Grapes are Always Sour for the Other 98%? A Tale Told by a Fox by DebaprasadBandyopadhyay Via Flickr: onceinabluemoon2021.in/2026/02/17/grapes-are-always-sour-... I, the fox—displaced, hungry, forever circling the perimeter of what others call success—have written this howl from the ashes of vanished forests and the margins of a city that builds towers while drowning its poor. Through five chapters filled with nearly endangered political satire, I trace how the grapes of sweetness remain forever sour, not from any defect in my leap, but because the vineyard itself is enclosed by design: fortified mansions rising above flood-prone shores, weddings costing hundreds of millions while hunger indices stay serious, births secured with foreign passports and luxury medicine while preaching national self-reliance to the rest, nationalism demanded as sacrifice from the many yet practiced as portable privilege by the chosen few, and finally an economics of limitless spectacle that devours the very earth required for any future life. From Aesop to Panchatantra to lived memory of deforestation and corporate predation, I refuse the fable’s tidy moral—that effort alone decides access—and instead diagnose structural denial, crony spectacle through conspicuous consumption and ostentatious display, ecological myopia, as well as selective patriotism. In the end I unlearn the dream of joining the feast; I choose instead the difficult, unglamorous arithmetic of limits—sufficiency, repair, localization, care without applause—because the bulldozers have already flattened the last vine and my vixen beneath them, and what remains is no longer a question of reaching the grapes, but whether any shared ground can still sustain breath in a world that mistakes endless extraction for destiny. This is my testimony, not of envy, but of ruthless clarity: the sourness was never in the fruit; it was always in the fence.
