Shubho Glucose

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I didn’t get any sweets.

I bought my own.

I don’t know whether anybody is interested in a harangue about this, especially one that begins with a missing plate and eventually requires astrophysics, but I keep thinking about the incongruous times I seem to inhabit, where possibilities are opening so rapidly for some people that the future can barely get its trousers on, while for others the possibilities remain approximately what they were yesterday, except that yesterday’s necessities have become slightly more expensive.

Anyway, happy Bijoya. Happy Dussehra. Dussehra falls on October 20 this year, while the Bengal observance of Bijoya Dashami falls on October 21. Consider this a greeting with enough shelf life to survive the interval.

I would have preferred to send sweets.

There is something peculiar about being alive when humanity can do so much and individual humans can do so little about their own circumstances. Somewhere a new discovery opens an entire field of work. Somewhere else, a person cannot afford the time, training, equipment, treatment, or uninterrupted afternoon required to benefit from it. Both are alive during the same scientific breakthrough. Both can be informed, quite correctly, that this is an extraordinary time to be alive.

Correctly. That is what makes it irritating.

The possibilities are real. So are the conditions attached to them. Money buys equipment, but it also buys the opportunity to fail without immediately becoming hungry. It buys another attempt. It buys the interval between an idea and anything coming of it, an interval we rather charmingly omit when telling people to follow their passion, as though passion could be boiled with potatoes and made to last until Friday.

This unequal arrangement is measurable, although the measurements do not tell us everything. In their 2024 study, Nitin Kumar Bharti, Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty, and Anmol Somanchi estimated that India’s top one percent received 22.6 percent of national income and held 40.1 percent of wealth in 2022–23. These are estimates, with data limitations the authors themselves discuss. They are not measurements of kindness. They do, however, give some scale to the difference between having options and being lectured about them.

For the smaller, stickier version, consider the circulation of Bijoya sweets in Calcutta.

A sweet has a surprisingly long human history before becoming a small white object that somebody declines because they have already eaten six. Milk has to arrive. Someone has to work over heat, judge texture, handle the batch, clean the vessels, pack the boxes, transport them. The finished sandesh is compact. The work inside it is not.

Then comes the other journey. Who gets remembered? Whose name comes readily to mind? Which plate goes where?

That is the part I keep getting stuck on.

I remember sweets circulating more readily. Then the plates seemed to dwindle, and the visits, and the casual remembering. Slowly. Nothing sufficiently dramatic to identify as the day people became more parsimonious. Just a little less each year, until an omission begins to feel normal and noticing it begins to feel embarrassing.

Memory can improve the past without asking permission. I know that. I have no annual census of sandesh with which to establish a statistically significant decline in human generosity.

I also know I didn’t get any.

And I know that some people have less to give. Rising expenses can shrink a plate without shrinking the person carrying it. I am not demanding that someone struggling to buy groceries preserve civilization through compulsory confectionery. What bothers me is the selective abundance, the way boxes appear to find other boxes, sweetness arriving where sweetness has already accumulated, enough syrup to float a ceremonial hippopotamus, while the poor, the lonely, the old, the weak quietly fall out of the route.

At certain prosperous thresholds, another tray seems almost an assault on an already beleaguered pancreas.

Elsewhere, remembering would have been enough to make the sweet matter.

I find myself getting angry about the quantities, then realizing that the quantity is not really what I mean. I bought my own. The edible part of the problem was therefore resolved. What I could not purchase with it was the small, unsolicited evidence that somebody had thought of me. I dislike how exposed that sounds. I would much rather be discussing dark matter. Dark matter has the advantage of not asking why I am making such a business out of a sweet.

The festival offers a grander explanation of itself, of course. Victory of good over evil. Light over darkness. The defeat of something terrible, followed by the hope that things might now become less terrible.

I can understand the appeal.

What interests me is how easily those enormous words slide past the smaller decisions through which people actually experience goodness. We can identify evil in a towering effigy with admirable confidence. The neglected person is more awkward. There is no convenient moment when the music stops and everybody points.

