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.
Category Archives: Art of Resistance
Following the dictum “Cultural revolution must precede political revolution”, we are striving to create the scope for an alternative cultural space, which can offer resistance to all forms of coercion, and can also serve as a medium for conducting non-violent, horizontal dialogical exchanges.
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 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.
Will to Hide: Vote Theft, DHFL Scam, and the Silencing of RTI in BJP-ruled India (Video)
In this video of OBMA, we trace how truth in contemporary India is not hidden in darkness, but blinded by the illegitimate, coercive glare of power itself. From the quiet theft of votes through digital deletions and duplicated identities, to the DHFL scam that turned public funds into private fortunes, to the slow asphyxiation of the Right to Information (RTI)— the same pattern of concealment runs through it all. This is not ignorance, but design: the rule of the “Golden Disc,” where polished words like development and national interest mask the disappearance of citizens, accountability, and justice. We ask: when every institution is scripted to glorify the untruth, who will unveil the face of truth?
Arrest Me or Erase Me — But Your Corporate Empire Cannot Silence Me: A Letter to Ajay Piramal
This satirical polemic addresses Ajay Piramal and the wider nexus of the BJP-led state and crony corporates (notably Adani-Ambani), charging them with using legal, political, and extra-legal means to silence dissent. Framed as two provocative requests, the author first volunteers to be arrested and prosecuted for “defamation” — demanding the spectacle of litigation as a public test of whether asking questions about the DHFL debacle is now a punishable offense. The letter catalogs named victims of legal harassment, violence, and suspicious deaths (journalists, RTI activists, and dissenting civil-society actors), criticizes SLAPP-style tactics attributed to corporate counsel (DSK Legal), and recalls Vijay Mallya’s critique of Indian prisons to underline the contested nature of incarceration. Second, in darker satirical mode, the author offers to be “erased” by the state-corporate apparatus to expose the climate in which inconvenient lives are neutralized, invoking calls previously made for legalizing active euthanasia as a political statement about living under a failing “welfare” state. The piece concludes by situating the critique within Mumbai’s cultural imagery — quoting “Yeh Hai Bombay Meri Jaan” — and appends a list of institutional and international recipients.
Affidavit And Public Legal Representation In Opposition To The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) Of Electoral Rolls, 2025
This affidavit opposes the 2025 Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls as an unconstitutional and discriminatory exercise that extends the exclusionary logic of the NRC–CAA–NPR regime. Framed as an administrative update, the SIR reproduces a politics of fear, surveillance, communal polarization and bureaucratic coercion—already driving marginalized citizens to despair and suicide. It exposes the State’s transformation of citizenship from birthright to conditional privilege, mediated by data and documents. Against this, the affidavit invokes planetary citizenship—an ethical-ecological vision affirming belonging beyond paper, religion, nation, or algorithm.
Why Indian Political Parties Are Ecologically Indifferent
This article examines the deep-rooted ecological indifference of Indian political parties across the ideological spectrum. Despite unprecedented environmental degradation—from the destruction of forests in Hasdeo and Nicobar to toxic urban air and vanishing rivers—ecology remains absent from India’s political grammar. The essay argues that this neglect is not accidental but structural: born of a development myth that equates progress with extraction and nationalism with industrial expansion. In a corporatized democracy, parties serve capital before climate, leaving the earth unrepresented in the republic’s moral imagination.
Why India Needs a No Kings Movement: From Fascist Corporatocracy to Partyless Democracy
This essay traces the global and Indian convergences of authoritarian populism, corporate capture, and digital surveillance through the metaphor of kingship. Beginning with the “No Kings” movement in the U.S., it reinterprets democracy as an anti-monarchical ethic — a practice of shared sovereignty rather than submission to personality cults. Through Modi’s curated spectacle of power, the text exposes India’s descent into corporatocracy, pseudology, and ecological tyranny. It ultimately envisions a “partyless democracy” rooted in decentralization, mutual care, and invisible leadership — a republic without kings, parties, or masters.
“Who’s Got the Paper? I’ve Got the Match”: Osibisa and the Politics of Documentation
This paper offers an interpretive and historical reading of Osibisa’s 1970s Afro-rock track Who’s Got the Paper? as a sonic meditation on the politics of documentation, identity, and resistance. Beneath its surface as a jubilant “party anthem,” the song encodes a global genealogy of documentary surveillance—from colonial pass laws and apartheid bureaucracies to postcolonial citizenship registers and digital data regimes. The refrain’s dialectical call and response—“Who’s got the paper?” / “I’ve got the match”—stage an encounter between state surveillance and insurgent agency, between the archive’s demand for verification and the people’s capacity for ignition. Combining lyrical analysis with postcolonial, Foucauldian, and musicological frameworks, the paper interprets sound as a mode of political imagination that exceeds textual control. Extending this argument to the Indian context, it situates the song’s critique within contemporary regimes of legibility exemplified by the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), National Register of Citizens (NRC), National Population Register (NPR), the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, and the Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDPA)—each reiterating the colonial “paper logic” of inclusion through exclusion. Drawing upon Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality, James C. Scott’s notion of legibility, Giorgio Agamben’s “state of exception,” and Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics, the essay argues that Who’s Got the Paper? performs the political imagination of music as resistance—where rhythm becomes revolt and dance becomes dissent. Through the contrapuntal readings of Edward Said, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and Frantz Fanon, Osibisa’s sound emerges as a postcolonial act of re-signification: transmuting the colonizer’s documentary order into an emancipatory rhythm of decolonial speech.
Nixit and the Pharmaco-Capitalist Soul: Hauntings Under Piramal Pharma
This essay interrogates Nixit—a nicotine lozenge produced by Piramal Pharma—as an artifact of contemporary bio-political control. By examining its chemical composition, rhetoric of health, and psychopolitical subtext, the paper situates Nixit within the neoliberal economy of purification, where addiction is not eliminated but reformatted for consumption. Drawing on Freud’s psychoanalysis and Foucault’s biopolitics, alongside the cinematic allegory of Anurag Kashyap’s No Smoking (2007), the article reveals how the pharmaco-industrial complex transforms rebellion into obedience, recoding the smoker’s desire into a commodified act of self-regulation. Incorporating Nietzsche’s genealogy of internalized violence and Derrida’s notion of hauntology, it further argues that the lozenge embodies the spectral persistence of repression under the guise of care. In the age of “managed freedom,” even the act of quitting becomes a performance of compliance—sweetened, packaged, and sold as virtue.
Once in a Blue Moon Academia 