Aravind Adiga Quotes & Sayings

Even here, in the weight machine of a train station, they try to hoodwink us. Here, on the threshold of a man's freedom, just before he boards a train to a new life, these flashing fortune machines are the final alarm bell of the Rooster Coop. — Aravind Adiga

The moment you recognize what is beautiful in this world, you stop being a slave — Aravind Adiga

Chain of envy linked them, showing each what was lacking in life, but offering also the consolation that happiness was present right next door, in the life of a neighbour, an element of the same society. — Aravind Adiga

India's great economic boom, the arrival of the Internet and outsourcing, have broken the wall between provincial India and the world. — Aravind Adiga

Go to Old Delhi,and look at the way they keep chickens there in the market. Hundred of pale hens and brightly colored roosters, stuffed tightly into wire-mesh cages. They see the organs of their brothers lying around them.They know they are next, yet they cannot rebel. They do not try to get out of the coop. The very same thing is done with humans in this country. — Aravind Adiga

It is an ancient and venerated custom of people in my country to start a story by praying to a Higher Power.
"I guess, Your Excellency, that I too should start off by kissing some god's arse.
"Which god's arse, though? There are so many choices.
"See, the Muslims have one god.
"The Christians have three gods.
"And we Hindus have 36,000,004 divine arses to choose from. — Aravind Adiga

I am not an original thinker - but I am an original listener.) — Aravind Adiga

Here's a strange fact: murder a man, and you feel responsible for his life - possessive, even. You know more about him than his father and mother; they knew his fetus, but you know his corpse. Only you can complete the story of his life, only you know why his body has to be pushed into the fire before its time, and why his toes curl up and fight for another hour on earth. — Aravind Adiga

You can't expect a man in a dung heap to smell sweet. — Aravind Adiga

These are the three main diseases of this country, sir: typhoid, cholera, and election fever. This last one is the worst; it makes people talk and talk about things that they have no say in ... Would they do it this time? Would they beat the Great Socialist and win the elections? Had they raised enough money of their own, and bribed enough policemen, and bought enough fingerprints of their own, to win? Like eunuchs discussing the Kama Sutra, the voters discuss the elections in Laxmangarh. — Aravind Adiga

Revenge is the capitalism of the poor: conserve the original wound, defer immediate gratification, fatten the first insult with new insults, invest and reinvest spite, and ke waiting for the perfect moment to strike back. — Aravind Adiga

I want to read Keats and Wordsworth, Hemingway, George Orwell. — Aravind Adiga

Let animals live like animals; let humans live like humans. That's my whole philosophy in a sentence. — Aravind Adiga

In a sense, being a full-time writer is less fun because there's no office to go to anymore, there's no set routine, there's no schedule. It can be quite isolating. — Aravind Adiga

When I was writing 'The White Tiger' I lived in a building pretty much exactly like the one I described in this novel, and the people in the book are the people I lived with back then. So I didn't have to do much research to find them. — Aravind Adiga

We may not have sewage, drinking water, and Olympic gold medals, but we do have democracy. — Aravind Adiga

O, I do read Indian novels sometimes. But you know, Ms Rupinder, what we Indians want in literature, at least the kind written in English, is not literature at all, but flattery. We want to see ourselves depicted as soulful, sensitive, profound, valorous, wounded, tolerant and funny beings. All that Jhumpa Lahiri stuff. But the truth is, we are absolutely nothing of that kind. What are we, then, Ms Rupinder? We are animals of the jungle, who will eat our neighbour's children in five minutes, and our own in ten. Keep this in mind before you do any business in this country. — Aravind Adiga

Neither. I am just one who has woken up while the rest of you are still sleeping. — Aravind Adiga

What good is winning a battle, if you don't even realise there's a war going on? — Aravind Adiga

An Indian Revolution?
No Sir. It won't happen. People in this country are still waiting for the war of their freedom from somewhere else - from jungles, from the mountains, from China, from Pakistan. That will never happen. — Aravind Adiga

It's true that all these gods seem to do awfully little work - much like our politicians - and yet keep winning re-election to their golden thrones in heaven year after year. — Aravind Adiga

Columbia University, where I went to study in 1993, insisted its undergraduates learn a foreign language, so I discovered French. — Aravind Adiga

I guess, your Excellency, that I too should start off by kissing some god's arse. Wich god's arse, though? There are so many choices. See the Muslims have one god. The Christians have three gods. And we Hindus have 36.000.000 gods. Making a grand total of 36.000.004 divine arses for me to choose from — Aravind Adiga

