Product Design @useascend / Design Director @SAAGanthology
Joined July 2014
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Mukul Chakravarthi retweeted
Still waiting for @bungarsargon to explain why the working class abandoned Trump en masse last night after all he did for them, as exhaustively defended by her for the past several years of her well-spent life
Mukul Chakravarthi retweeted
We printed that because right now 32 is less than 65 and America’s allies are not located in America. Go succeed in your plan and we will cover that with or without access. But one of our oldest rules is that it’s vapor till it ships
Mukul Chakravarthi retweeted
I’ve done 5 or 6 advising calls this year with designers ~10 years into their career. I told them all the same few things:
SF does retain its counter cultural instincts but in pockets. That said, largely agree with Ellington here. What’s funny is that the people making the most impassioned appeals to self-awareness are often the most steeped in credentialist status games.
It has been interesting to watch San Francisco as it has been stripped of nearly all of its original countercultural garments (distrust/apathy towards The Cathedral, high-openness, suspicion of credentialism, original thought, etc.) and has donned a new zeitgeist that is the absolute antithesis of its former ethos.
Everywhere you look resembles third-world, low-trust, social hierarchy jostling . "How much did you raise bro? Did you get the Sequoia check? You don't work at a Tier 1 lab? You didn't... didn't go to Stanford?".
The city that was once great because of its disgust with these sorts of people has now been corrupted by them as they have min-maxed Machiavellian social dynamics to accumulate power in the valley like XP points. Power which is now completely divorced from any genuine talent, skill, or benevolence. All that matters is that you are able to Scam a16z out of $15M (@cluely) because you are a poaster and you are anointed with SF Clout™
This infestation is so deep that even those who rightfully call it out are still willful participants in the exact culture they so detest (check her bio).
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Mukul Chakravarthi retweeted
I feel like you're arguing against a straw man rather than what I actually wrote, but I'll clarify my position here:
"Indian" is not an ethnicity. It's a nationality that is associated with the modern nation state. Some people use it as a stand-in for a broader civilizational identity, but I prefer to use "Hindu" or "Indic" in that context. While I have identified as "Indian American" in the past, I am increasingly averse to doing so these days because the label conflates the two rather carelessly.
Now, many Hindu Nationalists argue that Hindu identity is inseparable from India, and that to be a Hindu one must have some loyalty to the Indian nation state both spiritually and politically. This is basically the Savarkar position-- defining a "Hindu" as someone who considers India their holy land and fatherland.
But I see this territorial understanding of Hindu identity as impoverished and refuse to let my Hindu-ness be defined by an Indian political movement and a corrupt state it seeks to capture. Not just that, but I think this vision of Hindu identity is depressingly narrow and at odds with the profound expansiveness of Hindu metaphysics and Hindu civilization's historical character.
I see the separation from India as a necessary precondition for the development of a vital Hindu-ness that is philosophically and spiritually grounded in Hindu/Indic civilization, without being beholden to the culture and politics of modern India.
I see this as a far healthier and productive arrangement than the status quo, which swings between what KC Bhattacharya described as an "unthinking conservatism" that elevates all things Indian because they are Indian and an "imaginary progressiveness merely imitative of the west"
First, how to do the said detachment in an online world? Serious question.
Second, are European-Americans asked or supposed to do this? What does the “West” mean?
Third, whether or not Indian-Americans do said detachment will they be seen as doing so? How high must they jump?
Anyway, this is for Indian Americans to discuss, debate and decide.
If they are going to comment on our politics, we will comment on theirs. We might still comment anyway, actually.
Few think as lucidly and as refreshingly as @vjgtweets does on diasporic politics.
I took a lot of heat when I argued that those of us born and raised in America need to consciously detach ourselves from India politically, but this is precisely what you get when you fail to make that separation explicit.
When the expectation is that Americans of Indian origin magically retain some sort of intimate connection with the old country despite being born in America, only speaking English, not knowing anything about the country outside of what they read in the American press, this is ultimately what you get. India ceases to be an actual place. Rather, it persists as a symbol in the diasporic imagination that can strategically exploited to burnish one's position within the progressive cultural and political fabric.
