Bombay Quotes

Fate gives all of us three teachers, three friends, three enemies, and three great loves in our lives. But these twelve are always disguised, and we can never know which one is which until we’ve loved them, left them, or fought them.

The desire to love someone always exceeds the desire to be loved by someone & that's exactly why we end up loving the person who doesn't deserve that LOVE.

Last, but not least -- in fact, this is most important -- you need a happy ending. However, if you can create tragic situations and jerk a few tears before the happy ending, it will work much better.

I found Bombay and opium, the drug and the city, the city of opium and the drug Bombay

So, what would you like to drink?” “Aside from you?” I laughed anxiously. “You can’t drink me.” He leaned forward, his eyes running up and down my body, causing my skin to heat. “Yes, I believe I can. And I believe I will. But for now, I’ll just have a Bombay and tonic.

To be a Christian without prayer is no more possible than to be alive without breathing.

In this city, every deserted street corner conceals a crowd. It appears in a minute when something disrupts the way in which the world is supposed to work. It can disappear almost as instantaneously.

You know the funny thing about Afghanistan?’ Griffin’s voice was very soft. ‘The British aren’t going to invade with English troops. They’re going to invade with troops from Bengal and Bombay. They’re going to have sepoys fight the Afghans, just like they had sepoys fight and die for them at Irrawaddy, because those Indian troops have the same logic you do, which is that it’s better to be a servant of the Empire, brutal coercion and all, than to resist. Because it’s safe. Because it’s stable, because it lets them survive. And that’s how they win, brother. They pit us against each other. They tear us apart.

Her pores were like those of an orange, its skin filled with juice, which, if you applied the slightest pressure, would squirt up into your eyes. She was that fresh.

And at the moment of contact, they do not know if the hand that is reaching for theirs belongs to a Hindu or Muslim or Christian or Brahmin or untouchable or whether you were born in this city or arrived only this morning or whether you live in Malabar Hill or New York or Jogeshwari; whether you’re from Bombay or Mumbai or New York. All they know is that you’re trying to get to the city of gold, and that’s enough. Come on board, they say. We’ll adjust.

...wearing a turban of yellow, signifying knowledge, and a robe of purple, portraying purity and activity, Virchand Gandhi of Bombay delivered a lecture on the religions of India....

I wondered why people consider escapism so bad, even the escapism on display right then. At first it might appear unseemly, but in the end its lack of pretension gives it its own sort of beauty.

I, however, was raised neither as Catholic nor as Jew. I was both, and nothing: a jewholic-anonymous, a cathjew nut, a stewpot, a mongrel cur. I was--what's the word these days?--atomised. Yessir: a real Bombay mix.

Oh my God. I just got dumped by a red headed mortician in a funeral home named Crummy's, after pretending to be a circus freak at a visitation I had just crashed. I was pretty sure there'd be no bouncing back from this. -Dakota Bombay

A Brief for the Defense Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies are not starving someplace, they are starving somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils. But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants. Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women at the fountain are laughing together between the suffering they have known and the awfulness in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody in the village is very sick. There is laughter every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta, and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay. If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction, we lessen the importance of their deprivation. We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure, but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world. To make injustice the only measure of our attention is to praise the Devil. If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down, we should give thanks that the end had magnitude. We must admit there will be music despite everything. We stand at the prow again of a small ship anchored late at night in the tiny port looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning. To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth all the years of sorrow that are to come.

Some would assert that Providence was at work shaking out its pockets in Humanity's lap. Other would argue for that mindless choreographer, Chance. Either way it was a simple thing: a lost diary fell into the hands of a soul-sick war hero on a train from Bombay to Jaipur just when he'd grown tired of the scenery and needed something to keep his thoughts from the minefield of his wretched thoughts. In such mild ways is the groundwork laid for first kisses and ruined lives.

The ramdomness of events in the world is so lacking in logic that we give it names like destiny, fate, karma and kismat to deal with the irrationality of its sequence

Each person’s life is dominated by a central event, which shapes and distorts everything that comes after it and, in retrospect, everything that came before.

A city like Bombay, like New York, that is a recent creation on the planet and does not have a substantial indigenous population, is full of restless people. Those who have come here have not been at ease somewhere else. And unlike others who may have been equally uncomfortable wherever they came from, these people got up and moved. As I have discovered, having once moved, it is difficult to stop moving.

There is such dissociation between what the eyes see and what the mind envisions. The final thought is just a matter of interpretation, coloured by our experiences.

I was born in the city of Bombay ... once upon a time. No, that won't do, there's no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar's Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947. And the time? The time matters, too. Well then: at night. No, it's important to be more ... On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came. Oh, spell it out, spell it out: at the precise instant of India's arrival at independence, I tumbled forth into the world.

I know now that it's the sweet, sweating smell of hope, which is opposite of hate; and it's the sour, stifled smell of greed, which is the opposite of love.

In international commerce, India is an ancient country-(19th October, 1899)

Maybe I should go home. I miss Bombay. But the Bombay I miss isn't there to go home to anymore. This is who we are. We sail away from the place we love and then because we aren't there to love it people go with axes and burning torches and smash and burn and then we say, Oh, too sad. But we abandoned it, left it to our barbarian successors to destroy.

