If you have been reading this newsletter since the beginning of last year (or earlier), you know that I have been circling around a cluster of what might feel like unrelated themes:
The breakdown of the liberal international order and its descent into polycrisis followed by polyconflict.
The importance of energy and information flows in maintaining metabolic order, and how metabolic order underlies social and political order. Within this, the roles of Silicon and Carbon as master elements, the drivers of polyconflict among other things.
The interregnum between the Globe and the Earth and the reign of new ‘monsters’ in this period of turbulence, and the emergence of Planetary Governance as a practical need, rather than a utopian demand.
The need to couple human history with deep evolutionary and earth history, and human geography with a cosmological perspective on space.
Behind all of which is an attempt at a “Bhumics,” a thorough reckoning of the condition of Planetarity. As I have been doing so, the world hasn’t been staying still; the very opposite in fact, and I wrote some essays (here, here, here and here) on how the war in the Persian Gulf is impacting India’s access to some key commodities. These aren’t separate explorations: helium is both the product of stellar furnaces and the coolant that makes MRIs and chips possible. And energy, information, metabolism and habitability are themes that run throughout this enterprise at every scale.
Today’s essay is an attempt to bring many of these themes together in an analysis of the metabolic sovereignty of India. It’s a very long essay - about 7000 words - and I have gotten rid of images and hyperlinks (in the main body of this essay, not in this section) in favor of an uninterrupted narrative. Some years ago, I said that “nothing in society makes sense except in the light of the planet.” This essay is an attempt to make that connection explicit in the context of an issue that’s still raging on our screens, and in some cases, on our streets.
Much of the content of this essay is recycled from previous essays, but the take is new IMHO.
Introduction
For most of the last century, the primary instrument for making sense of politics was ideology. Know where a party or a regime sat on the spectrum from liberal capitalism to state socialism and you could predict its alliances, its campaign promises etc.
But ideology is a description of intentions. It tells you what kind of world a government claims it is building, not how that world actually runs. For that you need to look at the pipelines and shipping lanes, the semiconductor fabs and data centers, the pharmaceutical supply chains and fertilizer networks - the flows of energy, matter, and information that constitute the material substrate of social life - and every society and its reigning institutions (governments, corporations etc) have tacit theories of how these flows are to be regulated. It’s time to make that tacit governance into an explicit framework, or what I call metabology: the analysis of the protocols, formal and informal, that govern how energy, matter, and information actually move through and between societies.
When global supply chains are functioning, the metabolic substrate of civilization is invisible. When the system breaks, the metabolic reality announces itself. The diabetic who cannot get her medication and the farmer who cannot afford his fertilizer are experiencing a metabolic rupture. That rupture raises a political question: who controls these flows, and who is left at the mercy of those who do? This question is close to the traditional question of sovereignty: “who is the supreme authority within a territory”, except that we are not restricting ourselves to territorial control, but rather, the capacity of a political community to organize and secure the flows of energy and information that keep it alive.
Metabolic Sovereignty dictates whether you can provision your population with energy, pharmaceuticals, food, and compute without being held hostage by a chokepoint you do not control.
The geopolitical struggles defining our era are, at bottom, metabolic. When commentators describe a new cold war between the United States and China, the contest is often framed in ideological terms, but the material reality is a competition between metabolic stacks: the US champions a compute-centric stack - doubling down on AI, data centres, semiconductor design - while China centres an electric stack, commanding over 80 percent of solar PV manufacturing and three-quarters of global battery output. Both are bids for metabolic leverage.
India is caught between them, unable to fully participate in either stack while dependent on both, and the war in the Persian Gulf is bringing our metabolic needs to the forefront. Over the last few weeks, I have been investigating the commodity shocks arising out of the ongoing war between the US/Israel and Iran, with India firmly inside the fallout zone.
This essay is an attempt to incorporate what I have learned into a metabolic framework, with the metabolic sovereignty of India being its chief concern.
Three Metabolisms, One Conflict
When the global system works, natural gas arrives on schedule, pharmaceuticals stock the shelves, and cooking fuel fills the cylinder. We can treat geopolitics as something that happens elsewhere, to other people, and kick the systemic externalities down the road for our children to deal with. But when the system breaks down, as it is breaking down now in the Persian Gulf, geopolitical volatility ceases to be an abstraction.
The current war between the United States, Israel, and Iran is such a breakdown. It is not merely a military conflict confined to the belligerents. It has an epicenter, a blast radius, and a fallout zone. At the core are the combatants, trapped in a zone of drone strikes, ballistic missiles, and perhaps soon, land battles. In the immediate line of fire are the Gulf Cooperation Council countries - Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE - whose airspace is restricted, whose shipping lanes in the Strait of Hormuz are choked, and whose petrochemical infrastructure is under direct threat. Further out, in the fallout zone, sits India: not launching missiles or under bombardment, but caught in the wake of those who are. We lack the agency to stop the core conflict but face urgent consequences from its cascading disruptions.
