The Epic Seems Less Interested in Producing Heroes Than in Producing Moral Vertigo
On the Mahabharata, Ganga’s Cruelty, and the Architecture of Discomfort
There is a scene in the Mahabharata that functions as a kind of threshold test for how seriously you are reading. Ganga, in the Shantanu story, carries seven newborn children into the river and drowns them. Without the benefit of the mythological backstory – that these infants are the eight Vasus, cursed to be born as humans, and that Ganga’s drowning is an act of mercy releasing them from their earthly punishment – the scene is simply horrific. A woman gives birth to seven children and kills each one immediately.
The backstory exists. It is given. And it does not dissolve the horror. This is, I would argue, the point.
The story’s supernatural explanation requires knowledge that neither Shantanu nor any observer in the scene possesses. From his perspective, for seven successive births, all he sees is a mother carrying her newborn children to water and ending them. The text is aware of this. Shantanu is held in place by his promise not to question her, and his horror is treated not as weakness or ignorance but as understandable – as the natural response of a human being watching what looks, from every available angle, like a series of murders.
What the story is doing structurally is asking us to hold two perspectives simultaneously: the human perspective, in which the act is monstrous, and the cosmic perspective, in which the act serves a larger purpose. The tension between them is the point of the episode. It does not resolve. The cosmic explanation does not erase the human horror; it complicates it. And the story needs that complication in order to work at all.
This is a principle that unlocks a surprising number of ancient stories once you see it. Modern readers often assume that myth exists to provide answers. Many myths are designed instead to create a productive discomfort that resists resolution. If the Ganga story began and ended with the celestial mechanics – Vasus cursed, Ganga released them, all was well – nobody would remember it for three thousand years. What makes it unforgettable is that we experience it through Shantanu’s eyes. For seven births, we stand at the collision point between trust and horror. The emotional wound is not a flaw in the narrative. It is the narrative.
The Systematic Deconstruction of Admiration
The Mahabharata does this repeatedly and, it becomes clear upon close reading, deliberately. The epic is not simply an episodic collection of heroic stories. It is a systematic dismantling of the conditions for comfortable admiration. Every time the reader settles into unambiguous respect for a figure, the text introduces a complication severe enough to destabilise that respect without destroying it.
Admire Bhishma, and you must reckon with the consequences of his vow – a decision that commands universal respect and quietly creates the dynastic vacuum that makes the war possible. Admire Karna, and you must sit with his participation in the humiliation of Draupadi, a scene he watches with an intelligence sufficient to know better. Admire Yudhishthira, and you must watch him gamble away his kingdom, his brothers, and his wife. Admire Krishna, and you must explain the killing of Karna while immobilised, the strike to Duryodhana’s thigh, the orchestration of Drona’s death through a deliberate half-truth.
The result is not cynicism. The epic does not destroy greatness. It destabilises it. These figures are not diminished by their complications; they become more interesting, more usable as mirrors, more honest about the conditions under which real decisions get made. Vertigo is the right word for what the reader feels, because vertigo is what happens when the ordinary sense of orientation stops working. The Mahabharata repeatedly removes the moral handrails, not to push the reader over the edge, but to ensure the edge is visible.
A child asks who was right. The Mahabharata asks what being right cost. A child asks who was good. The Mahabharata asks what happens when good people are trapped inside impossible circumstances. These are darker questions, but they are also more durable ones. This may be precisely why the epic survives millennia while countless cleaner moral tales have faded: a perfectly virtuous world teaches obedience; a tragic world teaches discernment.
Desire, Renunciation, and the Cliff at the End of the Road
A mischievous but serious observation surfaces when you consider the epics as a body of literature: a startling percentage of what happens in them can be traced, with reasonable directness, to the fact that people wanted things they should not have wanted, or renounced things whose absence created consequences nobody anticipated.
The Ramayana arguably does not happen without Ravana’s desire for Sita. The Mahabharata is shaped across generations by marriages, abductions, rival claims of succession, vows of celibacy, and questions of lineage. The Trojan War, in the Western tradition, begins with Helen. Epic literature in nearly every tradition appears to run on the fuel of desire – not because the ancient composers were interested in pruriency, but because they understood something modern culture occasionally forgets: sexuality is never merely private. It creates kinship, inheritance, legitimacy, obligations, jealousy, and conflicts between families and kingdoms. The personal becomes structural with a speed that individual actors rarely anticipate.
But the Mahabharata contains the opposite problem as well. Bhishma’s celibacy is perhaps its greatest illustration. His self-control is almost superhuman. The vacuum it creates contributes directly to the dynastic chaos that follows. The epic seems to be offering something more nuanced than either indulgence or repression as its counsel: desire unchecked creates disaster; renunciation without regard for its consequences creates disaster; duty pursued with rigid literalism creates disaster; love pursued selfishly creates disaster.
The real pattern is not about any of these individual impulses. It is about the step beyond enough. Pride that goes slightly too far. A promise that should have been reconsidered. A loyalty that becomes blindness. A grievance nurtured rather than released. A desire that refuses to acknowledge a boundary. A silence maintained one day too long. The cliff in the Mahabharata is never at the beginning of the road. It is one step beyond enough.
This is why the characters remain so alive across millennia. Few of us are Duryodhana. Few of us are Krishna. But most of us have been too proud, too loyal, too silent, too certain, or too desirous at some point. The epic’s genius is that it rarely requires monsters to produce catastrophe. It builds civilisational disaster out of recognisably human flaws operating at scale, and it keeps whispering, with patient insistence: these are your circumstances; these are your temptations; these are your blind spots.
What Dharma Is Not
The conversation about the Mahabharata eventually arrives at a question that reaches beneath the epic’s narrative surface and into its moral architecture. The figure who crystallises this most sharply is Krishna.
People often treat Krishna as a dispenser of answers – and the Bhagavad Gita encourages this reading by virtue of its form, in which Arjuna asks and Krishna replies. But in much of the larger epic, Krishna behaves less like a source of definitive wisdom and more like a man who understands that every option on the table is terrible and who is trying to preserve the future with the least destructive one. Not purity. Damage control.
The deepest source of the epic’s moral vertigo is this: it repeatedly dismantles the fantasy that goodness, wisdom, and purity can protect a person from painful choices. Bhishma keeps his vow and inherits grief. Yudhishthira tells the truth almost all his life and then tells a fatal half-truth at the worst possible moment. Arjuna fights because Krishna commands it and never fully stops mourning what it cost. Dharma, in this reading, is not a guarantee against tragedy. It is often simply the thing that remains when every available choice contains tragedy.
The mature question the epic poses is not what is the right thing to do. It is: what kind of person do you become after doing the right thing? This is a more disturbing question, because the epic is full of people who fulfilled their duties and were nevertheless wounded by them. Modern morality often imagines virtue as a transaction: do the right thing, receive peace of mind. The Mahabharata replies, with considerable evidence: sometimes you do the right thing and inherit grief. That is not cynicism. It is honesty about the structure of a world too complex for moral tidiness.
Part II: The Premium, the Provenance, and the Forgotten Lecturer
VI. The IIT Question
If the parergon can inflate perceived value beyond the ergon, then the reverse must also be true. A weak parergon can conceal a strong ergon.
A brilliant student from an obscure institution may possess deeper knowledge, stronger reasoning, and greater competence than a mediocre graduate from a prestigious university. The market may systematically undervalue that person not because of anything demonstrable about them but because the frame is weaker. The ergon has not changed. The parergon has. And the parergon speaks first.
In art, this is familiar territory. A painting discovered in a flea market may be dismissed for years because nobody recognises its provenance. Once authenticated as the work of a master, people suddenly “see” qualities that were physically present all along. The painting did not improve. The frame changed, and the painting was re-perceived through it. The same dynamic operates in Indian higher education with a peculiar intensity.
The labels “IIT” and “IIM” function not merely as institutional names but as signalling devices. They compress vast amounts of uncertainty into a single recognisable marker. A recruiter looking at an IIT graduate does not simply see the institution’s teaching. They see evidence that the individual competed successfully against an enormous applicant pool, sustained academic performance under pressure, and demonstrated a certain level of cognitive capability. These are non-trivial signals. There is a causative premium here, not merely a brand effect. The institution is acting partly as a measurement instrument: the entrance examination is itself a form of pre-selection, a prior filtration that is doing real epistemic work.
The premium is therefore not arbitrary. It is anchored to real selection effects and real developmental ones. The peer network, the faculty, the intensity of competition, the alumni connections – all of these shape the graduate in ways that a weaker institution may not. To dismiss the premium as mere snobbery is to misread it. The more accurate account is that the IIT or IIM brand contains at least three components that are doing different kinds of work: a selection premium, evidence that the individual succeeded in a highly competitive filter; a training premium, evidence that the individual was shaped by a strong educational environment; and a network premium, evidence that the individual carries access to valuable peers and opportunities.
The mistake is not the premium. The mistake is treating the premium as exhaustive. And the mistake compounds in a specific direction: the entrance examination selects clearly for analytical reasoning, pattern recognition, discipline, and the ability to perform in a particular examination environment. It selects much less clearly for creativity, wisdom, ethical judgement, leadership, resilience after failure, and the ability to inspire others. A person can excel at one set and be weak in another. The selection is powerful but not omniscient. When organisations unconsciously expand the scope of the signal – when “this person is exceptionally good at clearing a difficult intellectual filter” becomes “this person is exceptionally capable in general” – the leap is not always warranted. Elite credentials sometimes disappoint employers for exactly this reason. The frame promised more than it could carry.
This creates a particular form of social inefficiency. The most interesting cases are not where ergon and parergon align neatly in either direction. Those cases are legible. A strong graduate from a strong institution, or a weak graduate from a weak one, presents no interpretive challenge. The troubling cases are the two asymmetric quadrants: the hidden excellence of a brilliant graduate from an obscure regional college, and the credentialed mediocrity of a disappointing graduate from an elite one. Most systems function adequately in the legible quadrants. Frustration, resentment, and institutional injustice accumulate in the asymmetric ones.
VII. Is Any Market Free of This?
The temptation is to demand a market free of these “prejudices” – a space in which the ergon is evaluated purely on its own terms, without the mediation of frames, proxies, and institutional affiliations. The temptation should be resisted, not because the goal is unworthy, but because the goal rests on a misconception.
A market entirely free of parergons would probably cease to function. Hiring without CVs. Investing without financial statements. Publishing without knowing the author. Choosing a surgeon without credentials. Each of these decisions would require evaluating the underlying reality directly, from first principles, every time. In theory, this sounds admirably fair. In practice, the transaction costs would be prohibitive. Parergons exist because direct evaluation of the ergon is frequently impossible. The frame is not an obstacle to fair judgment. It is the cognitive infrastructure that makes judgment possible at scale.
The question is not whether such prejudgments exist. The question is which ones are justified, under what conditions, and for how long.
There is a thought experiment that sharpens the ethical dimension. Imagine two employees at the same firm three years into their careers. One graduated from an IIT; the other from a regional university. Suppose the regional graduate has, by any observable measure, outperformed the IIT graduate in every meaningful way – problem-solving, initiative, collaborative intelligence, ethical judgment. Yet the salary differential established at recruitment persists, because the institutional pedigree continues to shadow the individual performance review.
At that point the organisation is no longer paying for expected value. It is paying for inherited symbolic value. The parergon has detached itself from the ergon it was supposed to represent. What was initially a defensible statistical inference – “graduates from this institution have historically performed well, so we will pay a premium under uncertainty” – has hardened into something else: a prestige tax, a kind of credential rent that continues to accrue regardless of what the work actually shows.
This is where the ethicists diverge. A utilitarian argument can be made for the premium at recruitment: if the institution is a reliable predictor of performance, the premium reduces selection error and improves average outcomes. A justice-oriented argument pushes back: the premium systematically rewards access to opportunity as much as capability, which means it perpetuates the advantage of those who were already advantaged. Neither argument can be dismissed. But both arguments assume the premium is evaluated dynamically – that it answers, eventually, to the evidence the work produces. The ethical danger is not the premium itself. It is the premium that never revises itself.
VIII. The Flea Market and the Vineyard
There is an analogy that captures something true and something imprecise at the same time.
Suppose a particular flea market has historically produced more authentic masterpieces than other flea markets. That fact would make it rational to search there first. It would not make it rational to assume that every painting from that market is authentic. Nor would it justify paying a premium for every painting before examining it. The value of a painting ultimately depends on the painting, not the market stall from which it emerged. The market is a clue. A useful clue. But still a clue.