Obviously, a rigid, blinkered, absolutist world view is the easiest to keep hold of, whereas the fluid, uncertain, metamorphic picture I've always carried about is rather more vulnerable. Yet I must cling with all my might to … my own soul; must hold on to its mischievous, iconoclastic, out-of-step clown-instincts, no matter how great the storm. And if that plunges me into contradiction and paradox, so be it; I've lived in that messy ocean all my life. I've fished in it for my art. This turbulent sea was the sea outside my bedroom window in Bombay. It is the sea by which I was born, and which I carry within me wherever I go.

I am an exile; citizen of the country of longing.

I was becoming addicted to Bombay. There was squalor and poverty, but I had begun to realise my good fortune and would never again forget it.

Bombay is a city where gossip is treated as a commodity.

See those people holding hands?" he asked at the candlelight vigil outside the still-smoking Taj Hotel. "They're neither Hindus nor Muslims, but citizens of Bombay first.

We lived in Bombay and we lived in Mumbai and sometimes, I lived in both of them at the same time.

time, in my experience, has been as variable and inconstant as Bombay’s electric power supply. Just telephone the speaking clock if you don’t believe me – tied to electricity, it’s usually a few hours wrong. Unless we’re the ones who are wrong . . . no people whose word for ‘yesterday’ is the same as their word for ‘tomorrow’ can be said to have a firm grip on the time.)

While in Bombay, I began, on one hand, my study of Indian law and, on the other, my experiments in dietetics in which Virchand Gandhi, a friend, joined me. My brother, for his part was trying his best to get me briefs. The study of India law was a tedious business. The Civil Procedure Code I could in no way get on with. Not so however, with the Evidence Act. Virchand Gandhi was reading for the Solicitor's Examination and would tell me all sorts of stories about Barristers and Vakils.

A teenage boy with a Mohawk sat across from me, sneering. I’d seen that look before. Why was it a problem to knit in public? “My grandma knits.” I ignored him. “So what are you making, Grandma?” Mohawk’s voice was ugly. I arched my eyebrow. “A cashmere cock ring. Your grandma ever knit one of those?” The kid’s eyes grew wide, and he suddenly became very interested in a four-year-old issue of Teen Vogue.

One day, as Sarita tended to the wash, Gemma played in the garden. She was a knight, you see, with a sword fashioned out of wood. Most formidable, she was, though I didn't quite know how formidable. As I sat in my study, I heard screaming from outside. I ran to see what the commotion was. Sarita called to me, wide-eyed with fear, "Oh, Mr. Doyle, look- over there!" The tiger had entered the garden and was making his way toward where our Gemma frolicked with her wooden sword. Beside me, our house servant, Raj, drew his blade so stealthily it seemed to simply appear in his hand by magic. But Sarita stayed his hand. "If you run for him with your life, you will provoke the tiger," she advised. "We must wait."... I must tell you that it was the longest moment of my life. No one dared move. No one dared draw a breath. And all the while, Gemma played on, taking no notice until the great cat was upon her. She stood and faced him. They stared at one another as if each wondered what to make of the other, as if they sensed a kindred spirit. At last, Gemma placed her sword upon the ground. "Dear tiger," she said. "You may pass if you are peaceful." The tiger looked at the sword and back at Gemma, and without a sound, it passed on, dissappearing into the jungle." ... "The tiger had gone. He did not come around a gain. But I was a man possessed. The tiger had come too close, you see. I no longer felt safe. I hired the best tracker in Bombay. We hunted for days, tracking the tiger to the mountains there. We found him taking water from a small watering hole. He looked up but he did not charge. He took no notice of us at all but continued to drink. "Sahib, let us go," the boy said. "This tiger means you no harm." He was right, of course. But we had come all that way. The gun was in my hand. The tiger was before us. I took aim and shot it dead on the spot. I sold the tiger's skin for a fortune to a man in Bombay, and he called me brave for it. But it was not courage that brought me to that; it was fear..."But you," he says, smiling with a mix of sadness and pride, "you faced the tiger and survived." ... "The time has come for me to face my tiger, to look him in the eye and see which of us survives." - Mr. Doyle

Bicycles, bullock carts, and buses that belched thick, black smoke moved in anarchic streams with the auto rickshaws and cars along the streets. Many of the shops—normally selling everything from groceries to stainless steel cookware to shoes—stood silent behind shutters and honeycomb grilles.

BOMBAY WAS CENTRAL, had been so from the moment of its creation: the bastard child of a Portuguese-English wedding, and yet the most Indian of Indian cities. In Bombay all Indias met and merged. In Bombay, too, all-India met what-was-not-India, what came across the black water to flow into our veins. Everything north of Bombay was North India, everything south of it was the South. To the east lay India’s East and to the west, the world’s West. Bombay was central; all rivers flowed into its human sea. It was an ocean of stories; we were all its narrators, and everybody talked at once.

At this moment she was remembering the voyage she had just made from Bombay with her father, Captain Crewe. She was thinking of the big ship, of the Lascars passing silently to and fro on it, of the children playing about on the hot deck, and of some young officers' wives who used to try to make her talk to them and laugh at the things she said.

History is simply the stories we inherit.

This is the true meaning of exile : some insurmountable force that keeps you from going back.

One of the many happy things about physics is that it works anywhere in the world. No matter whether you’re in Bishop’s Lacey or Bombay, friction is friction.

