Dhurandhar!

If you fall upholding Dharma, you will attain heaven.

If you are victorious, the world is yours.

So rise, O Arjuna, and prepare yourself for battle.

- Bhagavad Gita 2.37

After a long, long time I have seen a Hindi movie completely engrossed for 3.25 hours!

Amazing casting, immaculate screenplay and complete awareness of every minute details. 

I hope this movie shifts the game of Hindi movies to be more like Malayalam movies. 

This is the first time I watched Aditya Dhar's movie. I need to catch up on his other movies. 

I didn't know the meaning of the Sanskrit word Dhurandhar, so had to look it up.

Dhurandhar means well I got two versions; I like the later version:

• An Expert, master A A top notch person In a specific field.
• A person built to carry unbearable responsibility and still move forward.

On Satyendra Nath Bose

But Bose’s real story is actually far richer. His life and career reveal a complex, deeply human scientist who navigated intellectual passions and colonial-era challenges to make his historical mark. The narrow focus on his ‘accidental’ discovery overlooks the breadth of Bose’s pursuits and the context that shaped him. Bose was a true polymath, fluent in multiple languages and immersed in literature and philosophy, and a dedicated teacher who believed science should be accessible to everyone, not just an elite few. Crucially, he achieved all this while working under the British Empire, facing the hurdles of a colonised scientist: limited resources, isolation from international peers, and the pressures of life under foreign rule. Acknowledging Bose’s context doesn’t diminish his achievements; instead, it casts them in a more illuminating light. His groundbreaking work was not the result of mythical serendipity alone, but rather the culmination of perseverance, intellect and a willingness to think differently from the heart of a colonial world.

Bose was born on 1 January 1894 in Calcutta (now Kolkata), then the capital of British-ruled India. He was the only, eldest son (among seven children) of a lower-middle-class Bengali family. His father, Surendra Nath Bose, was an accountant with the East Indian Railways who had a knack for mathematics and science. His mother, Amodini Devi, although barely formally educated, managed the large household. Surendra Nath harboured nationalist sympathies; in 1901, he left his secure railway job, a position with the colonial government, to start a small chemical and pharmaceutical venture with a friend. Hence, Surendra Nath’s quiet defiance of colonial structures, and his turn towards Indian scientific enterprise, likely created a family world where a nascent nationalist milieu could thrive. This, I believe, left an enduring mark on his son.

The Bose family belonged to the Bengali Kayastha caste, which was traditionally excluded from the highest echelons of scholarship. By the late 19th century, however, social reforms of the Bengal Renaissance were loosening such barriers and opening up higher education to non-Brahmins. In this milieu of rising opportunities, young Bose demonstrated exceptional talent in mathematics and science, coming top in his classes at university.

Bose launched his academic career just as a new era in physics was dawning, but also during the tumult of the First World War, which cut off direct intellectual contact between British India and the German scientific centres pioneering quantum theory. Bose, however, was determined to keep up with the latest developments. He taught himself German and, with the help of mentors and colleagues, obtained copies of cutting-edge European research. He devoured papers by the physicists Max Planck and Arnold Sommerfeld, and studied advanced texts, such as James Clerk Maxwell’s and J W Gibbs’s treatises on statistical mechanics. Immersing himself in these resources, Bose stayed abreast of the new quantum ideas, even as some Western scientists remained sceptical of concepts such as the light quantum (the photon). Later in life, Bose reflected that working from the ‘periphery’ helped him think independently; the prevailing orthodoxies of the European establishment didn’t bind him.

[---]

By the early 1920s, quantum physics had emerged as a radical new field, offering Bose intellectual freedom from colonial strictures. As I argued in my book The Making of Modern Physics in Colonial India (2020), embracing the quantum provided ‘a great intellectual escape from the hegemony of scientific colonialism’ that defined the British-dominated scientific establishment in India, which focused on teaching classical physics in universities and exploring applied science that benefited colonial interests.

[---]

Notably, Bose was not a traditional firebrand political agitator; he did not lead rallies or write polemics against British rule. His form of nationalism was expressed through intellectual sovereignty. He showed by example that Indians could innovate at the highest levels of physics, even under the constraints of colonial rule. Moreover, by choosing to develop his career in India and by communicating science in an Indian language, he undercut the notion that one must go abroad or use English to be a successful scientist.

Beyond his famous work in quantum statistics, Bose led a rich and varied scientific life. Upon returning to Dacca after his European sojourn, he threw himself into new projects. One of his significant contributions was in the field of X-ray crystallography. With the know-how he gained in de Broglie’s lab in Paris, Bose established one of India’s first X-ray crystallography laboratories at Dacca University in 1926. Under his guidance, the lab’s students and technicians constructed advanced instruments. By the 1930s, they had built a Weissenberg X-ray camera, a sophisticated device for crystal structure analysis, in the department’s workshop. This was cutting-edge equipment for an Indian institution at the time, and it turned Bose’s Dacca lab into a regional hub of research activity. Not only his students used it, but students from other universities (including some from Calcutta) would travel to Dacca to conduct experiments. In an era when Indian scientists often struggled for resources, Bose’s initiative created rare opportunities for hands-on training within his home country.

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True to the label ‘polymath’, Bose’s interests were never confined to physics alone. His lifelong love of literature, music and philosophy complemented his scientific pursuits. Bose was fluent in several languages, including Bengali and English, as well as French, and had a working knowledge of German from his student days. He enjoyed reading the original works of Western philosophers and actively engaged in the cultural and intellectual debates of his time. Friends and colleagues recall that he could discuss the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore or the essays of Bertrand Russell with equal ease, as he could the latest findings in quantum mechanics.

- More Here

Omnipresent Ingratitude

Since Max was a puppy, I have heard this reasoning when something bad happens - "Hey, this always happens; everywhere." 

That drove me nuts.  I phrased a term for this - "consoling the conscience."

Then I reminded myself of this Adam Smith quote from his least read book Theory of Moral Sentiments (remember, he wrote only two books):

If he was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of his own.

People don't give a flying fuck about anything else other than themselves and their families but yet, what they love depends completely outside of that circle. 

I would calm myself, and go play frisbee with Max. Max made a freaking little better living being. He was wiser than I will ever be. 

I was barely out of my teens when Manmohan Singh and Narsihma Rao changed the destiny of India. 

Of-course I have no idea on the profound implications of their wisdom. All I saw was Coke and Pepsi was available in India and Aamir Khan's Pepsi ad's were phenomenal. 

And then my prefrontal cortex developed a little. Slowly, I understood their wisdom. I started developing not only gratitude but tremendous wisdom not only for their actions but they were able to pull this off in a country like India. 

Then I read Margaret Mead's wise sentence: 

Never underestimate the power of a small group of committed people to change the world. In fact, it is the only thing that ever has.

Then I read Taleb insight of Minority Rule. 

