Chronicles

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  • Chaos’r’us – A CJP Story

    Chaos’r’us – A CJP Story

    CJP came into existence as a satirical response to a Supreme Court judge’s throwaway quip about cockroaches crawling into the system with fake credentials. It hit a raw nerve among a section of society that had found refuge and sustenance in the corridors of certain institutions, bound together by a shared political leaning, a strong sense of group identity, and a radical, combative worldview.

    Their predecessors—the student radicals (Marxists, anarchists, and other left-wingers) of Paris in May 1968, and the generations that followed—had gone on to occupy premier positions in corporate and academic institutions, amass incredible wealth and fame, and carry the guilt of lost revolutions along the way. Over time, an ecosystem emerged, capable of supplying a steady stream of political causes to fuel outrage across the globe, in places of its choosing. The luminaries of the media, academia, global prize committees, human rights commissions, and think tanks could swoop in at any moment to set a narrative in motion, thrust it into your eyeballs through algorithms, and amplify it into a crescendo. Whether they are architects, facilitators, willing accomplices, or merely beneficiaries of the system is a question best left to the evidence. The machinery, however, appears remarkably well-oiled.

    Welcome to Chaos’r’us, where outrage is the product, moral indignation is the packaging, and political disruption is the service. The inventory is replenished continuously, the distribution network is global, and the customer is anyone with a political objective and a shortage of electoral success.

    The roaches scuttling about in the backyards of student-wing party offices are merely cannon fodder for the agents of chaos descending upon vulnerable capitals—Colombo, Dhaka, and Kathmandu—with considerable success. Now New Delhi joins the list, alongside Paris and Munich, albeit with some deference to local sensitivities. The Marxists among them were let down by their elders, having been unceremoniously ousted from electoral politics in India and across much of the world. Their bedfellows, who conveniently and opportunistically exploited toxic varieties of welfare politics, caste loyalties, and parochialism, have been found wanting as well. When the old merchandise stops selling, it is time to rebrand the product. The slogans may change, but the business model survives.

    Along came Rahul, the descendant of the longest-surviving political dynasty, working part-time to capture the imagination of the voting public, with or without the burden of a viable vision or idea—or perhaps merely anticipating his own ascendancy to power by virtue of anti-incumbency, or by waiting for the BJP to self-destruct. More than a decade away from power had perhaps made him desperate, frustrated at being outshone by a plebeian he had repeatedly insulted and sought to put in his place. Parliament, courts, due process—be damned. The upstarts who left the party because they thought they were his equals—be damned. He reserved the right to choose his lackeys, and it was time to hit the streets.

    The firebrand girls from the Marxist camps could always name the campaign and summon the roaches when the hour cometh. Every movement needs a face, every campaign a slogan, and every slogan a new breed of revolutionaries—a tactically resourceful, irreverent, and abrasive bunch to whom no rules ever apply. They may sign bail conditions one day, only to break them the next. And God forbid they should be punished—they’ll cry foul and ride the next wave of outrage, drowning it all out in sound and fury.

    The political leadership names the grievance, the activists supply the energy, the facilitators in the media guarantee the reach, and the institutional ecosystem flashes the moral certification. No need to convene a pre-agitation meeting. Everyone knows their part, and plausible deniability comes free with the package. It’s a win-win proposition: political dividends for some, almost no cost to the belligerents.

    By the way, right-wing schmucks—watch out. There is a list. You will be picked out one by one. Sometimes a straw man might be enough, like the CEC. It wouldn’t matter if he’d been our guy when we ran the machinery. Make no mistake: the target is always you. Get the heck out, or else we’ll bring in the international moralists and prize winners, and they’ll name and shame you with a choice selection of epithets—fascists, religious bigots, idol worshippers. Name your pick. The vocabulary is settled, the outrage is brewed, and the distribution is worldwide.

    No mercy! If you have any doubt, look at the skull-and-bones message on Ms. Bora’s T-shirt. It’s done, bro!

    Chaos’r’us. We manufacture the outrage. You bring in the grievance. Our facilitators will take care of the rest. No refunds, no accountability, and no guarantee that the chaos you buy today won’t come back to haunt you tomorrow.

