Vivek Shanbhag Quotes

there's a vast difference in the moral underpinnings of a business family and the household of a salaried teacher. I

The well-being of any household rests on selective acts of blindness and deafness.

I believe the essence of translation lies in taking what is unsaid in a work from one language to another. Words have memories, a history of their own. There are no two words with exactly the same meaning. To recreate the unspoken in another language, one needs to understand what went into making the original; then one must dismantle it and rebuild it in the other language.

Language communicates in terms of what is already know; it chokes up when asked to deal with entirely unprecedented.

Silence descended on the house. [....] Amma must have sensed that this was the sort of silence that, left unchallenged, could consume the family from within.

When you have no choice, you have no discontent either.

It didn't seem like they were here to find food. Nor did they have the patience to bite anyone. Left to themselves, they'd quickly haul to particles of mud and built nests here and there in the house. You could try scuttling them with a broom, but they'd get into a mad frenzy and climb up the broom and on to your arm. Before you knew it, they'd be all over you, even under your clothes. For days on end there would be a terrific invasion, and then one day you would wake up to find them gone. There was no telling why they came, where they went. I sometimes saw them racing in lines along the window sills in the front room, where there was nothing to eat. Perhaps they were on a mission of some sort, only passing through our house in self-important columns. But not once did I see the trail of a column, an ant that had no other ants behind it.

Ours is a joint family. We live in the same house - my wife and I, my parents, my uncle and Malati. Malati is my older sister, back home now after having left her husband. It is natural to wonder, I suppose, why the six of us should want to live together. What can I say - it is one of the strengths of families to pretend that they desire what is unavoidable.

it's not we who control money, it's the money that controls us. When there's only a little, it behaves meekly; when it grows, it becomes brash and has its way with us.

Appa enjoys our current prosperity with considerable hesitation, as if it were undeserved. He's given to quoting a proverb that says wealth shouldn't strike suddenly like a visitation, but instead grow gradually like a tree.

Cakes as good as the coins they cost.