Who is the best person for the job?

 Collated by Tusar Nath Mohapatra

The Mother of Swords: How the 2026 Act Chose Bankim’s Nationalism Over Tagore’s Patriotism

by Skand Priya countercurrents.org/2026/08/the-mo…

The 2026 National Honour (Amendment) Act has brought “Vande Mataram” into a new legal and political framework, extending penal protections to the National Song. This article examines the historical and ideological differences between Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay’s “Vande Mataram” and Rabindranath Tagore’s “Jana Gana Mana,” drawing on the distinction between nationalism and patriotism developed by Tagore. It traces the constitutional compromise of 1950, the later political recovery of the song’s militant stanzas, and the implications of making national honour a matter of law. The article argues that the Act marks a shift from voluntary patriotic sentiment toward a more assertive and coercive conception of nationalism.

https://x.com/Countercurrents/status/2093216946494009646

Discover Sarasvati—the sacred river, goddess, & eternal stream of wisdom. In this inspiring episode of Amazing Vedas, @PariksithSingh & @MakrandParanspe explore her timeless connection to knowledge, creativity, & spiritual awakening. Watch youtu.be/snGDC4QqJFo?si… @AmazingVedas

https://x.com/sriaurobindochr/status/2093323463138394172

How can ancient Vedic sciences help us understand our patterns? Explore Smt. Radhe Pfau’s journey into Vedic astrology and discover insights into self-understanding, patterns, and spiritual growth. youtu.be/yKCWEYb3GIg?si… @MakrandParanspe @PariksithSingh @AmazingVedas

https://x.com/sriaurobindochr/status/2093441993749741612

The Psychic Being Exists in a Fourth Dimension Outside the Three Spatial Dimensions sriaurobindostudies.wordpress.com/2026/08/28/the… via @santoshk1

https://x.com/santoshk1/status/2093453957876367823

Is there one definitive reality, or do we live trapped in our own minds? Philosopher Hilary Lawson argues that there is no objective truth; what we believe to be real is shaped by a series of mental conclusions, or "closures," that each of us makes for ourselves. To reason with conspiracy theorists, then, we must not appeal to "the truth," but learn to use their own logic against them. Join Hilary Lawson and Slavoj Žižek as they question the very foundations of reality. iai.tv/video/beyond-t…

https://x.com/IAI_TV/status/2093338321783001132

A system built on truth asks: who is the best person for the job? That question is lethal to inherited position – merit doesn’t check your surname... The large corporations are run exactly like socialism from the inside: committees instead of owners, process instead of judgment, HR as the party cell, DEI statements as the loyalty oath, promotion by narrative compliance – and the shareholders as distant and powerless as the Soviet “people” who nominally owned everything. The managerial class holds them the way the nomenklatura held the state enterprises: legally owning nothing, actually controlling everything, and answering for no result.

https://x.com/Kristof_Poland/status/2093249180072370191

“As Roger Griffin notes, many on the European New Right have drawn a theory of history from Julius Evola, choosing to view themselves as dwelling in the apocalyptic Kali Yuga on the threshold of a new golden age of history. As Nicholas Goodrick-Clark notes, in the post-war period, Evola’s ideas became a sophisticated alternative to crude Anglo-American neo-Nazism in which Nazi creed became reformulated as white supremacist ideology.”

https://x.com/scroll_in/status/2093273634630521336

To notice is not always a deliberate moral decision. Attraction may arise without invitation, and a thought may appear without being consciously chosen. But this is precisely where Dharma begins... Noticing is not the same as staring. Feeling attracted is not the same as believing we are entitled to another person. An involuntary response is not the same as a deliberate choice. An involuntary reaction does not justify a deliberate violation of another person’s dignity. The presence of stimulus does not remove individual responsibility. If anything, Dharma places responsibility firmly upon the individual.

https://x.com/Pragyata_/status/2093295590432182598

For an act of resistance to the tyranny of algorithms, try the Marginalian newsletter — undistracted notes on the search for meaning through art, science, philosophy, poetry, and various other tendrils of wonder. For 20 years, it has remained a one-woman labor of love — free, ad-free, AI-free, and fully human: themarginalian.org/newsletter 

https://x.com/themarginalian/status/2093353695559696472

Quite a good composition and well sung by Lata Mangeshkar but it is painfully screeching in the antara. Some find reaching higher notes a great feat but music must be comforting to the ears first; appealing to the musical grammar–mind comes later. 

https://x.com/abhiertigibbet/status/2093319115369029764

https://youtu.be/7fsme4Nn6yw?si=Po8qJZeRlaUreour

Psychiatry is perhaps the only medical speciality that reads about epistemology. However, not all psychiatrists know about it because their professors don't. Reading humanities/social sciences in Psychiatry, and Postpsychiatry are more important than ever.

https://x.com/abhiertigibbet/status/2093234185867555169 

Later Austrians would develop these ideas further, but the essential stance was already present in Menger: economics is not a branch of history. It is a theoretical science that begins with the elementary facts of human choice under scarcity. 

https://x.com/CreativeDeduct/status/2093030900606906442

Introduction: Social Ruling and Solidarity in Challenged Democratic Systems

D Fridberg, P Segal - Social Ruling and Solidarity in Challenged Democratic …, 2026

… John Moolakkattu’s “Majoritarianism and the Differential Ownership of Democracy
in India” describes how a decade of Hindutva-centered governance has fractured
minority belonging and unraveled informal powersharing habits. Here, Moolakkattu …

Book review: Narender Kumar (Eds), Politics and Religion in India

S Yadav

… The Congress disseminates secularism and coordinates non-Hindu communities
for political benefits, but has also made the government collaborate with a Hindutva
political party, such as in Maharashtra. Political leaders of the Congress have also …

[PDF] Jai Shri Ram: A Brief Analysis of the Godhra Train Incident and Gujarat Riots of 2002 Deborah Scott-Harrison Sam Houston State University Word Count: 2867

D Scott-Harrison

… in American academia, exposing the findings of the American funding of Hindutva
operations, as well as contextualizing the “semiotics of terror” created in the almost
80 year-old work of VD Savarkar’s, “Hindutva.” Published almost three years after …

