Dregs of Yore

Dear Readers, I’m delighted to share my newest essay,  Why We Should Return to Ivan Turgenev’s "Fathers and Sons"  published this week in Merion West. In this piece, I revisit Turgenev’s 1862 novel as a meditation on a question that feels surprisingly urgent in 2025: What happens when ideological certainty overwhelms empathy? I explore how Turgenev’s restrained, humane vision—neither revolutionary nor reactionary—offers a third path in moments of political exhaustion: one grounded in reform, humility, and the difficult work of listening across generations. You can read the full essay  here . Or check it out directly on Merion West’s  website . Warmly, Sadhika. 

The question of how “situated” our knowledge is—how much it depends on where, when, and who we are—has become inescapable in the modern world. In the classroom, this takes the form of epistemic debates about standpoint theory and the authority of lived experience. In culture, it shapes how we read, teach, and even tweet. Each time we read a book, listen to a neighbour, or attempt to judge a politician’s claim, we wrestle with the same unease: How much of what I know is truly mine—the product of reason and experience—and how much is an inheritance of accident, culture, and mood? To acknowledge that knowledge is situated is to admit that we all see the world through keyholes shaped by history, language, gender, and temperament. Yet that recognition, taken too far, risks breeding paralysis. It leads one, understandably, to question: if each person’s knowledge is inseparable from their circumstance, can we still speak across the walls of culture or class? Can there be such a thing as truth...

I. One evening a couple of years back, I stood watching a cow tethered to a post outside a neighbour’s courtyard, just as the sun dropped low over the fields of Bidholi. Her tail flicked at flies, her jaw worked slowly, and her eyes settled briefly on me. And in that moment, I felt a strange exposure. I was being looked at, but not known. I was implicated, but not addressed. Levinas has claimed that the human face is the ultimate site of ethics. In its vulnerability, it commands: Thou shalt not kill. But the cow’s gaze complicates this claim. It does not command or appeal; it does not even seem to “address” me. And yet, when I met those eyes, I felt implicated in a way Levinas’ formula does not explain. The gaze does not forbid killing, nor does it sanction it. Instead, it exposed me to the raw fact of another being. Perhaps its power lies precisely in what it withholds: the refusal to deliver meaning. II. I felt a similar jolt a few days later, in a dairy shed. Rows of cows were tethe...

There is an argument made by Ernest Becker in his unsettlingly lucid book The Denial of Death (1973) that has never stopped gnawing at the edges of modern self-understanding. Man’s greatest cruelties, he says, do not arise from his baser animal instincts, but from the earnestness of his attempt to transcend them — from the unbearable tension between his mortal flesh and his immortal imagination, from the struggle to superimpose the symbolic world onto the physical one. Man, Becker wrote, is “a god who shits”: a being forever caught between the extremes of divinity and decay. Between the body’s rot and the mind’s grandeur lies all of history’s blood and folly. The typical modern explanation for evil (greed, lust, power, rage, etc.) is too tidy. Becker’s diagnosis cuts deeper. In his view, it more often springs from aspiration: from man’s refusal to be merely what he is. The desire to live forever, if not biologically then symbolically, leads men and nations alike to mythologize themsel...

Isn’t it exceedingly ironic that those most loudly proclaiming the imminent destruction of the planet are also those most suspicious of the only force that seems to be capable of doing something effective about it? I mean capitalism, of course. That the capitalist should save the climate, is to modern moral imagination, rather like learning that the village Shylock has been feeding the poor. Yet, the truth, always so indelicate, so inconsiderate of ideology, appears to be moving stubbornly in that direction. How many decades has it been now that the intellectual classes began treating capitalism as the unwholesome contagion of our age? The very word evokes images of smoke-belching factories, predatory merchants, and men in top hats smoking fat cigars while they plot the despoiling of our rivers. Yet, these same malign actors, driven not by virtue but by profit, have produced the electric car, the solar panel, and a battery so efficient that it now powers not just phones but the dreams ...

Co-authored by  Ankit  and  Sadhika  on October 02, 2025 The recent imposition of a 50 percent tariff on Indian exports by the United States has brought to the fore a question that is rarely addressed publicly in diplomatic circles: is neutrality a universally applicable moral principle or simply a status conferred (or withheld) by those who dominate the international system? The Trump administration’s move, announced in August 2025, doubled the existing 25 percent duty —initially reciprocal, then steepened as a penalty for India’s continued purchase of Russian oil. Estimates suggest this action jeopardizes up to 66 percent of India’s $86.5 billion in annual exports to the U.S., affecting labour-intensive sectors like textiles, gems, shrimp, furniture, and more—potentially slashing export volumes by 70 percent and dropping total shipments to just $49.6 billion in 2025–26. When India began importing discounted Russian crude oil in the aftermath of the Ukraine co...