And then there is the business of light and darkness themselves.

We load them with moral qualities and sometimes drag skin complexion into the arrangement, as though pigment had submitted character references. But the mythology is much less cooperative than that crude chart suggests. Kali alone makes a wreck of any simple equation between dark complexion and evil. A dark goddess destroying demons is a substantial inconvenience for anybody trying to organize divinity along the lines of a fairness advertisement.

The universe is even less accommodating.

Under the standard cosmological model, ordinary matter accounts for roughly five percent of today’s cosmic mass-energy budget. Dark matter accounts for about twenty-seven percent. Dark energy, about sixty-eight percent.

Five percent for the atoms. The stars, the sweets, the teeth required to eat them, and this remarkably troublesome organism trying to turn an omitted greeting into a theory of existence.

The rest is mostly described using a word we keep treating as an insult.

“Dark,” in this context, does not mean wicked, black-painted, spiritually contaminated, or in need of a decorative bulb. Dark matter is inferred through its gravitational effects, while its physical identity remains unsettled. It does not interact with light in the familiar ways that make ordinary objects visible. Dark energy is a different problem, associated with the accelerating expansion of the universe.

They share an adjective. That does not make them the same thing. Depression and a depressed cake also share an adjective; I would advise against treating both with icing.

In 1933, Fritz Zwicky studied the Coma cluster and found that its galaxies were moving too rapidly for the visible matter to explain the cluster’s gravitational binding. There appeared to be much more mass than the light was revealing.

Later, Vera Rubin, Kent Ford, and other astronomers developed compelling evidence from the rotation of galaxies. The outer regions often moved faster than one would expect from the distribution of luminous matter alone.

The light wasn’t telling the whole story.

For a circular orbit in a roughly spherical gravitational field, the useful approximation is

Here, $v$ is orbital speed, $G$ is the gravitational constant, and $M(<r)$ is the mass enclosed within radius $r$. If most of the mass were concentrated well inside the orbit, speed should eventually fall approximately as $r^{-1/2}$. But many measured outer rotation curves remain roughly flat. In that simplified picture, the enclosed mass keeps increasing beyond much of the bright material.

Something that does not announce itself in starlight is still making its presence felt.

I find this wonderful. Annoyingly wonderful, because I had intended to remain in a foul mood.

Look at what happened. People watched distant objects, measured their movements, found that the luminous inventory was inadequate, checked and argued and measured some more. A difficulty became a question large enough to alter our account of the universe. The terminology sounds forbidding after it has been embalmed in a textbook, but underneath it there are people trying to understand why what they see does not behave as expected.

That is approachable. I spend a considerable amount of time in that condition myself.

In the standard account of cosmic structure formation, dark matter helped create concentrations of gravity into which ordinary matter could gather. Gas collected, cooled, became denser. Eventually stars formed. The luminous universe developed within an architecture whose greater mass was largely unseen.

There is the irony I was reaching for. Some of the conditions that helped assemble all that magnificent light belonged to the dark.

But I have to be careful even while enjoying myself. Photons do not require moral darkness in order to exist. “Without darkness there could be no light” is a satisfying sentence with several possible meanings and an excellent chance of becoming perfumed intestinal discharge if I pretend all those meanings have been experimentally established.

Dark energy needs its own correction, too. It is not the invisible adhesive holding galaxies together. The discoveries announced by two supernova research teams in 1998, associated with Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt, Adam Riess, and their collaborators, showed that cosmic expansion was accelerating. Dark energy is the name attached to the explanation within our prevailing cosmological account; its physical nature remains an open question.

One dark component helps explain how matter gathers. The other concerns how expansion accelerates on enormous scales.

The word alone tells us very little.

And I cannot extract an ethical instruction from either of them. Gravity will not tell me whom to visit at Bijoya. Dark matter cannot settle a wage dispute. The universe does not become compassionate because I have found an attractive metaphor inside it.

