Ātmadīpa is a non-school and a praxeo-gogy: not a greener exam-machine but a commons in which a people learns to inhabit a watershed in the polycrisis — lamp and island unto itself, and in the same motion a support to others. Head, hand and heart are taught as one and never ranked; the institution is deschooled. It resists the sale of learning, the capture of the curriculum, and the credential that pretends to be knowing. Its fields are the crafts of home-as-habitat — food, water, shelter, care, dissent, grief — held free at the point of use, federated without a headquarters, open-licensed, unfinished on purpose. Kindle your own lamp. Its only use is to light the road everyone walks.
Category Archives: Ecosophy
OBMA’s initiative “Ecotopians of Alternity” (EOA) responds to the contemporary crises of the natural environment, crises that expose the deepened hyper-separation of human beings from the natural world and/or other-than-human life forms. EOA underscores how the Global South disproportionately bears the burden of a so-called first-world consumerist lifestyle, alongside a debt-ridden developmental paradigm that enslaves minds, bodies, and ecologies. Rather than the term ecology, EOA activists adopt the concept of ecosophy—coined by the Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss—to signify the interrelated and (w)holistic nature of today’s polycrisis, encompassing environmental, social, political, and psychological dimensions. In place of extractivist modernity/coloniality, EOA envisions localized, small-scale, decentralized, low-energy societies—ecological utopias or ecotopias—as the ideals to be cherished and pursued.
Maoists Without Mao: The Misnomer of Indian ‘Maoism’
India’s so-called Naxalite–CPI (Maoist) “insurgency”, declared “effectively finished” around 2026, is called “Maoist” by the state, the press, and the movement itself; this article treats that name as a misnomer that does ideological work. It reconstructs Mao’s actual method — concrete analysis in On Practice and On Contradiction, the gun-and-pen doctrine of Yan’an, sinification rather than imported catechism, self-reliant base areas, a restless Confucian–classical substratum, and the brief Hundred Flowers opening toward a plural field of standpoints later formalised, in another idiom, as overdetermination by Althusser — and shows that the Indian movement kept the words and dropped the grammar: iconolatry (“China’s Chairman is India’s Chairman”), MLM as a frozen universal system, Gutian-condemned annihilationist militarism, and a parasitic levy-and-loot economy on a mineral frontier that is not the feudal countryside the doctrine presupposes. The name was decided; the referent would not coincide with Mao. Mapping the Red Corridor onto bauxite, iron, coal, chromite and uranium, and walking Bastar, Kalinganagar, Niyamgiri and Jadugoda through Marx, Sanyal and Levien on primitive accumulation and the need economy, it argues that “Maoist” functions as a security brand affixed to Adivasi resistance to ecological dispossession, while Foucault’s warning about people’s courts is inverted in bulldozer (in)justice. What remains is a compound the doctrine cannot cover: a frontier defence of jal–jangal–zameen, a Blanquist core, the armed edge of the governed. The brand erases the dispossessed subject the conflict was about.
“RUPP Tera Mastana”: Shell Parties and Simulacra
This article argues that a growing subclass of Indian parties is not janaseva (public service) but a fiscal enterprise—the party as limited company—whose tax and registration privileges are harvested whether or not it fights an election. The 2025 BBC News Hindi investigation of six Gujarat Registered Unrecognised Political Parties (RUPPs) is the entry: about ₹1,700 crore in FY 2023–24 donations against fifteen Lok Sabha candidates. From that mismatch it names the shell party, analogue of the shell company: a valid, vacant recipient whose use is fiscal (or, as with the NCPI merger of twenty TMC MPs, parliamentary). A four-provision interlock—RPA 1951 §29A; Income Tax Act §§13A, 80GGB, 80GGC; Companies Act §182—run in reverse, turns taxable income into a deduction plus cash after commission. The same lawful opacity is set beside electoral bonds and their afterlife in trusts, PM CARES as an un-askable receptacle, Tenth Schedule “mergers” that launder benches, and, as ED allegation not verdict, the DHFL–RKW–Mirchi–Dawood chain beside ₹27.5 crore declared to the BJP. Letterheads out-raised every national party except the ruling one. Read as Baudrillard’s simulacrum and Habermas’s legitimation crisis—including the public charge of vote chori—the register simulates pluralism while hollowing representation. Reform only reshapes the shell. Equal to the climate polycrisis is a bioregional, moneyless, partyless commons.
