“was it deleuze or guattari that said that the scientist as such has no revolutionary potential, and now you’re saying not just physical science but even social science cannot make great science fiction.

yeyya, the point i was belaboring was that in a world where science has no revolutionary potential, forget physical sciences, can or cannot social sciences save science fiction.

can scavenger robots annihilate manual scavenging.

elsewhere, sure, but here in hindia. maybe, maybe not.

is there a duality between mind and body.

you mean can there be thinking in the absence of laboring.

can a system that creates unequal division of laborers be ethically justified. ta-da. take the system of castes in hindia for instance where division of laborers preceded division of labors.

we’ve never really lived together as a community. are we a nation or a caste system crisscrossed by a varna system crisscrossed by racism crisscrossed by colorism crisscrossed by a class system.

that’s that’s that’s that’s. the layers of caste aren’t skin-deep as in the creamy layers of glow makeup. layered much like an onion one cannot peel its layers off without oneself welling up. it doesn’t just make one’s eyes well up and sting. it burns the very body. makes the whole self burn. caste burns down homes. burns up Dispossessed selves. the caste system that has lately colluded with capitalism denies agency to Adivasis, Fisherfolks, Agrarians and Non-Industrialists. curtails social mobility of the Historically Oppressed. caste severs young delighted yet-to-live Lovers. every day gau rakshaks lynch Pasmanda Muslims for transporting cattle, for having cooked meat or for not being hindu. caste slaughters irreplaceable Beings. and Becomings.

as if that isn’t enough in walk the hypocrites holding the severed heads and uteruses crossing themselves the western way accusing one and all of devil worship waving the repentance card.

themselves being caste-deniers or caste-blind.

or staunch casteists which they aren’t expected to be but very much are.

verily the ethnicities in this so-called nation have never ever lived together as a community. nor have we ever truly connected as communities. anywhere you turn self-respect is at stake. caste serves none except the dominant casteists and elites but primarily the oppressive parpanars that prefer to look the other way so as to unsee the onion of their own making. one often gets the urge to stop all the peeling and put a knife through it.

this vegan analogy does not cut it right and left as caste isn’t medicinal at all. it cannot even serve a purpose in the culinary. so let’s spare the onion. shall we.

now. pick an euclidean culture instead. enforce it in a non-euclidean culture.

what the effing eff did you just say.

or introduce a verticality that pretends to be transcendent to an immanent horizontality. or inject idealist rhetoric into materialist dialogic. picture then proto-capitalism invading proto-communism. then picture present-day communists being either caste-deniers or casteists. and that’s caste system rendered plain and simple for one.

one territory penetrates another. or one way of living collides with another. or more precisely a repressive patriarchal culture invades a progressive egalitarian culture, makes it regressive, breeding zones of non-violent conflicts at one level and at another bleeding sub-zones of violent conflicts. having set in stone a system where it’s sort of predetermined that it’d always be the (religious ideologic brahminical) cultural superstructure that’d determine, and as a consequence oppress and exploit, the economic base.

parpanars, that is brahmins, categorized many indigenous populace including tamils as Shudras, and Ati-Shudras, which literally or in a roundabout way really means bastards and then they worry about us referring to them as parpaans which is just a neutral term that actually doesn’t mean anything offensive.

Dalits very rightly do not want to be categorized as avarnas or panchamas.

no one will take vile categorizations lightly. and no one never ever should. in this age of science and technology why would anyone want to call themselves brahmins or kshatriyas or vaishyas let alone be referred to as Shudras or Panchamas.

and why would anyone in their right mind categorize the ethnicities that they encounter with mindless callousness and expect to be regarded highly and considered sacred and learned but not considered vicious. and for what. someone should tell the brits that the parpaans are viler than them.

if the oppressors’ oppressors gang up and oppress the oppressed oppressor looking very many layers down the caste lane saying ‘listen fool you aren’t the oppressed but the oppressor’ how malignant can that malignancy be. in the labyrinthine caste ladder. you tolerate your oppressor above you and slave for him. instead of revolting against him. because you’re preoccupied and content that below you there’s an oppressed to slave for you. and the person beneath you. instead of revolting against you is content. that there’s someone beneath him. this kind of caste institutionalized life in the vertical labyrinth has made us think and act as merely distinct categories. sans any authentic unity. and made sure we remain forever anti-revolutionary. false consciousness.

