Kiran Nagarkar Quotes & Sayings

Let nobody fool you, most couples are conjoined on earth.
The mismatches, now they are a different story. They are made in heaven
— Kiran Nagarkar

Mangal draws me aside and tells me that Puraji's doctor took a full day looking for the shrubs and herbs for the treatment. Wherefore the relief, i ask myself. Nothing has changed. If anything, the price is twenty four hours closer to death. I am about to leave when the doctor calls out to me. ' You'll wait outside till i have finished my examination.' It's a long, long time since anyone has spoken to me without my honorific. I am upset at his lack of mannerisms and grateful. If i am ordered around, someone else must be in charge. — Kiran Nagarkar

In the meanwhile, just see how profitable the fruits of non-violence are in this life. You stay pure while someone else, someone like me and my Rajput clan, does the sinning and the killing. While you religiously refrain yourself from bloodying your hands, you lend vast sums of money to finance the mightiest armies at minuscule decimal point percentages which add up to monstrous sums of interest. — Kiran Nagarkar

When you deal with naked power from an inferior position, perspectives get distorted. He was the aggrieved party and yet he felt guilty and would continue to do so all his life. — Kiran Nagarkar

The only battles that he and his kin fought, the only blood they spilt was on the chessboard. Massacres and carnage were not to his taste. He preferred the long, slow, tortuous death. I — Kiran Nagarkar

Where do songs go when you cease to hear them? Where does the turbulence of the air disappear after thousands of birds flap their wings homeward at eventide? Where are the cries of the Rajput women who spatter their red palm prints on the wall and leap into the flames of johar? Where is my childhood, my catapult, my broken slate, my first parrot, my youth and first sin and all those that followed, where is my old age and the first time I saw the woman from Merta? Ask Gambhiree. She knows it all. — Kiran Nagarkar

But if detachment is really fear of failure and hence never putting oneself to the test, or if it's fear of being hurt, humiliated or rejected, then one is closing all doors to life, to the possibilities of happiness, pain, dejection, achievement and experience. Reincarnation may be on the cards for most of us but we live this particular life, whether it is maya or whatever else, only once. This is our only chance to engage it. Excess — Kiran Nagarkar

Grammar, he felt, was a sign of competence, not of excellence. — Kiran Nagarkar

As you sow, so shall you reap has a neat ring to it but you are making a grievous mistake if you put your faith in that kind of cheap sentiment. There are no just deserts. The wages of sin are not necessarily hell and the path of goodness is often lined with treachery for the world is predicated upon the principle of randomness. — Kiran Nagarkar

people talk with a sense of wonderment about the incredible bravery of us Rajputs. This is missing the obvious. Whether it's Father, my brothers, my ancestors, I or my countrymen, we are, it goes without saying, unsurpassedly fearless and valiant. — Kiran Nagarkar

They are frauds. We justify pain because we do not know what to make of it, nor do we have any choice but to bear it. Happiness alone can make us momentarily larger than ourselves. Not always, but at least occasionally, it can break our obsession with the self. — Kiran Nagarkar

run. He is spoilt and his ambition is the work of an idle and over-reaching mother. — Kiran Nagarkar

Leelawati was sitting on a swing in the palace. Without meaning to, i ran towards her. She swung herself from the swing straight into my arms and hugged me. She wouldn't let go of me and i wasn't about to let go of her. To be trusted so, without any reservations, i too must have been up to some good in my past lives. — Kiran Nagarkar

Gurus Enable you to see new things. The trouble with Gurus is that you can rarely see beyond them. — Kiran Nagarkar

No amount of culture or civilization can subdue or hide the wanton violence in man. — Kiran Nagarkar

You can read all the books in the world on the Nazi concentration camps and the gas chambers, and yet reality will draw upon you only when you are put through that yourself. It is a law of God, or nature, if you prefer, that pain, suffering and grief cannot be transferred or known by proxy. Neither empathy nor sympathy but experience alone is a valid currency of affliction. It alone makes you a card-holding member all allows you to join the club of the wretched of the earth. All else is counterfeit. — Kiran Nagarkar

The only miracles in life are wrought by time. — Kiran Nagarkar

If not absolution, I yelled, give me oblivion. — Kiran Nagarkar

Pain may be the only reality but if mankind had any sense it would pursue the delusion called happiness. All the philosophers and poets who tell us that pain and suffering have a place and purpose in the cosmic order of things are welcome to them. They are frauds. We justify pain because we do not know what to make of it, nor do we have any choice but to bear it. Happiness alone can make us momentarily larger than ourselves. — Kiran Nagarkar

Rigour and ruthlessness do not preclude sympathy with another's point of view. — Kiran Nagarkar

She was fighting armies of demons which swirled through her mind and there was no way i could cross over into her nightmares and fight alongside her and bring her back. — Kiran Nagarkar

We watched the field exercises first and then sat in on a class by. Shafi Khan on classic attack formations. It was a lucid talk with ample diagrams and case-studies. — Kiran Nagarkar