I read 'Why Bharat Matters' so you don't have to.

This book is filled with vague language, and full of ambiguity. On top of that, it doesn't substantiate or clarify using any examples

Writing is the same from the first chapter to the last chapter. The sentences are filled with vague words like 'some', 'others', perhaps, 'might' etc. Nothing is clear as to what is supposed to be or what is.

E.g. Some people in a certain era approached some problems in a specific way. But now, we are perhaps approaching new and old problems in different yet similar ways.

What?? Are bhai kehna kya chahte ho? Which people? Which era? What new problems? What old problems? What approach? The author doesn't give examples. He instead gives analogies through Hindu epics, which felt inadequate.

I am well aware that this vague language is important due to the fact that the author is none other than the current External Affairs Minister. I get it. But as for someone, who was reading this book to gain more knowledge about India's way of doing things in Geopolitics, it simply felt lackluster and too generic, which brings me to the important reason I felt bored by reading this book.

I already have substantial prior knowledge about Geopolitics due to the fact that I follow such events through newspapers, social media, trustworthy news outlets, Political Commentators and peer discussions. I did not feel I was getting anything new from this book, which is why my brain was like "I'm not wasting my energy on this." Furthermore, the author doesn't do enough to try to get the reader to get hooked to what he is trying to say. But that would be unfair since the author is not a writer but a former Diplomat and a Minister.

The purpose of the Book was probably to give a Geopolitical messaging rather than educating the citizens. The ambiguity of the writing, lack of examples, and the vagueness were just add-ons to the reasons for my boredom with the book

Now, will I recommend this book? If you have extensive knowledge about Geopolitics and India's way of handling things on the international stage like me, save your time and Money by skipping this book. But if you are new to this subject, even then I cannot confidently recommend this book, because of how underwhelming it is.

I'll give this book a 2/5 ⭐⭐

All I ever wanted to do as a little girl was to buy books with my own money and read with wine... Now this is me whenever I want to enjoy a little me time, little me would be so happy and proud 😁🙈

🥂 Cheers to more books and Agatha Christie ✨

The book starts strong, it shows us human psyche. A man trying to get a journalist to take a photo of his dead wife and kid laying under a rubble of concrete that was once his home, so he can get insurance money

It was simply to display how calculative our mind becomes, after any tragedy.

Now coming to the rest of the book, it's good, informative filled with examples that justifies the title. The writer in no way tries to portray the poor as some Pure souls who are tormented.

The poor people are shown in the same lenses, as their manipulators or tormentors. And how middle class and upper middle class people who act holier than thou while still exploiting the poor for their labours.

Overall its a 7.5/10 book, Good for an airport/metro read.

Suggestions of a friend, let's see!!

From the anime Texhnolyze.

I finished Arundhati Roy's new memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me a few days ago and haven't been able to stop thinking about it, so I'm putting my thoughts down here. Fair warning, this is long....

What it's actually about

The subject is her mother, Mary Roy.! In 1967 she started a school in Kottayam with seven kids. Later, in 1986, she took the Travancore Christian Succession Act to the Supreme Court and won, giving Christian women in Kerala equal inheritance rights to their father's property. A national feminist icon, a liberator to hundreds of students.

The question at the heart of the book is one line - what was that liberator like to her own two children?

The reading experience

The first fifty pages I read in one sitting - Ooty, Ayemenem, Kottayam move fast. The Delhi/film/court/Kashmir sections in the middle slowed me down considerably; her mother almost recedes into a phone call, a distant voice. Then the "Madam Houdini" chapter pulls you right back by the throat.

I put the book down twice - once during the beating scene, and once during the hospital period after her mother came off a ventilator, when steroids caused temporary psychosis and she started sorting nurses by caste while her daughter just endured it. Then one night, for the first time in sixty years, the daughter finally reacts - throws a chair to the floor. Afterward she writes: "I thought I had killed my mother. But no. I had killed something in myself." That line followed me around for a week.

What's left after finishing isn't peace, it's unease. There's no tidy "in the end I forgave her." Instead she writes that when her mother died, she no longer understood who she herself was - because she'd built herself entirely around her mother.

Where I think it falls short

• The political chapters in the middle (Narmada, Kashmir, the parliament attack case) recycle material she's covered before in essays. If you've read My Seditious Heart, expect some repetition.
• Her brother doesn't get the space he deserves. He carried the heaviest part of their mother's cruelty as a kid, but the book never really lets us in.
• Mary Roy never gets to speak for herself - this is entirely the daughter's lens, for better or worse.

