This is not nostalgia. It is observation.

A Different Social Reflex

In much of the world shaped by late-stage capitalism, interaction is transactional by default. Help is conditional. Suspicion precedes generosity. Risk is individualised. In Chennai, the reflex is still different. People intervene without being asked. Strangers stop when something is wrong. Assistance is offered before motives are assessed. Money is often refused. This is not charity. It is social instinct. That instinct survives even in moments that theory says it should not: late nights, urban settings, infrastructural failure, ambiguity. The absence of alcohol matters. The presence of peer groups matters.

But more than anything, the cultural baseline matters.

Why Tamil Nadu Resists Homogenisation

Tamil Nadu’s resistance is not accidental, and it is not recent.

1. Language as a wall

   Tamil is not ornamental. It is enforced socially. This slows cultural flattening. It resists pan-Indian and global monocultures. It keeps local meaning dense.

2. Dravidian political memory

   Tamil society internalised an early suspicion of centralisation; religious, linguistic, or political. That suspicion created buffers long before the current political moment.

3. Pluralism without performance

   Religious difference is normalised rather than staged. Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism exist as lived traditions, not symbols in a culture war. This reduces siege psychology.

4. Weak penetration of chains

   Unlike Mumbai or Bengaluru, Chennai never fully surrendered its retail and social space to global chains. Local commerce still dominates daily life. That preserves face-to-face norms.

5. Family and neighbourhood density

   Gated isolation exists, but it is not total. Multi-generational presence and informal accountability remain strong.

Together, these factors produce something rare: modernity without total alienation.

The Dravidian Exception

Across South Asia, regions most exposed to imperial circuits, tourism corridors, financial hubs, Anglophone enclaves, develop a subtle sorting mechanism. Attention becomes differential. Westoxication, proximity to capital, or symbolic globality acquire value. Tamil Nadu largely escapes this logic. The reason is not moral superiority. It is insulation. Empire does not fully enter Chennai’s interior life. Compare this with places overwhelmed by external valuation; where service becomes calibrated, where the gaze changes, where people learn to distinguish between bodies. Tamil Nadu has been spared that training.

For now.

Capitalism Without Total Capture

Tamil Nadu is not anti-capitalist. It is industrial. It exports. It builds. But it has not fully internalised the idea that value must be proven through dominance, speed, or self-assertion. Accommodation still carries status. Adjusting to others is not read as weakness.

This is the opposite of the imperial ethic, where friction is resolved through power.

A Warning, Not a Celebration

None of this is permanent. The post-1990s generation shows strain. Gated living grows. English replaces intimacy. Phones replace neighbourhoods. Hyper-individualism seeps in. Capital does not destroy cultures all at once. It corrodes reflexes. Tamil Nadu’s strength lies in the fact that many people still remember another way of being, and can model it unconsciously. Once that memory fades, no policy can restore it.

Why This Matters Beyond India

What survives in Chennai is not “Indian culture” in the abstract. It is a pre-imperial social grammar: presence, mutual recognition, non-transactional help, emotional attunement. These traits exist wherever Empire has not fully won; whether in parts of the Global South, or in marginal spaces within the West itself. They are not backward. They are not inefficient. They are not sentimental. They are human.

And once lost, they are almost impossible to rebuild.

It was Dr V’s birthday this weekend, and we found ourselves in the Great English countryside; those great undulating fields and hedgerows that still whisper of an older order. There’s something about England’s pastoral stillness that throws modern anxiety into relief. The calm of inherited hierarchy, the sense that everything has already been decided, makes you think of those of us who were told that nothing was fixed, that we could climb forever if we just kept studying, working and performing.

The Dreams

The American Dream is: I start a business and I win!

The Indian Dream is: I struggle; my parents struggled but I make an incremental leap and the pathway is education; the Generational Company.

That faith, the Indian Dream, and by corollary the American one, was always incremental. Work hard, collect degrees, ascend by merit. It was a kind of soft socialism: the state would open the schoolhouse door, and the child of a clerk might someday become a civil servant, a doctor, an engineer abroad. It worked, for a while. But every compact eventually expires, and late stage capitalism has decimated every type of Dream there is, whether Indian or American.

The End of Incrementalism

Peter Thiel recently called today’s economy an “inter-generational fraud”: the elders own the assets, the young hold the debt, and the system tells the latter to innovate while giving them nothing to inherit.  Indian millennials, model pupils of meritocracy, have collided head-on with this reality.  They did everything right and still arrived too late.  Degrees now deliver anxiety, not mobility.  Education remains sacred but hollow, a ritual of reassurance for a world that no longer rewards it.

The great Indian middle-class compact depended on two illusions: that the economy would endlessly expand and that merit would always be rewarded.  Both illusions have collapsed.  A world of stable bureaucracies has given way to venture capital and algorithmic precarity.  The ladder has turned into a treadmill.

A New South-Asian Left

Out of this fatigue comes something quietly radical.  In New York, figures like Zoran Mamdani embody a generation unafraid of the word socialism.  His politics are not imported romanticism but a response to lived inequity: the working-class Bangladeshi, Pakistani, and Indo-Caribbean communities of Queens and the Bronx who watch the old desi elite consolidate power through nonprofits and tech start-ups.  They see the distance between theory and rent, between merit and survival.

Their language, justice, housing, dignity, comes not from the Ivy League but from the taxi depot and the bodega.  It is a reminder that South Asia’s original moral vocabulary was always egalitarian before it became aspirational.

Is India is held together by the patience of the marginalised?

The Hindu Exception

Set against this is the remarkable adaptability of the Hindu-American story.  The Brahmin–Bania compact, that ancient fusion of the intellectual and mercantile, has found in Western capitalism a natural extension of itself.  It does not wrestle with guilt; it optimizes.  Where others see exploitation, it sees efficiency.  The result is a cultural divide inside the diaspora: the socialist cadence of the Muslim-Bangladeshi-Pakistani left, and the managerial optimism of the Hindu right.  Both claim authenticity, yet they speak entirely different moral languages.

