Aravind Adiga Quotes

I was looking for the key for years But the door was always open

See, the poor dream all their lives of getting enough to eat and looking like the rich. And what do the rich dream of?? Losing weight and looking like the poor.

The moment you recognize what is beautiful in this world, you stop being a slave

It's amazing. The moment you show cash, everyone knows your language.

The story of a poor man's life is written on his body, in a sharp pen.

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.

Strange thoughts brew in your heart when you spend too much time with old books

Go to Old Delhi,and look at the way they keep chickens there in the market. Hundred of pale hens and brightly colored roosters, stuffed tightly into wire-mesh cages. They see the organs of their brothers lying around them.They know they are next, yet they cannot rebel. They do not try to get out of the coop. The very same thing is done with humans in this country.

Neither you nor I speak English, but there are some things that can be said only in English.

Let animals live like animals; let humans live like humans. That's my whole philosophy in a sentence.

The trustworthiness of servants is the basis of the entire Indian economy.

If only a man could spit his past out so easily.

A White Tiger keeps no friends. It's too dangerous.

So I stood around that big square of books. Standing around books, even books in a foreign language, you feel a kind of electricity buzzing up toward you, Your Excellency. It just happens, the way you get erect around girls wearing tight jeans. "Except here what happens is that your brain starts to hum.

Iqbal, that great poet, was so right. The moment you recognize what is beautiful in this world, you stop being a slave. To hell with the Naxals and their guns shipped from China. If you taught every poor boy how to paint, that would be the end of the rich in India.

You can't expect a man in a dung heap to smell sweet.

Nothing can stop a living thing that wants to be free

Do we loathe our masters behind a facade of love - or do we love them behind a facade of loathing?

The dreams of the rich, and the dreams of the poor - they never overlap, do they? See, the poor dream all their lives of getting enough to eat and looking like the rich. And what do the rich dream of? Losing weight and looking like the poor.

Sometimes I wonder, Balram. I wonder what's the point of living. I really wonder...' The point of living? My heart pounded The point of your living is that if you die, who's going to pay me three and a half thousand rupees a month?

...the future of the world lies with the yellow man and the brown man now that our erstwhile master, the white-skinned man, has wasted himself through buggery, cell phone usage, and drug abuse

A man's past keeps growing, even when his future has come to a full stop.

It is an ancient and venerated custom of people in my country to start a story by praying to a Higher Power. "I guess, Your Excellency, that I too should start off by kissing some god's arse. "Which god's arse, though? There are so many choices. "See, the Muslims have one god. "The Christians have three gods. "And we Hindus have 36,000,004 divine arses to choose from.

Never before in human history have so few owed so much to so many, Mr. Jiabao. A handful of men in this country have trained the remaining 99.9 percent—as strong, as talented, as inteligent in every way—to exist in perpetual servitude; a servitude so strong that you can put the key of his emancipation in a man's hands and he will throw it back at you with a curse.

Me, and thousands of others in this country like me, are half-baked, because we were never allowed to complete our schooling. Open our skulls, look in with a penlight, and you'll find an odd museum of ideas: sentences of history or mathematics remembered from school textbooks (no boy remembers his schooling like the one who was taken out of school, let me assure you), sentences about politics read in a newspaper while waiting for someone to come to an office, triangles and pyramids seen on the torn pages of the old geometry textbooks which every tea shop in this country uses to wrap its snacks in, bits of All India Radio news bulletins, things that drop into your mind, like lizards from the ceiling, in the half hour before falling asleep--all these ideas, half formed and half digested and half correct, mix up with other half-cooked ideas in your head, and I guess these half-formed ideas bugger one another, and make more half-formed ideas, and this is what you act on and live with.

Incidentally, sir, while we're on the topic of yoga - may I just say that an hour of deep breathing, yoga, and meditation in the morning constitutes the perfect start to the entrepreneur's day. How I would handle the stresses of this fucking business without yoga, I have no idea. Make yoga a must in all Chinese schools - that's my suggestion.

But isn't it likely that everyone in this world...has killed someone or other on their way to the top?...All I wanted was a chance to be a man--and for that, one murder is enough.

Inconvenience in progress, work is regretted.

تتخمر الكثير من الأفكار الغريبة في قلبك حين تمضي وقتاً طويلاً مع الكتب ,, القديمة ..

You were looking for the key for years, but the door was always open.

We may not have sewage, drinking water, and Olympic gold medals, but we do have democracy.

In a socialistic economy, the small businessman has to be a thief to prosper.

