North East India Quotes

If ideas and beliefs are to be denied validity outside the geographical and cultural bounds of their origin, Buddhism would be confined to north India, Christianity to a narrow tract in the Middle East and Islam to Arabia.

I am a Dalit in Khairlanji. A Pandit in the Kashmir valley. A Sikh in 1984. I am from the North East of India when I am in Munirka. I am a Muslim in Gujarat; a Christian in Kandhamal. A Bihari in Maharashtra. A Delhi-wallah in Chennai. A woman in North India. A Hindi-speaker in Assam. A Tamilian in MP. A villager in a big city. A confused man in an indifferent world. We're all minorities. We all suffer; we all face discrimination. It is only us resisting this parochialism when in the position of majoritarian power that makes us human. I hope that one day, I can just be an Indian in India - only then can I be me.

BOMBAY WAS CENTRAL, had been so from the moment of its creation: the bastard child of a Portuguese-English wedding, and yet the most Indian of Indian cities. In Bombay all Indias met and merged. In Bombay, too, all-India met what-was-not-India, what came across the black water to flow into our veins. Everything north of Bombay was North India, everything south of it was the South. To the east lay India’s East and to the west, the world’s West. Bombay was central; all rivers flowed into its human sea. It was an ocean of stories; we were all its narrators, and everybody talked at once.

Her conclusion was that the Mughal state was unusually extractive and appropriated 56.7 per cent of the total produce. Her research focused on five north Indian provinces: Agra, Delhi, Lahore, Allahabad and Avadh. The total

The first English settlements in North America were established in the early seventeenth century by joint-stock companies such as the London Company, the Plymouth Company, the Dorchester Company and the Massachusetts Company. The Indian subcontinent too was conquered not by the British state, but by the mercenary army of the British East India Company. This company outperformed even the VOC. From its headquarters in Leadenhall Street, London, it ruled a mighty Indian empire for about a century, maintaining a huge military force of up to 350,000 soldiers, considerably outnumbering the armed forces of the British monarchy. Only in 1858 did the British crown nationalise India along with the company’s private army. Napoleon made fun of the British, calling them a nation of shopkeepers. Yet these shopkeepers defeated Napoleon himself, and their empire was the largest the world has ever seen.

When the British invaders confronted the Iroquois on the east coast of North America, the British were able to draw upon technology, science, and other cultural developments from China, India, and Egypt, not to mention various other peoples from continental Europe. But the Iroquois could not draw upon the cultural developments of the Aztecs or Incas, who remained unknown to them, though located only a fraction of the distance away as China is from Britain. While the immediate confrontation was between the British settlers and the Iroquois, the cultural resources mobilized on one side represented many more cultures from many more societies around the world. It was by no means a question of the genetic or even cultural superiority of the British by themselves, as compared to the Iroquois, for the British were by no means by themselves. They had the advantage of centuries of cultural diffusion from numerous sources, scattered over thousands of miles.

Why were the Jews so restless? It was not because they were a difficult, warlike, tribal and essentially backward society, like the Parthians, who gave the Romans constant trouble on the eastern fringe, rather as the Pathans and Afghans worried the British on the North-West Frontier of India. On the contrary: the real trouble with the Jews was that they were too advanced, too intellectually conscious to find alien rule acceptable. The Greeks had faced the same problem with Rome. They had solved it by submitting physically and taking the Romans over intellectually. Culturally, the Roman empire was Greek, especially in the East. Educated people spoke and thought in Greek, and Greek modes set the standards in art and architecture, drama, music and literature. So the Greeks never had any sense of cultural submission to Rome.