they even go to the extent of saying caste system is scientific. and they will also say varna is misconstrued as caste and that caste is a borrowed term.

yea right, borrowed from Pluto? what is jati then, who made it rigid and for what purpose. neither rational nor methodical the concepts of caste and varna are supremacist mumbo jumbo with fire and brimstone. with imagined silly gods and authoritarian dharma karma drama. thought penetrating thought it’s just plain rhetoric and hullabaloo. the non-working owner caste divides the landless people of working castes so as to economically exploit them forever and isn’t that pre-industrial, feudal proto-capitalism. it’s tragic that we’re counting on them today to make radical policy changes.

caste holds the thinker higher and the Laborer lower. as if the Laborers cannot think for themselves. or think of themselves.

think of Them. think about THEM. just think about it and it will emerge that the parpanars didn’t really think about it. brahminical casteism divided Laborers. before dividing labors.

who’s to say who can think and who cannot. and how can one say the Woman or the Adivasi or the Dalit or anyone else for that matter cannot think. is there a greater thinker than Ambedkar or Iyothee Thassar.

caste idealism prefers the mind, the intellect, over the body. as if the body doesn’t matter and the mind isn’t made of matter. once they called it brahminism. now they call it hinduism.

do you often take a na. vanamamalai drink and stir it into a Periyarite cocktail.

hmm, well, i’ve also shot into my veins quite a bit of gnana aloysius too. the sly aryan missionaries later camouflaged their religion, brought all the Bahujans who had nothing whatsoever to do with it until then under its grip and sealed the deal institutionalizing it with the aid of brits, but standing on the shoulders of Periyar we of the dravidian stock call out this brown imperialism that’s parpanism.

doesn’t Shudra mean Slave.

if so then things couldn’t get any more pathetic. having thus established with cunning this idealism called parpanism as a valid school of thought they can then just chant mantras, enchant kings and eat.

doesn’t parpaan mean supervisor or one that does paperwork.

now you see. sit and eat. yes, sit and perform rajasuya yajna. eat and be the priestly caste. sit and be royal advisors. eat and order about. sit and do accounts. eat and collude with the brits. sit and collect revenues for the east india company. sit and eat and then aid and abet the brits when they take the brahmin-institutionalized caste system from the resource-rich river valley regions to the arid regions. eat and be officers. sit and be diplomats. eat and claim for monopoly occupation of the public and political spheres. sit and oppose proportional representation. eat and break up with the brits with whom once they broke bread with when they begin to make way for the Oppressed. sit and sabotage the option of separate electorates for Dalits. eat and be self-serving policymakers. sit and be unelected officers, ministers and governors. and what have you. and yes sit and be political analysts and eat and be judges.

sit and occupy television screens as well. eat and defend the powers that be. sit and ensure that the inegalitarian varnavyavastha isn’t annihilated. sit and eat and do what else. they sat and ate and shat and peed on us and now sit and eat and shit and pee on us.

and amid all this the elected shudra-parpaans run around hindia nodding yessir yessir to unelected governors and ministers. clad in all-white they call themselves kshatriyas at times. and sat-shudras at other. whatever the heck that might mean.

sat-shudra means pure slave, no.

pure slave indeed to the present-day brahmin-bania nexus that forms the modern brahminical. no kidding.

if caste makes me null in your eyes what does it make you in my mind’s eye.

it makes one and all null and void. is what. only the big corporations remain and a lifeless hollow earth. unlike class system caste system pits one caste against another. and even pits one sub-caste against another. we do not dare marry outside caste or sub-caste. not really due to classism. which is of course a by-product of social injustice by way of casteism. but actually due to caste pride that’s false pride. and this is prevalent even among the oppressed castes. false consciousness again.

