Sparsh

Irreverence is the champion of liberty and its only sure defence. -Mark Twain “There is only one thing that you write for yourself, and that is a shopping list.”? Umberto Eco, On Literature   ~Highly Recommended~ Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud - Peter Watson ~Worth a Look~ New Delhi Times (1986) - Gulzar Kashmirnama  - Ashok Kumar Pandey The Intelligent Investor - Benjamin Graham ~Pleasure Reading~ The Fires of Heaven (The Wheel of Time, #5) - Robert Jordan The Shadow Rising (Wheel of Time, #4) - Robert Jordan ~Avoid~ Midnight's Machines: A Political History of Technology in India - Arun Mohan Sukumar .  Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan William Dalrymple 4 What the Ladybug Heard Julia Donaldson 4

“It is our choices, which show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.” - J K Rowling "The day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom." - Anaïs Nin ~Highly Recommended~ Mera Dagistan -  Gamzatov, Rasul Indias War -  Raghavan, Srinath ~Worth a Look~ Full Spectrum: India's Wars, 1972-2020 -  Subramaniam, Arjun Sanskar - Ananthamurthy, U.R. ~Pleasure Reading~ A Bend in the River -  Naipaul, V.S. शिकायत मुझे भी है -  Parsai, Harishankar Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India -  Dalrymple, William Days at the Morisaki Bookshop (Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, #1) -  Yagisawa, Satoshi The Seventh Scroll (Ancient Egypt, #2) -  Smith, Wilbur Eskimo boy -  Freuchen, Pipaluk ~Avoid~ Escape from Pakistan: A War Hero's Chronicle - Chinoy, Dara Phiroze

"Life's most persistent and urgent question is, 'What are you doing for others?'" Martin Luther King Jr When you begin to see that your enemy is suffering, that is the beginning of insight. - Thich Nhat Hanh   ~Highly Recommended~ Man's Search for Meaning  - Viktor E. Frankl Maus II: A Survivor's Tale: And Here My Troubles Began (Maus, #2) - Art Spiegelman Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History (Maus, #1) - Art Spiegelman ~Worth a Look~ The Silk Roads: A New History of the World  - Peter Frankopan Early Indians: The Story of Our Ancestors and Where We Came From  - Tony Joseph The Complete Persepolis  - Marjane Satrapi A Memory of Light (The Wheel of Time, #14)  - Robert Jordan Towers of Midnight (Wheel of Time, #13; A Memory of Light, #2) - Robert Jordan The Gathering Storm (Wheel of Time, #12) - Robert Jordan The Path of Daggers (Wheel of Time, #8) - Robert Jordan ~Pleasure Reading~ Reverse Innovation in Health Care  - Vijay Govindar...

Infidel:My Life by Ayaan Hirsi Ali | Goodreads ⭐⭐⭐⭐✰ Worth Reading Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Infidel is a shocking, brutally honest, and deeply captivating memoir that tells the story of a woman who managed to save herself, change her life, and become a voice that is heard, while so many others remain unheard. This autobiographical narrative follows her life chronologically, tracing the various stages of her extraordinary childhood and youth as she moved between Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, Kenya, and eventually Europe. More than a personal story, Infidel is a politically charged memoir that explains how Hirsi Ali’s life experiences shaped her into a vocal critic of Islam and of Western multicultural policies that, in her view, often fail to confront injustice hidden behind the language of culture and tolerance. Hirsi Ali was born and raised in Somalia under the shadow of a rigid and extremist religious environment. Her father was a prominent opposition politician who fought against the co...

Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, which does not mean we deserve to conquer the Universe. - Kurt Vonnegut If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you are a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind - Kurt Vonnegut     ~Highly Recommended~ Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy Christopher L. Hayes In Service of the Republic: The Art and Science of Economic Policy Vijay Kelkar Black Box Thinking - Matthew Syed Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World - Cal Newport ~Worth a Look~ Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future - Peter Thiel Choices: Inside the Making of Indian Foreign Policy - Shivshankar Menon ~Pleasure Reading~ The Dragon Reborn (The Wheel of Time, #3) - Robert Jordan 3 The Great Hunt (The Wheel of Time, #2) - Robert Jordan 3 The Eye of the World (The Wheel of Time, #1) - Robert Jordan 3 Manifesto for a Moral Revolution: Practices to Build a Better World - Jacqueline Novogr...