Apparently, sir you Chinese are far ahead of us in every respect, except that you don’t have entrepreneurs. And our nation, though it has no drinking water, electricity, sewage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy, or punctuality, ‘’does’’ have entrepreneurs. Thousands and thousands of them. Especially in the field of technology. And these entrepreneurs—"we" entrepreneurs—have set up all these outsourcing companies that virtually run America now.

I am not an original thinker—but I am an original listener.)

He can read and write, but he doesn't get what he's read. He's half-baked. The country is full of people like him, I'll tell you that. And we entrust our glourious parliamentary democracy

These are the three main diseases of this country, sir: typhoid, cholera, and election fever. This last one is the worst; it makes people talk and talk about things that they have no say in ... Would they do it this time? Would they beat the Great Socialist and win the elections? Had they raised enough money of their own, and bribed enough policemen, and bought enough fingerprints of their own, to win? Like eunuchs discussing the Kama Sutra, the voters discuss the elections in Laxmangarh.

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

The Rooster Coop was doing its work. Servants have to keep other servants from becoming innovators, experimenters or entrepreneurs. The coop is guarded from the inside.

But without a family, a man is nothing.

I put my hand out and wiped the vomit from his lips, and cooed soothing words to him. It squeezed my heart to see him suffer like this - but where my genuine concern for him ended and where my self-interest began, I could not tell: no servant can ever tell what the motives of his heart are. "Do we loathe our masters behind a facade of love - or do we love them behind a facade of loathing? "We are made mysteries to ourselves by the Rooster Coop we are locked in.

Go to the tea shop anywhere along the Ganga, sir, and look at the men working in that tea shop - men, I say, but better to call them human spiders that go crawling in between and under the tables with rags in their hands, crushed humans in crushed uniforms, sluggish, unshaven, in their thirties or forties or fifties but still "boys." But that is your fate if you do your job well - with honesty, dedication, and sincerity, the way Gandhi would have done it, no doubt.

Any good society survives on a circulation of favours.

أي مكان هذا الذي ينسى فيه الناس أن يسموا أبنائهم؟

Who would have thought, Mr. Jiabao, that of this whole family, the lady with the short skirt would be the one with a conscience?

When it comes to work - hurry, hurry, hurry. When it comes to payment - delay, delay, delay. Caste, religion, family background nothing. Talent everything.

Like eunuchs discussing the Kama Sutra, the voters discuss the elections in Laxmangarh.

إنه ليس غاندي ، إنه بشر عادي مثلي و مثلك ولكنه في قفص الدجاج إن أمانة الخدم هي أساس الإقتصاد الهندي برمته ..

إحدى الحقائق المتعلقة بالهند أنك تستطيع أخد كل شيء تقريبا تسمعه من رئيس الوزراء بشأن البلد، و تقلبه بالعكس تماما، و عند ذاك ستعرف حقيقة ذلك الشيء

An Indian Revolution? No Sir. It won't happen. People in this country are still waiting for the war of their freedom from somewhere else - from jungles, from the mountains, from China, from Pakistan. That will never happen.

And our nation, though it has no drinking water, electricity, sewage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy, or punctuality, does have entrepreneurs.

The story of a poor man’s life is written on his body, in a sharp pen.

Iqbal, that great poet, was so right. The moment you recognize what is beautiful in this world, you stop being a slave.

The Great Socialist himself is said to have embezzled one billion rupees from the Darkness, and transferred that money into a bank account in a small, beautiful country in Europe full of white people and black money.

كان قن الدجاج يفعل فعله لا بد للخدم من أن يمنعوا الخدم الآخرين من أن يصبحوا مبدعين أو عمليين أو رجال اعمال هذه الحقيقة المحزنة سيدي فالقن محروس من الداخل

It's true that all these gods seem to do awfully little work - much like our politicians - and yet keep winning re-election to their golden thrones in heaven year after year.

Strange thoughts brew in your heart when you spend too much time with old books.

They remain slaves because they can't see what is beautiful in this world.

Do you know about Hanuman, sir? He was the faithful servant of the god Rama, and we worship him in our temples because he is a shining example of how to serve your masters with absolute fidelity, love, and devotion. These are the kinds of gods they have foisted on us Mr. Jiabao. Understand, now, how hard it is for a man to win his freedom in India.

But I complain about the police the way the rich complain; not the way the poor complain. The difference is everything.

Turning to his right, Danny saw a great fig tree sparkle in many places inside its dark canopy of leaves, like a thing that knew its own heart.

Free people don’t know the value of freedom, that’s the problem.

The more I stole from him, the more I realized how much he had stolen from me.

sardonic, seriocomic saga of the plight of India's poor.

