Let's talk about Hinduphobia. Let me make clear at the outset that I am not arguing that it doesn't exist. But it does need to be seen in the context it is employed. Hindus who are an ethnic minority in a foreign country like Pakistan or Bangladesh may very well be victims of it. This is because they are a marginalised community there. Their religion, coupled with, in Western countries, their skin colour and the languages they speak, may indeed make them the target of majoritarian bigotry in those countries. However, seen from the perspective of power structures, upper-caste Hindus are pretty much the White people of India.

They dominate culturally, financially, and enjoy tremendous privilege in all spheres, including media representation. But as "Hinduphobia" became a buzzword among Hindus living in the West (mostly because racism is real, not because White supremacists have a particular kind of hatred for Hinduism), it also got appropriated by many Hindus here in India, who started using it as a defence against legitimate criticism of upper caste Hindu society. People these days club any opposition to majoritarian privilege in India as Hinduphobia and try to put it in the same folder as the issues faced by Hindus as minorities in other countries.

This is obviously patently dishonest. It helps bigots in India pretend to be victims of racism while engaging in actual racist (read casteist or Islamophobic) behaviour on a regular basis. It also helps Indian Hindus residing in Western countries to feed discriminatory behaviour back home by lending their lens — their condition — to Hindus here in India. This lending has gone on for a long time now. Much of the intellectual support for Hindu nationalism in India comes from NRIs (non-resident Indians). These are Indians who claim to be victims of racism in the countries (sometimes rightly) that have adopted them while continuing to support racist and casteist practices and policies against the minorities and marginalised people of India.

Often, when discussing a social issue with someone, you might find that they are absolutely clueless about the ground realities of the world. For example, some days ago, I got a troll in my Instagram messages who wanted me to demand answers from feminists because apparently, they are responsible for the violent deaths of millions of men all over the world.

Obviously, there is no data to support this preposterous lie. And there is in fact ample evidence to support the opposite of this assertion — that millions of women die all over the world after being denied their human rights and individual liberties. And also that millions of men have actually lost their lives due to the kinds of behaviours patriarchy imposes on them from birth onwards. But far be it from angry incels to acknowledge this.

However, let me try to break down this alternate reality that my correspondent talked about - a world where feminists are roaming the streets causing hapless men to just drop dead by the sheer power of their feminismism. It's a fantasy, a narrative constructed on the lines of a religion and with believers all over the incel world. The reason it exists is because it must. It must exist as a counter to the reality of this world, where nothing like that happens.

As a YouTuber who publishes content about atheism, culture, and society, I frequently get questions from people who want answers to specific points. I am therefore often at pains to explain to them that I have already answered this particular query in a previous video or essay. However, I don’t always remember where I have done so. Often, it is a bit of a task to look it up, find the exact link and then the exact timestamp and them email it back to the person. And if my correspondent is angry or rude or annoying, my motivation to perform any or all of these tasks is even lower.

But Google’s NotebookLM offers me a great way out of it. I have created a few notebooks to help me organise and sift through my own output from previous years. This includes text, video, and audio files in both Hindi and English. NotebookLM not only understands and catalogues it all with great efficiency, it also helps me recall any of it at a moment’s notice in the form of a simple chat.

So I can type this into the chatbot:

Please generate an email response to someone who is angrily asking me why I never speak abut Islam. Be calm and polite yet firm.

Some stories are small and deal with small things. Like the events of a single day, or the solution to a small problem. Other stories are big and deal with events of a grand scale. Like an entire world or universe or the nature of reality or the human condition itself.

Not everyone is a storyteller, but we all still tell the stories we have heard from others. Sometimes, we retell small stories - gossip. Sometimes, we retell big stories about the scale of the cosmos, scientific curiosity in ancient times, philosophical sophistication of our ancestors - things like that.

But we are not our ancestors. The big stories they told are not everyone’s cup of tea. But because we draw our sense of self worth from our ancestors, we pretend to be the gatekeepers of their stories. We tell people that we should be treated with as much respect as they were because we are descended from them. We expect the respect that the world has for ancient India to extend to us also. We want to be treated like scientists and philosophers and artists because our ancestors did those things as well.

