The heaven on earth that never came: The collapse of capitalist and communist mythologies

For over a century, capitalism and communism have been locked in an ideological war—each claiming to have discovered the unbreakable laws of economics. 

Capitalists extol the invisible hand of the free market, while communists swear by the iron logic of historical materialism. But beneath this clash lies a shared delusion: both claim the authority of physics, while peddling the theology of myth.

Neither ideology has ever existed in pure form. The United States, long hailed as a capitalist utopia, is in fact a sprawling bureaucracy propped up by public spending, subsidies, and corporate bailouts. Silicon Valley owes more to government-funded research than to libertarian genius. 

On the other side, the Soviet Union, the supposed model of command economy, had black markets, informal networks, and enterprise bartering—capitalist impulses simmering beneath a planned surface.

Every economy is a mixed economy. The idea of a "pure" market or a "perfect" plan is a fantasy for the intellectually devout but historically blind.

In truth, capitalism and communism were not just economic systems. They were post-Enlightenment mythologies—secular successors to religious eschatology. Where traditional religions promised paradise in the afterlife, these ideologies promised heaven on earth. Adam Smith and Karl Marx weren’t merely thinkers; they were prophets of rival utopias.

But instead of delivering salvation, both ended in ruin. Capitalism gave us inequality without justice; communism gave us equality without freedom. One built glass towers on the bones of the poor, the other constructed gulags in the name of progress. Both promised light but delivered shadow.

As the Western-led global order unravels, these grand economic doctrines are also losing their grip. The myths of capitalist meritocracy and communist emancipation are no longer shaping the future—they are being shelved with the discarded scriptures of older ages. Capitalism and communism are becoming the Olympus and Asgard of the modern world—abandoned heavens, echoing with broken promises.

Economics was never a hard science. It has always been politics in disguise—a contest over values, priorities, and power. The most influential economists in history were not abstract theorists but advisors to political leaders who dared to imagine and act. Keynes had Roosevelt; Friedman had Reagan. What mattered was not the model, but the moment—and the will to shape it.

“Economic law” is often just political preference with a PhD.

If there is a truth to be salvaged, it is this: There are no economic laws—only economic choices. And every choice is a mirror reflecting the soul of a society.

As the myths of capital and the plan fade into twilight, we may finally begin to ask better questions—not about how to obey economic laws, but about how to build just, humane, and adaptable systems rooted in lived realities, not ideological certainties.

Because in the end, economics doesn’t rule the world—power does. And the sooner we admit that, the better we can wield it.

From Pax Americana to Tax Americana: Debt, Power, and the Fall of American Empire

Empires do not die with a bang—they default. No civilization in history has survived the moment its debts outgrew its power to collect. I first read David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years in 2012, drawn to its anthropological exploration of how debt is interwoven with barter, religion, slavery, law, war, and the very notion of civilization. 

Reading it again in the second decade of the twenty-first century, I find it less a historical study and more a prophetic text—a ledger of civilizational rise and inevitable collapse. This time, one revelation cuts through like a blade: the American empire is not merely an empire of influence or innovation. It is, more profoundly and more precariously, an empire of debt. And that empire now trembles on the edge of implosion.

Graeber, with anthropological precision and revolutionary insight, showed that “markets are founded and usually maintained by systematic state violence.” This is not just a reflection on antiquity—it is an indictment of American-style capitalism, which sustains its market supremacy through global militarism and financial coercion. 

The Pax Americana has not been built by trade alone, but by a peculiar alchemy of aircraft carriers and credit ratings, drone strikes and dollar diplomacy. Its economic order is not based on mutual value creation, but on debt enforcement—enabled, reinforced, and policed by overwhelming military force.

America's global dominance, then, is not the supremacy of a benevolent market, but the coercive apparatus of a creditor-state. In the guise of international institutions and alliances, it has institutionalized an imperial form of usury, where debtor nations dance to the tune of Washington’s debt collectors: the IMF, the World Bank, and even the global bond markets. 

“There’s no better way to justify relations founded on violence,” Graeber wrote, “than by reframing them in the language of debt—above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it’s the victim who’s doing something wrong.”

But the problem with debt as a pillar of an empire is that it works only as long as others believe you’ll be able to collect. The moment you can’t—or worse, the moment you no longer have the appetite to enforce your collections—the illusion shatters.

The United States is now approaching that moment. Its national debt has swollen to an astronomical $36 trillion, more than 124% of its GDP—a burden unseen since the aftermath of World War II. Even more staggering is the annual interest bill: over $1 trillion, a sum that eclipses even its formidable military budget. The empire is now paying more to maintain the illusion of solvency than it does to maintain its soldiers, ships, and satellites.

This isn’t merely a fiscal headache—it’s a civilizational migraine. Interest rates are rising as the Federal Reserve tries to tame inflation. But as rates rise, bond prices fall. Global creditors — China, Japan, and others—are dumping the U.S. Treasuries, wary of the risks and the returns. This forces the U.S. to borrow at ever-higher costs, compounding its debt burden. What emerges is a doom loop: debt begets interest, interest demands more debt, and faith in the dollar—America’s most potent weapon—begins to erode.

Without the ability to militarily enforce debt obligations on other nations, America risks losing its access to cheap, endless capital. And without that capital, the machinery that keeps its domestic politics lubricated—entitlements, subsidies, corporate bailouts, and military largesse—begins to grind and sputter. An empire cannot long survive when it must choose between paying its creditors and pacifying its citizens.

Every empire has its mythology. For Rome, it was the divine order of the Caesars. For Britain, the civilizing mission. For America, it is the sanctity of the dollar and the inevitability of growth under its capitalist system. But myths are fragile things. The moment they are questioned, they unravel. Once the dollar is no longer seen as the world’s ultimate store of value—once its debt instruments are no longer treated as safe havens but as liabilities—the edifice will crack.

India, like most Asian nations, lies within the blast radius of this implosion. As the American empire turns inward to grapple with its own insolvency, the geopolitical space it occupied may fragment into chaos—or opportunity. We must be ready to navigate a world where Washington no longer writes the rules, and where economic sovereignty is earned, not inherited.

In Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Graeber reminded us that debt is not just an economic arrangement—it is a moral narrative. And that narrative is beginning to collapse under its own contradictions. When an empire survives by indebting the world while enriching itself, it eventually loses the credibility to moralize. And when it loses the power to compel, its debts become just numbers—unpaid, unpayable, and unheeded.

This is not the fall of Rome. It is something more insidious: the slow-motion unraveling of an empire that bet its soul on compound interest. The world must now ask: What comes after the empire of IOUs?

Truth and reason didn't build civilizations - Fictions and lies did

“Truth alone triumphs”—Satyameva Jayate—stands enshrined beneath the national emblem of India, echoing an ancient Vedic ideal. But while this maxim has long inspired sages, reformers, and seekers, history often offers a more sobering tale. The triumph of truth, in the political or philosophical domain, is not a guaranteed destiny but a rare anomaly.

Across epochs, the victors of intellectual and political struggles have rarely been those aligned with what may be called “ultimate truth.” Instead, power has tended to favour those who wield illusions with conviction, who package complex realities into consumable myths, who wrap propaganda in the sacred garb of certainty. 

Civilizations rise not on foundations of transparent truths but on carefully woven tapestries of belief—fictions crafted so meticulously that they come to feel more real than reality itself.

This is not an indictment of humanity, but a reflection on its limits. Human beings, bounded by finite cognition, subjective perception, and cultural conditioning, lack the instruments to perceive ultimate truth in its fullness. Our sensory tools filter experience through lenses shaped by language, memory, emotion, and ideology. What we call “truth” is often but a mirror of our fears and desires, polished by history, inherited from myth, and burnished by power.

How then can one fight for truth, if truth itself is inaccessible? What does it mean to defend an idea that remains undefined, ungraspable, and endlessly contested? These are not merely epistemological questions; they are moral, civilizational, and political.

The great political ideologies—monarchism, liberalism, communism, fascism, nationalism—did not emerge from the patient pursuit of objective truth. They emerged from emotional energies, sacred stories, historical grievances, and the persuasive genius of those who could simplify chaos into narrative. The same holds true for many philosophical systems. The so-called “age of reason” did not displace mythology; it rebranded it. The Enlightenment merely replaced religious myth with secular myth—progress, liberty, rational man—as its new articles of faith.

