Amit's Blog

Why Coveting Ruins Empires: A Geopolitical Reading of the Isha Upanishad The opening verse of the Isha Upanishad—”Enjoy through renunciation; do not covet anyone’s wealth”—offers not a moral prescription but a realist maxim for survival in an interdependent, finite system. Over the last eighty years, geopolitical disasters from Iraq to Afghanistan, from nuclear brinkmanship to climate inaction, share a common pathology: the violation of Mā gṛdhaḥ (do not covet). When nations pursue absolute security or resource dominance, they trigger the security dilemma’s self-defeating spiral. Voluntary self-limitation, far from being weakness, represents the coldest realism for a non-zero-sum world where the other is never truly separate from the self. Treaty-based restraint succeeds where coercive dominance fails, not because of altruism but because of ontological fact. Do not grasp, for the hand that closes on another’s wealth Finds only the mirror of its own fear staring back The wor...

How Beijing Weaponized Strategic Inventories and Currency Insulation to Neutralize the 2026 Energy Shock The geopolitical crisis of early 2026, sparked by military conflict in the Middle East and the subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz, threatened to trigger a catastrophic global energy paralysis. As crude prices rocketed toward $120 per barrel, traditional market models predicted an inflationary collapse across major importing nations. Instead, China executed an unprecedented economic pivot, cutting its seaborne oil imports by roughly 5 million barrels per day to an eight-year low of 7.8 million barrels per day in May. Rather than succumbing to supply starvation, Beijing deployed a dual-layered fortress of national safety buffers, drawing down an immense, hidden stockpile of 1.4 billion barrels of crude. Supported by structural shifts toward vehicle electrification and domestic LNG shipping, China insulated its industrial base without participating in hyper-inflated spot mark...

From Palace to Deer Park—A Journey Through Extremes, Emptiness, and the Birth of Universal Compassion   The Buddha’s journey from prince to enlightened teacher offers no simple moral but rather a multi-layered map of human suffering and liberation. After abandoning palace luxury for six years of extreme asceticism, Siddhartha Gautama discovered the Middle Way—neither indulgence nor self-torture. Accepting a bowl of milk rice from Sujata, he sat beneath the Bodhi Tree and awakened to Dependent Origination, the “invisible grid” of cause and effect linking all existence. Yet enlightenment alone proved insufficient; the deity Brahma Sahampati had to persuade him to teach. His first sermon at Sarnath to five former companions, who had previously abandoned him in disgust, launched a spiritual revolution that rejected caste, prioritized intention over ritual, and spread rapidly through sixty enlightened disciples. This narrative synthesizes profound tensions: personal liberation ver...