  • Andrei’s sense of time

    Andrei’s sense of time

    “There will be time to murder and create,
    And time for all the works and days of hands
    That lift and drop a question on your plate;
    Time for you and time for me,
    And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
    And for a hundred visions and revisions”


    –T.S.Eliot (Love song of J. Alfred Prufrock)

    Andrei Tarkovsky was a poet. But he chose cinema for his medium. Every film of his had been a quest for Andrei’s identity as an artist. He believed no true artist had ever lived in an ideal world and the issues of the real world were the very impurity for the chemistry of creativity. He further believed that the same artist was challenged by the concept of time, more so for a director.

    The director is at pains to capture the fleeting moments of vision and sculpt them with structure, images and metaphors. The linear narrative is an impediment to poetic expression and the shining metaphors and visions that Andrei so dearly wanted us to see might just vanish. He is also worried about characters and their experience in the movie, taking over the experience of cinema and channels of communication between the connoisseur-audience and the artist.

    I revisited Andrei’s Andrei Rublev(1966) last week, one of the best films ever. It recounts the struggles of Andrei Rublev, a 15th century icon painter in Russia who lived through a brutal and volatile period of history with marauding Tartars and treacherous princedom. The film is divided into seven chapters with a prologue and an epilogue, revealing a deep rumination over the moral, ethical and artistic dilemmas faced by Rublev and they are narrated in a heap of metaphors, conversations, incomplete montage of ideas, fragmented memories and images conjured up from the landscape. There is no one point of view, but an orchestration of everything mentioned above. I just want to discuss briefly the last chapter which I felt singularly represented the cosmic-onomics of Tarkovsky’s world.

    It is titled “The Bell”. Andrei Rublev, under a vow of silence and overwhelmed by his self-doubts as an artist and atonement as a human being comes upon the casting of a great bell. The bellmaker has died, but his son, Boriska, claims his father ‘passed on’ the secret of the bell to him alone. He has inherited his father’s work. He was threatened of grave consequence should he fail. Amid confusion, rain and treachery the bell is finally cast and raised.

    During this cacophony, the monk Kirill, Rublev’s envious peer has a reckoning with him, accusing him of wasteful inactivity, of ‘taking his great talent to the grave’. As the bell at last rings out, Boriska, hysterical and exhausted, collapses, confessing that his father had not passed on his secret after all. The son had proceeded on faith, feeling and madness alone.

    This is the revelation Rublev was looking for. He tells Boriska that they should go to the Trinity monastery (the fresco project which Rublev earlier abandoned) together where Rublev will paint and Boriska will cast bells. The two men embrace as the camera pans past them over burning logs and dying embers, as the black and white images slowly dissolve into color fragments of Rublev’s frescoes.

    Out of the ash-nothingness arises a poetic vision. A deep meditation on the significance of inner conflicts, realization and triumph of an artist’s will over the senseless flight of time.

    Andrei was the true poet of cinema who had a great sense of time.

  • A mirror held against the soul

    A mirror held against the soul

    We celebrated every moment
    Of our meetings as epiphanies,
    Just we two in all the world.
    Bolder, lighter than a bird’s wing,
    You hurtled like vertigo
    Down the stairs, leading
    Through moist lilac to your realm
    Beyond the mirror.

    Andrei Tarkovsky placed Mirror (1975) onto his life. A life he knew through sepia-tainted memories, winter-green deaths and rainswept conflagrations. It reflected the contours of imperfect lives and their spiritual corridors within them, unrelenting and unflinching. The montage of art, history and spirituality went right through the soul, as if a million rays converged to immortalize a human being.

    When the movie begins to unreel, we find an adolescent overcoming his stutter under a spell of hypnosis. That is where Andrei wanted us to let the magical hold of Mirror unwind us. You let go of your fears and the handicaps of inert words, and your soul begins a journey of self-expression. When you do, you become kind and empathize; you sense the flow of time, feel the pangs of waiting and despair, and then you just be.

    Word is the last to die.
    When the drill of water pushes up
    Through the subsoil’s tough integument,
    Sky will stir.

    There are references to two Russians in the movie: Pushkin and Chekhov. At the beginning, we see a doctor passing by who strikes up a conversation with Andrei’s mother, Maria, waiting by the fence of their house. When the doctor contrasts plants and trees with humans, who rush about and speak in platitudes, Maria mentions Ward No. 6, Chekhov’s short story dealing with conformity and the perilous boundary between sanity and insanity, implying that the doctor is insane. He says, don’t worry, he is immune to all that—”Chekhov invented it all.”

    Another reference is to Pushkin, who, in a letter to a friend, wrote about Russia’s cultural and spiritual contexts being distinctly different and alienated from those of Europe after the invasions of the Mongols and Tatars. Andrei is prodding us to look at the Russian landscape with another eye.