The great enemy of plain language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one is real and one is declared aims, one turns instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms. ~George Orwell Listen carefully to first criticisms of your work. Note just what it is about your work that critics do not like- then cultivate it. That is the part of your work that's individual and worth keeping. -Jean Cocteau     ~Highly Recommended~ Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir  - Malik Sajad Hatred in the Belly: Politics Behind the Appropriation of Dr. Ambedkar's Writings Ambedkar Age Collective ~Worth a Look~ Let's Talk Money - Monika Halan Jaya -  Devdutt Pattanaik Bhutan: The Kingdom at the Centre of the World - Omair Ahmad Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action - Simon Sinek Topi Shukla  - Rahi Masoom Raza Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't - J im Collins अरे यायावर रहेगा याद? -  अज्ञेय,सच्चिदानंदा हीरानंद ~Pleasur...

Great critics, of whom there are piteously few, build a home for the truth. -Raymond Chandler “Peace of mind happens to a man only after he has developed deep insight. ~Sam Veda      ~Highly Recommended~ Peeli Chhatri Wali Ladki  - Uday Prakash Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind  - Yuval Noah Harari A River in Darkness: One Man's Escape from North Korea - Masaji Ishikawa Waiting For A Visa: Autobiographical notes - B.R. Ambedkar Andhavishwas Unmoolan: Aachar Vol.2  - Narendra Dabholkar   ~Worth a Look~ Andhavishwas Unmoolan : Siddhant  Vol. 3:  - Narendra Dabholkar The Amber Spyglass (His Dark Materials, #3) - P hilip Pullman The Subtle Knife (His Dark Materials, #2) - Philip Pullman The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials, #1) - Philip Pullman The Blind Watchmaker - Richard Dawkins Qissa Qissa Lakhnauwa - Himanshu Bajpai Andhavishwas Unmoolan: Vichar Vol.1  - Narendra Dabholkar   Azadi mera brand - Anuradha Beniwal Co...

“To travel,” Aldous Huxley once quipped, “is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.” “That is the American Dream: to make your life into something you can sell. — Chuck Palahniuk” ~Highly Recommended~ ~Worth a Look~ The Lottery of Birth: On Inherited Social Inequalities - Namit Arora Execution Premium - Robert S. Kaplan ~Pleasure Reading~ Origin (Robert Langdon, #5) - Dan    Brown Sidney Sheldon's Angel of the Dark - Tilly Bagshawe The Legend of Virinara - Usha Alexander Fathers and Sons - Ivan Turgenev The Great Indian Obsession: The Untold Story of India's Engineers  - Adhitya Iyer The One-Straw Revolution Masanobu Fukuoka 3 ~Avoid~

In the brief prose piece, The Four Cycles, Jorge Luis Borges wrote that there are only four stories in the world: the story of war, the story of return, the story of search, and the story of sacrifice (Troy, Ulysses, Jason, Christ). If Borges is right, then literature is not a museum of endless novelty so much as a chamber of recurring forms. What changes is not the underlying plot of human life, but the cultural machinery that gives those plots their authority—what makes war feel righteous, return feel inevitable, search feel sacred, sacrifice feel meaningful. That machinery is very often myth. Rich cultures—with their myths, religious narratives, heroic histories, and rituals—offer especially thick symbolic resources to legitimize rule, sacralize authority, and frame dissent as betrayal of the civilization itself. Mythical stories such as these refuse to see the past as fundamentally different from the present. People accept and assimilate myths, they act on the myths, and the myths ...

Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa by Peter Godwin Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa | Goodreads ⭐⭐⭐⭐✰ Worth Reading Rhodesia in the 1970s stands as one of history's most intriguing anomalies—a fully functioning economy, internationally isolated, ruled by a tiny white minority of about 7% who controlled the government, military, and economy while disenfranchising the 93% Black majority.  The book  that captures this paradox at its core, portraying a state born from defiance: in 1965, the white minority government unilaterally declared independence (UDI) from Britain, rechristening itself Rhodesia.  Rhodesia practiced white minority rule with a veneer of civility, a "multiracial" facade that fooled no one. Black people knew there was no path to reform; whites knew majority rule was inevitable. It was rotten from the start, a losing battle against the tide of history. The 1970s Bush War escalated into terrorism, cross-border incursions from Mozambique, and full civil war. In the en...

The Complete Persepolis  - Marjane Satrapi The Complete Persepolis  | Goodreads ⭐⭐⭐⭐✰ Worth Reading Marjane Satrapi's internationally acclaimed memoir-in-comic-strips,  Persepolis is a powerful autobiographical story about growing up in Iran during the fall of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi and the rise of a strict Islamic government after the Islamic Revolution . The story is told through the eyes of a girl child, which makes complex political events simple, emotional and deeply relatable. Through this young perspective, Satrapi shows how everyday life was shaped by fear, change, and uncertainty. Satrapi’s visual storytelling is deceptively simple, using stark black‑and‑white illustrations and concise narration to mirror the moral clarity and confusion of growing up during Iran’s Islamic Revolution. Satrapi skillfully mixes funny moments with serious ones to show how people survived difficult times under both regimes. This minimalist style allows ordinary moments from ...

