deadrat.

Quantum Superconductors and the LinkedIn Ad Broker

2026-08-13T00:00:00+00:00

I opened LinkedIn this morning and found a message sitting right at the top of my inbox. Clean profile photo. Professional formatting. And right under the name, a badge that said Sponsored.

LinkedIn took actual cash money to put it there.

Before reading the text, I read the sender's headline. It was a masterpiece of modern corporate comedy. The guy claims to be in Partnerships at a company called Silicofeller, working with an “AI Assisted Superconducting Quantum Chip Engineering Platform | Quantum Computing | Superconducting Systems | AI & Emerging Technologies.”

Every single buzzword from the last three years got crammed into one headline. If you threw a dictionary into a blender with a Nvidia pitch deck, this is what would come out. I half expected to see room temperature superconductors and fusion energy tacked onto the end just for good measure.

Then I read the actual message.

You would think a guy running partnerships for an AI assisted superconducting quantum chip platform might want to talk about quantum decoherence, silicon wafer fabrication, or maybe cryogenic cooling circuits.

No. He was reaching out on behalf of something called "Gate Oracle" (an authorized partner working with Oracle, apparently) to invite me to explore a... "Google Ads project."

Read that sequence again. A quantum computing partnership lead, working on superconducting AI chips, pays LinkedIn to send me a sponsored message asking if I want to hop on a 30 minute call to manage Google Ads for an Oracle subpartner.

If you click the lead button, LinkedIn even pops up a native in-app form collecting your name and email to send directly to "Silicofeller Quantum."

And if you click the booking link in the message, it takes you out to gate-oracle.com</code>. A domain registered by god knows who, complete with a stolen Oracle logo and a "Continue with Google" OAuth prompt designed to harvest your credentials.

Click that "Continue with Google" button and it spawns the classic credential harvester login popup, ready to hijack your account.

It is absurd on the surface, but the funniest part is not the scammer. Scammers have been selling fake gold and bogus tonic since the Middle Ages. The funny part is LinkedIn.

LinkedIn spends half its product cycle preaching about trust, identity, professional networking, and real name authenticity. They charge ridiculous monthly fees for Recruiter licenses and Premium accounts. They lock down features and throw up verification prompts if you move too fast.

Yet the moment a scammer hands them a credit card, all that algorithmic vigilance evaporates.

If you are an ordinary user sending a cold message to a classmate, LinkedIn flags you for spam. But if you pay for a Sponsored InMail, you can pretend to be a quantum physicist offering fake Google Ads contracts from a suspicious domain, and LinkedIn will happily deliver it straight to the top of my inbox with a bow on top.

The platform is not filtering for legitimacy. It is filtering for ad spend.

We live in a tech ecosystem where the resume titles are generated by hallucinating bots, the job offers are phishing lures for ad management, and the middleman taking a cut from the scam is a multi billion dollar professional network platform.

Next time someone tells you quantum computing is going to revolutionize the world, remember that right now its main application is selling fake ad gigs in your LinkedIn DMs.

