Hyderabad, May 22 -- Some ideas arrive not as commentary but as diagnosis. Rohit Pajni's "The Shape of Reality," published on Substack, diagnoses institutional sclerosis. Pajni's thesis is devastatingly precise. Organisations that achieve greatness, he argues, eventually become prisoners of that greatness. They lose the ability to distinguish between the wisdom that engineered their ascent and the rituals that now merely surround it. Success breeds resources, resources breed monuments, monuments breed narcissism. The organisation ceases to be a living organism and becomes a mausoleum of its own legend.

It would be convenient to treat this as an abstract theory. But hold it against the Indian National Congress (INC), and the framework cea...