Nandakishore Mridula

“Feminization is the process in which cultures have increasingly respected the interests and values of women. Since violence is largely a male pastime, cultures that empower women tend to move away from the glorification of violence and are less likely to breed dangerous subcultures of rootless young men.”
― Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity

“The historian Pieter Spierenburg has provocatively suggested that “democracy came too early” to America.85 In Europe, first the state disarmed the people and claimed a monopoly on violence, then the people took over the apparatus of the state. In America, the people took over the state before it had forced them to lay down their arms – which, as the Second Amendment famously affirms, they reserve the right to keep and bear. In other words Americans, and especially Americans in the South and West, never fully signed on to a social contract that would vest the government with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. In much of American history, legitimate force was also wielded by posses, vigilantes, lynch mobs, company police, detective agencies, and Pinker-tons, and even more often kept as a prerogative of the individual.”
― Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity

“By the time I was an adult and a working journalist, the India I grew up in had been transformed radically. So had its cultural moorings. In an environment exploding with mobiles and McDonald’s, economic and social ascent became the key drivers of dreams, creating a country within a country; one in which citizenship was no profound, or even, argumentative pact with nation-building but almost a corporate membership in a rewards programme designed to give maximum returns. Liberalization and rapid growth had also played midwife to the birth of a neo middle-class consumed by its own daily battles for survival and self-fulfilment.”
― Barkha Dutt, This Unquiet Land: Stories from India's Fault Lines

“It was sobering to think that the enormous power of the earthquake and the tsunami it had generated had managed to kill 230,000 people in fourteen countries but had still been unable to break down the wall that separated India’s Dalits from their countrymen.”
― Barkha Dutt, This Unquiet Land: Stories from India's Fault Lines