Even the loftiest civilizations, those celebrated for their wisdom, order, and law, have owed more to their ability to construct shared fictions than to the presence of objective truth. Rome was not built on fact, but on virtus. The Chinese Mandate of Heaven was a metaphysical doctrine, not a verifiable contract. Indian civilization, for all its spiritual profundity, transmitted its deepest truths not through philosophical dialectic alone, but through stories—Itihasa, Purana, Katha—where the line between fact and meaning was consciously blurred.

To say that civilization is the product of lies may sound nihilistic. But perhaps the word “lie” is too crude. What we truly inhabit are useful fictions—constructs that provide coherence, continuity, and a sense of collective direction. A fiction becomes civilizational when it is infused with ethical aspiration and metaphysical depth. When these fictions lose their ethical anchor, they decay into propaganda.

The task, then, is not to denounce the role of narrative, mythology, or belief in shaping society, but to become more conscious of their power. In a world where ultimate truth remains elusive, perhaps the higher calling is to craft noble fictions—ones that elevate, rather than manipulate; that harmonize, rather than divide.

In the end, truth may not always prevail. But the stories we choose to believe in will continue to shape the world—more enduringly, perhaps, than truth itself ever could.

The four sons of Shiva: A cosmic symphony of dharma, power & grace

In the vast ocean of Hindu cosmology, where the sacred and the symbolic coalesce, the sons of Shiva emerge as luminous archetypes—divine expressions of human aspiration, cosmic order, and transcendental truth. Kartikeya, Ganesha, Ayyappa, and Hanuman—each born of divine intent, each embodying a facet of dharma, each carving a distinct spiritual path in the complex terrain of Sanatana Dharma.

Drawn from the mythic streams of the Puranas and the Itihasas—texts that are not mere chronicles of the past but living commentaries on existence—these four sons are not simply deities in a pantheon. They are principles. They are mirrors. They are maps of the inner and outer worlds.

Kartikeya: The Eternal Warrior and Youth

Kartikeya, known also as Skanda or Murugan, is the commander of the celestial armies—the youthful god whose sinews carry the strength of tapas, whose eyes blaze with the fire of clarity. He is the archetype of the warrior-philosopher, born not merely to conquer but to uphold dharma in an age of adharma. Associated with the peacock, which subdues the serpent of desire, and the rooster, symbol of valor and vigilance, Kartikeya’s iconography is a metaphysical language in itself.

His six heads—born of his miraculous conception from the sparks of Shiva’s seed—represent not only the six directions but the omniscient vision of one who sees beyond time. He is celibate, not as a denial of life, but as an affirmation of single-pointed focus—a yogic force clad in armor.

Ganesha: The God of Beginnings and Remover of Obstacles

If Kartikeya is the fire of youthful action, Ganesha is the earth of profound wisdom. The elephant-headed god, born of Parvati’s longing and animated by Shiva’s breath, stands at the threshold of all beginnings. He is the guardian of portals, the lord of thresholds—symbolically, of every decision, initiation, and undertaking.

Corpulent yet agile in mind, childlike yet the wisest of the gods, Ganesha wrote the Mahabharata as Vyasa dictated, demanding that the sage speak without pause. Thus, in him, intellect and intuition merge. The serpent girdling his belly and the broken tusk in his hand are not ornaments—they are symbols of restraint and sacrifice. His vehicle, the humble mouse, reminds us that even desire must be guided by discrimination.

Ganesha’s iconography is feminine in its fertility and masculine in its wisdom. He is the one who teaches that prosperity (artha) and pleasure (kama) are not sins if pursued under the guidance of righteousness (dharma) and the aspiration for liberation (moksha).

Ayyappa: The Synthesis of Divine Energies

Ayyappa, the tiger-riding lord of Sabarimala, is the rare deity who arises from the union of Shiva and the demon-slaying feminine energy of Vishnu in his Mohini form. He is the very embodiment of paradox resolved—a child of both masculine asceticism and enchanting illusion.

Worshipped as Hariharaputra, the son of Hari (Vishnu) and Hara (Shiva), Ayyappa is born of union yet remains celibate. He is beautiful, balanced, and unwavering. His austerities are fierce, his dharma is unshakable, and his mission is clear: to slay Mahishi, the demon of ego and chaos. Ayyappa, like Hanuman, shows that the divine is not merely to be adored, but lived through tapas—inner heat, discipline, and sacrifice.

Hanuman: The Devoted Self, the Indestructible Spirit

To speak of Hanuman is to invoke the living ideal of bhakti—devotion that knows no fear, no fatigue, and no failure. The monkey god, born of Vayu, the wind, is not only the most powerful warrior in the Ramayana, he is also the subtlest yogi. His heart beats only to the name of Rama, yet he possesses the might to move mountains—literally and metaphorically.

Celibate by vow and ascetic by nature, Hanuman is also a trickster, a scholar, and a strategist. He does not conquer through pride but through humility. Like Shiva himself, he dwells in liminality—on the boundaries between human and divine, servant and master, form and formlessness.

Tapa and Rasa: Two Streams of One Dharma

Together, Kartikeya, Ganesha, Ayyappa, and Hanuman represent the fullness of human striving—tapa (the discipline of inner fire) and rasa (the taste of life’s pleasures), both embraced without contradiction. The dharmic way is not a rejection of the world, but a harmonisation of the world’s myriad calls.

Kartikeya and Hanuman, the ascetic warriors, guard us from outer threats and inner delusions. They are the kshatriyas of the spirit. Ganesha and Ayyappa, the balancers of prosperity and purity, guide us through the labyrinth of material life with the light of insight. They are the sages of worldly life.

Sons Not Just of Shiva, but of the Self

In a deeper sense, these sons of Shiva are not separate from the aspirant—they are states of being, potentialities of the self. As we move through life, battling our demons, seeking wisdom, managing duties, and yearning for release, we are Kartikeya on the battlefield, Ganesha at the threshold, Ayyappa in penance, and Hanuman in devotion.

Thus, in venerating them, we are not bowing to the material representations of divinity, but awakening the gods within.

In search of worthy adversaries: The strategic poverty of seeing Pakistan as rival

“To be successful, you need friends; and to be very successful, you need enemies.” ~ Sidney Sheldon, The Other Side of Midnight

There is a deep, almost brutal truth in Sidney Sheldon’s aphorism—one that transcends the realm of individual ambition and finds resonance in the destinies of nations. 

History is replete with the paradox that great civilisations, far from rising in tranquil isolation, ascend in the shadow of formidable adversaries. Adversity, when it takes the shape of a worthy rival, becomes not a curse but a crucible of national greatness.

A nation without enemies is like a muscle untested, an idea unchallenged, a spirit untempered. Complacency sets in. Intellectual life becomes decorative rather than generative. Ethics yield to convenience. The dream of permanence lulls the people into an opiate of false security. Culture becomes exhibition rather than essence, and politics devolves into performance rather than purpose. Peace, when prolonged in the absence of threat or tension, does not refine—it decays.

History offers ample testimony. The Roman Republic rose not by idle peace but in fierce contest with Carthage. The American resolve was forged through existential rivalry with the British Empire, later tested by the ideological juggernaut of the Soviet Union. Israel, a nation surrounded by hostility, has survived and innovated because it could never afford to rest. China, in its long civilizational march, has repeatedly redefined itself in the face of foreign domination and internal implosion.

The Nietzschean dictum—“What does not kill me makes me stronger”—rings truer at the scale of nations than it ever could for individuals. Strength is not inherited; it is cultivated, often at great cost, through confrontation with those who threaten to undo you.

And herein lies India’s peculiar predicament.

Seven decades after independence, India continues to define itself against Pakistan—an entity that has steadily slid into a vortex of economic implosion, political instability, and ideological extremism. This fixation, this psychological tethering to a state that has failed in almost every metric of modern governance, limits India’s own self-conception. It’s akin to a scholar obsessing over the envy of an illiterate neighbour.

