Unite India Quotes

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Any idea of a United India could never have worked and in my judgment it would have led us to terrific disaster.
Muhammad Ali Jinnah
The most dangerous people in the world are not the tiny minority instigating evil acts, but those who do the acts for them. For example, when the British invaded India, many Indians accepted to work for the British to kill off Indians who resisted their occupation. So in other words, many Indians were hired to kill other Indians on behalf of the enemy for a paycheck. Today, we have mercenaries in Africa, corporate armies from the western world, and unemployed men throughout the Middle East killing their own people - and people of other nations - for a paycheck. To act without a conscience, but for a paycheck, makes anyone a dangerous animal. The devil would be powerless if he couldn't entice people to do his work. So as long as money continues to seduce the hungry, the hopeless, the broken, the greedy, and the needy, there will always be war between brothers.
Suzy Kassem
Padre Crittle: … we heard on a radio jettisoned by one of the forestry men, the broadcast of Sir Reginald Dormal-Smith, the Governor of Burma. Speaking from Delhi he told the world just how well everything had been organized and how magnificently everyone had stuck to their posts. We who were in the middle of the chaos were “not amused” and loud were the jeers with which his speech was greeted: officers and civilians alike united in making caustic comments on British propaganda …
Elizabeth Tebby Germaine (EXTRAORDINARY TRUE STORIES OF SURVIVAL IN BURMA WW2: tens of thousands fled to India from the Japanese Invasion in 1942)
Money is one thing which rarely unites and mostly divides people.
Sudha Murty (The Old Man And His God: Discovering the Spirit of India)
Throughout human history, three caste systems have stood out. The tragically accelerated, chilling, and officially vanquished caste system of Nazi Germany. The lingering, millennia-long caste system of India. And the shape-shifting, unspoken, race-based caste pyramid in the United States. Each version relied on stigmatizing those deemed inferior to justify the dehumanization necessary to keep the lowest-ranked people at the bottom and to rationalize the protocols of enforcement. A caste system endures because it is often justified as divine will, originating from sacred text or the presumed laws of nature, reinforced throughout the culture and passed down through the generations.
Isabel Wilkerson (Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents)
It is interesting to note that an overwhelming majority of citizens in the world's three largest democracies have different religions: India (81 percent Hindu), the United States (76 percent Christian), and Indonesia (87 percent Muslim). Two of them have elected women as leaders of their government.
Jimmy Carter (A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power)
We therefore work, not for the work's sake, but for money—and money is supposed to get us what we really want in our hours of leisure and play. In the United States even poor people have lots of money compared with the wretched and skinny millions of India, Africa, and China, while our middle andupper classes (or should we say "income groups") are as prosperous as princes. Yet, by and large, they have but slight taste for pleasure. Money alone cannot buy pleasure, though it can help. For enjoyment is an art and a skill for which we have little talent or energy.
Alan W. Watts (The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are)
In the face of all the dire and often accurate warnings of danger on the road for women, it took modern feminism to ask the rock-bottom question: Compared to what? Whether by dowry murders in India, honor killings in Egypt, or domestic violence in the United States, records show that women are most likely to be beaten or killed at home and by men they know. Statistically speaking, home is an even more dangerous place for women than the road. Perhaps the most revolutionary act for a woman will be a self-willed journey—and to be welcomed when she comes home.
Gloria Steinem (My Life on the Road)
American involvement in the Persian Gulf has not been in order to secure energy supplies for the United States, but instead to supply energy for its energy-starved Bretton Woods partners in Europe and Asia. Put more directly, the Americans do not protect the Persian Gulf kingdoms and emirates so that the Americans can use Middle Eastern oil, but so that their Bretton Woods partners in Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Thailand, India, and Pakistan can.
Peter Zeihan (The Accidental Superpower: Ten Years On)
It’s a little-known fact that most terrorist groups fail, and that all of them die. Lest this seem hard to believe, just reflect on the world around you. Israel continues to exist, Northern Ireland is still a part of the United Kingdom, and Kashmir is a part of India. There are no sovereign states in Kurdistan, Palestine, Quebec, Puerto Rico, Chechnya, Corsica, Tamil Eelam, or Basque Country. The Philippines, Algeria, Egypt, and Uzbekistan are not Islamist theocracies; nor have Japan, the United States, Europe, and Latin America become religious, Marxist, anarchist, or new-age utopias. The numbers confirm the impressions.
Steven Pinker (The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined)
The matter on which I judge people is their willingness, or ability, to handle contradiction. Thus Paine was better than Burke when it came to the principle of the French revolution, but Burke did and said magnificent things when it came to Ireland, India and America. One of them was in some ways a revolutionary conservative and the other was a conservative revolutionary. It's important to try and contain multitudes. One of my influences was Dr Israel Shahak, a tremendously brave Israeli humanist who had no faith in collectivist change but took a Spinozist line on the importance of individuals. Gore Vidal's admirers, of whom I used to be one and to some extent remain one, hardly notice that his essential critique of America is based on Lindbergh and 'America First'—the most conservative position available. The only real radicalism in our time will come as it always has—from people who insist on thinking for themselves and who reject party-mindedness.
Christopher Hitchens (Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left)
Yet the past is ever with us and all that we are and that we have comes from the past. We are its products and we live immersed in it. Not to understand it and feel it as something living within us is not to understand the present. To combine it with the present and extend it to the future, to break from it where it cannot be so united, to make of all this the pulsating and vibrating material for thought and action—that is life.
Jawaharlal Nehru (The Discovery of India)
Facebook has more than 1 billion members, which by population makes it the third largest country in the world—somewhere between India and the United States. Who’s sending missionaries to that country? Who’s planting churches there?
Phil Cooke
Pakistan is merely another manifestation of a cultural unit demanding freedom for the growth of its own distinctive culture.
B.R. Ambedkar (Pakistan or the Partition of India)
In a world where continental structures like America, China, and maybe India and Brazil have already reached critical mass, how will Europe handle its transition to a regional unit?
Henry Kissinger (World Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History)
1. Bangladesh.... In 1971 ... Kissinger overrode all advice in order to support the Pakistani generals in both their civilian massacre policy in East Bengal and their armed attack on India from West Pakistan.... This led to a moral and political catastrophe the effects of which are still sorely felt. Kissinger’s undisclosed reason for the ‘tilt’ was the supposed but never materialised ‘brokerage’ offered by the dictator Yahya Khan in the course of secret diplomacy between Nixon and China.... Of the new state of Bangladesh, Kissinger remarked coldly that it was ‘a basket case’ before turning his unsolicited expertise elsewhere. 2. Chile.... Kissinger had direct personal knowledge of the CIA’s plan to kidnap and murder General René Schneider, the head of the Chilean Armed Forces ... who refused to countenance military intervention in politics. In his hatred for the Allende Government, Kissinger even outdid Richard Helms ... who warned him that a coup in such a stable democracy would be hard to procure. The murder of Schneider nonetheless went ahead, at Kissinger’s urging and with American financing, just between Allende’s election and his confirmation.... This was one of the relatively few times that Mr Kissinger (his success in getting people to call him ‘Doctor’ is greater than that of most PhDs) involved himself in the assassination of a single named individual rather than the slaughter of anonymous thousands. His jocular remark on this occasion—‘I don’t see why we have to let a country go Marxist just because its people are irresponsible’—suggests he may have been having the best of times.... 3. Cyprus.... Kissinger approved of the preparations by Greek Cypriot fascists for the murder of President Makarios, and sanctioned the coup which tried to extend the rule of the Athens junta (a favoured client of his) to the island. When despite great waste of life this coup failed in its objective, which was also Kissinger’s, of enforced partition, Kissinger promiscuously switched sides to support an even bloodier intervention by Turkey. Thomas Boyatt ... went to Kissinger in advance of the anti-Makarios putsch and warned him that it could lead to a civil war. ‘Spare me the civics lecture,’ replied Kissinger, who as you can readily see had an aphorism for all occasions. 4. Kurdistan. Having endorsed the covert policy of supporting a Kurdish revolt in northern Iraq between 1974 and 1975, with ‘deniable’ assistance also provided by Israel and the Shah of Iran, Kissinger made it plain to his subordinates that the Kurds were not to be allowed to win, but were to be employed for their nuisance value alone. They were not to be told that this was the case, but soon found out when the Shah and Saddam Hussein composed their differences, and American aid to Kurdistan was cut off. Hardened CIA hands went to Kissinger ... for an aid programme for the many thousands of Kurdish refugees who were thus abruptly created.... The apercu of the day was: ‘foreign policy should not he confused with missionary work.’ Saddam Hussein heartily concurred. 5. East Timor. The day after Kissinger left Djakarta in 1975, the Armed Forces of Indonesia employed American weapons to invade and subjugate the independent former Portuguese colony of East Timor. Isaacson gives a figure of 100,000 deaths resulting from the occupation, or one-seventh of the population, and there are good judges who put this estimate on the low side. Kissinger was furious when news of his own collusion was leaked, because as well as breaking international law the Indonesians were also violating an agreement with the United States.... Monroe Leigh ... pointed out this awkward latter fact. Kissinger snapped: ‘The Israelis when they go into Lebanon—when was the last time we protested that?’ A good question, even if it did not and does not lie especially well in his mouth. It goes on and on and on until one cannot eat enough to vomit enough.
Christopher Hitchens
If we were to define a sleeping bag as a house, India would move swiftly towards ending her housing shortage. A shortage of nearly thirty-one million units. Accept this definition, and you could go in for mass production of sleeping bags. We could then have passionate debates about the drastic reduction in the magnitude of the housing problem. The cover stories could run headlines: ‘Is it for real?’ And straps: ‘Sounds too good to be true, but it is.’ The government could boast that it had not only stepped up production of sleeping bags but had piled up an all-time record surplus of them. Say, thirty-seven million. Conservatives could argue that we were doing so well, the time had come to export sleeping bags, at ‘world prices’. The bleeding hearts could moan that sleeping bags had not reached the poorest. Investigative muckrakers could scrutinise the contracts given to manufacturers. Were the bags overpriced? Were they of good quality? That ends the housing shortage. There’s only one problem. Those without houses at the start of the programme will still be without houses at the end of it. (True, some of them will have sleeping bags, probably at world prices.)
Palagummi Sainath (Everybody loves a good drought)
The seven largest emitters of fossil fuels—the United States, the European Union, China, Russia, Japan, India, and China
Neil deGrasse Tyson (StarTalk: Everything You Ever Need to Know About Space Travel, Sci-Fi, the Human Race, the Universe, and Beyond (Astrophysics for People in a Hurry Series))
India is there to unite all human races. Because of that reason in India we have not been given the unity of races.
Rabindranath Tagore (Gitanjali)
A common strand appeared to unite these conflicts, and that was the advancement of a small coterie’s concept of American interests in the guise of the fight against terrorism, which was defined to refer only to the organized and politically motivated killing of civilians by killers not wearing the uniforms of soldiers. I recognized that if this was to be the single most important priority of our species, then the lives of those of us who lived in lands in which such killers also lived had no meaning except as collateral damage. This, I reasoned, was why America felt justified in bringing so many deaths to Afghanistan and Iraq, and why America felt justified in risking so many more deaths by tacitly using India to pressure Pakistan.
Mohsin Hamid (The Reluctant Fundamentalist)
The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that the United States would have to spend $3.6 trillion more than currently budgeted just to bring our infrastructure up to acceptable levels by 2020.95 China and India are spending almost 10 percent of GDP on infrastructure; Europe, around 5 percent.96 Even Mexico spends just over 3 percent.97 The United States has not broken 3 percent once since the mid-1970s.98
Jacob S. Hacker (American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper)
The important point of this report [Montague, Massachusetts; July 7, 1774] may be summed up in six resolutions: 1. We approve of the plan for a Continental Congress September 1, at Philadelphia. 2. We urge the disuse of India teas and British goods. 3. We will act for the suppression of pedlers and petty chapmen (supposably vendors of dutiable wares). 4. And work to promote American manufacturing. 5. We ought to relieve Boston. 6. We appoint the 14th day of July, a day of humiliation and prayer.
Edward Pearson Pressey (History of Montague; A Typical Puritan Town)
There is some virtue to be learnt from every part of the world — teamwork from Japan, precision from Germany, marketing and negotiation skills from the United States, courtesy, decency and refinement from the British, and human values from the villages of India. You
Ravi Shankar (Management Mantras)
It’s worth taking the comparison with America a bit further. In the United States, slavery was a 300-year-old institution. After abolition, it took another century of struggle for equality to secure full civil rights for black Americans. A half-century later, the struggle is hardly over. In India, caste has, over several millennia, woven itself into the fabric of society, infused itself as a climate of mind. Was it ever conceivable that one remarkable individual, a bracing, brave Constitution, and a few dozen free elections would blow it away?
Sunil Khilnani (Incarnations: India in 50 Lives)
In one of the awkward alignments of the Cold War, President Richard Nixon had lined up the democratic United States with this authoritarian government, while the despots in the Soviet Union found themselves standing behind democratic India. Nixon and Henry Kissinger, the brilliant White House national security advisor, were driven not just by such Cold War calculations, but a starkly personal and emotional dislike of India and Indians.
Gary J. Bass (The Blood Telegram)
Slavery is not a horror safely confined to the past; it continues to exist throughout the world, even in developed countries like France and the United States. Across the world slaves work and sweat and build and suffer. Slaves in Pakistan may have made the shoes you are wearing and the carpet you stand on. Slaves in the Caribbean may have put sugar in your kitchen and toys in the hands of your children. In India they may have sewn the shirt on your back and polished the ring on your finger. They are paid nothing. Slaves touch your life indirectly as well. They made the bricks for the factory that made the TV you watch. In Brazil slaves made the charcoal that tempered the steel that made the springs in your car and the blade on your lawnmower. Slaves grew the rice that fed the woman that wove the lovely cloth you've put up as curtains. Your investment portfolio and your mutual fund pension own stock in companies using slave labor in the developing world. Slaves keep your costs low and returns on your investments high.
Kevin Bales
Indian poverty is more dehumanizing than any machine; and, more than in any machine civilization, men in India are units, locked up in the straitest obedience by their idea of their dharma. The scientist returning to India sheds the individuality he acquired during his time abroad; he regains the security of his caste identity, and the world is once more simplified. There are minute rules, as comforting as bandages; individual perception and judgement, which once called forth his creativity, are relinquished as burdens, and the man is once more a unit in his herd, his science reduced to a skill. The blight of caste is not only untouchability and the consequent deification in India of filth; the blight, in India that tries to grow, is also the over-all obedience it imposes, its ready-made satisfactions, the diminishing of adventurousness, the pushing away of men of individuality and the possibility of excellence.
V.S. Naipaul (India: A Wounded Civilization)
The naming of a virus is a controversial matter. In 1832, cholera advanced from British India toward Europe. It was called ‘Asiatic Cholera’. The French felt that since they were democratic, they would not succumb to a disease of authoritarianism; but France was ravaged by cholera, which was as much about the bacteria as it is about the state of hygiene inside Europe and North America. (When cholera struck the United States in 1848, the Public Bathing Movement was born.) The ‘Spanish Flu’ was only named after Spain because it came during World War I when journalism in most belligerent countries was censored. The media in Spain, not being in the war, widely reported the flu, and so that pandemic took the name of the country. In fact, evidence showed that the Spanish Flu began in the United States in a military base in Kansas where the chickens transmitted the virus to soldiers. It would then travel to British India, where 60 percent of the casualties of that pandemic took place. It was never named the ‘American Flu’ and no Indian government has ever sought to recover costs from the United States because of the animal-to-human transmission that happened there.
Vijay Prashad
In American and European politics, “them” is often an immigrant hoping to come inside—the Mexican or Central American migrant hoping to enter the United States or the Middle Eastern/North African Muslim refugee hoping to live in Germany, France, Britain, or Sweden. In poorer countries, especially those with borders drawn by colonizers, “them” is often the ethnic, religious, or sectarian minorities with roots that are older than the borders themselves. Think of Muslims in India, in western China, or in the Caucasus region of Russia. Sunni Muslims in Iraq or Shia Muslims in Saudi Arabia. Think of Christians in Egypt or Kurds in Turkey. Think of Chinese and other ethnic minorities in Indonesia and Malaysia. There are many more examples. These groups become easy targets when times are hard and a politician looks to make a name for himself at their expense.
Ian Bremmer (Us vs. Them: The Failure of Globalism)
It is pluralism, not secularism, that defines democracy. A democratic state can be established upon any normative moral framework as long as pluralism remains the source of its legitimacy. England continues to maintain a national church whose religious head is also the country’s sovereign and whose bishops serve in the upper house of Parliament. India was, until recently, governed by partisans of an élitist theology of Hindu Awakening (Hindutva) bent on applying an implausible but enormously successful vision of “true Hinduism” to the state. And yet, like the United States, these countries are considered democracies, not because they are secular but because they are, at least in theory, dedicated to pluralism.
Reza Aslan (No God But God: The Origins, Evolution and Future of Islam)
Subhas Chandra Bose is to India what George Washington is to the United States of America.
Abhijit Naskar (Hurricane Humans: Give me accountability, I'll give you peace)
We can see the explicit dangers in the response to COVID-19 of the leaders of the United States, Brazil, and India, which was initially to dismiss the virus as an overblown hoax.*5
Jason F. Stanley (How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them)
India is a geographical term. It is no more a united nation than the Equator.
