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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  ur...

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...

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...

Howard Marks once said that “I became famous overnight after writing for 10 years.” Mr. Raj Shamani shared a valuable insight that sometimes people who are less smart, less prepared, and less talented still succeed and achieve bigger things. He emphasized consistency as a key factor enabling such success despite lacking typical advantages like talent or preparation.  I got inspired by that short to write down this blog post. A truly self-aware person recognizes that their greatest strength lies not in constantly accumulating new skills, but in nurturing and deepening the qualities that already define their unique identity. By embracing and building upon what is innately mine, I can offer a piece of life to the readers and viewers.  Hence, I am looking to work behind this YouTube Channel with imperfection and consistency.  I am thrilled to reintroduce the What good is a life if it trails behind work?  YouTube channel, a unique space that has been cultivating a rich ar...

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...