    The narrative of the movie is cyclic. You keep coming back to the same windswept green fields around Andrei’s childhood home. You find Maria sitting by the fence, waiting for her husband, and then years later, death. The walls made of logs. Sudden cuts to fire burning at middle distance in a field and the dark green woods behind.

    We were led to who knows where.
    Before us opened up, in mirage,
    Towns constructed out of wonder,
    Mint leaves spread themselves beneath our feet,
    Birds came on the journey with us,
    Fish leapt in greeting from the river,
    And the sky unfurled above…

    While behind us all the time went fate,
    A madman brandishing a razor.

    Andrei’s memory of his childhood and troubled marriage is a blend of impressionistic painting and profound photographic interpretation of dreams.

    Night. Interior of the dacha. Maria walks by the door and towards the window. An almost unnoticeable freeze of the frame, the color turning into sepia. The child in bed sits up. Maria washes her hair with the help of her husband. She goes towards a mirror and sees herself as an old woman. The house crumbles down in slow motion. Later, Maria lies suspended over the bed, in black and white.

    Dreams are given expression. You are awe-struck by the sheer contemplative detachment of the narrator from events. Music and poetry evoke such depth that nature—with its elements of fire, rain and wind—brings about the organic evolution of this miracle of a movie.

    The usual autobiographical ingredients are there as well: scenes of childhood memory intercut with newsreel footage; contemporary scenes examining the narrator’s relationships with his mother, his ex-wife and his son; child-custody arguments; and fragments from the history of the period—Prague Spring, Mao, border disputes with China, the Holocaust, the Leningrad blockade. The imperfect lives of Andrei, his parents and the people around them are given an ethereal expression.

    The last scene shows Maria leaning on her husband’s chest. She sits up. He asks, “Do you want a boy or a girl?” She looks down and smiles, then tears cross her face. She looks away.

    The camera cuts to the woods and pans left across the garden, where the mother—Maria as an old woman—is seen. It continues along the riverbank under trees, past insects, fallen trees and rotting trunks. The mother walks to the right, meets the child, takes his hand and walks on. Cut back to Maria, still carrying that mingled joy and sadness on her face. Then back to the mother, still walking across the field with two children. The camera pans back as mother and children walk away, accompanied by the sound of the bird the boy was imitating.

    Through the trees, the image fades to dark.

    And that beauty I witnessed in Mirror shattered me.

    A man has just one body a solitary shell
    The soul thinks it quite shoddy
    as many know so well
    With ears and eyes outfitted
    to cover bones and loins
    So fly out through the cornea
    into the vaulted sky
    Up to those ice cold wheel spokes
    where bird like chariots fly
    And listen from the shackles
    of your living prison room

    Note: All the poems are by Arseny Tarkovsky, Andrei’s father.

  • Sven Nykvist

    Sven Nykvist

    Watching old classics brought me back to Sven Nykvist and his magic of light and darkness. It also brought me back to an old post, written when I came across his obituary while waiting in a doctor’s office for my turn.

    The post certainly was not about personal bereavement, but about something relatively abstract, more personal than a bio, and literally about seeing inner and outer worlds from the vantage point of the lens underneath the iris.

    Sven knew where and when to look through his darkly lens. Of course, you would know that more than anyone else when you have Bergman and Tarkovsky in company. How do visuals make you forget the composition, the chromatic metrics of lighting, and the whirring ascents and descents of tripods, and lead you instead into an atmosphere so ethereal and tactile that you are wary the dream you conjure up with eyes wide open is about to vanish? How much do we miss of this world, its blinding beauty and the colors of people’s minds? Sven’s art made me visceral about the crushing beauty of everything he captured on camera, including tragedy.

    I watched Cries and Whispers (1973) in an auditorium for a makeshift theatre on top of the Ernakulam Public Library. The rental chairs and the projector were disconcertingly rickety. But that didn’t stop me from being absorbed in the majestic denouement of crimson red on the screen. I was lost. I began to think in color. If the soul had a color, it had to be a dragon’s red.

    The tortured, poignant, and sometimes wailing relationships were portrayed in color. Though Bergman cleverly sketched the backdrop in fleeting beauty—the fall, the traditional European setting and period—Sven’s art stood out. In the last scene, after her funeral, Karin reads from her diary about a charmed moment when the three sisters, clothed in silken white, stroll through a sunlit park. They sit beside each other on a swing. Karin remembers it as a perfect moment of anguish and happiness, and how she cherished its perfection.