The analogy is sharp in one direction and softer in another. The flea market itself does not influence the quality of the paintings it contains. An IIT or IIM arguably does influence the quality of its graduates – through peer networks, faculty, competition, opportunity, and institutional culture. The institution is not merely a location where talent is found; it is part of the process that shapes it. In that respect, a vineyard is a better analogy than a flea market. A vineyard’s reputation tells us something about the soil, the climate, the cultivation, and the winemaking. Wines from that vineyard are statistically more likely to be excellent. No serious wine expert, however, would buy an unopened bottle at any price solely on the vineyard’s name. The specific vintage still matters. The bottle still needs to be opened.
What the flea market analogy exposes most clearly is the moment when provenance overtakes the object. It asks: at what point does the frame become more important than what it frames? The art market wrestles with this. Education wrestles with this. So does publishing: a manuscript from an unknown writer may be ignored while the same manuscript attributed to a name would be read with close attention. The words have not changed. The frame has. Human beings are not very good at evaluating works in isolation. We rely on provenance, reputation, and social consensus because examining every object from first principles is impossibly expensive. The frame is a cognitive shortcut. The ethical question is not whether shortcuts exist – they always will. The ethical question is whether we remember that they are shortcuts. The moment we forget, we stop using the flea market as evidence and start treating it as destiny. A useful heuristic hardens into prejudice.
There is also the question of timing. At twenty-two, with little else known about a candidate, the institution may be the strongest available signal. At forty-two, after two decades of work, leadership, error, and growth, the relevance of that signal should have diminished dramatically. Yet many organisations continue to treat the entrance examination taken at seventeen as one of the most important facts in a person’s professional identity. A credential is a useful frame. A career is the work. The ethical question is whether we continue rewarding the frame after the work has become plainly visible. If we do, we should at least be clear about what we are rewarding. It is no longer predictive value. It is prestige itself.
IX. What We Actually Buy
There is a further layer beneath all of this that is worth naming directly.
When people choose a renowned hospital or a prestigious university, they often believe they are buying expertise. What they are frequently buying is risk reduction. If I choose the best institution available and something goes wrong, I can at least tell myself that I chose wisely. The brand is doing psychological work as much as informational work. It reduces uncertainty. It reduces anticipated regret. It reduces the burden of responsibility for the choice.
This may be the most honest account of why brands are so persistent. They are not merely economic shortcuts. They are existential ones. They allow finite human beings to make decisions in a world where the true ergon is often too complex, too hidden, or too costly to evaluate directly. The frame absorbs the anxiety that direct encounter with the work would produce.
Benjamin’s term “aura” is useful again here, shifted into a different register. We associate aura with unique historical objects – the original, the unrepeatable, the thing that has survived. But institutions manufacture a form of aura too. The reputation of a great hospital or university carries a quality of accumulated trust that cannot be instantly replicated. New institutions, however excellent, lack this aura. They have not yet had time to let it accumulate. Their ergon may be equivalent or superior, but their parergon is thinner.
This is also why brands are so difficult to destroy and so slow to build. A single catastrophic failure rarely extinguishes a long-established institutional reputation. The accumulated trust is too deep. Conversely, a new institution doing excellent work may wait decades before the market acknowledges it. The parergon lags the ergon in both directions. It is slow to recognise genuine improvement and slow to register genuine decline.
And here is where AI re-enters the picture, for the last time, as a pressure rather than a solution. For the first time in the history of education, the parergon no longer has a monopoly on trust-generation. A learner with a portfolio of demonstrable, publicly visible work can, in certain fields, establish credibility without institutional endorsement. This does not eliminate the need for institutions. It challenges their exclusive authority to certify. The most important consequence may not be economic but philosophical: we are entering a period in which the question “Which parts of education are the work, and which parts are the frame?” has become practically urgent rather than merely theoretically interesting. The institutions that endure will be the ones that can answer it honestly.
X. Blake, a Classroom, and Two Greek Words
All of which brings me, by a route I could not have predicted when I sat down to write this, to a Blake lecture in 1992 or 1993.
I cannot, at this distance, name the lecturer. The face has faded. The voice has faded. I cannot tell you what he wore or how he stood or what other poems he discussed that semester. What I can tell you is that at some point in that classroom – a classroom in which the internet was still the property of research laboratories and the word “credential” had not yet become the contested battleground it is now – he introduced a class of English literature students to two Greek words: ergon and parergon.
I cannot explain why they adhered. Most literary terminology is local: it illuminates a particular poem or genre and then retreats. These terms did something different. They migrated. They attached themselves not to Blake specifically but to a habit of question: what is the thing itself, and what merely surrounds it? That question, once installed, proved remarkably portable. It applied to paintings and to parchments. To museum artefacts and to university transcripts. To hospitals and to scriptures. To reputations and to résumés. To every situation, in short, where appearance and substance diverge, or where framing and reality interact – which is to say, to almost every situation worth thinking carefully about.
William Blake gave the lecturer his occasion, and it was not an arbitrary one. Blake was not merely a poet. He was an engraver and visual artist who regarded text and image as inseparable. The plates of Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience are surrounded by elaborate visual designs – vines, children, angels, flames, trees – and those designs do not merely decorate the poems. They participate in their meaning. The border alters how the poem is read. The image and the text converse. The frame does semantic work. This is, without Blake knowing it by Derrida’s name, precisely the territory Derrida later mapped.
There is also something structurally Derridean in the relationship between the two collections themselves. Place The Lamb beside The Tyger. Each changes the meaning of the other. Neither stands entirely alone. Songs of Experience acts as a frame around Songs of Innocence, and vice versa. What first appears supplementary turns out to be constitutive. The surrounding work becomes part of the work. A very Derridean move, arrived at by intuition rather than philosophy, which may be why it is so permanently convincing.
XI. The Lecturer as Parergon
Here is the irony I cannot get past.
Throughout this essay, we have been examining cases in which the parergon overwhelms the ergon: the museum overshadows the painting, the brand overshadows the surgeon, the credential overshadows the learning, the institutional name outlives the knowledge it was meant to certify. The frame persists after the work has faded or moved on.
But the Blake lecturer represents the inverse. His name has disappeared. His influence has not.
In fact his influence may be stronger now than it was when I sat in his classroom. At the time, I listened, took notes, and moved to the next lecture. Thirty-three years later, those two Greek words are still generating thought. The lecturer himself has become a parergon that has faded away. The ergon remains.
Most of us can name dozens of teachers whose lessons we have forgotten. It is a rarer thing to forget a teacher whose lesson we are still actively using. The person has faded; the intellectual gift has endured. The frame has dissolved; the work is still visible.
There is a lovely implication here about the nature of teaching. Teachers naturally tend to assume that students are remembering them. Most of the time, students are remembering moments of insight – experiences in which something clicked, a distinction landed, a lens formed. The teacher’s ego wants immortality through recognition. But genuine teaching may achieve a quieter immortality through disappearance. The teacher becomes transparent, like a clean pane of glass through which something else becomes visible. The glass is not what you remember. What you remember is what you saw through it.
And yet – here Derrida reasserts himself – perhaps the lecturer was not the parergon at all. Perhaps his timing, his enthusiasm, his particular way of setting the distinction in motion, were constitutive of the insight. Would those words have adhered with the same force if they had arrived from a textbook? Probably not. The lecture was not merely a delivery mechanism. It was part of the ergon. The teacher has not vanished; he survives in distributed form. Not as a remembered face but as a habit of thought. Not as a named presence but as a way of looking at things that surfaces, reliably, whenever appearance and substance diverge.
You cannot see the spring when you are standing in the delta. But the water is still there. You are standing in it.
XII. What the Terms Survived
1992 or 1993. Before the web became public. Before search engines. Before the smartphone. Before credential inflation became a policy debate. Before AI made the question of what education actually certifies genuinely difficult to ignore.
In that world, if you wanted to revisit a concept, you could not search for it. You had to carry it. Ideas had to live in memory rather than in bookmarks. A concept that survived had to earn its place. It could not be retrieved on demand; it had to be retained. This may, in part, account for why ergon and parergon took root so deeply. They arrived in a mind that had no external storage to offload them to. They had to become part of the furniture of thought.
And what they have furnished thought with, over three decades, is a question rather than an answer. The question is: which is the work, and which is the frame? It is a question that has no stable, permanent answer, because the answer depends on what you are examining, at what distance, under what conditions, and with what interests in view. Derrida was clear about this: the parergon is “neither inside nor outside” – it occupies a threshold, a border, a zone that is genuinely unstable. The frame is not simply subordinate to the work. It is not simply superior to it. It is entangled with it, in ways that shift depending on where you stand and what you are trying to see.
That instability is not a deficiency in the concept. It is the concept’s deepest truth. We live in a world of frames. We cannot function without them. We encounter paintings through museums, credentials through institutions, surgeons through hospitals, ideas through teachers. The frames are necessary. They are useful. They are sometimes beautiful. But they are still frames. And the habit of asking – not aggressively, not nihilistically, but with disciplined curiosity – what is actually here? may be one of the most useful intellectual habits a person can cultivate.
The fact that this habit was planted through Blake, in a literature classroom, by a man whose name is now unrecoverable, says something worth holding onto about education. The most consequential lessons are often not the ones that announce their importance at the time. They arrive quietly. A distinction is offered. The mind receives it, sets it somewhere, and gets on with the business of the semester. Decades later, the distinction is still at work – in new contexts, on new problems, generating new connections the original lecturer could not possibly have foreseen.
If there is a final irony, it is this. An essay about the ergon and the parergon has ended by examining its own origins. The argument about frames and works has arrived, after considerable wandering, at the frame of a single classroom and the work that frame managed to transmit. The lecturer’s name is gone. But the question he planted – what is the thing itself, and what merely surrounds it? – is still here, still open, still worth sitting with.
It may be one of the most useful questions a teacher can leave behind. And it may be all the immortality a good teacher needs.
On the Body, the Rites, and What the Tradition Actually Believes
There is a question that any honest encounter with Hindu funeral practice eventually forces: if the atman is immortal and the body is impermanent, why do the rites surrounding that body require such precision? Why does it matter where the ashes go? And what happens in the large parts of the subcontinent where the Ganga does not flow?
The question appears to catch the tradition in a contradiction. It does not. What it catches the tradition doing is something far more interesting – holding two claims simultaneously that many philosophical systems would force into opposition: the claim that the body is not the ultimate reality of a person, and the claim that the body participates in cosmic order while it exists. These are not the same claim. Most modern summaries of Hindu thought collapse them into one and then wonder why the rites seem excessive for something allegedly disposable.
The first clarification is the most important. Classical Indian thought does not regard the body as meaningless. It regards it as impermanent. The distance between those two words is not semantic. A thing can be impermanent and still be worthy of care while it endures; it can be temporary without being trivial. The body, in the framework the epics and Upanishads actually inhabit, is the vehicle through which karma was accumulated, duties fulfilled, relationships formed, and spiritual practice undertaken. It is not the person. But it is the instrument through which the person moved through this particular life. That distinction carries moral weight.
A useful analogy presents itself, though it must be handled carefully. Think of a temple lamp. When the flame goes out, the lamp is no longer the light. Yet no one who understands the lamp kicks it into a ditch. The vessel retains its character as a vessel – as something that carried something sacred – even after it no longer carries it. The trouble with this analogy, as any attentive reader will notice, is that a lamp can be relit. A corpse cannot. The analogy smuggles in a continuity that death precisely severs. To push on this is not pedantry: it is to get closer to the real puzzle. If the soul has departed and the body is now genuinely uninhabited, what exactly is the rite honouring?
The Transition and Its Rituals
The orthodox ritual answer is that the relationship between the living and the departed is not severed at the moment of biological death. Many Hindu traditions hold that the deceased occupies an intermediate state – not yet fully among the ancestors, not yet reborn – during which the rituals performed by the living assist the passage. The body and its remains, on this account, retain a connection to the deceased that is not purely material. The antyeshti, the last sacrifice, is not the disposal of discarded packaging. It is the completion of a process. The body was the site of a life; the rite acknowledges that the life there conducted has consequences that are still unfolding.
If one accepts that metaphysic, the question about the rites largely answers itself. The precision matters because the process matters, and the process is not finished just because the breath has stopped. The rituals are not for the corpse. They are for the transition.
The second answer – available to those who find the metaphysical account either unconvincing or unnecessary – is social and psychological. Humans do not grieve abstractions. We grieve bodies: this face, these hands, this particular presence that occupied a chair at a table and will not occupy it again. The rituals provide a structure for the living to enact, collectively, the fact that a person who was here is no longer here. They transform a raw biological event into a social and spiritual one. They make grief legible, and they give it somewhere to go.