To understand what those consequences actually look like, we need a way of seeing that our existing analytical tools do not provide. The standard media apparatus gives us abstractions such as “Brent Crude hitting $120 a barrel will lead to an extra 5% inflation in India.” But that inflation isn’t going to be uniform. I was told by a friend that the prices of vegetables are going down because people don’t have the LPG for cooking them. The paddy farmer in Punjab or the diabetic gig worker in Bengaluru needs a finer instrument.
I want to propose one. Every functioning society, I argue, runs on three coupled metabolisms. The first is the external metabolism: the flows of energy, matter, and information that power civilization. This metabolism has two registers. Its energy register encompasses the pipelines, shipping lanes, refineries, and chemical plants that convert raw hydrocarbons into the thousands of derivative molecules modern life depends on - from fertilisers to pharmaceutical precursors to cooking fuel. Renewables have a similar mesh of products. The information register of external metabolism encompasses the semiconductor fabs, data centres, fibre-optic cables, and cloud infrastructure that convert raw compute into the digital nervous system through which modern economies are coordinated.
The second is the bodily metabolism: the biological processes that keep individual human beings alive - cellular energy regulation, respiration, nutrition, and the pharmaceutical and diagnostic systems that maintain metabolic balance when the body fails. Perhaps education is also in this bucket - the cultivation of human capacity to respond to the world. While there’s plenty of thinking about the politics of energy flows and semiconductor chips, there’s very little political - let alone geopolitical - thinking about bodily metabolism even though shocks to the system are ultimately absorbed by our bodies.
The third metabolism is the political metabolism: the institutional capacity that governs the relationship between the first two, sovereignty over critical supply chains, strategic reserves, industrial policy, the ability to decide who gets what when scarcity arrives, and the willingness to treat essential goods as sovereign infrastructure rather than as commodities best left to the cheapest bidder.
It’s this third metabolism that metabolic sovereignty concerns itself the most, but of course the three are coupled. The external metabolism feeds the bodily metabolism, for you need fuel to cook food, gas to make drugs, industrial gases to power medical equipment. Political metabolism mediates the relationship - it decides whether to build strategic reserves, whether to manufacture critical inputs domestically, whether to subsidize essential services. It’s much more invisible than territorial sovereignty - no soldiers at the borders, no immigration agents, and when it works, the tankers arrive at their terminals and the lights stay on.
Then there’s the stage of crisis, or what is more likely given the interconnected world we are in, polycrisis. Polycrisis acknowledges multiple, intersecting emergencies. But it carries a hidden assumption: that a crisis is temporary, that the metabolism will eventually recalibrate into a new equilibrium, that one day, gas cylinders will be replaced with solar cookers. But solar cookers don’t appear out of nowhere: India cannot manufacture them at scale today without embedding ourselves into the Chinese supply chains. That’s tipping the crisis over into conflict.
Conflict is ongoing, structural, open-ended, and resistant to being fixed by the right policy, the right summit, or the right experts in the right room. That shift in framing, from polycrisis to polyconflict, is what the current moment demands, for we are in the interregnum between the reign of the Rules-Based International Order that governed the coupling between our three metabolisms (the RBIO was never perfect, never equal, and rarely rules-based, but it was the operating system we had) and whatever comes next, if we can even name it.
The old order was a metabolic order as much as a geopolitical arrangement. The global trading system, the petrochemical supply chains, the shipping routes through the Strait of Hormuz - these were the arteries of a planetary metabolism that fed energy into bodies, drugs into patients, and fuel into kitchens. The Rules-Based International Order was, among other things, a set of metabolic guarantees: that the flows would continue, that the couplings between the external and the bodily would hold, that the political metabolism would manage the exceptions when they arose. Those guarantees are dissolving.
India is living inside that dissolution, caught in a triple bind across all three metabolisms. Our external metabolism depends on Gulf hydrocarbons for energy and on Chinese manufacturing for the hardware of the energy and compute transitions. Our bodily metabolism is under chronic stress from diabetes, respiratory disease, and a fragile diagnostic infrastructure. And our political metabolism - its sovereignty over pharmaceuticals, energy, healthcare, and increasingly over compute - has been systematically hollowed out by three decades of decisions that seemed rational in the short term and have turned out to be structurally catastrophic.