this trait of caste system keeps it from being annihilated to this day. even after many reformers having belabored about the ills of caste. and its obnoxious webs and claws. the rot runs too deep. protestations of the Oppressed fall on deaf ears. unseeing eyes hurriedly walk past violent realities. in this graded inequality, oppressors play the blame game and shift the blame to the oppressed. in this state-sanctioned caste-hierarchy, a prime minister that declares manual scavenging is a spiritual experience washes the feet of a few Dalits for a few seconds hoping to hoodwink Dalits instead of freeing Them from the undignified religiously sanctioned manual scavenging duty. why not provide THEM instead with dignified jobs. in this hyper-religious society that justifies social injustices citing bad karma, even demands for the mechanization of the deadly dangerous manual scavenging is too much a demand. in this illiberal democracy that calls itself liberal, mere tokenism is celebrated as an exemplary revolutionary act. the caste-based reservation is too small a measure and bafflingly insufficient against nearly two millennia of caste oppression. when the practice of various forms of casteism isn’t yet taken to be a criminal offence. so what good is it if we cannot say good riddance to bad old caste or jati and varna. whatever happened to the actualization of the annihilation of caste. the rights that are seen on paper haven’t translated to reality. what’s heard in rhetoric isn’t seen in action. hindia being casteist and varna-dharmic through and through. whatever happened to the concept of indian union. in this tiered inequality, even the few from the Oppressed communities that squeeze through the caste impediments and somehow make it to the other side after immense struggles are co-opted to serve the status quo. let me go fetch some water.

we cannot split the body into a body and mind binary or body and soul or whatever and whatever else at will. body and mind makes one singular individual. yes one single individual. bodies and minds of distinct individuals form a collective. we cannot afford to sit and eat and just think and think without laboring. we simply cannot. and affirmative action is what matters the most. actions, yes. praxis being more crucial than theory. where is proportional representation. where are the self-respecters. thinking only of oneself makes for sick societies. a collective cannot afford to be idealist and view the Oppressed people’s cries for justice and societal change with suspicion and contempt. egalitarianism will be at stake. and with it self-respect. and very many other things. very much at stake.

if this does not cut caste fair and square, take a möbius strip instead for instance and—.

yeppa, just drop that already. had Ambedkar lived now, in the wake of the genocide of Tamils and Rohingyas at the hands of buddhist supremacists, would he have asked Dalits to embrace buddhism.

the new Navayana buddhism Ambedkar wanted Dalits to embrace wasn’t the old brahminized theravada buddhism. Ambedkar approached buddhism, just as Iyothee Thassar did, as a rationalist would, eschewing ritualistic buddhism and its pessimistic content. in that context, he would have certainly critiqued theravada buddhism’s supremacist texts such as mahavamsa and fascist caste-buddhists just as he had critiqued supremacist hindu texts and caste-hindus in a no-holds-barred manner.

did brahminism assimilate buddhist logic.

buddhism, just like jainism, assimilated the indigenous materialist philosophies that had been in vogue then for centuries and brahminism assimilated both, discredited the materialist dialectic and distorted it by needlessly integrating into it the concepts of atman and brahman so as to give leeway to lay the foundation for its idealist claptrap. this cut short the spontaneous progression of materialist thought here. the brahminism that justified casteism and the separation of head and hand, of mental work from manual work, now colludes with capitalism to ensure that science serves only the upper caste elites and not the oppressed communities, and the capitalism that’s constantly on the lookout for cheap labor is only too pleased to oblige.

that pretty much explains why the scientific method that a reemerged materialism, which suffered a similar fate first at the hands of greek idealism that justified slavery and then at the hands of christianity, gave way to elsewhere did not take place here. but can one be a marxist.

by that if you mean can one be simply a marxist in hindia, no. if one’s not also an Ambedkarite and Periyarite, one can in most cases only be a caste-marxist here as the marxists here tend to accept only the division of labors, adamantly and perhaps purposely unaccepting of the division of laborers which is the reality here, unaccepting of the fact that this great indian graded inequality is much more dastardly and that it’s much more humongous a problem than racism or the problem of class. communist parties here are either brahminical or brahminized. they do not care about the self-determination of Oppressed Ethnicities, confuse Their “ethno-nationalism” with ethno-fascism, refrain from calling out the Genocide of Ealam Tamils as genocide because the sri lanka freedom party under whose watch it was committed projects itself as center-left and democratic socialist, and it was a genocide committed by a buddhist ethnocratic state, aided and abetted as it was not only by india, britain and other usual neo-liberal suspects of the west but also russia, china and even cuba, and do i digress.

