2 ways of reading Niradh Chaudhri.

How should we read this purple passage from Niradh Chaudhri?

The emic Indglish way
Since Niradh Chaudhri read the same books as I did as an adolescent (I inherited them from my Grandmother who was self-educated in English) I can easily 'deconstruct' the 'dhvani' allusions in the above.
1) The dictionary of Quotations, Indian students used to memorize so as to variegate their exam answer-sheets and secure jobs in the Civil Service, had, under Immanuel Kant, this- '"Two things awe me most, the starry sky above me and the moral law within me." For a Tamil Sama Vedic Brahmin, like me, it was usual to pair this quotation with one from the Chandogya. Thus mention of oneself as a child gazing at the Night Sky had as dhvani, not the Pleiades suckling Murugan with star-light, but devotion to Murugan-as-Subhramanyam such that materialistic, that is ritualistic- for nothing mental is otherwise material merely- Purva Mimamsaka heteronomy is overcome.
Niradh, however, was a Sakta Kayastha with Brahmo leanings for whom, since Vaishnavism was declasse in Bengal, the occluded planet referred to was that Vaikunta where his Mom wasn't mentally ill and for which he remained home-sick.
2) Unlike me, Niradh was a scholar and naturally identified with prodigies like Bhratrhari. Furthermore, it was his education which increasingly took him away from his mother. Though not 'the axe that laid waste the forest of his mother's youth'- in the sense that she didn't have to work long hours to support his studies- nevertheless mental illness in Indian women at that time was linked to their feeling of loss of control because their children, from an early age, were under pressure to do well in a wholly alien educational system.
The scholar's lament that all his achievements are unreal, the world is unreal, because Mom isn't here to witness my success, translates well into the Bengali Sakta tradition- perhaps it is because theirs is a nation of scholars that feeling for the Mother is so highly developed in them- but, in Ramprasad Sen, that tradition, fuelled by Nabadwipa's Navya-Nyaya anticipations of modern set theory, had achieved, not what Godel sought in Bernay's Reflection Principle- but the Grothendieckian scandal by which, seeing Mother kick God in the chest, showing stony heartedness to the concreteness of the linga,  Faith stumbles over the Threshold of Dream into Incarnate Being-in-the-World.
Except that couldn't happen for Niradh coz he was a bit Brahmo- i.e. a Unitittyarian (nipples are many, titty is one)- shite at Maths and had seen Tagore, his Parmahans Swann, not frozen in a Mallarmean lake, but captivated and vulgarized and finally and very respectably outlived by that worthless Odette we call Shantiniketan.
Thus all that was left to him was
3) Chapter 5 of Browne's Urn Burial- a set-text for Matric back when that exam would have been impossible to pass for many a modern day Professor of English
Niradh aspired to be a historian, but in the meretricious mold of Hipplolyte Taine, and thus race, milieu, et moment- which, when doubled in every Mother tongue's Aagamani Mirror are Hermeneutics' six feet of ground- cashed him out as a gibbering Bangla gibbon berating Ghotis for ignoring their own imaginary 'moles of Adrianus'.
Of course, by an Indglish convention then current, mention of a 'Niti' text, like that of Browne, more especially because of its euphuistic 'Riti' texture, must immediately be followed by the striking of a Cyrenaic note- Nehru does this quite elegantly- before, of course, the obligatory 'mujhse pehle se mohabat, mahboob, na maang' stern Socialistic disavowal of availability for any tryst save with that Destiny which Marx, in Heaven, has already thoroughly debauched.
In the passage quoted above, Niradh, sadly, couldn't make that final and conventionally required presentment of Indglishry. Why? Well, he swotted too hard, as opposed to crammed simply, and so hadn't passed his M.A and gone on to Cambridge and the LSE and so on. Instead he had become a clerk in the Military Accounts Dept and had he stayed there, his hobby of military history- he corresponded with Capt. Liddel Hart- and love of French would have attracted attention. Moonje would have tried to recruit him. Bose, the younger, would have employed him as something more than a secretary. Some 'big gun' Maharaja would have sought him as a tutor for his son or lecturer for his putative Staff College.
But Niradh didn't stay the course in the Bureaucracy. True, he was picked up by All India Radio and, during the war, was paid to say things like- 'Pardon me, the correct pronunciation of 'Wipers' is 'Ypres' not 'that stinky French shithole'. What's more the Duke of Marlborough, the ancestor of our new Prime Minister, won a battle against General Faux pas Bidet at that very spot a couple of hundred years ago.' Well, that's not what he actually said- but Niradh was Bengali and, more inexcusably, he knew French so that's what listeners would have heard no matter what he actually said. Provided, that is, Hippolyte Taine's hermeneutic theory is correct and Niradh's own project not ludicrous ab ovo.

