Arnav Das Sharma

Author. Editor. Delhi School of Economics alum. Ex Reuters, India Today. Gandhi, Nehru, Ambedkar, Marx. Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Dickens & Joyce.

[Arnav Das Sharma @arnav_d]

Announcing my debut novel, Darklands. From Penguin Random House India.

[Arnav Das Sharma @arnav_d]

Looks more like internal sabotage. #MeenakshiNatarajan

[Asim Ali @AsimAli6]

Absence of real land reforms has been India's original sin. As Carl Schmitt wrote, all political order is founded on distribution of land. China brutally redistributed land by 1953. Nehru was begging Congress CMs (& UC dominated Cong units) to allow land reforms in late 1950s 👇

[Gurdeep Singh Sappal @gurdeepsappal]

He doesn’t have the luxury of normal democratic conditions like institutional fairness, media plurality, financial parity, and the rule of law that is applied equally.

I write ✍️

Still, @RahulGandhi has chosen to fight with what might seem the most inadequate of weapons: moral clarity, ideological consistency, and human empathy. 

@Ram_Guha Ramchandra Guha, after terrible decision to support Modi in 2014, now, searches for  another messiah.  He risks repeating the error: demanding perfection from an opposition leader who is overcoming unfair limits, with hands tied, facing constant hardships and battling the elements. Guha fails to recognise these chains and fetters.

It takes tremendous courage to be democratic in the absence of democratic space. To stand up for an idea knowing fully well that there is huge personal cost to be paid for it. 

Rahul Gandhi knows that he will be attacked and vilified. He knows his supporters will be attacked and vilified. But he still fights on. His approach can best be described in the words of Kabir, who understood about the nature of moral commitment in a hostile world:

कबीरा खड़ा बाज़ार में, मांगे सबकी खैर।
ना काहू से दोस्ती, ना काहू से बैर।।

कबीरा खड़ा बाज़ार में, लिए लुकाठी हाथ।
जो घर फूँके आपना, चले हमारे साथ।।

Dictatorial systems do not allow democratic functioning to proceed on level terms. If someone is standing firm within such a system, refusing to be broken or bought or diverted, there has to be a reason rooted in the quality of their leadership.
@INCIndia @kharge @RahulGandhi
 @thewire_in

https://t.co/wdsHrhJhWe

[Devamritasya Putra - देवामृतस्य पुत्र: 🇮🇳 @whiffofreshair]

Tagore, hands down.

Rabindranath Tagore is the Indian author who gets exactly this cult treatment and then some. Complete works in 32+ volumes, Gitabitan with 2,000+ songs still sung daily, novels, plays, essays, short stories, and translations that fill entire shelves across Bengal and beyond. Penguin, Macmillan, Oxford, Visva-Bharati - they’ve all done the uniform edition treatment for decades. He wrote the national anthems of two countries, won the Nobel, and still gets worshipped like a literary deity.

Kalidasa, Ashtadiggajas, Premchand? Respectable, but they’re not even in the same league when it comes to this level of obsessive, multi-volume shelf-worship.

Here’s the exact same energy with Tagore’s books.

Next time try knowing Indian literature before posting.

[Sabika @sadigalisabzi]

It's quite astonishing that people have forgotten the movement Muslims built from the ground up only a little over half a decade ago.

Musalman ke ilawa sab revolutionary lagte hai iss desh ko.

[Arnav Das Sharma @arnav_d]

Facing a lot of problems again with @policybazaar . I made a terrible mistake of trusting this company. @PBHelpDesk

[Darab Farooqui @darab_farooqui]

Let me tell you something very cool about this video.

Look at Rahul Gandhi's straight dive in the first few seconds. An effortless, elegant dive.

Now let me make a point. First, it shows he knows how to swim well. The kind of swimming where you could actually save someone else's life.

Now a point more political in nature.

It also shows the man developed other skill sets in life. He has a rounded personality. A politician with other skills, other life skills.

The mark of a life that was curious, enterprising, but above all a life that was looking to grow and challenge itself.

Now look at the top BJP politicians. We've seen them in Ganga snan. Pudgy, fat, out of shape. If they slip, they'll need someone like Rahul Gandhi to save them.

We've seen Modi float like an inflated tube, clumsy, trying to look comfortable in water and failing. These are not men who ever pushed their bodies, minds or souls or much else.

Now you may ask what this has to do with governance. Maybe nothing. Maybe everything.

I prefer politicians with additional life skills. Skills that tell me you challenged yourself in life.

The whole BJP top brass looks like it has spent its life sitting on benches and khatiyas in RSS shakhas.