i’m not pining for an mk stalinist bureaucracy either. but but but but. so finally, can social sciences save fiction or not.

is it really sensible to hope too much from science or fiction. as for fiction, for the foreseeable future it can do little more than emotionally challenge and tickle the ego of the self-absorbed reader. ’empathize much’ says the reader looking at the mirror time and time again. many respected writers here are conspiracy theorists who believe that any and all no-holds-barred critique of modern brahminical patriarchy must be nothing but a leftist/christian conspiracy. so long and good luck, revolution. in most cases, the so-called nuanced reader is a shamelessly self-righteous centrist. allow more representation in the scene, here or elsewhere, they’ll grab gazillion representations by their throats, put them all in a neat box and label it as p.o.d. or some shit. nice and easy, eh. seeing as how science of late has empowered idealists and cut down materialists to size, it takes a stance that’s conveniently centrist as well.

some spooky action, this. p.o.d. means payable on death, no.

yes, mediocre band but youth of the nation wasn’t that bad a song.

alive wasn’t that bad either. once there was mind–body duality.

now there is wave–particle duality. old-school smokescreen idealism in a brand-new bottle that reeks of gaumutra. smokescreen, yes, just that, but there it is. jadu house of bloody horror magic ghar. where, in the blink of an eye, godmen, charlatans and yogis, and the like replace scientists. ‘we’re here to annihilate manual scavenging’ say the scavenger robots but the caste-supremacist governments are busy doling out billions in loans to big corporations that are out to hollow out the earth and destroy the livelihoods of Adivasis, Fisherfolks and Agrarians instead of purchasing and implementing scavenger robots that will save many lives from many a deadly gas attacks that the manual scavengers encounter day in and day out. the Dalits who’re forced to perform the scavenging do not have the purchasing power to buy the robots. it’s true that science and technology exists only insofar as it serves the flow of the capital that fills the coffers of big banks. in hindia, science is at the service of the brahminical as well that perhaps views these robots through its jaundiced eyes as impure and hence they too have become untouchables and unseeables to them. even if they do eventually end up implementing the scavenger robots they will have privatized robotic scavenging for the sole benefit of the big bania corporation that will continue to only employ Dalits for the automated yet the same work. stuck in this stigmatized labor, with no alternative job environment available to those Dalits, when and how will They then be empowered to send THEIR CHILDREN to schools and universities. how else can They become autonomous. when will THEY break free from this vicious circle to which They’re being chained generation after generation. when will DALITS begin to live the dignified lives that each and everyone of us is entitled to..

if that’s the fate of hard science. what about soft science then.

that depends on who supervises the social science departments.

the self-serving brahminical and the brahminized. will they ever allow thoughts with revolutionary potential slip out of their gates.

who are the gatekeepers and why are they the gatekeepers in the first place. i don’t know, wish i knew, da. ta-ta. you tell me. now if you’ll excuse me.

what about the non-institutional academic … yedda, is this the right time to take a leak.

yes, any time is right time, right, no. i need more water. and where were we at.

when will all the non-individuated brahminical become individuated and stop being the self-serving creeps that they are.

and how and when will they implement scavenger robots. can robots annihilate caste. and, above all, when will Dalits become liberated from this and many other bondages that THEY have been historically subjected to. and when will we all—the Bahujans—ally with Dalits and Adivasis instead of seeking to be brahminized by allying with the self-serving brahminical?

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Ahimaz Rajessh (@ahimaaz) has been published recently with Glass, Elephants Never, Burning House Press, Marlskarx, Big Echo: Critical SF, Paint Bucket, Speculative 66, formercactus, Dream Pop Press and MoonPark Review. He lives in the Union of India.