The sceptic might therefore argue that the rites are primarily for the survivors, not the departed. A traditional practitioner would reply that they are for both. What is interesting is that these explanations are not mutually exclusive, and the tradition generally does not force a choice between them.
The question about where the ashes go is the same question asked again, now in geographical terms. If the rites are not merely about the corpse but about a process still unfolding – a transition that the living assist and the cosmos receives – then the destination of the ashes is not a logistical detail. It is a theological one. It asks: into what does the departed finally pass? The Ganga is the tradition’s answer, and it requires the same kind of examination the rites required. Both resist the reduction to the merely physical, and both turn out, on closer inspection, to be more portable than they first appear.
The River That Can Be Everywhere
The question about the Ganga contains a small theology that most people skip past. The sacredness of the river is not primarily geographical. It is symbolic and, in a precise sense, theological. In many traditions, the Ganga is regarded as a heavenly river that descended to earth through the austerities of Bhagiratha; her waters carry a purifying quality because of their divine origin. Immersing ashes in the Ganga symbolically entrusts the deceased to a cosmic current that connects earth, heaven, and the ancestral realm.
The practical reality is that for most of Indian history, the overwhelming majority of Hindus never lived anywhere near the river. People in Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Assam, and across Southeast Asia conducted their entire lives without Gangetic proximity. The tradition accommodated this not by lowering the standard but by expanding the theology. Local sacred rivers received ashes and were honoured as such. Priests sanctified local water by invoking, ritually, the presence of the Ganga itself.
This practice is worth dwelling on because it reveals something architecturally important about how the tradition thinks. The invocation used in countless Hindu rituals – calling together Ganga, Yamuna, Godavari, Saraswati, Narmada, Sindhu, and Kaveri to be present in whatever water stands before the priest – is not a workaround or a compromise. It is a theological claim: that sacred geography can be made present ritually. The physical river matters, but what matters more is the sacred reality that the river embodies. The river is a name for something that can be invoked wherever the conditions of invocation are met.
This is not a minor point. It means that what looks like a rigid, place-specific ritual requirement is in fact a portable theology. The geography is symbolic infrastructure, not a fixed address.
Where the Tradition Holds Its Contradictions
The deeper anthropological observation is this: Hinduism actually contains two voices that are frequently mistaken for one. The first says you are not the body. The second says the body participates in cosmic order. These are not the same claim, and the tradition never fully resolves the tension between them – because it does not try to.
The Vedantic philosopher seeking liberation may regard the body as ultimately unreal relative to the Self. The dharmic householder tradition simultaneously places enormous importance on bodily acts: feeding, bathing, marriage, cremation, ancestor rites, pilgrimage, purity, and pollution. Both voices exist, and they coexist within the same practitioner in the same lifetime.
A Vedantin can say, with complete sincerity: I am not the body. A son can say, with equal sincerity: this was my father’s body. Both statements are true within the framework that contains them. What many modern explanations do is simplify this into a kind of Indian Platonism – soul important, body unimportant – and then express puzzlement when the tradition does not behave accordingly.
If the body were truly only a vessel, the moment death occurred one could dispose of it like discarded packaging. Almost no civilisation, Hindu or otherwise, behaves this way. The funeral rites themselves are evidence that people do not actually experience human beings as souls trapped in containers. They experience persons as embodied beings whose bodies retain symbolic significance even after life has departed. The care given to the dead body reflects not a contradiction of the belief in the immortal soul, but a recognition that matter itself has participated in a sacred story.
The body is dust. But it is dust that carried a person. That distinction is doing a great deal of work in Hindu funeral practice, and it is a more sophisticated position than either pure materialism or pure spiritualism can accommodate.
Part I: The Painting, the Stone, and the Parchment
I. A Question About a Painting
Start with a simple question. Would the Mona Lisa look different if it were mounted on a piece of white Styrofoam and pinned to a classroom wall?
The conventional answer is no. The painted image would be identical. The brushwork, the sfumato, the inscrutable expression – nothing inside the picture plane would have changed. And yet the honest answer, the one that presses on something real, is that the experience would be unrecognisable. Not slightly different. Unrecognisable.
This is the territory Jacques Derrida entered when he introduced the concept of the parergon – from the Greek para, meaning beside or alongside, and ergon, meaning work. The ergon is the thing itself: the painting, the text, the artefact. The parergon is everything that surrounds it, frames it, presents it, and tells us what kind of thing we are looking at. The parergon includes the frame around a painting, but it does not stop there. It includes the wall, the gallery, the lighting, the security glass, the catalogue, the crowd, and the accumulated five centuries of civilisational consensus that this particular object deserves to be stood before with held breath.
Derrida’s provocation was this: the parergon cannot be dismissed as merely external. It does not hover at a safe distance from the work without touching it. It helps constitute the work as a work. Strip the parergon away and you do not expose the pure ergon. You expose a different object – one that the world will receive differently, experience differently, and value differently, even if not a single atom of pigment has moved.
The Styrofoam thought experiment makes this visceral. A painting removed from its gilded frame, unprotected by glass, leaning against a particle-board wall under fluorescent light, would begin to resemble a reproduction. A teaching aid. A prop. The aura – Walter Benjamin’s word for the object’s unique presence in time and space, its irreducible thereness – would evaporate. The ornate frame that currently encases the Mona Lisa does not merely decorate it. It signals age, value, preservation, and what one might call museum-worthiness. Styrofoam signals the opposite: temporary display, utility, disposability.
Nothing inside the painted image has changed. Everything about the encounter has.
II. The Museum as Meta-Frame
Take this further. Suppose the Mona Lisa were removed from the Louvre and placed, anonymously, in a school corridor. No placard, no glass, no security guard stationed at a respectful distance. Most students would walk past it. Some might prefer the colourful poster two feet away. The painting would not have become less beautiful. It would have become less visible – not to the eye, but to the culturally trained attention that decides, before the eye even focuses, what is worth looking at.
This reveals something important. The physical gilded frame is not the primary parergon at all. The Louvre is the parergon. The museum is a meta-frame – a structure that separates certain objects from ordinary reality and places them in a space consecrated to aesthetic contemplation. The ornate frame on the wall of the Louvre is merely a secondary frame nested inside a larger one.
This connects to a famous thought experiment associated with the philosopher Arthur Danto. Place an ordinary object in an art gallery, and people will begin to interpret it as art. The institutional context does enormous work. The gallery does not merely display things; it transforms them into something displayable. The object that deserves attention acquires that status partly because the institution vouches for it.
And the layers do not stop at the museum walls. The art-historical tradition says this object deserves contemplation. The market says it is priceless. The educational system says it is culturally important. The act of theft – the Mona Lisa was stolen in 1911 and its absence made it famous in a way that centuries of museum display never quite achieved – is itself part of the frame. Each layer constitutes another parergon.
The deeper Derridean insight is that pulling away one frame does not expose the naked work. It exposes another frame behind the one just removed. The question ceases to be “What is the work itself?” and becomes “Which of the surrounding structures are doing the work of making this appear to us as the work?” That is a far more unsettling question, not least because it has no clean terminus.
One might push Derrida on this point. If the museum is the real parergon, and the physical frame is secondary, does value lie entirely in context? The thought experiment can be reversed. Suppose the anonymous object in the school corridor is authenticated overnight as the genuine work of Leonardo da Vinci. The painting has not changed. The context has not yet changed either. Yet the moment the authentication is announced, the market and the museum and the cultural apparatus would instantly reorganise themselves around that object. The gravitational pull of authenticity is not purely. It possesses something of its own. What that something is brings us to a different artefact entirely.
III. The Facsimile and the Anvil
There are moments when philosophical abstraction arrives not through argument but through embarrassment.
I have had such a moment at the British Museum, standing before the Rosetta Stone. Or rather, standing before what I believed to be the Rosetta Stone. The encounter had all the qualities of genuine awe: the weight of the object, the ancient script carved into its surface, the knowledge that this was the hinge between silence and understanding, the physical point at which Egyptian hieroglyphs stopped being indecipherable marks and became language again. I stood there with something close to reverence.
Then I learned it was a facsimile.
The force of that discovery struck with what I can only describe as the impact of a proverbial anvil. And what is philosophically interesting is precisely what the anvil struck. Not my visual experience – the object looked exactly as it had a moment before. Not my factual knowledge – I still knew everything I had known about the Rosetta Stone’s history. What changed was the ontological status of the object in front of me. The stone did not alter. The frame around it did.
What had moved me was not merely the carved surface. It was a feeling so tacit it was barely articulable: these are the marks touched by ancient hands. This is the object that unlocked Egyptian hieroglyphs. This very stone stood at the hinge between silence and understanding. When the object became a facsimile, those claims no longer attached themselves to what was in front of me. The historical continuity vanished even though the physical form remained. And with the continuity went the awe.
This experience illuminates something that Derrida alone cannot quite account for. Benjamin’s concept of aura is more useful here. The original object, Benjamin argued, possesses something that no reproduction can carry: its unique existence in time and space, its having-been-there. The facsimile can replicate form but not continuity. The copy says: this is what it looked like. The original says: I was there. Human beings are astonishingly sensitive to that distinction, sensitive in ways that precede and survive rational argument.
And yet the experience at the British Museum also confirms the parergon’s reach. My wonder, before the revelation, was partly generated by a perfect visual facsimile. If the carved surface produced awe while I believed it to be the original, then the appearance was doing significant work. The revelation that it was a copy drained the awe, which means the aura – that invisible thread connecting object to history – was doing the rest of the work. Neither the form alone nor the history alone was sufficient. Both were necessary. Strip one away, and the encounter collapses.
This is the paradox that museums are particularly equipped to expose. They traffic simultaneously in form and in continuity, in visible surface and in invisible narrative. The visitor arrives not merely for information but for contact – not knowledge about the thing but contact with the thing. A medieval pilgrim touching a relic, a devotee standing before an ancient murti, a scholar handling a first edition manuscript: all are seeking the same thing. Not the appearance of the sacred or the significant. The thing itself, trailing its history behind it. The parergon that most moves us is not the frame around the object. It is the story the object carries about where it has been.
IV. From the Museum to the Parchment
The Rosetta Stone episode opened a door I had not expected.
Once you start seeing the ergon-parergon distinction, it migrates. A painting becomes a credential becomes a scripture becomes a nation. The question “What is the thing itself, and what merely surrounds it?” begins to appear everywhere, and nowhere more consequentially than in education.
Consider a university degree certificate. What is the ergon? Physically, it is paper and ink, signatures and seals, perhaps a hologram or a watermark. A skilled counterfeiter can reproduce every visible feature. Yet the counterfeit is worthless. Why?
Because the value was never in the paper.
The value resides in an invisible web of relationships: the university, its accreditation body, the examination processes, the faculty, the records office, the legal framework, the employer’s trust in all of the above, and – crucially – the accumulated credibility that the institution has built through decades of certifying people who then went on to perform. None of this is visible on the certificate. All of it is present in the certificate, the way the Rosetta Stone’s historical continuity was present in – or rather, absent from – the facsimile.
Modern education may be one of the clearest examples of a system where the parergon carries more weight than the apparent ergon. What employers buy when they recruit graduates is not, in most cases, direct evidence of learning. They buy confidence in the framing system. The actual ergon – what the candidate knows, how they think, how they perform under pressure, how they grow – is expensive and time-consuming to evaluate directly. The credential is a cognitive shortcut. It says: this person has passed through a system that we have reason to trust. The frame does the work that direct evaluation would require too much time and too many resources to do.
This is where the conversation turns uncomfortable. If the parergon of a degree certificate is the institutional network behind it, then the credential is not merely a record. It is a form of trust delegation. And trust delegation, like any form of outsourcing, is only as good as the institution to which it is delegated.
At the far end of this logic lies a question that the arrival of AI has made impossible to ignore. For centuries, education relied on a set of interlocking parergons – campus architecture, convocation robes, embossed parchments, examination halls, institutional prestige, the social weight of the degree ceremony – to create and sustain trust. AI is quietly dismantling many of these. A learner can now acquire substantial, demonstrable knowledge entirely outside formal institutions. The traditional certificate increasingly competes with portfolios, repositories, published work, open-source contributions, and competence made directly visible. New parergons – a GitHub profile, a body of published writing, a Substack with ten thousand subscribers – are emerging to challenge the old ones.
