How 31 Books Reframed My Understanding of the World in 2025

 How 31 Books Reframed My Understanding of the World in 2025

Screenshot grab from Goodreads

The year 2025 was tumultuous for many reasons, but as always, some things are in our control whereas others are not. I was able to read 31 books in 2025, putting aside all the chaos and unpredictable aspects of my existence and I am happy and content with that. 

I read a wide variety of subjects in the nonfiction category, books ranging from science, history, philosophy, sports, biography, psychology, health, etc. 

Rather than enumerating those 31 books below, I'm attempting to classify them into several categories and will provide a general overview of the lessons I acquired from each.

 

One simple theme that comes out from the below books is:

" Power is rarely moral — it is merely justified."

• On Palestine by Noam Chomsky
• Pakistan: A Hard Country By Anatol Lieven
• Permanent Record By Edward Snowden
• Bullshit Jobs: A Theory By David Graeber
• How Democracies Die By Steven Levitsky
• The Palestine Laboratory By Antony Loewenstein

The New Nuclear Age by Ankit Panda, The books On Palestine, The Palestine Laboratory, and Permanent Record talk about how surveillance, occupation, and control are normalised, exported, and defended as necessary. When European settlers come to a foreign land, settle there, and either commit genocide against or expel the indigenous people. The Zionists have not invented anything new in this respect; they are following the same playbook. Snowden taught me that nothing is harder than living with a secret that can't be spoken. Snowden couldn’t hide and digest it for sure and thus became a whistleblower. And ultimately, saying that you don't care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different from saying you don't care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say. Anatol Lieven's book shows that Pakistan is a 'tinderbox', forever on the brink, in the eye of the storm, or descending into chaos. It is an 'Insh'allah nation' where people passively wait for Allah. "countries own army but in Pakistan army owns a country". And David Graeber's book shows that economies around the world have, increasingly, become vast engines for producing nonsense jobs.

The following books can be shortly summarised by this line:

 "Humans Are Fragile, Mortal, and Pretend Otherwise, "

• ⁠Being Mortal By Atul Gawande
• Why We Die By Venki Ramakrishnan
• Everything Is Tuberculosis By John Green

The key learning from these books is that modern society is deeply uncomfortable with death, so we medicalise, delay and sometimes elongate the suffering in this process and deny it. The hard truth is "we are all going to die". Atul Gawande's book especially shows that none of us are spared; we are going to be dealing with such decisions sooner or later, and it's strange that we have all been so dense about it. I read this book when my dad was struggling with his life (he is no more) in the ICU. Here is the blog:https://asiforyou.blogspot.com/2025/08/an-ode-to-my-dad.html

The next category can be shortly summarised by this line:

"History Is Not the Past—It Is an Argument"

• ⁠The Language of History by Audrey Truschke
• The Golden Road By William Dalrymple
• Courting India: By Nandini Das
• ⁠The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine By Serhii Plokhy
• Divided by Partition By Mallika Ahluwalia

Vietnam: A War Lost and Won By Nigel Cawthorne

The key learning from the above book is that history is less about facts and more about who gets to narrate them. History cannot be neutral; thus, it can be converted into a weapon, a mirror and sometimes a confession.  And often we hear that history repeats, but I guess it rhymes!. Truschke's book dismantles a very simplistic theme about Hindu-Muslim binaries. Dalrymple's book enlightens us that India's ideas spread with its traders along the Golden Road and transformed the world, creating around itself an Indosphere, a cultural zone that spread over political borders. Plokhy's books again dismantle a common theory that Ukraine is NOT a buffer state but a civilisation in itself. 

The next category of books are one of my favourite categories and can be easily summaries as:

 "Science Is Not Cold — It Is Philosophical"

• ⁠Physics and Philosophy By Werner Heisenberg
• The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene
• ⁠Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life by Nick Lane.
• Bad Science by Ben Goldacre.

Heisenberg's book shows us how observation itself changes reality and how modern physics bears a striking resemblance to the doctrines of Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher. If we replace the word ‘fire’ with ‘energy’, we can almost replicate his statements from our modern perspective. Brian Greene's book, which talks about string theory, demonstrates that sometimes attaining the deepest familiarity with a question is our best substitute for actually having the answer. Nick Lane's book continually asks "why" things happen the way they do. How mitochondria holds the key answer to key topics such as ageing, power and death. The more deeply we understand nature, the less arrogant we should be.

The next category of book holds the key answers to our hyperactive virtual world and the real world. Proabably can be summarised as:

 "The Mind Is Being Rewired—and We’re Not Ready"

• The Anxious Generation By Jonathan Haidt
• ⁠Remember: The Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting By Lisa Genova
• The Ten Types of Human By Dexter Dias
• The Practice of Not Thinking by Ryūnosuke Koike

The key learning from the above book is that we are cognitively overloaded, emotionally dysregulated, and socially fragmented. Jonathan Haidt's book shows that humans evolved in a world of scarcity, so we are not wired to get this abundance; we are like those cacti in the rainforest, drowned in dopamine. And Lisa Genova's book shows that it's perfectly okay to forget something and why we should not bank too much on our memory; it's manipulative and not so reliable. One of my favourite books of all time is Dexter Dias's book, which shows that empathy is not optional – it's survival. Paying attention is now a moral choice. 

