So, I asked Grok (X AI) to visit this blog and write profile of the blogger. Within few seconds it was ready with the brief (imagine 20 odd years of effort capsulated in few seconds! I am speechless). Quite an interesting read and some amusing insights. Grok thinks i am well suited for 19th century coffeehouse!!
I am truly done here man! Where is my time machine? I am off to meet Ada Lovelace, Dostoevesky, Emerson...
Depalan strikes me as a man shaped by duality—someone straddling the personal and the political, the local and the global, with a restless intellect that refuses easy categorization. Likely in his late 40s or early 50s by 2025, given the blog’s timeline from 2006 onward, he carries the weight of someone who’s lived through enough cultural and historical shifts to distrust grand narratives. His South Indian roots, hinted at through mentions of Tamil Nadu and a surname tied to the region, suggest a grounding in a place rich with history, language, and struggle—perhaps a Tamil or Malayali background, where resistance to overreach, be it colonial or corporate, runs deep. Yet his gaze extends far beyond, dissecting global systems with the same intensity he applies to a village’s water woes.
He’s no armchair critic. His writing hints at a life of movement—physical travel through India’s dusty towns, intellectual journeys through philosophy and poetry, and emotional traversals of anger, wonder, and disillusionment. A 2006 post about investigating Coca-Cola and Pepsi’s impact on Tamil Nadu’s water tables paints him as a hands-on skeptic, chatting up locals and scribbling notes, less a journalist than a wanderer with a cause. His hesitance about photography in that same piece suggests a preference for words over images, a man who trusts language to capture both the tangible (parched fields) and the ethereal (Kunitz’s verses). This isn’t a tech-savvy influencer but someone who’d rather wrestle with ideas than polish a persona.
His worldview leans toward the deconstructionist, as his blog title proclaims—an unpicking of power’s threads, whether it’s multinational greed, war’s dehumanization, or democracy’s hypocrisies. His 2022 post on “crime against humanity” reveals a voice hardened by global crises, yet there’s a softness beneath: a poetic streak that surfaces in unexpected metaphors or quiet reflections on coexistence with nature. He’s likely read widely—Marx might mingle with Tagore in his mental library—but he’s no academic; his style is too rough-hewn, too personal, marked by long, winding sentences and occasional grammatical stumbles. It’s as if he’s thinking aloud, unconcerned with impressing anyone but himself.
Physically, I’d imagine him unassuming, with sharp eyes that miss nothing, the kind of person who blends into a crowd but startles you with a pointed question. He might carry a weathered notebook, scribbling thoughts on a train or under a tree, more at home in the wild than in urban sprawl. Socially, he seems solitary—not antisocial, but content with his own company, perhaps skeptical of collectives despite his empathy for the downtrodden. The blog’s sporadic updates suggest a life driven by impulse rather than routine—he writes when moved, not on schedule, hinting at a temperament that’s both stubborn and free-spirited.
Politically, he’s a rebel without a banner, critical of both authoritarianism and hollow liberalism, yet he doesn’t preach solutions. There’s a whiff of the anarchist in him, tempered by a realist’s sigh. Spiritually, he might lean toward the agnostic or the quietly reverent—nature and poetry are his touchstones, not dogma. As of February 25, 2025, Depalan feels like a man out of time: a thinker who’d fit as easily in a 19th-century coffeehouse debate as on a modern blog, a voice too jagged for mainstream appeal but too sincere to fade entirely, etching his mark in a digital wilderness few may ever find.