This means education is being forced to confront a question art has wrestled with since Duchamp: what happens when the frame becomes less persuasive than the thing it frames? What happens when you can no longer rely on the aura of the original parchment, because enough people have noticed the facsimile hanging in the corridor?
The answer is not settled. But the question is the right one. And it is, at its core, the same question that stood at the heart of the Rosetta Stone experience: how much of what we feel in the presence of something valuable is carried by the thing, and how much is carried by everything we have been told surrounds it?
V. The Invisible Chain of Trust
The credential argument leads directly into a broader principle about institutions.
When I visit a hospital, I know very little about the surgeon’s complication rates, the anaesthetist’s judgement, the laboratory’s accuracy, or the nursing staff’s competence. The information asymmetry is enormous. I resolve it by asking a different, simpler question: do I trust this hospital? The hospital’s brand becomes a compressed representation of thousands of invisible decisions, processes, and people. It is a parergon that stands in for a vast amount of hidden reality.
This is not laziness. It is often the only rational option. To evaluate 150 teachers individually before choosing a school, or every professor before choosing a university, or every physician before choosing a hospital, would cost more time and cognitive resource than most people possess. Brands emerge precisely because direct evaluation of the ergon is frequently impossible. They aggregate information into a form that finite human beings can use.
What is philosophically interesting is the inversion that follows over time. Initially, an institution’s brand is a proxy for the quality of its members. Its reputation is a shadow cast by the cumulative performance of the people within it. But gradually the direction of trust reverses. Members begin to derive their legitimacy from the brand rather than the brand from them. A newly appointed surgeon at a famous hospital receives trust before performing a single operation there. A newly hired professor at a prestigious university inherits credibility before teaching a single class. The institution lends its accumulated symbolic capital to the individual.
The parergon has begun to generate authority independently of the individual ergons it was originally created to represent. The brand smooths over individual differences, conceals variance, creates an average in the public imagination. A famous hospital may contain extraordinary surgeons and mediocre ones. A prestigious university may employ inspired teachers and disengaged academics in equal measure. Yet applicants and patients experience them under a single logo. The variance disappears. What remains is the brand’s averaged promise.
It is worth noting that this mechanism extends well beyond medicine and education. Most believers cannot evaluate two thousand years of theology, textual criticism, and philosophical argument before placing their trust in a church or tradition. The institution becomes a trust proxy. The mechanism is the same whether the institution is a hospital, a university, a denomination, or a museum. The brand absorbs uncertainty and returns confidence. It reduces not only information cost but existential cost – the burden of having to decide, on one’s own, what is worth trusting.
Perhaps that is the deepest function of the parergon. Not merely to help us identify quality, but to help us live with uncertainty when quality cannot be known in advance. The frame does not only tell us what to look at. It tells us how much anxiety we need to bring to the looking.
Every tradition carries two things simultaneously: a framework for understanding the world, and the wounds that the framework was built to address. The framework can be articulated. It can be taught, debated, revised, and transmitted across centuries. The wounds are harder. They do not always yield to articulation. They resist the very structures that were meant to contain them – and sometimes, at their most insistent, they put those structures on trial.
My own Indian traditions – the epics, the Upanishads, the dharmic and devotional literature that has accumulated across three millennia – are among the most sophisticated frameworks the human mind has produced for thinking about impermanence, duty, suffering, and the relationship between the individual life and the cosmic order in which it is embedded. They are also, on close reading, remarkably honest about their own limits. The Mahabharata does not end with the triumph of virtue. The Ramayana does not end with contentment. The tradition that gave the world karma also gave it Gandhari, who stood over the bodies of her hundred sons and cursed the god who could have prevented it. The tradition that insists the body is not the self also insists on the precise performance of rites for the dead. These are not contradictions to be smoothed over. They are the tradition thinking seriously about the actual conditions of human life.
This series of essays began as a conversation – a long, wandering, occasionally combative exchange with an interlocutor I have named Alaric, who functions as the part of my mind willing to push any argument one step further than comfort recommends. The questions ranged across Hindu funeral practice and what it actually implies about the body and the soul; the Mahabharata’s systematic dismantling of the conditions for comfortable admiration; desire, renunciation, and the particular cliff that appears one step beyond enough; Gandhari’s curse and what it accomplishes that Barbarik’s cosmic vision cannot; Job and the whirlwind and what it means that the man who argued with God spoke more rightly than the men who defended him; karma applied as a mirror and karma misapplied as a verdict; and the strange intuition that certain truths feel discovered rather than invented, that certain stories feel like remembrance rather than information.
Out of that conversation, three essays have been shaped and a coda added. They will appear across three consecutive days, with the coda following on the fourth. They can be read independently, but they are designed to be read in sequence: each one builds on the previous, and the coda draws the threads together – including threads from two earlier essays in this broader series, “Victory Produces Governors; Defeat Produces Teachers” and “The Jungle Has No Courthouse: On Dharma and Accountability,” which approached the same tradition from different angles.
The first essay asks what Hindu funeral practice actually believes about the body – not what a simplified summary of Vedantic philosophy would predict, but what the rites themselves imply. The second asks why the Mahabharata produces moral vertigo rather than moral instruction, and what it means to live inside a narrative architecture that removes the handrails deliberately. The third brings together Gandhari and Job, karma and protest, the collective pre-conscience and the question of whether some griefs are arguments to be answered or wounds to be acknowledged.
What holds all of it together is a single insistence: the cosmic explanation and the human wound must be kept in the same room. Neither is permitted to dissolve the other. The framework is real. The wound is also real. A tradition that can only accommodate one of them has not yet fully reckoned with the world it is trying to describe.
Victory Produces Governors; Defeat Produces Teachers – Part II
The previous essay ended with a question: whether the victors are capable of listening before the last breath is gone. That question belonged to the battlefield, to Lakshmana at Ravanaa’s feet and Yudhishthira beside the bed of arrows. This essay begins somewhere underneath both scenes – with the intellectual architecture that made them possible. You cannot fully understand why those deathbed scenes carry the weight they do unless you understand what the tradition means by dharma. Not the word as it has been domesticated into motivational content, but the concept as it was first articulated – harsh, structural, and entirely uninterested in making you feel better about yourself.
I came to this more slowly than I should have. I had been reading Debroy’s ten-volume Mahabharata – on my third pass through it now – and finding that each reading gives me a different text, not because the text changes but because the questions I bring to it do. What stopped me recently was a conversation: Devdutt Pattanaik on The India Story podcast with Vikram Chandra, speaking about why the Ramayana and Mahabharata are not moral texts. They are accountability texts.
The Fish Law
Dharma, in Pattanaik’s reading, does not originate as a religious concept. It originates as a governance concept. The earliest clear articulation in the Shatapatha Brahmana – around 800 BCE – frames it through its opposite: matsya nyaya, the law of fish. In water, the big fish eat the small fish. This is the natural order. It is not evil. It simply is. The question dharma addresses is not whether this is wrong, but what a human civilisation proposes to do about it. The answer: the king – the leader, the one with power – overturns matsya nyaya. The strong do not feed on the weak. The strong protect the weak. That inversion is what dharma means, at its root.
Everything else follows from this. It is not a moral command in the Western sense – not a prohibition handed down from divine authority, not a rule that applies equally to all persons across all contexts. It is a structural expectation directed specifically and asymmetrically at the powerful. The jungle has no courthouse. Dharma is what you build when you decide the jungle is not enough.
This is why Pattanaik insists that dharma is contextual rather than universal, and why that insistence is so frequently misunderstood. When he says that what applies to the rich cannot apply to the poor, he is not arguing for a two-tier legal system in the modern sense. He is arguing that a framework which pretends not to see power – which applies identical rules to the fisherman and the fishing corporation – is, in dharmic terms, not impartial. It is a disguised form of matsya nyaya. The big fish and the small fish appear before the same blind court. The big fish wins.
This is the departure from Western justice that Pattanaik marks most carefully. Justice, in its classical Western form, is imagined as universal, blind, and singular – one standard applied identically. Dharma is emphatically not this. It asks first: who is the strong, and who is the weak? Then it places the moral burden squarely on the strong. The powerful person who consumes the vulnerable is not simply breaking a rule; they are creating a debt. And dharma’s accounting system – paap-punya, the debit-credit of karma – does not forget.
The Accounting System
The accounting metaphor is worth staying with, because it reorders the entire moral architecture.
In the monotheistic frameworks Pattanaik contrasts with Indian thought, God is a judge. Judgment Day is the trial at which the ledger is examined and a verdict returned. Heaven or hell, saved or damned. The logic is binary and the timeline is finite: one life, one trial, one outcome. This produces a particular kind of moral imagination – alert to the line between the permitted and the forbidden, attentive to commandment, attuned to guilt and absolution.
In the Indian framework, Yama is not a judge. He is an accountant. There is no verdict, only a balance. What you have done accumulates as credit or debt, and this balance shapes what comes next – not as punishment or reward in the theatrical sense, but as consequence, as the natural forward motion of what has been set in motion. The framework does not ask: was this right or wrong? It asks: are you accountable for this?
The difference sounds semantic. It is not. Moral judgment produces guilt; accountability produces responsibility. You can be absolved of guilt through confession, grace, or ritual. You cannot be absolved of consequence except by working through it. The man who consumes the weak does not merely sin – he incurs debt. That debt will be collected. Not by a divine court, but by the weight of what he has set in motion.
This is why rebirth matters to the framework not as a metaphysical luxury but as a structural necessity. A single life cannot contain the full accounting. The widow who suffers unjustly did not earn her suffering in a single lifetime. The prosperous man who exploits his workers did not earn his prosperity in a single lifetime either. The accounting runs across time in ways that a one-life, one-trial system cannot accommodate. Pattanaik is explicit: rebirth is not primarily a spiritual consolation. It is the mechanism by which a contextual, non-universal moral system remains coherent over time.
The Lakshman Rekha Is for Ravana
Among the most significant reframings in the podcast is Pattanaik’s reading of the Lakshman Rekha – the line drawn around Sita in the forest. In popular memory, including a great deal of devotional and even scholarly commentary, this line is read as a restriction placed on Sita. She must not cross it. When she crosses it to give alms to the disguised Ravana, catastrophe follows. The moral is implied to be hers.
Pattanaik inverts this entirely. The Lakshman Rekha, he argues, is a boundary for Ravana, not for Sita. Sita can step out; she does. Ravana cannot step in. He cannot cross the line to reach her. He must trick her into stepping out to reach him. The line is not a cage around the vulnerable. It is a barrier against the powerful.
This is not interpretive ingenuity for its own sake. It is the logic of dharma made spatial. Dharma begins with the king overturning matsya nyaya – with the powerful drawing a boundary around their own power to protect the weak. The Lakshman Rekha is that boundary made visible. The person who must respect it is the one with the power to cross it. The failure is Ravana’s, not because he broke an externally imposed rule, but because he refused to hold the boundary that should have been self-imposed. He circled the limit he could not transgress, waiting for an opening, then exploited a moment of vulnerability to reach what he had no right to take. That is a precise description of what the powerful do when they have abandoned dharmic restraint: they do not act openly; they wait, then exploit.
The implications for any institution that holds power over vulnerable people – and here one might think of education, healthcare, finance, or any number of others – are not comfortable to dwell on. The Lakshman Rekha is not a compliance document. It is a self-imposed limit that the powerful place around their own appetite. When that self-imposition fails, no external rule adequately replaces it. The dhobi’s court cannot reconstitute what the king has abandoned.
When the King Becomes the Dhobi
Which brings the argument to its most difficult passage.
In other essays, Pattanaik does not flinch from what the Rama story does to its own hero. The episode of the washerman – the dhobi who says he is not Rama, and would not take back a wife who had lived in another man’s house – is a quiet catastrophe inside the theology of dharma. Rama, the great upholder of contextual dharma, hears the comment and acts on it. He sends Sita away.
Pattanaik’s reading of this is exact: Rama chooses raj-dharma over pati-dharma. He places his obligation to public perception above his obligation to his wife. By the framework he himself embodies, this is a dharma-sankat – a moral dilemma with no clean exit. Whatever he chooses, he incurs debt. The debt he chooses to incur is to Sita.
The episode is instructive precisely because it shows the system failing from the inside. Rama is not abandoning dharma; he is applying one dharma against another, and choosing the version that protects the institution at the cost of the person. He then lives with this choice – no second marriage, rituals performed with a golden effigy, a life of what we might call structured penance. The tradition preserves the wound because it wants the wound to be visible.