The last category of books shows that:

"Meaning Comes From Endurance, Not Comfort"

• North: Finding My Way While Running the Appalachian Trail By Scott Jurek
• I Too Had a dream by Verghese Kurien
• My Autobiography by Charlie Chaplin
• Source Code: My Beginnings By Bill Gates

The key learning from the above books written by athletes, actors and businessmen was very precise: fulfilment emerges from commitment, not optimisation. Scott Jurek's book shows that we often think we can’t go any farther and feel like we have nothing left to give, yet there is a hidden potential and strength in all of us, begging us to find it. Verghese Kurien's book shows institution-building as moral labour, and “When you stand above the crowd, you must be ready to have stones thrown at you.” Chaplin's autobiography humanises genius, and we all are a sum total of our desire, dreams, uniqueness, aspiration, trauma and happiness. Bill Gates's book shows that legacy is built quietly over a long time, with stubborn integrity.

I would end this with a conclusion that if there is one thing these books collectively taught me, it is this: the world is not short of intelligence, innovation, or information. It is short of humility, memory, and moral courage. And reading across science, history, and politics didn’t give me answers. It gave me better questions—and a deeper discomfort with easy ones.

I have pasted the URL of my Goodreads web link and listed the books that I read in 2025. 

https://www.goodreads.com/user/year_in_books/2025/117699836

 1.⁠ ⁠A (Very) Short History on Earth: 4.6 Billion Years in 12 Pithy Chapters  

   By Henry Gee

 2.⁠ ⁠Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End  

   By Atul Gawande

 3.⁠ ⁠Pakistan: A Hard Country  

   By Anatol Lieven

 4.⁠ ⁠On Palestine  

   By Noam Chomsky

 5.⁠ ⁠Source Code: My Beginnings  

   By Bill Gates

 6.⁠ ⁠Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection  

   By John Green

 7.⁠ ⁠Vietnam: A War Lost and Won  

   By Nigel Cawthorne

 8.⁠ ⁠The Language of History: Sanskrit Narratives of Indo-Muslim Rule  

   By Audrey Truschke

 9.⁠ ⁠How We Die: Reflections of Life's Final Chapter  

   By Sherwin B. Nuland

10.⁠ ⁠The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine  

    By Serhii Plokhy

11.⁠ ⁠Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science  

    By Werner Heisenberg

12.⁠ ⁠The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World  

    By Antony Loewenstein

13.⁠ ⁠The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness  

    By Jonathan Haidt

14.⁠ ⁠Divided by Partition: United by RESILIENCE: 21 Inspirational Stories from 1947  

    By Mallika Ahluwalia

15.⁠ ⁠Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life  

    By Nick Lane

16.⁠ ⁠The Ten Types of Human: Who We Are and Who We Can Be  

    By Dexter Dias

17.⁠ ⁠Courting India: Seventeenth-Century England, Mughal India, and the Origins of Empire  

    By Nandini Das

18.⁠ ⁠North: Finding My Way While Running the Appalachian Trail  

    By Scott Jurek

19.⁠ ⁠How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future  

    By Steven Levitsky

20.⁠ ⁠Remember: The Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting  

    By Lisa Genova

21.⁠ ⁠The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World  

    By William Dalrymple

22.⁠ ⁠Why We Die: The New Science of Aging and the Quest for Immortality  

    By Venki Ramakrishnan

23.⁠ ⁠Why the Poor Don't Kill Us

     By Manu Joseph 

24.⁠ ⁠Permanent Record

     By Edward Snowden

25. Bullshit Jobs: A Theory

     By David Graeber

26.  I Too Had a dream by Verghese Kurien

27. The New Nuclear Age by Ankit Panda

28. ⁠The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene

29. ⁠My Autobiography by Charlie Chaplin

30. ⁠ ⁠The Practice of Not Thinking by Ryūnosuke Koike

31. ⁠Bad Science by Ben Goldacre.

