Quotes & Sayings About Bombay

You obviously don't know what an Old Man of the Sea great wealth is. It is not a fat purse and time to spend it. Its owner finds himself beset on every side, at every hour, wherever he goes, by persistent pleaders, like beggars in Bombay, each demanding that he invest or give away part of his wealth. He becomes suspicious of honest friendship
indeed honest friendship is rarely offered him; those who could have been his friends are too fastidious to be jostled by beggars, too proud to risk being mistaken for one. — Robert A. Heinlein

'Bombay Velvet' is my most romantic film, it's my 'Titanic' or 'Gone With The Wind.' — Ranbir Kapoor

Traffic in the streets of Bombay is chaotic at best. Riding a bicycle is a dangerous occupation. However, there are hundreds of them on the streets competing with the cars and buses and lorries because it is the poor man's mode of transport. — Rohinton Mistry

But no turbulent emotions passed through me as he spoke, only a diluted version of the nauseating sensation that had taken hold the day in Bombay that I learned my mother was dying, a sensation that had dropped anchor in me and never fully left. — Jhumpa Lahiri

We lived in Bombay and we lived in Mumbai and sometimes, I lived in both of them at the same time. — Suketu Mehta

While in Bombay, I began, on one hand, my study of Indian law and, on the other, my experiments in dietetics in which Virchand Gandhi, a friend, joined me. My brother, for his part was trying his best to get me briefs. The study of India law was a tedious business. The Civil Procedure Code I could in no way get on with. Not so however, with the Evidence Act. Virchand Gandhi was reading for the Solicitor's Examination and would tell me all sorts of stories about Barristers and Vakils. — Mahatma Gandhi

An age that needs security guards is, of course, without security.
What do we have in the dull old days? Old man janitors in the schools; watchmen in the factories, and the watchman was usually the turbanned bearded Bombay armed only with a stick, drowsing on a stool by a gate. How his strong odor remembered now seems the very smell of safety!
In his place now lurks the man in uniform, armed with pistol and club and submachine gun: the "security" that stands for the insecurity of our times, being the human equivalent of the iron bars at the window, the barbed wire on the wall. — Nick Joaquin

At this moment she was remembering the voyage she had just made from Bombay with her father, Captain Crewe. She was thinking of the big ship, of the Lascars passing silently to and fro on it, of the children playing about on the hot deck, and of some young officers' wives who used to try to make her talk to them and laugh at the things she said. — Frances Hodgson Burnett

If I wanted, I could have ruled half of Bombay. — Dev Anand

I'm drinking here break motor oil and Bombay gin, I'll sleep when I'm dead. — Warren Zevon

I found Bombay and opium, the drug and the city, the city of opium and the drug Bombay — Jeet Thayil

Bombay, you will be told, is the only city India has, in the sense that the word city is understood in the West. Other Indian metropolises like Calcutta, Madras and Delhi are like oversized villages. It is true that Bombay has many more high-rise buildings than any other Indian city: when you approach it by the sea it looks like a miniature New York. It has other things to justify its city status: it is congested, it has traffic jams at all hours of the day, it is highly polluted and many parts of it stink. — Khushwant Singh

See those people holding hands?" he asked at the candlelight vigil outside the still-smoking Taj Hotel. "They're neither Hindus nor Muslims, but citizens of Bombay first. — Manil Suri

More dreams are realised and extinguished in Bombay than any other place in India. — Gregory David Roberts

Oh my God. I just got dumped by a red headed mortician in a funeral home named Crummy's, after pretending to be a circus freak at a visitation I had just crashed. I was pretty sure there'd be no bouncing back from this. -Dakota Bombay — Leslie Langtry

Everyone goes on about how Bombay is so similar to New York, so I had see what the big deal was. The bustling crowds are the same, but it's a lot quieter, it's a lot cleaner, and it's not humid. I think the energy is very similar to Bombay. — Tena Desae

One of the many happy things about physics is that it works anywhere in the world. No matter whether you're in Bishop's Lacey or Bombay, friction is friction. — Alan Bradley

Sometimes a director is making three films. Perhaps he is shooting a film in Madras and a film in Bombay and he can't leave Madras as some shooting has to be done, so he directs by telephone. The shooting takes place. On schedule. — Satyajit Ray

