Delhi Quotes

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.

When the world is itself draped in the mantle of night, the mirror of the mind is like the sky in which thoughts twinkle like stars.

I beg young people to travel. If you don’t have a passport, get one. Take a summer, get a backpack and go to Delhi, go to Saigon, go to Bangkok, go to Kenya. Have your mind blown. Eat interesting food. Dig some interesting people. Have an adventure. Be careful. Come back and you’re going to see your country differently, you’re going to see your president differently, no matter who it is. Music, culture, food, water. Your showers will become shorter. You’re going to get a sense of what globalization looks like. It’s not what Tom Friedman writes about; I’m sorry. You’re going to see that global climate change is very real. And that for some people, their day consists of walking 12 miles for four buckets of water. And so there are lessons that you can’t get out of a book that are waiting for you at the other end of that flight. A lot of people—Americans and Europeans—come back and go, ohhhhh. And the light bulb goes on.

How evanescent those loves and friendships seem at this distance in time…We move on, make new attachments. We grow old. But sometimes, we hanker for old friendships, the old loves. Sometimes I wish I was young again. Or that I could travel back in time and pick up the threads. Absent so long, I may have stopped loving you, friends; but I will never stop loving the Day I loved you.

Yesterday, I was sad, tomorrow i may be sad again, but today i know that i am happy. I want to live on and on, delighting like a pagan in all that is physical; and i know that this one lifetime, however long, cannot satisfy my heart.

Once through this ruined city did I pass I espied a lonely bird on a bough and asked ‘What knowest thou of this wilderness?’ It replied: 'I can sum it up in two words: ‘Alas, Alas!

When he died, I went about like a ragged crow telling strangers, "My father died, my father died." My indiscretion embarrassed me, but I could not help it. Without my father on his Delhi rooftop, why was I here? Without him there, why should I go back? Without that ache between us, what was I made of?

Partition was a total catastrophe for Delhi,’ she said. ‘Those who were left behind are in misery. Those who were uprooted are in misery. The Peace of Delhi is gone. Now it is all gone.

That's Delhi. When life gets too much for you all you need to do is to spend an hour at Nigambodh Ghat,watch the dead being put to flames and hear their kin wail for them. Then come home and down a couple of pegs of whisky. In Delhi, death and drink make life worth living,

I asked my soul: What is Delhi? She replied: The world is the body and Delhi its life. Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib

But big people’s illnesses are always made to sound big. The simple shutting and opening of the royal arse-hole was made to sound as if the world was coming to an end.

Whoever has built a new city in Delhi has always lost it: the Pandava brethren, Prithviraj Chauhan, Feroz Shah Tughluk, Shah Jehan ... They all built new cities and they all lost them. We were no exception.

Emptiness is emptiness. San Francisco or Delhi. Wherever you go, the emptiness surrounds you. Silence will follow you wherever you go.

We also knew that it was in the nature of an empty stomach to produce illusions of grandeur.

I shall be perfectly frank with you,” which is how politicians in both Delhi and Washington preface a real whopper of a lie:

Dying is not a solution.. I want to live with You..!

The histories of Islamic fundamentalism and European imperialism have very often been closely, and dangerously, intertwined. In a curious but very concrete way, the fundamentalists of both faiths have needed each other to reinforce each other’s prejudices and hatreds. The venom of one provides the lifeblood of the other.

During the meeting in Delhi with Dirac on 12 January 1955, Nehru asked him if he had any recommendations for the future of the new republic of India. After his usual reflective pause, Dirac replied: ‘A common language, preferably English. Peace with Pakistan. The metric system.

When a man's instincts are evil, repentance has a short lease and brief is his gratitude towards those who have done him good.

When you have counted eighty years and more, Time and Fate will batter at your door; But if you should survive to be a hundred, Your life will be death to the very core.

I'm always amazed at the human capacity to not make fundamental changes, but instead merely adapt. I see these pictures of people in Beijing and New Delhi, walking around with masks on, because you can't walk outside your house and breathe? If you can't breathe?…If that's not the cue to make a fundamental change, I don't know what is!

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.

You can draw any kind of picture you want on a clean slate and indulge your every whim in the wilderness in laying out a New Delhi, Canberra, or Brasilia, but when you operate in an overbuilt metropolis, you have to hack your way with a meat ax. (Robert Moses)

If the blanket of man’s fate has been woven black, even the waters of Zam Zam and Kausar cannot wash it white.

On the road, as in many other aspects of Indian life, Might is Right.

Nature provides that a man who slaves all day should spend the hours of the night in a palace full of houris whereas a king who wields the sceptre by day should have his sleep disturbed by nightmares of rebellion and assassination.

