Quotes & Sayings About Bengali

If Bengali cuisine were Wimbledon, the hilsa would always play on Centre Court. — Samanth Subramanian

At the age when Bengali youth almost inevitably writes poetry, I was listening to European classical music. — Satyajit Ray

The joke is that one Bengali is a poet, two Bengalis is an argument, three Bengalis is a political party, — Shashi Tharoor

My memory of my household is of one immersed in books and music. I have a very intimate relationship with Bengali literature, particularly Tagore, and my interest besides reading then was music. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

I have no words to express my sadness, grief, and frustration. I never thought Bengali people could do such a heinous and atrocious thing. My heart goes out to those innocent victims and their families. — Debasish Mridha

Fazulr Khan, a Bengali Muslim, designed the Sears Tower in Chicago. It was the world's tallest building when it opened in 1973. — Firas Alkhateeb

The terrible sacrifice offered to Kali in the name of religion enhanced my desire to know Bengali — Mahatma Gandhi

In Bilaath, I said. Bilaath, or Vilayet as it has otherwise been transcribed into English, derives from Persian and Ottoman Turkish, in which the word meant governorate or district. In Bengali, the word is used to refer to Britain. In fact, one English colloquial name for Britain, Blighty, somewhat archaic these days and mainly reserved for comedy, is derived from the word Bilaath, which was current in India in the time of the British Raj. — Zia Haider Rahman

A country which would never exist except by the efforts of a phenomenal collective will - except in a dream we all agreed to dream; it was a mass fantasy shared in varying degrees by Bengali and Punjabi, Madrasi and Jat, and would periodically need the sanctification and renewal which can only be provided by rituals of blood. — Salman Rushdie

In traditional Hindu families like ours, men provided and women were provided for. My father was a patriarch and I a pliant daughter. The neighborhood I'd grown up in was homogeneously Hindu, Bengali-speaking, and middle-class. I didn't expect myself to ever disobey or disappoint my father by setting my own goals and taking charge of my future. — Bharati Mukherjee

If a writer starts worring about what he or she has left out or forgotten, they might not be able to write even a single line. — Baby Halder

My films play only in Bengal, and my audience is the educated middle class in the cities and small towns. They also play in Bombay, Madras and Delhi where there is a Bengali population. — Satyajit Ray

I interviewed a lot of people in India, and I asked my mother to send me a lot of Bengali books on the tradition of dream interpretation. It's a real way for me to remember how people think about things in my culture. — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

The shefali will not bloom until it was time for the pujas. — Manoshi Bhattacharya

Growing up in an old-fashioned Bengali Hindu family and going to a convent school run by stern Irish nuns, I was brought up to revere rules. Without rules, there was only anarchy. — Bharati Mukherjee

This tradition doesn't exist for Bengalis, naming a son after father or grandfather, a daughter after mother or grandmother. This sign of respect in America ad Europe, this symbol of heritage and lineage, would be ridiculed in India. Within Bengali families, individual names are sacred, inviolable. They are not meant to be inherited or shared. — Jhumpa Lahiri

I am neither a Bengali nor am I from Delhi's St Stephen's. I am an Allahabad boy. — Vikas Swarup

My grandfather was an ordinary British citizen in the time of British Raj. He used to have Bengali friends from whom I learnt Bengali. — Fahmid Hassan Prohor

During the twenty-one year rule of Amir Abdul Rahman (1880-1901), one of Afghanistan's more pro-British rulers, only one school was built in Kabul, and that was a madrassa. Condemned to play a passive part in an imperial Great Game, Afghanistan missed out on the indirect benefits of colonial rule, the creation of an educated class such as would supply the basic infrastructure of the postcolonial states of India, Pakistan and Egypt.

Afghanistan's resolute backwardness in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was appealing to Western romantics. Kipling, who was repelled by the educated Bengali, commended the Pashtun tribesmen- the traditional rulers of Afghanistan and also a majority among Afghans- for their courage, love of freedom, and sense of honour. These cliches about the Afghans, which would be amplified in our own time by American journalists and politicians, also had some effect on Muslims themselves. — Pankaj Mishra

I would say the film world has stopped operating as one. We have divided it into Hindi movies, Bengali movies, Tamil movies and so on. Earlier, there was only one channel and we all knew what was going on. Today, it is hard to keep track of programmes due to the advent of regional channels. — Mithun Chakraborty

Shafiul's English, it must be said, is limited (although as one wag pointed out, not as limited as his interrogators' Bengali). So when he was asked whether he had deliberately tried to disrupt Trott's elongated guard-taking procedure by aborting his own run-up, he insisted there had been no plan. Pushed moments later on whether [Jamie] Siddons had spoken to the team about the need to disrupt Trott's elongated guard-taking process, Shafiul nodded jubilantly. We were left none the wiser. — Lawrence Booth

