What book are you reading?

Surya2023 said:
May be use a service like Garuda Vega to send these books to Dubai. Many of us use these service to USA and UK regularly. They are very safe and reach very fast. As these are weight basis you can send both the books together. On the lighter note too many people travel to Dubai from Hyderabad so u can send these with them and ask them to mail in Dubai itself.
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Please help me with this.

The member of old PDF, Saiyan0321, has a copy of Mahmood Ahmed's book that he is holding for me.

Any hints on how this forwarding would work in reverse, from Sheikhupura to Hyderabad?

Most grateful for any insights.
 
Joe Shearer said:
Please help me with this.

The member of old PDF, Saiyan0321, has a copy of Mahmood Ahmed's book that he is holding for me.

Any hints on how this forwarding would work in reverse, from Sheikhupura to Hyderabad?

Most grateful for any insights.
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Joe, you will be able to send books easily and safely to Dubai from Hyderabad
When we were in USA my father would send medicines, books and some stuff through post office and they always reached us safely. Father in law mailed pickles, sweets and snacks through Garuda Vega with no problem at all. Many people send regularly stuff to dubai through Garuda Vega as we telugus are quite fond of local snacks and pickles.

But I am not sure how it works from Pakistan. May be your locals from hakimpet will know. May be international couriers will work as many people will be getting stuff from Pakistan to India and vice versa. Hope this helps. As you said the book is a rare and difficult find I hope you will be able to get it.

Another choice is may be saiyan can scan it and just send you a pdf or epub and you can read it on a tablet. As it is for personal use it should not violate any copy right laws.
 
Surya2023 said:
Joe, you will be able to send books easily and safely to Dubai from Hyderabad
When we were in USA my father would send medicines, books and some stuff through post office and they always reached us safely. Father in law mailed pickles, sweets and snacks through Garuda Vega with no problem at all. Many people send regularly stuff to dubai through Garuda Vega as we telugus are quite fond of local snacks and pickles.

But I am not sure how it works from Pakistan. May be your locals from hakimpet will know. May be international couriers will work as many people will be getting stuff from Pakistan to India and vice versa. Hope this helps. As you said the book is a rare and difficult find I hope you will be able to get it.

Another choice is may be saiyan can scan it and just send you a pdf or epub and you can read it on a tablet. As it is for personal use it should not violate any copy right laws.
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Thanks, that was very useful.

As soon as I am well and back in circulation, I shall pursue these lines of enquiry.

As for the PDF, I really would rather have the book itself, even though I know that a church mouse like me should be saving such costs.
 
arjunk said:
Lamb's book on Kashmir is an excellent read and considered the best book on the matter. Here is the full text for free. Pages 121 onwards are especially informative.

archive.org

Kashmir A Disputed Legacy By Alastair Lamb : Alastair Lamb : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Kashmir A Disputed Legacy by Alastair Lamb
archive.org
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Thoroughly prejudiced and highly one-sided. He started the rabbit of the missing accession document. Will suit only apologists from Pakistan, trying to create a smokescreen around their covert operations to gain what they wanted and hadn't got.
 
Joe Shearer said:
Thoroughly prejudiced and highly one-sided. He started the rabbit of the missing accession document. Will suit only apologists from Pakistan, trying to create a smokescreen around their covert operations to gain what they wanted and hadn't got.
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This is the second edition. Vast majority of historians and scholars consider it to the most authoritative and detailed work on the matter yet. However, it is true that some Indian commentators vehemently detest it for not conforming to the Indian Hindu victim narrative.
 
Nilgiri said:
I don't think curiousity or greed are good things per se. Curiousity is neutral. It can be good or bad, depends on context.

Greed is generally bad (and often very bad), though depends on definition. To me it implies excessive allocation/need of something well past what is actually or reasonably needed/required.

Even with the many famous explorers, I can generally get a feeling (once I read enough of them) which ones had greed as motivation. Its not a good driving force for nature of exploration.

Anyway I am bit sad @VCheng seems to have left the forum. Hope he reading this and returns.

Gonna tag @Fatman17 to partake and add what he thinks about aliens and stuff, or anything else in last few pages.
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At the heart of human nature lies a fundamental drive for self-preservation and advancement. Greed is an intrinsic aspect of this innate desire for growth and fulfilment. Greed can be understood as the manifestation of humanity's relentless pursuit of individual betterment and existential significance.