What a fucking joke. — Aravind Adiga

A man's past keeps growing, even when his future has come to a full stop. — Aravind Adiga

Now there are some, and I don't just mean Communists like you, but thinking men of all political parties, who think that not many of these gods actually exist. Some believe that none of them exist. There's just us and an ocean of darkness around us. I'm no philosopher or poet, how would I know the truth? It's true that all these gods seem to do awfully little work - much like our politicians - and yet keep winning reelection to their golden thrones in heaven, year after year. That's not to say I don't respect them, Mr. Premier! Don't you ever let that blasphemous idea into your yellow skull. My country is the kind where it pays to play it both ways: the Indian entrepreneur has to be straight and crooked, mocking and believing, sly and sincere, at the same time. — Aravind Adiga

It's amazing. The moment you show cash, everyone knows your language. — Aravind Adiga

Iqbal, that great poet, was so right. The moment you recognize what is beautiful in this world, you stop being a slave. To hell with the Naxals and their guns shipped from China. If you taught every poor boy how to paint, that would be the end of the rich in India. — Aravind Adiga

But isn't it likely that everyone in this world ... has killed someone or other on their way to the top? ... All I wanted was a chance to be a man
and for that, one murder is enough. — Aravind Adiga

My whole life have been treated like a donkey. All I want is that one of mine - at least one - should live like a man. — Aravind Adiga

Vishram is a building like the people living in it, middle class to its core. Improvement or failure, it is incapable of either extremity. — Aravind Adiga

See, the poor dream all their lives of getting enough to eat and looking like the rich. And what do the rich dream of?? Losing weight and looking like the poor. — Aravind Adiga

The two of them kept an eye open for every tree or temple we passed by, and turned to me for a reaction of piety which I gave them, of course, and with growing elaborateness: first just touching my eye, then my neck, then my clavicle, and even my nipples.

They were convinced I was the most religious servant on earth. — Aravind Adiga

What keeps India safe really is the heroism of millions of poor Indians who every day reject the allure of terrorism. What keeps India safe is just the courage of poor Indians, not the actions of its government. — Aravind Adiga

I was never born and I will never die; I do not hurt and cannot be hurt; I am invincible, immortal, indestructible. — Aravind Adiga

Inconvenience in progress, work is regretted. — Aravind Adiga

In a socialistic economy, the small businessman has to be a thief to prosper. — Aravind Adiga

I grew up, as many Indians do, in an archipelago of tongues. My maternal grandfather, who was a surgeon in the city of Madras, was fluent in at least four languages and used each of them daily. — Aravind Adiga

If we were in India now, there would be servants standing in the corners of this room and I wouldn't notice them. That is what my society is like, that is what the divide is like. — Aravind Adiga

Incidentally, sir, while we're on the topic of yoga - may I just say that an hour of deep breathing, yoga, and meditation in the morning constitutes the perfect start to the entrepreneur's day. How I would handle the stresses of this fucking business without yoga, I have no idea. Make yoga a must in all Chinese schools - that's my suggestion. — Aravind Adiga

Out of respect for the love of liberty shown by the Chinese people, and also in the belief that the future of the world lies with the yellow man and the brown man now that our erstwhile master, the white-skinned man, has wasted himself through buggery, cell phone usage, and drug abuse, I offer to tell you, free of charge, the truth about Bangalore.
"By telling you my life's story.
"See, when you come to Bangalore, and stop at a traffic light, some boy will run up to your car and knock on your window, while holding up a bootlegged copy of an American business book wrapped carefully in cellophane and with a title like:
TEN SECRETS OF BUSINESS SUCCESS!
or
BECOME AN ENTREPRENEUR IN SEVEN EASY DAYS!
"Don't waste your money on those American books. They're so yesterday.
"I am tomorrow. — Aravind Adiga

He shook his head, but I kept flattering him, telling him how fine his beard was, how fair his skin was (ha!), how it was obvious from his nose and forehead that he wasn't some pig herd who had converted, but a true-blue Muslim who had flown here on a magic carpet all the way from Mecca, and he grunted with satisfaction — Aravind Adiga