The most reliable way to see how the three metabolisms are failing simultaneously is to trace the disruption through specific commodities, following each from the blast radius in the Gulf to the body in Bihar. Each of the three cases that follow illuminates a different failure mode across all three registers. A noble gas that cools superconducting magnets and semiconductor wafers. A synthetic molecule that regulates the bodily metabolism of 101 million diabetics. A fossil-fuel byproduct that determines whether women breathe clean air or toxic smoke. Each traces the same structural pattern: when the external metabolism is shocked and the political metabolism has no buffer, it is the bodily metabolism that absorbs the cost, and that cost falls heaviest on those whose bodies were already most precarious.
The Helium Shock: Where Energy Meets Compute Meets the Body
When missiles strike the energy infrastructure of the Persian Gulf, it is obvious that the price of crude oil will spike and that shipping delays will hit Liquefied Natural Gas. Oil and gas are first-order casualties of Middle Eastern wars - the disruptions everyone expects and the dependencies every state actively manages. But polyconflicts generate second-order dependencies that are less visible and often more damaging. Helium is a case in point.
Most people associate helium with balloons and blimps. In reality, it sits at the intersection of three critical systems: Gulf energy infrastructure, advanced semiconductor manufacturing, and medical diagnostics. To understand why, we need to grasp the chemistry of the second lightest element in the universe.
Helium is not manufactured. It is generated over hundreds of millions of years by the radioactive decay of uranium and thorium deep within the Earth’s crust - the alpha particles produced by decay are helium nuclei, which pick up electrons from surrounding rock and become helium gas. Being the second-lightest element, helium would normally escape Earth’s gravity and dissipate into space. But sometimes it gets trapped in the same geological formations as natural gas. This means helium is extracted almost exclusively as a byproduct of natural gas processing, separated through cryogenic fractional distillation towers that cool raw gas to extreme temperatures. Since helium has the lowest liquefaction point of any element, everything else in the gas condenses first, leaving only helium in gaseous form.
This geological reality chains helium directly to the world’s hydrocarbon nodes. Qatar’s Ras Laffan Industrial City complex is not just the world’s largest gas terminal; it also accounts for roughly 30 to 38 percent of the world’s entire helium supply. When Ras Laffan was struck by Iranian missiles, a third of this critical industrial gas vanished from the global market in a matter of days. And with the Strait of Hormuz contested, even helium that could be extracted has no shipping route out. The external metabolism suffered a sudden, severe constriction at one of its most critical nodes - and because helium cannot be stockpiled (the atom is so small it eventually leaks through the microscopic pores of almost any container), there is no warehouse of reserves to draw down. Helium must be a continuous, cryogenic flow.
We wouldn’t care about this so much if it weren’t so important: what makes helium irreplaceable are two properties:
Helium is chemically inert, and
Helium remains liquid at colder temperatures than any other substance in existence.
These properties make it the invisible substrate of modern medicine and advanced computing. Consider the MRI machine. An MRI works by exciting the hydrogen atoms in the body’s water molecules with a powerful magnetic field and mapping how those atoms relax - effectively imaging the fluid metabolism of tissue, revealing tumours, strokes, and neurological damage that cannot be detected any other way. To generate that magnetic field, the machine’s internal coils, typically a niobium-titanium alloy, must achieve superconductivity. That happens only at roughly 4 Kelvin, -269 degrees Celsius, a few degrees above absolute zero (-273 celsius, 0 Kelvin). Liquid helium is the only substance capable of reaching and maintaining those temperatures. Liquid nitrogen is too warm. There is no synthetic substitute. Without liquid helium, there is no MRI (though new technological alternatives are emerging).
India has roughly 2,500 to 4,800 MRI machines for a population of 1.4 billion - compared to over 12,000 in the United States, which has a quarter of India’s population. But the helium shock lies not in the numbers but in the composition of the fleet. The newest generation of MRI scanners uses only 7 litres of helium, permanently sealed at the factory. Zero-boil-off models use a refrigeration unit called a cold head to recapture evaporating helium. Both are too expensive for most Indian hospitals. Instead, the bulk of India’s MRI infrastructure, particularly in smaller diagnostic centres and Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities, consists of refurbished legacy machines imported from the West. These 10-to-15-year-old scanners require 1,500 to 2,000 litres of liquid helium and constantly vent it into the atmosphere, demanding frequent, expensive refills.
Even when a well-funded Indian hospital acquired a zero-boil-off machine, the technology was engineered for the predictable infrastructure of the Global North. The cold head requires a highly stable power supply and massive, uninterrupted industrial air conditioning. In the Indian context, frequent power grid fluctuations and extreme ambient heat cause these cold heads to trip or fail. When the cold head stops working, helium immediately begins boiling off, transforming a state-of-the-art machine back into a legacy bleeder and forcing the hospital into emergency refills at whatever the market will bear. If a hospital cannot secure a helium delivery or pay for it at the new wartime prices, the MRI machine’s magnet warms up, loses superconductivity, and potentially destroys itself in a catastrophic event known as a quench - a failure that results in crores of damage and takes the machine permanently offline. The external metabolism, disrupted at Ras Laffan, reaches directly into the bodily metabolism through the diagnostic machines on which India’s healthcare system depends. The three metabolisms create a mesh linking a gas field in the Gulf with a neurological scan in Muzaffarpur.