that night she dreamed of employing an army of women cleaners who would set forth across the planet on a mission to clean up all the damage done to the environment they came from all over Africa and from North and South and South America, they came from India and China and all over Asia, they came from Europe and the Middle East, from Oceania, and from the Antarctic, too she imagined them all descending in their millions on the Niger Delta and driving out the oil companies with their mop and broom handles transformed into spears and poison-tipped swords and machine guns she imagined them demolishing al the equipment used for oil production, including the flare stacks that rose into the skies to burn the natural gas, her cleaners setting charges underneath each one, detonating from a safe distance and watching them being blown up she imagined the local people cheering and celebrating with dancing, drumming and roasted fish she imagined the international media filming it- CNN, BBC, NBC she imagined the government unable to mobilize the poorly paid local militia because they were terrified by the sheer numbers of her Worldwide Army of Women Cleaners who could vaporize them with their superhuman powers afterwards, she imagined legions of singing women sifting the rivers and creeks to remove the thick slicks of grease that had polluted them and digging up the land until they'd removed the toxic sublayers of soil she imagined the skies opening when the job was fone and the pouring of pure water from the now hygienic clouds for as long as it took for the region to be thoroughly cleansed and replenished

HISTORICAL NOTE There are no nuclear power stations in Belarus. Of the functioning stations in the territory of the former USSR, the ones closest to Belarus are of the old Soviet-designed RBMK type. To the north, the Ignalinsk station, to the east, the Smolensk station, and to the south, Chernobyl. On April 26, 1986, at 1:23:58, a series of explosions destroyed the reactor in the building that housed Energy Block #4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station. The catastrophe at Chernobyl became the largest technological disaster of the twentieth century. For tiny Belarus (population: 10 million), it was a national disaster. During the Second World War, the Nazis destroyed 619 Belarussian villages along with their inhabitants. As a result of Chernobyl, the country lost 485 villages and settlements. Of these, 70 have been forever buried underground. During the war, one out of every four Belarussians was killed; today, one out of every five Belarussians lives on contaminated land. This amounts to 2.1 million people, of whom 700,000 are children. Among the demographic factors responsible for the depopulation of Belarus, radiation is number one. In the Gomel and Mogilev regions, which suffered the most from Chernobyl, mortality rates exceed birth rates by 20%. As a result of the accident, 50 million Ci of radionuclides were released into the atmosphere. Seventy percent of these descended on Belarus; fully 23% of its territory is contaminated by cesium-137 radionuclides with a density of over 1 Ci/km2. Ukraine on the other hand has 4.8% of its territory contaminated, and Russia, 0.5%. The area of arable land with a density of more than 1 Ci/km2 is over 18 million hectares; 2.4 thousand hectares have been taken out of the agricultural economy. Belarus is a land of forests. But 26% of all forests and a large part of all marshes near the rivers Pripyat, Dniepr, and Sozh are considered part of the radioactive zone. As a result of the perpetual presence of small doses of radiation, the number of people with cancer, mental retardation, neurological disorders, and genetic mutations increases with each year. —“Chernobyl.” Belaruskaya entsiklopedia On April 29, 1986, instruments recorded high levels of radiation in Poland, Germany, Austria, and Romania. On April 30, in Switzerland and northern Italy. On May 1 and 2, in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Great Britain, and northern Greece. On May 3, in Israel, Kuwait, and Turkey. . . . Gaseous airborne particles traveled around the globe: on May 2 they were registered in Japan, on May 5 in India, on May 5 and 6 in the U.S. and Canada. It took less than a week for Chernobyl to become a problem for the entire world. —“The Consequences of the Chernobyl Accident in Belarus.” Minsk, Sakharov International College on Radioecology The fourth reactor, now known as the Cover, still holds about twenty tons of nuclear fuel in its lead-and-metal core. No one knows what is happening with it. The sarcophagus was well made, uniquely constructed, and the design engineers from St. Petersburg should probably be proud. But it was constructed in absentia, the plates were put together with the aid of robots and helicopters, and as a result there are fissures. According to some figures, there are now over 200 square meters of spaces and cracks, and radioactive particles continue to escape through them . . . Might the sarcophagus collapse? No one can answer that question, since it’s still impossible to reach many of the connections and constructions in order to see if they’re sturdy. But everyone knows that if the Cover were to collapse, the consequences would be even more dire than they were in 1986. —Ogonyok magazine, No. 17, April 1996

Immigrants from the Arab countries arrived simultaneously - from Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia in North Africa and from Yemen as well as from the Middle East, namely Iraq, Iran and Syria. The Yemenis were brought in by plane, in an undertaking called the "flying carpet." Later would arrive the Jews from India, called "Bnei Israel." The newcomers needed everything that sustains life: food, shelter, work and the knowledge of the new language, a means of communication.