Greed also serves as a catalyst for progress and innovation. Throughout history, it has been the driving force behind countless human endeavours, from the exploration of uncharted territories to the pursuit of scientific knowledge and technological advancement. Greed compels individuals to push boundaries, take risks, and strive for excellence, ultimately propelling humanity forward on its quest for mastery over the forces of nature and the mysteries of existence.

Furthermore, greed plays a crucial role in the dynamics of human relationships and social structures. It fuels competition, ambition, and the pursuit of status, driving individuals to distinguish themselves and assert their dominance in various spheres of life. While this competitive aspect of greed may lead to conflicts and inequalities, it also fosters growth, resilience, and adaptation within societies, ultimately contributing to their evolution and survival.

In essence, greed is not merely a moral failing or aberration but an essential aspect of human nature that reflects our instinctual drive for survival, self-interest, and advancement. Greed definitely leads to negative consequences when left unchecked which is why I strongly believe that strong regulations must be in place to keep our greed in check but fundamentally greed is necessary for humans to advance.

This is my firm opinion on greed though you are more than welcome to disagree with me on this. I wonder what @Joe Shearer thinks about this.

@Developereo @Hamartia Antidote @RescueRanger @Meengla You guys are also welcome to participate here.
 
_NOBODY_ said:
At the heart of human nature lies a fundamental drive for self-preservation and advancement. Greed is an intrinsic aspect of this innate desire for growth and fulfilment.
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It depends upon what you define as Greed.
It sometimes is not as straightforward as you think

In some poor country greed may be the dream to live in your own home...which for people elsewhere may just be the expected thing.

You can claim Capitalism is just greed. Somebody wants to make something new and be rewarded handsomely for it. But is the invention of the car/plane/train poisoned because maybe the incentive was greed? Maybe to quote Gordon Gecko "Greed is good" at times.

Maybe we should define greed as you gain by taking away from someone else. How can you call the invention of the plane greed if it wasn't at the direct detriment of someone else.
 
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_NOBODY_ said:
At the heart of human nature lies a fundamental drive for self-preservation and advancement. Greed is an intrinsic aspect of this innate desire for growth and fulfilment. Greed can be understood as the manifestation of humanity's relentless pursuit of individual betterment and existential significance.

Greed also serves as a catalyst for progress and innovation. Throughout history, it has been the driving force behind countless human endeavours, from the exploration of uncharted territories to the pursuit of scientific knowledge and technological advancement. Greed compels individuals to push boundaries, take risks, and strive for excellence, ultimately propelling humanity forward on its quest for mastery over the forces of nature and the mysteries of existence.

Furthermore, greed plays a crucial role in the dynamics of human relationships and social structures. It fuels competition, ambition, and the pursuit of status, driving individuals to distinguish themselves and assert their dominance in various spheres of life. While this competitive aspect of greed may lead to conflicts and inequalities, it also fosters growth, resilience, and adaptation within societies, ultimately contributing to their evolution and survival.

In essence, greed is not merely a moral failing or aberration but an essential aspect of human nature that reflects our instinctual drive for survival, self-interest, and advancement. Greed definitely leads to negative consequences when left unchecked which is why I strongly believe that strong regulations must be in place to keep our greed in check but fundamentally greed is necessary for humans to advance.

This is my firm opinion on greed though you are more than welcome to disagree with me on this. I wonder what @Joe Shearer thinks about this.

@Developereo @Hamartia Antidote @RescueRanger @Meengla You guys are also welcome to participate here.
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I remember picking up an old book titled something like “plato’s study on the birth of Ego”. It was a remarkable old book because the price on the cover was 1 Shilling(very old British currency) so it was definitely a pre-partition book.

Was a fascinating read on how ego fuels avarice and the complexity of the human condition as it was termed.

Mind you I was 17 at the time so much of this blew my mind 🤯
 
_NOBODY_ said:
At the heart of human nature lies a fundamental drive for self-preservation and advancement. Greed is an intrinsic aspect of this innate desire for growth and fulfilment. Greed can be understood as the manifestation of humanity's relentless pursuit of individual betterment and existential significance.

Greed also serves as a catalyst for progress and innovation. Throughout history, it has been the driving force behind countless human endeavours, from the exploration of uncharted territories to the pursuit of scientific knowledge and technological advancement. Greed compels individuals to push boundaries, take risks, and strive for excellence, ultimately propelling humanity forward on its quest for mastery over the forces of nature and the mysteries of existence.