Entrepreneurs are made from half-baked clay.

Vishram is a building like the people living in it, middle class to its core. Improvement or failure, it is incapable of either extremity.

To sum up—in the old days there were one thousand castes and destinies in India. These days, there are just two castes: Men with Big Bellies, and Men with Small Bellies. And only two destinies: eat—or get eaten up.

There is no end in India, Mr. Jiabao,as Mr. Ashok so correctly used to say. You'll have to keep paying and paying the fuckers. But I complain about the police the way the rich complain; not the way the poor complain. The difference is everything.

I thought, What a miserable life he's had, having to hide his religion, his name, just to get a job as a driver—and he is a good driver, no question of it, a far better one than I will ever be.Part of me wanted to get up and apologize to him right there and say, You go and be a driver in Delhi. You never did anything to hurt me. Forgive me, brother. I turned to the other side, farted, and went back to sleep.

These are the three main diseases of this country, sir: typhoid, cholera, and election fever. This last one is the worst; it makes people talk and talk about things that they have no say in. - Balram Halwai

Even here, in the weight machine of a train station, they try to hoodwink us. Here, on the threshold of a man's freedom, just before he boards a train to a new life, these flashing fortune machines are the final alarm bell of the Rooster Coop.

Have you ever noticed that all four of the greatest poets in the world are Muslim? And yet all the Muslims you meet are illiterate or covered head to toe in black burkas or looking for buildings to blow up? It’s a puzzle, isn’t it? If you ever figure these people out, send me an e-mail.

Yes, it’s true: a few hundred thousand rupees of someone else’s money, and a lot of hard work, can make magic happen in this country.

Let animals live like animals; let humans live like humans.

My humble prediction: in twenty years’ time, it will be just us yellow men and brown men at the top of the pyramid, and we’ll rule the whole world. And God save everyone else.

Easiest thing in the world, becoming invisible to white people, who don’t see you anyway; but the hardest thing is becoming invisible to brown people, who will see you no matter what.

He read me another poem, and another one - and he explained the true history of poetry, which is a kind of secret, a magic known only to wise men. Mr. Premier, I won't be saying anything new if I say that the history of the world is the history of a ten-thousand-year war of brains between the rich and the poor. Each side is eternally trying to hoodwink the other side: and it has been this way since the start of time. The poor win a few battles (the peeing in the potted plants, the kicking of the pet dogs, etc.) but of course the rich have won the war for ten thousand years. That's why, on day, some wise men, out of compassion for the poor, left them signs and symbols in poems, which appear to be about roses and pretty girls and things like that, but when understood correctly spill out secrets that allow the poorest man on earth to conclude the ten-thousand-year-old brain-war on terms favorable to himself.

If I were making a country, I'd get the sewage pipes first, then the democracy, then I'd go about giving pamphlets and statues of Gandhi to other people, but what do I know? I'm just a murderer!

[...] anche se mi mandassero sulla forca, non dirò mai di aver fatto un errore quella notte a tagliare la gola del mio padrone a Delhi. Dirò che valeva la pena sapere, anche solo per un giorno, anche solo per un'ora, anche solo per un minuto, cosa significa non essere un servo.

Here’s a strange fact: murder a man, and you feel responsible for his life—possessive, even. You know more about him than his father and mother; they knew his fetus, but you know his corpse. Only you can complete the story of his life; only you know why his body has to be pushed into the fire before its time, and why his toes curl up and fight for another hour on Earth.

Here's a strange fact: murder a man, and you feel responsible for his life - possessive, even. You know more about him than his father and mother; they knew his fetus, but you know his corpse. Only you can complete the story of his life, only you know why his body has to be pushed into the fire before its time, and why his toes curl up and fight for another hour on earth.

العمود الفقري لأبي حبل معقود .، مثل ذلك النوع من الحبال التي تستخدمها النساء في القرية لسحب الماء من الآبار، الترقوة منحنية جول رقبته ببروز عالٍ، مثل طوق الكلب ، ثمة جروح و حزوز وندوب تشبه آثار السوط في جسده، تهبط من صدره إلى وسطه حتى عجيزته .. إن قصة الرجل الفقير مكتوبة على جسده بقلم حاد .

I gather you yellow-skinned men, despite your triumphs in sewage, drinking water, and Olympic gold medals, still don't have democracy. Some politician on the radio was saying that that's why we Indian are going to beat you: we may not have sewage, drinking water, and Olympic gold medals, but we do have democracy. If I were making a country, I'd get the sewage pipes first, then the democracy, then I'd go about giving pamphlets and statues of Gandhi to other people, but what do I know? I am just a murderer!