I don't know Bengali perfectly. I don't know how to write it or even read it. I have an accent, I speak without authority, and so I've always perceived a disjunction between it and me. As a result, I consider my mother tongue, paradoxically, a foreign language. — Jhumpa Lahiri

I speak English. I grew up speaking Bengali. This is the normal, the known, the obvious composition of who I am. Then there's Italian, this strange, other component of me that I've just created. It was a creative process just to learn the language, never mind to start expressing myself in it. — Jhumpa Lahiri

To me he will not just be remembered as a great player and a lovely human being, but as somebody who tried to learn Bengali for the last 14 years but never managed to do so! — Sourav Ganguly

My parents being Bengali, we always had music in our house. My nani was a trained classical singer, who taught my mum, who, in turn, was my first teacher. Later I would travel almost 70 kms to the nearest town, Kota, to learn music from my guru Mahesh Sharmaji, who was also the principal of the music college there. — Shreya Ghoshal

The Bengali was the Marwari of the early nineteenth century. — Amit Chaudhuri

She had no right to live there. She doesn't belong there. It took those people a long time to build that country; hundreds of years, years and years of war and bloodshed. Everyone who lives there has earned his right to be there with blood: with their brother's blood and their father's blood and their son's blood. They know they're a nation because they have drawn their borders with blood. Regimental flags hang in their cathedrals and all their churches are lined with memorials to men who died in wars, all around the world. War is their religion. That's what it takes to make a country. Once that happens people forget they were born this or that, Muslim or Hindu, Bengali or Punjabi: they become a family born of the same pool of blood. That is what you have to achieve for India, don't you see? — Amitav Ghosh

My wife Neelam is a North Indian, so she will make North Indian food, while my mother will make Bengali food. — Ronit Roy

India's linguistic diversity surprises many Westerners, but there are nearly thirty languages in India with at least a million native speakers. There are more native speakers of Tamil on our planet than of Italian. Likewise, more people speak Punjabi than German, Marathi than French, and Bengali than Russian. There are more Telugu speakers than Czech, Dutch, Danish, Finnish, Greek, Slovak, and Swedish speakers combined. — Bob Harris

I learnt to sing in Bengali, my mother tongue, then went on to sing in Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Gujarati and every possible Indian language. — Shreya Ghoshal

In a small village near Calcutta, in 1998, a villager who could not speak English sang me What Did You Learn In School Today? in Bengali! Tom Paxton's songs are reaching around the world more than he is, or any of us could have realized. Keep on, Tom! — Tom Paxton

It's not the type of thing Bengali wives do. Like a kiss or caress in a Hindi movie, a husband's name is something intimate and therefore unspoken, cleverly patched over. And so, instead of saying Ashoke's name, she utters the interrogative that has come to replace it, which translates roughly as Are you listening to me? — Jhumpa Lahiri

Human mental identities are not like shoes, of which we can only wear one pair at a time. We are all multi-dimensional beings. Whether a Mr. Patel in London will think of himself primarily as an Indian, a British citizen, a Hindu, a Gujarati-speaker, an ex-colonist from Kenya, a member of a specific caste or kin-group, or in some other capacity depends on whether he faces an immigration officer, a Pakistani, a Sikh or Moslem, a Bengali-speaker, and so on. There is no single platonic essence of Patel. He is all these and more at the same time. — Eric Hobsbawm

I'm scared that the pencil sides might disappear, just as a drawing can be rubbed out by an eraser. Bengali will be taken away when my parents are no longer there. It's a language that they personify, that they embody. When they die, it will no longer be fundamental to my life. — Jhumpa Lahiri

Even in India the Hindi film industry might be the best known but there are movies made in other regional languages in India, be it Tamil or Bengali. Those experiences too are different from the ones in Bombay. — Aishwarya Rai Bachchan

A little smile on your face, because you'd just untangled a new translation." He cleared his throat. "Like this one. Tumi amar jeeboner dhruvotara." She tilted her head, puzzling over the phrase. "That's not Hindustani." "Bengali. It means 'You are my life's bright star' in Bengali." The sweet words were edged with frustration, not tenderness. His knuckles cracked. "Obviously, I was saving that one. For the right morning. — Tessa Dare