Winston S. Churchill (Churchill by Himself: In His Own Words)
But say, India’s half the size of the United States. Which State are you going to?
Rudyard Kipling (The complete works of Rudyard Kipling)
NOTHING should more deeply shame the modern student than the recency and inadequacy of his acquaintance with India. Here is a vast peninsula of nearly two million square miles; two-thirds as large as the United States, and twenty times the size of its master, Great Britain; 320,000,000 souls, more than in all North and South America combined, or one-fifth of the population of the earth; an impressive continuity of development and civilization from Mohenjo-daro, 2900 B.C. or earlier, to Gandhi, Raman and Tagore; faiths compassing every stage from barbarous idolatry to the most subtle and spiritual pantheism; philosophers playing a thousand variations on one monistic theme from the Upanishads eight centuries before Christ to Shankara eight centuries after him; scientists developing astronomy three thousand years ago, and winning Nobel prizes in our own time; a democratic constitution of untraceable antiquity in the villages, and wise and beneficent rulers like Ashoka and Akbar in the capitals; minstrels singing great epics almost as old as Homer, and poets holding world audiences today; artists raising gigantic temples for Hindu gods from Tibet to Ceylon and from Cambodia to Java, or carving perfect palaces by the score for Mogul kings and queens—this is the India that patient scholarship is now opening up, like a new intellectual continent, to that Western mind which only yesterday thought civilization an exclusively European thing.I
Will Durant (Our Oriental Heritage (Story of Civilization 1))
Seeker: So what is social ego, Sadhguru? Sadhguru: Society has its own ego, isn’t it? For every small thing, the whole society gets upset. It need not be wrong. Suppose it’s summer in the United States. Everybody is hardly wearing anything or maybe they are in miniskirts. Let’s say you’re fully clothed. People will get upset: “What is she doing? Why is she all covered up?” Here in India, if you dress like that, they’ll all get upset. So this is one kind of ego; that is another kind of ego. It’s the social ego which is getting upset, and your karma is becoming part of the collective karma. I want you to really understand this with a certain depth. Your idea of good and bad has been taught to you. You have imbibed it from the social atmosphere in which you have lived. See, for example, a bandit tribe, like the Pindaris, who from a young age were trained to rob and kill, they even had gods who taught them skills and brought them success in their banditry. When the British army was let loose on them, they were shot and killed indiscriminately. They were completely bewildered, as in their perception they had not done anything wrong. The Pindari ego was just to be a good bandit. The same happened for the Native Americans also. Among some Native American tribes, unless you had killed a man in your life, you were not much of a man. They collected the scalp of the man and wore it around their neck. So what is right and wrong, what is good and bad, is all about how the social ego functions.
Sadhguru (Mystic’s Musings)
In recent years, multiple countries across the world have been overtaken by a certain kind of far-right nationalism; the list includes Russia, Hungary, Poland, India, Turkey, and the United States.
Jason F. Stanley (How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them)
Through Jimi Hendrix's music you can almost see the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and of Martin Luther King Junior, the beginnings of the Berlin Wall, Yuri Gagarin in space, Fidel Castro and Cuba, the debut of Spiderman, Martin Luther King Junior’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, Ford Mustang cars, anti-Vietnam protests, Mary Quant designing the mini-skirt, Indira Gandhi becoming the Prime Minister of India, four black students sitting down at a whites-only lunch counter in Greensboro North Carolina, President Johnson pushing the Civil Rights Act, flower children growing their hair long and practicing free love, USA-funded IRA blowing up innocent civilians on the streets and in the pubs of Great Britain, Napalm bombs being dropped on the lush and carpeted fields of Vietnam, a youth-driven cultural revolution in Swinging London, police using tear gas and billy-clubs to break up protests in Chicago, Mods and Rockers battling on Brighton Beach, Native Americans given the right to vote in their own country, the United Kingdom abolishing the death penalty, and the charismatic Argentinean Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara. It’s all in Jimi’s absurd and delirious guitar riffs.
Karl Wiggins (Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe)
Government,’ Ronald Reagan, fortieth president of the United States of America, said, ‘is like a baby’s alimentary canal, with a healthy appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.
Shankkar Aiyar (Aadhaar: A Biometric History of India's 12-Digit Revolution)
While the 1960s and 1970s were turbulent times for US–Pakistan ties, Pakistan again became closely allied with the United States in the 1980s, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Pakistan argued that US military assistance was required to expand the Pakistan Army, ostensibly because doing so would enable Pakistan to better counter the emerging Soviet threat, even though Pakistan sought this assistance to strengthen its position vis-à-vis India. Consequently, with US military and economic assistance, by 1989, the Pakistan Army had grown to nearly 450,000 and had become increasingly reliant upon US weapon systems.
C. Christine Fair (Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army's Way of War)
An early gesture was to rename Harrington Road after a hero of the world communist movement, so that at the height of the Vietnam War the address of the United States Consulate was 7 Ho Chi Minh Sarani, Calcutta.
Ramachandra Guha (India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy)
This historic general election, which showed that the British are well able to distinguish between patriotism and Toryism, brought Clement Attlee to the prime ministership. In the succeeding five years, Labor inaugurated the National Health Service, the first and boldest experiment in socialized medicine. It took into public ownership all the vital (and bankrupted) utilities of the coal, gas, electricity and railway industries. It even nibbled at the fiefdoms and baronies of private steel, air transport and trucking. It negotiated the long overdue independence of India. It did all this, in a country bled white by the World War and subject to all manner of unpopular rationing and controls, without losing a single midterm by-election (a standard not equaled by any government of any party since). And it was returned to office at the end of a crowded term.
Christopher Hitchens
In India, I learned a proverb that may seem somewhat heartless: “The tears of strangers are only water.” It means we are obligated to help only our own; if others have a problem, we wish them well, but it’s their problem.
Dinesh D'Souza (United States of Socialism: Who's Behind It. Why It's Evil. How to Stop It.)
People get away with enslaving village girls for the same reason that people got away with enslaving blacks two hundred years ago: The victims are perceived as discounted humans. India had delegated an intelligence officer to look for pirated goods because it knew that the United States cares about intellectual property. When India feels that the West cares as much about slavery as it does about pirated DVDs, it will dispatch people to the borders
Nicholas D. Kristof (Half the Sky)
Meanwhile, in 2015, there were 280 million smartphone addicts. If they banded together to form the “United States of Nomophobia,” it would be the fourth most populous country in the world, after China, India, and the United States.
Adam Alter (Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked)
Underlying or overall social mobility rates are much lower than those typically estimated by sociologists or economists. The intergenerational correlation in all societies for which we construct surname estimates - medieval England, modern England, the United States, India, Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Chile, and even egalitarian Sweden - is between 0.7 and 0.9, much higher than conventionally estimated. Social status is inherited as strongly as any biological trait, such as height.
Gregory Clark (The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility)
Holy scriptures may have been relevant in the Middle Ages, but how can they guide us in an era of artificial intelligence, bioengineering, global warming, and cyberwarfare? Yet secular people are a minority. Billions of humans still profess greater faith in the Quran and the Bible than in the theory of evolution; religious movements shape the politics of countries as diverse as India, Turkey, and the United States; and religious animosities fuel conflicts from Nigeria to the Philippines.
Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
He renamed India’s untouchables harijan, “God’s people,” and raised them to human stature. And in doing so he provided the nonviolent strategy as well as the inspiration for Martin Luther King, Jr.’s comparable civil rights movement in the United States. Gandhi
Huston Smith (The World's Religions, Revised and Updated (Plus))
Sex work is legal in fifty nations, including Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Macau, the Netherlands, Austria, New Zealand, Israel, Germany, France, and England; it is legal with limitations in another eleven nations, including Australia, India, Norway, Japan, and Spain.
Melinda Chateauvert (Sex Workers Unite: A History of the Movement from Stonewall to SlutWalk)
In Transylvania it was memories of the Romanian revolt that stalked the Hungarian aristocratic imagination.. In Galicia it was memories of Tarnow that performed a similar service for the surviving Polish noble families. Both societies shared something of the brittle, sports-obsessed cheerfulness of the British in India - or indeed of Southerners in the pre-1861 United States. These were societies which could resort to any level of violence in support of racial supremacy. Indeed, an interesting global history could be written about the ferocity of a period which seems, very superficially, to be so 'civilized'. Southern white responses to Nat Turner's Slave Rebellion in 1831, with Turner himself flayed, beheaded and quartered, can be linked to the British blowing rebel Indians to pieces from the mouths of cannons in 1857.
Simon Winder (Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe)
The country was passing through turbulent times. British Raj was on its last legs. The World War had sucked the juice out of the British economy. Britain neither had the resources nor the will to hold on to a country the size of India. Sensing the British weakness and lack of resources to rule, different leagues of Indians sniffed different destinies in the air following the imminent exit of the British: a long stretch of Nehru Raj, Hindu Raj extending from Kashmir to Kerala not seen since Emperor Ashoka in third-century BCE before the emperor himself renounced Hinduism and turned a non-violent Buddhist, a Muslim-majority state carved out of two shoulders of India with a necklace-like corridor running through her bosom along Grand Trunk Road, balkanisation of the country with princes ruling the roost, and total chaos. From August 1946 onwards, chaos appeared to be the most likely destiny as it spurted in Bengal, Bihar, and United Provinces, ending in the carnage of minority communities at every place. The predicament of British government was how to cut their losses and run without many British casualties before the inevitable chaos spread to the whole country. The predicament of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League, was how to achieve his dream of Muslim-majority Pakistan carved out of India before his imminent demise from tuberculosis he suffered from, about which—apart from his doctor—only a handful of his closest relations and friends knew about. The predicament of Jawaharlal Nehru, the heir apparent of the Congress Party anointed by Gandhiji, was how to attain independence of the country followed by Nehru Raj while Gandhiji, a frail 77-year-old at the time, was still alive, for God only knew who would be the leader of the party once Gandhiji’s soul and his moral authority were dispatched to heaven, and Nehru couldn’t possibly leave the crucial decision in the hands of a God he didn’t particularly believe in. Time was of the essence to all the three.
Manjit Sachdeva (Lost Generations)
What was America in 1492 but a Loose-Fish, in which Columbus struck the Spanish standard by way of wailing it for his royal master and mistress? What was Poland to the Czar? What Greece to the Turk? What India to England? What at last will Mexico be to the United States? All Loose-Fish.
Herman Melville (Moby Dick: or, the White Whale)
This book is about how two of the world’s great democracies—the United States and India—faced up to one of the most terrible humanitarian crises of the twentieth century. The slaughter in what is now Bangladesh stands as one of the cardinal moral challenges of recent history, although today it is far more familiar to South Asians than to Americans. It had a monumental impact on India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh—almost a sixth of humanity in 1971. In the dark annals of modern cruelty, it ranks as bloodier than Bosnia and by some accounts in the same rough league as Rwanda.
Gary J. Bass (The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide)
You aime lots of stupid crap." While Hassan worked to make God hates baguettes Colin's mind raced like this: (1) baguettes (2) Katherine XIX (3) the ruby necklace he'd bought her five months and seventeen days before (4) most rubies come from India, which (5) used to be under control of the United Kingdom, of which (6) Winston Churchill was the prime minister, and (7) isn't it interesting how a lot of good politicians, like Churchill and also Gandhi, were bald while (8) a lot of evil dictators, like Hitler and Stalin and Saddam Hussein, were mustachoied? But (9) Mussolini only wore a mustache sometimes, and (10) lost of good scientists had mustaches, like the Italian Ruggero Oddi, who (11) discovered (and named for himself) the intestinal tract's spinchter of Oddi, which is just one of several lesser-known sphicnters like (12) the pupillary spinchter.
John Green (An Abundance of Katherines)
Throughout human history, three caste systems have stood out. The tragically accelerated, chilling, and officially vanquished caste system of Nazi Germany. The lingering, millennia-long caste system of India. And the shape-shifting, unspoken, race-based caste pyramid in the United States.
Isabel Wilkerson (Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents)
You are the only one who can avoid the collapse of the party. And if the party breaks up, it is very likely that the whole country will fall to pieces. What has kept India united since independence? Our party. Who guarantees the values that enable all the different communities to live together in peace? The
Javier Moro (The Red Sari: A Novel)
Once again I draw your attention to the difficulties India has had to encounter and her struggle to overcome them. Her problem was the problem of the world in miniature. India is too vast in its area and too diverse in its races. It is many countries packed in one geographical receptacle. It is just the opposite of what Europe truly is, namely, one country made into many. Thus Europe in its culture and growth has had the advantage of the strength of the many as well as the strength of the one. India, on the contrary, being naturally many, yet adventitiously one, has all along suffered from the looseness of its diversity and the feebleness of its unity. A true unity is like a round globe, it rolls on, carrying its burden easily; but diversity is a many-cornered thing which has to be dragged and pushed with all force. Be it said to the credit of India that this diversity was not her own creation; she has had to accept it as a fact from the beginning of her history. In America and Australia, Europe has simplified her problem by almost exterminating the original population. Even in the present age this spirit of extermination is making itself manifest, in the inhospitable shutting out of aliens, by those who themselves were aliens in the lands they now occupy. But India tolerated difference of races from the first, and that spirit of toleration has acted all through her history. Her caste system is the outcome of this spirit of toleration. For India has all along been trying experiments in evolving a social unity within which all the different peoples could be held together, while fully enjoying the freedom of maintaining their own differences. The tie has been as loose as possible, yet as close as the circumstances permitted. This has produced something like a United States of a social federation, whose common name is Hinduism. India
Rabindranath Tagore (Nationalism)
We face the crowd near the fence and raise our fists. Like I’ve seen in old pictures of the Olympics in 1968, and the NoDAPL protests that have been going on for years, and women in India fighting for justice for rape victims, and the teens—just like me—at the March for Our Lives. It’s a simple gesture, and a beautiful one. It calls out through dusty pages of history and echoes from those whose shoulders I stand on—the ones who were hosed down but never retreated, who were beaten but persisted, and the ones whose voices were locked behind walls but whose spirits were never broken. The people united will never be defeated.
Samira Ahmed (Internment)
According to a UN report from 2014 surveying 185 countries and territories, only two did not guarantee any paid maternity leave; Papua New Guinea and the United States. The United States is also one of only a handful of countries that don’t guarantee their workers any paid time off for illness—others include Angola, India, and Liberia.
Anu Partanen (The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life)
The Chinese construction of South Asia’s tallest edifice, the Lotus (a Lotus Sutra in Buddhism) Tower, both points to Beijing’s Peaceful Rise and unsettles some onlookers. For the nervous India and the United States, the cleverly designed and highly sophisticated rising communications tower is more than a Buddhist symbol of Peaceful Rise.
Patrick Mendis (Peaceful War: How the Chinese Dream and the American Destiny Create a New Pacific World Order)
The bankers and merchants of Bengal who sustained Siraj ud-Daula’s regime had finally turned against him and united with the disaffected parts of his own military; now they sought to bring in the mercenary troops of the East India Company to help depose him. This was something quite new in Indian history: a group of Indian financiers plotting with an international trading corporation to use its own private security force to overthrow a regime they saw threatening the income they earned from trade.60 This was not part of any imperial masterplan. In fact, the EIC men on the ground were ignoring their strict instructions from London, which were only to repulse French attacks and avoid potentially ruinous wars with their Mughal hosts. But seeing opportunities for personal enrichment as well as political and economic gain for the Company, they dressed up the conspiracy in colours that they knew would appeal to their masters and presented the coup as if it were primarily aimed at excluding the French from Bengal for ever.*
William Dalrymple (The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company)
In many ways, the partition of India was the inevitable result of three centuries of Britain’s divide-and-rule policy. As the events of the Indian Revolt demonstrated, the British believed that the best way to curb nationalist sentiment was to classify the indigenous population not as Indians, but as Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, etc. The categorization and separation of native peoples was a common tactic for maintaining colonial control over territories whose national boundaries had been arbitrarily drawn with little consideration for the ethnic, cultural, or religious makeup of the local inhabitants. The French went to great lengths to cultivate class divisions in Algeria, the Belgians promoted tribal factionalism in Rwanda, and the British fostered sectarian schisms in Iraq, all in a futile attempt to minimize nationalist tendencies and stymie united calls for independence. No wonder, then, that when the colonialists were finally expelled from these manufactured states, they left behind not only economic and political turmoil, but deeply divided populations with little common ground on which to construct a national identity.
Reza Aslan (No God But God: The Origins, Evolution and Future of Islam)
Anthony Fauci’s Report Card Death Rates from COVID per million population, as of September 30, 202120: United States 2,107 deaths/1,000,000 Sweden 1,444 deaths/1,000,000 Iran 1,449 deaths/1,000,000 Germany 1,126 deaths/1,000,000 Cuba 650 deaths/1,000,000 Jamaica 630 deaths/1,000,000 Denmark 455 deaths/1,000,000 India 327 deaths/1,000,000 Finland 194 deaths/1,000,000 Vietnam 197 deaths/1,000,000
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
Whether by dowry murders in India, honor killings in Egypt, or domestic violence in the United States, records show that women are most likely to be beaten or killed at home and by men they know. Statistically speaking, home is an even more dangerous place for woman than the road. Perhaps the most revolutionary act for a woman will be a self willed journey-and to be welcomed when she comes home.
