A man’s past keeps growing, even when his future has come to a full stop.
Neither you nor I speak English, but there are some things that can be said only in English.
Too much of Indian writing in English, it seemed to me, consisted of middle-class people writing about other middle-class people – and a small slice of life being passed off as an authentic portrait of the country.
At a time when India is going through great changes and, with China, is likely to inherit the world from the West, it is important that writers like me try to highlight the brutal injustices of society.
You ask ‘Are you a man or a demon?’ Neither, I say. I have woken up, and the rest of you are sleeping, and that is the only difference between us.
Inconvenience in progress, work is regretted.
Strange thoughts brew in your heart when you spend too much time with old books.
In terms of formal education, I may somewhat lacking. I never finished school. I am a self-taught entrepreneur, that’s the best kind there is, trust me.
Let animals live like animals; let humans live like humans. That’s my whole philosophy in a sentence.
Do we loathe our masters behind a facade of love – or do we love them behind a facade of loathing?
If only a man could spit his past out so easily.
It has always been very difficult for writers to survive commercially in India because the market was so small. But that’s not true at all any more. It’s one of the world’s fastest growing and most vibrant markets for books, especially in English.
Like most people who live in India, I complain about corruption, but know that I can live with corrupt men. It is the honest ones I secretly worry about.
I had grown up in a privileged, upper-caste Hindu community; and because my father worked for a Catholic hospital, we lived in a prosperous Christian neighborhood.
Greenwich Village always had its share of mind readers, but there are many more these days, and they seem to have moved closer to the mainstream of life in the city. What was crazy 10 years ago is now respectable, even among the best-educated New Yorkers.
An honest politician has no goodies to toss around. This limits his effectiveness profoundly, because political power in India is dispersed throughout a multi-tiered federal structure; a local official who has not been paid off can sometimes stop a billion-dollar project.
Like most of my friends in school, I was a member of multiple circulating libraries; and all of us, to begin with, borrowed and read the same things.
When I was growing up in the south Indian city of Madras, there were only two political parties that mattered; one was run by a former matinee idol, and the other was run by his former screenwriter.
Any good society survives on a circulation of favours.
The book of your revolution sits in the pit of your belly, young Indian. Crap it out, and read. Instead of which, they’re all sitting in front of color TVs and watching cricket and shampoo advertisements.