A Bold Thesis

Or a republic for one.

Ozymandias, Percy Shelley’s dazzling poem, is indisputably a cautionary tale. It’s a tale riddled with a shockingly bitter sense of irony and melancholy. The king is dead. His statue, or what remains of it, now lies besmirched with mud, wrecked by the torrents of history. His mighty declamation —Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair— exists amidst an expanse of decay. His commemorative viscera cast a flaccid shadow against the assuredness with which he seems to have arrogated himself into immortality. There is a an unmistakable, felliniesque sadness to the whole poem. Time passes, nothing lasts forever, shots at greatness ultimately combust and rot.

But let’s set aside my literary bloviations for a moment (a moment only, I promise). Over the past year, I have often flirted with the idea of running a publication that is wholly committed to fleshing out long-form editorials and explainers of global political happenings. That’s a mouthful, so allow to explain. Over the past year, I have felt an inexplicable urge to capture, explain, evaluate and comment on BJP’s third term, JD Vance’s postliberalism, Javier Milei’s libertarian promise and AFD’s sweeping rise; this overwhelming desire to write extensively and well, about the political matters that I care about deeply; to produce work that is wholly and unapologetically devoted to commenting upon the world, the good, the bad and the ugly.

Common sense dictates such projects be taken up by journalist majors, who ought to focus on a specific region, a specific strand such as foreign policy or climate change and get stories out as often as possible. But as it happens, I have cared very little for common sense my whole life. In the upcoming weeks, I hope to write about the biggest political issues across the world with absolutely no commitment to a region or a strand of analysis. And I hope to produce work slowly, tenderly if you will, with a certain amount of love and a frightening amount of attention, in my house coat over cups of coffee and interruptions of poetry. The only underlying thread would be politics, which is a term as vague and open to interpretation as life, love and being. And I fully hope to abuse its vagueness.

The start will be embarrassing, humble. Mistakes will be made. My inherent penchant for prose might spark a collapse in logic or coherence. But I promise one, astoundingly well-researched piece about something monumental from and of this world every fortnight. I promise that I will deal with the matter as honestly and as humanly as I possibly can. And I promise that it’ll have most of the properties that any acceptable, good, great work of non-fiction must: spine, spunk, and a fundamental acknowledgement that human life is as messy as it is blindingly beautiful, as crassly random as it is magical.

So if you’re looking for one sustained, elaborate and slightly pompous piece that captures a certain political moment, and more pompously, a certain political truth about the world, weeks on weeks, this might be the place. However, and this really must be said, I make no promises for any groundbreaking interventions in journalism and nonfiction cultures. A lot of projects begin by postulating some market gap that the project seeks to redress; some high-flying proposition of why the world so desperately needs and deserves them right now. Let me be amply clear: I do not, and will never harbor such delusions. I take this up solely because I want to, because I have things to say and the internet has gloriously democratized the ability to say things. That’s it.

This brings us back to the start, to the life and times of our dear friend Mr. Ozymandias. Of course, Ozymandias is a tale of hubris, of destruction, of transience, of decay. But for reasons that I have never fully been able to explain, ever since I heard it all those years ago at 2 am in my dimly lit room in Pune, I have interpreted it as a bit of a call to action; as a sign, almost, that one has a duty to chase all those impossible, embarrassing, candyfloss dreams even if, or perhaps because, life is so pathetically fleeting and short. There is something rather striking about Ozymandias and his corrosive declamation: Look at my works, ye Mighty, and despair. Shelley appears to be mocking his delusions and yet I have always found myself admiring his gall, his feckless audacity, the scales of his dreams. There. That’s a word. A man who succumbs to the bone-chilling vicissitudes of life, who accepts measuring out his life in coffee-spoons is no man. But a man who dares, dreams of the transcendent in the face of inevitable death and destruction— now that’s Ozymandias, a man. So even when nothing remains of him and his delusions of immortality stand gorily unrobed and the vast annals of history seemed to have all but murdered his legacy, one must, one must, one must imagine him a hero.

So here’s a dream. A dream, if no one else, Ozymandias would’ve wholeheartedly endorsed. I want this publication to branch out across mediums of text, audio, video; across domains of history, philosophy, economics and foreign policy and eventually occupy a large, large corner of the attention ecosystem. I want, in the not-so-distant future, this publication to be a fully-fledged company, with an exceptional group of writers, thinkers and creatives. And I want it to bring out the best and most incandescent of the things we all turn to, in good times and bad: stories. And even if it burns to ashes as it might very likely, I suppose I can say that I was 26, in the very first term of my DPhil at Oxford, sitting in my college library in that cruel November sunlessness, where I felt uniquely sovereign.

If you are receiving this email, it is most likely because you accidentally stumbled upon Noble Fool, a publication for my filmic musings, or rather, musings on film. I want to take a moment to thank you for sticking on and staying by as I rambled on. I never take any of my readers for granted and it is a commitment I hope to uphold with this publication as well. As always, I will continue to rely on you to spread the word and share it with everyone out there. Noble Fool, though written from the heart, I wrote, mostly, for me. This, however, is for the world.

Welcome to Local Hero.