Gloria Steinem (My Life on the Road)
The wars around the globe into which religion is woven -- violence that over the past two decades has sent many tens of thousands of men, women, and children to terrible deaths in the Balkans, Iraq, Afghanistan, Indonesia, India, Israel, the Palestinian territories, and the United States -- deeply threaten what we have of a human society. Denouncing religion itself is futile. And such simple reactions badly miss the point. It is among the religious believers that the work must be done, within that overwhelming majority who would find common ground in being human and not wanting destruction, if only because their traditions are about so much more. Those traditions contain life-giving possibilities, even if the worst demagogues would try to twist dogma so hard as to wring poison from it.
Gustav Niebuhr (Beyond Tolerance: Searching for Interfaith Understanding in America)
in Australia, India, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United Kingdom, where 45 percent of all civilian deaths were people aged fifteen to thirty-five.97 Death was not caused by the influenza virus itself so much as by the body’s immunological reaction to the virus. Perversely, this meant that individuals with the strongest immune systems were more likely to die than those with weaker immune systems.
Niall Ferguson (Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe)
The first Baptist missionary (and the first missionary from the United States) was the African-American George Liele, the Baptist pastor of the first African Church of Savannah, who was able to purchase his own freedom and then went to Kingston, Jamaica, in 1783 as a missionary to African slaves. By the time Carey left for India, Liele already had planted the African Baptist Church of Kingston with more than five hundred
Timothy Tennent (Invitation to World Missions: A Trinitarian Missiology for the Twenty-first Century (Invitation to Theological Studies Series))
The scale of the climate challenge is so vast that it cannot be met solely by grassroots groups and corporations, no matter how Green. The situation requires government fiat to set rules and enforce them. Specifically, the four major energy-using governments—the European Union, the United States, China, and India—have to get tough. If all four do the right thing, there’s hope. So far the European governments have led the way.
Stewart Brand (Whole Earth Discipline: Why Dense Cities, Nuclear Power, Transgenic Crops, Restored Wildlands, and Geoengineering Are Necessary)
Bilingualism and diglossia are different. Bilingualism is about two languages you know having essentially the same functions, such that it is easy to translate from one to the other. Simultaneous translators are bilingual, or even trilingual as the United Nations requires, because they need to be able to say exactly the same things in their different languages. With diglossia, however, what you find is a child first learning one language and speaking it at home, and then later on, maybe at school, transiting to another language which is used for less basic things. The end result is not two separate languages that exist in parallel, but a single competence, where ground-level things are done in the first language and things to do with school, or the modern sector, in another. And since each of these languages is bound to its context, translation is not easy.
Peggy Mohan (Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages)
We aren’t here to cover our asses. We’re here to serve the United States of America. For four damn years people in this administration have known that a company in India had access to sensitive material. Just because we didn’t know they took it is no reason to pat ourselves on the back. Just because you didn’t know personally, people you are responsible for did. And just because I didn’t know personally, I am responsible for you.” Zilko
Mark Greaney (True Faith and Allegiance (Jack Ryan Universe, #22))
But if the doctrine of Fast-Fish be pretty generally applicable, the kindred doctrine of Loose-Fish is still more widely so. That is internationally and universally applicable. What was America in 1492 but a Loose-Fish, in which Columbus struck the Spanish standard by way of waifing it for his royal master and mistress? What was Poland to the Czar? What Greece to the Turk? What India to England? What at last will Mexico be to the United States? All Loose-Fish.
Herman Melville (Moby-Dick or, The Whale)
British journalist Don Taylor. Writing in 1969, by which time India had stayed united for two decades and gone through four general elections, Taylor yet thought that the key question remains: can India remain in one piece – or will it fragment? . . . When one looks at this vast country and its 524 million people, the 15 major languages in use, the conflicting religions, the many races, it seems incredible that one nation could ever emerge. It is difficult to even encompass this country in the mind – the great Himalaya, the wide Indo-Gangetic plain burnt by the sun and savaged by the fierce monsoon rains, the green flooded delta of the east, the great cities like Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. It does not, often, seem like one country. And yet there is a resilience about India which seems an assurance of survival. There is something which can only be described as an Indian spirit. I believe it no exaggeration to say that the fate of Asia hangs on its survival.
Ramachandra Guha (India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy)
Scholars still debate whether Jinnah’s equally adamant insistence on a full Pakistan was a bluff. An influential school of thought holds that the Quaid always intended to settle for a united India, after he had extracted as much power and autonomy as he could for himself and the five “Muslim” provinces. The League leader was perfectly rational, Liaquat told Mountbatten: he understood, or could at least be persuaded to understand, how fragile and unworkable a shrunken Pakistan would be.79
Nisid Hajari (Midnight's Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India's Partition)
One thing about a tiny island like Singapore is that every man, woman, and monkey in it originated from somewhere else. Whether your distant ancestors sailed from China, India, the Malay archipelago or the United Kingdom, your decision to stay is the only thing that makes you Singaporean. Your presence counts more than your origins. At least, that’s how it was supposed to be. Beneath an upper crust of white colonial administrators, the rest of us were muddled together like a savoury stew under mashed potatoes.
Ovidia Yu (The Betel Nut Tree Mystery (Crown Colony, #2))
I haven’t been cruel, believe me, but it is what she deserves. Making a mistake is not giving the floorboards enough time to settle before you seal them. Abandoning your children to go help the poor of India means you’re a narcissist who wants the adoration of strangers. I look at Kevin and May and I think, who would do that to them? What kind of person leaves their kids?” I felt like I’d been holding those words in my mouth since the moment I walked into the waiting room of the coronary care unit and saw our mother there.
Ann Patchett (The Dutch House)
India to accept a ceasefire,” he said. But there was nothing about reconciliation with India in the interview. Sulzberger noted that Bhutto “spoke gloomily of India” and implied that “India was behaving like a virtual satellite of Moscow.” He made predictions similar to those Ayub made about the Soviet Union gaining ground in the subcontinent and about India being on the verge of breaking up. “By sponsoring Bangladesh you will see that India will lose West Bengal and Assam,” he declared. “It is preposterous to think that in an association with
Husain Haqqani (Magnificent Delusions: Pakistan, the United States, and an Epic History of Misunderstanding)
At four degrees, there would be eight million more cases of dengue fever each year in Latin America alone and close to annual global food crises. There could be 9 percent more heat-related deaths. Damages from river flooding would grow thirtyfold in Bangladesh, twentyfold in India, and as much as sixtyfold in the United Kingdom. In certain places, six climate-driven natural disasters could strike simultaneously, and, globally, damages could pass $600 trillion—more than twice the wealth as exists in the world today. Conflict and warfare could double.
David Wallace-Wells (The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming)
With the advent of a public health pandemic like COVID-19, the attacks on expertise, science, and truth that are the lifeblood of fascist politics imperil much more than just our political system. We can see the explicit dangers in the response to COVID-19 of the leaders of the United States, Brazil, and India, which was initially to dismiss the virus as an overblown hoax.*5 The response of these governments to the virus was not some accident—as I show in the pages to follow, fascist ideology conflicts in principle with expertise, science, and truth.
Jason F. Stanley (How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them)
liberal democracy been in such peril. With the advent of a public health pandemic like COVID-19, the attacks on expertise, science, and truth that are the lifeblood of fascist politics imperil much more than just our political system. We can see the explicit dangers in the response to COVID-19 of the leaders of the United States, Brazil, and India, which was initially to dismiss the virus as an overblown hoax.*5 The response of these governments to the virus was not some accident—as I show in the pages to follow, fascist ideology conflicts in principle with expertise, science, and truth.
Jason F. Stanley (How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them)
For Jinnah, Partition was a constitutional way out of a political stalemate, as he saw it, and not the beginning of a permanent state of hostility between two countries or two nations. This explains his expectation that India and Pakistan would live side by side ‘like the United States and Canada’, obviously with open borders, free flow of ideas and free trade. It is also the reason why Pakistan’s Quaid-i-Azam insisted that his Malabar Hill house in Bombay be kept as it was so that he could return to the city where he lived most of his life after retiring as Governor-General of Pakistan.
Husain Haqqani (Reimagining Pakistan: Transforming a Dysfunctional Nuclear State)
A friend in Dallas recently pointed out a new church building that cost $74 million. While this thought was still exploding in my mind, he pointed out another $7 million church building going up less than a minute away. These extravagant buildings are insanity from a Two-Thirds World perspective. The $74 million spent on one new building in the United States could build more than 6,000 average-sized churches in India. The same $74 million would be enough to guarantee that the Good News of Jesus Christ could be proclaimed to a whole Indian state-or even some of the smaller countries of Asia.
K.P. Yohannan (Revolution In World Missions)
For the simple reason, Reid,’ said Mr Burnham patiently, ‘that British rule in India could not be sustained without opium—that is all there is to it, and let us not pretend otherwise. You are no doubt aware that in some years, the Company’s annual gains from opium are almost equal to the entire revenue of your own country, the United States? Do you imagine that British rule would be possible in this impoverished land if it were not for this source of wealth? And if we reflect on the benefits that British rule has conferred upon India, does it not follow that opium is this land’s greatest blessing?
Amitav Ghosh (Sea of Poppies)
Theodore W. Allen has explained that the distinction between racial and national oppression turns on the composition of the group that enforces elite rule: under a system of national oppression, such as Britain imposed on India or the United States maintains in Puerto Rico, the conquering power implements its dominance by incorporating sections of the elite classes of the subject population (in modern times a portion of the bourgeoisie and state bureaucracy) into the ruling apparatus. Under the system of racial oppression, elite rule rests on the support of the laboring classes of the oppressor group.
Noel Ignatiev (How the Irish Became White)
The reality is that Facebook has been so successful, it’s actually running out of humans on the planet. Ponder the numbers: there are about three billion people on the Internet, where the latter is broadly defined as any sort of networked data, texts, browser, social media, whatever. Of these people, six hundred million are Chinese, and therefore effectively unreachable by Facebook. In Russia, thanks to Vkontakte and other copycat social networks, Facebook’s share of the country’s ninety million Internet users is also small, though it may yet win that fight. That leaves about 2.35 billion people ripe for the Facebook plucking. While Facebook seems ubiquitous to the plugged-in, chattering classes, its usage is not universal among even entrenched Internet users. In the United States, for example, by far the company’s most established and sticky market, only three-quarters of Internet users are actively on FB. That ratio of FB to Internet user is worse in other countries, so even full FB saturation in a given market doesn’t imply total Facebook adoption. Let’s (very) optimistically assume full US-level penetration for any market. Without China and Russia, and taking a 25 percent haircut of people who’ll never join or stay (as is the case in the United States), that leaves around 1.8 billion potential Facebook users globally. That’s it. In the first quarter of 2015, Facebook announced it had 1.44 billion users. Based on its public 2014 numbers, FB is growing at around 13 percent a year, and that pace is slowing. Even assuming it maintains that growth into 2016, that means it’s got one year of user growth left in it, and then that’s it: Facebook has run out of humans on the Internet. The company can solve this by either making more humans (hard even for Facebook), or connecting what humans there are left on the planet. This is why Internet.org exists, a vaguely public-spirited, and somewhat controversial, campaign by Facebook to wire all of India with free Internet, with regions like Brazil and Africa soon to follow. In early 2014 Facebook acquired a British aerospace firm, Ascenta, which specialized in solar-powered unmanned aerial vehicles. Facebook plans on flying a Wi-Fi-enabled air force of such craft over the developing world, giving them Internet. Just picture ultralight carbon-fiber aircraft buzzing over African savannas constantly, while locals check their Facebook feeds as they watch over their herds.
Antonio García Martínez (Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley)
What was America in 1492 but a Loose-fish, in which Columbus struck the spanish standard by way of waifing it for his royal master and mistress? What was Poland to the Czar? What Greece to the Turk? What India to England? What at last will Mexico be to the United States? All Loose-Fish. What are the Rights of Man and the Liberties of the World but Loose-Fish? What all men’s minds and opinions but Loose-Fish? What is the principle of religious belief in them but a Loose-Fish? What to the ostentatious smuggling verbalists are the thoughts of thinkers but Loose-Fish? What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish?
Herman Melville (Moby-Dick or, The Whale)
Le Corbusier’s unrendered concrete towers, after 27 years of Punjab sun and monsoon and sub-Himalayan winter, looked stained and diseased, and showed now as quite plain structures, with an applied flashiness: megalomaniac architecture: people reduced to units, individuality reserved only to the architect, imposing his ideas of colour in an inflated Miróesque mural on one building, and imposing an iconography of his own with a giant hand set in a vast flat area of concrete paving, which would have been unbearable in winter and summer and the monsoon. India had encouraged yet another outsider to build a monument to himself.
V.S. Naipaul (India: A Million Mutinies Now (Vintage International))
Caste is not a term often applied to the United States. It is considered the language of India or feudal Europe. But some anthropologists and scholars of race in America have made use of the term for decades. Before the modern era, one of the earliest Americans to take up the idea of caste was the antebellum abolitionist and U.S. senator Charles Sumner as he fought against segregation in the North. “The separation of children in the Public Schools of Boston, on account of color or race,” he wrote, “is in the nature of Caste, and on this account is a violation of Equality.” He quoted a fellow humanitarian: “Caste makes distinctions where God has made none.
Isabel Wilkerson (Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents)
Eisenhower was determined to avoid a direct confrontation with the Soviets. It is unlikely he would have sent American armed forces unilaterally. Yet something could have been done through international organizations, especially if nonaligned nations like India could have been brought on board. In the event, nothing was done. The message to other “captive peoples” was clear: if you rebel, the United States will not help you, and the Soviets will crush you with overwhelming force. There was discontent in other satellite states at the time. If things had gone better in Hungary, more rebellions might have been inspired. The whole history of Europe and the Cold War might have developed differently.
Alex von Tunzelmann (Blood and Sand: Suez, Hungary, and Eisenhower's Campaign for Peace)
For Bancroft, the nation’s fate was all but sealed the day Columbus set sail. By giving Americans a more ancient past, he hoped to make America’s founding appear inevitable and its growth inexorable, God-ordained. He also wanted to celebrate the United States, not as an offshoot of England, but instead as a pluralist and cosmopolitan nation, with ancestors all over the world. “France contributed to its independence,” he observed, “the origin of the language we speak carries us to India; our religion is from Palestine; of the hymns sung in our churches, some were first heard in Italy, some in the deserts of Arabia, some on the banks of the Euphrates; our arts come from Greece; our jurisprudence from Rome.
Jill Lepore (These Truths: A History of the United States)
Consider this sobering statistic: Shortly before the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, CIDRAP undertook a national survey of hospital pharmacists and intensive care and emergency department doctors, as we detailed in chapter 18. The update of that survey identified more than 150 critical lifesaving drugs for all types of diseases frequently used in the United States, without which many patients would die within hours. All of them are generic and many, or their active pharmaceutical ingredients, are manufactured primarily in China or India. At the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, sixty-three were already unavailable to pharmacies on short notice or on shortage status under normal conditions—just one example of how vulnerable we are.
Michael T. Osterholm (Deadliest Enemy: Our War Against Killer Germs)
When Libya fought against the Italian occupation, all the Arabs supported the Libyan mujahideen. We Arabs never occupied any country. Well, we occupied Andalusia unjustly, and they drove us out, but since then, we Arabs have not occupied any country. It is our countries that are occupied. Palestine is occupied, Iraq is occupied, and as for the UAE islands... It is not in the best interest of the Arabs for hostility to develop between them and Iran, Turkey, or any of these nations. By no means is it in our interest to turn Iran against us. If there really is a problem, we should decide here to refer this issue to the international court of Justice. This is the proper venue for the resolution of such problems. We should decide to refer the issue of the disputed UAE islands to the International Court of Justice, and we should accept whatever it rules. One time you say this is occupied Arab land, and then you say... This is not clear, and it causes confusion. 80% of the people of the Gulf are Iranians. The ruling families are Arab, but the rest are Iranian. The entire people is Iranian. This is a mess. Iran cannot be avoided. Iran is a Muslim neighbour, and it is not in our interes to become enemies. What is the reason for the invasion and destruction of Iraq, and for killing of one million Iraqis? Let our American friends answer this question: Why Iraq? What is the reason? Is Bin Laden an Iraqi? No he is not. Were those who attacked New York Iraqis? No, they were not. were those who attacked the Pentagon Iraqis? No, they were not. Were there WMDs in Iraq? No, there were not. Even if iraq did have WMDs - Pakistan and India have nuclear bombs, and so do China, Russia, Britain, France and America. Should all these countries be destroyed? Fine, let's destroy all the countries that have WMDs. Along comes a foreign power, occupies an Arab country, and hangs its president, and we all sit on the sidelines, laughing. Why didn't they investigate the hanging of Saddam Hussein? How can a POW be hanged - a president of an Arab country and a member of the Arab League no less! I'm not talking about the policies of Saddam Hussein, or the disagreements we had with him. We all had poitlical disagreements with him and we have such disagreements among ourselves here. We share nothing, beyond this hall. Why won't there be an investigation into the killing of Saddam Hussein? An entire Arab leadership was executed by hanging, yet we sit on the sidelines. Why? Any one of you might be next. Yes. America fought alongside Saddam Hussein against Khomeini. He was their friend. Cheney was a friend of Saddam Hussein. Rumsfeld, the US Defense Secretary at the time Iraq was destroyed, was a close friend of Saddam Hussein. Ultimately, they sold him out and hanged him. You are friends of America - let's say that ''we'' are, not ''you'' - but one of these days, America may hang us. Brother 'Amr Musa has an idea which he is enthusiastic. He mentioned it in his report. He says that the Arabs have the right to use nuclear power for peaceful purposes, and that there should be an Arab nuclear program. The Arabs have this right. They even have the right to have the right to have a nuclear program for other... But Allah prevails... But who are those Arabs whom you say should have united nuclear program? We are the enemies of one another, I'm sad to say. We all hate one another, we deceive one another, we gloat at the misfortune of one another, and we conspire against one another. Our intelligence agencies conspire against one another, instead of defending us against the enemy. We are the enemies of one another, and an Arab's enemy is another Arab's friend.