People in this country are still waiting for the war of their freedom to come from somewhere else, from the jungles, from the mountains, from China, from Pakistan. That will never happen. Every man must make his own Benaras. The book of your revolution sits in the pit of your belly, young Indian. Crap it out, and read.

And then he realized that the thing that was blocking his passage was cleared, and he was falling; his body had begun its short earthly flight — which it completed almost instantaneously — before Yogesh Murthy's soul was released for its much longer flight over the oceans of the other world.

I watched him walk behind the bamboo bars. Black stripes and sunlit white fur flashed through the slits in the dark bamboo; it was like watching the slow-down reels of an old black-and-white film. He was walking in the same line, again and again - from one end of the bamboo bars to the other, then turning around and repeating it over, at exactly the same pace, like a thing under a spell. He was hypnotizing himself by walking like this - that was the only way he could tolerate this cage

He shook his head, but I kept flattering him, telling him how fine his beard was, how fair his skin was (ha!), how it was obvious from his nose and forehead that he wasn't some pig herd who had converted, but a true-blue Muslim who had flown here on a magic carpet all the way from Mecca, and he grunted with satisfaction

And then I understood: this was the real god of Benaras—this black mud of the Ganga into which everything died, and decomposed, and was reborn from, and died into again. The same would happen to me when I died and they brought me here. Nothing would get liberated here.

The two of them kept an eye open for every tree or temple we passed by, and turned to me for a reaction of piety which I gave them, of course, and with growing elaborateness: first just touching my eye, then my neck, then my clavicle, and even my nipples.    They were convinced I was the most religious servant on earth.

These people were building homes for the rich, but they lived in tents covered with blue tarpaulin sheets, and partitioned into lanes by lines of sewage. It was even worse than Laxmangarh. I picked my way around broken glass, wire, and shattered tube lights. The stench of feces was replaced by the stronger stench of industrial sewage. The slum ended in an open sewer - a small river of black water went sluggishly past me, bubbles sparkling in it and little circles spreading on its surface. Two children were splashing about in the black water.

A rich man’s body is like a premium cotton pillow, white and soft and blank. Ours are different. My father’s spine was a knotted rope, the kind that women use in villages to pull water from wells; the clavicle curved around his neck in high relief, like a dog’s collar; cuts and knicks and scars, like little whip marks in his flesh, ran down his chest and waist, reaching down below his hip bones into his buttocks. The story of a poor man’s life is written on his body, in a sharp pen.

Iqbal, che è uno dei quattro maggiori poeti del mondo [...] ha scritto una poesia che dice questo a proposito degli schiavi: «Rimangono schiavi perché non sanno vedere ciò che è bello in questo mondo». E la cosa più vera che sia mai stata detta. [...] Già da bambino sapevo vedere ciò che è bello in questo mondo. Non ero destinato a restare schiavo.

Now there are some, and I don't just mean Communists like you, but thinking men of all political parties, who think that not many of these gods actually exist. Some believe that none of them exist. There's just us and an ocean of darkness around us. I'm no philosopher or poet, how would I know the truth? It's true that all these gods seem to do awfully little work - much like our politicians - and yet keep winning reelection to their golden thrones in heaven, year after year. That's not to say I don't respect them, Mr. Premier! Don't you ever let that blasphemous idea into your yellow skull. My country is the kind where it pays to play it both ways: the Indian entrepreneur has to be straight and crooked, mocking and believing, sly and sincere, at the same time.

Just because drivers and cooks in Delhi are reading Murder Weekly, it doesn't mean that they are all about to slit their masters' necks. Of course they’d like to. Of course, a billion servants are secretly fantasizing about strangling their bosses — and that’s why the government of India publishes this magazine and sells it on the streets for just four and a half rupees so that even the poor can buy it. you see, the murdered in the magazine is so mentally disturbed and sexually deranged that not one reader would want to be like him — and in the end he always gets caught by some honest, hardworking police officer (ha!), or goes mad and hangs himself by a bedsheet after writing a sentimental letter to his mother or primary school teacher, or is chased, beaten, buggered, and garroted by the brother of the woman he has done in. So if your driver is busy flicking through the pages of Murder Weekly, relax. No danger to you. Quite the contrary. It’s when your driver starts to read about Gandhi and the Buddha that it’s time to wet your pants.