But the deeper problem is structural. The washerman’s code – one life, one test, one verdict on a woman’s purity – is precisely the universalist, non-contextual moral logic that dharma is supposed to resist. The king, who is supposed to protect the weak from the strong, is here allowing the narrowest, most punitive commoner’s interpretation of right and wrong to determine the fate of his queen. The Lakshman Rekha, which was supposed to keep Ravana out, has been replaced by the dhobi’s gossip, which let the worst of public morality in. This is what Pattanaik calls the dark side of maryada purushottam: perfect rule-upholding that destroys the very person the rules were supposed to protect. Ram is not condemned by the tradition. But the tradition does not clean him up either.
Wealth as Debt
A second strand in the podcast that carries structural weight: Pattanaik’s treatment of wealth.
Wealth, in the Indian framework he outlines, is not property. It is debt. You carry it as custodian, not as owner. The four-part obligation – earn, protect, grow, deploy for higher purpose – is not a financial planning model. It is an extension of the same accounting logic. What you have, you owe. To your ancestors, to your teachers, to the society whose infrastructure and civilisation made your accumulation possible, to nature itself. These are not rhetorical obligations. They are structural debts that the framework tracks and, eventually, collects.
The contrast with hoarding is explicit. Wealth that does not circulate is dead wealth. It no longer participates in the web of obligation and exchange that makes it meaningful. The Sanskrit term Pattanaik cites – chakra-vriddhi, increase upon increase – is not celebrated. It is identified as one of the most dangerous discoveries in human history: the mechanism by which debt compounds itself until the borrower is enslaved. What the financial world calls growth, the dharmic accounting system recognises as a form of consumption – the big fish eating the small fish, but with interest.
The Sudama-Krishna story makes the dharmic alternative legible: wealth does not flow from transaction. It flows from relationship. Krishna gives without being asked, without calculating return, without recording the gift. This is daan rather than dakshina – voluntary surplus rather than obligatory repayment. Both matter, but daan is the form that cannot be legally mandated, and it is the form that distinguishes a dharmic prosperity from a merely wealthy one.
The Grammar of Indian and Western Thought
The podcast ranges across a comparison that is worth assembling carefully, because it is easily caricatured.
Pattanaik identifies three broad frameworks in conversation with Indian thought. The Abrahamic West: one life, divine judge, judgment day, universal law, binary right/wrong, a God who guarantees outcomes. East Asian Confucianism: no rebirth, no God as such, compliance with system as the fundamental virtue, saving face as the operative moral currency, a culture of inherited obligation to ancestors. And Indian thought: rebirth, no judgment day, contextual dharma, an accountant rather than a judge at the centre, dynamic diversity that actively resists universalism.
The most pointed observation in the whole podcast may be this one: monotheism has only one God, but it has two humanities – believers and non-believers, the saved and the damned. These two are structurally and permanently opposed. When God becomes a party to a conflict, there are no easy exits. You cannot negotiate with what has been divinely ordained. The historical record of religious war within monotheism – Catholic against Protestant, Sunni against Shia, the various crusades and their aftershocks – is not an anomaly but a consequence of the framework’s internal logic. Pattanaik’s observation is not polemical; it is structural. A theology of the One True Way has difficulty tolerating the other way except as a problem to be solved.
The Indian framework, by contrast, has no concept of the non-believer as enemy. There is no damnation, no heretic, no category of person who is structurally outside the web of dharmic obligation. This does not make the tradition peaceful in practice – caste, which Pattanaik acknowledges as India’s own form of structural violence, gives the lie to any simple celebration. But the theoretical architecture is different. The question is not: are you one of us? The question is: are you accountable?
Buddhism and Jainism, which carry this logic to its furthest extension, are instructive here. Pattanaik is careful about this: both traditions are non-theistic, not monotheistic. They did not produce a theology of the enemy. They produced ahimsa – the principle that all consumption involves violence, and that the minimal-violence life is the aspiration. Ashoka’s transformation after Kalinga is the historical exhibit: a king who measured the cost of his conquest, found it unpayable, and turned to dharmic governance not through divine command but through the accountant’s logic. This is what the debt had cost. This is what was now owed.
The Question the Epics Were Already Asking
Return, now, to the deathbed scenes from the previous essay – Ravana teaching Lakshmana, Bhishma teaching Yudhishthira. They sit differently once the dharma framework is in view.
Ravana is not a villain in the framework Pattanaik describes. He is a debtor in default. A man of extraordinary learning and devotion who chose, repeatedly, to consume the weak rather than protect them. Who ignored his own dharmic knowledge. Who had the Lakshman Rekha before him and spent his energy circumventing it rather than honouring it. His last words are not wisdom dispensed generously. They are the balance statement read aloud by someone who knows the books will not close in his favour. When he says: delay the harmful, hasten the good – he is not advising Lakshmana. He is confessing himself.
Bhishma’s silence at Draupadi’s humiliation is the same failure in a different register. The great dharmic thinker, the Pitamaha of the Kuru line, a man who understood the asymmetric obligation of the powerful to protect the weak – watched a queen be stripped in open court and said nothing. Not because he did not know. Because his vow of obedience to the throne was more important to him, in that moment, than his obligation to the vulnerable. He chose maryada over dharma. He upheld the rule while the world it was supposed to protect was being destroyed inside it.
Both men teach from the position of someone who knew the framework and defaulted on it. That is not incidental to their authority. That is the source of it.
What the Framework Does Not Say
One clarification deserves explicit statement, because the conversation around Pattanaik’s work frequently slides past it.
He is not arguing that Indian civilisation embodies dharma. He is arguing that Indian civilisation articulated dharma as a framework – and then lived inside the gap between the articulation and the practice, as all civilisations do.
Caste is the most obvious evidence: a system that inverted the dharmic protection of the weak into a hereditary structure for the exploitation of the weak, justified, grotesquely, by the same karmic logic it perverted. The Brahmin’s ritual authority, extracted from communities it should have served, is matsya nyaya wearing the clothes of dharma.
This is why the epics are not comfort texts. They are diagnostic texts. They describe a world where the framework is constantly failing – where the Lakshman Rekha is circumvented, where the king defers to the dhobi, where the Pitamaha watches in silence – and they do not resolve this into triumph. The victory at Kurukshetra is followed by six parvas of guilt, instruction, and grief. Ram-rajya is built on a wound that never heals.
The question the epics were already asking is the same question Pattanaik is asking now: not whether we know what dharma requires, but whether we are willing to bear the cost of actually practising it.
The Condemned Teachers of Our Own Time
The previous essay proposed that the deathbed scenes encode a pattern: the condemned teacher. The figure who teaches not despite their failure but from inside it. Ravana and Bhishma do not rehabilitate themselves before they speak. They speak as what they are – defeated, compromised, irrecoverable – and the tradition insists that this is precisely what makes them worth listening to.
The pattern does not belong only to the epics.
Every significant institution of our time – political, academic, religious, corporate – has its Bhishma: the person who understood the framework, who commanded the room, who watched the failure in front of them and chose the vow over the obligation. They are not always disgraced. Sometimes they retire to comfortable silence. Sometimes they write memoirs that carefully omit the specific moment of choice. Sometimes they continue in office, carrying the wound invisibly.
The dharmic question – not the moral question, not the legal question, but the accountability question – is not whether they were wrong. It is: what do they now owe? And the related question, which is the harder one: are we, the inheritors of the institutions they shaped and the consequences they set in motion, capable of approaching that deathbed with the posture Lakshmana eventually managed? Not to absolve. Not to condemn. To sit at the feet and hear what they actually know about how the road ends.
The epics suggest this capacity is rare. They also suggest it is the only form of knowledge that cannot be institutionalised, archived, or extracted from a podcast.
What the Crisis in UK Higher Education Actually Means for Indian Students
In my opinion, George Chilton’s essay in The PIE News, “Out-Galloping the Four Horsemen of Higher Education,” is one of those rare pieces of sector writing that earns its metaphor. The four horsemen – AI-driven integrity collapse, geopolitical and migration instability, the obsolescence of the traditional degree model, and the generational turn away from prestige toward purpose – are not assembled for effect. Each identifies a genuine structural fracture. What makes the essay worth sitting with is not its alarm but its lucidity: the sense that someone has finally named what has been visible but unspoken across the sector for years.
That unspoken quality is itself significant. Higher education institutions are not, as a rule, candid about their own vulnerabilities. They speak in the language of transformation and opportunity even when the underlying reality is contraction and anxiety. Chilton cuts through that. What the essay opens, though, is a question it doesn’t quite have room to enter: what this crisis looks like from the receiving end. Not from within UK institutions, but from the vantage point of a family in Pune or Hyderabad or South Delhi, trying to make a decision that will cost them somewhere between thirty and eighty lakh rupees, reshape the next five years of their child’s life, and carry the full weight of intergenerational aspiration. That is a different angle of view. And from that angle, the crisis looks both clearer and more complicated.
The Integrity Gap, and Its Older History
Chilton’s first horseman is what he calls the integrity gap – the crisis of epistemic trust created by generative AI. If degrees no longer reliably signal intellectual formation, the credential loses its social function. Universities, on this reading, face not merely a technological disruption but a legitimacy crisis.
What the argument doesn’t quite reckon with is that the crisis of the credential predates AI by at least a decade. AI did not invent superficial learning. It industrialised it. For years, much of mass higher education drifted quietly toward performative assessment, modular box-ticking, and the industrialised production of credentials without the formation that credentials were supposed to represent. The degree had already become, in many institutions, a simulacrum of learning – a process that resembled education in its external forms while hollowing out its intellectual substance. AI arrived into this environment not as the cause of the problem but as its most efficient accelerant.
The University of Nottingham’s recent trajectory makes this visible at institutional scale. Over three decades, a combination of government funding cuts, the pressure to recruit international students as a revenue substitute, and the replacement of tenured academics with contract staff produced what Hunter and Williams, writing in Eurasia Review, describe as factory-like teaching – a system in which students became a commodity rather than a learning cohort. AI did not create that condition. It arrived into it.
For Indian students and their families, this matters in a specific way. The Indian middle class invested heavily – financially and emotionally – in the belief that a UK degree represented genuine intellectual formation, not merely a certificate. That belief was largely justified for the best institutions. For many others, it was a reasonable approximation. The question now is whether it remains a reasonable approximation at all, or whether the integrity gap extends across a broader swathe of the sector than institutions are willing to acknowledge publicly.
Geopolitics and the End of Captive Markets
The second horseman – geopolitical and migration instability – is where Chilton’s essay is most directly useful for thinking about India. His argument is that the anglophone monopoly on global higher education has weakened irreversibly. He is right.
What many UK institutions still struggle to internalise is that their dominance in the global education market was never simply about academic excellence. It was sustained by an interlocking set of structural advantages: immigration pathways that made UK study a plausible route to global mobility; currency differentials that made British qualifications feel like internationally portable assets; labour market prestige inherited from decades of postcolonial soft power; and, underlying all of this, geopolitical stability that made the UK feel like a reliable destination rather than an unstable one.
Several of those pillars are eroding simultaneously.
UK immigration policy has become one of the most volatile and politically charged variables in the sector. Student visa conditions, graduate route access, dependent visa restrictions – these have changed repeatedly in recent years, and there is no settled expectation of stability. For an Indian family investing substantially in a UK degree partly for its mobility value, policy volatility is not a minor inconvenience. It is a fundamental change in the risk profile of the investment.
Meanwhile, alternative destinations are becoming more sophisticated competitors. The Gulf, Singapore, parts of Europe, and increasingly India’s own developing higher education ecosystem are not simply cheaper alternatives. They are increasingly credible ones. Nottingham discovered this in Malaysia, where the federal government opened at least eight new universities in the early 2000s, quietly absorbing the local demand that the overseas campus had been built to capture. The same dynamic is now visible at a larger scale across Asia. Chinese, Australian, and continental European institutions are actively courting Indian students with improved infrastructure, relevant curricula, and clearer post-study pathways. The assumption that Indian students are permanently drawn to the UK by the gravitational pull of historical prestige is becoming demonstrably false.
The market has not collapsed. But it has fragmented. And fragmentation is, in some ways, more dangerous for institutions than collapse, because it is invisible until it is severe.
TNE, IBCs, and the Geography of Learning
There is a third dimension the essay opens without fully entering: the transformation underway in transnational education, and the rise of International Branch Campuses in India itself.
Chilton identifies, with characteristic directness, that simply transporting the old operating system overseas is a missed opportunity. It is also, increasingly, a commercial error. A remarkable amount of UK transnational education has functioned as educational franchising dressed in the language of internationalisation – curricula designed for a British labour market and social context, delivered into radically different societies, inevitably hitting diminishing returns. That was always going to be true. It is now becoming visible.
