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shal

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shal is Currently Reading

shal is currently reading

Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction

by Alec Nevala-Lee (Goodreads Author)

bookshelves: currently-reading

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May 15, 2024 10:58AM

shal is currently reading

The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall 1477–1806

by Jonathan I. Israel

bookshelves: enlightenment, c-dutch, currently-reading

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Nov 07, 2023 07:23AM

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An Independent, Colonial Judiciary: A History of the Bombay High Court during the British Raj, 1862-1947

by Abhinav Chandrachud

bookshelves: i-law, kindle, currently-reading, raj

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Oct 19, 2023 02:49AM

See all 5 books that shal is reading…

“While we fight for equality in the areas that do matter: for fundamental human and civil rights, or for the freedom for each person to pursue their thick desires (in the United States, this is called "the pursuit of happiness"); we also begin fighting for equality in areas that do not matter, our thing desires: to make as much money as someone else, to have the same number of Instagram followers, to have the same amount of status or respect or professional prestige as any one of the nearly eight billion models on the planet.”
― Luke Burgis, Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

2 likes

“Tolstoy, in the last year of his life, said of Gandhi, whose work he followed and with whom he exchanged letters: ‘His Hindu nationalism spoils everything.’ It was a fair comment. Gandhi had called his South African commune Tolstoy Farm; but Tolstoy saw more clearly than Gandhi’s English and Jewish associates in South Africa, fellow seekers after the truth. Gandhi really had little to offer these people. His experiments and discoveries and vows answered his own need as a Hindu, the need constantly to define and fortify the self in the midst of hostility; they were not of universal application.”
― V.S. Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization

2 likes

“Monogamous marriage changes men psychologically, even hormonally, and has downstream effects on societies. Although this form of marriage is neither “natural” nor “normal” for human societies—and runs directly counter to the strong inclinations of high-status or elite men—it nevertheless can give religious groups and societies an advantage in intergroup competition. By suppressing male-male competition and altering family structure, monogamous marriage shifts men’s psychology in ways that tend to reduce crime, violence, and zero-sum thinking while promoting broader trust, long-term investments, and steady economic accumulation”
― Joseph Henrich, The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous

11 likes

“Unless the republic is reclaimed, the time will come when all of us will be one incorrect meal, one interfaith romance, one unfortunate misstep away from being extinguished. The mobs that slaughtered ‘bad’ Muslims will eventually come for Hindus who are not ‘good’. India’s tragedy is that just when it is faced with an existential crisis, there exists no pan-Indian alternative to the BJP.”
― K.S. Komireddi, Malevolent Republic: A Short History of the New India

1 likes

“Nationality is a social feeling. It is a feeling of a corporate sentiment of oneness which makes those who are charged with it feel that they are kith and kin. This national feeling is a double edged feeling. It is at once a feeling of fellowship for one’s own kith and kin and an anti-fellowship feeling for those who are not one’s own kith and kin. It is a feeling of “consciousness of kind” which on the one hand binds together those who have it, so strongly that it over-rides all differences arising out of economic conflicts or social gradations and, on the other, severs them from those who are not of their kind. It is a longing not to belong to any other group. This is the essence of what is called a nationality and national feeling.”
― B.R. Ambedkar, Pakistan or Partition of India

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