India’s real challenges lie not in the fires across the western border, but in the shifting tectonics of global power: in China’s muscular expansionism, in America’s shifting strategic calculus, in the weaponization of global trade and technology, and in the race for control over critical resources and AI futures. While we stay transfixed by the chronic nuisance of a collapsed rival, the giants of the world are redrawing the rules of engagement.

To envision itself as a leading power, India must choose adversaries that reflect its potential, not its past. Pakistan is no longer the mirror in which India should see its reflection—it is a relic. The true tests of India’s strength, maturity, and global standing will emerge from how it contends with the economic might of China, the technological dominance of the West, and the turbulence of multipolar competition.

This does not mean inviting conflict—it means embracing complexity. It means recognizing that national greatness is not forged in the echo chamber of self-congratulation, nor in rivalry with the weak, but in difficult negotiations, strategic deterrence, and robust defence against those who possess real power.

A country is never sovereign unless it controls its narrative of threat and ambition. And to do that, it must reframe its enemies—not with belligerence, but with clarity. Greatness requires resistance. Resistance requires adversaries worth respecting. And respect, in geopolitics, is born not in shared history, but in the anticipation of future contests.

India stands at an inflection point. To rise, it must stop shadow-boxing with ghosts and begin grappling with giants. That is the paradox of power: the stronger you grow, the more daunting your enemies must become. Anything less is not worthy of India’s civilizational inheritance—nor its aspirations.

The scum also rises: The dangerous myth of civilizational superiority

It is often said, with culinary simplicity, that the cream rises to the top. But so, invariably, does the scum. This adage—drawn from the behavior of broth—carries a sobering truth when applied to human affairs.

Success does not distinguish the virtuous from the vile. Sometimes the noble ascend to prominence; more often, the cunning and the corrupt claw their way to the summit. Thus, to judge the character of a person merely by the height they have reached in the social or political order is to mistake outcome for essence. The most revered figures of an era may be moral failures in disguise, while those who languish in obscurity may possess the inner life of saints.

The same paradox holds true for civilizations. We are habitually conditioned to associate power with virtue—believing that a civilization that achieved global dominance must have been superior in intellect, moral clarity, or political brilliance. But history offers little support for such optimism. Many civilizations that rose to prominence did so not because they embodied justice, wisdom, or cultural refinement, but because they mastered the brutal logic of conquest, extraction, and domination.

In fact, the world has seen more than one high civilization—deeply ethical, artistically advanced, and intellectually fertile—crushed under the boots of less cultivated but more aggressive invaders.

It is an error, then, to conflate civilizational success with civilizational virtue. Power does not imply wisdom, nor does victory confer value. The Roman Empire, for all its legal, philosophical and engineering brilliance, was built on systemic slavery, blood sports and imperial exploitation. Timur, the scythe-wielding founder of the Timurid Empire, carved his legacy through massacres and terror—his empire vast, but his moral vision void. Nazi Germany achieved swift technical and military advances, yet its moral depravity remains without parallel. 

Success, whether military or economic, must always be measured against the means by which it is attained and the ends toward which it is directed.

Worse still, the historical record is often an unreliable witness. The origins of civilizations are embedded in mythology and nationalistic self-narration. Every civilization seeks to enshrine its past in tales of divine favor, civilizing missions, and righteous triumphs. But these stories are rarely neutral. They are embroidered by victors, censored by regimes, and propagated through generations until they ossify into orthodoxy. What is remembered is what serves power; what is forgotten is often what mattered most.

The truth, therefore, lies not in outcomes, but in essence. To understand a civilization, we must look not at the size of its armies, the scale of its monuments, the size of its economy, but at its metaphysical compass—its conception of justice, its ability to self-criticize, its vision of the place of humanity in the universe, and its openness to transcendental truths. These are harder to measure, harder still to preserve, and almost impossible to resurrect once lost. But they are the true indicators of a civilization’s soul.

To believe otherwise is to mistake surface for substance—a perennial error in the reading of history. It is to applaud the ascent of scum while mistaking it for cream. In our time, as in times past, discernment—not triumph—is the mark of wisdom.

The illusion of greatness: How Kissinger’s chosen leaders served American power, not their own nations

In Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy, Henry Kissinger offers a meditation on political power through the lives of six leaders he deems exemplary: Konrad Adenauer, Charles de Gaulle, Anwar Sadat, Lee Kuan Yew, Margaret Thatcher, and Richard Nixon.

“Leaders think and act at the intersection of two axes,” Kissinger writes with characteristic gravitas, “between the past and the future; and between the abiding values and aspirations of those they lead. They must balance what they know—drawn from the past—with what they intuit about the future, which is necessarily conjectural.” Leadership, then, in his view, is a strategic act of navigation—part memory, part foresight, and wholly attuned to power.

And yet, as one traces the arc of these six careers, an unsettling irony emerges. Kissinger extols them as visionaries, yet their actions, far from realizing national resurgence, arguably facilitated the erosion of their own countries’ sovereignty and influence—often in ways that benefited the United States more than their homelands.

Under Adenauer, West Germany relinquished the hope of strategic autonomy, aligning itself firmly with the Atlantic bloc and embracing a tutelary role under American and British influence. De Gaulle, for all his rhetoric of “grandeur” and independence, laid the foundations of a France increasingly beholden to liberal internationalism and domestic progressivism—a far cry from the civilizational confidence he sought to restore.

Anwar Sadat’s strategic pivot to the United States—sealed by the Camp David Accords—recast Egypt’s foreign policy and won him Western acclaim. But in abandoning Soviet alignment and pan-Arab nationalism, he entrenched economic dependence and eroded Egypt’s regional stature. The liberalization that followed brought instability without real reform. His assassination in 1981 marked not just the end of his rule, but the eclipse of Egypt’s postcolonial sovereignty.

Lee Kuan Yew is the outlier—a leader who resisted Western ideological imposition. Yet, in aligning Singapore closely with global capital and, later, with China’s rise, he created a tightly controlled but externally entangled city-state—prosperous, stable, but geopolitically vulnerable. Yew’s Singapore is not sovereign in the full civilizational sense.

Margaret Thatcher is hailed as the architect of modern British conservatism, yet her legacy reveals a stark inversion. By embracing market absolutism, she dismantled the industrial backbone of the nation—coal, steel, manufacturing—leaving vast regions hollowed out. Her war on organised labour fractured the working class, not to restore national strength but to usher in an era of financial dominance dictated by transatlantic capital. Far from reclaiming British sovereignty, Thatcher bound the UK more tightly to the American imperium. By the close of her tenure, Britain had ceased to act as a sovereign power and was reduced to a "vassal state" within a US-led global order—a nation trading its civilisational agency for economic orthodoxy.

Nixon, of course, is the anomaly—a patriot by Kissinger’s own standard. His boldest move, the abolition of the gold standard in 1971, severed the dollar from material backing, allowing the U.S. to export inflation while importing real goods. In doing so, he laid the foundation for the dollar’s ascendancy as the world’s default reserve currency—transforming it into America’s most effective instrument of global hegemony. Henceforth, the dollar was no longer just a currency—it became the United States' primary export and its most potent geopolitical weapon.

The subtext of Kissinger’s analysis thus becomes more legible: leadership, in his moral universe, is measured not by the fulfilment of national destinies but by the ability to integrate one's country into the architecture of American-led order. The statesman, in Kissinger’s telling, is great not when he preserves national civilizational integrity, but when he serves—wittingly or otherwise—the imperatives of the Pax Americana.

History, in this light, is less a source of wisdom than a convenient stage. For Kissinger, the true statesman is not the one who liberates his people from decline, but the one who—knowingly or not—facilitates the consolidation of American power. His “studies in strategy” are less about global leadership than about the architecture of the empire.

Vedic wisdom, the Gita, the eternal quest for truth and the permanence of doubt

The Vedic sages harbored no illusions about the finality of knowledge. For them, certainty was not a privilege granted to mortals, but a mirage—a temptation to be resisted. 

They understood that truth, far from being a fixed possession, is an ever-evolving revelation: not a monument to be guarded, but a path to be walked.