Helium does not only cool magnets. The semiconductor industry relies on gaseous helium for thermal management during chip fabrication. As chip architectures shrink to five nanometres and below, silicon wafers are bombarded with highly energetic lasers and plasma inside vacuum chambers during processes like extreme ultraviolet lithography and plasma etching. The vacuum contains no air to carry heat away. To prevent the atomic-level structures from melting or warping, gaseous helium is pumped into the microscopic gap between the cooling chuck and the wafer’s back surface. Its thermal conductivity is unmatched, and because it is a noble gas it does not react with the volatile chemicals used in fabrication. No other gas - not argon, not nitrogen - can substitute.
This is where the external metabolism’s two registers - that’s energy and information - collide in the same supply shock. India is currently investing billions in establishing domestic semiconductor manufacturing as part of a bid for compute sovereignty, i.e., the capacity to produce and govern the digital infrastructure on which a modern economy depends. Those nascent fabs require ultra-high-purity helium, which is the same helium the hospitals need, and they will be competing for it against TSMC and Samsung, tech giants that together consume over 20 percent of the world’s helium supply. The same supply shock that degrades India’s capacity to diagnose a brain tumour in Darbhanga also delays its bid to manufacture the chips that would underpin a domestically governed information metabolism.
And here the political metabolism reveals its failure most starkly. When the helium flow is interrupted, rationing begins. Industrial gas distribution is a highly consolidated oligopoly dominated by companies like Linde and Air Liquide, which can invoke force majeure and place all customers on allocation, a system where buyers receive only a percentage of their usual order. In that rationing hierarchy, a diagnostic centre in Bihar has no leverage against a politically connected mega-hospital in Boston, a semiconductor fab in Hsinchu, or a SpaceX launch facility in Texas.
There used to be a buffer. For decades, the U.S. Federal Helium Reserve held billions of cubic feet of helium as a sovereign shock absorber, capable of stabilising the market during exactly this kind of crisis. But in 2021, in a familiar triumph of short-term financial logic over long-term metabolic resilience, the U.S. government privatised the reserve, auctioning off its final assets to private industry. No one, it seemed, thought helium deserved a reserve in the public interest, which is the exact same delusion that runs through our modern polyconflicts: the belief that private markets always allocate resources more efficiently than the state, and that optimising for short-term returns is more important than maintaining buffers for long-term survival.
That decision - a failure of the political metabolism - now means that when the external metabolism breaks, there is no sovereign buffer between the shock and the body. Private distributors are forced to make opaque choices: fulfill an allocation for a politically connected mega-hospital in Boston, or a refurbished diagnostic centre in Bihar? The cost of a neurological scan in Muzaffarpur is set by a rationing algorithm in a corporate office in Munich. For a tenant farmer in Darbhanga, an undiagnosed tumour because of higher MRI costs means potential depth or crippling lack of mental function. Paying for the higher priced scans means pooling the family’s savings to travel to a city where a functioning MRI exists, paying vastly more for the scan, and slipping into generational medical debt. In the agrarian economy, healthcare debt is among the primary engines of rural dispossession. That’s the helium shock.
The Metformin Shock: Natural Gas and the Cellular Metabolism
If the helium case demonstrates how the external metabolism reaches the body through its diagnostic infrastructure, the metformin case takes us to the cellular level, where the external metabolism becomes the body’s metabolic regulator. The pharmaceutical industry, it turns out, is deeply dependent on the fossil fuel industry, and not merely as an energy source. Petrochemicals like benzene and ethylene are the building blocks of modern drugs.
If you are Indian, you almost certainly have a close family member with diabetes. Probably several. According to the 2023 ICMR-INDIAB study, over 101 million Indians are living with diabetes, with an additional 136 million in a state of pre-diabetes. India currently accounts for roughly one-quarter of the global diabetic burden.
We have been condemned by nature and nurture to occupy an evolutionary and metabolic profile known in the medical literature as the Thin-Fat Indian phenotype. For epigenetic reasons traceable to nutritional stress and colonial-era famines, Indians possess a lower metabolic capacity: smaller internal organs, particularly the pancreas and liver, and significantly less skeletal muscle mass. We are built to survive starvation, not abundance. But we now live in an environment of unprecedented metabolic load. An Indian with a seemingly normal Body Mass Index of 22 often carries the same hidden metabolic risk as a Caucasian with a BMI of 30. We are genetically predisposed to store fat viscerally, packed tightly around our internal organs, rather than subcutaneously. This visceral fat is highly inflammatory, triggering systemic insulin resistance and premature beta-cell failure in the pancreas. Indians are often diagnosed with diabetes in their late 20s or 30s, decades earlier than the typical Western patient.