What was Niradh's 'dark abyss'? For Indglish readers, it was obviously the Secular consequence of a Satanic non serviam. Niradh wrote his auto-biography to refute the charge that he was a slacker and a wastrel who gave up a good job in Military Accounts to become a soi disant Gypsy Scholar. Again and again he insists that he ended up financially better off, or at least not greatly disadvantaged, by his refusal to don the blinkers of 'Service' and trudge an accustomed groove.

What about non-Indglish readers? Would they find something different in this extract from Niradh? If so, would it be funny? After all, if Indglish Punditry, like mine, e'en aleatorily. attains virtuosity in being shite, it is only because English Punditry has always confused Virtue with possessing shite for brains.
Globalised Academia's etic way
This was written by a pukka English Prof.

Mindlessly repeating the cliche 'that puts itself in the abyss', is of course, as Hilary Putnam pointed out, what meat-headed post-grads thought doing Derrida meant. Niradh wasn't an academic, thus he'd been forced to write well. His Taineism was stupid but not opportunistic, unlike Spivak's Derridacoity.
Why the fuck would Niradh buy into so obviously false a notion as 'the ineluctable materiality of signs'? Linga means sign. Kali kicks it not because it is material and she is stony hearted but because it isn't and she is not. Ramprasad Sen sings about it and his song was on the lips of every Mother, every Aunt, every Ayah, every baul. Niradh wasn't 'caught between 2 language games'. He wrote 'Riti' Indglish same as wot I do. Okay he knew from Spelling and Sanskrit and Shit but then he hadn't the advantage of attending a Russel Group Uni.
Yet, at the end of the day, at least in Academia, it is this young Professor's reading which will prevail.Why? Because the same paragraph, only slightly rewritten, could cover any Third World writer of the previous century. This has obvious utility. Education isn't paideia, it is repeating the same shite regardless of alteration of circumstances. A Credentialized Higher Education system feeds an increasingly deracinated and transnational Bureaucracy which, so as to be ineffective in posing a check upon rootless oligarchs gaming the system, is both boundlessly stupid and utterly predictable.

Indglish, like sabak-e-hindi, or Riti, only flourished when bureaucracies were National in character and recruited, at the lower ranks, from the local bildungsburgertum.
Now that everybody and her cat has a PhD from Amrika, Indglish is doomed.
What for you getting so happy, I say?
Henceforth I will write only Urdu verse.
Mind it kindly.
Aiyayo.

Of a mightier Bharat who yet might speak

My Dark Rum is that Krishna, whose son's parrot beak,

Of a mightier Bharat yet might speak
Seeing Earth as but a picnic packed
Till Heaven, All Mother, is again attacked

Envoi- 

Since only Sir Motley and his sprog taste the Chandogya's honey.
Prince! Make the Smart do Math so the Stupid make money