What happened in India during 1991 was a ridiculous minority of three people (Green revolution happened because of Norman Borlaugh and most Indians don't know his name - god bless my species). 

(Hey a good human from the future: If you are reading this after I am long gone - don't give up animals.

Keep up your good work. Change will come. 

Love from Max and I will always be there for you. 

Remember no one will remember you but that is the ultimate victory for you. Why would you want these fucked up being to remember you? 

You will be one of those longest hours in the "Deep Time" when billions don't even make it micro-milli-second.) 

Samir Varma's wonderful and insightful piece how fucked up and ingratitude Indian memory is: 

The real reasons for the forgetting are deeper. And they’re not unique to India—they’re human. Which makes them harder to fix.

This is the deepest explanation, and it’s not Indian—it’s universal. It’s baked into how human memory works.

You cannot feel gratitude for something that didn’t happen.

The 1991 reforms prevented:

- Soviet-style economic collapse (remember what happened to Russia in the 1990s?)

- Possible mass famine (India was weeks from being unable to import food).

- Political fragmentation of a nuclear-armed state (India could have Balkanized).

- A generation of deeper poverty (another decade of 3.5% growth would have been catastrophic).

- The humiliation of permanent dependency on foreign aid.

- The brain drain accelerating until no one capable was left.

But because these didn’t happen, they’re not real to anyone. You can’t photograph the famine that didn’t occur. You can’t interview the refugees from the civil war that wasn’t fought. You can’t quantify the poverty that wasn’t endured.

The plane that didn’t crash. You don’t celebrate the engineer who prevented the disaster. You can’t point to a specific moment and say “there—that’s what they saved us from.” The counterfactual doesn’t have photographs. It doesn’t have victims whose stories can be told. It doesn’t have monuments or memorial days. It’s just... absence. An empty space where catastrophe would have been.

This isn’t an Indian problem. Americans don’t celebrate whoever prevented the 2008 financial crisis from becoming Great Depression II—assuming anyone did, assuming it wasn’t just luck. They barely remember Paul Volcker taming inflation in the 1980s—an achievement that made possible two decades of American prosperity. They’ve already forgotten the pandemic response that prevented millions more deaths. This is how human memory works. We remember disasters. We forget the people who prevented them.

[---]

Here’s an irony: the reforms succeeded so completely that they became consensus.

Every government since 1991 has continued them:

- BJP under Vajpayee: accelerated privatization

- Congress under Singh: continued liberalization

- BJP under Modi: GST, Make in India, further opening

When policy becomes consensus, it stops being anyone’s achievement. It’s just... what we do now. The way things are.

Nobody campaigns on “I will continue the reforms of 1991.” They campaign on what comes next. The foundation becomes invisible because everyone builds on it.

Success erased the memory of who created it.

Indian mythology celebrates:

- Suffering: Ram’s fourteen-year exile, the Pandavas’ humiliation

- Sacrifice: Bhishma’s lifelong celibacy vow, Karna’s tragic loyalty

- Martyrdom: Gandhi’s assassination, Bhagat Singh’s hanging

- Dramatic confrontation: Arjuna’s crisis on the battlefield

What does this template not include? Competent technocrats who quietly solved problems and went home.

Singh didn’t suffer publicly. Rao didn’t sacrifice visibly. Ahluwalia just... did his job well. They made it look easy. They didn’t create drama. They prevented drama—which is the opposite of what heroes do in Indian narratives.

They don’t fit the heroic template. In India, that’s not a hero. That’s a bureaucrat.

There’s a deeper cultural explanation, and it connects everything.

The successful prevention of catastrophe is the most thankless achievement in human history.

Rao, Singh, and Ahluwalia prevented a disaster. They did it so well that the disaster became unimaginable. And the unimaginable cannot be remembered.

That’s why India forgot them.

And if you are thinking this is history - think again. 

Its only because of steadfast minority refuses to live under totalitarianism that we don't live under totalitarianism. (via)

Fed Chairman Powel statement from yesterday. 

Thank you sir for your courage. Minority Rules!

via MR - Alex Tabarrok

Whether an independent Fed is desirable is beside the point. The core issue is lawfare: the strategic use of legal processes to intimidate, constrain, and punish institutional actors for political ends. Lawfare is the hallmark of a failing state because it erodes not just political independence, but the capacity for independent judgment.

What sort of people will work at the whim of another? The inevitable result is toadies and ideological loyalists heading complex institutions, rather than people chosen for their knowledge and experience.

 

Another word I hate most is "Legacy". I know so many morons who talk about their legacy. These   morons are people I know personally.

What freaking legacy? Just do the right thing.  And if you do the right thing, there is high probability very few people will remember you and thank you. That is just a second order effect. 

Our life is to do the right thing and stand up for truth. That should be a basic and decent categorical imperative. 

India’s Northeast Reveals A Path Beyond Factory Farming

India is a good example because it has states with human populations as big as some countries, and many of these have transitioned away from small-scale, extensive chicken production. While about 35% of chickens in India are still raised in small backyard flocks, most are now kept in indoor commercial systems. Large-scale free-range broiler farms and cage-free egg farms are very rare.

For their analysis, the authors looked at factors linked to intensive chicken farming, including the state’s wealth, human population density, level of urbanization, and local feed production like maize and soy. To spot the outliers, they checked for states whose actual intensification levels were far below predictions. Then they explored whether state policies could help explain this discrepancy.

The authors found that several states in Northeast India, especially Manipur, Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, and Sikkim, have much lower levels of chicken intensification than expected, given their income levels. For example, Sikkim has the second-highest income per person in India but less than 1% of its chickens are raised on commercial farms. In these states, chicken production remains reliant on smallholders, unlike most of India where commercial farming dominates.

One possible reason for these outliers is geography, as the mountainous, forested terrain of the Northeast makes large-scale farming difficult. Another reason could be the region’s lower human population densities, meaning that the market might not be large enough to encourage commercialization.

However, in the authors’ view, the most compelling reason is strong policy choices. Sikkim became the world’s first 100% organic state, banning hormones, growth regulators, feed additives, and antibiotics. Similar organic farming regulations exist in Mizoram, Arunachal Pradesh, and Meghalaya, with support from an organic agriculture program launched by the national government. These states also promote self-sufficiency in egg and chicken meat production through organic farming, and Sikkim has even invested in high-yield indigenous chicken breeds to improve productivity while keeping backyard systems.

The role of these organic policies is highlighted when considering Uttarakhand, a state with similar geography and population density to the Northeastern states but with high levels of chicken intensification. This suggests that the difference is less about physical conditions and more about policies shaping farming practices.

- More Here

The Evolution of Civilizationalism

In order to understand the civilizational turn, we need to look not only at the international political environment but also at domestic developments. Within the West and especially within Europe, the civilizational turn seems to be connected to a particular form of neoliberalism that seeks to “encase” the economy and protect it from democratic interference. As economic policy has been taken out of the space of democratic contestation in the last several decades, especially within the eurozone, political debate has shifted to cultural issues. Civilizationalism is a kind of identity politics produced by neoliberalism. 

