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Our Moon Has Blood Clots: The Exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits  by Rahul Pandita Our Moon Has Blood Clots - Goodreads Our Moon Has Blood Clots - Complete Book at Internet Archive ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Highly Recommended The best in me are my memories. Many people will come to life in them, people who gave their blood while they lived, and who will now give their example. -  Anton Donchev , Time of Parting Rahul Pandita opens the book with an epigraph from a historical Bulgarian novel: Time of Parting . The epigraph highlights the theme of loss, forced displacement and cultural rupture - themes that resonate with Pandita’s own narrative of the ethnic cleansing of Kashmiri Pandits . Kashmiri Pandits are among the oldest indigenous communities of the Kashmir Valley, with roots stretching back over two thousand years. For centuries, they lived in the Valley as custodians of its language, learning, and cultural traditions, deeply tied to the land they called home. Our Moon Has Blood Clots is a boo...

Snow (Kar) by Orhan Pamuk Snow by Orhan Pamuk | Goodreads ⭐⭐⭐⭐✰ Worth Reading By imagining through the eyes of others, we tap into the heart of their culture, circumstances, and surroundings. It makes our world a little more complete knowing that we share experiences, and celebrate differences, across a broad spectrum of possibility.   Orhan Pamuk, a Turkish novelist and recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature, invites readers to explore the complex social and political landscape of Turkey in his novel Snow ( Kar ). Set in the cold, far-off town of Kars situated near the Armenia, Georgia & Iran border, the novel follows Ka, a Turkish poet who returns to his country after twelve long years of exile in Germany. He comes back to Kars  posing as a newspaper reporter, officially to cover local municipal elections and investigate the troubling suicides of young girls who wear headscarves. But beneath this professional reason lies a very personal one: Ka wants to me...

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by  Cal  Newport Deep Work - Goodreads ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Highly Recommended Wally Loins , a British practitioner of corporate identity and branding, recognized a great truth about the modern capitalist economy.  The most precious resource in a noisy, crowded market is people's attention. The second is that consumers are not just looking for utility in the things they buy. They are also looking for meaning.  Today, streaming channels, social media and reels are present on the smartphone that draws away scarce personal resource: attention. And the network tools are developed by private companies, funded lavishly, and designed with behavioral nudges to capture our attention.  The consumer searching for the meaning, pleasure, escape from reality and utility has been caught in the maze of distractions. Information overload is getting exponentially worse and consist of four sub-problems that together add up to one b...

Hitch-22 - Some Confessions and Contradictions: A Memoir - Christopher Hitchens Hitch-22 - Goodreads ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Highly Recommended One of the leading U.S. critics of the 20th century, Lionel Trilling noted long ago - " Intellectuals have tended to embrace an 'adversary culture’: standing against the state, against the market, against the establishment, against anything and everything but themselves. Conciliation and Compromise do not come naturally to them. " Christopher Hitchens exemplifies Lionel Trilling's "adversary culture" to an extreme degree, earning a 10/10 rating who relentlessly critiqued the power structures - British monarchy, U.S. imperialism in Vietnam, Islamic Fatwa on Salman Rushdie, Mother Teresa's piety , Henry Kissinger's realpolitik and post-9/11 "Islamofascism" - often aligning against consensus on both left and right.   Who was Christopher Hitchens? Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) was a British American author, publi...

India's War: The Making of Modern South Asia, 1939-1945  by Srinath Raghavan India's War | Goodreads ⭐⭐⭐⭐✰ Worth Reading A French writer once asked: What made France a nation? He listed three factors – the French educational system, the French Army, and the French middle classes.  In the Indian context, the Second World War served as a crucible for nation-making through different mechanisms.  This is well documented in the book,  India's War: The Making of Modern South Asia, 1939-1945.  The book is an essential read for anyone interested in India’s involvement in World War II. Covering key wars and military operations, the book sheds light on the evolution of India's armed force & it’s the political, economic, monetary, and social impact on the nation. The war mobilized over 2.5 million Indian soldiers b etween 1939 to 1945 , and India underwent an extraordinary and irreversible change due to World War II.  Hundreds of thousands of Indians suddenl...

Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey  by  V. S. Naipaul Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey | Goodreads ⭐⭐⭐⭐✰ Worth Reading History bears out the proposition that political revolutions have always been preceded by social and religious revolutions.    In Bangladesh, a significant number of people have converted to Islam over centuries, particularly during the medieval period when the region was influenced by conquest of Muslim rulers and proselytization by Sufi saints. Today, there has been t he rapid rise of radicalism in Bangladesh with the ouster of ex- Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina  in the student protest.  The protest has now been hijacked by Islamic extremists. Over the years, there was  a surge in madrasas, and  this has led to growing religious fanaticism, with zealots aggressively pushing an Islamist agenda.  With Islamist influence in power, Bangladesh is modifying national identity by erasing symbols of its secular past, ...