These people may be good at winning elections, which they are.

But governance is a different ball game. It's art more than science.

It needs people who are innovative, intuitive, imaginative. But above all, people who challenge themselves.

[Arnav Das Sharma @arnav_d]

I can't get enough of Dickens's Bleak House. One can say, I am becoming sort of obsessed with it.

[Arnav Das Sharma @arnav_d]

Salman Rushdie, Jonathan Franzen, William Faulkner

[Ele 🌻 @elenadesaa1999]

¿Alguna vez has terminado un libro y has pensado: «Vale, voy a leer todo lo que escriba esta persona»?

[Arnav Das Sharma @arnav_d]

Firhad Hakim, aka Brutus. TMC as a party doesn’t exist as of now.

[Tamal Saha @Tamal0401]

#TMC leader Firhad Hakim resigns from the post of Mayor of #Kolkata Municipal Corporation.

Ritabrata Banerjee is the new LoP in #Bengal assembly. He along with 57 other TMC MLAs put forth their claim to the speaker - defying the choice made by #MamataBanerjee. The speaker has accepted it - superseding the previous choice of Sovandev Chattopadhyay.

All this in a month of #BengalElection results where TMC won 80

[ashutosh @ashutosh83B]

आशुतोष लिखते हैं -

क्यों रामचंद्र गुहा @Ram_Guha जैसे लोग बीजेपी की भाषा बोलते हैं ?

क्यों आज बीजेपी से लड़ना आसान नहीं है ?

क्यों अंत में जीत सामाजिक न्याय की ही होगी ?

https://t.co/qRCclfjLNn

[Al Pacino भारद्वाज @Undoubtfulnerd]

Congress kareeb 61 baar tooti hai aaj tak. 58 baar Independence ke baad se aaj tak.

Par Congress apne original form(INC) mien aaj bhi exist karti hai. Aur Congress ko kuch log roz khatam hota batate hai.

Hasi aati hai aiso par!

[Manash Firaq @manasharya]

My short response along with four others to Ram Guha's agonies against Rahul Gandhi.
[Deleted my previous post to remove a stupid rant. Thanks to everyone who liked, and responded to, the post.]
https://t.co/BZ23LkdtuQ

[Arnav Das Sharma @arnav_d]

Men like him below are the last sighs of a dying political system. You may not be ready, but reality is that Congress already is the sole and only arbiter of secularism. No one else comes close. Not now. Not forever.

[nikhil wagle @waglenikhil]

माझी भूमिका स्पष्ट आहे. मोदींची सत्तेतून हकालपट्टी व्हावी असं मला वाटत. पण मी कॅांग्रेसला सेक्युलॅरिजमचा एकमेव ठेकेदार मानायला तयार नाही!
#Modi #Rahul

[Arpita Das (she/her) @arpitayodapress]

Thank gods for these five eloquent and substantive rejoinders to a piece by Ram Guha that displayed lazy and dated 'analysis' and a poor pretence at critique only to flog the dead horse rhetoric of dynasty politics.
https://t.co/FDHDxDVkZE

[ParanjoyGuhaThakurta @paranjoygt]

Five rejoinders: What Ramachandra Guha gets wrong about Rahul Gandhi https://t.co/Uio5GiYbBS

[Arnav Das Sharma @arnav_d]

We all thought the Trinamool Congress will limp on, it's degradation process prolonged and protracted. No one, no political pundit would have guessed the death of TMC in just a matter of a few weeks from losing power. There's a big lesson here: we may disregard the importance of ideology, but now it is for all to see. No party without ideology can survive. And this is where Rahul Gandhi's greatest credit comes. He brought Congress back to its fundamental principles, gave it an ideological clarity, which is why elections can come and go, INC will live on.

[Ram Subramanian @iramsubramanian]

Not a “congressi” but I must congratulate the team from @RahulGandhi @INCIndia @IYC for their relentless pursuit of resolution in the NEET, CBSE and other Education Ministry scams. What they have done is beyond social media campaigns… they have done investigative journalism (that ideally should have been done by mainstream media), on ground campaigns and kept a consistent tone of constructive opposition. If Dharmendra Pradhan is pushed out of the ministry the greatest chunk of credit goes to them. (Rahul Gandhi’s interview of students was the tipping point). Great work. I am happy because we, the people, deserve a good opposition.

[Arnav Das Sharma @arnav_d]

@nguyenhdi Which edition of Moby Dick? Everyman’s?

[Become Unsearchable 🏳️‍🌈 @SomeLatinWord]

Claiming Tiruvalluvar is 'Hindu' is like claiming Plato is Christian lol