Once in a Blue Moon Academia (OBMA)

  The Big Picture of a Philanthropic Façade: Inside the Piramal Empire Posted on 29th November, 2025 (GMT 08:15 hrs) ABSTRACT This article offers a critical exploration of the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and philanthropic landscape surrounding the Piramal Group, with particular emphasis on the Piramal Foundation and its mastermind tycoon Ajay Piramal. It highlights the stark contradictions between publicly espoused moral principles and documented corporate controversies. While Piramal frames his business philosophy through the lenses of Gandhian trusteeship, Tagorean humanitarianism, and Vaishnava spiritual teachings—collectively termed by Mr. Piramal as so-called “conscious capitalism”—a series of regulatory incidents, allegations of political ties, environmental transgressions, restructuring tactics, and financial scandals underscore a dissonance between professed ideals and actual practices. The analysis contends that the Group’s philanthropic initiatives often se...

  From Cough Syrup to Contested Survival: Piramal Pharma’s Phensedyl and OTC Citizenship Posted on 30th November, 2025 (GMT 03:48 hrs) ABSTRACT This not-an-essay traces the cultural, political, and pharmaco-poetic life of Phensedyl—now manufactured by Piramal Pharma—and situates the codeine-laced syrup within a broader history of scarcity, surveillance, and self-medication in South Asia. Moving between memoir, literary analysis, public-health framing, and theoretical lenses drawn from Foucault, Derrida, and contemporary critiques of cannibal capitalism, the piece investigates how a seemingly mundane cough syrup becomes a portal into the infrastructures of regulation, desire, and dispossession. It examines how Phensedyl served, for many in the 1980s–90s, as a substitute for alcohol in restricted environments, how codeine’s codification reflects state power over pain, and how bodies transformed into sites of both rebellion and compliance. Through lyric passages, sociological ins...