In many non-Western countries, civilizational ideas have also become influential in the context of economic reform policies that opened up state-protected economies to the free flow of capital and market forces and drastically reworked the balance between public and private authority. Civilizationalism frequently serves as an idiom of legitimation for neoliberal reforms. For example, the Turkish state has used civilizational lessons about Ottoman practices of indigenous capitalism to justify neoliberal reforms while also championing civilization as a defense against the homogenizing effects of globalization. In China and India, civilizational assertions of power mirror the global aspirations of the new economic elites and middle classes and rationalize economic inequalities in terms of cultural reward. 

For all the differences among them, all cases of civilizationalism around the world are emerging in a context in which the distinction between authoritarianism and democracy is increasingly blurred. Both within the West and outside it, democracies are showing authoritarian tendencies—often referred to as “democratic backsliding”—and producing hybrid regimes. Conversely, even authoritarian states like China feel the need to draw on democratic rhetoric to legitimate themselves. This is why the concept of civilization is so useful to political elites as a source of legitimacy. 

Civilizationalism is not a phenomenon that should be identified exclusively with illiberal forces within and outside the West, as many seem to imagine. Rather, the global civilizational turn should be understood as a product of the way in which the boundaries between liberalism and illiberalism are becoming unclear as the center-right mainstreams and normalizes far-right ideas. If neoliberalism tends to produce identity politics, civilizationalism may be the form that this identity politics takes in a world in which international politics is increasingly being imagined as a competition between continent-sized powers.

- More Here

The Obscenity of India's Wealthy

Listen. 

Don't weep nor get angry. 

Think and change yourself and the ones around you. 

Buddha, Socrates, and Us: Ethical Living in Uncertain Times

Review of the book Buddha, Socrates, and Us: Ethical Living in Uncertain Times by Stephen Batchelor:

Raised in Britain as a post-Christian secular humanist and trained in Asia as a Tibetan and Zen Buddhist monk,” Stephen Batchelor writes at the end of his book, Buddha, Socrates, and Us, “I find that I can no longer identify exclusively with either a Western or an Eastern tradition.” 

Decades of dwelling in these traditions—each with its own intellectual, spiritual, and philosophical riches—have left him strangely homeless. Far from making him unhappy, though, this state of existential homelessness has given Batchelor access to what he sees as a higher life. For, while “unsettling and disorienting” at times, such “spaces of uncertainty seem far richer in creative possibilities, more open to leading a life of wonder, imagination, and action.”

At its core, Batchelor’s Buddha, Socrates, and Us may be read as a response to a simple, yet important observation: everything in life tends to fall into patterns, to settle into habits and routines. Not even matters of the spirit—religion and philosophy, beliefs and ideas, thinking and writing—seem to escape this fate. Such mindless repetition makes our lives easier and more comfortable, at least on the outside, but to do things mechanically and unthinkingly is to invite emptiness and meaninglessness into our existence. The older we get, the more spiritually ossified we become. Eventually, if nothing challenges us, our slumbered existence will be indistinguishable from spiritual death.

That’s what awakenings are for.

Batchelor focuses primarily on two masters of awakening: Gotama and Socrates. As chance would have it, they were contemporaries, even if they lived worlds apart. For all the cultural differences between fifth-century BCE India and Greece, however, Batchelor identifies a series of compelling parallels, from the merely anecdotical to the more substantive, which makes his book the delight of any comparatist of cultures. His narrative shuttles nimbly between the two figures, between East and West, the Indian world and the Greek one, in a compulsively readable way. Batchelor is not only a seasoned practitioner of Buddhism, and a great scholar of it, but a gifted storyteller to boot.

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“I want to make Buddhist and Greek thought more than merely compatible,” Batchelor writes at the beginning of this book. “I am seeking a new language, a synthesis that would transcend the binary of East/West, Greek/Buddhist altogether.” But to find such a voice, he adds, “I first have to come to terms with the Greek and the Buddhist inside me.” The project has taken him a lifetime, and he is still on the road. The delay may be by design, though. For the point of a project like his may be never to settle into a destination, but to keep your head on fire for as long as you can.

Rajinikanth - One Of The Greatest Orators of Our Time

Over the last few years, I have been listening to his every talk (he gives 2 or 3 in a year); every one of these talks are filled with immense wisdom, humility, truth, humor and so much more. 

All this without any pride about his stardom and power and with full skin in the game. 

A simple human teaching other humans what he has learned from his life in a very very hard way. 

I have learned a ton from Rajni sir on how to be a good human being. Thank you, sir. 

• Your Intelligence will tell you which thing to speak
• Your ability will tell you how to speak 
• Audience will tell you how much to speak 
• Your experience will tell what to speak and what not to speak :-) 

Immune & Metabolic Effects of African Heritage Diets vs. Western Diets

Years ago, when I went to an Ethiopian restaurant for the first time , I was blown away. A lot of their dishes were exactly how my grandma and mom cooked. I mean almost 1:1 similarity. 

My dad had told me years ago, plus I have done my DNA and we were one of the first "tribes" to move out of Africa and settle in Tamilnadu. Hence, there is so much similarity in the cooking style which is very different than well.. Indian restaurants here or most of India. 

So over the years, I started cooking like my grandma did. 

And now this paper, I was waiting for the longest time: 

Abstract: 

African heritage diets are increasingly being replaced by Western-style dietary patterns because of urbanization, economic development, increased access to processed foods, globalization and changing social norms. 

The health consequences of this nutrition transition are not well understood. We conducted a randomized controlled trial in the Kilimanjaro region in Northern Tanzania to investigate the immune and metabolic effects of switching between Kilimanjaro heritage-style and Western-style diets for 2 weeks and consuming a traditional fermented banana beverage (‘Mbege’) for 1 week. 

Seventy-seven young and healthy volunteers assigned male at birth, some living in urban areas and some living in rural areas, were recruited in the trial. Primary outcomes were changes in the immune and metabolic profile before and after the intervention and at the 4-week follow-up. The switch from heritage-style to Western-style diet affected different metabolic pathways associated with noncommunicable diseases and promoted a pro-inflammatory state with impaired whole-blood cytokine responses to microbial stimulation. In contrast, the switch from Western-style to heritage-style diet or consuming the fermented beverage had a largely anti-inflammatory effect. 

Some of the observed changes in the immune and metabolic profiles persisted at the follow-up, suggesting a sustained impact from the short-term intervention. These findings show the metabolic and immune effects of dietary transitions and the consumption of fermented beverages, underscoring the importance of preserving indigenous dietary practices to mitigate noncommunicable disease risk factors in sub-Saharan Africa. 

This episode from Zoe Podcast covered this well, listen to it here: Can a traditional African diet help protect against inflammation? 

