Notes from April, 2026

Personally, of course, Menon wore ‘just a loin-cloth’ in the afternoons, because as a man it was still permissible to do this. Yet for females the rules had been modified. Menon grew up with bare-breasted women, but with exposure to the wider world, he too came to frown upon that old tradition. He had absorbed (and was now endorsing) an external gaze in which women’s bodies necessarily needed covering up. To not do so became ‘abnormal’—or to channel the scholars referred to earlier, it was no longer ‘proper’. Which is fine, given that sensibilities change over time in every culture. Trouble arises, however, when we project a modern dynamic into the past to trigger unhistorical outrage and a well-meaning but misplaced indignation.

A note on the delimitation bill

The genuinely serious objections to these bills are structural and are barely being discussed. We are redrawing India’s constituency map using 2011 census data, eighteen years old by the time elections are held under it in 2029. Worse, Parliament has now given itself the power to decide by simple majority when any future delimitation occurs and which census it uses. There is no automatic constitutional trigger anymore. Every future government can time it to its own electoral advantage. The delimitation being carried out today could govern Indian elections for three decades, based on data that was already stale when the exercise began. Will this nullify any electoral advances possible through the realization of a caste census, which some states are considering or have considered?

Alongside a fascinating piece of history lost to time is this little nugget:

Pass through the doorway and you'll finally come face to face with a grave covered with a Persian rug, decorated with a giant AI rendering of a Mughal Princess.

A story about someone lost to time and erased by history, only to be revived and rendered by the approximation of a model. Conquistadors or Claude, the oppressor always erases memory.