Assamese life has more meaning than the violence, than its relationship with Delhi. Assam may not be sovereign politically, or economically, but the Assamese imagination has to remain sovereign.

For the British after 1857, the Indian Muslim became an almost subhuman creature, to be classified in unembarrassedly racist imperial literature alongside such other despised and subject specimens, such as Irish Catholics or ‘the Wandering Jew’.

From New Delhi to New York, from Durban to Rio; women and girls are been hunted down by rapists, abused by pedophiles and emotionally decapitated by a society that is becoming increasingly hostile to the womenfolk

a saint with the heart of a devil, or a fiend with the soul of a saint.

For all its faults we love this city.’ Then, after a pause, she added: ‘After all, we built it.

Sometimes the weak will last for years, while the strong will suddenly collapse and die.

little mother of ancient days: Thou hast cunningly dyed thy hair but consider That thy bent back will never be straight!

One Sikh may argue with one Sikh. One Sikh must never argue with two Sikhs–certainly not after dark.

The rain swirls over the trees and roofs of the town, and the parched earth soaks it up, exuding a fragrance that comes only once in a year, the fragrance of quenched earth, the most exhilarating of all smells.

[...] 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.

Teachers should have a proud place in society. In India, regrettably, they do not – as exemplified, by what I chanced to witness a few years back in Delhi. A wizened old man driving his 1938 Austin at a speed under 20 mph with a sign at the back of the car reading, ‘Please overtake me – as all my students have.’ Pathetic, but how true!

I am a Dalit in Khairlanji. A Pandit in the Kashmir valley. A Sikh in 1984. I am from the North East of India when I am in Munirka. I am a Muslim in Gujarat; a Christian in Kandhamal. A Bihari in Maharashtra. A Delhi-wallah in Chennai. A woman in North India. A Hindi-speaker in Assam. A Tamilian in MP. A villager in a big city. A confused man in an indifferent world. We're all minorities. We all suffer; we all face discrimination. It is only us resisting this parochialism when in the position of majoritarian power that makes us human. I hope that one day, I can just be an Indian in India - only then can I be me.

In Delhi, politicians and intellectuals privately bemoaned the “irrationality” of the uneducated Indian masses, but when the government itself provided false answers to its citizens’ urgent concerns, rumor and conspiracy took wing. Sometimes, the conspiracies became a consolation for loss.

If Allah has willed it that way... He must have better plans for you child...

There was a good reason for the face masks; they say the air is so bad in Delhi that it takes ten years out of a man’s life.

During our first month in the flat, however, Mr Puri was on his best behaviour. Apart from twice proposing marriage to my wife, he behaved with perfect decorum.

Why have the English remained to English? Throughout India's history conquerors have come from elsewhere, and all of them --- Turk, Arab, Hun, Mongol, Persian --- have become Indian. If --- when ---this Pakistan happens, those Muslims who leave Delhi, Lucknow and Hyderabad to go there, They will be leaving their homes. But when the English leave, they'll be going home.

The Hindus hatred of the Mussalmans did not make sense to me. The Muslims had conquered Hindustan. Why hadn’t our gods saved us from them? There was that Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni who had invaded Hindustan seventeen, times—not once or twice but seventeen times. He had destroyed the temple of Chakraswamy at Thanesar and nothing happened to him. Then Somnath. They said that even the sea prostrated itself twice every twenty-four hours to touch the feet of Somnath. But even the sea did not rise to save Somnathji from Mahmud.

But on balance I think you must never take land away from a people. A people’s land has a mystique. You can go and possibly order them about for a bit, perhaps introduce some new ideas, build a few good buildings, but then in the end you must go away and die in Cheltenham.’ Iris sighed. ‘And that, of course, is exactly what we did.

If a holy man eats half his loaf, he will give the other half to a beggar. But if a king conquers all the world, he will still seek another world to conquer. —SAADI, PERSIAN POET

I realized that I belonged neither to the Hindus nor to the Mussalmans. How could I explain to my wife that while the Brahmins lived on offerings made to their gods, the Rajputs and the Jats had their lands, Aheers and the Gujars their cattle, the Banias their shops, all that the poor Kayasthas had were their brains and their reed pens! And the only people who could pay for their brains and their pens were the rulers who were Muslims!

I knew I was free; that I had always been free; held back only by my own weakness, lacking impulse and the imagination to break away from an existence that had become habitual for years.