[PDF] Identity Construction and the Rise of Ethno-Religious Violence in India

DS Harrison

… In modern India, ethno-religious violence not only persists but is measurably
escalating coterminous to the rise of Hindutva-promulgating BJP or Bharatiya Janata
Party in Indian politics. Almost a century old, the Hindutva movement became a …

[TXT] HELSINGIN YLIOPISTO HELSINGFORS UNIVERSITET

T Kupias

… said that the BJP as well as Modi often take advantage of the Hindutva idea to reel
… Muslim Hindutva icon to many – and not least for the events described in the next
… a proponent of the Hindutva ideology, and is also a well known title attached to … ‘My God Is Modi Ji’: The Religious Representations in the Facebook Following of Narendra Modi - Teppo Kupias

[PDF] Weaponizing History: Threat to Democracy in India

A Mukherjee, M Mukherjee - Censorship and Self-Censorship in History Education

This paper discusses the current use and abuse of history in India, based on a false
colonial understanding that Hindus and Muslims constituted two antagonistic
nations and that Hindus have a deep historical memory of Muslim atrocities. The …

[PDF] “Saffronization” of the History Curriculum in India Under the BJP

A Farooq - Censorship and Self-Censorship in History Education

This essay examines the “saffronization” of history education in India under the
Bharatiya Janata Party, analyzing how curricular revisions, textbook deletions, and
popular culture together reshape historical knowledge to serve Hindu nationalist …

[PDF] Reshaping the Political Landscape: The Rise of Marginalized Sections in Contemporary Indian Politics

D Kumar

This article explores the reshaping of the political landscape in contemporary Indian
politics. How the marginalized section of the society shaped their place in the active
politics of India. Post 2014 Lok Sabha of Indian politics has undergone a significant …

[PDF] Governing Religion: Colonial Legality, State, and the Case of Hijab in India

TJ Kiliyamannil - Muslim Politics Review, 2025

In March 2022, India’s Karnataka High Court ruled that the wearing of hijab by
Muslim students was not an ‘essential religious practice’under Islam. This raised a
question of authority to interpret Islamic law, as the judges effectively decided what …

[PDF] Antinomies of Nativism: Understanding Decoloniality Theory's Affinities with the Global Far Right

A Bademsoy, N Larsen - Development and Change, 2026

This article examines the peculiar conjuncture of decolonial theory and
contemporary far‐right ideology. It argues that their shared fixation on the dualism of
native and settler is immanent to the development of advanced capitalism …

Pranab Patnaik passes away

 Collated by Tusar Nath Mohapatra

A voice that defined generations of Odia music has fallen silent. Legendary playback singer Pranab Kishore Patnaik, whose distinctive and soulful voice remained an integral part of Odisha's musical landscape for decades, passed away on Friday. His death marks the end of a golden chapter in the history of Odia music. #Odisha

https://x.com/soumyajitt/status/2090711970899181822

ନିଜର ମଧୁର କଣ୍ଠ ସ୍ଵର ଓ ଅନନ୍ୟ ଗାୟନ ଶୈଳୀରେ ଶ୍ରୋତାଙ୍କ ହୃଦୟରେ ଏକ ସ୍ୱତନ୍ତ୍ର ସ୍ଥାନ ଅର୍ଜନ କରିଥିବା ଓଡ଼ିଆ ସଙ୍ଗୀତ ଜଗତର ବର୍ଷିୟାନ କଣ୍ଠଶିଳ୍ପୀ ପ୍ରଣବ ପଟ୍ଟନାୟକଙ୍କ ବିୟୋଗରେ ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଭାଷା, ସାହିତ୍ୟ ଓ ସଂସ୍କୃତି ବିଭାଗ ତରଫରୁ ଭାବପୂର୍ଣ୍ଣ ଶ୍ରଦ୍ଧାଞ୍ଜଳି l ଓଡ଼ିଆ ସଙ୍ଗୀତ ପ୍ରତି ତାଙ୍କର ଅବଦାନ ସର୍ବଦା ଚିର ସ୍ମରଣୀୟ ହୋଇ ରହିବ।

#PranabKishorePatnaik #odiasinger #restinpeace #LegendPassesAway #culture #Odisha

https://x.com/Culturedeptt/status/2090783374831210543

ସେ ଥିଲେ ସ୍ବରର ସେହେଜାଦା। ପ୍ରେମର ସ୍ବର ପୁଣି ବିରହର ଆପଣାର। ଭକ୍ତି ହେଉ କି ଶାସ୍ତ୍ରୀୟ, ହିନ୍ଦୀ ହେଉ କି ଗଜଲ୍। ସୁଲଳିତ କଣ୍ଠରେ ଯାହା ଗାଉଥିଲେ ତାହା ହିଟ୍। ୫ ଦଶନ୍ଧି ଧରି କାଳଜୟୀ ଗୀତର ଯାଦୁଗର ଥିଲେ ପ୍ରଣବ ପଟ୍ଟନାୟକ। ‘ରୂପସୀ ରାଣୀ ଗୋ ମୋର’ଠୁ ଆରମ୍ଭ କରି ମାଝୀରେ ପର୍ଯ୍ୟନ୍ତ। ୮୮ ବର୍ଷ ବୟସରେ ସୀମା ହୀନ ଦରିଆ ଭଳି କିଭଳି ଅୟୁତ ସଫଳତାର ଉତ୍ତରାଧିକାରୀ ପ୍ରଣବ ପଟ୍ଟନାୟକଙ୍କର ଥିଲା ଲମ୍ବା କ୍ୟାରିୟର ଦେଖିବା ରିପୋର୍ଟ।...

