Zero to Zero

There’s a dry yellow pustule right at the inner crease of my thigh—not quite groin, not quite leg, exactly where your sweaty fold meets the gluteal-tang airlock—and I discovered it while self-directed neuromuscular consolation during a particularly intellectually stunted YouTube video on “Why India Was Once the Most Advanced Civilization.” Yes, I know, my algorithm is a sadist with a sense of irony.

Anyway, the boil’s probably a clogged hair shaft or karmic punishment for being born with a cerebral cortex and a gonadal urgency in this country, where we invented zero and then promptly started subtracting IQ points with every successive century, until now we’ve got engineering graduates who need to Google “how to boil an egg” and politicians who think bovine urinary dissent is a grand-scale broadband solution.

But let’s rewind. Let’s actually perform a temporal regression to that allegedly golden, biologically-waste-soaked moment in Indian history when some sun-baked half-naked proto-Bengali genius (likely squatting somewhere near Patna with a turmeric-stained dhoti and a raging case of amoebiasis) looked at a blank space and said, “Yes. That’s something. That is something.”

That, my kith and kin, was zero. Śūnya. Cipher. The glorious round vacuum of futility that allowed human beings to finally count beyond their own digits without needing a goat as an abacus.

And not just zero—the parentally-neglected decimal system. Base ten. Which, unlike our GDP charts, has structure. Has place value. Has order. This was not some bedtime fable nonsense—this was math that revolutionized trade, astronomy, engineering, and the eventual mechanical violation of reality through calculus. Our sweltering subcontinent gave it to the Arabs, who gave it to Europe, who gave us colonization, fake democracy, and air fryers. You’re welcome.

So what happened, huh? What the catastrophic symposium of decision-making occurred after that?

Somewhere between Aryabhata scratching digits into a palm leaf and my neighbor using coconut oil to fix his inverter, we stopped inventing things and started believing in things. Blindly. Religiously. Aggressively. Like the kind of people who see the divine in a chapati or think QR codes are the genetic surplus of the adversary. We went from inventing a numerical abstraction that underpins modern computation—to arguing about whether ancient Hindus had WiFi and plastic surgery based on some poorly proofread Sanskrit verses that mostly describe how to engage in unsanctioned horizontal diplomacy with your kith’s spouse with tantric detachment.

You want to know the real invention we made after zero?

Those digital congregational silos where your kith with the receding scalp and rising nationalism sends JPEGs of Hanuman photoshopped onto the moon, claiming the NASA rover found proof of ancient Hindu civilization by spotting a trident pattern on a rock. Meanwhile the same narrow-souled civic obstruction can’t format a resume in Word without calling his niece.

And don’t get me started on the lead-based sindoor industry or the national obsession with putting saffron in things that shouldn’t be saffroned—like milk, rice, or administrative constitutional amendments.

But this is bigger than just lazy post-colonial bellyaching.

You know what’s worse than being colonized? It’s being smug and stagnant after it. Like a bloated, intestinally-obstructed nation that produces fake pride instead of actual progress.

We act like zero was our winning lottery ticket, and we’ve been coasting ever since. But you ever notice how everything else we do with numbers now is biological refuse? GDP numbers are massaged harder than a Lok Sabha candidate’s ego. Pollution indexes are manipulated until a lungful of carcinogens reads “moderate.” Exam results, voter data, birth rates—they’re all decimal-rich, zero-heavy, beautifully aligned—utterly and philosophically void.

I read somewhere that Panini created one of the most sophisticated grammars ever conceived, millennia ago. Now every time I go to the grocery store, some shirtless organism behind the counter speaks a dialect of Hindi that sounds like it was chewed up by a dyslexic goat and evacuated through a social media algorithm.

What the point of inventing zero is if the only thing we do with it now is multiply it by our aspirations, I cannot fathom.

There are two kinds of countries in the world. The ones that use zero to build rockets. And the ones that use rockets to draw anatomical metaphors on neighboring maps. Guess where we are.

Meanwhile, my boil itches again. The pus has congealed into a crust shaped almost like the Indian subcontinent. No joke. I laugh, cough, and nearly suffer a urinary protest. Not from joy, but because my bladder, like this country, is too full of liquid dissent and too proud to admit it needs to empty its contents into the local infrastructure.

See, science was never supposed to be spiritual. It was supposed to be skeptical, malodorous, disobedient, curious. Like a teenager’s axillary gland after a physics exam. But in India, we turn everything into a temple. A nuclear physicist expires, and some intellectually-vacant broadcaster declares he was probably the reincarnation of Vishwakarma. A techie gets a visa, and ten thousand kith and kin light lamps to the gods of immigration.

We invented zero, but we outsourced reason. We sent that administrative surplus overseas. Global entrepreneurs colonize space while we build temples for data plans. Even our science fairs are now like saffron-frosted birthday cakes—sweet-looking, hollow, and packed with carcinogens.

My rice cooker beeps. The steam smells like despair and too much hing. I take a leak in the corner bathroom where my own reflection looks like the ancestrally disappointing child of Bhaskara and a government clerk. I try to think of one thing we’ve invented in the last fifty years that’s actually helped the average person.

And don’t say digital identity schemes, you disappointment to your lineage. That’s a surveillance wet dream with an atrocious interface.

Even zero had the humility to be nothing.

But we—oh we—shove our ancient anatomical confidence into every global conversation like some tantric time-traveler who once dated Pythagoras and now won’t cease articulating it at the reunion.

I scratch my thigh again. The boil’s leaking. It’s a satisfying kind of ooze. Warm. Slightly metallic. Definitely a pageant of bacterial incontinence. I think of it as my personal decimal point. Right there. Separating fantasy from reality. History from hallucination.

Progress from pus.