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Bharati Challa
https://breachingtheantechamber.substack.com/
https://www.goodreads.com/bharatichalla
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currently-reading (1)
read (325)
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hyderabad (8)
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favourites (17)
rites-of-passage (13)
for-college (12)
guilty-pleasures (11)
hyderabad (8)
mental-health (7)
philosophy (7)
“Count all these
sufferings from here to the end of the endless sky which is no
sky and see how many you can add together to make a figure
to impress the Boss of Dead Souls in the Meat Manufactory in
city City CITY everyone of them in pain and born to die,
milling in the streets at 2 A M underneath those imponderable
skies”—their enormous endlessness, the sweep of the Mexican
plateau away from the Moon—living but to die, the sad song
of it I hear sometimes on my roof in the Tejado district,
rooftop cell, with candles, waiting for my Nirvana or my
Tristessa—neither come, at noon I hear “La Paloma” being
played on mental radios in the fallways between the tenement
windows—the crazy kid next door sings, the dream is taking
place right now, the music is so sad, the French horns ache, the
high whiney violins and the deberratarra-rabaratarara of the
Indian Spanish announcer. Living but to die, here we wait on
this shelf, and up in heaven is all that gold open caramel, ope
my door—Diamond Sutra is the sky.”
― Tristessa
sufferings from here to the end of the endless sky which is no
sky and see how many you can add together to make a figure
to impress the Boss of Dead Souls in the Meat Manufactory in
city City CITY everyone of them in pain and born to die,
milling in the streets at 2 A M underneath those imponderable
skies”—their enormous endlessness, the sweep of the Mexican
plateau away from the Moon—living but to die, the sad song
of it I hear sometimes on my roof in the Tejado district,
rooftop cell, with candles, waiting for my Nirvana or my
Tristessa—neither come, at noon I hear “La Paloma” being
played on mental radios in the fallways between the tenement
windows—the crazy kid next door sings, the dream is taking
place right now, the music is so sad, the French horns ache, the
high whiney violins and the deberratarra-rabaratarara of the
Indian Spanish announcer. Living but to die, here we wait on
this shelf, and up in heaven is all that gold open caramel, ope
my door—Diamond Sutra is the sky.”
― Tristessa
“Late into the night we talked of love, of its complications. In my father's eyes they were imaginary. He refused categorically all notions of fidelity and serious commitments. He explained that they were arbitrary and sterile. From anyone else such views would have shocked me, but I knew that in his case they did not exclude either tenderness or devotion; feelings which came all the more easily to him since he was determined that they should be transient. This conception of rapid, violent and passing love affairs appealed to my imagination. I was not at the age when fidelity is attractive. I knew very little about love.”
―
―
“What you call 'forms' of intelligence are only degrees.”
―
―
“You are preserving your dignity by refusing to show your feelings. But there are moments when love ought to be undignified, extravagant, even violent.”
― A Fairly Honourable Defeat
― A Fairly Honourable Defeat
“Welfare bureaucracies claim a professional, political, and financial monopoly over the social imagination, setting standards of what is valuable and what is feasible.
This monopoly is at the root of the modernization of poverty. Every simple need to which an institutional answer is found permits the invention of a new class of poor and a new definition of poverty. Ten years ago in Mexico it was the normal thing to be born and to die in one's own home and to be buried by one's friends. Only the soul's needs were taken care of by the institutional church. Now to begin and end life at home become signs either of poverty or of special privilege. Dying and death have come under
the institutional management of doctors and undertakers.
Once basic needs have been translated by a society into demands for scientifically produced commodities, poverty
is defined by standards which the technocrats can change at will. Poverty then refers to those who have fallen behind an advertised ideal of consumption in some important respect.”
― Deschooling Society
This monopoly is at the root of the modernization of poverty. Every simple need to which an institutional answer is found permits the invention of a new class of poor and a new definition of poverty. Ten years ago in Mexico it was the normal thing to be born and to die in one's own home and to be buried by one's friends. Only the soul's needs were taken care of by the institutional church. Now to begin and end life at home become signs either of poverty or of special privilege. Dying and death have come under
the institutional management of doctors and undertakers.
Once basic needs have been translated by a society into demands for scientifically produced commodities, poverty
is defined by standards which the technocrats can change at will. Poverty then refers to those who have fallen behind an advertised ideal of consumption in some important respect.”
― Deschooling Society
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Bharati’s 2025 Year in Books
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