    Sven made the scene absolutely out of this world.

    I took the last bus home that night as a believer.

    Bergman’s trilogy of faith was another astonishing feat of Sven’s art. Those who watched Winter Light cannot forget the frigid winter outside and the interior winter of Pastor Tomas, nor the long close-up of Ingrid Thulin as she waded into their soulless existence with her monologue. Who will forget the pointless meanderings of Johan along the hotel corridors and the echoes of God’s silence in The Silence? In A Passion, Sven deconstructed color and eventually the coherence of visuals and senses to portray the emotional isolation of Andreas and his violent resistance to Anna’s efforts to break through the ice. His experiments with color and visual fragmentation were unlike anything I had seen.

    The human face was as wide a canvas as the landscape of Gotland overlooking the Baltic Sea. Persona (1966) was a case in point and a consummation of Bergman’s idea of the movie camera as “an incredible instrument for recording human soul as captured in the human face.” Despite the open-ended plot of the movie, Sven’s camera displays extraordinary control while moving between alienation and intimacy, abstraction and the sensitive portrayal of the Nurse and the Patient within a seemingly linear and natural narrative. The movie remains one of the great marvels of modern cinema.

    Fanny and Alexander (1982) was a retreat for Bergman and Sven to the common sources of their shared fascination. The magical world unleashed from the perspective of a child showed an unbridled curiosity to go beyond the limits of adult memory and perception. The child’s amazement at the wonders of everyday discovery, the home theatre that became a playground of dreams, the lantern-lit nights, the kaleidoscope, the festive family dinners, the sudden death of the children’s father marking the end of an era, the ghostly fantasy world, the defiant confrontation with the stepfather, the terror of growing up, and the realization of anguish through wisdom—all were observed through the eyes of a child.

    Childhood could never be dull. Sven captured the ephemeral world of a child’s life with all its incomprehensibilities, delights, pain, and wisdom.

    The Sacrifice (1986) was Tarkovsky’s final film. In many ways, Sven lived the grandeur and abomination of a cameraman’s life during its making. The long shots that were Tarkovsky’s wont achieved an extraordinary grace through Sven’s camera, even when Alexander burned down his house as a sacrifice to redeem the world from nuclear holocaust.

    And then the camera jammed.

    The single camera Sven had at his disposal failed while the house was being charred. When the rebuilt house was burnt again, midway through the blaze, the camera ran through an entire reel, breaking the crew into tears. Sven gave Tarkovsky his meditating lens to draw the twilight zone where humankind’s loss of spirituality was acknowledged, leading to repentance and the ultimate offer of sacrifice.

    The wide landscape, Bach’s music, the Japanese flute, Leonardo da Vinci’s chiaroscuro in The Adoration of the Magi—all were pointers to the creative sources of this astonishing and grandiloquently flawed masterpiece made for posterity.

    Perhaps Sven, like Tarkovsky, should be remembered not only for the spectacular triumphs but also for the spectacular failures.

  • The Karmic Journeys in The Legends of Khasak

    The Karmic Journeys in The Legends of Khasak

    The Karmic Journeys in The Legends of Khasak

    O.V. Vijayan chronicled journeys unlike any other writer I have read.

    In The Legends of Khasak, Ravi arrives in Khasak on the last bus. He leaves many familiar markers of identity behind when he takes up a job as the sole instructor in a school in a forgotten village.

    He once retold to his students the story of karmic journeys:

    Once upon a time, before reptiles and long before dinosaurs, two cells went for a walk one evening. They came upon a sunlit valley.

    “I wonder what lies beyond this?” the younger cell asked the elder.

    “This is an emerald valley. Let me linger here.”

    “I want to go,” the younger sister insisted. She looked toward the galactic paths that lay ahead.

    “Will you forget me?” the elder sister asked.

    “I won’t.”

    “You will,” the elder sister replied. “This is a loveless story of karmic cycles. There is only separation and grief.”

    Later in the book, the writer imagines human life as a journey in a passing train at night:

    “Ravi is alone in the evening at his farmhouse.

    He looks through the window. No cows are grazing outside.

    Night falls like grief and consolation. Fireflies drift through the darkness.

    The lights along the country road shimmer like distant travelers.

    The house becomes a railway coach. Suddenly he remembers the darkness outside.

    Where am I?

    Lamps rush past and disappear into the crystalline night. Another train flashes by.

    Yet another transit. A moment’s acquaintance of karma—only a moment between the wheels.

