Once in a Blue Moon Academia (OBMA)

  The Aeroplane’s Gaze: Mountain, Market and Martyrs Posted on 23rd June, 2026 (GMT 07:15 hrs) DEBAPRASAD BANDYOPADHYAY ⤡ ABSTRACT In this climate horror narrative with a positional paper disrupting the narrative flow, the author weaves personal flights over a rapidly thawing Himalaya with a critique of the “Three Ms”—Mountaineering, Market, and Martyrs—to expose how post-1990 commercialization has transformed high-altitude climbing into a neoliberal experience economy that commodifies risk, normalizes preventable deaths, and externalizes massive ecological waste onto fragile ecosystems. Drawing on observed glacial retreat, shrinking snowlines, data from Everest expeditions (e.g., 2019’s 877 summits and 11 deaths; 2025 permit hikes and ongoing congestion), the Chhanda Gayen case study, and corporate sponsorship spectacles, the analysis reveals how market logic—sunk-cost pressures, sponsorship demands for novelty, and regulatory filters—produces economic fatalism and “regulatory mar...

  Why Indian Political Parties Are Ecologically Indifferent Posted on 31st October, 2025 (GMT 07:56 hrs) ABSTRACT This article examines the deep-rooted ecological indifference of Indian political parties across the ideological spectrum. Despite unprecedented environmental degradation—from the destruction of forests in Hasdeo and Nicobar to toxic urban air and vanishing rivers—ecology remains absent from India’s political grammar. The essay argues that this neglect is not accidental but structural: born of a development myth that equates progress with extraction and nationalism with industrial expansion. In a corporatized democracy, parties serve capital before climate, leaving the earth unrepresented in the republic’s moral imagination. The crisis of nature can only be resolved by transforming the nature of politics. 1. Introduction: Ecology? Mercilessly Marginalized! India stands at the crossroads of an ecological crisis—facing unprecedented air pollution, land erosion and su...