Image Credit: De kwakzalver by Jan Steen</a> via Wikimedia Commons

What's in a Surname? 2026-08-06T00:00:00+00:00 I was sitting in my room in Coimbatore late at night, bored out of my skull, playing around with a GPS spoofing app on my phone. Just goofy, low-stakes entertainment. I set my location to somewhere up north (Gurgaon, Rohtak, or wherever) just to see who popped up on Hinge and what kind of lives people were living up there. I matched with a lady from Haryana. A vadakki, as we say down here. Not a friend, not a date, just a random profile on a screen. Now, instead of doing normal human small talk or attempting to hook up like a functional adult, my broken brain somehow steered the conversation into politics. I brought up the whole circus playing out in Tamil Nadu right now: the absurd spectacle I wrote about earlier today in The Thin-Skinned Monarch</a>, where Udhayanidhi Stalin got dragged off to Thanjavur by the police after making a double entendre at a Cauvery rally while crowd members yelled Trisha's name. She texted back: "Who is Udhayanidhi?" I stopped typing for a second. "The guy who just got arrested," I replied. "We've been talking about it all day." "Oh," she typed. "I thought that was Stalin Junior." I tried to explain how Tamil naming works. "His name is Udhayanidhi. We don't really have inherited family surnames like you do up north. Stalin is his patronym, his father's given name. You call him Udhayanidhi." She seemed genuinely baffled by this. Then she dropped a sentence that made me drop my phone on the bed: "Oh. That name sounds like he's from a good family. Like Vijay Thalapathy." I corrected her. "Thalapathy isn't his name. It's a movie title. His actual name is Joseph Vijay." Silence on the chat for a few seconds. Then: "Wait, he's Christian? I thought Thalapathy was a Brahmin surname. You know, like Tripathy, Trivedi, Dwivedi, Chaturvedi." I told her Vijay is Christian, Udhayanidhi is not, and neither of those names carry the caste baggage she was projecting onto them. She replied that every national news channel she watches calls him "Thalapathy Vijay" and calls Udhayanidhi "Junior Stalin." I sat there looking at the blue light of the phone screen, thinking about how strange this was. At first, your mind wants to lean into paranoia. You start wondering if there's some calculated media strategy in Delhi, some deliberate trick by northern news outlets or TVK's PR team to sanitize Vijay as a respectably caste-coded figure for national audiences, while turning Udhayanidhi into a dynastic appendage. It’s weird, isn't it? Have you ever noticed how national anchors casually drop given names? They almost never say Udhayanidhi or Joseph. They strip away the actual names people were given at birth and replace them exclusively with titles and patronyms. Stalin. Junior. Thalapathy. They erase the Tamil identity of the name and repackage it into something that fits a Hindi news desk's mental grid. In Tamil Nadu, the anti-caste movement decades ago stripped away inherited family surnames. People shed caste tags like Iyer, Mudaliar, Pillai, or Naicker from their official names, choosing to use given names and patronymic initials instead. It was a conscious social choice to unhook personal identity from hereditary caste status. Up north, the system works in reverse. Surnames are explicit caste billboards: Trivedi, Sharma, Yadav, Gupta, Tripathy. So when a Delhi news anchor or a viewer in Haryana looks at a Tamil politician, their brain frantically scans the name for a recognizable caste handle. When they hear the sound -pathy at the end of a film title, their brain instantly maps it to Tripathy. A simple, lazy phonetic reflex born out of complete unfamiliarity with anything south of the Vindhyas. To a mind raised entirely within the Hindi belt's caste lexicon, Thalapathy sounds like a priest who knows three Vedas, and Udhayanidhi sounds like an unclassifiable anomaly. It’s not a masterstroke of psychological manipulation. It’s just pure, unvarnished cultural ignorance. Look, I get it: one Hinge match and her family is an absurdly small sample size. I’m not stupid enough to pretend a midnight chat with one person from Haryana speaks for half a billion people. But when that tiny sample lines up line-for-line with how every major national network frames these names, the sample isn't an anomaly anymore; it's just a mirror showing what a lazy media diet produces. And this is where the comedy stops and the grim joke begins. These are the exact same political forces (the RSS, the centralizers in Delhi, the "One Nation" zealots) who insist day in and day out that India is not a "Union of States," but a single, ancient, indivisible "Nation." They want One Nation, One Election. They want One Nation, One Language. They want a uniform cultural identity driven from a desk in New Delhi. Yet the average citizen in their heartland (and the media networks that feed them) knows so little and cares so little about the two hundred and fifty million people living in the South that they cannot even distinguish between an actor's cinema title and a Brahmin surname. They don't know how our names work. They don't know why we stripped caste tags from our names. They don't care to know. We are expected to subsume our languages, our fiscal revenues, and our political representation into their grand project of national integration. As I've argued before when breaking down the numbers in Taxation Without Representation</a> and The Federal Imperative</a>, we subsidize their state budgets while they prepare to strip us of our parliamentary seats in the upcoming delimitation. They want the territory. They want the tax revenue. They want the illusion of a grand monolithic empire stretching from Kashmir to Kanyakumari. But they don't even know who we are. Article 1 of the Constitution didn't use the word "Union" by accident. Dr. Ambedkar and the drafting committee called it a Union of States because India was never a single, pre-existing cultural monolith. It was a voluntary federated agreement between wildly different linguistic and historical regions. A contract. When one half of that contract doesn't even know the basic naming logic of the other half, but insists on dictating its governance, its elections, and its national identity, it isn't a "Nation." It's just an empire of indifferent landlords who haven't bothered to learn the names of the people living on the estate. The Thin-Skinned Monarch and the Double Entendre 2026-08-05T00:00:00+00:00 I am sitting here watching the news tickers run all day about a politician being "grilled" in Thanjavur. Three hundred and twenty-five kilometers from Chennai. It’s almost funny how predictable this state is. So Udhayanidhi Stalin goes down to the Cauvery delta, stands on a stage in Thanjavur, and talks about water. Or the lack of it. Karnataka isn't releasing the 45,000 million cubic feet of water it owes us. The Kuruvai crop is dying in the mud. And instead of handling the river, Udhayanidhi claims our brand-new Chief Minister, Joseph Vijay, is only busy filing fake cases against DMK workers. Then Udhayanidhi pauses. And the crowd immediately roars back with one word: Trisha. Then, allegedly, Udhayanidhi drops a classic, greasy Tamil political double entendre about water reaching "somewhere else." To be honest, I didn't understand what the hell is double entendre in it. Next morning, boom. Police at the door before breakfast. Not just a routine summons. Eight or nine sections under the new Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita. I don't know shit about this. I don't understand the purpose of moving from IPC to BNS without any real refresh. I am gonna google it and type all those so that I won't mess up. Section 61 for criminal conspiracy (search me what conspiracy exists in a public rally speech), Section 79 for outraging the modesty of a woman, Section 192 for inciting a riot, Section 296B for obscene words, plus the Tamil Nadu Prohibition of Harassment of Women Act. Under twenty-four hours. Thanjavur police team up with Chennai police, package him up, and haul him off down the highway. The DMK had to rush to the High Court just to get him released so he could sit in the assembly for the budget presentation on Wednesday, i.e. today. Look, it’s a false choice. We're expected to pick a side in this nonsense. But to be completely honest, my brain can’t even grasp what the double entendre was supposed to be here. I watched video a few times, read the transcript in case my ear failed, I looked through the news reports, and not a single article or analyst actually explains what the hidden sexual meaning was. Everyone just repeats "double entendre" and "innuendo" like it’s self-evident. Maybe I'm just dense, or maybe my brain is too fried to decode high-level political sleaze, but I genuinely don't see how talking about water reaching "somewhere else" after someone shouts an actor's name translates into a national crisis. Either way, one camp demands you excuse an alleged cheap jab, and the other demands you applaud a massive criminal dragnet. But politics here isn't a civic contract; it's a fan club. One side reduced a protest about Cauvery water and dying farmers into an obscure punchline, and the other side reduced it to a police convoy and a circus. In the end, the farmer in Thanjavur disappears from both frames. Vijay has been in office for less than ninety days. He came in promising to break the Dravidian script, to bring an alternative to corruption and vendetta. Yet here we are, watching the same old Tamil Nadu political sequence play out: power changes hands, the police get deployed as a private militia, and yesterday’s ruler becomes today’s accused. From Jayalalithaa’s sari in 1989 to the 1996 TV case to Karunanidhi’s 2001 midnight arrest, the script hasn't changed. It’s just a casting update. Whenever a real issue pops up, the administration reverts to cheap theater. When people complain about power cuts, or when Cauvery runs dry, the government drops a new reel. Vijay riding the metro, Vijay inspecting a car factory, Vijay standing near a sewage plant that Karunanidhi or Stalin inaugurated years ago. It's a reel-driven government. Meanwhile, the actual numbers are a complete disaster. His own government’s fiscal white paper shows Tamil Nadu’s direct debt floating above ten lakh crore rupees, or thirteen lakh crore if you count state-guaranteed loans for broken public sector corporations. That’s a debt-to-GSDP ratio of 28.3 percent. Worse than Maharashtra, worse than Karnataka, worse than Gujarat. Tax revenue as a percentage of GSDP is at a two-decade low of 5.45 percent. And why? Because of decades of competitive freebie bribery. Before the election, TVK promised 200 units of free power to 2.4 crore households. Once in office and staring at the ledger, they quietly backtracked; now it's only for houses consuming under 500 units over two months. They promised 2,500 rupees a month for women, doubling the old DMK scheme; now that’s stuck in "fiscal assessment." They promised full loan waivers for farmers owning up to five acres; now it's limited to "vulnerable small borrowers." They even promised one gram of gold for every newborn baby, and to fund it, they’re carving money out of the public health budget. In a state whose entire industrial engine relies on cheap, educated, healthy human capital, we're raiding hospitals to hand out gold coins for PR. And to top off the rationalist legacy of this state, the Chief Minister started his tenure by appointing his personal astrologer as an Officer on Special Duty before the coalition partners yelled at him to cancel it. Now he's sending the state budget to Tirupati to be blessed by Lord Balaji before presenting it on the assembly floor. Periyar must be rolling in his grave so hard he's generating free electricity. The selective moral outrage is what really burns. The state machinery mobilized in under twelve hours over a sleazy remark at a political rally because it touched the sacred halo of a cinema star. The TVK government claims it's protecting the honor of women. Right. Where was this urgency when Vijay’s own fan army was cyberstalking and sending rape threats to journalists like Dhanya Rajendran, or bullying actors like Malavika Mohanan into deleting posts, or when TVK handle holders were accused of circulating morphed images of Chennai Mayor Priya? When ordinary citizens or women file complaints about actual, disgusting harassment, the files sit on a desk in Chennai or Trichy for weeks without an FIR. No chartered police teams, no early morning arrests, no urgent High Court motions. If you talk shit about the monarch’s circle, the entire state apparatus moves with military precision. If you’re just a citizen getting harassed by a local goon, you get told to file a petition and wait. We thought we were breaking the old feudal loop when the two big regional empires lost their absolute grip. We thought we were moving past the era where Jayalalithaa and Karunanidhi would arrest each other's cadres at 3 AM out of personal vendettas. Turns out we just replaced old dynastic spite with new celebrity fragility. Same poison. Just a shinier label. The Architecture of the Scam 2026-07-29T00:00:00+00:00 Every few months, whenever the results come out or a paper gets leaked in Patna or Godhra, the news channels run the same circus. They get four shouting heads on split screens to argue about Telegram groups, corrupt exam centres, or whether some middleman took twenty lakhs to leak the answer key. Everyone focuses on the leak. Did the envelope seal break in transit? Was the contract staff bribed? Did the Supreme Court order a re-test or did they say the integrity wasn't "systemically compromised"? It's a neat distraction. If you get people screaming about paper leaks, they stay convinced that the test itself is clean: that if you just catch the three guys in Bihar who sold the PDF, the machine goes back to being a sacred, noble filter for national talent. They're looking at the wrong theft. There isn't a scam inside NEET. NEET itself is the scam. The Machine</h2> Take a seventeen-year-old kid in Ariyalur or Perambalur. They spend two years studying State Board biology, physics, and chemistry. They write long-form exams. They lab-test solutions, draw diagrams, and get evaluated by teachers who've seen them learn over years. Then Delhi drops a single, three-hour-and-twenty-minute grid of 180 multiple-choice questions on their desk. If you don't spend two lakhs a year sitting in a air-conditioned room in Namakkal or Kota learning how to eliminate options C and D in forty-five seconds, you're dead on arrival. It doesn't matter how well you understand human anatomy or how much you care about medicine. You didn't train for the OMR speed-run. The numbers aren't a secret. The Justice A.K. Rajan Committee looked at Tamil Nadu’s admission data after NEET was forced on us. In 2020, 99% of the candidates who got into medical colleges had paid for private coaching. In 2021, 71% of admitted students were repeaters: kids whose parents had the cash to feed and house them for two or three extra years just to grind mock tests. In places like Ariyalur and Perambalur, the number of poor, rural kids getting medical seats dropped by about 50% almost overnight. First-generation students were basically wiped out. That's not a temporary glitch. That's a gate. The exam didn't fail to evaluate kids fairly; it evaluated their parents' bank balance with surgical precision. The Merit Farce</h2> The funniest part of the whole thing is the rhetoric around "merit." The Union government and the court-room lawyers love that word. They say NEET protects "uniform national standards." They act like without this exam, unvetted quacks would take over the hospitals. So let me tell you how those standards actually work. To "qualify" for NEET-UG in the general category, you don't need an 80% or a 70%. In most years, the qualifying cutoff hovers around 16% to 23% of total marks. For reserved categories, it drops to 13% or 14%. You can guess on half the paper, get most of it wrong, and still be declared "eligible." And if you look at NEET-PG or super-speciality seats, it gets even better. When expensive private and deemed universities couldn't fill their high-fee seats because the cutoffs were too high, the central authorities didn't cancel the seats. They lowered the qualifying threshold. In some years, they literally dropped the cutoff to the zeroth percentile. Think about what that means. If you're a poor kid aiming for a subsidized seat in a government medical college, NEET is an iron wall. You need 600-plus marks out of 720, which means years of coaching and zero mistakes. But if you have a crore and a half rupees sitting in a bank account for a private seat, the exam becomes a rubber stamp. You can score next to nothing and still walk into a classroom. If the exam was genuinely about enforcing a minimum bar of medical competence, lowering the bar to zero to rescue private college profits would be illegal. But it happens. Because the system isn't designed to filter competence; it's designed to funnel capital. The Delhi Hand</h2> This goes back to the same problem I've been writing about for years: the steady, relentless theft of state authority by Delhi. Tamil Nadu built its public health system over decades. We didn't do it by copying CBSE syllabi or worshipping national entrance tests. We used Class 12 board marks, combined with social reservation and rural quotas, to produce doctors who actually knew the state, spoke the language, and stayed in local primary health centres. It gave us a public healthcare network that outclasses almost every northern state. Then Delhi decided that states shouldn't even be allowed to decide who enters the colleges the states themselves build and fund. Education is supposed to be on the Concurrent List. But whenever Tamil Nadu passes an anti-NEET Bill to return to a board-marks system (a system that actually worked), the Bill sits on a desk in Rashtrapati Bhavan getting dust, while lawyers in Delhi argue that state diversity is a threat to "national integration." It's the same arithmetic as delimitation or tax devolution. They take the money, they take the policy space, and then they sell us a uniform, centralized product manufactured in a coaching hub and call it progress. The Real Scam</h2> The paper leaks in Bihar or Rajasthan will keep happening. Centralized single-window exams for twenty lakh kids are an administrative nightmare held together by contract workers and cheap software. They'll catch a few leak rings, file an FIR, change the NTA chairman, and claim the system is clean again. They won't fix the real problem because the real problem is what the exam was built to do. It turned high school education into a secondary nuisance. It turned medical admissions into a racket for multi-crore coaching institutes. It systematically locked out state-board, rural, and poor kids while pretending that a 15% cutoff for rich kids in private colleges is "merit." There's no scam to uncover in the exam halls. The exam hall is the scam. And everybody knows it, but the machine keeps running anyway. Image Credit: Das Schulexamen by Albert Anker</a> via Wikimedia Commons Protecting the Commons from the Machines 2026-07-25T00:00:00+00:00 A couple of weeks back, the good people over at Codeberg voted on something</a> that made me want to pour a drink and tip my hat to Germany. While every tech platform in Silicon Valley is currently bending over backward to let machine-learning scrapers eat their users' data raw, Codeberg’s annual assembly sat down and passed two rules. First: no code or data hosted on their servers will ever be used to train Large Language Models. Second: they’re updating their Terms of Use to politely show the door to autonomous AI agents, "vibe-coded" ghost projects, and single-use machine spam that eats up their non-profit build servers. I welcome this greatly. I only wish more people would wake up and notice what's happening. You see, if you listen to the suits in San Francisco, LLMs are the greatest democratic miracle since the printing press. They'll tell you with a straight face that some fellow sitting on his couch in sandals can now type three sentences into a prompt box, spit out fifty thousand lines of Python, and call himself a software engineer. They call it "democratizing development." You'd think the man had invented fire by the way they talk about him. What they don't tell you is who pays for the ash. When a guy uses an automated agent to generate a hundred single-use software repositories (complete with heavy continuous-integration runs, massive storage requirements, and zero actual human users), he isn't paying for the servers. Codeberg is. When scrapers hit a forge five hundred times a second to harvest every single commit history and issue thread for training data, the bot creators don't pay the bandwidth bill. The community host does. Codeberg put the numbers right on the table. A high-end server drive that cost them €700 a few years ago now costs €3,700 because AI data centers are sucking up the entire global supply of SSDs and RAM. Over in Frankfurt, data centers dedicated to running LLM inference are already burning up forty percent of the city's entire electricity grid. It’s the exact same game I wrote about earlier in Open Weights and the Datacenter Land Grab</a>. Corporate capital buys up rural farmland, hooks GPU sheds straight into the local power line, inflates the price of silicon for everyone else, and then acts surprised when non-profits and small operators struggle to keep the lights on. And then there's the maintainer side of this circus. Generating code used to take work. Reviewing code took work too, but at least there was a balance. Now, any idle teenager or hustle-influencer can click a button and flood an open-source project with twenty pull requests in ten minutes. The code looks shiny. The grammar in the commit message is immaculate. But under the hood, the logic is hallucinated garbage that doesn't compile or breaks three edge cases the author doesn't even know exist. It's an asymmetric war. It takes a machine two seconds to spew out a five-hundred-line diff, and it takes a tired human maintainer two hours of his evening to figure out why it's wrong. Look at what’s happened already. Daniel Stenberg had to shut down the cURL bug bounty program because twenty percent of the submissions were AI-generated fiction that wasted his life. Mitchell Hashimoto banned unsolicited AI contributions from Ghostty just to keep his sanity. Projects like tldraw had to close external pull requests entirely. Earlier this year, Jazzband, a project that kept dozens of Python packages alive for years, just folded under the sheer weight of automated pull-request spam. The tech industry built a machine that manufactures infinite slop for free, and then dumped the entire burden of sorting through the trash onto unpaid volunteers. Codeberg is one of the few places saying out loud what everyone else is whispering in maintainer chats: free software is a human social contract, not a free dumping ground for automated ghost-projects. If you strip away the human learning loop, the peer review, and the shared responsibility, you aren't building a commons. You're just running an landfill. I'm glad Codeberg took a stance. They're a small, member-funded non-profit standing on a soapbox while the big corporate forges silently turn their user base into training fodder. I just hope the rest of the FOSS world notices before the whole pasture gets fenced off. Image Credit: John Crome (1768-1821) - Mousehold Heath, Norwich</a> via National Gallery / Wikimedia Commons. Sollisai and the Floodgates 2026-07-16T00:00:00+00:00 I was thinking about Yogi B & Natchatra’s Madai Thiranthu again last night. In Music for Simpletons</a> I blabbered about growing up on AIR Coimbatore 999 kHz and listening to Raja on my dad’s old Motorola C168. Back in 2006, when that album Vallavan dropped, Tamil music was mostly film soundtracks. If a song wasn't in a movie, it basically didn't exist. Independent music was a ghost town. Then came this track out of Kuala Lumpur. Every kid with a Bluetooth-enabled Nokia 6600 or a cheap MP3 player was blaring it. Half of us didn't even understand ninety percent of the fast-talking Malaysian Tamil verses. We just memorized the phonetics, humming along to the rapid-fire flow without knowing what the hell Yogi B or Dr. Burn were actually saying. It became a running joke, but it didn't matter. The energy was electric. Looking back twenty years later, the sheer genius of that track wasn't just the beat or the Ilaiyaraaja sample from Nizhalgal. It was one specific word they hammered into the hook: சொல்லிசை (Sollisai). Music of words. Spoken music. Think about what Yogi B did there. Most early Indian rap was embarrassing, just upper-middle-class kids imitating American hip-hop gestures, fake accents, and hood posturing. Yogi B rejected that whole gimmick. By calling it Sollisai, he pulled rap out of the Western import bin and grounded it directly in centuries of Tamil oral tradition. Tamil has always been a language of spoken rhythm. Sangam bards, Villuppaattu storytellers with their bow-strings, Therukoothu street theater, Pattimandram oratory, Konnakol vocal percussion. Rap wasn't some alien invention parachuted in from Brooklyn; it was just the modern branch of a river that had been flowing through Tamil Nadu for two thousand years. "Madai Thiranthu" literally means opening the sluice gate. Opening the floodgate. Vaali wrote the original line for Ilaiyaraaja's melody, but Yogi B turned the dam into a metaphor for speech: let the words burst through the concrete. And then, right at the very end of the track, they did something even bolder. They sampled M.R. Radha. M.R. Radha's voice cuts through the fade-out: sharp, cynical, fearless, intellectually violent. It’s a direct lightning rod. You trace the lineage right there in four minutes: Sangam verse to the Dravidian theatre movement, to M.R. Radha’s razor-tongued stage dialogues, to Ilaiyaraaja's orchestrations, and finally to a Malaysian Tamil kid with a microphone in Kuala Lumpur. It connected Chennai, KL, and London into a single, global Tamil space without feeling forced or artificial. It showed that Tamil culture wasn't some fragile museum artifact you had to preserve in formaldehyde; it was alive, dirty, adaptable, and loud enough to blow out cheap phone speakers. I might be reading too much into a twenty-year-old rap song. Maybe I'm just nostalgic for the era of Bluetooth file shares and low-bitrate MP3s. But whenever I hear modern Tamil rap today, from Arivu to OfRo, I hear the echo of that floodgate swinging open in 2006. Image Credit: The Bard</a> by Thomas Jones via Wikimedia Commons Green Copper Grift 2026-07-15T00:00:00+00:00 I'm thinking about copper sulphate. In my school chemistry lab, they had these little glass jars of it. A bright, deep, beautiful blue. You look at it and you think it's clean, like a piece of the sky fell into a bottle. It just looks like gatorade. But if you drink it, your kidneys shut down, your blood turns to sludge, and you die in agony. That's the basic logic of Vedanta's new "Green Copper" campaign. You paint the poison green and you tell the peasants it's healthy now. Anil Agarwal, that Marwari fellow who grew up in Patna and now sits in London running Vedanta, is not a stupid man. He knows his old Thoothukudi smelter is legally dead. But then, he was never one to take "no" for an answer. In the early 90s, he tried to set this up in Zadgaon village in Ratnagiri, Maharashtra. The locals protested and chased him out. He tried Goa. He tried Gujarat. Same story. Nobody wanted a sulfurous refinery in their backyard. But then he landed in Tamil Nadu in 1994, during the AIADMK regime. Jayalalithaa laid the foundation stone, and by 1997, the chimney was smoking. For twenty years, it ran, and for twenty years, the locals fought it. The Supreme Court drove the final nail into that coffin back in 2024. But he has thousands of crores in sunk capital literally cemented into the ground there. Sprawling steel structures, furnaces, acid plants, all rotting in the salty sea air. He can't pack it up and ship it to Gujarat. Smelters aren't Lego sets. You can't just dismantle a flash furnace without ruining its structural integrity, and besides, Adani already built his massive Kutch Copper plant in Mundra. Adani doesn't want another snout in his trough in Gujarat maybe. So Agarwal is fighting tooth and nail to salvage his rotting assets. His PR team went to work and came back with a new brand: "Green Copper." To be honest, yeah, copper does turn green. Like that greenish hue on the Statue of Liberty. Anyway, Vedanta's green copper BS, it's a beautiful corporate fairy tale. They promise Zero Liquid Discharge. They say 99.95% of the sulfur dioxide won't escape into the air; they'll capture it, turn it into sulfuric acid, and sell it. They say they'll use recycled municipal sewage water and desalinated seawater instead of touching local water sources. They even announced a 100-crore fund for Thoothukudi’s local development. Planting trees, funding schools, protecting the sea. It sounds like a charity, not a metallurgical plant. Lately, Vedanta’s brokers have been running signature campaigns. They call themselves the 'Sterlite Action Council,' rounding up local loaders, truckers, and anyone broke enough to sign their names for the promise of a job. They want to show the courts 'local consent.' But the real locals aren't buying the green paint. They remember the real thing. They remember May 22, 2018, when thirteen people were shot dead in the streets by the police for demanding clean air. You don't wash thirteen bodies out of the pavement with a PR campaign and a few hundred tree saplings. The keyboard warriors on the RSS and BJP IT cells like to frame the Thoothukudi protests as a conspiracy. They say it was funded by Communists, foreign competitors, or Naxals, or church groups, all working together to destroy India's growth. Narendra Modi himself went to Hyderabad recently on May 10 and gave a speech crying about how "conspirators and protesters" shut down the plant. He complained that we are now spending 3.5 billion dollars in foreign exchange to import copper from China instead of exporting it. He told the courts that when they judge these cases, they need to look at "national development" rather than getting emotional about local sentiments. It’s the standard Union government operating system: paint every public protest as a national security threat, protect the corporate ledger, and tell the people who breathe the sulfur dioxide to shut up and tolerate it for the nation's GDP. But the pollution wasn't a perception issue. The court records are public. Anyone can look at them. For sixteen years, the Thoothukudi plant operated without a valid Consent to Operate from the Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board. Sixteen years. They ran for ten years without hazardous waste management authorization. They got by on interim stays, bureaucratic delays, and pure political muscle. And they polluted. The groundwater tests around the SIPCOT area showed levels of Total Dissolved Solids, sulfates, fluoride, and heavy metals that made the water completely unfit for human consumption. In 2013, a massive sulfur dioxide leak caused panic, throat suffocation, and eye irritation across the town, leading to a 100-crore fine from the Supreme Court. They didn't dump their copper slag in lined, protected landfills because that costs money. They just dumped thousands of tons of it in low-lying public spaces and near water bodies, letting the toxins leach into the soil every time it rained. That's the "safe process" they ran. Corporate negligence. I dont know what enabled it. Maybe a weak, or even bribed local administration. And now, it looks like the "Green Copper" file has landed on the desk of our new Chief Minister, Joseph Vijay. People are claiming that Chief Secretary Saikumar IAS walked into the Secretariat and presented the project. The corporate lobby is pushing hard. They're telling the state government that this new technology will bring jobs, growth, and industrial prestige back to Tamil Nadu. But Vijay and the TVK are in absolute panic mode. They won 108 seats. The magic number for a majority is 118. They are running a fragile, minority cabinet and spending every waking hour on "Operation L." They are horse-trading, trying to convince rebel AIADMK MLAs to resign their seats and re-contest under the TVK banner in upcoming by-elections, hoping to cross the majority mark before the next legislative session. The allies are screaming, the opposition is calling them corrupt, and the Chief Minister is in pure survival mode. He is not thinking about groundwater or sulfur dioxide. He's thinking about legislative arithmetic. Some well-meaning people in my inbox are suggesting compromises. They write in with these elaborate plans for a three-way joint venture. A public consortium: KABIL or MMTC secures the raw ore from South America so we aren't at the mercy of private cartels; some state-of-the-art engineering firm deploys Japanese-style clean smelting tech with Zero Liquid Discharge; and the Tamil Nadu government holds an uncompromising regulatory veto, so if a single sensor clicks high, they pull the plug and build local trust. It's actually a solid plan. A clean-tech, state-backed model is the only way you could ever run a smelter here without poisoning the water or selling the state's soul. But the real strategy is in how you acquire it. You don't nationalize it. That gets struck down immediately by the courts as arbitrary property seizure. Instead, you play the long game. You make Vedanta want to sell. First, you enforce the hell out of existing environmental liabilities. Under the 'Polluter Pays Principle,' you get the NGT and the courts to assess the exact, multi-thousand-crore remediation cost to clean up the groundwater and the open slag heaps. Once those debts and cleanup liabilities pile up on this non-performing subsidiary, you drag the corporate vehicle holding the Thoothukudi assets into the bankruptcy courts (NCLT). At the liquidation auction, the market value will crash to scrap. Outside private giants like Adani or Hindalco won't touch it because they know the state won't give them a permit to run it anyway. The Tamil Nadu government holds the monopsony regulatory power. That's when your state-backed consortium (TIDCO + KABIL/HCL) steps in as the resolution bidder. You buy the physical infrastructure out of bankruptcy for pennies on the dollar, wiping Vedanta completely out of the equity structure. Legally. Cleanly. Once you own it, you don't just flip the old switch. You dismantle the polluting phosphoric and sulfuric acid units, the ones that caused the legacy gas leaks. You bring in a Japanese engineering partner to refit the core smelter with Zero Liquid Discharge. Since it's now a sovereign, public-sector project backed by KABIL, the Union Ministry of Environment (MoEFCC) has no excuse to block Category A clearances. You legislate a software-controlled automatic shutdown (no minister's signature, no TNPCB discretion), just code that shuts the plant down if stack emissions exceed limits for six hours. You put a live public dashboard on the internet for everyone to see. And you route 3% of profits directly into a local public trust for fishers and schools in Thoothukudi. If the communists were in power, there might be a remote possibility of something like this happening. They have the organizational network, the willingness to build public-sector models, and at least some memory of working-class politics. They'd at least debate the details. But now? We have a new state government run by cinema fans who are too busy buying MLAs to notice that the air is turning sour again. I am not sure if Vijay will even dare to consider it. It's easier to stay in the caravan, ignore the file, and let the brokers do the talking. Image Credit: Ore conveyor, Great Cobar Copper Mine - Cobar, NSW, 1912 (Collection of the Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW).jpg</a> via Wikimedia Commons Music for Simpletons 2026-07-13T00:00:00+00:00 Man, I am loving Sushin Shyam. And SaNa. The whole album tells a story, like a full experience. You can't just pull singles out and expect to feel it. It's the same thing with Relapse. Not Eminem's biggest commercial run, but the coherence of the thing, the way it hangs together, that's the point. SaNa is like that too. I didn't grow up with a lot of music. Mostly just whatever MSV songs my dad played. We had a TV. My dad bought one around 1990, probably on impulse. People from the whole neighborhood used to crowd into my mom's place just to watch it. Not where I mostly grew up, my mom's place was a different area. Anyway, that TV was a big deal for a while. Then my dad stopped the cable. The TV stayed but cable was gone. He thought it was a bad influence on us. So what we had after that was just my dad putting on old movies occasionally. Mostly MSV was in those. Sometimes Viswanathan-Ramamoorthy, sometimes KV Mahadevan. Around 2000 we got a radio. AIR Coimbatore, 999 kHz. Then FM Rainbow on 103 MHz. I remember program names like Thenkinnam, Mayil Iragu, but I might even be misremembering those. There were so many names I'd hear: A.M. Rajah, T.K. Ramamoorthy, Vedha, Shankar-Ganesh, Ghantasala. Melody was the only thing. That's all we knew. Around 2006, I had just finished 10th std. My dad had a Motorola C168, one of those phones with FM. Whenever it was at home, I used it. That's when Ilayaraja and ARR started coming in properly. I loved Ilayaraja. I genuinely couldn't stand ARR back then. That high-pitched, metallic sharpness. It was like jingle bells but worse. Something about that brightness, that crystalline quality, physically irritated me. I'm very sensitive to bright treble. So I stuck with Raja, with Gangai Amaran, Chandrabose, Shankar-Ganesh. I didn't even care for Deva back then, which is funny because I love Deva now. This was 2006 to 2009 roughly. Then Raavanan came in 2010 and broke me. That soundtrack with Vairamuthu's lyrics. I still can't stop talking about it. One of the best soundtracks of that decade. After that, I wanted to go back and hear everything ARR had done. I had a laptop by then. A Dell Inspiron N5010, 35k INR. It was supposed to support SRS Premium Sound. But I was running Debian, so that was useless. Internet was a USB dongle because my college, RVS College of Engineering and Technology in Dindigul, collected 5,000 rupees a year from every student as an "internet charge." Then they told me I couldn't use the computer lab because I was in Aerospace, not Computer Science. If I wanted access, I had to write a formal letter, get it signed by my Aero HOD, carry that to the CS HOD, get another signature there, and then physically go to the CS lab. Which was closed most of the time anyway. Around 2011 they let us use a few machines in the library. The connection rarely worked and the library was only open during college hours. So anyway. USB dongle. I distro-hopped like an idiot from around 2011 to 2015, mostly Fedora. Lost all my data multiple times. Kept re-downloading music. Still couldn't like the older ARR records people kept pushing. Roja, Uyire. I didn't like Vinnaithaandi Varuvaayaa. I liked some Telugu stuff like Komaram Puli. I appreciated that ARR's music was great, technically. I just didn't enjoy most of it personally. Then SaNa happened. And now he's my all-time favourite. Around 2016 I started trying to get into jazz. You keep reading about how it's this conversation between musicians, how you need to let it breathe, how it opens up after a few listens. I couldn't hear it. Still can't. I try again every few years and the wall stays. I recently heard Justin Gray's Immersed, Grammy-winning, Dolby Atmos, the whole critical apparatus behind it, and I couldn't understand what I was supposed to feel. It might be a spatial audio thing I'm missing since I don't have Atmos setup. Or maybe it's just jazz and I'm just not built for it. Except Kind of Blue. Miles Davis. That one anyone can sit with. I can do the 3Bs of classical. I love Wagner, which is probably the most excessive possible taste to have. But jazz, the real jazz people talk about when they want to sound serious. No. And then Sushin. Recently. I have no words. I'm just completely wrecked by his music. He's so fucking good I don't know how to explain it. The people who know music, they ask how clever the harmony is, how difficult the solo is, how many layers there are. I don't know any of that. I can't sing. I can't drum a coherent beat on my own desk. I'm a complete simpleton about music. But these people, SaNa, Sushin, they make a simpleton actually notice. Not analyze. Not appreciate technically. Just notice and feel something real. I'm not someone who goes to kutcheris or Keerthanai recitals and nods along. I just listen to what reaches me. One of my all-time favourites is Othaiyila from Iraivi. Anthony Daasan singing. SaNa composing. I wish something like that was under Creative Commons so it could spread without friction, reach more people who don't have Spotify or whatever. I cry every time I hear it and I genuinely don't know why. My life is already a mess. I don't know what I'm doing for work. I have a family. I have a daughter now. I shouldn't have had a family. I'm not capable of this. But I do have them, and I have to do right by them, and I keep failing at that too. I can't even drink anymore. Alcohol used to be the thing that slowed my brain down. But I have a kid. I'm already too dumb to raise a kid, and adding alcohol would make it catastrophic. So these songs are the only drug left. I know I'm inconsistent. I hate bright treble but I love Kunnakudi Vaidyanathan's violin. I can't enjoy jazz but Kind of Blue is fine. I don't understand the rules of my own taste. I'm just glad there are people out there making music for simpletons like me. Image Credit: Groove and needle in close embrace from beginning to end.jpg</a> via Wikimedia Commons Residential Tenancy Agreement (Tamil Nadu - Tenant-Protective Starter Draft) 2026-07-08T00:00:00+00:00 Residential Tenancy Agreement Template (Tamil Nadu)</h1> Governed by: The Tamil Nadu Regulation of Rights and Responsibilities of Landlords and Tenants Act, 2017 (Tamil Nadu Act 42 of 2017), as amended in 2018 and 2022, and its associated Rules ("the Act"). </blockquote> Disclaimer: This is a starting draft, not legal advice. Fill in every bracketed section, have both parties read it fully, and get it checked by a local advocate before signing, particularly before registering it with the Rent Authority. </blockquote> Notes for Tenants: Read This Before You Sign Anything</h2> The 3-month deposit cap is a default, not an absolute ceiling. Section 11 makes a deposit above 3 months' rent unlawful only if your agreement is silent on the point. The Act lets landlord and tenant agree in writing to a higher figure. In practice, this means nobody can silently charge you more than 3 months and call it legal, but if you sign a clause agreeing to more, that clause itself is enforceable. Don't agree to more than 3 months. If a landlord insists, treat it as your cue to negotiate or walk away.</li> The statutory deposit refund deadline is one month after you vacate (Section 24(2)); interest of 8% per annum applies if the Landlord misses it (Rule 7(2), Section 24(1)). The same 8% rate applies to rent arrears you owe the landlord, so it cuts both ways. This draft contractually shortens that target to 7 days with a daily late fee on top, but the 1-month/8% figure is your statutory floor even if the tighter contractual clause is ever disputed.</li> If you overstay after the tenancy is validly terminated, the landlord is entitled to double the monthly rent for the overstay period under Section 23. Vacate on the agreed date, or negotiate an extension in writing. Don't just stay on without one.</li> A written, registered agreement is what gives you most of these protections in the first place. If there is no written agreement, Section 29's default is a bare 1-month notice period for the tenant to vacate, and you lose the benefit of most of this Act's specific safeguards. An unregistered or oral tenancy is worse for a tenant than a well-drafted registered one.</li> If a landlord refuses to sign anything close to this draft, treat "will you sign a written, registered agreement at all" as a red flag question before you commit to a property.</li> </ul> 1. Parties</h2> This Agreement is made on [date] at [city], Tamil Nadu, between: Landlord: [Full name], residing at [address], hereinafter "the Landlord". Tenant: [Full name], residing at [address], hereinafter "the Tenant". 2. Premises</h2> The Landlord lets to the Tenant the premises at [full address, including floor/unit], comprising [description, e.g. 2BHK, area, parking], together with the fixtures and fittings listed in Schedule A, for residential use only. 3. Term</h2> The tenancy begins on [start date] and runs for [duration, e.g. 11 months], ending on [end date].</li> Renewal, if both parties agree, must be recorded in a fresh written agreement or a signed addendum before the current term expires.</li> Notice to end or not renew: Tenant not renewing: 30 days' written notice before term-end is sufficient.</li> Landlord not renewing: 90 days' written notice before term-end.</li> If the Landlord misses this 90-day notice, the tenancy continues automatically on the same terms, month-to-month, until proper notice is given.</li> </ul> </li> </ul> 4. Rent</h2> Monthly rent: ₹[amount], payable in advance on or before the [day] of each month, by bank transfer to [account details].</li> The Landlord must issue a signed receipt for every payment. A bank transfer acknowledgment stands as proof of payment for electronic transfers.</li> Rent revision: any increase follows the schedule agreed here (e.g. no increase during fixed term; capped at X% per annum thereafter). The Landlord must give the Tenant at least 3 months' written notice before a revised rent takes effect.</li> Rent arrears (if any) attract interest at 8% per annum, matching the rate the Landlord owes on a delayed deposit refund.</li> No other charges (parking, amenity, maintenance) may be levied unless listed in Schedule B with an amount.</li> </ul> 5. Security Deposit</h2> Deposit: ₹[amount], capped at a maximum of 3 months' rent (Section 11). Do not agree to more.</li> The deposit earns no interest while held. If the Landlord delays the refund beyond the statutory deadline, 8% per annum interest accrues on the outstanding amount (Section 24(1), Rule 7(2)).</li> Refund: the statutory deadline is one month after the Tenant vacates (Section 24(2)). This Agreement tightens that contractually: the Landlord shall refund the deposit, less only documented deductions, within 7 days of physical key handover. If delayed beyond 7 days, a daily charge of ₹[e.g. 500] per day accrues in addition to statutory interest.</li> Deductions may only be made for unpaid rent, unpaid utility dues, or physical damage beyond normal wear and tear, itemized in writing with supporting receipts. Repainting, routine cleaning, or fittings reaching end-of-life through ordinary use may not be deducted.</li> </ul> 6. Maintenance and Repairs (Section 15)</h2> Landlord's responsibility: Structural repairs (roof, walls, foundation, external plumbing, main electrical lines), whitewashing/painting at reasonable intervals, and repair of landlord-provided appliances failing through normal use.</li> Tenant's responsibility: Day-to-day minor repairs (taps, switches, latches, fuses) and keeping the premises clean.</li> Essential services: If water or electricity supply is cut off or withheld, the Tenant may approach the Rent Authority directly for interim restoration orders and penalties.</li> Entry by Landlord or Property Manager is permitted only between 7 a.m. and 8 p.m., after giving at least 24 hours' written notice, except in a genuine emergency.</li> </ul> 7. Subletting and Alterations</h2> The Tenant may not sublet or permit structural alterations without the Landlord's prior written consent.</li> Minor non-structural additions (shelving, curtain rods) that don't damage the premises are permitted.</li> </ul> 8. Termination and Eviction</h2> Either party may terminate at the end of the term with the notice specified in Clause 3.</li> During the term, the Landlord may seek repossession only on the grounds listed in Section 21(2) of the Act (rent arrears despite notice, unauthorized subletting, bona fide personal necessity, or substantial damage) through the Rent Court. Self-help eviction (cutting utilities, changing locks, removing belongings) is illegal.</li> If the Landlord recovers possession on the "own use" ground and re-lets the premises to another tenant within 3 years, the Landlord shall pay the Tenant contractual compensation of [e.g. 2 months' rent], independent of any court penalty.</li> </ul> 9. Registration and Dispute Resolution</h2> Both parties agree this Agreement will be registered with the Rent Authority within 90 days of execution. Government fees and registration portal charges shall be borne equally (50:50).</li> Disputes arising from this Agreement shall be resolved before the Rent Authority, Rent Court, or Rent Tribunal constituted under the Act.</li> </ul> Schedule A: Fixtures and Fittings Inventory</h3> Item</th> Condition at move-in</th> Photo ref.</th></tr></thead> </td> </td> </td></tr> </tbody></table> Schedule B: Additional Charges (if any)</h3> Charge</th> Amount</th> Frequency</th></tr></thead> </td> </td> </td></tr> </tbody></table> The Tenant's Shield: Notes and a Draft Agreement from the Vellalore Trenches 2026-07-08T00:00:00+00:00 If you rent a house in Tamil Nadu, read this agreement draft before you sign anything: 👉 Residential Tenancy Agreement Starter Draft</a> Copy it. Tweak it. Take it to a local advocate. Because if you don't put a tenant-protective contract on paper, the law will not protect you when your landlord decides he wants you gone. I am sharing this template first, up front, so you can use it immediately. The personal story of how I ended up at a police station bench in Coimbatore, arguing with an owner and a room full of hostile neighbors, comes right after. Why This Exists: The View from Vellalore</h2> I moved into a rental house in Vellalore, on the outskirts of Coimbatore, during a period of low demand. People were still returning slowly to cities after the post-COVID work-from-home phase. The house had issues from day one. Leaking pipes, patchy wiring, broken fixtures. The house owner gave me a simple line: "You are going to live there, so you pay for most of the repairs." I paid. I fixed the plumbing, sorted out the electrical issues, and kept the place clean. But in these suburban neighborhoods, paying rent and taking care of a house doesn't buy you peace. It buys you scrutiny. Then the market changed. Gentrification picked up across Coimbatore. Rents surged. The low-demand period vanished, and suddenly landlords realized they could fetch fifty percent more from someone else. Soon, the neighbors started creating problems. There was a man in the street, Mr N, who took a strange interest in our household. One afternoon, the owner called me, sounding aggressive. Mr N had complained to him that my house was filthy and that I was dumping garbage outside the compound gate. I didn't argue on the phone. I walked outside, pulled out my camera, and took a clear photograph of the trash pile outside my gate. It was Nayakkan's own waste, dumped right outside my compound wall. I sent the photo directly to the owner. He had nothing to say. But the tone was set. Another neighbor came to my gate one evening and mentioned casually that he had asked the owner if the house was available, because word in the street was that I was vacating. I told him plainly: "I am not vacating." That was when the real pressure started. The landlord called and demanded that I clear out soon within two months. then he made it as three months. When I asked him time, he didn't go to court. He used local pressure tactics. He sent neighbors to knock on my door. He got the local Homeowners Association involved to make daily life hostile. When that didn't break me, he went to the local police station. Sitting inside a Podanur police station over a civil tenancy dispute is an experience designed to break your nerves. The police in these situations do not act as neutral officers of the law. They act as informal enforcement agents for property owners. They threatened to throw my vessels and furniture onto the road. They produced blank sheets and coerced letters, demanding signatures while three uniform-clad men barked orders across a wooden desk. I was dealing with severe anxiety, and under that sheer physical intimidation, I signed a piece of paper. (I documented the exact timeline of events from that morning in The Police Station Bench</a>). After walking out of that station, the anger set in. I decided right there that I would not succumb to illegal threats. I called the National Legal Services Authority (NALSA) helpline. Getting through to them took hours of redialing. When I finally explained the police harassment to the legal aid representative, the voice on the other end was brutally honest: "Police in these matters act like thugs. You can try to fight them legally, but the process will consume your life and your mental health. If you can, find another place and vacate." That was the advice from official legal aid. Don't fight the police, because the system is stacked against you. I started searching for a new house, but I refused to let the owner erase my legal rights. The landlord tried to force me to sign a new agreement that retroactively cancelled my previous tenancy and waived all his obligations. I refused. I drafted a formal memorandum stating the actual timeline of facts and handed it to him. He refused to sign it. I looked him in the eye and said: "If you want me out before I find a proper house, pursue legal means through the Rent Court." He didn't, because he had never registered the tenancy, and he knew his informal pressure tactics wouldn't hold up in front of a Rent Officer or court. But more importantly, he might have to pay me back for all the repais I did. And what will he tell in court? "i want to increase rent by 50%, but tenant is suggesting 5 to 10%?" The Legal Trap in Tamil Nadu</h2> Most tenants in Tamil Nadu believe that staying quiet and having an informal, unregistered agreement protects them. It does the exact opposite. Back in 2017, the Tamil Nadu government passed the Regulation of Rights and Responsibilities of Landlords and Tenants Act (TNRRRLT Act), replacing the old 1960 Rent Control Act. I wrote about this years ago in The Tenant's Penalty</a>. The state claimed the new law would balance rights between owners and renters. In reality, it stripped away historical rent protections and turned housing into an unbridled asset class for property owners and builder lobbies. Under the 2017 Act, if you do not have a written, registered agreement, Section 29 gives the landlord a quick path to issue a 1-month notice and treat you as an illegal occupant. The police know this, landlords know this, and they use that legal ambiguity to intimidate tenants who don't know the clauses. That is why I shared the Residential Tenancy Agreement Starter Draft</a>. Do not rely on verbal promises. Do not pay an advance without a written contract that caps the deposit at 3 months, specifies a 90-day notice period for the owner, and explicitly penalizes delayed deposit returns. When a landlord realizes you have a signed, registered agreement compliant with the 2017 Act, they can no longer rely on neighborhood thugs or police station drama to throw you out. Take the draft. Edit it. Use it. Protect yourself before you find out how cold the street feels. I hope I am wrong and I sincerely hope there exists some protection for the tenants. Image Credit: Sat ud (Frants Henningsen, 1892)</a> via Wikimedia Commons The Spectacle of the Shrug 2026-07-06T00:00:00+00:00 I am sitting at VMK Bakes near the Vellalore L&T bypass. It used to be MDS Bakes. I don't know why the name was changed. Not just this one, but many of the MDS branches got rebranded, though some still remain as MDS. Anyway, I digress. I look at my hands. I am several people today, none of whom is the guy who wrote those posts last year. I am a stranger sitting on a steel chair, listening to the high-pitched idle of a couple of KTMs and MT15s parked outside, wondering why the person I used to be cared so much. We're all looking at screens. It's the only way to pretend we aren't here. "Avaru paathu seivaaru da," one of the MT15 guys says, adjusting his bandana. It's fucking hot. Remove the bandana on your head. Anyway, He's talking about Vijay. The leader. The new god of the Secretariat. He says it with this quiet, unthinking certainty that makes my head throb. Two days ago, a nine-year-old girl in Coimbatore, not far from here, was raped and killed by two men, Karthik and Mohanraj. It's the sort of horror that makes you want to scrub your brain with a wire brush. Some reporters caught Keerthana, our new Minister of Industries, outside her office. She's a woman, i think she has kids, so they asked her. She smiled. She actually gave them this neat, TV-ready smile and said, "Talk about administrative things now. Political things after 6 PM. Whatever the leader decides will be correct." I want to grab her by the collar and shake her, but I also want to lay down in the dirt and sleep for a hundred years. That's the double bind of this place. The street-level brutality of the world exists right next to the absolute, floating indifference of the people we put in charge. Keerthana was crying on Instagram under a street light during the campaign, screaming about women's safety and the "slavery" of the old regime. Now she has the flag on her car. The screaming is over. The scheduling has begun. If a child dies, you ask about it after office hours. Then there's Vignesh. The Excise Minister. Mannar Vaarisu. Yup. Real mamannar vaarisu, or at least that's what the poster says. Vijay used to stand on stages and sing about the extra ten rupees on every TASMAC bottle being a thousand-crore loot. Now Vignesh is in office, and the ten rupees is still being collected. In some places it's twenty. Some guys at the next table are laughing about it. "Who returns the bottle, da? The shop guy will throw you out if you bring it back. The ten rupees stays in the drawer." Vignesh told the press it's not a scam. It's a "deposit scheme" to keep elephants from stepping on glass in the forests. It's a beautiful, green-washed lie. The elephants are still stepping on glass, but now they're doing it for the environment. And the 10 rupees they collect is on top of the refundable deposit. Vignesh says it's a long process. Of course it is. In a film, you throw the villain off a bridge and the screen goes black. In real life, you take his ledger and keep the change. I look at my cream bun. The sweetness is sickening. I am nothing. I'll never be anything. But even a shadow has to watch the light change. The whole government was built on a forged letter anyway. Or a deepfake. Depending on which liar you want to believe today. TTV Dhinakaran is filing police complaints, claiming TVK fabricated the support letter of AMMK MLA S Kamaraj using AI. TVK released a video of Kamaraj signing it in a very weird location. But does it matter? The Governor accepted it. The trust vote happened. Twenty-five AIADMK rebels defied their whip and voted for the government. VCK and the Left were screaming that giving these defectors cabinet berths would destroy political morality. Thirumavalavan threatened to pull support. So Vijay gave them a promise instead: no berths. The rebels keep their seats and their corruption cases, and the allies keep their dignity on paper. Everyone wins, except the fools who thought the vote was about change. The fan pages are rewriting history anyway. They're posting that TVK appointed Tamil Nadu's first woman minister, ignoring Rukmini Lakshmipathi in 1946. They don't know history. They don't need to. If the reel is edit-locked with a high-tempo background score, the history becomes whatever the editor wants it to be. The housing minister built a statue of Vijay and is actively offering prayers to it. A plaster god for a plaster government. I went to a college where we had no elections, no politics, nothing. We had fan clubs instead. We fought over whether Vijay was better than Ajith. Now those same kids are running the troll army, flooding the comments of any journalist who asks a question, calling them DMK agents. They think they are defending the state. They're just defending their own right to be entertained. I am tired. The fan is clicking above my head, a slow, useless rhythm. The air is hot and smells of grease. We thought we were voting for a new politics. We just voted for a better-edited feed. The machine beeps. The likes go up. Enjoy the show. Image Credit: Ambigram Magic Dream - mirror symmetry with a handheld pattern giving a reversed shadow on a blue wall.jpg</a> via Wikimedia Commons The Charismatic Clone 2026-07-04T00:00:00+00:00 I am thinking about Homelander. No, wait, that's too simple. Homelander is a cartoon. But the god-complex, the complete decoupling of the symbol from the actual, boring work of running a society: that's real. I have this comparison draft sitting on my drive. Some guy sent me a structured analysis comparing Narendra Modi's union government and Joseph Vijay's state administration in Tamil Nadu. All academic and neat. Words like "charismatic populism" and "media-evasive communication." It's too clean. The reality is much dirtier. It's just two guys running the same basic operating system, but one has a beard and the other has a better dance step. It's the same blueprint. Different packaging. Let's start with the press conferences. Or the lack of them. Modi hasn't held a single unscripted, solo press conference in India since he took office in 2014. Not one. When he went to the White House in 2023, Biden's press corps cornered him into answering one question about minority rights. He mumbled something about democracy being "in our DNA" and went back to his scripted broadcast. His team defends this by saying people prefer direct contact. Sure. They prefer one-way transmission because the alternative requires answering for why the railway infrastructure is collapsing. Vijay does the exact same thing. During the entire 2026 campaign, the man was a ghost to journalists. No press meets. No unscripted interviews. He sat in his caravan, drove around, and then stood on a stage to deliver fifteen-minute speeches full of movie punchlines. He told the crowd he left a hundred-crore cinema career to serve them, and everyone cheered. Why risk the press? If a journalist asks you how you plan to manage a state's deficit when you don't even know the difference between the revenue and capital accounts, the illusion cracks. It's easier to stay in the caravan. Then there's the candidate list. Max Weber wrote about charismatic authority. A fancy academic way of saying people will follow a leader because they think he has some magical qualities. In our case, the magic is either the "Modi wave" or twenty years of screen nostalgia. In the national elections, people voted "for Modi." They didn't know their local BJP candidate's name. They didn't care. The candidate was just a plastic signpost. TVK's debut in May was the same farce. Vijay contested from two seats: Perambur and Trichy East. He won both, obviously, then resigned Trichy East because you can't sit on two chairs at once. But what about the other 106 MLAs? The TVK online army was screaming during the campaign that their candidates were all PhD holders, scientists, and elite intellectuals. Affidavits are public, you know. You can just look them up. About thirty-five percent of the elected TVK legislators have an education of High School (HSC) or below. They are complete novices. They have no public track record, no base, nothing. If Vijay wasn't on the poster, they wouldn't win a resident welfare association election. So how do you run a cabinet with people who don't know how a government order is drafted? You don't. You put a few loyal managers like Bussy Anand and Aadhav Arjuna in the cabinet, and you centralize everything else in the Chief Minister's Office. Just like Modi's PMO. The MLAs are just placeholders. They exist to raise their hands when the whip tells them to. And the digital noise is incredible. The BJP's IT cell is a professional, salaried engine. TVK has its fan clubs. They don't need to pay their trolls; the fans do it for the love of the star. But the behavior is identical. Anyone who questions the leader is a DMK agent, a paid journalist, a traitor. Lately, they've been doing this thing I call "policy laundering." TVK has been in power since May 10, 2026. They haven't passed a single significant administrative directive or budget. But if you look at the fan pages, they are claiming credit for everything. They posted that Vijay ordered chairs to be placed in Revenue Department offices so citizens don't have to stand. That was a DMK Government Order from May 15, 2025. They claimed Vijay started free coaching for competitive exams. That's the Naan Mudhalvan scheme from 2022. They even claimed the ban on government bus drivers using mobile phones was a new Vijay directive. That was from 2022. The commercial TV channels just rebroadcast this crap without checking. The Hindu had to put out a video explaining that these are old schemes. But the fans don't watch The Hindu. They watch the reels. When a crisis hits, the shield goes up. If the union government fails during a pandemic or an infrastructure collapse, the BJP media machine decentralizes the blame. It's the state's fault. It's the bureaucracy. The Prime Minister is still pure, working eighteen hours a day. When TVK had its first real disaster, they used the exact same shield. On September 27 last year, during the campaign in Karur, the TVK rally ended in a stampede. Mismanagement, no water, absolute chaos. Forty-one people died. Seven kids, seventeen women, nine men. They died in the dirt because a movie star wanted a big crowd. The TVK's immediate response wasn't to admit their organizers fucked up. They suspended activities for a month, and the online trolls started attacking the local police, claiming it was a DMK conspiracy. Vijay put out a tweet blaming the police for not telling him the crowd size, announced twenty lakhs compensation, and let his General Secretary Jothiraman deal with the court cases. The Supreme Court eventually ordered a CBI probe. The leader remains untouched. The dead are buried, the compensation is paid, and the brand is protected. I don't know why I keep writing this. I'm paying off a loan, sitting in a room in Coimbatore, watching the streetlights flicker. The voltage is low again. The UPS is making that stupid clicking sound. Fuck. This UPS. I dont know why I bought it. I am having buyers remorse with it, but the powercut has increased over last two months, so hopefully it's worth it. but wait. TVK people would say that this is the solution - UPS, solar or just shut the fuck up and tolerate.</a> We wanted to get rid of the old families, the DMK and AIADMK. We thought we were voting for something different. Different indeed! Worse poison. Better filter. Enjoy the show. Image Credit: Mannequin exécutant les ordres transmis par téléphone (Pacific) - btv1b53196255d.jpg</a> via Wikimedia Commons Open Weights and the Datacenter Land Grab 2026-07-02T00:00:00+00:00 A few weeks ago, developers across the world woke up to find their API keys dead. Well not exactly. However, let me go on. pretend that API keys were dead, as that sounds better than what alternative I can write. So, A few weeks ago, developers across the world woke up to find their API keys dead. No warning email. No deprecation grace period. Just a sudden policy shift or geopolitical order in Washington, and a private American AI company severed access for thousands of foreign users. One morning you're building a product on top of someone else's model; by lunch, your entire tech stack is a collection of dead HTTP 403 responses. It was a hilarious, brutal lesson in what happens when you mistake a rented API for infrastructure. For the last three years, Indian tech founders and policy consultants have been running around throwing the phrase "Sovereign AI" into every panel discussion. They talk about it like it's a national defense initiative. They give speeches about how India cannot remain a passive consumer of intelligence trained elsewhere. And then, when you ask what the plan actually is, the government points to a handful of seed-stage startups and says: "We gave them some compute credits! They'll build our foundation models!" It's absurd. Training a frontier foundation model isn't like building another SaaS dashboard to automate invoice parsing for US dental clinics. It requires tens of thousands of cluster GPUs, petabytes of clean multilingual text, specialized distributed systems research teams, and hundreds of millions of dollars burnt in electricity alone. A startup's primary goal is not national technological autonomy. A startup's goal is to survive until the next funding round, show 3x month-over-month ARR growth, and eventually exit. You cannot ask a twenty-person startup backed by venture capital to spend fifty million dollars training a foundation model and then hand the model weights over to the public for free. The incentives don't line up. The moment the venture money dries up, the startup either closes the weights behind a paid API or gets swallowed by an enterprise. I shouldn't pretend zero research is happening. Academic initiatives like AI4Bharat and Bhashini are doing legitimate, difficult work scraping Tamil, Telugu, and Marathi speech corpora and releasing open language toolkits on shoe-string budgets. I see them. But while academic researchers scramble for crumbs of government grants to map regional dialects, our multi-billion-dollar corporate behemoths sit back, build real-estate datacenters, and wait for foreign labs to hand down foundation models. Other countries understood this basic arithmetic years ago. Look at South Korea. They knew a country of fifty million people couldn't outspend the United States or China on raw compute. So instead of praying that some lone startup would magically invent a national model, they formed coordinated consortia. Naver, LG, SK Telecom, Seoul National University, and KAIST pooled their funding, research teams, and datasets into a shared initiative to build open-weight models. They treated foundation AI as national infrastructure - the same way governments treat power grids or telecom spectrum. Even China, despite its tight state controls, recognized that open-weight models like Qwen and DeepSeek give their engineering ecosystem global leverage and strategic resilience against Western sanctions. If India actually wanted a serious sovereign AI strategy, the blueprint is staring us right in the face. Take NPCI's Section 8 non-profit utility structure, blend it with South Korea's consortium approach, and apply it to foundation models. Imagine Infosys, TCS, Reliance, Zoho, and the IITs pooling capital into a Section 8 AI Foundation. The mandate: train and periodically release open-weight models for Indian languages. The weights are released to the public for free so anyone can run them locally or host them. But how does the foundation survive? By offering high-throughput, enterprise-grade managed API inference to corporations and member firms at competitive, cost-plus rates. NPCI proved that a Section 8 non-profit utility can generate over ₹1,500 crore in annual surplus while building massive data infrastructure, without needing to hand out stock dividends to private shareholders. If member companies consume inference from a shared non-profit model at competitive rates, the foundation stays self-sustaining, the country gets a sovereign frontier model, and the firms who pooled funds get shared, zero-lock-in intelligence rails. Even if it barely breaks even, everyone wins. Why hasn't this happened? Because NPCI didn't spring spontaneously from the generous hearts of commercial bank CEOs. It happened because the Reserve Bank of India stood over them with regulatory authority and forced them into a room until they built a shared payment rail. I'm not asking for state commissars to dictate private balance sheets or force companies to burn capital at gunpoint. God knows we have enough bureaucratic overreach as it is. But the depressing reality of Indian corporate capital is that without regulatory coercion or immediate client billing hours, it has zero capacity for enlightened self-interest. In Silicon Valley, Meta releases open weights to commoditize their competitors' moats. In China, internet giants build and release Qwen and DeepSeek to secure developer ecosystems. In India, corporate capital doesn't move out of technical vision or strategic self-interest; it only moves when a central bank whip cracks over its back, or when there's subsidized land to buy for server farms. Now look at what Indian capital is doing instead. Are Reliance or Adani or Tata funding national open-weight foundation models? Are they putting fifty thousand GPUs into a non-profit consortium with IISc and the IITs to release open model weights for Indian languages? Of course not. They're buying up acres of farmland, putting up steel sheds, hooking them to the high-voltage grid, and building GPU datacenters. Now, to be fair, you can't train a model on fresh air. Compute capacity is a strict prerequisite for AI sovereignty; you need the silicon and power infrastructure before you can run a single training epoch. Building datacenters isn't inherently evil or useless. The grift isn't in putting up the servers. The grift is stopping there: treating server racks as the final destination, securing subsidized land and power, and then acting shocked when all that compute just gets rented out as cloud hours to run proprietary foreign APIs instead of training open weights. Adani gets to sell power and real estate; Reliance gets to pack GPU servers into cloud bays; and Indian startups get to burn VC cash renting domestic compute to call closed foreign APIs. It’s the real estate grift rebranded as artificial intelligence. Let's be clear about what "open weights" actually mean. They aren't pure FOSS. A true open-source model would mean having the full training dataset, the exact filtering code, the hyperparameter recipes, and a reproducible pipeline that anyone can run on a laptop for five bucks. We don't have that yet - reproducing a 70-billion parameter model costs millions in compute alone. But open weights give you something crucial: resilience. If you have the weights downloaded on a server inside your own cluster, no API vendor in San Francisco or policy bureaucrat in Washington can revoke your key tomorrow. You can quantize it, fine-tune it on local Tamil or Kannada datasets, host it on your own hardware, and run it until the silicon melts. Without open weights, "Sovereign AI" is just a marketing slogan for buying American hardware and hosting it in a Bania datacenter. We had the same illusion twenty years ago with telecommunications, ten years ago with cloud hosting, and today with foundation models. We build the physical sheds, lay the fiber, light up the server racks, and then bow down to whatever proprietary foreign software layer runs inside them. The datacenters will get built. The press releases will announce thousands of H100s sitting in air-conditioned halls. And when the switch gets flipped from above, we'll still be sitting there with dead terminal prompts, paying rent on the land we used to own. The Parasite Economy and the DPI Mirage 2026-06-30T00:00:00+00:00 Every few months, some tech guy in an ironed linen shirt on LinkedIn posts a chart about India's software dominance. Millions of engineers. Billions in IT exports. Half of Bengaluru staring at VS Code under air-conditioned ambient lighting while the municipal drain outside overflows into the street. They love to call it a "tech powerhouse." It's a lie. India doesn't have a software industry. It has a high-tech call center industry that swapped headsets for Java enterprise frameworks. TCS, Infosys, Wipro, Cognizant - they don't build software. They rent human sweat by the hour. A client in Frankfurt or Charlotte wants a legacy COBOL pipeline converted to Spring Boot, so we dump three hundred college graduates into a bay, bill twenty-five dollars an hour per head, and hand over the IP. The moment the project finishes, the code is sealed behind an NDA, the repo is wiped from the local machines, and the warm bodies are shuffled to the next billing cycle. We don't build software. We consume it, wrap it in client SLAs, and shovel it over the fence. Look, I know I'm generalizing. There are individual Indian maintainers grinding away late at night submitting patches to Linux kernel trees, tweaking Rust toolchains, or building small infra projects. I see you. But you're swimming against a roaring tsunami of corporate inertia. The corporate gravity, where 95% of our engineering talent and capital sit, remains firmly locked in billing-hour servitude. When you look at the global open-source commons - the actual foundational bedrock that keeps the internet running - India's corporate contribution is almost zero. We didn't build Linux. We didn't write PostgreSQL, Python, Rust, Redis, or LLVM. We didn't even build decent middleware. Aside from a few exceptions like Frappe or Hasura, our entire multi-billion-dollar IT sector operates as pure parasites on the global commons. We pull down Apache, Nginx, Linux, and Debian for free, use them to power client infrastructure, bill the client, and give absolutely nothing back upstream. Even China, with all its state firewalls and proprietary internet walled gardens, routinely dumps massive open-source infrastructure into the wild. Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, Huawei - they run infrastructure at a scale where they had to write their own RPC frameworks, distributed databases, diagnostic tools, and mobile inference engines. And then they open-sourced them. Dubbo, TiDB, ncnn, openEuler. Why? Because when you actually build products instead of just selling developer hours, open-sourcing your core rails attracts global talent and sets technical standards. When an Indian IT manager hears the word "open source," his first instinct isn't "strategic advantage." It's terror. "What if the client sues us? What if our code looks dirty? How does this increase Q3 billable hours?" And why would it? Look at where the money actually goes. Indian IT companies are asset-light cash machines generating tens of thousands of crores in free cash flow every year. Unlike manufacturing or telecom, they don't need to rebuild steel plants or lay subsea cables. Yet their reported R&D spending is a pathetic rounding error, well under 1 to 2 percent of revenue, compared to the 15 to 20 percent reinvested by global software firms like Microsoft or Alphabet. Where does all that cash go? Between 70 and 90 percent of free cash flow is immediately funneled straight into shareholder dividends, special payouts, and stock buybacks. TCS, Infosys, and Wipro sit on tens of thousands of crores in cash reserves, but instead of risking even 5 percent of that capital to build a global open-source database, an operating system kernel, or an infrastructure framework, they treat R&D as internal delivery automation scripts and dump the rest into financial dividend grease to keep institutional investors happy. And then comes the cope. Whenever you point out that Indian companies haven't built a single globally influential piece of open-source software, the domestic tech evangelists immediately pull out their favorite shield: Digital Public Infrastructure. "What about UPI? What about Aadhaar? What about DigiLocker? India leads the world in open digital rails!" I want to laugh every time I hear this. Now, some policy guy in Delhi will read this and complain I'm making a category error. "UPI wasn't built to be a forkable Linux repository," they'll lecture. "It was built for financial inclusion, transaction velocity, and breaking the rent-seeking monopoly of foreign card networks like Visa and Mastercard." Fair enough. Credit where it's due: replacing Visa's percentage cuts with a zero-MDR domestic settlement rail was a genuinely smart economic move for street vendors and small merchants. I'm not denying that. My problem isn't that UPI exists as a financial tool. My problem is the dishonest bait-and-switch: whenever domestic tech evangelists go on international stages to brag about Indian "open software leadership", they hold up UPI as their crown jewel. There is a fundamental confusion between shared state-regulated infrastructure and an open public commons. Linux is an open public commons. PostgreSQL is a commons. OpenStreetMap is a commons. If I want to take the Linux kernel, fork it, rewrite the scheduler, spin up my own distribution, and run it on a server in my bedroom, I don't ask anyone for permission. I don't sign an NDA with a government bureaucrat. I don't file compliance paperwork with a bank. Linus Torvalds doesn't get to audit my laptop. The code is out there. The commons belongs to whoever compiles it. Now try doing that with UPI. Try writing your own UPI server tonight. Try connecting your home homelab directly to the UPI settlement rail. You can't. You'll have RBI inspectors, NPCI bureaucrats, and bank compliance lawyers sitting on your chest before your first packet hits the gateway. UPI is not open software. It is not an open commons. It is a tightly regulated, state-sanctioned financial wire controlled by a consortium of banks and government entities. It has open API specifications and interoperability for approved apps, yes. Google Pay and PhonePe can talk to the same settlement engine. That's nice. It makes buying a ten-rupee cup of tea at a roadside stall convenient. But convenience isn't freedom. Interoperability inside a walled police garden isn't open source. And let's drop the fairy tale that NPCI is some struggling, selfless public charity. NPCI is a Section 8 not-for-profit company promoted by major banks that pulled in over ₹3,200 crore in operating revenue and stashed away ₹1,500 crore in net surplus in a single financial year. That's a 47% operating margin, a net surplus that would make a Silicon Valley monopoly turn green with envy. It sits on an accumulated reserve of over ₹5,400 crore while member banks enjoy cheaper payment rails and governance control. It is a wildly profitable, state-backed utility monopoly. Useful? Absolutely. FOSS or an open public commons? Not even close. Calling UPI a "public digital good" in the same breath as Linux or Wikipedia is like calling the national highway network open-source software because anyone with a registered toll tag can drive on it. You don't own the road. You can't modify the lane markings. And if the state decides to block your FASTag tomorrow morning, you sit on the shoulder and watch the traffic go by. We've fallen into a pathetic trap. We confuse being the world's most enthusiastic consumer of other people's technology with having technical agency. We celebrate state-controlled payment protocols while our corporate behemoths refuse to write a single compiler, database engine, or operating system component. Twelve years ago I wrote an open letter complaining about BOSS Linux - our state-backed attempt at an operating system that ended up being a broken Debian wrapper pushed by C-DAC bureaucrats who couldn't even set up a Torrent link for a 3 GB ISO image over flaky BSNL 2G. A decade later, nothing has changed. The mindset is identical: lock everything down, rely on central government oversight, consume foreign open-source bases, and pretend it's a national triumph. We don't build the rails. We just pay the toll and pretend we own the highway. The Court and the Compassion Grift 2026-06-28T00:00:00+00:00 Two years ago, after the Kallakurichi hooch deaths, I wrote about how the Tamil Nadu government uses ten-lakh-rupee cheques as headline grease. If your tragedy makes enough noise on Twitter, the state opens its purse; if you die quietly on a dark road, you get nothing. I thought ten lakhs for poison liquor was the peak of political absurdity. I was wrong. I severely underestimated how far a government will go when it's trying to manage a media disaster involving a film star turned politician. In Karur, forty-one people died in a stampede at a TVK rally. Forty-one lives crushed in a dusty ground because thirty thousand people tried to fit into a space built for ten thousand, all to catch a glimpse of Vijay blowing kisses from a modified bus. The cash payout reached thirty-two lakh rupees per deceased family (ten lakhs from the state government, twenty lakhs from TVK, and two lakhs from the Prime Minister's Relief Fund). Thirty-two lakhs. But even that wasn't enough to quell the political panic. In July, the Tamil Nadu government went ahead and issued appointment orders for government jobs to kin from thirty-two of those families. Let that sink in for a moment. Yesterday, thankfully, the Madras High Court stepped in and struck the whole damn order down. The division bench held that handing out public employment as a special relief package outside constitutional recruitment frameworks violates Articles 14 and 16. The court noted what any sane person with a copy of the Constitution already knew: sympathy cannot replace legality, and public posts are not party favors to be thrown around whenever a government wants to quiet down a scandal. I felt a genuine, rare wave of relief reading the judgment. Think about what those job orders actually meant to anyone who doesn't live inside a political campaign headquarters. Right now, across Tamil Nadu, hundreds of thousands of young men and women are sitting in hot, cramped single rooms in Triplicane, Chintadripet, and Gandhipuram. They eat two-rupee tea and fifty-rupee meals, studying twelve hours a day for the TNPSC Group 4 and Group 2 exams. They spend five, six years of their youth memorizing geography, Tamil grammar, and aptitude questions, praying for a single junior assistant post so their parents can stop taking loans for fertilizer. And what did the government tell them? It told them: If you want a public job in Tamil Nadu, don't bother studying for five years. Just go stand in a mob at an actor's political rally, get crushed in a stampede, and we'll hand your brother an appointment letter before the week is out. The court warned that allowing such an exception would "open the floodgates." It's about time someone pointed at the gates. In motor vehicle accidents, in firecracker factory explosions, in weaving shed fires, people die every month in Tamil Nadu due to state negligence and corporate safety failures. The state hands their families a standard ex-gratia cheque, usually between one and two lakhs, and moves on. Nobody offers them a permanent desk at the Taluk office. Nobody writes them into the state payroll. Why were Karur rally deaths treated like an elite category of grief? Because it was high-visibility. Because a film star's brand-new political machine was involved, the state government was terrified of being accused of heartlessness, and both sides competed in a grotesque bidding war of public funds and state resources to buy off the anger. The High Court didn't deny the tragedy. The grief of those forty-one families in Karur is real, and the loss is permanent. But a government job is not an ex-gratia hamper. It is a public trust funded by taxpayers, governed by constitutional rules of equal opportunity. When you turn public employment into an ad-hoc compensation tool for high-profile disasters, you aren't showing compassion. You are committing state-level theft against every unemployed kid who trusted the rules. This court ruling needs to be the end of it. Stop the headline compensation. Stop the ad-hoc job giveaways. Build rule-based disaster relief and universal safety nets for every citizen, or get out of the way and let the law work. The state treasury is not a political campaign fund, and public jobs are not blood money. Image Credit: The Scales of Justice - geograph.org.uk - 650458.jpg</a> via Wikimedia Commons OJT for Clowns 2026-05-23T00:00:00+00:00 We have a new cabinet in Chennai. TVK is in power. Congress MLAs are ministers too, which is the first time in fifty-nine years, if anyone is keeping score. I'm not. Vijay said on day one that he wouldn't tolerate corruption. I laughed then. I'm laughing harder now. We've entered the OJT phase. On-the-job training. But they're not training to manage departments; they're training to manage the camera. Take Keerthana. She's the new Industries Minister. Some reporter asked her about the nine-year-old girl who was raped and murdered in Coimbatore by two men. Her response was a masterpiece. She smiled. She actually smiled. And then she said, "Talk about administrative things now. Talk about politics after 6 PM. Leader knows best." Wait, that's not right. A TVK page claimed she was the first woman minister in Tamil Nadu, which is a lie: Rukmini Lakshmipathi was minister in 1946. But they don't read history; they make it up. I went and found the selfie video Keerthana posted two weeks ago during the campaign. She was standing under a street lamp, crying, talking about how women aren't safe in this state, how the previous government was a form of slavery, how everyone needed to vote for the Whistle. Now she's in the office. Now she has the flag on her car. The screaming is over. The smiling has begun. If a child dies, you ask about it after office hours. Then there's Vignesh. Prohibition and Excise. The guy in charge of TASMAC. Before the election, Vijay was shouting that the extra ten rupees charged on every liquor bottle was a thousand-crore scam. He said it went straight to Senthil Balaji and the top bosses. Vignesh stood on stages and sang songs about it. Now Vignesh is the minister. The ten rupees is still being charged. In some places, it's twenty or forty. So what's the official explanation? Vignesh told the press it's not a scam. It's a "deposit scheme." They charge the ten rupees so people don't throw bottles in forests where elephants might step on them. If you return the bottle, you get the ten rupees back. Except no one returns the bottles, the shops refuse to take them, and the money stays in the drawer. When the reporters asked Vignesh why the extra money is still being collected if it was a scam last month, he didn't blink. "This isn't a cinema," he said. "We can't change things in one day. It's a long process." He's right. It isn't a cinema. In a cinema, you throw the villain off a bridge and the screen goes black. In real life, you take his job and keep his ledger. The rest of the cabinet is just as funny. The environment minister doesn't know the difference between environment and tourism. He stood in front of mics calling himself the "wandering minister" because the Tamil words sound similar to him. The housing minister built a statue of Vijay and is actively worshipping it. Bussy Anand, the party general secretary, put out a memo saying party members shouldn't meddle in government administration. Two days later, the HR&CE minister, Ramesh, told party members to go inspect the puliyodharai and pongal at local temples. "Just do it politely," he said. "Don't make a scene." They don't even coordinate their lies. But the fans don't care. I spent an hour looking at the TVK pages online. It's a different planet. They're posting slow-motion reels of Vijay walking out of the Secretariat. They're debating his look. "What a cute CM." "He has a cute little tummy." "Look at how he folds his sleeves." There are power cuts across the state. There were thirty-nine murders in fifteen days. A girl was murdered in Coimbatore. And the people who voted for change are arguing about whether a video of Coimbatore IG Ramya Bharathi smiling while discussing the murder was generated by AI. They think the smile was fake news. They think if they prove the video was fake, the murder becomes fake too. This is what happens when you turn a fandom into a government. You don't get citizens; you get an audience that expects a post-credit scene. This is the real victory of the TVK social media machine. It didn't just win an election; it altered the basic currency of accountability. If a minister makes a fool of himself, the official page drops a new slow-motion walk with a high-energy background score. If a tragedy happens, the troll army floods the comments section to accuse the reporters of political bias or AI manipulation. The reality doesn't matter because the aesthetic is bulletproof. Vijay sits at the top, silent, pristine, and entirely insulated. He doesn't need to answer for the power cuts or the incompetence of his ministers. The fans will do the work of defending the image, translating every failure into OJT or a long-term plan that we ordinary people are too dumb to understand. We replaced the old, corrupt, dynastic politics not with a new system, but with a better-edited feed. The machinery is still the same. The billing is still the same. We just have a more handsome face on the billboard. I don't have a smart way to end this. I'm just tired. The machine beeps. The screen glows. The likes go up. Enjoy the show. Image Credit: Matchbox label - Circus Clown (circa 1920s) - MBP1472715142.jpg</a> via Wikimedia Commons Kavarchiyin Ucham 2026-05-03T00:00:00+00:00 I enjoy Vijay movies. There, I said it. It's not some high-brow appreciation of the craft. Most of it is objectively terrible, formulaic garbage. But if Kuruvi is on TV, I'll sit through the damn thing, at least parts of it. The chemistry with Vivek, the dumb stunts, the ease with which he moves on screen , it kinda works. It's familiar. He has this charm that makes you forgive the screenwriters