The biological vulnerability is compounded by the carb-heavy nature of the Indian diet. Rice and wheat are the anchors of the Indian plate and palate. In the 1960s, the threat of mass starvation led to the Green Revolution and the massive expansion of grain cultivation. The mountains of cheap rice and wheat that sustain India today are only possible because of massive applications of urea, a highly concentrated nitrogen fertilizer. India is overwhelmingly dependent on the Persian Gulf for this urea - over 45 percent of imports come from Oman alone, with Qatar and Saudi Arabia providing much of the rest. With the Strait of Hormuz mostly closed, the urea supply is threatened. A shortage could mean immediate drops in crop yields for the upcoming Kharif season, which translates into punishing inflation in basic staples. And when food prices spike, people do not pivot to lean proteins and organic vegetables. They default to the cheapest, most heavily processed, high-glycemic carbohydrates available: more refined flour, more sugar, more cheap starch. The Gulf war is producing a more diabetogenic diet for millions of Indians at the exact moment their access to diabetes medication is about to decrease.
That medication is Metformin, and it is keeping a significant proportion of those 101 million people alive. While its origins trace back to the French Lilac plant (Galega officinalis) used in medieval European folk medicine, modern Metformin is effectively solidified natural gas. Its industrial synthesis depends on two chemical building blocks: Dimethylamine and Dicyandiamide. Manufacturing Dimethylamine requires enormous quantities of methanol and ammonia, which require massive, continuous flows of methane. Synthesizing Dicyandiamide requires nitrogen-rich feedstocks processed in energy-intensive, high-heat environments. The petrochemical complexes at Ras Laffan and Saudi Arabia’s Jubail industrial city are the primary global sources for the methane and ammonia that flow into metformin. The first was hit by Iranian missiles. The second has been threatened repeatedly.
What Metformin does inside the body is metabolic in the most literal sense. It activates AMPK - adenosine monophosphate-activated protein kinase - the enzyme that functions as the master regulator of cellular energy metabolism. AMPK is the body’s fuel gauge. When Metformin activates it, AMPK instructs the liver to stop overproducing glucose and signals muscle tissue to become more sensitive to whatever insulin remains. Metformin is cheap to produce, effective at controlling blood sugar, and carries low risk of inducing fatal hypoglycaemia. For most Indian diabetics, it is the foundational treatment. The ICMR guidelines position it as first-line therapy for nearly all newly diagnosed patients. In the Indian pharmaceutical market, it is combined with other drugs in Fixed-Dose Combinations - single tablets that reduce the pill burden and improve compliance. Metformin is the bedrock of India’s public health response to a disease affecting a quarter of a billion people including pre-diabetics. There is no viable, affordable substitute. Patients cannot switch to thousand-dollar-a-month GLP-1 receptor agonists like Ozempic or manage complex, refrigerated insulin regimens. For most of them, it is Metformin or nothing. And in a grim irony, the patent for Semaglutide, the active ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy, the much-hyped next-generation diabetes drugs, expired recently. Indian firms are eager to manufacture generic versions. But to do so, they need the same petrochemical precursors from Qatar and Saudi Arabia that are currently under threat.
The chain from Gulf gas to the Indian liver runs through China, and here the political metabolism enters the story as a history of deliberate surrender. China currently dominates the global production of Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients - the synthesized medicinal chemicals that do the actual work in the body. As of 2024, China accounted for roughly 45 percent of all new global API filings. Massive, heavily subsidized chemical mega-factories in provinces like Shandong synthesize the Gulf-sourced precursors into pure, bulk Metformin API. India then imports this powder by the megaton - 70 to 80 percent of its total API and bulk drug imports come from China. In formulation plants in Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, and Mumbai, Indian companies press Chinese API into tablets, package them, and ship them worldwide. India calls itself the Pharmacy of the World. The phrase is accurate about the final step - the tabletting, the packaging, the export - and misleading about every step before it. We are assemblers, not makers. We press imported Chinese powder into blister packs and call it sovereignty.