Here is the full list of the banned words I used: active homosexual; career women; Third World; blacks; Asians; Australasia; Bangalore; primitive African tribes; crippled; in a wheelchair; hare lip; ethnic minorities; handicapped; spinster; committed suicide; gypsies; Bombay; illegitimate daughter; air hostess; Siamese twins; Calcutta; deaf ears; illegal asylum seeker; province of Northern Ireland; grandmother; bachelor. — Rod Liddle

Flying has changed how we imagine our planet, which we have seen whole from space, so that even the farthest nations are ecological neighbors. It has changed our ideas about time. When you can gird the earth at 1,000 m.p.h., how can you endure the tardiness of a plumber? Most of all, flying has changed our sense of our body, the personal space in which we live, now elastic and swift. I could be in Bombay for afternoon tea if I wished. My body isn't limited by its own weaknesses; it can rush through space. — Diane Ackerman

In the '50s, listening to Elvis and others on the radio in Bombay - it didn't feel alien. Noises made by a truck driver from Tupelo, Mississippi, seemed relevant to a middle-class kid growing up on the other side of the world. That has always fascinated me. — Salman Rushdie

He stayed on the balcony for a while, the throbbing energy of the chawls filling his veins as he watched traffic ebb and flow. Shutters veiled the shops on the ground floor across the lane, and only a few lights flickered here and there, probably other mill workers like his father.
(from Aam Papad) — Ken Doyle

Obviously, a rigid, blinkered, absolutist world view is the easiest to keep hold of, whereas the fluid, uncertain, metamorphic picture I've always carried about is rather more vulnerable. Yet I must cling with all my might to ... my own soul; must hold on to its mischievous, iconoclastic, out-of-step clown-instincts, no matter how great the storm. And if that plunges me into contradiction and paradox, so be it; I've lived in that messy ocean all my life. I've fished in it for my art. This turbulent sea was the sea outside my bedroom window in Bombay. It is the sea by which I was born, and which I carry within me wherever I go. — Salman Rushdie

I met my wife in Bombay at an official function. And then we courted for three years. That's a great old term, 'courting.' And we had to do it quietly, of course, because you would know the difficulties one might have with Indian parents. She was advised by her father that people in the West don't take marriage seriously. — Glenn Turner

She removed the shining black disk from its sleeve, holding it by the edges. After she placed it on the turntable and set the arm into motion, she adjusted the volume on the amplifier, flooding the room with sound. She closed her eyes and began to sway to the music. She could almost feel Clive's arms guiding her, as he had done so many times over the course of their lives together.
(from Independence Day) — Ken Doyle

Duly Enlightened Gandhi's head by Mall of the 'Free Press Journal,' Bombay, in 1932Watches may disagree, but let us not. — Mahatma Gandhi

Now, her mother lifts Kavita's head up out of her lap and holds her face, hot with tears, in her cool hands. "I am glad it is you who is going," her mother whispers.
Kavita looks up at her with shock.
"I won't worry about you, Kavita. You have strength. Fortitude. Shakti. Bombay will bring you hardship. But you, beti, have the strength to endure it."
And through her mother's words and her hands, Kavita feels it - shakti, the sacred feminine force that flows from the Divine Mother to all those who have come after her. — Shilpi Somaya Gowda

How people's faces turned slightly upward when they stared at the sea, as if they were straining to see a trace of God or were hearing the silent humming of the universe; she would notice how, at the beach, people's faces became soft and wistful, reminding her of the expressions on the faces of the sweet old dogs that roamed the streets of Bombay. As if they were all sniffing the salty air for transcendence, for something that would allow them to escape the familiar prisons of their own skin. — Thrity Umrigar

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

I was very happy in Bombay. I was good at school. There was no reason to change anything. I suppose it must have been some spirit of adventure, of wanting to see the world. — Salman Rushdie

When I was growing up, everyone around me was fond of fooling around with words. It was certainly common in my family, but I think it is typical of Bombay, and maybe of India, that there is a sense of play in the way people use language. — Salman Rushdie

Dixitque Deus: fiat lux. Et facta est lux. Translated by himself into his personal Bombay "Wulgate": And God said, Cheap Italian motor car, beauty soap of the film star. And there was Lux. Please, Daddy, why did God want a small Fiat and a bar of soap, and also please, why did he get the soap only? Why couldn't he make the car? And why not a better car, Daddy? He could've asked for a Jesus Chrysler, no? — Salman Rushdie

