Essays
The finished arguments, newest first — each with its claims ledger on the page and a suggested citation. Earlier-stage pieces are gathered under working papers.
The Temple the Takedown Didn't See
Frisco, 2026 — an essay on surveillance, categories, and a $61 million blind spot
Dukh and the Duke: The Five Thieves as Systemic Agents
Gurmat Political Theology in Moulin Rouge! and Devdas
Heeramandi: The District the Goddess Lost
Bhansali's Return to the Kotha — Colonial Law, Sacred Space, and the Argument Netflix Didn't Know It Was Making
Mind as Policy
Reinforcement Learning, Belief, and the Old Technology of Changing Yourself
The Colonization Operating System: From Untermenschen to 1984
How a Regime Stops Needing Guards
The Second Closure
Partition, Refugee Displacement, and the Remaking of Sikhism, 1947–1971
What They Called Themselves
Reclaiming the Zoroastrian Rulers and Figures That Built the World's Moral Architecture
The Sanskrit Mirror
How the Vedic and Zoroastrian Traditions Emerged from the Same Source — and What Their Divergence Reveals
And Then Came Nanak
Ik Onkar, the Completion of the Arc, and Why the Matrix Has No Door That Opens From the Other Side
They Scheduled the Cure
How the Justice-Rehabilitation Alliance Criminalized the Most Effective Treatments for Addiction
No Key to the House
Scorsese, Coppola, and the Architecture of the American Guest Condition
The Cow's Lament
Two Traditions, One Cry, and the Oldest Unacknowledged Parallel in Indo-Iranian Scholarship
What Grows in the Dung
The Cow's Body as Entheogenic Substrate, the Unbroken Pre-Colonial Thread, and the Erasure That Followed
Shamans of the Shivaliks
Reconstructing Foothill Consciousness Practices Without Inventing Them
Moulin Rouge! and Devdas: The Sacred Feminine Refuses Possession
Two Films, One Indic Thesis
The Devdas Operating System: Why Self-Destruction Reads as Devotion
The SICI Reading of Hindi Cinema's Longest-Running Hero
Datura and Hindu Demonology: A Pharmacological Reading
The Rākṣasa Profile Against the Anticholinergic Toxidrome — and Why the Asura Drops Out
Before Neo
Granted Vision in the 1980s Television Epics — and the Screen Precedent for Nadar
The Door That Opens From the Other Side
Reading The Matrix Through Sikh Philosophy