Prof. Quirijn de Mast: It's not easy to define because there is not a typical, traditional African diet. I mean, Africa is a huge continent, and there's so much diversity in dietary patterns across the different regions. That said, there are some unifying themes. If you talk about African diet, so many of the traditional African diets, they're mainly plant-based. That's one. 

So people consume a lot of legumes, traditional grains like millet, sorghum, and teff in Ethiopia. And these are very, I would say, interesting small grain cereals with many health benefits. 

[---]

Jonathan Wolf: And you've mentioned quite a few grains that I'm not familiar with. Sorghum, I wouldn't know if it dropped on my head. 

Could you describe for listeners who maybe are not familiar with a millet or a sorghum? What are they similar to, that we might be used to finding in a Western supermarket?

Prof. Quirijn de Mast: To be honest, I can't really compare it to what we are used to in Europe or in Western supermarkets. 

But they are extremely interesting, these grained cereals, because they're so nutritious. They contain lots of fiber, more than, for example, wheat. They are rich in polyphenols. They also have a low glycemic index, so you don't see this spike in glucose or insulin when you eat them. 

Yeah, they're kind of neglected, I would say, but they have very interesting health benefits. 

Yes, Shrimp Matter

I left private equity to work on shrimp welfare. When I tell anyone this, they usually think I've lost my mind. I know the feeling — I’ve been there. When I first read Charity Entrepreneurship's proposal for a shrimp welfare charity, I thought: “Effective altruists have gone mad — who cares about shrimp?” 

The transition from analyzing real estate deals to advocating for some of the smallest animals in our food system feels counterintuitive, to say the least. But it was the same muscle I used converting derelict office buildings into luxury hotels that allowed me to appreciate an enormous opportunity overlooked by almost everyone, including those in the animal welfare space. I still spend my days analyzing returns (though they’re now measured in suffering averted). I still work to identify mutual opportunities with industry partners. Perhaps most importantly, I still view it as paramount to build trust with people who — initially — sit on opposite sides of the table.

After years of practicing my response to the inevitable raised eyebrows, I now sum it up simply: ignoring shrimp welfare would have been both negligent and reckless.

This may seem like an extreme stance. Shrimp aren't high on the list of animals most people think about when they consider the harms of industrial agriculture. For a long time — up until the last few years — most researchers assumed shrimp couldn't even feel pain. Yet as philosopher Jonathan Birch explains in The Edge of Sentience, whenever a creature is a sentience candidate1 and we cannot rule out its capacity for conscious experience, we have a responsibility to take its potential for suffering seriously.  

We don’t know what it is like to be a shrimp. We do know that if shrimp can suffer, they are doing so in the hundreds of billions. 

Why worry about shrimp in a world where so many mammals and birds live in torturous conditions due to industrial agriculture?2 The answer is that shrimp farming dwarfs other forms of animal agriculture by sheer numbers. An estimated 230 billion shrimp of various species are alive in farms at any given moment —  compared to the 779 million pigs, 1.55 billion cattle, 4 33 billion chickens, and 125 billion farmed fish.

Shrimp are harvested at around 6 months of age, which puts the estimated number slaughtered annually for human consumption at 440 billion. For perspective: that’s more than four times the number of humans who have ever walked the earth. At sea, the numbers are even more staggeringly shrimpy. Globally,  27 trillion shrimp are caught in the wild6 every year, compared to 1.5 trillion fish.

Despite their size, shrimp are the proverbial “elephant in the room” when discussing animal welfare in food systems.

[---]

The future of shrimp welfare is one of the most underexplored areas in modern animal rights, but its potential for impact is immense. We are only at the beginning of a movement that could fundamentally shift the way we treat aquatic animals — both on farms and for those caught in the ocean. While challenges remain, including entrenched industry practices and global trade complexities, the path forward is becoming clearer with each step taken by animal NGOs and progressive food companies.

For the first time ever, shrimp welfare is becoming a relevant topic within the broader animal welfare movement, one that has traditionally focused on larger animals and more familiar causes. But the staggering number of shrimp affected, their capacity to suffer, and the emerging solutions make this a moral issue we can no longer ignore. Addressing shrimp welfare isn’t just about reducing suffering for billions of animals — it’s about redefining our relationship with the natural world, expanding our circle of compassion, and challenging the limits of our ethical responsibilities.

- More Here

Thank You Inspector Hathiram Chaudhary

There are hardly any good Indian movies but there are some hidden gems in the form of Hindi series.

A colleague told me about the Paatal Lok series a couple of years ago and I was hooked. 

Jaideep Ahlawat as Inspector Hathiram Chaudhary is just brilliant. In the middle crappy actors, Jaideep is an actor who is showered with talent probably from up above. 

Jaideep Ahlawat is the Hindi version of what Vijay Sethipathi is to Tamil cinema. 

I haven't been to India for almost 2 decades now but through Hathiram's eyes I am discovering not much has changed - poverty, power, and pusillanimous seems persistent. 

Thank you sir for making me lost in your art and making me think. 

Hathiram Chaudhary: A Hero For Our Times

He is an Indian, Rohtak-born. His precinct is Outer Jamuna Paar in Delhi. His currency of operation is that tough, drain-pipe humanity, which he has to preserve in an increasingly murky world.

High-profile police cases that turn out to be zero-sum games are his to negotiate. Slouch-shouldered and pot-bellied, he goes through a series of spirals only to come upon dead ends.

To do this night after night is to earn those bleary, exhausted eyes that are his signature.

Those eyes have wonderful bags under them that touch us deeply.

[---]

We keep persisting with Paatal Lok's hardbound cynicism because we know that even if wiped out and shattered, we can still come home to Hathiram Chaudhary. We are sure he would let us in with a shrug.

He has a political stance; he most certainly does. But he never uses it as a tool to patronize, instruct, or elevate himself to a higher moral plane.

Does this explain his broad appeal, why he's equally beloved by right-wingers and lefties?

Here's Hathiram's version of liberalism, as unrehearsed as they come.

In the first season, while standing up for a Muslim colleague, he doesn't position himself as the progressive one battling a bunch of bigots.

On the contrary, his actions suggest that steering clear of bigotry is something we all can aspire to.

In Season 2, there's a wonderful scene involving the revelation of a close friend's sexuality, where he rebukes his personal brand of Haryanvi machismo as he lends his support to the slightly embarrassed friend.

"I'm a country bumpkin with no knowledge of gay parades. But if it feels right to you, then that's all that matters," so says the bumpkin, not emphatically but searchingly, and with a faint note of some swear-word bubbling up in his throat.

His inclusive attitude is unique: It may not possess the jingle of a placard slogan, but it surely has the warmth of a hardboiled embrace.

 

Grow Up - Enough With the Fireworks Already

Growing up in India, I enjoyed celebrating Diwali because I could play with fire and be macho. 

As time passed, I grew the fuck up. I grew the fuck up. I learned how much fireworks harm animals, ecosystems and the environment. 

