Received a great set of books today, on #VaikunthaEkadashi 📚🕉️🙏

"Mahabharata Tales: 12 Riveting Tales from the Great Epic", by @deepakmrd27
@subbubooks
Thank you, @IndicaOrg @IndicaBooks
#1000ReviewersClub "Reading Sri Aurobindo", edited by Gautam Chikermane @gchikermane and Devdip Ganguli
Pub. @PenguinIndia

Thank you, @IndicaBooks, @IndicaBooks

#1000ReviewersClub

1/6
Watched Kantara a few days back, with subtitles.
Yes, probably the last person to watch it, but...

It's directed by @shetty_rishab, who is also plays the lead character.

Kantara is a great example of superb storytelling, well-etched characters, earthy yet sharp dialog. 2/6
The movie is not only rooted in Hindu ethos, but also, interestingly, checks off most boxes of modern, western storytelling.

You have the hero's journey, the narrative arc, the fall and the redemption - it's all there.

Diana Eck presented D. Mandal as a 'historian' on #Ayodhya.
This is what she cited D. Mandal as saying about the evidence of a temple beneath the Babri Masjid— "There is not a single piece of evidence for the existence of a temple of brick, stone, or both." The Sunni Central Board of Waqf presented D. Mandal as an expert witness for its side.
This is what D. Mandal said under oath:
⊙ I never visited Ayodhya.
⊙ I do not have any specific knowledge of history of Babur's reign.
⊙ I did not get any degree of diploma in archaeology.

Flipkart.
Burns through $3.7 billion in one year.
That's approximately ₹30,000 crores.
₹82.2 crores a day, every day.
₹3.42 crores an hour, every hour of the year.
15 years and not a single naya paisa, dhela, pai, in profits. Ever.
#valuations We have a winner here.

"Five-year-old OkCredit spends ₹297 to earn a rupee in FY22"

Revenue from operations: ₹39 lakh
Total expenses: ₹115 crores
BTB, income from interest & investments: ₹1.93 crores
🤡💸
@entrackr
entrackr.com/2022/12/five-y…

😀😀
"Vandhiyathevan, watching the altercation, felt an overwhelming desire to wrench the staff from the excitable Nambi and deal him a few well-placed, sacred blows upon his revered person, himself."
"Ponniyin Selvan…" by Kalki R Krishnamurthy amzn.in/3ChoFBJ "She gurgled over rocks, flowed through forests, tumbled off hills and gushed through vales; her eagerness to reach her destination growing each moment. As she poured over the plains, it occurred to her that she was closer than ever to her loved one. Her heart trembled..."

Playbook 101

⊙ If you speak up, "Why are you 24x7 in crib mode?"
⊙ If you don't, "Be constructive; don't do RR all the time!"
⊙ If you support the ruling party, "Look at the other good work they are doing!"
⊙ If the opposition, "So you want those thieves to come, eh?"
1/3 ⊙ If you are rich, "Entitled brats like you always want everything for nothing!"
⊙ If you are poor, "Stop whining like some rich dude! Be thankful for what you have."
⊙ If you are an IT professional, "People like you have f**ed up this city; so just STFU!"
2/3

Why do I get the feeling this fishing expedition/proposal to eventually tax UPI transactions is yet another win for the international credit card duopoly, aided by the natural proclivities of the government to tax everything in sight, and often tax them out of existence? 1. The current annual cost of UPI transactions is ~₹ 500 hundred crores.

2. The central government spent ₹4,33,108 crores on subsidies in FY 2021-22.

3. Therefore, the total UPI subsidy burden is ~0.115%, what the govt spends in 10 hours on subsidies.

Really?
I mean, really??

"India is likely to introduce human papillomavirus vaccine (HPV) this year in the country's immunisation programme"
economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/healt… Parliamentary Panel's report in 2013:
⨀ Out of 100 consent forms for AP Project taken
for study, it was found that signatures of witnesses were missing in 69 forms.
⨀ In many forms there were no dates while in others the signature of just one person appeared in seven forms.

Thread from my book review.
"Mahmud Ghaznavi attacked & plundered Mathura in 1071. Al-Utbi recorded the destruction,describing a beautiful temple that would take “200 years” & “hundred thousand red dinars” to replicate,& which had 5 idols made of red gold, each five yards high." "Ghaznavi had all the temples burnt and levelled to the ground. Alberuni, an Iranian chronicler in the eleventh century, wrote that Mathura was venerated “because Vasudeva was there born”."

1/
A thread on books on the #Mahabharata.
In no particular order.
Doesn't cover many genres and non-English languages.