It was not always this way. Following the Patents Act of 1970, which recognised process patents but not product patents, India built a vertically integrated pharmaceutical sector. Indian scientists reverse-engineered global blockbuster drugs and manufactured the APIs domestically. In 1991, Chinese ingredients made up less than 1 percent of India’s bulk drug imports. But after liberalisation, Indian pharma executives recognised that high margins lay in marketing finished formulations to Western markets, not in the dirty, highly regulated, energy-intensive, low-margin business of chemical synthesis. Simultaneously, China made a strategic state decision to capture the base of the global pharmaceutical supply chain, building massive chemical parks powered by cheap coal. From the perspective of any individual Indian pharmaceutical company, outsourcing API production to China was the rational short-term choice. Collectively, these individual rational choices amounted to the voluntary dismantling of India’s own chemical foundation. We dismantled our fermentation plants and allowed our synthesis capacity to wither because it was cheaper to buy the molecules from Shandong. Today that figure of less than 1 percent has become 70 to 80 percent. India surrendered its pharmaceutical sovereignty - a failure of the political metabolism - because the logic of liberalised markets treated sovereignty as an inefficiency to be optimised away.
The consequences are now recursive. As the government scrambles to launch Production Linked Incentive schemes to bring API manufacturing back to Indian soil, it faces a brutal paradox. To rebuild these energy-intensive factories, India needs cheap, reliable power, stable grids, and raw petrochemical feedstocks. Where does that energy come from? The Persian Gulf. What about renewables? The solar panels and batteries needed for green energy manufacturing come from China. Rebuilding pharmaceutical sovereignty likely means that India will sink deeper into energy dependency on the two nodes it is trying to escape. Meanwhile, China’s dominance in the API supply chain is not only about cheap energy and labour. It has been built partly on state-subsidized, computationally optimised chemical synthesis, where AI accelerates molecular design and process efficiency. The information metabolism and the pharmaceutical supply chain are already entangled at the source.
The global dimension of this shock deserves attention, because it demonstrates that the these metabolic disruptions do not stop at India’s borders. India supplies roughly 40 to 50 percent of all the generic drugs consumed in the United States and the United Kingdom. If Chinese export curbs and Gulf energy shocks squeeze the Indian manufacturer in Hyderabad, the downstream effect reaches pharmacy shelves in London, Detroit, and Boston within weeks. The rationing hierarchy we observed with helium - where hospitals compete for scarce supply - replicates itself in pharmaceuticals. The American and European working classes, already burdened by decaying, hyper-financialised healthcare systems, could face shortages in basic metabolic maintenance drugs. The pauper in Darbhanga and the pauper in Detroit are tethered to the same fragile supply chain.
Then comes the perfect storm: when the external metabolism attacks the bodily metabolism from two directions at once. On one front, the cost of Metformin rises as API supply chains fracture, energy costs spike, and shipping insurance premiums surge. On the other front, food inflation driven by urea shortages makes healthy, protein-rich diets economically impossible for the majority of the population. Consider the daily reality of the tenant farmer in Bihar or the gig worker in Bengaluru: their diet is becoming more carb-heavy, more ultra-processed, and more diabetogenic as the medication required to manage the physiological fallout of that diet becomes scarce and expensive.
The war in the Gulf is simultaneously worsening the disease and removing the treatment, and the costs of this metabolic fracture fall along India’s socioeconomic fault lines, concentrating stress on the most vulnerable and shifting the burden onto the household.
LPG, Firewood, and the Gendered Metabolism
Cooking is the oldest and most intimate interface between the external metabolism and the bodily one. It is the act through which humans have always extended their metabolism into the world, converting raw matter into something the body can use. Fire is the original metabolic technology. For millions of Indian women, that technology takes the form of a biomass-burning chulha - a mud or clay stove fuelled by firewood, crop residue, and dried cattle dung. Burning solid biomass in an enclosed space produces devastating levels of indoor air pollution.
Cooking three meals a day over a chulha is the physiological equivalent of smoking hundreds of cigarettes. It is a primary driver of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, acute respiratory infections, and cataracts among rural Indian women. The combustion products do not merely enter the lungs; they attack the respiratory metabolism directly, scarring tissue over years of daily exposure, producing irreversible damage. The environmental cost is equally severe as the relentless need for cooking fuel drives the slow, steady stripping of local scrublands and forests, destroying the ecological commons that rural communities depend on for resilience. The chulha attacks both the bodily metabolism and the environmental substrate on which it depends.
And firewood does not pipe itself into a kitchen. It must be foraged, cut, and carried, labour that falls squarely on the shoulders of women and girls who often spend hours every day walking miles to gather fuel. Every hour spent foraging is an hour stolen from education, from income-generating work, from rest. The chulha is a mechanism of gender inequality. It chains women to the hearth, destroys their lungs, and consumes their time. Whatever its historical usefulness, it is an ongoing catastrophe.
