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Quote by Abhijit Naskar

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Iftar-e Insaniyat: The First Supper

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Abhijit Naskar

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“When Whiteness Collapses (Sonnet) When the whites benefit from privilege, it's part and parcel of colonial heritage, but when a giant rises from the marginals, it eclipses the shallow heights of whiteness. I'm colored, I'm scientist, I'm poet, I'm polyglot - coming from zero money, I won the world with words. Try and get your puny white brains around this existence enigma - compile your white canons of a century, and they turn bleak next to just one year of multicultural, multidisciplinary Naskar. I never grovelled to be included, I let my vastness out, and the world queues for my grace.”

PhilosophyLiteratureGeniusSocial JusticeInequalityMulticulturalismDecolonizationWhite PrivilegeMarginalized
Book:Kral Fakir: When Calls The Kainat
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“Proof of Sapiens (Sonnet 2403) If a 3 pound brain can contain a 100 billion nerve cells, a planet with land the size of 20 billion stadiums should have room for 10 billion people. Then how come, so many have to survive on so little, on a planet this size, this rich! It all comes down to hoarding - if we cared more about social responsibility than social etiquette, we wouldn't have such drastic paradoxes of disparity. In English we say: proof of the pudding is in the eating. In Naskarian we say: proof of the Sapiens is in the sharing.”

PrejudiceEqualityInequalityBigotryEqual RightsInclusiveDisparityAccessibility
Book:Sonnets From The Mountaintop
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“One way to make sure that white and Black Americans have similar levels of wealth would be for society to get a lot more equal, lifting poor Black people out of poverty. But another way to make sure that white and Black Americans have similar wealth would be for a small number of Black people to become extremely rich. Marxists like Reed are aware of the fact that the latter course of action would ask much less of the rich and powerful, allowing them to keep most of their wealth. This, they worry, makes it much more likely that societies will try to achieve equity through such comparatively cosmetic changes that don’t actually reduce overall inequality. And if America manages to create a few dozen Black billionaires while millions of Americans of all races continue to live in poverty, they conclude, precious little is gained for most people: “The disparitarian ideal is that blacks and other nonwhites should be represented on every rung on the ladder of economic hierarchy in rough proportion to their representation in the general population.” But “a society where making black and white people equal means making them equally subordinate to a . . . ruling class is not a more just society, just a differently unjust one.”

InequalityEquityBillionaireIdentity Politics
Book:The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time
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“For example, regions in the Americas that were well suited to cash crops that required intensive farming and benefited from large pools of labour became places with high levels of inequality and limited distribution of rights among the population. Locations better suited to less intensive forms of agricultural production on the other hand - regions that favoured the growing of wheat, for example - proved to be more egalitarian, with better distribution of rights among the population. The short explanation for this is that crops that required lower labour input produced smaller profits and therefore meant there was less to fight over, and more reason to co-operate. This is one of the reasons why it is possible to identify a strong relationship between a country's socio-economic development and its distance from the equator.”

HistoryInequality
Book:The Earth Transformed: An Untold History
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“We are living through an absolutely crucial juncture in human history, when the externalities of our current economic system are coming home to roost. These include misinformation (courtesy of 'Big Tech'), global heating (thanks to 'Big Oil'), and wealth inequality (exacerbated by neoliberal economic policies). Together, these interlocking crises are buffeting our political institutions, threatening to envelop them in a vortex of partisanship and chronic instability. Looming over these challenges is the threat of societal disruption from AI and the imminent collapse of a rules-based international order. At such a time, what we need more than ever is a big vision, a narrative to help people make sense of the bewildering world we live in, and political courage. Both things that seem distinctly lacking from our political class.”

InequalityGlobal WarmingArtificial IntelligenceMisinformationInstabilityNeoliberalismPolitical Courage
Book:Reforesting Scotland 72: Autumn/Winter 2025
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“Utopianism also finds a receptive audience among the society's disenchanted, disaffected, dissatisfied, and maladjusted who are unwilling or unable to assume responsibility for their own real or perceived conditions but instead blame their surroundings, 'the system,' and others. They are lured by the false hopes and promises of utopian transformation and the criticisms of the existing society, to which their connection is tentative or nonexistent. Improving the malcontent's lot becomes linked to the utopian cause. Moreover, disparaging and diminishing the successful and accomplished becomes an essential tactic. No one should be better than anyone else, regardless of the merits or values of his contributions. By exploiting human frailties, frustrations, jealousies, and inequities, a sense of meaning and self-worth is created in the malcontent's otherwise unhappy and directionless life. Simply put, equality in misery -- that is, equality of result or conformity -- is advanced as a just, fair, and virtuous undertaking. Liberty, therefore, is inherently immoral, except where it avails equality.”

InequalityUtopianismMalcontents
Book:Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America
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“Equality, as understood by the American Founders, is the natural right of every individual to live freely under self-government, to acquire and retain the property he creates through his own labor, and to be treated impartially before a just law. Moreover, equality should not be confused with perfection, for man is also imperfect, making his application of equality, even in the most just society, imperfect. Otherwise, inequality is the natural state of man in the sense that each individual is born unique in all his human characteristics. Therefore, equality and inequality, properly comprehended, are both engines of liberty.”

LibertyEqualityInequality
Book:Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America
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“What a child does not know and does not want to know of race and colour and class, he learns soon enough as he grows to see each man flipped inexorably into some predestined groove like a penny or a sovereign in a banker's rack. Kibii, the Nandi boy, was my good friend. Arab Ruta (the same boy grown to manhood), who sits before me, is my good friend, but the handclasp will be shorter, the smile will not be so eager on his lips, and though the path is for a while the same, he will walk behind me now, when once, in the simplicity of our nonage, we walked together.”

DiscriminationInequalityAfricaColonial Society
Book:West with the Night
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