Muammar Gaddafi
Now because Britain, France, and recently the United States are imperial powers, their political societies impart to their civil societies a sense of urgency, a direct political infusion as it were, where and whenever matters pertaining to their imperial interests abroad are concerned. I doubt that it is controversial, for example, to say that an Englishman in India or Egypt in the later nineteenth century took an interest in those countries that was never far from their status in his mind as British colonies. To say this may seem quite different from saying that all academic knowledge about India and Egypt is somehow tinged and impressed with, violated by, the gross political fact—and that is what I am saying in this study of Orientalism. For if it is true that no production of knowledge in the human sciences can ever ignore or disclaim its author’s involvement as a human subject in his own circumstances, then it must also be true that for a European or American studying the Orient there can be no disclaiming the main circumstances of his actuality: that he comes up against the Orient as a European or American first, as an individual second. And to be a European or an American in such a situation is by no means an inert fact. It meant and means being aware, however dimly, that one belongs to a power with definite interests in the Orient, and more important, that one belongs to a part of the earth with a definite history of involvement in the Orient almost since the time of Homer.
Edward W. Said (Orientalism)
When I came back I joined a black church in Oakland and that made me feel more at home, a bit like being connected to India. It felt funny to be around so many white people when I came back to the United States. It still bothers me. One of the things I liked living in Hawaii years later was the racial complexity of it. I remember that at the time when Sucheng and I got married--we met as graduate students at Berkeley and have been married almost forty years--one of the first houses we bought was in a Black neighborhood in west Berkeley and we didn’t quite notice how uniformly Black it was until some weeks later. I said to Sucheng, “You know, we’re the only white people in this neighborhood.” And she looked at me and said: “Speak for yourself, honkie!
Mark Juergensmeyer
When President Obama asked to meet with Steve Jobs, the late Apple boss, his first question was ‘how much would it cost to make the iPhone in the United States, instead of overseas?’ Jobs was characteristically blunt, asserting that ‘those jobs are never coming back’. In point of fact, it’s been estimated that making iPhones exclusively in the US would add around $65 to the cost of each phone – not an unaffordable cost, or an unthinkable drop in margin for Apple, if it meant bringing jobs back home.  But American workers aren’t going to be making iPhones anytime soon, because of the need for speed, and scale, in getting the product on to shelves around the world. When Apple assessed the global demand for the iPhone it estimated that it would need almost 9,000 engineers overseeing the production process to meet demand. Their analysts reported that it would take nine months to recruit that many engineers in the US – in China, it took 15 days. It’s these kind of tales that cause US conservative media outlets to graphically describe Asia as ‘eating the lunch’ off the tables of patriotic, if sleep-walking, American citizens. If Apple had chosen to go to India, instead of China, the costs may have been slightly higher, but the supply of suitably qualified engineers would have been just as plentiful. While China may be the world’s biggest manufacturing plant, India is set to lead the way in the industry that poses the biggest threat to western middle-class parents seeking to put their sons or daughters through college: knowledge.
David Price (Open: How We’ll Work, Live and Learn In The Future)
Everything, it said, was against the travellers, every obstacle imposed alike by man and by nature. A miraculous agreement of the times of departure and arrival, which was impossible, was absolutely necessary to his success. He might, perhaps, reckon on the arrival of trains at the designated hours, in Europe, where the distances were relatively moderate; but when he calculated upon crossing India in three days, and the United States in seven, could he rely beyond misgiving upon accomplishing his task? There were accidents to machinery, the liability of trains to run off the line, collisions, bad weather, the blocking up by snow—were not all these against Phileas Fogg? Would he not find himself, when travelling by steamer in winter, at the mercy of the winds and fogs?
Jules Verne (Around the World in 80 Days)
The fate of India showcased the moral logic of climate change at its most grotesque: expected to be, by far, the world’s most hard-hit country, shouldering nearly twice as much of the burden as the next nation, India’s share of climate burden was four times as high as its share of climate guilt. China is in the opposite situation, its share of guilt four times as high as its share of the burden. Which, unfortunately, means it may be tempted to slow-walk its green energy revolution. The United States, the study found, presented a case of eerie karmic balance: its expected climate damages matching almost precisely its share of global carbon emissions. Not to say either share is small; in fact, of all the nations in the world, the U.S. was predicted to be hit second hardest.
David Wallace-Wells (The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming)
Despite all technical change in the advanced countries, to this day India, with a much smaller cultivated area than the US, produces annually a larger total tonnage of cereals, root crops, oil crops, sugar crops, fruits and vegetables. The precise figures are 858 million tonnes in India and 676 million tonnes in the US in 2007, the latest year for which the data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation is available. As for China, its even more intensive cultivation, developed over centuries, and consequent high land productivity were legendary; Britain’s agricultural yields at that time, properly measured over the same production period, were pathetic in comparison. By 2007 China produced 1,308 million tonnes from an area substantially less than that of India and of the US.
Utsa Patnaik (The Agrarian Question in the Neoliberal Era: Primitive Accumulation and the Peasantry)
While taste conveys the complexity of life, a good chef should keep in mind that food can have a meaning that is often not apparent but affects the palate nonetheless. For example, the "A1 sauce" is now very popular in America. I have tried it. It is very good. What is not understood is that when one takes a bite of a steak that has been smothered in "A1," as the sauce was proclaimed by King George IV, they are eating history. The combination of malt vinegar, dates, mango chutney, apples and orange marmalade all serve as a reminder that the United States was settled by England and will always be England's. The bold combination of malt vinegar and orange marmalade- England's lifeblood- and those flavors of England's conquered- mango from India and apples so strongly identified with America- cannot be ignored.
N.M. Kelby (White Truffles in Winter)
by allies, meant no good to its neighbor. Between them, Pakistan, China, and the United States, each for its own reasons, wanted to contain India, the new, independent, and rising power. This was the dominant Indian strategic outlook in the decades of the 1970s and 1980s, up to the end of the cold war. India was able to pursue a policy of inaction for several reasons.15 First, it was the preferred policy most of the time—the default policy, and the guiding philosophy of one of India's least-heralded prime ministers, P. V. Narasimha Rao. He used to tell associates that in time most problems would take care of themselves. Rao demonstrated this by forwarding no significant initiatives toward Islamabad during his tenures as foreign minister and prime minister. At the same time, India has often been unable to act because
Stephen Philip Cohen (Shooting for a Century: The India-Pakistan Conundrum)
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)
The home of the young bride and her widower groom lies in Travancore, at the southern tip of India, sandwiched between the Arabian Sea and the Western Ghats—that long mountain range that runs parallel to the western coast. The land is shaped by water and its people united by a common language: Malayalam. Where the sea meets white beach, it thrusts fingers inland to intertwine with the rivers snaking down the green canopied slopes of the Ghats. It is a child’s fantasy world of rivulets and canals, a latticework of lakes and lagoons, a maze of backwaters and bottle-green lotus ponds; a vast circulatory system because, as her father used to say, all water is connected. It spawned a people—Malayalis—as mobile as the liquid medium around them, their gestures fluid, their hair flowing, ready to pour out laughter as they float from this relative’s house to that one’s, pulsing and roaming like blood corpuscles in a vasculature, propelled by the great beating heart of the monsoon.
Abraham Verghese (The Covenant of Water)
NATIONAL ANTHEM OF AZAD HIND May Good Fortune, Happiness and ease rain down upon India; On Punjab, Sindh, Gujarat, Maratha on Orissa and Bengal, On the Indian Ocean, on the Vindhya Mountains, On the Himalayas, the blue Jamuna and the Ganges. May thy ways be priased, from Thee our life from thy body our hope. May the rising sun shine down upon the world and exalt the name of India In every heart may thy love grow and thy sweetness take shape. So that every dweller in every province. Every faith united, every secret and mystery put aside. May come into thy embrace, in plaited garlands of love. May the rising sun shine down upon the world and exalt the name of India. May the early morning with the wings of a bird praise Her. And with all the power and fullness of the winds bringing freshness into life. Let us join together and shout: ‘Long Live India’, our beloved country. The rising sun shines upon the earth, exalting the name of India. Victory! May India’s name be praised. Translated by C.H. IVENS
Hugh Toye (Subhash Chandra Bose)
Making a mistake is not giving the floorboards enough time to settle before you seal them. Abandoning your children to go help the poor of India means you’re a narcissist who wants the adoration of strangers. I look at Kevin and May and I think, who would do that to them? What kind of person leaves their kids?” I felt like I’d been holding those words in my mouth since the moment I walked into the waiting room of the coronary care unit and saw our mother there. “Men!” Maeve said, nearly shouting. “Men leave their children all the time and the world celebrates them for it. The Buddha left and Odysseus left and no one gave a shit about their sons. They set out on their noble journeys to do whatever the hell they wanted to do and thousands of years later we’re still singing about it. Our mother left and she came back and we’re fine. We didn’t like it but we survived it. I don’t care if you don’t love her or if you don’t like her, but you have to be decent to her, if for no other reason than I want you to. You owe me that.
Ann Patchett
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. For an Indian assessing this period, it is telling that a competitor willing to take greater risks and pursue strategic clarity not only got a decade’s head start in economic growth but also a more favourable geopolitical balance. So much again for consistency.
S. Jaishankar (The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World)
At most periods of her history India, though a cultural unit, has been torn by internecine war. In statecraft her rulers were cunning and unscrupulous. Famine, flood and plague visited her from time to time, and killed millions of her people. Inequality of birth was given religious sanction, and the lot of the humble was generally hard. Yet our overall impression is that in no other part of the [Page 9] ancient world were the relations of man and man, and of man and the state, so fair and humane. In no other early civilization were slaves so few in number, and in no other ancient lawbook are their rights so well protected as in the Arthaśāstra (p. 152f). No other ancient lawgiver proclaimed such noble ideals of fair play in battle as did Manu (p. 126). In all her history of warfare Hindu India has few tales to tell of cities put to the sword or of the massacre of noncombatants. The ghastly sadism of the kings of Assyria, who flayed their captives alive, is completely without parallel in ancient India. There was sporadic cruelty and oppression no doubt, but, in comparison with conditions in other early cultures, it was mild. To us the most striking feature of ancient Indian civilization is its humanity.
A.L. Basham
In an effort to control their populations, both China and India adopted family planning programs in the 1970s. China created a one-child policy, and India turned to policies that included sterilization. In the 1960s and ’70s, population control was embraced in US foreign policy based on predictions that overpopulation would lead to mass famine and starvation and possibly to large-scale migration because of a lack of food. Earlier in the twentieth century, birth control advocates in the United States had also pressed their case, many of them hoping to help the poor avoid having unwanted children. Some of these advocates were eugenicists who wanted to eliminate “the unfit” and urged certain groups to have fewer children, or none at all. Sanger herself supported some eugenicist positions. Eugenics is morally nauseating, as well as discredited by science. Yet this history is being used to confuse the conversation on contraceptives today. Opponents of contraception try to discredit modern contraceptives by bringing up the history of eugenics, arguing that because contraceptives have been used for certain immoral purposes, they should not be used for any purpose, even allowing a mother to wait before having another child.
Melinda French Gates (The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World)
We hear all this talk about integrating the world economically, but there is an argument to be made for not integrating the world economically. Because what is corporate globalization? It isn't as if the entire world is intermeshed with each other. It's not like India and Thailand or India and Korea or India and Turkey are connected. It's more like America is the hub of this huge cultural and economic airline system. It's the nodal point. Everyone has to be connected through America, and to some extent Europe. When powers at the hub of the global economy decide that you have to be X or Y, then if you're part of that network, you have to do it. You don't have the independence of being nonaligned in some way, politically or culturally or economically. If America goes down, then everybody goes down. If tomorrow the United States decides that it wants these call center jobs back, then overnight this billion-dollar industry will collapse in India. It's important for countries to develop a certain degree of economic self-sufficiency. Just in a theoretical sense, it's important for everybody not to have their arms wrapped around each other or their fingers wrapped around each others' throats at all times, in all kinds of ways.
Arundhati Roy (The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile: Conversations with Arundhati Roy)
Yet the homogeneity of contemporary humanity is most apparent when it comes to our view of the natural world and of the human body. If you fell sick a thousand years ago, it mattered a great deal where you lived. In Europe, the resident priest would probably tell you that you had made God angry and that in order to regain your health you should donate something to the church, make a pilgrimage to a sacred site, and pray fervently for God’s forgiveness. Alternatively, the village witch might explain that a demon had possessed you and that she could cast it out using song, dance, and the blood of a black cockerel. In the Middle East, doctors brought up on classical traditions might explain that your four bodily humors were out of balance and that you should harmonize them with a proper diet and foul-smelling potions. In India, Ayurvedic experts would offer their own theories concerning the balance between the three bodily elements known as doshas and recommend a treatment of herbs, massages, and yoga postures. Chinese physicians, Siberian shamans, African witch doctors, Amerindian medicine men—every empire, kingdom, and tribe had its own traditions and experts, each espousing different views about the human body and the nature of sickness, and each offering their own cornucopia of rituals, concoctions, and cures. Some of them worked surprisingly well, whereas others were little short of a death sentence. The only thing that united European, Chinese, African, and American medical practices was that everywhere at least a third of all children died before reaching adulthood, and average life expectancy was far below fifty.14 Today, if you happen to be sick, it makes much less difference where you live. In Toronto, Tokyo, Tehran, or Tel Aviv, you will be taken to similar-looking hospitals, where you will meet doctors in white coats who learned the same scientific theories in the same medical colleges. They will follow identical protocols and use identical tests to reach very similar diagnoses. They will then dispense the same medicines produced by the same international drug companies. There are still some minor cultural differences, but Canadian, Japanese, Iranian, and Israeli physicians hold much the same views about the human body and human diseases. After the Islamic State captured Raqqa and Mosul, it did not tear down the local hospitals. Rather, it launched an appeal to Muslim doctors and nurses throughout the world to volunteer their services there.15 Presumably even Islamist doctors and nurses believe that the body is made of cells, that diseases are caused by pathogens, and that antibiotics kill bacteria.
Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
Indians have made some contribution to science in this century; but - with a few notable exceptions - their work has been done abroad. And this is more than a matter of equipment and facilities. It is a cause of concern to the Indian scientific community - which feels itself vulnerable in India - that many of those men who are so daring and original abroad should, when they are lured back to India, collapse into ordinariness and yet remain content, become people who seem unaware of their former worth, and seem to have been brilliant by accident. They have been claimed by the lesser civilization, the lesser idea of dharma and self-fulfillment. In a civilization reduced to its forms, they no longer have to strive intellectually to gain spiritual merit in their own eyes; that same merit is now to be had by religious right behaviour, correctness. India grieved for the scientist Har Gobind Khorana, who, as an American citizen, won a Nobel Prize in medicine for the United States a few years ago. India invited him back and fêted him; but what was most important about him was ignored. 'We could do everything for Khorana,' one of India's best journalists said, 'except do him the honour of discussing his work.' The work, the labour, the assessment of labour: it was expected that somehow that would occur elsewhere, outside India.
V.S. Naipaul (India: A Wounded Civilization)
These developments led to the eventual fall of the Qing Dynasty, the resignation of the Japanese government, and the continued control of India by the British. Especially in Japan and China, it also led to the realization that they needed to modernize, which prompted the Meiji Restoration (in Japan) and the Self-Strengthening Movement (in China). This move was very successful in Japan and not successful in China, which continued to suffer in what the Chinese call the Century of Humiliation. Second Industrial Revolution (1850s–early 1900s) Beginning in the mid-1800s, a second big wave of innovation took place, centered at first around steam-powered locomotion (e.g., railroads) and then electricity, telephones, interchangeable manufacturing parts, and other innovations at the turn of the 20th century. Whereas the First Industrial Revolution was centered on the UK, the Second Industrial Revolution primarily benefited the United States. As is typical, this period produced both great wealth and great wealth gaps and excesses in the capital markets, leading to an era known as the Gilded Age in the US. Invention of Communism (1848) The invention and development of communism in the mid-1800s came as a reaction against both capitalism and the wealth gaps it created and the benefits of the Industrial Revolutions going more to the owners of the new technologies than to the workers.
