Pushpak Karnick

“My life is not an apology, but a life. It is for itself and not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it should be of a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal, than that it should be glittering and unsteady.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance: An Excerpt from Collected Essays, First Series

“The rise of the 9.9 percent, I argue, accounts for the paradox of a nation where well-toned abs are an obsession even while pre-existing conditions multiply at pandemic levels, where billionaires look like fitness trainers while the average life expectancy declines. It is the fundamental reason why the nation with the most expensive health care system in the known universe is among the least able to protect its public health. Inequality disrupts progress by distorting our ideas about the only kind of well-being that actually matters, or about actual human prosperity.”
― Matthew Stewart, The 9.9 Percent: The New Aristocracy That Is Entrenching Inequality and Warping Our Culture

“What reconciles me to my own death more than anything else is the image of a place: a place where your bones and mine are buried, thrown, uncovered, together. They are strewn there pell-mell. One of your ribs leans against my skull. A metacarpal of my left hand lies inside your pelvis. (Against my broken ribs your breast like a flower.) The hundred bones of our feet are scattered like gravel. It is strange that this image of our proximity, concerning as it does mere phosphate of calcium, should bestow a sense of peace. Yet it does. With you I can imagine a place where to be phosphate of calcium is enough.”
― John Berger

“If individual merit considered in isolation were the source of wealth, then excluding more than half of the population from realizing their potential on account of their sex or skin color would be like sabotaging more than half of all factories or making more than half of all homes uninhabitable.”
― Matthew Stewart, The 9.9 Percent: The New Aristocracy That Is Entrenching Inequality and Warping Our Culture