“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 earliest career ambition was modest: to be adopted by a rich family. That never worked out, so he settled for school, where malnutrition left him scrawny, curiosity made him reckless, and the beauty of his English teacher distracted him from learning the language. He failed English not for lack of intelligence, but because he was too busy admiring the teacher’s face instead of her grammar.
At school, Panini had the fatal combination of being small, poor, and endlessly inquisitive. He was the child who asked too many questions, who challenged teachers’ shaky explanations, the boy who could never leave nonsense unchallenged. Teachers didn’t appreciate his curiosity; bullies enjoyed his inability to fight back. Punishments piled up whether he was guilty or not.
But out of this misery came a stroke of practical genius. One day he discovered the miracle of carbon paper. During exams, he slipped a sheet under his answer page, creating a duplicate. The carbon copy he passed to the school’s biggest but dimmest boys, who then copied his answers and, for the first time, managed to pass. In exchange, they became his personal bodyguards. The daily beatings stopped. His enemies found themselves beaten instead. The frail Brahmin boy who had been everyone’s punching bag suddenly ruled the playground. Terror, he learned, 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 a Party member, and through him Panini attended meetings where dialectics was taught with the reverence of scripture. For the first time, he heard the language of Marx and Engels, the logic of contradictions, and the vocabulary of revolution.
But the men who preached dialectics most loudly hated it when he practiced it. They worshipped their leaders more than reason. They recited Marxist theory the way priests recite mantras, but they grew uncomfortable when asked to defend it. Panini, freshly armed with their own tools, turned the tables. He out-argued them, pushed contradictions into their faces, and exposed their double standards. The self-proclaimed dialecticians became furious at the boy who dared to out-dialectic them.
Later, history carried him 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 on the worksite, especially those from his hometown of Hyderabad. They went out of their way to humiliate him. His Iranian boss, a Muslim himself, noticed. One day, with a stroke of bureaucratic justice, he canceled their work permits. The offenders were deported, and Panini was suddenly elevated from victim to hero. Once again, the skinny boy who had been bullied into the dirt was feared and respected—not by fists but by paperwork.
Then came the Iranian Revolution. Panini hadn’t worked with Ayatollahs, but he had lived in a country suddenly ruled by them, where revolutions swept away jobs like sandcastles at high tide. But fortune blinked his way: he secured an American visa.
Landing in New York was like stepping into another universe. The skyscrapers rose like steel cathedrals, the people walked as if in a perpetual sprint, and the famously rude culture of New Yorkers felt, oddly enough, like a form of Buddhist enlightenment. Everything was questioned, nothing was sacred, and everyone was in a hurry.
But epiphanies don’t pay rent. Panini was fortunate enough to land one of the most prestigious jobs in Midtown Manhattan: lunch delivery boy for a restaurant at 56th and 5th Avenue. Day after day he ferried paper bags of hamburgers, fries, and Diet Cokes through the glass cathedrals of Manhattan. He carried lunch to Harry Winston, jeweler of kings. He delivered to Diane von Fürstenberg, queen of the wrap dress. He brought burgers to Louis Nizer, the great attorney.
And across the street, on 57th and 5th, a steel-and-glass tower was rising. Panini delivered food daily to the construction crews, and occasionally to the manager himself. The man was brash, abrasive, but nice. His name was Donald J. Trump. Panini delivered him food occasionally—enough times to be memorable. The building became Trump Tower, and decades later, its owner became the 45th and 47th president of the United States. Panini could truthfully say that he once delivered lunch to a future president—back when his hands carried hamburgers instead of ballots.
Marriage eventually brought him to the American South, where he found work in the insurance industry. At first, he was just another foreign clerk drowning in oceans of paperwork. But his old instincts stirred. With the same habit that had once turned bullies into bodyguards and clerical permits into power, he restructured the entire flow of information. The result: six million dollars in direct savings and millions more in collateral efficiency. The company rewarded him with a bonus. His middle-management colleagues rewarded him with resentment. Dialectics worked, but the middle managers found themselves out of work. That is the power of contradiction: the affirmation of efficiency and the negation of bureaucracy.
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 is. But on September 12, 2001, his worldview flipped 180 degrees. He concluded that Islamic terrorism was not a nuisance but 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 the vocation he began in Hyderabad more than half a century ago: philosophy. He no longer delivers hamburgers or rewrites insurance spreadsheets. Instead, he writes in the basement of his house, hammering out polemics on dialectical materialism and logical empiricism. It is, in his opinion, the best job in the world. No bosses, no middle 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? That the world changes its costumes but not its essence. In his schoolyard, the strong beat up the weak until he flipped the script with carbon paper. In Hyderabad, the Marxists taught him dialectics but hated him for out-arguing them. In Iran, he lived in a country suddenly ruled by Ayatollahs. In New York, he delivered hamburgers to elites and, memorably, to Donald Trump. In the South, he saved millions and earned enemies. In politics, he changed when evidence demanded it. The pattern was always the same: the powerful do not fear enemies; they fear questions.
Dialectics and logical empiricism may give solace, but implementing them is the fastest way to lose friends and jobs. Dale Carnegie was not a dialectician, which is why he sold millions of copies of How to Win Friends and Influence People 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 confront that.
Better, then, to be the frail boy who became a terror with carbon paper than one more silent victim of the system.