There didn’t seem to her any harm in it, and the make-believe was so comforting.
The carnage upon the chessboard of life, left wounded humans in its wake.
He who spits paan at the ceiling only blinds himself.
Traffic in the streets of Bombay is chaotic at best. Riding a bicycle is a dangerous occupation. However, there are hundreds of them on the streets competing with the cars and buses and lorries because it is the poor man’s mode of transport.
In the broad sense, as a processing of everything one hears or witnesses, all fiction is autobiographical – imagination ground through the mill of memory. It’s impossible to separate the two ingredients.
I met my wife when we were both 19 or 20, at a music school where she was taking voice and piano lessons and I was doing classes in music theory and composition.
Walk, first, through the fire, then philosophize...
You have to maintain a fine balance between hope and despair.
In foreign countries they fear baldness. They are so rich in foreign countries, they can afford to fear all kinds of silly things.
Loss is essential. Loss is part and parcel of that necessary calamity called life.
There was no such thing as perfect privacy, life was a perpetual concert-hall recital with a captive audience.
How can time be long or short? Time is without length or breadth. The question is, what happened during its passing. And what happened is, our lives have been joined together.
But nobody ever forgot anything, not really, though sometimes they pretended, when it suited them. Memories were permanent. Sorrowful ones remained sad even with the passing of time, yet happy ones could never be recreated – not with the same joy. Remembering bred its own peculiar sorrow. It seemed so unfair: that time should render both sadness and happiness into a source of pain.
You see, we cannot draw lines and compartments and refuse to budge beyond them. Sometimes you have to use your failures as stepping-stones to success. You have to maintain a fine balance between hope and despair.′ He paused, considering what he had just said. ‘Yes’, he repeated. ‘In the end, it’s all a question of balance.
What folly made young people, even those in middle age, think they were immortal? How much better, their lives, if they could remember the end. Carrying your death with you every day would make it hard to waste time on unkindness and anger and bitterness, on anything petty. That was the secret: remembering your dying time, in order to keep the stupid and the ugly out of your living time.
The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.
Maneck studied beggermaster’s excessive chatter, his attempt to hide his heartache. Why did human do that to their feelings? Whether it was anger or love or sadness, they always tried to put something else forward in its place. And then there were those who pretended their emotions were bigger and grander than anyone else’s. A little annoyance they acted like gigantic rage; where a smile or chuckle will do, they laughed hysterically. Either way, it was dishonest.
If you ignore little things, they become big problems.
Curious, he thought, how, if you knew a person long enough, he could elicit every kind of emotion from you, every possible reaction, envy, admiration, pity, irritation, fury, fondness, jealousy, love, disgust. But in the end all human beings became candidates for compassion, all of us, without exception... and if we could recognize this from the beginning, what a saving in pain and grief and misery.
At the best of times, democracy is a seesaw between complete chaos and tolerable confusion. You see, to make a democratic omelette you have to break a few democratic eggs. To fight fascism and other evil forces threatening our country, there is nothing wrong in taking strong measures.