@GitaPress has an unabridged, five-volume, Hindi translation, with Sanskrit shlokas.
You can't go wrong with that. 2/
@bibekdebroy authored a ten-volume, unabridged translation based on the @BhandarkarI Critical Edition.
It was published by @PenguinIndia from 2010-2014.
Spanning 73k shlokas, it is one of the few unabridged translations.
Highly recommended.
#Mahabharata

1/
My wife and I watched #TheKashmirFiles today.
Brief thoughts.
@vivekagnihotri has made a movie that is brilliant.
It stands with the best of them.
It holds its own.
It holds you & does not let you let you look away.
Acting, cinematography, editing, music, dialogs—outstanding. 2/
If #TheKashmirFiles had been only a collage of the horrors perpetrated on Kashmiri Pandits, it would have been out of theaters by now.

It is brutal, truthful, and a very well made movie.
It is also why the 'system' is finding it so difficult to dismiss the movie.

This is one thread on how the media, conglomerates like Disney and others sexualize childhood and children to make them more profitable consumers.

https://twitter.com/AbhinavAgarwal/status/1495275952297099267

This is a second thread on the same topic, with excerpts from "Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture", by Peggy Orenstein.

amzn.to/3p07OE8
#media #society #childhood #sexualization

1/
Thread on the sexualization of children in society and the role the media, movies, and toys play.

These excerpts are from "So Sexy So Soon: The New Sexualized Childhood, and What Parents Can Do to Protect Their Kids", by Jean Kilbourne & Diane E. Levin
amzn.to/3JDAtXv 2/
"A four-year-old girl, in the dramatic play area of her preschool, begins swaying her hips and singing, “Baby, I’m your slave. I’ll let you whip me if I misbehave.”"

#sexualization #society

Mainstream publishers refused to publish these books. These fine books were published by @AryanBooksInt
Each book is lavishly illustrated and beautiful produced, hardbound and printed on thick paper.
Each book is a collector's item.
Each book has broken new ground, shed light and dispelled long standing misconceptions.

A thread (my 205 @SwarajyaMag piece):
"For Sir Winston Churchill Was an Honourable Man"

Churchill authored the six-volume magnum opus, “The Second World War”.
It helped the author earn millions of dollars in today’s value, a Nobel Prize in Literature.

swarajyamag.com/commentary/for… This work was written substantially by a team of ghost writers called The Syndicate – which researched and wrote the drafts for most of the book, as well as pulling material from the war records and archives.
Churchill alone collected the royalties, credit, & the Nobel.

11 Jan, 1966 - India's prime minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri, 'dies' in Tashkent.

Two weeks later...

24 Jan 1966 - Dr. Homi Jehangir Bhabha, founding director of (now named) Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, dies when Air India Flight 101 'Kanchenjunga' 'crashes' in the Swiss Alps. 30th of December 1971
Vikram Sarabhai, known as the father of India’s space program & also the founding chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization, found dead in a hotel room at the Halcyon Castle in Kovalam.
Like Shastri, his cremation was performed without an autopsy.

1/10
Srinagar, Jan 4, 1990.
"Aftab, a local Urdu newspaper, publishes a press release issued by Hizb-ul Mujahideen... asking all Hindus to pack up and leave. Another local paper, Al Safa, repeats this expulsion order.

@KanchanGupta's article from 2005.
rediff.com/news/2005/jan/… 2/10
"Walls are plastered with posters and handbills, summarily ordering all Kashmiris to strictly follow the Islamic dress code, prohibiting the sale and consumption of alcoholic drinks and imposing a ban on video parlours and cinemas."

1/
"Criticism/rejection become commonplace as competitive parents continue to push their children toward higher levels of accomplishment.
As a result,kids can’t find the time, literal/psychological,to linger in internal exploration; a precursor to a well-developed sense of self." 2/
"Kids can present as models of competence and still lack a fundamental sense of who they are. Psychologists call this the “false self,” and it is highly correlated with a number of emotional problems, most notably depression."

1/
A short thread on the boom in startups and their valuations:
Interest rates have been low in the US for more than 10 years. The Fed Funds rate has been at 0.25% since 2008, except for a few years during the Trump administration when they rose to 2%. They are back to 0.25% now. 2/
Quantitative Easing (QE) has pumped in trillions of dollars into the US economy.
Clearly, the money has to go somewhere and VCs need returns.
Startups is where some of that money has gone.

A thread on my reviews of Meenakshi Jain ji's books I've written over the years:
"Rama and Ayodhya"
pub: @AryanBooksInt
blog.abhinavagarwal.net/2016/05/rama-a… "Sati: Evangelicals, Baptist Missionaries, and the Changing Colonial Discourse"
by Meenakshi Jain
@AryanBooksInt
blog.abhinavagarwal.net/2019/03/flight…

"But those forty thousand hours had ‘taught him a thing or two about telling a story’ and ‘the rhythms and grammar of storytelling had been imprinted on his DNA’." "He’d written thousands of links, trailers, commercials and news stories on deadlines that ranged from fifteen minutes to fourteen seconds. The thought of a novel a year didn’t faze the controller."
Excerpts from "The Reacher Guy"
@drheathermartin
@LeeChildReacher