Rajiv Chopra > Rajiv's Quotes

“According to Colin Gray, director of the Centre for Strategic Studies at the University of Reading in the UK, ‘Making strategy is by far the most difficult and risky than making policy and war plans. By its very nature strategy is more demanding of the intellect and perhaps the imagination. Excellence in strategy requires the strategist to transcend simple categories of thought. Success”
― Pravin Sawhney, Dragon on Our Doorstep: Managing China Through Military Power

“biggest mistake that the West has made in addressing the issue of radicalization is to dismiss the cause. It is almost impossible for a person, with the promise of a fulfilling life ahead, to choose death without a cause. Since we usually emulate the West, we are making the same mistake in Kashmir—dismissing insurgents as either misguided youth or denouncing them as terrorists, as if they are operating completely without a context.”
― Pravin Sawhney, Dragon on Our Doorstep: Managing China Through Military Power

“The late defence analyst K. Subrahmanyam wrote, ‘Politicians enjoy power without any responsibility, bureaucrats wield power without any accountability, and the military assumes responsibility without any direction.”
― Pravin Sawhney, Dragon on Our Doorstep: Managing China Through Military Power

“M.C.A. Henniker. 1951. Memoirs of a Junior Officer. HMSO, p. 235. M.C.A. Henniker’s company was engaged in building a blockhouse on a hilltop overlooking the Khyber Pass. Pathans could have, but they did not stop the life-giving water supply to the British, yet the British army used poison gas on the Frontier Pathans in the early twentieth century. This was only to be expected because the British Manual of Military Law stated that the rules of war applied only to conflict ‘between civilized nations’. In fact, the Manual of 1914 clarified that ‘they do not apply in wars with uncivilized States and tribes’.”
― Rajiv Dogra, Durand's Curse: A Line Across the Pathan Heart

“Afghanistan was not an end in itself; the jewel was India which had to be protected from the lusting Russian eyes. As J.R. Seeley noted, …we have the possession of India, and a leading interest in the affairs of all those countries which lie upon the route to India. This and this only involves us in that permanent rivalry with Russia. Two of the world’s greatest powers then, Victorian Britain and Czarist Russia, were engaged in this tournament of shadows; the so-called permanent rivalry which profited neither country. When they started in the beginning of nineteenth century they were 2,000 miles apart. Within a hundred years they were within sniffing distance of each other; some Russian positions were just about 20 miles away from India.”
― Rajiv Dogra, Durand's Curse: A Line Across the Pathan Heart

“When prejudice shapes policy, every move by the other side appears ominous.”
― Rajiv Dogra, Durand's Curse: A Line Across the Pathan Heart

“It is important to note here that Mortimer Durand tells the Amir right at the start of their negotiations that ‘for the future, the Persian text of all communications between the Government of India and the Amir would be regarded as binding.’ Despite this British undertaking, the Amir was made to sign only the English text of the Agreement on 12 November. But moral issues and broken promises did not unduly trouble Durand.”
― Rajiv Dogra, Durand's Curse: A Line Across the Pathan Heart

“In each of these, there was initial turmoil. In some cases, mass migration and bloodshed had followed. But after the first few bitter months, people settled down to make new lives. Only the Pashtuns have remained unreconciled. Is it because the Pashtuns were, and are, poor? As Henry Miller said in the American context, ‘We have two American flags always: one for the rich and one for the poor. When the rich fly it, it means that things are under control; when the poor fly it, it means danger, revolution and anarchy.’ Alas, fate has handed the Pashtuns a poor flag.”
― Rajiv Dogra, Durand's Curse: A Line Across the Pathan Heart

“Scientists in Israel created mutations in the receptor-binding domain in an attempt to find variants that bind ever more tightly to the receptor. They were remarkably successful. They were able to increase the binding of the S protein by 640 times from 1600 to 2.5 picomolar (Table 1).”
― William A. Haseltine, Variants! The Shape-Shifting Challenge of COVID-19

“Scientists at Rockefeller University deliberately selected laboratory variants resistant to convalescent patient antisera. They found that regardless of the sera used, the S protein could mutate to escape. Most, but not all, of the escape mutants were found in three regions of the spike protein, the N-terminal domain, the receptor-binding domain, and near the furin cleavage site (Figures 52, 53).”
― William A. Haseltine, Variants! The Shape-Shifting Challenge of COVID-19

“The truth is that the price of totalitarian rule was so high that in neither Germany nor Russia has it yet been paid in full.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

“Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

“same. Today, Coca-Cola still sells the same old Coke (at least since 1929, when cocaine was finally eliminated from the drink). None of the workers from back then are left.”
― Jan Eeckhout, The Profit Paradox: How Thriving Firms Threaten the Future of Work

“Yet how can we make sense of an ideology that appeals to skinheads and intellectuals; denounces the bourgeoisie while forming alliances with conservatives; adopts a macho style yet attracts many women; calls for a return to tradition and is fascinated by technology; idealizes the people and is contemptuous of mass society; and preaches violence in the name of order? Fascism, as Ortega y Gasset says, is always ‘A and not A’.”
― Kevin Passmore, Fascism: A Very Short Introduction