#PranabPatnaik #PranabKishorePatnaik #OdiaMusic #OdiaCinema #Ollywood #OdiaSongs #MusicalLegacy #SpecialStory #OdishaTV #OTV

https://x.com/otvkhabar/status/2090822108842705214

ପରଲୋକରେ ପ୍ରଣବ ପଟ୍ଟନାୟକ । ଦୀର୍ଘ ଛଅ ଦଶନ୍ଧିରୁ ଅଧିକ ସମୟ ଧରି ନିଜ ମଧୁର ସ୍ୱରରେ ଅଗଣିତ ଶ୍ରୋତାଙ୍କୁ ମନ୍ତ୍ରମୁଗ୍ଧ କରିଥିବା ପ୍ରଣବଙ୍କ ଅପାସୋରା ଗୀତ ଆଜି ସ୍ମୃତିରେ ଗୁଞ୍ଜରିତ ହେଉଛି । ଏହି କାଳଜୟୀ କଣ୍ଠଶିଳ୍ପୀଙ୍କ ସଙ୍ଗୀତ ଯାତ୍ରାର କାହାଣୀ ନେଇ ଦୂରଦର୍ଶନର ସ୍ୱତନ୍ତ୍ର ଉପସ୍ଥାପନା.... #PranabPattnaik #Odisha #LegendarySinger

https://x.com/DDNewsOdia/status/2090808592412925952

This is a self goal. Given time ignorant fanatics amongst Abhrahamic and leftists will demand the same for those songs as well. One argument to make would be that in Indian culture and literary tradition we personify nation, language and rivers as Mother and adore them.

https://x.com/Shiva_Uvacha/status/2090729800877146245

Between Fluency and Belonging: English and the Learners Left Behind

by Sanjoe P Davis countercurrents.org/2026/08/betwee…

India’s English education system has long focused on grammar, comprehension and written performance, while giving little attention to whether learners experience English as a language they can genuinely use and claim as their own. This article examines the gap between examination-based proficiency and meaningful language use, drawing on research into language, identity, class and caste. It explores the idea of “language investment” and proposes Language Identity and Agency as a dimension of English assessment. The article argues for an approach that recognises oral communication, self-expression and learners’ relationships with English alongside conventional measures of grammatical accuracy and written competence.

https://x.com/Countercurrents/status/2090760479534883155

Why @BJP4India Must Recover Its Soft Power: Time for the party to learn from the subversive genius of Mahatma Gandhi 

openthemagazine.com/politics/bjp-m… @psitsgayatri @TVMohandasPai @sriaurobindochr @sriaurobindofdn @PariksithSingh @Openthemag @prasannara @narendramodi @narendramodi_in

https://x.com/MakrandParanspe/status/2090758014320115771

Gandhi Propagated the Varna System in Northeast India through Hindi: Mohandas Naimishray

by Rajashree Saikia and Ajit Kumar countercurrents.org/2026/08/gandhi…

Mohandas Naimishray discusses the history and contemporary state of Dalit literature, social justice and Ambedkarite thought in Northeast India in a conversation with Rajashree Saikia and Ajit Kumar. He argues that the promotion of Hindi during Gandhi’s visits to the region also carried Hindu religious practices, customs and the varna system, while Ambedkar’s ideas had limited institutional and literary presence. Naimishray calls for greater access to Ambedkar’s writings, Dalit literary conferences and stronger Ambedkarite engagement across the Northeast. The conversation also explores his understanding of hissedari, the relationship between literature and politics, Buddhism, caste discrimination and the continuing development of Dalit literature.

https://x.com/Countercurrents/status/2090756657513160803

What we’re seeing here is the otherwise quite conservative and traditionalist scholar of the #dharmashastra PV Kane throwing his support behind the efforts of #ambedkar with respect to the super-controversial Hindu Code Bill. 

Ambedkar cited Kane extensively (albeit critically) and Kane also read Ambedkar’s “The Buddha and His Dhamma” and referenced it. I’m trying to learn more about their relationship, especially the overlapping time they spent together in the Rajya Sabha.

https://x.com/ASR_Metta/status/2090764954475417856

Barbarians at the Gate — When Greed Takes the Driver’s Seat By Bryan Burrough and John Helyar

The more uncomfortable interpretation is that the greatest threat may come from inside the organisation itself—when executives, boards and financiers begin treating a company primarily as a vehicle for personal wealth, prestige and power. That makes the book much more than a story about an old takeover. It becomes a study of corporate greed and human nature. When numbers conceal human behaviour

https://x.com/shrikant_soman/status/2090774327843225705

Down with Upper Respiratory Tract Infection—sore throat, sinusitis, running nose, earache—mostly viral. Never do I get the urge to sing more than these days when I have a blocked nose and sore throat.

https://x.com/abhiertigibbet/status/2090776582520529234

#NewPublication Atlas of Medieval and Renaissance Thought, Philosophy and Science Overviews and Surveys in the Form of Charts, Tables and Conceptual Maps Thomas H. Brobjer, Routledge, 2026 Preview PDF taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.…

https://x.com/khalidsyossef/status/2090473700571144413

Galileo claimed “mathematics is the language in which the book of nature is written”, and no more is this apparent than in quantum field theory. bit.ly/4n1z5lP But Timothy Nguyen argues predictive success along is not enough for a fundamental theory of reality.

https://x.com/IAI_TV/status/2090824752055144620

Gravity is simultaneously familiar and mysterious. | bit.ly/3U8HHxo Physicist Melvin Vopson argues for a controversial view of gravity, arguing information is as fundamental as mass and energy, and gravity is a way for the universe to minimize the complexity of information.

https://x.com/IAI_TV/status/2090404502729818544

Identity, Development and Governance

J Mukherjee - The 2024 Parliamentary Elections in India: Nation …, 2026

… electoral politics, caste politics has taken a new turn towards subaltern Hindutva.
3 There has been a transformative shift over the years … The 2009 manifesto of the
BJP appears to present a more liberal secular outlook of the BJP far removed from …

[PDF] Mapping Media Bias: Global Islamophobic Trends and their Reflections in South Asia

N Shahid, B Ghazanfar - The Beacon Journal, 2025

… This type of negative media coverage relies heavily on the ‘us-vs-them’ framework,
which stigmatises the Muslim communities and reinforces the Hindutva narrative that
the very presence of Muslims in India is an abhorration to what constitutes an Indian …

Indian National Congress in the 2024 Lok Sabha Election: Nation, Religion, and Identity

R Saxena - The 2024 Parliamentary Elections in India: Nation …, 2026

… without completely abandoning the BJP’s Hindutva ideology. The Congress had
to uphold its … and its attempt to counter the BJP's Hindutva rhetoric while
simultaneously appealing to a wide … But the emergence of Hindutva politics …

[PDF] Mandir vs Mandal in 2024: are there limits to the BJP's social engineering?

