Neither Left nor Right. But either here or there.

The much awaited explication on my political leanings (real). Also the limitations of labels and why truth lies beyond them

It happens often enough that I’m called “woke” or “leftist liberal saali” by random new people I meet. Instead of wondering what I’ve done to give myself away so quickly, or why god puts such people on my path, I think about what it takes to be called that, and realise it’s not much actually.

A lot about me is liberal-coded to the naked eye: I am a 32-year-old unmarried woman who lives alone in an apartment complex in a cosmopolitan Indian city. English would seem to be my primary language, though my mother tongue is Tamil, and my Hindi is good too. I probably come across as affable yet self-possessed, given I am tall and well-built, thank you very much. If there was ever an exemplar of the “strong independent woman” trope, it might be me, except it only takes a few meetings for someone I vibe with to see that I am also deeply emotional and using a processing system that senses itself and the world in 1080p.

Professionally, I do a few things: I’m an author; I write about culture, politics, technology, business, spirituality, myself, my generation, the life and times, you know. I am a “marketing leader” who has sold detergent, magazines, and software products alike, now including AI (what doesn’t?). I have been an engineer of two kinds in past lives, and my hobbies include meditating, playing games, laughing with friends, having intense relationships, and whatever else might catch my obsessive fancy in the future.

This is some history, I know, but I’ve bristled against being called “privileged” at first sight. To be sure, my family has always been well above the poverty line, and we’ve only lived in metro cities, but my father was unemployed for most of my life. Women in my family were supposed to be educated, but not for their own sakes. The historical purpose was to be suitable in-house companions for the ‘man of the house’, and there were harsh penalties for venturing outside of this strictly policed box. Because I’ve had to fight hard to be where I am, overcoming serious and sustained violence at the hands of the patriarchy, I hate when my intelligence or vocations or complexity are trivialised, especially by men, or even people who don’t know me well or seem to think about such things seriously.

I occupy these contradictory positions—artist-capitalist; artist-scientist; a believer in social freedoms and socialism both; a feminist who argues that there is such a thing as ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’, but that its unique admixture in each individual is for them to discover and maybe transcend, because all forms of identity, including gender, are ultimately a prison; I think AI writing is terrible but not that AI shouldn’t be built at all; fascism is bad but religion serves a necessary function in the human psyche and culture; capitalism is deeply flawed but works better than communism ever did, and I like money, being comfortable, and buying nice things; I meditate a lot but my spirituality does not oppose (anymore) my materialism nor my ambition; I’m rational on most days but prone to excessive tarot readings and GPT usage when anxious—and so I take offence at being called “left” or “right”.

You see where I’m going with this?

Labels are seductive but reductive. You could put that on a billboard, and it would still be an insufferable thing to say, because where would we be without constructs and concepts? But I’m concerned that black-and-white thinking enables our worst tendencies as a human race.

Apart from making me feel grossly misunderstood, labels when tightly gripped close us off to intellectual humility (that there may be some new angle for us to consider) and compassion (that however ‘wrong’ someone seems in their opinion, they still have the right to believe what they do, and we should not be too harmful about our differences). Plus, no ideology can have the right answer 100% of the time, which means that to be wedded to a worldview is to commit to being wrong at least some of the time, for the sake of an attachment.

Nothing is fixed, and complexity is where truth lives. Spotting it and continually seeking it is already the exception to how most think, I think. With subjects as sensitive, charged, and personal like political views, especially, I feel like it’s imperative to start with what people mean when they say “left” or “right”, which I don’t think we do enough.

My thinking on this was first broadened in the company of some brilliant friends at B-school. AJ told me about the Political Compass test, which exposed to me the sloppiness behind just “left” and “right”. The site explains that these were meant to be used primarily on an economic axis—complete ‘left’ meaning a state-controlled economy, and complete ‘right’ meaning a total free market—whereas people also conflate them with a social axis—‘left’ meaning total social freedom, ‘right’ meaning authoritarianism—and so, put together, you have a 2x2 matrix for where you stand politically. You can’t be only “left” or “right”, you could be left-left, left-right, right-left, right-right. See below.

Upon AJ’s advice, I took the test over time to see how my views changed with the years. Four results from 2019 through 2026 indicate that I am, in fact, a “leftist liberal saali”! Left libertarian, to be exact.

So, my haters are right! But not on purpose, I think.

(One time, I scored equally socially left as always, but slightly to the right of centre economically, which placed me right on top of Milton Friedman, but I don’t have record of this.)

My point in bringing this up now is not only for educational reasons or to give anyone any satisfaction. But I think a lot about the gap between a given truth and the ways in which people distance themselves from it because of their egoic and intellectual attachment to some frame overall.

For example, one of my essays that drew the strongest reactions was about the relevance of Sanskrit in the world of AI. It managed to irritate Indian Twitter’s left and right both. The right, predictably so, because it questioned their chokehold on Indian science and research. The left, more interestingly, because I took the subject seriously enough to surface something genuine, which is that Sanskrit, because of its rule-based nature, definitely has relevance to programming. The typical write-off is that this is all right-wing propaganda, but, again, the truly intellectually rigorous answer is that Sanskrit does have a mathematical nature that there is value in studying, but it is far from being useful to modern AI, and the only thing keeping the two tied are vested political interests.

The experience of writing that piece, and coming up with its ending, in particular, taught me something important. Good writing—and good thinking—should complicate a subject before clarifying it. Instead of simply confirming or dis-confirming preconceptions, it should offer a model that honours difficult new truths beyond what we’re programmed to think.

Black-and-white thinking, or ideological affinity, should make anyone uncomfortable. There is often a kernel of truth in both liberal and conservative thought, that may or may not apply to broader policy questions or decisions on How to Live or What is Right. It may be true that there are masculine and feminine poles in human psychology, but how that should translate to questions of safety, fairness, freedom, sport, etcetera, is work that belongs to experts and institutions who can straddle competing truths and interests in good faith. It may be so that Indian scientific effort has been besmirched by the political agenda of our times, but it is also true that Sanskrit had something to offer science, just not in the way it was being used.

How often does your affinity to an ideology or worldview obscure something deeper? Have you thought about this? In this essay, you will—