Sparsh

Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent by Eduardo Galeano | Goodreads ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Highly Recommended Where to Read: Open Veins of Latin America “They don’t let people see what I write because I write what I see.” -  Blas de Otero Written in 1971, the era of some of the darkest years of the Latin American dictatorships,  Open Veins of Latin America carries a sense of urgency that is both political and deeply human. Open Veins of Latin America first confronted the readers (me too) as a book of horrors; only afterwards does its vast history begin to settle in the mind. It is not a gentle awakening but a slap from sleep. Page after page, Galeano forces us to look at what the modern world would rather forget.  Reading it is emotionally exhausting. Horror gives way to grief, grief hardens into anger, and anger finally becomes awareness. This is perhaps exactly what Galeano intended: not passive sympathy, but a refusal to see injustice as natural, di...

Hatred in the Belly: Politics Behind the Appropriation of Dr. Ambedkar's Writings by Ambedkar Age Collective Where to read book? Here . ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Highly Recommended Public intellectuals  have largely abandoned holistic, critical reasoning for ego-driven discourse.  They justify and comment everything under the sun without the courage to admit when they do not understand something or are not the right people to speak for a particular tradition.  In s uch a scenario, celebrity intellectuals complicate an honest debate as those with the highest stakes can get sidelined. Intellectual honesty, therefore, begins with recognizing the limits of one’s own authority and allowing those closest to a lived tradition to speak for themselves. Reading Hatred in the Belly: Politics Behind the Appropriation of Dr. Ambedkar’s Writings reminded me why this principle matters. The book responds critically to Arundhati Roy’s lengthy introduction, “ The Doctor and the Saint ,” published with a new e...

Catherine Belton, in Putin’s People , recalls Zbigniew Brzezinski’s piercing question to Russian officials: “ If so much Russian wealth is parked in Western accounts, whose elites are they — Russian or Western — and whom do they really serve?” That question no longer belongs only to Russia. It has become one of the defining questions of our age. A significant section of India’s political, judicial and corporate elite relies on foreign universities, careers and global residency options even while public discourse frequently stresses domestic education, self-reliance and institution-building.  Vivek Doval, the younger son of National Security Adviser Ajit Doval, is a British citizen and an Overseas Citizen of India (OCI). Separately, Isha Ambani and Akash Ambani, children of Mukesh Ambani, and Isha Ambani’s twins, Aadiya Piramal and Krishna Piramal, were reportedly born in the United States. Children and members of several prominent Indian political and corporate families have r...

Let me answer a question on Pakistan from Indian point of view:  How geography, military dominance, ideological transformation and dependence on external powers shaped Pakistan’s history, its rivalry with India and its continuing search for a stable national identity?  Pakistan’s geopolitical history is marked by a recurring contradiction. It seeks strategic autonomy and regional influence, yet much of its security architecture has depended on relationships with larger external powers, principally the United States and China. Pakistan became important not primarily because of what its economy produced, but because of where it was located, whom it bordered and what strategic services it could provide to larger powers. Its geography repeatedly brought military assistance, financial support and diplomatic relevance. Yet this external importance often reduced the pressure to build autonomous political, economic and civilian institutions. Pakistan consequently achieved strategic re...