Women are manifestation of Time. A time which seems like yesterday was maybe 10 years ago... A woman who seems friendly and close to you may actually be very emotionally distant from you. Men are manifestation of Space. Delhi to Bangalore distance feels like a lot but it’s less than 3 hours flight... A man who seems distant and aloof may come emotionally close to you very fast.

June in Delhi illustrates the common belief that a Delhiwala, like a cockroach, can survive anything, for such are the vicissitudes of weather, conditioning and deprivation that the human spirit here has soared to new heights of indomitability to survive.

I am back in my beloved city. The scene of desolation fills my eyes with tears. At every step my distress and agitation increases. I cannot recognize houses or landmarks I once knew well. Of the former inhabitants, there is no trace. Everywhere there is a terrible emptiness. All at once I find myself in the quarter where I once resided. I recall the life I used to live: meeting friends in the evening, reciting poetry, making love, spending sleepless nights pining for beautiful women and writing verses on their long tresses which held me captive. That was life! What is there left of it? Nothing.

His Indian/ British accent was a map of where he’d been and what he’d seen. He travelled from our village in Bahowal to Delhi, to Southall, to Calgary. His voice mirrored those journeys, a living imprint of his memories, and revealed the things he didn’t about himself.

What I am describing to you here is what happens to drivers in Delhi every day, sir. You don’t believe me—you think I’m making all this up, Mr. Jiabao?

He is a thinker,’ wrote Jacquemont in his memoir, ‘who finds nothing but solitude in that exchange of words without ideas which is dignified by the name of conversation in the society of this land.

People who have much to say, a distinctive story to tell, often do not do so because they fear their words will fall on deaf ears. They feel excluded from political power and, to a large extent, from political and civic participation. Even if they were to shout their grievances from the rooftops of Westminster – or Brussels or Washington or New Delhi – they doubt it would have the slightest impact on public policy.

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.

It has been said that Delhi is not a city, but a collection of villages... There were Tamil villages, and Gujarati and Kannadiga, and over everything, like a blanket -- like a blankety-blanket -- a vast and spirited Punjabi joy in living that kept the city together and made it one, made it as much as was possible a city.

Involved. At least that was the right word, Alsana reflected, as she liftes her foot off the pedal, and let the wheel spin a few times alone before coming to a squeaky halt. Sometimes, here in England, especially at bus-stops and on the daytime soaps, you heard people say “We’re involved with each other,” as if this were a most wonderful state to be in, as if one chose it and enjoyed it. Alsana never thought of it that way. Involved happened over a long period of time, pulling you in like quicksand. Involved is what befell the moon-faced Alsana Begum and the handsome Samad Miah one week after they’d been pushed into a Delhi breakfast room together and informed they were to marry. Involved was the result when Clara Bowden met Archie Jones at the bottom of some stairs. Involved swallowed up a girl called Ambrosia and a boy called Charlie (yes, Clara had told her that sorry tale) the second they kissed in the larder of a guest house. Involved is neither good, nor bad. It is just a consequence of living, a consequence of occupation and immigration, of empires and expansion, of living in each other’s pockets… one becomes involved and it is a long trek back to being uninvolved. And the woman was right, one didn’t do it for one’s health. Nothing this late in the century was done with health in mind. Alsana was no dummy when it came to the Modern Condition. She watched the talk shows, all day long she watched the talk shows — My wife slept with my brother, My mother won’t stay out of my boyfriend’s life — and the microphone holder, whether it be Tanned Man with White Teeth or Scary Married Couple, always asked the same damn silly question: But why do you feel the need…? Wrong! Alsana had to explain it to them through the screen. You blockhead; they are not wanting this, they are not willing it — they are just involved, see? They walk IN and they get trapped between the revolving doors of those two v’s. Involved. Just a tired inevitable fact. Something in the way Joyce said it, involved — wearied, slightly acid — suggested to Alsana that the word meant the same thing to hear. An enormous web you spin to catch yourself.

Certainly Delhi is unimaginably antique, and age is a metaphysic, I suppose. Illustrations of mortality are inescapable there, and do give the place a sort of nagging symbolism. Tombs of emperors stand beside traffic junctions, forgotten fortresses command suburbs, the titles of lost dynasties are woven into the vernacular, if only as street names.

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.

To the sick man sweet water tastes bitter in the mouth.

He disdains such cowardly acts as looking in wing mirrors or using his indicators.

The Tughluks have gone; Tughlukabad is a ruin; only Nizamuddin remains.

One aspiration and thousand aspirants fighting to make their place.