In this spirit, they rejected dogma and embraced inquiry. Truth, they believed, is not the domain of the rigid, the alienated, or the misanthropic. Rather, it belongs to the free-spirited, to those who engage life with joy, curiosity, and openness. The true seeker is not one who clings to answers, but one who dares to examine all sides of a question, who listens before asserting, and who holds belief lightly—like a song, not a sword.

The Vedic tradition, profoundly aware of the impermanence of language and the limits of writing, preserved its wisdom through an oral lineage. Knowledge was sung—not carved in stone, but carried in breath. Truth was performed aloud, in the presence of others, under the sky, where it could be tested, challenged, and understood collectively. Only that which could be spoken clearly and heard by all had the legitimacy to be considered truth.

This ethos reaches its dramatic apogee in the Bhagavad Gita, where Krishna’s ultimate teaching to Arjuna unfolds not in a temple or monastery, but in the liminal space between two massive armies, poised for slaughter on the fields of Kurukshetra. The battlefield, with its clash of duties and its moral ambiguities, becomes the ideal setting for the revelation of truth—not despite its violence, but because it reflects the human condition in all its complexity.

Here, truth is not divorced from action. It is discovered in the midst of responsibility, in the act of engagement with the world. Krishna does not offer Arjuna a metaphysical escape from conflict; instead, he helps him see through his confusion, dissolve his paralysis, and reclaim his agency. It is in this moment—neither peaceful nor abstract, but charged with consequence—that Arjuna attains clarity.

His response, recorded in verse 73 of the Gita, is quiet yet momentous:

“By your grace, my delusion is gone; I have recognized my true self. O Acyuta, I am free from doubt. I shall act according to your word.”

This is the recognition that matters—not a sudden acquisition of omniscience, but the gentle lifting of fog. The truth, for Arjuna, is not a set of doctrines; it is the inner alignment that allows him to act with conviction, freed from fear and inner contradiction.

In a world too often marked by absolutism and ideological rigidity, the Vedic insight remains strikingly modern. Truth is not a prize for the loudest or the most certain. It is something more fragile, more sacred: a process of articulation, of listening, of emergence. It lives in dialogue, not monologue. It thrives in uncertainty, not closure.

The sages sang their truths under the open sky—and in the Gita, we are reminded why. Truth must be spoken, heard, and lived. It must be earned, again and again, in the thick of life—not away from it.

The Myth of the Civilizational Clash: Why Huntington’s Civilizational Thesis Falls Short

Samuel P. Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations offers a seductive but fundamentally flawed lens through which to view global conflict. 

While his thesis resonates emotionally—inviting people to externalize blame by identifying threats in cultural or religious “Others”—it does so at the expense of historical accuracy and analytical depth. In truth, the most violent and transformative conflicts in human history have occurred not between civilizations, but within them.

Take Europe, for instance—the cradle of modernity and a continent Huntington classifies as a single civilization. From the British massacres of the Irish, the Napoleonic Wars to the two World Wars, Europe tore itself apart through internecine conflict. World War I and World War II—commonly labeled as global conflicts—were in essence European civil wars that spilled across borders. A more accurate naming convention might be European War I and European War II. These wars were fought not against alien civilizations but among nations that shared language families, religions, and philosophical traditions.

The Holocaust further underscores this internal descent into brutality. Nazi Germany, a supposed pinnacle of Western advancement, built industrial mechanisms to annihilate millions of fellow Europeans. This genocidal project was born not from a clash with an external civilization, but from a political agenda within the West itself.

Terrorism, too, has often originated internally. The United Kingdom’s most persistent security threat until the late 20th century came not from foreign jihadists, but from the Irish Republican Army. In 1984, the IRA nearly assassinated Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Their campaign was rooted in historical, political, and religious disputes within the British Isles—not in a civilizational divide.

The Cold War, long seen as a binary confrontation between East and West, also fails Huntington’s test. Both the United States and the Soviet Union drew from the same intellectual lineage of Enlightenment rationalism and industrial modernity. Marx, the father of communism, was German and did most of his work in London. Lenin was steeped in European political theory. The Cold War was a geopolitical sibling rivalry—not a civilizational standoff.

Religious schisms within civilizations have also fueled centuries of violence. The Catholic–Protestant conflicts in Europe, including the Thirty Years’ War and the English Civil War, were devastating and long-lasting. These were not clashes of civilizations but internecine wars waged over authority, theology, and political control.

A similar pattern is visible in the Middle East. The Sunni–Shia divide has been the root of many of the region’s bloodiest conflicts, from the Iran-Iraq War to the contemporary civil wars in Syria and Yemen. These are fratricidal struggles within Islam, not confrontations with external civilizations.

Even the United States, often framed as a monolithic representative of Western civilization, was nearly torn apart by its own Civil War—a domestic conflict between Americans of European descent. More than 600,000 lives were lost, not to foreign armies, but to an internal reckoning over slavery, state sovereignty, and national identity.

The ongoing tensions between the United States, Israel, and Iran are also mischaracterized when framed as a civilizational clash. If this were truly a confrontation between Western and Islamic civilizations, the 57 Muslim-majority nations would rally behind Iran. Yet, many key Muslim nations—Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, and others—have chosen either neutrality or quiet alignment with the West. This fracture underscores the reality that geopolitical rivalries, regional interests, and ideological divisions within civilizations are far more significant than simplistic civilizational binaries.

The deeper historical lesson is clear: the gravest threats to any society often come from within. Conflict is most likely where identities intersect and power is contested among close cultural or political relatives. Civilizations are not monoliths, and their greatest ruptures tend to emerge internally—from ideological, theological, and political fault lines.

Huntington’s framework, though rhetorically powerful, is historically unconvincing. By casting global conflict as a clash of civilizations, it obscures the internal dynamics that truly drive human violence. Understanding the past requires more than fear of the “Other”; it requires confronting the mirror.

The New Triumvirate: America, Europe, China—and Israel’s Wars to Prevent Multipolarity

The United States, Western Europe, and China are not enemies. They are allies masquerading as rivals—co-owners of a global empire that fears no internal division as much as it fears the rise of an outside challenger. The real war is not between them. It is between their triumvirate and the rest of the world.

Bound by intricate economic ties, shared technological ecosystems, and overlapping interests in preserving the current international order, these three powers represent not a fractured geopolitical landscape, but a unified civilizational core determined to uphold its dominance across the globe. Their cohesion is not ideological but structural, based on a shared interest in controlling the narrative, institutions, and flows of global power.

This configuration finds a compelling historical parallel in the First Triumvirate of the late Roman Republic—Pompey, Crassus, and Caesar. Although divided by personal ambition, these three men worked in coordination to suppress the republican institutions that had once defined Rome. The fatal blow to this fragile alliance came not from within but from without: the death of Crassus at the hands of the Parthians in 53 BCE, during the ill-fated campaign at Carrhae. 

Crassus's defeat shattered the balance, ushering in a civil war between Pompey and Caesar. Pompey was eliminated by Caesar’s forces, and Caesar himself was later assassinated by senators who feared his imperial ambitions.

Today’s triumvirate—America, Europe, and China—similarly dreads not one another, but the rise of a fourth force: an external actor that rejects their norms, resists absorption into their system, and potentially reorders global power. This "fourth force" could manifest as a resurgent Russia, an emerging Middle Eastern coalition, or even an unpredictable coalition of developing states—any configuration that escapes the gravitational pull of the current order. What unites the triumvirate is not mutual affection, but a collective imperative to prevent such a force from gaining traction.

In this context, Israel plays a pivotal, if often misunderstood, role. Far from being a solitary actor engaged in regional conflicts for its own survival, Israel has become an indispensable strategic tool in the hands of the triumvirate. It serves as a frontline buffer to contain any fourth force that may rise from the Middle East—a region historically resistant to imperial integration and deeply skeptical of Western frameworks. 

Israel's wars, therefore, are not merely its own; they are waged for the preservation of the triumvirate’s global hegemony. Whether confronting non-state actors or hostile regimes, Israel acts as a surrogate enforcer, a bulwark ensuring that the Middle East does not become a staging ground for a new, unaligned pole of power.