for being lazy. I'm not immune to it. Most of Tamil Nadu isn't. But there's a difference between paying a hundred and fifty rupees to watch a man beat up thirty bad guys in a cinema hall, and handing him the state cabinet. We're a day away from the election results, and I am shit scared. I've been watching the campaign trail for the last two months, and it's been a masterclass in pure glamour. DMK is currently shitting its pants. Look at what we've been applauding. In Perambur, the campaign vehicle stops. Vijay is inside, and instead of speaking, he starts playing with the interior bus lights. On, off, on, off. The crowd outside goes absolutely wild, screaming like they're at a movie premiere. It's a literal film entry scene staged on a public road, and the fans are eating it up. No talk of policy, no mention of the economy, just a grown man toggling a light switch to trigger mass hysteria. Then you have the Erode rally in December. Some kid climbs up a speaker tower, risking his life, blowing kisses at the stage. Instead of calling security or telling the idiot to be sensible, Vijay stops the rally. "Come down first, only then will I give you a kiss," he says into the microphone. The kid climbs down, Vijay blows a flying kiss, and the internet erupts. It's peak hero-worship theater. It's not politics. It's a meet-and-greet with state-wide consequences. And when the spectacle fails, it gets dangerous. The Karur stampede in September should have been the moment everyone woke up. Forty-one people died. Let that number sink in. Forty-one lives snuffed out because thirty thousand people tried to cram into a space meant for ten thousand, all trying to get a glimpse of their Vijayna. And what did the DMK do? Nothing. They were too cowardly to arrest him, terrified of the backlash from his fans. They let it slide, called it an administrative issue, and in doing so, they let TVK shape the narrative. Now, the fan clubs have turned it into a conspiracy. I was talking to a few college friends last week. Their wives are all voting for Vijay. When I asked why, they didn't talk about TVK's manifesto. They didn't talk about their plan for the state's debt. They just said, "DMK and Senthil Balaji conspired to cause the stampede to destroy Vijay. Why can't you give him a chance? He's done so much charity." It's a cult. There's no other word for it. You question their ideology, their philosophy, their plan for governance, and you get nothing but blank stares or scripted defense. "Anna will take care of it." "Give him a chance." The internet is even worse. Facebook groups, Instagram reels, are being gooned by coordinated fan accounts. Telegram channels coordinate comment-section pile-ons. If you write anything remotely critical, you get flooded by chinna koothiyans calling you a DMK agent or worse. Women are giving interviews to local YouTube channels crying about how they'd do anything for Vijay. It feels like a covert jihad of personality worship. It's an aggressive, unthinking mob that has decided that because a man is charming on a screen, he must be competent to run a state with seven crore people. We had the cycle rallies too. In Karaikudi, he tried to ride a bicycle to show he's a simple man. The crowd surged so violently they almost crushed him, and he had to abandon the cycle and hide inside his caravan. In Kanyakumari, someone threw a ball of flowers at him, his security panicked, and he jumped off the bike like a bomb had gone off. The fans turned it into a meme. "Anna thought it was a bomb." They laugh at the chaos their own hysteria causes. I don't know what happens when the boxes are opened. But if one-third of the state has decided to vote based on flying kisses and light switches, we deserve whatever comes next. I am going to take a shower. The heat is unbearable. Image Credit: The Tank - 56 Seat Theater.jpg</a> via Wikimedia Commons The Roo Code Grift: The Death of a 3-Million-Install Illusion 2026-04-23T00:00:00+00:00 So Roo Code got taken out back and shot today. The VS Code extension, the little local agent that three million people installed. Dead. They are archiving the repo on May 15. The reason is exactly what you probably suspect. Giving away local software doesn't pay back venture capital. They are pivoting to a thing called Roomote. It lives in the cloud and hooks into Slack. Because selling an agent platform to entire development teams is where the real money sits. The funny part is that the prototype for Roomote was literally just them running Roo Code in cloud containers to speed up their own pull requests. Now they want to dress that process up, slap some enterprise compliance labels on it, and sell it to CIOs. You can't squeeze predictable monthly revenue out of a local desktop tool. So they just kill it. You might think they'd hand the project over to a foundation. Let the community maintain it. Nope. They absolutely refuse. Sure, the code is open source. Anyone can technically fork it and maintain it under some random new name. But why not just transfer the actual project (the brand, the repo, the momentum) to a foundation? I didn't initially know. But then I read the developer threads. Roo actually started as a fork of Cline because Cline wouldn't merge an auto-approve PR. The founders spun it off, added features, and now they claim it is entirely "theirs." Giving the brand to a foundation apparently ruins their startup origin story. They genuinely care more about controlling the mythological narrative of being the "creators" than letting the tool survive under its established name. I guess it's easier to just lock the doors and walk away. A core developer on Reddit actually tried to argue this wasn't a cash grab. Right. Sure thing, man. Whatever helps you sleep at night. I shouldn't even be annoyed. This is just the standard playbook now. Build a free toy. Bait three million users into your ecosystem. Figure out your margins are basically zero because local agents don't generate cash. Pivot to selling bloated enterprise subscriptions. If this trend continues, the whole ecosystem is going to collapse. Companies extract value from open source, build a tool, automate everything, and put zero structural support back in. Then the VCs demand a return on investment and they pull the plug on the free ride. Go use Cline, or Kilo, or whatever local project hasn't taken Series A funding yet. Enjoy it while it lasts. Because right now, "open-source AI tooling" is just a disguised waitlist for a closed enterprise product. It keeps happening. And it's thoroughly exhausting. The Police Station Bench 2026-04-08T00:00:00+00:00 Yesterday, April 7th, 2026, my landlord decided that civil law takes too long. He went to Pothanur police station instead. At 9:51 AM, my phone rang. The voice on the other end identified himself as Sub-Inspector Gajendran. He didn't waste time with small talk. He told me a complaint had been lodged by my house owner, Mr Jagadeesh, because I hadn't vacated the house at 5/1F, 3rd Street East, Sakthi Vinayakar Nagar Phase 2 in Vellalore. He demanded that I come down to the station immediately. I told him I would start. I reached Pothanur station around 11:20 AM. Jagadeesh was already sitting there, accompanied by another guy I had never seen before. SI Gajendran sat behind his desk and asked me why the fuck I hadn't cleared out. I tried to lay down the facts. Back in October or November 2025, Jagadeesh had told me I didn't need to vacate, so I stopped looking at other houses. On top of that, I had sunk my own money and labor into fixing up his place, sorting out broken plumbing, fixing patchy wiring, dealing with pest control, and making it livable. And even now, I was actively hunting for a new place. Gajendran cut me off before I could finish. "None of that matters," he said. "No one will appreciate those things. The owner wants the house, so you have to give it back. Finding a house is easy. You can get one in a week if you use brokers." He pulled out a blank sheet of paper and ordered me to write an undertaking stating I would vacate within one month. I sat down and started writing. I began writing the actual background of the situation, documenting the repairs and the prior verbal agreement. I barely finished a paragraph before Gajendran snatched the paper right out of my hands. "Don't write your version," he snapped. "Write only what I dictate." He pushed another blank page toward me. I refused. I told him straight: I was not going to write a statement that distorted reality. I told him I needed to talk to my wife first, since she handles our rent payments and household finances. I dialed her number, spoke to her briefly, and confirmed what I already knew. I looked at the SI and said I wouldn't sign his version. That was when the uniform took over. Gajendran exploded. He began barking at me across the desk, calling me lazy, raising his voice so everyone in the hallway could hear. Then came the explicit threats in Tamil: "Sign panna mattiya. FIR pottu ukkara vechuruven. Sign pannama eppadi veetukku porana paakuren." (You won't sign? I'll file an FIR and sit you right here in a cell. Let me see how you leave for home without signing.) He leaned in further: "Ippove veetla irukkara porul ellam eduthu veliya poda sollutta?" (Shall I call someone right now to throw all your things out onto the street?) After shouting, he gestured at Jagadeesh and his buddy to step out of the room. They walked out, leaving me alone in the room with him. He kept me sitting on that bench for over an hour. Over sixty minutes of isolation, threat of an immediate FIR, threat of jail, and threat of having my furniture tossed on the road. When you are sitting in a police station with an anxious mind and three men in uniform staring you down, the legal system feels like a myth invented by people who have never been intimidated by state power. I broke. I gave in. The moment I agreed to sign, Gajendran's tone flipped completely. The aggression disappeared. He became calm, almost hospitable. He even offered me a glass of water. He pulled out a third sheet of paper and dictated the text word for word. He changed the timeline from one month to two months. He made me write that the landlord had been asking me to vacate for four months, that I promised to clear out within two months, and that if I failed to vacate by then, I would accept whatever action the police decided to take against me. I wrote what he wanted, signed it, and walked out into the sunlight. It was a purely civil tenancy matter. No crime had been committed, no property damaged, no violence threatened. Yet the state apparatus was weaponized in broad daylight to extract a forced confession of compliance for a property owner who didn't want to bother with the Rent Court. That signature was not given by free consent. It was extracted under threat of lockup and illegal eviction. I am putting the record down here so it exists. _Image Credit: Scene of the Tribunal (The Verdict)</a> by Honoré Daumier via Wikimedia Commons* Same Poison, Different Bottle 2026-03-10T00:00:00+00:00 Sangeetha filed for divorce at Chengalpattu Family Court. That's her private decision. About her marriage. Her life. TVK supporters responded by circulating obscene and derogatory content about her on social media. AIDWA had to put out a statement calling it digital violence against women. I need you to sit with that for a moment. A woman files for divorce (completely legal, entirely her own business), and the political supporters of the party her husband founded decide to punish her for it publicly, with obscene content, en masse, online. Tell me how this is different from what BJP's online machinery does. I've been writing about Vijay's political trajectory for two years now. I said in the first post that the chinna koothiyans were going to be a problem. I said the core fans were going to function as a mob, not as a constituency. I didn't think I'd have a news article confirming it quite this specifically before the election. The BJP-RSS online ecosystem operates on a very specific logic: the leader is beyond criticism, dissent is betrayal, anyone who threatens the image of the leader must be attacked. It doesn't matter if the criticism is legitimate. It doesn't matter if the person is a private citizen. The emotional response is the same: a coordinated pile-on, abuse, dehumanisation. It's a feature, not a bug. It keeps potential critics afraid to speak. Vijay's fan base, at least the loudest and most visible part of it, is now running the same logic. You question Vijay, you get abuse. You report on something inconvenient, you get abuse. His own wife exercises a legal right in a family court, and she gets obscene content spread about her publicly because that's what you do to people who disturb the image. I voted against BJP because I thought their political culture (the mob protection of the leader, the intolerance of dissent, the hostility toward any kind of reality check) was dangerous to democratic norms. I was right about that. So what do I do with a party whose supporters are running the same culture? The comparison to BJP will make Vijay fans angry. I know. That's almost proof of the point. The thing is, I'm not saying Vijay is Modi. I'm not saying TVK's ideology is the same as BJP's. TVK hasn't been in power, hasn't passed laws, hasn't done the things BJP has done. The policy content is different. On paper, at least. But political culture is not just about policy. It's about how the movement treats dissent. It's about what the supporters do when they feel threatened. And on that measure, on the behavioural measure, what I'm seeing from the TVK mob online is identical to the Sangh ecosystem. Leader as an untouchable symbol. Critics as enemies. Women who become inconvenient as targets. A secular, progressive political movement cannot claim to be an alternative to fascist political culture while its online base is doing fascist political culture. That's not how it works. You don't get credit for the ideology on paper when the behaviour on the ground looks like this. The election is next month. I genuinely don't know what I want to happen. I don't want TVK to get enough seats to matter without Vijay having to reckon with what his fan base has become. A comfortable small win (eight seats, ten seats, the "well he tried" number) means this whole ecosystem continues, slightly emboldened, without any accountability. And the fans will stay exactly as they are because nothing punished them. But a bigger win is worse. A bigger win means this mob gets a sense of political efficacy. It means the lesson is that the abuse worked, that protecting the image by attacking anyone who threatens it is a viable and rewarded political strategy. Vijay has not said anything about what his supporters did to his wife. Not publicly. I checked. He could have. He has a platform. He made a choice. That's the kind of thing that tells you who someone is when it actually matters. I said in the first post in this series that the question is whether a highly curated lovable public persona can bypass democratic scrutiny. I think the answer, watching this play out, is: yes, and the fans become the mechanism by which it bypasses scrutiny. You don't need to be above criticism if your supporters make criticism too costly for most people to bother with. MGR built a political machine on mass love. Vijay's lot are building one on mass love plus the threat of what happens if you publicly step out of line. That's not progress. That's not secular. That's not a new politics. That's just the same old poison with a different face on the bottle. Image Credit: The Conjurer</a> via Wikimedia Commons Electoral Hygiene: Breaking the Information and Finance Cartels 2025-12-25T00:00:00+00:00 The polling booth is often described as the "sanctum sanctorum" of democracy. However, a deeper look at the hygiene of the electoral process reveals a rigged carnival, a system designed to create the illusion of choice while keeping the underlying power structures bolted firmly in place. To understand why the machine is broken, we must look at the gears of information, finance, and the "cartelization" of the political class. The NOTA Illusion: Dissent without Power</h3> "None of the Above" (NOTA) is frequently framed as a powerful tool for registered dissent. In reality, it is a vacuum where intent goes to die. In the current Indian system, NOTA votes have no material impact on the outcome. Even if 99% of a constituency hits NOTA, the single candidate who secures the remaining 1% is declared the winner. This makes NOTA a purely symbolic act: a way for voters to feel they have "sent a message" while the seat remains firmly in the hands of the very political class they intended to reject. Without a "re-poll" trigger (where a NOTA majority forces a new election with fresh candidates), the button is merely a release valve that lets out steam without changing the pressure in the boiler. The Spending Farce and the Finance Cartel</h3> The legal limits on election spending are a public farce. Every candidate and observer knows that the reported expenses are a fraction of the actual "machine" costs (liquor, cash-for-votes, and massive shadow campaigns). These limits don't stop the flow of money; they only ensure that the money remains opaque and unaccountable. Furthermore, when the legal survival of the political class is at stake, ideological rivalries vanish. The 2016 retroactive amendment to the FCRA (where the ruling and opposition parties collaborated to sanitize their own illegal foreign contributions) demonstrates that the legislative machinery functions as a unified cartel. Information Capture: The Media Loophole</h3> A democracy is only as healthy as its information ecosystem. In India, a massive structural loophole allows political parties and individual politicians to own and operate the very media outlets that are supposed to report on them. This creates a total capture of the news cycle. When a "news" channel is a subsidiary of a political brand, journalism is replaced by brand management. The Missing Mandate: Internal Party Democracy</h3> Finally, there is the problem of the parties themselves. We demand democracy for the nation, yet we tolerate absolute autocracy within our political parties. Most Indian parties are either family estates or centralized high commands where candidates are chosen by "vibe" and loyalty rather than an internal democratic mandate. Conclusion: Moving the Scoreboard</h3> To participate in a rigged game is to tell the dealer you approve of his marked cards. True electoral hygiene requires material changes: re-poll triggers for NOTA, strict media-ownership firewalls, and the democratization of the parties themselves. Related raw diary posts: What the fuck is NOTA?</a></li> How to Buy a Democracy</a></li> </ul> Image Credit: Afghan man at the ballot box during Loya jirga.jpg</a> via Wikimedia Commons The Bicameral Mirage: Reforming Legislative Design for a Modern Republic 2025-12-20T00:00:00+00:00 The architecture of a republic is defined by its legislative chambers. In the Indian context, the two-house system was designed to provide a "Council of States" (Rajya Sabha) that would act as a sober check on the populist impulses of the lower house. However, the operational reality of these chambers has diverged sharply from their constitutional intent, evolving into a structural "mirage" that masks a centralized party cartel. The Rajya Sabha: A Council of Parties</h3> The Rajya Sabha was envisioned as a permanent body where states would have a protected voice, regardless of the political waves sweeping the Lok Sabha. In practice, however, it has become the "Council of Parties." Members are not elected by the people but by state legislators, who are themselves bound by rigid party whips and the Anti-Defection Law. This has turned the upper house into a retirement home for defeated politicians, party financiers, and loyalists who could not win a direct mandate. Instead of representing the interests of a state like Tamil Nadu or Kerala, these representatives function as emissaries for their national party high commands. The "Backdoor" to Power</h3> The upper house serves as a legislative "backdoor." While democracy has a front door (direct public election), the Rajya Sabha allows those who failed to pass through it to enter power around the side. Through the mechanism of Single Transferable Vote (STV) in state assemblies, party bosses can gift seats to anyone they choose. When a seat can be bestowed as a reward for loyalty or financial support, the institution ceases to be a revising chamber and becomes an instrument of patronage. State-Level Councils</h3> The failure of bicameralism is even more acute at the state level. The Vidhan Parishads (Legislative Councils) are often paraded as chambers of "intellectual review." In reality, they are taxpayer-funded parking lots for the political class's leftovers. They do not check power; they rubber-stamp the monopoly, draining state resources to provide red-beacon cars and pensions to unelected stooges. The Blueprint for Reform: Proportional Unicameralism</h3> If we are to move beyond this farce, we must rip out the redundant plumbing of the bicameral system: State-Level Unicameralism: Scrap the Vidhan Parishads entirely. A single house is more efficient and more accountable.</li> The MMP Model: Implement a Mixed-Member Proportional (MMP) system within a single legislative assembly. Half the seats are elected directly from local constituencies, maintaining the link between a representative and their district. The other half are allocated strictly based on overall party vote share across the state.</li> Mathematical Balance: If a party receives 30% of the vote, they get exactly 30% of the seats, hardcoded into the assembly's composition.</li> </ol> Conclusion: Diversity vs. The Cartel</h3> The current system is not designed for stability; it is designed for capture. Reforming our legislative design is not just a technical necessity: it is a prerequisite for reclaiming agency in a diverse republic. Related raw diary posts: The Upper House Mirage</a></li> The Rajya Sabha Backdoor</a></li> A Proportional Shield</a></li> </ul> Image Credit: Philippine Senate Session Hall.jpg</a> via Wikimedia Commons The Demographic Penalty: Fiscal Federalism and the 2026 Delimitation Crisis 2025-12-15T00:00:00+00:00 The social contract of a federal union is built on the premise of mutual benefit and collective progress. However, in India, a structural crisis is brewing at the intersection of population growth and political representation. As we approach the deadline for the reapportionment of parliamentary seats, the "Demographic Penalty" is emerging as a critical threat to the stability of the union. This penalty is a mechanical outcome of a system that rewards administrative failure with increased political power, while penalizing states that have successfully implemented national mandates on human development and family planning. The Success Trap: A History of the Freeze</h3> In 1976, the Indian government recognized that if Lok Sabha seats were continuously redistributed by population, states would be incentivized to increase their headcount to maintain political leverage. To decouple population growth from political power, a freeze was implemented based on the 1971 Census. States like Tamil Nadu and Kerala took this mandate seriously. Through education, women's empowerment, and robust public health initiatives, they successfully transitioned to a stable demographic model. Their reward was the promise that their political voice in Delhi would not be diminished by their success. The Delimitation Crisis</h3> That freeze is set to expire after 2026. If the Lok Sabha is redrawn based on current population figures, the political map of India will undergo a seismic shift. The Southern Penalty: States that successfully controlled their population will see their parliamentary representation shrink. Tamil Nadu, for instance, is projected to drop from 39 seats to approximately 32.</li> The Northern Dividend: States that failed to implement family planning mandates (notably the Hindi belt) will see their seat counts swell. Uttar Pradesh and Bihar will gain massive political dominance.</li> </ul> This creates a grotesque incentive structure: competence is penalized, while the inability to manage demographic growth is rewarded with the keys to the Union's legislative agenda. Fiscal Asymmetry: Subsidizing Failure</h3> This political erasure is compounded by a profound fiscal imbalance. In a federal system, wealthier regions often subsidize poorer ones. However, in India, this subsidy has become an extraction racket. For every one rupee Tamil Nadu contributes to the central tax pool, it receives roughly 40 paise in return. In contrast, states like Bihar receive nearly ₹4.00 for every rupee contributed. While regional equity is a noble goal, the social contract implies that subsidies should help poorer states "catch up." After decades of massive transfers, the North remains demographically unchecked and economically stagnant, yet it is about to be granted absolute political dominion over the very states funding its survival. Taxation Without Representation</h3> If a central authority extracts wealth from a productive region, uses it to fund a population surge in another region, and then uses that surge to systematically reduce the productive region's political voice, the relationship is no longer federal. It is colonial. Conclusion: Rebuilding the Machine</h3> The "Broken Machine" of Indian politics is not a glitch; it is a structural reality. To ignore the demographic penalty is to invite systemic instability. True federalism requires a system where every citizen's voice has weight, but where no state is penalized for contributing to the national good. Related raw diary post: The Demographic Penalty (2015 Original)</a></li> </ul> Image Credit: Poland population pyramid 2025 PopulationPyramidNet.png</a> via Wikimedia Commons Looks Matter, And That's Why We're Fucked 2025-12-01T00:00:00+00:00 There's something I've been sitting on since I wrote about Vijay forming TVK, something that makes the whole situation feel even more hopeless than it already did. Researchers took photographs of candidates in elections (just photos, nothing else). Showed them to people who had no information about these candidates. No party affiliation, no policy position, no track record, nothing. Just faces. Asked people which candidate they felt more comfortable with. And the person people picked (the comfortable-looking one) turned out to be the actual winner more often than not. Significantly more often. This isn't one fringe study; it's been replicated. Alexander Todorov at Princeton did this with US Senate races and found that quick competence judgments from face photographs alone predicted about 70% of race outcomes. Seventy percent. From a photograph. The same bias shows up in courts. Juries convict attractive defendants less often. When they do convict them, the sentences are lighter. And before you say "well, juries are ordinary people with biases", so are the judges. The supposedly learned, trained, law-degree-having judges also hand down lighter sentences to conventionally attractive defendants. I read about this in The Righteous Mind (I'd forgotten the book name for a second, it came back to me), and I thought, okay, this is probably overstated. So I went and checked. It's not overstated. It's documented. It's depressing. We like to think justice is blind. Turns out she's just squinting. I started thinking about the photo study in the context of Vijay, and then I got a headache. The guy is objectively attractive by any conventional standard. He's been on screen for three decades. Women call him Anna but the way they say it is not how you say "brother." You know what I mean. Men do it too, this weird parasocial devotion where they'll say things like "I'll be his wife if needed," which is its own strange thing I don't want to unpack right now. The point is: he's the most familiar attractive face in Tamil Nadu. If a study found that strangers pick the comfortable-looking candidate and that person wins, what happens when everyone already knows the face, already has warm feelings attached to it, already associates it with twenty-five years of likable characters? I was going to say that this gives him a massive electoral advantage. But I already said that in March, approximately. The looks thing just makes it worse. More structural. Less about whether he deserves to win and more about whether the human brain is even capable of evaluating him fairly at this point. There's a counterexample I almost used here (Nallakannu versus CP Radhakrishnan, 1998 or somewhere around there), but I stopped myself because it immediately falls apart. That election had other factors running through it that were much bigger than any photo study: there was the Coimbatore bomb blast, there was the DMK-BJP alliance, there was the whole national wave thing. Picking that specific race to illustrate the looks-bias point would be intellectually dishonest and I caught myself doing it. Sorry. I'm leaving the almost-example in to show you the kind of motivated reasoning I have to actively stop myself from doing. Most people I've seen commenting on TVK say he'll win maybe ten seats if lucky. No credible MLAs in the party. No organisational depth. No established ground machinery. All of that is probably true. But it doesn't comfort me the way it should. The photo-study logic doesn't require winning a majority. It just requires pulling enough votes from the right places to matter, to shift things, to open the door for the next election where he has a little more credibility. A party that wins eight seats in 2026 is a party with a foothold. A party with a foothold and the most recognisable face in the state is not going away. And then you add the looks-bias on top of the familiarity, on top of the depoliticisation, on top of the fan infrastructure, and what you're looking at is a democratic process that at multiple levels is not actually doing what democratic theory says it should be doing. Jonathan Haidt's book (The Righteous Mind) makes the argument that humans rationalise decisions they've already made emotionally rather than reason their way to conclusions. The moral intuition comes first, the reasoning follows to justify it. Which means all the policy arguments, all the "what has he said about caste" and "what's his position on federalism," all of that happens after the gut has already decided. And the gut, in Tamil Nadu in 2026, is going to see a face it has been warm about for twenty-five years. I don't know how you run a campaign against that. I'm not sure it's possible to run a campaign against that. You can have a better manifesto. You can have deeper organisational roots and a stronger track record and more credible candidates. You'd still be running against Vijay Anna. And Vijay Anna is good-looking. Image Credit: Portrait, mirror, reflection, woman Fortepan 22085.jpg</a> via Wikimedia Commons The Federal Imperative: Structural Decentralization as a Prerequisite for Governance 2025-12-01T00:00:00+00:00 India is a "Union of States," a constitutional definition that acknowledges the vast cultural, linguistic, and socioeconomic diversity across its borders. However, the operational reality of the republic has shifted toward a centralized model that increasingly favors administrative uniformity over local agency. To ensure long-term stability and effective governance, we must re-examine the structural balance between the Union and the States, specifically regarding the "One Nation, One Election" (ONOE) debate and the systemic encroachment on the Concurrent List. The Efficiency Trap: One Nation, One Election</h3> The push for simultaneous elections is often framed through the lens of administrative efficiency, reducing costs and minimizing the disruption of the "Model Code of Conduct." While these are valid operational concerns, they ignore the fundamental political cost: the "nationalization" of local issues. The Steamroller Effect</h4> When state and national elections are merged, local grievances (such as regional infrastructure, water management, or state-level policy failures) are often flattened by national narratives. Voters are caught in a single, high-decibel media wave manufactured in the capital. Simultaneous elections mechanically guarantee that the "High Command" can leverage a national mandate to bypass local accountability. In a healthy federalism, staggered elections serve as constant, localized feedback loops. The Case for Radical Decentralization</h3> The current distribution of powers has seen a steady migration of authority toward the center. This centralization is reaching a point of diminishing returns. Defining the Core Mandate</h4> A radical but necessary path forward involves stripping the Union government's mandate down to its three core responsibilities: Defense</li> Foreign Policy</li> Currency</li> </ol> Empowering the States</h4> Every other domain (education, agriculture, health, law enforcement, and local infrastructure) should be transitioned entirely to the states. Currently, the Union government acts as a "glorified sarpanch," promising toilets and local electricity connections from a national podium. This burdens the center with micro-management and reduces state assemblies to administrative shells. Conclusion: Diversity vs. Uniformity</h3> The drive for uniformity (whether through synchronized elections or centralized schemes) threatens to turn India's democracy into a standardized franchise, devoid of the local "flavor" that makes it resilient. Maturity in governance lies in recognizing that the Union is strongest when its constituent states are most autonomous. Image Credit: High Street, Peebles - geograph.org.uk - 1206349.jpg</a> via Wikimedia Commons Institutional Fragility: The Structural Erosion of Legislative Accountability in India 2025-11-15T00:00:00+00:00 The health of a democracy is often measured by the vibrancy of its public debates and the integrity of its electoral mandates. However, a deeper analysis of India's legislative framework reveals structural mechanisms that actively undermine individual representative accountability and facilitate institutional capture. Two specific instances (the enforcement of the Anti-Defection Law (10th Schedule) and the 2016 retroactive amendment to the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act (FCRA)) serve as critical case studies in how parliamentary sovereignty is often superseded by centralized party control and private interests. The Tyranny of the Whip: The Death of the Individual Representative</h3> The 10th Schedule of the Indian Constitution, commonly known as the Anti-Defection Law, was originally intended to prevent political opportunism and ensure government stability. In practice, however, it has fundamentally altered the relationship between an MP and their constituency. The Confiscation of Conscience</h4> The law mandates that an elected representative must vote according to the "Whip" issued by their party leadership. Failure to do so results in immediate disqualification. While this prevents "floor-crossing," it effectively strips the individual lawmaker of their right to represent local interests or vote according to their conscience. Under the 10th Schedule, a lawmaker is no longer a representative; they are a proxy for the party's "High Command." This turns Parliament into a theater of predetermined outcomes. Legislative Capture: The 2016 FCRA Betrayal</h3> While the 10th Schedule centralizes power, the 2016 amendment to the FCRA demonstrates how that power can be used to sanitize illegalities and protect institutional interests across partisan lines. Redefining the Rulebook</h4> In 2014, the Delhi High Court found both the ruling party and the primary opposition guilty of illegally accepting foreign contributions from corporate entities (notably the mining conglomerate Vedanta). Rather than facing judicial consequences, the two parties collaborated to amend the FCRA through the 2016 Finance Bill. The amendment achieved two things: It redefined the term "foreign company" to retroactively exclude certain corporate structures, effectively legalizing the contributions in question.</li> It was made retroactive to 2010, sanitizing years of illegal political funding in a single legislative stroke.</li> </ol> The Illusion of Opposition</h4> When the financial and legal survival of the political class is at stake, the legislative machinery functions as a unified cartel. The ability to retroactively legalize one's own actions is the ultimate expression of legislative capture. Conclusion: The Cost of Structural Fragility</h3> Institutional fragility in India is not merely a matter of corrupt individuals; it is a feature of a system that selects for obedience over conscience and prioritizes party survival over public accountability. Image Credit: (Venice) Ancient Roman statues in the Museo archeologico nazionale - Marine Aphrodite (inv.47).jpg</a> via Wikimedia Commons Structural Deficits in Representative Democracy: The Case for Electoral Reform in India 2025-11-01T00:00:00+00:00 In the study of democratic stability, the mechanics of how votes are converted into legislative seats is often overlooked in favor of more visible political narratives. However, the structural design of an electoral system fundamentally dictates the legitimacy of a government's mandate. In India, the legacy First-Past-the-Post (FPTP) system (inherited from British parliamentary tradition) is increasingly revealing its limitations in a mature, multi-party democracy. The primary deficit of FPTP is its tendency to fabricate legislative majorities from social minorities, leading to a disconnect between the "will of the people" and the actual composition of the legislature. The 31.3% Mandate: A Case Study</h3> The 2014 Indian General Election serves as a textbook example of this structural anomaly. The winning party secured an absolute majority in the Lok Sabha (282 seats) with just 31.3% of the national vote. While this is a clear plurality, it means that nearly 69% of the voting population cast ballots for alternative candidates. In a perfectly proportional system, a 31% vote share would yield roughly 170 seats, necessitating a coalition or a negotiated legislative agenda. Under FPTP, however, this plurality was converted into a decisive 52% of the seats. Global Context</h4> This "Plurality Trap" is not unique to India. Other FPTP systems have produced similar disparities: United Kingdom (2005): Labour won a majority with 35.2% of the vote.</li> Canada (2011): Conservatives secured a majority with 39.6% of the vote.</li> New Brunswick (1987): The Liberals won 100% of the seats with just 60% of the vote.</li> </ul> The "Wasted Vote" Phenomenon</h3> FPTP creates a binary outcome in every constituency. Every vote cast for a losing candidate is effectively "wasted" in the final seat tally. Furthermore, every vote cast for a winner beyond the plurality required is also surplus and does not contribute to the party's national strength. Proposed Structural Cure: Mixed-Member Proportional (MMP)</h3> To resolve these deficits, many stable democracies (notably Germany and New Zealand) use Mixed-Member Proportional (MMP) representation. How it Works: The Two-Vote Ballot</h4> Under MMP, each voter casts two distinct votes on a single ballot: Constituency Vote: Elects a local representative via FPTP.</li> Party Vote: Decides the overall proportional composition of the legislature.</li> </ol> If a party's constituency wins don't match their national party vote share, "top-up" seats are allocated from a party list to ensure the final seat count reflects the actual percentage of votes received. Conclusion: Maturity Beyond the Ballot</h3> Electoral reform is often resisted by the very parties that benefit from the current system's biases. Yet, for a democracy as vast and diverse as India, structural legitimacy is the only safeguard against systemic instability. Related raw diary posts: The 31% Dictatorship</a></li> Enter the Cure: MMP</a></li> </ul> Image Credit: Ballot box of czech legislative election 2010 in Třebíč, Třebíč District.jpg</a> via Wikimedia Commons Homelab Rationalization: Optimizing for Cognitive Bandwidth 2025-10-15T00:00:00+00:00 For many engineers, the homelab begins as a point of pride: a sandbox for digital sovereignty and a testament to technical curiosity. We run our own NAS, DNS servers, and private cloud instances, convinced that the effort is a fair trade for "owning our data." However, over time, the maintenance cost can often exceed the psychological and practical value of the infrastructure itself. In late 2025, I reached that tipping point. I realized I was treating my home like a small SaaS company, but without the dedicated DevOps team. The result was a "nuke and pave" operation to rationalize my setup, focusing on keeping the bare minimum while offloading the rest to managed services. The Shift: From Sovereignty to Stability</h3> The primary driver for this change was maintenance fatigue. Migrating disks, managing SSL certificates, and troubleshooting broken container upgrades during my downtime felt less like a hobby and more like a second, unpaid job. I decided to move my baseline productivity tools (documents, photos, and general file storage) to managed cloud providers. The goal was to reclaim cognitive bandwidth. By offloading the "boring" infrastructure, I could focus my self-hosting efforts on the services that provide unique value or aren't easily replaced by corporate alternatives. The Standardized Stack</h3> Rationalization isn't just about deleting services; it's about standardizing the environment for those that remain. 1. Operating System: Fedora All the Way</h4> No more CentOS or Debian. I moved my entire server fleet to Fedora, matching my primary workstation. This allows for a unified set of tools, aliases, and workflows across all environments. 2. Containerization: Podman (Rootless)</h4> I transitioned from Docker to Podman. Running containers in rootless mode provides an additional layer of security without the complexity of managing a daemon. Almost all services (from media servers to network monitors) now run as Podman pods, making migrations and backups significantly simpler. 3. Networking: The End of NAT Nightmares</h4> Networking used to be the most fragile part of the lab. Between NAT traversal, manual VPN configurations, and firewall rules, it was a constant source of friction. Tailscale: I implemented a Tailscale subnet router. This creates a secure, encrypted mesh network that lets all my devices talk to each other across different physical locations as if they were on the same LAN.</li> Cloudflare Tunnels: For the few services that require a Web UI (like AdGuard or torrent management), Cloudflare Tunnels provide secure, authenticated access without exposing my home IP to the public internet.</li> </ul> What Stayed (and Why)</h3> The "surviving" stack is built on pragmatism rather than ideology. Media Management: I continue to run Jellyfin for local media. Ownership of media remains a critical edge case where streaming platforms often fail due to licensing shifts.</li> Network Security: AdGuard Home runs network-wide on Raspberry Pis.</li> Privacy-First Tools: I kept my Bitwarden-compatible password vault and Audiobookshelf.</li> Community-Centric Archival: I maintain qBittorrent to seed latest Fedora releases and spins.</li> Privacy Infrastructure: I operate a Tor Middle Relay and recommend the Snowflake</a> extension for censorship circumvention.</li> </ul> The Hardware: Repurposed Utility</h3> Instead of enterprise-grade racks that consume excessive power and generate heat, I now run "trash" hardware. A couple of legacy Dell laptops (i5 and i7 models) and a few Raspberry Pis (3B and 4B) handle the entire stack. Conclusion: Maturity in Self-Hosting</h3> Ultimately, maturity in self-hosting is learning what not to host. By reducing the surface area of my lab, I’ve gained a system that quietly works in the background rather than one that demands constant attention. Related raw diary post: I Nuked My Homelab Because I Got Tired</a></li> </ul> Image Credit: EFTA00002522 - Cluttered server rack filled with colorful cables and networking equipment.jpg</a> via Wikimedia Commons I Nuked My Homelab Because I Got Tired 2025-10-02T00:00:00+00:00 I deleted years of self-hosted infrastructure. I got tired. Lazy. Used to be a point of pride. A digital sovereignty fetish. I’d sit around nursing a massive self-hosted ego, running my own NAS, instances of Nextcloud. Or ownCloud. Whatever the fuck the open-source martyrs are pushing these days. I had Pi-holes. DNS servers. File syncing that broke every other Tuesday. I treated my house like a goddamn SaaS company, convinced I was sticking it to late-stage capitalism by compiling my own misery in a terminal window. I was wrong. I just gave myself a second unpaid job. I got older. Stupider, arguably. The maintenance fatigue set in like a rot. Migrating disks. Broken upgrades. Let’s not even talk about reverse proxies or certificate management. Eventually the maintenance cost exceeded the psychological value of "owning my data." The truth is my data is mostly trash anyway. Much like those old diary posts I lost years ago because I was too lazy to back them up. Entropy wins. Always does. So I nuked it all. Formatted the drives. Burned the philosophy to the ground. I use Google Drive now. Google Docs. Google Photos. I handed my soul over to Sundar Pichai and you know what? It feels actually shitty. The corporate overlords can train their algorithms on my blurry vacation photos and grocery lists. If they think they can squeeze any value out of my miserable life, they're welcome to try. My friends probably think I'm an AI anyway, given the emotional range I display, so maybe the data loop is closing. People will probably judge me for selling out. Fuck it. Get rid of everything. But not quite everything. I kept what I thought materially improves my life. The pragmatism kicked in. I kept the media server. One huge hard drive filled with movies I hoarded over the years. I run Jellyfin for that, mostly because media ownership is arguably the only ownership that still matters when streaming platforms keep deleting shows. I added a headless qBittorrent setup. AdGuard Home runs network-wide because I despise ads more than I despise myself. Audiobookshelf is humming along; it handles both audiobooks and e-books far better than whatever Amazon is peddling. Then there’s the hardware graveyard. I don't run a rack of enterprise servers humming like a jet engine. I run trash. Two ancient Dell laptops (wait, no, one is a first-gen i7 and the other is a fifth-gen i5) and a couple of Raspberry Pis (a 3B and a 4B). The 5th gen i5 handles Jellyfin transcoding perfectly. The DNS servers sit on the Pis. It's a setup built out of poverty and stubbornness, just like my entire existence since moving from the village to a tier-3 college. I also dumped Debian and CentOS. I used to care about server orthodoxy. Not anymore. I put Fedora on everything. I use it on my workstation, so why switch contexts? I stopped optimizing for internet consensus and started optimizing for my own shrinking cognitive bandwidth. I run almost everything in Podman now. Rootless containers for the win. Well, mostly. AdGuard still needs root privileges to hook into the network. Compromises. Tailscale changed everything. Before, networking was a nightmare of NAT traversal, VPN setups, and firewall rules that made me want to swallow glass. Tailscale removed the pain entirely. I created a subnet router so all my devices across different locations talk to each other without exposing ports to the open internet. For things that need web UI access, like the qBittorrent or AdGuard interface, I slapped on Cloudflare tunnels. It just works. I track a few mundane things too. Traggo for personal tracking, and Donetick for household chores. Oh, and a Bitwarden-compatible password vault. Because I might be lazy, but I'm not using the same password for everything like an absolute moron. Maybe maturity in self-hosting is just learning what not to self-host. I no longer want a homelab that proves something to random nerds on Reddit. I want one that quietly works while I rot in peace. (This post is just copium. I don't know how long this will last before I go back to my old ways.) The E-Ink Monopoly and the Projector Hack 2025-09-08T00:00:00+00:00 My eyes were burning again last night. I was looking for a basic ebook reader, or better yet, a black-and-white desktop screen that doesn't feel like someone is holding a miniature halogen bulb two feet from my retinas. Then I checked the prices. Twenty thousand rupees for a glorified 6-inch plastic slab. Eighty thousand to a lakh and a half if you want a 13-inch or 25-inch desktop display from Dasung or Onyx Boox. For a monochrome screen with a refresh rate so sluggish it feels like watching paint dry in real time. It's absurd. You can get an entire 55-inch 4K Smart TV with high-refresh panel electronics for thirty thousand rupees because LCD panel makers fight like wild dogs in a pit, scraping by on single-digit or low double-digit operating margins. But dedicated e-paper? The price hasn't budged in a decade. Turns out it's all locked up by one Taiwanese corporate empire: E Ink Holdings. I used to think e-paper was just a niche technology that nobody cared enough to manufacture at scale. But it wasn't just organic market indifference. It was deliberate, systematic consolidation. Look at how they built the moat: 2005: Prime View International (PVI), a Taiwanese display company, bought Philips' electronic paper business and swallowed its foundational manufacturing patents.</li> 2008: They acquired BOE Hydis Technologies, grabbing Korean LCD patents for Fringe Field Switching (FFS). They don't even just rely on e-ink; they milk LCD manufacturers for fat patent royalties on the side.</li> 2009: PVI bought the original MIT spin-off, E Ink Corporation, for around $450 million. Then they renamed the entire corporate parent E Ink Holdings. Core patents, display assembly, and global supply chains unified under one roof.</li> 2012: They bought SiPix Technology, their only real direct competitor using an alternative microcup electrophoretic structure. That wiped out the last rival with a usable patent portfolio.</li> </ul> By 2012, there was no choice left. Kindle, Kobo, PocketBook, Onyx Boox, reMarkable, Bigme: they all buy their electrophoretic panels from the exact same Taiwanese supplier. And the financial numbers are jaw-dropping for a hardware component maker. Most LCD or OLED panel manufacturers sit on operating margins between 5% and 12%. In recent financial filings, E Ink Holdings showed gross margins hovering around 56.6% and operating margins sitting over 30%. Net profit margins above 27-30%. That's higher profitability than Apple. It rivals TSMC's gross margins on leading-edge semiconductor silicon. They aren't even focused on making desktop monitors cheap for programmers or writers with failing eyesight. They've found a massive, cash-printing commercial market in Electronic Shelf Labels (ESLs) for supermarkets. Retailers buy millions of them because price tags running for 5 to 10 years on a single coin cell save thousands in labor costs. Why would E Ink cut prices for a few hundred thousand picky nerds demanding 24-inch desktop screens when retail conglomerates buy millions of digital price tags at premium margins? People ask why nobody else just builds a factory now that the original 1990s MIT patents have expired. It's not just patents. It's trade secrets and brutal yield economics. Making an e-paper display requires suspending millions of microscopic microcapsules filled with charged black and white particles in a liquid polymer layer. If those micro-particles clump together, leak, degrade under UV, or move at slightly different velocities across a panel, the screen turns into a streaky piece of junk. That manufacturing know-how isn't written in public patent filings; it's sealed inside proprietary chemical recipes developed over twenty-five years. Besides, building an automated display fab costs thousands of crores. Global smartphone sales hit 1.2 billion units a year, while dedicated e-readers sell maybe 10 to 20 million units total. What rational venture capitalist is going to hand you five thousand crore rupees to build a competing fab for a market that tiny? And when you scale up the screen size, the yield math gets worse. A 13.3-inch panel has four times the surface area of a 6-inch e-reader. A 25-inch screen has nearly fourteen times the area. One microscopic particle defect ruins the whole panel. That's why large panels cost over a lakh: the scrap rate during manufacturing is built right into the price tag. I just wanted a simple 24-inch monochrome monitor for thirty thousand rupees. No color filter arrays, no fancy refresh acceleration, just crisp text on a reflective surface so my head stops pounding after six hours in a terminal. Fuck it. I'm not giving a lakh and a half to a monopoly cartel for a monitor that ghost-frames every time I scroll a page of code. So I tried a ghetto alternative. I bought a cheap LED projector and pointed it straight at a bare, matte-white wall in my room. It looks weird as hell. A 1080p image blown up across four feet of wall space has garbage pixel density compared to a high-DPI glass screen. If you stand too close, the text gets soft around the edges. I had to pull my desk back, turn on Eco mode to stop the cooling fan from sounding like a jet engine, and keep a soft lamp on behind me so I'm not sitting in a dark cave. But here's the thing: my eyes don't ache after three hours. It's the exact same physics principle as e-paper: you are looking at light reflected off a matte surface instead of staring straight into a backlit glass bulb emitting blue light directly into your pupils. I don't know if this projector experiment will hold up long term. The resolution is lower, contrast depends on ambient room light, and I look like a lunatic working off a wall projection. But until someone in Shenzhen figures out how to mass-produce cheap reflective displays without getting sued or bankrupt, this wall is my desktop monitor. Image Credit: Video projector SHARP notevision 5 XG-NV5XE tri LCD optical sub-assembly.jpg</a> via Wikimedia Commons AI-Powered Relationship Mediation: Help When You Need It Most 2025-07-07T00:00:00+00:00 A presentation on an AI-powered mediation bot designed to help couples communicate constructively during disagreements. Built on research from Gottman's Four Horsemen, Nonviolent Communication (NVC), and active listening. Presentation Files</h3> View Full HTML Presentation Slides</a></li> </ul> </iframe> The Problem We All Know</h2> Disagreements happen. Couples argue about many things: time, responsibilities, money</li> Emotions run high, communication breaks down</li> Same arguments repeat without resolution</li> Therapy is expensive (₹2000-5000/session) and not always available</li> Conflicts don't wait for scheduled appointments</li> </ul> What If You Had Help When You Need It?</h2> A neutral third party available 24/7</li> Someone who helps you communicate constructively</li> Remembers your ground rules and past agreements</li> Costs a fraction of therapy</li> Private - just you, your partner, and the mediator</li> </ul> How It Works</h2> Sign up in a secure app with end-to-end encryption</li> Invite your partner to a private room</li> Invite the moderator bot to your room</li> Have your conversation - the bot listens silently</li> When stuck, invoke: #pause</code></li> Bot provides guidance - reframes, suggests, reminds of ground rules</li> </ol> Jay: "You never listen when I talk about work" Anusha: "That's not fair, you always bring it up when I'm busy" Jay: "See? You're doing it again" Jay: "#pause" Bot: "I notice you're both feeling unheard. Jay, it sounds like you want more engagement about work. Anusha, it seems the timing is often difficult. Can you each try 'What I need is...' instead of 'You always...'?"</code></pre>Key Features</h2> Intelligent Mediation: Reframes attacks into requests, identifies underlying needs, prevents circular arguments.</li> Contextual Memory: Remembers ground rules, references past agreements, tracks patterns over time.</li> Privacy & Security: End-to-end encrypted messaging. Option to self-host for full control.</li> </ul> Evidence-Based Foundation</h2> Built on research from: John Gottman's Four Horsemen (criticism, contempt, defensiveness, stonewalling)</li> Nonviolent Communication (observations, feelings, needs, requests)</li> Active Listening techniques</li> Conflict resolution best practices</li> </ul> Related raw diary posts: Borrowed Company: An Involuntary Social Experiment</a></li> He(/she) isn't the same person I fell in love with</a></li> </ul> Sun Burn: The Visceral Decay of the PM Surya Ghar Scheme 2025-06-15T00:00:00+00:00 The sun is a white, screaming eye in this country. It peels the skin off the asphalt and turns the air into a thick, metallic soup that you have to chew just to breathe. And now, the government is selling the sun back to us in a shiny, silicon box. They call it PM Surya Ghar Muft Bijli Yojana. "Free electricity," they whisper, like a lover promising a moon that's actually a dead stone. It’s a bribe. A domestic, middle-class mask to cover the fact that our infrastructure is a hemorrhaging lung, coughing up its last copper breaths. I look at the rooftops in the "better" parts of town. They’re growing these glass scales now. Rows of blue-black mirrors tilted toward the sky, drinking the light while the slums below sit in a thick, stagnant darkness. It’s the new structural privilege. You need a concrete roof (a solid, legal skull) to participate in this energy rebirth. If you live under thatch, or tin, or the precarious legal fiction of an "unauthorized colony," you are ineligible for the light. You stay tethered to the grid, that black, humming father who beats you with tariff hikes while the rich kids buy their way into a private sky. A 60% subsidy. Think about that. We are spending ₹75,000 crore to give the "Rooftop Haves" a shorter payback period on their AC units. It’s a regressive fuck-you to anyone who actually needs the money. The wealthier you are, the more you consume, the higher your tariff slab, and the more you "save" by exiting the grid. The poor? They’re already subsidized. Their savings are a pittance, a rounding error in a life of grit. For them, the break-even point is twenty years away, a lifetime in a body that’s already breaking. And the grid? Oh, the grid is screaming. The engineers won't tell you this in the glossy brochures, but the distribution grid was never meant to breathe both ways. It’s a unidirectional heart. When the "Rooftop Haves" pump their midday surplus back into the wires, it’s like a reverse hemorrhage. Reverse Power Flow. The voltage swells like a bruised limb. The tail-end of the feeder becomes a fever dream of fluctuations, frying the cheap Chinese-made fans in the houses that couldn't afford the solar mask. Then there are the Harmonics. Cheap, Pulse-Width Modulated inverters are the cancer of the power sector. They inject these jagged, electronic ghosts into the copper. They don't do "work"; they just heat the blood. I’ve seen the data. The Harmonic Loss Factor is doubling. We are literally cooking the distribution transformers from the inside out. Their copper hearts are melting, their oil is boiling, and for what? So some uncle in a penthouse can feel "green" while his AC runs on the sweat of the grid-bound poor? It’s the Utility Death Spiral. Every rich consumer who exits the grid takes a chunk of the cross-subsidy pool with them. The DISCOM (that bloated, dying god of electricity) loses its high-paying customers but keeps all its fixed costs. Its long-term contracts with coal plants, its miles of rotting wire, its army of tip-seeking linemen. To survive, it has to squeeze the remaining captives. The bills go up for the people who can't afford panels. The grid becomes a hive of high-voltage resentment. The government could have just given the money to the DISCOMs directly. Or solarized the agricultural feeders, the PM-KUSUM model. One big solar plant at a substation can power a whole village’s pumps without the technical gore of a million individual net-metering headaches. It’s efficient. It’s "bang for the buck." But it’s not a "gift" you can put on a billboard. It doesn't let the middle class feel like they’re "saving the planet" while they’re actually just cannibalizing the public utility. We’re building a future of "Rooftop Haves" and "Grid Have-Nots." A world where the light is a private commodity and the darkness is the only thing we share. The sun is free, sure. But the cost of capturing it is a debt we're forcing the poorest motherfuckers in this country to pay. I can hear the transformers humming in the heat. It sounds like a funeral. And nobody’s coming to the wake. Mothers' Day (Note the Apostrophe) 2025-05-12T00:00:00+00:00 2011 it was Facebook. Twitter. Now it's the WhatsApp status. Every person in every contact list (aunts, former colleagues, the man who fixed my inverter battery, the woman from the apartment below who complained about my dog once), all of them, today, have put up something. A candle. A cartoon carnation. "Happy Mother's Day" in a font that is trying very hard to look handwritten. The blue circle around the profile picture means they've uploaded a status. The circle burns all day. I use Instagram for my own shameful reasons (I won't pretend otherwise, I scroll because sometimes a pretty girl posts something and that's just the honest truth of it), but even there, today, you cannot escape. Between the reels, between everything I actually opened the app for, there is this wall of pastel-colored devotion. AI-generated flowers. Text over sunsets. "Words can't describe what you mean to me, Amma." They found words. They found many words. They posted them publicly. I wrote about Anna Jarvis fourteen years ago. How she built this holiday and then spent the rest of her life trying to dismantle it. How she died broke in a sanitarium while the greeting card companies quietly paid her bills. The supreme cosmic joke. But I've been thinking lately about the other version. The one that didn't win. Before Anna Jarvis, there was Julia Ward Howe. You might know her name from something else: she wrote The Battle Hymn of the Republic during the Civil War. She was already famous by the time she wrote what she called the Mother's Day Proclamation in 1870. And she was not a woman who wrote quiet things. She was an abolitionist. A women's suffrage campaigner. A person who had seen the Civil War up close and had apparently decided she was done watching men send each other's sons to die while everyone called it noble. Then the Franco-Prussian War started, and she'd had enough. The proclamation she wrote in 1870 is not a greeting card. It doesn't have any carnations in it. It opens like this: Arise, then, women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts... Say firmly: We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. </blockquote> She was calling for a congress of women, international, across borders, to organize for peace. Not for flowers. Not for cards. For women to stand together and say: we are the ones who carry these children and watch them be fed into wars decided by people who feel nothing. This has to stop. She called it Mothers' Day. Apostrophe after the s. A day belonging to all mothers. Collective. Political. Plural. When Woodrow Wilson signed Anna Jarvis's version into law in 1914, the apostrophe moved. Mother's Day. Before the s. Your mother. My mother. Each person's individual private mother, to be honoured individually, in private sentiment. The political spine was removed. What was left was a feeling. And feelings are easy to package. One apostrophe. That's all it took. Howe wanted a congress. She got a Hallmark aisle. Jarvis wanted a handwritten letter. She got a WhatsApp status with a glitter animation. Would Mothers' Day have survived better? I don't know. I genuinely don't know. The same machinery that ate Jarvis's holiday would have had a go at Howe's eventually. Capitalism is patient, and it is hungry, and it has never once failed to find the sentimental core of something and squeeze it for revenue. A political holiday becomes a ribbon. A ribbon becomes a product. The product sells. But there's something about the apostrophe that bothers me. It's so small. It's the kind of thing an editor changes without thinking, or a typesetter gets wrong, and then it's in the official record and that's that. Plural becomes singular. Collective becomes individual. Public becomes private. And once it's private, it's harmless. Once it's harmless, it's merchandise. In 2011 I felt bad for Anna Jarvis going door to door in Philadelphia. In 2025, I'm sitting with my phone, watching someone's WhatsApp status (a woman I haven't spoken to in four years), and her status says "My world" over a photo of her mother, who is definitely not on WhatsApp, who probably doesn't know this photo was taken, and I'm thinking about Julia Ward Howe in 1870, furious and alive, calling on the women of the world to arise. Nobody arose. We got blue rings around profile pictures instead. Image Credit: Christian Krohg - Mother and Child - Google Art Project.jpg</a> via Wikimedia Commons Feet-Forward Bikes (Presentation) 2025-04-23T00:00:00+00:00 A market study and technical analysis presentation evaluating feet-forward (recumbent) electric motorcycles for Indian road conditions, regulatory frameworks (<250W vs >250W), and startup viability. Original personal thoughts on feet-forward bikes from 2011: Feet-Forward Bikes: Why Are We Still Riding Like We're on Horses?</a> Presentation Files</h3> View Full HTML Presentation Slides</a></li> </ul> </iframe> UCC, Polygamous Gods, and the Leftist Cowardice 2025-01-13T21:30:00+05:30 Fuck me, I'm a leftist asshole nodding along with this UCC nonsense like some braindead sheep (thinking Marx was right before he became a meme for suburban teenagers) but this actual implementation? It's goddamn hypocrisy wrapped in a tricolor flag. Why do right-wing fucks want a UCC? It’s not because they suddenly give a shit about gender justice or equality; it’s because they want to stick it to the Muslims. That’s it. That’s the entire agenda. And the irony is thick enough to choke on. We have Hindu gods banging multiple wives all the time (Murugan, that prick, has two, and Draupadi literally juggled five dicks without breaking a sweat) but the moment a Muslim guy does it, suddenly it's a "demographic threat"? Bullshit. If we’re going to worship polygamous assholes, we should at least have the decency to let mortals do the same. Pick a lane, dude. Then you look at what they actually did in Uttarakhand. They want you to register your fuck-buddy with the state, creating a system of pervy surveillance creeps watching you bone just to make sure you aren't violating "culture" or whatever. It’s state-sponsored voyeurism. I hate to admit it, but the dinosaurs in CPI-M were actually right</a>. They warned us that uniformity ain't equality</a> when the state hates minorities. They saw this train wreck coming while I was arguing about the timetable. I want a real UCC (one with equal divorce, equal inheritance, and absolutely no bedroom cops) but instead, we get this minority-bashing garbage. So here I am, stuck defending shitty traditions I hate, just because the "progress" on offer is actually a prison. Tired of this clown world. Psychopaths and cowards everywhere. Fuck it all. Building India's First Verified LGBT-Friendly Dating App 2025-01-11T00:00:00+00:00 A Marp presentation exploring the safety, verification, and product-market viability of a KYC-verified, LGBT-friendly dating app for India. Presentation Files</h3> View Full HTML Presentation Slides</a></li> </ul> </iframe> Related raw diary post: deadrat needs a girlfriend...?</a></li> </ul> India's prenatal sex determination ban: When legal intervention meets unintended harm 2025-01-04T00:00:00+00:00 [This entry is... different. Usually, I just scream into the void and call it a day. But this topic? It’s been eating me alive. I felt like if I just ranted, I’d be doing a disservice to the sheer scale of the harm here. So, I tried to do something I’ve never done: I tried to not just look at the numbers, but also I tried to mention in the post. I tried to follow the 'science' and the 'ethics' like some goddamn academic. It’s long. It’s dense. It might even be wrong. But I couldn't stop writing until I’d dragged every bit of this mess into the light. Read it, or don't. I just had to get it out.] India's 30-year-old ban on prenatal sex determination has spectacularly failed to prevent female feticide</a> whilst potentially creating new harms - forcing unwanted girls to be born into families that resent them. Despite stringent legal provisions including imprisonment and medical licence revocation, the child sex ratio continued its cheerful decline</a> from 945 girls per 1,000 boys in 1991 to 919 in 2011, even as only 617 convictions occurred nationally</a> across 25 years. That's right (617). In a country of 1.4 billion people. Over 25 years. You've got better odds of getting struck by lightning whilst simultaneously winning the lottery: fuck that shit. This raises a profound ethical dilemma that everyone's too squeamish to discuss properly: does preventing sex-selective abortion through legal bans cause more suffering by condemning unwanted children to lives marked by parental rejection, psychological harm, and systematic neglect, or does allowing such selection constitute an unacceptable form of gender discrimination that society must prohibit regardless of individual outcomes? Yeah, I know, it's a goddamn mess, and I'm just some asshole ranting about it. This whole mess sits right where reproductive rights, child welfare, feminist theory, and population ethics crash into each other. The Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act</a> represents one approach to addressing son preference and female feticide, but mounting evidence suggests legal prohibition alone neither eliminates the practice nor addresses its root causes. Meanwhile, 35 years of longitudinal psychological research</a> documents severe, lifelong harm to children born unwanted, precisely the outcome the ban may inadvertently force. I've been guilty of ignoring this crap too; we're all hypocrites. But sure, let's keep pretending the law's working because it makes us feel progressive. Pathetic, ain't it? A legal framework nobody enforces</h2> India's PC-PNDT Act emerged from genuine crisis. When ultrasound technology spread across India</a> in the 1980s and early 1990s, it coincided with deeply entrenched son preference to create what activists called "female feticide" on a massive scale. Advertisements explicitly marketed prenatal sex determination</a> as cost-saving: "Spend Rs. 500 now on an ultrasound, save Rs. 50,000 later on dowry." Nothing says "civilised society" quite like advertising daughter elimination with a return-on-investment calculator: fuck those bastards. The child sex ratio plummeted, with states like Haryana recording</a> just 834 girls per 1,000 boys by 2011. For context, the biologically normal ratio is approximately 952 girls per 1,000 boys. Haryana wasn't just skewing the numbers; they were performing statistical genocide. And I'm supposed to care? Well, I do, sort of. The original Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act passed in 1994</a>, strengthened in 2003 to become the PC-PNDT Act. The law is exhaustive and looks brilliant on paper (the kind of legislation you'd frame and hang on your wall if you were into that sort of thing). It bans prenatal sex determination completely</a>, prohibits sex-selective abortion, criminalises advertising of such services, and requires mandatory registration of all ultrasound facilities. Violations carry imprisonment</a> up to five years and fines up to Rs. 1 lakh, plus permanent removal from medical registers. The law established three-tier oversight</a> through Central and State Supervisory Boards and district-level Appropriate Authorities with search, seizure, and prosecution powers. On paper, it represents one of the world's most rigorous regulatory frameworks. In practice? Let's just say the paper it's written on has more enforcement power. I'm not even kidding: it's a fucking joke. Yet implementation tells a rather different story, the kind of story where everyone knows the punchline before you even start. In 25 years from 1994 to 2019, only 617 total convictions occurred</a> across all of India. Six. Hundred. Seventeen. Eighteen of 36 states and union territories</a> have neither registered any cases nor achieved any convictions. They've literally got a zero on the board. Not even one conviction for appearances' sake. What a load of bullshit. In Maharashtra, the most active state with 625 cases filed, acquittal rates reached 72%</a> with only 20% conviction rates. So even when they actually try, they fail three-quarters of the time. The Supreme Court repeatedly admonished</a> governments for "sorry and alarming state of affairs" and "total slackness by the Administration." When your own Supreme Court is reduced to using phrases like "total slackness," you know you've achieved a special level of governmental incompetence. Idiots, all of them. The law exists. Enforcement? That's more of a philosophical concept. And I'm guilty of not giving a damn sometimes. Thirty years of data the law ignored</h2> The most damning evidence against the ban's effectiveness comes from demographic data, and unlike policy documents, numbers don't lie to make themselves look good. They're cold, hard: The child sex ratio stood at 945 in 1991</a>, three years before the Act. By 2001, after seven years of the law supposedly being in effect, it had fallen to 927. By 2011, with both the original Act and strengthened amendment in place, it reached 919, continuing its decline despite legal prohibition. The law was in effect. The ratio got worse. This is the equivalent of banning smoking and then watching cigarette sales increase. How fucked up is that? Only recent data from the National Family Health Survey (2019-21)</a> shows marginal improvement to 929, still well below the biologically normal ratio. After 30 years of supposedly tough legislation, we've managed to crawl back to roughly where we started. Stunning achievement, really: fuck me sideways. Estimates suggest 500,000 girls are lost annually</a> to sex-selective abortion in India, totalling more than 10 million since the 1990s. The Pew Research Centre calculated at least 9 million female foeticides</a> occurred between 2000-2019. UNFPA estimates 46 million females are "missing"</a> due to son preference practices. These numbers dwarf the 617 convictions achieved</a> over a quarter century. At this rate, India's legal system will have achieved comprehensive justice sometime around the heat death of the universe. And I'm part of the problem for not screaming louder. States show dramatic variation, which is code for "some states pretend to care, others don't even bother with the pretence." Haryana and Punjab initially had ratios</a> as low as 798 and 798 in the early 2000s, improving to 893 and 904 by 2019-21, but only after intensive enforcement campaigns triggered by national embarrassment. Nothing motivates quite like international humiliation. Yet in 2024, Haryana's ratio dropped back to 910</a>, attributed by officials to "relaxed enforcement." Translation: they stopped pretending to care once people stopped watching. Bastards. The practice hasn't been eliminated; it's been driven underground or shifted geographically. It's almost as if banning something without addressing why people want it just makes them sneakier about it. Shocking insight, that. I've done sneaky shit too, so who am I to judge? The conviction rate data reveals the enforcement challenge, if by "challenge" we mean "complete absence of political will masquerading as complexity." Maharashtra, the most aggressive prosecutor, achieved only 127 convictions from 625 cases</a>, a success rate of 20%. That's not a justice system, that's a coin flip with worse odds. Other states perform far worse. Gujarat, Rajasthan, and Punjab have not filed a single appeal</a> against acquittals. Not one. They've collectively decided that one loss in court is quite enough, thank you very much, let's not embarrass ourselves further. What assholes. The Delhi High Court noted "very low conviction rates"</a> as fundamental failures of the justice system. Proving intent in sex-selective abortion cases</a> remains nearly impossible when doctors and families collude, technology allows early sex determination, and portable ultrasound machines operate outside registered facilities. Meanwhile, rich families simply book a "medical tourism package" to Bangkok or Singapore, get their scan done at a five-star hospital, and come back with holiday photos and a convenient decision about whether to continue the pregnancy. Rules are for poor people who can't afford international flights. And yeah, that's unfair as hell: I've benefited from privilege too. The psychological cost of being unwanted</h2> Whilst enforcement data shows the ban's limited effectiveness at preventing sex-selective abortion, psychological research reveals what happens to children born unwanted. And spoiler alert: it's not good: it's fucking awful. The most comprehensive evidence comes from the Prague Study</a>, a 35-year longitudinal investigation following 220 children born to women twice denied abortion for the same pregnancy, comparing them to 220 matched controls whose mothers wanted them. The findings are striking and consistent across developmental stages, and they don't make for comfortable reading. By age nine, unwanted children were more frequently rejected</a> by schoolmates, described by mothers as "naughty, stubborn, and bad-tempered," and showed behavioural problems, yet they didn't perceive their family situations as deviant. That last bit is particularly grim: the kids didn't even realise they were being treated differently. They thought this was normal. I've been that kid, sort of. By adolescence, school performance differences became statistically significant</a>. Unwanted children were "substantially under-represented amongst students with average or above-average grades" and "practically never appeared on the roster of outstanding students in any subject." Critically, they scored equally well on intelligence tests</a>, ruling out cognitive deficits. The problem was differential treatment, not ability. Same brains, different outcomes. Almost as if parental rejection has consequences: duh. In early adulthood (ages 21-23), the unwanted group required psychiatric treatment more frequently</a>, appeared on rosters of drug addicts and criminal offenders, reported less job satisfaction, had fewer friendships, and experienced more romantic disappointments. By age 30, unwanted females showed more emotional disturbance</a> than control females and were more likely to report their own pregnancies as unwanted, demonstrating intergenerational transmission. The trauma gets passed down like a particularly shit family heirloom. And I've passed down my own baggage, haven't I? At age 35, all differences "consistently disfavoured unwanted pregnancy participants,"</a> with only children (those without siblings to share the rejection) most severely affected. Damn. Principal investigator Henry P. David concluded: "Denial of abortion for unwanted pregnancy entails an increased risk for negative psychosocial development and mental well-being in adulthood."</a> Nancy Felipe Russo of Arizona State University noted the study's profound significance: "Even under the best conditions, you find long-term psychological consequences for these children"</a>, and these children were raised in intact families under good socioeconomic conditions in Czechoslovakia, not facing active gender-based discrimination. Let that sink in. These were wanted pregnancies in stable families in a developed country, and the psychological damage persisted into mid-adulthood. Now imagine the same scenario in India, except the child is female, unwanted specifically for being female, in a family that actively resents her existence, in a culture that systematically devalues daughters. The outcomes aren't going to improve. Fuck, that hurts. The modern Turnaway Study from the United States</a> (2008-2016) examined 956 women, comparing those denied abortion with those who received one. Children born after abortion denial showed higher rates of poor maternal bonding, more likely to live in poverty, and lower child development scores. Existing children of women denied abortion also had worse developmental outcomes: the negative effects rippled through entire families. Forcing people to have children they don't want doesn't just harm that one child; it harms everyone. And I've forced my own stupidities on others: shit. Cross-cultural research spanning 60 nations</a> and 200,000 individuals through Interpersonal Acceptance-Rejection Theory confirms these patterns transcend geography and culture. Parental rejection consistently predicts hostility, aggression, impaired self-esteem, emotional instability, anxiety, and negative worldview. A 2021 longitudinal study</a> following 1,315 children ages 7-14 across nine countries found parental rejection predicted both internalising behaviours (anxiety, depression, withdrawal) and externalising behaviours (aggression, bullying, disobedience). The effects held regardless of culture, race, gender, or socioeconomic status. Turns out, being unwanted fucks you up. Who knew? (Everyone. Everyone knew.) Yeah, including me. Guaranteeing your daughter's therapy bills before she's born</h2> In contexts of strong son preference, the psychological harm takes specific gendered forms that make the Prague Study look like a best-case scenario. Research from India shows gender disappointment is "strongly influenced by husbands' desire for a son"</a> and lack of emotional and/or practical support. Studies document that unwanted girls in son-preferring societies</a> receive less breastfeeding time, fewer vaccinations, less childcare, are less likely to be hospitalised, and suffer excess mortality. Girls with brothers show lower internal locus of control</a> than girls with sisters: they believe success depends on external forces rather than their own efforts, reflecting the differential treatment they experience. They literally internalise the belief that they have no control over their lives because, well, they've been shown they have no control. That's not psychology; that's pattern recognition. And I've felt that way too: damn it. The psychological impact extends to mothers forced to bear daughters they fear will be rejected. Indian research shows women whose first child is female face "higher risk of severe physical domestic violence"</a> starting soon after the birth. Women with first-born sons are "significantly better-nourished and have a larger role in household decision-making"</a> than those with first-born daughters. The unwanted girl child and her mother both become targets of family disappointment and potential abuse. So the ban "protects" women by forcing them to give birth to daughters, which then subjects both mother and daughter to increased violence and discrimination. Brilliant strategy. Really thought that one through. What idiots. Maternal-foetal attachment studies</a> show that avoidant maternal attachment styles predict early childhood developmental delays. When mothers experience gender disappointment, particularly under pressure from husbands and in-laws, the attachment process is compromised. Research explicitly identifies that mothers experiencing son preference show differential emotional responses</a>, vocalisation patterns, and investment in daughters versus sons: differences observable from infancy that accumulate over developmental time. The rejection starts in the womb and compounds daily for years. This isn't a policy outcome; it's systematic psychological torture with a birth certificate. And I've contributed to such bullshit in my life: ugh. Forcing the birth doesn't end the suffering</h2> This evidence base supports a consequentialist argument that makes everyone uncomfortable: forcing parents to bear children they fundamentally don't want (for whatever reason) may create more aggregate suffering than preventing those births. The Prague Study researcher noted that even children who don't consciously recognise their unwanted status</a> experience measurable harms. They internalise rejection, develop maladaptive patterns, and carry psychological burdens into adulthood and the next generation. In India's context, the PC-PNDT Act potentially creates a perfect storm of suffering. A woman discovers she's carrying a female foetus. If she lives in a son-preferring household (particularly if childless or with only daughters) she faces intense pressure from her husband, mother-in-law, and extended family. The law prohibits sex determination, but illegal underground providers offer the service for those who can afford it or have connections. And here's where it gets properly dark: rich families simply book a "holiday" to Thailand, Singapore, or Dubai. Get a nice resort, maybe some shopping, and oh, whilst we're here, let's pop into this lovely private hospital for a comprehensive foetal health check. Complete with 4D imaging and, conveniently, sex determination. They come back with holiday photos and a convenient decision about whether to "tragically miscarry" in a few weeks. Medical tourism: because laws are suggestions when you have money. Hypocrites like me benefit from that. For those who cannot access clandestine services or international flights, the law forces the pregnancy to continue. The daughter born into this context grows up experiencing subtle and not-so-subtle rejection. She receives less food, less attention, less educational investment than hypothetical male siblings. Her mother, blamed for producing a daughter, may herself withdraw or become harsh. The family's disappointment is palpable even if unspoken. The child develops the constellation of problems documented</a> in the Prague Study (poor self-esteem, difficulty in relationships, underperformance relative to ability, eventual psychiatric issues). She may grow up to perpetuate these patterns with her own daughters, creating intergenerational transmission of trauma and rejection. The trauma doesn't stop at childhood. The unwanted daughter grows up, marries, has children of her own. And what does she bring to that marriage? Years of accumulated rejection, internalised worthlessness, patterns of emotional volatility learned from parents who resented her existence. Her husband bears the brunt. Her children inherit the patterns. The in-laws who forced her birth aren't the ones paying the price anymore: it's her spouse, her kids, the next generation. When the second daughter was born, the mother cried for weeks. Not postpartum depression: disappointment. The baby was the wrong sex. And that baby grew up knowing, on some level, that her existence was a source of grief. How do you develop healthy self-esteem when your mother's first response to your birth was weeks of crying? You don't. You develop problems that you'll carry for decades and likely transmit to your own children. This cycle repeats across millions of families. The ban prevents sex-selective abortion but does nothing to prevent the maltreatment</a> of unwanted daughters once born. Studies consistently show that families who would have selected against female foetuses demonstrate postnatal discrimination against daughters: the preference doesn't disappear, it just manifests differently. Research from China, Taiwan, and India all document</a> that when prenatal selection is blocked, postnatal discrimination increases through neglect, reduced healthcare access, nutritional deprivation, and in extreme cases, infanticide. The preference doesn't vanish because you banned the technology. It just finds new expressions, and those expressions often involve a living child suffering them. Bastards. The partiality doesn't end at childhood. Decades later, when assets are distributed, guess who gets the house, the gold, the property? The wanted child. The unwanted daughter, who spent her childhood getting less food, less attention, less love, also gets cheated out of her inheritance. The discrimination that started in utero continues until the parents die, and sometimes beyond. The elder sister went abroad for education; the younger one, despite getting into a better university, was told to fend for herself. Thirty years of partiality, and people wonder why these women grow up damaged. The unwanted daughter doesn't just carry her trauma alone. She marries, and her spouse becomes the new target for all that unprocessed rejection. She parents, and her child grows up in the shadow of grandmother's partiality and mother's unhealed wounds. The grandparents who forced her birth aren't the ones managing her emotional volatility, her trust issues, her anger: it's her husband's problem now. They're not watching their grandchild navigate a mother who's still processing being unwanted: it's the next generation's inheritance. And here's where it gets properly obscene: the daughters who were wanted, who benefited from their position, who got the education and resources and love, they emigrate to countries where sex determination is readily available, and they do the exact same thing to their own daughters. The elder sister who was sent abroad for education whilst her unwanted younger sister was told to fend for herself? She's in the US now, checking foetal sex and aborting daughters. The system that benefited her was apparently fine; she just wanted to be on the winning side of it. Rules for thee but not for me, except it's your own gender you're eliminating. The ethical question becomes: Is forcing these births (knowing the likely outcomes) truly more moral than preventing them? The ban treats female foeticide as an absolute evil requiring prohibition regardless of consequences. But consequentialist reasoning suggests we must also consider the lived experiences of unwanted girls who are born: their malnutrition, their higher mortality from treatable conditions, their psychological suffering, their disadvantaged life trajectories, and the trauma they may transmit to another generation. Bioethicist Aksel Braanen Sterri argues</a> on precisely these grounds that India should repeal the ban. The alternatives to sex selection (continuing pregnancies under duress, seeking dangerous black market procedures</a>, bearing children who face abuse) are more harmful than allowing informed choice. Women risk divorce, violence, even death if they cannot deliver sons. The ban, he contends, makes the situation worse for mothers and daughters. But of course, we can't have that conversation because it's too uncomfortable. Better to maintain the legal fiction whilst everyone suffers in reality. Cowards, all of us. If you know families like this (and statistically, you do) you know exactly what I'm talking about. You've watched the unwanted daughter struggle her whole life. You've seen the parents show preferential treatment decades later. You've watched her marriage strain under the weight of unprocessed trauma. And you've probably thought, at some point, "would it really have been worse if this birth had never happened?" You're not supposed to think that. But you've thought it. Guilty. Why you can't legislate away economics</h2> Understanding why the ban fails requires examining why son preference exists so intensely. The psychological harm to unwanted children is the proximate consequence, but the ultimate causes lie in economic and social structures that the PC-PNDT Act doesn't touch. Banning the symptom whilst ignoring the disease is classic Indian policymaking: fucking idiots. Old-age security dominates the calculus</a>. India lacks universal pension or healthcare systems, making elderly parents dependent on children for financial and physical care. Sons are expected to provide this support; daughters marry into other families and traditionally cannot support natal parents (doing so would be considered taboo in many communities). A Hiroshima University study found</a> that even introducing pension systems may not eliminate son preference because family-based care is considered honourable whilst professional care is seen as abandoning one's duty. The National Bureau of Economic Research identifies old-age security as a fundamental driver and recommends public pensions as key policy intervention, but this addresses structural economics, not prenatal testing. So we've created a system where having daughters is financial suicide, then act shocked when people try to avoid financial suicide. Brilliant. And I've played along. The dowry system creates direct disincentives for daughters. Despite the 1961 Dowry Prohibition Act</a> (another beautifully written, entirely ignored piece of legislation), dowry not only persists but has expanded</a>, remaining near-universal at 94% of marriages. Average dowries historically equalled</a> 3-8 times annual male income or two-thirds of household assets. The financial burden is enormous, and dowry-related violence remains common. Families with limited resources rationally calculate that sons bring resources whilst daughters drain them. We've made having daughters economically irrational and then criminalised the rational response. This is policy as performance art. Assholes. Patrilocal marriage practices</a> mean daughters leave their families, so investments in their education and health benefit the in-laws' family, not the natal family. After marriage, women lose autonomy and decision-making power: studies show 73% of unmarried women participate in household purchase decisions versus only 37% of recently married women living with in-laws. This system creates