Modern Bombay, in a sense, has its genesis in the poppy fields of Bihar.

I thought that the Hindus and Muslims would busy themselves in this war and their blood, which did not mix in mosque and temple, would finally mingle in Bombay’s drains and gutters. I

Poetic Terrorism WEIRD DANCING IN ALL-NIGHT computer-banking lobbies. Unauthorized pyrotechnic displays. Land-art, earth-works as bizarre alien artifacts strewn in State Parks. Burglarize houses but instead of stealing, leave Poetic-Terrorist objects. Kidnap someone & make them happy. Pick someone at random & convince them they're the heir to an enormous, useless & amazing fortune--say 5000 square miles of Antarctica, or an aging circus elephant, or an orphanage in Bombay, or a collection of alchemical mss. ... Bolt up brass commemorative plaques in places (public or private) where you have experienced a revelation or had a particularly fulfilling sexual experience, etc. Go naked for a sign. Organize a strike in your school or workplace on the grounds that it does not satisfy your need for indolence & spiritual beauty. Graffiti-art loaned some grace to ugly subways & rigid public monuments--PT-art can also be created for public places: poems scrawled in courthouse lavatories, small fetishes abandoned in parks & restaurants, Xerox-art under windshield-wipers of parked cars, Big Character Slogans pasted on playground walls, anonymous letters mailed to random or chosen recipients (mail fraud), pirate radio transmissions, wet cement... The audience reaction or aesthetic-shock produced by PT ought to be at least as strong as the emotion of terror-- powerful disgust, sexual arousal, superstitious awe, sudden intuitive breakthrough, dada-esque angst--no matter whether the PT is aimed at one person or many, no matter whether it is "signed" or anonymous, if it does not change someone's life (aside from the artist) it fails. PT is an act in a Theater of Cruelty which has no stage, no rows of seats, no tickets & no walls. In order to work at all, PT must categorically be divorced from all conventional structures for art consumption (galleries, publications, media). Even the guerilla Situationist tactics of street theater are perhaps too well known & expected now. An exquisite seduction carried out not only in the cause of mutual satisfaction but also as a conscious act in a deliberately beautiful life--may be the ultimate PT. The PTerrorist behaves like a confidence-trickster whose aim is not money but CHANGE. Don't do PT for other artists, do it for people who will not realize (at least for a few moments) that what you have done is art. Avoid recognizable art-categories, avoid politics, don't stick around to argue, don't be sentimental; be ruthless, take risks, vandalize only what must be defaced, do something children will remember all their lives--but don't be spontaneous unless the PT Muse has possessed you. Dress up. Leave a false name. Be legendary. The best PT is against the law, but don't get caught. Art as crime; crime as art.

So now that began to develop into a full-fledged shouting match of its own, and all in all it was soon a full-scale old-style Bombay tamasha, with people watching from every balcony and window in every building, up and down the road, laughing and giving advice and yelling at each other.

how people’s faces turned slightly upward when they stared at the sea, as if they were straining to see a trace of God or were hearing the silent humming of the universe; she would notice how, at the beach, people’s faces became soft and wistful, reminding her of the expressions on the faces of the sweet old dogs that roamed the streets of Bombay. As if they were all sniffing the salty air for transcendence, for something that would allow them to escape the familiar prisons of their own skin.

There were fat cats and skinny cats. The long-tailed and the bobbed. The daring young leapers, and the old windowsill sleepers. Balls of waddling fluff, smooth-coated prowlers, and hairless ones that looked fragile and wise. The tiger-striped, the ring-tailed, and the ones with matching coloured socks and mittens. There were tabbies and calicos. Manx and Persians. Siamese and Bombay. Ragdolls and Birmans. Maine Coons and Russian Blues. There were Snowshoes and Somalis, Tonkinese and Turkish, and many, many more. Brown and beige and orange and grey and black and white and silver cats, each with gleaming eyes of emerald, or sapphire, or amber. A rainbow of precious stones.

If only certain things had been preventable, his life would have unfurled in front of him as intended, like a lush Oriental carpet. No surprises, no detours. Just a thick tapestry of days and nights that at the end of his time on earth, he could roll up and proudly claim as his own.

...People stop, stare. No one stop and stare if one of your own beggars drop dead in street. No just step over him like he is a stone, or a dog turd and go away quickly. But when they see a white man with golden hair lying on the street, everyone stop, everyone cry, "Hai - hai, - poor boy, call doctor, call ambulance. What has happen, Farrokh-bhai?"..." - Farrokh said to Baumgartner when he wanted to get rid of the reluctant, overly drugged homeless foreigner out of his restaurant. (Page 167)

The obituary column in the Times of India, Bombay, regretted the demise of ‘D’Ocracy, DEM beloved husband of T. Ruth, loving father of L I Bertie, brother of Faith, Hope, Justice [who] expired on 26th June’. The obituary became a popular Emergency joke.

Whatever I had expected, it was not this. Astonishment gave way to bitterness. I was a mixed breed, a bastard, not worthy of his daughter. Had I not seen that mix of pity and disapproval all my life? Indians did not tolerate the mingling of races any more than the English.

In polite circles, a man who was happy until then to shake my hand would hear my name...and pause. His shoulders would stiffen , and he might spot an acquaintance across the room, and need to meet him. Women who seemed perfectly gracious--as they heard my Indian surname, their eyes widen with understanding.