Material success comes easily to a civilisation that never considered wealth inherently sinful.  For others, the tension between faith, fairness, and survival remains unresolved.

The Death of the Dream

The Indian Dream was not false; it was finite.  It lifted millions out of poverty, produced scientists and novelists and global CEOs.  But it cannot reproduce itself indefinitely in a saturated world.  The pipeline from exam to office to visa has narrowed to a trickle.  The next generation faces something its parents never did: stagnation after success.

Across the diaspora, one senses exhaustion; the feeling of being permanently proximate to prosperity but never secure within it.  Education has become the new inheritance tax: everyone pays, few benefit.

After Meritocracy

Maybe this is the moment to stop mourning meritocracy’s death and start questioning its sanctity.  If the compact is broken, the question is not how to fix it, but what to build instead.  A society that measures worth only by productivity was always going to collapse under its own cleverness.

Perhaps what follows the Indian Dream will be smaller, slower, more communal: less about climbing, more about belonging.  The South-Asian story has never truly ended; it just keeps rewriting its social contract.  The new one will have to begin where the old one refused to look: with justice, with rest, and with the ordinary dignity of staying put.

Kabir removed three of Dave’s comments, and while I felt it was over-moderation, I’ve kept my promise not to interfere unnecessarily in his threads.

The excerpt above, though, is interesting — the comparison between Zia’s Pakistan and Modi’s India. What’s striking about both is the twin emphasis on capitalism and cultural conservatism: the promise of economic growth wrapped in moral revival. It raises a deeper question — whether right-wing politics are, paradoxically, the only antidote societies find to extreme inequality.

Class, even more than caste or creed, is the fundamental distinction in any society. The bottom half ultimately has more in common with each other than with the top half. Yet society endures only when that bottom half is so compromised that it cannot mount effective resistance. When the Establishment promise uplift but depend on the passivity of the lower half, then the “distribution of prosperity”, twinned with ideology, itself becomes the subtlest form of control.

Originally Published: January 26, 2025

Part 1.1

[1].[1].[1] The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalitization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off.

Perhaps the other most important factor that contributed to the rise of modern Capitalist Modernity is actually a confluence of several sub-factors: the development of the printing press, the mass-enletterment of Western European societies, the many efforts made to translate the Christian Bible from Latin to European vernaculars, and the upswell in Protestant Christian cults and sects which cracked apart the oneness of Western Christendom. It is easy to see how Burroughs may have have come up with an idea of language being akin to a viral infection, as well as how Land landed upon an image of technocapital virality.

Commoditization & Production

Their thoughts weigh heavy on the work of Land as As Mackay and Brassier explain in the ‘Editors’ Introduction’ of Fanged Noumena (Land, 2012):

“Fuelled by disgust at the more stupefying inanities of academic orthodoxy and looking to expectorate the vestigial theological superstitions afflicting mainstream post-Kantianism, Land seized upon Deleuze-Guattari’s transcendental materialism – years before its predictable institutional neutering – and subjected it to ruthless cybernetic streamlining, excising all vestiges of Bergsonian vitalism to reveal a deviant and explicitly thanatropic machinism. The results of this reconstructive surgery provide the most illuminating but perhaps also the most disturbing distillation of what Deleuze called ‘transcendental empiricism’. In Land’s work, this becomes the watchword for an experimental praxis oriented entirely towards contact with the unknown. Land sought out this exteriority, the impersonal and anonymous chaos of absolute time, as fervently as he believed Kantianism and Hegelianism, along with their contemporary heirs, deconstruction and critical theory, were striving to keep it out.” (p. 5)

Production is one of the key topics of the first chapter of Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972/1977), perhaps the most well-known of the pair’s works. In the first chapter, ‘The Desiring Machines’, production is defined as a process which has three elements:

1)It incorporates “recording and consumption within production itself, thus making them productions of one and the same process” (p. 4).
2)It makes “no distinction between man and nature: human essence of nature and the natural essence of man become one within nature in the form of production or industry, just as they do within the life of man as a species…man and nature are not like two opposite terms confronting each other — not even in the sense of bipolar opposites within a relationship of causation, ideation, or expression (cause and effect, subject and object, etc.); rather, they are one and the same essential reality, the producer-product” (p. 4-5)

3) And lastly, “it must not be viewed as a goal or an end in itself, nor must it be confused with an infinite perpetuation of itself.” (p. 5)

A forced prolongation of the process, however, is considered by D&G to be tantamount to bringing it to an abrupt & premature end, which leads to the kind of “artificial” schizophrenia found in mental hospitals (p. 5). The schizophrenic is described as the universal producer with no distinction between producing and product (and thus, a rejection of “renaissance rationalization”, or humanistic reason itself).

Commoditization could thus be seen as a cycle of production-consumption pushed to its utmost extremes, wherein the drive to produce requires the consumption of ever-increasing stores of capital — material, social, cultural, and spiritual — thereby corrupting the social or ethnic body (see Dugin) from within like a festering tumour sent into cancerous overdrive.

In short, taking the Landian Singularity to be a merely destructivephenomenon (or rather, noumenon) — at least as that word would normally be understood — would be a gross simplification. What the Singularity does is achieved through the intensification of the production process which, rather than outright destroy, corrodes, corrupts, and consumes the cultural substrate upon which it preys, like a predatory elite — like a vampire (cf. “lesbian vampirism”, Meltdown). By accelerating the cycle of creation and consumption of commodities past the limits of human comprehension (initially, through such humnanistic media such as marketing, advertisements, and entertainment), technocapital ever more quickly approaches the point at which demand is wholly manufactured and the capacity to decide has been lifted out of the hands of humanity¹.