In writing 'The Satanic Verses,' I think I was writing for the first time from the whole of myself. The English part, the Indian part. The part of me that loves London, and the part that longs for Bombay. And at my typewriter, alone, I could indulge this. — Salman Rushdie

For good or bad, there is a certain level of generalisation when it comes to my work. I want to break that perception. My decision to direct 'Bombay Talkies' or to present 'The Lunchbox' is an attempt to do that. These are the films that gel well with my sensibility, and it's unfortunate, it's not the perception out there. — Karan Johar

The weeks I'd spent in Bombay with Prabaker had taught me that the shaking or wiggling of the head from side to side - that most characteristic of Indian expressive gestures - was the equivalent of a forward nod of the head, meaning Yes. — Gregory David Roberts

One can only hope you feel better than you look," Amelia said.
"I'll feel better once I can find some decent refreshment. I've asked thrice for wine or spirits, and the servants all seem damnably absentminded."
She frowned. "Surely it's too early in the day even for you, Leo."
He extracted a pocket watch from his waistcoat and squinted at its face. "It's eight o'clock in Bombay. Being an internationally minded fellow, I'll have a drink as a diplomatic gesture. — Lisa Kleypas

These are stories you hear ... of people sitting in a mall and being spotted, and you think it will happen to you. And when you're fresh off the boat, and new in Bombay, you want those kind of things! They are magical fables. You want to, somewhere, be a part of it, something people will read about. But reality is different. — Nimrat Kaur

Magic, the trick that connects the ordinary to the impossible, was the invisible river that ran through every street and beating heart in Bombay in those years, and nothing, from the postal service to the pleading of beggars, worked without a measure of it. — Gregory David Roberts

Having grown up in Bombay, from the day you're born, you have absolute freedom to choose who you want to be. — Freida Pinto

It is a remarkable irony that many of the best shows in London - Chicago, Oklahoma! - and even such harmless diversions as The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast - are imports from the colonies, while the homegrown productions include such luxurious twaddle as Mamma Mia!, Bombay Dreams, and Starlight Express. Brits who view' American culture with disdain are the ones who must pay the freight here, being careful not to throw stones from inside their glass houses. Though it is doubtless a bitter pill to swallow, not everything that is idiotic, pandering, or unsophisticated originated in the land of the free and the home of Kenny G. Americans did not invent Cats. — Joe Queenan

It's the eternal tragedy of being gay in Bombay," I lamented. "Never a place to yourself." With city rents so high, most sons lived with their parents until marriage - and usually well after as well. — Manil Suri

Let me end this chapter with an encouraging story. A young man found his way up to the small apartment of Nisargadatta, my old Hindu guru in Bombay, asked him a spiritual question and then left after this one question. One of the regular students then asked, "What will happen to this man? Will he ever become enlightened or will he fall off the path and go back to sleep?" Nisargadatta said, "It's too late for him! He has already begun. Just the fact that he came up here and asked one question about what is his true nature means that that place in him that knows who he really is has started to wake up. Even if it takes a long, long time, there's no turning back. — Jack Kornfield

A teenage boy with a Mohawk sat across from me, sneering. I'd seen that look before. Why was it a problem to knit in public?
"My grandma knits."
I ignored him.
"So what are you making, Grandma?" Mohawk's voice was ugly.
I arched my eyebrow. "A cashmere cock ring. Your grandma ever knit one of those?"
The kid's eyes grew wide, and he suddenly became very interested in a four-year-old issue of Teen Vogue. — Leslie Langtry

'Bombay Velvet' is my first film in a trilogy about Bombay, before it became a metropolis. — Anurag Kashyap

When I moved to Bombay, it was very harsh. I was nothing like what I am today. I couldn't speak a word of English. In England, people might be very understanding about that, but in Bombay, they're not very forgiving. 'If you don't speak English, how do you expect to work in Hindi films?' — Kangana Ranaut

For each glass, liberally large, the basic ingredients begin with ice cubes in a shaker and three or four drops of Angostura bitters on the ice cubes. Add several twisted lemon peels to the shaker, then a bottle-top of dry vermouth, a bottle-top of Scotch, and multiply the resultant liquid content by five with gin, preferably Bombay Sapphire. Add more gin if you think it is too bland ... I have been told, but have no personal proof that it is true, that three of these taken in the course of an evening make it possible to fly from New York to Paris without an airplane. — Isaac Stern

