Tag Archives: Environment

This article delineates the vision and praxis of Once in a Blue Moon Academia (OBMA), a self-funded, non-profit platform established in 2021 to critically intervene in the intertwined crises of India’s financial and ecological orders. Anchored in the dual focus on the devastating financial ecosystem—exemplified by the Dewan Housing Finance Corporation Limited (DHFL) crisis—and the accelerating catastrophe of climate change and environmental degradation, OBMA advances a form of academic activism that traverses disciplinary, institutional, and epistemic boundaries. Drawing inspiration from Gandhian non-violent civil disobedience and movements such as Occupy Wall Street, it mobilizes legal challenges, digital campaigns, and critical scholarship to expose crony capitalism, regulatory complicity, and ecological neglect. At the same time, it expands into a broader intellectual–activist ecosystem that interrogates neoliberal political economy, authoritarian democratic forms, institutionalized education, proprietary regimes of knowledge, and epistemic monism, while experimenting with alternatives grounded in commons, decentralization, scepticism, and plural ways of knowing. Guided by the ethical horizon of bahujana sukhaya, bahujanahitaya ca (“for the welfare and happiness of the many”), OBMA seeks not merely reform but a reconstitution of socio-political and intellectual life through interdisciplinary praxis, prefigurative politics, and sustained critical engagement with structures of power, inequality, and ecological collapse.