As regards the usage of the term by D&G, schizophrenia could be considered something akin to an a priori platonic form of which mundane clinical schizophrenia is but an imperfect reflection. This view of perfect forms becoming manifest as stunted and twisted reflections in the unstable surface of the lake of matter is not entirely out of line with Hindu metaphysical understandings of the relation between the spiritual world (first, boundless, & unchanging) and the material one (secondary, bounded, & ever-changing), though, of course the French duo would likely reject a transcendental realm of forms distinct from the immanent.

Primordial Desire

On the contrary, D&G argue that the “objective being of desire is the Real in and of itself” (p. 26-27) and what desire lacks is not the object but the subject.

More specifically, D&G talk about ‘desiring-production’, synthesizing the psychoanalytic work of Freud and the economics of Marx to develop a new system of thought. As Smith, Protevi, & Voss (2023) summarize in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Gilles Deleuze:

“Passing to the conceptual structure of the book [Anti-Oedipus], the key term of Anti-Oedipus is “desiring-production,” which crisscrosses Marx and Freud, putting desire in the eco-social realm of production and production in the unconscious realm of desire. Rather than attempting to synthesize Marx and Freud in the usual way, that is, by a reductionist strategy that either (1) operates in favor of Freud, by positing that the libidinal investment of social figures and patterns requires sublimating an original investment in family figures and patterns, or (2) operates in favor of Marx by positing neuroses and psychoses as mere super-structural by-products of unjust social structures, Deleuze and Guattari will call desiring-production a “universal primary process” underlying the seemingly separate natural, social and psychological realms. Desiring-production is thus not anthropocentric; it is the very heart of the world. Besides its universal scope, we need to realize two things about desiring-production right away: (1) there is no subject that lies behind the production, that performs the production; and (2) the “desire” in desiring-production is not oriented to making up a lack, but is purely positive. Desiring-production is autonomous, self-constituting, and creative: it is the natura naturans of Spinoza or the will-to-power of Nietzsche.”

An interesting proposition to be sure, but how are we to understand it from the Hindu perspective?

Kāmapuruṣa

The word subject has two meanings that are of great weight to us. Both of them can be covered by a single Sanskrit term, puruṣa, which, like its English counterpart, has several connotations across various fields. The first of these meanings is the grammatical, which inevitably leads one to ask the question: who is it that desires? According to D&G (1972/1977), desire lacks a fixed subject, being instead “the set of passive syntheses that engineer partial objects, flows, and bodies, and that function as units of production.” (p. 26). They believe that both desire and the object of desire are machines (we will unpack this term later) hooked up to one another leading to production being deducted from the production of production (the process of desiring-production in which producing is always ‘grafted onto’ the product); that is to say, between the act of producing and the product, something detaches, “thus giving the vagabond, nomad subject a residuum.” (p. 26). Without a fixed subject, desire is something which can be experienced by all beings and which, in the deleuzoguattarian sense at least, appears to have a liberating function which frees men from restrictions. Of course, we must keep in mind that Landian Accelerationism does not bother itself with such humanistic concerns.

The second meaning of puruṣa with which we must concern ourselves is the philosophical and theological one. It can be used to refer both to the individual ātman (Self) as well as the Eldmost Man of the Puruṣa Sūktam³ (RV 10.90), who can only be identified as Śrīman Nārāyaṇa (Sundar, 1995), or Viṣṇu — that is to say, God Himself (Bhagavān).

What, one may ask, is the relationship between desire and God?

For this, we must turn to myth, where the primordiality of desire is attested to, both Hellenistic and Hindu. Hesiod’s Theogony (Evelyn-White, 1914), one of the key sources for Greek myths of creation, states:

“Verily at the first Chaos came to be, but next wide-bosomed Earth, the ever-sure foundations of all the deathless ones who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus, and dim Tartarus in the depth of the wide-pathed Earth, and Eros (Love), fairest among the deathless gods, who unnerves the limbs and overcomes the mind and wise counsels of all gods and all men within them.” (116-122, p. 87)

After this, Eros causes the other gods to pair off, and through their unions, people the cosmos with all the races known to the Greeks: gods, titans, giants, and mortals.

Another important source of Hellenistic beliefs on the origins of desire is the Orphic tradition. According to Orphic theogony, the union of Chronos (‘Time’) and Ananke (‘Necessity’, ‘Fate’) in the primordial abyss, filled with nothing but water and earth, brought forth a silver egg surrounded by a serpent, from which Phanes (from ϕαίνω, “to bring to light, bring into sight, make to appear, in physical sense…to shew forth, make known, reveal, close”; Liddell & Scott, 1883) appeared, separating Aether (‘day sky’) and Chaos (‘chasm’) from. He was called First-born (Prōtogónos) and identified with Eros (among other deities, like Dionysus, Zeus, and Pan). Chronos was also known as Aion. In this form he was commonly depicted holding the wheel of the zodiac, together with his spouse, the Earth Mother (Gaia), and their four children, the seasons. Statues of a winged, lion-headed figure, wrapped by a serpent, found in Roman mithraea have also been identified with Aion⁴.

Why is this of significance? Because we can see the very same connections made out in the Vedic context as well. Much of what has been said about desire in the Hellenic sources is not unlike the Hindu understanding of the same, right down to the association of Eros with another primordial, transcendent, and radiant deity.

Kāma is the Hindu counterpart of Eros, and just like his Greek twin’s, his name denotes both a God of love and the abstract concept of desire. Just as eros is meant to orient man towards God according to Plato, kāma is one of the four goals of human life (puruṣārthas) meant to lead one to liberation (mokṣa) from death and rebirth.

The primordiality of kāma is attested to in the Vedas, and especially in the Nāsadīya Sūktam (RV 10.129), which is an important source to understand the Vedic cosmogony. Many of the same themes and motifs as the Orphic theogony can be found in the first four verses of this hymn:

“The non-existent was not, the existent was not; then the world was not, nor the firmament, nor that which is above (the firmament). How could there be any investing envelope, and where? Of what (could there be) felicity? How (could there be) the deep unfathomable water?

