"An Indian hostel room is what happens when you start with Japanese minimalism. You then strip the minimalism of all grace and tranquility. To what remains you add Soviet austerity. You take the progeny and let it commingle with South Asian material impoverishment. An Indian hostel room follows. You briefly consider adding a swastika, the Vedic and not the antisemitic. Or a rose motif. Or a single stroke of vermillion to light up the life of the young resident. But you don’t. It is an Indian hostel room."
- Chapter one, The Forest had Pied Pipers
“All the smileys you sent were just that... emoticons? Your lips didn’t even crack?”
“I mean I rarely laugh out loud. But come to think of it, an emoticon is a specific kind of hat tip; with a smiley, it is an acknowledgement that an attempt at humor has not gone unnoticed. An emoticon is not meant to be an accurate reflection of your reaction or internal state. Even if it is, it is exaggerated. An emoticon is a specialized exclamation mark.”
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“Do you always talk like you have just published a book, and being interviewed by New York Times magazine?”
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“One lives in the hope the next sentence will be better.”
Moments and Lines
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Excerpts and Passages
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Within a month and a half of the incident, Jane had been on national television three times, and on local channels several times more. The job on camera, it dawned on Jane after the first few appearances, was to deliver aestheticised misery.
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The visual medium wasn’t like the printed word, it wasn’t about facts or arguments or logic or polemics or even about a narrative. It was about slipping in a Trojan horse of images and sound bites that tugged at the trifecta of base human emotions – hope, fear, anger, and took over the viewers’ entire being. The end goal of television was to make a zombie who played on your side.
My grandmother believed you can learn a lot about a man from what he does in a bookstore. If he is not a reader, he picks up maybe a sporting hero’s autobiography, or a bestseller he has heard of. He then proceeds to read the jacket blurb, give it a once over, and stand quietly at a corner, waiting for the ordeal to be over.
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There are those who have a book in mind, and having found the book, pay up, and wait for others to finish. The book might be important to the man, but it is an errand he is running.
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The third kind is the prospector who might not know exactly what bounty his gold panning would land that day, but upon finding a title that catches his fancy, he settles down on a low chair, and immerses himself.
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The fourth is the jittery, ravenous, polyamorous bibliophile who picks up five titles across four genres.
Jangal Mahal was endless. What lay beyond the edge of the forest was more forest. A pebble bouncing of water makes ripples, which creates more ripples. But ripples finally die at the bank. The forest did not appear to have a bank. Among the many fears the boys fought everyday was the sense of being engulfed by the trees and the sky.