So grow the fuck up and stop using fireworks in name of god knows what. Fireworks has nothing to do with you political ideology. 

Margaret Renkl reminds us that same but more politely than I do: 

For 15 straight years, our old dog Clark — a hound-shepherd-retriever mix who was born in the woods and loved the outdoors ever after — spent the Fourth of July in our walk-in shower. He seemed to believe a windowless shower in a windowless bathroom offered his best chance of surviving the shrieking terror that was raining down from the night sky outside.

Did he think the fireworks, with their window-rattling booms, were the work of some cosmic predator big enough to eat him whole? Did he think they were gunshots or claps of thunder spreading out from inexplicable lightning bolts tearing open the sky above our house?

There’s no way to know what he was thinking, but every single year that rangy, 75-pound, country-born yard dog spent the Fourth of July in our shower, trembling, drooling and whimpering in terror.

Clark was lucky. We have friends whose terrified dog spent one Fourth of July fruitlessly trying to outrun the explosions. The next day a good Samaritan found him lying on a hot sidewalk miles away, close to death. Other friends came home from watching the fireworks to discover that their dog had bolted in terror from their fenced backyard and been killed by a car.

And those were all companion animals, the ones whose terror is clear to us. We have no real way of knowing how many wild animals suffer because the patterns of their lives are disrupted with no warning every year on a night in early July. People shooting bottle rockets in the backyard might not see the sleeping songbirds, startled from their safe roosts, exploding into a darkness they did not evolve to navigate — crashing into buildings or depleting crucial energy reserves. People firing Roman candles into the sky above the ocean may have no idea that the explosions can cause seabirds to abandon their nests or frighten nesting shorebirds to death.

Then there’s the wildlife driven into roads — deer and foxes, opossums and skunks, coyotes and raccoons. Any nocturnal creature in a blind panic can find itself staring into oncoming headlights, unsure whether the greater danger lies in the road or in the sky or in the neighborhood yards surrounding them.

And all that’s on top of the dangers posed by fireworks debris, which can be toxic if ingested, or the risk of setting off a wildfire in parched summertime vegetation. Little wonder, then, that fireworks are banned in all national wildlife refuges, national forests and national parks.

[---]

“All flourishing is mutual,” writes Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, in her best-selling book, “Braiding Sweetgrass.” This is one of the most repeated lines in contemporary environmental literature, and for good reason. It reminds us that all creation, human and other than human, is interconnected. At a time when life on this planet is faltering in every possible way, Dr. Kimmerer gently points out that our own flourishing depends on the flourishing of planetary systems that we are barely beginning to understand.

Addressing climate change and biodiversity loss on a planet with eight billion human residents won’t be simple. How to grow affordable food without using petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides that poison pollinators, for example, is a challenge. How to build enough housing for human beings without also disrupting natural ecosystems is a challenge. Such things are doable, though they won’t be easy.

But there are easy things we can do at no real cost to ourselves. We can eat more vegetables and less animal protein. We can cultivate native plants. We can seek out products that aren’t packaged in plastic, spend less time in cars and airplanes, raise the thermostat in the summer and lower it in the winter. As Dr. Kimmerer points out in “The Serviceberry,” her forthcoming book, “We live in a time when every choice matters.”

In that context, surely, we can give up fireworks. Of all the little pleasures that give life meaning and joy, surely fireworks don’t come close to the top of the list, and it costs us nothing to give them up. This is one case in which doing the right thing requires no significant sacrifice, one case in which doing the right thing has an immediate, noticeable, undeniably positive effect on a suffering world.

The conflation of selfishness with patriotism is the thing I have the hardest time accepting about our political era. Maybe we have the right to eat a hamburger or drive the biggest truck on the market or fire off bottle rockets deep into the night on the Fourth of July, but it doesn’t make us good Americans to do such things. How can it possibly be American to look at the damage that fireworks can cause — to the atmosphere, to forests, to wildlife, to our own beloved pets, to ourselves — and shrug?

The truly American thing would be to join together to make every change we can reasonably make to alleviate the suffering of our fellow creatures, human and other than human alike. The truly American thing would be to plant a victory garden large enough to encompass the entire natural world.

 

The Elemental Foe - Poverty

Gratitude, gratitude, gratitude. Most of humanity lacks a sense of what we are escaping everyday. 

We abuse and torture all animals in the name of protein, waste so much food every time we eat, waste so much water, electricity and zillion other material things. 

Next time you do any of the above and/or forgot gratitude, remember these lines from this important post: 

Even now, having escaped true poverty, you walk through your days with no consciousness of how closely it stalks behind you. Remember the last time you had to go an extra hour without eating? Remember the gnawing feeling in the pit of your stomach, the red fog that seemed to settle over your brain? You are always just a few hours away from that. You will never outrun it. Humanity as a whole is only a few days or weeks away; if the elaborate and fantastically expensive food supply and distribution system we’ve built were to suffer an interruption, we would be reduced to the level of starving wild animals in short order.

[---]

It is industrial modernity — our single weapon against the elemental foe. It took centuries of blood and sweat to build, centuries of sacrifice by our sturdiest workers, our most brilliant inventors, and our most visionary leaders. And it is fantastically complex, far beyond the ability of even the most brilliant individual to understand in full; only collectively, at the level of society, do we shore up its fragile walls and keep it from collapse every day.

[---]

And to us also falls the task of reminding the world that growth must be sustainable. If we burn the walls of our fortress to throw a party in the moment, there will be nothing left to protect our descendants, and the foe will devour them. It is tempting to believe that manmade climate change is not real, that natural habitats can be razed without consequence, and that the world’s waters represent an infinite safe dumping ground for pollution. These are all just more unaffordable daydreams.

Part of this task is to remind the world of the importance of technological progress. Without newer and more sustainable sources of energy and materials, our choice would be between degrowth and environmental destruction. Technology built industrial modernity, and technology sustains it, and only technology can extend it into the indefinite future.

But most of all, it falls to us to extend the fortress’ protection to every human on the planet. As you read these words, there are still billions of humans living outside the sheltering walls of industrial modernity — still grappling hand to hand with the foe. Less than half of humanity lives on more than $10 a day. Almost two billion live on less than $3.65. Two billion lack access to safely managed drinking water. Every day, 190 million people go hungry in India alone.

[---]

If you want to understand the principles that underlie my political leanings, this is the key. Humanity is at war — a war so old, so terrible, and so all-consuming that even World War 3 would be a minor skirmish in comparison. Whether or not we remember it, we are always on death ground. 

We need to innovate to eradicate elemental foe, and eradicate pain and suffering of all living beings.

• Perceptually educate kids on this. 
• Work on turning this into an omnipresent awareness. 

Because as usual in the history of humanity, only a handful of humans will rise to the task and make this a reality. 

And yes, rest will be complacent. We cannot afford to keep complaining about the complacent 99.9% of humanity. 