If Abby were truly "passionate about ending fascism" she would move to India, but she isn't and she won't. Her main concern-- reflected in the tweet below-- is to differentiate herself from the similarly deracinated South Asians who instead choose to act out their supposed cultural "authenticity" by railing against cultural appropriation or whatever.
This dynamic is downstream from the particular racial pathologies of progressive multiculturalism, which-- like the nativist right-- doesn't see people as individuals, but as representatives of their ethnic, religious, or caste identities.
Mukul Chakravarthi retweeted
Sudipta Kaviraj, in “The Imaginary Institution of India”
“The paradox, to put it in the way in which T.N. Madan has done, is that if Indian politics becomes genuinely democratic in the sense of coming into line with what the majority of ordinary Indians would consider reasonable, it will become less democratic in the sense of conforming to the principles of a secular, democratic state acceptable to the early nationalist elite.
What seems to have begun in Indian politics is a conflict over intelligibility, a writing of the political world that is more fundamental than traditional ideological disputes.
It appears that the difference between the two discourses is reappearing, now that the lower discourse is asserting itself and making itself heard precisely through the opportunities created by the upper one. The way it rewrites the political world might not be liked by the ruling modernist elites, but it is too late to disenfranchise them.”
Mukul Chakravarthi retweeted
Astonishingly poorly informed. The L doesn't go to Moscow. It's just for going back and forth between Manhattan and Brooklyn.
Calm down. I doubt anything will come of the Ilhan Omar deportation stunt but she obviously at minimum shouldn’t be allowed to hold office in America because she’s an anti-American shit-stirrer and also probably a fraudster. Why shouldn’t naturalized citizens be stripped of their citizenship if they hold views that actively go against the interests of the majority and sow racial discord? If there could actually be an honest inquest into her “ideas” and activities, I would even take the L and volunteer myself for self-deportation provided I could take my son and they sent us to Moscow and not some bumblefuck globalist shithole like Tbilisi or Yerevan.
Mukul Chakravarthi retweeted
i refuse to engage in taste discourse with men whose bookshelf is just the entire stripe press catalog
Mukul Chakravarthi retweeted
The tone here—“the fact that a significant number of Indians and Indian Americans seem comfortable advancing this absurd position”—is so arrogant and ludicrous.
I’m an American. I was born here. In the eyes of the Constitution, I am no less than you or anyone else simply because of my race or ethnicity. I can advance whatever the hell position I want.
Including that America is a creedal nation. Because it is.
The gaslighting on these sorts of questions by folks like Rep. Krishnamoorthi, who should know better, is disgusting.
First, both @L0m3z and @christopherrufo are temperamentally reasonable people in every respect. As others have said-- if you find what they are saying to be shocking, you are really *not* going to like what is coming down the pike.
Second, the notion that it is somehow immoral or illegitimate to care about the overall ethnic, racial, or cultural demographics of the American people is absurd.
Now we can have an argument about how much to weigh those vs. other factors in setting migration policy, but the creedal fundamentalists' position is not a serious position, IMHO, and pretending like not only is it serious, but it is the *only* position that we are legitimately allowed to have is the sign of a pure bad actor.
Third, the fact that a significant number of Indians and Indian Americans-- at least on this platform--seem comfortable in advancing this absurd position, and that this is a fast-growing and increasingly influential community (highest income group in the country, and reasonably likely to hold the mayorship of America's two largest cities in a few months) is reason enough to hit pause on mass immigration from India-- especially given the amount of fraudulent and bogus activity underlying significant portions of it.
Mukul Chakravarthi retweeted
for those monitoring the situation this seems to be the official US department of education account doing a dogwhistle about getting rid of some Indian kids attending a UT football game
Mukul Chakravarthi retweeted
15 years ago, I and @pieteromvlee changed design, forever.
We're ready to do it again, with something new, starting tomorrow.
Mukul Chakravarthi retweeted
Still more absolute 🔥 from Terence Tao:
“We have now seen that even the rumor of someone working on a problem can trigger a massive amount of AI-powered effort to flatten it before the original research project has time to reach its full potential. The incentives may now be pointing in the direction of no longer sharing any promising research directions with the broader community, which would reverse centuries of traditions of open science and do serious long-term damage to the future of the field”
