kumar shubham

“Life, Prince Leon, may well be compared with these public Games for in the vast crowd assembled here some are attracted by the acquisition of gain, others are led on by the hopes and ambitions of fame and glory. But among them there are a few who have come to observe and to understand all that passes here. It is the same with life. Some are influenced by the love of wealth while others are blindly led on by the mad fever for power and domination, but the finest type of man gives himself up to discovering the meaning and purpose of life itself. He seeks to uncover the secrets of nature. This is the man I call a philosopher for although no man is completely wise in all respects, he can love wisdom as the key to nature’s secrets.”
― Simon Singh, Fermat’s Last Theorem: The compelling biography and history of mathematical intellectual endeavour

“China’s rise is especially instructive for India. It was driving diplomatically in the late 1970s efforts to forge a united front against the USSR. This is in contrast to its reluctance to intervene, even indirectly, in the 1971 Bangladesh conflict despite being exhorted to do so by the Nixon Administration. What changed during this period was a determination to break up the cooperative strand in the ties between the US and USSR that was constricting China’s strategic space. So it utilized both the Vietnam and Afghanistan conflicts to that end. And thus created a favourable political climate for the flow of Western investments. So much so, that even when the Tiananmen incident happened, there were enough advocates abroad to mitigate the damage. Having more than achieved its strategic objectives when the USSR broke up, China altered course and made up with a Russia coming under pressure.”
― S. Jaishankar, The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World

“I agree that man is pre-eminently a creative animal, predestined to strive consciously for an object and to engage in engineering--that is, incessantly and eternally to make new roads, WHEREVER THEY MAY LEAD. But the reason why he wants sometimes to go off at a tangent may just be that he is PREDESTINED to make the road, and perhaps, too, that however stupid the "direct" practical man may be, the thought sometimes will occur to him that the road almost always does lead SOMEWHERE, and that the destination it leads to is less important than the process of making it, and that the chief thing is to save the well-conducted child from despising engineering, and so giving way to the fatal idleness, which, as we all know, is the mother of all the vices.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground

“The only certainty is that we are here, in this moment, in this now. It’s up to us: to live fully, experiencing each moment, aware, alert and attentive. We are here, each one of us, to write our own story—and what fascinating stories we make!”
― Emily Esfahani Smith, The Power of Meaning: The true route to happiness