Bombay Sapphire and Gogol should never be mixed. — Dan Brown

Most of the top actors and actresses may be working in ten or twelve films at the same time, so they will give one director two hours and maybe shoot in Bombay in the morning and Madras in the evening. It happens. — Satyajit Ray

This is not India. There are people here from every part of India, but Bombay isn't India. Bombay is an own-world, a world in itself. The real India is out there. — Gregory David Roberts

He looked at me with a smile that I still remember and ran a finger along his impeccably trimmed mustache. Cricket is about a lot more than playing by the rules, Mistry. It's a gentleman's game. Don't you ever forget that. — Ken Doyle

If only certain things had been preventable, his life would have unfurled in front of him as intended, like a lush Oriental carpet. No surprises, no detours. Just a thick tapestry of days and nights that at the end of his time on earth, he could roll up and proudly claim as his own. — Shilpa Agarwal

BOMBAY WAS CENTRAL, had been so from the moment of its creation: the bastard child of a Portuguese-English wedding, and yet the most Indian of Indian cities. In Bombay all Indias met and merged. In Bombay, too, all-India met what-was-not-India, what came across the black water to flow into our veins. Everything north of Bombay was North India, everything south of it was the South. To the east lay India's East and to the west, the world's West. Bombay was central; all rivers flowed into its human sea. It was an ocean of stories; we were all its narrators, and everybody talked at once. — Salman Rushdie

George Bernard Shaw of England stopped over just long enough to make one speech in Bombay, India, started a war and 100 Indians killed each other. That's what I call good speech-making. The only enthusiasm any of our speakers can rouse is a demand to kill the speaker. — Will Rogers

Fate gives all of us three teachers, three friends, three enemies, and three great loves in our lives. But these twelve are always disguised, and we can never know which one is which until we've loved them, left them, or fought them. — Gregory David Roberts

I looked at the people, then, and I saw how busy they were - how much industry and energy described their lives. — Gregory David Roberts

In this city, every deserted street corner conceals a crowd. It appears in a minute when something disrupts the way in which the world is supposed to work. It can disappear almost as instantaneously. — Jerry Pinto

Velayudhan Nair says: 'Man, we go to the doctor.' Velayudhan Nair always began every sentence with Man, for he had been to Bombay. In Colaba every De Souza says: Man. This they learned from the P & O ships. And P & O ships touch Plymouth. Do they say 'Man' there, one wonders.

'So, man, we go to the doctor,' he repeated.

'Mr Man, I come,' said Govindan Nair. He sometimes used Mister to show he too could be elegant. He called his son Mr Shridhar. ('Mr Shridhar, go and get me a chew,' 'Mr Shridhar, the thing that father puffs is wanted,' etc. etc. Mr Shridhar therefore brought the chew tobacco or that which father puffs, according to orders.) — Raja Rao

In Bombay, we have a fine concert hall. I think it is high time we built venues in Delhi and Calcutta, not only for western music, but also Indian music. It doesn't matter which party is in power; don't you think the capital of India should have a concert hall? — Zubin Mehta

And at the moment of contact, they do not know if the hand that is reaching for theirs belongs to a Hindu or Muslim or Christian or Brahmin or untouchable or whether you were born in this city or arrived only this morning or whether you live in Malabar Hill or New York or Jogeshwari; whether you're from Bombay or Mumbai or New York. All they know is that you're trying to get to the city of gold, and that's enough. Come on board, they say. We'll adjust. — Suketu Mehta

So, my sweetheart back home writes to me and wants to know what this gal in Bombay's got that she hasn't got. So I just write back to her and says, Nothin', honey. Only she's got it here. — Alvah Bessie

A city like Bombay, like New York, that is a recent creation on the planet and does not have a substantial indigenous population, is full of restless people. Those who have come here have not been at ease somewhere else. And unlike others who may have been equally uncomfortable wherever they came from, these people got up and moved. As I have discovered, having once moved, it is difficult to stop moving. — Suketu Mehta

'Salaam Bombay' didn't put a halo on the poor. Instead, it said that they will teach us how to live. — Mira Nair

Bombay is a city where gossip is treated as a commodity. — Tahir Shah

I loved being in Bombay. It was a pretty thrilling place to walk around and explore. — Dan Futterman

I know now that it's the sweet, sweating smell of hope, which is opposite of hate; and it's the sour, stifled smell of greed, which is the opposite of love. — Gregory David Roberts

As they left the pier and walked into the park, Chahda looked around appreciatively. "Nice place, this. Capital of New Caledonia. Big island, has 8,548 square mile, also has 53,245 peoples. Eleven thousand in Noumea. That is what says the Worrold Alm-in-ack."