For 20 years, I faced ‘Get Outs’ (by publishers), did not sell copies of my books, but I kept on trying. Junoon hona bahut zaruri hai, aur thoda sa pagalpan bhi (Passion is important, so is a bit of craziness). MINT New Delhi 2nd May, 2016

I heard, when I was in Delhi, that the men of the West are studying the construction of the atom, and have guessed at the force imprisoned in it. Wait until they have learned how to explode the atom, and then see what they will do to one another.

Dr Jaffery said that very few people in Delhi now wanted to study classical Persian, the language which, like French in Imperial Russia, had for centuries been the first tongue of every educated Delhi-wallah. 'No one has any interest in the classics today,' he said. 'If they read at all, they read trash from America. They have no idea what they are missing. The jackal thinks he has feasted on the buffalo when in fact he has just eaten the eyes, entrails and testicles rejected by the lion.

The outbreak revealed the surprising degree to which the Mughal court was still regarded across northern India not as some sort of foreign Muslim imposition – as some, especially on the Hindu right wing, look upon the Mughals today – but instead as the principal source of political legitimacy, and therefore the natural centre of resistance against British colonial rule.

Given the somewhat dubious and sectarian reputation of madrasas today, it is worth remembering that many of the most brilliant Hindu thinkers, including, for example, the great reformer Ram Mohan Roy (1772–1833), were the products of madrasa educations.

Most of us, Ogu, live with a vague dissatisfaction, if we are lucky. Living as we do, upon us is imposed a particular rhythm - birth, education, a job, marriage, then birth again, but we all have minds don't we? For most Indians of your age, just getting any job is enough. You were more fortunate for you had options before you. These sound like paternal homilies, don't they, but you've always had surrogate parents, your aunts, and then in Delhi, your Pultukaku, and we've not really spent much time together.

It was again to the Prophet Musa that Allah conveyed the essence of true religion. The Almighty said. ‘I was sick, and you did not come to see me. I was hungry, and you did not give me food.’ Musa asked ‘My God, can you also be sick and hungry?’ God replied ‘My servant so-and-so was sick, and my servant so-and-so was hungry. If you had visited one and fed the other, you would have found me with them.

In 1951 Dec 20th, Nehru, while campaigning for the first democratic elections in India, took a short break to address a UNESCO symposium in Delhi. Although he believed democracy was the best form of governance, while speaking at the symposium he wondered loud... the quality of men who are selected by these modern democratic methods of adult franchise gradually deteriorates because of lack of thinking and the noise of propaganda....He[the voter] reacts to sound and to the din, he reacts to repetition and he produces either a dictator or a dumb politician who is insensitive. Such a politician can stand all the din in the world and still remain standing on his two feet and, therefore, he gets selected in the end because the others have collapsed because of the din. -Quoted from India After Gandhi, page 157.

Today, whether we work in Düsseldorf or Dubai, Brasília or Beijing, New York or New Delhi, we are all part of a global network (real or virtual, physical or electronic) where success requires navigating through wildly different cultural realities. Unless we know how to decode other cultures and avoid easy-to-fall-into cultural traps, we are easy prey to misunderstanding, needless conflict, and ultimate failure.

During their colonial rule of India, the British government began to worry about the number of venomous cobras in Delhi. To reduce the numbers, they instituted a reward for every dead snake brought to officials. In response, Indian citizens dutifully complied and began breeding the snakes to slaughter and bring to officials. The snake problem was worse than when it started because the British officials didn’t think at the second level.

You will encounter resentful, sneering non-readers who will look at you from their beery, leery eyes, as they might some form of sub-hominid anomaly, bookimus maximus. You will encounter redditters, youtubers, blogspotters, wordpressers, twitterers, and facebookers with wired-open eyes who will shout at from you from their crazy hectoring mouths about the liberal poison of literature. You will encounter the gamers with their twitching fingers who will look upon you as a character to lock crosshairs on and blow to smithereens. You will encounter the stoners and pill-poppers who will ignore you, and ask you if you have read Jack Keroauc’s On the Road, and if you haven’t, will lecture you for two hours on that novel and refuse to acknowledge any other books written by anyone ever. You will encounter the provincial retirees, who have spent a year reading War & Peace, who strike the attitude that completing that novel is a greater achievement than the thousands of books you have read, even though they lost themselves constantly throughout the book and hated the whole experience. You will encounter the self-obsessed students whose radical interpretations of Agnes Grey and The Idiot are the most important utterance anyone anywhere has ever made with their mouths, while ignoring the thousands of novels you have read. You will encounter the parents and siblings who take every literary reference you make back to the several books they enjoyed reading as a child, and then redirect the conversation to what TV shows they have been watching. You will encounter the teachers and lecturers, for whom any text not on their syllabus is a waste of time, and look upon you as a wayward student in need of their salvation. You will encounter the travellers and backpackers who will take pity on you for wasting your life, then tell you about the Paulo Coelho they read while hostelling across Europe en route to their spiritual pilgrimage to New Delhi. You will encounter the hard-working moaners who will tell you they are too busy working for a living to sit and read all day, and when they come home from a hard day’s toil, they don’t want to sit and read pretentious rubbish. You will encounter the voracious readers who loathe competition, and who will challenge you to a literary duel, rather than engage you in friendly conversation about your latest reading. You will encounter the slack intellectuals who will immediately ask you if you have read Finnegans Wake, and when you say you have, will ask if you if you understood every line, and when you say of course not, will make some point that generally alludes to you being a halfwit. Fuck those fuckers.

