Jyotsna Krishnakumar

“Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.”
― Marcel Proust

“In 1951 Dec 20th, Nehru, while campaigning for the first democratic elections in India, took a short break to address a UNESCO symposium in Delhi. Although he believed democracy was the best form of governance, while speaking at the symposium he wondered loud...
the quality of men who are selected by these modern democratic methods of adult franchise gradually deteriorates because of lack of thinking and the noise of propaganda....He[the voter] reacts to sound and to the din, he reacts to repetition and he produces either a dictator or a dumb politician who is insensitive. Such a politician can stand all the din in the world and still remain standing on his two feet and, therefore, he gets selected in the end because the others have collapsed because of the din.
-Quoted from India After Gandhi, page 157.”
― Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“Some things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write it down, and either you over dramatize it, or underplay it, exaggerate the wrong parts or ignore the important ones. At any rate, you never write it quite the way you want to.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come...And so....there is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being