Furthermore, greed plays a crucial role in the dynamics of human relationships and social structures. It fuels competition, ambition, and the pursuit of status, driving individuals to distinguish themselves and assert their dominance in various spheres of life. While this competitive aspect of greed may lead to conflicts and inequalities, it also fosters growth, resilience, and adaptation within societies, ultimately contributing to their evolution and survival.

In essence, greed is not merely a moral failing or aberration but an essential aspect of human nature that reflects our instinctual drive for survival, self-interest, and advancement. Greed definitely leads to negative consequences when left unchecked which is why I strongly believe that strong regulations must be in place to keep our greed in check but fundamentally greed is necessary for humans to advance.

This is my firm opinion on greed though you are more than welcome to disagree with me on this. I wonder what @Joe Shearer thinks about this.

@Developereo @Hamartia Antidote @RescueRanger @Meengla You guys are also welcome to participate here.
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Reminds me of the scene from A Beautiful Mind where they realize that the optimal strategy for success is a combination of competition and cooperation. EIther one by itself is suboptimal.

The test goal in this case was to get some beautiful girl's phone number or something at a bar.
 
Nilgiri said:
How to be a dictator: The cult of personality in the 20th century
(By Frank Dikotter)

It serves as useful compare and contrast for me with his books on modern China (also quite good and recommended, but its heavy reading and there's occidental bias involved in some measure).

A Chinese friend of mine (from exiled family) has very strong opinions that Dikotter doesnt go far enough on some of his harsh criticism of Mao, CCP and so on..... and his is a mismatch of primary material but lot of anecdotal stuff too for his basis.

This is a galaxy of a subject in the end....very few people really explore it. I might give short summary a bit later of some stuff I notice when it comes to truth and perspective here later on....that materialise in deep way even for this forum.
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I reference my older Chinese friend here again:

Debt tripled under Modi Raj

How are they doing better?? Their external debt per capita is higher than us while GDP per capita lower than us. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/DT.DOD.DECT.CD?locations=PK-IN As if ppp matters. India has more income inequality. Remove Jain Gujarati Marwadi crony capitalists out of the...
defencepk.com

Nilgiri said:
Pakistan can sorely do a lot better for sure.

But that goes for India too. Its just matter of degree in the end....but its nothing to write home about for India's case.

"Balanced" is subjective here in end. I don't see things as balanced for India as I put the social engineering aspect (for social stability and cohesion aligned to truth, reason and justice) as the primary consideration.....far before anything to do with the economy.....as really the economy flows from this. The economy cannot fix what is broken here.....it is downstream to it.

i.e the great importance of what are the basic rights in every individual to be protected by the rule of law.....rather than be pressured, challenged, eroded.....or stripped away or not given at all to begin with.

I have met many kinds of people in my life so far, I thank God for that opportunity....I wish one day far more human beings have the same.

Some of the most interesting have been the exiled patriots.....the older the better (as that means the depth and length of what they've seen and know about).

The reason why is they, more than anyone else I've seen, fundamentally understand the consequences of social engineering done wrong....what they loved about an older version of a country before say a regime imposed and corrupted it for some stretch of decades. What they still sense as surviving past that all and what may have changed permanently for the worse.....what part of the population struggle and strive against it, what portion are active in enabling the corruption, what portion are resigned to it, what portion have stockholm syndrome to it and so on.

Iranian friend elder to me by decades...you can tell him any number, any balanced outlook or prospect related to Iran today and it will just evoke a fierce anger for reasons he has made quite plain to me....as simply the captors and all their lackeys have to go, and that these secondary numbers and burnished propaganda mean very little compared to it.

He at least has been able to isolate the specific problems somewhat, in order to love the "deeper" country to the degree he can manage with his age and time away

Another exiled patriot, an even older Chinese friend who has passed on some years ago, saw far worse and fared worse on this stuff. He found the despot praise of the Japanese "war" helping bring him to power especially distasteful....and the continued cult image for the regime to preserve. From that all the other extreme excesses and their sociological costs were almost inevitable, as there was some never-ending need for social warfare....as only war made sense to the despot.