The triumvirate’s true fear, then, is not disorder but independence—not violence, but non-compliance. It is the rise of a geopolitical actor that cannot be co-opted through trade, intimidated through sanctions, or deterred through military posturing. Like the Parthians of antiquity, this actor may emerge suddenly, from beyond the boundaries of acceptable discourse and diplomatic predictability. It may deal a blow to one member of the triumvirate—not necessarily by conquest, but through systemic disruption—and set in motion a collapse that no summit or sanctions regime can reverse.

What we are witnessing today is not the peaceful transition to multipolarity, but a frantic effort to defend an aging world order. The so-called rivalries between America, Europe, and China are less significant than the machinery of collaboration that undergirds them—through supply chains, financial markets, intelligence sharing, and diplomatic alignment. Like the Roman triumvirs, they may clash for precedence, but they remain united in one key objective: to prevent a rupture in the architecture of global control.

The lesson from Rome is clear. Power shared among elites is vulnerable to the shock of the outsider. And just as the Parthians exposed the limits of Roman imperialism, so too might today’s fourth force—wherever it emerges—reveal the fragility of the modern triumvirate.

Kishkindha to Kurukshetra: Vishnu’s Hand in the Cosmic Rivalry Between Surya and Indra

The cosmic confrontation between Karna and Arjuna in the Mahabharata is more than just a clash between two heroic warriors—it can be interpreted as the continuation of an ancient and symbolic rivalry between two celestial powers: Surya, the solar deity, and Indra, the king of the heavens. 

As the sons of these two deities, Karna and Arjuna embody this cosmic antagonism on the mortal plane. Karna, born of Surya, and Arjuna, son of Indra, are cast into opposing roles in the great war of Kurukshetra. Their destinies culminate in Karna’s death, brought about by Arjuna with the indispensable guidance of Krishna, the eighth avatar of Vishnu.

This divine pattern of conflict, however, has an antecedent in the Ramayana, set in an earlier Yuga. There, the cosmic rivalry between Surya and Indra is mirrored in the fraternal conflict between Vali and Sugriva. Vali, the mighty vanara king and son of Indra, is opposed by his younger brother Sugriva, born of Surya. Once again, Vishnu—this time in his seventh avatar as Rama—intervenes decisively. Siding with Sugriva, Rama slays Vali and restores Sugriva to the throne of Kishkindha.

A striking symmetry emerges from these narratives. In the Ramayana, Surya’s son (Sugriva) triumphs over Indra’s son (Vali) with the help of Vishnu as Rama. In the Mahabharata, Indra’s son (Arjuna) vanquishes Surya’s son (Karna), aided by Vishnu as Krishna. In both epochs, the conflict between the celestial lineages is resolved not through the independent might of either side, but through divine intervention. It is the avatar of Vishnu who tilts the scales of fate, suggesting that dharma, not mere lineage, dictates the course of victory.

These epic patterns invite a deeper reflection: is there a cosmic balance being maintained between the houses of Surya and Indra, mediated by Vishnu across Yugas? Or does the repetition serve to highlight the futility of divine rivalry when set against the larger arc of Vishnu’s dharmic mission?

Ultimately, the question of superiority between Surya and Indra remains unresolved, perhaps deliberately so. For it is not the triumph of one deity over another that the epics foreground, but the recurring centrality of Vishnu—the preserver—whose avatars uphold the moral and cosmic order. The epics suggest that in the theatre of divine drama, power alone is insufficient without dharma, and destiny bows to the will of the divine incarnate.

Visha and Amrita: The Fragile Boundary Between Intellectualism and Barbarism

Churning of Cosmic Ocean

The boundary between medicine and poison, between what heals and what harms, has long been recognised in Indian thought as subtle and deeply contextual. In the Atharva Veda, one of the earliest Indian texts concerned with healing, disease and remedy are treated as forces that can both originate in and be dispelled by divine or natural means. 

The same herb, the same mantra, the same force—ojas or tejas—may bring either vitality or destruction, depending on its application, intention, and measure. This duality is also reflected in the Sanskrit term visha, meaning poison, which is etymologically and symbolically close to amrita, the nectar of immortality—both are born of the same cosmic churning (samudra manthan), the same act that yields the divine and the deadly.

This paradox of opposites—where poison and nectar, good and evil, often emerge from a common source—provides a potent metaphor for the relationship between the intellectual and the so-called barbarian. Much like the Vedic Rishi, who isolates himself to gain higher knowledge and then re-engages with society as a moral guide, the intellectual presumes a role of healing: to shield the body politic from ignorance, chaos, and violence. 

Yet the tradition also warns us against false ascetics and hollow scholars—those who pursue knowledge not for satya (truth) but for svārtha (self-interest). As the Bhagavad Gita cautions, those entrenched in avidya (ignorance) often masquerade under the guise of wisdom, and even tamas, the quality of inertia and decay, can wear the robe of sagacity.

The Mahabharata abounds with such inversions. The Kauravas, educated in the shastras, trained by royal gurus, are heirs to the throne. Yet it is Pandavas with their raw force and naturalistic values, and Krishna, with his cosmic vision, who preserve dharma. It is not the cultivated or the learned who uphold civilization, but often the forgotten, the exiled, the so-called barbarians whose strength lies in their unyielding will and raw power.

The history of empires in India, too, follows this rhythm. From Chandragupta Maurya—who rose from obscurity under the guidance of Chanakya—to the founders of the Gupta and Chola empires, it is often those from outside the sanctified elite who inject new energy into a stagnant polity. The decline of great kingdoms, conversely, is marked by excesses of ritualism, philosophical abstraction, and detachment from the realities of statecraft—a condition vividly described in Kautilya’s Arthashastra and critiqued implicitly by later Bhakti poets, who rejected hollow scholasticism in favour of lived, experiential truth.

The distinction between the intellectual and the barbarian is not absolute but cyclical, even illusory. When intellectualism ossifies into elitism and complacency, it ceases to be a healing force and becomes a poison. Conversely, what is dismissed as barbaric or uncivilized may contain within it the latent energy necessary for renewal. The same cosmic churning that produces poison also yields nectar. The task of any civilization is not to suppress the churning, but to recognize when its medicines have become its poisons—when its savages may be its saviours.

History’s Iron Law: The Fall of Empires to Their Former Colonies

The arc of imperial history is replete with ironies, none more persistent than the recurring phenomenon of great empires being undone by forces once subordinated to their power. This historical inversion—the return of the periphery to challenge and often supplant the core—has played out repeatedly across centuries and civilizations, suggesting a structural dynamic embedded within the very nature of empire.

Consider the fate of the Achaemenid Persian Empire. Once the dominant power of the ancient Near East, it fell not to a rival civilization but to a coalition led by its former western vassals—the Macedonians under Alexander the Great. Similarly, the Roman Empire, which extended its control across vast swathes of Europe, North Africa, and the Levant, was ultimately overwhelmed not by a peer polity but by a convergence of Central Asian and Germanic tribes—Visigoths, Vandals, and Huns—many of whom had once served as auxiliary forces or client states within the imperial framework.

The Byzantine Empire offers another poignant example. It once exercised suzerainty over various Turkic and Balkan groups, including the ancestors of the Ottomans. Yet by 1453, it was these very Ottomans—former vassals—that delivered the final blow to Constantinople, signaling the definitive end of Roman imperial continuity. Likewise, the Islamic conquests of the Iberian Peninsula, which lasted nearly 800 years, were initially facilitated by political factions in Italy and Byzantium. These powers supported Arab-Berber incursions into Visigothic Spain in a bid to weaken their rivals—only to see a new Islamic civilization emerge on European soil.

This pattern is not confined to the ancient or medieval world. The Zengid dynasty, instrumental in the rise of the Kurdish commander Saladin, was eclipsed by him as he established the Ayyubid Sultanate. In turn, the Ayyubids were overthrown by the Mamluks—former slave-soldiers of Turkic and Circassian origin—who forged one of the most enduring military regimes in Islamic history. Similarly, the Mongol Empire, which spanned from the Pacific to the Danube, was ultimately supplanted by successor states in Russia and China—regions that had once existed under Mongol dominion.

In the modern period, the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries was not solely the result of European power but also of nationalist movements and regional actors who had once been subordinate to Ottoman rule. From the Balkans to the Levant, former provinces became crucibles of resistance and eventual independence.

