Arunabha Ghosh Quotes

The world is a stage. Life is an act... Just a balancing act. ~ Tapan Ghosh

[T]he great, irreplaceable potentiality of fiction is that it makes possible the imagining of possibilities. ~ Amitav Ghosh

Teaching Career does not begin with the completion of graduation and post graduation and attaining a degree – it begins the moment one starts caring about learners. ~ Kavita Bhupta Ghosh

One could never know anything except through desire, real desire, which was not the same thing as greed or lust; a pure, painful and primitive desire, a longing for everything that was not in oneself, a torment of the flesh, that carried one beyond the limits of one's mind to other times and other places, and even, if one was lucky, to a place where there was no border between oneself and one's image in the mirror. ~ Amitav Ghosh

'Time' is an internationalist publication catering to internationalist readers who are not only interested in their own backyard. ~ Bobby Ghosh

Life is a sail boat ride. Wind, the destiny. But dammit, you are the sailor! ~ Tapan Ghosh

Life is a dilemma between living a lie and speaking one. ~ Tapan Ghosh

The true tragedy of routinely spent life is that its wastefulness does not become apparent till it is too late. ~ Amitav Ghosh

[On the cities of Venice and Varanasi]

Everywhere you look there is evidence of the enchantment of decay, of a kind of beauty that can only be revealed by a long, slow fading. ~ Amitav Ghosh

It occurred to him now to ask himself if this was how it happened : was it possible that the mere fact of using one's hands and investing one's attention in someone other than oneself, created a pride and tenderness that had nothing whatever to do with the response of the object of one's care - just as a craftsman's love for his handiwork is in no way diminished by the fact of it being unreciprocated? ~ Amitav Ghosh

When you help someone, you also help yourself. Instead of worrying about how much you get in return, you are better off helping as many people as you can. ~ Tapan Ghosh

Her hair, long, black and flowing, was her great asset, and she liked to wear it over her shoulders, ~ Amitav Ghosh

True love is all about your love and not the one you love. ~ Tapan Ghosh

Oh shame on you, who call yourself a Christian! Do you not see that it is the grossest idolatry to speak of the market as though it were the rival of God? ~ Amitav Ghosh

But money, if not mastered, can bring ruin as well as riches, ~ Amitav Ghosh

The most interesting part of IIFA is that I get to meet filmmakers from India. I just attended a symposium on Satyajit Ray with Rituparno Ghosh and others. It was just so satisfying ~ Deepa Mehta

Unlike man, a dog lives every moment and dies only once. ~ Tapan Ghosh

What's right and what's wrong can only be judged by the alternate truth because the real truth is not judgmental. ~ Tapan Ghosh

In the old days, farmers would keep a little of their home-made opium for their families, to be used during illnesses, or at harvests and weddings; the rest they would sell to the local nobility, or to pykari merchants from Patna. Back then, a few clumps of poppy were enough to provide for a household's needs, leaving a little over, to be sold: no one was inclined to plant more because of all the work it took to grow poppies - fifteen ploughings of the land and every remaining clod to be built; purchases of manure and constant watering; and after all that, the frenzy of the harvest, each bulb having to be individually nicked, drained and scrapped. Such punishment was bearable when you had a patch or two of poppies - but what sane person would want to multiply these labours when there were better, more useful crops to grow, like wheat, dal, vegetables? But those toothsome winter crops were steadily shrinking in acreage: now the factory's appetite for opium seemed never to be seated. Come the cold weather, the English sahibs would allow little else to be planted; their agents would go from home to home, forcing cash advances on the farmers, making them sign /asámi/ contracts. It was impossible to say no to them: if you refused they would leave their silver hidden in your house, or throw it through a window. It was no use telling the white magistrate that you hadn't accepted the money and your thumbprint was forged: he earned commissions on the oppium adn would never let you off ~ Amitav Ghosh

To conflict journalists, a tiny, tight-knit tribe, tragedy is practically an occupational requirement: our work requires us to seek it out, measure it, contextualize it, and chronicle it. ~ Bobby Ghosh

I consider myself lucky that Sonu Nigam, Bikram Ghosh and Taufiq Quereshi came forward to create an original soundtrack to promote my book, something that hasn't been tried here before! ~ Amish Tripathi

Whatever the case, he saw now that it was a rare, difficult and improbable thing for two people from worlds apart to find themselves linked by a tie of pure sympathy, a feeling that owed nothing to the rules and expectations of others. He understood also that when such a bond comes into being, its truths and falsehoods, its obligations and privileges, exist only for the people who are linked by it, and then in such a way that only they can judge the honour and dishonour of how they conduct themselves in relation to each other. ~ Amitav Ghosh

One evening when we were sitting out in the garden she wanted to know whether she would be able to see the border between India and East Pakistan from the plane. When my father laughed and said, why, did she really think the border was a long black line with green on one side and scarlet on the other, like it was in a school atlas, she was not so much offended as puzzled.