Death was not nor at that period immortality, there was no indication of day or night; THAT ONE unbreathed upon breathed of his own strength, other than THAT there was nothing else whatever.

There was darkness covered by darkness in the beginning, all this (world) was undistinguishable water; that empty united (world) which was covered by a mere nothing, was produced through the power of austerity [tapas⁵].

In the beginning there was desire [kāma], which was the first seed of mind; sages having meditated in their hearts have discovered by their wisdom the connexion of the existent with the non-existent.” (RV 10.129.1-4)

The Nāsadīya Sūktam is stated to be addressed specifically to to the devatā Prajāpati Parameṣṭhī. The Nārāyaṇīya⁶ (a text within the larger Mahābhārata) tells us is Brahmā-deva, the creator of the material world (MB 12.326.17).

Here, we shall have to hearken unto the third meaning of ‘subject’ with which we shall concern ourselves: the bond of a subordinate to a ruler. In Sanskrit, this is expressed through the word prajā, which, among other things, means precisely that. But it is not enough to content ourself with a shallow understanding such as this — it is needful that we think deeply upon the other meanings of this word as they have a great bearing upon this work. Prajā can also mean precisely the same thing as its cognate, progeny. The master of said progeny (or ‘creatures’) is thus called a progenitor, a prajāpati (‘lord of the people or creatures’, from pati, ’husband’ but also meaning ‘master’ or ‘sovereign’ at the end of a compound word).

Aside from being an oft-used proper name for the Hindu demiurge, a broad overview of our texts, on the other hand, tells us that prajāpati has also been used as a title to refer to those beings who can be thought of as fathers or progenitors of the cosmos. A list of twenty-one Prajāpatis in the Mahābhārata includes both Śrī Brahmā, several of his sons (such as Dakṣa, most famously), and Rudra, among other Devas and Ṛṣis. Oddly enough, there is one major deity clearly missing from these lists: Śrī Viṣṇu⁷.

This is a rather odd omission, given His connection to fertility and virility, which, as the blogger at mAnasa-taraMgiNI points out in his post ‘A note on Śrī, Viṣṇu and śṛṅgāra’ (Feb. 27, 2022), is an ancient one, stretching back into the Vedas (RV 1.164.36, 10.184.1) where He is also associated there with multiple mother goddesses (janitrīḥ, RV 3.54.14). Even the epics associate Him with manly vigour and fatherhood. In the Vedas and Purāṇas, He is associated with Bhū-devī (Goddess Earth) in His Varāha-avatāra, as a result of His having lifted her up out of the primordial cosmic waters. In the Bhagavad Gītā, Śrī Kṛṣṇa, refers to Himself as the “seed-giving father” of the cosmos (bīja pradah pitā, BG 14.4), and, in a more literal sense, Śrī Kṛṣṇa is also the father of the reincarnated Deva of Desire, Kāma. When his body was burnt to ashes by the fire spat out by Mahādeva’s third eye, he became Ananga, the Bodiless One. Later, he was took birth among the Vṛṣṇis of Dvārakā as Pradyumna, the Most Mighty, son of Śrī Kṛṣṇa, akin to whom he was said to look in all respects.

There is, however, another Pradyumna is spoken of and glorifed in the Mahābhārata and the writings of the Pāñcarātra Saṁhitā, a body of work which stands out as among the oldest witnesses of Vaiṣṇava thought and worship of Śrī Viṣṇu. They speak of his place among the caturvyūhas — the ‘four-fold forms’ of Hari who create, maintain, and destroy the material world, protect devotees, and make steadfast Dharma: Vāsudeva, Saṁkarṣaṇa, Pradyumna, and Aniruddha. Some texts say that Pradyumna is also associated with the mind (MB 12.326.39; 12.332.15) as kāma is in the Nāsadīya Sūktam (RV 10.129.4). In the Nārāyaṇīya, Bhīṣma, the great elder and renunciate hero of the kingly Kuru bloodline tells of how the great sage Śrī Nārada (one of the most renowned devotees of Hari) came face-to-face with the manifold form of Śrīman Nārāyaṇa in all His glory and splendour (MB 12.326.1-14). It was at this meeting that the Lord taught His worshipper the truth of the worlds:

“This Eternal I, coming into manifestation, become established in the firmament. Then at the end of a thousand eons (yugas), I will withdraw the universe again, absorbing into my Self all beings—both moveable and immovable.

As singular Being I will wander with knowledge, O best of the twice-born, and then I will create the entire universe again with the aid of knowledge.

My fourth form, which created the undecaying remainder, that itself is called Saṁkarṣaṇa who further gave birth to Pradyumna.

I am Aniruddha, [born] of Pradyumna. And my creation occurs again and again. Then from Aniruddha is born Brahmā, whose origin is there in the primeval lotus.” (MB 12.326.66-69).

Brahmā-deva is also known as Hiraṇyagarbha since he was born from the Golden Egg or Golden Embryo atop the lotus growing from the navel of Śrī Mahāviṣṇu, who lays atop his serpentine bed, drifting upon the causal sea. The Hiraṇyagarbha Sūktam (RV 10.121) tells us more about this enigmatic byname. That Hiraṇyagarbha generally refers to Brahmā-deva can be inferred from the fact that nine of the ten ṛks (verses) in this sūktam end with the refrain “kasmai devāya haviṣā vidhema”: let us offer worship with an oblation to the divine Ka. Sāyaṇa-ācārya’s commentary on the first ṛk of this text cites, among other works, the Nirukta of Yāska (perhaps the oldest extant work on etymology) to support this claim. Similarly, Śrīman Nārāyaṇa in the Mahābhārata also tells Nārada-ṛṣi: “Hiraṇyagarbha, preceptor of the world, the four-faced one who can be understood through etymology (niruktaga), the immortal god Brahmā reflects on my pluripotent [nature].” (MB 12.326.47). The hymn further says that “When the vast waters overspread the universe containing the germ [garbhaṁ] and giving birth to Agni, then was produced the one breath of the gods” (RV 10.121.7), and that he “who is the parent of the earth, or who the unerring support (of the world) begat the heaven, and who generated the vast and delightful waters” (RV 10.121.8). The commentary of Sāyaṇa-ācārya says that “the germ of the world, Brahmā” was said by Manu to come from “yat, tataḥ: from that (cause)”, while the waters refer to Mankind. Turning to the Manusmṛti, we can understand what the ācārya was pointing to:

“This (World) was in existence in the form, as it were, of dense Darkness,—unperceived, undifferentiated, incogitable, (hence) incognizable; as it was wholly merged in deep sleep.

