175 quotes found
“In India even the most mundane inquiries have a habit of ending this way. There may be two answers, there may be five, a dozen or a hundred; the only thing that is certain is that all will be diffe...”
“India, she now knew, would not be content staying in the background, was nobody's wallpaper, insisted in interjecting itself into everyone's life, meddling with it, twisting it, molding it beyond r...”
“It is easy, from a safe distance, to overlook the fact that in undercities governed by corruption, where exhausted people vie on scant terrain for very little, it is blisteringly hard to be good.”
“This is indeed India! ". The land of dreams and romance, of fabulous wealth and fabulous poverty, of splendour and rags, of palaces and hovels, of famine and pestilence, of genii and giants and Ala...”
“It never bored them to hear words, words; they breathed them with the cool night air, never stopping to analyse; the name of the poet, Hafiz, Hali, Iqbal, was sufficient guarantee. Indiaa hundred I...”
“Kashayam [was] a drink the vanaras had morning, noon and night, and a few times in between. It was a kind of brew with all kinds of herbs thrown in: the thick, sharp-tasting furry karpuravalli, the...”
“We all have our patchwork ideas of India, our notions and opinions and prejudicesoften fallacious and absurdof this enormous, disparate country, which, as I take pleasure in reminding newcomers, bi...”
“In the winter of 1987 India was full of iskeems that had gone awry. Agricultural iskeems, political iskeems, economic iskeems, educational iskeems, stop black money iskeems, attract white tourists ...”
“An array of colorful camps dotted the river banks, like a garrison of army on a peace keeping mission. A mini India, many great nations. different people living in the same place, an inversion of t...”
“I'd been surprised by the depth of emotion that was invested in that curiously archaic phrase 'great power'. What would it mean, I'd asked myself, to the lives of working journalists, salaried tech...”
“Marble flooring is to a Punjabi what a foreign degree is to a Tamilian”
“She is too intelligent to be a good daughter-in-law”
“That's the secret - to distract the senses. Have I told you my theory about them? I think that our sight, smell, taste, touch, hearing are all calibrated for the enjoyment of a perfect world. But s...”
“There was just enough room for the tonga to get through among the bullock-carts, rickshaws, cycles and pedestrians who thronged both the road and the pavement--which they shared with barbers plying...”
“for in the absence of a magistrate (dandadharabhave), the strong will swallow the weak; but under his protection, the weak resist the strong.”
“At the meeting you behaves exactly as Marathi novelists of the last century tell is husbands do in sari shops.”
“The best thing about India is the freedom that one enjoys here, which is also the worst thing about it.”
“a good traveller has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving" Taoist dictum quoted by Sam Miller”
“She leans over Roop the way Sardarji leaned over Satya the years she cried for children, brushing tears from Roop's heavy lashes with her lips. She strokes her head as a mother would, says. "Slpee ...”
“It is the intense spirituality of India, and not any great political structure or social organisation that it has developed, that has enabled it to resist the ravages of time and the accidents of h...”