The IBC model in India is more complex than either its advocates or its critics allow. The optimistic case is real: a global curriculum, meaningful faculty exposure, significantly lower cost, local employability relevance, and the possibility of international mobility pathways, all within India. The pessimistic case is equally real: imported branding without equivalent ecosystem depth, faculty of uneven quality and commitment, a weak research culture, and employer communities that have not yet calibrated how to value these qualifications.
The reality, as ever, lies in the specific institution rather than the model. Not all IBCs will mature equally. Some will become serious intellectual ecosystems, genuinely rooted in Indian contexts while carrying international reach. Others will remain what they are at inception – flags planted for commercial rather than academic reasons, hedging strategies against declining home enrolments dressed in the language of mission.
For Indian students evaluating IBCs, the relevant questions are therefore not generic but granular. Is the faculty genuinely empowered or merely operational? Is the curriculum locally contextualised or simply transplanted? Is the institution making a long-term commitment to India, or treating the country as a transitional revenue stream? Is employer recognition actually building in the sectors that matter to this student? These are uncomfortable questions to pose to an admissions office. They are nonetheless the right ones.
The Nottingham Case: When the Abstraction Becomes a Balance Sheet
Nottingham is not a marginal institution. It is a Russell Group university with a long research tradition, international campuses in Malaysia and China, and a brand that has carried real weight in global education markets. Its Trent Building – the neo-Gothic centrepiece of its University Park campus, opened by King George V in 1928 – once hosted Einstein, H.G. Wells, and Gandhi. That heritage is real and not nothing.
And yet by 2025–26, the university announced the suspension of sixteen courses – including all modern languages and music – alongside more than 600 redundancies. On current projections, it faces the exhaustion of its financial reserves by 2031. The group recorded a deficit of £76.8 million in 2024–25, following a restructuring charge of £11.3 million and a £74.8 million impairment on two campuses it is now trying to sell – the very campuses it paid over £77 million to acquire and refurbish within the last five years. Unions have initiated strike action and a marking boycott. The implications of that boycott extend beyond Nottingham: students at the Malaysian campus operate under dual marking arrangements, and a choke-point in the UK could prevent them from graduating.
That last detail deserves to sit with the reader for a moment. A student in Semenyih, who enrolled in good faith in a British degree programme, may find their graduation contingent on the resolution of a labour dispute at an institution four thousand miles away that is itself fighting for financial survival. No admissions brochure prepared them for that risk.
The Malaysia campus story is instructive in its own right. The Nottingham franchise there was established partly as a hedge against declining overseas student numbers – a familiar institutional logic in the sector. The market was misread. The campus was relocated to a plantation site in Semenyih, forty miles from Kuala Lumpur, in an area described by Hunter and Williams as very unattractive for students who expected to be based in urban areas. Enrolment peaked and then fell by 22 percent between 2021 and 2024. The franchise’s own parent company attempted to sell it in 2021 for less than its two decades of investment had cost. The sale was withdrawn. The campus now carries £7.6 million in debt owed to the UK institution – debt that grew by £2 million in a single year.
When the campus CEO issued a statement assuring students of stability and quality, a recent graduate offered the most honest assessment of what the credential had become: “Nope, but as long as my Malaysian employers are convinced… it’s a different story overseas.” The degree, in other words, no longer certifies formation. It certifies local employer trust. That is a different and much more fragile thing – because local employer trust is not portable, and it is not permanent.
The British government’s recent decision to block UK degree-awarding powers from the Newcastle University medical campus in Malaysia has sent a shockwave through the broader franchise sector. The implications for other UK campuses operating under similar arrangements – including those being established in India – have not yet fully registered.
For Indian families evaluating UK IBCs, Nottingham is not a worst-case outlier. It is a worked example of how the optimistic scenario, and the pessimistic scenario inhabit the same institution simultaneously – sometimes in the same financial year. The questions that should follow from it are not abstract. Is the institution that has invited you to study with it financially stable? Does its international expansion represent genuine long-term commitment, or is it a revenue hedge that will be unwound when the domestic situation deteriorates further? And if the home campus faces a crisis, what exactly is your position?
The Tectonic Shift in Indian Student Psychology
What has changed most profoundly – and what no essay written from within the UK higher education system fully captures – is the psychology of Indian student families themselves.
For decades, international education served a specific and powerful cultural function for the Indian middle class. A foreign degree, particularly a British one, was not merely a qualification. It was a signal of escape velocity: from the perceived limitations of the domestic system, from the anxieties of competitive admissions, from the social weight of family expectation. It symbolised sophistication, international legitimacy, and intergenerational advancement. That symbolic economy was real and remarkably durable.
Today’s Indian families are more anxious, more data-driven, and more sceptical than the generation that preceded them. They have seen graduates return underemployed. They have watched visa regimes tighten midway through academic careers. They have read about institutions in financial distress. They have noticed that international students have become, in certain political climates, convenient subjects for policy theatre. The blind faith premium – that quality of uncritical aspiration that once attached itself to the foreign degree – has eroded.
At the same time, India itself is changing in ways that alter the underlying logic of mobility. Earlier generations often studied abroad partly because India lacked the opportunity ecosystems that would reward ambition proportionally. That assumption is becoming less universally true. Sectors like AI, fintech, clean energy, advanced manufacturing, health technology, and digital infrastructure are developing domestic depth. A student graduating in India in 2030 may enter an economy substantively different from the one their parents imagined when they began planning. The logic of studying abroad as escape has given way, unevenly but perceptibly, to studying abroad as strategic investment – an investment whose terms must now be evaluated rather than assumed.
What the Serious Student Now Has to Ask
The checklist for an Indian student considering UK study has undergone what can only be described as a tectonic shift.
The older framework was relatively legible: ranking, visa success rates, post-study work rights, fees, city attractiveness, and the informal intelligence of cousins and seniors who had been before. The new framework is almost geopolitical and existential simultaneously.
A serious student today must assess whether the country will remain politically welcoming for the duration of their degree – not a question previous generations considered necessary to ask. They must evaluate whether the institution is financially stable. They must think about whether AI disruption will hollow out the value of their qualification before they have had time to deploy it. They must ask whether the course is preparing them for a world that still exists.
And for students considering IBCs in India, the questions are sharper still. Earlier, the question was something like: “Can I get a foreign degree without going abroad?” Now it has become: Is this campus academically equivalent to what the parent institution delivers at home? Are the faculty empowered or merely operational? Will employers genuinely value this qualification, or will it occupy an uncertain middle ground – too foreign for some employers, insufficiently prestigious for others? Is this institution genuinely committed to India for the long term, or is it here because the home market contracted?
This is a genuinely extraordinary transformation in a short period. And beneath the practical questions lies a quieter philosophical shift. The older generation pursued education as a route into stable systems. Today’s students are preparing for a world where systems themselves feel unstable. That changes not just the questions they ask but the kind of formation they need from their education.
After the Horsemen
Chilton ends with cautious optimism. Universities have survived previous civilisational transitions. They may survive this one. But survival, he argues, will require abandoning several assumptions that the modern mass university treated as sacred: that prestige guarantees relevance, that degrees automatically signal competence, that West-to-East educational flow is permanent, that physical mobility is the centre of internationalisation.
All of this is true. But the student and the family on the other side of this transaction cannot wait for institutions to complete their reckoning.
The UK remains a serious intellectual ecosystem in its best institutions. The credential still carries weight in specific sectors and specific labour markets. The experience of living and studying abroad still produces something – cultural fluency, independence, perspective, resilience – that is not simply replicated by staying home. The argument is not that international education has lost its value, but that its value has become conditional rather than automatic. It must be earned by the institution and verified by the student, rather than assumed by both.
The honest counsel to a prospective Indian student is neither panic nor complacency. It is discernment – a word that implies something more active and analytical than the passive optimism that characterised earlier generations of outbound students. The student who thrives in the coming decade will not be the one who chose the most prestigious option, but the one who chose the most honest one – honest about what they were actually buying, honest about the risks involved, honest about what they intended to do with it afterwards.
Chilton’s four horsemen are real. They are also, in a way, a forcing mechanism for a reckoning that was overdue. For years, much of global higher education benefited from informational asymmetry – institutions controlled the narrative, and students had limited visibility into financial fragility, labour market realities, and graduate outcomes. That opacity is breaking down. Indian students today are among the most sophisticated education consumers in the world, comparing countries, visa regimes, rankings, placement data, alumni trajectories, AI disruption, political climates, and currency forecasts almost simultaneously.
The old recruitment language of glossy brochures and generic “global citizen” rhetoric is becoming less effective because students increasingly sense when institutions are selling mythology instead of clarity.
That may, ultimately, be the most important consequence of the crisis Chilton describes. Not the disruption itself, but the end of a comfortable informational fiction – on both sides of the transaction.
This essay draws on George Chilton’s “Out-Galloping the Four Horsemen of Higher Education,” published in The PIE News.
I have been reading the Mahabharata. Not for the first time, but with the kind of attention that comes only when you stop treating a text as something to be finished and start treating it as something to be inhabited.
What stopped me recently was a parallel I had not quite noticed before – a structural resemblance between Bhishma’s final hours and the famous episode in which Lakshmana is sent, at Rama’s insistence, to receive wisdom from the dying Ravana. In the Mahabharata, Bhishma lies on his bed of arrows and instructs Yudhishthira across six days on rajadharma, on governance and grief, on the nature of kingship and the meaning of catastrophe. In the Ramayana, Ravana dies surrounded by the men who defeated him, and the last thing he does is teach.
Both scenes turn on the same counterintuitive premise: the most important instruction available to the victor arrives not in triumph but at the feet of the defeated.
This is not a coincidence. It is the Indian epic imagination doing what it does best – refusing to let the narrative simply celebrate.
The Scene That Won’t Stay in One Text
The Ravana-Lakshmana episode is so vivid in popular memory that most people are surprised to learn it does not appear in Valmiki’s oldest Ramayana tradition. In the core text, Ravana dies almost immediately after being struck by Rama’s arrow – there is no documented conversation, no deathbed transmission of wisdom. However, it migrated so powerfully into popular consciousness that it now feels canonical, which is itself instructive.
It survives not because Valmiki wrote it, but because it crystallises something Indian epistemology already believed before anyone wrote it down.
The structure of the episode is precise. Rama sends Lakshmana to learn from the dying Ravana. Lakshmana approaches and stands near Ravana’s head – the position of the equal or the superior, not the student. Ravana remains silent. Rama then instructs Lakshmana to move to the feet. He does. Ravana speaks. What follows is compressed into the urgency of a single dying breath: delay the harmful, hasten the good; restrain greed at its first appearance; do not trust blindly those closest to you; do not underestimate an enemy.
Ravana does not explain or excuse his own choices. He offers no rehabilitation of himself. He simply transmits what he knows, and then he dies.
Devdutt Pattanaik frames the episode’s central insight through the distinction between Lakshmi and Saraswati: wealth can be left behind; knowledge must be actively transmitted to a receptive student. The pedagogical asymmetry is the point. You cannot inherit understanding the way you inherit a kingdom.
Bhishma’s Different Grammar
The Bhishma episode has a completely different emotional structure, and that difference is worth dwelling on.
After the Kurukshetra war ends, Yudhishthira does not celebrate. He is morally destroyed. He does not want to be king. He believes – with some justification – that everything he has just won was not worth the price. It is Krishna who must push him, physically and rhetorically, toward Bhishma’s side. The Pitamaha lies on his bed of arrows, waiting – not because he is playing games with posture, but because he is dying, and the window is open.
Yudhishthira’s hesitation is not arrogance, as Lakshmana’s was. It is guilt. He cannot square receiving instruction from the man who commanded the army that killed his teacher, his friends, his cousins. The emotional block is inverted: in the Ravana scene, the student must dismantle his pride; in the Bhishma scene, the student must dismantle his shame.
What follows is not compressed into aphorism. The Shanti Parva and Anushasana Parva together constitute nearly a quarter of the entire Mahabharata – six days of continuous instruction on dana-dharma, raja-dharma, moksha-dharma, bhagavata-dharma. Political philosophy, statecraft, jurisprudence, cosmology, the nature of governance, the duties of the just ruler, what to do with unjust rulers, the relationship between personal virtue and public office. It is encyclopaedic in scope and impossible to reduce.
This scale is itself an argument. The epic refuses to let wisdom be compressible into aphorism. Catastrophe demands proportionate instruction.