He ate off dirty plates and was unfazed. His pillowcase was soiled and stank, but he never thought of changing it. Hamid thought long and hard, but he couldn’t understand him. He often asked, ‘Babuji, why aren’t you revolted by dirtiness?

Dale's father edited an English-language newspaper in Bombay and Dale always shouted "Aiee!" when he was in pain. It had amazed me greatly when I first heard him stubbing his toe against the foot of the bed in the dormitory, since I had never imagined that expressions of pain could vary. I had thought "Ouch!" and "Ow!" were the same all over the world. I had suffered a hot and bothered exchange in my first French lesson, for example, when I was told that the French for "Oh!" was "Ah!" "Then how do they say 'Oh,' sir?" "They say 'Ah.'" "Well then, how do they say 'Ah'?" "Don't be stupid, Fry." I had sulked for the rest of the lesson.

One generation's pleasure became a burden for another. Hence, entire collections from father to son were sold for a song, and the vendors, knowing nothing about literature, would place a price on the books. (about secondhand literature book)

..to put it in the modern parlance, this is a re-run. We have been here before. This is like watching TV in Bombay or Kingston or Dhaka, watching the same old British sitcoms spewed out to the old colonies in one tedious, eternal loop. Because immigrants have always been particularly prone to repetition - something to do with that experience of moving West to East or East to West or island to island. Even when you arrive, you're still going back and forth; your children are going round and round.

—Haces que me olvide de todo —susurró a su oído y notó como ella se estremecía. —No parece un mal don —replicó ella con la voz entrecortada.

Tears,’ they would sneer, ‘are the indulgences of those who haven’t suffered enough.’ To

if one woman doesn’t help another, we will all suffer.

Most things, I find, are temporary and pass into distant memory with the next great event. But this commentary drew blood to my face.

A hit man's character is defined above all by narcissism, that complex mix of egotism and self-hatred.

Anybody in the world can come to India and find home.

You can go home again, and you can also leave again. Once more, with confidence, into the world.

She wasn’t beautiful in the way Bombay Silk was, but she was sexier, more intriguing, handsome in the way some women can be.

Für diese Art von Geld braucht man keinen Taschenrechner. Für diese Art von Geld würde man plötzlich Verwandte im Abwassersystem von Bombay entdecken.

Paharia women like Guhy walk a distance equivalent to that between Delhi and Bombay—four to five times a year.

If Mozart had been born to a poor family in Bombay instead of a cultured one in Salzburg, would he have composed Symphony no. 36 in C? Not a chance.

If Mozart had been born to a poor family in Bombay instead of a cultured one in Salzburg, would he have composed Symphony no. 36 in C?

gin and tonic,” Christian says. “Hendricks if you have it or Bombay Sapphire. Cucumber with the Hendricks, lime with the Bombay.

It's the eternal tragedy of being gay in Bombay," I lamented. "Never a place to yourself." With city rents so high, most sons lived with their parents until marriage - and usually well after as well.

It’s one thing to be brilliant, but to be brilliant without opportunity—that was something else. If Mozart had been born to a poor family in Bombay instead of a cultured one in Salzburg, would he have composed Symphony no. 36 in C? Not a chance.

Bombay, you will be told, is the only city India has, in the sense that the word city is understood in the West. Other Indian metropolises like Calcutta, Madras and Delhi are like oversized villages. It is true that Bombay has many more high-rise buildings than any other Indian city: when you approach it by the sea it looks like a miniature New York. It has other things to justify its city status: it is congested, it has traffic jams at all hours of the day, it is highly polluted and many parts of it stink.

Time heals the broken. Sometimes, the healing is slow. Sometimes, it is slower. You cannot predict how long it will take before one forgets what it all felt like—heartbreak, the pain, the anguish, and that emptiness. Years could roll by, and you’d have done ten million different things to keep yourself from thinking, and yet, the mind would remember that moment when your life fell apart and crushed you whole.

Ça m'a pris presque un an pour réaliser qu'elle n'est nulle part, l'aventure. L'aventure ne se trouve pas dans un livre, un guide ou une expédition prévue pour ça. L'aventure est une porte qui s'ouvre par en-dedans. Le reste dépend de vous. Ça peut se passer à Bombay, à Brossard ou dans la prison de Tanguay. L'aventure débute avec la fin de la peur: de la peur de rire quand on doit se taire; de la peur de fuir quand on doit plaire; de la peur d'être nu, ridicule et vulnérable, mort; de la peur de se tromper; de la peur d'échouer. Se placer volontairement les pieds dans les plats? Pourquoi pas! Se confronter à une tâche impossible à réaliser? Kick ass, baby! L'aventure a la tête dure. L'aventure n'apprend pas de ses erreurs, sinon qu'elle n'en a jamais assez commises. Et toujours, l'aventure prend des fucking de drôles de tournures. Même que, parfois, elle commence où on croit qu'elle finit...

Bombay. Cairo. Paris. New York. I've been to those places now. The curious thing is that no matter how different they are, people are all preoccupied with the same things, that is, the same thing; how to live. We have to eat, we want to make money, but in every pause the question returns: How shall I live?

