The Char Dham conflict in Uttarakhand exposes a deep contradiction within contemporary Hindutva: a BJP-led “developmental Hinduism” that fuses neoliberal infrastructure, militarized nationalism, and centralized temple governance is destroying the sacred-ecological fabric it claims to protect. The 2016 Char Dham all-weather highway and the 2019 (later repealed) Devasthanam Management Act have sought to convert the fragile, divine Himalayan shrines of Yamunotri, Gangotri, Kedarnath, and Badrinath into a securitized tourism-military corridor. In response, hereditary priests, ascetics, and local communities have mobilised a powerful resistance, framing the mountains and rivers as the living body of Shiva rather than exploitable resources. Drawing on Guattari’s three ecologies, their protests defend an embodied, relational sacred ecology against the state’s homogenizing, extractive logic. Far from a mere environmental dispute, this struggle reveals Hindutva’s betrayal of plural, place-based Hinduism and challenges the secular-pluralist foundations of the Indian republic.
The Sovereign Insider: A Philosophical Indictment of Corporate Immunity in India — An Open Letter to Ajay Piramal
This open letter to Mr. Ajay Piramal is a philosophical indictment of the structural immunity enjoyed by India’s most privileged corporate actors, written from the vantage point of the outsider — the figure who stands scorched at the margins while power glides in the cool interior of impunity. Drawing on Camus, Kafka, Agamben, Śūdraka, and Brecht, the letter argues that the DHFL debacle and a string of insider-trading controversies reveal not isolated breaches but a systemic architecture in which political patronage, regulatory indulgence, and judicial hesitation combine to create a sovereign exception for the well-connected. Through satire, allegory, and critical theory, the narrative exposes how legality becomes porous, accountability becomes theatrical, and “honour” becomes a performative mask concealing a chaosophic, irrationally rational logic of sanctioned violence. The letter positions Piramal not merely as an individual accused of impropriety but as a symptom of a deeper political–economic disorder in which capital transcends consequence while ordinary depositors bear the existential weight of abandonment. Ultimately, it is a citizen’s dispatch from the perimeter of power — a call to recognise how India’s corporate–political nexus manufactures insiders and outsiders with sunlit inevitability.
Piramal Pharma’s QuikKool and the Biopolitics of Relief
This essay is a hybrid inquiry into pain, pharmacology, and structural violence, using Piramal Pharma’s QuikKool oral gel as both a clinical artefact and a political metaphor. Grounded in the lived experience of the author as a DHFL victim—one of the statistically erased bodies in India’s ongoing financial governance crisis—the text follows how stress-induced oral ulcers become sites of embodied vulnerability. These wounds, though clinically minor, reveal a deeper narrative: that the body becomes an archive where systemic injustice is recorded in mucosal scar tissue, where governance is felt not only in courts and bureaucracies but also in nerves, blood vessels, and salivary chemistry. A rupture in the narrative—a pharmacological table—interrupts the personal account, echoing what D. S. Kothari identifies as the reductionist violence of modern medicine. Clinical data intrudes into lived reality, forcing suffering to format itself into measurable toxicities, biochemical pathways, and treatable symptoms. The essay draws on Foucault, Sontag, Illich, Nandy, and Kothari to frame the ulcer as a biopolitical wound, the gel as an instrument of structural anesthesia, and the body as a ledger of financial erasure. Relief appears not as a neutral good but as a technique of governance: a way of rendering pain clinically legible while erasing its political origins. By interweaving pharmacology, political economy, narrative testimony, and philosophical critique, the essay argues that modern medicine—especially in its commercial OTC form—participates in a wider regime of numbing. Piramal’s non-pharmacological OTC products, when examined alongside QuikKool, reveal how toxic capitalism operates even through substances marketed as harmless. The essay ends by proposing a radical ethical stance: that healing must be understood as a political act, and relief must be interrogated as a form of governance.
DHFL Scam and the Piramal Empire: Chaosophies of the Share Market
This analysis examines the Piramal Group’s post-DHFL restructuring across Finance, Pharma, and Realty, situating it alongside the DHFL insolvency to reveal a systemic logic of corporate immunity in India. Through demergers, reverse mergers, and strategic rebrandings, the group consolidated promoter control, quarantined legacy risks, and leveraged regulatory timing while dispersing accountability. Piramal Finance Ltd.’s premium listing, despite DHFL-linked liabilities and opaque asset valuations, exemplifies how market narratives, algorithmic momentum, and legal finality privilege investor perception over depositor justice. Piramal Pharma’s operational stress contrasts with narrative-driven valuation, highlighting structural fragility masked by forward-looking communications. The study demonstrates that restructuring has evolved into a mechanism of reputational cleansing and social erasure, wherein financial architecture advances faster than justice, and ethical accountability is systematically sidelined. Moreover, the chaosophy of the share market—its inherent unpredictability, narrative-driven volatility, and speculative feedback loops—renders conventional risk assessment almost performative, showing how perception, hype, and algorithmic herding often dictate market outcomes more than fundamentals or depositor rights.
SLAPPocalypse Now: When Corporate Fragility Meets the DPDP Act — A Sarcastic Missive to Ajay Piramal (Featuring A Case Against OBMA)
This satirical legal draft lampoons the alleged use of SLAPP suits by Ajay Piramal’s legal team, mocking their attempts to file defamation and DPDP-based complaints against the author and OBMA despite the obvious legal incoherence of such actions. Through exaggerated legal language, ironic self-deprecation, and political commentary, it portrays the Respondents as targets of authoritarian overreach while highlighting how the DPDP Act is being misapplied to suppress dissent. The document parodies courtroom procedure, inflates accusations to absurd extremes, and ultimately undercuts its own premise by noting that the DPDP Act cannot even be used for defamation—exposing the strategic misuse of lawfare against activists and critics.
