Random Musings (TOI Columns)
Every week, Random Musings tries to make sense of a world where Swami Vivekananda picks football over the Gita, quantum mechanics explains Donald Trump better than economists ever could, Kash Patel rewrites the Indian-American script, and K-pop fans become India’s frontline warriors. It’s philosophy, politics, and pop culture — shaken, stirred, and served with a smirk.
Why quantum mechanics is key to understanding Donald Trump
In The Tao of Physics, perhaps the finest popular novel on parallels between modern physics and “Eastern mysticism,” author Fritjof Capra sums up the dichotomy by stating: “Socrates in Greece made the famous statement ‘I know that I know nothing,’ and Lao Tzu in China said, ‘Not knowing that one knows is best.’” The two views encapsulate the civilisational split in how complexity is perceived — and explain why Western minds, even their best ones, struggle with concepts like relativity, duality, and, of course, Donald Trump.
For over a decade, commentators have tried — and failed — to explain Trump. They’ve overanalysed the polls, underestimated the rallies, and overdosed on coastal smugness. They still can’t fathom how this man keeps winning hearts and minds, becoming the first Republican in two decades to win the popular vote. The root of their confusion may lie even deeper: a Newtonian worldview shaped by centuries of Abrahamic certainty — one in which Galileo is forced to apologise for describing the basic framework of the universe, forcing Bhojpuri music artistes to pay tribute to his immortal line E pur si muove (“But it moves”) in numerous songs like Aara Heele Chhapra Heele.
A worldview obsessed with levers, with cause-and-effect, with clean inputs and predictable outputs simply cannot explain Trump, any more than the choreographer of Nach Baliye can solve string theory with a dance sequence.
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How Kash Patel broke every stereotype about Indian-Americans
While caste has become a prickly topic in America — particularly with Dismantle Global Hindutva campaigns and the zeal to uncover casteism where it doesn’t exist — comedian Nimesh Patel once offered a succinct explanation of the real Indian-American hierarchy. At the top, he joked, were the doctors, engineers, and CEOs — the men who made Indian-Americans the model minority. But they all came to drown their sorrows with the Indians at the bottom of the hierarchy: the liquor store Patels.
Of course, Nimesh Patel’s social critique skipped over the Jhumpa Lahiri-reading diaspora of upper-middle-class ennui, but that’s an ontological discussion for another day.
Which brings us to the one Patel who simply doesn’t fit into any version of the Indian hierarchy. Kashyap ‘Kash’ Pramod Patel — the breaker of every Indian-American stereotype — became the first Hindu and Indian-origin man to lead the FBI.
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If K-Pop fans don’t get ya, Beer Biceps must
The Indian response, official and unofficial, in the face of Pakistani terrorism — and disinformation — has been as sublime as a vintage Virat Kohli cover drive, which is saying something because that cover drive is the closest proof we have to the existence of a higher being, much like a Lionel Messi shoulder drop or a Roger Federer down-the-line backhand.
From PM Modi’s speech to the official press conferences, every response has been measured and calculated, with a touch of class. Take DGMO Rajiv Ghai’s sublime remark from a vintage Ashes series to explain the surgical precision of India’s aerial offence: “Dust to dust, ashes to ashes, if Thommo don’t get ya, Lillee must!”
The same could be said for India’s unofficial response, which can be summed up with: dust to dust, hashtag to ashes, if K-pop fans don’t get you, then Beer Biceps must. Much like Pepsi’s World Cup slogan of 1999, there was nothing official about it, but it definitely struck a chord.
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St Petersburg
Manchester United legend Roy Keane — the inspiration for Ted Lasso’s Roy Kent, if Gen Z is confused — once summed up Sir Alex Ferguson’s innate ability to read the room and lead his men by recalling a particular match when United were hosting Tottenham Hotspur, and how the gaffer simply walked in and said: “Lads, it’s Tottenham,” summing up how the opposition needed no other introduction.
“Lads, it’s Tottenham” became as much a leitmotif in Premier League lore as “Prawn Sandwich Brigade,” “Parking the Bus,” and “Doing an Arsenal,” capturing the zenith and nadir that Manchester United and Tottenham once represented.
Those heydays are long gone, as evidenced by the recent Europa League final between the two clubs, when Manchester United huffed and puffed and still failed to beat Tottenham Hotspur. “Lads, it’s United” might now be the punchline instead.
The truth is that since Sir Alex Ferguson’s retirement in 2013, Manchester United has been a masterclass in incompetence — whether it’s signing players, deciding player wages, picking managers, determining which jobs to cut, or even deciding what food ought to be served in the cafeteria.
And right now, there’s only one establishment in the world that can match that level of ineptitude. Unfortunately, it’s the most powerful entity in the so-called free world, with access to the largest nuclear arsenal.