An Ode to My dad

An Ode to My dad

 

It’s been 19 days since Dad passed away on August 01, 2025. I still wake up in the morning thinking this is a nightmare and he is not really gone. At night I look at the sky and make a wish on the brightest star I see, and I believe it is you. Dad passed away due to complications from multiple heart attacks, struggling for his life in intensive care for 30 days. He was 84. My father was a flawed man, but he was a genuinely good man, innocent and unfailing in a way we usually only find in books or movies. He wanted, more than anything, to do good in the world, to always do the right thing.  As I remember him each moment after his passing, the painful image of my very sick, frail father is fading. I will always carry your pain and suffering in my heart. If there is meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death, human life cannot be complete. 
Death is not a confrontation; it’s simply an event in nature’s ongoing rhythms. Disease, the malign force that requires confrontation, is the real enemy. Death is the respite that comes when the exhausting battle has been lost. The greatest dignity to be found in death is the dignity of the life that preceded it. This is a form of hope we can all achieve, and it is the most abiding of all. Hope resides in the meaning of what our lives have been.
Whether my dad ever realised it or not before he died, he lived a great life. He might not have fulfilled any of his biggest goals and dreams and failed at many of the things he tried, but he changed the lives of all of the people he came into contact with. He truly made the world a brighter, kinder, more compassionate place.
Whenever I used to enter the intensive care unit to meet him, one thing was very evident: he was neither sad nor scared about his impending death. He wanted to live as much as he could in his remaining days to enjoy and share his happiness with everyone around. In his last 30 days in intensive care, I sat beside him, holding his hand, trying to be strong, but I don't understand the man who raised me and taught me to fight. Now he fades like the stars at the break of light. I'll hold his name, and one day, when I die, I'll see him again. 
Perhaps the best way I can celebrate Dad's life is to try as hard as I can to walk in the world with the same compassion, humility, love, and joy that he carried with him so that the light of his life will not extinguish even after the passing of his mortal body. Some days I wonder if our dreams are really our own or if we are all fated to fulfil the unrealised dreams of our parents. But today, as I remember my father and celebrate his life, it strikes me that perhaps the best way to remember the life of someone who shaped and inspired you is to realise their dreams. 
I read long ago in the book Tuesdays with Morrie, "Death ends a life, not a relationship." His physical presence is gone, but the emotional and spiritual connections that I have with him shall endure. The love, memories, and impact that he has on me will not disappear with his passing. Instead, it will continue to live on through my memories and stories. In the end, people don't view their life as merely the average of all its moments—which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens.
“Your parents, they give you your life, but then they try to give you their life,” said Chuck Palahniuk, the noted American fiction novelist.

 

The Anxious Generation 

by Jonathan Haidt

This book is about the tragic great rewiring that was inflicted on Gen Z between 2010 and 2015 that completely upended them from a normal childhood and caused a generational mental health crisis. He presents more than a dozen mechanisms by which this enormous rewiring of childhood has interfered with children's social and neurological development, covering everything from sleep deprivation to attention fragmentation, addiction, loneliness, social contagion, social comparison, and perfectionism. He explains why social media damages girls more than boys and why boys have been withdrawing from the real world to the virtual world, with disastrous consequences for themselves, their families, and their societies.

Here are some pointers that I drew from this book:
The mental health crisis has hit boys and girls in a different manner. Their rates of depression and anxiety among boys have also increased a lot, although usually not by as much as for girls. Boys technology use and mental health difficulties are somewhat different from those of girls.
 2.⁠ ⁠⁠Between 2010 and 2015, the social lives of teens moved largely onto smartphones with continuous access to social media, online video games, and other internet-based activities. This Great Rewiring of Childhood, the author argues, is the single largest reason for the tidal wave of adolescent mental illness that began in the early 2010s.
 3.⁠ ⁠⁠Free play is as essential for developing social skills, like conflict resolution, as it is for developing physical skills. But play-based childhoods were replaced by phone-based childhoods as children and adolescents moved their social lives and free time onto internet-connected devices.
 4.⁠ ⁠⁠Children learn through play to connect, synchronise, and take turns. They enjoy attunement and need enormous quantities of it.
 5.⁠ ⁠⁠Attunement and synchrony bond pairs, groups, and whole communities. Social media, in contrast, is mostly asynchronous and performative. It inhibits attunement and leaves heavy users starving for social connection.
 6.⁠ ⁠⁠The human brain contains two subsystems that put it into two common modes: discover mode (for approaching opportunities) and defend mode (for defending against threats). Young people born after 1995 are more likely to be stuck in defend mode, compared to those born earlier. They are on permanent alert for threats rather than being hungry for new experiences. They are anxious.
 7.⁠ ⁠⁠All children are by nature antifragile, from the book Antifraglie by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Just as the immune system must be exposed to germs and trees must be exposed to wind, children require exposure to setbacks, failures, shocks, and stumbles in order to develop strength and self-reliance. Overprotection interferes with this development and renders young people more likely to be fragile and fearful as adults.
 8.⁠ ⁠⁠Children are most likely to thrive when they have a play-based childhood in the real world. They are less likely to thrive when fearful parenting and a phone-based childhood deprive them of opportunities for growth.
 9.⁠ ⁠⁠Smartphones are a second kind of experience blocker. Once they enter a child's life, they push out or reduce all other forms of non-phone-based experience, which is the kind that their experience-expectant brains most need.
10.⁠ ⁠⁠Dopamine release is pleasurable, but it does not trigger a feeling of satisfaction. Rather, it makes you want more of whatever you did to trigger the release. The addiction researcher Anna Lembke who authored Dopamine Nation, says that the universal symptoms of withdrawal are "anxiety, irritability, insomnia, and dysphoria." She and other researchers find that many adolescents have developed behavioral addictions that are very much like the way that people develop addictions to slot machine and gambling.
11.⁠ ⁠⁠ Social media harms girls more than boys. Correlational studies show that heavy users of social media have higher rates of depression and other disorders than light users or nonusers. The correlation is larger and clearer for girls: heavy users are three times as likely to be depressed as nonusers.
12.⁠ ⁠⁠Girls use social media a lot more than boys, and they prefer visually orientated platforms such as Instagram and TikTok, which are worse for social comparison than primarily text-based platforms such as Reddit.
13.⁠ ⁠⁠ Two major categories of motivations are agency (the desire to stand out and have an effect on the world) and communion (the desire to connect and develop a sense of belonging). Boys and girls both want each of these, but there is a gender difference that emerges early in children's play: Boys choose more agency activities; girls choose more communion activities. Social media appeals to the desire for communion, but it often ends up frustrating it.
14.⁠ ⁠⁠Girls are more sensitive to visual comparisons, especially when other people praise or criticize one's face and body. Visually orientated social media platforms that focus on images of oneself are ideally suited to pushing down a girl's "sociometer" (the internal gauge of where one stands in relation to others).
15.⁠ ⁠⁠Girls are also more likely to develop "socially prescribed perfectionism," in which a person tries to live up to impossibly high standards held by others or by society.