The mere mention of the Farakka Express, which jerks its way eastward each day from Delhi to Calcutta, is enough to throw even a seasoned traveller into fits of apoplexy. At a desert encampment on Namibia's Skeleton Coast, a hard-bitten adventurer had downed a peg of local fire-water then told me the tale. Farakka was a ghost train, he said, haunted by ghouls, Thuggees, and thieves. Only a passenger with a death wish would go anywhere near it.

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.

A seeker has heard that the wisest guru in all of India lives atop India’s highest mountain. So the seeker treks over hill and Delhi until he reaches the fabled mountain. It’s incredibly steep, and more than once he slips and falls. By the time he reaches the top, he is full of cuts and bruises, but there is the guru, sitting cross-legged in front of his cave. "O, wise guru,” the seeker says, “I have come to you to ask what the secret of life is.” “Ah, yes, the secret of life,” the guru says. “The secret of life is a teacup.” “A teacup? I came all the way up here to find the meaning of life, and you tell me it’s a teacup!” The guru shrugs. “So maybe it isn’t a teacup.

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.

Delhi is not just a national capital, it is one of the political ultimates, one of the prime movers. It was born to power, war and glory. It rose to greatness not because holy men saw visions there but because it commanded the strategic routes from the northwest, where the conquerors came from, into the rich flatlands of the Ganges delta. Delhi is a soldiers' town, a politicians' town, journalists', diplomats' town. It is Asia's Washington, though not so picturesque, and lives by ambition, rivalry and opportunism.

It is difficult to describe what happened next-except to say that it is a moment that occurs uniquely in the history of refugees. Q tiny bolt of understanding passed between them. The woman recognized my father- not the actual man, whom she had never met, but the form of the man : a boy returning home. In Calcutta- in Berlin, Peshawar, Delhi, Dhaka- men like this seem to turn up everyday, appearing out of nowhere off the streets and walking unannounced into houses, stepping casually over thresholds into their past.

Do you know which is the greatest epic till date?

if he conquers, he obtains power and good fortune. If he perishes, he obtains paradise and bliss.’ The outcome of the battle therefore did not matter much to him.

As much as they were right for each other, time wasn't right for them.

In the notoriously fickle drawing rooms of Delhi, I had often heard Rahul being described as not-too-bright (in far less charitable terms). But the few times I had spoken with him I had thought otherwise. He was well read, respectful of academic expertise, and keen to meet specialists to mine their minds. His problem was not that he had read too few books—it was that he had a clinical, statistical approach to a profession that was often about instinct and human connections. He was like a man looking for the exactitudes of mathematics in the mysteries of poetry.

But if they asked me ‘Abdullah when will you become a true Muslim?’ I would reply ‘Soon, if that be the will of God— Inshallah.’ If anyone asked me whether we were Hindus or Mussalmans, we would reply we were both. Nizamuddin was our umbrella against the burning sun of Muslim bigotry and the downpour of Hindu contempt.

Many of the politicians in Delhi and Karachi, too, had once fought together against the British; they had social and family ties going back decades. They did not intend to militarize the border between them with pillboxes and rolls of barbed wire. They laughed at the suggestion that Punjabi farmers might one day need visas to cross from one end of the province to the other. Pakistan would be a secular, not an Islamic, state, its founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, promised: Hindus and Sikhs would be free to practice their faiths and would be treated equally under the law. India would be better off without two disgruntled corners of the subcontinent, its people were told, less

The Gandhi-Irwin truce, signed in New Delhi on March 5, 1931, marked a turning point in the Indian revolution and in the affairs of the British Empire. Not that Gandhi won much. I was surprised that he had conceded so much, and Nehru was bitter. The Mahatma seemed to have given in on almost every issue. Not even his eloquent defence of what he believed he had achieved, imparted to me in long talks on the succeeding days, convinced me that he had not, to an amazing extent, surrendered. It would take some time for me to realise that Gandhi, with his subtle feeling for the course of history, had actually achieved a great deal. For the first time since the British took away India from the Indians, they had been forced, as Churchill bitterly complained, to deal with an Indian leader as an equal. For the first time the British acknowledged that Gandhi represented the aspirations and indeed the demands of most of the Indians for self-government. And that from then on, he, and the Indian National Congress he dominated, would have to be dealt with seriously.

