Amit's Blog

Why an Ancient Elephant-Headed Scribe Understands Power Better Than Modern Commentators Do Let’s be honest: when most people hear “Ved Vyas and Lord Ganesha,” they think of a nice religious story about devotion and divine cooperation. Meanwhile, in the real world, diplomats and strategists are busy “inventing” concepts like “asymmetric partnerships” and “conditional cooperation” as if they’ve discovered fire. The irony is delicious: ancient mythology had already cracked the code of power politics while modern statecraft is still trying to figure out why its alliances keep falling apart. Here’s the uncomfortable truth: that “divine harmony” between the sage and the elephant-headed god wasn’t harmony at all. It was a ruthlessly negotiated contract between two parties who knew exactly what they wanted and weren’t about to trust each other any further than they could throw an elephant. Sound familiar? It should. The Myth That’s Actually a Manual Let’s strip away the incense and dev...

From Mughal Treasure House to Colonial Enclave to Communist Heartland—A Four-Century Journey Through Wealth, Power, and Structural Tragedy   For nearly two centuries, Bengal was the undisputed economic crown jewel of the Mughal Empire—generating nearly twelve percent of imperial GDP, dominating global textile markets, and functioning as the empire's treasury. Yet the Mughals never moved their capital there. The British eventually did, making Calcutta the seat of their Indian empire, only to abandon it for Delhi in 1911. This article synthesizes a sweeping historical analysis of why Bengal—despite its staggering natural wealth, human capital, and commercial sophistication—consistently failed to translate prosperity into sovereign power. The answers lie in a complex web of geography, climate, institutional design, colonial extraction, and political ideology. From the delta's annual self-fertilization to the Permanent Settlement's feudal codification, from the Jagat Seth...

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...