, ecological drawdown and financial intermediation, while the index fall is a price of claims whose relation to any underlying surplus remains unproven. The BSE and NSE are read as a chaosophic machine (Guattari) that metabolises volatility, asymmetry and rupture as its engine of appropriation rather than suffering them as pathology; the method is tested against Indian evidence that includes the 2026 foreign-capital flight, SEBI’s finding that 91% of individual derivatives traders lost a net ₹1.06 lakh crore in FY25, the Jane Street interim order, the NSE co-location settlement of ₹1,491.21 crore weeks before its ₹22,562 crore offer-for-sale IPO, the Himalayan yogi’s documented influence on the NSE chief executive, and the longer ledger of Mehta, Parekh, Satyam and DHFL. Into this frame the essay inserts the distinction between socially necessary labour (performed for self, family, neighbours, the old and the very young) and surplus labour (performed for the capitalist), arguing that a share is a price without a value—a title to a slice of surplus, not a slice of the factory—and that every ΔM on the ticker is distributed surplus, revaluation, transfer or toll; when claims outgrow what s/v can carry, they are devalued and households pay. Money is treated as a null signifier that equates the unequal by the act of exchange. The argument concludes that the condition will not overturn itself: regulation arrives after rupture and becomes the terrain of the next extraction, the exposed class is structurally enrolled as the extractable base, and only a sustained, partyless, non-violent Seize Dalal Street movement—organised across the rails of speed, expiry design, insolvency priority, political funding and the null signifier itself—can impose the finality the exchange has so far deferred.
Laughter in the Time of Saffron Fascism
This article examines post-2014 Indian political satire—stand-up comedy, digital satire, and editorial cartoons—through the classical Indian aesthetic framework of the Nāṭyaśāstra (the ancient Treatise on Dramaturgy). It draws on Abhinavagupta’s theory of sādhāraṇīkaraṇa (the universalisation of emotion) and K.C. Bhattacharyya’s elevation of bībhatsa (the odious, or disgust) as the supreme aesthetic sentiment (mahā-rasa). The argument is that under the BJP-RSS regime the negative sentiments no longer pass through an aesthetic frame: fear (bhayānaka) circulates as institutionalised dread through laws such as the UAPA, rebranded sedition provisions, raids, detentions, police repression, and digital regulations, while disgust (bībhatsa) appears as a sovereign “Will to Hide”—a pathological refusal of transparency over crony finance, electoral funding, and public accountability. Against this deadlock, satirists deploy a triad of playful wonder (kautuka), laughter (hāsya), and implied or ironic meaning (vyāṅga) as forms of subversive resistance. Tracing the work of comedians from the 2015 AIB Roast through Kunal Kamra, Munawar Faruqui, Vir Das, and others, and of cartoonists such as Rachita Taneja, Satish Acharya, Manjul, and G. Bala, the article shows that official reprisals—FIRs, venue attacks, contempt proceedings, and platform blocks—confirm rather than defeat the force of laughter. Satire universalises disgust and converts the sensitive spectator from a paralysed witness into an active resistor. The claim is not that laughter ends power, but that power which cannot contain laughter has already lost its claim to solemnity.
Rahul and Priyanka: Art of Resistance Against Sangh Parivar
This essay examines the RaGa–PriGa collective-oppositional praxis as a disciplined form of non-violent militancy against the BJP–RSS project of crony Brahmanical Hindutva. Drawing on Vipassanā (Goenka lineage), Aikido and Brazilian jiu-jitsu, Tagorean and Gandhian satyagraha, and Ambedkarite constitutional argument, it reads the decade 2015–2026 as the public application of a single grammar: the refusal to return force, the exposure of concealed holds, and the constructive rebuilding of an alternative order. The method is tracked from private discipline to embodied resistance (Hathras, Sitapur, Delhi 2026), organisational logistics (yatras), forensic disclosure (vote chori, ecological chori), and iconographic counter-politics (Naṭarāja against the sovereign Rāma). The argument is not confessional. It claims only that the record shows a sustained, non-reactive praxis whose strategic aim is the dissolution of manufactured legitimacy rather than the seizure of power for revenge.
Is it “Gen Z” Enough? The Limits of Generational Categories
Generational labels function as a historically specific technology for ordering persons; the classification itself, not the cohorts it names, requires analysis. Drawing on Foucault’s archaeological and genealogical methods, the article traces the grid’s descent through state registration, demography, journalism, marketing and consultancy, showing how it imposes discrete essences on a continuum of births, scales disciplinary seriation to the population, generates looping effects, and recodes structural antagonisms as conflicts between age cohorts. The 2026 Indian mobilisation, branded a “Gen Z” uprising, serves as the principal test case: its composition, demands and alliances exceed any single cohort, demonstrating the non-contemporaneity of the contemporaneous. The Yayati–Babur circuit names the patriarchal mechanism that sustains this reduction. Within the same mobilisation the slogans of the dominant are echoed by the street; the echoing, read through Bhabha’s mimicry and Guha’s prose of counter-insurgency, opens a Third Space in which the national cry is made to carry a demand the apparatus refuses to hear. A parallel episode during Durga Puja in West Bengal—attacks on Left bookstalls resisted by student cadres of comparable age—further shows that shared birth years explain neither the violence nor the defence. The article rejects “mental age” as an alternative scale and proposes instead the plurality of temporalities that run through every subject and every movement.