I am a palette of emotions; I remember how I have cov-eted to be free from the school rules. I look around to see people casually dressed up and walking with an aim maybe to make a better career or just add fame of DU degree like me. The campus is buzzing with freshman and activity. I just hope, these corridors, hallways, and passages don’t see me trip-ping and falling any day. I feel more comfortable standing in between the crowd of people moving. Like nobody is paying any heed. You can be yourself without feeling awkward about anything.

Of the 850,000 Indian soldiers who left the subcontinent during the First World War, 49,000 were killed in action. India also made her contribution to the material aspects of the Allied struggle, including the manufacture of 555 million bullets and more than a million shells. Over 55,000 Indians served in the Indian Labour Corps, as butchers, bakers, carpenters, shoemakers, tailors and washermen. Many did menial work within range of the enemy guns. In Delhi, a monumental arch records the Indian losses, India’s contribution in blood to the Allied war effort.

The first Embassy to Afghanistan by a western power left the Company's Delhi Residency on 13 October 1808, with the Ambassador accompanied by 200 calvary, 4,000 infantry, a dozen elephants and no fewer than 600 camels. It was dazzling, but it was also clear from this attempt to reach out to the Afghans that the British were not interested in cultivating Shah Shuja's friendship for its own sake, but were concerned only to outflank their imperial rivals: the Afghans were perceived as mere pawns on the chessboard of western diplomacy, to be engaged or sacrificed at will. It was a precedent that was to be followed many other times, by several different powers, over the years and decades to come; and each time the Afghans would show themselves capable of defending their inhospitable terrain far more effectively than any of their would-be manipulators could possibly have suspected.

Yet, there is a Chennai that hasn’t changed and never will. Women still wake up at the crack of dawn and draw the kolam—the rice-flour design—outside their doorstep. Men don’t consider it old-fashioned to wear a dhoti, which is usually matched with a modest pair of Bata chappals. The day still begins with coffee and lunch ends with curd rice. Girls are sent to Carnatic music classes. The music festival continues to be held in the month of December. Tamarind rice is still a delicacy—and its preparation still an art form. It’s the marriage between tradition and transformation that makes Chennai unique. In a place like Delhi, you’ll have to hunt for tradition. In Kolkata, you’ll itch for transformation. Mumbai is only about transformation. It is Chennai alone that firmly holds its customs close to the chest, as if it were a box of priceless jewels handed down by ancestors, even as the city embraces change.

people who have made India awesome aren’t all politicians. Most of the people that did this are not from the government. Whether it is entrepreneurs like J.R.D. Tata and N.R. Narayana Murthy, sportspersons like Sachin Tendulkar or musicians like A.R. Rahman, people from all walks of life have helped improve our nation. Not just celebrities, but E. Sreedharan, responsible for the Delhi Metro, and Dr Verghese Kurien, who created the Amul revolution, were all ordinary people doing their work extraordinarily well. Mahatma Gandhi and Swami Vivekananda, two of the most influential figures in India’s history, never held political office. Aim to be one of those people who made India awesome.

Amongst these brave soldiers was Dfr Vir Singh (Retd) of 4 Horse, whose flesh was charred off his bones by a Cobra missile that hit his tank. He spoke with great regard for his Squadron Commander Maj Bhupinder Singh, MVC, who too was severely burned in the same attack after they had destroyed many tanks in the Battle of Phillora. When the then Prime Minister of India Lal Bahadur Shastri visited a dying Maj Singh in the Army Base Hospital, Delhi, the officer had tears in his eyes. A touched Shastri told Maj Singh that tears didn’t become a brave soldier like him. Maj Singh replied, ‘Sir, I’m not pained because of any injury. I’m anguished that a soldier is not being able to salute his Prime Minister.