S Chaturvedi, DN Gellner, SK Pandey - Contemporary South Asia, 2026

… The BJP’s strategy for winning in UP depends on a combination of its core Hindu
nationalist (Hindutva) message with ‘social engineering’, ie, seeking to include
formerly subordinate social groups, politically, socially, and economically, within the …

BJP's Fortuitous Victory in Odisha's 2024 General Elections

P Sarangi - The 2024 Parliamentary Elections in India: Nation …, 2026

… The ideology and politics of Hindutva in Odisha could be traced back to the pre-independence
years and was discernible in every sphere … This [new] political process marks a
clear contrast against subaltern Hindutva that patronisingly implies the co-optation of …

Hindutva Checkmated? Interplay of Religion, Caste and Identity in the 2024 Lok Sabha Election in West Bengal

H Bhattacharyya, P Ganguly - The 2024 Parliamentary Elections in India: Nation …, 2026

Since its outstanding electoral performance in 2019 Lok Sabha elections in West
Bengal, the electoral fortunes of the BJP dwindled although it maintained a
competitive share of popular votes to that of the ruling TMC. In 2024 Lok Sabha …

[PDF] The Curious Case of Dadagiri: Masculinities and Everyday Power in the Ghats of Kolkata

R Ghosh - Journal für Entwicklungspolitik, 2025

While masculinity has often been read as a conscious projection of identity, a
performance or a “configuration of praxis” to practice “hegemony, subordination,
complicity or marginalisation” (Connell 1995, 2016), this paper showcases how …

Religion, Region and Immigrants: Decoding the BJP Victory in Assam in 2024 Lok Sabha Elections

S Nag - The 2024 Parliamentary Elections in India: Nation …, 2026

… allure of Hindutva in Assam. It is noteworthy that, despite a century-long struggle
of Assamese Hindus against Muslim immigration, Hindutva has … In 2024, the BJP’s
victory was attributable not to the ascendance of Hindutva, but rather to the …

Religion, Caste and Contingency: Electoral Politics in UP

S Pai - The 2024 Parliamentary Elections in India: Nation …, 2026

… This chapter examines the strident contest between the newly formed INDIA
Alliance (IA) and the BJP-led NDA, on Hindutva versus democracy in the 2024
general elections and why it could not be sustained, despite the former making a …

Hindus and their Christian Interlocutors

J Lunstroth - Fratelli Tutti in Conversation

… I made an argument in my last paper in this book series that Hinduism is now
synonymous with Hindutva, the conservative Indian political … In Hindutva religion
and politics are merged, in imitation of the Christian ideal, and the Catholic actuality …

Human need for a messiah

 Gone with the Wind is the greatest American novel about loss – and the most honest portrait ever written of what it means to watch a civilization burn and decide to survive it anyway.

1. The Old South that opens the film is not presented as just. It doesn’t need to be. It is presented as a world — complete, self-contained, possessed of its own beauty and its own codes — and the film’s real subject is what it feels like to watch a world end. Every civilization that has ever collapsed was, to the people inside it, simply home. That is the thing comfortable posterity always forgets when it judges from a safe distance.

2. Scarlett O’Hara is not a feminist icon. She is something more interesting and more uncomfortable: a human being stripped of every comfort and illusion, possessed of a survival instinct so fierce it overrides everything else including her own happiness. She is vain, ruthless, self-deceiving, and magnificent. She does not survive because she is good. She survives because she refuses not to. The distinction matters.

3. Rhett Butler is the Machiavellian realist in a world of romantics. He sees the war clearly from the start – knows the South will lose, knows the cause is already dead, knows the men riding off heroically are riding to their graves. He says so, repeatedly, and is despised for it. The man who tells the truth in a civilization built on illusion is always the villain. Until the illusion collapses. Then he is simply the only one who was right.

4. Ashley Wilkes is the figure nobody discusses and everyone should. He is the Old South’s Last Man – beautiful, cultivated, honourable, and completely incapable of functioning in the world that replaces the one he was built for. He cannot adapt. He cannot rebuild. He can only mourn. Every civilization in decline produces Ashley Wilkes by the thousand – men perfectly formed for a world that no longer exists, grieving too elegantly to build the next one.

5. “As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again.” The most important line in the film is not a love declaration or a battle cry. It is a woman alone in a destroyed field, eating a raw turnip, making a covenant with herself. This is the survival instinct as civilizational force – the thing that plants next year’s crop in the ashes of this year’s harvest. It is not pretty. It is not ideologically convenient. It is why civilizations continue.

6. The burning of Atlanta is not a backdrop. It is the argument. We watch an entire world end in real time – not just buildings but assumptions, codes, the complete architecture of a society’s self-understanding. The film doesn’t judge it. It shows what it cost. That is a more serious act than judgment.

7. “Tomorrow is another day.” Not optimism – something harder. The refusal to let the present moment be final. Scarlett has lost everything: the war, the plantation, Ashley, Melanie, Rhett, her own illusions. She chooses to continue. Not because things will get better but because stopping is not in her. This is not a Hollywood ending. It is the oldest human response to catastrophe – the one that produced every civilization that ever rose from ruins.

https://x.com/i/status/2077371112527192535

What a Great Man – the Holy Grail.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail is not a medieval comedy. It is the most precise diagnosis of institutional dysfunction, bureaucratic absurdity, and the gap between the quest and the procedure ever committed to film. And John Cleese is the instrument through which it delivers its sharpest blows.

1. The quest itself is the first joke – and the deepest one. Pursuing an objective nobody can define, by a method nobody can explain, toward a destination nobody has seen. The Grail is perfect as the MacGuffin because it is undefined – which makes it identical to every institutional objective that survives because its vagueness makes it impossible to declare achieved or failed. Every government program ever funded. Every five-year plan. Every diversity strategy. The quest continues because stopping it would require admitting nobody knew what it was for.

