Rohini Murugan > Recent Status Updates

Wth am I reading in these pages? This is an appropriate read for like a 12 year old…

Most of us have always known Silicon Valley CEO billionaires are rich, spoiled, fourteen-year-olds who lack any iota of principles or moral standings, but it does feel personally gratifying when someone else who worked closely with them also feels the same way.

I forgot what good literature sounds like until I started reading Atwood

Charmed, so far.

'The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.'

Barely like 10 pages in, and Suzanne Collin’s hits you right where it hurt, years back when Katniss Everdeen and Petra Mellark walked up the podium.

I just finished reading Willian Dalrymple, and Nehru is again giving me the same Indian history spiel

“I suppose the poor and unfortunate in every other country become to some extent, other-worldly, unless they become revolutionaries, for this world is evidently not meant for them.”

It’s enchanting to see your beloved city being described of its beauty and wonder through the eyes of a stranger, a white man nonetheless.

These pages make me yearn for a yesteryear Madras, a time I haven’t lived in, but long to.

Not a single mention of any Mughal rulers. Not one (except as Islamic invaders ofc). The Portuguese are already here, so I doubt there is going to be any in the future pages either.

How can someone claim to write about the historical aspect of a country while ignoring a large swath of time period?

The author asks himself why did early Indians impose caste restrictions on themselves, which is a logical question, and then proceeds to say, that he doesn’t have a satisfactory answer to it, which is stupid because caste endogamy is how Hinduism has managed to keep its hierarchical strata intact towards keeping the select few, the Brahmins, happy.

Ambedkar had already wrote about this.

A better way to enjoy the book would be to take a shot whenever he mentions anything subtly saffronish

My views might partly be corrupted by the fact that I’m reading a stellar nonfiction in parallel, compared to which this sounds like a story scribbled out of boredom in a lazy afternoon English class

I’m almost creeped out by this book - but I can’t place a finger as to why. It feels like woke Harry Potter failing miserably in its mission

‘Plaything of nature’s mighty forces, less than a speck of dust in this vast universe, he has hurled defiance at the elemental powers, and with his mind, cradle of revolution, sought to master them. Whatever gods there be, there is something godlike in man, as there is also something of the devil in him.’

I’m in tears.

‘I find myself incapable of thinking of a deity or of any unknown supreme power in anthropomorphic terms, and the fact that many people think so is continually a source of surprise to me’

Damn.

I 100% did not expect to read Nehru’s thoughts on free will and determinism in the first 20 pages.

May God bless me for not ending up a nationalist at the end of this, what I can strongly predict to be a beautiful, journey