'No, that wasn't what I meant', she said. Of course not. But surely there's something - trenches perhaps, or soldiers, or guns pointing at each other, or even just barren strips of land. Don't they call it no-man's land?...[I]f there aren't any trenches or anything, how are people to know? I mean, where's the difference then? And if there's no difference, both sides will be the same; it'll be just like it used to be before, when we used to catch a train in Dhaka and get off in Calcutta the next day without anybody stopping us. What was it all for then - Partition and all the killing and everything - if there isn't something in between? ~ Amitav Ghosh

( ... ) it seemed to me exceedingly peculiar that a man should love flowers as well as opium - and yet I see now that there is no contradiction in this, for are they not perhaps both a means to a kind of intoxication ? Could it not even be said that one might lead inevitably to the other ? ~ Amitav Ghosh

The best way to ease your anxiety while waiting for a decision is to move into your alter ego. ~ Tapan Ghosh

Neither Man, nor machine can replace its creator. ~ Tapan Ghosh

There was no place more solitary than a dark room, with its murky light and fetid closeness. ~ Amitav Ghosh

( ... ) an instance when Fate had conspired with Nature to give them a sign that theirs was no ordinary journey. ~ Amitav Ghosh

Artificial Intelligence is not a Man versus Machine saga; it's in fact, Man with Machine synergy. ~ Sudipto Ghosh

Kanai, the dreamers have everyone to speak for them,' she said, 'But those who try to be strong, who try to build things - no one ever sees any poetry in that, do they? ~ Amitav Ghosh

It would be enough; as an alibi for a life, it would do; she would not need to apologize for how she had spent her time on this earth. ~ Amitav Ghosh

What you have always believed in is the real you. ~ Tapan Ghosh

There is something strikingly different about the quality of photographs of that time. It has nothing to do with age or colour, or the feel of paper ... In modern family photographs the camera pretends to circulate like a friend, clicking its shutters at those moments when its subjects have disarranged themselves to present to it those postures which they would like to think of as informal. But in pictures of that time, the camera is still a public and alien eye, faced with which people feel bound either to challenge the intrusion by striking postures of defiant hilarity, or else to compose their faces, and straighten their shoulders, not always formally, but usually with just that hint of stiffness which suggests a public face. ~ Amitav Ghosh

Where it concerns human beings, it is almost always true that the more anxiously we look for purity the more likely we are to come upon admixture and interbreeding. ~ Amitav Ghosh

The wind is rising and we must make sail. Anchors aweigh! We must be off! ~ Amitav Ghosh

Every victorious warrior draws his strength from the highest source; his love. ~ Tapan Ghosh

Recognition is famously a passage from ignorance to knowledge. ~ Amitav Ghosh

There seemed never to be a moment when he was not haunted by the fear of being thought lacking by his British colleagues. And yet it seemed to be universally agreed that he was one of the most successful Indians of his generation, a model for his countrymen. Did this mean that one day all of India would become a shadow of what he had been? Millions of people trying to live their lives in conformity with incomprehensible rules? Better to be what Dolly had been: a woman who had no illusions about the nature of her condition; a prisoner who knew the exact dimensions of her cage and could look for contentment within those confines. ~ Amitav Ghosh

The government to you is what God is to agnostics
only to be invoked when your own well being is at stake. ~ Amitav Ghosh

Teachers are the architects of a Nation. They build characters, construct personalities and strengthen spirits in learners who become National Assets of tomorrow. ~ Kavita Bhupta Ghosh

Dolphins in the water. He recalled that the dolphins usually gathered there when ~ Amitav Ghosh

Nobody knows, nobody can ever know, not even in memory, because there are moments in time that are not knowable. ~ Amitav Ghosh

That unthinkable, adult truth: that need is not transitive, that one may need without oneself being needed. ~ Amitav Ghosh

In a further effort to be helpful, I tried to pry the dentures apart. But Rajkumar had grown impatient and he snatched the tumbler from me. It was only after he had thrust his teeth into his mouth that he discovered that Uma's dentures were clamped within his. And then, as he was sitting there, staring in round-eyed befuddlement at the pink jaws that were protruding out of his own, an astonishing thing happened - Uma leaned forward and fastened her mouth on her own teeth. Their mouths clung to each other and they shut their eyes. ~ Amitav Ghosh