Rick and Scotty laughed. It was like old times to hear Chahda quoting from The World Almanac. A Bombay beggar boy, he had educated himself with only the Almanac for his textbook, and he had laboriously memorized everything in it. — John Blaine

India's way is not Europe's. India is not Calcutta and Bombay. India lives in her seven hundred thousand villages. — Mahatma Gandhi

My family and relatives alone could fill Shanmukhananda Hall in Bombay. — Zubin Mehta

There is here a striving,avid and worldly civilisation, of course; these huge and eager markets, to this incessant buying and selling, that make that self evident; but I had no conception of the ubiquitous sense of the holy, no notion of how another world can permeate the secular. Filth, stench, disease,"gross superstition" as our people say, extreme poverty, promiscuous universal defecation, do not affect it: nor do they affect my sense of humanity with which I am surrounded. What an agreeable city it is, where a man may walk around naked in the heat if it so please him — Patrick O'Brian

The brown toxic cloud strangling Los Angeles never lifts and grows thicker with every immigrant added. One can't help appreciate the streets of Paris will soon become the streets of LA. However, Paris' streets erupted while LA's shall sink into a Third World quagmire much like Bombay or Calcutta, India. When you import that much crime, illiteracy, multiple languages and disease-Americans pick up stakes and move away. — Frosty Wooldridge

I was becoming addicted to Bombay. There was squalor and poverty, but I had begun to realise my good fortune and would never again forget it. — Tahir Shah

The choking humidity makes amphibians of us all, in Bombay, breathing water in air; you learn to live with it, and you learn to like it, or you leave. — Gregory David Roberts

All I did was write it down, one word after the other, beginning and ending with the same one, Bombay. — Jeet Thayil

So, what would you like to drink?"
"Aside from you?"
I laughed anxiously. "You can't drink me."
He leaned forward, his eyes running up and down my body, causing my skin to heat. "Yes, I believe I can. And I believe I will. But for now, I'll just have a Bombay and tonic. — Karina Halle

There were fat cats and skinny cats. The long-tailed and the bobbed. The daring young leapers, and the old windowsill sleepers. Balls of waddling fluff, smooth-coated prowlers, and hairless ones that looked fragile and wise. The tiger-striped, the ring-tailed, and the ones with matching coloured socks and mittens. There were tabbies and calicos. Manx and Persians. Siamese and Bombay. Ragdolls and Birmans. Maine Coons and Russian Blues. There were Snowshoes and Somalis, Tonkinese and Turkish, and many, many more. Brown and beige and orange and grey and black and white and silver cats, each with gleaming eyes of emerald, or sapphire, or amber. A rainbow of precious stones. — Brooke Burgess

I was born in the city of Bombay ... once upon a time. No, that won't do, there's no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar's Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947. And the time? The time matters, too. Well then: at night. No, it's important to be more ... On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came. Oh, spell it out, spell it out: at the precise instant of India's arrival at independence, I tumbled forth into the world. — Salman Rushdie

I didn't really enjoy modeling in Bombay. I floated through it in the hopes that I would get my ticket to the next big thing. There was no real joy that I got out of it, to be really honest. — Freida Pinto

You can take the boy out of Bombay; you can't take Bombay out of the boy, you know. — Salman Rushdie

...wearing a turban of yellow, signifying knowledge, and a robe of purple, portraying purity and activity, Virchand Gandhi of Bombay delivered a lecture on the religions of India.... — The New York Times

Gin and tonic," Christian says. "Hendricks if you have it or Bombay Sapphire. Cucumber with the Hendricks, lime with the Bombay. — E.L. James

The fun of sitting around Pangong Lake with 40 guys around a fireplace, having a glass of wine ... staying in one camp together ... that's an experience. Waking up at 5 in the morning, watching the sun come up. You don't do these things in Bombay. — Gautam Singhania