Focus on lifting those handful of humans who act on it. 

 

The Myth Of The West

I am exhausted hearing people talking and writing about omnipotent and wise Greeks and Romans. 

A delusion propagated for centuries that these ancients somehow "plucked" wisdom out of thin air. The reality was very different. 

Few years ago, Gladwell wrote a brilliant piece titled "The Tweaker" on Steve Jobs. 

Greeks and Romans (as far as we know) were the best tweakers. They were exceptional at assimilating good ideas from other civilizations. In other words, these folks were open-minded, and integrated wisdom from other civilizations. 

We need to understand this important and powerful trait and stop teaching "magic". 

Review of Josephine Quinn's new book How the World Made the West: A 4,000-Year History:

This book is written in opposition to “civilisational thinking”, which suggests that there is such a thing as “Western civilisation” existing independently of all others. To Quinn, the concept is not only a manifestation of arrogance on the part of the Westerners who promoted it (especially 19th-century imperialists): it is also a recipe for sterility. Civilisation thrives on cross-pollination.

Quinn’s second big idea is that the notion of “influence”, suggesting that successor cultures are shaped by those that precede them, is misleading. A conventional narrative relates that the collective European mind was formed by the thinkers of ancient Greece and Rome, with modifications by Christianity. On the contrary, says Quinn: the past is dead. It is the living who pick and choose the ingredients they will throw into the stew of their own culture. Peoples of the “West” cooked up their material and conceptual world using the wheel from the Central-Asian steppe, poetry from Persia, legal codes from Mesopotamia, mathematics from Babylon and India, Mongolian stirrups, gold from sub-Saharan Africa, maritime skills from the people of the Levant and the far north, and an Asian religion. The founders of “Western civilisation” didn’t limit themselves to any hemisphere, geographically or intellectually, and without their interminglings the mongrel culture we have inherited would have been infinitely poorer and less dynamic.

[---]

She is more interested in trade than in conquest, less impressed by Alexander and Julius Caesar than by the Phoenician sailors who rounded the Cape of Good Hope in the sixth century BCE, nearly 2,000 years before the Renaissance explorer Bartolomeu Dias. Readers are likely to seize upon old acquaintances, but she nods only briefly at Achilles and Abraham (whom she describes approvingly as a “travelling man”) and at William the Conqueror. Her project is to remind us that if these names are familiar, it is because the caprices of fate and propaganda have made them so. She prefers to dwell on less celebrated names and societies – not Rome but Etruria; not Sparta but Uruk; not the Egypt of the pharaohs and Cleopatra, but the Garamantes, who built a city that dominated trade across the Sahara for a thousand years, digging tunnels up to five kilometres long to bring water from underground lakes to irrigate their crops.

Her time-scale is immense, and she manages it in quick-quick-slow rhythm. An empire can rise and crumble, four centuries passing, in one sentence. Other times she slows right down to focus on a single encounter. Her geographical reach is equally large. Constantine is in York when he is proclaimed “Augustus” (a term Quinn prefers to “emperor”), and from there he crosses all Europe to establish his capital in the Greek town of Byzantium, on the Roman empire’s easternmost edge.

[---]

Quinn is a professor of ancient history at Oxford, and year after year she reads applications from students saying dutifully that they want to study classics to familiarise themselves with the roots of Western culture. Wrong, she says. This book is a reminder of how much more widely they need to look.

Very Good Sentence On Cooking & Eating Vegetables

There were so many things I didn’t think about Chinese food until I read it in Fuchsia Dunlop. Her new book Invitation to Banquet is organized around 30 dishes to explain every aspect of Chinese cuisine:

Cantonese sashimi, for example, to discuss knifework; and Mapo tofu to talk about the intense flavors that comes from fermenting the bean. 

Fuchsia raises the questions I have: “Where is the creativity, where the delight, in simply roasting a chunk of meat and serving it with bald potatoes and carrots, as the English like to do?” 

And I feel like she is speaking for me when she is lamenting the poor use of leafy vegetables in western cuisine: “either overcooked or served brutally raw as some strange kind of virtue,” compared to the Chinese greens, which are “more generously portioned than the apologetic little dishes of spinach served on the side… and cooked as carefully as anything else.” 

I wish that there was a book like this for every cuisine to introduce techniques and traditions through personal stories.

- Dan Wang's 2023 Letter

Dog Amma In Delhi

 I salute you Amma! Thank you for everything you do. 

All That Breathes...

1983 & Jersey - Sports As A Means To An End !

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

- Margaret Mead

I was 9 years old when India won the world cup in 1983.  Everyone in my house were sleeping; I was watching the match with someone who was visiting us. I think he was my mom's relative. That is one of my oldest memories. I don't remember how jubilant I felt that night but there are glimpses of me walking to the refrigerator and drinking ice cold water (which meant I was happy and needed a drink).

That victory changed confidence of Indian people. It was the seed which lead to the growth of Tendulkar in 1990 who single handedly responsible for boasting confidence of India. Timing was impeccable as the economy opened up around the same time. I am pretty sure, this generation doesn't have any idea what it meant and hence, they have no gratitude for what they have now. 

I also met Kapil Dev near my house before I moved to US. These two cricketers are great human beings who have a big hand in changing a fate of nation which was stuck in the past even after 4 decades of independence. 

The English game of cricket was the biggest catalyst for India to come out of the shadow of English imperialism. 

I don't watch cricket anymore nor any other sports. I think, it was very useful tool for me during my younger days. Sports inspired me and I moved on to other things as I grew older. It's pity that most people use it as a passive entertainment and wasting hours everyday sitting in front of the TV. It's worse in US. 

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumble puppy. 

As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions."

In 1984, Huxley added, "people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us".

This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.

- Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

Jersey is a heart warming story. It's inspired from the life of the late cricketer Raman Lamba. I don't remember much about his career but the kid in me was thrilled to see him come out to bat and he was the fittest person in the team. 

When I read the review of the movie, I thought it was the story of Robin Singh. But this is a story of thousands of talented Indian cricketers and other sportsmen who lost their dreams because of omnipresent bureaucracy. This hasn't changed even today. 

Movies like Jersey are a remainder to younger generation to see the reality as it is, stop using cricket to fuel nationalism, be persistent to fight the system and change it. One can dream. 

The song Maiyya Mannu is soothing.

After a long long time, I got to watch not one but two soulful Hindi movies.

"Re-Discovering" Ashoka In India

Ashoka is one my favorite human beings; but little did I know that he was forgotten in India (surprise! surprise!) until William Jone's resurrected him back in late 1700. 