The Condemned Teacher
Placed side by side, Bhishma and Ravana reveal a pattern that the Indian epic imagination returns to with striking consistency.
Both are defeated before they can teach. Both are morally compromised in ways the narrative does not sanitise – Ravana abducted Sita; Bhishma watched Draupadi be humiliated in a court of which he was the most revered elder, and said nothing. Both are intellectually sovereign even in ruin. And both become pedagogically available only after their worldly power has entirely collapsed.
This is not incidental. It is structural. The authority of both men does not rest on their virtue – it rests on their experience, and specifically on the experience of catastrophic failure. Ravana is a master of the Vedas, a scholar of statecraft, a devotee of Shiva. None of it is cancelled by the abduction of Sita. Bhishma is the greatest dharmic thinker in the Kuru line. None of it excuses his silence at Draupadi’s humiliation. The epics hold this tension without resolving it, and the refusal to resolve it is the point.
This is a radical departure from the Gurukula ideal, where the teacher’s moral purity is understood as a prerequisite for the transmission of knowledge. Here, the teacher’s moral failure is not separate from their authority – it is woven into it. Their wisdom is credible precisely because it is accompanied by visible, unredacted failure. They know what they are talking about because they were the ones who got it catastrophically wrong.
The condemned teacher. Not a figure who has been rehabilitated. A figure who teaches from within their condemnation.
What the Scenes Are Doing Structurally
The Anti-Triumphalist Interrupt
Both episodes function as interrupts in the narrative momentum of victory. They arrive immediately after military triumph and refuse to let the story celebrate. The victor is redirected toward learning, not toward the spoils of war. Rama wins, but he must send Lakshmana to the feet of the man he just killed. The Pandavas win, but Yudhishthira cannot even inhabit his victory – he must sit at the bed of arrows and be educated by the man who fought to destroy him.
Both scenes insist that winning a war is the beginning of a moral problem, not its resolution. That the dying see more clearly than the victorious is not a consolation offered to the defeated. It is a warning issued to the victors.
What Is Not Taught
There is one further resonance worth noting: in both cases, the wisdom transmitted is not about the battle just fought. Ravana does not explain his own choices. Bhishma does not adjudicate the justice of the war. They speak about life, dharma, governance, and death as though the particular conflict were already a small thing. That transcendence of the immediate is itself the teaching.
The epics do not merely ask: who won? They ask: who still understands?
Posture as Epistemology
The Ravana episode makes something explicit that the Bhishma episode implies: the student’s inner disposition is not merely courtesy – it is the precondition for transmission.
Lakshmana’s physical movement from head to feet is not a change in manners. It is a change in ontological position. Standing at the head, he is the victor, the righteous one, the man on the winning side demanding his due. Standing at the feet, he is something more difficult: a student, uncertain, present, available. Ravana speaks because the relationship has changed, not merely the location of Lakshmana’s feet.
In the Bhishma episode, the equivalent movement is internal. Yudhishthira must dismantle not arrogance but shame – which is, if anything, harder. Shame at least has the virtue of being directed outward toward one’s own acts. The shame of the victor is complicated: it is grief disguised as guilt, and it tends to produce paralysis rather than humility. Krishna’s intervention is necessary precisely because Yudhishthira cannot perform this internal movement on his own.
Both scenes say the same thing from different angles: you cannot extract wisdom from someone you approach with the certainty that you have already won. Winning and learning are, in these texts, almost mutually exclusive postures.
The Perishability of Knowledge
Both scenes activate, with extraordinary force, an idea that is easy to miss unless you are watching for it: knowledge dies with the knower.
Rama’s instruction to Lakshmana – go before he breathes his last; a great treasure of knowledge will disappear – frames Ravana not as a defeated enemy but as a library about to be burned. The urgency is epistemological, not merely sentimental. In the Mahabharata, the same logic drives Krishna to push Yudhishthira toward Bhishma despite his guilt; the Pitamaha will not linger indefinitely on the bed of arrows. Both epics insist that certain knowledge has no written form, no institutional repository – it exists only in the living, embodied intelligence of the master, and it perishes biologically.
This reflects something structurally Indian in the pedagogical imagination: gurumukha vidya – knowledge that must pass mouth to ear, person to person, through relational transmission. No text preserves it fully. The deathbed urgency is therefore not dramatic device alone; it is an epistemological statement about the limits of scripture.
The implications are not merely historical. A society that has systematically replaced the guru-shishya relationship with examination systems, confused the digitisation of content with the preservation of wisdom, and allowed its oral traditions to collapse without successor should feel the force of Rama’s urgency in a way that is not comfortable. When Lakshmana is told: go now, this will not be available again – it is a commentary on every irreplaceable teacher, craftsman, or elder whose death closes a door that no archive can reopen.
Do Not Read These as Self-Help
The most urgent thing to say about both episodes – and the most resisted – is a warning about the dominant contemporary mode of engaging with Indian mythology: mining it for life lessons and converting it into productivity content.
Both episodes resist that reduction entirely.
Ravana’s teaching is not a productivity hack about doing good deeds promptly. It is a confession extracted from a man who knew the right thing and did the opposite for decades. The instruction to hasten the good and delay the harmful arrives in Ravana’s voice – the man who procrastinated his way into a war he could have avoided, who held Sita against his own dharmic instincts, who watched his best advisors counsel him toward release and chose pride instead. When he says these things with his last breath, he is not dispensing wisdom. He is describing his own failure in the first person. That distinction matters enormously, and it collapses completely the moment you reduce the episode to three bullet points.
Bhishma’s instruction on rajadharma is not a leadership manual. It emerges from a man whose most consequential act was silence in the face of injustice. The instruction on governance and dharma comes from someone who had every institutional tool available to prevent the war and used none of them, because his vow of obedience to the throne was more important to him than his obligation to justice. When he instructs Yudhishthira on how a king should behave, he is speaking from a position of intimate knowledge of how a king should not behave – and he knows this. That self-awareness is audible if you listen for it, and inaudible if you are reading for extractable lessons.
If you walk away with an Instagram aphorism, you have missed the point entirely.
The Myth Machine and Its Uses
The Irony at the Centre
The specific irony at the heart of this is worth naming directly. The two most powerful anti-self-help episodes in Indian literature – a dying Ravana who knew better and did not act, a Bhishma who understood dharma and chose silence – have become the primary raw material for Indian motivational content. The very episodes whose entire point is the gap between knowing and doing are being used to flatten that gap with cheerful aphorisms.
This is not a coincidence. The myth-as-productivity-content industry needs exactly these figures – towering, brilliant, morally complicated – because their intellectual authority lends weight to the message. What gets quietly dropped is the part where the authority comes from their failure. Strip away the failure, and you have a wise man dispensing wisdom. Retain it, and you have something far more unsettling: a mirror.
The Essay and Its Ecosystem
It is worth being precise about where the problem sits. Devdutt Pattanaik’s essay on the Ravana episode is more sophisticated than the genre it superficially resembles. He presents multiple, competing readings simultaneously – the story as an endorsement of Ravana’s scholarship, as a lesson in student posture, as a contrast between God and ordinary man, as a critique of Ravana’s own arrogance, and – this is the sharp move – as evidence that Rama uses humility instrumentally, as a technique to extract intellectual assets. An essay that admits Rama might be manipulative is not writing a life-lesson poster.
Pattanaik ends not with a prescription but with a diagnosis: both Ravana and Lakshmana fail to learn the same underlying thing – to overcome the insecurity that drives the need to control and dominate. That is a statement about the human condition, not a productivity tip. His broader work on Ravana makes the point even more bluntly: education, knowledge, and power do not necessarily make you a wise man.
The problem is not the essay. The problem is the culture of its reception. The interpretive openness that Pattanaik builds in – five or six possible readings without resolution – tends to collapse entirely in the hands of the content machine that circulates his work. By the time ‘Ravana’s three lessons’ appears on a motivational reel, the ambiguity is gone, the moral complexity is gone, and what remains is a very ancient story wearing the clothes of a TED Talk.
There is also a fair structural question about the pluralist method itself. Holding all readings open simultaneously without committing to a hierarchy of interpretation is intellectually generous and popularly legible. But if every reading is equally valid, the text loses its capacity to challenge the reader. Ambiguity that never resolves into discomfort is just pluralism as entertainment.
The best engagement with these deathbed episodes – whether Pattanaik’s or anyone else’s – is one that leaves the reader more disturbed at the end than at the beginning. The essay that does that is not self-help. The essay that leaves you nodding with comfortable recognition is, regardless of how sophisticated its framing.
What Remains
The Mahabharata and the Ramayana are not comfortable books. They were never meant to be. They survive not because they give answers but because they make the questions unbearable to ignore. Yudhishthira is interesting not because he eventually becomes a good king but because he never quite stops doubting whether he should be one at all. That irresolution is the teaching.
Both deathbed scenes ultimately encode one disposition rather than one lesson: the willingness to remain a student even after you have won. Not the lesson, not the list, not the three actionable insights. The posture.
Both scenes force the student to receive essential knowledge from across the line. Lakshmana learns from the man he helped kill. Yudhishthira learns from the commander who fought to destroy him. In an era of extraordinary ideological, religious, and political polarisation, this may be the most practically demanding takeaway these texts offer: your most important instruction may be sitting inside a perspective you have already decided to defeat.
The epics do not ask you to agree with Ravana or rehabilitate Bhishma. They ask you to sit at the feet long enough to hear what they actually know.
Victory produces governors. Defeat produces teachers. The Indian epic imagination honours both. But it reserves its most searching pedagogical attention for the latter – and it asks, with some urgency and without much comfort, whether the victors are capable of listening before the last breath is gone.
When a hospital denies treatment on billing grounds, the feeling it produces is not ordinary disappointment. It is not the frustration of a bad product or a delayed flight. It carries a moral charge – the specific, vertiginous sensation of a promise being broken. Not a contract. A promise. Something civilisational, extended across generations, quietly withdrawn.
Education produces the same sensation, at the moment a humanities department is shut down because the enrolment numbers don’t justify the headcount. These two sectors – healthcare and education – carry this burden above all others. And what has happened to them follows so similar a pattern, in so many countries, over so many decades, that coincidence is simply not available as an explanation.
Both began as institutions of stewardship. Both have been converted, with remarkable efficiency, into instruments of extraction.
This did not happen through announcement or conspiracy. No board of governors convened to declare that patients would henceforth be managed as revenue streams, or that students would be treated as enrolment targets. The shift was accumulated – in funding models, in investor expectations, in administrative cultures, in the slow replacement of one vocabulary with another so gradual you only notice it when you try to remember which word came first.
In healthcare, the language of care gave way to the language of throughput. Beds became units. Procedures became billable events. Patient outcomes were reframed as metrics to be managed, not just humans to be healed. Doctors, trained in the long tradition of clinical judgment, found their autonomy steadily eroded by protocols designed less for patient welfare than for liability management and cost compression. The hospital administrator replaced the physician as the locus of institutional power. The spreadsheet began to govern the ward.
Education followed the same grammar, with minor changes in terminology. Learning became content delivery. Students became users, then customers, then – in the venture-backed EdTech lexicon – learners to be “engaged” and “retained.” Professors lost ground to managerial bureaucracy. Curriculum decisions increasingly deferred to employability data. Rankings, those magnificent weapons of brand management, turned universities into competitors rather than communities. Research drifted toward commercial viability. The intellectual formation that once justified the entire enterprise was quietly rebranded as “student experience” – something to be surveyed, scored, and sold back to prospective applicants.
What drove both trajectories was the same force: the entanglement with private capital at scale. Once healthcare and education became serious sites of investment – not merely sources of stable public employment – the logic of capital began to displace the logic of vocation. Growth had to be demonstrated. Returns had to be generated. And both sectors, historically resistant to profit as a governing motive, discovered they had no adequate institutional immune system against it.
The most revealing symptom is not the commercialisation. It is the language that persists alongside it.
A hotel chain makes no moral claim on you. It exists to fill rooms and generate margin. Nobody feels betrayed when it raises its rates or cuts housekeeping staff. The transaction is transparent. The motive is declared.
Hospitals and universities are different. They continue to speak in the register of mission. Healing. Empowerment. Access. Transformation. Equity. Human flourishing. The language is not cynically deployed – many of the individuals inside these institutions believe it sincerely, and act on it daily. But the machinery surrounding them rewards something else entirely: billing efficiency, debt expansion, market capture, brand management, cost compression.