Adani and the BJP: The Crony Cakravyūha
Between 2014 and 2026 one private citizen, Gautam Adani, came to control major shares of India’s ports, airports, coal, thermal and solar power, transmission, smart meters, city gas, cement, roads, water, defence, data centres, Asia’s largest informal settlement, a national television network and a news agency, while the BJP government and BJP-ruled states cleared his path through one-rupee land at Mundra and Pirpainti, rules rewritten before tenders that delivered coal blocks and all six airports he bid for, agency raids that preceded the Mumbai airport, NDTV and Coastal Energen takeovers, the 2020 farm laws that lifted stock limits after Adani lobbying, public money that arrived when private lenders fled, and foreign contracts that followed the Prime Minister’s tours. The record assembled here — from the Hindenburg and OCCRP exposés cleared by SEBI on a technicality, to the 2024 US bribery indictment that ended in 2026 after an India–US trade deal, a $10 billion pledge and the hiring of President Trump’s lawyer, a $275 million OFAC penalty for Iranian gas, a reported $3.9 billion LIC plan, the Mundra heroin route, the destruction of Hasdeo, Godda, Bhagalpur, the Galilee Basin, the coasts of Kutch and Kerala, the proposed Great Nicobar project, and the files the same formation has kept closed — shows public land, public money, public regulators, public forests and public diplomacy systematically feeding one private balance sheet whose profits return as political power. This is not merely crony capitalism at the margin of a market economy. It is a crony cakravyūha: a closed spiral, built and defended by the BJP, in which every turn makes the next easier and escape harder for everyone caught inside it.
Dissent, Dynamics and Domination: India’s Protest Movements (2014-26)
Between May 2014 and October 2026, India’s BJP-led National Democratic Alliance confronted an almost unbroken sequence of protest and resistance—from the 2015 land-ordinance agitation and the 2020–21 farmers’ siege of Delhi to the 2026 youth-led Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) rising—under conditions of sustained political domination rather than the successful production of consent. This article maps the ecology of that dissent: the movements themselves; a counter-public of non-Godi and crowdfunded media; satirists and stand-up comedians deploying hasya and vyanga against the regime’s bhayanaka and vibhatsya; organic intellectuals of political and civil society; dissenting advocates and judges; and watchdog NGOs. It documents the repertoire of domination deployed against them—imprisonment without trial, preventive detention, financial and regulatory strangulation, blocking, SLAPP litigation, career reprisals, threats, vigilante violence, surveillance, state violence and assassination by non-state actors—and reads the CJP against this longer inheritance through Gramsci’s account of hegemony and organic intellectuals, Partha Chatterjee’s distinction between civil and political society, Habermas’s concept of legitimation crisis, Ranajit Guha’s dominance without hegemony, and Ambedkar’s warning against bhakti in politics. The CJP’s speed and visibility rest on more than a decade of prior investigation, litigation and protest. Its demand for the resignation of named officeholders addresses persons rather than the paradigm or the chair; under a regime that has already closed ordinary channels and made the power to guarantee life the underside of the power to expose marked populations to the sovereign mark, the absorption of a name is the state’s work, not the movement’s. The article treats the CJP as a genuine opening for a new constituency whose unarmed presence has already forced the repressive and ideological apparatuses into public view. The further task is to keep the energy released by that showing from being returned, through the regime’s mechanisms of absorption and attribution, to the chairs that still decide who is to be made live and who is to be marked.
The Street Army: Bajrang Dal
The official Indian record of Bajrang Dal and Sangh Parivar violence does not cohere on its own terms: it counts its dead by the dozen in cow-protection attacks while securing convictions by the handful, files named killers as anonymous mobs of thousands, convicts the gang-rapists of a pregnant woman and then releases them to garlands, and constitutes commissions only to bury their findings. This dossier reads that systematic incoherence as the evidence itself. The Bajrang Dal was manufactured by the RSS in 1984–86 as a deniable youth militia for the Ayodhya campaign; it has since operated, with BJP-supplied licence, as a cadre street-army whose repertoire—gau-raksha lynching, moral policing, anti-Christian violence, processions-as-detonators, and filmed humiliation—runs from the Babri demolition through Kandhamal, Gujarat 2002 (including Naroda Patiya and Bilkis Bano), the post-2014 lynching years (Akhlaq, Pehlu Khan, Tabrez Ansari), Nuh 2023, and Kathua. The same architecture converts authored atrocity into unprosecutable events through non-registration, reclassification, dilution, attrition, and inversion, while routing unemployed young men from shakha to Bajrang Dal, Sri Ram Sene, and Hindu Raksha Dal. In 2026 the machine applied direct state terrorism—mass preventive detention, blackouts, and site denotification—against the non-violent Cockroach Janta Party protest at Jantar Mantar, while a self-identified Hindutva affiliate’s filmed confession of assault received delayed process and restored liberty. The licence is not the absence of a finding; it is the finding. The record is the charge.
An Open Appeal to India’s Security Forces: Stand with Democratic Dissent
On 10 October 2026, as unarmed citizens, students and opposition voices gather at Jantar Mantar in peaceful civil disobedience, the State has assembled more than 40,000 Delhi Police and Central Armed Police Forces personnel, detention centres, facial-recognition cameras and metro closures against them. Once in a Blue Moon Academia appeals to those in uniform, not as adversaries but as fellow citizens, to let conscience precede command, to refuse the police state the last word, and to stand with the constitutional right to dissent.