From the bird’s eye view, energy is a neutral resource - policymakers see barrels of oil, cubic metres of gas, gigawatts of solar, BTUs of heat. But on the ground, energy is never neutral. It is distributed along axes of power, and gender is one of the most durable of those axes. Recognising this injustice, the Indian state launched one of the most ambitious public health and gender-equity interventions in modern history: the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana. By heavily subsidising Liquefied Petroleum Gas connections for below-poverty-line households, the programme aimed to move hundreds of millions of women from toxic chulhas to clean, efficient cooking fuel. The blue flame of the LPG stove became a symbol of metabolic liberation, freeing millions of hours and clearing the air in rural kitchens.
The Ujjwala Yojana intervened across all three metabolic registers simultaneously. It changed the external metabolism by introducing a cleaner fuel supply. It protected the bodily metabolism by reducing respiratory damage and reclaiming women’s time. And it altered the political metabolism by formally recognising that women’s bodily sovereignty - their right to breathe, their right to time - was a legitimate object of state policy. In just over a decade, India’s LPG consumption has doubled, from 16 MMT (Million Metric Tonnes) in FY 14 to over 31 MMT in FY 25. India is the world’s second-largest consumer of LPG.
LPG is a byproduct of natural gas processing and crude oil refining. India does not produce enough of it. Roughly 55 percent of India’s LPG is imported from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, and those tankers are now stranded at the Strait of Hormuz. Supply has constricted. The global price of gas has surged. The fiscal arithmetic of maintaining the Ujjwala subsidy at wartime prices is already breaking down.
What happens when LPG becomes unaffordable? A decade of hard-won progress on gender equality begins to unravel as daughters are pulled from school to forage - because of a war in the Gulf that they had no voice in, no knowledge of, and no agency over. We too easily forget how much fossil fuels are woven into our idea of modernity. The three registers trace the shock as LPG supply and price both move against India and the external metabolism falters, which destabilizes the political metabolism as the subsidy becomes unsustainable, and finally the bodily metabolism absorbs the final cost in lungs, time, education, health.
The information metabolism is implicated here too, for the Ujjwala subsidy reaches its beneficiaries through Aadhaar-linked digital systems and the electrostate transition that could genuinely free India from Gulf LPG dependency with solar-powered induction stoves, decentralised microgrids and village-level renewable energy. That also requires a compute stack: smart inverters, grid management software, digital metering, demand forecasting. Unfortunately, that compute stack, today, runs largely on Chinese hardware and American cloud infrastructure. The attempt to liberate women’s bodily metabolism from one set of external dependencies introduces another.
This is where the concept of bad intersectionality earns its spurs. In academic and progressive circles, intersectionality describes how various forms of oppression compound one another. Polyconflicts are intersectional in the most destructive sense of the word. They act like water under pressure, seeking out the deepest, most historically entrenched fault lines in a society and cracking them wide open.
We have known this about shooting wars for a long time: men die on the front lines while women face sexual violence. But modern geoeconomic warfare - supply chain fractures, commodity shocks, subsidy collapses - also has a gendered fallout, and it is less visible precisely because no one is firing a weapon. When global energy prices spike due to a war in the Gulf, it is rural Indian women who pay the physical price of the LPG squeeze. Their lungs fill with toxic smoke. Their time is stolen by the daily march for firewood. Their daughters are kept home from school to help with housework. When the external metabolism is disrupted and the political metabolism fails to buffer the shock, the cost does not distribute equally. It concentrates on those whose bodies were already doing the most uncompensated work, whose claims on the political metabolism were already weakest.
The Metabolic Condition
The three cases we have traced, i.e., helium, metformin, and LPG/Firewood, involve different commodities, different populations, and different technical specifics. A noble gas used for superconducting magnets and semiconductor cooling. A synthetic molecule that regulates cellular energy metabolism in 101 million diabetics. A fossil-fuel byproduct that determines whether women breathe clean air or toxic smoke. But beneath their differences, the cases reveal the same pattern operating at different nodes of the same system.
In each case:
First the external metabolism is disrupted - energy flows are cut, supply chains fracture, prices spike.
Second, the political metabolism fails to buffer the shock - because strategic reserves have been privatised, or because sovereign manufacturing capacity has been outsourced, or because public health programmes have been built on top of geopolitical dependencies.
And in each case, the bodily metabolism absorbs the cost in the form of undiagnosed tumours, unregulated blood sugar, scarred lung tissue, or daughters pulled from school.
To name this pattern is to arrive at the concept of metabolic sovereignty - as a diagnostic instrument for now, but with normative policy goals in the background. Metabolic sovereignty describes the degree to which a political community can govern the coupling between its three metabolisms: maintaining sufficient control over external energy and information flows, sufficient investment in its population’s bodily health, and sufficient institutional capacity to defend both under stress. It is what the systems theorists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela called autopoiesis, the capacity of a living system to continuously regenerate the conditions of its own existence. A cell does this. An organism does this. A metabolically sovereign polity would be one that can keep making itself under changing conditions, without being at the mercy of chokepoints it does not control.
