Ritesh Chakravarthy

“পুরানো মাঝে যা-কিছু ছিল
চিরকালের ধন,
নূতন,তুমি এনেছ
তাই করিয়া আহরণ ॥”
― Rabindranath Tagore

“Imperialism is the object-less disposition of a state to expansion by force without assigned limits... Modern Imperialism is one of the heirlooms of the absolute monarchical state. The "inner logic" of capitalism would have never evolved it. Its sources come from the policy of the princes and the customs of a pre-capitalist milieu. But even export monopoly is not imperialism and it would never have developed to imperialism in the hands of the pacific bourgeoisie. This happened only because the war machine, its social atmosphere, and the martial will were inherited and because a martially oriented class (i.e., the nobility) maintained itself in a ruling position with which of all the varied interests of the bourgeoisie the martial ones could ally themselves. This alliance keeps alive fighting instincts and ideas of domination. It led to social relations which perhaps ultimately are to be explained by relations of production but not by the productive relations of capitalism alone.”
―  Joseph A. Schumpeter, The Sociology of Imperialism (1918)

“I met death in Dickens. It made more of an impression on me than anything else in Dickens. There was the death of Little Nell, the death of Paul Dombey, the death of Barkis in David Copperfield, the death (above all) of Dora. I remember reading about that in the autumn of 1918. It was October; it was a rainy day; and it was late afternoon when I read that chapter. I read it by the light of the fire. I can still remember all that. I can still remember my grief, and I can still remember that it took me several months to overcome that grief about a fictive character in a book—not that I have ever really recovered. That experience at the age of eight prepared me to find value in the passing of loved ones. It helped me to endure and properly experience the real deaths that followed it . . . We need to prepare our children for death. It is one of the things that they need and have a right to learn, and it is from literature that they can best learn it.”
― Arm the Children

“মেঘ সে বাষ্পগিরি,
গিরি সে বাষ্পমেঘ,
কালের স্বপ্নে যুগে যুগে ফিরি ফিরি
এ কিসের ভাবাবেগ॥”
― Rabindranath Tagore