Karan Mahajan Quotes & Sayings

The roots of shame run deep. — Karan Mahajan

Inside him, in a broth of blood and water, organs bumped softly, organically into one another, like fish in an aquarium. — Karan Mahajan

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? — Karan Mahajan

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 — Karan Mahajan

Every way he turned, his past was detonated, revealing tunnels and alternative routes under the packed, settled earth of the present. — Karan Mahajan

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

there was a long silence before the screams started, as if, even in pain, people watched each other first to see how to act. — Karan Mahajan

Why do the poor refuse to give an accurate picture of their suffering? — Karan Mahajan

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. — Karan Mahajan

Mr. and Mrs. Khurana were forty and forty, and they had suffered the defining tragedy of their lives, and so all other competing tragedies were relegated to mere facts of existence. — Karan Mahajan

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. — Karan Mahajan

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. — Karan Mahajan

The best way to describe what he felt would be to say that first he was blind, then he could see everything. This is what it felt like to be a bomb. You were coiled up, majestic with blackness, unaware that the universe outside you existed, and then a wire snapped and ripped open your eyelids all the way around and you had a vision of the world that was 360 degrees, and everything in your purview was doomed by seeing. — Karan Mahajan

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. — Karan Mahajan

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

Every child is a packet of disappointments, hurts, dangers. — Karan Mahajan

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. — Karan Mahajan

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

Silence is the small man's only defense. — Karan Mahajan

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." — Karan Mahajan

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. — Karan Mahajan

When things are good, you can see no other way of living; when things are in ruins, there appear a million solutions for how this fate could have been avoided. — Karan Mahajan

Mansoor had seen Vikas Uncle's movies before and had never cared for them. They were serious, stiff, shot in black-and-white, the characters speaking crisp English. Nothing good happened to anyone. People lived enclosed middle-class lives, taunting each other with petty memories, and women and men argued incessantly. "They're so joyless," he had told his mother, wondering at how tragic Vikas Uncle's sensibility had been even before the blast - it was as if he were sitting at a ceremonial fire, fanning a tragedy toward himself. "But they are very acclaimed," his mother had said reverently. — Karan Mahajan

Terror is a form of urban planning. — Karan Mahajan

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

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 — Karan Mahajan

Yes, madam," he said, with the exceeding politeness of a man who has just imagined raping you. — Karan Mahajan

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 — Karan Mahajan

they were excited by these bombings in a way that only victims of esoteric, infrequent tragedies are motivated by horrors — Karan Mahajan

Divide and rule. It wasn't just the British toward the Indians but all parents toward their children. — Karan Mahajan

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. — Karan Mahajan

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

No action is safe from meaning. — Karan Mahajan

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. — Karan Mahajan

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 — Karan Mahajan

Growing up in Delhi, one gets addicted to pollution. — Karan Mahajan