    Again, it whistles past.”

    The two passages evoke Vijayan’s deepest philosophical intuition: existence as an endless movement through separation, memory, and fleeting encounters.

    Note: Translated from Malayalam by me.

  • Where roaches fear to tread

    Where roaches fear to tread

    When CJP was conceived and cast into the ether, it was a movement in search of a cause. A staggering 65 percent of India’s population—over 350 million youth and counting—are more aspirational than ever. The IT and pharma industries that surged after the nineties propelled and sustained internal economic growth, while education yielded a windfall of foreign remittances, albeit at the high cost of brain drain. Securing admission to a professional course had become the critical milestone for many of them—achieved either through merit or money.

    Keeping the admissions and evaluation process fair and accessible is not only necessary to select the best and brightest minds; society needs to trust the system in which it has invested its faith, hard-earned money, and children’s futures. When the system decays and opportunistic criminals find ways to game the process, it erodes the very foundation of a functioning society. The fallout—a frustrated youth stripped of hope—can drag a nation into chaos and turmoil.

    In the era of social media, CJP caught the imagination of a vast swath of society that had lost faith in the system and the politicians running the machine. Ironically, the movement was quickly hijacked by opposition parties who had originally subverted the education system to perpetuate politics as a rent-seeking enterprise. Political leaders from Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and Kerala arrived in hordes, with a clear reason to back the movement: finding an external adversary cost them nothing in terms of their local governance or economic models, as the BJP was not the dominant political force in most of those states. (There are exceptions too, like Gujarat, where similar structures are firmly in place.)

    A rent-seeking political economy creates sector monopolies, state patronage, and administrative gatekeeping to replace actual wealth generation. When the state controls access to security, livelihoods, and institutional power, controlling those access points becomes the primary political strategy. The public sector and education become rent engines; state-dominated education and government services (like the Public Service Commission) are treated not as public goods, but as patronage distribution systems. Meanwhile, admission quota systems squeeze out candidates who do not belong to reserved groups based on caste, religion, “management,” or special interests.

    Education and jobs have become direct methods for distributing rent to loyalists.

    For example, Kerala accounts for roughly 60% of all PSC recruitments nationwide despite having only 3% of the country’s population. A public sector job is the ultimate prize—secured via backdoor appointments, temporary-to-permanent conversions, or board placements. The state also harbors “Aided” Education Cartels: school and college networks in which private management boards (caste, religious, or political bodies) control hiring, while the taxpayer-funded government pays salaries. Hiring rights are routinely monetized by management, while political unions dominate university syndicates, dictating appointments, curricula, and campus access.

    We typically see funny Instagram reels of politicians with multiple postdoctoral degrees struggling to articulate basic English. The issue is not their command of English—or any language—but the widening gulf between academic certification and demonstrable competence. This also explains why the battle over vice-chancellor appointments has become so ferocious. It is routinely framed as a constitutional dispute between the Centre and the states or an ideological contest over the soul of Indian education. It is certainly both. But it is equally an economic struggle. Whoever appoints the vice chancellor influences faculty recruitment, promotions, research funding, procurement, university syndicates, and the patronage networks that flow through them. Universities do not merely shape ideas; they allocate careers, resources, and influence. Control the institution, and you control all three.

    Both Left and Right parties employ the exact same playbook:

    Institutional Control: LDF party cadres have penetrated deep into state service unions, university syndicates, and cooperatives. The UDF distributes state resources through caste and community organizations (e.g., NSS, SNDP, IUML) and religious education trusts. Both factions maintain vast networks of cooperative banks for partisans and communities to fund loyalists, offer jobs, and leverage credit.

    Labor Market Control: Union-enforced strictures, trade-union dominance, and administrative gatekeeping actively stifle private manufacturing. The UDF, when in power, grants liquor licenses, real estate clearances, and bar permits to its own patronage networks.

    Because both fronts rely on state distribution rather than expanding the economic pie, neither side has a true incentive to dismantle the system. When state institutions become rent-distribution engines for the political class, productive private investment is squeezed out. With local industry suppressed, educated youth are forced into two paths:

    Compete for state-allocated rents (government exams, PSCs, party cadre jobs). OR emigrate to the Gulf, Europe, or other Indian states to earn a living.

