This article offers a philosophically rigorous and politically charged re-reading of the “negative” rasas — bībhatsa (disgust) and bhayānaka (fear) — from Bharata Muni’s Nāṭyaśāstra. Drawing on Abhinavagupta’s doctrine of sādhāraṇīkaraṇa and Krishna Chandra Bhattacharyya’s elevation of bībhatsa as mahā-rasa, it argues that these affects, when properly aestheticised, become vehicles of contemplative bliss (ānanda) and ethical purification (śuddhi). In their non-aestheticised, lived forms under late-capitalist authoritarian regimes, however, they degenerate into pathological modalities: sovereign “Will to Hide” (jugupsā as opacity) and pervasive climates of dread (bhaya as governance). Through a synthesis of dramaturgy, philosophy, and political theory, the paper diagnoses the contemporary global and Indian conjuncture — marked by neo-imperial violence, ecological collapse, inequality, and democratic erosion (especially post-2014 India) — as a theatre in which these rasas circulate without universalisation, producing a deadlock of terror and revulsion. In response, it proposes kautuka–hāsya–vyaṅga (wonder, laughter, and satire) as śilpita pratirodha (art of resistance), tracing a hauntological lineage from Husserl, Benjamin, Camus, and Tagore to Charlie Chaplin and contemporary Indian political comedians and cartoonists, thereby reclaiming rasa as both a diagnostic tool and a horizon of emancipatory resistance against neo-fascist tyranny.
Category Archives: Journal
CONVERGENCE TO PRAXIS
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 attempts to achieve this end by means of dialogue without manipulation in the context of a participatory, local-resource based, low-energy efficient, small-scale, self-reliant, partyless, moneyless, decentralized democracy. As this journal is against the academiocratic elitism and patron-client relationship, it maintains the Copyleft Writers’ Movement and follows the Creative Commons License.
Bankruptcy as Profitable “Bijness”: India’s Grand IBC Heist!
India’s insolvency regime, culminating in the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC, 2016), represents not a rupture but a refinement of a long-standing political economy that protects and reproduces elite accumulation. While the pre-2014 framework (BIFR/SICA/DRT/SARFAESI) enabled overt promoter impunity through delay and fragmentation, the post-2016 IBC has professionalised and sanitised this asymmetry into a time-bound, creditor-driven architecture that systematically socialises losses and privatises gains. Empirical trends—~8,800+ CIRP admissions, ~31–33% recovery rates, ~67% average haircuts, ₹4+ lakh crore realised against far larger claims, and a surge in wilful defaulters to ₹3.83 lakh crore by 2025—reveal a system where public-sector banks, workers, SMEs, and retail investors absorb the bulk of distress while politically connected acquirers consolidate assets at deep discounts, often through phoenixing and procedural arbitrage. Landmark cases like Dewan Housing Finance Corporation Ltd illustrate how legal doctrines (e.g., Section 32A clean slate vs. Section 66 fraud recovery) enable the transfer of both assets and upside from fraud to new owners under the doctrine of CoC “commercial wisdom.” Far from disciplining capital, the IBC normalises strategic default as a rational, even aspirational pathway within India’s crony-capitalist order—an evolution from chaotic promoter protection to a streamlined mechanism of wealth transfer, embedded within a broader regime of opaque political funding, selective enforcement, and taxpayer-backed recapitalisation.
The Crocodile’s Jaw: Piramal’s Architecture of Vocabulary Theft and Semantic Re-Stipulation
This article interrogates the neoliberal appropriation of language as a commodity under conditions of electronic capitalism and philanthro-capitalism in contemporary India. Drawing on Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism, Foucault’s analytics of discourse-power, and Debaprasad Bandyopadhyay’s concept of linguistic cyber-colonization, it argues that radical and emancipatory lexemes — such as “university,” “changemaker”, “sewa bhaav” (selfless service), “sustainability,” “regeneration,” and “biophilic living” — are systematically subjected to vocabular theft. Stripped of their historical, ethical, and subversive genealogies, these terms are re-stipulated within corporate and state discursive regimes to serve capital accumulation, ideological normalization, and regulatory impunity. By examining the Piramal Group as a paradigmatic case, the article traces the mechanisms of semantic re-stipulation, epistemic laundering, and hermeneutic enclosure. It reveals a shared Wor(l)d order in which meaning is engineered to obscure exploitation while performing virtue. In an era of discursive capture, the article concludes that genuine resistance requires not mere reclamation but radical de-subsumption of stolen vocabularies — reopening language as a contested site for emancipatory praxis against neoliberal semantic tyranny.