Still, it unsettles the conceit that everything valuable must advertise itself brilliantly.

Think again about the sweet and the work inside it. Ask how much of that work remains visible once the box acquires a ribbon. Ask whether the person who made the thing has been paid properly. Ask how easily we recognize the recipient’s importance while accepting the maker’s obscurity as the natural order of events.

I don’t want to turn workers into some picturesque human equivalent of dark matter and then consider the debt discharged. People need money and rest and fair treatment. Being compared favorably to an invisible cosmic substance is unlikely to meet any of those needs.

There is enough of this decorative compassion already. We admire endurance with particular enthusiasm when somebody else is doing the enduring.

Meanwhile, the habit of remembering people according to their usefulness works its way into everything, including a plate of sweets. A gift can travel toward influence almost without anybody consciously deciding to be vile. There might be a favor later. There might be a connection worth preserving. There might be nothing at all to gain from the person who receives nothing.

What a small, respectable calculation. Repeat it often enough and whole categories of people disappear from ordinary consideration.

Then we wish everybody happiness.

Everybody is a wonderfully accommodating word. No individual delivery is required.

I am not suggesting that an extra sandesh repairs inequality, or that an old person can eat a greeting in place of dinner. I would like us to retain some sense of proportion. A festival gift cannot replace healthcare, income, accessible public space, or the less photogenic labor of checking whether somebody needs help after the festival has packed up.

But the very smallness of the gesture is what bothers me. Remembering somebody ought to be easier than reorganizing an economy. A plate can travel farther without awaiting a constitutional amendment.

I keep wondering whether people are becoming more selfish, then wondering how much of that judgment comes from finding myself on the unremembered side. There is no flattering answer available to me. Perhaps I would be less perceptive about the decline of civilization if I were occupied with my third box of sweets. My moral sphincter may be no more reliable than anybody else’s.

I would still like to be remembered.

There. An entire universe, a galaxy cluster, several economists, and an equation to arrive at something that could have been said before the sweets went stale.

Happy Bijoya. Happy Dussehra. I mean it, although I seem to have put the greeting through a rather unnecessary digestive ordeal.

I can’t send you readers sweets from here. Partake of whatever sweet thing suits you. Wish yourself a happy sweet-something day, particularly if nobody else has remembered to do it. No grand revelation need accompany the chewing.

As an atheist, this day translates fairly directly into unbridled glucose consumption. Table sugar is sucrose, technically, and digestion splits it into glucose and fructose. Apparently even my godlessness requires a chemistry correction.

Have something sweet.

I bought my own.

P.S. References

Festival dates: Drik Panchang, Bengal Vijayadashami 2026, Kolkata: https://www.drikpanchang.com/festivals/vijayadashami/bengal/vijayadashami-date-time.html?geoname-id=1275004&year=2026

Cosmic composition and dark matter: NASA, “Building Blocks,” https://science.nasa.gov/universe/overview/building-blocks/ ; “Dark Matter,” https://science.nasa.gov/dark-matter/ ; “Rotating Galaxies and Dark Matter,” https://cdaweb.gsfc.nasa.gov/pub/documents/archived_websites/pwg.gsfc.nasa.gov/stargaze/Sun4Adop3.htm

Cosmic structure formation: European Space Agency, “History of cosmic structure formation,” https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Planck/History_of_cosmic_structure_formation

Accelerating expansion: Nobel Prize in Physics 2011, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2011/summary/

Kali’s iconography: Vaishnavi Patil, “Seeing Kali Clearly,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art, https://www.metmuseum.org/perspectives/household-gods-kali-lithography

Inequality estimates: Bharti, Chancel, Piketty, and Somanchi, “Income and Wealth Inequality in India, 1922–2023: The Rise of the Billionaire Raj,” World Inequality Lab, Working Paper 2024/09: https://wid.world/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/WorldInequalityLab_WP2024_09_Income-and-Wealth-Inequality-in-India-1922-2023_Final.pdf