The Utility of Futility

Suppose there is a market which clears- i.e. a price is established at which everyone who wants to buy can do so and everyone who wants to sell can get rid off their stock. Suppose further that no buyer or seller now has an unanticipated change in wealth. Suppose this is true of all markets and that everything people want to buy and sell has a market.
Then, Economists say the Market has achieved an equilibrium with a certain valuable property- it is Pareto efficient. No one can be made better off without someone being made worse off.
By some magic, it appears that individuals, knowing only their own endowments and preferences and the price called out by the auctioneer, can co-ordinate their activities just as well as an omniscient God.
However, there is a problem with this story. Suppose my buying the last chocolate eclair at one dollar means that, unknown to me, my diabetic twin brother, kidnapped by Monetarists and raised in a freak show, doesn't get that life saving confection for which he was prepared to pay 99 cents. The market may have cleared but, with hindsight, it wasn't Pareto efficient.
(The same thing is true is I didn't have a twin brother of that description but you, with unknown probability, believe you might do so and there exists some series of arbitrageurs, or 'externality internalising entities, to connect us.)
More generally, at the margin, unless I know the endowments and preferences of everybody else, the Market may be inefficient even if there are no unanticipated wealth effects.
One way round this scandal for 'Democratic' Social Choice- which is that there is no way to co-ordinate human beings as efficiently as an omniscient God- is to believe that God, for some reason of his own, wants us to put zero value on any gain or loss received outside the market.
Call this new 'Purushartha' Utility and define it as follows- suppose God only wants you to know what our theory assumes you know, then, Utility is the Purushartha that God has ordained for you to maximize. Surely, in this case, Utility theory is Muth Rational- i.e. free of hysteresis effects?
Following Samuelson, we could go on to say 'Ours is the only true Economics because we have the assurance that we are only dealing with ergodic processes. Otherwise, our subject would be empty or 'anything goes'. It is surely reasonable that we all constrain our discourse to path-independent Utility functions.'
In other words, just as ritualists accept certain constraints on what they can do so as to have an inter-subjective 'Purushartha' which they can fulfill as a signal to God of their devotion- this is like making Mum a mud cake for her birthday coz u know she like Black Forest gateaux- so too can people foolish enough to have studied Economics at University pretend Utility functions are integrable and hysteresis free.
Though Monetarists and Libertarians and other such fucktards disliked Samuelson, they raised no objection to a well paid class of Pundits arising who pretended to believe that this sort of Utility function was indeed Man's Purushartha.
Sadly, Moore's Law kept making computing cheaper and so from the Eighties onward larger and larger data sets became available which attracted the attention of, not failed Physicists, but the real deal.
A prominent 'Econo-physicist', Joseph L McCauley, wrote a scathing paper some fifteen or twenty years ago titled 'the Futility of Utility' in which he said- ' Economists usually assume that price is the gradient of utility in equilibrium, but I observe instead that price as the gradient of utility is an integrability condition for the Hamiltonian dynamics of an optimization problem...
'Hamiltonian dynamics shows that it is dangerous blindly to assume that the question of path dependence of a utility functional can be divorced from the question of integrability of the underlying dynamics. Gibbs tried but failed to make a similar point to I. Fisher , who was not as strong a mathematician as was Gibbs and didn’t understand integrability. Gibbs pointed out that the utility is generally path dependent, and suggested that Fisher address the problem of nonintegrability in relation to a possible underlying dynamics. Fisher did not understand nonintegrability of differential forms (neither did Walras or Pareto), so that Gibbs’ point was entirely lost on Fisher, who erased all mention of nonintegrability from his last papers on utility after he had become established as an economist... Fisher’s failure to address the path dependence of utility left Samuelson and other economists to worry about nonintegrability some fifty years later. The economists finally stopped worrying about it, but never solved the problem. It is not clear that they became aware of Liouville’s integrability theorem, connecting the existence of a utility function to integrability of the dynamical system, during the heyday of deterministic chaos.'

The problem here is that, Muth rationality can still obtain in over determined dynamical systems- indeed, must do, otherwise the sort of noise needed to drive liquidity would actually dissolve it- thus price can be the gradient of anything it likes, including the Utility function.
No alethic or instrumental argument Econophyics can marshal in this connection gains any purchase because, whereas agents have some knowledge of price and endowment vectors and could choose to subscribe to Samuelson type integrable, non-path dependent Utility by reason of Muth rationality, of almost any Walrasian equilibrium involving such agents, all we can know is that its price vector is not effectively computable in the life time of the Physical Universe.

Utility, thus, isn't futile at all. It is about co-ordination problems and reflexivity and Schelling focal points, on the one hand, and, on the other, it is Ninomiya concession and Upanishadic neti, neti.
In other words, if Econ aint empty, Utility is that Purushartha wherein, uniquely, God might find us wanting but only to show all wanting futile thus leaving only the undiminishable plenitude of Om Purnamadah Purnamidam &c

Iqbal, Tagore & Possible Worlds

Iqbal- ..so then I said to the Shah of Iran, 'Majesty, I've got more literary genius in my little finger than that bearded fucktard Tagore whom you and King Feisal keep feting and fawning over.'
Interviewer (Sarojini Naidu)- What if your little finger was up Rabi Da's butt hole?
Iqbal- LOLWAT? Why would my finger be up that Bengali fucktard's butt hole? You calling me a fag? Look at my tache. This the tache of a fucking gay boy?
Interviewer- I just assumed. Anyway, the point about genius is that it is not something contingent but rather is an essence and therefore exists in all possible worlds including ones in which your little finger is up the Sage of Shantiniketan's butt hole.
Iqbal- Fair point, Sarojini. Anyway, like I was saying, I've got more literary genius in my little finger that than bearded fucktard Tagore, unless, obviously, my little finger happens to be up his butt hole.
Interviewer- Why is it obvious that your little finger would happen to be up his butt hole?
Iqbal- Because Islam is in danger.