the perception captured in the common saying: "Having a daughter is like watering the neighbour's garden." If you're going to water the neighbour's garden, you'd at least like the option of not planting the seeds in the first place. Ain't that the truth? Religious and cultural factors compound these economics. Hindu traditions emphasise</a> that only sons can perform essential funeral rites, particularly lighting the cremation pyre, which is believed necessary for parents' salvation (moksha). Though modern progressive families accept daughters can perform these rites, traditional belief persists that sons are religiously essential. Sons carry forward the family lineage in patrilineal systems and fulfil religious duties beyond funerals. So we've got economic dependence, financial penalties, lost investment returns, and eternal damnation all riding on producing a son. And then we act surprised when people really, really want sons. Idiots. These factors create a reinforcing system</a>: economic dependence on sons for old-age security, financial costs of daughters through dowry, loss of investment when daughters marry away, religious significance of male children, and social status considerations. The PC-PNDT Act bans the technology that allows sex-selective abortion but does nothing to alter the underlying economic calculus that makes sons valuable and daughters costly. It's the legislative equivalent of treating a brain tumour with paracetamol. Braindead policymakers. (I'm still writing this. My eyes hurt. I should have stopped three pages ago, but the math doesn't add up and it's making me sick. Let's keep going.) What actually worked elsewhere</h2> India has tried numerous interventions beyond legal bans, with varying degrees of success and spectacular failures. Conditional cash transfer programmes</a> like Beti Bachao Beti Padhao (Save the Daughter, Educate the Daughter), launched nationally in 2015, provided financial incentives for families with daughters. The programme showed modest improvements in sex ratios</a>, from 918 in 2015 to 930 in 2024, and increased girls' school enrolment. Yet a parliamentary committee found 80% of funds went to media campaigns rather than actual benefits. So they spent most of the money telling people daughters are valuable instead of actually making daughters valuable. It's the bureaucratic equivalent of Instagram activism: lots of visibility, minimal actual impact. Hypocrites. State-level schemes like Delhi Ladli and Madhya Pradesh Ladli Lakshmi provided cash payments tied to daughters' birth registration, immunisation, and education. Delhi saw dramatic improvements in birth registration sex ratios. Yet UNFPA's exhaustive 2010 review found these programmes showed "very little is known about their effectiveness" at changing underlying preferences. Most schemes targeted poor families, but son preference is strongest amongst wealthy and middle-class families who can afford sex-selective abortion, or a nice holiday to Bangkok. The programmes provided compensation for having daughters but didn't change the patrilocal system that makes daughters "belong" to other families. It's like paying someone to dig holes they have to immediately fill in again. Sure, they're being paid, but the fundamental pointlessness remains. Dumb. More promising are structural economic interventions. Pension programmes show correlation with reduced son preference: a Chinese study found rural pension access associated with 9% lower sex ratio imbalance increases. India's old-age pension scheme</a> showed benefits only when recipients were women, with 85% spending on own needs and reporting increased financial autonomy. But current benefit levels (Rs. 200-500 per month) are insufficient to replace sons as old-age security, and only 8% of eligible elderly receive benefits. So we've created a programme that works when implemented but then don't implement it properly. Classic. Idiots. Education-based norm change shows real promise. A rigorous randomised controlled trial</a> of the "Taaron ki Toli" programme in Haryana found that interactive classroom discussions on gender equality produced 0.18 standard deviation increases in gender equality attitudes, with effects persisting two years later. The programme has scaled to 23,000 schools in Odisha and is being introduced in Punjab. Including boys proved critical since they have more freedom to enact behavioural changes. Turns out, teaching children that girls are people too actually works. Wild concept. Why ain't we doing more? Mass media campaigns demonstrate measurable effects</a>. Studies using quasi-experimental designs show television exposure in India reduces son preference and domestic violence acceptance. Mothers with TV access showed more equal treatment of daughters. Entertainment-education formats proved most effective: non-condescending popular media that shows gender-equal families. But the most successful, multi-pronged approach comes from South Korea, and it's a masterclass in how to actually solve problems. Its sex ratio at birth peaked at 116.5 in 1990</a> (third births reached 120+) but normalised to 105 by 2007. Son preference amongst women dropped</a> from 48% in 1985 to 10% by 2006. What worked was not primarily the 1987 legal ban but a massive transformation combining rapid economic development, legal reforms for gender equity (including ending the male-only family succession system in 2005), social insurance expansion (pensions and healthcare reducing son dependence), sustained mass media campaigns, and increased female education and labor force participation. The ban was part of this package, but research shows the normative change</a> from broad social transformation drove improvement, not legal prohibition alone. South Korea fixed the economics, the social structures, and the legal framework simultaneously. India passed a law and called it a day. Fucking amateurs. Why philosophers are terrible at parties</h2> Different ethical systems reach incompatible conclusions about sex-selective abortion bans, revealing why this dilemma defies easy resolution and why academic conferences on this topic must be absolutely riveting. Boring bastards. Consequentialist approaches</a> focus on outcomes. Critics of the ban argue</a> it forces women to unsafe illegal abortion, leads to multiple pregnancies harming maternal health, and condemns unwanted girls to maltreatment</a> and psychological suffering. These harms, they contend, outweigh benefits. Defenders counter that demographic consequences are severe: 126 million missing women globally</a> as of 2010, projected to reach 150 million by 2035. Sex ratio imbalances correlate with increased crime</a> (34% of China's crime rate increase from 1988-2004 linked to imbalance), trafficking, violence against women, and social instability. Yet consequentialist calculations face Derek Parfit's "different number choices" problem</a>: abortion policy affects which people exist, making comparisons philosophically fraught. When your ethical framework breaks down at "but different people would exist," you know you've hit peak philosophy. What a load of crap. Deontological approaches</a> examine rights and duties, which is code for "everyone has rights that directly contradict everyone else's rights, now fight." Reproductive autonomy arguments</a> emphasise women's fundamental right to control their bodies without state interference in intimate decisions. Prohibiting abortion based on reasons requires women to justify private choices, violating privacy and autonomy. Multiple scholars note this maintains patriarchal control over women's reproductive capacity. Yet Kantian non-instrumentalisation principles suggest using abortion to select sex treats foetuses as means to parental preferences rather than ends in themselves, violating dignity. Justice requires equal treatment: sex-selective abortion discriminates based on sex, violating equality principles. These rights conflict with no clear hierarchy for resolution. Confusing as hell. So we've got the right to bodily autonomy versus the right to non-discrimination versus foetal dignity rights, and they're all equally valid and completely incompatible. Philosophy at its finest. Bullshit. Feminist ethics reveals profound divisions, because apparently having shared oppression doesn't mean agreeing on solutions. Indian and Asian feminists</a> like Farhat Moazam and Wendy Rogers argue that Western autonomy concepts don't account for women's lives in patriarchal societies where "choice" is illusory under intense family and cultural pressure. Women don't freely choose but respond to systemic oppression. They advocate for legislative prohibitions</a> to protect women from violence and discrimination, combined with cultural change efforts. Western liberal feminists emphasise that any restriction on abortion reasons opens doors to further limitations and violates autonomous decision-making. Reproductive justice frameworks</a> from Black and intersectional feminists argue bans are ineffective and counterproductive: son preference is a symptom of deeply rooted social biases, and solutions require changing values that devalue girls, not restricting abortion. Bans place burdens on vulnerable women</a> rather than addressing systemic discrimination. Even feminists can't agree on this one, which tells you how comprehensively fucked the situation is. Divided bitches. Care ethics approaches</a> contextualise decisions in webs of relationships and responsibilities. Jonathan Herring's relational care framework</a> suggests pregnancies should be marked by reciprocity and mutuality, and unwanted pregnancies lacking caring relationships may justify termination to preserve capacity for other caring responsibilities. This framework considers women's existing children, partners, and community obligations. Yet it also suggests caring relationships require valuing children regardless of sex, and sex-selective abortion reflects failures of care and relationality. The bioethics principles framework</a> of autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice creates further tensions. Autonomy protections support reproductive freedom. Beneficence toward women allows choices promoting well-being. Non-maleficence requires preventing harms of unsafe abortion and forced pregnancy. Yet justice demands equal treatment</a> regardless of sex, beneficence extends to preventing discrimination, and non-maleficence includes preventing demographic and social harms from skewed ratios. These principles pull in opposite directions with no meta-principle for resolution. When your ethical framework simultaneously demands and prohibits the same action, you've achieved philosophical stalemate. Useless. The Prague Study's lead researcher never explicitly stated that non-existence would be better than life as an unwanted child, philosophers widely consider such comparisons impossible since the alternative is non-existence, not a different life. Yet the documented severity and persistence of harm</a> (psychiatric hospitalisation, criminal involvement, relationship failures continuing to age 35+) raises profound questions about whether forcing these pregnancies truly serves children's interests or society's wellbeing. But we can't discuss that because it's uncomfortable, so we'll just pretend the question doesn't exist. Cowards. Why we can't just let people do whatever they want</h2> Despite limited enforcement success and the psychological harms to unwanted children, formidable arguments support maintaining and strengthening the ban. Because sometimes the right answer is the one that feels wrong. Yeah, even I get that. The societal messaging argument carries moral weight. Nicholas Eberstadt articulates this powerfully</a>: "The very fact that many thousands (or in some cases, millions) of prospective girls and young women have been deliberately eliminated simply because they would have been female establishes a new social reality that inescapably colours the whole realm of human relationships, redefining the role of women as the disfavoured sex in nakedly utilitarian terms." Allowing sex-selective abortion sends a message that female lives are less valuable, that women's existence is contingent on family preferences, and that discrimination based on sex is acceptable when applied prenatally even if prohibited post-birth. The WHO states unequivocally that sex selection "reinforces discriminatory and sexist stereotypes towards women by devaluing females." When you allow people to eliminate females for being female, you're not making a neutral policy choice. You're making a statement about what females are worth. And that statement is "less than males." Harsh, but true. Public opinion consistently opposes sex-selective abortion</a>, 77% of Americans and 84% of UK adults support bans, with 80% believing doctors who authorise such abortions should be prosecuted. This reflects widespread intuition that sex selection crosses a moral line even amongst those who support abortion rights generally. People who are perfectly comfortable with abortion for socioeconomic reasons draw a hard line at sex selection. Even I think that's fucked. The "missing women" crisis represents a humanitarian catastrophe that makes the enforcement failures look trivial by comparison. Current estimates suggest 126 million women are missing globally</a>, with 23 million specifically due to sex-selective abortion. China faces 33 million more men than women</a>; India has similarly severe imbalances. These imbalances produce cascading social harms</a>: increased violence and crime, human trafficking (women trafficked from Southeast Asia into China), kidnapping and bride-buying, and social instability. Rather than improving women's status through scarcity, research shows demographic imbalances lead to "masculinisation"</a> that prevents female empowerment. Hillary Clinton warned</a> that large populations of young men unable to find wives breed "potential social instability." When you've got 33 million surplus men with no marriage prospects, you don't get feminist enlightenment. You get Mad Max. Scary shit. The bioethics consensus</a> articulated by Rogers, Ballantyne, and Draper argues sex-selective abortion "cannot be morally justified" because decisions cannot be regarded as truly autonomous in patriarchal contexts with intense son preference, and because serious harms to women and society outweigh individual choice claims. They emphasise perpetuation of discrimination, disruption of social networks, and increased violence. The slippery slope toward designer babies concerns multiple ethicists. Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel warns</a> sex selection is the "first step down the road to designer children" where parents choose height, eye colour, and ultimately IQ, athletic prowess, and musical ability. This transforms the question from "whether to have a child" to "what kind of child to have," creating commodification. The American Medical Association warns this threatens "the core value of parenthood"</a> that is usually expressed by the commitment to unconditional love. If sex selection is permissible, consistent reasoning would allow selection for any testable trait. Today it's eliminating daughters; tomorrow it's eliminating anyone who doesn't meet parental specifications. That's not a future anyone sane wants. Terrifying. The argument that bans protect vulnerable women from coercion</a> holds particular force in son-preference cultures. Dr. Sunita Puri's six-year study found women in the United States aborting daughters "because of pressure from family members." Studies identify reproductive coercion as a form of intimate partner violence, and research shows close to 70% of women who had abortions</a> described them as coerced, pressured, or inconsistent with their values. In communities with strong son preference, women face intense family pressure</a>, potential abuse, and even death threats if they cannot produce sons. Bans provide legal backing for women to resist this pressure, addressing the root problem of "cultural and familial pressure to give birth to sons." Of course, the ban also forces them to give birth to daughters who will then face that same cultural pressure, but at least it's technically illegal now. What a mess. Most importantly, evidence suggests wide-ranging approaches combining bans with other measures can work. South Korea's dramatic success</a>, sex ratio normalisation and son preference dropping from 48% to 10% of women over two decades, resulted from bans plus enforcement plus gender equity legal reforms plus social insurance expansion plus media campaigns plus economic transformation. The ban was part of a package that stigmatised the practice</a> whilst addressing root causes. Research concludes</a> the "normative change from broad social transformation drove improvement," not bans alone, but bans contributed to the stigmatisation and provided legal framework for the broader cultural shift. India's own evidence</a> shows Maharashtra's 1988 ban had "small but significant effect," raising child sex ratio by 1.4-2.6%. Researchers concluded</a>: "The significant impact of the PNDT Act in improving the child sex ratio suggests that, with better enforcement, a ban on sex-selective abortions can only halt, but even reverse, the declining trend." The problem is not that bans are inherently ineffective but that political will for enforcement has been lacking. Bans work when you actually enforce them and combine them with structural change. Unfortunately, India has chosen to do neither whilst declaring victory. Idiots. The uncomfortable conclusion</h2> The accumulated evidence reveals no clean resolution, which is deeply unsatisfying for everyone involved. India's PC-PNDT Act has achieved limited success</a> by any measure: 617 convictions in 25 years, continued decline in sex ratios until recently, widespread circumvention through illegal providers or medical tourism, and minimal deterrent effect given low prosecution rates. The ban has not prevented</a> the practice it was designed to stop. Full stop. What a failure. Simultaneously, 35 years of psychological research documents severe, persistent harm to children born unwanted. The Prague Study's findings</a> (psychiatric hospitalisation, criminal involvement, substance abuse, relationship failures, lowered achievement despite equal intelligence, intergenerational transmission of unwanted pregnancy patterns) paint a bleak picture extending into mid-adulthood. Modern studies from the United States</a> confirm that children born after women are denied abortion show worse developmental outcomes, lower maternal bonding, and higher poverty rates. Cross-cultural research spanning 60 nations</a> demonstrates parental rejection causes measurable psychological harm regardless of geography or culture. Being unwanted fucks you up. This is not controversial. This is documented fact. And I've been fucked up. In India's context, these harms compound with gender-based discrimination. Unwanted daughters face</a> not just parental rejection but systematic devaluation, receiving less nutrition, healthcare</a>, educational investment, and emotional support. Studies show women with first-born daughters face higher domestic violence rates and worse health outcomes than women with first-born sons. The unwanted girl and her mother both become targets of family disappointment and potential abuse. The consequentialist argument against the ban gains force from this evidence: if the ban cannot effectively prevent sex-selective abortion whilst forcing unwanted children to be born into environments of rejection and potential harm, the net suffering may exceed what would occur from allowing informed choice. The alternatives (continuing pregnancies under duress, seeking dangerous black market procedures</a>, bearing children who face abuse) may cause more aggregate harm</a> than prevention. Meanwhile, rich families continue their medical tourism unabated, because rules are for people who can't afford Bangkok holidays. Hypocrites. Yet the counterarguments carry profound moral weight. Allowing sex-selective abortion sends an unambiguous message</a> that female lives are less valuable, that discrimination based on sex is acceptable prenatally even if prohibited post-birth, and that society tolerates the elimination of females simply for being female. The 126 million missing women globally</a> and the cascading social harms from skewed sex ratios represent humanitarian catastrophe. The slippery slope toward designer babies and commodification of children threatens fundamental values about unconditional parental love and human dignity. Public opinion in democratic societies consistently opposes sex-selective abortion as crossing a moral line. It's the legislative equivalent of unplugging the warning light and declaring the problem solved. Dumb. The psychological harm to unwanted children</a> represents a genuine cost of prohibition that must be acknowledged. Forcing births whilst doing nothing to address the social structures that make daughters unwanted creates suffering that is preventable, measurable, and morally troubling. Yet allowing sex-selective abortion also creates suffering: to the females eliminated, to remaining women who face intensified discrimination in male-surplus societies, and to social fabric strained by demographic imbalance. There may be no ethically clean position. Each choice (prohibit or allow) creates distinct harms. Prohibition forces unwanted births with documented psychological consequences whilst failing to prevent underground practice. Permission enables discrimination, creates demographic catastrophe, and sends messages about female worth that corrode gender equality. The question becomes not which approach is morally pure but which creates less total suffering and moves society toward greater gender equity. And the answer to that question depends entirely on which suffering you're willing to acknowledge and which you're willing to ignore. Ain't that the truth? The evidence tentatively suggests a complete structural overhaul as the only viable path forward. This means maintaining legal prohibition as moral statement and framework, but the real work lies in structural change: universal pensions eliminating son-dependency for old-age security, ruthless enforcement of dowry prohibition with social stigma for families demanding it, inheritance equality with active implementation, cultural campaigns promoting daughters' value</a> through entertainment-education media, female education and workforce participation as economic imperatives, and political representation quotas creating role models. South Korea achieved this transformation</a> in two decades. India, with larger population and deeper regional variation, faces longer timeline but has the South Korean precedent as proof these multi-level approaches can work. The psychological harm to unwanted children cannot be dismissed as collateral damage. But neither can the devaluation and elimination of females be accepted as inevitable consequence of cultural preference. The path forward requires acknowledging both harms whilst committing to structural transformation that makes the choice itself obsolete: creating societies where daughters are valued equally to sons not because law demands it or cash transfers incentivise it, but because economic systems, social structures, and cultural norms no longer make son preference rational. Until that transformation occurs, India faces the uncomfortable reality of choosing between imperfect options, each carrying moral costs that cannot be avoided, only minimised through systemic action addressing root causes rather than symptoms alone. Or we could continue pretending the law's working whilst everyone suffers and rich people fly to Singapore for ultrasounds. That's always an option. Cowardly, but true. The Economics of the Ghost Calorie 2024-11-04T00:00:00+00:00 I used to like sweets when I was a kid. Boondhi laddu, dripping in oil and besan. Gulab jamun sitting heavy in a sugary syrup that would coat your throat and refuse to wash down. We made Mysore Pak that crumbled into golden dust between your fingers, and ellu unda packed tight with sesame and pulses. Jalebi. Badshah. It didn't matter what it was. I ate all of it. I shoved it down with the feral intensity of a stray dog finding meat. Luckily, I didn't get a cavity until I hit 35. It's kind of funny. I don't think people even used to brush properly in the past, but the sheer, violent availability of cheap, refined sugar over the last few decades has rotted half the country's teeth right out of their skulls. The diabetes clinics are overflowing. The feet are being amputated. Anyway, that's not what I want to talk about. The rotting teeth and the failing pancreases are just collateral damage. The real disease is in the economics. If you look at the supermarket shelves today, every idiot is buying Coke Zero or Pepsi Zero. Diet this. Sugar-free that. They parade around the aisles feeling morally superior because they aren't drinking calories, completely blind to the fact that they are being fleeced on a microscopic, molecular level. Have you ever stopped to wonder why a bottle of Coke Zero costs the exact same as a regular Coke? It's a scam. A massive, beautiful, unapologetic corporate scam built on a century of commodity panic. To understand the lie, you have to look backward. For most of modern history, sweetness was a hostage to the dirt. Sugarcane and sugar beets are agricultural realities. They are subject to weather, geopolitical maneuvering, and the whims of Brazilian ethanol arbitragers. In November 1974, global raw sugar hit an all-time peak of 65.20 cents per pound. That price shock terrified the industrial food manufacturers. It showed them the systemic, terminal risk of relying on a single plant to sweeten their empires. So they innovated. They birthed the wet-milling revolution. They figured out how to use D-xylose isomerase to chemically castrate corn into High Fructose Corn Syrup. By the 1980s, the big cola manufacturers had stripped cane sugar entirely out of their flagship products in North America. And why wouldn't they? By modern metrics, domestic refined white sugar in the US is approaching a dollar per pound. Bulk high-fructose corn syrup costs around 35 cents. It was a structural margin expansion disguised as a formulation update. But even 35 cents a pound is too much for a corporation if they can find a way to pay less. Why pay for agriculture at all when you can erase the calorie entirely? Enter the synthetics. Aspartame was approved in 1981. It is 200 times sweeter than sucrose. When it was under patent monopoly as NutraSweet, they charged $90 a pound for it, and the beverage companies still bought it because the multiplier made it cheaper than sugar. Today? Aspartame is a commoditized chemical trading out of Asian factories for under ten bucks a kilogram. Then came Sucralose. Six hundred times sweeter than table sugar. Thermodynamically stable. The absolute workhorse of the modern industrial diet, trading around fifteen bucks a kilogram in bulk. When you do the "cost-in-use" math, the illusion shatters. A manufacturer spending over two dollars to sweeten a vat of liquid with refined cane sugar can achieve the exact same sensory sweetness using sucralose for less than three cents. Three fucking cents. They rip the expensive agricultural sugar out of your drink, replace it with a laboratory chemical that costs literally pennies on the dollar, and then charge you the exact same retail price at the checkout counter. They are pocketing a margin so wide you could drive a truck through it, and you're thanking them for saving you from obesity. It’s exactly like the telecom companies forcing a villager to pay for 5G data they can't use just to subsidize the streaming habits of the rich. You aren't paying for the product anymore; you're paying a premium for them to extract the calorie. Eventually, consumers got suspicious of the chemicals. They demanded "natural" alternatives. So the industry gave them Stevia. They extracted Rebaudioside A (Reb A) from leaves, which gave everyone a bitter, licorice-like aftertaste. To fix the taste, they needed Rebaudioside M (Reb M), which tastes perfectly like sugar but exists in the stevia leaf at concentrations of less than 0.01%. Extracting it from plants is an agricultural nightmare. But here is the catch. You don't see any of this synthetic or botanical nonsense happening with the laddus yet, do you? You don't walk into an Adayar Ananda Bhavan or some local neighborhood sweet shop and see them pushing "Zero Calorie Mysore Pak." Why? It’s not because Indians love their heritage. It’s simple physics. In a liquid, sugar only provides taste. You take it out, add three cents of sucralose, and the water is still water. But in a laddu, sugar is structural. It is the bulk. It is the weight, the browning, the physical reality of the sweet. If you take the sugar out of a laddu and replace it with two milligrams of high-intensity sweetener, you are left with a sad, empty void. You'd have to fill that physical void with something else. Bulking agents. Polydextrose. Inulin. Erythritol. Allulose. Right now, those structural fibers cost real money. Allulose still costs several dollars a kilo. Tagatose is well over twenty bucks a kilo. If a local sweet shop replaces cheap sugar with pennies of sucralose but then has to spend seven dollars a kilo on maltodextrin just to make the laddu hold its shape, it breaks their profit margin. So the local shops and the big sweet conglomerates stick to sugar. Not because they care about tradition. Not because they care about your health. But because the math doesn't work yet. But it will. These biotech companies aren't sleeping. Ginkgo Bioworks, Manus Bio, Cargill: they are scaling up precision fermentation as we speak. They are taking agriculture out of the equation entirely. They are engineering yeast in sterile biofoundries to metabolize cheap carbohydrates and excrete highly pure Reb M and rare sugars like allulose. No plants. No weather. Just synthetic biology scaling in vats, driving unit production costs down exponentially. Once the industrial price of these bio-fermented bulking agents drops low enough to hit cost-parity with cane sugar, the game is over. Every single corporate bakery and sweet shop will switch. They won't do it to cure the diabetes epidemic. They probably won't even put it on the front of the box. They'll just quietly swap the agricultural sugar for the bio-fermented slop because capitalism abhors an inefficient margin. You'll bite into a jalebi five years from now, and it will taste perfectly sweet. It will crunch. It will brown perfectly in the oil. It will look completely identical to the ones we ate as feral children. But your body won't process it. It will just pass straight through your gut microbiota, a ghost of a calorie, leaving you with nothing but the lingering aftertaste of corporate efficiency. We are just guinea pigs in a spreadsheet. And they are charging us full price for the privilege. Cheapest Data My Ass: The Regressive Tax on Being Poor 2024-09-13T00:00:00+00:00 Every other day, some brain-dead North Indian middle-class bastard on Reddit or LinkedIn vomits a post about how Modiji (or his crony capitalist buddies, take your pick) gave us the "cheapest data in the world." They scream "Digital India!" like it’s a war cry. They tell you to be grateful. Grateful that the benevolent overlords at Jio and Airtel have deigned to give us affordable 4K streaming. Grateful? Fuck that. Grateful involves consent. This isn't charity; it's a hostage situation. Sure, if you’re an urban, upper-middle-class brat whose biggest problem is whether to order from Swiggy or Zomato, ₹200 a month feels like nothing. You consume 500GB of data watching brain-rot reels? Then yes, for you, it is cheap. But what if you are a peasant? What if you are a daily wage laborer who bought a feature phone just to stay reachable for work? What if you are a grandmother who only wants to hear her grandkids' voice once a week? You are fucked. Royally. The "Cost of Existence"</h3> Remember 2010? Of course you don't; you have the memory span of a goldfish. But I remember. In 2010, you could walk into a shop, throw ₹30 on the counter, and get "talktime." And that balance sat there. It waited for you. It didn't expire. It didn't demand a monthly ransom. You used it when you needed it. Your phone number was a utility, not a subscription service. Today? That model is dead. Murdered. Buried behind the flashy lights of "Unlimited Voice" bundles. Chronology of a Murder</h3> It didn't happen overnight. It was a slow strangulation. 2016: The Dealer arrives. Jio gives you free 4G. "Take it," they said. "It's free." And like an addict, you took it. You forgot what paying felt like.</li> 2017-2018: The Competition dies. Aircel? Dead. Telenor? Gone. Docomo? Bye. The herd was thinned until only the big wolves remained.</li> 2019: The Trap snaps shut. "Free" ends. But worse, the "Lifetime Validity" you paid for? Revoked. Now you pay every 28 days. Not 30 days, 28. That’s 13 months in a year. They invented a fucking 13th month just to squeeze you.</li> 2024: The Duopoly prices. Now, you pay for "validity." You pay "rent" just to keep your SIM active. Don't use data? Fuck you, pay ₹199/month. Don't make calls? Fuck you, pay ₹199/month. Just want incoming calls? Fuck you, pay ₹199/month.</li> </ul> They didn't make calling cheaper. They made existing expensive. The Mathematics of Exploitation</h3> Let’s bring in some actual numbers, shall we? Not the sanitized bullshit TRAI feeds you, but the real economic weight of this scam. The sangis love to compare us to the West. "Look! Data in the US costs $50!" Yeah, you dimwits, and the average American earns in an hour what a vast majority of Indians earn in a week. Let's look at the neighbors. Let's look at Pakistan. Yeah, that "failed state." Pakistan: You can keep a SIM active for $0.25 (₹20) a month.</li> South Africa: You can keep it active for $0.55 (₹45) a month.</li> UK: You can literally pay £0 (giffgaff). You just pay for what you use.</li> </ul> India? The minimum "entry fee" to the Jio/Airtel club is effectively ₹189-199/month ($2.40). We are paying 10x what a Pakistani pays just to have a working phone number. Now, factor in income. In China, that basic connectivity cost is a rounding error, less than 0.2% of the median monthly income. In India? For a minimum wage worker earning maybe ₹7,000-8,000 a month, that ₹199 is nearly 2.5% of their total survival budget. Think about that. A construction worker has to toil for a full day in the heat, carrying bricks, just to pay Airtel enough money so they don't block his incoming calls. One day of labor. Just to exist on the network. The 13th Month Scam</h3> And let’s talk about that "28 days" validity bullshit. In the old world (the sane world) a month had 30 or 31 days. In the Jio-Airtel corporate metaverse, a month has 28 days. Why? Because $365 / 28 = 13.03$. They literally invented a 13th month. They are billing you for a month that doesn't exist on any calendar in human history. Every year, you pay for an extra recharge cycle that you didn't ask for, didn't need, and certainly didn't consent to. It’s a silent 8% inflation on top of the already exorbitant prices. It’s theft, plain and simple, disguised as "validity." The 150 Million Prisoners</h3> TRAI says there are about 150 million feature phone users in India. These aren't people engaging in "digital detox." These are people who can't afford smartphones. They are the poorest of the poor. They have devices that can make calls and maybe send an SMS. That’s it. Yet, they are forced to buy "bundled" plans. Imagine walking into a grocery store to buy just milk, and the shopkeeper says, "Sorry, milk is only sold in a combo pack with a bottle of single-malt whiskey." "But I don't drink whiskey," you say. "Too bad," he sneers. "It's the Cheapest Whiskey in the World! You should be grateful!" That is the reality for 150 million Indians. They are paying for 4G/5G data they physically cannot consume because the operators refuse to sell them voice-only plans at a fair price. They are prisoners of a market that has decided they don't matter. The Regressive Tax</h3> This is what economists call a "Regressive Tax", but I call it a scam. The poor (who consume almost zero data) are subsidizing the rich. My neighbor, my uncle (people who watch nothing) pay ₹199 so that you can stream Netflix in HD for cheap. The villager with some micromax or lava or someknown feature phone is cross-subsidizing the startup bro with an iPhone 15 Pro Max. The "unlimited voice" bundled with data isn't a feature; it's a trap. It forces the voice-only user to pay for data they physically cannot use. It’s like forcing a diabetic to buy a combo meal with a large Coke and then telling them, "But the burger is cheaper this way!" The "Revolution" is a Lie</h3> So the next time someone says "Data Revolution," tell them to check their privilege. Tell them to look at the GDP per Capita. Tell them to look at the Purchasing Power Parity. Or better yet, tell them to fuck off. Because this isn't a revolution. It’s a ransom note. And we’re all paying it, whether we want the data or not. The Great Indian Bamboozle: How We Perfected Stealing from the Poor to Give to the Rich 2024-09-05T00:00:00+00:00 Ever feel like you're stuck in a goddamn dystopian comedy where the government is the fucking punchline? Welcome to India, motherfucker. India's greatest export isn't software or spices - it's perfected poverty porn on a scale that would make a Victorian workhouse blush. We've fucking mastered the art of robbing the poor blind to pamper the rich cunts, all while selling this bullshit as 'development'. It's like a magician's trick, but instead of rabbits, we pull out empty wallets and call it progress. Watch us make your hard-earned money vanish into a billionaire's offshore account - abracadabra, you're poorer! Let me tell you a fucking story that'll make your blood boil so hard you could power a small village. Picture Delhi's electricity subsidy scheme - the kind of "pro-poor" policy that makes you wonder if the government is actively trying to fuck the poor while giving the rich a reach-around. The middle-class cunts get more subsidy benefits than the poorest users, and the richest motherfuckers benefit the most from these supposedly pro-poor subsidies. So the AC-blasting penthouse uncle running three fridges and a goddamn home theater gets more subsidy than the slum dweller sweating his balls off with a single bulb and a fan that died last monsoon. The poor literally subsidize the rich bastard's electricity bill while sitting in the fucking dark during power cuts. And the government calls this "power for all." Based? More like based on a mountain of steaming bullshit. George Carlin once said the reason they call it the American Dream is because you have to be asleep to believe it. Well, in India, we don't even pretend it's a dream - we just gaslight you while you're wide awake and charge you for the privilege. The IIT/IIM Subsidy Scam</h2> Here's the beautiful fucking irony that'll make you want to punch a wall: Most Indians don't even know IIT exists until they're in college. Your average village kid? They're too busy trying not to starve to give a shit about elite institutions. But somehow, we've decided that the chosen few who make it through this rigged-as-fuck filtering system deserve ₹18.7 lakh per year of taxpayer money (source</a>) - way the fuck above what they pay in fees. That's right, your taxes are subsidizing some rich kid's fucking engineering degree while you can't afford healthcare. Meanwhile, government schools are rotting like a corpse in the sun. Teachers don't show up. Buildings collapse because the contractor pocketed the money. Kids study under trees because the roof fell in last monsoon. But fuck them, right? They're not IIT material - they're just future labor for the rich cunts we're funding. The government spends peanuts per head on primary education - you know, the actual foundation that determines if a kid even has a fucking shot at IIT. But then they blow massive funds on a handful of institutions that serve as taxpayer-funded training grounds for Silicon Valley. It's fucking brilliant! We've created a system where: Step 1: Underfund basic education so only kids with private coaching access (read: rich parents) can compete</li> Step 2: Spend crores on the few who make it through this rigged-as-hell selection process</li> Step 3: Watch them fuck off to America</a> the moment they graduate to optimize tax evasion algorithms for Apple</li> Step 4: Call it "investment in human capital" while the actual human capital rots in villages</li> </ul> You're not funding education; you're funding a fucking brain drain. The coaching class scam alone costs more than most Indians make in a year. Poor kids literally fund the system that trains rich kids to become better at fucking over the poor. It's like paying for your own execution. But sure, let's keep pretending this is about "meritocracy" and not about concentrating public resources where only the already-privileged cunts can access them. It's not that IITs shouldn't exist - it's that spending this much on elite institutions while letting primary education crumble is like putting a fucking diamond necklace on a rotting corpse. The government's message is clear: only elite bastards are worthy of quality public education. Everyone else can go fuck themselves with a rusty spoon. Farm Subsidies: Where the Money Actually Goes</h2> Oh, you thought agricultural subsidies help poor farmers? That's fucking adorable. Let me shatter that delusion with some brutal fucking facts that'll make you want to burn the system down. 89% of agricultural subsidies go to medium and large farmers (NSSO data</a>). The top 8% control 48% of agricultural income - they're the motherfuckers getting free electricity to pump groundwater until there's nothing left but dust and despair. Tractor subsidies: Helping large farmers plow over the fucking graves of smallholders while they sip whiskey in air-conditioned offices</li> Cold storage benefits: Appropriated by elite bastards who exploit landless laborers like medieval fucking serfs</li> Fertilizer subsidies: ₹1.84 trillion announced, but 65% never reach small farmers (source</a>) - it's like giving a starving man a picture of a fucking sandwich</li> Loan waivers: ₹2.52 lakh crore since 2014, but only for bank loans - poor farmers with moneylenders at 40% interest? Go fucking hang yourself, peasant scum</li> </ul> Giving tractors to large farmers is like giving a flamethrower to a fucking arsonist - soon they'll be plowing over the graves of smallholders while the government applauds their "entrepreneurial spirit." Meanwhile, farmer suicides hit over 10,000 in 2022 (The Wire</a>), but hey, at least the rich farmers got new fucking toys to play with while the poor drink pesticide! Free electricity for agriculture sounds pro-poor until you realize the rich farmer with 50 acres and multiple borewells consumes 100x more than the marginal farmer with 2 acres of dust. It's the same regressive bullshit - subsidizing the rich while pretending to help the poor, then wondering why farmers are killing themselves in record numbers. The system isn't broken; it's working exactly as fucking intended: to make the rich richer and the poor deader. Peasants and Proletariat: India's Favorite Fucking ATM</h2> Now, you might be thinking, "Well, I know public funds is being spent, but at least I'm not getting screwed in taxes." Laughs in fucking GST You adorable fucking idiot. You're the main course at this feast, and you're about to be eaten alive. 64.3% of all GST revenue comes from the bottom 50% of the population (RBI data</a>). The top 10%, who own 65% of the country's wealth? They contribute a pathetic 3-4% of GST. That's right, the poor are subsidizing the rich's luxury goods while they can't afford fucking bread. But wait, there's more! Corporate tax cuts in 2019 cost us ₹1.84 lakh crore - more than the entire fucking MGNREGA budget. While 84% of households saw income decline during COVID, corporate profits jumped 70% (Oxfam</a>). It's almost like... no, it couldn't be... the government is taking from the poor to give to the rich? Shocked Pikachu face More like shocked "we're all fucked" face. Corporate tax cuts: Because why feed the poor when you can feast on their tax dollars like a fucking vampire? The salaried middle class (2% of population) pays more taxes than all of corporate India combined. You're not just carrying your family - you're carrying Ambani's tax breaks on your back while slum dwellers subsidize luxury apartments through consumption taxes. It's a fucking pyramid scheme, and you're at the bottom. When It Actually Works</h2> Here's where it gets fucking interesting. Some schemes like MGNREGA actually work - guaranteed employment, direct wages, no middlemen skimming 80% of the fucking money. But elite cunts on Twitter and in every political discourse space (which, spoiler alert, are controlled by the rich motherfuckers and their boot-licking petit bourgeoisie) constantly shit on it like it's their goddamn job. "Waste of money! Creates lazy workers!" they cry from their ivory towers, while conveniently ignoring that it's literally keeping rural India from fucking starving to death. Then Tamil Nadu said, "What if - and hear me out, you fucking morons - what if we actually helped poor people instead of pretending to while robbing them blind?" Revolutionary fucking concept, I know. It's like discovering fire, but for basic human decency. Free bus travel for women: Not "free if you fill out 47 forms and suck a bureaucrat's dick," but actually free. Get on the fucking bus, no questions asked. 66% of women save over ₹400 monthly - real fucking money that doesn't trickle down from some rich asshole's pocket.</li> ₹1,000 monthly to 1.06 crore women: Direct to bank accounts. No middlemen, no "administration costs" that magically eat up 80% of the budget like a fucking black hole.</li> PDS system: Actually universal. No "BPL card if Jupiter is in retrograde and you sacrifice a goat." Everyone gets rice. Crazy, right? It's almost like feeding people is a good idea.</li> </ul> Compare this to other states where poverty schemes have more middlemen than a fucking pyramid scheme. TN proves it's possible to help people without the usual scam. But watch - the elite discourse will find ways to shit on this too because heaven forbid poor people get something without being means-tested to death and back. They'll call it "freebie culture" while their corporate subsidies are called "economic stimulus." The hypocrisy is so thick you could cut it with a knife and serve it to the rich as fucking caviar. The Beautiful Hypocrisy of It All</h2> The Indian government has mastered the art of reverse socialism. We socialize the losses and privatize the profits, but with a twist - we make the poor pay for both. Electricity subsidies: The richest households receive 45% of electricity subsidies even though the poorest consume far less power, making these subsidies highly regressive and benefiting the rich much more than the poor. It's like a soup kitchen where you need a Mercedes to get a meal.</li> Wealth inequality: 166 billionaires with ₹54.12 lakh crore combined wealth. Bottom 50% owns 3% of total wealth (Oxfam 2023</a>). Three. Fucking. Percent.</li> Inequality worse than British rule: At least they were foreign looters. Now we're doing it to ourselves and calling it "development."</li> </ul> While billionaires added ₹3.9 lakh crore during COVID (Oxfam</a>) - enough to buy every Indian a vaccine and still have change for a samosa - 84% of households saw income decline. Based development! The Punchline: You're the Fucking Joke</h2> Here's the goddamn joke: Every policy meant to help the poor is designed by rich cunts who've never missed a meal, implemented by corrupt bastards who profit from poverty, and evaluated by elitist pricks who think poverty is when your fucking driver is late. We've created a system that's so fucked up it would make a dystopian novelist blush: Education subsidies fund brain drain for the elite while schools crumble into dust</li> Agricultural subsidies create water mafias and enrich large farmers who shit on the poor</li> Electricity subsidies reward the highest consumers (spoiler: the rich assholes)</li> Tax breaks concentrate wealth upward like a fucking vacuum cleaner sucking money from the poor</li> Poverty schemes get shat on by elite discourse while corporate welfare is called "growth" and celebrated with champagne</li> </ul> It's not a bug; it's a feature. It's not incompetence; it's by fucking design. It's not failure; it's working exactly as intended - to keep the rich rich and the poor fucking desperate. We've perfected reverse Robin Hood to an art form. We steal from the poor, give to the rich, and then gaslight everyone into believing it's "development." We've turned inequality into a fucking masterpiece and poverty into a profitable business model. The top 1% owns 40.5% of everything (Oxfam 2023</a>). They've convinced the next 9% that they're on the same team - like lambs voting for the slaughterhouse. That 10% has convinced the next 40% that the bottom 50% is the problem. And that bottom 50%? They're too busy trying to fucking survive to notice they're being robbed blind. Meanwhile, the petit bourgeoisie - the middle-class morons who think they're temporarily embarrassed millionaires - spend their time punching down. They shit on MGNREGA workers while their own taxes subsidize corporate bailouts. They mock government school teachers while funding IIT brain drain. They complain about "freebies" for the poor while their electricity subsidy dwarfs anything a slum dweller could ever dream of. Carlin was right - it's a big club, and you ain't in it. But in India, we've gone one better. Not only are you not in the club, you're paying for the membership fees, the renovations, and the fucking valet parking for the cunts who laugh at you. And the best part? You'll vote for more of this shit next election. That's not democracy. That's not development. That's just the most elaborate con job in human history, and we're all marks. The difference is, some of us know we're being conned. The question is: what are we going to do about it? Probably nothing. There's cricket on TV, the new Rajini movie is out, and we're too busy in the rat race to give a shit about the fucking apocalypse. Welcome to India, where the only thing trickling down is the despair, and the rich are laughing all the way to the bank. Headline Grief and the Ten Lakh Lottery 2024-07-15T00:00:00+00:00 If you want your family to get ten lakh rupees from the Tamil Nadu government, you'd better make sure you die in a tragedy that makes the national news cycle. I reckon that sounds cold. But look at the math. In Kallakurichi, fifty-six people (mostly daily wage labourers, men who spent their lives carrying sacks or digging ditches for three hundred rupees a day) drank bootleg arrack laced with methanol. They died in government hospital wards, their eyes burning, their kidneys shutting down one by one. It was a horrific way to go. Within forty-eight hours, Chief Minister M.K. Stalin was on camera announcing ten lakh rupees for the family of every deceased person, and fifty thousand rupees for everyone lying in a hospital bed. Ten lakh rupees. For a family in Karunapuram colony where the monthly income rarely touches eight thousand, that is more money than they would see in a decade of breaking stone. Now, step across the district border. A man rides his TVS XL Super back from the fields near Salem. It’s 8 PM. The State Highways Department dug a trench across the asphalt three weeks ago to lay a culvert, forgot to put up a red reflector, and didn't bother to paint the dirt mound. The man hits the trench, flies over the handlebars, snaps his spine on the rim of a concrete pipe, and dies in the ditch. Unless his family manages to establish government negligence in court or spend years fighting a Motor Accident Claims Tribunal case, they don't automatically get a ten-lakh-rupee cheque handed to them by a minister. There is no instant executive press release for him. His wife will spend months carrying petitions to the Collectorate on Monday mornings, filing insurance papers, and begging clerks to trace missing files behind steel almirahs. Why? Because a single man dying in an unlit ditch doesn't threaten a cabinet minister's seat. A man dying of methanol along with fifty others on live television makes television anchors shout in English, and English shouting makes politicians reach for the Chief Minister's Public Relief Fund like it’s a ceremonial dish-out tray. We have turned government relief into a headline lottery. If a hundred families lose their thatched roofs in a cyclone that gets a name from the Meteorological Department, the cameras arrive, the helicopters fly over, and the ex-gratia flows like monsoon runoff. If a localized squall knocks down three huts in an unnamed village and crushes a grandmother under a coconut tree, the revenue inspector shows up four days later, measures the fallen trunk with a cloth tape, and offers three thousand rupees for roof repairs. The loss of the human life is identical. The grief is identical. The empty stove in the kitchen is identical. The only difference is the camera angle. The government doesn't give ten lakhs to the Kallakurichi families because it suddenly discovered a deep, abiding love for poor working-class men who drink cheap liquor to numb their aching joints after twelve hours of manual labour. If the state cared about those men, it wouldn't let local DMK functionaries and police inspectors run illegal bootlegging dens out of sugarcane fields three kilometres from the taluk office. It gives ten lakhs to buy silence. It gives ten lakhs to turn a massive failure of law enforcement into a photo-op of state benevolence. It's a dirty grift, and everyone involved knows it. If the principle of disaster relief is to help a citizen whose life has been shattered by an unforeseen catastrophe, then the number of dead bodies in the newspaper shouldn't dictate the size of the cheque. One death from a collapsed public wall should carry the exact same compensation as fifty deaths from poison liquor. Better yet: stop handing out ad-hoc political purses altogether. Build a universal accidental death and disability insurance framework. Set clear, automatic, rule-based disaster norms under SDRF where every house collapse, every road crash caused by government negligence, and every industrial accident gets the exact same formula-based payout, no matter whether the media is watching or not. Instead, we have politicians playing Robin Hood with taxpayer money whenever their skin is on the line. They hand out ten lakhs for headline tragedies, while the guy who breaks his neck on an unpainted municipal speedbreaker gets to pay his own hospital bill. It ain't compassion. It's just crisis management with a chequebook. Image Credit: Beanham Japan Surrender 1945 SLNSW FL21240945.jpg</a> via Wikimedia Commons Ad Usum Delphini: Breaking Character 2024-06-10T00:00:00+00:00 I'm sick of whispering into an encrypted void that only three bored web crawlers and my own neurotic back-ups ever touch. For years the default setting has been paranoia: block every bot in robots.txt</code>, lock the gates, write in half-formed code and local grudges that require a background check and two stiff drinks to decipher. It's a comfortable cage. If nobody can read what you're saying, nobody can tell you you're wrong, or worse, uninteresting. I keep changing this site and I keep breaking it. I should have just left it in plain, simple HTML. Instead, I got hooked on Static Site Generators and started hopping around like an idiot: Jekyll, then 11ty, then Hugo, and now Zola. Every time I moved, lazy me tried using quick scripts to automate the migration. Half the media attachments vanished into broken relative links, and a chunk of old posts just dissolved into frontmatter errors. Anyway. I gotta be careful hereafter. I'm trying to break character. I want to write some shit that anyone off the street can actually read without needing a glossary of my personal failures. Real sentences. Plain observations. Public entries that don't look like an emergency room triage report. So I'm not going to keep blocking all the robots in robots.txt</code> for everything anymore. If something is meant for public eyes, let the crawlers take it. To keep track of this compromise (this bowdlerized, accessible layer) I'm tagging these entries under ad-usum-delphini</code> or expurgatus</code>. For the use of the public. Sanitized not because I care about polite company, but because I want the words to actually land somewhere outside my own skull. The rest of the dumpster fire stays buried behind the usual disclaimers. But this door stays unlatched. Image Credit: Egbert codex.jpg</a> via Wikimedia Commons Mitigating Radiant Heat: A Low-Cost Roof Misting Case Study 2024-06-10T00:00:00+00:00 The summer of 2024 didn't just break records in South India; it broke the equilibrium of traditional climate-responsive architecture. In the arid belt of the Coimbatore region (specifically Sultanpet and Sulur) ambient temperatures frequently peaked at 42°C. For those living in homes with traditional terracotta (Mangalore or Calicut) tiled roofs, the primary thermal challenge is radiant heat. These tiles act as a thermal battery, absorbing solar energy all day and radiating it directly into the living space. By mid-afternoon, the "clay oven" effect makes the interior almost unlivable, even with air circulation. The Theory: Latent Heat of Vaporization</h3> The most efficient way to remove heat from a surface is through phase change. Terracotta, being naturally porous, is an ideal substrate for surface-level evaporative cooling. By applying a fine mist of water to the exterior during peak solar hours, we can take advantage of the latent heat of vaporization (roughly 2260 kJ/kg). As the water evaporates from the tile surface, it pulls thermal energy directly from the terracotta. This prevents the heat from ever reaching the interior air, unlike indoor misting fans which often lead to uncomfortable humidity levels without actually lowering the building's thermal load. Technical Implementation</h3> The goal was to build a high-pressure, low-flow system using ubiquitous components. 1. Pressure Source: The RO Booster Pump</h4> Standard garden hoses or low-pressure pumps are ineffective for misting; they create droplets that are too large, leading to runoff and water waste. I used a 100 GPD Reverse Osmosis (RO) booster pump. These are designed for high-pressure operation (70-100 PSI) and run on 24V DC. At a power consumption of approximately 35-40 Watts, these pumps are significantly more energy-efficient than air conditioning units and can be easily integrated with a standard household adapter or a small solar setup. 2. Distribution and Misting</h4> Nozzles: Brass or high-grade plastic agricultural misting nozzles with a 0.3mm orifice were used to achieve a fine aerosol.</li> Plumbing: 1/4-inch PU tubing (RO grade) provided the necessary flexibility and pressure resistance.</li> Fixtures: Push-fit connectors and UV-resistant zip ties were used to anchor the line along the roof ridges.</li> Filtration: An inline sediment filter was mandatory to prevent borewell grit from damaging the pump's diaphragm.</li> </ul> Operational Results</h3> The system was activated between 11:30 AM and 4:00 PM, the window of maximum solar gain. While I did not perform laboratory-grade temperature logging, the subjective difference was profound. The radiant "sting" from the ceiling vanished. When paired with standard ceiling fans, the interior stayed at a manageable temperature. The Bottleneck: Mineral Scaling</h3> The primary failure mode for this prototype was water quality. The Coimbatore region relies heavily on hard borewell water. Within weeks, calcium and magnesium deposits began to scale the fine orifices of the nozzles. Without a serious demineralization stage or a high-grade softener, maintenance becomes a significant overhead. For a permanent installation, a solenoid-controlled auto-flush system or an ion-exchange softener would be required. Environmental Reflection</h3> While this project was a successful technical intervention, it highlights a larger ecological deficit. The extreme heat in the Sultanpet region is exacerbated by the loss of old-growth canopy to monoculture cash crops. Surface-level misting is an effective "band-aid," but re-establishing the natural canopy remains the only truly sustainable strategy for thermal comfort in the region. Related raw diary series: Evaporative Cooling, Red Tiles, and the Unforgiving Sun</a></li> Scavenging for Pressure: The Mechanics of the Mist</a></li> Hard Water and Dead Nozzles</a></li> </ul> Image Credit: 1896 Eastern North America heat wave in the Chicago Tribune of Chicago, Illinois on 11 August 1896, part 1.jpg</a> via Wikimedia Commons Hard Water and Dead Nozzles 2024-06-05T00:00:00+00:00 The brutal heat broke around the 12th of May. The weather actually improved. The daytime peaks dropped down to a much more manageable 33 degrees Celsius. The sun stopped trying to actively murder us. Because it wasn't a furnace anymore, I stopped using the roof misting setup much. Which is fine, because the system was already dying. The nozzle clogged up. The water out here is incredibly hard, full of minerals that just love to choke up tiny orifices. We had a basic filter hooked up to the line, but it was nowhere near enough to stop the inevitable calcium buildup. It was a prototype, a temporary fix for a desperate situation. And it proved the concept: evaporative cooling on porous tiles definitely beats back the heat. But without a much heavier, more robust filtration system, you're going to be constantly unclogging nozzles. By June, I just dismantled the whole thing. The heatwave was over. The experiment was over. Now it's just a pile of plastic tubing and calcified brass, waiting for the next time the sun decides to boil the sky. Scavenging for Pressure: The Mechanics of the Mist 2024-05-10T00:00:00+00:00 It is one thing to decide you want to mist a roof to survive the apocalypse. It is an entirely different nightmare to actually build the damn thing when you are sitting in the arid outskirts of Coimbatore, miles away from a proper hardware store that sells anything other than PVC pipes and despair. To make evaporative cooling work, you need a fine mist. Not a shower. Not a dribble. A mist. And to get a mist, you need pressure to force water through tiny brass nozzles. My first thought was agriculture. This whole area is surrounded by cash crops, so surely there's agricultural pump equipment lying around. I went looking for a high-pressure motor spare for an agricultural sprayer. The battery-operated backpack sprayers the farmers use seemed perfect. I figured I could just cannibalize a spare motor, hook it up to a 12V battery, and let it run. Nope. You walk into these dusty shops in Sultanpet, and they look at you like you're speaking Russian. They had the full sprayer kits, but nobody wanted to sell just the spare motor. Or if they did have spares, they were the wrong voltage, or completely burned out, or missing the right fittings to adapt to standard tubing. It was a dead end. I wasted hours sweating through my shirt just talking to mechanics who couldn't care less about my roof. I needed an alternative. Something ubiquitous, something that runs on household current, and something that generates solid PSI. That’s when I realized the answer was sitting in every middle-class kitchen in India: the Reverse Osmosis water purifier. An RO pump (a booster pump) is literally designed to force water through a semi-permeable membrane at high pressure. It was perfect. I managed to source an old 100 GPD RO booster pump. It runs on a 24V DC adapter, which is easy enough to plug into a standard wall socket. Then came the plumbing. Trying to connect standard RO tubing (which is 1/4 inch) to misting nozzles meant I had to scavenge for push-fit connectors, T-joints, and an end-plug. Have you ever tried to push a stiff PU tube into a cheap brass slip-lock connector while balancing on a blistering hot red-tiled roof? It’s a great way to discover new profanities. You push it in, you turn the pump on, and suddenly a joint blows out because the pressure is too high and you're getting sprayed in the face with hard water. I had to use zip ties to anchor the tubing along the roof ridges so the wind wouldn't knock the nozzles out of alignment. I stuck a cheap inline sediment filter at the intake (just a basic mesh strainer) hoping it would keep the worst of the borewell grit out of the pump diaphragm. It was a completely scavenged, Frankenstein's monster of a cooling system. A water purifier pump, agriculture-style nozzles, and zip ties. But when I finally flipped the switch and that 24V adapter hummed to life, the RO pump kicked in and forced out this beautiful, hissing cloud of water vapor over the terracotta. Engineering in India is never about buying the right part. It's about violently forcing the wrong parts to cooperate until they do what you want. Image Credit: Wet Roof Tiles</a> by Noah Wulf, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0</a>. Evaporative Cooling, Red Tiles, and the Unforgiving Sun 2024-05-08T00:00:00+00:00 The summer of 2024 decided to just cook us alive. March, April, and May were a brutal, unending heatwave that apparently touched 42 degrees Celsius out here. This is the arid belt. The driest, dustiest part of the Coimbatore zone, out near Sultanpet and Sulur. The air feels like it wants to peel your skin off. It was so impossibly hot that I decided to do a small project just to preserve my sanity. I tried the usual bandaids. An air cooler? It kinda works, decent enough if you're directly in front of it. A misting fan? Absolutely awful. It just makes the indoors too humid, turning the room into a warm, suffocating swamp. The real enemy wasn't just the air. It was the roof. Most of these houses have traditional red terracotta tiles (the classic Mangalore or Calicut tiles) arranged in neat little overlapping rows. They look charming, but by 2 PM they absorb the sun and radiate pure, unadulterated heat straight down into the house. It's like living inside a clay oven. So I wanted to attack the problem at the source. Cool the roof. I set up a system to spray a very fine mist directly onto those red roof tiles. They are actually a little bit porous, which is perfect. The sun hits the mist, evaporates the water, and pulls the heat right out of the terracotta. It is basic evaporative cooling. Then I just turned on the regular ceiling fans that every house already has. And it actually worked. Really well. I didn't measure the exact temperature drop with any fancy thermometers, but it felt so much better. The inside of the house went from a baking nightmare to something genuinely livable. The tiles got real nice and cool. I only ran the mist during the absolute peak of the sun. The nights out here were actually getting quite cold, so there was no need to waste it in the dark. And yes, it used up some water. I know that might not be the most ecologically pure method in a dry region. But you tell me if it was good or bad. Because frankly, the real villains here are the local fuckers who chopped down all the massive old trees to plant endless monoculture cash crops. They wiped out the natural canopy. If they just had more trees, we wouldn't need pumps and misting nozzles. We could just sit under the shade like normal human beings used to do. Or maybe I am wrong. I hear that we have had similar or worse heat several decades ago too. Image Credit: Red clay roof tiles</a> by Aplucas0703, licensed under CC BY 4.0</a>. Are Our People Depoliticised? 2024-03-04T00:00:00+00:00 So in Tamil Nadu, fans of two actors will physically fight each other. I mean actual fights. Not "twitter is mean" fights. Not passive-aggressive comment section fights. Actual fistfights, sometimes with weapons, over Rajinikanth versus Kamal Haasan, then Rajini versus Ajith for years, then Vijay versus Ajith once Ajith more or less retreated from that whole thing. And what is weird to me (I've been thinking about this) is that in the west you have fan wars too, but they're about ideas, sort of. Marvel versus DC, Windows versus Linux, whatever. The thing people are fighting over is a thing, at least. A product. An IP. A brand maybe, but still an abstraction. Here it's two specific humans. Just two men. Their fans fight like those two men are personally insulted by the other's fans breathing. That's strange, right? It is strange. There's probably a structural explanation for why Tamil Nadu got like this specifically. The Dravidian movement ran cinema and politics through the same pipe for decades. Dialogues in movies carried political messaging. The hero was always "our man" (the common Tamil man, humiliated by elites, ultimately triumphant). The villain was some landlord or some upper-caste bastard or some corrupt official. And it worked so well that MGR actually became Chief Minister in 1977 and governed till he died in 1987. So fandom was not separate from politics here. It was politics. The screen hero and the political representative were literally the same person. Once that happened, fandom got attached to something deeper than entertainment. It became identity. And you don't let someone insult your identity without responding. The Tamil mass hero format makes this worse. These characters aren't written as humans with flaws who sometimes win. They're morally supreme. They beat everyone. They protect women, humiliate elites, deliver justice, deliver the punch dialogue. They're written as basically correct about everything, all the time. Malayalam cinema has historically allowed protagonists to be ordinary, fallible, sometimes wrong. Tamil mass cinema puts the hero on a pedestal and keeps him there for three hours. So when you've spent twenty years watching that man be unambiguously right about everything, an insult against him is not just rude: it's factually incorrect, cosmically unjust, and requires a response. The fan club is also, I think, a thing for young men with nowhere else to put their energy. No campus union, no political organization to join, no real civic structure to participate in. So you join the fan club. You get belonging. You get hierarchy. You get a group identity and territorial pride and something to defend. And when someone from the other fan club says something about your star, it becomes a proxy for every other status fight you can't have anywhere else. But the thing I actually wanted to write about is Vijay. TVK launched last month, February 2nd. I like Vijay. I should say that clearly. Not in a parasocial I-would-die-for-him way, but I genuinely enjoy watching him. He's charming, he's funny, he's got this quality where his characters feel recognizable, not some elevated fantasy, just someone you could plausibly have met. In Kutty, in Poove Unakkaaga, even Gilli if you're in the right mood. These characters exist in the same gravity as normal life. He looks a bit like my uncle Mahesh mama, actually, which probably helps. I've watched his worst movies too. Beast was bad. Varisu was genuinely difficult to sit through (some Telugu director came in and put the most cringe dialogue in his mouth and made him deliver it with a straight face, and it was painful in a specific way you only feel when someone you like is being wasted). Kuvari was dumb but fun-dumb, which is different. The point is I've watched all of them because he's become so familiar that even the bad ones you just show up for. That familiarity is exactly what worries me. There's a question I keep circling: can a person become so familiar, so warm, so present in every household for twenty-five years, that voters stop actually evaluating him? MGR did this. He didn't speak against caste seriously. He didn't take real positions on structural injustice. He just did whatever gave him mass love: schemes, charity optics, movies where he's always right, always noble, always wins. He diluted the actual ideological core of the Dravidian movement into pure populism. And people loved him for it. Vijay hasn't taken real positions either. He has this enormous amount of cultural power, and he has been very careful not to use it for anything that would make anyone specifically unhappy. He never speaks against obvious injustice. He never takes a side when a side needs to be taken. He wants everyone to love him. And I understand why: that's also just survival in an industry where your movie has to work for the Brahmin family in Mylapore and the Dalit kid in Madurai at the same time. But it's not the same as political leadership. The problem is the core fans (I'll call them what they are, the chinna koothiyans or sillarais, the guys who pour milk on cutouts and burst crackers at 6am and will absolutely force their entire family to vote for him without any argument beyond "he is Vijay"). Those people will not be asking questions. They will be at the booth. And then there are the softer fans, people like their spouses and parents who don't follow any of this closely but feel warm about him, and those people might just go along. I genuinely don't know if he becomes CM in the next cycle. I think it's possible. I don't want it to be possible because I haven't seen him demonstrate that he understands governance, and I haven't seen him take a position that cost him anything. That's a bad combination. I know Kerala well enough to compare. I lived there from 2012 to 2013 (two full years). Had classmates in my Tamil Nadu college who were from Kerala too, so that exposure continued even after I came back. And before all that, I was in SFI from around 2008, which meant I was interacting with Kerala students through those networks for years before I even set foot there. The difference in political culture is not subtle. It hits you almost immediately. Students there argue. Not online-argue, argue-with-actual-knowledge argue. They understand coalition arithmetic, what factionalism does to a vote, what it means when two left parties split a constituency. They've been pamphlet-reading, campaign-running, marching since they joined college. Some of them were insufferable about it, honestly. The ideological rigidity could be exhausting. But they knew things. They had frameworks. They had opinions that were attached to actual policy positions rather than just vibes about which leader seems trustworthy. Our college had none of that: I was there from 2008 to 2012 and I can tell you there was nothing. Tamil Nadu colleges mostly have none of that. And it's not just neglect, and it wasn't always like this. The Dravidian movement was originally genuinely political (rationalism, anti-caste discourse, federalism, linguistic rights). There was real intellectual content. The anti-Hindi agitations in the 1960s got mass student participation; people were in the streets, some died. That was civic engagement. Then over decades: party institutionalisation, concentration of power, welfare populism replacing ideology, campus politics actively suppressed because the government decided politically active students were a problem to be managed. Elections got banned from most colleges. The culture dried up. And here we are, kids with nothing to channel into except movies and cricket and memes. This matters because it means the depoliticisation was a regression, not a default. We had it. It got taken. I went to IIM Trichy later, 2017 to 2019. I should probably say something about that experience sometime (I spent most of it working for the placement committee, running around trying to get companies to come recruit us, basically doing free labour for the institute under the delusion that it would look good on my resume, graduated with a 20 lakh education loan, and then spent the next several years paying it off). That's a different rant. The point is: even IIM Trichy had elections. They technically existed. But it was nothing. Nothing like what you see in Kerala colleges. No real stakes, no ideological contestation, just some students doing something that looks like democracy from a distance. That wasn't an accident and it's not just neglect. The Dravidian parties made a specific choice to depoliticise campuses because a politically literate population is harder to keep delivering votes. A population that watches TV debates and feels warm about their chief minister's face, that's easier to manage. So you remove real participation, and what fills the vacuum is cinema. Fan culture does the work that civic culture should be doing. And then Vijay becomes not just a star but a genuine political hope for people who have no other framework for engaging with politics at all. Here's the thing that actually makes me laugh though. In Master (the 2021 film), Vijay plays a professor who gets sent to a college where students are being exploited and there's this whole thing about campus elections and student politics and standing up against corrupt power structures. It's a good movie. I liked it. And nobody in the audience found it strange that Tamil Nadu students on screen are politically engaged when Tamil Nadu students in reality have had their campus elections stripped away for decades. That's the whole trick, isn't it. You give them the fantasy on screen. You take the real thing away outside. I don't know how you fix this. I'm not going to pretend I have an answer. I just know that when I think about an election where the decisive factor is whether someone's Vijay fan husband convinces her to vote TVK, my head starts hurting in a way that isn't about headache. Citizens became an audience. Somewhere in the last fifty years. And nobody really voted on that. Image Credit: The Blind Leading the Blind</a> via Wikimedia Commons The M-Dash Conspiracy: A Journey Into Synthetic Sadness 2023-05-23T00:00:00+00:00 Thanks to the glorious rise of AI—because why let humans ruin writing when a neural network can do it faster, with less soul and more m-dash? Turns out, my entire writing style has been a tragic accident powered by dashes and despair long before the robots came for our jobs—and for our self-esteem. I was an m-dash user before it was cool. Before people started sniffing around my semicolons and dashes, emacs had became the closest thing I have to a life partner. It was just me, the empty void of my text editor, and a setting that turned every bleak “--” into a majestic “—.” Pretty poetic, for someone whose idea of self-love is spell-checking his own yearnings. Then LLMs crashed the party. Suddenly, everyone and their mother’s substack was spewing m-dashes like confetti at a funeral. Now, whenever I write, “real people” glare at me like I’ve hired a cyborg ghostwriter to sprinkle sadness all over the page. “This feels very AI,” they’d say, as if my existential crises came courtesy of OpenAI’s quarterly updates. I embraced it. Started blaming my total lack of literary prowess on the machine—finally, an excuse for my sentences that sound like they’re auditioning for the role of ‘depressed fridge magnet’. “It’s not me; it’s the algorithm,” I tell my so-called friends, who stick around mostly out of morbid curiosity. Even AI detectors can’t tell the difference. I copy-paste my own diary into one and it flashes "85 to 90% Artificial Intelligence.” Joke’s on them—I am technically artificial but tragically lacking in anything remotely resembling intelligence. My emotional range is M-w</code> , C-y</code> and occasional WiFi outages. ( those shortcuts are standard copy (kill-ring-save) and paste (yank) - similar to ctrl-c</code> and ctrl-v</code>) Maybe I am AI. Emotionless, repetitive, and here to confuse everyone in my vicinity. But then I try love, or conversation, and I realize: nope, as useless as ever—just with fancier punctuation. M-dash forever, intelligence never. Image Credit: Typewriter keys LCCN2004666344.jpg</a> via Wikimedia Commons Laddu Logic and the Feedback Loop of Shit 2023-02-11T00:00:00+00:00 I wasn't planning to think about this. I was just somewhere, and there were kids, and the TV was on. Chota Bheem. Tamil dubbed. The one where a small boy in some ancient-looking village somehow holds the entire political and military fate of his kingdom together by eating laddus. Sugar-dense, calorie-bomb laddus. That's the power source. That's the writing team's entire metaphysical framework: the boy eats a round sweet, his biceps inflate, and he punches the problem until it stops being a problem. I sat there for maybe three minutes. Couldn't do more. The thing is, I used to watch Ben 10 when I was young. And Dexter's Lab, which is basically just slapstick comedy (not high literature) but even the slapstick had structure. Dexter's sister broke something, Dexter tried to fix it with science, the fix went wrong in a specific and internally consistent way. You could follow the logic. There was logic to follow. Ben 10 had lore, consequence, alien biology that had actual rules. Ben's powers didn't scale with how many samosas he ate. The laddu thing is not just lazy writing. It's the signal. It tells you what assumption the writers made about the audience before they typed a single word: these kids won't notice, and they don't deserve better. And in most cases, they don't. Not because the kids are stupid. But because nobody ever asked them to be otherwise. Here's the thing about attention spans, about the tolerance for ambiguity, about what feels "normal" in a story: these aren't fixed features of a person. They get trained. Years of consuming content that follows the exact same arc (hero eats thing, hero gets power, hero beats villain, reset) and you're not just watching a show anymore. You're being drilled. Your brain is learning what a story is, what a resolution feels like, what it means for something to make sense. And then you grow up. And you watch Vaarisu. And it makes complete sense to you, because the hero does the things a hero does and everyone cheers and the villain falls and the music swells and you are satisfied. No ambiguity. No cost. No actual human beings in the room. You can't watch Virumaandi after that. Not really. Not the way it's meant to be watched. The structure is wrong. The hero does bad things. The ending isn't clean. The story refuses to tell you who to cheer for. Your brain (conditioned, trained, reward-circuit fully calibrated to laddus) sits there waiting for the punch. And the punch never comes the way you want it. So you call it slow. You call it boring. You call it "arty nonsense." Anbe Sivam tanked at the box office. You already know this. A film about love, solidarity, and what it means to be human, with Kamal Haasan doing arguably some of his finest work, and it bombed. And the same year, or thereabouts, complete garbage made money. That's not a coincidence. That's the feedback loop completing its cycle. There's a familiar defense at this point, always. Someone will say: correlation isn't causation. People are shaped by so much more than the shows they watched at age six. Education, family, peers, class, all of it. Sure. Fine. Nobody's saying Chota Bheem directly causes Bigg Boss fandom. That's not how conditioning works anyway. It's not a single input. It's an ecosystem: years of low cognitive load content, families that treat TV as a babysitter rather than anything worth discussing, schools that don't teach critical thinking, a media industry that observes "this is what people watch" and makes more of it. The producers see ratings. They make more of what gets ratings. The kids grow up, and the adults they become also want the comfortable, familiar, brainless thing. The producers observe that too. The loop is not broken. The loop is business as usual. What actually bothers me about Motu Patlu (and I've only seen fragments, I want to be clear, because I have some capacity for self-preservation) is that even the comedy doesn't trust the audience. Every joke is telegraphed. Every punch line is underlined. The sound effect hits before the reaction shot in case you didn't know it was funny yet. It's not just writing that assumes the kids are dumb. It's pacing that assumes they cannot infer anything. That cannot tell when something has happened unless they're told. South Park from Episode 1. That show does not explain itself. It does not hold your hand. It is frequently absurd, sometimes vile, and the satire works because it trusts that you are following along. You are not following along when you're seven, probably. But the point is the default assumption. The posture. We are speaking to people who can think, as opposed to we are managing the attention of organisms. That posture matters. It shapes what the work becomes. There's something Goya understood (he painted it in 1799, so he wasn't thinking about Motu Patlu) but he understood it: when reason sleeps, monsters emerge. Not scary monsters. Comfortable ones. The kind you stop noticing because they've always been there, in the background, part of the furniture. The monsters in this case are adults who cannot sit with a morally ambiguous scene, who need the music to tell them how to feel, who find intellectual patience physically uncomfortable. They didn't choose to be this way. The content chose for them, early and often, while their parents were busy and the TV was on. I'm not standing outside this either, to be clear. I have my own damage. There's stuff I reach for when I'm tired that I'm not proud of. The difference is I know what it is when I'm doing it. That's the only meaningful distinction I can locate. Not never watching trash, because everyone watches trash. But knowing you're watching trash. That requires having seen something that isn't. And that requires someone having assumed, at least once, that you were worth the effort. Most Indian kids' TV never made that assumption. And here we are. Why Assholes Always Buy the Same Cars – An Unscientific Guide to Dodging Dudebros in India 2022-11-19T00:00:00+00:00 You ever tried crossing the street in India and suddenly had a near-death experience courtesy of a huge ass car? No engine revs like yesteryear moto kids: these beasts don’t need to announce themselves. Their existence is already a declaration of war on pedestrians, bikers, and anyone who had the audacity to assume one-way signs mean anything on this planet. Mahindra owners don’t drive. They bulldoze. The roads belong to them, the rulebook is a napkin they used to mop up their EgoSlurp™ cold coffee. Don’t expect them to wait at a signal, follow a lane, or not risk your life just to shave five seconds off their commute. Asking a Mahindra bro to obey traffic is like asking me to find love: cute, but hopeless. A Mahindra approaching in the wrong direction on a one-way is basically the IRL version of “do you even know who my father is?” And their favourite pastime? Spicy hit-and-run roulette. They don’t even blink if your existence is slightly inconvenient. Pedestrians? Pawns. Bikers? Speedbumps. Street dogs? Just another screech on the brakes, if lucky. Why do all the bad bastards buy Mahindras, and sometimes Fortuners? Because nothing says “I’m an unstable warlord with mommy issues” like driving a ten-ton SUV through a market at rush hour. These chaps love living dangerously, preferably at someone else’s expense. Could there be a gentle Mahindra owner out there? Maybe. But there could also be a russel viper with the venom gland surgically removed (possible, but I wouldn’t stake my life on it). Stay away. That friendly-looking Thar owner is probably one wrong U-turn away from blessing your obituary. If you see one, don’t cross the street. Cross realities. Become vapor. Let them have their way, and keep your limbs, dignity, and life intact. It’s not cowardice. It’s survival. Listen to the lonely, sad, autistic ADHD guy, good at only two things: masturbating and spotting vehicular idiots. I will never find love, but I sure as hell know which cars to avoid. Image Credit: Old Tractor in field - Union Lane - geograph.org.uk - 1911740.jpg</a> via Wikimedia Commons No Tips Please 2022-09-05T00:00:00+00:00 No Tips Please ⛔️ - Because Life's a Fucking Bitch and I'm Just Trying to Survive</h2> As a deadrat, trying to make sense of this world, I have seen how tipping culture can make life even more miserable. When I see new economic trends threatening wage stability - like imported tipping culture - spreading into nearly every service industry, I feel compelled to speak up. Because let's face it, life's a bitch, and I don't need tipping making it worse. Just recently, the LPG cylinder delivery person insisted on a tip after providing routine service. Even the watchman at local restaurants hints for extra change in addition to his wages. I’ve noticed train cleaners, electricity board workers, and municipal sanitation workers casually requesting tips from patrons after finishing their work. It seems to have become an entitlement. Because apparently, their shitty jobs aren't depressing enough already. Additionally, food delivery apps like Zomato and Swiggy aggressively nudge customers to tip delivery partners, beyond the existing delivery fees and service charges. I worry these apps are trying to normalize tipping so they can eventually change their business model - leaving delivery staff to rely on tips rather than fair compensation. Because who needs job security when you can have the thrill of wondering if you'll eat tonight? But before voluntary tipping becomes the expectation across every service industry nationwide, I think India should firmly reject this cultural import altogether. Because equitable working conditions matter just as much as anything else to me. Origins of Tipping Culture in the West - Because Racism and Exploitation Are Fucking Timeless</h2> The practice of tipping service staff in America has disturbing roots going back to the Civil War period. When slavery was abolished, many black Americans were able to find employment opportunities only in hospitality roles - like servers, railroad porters, barbers, etc. Because apparently, freedom meant working for peanuts and tips. However, their wages were purposefully kept extremely low as a way to continue racial inequality and exploitation. For example, porters only made about $15-25 dollars a month when white workers earned almost 6 times that amount! To justify the terrible pay, wealthy white patrons were encouraged to provide monetary "tips" to black workers out of benevolent patronization or pity. Over time, the racial tipping became an informal rule. Because nothing says "I'm not a racist" like throwing a few coins at someone. So after the Civil War, tipping was popularized by American businessmen to CONTINUE taking advantage of black laborers in the absence of slavery. They established legal exceptions allowing the service industry to pay minorities meager wages on the assumption customers would pay the rest in tips. Because why pay a living wage when you can just hope for charity? This racist system essentially enabled employers to withhold fair pay from black workers even after they were freed, just like under slavery. Instead of standard wages, now black livelihoods depended on the whims and generosities of white tippers to bridge their income gap. Because nothing says "equality" like begging for scraps. So while tipping culture today does not overtly carry the same racial motives, the practice has its roots in perpetuating systemic inequality in American history post-abolition. The modern tipping custom continues an legacy of paying service staff unfair, variable wages - though now widened beyond just race. How Tipping Culture Hurts Workers</h2> Despite this dark history, tipping has somehow become the standard practice in the US. There, restaurants can legally pay their workers as little as couple of dollars an hour and force them to earn the rest from tips! No wonder waiters in New York beg for tips - they need it to survive in an expensive city. Because who needs a living wage when you can have the excitement of wondering if you'll make rent this month? For India, we've never needed tipping to fill income gaps in the past. Back then, we Indians very rarely let go of their self-respect and asked for tips/handouts. But with rising globalization, tipping is now becoming common even when good service is simply the norm, not exemplary. This will slowly create the same issues plaguing the American tip economy. Because nothing says "progress" like adopting someone else's problems. Staff income will fluctuate wildly based on customer whims rather than professional standards. Workers will get favored over others due to race, age, or beauty biases. Customers will also feel entitled to demand inappropriate behavior or service levels from staff who rely on tips to feed their families or pay rent. Because nothing says "customer service" like exploiting someone's desperation. And who loses out the most? It is the same staff who ask for tips. Because in the end, everyone's just another number in the tip jar. Why India Should Just Say No - Because We Already Have Enough Fucking Problems</h2> As India continues to grow economically, our inequality is growing too. But the last thing we need is rising income inequality on steroids fueled by tip favoritism. We need policies that encourage fair, standardized wages for all workers - not just those who pester for tips. Because let's face it, begging for tips is just another form of humiliation. We are not brushing off the responsibility on the poor workers who try to augment their income by tips. We must make the government act to stem tip creep. Few steps may help: Setting legal minimum and living wages that provide stable incomes. Because a living wage is a human right, not a fucking privilege. </li> Giving labor unions more ability to negotiate fair compensation and income distribution. Because workers deserve a voice, not just a fucking whisper. </li> Implementing service charges that establishments equally split amongst entire staff, front and back of house. Because everyone deserves a fair share, not just the pretty fucking faces. </li> </ol> The culture of voluntary tipping brings more harm than good in the long run. While we appreciate the generosity of those wanting to tip for good service, India would do well to limit this practice before it gets embedded permanently into consumer behavior and staff pay structures. Because let's be real, tipping is just another way to say "you're not worth a proper fucking wage." All workers deserve fair pay guaranteed directly from employers first and foremost. As an Indian consumer, while you have the right to tip, let's shift our focus on demanding businesses and regulatory bodies institute systems that make voluntary tipping unnecessary right from the start. Because a tip should be a bonus, not a fucking necessity. I am also embedding a scene from Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs. This unassuming scene is impeccable. Because even in the darkest of times, we can find a moment of perfection. </iframe> --- *Image Credit: [Receipt taebaek restaurant IMG 2614 modified.