I'd seen death at Maiwand. Dying friends and dead Afghans. On the road to Khandahar....and Karachi. Each time is different, but to me the pain was the same. An ache twists inside when a friend's eyes plead, pleading that gives way to realization, that final contortion as the body fights to hold a soul already breaking free, tearing its way out.

It was later disclosed that the Hindu majority Lahore was originally a part of India. But Jinnah objected to the ‘Radcliffe Line’ stating that all the four metropolitan towns of Delhi, Calcutta, Bombay and Lahore were given to India. Finally, the Indian Prime Minister Nehru was convinced by Gandhi to let go Lahore and thus, Lahore was acceded to Pakistan. The

I have a friend who each year on the anniversary of his wife's death, goes to her grave with some friends where they ritually pour Bombay gin on her grave because she liked martinis. As frivolous as that may seem, there is something in libation, a pouring out that symbolizes a pouring out of the soul, a pouring out of love, of remembrance. There is extravagance in my friend's ritual because gin, especially Bombay gin, is expensive; it's not something that one normally pours into the ground. In the annual ritual of spilling gin on the grave there is also the dimension of community. My friend goes with others who knew his wife, who laughed with her, who celebrated with her, who worshiped with her. They together make the pilgrimage. Therefore there is a further sense of community, of bonding among them as they make the annual pilgrimage, perhaps one member less through death, perhaps one member absent because he or she has moved to another place, or is ill. Still they go together, however many they are, to celebrate this person's life, to tell stories, to pour out gin, to pray.

The city continued on its way. Boys tried to sell me drumsticks, girls played hopscotch, the Bihari badly worker carried his gathri of ironed clothes to the homes from which they had come, and the buses honked at suicidal cyclists. At one level this was vaguely confusing. Surely, something should acknowledge how much things had changed? At another level, it was oddly comforting.

there is here a striving, avid and worldly civilisation, of course; these huge and eager markets, to this incessant buying and selling, that make that self evident; but I had no conception of the ubiquitous sense of the holy, no notion of how another world can permeate the secular. Filth, stench, disease, "gross superstition" as our people say, extreme poverty, promiscuous universal defecation, do not affect it: nor do they affect my sense of humanity with which I am surrounded. What an agreeable city it is, where a man may walk around naked in the heat if it so please him

Tell me, is it possible to love someone who is not as smart as you are?” Caravaggio, in a belligerent morphine rush, wanted the mood of argument. “This is something that has concerned me most of my sexual life—which began late, I must announce to this select company. In the same way the sexual pleasure of conversation came to me only after I was married. I had never thought words erotic. Sometimes I really do like to talk more than fuck. Sentences. Buckets of this buckets of that and then buckets of this again. The trouble with words is that you can really talk yourself into a corner. Whereas you can’t fuck yourself into a corner.” “That’s a man talking,” muttered Hana. “Well, I haven’t,” Caravaggio continued, “maybe you have, Kip, when you came down to Bombay from the hills, when you came to England for military training. Has anyone, I wonder, fucked themselves into a corner. How old are you, Kip?” “Twenty-six.” “Older than I am.” “Older than Hana. Could you fall in love with her if she wasn’t smarter than you? I mean, she may not be smarter than you. But isn’t it important for you to think she is smarter than you in order to fall in love? Think now. She can be obsessed by the Englishman because he knows more. We’re in a huge field when we talk to that guy. We don’t even know if he’s English. He’s probably not. You see, I think it is easier to fall in love with him than with you. Why is that? Because we want to know things, how the pieces fit. Talkers seduce, words direct us into corners. We want more than anything to grow and change. Brave new world.

On 10 September 2008, Raghuram Rajan, noted economist and honorary advisor to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, delivered a speech at the Bombay Chamber of Commerce where he spoke about how most of India's billionaires did not derive their wealth from IT or software but from land, natural resources, and government contracts or licences. He spoke of India being second only to Russia in terms of wealth concentration (the number of billionaires per trillion dollars of GDP). To show how extraordinary this number was he quoted the case of Brazil which had only 18 billionaires despite a greater GDP than India. Or Germany, which had three times India's GDP and a per capita income 40 times India's but had the same number of billionaires. 'If Russia is an oligarchy, how long can we resist calling India one?' he wondered.

Διαφθορά δεν είναι μόνο το να δίνεις χρήματα κάτω από το τραπέζι ή το να βάζεις λαθραία εμπορεύματα σε μια χώρα. Η διαφθορά αρχίζει εκεί όπου υπάρχει ιδιοτέλεια. Εκεί όπου υπάρχει ιδιοτέλεια, εκεί βρίσκεται η πηγή της διαφθοράς.

British journalist Don Taylor. Writing in 1969, by which time India had stayed united for two decades and gone through four general elections, Taylor yet thought that the key question remains: can India remain in one piece – or will it fragment? . . . When one looks at this vast country and its 524 million people, the 15 major languages in use, the conflicting religions, the many races, it seems incredible that one nation could ever emerge. It is difficult to even encompass this country in the mind – the great Himalaya, the wide Indo-Gangetic plain burnt by the sun and savaged by the fierce monsoon rains, the green flooded delta of the east, the great cities like Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. It does not, often, seem like one country. And yet there is a resilience about India which seems an assurance of survival. There is something which can only be described as an Indian spirit. I believe it no exaggeration to say that the fate of Asia hangs on its survival.

anyone before! Excited about his trip to Bombay, Ramkrishna trotted alongside his mama to the railway station. He patted the bundle of his life’s savings tied at his waist and felt secure. Soon they were inside a moving train. The train gathered speed and after a few hours stopped at a junction where they alighted to take another connection. They were waiting at a platform for the next train that would take them to their destination when an old man, bent over double, approached them.

