Jeswin Arangassery > Recent Status Updates

300 pages in... I feel so excited reading a non-fiction. Last part was about the Southern challenge India faced. Maybe it is because this is all part of my story that I feel so connected and excited along with the book.

started on december 29

Chapter 5

So many thoughts, how will I recollect any of it??
Now I get why there is a branch of study for this sort of works.. PHILOSOPHY... You cant keep track of everything he is saying. And maybe that's ok we only need the conclusions

Russians and Indians working together to build Bhilai steel plant is one of the exciting and intriguing chapters of the book yet

Nehru and Golwalkar agreeing on something

The battle for Kashmir was, and is, not merely or even mostly a battle for territory. It is, as Josef Korbel put it half a century ago, an ‘uncompromising and perhaps uncompromisable struggle of two ways of life, two concepts of political organization, two scales of values, two spiritual attitudes’.^

On one side was the idea of India; on the other side, the idea of Pakistan.

The press nowadays is chock full of stories of India's economic success, this reckoned to be so much at odds with it's past history of poverty and deprivation. However the real success of modern India lies not in the domain of Economics but in the that of politics.

India's existence has been a puzzle not just to casual observers or commonsensical journalists; also been an anomaly for academic political science, according to whose axioms cultural heterogeneity and poverty, do not make a nation, still less a democratic one