631 books
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Dinesh Jayaraman
https://www.goodreads.com/dineshjayaraman
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The Promise
by
I don’t have a life of my own; I have only feelings. My experiences were never important—not during the course of my life nor even on the threshold of death. Instead, the lives of others have become mine.
“The Vedic people stopped interbreeding with the earlier local population and began to talk of purity only when they no longer needed women from outside their community as wives, because they now had enough girl-children whose early mixed roots, they decided, did not matter. And the British came up with their racist notions of not mixing with Indians only after the Suez Canal opened and there were fast steamships bringing white British women to India in search of British husbands. Purity is a convenient political myth floated by the powerful to justify brutal apartheid.”
― Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages
― Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages
“Fictions could be as powerful as histories, revealing the new people to themselves, allowing them to understand their own natures and the natures of those around them, and making them real. This was the paradox of the whispered stories: they were no more than make-believe but they created the truth, and brought into being a city and an army with all the rich diversity of nonfictional people with deep roots in the actually existing world.”
― Victory City
― Victory City
“Terran man was clay, red dust. Athshean man was branch and root. They did not carve figures of themselves in stone, only in wood.”
― The Word for World Is Forest
― The Word for World Is Forest
“I don’t know what ‘human nature’ is. Maybe leaving descriptions of what we wipe out is part of human nature.”
― The Word for World Is Forest
― The Word for World Is Forest
“But old women are different from everybody else, they say what they think.”
― The Word for World is Forest
― The Word for World is Forest
The Aspiring Polymath's Society
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— last activity Sep 04, 2021 11:15PM
For readers who love to learn for learning's sake, this group features regular group reads of nonfiction from a variety of fields, or fictional reads ...more
Dinesh’s 2025 Year in Books
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