“Roomba, made headlines when the company’s CEO, Colin Angle, told Reuters about its data-based business strategy for the smart home, starting with a new revenue stream derived from selling floor plans of customers’ homes scraped from the machine’s new mapping capabilities. Angle indicated that iRobot could reach a deal to sell its maps to Google, Amazon, or Apple within the next two years. In preparation for this entry into surveillance competition, a camera, new sensors, and software had already been added to Roomba’s premier line, enabling new functions, including the ability to build a map while tracking its own location. The market had rewarded iRobot’s growth vision, sending the company’s stock price to $102 in June 2017 from just $35 a year earlier, translating into a market capitalization of $2.5 billion on revenues of $660 million.1 Privacy”
― Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power

“The obscene laws that constitute apartheid are not crazed edicts issued by a dictator, nor the whims of a megalomanic monster, nor the one-man decisions of a fanatical ideologue. They are the result of polite caucus discussions by hundreds of delegates in sober suits, after full debate in party congresses. They are passed after three solemn readings in a parliament that opens every day’s proceedings with a prayer to Jesus Christ. There is a special horror in that fact.”
― Donald Woods, Biko: The powerful biography of Steve Biko and the struggle of the Black Consciousness Movement

“The irony of it all is that we in the developed world are the prime polluters, the most destructive of people on the planet, yet although we have the money and the means to prevent the Earth crossing the deadly threshold that will make global change irreversible, we are hampered by fear.”
― James E. Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth is Fighting Back and How We Can Still Save Humanity

“Famously reversing Voltaire’s dictum, ‘if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him’, Bakunin declared, ‘if God really existed it would be necessary to abolish him’.”
― Ruth Kinna, The Government of No One: The Theory and Practice of Anarchism

“Our livelihoods increasingly depend on our ability to make our case to machines. The clearest example of this is Google. For businesses, whether it’s a bed-and-breakfast or an auto repair shop, success hinges on showing up on the first page of search results.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“Intelligence is the ability to harness the powers of the surrounding world without destroying the said world.”
― Arkady Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic

“Pablo Picasso once remarked, ‘One starts to get young at the age of sixty.”
― Jean Drèze, An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions

“When truth is replaced by silence, the silence is a lie.’ —Yevgeny Yevtushenko”
― Anuradha Bhasin, A Dismantled State: The Untold Story of Kashmir After Article 370

“fascist politicians themselves are invariably vastly more corrupt than those they seek to supplant or defeat. As the historian Richard Grunberger writes in his book The 12-Year Reich, It was a paradoxical situation. Having dinned it into the collective consciousness that democracy and corruption were synonymous, the Nazis set about constructing a governmental system beside which the scandals of the Weimar regime seemed small blemishes on the body politic. Corruption was in fact the central organizing principle of the Third Reich—and yet a great many citizens not only overlooked this fact, but actually regarded the men of the new regime as austerely dedicated to moral probity.2”
― Jason F. Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

“It is often noted, rightly, that fascism elevates the irrational over the rational, fanatical emotion over the intellect. It is less often remarked upon, however, that fascism performs this elevation indirectly, that is to say, propagandistically. “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle’ ” is a 1939 essay by the American literary theorist Kenneth Burke.”
― Jason F. Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

“We have often sneered at the superstition and cowardice of the mediaeval barons who thought that giving lands to the Church would wipe out the memory of their raids or robberies; but modern capitalists seem to have exactly the same notion; with this not unimportant addition, that in the case of the capitalists the memory of the robberies is really wiped out. —G. K. Chesterton (1909)”
― Patrick Radden Keefe, Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty, winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction

“century ago, Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin apparently said that “there are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen.”
― Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution

“If we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future. —WINSTON CHURCHILL”
― Daniel E. Lieberman, The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health and Disease

“Everything about human history is rooted in the earth, which has meant that we must think about habitation, but it has also meant that people have planned to have more territory and therefore must do something about its indigenous residents.”
― Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism

“The River Between, by James Ngugi (later Ngugi wa Thiongo), redoes Heart of Darkness by inducing life into Conrad’s river on the very first page. ‘The river was called Honia, which meant cure, or bring-back-to-life. Honia river never dried: it seemed to possess a strong will to live, scorning droughts and weather changes. And it went on in the very same way, never hurrying, never hesitating. People saw this and were happy.’51 Conrad’s images of river, exploration, and mysterious setting are never far from our awareness as we read, yet they are quite differently weighted, differently—even jarringly—experienced in a deliberately understated, self-consciously unidiomatic and austere language. In Ngugi the white man recedes in importance—he is compressed into a single missionary figure emblematically called Livingstone—although his influence is felt in the divisions that separate the villages, the riverbanks, and the people from one another. In the internal conflict ravaging Waiyaki’s life, Ngugi powerfully conveys the unresolved tensions that will continue well after the novel ends and that the novel makes no effort to contain. A new pattern, suppressed in Heart of Darkness, appears, out of which Ngugi generates a new mythos, whose tenuous course and final obscurity suggest a return to an African Africa. And in Tayb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, Conrad’s river is now the Nile, whose waters rejuvenate its peoples, and Conrad’s first-person British narrative style and European protagonists are in a sense reversed, first through the use of Arabic; second in that Salih’s novel concerns the northward voyage of a Sudanese to Europe; and third, because the narrator speaks from a Sudanese village.”
― Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism

“Much of the passionate controversy about ‘cultural literacy’ in the United States and Europe was about what should be read—the twenty or thirty essential books—not about how they should be read. In many American universities, the frequent right-thinking response to the demands of newly empowered marginal groups was to say ‘show me the African (or Asian, or feminine) Proust’ or ‘if you tamper with the canon of Western literature you are likely to be promoting the return of polygamy and slavery’.”
― Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism