548 books
—
948 voters
Hridesh Raj
https://www.goodreads.com/hrdshraj
We avoid talking about caste, hoping to somehow find a place in the world of upper-casteness that has been forbidden to us.
J. Dhopte liked this
“The first thing I learned about having money was that it gives you choices. People don’t want to be rich. They want to be able to choose. The richer you are, the more choices you have. That is the freedom of money.”
― Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood
― Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood
“We tell people to follow their dreams, but you can only dream of what you can imagine, and, depending on where you come from, your imagination can be quite limited. The highest rung of what's possible is far beyond the world you can see. My mother showed me what was possible. The thing that always amazed me about her life is that one showed her. No one showed her. She did on her own. She found her way through sheer force of will.”
― Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood
― Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood
“In any society built on institutionalized racism, race mixing doesn't merely challenge the system as unjust, it reveals the system as unsustainable and incoherent. Race mixing proves that races can mix, and in a lot of cases want to mix. Because a mixed person embodies that rebuke to the logic of the system, race mixing becomes a crime worse than treason.”
― Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood
― Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood
“I often meet people in the West who insist that the Holocaust was the worst atrocity in human history, without question. Yes, it was horrific. But I often wonder, with African atrocities like in the Congo, how horrific were they? The thing Africans don’t have that Jewish people do have is documentation. The Nazis kept meticulous records, took pictures, made films. And that’s really what it comes down to. Holocaust victims count because Hitler counted them. Six million people killed. We can all look at that number and rightly be horrified. But when you read through the history of atrocities against Africans, there are no numbers, only guesses. It’s harder to be horrified by a guess. When Portugal and Belgium were plundering Angola and the Congo, they weren’t counting the black people they slaughtered. How many black people died harvesting rubber in the Congo? In the gold and diamond mines of the Transvaal? So in Europe and America, yes, Hitler is the Greatest”
― Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood
― Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood
“Hustling is to work what surfing the Internet is to reading. If you add up how much you read in a year on the Internet—tweets, Facebook posts, lists—you’ve read the equivalent of a shit ton of books, but in fact you’ve read no books in a year.”
― Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood
― Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood
Hridesh’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Hridesh’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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