Ants Among Elephants Quotes

I GREW UP IN THE untouchable slum of Elwin Peta in Kakinada. All around me was abject poverty. When you are surrounded by so much misery, you don’t see it as anything extraordinary.

A nation is not the soil. A nation is the people.

This is what it must feel like to be an ant among elephants, Akira thought. The giant sequoias made her feel small and insignificant, but in a good way. They reminded her that she wasn't at the center of the universe. That there were things that were far older and bigger than she was.

He is an offensive man,” Manjula said. “Why?” “He asked me an offensive question.” “What did he say?” “He wanted to know if I know cooking.

The night before, Bharati had been sitting at the entrance of her hut studying for the exam with a small kerosene lamp for light. Her mother was asleep on the ground outside. They were so poor they couldn’t afford a lamp with a glass cover over the flame. Bharati dozed off. The lamp fell over. Kerosene spilled. The hut caught fire. Thirteen-year-old Bharati, the daughter of the martyr Noble, was consumed in the blaze.

Biologically speaking, man is a moderately gregarious, not a completely social animal – a creature more like a wolf, let us say, or an elephant, than like a bee or an ant. In their original form human societies bore no resemblance to the hive or the ant heap; they were merely packs. Civilization is, among other things, the process by which primitive packs are transformed into an analogue, crude and mechanical, of the social insects’ organic communities. At the present time the pressures of overpopulation and technological changes are accelerating this process.

When people in this country ask me what it means to be an untouchable, I explain that caste is like racism against blacks here. But then they ask, “How does anyone know what your caste is?” They know caste isn’t visible, like skin color. I explain it like this. In Indian villages and towns, everyone knows everyone else. Each caste has its own special role and its own place to live. The brahmins (who perform priestly functions), the potters, the blacksmiths, the carpenters, the washer people, and so on—they each have their own separate place to live within the village. The untouchables, whose special role—whose hereditary duty—is to labor in the fields of others or to do other work that Hindu society considers filthy, are not allowed to live in the village at all. They must live outside the boundaries of the village proper. They are not allowed to enter temples. Not allowed to come near sources of drinking water used by other castes. Not allowed to eat sitting next to a caste Hindu or to use the same utensils. There are thousands of other such restrictions and indignities that vary from place to place. Every day in an Indian newspaper you can read of an untouchable beaten or killed for wearing sandals, for riding a bicycle.

Man makes his plans. God has his own.

In Telugu there is a saying, Maradalu ardha mogudu: “Husband’s sister is half a husband.

I was born in south India, in a town called Khazipet in the state of Andhra Pradesh.

MY MOTHER AND HER ELDEST brother have facility with language, insight into people and social conditions. He became a famous poet (under the pen name Shivasagar),

beautiful. Satyam read the Navayuga Vythalikulu (Harbingers of the New Era) anthology of Muddu Krishnudu.

From the human perspective, an ant is pretty much just an ant. As soon as you begin to look at ants through a magnifying glass, however, a world of wonderful diversity snaps into focus. With the benefit of magnification, Wilson and Hölldobler write, ants “differ among themselves as much as do elephants, tigers, and mice. In size alone the variation is spectacular. An entire colony of the smallest ants . . . could live comfortably inside the head capsule of a soldier of the largest species, the giant Bornean carpenter ant, Camponotus gigas.

There are many untouchable castes. They all have to toil on the fields of caste Hindus, but they are distinguished by the tasks they are called on to perform in addition. Malas such as Satyam and his family were village servants made to do whatever menial work was needed. Madigas haul away dead animals from the village and use the hide to make leather. Malas see themselves as superior to other untouchable communities such as the madigas. To the caste Hindus, though, they’re all untouchable, all despicable.

One morning on his way to campus he saw a pitiful sight. A colony of poor migrant lepers from Tamil Nadu were gathered outside their huts, wailing and beating their chests. A bulldozer was knocking down their homes, sent by a landlord who wanted to take over the land. Satyam flung his books aside and ran in front of the bulldozer. His friends Nancharayya, Rama Rao, and Vishnu joined him, and together they halted the destruction. A few months later a court awarded the land to the lepers, who renamed their colony Satyamurthy Nagar out of gratitude.

And Carey had another cause that got him into trouble with that gang. He led a group of his friends—all fearless mala sons of bitches like himself—in protecting the honor of untouchable girls in town from caste boys who saw them as cheap and easy.

You cannot tell them about your life. It would reveal your caste. Because your life is your caste, your caste is your life.

One time in a bar in Atlanta I told a guy I was untouchable, and he said, “Oh, but you’re so touchable.

If you get them to believe your lie, then of course you cannot tell them your stories, your family’s stories. You cannot tell them about your life. It would reveal your caste. Because your life is your caste, your caste is your life.