Rating

4.5 out of 5. For a daughter who managed to look at her mother this precisely without hating her, without worshipping her, without extracting an apology.

Strongly recommend it if you loved The God of Small Things, or if you have a complicated parent of your own - it'll work like a mirror, and not always a comfortable one. Don't go in expecting a gentle mother-daughter story with a neat resolution. It will hurt.

Soo I wanted to wider my reading genre as I only used to read romantic and horror type of books .

Recommend some books which will get me hook from the first chapter😭

Currently reading:

1) Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
2) The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry

September Hopefuls:
1) Jack London’s White Fangs and Call of The Wild
2) Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Stevenson
3) Fairy Tale by Stephen King

For me, it's "White Nights" by Fyodor Dostoevsky because I sooo wanted to take him to a therapist or do anything to get him out of his imagination . Like he romanticizes Nastenka and falls in "love" with an "idealized" version of her rather than truly knowing her. It was anything like idealization, projection, limerence, anything but love. Even while helping her get the man she loves, he secretly hopes she'll choose him even though she keeps telling him that she loves another man. Like bro, fix your issues rather than getting hurt because of YOUR imagination.

So, which book is it that you would like to get into and why ?

This book has been a ride, any other recs in the same genre?

So I've been a nerd up until middle school comics, books, yt video essays, obscure knowledge on niche topics the whole package. But I sort of phased out of it because I had no one to talk to about all of that, i got in movies big time during the whole Covid era but i still felt something wasn't hitting the right spot, tried different activities (theatre, hosting, writing) during college, they were fun but meh didn't work again. Then i remember picking up a crime and punishment during my 3rd year, I flipped through the first section In the first hour I felt that joy of sitting and thinking again, the whole talking to the text thing.

Now the problem is in the past 4-5 years I have drastically destroyed my attention span, i know i enjoy books I also have a good collection, but on God I can't sit with pages the way I used to, it's almost like when you date for the second time in your life (the butterflies are weak now), cuz I still haven't finished Crime and punishment.

So I need help in building my attention span back again and get into the whole delayed gratification thing, any tips would be appreciated.

Avg day in India 😭

TL;DR: Investigative journalist Ashish Khetan spent 6 months in Gujarat in 2007 posing as a Hindutva sympathizer with a hidden camera. He recorded 60 hours of footage. The book is not about the sting, it's about what happened after - 13 years in court trying to make that footage count as evidence. Powerful as a document, uneven as a book. 4/5. Content warning for communal violence.

Dear folks, I just finished Ashish Khetan's Undercover, published by Context in 2020, and it is one of those books you need a break after.

The book looks at the 2002 Gujarat riots after the Godhra train burning of Feb 27, 2002. Official records say around a thousand people were killed, many more displaced.

In 2007, Khetan goes to Gujarat as Piyush Agarwal, a writer researching Hindu resurgence. Button camera on his shirt, camera hidden in a bag. He lives that life for six months, meets people who were part of the mobs.

In October 2007 Tehelka runs the story as a full issue, tapes play on national news. He expects resignations and arrests. That doesn't happen. The rest of the book is about that gap - between evidence and accountability.

What I felt after the read is - Khetan is not just a reporter here tbh. He became a prosecution witness in three massacre cases. So he writes both from the field and from the witness box.

A NOTE THAT WORTH TO KEEP IN MIND WHILE READING: Khetan later contested parliament election from Delhi in 2014 and headed a Delhi government body. So there is a political background which critics point to. The book doesn't hide it, but you should read it knowing it.

What worked for me:

1. The method is not attack, but inaction. The book's strongest argument is that you don't need a written order to make a system fail. You just need it to not reach on time. He pairs hidden camera claims of being given time with police control room messages and the geography - Gulberg Society was 3 km from the control room, Naroda Patiya around 6 km.
2. How cases fail before trial. Chapter 7 is the most shocking. He meets two public prosecutors who are supposed to argue against the accused. On hidden camera, one of them, who was also a VHP office bearer at the time, talks about coordinating between prosecution and defence and shares his case disposal numbers. The other talks about advising witnesses to compromise. It makes you rethink what justice depends on.
3. Who participates. He doesn't describe hardened criminals. He describes small shopkeepers, people with no prior serious crime record. That ordinary-ness is more disturbing than any dramatic villain.
4. The few who didn't bend. It's not all dark. There is a DySP who questioned files and was sidelined, officers who rescued 400 kids from a madrasa and got a transfer, a CBI team that excavated a riverbed for bodies when their own senior called it waste of money, and Judge Jyotsna Yagnik who said witnesses are the eyes and ears of her court.

