Balaji

“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

“We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls, you can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful, but not too successful. Otherwise, you would threaten the man. Because I am female, I am expected to aspire to marriage. I am expected to make my life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important. Now marriage can be a source of joy and love and mutual support but why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage and we don’t teach boys the same? We raise girls to see each other as competitors not for jobs or accomplishments, which I think can be a good thing, but for the attention of men. We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists

“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

“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