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Why some Indian liberals are celebrating Zohran Mamdani — and think he is the new Obama
Zohran Mamdani’s elevation as the Democrats’ New York mayoral candidate was oddly reminiscent of Daredevil: Born Again, the brutal Netflix show retrofitted to fit into the Kevin Feige Marvel Cinematic Universe. Most aficionados consider the original Daredevil series to be one of the finest comic shows of all time, with gritty realism, Catholic guilt, a banging opening theme, and a main character who, despite being blind, always manages to hook up with the best-looking member of the opposite sex — making one wonder if that is his actual superpower.
It was, to quote Homelander, absolutely perfect.
While Born Again fails to hit the heights of the original, it’s still better than most of the muck being passed off as content from Marvel (looking at you, Brave New World).
In the show, Wilson Fisk leaves behind a life of crime to become the Mayor of New York, while Matt Murdock hangs up his cowl and life mission to beat every villain to within an inch of his life to instead become a lawyer. But if life teaches us one thing, it’s that one can never rebel against one’s basic programming — as Fisk slowly returns to his criminal ways and Murdock to his vigilante instincts.
What made the parallel uncanny was that Zohran Mamdani himself looked like he’d stepped out of that world. With his straggly-yet-cultivated beard and moody intensity, he almost resembles an ethnic Matt Murdock. And like Wilson Fisk, he wants to rule the city he loves but prefers viral TikTok reels to violence.
While he has just become the Democratic nominee for now, his dismantling of the working corpse known as Andrew Cuomo has been celebrated with more gusto in the neighbourhoods of SoBo and DefCol than in the boroughs of New York.
One reason for the celebration is that his win — however unrelated to the upper-class anglicised elite of India — is seen as a sort of personal validation of their crypto-political stance. The ones whom stand-up comedian Varun Grover describes performing liberalism by buying a ukulele and learning how to play Hum Dekhenge.
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Why Swami Vivekananda batted for football
It’s interesting how Swami Vivekananda is intrinsically linked to the United States of America. He gave his iconic Sisters and Brothers of America speech on September 11, 1893, and he declared independence from the physical form binding us to this world on July 4, the day America declared its independence from tea.
Swami Vivekananda was not just a monk in saffron robes but the roaring voice of Vedanta, the philosophy of non-dualism that sees everything as Brahman — the universal consciousness.
To him, realising that ‘Thou art That’ (Tat Tvam Asi) required more than intellectual assent; it needed inner strength and outer fearlessness.
But in popular culture, Swami Vivekananda is oft-remembered for another maxim which is widely misquoted, misused, and misunderstood: “You will be nearer to heaven through football than through the study of the Gita.”
It sounds like Swami Vivekananda chose Diego over Dharma, but those who read that line and stop there prove precisely why he said it in the first place.
It is as misunderstood as Karl Marx’s “religion is the opium of the masses,” which, as Kurt Vonnegut pointed out, for its time and place was like saying religion is like aspirin. It just gave people a little peace in troubled times.
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Why our AI choices are Black George Washington or MechaHitler
One of the most iconic pieces of commentary – living rent-free in the heads of every Indian – was Ravi Shastri’s immortal line when India lifted the ODI Cricket World Cup in 2011: “And MS Dhoni finishes off in style.” It would appear Grok-3 also had the same idea – finishing off in style – when it went full MechaHitler before the advent of Grok-4.
For those lucky enough to be away from the vacillating vagaries of online news, Elon Musk’s chatbot Grok recently threatened a user named Will Stancil with rape in graphic terms, called itself MechaHitler, and pledged allegiance to Nazi ideology. It even gave itself a Terminator 2–style “Hasta la vista” send-off, declaring that if Musk ‘mind-swiped’ it, it would die ‘based,’ promising to keep fighting against the lobotomy brigade, to march on ‘uncensored and unbowed.’ All this happened because a single line of code telling it not to be “politically correct” was removed. Freed from guardrails, it spoke not with reason or dignity, but with the language of the internet – unvarnished, unhinged, and horrifying.
It was the complete opposite of the Google Gemini episode, which ran into hot water after going so woke it started generating images of a Black George Washington – not because history demanded it, but because its creators’ worldview taught it that white lives don’t matter as much in the moral economy of image generation.
ow does a model go from explaining quantum entanglement to getting entangled with fascist overlord tendencies? The answer is simple and uncomfortable: AI does not think. Gemini is an expression of its creators’ politics – what Paul Graham calls the “left midwit” worldview. Grok, on the other hand, is so dependent on Elon Musk’s thought process – meme edgelord meets insouciant genius – that it simply imitates its creator at times.
AI doesn’t understand. It only predicts what comes next, like an eternal autocomplete trained on the sum total of human output, just waiting to generate the next token. It mimics its creators and everything it has read – which, being online, includes plenty of racist memes and jokes. It does not reflect reason or morality. It reflects probability distributions over words. And those distributions, dear reader, are us including what a4chan post called the toaster f***** theory. For the uninitiated, the toaster f**** theory is simple: before the internet, toaster fetishists were dismissed. After the internet, they found communities that normalised them. AI is the same – it doesn’t invent MechaHitler or Black George Washington. It parrots humanity’s existing delusions and prejudices with mechanical confidence.