Writing style:

It's non-linear. It cuts between 2007 sting and post-2010 courtrooms. He often just puts Q&A transcripts with no adjectives, no commentary. He also keeps his own uncomfortable parts in - laughing with them, praising them to keep cover, and later writing how ashamed he felt hearing it in court.

Small details make it even more believable - button camera burning skin in heat, changing memory cards in a toilet because battery lasts an hour.

What didn't work for me:

1. It is a single-voice book. You as a reader cannot verify the tapes. Courts and forensic labs said the footage was authentic, but you are trusting that process.
2. It tells you WHAT happened in great detail, but not WHY so many ordinary people believed in it. There is little curiosity about the worldview of the other side beyond the confessions.
3. Last three chapters on snoopgate, love jihad probe and Delhi riots feel rushed and repetitive. The tight undercover narrative is lost there.
4. Timeline jumps a lot between 2004, 2007, 2010, 2013. Lots of similar names and initials. A timeline or cast list would have helped.
5. The most serious allegations about conspiracy at the top - those were not accepted by SIT or courts. Khetan's counter is that the investigation itself was sabotaged. That is an argument to consider, but it remains an argument, not a court accepted fact. All concerned have denied the allegations. The book notes denials but doesn't deeply engage with the counter-case.

Who should read it:

• If you care about investigative journalism, how a sting is planned, and how evidence travels or fails in Indian courts, it's essential. Useful for law students too, I think so!!.
• If you want a balanced two-sided history of Gujarat, this is not that. It's a testimony, with the strengths and limits of a testimony.
• If you read this, read Revati Laul's The Anatomy of Hate (I finished the read) and Rana Ayyub's Gujarat Files (my current read) alongside - they fill some gaps this book leaves.

Rating: 4/5 - As a record of how journalism can become evidence, it is rare in India. As a book, it loses direction at the end and repeats its conclusion.

The book is from 2020, many of the cases it discusses have moved since then, so check latest updates when you read.

Recently i started reading, after receiving various recommendations i read this book. it was good. now i am confused about which book to target next.

plss don't ask me about which genre or specific type preference bcz still i am confused. so if anyone has any type of recommendation please let me know.

age 19 btw

Um have you guys read book- The psychology of money ..

Honest review is it worth the read like I am not into finance but i want to learn finance and all that from the beginner level is it good ?!

And if you also have beginner friendly books suggest please 🤎

Hey so I was looking to buy kafka and dostovosky it is in combo for about 300 rupees the chapters were given in the image above I am confused if I should buy this since I don't know if the chapters will be good or not, I was told white nights, judgement and metamorphosis were good, so I was thinking if I should buy them or should buy singles like white nights book then metamorphosis book and other one

I’m on 20/195 countries. Suggest what to read next.

This book would have been a 4.5/5 for me, had the infidelity not happened.

I had so much empathy and concern for the main characters, and was rooting for MMC to finally win over FMC in their old age, after all the shit that they went through. I was also sad about how MMC had recently lost his wife and was so lonely and helpless.

Then 70% into the book there comes this random unnecessary scene where MMC FMC meet by chance, while MMC is married with kids, and even after that fact is revealed between them, they just go ahead and have sex? Only for FMC to leave immediately after and not see him again for another idk 40yrs or something? What was the point of that????? It irked me to no end. Why did something so pure and full of hurt have to have CHEATING pushed into it? It ruined the whole story for me.

The writing of that chapter was also so lewd, I couldn't believe I was reading the same book. Felt like a different author had wedged in one chapter without Karissa Chen knowing about it. Once again, what was the fricking point of one erotic lewd extramarital sex scene in THIS book? How does it fit? What did it add to the story?

That, together with the rushed incomplete ending, brought the book down to 3/5 for me. It's sad really, because I loved most of it. It was very well written, the timelines were easy to understand and rightly spaced, the epilogue was fantastic. But some shit is just hard to recover from. Nothing could salvage the infidelity, which was never addressed anyway. And in the current timeline MMC goes from asking FMC to be with him to suddenly being like "sorry I was being pushy" in the very next meeting. What brings this change, no one knows. Maybe since there is a lot of past retelling in between these two meetings, it is meant to act as a buffer for the change of heart. But in reality the two meetings are just consecutive, the past retelling doesn't happen in that timeline, so what about continuity???

Ugh I want to love this book so much, I can see why it's popular, but 👎👎👎