Reading ‘Vande Mātaram’ Across Registers: Text, Myth, Ritual
This “reading” traces Vande Mātaram’s discursive transformation(s) from a specifically Bengali hymn into an unstable national emblem and, finally, a ritualised test of belonging. It begins with the demographic hinge of saptakoṭi/dvisaptakoṭi—seven crore throats and fourteen crore arms—corresponding to the Bengal Presidency, not India, and follows its mutation from Bankim’s fixed text to the 1905 inflation of thirty crore, the Republic’s excision of the number-bearing and goddess-identifying stanzas in 1937–50, and the later dissolution into unbounded koṭi-koṭi. Across page, stage, state and popular transmission, the essay asks what happens when a countable provincial people becomes an infinite, unauditable mass. It reads the hymn through the genesis of Ānandamaṭha, Tagore’s counter-discourse of neśā, the colonial genealogy of mātṛbhūmi/mātṛbhāṣā, and the “(M)Other-Tongue” mechanism that manufactures Others. The stanza-by-stanza appendix tests the hymn’s claims of water, fertility, beauty, knowledge, feminine strength and sustaining earth against ecological depletion, educational precarity, demographic violence and extractive concentration, exposing a structure in which the signifier survives while the referent is hollowed out. The blurred number, singular vande, and 2026 penalisation of disruption converge as political ritual: citizen becomes chorus, dissent filial betrayal. The argument is not that singing is illegitimate, but that compelled, unexamined singing surrenders the critical freedom citizenship requires; to decline the chant is not to refuse the country, but to refuse a mistranslation, a miscount, a manufactured Mother, and the disappearance of the historically located citizen into an infinite chorus.
Azadi, or Democratic Unfreedom? A Video Message from OBMA
This video asks what “Azadi” (freedom) means in India today, and whether the formal existence of democracy can coexist with a lived condition of democratic unfreedom. Tracing the period from 2014 to 2026, it examines the erosion of civil liberties, institutional accountability, democratic participation, ecological security, and economic justice, before asking what genuine freedom might require: the Right to Reject, the Right to Recall, a partyless democracy, and an ecological politics rooted in Oikos — our shared home.
A Solidarity Statement for Sonam Wangchuk, Satyagrahi of the Anthropocene
On the 17th day of his indefinite hunger strike at Jantar Mantar, Sonam Wangchuk continues his non-violent resistance for justice, dialogue, and ecological protection of Ladakh. Echoing Jatin Das’s 1929 martyrdom and G.D. Agarwal’s sacrifice for the Ganga, Wangchuk’s ātmaśakti exposes the Indian state’s moral deafness and hypocrisy in the face of genuine satyagraha. Invoking Tagore’s fiery Bhairava hymn — “sarva kharvatāre dahe tava krodhadāha” — this post calls for solidarity with a man who has become the moral centre of a republic that has abandoned its conscience.
Damn the Dams!
This paper critically examines the political ecology of mega dams and hydroelectric power through historical, scientific, and activist lenses, exposing the profound environmental, geological, and social costs that often eclipse their touted benefits. From Lenin’s GOELRO electrification drive and Nehru’s “temples of modern India” to the suppressed warnings of scientists Meghnad Saha and Kapil Bhattacharya, the analysis reveals how hydraulic nationalism has repeatedly silenced ecological knowledge, leading to reservoir-induced seismicity (as in Koyna), catastrophic siltation, landslides, and dam failures. Drawing on cases like the Tehri Dam, Farakka Barrage, Vaiont, and Banqiao disasters, alongside Gandhian resistance by Sundarlal Bahuguna, Baba Amte, and the Narmada Bachao Andolan, and cultural critiques in Tagore’s Muktadhara and Tarkovsky’s Stalker, the author argues for a fundamental reevaluation prioritizing river integrity, democratic consent, and geological realism over technocratic hubris. In an era of climate change, the paper calls for letting rivers flow as essential to ecological justice and human survival.
