Amit Chaudhuri: Trending quotes (page 5)

“… the Bengali was the Marwari of the early nineteenth century.”

“She would sweep the floor – unending expanses, acres and acres of floor – with a short broom called the jhadu, swiping away the dust in an arc with its long tail, which reminded one of the drooping tail of some nameless, exotic bird.”

“It's a well-known fact that no novel is taken seriously in India until a good deal of research has gone into it. This stay in the Taj will be my research. Going down the stairs will be research. So will looking out at the sea.”

“I treat vegetarianism as a phase that might any second end without warning.”

“Abhi, Babla and Sandeep slept like primeval creatures huddled on the island of the bed, close to the horizon, outwaiting the dawn that would bring the first thought to their heads. Their bodies slept with a pure detached love for every moment of sleep.”

“I love churches in Bombay…they make me think of shadow. Of footfall on stone. In England, churches preside over their habitat till they're gratuitous.”

“Calcutta is like a work of modern art that neither makes sense nor has utility, but exists for some esoteric aesthetic reason.”

“… what I’ve tried to allow is for the essay to be a space in which the consciousness which reads poetry or remembers a line of poetry or listens to music or goes for a walk, is also the consciousness that is inflected and threatened and endangered by the political; is also the consciousness that registers and is permeated by the political. That somehow it is not a separate … consciousness that is hiding behind the facade of the man who remembers a line of poetry or forgets it, but that it is the same consciousness in which these various things are coming in and going out.”

“Only drunks stare at statues …. I never liked the statues keeping vigil, primarily because they were too close to life.”

“where the noon is a charged battery, and evening’s a visionary gloom’ ( St Cyril Road, Bombay )”

“I drifted past heliotropic rubbish-heaps, elderly/white houses.’ ( The Bandra Medical Store )”

“Each view has a history. You sense you're where others have been.”

“People are much more aware of one another in England, super-aware. They are focused on others in a seemingly detached and abstract way. This was very different from India. In India you could do anything and people would see you but not see you, hear you but not hear you.”