krishnendu's reviews
43 reviews

Felt engineered to provoke strong emotional responses than genuine reflection. 

This was a difficult read. It's disorienting to realise just how unchanging the female experience of mental illness has remained across generations and cultures. While the medical system has thankfully improved, what's heartbreakingly static is a society that still judges and treats female mental illness as a spectacle. plath brilliantly drags you through the three great stages of the deal - denial, despair and finally, the almost comical indifference to your condition. Perhaps the best stream of consciousness work on the descent into depression, which however contains disturbing aspects like racism and homophobia which cannot be dispensed as products of its time.

A misguided attempt. The book makes some (hardly) valid points in the author's usual inflammatory verbose about issues facing Hindus in India, like the Places of Worship Act and the Waqf Act. However, the book, in its entirety, is a one-sided, hyperbolic rhetoric with appalling Hindu self-victimisation.

The cherry-picked data does its part to ruin its credibility. For example, the book cites that 31.3% of homes under Awaas Yojna have gone to Muslims despite Muslims being only 14.2% of India's population. What is conveniently left unsaid is that Muslims are the poorest religious group in India, with every third Muslim being multidimensional poor (UN. 2019). The author also fails in his discussion of the RTI Act to note how many Hindu-run schools have found ways to circumvent its minority quota requirements by designating themselves as a linguistic minority rather than religious minority.

Moreover, the author assumes a monolithic "Hindu way of life" forgetting the diversity within Hinduism. What he fails to acknowledge is the far greater discrimination, or "apartheid," to use his own term, faced by Dalits within the very religion he seeks to defend. The "Hindu cause" he repeatedly invokes serves only the interests of upper-caste, upper-class Hindus. Criticising Dalits for not rallying behind this cause is in particularly poor taste when there is not even a cursory attempt to explain how it might uplift them (economically or even socially) in any meaningful way.

The book also cites a large chunk of non-academic sources, including YouTube videos. Unbiased academic sources would better serve an unbiased reader. Resorting to victimhood narratives and demonisation of minorities is a poor way to gain people to support this agenda.

- a Hindu.