2. Dennis the peasant is the film’s philosophical center. Arthur rides up claiming kingship. Dennis — muddy, constitutionally precise, entirely unmoved — refuses to accept the premise. "Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government." The peasant who understands the theory of legitimate authority better than the king is the film’s deepest political joke – and its most serious point. The credential does not confer the competence. The crown does not confer the right.

3. The Black Knight – Cleese at his most lethal. Both arms severed. Still fighting. "It’s just a flesh wound." The most accurate portrait of institutional denial in the history of cinema. The organization that has lost everything and cannot acknowledge it, because acknowledging it would require stopping. Every Soviet plan that missed every target and announced success. Every institution that rewrites the metrics rather than changes the behavior. The Black Knight doesn’t lack courage. He lacks the ability to process feedback.

4. The French taunter – Cleese again, from the other side. Already inside the castle. Already safe. Mocking the quest from a position of complete comfort, with no stake in the outcome. The establishment intellectual who has nothing at risk ridiculing those who are still trying. The tenured professor dismissing the entrepreneur. The bureaucrat laughing at the reformer. The castle is taken. The taunting costs nothing.

5. The Knights Who Say Ni represent pure bureaucratic power – the arbitrary demand, the impossible condition, the procedure that exists to justify the procedure. They want a shrubbery. Why? Because they say so. The authority derives not from any legitimate function but from the willingness to demand. This is every regulatory body that has ever required a form to obtain the form required to begin the process of applying for permission to do something that didn’t require permission last year.

6. Cleese as the animator who dies of a heart attack mid-scene – and the animation stops. The creator who was also the sustaining force, removed, and the entire narrative collapses without him. The Atlas Shrugged point made in ten seconds of cartoon. When he stops, everything stops. Not metaphorically. Literally.

7. The police arrive at the end and arrest everyone. The heroic quest is stopped not by a dragon, not by a rival, but by paperwork. The institution that was supposed to support the quest becomes the obstacle that ends it. Kafka made funny – and the most accurate ending possible. The system doesn’t need to defeat the quest. It just needs to process it. Not at the Grail, but at the policeman with the clipboard. The Black Knight was just a flesh wound. The clipboard is fatal.

https://x.com/i/status/2082423035399745782

John Cleese — the Man with Common Sense Among the Madness.

He has been saying the same thing for fifty years: that the emperor has no clothes.

Life of Brian is the most conservative film the left ever celebrated – and the most honest film about the left ever made. They loved it for the wrong reasons and have been trying to cancel it ever since, for the right ones.

1. The film is not about Jesus. It is about the crowd – the human need for a messiah, the willingness to follow anyone who seems to have the answers, the transformation of an ordinary man into a symbol by people who need a symbol more than they need a man. Brian doesn’t claim to be the Messiah. He denies it, repeatedly, with increasing desperation. The crowd hears confirmation in every denial. This is not a theological point. It is a political one – about every revolutionary movement, every ideological project that has ever needed a face to follow more than an argument to evaluate.

2. "You’re all individuals!" Brian shouts at the crowd. "Yes, we’re all individuals!" they respond, in perfect unison. One voice at the back: "I’m not." The most precise image of progressive conformity ever produced. The anti-herd herd. The counterculture that became a culture. Still running, unchanged, in every progressive coalition that has tried to agree on anything since.

3. The People’s Front of Judea is the left eating itself – the meeting instead of the action, the motion instead of the movement, the ideological purity that makes the slightly differently named rival organization the real enemy. Not the Romans. The other liberation front. "Splitters." Fifty years later, every progressive coalition still runs this scene at least once per election cycle.

4. "What have the Romans ever done for us?" – Bastiat made funny. The revolutionary who cannot acknowledge that the system he opposes also produced everything he values. The aqueduct. The roads. The sanitation. The wine. "All right, but apart from that…” Every anti-capitalist who types his manifesto on an iPhone is running this scene without knowing it.

5. “He’s not the Messiah – he’s a very naughty boy." Brian’s mother, against ten thousand people who need to believe. No ideology, no illusions, no patience for any of it. She is the only person in the film operating at full resolution – seeing what is actually there rather than what the crowd needs to see. Common sense as the last form of radicalism.

6. Then there is the scene. Stan announces he wants to be a woman and have babies. Cleese responds: “What’s the point of fighting for his right to have babies when he can’t have babies?” The room falls silent. The most precise philosophical question about gender ideology ever asked – forty years before gender ideology existed as a political movement. Not cruel. Not dismissive. Just the question the ideology cannot answer – because the ideology’s central problem has always been its struggle with reality. Cleese noticed it, named it, waited for the silence. They cancelled him forty years later for doing the same thing in real life. He noticed that too.

7. Cleese is the most conservative comedian the left ever claimed. He has been saying the same thing for fifty years – with the calm of a man who finds the outrage neither surprising nor particularly interesting. Empirical, rational, anti-performative, genuinely funny precisely because he refuses to manage reality. Always Look on the Bright Side of Life – men being crucified, choosing to whistle. Marcus Aurelius with a ukulele. The one position that survives contact with reality: you are here, the situation is what it is, and the response is yours to choose. The man with common sense among the madness. Still standing. Still asking the question. Still waiting for an answer that isn’t coming.

https://x.com/i/status/2082378141922742626

https://plasim.blogspot.com/2026/08/founding-wound-of-america.html

https://orchidrose.blogspot.com/2026/08/some-human-beings-can-reach-heights.html

https://feelphilosophy.blogspot.com/2026/08/there-is-no-such-thing-as-happiness.html

https://evergreenessays.blogspot.com/2026/08/we-can-all-be-neo-now.html

https://becausethouart.blogspot.com/2026/08/you-do-not-arrive-good.html

https://marketime.blogspot.com/2026/08/montesquieu-bastiat-tocqueville-and.html

https://vipvak.blogspot.com/2026/08/low-budget-art-with-message-ceases-to.html

https://rainbowther.blogspot.com/2026/08/love-makes-ordinary-irreplaceable.html

https://orchidrose.blogspot.com/2026/08/from-odyssey-to-idiocracy.html

https://plasim.blogspot.com/2026/08/orwell-tolkien-and-huxley.html

https://serfrat.blogspot.com/2026/08/political-imagination-has-been-shaped.html

https://sepact.blogspot.com/2026/08/reality-doesnt-care-about-virtue.html

https://savitrieraparty.blogspot.com/2026/08/freedom-as-participation-in-moral-and.html

https://selforum.blogspot.com/2026/08/philosophy-fumbles-only-culture-can.html

https://seof.blogspot.com/2026/08/foucault-derrida-and-deleuze-forged.html

https://evergreenessays.blogspot.com/2026/08/greeks-gave-west-reason-romans-gave-it.html

https://feelphilosophy.blogspot.com/2026/08/american-founders-read-burke-hume-smith.html

https://marketime.blogspot.com/2026/08/locke-built-foundation-and-montesquieu.html

Collated by Tusar Nath Mohapatra

Love makes the ordinary irreplaceable

 Beauty Is What Serves Life – Lessons from The Little Prince

The Little Prince speaks poetically, but he doesn’t fully understand his own intuitions. Worth translating them from the poetic into the rational.