Ray Dalio (Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail)
Page 141: Group Polarization Patterns Political anger and demands for privileges are, of course, not limited to the less privileged. Indeed, even when demands are made in the name of less privileged racial or ethnic groups, often it is the more privileged members of such groups who make the demands and who benefit from policies designed to meet such demands. These demands may erupt suddenly in the wake of the creation (or sharp enlargement) of a newly educated class which sees its path to coveted middle-class professions blocked by competition of other groups--as in India, French Canada, or Lithuania, for example. * * * A rapid expansion of education is thus a factor in producing inter-group conflict, especially where the education is of a kind which produces diplomas rather than skills that have significant economic value in the marketplace. Education of a sort useful only for being a clerk, bureaucrat, school teacher--jobs whose numbers are relatively fixed in the short run and politically determined in the long run--tend to increase politicized inter-group strife. Yet newly emerging groups, whether in their own countries or abroad, tend to specialize precisely in such undemanding fields. Malay students, for example, have tended to specialize in Malay studies and Islamic studies, which provide them with no skills with which compete with the Chinese in the marketplace, either as businessmen, independent professionals, or technicians. Blacks and Hispanics in the United States follow a very similar pattern of specializing disproportionately in easier fields which offer less in the way of marketable skills. Such groups then have little choice but to turn to the government, not just for jobs but also for group preferences to be imposed in the market place, and for symbolic recognition in various forms. *** While economic interests are sometimes significant in explaining political decisions, they are by no means universally valid explanations. Educated elites from less advanced groups may have ample economic incentives to promote polarization and preferential treatment policies, but the real question is why the uneducated masses from such groups give them the political support without which they would be impotent. Indeed, it is often the less educated masses who unleash the mob violence from which their elite compatriots ultimately benefit--as in Malaysia, Sri Lanka, or parts of India, Africa, or the United States, where such violence has led to group preference policies in employment, educational institutions, and elsewhere. The common denominator in these highly disparate societies seems to be not only resentment of other groups' success but also fear of an inability to compete with them, combined with a painful embarrassment at being so visibly "under-represented"--or missing entirely—in prestigious occupations and institutions. To remedy this within apolitically relevant time horizon requires not simply increased opportunities but earmarked benefits directly given on a racial or ethnic basis.
Thomas Sowell (Race And Culture: A World View)
Antislavery insurgencies gravely threatened racial capitalism and forced the hand of Southern politicians. Southern elites viewed the preservation of slavery and the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act to be nonnegotiable. The leading white women of Broward’s Neck, Florida, informed the Jacksonville Standard shortly after the election of 1858, “In our humble opinion the single issue is now presented to the Southern people, will they submit to all the degradation threatened by the North toward our slave property and be made to what England has made white people experience in the West India Islands—the negroes afforded a place on the same footing with their former owners, to be made legislators, to sit as Judges.” In the spring of 1860, Democrats in Jacksonville stated that regardless of who was nominated to run for president, “The amplest protection and security to slave property in the territories owned by the General Government” and “the surrender [of] fugitive slaves when legally demanded” were vital to Florida’s interests. If these terms were not met, they asserted, “then we are of the opinion that the rights of the citizens of Florida are no longer safe in the Union, and we think that she should raise the banner of secession and invite her Southern sisters to join her.”47 The following year, John C. McGehee, the president of the Florida Secession Convention, gave the most concise reason why the majority of his colleagues supported secession: “At the South, and with our People of course, slavery is the element of all value, and a destruction of that destroys all that is property.
Paul Ortiz (An African American and Latinx History of the United States (ReVisioning History Book 4))
With China and Russia, the ideological contrast is clearer. Putin, the commandant of a petro-state that also happens to be, given its geography, one of the few nations on Earth likely to benefit from continued warming, sees basically no benefit to constraining carbon emissions or greening the economy—Russia’s or the world’s. Xi, now the leader-for-life of the planet’s rising superpower, seems to feel mutual obligations to the country’s growing prosperity and to the health and security of its people—of whom, it’s worth remembering, it has so many. In the wake of Trump, China has become a much more emphatic—or at least louder—green energy leader. But the incentives do not necessarily suggest it will make good on that rhetoric. In 2018, an illuminating study was published comparing how much a country was likely to be burdened by the economic impacts of climate change to its responsibility for global warming, measured by carbon emissions. The fate of India showcased the moral logic of climate change at its most grotesque: expected to be, by far, the world’s most hard-hit country, shouldering nearly twice as much of the burden as the next nation, India’s share of climate burden was four times as high as its share of climate guilt. China is in the opposite situation, its share of guilt four times as high as its share of the burden. Which, unfortunately, means it may be tempted to slow-walk its green energy revolution. The United States, the study found, presented a case of eerie karmic balance: its expected climate damages matching almost precisely its share of global carbon emissions. Not to say either share is small; in fact, of all the nations in the world, the U.S. was predicted to be hit second hardest.
David Wallace-Wells (The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming)
In a 2013 speech, President Barack Obama laid out three rules for deciding whether to launch a drone strike against a specific target. The starting point was the national security, geopolitical, and civilian-safety objectives the president hoped to achieve. Three simple rules translated these broad goals into more concrete guidelines: Does the target pose a continuing and imminent threat to the American people? Are there no other governments capable of effectively addressing the threat? Is there near certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured? Only if the answer to all three of these questions was yes would a drone strike be authorized. The American drone program is shrouded in secrecy, and it is unclear exactly how these simple rules have been used within the chain of decision making. By virtue of their simplicity and directness, however, they could provide a useful framework to structure discussions about these very tough decisions. And there is some evidence that they are working. In 2013, the year Obama articulated these simple rules, there was a sharp decline in confirmed civilian casualties by drone strikes. The concreteness of these rules also makes communicating them, both to U.S. citizens and the international community, straightforward. The United States has enjoyed a virtual monopoly on military drones, but that will not last forever. The U.K., China, Israel, and Iran had operational military drones in 2014, while other countries, including India, Pakistan, and Turkey, have advanced development programs. By articulating and adhering to a set of principles governing the use of drones, the United States has an opportunity to shape the international standards that other countries will use to guide their decisions in the future.
Donald Sull (Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World)
NOBEL PRIZE–WINNER, British poet laureate, essayist, novelist, journalist, and short story writer Rudyard Kipling wrote for both children and adults, with many of his stories and poems focusing on British imperialism in India. His works were popular during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, even though many deemed his political views too conservative. Born on December 30, 1865, in Bombay, India, Kipling had a happy early childhood, but in 1871 he and his sister were sent to a boarding house called Lorne Lodge in Southsea, where he spent many disappointing years. He was accepted in 1877 to United Services College in the west of England. In 1882, he returned to his family in India, working as a journalist, associate editor, and correspondent for many publications, including Civil and Military Gazette, a publication in Lahore, Pakistan. He also wrote poetry. He found great success in writing after his 1889 return to England, where he was eventually appointed poet laureate. Some of his most famous writings, including The Jungle Book, Kim, Puck of Pook’s Hill, and Rewards and Fairies, saw publication in the 1890s and 1900s. It was during this period that he married Caroline Balestier, the sister of an American friend and publishing colleague. The couple settled in Vermont, where their two daughters were born. After a quarrel with his brother-in-law and grumblings from his American neighbors about his controversial political views, Kipling and his family returned to England. There, Caroline gave birth to a son in 1896. Tragically, their eldest daughter died in 1899. Later, Kipling’s son perished in battle during World War I. In 1907 Kipling was awarded the Nobel Prize. He died on January 18, 1936, and his ashes are buried in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.
Jonathan Swift (The Adventure Collection: Treasure Island, The Jungle Book, Gulliver's Travels, White Fang, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood (The Heirloom Collection))
CHAPTER 2 GANDHI When something happens, there’s usually a simple explanation. But that simple explanation is almost never the full story. Here’s the simple explanation anyway: Dave had decided to stop talking for a whole day because of something he’d read in a book. See? Very simple, very clear. But it’s not the whole story. So here’s a little more. Dave and a partner had to prepare a report on India—not a long one, just some basic facts. Something about the history, something about the government, something about the land and the industry, something about the Indian people and their culture. Five minutes or less. Dave’s report partner was Lynsey Burgess, and neither one of them was happy about that—there were some boy-girl problems at Laketon Elementary School. But this isn’t the time to tell about that. Even though Dave and Lynsey had to give their report together, they both agreed that they did not want to prepare it together. So they divided the topics in half, and each worked alone. Dave was a good student, and he had found two books about India, and he had checked them out of the library. He hadn’t read both books, not completely—he wasn’t that good a student. But he had read parts of both books. Dave thought the most interesting section in each book was the part about how India became independent, how the country broke away from England to become a free nation—sort of like the United States did. And Dave thought the most interesting person in the story of India’s independence was Mahatma Gandhi. Dave was amazed by Gandhi. This one skinny little man practically pushed the whole British army out of India all by himself. But he didn’t use weapons or violence. He fought with words and ideas. It was an incredible story, all of it true. And in one of the books, Dave read this about Gandhi:
Andrew Clements (No Talking)
If the theory of the balance of power has any applicability at all, it is to the politics of the first period, that pre-industrial, `dynastic` period when nations were kings and politics a sport, when there were many nations of roughly equivalent power, and when nations could and did increase their power largely through clever diplomacy, alliance and military adventures. The theories of this book, and the theory of the power transition in particular, apply to the second period, when the major determinant of national power are population size, political organization, and industrial strength, and when shifts in power through internal development are consequently of great importance. Differential industrialization is the key to understanding the shifts in power in the 19th and 20th centuries, but it was not the key in the years before 1750 or so and it will not always be the key in the future. Period 3 will require new theories. We cannot predict yet what they will be, for we cannon predict what the world will be like after all the nations are industrialized. Indeed, we may not have nations at all. By projecting current trends we can make guessed about the near future, but we cannon see very far ahead. What will the world be like when China and India are two major powers, as it seems likely they will be? (1958 n.n.)... We are all bound by our own culture and our own experience, social scientists no less than other men... Social theories may be adequate for their day, but as time passes, they require revision. One of the most serious criticisms that can be made of the balance of power theory is that it has not been revised. Concepts and hypotheses applicable to the 16th century and to the politics of such units as the Italian city states have been taken and applied, without major revision, to the international politics of the twentieth-century nations such as the United States, England, and the Soviet Union. (p. 307)
A.F.K. Organski (World Politics)
Except then a local high school journalism class decided to investigate the story. Not having attended Columbia Journalism School, the young scribes were unaware of the prohibition on committing journalism that reflects poorly on Third World immigrants. Thanks to the teenagers’ reporting, it was discovered that Reddy had become a multimillionaire by using H-1B visas to bring in slave labor from his native India. Dozens of Indian slaves were working in his buildings and at his restaurant. Apparently, some of those “brainy” high-tech workers America so desperately needs include busboys and janitors. And concubines. The pubescent girls Reddy brought in on H-1B visas were not his nieces: They were his concubines, purchased from their parents in India when they were twelve years old. The sixty-four-year-old Reddy flew the girls to America so he could have sex with them—often several of them at once. (We can only hope this is not why Mark Zuckerberg is so keen on H-1B visas.) The third roommate—the crying girl—had escaped the carbon monoxide poisoning only because she had been at Reddy’s house having sex with him, which, judging by the looks of him, might be worse than death. As soon as a translator other than Reddy was found, she admitted that “the primary purpose for her to enter the U.S. was to continue to have sex with Reddy.” The day her roommates arrived from India, she was forced to watch as the old, balding immigrant had sex with both underage girls at once.3 She also said her dead roommate had been pregnant with Reddy’s child. That could not be confirmed by the court because Reddy had already cremated the girl, in the Hindu tradition—even though her parents were Christian. In all, Reddy had brought seven underage girls to the United States for sex—smuggled in by his brother and sister-in-law, who lied to immigration authorities by posing as the girls’ parents.4 Reddy’s “high-tech” workers were just doing the slavery Americans won’t do. No really—we’ve tried getting American slaves! We’ve advertised for slaves at all the local high schools and didn’t get a single taker. We even posted flyers at the grade schools, asking for prepubescent girls to have sex with Reddy. Nothing. Not even on Craigslist. Reddy’s slaves and concubines were considered “untouchables” in India, treated as “subhuman”—“so low that they are not even considered part of Hinduism’s caste system,” as the Los Angeles Times explained. To put it in layman’s terms, in India they’re considered lower than a Kardashian. According to the Indian American magazine India Currents: “Modern slavery is on display every day in India: children forced to beg, young girls recruited into brothels, and men in debt bondage toiling away in agricultural fields.” More than half of the estimated 20.9 million slaves worldwide live in Asia.5 Thanks to American immigration policies, slavery is making a comeback in the United States! A San Francisco couple “active in the Indian community” bought a slave from a New Delhi recruiter to clean house for them, took away her passport when she arrived, and refused to let her call her family or leave their home.6 In New York, Indian immigrants Varsha and Mahender Sabhnani were convicted in 2006 of bringing in two Indonesian illegal aliens as slaves to be domestics in their Long Island, New York, home.7 In addition to helping reintroduce slavery to America, Reddy sends millions of dollars out of the country in order to build monuments to himself in India. “The more money Reddy made in the States,” the Los Angeles Times chirped, “the more good he seemed to do in his hometown.” That’s great for India, but what is America getting out of this model immigrant? Slavery: Check. Sickening caste system: Check. Purchasing twelve-year-old girls for sex: Check. Draining millions of dollars from the American economy: Check. Smuggling half-dead sex slaves out of his slums in rolled-up carpets right under the nose of the Berkeley police: Priceless.
Ann Coulter (¡Adios, America!: The Left's Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole)
When he had made all the necessary preparations the army began to embark at the approach of the dawn; while according to custom he offered sacrifice to the gods and to the river Hydaspes, as the prophets directed. When he had embarked he poured a libation into the river from the prow of the ship out of a golden goblet, invoking the Acesines as well as the Hydaspes, because he had ascertained that it is the largest of all the rivers which unite with the Hydaspes, and that their confluence was not far off. He also invoked the Indus, into which the Acesines flows after its junction with the Hydaspes. Moreover he poured out libations to his forefather Heracles, to Ammon, and the other gods to whom he was in the habit of sacrificing, and then he ordered the signal for starting seawards to be given with the trumpet. As soon as the signal was given they commenced the voyage in regular order; for directions had been given at what distance apart it was necessary for the baggage vessels to be arranged, as also for the vessels conveying the horses and for the ships of war; so that they might not fall foul of each other by sailing down the channel at random. He did not allow even the fast-sailing ships to get out of rank by outstripping the rest. The noise of the rowing was never equalled on any other occasion, inasmuch as it proceeded from so many ships rowed at the same time; also the shouting of the boatswains giving the time for beginning and stopping the stroke of the oars, and the clamour of the rowers, when keeping time all together with the dashing of the oars, made a noise like a battle-cry. The banks of the river also, being in many places higher than the ships, and collecting the sound into a narrow space, sent back to each other an echo which was very much increased by its very compression. In some parts too the groves of trees on each side of the river helped to swell the sound, both from the solitude and the reverberation of the noise. The horses which were visible on the decks of the transports struck the barbarians who saw them with such surprise that those of them who were present at the starting of the fleet accompanied it a long way from the place of embarkation. For horses had never before been seen on board ships in the country of India; and the natives did not call to mind that the expedition of Dionysus into India was a naval one. The shouting of the rowers and the noise of the rowing were heard by the Indians who had already submitted to Alexander, and these came running down to the river’s bank and accompanied him singing their native songs. For the Indians have been eminently fond of singing and dancing since the time of Dionysus and those who under his bacchic inspiration traversed the land of the Indians with him.
Arrian (The Campaigns of Alexander)
Think about it,” Obama said to us on the flight over. “The Republican Party is the only major party in the world that doesn’t even acknowledge that climate change is happening.” He was leaning over the seats where Susan and I sat. We chuckled. “Even the National Front believes in climate change,” I said, referring to the far-right party in France. “No, think about it,” he said. “That’s where it all began. Once you convince yourself that something like that isn’t true, then…” His voice trailed off, and he walked out of the room. For six years, Obama had been working to build what would become the Paris agreement, piece by piece. Because Congress wouldn’t act, he had to promote clean energy, and regulate fuel efficiency and emissions through executive action. With dozens of other nations, he made climate change an issue in our bilateral relationship, helping design their commitments. At international conferences, U.S. diplomats filled in the details of a framework. Since the breakthrough with China, and throughout 2015, things had been falling into place. When we got to Paris, the main holdout was India. We were scheduled to meet with India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi. Obama and a group of us waited outside the meeting room, when the Indian delegation showed up in advance of Modi. By all accounts, the Indian negotiators had been the most difficult. Obama asked to talk to them, and for the next twenty minutes, he stood in a hallway having an animated argument with two Indian men. I stood off to the side, glancing at my BlackBerry, while he went on about solar power. One guy from our climate team came over to me. “I can’t believe he’s doing this,” he whispered. “These guys are impossible.” “Are you kidding?” I said. “It’s an argument about science. He loves this.” Modi came around the corner with a look of concern on his face, wondering what his negotiators were arguing with Obama about. We moved into the meeting room, and a dynamic became clear. Modi’s team, which represented the institutional perspective of the Indian government, did not want to do what is necessary to reach an agreement. Modi, who had ambitions to be a transformative leader of India, and a person of global stature, was torn. This is one reason why we had done the deal with China; if India was alone, it was going to be hard for Modi to stay out. For nearly an hour, Modi kept underscoring the fact that he had three hundred million people with no electricity, and coal was the cheapest way to grow the Indian economy; he cared about the environment, but he had to worry about a lot of people mired in poverty. Obama went through arguments about a solar initiative we were building, the market shifts that would lower the price of clean energy. But he still hadn’t addressed a lingering sense of unfairness, the fact that nations like the United States had developed with coal, and were now demanding that India avoid doing the same thing. “Look,” Obama finally said, “I get that it’s unfair. I’m African American.” Modi smiled knowingly and looked down at his hands. He looked genuinely pained. “I know what it’s like to be in a system that’s unfair,” he went on. “I know what it’s like to start behind and to be asked to do more, to act like the injustice didn’t happen. But I can’t let that shape my choices, and neither should you.” I’d never heard him talk to another leader in quite that way. Modi seemed to appreciate it. He looked up and nodded.