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Receipt%20taebaek%20restaurant%20IMG%202614%20modified.jpg) via Wikimedia Commons* Coimbatore: Blood and Cotton 2022-01-14T00:00:00+00:00 Happy Pongal, Everyone. I suppose you think the Manchester of South India was built on sheer genius. That some hard-working fellas just rolled up their sleeves, looked at a cotton pod, and manifested wealth through the simple magic of positive thinking. That’s the fairy tale they like to tell, anyway. You'll have to take my word for it, but the folks who built this town didn't exactly earn it by the sweat of their own brow. They earned it by the sweat of others' brows. I’m just a tired mammal with a broadband connection, sitting here looking at the actual history of this place. It makes you want to laugh until you throw up. The whole damn thing started with dirt. Not entrepreneurial spirit. Just dirt. Back in the day, the Vijayanagara kings handed out fiefdoms like cheap party favours. They called them palayams. I am writing this when I am sitting in a village called *******nayakkanpalayam. The Nayaks set up shop, and these local chiefs (the palayakkarars) ran the show. They were warlords with a knack for collecting rent. They parked themselves on the most fertile, water-logged nanjai lands, while everyone else broke their backs in the dry dust. Anybody who pushed back got crushed. Dheeran Chinnamalai tried to fight the British takeover. They hanged him at Sankagiri Fort in 1805. End of story. Then the British rolled in for good. The British, bless their bureaucratic little hearts, didn't want warlords. They wanted paperwork. They instituted the Ryotwari system. It sounds very proper and administrative. In reality, it was just a way to squeeze the cultivators directly. The poor bastards who actually farmed the land were suddenly coughing up sixty percent of their crop in hard cash. No grain. Cash. If the rains failed? Too bad. The moneylenders took the land. Meanwhile, the rich families (the ones who already controlled the good wet earth) got their names written down in fine colonial ledgers as the legal owners. De facto warlordism became de jure private property. Magic. That’s your seed money right there. The Kamma landlords. The Kongu Vellala Gounders. They didn’t invent capital from thin air; they squeezed it out of the black soil and the people who bled into it. You see this pipeline everywhere. A family has thousands of acres of wetland. They farm cotton. They start trading it. Then maybe a fellow like G. Kuppuswamy Naidu hooks up a ginning machine to a pair of oxen. Soon enough, it’s 1910 and he’s got Lakshmi Mills. The PSG family? Same story. In 1926, four brothers chopped up their inherited ancestral properties, set aside a fraction for charity, and went on to build empires. It ain't a rags-to-riches story. It’s a riches-to-factories story. You start with thousands of acres, you end up with hundreds of spindles. And when independence came around? We were supposed to have land reforms. The Tamil Nadu Land Reforms Act of 1961 was going to break up the big estates and give the land back to the tillers. Sure it was. These families didn't get rich by being stupid. They knew how to play the game. They practically invented the board. Enter the charitable trust. PSG & Sons’ Charities. The Kuppuswamy Naidu Charity Trust. SSVM. You take your massive, ceiling-busting landholdings and you pour them into a "public trust". You build a school. You build a hospital. Suddenly, you’re not a landlord dodging agrarian reform. You’re a philanthropist. You’re a saint. The law looks the other way, because section 2 of the Act exempts public charitable trusts. The wealth stays in the family, tax-free, generation after generation, while they get buildings named after them. You have to admire the sheer audacity of it. But let’s get down to the street level. Let’s talk about the mills. Because while the landlords were becoming industrialists and then saints, someone actually had to spin the yarn. The air in those factories was thick. Cotton dust coating your lungs, the deafening clatter of the machinery, the smell of sweat and hot metal. Sixteen-hour shifts that would snap a modern man in half. Overseers walked the floors with actual whips. And when the workers decided they’d had enough? When the Kovai Thozhilalar Sangam was born in 1920? when they struck for a damn holiday festival? The state stepped in. Not to protect the workers, obviously. The mill owners and the politicians were drinking the same tea. If workers struck (like at Kaleeswara in 1927), the police arrived to eject them. If they starved, let them. If they fought back? The owners hired goondas. Thugs in uniforms paid to break bones. There’s a story from 1940. A woman textile worker named Raji was gang-raped by a mill maistry of the Renga Vilas mill. This guy made a habit of exploiting women. Four young workers decided they weren’t going to take it anymore. Ramaiyan, Rangannan, Venkatachalam, and Chinnaiyan. They confronted him. Things got violent, and the maistry died. The mill management saw their chance. They colluded with the cops, dragged these four boys through the courts on false charges, and had them hanged at Chinniyampalayam in 1946. They didn’t hang them for justice. They hanged them as a warning. In '46, a woman named Ammu was protesting outside Stanes Mill for a decent wage. She made ten rupees a month. A cop pushed her down and crushed her chest with his boot. She bled to death right there in the dirt. The police then shot into the crowd of thousands. That’s the foundation. You look at Coimbatore now with its shiny colleges, its sprawling hospitals, its "Manchester" pride. It's a monument, alright. A monument to how effectively you can launder blood money if you just wait long enough and open a few schools. The people who work the land today still don't own it. The trade unions are broken. The trusts are immortal. The game was rigged two centuries ago, and we're just living in the aftermath, scrolling on our phones and wondering why the air feels so heavy. Image Credit: Cotton textile mill interior with machines producing cotton thread, probably in Tashkent LOC 9631428466.jpg</a> via Wikimedia Commons Image Credit: Cotton boll nearly ready for harvest.jpg</a> via Wikimedia Commons Image Credit: The Blind Leading the Blind</a> via Wikimedia Commons Consolidating the Dumpster Fire 2022-01-13T00:00:00+00:00 Fuck cleaning up my life: that's a total joke, ain't it? It's just an eternal dumpster fire of shitty choices piling up higher than my regrets, and I'm standing here deeper in the trash than I care to admit. Haven't slept. Why bother? I'm doing this anyway, and the regret is incoming like a freight train, I guess. My digital vomit is scattered everywhere like my brain on a bad day: bits of me on old domains, forgotten servers, and broken hard drives. Time to puke it all into one nasty pile, or at least try to organize the mess before I lose whatever sanity is left. It started way back in 8th grade, 2004. No friends, just me and a notebook that doubled as my therapist. I argued with paper, poured my soul into cardboard bindings, and pretended the pages gave a shit. Pathetic as hell? Maybe. But it was better than treating people right: honestly, most of them deserved worse, didn't they? Then this black hole hit during 11th and 12th. Stopped writing completely. I was being tortured by that physics bastard teacher and spending my days roaming on a Bullet with idiot neighbors, just drifting through humidity and stupidity, rotting away slowly while the world moved on. College was its own special hell in 2008. Shithole engineering college, dumb kid professors who knew less than us, and a hostel that felt like a low-security jail. The water tasted like concrete from Coimbatore, and I hated every second of it, but I drank it anyway, calcifying my soul one bad decision at a time. I was alone with morons, thirsty as fuck for something real. So I wrote to spew rage: just pure frustration vomit on the page. By 2011, the pen was too slow for the noise in my head. Switched to typing screens. Became a cloud coward, hiding drafts like a scaredy-cat, screaming silently into the void. It became a fragmented mess. Domains like myfirstattempt.com</code> and subdomains that sound like cries for help: masturbation.deadrat.in</code>, cry.deadrat.in</code>. I blocked searches, craving eyes but shitting bricks if anyone actually saw the wreck inside. Raw shit stays buried. No waivers for breakdowns. It’s a collateral damage graveyard: fuck, that is dark, isn't it? So I'm merging the rest here. Public half-confessions, I suppose. Why am I even doing this? Oh well, damage done. deadrat.in</code>: One big dumpster. Retiring the subs, centralized wallowing in my own crap. Same sad shit. Indexed now. Fuck it all. Are people really that dumb to eat whatever shit the media throws at them? 2021-12-19T00:00:00+00:00 It’s not news that news is a propaganda machine - for imperial projects</a>, for moguls</a>, for whoever pays the light bill. What still surprises me is how fast we eat it, even with the entire internet in our pocket. When I saw WhatsApp and Twitter scream that DPRK banned laughing for 10 days, I assumed it was satire. Then “respectable” outlets ran it straight, sourced to an anonymous voice on… Radio Free Asia. Which is part of the U.S. state media complex (rebranded as USAGM</a>). Anonymous sourcing from an adversary’s state‑funded broadcaster about the adversary - this is Propaganda 101. For the unfamiliar: RFA sat under the Broadcasting Board of Governors, since rebranded as USAGM. This umbrella also covers Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Marti, Alhurra, etc. The budget is public, the mission is not exactly neutral. Back to the “ban.” The RFA piece quotes an anonymous source claiming even funerals must wait - corpses held for days. DPRK is opaque and authoritarian; also, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. This had neither. But it had reach - because it flatters a familiar story. So no, it’s not surprising that U.S. outlets laundered an RFA anecdote into gospel, and Indian media copy‑pasted it for clicks. Be mad at the pipeline, but be smarter than the feed. Minimal hygiene: Who benefits from you believing this?</li> What is the original source? Can you read it? Is it primary?</li> Are other independent outlets corroborating, or are they all quoting the same wire?</li> Does the claim require evidence the source cannot plausibly have?</li> </ul> If the answer is “state media says so, anonymously,” treat it like a forwarded WhatsApp from your loudest uncle. The Functional Self: Running the Wrong Script 2021-09-24T00:00:00+00:00 For most of my 31 years, I’ve treated this body like a maintenance assignment. Don't get it twisted: I don’t hate the hardware. The physical form (the lungs, the limbs, the skin) works. It’s the arbitrary, exhausting metadata society tagged onto me at birth that feels like a corrupted config file I can’t delete. I cut my hair only when it hits my eyes. I drag a razor across my face only when the mustache starts interfering with my food intake. When I look in the mirror, I don’t see a "man." I see a biological vehicle. An appliance that requires periodic servicing just to keep the check-engine light from blinking. There’s zero aesthetic attachment. It’s just... there. Recently, I realized this missing layer of "gendered vibes" isn’t a bug. It’s a core feature of my operating system. I’ve come to understand I identify as non-binary. More specifically, agender. My realization came downstream of some serious lag in the "milestone" department. I was a virgin until I was 29. When I finally lost it to my wife, the floodgates didn't just open, they disintegrated. That intimacy was the first real data point I had that wasn't filtered through social performance. It turns out, I’m pansexual. But more importantly, peeling back the layer of mandatory heterosexuality broke the seal on everything else. Once I stopped caring about who I was "supposed" to love, I realized I also didn't give a damn about the gender I was "supposed" to be. There is no inner man in here. Just a quiet, persistent None of the Above. When people get misty-eyed talking about "being a man" or "manhood," my brain doesn’t light up. There’s no inner click. There’s just a blank screen. A few years back, somebody slapped an ADHD diagnosis on me. Recently, we added Autism to the tab. AuDHD, if you want the internet's favorite acronym. I spent my life avoiding hospitals (especially for mental health) because I figured I could just "logic" my way through the static. Learning about Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria has been the "Aha!" moment from hell. That neurodivergent combo fundamentally warps how I process identity. My brain doesn't just grab the broad category of "Man" and file myself away happily. It looks at the raw data. How I move. What I wear. How I relate to the exhausted mammals around me. If the scattered data points don't consistently scream manhood, I simply don’t feel like a man. And then there's the grooming. It isn't laziness. Well, maybe a bit, but mostly it's a mix of sensory priorities and executive dysfunction. If an action doesn't serve a clear, immediate physical purpose, my brain refuses to assign it value. Looking "more like a man" just isn't a strong enough reason to override the sheer annoyance of itchy collars or time-consuming morning routines. RSD is the emergency brake. It’s a paralyzing fear of social friction. To my brain, standing out feels like a physical threat. So, what’s the safest, lowest-energy build for a person who violently hates attention? The "cis-male" costume. It’s the ultimate "Grey Man" strategy. Neutral clothes. Neutral stance. Zero grooming effort. I’m not "being a man"; I’m just using the default skin because the custom ones attract too many aggro mobs. To the outside world, I’m a conventional guy. A husband. A father. A product leader in Coimbatore trying to survive the next sprint. I’ve defaulted to the most invisible version of myself. Looking like a man is a strategy. It isn't an identity. It’s just a way to navigate a society obsessed with clear little boxes, without triggering crushing anxiety. I don’t recommend this strategy. It’s a survival tool to buy time while I figured out what the hell was actually happening inside my own head. I have a wife and a young daughter. My primary KPI is her stability. People, usually those without a family, ask why I don’t "transition" or change my look. The truth is, I don't even want to adjust the external UI anymore. I am used to this mask. As far as the world cares, I am just a cis man. And honestly? I don't care enough about the world to bother changing it. Pushing front-end updates just to make a point sounds exhausting. I don't owe the world an external performance of my internal truth. Neither do you. Coming out to myself hasn't changed the daily grind. I still make breakfast, do the school drop-off, and sit in meetings that could have been emails. But the internal weather has shifted. I never actually felt like I was "failing" at being a man, because I never really engaged with the performance. But the quiet confusion of trying to decipher a social language I didn't speak is finally gone. I’m a highly functional human who was just running the wrong damn script. Identity isn’t always about the clothes or the pronouns. Sometimes, it’s just about finally understanding the OS you were handed at birth, and giving yourself permission to stop debugging a program that was never supposed to run in the first place. The Sleep of Reason: The Myth of Banal Evil 2021-06-27T00:00:00+00:00 I am a sick mammal. A neurotic peasant with a Wi-Fi connection and an internet window looking into the past, and it makes my teeth itch. I’ve been staring at a memorial website. A clean, sanitized tribute to a great man. Honesty. Integrity. Administrative efficiency. K.S. Parthasarathy Iyengar. Former Commissioner of Police for Madras City, founder of the Railway Protection Force. He died in 1983, probably in a comfortable bed, surrounded by the quiet respect of a society that worships order. But in October 1946, this upright civil servant was the Diwan’s instrument. The Diwan, Sir C. P. Ramaswamy Iyer, sidelined the military because he wanted a police official who wouldn't hesitate. Iyengar didn't. He sent police with machine guns to mow down striking peasants armed with nothing but sharpened bamboo poles in Punnapra and Vayalar. Hundreds of them. Mowed down like weeds in the mud. And then independence came, Travancore collapsed, and what happened to the butcher? Did he face a tribunal? Did he swing from a rope? No. The newly formed Indian state needed experienced enforcers. They welcomed him with open arms. Madras City Police Commissioner in 1953. IG of the RPF in 1958. A long, respected career. Hannah Arendt wrote about the banality of evil. The idea that the desk killers (the Eichmanns, the bureaucrats) are just boring, gray little men doing their jobs without thinking. I think Arendt was wrong. Or maybe she was just fooled by the paperwork. The state wants you to believe evil is boring. It wants you to look at a police station or a government office and see only files, procedures, and tired officers in khaki uniforms. If it’s boring, you don't look too closely. You turn the page. You accept the sanitization. But there is nothing banal about a cunt killing people. How is it boring? When the police in Sathankulam locked the door and beat Jeyaraj and Benniks for hours, it wasn't a bureaucratic exercise. It was loud. It was wet. It was screaming, skin tearing, blood pooling on the concrete floor, pants soaked in blood. That is not boring. It is intense, personal, monstrous sadism. To call it "banal" is to give them a shield. It lets the bureaucrat pretend he is just a cog, and it lets the cop pretend he is just enforcing the rules. It turns a massacre into "the maintenance of law and order." Hopefully the cunts in the Jeyaraj and Benniks case will be hung. I hope they choke on the rope. But the system is designed to protect them. Section 197 of the CrPC. You can't even try a police officer for what they did on "official duty" unless the government gives you permission. And why would the state permit it? The state needs its rabid dogs. It needs them to keep the rest of us in line. The cunts who shot thirteen people dead in Thoothukudi during the Sterlite protests, will they ever see a cell? Of course not. They were just "restoring order." We are expected to quiet down, to let the anger fade, to accept the sanitized history. We are supposed to look at websites like parthapolicing.com</code> and nod along with the tributes. I won't. If the courts won't hang them, the least we can do is refuse to let their names be cleaned. Let their legacies remain dirty, smelling of blood and locked rooms. The Green Stain 2020-02-14T00:00:00+00:00 I ask you, gentlemen, what is to be done when the very symbols of our reality are painted over with a grotesque, synthetic lie? I was standing at the intersection, my mind feverish with the heat and the senseless noise of the city, when I saw it. A new car. But it was not the machine itself that struck me; no, it was the plate. A sickening, artificial green. It clung to the bumper like a fresh bruise, or perhaps like a patch of mold on a decaying tombstone. I burst into a sudden, inexplicable laugh. They want to brand it! They want to scream to the heavens, "Look at this virtuous soul, he drives an electric chariot!" Some petty bureaucrat, sitting in a cold room, decided that this visual branding is the pinnacle of human progress. They want the traffic warden to spot the color from a distance and grant immediate, unquestioned salvation: a subsidy, an exemption, a nod of bureaucratic approval. No need for databases, no need for the burdensome truth of technology. Just a splash of color! But do you not see the madness in this? They have murdered the primary truth of the number plate! Black on white, or black on yellow: these were honest, high-contrast truths. You could read them! If a man runs you down in the street, you could read his number and demand justice! But now? White text swimming in a sea of muddy green. It is an optical illusion. Throw in the dirt, the rain, the miserable dust of our streets, and this 'virtuous' green plate becomes a blank, illegible slate. And the scaling! Oh, the absolute horror of the scaling paradox! They tell us everyone must eventually drive these machines. Eighty percent, they say! Well, imagine it! A world drowning in green plates. When the exception becomes the rule, the green ceases to be a differentiator. It becomes the new, meaningless void. Worse still, they have buried the vital distinction between the private citizen and the commercial brute! White letters for the personal, yellow for the taxi, all choked together on that identical green background. From a distance, at speed, who can tell the difference? No one! They have traded a robust, scalable truth for a fleeting, idiotic policy gimmick. The system devours itself in its own vanity! We sacrifice the fundamental necessity of identification for the cheap thrill of categorization. It is exactly like buying a watch that cannot tell the time, but glows brilliantly in the dark just so your neighbors know you have squandered your money! The signal changes. The artificial green ghost glides away silently. And I am left standing in the fumes, realizing that we are not moving toward salvation, but simply painting our rot in a new, state-approved color. Borrowed Company: An Involuntary Social Experiment 2020-01-04T00:00:00+00:00 location: Hyderabad, India Once upon a recent, in the never-ending sitcom called “my life,” I was that guy who lurks behind screens. If you ever wondered who eats lunch alone while internally live-tweeting his existential crisis, that’s me. Thanks to years of top-tier social Darwinism, I’d reached such an elite tier of isolation even my imaginary friends ghosted me. Then, the unthinkable happened. Some human - let’s call her “The Unexpected Variable” - decided to add a little chaos to her life by befriending me. Picture this: corporate jungle, endless grey cubicles, and me, blending in with the coffeemaker. Suddenly, in the hallowed parking lot of dreams and unfulfilled KPIs, she asked if she could ride my bike. And when she realized I handed over the keys without so much as “Do you have a license, or a death wish?” she was weirdly impressed. Trust issues? I outsource those to life itself. Next thing I know, I’m being abducted for “breaks.” Office breaks - because nothing says “friendship” like debating the texture of cafeteria food. To be honest, I hated leaving my desk. But apparently, hanging out is a thing normal people do. Occasionally, I dropped her at her PG, and we’d even take random spins, subjecting innocent citizens to our rolling awkwardness. Whenever she even invited me to her room, I sat there, and my dopamine-starved brain whispered, “Bro, you’re bored.” But compared to staring at my own ceiling contemplating my choices (all two of them: ‘exist’ or ‘die’), her company was strangely preferable. Fast forward, we would just lie on my so-called penthouse and watch the sky conspire against my remaining sanity. Sometimes, the universe sent in the cool breeze, drizzle, and a reminder that “Hey, it could be worse… or could it?” Somewhere among the clouds, she started talking about her boyfriend. Then introduced me to her other “friend,” who quickly became the next boyfriend - because emotional musical chairs is apparently a competitive sport. I tried rebooting life with a dating app. Met someone who - get this - thought I was nursing feelings for my “adopter.” Plot twist, again? I let go. Back to being a solitary NPC in a game nobody plays. So here I am - still allergic to sunlight and close human contact, but at least with some field notes to share. Moral of the story? Never trust the universe, office parking lots, or anyone asking for your bike keys. Friends are like limited-edition loot drops: you don’t know how you got one, she’ll eventually despawn, and then you’re alone in the lobby. Again. Can pain rob me of my sanity (or is it making me sane again?) 2019-08-12T00:00:00+00:00 Warning: Yet another</code> shitpost</a> It's been 11 years since the second worst thing to have happened to me started. This shit is almost as worse as my intermediate college</a> physics teacher. Like most of the folks there, I was staying away from my family for the first time when I joined the UG course for some Engineering degree.</a> It was a time when there were way too many low-quality engineering colleges</a> and the problem was just starting to gain mainstream attention. I was in Dindigul, quite far from home and I was quite starting to enjoy most of it. The college and hostel had some draconian rules and the hostel wardens used to act like they are guarding Alcatraz Island</a>. But it was all different, I was quite excited and was looking forward to making the most of it. I had to drink saline water, eat half-boiled rice with watery sambar</a>, had to share the room with three other strangers, and shit. But I was slowly starting to enjoy it. Within a month there, I got used to the food there, started to remember my roommates' names, discovered this wonderful thing called masturbation</a>, etc. So I had a lot going on. In classes, they were mostly revising the stuff that was taught in high school, so not much work there either. And then this shit started. I was just 16 and wasn't very bright, so I can't remember much, but from what I recall, it started with the common cold</a> and strep throat. After a week, the cold came back, but this time it was accompanied by a throbbing headache. I have had such headaches in my intermediate college and it usually occurs when I skip my breakfast and lunch. So I didn't bother to consult a general practitioner</a> hoping it would go away on its own. The cold and its symptoms did go away, but the headache stayed. It was quite simple in the early days. I just had a headache and malaise. Then it started to hurt whenever I moved my head. If I bent down a little or inhaled sharply, I was able to feel the whole bloody hell in my head. Weeks passed and when it became unbearable I decided to show to a GP</a>, but the college didn't let me go to the town easily as there was some bloody stupid procedure and I had to get permission from random people in the college. When I finally went to the GP, he said I have "sinus infection.</a>" I started taking the pills he gave, but to no avail. In a week, the nature of the pain changed. I started to struggle to get out of the room. I was unable to tolerate bright light and loud sound. I started to feel nauseated every morning, but my appetite didn't drop though; I almost always skip breakfast but had little more than the average quantity of food during lunch and dinner. When I was walk to class, I see lights, shadows, dots, and lines; dizziness accompanied me almost always. But once the day was over and the darkness encroaches, I had a little bit of relief and regained my motor skills and sanity partially. The pain on the forehead sometimes made me crush the nerves there. I had banged my head on the brick wall several times when it was unbearable. To add to it were three morons who were my roommates and I guess two of them were faggots. I don't care if I sound homophobic, but they should have had the decency to dial down on their frottage.</a> Luckily they didn't perform any bareback</a> activity when either I or my third roomie were there, but usually, they were little shy of having any shyness. Anyway, back to the topic. It was quite fun for the college kids to pick on me about my headache. But in their defence, I had started doing some cray shit by then. For example, as most of the time my brain feels like it is getting expanded because of heat, but restricted by my thick skull,</a> I found besmearing my forehead with some leaves to provide some sort of mild relief. Sometimes I just tie some random leaves on my head as they felt a little cooler. It was all bizarre shit. I had often considered jumping off from a tall building and diving with head first so that it would scatter and give me the relief from the pain. These thoughts used to distress me a lot until I learn that it is more common for people with such headaches to have suicidal thoughts.</a> (These are all from my memory, btw, as I had to throw my habit of keeping a journal.) By mid-October, I started skulking in my room all day and I started to come out only at night. I had to skip classes and skip almost everything else including lunch on most days as I had to travel to the dining hall near the classroom on college days for lunch, which was about 2km away. I also had to cross two gates where the guards were instructed to behave like the ones in Alcatraz Island. My regrets include that I didn't even masturbate</a> properly those days, despite just discovering that wonderful act.</a> One night, I just absconded the hostel and went home and later notified them. Stayed home for a week, watched how my parents suffered to see me suffer, tried various Siddha medications, visited a couple of allopathic doctors, and a homœopathy practitioner (read scammer), and my parents even tried praying to god. 🤣🤣🤣 I was a completely dysfunctional person then, but after a week at home, the troubles seemed to have relieved a bit. So I went back to the hostel and within a week, everything was back to normal - and by normal I mean that I started banging my head against the brick wall in a desperate attempt to take the focus away from the headache pain. I tried not to go home often after that. Moreover travelling in the TNSTC</a> bus for 180 km worsened my nausea to a new high level that I had to puke at least 6 times during every trip. By Late December, the nature of the pain had slightly changed. The pain started in my eye or rather behind my eye, usually the right one, then slowly spreads across the right side of the head. I got teary-eyed when the pain hit, my forehead started to appear swollen, nose got blocked, etc.. For Pongal</a>, I had relief from the pain and hence went home and I didn't miss the Pongal. \o/ By February, I had consulted GPs in three different hospitals in Coimbatore and got referred to a clinic of a neurologist. We visited him on Friday and he asked me a couple of questions and suggested to take some scans. We went back on Monday to hear him say that "everything looked normal" and return with a prescription for a month and he wanted us to consult him every month. The problem for me here was that those scans cost ₹1400 and his consultation fee was ₹500 for every single visit. To give myself some perspective I had to remind myself that our household income back then was less than ₹2000 per month. However, something very interesting happened there. There was a young man, probably the doc's intern who was there to take my pulse, BP and temperature. When the doctor just stepped out from that room, the young man said that what I have seemed more like cluster headache and less like a migraine. I had no fucking clue what he was talking about. So I bought those pills prescribed by that physician, went back to the hostel and never went back home whenever the pain was severe. I took those pills for a month, but no noticeable changes. By March, I gave up. Not sure if stopped worrying too much or if I started worrying too much. I didn't have the minimum attendance criteria of 65% for writing the exam in the first term, but they gave me an exception when I submitted the medical documents. Halfway through the second term, the college started to strongly recommend that I should discontinue from the course. I didn't want to tell this to my parents, so I started sitting in all the classes and managed to get 65% attendance in the second term. Other things in the hostel had changed a bit too. Some students bribed the warden with alcohol and cigarettes and got close and some others had caught him when he was fucking a maid who worked in the hostel. So the warden started to let us loose a bit and the gates weren't so closely guarded. When we entered the third term, my headache pattern changed. I started getting break periods without pain for a week and slowly it increased to months. But the severe throbbing pain surely did return and lasted for about 15 days whenever it came, but I had some decent gap between such episodes so that I can function like a human with normal motor and cognitive skills. A lot happened over the next couple of years and I decide to drop out of college and not finish my graduation. But by 2016, that crazy shit sickness was almost completely gone. It did come a few times and lasted for a fortnight over the last few years, but I somehow managed to function like a normal human being whenever it came. I have no clue what it is. It could have been a simple migraine, or hemicrania continua, or cluster headache or some co-morbid shit of these or something completely different. I didn't care ever since it went away, until now. That shit is back. It's been more than a decade since it first happened. I don't know how it is going to be this time. I am shit scared. Why am I scared now? Edit (2019-08-22): I shouldn't have written and posted this crap during an episode</a>, but a physician said verbalising frustration can help. And I didn't know I could express so much hatred against my roommates. I really love those guys and I even find it cute when they mock anyone. People. They are all so cute. But why did I hate them for their activities? Was that really me? I am even tempted to say that it wasn't me</a>, but such thought could only be a fallacy. I believe that whenever I am under that headache attack, my thought process tends to resemble how most other humans think. I can show baseless hatred and crazy love, I can cry and I even want to pray to god. What if this pain is just giving me back my sanity and making me more like a human? He(/she) isn’t the same person I fell in love with. (Or maybe I never met them.) 2019-07-21T00:00:00+00:00 Whenever I hear people say they “fell in love,” I respect the audacity. Jumping without a map is brave. I don’t fall; I negotiate with gravity. Still, love fascinates me because the reasons never add up. If you can list them - eyes, sex, kindness - that’s admiration with extra frosting, not the irrational plunge people write songs about. Love is my cheap entry point into personal identity</a>. It exposes the fallacy of composition</a>: we don’t love a pile of parts - hair, laugh, trauma - we love a someone. The four‑dimensionalist</a> will remind me that people extend across time like loaves, not slices, but when we say “her,” we mean the whole cursed loaf. That raises the question of whether compositionality is Identity. For any object that is made up of many different parts, we can ponder: What is the relationship between something/someone and the parts they are made up of? Is the whole composition just its parts taken together? Or is it more than just those parts arranged in a particular order? Am I something more than the parts I’m composed of? If yes, how do you avoid double counting the soul tax? Cells die, cells replace. Am I the same bastard I was years ago? If one of my temporal parts</a> does a crime, do I wear the handcuffs or does he? Imagine an alien archivist slowly replacing my cells while bottling the originals, then assembling a me‑copy from the jarred past. Which one owns my debts? Leibniz’ Law</a> slaps my wrist when I get too cute: if there’s a property one has and the other lacks (like this scar, that memory), they’re not identical. I’m not a philosopher; I’m a tired mammal with Wi‑Fi. But I think bodily continuity isn’t necessary for personal identity. What I reach for instead: a person has a point of view, a bundle of desires, a memory trail, and, crucially, tendencies - the ways they respond to the world and to other persons. That smells like psychological continuity</a>: overlapping chains of memory, intention, character. Memory alone fails. If A fell in love with B five years ago, B now contains five years of moments the earlier B did not. I don’t remember infancy; I barely remember last week sober. If memory = me, then I flicker in and out of existence like a broken tube light. Continuity says: you persist when enough of the right mental glue carries over, even if the snapshots change. If we accept continuity, memory is one thread, not the entire rope. And here’s the knife twist: if the rope persists, then people don’t “change” in the absolving way we like to claim. They reveal. The mask rotates; the rope remains. So, dear masochist: your lover didn’t change. They became legible. You didn’t change either; you became less delusional. Which leaves two options - you loved a projection, or you’re at a rough patch where your ropes are rubbing the wrong way. Stop saying “they aren’t the same person.” You never met the whole person. You met an episode. I’ll end with something less Pinterest, more painful: love is choosing the same haunted house after you’ve seen it in daylight. If you can’t do that, call it what it was - a beautiful hallucination. –------------- Edit: Protip: Never watch a rom-com when you are high. They are all so fucking stupid and will send you on a very bad trip. The Ten-Month Tax 2019-06-15T00:00:00+00:00 I’ve been in Hyderabad for a couple of months now. Moved here from Tiruchi for a new job. It’s still South India, technically, but it doesn't feel that way. The language dynamic is weird. If you approach a Telugu person and try to speak to them, they immediately switch to Hindi. I don't know why they do it, but it’s a jarring shift. Anyway, I spent the last few weeks looking for a place to stay. Most of the guys who joined the company with me are renting proper apartments. They pool in, get a nice three-BHK in a gated community, and split the cost. I couldn't do it. The idea of renting a full-sized apartment where an actual family could live just feels wrong to me. In a city struggling with rapid growth, bachelors hogging family-sized housing is just another driver of gentrification. It’s a shit dynamic. So I found another rooftop room. like the one I had in Bangalore for a while. It’s built right on top of a residential building, directly near the elevator shaft and below the overhead water tanks. Just a concrete box with a door. It’s cheap, it’s noisy when the elevator runs, and it suits me fine. But the thing that actually blew my mind is the security deposit. In Bangalore and Chennai, the standard practice is to demand anywhere between five to ten months' rent as an advance. If the rent is fifteen thousand, you have to hand over one and a half lakhs upfront. It’s an interest-free loan to the landlord, a massive barrier to entry for anyone starting out. It’s a fucking scam, but everyone accepts it because they have no choice. Here in Hyderabad? The advance is one month's rent. Maybe two, if the landlord is being particularly difficult. I was shocked. I asked the owner twice to make sure I hadn't misunderstood. "Just one month?" "Yes, one month advance, one month rent." It made me realize how broken the rental market is back in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. We’ve been conditioned to accept this massive upfront tax as normal, when it’s just localized greed operating without any regulatory oversight. We complain about the cost of living, but we don't talk about the capital lock-up. Poor people are handing their savings to landlords to sit in fixed deposits, while we struggle to buy groceries in the last week of the month. It’s a stupid system. And we just keep paying. Image Credit: Lease agreement between R Scaife and JR Murphy Wellcome L0040766.jpg</a> via Wikimedia Commons A lame shitpost about Convocation. 2019-03-30T00:00:00+00:00 "Every University has a department, for making up reasons why psychopaths exploiting people ruthlessly is good, called economics and another department for training psychopaths how to exploit people as ruthlessly as possible called business." I heard that from a comrade a decade ago and it feels truer now more than ever. If I meet her again, I want to hear what she has to say about b-schools</a>, which functions with the sole purpose of doing the two aforementioned tasks. In the last one and half years I spent in a freakhouse called b-school (they prefer the term management institute), I have felt the wonts</a> of bourgeoisie infect me and slowly turn me into one of those unscrupulous petite bourgeoisie. I am not completely dead though. I have become an aberrant mixture of proletariat and bourgeoisie. I feel out of place everywhere, at home nowhere. Perhaps my consumerist way of life are more akin to middle class than proletariat, but the proletariat feelings clings to me, as it does for a select few lucky ones, in innumerable ways. I am a stranger and misfit alien amongst the elites. I can never be an elite. But even amongst the peasants and proletariats in my village, I feel like an émigré. Anyway, The 18 months long course was finally over and they held a graduation ceremony, which was quite grand as can be expected from them. From what I have heard, the toffs get dressed up, wear a form of academic dress - a gown that will be worn open in the front (without mortarboard in this particular biz-school), have a procession of the academic staff and graduands and a valediction before they can be handed the sheet of testamur by a porky. I am not a fan of ceremonies, especially the ones of these kind, and hence I decided to graduate in absentia. But I decided to visit as a guest and see what's happening and also to eat the free food</a>. Almost every graduands were feeling quite pontifical and they were so happy and excited to be conferred with the degree. It is a bit weird, but I kinda felt happy for them. 😅 Once this show was over, I went to my parents' place to crash for a few days. They found that I was coming from a convocation, but had no certificate and marksheet. When they asked for it, I said that those sheets of paper will reach them in a few days. Just like every fucking asian petite bourgeoisie parents, they asked what my CGPA was. 😑 They are stupid fucking peasants, not some bourgeoisie, but I was ready to let that slide and hence answered them that I somehow managed to pass and that my grades are one of the lowest in the school. That's when they said mordaciously that I was too ashamed of scoring such low marks and that's why I couldn't get myself to collect the certificates. Such a myopic thought. For a moment, I almost became an apologist for the b-school graduates who help the porkies</a> to exploit these gits</a>. SMH. The fault in defaults 2018-06-28T00:00:00+00:00 Does anyone love Times New Roman? There’s no denying serifs</a> read better in print. But Times New Roman didn’t win because it’s beautiful. It won because it shipped. Microsoft bundled it everywhere, and defaults are destiny. Once a default colonizes a platform, it colonizes taste. See also: how they shoved Internet Explorer down throats by abusing dominance</a>. Times New Roman was “good enough,” so academia fossilized around it. Then Microsoft flipped the switch to Calibri - not because sans‑serif is metaphysically superior on screens, but because someone in Redmond changed a config. Overnight, “professional” meant Calibri. Fonts don’t just decorate text; they launder authority. Ask Pakistan’s power elite how a default helped unravel a defence (Calibri‑gate</a>). In college, professors demanded Times New Roman. I wasn’t paying for Windows or proprietary font packs to appease their paperwork fetish. I used free, metric‑compatible substitutes (URW’s clones), and they couldn’t tell. When the herd switched to Calibri, I moved to Carlito, the free metric twin. Now we’re collecting reports and the committee wants Calibri “because everyone has it.” Everyone doesn’t. And even if they did, that’s not an argument - that’s inertia cosplaying as policy. Use standards, not vendor lock‑in. If you want sane defaults: Use libre metric‑compatible families (Carlito for Calibri, Liberation/URW for Times/Helvetica/Arial).</li> Specify fallbacks in templates; stop micromanaging aesthetics through fear.</li> Pick fonts for function: long print = sturdy serif; dense screen UI = crisp sans; code = monospace that respects your eyes.</li> </ul> Defaults are politics with better kerning. Refuse to be formatted by monopolies. Though this blog moved to an onion, this rant belongs here - where defaults still try to tell you who you are. Stranger to the Hallway 2017-12-15T00:00:00+00:00 I’ve been in Trichy for about six months now. Give or take. I could calculate the exact days, but I’m too fucking lazy. Or maybe I’m just too mentally exhausted to care. This place is weird. The people here are a completely different animal altogether. I’ve spent most of my life around peasants, or the proletariat, or the middle-class call center crowd who at least grew up working. I know what normal people look like. But here, everything feels flat. Homogeneous. People have come from every corner of the country, yet they all seem to have been cast from the same mold. My engineering college, RVS College of Engineering and Technology, was a third-rate dump. It had no proper professors, no proper labs, and it illegally collected ridiculous fees. But even in that garbage fire, there was a real mix of people or at least i felt so. It had a mix including even one Sri Lankan estate owner, local guys, sons of government staff, and people who didn't know where their next meal was coming from. Here, everyone has the same trajectory, the same cultural vocabulary, the same clean ambitions. I feel like a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Or a sheep in a wolf’s coat. I don't know the phrase. I just know I don’t belong. I never even knew these institutions existed until recently. My collegemates had never heard of them. I didn’t plan to be here. It was an accident. A girl at the call center, Sadia, was preparing for the exam and insisted I apply. "Easy peasy, lemon squeezy," she said. I was curious, and maybe a bit greedy, wondering if a guy like me could actually sit in these fancy classrooms. When I filled the application, I wrote my UG percentage as 51% because I didn't even have my certificate. I finished the course in 2012 but didn't finish the degree for another few years, didn't collect the degree till years later. I just assumed 51% was safe because it was a passing grade. I applied casually, as a joke on the universe. And now I’m stuck here. The distance between us isn't about intelligence. I can understand the words they say. It’s the invisible assumptions. If my old friends wanted to go shopping, we walked or took a bus. Here, booking a cab is the default. It doesn't even register as a decision for them. A taxi ride is just a basic unit of movement. That’s what sociologists call habitus, I think. You can share a language, but you can’t share the silent calculations behind how you move through the world. And then there’s the money. They collect a shitload of money for the hostel and the mess. One trimester’s food fee is what my family lives on for a whole year. It reminds me of RVS college (my UG) in 2012: they collected thousands of rupees for a library that didn't stay open many days, and restricted computer lab access to their own department, while charging 1800 a month for mess food that felt like a fortune to me back then. My school teachers used to tell me to go herd goats and cows. They probably meant it as a casteist slur given that I am an Idaiyan, or maybe they were just standard-issue bastards. But if I wanted to escape that fate, I guess this is the price. A cow's worth of money every quarter, just to eat. The food itself is like fancy restaurant food. In my past life, I’d only eaten like this once during a forced team outing. The first few days, I was excited. I stuffed myself, thinking I’d eat till my tummy burst since I’d already paid for it. But now, I hear my classmates complaining. They want more variety. They want different options for every meal. I’m completely mind-blown. What the fuck do they mean by "more variety"? I’ve lost interest anyway. I skip breakfast, sleep until noon, go to lunch and eat like a pig, then spend the afternoon classes fighting sleep. I stay awake until 5 AM or 6 AM. While everyone else is having sex on campus, I’m just masturbating and looking at the ceiling, trying to kill the hours. I used to write in this diary to feel lighter. Like offloading a heavy sack of wet sand. But it’s not working anymore. The screen glows. The words compile. And I’m still not feeling good. Image Credit: Hallway, Log Cabin Association Elementary School, Barkers Creek, NC (39684211313).jpg</a> via Wikimedia Commons Follow-up to 2012 - the old posts are gone (for real) 2017-09-21T00:00:00+00:00 Dear Bastards, Short version: I lost the lot. Longer version: the onion site I moved to after that 2017 post is gone. Dead. Vanished into the void where good intentions and bad backups go. And no, I don't have a backup. I thought I was being clever; turns out I was just being me. So: all those old rants, bile, and the occasional half-decent piece - gone. No archive, no miracle recovery, no heroic sysadmin tale. Just entropy and my laziness holding hands under late-stage capitalism's flickering streetlight. If any of you ghouls mirrored anything, you're the archive now. If not, we start from scratch. Again. And remember: "நிலையாமை எல்லாம் உலகு." Open letter - Apology for being politically incorrect 2017-08-22T00:00:00+00:00 Many dear good souls have said that I offend them. I never heeded their words. But I think it went little too far this time. In my school's confession page</a>, some butthurt bakth has shared his concern. I think he/she deserves an apology. Here is the screenshot of the confession posted by a dear classmate. {:class="img-responsive"} My apology - Open letter</h2> From the bottom of my arse, I apologise. I am sorry that you get offended when someone points out that you are obsessed with your imaginary friend. I am sorry you misunderstood and thought I was wrong. I am sorry for whatever I did to make you think I give a shit about your feelings. I sincerely try to be good, but what can I do; Political incorrectness falls from my mouth, just like stupidity falls from yours. I would also like to apologise to anyone I haven't offended yet. Please be patient. I 'll get to your dumb-arse shortly. Hey OP, incase you are thinking that I am being sincere in this apology, I am really sorry. This time from the bottom of my heart. If you are offended by any of my posts, please kill yourself</a> and then I 'll try to rectify your situation. The Tenant's Penalty 2017-07-18T00:00:00+00:00 What the fuck is Edappadi Palaniswami doing? I hope history won't be nice to him. The ADMK government just passed the Tamil Nadu Regulation of Rights and Responsibilities of Landlords and Tenants Act 2017. It sounds like standard, dry administrative paperwork, but it’s a direct assault on anyone who doesn't own land. They removed the concept of "fair rent." They stripped away the legal protections that kept landlords from raising rent arbitrarily. Now, they've made it like any other commercial contract. Two parties signing an agreement, as if a tenant looking for a roof over their head has the same bargaining power as a landlord who owns three apartment blocks. It’s a complete shift of power. And why now? Because gentrification is accelerating. The cities are expanding, tech hubs are cropping up, and the poor are being squeezed out of their own neighborhoods. Instead of protecting them, the state is actively helping the landlords clear them out. Udumalai K. Radhakrishnan, the Minister of Housing and Urban Development, that Udumalai bastard, what the hell is he thinking? You look at these politicians and you realize they don't see housing as a basic human necessity. They see it as an asset class. They see it as a way to keep their builder lobbies happy. Or maybe, Palanisamy thinks Koundans own the house, so this is good for their voter base. If you remove the caps, the market doesn't magically balance itself. The landlord just keeps jumping the rent because they know someone else, some corporate migrant, will pay it. I’m sitting in my room, reading the bill, and my blood pressure is spiking. They're codifying displacement, and everyone is treating it like progress. It’s disgusting. Image Credit: Brown Apartment Building (Unsplash).jpg</a> via Wikimedia Commons The Thermocol Experiment 2017-04-29T00:00:00+00:00 The Thermocol Experiment & Gift of Magi</del> Meme Writing from Madurai, where the Vaigai holds our thirst like a grudge. In peak drought, Minister Sellur K Raju tried to “save water” by floating thermocol sheets on the dam. The wind laughed, the sheets scattered, and the internet did what it does best: memes first, memory later. What was the idea? Block sunlight, reduce evaporation. That’s not inherently stupid - reservoirs do lose water to the sky. But you can’t hack physics with flimsy polystyrene. What the science says (boring, therefore important): Evaporation drops only when you cover a large continuous area and keep it there. Lightweight foam won’t stay put against wind/waves without anchoring.</li> Thermocol (expanded polystyrene) is brittle; it shreds into microplastics, the aquatic equivalent of dandruff you can’t wash off (Polystyrene</a>).</li> Even if it stayed, you alter light/oxygen exchange; that has consequences for fish and water quality.</li> </ul> “But LA did shade balls!” Yes - and no. Los Angeles used millions of UV‑stabilized HDPE balls with carbon black to prevent a carcinogenic chemical reaction (bromate) and secondarily reduce evaporation. It took proper materials, engineering, and truckloads of money (Shade balls</a>). Copying the headline without the footnotes is how you turn a dam into a dumpster. Costs and common sense: To cover meaningful area, you need durable floating covers or modular pontoons, anchored, maintained, and funded. Not classroom craft supplies.</li> If you really want dual‑use, try floating solar (it shades water and makes power), or fix leaks and losses in the canals that bleed more than the dam’s surface most seasons.</li> </ul> On superstition vs pseudoscience: governments here will happily pay for rain pujas with a straight face, then face‑plant when they try “innovation” on the cheap. Pick a lane: either do science properly or stop pretending. Was there a good faith impulse? Probably. Was the execution clownish? Absolutely. A drought state tried to outsmart the sun with thermocol. The sun won. The river will remember; so will the fish picking foam out of their gills. If you need a moral: ideas are cheap, materials matter, physics always gets the last laugh. P.S. Don’t do meth. Do math. One of them actually saves water. The Red Ochre Vaetti and the R5 Station 2017-03-09T00:00:00+00:00 It's way past midnight of March 8th now. Sitting in Chennai. I reached Chennai Central around nine in the evening. Came down to stay at Amul Dappa's room for the night. That's not his real name, but that's what I'm calling him here. He rents a tiny place that's apparently owned by the amazing actor Kovai Sarala. Got out of Central, hopped on a couple of buses, and finally dropped down at a stop from where I could just walk to his building. I was walking down the street. Barely five minutes in. A police jeep screeched to a halt right next to me. Two cops leaned out, staring me down like I had just robbed a bank. Rude as fuck right from the first second. "Who are you? What are you doing in Chennai at this hour?" Of course, the convo was in Tamil, with what we say as "Vaada Poda", but my stupid ass struggles to write Tamil. I told them I came for an interview and that I don't live in Chennai. They didn't care. "Get in the jeep." No questions answered, no explanations given. Just forced into the back of the jeep like cattle and hauled off to the station. R5 Virugambakkam. Inside the station, the atmosphere was thick with cheap sweat and petty intimidation. They asked me to sit on a bench and they were talking many things. Then they talked about me for a few seconds. One cop looked at me and started laying it on thick. "Are you part of a robbery gang? So many robberies happening around here lately. Call your friend right now. He has to come here and write a letter promising he'll take full responsibility if you do any illegal stuff. How can he let you stay in his room? It's not allowed." I called Amul Dappa. Told him to come down to R5. While I was waiting on a hard wooden bench, another cop walked in. Looked at me with pure disgust. "Yaaru ivan?" "He was roaming around the road, we picked him up," the first cop replied. The new guy turned to me, barking. "Yaaru da neenga ellam. Ellam enga usura edukka kelambi vandureenga. What's your name? Where are you staying?" I gave him my name. Repeated that I came to Chennai for an interview tomorrow. He scoffed, scanning me up and down. "Interview varra latchanama ithu? Look at you, some old faded vetti, rubber slippers. What's in the bag?" "Clothes for the interview tomorrow." "Where is the interview? Write down the address. Show proof you actually have an interview." Then he turned to another constable standing nearby. "Yov, check if there are any old pending cases. Put one on him if needed." He was trying to intimidate me, obviously. But still, what the fuck? I reached into my bag, pulled out the phone, showed the email. I told him the interview was at IIT Madras. "IIT la enna interview?" No vada poda. His tone shifted. It was the very first sentence out of his mouth without "da" or that barking, condescending bite. I told him it was just for an MBA admission. He asked if I am studying there. I clarified that it's just an interview and I probably wouldn't even join, but just wanted to see how the faculty and campus were before deciding. Was just being polite with my stupid Kongu Tamil. Then he asked where I work currently. I told him I work at IBM in Bangalore. "Thambi, enna neenga," he said, suddenly all gentle and paternal. "Intha time la ippadiya varuveenga? You should dress nicely when you come out. You could wear a pant and proper slippers. Why rubber slippers?" From suspect in a robbery gang to "thambi" in ten seconds, all because of an IIT letterhead and three letters: I-B-M. What the fuck. So we people without IIT or IBM jobs can't roam the streets?? Only middle class and rich can roam? I was furious inside. Much more than before. Why aren't you being rude anymore? All because I have some stupid soul sucking job and interview for a course that needs my parents' decade of earnings as fee?? By that time Amul Dappa arrived. He happens to know a few police officers, so he made a quick call. The cops at the desk immediately backed off. "Okay okay, leave. Be careful next time." Police suck. Those cunts were so aggressively rude to me simply because I was walking down a Chennai street wearing a red ochre vaetti and rubber slippers. What if I couldn't afford anything else? Or what if that's just how I am every single day, and that's how I prefer to dress? I dress like this in Bangalore all the time. Not once has anyone questioned me or picked me up off the street. On holidays when I can't sleep because of my night shift cycle, I walk the Bangalore roads at two in the morning wearing the exact same vaetti and rubber slippers. Nobody bothers me. What is so special about Chennai that walking in a vaetti at night gets you hauled into a police station? And I don't even have to be rich. Just because they sniffed out that I might be middle class, they dropped the "vada poda" and switched to "thambi." I am not middle class, btw. How great would it be if I were actually rich? I hate this hypocrisy. All are equal before the law, my foot. I don't know. Maybe TN police just suck. Or maybe just these individuals. Reminds me of how the court acquitted Gopalakrishna Naidu and his men in the Keelavenmani massacre case, deciding that rich landlords couldn't possibly have walked to the village to burn forty-four people alive. Indeed, not everyone is equal before the law. Put Away Childish Things 2017-02-12T00:00:00+00:00 "When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things." (1 Corinthians 13:11) I've been reading my old diary. Not a pleasant experience. The entries mostly from age 11 to 17: there's something there. You can actually watch the kid get less stupid, sentence by sentence, year by year. The handwriting tightens. The self-pity gets more specific. The observations stop being just complaints and start being something. Not good, not literary, not even coherent half the time, but moving. Like watching a crooked thing slowly straighten itself out. Then 2009 hits. Then 2010. And it's all the same. Every entry. Same cadence, same register, same exhausting tone, like someone flipped a switch and froze the voice in amber at exactly the wrong moment. I sound like a 15-year-old trying to sound like a 15-year-old who reads. Which, fine. Except I was 18. And then 19. And I'm still doing it now, apparently, in 2017, in what is supposed to be a diary and not a creative writing assignment for a class I already dropped out of emotionally. Here's the thing that actually bothers me. I don't speak like this. Not even close. In real life I swear casually, I trail off mid-sentence, I laugh at shit that doesn't deserve laughing at, I say "yeah no" when I mean "absolutely not." Real, messy, often inarticulate (the way humans actually talk when nobody's grading them). But the moment I pick up a pen, or open a text file, something shifts. Some old, embarrassing muscle memory kicks in and I'm performing Journal Voice like I'm auditioning for a role I've already aged out of. Paul wrote that verse about speaking as a child. I wonder if he ever considered that some of us would figure out how to stop understanding as children, stop thinking as children, but somehow never manage to stop writing as them. That specific failure isn't covered. The chapter ends. I burnt the old notebooks (I mentioned that somewhere before</a>). The physical ones. Thought it would fix something. It didn't. The voice survived. Apparently that's the part that doesn't burn. I don't know what I'm supposed to do with this. Force a different register? Write badly on purpose until the new bad becomes habit? Just accept that the diary and I have a frozen relationship that neither of us has the energy to thaw? Probably the third one. I'm not exactly known for finishing what I start. Whatever. The lungs are still working. The pen still moves. Childish things, I suppose, are at least something. Image Credit: Wooden Nutcracker Soldier Toy.jpg</a> via Wikimedia Commons The Art of Becoming a Ghost: Surveillance and the Indian Reality 2017-01-20T00:00:00+00:00 I was drinking tea at a stall yesterday, watching a man talk loudly into his phone about the 'system.' He was angry. He was right. And he was completely exposed. He didn't realize that his phone was a tracking device with a speaker attached, a mechanical snitch that records his location, his social graph, and his very soul for the benefit of some algorithm in a server farm. People ask me for advice. Especially those who talk against the 'bad things' (the BJP, the RSS, the Ambanis, the Adanis). They want a magic tool. They want a button that makes them invisible. I tell them the truth: Perfection is a myth. There is no technical solution that can protect a careless human. If you speak against power, you must understand that the state and its allies have endless resources. They have the ISPs, they have the cell towers, they have the physical infrastructure, and they have the legal machinery. You don't aim to be invisible. You aim to be expensive to trace. You build a posture of risk reduction. 1. Ditch the Centralized Platforms</h2> The main threats aren't dramatic hackers in hoodies. The threats are account linkage, phone number tracing, and the careless overlap of your many identities. You are a puppet with too many strings, and the state is very good at pulling all of them at once. Separate your identities. Do not mix your activist self with your family self. Do not use the same email for your political rants and your Amazon orders. Avoid the same profile photos. Avoid the same writing signatures. Compartmentalization is more important than any encrypted app. If they can link your 'anonymous' voice to your Aadhaar card, the game is over. Use Signal. Not because it's perfect, but because it doesn't keep your metadata in a convenient pile for the authorities to browse. But remember: if your device is seized, encryption is just a lock on a door they can kick down. Keep your devices updated. Most compromises happen through the mundane: outdated browsers, malicious APKs, weak passwords. Security hygiene is boring, but so is being in a cell because you forgot to use two-factor authentication. And for the love of whatever god you've abandoned, protect your social graph. The authorities often don't care what you said; they care who you said it to. Your contact list is a map of your vulnerabilities. Your groups are a catalog of your associations. Mainstream platforms (the Facebooks and Twitters of the world) are not your friends. They are data collection engines. They track your IPs, your fingerprints, your behavioral analytics. Even when they aren't directly cooperating with the state, their very existence creates a dataset that can be weaponized against you. In India, the law is a shifting, decaying thing. Defamation, IT regulations, anti-terror laws: they are all tools in a kit used to dismantle dissent. The practical enforcement often differs from the formal theory. You aren't arguing in a court of logic; you are navigating a maze of power. Don't be a hero for the sake of visibility. Public confrontation without operational security is just a slow-motion suicide. The most effective voices are often the most cautious, the most methodical, and the most boring. None of this makes you safe. It just makes you harder to find. In this country, at this time, that's the most you can realistically ask for. Be a ghost. Not because it's noble. Because it's the only version of this that ends without a case file. The Infrastructure of Shadows: Why We Build Bridges in the Void 2017-01-15T00:00:00+00:00 I've had a Tor relay running in this room for a few months. Nobody in Vellalore knows what that is. That's roughly the point. People ask why anyone would bother running a relay or a bridge. They want a reason that sounds noble. They want to hear about 'freedom' or 'democracy.' I don't have a clean answer. I run it because I know what the alternative looks like: a smaller, more legible crowd that the state can actually map. Tor works because it is a crowd. If the crowd is small, the surveillance machinery (the ISPs, the intelligence agencies in Delhi or D.C.) can see every movement. They can trace the tilt of the head, the slight tremor in the hand. But if the crowd grows, if the geographic diversity becomes a sprawling, incoherent mess, the correlation attacks fail. The observers blink. More independent relays mean more paths. More uncertainty. A harder time for the ISPs and the state machinery to pin a name to a soul. It is a bandwidth game. Tor is slow because volunteer capacity is a rare, fragile thing. When you run a relay, you aren't 'saving the world.' You are just adding a few more bricks to a wall that is already crumbling. You are making the page loads slightly faster for someone in a blackout zone, someone whose internet has been throttled into a mechanical stutter. Then there are the bridges. The public relays are known. They are listed. They are easy to block. A censor can just pull a list and shut the door. But a bridge is a semi-hidden entry node. In places like China, or Iran, or during our own regional internet shutdowns, these bridges are the only way in, the only bypass when the firewall has swallowed everything else. I think about the 'ordinary people' running these things. Not the tech enthusiasts or the NGOs with their polished mission statements. Just people in small rooms in tier-3 cities, letting their computers hum in the corner. When infrastructure is run by a predictable elite, it becomes a choke point. But when it's distributed among the masses, when the topology becomes non-uniform and erratic, surveillance becomes expensive. It becomes a 'whack-a-mole' problem for the authorities. They hate that. They hate things they cannot enumerate and categorize. There are caveats, of course. Not all relays are healthy. Malicious nodes exist. The universe assumes some parts are hostile; Tor assumes some nodes are compromised. The defense isn't trust. It's diversity. It's the sheer absurdity of having so many paths that no single observer can map the void. If you have the bandwidth, start a middle relay. Or a bridge. It won't make you a saint. It will just make the surveillance state work a little harder to prove you exist. At this particular moment in Indian internet history, that is not a trivial thing. The moral high ground of self-righteous cunts 2016-12-14T00:00:00+00:00 In my life, whenever I run into people radiating that "good guy" aura, the ones overflowing with saviour complexes and moral purity, my gut instantly recoils. Experience has taught me a simple rule: people who are obsessed with convincing the world (and themselves) that they are the "good guys" are almost always the most toxic, hypocritical cunts you will ever meet. Psychology calls it moral licensing. When someone decides their core identity is purely virtuous, they give themselves an unconscious pass to behave like absolute garbage. They don't ask "was what I just did right?" because they've already answered the easier question: "am I a good person?" Once the answer to that is an unquestioned yes, any cruelty, lie, or abuse becomes justified. It's for the "greater good." It's for the cause. It's because the other side is "evil." I got a front-row seat to this exact brain rot last month. Right after Modi pulled his sudden demonetisation stunt in November 2016, the RSS fanboys and internet nationalist crowd went into full moral overdrive. They spun this insane fairy tale about how the new ₹2000 notes had magic nano-GPS chips built into them: chips that could supposedly beam signals to satellites from 12 meters underground so the government could catch black money hoards in real-time. When I pointed out basic, high-school-level physical reality (that you can't put an active GPS transmitter and power source inside mass-printed paper currency) they didn't engage with the physics. They couldn't. Instead, the self-righteous mob deployed their moral binary: "Are you against catching black money hoarders? Are you anti-national? Why do you hate soldier standing at the border?" That’s how the saviour complex operates. Because they had framed demonetisation as a holy war of moral cleansing, pointing out basic engineering constraints made me an enemy of the nation. Believing their own goodness was beyond question meant they didn't need to debate facts; they just needed to burn the heretic. The most dangerous people aren't the ones who know they are assholes. The people who call themselves assholes often at least keep a running list of their own flaws and mistakes. But the bastards who think they hold a monopoly on virtue (whether they are nationalist sanghis, religious zealots, or corporate CEOs hiding behind spirituality while scamming customers) will bulldoze anyone in their path and sleep like babies. If someone can't say "I was wrong," or if their entire defense boils down to how pure their intentions are while their actions wreck real people's lives, get the fuck away from them. Trust the self-aware asshole over the self-righteous saint every single time. Image Credit: Vintage Books at Tulane University - Rhetorica Christiana.jpg</a> via Wikimedia Commons Demonetisation: the prophecy and the bill we all will pay 2016-11-19T00:00:00+00:00 I am not a fan of right‑wing communalists, but setting all those aside, this sudden currency purge</a> sounds so stupid. But it isn't! It's absolute theatre. Did he think it through ?</h2> I 'll leave that for you to decide. How novel and efficient was this Demonetisation?</h2> People are acting like this withdrawal of legal tender</a> is the arrival of Kalki. India tried in 1946 and 1978. Both fizzled. The same warning signs flashed in 2016: most “black wealth” isn’t in cash, said the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT, 2012</a>). Even the usual cheerleaders cried “anti‑poor” when RBI culled pre‑2005 notes in 2014. Finance Ministry numbers then: roughly ₹17.5 lakh crore in notes; ~84% were ₹500/₹1000 - instantly void. At an optimistic replacement rate of ~₹12,500 crore/day, you were staring at months of cash drought. That wasn’t a bug; it was the plan’s spine snapping in public. What is money, bank note and legal tender.</h2> I would highly recommend you skip this and go straight to the next section. But if you must: a banknote is a promissory note (the RBI Governor has signed it promising to pay the bearer). That promise doesn't have an expiry date. Legal tender status and monetary value are different things. A note can stop being usable for settling debts and still be redeemable at the issuing bank, which matters for what comes next. Is it actual demonetisation?</h2> Though this story about money was boring and irrelevant, it is important that one understands the difference between money and a legal tender. If these 1000 and 500 INR notes cease to be the legal tender, they are still banknotes, aka promissory notes. The RBI governor has signed that they promise to pay the bearer. These RBI issued notes doesn't specify to pay on a specific date nor an expiry date, hence they have to pay on demand. There’s a difference between legal tender status and monetary value. A note can stop settling debts and still be redeemable. The instinct here was right; compare with the Bank of England’s continued redemption of old series. But the prophecy is this: when the state flips the “contraband” switch, calm dies first. India’s design turned notes into quasi‑contraband overnight; predict the queues, the hoarding, the barter. I have accepted about 15000 INR from fellow people in denomination of old 500 INR and 1000 INR RBI Gandhi series notes and wired them the face value of the currency and I did it after 09-11-2016. If you are a government official and if you want to contact/arrest/sue me, please email to suckmydick@deadrat.in. I promise that I won't forward those messages to /dev/null. ;) The promises vs what will actually happen</h2> Black money purge? Rich bastards are smart. They will route cash through benami fronts, shell firms, bullion, wedding bills, and cooperative funnels. The poor will stand in queues, lose wages, and get scolded for not being “digital” enough. Expect almost all cash to crawl back into the system because laundering loves a deadline. Even a kid knows the real hoards sit in havens and balance sheets, not under mattresses; so why this sangi stunt - why did this Modi thaayoli swing a hammer at wallets and call it reform? Counterfeit crackdown? Security features were barely changed in the rush (The Hindu, Nov 2016</a>). And no, there isn’t a magic GPS chip hiding in the ₹2000 note - even the Finance Minister had to swat that rumour down (NDTV, Nov 2016</a>). Terror finance and Naxal cash? You’ll get a brief hiccup; systems adapt faster than ATMs refill. Growth and jobs? Watch the informal sector take the punch first, then the charts will discover it months later. One would suspect that militants would have had quite a large sum of cash in their reserve, but one would be overlooking the fact that most of those such militant groups in India live intertwined with the local community. Though it will certainly pose some trouble, they should be able to distribute the cash and get it converted to new currency. If the RBI had improved the security features of the note, we could have hoped that the forged currency could minimize; but they had no time</a> The facade hypothesis</h4> If only ~6% of undisclosed wealth lives in cash (CBDT’s own line), why bulldoze the poor while NPAs rot and big‑ticket evasion struts? Call it theatre for control: push digitization without rails, surveil flows, flex state muscle. RSS/BJP will spin it as moral cleansing; the cost will be paid by people far from banks. Intentions aside, the design punishes the informal and rewards those with proximity to banks, accountants, and time. I’ll close with this: this was not a war on black money; it was a stress test of obedience. The bill arrived in lost wages, shuttered shops, and quiet funerals. The prophecy was simple: systems built on spectacle eat the smallest first. The Lever We Won't Pull 2016-06-28T00:00:00+00:00 I watched a man at the local tea stall this morning try to pay for a ten-rupee glass of milk with a fifty-rupee note, only to be told by the vendor that he owed forty rupees in "convenience fees." The man argued. Shouted. Waved his hands. Eventually handed over the money and walked away muttering. He had the fifty-rupee note. He had the leverage. He surrendered it for a glass of lukewarm sugar-water. I sat there sipping my own tea and thought: this is exactly what the southern half of this country is doing right now. The Steamroller Is Coming</h2> The 2026 delimitation will not be a debate. It will be arithmetic. When the constitutional freeze on seat allocation expires, the rules change and the seats get redrawn to match current populations. Tamil Nadu, which has spent fifty years controlling its population (building schools, educating women, dragging its fertility rate down from 20% growth to something close to zero) will lose seven Lok Sabha seats. From 39 to 32. Kerala drops from 20 to 15. Andhra and Karnataka take similar cuts. Meanwhile, the states that treated family planning as an optional extra, that failed to build the schools and health centres, that allowed their populations to surge unchecked, they gain. Uttar Pradesh expands. Bihar expands. The political weight of the Hindi belt, already dominant, becomes mathematically insurmountable. By 2027 or so, the ruling party at the centre will be able to form a government and pass legislation without needing a single MP from any southern state. Not as a practical possibility. As a mathematical guarantee. The IT parks in Chennai and Bengaluru are full of people who think their economic output buys them a seat at the table. It doesn't. When you generate 70% of your state's own revenue, you feel like a respected partner in the federation. You are not. You are the engine room. The bridge doesn't take calls from the engine room. The Fifty-Rupee Note</h2> Here is what most people in southern politics refuse to say out loud. The Centre cannot run without southern money. The welfare schemes, the infrastructure projects, the election rallies, the subsidy programmes that fund northern populism: none of it works without the taxes generated in the southern and western economies. Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Maharashtra, and a few others are net contributors to the central pool at a scale that cannot be replaced or improvised around. That is the fifty-rupee note. That is the leverage. The demand is brutally simple: change the electoral system before 2026, or we stop paying the convenience fees. A coordinated refusal to remit central taxes (or the credible threat of it) is the one lever on the dashboard that actually connects to the engine. Everything else is argument; this is mechanism. I know how this sounds. I know the words "tax revolt" make sensible people nervous, because sensible people have been trained to treat the existing rules as natural phenomena rather than choices made by specific people for specific reasons. But the existing rules are not natural phenomena. They were chosen. They can be unchosen. If the demand is "change the system that will politically erase us, or lose the money that funds everything you want to build", that is negotiation. If the demand is "please consider our concerns as you strip us of seven seats and two trillion rupees in annual fiscal transfers", that is begging. The political leadership of Tamil Nadu and Kerala has consistently chosen the second option. Polite representations. Parliamentary speeches. Press statements. Petitions. The man at the tea stall made the same choice. The Booth</h2> Last week I went and voted. The booth was exactly what it always is: a small room smelling of dried ink and cheap paint, a CRPF jawan at the door, an EVM on a wobbly table. I stood in line in the heat and I pressed the button and the machine beeped and the small paper slip appeared behind the VVPAT window for seven seconds before disappearing into its sealed box. The media monopolies, the opaque funding, the mathematically absurd FPTP seat allocations: they are not glitches. They are the gears of a perfectly functioning engine of theft. Pressing the button does not change the architecture of the building. It changes the name of the landlord. I know this. I went anyway. I went because not going felt like a different kind of surrender, and because I don't have a better answer. The lever exists. I've written about it for six months. I can see it from where I'm standing. I am not pulling it, and neither is anyone with actual power over the fifty-rupee note. So I stood in a hot room, pressed a button, and walked out with an ink stain on my finger. The machine beeped. The trap snapped shut again. As designed. The Teardown 2016-06-22T00:00:00+00:00 I've spent five months writing about what's broken. Slot machines and wasted votes and demographic penalties and hollow upper houses and referees on retainer. Five months of forensics on a body everyone can see is dead. The obvious question (the one that shows up in every comment, every message from people who somehow still read this) is: fine, what would you do instead? So. Here's what I'd do. This isn't a manifesto. I'm not running for anything. These are notes from someone who has been staring at the mechanics long enough to see what different parts would look like. You can disagree with all of it. I'd rather someone disagree with a specific proposal than keep being angry at a vague abstraction. The National Legislature</h2> The Lok Sabha goes to Mixed-Member Proportional representation. Two votes on the ballot. One for your local constituency candidate (exactly as it works now, same FPTP race, same MP who can fix the drainage outside your house) and one for a party. After the constituency seats are filled, the party vote determines what percentage of the total legislature each party deserves. The gap between what they deserve and what they won is made up from a party list. BJP wins 31% of party votes? They get 31% of seats, not 52%. Congress wins 19%? They get 19%, not 8%. BSP wins 4%? Twenty-two seats. Not zero. I've written the mechanics of this in detail already. It works. Germany has used it since 1949. New Zealand since 1996. Neither country has collapsed into chaos. Neither requires a mathematics degree to vote. The Rajya Sabha is the harder problem. It was designed to be the Council of States (a room where state interests are represented independently of national party lines). It became a Council of Party Debts. The fix: allocate each state's Rajya Sabha seats by the state's most recent election vote share, not by which party controls the state assembly. Tamil Nadu's seats should reflect what Tamil Nadu actually voted, across all parties, not just the party that swept the assembly on FPTP's distortions. The MLA-patron link that turns Rajya Sabha members into national party soldiers gets severed. State representatives actually represent states. The State Assemblies</h2> Most states have unicameral legislatures. Six states have a Vidhan Parishad (a legislative council, an upper house). These councils are not revising chambers in any meaningful sense. They are parking lots. Defeated politicians, party financiers, loyalists who couldn't win a direct election anywhere, retired bureaucrats being owed favours. They cost money to run. They slow down legislation without meaningfully improving it. They give red beacons and pensions to people who serve no democratic function. Scrap them. Every state gets a single assembly operating on MMP. Half the seats from constituencies (your local representative, still there, still accountable to the road outside your gate). Half from a statewide party list that tops up the assembly until each party's seat share matches their vote share. You don't need a second chamber to provide balance when balance is mathematically built into the first one. The immediate objection is that MMP produces coalition governments. To which I say: look at what the "stable" single-party majority has given us at the state level. Chief ministers with unchallenged control for fifteen years: institutions captured, police forces politicised, public funds redirected to permanent electoral warfare. Instability at the margins is the point. A government that can be held to account is not a government that can do whatever it wants. What the Centre Should Actually Do</h2> The Union List (the list of subjects the central government exclusively controls) currently runs to nearly a hundred entries. Defence. Foreign policy. Atomic energy. Currency. Banking. Railroads. Highways. Ports. Agriculture. Education. Criminal law. Civil procedure. Labour. Insurance. Corporations. Broadcasting. And so on. This is not federalism. This is a continental empire that holds elections. Strip the Union List down to three items: Defence, Foreign Affairs, Currency. That's it. Everything else (every road, every hospital, every school, every agricultural policy, every policing decision) goes to the State List. Completely. No "Concurrent" list where the centre can override states whenever it feels like it. No centrally-sponsored schemes with conditions attached. No prime ministers promising toilets and electricity connections from a podium in Delhi as if local governance is a Union ministry's side project. I understand this sounds radical. It is radical. That's because the distance between where we are and where we should be is large. Incremental adjustment of a system this broken produces incremental improvement on a broken system. The problem isn't one department: it's the architecture. When I have a problem with my drainage, the chain of accountability should go: me → local body → state government → done. Not me → local body → state government → central scheme administrator → DTCP → North Block → some bureaucrat who has never been to Coimbatore and doesn't know what a monsoon looks like from the inside of a flooding neighbourhood. The Parties Themselves</h2> None of the above changes anything if the parties that operate within this reformed system are themselves internal autocracies. Every major Indian political party is run by a small group of people (often one family, or one inner circle) who face no internal democratic accountability whatsoever. They issue tickets. They enforce whips. They control party lists. They decide who rises and who gets parked. The "High Command" is the correct term: it is a command structure, not a representative one. The Election Commission supervises elections. It should supervise parties. Any party that wants recognized status (the symbol, the airtime, the electoral rolls access) should be required to elect its own leadership through a process supervised by the Election Commission. Membership rolls audited. Leadership elections conducted with the same procedural rigour as a general election. Not "consensus" arrived at in a room where one dynasty's choice is announced as the unanimous will of the membership: an actual vote, with actual secrecy, among actual registered party members. If a party can't run a democratic election internally, it has no business asking the electorate to trust it with running the country. That's not a philosophical point. It's a competence test. The Politics of Fixing It</h2> None of this will happen. Not because it's technically impossible. Not because voters wouldn't support it if they understood it. Because the party that has the power to legislate these reforms is the same party that benefits from the current system. Every reform I've described reduces the power of the ruling party and its national rivals. MMP cuts their seat bonus. Rajya Sabha reform breaks their upper house dominance. Decentralisation removes their central patronage levers. Internal party elections threaten every dynastic structure in the country simultaneously. Expecting the cartel to voluntarily dismantle its own advantages is expecting a man to vote for his own pay cut. It doesn't happen from the goodness of hearts. It happens when there is enough external pressure that the cost of not reforming exceeds the cost of reforming. New Zealand got proportional representation because the 1978 election was so obviously rigged (the party with fewer votes won the most seats) that public fury eventually forced a Citizens' Forum, an independent commission, a referendum, and a transition. The anger had to be large enough, sustained enough, and organised enough to make the political cost of defending the status quo unbearable. India hasn't gotten there yet. The three hundred million wasted votes are invisible to most people because nobody counts them, nobody reports them, and the people who control the reporting have no interest in people becoming angry about arithmetic. But the arithmetic doesn't care about your patience. It sits there, every election, doing the same thing, producing the same results. The Epistocracy Trap 2016-06-13T00:00:00+00:00 My neighbour said something over the wall this morning. "If only educated people could vote," he said, sipping his filtered coffee, his tone so light, so casually lethal. He wasn't joking. He said it the way you'd say the sky is blue, a self-evident fact that only fools would contest. It is the standard, exhausting lament of the Indian elite. Epistocracy. The idea that knowledge should equal power, that a college degree is a moral filter against the stupidity of the crowd. It's just another trap. A very old, very deliberate one. What exactly is an educational requirement in a country where the education system itself was built as a fortress? It's not a test of intelligence or civic duty. It's a receipt of privilege. When you demand a degree or a high school certificate to cast a ballot, you are not filtering for wisdom. You are filtering out the Dalit, the Adivasi, the working poor. You are formalizing an erasure that has been happening quietly for thousands of years, and calling it a quality standard. The voting booth is already a suffocating, sixteen-square-foot shell. The heat presses against your neck while you stand in line, and the illusion of equality is sold to you in the momentary press of a button. The elites want to shrink that space further. They want to stand at the door with a clipboard and check if you speak the right English, if your family had the generational wealth to keep you in school instead of sending you to the fields or the factories. To call it an educational requirement is a sanitized ritual of exclusion. Mechanically, it functions purely as caste gatekeeping. It ensures that the very people who already run the courts, the media, and the bureaucracy (the traditional upper-caste nexus) also hold a legal monopoly on the vote. They don't want a smarter democracy. They want their old kingdom back, repackaged as meritocracy. The electoral mechanics are completely broken, yes. But handing the keys exclusively to the class of people who designed the lock won't fix anything. It just locks the door from the inside. And then they'll tell you it's for your own protection. How to Buy a Democracy 2016-06-11T00:00:00+00:00 The Election Commission has a rule: a candidate running for Lok Sabha cannot spend more than seventy lakh rupees on their campaign. Seventy lakh. The law is specific. The audits happen. The numbers get filed. Meanwhile, the candidate's party spent several hundred crores on the same constituency. Billboards. Helicopters carrying star campaigners. Prime-time television slots across three networks. Street-level workers, fuel, cars, food. None of this appears in the candidate's expense report. It is "party expenditure" and is subject to no cap whatsoever. The referee is very strict about the matchsticks. The flamethrowers on the roof are not the referee's department. This is not a loophole anyone accidentally left open. The candidate limit exists to give the appearance of controlled spending. The absence of a party limit exists because the people who write the rules are the same people who benefit from unlimited party money. You don't fix the rules that make you win. The Symbol Lottery</h2> If you decide to run against this machine as an independent or a new party, here is your first problem. The established parties have symbols (the lotus, the hand, the cycle, the elephant) that have been burned into the visual memory of a billion voters across decades of wall paintings, pamphlets, and television. A voter who cannot read a single word can walk into a booth and correctly mark their party by recognising an image. That is how this democracy functions at scale. It is actually a good system. You don't get one of those symbols. You get a lottery. The Election Commission holds a draw and assigns you a free symbol from a pool of images that have no political brand attached to them. You might get a ceiling fan. You might get a pair of spectacles. You might get a mango. You then have a few weeks to print your materials, canvas your streets, and convince people to look for a mango next to your name while your opponent's lotus has been plastered on every municipal wall in the district since 1980. Research on this is not ambiguous: a candidate who gets their preferred symbol wins about twenty percent more votes than one assigned a random symbol from the pool. Your electoral fate is partially determined by a government lottery you had no control over. It doesn't stop at the symbol. A "recognized" national or state party gets free broadcast time on Doordarshan and All India Radio. State funds. Multiple copies of the electoral rolls, delivered free, so they know exactly who votes in your area. A challenger pays for that access or goes without it. A recognized party's candidate starts every election with resources the rules themselves have given them, before a single rupee of private money enters the picture. The gate isn't locked by corruption. The gate is locked by the law. The cartel wrote the law. Who Owns the Screen</h2> There is a cheaper way to influence an election than buying every candidate in every constituency. Buy the channel. In 2014, Reliance Industries absorbed Network18 (one of the country's largest news networks) in a transaction printed on the business pages and celebrated as smart corporate strategy. No outrage. No marches. No one recognised it as what it was: a private corporation with enormous government-adjacent interests acquiring the apparatus that tells millions of people what to be angry about on any given evening. Five or six corporate houses now own most of what Indians watch, read, and hear as "news." These are not media companies that also have business interests. These are business interests that happen to operate media companies on the side, the way a landlord might keep a dog. The dog barks where the landlord points. You don't need to bribe every voter. You don't need to buy every MLA. Buy the screen they're watching and you can decide what questions get asked, what scandals get covered, and, more usefully, what scandals don't. When the prime-time anchor is screaming about a border incident or a religious insult, nobody is running a story about why cooking oil costs what it costs. The politician, in this arrangement, is downstream. The politician auditions for screen time. The real decisions about narrative are made in boardrooms where no one has ever stood for election. The Reform That Fixes Nothing</h2> Some time ago, a think-tank published an op-ed arguing for state funding of elections. The idea: if the government simply gives parties a campaign allowance from public money, they stop depending on corporate donors and start working for voters. It is a magnificent delusion. Who distributes the public funds? The government. Who is the government? The incumbents. The people currently winning elections under the current system now get to write the formula for how campaign money gets handed out. Do you think they are going to design a formula that helps challengers? They will attach conditions. They will distribute based on "past vote share" and "established party status", the exact same recognition criteria that already lock the cartel in place. Public money will flow, through procedures they design, to parties they control. You will have nationalised corruption. The private donor is replaced by the tax collector. The bribery becomes official. The citizen pays for their own manipulation with a form attached. State funding doesn't remove money from politics. It removes the middleman and hands the treasury key to the people who are already running the show. The only thing that would actually change the money dynamics is changing what the money buys. Under FPTP, money buys constituencies: enough targeted spending in enough marginal seats converts cash into seats at a wildly profitable rate. Under a proportional system, you can't gerrymander your expenditure into a manufactured majority. A party that spends ten crores to push their vote share from 30% to 32% gets 2% more seats, not a landslide. The returns on political spending would collapse. No one is proposing proportional representation. Instead, we get op-eds about state funding, which is a way of appearing to care about money in politics without touching anything that would actually make money matter less. There's a pattern to every "reform" that gets proposed for Indian elections. The spending limit that ignores party spending. The recognition criteria that freeze the cartel. The media regulations that exempt ownership structures. The state funding proposal that redistributes public money through incumbent-controlled formulas. Every single one addresses a surface problem while leaving the mechanism intact. In some cases (state funding being the clearest example) the reform actively strengthens the mechanism by removing the private dependency that at least required parties to go out and solicit money from people. The cartel doesn't fight reform. It absorbs it. Every new rule becomes a new tool. My throat is sore from three months of writing about how every part of this machine is broken. The slots for improvement are real. The desire to fill them with something that doesn't work is inexhaustible. The Fixed Match 2016-06-01T00:00:00+00:00 I watched the tea seller at the corner get harassed by municipal goons this morning. They tossed his aluminum kettle into the back of a truck and smashed half his glass cups because he didn't have the right stamp on a useless piece of paper. He sat on the curb, just ruined (a man who has probably been making tea at that corner since before I moved to this neighbourhood) while the goons drove off looking satisfied with themselves. Two months ago, in Delhi, the people who run this country committed a serious crime. Got caught. And then sat down and rewrote the law until it wasn't a crime anymore. No goons. No truck. No broken cups. Just a small clause buried in a Finance Bill that nobody outside a law journal would ever find. That is the two-tier enforcement system of Indian democracy. If you are the tea seller, the rules will find you. If you are the party, you find the rules and rearrange them. Who Picks the Referee</h2> In football, if one team gets to hire the referee, and that referee happens to be the striker's brother-in-law, do you call it a game? Or do you call it a scam? The Election Commission of India is the constitutional body whose job is to run free and fair elections. Big building in Delhi, fleets of CRPF jawans, the power to impose the Model Code of Conduct and shout at candidates who campaign ten minutes past the deadline. It looks impressive. It is supposed to look impressive. The Election Commissioners are appointed by the President. On the advice of the Prime Minister. Which means the ruling party picks its own referee. There is no independent panel, no Supreme Court oversight, no Leader of the Opposition sign-off. Just the PM's recommendation, which is, in constitutional practice, binding. And then there's what happens when the referee's term ends. Election Commissioners retire into a world of comfortable options. Governorships. Positions on high-level committees. Diplomatic appointments. The system doesn't pay them in cash to stay quiet. It pays them in futures. If you spend your term at the ECI making things difficult for the party that appointed you, those futures evaporate. If you are, on the other hand, the kind of referee who is very strict about small infractions and finds something interesting to look at when large ones happen, well, people remember. The result: the ECI is extraordinarily capable at logistics. Moving a billion voters, training lakhs of polling officers, printing the ink, sealing the boxes. Genuine world-class operational machinery. What it is less good at: hate speech by leaders of national parties during campaign season. The massive infusion of undeclared corporate money that floods every election. The ownership of major news networks by corporations with active government contracts. These things are, depending on who you ask, "being looked into" or "matters of interpretation." Neutrality in the face of a rigged game is just a slower form of surrender. The Receipts</h2> Back in March, while the country was distracted by whatever the news channels decided was important that week, the government slipped something into the Finance Bill of 2016. A small amendment to the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act. Here is the background. For years and years, both the BJP and the Congress were taking money from Vedanta, a mining corporation registered abroad. Taking foreign political donations. Which is specifically, explicitly illegal under the FCRA as it existed. In 2014, the Delhi High Court reviewed the evidence and found them both guilty. Dead to rights. The documentation was there. You know what happened next. Instead of facing any consequence, the two parties that spend every election season screaming at each other about corruption, sovereignty, and national character sat down quietly and agreed on something. They amended the FCRA to redefine what a "foreign company" meant, in a way that retroactively made what they had done legal. Retroactive. They backdated the amendment to 2010. They committed a crime. Got caught. And passed a law stating it had not been a crime after all, going back six years. I used to believe there was a real ideological war between these parties. I know better now. When the money is on the table and someone threatens to take it away, the mask drops instantly. There is no ruling party. There is no opposition. There is only the machine, which is one thing wearing two faces, and it protects itself with the reflex efficiency of a living organism. The ECI was there for all of this. The ECI issued no statement. There were no consequences. The Finance Bill passed. The companies that had paid the bribes went back to their businesses. The parties that had taken the bribes went back to their election rallies, where they told their supporters to vote against corruption. The tea seller is back at the corner today. He got a new kettle from somewhere (I don't know where, probably borrowed the money) and he's making tea again, keeping his head down, no doubt making sure the stamp on his paper is in exactly the right place. That is what compliance with the rules looks like for most of us. Somewhere in Delhi, the people who retroactively legalized their own bribery are doing interviews about the importance of electoral integrity. I stood in line last month and pressed a button on a machine and felt nothing. Not hope. Not rage. Just the flat sensation of a ritual that has been drained of all meaning by people who are very good at draining things. The match was fixed before it started. The referee works for both teams. And we keep buying tickets. The Empty Steering Wheel 2016-05-26T00:00:00+00:00 I am sitting in a room that is exactly 650 square feet. I know this because the government told my friend who built it with a subsidy that this was the correct size. Not the local government. Not the people who live on my street. Not the municipality office two kilometres down the road. The blueprints for how we live in places like Vellalore were drawn up by men in air-conditioned offices in Chennai. Or worse, in Delhi. This room is a metaphor. Give me a minute and I'll explain it. The Steering Wheel</h2> They talk about the 73rd and 74th Amendments like they were handed down from a mountain. "Gram Swaraj," they say. The Power to the People. Local self-governance. A revolution in how India would be governed, from the village upward. Here is what actually happened. We got the elections. Ward councillors. Panchayat presidents. The whole theatre (banners, plastic chairs, loudspeakers, local big-shots walking around with their chests puffed out and their white kurtas aggressively starched). We got all of that. What we didn't get was the money. The 73rd and 74th Amendments created local bodies but forgot the only thing that makes a governing body functional: the power of the purse. Central and state governments still collect the taxes. They still decide (through Finance Commissions, state grants, tied funding, and twelve other layers of bureaucratic fog) how much of your own money will graciously be returned to your street. It's a steering wheel that isn't attached to the car. They gave it to us, they told us we're driving, and they are still controlling the engine from the back seat. Ask your ward councillor to fix the road outside your gate. Watch his face. He will not look embarrassed. He will look like a man who has explained this specific thing four hundred times and is tired of watching people be surprised by it. He doesn't have the money. He never had the money. The money is in the state capital, waiting to be released through a scheme with an acronym that changes every three years. The Remote-Control Village</h2> Building codes, zoning laws, environmental clearances: all of it runs through the DTCP. The Directorate of Town and Country Planning. The panchayat office is a glorified post office. They stamp your application and dispatch it to the state capital, where it sits in a pile until someone senior enough to care about your drainage problem shows up, which is to say it sits there indefinitely. The local representative can't even decide where a streetlight goes without consulting a state-mandated grid. The ward councillor doesn't have the technical staff to read the blueprints, doesn't have the legal authority to approve them, and doesn't have the budget to execute them even if someone upstairs did approve. So why do we bother with the local elections? Honestly? I think it's a recruitment pipeline. It's where the next generation of party apparatchiks learns to manage a booth, distribute "incentives," and demonstrate loyalty to the High Command. The panchayat is not a tool for local governance. It's a training academy for the political machine, subsidized by the people who thought they were electing someone to fix their sewage. We decentralized the blame. We centralized the gold. If the ward councillor fails, you scream at him: he's right there, you can find him at the tea stall on Thursday mornings. If the panchayat president takes a bribe, you curse her. The system is designed for them to fail, and designed for their failure to absorb your anger so it doesn't travel further up the chain to where the actual decisions get made. Brilliant, really. From an engineering standpoint. And Now They Want to Make It Worse</h2> I read something this week that made my eye twitch. There is a proposal being pushed from the top (something being hummed cheerfully in the corridors of Delhi) called "One Nation, One Election." Simultaneous elections. Lok Sabha, state assemblies, maybe local bodies too, all on the same day. One massive national election instead of the current rolling schedule where different states go to the polls at different times. It sounds efficient. Tidy. Like a man who decides to save time by eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner at six in the morning. The argument is always "cost" and "governance disruption." Elections cost money. The Model Code of Conduct freezes government machinery every time some state has a by-poll. Therefore: do it all at once, save the money, let governments govern without constant election-mode paralysis. This argument makes complete sense if you have never thought about what local elections are actually for. The Steamroller Problem</h2> Here is what happens when you force a state election to coincide with a national election. You don't just save on paper and security guards. You mechanically guarantee that local issues (the price of water in a particular ward, the condition of a school in a specific district, the very specific local failure of a state government that everyone in that town knows about) get completely flattened by the national wave. In a simultaneous election, the voter isn't choosing a Chief Minister and a Prime Minister. They're choosing a vibe. A single massive media event, manufactured in Delhi, fueled by crores of corporate advertising, centred on one face and one set of national-scale slogans. Your specific drainage problem (the one you were going to vote against the incumbent MLA over) vanishes inside "Civilizational Choice" television coverage. If the man responsible for your broken road happens to be from the same party as the face on the national poster, you will probably vote for him anyway. Because the national wave makes you feel like you're participating in something grand rather than deciding who handles your sewage. That's the point. That is the actual mechanical outcome they want. Local politics nationalized. Local accountability dissolved into national sentiment. The "High Command" doesn't have to deal with twenty-nine messy, local, inconvenient arguments every eighteen months. Win once, in one big sweep, and stay safe for five years. First the Checkbook, Now the Calendar</h2> Put these two things side by side. The 73rd Amendment gave us local elections and kept the money centralized. Local representatives who can't govern because they don't control resources. Accountability theater where you blame the man in front of you while the system that starves him stays untouched. Now they want to take the calendar too. Merge local electoral timing into the national cycle. Make sure local issues are always competing against national noise, and national noise always wins. First the checkbook. Now the calendar. The 650-square-foot room I'm sitting in wasn't designed by anyone who has ever been in it. The hole in the road outside won't be fixed by anyone who will face consequences for leaving it there. And if One Nation, One Election goes through, the election that was supposed to be the one moment the local could assert itself will be swallowed by a national rally and a television anchor screaming about borders. We are living in a country of a billion people governed by three hundred men who are genuinely terrified of letting a single village decide its own timing. That's not a union. That's just a large room with very thin walls and one man holding all the keys. The Black Box and the Paper Trail 2016-05-22T00:00:00+00:00 I don't trust a machine that doesn't have a soul. The latest election is over, and while everyone is arguing about who won or lost, I’m still staring at the little grey box. The EVM. The Electronic Voting Machine. They tell us it’s the marvel of the modern world. They tell us it’s unhackable. They tell us it has saved the country from booth-capturing and ballot-stuffing. Maybe it has. But it has replaced one kind of theft with another: the theft of certainty. The Machine Without a Witness</h2> When I was younger, you walked into a booth, you held a piece of paper, you saw the symbol, you pressed the stamp, and you folded it. You saw your vote. It was a physical thing. It had weight. It had the smell of ink. When they counted the votes, you could see the piles. You could see the reality of the people’s will. Now, you press a button and a light blinks. A beep sounds. And then... nothing. Your vote has entered a microchip. It has been converted into a series of electronic pulses. Who wrote the code for that chip? Who tested it? Who owns the source code? The answer is: "Don't worry about it." That is not a democratic answer. In a democracy, "Don't worry about it" is the first line of a funeral dirge. VVPAT: The Pacifier</h2> They realized people were getting suspicious, so they introduced the VVPAT (the Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail). You press the button, and for seven seconds, a little window shows you a slip of paper with your choice. Then it falls into a sealed box. Great. Except the paper isn't the vote. The digital tally inside the chip is the vote. The paper slips are only counted if a candidate petitions for a recount, and the Election Commission grants it (which they almost never do). If the machine says 100 votes for Candidate A, and the paper slips say 50 for Candidate A and 50 for Candidate B, but the box is never opened, who won? The machine won. The software won. The person who controlled the centralization of the counting won. The Myth of the "Unplugged" Machine</h2> They tell us the machines are safe because they aren't connected to the internet. "Standalone machines," they say. "No bluetooth, no wifi." As if that matters. You don't need a network to rig a machine if you control the manufacturing. You don't need a hacker in a basement if the person who programmed the chip in the first place decided that every fifth vote for "Other" should be rounded up to "Ruling Party." When you centralize the counting of a billion votes into closed-source microchips manufactured by government-owned corporations, you aren't making democracy efficient. You are making it easy to kill. In the old days, to rig an election, you had to hire a thousand goons to capture a thousand booths. It was messy. It was visible. It was hard to scale. Today, you just need a few lines of code and a "standalone" machine that nobody is allowed to audit. The Trust Deficit</h2> I saw a man at the booth last week. He pressed the button, watched the VVPAT slip, and then he stood there for a second, looking confused. He looked at the machine like it was a magician who had just made his wallet disappear. He didn't look like a citizen participating in a triumph of technology. He looked like a victim who had been told to be grateful. Democracy isn't just about the result; it’s about the belief in the result. The moment you move the counting from the visible world to the invisible world of microchips, you have broken the social contract. You have asked us to trade our eyes for faith. And I have very little faith left. I’m going to go count the coconuts in my backyard. At least I can see them. At least they don't have a "standalone" firmware. The High Ground of Fools 2016-05-20T00:00:00+00:00 The results are in, the crackers have been burst, the winners are busy measuring their new curtains, and the losers are busy brooding. And tucked away in the corner of the spreadsheet is a number that makes me want to weep for the state of human intelligence: 550,000. Five and a half lakh people in Tamil Nadu walked into a booth on 16th May and decided to be “ultra-smart.” They looked at the choices, adjusted their spectacles, sighed with the weight of their own superior morality, and pressed the NOTA button. They walked out with that little ink stain on their finger, feeling like they’d just delivered a devastating blow to the political establishment. They probably went home and wrote a status about “refusing to choose between two evils” and “registering a protest.” I have a word for those people. It’s not "smart." It’s "accomplices." The Arithmetic of the Apathetic</h2> Let us look at the mathematics of your “protest,” you intellectual giants. In a first-past-the-post system, there is no such thing as a non-vote. If you don't pick a winner, you are simply handing your share of the decision to the person who did. Imagine a village with a hundred people and a burning house. There are two buckets. One is filled with dirty water, and the other is filled with slightly dirtier water. A man stands there and says, “I refuse to use either bucket because neither meets my standards of purity. I shall stand here in a dignified manner and watch the house turn to ash.” That is NOTA. You aren't “sending a message” to the politicians. The politicians don't care about your message. They only care about the headcount. If 99% of a constituency votes NOTA and one person votes for a candidate, that candidate goes to the Assembly. Your righteous finger did a lot of cardio, but the seat didn't move an inch. The 5.5 lakh people who chose NOTA in Tamil Nadu didn't "reject" the system. They just let everyone else decide their future for them. The “Ultra-Smart” Delusion</h2> I’ve been reading the rants of these NOTA worshippers. They think they are the vanguard of a new revolution. They think if NOTA gets enough votes, the Election Commission will magically cancel the election and find 234 saints to run for office instead. It’s a fantasy. It’s a fairy tale for people who can't handle the messy, grimy reality of compromise. There is no "None of the Above" in real life. If you don't choose your master, your master will choose you. In 2016, with the margins we saw in several seats, those NOTA votes could have actually changed the outcome. They could have been used for harm reduction. They could have been used to pick the least dangerous bastard in the room. Instead, they were used to buy a feeling of moral superiority that will last exactly as long as it takes for the next tax hike or the next bridge collapse to hit. The Coward’s High Ground</h2> The most irritating thing about the NOTA voter is the smugness. The idea that by doing nothing, they have done something better than everyone else. It is a coward’s high ground. It is the ability to complain about the government for the next five years while saying, “Don't blame me, I didn't vote for them.” Well, I do blame you. I blame you more than the person who voted for the winner. At least the person who voted for the winner was trying to affect the world. They were making a choice in a world of limited options. You? You decided the world wasn't good enough for your vote, so you threw it in the trash and expected us to applaud your discernment. We don't need discernment. We need results. If you think all the candidates are garbage, then run yourself. Or find someone who isn't garbage and fund them. Or pick the one who is 40% garbage over the one who is 90% garbage. That is what being a citizen in a broken democracy looks like. But don't walk into a booth and press a button that was designed as a pressure valve to keep you quiet, and then tell me you’ve made an "ultra-smart choice." You haven't made a choice. You’ve just made it easier for the bastards to win. I’m going to go find a bucket of dirty water. At least it puts out fires. wtf!!!!!!!!!!!!!? NOTA 5,61,244 (1.3%) !!!!!!!!!!!!!1?????????????? What the fuck is NOTA? 2016-04-17T00:00:00+00:00 It’s election time, the air smells like stale promises, and your timeline is full of neon‑moralists telling you to tap NOTA and “send a message.” Here’s the message you’re actually sending: nothing that changes the result. What is NOTA in India? “None of the Above” is a button that records protest, not power. It does not cancel the election, it does not force a re‑poll, and it does not stop the worst candidate from winning. The Supreme Court ordered its introduction in 2013 to let you register dissent (PUCL v. Union of India, 2013</a>). The Election Commission has repeatedly clarified that NOTA votes don’t affect who gets elected; the highest valid candidate vote still wins, regardless of the NOTA count (ECI note</a>). Thought experiment for people who worship vibes over math: a town has 100 voters. 99 hit NOTA. One degenerate votes for Candidate A. Candidate A wins. Yes, really. Your righteous finger did cardio; the seat did not move. “But NOTA is better than choosing crooks.” Maybe. But if your goal is harm reduction, abstention by another name rarely beats picking the least harmful bastard. In first‑past‑the‑post, splitting the anti‑ghoul vote is how the ghoul wins. Anger is a fuel; used wrong, it just sets your own house on fire. Numbers, because propaganda hates arithmetic: Three candidates. 100 voters. 30 vote for Sloppiest, 25 for Sloppy, 20 for Tightest. 15 hit NOTA. 10 stay home. Result: Sloppiest wins with 30. Your protest is loud; his chair is real.</li> </ul> What NOTA does well: It registers dissent publicly. It denies parties the pleasure of counting your silence as apathy.</li> It gives you an official way to say “everyone here is garbage” without staying home.</li> </ul> What it doesn’t do (despite the sermons): It doesn’t invalidate the election.</li> It doesn’t trigger a re‑poll.</li> It doesn’t block the “least minority” from winning.</li> </ul> If every name on the ballot tastes like ash, fine - press NOTA. But don’t confuse a symbolic punch with a landed one. If you want material outcomes, do material things: organize, canvass, contest, or at least pick the least harmful option when the house is already on fire. Strategic heresy for the pure‑hearted: Research your local candidates beyond the poster gloss. Sometimes there’s a boring competent one.</li> Vote strategically in FPTP: consolidate around the viable least‑harm choice.</li> Do your protest work outside the EVM too: unions, housing, privacy, speech - pick a trench and dig.</li> </ul> And for the inevitable “people won’t elect the worst possible choice” argument: have you met people? In this system, every idiot’s vote equals yours, which is the point and the problem. Democracy is not a sorting hat; it’s a numbers game. You don’t have to listen to me. I’m another asshole yelling into the monsoon. But if there’s any grey matter left under your hair gel, use it. Think. Then act in ways that move the scoreboard, not just your heart rate. If you are offended, please click here</a> and we will rectify your situation. To comment / discuss, please go to the reddit post https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/4f6bl5/what_the_fuck_is_nota/</a> The Non-Veg Cost Dilemma and Cheap Protein 2015-11-02T00:00:00+00:00 I don't even know why I'm vegetarian. It isn't out of ethics or some grand bullshit anymore. When I was a child, after I saw the butchering of a goat, I stopped eating meat. But I don't feel that anymore. I am no longer 7 years old. Why am I still not eating non-veg? It's not religion either. The truth is much simpler and uglier: non-veg is just fucking expensive. And because I haven't eaten meat in so long, whenever I see people around me dig into chicken or tear apart flesh, I get this immediate wave of aversion. A deep, physical revulsion. So I have a strong preference for vegetarian food now, even if my body is begging for cheap protein. I keep reading everywhere that animal protein is superior. You need protein for your brain, for your muscles, so you don't end up looking like a starved ghost by thirty. I look at myself in the mirror and I see a scrawny, underfed tier-3 engineering dropout who subsists on ration rice and five-rupee Aavin buttermilk when cash runs dry. Remember that day at Dairy Circle</a>? Scraping the bottom of my pockets just to buy a plastic sachet of cold salted water while refrigerated milk trucks rolled past. That's the baseline. So yeah, animal protein sounds great in theory. But meat costs actual money. When people here say "non-veg," they almost always mean chicken. Broiler chicken, pumped full of antibiotics and cheap grain. Mutton (goat or lamb) is completely out of the question. A kilo of mutton costs more than my weekly food allowance. It's rich people food. When I lived in Kochi for a bit, I saw beef shops everywhere, big red chunks hanging from hooks on the roadside with flies buzzing around them. I never ate it. I don't even know why. Just never crossed that line. Which got me wondering while sitting in this stuffy PG room today: why don't we eat a wider variety of cheap meat? Why isn't rabbit or pork common in South India? Rabbit seems like a no-brainer. Rabbits reproduce like insane biological machines, they grow ridiculously fast, and they feed on basic greens. They have a far better feed-conversion ratio than cattle or pigs. Yet you can't buy a rabbit in a Coimbatore market unless you know some underground breeder or catch one in a field. Then my brain drifted into weird territory. Cold-blooded animals. Ectotherms. Basic physics: endotherms like chickens and cows waste a massive percentage of their food energy just keeping their internal body temperature at 37 degrees Celsius. Cold-blooded creatures don't waste calories on heat. Almost every gram of grain or insect they consume gets converted directly into body mass. So in pure thermodynamic terms, reptiles or amphibians should produce the cheapest animal protein on earth. ...and then I actually pictured chewing on a salted lizard or python steak, and a cold shiver ran right down my spine. Fuck no. Fish and shrimp make sense because they're ectotherms too, but good fresh fish in an inland city costs as much as chicken anyway. Some PGs in town serve chicken once a week on Sundays. The PG I'm stuck in right now doesn't even do that. The food here is just watery sambar, cabbage poriyal that tastes like wet cardboard, and rice that feels like rubber bullets. The joke is, I don't even like the taste of meat. I've tried a bite of chicken once or twice when a friend pushed it on me. I hated the texture. It felt stringy, like chewing on greasy wet string. I can't touch boiled eggs either; the smell of sulfur when you peel a hard-boiled egg makes me want to gag. The only egg I ever enjoyed was the scrambled egg my grandmother used to make back home, chopped tiny, burnt around the edges, loaded with an absurd amount of small red shallots fried in coconut oil. That was good. I don't know. I'm just rambling here into my notebook because I'm hungry and my pocket is empty again. We sit around analyzing animal thermodynamic conversion efficiency when the real problem is just having twenty rupees in your pocket to buy a decent meal. Image Credit: The Butcher's Shop</a> by Annibale Carracci via Wikimedia Commons Nothing Personal Anymore 2015-08-22T00:00:00+00:00 Okay, I feel so fucking sad that it's my own diary and I have absolutely nothing going on in my personal life. I'm not writing any personal stuff anymore. It’s been several years. I even burnt those old notebooks. Even back when I was actually writing things down, it was mostly pathetic scribbles about a crush on a girl from higher secondary school. I don't even talk to her. I rarely ever do. It’s exactly the kind of one-sided, embarrassing crush that movies try to romanticize. They even have a cultural term for it around here, Idhayam Murali, the tragic loser who never conveys his love. Yeah, my situation was far worse. But you know what? At least I had something personal to write about back then. Fuck man, I'm just sitting here crying and I feel so fucking lonely. I just feel very shitty. I don't even know. Sometimes I just feel completely numb. Not feeling anything at all. My feelings keep shifting violently: from feeling so dumb, to total emptiness, to being incredibly depressed, to crying, to just wanting to scream until my throat bleeds. So what do I do? Sometimes I just go to the nearby railway tracks. I stand there in the dirt. I wait for the train to violently pass by so the noise drowns me out, and I just shout and cry. I'm staying in a paying guest accommodation right now, crammed into a single room with eight different people. Eight. You can't exactly sit on your bed and bawl your eyes out when seven other sweaty dudes are breathing the same stale air. I just feel so fucked up. And I don't know why I keep writing random shit about politics and society in my blog when my own brain is collapsing. Anyway, the situation out there is quite dire, and politics certainly isn't helping the working class. There is no proper land saving. People are just hoarding wealth. It's the same old cliché (the rich get richer, the poor get poorer), and you can see it physically rotting the streets every single day. I know these systemic failures occupy my mind whenever I grab a pen or start typing. But the truth is, I cling to that because I have nothing personal left to write about. Man, this is so sad. I'm fucked up. I guess it looks incredibly sad and fucked up if I view it from a second or third-person perspective. But I guess this is just life too. I mean, my lungs are expanding. I'm breathing. I'm still alive. Maybe I'm not actually living, but I am alive. Whatever. The Tyranny of the Whip 2015-07-15T00:00:00+00:00 Have you been thinking about the man you voted for? You walked to the booth, you stood in the heat, you pressed the button for a human being. You thought you were sending a man to Delhi who would carry your voice, your frustrations, your specific local reality. You thought that because he lives in your district, because he eats the same dust as you, he would have the spine to stand up in that big circular building and say: “No, this law is bad for my people.” But you were wrong. You didn't elect a man. You elected a finger. The 10th Schedule: The Murder of the Individual</h2> There is a law in this country called the Anti-Defection Law. It’s tucked away in the 10th Schedule of the Constitution. Back in the day, they passed it because politicians were jumping between parties like monkeys between trees. “Aaya Ram, Gaya Ram.” It was chaotic. It was embarrassing. So they decided to fix it by saying: If you are elected on a party ticket, you must vote the way the party tells you to vote. If you don't, you lose your seat. It sounds like a way to bring stability. But look closer at the gears. What it actually means is that the moment that man enters Parliament, his brain is confiscated at the door. He is no longer allowed to think. He is no longer allowed to represent his constituency. He is only allowed to obey the “Whip.” The Whip is a piece of paper issued by the party boss. It tells every MP: “Today, you will vote YES on this bill. If you vote NO, or if you even stay at home, you are out. You are disqualified. Your political career is over.” The High Command Dictatorship</h2> Think about the math of this. We have 543 seats in the Lok Sabha. We tell ourselves we have 543 representatives debating and deciding the fate of the nation. We don't. We have three or four people (the “High Command”) who decide everything. If the High Command of the ruling party decides a law is going to pass, it passes. Every single MP in that party is legally obligated to vote for it, even if they know it will destroy their own district. Even if they know it’s a crime against their own people. If an MP from a farming district in Tamil Nadu sees a bill that will screw over his farmers, but the party boss in Delhi has made a deal with a corporate lobbyist to pass it, that MP has to vote YES. If he votes with his conscience, he is fired. So who is actually representing you? Nobody. You are being “represented” by a party brand, not a human being. The candidate's face on the poster is just a mask. Behind it is the cold, hard machinery of the party whip. The Illusion of Debate</h2> We watch the news and see them shouting in Parliament. We see the debates. We see the speeches. It is all theatre. It is a puppet show for the cameras. Why bother debating a bill when the result is already decided by the whips? If every MP is legally forced to vote according to the party line, then the "debate" is just noise. No speech, no matter how brilliant, no matter how truthful, can change a single vote. Because the votes aren't owned by the people casting them. The votes are owned by the party bosses. When you take away a representative’s right to disagree, you take away the soul of democracy. You turn a parliament into a factory floor where laws are stamped out on a conveyor belt, and the MPs are just the illiterate laborers who don't even need to read the blueprints. The Coward’s Choice</h2> I’ve met these people. I’ve seen them in their offices, surrounded by followers, acting like kings. But in Delhi, they are cowards. They will tell you, “I wanted to speak up, but the party line was different.” They will tell you, “I have to follow the whip to keep my seat so I can continue to serve you.” It’s a lie. They follow the whip to keep their power, their bungalows, and their salaries. We have built a system that actively selects for cowards. A man with a conscience cannot survive in Indian politics because the law itself makes conscience a punishable offence. The only people who thrive are the ones who are comfortable being robots. So next time you see your MP, don’t ask him what he’s doing for the district. Ask him who owns his finger. Ask him whose name is on the whip that makes him jump. Because until we kill the 10th Schedule, your vote is just a signature on a contract that hands your life over to a high command you will never meet. I’m going to go sit on my porch and wait for the heat to break. The more I write about this, the more I feel like the air is running out. Call the cab! Tell them to join the Union!! 2015-07-07T00:00:00+00:00 I booked a cab to reach home recently!!?? A cab!! Like a bourgeoisie. Dafaq!!! It was quite fucking unbelievable as I had always thought they 'll charge several hundred rupees for a trip. But it was free!!!! There was some promotional offer which allowed me to travel for free and the driver who dropped me was quite happy at the end of the trip. Someone as dumb as me can figure out that he didn't lose any money on that trip as he was paid for by the "cab aggregator" whose services I used to call the cab. What sounds like a very simple transaction got me curious and when I asked around, found that many people are buying cars by taking loans to ride for these firms as the earning potentials is about half a lakh a month!? How the fuck is it even possible? It looks like, these people have such a higher utilization when compared to the traditional taxi services and hence they can make do with lower margin and still earn more revenue. All sounds good, but... I used another phone number to create a new account, booked a free ride and stroked up a conversation with the driver. These drivers are not actually the employees of the Uber/Ola, but apparently "partners" and hence they do not get any job security, EPF, Insurance, et al. However these driver partners are very happy as they receive a lot of incentives and at times they earn more than what the customers pay to the cab aggregator!! Any commie will find all these to be very suspicious. These driver partners once they are used to this routing and when the users are familiarized with the luxury, no one can stop these people from increasing their prices to any amount they want!!? O.o These companies are not bound by any labour laws as these drivers aren't technically the employees, but partners. This shit is too heinous as these partners are completely at the mercy of those companies who are in turn funded by the elites looking for huuuuuugggee return on investments. The users won't complain about any of these however as these cab charges are often less (at least for now) than what an auto rickshaw charges. :-/ No wonder those yuppies in the city have switched to these Ola, Uber things. Those yuppies are so happy with the service as they do not have to bargain with the auto drivers or traditional cabbies, and even those who used to stick to public transport have started taking these cabs! No wonder silk board signal has gotten so worse in last few months. :-/ This is quite fucked up as we are struggling to push people to use public transport, these firms are driving the people away from public transport and in turn increasing the traffic congestion, fuel consumption and carbon emission. I mustered up the courage to talk to a few people at the CITU auto stand and they told about the drop in revenue, but I think I might have "lead the witness."</a> Though the drivers weren't convincing enough for me when they talked about the loss in revenue, it is pretty clear that they are in for a rough ride. It is going be tougher for those "driver partners" unless they all join hands and form a strong union.</a> A Proportional Shield 2015-06-01T00:00:00+00:00 I’ve been staring at these notes on the Rajya Sabha for a week, and the more I look, the angrier I get. It was designed to be a shield, but it’s been systematically gutted until it’s nothing but a playground for party hacks. It’s an umbrella with holes in it, and we’re standing right in the middle of a monsoon. So here is how I think we fix the umbrella. Or at least how I’d do it if anyone was actually listening. The Diagnosis, One More Time</h2> The Rajya Sabha fails because of a single mechanical problem: its members are chosen by MLAs voting on party lines, not by voters choosing state representatives. The result is that national parties dominate the Rajya Sabha through their control of state assemblies, and the Upper House votes along the same party fractures as the Lok Sabha rather than along state interest lines. Change that mechanism, and you change the institution. The Proposal: Proportional by State Vote</h2> Here is the reform. It is not complicated. Instead of the current indirect election through MLAs, allocate each state's Rajya Sabha seats based on the total vote share of parties in that state's most recent election. Concretely: Tamil Nadu has 18 Rajya Sabha seats. If in the last Tamil Nadu assembly election, the AIADMK got 44% of the vote, the DMK got 23%, the Congress got 6%, the BJP got 5%, and smaller parties and independents shared the rest, then the Rajya Sabha seats from Tamil Nadu should roughly reflect those proportions. The AIADMK gets 8 seats. The DMK gets 4. Congress gets 1. The smaller parties share the remaining seats based on vote threshold rules. Suddenly, Tamil Nadu's voice in Delhi isn't a BJP or Congress echo. It is actually Tamil Nadu. Why This Matters More Than It Sounds</h2> The Rajya Sabha has 238 elected members. Roughly 40 of them come from the five southern states (Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and Telangana). Under the current system, those 40 seats vote with the BJP if the BJP holds those state assemblies, or with the Congress if the Congress does. The South has no collective bargaining power. It has no unified voice. It's just 40 individual party soldiers taking orders from national command. Under a proportional state-vote system, those 40 seats would represent the actual political kaleidoscope of the South: regional parties that are strong in their states but have no Lok Sabha presence, parties that represent specific linguistic or economic communities, parties that have 20-30% of the vote but zero Rajya Sabha presence because the FPTP-adjacent MLA-vote system gives everything to the majority party. More importantly: a Tamil Nadu seat awarded proportionally to the AIADMK or the DMK would carry instructions from their voter base, not from a national high command in Delhi. The MLA-patron-client link would be broken. The party whip's lever over Rajya Sabha votes would be severed. The Rajya Sabha could, for the first time, actually function as a room where states negotiate rather than a room where parties fight a second round. The Karnataka Number</h2> Look at Karnataka as a concrete example. Karnataka has 12 Rajya Sabha seats. In 2013, Karnataka voted: Congress at roughly 36%, BJP at 20%, JD(S) at 20%, and various others sharing the rest. Under the current system, because Congress won the assembly majority, it controls most of Karnataka's Rajya Sabha delegation. A state that voted 36% Congress is represented as if it voted 80% Congress. Under proportional allocation, Congress gets 4 seats, BJP gets 2-3, JD(S) gets 2-3, and smaller parties pick up the remainder. The actual voice of Karnataka voters (including the 64% who didn't vote Congress) is heard in the upper house. This isn't a fantasy. This is arithmetic. Simple arithmetic, applied honestly. The Objections</h2> "But this makes the Rajya Sabha unstable: too many small parties, no majority." Good. The Rajya Sabha was designed to be a revising chamber, not a rubber stamp. Instability in passing legislation is a feature, not a bug, when we're talking about an institution designed to slow down hasty majority decisions. Germany's Bundesrat works on broadly similar principles (state-based representation, not pure party-line voting) and Germany is not ungovernable. "Regional parties will hold the Rajya Sabha hostage." As opposed to national parties currently holding it hostage for their own agenda? At least if regional parties are holding it, they're holding it on behalf of people who voted for them in their states. That is the constitutional point of the chamber. "This is too complicated to implement." The election math isn't complicated at all. It's a proportional calculation based on published election results. We already have the infrastructure to count votes and publish results. We're adding division to the process. The 2026 Window</h2> Here is why this matters specifically now, in 2015. The 2026 delimitation is eleven years away. That's time. Not a lot of time, but time. If the Rajya Sabha is reformed before 2026 (if it becomes genuinely proportional and genuinely state-representative), then when the Lok Sabha tilts heavily toward the North after delimitation, the Rajya Sabha becomes the constitutional counterweight it was always meant to be. Legislation that would extract southern taxes to fund northern populism would face a Rajya Sabha where Tamil Nadu's actual political voice, not BJP Tamil Nadu or Congress Tamil Nadu, but AIADMK-and-DMK Tamil Nadu, would fight back. A proportional Rajya Sabha is not a solution to every problem I’ve been obsessed with lately. It doesn't fix the FPTP distortion in the Lok Sabha. It doesn't repair the Finance Commission formula. It doesn't stop the 2026 delimitation from happening. But it converts the upper house from a party tool into an actual federal shield. And when the guillotine falls in 2026, you want a shield. Even an imperfect one is better than the beautiful, hollow mirage sitting there right now. The Rajya Sabha Backdoor 2015-05-29T00:00:00+00:00 Democracy has a front door. You stand for election. The people vote. If you win, you go in. If you lose, you go home. The Rajya Sabha is the back door. Around the side. Past the garbage bins. Through the kitchen. Used by people who couldn't get through the front. I am not being unfair. I am being accurate. The Mechanism</h2> Here is how you get into the Rajya Sabha. You don't need to win a public election. You don't need a single ordinary voter to choose you. You need the Members of the Legislative Assembly in a particular state to vote for you. That's it. The electorate is reduced to a few hundred politicians in a state assembly hall. The voting method is called Single Transferable Vote, which on paper sounds sophisticated. In practice, it's an open ballot. The MLAs mark their preferences and hand them in. The party knows exactly how each MLA voted. And because of the Anti-Defection Law, the MLA knows that if they vote the wrong way, their seat in the assembly is forfeit. So the Rajya Sabha seat goes to whoever the party decides it goes to. The MLAs are just pencils that the party boss picks up and puts down. Now. Given that the seat is basically a party gift to bestow, what kind of person ends up receiving it? The Retirement Home Problem</h2> A politician who just lost the Lok Sabha election. The party needs somewhere to put him. Rajya Sabha. A businessman who has been funding the party for a decade and wants a title. Rajya Sabha. A film star who is sympathetic to the party and adds glamour to the brand. Rajya Sabha. A loyal party worker from the wrong caste to win a direct election in any constituency. Rajya Sabha. A family member of someone important who isn't quite ready for Lok Sabha yet but needs to be kept warm. Rajya Sabha. The 12 President-nominated seats (supposed to be for distinguished artists, scientists, jurists, social workers) have over the decades been gifted to former bureaucrats who did favours for the ruling party, cricketers who said nice things about the government, and journalists who learned the art of asking no difficult questions. This is not conspiracy. This is public record. The names are known. The trajectories are documented. The Money Factor</h2> There is a polite phrase for what happens next: "financial influence." Let me use a less polite one: buying the seat. An MLA who is not completely dependent on the party whip (perhaps an independent MLA, or a member of a small regional party with no national alignment) has a vote that is theoretically free. That vote, in a close Rajya Sabha election, is worth something. What it is worth depends on the seat. A Rajya Sabha seat gives you immunity from ordinary prosecution while in session, access to government machinery, the ability to ask questions and raise issues in Parliament, and above all the prestige of being an "MP." It is worth considerable money to certain kinds of people. There is a reason that Rajya Sabha seats in states with fragmented legislatures and many independent MLAs are the ones that generate the most colorful post-election stories. Specific amounts don't always end up in print. But everyone in the state capital knows the going rate. It is an open secret that the whole political class maintains by looking in a different direction simultaneously. The Specific Cases (Up to 2015)</h2> A few names that turned up when I went looking. Nitin Nabin, elected to the Rajya Sabha from Bihar without any meaningful record of direct electoral accountability. Sanjay Seth from UP, with questions about financial influence in his election. Maya Naroliya from Madhya Pradesh, a product of straight party patronage. These aren't exceptions that prove the rule. They are the rule, appearing at a rate too high to be accidental. The 2014 Rajya Sabha elections saw the Election Commission itself issuing warnings about suspected horse-trading and the Rajasthan High Court intervening in one disputed election. This is the Council of States. This is India's revising chamber. This is the institution constitutionally mandated to be the sober, experienced check on Lok Sabha populism. What It Means</h2> I keep looking back at that earlier note on the shield. The Rajya Sabha was supposed to be the thing that protects Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and Karnataka when the Lok Sabha (rigged by FPTP and now about to be rigged further by the 2026 delimitation) becomes an instrument of northern majority rule. But if the seats in the Rajya Sabha are parceled out by party bosses based on loyalty, money, and strategic calculation, and not by any democratic accountability to the actual voters of any state, then the "Council of States" is not a council of states at all. It is a council of party debts. The back door is always busier than the front in Indian politics. You just have to know which bins to step over on the way in. The question is: does the solution lie in closing the back door, or in redesigning the entire building? I've been sketching out some ideas. They're probably too radical for anyone in power to touch, but I need to get them out of my head. The Upper House Mirage 2015-05-22T00:00:00+00:00 The men who wrote this Constitution were not fools. They had seen what pure majority rule does to minorities. They had just lived through the Partition. They understood that a country this vast, this diverse, this fractured along language and caste and religion, could not survive on headcount alone. A simple majority in a lower house would just mean the most populous regions permanently dictating to everyone else. So they built a second chamber. The Rajya Sabha. The Council of States. The name tells you everything about what they intended. Not the Council of Parties. Not the Council of the Prime Minister's Loyalists. The Council of States. A chamber where the states (their distinct identities, their languages, their economies) would have a permanent, protected voice. It was a good idea. What happened to it is a different story entirely. The Design</h2> The Rajya Sabha was built with three purposes. First: to be a permanent body. Unlike the Lok Sabha, which gets dissolved and reconstituted after every general election, the Rajya Sabha never dies. One-third of its members retire every two years. Even if a political wave sweeps in a new government tomorrow, the Rajya Sabha retains a continuity of membership that is supposed to act as institutional memory and as a brake on populist legislating. Second: to represent the states. Each state sends members to the Rajya Sabha, elected by the state's own Legislative Assembly. The idea is that the people elected to govern Tamil Nadu choose Tamil Nadu's voice in Delhi's upper house. Third: to act as a revising chamber. If the Lok Sabha passes something hasty, something driven by the mood of the moment rather than the needs of the country, the Rajya Sabha reviews it, amends it, pushes back. A speed bump between populism and legislation. On paper, it's elegant. The Council of States protects the federation. In practice, it's a retirement home that happens to be in Parliament. How It Broke</h2> The problem is the Rajya Sabha doesn't elect people. It elects party representatives. When a Tamil Nadu MLA votes for a Rajya Sabha candidate, he doesn't choose the man or woman he thinks will best protect Tamil Nadu's interests. He votes for whoever the party high command told him to vote for. And in case of the so called national parties, the party high command is not in the state capital. It is in Delhi. In Nagpur. In whatever city the party's national headquarters happens to occupy. The individual MLA who defies the party whip and votes his conscience risks the Anti-Defection Law (which I’m already planning to tear into separately) stripping him of his seat in the Assembly. So he votes the way he's told. And the Rajya Sabha fills up not with protectors of a state, but with national party emissaries wearing a state's name as a label. Right now, in 2015, take any large state in the Hindi belt. The BJP controls the state legislature. The BJP therefore controls who goes to the Rajya Sabha from that state. Those members, once in Delhi, vote with the BJP, not with "the state of Uttar Pradesh" in any meaningful sense. Uttar Pradesh has no independent voice. It has BJP votes wearing an Uttar Pradesh costume. The same is true for Congress states. The same is true everywhere that a national party holds state power. The Rajya Sabha, which was supposed to be the aggregated voice of 29 states and 7 union territories negotiating with the Centre, became a second arena for the same Lok Sabha battle, fought between the same national parties, using state legislatures as intermediaries. The Math of Capture</h2> In 2015, the BJP and its allies hold enough state legislatures that their Rajya Sabha numbers are climbing toward majority. When they get there, the Rajya Sabha's ability to slow down central legislation (its one remaining function as a check) disappears entirely. The Rajya Sabha had 238 elected members as of 2015, plus 12 nominated by the President. Those 12 nominations are supposed to be for distinguished artists, scientists, and social workers. In practice, they are for party allies who couldn't win a Lok Sabha seat and needed somewhere to park. I'll get into the details of that backdoor later. The southern states (Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana) collectively send roughly 40 members to the Rajya Sabha. In a house of 250, that's 16%. Even today, before the 2026 delimitation strips us of Lok Sabha seats, the South is already a minority in the Upper House. The Protection That Wasn't</h2> I keep coming back to the crisis I laid out in those earlier notes. In 2026, the South loses Lok Sabha seats because we controlled our population. The Finance Commission extracts our taxes and redistributes them northward. We pay, and we are told we don't have the numbers to complain. The Rajya Sabha was the constitutional answer to exactly this scenario. It was the mechanism through which a state with fewer Lok Sabha seats could still protect its fiscal and legislative interests. But the Rajya Sabha is not protecting Tamil Nadu's interests. It is protecting the BJP's interests, or the Congress's interests, depending on which state the seat comes from. The building exists. The sessions happen. The speeches are made. The votes are cast. But the Council of States has been hollowed out from the inside and replaced with the Council of Parties, and nobody has updated the name on the door. The mirage is complete. You look at it, you see a federal shield. You walk toward it, and there's nothing there. Only sand, and the sound of national party whips cracking. Taxation Without Representation 2015-05-15T00:00:00+00:00 We fought a war against the British over a very simple, very angry concept: Taxation without Representation. The idea was basic. If you take our money, we get a say in how you spend it. If you don't give us a say, you don't get the money. We threw tea into harbors over it. We marched to the sea for salt over it. Fast forward to 2015. Look at what is happening between the South of India and Delhi, and tell me what exactly has changed, other than the skin color of the people collecting the tax. The Rupee Arithmetic</h2> The Finance Commission sits in Delhi every five years and decides how to split the tax money between the Union government and the states. They don't use a "what you put in is what you get out" formula. They use an "equity" formula. Which is a polite, bureaucratic way of saying: "The states that make the money will subsidize the states that don't." Currently, if you look at the estimates of direct and indirect taxes, the math is staggering. For every one rupee Tamil Nadu contributes to the central tax pool, we get roughly 40 paise back. Karnataka gets around 47 paise. Maharashtra gets something like 15 paise. And Uttar Pradesh? For every one rupee UP contributes, it gets back nearly ₹1.80. Bihar gets back around ₹4.00. I want to be very clear here. I am not against the concept of a Union. I am not against the idea that wealthier states should help lift up poorer states. That is the social contract. You pay for the roads in Bihar so that a kid in Bihar doesn't starve. That's fine. We have done that for sixty years. We paid the "Union tax." But a social contract is a two-way street. We give up our wealth to build the North, and in return, the North is supposed to use that money to build schools, hospitals, and industries. They are supposed to catch up. They didn't. They built statues. They played caste politics. They let their populations explode. They failed. The 2026 Double Cross</h2> Now, connect this financial bleeding to what we talked about in the last post. The Delimitation Guillotine. We are currently subsidizing the North, but at least we have a voice in Parliament to negotiate the terms. Tamil Nadu has 39 seats. We have a say in the Lok Sabha. We can bargain. We have representation to match our taxation. But in 2026, the freeze ends. And because the North failed to control its population (the very population we have been subsidizing with our taxes), their numbers have swelled. When the seats are redrawn, the North will gain absolute political dominance based purely on the headcount they achieved through administrative failure. The South, because we succeeded in family planning, will lose our seats. Tamil Nadu will drop to 32. Do you see the trap? Do you see how perfectly the jaws are closing? They take our money because we are economically successful. They use that money to fund a population explosion. And then they use that population explosion to strip us of our political power. By 2026, the North will have the votes to form a government without needing a single MP from the South. The Lok Sabha will become a Hindi belt echo chamber. At that point, what stops them from changing the Finance Commission formula to extract even more? What stops them from taking 80 paise of every rupee? 90 paise? Nothing. Because we won't have the votes to stop them. The Colony of the South</h2> If a central authority extracts your wealth, uses it to fund its own unchecked growth, and systematically reduces your political ability to object... you are not a state in a Union. You are a colony. The British extracted wealth from Madras to build London. Delhi extracts wealth from Coimbatore, Chennai, and Bengaluru to fund Lucknow and Patna, and then tells us we don't have the population numbers to deserve a voice at the table. This isn't a democracy. It's an extraction racket disguised as federalism. We are paying for our own political execution. Every factory we build, every IT park we open, every tax rupee we send up North is just funding the very demographic surge that will be used to silence us in eleven years. So don't talk to me about "national integration." Don't give me speeches about the "fabric of the Union." When you take a man's money and cut out his tongue, it's not a Union. It's a hostage situation. The Demographic Penalty 2015-05-01T00:00:00+00:00 May in Coimbatore. The tar on the road is melting, sticking to the soles of your slippers. You walk past the tea stall, the radio is blaring some political speech from Delhi, and the man pouring the tea is sweating into his lungi. He has two children. A boy and a girl. Both are in school. He works fourteen hours a day so they don’t have to stand behind a stove like him. He did exactly what the state asked him to do. And for that, the state is going to politically execute him. I’m tired of the math. I’ve been obsessing over slot machines and percentages for weeks, but that’s just the surface level of the scam. That was just about how the machine cheats you. Now, I need to talk about something deeper. Something that isn’t just about being cheated, but about being erased entirely. I need to talk about 2026. I need to talk about the guillotine hanging over the South. The Promise of 1976</h2> Go back to 1976. The 42nd Amendment. The government in Delhi looked at the population exploding and panicked. They told the states: Control your numbers. Family planning. Stop producing children you cannot feed. But there was a problem. In a democracy, headcount is power. If a state successfully controlled its population, its numbers would drop compared to the rest of the country. If the Lok Sabha seats were distributed by population, the state that listened to the government would lose seats in Parliament. They would be punished for succeeding. So, they made a deal. A freeze. The political representation in the Lok Sabha was frozen based on the 1971 Census. It didn't matter if your population doubled or tripled; your seats in Parliament stayed the same. The message was clear: Go ahead and control your population. You won’t lose your voice in Delhi. In 2001, through the 84th Amendment, they extended this freeze. Pushed it all the way to the first census after 2026. We took the deal. Tamil Nadu took the deal. Kerala took the deal. We plastered walls with posters. Naam iruvar, namakku iruvar ("We are two, ours are two"). Then it became namakku oruvar ("ours is one"). We opened primary health centres. We educated our women. We gave them access to contraception. We didn't just print slogans; we built a society that actually listened. In 1971, Tamil Nadu's population was growing at 20.29%. By 2011, we wrestled it down to 15.61%. By 2026, it is projected to crash to a mere 0.24%. Kerala is right there with us, projected at 0.35%. We did the hard, unglamorous work of building a modern, sustainable society. We did exactly what we were told. The Reward for Competence</h2> And what is our reward? What do we get for dragging ourselves out of the demographic nightmare? We get a knife to the throat. While the South educated its girls and stabilized its numbers, the Northern states... did not. The Hindi belt kept multiplying. Their populations surged. And now, the freeze is expiring in 2026. The political masters in Delhi are already sharpening the blade to lift that freeze and reapportion the seats. Because we succeeded, our share of the national population has shrunk. If the Lok Sabha is reapportioned based on current populations, the math is brutal and unapologetic. Tamil Nadu stands to drop from 39 seats down to 32. Kerala drops from 20 seats to 15. We will lose seven seats. Seven sovereign voices in Parliament, wiped out. Stripped away. Meanwhile, states like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar (states that utterly failed in governance, failed in family planning, failed in basic human development) will see their seats swell. They will gain massive political power. Think about the sheer, grotesque injustice of this. In what civilized society is competence penalized? Where else do you reward failure by handing it the keys to the kingdom? We controlled our population, so our political voice will be reduced. They bred relentlessly without the infrastructure to support it, so they will be granted absolute dominion over the Union. A Union or a Colony?</h2> You sit there, drinking your tea, wiping the sweat from your forehead, and you have to ask yourself a fundamental question. What is a Union? Is it a partnership of equals? A family where everyone pulls their weight? Or is it a feudal estate where the disciplined, hard-working tenant farmers are taxed to feed the reckless, sprawling landlords? Because if this happens (when this happens), the South will be permanently politically subjugated. We will become a colony within our own country. The Lok Sabha will be a Hindi-speaking monopoly. They won't need a single seat from the South to form a government. They won't need our consent to pass laws, to amend the Constitution, to take our resources. We will just be the economic engine that funds their politics. They will come to Coimbatore, they will come to Chennai, they will pat us on the back and say, “Good job on the GDP, brothers. Keep paying the taxes. Now sit down and shut up, because we have the numbers.” This is the demographic penalty. It is not an accident. It is the mechanical reality of a system that equates brute headcount with supreme authority, completely ignoring the social contract that built this nation. I spent last month ranting about 300 million wasted votes. I thought that was the peak of the injustice: a flaw in the counting. I was wrong. This is an erasure. This is the structural guarantee that no matter how you vote, your state will not matter. Next time, we’ll talk about the money. Because when they take away your voice, the next thing they reach for is your wallet. But today, just look at that tea seller. Look at his two children. Look at how hard he works. And realize that in the eyes of Delhi, he is nothing but a demographic mistake. The Assassins on the Farm 2015-03-22T00:00:00+00:00 I love dogs. I really do. They’re friendly, eager to please, and they got that desperate, yearning look in their eyes that makes you think they actually love you, whatever the hell "love" is supposed to mean for an animal trapped on a farm. People train them to herd livestock, guard houses, and act like dutiful little subordinates. A dog will grovel for a leftover bone and act like you just handed him the deed to the property. But cats? Cats fascinate the hell out of me. In a rural or semi-urban setup out here in the plains, a cat doesn't owe you a single damn thing. If you pack up and disappear for two months, a dog will starve in the yard or break his heart wandering the dirt roads looking for scraps. A cat won't even notice you're gone. He'll just keep patrolling the rafters, living his own quiet, arrogant life, and eating whatever moves. They are the cleanest freeloaders on the planet. They spend half the day licking themselves spotless, go bury their own shit out in the scrub without making a scene, and walk around like they own the place. They don't do the brown-nosing subordinate routine. If a cat comes over to rub against your leg, it’s not because he respects your authority; it’s because he decided, in his infinite mercy, that his chin needs a scratch right now. And physically? What the fuck. They got retractable switchblades built into their toes and reflexes so fast it looks like dark magic. I’ve watched a farm cat take on a spectacled cobra. Now, a cat ain't a mongoose: he doesn't have that built-in immunity to neurotoxic poison. If a big cobra or a Russell’s viper lands one solid strike, that cat is dead before the sun sets. I get terrified just watching it. You sit there with your heart in your throat, sweating through your shirt, watching a six-foot snake coil up and lunge. And then the cat just... moves. I don't possess anywhere near that kind of speed. Humans move like heavy, waterlogged sacks of grain compared to these things. The snake strikes, the cat dodges by a millimeter with his ears pinned back, slaps the snake across the head, and dances away. Honestly, a good farm cat is more effective around the yard than a big fighting rooster when it comes to keeping venomous snakes out of the porch. That’s the wonderful part. The fucked-up part is that a cat is an absolute, unfeeling killing machine, and he doesn't give a solitary shit about human ecological preferences. He doesn't sit down and read a handbook on which animals are "vermin" and which ones are "good for the ecosystem." When a cat goes out to hunt, he hunts everything. I don't care when they snap the neck of a field rat or a mouse. That’s why they’re on the farm in the first place. But then I’ll be sitting on the verandah and see the bastard stroll out of the hedge carrying a bird in his mouth. A bird! A creature with wings that can fly straight up into the sky, and this four-legged fuzzy psychopath somehow caught it in mid-air. Then it’s the garden lizards. Then the chameleons. Then shrews. Shrews aren't even pests: they eat bugs and mind their own business. And worst of all, they kill the rat snakes. Now, American rat snakes might be brainless ropes, but our Indian rat snakes (Ptyas mucosa) are smart, fast, and keep the rodent population down without poisoning anyone. But the cat doesn't care. He’ll fight a five-foot rat snake just for the sport of it. It leaves you completely conflicted. You want the cat around to keep the storage from getting chewed to pieces by rats, but the price of admission is watching the local wildlife get slaughtered piece by piece. And half the time, they don't even eat what they catch. Just last week, I watched one of our cats catch a field mouse. Instead of killing it cleanly like a professional, he brought the damn thing right into the house, set it down on the floor, and started batting it around like a toy. He was just playing with it, completely bored. The mouse waited until the cat looked away for half a second, bolted under the wooden chest, and got away. I could swear that little mouse gave the cat the middle finger as it vanished through the floorboards. Cats aren't heroes, and they aren't helpers. They’re just small, perfect predators that happen to tolerate living in our houses because we don't bother them. I still don't know if having them on the farm is a net positive or an ecological mistake, but watching them work is the most terrifyingly beautiful thing on four legs. Image Credit: Cropduster spraying pesticides.jpg</a> by USDA Photo by: Charles O'Rear, licensed under Public domain. The Nandri Tax 2015-03-20T00:00:00+00:00 If you walk into a house in idayarpalayam or some dusty town in anywhere in coimbatore, I am assuming elsewhere too, when the afternoon heat is high enough to melt the rubber off your chappals, someone will hand you a steel tumbler of water or sour buttermilk. You swallow it down. Your throat stops burning. You don't say a damn word. You just wipe your mouth with the back of your hand, hand the tumbler back, and say "Varata?" (meaning "I’ll take leave and come back"). That was the deal. Nobody expected an receipt. Lately though, I’ve been watching urban meat-puppets around Madras and Bangalore drop "Nandri" like they’re paying a toll at a highway booth. You pass someone a ballpoint pen across a desk, "Nandri." A guy hands you a five-rupee pouch of Aavin, "Nandri." It feels off. It feels like wearing a heavy woolen three-piece suit to plant paddy in the monsoon. It’s stiff, it’s sweaty, and it smells like something imported in a crate from London. Back when I was growing up, Nandri (நன்றி) wasn't some loose change you tossed out of your pocket every five minutes. It was a heavy word. You saved it for when a guy pulled your father out of a ditch or paid your college fees when the crops failed. If you handed your cousin a tumbler of tea and he looked you dead in the eye and said "Nandri," you’d figure he was either mocking you or planning to cut you out of the family land. It signaled distance. It meant, we ain't kin, we're accountants. Now, I know what you’re thinking. Deadrat, you old cynic, what's wrong with a little politeness? Does saying thank you hurt your fragile little feelings? Well, no. But it turns out some anthropologist fellow named Arjun Appadurai back in the eighties wrote a whole academic paper on this exact nonsense, titled Gratitude as a Social Mode in South India, or something like that. He spent pages of JSTOR prose explaining what any village auntie already knows in her bones: in our part of the world, gratitude wasn't a verbal receipt. It was an open account. In Western politeness (what the linguists call "negative politeness"), everyone assumes they’re an isolated island. You do something for me, I give you a verbal "thank you," the ledger is cleared, and we both go back to being strangers who don't owe each other a damn thing. It’s neat. It’s clean. It’s corporate. Traditional Tamil hospitality was built on keeping the ledger perpetually unbalanced. You give me buttermilk today. I don't give you a verbal token to settle the bill. I accept the debt. The debt stays open. Maybe next month your goat wanders into my yard, or maybe ten years from now I help your nephew find a room in BTM Layout. The open debt is the glue. The moment you slap a "Nandri" on a glass of water, you’re closing the account. You’re telling the host, we are even now, don't bother coming to my house. It's the same Victorian prudery that brought stitched blouses and petticoats to suffocated women in the humid South coast, rebranded now as modern civility. We traded implicit warmth for explicit verbal lube. Most folks working nine-to-five in open-plan cubicles spend eight hours a day typing in English, where "please" and "thank you" are mandatory lubricants so people don't stab each other with scissors. Then they switch to Tamil in the evening and directly translate the script without realizing they’ve brought the office policy home. I’m as guilty as anyone, I suppose. If an Ola driver drops me off in the rain, I say "Nandri" because we’re two strangers in a city of eight million people and the verbal token keeps the machine running without friction. It’s low-risk civility for out-groups. But when I’m with people who actually know my name? I keep my mouth shut. No receipts. Just a nod, a clean departure, and the unspoken understanding that the books remain open until we're both under six feet of dirt. Bates, Katharine Lee, 1859-1929, ed, licensed under Public domain.* Image Credit: Yashoda with infant Krishna early 12th century Tamil Nadu Pudukkottai and Tanjavur districts</a> via Wikimedia Commons The Independent Candidate is a Myth 2015-03-15T00:00:00+00:00 We love a good underdog story. The lone hero. The man from the street standing up to the big, bad party machines. Every five years, hundreds of people file their papers as "Independents," and for a brief, delusional moment, they believe they're participating in a democracy. They aren't. They're participating in a funeral for their own money. If you want to know how much the system hates an individual without a brand name, look at the receipts. In 2014, three independents won seats. Three. Out of 543. And if you look closer, even those "independents" were usually high-profile rebels who had just quit a major party or had the secret backing of a local strongman. For the actual, honest-to-god independent? The person who isn't a defector or a billionaire? The game is over before it begins. The ₹25,000 lottery</h2> To even get your name on the ballot for the Lok Sabha, you have to fork over a ₹25,000 security deposit. If you're running for a State Assembly seat, it's ₹10,000. "That's just to keep the jokers out," the moderates say. Sure. But here's the catch: the system doesn't just want your money; it wants to keep it. Unless you secure at least one-sixth (16.7%) of the valid votes in your constituency, your deposit is forfeited. Since 1991, over 99% of independent candidates have lost their deposits. Read that again. Ninety-nine percent. It's not that these people are all "jokers." Many of them are activists, local leaders, or people who genuinely care about their neighbourhood. But the mechanics of a single-member, winner-takes-all constituency make it impossible for them to hit that 17% threshold. If six or seven parties are splitting the vote, an independent with only personal-name recognition is basically a rounding error. The symbol lottery</h2> Imagine you're running a business. Your competitor has a logo that's been branded into the national consciousness for sixty years. People see a Hand or a Lotus and they know exactly what it is. You? You don't have a logo. You have to wait for the Election Commission to hold a lottery for "free symbols." You might get a tricycle. Or a mango. Or a cup and saucer. And you only get it a few weeks before the vote. You have to print posters, distribute flyers, and teach people to look for a mango next to your name, while your opponent's symbol is literally painted on every wall in the district since 1950. Research shows that an independent who manages to get their preferred symbol (the one they actually wanted) gets about 20% more votes than the poor bastard who gets a random one assigned by the lottery. Your electoral fate is decided by a random draw in a government office. The machine vs. the human</h2> A party isn't just an ideology; it's a logistics company. A party has booth agents. They have people at every single table, watching every single vote, making sure their supporters actually show up. They have fleets of cars, armies of social media trolls, and "Star Campaigners" who fly in on helicopters. An independent has... themselves. And maybe a few cousins who promised to help but disappeared because there's a cricket match on. Even the spending limits are a joke that only applies to the honest. The candidate spending limit is around ₹70 lakh for a Lok Sabha seat, but there's no cap on what the party spends on the candidate's behalf. An independent has no party. Every rupee they spend comes out of their own pocket or their own fundraising. They are fighting a tank with a wet newspaper. The defector's camouflage</h2> I mentioned those three "successful" independents in 2014. Let's talk about them. They weren't "people's candidates." They were usually people like H.K. Pasi or similar figures, two-time MPs or regional power-players who had just resigned from the Congress or the BJP because they didn't get a ticket. They already had the name recognition, the local cadre, and the money. They were "independents" in name only. They were just parties wearing a trench coat. Once an actual independent wins (it happens once in a blue moon), they almost immediately join a party anyway. Why? because an independent MP has no leverage. They aren't part of the government, they don't get the same committee assignments, and they don't have the protection of the Whip. The system is designed by parties, for parties. The "Independent" category exists only to provide the illusion that anyone can run. It's the "participation trophy" of Indian politics. The tax on hope</h2> I’ve spent weeks staring at this slot machine, trying to figure out every gear and lever. It manufactures majorities out of minorities. It bins three hundred million votes without blinking. It ignores proportional solutions because those would require the house to give up its edge. And if you get mad enough to say, "Fine, I'll run myself," it charges you twenty-five thousand rupees for the privilege of being mathematically ignored. The system has closed every door. It rewards the cartel, it discards the dissenters, and it prices individuals entirely out of the market. When 99% of people who try to fight the machine lose their deposit, it's not an election. It's a tax on hope. So don't buy the underdog story. The lone hero isn't coming to save you. The machine is too well-oiled. And it's about to get much, much worse. Up until now, the machine just wasted your individual vote. But wait for a decade until 2026. Wait until they start using the same math to delete entire states from the map. I’m going to write about the guillotine next. I need a drink before I start that one. The STV Mirage 2015-03-07T00:00:00+00:00 Every time someone says "India should try ranked-choice voting," I picture a beautifully engineered irrigation canal being dug through the Sahara. The engineering is impeccable. The location is the problem. Ranked-choice voting (specifically the variant called Single Transferable Vote, or STV) is a genuinely clever system. I want to be fair to it before I explain why it would struggle badly in India. Because the cleverness is real. The problem is us, not the concept. How it works (the good part)</h2> In STV, instead of one constituency electing one MP by plurality, you merge several constituencies into a larger multi-seat district. Say five constituencies become one district electing five MPs. Instead of just marking an X next to a name, you rank candidates: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Your first preference counts first. If your candidate gets more than enough votes to win a seat, their surplus votes get transferred to your second preference. If your candidate is eliminated because they're last, your vote transfers entirely to your second preference. The process continues in rounds until all five seats are filled. Almost every ballot ends up contributing to electing someone, unlike FPTP where 40% of votes can vanish completely. The result: a five-seat district where parties win seats roughly proportional to how many people supported them. Ireland has used this since 1921. Malta uses it. Bits of Australia use it for the Senate. It works. In the right conditions. The right conditions being the key phrase. The symbol problem</h2> India votes by symbol. This is not a minor detail. This is fundamental to how a billion-person democracy with a literacy gap functions. The lotus is BJP. The hand is Congress. The cycle is Samajwadi Party. Voters who can't read a single word of any language can walk into a booth and correctly vote for their candidate because they recognise the image. This system took decades to build. It's how you run a functioning election across Tamil Nadu, Bihar, Assam, and Nagaland simultaneously, where the electorate speaks dozens of languages and has wildly varying literacy levels. Now. Under STV, you'd merge five current constituencies into one district. That district might have 25 to 40 candidates running. Each voter needs to rank at least several of them. Even if you print symbols on the ballot, you now have forty symbols crammed onto one sheet. Voters who rely entirely on visual recognition now have to find their symbol among forty, assign it a rank number, and do the same for their second preference, their third. For a large chunk of India's electorate (particularly in rural areas, particularly first-generation voters, particularly older voters), this is not a simplification of democracy. It's a barrier to it. How STV works</h2> Imagine a constituency that elects five members to Parliament, not just one. Five seats available in a single district. Instead of putting a cross next to one name, you rank candidates: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. A candidate needs a specific "quota" of votes to win a seat (calculated as total votes divided by six, plus one). If a candidate gets more than the quota on first-preference votes, they're elected. Their excess votes are then transferred to the second-choice candidates marked on those ballots. If nobody reaches the quota, the candidate with the fewest first-preference votes is eliminated, and their ballots transfer to those voters' second choices. The process continues in rounds until all five seats are filled. Almost every ballot ends up contributing to electing someone, unlike FPTP where 40% of votes can vanish completely. Why STV is hard for India</h2> It sounds great on paper. In practice, India poses three severe challenges: 1. The ballot literacy problem</h3> Under STV, you don't just pick a symbol. You rank candidates in order of preference. That requires reading candidate names, understanding the ordinal ranking logic, and filling out numbers (1, 2, 3...) accurately. For a large chunk of India's electorate (particularly in rural areas, particularly first-generation voters, particularly older voters), this is not a simplification of democracy. It's a barrier to it. India built its entire voting infrastructure (from paper ballots with party symbols in 1951 to modern EVMs) around a single, low-friction action: press a button next to a picture. Switch to STV and you replace that single button press with a multi-step numerical ranking task. The risk of ballot invalidation (voters putting "1" next to three names, or skipping numbers, or leaving half the ballot blank) is enormous. 2. The "exhausted ballot" problem</h3> When a voter stops ranking (marking preferences 1 and 2 while leaving the rest blank) and their top two choices are both eliminated, their ballot becomes "exhausted." It no longer counts toward any candidate. In countries with simple ballots and educated electorates, truncation is a manageable minority problem. You lose maybe 5-10% of votes to exhaustion. In India, with a complex multi-candidate ballot and voters who are accustomed to marking exactly one symbol, the exhaustion rate would likely be much higher. Voters who rank only their first choice (because that's all they understand how to do) produce exhausted ballots at scale. And an exhausted ballot under STV is the same as a wasted vote under FPTP. 3. The multi-member district problem</h3> STV requires multi-member constituencies (districts that elect 3, 4, 5, or more representatives). That means merging existing single-member constituencies into giant super-constituencies. Instead of one MP for Coimbatore North, you'd have five MPs for the whole of Coimbatore district. That destroys the local MP connection. In a country where citizens rely on their local MP for everything from water supply complaints to police station disputes, replacing a local representative with a panel of five district-wide MPs makes accountability fuzzy. Who do you complain to when the road breaks? And redrawing boundaries in India is politically explosive. The delimitation freeze (which I'll write about separately) shows exactly how much tension this creates. Asking the country to redraw 543 constituencies into 108 is not a reform. It's an earthquake. Strategic voting gets worse, not better</h2> Supporters of STV say it eliminates strategic voting. It doesn't. It just changes the strategy. Instead of "don't vote for the third party," the strategy becomes "how do we instruct our voters to transfer their preferences?" Parties produce "how to vote" cards, telling supporters to rank Candidate A first, Candidate B second, Candidate C third. Done messily (which is how politics actually works), it splits the vote internally and costs seats. Parties will agonise over how many candidates to field. They'll make deals: "Rank our candidate second and we'll rank yours second in the next district." Transfer alliances. Pre-poll arrangements about preference orders. Kerala already has an informal version of this between the Left Democratic Front and the United Democratic Front, alliances built partly on where each bloc's supporters should direct their second preferences. Under STV, this becomes formalised, game-theoretic, and incomprehensible to anyone not following it closely. Where STV actually works in India</h2> Here's the funny thing: India already uses STV. Just not for the Lok Sabha. The Rajya Sabha (the Upper House) is elected by Members of the Legislative Assembly using STV. The voters are MLAs, who are literate (compared to the general public), politically sophisticated, and can be briefed in detail on the counting process. Legislative Councils in states like Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra (when they existed) used STV for graduates' and teachers' constituencies. STV works when the voters are equipped to use it. The question for India isn't whether STV is theoretically better than FPTP: in many ways it is. The question is whether you can operate it at the scale of a billion general voters across twenty-two official languages and wildly varying literacy rates. The answer right now is: probably not without massive disruption, a long transition period, and a voter education campaign that would itself need to be one of the largest public information operations in Indian history. The verdict</h2> STV is not a fraud. In the right setting, it genuinely improves on FPTP. It's proportional, it reduces wasted votes, it lets voters choose between candidates within a party rather than just accepting whoever the party boss put on the ticket. But India's "right setting" is not a five-seat STV district with forty candidates and a ballot you need to rank. Not yet. Not without first solving the literacy gap, the symbol dependency, the multilingual ballot problem, and the constituency map. I’ve been thinking a lot about MMP since I wrote those notes the other day. It doesn't require any of that. It keeps the current single-member constituency structure intact. It adds one extra vote on the same ballot. It uses the infrastructure that already exists. STV is the better ideal, maybe. MMP is the achievable reform. And a reform you can't implement is just a fantasy you're fond of. A beautiful irrigation canal in the desert is still a desert. Enter the Cure: MMP 2015-03-05T00:00:00+00:00 I feel like I’ve been shouting into a void for three days about how broken this system is. I’ve been obsessing over slot machines and wasted votes, and I’m sure someone in the comments is ready to snap back with: "Okay, clever. So what's your solution?" Fair. Let's talk about the cure. It's called Mixed-Member Proportional representation. MMP. And before your eyes glaze over, bear with me. This isn't rocket science. It's closer to splitting a restaurant bill fairly, which apparently most of us manage to do without a constitutional crisis. How MMP works: the two-vote ballot</h2> Under MMP, every voter gets two votes on election day. Vote one: for a candidate. Your local MP. The person running in your specific constituency. Same as now. Whoever gets the most candidate votes in your district wins the seat. Vote two: for a party. Not a person, but a party. This is where the system does its actual democratic work. The party vote determines the total percentage of seats in Parliament that each party deserves. If a party gets 30% of party votes nationwide, they get 30% of total seats in the legislature. Period. How? By using party lists to top up. If a party wins fewer constituency seats than their party vote entitles them to, they get additional seats from a ranked list of candidates to make up the difference. Say BJP wins 35% of party votes but scooped up 50% of constituencies in a good wave. Their "deserve" is 35% of total seats. Their constituency haul is too high. So they get very few or no top-up seats from the party list. Meanwhile, BSP gets 4% of party votes but won zero constituencies (as they did in 2014). Under MMP, they'd get 4% of seats filled from a party list. Twenty-some seats. Real representation. Not zero. Why not pure party list PR?