These people were building homes for the rich, but they lived in tents covered with blue tarpaulin sheets, and partitioned into lanes by lines of sewage. It was even worse than Laxmangarh. I picked my way around broken glass, wire, and shattered tube lights. The stench of feces was replaced by the stronger stench of industrial sewage. The slum ended in an open sewer - a small river of black water went sluggishly past me, bubbles sparkling in it and little circles spreading on its surface. Two children were splashing about in the black water. — Aravind Adiga

I thought, What a miserable life he's had, having to hide his religion, his name, just to get a job
as a driver - and he is a good driver, no question of it, a far better one than I will ever be.Part of
me wanted to get up and apologize to him right there and say, You go and be a driver in Delhi.
You never did anything to hurt me. Forgive me, brother.
I turned to the other side, farted, and went back to sleep. — Aravind Adiga

When I was growing up in the south Indian city of Madras, there were only two political parties that mattered; one was run by a former matinee idol, and the other was run by his former screenwriter. — Aravind Adiga

And then he realized that the thing that was blocking his passage was cleared, and he was falling; his body had begun its short earthly flight - which it completed almost instantaneously - before Yogesh Murthy's soul was released for its much longer flight over the oceans of the other world. — Aravind Adiga

Go to the tea shop anywhere along the Ganga, sir, and look at the men working in that tea shop - men, I say, but better to call them human spiders that go crawling in between and under the tables with rags in their hands, crushed humans in crushed uniforms, sluggish, unshaven, in their thirties or forties or fifties but still "boys." But that is your fate if you do your job well - with honesty, dedication, and sincerity, the way Gandhi would have done it, no doubt. — Aravind Adiga

Neither you nor I speak English, but there are some things that can be said only in English. — Aravind Adiga

In a sense, journalism can be both helpful and detrimental to a writer of fiction because the kind of writing you need to do as a journalist is so different. It has to be clear, unambiguous, concise, and as a writer often you are trying to do things that are more ambiguous. I find that writing fiction is often an antidote to reading and writing too much journalism. — Aravind Adiga

I watched him walk behind the bamboo bars. Black stripes and sunlit white fur flashed through the slits in the dark bamboo; it was like watching the slow-down reels of an old black-and-white film. He was walking in the same line, again and again - from one end of the bamboo bars to the other, then turning around and repeating it over, at exactly the same pace, like a thing under a spell. He was hypnotizing himself by walking like this - that was the only way he could tolerate this cage — Aravind Adiga

The worst part of being a driver is that you have hours to yourself while waiting for your employer. You can spend this time chitchatting and scratching your groin. You can read murder and rape magazines. You can develop the chauffeur's habit it's a kind of yoga, really of putting a finger in your nose and letting your mind go blank for hours (they should call it the "bored driver's asana"). — Aravind Adiga

In my family, as in most middle-class Indian families I knew when I was growing up, science and mathematics were held in awe. — Aravind Adiga

Greenwich Village always had its share of mind readers, but there are many more these days, and they seem to have moved closer to the mainstream of life in the city. What was crazy 10 years ago is now respectable, even among the best-educated New Yorkers. — Aravind Adiga

Who would have thought, Mr. Jiabao,
that of this whole family, the lady with the short skirt would be the one with
a conscience? — Aravind Adiga

A White Tiger keeps no friends. It's too dangerous. — Aravind Adiga

He can read and write, but he doesn't get what he's read. He's half-baked. The country is full of people like him, I'll tell you that. And we entrust our glourious parliamentary democracy — Aravind Adiga

Do we loathe our masters behind a facade of love - or do we love them behind a facade of loathing? — Aravind Adiga

Strange thoughts brew in your heart when you spend too much time with old books — Aravind Adiga

If only a man could spit his past out so easily. — Aravind Adiga

So I stood around that big square of books. Standing around books, even books in a foreign language, you feel a kind of electricity buzzing up toward you, Your Excellency. It just happens, the way you get erect around girls wearing tight jeans.
Except here what happens is that your brain starts to hum. — Aravind Adiga

I never did very well as an immigrant. I've lived in several countries and been a disaster everywhere. — Aravind Adiga

The trustworthiness of servants is the basis of the entire Indian economy. — Aravind Adiga

