Amit's Blog

The Octopus Entwined: United States Complicity in the Dominion of the United Fruit Company The United Fruit Company’s dominance over Central America was fundamentally enabled by the active and sustained complicity of the United States government, which transformed the corporation into an instrument of American foreign policy. Through repeated military interventions, diplomatic pressure, and covert operations, successive U.S. administrations protected and expanded United Fruit’s monopolistic control over vast tracts of arable land, railroads, ports, and export infrastructure in countries such as Honduras, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Colombia, and Nicaragua. This partnership, rooted in the Roosevelt Corollary and exemplified by the Banana Wars, allowed the company to maintain economic hegemony, owning up to half of the arable land in some nations while deliberately leaving millions of acres fallow to suppress competition. The most notorious instance of this complicity was the 1954 CIA-orche...

The Fabricated Phantom: Engineering Grandeur from a Gypsy Chassis In the crowded lanes of India, where wedding processions transform streets into spectacles of unbridled celebration, a unique automotive phenomenon prevails: custom-built replicas of pre-war Rolls-Royce Phantom sedanca de ville motorcars, constructed upon the utilitarian chassis of Maruti Gypsy vehicles. These fabricated vehicles meticulously replicate the visual characteristics of 1930s luxury automobiles while substituting their complex and unreliable mechanical components with the simple, rugged engineering of a mass-produced utility vehicle. This combination of regal aesthetics and practical engineering has created a specialized industry that serves the ceremonial demands of Indian society while circumventing the formidable challenges of maintaining genuine vintage automobiles.   The fabrication of these replicas represents a sophisticated vernacular adaptation of traditional coachbuilding techniques, execu...

Nocturnal Vows: The Regional Rhythms of Indian Weddings   Indian weddings, a vibrant mosaic of traditions, exhibit striking regional variations in timing, reflecting deep historical, cultural, climatic, and religious influences. In North India, ceremonies often unfold under the stars, driven by historical security concerns during invasions, practical escapes from daytime heat, and lunar astrological preferences that favor nocturnal muhurats. Conversely, South Indian weddings embrace the dawn, adhering strictly to Vedic injunctions that venerate the sun as a symbol of purity and divine witness. Eastern regions like Bengal and Odisha mirror the North's nighttime rituals due to shared Indo-Aryan roots and Gangetic plain vulnerabilities, while Western states such as Maharashtra and Gujarat serve as transitional zones, blending Vedic daytime cores with Northern grandeur in evening festivities. Punjabi Sikh weddings stand apart with morning Anand Karaj ceremonies mandated by religiou...

The Grand Trunk Road from Ashoka to Aurangzeb – A 2,300-Year Path Dependency   Long before the British ever macadamised it, the Grand Trunk Road was already one of the greatest engineering and commercial achievements in human history. Born as the Mauryan Uttarapatha in the 4th century BCE, dramatically rebuilt by Sher Shah Suri in 1540–45 and perfected under the Mughals, it stretched 2,500–2,700 km from Sonargaon in Bengal to Kabul, shaded by continuous avenues of trees, lined with thousands of sarais, and wide enough for twenty-five horsemen to ride abreast. For two millennia it remained the single most important east–west artery of the Indian subcontinent, outlasting empires while dictating where cities rose, armies marched, and trade flowed. European travellers who had seen the Roman Via Appia or the Persian Royal Road repeatedly declared it “the finest highway in the world”. Its path dependency – the stubborn persistence of a single alignment across centuries – locked north...