Autopoiesis is not autarky. A sovereign system is not a closed system. It can trade, import, and exchange. What it cannot afford is to lose the capacity to refuse a dependency when that dependency becomes coercive. There is a difference between interdependence and indebtedness. Metabolic sovereignty, as a diagnostic concept, asks a simple question of any given commodity chain: if the external supply were cut off tomorrow, does the political metabolism have the institutional capacity to protect the bodily metabolism from the shock? For helium, for Metformin, for LPG, the answer in India’s case is no.
By that measure, India’s metabolic sovereignty is low. And the three cases establish that this is not bad luck, not the unfortunate coincidence of a distant war landing on an unlucky country. It is the accumulated result of specific choices made within the political metabolism over three decades - choices shaped by the same neoliberal logic that assumed private markets always allocate resources more efficiently than the state, and that optimising for short-term financial returns is more important than maintaining buffers for long-term survival. The privatisation of strategic buffers - as with the U.S. Helium Reserve, which once served as a global shock absorber. The outsourcing of critical manufacturing capacity - as with the pharmaceutical industry’s surrender of API production to China in pursuit of higher margins on finished formulations. The embedding of essential public programmes inside geopolitical dependencies that were treated as permanent - as with the Ujjwala Yojana’s reliance on Gulf LPG imports.
Each of these was a rational decision within its own frame. Each optimised for short-term efficiency at the expense of long-term metabolic resilience. The pattern is consistent enough to constitute a diagnosis: what the neoliberal era called efficiency, such as outsourcing API production, privatising helium reserves, tethering public health programmes to imported fuel, was, in metabolic terms, the systematic destruction of buffers. A buffer is metabolically expensive; it looks like waste on a balance sheet. But a buffer is also what stands between a supply shock and the bodies of citizens.
Remove the buffers, and the body absorbs the shock directly.
The double bind completes the analysis: India’s escape from Gulf hydrocarbon dependency runs into Chinese manufacturing dependency. The solar panels, lithium batteries, EV components, and rare earths needed for the energy transition flow almost entirely through China, which controls over 80 percent of solar PV manufacturing capacity and dominates battery and rare-earth processing. China is a strategic rival with whom India shares a heavily militarised, contested border, and one with a demonstrated willingness to weaponise economic leverage. Every rooftop solar panel installed in Pune, every electric two-wheeler sold in Coimbatore, deepens a dependency on this rival. The faster India electrifies to escape the first set of dependencies, the deeper it embeds itself in the second.
India’s bid for compute sovereignty faces a parallel dependency structure. Advanced chips come from TSMC in Taiwan. The extreme ultraviolet lithography machines that make those chips possible come from ASML in the Netherlands. China dominates midstream manufacturing and packaging. AI-grade data centres are currently located in only 33 countries worldwide, with capacity heavily concentrated in the United States and China. India’s nascent semiconductor fabs need helium from Qatar, energy from the Gulf or China, and equipment from supply chains it does not control.
Information and energy metabolisms are entangled at every level, since data centres require enormous amounts of electricity, while modern energy grids require computation for forecasting, dispatch, and cyber defence. You cannot be sovereign in one without being sovereign in the other. The faster India tries to escape the petrostate nexus, the deeper it wades into the electrostate and computestate nexuses, each of which carries its own sovereignty risks. There is no clean exit from metabolic precarity. There is only a shifting of which dependencies expose which bodies to which risks, mediated by a political metabolism that has consistently underestimated how tightly the three registers are coupled.
Consider, finally, the full shape of what these three cases reveal when seen together. A paddy farmer in Punjab sees his input costs jump because urea prices spiked. That traces back to a gas field attack. If the Government of India covers the mounting fertiliser subsidy by cutting rural health allocations, the farmer might decide to migrate to Delhi. Where will he live? What will he do? Meanwhile, an EV buyer in Bengaluru thinks she is making a responsible ecological choice. It is a better choice for sure, but one embedded in a macroeconomic rivalry with China that could cut off her spare parts tomorrow. The diabetic gig worker who drives her electric scooter cannot get Metformin because the API factory in Shandong is prioritising domestic supply. The woman in Bihar who was promised clean cooking fuel is back in a smoke-filled kitchen because the LPG tankers cannot transit the strait. The hospital in Patna cannot run its MRI machine because the helium that was supposed to arrive from Qatar is sitting in a cryogenic container on a ship stuck in the Strait of Hormuz.
Moral of the Story: India’s three metabolisms, the external, the bodily, and the political, are coupled in ways that the political metabolism is struggling to govern.