Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. Don't let the bastards grind you down.

I know The Handmaid’s Tale is classified as dystopian fiction, but while reading it, I kept thinking how dangerously close it feels to reality. It doesn’t feel like a far-off nightmare. It feels like something we’ve already seen fragments of—again and again—especially when it comes to how governments try to control women’s bodies. What women can do. What they can’t. Who gets to decide? And how quietly those decisions are taken away.

Throughout history, one of the easiest ways for power to assert itself has been through women’s bodies. Reproduction, morality, “purity,” safety—these words are often used as justification. What unsettled me about this book is that nothing in it felt sudden. There’s no dramatic switch. No overnight collapse. Everything happens slowly. So slowly that people convince themselves it’s normal. Necessary, even.

This might not be our immediate future. But with the political shifts we’ve been seeing lately, it doesn’t feel impossible either. I had noticed The Handmaid’s Tale surge in popularity every now and then, but I think I found this book at exactly the right moment. Especially after the Gen Z movements in Nepal—amid all the noise, misinformation, misleading agendas, and propaganda flying around. We’re still in this strange waiting period, unsure how our country will move forward, desperately waiting for elections, clarity, something solid. Reading this book during all that chaos gave me chills. It felt like watching something unfold in real time rather than reading fiction.

There’s one paragraph that still hasn’t left me. I remember reading it on a train ride in China—which, honestly, felt ironic in itself. Reading a book that would probably be banned in a country where control is so normalized.

“Before Gilead, it didn’t feel like a coup. It was gradual, like everyone was too tired to notice until it was fully in place. They took away freedoms step by step—first words, then movements, then choices—all justified by fear and safety. People believed if they complied, they’d be safe. That’s how control was won: not with loud guns at every corner, but by convincing citizens to accept restriction in small, almost invisible pieces.”