Carbon Copies, Contradictions, and the Negation of Bureaucracy
Panini was born into a poor Telugu Brahmin family, with more siblings than shirts and fewer meals than arguments. His first ambition was modest: to be adopted by a wealthy family. That never happened, so he stuck with school, where hunger made him thin, curiosity made him reckless, and the beauty of his English teacher stole his focus. She was dazzling—her face more enchanting than any grammar lesson—and though he loved to look at her, she left him with no vocabulary beyond love and admiration. He failed English not because he was slow, but because he was too busy staring at her instead of the blackboard.
At school, Panini had the unlucky mix of being small, poor, and endlessly curious. He was the boy who asked too many questions, who picked apart weak explanations, who couldn’t let nonsense go unchallenged. Teachers disliked him, bullies loved tormenting him, and punishments piled up whether he was guilty or not.
Out of this misery, he found a stroke of genius. One day, he discovered carbon paper. During exams, he slipped a sheet under his answer page, making a duplicate. That copy he passed to the biggest but dullest boys in class. They copied his answers, passed the test for the first time, and in return, became his bodyguards. The daily beatings stopped. His enemies were beaten instead. The scrawny Brahmin boy who had been everyone’s punching bag suddenly ruled the playground. He learned young that terror could be subcontracted.
He didn’t yet know the word “dialectics,” let alone philosophy. That education came later, when he fell into the orbit of Hyderabad’s Communists. His older brother was in the Party, and through him, Panini sat in on meetings where dialectics was taught like scripture. For the first time, he heard the language of Marx and Engels, the logic of contradictions, the vocabulary of revolution.
But the men who preached dialectics didn’t like it when he used it. They worshipped their leaders more than reason. They quoted Marx like priests chant mantras, but they grew nervous when asked to defend their faith. Panini, armed with their own tools, turned the tables. He out-argued them, shoved contradictions in their faces, and exposed their double standards. The great dialecticians grew furious at the boy who beat them at their own game.
History carried him next to Iran, where he worked as a clerk for an Italian construction company in Bandar Abbas, helping build the country’s largest port. The Italians were gracious, the Iranians polite, but trouble came from Indian and Pakistani Muslims at the site, especially those from Hyderabad. They tried to humiliate him. His Iranian boss, a Muslim himself, noticed. With a stroke of bureaucratic justice, the boss canceled their work permits. The offenders were deported, and Panini went from victim to hero. Once again, the bullied boy became feared and respected—not with fists this time, but with paperwork.
Then came the Iranian Revolution. Panini never worked with the Ayatollahs, but he lived in a country suddenly ruled by them, where revolutions wiped out jobs like tides erasing sandcastles. Fortune blinked his way: he got an American visa.
Landing in New York was like stepping onto another planet. Skyscrapers rose like steel cathedrals, people walked as if racing, and the famously rude culture of New Yorkers felt almost like Buddhist enlightenment. Everything was questioned, nothing was sacred, and everyone was in a hurry.
But epiphanies don’t pay rent. Panini secured a position in one of the most prestigious jobs in New York. – as a lunch delivery boy in Midtown Manhattan. Day after day, he carried paper bags of hamburgers, fries, and Diet Cokes through the glass cathedrals. He delivered lunch to Harry Winston, the jeweler of kings; to Diane von Fürstenberg, the queen of the wrap dress; and to Louis Nizer, the famed attorney.
Across the street on 57th and 5th, a tower was rising. He delivered food daily to the construction crews, sometimes to the manager himself. The man was brash, abrasive, but not unkind. His name was Donald J. Trump. Panini often delivered him food, enough to be remembered. The tower became known as Trump Tower, and decades later, its owner became the 45th and 47th president of the United States. Panini could truthfully say he once delivered lunch to a future president—back when Trump’s hands reached for hamburgers, not ballots.
Marriage later took him to the American South, where he worked in the insurance industry. At first, he was just another foreign clerk drowning in paperwork. But his old instincts stirred. Using the same dialectics that once turned bullies into bodyguards and permits into power, he restructured the company’s information flow—the result: six million dollars in direct savings, millions more in efficiency. The company gave him a bonus. His middle-management colleagues gave him resentment. Dialectics worked—but the middle managers lost their jobs. That was the power of contradiction: efficiency affirmed, bureaucracy negated.
Then came September 11. Until that morning, Panini had been a bleeding-heart liberal, even working for a powerful Democratic politician in the South. He will leave the name unspoken; everyone knows who it was. But on September 12, 2001, his worldview flipped. He saw Islamic terrorism not as a nuisance but as an existential threat to India, Europe, and America alike. The boy who once delivered hamburgers to Trump Tower now proudly supported its owner in 2016, 2020, and 2024.
Now retired, with three children and two grandchildren, Panini has returned to his first calling: philosophy. He no longer delivers hamburgers or rewrites spreadsheets. Instead, he writes in his basement, hammering out polemics on dialectical materialism and logical empiricism. It is, in his view, the best job in the world. No bosses, no managers, no slogans to memorize. Just a keyboard, a basement, and the First and Second Amendments on his side—plus the local police, if debates get too heated.
And what has Panini learned? The world changes its costumes but not its essence. In his schoolyard, the strong beat the weak until he flipped the script with carbon paper. In Hyderabad, the Marxists taught him dialectics, but they hated him when he applied it. In Iran, he lived in a country swallowed by Ayatollahs. In New York, he delivered hamburgers to elites and, memorably, to Trump. In the South, he saved millions and made enemies. In politics, he changed when evidence demanded it. Always the same: the powerful don’t fear enemies; they fear questions.
Dialectics and logical empiricism may comfort the mind, but practicing them is the fastest way to lose friends and jobs. Dale Carnegie was not a dialectician, which is why he sold millions of books on winning friends, while dialecticians mostly lose both. Sweet talk may build careers, but it cannot solve the conflicts that matter. Theological dogmas kill tens of thousands every year. Only dialectics and logical empiricism—not politeness—can fight them.
It’s better to be the fragile boy who turned into a terror with carbon paper than just another silent victim of the system.
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