6 trillion, 16 trillion....or 60 trillion or what have you could never be attributable to the regime (anything good that came to society from these numbers, whatever is true and fake about them.... was wholly the degree to which the regime was finally getting out of the way from things it should never have been puppeteering top down to begin with, while drastically absconding from being aligned to truth, justice and virtue to begin with....or even inverting and perverting these).

Simply put the regime has taken away too much (from both him personally and from his larger people, especially the weak, innocent and defenceless), that it can never give back....yet wont hold itself to account. It prefers delusion by some might makes right....totally contrary to way reality aligns to truth in the end.

So now come the costs, the costs always come in the end....as reality always wins in the end. You need comprehensive development of honest and truthful society in the end to completely dominate the scope of any regime, as to what the regime is alloted to, what its purpose is.

Otherwise you get even the hotchpotch costs of the downstream things in the economy....like the what and how of why price signalling was never allowed full transmission in the old marxist contraption opened to just this or that tier and level, and which sectors doggedly stick to labour theory of value.....and the great accumulating costs here to further add to the sociological ones. Real estate problem in China is just one part of it though not the only one....but it is all tied to the earlier period of the CCP and what it brutalised upon the people with unchallengeable mandate and far too few scruples.

India ignores all of this at its own peril. There are fundamental valuable things that were never in great shape that it is making worse now.

It is imperative that is course corrected and set on better heading again....only by doing that is there more assured basic balance on the downstream things like economy, that are ultimately heavily reliant on this. Wealth and progress cannot come in any meaningful way to a weak, fissured society eternally scapegoating and struggling with itself on matters that should have been left behind long ago.
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BTW @FuturePAF , you might find this book thread interesting to go through and contribute to over time as well.
 
_NOBODY_ said:
At the heart of human nature lies a fundamental drive for self-preservation and advancement. Greed is an intrinsic aspect of this innate desire for growth and fulfilment. Greed can be understood as the manifestation of humanity's relentless pursuit of individual betterment and existential significance.

Greed also serves as a catalyst for progress and innovation. Throughout history, it has been the driving force behind countless human endeavours, from the exploration of uncharted territories to the pursuit of scientific knowledge and technological advancement. Greed compels individuals to push boundaries, take risks, and strive for excellence, ultimately propelling humanity forward on its quest for mastery over the forces of nature and the mysteries of existence.

Furthermore, greed plays a crucial role in the dynamics of human relationships and social structures. It fuels competition, ambition, and the pursuit of status, driving individuals to distinguish themselves and assert their dominance in various spheres of life. While this competitive aspect of greed may lead to conflicts and inequalities, it also fosters growth, resilience, and adaptation within societies, ultimately contributing to their evolution and survival.

In essence, greed is not merely a moral failing or aberration but an essential aspect of human nature that reflects our instinctual drive for survival, self-interest, and advancement. Greed definitely leads to negative consequences when left unchecked which is why I strongly believe that strong regulations must be in place to keep our greed in check but fundamentally greed is necessary for humans to advance.

This is my firm opinion on greed though you are more than welcome to disagree with me on this. I wonder what @Joe Shearer thinks about this.

@Developereo @Hamartia Antidote @RescueRanger @Meengla You guys are also welcome to participate here.
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I understand where you are coming from. But I'm going from the definition of the cardinal sin, where "the drive" as you put is strongly implied or established to be excessive.

Hence things like greed, gluttony, lust, pride and so on...(sloth, envy, wrath, sorry I had to test my memory a bit).

i.e take pride, the earlier non-excessive state of being proud of something is not a bad thing (and can be a good thing even), but pride here defines the excessive state of being so.

But pride is also used for the non-excessive state in generalised parlance too (I take great pride in this good work done etc). So I suppose greed can be as well. i.e I get where you are coming from. Freud might say the tiers between the id and superego exist as they do for us to recognise and try learn from. But it is the superego that keeps the id in check, excessive id makes a human being corrupt and animalistic in the worst ways.

So when greed implies that excess or has it as some default (especially when engaged upon to the detriment of others, as some resources are indeed zero-sum and finite especially in a localised relevant realm)....it is a bad thing as you are infringing upon virtue and morality.

i.e The neutral/positive aspects greed grows out of, other words come into view to describe those for a reason too. But I am not going to throw up too much of a fuss if like pride, greed is just as general form for the whole too. It can be fleshed out as to what you mean like you just did.
 
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