Kaustubh Dudhane > Recent Status Updates

This is how Elihu Yale, the Governor of Madras, amassed a large personal fortune before being removed from his post on suspicions of corruption. Part of this ill-gotten wealth was used to fund the university that bears his name. Thus, one of North America's leading universities is built on money garnered through dodgy deals in the Indian Ocean.

One of the intriguing aspects of the medieval world is the success with which the Arabs blocked information about the Indian Ocean from reaching the Europeans.

It is a testimony to the importance of ancient Muzeris that these early Jewish, Christian and Islamic sites are all located within a very short distance of each other. This is saying something at a time when the Christian community in Syria and Iraq is being systematically wiped out by the so-called Islamic State.

A few Western writers like Charles Allen have patronizingly written how ancient Indians were somehow foolish to have had little regard for a great king such as Ashoka. On a closer look, it appears that they knew what they were doing. What is more worrying is how easily modern Indians have come to accept a narrative based on such minimal evidence.

(On agriculture coming much later to Southern India...)
My own guess is that faced with a choice between big game fishing and watching vegetables grow, the lads made the obvious choice. 😂

Given all this mixing, forget racial purity, it seems most of us are not even pure Homo Sapiens!

"You know the problem," Zellion said, "with ruling by tyranny? There's always someone stronger."

"Nobody goes into the maelstrom," Contemplation said. "It's madness."
"Same is said of the storm on my home-world," Nomad said. "But I know someone who survived it, then inspired a whole host of us to do the same."

Most epic reference to Stormlight Archives ❤️

Ideals are like statues in the wind. They seem so permanent, but truth is, erosion happens subtly, constantly.

Maybe goats understood me better than the arbabs ever did. They must have realised that I wouldn't hurt them even if they charged at me.

Some situations in our lives are even more absurd than a film scene.

As Rama, the Preserver had turned a rock into Ahilya. As Krishna now, he had turned a hunchback into a beauty.

Gods and goddesses appeared now to see this divine spectacle. To see Vasudev cradling the lord below and Vasuki shielding him from above. To see both man and animal celebrating the Preserver who had taken another avatar for their sake. Vishnu, who helped men to cross over, was being ferried across by a man. Vishnu, who had kept afloat the vessel of Manu, was being kept afloat by a manava.

'So, deva bridles devi again,' Parvati glanced at Shiva.

The Destroyer offered her a flower. 'Devi, too, curbed Mahishasura. Devi, too, curbed Raktabija. Deva also bridled another deva when I as Sharabh calmed Sri Hari as Narsimha. When Sri Hari calmed my Rudra Tandava. It is never about deva or Devi. It is forever about counteracting any poison that threatens the cosmos. And poison has no gender.'

Any incantation without "Swaha" shall be like a tree without fruit, a snake without venom and a man without knowledge. The yagna shall remain incomplete and prove inauspicious.

For Nove, hope wasn't a wish. It was a mathematical fact.

You have to consider the best possible scenario.

In murder and in marketing, if you're not buying or selling, you're the product.

People don't want to be ethical. They want to believe they're ethical, and there's a lot of skeletons in the gap between those two.

“Like plundering their homes?” asked the Orcess.

“That’s old thinking,” said the Goblin. “Pillage a town’s gold, and you’ll be rich for a day. Make a town systemically dependent on services that only you provide, and you’ll be rich for a lifetime.”

Yet he also knew that coincidence and destiny are much the same, in the way that raindrops and the ocean are the same; one might have been more vast and powerful and dangerous than the other, but they were made of identical components, and in sufficient quantities the lesser became the greater.

The real reason people pray at the temple is to tell the God that there what they're determined to do, or what they are desperate for.
I didn't have anything like that to pray about.

Where do human memories live?

Are they in a synaptic circuitry of the brain? Do retinas and fingertips hold memories, too? Or is there an invisible, amorphous, mistlike, spiritual collective somewhere, and that's where memories reside? Something we'd call the heart or the mind or the soul. Is it something you can take out and stick back in, like a memory card with an OS on it?

"They said that cords are the flow of time itself. They twist and tangle, come apart and reunite. They said that's time. That's..."
A mountain in autumn. The sound of a brook. The smell of water. The taste of sweet barley tea.
"That's musubi."

The scene bursts into my mind.

It’s way easier to tear a kingdom down than fix it. Utopia’s never gonna happen. At least total annihilation might be possible.

There was a point of equilibrium in any organization’s middle management, a fulcrum of responsibility that remained still while the upper and lower ranks of the bureaucracy moved around it. Tyren knew from experience that a shrewd official could find this pivot-point within the org chart and, once entrenched, enjoy near-complete autonomy with almost no responsibility.

There were no good people, no innocent townsfolk to save. Today’s victims were tomorrow’s monsters.

The wetness was new. His brow knotted as he concentrated on the sensation. It wasn’t like the persistent dampness around his shredded, broken limbs, or the warmth of the blood leaking from the slash across his chest. Instead, it was a moist, rhythmic slathering, gently pulsing up his cheek toward his —
Gorm sputtered and choked as a dog tongue slid into his open mouth.

The key to managing failure was to make it sound like success.

"Employers do not keep their employees in cages," Nurse Ratched said.

The Coachman laughed. "And that is where you're wrong, my dear. I happen to know that employers once did keep their employees in cages called 'cubicles'!"

Dad closed his eyes and hummed along with the song. He stopped when Hap said, "It feels like... a memory. Like something I've forgotten. What do you do if you've forgotten all you know?"

Dad opened his eyes. He was silent for a moment, as if carefully choosing the words. "You start again from the beginning."