He tells us that an occupation can be beautiful, "and since it is beautiful, it is truly useful" – beauty and usefulness bound together. But the causality runs the other way: we call something beautiful when it serves life. The desert is beautiful, he says, because somewhere it hides a well. Exactly – we call a landscape beautiful when it serves survival: a road that leads somewhere, that lets us move or escape or reach others; water, without which nothing lives; hills to shelter behind or defend, maybe a fortress; a tree for shade; and best of all, a fertile valley that can feed us. Call it primitive landscape-appreciation if you like – it’s our most basic aesthetic sense, keyed to what keeps us alive.

The next layer up is the appreciation of competence. We admire what required rare skill and real labor to make – because skill, whether in one person or in a whole civilization, is what sustains life and passes it on. A beautiful city is one where life is evidently good – its beauty is the visible trace of a culture’s competence and wealth.

This isn’t only about who attracts us for reproduction; it’s that any closeness to competent people helps sustain and transmit life, and our sense of beauty is what pulls us toward them.

What makes a house, the stars, or the desert beautiful, the Prince says, is invisible.

A beautiful house is one where many children could be well raised – but also one that required capable builders, and whose owner proved able to gather real resources and use them well. The things we can’t see are exactly the things beauty is tracking: usefulness to life, hidden behind the visible form.

The Prince is lonely, and he goes looking for people to become his friends – because a human being needs other humans. Without them he barely survives, and he certainly doesn’t reproduce. But he needs more than company. He needs to tame someone – to build a bond. What is that, really? It’s knowing someone deeply enough, and trusting them strongly enough, to cooperate on shared aims. In plain terms: family – the thing required to raise children at all.

Notice, too, that the Prince is wounded when he discovers thousands of roses just like his – proof that his one flower isn’t unique after all. And there’s a loneliness that persists even among people – not physical isolation, but the absence of shared understanding and shared purpose, the very things needed to reproduce and raise the next generation well. The cure the book offers is taming: knowing, understanding, aligning goals.

Watching the caravans pass, the Rose says people have no roots, and that’s why they drift. True enough – travel teaches you the world, helps you find your place. But eventually you have to settle and put down roots. Why? Because that too serves life – in this case, the stability a family needs to raise children in peace.

And so it is with everything in the story. Every mechanism it describes serves life – its survival and its transmission. If it didn’t, we wouldn’t carry these instincts in us at all.

Our Earth, as the book’s drawings remind us, turns out to be a rather wonderful place for exactly that.

https://x.com/i/status/2074088327406403897

1. The Little Prince is not a children’s book. It is a book for adults who remember, faintly, what they lost when they became adults – and can no longer say exactly when it happened, or who took it.

2. The adults on their tiny planets are not eccentrics. They are a taxonomy of what power does to a person. The king who commands only what is already happening. The vain man who wants only applause. The drunkard who drinks to forget the shame of drinking. Each one alone on his planet, orbiting nothing, utterly convinced that what he is doing matters.

3. The "businessman" is the sharpest portrait. He counts the stars, writes the number down, deposits it in a bank. He owns them. This is property without relationship, power without love, administration without life. He is every bureaucrat who ever managed something beautiful into meaninglessness – and every ideology that ever replaced the particular with the abstract.

4. “What is essential is invisible to the eye.”

The fox gives him this – the key to everything, and the thing the system most reliably destroys. Not by denying it. By making the inessential so loud that the essential becomes inaudible.

5. The rose. One rose, tended and argued with and covered against the wind. In a garden of ten thousand identical roses he discovers she is not unique. Then the fox explains taming: that love makes the ordinary irreplaceable. This is precisely what every collectivist system must eliminate – attachment to the particular, responsibility to the specific, the love that cannot be redistributed.

6. “You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.” The sentence the system cannot process and therefore must destroy. You cannot love your neighbor specifically and love the people abstractly at the same time. The system knows this. It replaces the particular with the general, the irreplaceable with the interchangeable, the rose with the collective garden.

7. The prince goes home through the snake – through something like death, because Saint-Exupéry knows there is no easy way back to what is essential once you have seen clearly what the grownups have made of their planets. He wrote this in exile, in America, then flew back into the war, and disappeared over the Mediterranean not long after. He went home the only way left. The book knows this ending is coming. That is why it is not a children’s book.

https://x.com/i/status/2074095820173893960

Atlas Shrugged made simple:

1. Society runs on a small number of highly capable producers – industrialists, inventors, engineers – whose work everyone depends on but takes for granted.

2. The system starts rewarding need over achievement: the more capable you are, the more you’re expected to sacrifice for those who aren’t.

3. Success gets treated like a debt – taxed, regulated, resented – until the most capable start asking why they bother trying at all.

4. One by one, led by a man named John Galt, they simply withdraw – walking away rather than keep propping up a system that punishes them for producing.

5. Without them, the whole structure collapses, revealing that the “automatic” prosperity everyone assumed was actually being generated by specific, irreplaceable people.

6. Atlas is the Titan from Greek myth, condemned to carry the sky on his shoulders forever – Rand’s stand-in for the producer class, holding up civilization while getting blamed for it.

7. “Shrugged” is the whole argument in one word: Atlas doesn’t fight, doesn’t protest – he just quietly sets the weight down. Nobody realized the sky was being held up by anyone in particular, until the day it isn’t.