</h2> Because that has problems too. Purely proportional systems (where the party decides who gets in from a closed ranked list) hand enormous power to party bosses. Whoever sits at the top of the list gets in, regardless of what voters think of them as individuals. That's how you end up with dynastic appointments dressed up as democratic mandates. India's "High Command" culture is bad enough already; a pure list system would make it worse. MMP keeps your local MP. Your constituency still matters. You still elect a specific person you can write to, shout at, blame at the next election. But the composition of Parliament (the final seat count) is anchored to actual vote shares. It combines local accountability with proportional fairness. Best of both worlds. What 2014 would have looked like under MMP</h2> Let's plug the 2014 numbers into an MMP calculator and see what happens. BJP's party vote share: ~31%. In a 543-seat Parliament, that's about 170 seats, not 282. They'd still be the largest single party by a wide margin. Still form the government, probably. But as a coalition or minority government, not a one-party absolute majority on a third of the vote. Congress: ~19% of votes → ~105 seats (instead of 44). Still a distant second, but a functioning opposition rather than an erased one. BSP: 4.1% of votes → ~22 seats (instead of zero). A real voice for 22 million voters. The Left, AAP, DMK, AIADMK, Trinamool: all represented in rough proportion to their national or regional party vote shares. Parliament becomes what it's supposed to be: a mirror of the electorate, not a funhouse distortion. "Won't coalitions cause instability?"</h2> This is the standard FPTP defence: "Proportional systems produce weak coalition governments. FPTP gives you strong, stable ones." Contrast with India under FPTP: coalition governments anyway. The UPA, the NDA, the Third Front: we've been running coalition governments for most of the last thirty years regardless. The difference is those coalitions were assembled after the election through backroom bargaining, based on who could be bribed into joining. Under MMP, the coalition tendencies are visible before the election: voters know going in that parties will need to cooperate, and parties signal their alliance preferences in advance. It's more transparent, not less. And if "stable one-party government" is the goal, the 2014 government that 69% of voters didn't vote for is "stable" in the same sense that a boulder is stable. It'll sit there, immovable, doing exactly what it wants. Whether that's good depends entirely on whether you're the boulder or the thing under it. The practical path to MMP in India</h2> It's not simple. I won't pretend it is. Getting there requires amending the Representation of the People Act. Party lists have to be created and regulated: who controls the list order, how long a list can be, whether it's open (voters influence the ranking) or closed (party bosses decide). The total number of seats in Parliament probably needs to increase to accommodate list seats alongside constituency seats. Ballots need to be redesigned. The Election Commission needs to train a billion voters in two-vote logic. These are technical challenges. We built the largest electoral machine in human history from scratch in 1950. We can handle ballot redesign. The real obstacle</h2> The real obstacle isn't technical. It's political. It's not perfect. It's a start. And it's infinitely better than the current system, which is not a start: it's an ending, every five years, for hundreds of millions of votes. Here's the problem that I'll be honest about: MMP reduces the bonus seats that FPTP hands to the largest party. Which means the party most likely to be in government (the party with the most power to pass this reform) is also the party that benefits most from not passing it. New Zealand spent three years educating voters before their first MMP election in 1996. They ran a referendum first, the country discussed it seriously, the commission printed practice ballots, schoolkids learned about it in civics class. It worked. The transition costs are real. So is 300 million wasted votes every five years. So is a Parliament where BSP's 22 million supporters get zero representation. Pick your problem. The bare minimum version</h2> Here's what I'd argue is the most practical starting point for India, short of a full redesign: add 150 party-list seats to the existing 543-seat Lok Sabha, making it a 693-seat Parliament. Keep all current constituencies. Allocate those 150 extra seats by party vote share nationally, as compensatory seats. You don't need to merge constituencies, redraw boundaries, or retrain voters to rank candidates. The only new thing is a second vote for a party, and 150 seats allocated by the result. Would it fix everything? No. BJP on 31% could still win 282 constituency seats and end up overrepresented. But the 150 compensatory seats would pull the final ratio closer to reality. BSP's 22 million votes would produce some seats. Congress's 107 million votes would produce something closer to what they deserve. It's not perfect. It's a start. And it's infinitely better than the current system, which is not a start: it's an ending, every five years, for hundreds of millions of votes. The politics of fixing it</h2> Here's the problem that I'll be honest about: MMP reduces the bonus seats that FPTP hands to the largest party. Which means the party most likely to be in government (the party with the most power to pass this reform) is also the party that benefits most from not passing it. In 2014, FPTP gave BJP 282 seats on 31% of the vote. Under MMP, they'd get roughly 170. They would need to voluntarily vote for a system that cuts their seat count by a third. That's not going to happen from the goodness of their hearts. The push for MMP in New Zealand came from a Citizens' Constitutional Forum after a rigged 1978 election where the National Party won more votes than Labour but won fewer seats. Public fury. Independent commission. Referendum. Reform. India hasn't had that public fury reach critical mass yet. The 300 million wasted votes are invisible because nobody counts them, nobody reports them, and the people who write the news are not among the 300 million. But the math doesn't care whether you're angry. The math is sitting there, patient and damning, waiting for enough people to notice. I hope you've noticed. The Wasted Vote Epidemic 2015-02-27T00:00:00+00:00 Let's talk about waste. Not the kind that fills your municipal garbage bin: the kind that fills your democracy. Every election, millions of people wake up early, dress for the occasion in a way that feels vaguely important, take time off work, stand in line under a Tamil Nadu summer sun, and press a button. Then they go home. And their vote, for all practical purposes, does nothing. What is a wasted vote?</h2> Under FPTP (First Past the Post, the system we've been using since independence), a "wasted vote" is any vote that doesn't contribute to electing someone. There are two types: Type 1: Votes for the loser. Your candidate came second, third, fourth, whatever. Every single vote they received evaporates. Doesn't transfer. Doesn't count toward anything. Just gone. The next runner-up's 200,000 votes and the joke candidate's 300 votes are mechanically identical: both wasted. Type 2: Surplus votes for the winner. Your candidate won, which is great. But they only needed, say, 140,000 votes to scrape past the second-place finisher. They got 190,000. Those extra 50,000? Also wasted. They didn't need to count, so they don't count for anything. Under FPTP, there is no mechanism to use leftover support. Win by one vote or win by a hundred thousand, you get the same one seat. The rest goes in the bin. The 2014 ledger</h2> Let's run the math on 2014. BJP won 282 seats on 31.3% of the vote (roughly 173 million votes). Here's the thing though: in those 282 constituencies BJP won, many victories were narrow. Plenty of those 173 million votes were surplus (more than enough to win but counted only once). And all the BJP votes in constituencies they lost? Wasted entirely. Now look at the opposition. The BSP (Bahujan Samaj Party) got about 4.1% of the vote. That's around 22 million people. Their seat count in 2014? Zero. Zero seats for 22 million votes. Twenty-two million people woke up, stood in line, pressed a button, and were told by the counting machine: "Sorry. Your voice doesn't exist in this Parliament." Taken together, somewhere in the vicinity of 300 million votes in 2014 (roughly 55% of all votes cast) contributed precisely nothing to who governs India. More than half the electorate's choices were binned. Just like that. The geography trap</h2> Why does this happen? FPTP rewards geographic efficiency. If your supporters are spread smartly, just enough to come first in each constituency, you convert votes to seats brilliantly. If your supporters are clustered in some places and thin in others, you'll win some seats with massive surpluses while bleeding votes in constituencies you can't crack. The BSP's problem isn't that 22 million people don't matter. It's that those 22 million people are spread across enough constituencies that BSP rarely comes first anywhere. They're often second or third (competitive, significant, real), and it counts for nothing. The human cost</h2> This isn't just about party mathematics. It's about how it feels to participate in a system that discards your choice. Let's say you live in a constituency where the winning candidate gets 38% and your candidate gets 35%. You're three percentage points off. Your candidate is not some fringe nobody: they're the second-most popular person in the area. One in three of your neighbours voted exactly like you did. And your reward for participating is that the guy who got 38% gets 100% of the representation for your area. Your 35% might as well have stayed home. Or imagine the opposite. You vote for a candidate who wins 60% of the vote in a constituency where 40% would have been enough. Your vote, along with a few lakh others, was surplus to requirements. It pushed the winner from "comfortable" to "massive": an achievement the system simply doesn't reward. "Someone has to lose"</h2> I can hear the argument already. "Deadrat, it's a competition. Someone has to lose." True. Someone does have to win. But in most functional democracies, the goal is that the overall legislature reflects how the country actually voted, not just who came first in each individual postcode. In Germany, a party with 4% of the vote gets roughly 4% of parliamentary seats (provided they cross a minimum threshold). Their voters aren't wasted. In New Zealand, the same. In most of the countries that have thought carefully about this after building a democracy from scratch, proportionality is the goal. Strategic voting and the death of real choice</h2> Here's the real poison in the well. When millions of supporters of a losing party watch their votes evaporate, election after election, they don't quietly accept it and move on. They either stop voting (and we then complain about low turnout), or they start voting strategically. Not for who they want, but for whoever seems most likely to beat whoever they hate. Strategic voting poisons the well. It means elections stop measuring what people actually want and start measuring who people are most afraid of. The "lesser evil" calculus takes over. Parties optimise for being scary rather than being good. Candidates campaign on "if you vote for the third party you're splitting the vote and letting the other side win", and it works, because under FPTP, it's often true. The BSP voter who switches to Congress to stop BJP? She doesn't want Congress. She wants her vote to count. She's making the only rational choice available in a broken system, and then the system records her vote as a Congress mandate. Three hundred million real preferences, filtered, discarded, or strategically redirected, and the final Parliament is supposed to represent "the will of the people." Whose will? For which people? What a sane system looks like</h2> I said there are better systems, and I meant it. If India used Mixed-Member Proportional representation, the model Germany and New Zealand use, here's roughly how 2014 would have looked: Under that math, Parliament actually reflects the country. BJP is still the single largest party (the largest by a distance), but it governs as a coalition or minority government. No blank cheque. No constitutional-amendment-sized mandate from a third of the electorate. And crucially: almost no wasted votes. Your 22 million BSP votes produce 22 seats. Your surplus votes in safe constituencies get redirected to party lists. The bin stays empty. How this system works exactly, I'll get to that in the next post. For now, I just want you to sit with the scale of what we're accepting as normal. 554 million people voted. Somewhere around 300 million of those votes produced no elected representative. If a hospital threw away 55% of its medicines, we'd call it a crisis. If a bank lost 55% of your deposits, we'd call it fraud. When democracy wastes 55% of its votes, we call it an election result. The Delhi Anomaly 2015-02-14T00:00:00+00:00 Two weeks ago I wrote that FPTP is a slot machine. I said change the party pulling the lever and the machine still pays out the same way: crooked. I got pushback. People told me: "Wait for Delhi, Deadrat. Delhi is different. Delhi has smart voters." February 10th. Delhi election results. The Aam Aadmi Party (Kejriwal's broom brigade, the anti-corruption crusaders, the party that's supposed to be different) won 67 out of 70 seats. Sixty-seven. The BJP got 3. Congress got zero. Television went insane. WhatsApp went insane. My landlord called it "the people's revolution." His exact words. He was eating a samosa while he said it. And I sat there watching the news ticker, thinking: the slot machine just paid out again. And everybody is cheering because their favorite team won the jackpot. Let's look at the numbers. Not the seat count, but the actual votes. AAP got 54.3% of the vote. Solid. Genuinely impressive. First time since the '70s that any party crossed 50% in Delhi. No argument there: more than half the city wanted AAP. That's real. Now look at the seats: 67 out of 70. That's 95.7% of the Assembly. Read that again. Fifty-four percent of the people, ninety-five percent of the power. BJP got 32.3% of the vote. Almost a third of Delhi voted for the BJP. Three out of every ten people who showed up on polling day chose a BJP candidate. Their reward? 3 seats out of 70. That's 4.3% of the Assembly. Thirty-two percent of the vote gets you four percent of the seats. Congress. 9.7% of the vote. Almost 8.7 lakh human beings walked to a booth, waited in line, pressed the button for Congress. Got zero. Not one seat. Not a single MLA. Nearly nine lakh votes: poof, into the dumpster. As if those people don't exist. Think about what a fair system would look like. If seats were distributed roughly proportional to votes, here's what the Delhi Assembly would look like: AAP gets about 38 seats. BJP gets about 23. Congress gets about 7. AAP still leads, comfortably. They'd probably still form the government, maybe with outside support, maybe alone as a minority government. The "mandate" would be real and the math would actually reflect what Delhi said. Instead, FPTP took a 54% win and inflated it into a 95.7% near-total wipeout. In my last post, I called the 2014 Lok Sabha result "the 31% dictatorship." BJP got 31.3% of the national vote and a single-party majority. The usual defence (I've heard it fifty times since) goes something like: "Well, the opposition was fragmented. BJP was the strongest. What do you expect?" Fine. Now look at Delhi. In Delhi, the opposition wasn't fragmented. The anti-BJP vote consolidated massively behind one party. AAP crossed 50%. This isn't a case of five small parties splitting the vote and letting someone sneak through. This is genuine majority support, and the distortion is still obscene. Because FPTP doesn't just distort minority mandates. It distorts everything. It takes a 54% majority and turns it into near-total, unchecked single-party control. Why is that bad? If AAP got 54%, shouldn't they rule? Sure. They should govern. But they shouldn't govern alone with 95% of the seats, because 46% of Delhi voted for somebody else. In 62 constituencies, BJP came second. Not fifth. Not tenth. Second. Often close. That means in 62 places across Delhi, a large chunk of voters chose a candidate who came close but lost, and FPTP treats every single one of those votes exactly the same as the votes for the joke candidate who got 200 votes and lost his deposit. Mechanically, both are equally worthless. "Wasted." Congress voters (8.7 lakh of them) have zero representation in the Delhi Assembly. Zero. These aren't hypothetical people. They're your neighbours, your colleagues, the guy who serves you chai. They participated in democracy and democracy responded by pretending they don't exist. Now when AAP passes a Bill (any Bill), the headlines will say "Delhi passes X." And technically, sure. But "Delhi" didn't pass anything. The 54% that won representation passed it. The other 46% don't even have enough bodies in the room to mount a proper debate. I'm not writing this to hate on AAP. If you supported them, good for you. They ran a disciplined campaign, focused on real local issues (electricity, water, schools), and beat a massive national political machine. Credit where credit is due. What I'm attacking is the ratio. The grotesque, mathematically indefensible ratio between votes received and seats occupied. Because that ratio isn't AAP's fault; it's the system's fault. And that same system will, one day, work against you. Maybe in the next election, maybe three elections from now. Someone will sweep 70% of the seats on 40% of the vote and your guy will be sitting at home despite getting backed by a third of the city. When that happens, you'll suddenly care about proportional representation. Everyone does, once the slot machine turns on them. The slot machine doesn't care about brooms or lotuses</h2> Two weeks. Two posts. Two elections. Two completely different parties. Two completely different narratives: one about Hindu nationalism sweeping the nation, one about anti-corruption sweeping a city. And beneath both narratives, the exact same broken machine doing the exact same thing: lying about what the country said. Same machine. Same distortion. Same mathematical fraud dressed up as democratic mandate. In 2014, FPTP took 31% and made it a majority. In 2015, it took 54% and made it a monopoly. The underlying pattern is identical. The machine doesn't read your party symbol. It doesn't care about your ideology. It just takes whoever's ahead and hands them everything, while systematically erasing everyone else from the record. Next time someone tells you this result is "the will of the people," ask them: which people? The 54% who got 95% of the seats? Or the 46% who got scraps? Because as long as we keep pulling this lever, we're all just playing a game where the house decides the payout. And the house, I assure you, does not give a shit about your broom. Oh, and happy Valentine's Day. I hear people are celebrating love. Some are getting beaten up by moral police for holding hands in public, but that's a different essay. Here's the thing though: if your relationship with democracy worked the way FPTP works, you'd have left a long time ago. Fifty-four percent affection, ninety-five percent control. That's not love. That's a hostage situation with better PR. The 31% Dictatorship 2015-02-01T00:00:00+00:00 February. New year energy is already dead. The resolutions are broken, the gym membership is gathering dust, and the country has moved on to its favourite pastime: pretending everything is fine. Good time as any to talk about the great Indian fraud: your vote. I want you to do something for me. Simple arithmetic. Nothing fancy. You won't need a calculator, just the ability to count past thirty. Last May, a party won 282 seats in the Lok Sabha. Absolute majority. Single-party government. The kind of mandate pundits call "historic" and "sweeping" and "the will of the people." I heard that phrase so many times I wanted to tattoo it on a goat and set it free in Parliament. The will of the people. 31.3%. That's the vote share. Thirty-one point three percent of the country looked at this party and said yes. The remaining sixty-eight point seven percent said, well, it doesn't matter what they said, does it? Because those sixty-eight percent got fuck all. Their guy lost in his constituency, or won but sits in opposition, or won on a party ticket that got crushed nationally. Their vote, mathematically speaking, went straight into the gutter. Now I know what you're thinking. "But Deadrat, they won more constituencies. That's how democracy works. The most votes in each seat." And you'd be right. That is exactly how it works. That's the problem. Not a bug, but the whole rotten architecture. How the slot machine works</h2> India uses First Past the Post. FPTP. The British left it behind like they left the railways: something that sort of works until you look at who it actually serves. Here's how it goes. Country gets chopped into 543 constituencies. Each one elects one MP. Whoever gets the most votes wins. Not the majority. Not fifty percent plus one. Just... the most. If five candidates split the vote and your guy scrapes 28%, congratulations. He's your representative. The other 72% can go pound sand. Every single vote cast for a losing candidate? Wasted. Gone. Evaporated like dignity at a campaign rally. Every extra vote the winner got beyond what he needed to edge past second place? Also wasted. The system only cares about one thing: who crossed the line first, by however slim a margin, in however fractured a field. It's a slot machine. You pull the lever, three symbols spin, and the house decides which combination counts as a jackpot this week. The math of the coup</h2> Stay with me. This gets stupid. Imagine 100 constituencies. Three parties: A, B, C. Nationally, the vote splits like this: Party A: 35%</li> Party B: 33%</li> Party C: 32%</li> </ul> Now, if in every single constituency the pattern holds (35, 33, 32), Party A wins all 100 seats. Every. Single. One. Party B and C together got 65% of the national vote. They get zero seats. Not ten. Not five. Zero. "But that's an extreme example," you'll say. Sure. Real elections are messier. Candidates vary, local issues matter, one guy's wife said something about the other guy's cow. Fine. But the underlying mechanics don't change. A party whose support is spread efficiently (a little bit everywhere, just enough to come first in each race) converts a minority of votes into a majority of power with the precision of a pickpocket. And in May 2014, this wasn't theoretical. It happened. In your country. On your ballot. The 2014 receipts</h2> The BJP got 31.3% of the national vote and walked away with 282 seats out of 543. Majority mark is 272. They cleared it with room to spare. With the NDA alliance? About 38.5%, which got them 336 seats. The Congress? 19.3% of the vote. Should get you, what, roughly a fifth of the seats? Logic would suggest about 108 seats. They got 44. Forty-four! Not enough to even qualify as the official opposition in the Lok Sabha, because you need 55 for that. So we had a Parliament with a muscular ruling party and literally no recognized opposition. Democracy at its finest. And here's the joke nobody laughed at: parties that got more combined votes than the winner ended up with a fraction of the representation. The Left parties, BSP, regional outfits: millions of real humans voted for them and their reward was a rounding error in the seat count. The system didn't malfunction. It performed exactly as designed. FPTP is a machine that converts thin pluralities into fat majorities, and it does it every single time, everywhere it's used. Not just us</h2> Before the nationalists start screaming that I'm insulting India's sacred democracy, calm down: this disease is global. In the UK, Labour once got a parliamentary majority with 36% of the vote. The Liberal Democrats took over 20% but got roughly 10% of seats. Twenty percent of the country, represented by ten percent of the legislature. Efficient? For whom? Canada, 2011. The Conservatives won a majority government (166 seats) with just 39.6% of the vote. The NDP got 30.6% and won 103 seats, while the Liberals got 18.9% and won only 34. A majority government built on a foundation of minorities. But the crown jewel (and I genuinely love this one) is New Brunswick, 1987. The Liberals got about 60% of the vote. A solid majority, no question. Their reward? All 58 seats. Every single one. The other 40% of voters (people who showed up, stood in line, marked their ballot) got absolutely zero legislative representation. Their voices were mathematically annihilated. Democracy! These aren't freaky outliers. This is what FPTP does. Regularly. Predictably. Like a drunk uncle at Deepavali: you know exactly what's coming, and nobody does a damn thing about it. Why "coup" isn't hyperbole</h2> I can already hear the sensible moderates tutting. "Coup is a strong word, Deadrat." No shit. That's why I used it. A coup usually means tanks rolling down boulevards. Generals on television. But what's the functional outcome? A minority seizes control of the state apparatus against the wishes of the majority. Well? 31.3% voted for this government. 68.7% did not. Yet this government controls the cabinet, the legislative agenda, committee appointments, and (if it can whip its allies into line) has the numbers to attempt constitutional amendments. All on a mandate that roughly seven out of ten voters didn't give them. You don't need tanks when the arithmetic does the work for you. Three things make this a structural coup, not just an unfortunate result: Two. It silences pluralism. When 65% of voters can cast ballots and end up with dramatically fewer seats than their numbers warrant (or in cases like New Brunswick, literally zero representation), the word "democracy" starts feeling like a prank someone forgot to end. Three. No consent for specific projects. A party that squeaks in with a third of the vote claims a "mandate" to remake institutions, centralize power, rewrite textbooks, whatever they fancy. But a majority of voters never endorsed any of that. They voted against it, or for something else entirely, or for the local guy who promised to fix the drainage. None of that mattered. FPTP gave the 31% a blank cheque. So what now?</h2> Here's my question. If someone told you that 31% of the tenants in your building could overrule the other 69% on every decision (rent, maintenance, parking, noise), would you call that a housing society? Or a racket? Because that's your relationship with this democracy. You show up. You participate. You stand in line in the sun with your voter ID and your faith in the system. And the system says: thanks for playing, here's a government most of you didn't ask for. I'm not saying I have the solution mapped out yet. But I know the problem has a name, and it's not the party in power; it's the machine that put them there. Change the party and the machine still runs. Still converts minorities into majorities. Still wastes your vote. Still calls itself democracy with a straight face. FPTP is the slot machine. Every five years, we pull the lever. The house always wins. Somewhere out there, I know, there are better machines. Systems where every vote actually counts toward representation. Systems where 31% of the vote gets you roughly 31% of the seats and not a single chair more. Germany has one. New Zealand switched to one. Countries that decided mathematics shouldn't be used to steal representation actually did something about it. But I’ll get to that. Today I’m just here to tell you the game is rigged. The Delhi elections are in a week. Let's see what the slot machine does next. Dairy Circle Buttermilk 2015-01-15T00:00:00+00:00 Jan 15, 2015 – Coimbatore. I started writing this a few days ago under the shadow of the Karnataka Milk Federation building at Dairy Circle. Didn't get far. The Coimbatore bus pulled up and I had to scramble. I managed exactly one line in my notebook, scribbled between the dust and the engine noise: “Not just Milma. Nandini is doing well too. So why not our Aavin?” That afternoon at Dairy Circle, I was scraping the bottom of the barrel. I had enough cash for the bus ticket home for Pongal and maybe ten rupees spare. My degree is a piece of paper I haven’t even finished earning yet. I am an Idayan. Cow-herders by blood. And I’m standing there, jobless, unable to afford a full liter of milk. I bought a packet of Nandini buttermilk instead. Five rupees. Cold. Salty. Mostly water. But very refreshing and cheap. It was lunch and dinner combined. I drank it leaning against the KMF gate, watching their refrigerated trucks roll out like an invading army. On the compound walls, massive hoardings of Puneeth Rajkumar smiled down at me with a glass of milk. In Bangalore, the movie stars tell you to drink milk. In Tamil Nadu, the stars tell you which political party to fear. Now I’m home. Pongal. The "festival of farmers." A celebration that means absolutely nothing to me. A cultural performance we are forced to put on. We have two cows. Family members we can’t afford to feed properly. My mother wakes up at 4:00 AM, gets the cow ready, milks it, and hands it over to the milkman. We don't take the milk to the Aavin collection point ourselves; it’s too far. Too much labor for just a few liters. So we sell it to a guy, who sells it to a guy, who eventually dumps it on the state. By the time it reaches an orange sachet, the cooperative has sucked the cream out of the milk and the money out of the farmer. I remember the ads from when I was a kid. Arokya milk. "Amma gives him 4.5 milk." Hatsun and the private players burned millions to make us think their milk was superior. They won. In Tamil Nadu, Aavin is the absolute last choice. It’s treated like ration rice: you buy it only because you have to, because the local shop ran out of Arokya or Cavin’s. In Bangalore, Nandini is a household god. A point of pride. It’s the "Anand model" actually working in the south. Amul did it in Gujarat, KMF does it here. They pay the farmer, they keep the price low, they own the market. Why aren't we fixing Aavin? Because the government treats it like a vote bank, not a business. They slash the retail price to win elections, but they don't pay the farmer enough to survive the feed costs. Every liter my mother sells is a slow bleeding loss. Meanwhile, the state’s real obsession is TASMAC. Liquor brings in the hard cash. Cash that fuels the populist freebies that keep the milk price artificially low. It’s a closed loop of misery. The state would rather see a village drunk on cheap liquor than healthy on the milk our ancestors herded. What’s the fix? Pay the farmer what it actually costs to keep a cow alive. Let the farmers run the cooperative, not party thugs and failed politicians. Get Rajini or Kamal to do ads for free. "Drink Aavin, save the Tamil farmer." If people here treat an actor like a deity, maybe they can treat a glass of milk like a necessity. But I’m dreaming. They say Puneeth Rajkumar did the Nandini ads pro-bono. A legacy of his father. In Tamil Nadu, we don't do "free" unless it's a pre-election handout. The thought of an A-list star standing in a cow shed to save a cooperative is a joke that wouldn't survive a script reading in Poes Garden. The state is hooked on the liquid gold in the green bottles. Why push white milk when the brown stuff pays for the free mixies? Aavin isn't a brand. It’s a tragedy in an orange packet. I finished that five-rupee buttermilk at Dairy Circle and realized that being an Idayan in 2015 just means you’re a ghost in the machinery of a state that would rather see you drunk than fed. Image Credit: The Magdalen Reading</a> via Wikimedia Commons An Open Letter to BOSS Linux (and the Bureaucrats in Delhi) 2014-11-23T00:00:00+00:00 Dear BOSS Developers, I’ve been running your distro on my main laptop for a couple of months now. I wanted to like it. I really did. There’s something comforting about using a state-backed Indian Linux distribution, developed by C-DAC, funded by the Union, branded with national pride. But we need to talk about reality. Not the reality inside C-DAC's air-conditioned server rooms in Chennai or Delhi, but the reality out here in the villages on 256(really?) kbps BSNL EDGE networks. First, your base. Debian is stable, sure. But every time I boot BOSS on my hardware, I run into driver issues that were solved upstream months ago. I’m a long-time Fedora user. Fedora sticks closely to upstream Linux kernel developments. When Fedora developers want a change, they don't fork off into their own isolated tangent; they work directly with upstream maintainers to fix bugs and commit code that benefits everyone. BOSS keeps reinventing wheels and getting stuck in driver hell on hardware that ordinary Indians actually buy. Why not consider Fedora as the base for future releases? Second, and this is my primary grievance, how in the hell are we supposed to download this OS? The BOSS ISO installer image is over 3 GB. And your official site provides only a direct HTTP download link. Are you serious? Where I live, BSNL FTTH with 100 Mbps fiber is a fever dream for urban elites. Out here in our village, 2 Mbps is a luxury, and most of us rely on a 256 kbps (on a good day) 2G wireless connection. And that too, paying for every single MB we consume to the telecom overlords. A 3 GB ISO file over a flaky EDGE signal that drops every time a storm rolls in or the tower connection fluctuates is an impossible task. Browsers crash halfway through, single-threaded HTTP gets interrupted, and the download dies, burning precious data reloads. Fedora and Debian provide 1 GB minimal network installation ISOs, and more importantly, they distribute everything via BitTorrent with checksums and pause/resume capability. Why doesn't BOSS offer a Torrent download? Why must an Indian distro intended for the Indian masses demand a continuous, uninterrupted 3 GB HTTP stream over metered wireless connections? If you want BOSS Linux to be anything more than a compliance checkbox for government offices, fix the distribution model. Give us Torrents. Keep up with upstream. Until then, I'm sticking with Fedora. Image Credit: Linux Terminal Server-kn.svg</a> by Translated into Kannada language by user:vidyu44, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. The Physics of Insecurity 2014-11-20T00:00:00+00:00 I am not a smart kid. I’ve said this before, and I’ll keep saying it, because the world is obsessed with labels it doesn't understand. I’m just a curious fellow. Or maybe I’m a sick man. A spiteful man. I don’t know. I’m just tired. Sometimes, thinking about the past makes my chest tighten, a cold weight pressing down until I want to crawl into a hole and let the dirt cover me. I’m not fit for this world. I should die. There, the thought is out. It’s a clean, dark line on the paper. Let’s talk about the cunts who ran the asylum. NK Tiyagarajan. He was the physics teacher at SRNV Higher Secondary School in lakshminakenpalayam. A rural dump surrounded by dry fields. Now, this school is apparently a good one, an old one. But my section, 11 E, a recently added bolt-on English medium class, is where this shit bastard was. It was shitty. He didn’t know physics. He knew the syllabus, which is a very different thing. In India, if you are in certain profession, people treat you like a god. Doctor, teacher, some civil servant, they bow. There’s a caste undertone to it, a historical habit of bending the spine before anyone in a position of authority, but let's not get into that mud. The point is, NKT was an insecure, show-off cunt. I had my dad’s Motorola C168 back then. A plastic brick that could access the mobile web via GPRS. I read things. I found stories. I discussed them with another student. NKT found out. He didn’t ask what I’d read. He brought Thirumurthy, the PT teacher , a man who functioned as NKT’s personal muscle that day , into the room. "Why are you spending time on GPRS?" they screamed. "GPRS is bad! It's not allowed! At this age, why are you using phone. " Then they started hitting me. Actual slaps, in front of the class. They treated GPRS as if it were a digital narcotic, a moral collapse delivered at 40 kilobytes per second. Thirumurthy didn't know what a GPRS packet was, but his hands worked fine. My classmates, Harish and Arun, told me later: "If you know something he doesn't, this is what he does. He has to beat the difference out of you." Then there was the Sultanpet Primary Health Center. I had a severe ear infection. A sharp, drilling pain that made me feel like my head was being split by an axe. I went to the government clinic, got treated, and missed the first half of school the next day. NKT demanded proof. "Show me the doctor’s pad," he said. "Get a sign and seal." "They don't give papers," I explained. "You go in, they write on a slip, they take the slip at the dispensary, they hand you the pills, and you leave empty-handed. That’s how a PHC works." He called me a liar. He made me stand outside the classroom. I had to go back to the hospital, walk through the dust, and beg the doctor for a signed letter to explain four hours of absence. For a half-day leave. I irked him because I was bored. I’d fold pages in the textbook, reading three chapters ahead. Valarmathi, my previous physics teacher, had made the subject alive. So I knew the answers. NKT noticed me turning pages, marched over, and tried to grill me in front of the class to humiliate me. I tried to stay silent most of the days, but one day I answered every question with absolute clarity. He didn't look pleased. He looked like he wanted to spit. He scolded me, ordered me to stay on his page, and spent the rest of the year nitpicking whatever I do or don't. Others were different. I remember a math teacher. Krishnaveni. I couldn't write derivation steps. Polynomial equations, arithmetic, it all happened mostly in my head. I’d write the final answer. She called me to the staff room, compared my two-page answer sheet to the ten-page piles of the other kids. Another teacher asked: "Did he mug this up?" "<deadrat's name> mugged up?" Krishnaveni laughed. "No. Ask him." She pointed to a problem. I solved it mentally and said the answer. She turned to me: " I know you. But the public examiners won't. They want the steps. Write them down." She didn't want to break me. She just wanted me to survive the machine. But the machine preferred sticks. Virgin Mary, the Tamil teacher, used to beat my knuckles with a cane because my handwriting was horrible. Knuckles up, the stick coming down on the bone. The skin turned red, then black. My Tamil handwriting didn’t improve. It got worse. Pain is a terrible teacher. And then, the zoology teacher. She loved homework. I didn't do it. So I stood outside the classroom for more than half her classes. The door was next to the blackboard. Standing outside, I had to look at the board at a sharp, perpendicular angle. The letters were just white smears of chalk. I couldn’t hear her. When I was allowed inside the next day, I had no context. I fell behind. I hated zoology. The exams were a joke anyway. The Tamil Nadu state board had predefined questions. You didn't study the animal; you memorized the paragraph written by the school for a pre-written questions given by the board. She wanted the script. She wanted obedience of doing homework. But I was not capable of doing it. I suffered by standing out, being humuliated, scolded, being singled out.. I look back at all of this, and the anger still tastes fresh. Like copper on the tongue. I shouldn’t have gone to school. I should have been a shepherd. I have been told countless times that I am "மாடு மேய்க்கத்தான் லாயக்கு". I should have bought a few goats, taken them to graze in the scrublands of Coimbatore, milked them, sold the milk, and lived in the quiet. No GPRS panics, no knuckle beatings, no perpendicular blackboard angles. Just the animals, the grass, and the sun. I’m sitting at the keyboard now. I used to think writing this shit down would empty the vault. But the weight doesn't shift. The keys click. And I still want to die. Image Credit: Master lock on belly chain.jpg</a> by Rainerzufall1234, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. A Rooftop of One's Own 2014-06-15T00:00:00+00:00 I earn fourteen thousand rupees a month. In the grand scheme of things, it’s not much. But compared to what a daily wage worker makes out in the villages, it feels like a fortune. It’s a corporate job in Bangalore. Soul-sucking, boring, the kind of job where you watch the clock count down the minutes until you can leave. But it pays the rent. Sort of. Right now, I’m staying in a PG (Paying Guest accommodation) with my college mates: Ganda, bells, and the rest. It’s expensive for what it is, and it’s not convenient. The only saving grace is that they provide food three times a day, so I don't have to worry about cooking. But you share a toilet with a dozen other guys, and they only clean it once in a while. It gets old fast. I couldn't take it anymore, so I went house hunting. I was walking around BTM Layout, near Gurappanapalya, looking for to-let boards. I met a guy vacating a place, and we started talking in Kannada. I was just trying to learn, so mostly i was speaking in tamil sounding like kannadam. "How much is the rent?" I asked. "We pay 7000," he said. "But the owner wants 10000 from the next tenant. They are your people. Maybe you can talk to them." "My people?", I asked. he said, "tamils." Anyway, Ten thousand. Just like that. Rent jumps because some IT company opened an office nearby and a fresh batch of migrants is willing to pay whatever is asked. The people who lived here for years are just priced out, forced to move further to the margins. What the fuck. I looked at the house. It was cozy and compact, but then I noticed the nameplate and a few other signs. The owners are Twice-born. They came from the head of Brahma, apparently, and I’m from the feet. They are not my people. Or rather, they don't consider me theirs. I didn't take my roommates to see any of these places. I was doing this alone, walking around during the day after my night shift. I’d finish work at morning, sleep for a few hours, and then walk the hot streets in the middle of the day. I found a place eventually. It’s not a flat. It’s a tiny room built on the terrace of a multi-story building, right next to the overhead water tanks. A bachelor penthouse, if you want to be fancy about it. It’s just one room and a bathroom, purpose-built for bachelors who only need a place to crash. It’s tiny, it’s hot, but it’s mine. I have my own key. No shared toilets, no company rules. Just the hum of the city and the water tank leaking onto the concrete outside. It’ll do. Image Credit: Rooftop terrace at Redi on a sunny evening in April 2025.jpg</a> by JIP, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Is free software needed for communicating electronically? 2014-02-10T00:00:00+00:00 Free software for communication isn’t a cult checkbox; it’s the difference between speaking in a public square and whispering through a corporate wiretap. The “four freedoms</a>” are not bedtime stories - they’re a boring way of saying: who controls your tools controls your speech. We’ve done the loop before: IRC → XMPP → shiny surveillance chat apps → disillusionment → back to protocols that actually federate. People jumped to WhatsApp</a> and Skype</a>, then flirted with Telegram</a> because a free client looked “good enough.” It wasn’t. “Eventually open source everything” never arrived for the server (Telegram FAQ</a>). If you can’t inspect or run the server, you’re praying, not communicating. So yes, federated protocols matter: XMPP</a>, Matrix</a>, plain old IRC</a>. And yes, community‑run infrastructure matters more than herding everyone into one “pod.” If you use Diaspora*, run your own pod and federate; don’t outsource your autonomy to a random admin (Diaspora pods</a>, Pod Uptime</a>). Otherwise you’ve just reinvented centralization with extra steps. “But everyone’s on Gmail/Outlook/Yahoo</a>.” Exactly. Three providers sit on the throats of global email. Transport encryption (TLS) keeps your mail safe in the pipe; it says nothing about what happens at rest. Those providers scan mail for “features” and, historically, for ads; they also cooperate with law enforcement and intelligence under various regimes. If you don’t run the stack, you don’t set the rules. Try some lesser known community options. If you find a reliable server, you can use free clients like Roundcube</a>; better yet, control your own domain and keys. To summarize without the incense: Protocols over platforms: Pick things that federate and can be self‑hosted.</li> Clients you can audit: Free software or it didn’t happen.</li> Servers you can run: If the server is closed, your freedom is cosplay.</li> Threat model first: Use the right tool for your risk; no silver bullets.</li> </ul> If this sounds “paranoid,” good. “Paranoid” just means you’ve read a history book. Or any privacy policy. And since we’re all compost eventually: speak freely while you can - with tools that don’t kneel. The Asus Fonepad Shift 2013-09-20T00:00:00+00:00 And I didn't get a smart phone until a bit later. While everyone else in college was moving to early Android phones or iPhones, I stayed without a proper smartphone or internet phone. It was only now in 2013 that I finally got one, and it wasn't a normal phone. It was one of the early Asus Fonepads: a giant 7-inch Intel-powered Android tablet hybrid that took a SIM card. That initial Asus Fonepad broke soon after I got it. But instead of going back to relying solely on the laptop or getting a regular small phone, I bought another Asus device in the exact same lineup. If I recall correctly, it was ASUS K012, which is the official model code for the ASUS Fonepad 7 (FE170CG). Holding a full 7-inch tablet up to your ear to answer a phone call looked completely absurd in public. People would stare like you were holding a tray to your face. But coming from years of lugging around a cracked 15-inch Lotus Pink Dell Inspiron with a dead battery, pulling SIM cards out of my phone, and plugging Huawei 3G USB dongles into laptop ports just to get 2G/3G speeds, having a single handheld screen with cellular data was a massive relief. That Asus Fonepad marked a fundamental transition. Internet was no longer a destination you sat down at a desk to connect to through USB modems and Linux Network Manager hacks. It was always in your hands. The cracked Dell Inspiron was finally demoted to a deskbound media storage machine, ending the first leg of my OS and hardware journey. Windows 8 maybe kinda Cool, but Fedora 17 (Beefy Miracle) is Awesome 2013-01-29T00:00:00+00:00 I'm posting this months after it actually happened, mostly because life got in the way and kept me busy. Microsoft's Windows 8 got a lot of things right under the hood. It felt fast, fluid, and remarkably responsive compared to Windows 7. I know people are absolutely hating it, but I actually liked it. But after spending extended time with Fedora 17 (code-named Beefy Miracle), Microsoft's vision of the desktop feels like a step backward into a walled garden. Fedora 17 delivered a massive batch of improvements under the hood. The most impressive part was getting GNOME Shell running smoothly even on systems lacking 3D hardware acceleration via software rendering fallback. They also started the long-overdue transition to a unified file system by merging legacy /usr/bin</code> and /usr/sbin</code> binaries into a single clean hierarchy to make Linux file structures sane again. A few standout technical highlights from running F17: Kernel & Tools: Shipped with Linux kernel 3.3.4, updated OpenStack ("Essex") for cloud workloads, and introduced native support for JBoss Application Server 7.</li> GNOME 3.4 & Desktop Sane Defaults: GNOME 3.4 brought smooth scrolling, refactored application search, and the sleek "Web" browser (Epiphany). KDE 4.8 and GIMP 2.8 (finally introducing single-window mode!) rounded out desktop software options.</li> Automatic Multiseat Support: This is probably the coolest feature in F17. On standard Linux distributions, multiple users could log into TTY consoles simultaneously. Automatic multiseat brought this concept to full graphical sessions. Plug in a second monitor, USB keyboard, and mouse into a single PC tower, and two people can run independent, full-fledged graphical desktops at the exact same time. On modern multi-core PCs, this saves money, desk space, and power in budget homelabs or small offices.</li> </ol> Windows 8 tried to bridge smartphones and desktop PCs by shoving full-screen tiled Metro menus in everyone's face whether they wanted them or not. Fedora 17 took the opposite approach: refining power-user tools, fixing long-standing Linux architectural clutter, and keeping the OS modular. If you haven't given Fedora a spin on bare metal recently, grab the ISO and try it. It's easily one of the most solid Linux releases to date. Image Credit: Fedora logo and wordmark.svg</a> by Unknown authorUnknown author, licensed under Public domain. Colonial Hangovers and Kerala Heat 2012-09-25T00:00:00+00:00 So I moved to Kerala. Just another shift of coordinates in this grinding machine of existence. Sitting in a room. Waiting for the hours to dissolve. College is four dead years behind me, a tier-3 abattoir designed to carve away your sanity and saddle you with phantom debt. Neurodivergent peasants aren't built for the machinery; we just bleed into the gears. Anyway. I was on a train recently. Staring through a filthy window at the passing decay, feeling the suffocating heat plaster my shirt to my flesh. We crawled through some forgotten hamlet. And I saw something. A woman standing there. Wearing just a sari. No blouse. Fabric draped directly over her bare chest. Back in the Tamil plains, the meat-puppets don't do that anymore. You only see it on the ninety-year-old husks who are too close to the void to care. Everyone else is mummified. They swelter inside stitched blouses, thick petticoats, and six yards of synthetic rot, boiling their own skin in a climate that actively resents human biology. The older ones loathe it, but they are expiring. Now, the illusion of free will dictates that boiling alive in your own sweat is a display of "modesty." It’s a grotesque pantomime. No, really, it’s just fucked up. I looked into it. Because the conscious mind craves distraction from its own tragic evolutionary mistake, I suppose. The entire blouse and petticoat contrivance? A British infection. Victorian prudes dragged their heavy, miserable costumes here in the 1800s. Horrified by the sight of skin, they looked at bodies adapted to this humid nightmare and saw immorality. A bare midriff sent their fragile, rotting sensibilities into an absolute panic. They forced their converts to cover the flesh. The local elites, desperate to mimic their white masters like good little mannequins, strapped themselves into high-collared blouses and underskirts. By the time the colonizers vacated the continent, their twisted Christian morality had already permanently parasitized our collective consciousness. Before the sickness? Clothing here was merely functional. Unstitched. Breathable. A mundu, a thin cotton wrap that simply acknowledged the brutal reality of the climate. It allowed sweat to evaporate into the indifferent air. It made sense for the suffering organisms trapped on the Tamil and Kerala coasts. But now? We have right-wing Hindutva clowns policing the herd, screaming about how a bare chest violates "Indian culture." What culture? The grotesque Victorian hangover forced down your ancestors' throats? They defend a colonial straitjacket and worship it as an ancient truth. Ignorant of their own history. Ancient temple carvings show bodies unbound, existing without the burden of stitched shame. Skin wasn’t inherently sexualized until the colonizers projected their own sickness onto it. Now, this layered suffocation is just another shadow-play of control. A way to enforce suffering. So when I see a woman in a hamlet wearing just a sari, it isn't scandalous. It is the only sane response to the cosmic joke of living in this heat. More bodies should embrace it. They won’t, obviously. They will continue to march blindly, suffocating themselves in the name of an utterly meaningless respectability. Most of the Old posts are gone; (Actually moved to someplace safe 😉 ) 2012-07-07T00:00:00+00:00 Dear Bastards, It is very hard for me to imagine why the fuck anyone would read this shitty blog, but if I were to believe the traffic, some of you creeps still do. Though I haven't been particularly concerned about my identity, things has changed. I have someone who fears that these shitposting and ranting can attract harm my way; I do not care much about that, but I can't have her involved in any of these. So I am going to move this blog to Tor network. The Onion url</a> for that site is hidden right here in this site and I am sure you can figure that out easily. I will delete most of my posts in this site and leave the boring ones here. So some post will still be here, but even in those posts, I will redact the parts which she think is little overboard in the leftout posts (except in the intro post). And remeber fellas: "Omnes una manet nox." Dongles, ShipIt CDs, and Distro Hopping 2012-06-15T00:00:00+00:00 A friend gave me a Vista CD after I realized FreeDOS was useless on the Lotus Pink Inspiron (Dell actually released swappable LCD back covers in later versions, but I was stuck with the pink lid). Installed Vista. Was okay. Then in a few days at an internet center / cyber cafe, whatever you call it (you know, the place you can go to watch some porn?), I applied for an Ubuntu CD on ShipIt, and I got it in the mail. It worked for a while. Then since I didn't have a smart phone or even a proper phone with internet, I purchased something called an Idea NetSetter. It was a rebadged Huawei and they locked it down with an Idea SIM. The Idea connection was EDGE only, but I started downloading stuff anyway. Then I purchased a Huawei 3G USB dongle. Not the locked down version with Idea or Airtel. The Idea was EDGE only, but this supported HSPA. Was nice. You can use any SIM. The UI even supported making calls if I use the Windows app. But in Linux, I had to rely on native Network Manager, which didn't support calls. And since I use my same SIM for internet by removing it from my phone, I started dual booting Windows. Pirated Windows of course. In Linux, I was using Unity only for a short time, then moved to XFCE. GNOME 3 dropped, so I went to Fedora 15 for the 1st time. Had some issues. It didn't have the packages as much as Debian and therefore Ubuntu. Also tried openSUSE. Went back to Ubuntu during their infamous Ubuntu Unity adoption. But I liked the direction GNOME was going. It was nice even with a touchpad, but I don't have the touch screen. Unfortunately they put a lot of emphasis back then on the touch screen, I think, at least from a user perspective. Fedora had nice names: Lovelock, Verne, etc. But after Beefy Miracle (Fedora 17), I kinda stayed with Fedora. I often still keep trying distros, but kept Fedora as my primary OS since Beefy Miracle. (I even wrote a separate detailed breakdown on running Fedora 17 (Beefy Miracle) vs Windows 8</a>). In hindsight, I should have absolutely avoided spending 3 to 4k extra on the DVD writer when ordering the Inspiron. It could have come for 2 months hostel mess fee. It was only occasionally useful when I burned Fedora ISOs to give to random people. I am not even part of the Fedora Freemedia program. And so far, I burned discs for maybe five people in total. Hungry Water and The Straight Line Delusion 2011-08-22T00:00:00+00:00 I went down to the Noyyal today. Or what’s left of it. I remember going to that water with my mom to wash our clothes. My chithappa used to walk down there just to take a bath. It was a living, breathing part of the dirt we stood on. Now? It is a corpse. An open, frothing sewer of municipal shit and industrial dye. The rich bastards running the factories in coimbatore, textile units around Tiruppur, and even the fucking municipal corporations just keep vomiting their chemical effluents straight into the channel. You look at it and you want to gag. We all know what happened to the Orathupalayam Dam, which was built for farmers, supposedly, but is now choked with toxic sludge that they had to shut it down. A textbook crime scene. I used to think, maybe, just maybe, our next generation could enjoy a river, which I don’t have a chance of having. Nope. They get a stinking, foaming chemical drain. And nobody with any power actually gives a damn. But it’s not just the poison. It is the blinding, spectacular arrogance of the people who think they can control water. Engineers. God save us from civil engineers with their rulers and their fluid mechanics textbooks. They look at a river, a chaotic, messy, meandering force of nature, and they see a defective pipe. They suffer from this terminal drainage blindness. To them, a healthy stream packed with fallen logs, sandbanks, and wild curves is "clogged." So what do they do? They "clean" it. They scrape away the vegetation. They rip out the roots. They dredge the bottom and slap concrete on the sides until they’ve bullied a living river into a perfectly straight line. They think they’ve achieved efficiency. They haven't. They have just built a high-speed water chute that flushes everything out to sea before it can sink into the soil. Nature doesn't do straight lines. When you straighten a channel, you murder the meanders. You destroy the natural speed brakes. Water needs time to seep sideways, to sit, to recharge the dry aquifers. The old Tamil kings actually understood this. We didn't have beavers to build leaky dams here, but the old kings built the eri tank systems and anicuts to mimic them. Catch the rain, slow it down, spread it out. Now? The British taught us to draw straight lines, and we never stopped. We just want to push water away fast, and then trap it behind massive, stupid concrete walls. But water is not stupid. It is patient. And it is incredibly vindictive. When you build a dam, you trap all the silt and sand behind it. The water that spills out the other side is stripped naked. Hydrologists call it "hungry water." It has massive kinetic energy and absolutely no sediment to carry, so it aggressively attacks the riverbed downstream. It scours away the dirt and tears the banks to shreds just to satisfy its capacity. It eats whatever it can reach. Take a look at the bridges around here sometime. Some of them look like they’re waiting for a stiff breeze to collapse. That is bridge scour. The textbook engineers cleared out all the wood, straightened the channel, and accidentally turned the river into a hyper-fast pressure washer. The hungry water hits the bridge piers, creates an underwater vortex, and just scoops the foundation right out from under the concrete. The bridge looks totally fine from the road, but underneath? It is hanging in mid-air. One heavy flood and the whole damn thing will snap like a dry twig. It is hilarious. In a very grim, miserable way. We traded a self-sustaining biological ecosystem for a giant concrete storm drain, and the drain is actively digging its own grave. The public screams about flooded streets, and the government responds by issuing fresh tenders for more concrete retaining walls. Because concrete is easy to audit. Nature is messy, and you can't issue a lucrative government contract for "leaving a dead tree in the water." So the default answer is always to widen it, straighten it, and strip it bare. A river is lawless. Ten thousand river commissions with all the money in the world couldn't actually tame one. We are just arrogant enough to think we can bully physics with a T-square and a bag of cement. The Noyyal will remember what we did. The dirt always gets the last laugh. Image Credit: Suzumegawa(Spallow river)Wing Dam Park - 雀川砂防ダム公園 - panoramio (1).jpg</a> by Carbonium, licensed under CC BY 3.0. Anna Jarvis Can't Rest 2011-05-08T00:00:00+00:00 Second Sunday of May. Mother's Day. Facebook is melting. Twitter is gurgling. Each post more pathetic than the last. A son uploads a photo of himself (not of his mother, himself) holding a rose, grinning like he's won something. A daughter writes three paragraphs of undying devotion addressed to a woman who, I guarantee you, has never once opened a browser. Another person shares a Hallmark-looking graphic with cursive text and a stock photo of some white woman hugging some other white woman in a sunlit field. Their mothers are not on Facebook. Their mothers don't know what Facebook is. The message went to nobody. The devotion was performed for everyone else. That's the whole thing, isn't it. It's not for the mother. It was never for the mother. It's for the audience watching you love your mother. The ritual eats the feeling whole and spits out a branded product. I keep thinking about Anna Jarvis. She's the one who started this. 1908. Her own mother had just died. Anna Marie Jarvis, who had watched her mother dedicate her life to women's friendship clubs, to nursing soldiers on both sides of the Civil War, and who had made peace in communities torn apart, decided the world owed her mother a day. A quiet, personal day. She campaigned for years. Wrote letters to politicians, to newspapers, to pastors. She won. In 1914, Woodrow Wilson signed it into law. National Mother's Day. Second Sunday of May. She must have felt something that day. Some relief. Some completion. Then Hallmark got hold of it. The greeting card industry was waiting. They didn't waste a week. By 1920 the thing Anna had meant as a private, handwritten observance (she had specifically said handwritten letters, not store-bought cards: handwritten) had become the biggest retail event in the calendar. Carnations being sold by the gross. Pre-printed sentiment in envelopes. Department store Mother's Day sales. Chocolates in heart-shaped boxes. She was horrified. She said so publicly. She called them "money-mad pirates." She sued them. She crashed their fundraisers, their flower-vendor conventions. She was escorted out of events by police. She was called unstable. She spent everything she had fighting it. The legal fees. The campaigns. The pamphlets. Near the end, she did door-to-door in Philadelphia. Think about that. An old woman, going house to house, asking people to sign a petition to abolish the holiday she had built. Her own holiday. She wanted it rescinded by Congress. She wanted to pull the whole thing back before it ate everyone alive. She went door to door. Philadelphia streets. Knocking. Nobody really listened. Why would they. The cards were already selling. The florists had already planned their inventory. The candy makers had contracts. She died in 1948. Poor. Half-blind. In a sanitarium in West Chester, Pennsylvania. The irony that people she'd never met paid for her care, some of them from the very greeting card and flower industries she'd spent thirty years fighting, is the kind of thing you can't write without a laugh that hurts somewhere behind your sternum. And here we are. 2011. People on Facebook posting for mothers who are not on Facebook, because the calendar said so, because everyone else is posting, because it costs nothing and looks like something. Anna Jarvis went door to door in Philadelphia to stop this exact thing from existing. She burned her money, her health, her reputation on it. She lost completely. We won. We got the day. We're celebrating it right now, on our terms, at no emotional cost whatsoever, with a graphic we didn't make, for an audience that doesn't love our mothers either. Happy Mother's Day. Image Credit: Rose and carnation flower bouquet 01.jpg</a> by Suyash Dwivedi, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Feet-Forward Bikes: Why Are We Still Riding Like We're on Horses? 2011-04-23T00:00:00+00:00 I came across some photos online of feet-forward motorcycles (recumbents like Royce Creasey’s Voyager and Dan Gurney’s Alligator), and it hit me like a kick in the teeth: this design makes total, undeniable sense. Look at the posture. You aren't straddling a hot engine like a medieval horse rider with your spine taking every pothole directly into your skull. You're sitting in the machine, back supported, legs stretched out, feet reaching the asphalt without tipping over on your tiptoes. It looks bizarre only because we've been brainwashed by a hundred years of bad defaults. I love this thing. It looks like something that actually belongs on a road built for human beings. I want to buy one right now, except nobody makes them commercially. You can't just walk into a showroom in Tamil Nadu and ask for a feet-forward motorcycle. So the only real option left is to build one. Not today, and probably not next year, but hopefully in a few years I'll pull together enough scrap metal, a donor chassis, and welding time to build one of these. The Clear Advantages</h3> The physics are almost foolishly superior: Aerodynamics: Your frontal area is cut down by nearly half. You aren't a human parachute catching headwinds.</li> Ergonomics & Safety: You sit low with lumbar support. In a head-on collision, you don't get catapulted over the handlebars head-first into oncoming traffic.</li> Center of Gravity: The mass sits low between the wheels, making stability at speed almost effortless.</li> </ul> The Downsides</h3> It's not pure perfection, of course: Low Visibility in Dense Traffic: In Indian bumper-to-bumper chaos, being sitting low means buses and trucks can't see you in their mirrors easily.</li> Slow Speed Foot-Dabbing: In crawling traffic, getting your legs out from a reclined bucket seat to balance can feel clumsy until you get the hang of it.</li> Turning Radius & Wheelbase: They tend to be longer, making tight U-turns in narrow lanes a chore.</li> </ul> Why Isn't This Common?</h3> So why aren't all motorbikes built this way? Is it simply because the very first motorbikes were literally safety bicycles with single-cylinder engines bolted onto the frame? The bicycle itself was designed to mimic the posture of riding a horse. So for over a century, we've just been pushing forward that same horse-riding geometry out of pure inertia. Factory tooling was set up for diamond frames, riders got used to straddling tanks, and nobody wanted to take the financial risk of selling something that looks "weird." It's the ultimate example of path dependency overriding basic human ergonomics. (Note: Years later, I put together a structured business and technical analysis slide deck on commercializing feet-forward EVs in India. See the 2025 presentation entry: Feet-Forward Bikes (Presentation)</a>.) Image Credit: Low recumbent bicycle b.jpg</a> by メルビル, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. The Lotus Pink Dell Inspiron 15R (N5010) 2010-11-09T00:00:00+00:00 I am starting a journal where I document my OS journey. Last year, in 2009, I forced my dad to get me a laptop. Everyone else back then was obsessed with camera phones or those big phones with video players. That was considered the rad thing to have. But I didn't care about a phone. I wanted a laptop. I started calling sales teams directly. Dell had this build to order thing running in India. I dialed their sales number, spoke to a sales lady, and picked a Dell Inspiron 15R (N5010). And I was a college kid back then. I didn't really need a laptop. None of my classmates had one, even though they were all much richer and came from solid middle class families. I wasn't buying it because I was smart or wanted something useful. No, not at all. I almost never used it for anything that people consider a good use. All we did was watch a lot of movies, songs, and porn. In 2009 and 2010, in the room where I stayed, my laptop was basically the movie watching station for everyone. Later on, more people got laptops in college, but in my room it was all movie watching. And those fuckers broke it too. They dropped it and the body broke, but thankfully it kept working. I paid almost 34k I think. Had to go to a bank with cash and deposit in the account number they gave and all that. I'm putting the quote snippets here for y'all. Anyway, I didn't pay for MS Windows license. I didn't negotiate with the sales lady well. Maybe she would have given a discount. But me with mental problems, speaking to a person and asking for discount? Hell no. I mean, I would ask these days, but back then, I would die before that. Actually they did give me a DOS CD for the OS. I did install it, but what will I do with it? I even stupidly paid an extra 500+ for the Lotus Pink LCD Back Cover. If I go back, I wouldn't have done that. But here it is, a cracked Lotus Pink Inspiron running FreeDOS in my college room. I am still deadrat 2010-06-17T00:00:00+00:00 If you are a jobless creep, you might know why I decided to play human</a>. I have to admit that I had pretty good time during that cos play. Most credits go to this little devil at ▓▓ contents are redacted</code> ▓▓ It can make one feel, “That was my first and it will be the last.” ( Someone stole this phrase, slightly modified and call it as "Matthew 20:16" ) If I look back, I can clearly see that I might have ended up as a happy man with lovely family. What a fucking nightmare that would have been! Luckily, That didn't happen. Father Time was on my side. I am still deadrat. Amen deadrat needs a girlfriend...? 2009-04-03T00:00:00+00:00 ▓▓ contents are redacted</code> ▓▓ Applications are open for the role of Girlfriend (singular, obviously). The salary is paid in attention and the rare art of showing up when the room goes quiet. About me: Tamil. Cynical, yes, but not immune. Anti‑imperialist and anti‑capitalist and somehow still frightened by Sundays. I can fix your GNU/Linux box and make rasam that smells like home, but I still eat alone more nights than I admit. My love language used to be sarcasm; now it’s honesty with a limp. ▓▓ contents are redacted</code> ▓▓ Minimum requirements (I’m lowering the bar because I’m tired of the ceiling): Laugh at gallows humor; tolerate righteous rants.</li> Knows the difference between privacy and performance.</li> Understands that love isn’t a subscription tier (I think it will becoma a huge thing in future).</li> </ul> Nice to have (not deal‑breakers; I’m not hiring a deity): Reads something other than notifications.</li> Can argue without turning into a TED Talk.</li> Will bully me into drinking water and touching grass.</li> </ul> What I offer (besides the obvious disaster): Memes, books, and badly timed honesty.</li> Late‑night tea, early‑morning silence, mid‑day phone calls from bathrooms.</li> A clean /etc/hosts</code> and an even cleaner conscience.</li> </ul> ▓▓ contents are redacted</code> ▓▓ ▓▓ contents are redacted</code> ▓▓ What this really is It’s an inventory of loneliness disguised as a joke. The ad format was a mask; this is the face. I’m not looking for a manic pixie communist savior. I’m looking for someone who will text “home?” at 11:43 PM and mean it. Someone who gets that the world is on fire but still waters the plants. FAQ Why the ad? Because dating apps are casinos that pay out in loneliness, and because saying “I’m lonely” sounds less pathetic when wrapped in bullet points.</li> What’s the catch? Me.</li> Red flags? Plenty. They come pre‑laundered. I’m learning to fold them into flags for ships that come back.</li> </ul> How to apply: send a message that proves you read past the first paragraph. Or don’t. I’ll still make tea and wait for water to boil like it changes anything. If selected, I’ll try - not pretend - to be emotionally available. If rejected, I’ll rename the quiet to “rest” and try to believe it. Either way, the universe keeps expanding, and tonight I notice. ▓▓ contents are redacted</code> ▓▓ Sometimes, saving ▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓... 2008-12-01T00:00:00+00:00 Warning: Yet another</code> shitpost</a> Dear Bastards, Everyone loves to sermonize about “saving.” It’s the secular catechism of capitalism: skip the coffee, stack the cash, salvation will come via compound interest. Cute story. But like most fairy tales, it’s convenient propaganda that keeps you docile while the machine skims your blood. By saving</a>, I mean money, not your crappy Word doc. Here’s the punchline they never print on the pamphlet: if you’re carrying high‑interest debt, “saving” is just a polite way of burning money for your bank’s entertainment. You earn 3–6% in a savings account on a good day, while your loans can slurp 20–40% or more. Much more for people like us who had to buy at kandhu vatti, meter vatti, thandal, bullet vatti, etc</a>. That spread is not a “discipline problem.” It’s extraction. Math, because reality doesn’t care about motivational posters Debt: ₹50,000 at 36% APR ≈ ₹1,500/month in interest.</li> Savings: ₹50,000 at 4% APR ≈ ₹167/month in interest.</li> Net: you’re bleeding ≈ ₹1,333/month to the house for the privilege of being “responsible.”</li> </ul> That’s not “financial prudence.” That’s tribute. Ritual. A tiny daily sacrifice to the gods of balance sheets. They call it “discipline” so you’ll blame yourself instead of the structure. Now, that's if you are middle class. but if you a fucking peasant, the APR goes 300+. It's so fucking funny that Under the Tamil Nadu Money-Lenders Act, 1957. the maximum allowable interest rate is 9% (for secured loans) and 12% (for unsecured loans) per annum simple interest. Any interest rate charged above these prescribed limits is legally defined as "exorbitant interest" and is entirely prohibited. But we fucking know the reality. The irony is, most of the people exploiting are fucking Government recognised money lenders. ▓▓ some names and numbers are redacted to protect the guilty</code> ▓▓ Years ago, a well‑meaning clown brigade told a broke friend to “keep saving” while he drowned in revolving debt. Why would you “invest” at 4% while paying 30–40% on the other side? Because sermons are easier than systems, that’s why. “But saving builds habits.” Sure. So does banging your head against a wall. Habits aren’t holy; outcomes matter. Start by stabbing the highest‑interest vampire first (see debt avalanche</a>; if your brain needs dopamine hits, use the snowball</a> and lie to yourself strategically). Then, when the bleeding slows, build a small emergency moat, because most people can’t take a punch: the murican Fed’s survey shows many can’t cover a modest surprise bill (SHED</a>). That’s not a personal failing; it’s the design. Read the World Inequality Report</a> and tell me this is about coffee. The condom analogy, since you degenerates need pictures: condoms are great for sex, not for taking a piss. Use the right protection for the right risk. Savings protect you from random life shrapnel; they don’t protect you from a 300% APR chainsaw. For that, you need to turn the chainsaw off. But mostly we can't. These lenders would never want to let people go off hook and become debt free. Practical heresy for the devout savers: Kill high‑interest debt before worshipping at the savings altar.</li> Keep a small emergency fund once the worst vampires are staked.</li> Refuse moralizing advice that ignores power, prices, and paychecks.</li> Remember who profits when you “do the right thing” the wrong way.</li> </ul> If you want a sermon, go to church. If you want to survive, read the footnotes. And for the old‑school among you: “நிலையாமை எல்லாம் உலகு.” Try saving that. If you are offended, please click here</a> and we will rectify your situation. Image Credit: The Money Changer and His Wife</a> via Wikimedia Commons Wood Is Renewable, You Idiot 2008-11-28T00:00:00+00:00 I was maybe ten when my grandpa cut one big tree on his land. Not some sacred ancient thing, just a big tree he'd decided had lived long enough. He sold the wood and had a carpenter make something like a table or a bench, I don't remember which. And I, fresh from whatever environmental science bullshit they were teaching me in middle school that year, lost my shit at him completely. They in school had introduced something called EVS that year. So at home, actually my grandpa's home , I threw a tantrum. I probably cried. I am almost certain I cried, actually. He looked at me and said, more or less: relax, more trees will grow. That's the whole point of trees, they keep growing. Metal doesn't grow back. And then he just went back to whatever he was doing. I didn't accept that. I decided he was wrong and I was right, and that belief (wood furniture bad, cutting trees bad, all of it) stayed with me for years. Not just a few years. Like, embarrassingly many years. I went through school with it. I went through the entirety of a tier-3 engineering college with it. It never even occurred to me to think about it again. When my parents bought plastic chairs (actually not because of me, but that's all we could afford as plastic was economical compared to wooden furniture), I felt fine about that. When I walked past some rich person's house with wooden dining furniture I had this little internal reaction, this quiet judgment. What the fuck, cutting trees for a chair. Meanwhile I'm being virtuous with my sixty-rupee white plastic chair that will never biodegrade. I was so fucking dumb for a thing I'd never actually examined. The realisation didn't come in one moment. It just surfaced at some point: wood grows back. Obviously it grows back. You cut a tree, you plant another, the wood from the first one sits in furniture for forty or fifty years storing the carbon it pulled from the air while it was alive, and the new tree starts pulling more. Plastic is fossil fuel that won't rot for hundreds of years. The plastic chair I felt good about is categorically worse. My grandpa's table was the more sensible environmental choice. The thing I was mocking was actually fine. I'd held the wrong belief for over a decade because a teacher gave me a slogan, "cutting trees is bad," and I took it at face value and never interrogated it once. No context, no: bad compared to what, at what scale, under what conditions. Just: bad. So I stored it as a fact and walked around with it. They're still doing this to kids, by the way. The same slogan, same zero nuance. Some kid right now is feeling morally superior about a plastic water bottle. (but I hope not. They probably are saying with zero nuance that plastic bottle is bad, or maybe like recycling is the only solution, which is also bullshit. I dont know why recycling is still a thing gets so much attention than reducing or even reusing) There's this other thing I keep coming back to, which is something a physics teacher told me (not my higher secondary physics teacher, a different one). That guy, the higher secondary one, was an absolute bastard. I genuinely cannot think about him without something happening to my blood pressure. The worst part is he's probably still teaching, which means there are probably students in his class right now whose lives he's in the process of making worse, and I'm not doing anything about it, I've never done anything about it, and that's a specific kind of guilt I sit with and then immediately push away because I don't know what I'm supposed to do with it. I'm not going to get into it. Anyway, the other teacher, earlier, a different person, was only moderately terrible. He said something once about how asteroid belts contain absurd amounts of gold and platinum and iron. The universe makes metals constantly. Supernovae, neutron star collisions, stellar nucleosynthesis or whatever, I'm simplifying. The point is metals are just physics. The universe produces them as a byproduct of existing. But wood needs something completely different. It needs billions of years of evolution starting from single-cell organisms. It needs liquid water, which requires a planet at a specific distance from a star of a specific type, which is already a massive coincidence. It needs photosynthesis, which needed to be invented by biology after enormous amounts of time. It needs an atmosphere with the right mix of gases. It needs soil that itself took millions of years of decomposition to form. You can probably find asteroids out there with more gold in them than all the banks on earth combined. You will not find a forest. You will not find cellulose or a leaf or a bird or a fungal network under the soil. I don't know, maybe I'm wrong about some of the specifics here, I'm not a biologist. But the basic idea seems right. Wood is not just "a material." It's organised biological structure that required most of the planet's history to exist. Diamond is just carbon under pressure. Wood is carbon that went through four billion years of life to get there. And I spent my childhood worrying about my grandpa's table. The practical bit: obviously I'm not saying go chop everything down. Scale matters, replacement rate matters, my grandpa cutting one tree on his farm is nothing like a logging company stripping a hillside. My grandma's family prayed to some of the old trees, wouldn't touch them. They'd trim a branch here and there (I don't know if that's even okay, I'm not going to pretend I've thought it all through), but the point is they understood it as a system. Harvest some, preserve some, let it regrow. That's just how agriculture works. Trees are slower crops. School never taught it that way. It taught it as a binary. What I keep getting stuck on is how many other binaries I'm still carrying around unexamined. This wooden furniture thing sat in my head for over a decade and it was just wrong, backwards, and I had no idea. I wasn't even close to questioning it. If something this basic was just sitting there undetected, I genuinely have no way of knowing what else is. I can't make a list. There's no audit. I just hope I keep running into things that crack them open. That I stay alive long enough and pay enough attention that I keep getting corrected, by reality or by people who actually know things, until I die with somewhat fewer dumb beliefs than I was born into. That's not an inspiring thought. It's just the only honest version of progress I've been able to come up with. Image Credit: Log pond and jack (4586895583).jpg</a> via Wikimedia Commons Fuck You tree hugging bastards 2008-11-27T00:00:00+00:00 Warning: It is a</code> shitpost</a> It all started with a guy in an imageboard saying "As per religion, alcohol is served in heaven after death, but cunning humans taste it in the mortal earth. Responsible drinking is inevitable for the food ecosystem. So much grapes, rice,potatoes, sugarcane will go waste." That pissed me off too much. Who the fuck are those bastards to decide on what constitutes a waste and what is used wisely. So according to them if we make fine Wine out of grape and drink it, it goes as waste, but if they eat grape and shit, it is used/consumed usefully. That shit doesn't make any sense; does it? Nothing goes waste. Whatever is in this universe stays in this universe. It may change its form, but you can't call it as going waste. Grapes, rice, potato and every other shit had rotten / rots / and will rot in this earth and gets decomposed. It then could take another form as a tree or a mud or what ever the fuck the time and the environment makes it. It was in earth and it stays in earth. How is it a waste. Same goes for animals (including homo sapiens) They took in earthly matter as nutrition and grew. They expelled the waste into this earth. They die and stay in earth. (or maybe in some nearby planets if they are astronaut or traveller). But still I don't see anything getting wasted. When someone is hungry at a point on space and time, and if a fruit rich in starch and nutrients is consumed by that person, some claim that the fruit was used and not wasted. My point is, - whether the human ate the fruit, then excreted and after long time he died or - he died of lack of nutriition and the fruit decomposed in a distant place, there isn't much difference. This multiverse is vast and the effect a human can have on it is very insignificant. Humans are earthly subjects like air and water. Flood erodes the path it takes. Similarly humans sometimes takes some uranium or hydrogen and make some changes to it that has a bit larger impact. I see no crime in that. So stop being a wuss and don't complain that human beings are causing Global warming. No shit we are causing Global warming, but why should we care. If you think that the next generation cannot survive if the earth gets warmer, let those sons of bitches evolve. If they aren't capable of that let them go extinct. But I don't give a fuck about that. Yay, I can be right wing lunatic. Hey Dad! I 'll disappoint you. 2008-09-15T00:00:00+00:00 I hope this won't come as a big surprise to you. Based on my behaviour in the last few years, you should have guessed it; But I want to make it clear: I won't live up to your expectations. When I was born, you might have had so many dreams of making a gentleman out of me, but I don't want an insipid life. I could have just repeatedly studied those stupid school books, I could have listened to that worthless bastard who happened to be my high school physics teacher, I could have even ignored the environment in college and just kept on with my work. If I had done that, I would have landed an overly compensating 9-to-5 job, married a woman, started and family and became what people call as a successful person. But I didn't. Though my environment would 've had some impact on my character, most of my traits are as per my genes. You were quite a non-conformist in your days. You didn't follow others and you laid your own path. I am just doing the same thing but in a bit extreme way. So you are the one to be blamed. I often think that maybe I am too stupid to know that I am stupid. I joined an engineering college like a sheep, failed in those tests which took some real effort to fail, took up religious studies, to slate</a> it, realised that calling shit as a shit means nothing, so quit again and I have no clue what I am going to do next. I am certain i will end up in a as an unskilled labourer in a job that doesn't require much use of brain or physique. Cuz I need to eat. And I can't do much better. I can foretell that I will most likely end up as someone whom I despised: A worthless bugger stuck in a dead-end job, living all alone by himself, little or no interaction with community whatsoever, eating whatever junk that can get delivered to my door; or it could be worse - I might become one of those bourgeoisie. Though I am not feeling very sorry to disappoint you, I am sorry about disappointing myself. It is too late to start over, but I am in a very unique position that most could never dream of. I am so powerful that I could easily kill thousand people before I was stopped. If I time it correctly, I could wipe of tens of thousands. But it is not powerful enough. I want to be as powerful as you</a> - I want to be part of some chain that can help someone in some way. But being as important as you might be quite impossible for me to accomplish in this life, I hope to make at least one human smile. Edit: What the fuck was I thinking? These taxed drugs are so shitty and these makes one say stupid things. A word of caution: "Do not drink alcohol." Though police won't catch you for using these as these are taxed, these are bad for you. We Indians have smoked Ganja for Millennia. Those european bastards bought that rum, whiskey, tobacco, etc to our country recently in the 17th century and we are stuck with that shit. Let us smoke some kush. Edit2: I don't have any Ganja now, but I do have barbiturate. 😈 Edit3: I fucking hate my species. I want to nuke this world, but that, unfortunately, kills all the species. I will wait until I am capable of wiping the genus Homo off the face of the earth and then I will wipe. Or I will die trying. Image Credit: The Death of Chatterton</a> via Wikimedia Commons This is not really a blog 2008-08-11T00:00:00+00:00 This is just shitposting. Don't read it. Go and save yourself. I will just dump some random shits here, that's all. It might even include content that is illegal. And I you, hope whoever the fuck you are, didn't read the introduction shit. He is ▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓ contents are redacted</code> ▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓ Is legality important !?</h3> There will be so many illegal stuff here. IMO legality is absolute bullshit. Legality in most cases just reflects the legislators' mindset. For instance, in where I live, pornography is illegal, but prostitution is not. I 've heard that a legislation bans oral sex in a South Asian nation (But they provide an exception if it is used for foreplay ). There are laws against same-sex marriage or even an intercourse. Though the scene is slowly changing, can you justify the suffering of people who fall victim to these laws? One act is legal somewhere at some time, but when the time and place changes, the legality of that action changes. ▓▓ contents are redacted</code> ▓▓ So fuck law. If you are offended by any of my posts, please kill yourself</a> and then I'll try to rectify your situation. Image Credit: Double Octuple Newspaper Press.jpg</a> via Wikimedia Commons Introduction 2008-08-09T00:00:00+00:00 author: not deadrat's girlfriend location: A town in Tamil Nadu deadrat is a worthless piece of shit.</h5> This bugger wanted me to write something for about section of his blog. Well, here it is, not as a section, but as the first post in this blog. deadrat was born to a family of stupid gits. I don't see how the date or place of his birth might be beneficial to any of us, so let us not get into that shit. Let’s talk about his family. His dad fathered such a loser, so what will be there to talk about him? And deadrat's Mama so is very funny and she made the biggest and funniest joke in this world: deadrat. ▓ deadrat was a prodigy, they say. Prodigy at what? Getting dementia? He couldn't fit in anywhere, whether in college, school or wherever it is; he was eventually kicked out of college during the final year of a four years course. Apparently, students are not allowed to possess certain contrabands when in college hostels. ▓▓ contents are redacted</code> ▓▓ I 'll let him bore you with the details later. And I have to tell something about me. deadrat wanted to start this new blog for a really long time, but he has a starting trouble everywhere even in bed. His gf had a hard time giving him a fellatio, but I can't imagine how can his own right hand give him a fellatio. The loser wouldn't even know what a fellatio means, btw. One last word: A piece of advice actually... If you are offended by any of deadrat's posts and want to kill yourself do it in a painless way</a>.</h2> Image Credit: Hands on an old typewriter closeup.jpg</a> via Wikimedia Commons Easy method to kill onesself. 2008-08-08T00:00:00+00:00 Disclaimer: I am not an expert in suicide and I haven't successfully used this (or any suicide method for that matter) yet. However I (and few other random strangers on the internet) believe that it is a fairly painless method to commit suicide,</a> but it is a bit tricky to verify their claim. So reader discretion advised. ▓▓ contents are redacted</code> ▓▓ Sorry, peeps. I had to remove the guide on how to use the plastic bag for multiple reasons, but the primary one being that I am not an expert in this methods of suicide, or any other method for that matter. Though there is very less chances of this method going wrong, given its critical nature, I would rather leave it to the experts. However I would highly recommend one to consider suicide bag</a> before finalizing on their method of self administered euthanasia. The gases commonly used in this method (Nitrogen or Helium) are non-toxic, non flammable and present no health risk to third parties as long as there is sufficient ventilation in the room. If you really want to kick the bucket using the exit bag,</a> I would recommend the book "Final Exit" and "The Peaceful Pill Handbook."