We now know that the greatest concentration of "abnormal" lactose absorbers lives in Europe north of the Alps. Over 95 percent of the Dutch, Danes, Swedes, and other Scandinavians have enough lactase enzyme to digest very large quantities of lactose throughout their lives. South of the Alps, high to inter­ mediate levels prevail, falling to intermediate and low levels in Spain, Italy and Greece and among Jews and city-dwelling Arabs in the Middle East. Intermediate to high levels of absorbers occur again in northern India, while high levels of absorbers occur in isolated enclaves such as the Bedouin nomads of Arabia and cer­ tain pastoral groups in northern Nigeria and East Africa. Mammals obviously have to be able to drink milk in infancy,

For the young Turks, soon to assume power and build a nation-state on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, Japan provided clear inspiration. These envious outside observers of Japan’s progress did not see the extreme violence of the country’s makeover. Nor did they notice the trends towards conformity, militarism and racism that were later to make Japan a ominously successful rival to Europe’s imperialist nations- by 1942, Japan would occupy or dominate a broad swathe of the Asian mainland, from the Aleutian Islands in the north-east to the borders of India, after booting out almost all the European masters in between. For many Asians in the late nineteenth century, the proof of Japan’s success lay in the extent to which it could demand equality with the West; and, here, the evidence was simply overwhelming for people who had tried to do the same and had failed miserably.

['A]lamgir [Aurangzeb] came to formulate a very different model of sovereignty for himself and for the empire he ruled. In this new dispensation, the kingdom would be governed not by a charismatic, semi-divine king, but by a impersonal law -- namely, the 'shar'ia' of Hanafi Sufis -- administered by a reconstituted and vastly empowered judiciary guided by a reformed, thoroughly codified legal style. [...] In the courts of local judges in Gujarat, Hindu artisans, merchants and Brahmins commonly invoked the 'shar'ia' in transactions pertaining to buying, selling, renting and mortgaging property, or in pursuing litigation in law courts. Hindu women in particular used Islamic law in their attempts to resist patriarchal domination. The same held true further north. In the Punjabi town of Batala, writes the historian J. S. Grewal, 'the brahmin, the Khatri, the goldsmith and the Hindu carpenter frequented the qazi's court as much as the sayyid and the Muslim mason'. And in Malwa, the vast majority of attesters in court documents, excepting those dealing with Muslim marriages, were non-Muslims. While acknowledging religious difference, moreover, such courts did not draw legal boundaries around India's ethnic or religious communities. Significantly, the word 'shari'a' as used in local courts was not understood as applying to Muslims only, as it is today. Rather it carried the ordinary and non-sectarian meaning of 'legal'. Until the 1770s, when East India Company officials codified separate legal systems for Muslims and Hindus, Islamic law as it was administered in Mughal courts had functioned as common law. 'Alamgir's project of basing Mughal governance and sovereignty on a standardized codification of that law therefore built upon legal practices that, even though applied differently across the empire, were already in place in the Indian countryside.

All the sovereignty issues stem from the same desires and fears – the desire to safeguard routes for military and commercial shipping, the desire to own the natural riches of the region, and the fear that others may gain where you lose. Until recently the riches were theoretical, but the melting ice has made the theoretical probable, and in some cases certain. The hunger for energy suggests the race is inevitable in what some Arctic specialists have called the ‘New Great Game’. There are going to be a lot more ships in the High North, a lot more oil rigs and gas platforms – in fact, a lot more of everything. However, there are differences between this situation and the ‘Scramble for Africa’ in the nineteenth century or the machinations of the great powers in the Middle East, India and Afghanistan in the original Great Game. This race has rules, a formula and a forum for decision-making. The Arctic Council is composed of mature countries, most of them democratic to a greater or lesser degree. The international laws regulating territorial disputes, environmental pollution, laws of the sea and treatment of minority peoples are in place.