These historical precedents point to a cyclical law of reversal: the imperial center, in time, becomes vulnerable to the energies it once harnessed and subordinated. Empires are seldom felled by foreign equals; they are more often eroded from within or overtaken by those they once ruled.

This historical logic may once again assert itself in the decades ahead. The post-World War II Western order—led by the United States and upheld by former colonial powers such as Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain—now faces demographic, economic, and ideological challenges emerging from the very regions they once colonized. Migration flows, capital investments, and technological diffusion from Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and Latin America are beginning to reshape the political and cultural landscapes of Europe and North America.

The prospect, then, is not merely one of geopolitical rebalancing but of civilizational inversion. The imperial core—once the agent of global domination—may, within the next fifty years, find itself increasingly subject to the influence, and perhaps even the ascendancy, of forces and populations it once ruled. If history remains a reliable guide, the next wave of transformation may well be led not by the heirs of empire, but by the children of its margins.

Prosperity Without Liberty: Rethinking the Capitalist Free Market Orthodoxy

The belief that privatization inherently advances freedom is not only overly simplistic—it is historically indefensible. Far from being bastions of liberty, private corporations have at times been among the worst violators of human rights. Some of history’s most exploitative systems of slavery were not the result of feudal tyrannies or authoritarian regimes but were driven by private enterprises operating under the banner of commerce and profit.

Institutions like the British East India Company, the Royal African Company, and the Dutch West India Company—respected and even celebrated in their time—trafficked in human lives while amassing vast political and economic power. These were not outliers; they were emblematic of an era where profit was pursued without ethical constraint. Their legacies serve as a sobering reminder: privatization is no guarantee of liberty. When left unregulated and unaccountable, private enterprises can be just as oppressive as despotic governments or feudal warlords. 

This historical insight invites us to question the assumptions underlying modern economic orthodoxy. Is economic success truly the product of private ownership and unregulated markets? Or is it better explained by the presence of strong institutions, effective governance, and coherent national strategies?

China presents a striking counterpoint to the conventional wisdom of free-market supremacy. Despite being a one-party authoritarian state, China has witnessed the fastest economic transformation in modern history. Its rise to the status of the world’s second-largest economy has been driven not by liberal democracy or laissez-faire capitalism, but by long-term planning, centralized control, and strategic reforms. Crucially, state-owned enterprises have played a central role in this transformation—demonstrating that public ownership, under the right conditions, can be both efficient and globally competitive. China's experience challenges the idea that prosperity depends on privatization; instead, it underscores the importance of institutional stability and visionary governance.

Even in the supposed heartland of free-market capitalism—the United States—the notion of an open and competitive market economy is more illusion than reality. American capitalism is deeply skewed in favor of large multinational corporations that often operate in lockstep with political and bureaucratic power. The lines between government and corporate America have blurred to the point of indistinction, creating a system where policy is routinely shaped by lobbyists and campaign donors rather than public interest.

While these multinational giants enjoy deregulation, tax privileges, and global reach, small and medium-sized businesses are burdened with red tape, compliance costs, and structural disadvantages. In this landscape, the promise of equal opportunity through market competition is hollow. What emerges instead is an entrenched oligarchy—where wealth translates into power, and power perpetuates privilege.

U.S.-style capitalism does not represent the triumph of freedom. It is increasingly the fountainhead of global oligarchy—producing economic dynasties that seek not only to dominate markets, but to influence politics, control narratives, and shape the rules of the game to their advantage. The idea that market forces will spontaneously align with public good is not only naive—it has been consistently disproven by history.

Khrushchev's Fire: From Stalin’s Purges to Kennedy’s Philandering, and the Fall of the Soviet Empire

Stalin once lost his pipe. A few days later, Lavrentiy Beria, the ever-diligent head of the NKVD, arrived with an update. “Did you find your pipe?” he asked. Stalin, deadpan, replied: “Yes. It was under the sofa.” Beria blinked. “Oops,” he said. “Three people have already confessed. They’ve been executed.”

Such was the bureaucracy of terror—pre-emptive, paranoid, and wholly indifferent to truth.

After Stalin’s death, and Beria’s prompt liquidation, Nikita Khrushchev emerged from the shadows—bald, voluble, and eager to cast himself as the conscience of the new Soviet era. This was the same Khrushchev whom Stalin had once publicly mocked by tapping his pipe on his head and declaring, “It is hollow.” When the Wehrmacht stood poised to overrun Stalingrad, Stalin ceremonially poured ash on Khrushchev’s head, invoking a Roman ritual used to shame defeated generals.

Yet Khrushchev would have the last word—or so he imagined. Once in power, he launched the grand campaign of de-Stalinization. Out went the cult, the statues, the steely iconography of the vozhd. In came the anecdotes, the horror stories, the grainy memoirs. On a 1958 visit to Hollywood, Khrushchev even told John Wayne that Stalin had once ordered the actor’s assassination over his anti-communism—and that Khrushchev had heroically rescinded the hit. The tale appears nowhere in his memoirs and served mainly to flatter American egos while recasting Khrushchev as the enlightened reformer.

But Khrushchev’s true alliance was not with the West’s movie stars—it was with its propaganda mills. He handed them, gift-wrapped, the caricature they had long desired: Stalin as a paranoid butcher, a geopolitical maniac juggling nuclear grenades. And while Stalin’s cruelty was both real and immense, the irony lies in the balance of terror. For all his crimes—and they were numerous and grave—Stalin presided over a world that, however brutal, never flirted so openly with nuclear annihilation.

That particular honor fell to Khrushchev himself, who in 1962 blundered into the Cuban Missile Crisis with the finesse of a sleepwalker juggling live ordnance. Opposite him stood John F. Kennedy—charming, reckless, and depending on which document you read, either a Cold War tactician or a pill-popping philanderer with mafia entanglements. Together, they brought the planet within a hair’s breadth of incineration.

The Cold War had many architects, but few episodes captured its lunacy like those thirteen days in October, when ideology, ego, and testosterone collided in the tropical humidity of Havana’s shadow. And Khrushchev’s moral indignation rang hollow when set against history’s broader ledger. Yes, Stalin built an empire through repression—but he was not unique in brutality.

The founding fathers of the United States, after all, were slaveholders—men who spoke of liberty while owning other human beings. They waged wars of extermination against indigenous peoples, laying the foundation of the so-called “land of the free” atop a continent-wide genocide. Empire is never a clean business. And those who sit tall on their moral high horses often forget the dried blood crusted on their own saddles.

What made Stalin intolerable to the West was not his cruelty—it was his defiance. Khrushchev, by contrast, sought applause. In condemning Stalin, he hoped to win legitimacy abroad. Instead, he shattered the internal scaffolding that had held the Soviet system together through war, famine, and fear. What followed wasn’t reform, but entropy.

A parade of uninspired leaders—Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko—offered stagnation as statecraft. And then came Gorbachev, with glasnost and perestroika in hand, determined to hammer the final nail into the Soviet coffin. Enamoured with the West and eager to remake the USSR in America’s image, he proved a willing listener to the whispers of Washington’s deep-state strategists. The reforms he enacted were incoherent, ideologically muddled, and economically disastrous. The result was not renewal, but ruin: a plummeting economy, a crumbling state, and the quiet, almost ceremonial dissolution of an empire.

And the West? It was not content with victory. The goal was never simply to dismantle the Soviet Union—it was to fragment Russia itself. A patchwork of compliant mini-states, stripped of sovereignty and saturated with Western capital, was the ultimate ambition. First came NATO’s eastward creep. Then the velvet revolutions, IMF shock therapy, and NGOs with strategic subtexts. The Cold War ended. The playbook didn’t.

Khrushchev was no Stalin—but he may have been something worse: a man who mistook applause for strategy, and sabotage for reform. The Soviet Union didn’t collapse in a day. It began to decay the moment the round-headed fool tried to look clever by setting fire to the house he once helped build.

China Chose Order Over Freedom—And Prospered. Should India Rethink Its Path?

Can freedom survive without order? Increasingly, the answer appears to be no.

