Balaji

“Never speak of marriage as an achievement. Find ways to make clear to her that marriage is not an achievement, nor is it what she should aspire to. A marriage can be happy or unhappy, but it is not an achievement. We condition girls to aspire to marriage and we do not condition boys to aspire to marriage, and so there is already a terrible imbalance at the start. The girls will grow up to be women preoccupied with marriage. The boys will grow up to be men who are not preoccupied with marriage. The women marry those men. The relationship is automatically uneven because the institution matters more to one than the other.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions

“Tall ships and tall kings
Three times three,
What brought they from the foundered land
Over the flowing sea?
Seven stars and seven stones
And one white tree.
(The Two Towers)”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers

“Alexander Lubotsky has, however, proven decisively that the Vedic “substratum”—that is, the linguistic environment that the speakers of Vedic Sanskrit encountered as they moved southward and eastward into the subcontinent—cannot have been Dravidian; and Michael Witzel has convincingly shown (following F. B. J. Kuiper) that there is a significant lexical level of Munda (Austroasiatic) language in the Veda, with hundreds of loan words, thus making Austroasiatic a more likely candidate for the early substratum.33”
― David Dean Shulman, Tamil: A Biography

“modern spoken Tamil is astonishingly rich in Sanskrit loan words. Indeed, there may well be more straight Sanskrit in Tamil than in the Sanskrit-derived north Indian vernaculars.”
― David Dean Shulman, Tamil: A Biography