It was a hugely significant moment: with one stroke of the pen, in return for a relatively modest payment of Rs2.6 million,* and Clive’s cynical promise on behalf of the Company to govern ‘agreeably to the rules of Mahomed and the law of the Empire’, the Emperor agreed to recognise all the Company’s conquests and hand over to it financial control of all north-eastern India. Henceforth, 250 East India Company clerks backed by the military force of 20,000 Indian sepoys would now run the finances of India’s three richest provinces, effectively ending independent government in Bengal for 200 years. For a stock market-listed company with profit as its main raison d’être, this was a transformative, revolutionary moment.

these states relate to the progressive age of maturation of a human being. Bala here means ‘child’; a planet in Bala Avastha will have a child-like energy to it, and like a child will not be able to exhibit the full potential of its strength. In fact, a planet in Bala Avastha displays only about one-fourth of the strength that would otherwise be predicted for it. Kumara means ‘youth’ and, like a vigorous youth, a planet in Kumara Avastha gives one-half of its results since, though strength is present, the wisdom needed to direct that strength, which is derived from experience, is usually lacking. Yuva, which also means ‘young’, indicates a young adult who has had sufficient experience to gain some of life’s wisdom. A planet in Yuva Avastha gives full results. Vriddha means ‘aged’ and indicates a planet which has entered its senior, retired years; it gives minimal results. Mrita means ‘dead’; relatively speaking, dead planets produce no results, though every planet does in some way or other give some result. Directional Strength TABLE 4.4 Directional Strength and Weakness of the Planets House Planet’s Strength Planet’s Weakness First (East) Mercury-Jupiter Saturn Fourth (North) Moon Venus Sun Mars Seventh (West) Saturn Jupiter Mercury Tenth (South) Sun Mars Moon Venus A horoscope’s tenth house corresponds to the sector of the heavens that is highest in the sky at any particular moment, while the fourth house corresponds to the sector that is underfoot, i.e. opposite the tenth house below the earth.

And yet, certain physical aspects of Rhode Island—a state so small within the context of America that on some maps its landmass was indicated only by an arrow pointing to its location—corresponded roughly to those of Calcutta, within India. Mountains to the north, an ocean to the east, the majority of land to the south and west.

Barbarism, thy name is Britain. In this day and age, if any societal structure is a revolting blot on the fabric of the democratic world, it's not Russia or North Korea, but the not-so-great Britain. The queen might have been a nice person, I don't know. But when a person is declared the supreme authority (head of state) of an entire people by birth, it's not something to take pride in, rather it's something to be ashamed of. Britain may mourn the death of the queen as a person, but no land deserves to be called civilized while mourning the death of a monarch. Let me put this into perspective. Almost every week a country celebrates independence from britain - if this doesn't tell you why the monarchy is the antithesis of everything that is civilized, nothing can. I wonder, they can throw a homeless man in jail for lifting a bread out of hunger, yet the empire walks free, even after raping, pillaging and looting from 90% of the world's countries! Where is the ICC (International Criminal Court) now, when one monarch after another sits on the throne, wielding the crown jewels encrusted with national treasures stolen from all over the globe!

The Pāli canon that the Buddhist tradition of Ceylon and South East Asia presents us with appears to be basically the Tipiṭaka that the compilers of the commentaries had before them in the fifth and sixth centuries CE. The Pāli tradition itself records that the texts of the canon at first existed only orally and were committed to writing at a relatively late date, some time during the first century BCE. On the basis of this tradition – and scholars have generally looked upon it quite favourably – we may be justified in concluding that the Pāli canon as we have it is substantially as it was written down at that time. Presumably this canon was brought to Ceylon from India at some earlier date, possibly by Mahinda, who, according to the Pāli tradition, came to Ceylon some time during the reign of Asoka. This tradition may have a kind of corroboration in the form of Asoka's thirteenth rock edict. Certainly the language of the canon appears to be entirely consonant with a north Indian provenance, and any evidence for significant additions to the canon after its arrival in Ceylon is at best inconclusive.

The great plain of India lies like a cup between the Himmaleh and the ocean, on the north and south—and the Indus and the Brahmapoutra, on the east and west, wherein the primeval race was received—as if it were the cradle of the human race.