The Aeroplane’s Gaze: Mountain, Market and Martyrs
In this climate horror narrative with a positional paper disrupting the narrative flow, the author weaves personal flights over a rapidly thawing Himalaya with a critique of the “Three Ms”—Mountaineering, Market, and Martyrs—to expose how post-1990 commercialization has transformed high-altitude climbing into a neoliberal experience economy that commodifies risk, normalizes preventable deaths, and externalizes massive ecological waste onto fragile ecosystems. Drawing on observed glacial retreat, shrinking snowlines, data from Everest expeditions (e.g., 2019’s 877 summits and 11 deaths; 2025 permit hikes and ongoing congestion), the Chhanda Gayen case study, and corporate sponsorship spectacles, the analysis reveals how market logic—sunk-cost pressures, sponsorship demands for novelty, and regulatory filters—produces economic fatalism and “regulatory martyrdom” while generating symbolic capital from sacrifice and legacy trash (tens of tons of plastic, human waste, and gear). Framed by Tagorean imagery, Kalidasa’s metaphors, and Heideggerian reflections, the work culminates in a call to dismantle these structures, positioning the author’s embodied witness—flying through turbulent “intentioned” clouds—as a reversal from being-towards-death to death-towards-being, urging emancipation through corporeal awareness amid capitalism’s atmospheric and terrestrial violence.
The “Secular” State Paradox: the Erosion of Constitutional Secularism in Contemporary India
Since 2019, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has systematically blurred India’s constitutional separation between the state and religion—a doctrine central to India’s secular democracy since 1950. This article documents seven major constitutional violations spanning religious ceremony participation (Ram Mandir consecration, January 2024; Central Vista Parliament inauguration, May 2023), executive-judicial merger (Ganesha Puja at CJI DY Chandrachud’s residence, September 2024), selective state support for Hindu rituals over Muslim prayer practices (Red Road Yoga Day vs. namaz bans, June 2024), misappropriation of state security apparatus for personal religious acts (Z+ protection for sacred baths), documented abdication of constitutional duty during a national security crisis (Bear Grylls shoot during Pulwama attack, February 2019), and ecological destruction for religious symbolism (Yamuna “beautification” project). Each violation contradicts established constitutional convention (the Rajendra Prasad precedent of 1951), invokes specific legal provisions (Articles 14, 15(1), 25, 36, 44, 48-A, 50, 51-A(h), 60, 75), and collectively demonstrates how the “impunity loop”—where executive overreach faces no judicial reckoning—has eroded India’s foundational secular guarantee. The Central Vista Parliament consecration is particularly egregious: by permanently installing a religious symbol (the Sengol, representing divine-right monarchy) in the Speaker’s chair and framing Parliament as a Hindu “temple,” Modi has transformed the highest legislative chamber itself into a site of state-sponsored Hindu nationalism. Drawing from Supreme Court jurisprudence on basic features (Kesavananda Bharati), Article 32 remedies, separation of powers doctrine, and administrative law, this article argues that these violations constitute not individual transgressions but a systematic architecture of “selective secularism” that transforms Hindu nationalism into state policy while marginalizing minority rights. The article traces the “impunity loop” mechanism—how each violation normalizes the next through institutional passivity (judicial silence), doctrinal innovation (the “24/7 duty” doctrine that abolishes answerability), and intellectual capture (reframing Hindu nationalist practices as “secular culture” while suppressing minority religious expression). The absence of Supreme Court intervention despite clear constitutional grounds, combined with parliament’s majority-government control and investigative agency capture, has created conditions where constitutional limits have become advisory. The article concludes that India’s secular Constitution remains intact on paper while its practice converges toward Hindu nationalist theocracy, raising urgent questions about whether institutional actors can recover their constitutional commitment before the basic feature of secularism is irreversibly eroded.
