While It Rains

  Political science is the master science. -Aristotle. Evolution is the only permanent truth. Makes sense when seen through the theory of an ever-expanding universe. Within this dynamic, the advancement of humans in all fields is nothing short of a marvel. But I believe that only in the field of political science, we are not quite at par with the pace of evolution witnessed in other disciplines. And that too is ironic, given that political science is what holds the architecture of all other fields together. If political institutions collapse, so does everything else. Since the 1600s, political science was reduced to a means for economics, whether through the lens of social contract theory, idealist welfare models, or Marxist interpretations. But the growing political apathy of our times, as Herbert Marcuse foresaw, calls out the dangers of reducing humans to one-dimensional beings, increasingly shaped by individualism and the idea of the ‘economic man.’ This disconnection is especi...

 Traversing the Tirumala hill on a four-wheeler, I moved along a tar road carved and maintained with calculated effort through the rough terrain. Through the glass that shielded me from the wind, I caught vivid glimpses of the various techniques used to preserve the route—methods engineered to resist natural erosion, which, if left unchecked, would gradually reduce the sacred hilltop to debris. In that moment, the sheer human will encoded in this effort struck me. At one bend, I saw a man working with concrete and steel, blending into the rhythm of the terrain. This brought to my mind Howard Roark—the fiercely independent architect from Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. Roark’s creative integrity represented the pinnacle of individual genius shaping the physical world, and here too, I sensed a similar quiet assertion of human superiority over nature—not in conquest, but in preservation. Yet, unlike Roark’s lone pursuit, this man’s labour wasn’t driven by personal vision alone. This was ...