Savage Cannibal Capitalism’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde — The Piramal Scenario
This article offers a structural critique of contemporary capitalism through Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia, exposing the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde split between the ethical philosophy of conscious capitalism — inclusive growth, Gandhian trusteeship, Karuṇā–Sevā–Samṛddhi, philanthro-capitalism, and animal spirits — and the savage cannibal logic of surplus labour extraction. The luminous Dr. Jekyll face presents capitalism as purposeful and compassionate, with profit as mere “oxygen” and Shubh Labh as guiding intent, yet this high-definition screen conceals the relentless Mr. Hyde reality of appropriating unpaid labour, life savings, and ecological commons for capital accumulation. Marxist, anarcho-syndicalist, and Orwellian lenses reveal how ethical language merely re-describes extraction without changing its arithmetic, unmasking doublespeak and Memory Hole mechanisms in restructuring and philanthropic reterritorialization. The 2021 DHFL resolution, upheld by the Supreme Court on 1 April 2025 and culminating in the 2025 reverse merger into Piramal Finance, exemplifies the paradox: celebrated as bold value unlocking, it delivered steep haircuts for retail depositors while allowing the acquirer to retain avoidance recoveries — losses socialised downward, gains capitalised upward. Conscious-ethical-inclusive capitalism thus emerges as a Chimera, generating a Glitch Art aesthetic of smooth philanthropic visions atop crashing realities for the vulnerable, as capitalism deterritorializes ethical flows only to reterritorialize them as legitimacy capital, sustaining its schizophrenic reproduction. True change demands confronting the foundational mechanics of accumulation beyond moral rebranding.
Speed, Violence and Exclusion: the Legitimation Crisis of India’s Electoral System
This article critically examines the 2025–26 Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls conducted by the Election Commission of India, arguing that it marks a decisive shift from deliberative enumeration to accelerated exclusion. In contrast to the time-intensive, de novo 2002–03 revision, the current exercise compresses verification into a high-velocity, deadline-driven regime that relies on legacy databases while shifting the burden of proof onto citizens. Drawing on emerging empirical patterns—including mass deletions (over 90 lakh in West Bengal, more than 2 crore in Uttar Pradesh, and over 65 lakh in Bihar), documented worker deaths and distress, and disproportionate impacts on migrants, minorities, and economically vulnerable populations—the article contends that the SIR functions less as administrative “cleanup” than as a system of structured electoral filtration. It further interrogates the role of the Supreme Court of India, whose limited, non-disruptive interventions have allowed the process to proceed within its compressed temporal architecture, thereby reinforcing rather than restraining its effects. Situating the SIR within broader dynamics of accelerationist governance and “speed capitalism,” the analysis demonstrates how administrative velocity, when detached from deliberation, accountability, and human-scale verification, risks transforming electoral governance into an apparatus of systemic disenfranchisement—eroding the epistemic integrity, ethical grounding, and participatory foundations of Indian democracy.
The Optics of the Rupee: Fragile Notes and Confusing Coins to Moneyless Futures
The Indian rupee, far from a stable symbol of sovereignty, has become a theatre of illusion, confusion, and quiet violence—where citizens struggle to recognize notes and coins, multiple designs of the same denomination coexist, and fragile post-2016 currency circulates at high fiscal (₹6,372.8 crore in FY 2024–25) and ecological cost. Tracing a lineage from Muhammad bin Tughlaq’s failed token currency to demonetisation and the fleeting ₹2000 note, this critique reveals a recurring pattern of top-down monetary experiments that burden the public while failing to ensure stability or inclusion. The rupee’s steady depreciation against the US dollar (crossing ₹91 in 2025) reflects deeper global asymmetries masked by PPP metrics, exposing ongoing value extraction from the Global South. Drawing on Marx’s Grundrisse, the analysis frames money as a fetish form that conceals labour and ecological relations behind abstract price, whether in physical currency or digital alternatives. Ultimately, neither reform nor technology can resolve these contradictions; emancipation requires transcending the money-form itself toward a reciprocal, ecological, and post-capitalist society—where value is lived rather than priced, and the rupee is recognized not just as broken, but as a symptom of a deeper civilisational illusion.