My Dagestan (Мой Дагестан) (Avar: Дир Дагъистан) by R asul Gamzatov . The book was translated in English in 1970 by Julius Katzer and Dorian Rottenberg. ⭐⭐⭐⭐✰ Worth Reading Let me speak of Dagestan —a rugged land along North Caucasus of Eastern Europe and the western shore of the Caspian Sea. The word Dagestan is of Turkish and Persian origin, directly translating to "land of the mountains".  The land has for centuries been a mosaic of peoples and languages: Avars, Dargins, Lezgins, Laks, Kumyks, and many others. The territory was annexed into the Russian Empire after protracted wars in the early nineteenth century.   By 1921, with the Red Army’s advance, the Dagestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic came into being.  Soviet state enforced sweeping modernization in  Dagestan, bringing it into line with Marxist-Leninist ideology while managing the religious sentiments.  Arabic was replaced first by Latin, later by Cyrillic; schools sprang up, teach...

Bhutan: The Kingdom at the Centre of the World  by  Omair Ahmad Bhutan: The Kingdom at the Centre of the World | Goodreads ⭐⭐⭐⭐✰ Worth Reading Despite the neighboring state of India, relatively limited number of books for common readers are available on Bhutan , a landlocked country in the Eastern Himalayas. This can be attributed to  unique geography and isolation  a policy of self-imposed isolation, which was successful in preserving its territorial integrity  as a Himalayan kingdom. Bhutan is much less known in the U.S. and western hemisphere that too for its Buddhism and as a mystical, serene travel destination.  Bhutan is slowly gaining popularity as a travel destination and t he readers will know a surprising  fact  on reading the book co nnecting Bhutan with the ' Golden Gate Bridge ' of San Francisco. Omair Ahmad has written an  insightful and beautiful book into the history of Bhutan, Druk Yul: Land of the Thunder Dragon. The book is...

Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy by Christopher L. Hayes ⭐⭐⭐⭐✰ Worth Reading “To see what is in front of one’s nose is a constant struggle,” George Orwell famously observed. So, what is it that American liberals and conservatives have missed? Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy is a 2012 nonfiction book written by Christopher Hayes. The book Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy by Christopher L. Hayes explores the crisis of authority in America, attributing it to the failures of the modern meritocracy. Hayes argues that since the 1960s, as more diverse groups rose to elite status through meritocratic means, a new elite emerged that is marked by increased social distance, corruption, and institutional failure.  This elite, embraced inequality, leading to widespread distrust in key institutions such as government, corporate America, the media, and even sports organizations.  Today, the children of these  elites enjoy outsized ret...

Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan  by William Dalrymple ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Highly Recommended Despite the significant failures experienced in Vietnam, the idea of American exceptionalism remained deeply ingrained in the U.S. national psyche till 2000. Then, 9/11 happened. A focused military-intelligence operation targeting the perpetrators of 9/11 could have addressed domestic demands for justice. Alas, Bush administration launched a large-scale ground invasion of Afghanistan.  USA withdrew ultimately from war scarred land of Afghanistan, marking the end of a twenty-year military presence. They couldn't capture and run a dummy Afghan government. Sounds familiar !  The aphorism “History does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes” is evident in these events when the United States withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021, echoing past foreign interventions in the country. The rapid collapse of Afghanistan’s government and swift Taliban resurgence after the U.S. exit underscore the c...

Maus (Complete Part I and II)  by  Art Spiegelman ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Highly Recommended How difficult it is to write the review of a book acclaimed worldwide by critics? It is the only graphic novel to have won a Pulitzer Prize.  Between moral weight and artistic expression, one struggles to find words that do justice to a depiction of quiet lives being lived alongside a loud and brutal sweep of history. "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting," -  Milan Kundera   “A human being survives by his ability to forget. Memory is always ready to blot out the bad and retain only the good.” - Varlam Shalamov Both these quotes hold profound significance in understanding the dynamics of power struggles, history, and human agency. Yet some memories refuse oblivion; they persist through narrative as a warning and a plea to the humanity. This memory has been itched in a book touching the lives of many and showing all the importance of bea...

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World  by   Peter Frankopan ⭐⭐⭐⭐✰ Worth Reading “ The age of empire and the rise of the west were built on the capacity to inflict violence on a major scale. The Enlightenment and the Age of Reason, the progression towards democracy, civil liberty and human rights, were not the result of an unseen chain linking back to Athens in antiquity or a natural state of affairs in Europe; they were the fruits of political, military and economic success in faraway continents .” The Silk Roads  by  Peter Frankopan  challenges conventional Eurocentric narratives by revealing how global history, trade, and exchange formed the bedrock for the modern world.    This perspective challenges the notion of Western progress as an isolated or inevitable phenomenon, situating it instead within the interconnected histories of empire, trade, conquest, and genocide.   The Silk Roads is a deceptive title for a profound book. While th...

Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud by   Peter Watson ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Highly Recommended The past is an inheritance, a gift and a burden. It can’t be shirked. You carry it everywhere. There’s nothing for it but to get to know it. - Jill Lepore Crisis makes radical ideas relevant. Radical ideas inspire social movements. Social movements amplify crisis. In a crisis, shovel-ready ideas can win support quickly.  History is full of deeply flawed  ideas adapted rapidly by civilization and also burial ground of the ideas applied with the best of intentions.  We must look at history and to understand that change never, ever, ever comes about in a brief period. It's the gradual accumulation of knowledge as ideas to historical change that lead to the historical changes. All the  current knowledge has been built on past insights, and a book is devoted for the cause.  Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud by Peter Watson, has c...