If ideas and beliefs are to be denied validity outside the geographical and cultural bounds of their origin, Buddhism would be confined to north India, Christianity to a narrow tract in the Middle East and Islam to Arabia. The

In contrast, China has been a relatively isolated civilisation, both geographically and historically. On the eastern side stands the vast Pacific Ocean; to the south and the west, the impassable gorges of the Burma border and the inhospitable plateau of the Tibetan Himalayas, and to the northwest and north, the sparsely populated grasslands of Central Asia and the Gobi desert, the fifth largest desert in the world. Contact with other regions did occur, with India through the northwest corridor, with the Arab world by sea, and through the Silk Road along the steppes. But the salient point is that China has developed her own culture in a far less connected way than Europe. Black African kingdoms have been very isolated: sub-Saharan Africa is surrounded by the Sahara Desert in the north, which hindered contact with the Mediterranean, and by the Kalahari Desert in the south, which partially disconnected the southern plateau and coastal regions from central Africa. On the western side, Africa is faced by the vast Atlantic Ocean that Portuguese navigators only managed to navigate southwards in the 16th century. To the north and south of the equator, Black Africa had to contest with dense rainforests which occupy a west-east band of territory from the southern coast of West Africa across to the Congo basin and all the way to the Kenya highlands. Moreover, with an average elevation of 660 meters, African cultures were limited by the presence of few natural harbours where ships can dock, and few navigable rivers. Of the Niger, the Congo, the Nile, the Zambezi, and the Orange Rivers, only the Nile has relatively long navigable areas.

The three great armies of the Mughal world had come together to defeat the Company and expel it from India. When instead it was the Mughals that were defeated, the Company was left the dominant military force in north-east India. Buxar confirmed the Company’s control of Bengal and the coast and opened the way for them to extend their influence far inland to the west.

The geography of the Ramayana is oriented along a North–South axis while the Mahabharata is generally oriented on an East–West axis. This is not a total coincidence for they are aligned to two major trade routes. ” Excerpt From: Sanjeev Sanyal. “Land of the Seven Rivers A Brief History of India's Geography”. Apple Books.

Partition-related communal violence had actually begun long before, beginning with the Muslim League’s call for Direct Action Day on 16 August 1946.4 Starting with the bloodshed in Calcutta and other places in Bengal, this fire had spread to Bihar and UP, and later West Punjab. By mid-1947, the flames had engulfed most of North India, from the NWFP in the west to Bengal in the east.

The Buddha was born in Kapilavastu (on the Indo–Nepal border) but he attained enlightenment at Bodh Gaya, just south of the old Magadhan capital of Rajgir. However, he did not deliver his first sermon in Bodh Gaya, the nearby towns and villages or even in the royal capital of Rajgir. Instead, he headed west to Varanasi (also called Kashi). Why did he go all the way to Varanasi to spread his message? According to historian Vidula Jayaswal, this was a natural choice since Varanasi was an important place for the exchange of both goods and ideas because it stood at the crossroads between the Uttara Path and a highway that came down from the Himalayas and then continued south as the Dakshina Path. In some ways, this remains true to this day as the east–west National Highway 2 meets the north–south National Highway 7 at Varanasi” Excerpt From: Sanjeev Sanyal. “Land of the Seven Rivers A Brief History of India's Geography”. Apple Books.

Sardar Patel, in as early as 1950, drew Nehru's attention to the threat posed by China. In a detailed letter containing some truly prophetic formulations about China's intentions and plans, he warned JN of the dangers of complacency and strongly urged a serious reconsideration of the entire China policy and the various steps that needed to be taken to meet the new situation. The Sardar said, in his letter: "Thus, for the first time after centuries, India’s defence has to concentrate itself on two fronts simultaneously. Our defence measure have so far been based on the calculations of a superiority over Pakistan. In our calculations we shall now have to reckon with Communist China in the north and in the north-east, a Communist China which has definite ambitions and aims and which does not, in any way, seem friendly disposed towards us. In my judgement, the situation is one in which we cannot afford either to be complacent or to be vacillating. We must have a clear idea of what we wish to achieve and also of the methods by which we should achieve it. Any faltering or lack of decisiveness in formulating our objectives or in pursuing our policy to attain those objectives is bound to weaken us and increase the threats which are so evident.