Beautiful essay on Knowledge is power: The unintended outcomes of Orientalist William Jones’ study of Sanskrit texts

William Jones’s investigations of the past were hobbled by the imperative, commonly felt by European intellectuals of his era, to synchronise events with Biblical timelines. He did, however, make one crucial contribution to the study of Indian history by providing the first accurate dating for the reign of an Indian sovereign who had ruled before the common era. Greek chronicles mentioned that Seleucus Nicator, who succeeded to Alexander the Great’s eastern dominions, had sent his ambassador Megasthenes to the court of an emperor named Sandrocottus at Palibothra. Historians had speculated that Palibothra was the same as Pataliputra, the city known as Patna in modern times. However, that theory had a fatal flaw. Megasthenes described the capital of Sandrocottus as standing at the confluence of two rivers, the Ganges and the Erranaboas, but only the first of these flowed through Patna. Jones unearthed the fact that Patna used to be the site of the confluence of the Ganga and the Son, before the latter changed its course. He found, further, that another name for the Son was the Hiranyabahu, which matched the Erranaboas of Megasthenes’ account. Finally, he discovered a play which told of a usurper king called Chandragupta, who had a court at Pataliputra and had welcomed foreign ambassadors to it. Marshalling all this evidence, Jones could confidently state that Chandragupta was the same as Sandrocottus, whose reign had to have commenced between 325 BCE and 312 BCE.

Following Jones’s proof, the story of the dynasty Chandragupta founded, known as the Mauryas, was pieced together. The most important part of this history related to Chandragupta’s grandson, Ashoka Maurya. It was unravelled by James Prinsep, who came to Calcutta in 1819 as Assistant Assay-Master in the Mint and was later posted to Benares. Where the humanist Jones had delved into literary works, the scientifically-oriented Prinsep studied indecipherable inscriptions in two scripts, Brahmi and Kharoshti. Officials in far-flung areas of the burgeoning British empire in South Asia had come upon pillars and rocks bearing similar-looking messages in these scripts. After years of painstaking collation of data from edicts and coins, Prinsep succeeded in the late 1830s in decoding them.

It was revealed that the pillar and rock inscriptions had been commanded by a king referred to as Devanampiya Piyadasi, Beloved of the Gods. They expounded the ethical principles on which his kingdom was run and were clearly Buddhist in inspiration. Prinsep was informed by a colleague posted in Ceylon that a great Indian king called Ashoka, also known as Piyadasi, had converted to Buddhism and sent a religious mission to Ceylon. The mystery of the inscriptions was thus resolved and Ashoka returned to his rightful place in Indian history alongside Chandragupta/Sandrocottus. The pillars on which Ashokan inscriptions were carved often had lion capitals atop them. A perfectly preserved specimen was excavated in Sarnath in 1904, and was adopted as one of India’s national symbols after independence. The chakra from Ashokan pillars was incorporated in the Indian flag. Thanks to the efforts of British Orientalists, two emperors who had been completely forgotten in India were established among the greatest rulers the subcontinent had seen. It was as if Dushanta’s lost memory had been returned to him.

What I've Been Reading

A long historical view not only helps us to keep calm to a "time of trouble" but reminds us that there is an end to the longest tunnel. Even if we can see no good hope ahead, an historical interest as to what will happen is a help in carrying on. For a thinking man, it can be the strongest check on a suicidal feeling. 

[---]

What can the individual learn from history as a guide to living? Not what to do but what to strive for. And what to avoid in striving. The importance and intrinsic value of behaving decently. The importance of seeing clearly; not least seeing himself clearly. 

[---]

He may realize that the world is a jungle. But if he has seen that it could be better for anyone if the simple principles of decency and kindliness were generally applied, then he must in honesty try to practice these consistently and to live, personally, as if they were general. In other words, he must follow the right he has seen. 

Why Don't We Learn from History? by B.H Liddell Hart (1944). 

Time for a small rant: How stupid of me for not having read this book for over 3 decades, end rant. And I don't think, I have to say anything more. 

Cost of quantifying history (and not understanding history is both science & art): 

It was the school of German historians, headed by Ranke, who in the last century started the fashion of trying to be purely scientific. Any conclusions and generalizations were shunned, and any well-written books become suspect. What was the result? History became too dull to read and devoid of meaning. It became merely a subject for study by specialists. 

So the void was filled by new myths, of exciting power but appalling consequences. The world has suffered, and Germany worst of all, for the sterilization of history that started in Germany. 

The hardest lesson to learn (caused by societal delusion): 

The most dangerous of all delusions are those that arise from the adulteration of history in the imagined interests of national and military morale. Although this lesson of experience has been the hardest earned, it remains the hardest to learn. Those who have suffered most show their eagerness to suffer more. 

This camouflaged history not only conceals faults and deficiencies that could otherwise be remedied, but engenders false confidence, and false confidence underlies most of the failures that military history records. 

On human nature: 

It was saddening to discover how many apparently honorable men would stoop to almost anything to help their own advancement. 

Loyalty is a noble quality, so long as it is not blind and does not exclude the higher loyalty to truth and decency. 

Faith vs. Truth: 

A realization of the cycle of familiar errors, endlessly recurring, which largely makes up the course of military history may lead one to think that the only hope of escape lies in more candid scrutiny of past experience and new honest in facing the facts. 

But one should still be able to appreciate the point of view of those who fear the consequences. Faith matters so much in times of crisis. One must have gone deep into history before reaching the conviction that truth matters more. 

We are blind to our own blindness: 

All of us do foolish things, but the wiser realize what they do. The most dangerous error is the failure to recognize our own tendency to error. That failure is a common affliction of authority. 

Understanding the restraints of democracy: 

We learn from history that democracy has commonly put a premium on conventionality. By its nature, it prefers those who keep step with the slowest march of thought and frowns on those who may disturb the "conspiracy for mutual inefficiency". Thereby, this system of government tends to result in the triumph of mediocrity and entails the exclusion of first-rate ability if it is combined with honesty. But the alternative to it, despotism, almost inevitably means the triumph of stupidity. And of the two evils, the former is less. 

Anyone who urges a different system, for efficiency's sake, is betraying the vital tradition. 

(Note: A lot of "intelligent" people voted for a narcissist Trump deluding themselves with imagined efficiency and unfortunately, it is still happening in India with no end in sight. Now, please go back and read the title of this book.) 

On Napolean & Hitler: 

To the unromantic historian, Napolean is more of a knave than a hero. But to the philosopher, he is even more of a fool than a knave. His folly was shown in the ambition he conceived and the goal he pursued, while this frustration was ensured by his capacity to fool himself. Yet the reflection remains that such a fool and his devasting folly was largely the creation of smaller, if better, fools. So great is the fascination of romantic folly!

Almost exactly 129 years after Napolean launched his invasion is Russia, Hitler began his attack on Russia, on June 22, 1941. Despite the revolutionary changes which had taken place in the interval he was to provide a tragic demonstration of the truth that mankind, and least of all its "great men," do not learn from history. 

The secret of lasting reforms: 

Reforms that last are those that come naturally, and with less friction, when men's minds have become ripe of them. A life spent in sowing a few grains of fruitful thought is a life spent more effectively than in hasty action that produces a crop of weeds. That leads us to see the difference, truly a vital difference, between influence and power. 