India : A Linguistic Civilization

The author starts this book with a beautiful paragraph:

"For millennia, Indians have cultivated a multilingual mindset, integrating it into their daily lives and environment. The national anthem they sing with such great pride describes India primarily in terms of some of its language communities, speakers of the Punjabi, Sindhi, Gujarati, Marathi, Dravidian languages, Odia, and Bangla. Clearly, Indians understand that their unity as a nation doesn't hinge on speaking a single language, nor does it falter despite their rich linguistic diversity; rather, it thrives precisely because of the multitude of languages they embrace."

India's spectacular linguistic diversity is one of its most defining characteristics as a civilization. The story of Indian languages is extremely complex and has an epic span. The number of languages that have existed in the subcontinent in the past eras and the languages that are currently in existence all put together is far too large to admit any single and cohesive description.The complex trajectory of our languages is intertwined with the evolution of the Indian identity, imagination, and intellectual history. Our languages are a repository of human ideas and experiences across millennia and remain at the core of intense deliberations on what constitutes the idea of India.

Many Indians mistakenly believe that Sanskrit is the source of the majority of languages spoken today. Where as many languages are actually derived from Tamil that is mentioned in the below pointers, and some others in the Northeast from Sino-Tibetan or Tibet-Burmese origin. And Prakrits and Pali have contributed as significantly to our languages as have Sanskrit, Tamil, Arabic, Persian, and English.

Never in its long history did India have any single 'pan-Indian national language'. India has always been multilingual and it is in the multilingual character of India that 'Indian-ness' can be located. As of now, India has 850 living languages and every language matters since each one provides a unique world-view and people will be ready to fight for the preservation and dignity of their mother tongues. Out of 7,000 existing languages in the world, the first thirty include Bengali, along with Hindi, as well as Urdu, Marathi, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, and Gujarati. There is no way that Hindi can be imposed on them or the speakers of these languages can be made to accept such an imposition. Hindi is now claimed as the mother tongue by almost one in every three Indians.However, it is necessary to bear in mind that what is counted as Hindi is, in reality, a group of a large number of dialects, regional varieties and sub-languages.

Each language presents a world-view. It combines a community's imagination as well as memory. Each language is a unique world. The imagination and memory combine in a language. The consciousness-supported by the sensory capabilities of the human body in time and space-makes sense of the world only through constant encounter with time and space. It is imagination which helps us through a series of images to organize space. Images of external objects keep bombarding our mind through the eye and the mind, and organize them as a created replica of the space. That's why imagination is important. 

Scripts, though conventionally wedded to their respective languages, have no logical relation whatever with the languages they represent. A given language is never dependent for its growth or decline on the script in which it is written. Having a well-developed script does not ensure superiority of a given language over other languages. A language can never be considered lacking in valuable aspects if it has not developed a script for itself. For example, the English language does not have a script of its own till today. English uses the Roman script. Yet, it is a mighty language. We cannot dismiss it as a dialect of Latin.

Here are some below pointers that I learnt and felt were important to be highlighted and explain India's spectacular linguistic diversity and rich tapestry of Indian languages. 

• Language is not only a social system of verbal icons, arbitrarily assembled through ages, it is also a 'means' of carrying forward the cumulative human experience of millennia to the future generations. When language trajectories are snapped, the accumulated wisdom in those languages too gets submerged and continues to survive in severely truncated, irreparable, and insensible forms.
  
