Indian Sociology-Land

    There is perhaps a strange similarity between Antigone and the fate of the revolutionaries in Thomas Pynchon's Vineland (1990), a novel which recently acquired a second life through Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another (2025). Both works are concerned with the extraordinary difficulty of distinguishing a revolutionary subject from the conditions through which he or she becomes its opposite.  Vineland begins in California in 1984, where a certain Zoyd Wheeler, a former hippie, must perform an annual act of public insanity in order to continue receiving disability benefits. This year he has decided to wear a woman's dress and attack a bar with a chainsaw, a performance which must be witnessed by television cameras if he is to continue being recognised by the welfare state as a lunatic. Unfortunately, the bar has been gentrified, the loggers have developed expensive tastes and his entire performance has been moved by somebody else to another location. Even ...

 " There are a bunch of concepts in your head that then your brain has to try to compress into this incredibly low data rate called speech or typing. That’s what language is – your brain has executed a compression algorithm on thought, on concept transfer. And then it’s got to listen as well, and decompress what’s coming at it. And this is very lossy as well. So, then when you’re doing the decompression on those, trying to understand, you’re simultaneously trying to model the other person’s mind state to understand where they’re coming from, to recombine in your head what concepts they have in their head that they’re trying to communicate to you … If you have two brain interfaces, you could actually do an uncompressed direct conceptual communication with another person … If I were to communicate a concept to you, you would essentially engage in consensual telepathy. You wouldn’t need to verbalize unless you want to add a little flair to the conversation or something (laughs), but ...

Reading some posts from a fragment of the Indian political Twitterati I discovered a peculiarly hyperbolic arrangement of modren Indian alt-right cerebral life. Between them the Indian copycat alt-right have ostensibly managed to govern the entire subcontinent without leaving X.  I am, however,   concerned here with a narrower operation. How does the vocabulary of economic improvment, prosperity, technology and effeciency acquire the voice of a small political tyrant? And why does the tyrant suddenly begin to speak like an infrastructure consultant? I want to call this operation ‘the match’. Two langauges meet, and for a moment the words of one can be made to perform the work of the other. “Development” arrives as a fairly harmless public ambition. Most people prefer a working railway to a railway which is on fire. But fasten that ambition to a second demand — that the people who obstruct the railway, question its cost, object to its route, or fail to admire its ribbon-cutti...

  Have you seen Dhurandhar? And watched Ranveer Allahbadia explain the real World that, apparantly, lies behind it? I ask becuase I propose a comparison between a film which makes a respectable business out of exploding human beings and a podcast which makes a respectable business out of putting them back together. I suffered the movies and the @BeerBiceps interviews for a paper I wrote recently, and now I ask as a good Christian to suffer with me and be cleansed thereof. One Ranveer supplies the damaged bodies and the other Ranveer offers to heal the soul. The first has Ranveer Singh with a Machine gun; the second has Ranveer Allahbadia with a microphone, some decorative plants, and the air of a young man who has just discovered that thinking is a wonderful alternative to knowing anything. both Ranveers sell intensity. The difference is that one charges admission and the other asks us to subscribe, breathe deeply, and achieve the best possibel version of ourselves.   In ...