This city was our common ground, I want to tell Kaiz. Not simply its soil, nor its salt or tides, not lines on any map, nor buildings and streets. Something else entirely. An image, a dream, an idea that beguiled both of us: a magical place with chaos in its code, where our stories collided briefly. That romance with the city he carries with him wherever he goes. What it means to me, though, goes beyond what we had in common, it can’t be packed up and transported tidily. Mumbai for me is two people who moved from small coastal towns to this metropolis by the sea and made it their home. My home. And that is how the city is different for the two of us: for him both Mumbai and home were abstractions. Abstractions are at once more fragile and more hardy than reality.

I never liked North America, even first trip. It is not most crowded part of Terra, has a mere billion people. In Bombay they sprawl on pavements; in Great New York they pack them vertically--not sure anyone sleeps. Was glad to be in invalid's chair. Is mixed-up place another way; they care about skin color--by making point of how they don't care. First trip I was always too light or too dark, and somehow blamed either way, or was always being expected to take stand on things I have no opinions on. Bog knows I don't know what genes I have. One grandmother came from a part of Asia where invaders passed as regularly as locusts, raping as they went--why not ask her? Learned to handle it by my second makee-learnee but it left a sour taste. Think I prefer a place as openly racist as India, where if you aren't Hindu, you're nobody--except that Parsees look down on Hindus and vice versa. However I never really had to cope with North America's reverse-racism when being "Colonel O' Kelly Davis, Hero of Lunar Freedom.

Now, her mother lifts Kavita’s head up out of her lap and holds her face, hot with tears, in her cool hands. “I am glad it is you who is going,” her mother whispers. Kavita looks up at her with shock. “I won’t worry about you, Kavita. You have strength. Fortitude. Shakti. Bombay will bring you hardship. But you, beti, have the strength to endure it.” And through her mother’s words and her hands, Kavita feels it—shakti, the sacred feminine force that flows from the Divine Mother to all those who have come after her.

Marcinko chose SEALs for his new command based solely on his personal opinion of them, an opinion often formed during barroom interviews with prospective members. “The man liked to drink,” said an officer who worked under Marcinko in Team 6. “To be with him, you had to drink—to be in the ‘in’ crowd.” Marcinko acknowledged to an author his capacity to down large quantities of Bombay gin on the job, but added, “I use booze as a tool.” Fairly or not, such behavior colored the opinions of Team 6 held by many others in the special ops community for years after Marcinko left the unit in July 1983.

He blinks several times. The house is spacious and beautiful but feels sterile to him, just like their lives. He doesn’t notice it as much when Asha fills it with her chatter and laughter, but even then, it never feels as full and rich as the family get-togethers he remembers from childhood. This is the life he envisioned, the life he hoped for, but somehow the American dream now seems hollow to him. Just a few weeks ago, his family back home was all gathered for Diwali dinner at his parents’ home, at least two dozen people in all. Krishnan was the only one missing, so they called him, passing the phone around so each could wish him a happy Diwali. He had been rushing out the door that day when the phone rang, but after hanging up, he sat motionless at the kitchen table with the phone in hand. It was evening in Bombay, and he could close his eyes and picture the millions of diyas, the tiny clay pots holding small flames lining the balconies, the street stalls, and the shop windows. Visitors came to exchange boxes of sweets and good wishes. Schools closed and children stayed up to enjoy fireworks. Ever since he was a child, it had been one of his favorite nights of the year, when the whole of Bombay took on a magical feel.

Velayudhan Nair says: 'Man, we go to the doctor.' Velayudhan Nair always began every sentence with Man, for he had been to Bombay. In Colaba every De Souza says: Man. This they learned from the P & O ships. And P & O ships touch Plymouth. Do they say 'Man' there, one wonders. 'So, man, we go to the doctor,' he repeated. 'Mr Man, I come,' said Govindan Nair. He sometimes used Mister to show he too could be elegant. He called his son Mr Shridhar. ('Mr Shridhar, go and get me a chew,' 'Mr Shridhar, the thing that father puffs is wanted,' etc. etc. Mr Shridhar therefore brought the chew tobacco or that which father puffs, according to orders.)

Let me end this chapter with an encouraging story. A young man found his way up to the small apartment of Nisargadatta, my old Hindu guru in Bombay, asked him a spiritual question and then left after this one question. One of the regular students then asked, “What will happen to this man? Will he ever become enlightened or will he fall off the path and go back to sleep?” Nisargadatta said, “It’s too late for him! He has already begun. Just the fact that he came up here and asked one question about what is his true nature means that that place in him that knows who he really is has started to wake up. Even if it takes a long, long time, there’s no turning back.