  
• In human history, language was created as a surplus of man's cognitive and emotive transactions, a product of the labour of the mind. For a significant duration spanning human history, language continued to retain its character as a predominantly free system that is sturdily resistant to government controls, market regulations, and cultural oppressions.
  
  
• Only the human animal speaks in a complex language. Other animals can refer only to the present—a dog or a dolphin may have limited memory. Humans, on the other hand, have conceptualized time, and complex time at that. 
  
  
• The present tense was easy. The present tense refers to 'fact or truth', and the past tense tells a memory impression or fiction'. Telling an imagined memory' demands a much more complicated working of the brain. In the evolutionary history of language it has taken nearly 200,000 years or so for the humans to formulate something in the past tense.
  
  
• India literally past, most of the linguistics creativity has been in the oral tradition Though people knew how to write, writing was not used as a means of educating the next generations.When British arrived in this country, we decided that the written is more important than oral and thus when British arrived in this country, the written became sacred.
  
  
• The most striking example of reference to writing embedded in oral traditions is found in the Mahabharata, the mother of all that is literature in India. The Mahabharata has been, in its textual tradition', an 'oral epic', something so beautifully captured by A. K. Ramanujan, when he stated that, 'Everybody in India knows the Mahabharata because nobody reads it.'
  
  
• In the 2011 census, Hindi was reported to be spoken by 52 crore people in India. But, out of those 52 crore, there were many who did not speak Hindi as their mother tongue but only as a second language. For instance, Bhojpuri speakers had numbered about 5.03 crore in the same census. But they were clubbed together with Hindi. Similarly, Rajasthan has nearly 40 odd languages small and big all of them were grouped under Hindi. 
  
  
• There have been at least five major language families in India: (1) Indo-European; (a) Indo-Aryan, (b) Germanic, (2) Dravidian, (3) Austro-Asiatic, (4) Tibet-Burmese, (5) Semito-Hamitic.
  
  
• Middle Indo-Aryan dialects in the East split into Bangla and Odia (tenth century). Subsequently, Bangla gave birth to Assamiya (thirteenth century). The Northwestern dialect developed into Kashmiri (thirteenth century), Sindhi (fifteenth century), and Punjabi (fourteenth century).
  
  
• Middle Indo-Aryan distributed itself into Hindi (which till the beginning of the nineteenth century existed as several distinct dialects), Gujarati (eleventh century), and Marathi (eleventh century).
  


• Tamil after a continuous history of two thousand years, branched into Telgu (eleventh century). Earlier, Kannada had already become an independent dialect of Tamil (fifth century). Nine hundred years later, Tamil and Kannada jointly gave birth to Malayalam (fourteenth century).
  
  
• The Hindi family of dialects developed autonomy in the fourteenth century. It also interacted with Persian, which was spoken in India from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries, and Arabic, in use from the eleventh to the nineteenth centuries, and produced the cantonment language Urdu (thirteenth century), which later became a great literary language.
  
  
• There was human habitation in India for thousands of years prior to the emergence of Sanskrit, and it is known that various languages existed, but we have no record of those languages which can help to reconstruct the entire linguistic past. When Sanskrit arrived in India thirty-five centuries ago, there already were languages which were later identified as Prakrits and ancient Dravidian.

The Shortest History of China

This book is flawless and a great introductory tour to a vast history to this giant ancient land. The Chinese history simmers with larger-than-life characters, philosophical arguments and political intrigues, military conflicts and social upheavals, artistic invention and technological innovation. It progresses in twists, turns, leaps and returns. Chinese historical records are long and deep, stretching back at least 3500 years. Their themes and lessons, as well as the memories of wounds and triumphs, pulsate under the surface of contemporary Chinese life, language, culture and politics. The increasingly key role the People's Republic of China (PRC) plays in global affairs makes an awareness of this history essential, for it is the key to understanding China today.

The first appearance of the name 'China' in a European language is in a sixteenth-century Spanish text. The word seemingly derives from references to the ancient Qín dynasty (221-206 BCE), via Sanskrit चीन (cina) and Japanese (shina). In Chinese, the most common expression for China in the sense of a nation is Zhongguó in simplified characters - more on those shortly). This expression dates back 3000 years to the ancient compilation of poetry and song, the Book of Odes . Zhong means middle, or centre. Although Zhongguo is often translated as Middle Kingdom', zhong originally referred to the centre of the kingdom or city, rather than implying that the kingdom itself was at the centre of the world.

Nothing about China is small in scale. With some 1.4 billion people, the PRC boasts the world's largest population - nearly one in every five people on Earth (not counting another forty-five million people worldwide who identify as Chinese). At 9.3 million square kilometres, it occupies the third-largest landmass of any country after Russia and Canada, and shares borders with fourteen nations. The PRC is the world's largest trading nation and second-largest economy, a manufacturing powerhouse and an assertive military power, its army bigger than any other national armed force. It plays a steadily increasing role in global institutions and international affairs.

