In My Hands Today…

Posted on by
Reply

Your Future Self: How to Make Tomorrow Better Today – Hal Hershfield

We’ve all had the desire to travel through time and see what our lives will be like later in life. But while we want the best possible future for ourselves, we often fail to make decisions that would truly make that version of the future.

Based on over a decade of groundbreaking research, Your Future Self is the “entertaining and powerful book” (Carol Dweck, author of Mindset ) that explains that in our minds, our future selves often look like strangers.

Many of us view the future as incredibly distant, making us more likely to opt for immediate gratification that disregards our health and well-being in the years to come.

People who are able to connect with their future selves, however, are better able to balance living for today and planning for tomorrow. Your Future Self describes the mental mistakes we make in thinking about the future and gives us practical advice for imagining our best future so we can make that vision a reality.

In My Hands Today…

Posted on by
Reply

Red Memory: The Afterlives of China’s Cultural Revolution – Tania Branigan

“It is impossible to understand China today without understanding the Cultural Revolution,” Tania Branigan writes. During this decade of Maoist fanaticism between 1966 and 1976, children condemned parents, students condemned teachers, and as many as two million people died for their supposed political sins, while tens of millions were hounded, ostracized, and imprisoned.

Yet in China this brutal and turbulent period exists, for the most part, as an absence; official suppression and personal trauma have conspired in national amnesia. Red Memory uncovers forty years of silence through the stories of individuals who lived through the madness. Deftly exploring how this era defined a generation and continues to impact China today, Branigan asks: What happens to a society when you can no longer trust those closest to you? What happens to the present when the past is buried, exploited, or redrawn? And how do you live with yourself when the worst is over?

Happy New Year!

Posted on by
Reply

It’s 2025! Happy New Year…

Source

As the calendar turns and we welcome a new year, it’s a moment filled with promise and opportunity. The transition into a new year is not just a celebration of time passing; it’s a chance to reflect on our journeys, set intentions, and cultivate a mindset that fosters growth and positivity.

So what will 2025 bring to this space?

For starters, it will take a couple of weeks for me to type the year correctly. After a year of tying 2024, it will take me a few weeks to get used to typing 2025!

I have some ideas on where I want to take my blog this year. I am going to consolidate all my memory posts into one that I will call Mumbai Memories. This will be all about my childhood memories, my reflections on growing up, and my memories of my grandparents. I hope to be able to share memories of growing up in Mumbai that were both rooted in the past and were looking forward to the future.

After a short hiatus, I will restart my travel bucket list series with Nepal. I am going to deep dive into the country and try to go to the distant corners of the country. And I am super excited about this.

I am also planning another series based on my resurgent interest in Hindu spirituality, more details later in the year.

My Adulting 101 series will continue with information and tips for young adults. This series is aimed at late teens and those in their early twenties who are either in university or starting their first jobs. This series aims to give them a leg-up in their career they wouldn’t really know until they’ve had experience.

I will continue to write more stories and poems as well as try and find interesting festivals from India. And of course more interesting blog posts on personal development.

So once again, thank you to everyone who supports me and makes me want to write more. If you have any ideas on what I should be writing, please share them with me, and I will try and incorporate your suggestions. So stay tuned for interesting posts in 2025!

In My Hands Today…

Posted on by
Reply

Waiting to Be Arrested at Night: A Uyghur Poet’s Memoir of China’s Genocide – Tahir Hamut Izgil, translated by Joshua L Freeman

One by one, Tahir Hamut Izgil’s friends disappeared. The Chinese government’s brutal persecution of the Uyghur people had continued for years, but in 2017 it assumed a terrifying new scale. The Uyghurs, a predominantly Muslim minority group in western China, were experiencing an echo of the worst horrors of the twentieth century, amplified by China’s establishment of an all-seeing high-tech surveillance state. Over a million people have vanished into China’s internment camps for Muslim minorities.

Tahir, a prominent poet and intellectual, had been no stranger to persecution. After he attempted to travel abroad in 1996, police tortured him until he confessed to fabricated charges and sent him to a re-education through labor camp. But even having endured three years in the camp, he could never have predicted the Chinese government’s radical solution to the Uyghur question two decades later. Was the first sign when Tahir was interrogated for hours after a phone call with a fellow poet in the Netherlands? Or when his old friend was sentenced to life in prison simply for calling for Uyghurs’ legal rights to be enforced? Perhaps it was when the police seized Uyghurs’ radios and installed jamming equipment to cut them off from the outside world.

Once Tahir noticed that the park near his home was nearly empty because so many neighbors had been arrested, he knew the police would be coming for him any day. One night, after Tahir’s daughters were asleep, he placed by his door a sturdy pair of shoes, a sweater, and a coat so that he could stay warm if the police came for him in the middle of the night. It was clear to Tahir and his wife that fleeing the country was the family’s only hope.

Waiting to Be Arrested at Night is the story of the political, social, and cultural destruction of Tahir Hamut Izgil’s homeland. Among leading Uyghur intellectuals and writers, he is the only one known to have escaped China since the mass internments began. His book is a call for the world to awaken to the unfolding catastrophe, and a tribute to his friends and fellow Uyghurs whose voices have been silenced.