Miss Clueless

What books have I read in July? Let's see. 1. The Indispensable Zinn, Howard Zinn 2. A Livable Future is Possible, Noam Chomsky, C.J.  Polychroniou 3. Manufacturing Consent, Edward S. Herman, Noam Chomsky 4. History of Manipur Pre-Colonial Period, Gangmumei Kamei 5. Rebel India, Henry Noel Brailsford 6. Rainbow Valley, L.M. Montgomery The Indispensable Zinn is a curated collection of Howard Zinn's most influential writings. The book highlights his lifelong commitment to social justice, anti-war activism, and grassroots democracy. It includes selections from A People's History of the United States and his speeches, essays, and personal reflections. He made a powerful case for ordinary people as agents of change in history, which is exactly the kind of thing I want to read, learn, and get inspired by. I'm very glad I picked this up. A Livable Future is Possible is a series of interviews with Noam Chomsky conducted by journalist C.J. Polychroniou (sounds like a chemical su...

 Scrolling through Instagram, I was seeing clips of a debate where one guy was openly declaring himself a fascist and laughing out loud; another guy was not answering a straight question of whether or not Israeli snipers shooting Palestinian children in the head was the fault of Israel. Instead, he tried to justify that those children may not be innocent. Seriously!! Sooo exasperating!! They were CHILDREN, for goodness' sake!!! Then there's another guy saying, White people are Native Americans. 🙄 These are actually clips from a YouTube debate titled "1 Progressive vs 20 Far-Right Conservatives (ft. Mehdi Hasan). Going viral now, I think. Of course, I watched the entire thing straight. I have to say Mehdi Hasan is excellent at what he does. So satisfying to watch. I felt bad when the guy with the pink shirt and white cap told him, "Get the hell out." I am not surprised, though. I know these people exist. Racist, fascist, privileged white supremacists who do not a...

 It's 3:23 am, Friday the 27th of December, 2024. I am up because I had a bad dream. I tried going back to sleep, but I felt that I should write down how I was feeling. Perhaps I will feel a little better or more relieved after doing that. I don't know whether the way we left off our phone conversation or the news about the total shutdown had anything to do with the dream. I mean, we didn't finish our conversation on good footing. We nearly, no! We most certainly raised our voices. And there was news about the shutdown, which was a reason for some panic.  So, in the dream, I was in a big lecture hall with benches & seats on big steps. There were many people. The person beside me was just telling me to be careful, more like hide my face, because I, with two other people (I didn't know who they were), looked a bit like Kukis. (I mean, what?! How did this even pop up in my dream, huh!?) He said that we were more susceptible to attacks, so it's better to be safe and...

Last month, in June, I read the History of Modern Manipur. It's a book edited by Lal Dena (Department of History, Manipur University). This copy is a first edition, published in 1990. Our story starts way back in 1762 —the year Manipur came into its first formal contact with the British . At that time, King Bhagyachandra of Manipur was in big trouble. The Burmese (from present-day Myanmar) had invaded his kingdom, and he had to run for his life! So what did he do? He asked the British East India Company for help. The British, who were gradually expanding their power in India, believed that assisting Manipur could be beneficial. So they signed a treaty with Bhagyachandra in 1762 and promised to help him get his kingdom back. Spoiler alert: they didn’t do much at that time. But it was the start of a new relationship between Manipur and the British. Fast forward to 1819 . Manipur was in total chaos . Brothers were fighting for the throne. They were the sons of Bhagyachandra: ...

 Today is the last day of June, and I feel compelled to jot down the books I read this month to reflect on my experience and learnings. These are the books: ~The Magic Fish by Trung Le Nguyen ~My Seditious Heart by Arundhati Roy ~Annihilation of Caste by Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar ~History of Modern Manipur by Lal Dena Just four. It's okay, really. There is no compulsion to read 6/7 books every month. Reading fewer books doesn't mean I'm learning less. In fact, I learned more deeply. The books this month have been impactful in different ways. Clearly, there is a shift in my choices, and I feel this was meant to be. Meaning, I'm leaning more into nonfiction now. I guess I've always been angry and frustrated deep inside. Angry about the climate crisis, social injustice, discrimination, violence, war, exploitation, etc., etc. I was just deluding myself, living in the comforting world of fiction, escaping all these thoughts. As I read more nonfiction, I get angrier, but I k...

Reading Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq—the winner of the International Booker Prize 2025—was, I'm not going to lie, a frustrating experience. This is a collection of short stories about oppressed Muslim women, many of whom are trapped in painful, inhumane relationships, mostly with their husbands. What broke me was the fact that so many of these women had no way out. No choice. Their circumstances, their communities, and the world around them offered little to no support. Reading about their lives burned. It made me angry. It made me feel helpless.  But maybe that’s what this book is meant to do—hold up a mirror, make us feel the injustice, and help us understand what these women go through every day. Maybe if more people read these stories, things can change. Awareness is the first step. Empathy is next. Another thing that stood out to me was the writing itself. The book is translated from Kannada, and since I lived in a Kannada-speaking city for more than a decade, the language ...

The Doctor and the Saint  is a nonfiction essay, a theoretical debate between two towering figures in Indian history: B.R. Ambedkar and M.K. Gandhi. The "doctor" refers to Ambedkar, jurist, economist, and the chief architect of India’s Constitution, while the "saint" is Gandhi, the internationally revered leader of India’s independence movement. Roy challenges the sanitized image of Gandhi often taught in mainstream narratives, especially regarding his views and actions on caste. She contrasts this with Ambedkar’s radical anti-caste politics, his lived experience as a Dalit, and his demand for dignity and structural change. The book not only examines their ideological rift but also asks hard questions about how we remember history, who gets to tell it, and what justice really looks like. In the book , Arundhati Roy writes: For a writer to have to use terms like ‘Untouchable,’ ‘Scheduled Caste,’ ‘Backward Class,’ and ‘Other Backward Classes’ to describe fellow human ...