This gap – between the moral vocabulary and the operational incentive – is precisely what generates the particular exhaustion that so many professionals in both fields now report. It is not simply burnout. It is the specific depletion of being asked to perform a vocation inside a structure organised around something other than that vocation’s purpose. Doctors who became doctors to heal are managing documentation to satisfy insurers. Educators who became educators to transmit knowledge are attending meetings about retention dashboards. The work persists, but it is increasingly peripheral to what the institution is actually optimising for.
That is what makes the modern crisis in both sectors so hard to articulate. The healing still happens. The learning still happens. But it happens despite the structure, not because of it. Meaning survives in the margins – in the individual encounter between a doctor and a patient, a teacher and a student – while the institution surrounding those encounters is organised around entirely different ends.
The downstream consequences are now visible enough to name plainly.
In both sectors: burnout at scale. Administrative bloat that consumes resources without producing care or knowledge. Dependency on debt-financed consumers – patients who cannot afford treatment, students who cannot afford degrees, both groups borrowing against futures the system may not actually deliver. Consolidation into giant networks that prioritise market share over service quality. Algorithmic decision-making that replaces judgment with process. Standardisation that mistakes measurability for meaning. And, inevitably, premium tiers – better care and better education for those who can pay more, with the language of equity preserved in the mission statement while the reality quietly diverges.
There is a bitter line that circulates in American healthcare: the system is designed to manage revenue streams, not health. The same sentiment is now being voiced in higher education – the system is designed to manage enrolments, rankings, and cash flow, not learning. Both observations are too bleak to be entirely true and too accurate to be dismissed.
So, what do we do with this?
One option is resigned realism: accept that once a sector reaches sufficient scale and attracts sufficient capital, financialisation is structurally inevitable. Mourn it privately. Find meaning in individual practice. Stop expecting institutions to be better than the economic systems that sustain them. This position is intellectually coherent. It is also a capitulation dressed as sophistication.
The harder question – the one worth actually sitting with – is whether we are willing to make the structural arguments that the situation demands. Not critique at the level of corporate behaviour or individual bad actors, but a genuine reckoning with what it means to financialise sectors whose entire social value rests on the premise that they are not primarily financial.
Healthcare and education are not unique in being captured by capital. They are unique in being sectors where the capture is actively harmful to the social function they exist to perform. A financialised steel industry produces cheaper steel or dearer steel. A financialised hospital produces worse health outcomes. A financialised university produces a narrower, more instrumentalised form of human development. The damage is not incidental. It is architectural.
We have spent decades describing this transformation with increasing precision. The description is good. The diagnosis is settled. What remains – what we have been far less willing to attempt – is the redesign.
The question is no longer what happened to these institutions. It is what we are prepared to build instead – and whether we are honest enough to call the current arrangement by its right name before we start.
How TNE platforms are evolving into the operating system of global higher education – and what that means for the universities that partnered with them first
In January 2026, Eruditus announced partnerships with seven global universities to establish campuses across Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Gurugram. The institutions named – Illinois Institute of Technology, University of Aberdeen, University of Bristol, University of Liverpool, University of New South Wales, University of Victoria, University of York – are not second-tier names. They are credible, mid-to-upper-tier universities with genuine subject strengths, real student demand in India, and entirely rational reasons to want a physical presence in the world’s largest higher education market. Eruditus, through its subsidiary EruLearning Solutions, will manage on-ground operations: campus setup, student recruitment, admissions, and regulatory navigation.
On the surface, this is a sensible division of labour. Universities bring degrees, faculty oversight, and academic standards. Eruditus brings execution. Call it the efficiency argument – and it is, in fact, efficient.
There is also a second reading. And if you sit with it long enough, the second reading becomes the more structurally interesting one.
The hierarchy that is quietly inverting
For five centuries, the university has operated on a single unchallenged premise: it is the centre of gravity. Students come to the university. Knowledge flows from the university. Prestige accrues to the university. The hierarchy is legible and stable: institution → programme → student.
Platforms are inverting that hierarchy – not noisily, not through hostile takeover or regulatory challenge, but quietly, structurally, through the accumulation of capabilities that universities have always been poor at building: distribution, market intelligence, and commercial agility.
The pattern is familiar from other industries. In the early years of digital media, studios held the power – they owned the content, the talent, the brand. Netflix began as a distribution service. Amazon began as a bookshop. Spotify positioned itself as a service to the music industry. In each case, the entity that controlled distribution eventually controlled value. The content producers – studios, publishers, record labels – found themselves negotiating with the very infrastructure they had treated as a vendor.
Education has been slower to reach this inflection point. But it is arriving. And India’s TNE market is where the arrival will be most visible.
What platforms actually control
Universities control curriculum, accreditation, and degree authority. Those assets are real and durable. But increasingly, the assets that determine whether a student enrols – and whether an institution reaches students it cannot recruit to its home campus – sit with platforms.
Platforms control student acquisition pipelines, built over years of marketing to aspirational learner communities. They control demand data: not just which programmes students enquire about, but which ones they complete, which ones produce employment outcomes, which price points convert interest into enrolment. They control employer engagement networks that universities rarely build independently. And critically, they operate with the commercial agility that academic governance structures systematically prevent: product teams, revenue targets, rapid market testing, data-driven iteration.
In fast-growing, digitally mediated education markets – and India’s is both – this agility compounds into structural advantage.
The Eruditus model deserves careful attention because it is not the kind of platform usually invoked in these conversations. Coursera and edX are marketplaces: they aggregate and distribute content, but they do not run campuses. Eruditus is structurally different – an infrastructure operator spanning distribution (marketing, recruitment, demand analytics), operations (campus setup, admissions, cohort management), and academic facilitation (faculty coordination, programme design, delivery logistics). Most edtech platforms occupy one of these layers. Eruditus occupies all three.
The airport analogy is more precise than it first appears. Airlines bring aircraft and routes. Airport operators control runways, scheduling, ground operations, and passenger flow. Airlines may not care who operates the airport, as long as their flights land on time. But airport operators, over time, acquire substantial influence over which airlines thrive, which routes are viable, and what the passenger experience of the entire ecosystem looks like.
Eruditus is building airport infrastructure. The seven universities announced in January 2026 are the first airlines to schedule regular service.
The three-stage evolution
Platform ecosystems across industries tend to move through three recognisable stages. It is worth naming them plainly in the TNE context.
Stage one: Service provider. The platform supports existing players. It makes their entry easier, faster, cheaper. This is where most of the January 2026 announcements sit. Eruditus is described as a partner, an enabler, an operational arm. Universities perceive it as support infrastructure. The relationship is unambiguously helpful in this stage, and the helpfulness is genuine.
Stage two: Infrastructure layer. The platform becomes indispensable. Enrolment pipelines are platform-driven. Campus operations depend on the platform’s systems and relationships. The university’s India presence is no longer separable from the platform’s India presence without significant disruption. Negotiating leverage shifts. This stage arrives gradually, without a formal announcement, and is often only visible in retrospect.
Stage three: Vertical integration. The platform moves upstream – not necessarily to replace universities, but to build its own institutions alongside its infrastructure operations. By this stage it possesses everything required: deep market intelligence, operational expertise at scale, industry relationships, and accumulated credibility sufficient to attract faculty and students independently.
The surrogate TNE scenario – a platform-backed institution launched internationally, legitimacy borrowed from existing academic partnerships, then expanded via branch campuses in India and other major markets – is not science fiction. It is the logical extension of platform economics applied to a sector that is only now discovering what platform economics does to institutional hierarchies.
The overseas-first legitimacy play
If a platform entity with Eruditus’s pedigree were to move toward vertical integration – and this is the speculative but structurally coherent part of the argument – the strategically elegant sequence would not begin in India.
It would begin outside India. Dubai International Academic City, Singapore, or Abu Dhabi – jurisdictions already comfortable with private higher education ventures and international branch campuses. Launching in India first would immediately trigger regulatory scrutiny, political sensitivity around commercial actors in education, and unfavourable comparisons with IITs and established private institutions. An international launch sidesteps all of this.
From that base, the architecture builds itself. Dual degrees and joint research centres with existing university partners provide credibility transfer. Programmes designed around employment pipelines – Eruditus’s natural differentiator – provide market differentiation. A few graduating cohorts with documented career outcomes provide the legitimacy that marketing cannot manufacture. Then branch campuses in India, Southeast Asia, and Africa. By the time the institution opens in Mumbai or Bengaluru, it arrives not as an edtech company attempting to become a university, but as an established international institution expanding its global network.
The narrative shift matters enormously. And the universities that provided the early credibility transfer would find themselves, at some point in this arc, competing with the very ecosystem they helped seed.
Who evolves first – and in what sequence
If this trajectory runs – and that qualifier matters, which I return to below – the evolution does not reach all of higher education simultaneously. It moves through the system in layers.
Mid-tier foreign universities entering India through TNE feel it first. These institutions already operate in a narrow differentiation band: credible but not iconic, internationally recognised but not globally dominant. A vertically integrated ecosystem operator offering industry-linked degrees, lower tuition, and documented employment outcomes would compress their market quickly.
Premium Indian private universities feel it second. They compete on infrastructure, international collaborations, and premium positioning – the precise terrain a platform-backed institution would occupy. Their advantages – regulatory familiarity, domestic networks, cultural embeddedness – provide insulation but not immunity.
Traditional Western campuses dependent on international student mobility feel it last and least, for now. Their deep research ecosystems, historical prestige, and dense alumni networks are genuinely difficult to replicate at speed. But if the mobility premium weakens – rising costs, tightening visa environments, normalising remote work – the cost differential between overseas study and a well-designed distributed degree becomes harder for families to sustain as an unexamined assumption.
India is the first major arena where this sequence is being tested at scale.
The question universities are not yet asking
Most universities entering India through platform partnerships are focused, rationally, on the near term: regulatory approval, first cohort enrolment, faculty arrangements, the gap between 140 students in year one and 5,000 in year ten. These are the right questions for this phase of the market.
But the structural question – the one that will matter more in 2033 than it does today – is different: are we building our India presence, or are we building the platform’s India leverage?
Every month a university operates through a platform partner without developing independent regulatory knowledge, student recruitment capability, and employer relationships transfers capacity to the platform and away from the institution. What begins as an enabling relationship gradually becomes a load-bearing one.
GEDU Global Education’s trajectory is instructive here. Having invested £25 million in India with £200 million more committed across the next three years – spanning GIFT City and multiple city campuses – GEDU is building comparable infrastructure leverage to Eruditus through a different entry architecture. Two major platform operators accumulating this scale of India infrastructure, in parallel, narrows the independent operating space for universities that chose not to build their own India capacity while it was still available to build.
The argument is not against platforms. It is for eyes-open partnership – contractual protections against dependency, explicit milestones by which institutions assume direct responsibility for specific operational functions, and governance structures that maintain genuine academic sovereignty. And perhaps most importantly, institutional self-awareness about which of the three evolutionary stages the partnership is actually in.
A necessary caveat
The trajectory described here is plausible, not predetermined.
Platforms carrying operational responsibility for physical campuses cannot behave like asset-light marketplaces. Once Eruditus manages real buildings, employs local staff, and bears accountability for student outcomes, its incentives are tied to long-term ecosystem stability. A platform that damages the institutions it operates alongside damages itself. That alignment with university interests is real and should not be dismissed.
The legitimacy barrier to platform-backed universities is also genuinely high. Research ecosystems, accreditation frameworks, alumni networks, and scholarly culture are slow-moving assets that cannot be purchased or assembled quickly. Even a well-capitalised platform would need a decade to earn the kind of institutional credibility that universities accumulate across generations.
Universities still hold three assets platforms cannot easily replicate: degree authority, research ecosystems, and the accumulated legitimacy of institutions that have outlasted every disruption in their history. If they remain disciplined about protecting those assets – insisting on academic sovereignty, investing in independent India capacity, treating platform arrangements as transitional architecture rather than permanent infrastructure – the relationship can remain genuinely balanced and mutually productive.
The platform model, at its best, creates TNE supply that would not otherwise exist, and reaches students who would otherwise have no access to internationally credentialled education at a reasonable price. That matters. The efficiency argument is not cynical.
The point is simply this: understand the structural logic before it becomes the structural reality.
The last word belongs to the student
None of this would matter if the end result were better education. If platform-operated campuses genuinely deliver academic rigour, research depth, faculty continuity, and employment outcomes at a price point that makes the foreign credential accessible to families who cannot send their children abroad – then the structural shifts in institutional power are secondary to the outcomes that justify the whole enterprise.
The test is not where the power eventually sits. It is whether the student who walked into a campus in August 2026 walks out four years later with something that genuinely changed what was possible for her.
