There is a kind of success that corrodes the hand that holds it. Valluvar knows this. Twenty-six chapters into the Book of Polity, after cataloguing every instrument of statecraft — ministers, allies, fortresses, armies — he stops to ask a question that most political traditions avoid: not whether your actions succeed, but whether they are clean. The chapter title itself is a compound that English cannot replicate in two words: 'vinai-t-thooimai,' the purity-of-the-deed, where the deed is not judged by its outcome but by the moral texture of its execution. What follows is not a gentle homily about being nice. It is a tightly argued case that impure means destroy their own ends — that wealth seized through tears departs in tears, that forbidden deeds deliver grief even when they succeed, and that the entire apparatus of ill-gotten power is as stable as water stored in an unfired clay pot. Valluvar's final image is not a metaphor. It is a physics lesson.