Okay, so this thought kind of woke me up in the middle of the night, so I’m recording it because I don’t want to forget it. It’s about the nature of writing right now. You have people who call themselves writers and who use AI to write. And then there are people like me who say that if you’re not actually writing, then you’re not really a writer. If you’re using AI to write, are you truly a writer? That stance can come across as an insult, like I’m some snooty purist saying, “You’ll never be like us—real writers.” But I’m actually talking about something else.

We didn’t have video for a huge portion of human history. Then, when video came along, cinema happened, and a whole lot of professions mushroomed around it: cinematographer, choreographer, director, actor, and so on. Directors and actors existed before, but they performed in live plays on stage, with no recording involved. Cinema was something new. Pardon the expression (and forgive the barking dog in the background—it’s out of my control). Cinema was sort of like a play, except now the performance could be recorded and replayed. It was a new form of storytelling that hadn’t existed before, and its existence opened up new ways to tell stories.

The people who make movies aren’t writers, nor are they simply people engaged in theater. It’s a bit of both, and maybe neither. So, when I say that someone using AI to “write” a story isn’t a writer, I know it sounds purist. But I think that those people shouldn’t call themselves writers. The AI tools they’re using aren’t tools for writers. If you’re a writer, you’ll write. These tools are for a new kind of creator—one we don’t have a name for yet.

They’re people who, in a way, direct prose into existence. Until now, creating prose has been the job of a writer, so these individuals are mistakenly being classified as writers. But they’re not writers. They’re something else, and we need a term for them soon, or this debate will continue longer than it needs to.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the podcast.

Today, I want to discuss something that's been on my mind for a while. It relates to my recent decision to leave social media. One of the reasons behind this was that I felt my way of thinking was being influenced by the need to produce content in very specific formats. I realized that, over time, this could harm my creative process. So, I want to break down my thoughts on this, hoping to make it understandable to others.

Initially, I considered putting this out as a public video, but then I realized that not everyone might resonate with it. Instead, I’m sharing it here, knowing that many of my subscribers are creators themselves and will likely understand what I’m saying.

Think of it this way: if you’re a creator—a writer, painter, filmmaker, musician, songwriter, or podcaster—you naturally think in terms of the medium you use to convey your message. For example, a filmmaker who has an idea will start thinking in cinematic terms, translating that idea into visuals before expressing it. A writer will seek the best words to convey the idea, while a painter will think about colors and painting styles. And this applies to every creative field.

I cannot remember when or from whom I heard this, but it was a response by an older writer to a younger writer. It went like this: “Do you want to be a writer? Or do you want to write?”

The speaker was not talking about creativity in the 21st century, in a world of chatbots, generative AI, and machine learning. They were speaking of something much more fundamental: namely, what writing feels like. It’s something we are likely to forget about in a world where the value of writing is measured in the number of readers (or followers / subscribers / buyers) and where a writer is ‘successful’ if they have ‘produced’ a lot of words in very little time.

But we don’t often talk about the value that the act of writing provides to the writer.

Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the podcast. This is being recorded on Diwali night, so if you hear some background noise, that’s the neighborhood celebrating.

Tonight, I want to talk about a shift in how we think of misinformation. Traditionally, we imagine someone actively keeping the truth from us or replacing it with lies. In this scenario, we picture essential information—critical for making informed decisions—not reaching us. Instead, we’re fed propaganda, and as a result, our choices get skewed by falsehoods.

But today, I think we’re in an age of meaninglessness, which has a few layers. Our issue isn’t the lack of information; it’s that we have too much of it. We’re drowning in multiple versions of the same event, endless claims, and interpretations, making it difficult to discern the truth. Picture a fantasy scene where an evil sorcerer multiplies themselves, creating countless versions. Which one is the real sorcerer? By the time you figure it out, the opportunity to act has slipped away.

