Once in a Blue Moon Academia (OBMA)

  The Skin Remembers Capital: Piramal Pharma, Dermatological Capitalism, and the Pharmakon of Neoliberal Care Posted on 29th October, 2025 (GMT 03:49 hrs) Editor’s Note: This essay continues our investigation into the moral and epistemic architecture of India’s pharmaceutical and cosmetic industries, following earlier reports on Piramal Pharma’s Lacto Calamine and Tetmosol. Here, the inquiry shifts from reportage to philosophy — exploring what it means for care itself to become a site of harm. ABSTRACT This essay interlaces embodied testimony, regulatory critique, and philosophical reflection to examine the moral and epistemological crises surrounding Piramal Pharma’s Lacto Calamine and Tetmosol. Framed as a confession of corporeal and existential disillusionment, it argues that these consumer products—marketed as instruments of care—operate as pharmakon in Derrida’s sense: both remedy and poison, soothing and subjugating. Drawing on psychodermatology, Foucault’s biopolitics, ...

  Nixit and the Pharmaco-Capitalist Soul: Hauntings Under Piramal Pharma Posted on 27th October, 2025 (GMT 07:40 hrs) ABSTRACT This essay interrogates  Nixit —a nicotine lozenge produced by Piramal Pharma—as an artifact of contemporary bio-political control. By examining its chemical composition, rhetoric of health, and psychopolitical subtext, the paper situates  Nixit  within the neoliberal economy of purification, where addiction is not eliminated but reformatted for consumption. Drawing on Freud’s psychoanalysis and Foucault’s biopolitics, alongside the cinematic allegory of Anurag Kashyap’s  No Smoking  (2007), the article reveals how the pharmaco-industrial complex transforms rebellion into obedience, recoding the smoker’s desire into a commodified act of self-regulation. Incorporating Nietzsche’s genealogy of internalized violence and Derrida’s notion of hauntology, it further argues that the lozenge embodies the spectral persistence of repressi...