La superficie no resiste. Huyo hacia delante llevando el dolor cosido a los talones. Ninguna acequia en la que ahogarlo, ninguna huella en la que perderlo. Decido enfrentarlo como se enfrenta al cielo la llanuera: a descubierto. Habré de perderme a mí ya que en el mí se aloja todo dolor. Digo dolor para nombrarlo, exorcizar al mí. Escribo el mí para que ruede hacia la página, pero se me pega a los dedos y no acierto, no acierto a diluir en la tinta el llanto. A sacudidas me digo, a sacudidas la letra y luego contra lo irremediable me alzo. Alzo el grito. Contra lo irremediable. Vago por el mundo dejando un rastro de gritos. Cada saludo es un frito, cada sonrisa un grito. Mi sonrisa oculta el primer grito del mundo, el único, el mismo, aquel que brota en el final, cuando ya nada importa. Intrusa de mi mundo y del ajeno, no hallo lugar para el descanso. La fe de los comienzos, no El perdón no. Sólo el balbuce. La salvación no. Sólo el balbuceo. Después del grito el balbuceo. Asolada el balbuceo. Mis pasos doblándose hacia dentro. La mente desposeída de estrategias. Sólo el balbuceo. Dolor, ni tan siquiera -palabra sin sentido-. No abro las cortinas. Ninguna cortina. La habitación oscura. Málagra, Damasco, Delhi, en todas las ciudades la vida me es ajena, Todas las ventanas son la misma ventana. Todas las aceras reciben el mismo cuerpo. La misma soledad cayendo, excesiva. Morir es un exceso. Me ex- cedo. Balbuceo. Sigo alimentándome tan sólo para poder decir el exceso. A contra-vida. Abajo. Y a nadie que esté vivo ha de importarle lo que digo. No es más que un murmullo soterrado, apenas inquietante.

An oceanic expanse of pre-dawn gray white below obscures a checkered grid of Saskatchewan, a snow plain nicked by the dark, unruly lines of woody swales. One might imagine that little is to be seen from a plane at night, but above the clouds the Milky Way is a dense, blazing arch. A full moon often lights the planet freshly, and patterns of human culture, artificially lit, are striking in ways not visible in daylight. One evening I saw the distinctive glows of cities around Delhi diffused like spiral galaxies in a continuous deck of stratus clouds far below us. In Algeria and on the Asian steppes, wind-whipped pennants of gas flared. The jungle burned in incandescent spots in Malaysia and Brazil. One clear evening at 20,000 feet over Manhattan, I could see, it seemed, every streetlight halfway to the end of Long Island. A summer lightning bolt unexpectedly revealed thousands of bright dots on the ink-black veld of the northern Transvaal: sheep.

Maj Thapa rose to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and served till he retired. He continued to attend almost all the Republic Day parades from 1964 to 2004. Sick and undergoing dialysis for kidney failure in Delhi, Lt Col Thapa would slip in and out of consciousness in his last year. Poornima, who was taking care of him, pleaded with him to not attend the parade that year, but he refused gently yet firmly. ‘When I wear my uniform and go for the parade, I represent my soldiers; those men who fought a war with me. I cannot let them down,’ he told her. Though he could hardly stand for long or even stay alert, he put on his uniform, pinned on his PVC, tilted his Gorkha hat at the perfect angle and went for the parade, remembers Poornima. Through sheer willpower, he managed to stand in the jeep till he had saluted the President. After that, he sat down. That would be the last Republic Day parade he would attend. On 5 September 2005, Lt Col Thapa died of kidney failure. He was 77 years old.

It must be said here that ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’ is not an attribute of patriotism, but of deep patriarchy. Extreme mother-love is a camouflage for extreme misogyny. Over the past few years in India, the nature of the violence inflicted on women during rapes, riots and caste retributions is of an order seldom witnessed before in any part of the world, except perhaps, in Bosnia during the civil war, or in the Congo, or in Sri Lanka during the final moments of the pogrom against the civilian Tamil population there. From the barbarity of the jawans of the Assam Rifles on Manorama Devi, to incessant mass rapes by soldiers in Kashmir, to the graphic and horrific brutalities (that were videotaped) on even pregnant women in Gujarat in 2002, to the Nirbhaya case in Delhi, there is no evidence to prove that devotion towards an abstract ‘Bharat Mata’ translates into even a semblance of affection or respect for real flesh-and-blood women. Indeed, here it is only literally the flesh and blood that seems to matter. Add