Guwahati: North East India Petroleum Dealers Association, Greater Gauhati Unit (NEIPDA-GGU) has called for 48-hour petrol pump closure in Guwahati from 6 am of October 22 to 6 am of October 24. In an official letter written by NEIPDA-GGU read, “the Association has informed the OMCs regarding the decision to go for closure of Retail Outlet (Petrol Pump) with effect from 6:00 AM of 22/10/2021 for a duration for 48 hours.” The association has also raised a 10-point charter of demands relating to various issues concerning the petroleum dealership business.

Bernier became the first popular classifier of all humans into races, which he differentiated fundamentally by their phenotypic characteristics. To Bernier, there existed “four or five Species or Races of men so notably differing from each other that this may serve as the just foundation of a new division of the world.” As a monogenesist, he held that “all men are descended from one individual.” He distinguished four races: the “first” race, which included Europeans, were the original humans; then there were the Africans, the East Asians, and the “quite frightful” people of northern Finland, “the Lapps.” Bernier gave future taxonomists some revisionist work to do when he lumped with Europeans in the “first” race the people of North Africa, the Middle East, India, the Americas, and Southeast Asia.

Before flooding India with socialistic or political ideas, first deluge the land with spiritual ideas. The first work that demands out attention is that the most wonderful truths confined in our Upanishads, in our scriptures, in our Puranas must be brought out from the books, brought out from the monasteries, brought out from the forests, brought out from the possession of selected bodies of people, and scattered broadcast all over the land, so that these truths may run like fire all over the country from north to south and east to west.

The nation has a ‘sacred’ geography, encompassing an impressive amount of real estate. Golwalkar spoke of it as extending from Iran in the west to the Malay Peninsula in the east, from Tibet in the north to Sri Lanka in the south.31 One cannot escape the conclusion that many in the RSS consider the whole area an integral part of Bharat Mata (Mother India) which should be brought together into some kind of a political relationship.

Fourteen of the world’s twenty biggest cities are currently experiencing water scarcity or drought. Four billion people, it is estimated, already live in regions facing water shortages at least one month each year—that’s about two-thirds of the planet’s population. Half a billion are in places where the shortages never end. Today, at just one degree of warming, those regions with at least a month of water shortages each year include just about all of the United States west of Texas, where lakes and aquifers are being drained to meet demand, and stretching up into western Canada and down to Mexico City; almost all of North Africa and the Middle East; a large chunk of India; almost all of Australia; significant parts of Argentina and Chile; and everything in Africa south of Zambia.

In Abraham I had found a staunch Indian nationalist, who was discarded by independent India, like many other freedom fighters in the North East. He had understood the futility of waging a war against the government of India. But he insisted that the Nagas, a proud people, should be helped to come out of the stranglehold of some of the Pakistan and China inspired leaders and the machination of the certain Church functionaries owing allegiance to the American Baptist Foreign Missionary Society (ABFMS), which was headed by Billy Graham.

The heroic nationalists have started fading into the background making way for the political traders and greedy bureaucrats. World changes, but in the North East it has changed at faster paces and not for the better. I should also make it clear that the mainstream of the Meitei society, though alienated, were wedded to the historical and cultural ties with India. Most of them had welcomed the merger with India. Only a few obscurantist and revivalists dreamt of returning to the golden days of Meitei kingdom. Besides the stalwarts like Dwijamani Dev Sharma I had encountered staunch Indian nationalists in Moirang Koireng Singh, H.Nilomani Singh, R.K Ranabir Singh, R.K.Birachandra Singh and a couple of CPI leaders, amongst whom Meghachandra Singh deserves special mention. The redoubtable journalist L. Joychandra Singh too played a prominent role in spite of humiliation heaped upon him by Baleshwar Prasad.

There are Bedouins in Arabia, Tuareg in North Africa, Somalis and Maasai in East Africa, Sami of northern Scandinavia, Gujjars in India, Yörük in Turkey, Tuvans of Mongolia, Aymara in the Andes. There are herds of sheep, goats, cows, llamas, camels, yaks, horses, or reindeer, with the pastoralists living off their animals’ meat, milk, and blood and trading their wool and hides.