    The irony is profound: remittances from citizens who fled this system underwrite the state’s tax revenues. Those revenues then fund the salaries, pensions, and patronage networks of the state-dominated apparatus, sustaining the cycle without necessitating economic reform. In essence, the political strategy across the spectrum has been to control the gates of the state, distribute the toll to loyalists, and rely on citizens working abroad to keep the broader economy alive. The deep institutional integration of the state’s exploitative machinery is woven into the psyche of its citizens with clinical precision.

    West Bengal had its “Party-Society,” adapted rigorously and ruthlessly by TMC cadres. Gujarat has its Panna Pramukh system. Tamil Nadu operates a welfare machine that sustains a perpetual transactional loop between voter loyalty and the state. Similar examples cut across Marxist, Dravidian, or Hindutva booth management.

    If CJP is to rise against the malaise that plagues Indian society, it must go after these very patrons—the ones currently farming public outrage to maneuver their way back into the glory days of rent collection.

  • Election in Kerala & Confederacy of Dunces

    Election is nigh in Malayalee-land.

    The federal and provincial political theater has always had its dependable cast of characters—mostly vaudevillian, corrupt, and inept, with a proven track record of inflicting immense harm upon the very people they claim to serve since Independence.

    Politicians from Kerala, however, are a breed apart. Their incompetence and corruption are beyond dispute, but what truly sets them apart is their unshakeable belief in the moral and intellectual superiority of the “Kerala model” of human development. They speak of it with the reverence of medieval monks preserving sacred texts, never tiring of its glory, nor of lamenting the unfortunate condition of the lesser mortals inhabiting other Indian states.

    The first elected government of Kerala was formed by the Communists. Having endured one too many encounters with loudmouth leftists in Delhi, Indira Gandhi reportedly assembled an informal “kitchen cabinet”—complete with tea, biscuits, and mild constitutional subversion—to engineer a bloodless coup.

    But she did not stop there. Like a political necromancer, she resurrected the defunct and guilt-ridden Muslim League, along with an assortment of Hindu caste blocs and Christian clergy, ensuring that Kerala’s politics would henceforth be entrusted to a rotating fellowship of the perpetually indignant. Their communist counterparts, never to be outdone, split into factions, reunited, split again, and eventually stitched together alliances from ideological leftovers—many of whom proved even more doctrinaire and regressive than their rivals.

    Thus emerged two grand banners under which all ambition, hypocrisy, and moral posturing would be conveniently organized: the United Democratic Front (UDF) and the Left Democratic Front (LDF). The irony, of course, is that both claim ideological purity while practicing political opportunism with breathtaking consistency—each accusing the other of the very sins they commit with greater efficiency.

    The UDF

    The United Democratic Front is best understood as a coalition of eternal negotiation. Its ideology is less a coherent framework and more a delicate balancing act between community arithmetic, historical grievances, and seat-sharing squabbles. Every election cycle, the UDF presents itself as the reasonable alternative—less ideological, slanted slightly to the left, and always just one internal disagreement away from collapse. Its motley leadership, with the Gandhi royalty at the center as the reluctant arbiters of impossible wishes, specialize in seeking votes they never quite earned. They eternally rely on identity politics from a sea of parochial islands, trusting that the voters will remain preoccupied with opposing “the enemy” rather than scrutinizing their own representatives.

    Their discourse on development proceeds cautiously, in the tone of landlords negotiating rent—measured, evasive, and careful not to alienate any bloc whose support they might need sooner than later. The UDF voter, meanwhile, is a connoisseur of compromise—firmly convinced that stability lies in maintaining the status quo. Their ultimate goal of governance is to have a member from their own congregation, caste, or religion in the assembly. If their families really needed economic growth, they could always just send their children abroad.

    The LDF

    The Left Democratic Front operates with the confidence of a movement that believes history is on its side—even when Marxists are declared an extinct species around the rest of the world. Its rhetoric is rich with revolution, resistance, and righteous indignation, though its governance is all about a partisan bureaucracy with excellent public relations work paid for by the people. The LDF prides itself on ideological clarity, which it demonstrates by explaining complex global injustices at great length before addressing local potholes. They exhort students to boycott classes and workers to skip the day in the factory or office so they can join protests against the “grand schemes of imperial forces.”

    They hope to see the “party-villages” taking over the state while the natives parrot words prescribed to them by the party’s secretariat. The leader appears mildly amused at how loyal—and useful—his subjects are, both the literate and the less so. In return, he hands out jobs, contracts, awards, and university degrees. Occasionally, a few deviants might be cut into fifty-one pieces as a reminder of the party line. Its cadre remains deeply committed, disciplined, and ever ready to defend the party on social media, where revolutions are now most efficiently conducted. To its critics, it is a system that has mastered the art of appearing perpetually radical while co-opting the most radical elements of its population.