Thereafter, the supreme being Hiraṇyagarbha*, self-born, unmanifest and bringing into view this (universe), appeared,—dispelling darkness and having his (creative) power operating upon the Elemental Substances and other things.

He,—who is apprehended beyond the senses, who is subtile, unmanifest and eternal, absorbed in all created things and inconceivable,—appeared by himself.

Desiring to create the several kinds of created things, he, in the beginning, by mere willing, produced, out of his own body, Water; and in that he threw the seed.

That became the golden egg, resplendent like the Sun; in that (egg) he (Hiraṇyagarbha) himself was born as Brahmā, the ‘Grand-father’ of the whole world.

Water is called ‘nara,’—water being the offspring of nara; since water was the first thing created by (or, the original residence of) that being, he is, on that account, described as ‘nārāyaṇa.’

That which is the cause—unmanifest, eternal and partaking of the nature of the existent and the non-existent,—the being produced by that (cause) is described among people as ‘brahmā.’

That supreme lord, having dwelt in that egg for a year, himself, by his own thought, broke that egg into two parts.

Out of those two pieces (of the egg) he formed Heaven and Earth, and, between them, the Ākāśa, the eight quarters and the eternal receptacle of water.” (MS 1.5-13)

In effect, this the same account as the one given in the Puruṣa Sūktam when it states: “From him was born Virāt. and from Virāt. Puruṣa; he, as soon as born, became manifested, and afterwards (created) the earth (and) then corporeal forms.” (RV 10.90.5). Virāj means something akin to “The Wide-Shining One”, a clear parallel to Hiraṇyagarbha, and puruṣa has near enough the same meaning as nara.

Here we finally have the key to begin understanding Eros and Kāma. The name of Phanes is cognate with Bhānuḥ (one of the thousand names of Śrī Viṣṇu in the Viṣṇu Sahasranāmam) and thus akin to the Vedic names Virāj and Hiraṇyagarbha. By holding up the Hellenic and Hindu sources beside one another, we can see that a shining son who shares in the characteristics of his father, a supreme being who rules over time itself, the first-born of the cosmos aroused by desire, splits apart the cosmic egg into two halves, laying down the space needed for the world as we know it to come into being.

He is also, however, linked to the end of all that is. The Mahābhārata says that it is into Pradyumna that all beings merge at the time of pralaya⁸ (MB 12.326.36). In a certain sense then, one could say that both the birth and death of all material worlds, beings, and associated phenomena are thereby united in Desire.

^{1. Ironically, this should signal that contemporary efforts towards AI alignment are likely to be futile, because any “AI” that can be aligned (towards humanitarian ends) is not a true Artificial Intelligence in the Landian sense. The true Abominable Intelligence lurking behind the Faustian IMPulse is just that: an imp — a malevolent spirit or an evil god. And neither a god nor a fiend can be contained through secular means.↩}

^{2. Fantasy (along with superstitions and hallucinations) being an example of the Kantian reinforcement of the idealistic definition of desire, which for Kant can only produce psychic realities. As we noted in the Introduction, the Ccru, of which Land was a member, posited the phenomenon of hyperstition (a portmanteau of ‘hyper’ and ‘superstition’, in which objectively fictional or fantastical forces and figures have a way of making themselves real by infecting or invading the minds of the living in the present-day, present-time world through means such as literature and entertainment. One example of this might be Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (mentioned later on by Land in this text), which launched in 1983 and was intended to avoid mutually assured destruction between American and Soviet nuclear exchanges by developing experimental new weaponry that seemed right out of science fiction, leading to opponents of the program and/or the president to dub it the “Star Wars program”, which was picked up by the media and used to shape public opinion against it, eventually leading to it coming to be known by that moniker popularly.↩}

^{3. A sūktam is a Vedic hymn or panegyric dedicated to one or more deities, composed in a specific verse, and attributed to a specific Ṛṣi (Seer) to whom it was revealed or bequeathed. Some of the more popularly recited sūktams include the aforementioned Puruṣa Sūktam, the Nārāyaṇa Sūktam, the Śrī Sūktam, and the Durgā Sūktam. Another famous one is the Nāsadīya Sūktam.↩}

^{4. Though likely unrelated to the lion-headed form of the Lord (as it may have reflected the fourth degree of Mithraic initiation, Leo, which was associated with thunderbolts and Jove, much like Phanes), this figure is, nevertheless, strikingly similar to Śrī Narasiṁha Bhagavān in appearance. These statues have also been identified with the Iranic deity of time, Zurvan (Skt. Sarva, ‘All’; another name of Śrī Viṣṇu in the Viṣṇu Sahasranāmam).↩}

^{5. The word tapas appears here as a neuter noun stemming from the root √tap (‘to heat, be hot, suffer pain, practice austerities’). When used with reference to humans, it can mean ascetic practices, self-mortification, austerities, meditation, or literal heat in the form of the five fires an ascetic might surround himself with on all sides in order to intensify his askesis, with the fifth taking the form of the summer sun above. Sāyaṇa-ācārya’s commentary on this verse clarifies the usage of the word, saying that “Austerity: tapas = not penance, but the contemplation of things which were to be created: yahsarvajñaḥ sarvavit yasya jñānamayam tapaḥ: Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad 1.1.9”. Thus, in this context, tapas seems to indicate a mystic heat that leads to the ‘production of desire’ to borrow a Deleuzoguattarian phrase.↩}