Dies Irae- Armenian version

We are those Armenians whose Sultan censors the word 'sword'

Till, surd, our throats learn it from his Hamidiye horde

 Whose Judas Silver will be their own tongue proscribed

Till all Bullion is by Christ's Blood bribed.

Light's limerence, Love's immanence

Holding my Son, hugging my Pop; my smiles shinier than my one crappy blazer

To Pain's Prosopoi, these two happy snapshots have been as Occam's razor

Showing the Son's implacable Saul is, to the Father, an Oedipal Freud

So only its Photons, not Protons, thus created are thus destroyed.

Again Light's limerence your photo pummels

 & Love's immanence, quantum tunnels

Till, in Bedil's mirror, I teach to shave

Son, Barzakh's evanescent wave.

Envoi-

Prince! Tri-Vikrama or Akram Asura or howsoever now yclept

Fatherhood's facticity shames no founder of a sept!

Welfare Economics is the gift of the Grinch.

Welfare Economics is about pretending to know what is good for Society. It is taught at University to people too stupid to become Physicists or Doctors and too egotistical or greedy to be content with mindless clerical employment.

It has 2 fundamental theorems which, taken together, state that if a guy has perfect information, zero transaction costs and the power to take anything from any other guy and give it to whoever he pleases, then he can ensure that any physically feasible state of the economy can come to pass.

If  he so wishes, these states can be Pareto efficient- i.e. no one could be made better off by doing a trade with someone else.
Suppose he is so mean as not to wish that this should be the case. In other words, suppose this guy is a real Grinch and enjoys taking away your copy of Roberto Unger's latest monograph and replacing it with my copy of Mega-melons monthly. Then, supposing both you and me have perfect information and zero transaction costs and markets for everything exist, then there is some sequence of trades we can both do such that the Economy still reaches a Pareto efficient outcome.

Thus, the 2 fundamental theorems of Welfare Econ, taken together, state that if and only if
1) there is a God like omniscient guy who can just give or take anything from anyone
and
2) he's a Grinch who enjoys fucking with us
Then
Markets can be a good thing provided everybody else has an equal God like omniscience and there are no transaction costs and markets for everything exist.

An Economist reading this might say 'Quite false! Perfect information only means knowledge of the price vector nothing more.'
The problem here is that the second fundamental theorem assumes the ability to levy non-distortionary lump-sum taxes. This can only be done if some agent has perfect knowledge of everybody's preferences & endowments. But this knowledge suffices to make the market redundant unless the agent possessing it is also a horrible meanie.

Thus Welfare Economics owes its existence to the Grinch.

However, even if all agents have equal God like omniscience to the Grinch, the Market would still fail to yield Pareto optimality unless all agents were also equally horrible meanies who didn't care that they might be entering 'repugnancy markets' simply to satisfy their own selfish desires.
(This follows because it is morally repugnant to efface all traces of a spiteful injury such that no Consequentialist burden of guilt or Virtue Ethic marker of shame or Deontological evidence of infraction remains visible)
In other words, it is not enough that the Grinch create Welfare Econ, it is also necessary for that Subject's continued existence that all agents engage in a devout imitatio of the Grinch so as to secure the imprimatur of Pareto optimality for any Market activity which the mean-spiritedness of the Grinch has left scope for.

Welfare Econ could get rid of the Grinch by embracing imperfect information, missing markets and so on but, and this is beauty of Greenwald-Stiglitz, by showing that, if such conditions obtain, the Govt. can always improve everyone's welfare with some mix of taxes and subsidies, what actually happens is that the Grinch is resurrected as that very Government!
Why?
Suppose a Stationary Bandit- i.e. a Govt.- isn't a Grinch at all. Suppose it devotes itself to improving everybody's welfare by plugging missing markets, reducing information asymmetry, promoting Golden path focal points etc. Muth Rational agents would recognize this to be the case and join the Govt. thus gaining a higher return on their productive power. Non Muth Rational agents would find themselves confined, this is the evolutionary stable strategy, to a turbulent margin of the economy- a series of repugnancy markets damming up 'capacitance diversity'. But this would mean Welfare Econ would itself be a repugnant market for ideas. To rescue itself from this fate, it has to take the Grinch like nature of the Govt. as its fundamental axiom. After all, it is only because the Govt. is such a Grinch that it isn't already doing whatever Stiglitz decides to tell it to do.