Who Owns the Crisis? Indian Banking from Nationalization to Crony Regime
Posted on 1st April, 2026 (GMT 07:50 hrs) ABSTRACT This article traces the historical transformation of Indian banking from postcolonial state-led social banking to the contemporary regime of what it terms “resolution capitalism,” foregrounding the shifting configurations of power, distribution, and knowledge. Beginning with the pre-1969 era of private concentration and systemic fragility, it examinesContinue reading “Who Owns the Crisis? Indian Banking from Nationalization to Crony Regime”
Pressing Repeat: A Tragi-Comedy of DHFL Ruin, Viraha, and Satyagraha through Dilemma
In this darkly comic, self-reflexive monologue, a financially devastated DHFL victim—robbed of her life savings and hounded by a 100-crore SLAPP suit under an undeclared emergency—chronicles her solitary existence through obsessive loops of Rabindrasangeet. Trapped between paralyzing fear and compulsive repetition, she navigates aesthetic intimate separation anxiety (biraha), confronts the absence of any divine or human companion, and mercilessly dissects the selective “divine intervention” granted to the powerful while she receives only silence. Weaving Tagore’s melodies, Sudhindranath Dutta’s merciless “Ostrich,” Socrates’ Euthyphro Dilemma, Nietzsche’s amor fati, and Gandhi’s faith in truth, she transforms personal malady into a weapon of creative resistance. Refusing fatalism or piety, she reclaims the pharmakon of crisis, turning her suffering into non-violent digital satyagraha against the state-corporate apparatus. The result is a haunting, non-conclusive testament: a lone whistleblower who, though penniless and abandoned, continues to press “send” — pressing repeat no longer as surrender, but as quiet, unrelenting war.
Retrospective Truths: Valmiki, Ayodhya, IBC 32A, and the Stake of Constitutional Secularism
This short article explores a striking parallel between poetic creation and state-sanctioned reality-making in contemporary India. Drawing from Rabindranath Tagore’s poetic dialogue with Narada in the context of Valmiki’s Ramayana—where the poet’s imaginative mind-realm is declared Rama’s truer birthplace than historical Ayodhya—the discussion extends to two landmark institutional acts: the Supreme Court’s 2019 Ayodhya verdict (with Justice D.Y. Chandrachud’s later confession of seeking divine guidance) and Section 32A of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC), which retrospectively absolves corporate debtors of pre-insolvency offences upon plan approval, as vividly illustrated in the DHFL-Piramal takeover. Both instances represent exercises in retrospective ontological surgery: the poet erases or reconfigures the past through fiction for ecstatic delight (jouissance), while the judiciary and legislature do so through unsigned judgments infused with faith-based inspiration and statutory “clean-slate” mechanisms that shield economic continuity at the expense of accountability. The article argues that such sovereign rewritings—whether sacralising faith in a title suit or engineering corporate rebirth—breach the thick wall of separation between powers, subordinate evidence-based adjudication to revelation or expediency, and inflict profound injury on constitutional secularism. By collapsing the distinction between objective historical/legal truth and creatively decreed higher truth, these developments risk transforming the secular Republic into a palimpsest open to majoritarian or crony capture, where Article 51A(h)’s mandate of scientific temper yields to engineered absolution and divine endorsement. Ultimately, while the poet may harmlessly invent birthplaces, when the State borrows that crown, the stake is nothing less than the integrity of constitutional secularism itself.
The Archaeology of Architecture in the Piramal Archipelago
This article examines the ecological contradictions embedded in contemporary corporate development through a critical analysis of four interconnected cases linked to the activities of the Piramal Group. Situated within the broader environmental context of Mumbai—one of the world’s most climate-vulnerable coastal megacities—the study explores how industrial production, urban real-estate expansion, and superrich architectural consumption intersect with fragile ecosystems and emerging climate risks. The first case investigates allegations of groundwater contamination linked to pharmaceutical manufacturing in Digwal village in Telangana, where proceedings before the National Green Tribunal raised concerns about impacts on aquifers and agricultural landscapes. The second examines controversy surrounding a chemical manufacturing facility in Dahej in Gujarat, where the Gujarat Pollution Control Board ordered a plant shutdown after allegations that hazardous industrial waste had been discharged into a canal connected to the Narmada River system. The analysis then turns to Mumbai’s coastal urban landscape, where luxury developments by Piramal Realty illustrate the commodification of waterfront environments marketed through narratives of sustainability and “biophilic living.” Finally, the study examines the sea-facing residence Gulita as a symbolic expression of wealth concentration along a climate-exposed coastline. Drawing on environmental reports, regulatory proceedings, and urban climate research, the article situates these cases within a broader framework of coastal capitalism and urban ecological transformation, arguing that corporate sustainability narratives often coexist with environmental risks displaced onto rural landscapes, industrial waterways, and vulnerable urban coastlines.
Once in a Blue Moon Academia 