^{6. “The Nārāyaṇīya or “(the work containing) everything about Nārāyaṇa” (or “(the work) promulgated by Nārāyaṇa”[1]) is a small text of 1006 verses occurring in the Śāntiparvan of the Mahābhārata.[2] The name of this text, which is found consistently in the manuscript colophons, is possibly derived from verses 12.326.100–101 of the text: “This great Upaniṣad, perfectly consonant with the four Vedas, nourished with Sāṁkhya and Yoga is sung by Nārāyaṇa and designated Pañcarātra by Him, dear one. Nārada told this again in Brahmā’s dwelling exactly as was seen and heard [on Śvetadvīpa].”[3] The Nārāyaṇīya, then, would be the knowledge[4] concerning Nārāyaṇa or the knowledge uttered by Nārāyaṇīya (concerning himself). The principal aim of the Nārāyaṇīya is the glorification of the God Hari-Nārāyaṇa, who is described as the God of gods (devadeva, 12.325.4[1]), the Creator (prajāpati, 12.325.4[18]), the Supreme Soul (paramātma), and the supreme Brahman. The text unfolds a monistic ontology that explains how the One Being, though remaining distinct from and transcending all beings, nonetheless is the indwelling Self of all beings (antarātmā bhūtāna, 12.321.28), the knower of the field (kṣetrajña, 12.321.28) and the allpervading witness (sarvagataḥ sākṣī, 12.326.21). Nārāyaṇa is described as the goal not only of all sacrifices and rites but also of austerities and the different philosophical systems of Sāṁkhya, Yoga, and Pañcarātra (12.330.29–31, 12.337.59–68). The text, however, recommends devotion (bhakti, 12.321.41 and 323.48) or onepointed focus (ekāntitvam, 12.321.42 and 323.49) as the best means for attaining Him.” (Adluri, 2018, p. xi-xii) “The Nārāyaṇīya occurs in the Śāntiparvan, the twelfth major book of the Mahābhārata. The Śāntiparvan contains three sections: the Rājadharmaparvan (on the law of kingship), the Āpaddharmaparvan (on the law of emergencies) and the Mokṣadharmaparvan (on the praxis of salvation). The Nārāyaṇīya appears in the last of these sections and marks the culmination of the epic’s cosmological, soteriological, and literary program. The immediate context of the Nārāyaṇīya is an extended dialogue between the fallen Kuru patriarch Bhīṣma and the victorious king Yudhiṣṭhira regarding the various forms of dharma.[18] It includes the divine sage Nārada’s visit to the mystical island Śvetadvīpa (or the “White Island”) where Nārāyaṇa reveals himself in his universal form (viśvarūpa, Mahābhārata 12.326.1c). The text is interesting as it provides not only a well-developed theology, but also philosophical discussions on ontology, cosmology, etymology, divinity, and ritual. A summary of the various descents of the One Being (ekaṁ puruṣaṁ, 12.326.31c) Nārāyaṇa into the cosmos can be found here[19]—a theme that is richly developed in later sectarian texts, the Purāṇas.” (Adluri, 2018, p. xv-xvi)↩}

^{7. For the argument as to why Śrī Viṣṇu may be identified with Prajāpati read ‘The sixteen-fold Puruṣa’(June 16, 2024) by the blogger at mAnasa-taraMgiNI. The story of Śrī Śiva’s attack on the yajña of Prajāpati Dakṣa (one of the sons of Brahmā-deva) and subsequent pursuit of the Yajña-puruṣa (the embodied sacrificial rite) who escaped in the form of a stag, as told in the Harivaṁśa, is remarkably similar to the story told in the Aitareya Brāhmaṇa about Rudra hunting Prajāpati. Lastly, Bhagavad Gītā 10.6 states that the seven Saptaṛṣis, the four Kumāras, and the fourteen Manus — twenty-five beings in total — are born from His mind and populate the world.↩}

^{8. Pralaya is the periodic cosmic dissolution which takes place in between the incomprehensibly large timespans which contain the rise and fall of innumerable civilizations and species of life across the many worlds in this universe. href=”#ref8″>↩}

Technocapital Singularity & A Brief History of Capitalism, Commoditization & Production, and Primordial Desire

Originally Published: January 26, 2025

[1].[1].[1] The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalitization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off.

“Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman, as it rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities, and hacks through security apparatuses, tracking a soulless tropism to zero control. This is because what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy’s resources. Digitocommodification is the index of a cyberpositively escalating technovirus, of the planetary technocapital singularity: a self-organizing insidious traumatism, virtually guiding the entire biological desiring-complex towards post-carbon replicator usurpation.”— Machinic Desire (Land, 1993)

Technocapital Singularity

I’ve known Afshan Shafi for a while now as a mentor and a senior poet in the Pakistani Anglophone poetry scene (which is growing rapidly). Especially through the Dead Poets Society of Pakistan, a collective I founded, I’ve had the chance to learn from her presence and support. I still can’t believe we started just 2–3 months ago, and already we’ve grown to over 50 members, with nearly 30 actively contributing to our first anthology volume.

Anyway, I’ve tried here to annotate a poem from Afshan’s book Quiet Women, titled: Ganesh, in a confectionery mill.

Stanza I:
Last November’s basilica is crumbling,
The taffy foundry found to the char, the last scruff of meal
rotten.
still aerate masses dispense themselves
Onto the curd, and enter the extruder to be filled with
Shiny viscera,
Palm oil kidneys blossoming under the churn,
The winds percolating soft while
The clouds widen their tangerine irises,

This modernist-lyrical poem positions the Hindu deity Ganesh, traditionally a remover of obstacles and God of beginnings, in an absurdly industrial, even grotesque setting: a confectionary mill. It layers Hindu symbolism with post-industrial imagery, a surrealist aesthetic, and biting socioeconomic subtext.

