Once in a Blue Moon Academia (OBMA)

  Retrospective Truths: Valmiki, Ayodhya, IBC 32A, and the Stake of Constitutional Secularism Posted on 18th March, 2026 (GMT 02:37 hrs) Dedicated to Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Barrister-at-law ABSTRACT This short article explores a striking parallel between poetic creation and state-sanctioned reality-making in contemporary India. Drawing from Rabindranath Tagore’s poetic dialogue with Narada in the context of Valmiki’s Ramayana—where the poet’s imaginative mind-realm is declared Rama’s truer birthplace than historical Ayodhya—the discussion extends to two landmark institutional acts: the Supreme Court’s 2019 Ayodhya verdict (with Justice D.Y. Chandrachud’s later confession of seeking divine guidance) and Section 32A of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC), which retrospectively absolves corporate debtors of pre-insolvency offences upon plan approval, as vividly illustrated in the DHFL-Piramal takeover. Both instances represent exercises in retrospective ontological surgery...

  Corruption, Normalization, and the Procrustean Bed: India’s Grave Crisis Posted on 20th June, 2025 (GMT 21:50 hrs) ABSTRACT This paper interrogates the normalization of corruption in contemporary India through the theoretical frameworks of Michel Foucault and Theodor Adorno. Rejecting the moralistic and legalistic definitions of corruption as insufficient, it argues that corruption functions not as a deviation from institutional norms but as the normative logic of governance itself. Employing the metaphor of the Procrustean bed, the paper explores how disciplinary power, media capture, and cultural internalization enable the institutional reproduction of corruption. Empirical data from Transparency International and the Global Economic Freedom Index further substantiate the entrenchment of corruption across sectors. The study concludes with a call to dismantle the ideological apparatus sustaining this disciplinary regime. 1. Rethinking Corruption Conventional understandings ...