Out of respect for the love of liberty shown by the Chinese people, and also in the belief that the future of the world lies with the yellow man and the brown man now that our erstwhile master, the white-skinned man, has wasted himself through buggery, cell phone usage, and drug abuse, I offer to tell you, free of charge, the truth about Bangalore. "By telling you my life's story. "See, when you come to Bangalore, and stop at a traffic light, some boy will run up to your car and knock on your window, while holding up a bootlegged copy of an American business book wrapped carefully in cellophane and with a title like: TEN SECRETS OF BUSINESS SUCCESS! or BECOME AN ENTREPRENEUR IN SEVEN EASY DAYS! "Don't waste your money on those American books. They're so yesterday. "I am tomorrow.

There was a fierce jam on the road to Gurgaon. Every five minutes the traffic would tremble - we'd move a foot - hope would rise - then the red lights would flash on the cars ahead of me, and we'd be stuck again. Eveyone honked. Every now and then, the various horns, each with its own pitch, blended into one continuous wail that sounded like a calf taken from its mother. Fumes filled the air. Wisps of blue exhaust glowed in front of every headlight; the exhaust grew so fat and thick it could not rise or escape, but spread horizontally, sluggish and glossy, making a kind of fog around us. Matches were continually being struck - the drivers of autorickshaws lit cigarettes, adding tobacco pollution to petrol pollution.

O, I do read Indian novels sometimes. But you know, Ms Rupinder, what we Indians want in literature, at least the kind written in English, is not literature at all, but flattery. We want to see ourselves depicted as soulful, sensitive, profound, valorous, wounded, tolerant and funny beings. All that Jhumpa Lahiri stuff. But the truth is, we are absolutely nothing of that kind. What are we, then, Ms Rupinder? We are animals of the jungle, who will eat our neighbour's children in five minutes, and our own in ten. Keep this in mind before you do any business in this country.

Every day, on the roads of Delhi, some chauffeur is driving an empty car with a black suitcase sitting on the backseat. Inside that suitcase is a million, two million rupees; more money than that chauffeur will see in his lifetime. If he took the money he could go to America, Australia, anywhere, and start a new life. He could go inside the five-star hotels he has dreamed about all his life and only seen from the outside. He could take his family to Goa, to England. Yet he takes that black suitcase where his master wants. He puts it down where he is meant to, and never touches a rupee. Why? "Because Indians are the world's most honest people, like the prime minister's booklet will inform you? No. It's because 99.9 percent of us are caught in the Rooster Coop just like those poor guys in the poultry market.

I am talking of a place in India, at least a third of the country, a fertile place, full of rice fields and wheat fields and ponds in the middle of those fields choked with lotuses and water lilies, and water buffaloes wading through the ponds and chewing on the lotuses and lilies. Those who live in this place call it the Darkness. Please understand, Your Excellency, that India is two countries in one: an India of Light, and an India of Darkness. The ocean brings light to my country. Every place on the map of India near the ocean is well off. But the river brings darkness to India—the black river.

From the advertisement, his eyes moved up the skywalk, the zigzagging metal bridge that connected various locations in the neighborhood to the Banda train station. Behind the metal grid, men moved back and forth. Tommy Sir's eyes grew tired. He felt that up there, on that seemingly never-ending bridge, shadowy figures were moving toward obscure destinations, possibly only to return to their point of origin, like in an architectural sketch of infinity by M.C. Escher. Hell is a choice, made daily and by millions, and breathing slowly and watching this aerial cage, Tommy Sir saw Mumbai, minute by minute, unbecome and become hell.

The Light and the Darkness both flow in to Delhi. Gurgaon, where Mr. Ashok lived, is the bright, modern end of the city, and this place. Old Delhi is the other end. Full of things that the modern world forget all about rickshaws, old stone buildings and Muslims. On a Sunday, though, there is something more: if you keep pushing through the crowd that is always there, go past the men clearing the other men’s ears by poking rusty metal rods into them, past the men selling small fish trapped in green bottles full of brine, past the cheap shoe market and the cheap shirt market, you come great secondhand book market Darya Ganj. You may have heard of this market, sir, since it is one of the wonders of the world. Tens of thousands of dirty, rotting, blackened books on every subject- Technology, Medicine, Sexual Pleasure, Philosophy, Education, and Foreign Countries — heaped upon the pavement from Delhi Gate onwards all the way until you get to the market in front of the Red Fort. Some books are so old they crumble when you touch them; some have silverfish feasting on them- some look like they were retrieved from a flood, or from a fire. Most shops on the pavement are shuttered down; but the restaurants are still open, and the smell of fried food mingles with the smell of rotting paper. Rusting exhaust fans turn slowly in the ventilators of the restaurants like the wings of giant moths. I went amid the books and sucked in the air; it was like oxygen after the stench of the brothel.