Moan

10/6/2025

I still have faith in grunting when it’s hard to push a big turd out through my narrow Bengali sphincter. But these grunts aren’t of the growling, sopranic, furniture-vibrating kind; they’re the feeble, middle-class, middle-aged, half-assed, moronic, low-throated mosquito moans that only someone with an ear for such sad acoustics could ever decipher.

It’s usually the only time I say anything at all. My vocal cords are on permanent sabbatical, sunbathing somewhere in my throat, leaving me to mime my way through life. Not that it’s such a tragedy—every time I try to talk, people eventually want to injure me in some permanent way. I’ve come to believe language itself is a scam, a Ponzi scheme invented by grifters who couldn’t afford silence. People talk and talk like leaky faucets in a government flat, dripping stupidity by the second, while plumbers of reason are all dead or drunk. Words have become the equivalent of cheap plastic bangles—bright, brittle, endlessly sold to suckers. I don’t buy anymore. My silence is the only luxury brand I can still afford.

Besides, when I do try to engage, it’s like throwing pearls before swine, except the pearls are made of rotting fish-eyes and the swine are drunk douchebag with opinions about geopolitics. Someone once asked me, “Why don’t you say something cheerful?” The answer is simple: because the cheerful ones are already armed, dangerous, and running pyramid schemes of fake optimism. One wrong syllable from me, and they’d gladly use my bones as curtain rods for their overpriced duplex flats. And so I grunt. The grunt is democratic, noncommittal, untraceable, and biodegradable. A grunt doesn’t overstay its welcome the way a sentence does. A grunt doesn’t need footnotes or context or citations in APA. It just rumbles out, dies on the spot, and is forgotten, like the great political promises of our age.

There’s a certain dignity in shit that people refuse to acknowledge. Birth is bloody, death is smelly, and the only honest interval in between is the long, slow parade of turds. The rest is costume drama. Nobody wants to admit that their Nobel-winning brain, their fancy tie, their hundred-year-old lineage all ends up as a skid mark on the ceramic basin of history. The sphincter is the great democratizer—tight, reluctant, but ultimately yielding, and every emperor, beggar, saint, and software engineer has to pass through its indifferent gate. I’ve sat on the commode long enough to know more about mortality than priests and poets. The struggle to excrete is rehearsal for the struggle to expire. You sweat, you push, you tremble, you pray, and then—release. A turd slides into oblivion the same way a man slides into his coffin: graceless, brown, final. The only applause is the flush, and even that’s a kind of mechanical lie, a fake ovation before your creation is whisked away to the underworld of septic tanks. Like the ordeal that thousands of Durga idols are going through at the very moment now.

And what a kingdom that underworld is—millions of tons of the world’s unspoken autobiography, swirling together in dark rivers. Nobody reads that book, though it’s the truest history ever written. Civilizations are judged by their sewage, not their scriptures. If archaeologists of the future dig us up, they’ll find less wisdom in our libraries than in the compacted sludge of our drains.

The tragedy is if I am sick, which I already halfway am, but say moribund; I won’t remember anything—no faces, no syllables, no half-chewed hopes—in my defense to either preserve my turd-like existence or pass on any meaningful words to the silence and absence of kith and kin. This is the great final constipation of life: the brain clogging before the bowel, the memories drying into brittle flakes, the self reduced to a trembling anus of thought squeezing out nothing but the smell of what once was. And in that last muted grunt, there will be no audience, no elegy, just the echo of a man who mistook his own shit for a message and discovered, too late, that the void doesn’t read. And here I am, a name that no one remembers, writing a blog that no one ever reads. I tried to do something in India once — a health information exchange, jesus fucking shitting christ, in India — where we all know we’ve got too many gods to worry about and to defend those gods against that fucking arabian bearded god. It’s a difficult bed to lie in, trying to do anything here as an entrepreneur; the odds of striking any metal, or even non-metal, are zero because the system is set up against you. The entire system is corrupt, and nobody really cares about health care or transparency, and if you dare to put the two together — health care and transparency — then, jesus fucking christ again, you’ve summoned the perfect storm of indifference. We don’t care. We actually want people to die here, die in filthy squalor, and charge them for it, charge twice, bill them thrice, cleanse nothing and leave it all as a holy fucking bollywood singsong shit-stain. And I, at best, am a shittier stain, with a mumbling moan — the defecation grunt of the day that no one’s here to hear — just the echo of a man who mistook his own shit for a message and discovered, too late, that the void doesn’t read, while the rest of India, shackled and servile, keeps forever sucking the white man’s grunting IT cock, mistaking servitude for salvation and code-mongering for civilization.

Anyway I have to wipe now.

Come to think of it, AI is now going to take that cock away from Indians, and we’ll be left sucking on some cold, stainless-steel balls, licking chrome-plated boots polished with silicon spit, our tongues cut on the jagged edges of algorithms we don’t understand and never wrote. The outsourcing orgy ends not with a bang but with a metallic clang: call centers ghosted by chatbots, code factories replaced by machine forges, and the whole proud Indian IT revolution reduced to a historical fart, dissipating into nothingness. Instead of sucking up to white project managers, we’ll be on our knees before faceless servers, genuflecting to GPUs whirring like angry gods, choking on the oily lubricant of progress while convincing ourselves that servitude to machines is somehow nobler than servitude to men.

On one hand, there are people giddy with the optimistic euphoria of dark factories and humanless automation, and although these look reasonable in advanced economies and advantaged geographies that sit on monopolies, the reality of what will happen in India over just the next two cataclysmic years makes me hesitant to join them. India is mismanaged; it’s a subverted democracy—which is a polite way to avoid uttering unparliamentary invectives—but you get the idea: a plutocratic, oligarch-led, kleptocratic kakistocracy, which is essentially saying that we can’t do any worse. And once all the grunt business process outsourcing jobs that have been holding up the talcum powder on brown faces dry up and go to the robots, there won’t be any jobs. We don’t have any internally self-sufficient cycles that can keep us afloat and safe. And if anyone asks you about the future of employment in management and IT, tell them point-blank it’s not only zero but not even negative—it’s on the imaginary number axis now. Which, without the mathspeak, means not only are no jobs going to be created, not only are positions going to be made extinct, but entire fields now have question marks in front of them and may not even exist.

In this dystopian setup, even if the only business left standing were the brothel trade, who exactly would be the customers? You can’t run an economy where everyone’s selling and no one’s buying, and that’s precisely the direction we’re sprinting toward—an entire country hawking its labor, its decency, its last scraps of pride, to no one in particular. If every girl became a seller and every man her manager, the ledger would still bleed red because there’d be no demand, just a great national clearance sale of desperation. The irony is that the Indian talent for jugaad would still try to rig even that doomed market, underbidding itself to extinction, proving once again that the apocalypse here won’t arrive with fire and brimstone but with an invoice and a discount.