Ben Rhodes (The World As It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House)
By the time the Dalai Lama came to India, there was regular trouble between the Indians and the Chinese at the borders. General Thimayya, the Indian army chief, asked that the equipment be improved and that troops be sent to the Chinese border. Some units of the army were still fighting with weapons from the First World War! But Nehru and Krishna Menon, who was then the Defence Minister, did not listen.
Sanjeev Sanyal (The Incredible History of India's Geography)
The price that the market sets on the services of our resources is similarly affected by a bewildering mixture of chance and choice. Frank Sinatra’s voice was highly valued in twentieth-century United States. Would it have been highly valued in twentieth-century India, if he had happened to be born and to live there? Skill as a hunter and trapper had a high value in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America, a much lower value in twentieth-century America. Skill as a baseball player brought much higher returns than skill as a basketball player in the 1920s; the reverse is true in the 1970s. These are all matters involving chance and choice—in these examples, mostly the choices made by consumers of services that determine the relative market prices of different items.
Milton Friedman (Free to Choose: A Personal Statement)
The United States and India are profoundly different from each other—in culture, technology, economics, ethnic makeup. And yet, many generations ago, these two great lands paralleled each other, both protected by oceans and ruled for a time by the British, fertile and coveted. Both adopted social hierarchies and abide great chasms between the highest and the lowest in their respective lands. Both were conquered by people said to be Aryans arriving, in one case, from across the Atlantic Ocean, in the other, from the north. Those deemed lowest in each country would serve those deemed high. The younger country, the United States, would become the most powerful democracy on earth. The older country, India, the largest.
Isabel Wilkerson (Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents)
When the proximate community is dysfunctional, alienated individuals need some other way to channel their need to belong.4 Populist nationalism offers one such appealing vision of a larger purposeful imagined community—whether it is white majoritarianism in Europe and the United States, the Islamic Turkish nationalism of Turkey’s Justice and Development Party, or the Hindu nationalism of India’s Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.
Raghuram G. Rajan (The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind)
…it also emphasizes the danger of the improper sequencing of different elements of political development: too much rule of law too soon can strain the development of an effective state, as happened in India; electoral democracy introduced in the absence of an autonomous bureaucracy can lead to clientelism and pervasive corruption, as happened in Greece. Even the societies in which a proper balance of democracy, rule of law, and an effective state has been struck in the past are susceptible to political decay when rent-seeking extractive elite coalitions capture the state, as has happened in the United States.
Wesley Yang (The Souls of Yellow Folk: Essays)
For example, in 1602 when the United Dutch Chartered East India Company (Dutch East India Company, for short) became the first company to issue stock,1 the shares were extremely illiquid. When first issued, no stock market even existed, and purchasers were expected to hold on to the shares for 21 years, the length of time granted to the company by the Netherlands’ charter over trade in Asia. However, some investors wanted to sell their shares, perhaps to pay down debts, and so an informal market for the stock (the very first stock market) developed in the Amsterdam East India House. As more joint-stock equity companies were founded, this informal location grew, and was later formalized as the Amsterdam Stock Exchange, the oldest “modern” securities exchange in the world.2 Despite the structure of the shares of the Dutch East India Company not changing much, their market liquidity and trading volumes changed considerably.
Chris Burniske (Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond)
And he said to himself, “Yes, I am an untouchable, and every Negro in the United States of America is an untouchable.” In that moment, he realized that the Land of the Free had imposed a caste system not unlike the caste system of India and that he had lived under that system all of his
Isabel Wilkerson (Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents)
He was viscerally opposed to the Bengalis. I find such sentiments even today. It is incongruous to consider someone you want as an equal partner, at least in theory if not in practice, to fall in line and function as a second class citizen. When I asked him how he expected the majority of the population to accept the rule of the minority, he said some things were ordainded to be and that it was the fate of inferiors to be subservient to the superiors. It was clear that Col. Mujeeb was racially motivated. With such views prevailing even among the intelligentsia, how could one hope for the two Wings to remain united. It was clear that my Pakistan was dead.
Ikram Sehgal (Escape from Oblivion: The Story of a Pakistani Prisoner of War in India)
percent return, but international stocks returned 187 percent. The very fact that the returns differentials could be this large between U.S. and international stocks shows that you don’t get enough international exposure by just buying U.S. stocks. Faulty argument #2: One should overweight international stocks, because most of the world’s economic growth will come from overseas. I certainly agree with this argument, but that does not translate into international stocks outpacing U.S. stocks. That’s because it’s not exactly a secret that countries like China and India are growing faster than the United States, and this knowledge is already priced into the market. This is the same phenomenon as Google being priced at much higher multiples than Ford, because we know Google has better economic prospects. Remember that beaten-up value stocks tend to make better investments than the star growth stocks. The same may be true in that the fastest-
Allan S. Roth (How a Second Grader Beats Wall Street: Golden Rules Any Investor Can Learn)
Colonial Policy and Practice: A Comparative Study of Burma and Netherlands India by J. S. Furnivall Page 178-179: It was not only unnecessary but imprudent to recruit Burmese [during the time Burma was part of the British Empire]. There could be little reliance on troops raised from among a people with no divisions of caste but united in religion, race and national sentiment … Obviously security required that the Burmese should be disarmed and debarred from military service. The Karens and other minor tribes, however, might be expected to side with the British, and these have been recruited, even when an initial reluctance had to be dispelled, but it has always been easy to find reasons for withholding military training, even as volunteer cadets, from the great mass of the people.
J. S. Furnivall
By 500 BCE, we start getting clear evidence of established states or political units. These were referred to as the Mahajanapadas. We find their reference in Panini’s Ashtadhyayi and in many Jain and Buddhist scriptures. There were sixteen such Mahajanapadas, mostly in north, north-west and eastern parts of the Indian subcontinent.
Vijender Sharma (Essays on Indic History (Lesser Known History of India Book 1))
member from the United Provinces, Begum Aizaz Rasul,
Ramachandra Guha (India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy)
In 2018, there were 867 cars for every thousand people in the United States, 520 in the European Union. Compare that to the 339 in Russia, the 208 in Brazil, the 160 in China—and just 37 in India. In other words, the world’s auto population will grow substantially as incomes rise and the number of people increases from today’s 7.8 billion to 9.5 or 10 billion.
Daniel Yergin (The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations)
In 2018, there were 867 cars for every thousand people in the United States, 520 in the European Union. Compare that to the 339 in Russia, the 208 in Brazil, the 160 in China—and just 37 in India. In other words, the world’s auto population will grow substantially as incomes rise and the number of people increases from today’s 7.8 billion to 9.5 or 10 billion. In “Rivalry,” IHS Markit’s planning scenario, the world’s auto fleet grows from its current level of just over 1.4 billion to over 2 billion by 2050. Of that 2 billion, about 610 million are electric vehicles—almost a third of the total. The fleet simply does not turn over quickly. Annual new-car sales represent only about 6–7 percent of the total fleet. Most of the fleet is composed of vehicles that have been purchased over the preceding dozen years—in the United States, cars on average remain on the road for 11.8 years. But EVs catch up. By 2050, in this scenario, some 51 percent of total new car sales are EVs.
Daniel Yergin (The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations)
Somehow, I was doubtful. It wasn’t Singh’s fault. He had done his part, following the playbook of liberal democracies across the post–Cold War world: upholding the constitutional order; attending to the quotidian, often technical work of boosting the GDP; and expanding the social safety net. Like me, he had come to believe that this was all any of us could expect from democracy, especially in big, multiethnic, multireligious societies like India and the United States. Not revolutionary leaps or major cultural overhauls; not a fix for every social pathology or lasting answers for those in search of purpose and meaning in their lives. Just the observance of rules that allowed us to sort out or at least tolerate our differences, and government policies that raised living standards and improved education enough to temper humanity’s baser impulses. Except now I found myself asking whether those impulses—of violence, greed, corruption, nationalism, racism, and religious intolerance, the all-too-human desire to beat back our own uncertainty and mortality and sense of insignificance by subordinating others—were too strong for any democracy to permanently contain. For they seemed to lie in wait everywhere, ready to resurface whenever growth rates stalled or demographics changed or a charismatic leader chose to ride the wave of people’s fears and resentments. And as much as I might have wished otherwise, there was no Mahatma Gandhi around to tell me what I might do to hold such impulses back.
Barack Obama (A Promised Land)
Today, nine nations have nuclear programs—the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea. Iran threatens, and it is naïve to think a nuclear Iran is impossible.
Bret Baier (Three Days in Moscow: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of the Soviet Empire (Three Days Series))
Zen has its origin in India and was introduced to China where it united with the thought of Lao-tsu and the realistically oriented world outlook of the Chinese, stressing as it does the value of human labor. Zen further developed by incorporating the Confucian emphasis on etiquette and culture, reaching its zenith in the period from the Tang through the Sung dynasty (618–1279). It was transmitted to Japan in the Kamakura period (1185–1336) where it not only contributed to the disciplining of the spirit of the emotionally prone Japanese people but also deeply influenced the military and fine arts as well as daily life in general.
Koji Sato (The Zen Life)
Starting in the sixth century in China, Zen was formed by way of a creative synthesis of Buddhist teachings and practices imported from India with the Chinese traditions of Confucianism and especially Daoism. Centuries later, starting in the twelfth century, Zen was brought to Japan, where for eight centuries it has developed in conjunction with Japanese culture and Shintō sensibilities. Over the course of the last century, Zen has been imported to the United States and other Western countries, initially from Japan and later also from Korea, China, and Vietnam.
Bret W. Davis (Zen Pathways: An Introduction to the Philosophy and Practice of Zen Buddhism)
Fasal is an online system that connects farmers in rural India directly with market agents and other buyers. Via Fasal, farmers can quickly learn the price of goods at a number of nearby markets, choose the sales location most advantageous to them, and use the data to negotiate a better deal, a challenge that exists around the world.2 Sangeet Choudary, one of the authors of this book, led the commercialization and launch of the Fasal initiative. One of the challenges facing Choudary and his team was figuring out what kind of communications infrastructure they could use to enable producers and consumers to share value units. They realized that the big advantage working in their favor was cell phones. More than half of Indian farmers, even the poorest, own and use cell phones. In fact, as in much of the developing world, cell phone use in rural India has spread rapidly. Cellular telephony, with its instant communications capability, became the conduit for the market data the small farmers so desperately needed.
Geoffrey G. Parker (Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy and How to Make Them Work for You)
Poonam, 54, is a senior United Nations official. She joined the elite Indian Administrative Service as a 23-year-old. ‘ No, no, I am not afraid. I think I wanted to be thought of  as a nice person . . . not someone with a bichhoo [ scorpion ] in her mouth that comes out suddenly, so I didn’t speak up. Like you know that aggressive Punjabi woman, I didn’t want that to happen. I think it was all these  things  –  what will so-and-so think, how they won’t see it from my point of view and thinking that the  whole  relationship  will fail. So many fears, imagined or real, who knows . . .    I just want to please, please, please. I have never been able  to communicate or talk openly and clearly with people who matter to me, who I love, my family and friends, about what I want. I would get small small ideas from outside like keep your own account – but I was so scared to say it. Even today. Slowly I am changing with little little things. What TV show to watch, what food to eat.
Deepa Narayan (Chup: Breaking the Silence About India’s Women)
There was an astounding variety to go through. He had seen a fat one addressed to Paris—the envelope sealed with a Christmas tree sticker. A card to the Czech Republic. And one to India. Another of Morley's. A small red envelope going to England. A lot to the United States. A lot more for Canada. Another of Morley's. And a second, in a child's printing, addressed to the North Pole. It was affecting. All of them presumably said the same thing. The one thing that is so hard to say in person, but that everyone says at the bottom of a card: love. Love, me. Love, you. Love, Dave. Love, Stuart.
Stuart McLean (Christmas at the Vinyl Cafe)
There are a few large and successful firms in most industries. 2. These successful companies are becoming even more successful. 3. Weak companies are getting weaker. Numbers 1 and 2 are direct conclusions of the research, and number 3 is an indirect but logical outcome of 1 and 2. As I wrote earlier, our investing experience in India is not different from what research from the United States, the United Kingdom, or Europe says. Our investee companies have been gaining share over the competition over decades. Some examples are Berger in the paint industry, Supreme in plastic pipes, Voltamp in industrial transformers, Page in innerwear, Havells and V-Guard in consumer electricals, Amara Raja in batteries, Info Edge in job boards, MRF in tires, and Ratnamani in specialty steel pipes. In India, too, great businesses continue to be great, and poor businesses continue to suffer. The observation that “stasis is the default” does not respect national boundaries.
Pulak Prasad (What I Learned About Investing from Darwin)
India would understand. For two decades he had worked at becoming the man who could make Sir Michael pay for Jallianwala Bagh, however, in the process, he believed he had become so much more. It was no longer enough to settle his own score; he now had to unite his people in a full-blown revolution. Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs would come together behind his act. He would avenge the dead. He would inspire the living.
Anita Anand (The Patient Assassin: A True Tale of Massacre, Revenge, and India's Quest for Independence)
At the age of five, she was forced to flee an area of the world that is now Pakistan. It was during the time of the bloody Indian subcontinent partition. Along with her family, my mother joined one of the largest human migrations in history. After arriving in India, she lived as a refugee for the next several years, struggling to survive. People in those refugee camps didn’t have the luxury of hopes, dreams, and aspirations. Yet her mother (my grandmother), Gopibai Hingorani, a woman who had completed only the fourth grade, told her she was going to make sure her daughter received something that no one could ever take away from her: an education. It still gives me shivers to imagine a young girl trapped in a camp being told she would one day become someone who mattered. By keeping her promise, my grandmother initially gave my mother her sense of purpose. My mom completed engineering college in India and made history as the first female engineer there. It was just the beginning of her life in a male-dominated space. After reading a biography of Henry Ford, she dreamed of working for the company that he’d built. Again, my grandparents came through. They took their savings of a lifetime to send my mom to the United States in 1965. At age twenty-four, she became the first woman hired as an engineer at Ford Motor Company. My parents are now retired in Florida, but they stay active, playing a lot of bridge, singing karaoke, and traveling. My mother spends a lot of time with her five granddaughters, teaching them the value of a life lived with purpose.
Sanjay Gupta (Keep Sharp: Build a Better Brain at Any Age)
I nodded, recalling the conversation I’d had with Václav Havel during my visit to Prague and his warning about the rising tide of illiberalism in Europe. If globalization and a historic economic crisis were fueling these trends in relatively wealthy nations—if I was seeing it even in the United States with the Tea Party—how could India be immune? For the truth was that despite the resilience of its democracy and its impressive recent economic performance, India still bore little resemblance to the egalitarian, peaceful, and sustainable society Gandhi had envisioned. Across the country, millions continued to live in squalor, trapped in sunbaked villages or labyrinthine slums, even as the titans of Indian industry enjoyed lifestyles that the rajas and moguls of old would have envied. Violence, both public and private, remained an all-too-pervasive part of Indian life. Expressing hostility toward Pakistan was still the quickest route to national unity, with many Indians taking great pride in the knowledge that their country had developed a nuclear weapons program to match Pakistan’s, untroubled by the fact that a single miscalculation by either side could risk regional annihilation.
Barack Obama (A Promised Land)
Somehow, I was doubtful. It wasn’t Singh’s fault. He had done his part, following the playbook of liberal democracies across the post–Cold War world: upholding the constitutional order; attending to the quotidian, often technical work of boosting the GDP; and expanding the social safety net. Like me, he had come to believe that this was all any of us could expect from democracy, especially in big, multiethnic, multireligious societies like India and the United States. Not revolutionary leaps or major cultural overhauls; not a fix for every social pathology or lasting answers for those in search of purpose and meaning in their lives. Just the observance of rules that allowed us to sort out or at least tolerate our differences, and government policies that raised living standards and improved education enough to temper humanity’s baser impulses.
Barack Obama (A Promised Land)
In the meantime, we would wreck the US economy and actually do little to clean up the environment. The proposal calls for covering hundreds of thousands of acres of land with windmills and solar panels, which would do irreparable damage to land on which wildlife is protected by federal statutes. It also addresses only the United States’ carbon emissions and gives countries like China and India a pass for a decade. I’m no scientist, but I’m pretty sure we can’t keep China’s dirty air from sneaking into the atmosphere over the United States. I am pretty good at economics, though, and economists have a term for that type of thinking: freaking stupid. AOC once said that people her age should reconsider having children because of global warming. Can you imagine? I think the best answer to that ridiculous statement was by my friend, Jerry Falwell, Jr., “People her age should reconsider having children if people like AOC ever get to be in charge of this country.