In this age, meaning isn’t withheld; instead, we're overwhelmed with so many interpretations that identifying the truth becomes nearly impossible. For instance, fact-checkers like Alt News have noted that misinformation has grown so vast, it’s impossible to debunk it all. To bury one truth, you need twenty lies, each similar enough to confuse. In this haze of half-truths and close-but-not-quite-facts, the moment to recognize the truth often vanishes.

Hello friends! I am quitting Instagram and will focus more on YouTube and other long-form platforms now. Below is what I wrote to announce this on Instagram.

This isn’t a goodbye, but it kind of feels like one. Instagram has been a huge part of my journey. It is what everything else stemmed from -- my live streaming, my podcasts, my channels. It is where my ideas first found popularity and where I found many friends. It has been the source of much stress and burnout, and I have taken many “breaks” from it over the years to calm down and recharge, this time feels different.

The self-declared defender of ancient values (by which he mostly means Brahminical culture) is himself somewhat unsure of himself. If he were not, he would dress and talk like his forebears. But even he knows nobody is going to buy that shit, not even his crowd of culture warrior followers. So he dresses in suits and speaks English and uses testimonials from Western scholars to validate his point.

Even he knows that that is the only way he can be seen as respectable and acceptable. He knows that if he shaved his head and acquired the bare-bodied likeness of the ancient ‘intellectuals’ he so admires, he’ll get laughed out of civilised company. Thus, even when he wants to talk about his precious ‘ancient culture’, he has to tragically acquiesce to the needs of the times he lives in.

Upon digging deep enough, it becomes abundantly clear that what he is really looking to do is not bring back whatever the fuck he says he wants to bring back. His true motivations are somewhat more self-centered. They have to do with taking on the appearance of a scholar and looking like someone who deserves to be listened to. And since nobody wants to listen to someone who looks like his plump and pompous heroes anymore, this opportunistic defender of ancient values has wisely decided to look as much like his former oppressors as possible.

Whenever a Right Winger calls progressives “fake liberals” or “pseudo progressive” or something on those lines, we get a very useful insight into the nature of the shrinking discourse window. However, since we often miss it, I wanted to throw some light on it.

You see, the discourse is uaually divided into two sides. This is for purposes of simplicity. It is done for the same reason that high school debates happen between for and against a particular framing of a motion. It keeps things clear and allows for a clear conclusion to be reached. It has very little to do with how real life works though. It is simply convenient. This is why the popular versions of a number of conversations and debates about society and public policy take the form of such binaries. The average TV studio “debate” has two sides.

One of these sides is occupied by the Progressive and the other side is occupied by the Conservative. The Conservative side was once the fringes, but now, thanks to a fresh infusion of power, has become the mainstream.

When it comes to assigning responsibility for the fake news epidemic, people point fingers in many directions. But though that is easy to do, I think that the source of it is cultural. Where did our fake news problem come from?

It came from a media landscape which values immediacy more than accuracy. It started with the many small lies that slipped past editors eager to "break" news before there were retractions and non-apologies because "such is the nature of the news business".

Fake news came from our love of gossip and our preference for voyeurism in the form of TV shows like Bigg Boss. We pretty much told news-makers we want to hear exciting things more than we want to hear true and important things. We announced, by making such shows TRP goldmines, that we would rather spy on people’s personal lives than spend time understanding matters of contemporary and historical importance. We chose the tabloid over the newspaper.

Just about every religion believes that there exists something like a soul — an aspect of human existence that is separate from the body and indeed, superior to it. The idea has persisted even in religions like Buddhism, which may be described as atheistic on account of the fact that they don’t necessitate the acknowledgment or worship of a deity. But the spirit or the soul transcends religious boundaries.

On the face of it, the soul is a simple manifestation of the belief that humans are special and that there is an aspect of them that can and will survive death. Hinduism would seem to have a wider definition of what the soul is as their are schools of thought (ISKCON for example) that believe that an individual’s spirit “transmigrates” between species of animals. But in either case, the body is a secondary factor of existence for most of the world’s religions. Even Buddhism, with its suffering-focused attitude, sees the body as something one must eventually leave behind in pursuit of a non-physical ideal — Nirvana.

Let’s be straight. The body is far from perfect. It is subject to damage, disease, ageing, violation, and inevitably, death. It hurts and leaks and breaks and can be rather bothersome.