We aren’t even seeing the other side of the world; that’s our complaint,” said Adela. Mrs. Moore agreed; she too was disappointed at the dullness of their new life. They had made such a romantic voyage across the Mediterranean and through the sands of Egypt to the harbour of Bombay, to find only a gridiron of bungalows at the end of it. But she did not take the disappointment as seriously as Miss Quested, for the reason that she was forty years older, and had learnt that Life never gives us what we want at the moment that we consider appropriate. Adventures do occur, but not punctually. She said again that she hoped that something interesting would be arranged for next Tuesday.

the key question remains: can India remain in one piece – or will it fragment? . . . When one looks at this vast country and its 524 million people, the 15 major languages in use, the conflicting religions, the many races, it seems incredible that one nation could ever emerge. It is difficult to even encompass this country in the mind – the great Himalaya, the wide Indo-Gangetic plain burnt by the sun and savaged by the fierce monsoon rains, the green flooded delta of the east, the great cities like Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. It does not, often, seem like one country. And yet there is a resilience about India which seems an assurance of survival. There is something which can only be described as an Indian spirit. I believe it no exaggeration to say that the fate of Asia hangs on its survival.9

Most of us are so unconcerned with this extraordinary universe about us; we never even see the waving of the leaf in the wind; we never watch a blade of grass, touch it with our hand and know the quality of its being. This is not just being poetic, so please do not go off into a speculative, emotional state. I say it is essential to have that deep feeling for life and not be caught in intellectual ramifications, discussions, passing examinations, quoting and brushing something new aside by saying it has already been said. Intellect is not the way. Intellect will not solve our problems; the intellect will not give us that nourishment which is imperishable. The intellect can reason, discuss, analyze, come to a conclusion from inferences, and so on, but intellect is limited, for intellect is the result of our conditioning. But sensitivity is not. Sensitivity has no conditioning; it takes you right out of the field of fears and anxieties…. We spend our days and years in cultivating the intellect, in arguing, discussing, fighting, struggling to be something, and so on. And yet this extraordinarily wonderful world, this earth that is so rich—not the Bombay earth, the Punjab earth, the Russian earth, or the American earth—this earth is ours, yours and mine, and that is not sentimental nonsense; it is a fact. But unfortunately we have divided it up through our pettiness, through our provincialism. And we know why we have done it—for our security, for better jobs and more jobs. That is the political game that is being played throughout the world, and so we forget to be human beings, to live happily on this earth that is ours, and to make something of it.

As in Lahore, a road in this town is named after Goethe. There is a Park Street here as in Calcutta, a Malabar Holl as in Bombay, and a Naag Tolla Hill as in Dhaka. Because it was difficult to pronounce the English names, the men who arrived in this town in the 1950s had rechristened everything they saw before them. They had come from across the Subcontinent, lived together ten to a room, and the name that one of them happened to give to a street or landmark was taken up by the others, regardless of where they themselves were from. But over the decades, as more and more people came, the various nationalities of the Subcontinent have changed the names according to the specific country they themselves are from – Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan. Only one name has been accepted by every group, remaining unchanged. It’s the name of the town itself. Dasht-e-Tanhaii. The Wilderness of Solitude. The Desert of Loneliness.

A BRIEF FOR THE DEFENSE Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies are not starving someplace, they are starving somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils. But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants. Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women at the fountain are laughing together between the suffering they have known and the awfulness in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody in the village is very sick. There is laughter every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta, and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay. If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction, we lessen the importance of their deprivation. We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure, but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world. To make injustice the only measure of our attention is to praise the Devil. If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down, we should give thanks that the end had magnitude. We must admit there will be music despite everything. We stand at the prow again of a small ship anchored late at night in the tiny port looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront is three shuttered cafes and one naked light burning. To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth all the years of sorrow that are to come.

The thin woman in the green sari stood on the slippery rocks and gazed at the dark waters around her. The warm wind loosened strands of her scanty hair, pulling them out of her bun. Behind her, the sounds of the city were muted, shushed into silence by the steady lapping of the water around her bare feet. Other than the crabs that she heard and felt scuttling around the rocks, she was all alone here—alone with the murmuring sea and the distant moon, stretched thin as a smile in the nighttime sky. Even her hands were empty, now that she had unclenched them and released her helium-filled cargo, watching until the last of the balloons had been swallowed up by the darkness of the Bombay night. Her hands were empty now, as empty as her heart, which itself was a coconut shell with its meat scooped out. Balancing gingerly on the rocks, feeling the rising water tonguing her feet, the woman raised her face to the inky sky for an answer. Behind her was the lost city and a life that at this very moment felt fictitious and unreal. Ahead of her was the barely visible seam where the sea met the sky. She could scramble over these rocks, climb over the cement wall, and reenter the world; partake again of the mad, throbbing, erratic pulse of the city. Or she could walk into the waiting sea, let it seduce her, overwhelm her with its intimate whisperings. She looked to the sky again, searching for an answer. But the only thing she could hear was the habitual beating of her own dutiful heart…