In her book Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion, Carol Tavris recounts a story about a Bengali cobra that liked to bite passing villagers. One day a swami - a man who has achieved self-mastery - convinces the snake that biting is wrong. The cobra vows to stop immediately, and does. Before long, the village boys grow unafraid of the snake and start to abuse him. Battered and bloodied, the snake complains to the swami that this is what came of keeping his promise.
"I told you not to bite," said the swami, "but I did not tell you not to hiss."
"Many people, like the swami's cobra, confuse the hiss with the bite," writes Tavris. — Susan Cain

Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay is a stylistically daring writer in love with surrealism, credited with being 'the woman who reintroduced hardcore sexuality to Bengali literature'. But though the (male) establishment used this label of erotica to dismiss her work, the sex scenes have exactly the same transgressive function as her use of chronology and narrative voice. — Deborah Smith

In the Bengali language, there's not a real word for blow job. They call it "doing the ice cream." — Michael Glawogger

I feel I can express the nuances of the Bengali lifestyle and ways of thinking better than other cultures. — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

What had driven the litigation-loving Bengali to turn his gentle green valley into a pocket edition of hell?'

John Younie, the judge who tried the Chittagong Armoury Raid Case. — Manoshi Bhattacharya

In Bengali class, Gogol is taught to read and write his ancestral alphabet, which begins at the back of his throat with an unaspirated K and marches steadily across the roof of his mouth, ending with elusive vowels that hover outside his lips — Jhumpa Lahiri

The shefali will not bloom until it is time for the pujas. — Manoshi Bhattacharya

I was about 12 when I first encountered 'The Moonstone' - or a Classics Illustrated version of it - digging through an old trunk in my grandfather's house on a rainy Bengali afternoon. — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Whenever I get married, it will be a Bengali wedding. If I won't have a Bengali wedding, my mother won't come. She has warned me. So, I am going to have a Bengali wedding for sure. — Bipasha Basu

The intention (of the puja pandals) is not so much to entertain as to disorient and astonish; to tap into the Bengali's appetite for the bizarre, the uncanny. — Amit Chaudhuri

Being a Bengali, one is surprised when all the endless spume and froth of talk suddenly reveals itself to be the front of a gigantic wave of action. — Neel Mukherjee

I want to live in Kolkata; I don't want to live in Europe - I can't write there. I write in Bengali, and I need to be surrounded by the Bengali language and culture. — Taslima Nasrin

I used to crack A joke when Sourav Ganguly is upset and make him happy , i usually speak in bengali which would make him laugh — Sachin Tendulkar

There was a time when the Bengali language was an angry flood trying to break down her door. She would crawl into a closet and lock herself in, stuffing her ears to shut out those sounds. But a door was no defense against her parents' voices: it was in that language that they fought, and the sounds of their quarrels would always find ways of trickling in under the door and thorugh the cracks, the level rising until she thought she would drown in the flood ... The accumulated resentsmnets of their life were always phrased in the language, so that for her its sound had come to represent the music of unhappiness. — Amitav Ghosh

We even had a different word for Christmas in my language, Bengali: Baradin, which literally meant 'big day.' — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

It was the English word she used. It was in English that the past was unilateral; in Bengali, the word for yesterday, kal, was also the word for tomorrow. In Bengali one needed an adjective, or relied on the tense of a verb, to distinguish what had already happened from what would be. — Jhumpa Lahiri

In my case there is another distance, another schism. I don't know Bengali perfectly. I don't know how to read it, or even write it. I have an accent, I speak without authority, and so I've always perceived a disjunction between it and me. As a result I consider my mother tongue, paradoxically, a foreign language, too. As — Jhumpa Lahiri

Other Bengalis gossiped about him and prayed their own children would not ruin their lives in the same way. And so he became what all parents feared, a blot, a failure, someone who was not contributing to the grand circle of accomplishments Bengali children were making across the country, as surgeons or attorneys or scientists, or writing articles for the front page of The New York Times. — Jhumpa Lahiri

British officers arriving in India were supposed to spend up to three years in a Calcutta college, where they studied Hindu and Muslim law alongside English law; Sanskrit, Urdu and Persian alongside Greek and Latin; and Tamil, Bengali and Hindustani culture alongside mathematics, economics and geography. — Yuval Noah Harari

Monica Besra, a Bengali woman from a remote Indian village, was reportedly suffering from a malignant ovarian tumor when she went, in 1998, to a hospice founded by Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity. Nuns at the mission reportedly placed a medallion with Teresa's image on Besra's abdomen, and the tumor disappeared. — Charles Duhigg

The worst ... was what the Pakistani soldiers did to the Bengali women after their failed rebellion. — Iris Chang

The Bengali tends to run to brains rather than brawn and does not take kindly to the discipline and order of a hard life; at the same time, he lacks neither courage nor ability, and shines in the higher ranks."

Sir Charles Tegart — Manoshi Bhattacharya