China is diverse in numerous ways. If more than 90 per cent of the population claim Han ethnicity, the rest belong to fifty-five other ethnic groups including Uyghurs, Mongolians and Tibetans. Many speak distinct languages and retain their own religious and cultural practices, despite pressure to assimilate. The Han, too, may identify with different regional cultures and subcultures, and speak discrete and even mutually unintelligible dialects including Shanghainese and Cantonese - the last claiming more native speakers (over sixty-two million) than Italian. The national language, Putonghuà, sometimes called Mandarin in English, is a constructed tongue. The PRC's own Ministry of Education admitted in 2013 that it was spoken with native fluency by less than 10 per cent of the population, and barely at all by 30 per cent, though it aimed to change that.!

China's human, cultural and economic potential is limitless. The CCP under Xi Jinping's leadership believes that the PRC can fulfil this potential without relaxing - and while even tightening - its control over Chinese society, culture and intellectual life, and suppressing minority cultures and populations. But historically, China has flourished most in times distinguished by their diversity and openness, such as the Tang dynasty. And what we think of as Chinese civilisation is the product of myriad interactions and exchanges between the Han and the peoples and cultures of Central Asia, the far southwest, the northeast and beyond. 

The PRC's economy and technology industries may well overtake those of the United States, and militarily, the PRC is certain to keep flexing its muscles in the East and South China Seas and the Taiwan Strait in ways that will challenge, if not reshape, the world order. Yet the PRC may struggle to see its soft power - the power of attraction - match its hard power. The only way to learn from history is to learn history. Disparate voices and competing narratives inevitably inhabit a history as long as China's. The CCP prefers to keep it simple, using history to bolster its claim to be the legitimate rulers of this ancient nation. The author says that the new era of Xi Jinping is, so far, a blink of the historical eye. Conjectures on how long it will last or what will come next, but if the future is unknowable, history can at least make it less surprising.

the insistence of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that Hong Kong and Táiwān, along with Tibet, Xīnjiāng and islands in the South China Sea, are part of China. The intensity with which the CCP pursues ‘reunification’ has roots The century of humiliation was a period in Chinese history beginning with the First Opium War (1839–1842), and ending in 1945 with China (then the Republic of China) emerging out of the Second World War  and semi-colonisation of China by imperialist powers in the nineteenth century and the civil war of the twentieth century. It also speaks to violent periods of division that occurred as long as two thousand years ago but have left their stamp on the national psyche. That the first great unification, in 221 BCE – which also involved the epic standardisation of weights, measures and the written language – came with a high dose of tyranny is also part of this history’s complex legacy.

The argument is that a similar cycle would apply to the modern era of Mao to Xi Jinping (and beyond). Author implies that telltale signs are appearing again, with any eventual fall only delayed by brutal suppression. Xi Jinping’s China is but a blink in history, says the author, which if you follow along the general theory of empires, is an inescapable conclusion. 

WHY I RUN?

WHY I RUN?

In the trails of Palani hills.

I am a runner. I have pushed myself across thousands of miles looking for answers that only make sense to me. From one race to another, from the roads in the Berlin Marathon to the heights of the Khardungla Challenge approx 5000m above sea level, I discovered the secrets of self-respect and personal ability On the Khardungla Challenge high altitude route, all the while uncovering secrets of my own abyss. Long-distance running is a great way to retrospect. On my last run in the Tata Mumbai Marathon 2024, I needed to discover some more answers. Whatever answers I found, one question remained uncertain - WHY? Why do I RUN? Nature is perfect in every single way and it is amazing to be able to be out here and be a part of this ecosystem that's just absolutely uninterrupted at all. Earth, our home.The place of our history. A tiny point in time, which ticks towards one’s own demise yet is slow enough to allow for the birth of the most beautiful thing in the universe, life! That life is nature. We have grown estranged from it, both collectively and individually. That chasm we created through convenience is now the missing link. The cog that disappeared from the mechanism of fulfilment and serenity. “I’m the kind of person who likes to be by himself. To put a finer point on it, I’m the type of person who doesn’t find it painful to be alone. I find spending an hour or two every day running alone, not speaking to anyone, as well as four or five hours alone at my desk, to be neither difficult nor boring. For me, running is both exercise and a metaphor. Running day after day, piling up the races, bit by bit I raise the bar, and by clearing each level I elevate myself. At least that’s why I’ve put in the effort day after day: to raise my own level. I’m no great runner, by any means. I’m at an ordinary level. But that’s not the point. The point is whether or not I improved over yesterday. In long-distance running the only opponent you have to beat is yourself, the way you used to be

The last few years, especially after the Khardungla Challenge and running many marathons, shook my life they changed my values. I am really happy. This is one of the most beautiful parts of my life. It's the closest you'll get to heaven, as you will, or God or Spirit that you can on Earth With every new time I venture to run I feel as if I am returning to the place I belong. It is fundamental not just for my own good, but for the good of my environment that I discover myself, that I see myself as “Nature”. I am nature and I can only find myself as part of it. I find here a place to think without stressing out because you have so much time here. Time is a blessing or curse. It marches on relentlessly and continuously reminds us that we are not forever, that we are not eternal. Like a pendulum, it swings above our heads. Life nowadays seems to take away the blessings of time leaving only its dark side. On voyages like this, time slows down A day does not just last 24 hours. It lasts longer, so much longer. Life should be slow. It should be giving us. 

