Karan Mahajan Quotes

He was a person who thrived on company, who desired camaraderie, even in its lowest, most base form; he felt that just seeing other people, no matter the circumstances, even if the people were enemies, filled you with health, gave you a reason to live

He had the slick, proprietary attitude that small men from big cities sometimes bring toward big men from small cities

What if I've died a long time ago and come here? he wondered. What if the defining characteristic of hell is that you're locked in an endless, blind battle to reform it?

There was a contradiction within Vikas, an open wound: though he was fascinated by the poor, good at joshing with them, he was afraid, thanks to his bourgeois background, of being perceived as poor. Poverty equaled failure.

You've read Gandhi-ji? He said that the two worst classes of human beings are doctors and lawyers. Lawyers because they prolong fights and doctors because they cure the symptoms, not the cause. Doctors don't eliminate disease--they perpetuate the existence of doctors.

Village people had no central conception of truth or time or even of other people's memories; they always just played dumb when he told them they'd changed their stories

The months and years of struggle were suddenly canceled by three weeks of exercise and some visualization and focus.

And you know what happens when a bomb goes off? The truth about people comes out. Men leave their children and run away. Shopkeepers push aside wives and try to save their cash. People come and loot the shops. A blast reveals the truth about places. Don't forget what you're doing is noble.

It occurred to him now that people are defined much more by their association with death than by what they do in life.

The roots of shame run deep.

Growing up in Delhi, one gets addicted to pollution.

He had to go to bed every night knowing his world had been destroyed and wake up knowing he must feel the opposite and go on.

Back in the market, people collapsed, then got up, their hands pressed to their wounds, as if they had smashed eggs against their bodies in hypnotic agreement and were unsure about what to do with the runny, bloody yolk. Most

Like men who have failed together, they wanted nothing more than to never see each other again.

Artists, who are selfish people, become anxious around the self-sacrificing

I just remembered something you said when we first talked. That your pain only went away when you started thinking about others." "Not just that," Ayub said. "But when I found God." ________

To ask a child to feel sympathy for the poor is harder than getting him to feel sympathy for a chicken or a goat - at least you can see a goat being slaughtered.

Life is fragmentary but dreams are not.

Finally, on a windswept, befogged afternoon, the sort in which all of Delhi is wearing a sweater of atmospheric dirt, he went over with the driver to see the Khuranas.

But there was no sign of the bomb in the market. Like all other tragedies, it had been covered up; the market had gone into a huddle of concrete and commerce around the blast, paving over the scars like a jungle coming back over a burnt field

Terror is a form of urban planning.

American life is based on a reassurance that we like one another but won't violate one another's privacies. This makes it a land of small talk. Two people greet each other happily, with friendliness, but might know each other for years before venturing basic questions about each other's backgrounds....In the East, I've heard it said, there's intimacy without friendship; in the West, there's friendship without intimacy.

There are no higher values, people in the West say. Live by your own instincts, for yourself, for your own pleasure... In America, you see, you're not supposed to take care of the elderly. You're supposed to look after yourself, chase your dreams. But what happens when you grow old? Will your individualism save you?

Every child is a packet of disappointments, hurts, dangers.

Silence is the small man's only defense.

No action is safe from meaning.

Most of the people in the audience were white and old. They had the gaunt look of people who have seen all the important movies and can now only look forward to reruns.

During these years in the small-talk wilderness, I also wondered why Americans valued friendliness with commerce so much. Was handing over cash the sacred rite of American capitalism - and of American life? On a day that I don't spend money in America, I feel oddly depressed. It's my main form of social interaction - as it is for millions of Americans who live alone or away from their families.