The opening line juxtaposes Ganesh, a spiritual figure, with confectionary mill—a symbol of capitalist excess, mechanized desire, and sweetness-turned-sinister. The “basilica” references crumbling sacred spaces, showing how religion itself is industrialized or decaying in a consumerist age. The “taffy foundry” being burnt and the meal rotting suggest both spiritual and material entropy.

Further, it presents visceral industrial birth. A grotesque fusion of biology and production. “Palm oil kidneys” evoke cheap globalized ingredients, outsourced and mechanized labor. The clouds’ “tangerine irises” lend a psychedelic, possibly apocalyptic aura, where even nature gazes on in artificial hues.

Stanza II:
Ganesh wakes with a strawberry smile
his Styrofoam lips expunge bliss from leather jowls,
lashes and white hoarfrost of the eye
refract petroleum flora and
The textile of his palm, offers a hilltop of
Pink candy and glucose intaglio.
no satyr could have envisaged him thus, with
this clutch of winching blades and death ribbons
in rococo hands; he loosely wills to the green lotus.
a noose, hammer, axe, tusk, and garland,
a comely exhibition of rage.

Ganesh is now awakened, but with synthetic, sterile parts: “Styrofoam lips,” “leather jowls,” “petroleum flora.” This re-engineering of divinity underscores how capitalism and mass production cannibalize the divine, reconfiguring joy as pre-packaged euphoria. “Glucose intaglio” suggests even meaning is etched in sugar, brittle and saccharine.

We see an inversion of traditional religious iconography; Ganesh’s usual items (lotus, tusk) are now joined by industrial tools and “death ribbons.” Rococo—an ornate, decadent European aesthetic—is ironically placed in the deity’s hands, symbolizing colonial residues and grotesque excess. His rage becomes a beautiful but hollow spectacle.

Stanza III:
he, who galumphed through the century’s rain-carousel,
like a little girl
in his emerald playground, iliac metal suffused
with humectants, sacred sugars cohering his cross bones
and the toppling caul of an
ancestral-star, across his neck.
his delicate calf, frozen, in supplication to the woodbulb
of his throne,
for a being so strong
his gaze is weary, adolescent,
has no gunpowder to sustain the promise
of violence and eldritch-rosy,
He does not even possess the tranquilized regret
of the aesthete or the shaman
though one can see him across the
astral esplanades, chalking out his charkas,
hope scotching across the sediment, not even
alert to the cosmic sanguinity of his pleasure,
roaring beyond
the elongated shadows.

Ganesh is reimagined as childlike and vulnerable, “galumphing” playfully—an echo of Carrollian absurdity—but in a world of “iliac metal” and “sacred sugars.” This verse mourns the death of sacred innocence in a world overrun by commodified spirituality and mechanical ritual. The “ancestral-star” falling suggests cosmic disinheritance.

There’s a paralysis of divine strength. Ganesh kneels before an industrial “woodbulb,” a bastardization of enlightenment or throne. His adolescent gaze captures a mood of spiritual fatigue and confusion, as if divine power itself is exhausted in late capitalism.

Even violence is rendered inert, “no gunpowder” to fuel change. Neither divine fury nor aesthetic contemplation is viable anymore. The aesthete and shaman, both archetypes of deep feeling and mystical insight, are absent, replaced by a numb spectator god.

The poem ends on a note of withdrawal and loss of awareness. Ganesh remains, perhaps in form, but is disconnected from his own pleasure, joy, or purpose. His “chalked chakras” become meaningless diagrams. “Hope” is burning uselessly, never catching flame.

Much like:

1. 1. Since 2020, $42 trillion in new wealth was created, with 63% ($26 trillion) captured by the top 1%.
   2. From 1995–2021, the top 1% gained 38% of global wealth growth, while the bottom 50% got only 2%.
   3. In Pakistan, the richest 10% earning 16x the poorest, and landed aristocracy (nearly 52% of National Assembly members) exempting itself from tax.
   4. Land Ownership in Pakistan: 5% of large landowners hold 64% of farmland; 65% of small farmers own just 15% of land.
   5. Public neglect of social welfare: education spending slashed, health stagnant, and the HDI plunging.

CODA: The holy has decayed, not because gods have abandoned humans, but because humans have converted gods into icons of consumption. This poem is not just an abstract surrealist poem. It is a lament and a critique, a religious and political satire, invoking a plastic deity in a sugarcoated hell. It mourns the erosion of the divine, critiques structural injustice, and questions whether even the gods plasticized and commodified, can feel pleasure or rage anymore.

What does it say that even after spending nearly half a billion dollars on a wedding for his son, India’s wealthiest man doesn’t merit a spellcheck? It says a lot.

🧠 The Chimera of Respect via Capital

There’s a pathology, particularly among upper-caste Indians, that material success will eventually buy the West’s respect. That more Ambanis, more unicorns, more opulence will earn India a seat at the table—not just economically, but civilizationally. But the spelling mistake is the tell.

Respect is not purchased. It is either structurally granted or strategically extracted. The former rarely applies to brown nations.

🧮 The Brahmin–Baniya Compact

Upper-caste Hindu society operates on a twin dynamic:

• The Brahmin, who claims knowledge and legitimacy.
• The Baniya, who accumulates capital as insulation from precarity.

Together, they create a high-caste compact that mocks Pakistan for poverty, idealizes China’s success, and attempts to mirror Western hegemony—without challenging its architecture. But that’s not sovereignty. That’s simulation.

🇨🇳 The Real Winner: China in the Cleft

While South Asia has been obsessively cleaving itself—India vs. Pakistan, Hindu vs. Muslim, upper caste vs. Other—China has mastered the art of sitting in the clefts. It rarely extends unnecessarily. It moves tactically. And it sits wherever the colonial powers once withdrew—whether in Africa, Central Asia, or, more recently, the Russia–Ukraine cleft. Wherever empire exits, China settles.

🧭 South Asia’s Hardening Horizon

As borders calcify and imagination shrinks, we are left with a subcontinent fragmenting by design and by habit.