    The NDA

    The National Democratic Alliance in Kerala is less a political force and more a state of persistent and optimistic anticipation. Every election is heralded as the moment of breakthrough—the year when Kerala will finally align with the broader national mood. That moment, like the quest for the Philosopher’s Stone, is always around the corner but never found. The NDA campaigns with energy, conviction, and a firm belief that ideological clarity will eventually triumph over entrenched local loyalties and decades of hoary tales about fascism.

    However, the Muslim community’s aversion, the Christians’ apprehensions, and the resistance of left-leaning Hindus have left the NDA in the lurch with no redemption in sight. Whenever they get close to the finish line, the U & L factions prove remarkably nimble on their feet, calling a truce just to keep the intruder out. The leaders have learned to live on subsistence allowances from the Center as low-key operatives in the political landscape of Mall-land. As the technocrats at the top will soon realize—we are like that wonly! For now, the NDA remains the most optimistic participant in the electoral process—a party that contests not just elections, but probability itself.

    * * *

    And so, the stage is set once again. Speeches will be made, alliances rearranged, scandals recycled, and manifestos printed with the solemnity of sacred scripture. The voter, as always, will deliberate carefully—before returning the same actors to the same stage in slightly altered costumes. Democracy, after all, is not about change. It is about the freedom to complain about the same things, repeatedly, with renewed enthusiasm.

    Happy voting!

  • The Champions

    The Champions

    Winning the championship this time felt almost inevitable. The juggernaut took time to gather pace and even stumbled briefly during the Super Eight stage. But once it hit its straps, it mowed down everything in its path. From the outside, the wheels seemed to roll forward with ruthless efficiency. Yet the parts were human—an ensemble of frailty and triumph.

    Sanju Samson

    When he knelt down, letting the helmet and bat tumble away as he raised his hands, it felt as though the cricketing gods had finally anointed him. Not long ago, he had been down and out, resigned to a fate shaped by a string of low scores and a place out of favour. But fate had other plans. The loss to South Africa, Rinku Singh’s family emergency, and the virtual knockout matches that followed revealed a Sanju-shaped void in the batting lineup.

    No one had ever crossed 80+ scores in three consecutive knockout matches on the way to a championship. Riding the vagaries of T20 batting, he unfurled a series of sublime shots, his face carrying an almost spiritual calm. The believers finally exhaled when the prophecy was fulfilled.

    Hardik Pandya

    Hardik is a champion who has tasted glory many times. Like a trapeze artist, he searches constantly for that perfect arc where time and space align—leaving the audience gasping as he pulls off feats reserved for supreme athletes. It could be a blazing drive through the V, a hard-length ball that traps a marauding batter, or a lightning throw from the boundary to end a charge.
    Yet the final reminded everyone that glory is also a conspiracy of time and space. Without that divine alignment, Hardik too is mortal. No matter how fiercely he chased it, the arc would not appear. But Hardik will never stop chasing.

    Ishan Kishan

    When Ishan first burst onto the scene, he startled everyone with audacious shots and manic hitting, trying to score as much as mathematically possible. Pessimists dismissed it as desperate thrashing that would not last—and it did not.
    What followed defined him. He accepted exile gracefully and returned to the wilderness of domestic cricket. There he flailed, but with purpose, carrying his provincial team all the way to the championship. His swivel-pulls, launched from the remotest corners of the country, sent the non-believers out of the cricketing orbit – seeing is believing, and we saw it match after match.

    Jasprit Bumrah

    Bumrah carries a three-dimensional pitch-map in his mind. His run-up is short and unconventional, but by the time he releases the ball, he has processed a million mental models—like a data scientist narrowing probabilities—to arrive at the most likely mode of dismissal. Bowling becomes an art born of applied artificial intelligence, whenever the fragile body allows him. Against such precision, a batter’s power and instinct rarely stand a chance.

    Axar Patel

    Axar is the one who quietly picks up everyone’s slack—the wise, self-effacing elder brother who appears whenever the family needs help. When things settle, he slips back into the background, ensuring everything stays in order.
    The impossible catches, the teased-out wickets, the runs conjured when others had failed—each act was simply about the team’s wellbeing. No rancour. He has your back.

    The Captain

    SKY made his reputation in the most fickle format of the game. For some time now, the 360-degree strokeplay has not flowed as freely as it once did. Yet he adjusted, moving himself around so others could flourish.