Donald Trump Jr. (Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us)
In uncertain times, Mr. President,” the prime minister said, “the call of religious and ethnic solidarity can be intoxicating. And it’s not so hard for politicians to exploit that, in India or anywhere else.” I nodded, recalling the conversation I’d had with Václav Havel during my visit to Prague and his warning about the rising tide of illiberalism in Europe. If globalization and a historic economic crisis were fueling these trends in relatively wealthy nations—if I was seeing it even in the United States with the Tea Party—how could India be immune? For the truth was that despite the resilience of its democracy and its impressive recent economic performance, India still bore little resemblance to the egalitarian, peaceful, and sustainable society Gandhi had envisioned. Across the country, millions continued to live in squalor, trapped in sunbaked villages or labyrinthine slums, even as the titans of Indian industry enjoyed lifestyles that the rajas and moguls of old would have envied. Violence, both public and private, remained an all-too-pervasive part of Indian life. Expressing hostility toward Pakistan was still the quickest route to national unity, with many Indians taking great pride in the knowledge that their country “had developed a nuclear weapons program to match Pakistan’s, untroubled by the fact that a single miscalculation by either side could risk regional annihilation.
Barack Obama (A Promised Land)
Western nations originally conceived the World Health Organization and the United Nations to embody liberal ideologies implemented via a democratic structure of one nation, one vote,” India’s leading human rights activist, Dr. Vandana Shiva, told me. “Gates has single-handedly destroyed all that. He has hijacked the WHO and transformed it into an instrument of personal power that he wields for the cynical purpose of increasing pharmaceutical profits.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
He visited several towns in the United Provinces, before moving on to the Punjab. Then he moved south, where, in the first week of April, the AICC met at Vijayawada. In attendance was an Andhra Congressman named P. Venkayya, who for several years had been pressing Gandhi to adopt a ‘national’ flag for the nation-in-the-making. This time too Venkayya made the same proposal, but in the design he offered, Gandhi ‘saw nothing to stir the nation to its depths’. Then Lala Hansraj of Jullundur suggested that the spinning wheel should find a place on the Swaraj Flag. Gandhi was struck by the suggestion, and asked Venkayya to give him a design containing a spinning wheel on a background of saffron (denoting Hindu) and green (denoting Muslim). The enthusiastic Venkayya produced a design in three hours. Gandhi looked at it, and realized that a colour was also needed for the other religions of India. He suggested white be added to the saffron and the green. For, ‘Hindu-Muslim unity is not an exclusive term; it is an inclusive term, symbolic of the unity of all faiths domiciled in India. If Hindus and Muslims can tolerate each other, they are bound to tolerate all other faiths.’ Gandhi further suggested the order in which the colours should be placed: white first, next green, finally saffron, in progressive order of numerical importance, ‘the idea being that the strongest should act as a shield to the weakest’. Eventually, the white was placed in the middle, between the saffron and the green, the two major religions symbolically surrounding and protecting the others.
Ramachandra Guha (Gandhi 1915-1948: The Years That Changed the World)
Travelling through eastern and central India, Gandhi found the purdah system far more prevalent than in other parts of the country. In western and southern india, women were attending schools and colleges and even participating in public life. The Tamil women he knew in South Africa had raised money for his struggle and even courted arrest. But in Bihar and the United Provinces the situation was altogether different. The women who attended his meetings were dressed in purdah, and sat behind a screen segregating them from the rest of the crowd. In an article for Young India, Gandhi wrote of how the treatment of women had ‘pained and humiliated’ him. ‘Why do not our women enjoy the same freedom we do?’ he asked. ‘Why should they not be able to walk out and have fresh air?’ Purdah was a ‘barbarous custom which, whatever use it might have had when it was first introduced, had now become totally useless and [was]doing incalculable harm to the country
Ramachandra Guha (Gandhi 1915-1948: The Years That Changed the World)
To see the power of kinship, consider that pushing down cousin marriage prevalence from 40 percent to zero is associated with an increase of 40 points on individualism (going from India to the United States, say). Notice that in Figure 6.4A, countries high on KII are always low on individualism, but those low on KII span the full range of individualism. Many of the countries that have both low KII and low individualism are in Latin America. This suggests that breaking down intensive kinship opens the door to developing the full individualism complex, but that other institutions—and perhaps other factors—are necessary to really drive up individualism.
Joseph Henrich (The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous)
As Kashmir remains occupied by India, Palestine by Israel, Arab states by their dictators, and Pakistan by its armed institutions, similarly, superpowers continue to control others' trade, democracy, and foreign policy around the world. Independence and the freedom of the states and people are still a dream and a question in the presence of the United Nations Charter.
Ehsan Sehgal
In well regulated armies it is not the statutory function of superior commanders to order the moves of units, or to evict junior commanders from their HQs. A formation is given a task, and the formation commander executes it. If he fails, he should be removed.
J.P. Dalvi (Himalayan Blunder: The Angry Truth About India's Most Crushing Military Disaster)
It’s being made out that the whole point of the war was to topple the Taliban regime and liberate Afghan women from their burqas. We’re being asked to believe that the US marines are actually on a feminist mission. (If so, will their next stop be America’s military ally Saudi Arabia?) Think of it this way: in India there are some pretty reprehensible social practices, against ‘Untouchables’, against Christians and Muslims, against women. Pakistan and Bangladesh have even worse ways of dealing with minority communities and women. Should they be bombed? Should Delhi, Islamabad, and Dhaka be destroyed? Is it possible to bomb bigotry out of India? Can we bomb our way to a feminist paradise? Is that how women won the vote in the United States? Or how slavery was abolished? Can we win redress for the genocide of the millions of Native Americans, upon whose corpses the United States was founded, by bombing Santa Fe?
Arundhati Roy (My Seditious Heart: Collected Non-Fiction)
Why did the military–industrial–scientific complex blossom in Europe rather than India? When Britain leaped forward, why were France, Germany and the United States quick to follow, whereas China lagged behind?
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
Christians, Muslims and Hindus in India…divided by religion, united by caste !
Raghu Venkatesh
One of East Africa's best-kept skincare secrets is Qasil powder. Qasil is a fine powder made from the leaves of the Gob tree, which is endemic to Somalia and is popular among Somali women. This fine powder is loaded with nutrients that help the skin and hair detox. It draws impurities from beneath the skin's surface, aids in the healing of obstinate breakouts, and dramatically reduces the appearance of pores and dark spots when used as a face mask for women. Where to Buy qasil powder? When preparing your own DIY facial mask, this is a must-have ingredient so it deeply cleanses, balances, and purifies the skin. It's also popular for gently exfoliating, hydrating, and leaving the skin soft and supple. Qasil powder skin benefits appearance while also providing a natural glow. INGREDIENTS THAT CAN BE USED TO Form A Disguise WITH QASIL Turmeric powder can aid in the healing of acne and the fading of dark spots ( for oily skin ) Sandalwood Powder is used to give the skin a healthy glow. Huda organics – to promote overall skin health, combat early indications of ageing, and work wonders on fine wrinkles. Rose water is used to tone the skin and aid in the deep washing process. Honey is used to rejuvenate the skin. The use of a face mask skin care is one of the most important processes that many women overlook or misunderstand. Some women are unable to choose the appropriate product for their skin type, while others are unaware of new products that can improve their skincare routine. So, if you're not sure what the best face masks for women in India are, or which skin types they suit, here's a list of items to help you make smarter grooming decisions in the future. Throughout the classical era, herbal medicine and its active constituents have been a trusted source of medicine. As in treatment of symptoms, herbal supplements including plant based remedies in raw state or their bioactive substances are gaining popularity [1]. Plants are abundant in medicinal chemicals, and practically every part of a plant can be used as medicine in some fashion. Flowers, fruits, seeds, roots, leaves, bark, and other parts seem to be the most widely used. Due to the rise in disease kinds, resilience to existing drugs, and need for drugs with fewer complications, there has been a push to use mainstream science / concepts to find the greatest source of medicine. So you should buy organic qasil powder from Huda Organics, which is located in the United Kingdom, ST Westend, London, WC2H 9JQ. You can reach us at 7566209608 or via email at info@hudaorganics.com.
Huda
Both exiled their indigenous peoples—the Adivasi in India, the Native Americans in the United States—to remote lands and to the unseen margins of society. Both countries enacted a fretwork of laws to chain the lowliest group—Dalits in India and African-Americans in the United States—to the bottom, using terror and force to keep them there.
Isabel Wilkerson (Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents)
absolute numbers were highest in India (18.5 million deaths) and China (between 4.0 and 9.5 million), but death rates varied widely from place to place. Close to half (44.5 percent) of the population of Cameroon was wiped out; in Western Samoa, nearly a quarter (23.6 percent). In Kenya and Fiji, more than 5 percent of the people died. The other sub-Saharan countries for which we have data suffered mortality of between 2.4 percent (Nigeria) and 4.4 percent (South Africa). In Central America, mortality was also high: 3.9 percent of the population of Guatemala, 2 percent of all Mexicans. Indonesia also had a high death rate (3 percent). The worst mortality rates in Europe were in Hungary and Spain (each around 1.2 percent), with Italy not far behind. By contrast, North America got off lightly: between 0.53 and 0.65 percent for the United States, 0.61 percent for Canada.
Niall Ferguson (Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe)
Swiss citizens in general used about 5,000 watts. This was compared to 6,000 in the rest of western Europe. Chinese citizens about 1,500. 1,000 in India. 12,000 in the United States. His country, the great whale in this as in everything, slurping down the world.
Kim Stanley Robinson (The Ministry for the Future)
The main idea of the Bahá’í faith is that we are all connected. There is no us or them. Bahá’í teachings revere Jesus Christ and the Prophet Muhammad, believing that all major religions come from one spiritual source. The community started in the mid-1800s in Iran, and it has spread just about everywhere. There are 150,000 adherents in the United States. The largest community is in India. But there are no ministers, no clerical leaders to run things. So how do they make decisions?
Amanda Ripley (High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out)
Wanna learn about modern United States - don't study me, study MLK. Wanna learn about modern Latin America - don't study me, study José Martí. Wanna learn about modern India - don't study me, study Narendranath Datta. But if you wanna learn about modern humankind, beyond borders and cultures - then you may grab my hand - not so I could give you knowledge or comfort, but so I could set you on fire.
Abhijit Naskar (Dervish Advaitam: Gospel of Sacred Feminines and Holy Fathers)
When the researchers asked adults in the United States, Canada, and India whether life is long or short, and whether it’s easy or hard, the North Americans were no more sanguine than the Indians despite their statistical advantages in life expectancy and income.
John Tierney (The Power of Bad: How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It)
We are still slaves, facing colonialists and their pawns, direct or indirect, in the package of so-called democracies. - The world is such a train that has engines at both ends, the USA drives the front side while Russia operates the backside, and Western Europe performs as a ticket collector of that endless journey towards the mirage; all other states are passengers of that - The so-called Wars on terror, whether in Iraq, Afghanistan, or such other victimized Muslim States by the USA, West, Russia, Israel, and pawn leaders of the Muslim world, were for oligopoly, duopoly interests to monopolize and that resulted in thousands of deaths. The oppressor Arab leaders supported the destruction of Iraq, Libya, Yemen with all national resources, and Pakistan criminally favoured and fought in Afghanistan against those that its institutions created to defeat the former Soviet Union to obey and fulfil the desire of the USA; whereas, India benefited and achieved evil goals from legalized terror with the approval of the United Nations. The conclusion of those wars is that; India and Pakistan fooled the USA and West Europe for dollars, and the USA lied to its people, and Russia enjoyed the tragedies and consequences of the unnecessary wars; sure, history will never justify that and forgive criminals and such warmongers.
Ehsan Sehgal
The so-called Wars on terror, whether in Iraq, Afghanistan, or such other victimized Muslim States by the USA, West, Russia, Israel, and pawn leaders of the Muslim world, were for oligopoly, duopoly interests to monopolize and that resulted in thousands of deaths. The oppressor Arab leaders supported the destruction of Iraq, Libya, Yemen with all national resources, and Pakistan criminally favoured and fought in Afghanistan against those that its institutions created to defeat the former Soviet Union to obey and fulfil the desire of the USA; whereas, India benefited and achieved evil goals from legalized terror with the approval of the United Nations. The conclusion of those wars is that; India and Pakistan fooled the USA and West Europe for dollars, and the USA lied to its people, and Russia enjoyed the tragedies and consequences of the unnecessary wars; sure, history will never justify that and forgive criminals and such warmongers.
Ehsan Sehgal
No Muslim leader is known to have explicitly accepted the prospect of a purely democratic polity in a united India without any special privileges for the Muslims.
Koenraad Elst (Why I Killed the Mahatma: Understanding Godse's Defence)
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.
virender
Today I learned that our home is basically a cell unit. The walls are nothing but membranes. For you, I'm the nucleus. And Maa, you're the powerhouse of this beautiful cell we reside in. You're my mitochondria.
Shalaka Kulkarni (Orenda - flash fiction based in modern India)
Anand was on tour in a distant village when the shattering news of the Chinese invasion was announced. Within hours, there was an astonishing metamorphosis in the prevailing atmosphere. Except for the lone troubled voice that came from the radio, there was a numbed silence all around. Every citizen was in the grip of an indescribable mixture of anger, anguish, a sense of disappointment, and above all, a feeling of unity with every other Indian. Just when Anand was about to leave, a lad of about ten came forward. He put his hand in his shirt pocket and produced a twenty-five paise coin. He held it out tentatively and stammered, "This is my contribution to defeat China..." Anand accepted the coin and hugged the boy. He controlled his emotion with some difficulty. The gesture electrified the atmosphere. For the first time faces brightened somewhat. "Why not raise a fund in the village?", said the Sarpanch. "Yes!" interjected the villagers. "We must give and give and give until it hurts! Each a little more than he can afford to." God! Does this country need the threat of external aggression to unite it internally? wondered Anand, as his car turned into the highway.
P.V. Narasimha Rao (The insider)
Is Spain task-based or relationship-based? If you are like most people, you would answer that Spain is relationship-based. But this answer is subtly, yet crucially, wrong. The correct answer is that, if you come from France, the United Kingdom, Sweden, the United States, or any other culture that falls to the left of Spain on the scale, then Spain is relationship-based in comparison to your own culture. However, if you come from India, Saudi Arabia, Angola, or China, then Spain is very task-based indeed—again, in comparison to your own culture.
Erin Meyer (The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business)
In the United States and other Anglo-Saxon cultures, people are trained (mostly subconsciously) to communicate as literally and explicitly as possible. Good communication is all about clarity and explicitness, and accountability for accurate transmission of the message is placed firmly on the communicator: “If you don’t understand, it’s my fault.” By contrast, in many Asian cultures, including India, China, Japan, and Indonesia, messages are often conveyed implicitly, requiring the listener to read between the lines. Good communication is subtle, layered, and may depend on copious subtext, with responsibility for transmission of the message shared between the one sending the message and the one receiving it. The same applies to many African cultures, including those found in Kenya and Zimbabwe, and to a lesser degree Latin American cultures (such as Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina) and Latin European cultures (such as Spain, Italy, Portugal) including France.
Erin Meyer (The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business)
Women as mothers have been defined through their relationship with men and not as individuals who could head the family unit or could be the providers and carers, at the same time while nurturing their children without being dependent on men. This narrow construction of motherhood ignores the fact that merely through their existence, female-headed households, for ages, have been demolishing these regressive ideas.
Shalu Nigam (Single Mothers, Patriarchy and Citizenship in India: Rethinking Lone Motherhood through the Lens of Socio-legal and Policy Framework)
Consider the strategy of any typical early chartered corporation. In 1602, the Dutch Crown sanctioned the United East India Company to conquer territory and exploit resources in the Pacific. The Company’s scheme was to acquire lands in Indonesia by lending money to cultivators and then dispossessing them when they failed to make payments. This was made easier by trade policies that guaranteed the farmers’ failure. The Company got the Dutch to prohibit cultivation of the most profitable export crops—like cloves—on land not already under Dutch ownership. Loans failed, and more collateral in the form of land passed into Company hands. Indonesians lost access to the most fertile land, and were ultimately forced to buy their rice from United East India at the artificially inflated, monopoly-supported prices. The local economy was devastated as more land and labor were surrendered to the corporation. As
Douglas Rushkoff (Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back)
As of 2023, there are five nations known to have a full “triad” of nuclear weapons (intercontinental ballistic missiles, air-delivery bombs, and submarine-launched ballistic missiles): the United States (5,244 warheads), Russia (5,889), China (410), Pakistan (170), and India (164).[8] Three other nations are known to have a more limited form of delivery system: France (290), the United Kingdom (225), and North Korea (around 30).
Ray Kurzweil (The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI)
Kissinger explicitly stated in the memorandum, ‘how much more efficient expenditures for population control might be than (would be funds for) raising production through direct investments in additional irrigation and power projects and factories.’ British 19th century Imperialism could have expressed it no better. By the middle 1970’s the government of the United States, with this secret policy declaration, had committed itself to an agenda which would contribute to its own economic demise as well as untold famine, misery and unnecessary death throughout the developing sector. The 13 target countries named by Kissinger’s study were Brazil, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Egypt, Nigeria, Mexico, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, Turkey, Ethiopia and Colombia.13
F. William Engdahl (A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order)
India is an obvious fourth pillar to a new global order of giants, alongside the United States, China, and the EU. Its population is young and entrepreneurial, increasingly urbanized, and ever more connected and tech savvy. By 2030 its economy will have passed those of countries like the U.K., Germany, and Japan to be the third largest in the world; by 2050, it will be worth $30 trillion.