The Atmanirbhar Paradox: “Boycott China” for Citizens, Shanghai Sourcing for Piramal
This letter interrogates the glaring contradiction between the BJP-led Indian government’s public calls for boycotting Chinese goods and Piramal Pharma’s own officially listed Shanghai “Sourcing Office,” highlighting how nationalist rhetoric is imposed on ordinary citizens while crony conglomerates quietly expand global supply chains. Situating Ajay Piramal within a wider system of ruling-party proximity—ranging from electoral bonds and PM-CARES contributions to corporate-state entanglements—the letter questions how the BJP’s notion of “anti-nationalism” conveniently excludes large corporations even when their actions allegedly harm Indian retirees (as in the DHFL resolution) or depend heavily on China despite territorial tensions. It argues that nationalism has become a burdensome commodity forced upon the masses while exempting favoured corporates who simultaneously benefit from state patronage and globalized profit structures. Ultimately, it challenges the moral and political legitimacy of this selective patriotism and demands transparency regarding Piramal Pharma’s China-linked operations amid government-led narratives of “Atmanirbhar Bharat.”
The Reverse Merger Republic: Piramal Finance, DHFL, and the Architecture of Cunning Capitalism
This article examines the DHFL resolution and Piramal Group’s subsequent restructuring as a paradigmatic case of contemporary financial consolidation in India, tracing how regulatory design, corporate strategy, and state-enabled mechanisms converged to produce an outcome that is legally final yet institutionally opaque. It analyses the RBI’s supervisory–administrative dual role, the CoC’s opacity, the judiciary’s tendency toward implied finality, and the structural conflicts that limited independent scrutiny during the insolvency process. The paper then situates Piramal’s rare reverse merger—where the listed parent (PEL) was absorbed into its regulated lending subsidiary (PFL)—as a decisive act executed amidst pending appeals, effectively embedding DHFL-acquired assets inside a newly listed NBFC-ICC. The listing-by-merger, driven by upper-layer regulatory requirements, market optics, and corporate consolidation goals, is shown to function not merely as compliance but as a strategic reorganisation that consolidates control, complicates retrospective accountability, and reconfigures contested assets into an ostensibly neutral balance sheet. By synthesising legal, regulatory, financial and political-economy perspectives, the article argues that the Piramal–DHFL arc reveals a wider architecture of contemporary consolidation—one in which regulatory frameworks, capital markets, and corporate power align to enable irreversible restructurings under conditions of weakened transparency and constrained avenues for redress.
The Hidden Chemistry of Piramal Pharma’s “Tri-Activ”: A DHFL Victim Writes to Ajay Piramal
This letter addresses Piramal Pharma’s Tri-Activ line of disinfectants, critically examining the disparity between the products’ marketed claims of “triple protection” and the documented human health and ecological risks posed by their chemical constituents, notably ethanol and benzalkonium chloride (BAC). Written from the perspective of a survivor of systemic corporate harm, it combines lived experience with peer-reviewed evidence to demand transparency, full disclosure of toxicological and environmental data, and remedial measures including independent environmental monitoring, responsible labeling, and extended producer responsibility initiatives. Beyond consumer safety, the letter interrogates regulatory ambiguities, corporate ethics, and the broader social and ecological consequences of commodified cleanliness, framing the correspondence as a civic appeal for accountability and moral stewardship in the pharmaco-industrial sector.
The Fallen Sceptre(s) Of Your Justice: Dirty My-Self and Piramal Pharma’s Tri-Activ
“The Fallen Sceptre(s) of Your Justice: A Pseudo/Quasi-Pharmaco-Philosophical Reflection on Piramal Pharma’s Tri-Activ — and Other Things Otherwise” is an ecosophical and deconstructive meditation on the spectral transformation of power—from gods to kings to states to corporations—through the pharmaco-industrial complex. Anchored in the case of Piramal Pharma’s Tri-Activ disinfectant products, the piece entwines lyrical confession, ecological critique, and self-reflexive philosophical inquiry to expose how the rhetoric of purity and hygiene conceals necropolitical violence and ecological toxicity. Blurring boundaries between body and world, sickness and system, the text stages the body as a site of contamination, resistance, and remembrance, where care becomes commodified and justice spectral. Through interlacing idioms of Tagore, Derrida, and anarchist refusal, it calls for reclaiming the fallen sceptre of justice from algorithmic kings and chemical prophets—toward an ethics of vulnerability, ecological interdependence, and collective redemption.
On Systemic Erasure: From Electoral Rolls to the DHFL Resolution Process: A Letter to Ajay Piramal
This letter addresses the systemic erasure at the heart of both contemporary electoral disenfranchisement and the DHFL Corporate Insolvency Resolution Process, arguing that what appears as legal and administrative procedure is in fact a coordinated state–corporate apparatus of dispossession. Just as voters are made to vanish through calibrated electoral roll manipulation and bureaucratized opacity, depositors were erased from the DHFL resolution through committee intermediation, controlled documentation, engineered CoC voting, judicial sanction, and regulatory abdication. The RTI regime—designed as a transparency safeguard—functioned instead as a ritual of deferral, where responsibility was endlessly transferred across institutions to ensure that accountability remained structurally unreachable. The result is the same in both domains: those who constitute the basis of legitimacy—citizens as voters and as depositors—are stripped of presence, agency, and voice. This is a crisis not of procedure but of democratic integrity, where legality is weaponized to launder injustice and the polity is exhausted into silence. The letter refuses that silence.
Once in a Blue Moon Academia 