They destroyed all the equipment, all the medicines. The Harijans – the people we used to call Untouchables – used to come a hundred miles for treatment.’ ‘But I thought Untouchability was outlawed at independence,’ I said. ‘Technically it was,’ replied Tyagi. ‘But do you know the saying “Dilli door ast”? It means “Delhi is far away.” The laws they pass in the Lok Sabha [Indian parliament] make little difference in these villages. Out here it will take much more than a change in the law to alleviate the lot of the Dalits [the oppressed castes, i.e. the former Untouchables].’ ‘But I still don’t understand why the Rajputs did this. What difference does it make to them if you educate the Untouchables?’ ‘The lower castes have always been the slaves of the higher castes,’ replied Tyagi. ‘They work in their fields for low wages, they sweep their streets, clean their clothes. If we educate them, who will do these dirty jobs?’ Dr Tyagi waved his hands at me in sudden exasperation: ‘Don’t you see?’ he said. ‘The Rajputs hate this place because it frees their slaves.’ ‘And what did you do,’ I asked, ‘while the Rajputs were beating the place up?’ Dr Tyagi made a slight gesture with his open palm: ‘I was just sitting,’ he said. ‘What could I do? I was thinking of Gandhiji. He was also beaten up – many times. He said you must welcome such attacks because it is only through confrontation that you can go forward. An institution like ours needs such incidents if it is to regenerate itself. It highlights the injustice the Harijans are facing.’ He paused, and smiled. ‘You yourself would not have come here if this had not happened to us.’ ‘What will you do now?’ I asked. ‘We will start again. The poor of this desert still need us.’ ‘And if the higher castes come for you again?’ ‘Then we will welcome them. They are also victims of their culture.

Except then a local high school journalism class decided to investigate the story. Not having attended Columbia Journalism School, the young scribes were unaware of the prohibition on committing journalism that reflects poorly on Third World immigrants. Thanks to the teenagers’ reporting, it was discovered that Reddy had become a multimillionaire by using H-1B visas to bring in slave labor from his native India. Dozens of Indian slaves were working in his buildings and at his restaurant. Apparently, some of those “brainy” high-tech workers America so desperately needs include busboys and janitors. And concubines. The pubescent girls Reddy brought in on H-1B visas were not his nieces: They were his concubines, purchased from their parents in India when they were twelve years old. The sixty-four-year-old Reddy flew the girls to America so he could have sex with them—often several of them at once. (We can only hope this is not why Mark Zuckerberg is so keen on H-1B visas.) The third roommate—the crying girl—had escaped the carbon monoxide poisoning only because she had been at Reddy’s house having sex with him, which, judging by the looks of him, might be worse than death. As soon as a translator other than Reddy was found, she admitted that “the primary purpose for her to enter the U.S. was to continue to have sex with Reddy.” The day her roommates arrived from India, she was forced to watch as the old, balding immigrant had sex with both underage girls at once.3 She also said her dead roommate had been pregnant with Reddy’s child. That could not be confirmed by the court because Reddy had already cremated the girl, in the Hindu tradition—even though her parents were Christian. In all, Reddy had brought seven underage girls to the United States for sex—smuggled in by his brother and sister-in-law, who lied to immigration authorities by posing as the girls’ parents.4 Reddy’s “high-tech” workers were just doing the slavery Americans won’t do. No really—we’ve tried getting American slaves! We’ve advertised for slaves at all the local high schools and didn’t get a single taker. We even posted flyers at the grade schools, asking for prepubescent girls to have sex with Reddy. Nothing. Not even on Craigslist. Reddy’s slaves and concubines were considered “untouchables” in India, treated as “subhuman”—“so low that they are not even considered part of Hinduism’s caste system,” as the Los Angeles Times explained. To put it in layman’s terms, in India they’re considered lower than a Kardashian. According to the Indian American magazine India Currents: “Modern slavery is on display every day in India: children forced to beg, young girls recruited into brothels, and men in debt bondage toiling away in agricultural fields.” More than half of the estimated 20.9 million slaves worldwide live in Asia.5 Thanks to American immigration policies, slavery is making a comeback in the United States! A San Francisco couple “active in the Indian community” bought a slave from a New Delhi recruiter to clean house for them, took away her passport when she arrived, and refused to let her call her family or leave their home.6 In New York, Indian immigrants Varsha and Mahender Sabhnani were convicted in 2006 of bringing in two Indonesian illegal aliens as slaves to be domestics in their Long Island, New York, home.7 In addition to helping reintroduce slavery to America, Reddy sends millions of dollars out of the country in order to build monuments to himself in India. “The more money Reddy made in the States,” the Los Angeles Times chirped, “the more good he seemed to do in his hometown.” That’s great for India, but what is America getting out of this model immigrant? Slavery: Check. Sickening caste system: Check. Purchasing twelve-year-old girls for sex: Check. Draining millions of dollars from the American economy: Check. Smuggling half-dead sex slaves out of his slums in rolled-up carpets right under the nose of the Berkeley police: Priceless.