Mustafa Suleyman (The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future)
In 1870 the population of the United States had on average around four years of formal education—while those of the United Kingdom, Japan, France, India, and China were all below one year.
Ray Kurzweil (The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI)
IRCC Updates Guidance on Intra-Company Transferees Amid Canadian Immigration Changes: ESSE India Insights On October 3, Immigration, Citizenship, and Refugees Canada (IRCC) introduced updated guidelines concerning Intra-Company Transferees (ICTs) under Canada's International Mobility Program. These updates are especially relevant for foreign nationals looking to transfer within multinational corporations to Canadian branches, as they clarify the criteria for eligibility and the assessment of specialized knowledge. For individuals pursuing, including those engaging in work programs like the Global Talent Stream Canada, these changes have significant implications. These updates align with IRCC’s broader objective to decrease the proportion of temporary residents in Canada over the next three years. This is particularly important for those seeking assistance from Canada immigration consultants, especially those based in India, who are providing services for Canada PR consultancy. Key Changes to the Intra-Company Transferee Program The IRCC has refined the ICT program under section R205(a) of Canadian Interests – Significant Benefit. Transfers must now originate from an established foreign enterprise of a multinational corporation (MNC). The updates also clarify the definition of “specialized knowledge,” which is crucial for foreign workers applying for such roles. Furthermore, all ICT instructions have been consolidated onto a single page, streamlining the process for applicants and immigration consultants alike. These changes don’t just affect ICT applicants but also extend to broader implications for those navigating the Canada PR process, including individuals using Canada immigration consultants in India or from other locations. Those applying through programs such as bcpnp, provincial nomination, or even looking to work and study in Canada for free should take these updates into consideration. Free Trade Agreements and the International Mobility Program The updates also encompass free trade agreements related to ICTs, including the Canada–United States–Mexico Agreement, Canada–Korea Free Trade Agreement, and Canada–European Union: Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement. These agreements simplify the Canada PR procedure for skilled workers, often allowing them to bypass the requirement for a Labour Market Impact Assessment (LMIA), which can be time-consuming. This simplification is beneficial for businesses and foreign nationals navigating the Canadian immigration system. For those considering PR in Australia or Germany through the Global Talent Stream Australia or Global Talent Stream Germany, understanding the differences in immigration policies between countries is vital. As Canada refines its ICT program, both Australia PR and Germany PR processes have their own unique requirements, which can be managed with the help of Australia immigration consultants or Germany immigration consultants. Impacts on Temporary Resident Programs and the Canadian Labour Market In conjunction with the ICT updates, Canada's Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP), which involves LMIA-based work permits, is undergoing significant reforms. IRCC’s new measures aim to reduce temporary residents in Canada from 6.5% to 5% of the total population by 2026. These changes will be especially relevant for foreign nationals seeking permanent residency in Canada and for those applying for Canada Visa Consultancy Services, such as spouse visa consultants or tourist visa ETA applications. Long-Term Outlook for Canadian Immigration Looking ahead, IRCC’s reforms signify a strategic shift in Canada’s immigration framework. Key programs such as the Provincial Nominee Program (PNP), study permits, and post-graduation work permits (PGWPs) will be affected by these changes. For immigrants relying on Canada immigration consultants, staying informed about these updates is essential for making well-informed decisions.
esse india
Caste,” wrote Bhimrao Ambedkar,1 the father of the anti-caste movement in India, “means an artificial chopping off of the population into fixed and definite units, each one prevented from fusing into another through the custom of endogamy.
Isabel Wilkerson (Caste: The Lies That Divide Us)
He also discusses Christopher D. Stone, a law professor from the University of Southern California who used a theory of legal standing in 1972 when arguing Sierra Club v. Morton and went on to write the book Should Trees Have Standing? Since then, similar legal undertakings have happened in Ecuador, Argentina, Peru, Pakistan, India, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. In 2019, the Yurok Tribe (the same tribe that provided guidance for the California law on controlled burns) granted legal personhood to the Klamath River under tribal law, hoping it would aid legal actions on behalf of the river.
Jenny Odell (Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture)
It was no easy task to integrate such a big country, with its many religions and languages, which had never been one country. So many different States had to be integrated and organized in order that the whole country should be free. But we had comparatively little trouble; we have, therefore, not enough appreciation for this. That, however, is not the end of our task.
Publications Division (For a United India - Speeches of Sardar Patel 1947-1950)
What opium provided was the liquidity for Britain to buy American cotton. To reduce the connections to their simplest: British plantations produced opium in India, the opium was shipped and sold in China, the silver that paid for this opium was shipped to the United States to buy raw cotton, which was shipped to England to manufacture cloth, which was shipped to India (where the company had been successful in suppressing the native cotton textile industry), the proceeds of which then bought more opium.
Timothy Brook (Great State: China and the World)
Fur traders reaped in profits from trading with the Native Americans of the northwest coast of America. Expeditions from India, England, China, and various parts of the Americas set out to engage in this trade, with the main rendezvous point being Vancouver Island. The island was located just above what is now the northern border between the United States of America and Canada. The small body of water that lay on the western edge of Vancouver Island was called Nootka Sound, with “sound” meaning a part of the sea that turns into an inlet of sorts.
Captivating History (History of Hawaii: A Captivating Guide to Hawaiian History (U.S. States))
If someone enters your house and makes you hostage, captures all your belongings and makes all the decision related to your house, what will you think about this infiltrator? The same are the feelings of Kashmiris about India. India entered Kashmir on the request of Maharaja who wanted to save his own hegemony. But the people of Kashmiri wanted the right to determine their own future. India also accepted this right before the United Nations and now refusing to grant this right to Kashmiris, so how can Kashmiris be happy with India?
Kashmir dispute-UNSC
Note: Whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump becomes president of the USA, there will be changes; nothing nor the world will be able to enjoy peace and human rights. However, one change will be definite if Kamala takes the black presidential oath in the White House atmosphere. A man of accusations, Trump should enjoy the retirement of life with beauties. An open letter, which Ehsan Sehgal wrote to him, is republished in Medium to realize his political character and role.  Dear President of the USA, Donald Trump  Your Excellency,  Equality, justice, harmony, and love, within the concept and context of security and respect, are for the entire humanity, not only for the USA and its people. Global peace lies in a step that pulls out your troops from the Muslim States and stops interfering with its systems and way of life; all terrorists will disappear, and peace shall prevail.  One should realize the atrocities of Israel against Palestinians’ determination and India against Kashmiris that the United Nations and its Security Council failed to resolve and solve those disputes under the umbrella of the USA. Consequently, each one of us faces the consequences.  You, as a leader of a great nation, ought to be great and noble. It is possible if you change your distinctive thoughts and policies, you may change human history, becoming the historical leader of the entire humanity that suffers from injustice, hunger, and death.  As far as I know, the Pakistan Armed Forces have devotedly and significantly sacrificed along with the Armed Forces of the USA for global peace, so never degrade your national pride by ignoring, denying, and forgetting the sacrifice of Pakistani men and women, which they are still paying. You should cooperate instead of becoming influenced by the opposing third party to accuse Pakistan. They are a peaceful nation and are determined to stand along with the US forces to eliminate all sorts of terrorists for world peace. God bless you.  Ehsan Sehgal
Ehsan Sehgal
I was born in the last decade of the nineteenth century, and passed my first eight years at Gorakhpur. This was my birthplace in the United Provinces of northeastern India. We were eight children: four boys and four girls. I, Mukunda Lal Ghosh,3 was the second son and the fourth child.
Paramahansa Yogananda (Autobiography of a Yogi)
under the Kushans and then the Guptas, Indian mathematicians first mastered the decimal system and place-value arithmetic, with separate columns for units, tens, hundreds and thousands. This enabled the efficient, compact representation of numbers, as well as facilitating complex arithmetic calculations that had previously been very difficult to perform.27
William Dalrymple (The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World)
Societies united by ideology or historical circumstance but divided by civilization either come apart, as did the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Bosnia, or are subjected to intense strain, as is the case with Ukraine, Nigeria, Sudan, India, Sri Lanka, and many others.
Anonymous
Why Menon got where he did under the patronage of Pandit Nehru remains, and probably will remain, unexplained. Panditji had him elected to Parliament and sent to the United Nations to lead the Indian delegation. His marathon thirteen-hour speech on Kashmir won India a unanimous vote against it. He was then made Defence Minister against the wishes of almost all the members of the Cabinet. He wrecked army discipline by promoting favourites over the heads of senior officers. He was vindictive against those who stood up to him. More than anyone else he was responsible for the humiliating defeat of our army at the hands of the Chinese in 1962. Pandit Nehru stuck by him to the last.
Khushwant Singh (Truth, Love & A Little Malice)
Interestingly, the propensity for sharing was more likely outside the United States (especially high in India and Indonesia), was highest among those with higher income, and was increased when associated with potential for research to help others or reduction in their health care costs. Overall,
Eric J. Topol (The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine is in Your Hands)
or declaration of party fund raising. Unlike in the United States where fund raising is a completely transparent process and there is accountability to the last dollar—in India, party donations are not talked about, any corporation or individual
Shaili Chopra (The Big Connect: Politics in the Age of Social Media)
It’s being made out that the whole point of the war was to topple the Taliban regime and liberate Afghan women from their burqas, we are being asked to believe that the U.S. marines are actually on a feminist mission . (If so, will their next stop be America’s military ally Saudi Arabia?) Think of it this way: in India there are some pretty reprehensible social practices against “untouchables”, against Christians and Muslims, against women. Pakistan and Bangladesh have even worse ways of dealing with minority communities and women. Should they be bombed? Should Delhi, Islamabad and Dhaka be destroyed? Is it possible to bomb bigotry out of India? Can we bomb our way to a feminist paradise? Is that how women won the vote in the U.S? Or how slavery was abolished? Can we win redress for the genocide of the millions of Native Americans upon whose corpses the United States was founded by bombing Santa Fe?
Arundhati Roy
Forget and forgive the pastime. Each one of us should unite in the name of humanity, love, harmony and peace. The boundary walls, execute not the problems and damage. However, if one cannot open that, one may open the lack of heart, mind, and eyes, which constitutes only the hatred and enmity, for nothing. India and Pakistan should feel and remove such evil elements from its agencies that hinder to peace, and welfare of both sides people. No one will help if one cannot decide, and encourage the peace and love. Each one of us should realise the speed of the world; it is time, to feed, educate and save the people, not to kill them for hatred or evil purposes.
Ehsan Sehgal
Snakes kill about 20,000 persons in India every year. These fatalities may be compared to the number of deaths sustained in traffic accidents in the United States.
Carveth Wells (Adventure!)
The Scriptures tell us that right and wrong do exist. Our duty is to do what is right, and it is not too difficult to discern. For example, look at the issue of transgendered people and using bathrooms. Just because someone is confused, doesn’t mean we give up our common sense. Many who have had sex-change surgery want to change back. They have big regrets. They may change their looks on the outside, but their chromosomes stay the same on the inside. Figuring out which bathroom to use should be a pretty simple matter, if you think about it. God has given each of us a certain kind of plumbing. Guys go to one bathroom and ladies go to another. You see, bathrooms are supposed to be biological and not social. But, of course, there is much more to this agenda than meets the eye. This is the breakdown of the family. This is an assault on what God says is right and wrong. God says man and woman in marriage, and the world says any combination of genders in marriage is fine. The Bible says to have kids within a heterosexual family, and the world says to have kids within any kind of family structure you want. On a recent plane flight, a guy named John was sitting next to me. He loved logic. Everything had to be logical for him. When I asked him, “If you could have any job on planet Earth and money wasn’t an issue, what would you want to do?” He didn’t hesitate. He said, “Philosophy professor at a university!” I already knew this was going to be a good conversation, but his reply was icing on the cake! Then out of nowhere he asked me, “What do you think about gay marriage?” This seems to be the only question on people’s minds these days! Some people are interested in your answer; others just want to label you a bigot. Whether or not they want to categorize you doesn’t matter; our job is to tell people the truth. So I asked him, “When people get married, how many people get married?” He responded that he didn’t understand my question. So I said, “When you go to a marriage ceremony in India, China, Russia, Canada, or the United States, how many people are in that ceremony?” He replied, “Two.” I then continued, “Where did the number come from?” You should have seen the look on his face. He didn’t have a clue. I let him know it came from the oldest writing ever on the subject of marriage. It came from the Jewish Torah, and in the book of Genesis, it says: Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh. Genesis 2:24 The interesting thing was that John knew the verse! When I said it out loud, he finished it by saying, “one flesh.” Someone had taught him that verse at some point through the years. Then I said, “Whoever gets to tell you how many people can get married can also tell you who gets to be in that number.” He loved the logic. But, of course, God is logical. That is why it is logical to believe in Him. I also read somewhere: Whoever designs marriage gets to define marriage! That is a good statement, and I have been using it as I talk with people about this subject.
Mark Cahill (Ten Questions from the King)
Indeed, in many agricultural regions — including northern China, southern India (as well as the Punjab), Mexico, the western United States, parts of the Middle East, and elsewhere — water may be much more of a constraint to future food production than land, crop yield potential, or most other factors. Developing and distributing technologies and practices that improve water management is critical to sustaining the food production capability we now have, much less increasing it for the future. Water-short Israel is a front-runner in making its agricultural economy more water-efficient. Its current agricultural output could probably not have been achieved without steady advances in water management — including highly efficient drip irrigation, automated systems that apply water only when crops need it, and the setting of water allocations based on predetermined optimum water applications for each crop. The nation’s success is notable: between 1951 and 1990, Israeli farmers reduced the amount of water applied to each hectare of cropland by 36 percent. This allowed the irrigated area to more than triple with only a doubling of irrigation water use.37 Whether
Laurie Ann Mazur (Beyond the Numbers: A Reader on Population, Consumption and the Environment)
If the world’s population had the productivity of the Swiss, the consumption habits of the Chinese, the egalitarian instincts of the Swedes, and the social discipline of the Japanese, then the planet could support many times its current population without privation for anyone. On the other hand, if the world’s population had the productivity of Chad, the consumption habits of the United States, the inegal-itarian instincts of India, and the social discipline of Argentina, then the planet could not support anywhere near its current numbers. 9 NO
Laurie Ann Mazur (Beyond the Numbers: A Reader on Population, Consumption and the Environment)
Our neighbor, Hugo du Toit, was a very handsome Afrikaner, who, with his two sisters, was a close friend of Louis Botha, the first Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa, and also a close friend of General Jan Christiaan Smuts, the Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa from 1919 until 1924. He became a South African military leader during World War II. Although some accuse Smuts of having started apartheid, he later stood against it and was a force behind the founding of the United Nations. He is still considered one of the most eminent Afrikaners ever…. At his expansive farm house, Hugo had autographed photos of both men on his study wall. Parties were frequently held at my grandparents’ home and the thought of roasted turkeys and potatoes which Cherie had prepared, brings back warm memories of a delightful era, now lost forever.” The Colonial History of South Africa For many years South Africa was occupied primarily by Dutch farmers known as Boers who had first arrived in the Cape of Good Hope in 1652 when Jan van Riebeeck established the Dutch East India Company and later by British settlers who arrived in the Cape colony after the Napoleonic wars in the 1820’s, on board the sailing ships the Nautilus and the Chapman. For the most part the two got along like oil and water. After 1806, some of the Dutch-speaking settlers left the Cape Colony and trekked into the interior where they established the Boer Republics. There were many skirmishes between them, as well as with the native tribes. In 1877 after the First Boer War between the Dutch speaking farmers and the English, the Transvaal Boer republic was seized by Britain. Hostilities continued until the Second Boer War erupted in October of 1899, costing the British 22,000 lives. The Dutch speaking farmers, now called Afrikaners, lost 7,000 men and having been overrun by the English acknowledged British sovereignty by signing the peace agreement, known as the “Treaty of Vereeniging,” on May 31, 1902. Although this thumbnail sketch of South African history leaves much unsaid, the colonial lifestyle continued on for the privileged white ruling class until the white, pro-apartheid National Party, was peacefully ousted when the African National Congress won a special national election. Nelson Mandela was elected as the first black president on May 9, 1994. On May 10, 1994, Mandela was inaugurated as The Republic of South Africa's new freely elected President with Thabo Mbeki and F.W. De Klerk as his vice-presidents.
Hank Bracker
The recent explosions, from India to the United States, of ressentiment against writers and journalists as well as politicians, technocrats, businessmen and bankers reveal how Rousseau’s history of the human heart is still playing itself out among the disaffected. Those who perceive themselves as left or pushed behind by a selfish conspiratorial minority can be susceptible to political seducers from any point on the ideological spectrum, for they are not driven by material inequality alone. The Jacobins and the German Romantics may have been Rousseau’s most famous disciples, determined to create through retributive terror or economic and cultural nationalism the moral community neglected by Enlightenment philosophes.
Pankaj Mishra (Age of Anger: A History of the Present)