The Palace of Dreams  -  Ismail Kadare The Palace of Dreams  | Goodreads The Palace of Dreams - Complete Book - Internet Archive ⭐⭐⭐⭐✰ Worth Reading The Palace of Dreams (Pallati i Ëndrrave) carries an atmosphere that instantly brought to mind the quiet surveillance of The Lives of Others , and the dream visual world of Tarsem Singh’s The Fall - a connection that may particularly strike the cinephiles.   His portrayal of the labyrinthine state machinery aligns with which skewered international inefficiency and echoes the traditions of Kafka’s claustrophobic nightmares and Orwell’s stark warnings about power.  The result is a kind of alternate universe that feels disturbingly relevant in any large bureaucracy - whether you’ve dealt with the inner workings of global south governments or simply navigated everyday administrative chaos.  The readers who are accustomed to stories where absurd, politics, and bureaucracy often intersect - Kadare’s novel feels...

Under the Yoke  -  Ivan Vazov Under the Yoke | Goodreads Under the yoke - Complete Book - Internet Archive ⭐⭐⭐  Above average Set against the turbulent geopolitics of the late 19th century—when the Ottoman Empire, long dubbed the “ Sick Man of Europe ,” was steadily losing its grip over the Balkans - Ivan Vazov ’s Under the Yoke emerges not merely as a novel but as a national monument. The crumbling Ottoman domains had become the arena for conflicting imperial ambitions: Russia sought influence across the Black Sea; Britain worried about routes to India; France defended its prestige in the Levant; and Austria-Hungary looked to stabilize the Balkans. It was an era when the so‑called Eastern Question dominated Europe’s imagination, and the fate of Bulgaria lay entangled within it. This international tension was sharpened in 1876 by what British statesman William Gladstone famously denounced in his pamphlet ,  Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East . He  u...

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - Goodreads ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Highly Recommended In 1945, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a decorated Soviet officer who made a small, private joke about Stalin in a letter. The state opened it, read it, and treated it as a crime. Within weeks he was arrested, stripped of rank, and fed into the camps, where he served eight years in the Gulag . The camps were designed to teach one lesson: say nothing, remember nothing, become nothing. His novel’s unflinching realism reflects these lived experiences. The novel was an unprecedented event in Soviet literary history, boldly exposing Stalin’s crimes. It explains that One Day was allowed to be published in 1962 because Khrushchev’s de‑Stalinization briefly eased censorship. Khrushchev’s approval made the book a political and literary sensation worldwide, though it was soon banned again—ironically helping Solzhenitsyn win the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature ...

The Jihad Game: Inside Pakistan’s Dark War by Abhinav Pandya The Jihad Game: Inside Pakistan’s Dark War by Abhinav Pandya | Goodreads ⭐⭐⭐⭐✰ Worth Reading India-Pakistan conflict (wars) is a challenging mostly negative-sum game where both countries are often in escalation cycles with no easy solution. The roots of the conflict, particularly cross-border terrorism supported by Pakistan trace back strongly to Kashmir.  Pakistan has long used Jihad   (religious war against infidels)   as a strategic tool in Kashmir, now reinforced by a nuclear umbrella. Kashmiri Muslims were predominantly Sunni Hanafi , practicing a syncretic, Sufi-influenced Islam shaped by local traditions (Rishiyat), shrine culture and coexistence with Kashmiri Pandits. What has changed over the years? Religious followership has shifted toward a more orthodox, radical Sunni Islamist and scriptural orientation  especially among youth. The 'Jihad Game' written by Abhinav Pandya (counter-terro...

Putin's People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took on the West  - Catherine Belton Putin's People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took On the West by Catherine Belton | Goodreads ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Highly Recommended Catherine Belton’s Putin’s People  is less a conventional political biography and more a forensic examination of how money, power, and state institutions fused to produce modern Russia under Vladimir Putin. For readers seeking to understand Putin not just as a man, but as a system, this book is essential reading—even if it leaves you uneasy about where responsibility truly lies.  Origins: Perestroika, Collapse, and the Intelligence State Belton begins the narrative in the early 1990s, just before the Soviet Union collapsed. Russia lagged far behind the West technologically, while Dresden - where Putin served as a KGB officer- had become a hub for smuggling and covert intelligence networks.  During Perestroika , KGB closely monitored the Soviet Union’s...