BinderBwoy

I wanted to write the review of this book immediately I crossed the last full stop, but it was already 3.30am and I had to switch on straight to Houston in time for that Lisandro Martinez butchery treatment of Jude Bellingham. Bwana if Manchester United doesn’t win the Champions League this season, I’m putting Midusa up for sale. You all know @SominiSengupta In September 1975, when India Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency for the first time on the subcontinent, life suddenly became unbearable – stores ran out of basic food supplies, dissidents were sent to jail, newspapers arrived with front pages empty, men in slums were enlisted in an aggressive government-sponsored birth control programme, inflation hit 30%. Somini’s father, tired of hustling for a tank of cooking gas and milk powder for his young daughter, gathers all the valuables he will need, packs the family on a whirring British Airways jet, waves to an army of relatives left behind, leaving in search of a better life away from that hellhole back at home. They first land in a wintry Canada, then onwards to settle the United States of America, where they ship the giant statue of Ma Durga, the mother goddess herself, with all ten arms intact, to create a semblance of a new home away from home. She would later be sent back to India as the New Delhi Bureau Chief for the giant paper, New York Times. This journalistic experience opened her eyes to an India she never got to fully experience when she was young. She wrote this book, primarily to warn those in positions of policy influence taking India’s youth for granted, to watch out for the big boom because she had seen it with her own eyes, and it was not going to be kind to those standing in its way. Perhaps the most appropriate title for this gripping piece of ingenuity would’ve been, ‘The Ethnographic Profile of New India’. This book is loaded with real life case studies of hostile cultural practices carried over from precolonial India that keeps dragging down the world’s most populous country from taking its right place in the league of developed nations. ‘𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐄𝐧𝐝 𝐨𝐟 𝐊𝐚𝐫𝐦𝐚’, therefore, is a fitting title to a highly personalized chronicle of today’s India, told through the touching life stories of ordinary men and women who represent the yearnings of India’s most transformative generation in their relentless, almost deathly quest, to break free from the retrogressive caste system - the cultural birthright of fatality that has everything to do with where you were born, and not what you’re innately capable of. The case studies in this book might have been sourced from the streets of India, but they are all relatable wherever you read the book from. They are stories of audacious ambition and a portrait of how India conspires to fail young people every step of the way. The highlight episode that gave me goosebumps is that of Maoist rebellion that was hatched in the late ‘60s India. It showed how devastating it can be when young people are promised so much, and given so little. The volatile cocktail of rich lands and poor people has produced ugly conflicts everywhere you look. From the mineral-rich Democratic Republic of Congo to the oil-rich Niger Delta, and India, with its vast coal deposits and iron ore reserves, it is no different. Unlike their parents and grandparents who never ventured beyond their villages, young people growing up in modern India know what else is out there. They know what they have been denied for generations, and they are going out there and harnessing their inner willpower to break down prejudices of birth to model their countries in their own images. Unlike their parents who were bogged down by government rules and were stickler to cultural red tape, India’s young people are supremely self-confident, certain about how far they have come and what they are capable of. They don’t second guess themselves, neither do they have difficulties proving themselves whether they’re given a chance or not - they will find it by their own willpower and model their destiny in their own image. This book would not have been complete without a case study on how India’s politics has failed young people, and what they’re doing to sort it out. It starts with the 1992 premeditated attack on an Islamic mosque in the prehistoric city of Ayodhya, the birthplace of Lord Rama, the epic Ramayana; and how this attack gave life to a devastating rightwing Hindu nationalist movement that destroyed everything in its wake in India, and led to the rise of the current Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Bwana they have mentioned Lakshman and Sita in that story. I was waiting for Hanuman with his giant club, but Somini ran out of ink and decided to ask us to go read widely for ourselves. What Somini doesn’t know is that every Kenyan child growing up in the ‘90s Kenya was hooked on that Indian show Ramayana like a drug, it was aired every Sunday afternoon by the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation (KBC). We even answered the Hindu Religious Education questions on the GHCRE paper, when the corresponding quiz on the Christian equivalent was difficult to fathom. That thing took me back to my younger days in Miwani. The story of the India at noonday is the story of ambition, and it is a story of ambition thwarted. As policy makers would discover in this book, when ambition is thwarted, it can unleash demands for change, perhaps even a new freedom struggle. For a nation that desires to be a world power, too many of its young are hungry, too many are forced to live in filth, and too many of them grow up as though they have nothing to lose. They are hardly going to bottle their aspirations forever, they may not give their elders much time, and like Somini’s daughter keeps reminding her, India’s youth “𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞 𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐭𝐥𝐞𝐬, 𝐰𝐞 𝐜𝐚𝐫𝐫𝐲 𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐡𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐬 𝐨𝐧 𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐛𝐚𝐜𝐤𝐬.” * * * * * I got this book from @AbdullahiBulle of @NuriaStore. He can literally find you any book whether he has it in store or not. Cheers to all miracle workers making this world a better place. Your reward is in heaven.

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BinderBwoy @BinderBwoy

about 3 years ago

@zenithgains Inamanisha car cando😂

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BinderBwoy @BinderBwoy

about 5 years ago

@Prudence__Tonui @nastragoo @mzee_ni_wewe @Nancy_lanes @self_essteem @jamrick_ @EcEssie @AmberRayke @allarick_ @main_wolfgirl @juja_kot Chukua figure poa...character ikiwa mbaya tandika hadi a change..