The Bombay Chronicle asked Mohandas Gandhi what he thought of the fact that the United States was now in the war. It was December 20, 1941. 'I cannot welcome this entry of America,' Gandhi said. 'By her territorial vastness, amazing energy, unrivalled financial status and owing to the composite character of her people she is the one country which could have saved the world from the unthinkable butchery that is going on.' Now, he said, there was no powerful nation left to mediate and bring about the peace that all peoples wanted. 'It is a strange phenomenon,' he said, 'that the human wish is paralysed by the creeping effect of the war fever.' Churchill wrote a memo to the chiefs of staff on the future conduct of the war. 'The burning of Japanese cities by incendiary bombs will bring home in a most effective way to the people of Japan the dangers of the course to which they have committed themselves,' he wrote. It was December 20, 1941. Life Magazine published an article on how to tell a Japanese person from a Chinese person. It was December 22, 1941. Chinese people have finely bridged noses and parchment-yellow skin, and they are relatively tall and slenderly built, the article said. Japanese people, on the other hand, have pug noses and squat builds, betraying their aboriginal ancestry. 'The modern Jap is the descendant of Mongoloids who invaded the Japanese archipelago back in the mists of prehistory, and of the native aborigines who possessed the islands before them, Life explained. The picture next to the article was of the Japanese premier, Hideki Tojo. In the Lodz ghetto, trucks began taking the Gypsies away. They went to Chelmno, the new death camp, where they were killed with exhaust gases and buried. It was just before Christmas 1941.

NOBEL PRIZE–WINNER, British poet laureate, essayist, novelist, journalist, and short story writer Rudyard Kipling wrote for both children and adults, with many of his stories and poems focusing on British imperialism in India. His works were popular during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, even though many deemed his political views too conservative. Born on December 30, 1865, in Bombay, India, Kipling had a happy early childhood, but in 1871 he and his sister were sent to a boarding house called Lorne Lodge in Southsea, where he spent many disappointing years. He was accepted in 1877 to United Services College in the west of England. In 1882, he returned to his family in India, working as a journalist, associate editor, and correspondent for many publications, including Civil and Military Gazette, a publication in Lahore, Pakistan. He also wrote poetry. He found great success in writing after his 1889 return to England, where he was eventually appointed poet laureate. Some of his most famous writings, including The Jungle Book, Kim, Puck of Pook’s Hill, and Rewards and Fairies, saw publication in the 1890s and 1900s. It was during this period that he married Caroline Balestier, the sister of an American friend and publishing colleague. The couple settled in Vermont, where their two daughters were born. After a quarrel with his brother-in-law and grumblings from his American neighbors about his controversial political views, Kipling and his family returned to England. There, Caroline gave birth to a son in 1896. Tragically, their eldest daughter died in 1899. Later, Kipling’s son perished in battle during World War I. In 1907 Kipling was awarded the Nobel Prize. He died on January 18, 1936, and his ashes are buried in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.

Like,” he repeats with distaste. “How about I tell you what I don’t like? I do not like postmodernism, postapocalyptic settings, postmortem narrators, or magic realism. I rarely respond to supposedly clever formal devices, multiple fonts, pictures where they shouldn’t be—basically, gimmicks of any kind. I find literary fiction about the Holocaust or any other major world tragedy to be distasteful—nonfiction only, please. I do not like genre mash-ups à la the literary detective novel or the literary fantasy. Literary should be literary, and genre should be genre, and crossbreeding rarely results in anything satisfying. I do not like children’s books, especially ones with orphans, and I prefer not to clutter my shelves with young adult. I do not like anything over four hundred pages or under one hundred fifty pages. I am repulsed by ghostwritten novels by reality television stars, celebrity picture books, sports memoirs, movie tie-in editions, novelty items, and—I imagine this goes without saying—vampires. I rarely stock debuts, chick lit, poetry, or translations. I would prefer not to stock series, but the demands of my pocketbook require me to. For your part, you needn’t tell me about the ‘next big series’ until it is ensconced on the New York Times Best Sellers list. Above all, Ms. Loman, I find slim literary memoirs about little old men whose little old wives have died from cancer to be absolutely intolerable. No matter how well written the sales rep claims they are. No matter how many copies you promise I’ll sell on Mother’s Day.” Amelia blushes, though she is angry more than embarrassed. She agrees with some of what A.J. has said, but his manner is unnecessarily insulting. Knightley Press doesn’t even sell half of that stuff anyway. She studies him. He is older than Amelia but not by much, not by more than ten years. He is too young to like so little. “What do you like?” she asks. “Everything else,” he says. “I will also admit to an occasional weakness for short-story collections. Customers never want to buy them though.” There is only one short-story collection on Amelia’s list, a debut. Amelia hasn’t read the whole thing, and time dictates that she probably won’t, but she liked the first story. An American sixth-grade class and an Indian sixth-grade class participate in an international pen pal program. The narrator is an Indian kid in the American class who keeps feeding comical misinformation about Indian culture to the Americans. She clears her throat, which is still terribly dry. “The Year Bombay Became Mumbai. I think it will have special int—” “No,” he says. “I haven’t even told you what it’s about yet.” “Just no.” “But why?” “If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll admit that you’re only telling me about it because I’m partially Indian and you think this will be my special interest. Am I right?” Amelia imagines smashing the ancient computer over his head. “I’m telling you about this because you said you liked short stories! And it’s the only one on my list. And for the record”—here, she lies—“it’s completely wonderful from start to finish. Even if it is a debut. “And do you know what else? I love debuts. I love discovering something new. It’s part of the whole reason I do this job.” Amelia rises. Her head is pounding. Maybe she does drink too much? Her head is pounding and her heart is, too. “Do you want my opinion?” “Not particularly,” he says. “What are you, twenty-five?” “Mr. Fikry, this is a lovely store, but if you continue in this this this”—as a child, she stuttered and it occasionally returns when she is upset; she clears her throat—“this backward way of thinking, there won’t be an Island Books before too long.