You don’t want us? We just go…

https://x.com/i/status/2071948517837353292

Now The Fountainhead – arguably the better book:

1. There are two ways to exist: create from your own vision, or live by reflecting and pleasing others – Rand calls them the first-handers and the second-handers.

2. Howard Roark is an architect who will only build what he actually believes in. He starves rather than compromise the design. The world resists him constantly.

3. Peter Keating is the opposite – talented enough, but builds his entire career on flattering clients, copying styles, and climbing socially. He succeeds, but remains hollow.

4. The villain, Ellsworth Toohey, is the system made conscious: he deliberately promotes mediocrity, knowing that a world of second-handers needs a critic to tell them what to think – and that gives him total power.

5. Roark’s crime, in the eyes of that world, isn’t failure – it’s that he doesn’t need their approval. That independence is experienced as an affront.

6. The novel’s argument: civilization’s actual source is the rare individual who originates rather than imitates. Everyone else — including people who despise him — lives downstream of what he creates.

7. The Fountainhead is Roark himself. Not a fountain – a fountainhead: the original source, where the water actually comes from. Before the river, before the tributaries, before anyone else draws from it. The title says: find that person, and you’ve found where everything real begins.

https://x.com/i/status/2072225418577400031

The Road to Serfdom made simple:

1. Plan the whole economy: someone must decide what gets made and who gets what, since people don’t naturally agree on one set of priorities.

2. These decisions are too big and detailed for normal democratic debate, so power shifts to a smaller group who can just act – technocrats.

3. Fixed laws everyone can rely on get replaced by case-by-case rulings, because a plan needs flexibility, not predictability.

4. Dissent becomes a problem to manage, not an opinion to vote on – the plan can’t work if people are free to ignore it.

5. Enforcing all that selects for people most willing to be ruthless – Hayek’s “worst get on top” – i.e. negative moral selection.

6. Since economics touches everything (your job, home, speech), controlling the economy ends up controlling your whole life.

That’s the "serfdom."

https://x.com/i/status/2071927323624956144

Consciousness, Character, and Curriculum: The Cross-Disciplinary Imperative of Sri Aurobindo's Educational Thought

SS Pujahari - 2026

… Even Haridas Chaudhuri, interpreting Integral Yoga in global philosophical
contexts, affirms that its anthropology provides “a multidimensional … Integral
knowledge thus demands the cultivation of intuition, ethical awareness, and inward …

https://orchidrose.blogspot.com/2026/08/from-odyssey-to-idiocracy.html

https://plasim.blogspot.com/2026/08/orwell-tolkien-and-huxley.html

https://serfrat.blogspot.com/2026/08/political-imagination-has-been-shaped.html

https://sepact.blogspot.com/2026/08/reality-doesnt-care-about-virtue.html

https://savitrieraparty.blogspot.com/2026/08/freedom-as-participation-in-moral-and.html

https://selforum.blogspot.com/2026/08/philosophy-fumbles-only-culture-can.html

https://seof.blogspot.com/2026/08/foucault-derrida-and-deleuze-forged.html

https://evergreenessays.blogspot.com/2026/08/greeks-gave-west-reason-romans-gave-it.html

https://feelphilosophy.blogspot.com/2026/08/american-founders-read-burke-hume-smith.html

https://marketime.blogspot.com/2026/08/locke-built-foundation-and-montesquieu.html

Collated by Tusar Nath Mohapatra

Every day is a new opportune moment to make yet another attempt

 Collated by Tusar Nath Mohapatra

Introduction

Sri Aurobindo straddled epochs and transcended them. He negotiated with the times to give us the gift of the timeless. In an unparalleled act of spiritual fortitude, he scanned the entirety of Indian civilisational experience and accessed the fount that birthed it all.

He synthesised the mystical, metaphysical, psychological and the artistic dimensions of our civilisation and relayed to us, the direct experience of ‘being’. It is through his vision that we get a glimpse of the world of elements, deities, psychic powers and celestial beings. He made the hoary world of Vedas legible to us in its full splendour. Forces, Symbols, Rituals, meaning(s) — He clarified and crystallised them all. 

Of particular importance in this is his exposition on Agni — The primordial and the primal. In his exposition of Agni, we find the synthesis of the mystical with the personal.

In this essay, we explore simultaneously the ontological content of Sri Aurobindo’s exposition on Agni and the psychological import of that for us as individuals. In the process of this reflection is the potential for us to become the Yajna we seek to understand. 

Aspiration for Perfection

There is a fire within us, that is resolute to climb out of ignorance. It refuses to live in the twilight of falsehood. Standing in the chasm of darkness, it intuits the realms of Supernal Dawn, where the Truth shines unsullied. But this climb is steep and most often accompanied by the atavistic voices of resistance and denial. Yet this inner force doesn’t rest, doesn’t yield. 

Every day is a new opportune moment, to make yet another attempt, to carve out an ounce of perfection from the boulders of habitual imperfection. However impossible this goal might appear, something in the human mould burns resiliently like Agni, the indomitable will power, as if planted in our ignorant realms by the Godheads, whose embers keep rising up even amidst the darkest hours. This aspiration of the Inner Flame towards perfection, progress and incessant self-consecration, finds the Divine impetus in Sri Aurobindo’s words. Therefore His words and His vision, are not a matter of choice but an evolutionary imperative to the current world order which is enamoured by asuric notions of progress and power. - Ramachandra Roddam 

https://www.sriaurobindosaction.org/Download/01_Sri_Aurobindos_Action_2024_Jan_issue.pdf

https://www.sriaurobindosaction.org/SpecialEdition.htm

This exactly fits with my use of @sbaroncohen 's E-S theory to explain Victimarian ("Woke") ideology. In Egregore Ascendant I show how Victimarianism totally captured power institutions like Academia, mass media etc, totally flipping and inverting the power structures described by the Frankfurt School. The Frankfurt School thus became too successful. 

https://x.com/i/status/2088256148671726062

We’ve read a lot about Indic knowledge systems in the press lately. NEP 2020 roots education in Indian ethos/indigenous knowledge. It prioritises traditional Indian contributions in mathematics, medicine, philosophy etc. This seeks to replace colonial/Eurocentric frameworks with a curriculum grounded in India’s own intellectual heritage.

https://x.com/i/status/2088257407893815362

"To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance... To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple." Arundhati Roy on the deepest measure of success:

https://x.com/i/status/2088229649478283540

A feedback loop can destroy the body—or transform the self. @PariksithSingh reveals the striking contrast between physiological breakdown and a self-enhancing cycle of spiritual growth, peace, and awareness. Watch discussion youtu.be/IG7xD67V7FE?si… @MakrandParanspe @AmazingVedas

https://x.com/i/status/2088250536512373240

Vedic Chhanda

The concept of alankara came with Bhamah in the history of Indic prosody

But when we study the Veda we find that these alankaras were already present in the Veda

Every shabda alankara that we know and use today, including the anuprasa, yamaka, shlesha, punravritti and vakrokti has already been used in the Veda. How is this possible? 