Time is something precious. Running for me provides exactly that, slowness, focus on what matters, transcendence! Here, time is a partner whispering not to be afraid of impermanence. You have time to think about life. Time that you really don't have at home because you have so many things on your mind but out here you have a whole day - just fuse and silence, nature, animals, everything but nothing else that clutters the mind. Seize the day… because a day can last a second,  blow by like a whirlwind, or it can become a whole eternity! My time, my choice. I choose eternity! Man is not a man without other people. Warmth, togetherness, wonderful lives and stories. When I run with folks, we respect each other more,  we listen more, and we love each other more. We achieve purity, we are the most sincere self. With people like that, I feel purpose and kinship again. I belong to a community and finally do not feel the need to escape it. As Murakami aptly mentioned in his book "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running", "People sometimes sneer at those who run every day, claiming they’ll go to any length to live longer. But I don’t think that’s the reason most people run. Most runners run not because they want to live longer, but because they want to live life to the fullest. If you’re going to while away the years, it’s far better to live them with clear goals and fully alive than in a fog, and I believe running helps you do that. Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that’s the essence of running, and a metaphor for life" I believe many runners would agree with it. 

That is big! Everyone out here is kinda making the same sacrifices to be out here and around the same wavelength and yeah, I guess the people out here really restore my faith in humanity. Nice people, great people. It's been an incredible experience as far as the kindness that people have shown to me. That's a big surprise I mean people have been unbelievable. You meet some of the best people out here in your runs. I love meeting people in my runs and I feel like they are more my people than most of the other people I know. It's the best community I've ever been involved in. I bump into like-minded people. Individuals who share the same passions, same goals as myself. One small thing that is truly irreplaceable. 

We are saturated with consumer goods, and we live in excess, yet we choke on dissatisfaction at the same time. We have everything and subsequently do not see the essence. The running gave me satisfaction over a sip of water… the smell and taste of food the joy of a warm shower or a place to rest my weary legs and to know when my limits and embrace them efficiently like in the book 'Once A Runner' John L Parker mentions that “A runner is a miser, spending the pennies of his energy with great stinginess, constantly wanting to know how much he has spent and how much longer he will be expected to pay. He wants to be broke at precisely the moment he no longer needs his coin.”  

We have forgotten about the little BIG things! For me, running is always been super therapeutic.  You have hours upon hours of just uninterrupted thinking processes as you are running. And just in the silence... Like others, I also deal with anxiety and depression and trying to figure out how to handle some depression I feel a lot more myself out here than I do pretty much everywhere else. And I come back out to get re-centered. To cope with my struggle with anxiety a little bit and every day that I am out here to run I really feel alive. Even a bad day running is probably one of the best days of your life. That type of well-being we can also call gratitude. From this, we have been inoculated by the overindulgences of modern living. Gratitude changes me, heals me, and makes my mind healthier. The gloom/melancholy, weight, depression and oversaturation of everything implanted into my mind, the wilderness heals with its austerity. That is why I need it and why I bring with me the bare minimum. I crave an experience that will connect me to a piece of inhabitable matter in the lifeless vacuum of eternal blackness. Cosmically negligible and practically unbelievable, life is a gift in which I need to inject enhancers: the flavours, colours, and smells of my origins Because I am the universe in the atom of humanity, an assemblage of molecules uniting the chaos of the Big Bang and the order of life. Conscious, weak and powerful at the same time, completely split but perfectly unique – I am the author of a piece of eternity. That eternity is my life and I will make every effort to carve out of it the best possible monument.

The way I look at running as a sport has been changing over the years as I pursue it. In each phase of my life, I have observed this from a different vantage point and learned something new. Runners are rhythm people, and I imagine train drivers are as well. both relying on distance, speed and time and how the moving parts travel over terrain. When your rhythm stops all of a sudden to navigate an unrunnable track, it accentuates just how attached we are to a certain kind of pace. I suppose my heartbeat is like the chug of an engine and the repeat of the wheels.... but you know what? I don't care much for distance over time now like a train driver pushing to make stations on time. I want to be engaged with what's around me, not my watch or distance markers. I want to be distracted by the trail, or the lack of one, and I want to work hard to get where I'm going. This is my new kind of running, which in some ways isn't running at all, it is exploring. And I bloody love it. 