I was watching Stargate the other day and was reminded of how the themes from the show align rather well with what I often talk about. The show is about aliens pretending to be gods who exploit and dehumanise humans and use them against each other.

Religion empowers tribalism by making us not feel the pain that we are naturally programmed to feel. The pain that comes with being an empathetic being. The pain that is essentially the foundation of human civilisation — our ability to feel someone else’s pain and relate to them.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one. There is a patriarchal household where the boys and men don’t cook and the kitchen has been determined to be the domain of women. But then, into this world comes a boy who decides to do the dishes or to belo a roti one day.

The result? He becomes a star!

Parents and uncles and aunties and grandmas all get together to exclaim how wonderful the boy is for doing some haath bataana and helping out his mother and sisters. And while all this happens, the girls and women who have been doing the bulk of the work like always get overshadowed by the boy who did a fraction of what they do on just one occasion.

Unless you have been living under a rock, you must know that a bunch of Indian comedians have been called out for making casteist remarks, insulting Dalit-Bahujan-Adivasi figures, and generally being offensive towards marginalised communities. The outrage has been on its way for quite some time and it is heartening to see it land with this much of a splash. But what has been equally interesting to watch is reactions from some comedians. Particularly, the refrain that their job is to make people laugh and that nothing else matters.

Over the last few days, I have had some enlightening conversations with comedians and one theme that has come across over and over again is this — “I am just a comic. It is never my intention to insult anyone. The only thing I think about when writing / making a joke is making people laugh. If I start worrying about everyone’s offence, I will start self-censoring.”

And the most interesting of all: “If you don’t like my jokes, don’t watch them.”

This episode is a sticthed together version of a bunch of videos I made for a short-lived channel I had some time ago. So ignore my changing appearance throughout it. The episode was recorded over several days.

Below is an AI generated (NotebookLM) summary of the episode.

The provided text is an excerpt from a podcast episode where the speaker discusses four books that explore the impact of technology, particularly the internet and social media, on human thought, behavior, and culture. The speaker begins by mentioning Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport, which advocates for a mindful approach to technology use by suggesting a digital detox to reduce the negative effects of constant online engagement. Next, the speaker highlights The Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen, a book published around 2007, which critiques the internet's impact on culture and quality work due to its emphasis on amateurism and the devaluation of expertise. Following that, the speaker mentions Free Ride by Robert Levine, a book that focuses on how the internet is affecting the entertainment and publishing industries. Finally, the speaker concludes by discussing The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, which examines how the internet is altering our cognitive processes, particularly our abilities to focus, read deeply, and retain information. The speaker concludes by stressing the importance of recognizing how technology shapes us and the need to remain aware of the potential negative consequences of its widespread use.

The real danger from AI tools to writers is not that people using AI will replace writers. It is that writers will get too reliant on AI tools and consequently lose the spark that makes them writers.

This video is from a YouTube channel I used to run. The channel no longer exists (because the only thing more difficult than running one YouTube channel is running four YouTube channels) and I figured this Substack is a good place for the things I had made for it.

Online discourse is full of terrible defences of oppression and bigotry. Often however, what tends to be even more frustrating than those is the position that one should be “balanced” and equidistant from both “extremes”. And the centrists who advocate this often tend to be entirely oblivious to existing power structures and the lack of balance in the political discourse.

Here then, is a simple way to explain why adamantly remaining in the middle may not be as prudent a strategy as some think if the goal is achieving balanced.

I got to thinking about how almost every day, we all talk about the same things and think about the same things. And about how not engaging in conversations about these topics of the day ostracises us in the eyes of our fellow media consumers. To the extent that not having a view (or choosing not to express a view that you have) can bring haters to your yard. This is especially true if you have a bit of a following online, but I am sure it affects everyone to one extent or another. You just have to have an opinion!

And the other side of this coin involves all those ideas that do not get talked about or even thought about because we are all busy gaining each other’s approval by talking about the topic of the day. It involves all of us missing out on opportunities to expand and enrich our cultural horizons.