    He seized the important moments and guided the team with quiet assurance. In the end, his legacy may not lie in the shots he played, but in a general’s belief and unwavering loyalty to his troops, even for the beleaguered Abhishek and Varun caught in the cauldron.

    It may have looked like the machine that rolled forward with ruthless efficiency. But the wheels moved only because of the frailties, faith and stubborn will of the men who turned them.

    If you doubt it, ask Sanju. Ask Abhishek.

  • End of Revolution?

    End of Revolution?

    The upheavals of the two World Wars and the Cold War produced two nations built on the ideology of faith—Pakistan and Iran, respectively. Pakistan emerged as the imperial construct in which religion became a political instrument of military rule. Iran, by contrast, absorbed Marxist polemics of Western imperialism and recast Islamic theology as the engine of a new revolution.

    When V. S. Naipaul visited Iran after the 1979 Iranian Revolution, he found the streets and universities of Mashhad and Qom overrun by believers drawn toward the Ayatollah at the center, surrounded by his coterie, urging, “Iranians should keep the flame of Islam burning.” Ayatollah Taleqani, leading the prayer, spoke about the Prophet’s vision of revolution, and foretold that the Persians—the descendants of Salman-e-Farsi—were to be the pioneers of Islam at a time when the world had deviated from the faith and the ancient debate over true inheritors was to be settled.

    Khomeini’s advertisement in The New York Times in January 1979, while still in exile in France, and his speech on Jerusalem Day in August marked a shift in tone: the conversation moved from claims of equal civilization to the invincibility of faith and its ultimate victory over the world. The liberal world, too, co-opted the Muslim cause globally, framing Iranian resistance and the strife in Gaza as counterpoints to fascism and other manifestations of authoritarianism, conveniently ignoring the colossal failures of their own ideology.

    Revolutionary euphoria quickly gave way to repression. Marxists who had supported the uprising were among the first to be purged. Kurds, Jews, and alleged collaborators soon faced the Supreme Leader’s judgment, and the punishments were swift. Volumes of commentary were written about following the one true faith. The guardians of God became tyrants with solemn faces and flowing gowns, soon revealed as hollow men seeking power over land and veiled women.

    The hard-won revolution had to be protected at all costs, especially from enemies within and beyond the border. The Revolutionary Guard and the long line of Ayatollahs built a fortress of faith. The ranks of Hamas guerrillas, Hezbollah militants, and the surge of the Muslim Brotherhood—armed with belief—were supposed to change the world. However, the domino effect unleashed on October 7 set events in motion.

    How long the war will last, now that the latest Khamenei has exited, and how the IRGC might maneuver to preserve the regime of oppression remains to be seen—only time will tell.

  • Philadelphia

    Philadelphia

    Philadelphia is a city where the dwellers seem gripped by a recurring sense of having lived the exact moment before. The same conversation, the same person with a smirk on his face, the same weather — precisely when your neighbor locked his apartment to leave and the mayor was having a nightmare about his house being bugged by the FBI. Or you might hear the jumbled voices on the radio discussing Dalí and the death of a jazz singer in your car while a Black man walked across the street with a beer bottle in hand.

    It’s a city that has been aging ever since Ben Franklin dreamed that, on the day of his funeral, leaders — thirty-four ministers, preachers, priests, and at least one rabbi — marched arm in arm behind his casket as it was carried to the gravesite. He even dreamed of the Liberty Bell crumbling.

    If you sit in one of the chairs in the old assembly hall of the Constitution House, after climbing the sturdy wooden stairs, you could still sense the rustle of tunics and sombreros worn by your fellow legislators. Perhaps you could still argue with them to make Gujarat the fifty-first federal state.

    If you walk through Center City along the sun-soaked brick buildings, you might meet travelers from neighboring towns afflicted by bouts of insomnia, lost in the constitutional walking tour of Philadelphia. And if you drift down toward the inner city along the Delaware River, you might find Lila, the aging and desperate wharf-bar pickup, and hone your ruminations on life and civilization into something understandable and real before you sail back out to the outer seas again.

    Further north, you might find Mr. George Tharakan stepping out of his Mercedes-Benz in a suit, entering his four-bedroom house, then later emerging in a lungi to inspect the fence he shares with his fellow native. If you glanced through his family album, you would find him wearing the exact same lungi, inspecting his fence on a similar sunny evening in Thiruvalla, Kerala.