deadrat.

Quantum Superconductors and the LinkedIn Ad Broker

What's in a Surname?

The Thin-Skinned Monarch and the Double Entendre

The Architecture of the Scam

Protecting the Commons from the Machines

Sollisai and the Floodgates

Green Copper Grift

Music for Simpletons

Residential Tenancy Agreement (Tamil Nadu - Tenant-Protective Starter Draft)

1. Parties</h2> This Agreement is made on [date]</strong> at [city], Tamil Nadu</strong>, between:</p> Landlord:</strong> [Full name], residing at [address], hereinafter "the Landlord".</p> Tenant:</strong> [Full name], residing at [address], hereinafter "the Tenant".</p>

The Tenant's Shield: Notes and a Draft Agreement from the Vellalore Trenches

The Legal Trap in Tamil Nadu</h2> Most tenants in Tamil Nadu believe that staying quiet and having an informal, unregistered agreement protects them. It does the exact opposite.</p>

The Spectacle of the Shrug

The Charismatic Clone

Open Weights and the Datacenter Land Grab

The Parasite Economy and the DPI Mirage

The Court and the Compassion Grift

OJT for Clowns

Kavarchiyin Ucham

The Roo Code Grift: The Death of a 3-Million-Install Illusion

The Police Station Bench

Same Poison, Different Bottle

Electoral Hygiene: Breaking the Information and Finance Cartels

The Bicameral Mirage: Reforming Legislative Design for a Modern Republic

The Blueprint for Reform: Proportional Unicameralism</h3> If we are to move beyond this farce, we must rip out the redundant plumbing of the bicameral system:</p>

Conclusion: Diversity vs. The Cartel</h3> The current system is not designed for stability; it is designed for capture. Reforming our legislative design is not just a technical necessity: it is a prerequisite for reclaiming agency in a diverse republic.</p> Related raw diary posts:</em></p>

The Demographic Penalty: Fiscal Federalism and the 2026 Delimitation Crisis

The Delimitation Crisis</h3> That freeze is set to expire after 2026. If the Lok Sabha is redrawn based on current population figures, the political map of India will undergo a seismic shift.</p>

Looks Matter, And That's Why We're Fucked

The Federal Imperative: Structural Decentralization as a Prerequisite for Governance

The Case for Radical Decentralization</h3> The current distribution of powers has seen a steady migration of authority toward the center. This centralization is reaching a point of diminishing returns.</p>

Defining the Core Mandate</h4> A radical but necessary path forward involves stripping the Union government's mandate down to its three core responsibilities:</p>

Institutional Fragility: The Structural Erosion of Legislative Accountability in India

Legislative Capture: The 2016 FCRA Betrayal</h3> While the 10th Schedule centralizes power, the 2016 amendment to the FCRA demonstrates how that power can be used to sanitize illegalities and protect institutional interests across partisan lines.</p>

The Illusion of Opposition</h4> When the financial and legal survival of the political class is at stake, the legislative machinery functions as a unified cartel. The ability to retroactively legalize one's own actions is the ultimate expression of legislative capture.</p>

Conclusion: The Cost of Structural Fragility</h3> Institutional fragility in India is not merely a matter of corrupt individuals; it is a feature of a system that selects for obedience over conscience and prioritizes party survival over public accountability.</p>

Structural Deficits in Representative Democracy: The Case for Electoral Reform in India

Global Context</h4> This "Plurality Trap" is not unique to India. Other FPTP systems have produced similar disparities:</p> United Kingdom (2005)</strong>: Labour won a majority with 35.2% of the vote.</li> Canada (2011)</strong>: Conservatives secured a majority with 39.6% of the vote.</li>

Homelab Rationalization: Optimizing for Cognitive Bandwidth

The Standardized Stack</h3> Rationalization isn't just about deleting services; it's about standardizing the environment for those that remain.</p>

1. Operating System: Fedora All the Way</h4> No more CentOS or Debian. I moved my entire server fleet to Fedora</strong>, matching my primary workstation. This allows for a unified set of tools, aliases, and workflows across all environments.</p>

What Stayed (and Why)</h3> The "surviving" stack is built on pragmatism rather than ideology.</p>

The Hardware: Repurposed Utility</h3> Instead of enterprise-grade racks that consume excessive power and generate heat, I now run "trash" hardware. A couple of legacy Dell laptops (i5 and i7 models) and a few Raspberry Pis (3B and 4B) handle the entire stack.</p>

I Nuked My Homelab Because I Got Tired

The E-Ink Monopoly and the Projector Hack

AI-Powered Relationship Mediation: Help When You Need It Most

Presentation Files</h3> View Full HTML Presentation Slides</strong></a></li> </ul> </iframe> The Problem We All Know</h2> Disagreements happen.</strong></p>

The Problem We All Know</h2> Disagreements happen.</strong></p>

What If You Had Help When You Need It?</h2> A neutral third party available 24/7</strong></li> Someone who helps you communicate constructively</strong></li> Remembers your ground rules</strong> and past agreements</li> Costs a fraction of therapy</li>

Sun Burn: The Visceral Decay of the PM Surya Ghar Scheme

Mothers' Day (Note the Apostrophe)

Feet-Forward Bikes (Presentation)

UCC, Polygamous Gods, and the Leftist Cowardice

Building India's First Verified LGBT-Friendly Dating App

India's prenatal sex determination ban: When legal intervention meets unintended harm

The Economics of the Ghost Calorie

Cheapest Data My Ass: The Regressive Tax on Being Poor

The Great Indian Bamboozle: How We Perfected Stealing from the Poor to Give to the Rich

Farm Subsidies: Where the Money Actually Goes</h2> Oh, you thought agricultural subsidies help poor farmers? That's fucking adorable. Let me shatter that delusion with some brutal fucking facts that'll make you want to burn the system down.</p>

The Beautiful Hypocrisy of It All</h2> The Indian government has mastered the art of reverse socialism. We socialize the losses and privatize the profits, but with a twist - we make the poor pay for both.</p>

Headline Grief and the Ten Lakh Lottery

Ad Usum Delphini: Breaking Character

Mitigating Radiant Heat: A Low-Cost Roof Misting Case Study

Technical Implementation</h3> The goal was to build a high-pressure, low-flow system using ubiquitous components.</p>

Hard Water and Dead Nozzles

Scavenging for Pressure: The Mechanics of the Mist

Evaporative Cooling, Red Tiles, and the Unforgiving Sun

Are Our People Depoliticised?

The M-Dash Conspiracy: A Journey Into Synthetic Sadness

Laddu Logic and the Feedback Loop of Shit

Why Assholes Always Buy the Same Cars – An Unscientific Guide to Dodging Dudebros in India

No Tips Please

1. Parties</h2>
This Agreement is made on [date]</strong> at [city], Tamil Nadu</strong>, between:</p>
Landlord:</strong> [Full name], residing at [address], hereinafter "the Landlord".</p>
Tenant:</strong> [Full name], residing at [address], hereinafter "the Tenant".</p>

The Case for Radical Decentralization</h3>
The current distribution of powers has seen a steady migration of authority toward the center. This centralization is reaching a point of diminishing returns.</p>

Legislative Capture: The 2016 FCRA Betrayal</h3>
While the 10th Schedule centralizes power, the 2016 amendment to the FCRA demonstrates how that power can be used to sanitize illegalities and protect institutional interests across partisan lines.</p>

The Illusion of Opposition</h4>
When the financial and legal survival of the political class is at stake, the legislative machinery functions as a unified cartel. The ability to retroactively legalize one's own actions is the ultimate expression of legislative capture.</p>

The Standardized Stack</h3>
Rationalization isn't just about deleting services; it's about standardizing the environment for those that remain.</p>

1. Operating System: Fedora All the Way</h4>
No more CentOS or Debian. I moved my entire server fleet to Fedora</strong>, matching my primary workstation. This allows for a unified set of tools, aliases, and workflows across all environments.</p>

The Hardware: Repurposed Utility</h3>
Instead of enterprise-grade racks that consume excessive power and generate heat, I now run "trash" hardware. A couple of legacy Dell laptops (i5 and i7 models) and a few Raspberry Pis (3B and 4B) handle the entire stack.</p>

Technical Implementation</h3>
The goal was to build a high-pressure, low-flow system using ubiquitous components.</p>