He read me another poem, and another one - and he explained the true history of poetry, which is a kind of secret, a magic known only to wise men. Mr. Premier, I won't be saying anything new if I say that the history of the world is the history of a ten-thousand-year war of brains between the rich and the poor. Each side is eternally trying to hoodwink the other side: and it has been this way since the start of time. The poor win a few battles (the peeing in the potted plants, the kicking of the pet dogs, etc.) but of course the rich have won the war for ten thousand years. That's why, on day, some wise men, out of compassion for the poor, left them signs and symbols in poems, which appear to be about roses and pretty girls and things like that, but when understood correctly spill out secrets that allow the poorest man on earth to conclude the ten-thousand-year-old brain-war on terms favorable to himself. — Aravind Adiga

Have you ever noticed that all four of the greatest poets in the world are Muslim? And yet all the Muslims you meet are illiterate or covered head to toe in black burkas or looking for buildings to blow up? It's a puzzle, isn't it? If you ever figure these people out, send me an e-mail. — Aravind Adiga

The book of your revolution sits in the pit of your belly, young Indian. Crap it out, and read. Instead of which, they're all sitting in front of color TVs and watching cricket and shampoo advertisements. — Aravind Adiga

But I complain about the police the way the rich complain; not the way the poor complain.
The difference is everything. — Aravind Adiga

Indira Gandhi had been this very powerful, dominating, ambiguous mother figure. Ambiguous because she was tyrannical, she had imposed ... she had suspended Indian democracy for a few years but she also was the woman who had defeated Pakistan in war at a time when most male politicians in India had secretly feared fighting that war, so that here in India even today Indira Gandhi is called by Indian nationalists the only man ever to have governed India. — Aravind Adiga

Do you know about Hanuman, sir? He was the faithful servant of the god Rama, and we worship him in our temples because he is a shining example of how to serve your masters with absolute fidelity, love, and devotion.
These are the kinds of gods they have foisted on us Mr. Jiabao. Understand, now, how hard it is for a man to win his freedom in India. — Aravind Adiga

I had grown up in a privileged, upper-caste Hindu community; and because my father worked for a Catholic hospital, we lived in a prosperous Christian neighborhood. — Aravind Adiga

There was a fierce jam on the road to Gurgaon. Every five minutes the traffic would tremble - we'd move a foot - hope would rise - then the red lights would flash on the cars ahead of me, and we'd be stuck again. Eveyone honked. Every now and then, the various horns, each with its own pitch, blended into one continuous wail that sounded like a calf taken from its mother. Fumes filled the air. Wisps of blue exhaust glowed in front of every headlight; the exhaust grew so fat and thick it could not rise or escape, but spread horizontally, sluggish and glossy, making a kind of fog around us. Matches were continually being struck - the drivers of autorickshaws lit cigarettes, adding tobacco pollution to petrol pollution. — Aravind Adiga

Every book is a kind of struggle, and it's a miracle when it comes out. — Aravind Adiga

An honest politician has no goodies to toss around. This limits his effectiveness profoundly, because political power in India is dispersed throughout a multi-tiered federal structure; a local official who has not been paid off can sometimes stop a billion-dollar project. — Aravind Adiga

When it comes to work - hurry, hurry, hurry. When it comes to payment - delay, delay, delay. Caste, religion, family background nothing. Talent everything. — Aravind Adiga

The coop is guarded from the inside. — Aravind Adiga

Never before in human history have so few owed so much to so many, Mr. Jiabao. A handful of men in this country have trained the remaining 99.9 percent - as strong, as talented, as inteligent in every way - to exist in perpetual servitude; a servitude so strong that you can put the key of his emancipation in a man's hands and he will throw it back at you with a curse. — Aravind Adiga

Nothing gives us greater pride than the importance of India's scientific and engineering colleges, or the army of Indian scientists at organizations such as Microsoft and NASA. Our temples are not the god-encrusted shrines of Varanasi, but Western scientific institutions like Caltech and MIT, and magazines like 'Nature' and 'Scientific American. — Aravind Adiga

Indians mock their corrupt politicians relentlessly, but they regard their honest politicians with silent suspicion. The first thing they do when they hear of a supposedly 'clean' politician is to grin. It is a cliche that honest politicians in India tend to have dishonest sons, who collect money from people seeking an audience with Dad. — Aravind Adiga

Sardonic, seriocomic saga of the plight of India's poor. — Aravind Adiga

People in this country are still waiting for the war of their freedom to come from somewhere else, from the jungles, from the mountains, from China, from Pakistan. That will never happen. Every man must make his own Benaras.
The book of your revolution sits in the pit of your belly, young Indian. Crap it out, and read. — Aravind Adiga

