Bhargav Varshney

the depth of a conversation depends on how deeply seen you feel, not on the topic of conversation

Too many people think freedom is the ability to do anything you want, instead of the discipline to not be a slave to your compulsions.

attention as inner ecology—and then, I could see ways that a holistic system was imperiled. I could see an inner landscape as a patch of thriving rainforest, a complex, interdependent ecology slashed back and stripped bare to accommodate the incursions of an export crop (and as we know, export crops don’t feed the locals). The long-rooted, sustaina... See more

The seeking was passive, the reward pale, the sense of agency bled dry. I checked reflexively, without intention.

write a memoir that was “defiantly self-incriminating”—and the result was a messy jumble of conflicting impulses, part provocation, part self-critique. Western readers rode roughshod over this paradox and made of Chua a kind of Asian minstrel figure. But more than anything else, Battle Hymn is a very American project—one no traditional Chinese pers... See more

I care, in the end, about expressing my obdurate singularity at any cost.