This website is NOT a sequel to “How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie.”
It was not written to please the polite, sedate the offended, flatter the fashionable, or purchase admission into respectable stupidity. It is iconoclastic by design and uncompromising by necessity.
It is written from the standpoint of a Logical Empiricist, or Logical Positivist. I use the two terms interchangeably here. I know the technical differences. They are irrelevant to the task: to separate what can be known from what is merely preached, inherited, threatened, or repeated until repetition is mistaken for proof.
I was born a Hindu, whatever that is supposed to mean, since I had no vote in the matter. Had birth been a voluntary act, I might have chosen to arrive as a Teutonic Knight — armored, crusading, on the winning side of history’s long conversion. I did not. I was born a Telugu Brahmin: the conquered, not the conqueror; the catalogued, not the cataloguer. Birth, tribe, geography, and label notwithstanding, I am a Secular Humanist in ethics and a Logical Empiricist in epistemology. Everything else was assigned to me. This I chose.
I come from a civilization invaded, broken, converted, catalogued, mocked, patronized, and interpreted by its conquerors for nearly 1,400 years. For a Hindu, or an Indian, a decent job, a decent home, clean air, and a life without fear remain harder to secure than they are for many Americans, Europeans, Russians, Chinese, or Japanese. I use Hindu and Indian interchangeably, because the civilizational wound cannot be amputated from the historical one.
I wanted to know why.
Why did my civilization fail to prevent centuries of foreign domination? Why does it still stand in the dock, awaiting the verdict of outsiders, to be renamed, corrected, secularized, saved, or condemned? Why does Indian democracy still borrow its metaphysical, moral, and epistemological vocabulary from the very civilizations that conquered it, converted it, insulted it, and then appointed themselves its judges? Why is India still, in every way that matters, a de facto colony of Abrahamic monotheism and Abrahamic definitions of the real?
The consequences are not poetic. They are not symbolic. They are measured in corpses, and they are still being counted.
This website is my attempt to think through that catastrophe. Not with folded hands. Not with apology. Not with borrowed slogans. Not in the vocabulary of the conqueror. Rationally, historically, philosophically, empirically — and without permission.
It is the product of a lifetime. It has cost me a great deal. I decline to itemize the cost, because an itemized bill is either a beggar’s lament or a parade of self-importance, and I am selling neither.
I am asking for support for the work.
Your donation keeps this work independent and unbought — answerable to evidence and to nothing else. No institution funds it. No church, no party, no faculty, no donor with a doctrine to protect. That is the point, and that is the expense.
If you find this work valuable, fund it. If you agree with it, arm it. If you disagree, tell me where the argument fails. If it offends you, interrogate the offense before you interrogate me. If it disturbs you, ask whether comfort has quietly replaced truth as the thing you defend. If it provokes you, follow the provocation to its source. You may not like what you find there.
This website exists for those willing to think without permission.
Respectfully,
Panini