I'm a pucca Indian. Bombay is my home. — Zubin Mehta

Not everybody likes the idea of their cities filling up with the poor. A judge in Bombay called slum dwellers pickpockets of urban land. Another said, while ordering the bulldozing of unauthorized colonies, that people who couldn't afford to live in cities shouldn't live in them. When those who had been evicted went back to where they came from, they found their villages had disappeared under great dams and dusty quarries. — Arundhati Roy

So now that began to develop into a full-fledged shouting match of its own, and all in all it was soon a full-scale old-style Bombay tamasha, with people watching from every balcony and window in every building, up and down the road, laughing and giving advice and yelling at each other. — Vikram Chandra

What's interesting about Twitter is the unmediatedness of it, the directness of it. I'm on a train somewhere in New York and I send out a tweet. Somebody sitting at dinner in Bombay checks their phone and they see it. — Teju Cole

And so, out of bloody-mindedness, I had said the word, and we went for the first time, into those Bombay Central alleys that have no name. Lamba introduced me simply as 'The Moor', and because I came with him there was less contempt than I had expected. — Salman Rushdie

When I was in college, my brother, B.R. Chopra, who is everything to me, was a director in Bombay. He taught me filmmaking. What I am today is because of him. — Yash Chopra

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

The incredible length of Bombay sped by, those endless sprawls of buildings, huts and shacks, children squatting and shitting by the tracks, refuse, the crowded grey roads twisting and winding between, all of it blurred but fearsome in its strength, in its very life that grew it unstoppably. — Vikram Chandra

Some would assert that Providence was at work shaking out its pockets in Humanity's lap. Other would argue for that mindless choreographer, Chance. Either way it was a simple thing: a lost diary fell into the hands of a soul-sick war hero on a train from Bombay to Jaipur just when he'd grown tired of the scenery and needed something to keep his thoughts from the minefield of his wretched thoughts.
In such mild ways is the groundwork laid for first kisses and ruined lives. — Laini Taylor

Well the Bombay film wasn't always like how it is now. It did have a local industry. There were realistic films made on local scenes. But it gradually changed over the years. — Satyajit Ray

Credit, security passes, and other documents. It was a booming trade in the booming economy of Bombay, and we often worked through the dawn to satisfy the demand. And the business was generational: as licensing authorities and other bodies — Gregory David Roberts

When I did musicals in London a number of years ago, I was in a workshop scenario for a year or more with 'Bombay Dreams.' — Raza Jaffrey

O put it in the modern parlance, this is a re-run. We have been here before. This is like watching TV in Bombay or Kingston or Dhaka, watching the same old British sitcoms spewed out to the old colonies in one tedious, eternal loop. Because immigrants have always been particularly prone to repetition - something to do with that experience of moving West to East or East to West or island to island. Even when you arrive, you're still going back and forth; your children are going round and round. — Zadie Smith

I've been to Delhi, Madras, Bangalore and a lot of other cities, but I have never seen a crime set-up like that in Bombay. — Gregory David Roberts

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

Delhi is excellent. Everything looks so beautiful. In Bombay, we don't have such beautiful roads, spacious places, and you cannot have the luxury of having houses and bungalows. You have to live in little pokey flats and cost of living is extremely high in Mumbai. Delhi has a lot that people keep preserving ... a lot of which is what Delhi is about. — Bipasha Basu

I do think of Bombay as my hometown. Those are the streets I walked when I was learning to walk. And it's the place that my imagination has returned to more than anywhere else. — Salman Rushdie

I must confess that here I had to compromise the principle of giving no commission, which in Bombay I had so scrupulously observed. I was told that conditions in the two cases were different; that whilst in Bombay commissions had to be paid to touts, here they had to be paid to vakils who briefed you; and that here as in Bombay all barristers, without exception, paid a percentage of their fees as commission. — Mahatma Gandhi

Let me explain something to you. Look around here. How many people do you count? Sixty, eighty, eighty people? Greeks, Germans, Italians, French, Americans. Tourists from everywhere. Eating, drinking, talking, laughing. And from Bombay - Indians and Iranians and Afghans and Arabs and Africans. But how many of these people have real power, real destiny, real dynamic for their place, and their time, and the lives of thousand of people? I will tell you - four. Four people in this room with power, and the rest are like the rest of the people everywhere: powerless, sleepers in the dream. — Gregory David Roberts