This indicates, as Sri Aurobindo pointed out, that our historical estimates of our ancestors is flawed and they are unable to explain the remarkable sophistication and refinement of the Veda. It is possible and even likely that the Veda came at the end of an age that had made significant accomplishments in the fields of prosody, linguistics, spirituality, and arts and that the Veda is only a glimmer of the mystical realizations of that age. And that it was preserved for us to help us navigate through the inevitable downturn in the spiral of our evolutionary cycles 

https://x.com/i/status/2088110081149698486

The Veda: Revered, Yet Rarely Understood — with Richard Hartz youtu.be/THMfZXzh5GM?si… via @YouTube @AmazingVedas @PariksithSingh @sriaurobindofdn @sriaurobindochr

https://x.com/i/status/2088246513655021750

Why is Soma called Pavamaana? @PariksithSingh  explores its deeper Vedic meaning—purification, inner refinement, elevated consciousness, and divine bliss. Discover the spiritual wisdom of Soma. Watch now! youtu.be/xlil08En6Tg?si… @MakrandParanspe @AmazingVedas

https://x.com/i/status/2087960625456554031

Yoga’s roots run deep. Explore its presence in the Vedas, wisdom from the Bhagavad Gita, and its relevance today with @PariksithSingh and @MakrandParanspe. Watch now! youtu.be/Ai7syffv8lA?si… @AmazingVedas

https://x.com/i/status/2088010705370812437

Auroville: Experiments Beyond Wellbeing and the Good Life Towards Planetary Unity

C Woiwode, LK Bhati - Quest for Planetary Well-Being: Essays in Honour of …, 2026

… yoga, and Auroville as an experimental laboratory including its physical
realisation. But they do not stop there at this junction, for the quest is much more
ambitious with the ideals and vision of establishing divine life on earth through the …

Revelation, Interpretation, and Analysis: MV Nadkarni's Engagement with the Gita

OZ Soltes - Quest for Planetary Well-Being: Essays in Honour of …, 2026

… the four types of yoga, observing that, where karma-yoga, bhakti-yoga, and jnana-yoga—also
referred to as buddhi-yoga—are concerned, “… are integral to that pattern (if I am
only focused on my self—including when I offer whatever the ritual sacrifice—how …

[PDF] Concept Of Yoga As Depicted In The Primary Ayurvedic Texts

S Meena, DK Meena, A Kumar

… Yoga was an integral part of Ayurveda, as it served the same objectives. However,
the primary aim of Yoga was not the achievement of the entirety of human instinct; it
was essentially developed to achieve Moksa“YogoMoksaPravartaka.” Thus …

[PDF] Role of Yoga in the Treatment of Mental Illness: A Philosophical Evaluation

SK Tiwari, S Tiwari - International Journal of Innovations in Science …, 2025

… on neurochemical or cognitive mechanisms, yoga conceptualizes mental illness
as an imbalance in … foundations of yoga are articulated most systematically in
Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtras, which … The yogic emphasis on ethical cultivation …

Neurochemical Pathways Linking Physical Activity

R Sharma - The Effect of Exercise on Emotion, 2026

… The gut also plays an integral role in emotional response. A significant portion of
serotonin is stored in the intestinal system, and a balanced microbiome contributes
to emotional stability. Fermented foods, fiber-rich meals, probiotic supplements, and …

Medicinal Plant Wealth of Northeastern India: Diversity, Conservation, Trade, and Bioprospection for Sustainable Livelihoods

NA Bhat, M Alom, YK Mohanta, P Baralie - … and Development in Asia: The Belt and …, 2026

Northeastern India, being an integral part of the Himalaya and Indo-Burma
biodiversity hotspot, is home to over 2000 medicinal plant species, representing
nearly half of India’s medicinal flora. This rich biodiversity supports conservation …

Emotional Regulation in Bipolar Disorder

J Sangwan, L Panchal - The Effect of Exercise on Emotion, 2026

… Taken together, aerobic and resistance exercise should be viewed as integral
interventions capable of targeting the core pathophysiology of BD . Their combined
capacity to restore neural connectivity, normalize neurotransmission, enhance trophic …

[PDF] Intellectual Origins And Academic Evolution Of Public Administration In India: A Pre-Wilsonian Context

S Lata, RK Kundu

This paper explores the rich tradition of administrative thought and practice in India
before Wilsonian discourse, emphasising a distinct, integrated governance model.
Ancient Indian texts like Kautilya's Arthashastra advocated a balance between …

Outrageous Synchronicity: Journey to the Sacred

J Crichton - 2026

Outrageous Synchronicity is a captivating memoir that will challenge conventional
paradigms and inspire the reader to a deeper knowledge of life and relationships.
Offering a unique blend of the mystical and the everyday, it traces one woman’s life-changing …

[PDF] Multisensory Processing: The Formation of Object Categories

MA Seveso - 2026

Every day we categorise myriad objects using information from multiple sensory
modalities. For instance, when we encounter a cat, we perceive it through its visual
properties (eg, shape, size, colour), the sounds it makes (eg, meowing), and its …

Beyond the Symbolic Masculine Body Interrogating Embodied Power and Inner Body in Byayam Samitis of Kolkata

S Saha - Beyond the Hegemonic: A Global Exploration of Theory …, 2026