We'll call you ... Ram. Wait - don't we have a Ram in this class? I don't want any confusion, it'll be Balram. You know who Balram was, don't you?"
"No, sir."
"He was the sidekick of the god Krishna. Know what my name is?"
"No, sir."
"He laughed. "Krishna. — Aravind Adiga

Apparently, sir you Chinese are far ahead of us in every respect, except that you don't have entrepreneurs. And our nation, though it has no drinking water, electricity, sewage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy, or punctuality, 'does' have entrepreneurs. Thousands and thousands of them. Especially in the field of technology. And these entrepreneurs - "we" entrepreneurs - have set up all these outsourcing companies that virtually run America now. — Aravind Adiga

Having plenty of living space has to be the greatest luxury in a city, and I guess in some sense Bombay is the antithesis of what living in Canada must be. — Aravind Adiga

The Great Socialist himself is said to have embezzled one billion rupees from the Darkness, and transferred that money into a bank account in a small, beautiful country in Europe full of white people and black money. — Aravind Adiga

I am coming back to New York after five years, and it seems that psychics are taking over the city. — Aravind Adiga

I gather you yellow-skinned men, despite your triumphs in sewage, drinking water, and Olympic gold medals, still don't have democracy. Some politician on the radio was saying that that's why we Indian are going to beat you: we may not have sewage, drinking water, and Olympic gold medals, but we do have democracy.
If I were making a country, I'd get the sewage pipes first, then the democracy, then I'd go about giving pamphlets and statues of Gandhi to other people, but what do I know? I am just a murderer! — Aravind Adiga

You were looking for the key for years, but the door was always open. — Aravind Adiga

Entrepreneurs are made from half-baked clay. — Aravind Adiga

Too much of Indian writing in English, it seemed to me, consisted of middle-class people writing about other middle-class people - and a small slice of life being passed off as an authentic portrait of the country. — Aravind Adiga

In India, it's the rich who have problems with obesity. And the poor are darker-skinned because they work outside and often work without their tops on so you can see their ribs. — Aravind Adiga

And our nation, though it has no drinking water, electricity, sewage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy, or punctuality, does have entrepreneurs. — Aravind Adiga

Sometimes I wonder, Balram. I wonder what's the point of living. I really wonder ... '
The point of living? My heart pounded The point of your living is that if you die, who's going to pay me three and a half thousand rupees a month? — Aravind Adiga

Like most of my friends in school, I was a member of multiple circulating libraries; and all of us, to begin with, borrowed and read the same things. — Aravind Adiga

It has always been very difficult for writers to survive commercially in India because the market was so small. But that's not true at all any more. It's one of the world's fastest growing and most vibrant markets for books, especially in English. — Aravind Adiga

I put my hand out and wiped the vomit from his lips, and cooed soothing words to him. It squeezed my heart to see him suffer like this - but where my genuine concern for him ended and where my self-interest began, I could not tell: no servant can ever tell what the motives of his heart are.
"Do we loathe our masters behind a facade of love - or do we love them behind a facade of loathing?
"We are made mysteries to ourselves by the Rooster Coop we are locked in. — Aravind Adiga

The future of the world lies with the yellow man and the brown man now that our erstwhile master, the white-skinned man, has wasted himself through buggery, cell phone usage, and drug abuse — Aravind Adiga

Every day, on the roads of Delhi, some chauffeur is driving an empty car with a black suitcase sitting on the backseat. Inside that suitcase is a million, two million rupees; more money than that chauffeur will see in his lifetime. If he took the money he could go to America, Australia, anywhere, and start a new life. He could go inside the five-star hotels he has dreamed about all his life and only seen from the outside. He could take his family to Goa, to England. Yet he takes that black suitcase where his master wants. He puts it down where he is meant to, and never touches a rupee. Why?
Because Indians are the world's most honest people, like the prime minister's booklet will inform you? No. It's because 99.9 percent of us are caught in the Rooster Coop just like those poor guys in the poultry market. — Aravind Adiga

Because in this world, there is a line: on one side are the men who cannot get things done, and on the other side are the men who can. And not one in a hundred will cross that line. Will you? — Aravind Adiga

Any good society survives on a circulation of favours. — Aravind Adiga

Mangalore, the coastal Indian town where I lived until I was almost 16, is now a booming city of malls and call-centres. But, in the 1980s, it was a provincial town in a socialist country. — Aravind Adiga

But without a family, a man is nothing. — Aravind Adiga