What is your favourite quote / para from a book you have read?

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Great work! :) my favourite is this: “ Right and wrong, perhaps amongst the first to be taught, But it takes a lifetime to unravel the thought.” Keep writing! 

I read it an impressionable age. I also loved “the five people you meet in heaven” by Mitch Albom. I love it’s opening lines too. I do judge a book by its opening lines. I had a copy signed by Shah Rukh khan when  i was in Bombay in a mall like a decade back.

Then one fine day, on a particularly emotionally turmoiled day, I read the sixth person you meet in heaven.

Apart from that, I have loved all of Erich Segals work. In my defence, I was young and in college or late school :) 

Care to share the YouTube link ?

How do you like the case studies ? Are they kinda challenging ?

I was reading "The Steel Frame" by Deepak Gupta Sir, on a lookout for some civil services vocabulary. Read one chapter and in that one small section dealing with Indians who chose to join the ICS stood out for me. It so beautifully captures the dualities an Indian would face joining the imperial service at the height of the nationalist movement.

When faced with the question "Why IAS?" all of us can give some rational explanation but there are so many inconsistencies and unresolved dilemmas associated with the decision which only the heart knows. Reading about these other aspirants situated centuries apart was weirdly relatable. 

Notably, RC Dutt describing the exam as "this difficult undertaking" that involves "recklessly staking everything on an almost impossible success." KPS Menon says, about his days at Oxford: “We made vehement speeches which we thought patriotic and which the British thought seditious. At the same time, we went on studiously preparing for the ICS. The inconsistency… did not strike us!” Even Nehru was drawn by the glamour of the ICS in his days studying in England.

The exam was the Mount Everest of bright and meritorious students’ ambitions then, as it is now. 

As the world’s largest democracy, India is a natural ally for the G7 and guest countries to defend these shared values from a host of threats stemming from authoritarianism, terrorism and violent extremism, disinformation and infodemics and economic coercion. Democracy and freedom are part of India’s civilisational ethos, and find expression in the vibrancy and diversity of India’s society - PM Modi

update :

https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/ghaziabad-assault-case-notice-to-twitter-india-md/article34846242.ece?

https://indianexpress.com/article/india/cow-vigilantes-lynch-mp-man-transporting-cattle-in-rajasthan-7359292/

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There is widespread consensus that the main thingthat can hold India back is India itself.There are no alibis if we were, in these circumstances, to fail. But while the underlying trends are propitious, time is of the essence. This is the case in two senses. The window of opportunity for India becoming a prosperous nation is relatively small: the basic structures and dynamics necessary to achieve this prosperity will have to be put in place in the next 10 to 15 years. Theunderlying factors that are propitious for our growth may not last very long.

Second, our future possibilities are going to be heavily path-dependent.Once certain institutional choices and development pathways are adopted, it will be very hard to changethem: they will become entrenched. So, the choices we make now will define the horizons of our possibility for decades, if not longer. It follows that rather than imagining that growth can allow us to postpone hard decisions, we need to take exactly the opposite tack. If we do not take the opportunities provided by a relatively benign environment, we will not get a second chance to correct our mistakes. For instance,if India wants to avoid the ‘middle income trap’that has afflicted many other societies where growth rates experienced rapid acceleration only to peter out, then it will have to move decisively and rapidly across a range of fronts.

--NA 2.0

this was in 2011 i guess, have we committed the exact mistake that this document warned us against ?

Please check out Shekhar Gupta's bell curve theory about insurgencies in India and how the state deals with them. You might find it interesting! 

Andrea: Unhappy is the land that breeds no hero.

Gelileo: No Andrea. Unhappy is the land that needs a hero.

For it is silly, my dear Lucilius, and no way for an educated man to behave, to spend one’s time exercising the biceps, broadening the neck and shoulders and developing the lungs. Even when the extra feeding has produced gratifying results and you’ve put on a lot of muscle, you’ll never match the strength or the weight of a prize ox. The greater load, moreover, on the body is crushing to the spirit and renders it less active. So keep the body within bounds as much as you can and make room for the spirit. Devotees of physical culture have to put up with a lot of nuisances. There are the exercises, in the first place, the toil involved in which drains the vitality and renders it unfit for concentration or the more demanding sort of studies. Next there is the heavy feeding, which dulls mental acuteness. Then there is the taking on as coaches of the worst brand of slave, persons who divide their time between putting on lotion and putting down liquor, whose idea of a well spent day consists of getting up a good sweat and then replacing the fluid lost with plenty of drink, all the better to be absorbed on a dry stomach. Drinking and perspiring – it’s the life of a dyspeptic! There are short and simple exercises which will tire the body without undue delay and save what needs especially close accounting for, time. There is running, swinging weights about and jumping – either high-jumping or long-jumping or the kind indulged in by the priests of Mars, if one may so describe it, or to be rather more disrespectful, by the laundress. Pick out any of these for ease and straightforwardness. But whatever you do, return from body to mind very soon. Exercise it day and night. Only a moderate amount of work is needed for it to thrive and develop. It is a form of exercise to which cold and heat and even old age are no obstacle. Cultivate an asset which the passing of time itself improves.

😂😂