Renuka Govind

“Genghis Khan always honored his word. Those who surrendered suffered no harm, and he treated them well. In turn, he used this fair treatment as a means of encouraging other cities to surrender.”
― Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Quest for God: How the World's Greatest Conqueror Gave Us Religious Freedom

“if you were to identify a single person who embodies us Indians the best, who do you think it should be? Ideally, it should be a tribal woman because she is most likely to be carrying the deepest-rooted and widest-spread mtDNA lineage in India today, M2. In a genetic sense, she would represent all of our history, with very little left out. She shares the most with the largest number of Indians, no matter where in the social ladder they stand, what language they speak and which region they inhabit because we are all migrants, and we are all mixed.”
― Tony Joseph, Early Indians: The Story of Our Ancestors and Where We Came From

“People are usually afraid of change because they fear the unknown. But the single greatest constant of history is that everything changes.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow

“Usually the assassination was a suicide attack, as his targets’ guards generally either killed assassins immediately or captured and then tortured them to death. But some managed to escape and return to the lands around Alamut, where they were invited to live a blessed life of paradise on Earth, meaning ample supplies of drugs and sex. It is from this practice of using hashish that they supposedly acquired their name of hashshashin, users or smokers of hashish. It is debatable how much hashish was consumed, and this may merely have been an insult hurled by their enemies to explain their addled thinking. Whether or not it was true, the term took on a new connotation in the West and became the modern word assassin.”
― Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Quest for God: How the World's Greatest Conqueror Gave Us Religious Freedom