ব্রাত্য বঙ্গে সনাতনী ঘুসপেটিয়া
This work is a deliberate act of counter-propaganda — a sustained, repetitive, and self-consciously plagiaristic agit-prop by two melancholy Kolkata Bandyopadhyays who describe themselves as residents of a “non-nation.” Written in a deliberately hybrid register that mixes formal Sadhu Bangla with colloquial Chalit, code-switching, Sanskrit citation, and street humour, the text performs its own central argument: that the imposition of linguistic and cultural uniformity is itself a form of violence. The book’s governing question is the political and civilisational fate of Bengali identity under Hindutva’s ascendant national project. The argument unfolds across seven chapters and proceeds on several interlocking planes. It opens by mapping the deep genealogy of anti-Bengal prejudice within Brahmanical Sanskrit literature — from the Ṛgveda and Aitareya Āraṇyaka to the Baudhāyana Dharmasūtra — showing how the term vāyaṃsi (birds, creatures of unstable motion) was deployed to mark the peoples of Bengal and the eastern territories as ritually impure, geographically ungovernable, and socially excludable. This ancient ideology of exclusion is read as the structural antecedent of contemporary Hindutva’s hostility toward Bengal. The book then interrogates the ideological apparatus of nationalism itself. The concepts of mātr̥bhūmi (motherland) and mātr̥bhāṣā (mother tongue) are traced to their origins in Christian ecclesiastical vocabulary — adopted into Bengali and Indian nationalist discourse during the colonial period — rather than to any ancient Sanskritic or “Sanatan” tradition. Through a close reading of Bankimchandra’s “Bande Mataram” and Rabindranath’s Ghare Baire — particularly the counter-nationalist voice of Nikhilesh — the authors argue that the nationalist invocation of the “mother” is a manufactured intoxication (nesha) that substitutes enchantment for genuine political freedom. The category of “Hindu” identity is subjected to rigorous historical disaggregation. Drawing on Rajataraṅgiṇī, Chola-period inscriptions, and the long record of Shaiva-Vaishnava conflict, the book demonstrates that the “one religion, one nation” claim of the Sangh Parivar has no historical foundation: what existed was a complex, internally contested plurality of sects, practices, and cosmologies — a plurality that colonial administration and contemporary Hindutva alike have violently flattened. A substantial chapter examines the political economy of language. Grierson’s own admission of the impossibility of distinguishing language from dialect is mobilised to expose the census-driven erasure of Odia, Assamese, and other eastern linguistic identities in the service of a Hindi-dominated national demography. The historical construction of Bengali geographic identity — from Pundra, Gauda, and Banga through the Mughal Suba-e-Bangla to the colonial Bengal Presidency — is traced to show that “Bengal” itself is a layered historical formation rather than an eternal essence. The chapter ends with a detailed empirical treatment of what the authors call the carabeef paradox: the coexistence of cow-vigilante violence and lynching with India’s status as the world’s largest exporter of bovine meat under Hindutva governance — complete with data on the Allana Group’s political donations and the corporate structures behind the trade. The critique of Bengali identity is turned inward as well. Drawing on Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s Ātmaghātī Bāṅālī while contesting his Eurocentric prescription, the authors indict the Bengali bhadralok’s chronic self-deception, selective memory, and hypocritical Islamophobia — the same community that produced Derozio, Vidyasagar, and Nazrul now reaches for saffron affiliation or comfortable silence. The book closes with a rereading of the Sanskrit tarpaṇa (ancestral water-offering) ritual as a philosophical statement of radical solidarity — one that extends water and recognition even to enemies, to serpents, to trees, to the dispossessed. The “I” (ayam) is asked to journey toward “we” (vayam), a movement the authors align with the Bantu concept of ubuntu. The final aspiration, voiced through Nazim Hikmet, John Lennon, Juan Ramón Jiménez, and Carl Sagan, is not for a better nation but for the dissolution of the nation-statist form itself — a trans-planetary, non-violent dwelling in the (other-than-)human species-condition, from Kolkata to the pale blue dot.