On the myth of "great man" (god delusion): 

History shows that the main hindrance to real progress is the ever-popular myth of the 'great man'. While 'greatness' may perhaps be used in a comparative sense, if even then referring more to particular qualities than to the embodied sum, the 'great man' is a clay idol whose pedestal has been built up by the natural human desire to look up to someone, but whose form has been carved by men who have not yet outgrown the desire to be regarded or to picture themselves, as great men. Many of those who gain power under power present systems have much that is good in them. Few are without some good in them. But to keep the lowest common denominator of the people, to instinct rather than to reason, to interest rather than to right, to expediency rather than to principle. It sounds practical and may thus command respect where to speak of ideals might only arouse distrust. But in practice, there is nothing more difficult than to discover where expediency lies, it is apt to lead from one expedient to another, in a vicious circle through endless knots. 

The ultimate dream (and mine too): 

How differently the affairs of the world would go, with a little more decency, a little more honesty, a little more thought! Thought-attempting, above all, to see a few moves ahead and realize the dangers of condoning evil. We try to play the old diplomatic game, yet cannot hope to play it successfully, because we have acquired scruples from which the old-style exponent of realpolitik is free, not yet having grown up as far. 

(Note: "decent" men who never use foul language in public nor private, mindlessly voted for the dangerous man Trump who used the word "pussy" in public gatherings. Now, please go back and read the title of this book.)

The germs of war: 

Sympathies and antipathies, interests and loyalties, cloud the vision. And this kind of short-sight is apt to produce short temper. 

As a light on the processes by which wars are manufactured and detonated, there is nothing more illuminating than a study of the fifty years of history preceding 1914. The vital influences are to detected not in the formal documents compiled by rulers, ministers, and generals but in their marginal notes and verbal asides. Here are revealed their instinctive prejudices, lack of interest in truth for its own sake, and indifference to the exactness of the statement and reception which is a safeguard against dangerous misunderstanding. 

I have come to think that accuracy, in the deepest sense is the basic virtue, the foundation of understanding, supporting the promise of progress. 

Sweeping judgments, malicious gossip, inaccurate statements which spread a misleading impression; these are symptoms of the moral and mental recklessness that gives rise to war. Studying their effect, one is lead to see that the germs of war lie within ourselves, not in economics, politics, or religion as such. How can we hope to rid the world of war until we have cured ourselves of the originating causes?

(Note: once again, men of "character" without a hint of irony nor awareness of their dissonance voted for a narcissist Trump. Now, please go back and read the title of this book.)

How the germs work: 

While economic factors formed a predisposing cause, the deeper and more decisive factors lay in human nature, its possessiveness, competitiveness vanity, and pugnacity, all of which were fomented by the dishonestly which breeds inaccuracy. 

Both of those governments, and their foreign ministers, in particular, were all ready to bring misery upon millions rather than swallow their injured pride. 

Plan for peace: 

Any plan for peace is apt to be not only futile but dangerous. Like most planning, unless of a mainly material kind, it breaks down through disregard of human nature. Worse still, the higher the hopes that are built on such a plan, the more likely that their collapse may precipitate war. 

There is no panacea for peace that can be written out in a formula like a doctor's prescription. But one can set down a series of practical points; elementary principles drawn from the sum of human experience in all times. Study war and learn from its history. Keep strong, if possible. In any case, keep cool. Have unlimited patience. Never corner an opponent and always assist him to save his face. Put yourself in his shoes so as to see things through his eyes. Avoid self-righteousness like the devil; nothing is so self-blinding. Cure yourself of two commonly fatal delusions: the idea of victory and the idea that war cannot be limited. 

How did our civilization has survived so far?: 

An important influence was the growth of more formal and courteous manners in social life. This code of manners spread into the field of international relations. These two factors, reason and manners, saved civilization when it was on the verge of collapse. Men came to feel that behavior mattered more than belief, and customs more than creeds, in making earthly life tolerable and human relations workable. 

(Note: Belief in an imaginary economy mattered for 70 plus million US citizens than behavior and customs and ended up voting for a narcissist Trump).

War is a means to an end (Difference between Napolean and Wellington): 

It was because he really understood war that he became so good at securing peace. He was the least militaristic of soldiers and free from the lust of glory. It was because he saw the value of peace that he became so unbeatable in war. For he kept the end in view, instead of falling in love with the means. Unlike Napolean, he was not infected by the romance of war, which generates illusions and self-deception. That was how Napolean had failed and Wellington prevailed. 

If you wish for peace, understand war. If there is one lesson that should be clear from history it is that bad means deform the end, or deflect its course thither. I would suggest the corollary that, if we take care of the means, the end will take care of itself. 

History and Christianity (how to limit and eliminate idealogy): 

The oldest gospel manuscripts belong to the fourth century A.D. They are copies of copies so that there was an immensely long interval during which copyists might alter the original text to fit the religious ideas of their own generation. Biblical scholars have to base themselves on nothing more definite than a tradition in ascribing the origin of the earliest written gospels to the second half of the first century A.D. If they are correct in their deduction, which is really speculation, there is still no means of telling how much they were altered by editing in the course of three hundred years; a period that abounded in controversy and schisms in the Chruch. 

We are given minds to use, and there can be no better use for them than religious thinking. But we should humbly recognize there may be different paths and feel in sympathy with all other travelers. The difficulties that arise in religious doctrine and history too often drive thoughtful people into a state of no belief. But for my own part, I have found that the difficulties tend to disappear if one remembers that such doctrine and history was complied by human interpreters, humanly liable to mistakes. 

On Confucianism (and Buddism): 

Confucianism was humanly wiser. It recognized, and applied, better than Christianity the truth of experience that was epitomized in Aristotle's observation that "Men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting in a particular way."  At the same time, the Chinese themselves seem to have found that Confucianism "was not enough." Hence the appeal of Buddhism and Taoism there, often in combination with Confucianism. They provided a more spiritual element that mankind wanted. 

Towards the middle of the book, Liddell Hart wrote these beautiful lines to given a simple heuristic on what might work. It felt as though he was talking about how Max and I lived for 13 years (I continue to do so with him inside me). It made me smile and think at least we were and are on the right path... 

The race of power and personal positions seems to destroy all men's characters. I believe that the only creature who can keep his honour is a man living on his own estate; he has no need to intrigue and struggle, for it is no good intriguing for fine weather. 

This is an amazing book and should be treasured for life. Please read and re-read it for the rest of your life. 

Our deeper hope from experience is that it should make us, not shrewder (for next time), but wiser (forever). History teaches us personal philosophy. 

- Jacob Burckhardt

Once we get a meta-level understanding of history, we should turn to the present and salute the people who make this civilization tick. One of them is Alexey Navalny. Let's cheer and support his audacity.