Rakesh

“Corruption is power that overflows its bounds. By definition, it rarely stays contained in a single location.”
― Nick Harkaway, Gnomon

“I've never understood America,"said the king.
"Neither do we, sir. You might say we have two governments, kind of overlapping. First we have the elected government. It's Democratic or Republican, doesn't make much difference, and then there's corporation government."
"They get along together, these governments?"
"Sometimes," said Tod. "I don't understand it myself. You see, the elected government pretends to be democratic, and actually it is autocratic. The corporation governments pretend to be autocratic and they're all the time accusing the others of socialism. They hate socialism."
"So I have heard," said Pippin.
"Well, here's the funny thing, sir. You take a big corporation in America, say like General Motors or Du Pont or U.S. Steel. The thing they're most afraid of is socialism, and at the same time they themselves are socialist states."
The king sat bolt upright. "Please?" he said.
"Well, just look at it, sir. They've got medical care for employees and their families and accident insurance and retirement pensions, paid vacations -- even vacation places -- and they're beginning to get guaranteed pay over the year. The employees have representation in pretty nearly everything, even the color they paint the factories. As a matter of fact, they've got socialism that makes the USSR look silly. Our corporations make the U.S. Government seem like an absolute monarchy. Why, if the U.S. government tried to do one-tenth of what General Motors does, General Motors would go into armed revolt. It's what you might call a paradox sir.”
― John Steinbeck, The Short Reign of Pippin IV

“Our self is not constructed by claiming one side of a duality. Rather we are fashioned as drops of water, of the same abundant substance as the ocean. We have within our small selves all the properties, all the constitutive molecules that make up the limitless whole. We are the many, held in the one. We are fractal images of the ultimate reality.

If we embraced this wholeness within ourselves, perhaps we would be less anxious as men about the feminine within, less anxious as heterosexuals about our (perhaps unexplored) capacity to love someone of the same sex, less anxious as Hindus about the evidence of Muslim culture in our lives, less anxious as ‘upper castes’ about the breaching of our spaces by the “lower”, and generally speaking less anxious as “us” about the lurking presence of “them” in us. We could relax into our porosity. We would no longer need to feel small, threatened and in constant need of securing our borders, rallying our defences against being overwhelmed by the “Other”.”
― Shabnam Virmani, Burn Down Your House: Provocations From Kabir

“There's no such thing as the Third World. There are only two worlds, and both of them exist everywhere. In one live those who create injustice, and all the rest, the ones who have to put up with the injustice, live in the other.”
― Uday Prakash, The Walls of Delhi: Three Stories