Liberty without structure is fragile. It fractures under pressure, degenerates into chaos, and ultimately becomes susceptible to co-option—whether by demagogues, mobs, or malign external forces. Freedom, when unmoored from order, becomes not a birthright but a mirage—an illusion that dissolves the moment institutions falter, insurgencies erupt, or ideological fragmentation goes unchecked.

Freedom does not exist in a vacuum. It requires scaffolding: a dependable legal system, robust institutions, and a shared cultural framework that engineers stability. Only in societies where peace and predictability prevail do people begin to assert liberty as a right. Where violence dominates and governance collapses, survival supersedes sovereignty. Under such conditions, freedom is not merely endangered—it becomes irrelevant.

China’s modern trajectory exemplifies this logic. In the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, the Chinese Communist Party imposed an unforgiving form of political control. Yet it was precisely this imposition of order—ruthless though it was—that laid the groundwork for China’s meteoric rise. By extinguishing internal dissent, the CCP created the conditions necessary for long-term economic planning, infrastructure development, and integration into global markets. In three decades, China transitioned from inward-looking authoritarianism to a formidable global power—not because it embraced freedom, but because it prioritized stability.

The key insight is simple: chaos is the enemy of progress. Disorder—whether driven by ethnic strife, sectarian politics, or decaying institutions—has been one of India’s most enduring challenges. Since 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has brought a degree of cohesion and clarity to the governance model, restoring direction to a state long beset by drift. Yet, fault lines remain. From separatist movements to criminalized politics, several regions in India continue to struggle with chronic instability.

If India is serious about achieving the vision of Viksit Bharat by 2047, political order cannot remain a rhetorical ambition—it must be institutionalized. And this requires a blunt reckoning with the inherited architecture of governance. Many of India's institutions are colonial holdovers—designed to rule a subjugated population, not empower a sovereign citizenry. Their functioning is slow, opaque, and frequently obstructive. Unless these institutions are thoroughly reformed, they will continue to frustrate developmental ambitions rather than facilitate them.

The Modi government has shown resolve in pockets, but systemic reform remains an unfinished—and perhaps deliberately avoided—agenda. Transforming governance demands more than technocratic tweaks; it requires political courage, intellectual clarity, and the ability to question sacrosanct liberal orthodoxies. 

For instance, diversity is often celebrated as a national strength. But history offers a more sobering picture: societies with less internal fragmentation—more cohesive in religious cultural aspects—tend to move faster in achieving economic and cultural ascendancy. Homogeneity, for all its discomforts in polite discourse, has often gone hand in hand with order and effectiveness.

If India is to become a truly developed nation by 2047, it must make difficult choices. It must find ways to reduce friction—political, ethnic, administrative—and foster a more unified sense of purpose. That does not mean eliminating difference, but it does mean subordinating factionalism to national coherence. Political freedom, far from being the starting point, is the end product of a stable order and a flourishing society.

A republic is only as strong as the foundation it rests upon. India must decide whether it wants to be a nation permanently negotiating its internal contradictions—or one that builds durable order and, through it, secures lasting freedom.

Kissinger’s warning and the India-Pakistan ceasefire: When friendship with America turns costly

“It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal.” ~ Attributed to Henry Kissinger by William F. Buckley Jr.

This darkly prophetic remark, reportedly made by Henry Kissinger during a phone conversation in 1968 amid the bloody churn of the Vietnam War, encapsulates the paradox at the heart of American foreign policy. 

The conversation, as recounted by Buckley, revolved around the tragic fate of two South Vietnamese presidents—Ngo Dinh Diem, overthrown and executed in a CIA-backed coup, and Nguyễn Văn Thiệu, who was later abandoned by his American patrons and left to flee his crumbling nation. Kissinger, the master tactician of realpolitik and the quintessential deep state functionary, understood the ruthless logic of empires better than most.

Contrary to the high-minded rhetoric peddled by Hollywood stars, media pundits, and Ivy League theorists, the post-World War II American foreign policy has rarely been about promoting democracy, human rights, free trade or global peace. 

These are the ornamental veneers, the palatable narratives sold to the world. Beneath them lies a colder, more enduring objective: the consolidation and perpetuation of American hegemony. Whether in Latin America, the Middle East, or Southeast Asia, Washington’s actions have consistently favoured strategic dominance over ethical consistency.

It is in this broader context that America's recent role as a peacemaker between India and Pakistan must be viewed. While Washington claims to play the benevolent intermediary, its deeper motivations are strategic. Peace talks, ceasefires, and crisis diplomacy offer the United States not just influence but leverage—particularly over two nuclear-armed neighbours with divergent trajectories.

Pakistan, economically fragile and politically unstable, remains deeply enmeshed in what is often described as the triad of the “three A’s”: America, Army, and Allah. The first provides aid and international cover; the second runs the state; the third, increasingly, offers the ideological glue in a fracturing polity. In such a context, America's leverage is overt, structural, and near-total.

India, on the other hand, presents a more complex challenge. A rising economic power and a vibrant, if often chaotic, democracy, India is not easily amenable to external pressure. But therein lies the risk. 

If New Delhi begins to rely on Washington to maintain strategic equilibrium in the subcontinent—especially in moments of acute crisis—it could slowly cede space in its foreign policy to American calculation. And when American interests inevitably diverge from Indian ones, history offers a clear warning: the United States has rarely hesitated to jettison even its closest partners in pursuit of its own geopolitical calculus.

Moreover, while the U.S. may occasionally make sacrifices to protect the interests of Western allies, its track record with non-Western nations is far more chequered—and often catastrophic. From orchestrating coups in Iran and Chile to plunging Iraq and Libya into prolonged chaos, American involvement has frequently ushered in not democracy, but disorder; not freedom, but tyranny; not development, but economic devastation. For many countries outside the Western fold, the American footprint has meant political instability wrapped in the language of liberation.

The lessons of Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan—and indeed Pakistan itself—are not ancient history. They are cautionary tales still unfolding. India must remember: alliances with superpowers can offer short-term gains, but dependency, however gradual, may prove fatal in the long run.

Alien oceans, familiar chemistry: The mysterious case of Planet K2-18b

Scientists have detected molecules in the atmosphere of a distant exoplanet that, on Earth, are strongly linked to biological activity. The planet—K2-18b, located 124 light-years away in the constellation Leo—is classified as a "Hycean" world, potentially covered by a global ocean and enveloped in a hydrogen-rich atmosphere.

It is here that traces of dimethyl sulfide (DMS) and dimethyl disulfide (DMDS) have been tentatively identified. On Earth, these compounds are produced almost exclusively by living organisms, particularly marine microbes like phytoplankton.

These findings come from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which has already detected methane and carbon dioxide in K2-18b’s atmosphere. Now, the possible presence of DMS and DMDS has intensified speculation about the planet’s potential to host life.

Could we be approaching the first credible detection of alien life—or are these molecules the byproducts of unknown non-biological processes? Could what we classify as biosignatures on Earth arise differently in alien environments? And if life can emerge in the deep oceans of a planet orbiting a distant red dwarf star, how common might it be across the universe?

If confirmed, this would mark the strongest evidence yet of life beyond Earth. Given the vastness of the cosmos, it seems unlikely that Earth is unique. The Milky Way alone hosts hundreds of billions of stars, most with planetary systems. Beyond it lie countless galaxies, each with their own stars, moons, and planets—potentially trillions of worlds.

In a universe so expansive, dynamic, and ancient, the idea that life exists only here feels increasingly improbable. Perhaps life is not the exception, but the rule.

The Pfizer Papers: Unmasking the medical-industrial complex

Over the past century, human health and life expectancy have improved dramatically. The prevailing narrative—vigorously propagandized by the pharmaceutical industry—credits this progress primarily to the widespread use of medicines and vaccines. But is this claim justified? I believe it tells only a narrow, self-serving part of the story.

The real engine behind longer, healthier lives is not the pharmaceutical industry but the big transformation in living conditions. Today, people benefit from cleaner water, more nutritious food, better housing, enhanced hygiene, and more accessible education. Conflict-related deaths have declined. Public health infrastructure, law enforcement, and economic stability have improved in most parts of the world. These factors, not pills and injections, have laid the groundwork for better health outcomes on a global scale.

In fact, the over-reliance on pharmaceutical products may be doing more harm than good. Many of today’s chronic illnesses—such as heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and hypertension—can often be prevented or significantly managed through lifestyle changes rather than long-term medication. Those who maintain balanced diets, sleep well, exercise regularly, and avoid excessive medication often fare better than those who rely heavily on pharmaceutical interventions.

This argument is advanced forcefully in The Pfizer Papers: Pfizer's Crimes Against Humanity, edited by Naomi Wolf and Amy Kelly, with a foreword by Stephen K. Bannon. The book makes the convincing case that the global pharmaceutical industry, far from being a benevolent force, may be complicit in undermining public health, individual freedoms, and democratic governance.

Focusing on the COVID-19 pandemic, the authors allege a disturbing confluence of interests among Big Pharma, government regulatory bodies, mainstream media, and major social media platforms. According to the book, these actors worked in coordinated tandem—not merely to manage a public health emergency, but to shape a one-dimensional narrative, suppress dissent, and manipulate public perception. 

This alliance, the book argues, brainwashed large segments of the population into accepting extended lockdowns, masking mandates, and mass vaccination campaigns—despite growing evidence that these vaccines failed to prevent transmission and, in many cases, led to serious side effects.

This critique is particularly damning in the case of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine. The authors contend that both Pfizer and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) failed to conduct or disclose adequate safety testing. Despite possessing knowledge of serious adverse events, they proceeded with the vaccine rollout under the protective umbrella of the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act—legislation that grants pharmaceutical companies immunity from liability during public health emergencies.

This immunity, originally designed to enable swift crisis response, has effectively shielded corporations from legal consequences even when their products cause harm. The result, the authors argue, is a regulatory environment where corporate profit is prioritized over public safety, and where public trust is eroded by the very institutions meant to protect it.

Moreover, the book suggests that social media companies played a pivotal role in enforcing this narrative. Posts questioning vaccine efficacy or highlighting side effects were systematically suppressed, deplatformed, or labeled as misinformation—even when they were backed by data or legitimate scientific concern. The suppression of alternative views and scientific debate, the book warns, marks a dangerous slide toward digital authoritarianism masquerading as public health advocacy.

To be clear, this is not an argument against all medicine or legitimate pharmaceutical intervention. But it is crucial to draw a line between genuine medical progress and a corporatized and bureaucratized health regime that equates public well-being with forcing people to consume certain medical products and locking down the global economy. 

At its core, The Pfizer Papers calls for a reckoning—a reexamination of the powerful nexus between corporate interests, government agencies, and information platforms. It raises questions about regulatory capture, media integrity, and the right of individuals to make informed medical decisions without coercion or censorship.

As citizens in a data-driven world, we have to fight for transparency, accountability, and independent oversight of those who shape public health policy. Real health is not manufactured in Big Pharma’s laboratories—it is achieved through clean air, honest governance, nutritious food, community resilience, and personal autonomy.

People, Power & the Politics of the Past: Between Zinn’s progressive vision and Harman’s Marxist doctrine

History, as the adage goes, is written by the victors. From imperial chronicles etched into stone to modern state-sponsored textbooks, the telling of the past has long been a prerogative of those who prevailed in the political and military arenas. The vanquished, when given voice at all, are often consigned to the footnotes of history — if not erased altogether.

Yet there exists a third, more elusive narrator in the grand chronicle of civilization: the ordinary person. The farmer whose grain fed empires, the weaver whose textiles clothed kings, the soldier who marched for causes he did not choose. Their lives shaped the world as profoundly as any monarch's edict, yet their stories remain the most underrepresented — rarely told in their own voice, often mediated through the lens of ideology.

In the last century, Marxist and leftist historians have positioned themselves as champions of the voiceless. They promised a historiography rooted in the lived experiences of the working class, the oppressed, and the colonized — a “history from below.” Yet the irony is striking: while seeking to subvert elite narratives, many of these works fall into their own hierarchy of abstraction. Revolutions are told through the speeches of Lenin, Mao, or Castro. Labor struggles are described in terms of party resolutions and strike statistics. The workers, ironically, remain nameless — symbolic placeholders in a broader ideological argument.

It is in this context that Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (1980) arrived like a thunderclap. With an opening salvo that declared, “I will try to tell the history of the United States as seen by the victims of the system,” Zinn set out not merely to revise American history, but to fundamentally reorient its vantage point. Gone were the paeans to founding fathers and frontier heroes. In their place stood the Cherokee driven from their land, the African slave resisting dehumanization, the Lowell mill girl writing poetry in defiance, the Vietnam War protester, the labor organizer, the civil rights marcher.

Zinn's narrative is not concerned with neutrality. He makes no pretensions of being above the fray. “There is no such thing as a pure fact, innocent of interpretation,” he reminds the reader. His allegiance is unapologetically with the oppressed. And yet, even as he shatters the myth of benevolent empire, Zinn occasionally erects new myths of his own — idealizing Indigenous societies or downplaying the internal contradictions of resistance movements. The risk, as some critics have noted, is that he sometimes replaces the great man theory of history with the “noble victim” theory — flattening complexity in service of moral clarity.

Nonetheless, Zinn’s achievement is profound. He reframes American history not as a march of progress, but as a contested terrain of power, violence, and defiance. His chapter titles alone — “Columbus, the Indians, and Human Progress,” “The Intimately Oppressed,” “Robber Barons and Rebels” — signal a deliberate inversion of traditional narrative frames. This was not merely a history book; it was a cultural intervention.

Following in Zinn’s footsteps, though on a far more ambitious scale, is Chris Harman’s A People’s History of the World (1999). Harman attempts the near-impossible: to tell the story of all human civilization — from hunter-gatherer tribes to the dawn of the 21st century — through the lens of class struggle. His is a world history stripped of kings and chronicles, peopled instead by those who toiled, rebelled, and resisted.

Yet here, the promise of a “history from below” encounters a paradox of its own. Harman, a prominent member of the British Socialist Workers Party and editor of Socialist Review, wears his Marxist commitments on his sleeve. His prose, while passionate and erudite, lacks the narrative vigor that made Zinn's work so widely read beyond academic and activist circles. Where Zinn painted in vivid, human strokes, Harman often delivers polemic. The result is a book that, while ideologically rigorous, sometimes reads more like a manifesto than a story.

His chapter on the fall of the Roman Empire, for example, is not a meditation on cultural decline or moral decay but a critique of overreliance on slavery and the parasitic nature of aristocratic power. When writing about feudalism, he focuses not on chivalric myth or castle intrigue, but on the surplus labor extracted from serfs. These are valid and important perspectives — yet they are delivered with such theoretical density that the reader may struggle to connect emotionally with the people whose lives the book seeks to illuminate.

Moreover, in applying the Marxist framework universally — even to prehistoric and tribal societies — Harman occasionally stretches the materialist analysis to the point of distortion. Not all historical events can be adequately explained through the binary of exploitation and revolt. Human motivations are messier: shaped by religion, kinship, love, fear, accident. Harman’s strict ideological lens sometimes leaves no room for these subtler forces.

However, Harman is aware of history's recurring cycles of rebellion and repression. He writes, “Again and again, the mass of people have shown their capacity to fight for a new and better world. But again and again they have been diverted, betrayed or crushed.” This refrain is a recognition that the historical agency of the masses, while often stifled, is never fully extinguished.

The comparison between Zinn and Harman reveals more than just differences in style or scope. It illustrates the tension inherent in writing history from below. Can such a history ever be free of ideology? Should it be? Must a people’s historian choose between emotional resonance and analytical rigor, between storytelling and structure?

Perhaps the answer lies in synthesis. Zinn's emotive storytelling can inspire, but needs anchoring in nuanced analysis. Harman’s intellectual scaffolding is fine, but cries out for the warmth of lived detail. The future of “people’s history” may well depend on the union of both: a commitment to truth without romanticism, to justice without dogma, to narrative without myth.

In an age of resurgent nationalism, culture wars, and contested memory, the question “Who gets to tell history?” has never been more urgent. The people’s history project — flawed, unfinished, and vital — remains one of the most important intellectual tasks of our time. As Zinn once wrote: “To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, and kindness.”

The historian of the people must remember all of it.