I tried to cover the below points with regards to my running, which are:

NATURE

TIME

COMMUNITY

MENTAL HEALTH

GRATITUDE

The Tata Mumbai Marathon finisher Medal.

Life Is A Marathon.

 

This book is and isn't about running.

I really loved the exploration of the entanglement running has with the human condition and how the sport is a microcosm of life itself.  The author is a runner for sure and the book is about him running marathons but it parallels his marriage to a woman named Nataki whom he has been married for some 20 years or so. She isn't a runner and also suffers from bipolar disorder and the author does get honest about marriage and about mental health and about what he and his wife have gone through. It doesn't paint a picture such that running solves anything. It is a raw and honest look at what we do and why we do them and I would recommend this book to people even if they aren't runners. It's about commitment and endurance.

Love is sacrifice. To love is to put another person's needs ahead of one's own, to donate a kidney to a dying sibling, to skip a few meals for God, to (as the song goes) "climb the highest mountain ... only to be with you." The more we love, the more we are willing to sacrifice or suffer for the beloved. There's not much difference, if you think about it, between climbing a mountain to be with someone and running a marathon to cure cancer or bringing joy to a friend who used to run marathons before the accident. A person may choose to run a marathon for personal or even selfish reasons initially, but once he's neck-deep in suffering at mile twenty-four, he starts to think of others, because that's just how the human heart works. A runner who's neck deep in suffering needs the most powerful motivator he can find to endure the suffering he must endure to finish the race, and nothing motivates like love. Even the most competitive runners, the professionals, the Olympians- who may seem to race only for money, fame, and the thrill of victory, if you talk to them about their motivators (as the author has), will tell you they never run harder than when they are running for their family, their team, their tribe, their school, their god, or their country. 

There are so many things about running and life the author delves into this book that it is difficult to jot them down in a blog, his interpretation of "Real Runner" is something very striking to me. He says, 

All runners learn to be "real" runners. The definition of this term, however, is relative, not absolute. The runner who cannot yet complete a 5K without walking may define a real runner as one who can, and strives to do so. The runner who can already run a full 5K but has never run farther may define a real runner as one who has completed a marathon, and strives to do so. And so on. At every level, runners define "real runner" in such a way that it is just within their reach to become one, but only if they take the whole trip, giving everything they've got to realize whatever amount of potential they have. All runners who try as hard as they can to become the best runners they can be discover something in themselves the author described "real satisfaction that I've got the fire in the belly to dig deep and not fade away when the going gets tough" which heightens their self-image. All runners who try as hard as they possibly can to measure up, do.

The one thing everyone wants is to be happy. We seek happiness in all we do, however misguidedly at times. The most obvious way to go after happiness is to satisfy our worldly wants: to get the house we want, the spouse we want, the food we want, and the social media recognition we want. But this way never succeeds. None of us can create a world in which we have everything we want and nothing bad happens. Disappointment, pain, and hardship are inescapable.

 The other way to chase happiness is to change not the world we occupy but ourselves.  Fitzgerald says, "The happiest men and women are those who have become or are becoming, the persons they want to be. The folks among us who have consciously chosen themselves possess more strength and harbour less fear than do those who have everything they want (for now), and it is strength and fearlessness, not luck, that we need to face life's unpleasant parts. To become the person you want to be, you must first define that Person and then you must work hard to close the gap between your current and best selves. This work may take a variety of forms, but in my experience, none is more effective than running marathons."

 In the pain of a marathon, we learn who we are, discovering within ourselves both the weaknesses and flaws that hold us back and the strengths and virtues that drive us forward, which are different in each of us. To the extent that we keep going, finishing today's race and trying again tomorrow, we actively choose our strengths and virtues and reject our flaws and weaknesses. Over time, the good things in us grow as the bad things shrink, a process not unlike building muscle and burning fat. It is simply impossible to become a better person in one's own estimation through such a process and not at the same time become a happier person. 

My perspective after reading this book:

So can people really be addicted to something as challenging and uncomfortable as running marathons? I wondered. The answer to this question was all around me and within me too. Too much is made of human laziness. Yes, we are lazy. That's why 75 per cent of us don't exercise at all. But we're also not lazy. That's how we peopled every habitable inch of the planet within 85,000 years of first venturing out of Africa and how we landed on the moon a mere 15,000 years after that. George Mallory famously said that he climbed Mt. Everest "because it's there.' It would have been more accurate of him to say he climbed the mountain because he's human. There is an instinct within us as irresistible as our instinct to take the path of least resistance to set and achieve goals, to complete tasks, to test our limits and to discover what we are capable of. A person can become addicted to anything that brings pleasure, and achievement is one of life's most transcendent pleasures because it is attainable only by passing through pain and struggle, pleasure's antipodes. 

The marathon is a Mt. Everest for everyone a healthy challenge, universally respected, that rewards its conqueror with a sense of earned pride that, on the spectrum of life's satisfactions, falls somewhere between splitting the last log in a pile of cordwood and being the first human to set foot on the moon.