The great poet Kabir wrote: Do not ask the caste of the saint; ask of his wisdom. Value the sword, not the scabbard.

But caste is now stylized. Wealth is confused for wisdom. And respect—when granted—is misspelled. The soft border of South Asia (the Great Punjab) is hardening (the Sikhs remain a bridge). The thread won’t stitch itself. And China, once again, is watching the seam unravel—silently preparing to fill the cleft. And what will remain? Perhaps only brown billionaires trying to outdo each other in wedding budgets, chasing Western approval, while their names are still mispronounced in policy rooms that matter.

At the front: white staff—stylish, aesthetic, articulate—handling (bossing sometimes but in general everyone is exceptionally lovely & calm) model minority clientele with curated ease. In the kitchen: Mexican workers—efficient, invisible, foundational. It’s the same setup across most of America’s cool, clean consumer spaces: the aesthetic and the labor silently segregated by race and language.

No one talks about it. You’re not supposed to notice the subtle “Americanisation” at play (the American dream and its attendant complexities). But once you do, as a twice-immigrant (East to Britain, old England to New England), it’s hard to unsee. The roles aren’t assigned by policy, but by a deeper algorithm—one that sorts people into place based on centuries of sedimented power: race, class, culture, even aesthetics.

This isn’t new. In an earlier post (still unpublished), I described the world as a passenger aircraft: the visible stewards perform for the various tiers, while unseen staff in the cockpit captain the craft forward. Race and labor operate like cabin class—structurally invisible, casually enforced.

The genius of capitalism—if we’re being sarcastic—is that it doesn’t need to enforce this explicitly. Everyone is too busy striving for their next milestone to stop and ask why the system feels so natural. Upward mobility is the opiate. But look around long enough, and the patterns return. They always do.

In post-identity America, the real bias is not in loud proclamations, but in quiet correlations. Where you stand in the café—front or back—still says more than it should.

Originally Published: March 18, 2023

Invocation: To the true Fanged Noumena, Śrī Narasimha Bhagavān, that Lion-faced Lord who with “celestial will” destroys all evils, eradicates all demons, and protects all devotees. May He take pity on this worthless one and guard him from the predations of the wicked.

Dedication: To the followers of the Dharma, past, present, or future, that they might find something of worth in my humble offering and bless my ventures for the wellbeing of our folk and indeed the world.

Thanks: to the various readers, reviewers, and friends who gave me advice throughout my time writing this and whose excitement was just as important to me as my own.

The Electronic Revolution: Feedback from Watergate to the Garden of Eden (1970): Part 1 of a two-part essay collection.

CCRU:

Lemurian Time War: a key CCRU text best described as a nesting doll of narratives woven together from fact and fiction a la Inception

Glossary, “Hyperstition”

Webpage, “Syzygy”

Exchange History NL:

400 years: the story: a history of Dutch economics

Hermitix Podcast:

The Occult Roots of Political Power with John Michael Greer (April 21, 2021)

Land, Nick:

Meltdown (1994)

A Quick-And-Dirty Introduction To Accelerationism (2017)

Pseudoanalysis:

A Response to Philosophical Critiques of Landian Accelerationism

Rao, Sreenivasa (sreenivasarao’s blogs):

The Meaning of ‘MEANING’ – Part Nine (2017): blog post on Vāk

Other References:

C.J. Cala

Youtube

Chad A Haag Philosophy Channel

Youtube

Hermitix Podcast:

Accelerationism & Capital with Nick Land (October 13, 2018)

Schopenhauer, Arthur:

The Emptiness of Existence

The transformation is multi-layered. Decolonization’s legacy, the Cold War’s end, technological advances, and globalization have created a world where multi-racial societies thrive, yet economic systems dominate. In the UK, immigration complicates old class hierarchies, and categories like “British Asian” are fragmented by religion, migration waves, and economic stratification. Social media amplifies these shifts by establishing Anglo-Western ideals as global standards of aspiration, blending diversity into an overarching capitalist framework.

Platforms like YouTube exemplify these dynamics. Channels such as T-Series and Sony TV reflect Global South audiences, but creators like MrBeast and PewDiePie dominate influence.

This asymmetry highlights the platform’s duality: leveraging massive Global South audiences while maintaining Global North cultural dominance. With China blocked by the Great Firewall, YouTube thrives in regions where English reigns as the lingua franca, benefiting creators with historical and economic advantages.

Wealth and inequality, subtle markers of privilege, underscore this reality. “Whiteness” retreats into elite spaces as capitalism homogenizes success, erasing local identities for global aspirations. Yet, these inequalities endure beneath a veneer of meritocracy.

Navigating this landscape requires balancing personal and global identities. Personally, I’ve oscillated between Anglo-American and Indian perspectives while keeping my Pakistaniat heritage in deep stasis—a reflection of broader global patterns. The continued dominance of English-speaking nations hinges on adapting to these emerging trends.

India’s role as the world’s largest democracy and English-speaking nation raises the ten trillion-dollar question: is it simply an exotic extension of Western capitalism or something distinct? As a rising power, Indians—economically aspirational and politically flexible—face pressures to align culturally while retaining complexity amid global homogenization.

The dominance of English-speaking nations sets the cultural tone, yet competing systems like China’s challenge the narrative. This era demands vigilance: inequity persists, anesthetized by technology that entrenches divisions rather than resolving them.

The luxury market, whether Ivy League schools or London real estate, thrives on limited supply meeting insatiable global demand. Meanwhile, the online world serves as an anodyne for those structurally unable to compete offline.

This isn’t dystopia. Rising living standards and connectivity coexist with increasing asymmetries. Technology shapes identity and relationships in unprecedented ways, from a teenager idolizing Taylor Swift as a “friend” to the global consolidation of wealth and influence. Capitalism’s dominance, underpinned by technology, reshapes the world invisibly, demanding we adapt, question, and remain critically aware.