ANTAKALIPA

Built to Last: Visionary Companies and the Architecture of Endurance Most companies are born with ambition. Very few are born with longevity. Built to Last begins with a deceptively simple question: Why do some companies endure for generations while others, equally brilliant in their moment, fade into irrelevance? Jim Collins and Jerry Porras do not seek charismatic leaders, clever strategies, or perfect timing as their answer. Instead, they uncover something more unsettling—and more powerful: enduring greatness is designed, not improvised. The Core Paradox: Stability and Change At the heart of Built to Last lies a paradox that contradicts much modern business mythology. Visionary companies are fanatically stable at their core yet relentlessly adaptive in everything else. While ordinary companies chase trends, visionary companies anchor themselves to a core ideology—a combination of core values and core purpose that remains untouched by markets, technologies, and leadership...

Brave New World: The Tyranny of Happiness and the Death of the Soul Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is not a novel about oppression in its obvious, brutal form. There are no jackboots, no gulags, no public executions. Instead, it presents something far more unsettling: a civilization that has solved suffering—and in doing so, abolished humanity. Huxley’s dystopia does not rule by fear, but by pleasure; not by censorship, but by saturation; not by violence, but by comfort.  The result is a society in which no one rebels because no one remembers what it means to want something deeply enough to fight for it. Unlike the tyrannies of the past, the World State does not need to silence dissent. It engineers a population incapable of dissent from birth. Conditioning as Destiny From the opening scenes in the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, Huxley establishes the novel’s central horror: human beings are manufactured.  Natural birth is obscene. Mothers and fa...

1984 : Power, Truth, and the Architecture of the Mind George Orwell’s 1984 is not merely a dystopian novel; it is an anatomy of power at its most refined and merciless. Written in the aftermath of World War II and under the long shadow of totalitarian regimes, the novel functions as a philosophical warning disguised as fiction. Orwell does not predict the future so much as reveal a pattern: how power consolidates, how truth dissolves, and how the human soul is reshaped when language, memory, and fear are brought under absolute control. At its core, 1984 asks a devastating question: What happens to the individual when reality itself becomes a political instrument? The World of Oceania: Power Without Justification Oceania is ruled by the Party, an entity so abstract that it becomes godlike. Unlike traditional tyrannies that justify themselves through ideology, religion, or promises of prosperity, the Party offers no ultimate justification. Power is not a means to an end; it...

Sun Tzu’s The Art of War: Strategy as the Highest Form of Intelligence Sun Tzu’s The Art of War is often misunderstood because it has been quoted too frequently and read too shallowly. It appears on corporate PowerPoint slides, leadership seminars, and motivational posters—usually reduced to clichés about “knowing your enemy” or “choosing battles wisely.” But The Art of War is not a book about aggression. It is a book about restraint, perception, and the invisible mechanics of power. At its core, it is a philosophy that treats war as a tragic failure of politics, to be concluded swiftly, intelligently, and with minimal bloodshed. Unlike later Western military theorists such as Clausewitz, who framed war as the continuation of politics by other means, Sun Tzu frames war as something to be avoided if possible, and ended before it begins if unavoidable. Victory, for Sun Tzu, is not measured by conquest but by control without destruction. This inversion is what makes The Art of...

The 50th Law: Fearlessness as Power in a World Built on Anxiety Robert Greene’s The 50th Law, co-authored with Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson, stands apart from Greene’s other works not because it abandons strategy, but because it strips strategy down to its rawest psychological core: fear. Where The 48 Laws of Power teaches manipulation, misdirection, and control, The 50th Law asks a more unsettling question—what happens when fear disappears entirely? The answer, Greene suggests, is not recklessness, but sovereignty. This book is not a motivational manifesto, nor is it a gangster memoir disguised as philosophy. It is a meditation on power from the perspective of those who begin with nothing—no safety net, no institutional protection, no illusions about fairness. By pairing Greene’s historical analysis with 50 Cent’s lived experience of poverty, violence, betrayal, and reinvention, The 50th Law becomes a study in fearlessness as an existential stance, not a personality trait. At ...

From Florence to the Boardroom: Machiavelli’s The Prince and Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power Power does not announce itself as evil. It arrives disguised as necessity. Niccolò Machiavelli understood this in sixteenth-century Florence; Robert Greene understands it in corporate offices, political arenas, and social hierarchies centuries later. The Prince and The 48 Laws of Power are separated by time, language, and cultural surface, but they belong to the same bloodline. Greene’s book is not a reinvention of Machiavelli—it is his translation into a world that still pretends to be moral. Together, these texts form a single philosophy: power is amoral, relational, and governed by perception rather than truth. What Machiavelli articulated with brutal minimalism, Greene expands into a manual for psychological warfare in modern life. The Break with Innocence Machiavelli’s great rupture was his refusal to speak of power as it should be. He rejected saints, philosophers, and th...

Marabi At the Market Theatre for the opening of "Marabi". Piano, Kasi, Stocko, Doornfontein! A full house, everyone in full attendance. The energy palpable, everyone is just excited! It's the first show of the year! Marabi is a South African musical theatre classic adapted from Modikwe Dikobe’s novel The Marabi Dance and originally developed through Junction Avenue Theatre Company workshops. It’s set in the Doornfontein slumpyards, rusted corrugated sheets is the feeling and tone, 1930s - the show tells a powerful story of family, music and change.  The play opens with the Mabongo family, first-generation Black migrants who have come to Johannesburg in search of opportunity but instead face the harsh realities of urban poverty and crowded township life. The central figure, July Mabongo, carries the burden of ancestral expectations, traditional values, and the tension between holding on to the past and surviving in a fast-changing city. ...

Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince: Power Without Illusions Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince is not a book that asks to be loved. It asks to be understood. Written in the early sixteenth century amid the political disintegration of Renaissance Italy, the text reads less like a moral treatise and more like a survival manual for a world governed by betrayal, chance, and force. What makes The Prince endure is not merely its cynicism, but its brutal clarity. Machiavelli tears away the comforting illusions of virtue and exposes power as it actually operates—unadorned, unstable, and merciless. In antakalipa style, The Prince is a confession whispered behind palace walls, a chant for rulers who understand that innocence is a liability and appearances are weapons. It is not an argument for evil, but an autopsy of politics after morality has failed. A World After God Machiavelli writes in a world where the medieval synthesis—God, monarchy, virtue, and order—has fractured. Italy is div...

Nobody Told Me  On the square to watch a Masterpiece "Nobody Told Me" , very early on and you are looking at a Production of the Year contender. A Poignant, reflective, wrenching and deeply compassionate play exploring life in the Warsaw Ghetto, Poland for Jewish residents under German occupation. Nazi's the instigaters - Swastikas, German efficiency, in uniform, Poland, WWII, heil Hitler.  Nobody Told Me is a contemporary stage play written by Luc Albinski. It’s a dramatic theatrical work inspired by true family history and the experiences of a Jewish doctor in World War II Warsaw. It follows the emotional journey of Wanda, now in her 80s, and her son Luc (the playwright), as they explore long-buried family secrets about Wanda’s mother — Dr Halina Rotstein, a Jewish physician who worked in the Warsaw Ghetto’s Czyste Hospital during the Holocaust. The story shifts between present-day conversations and flashbacks to the 1930s–40s in Warsaw, showing ...