Ghosh Quotes & Sayings

I'd been surprised by the depth of emotion that was invested in that curiously archaic phrase 'great power'. What would it mean, I'd asked myself, to the lives of working journalists, salaried technocrats and so on if India achieved 'great power status'? What were the images evoked by this tag?
Now, walking through this echoing old palace, looking at the pictures in the corridors, this aspiration took on, for the first time, the contours of an imagined reality. This is what the nuclearists wanted: to sign treaties, to be pictured with the world's powerful, to hang portraits on their walls, to become ancestors. On the bomb they had pinned their hopes of bringing it all back. — Amitav Ghosh

She had talked of this at length with Kadambari - Mrs. Dutt: Why should it not be possible for these freedoms to be universally available for women everywhere? And Mrs. Dutt had said that of course, this was one of the great benefits of British rule in India; that it had given women rights and protections that they'd never had before. At this, Uma had felt herself, for the first time, falling utterly out of sympathy with her new friend. She had known instinctively that this was a false argument, unfounded and illogical. How was it possible to imagine that one could grant freedom by imposing subjugation? that one could open a cage by pushing it inside a bigger cage? How could any section of a people hope to achieve freedom where the entirety of a populace was held in subjection? — Amitav Ghosh

'Time' is an internationalist publication catering to internationalist readers who are not only interested in their own backyard. — Bobby Ghosh

What she had liked better still was his drowsy demeanour and slow manner of speech; he
had seemed inoffensive, the kind of man who would go about his work without causing trouble, not the least desirable of qualities in a husband. — Amitav Ghosh

Make every moment last forever, because nothing else does. — Tapan Ghosh

You see, in our family we don't know whether we're coming or going - it's all my grandmother's fault. But, of course, the fault wasn't hers at all: it lay in language. Every language assumes a centrality, a fixed and settled point to go away from and come back to, and what my grandmother was looking for was a word for a journey which was not a coming or a going at all; a journey that was a search for precisely that fixed point which permits the proper use of verbs of movement. — Amitav Ghosh

Yet, there is a Chennai that hasn't changed and never will. Women still wake up at the crack of dawn and draw the kolam - the rice-flour design - outside their doorstep. Men don't consider it old-fashioned to wear a dhoti, which is usually matched with a modest pair of Bata chappals. The day still begins with coffee and lunch ends with curd rice. Girls are sent to Carnatic music classes. The music festival continues to be held in the month of December. Tamarind rice is still a delicacy - and its preparation still an art form. It's the marriage between tradition and transformation that makes Chennai unique. In a place like Delhi, you'll have to hunt for tradition. In Kolkata, you'll itch for transformation. Mumbai is only about transformation. It is Chennai alone that firmly holds its customs close to the chest, as if it were a box of priceless jewels handed down by ancestors, even as the city embraces change. — Bishwanath Ghosh

Already the sahibs have done more to keep the lower castes in their places than our Hindu kings did over hundreds of years. — Amitav Ghosh

Great Teachers are passionate and compassionate - they have a powerful personality to engage every mind in the classroom. They are never forgotten. — Kavita Bhupta Ghosh

Back-benchers and Last-rankers in School; they have determined hands, powerful minds and courage to turn the mountain of opportunities in their favour, grind challenges and mould desires and dreams into Grand Realities. — Kavita Bhupta Ghosh

But money, if not mastered, can bring ruin as well as riches, — Amitav Ghosh

Beauty is nothing but the start of terror we can hardly bear, and we adore it because of the serene scorn it could kill us with ... — Amitav Ghosh

In Bengal it was so easy to know who was who; more often than not, just to hear someone's name would reveal their religion, their caste, their village. — Amitav Ghosh

I'm so sorry,' Stone said. I don't know whether he was speaking to me, or Ghosh, or the universe. It wasn't enough, but it was about time. — Abraham Verghese

( ... ) an instance when Fate had conspired with Nature to give them a sign that theirs was no ordinary journey. — Amitav Ghosh

It occurred to him now to ask himself if this was how it happened : was it possible that the mere fact of using one's hands and investing one's attention in someone other than oneself, created a pride and tenderness that had nothing whatever to do with the response of the object of one's care - just as a craftsman's love for his handiwork is in no way diminished by the fact of it being unreciprocated? — Amitav Ghosh

That which a man takes for himself no one can deny him. — Amitav Ghosh

[T]hat state, love, is so utterly alien to that other idea without which we cannot live as human beings
the idea of justice. It is only because love is so profoundly the enemy of justice that our minds, shrinking in horor from its true nature, try to tame it by uniting it with its opposite [ ... ] in the hope that if we apply all the metaphors of normality, that if we heap them high enough, we shall, in the end, be able to approximate that state metaphorically. — Amitav Ghosh

Life is full of signs. The trick is to know how to read them. Ghosh called this heuristics, a method for solving a problem for which no formula exists. — Abraham Verghese

The wind is rising and we must make sail. Anchors aweigh! We must be off! — Amitav Ghosh

Ghosh trusted me to do whatever it is I would choose to do. That, too, is love. He'd been dead more than a quarter century and he was still teaching me about the trust that comes only from true love. — Abraham Verghese

He (Kesri) understood that the gap left by his departure from home had been filled by the continuing flow of their lives. — Amitav Ghosh

I had thought you were a better man, Mr Reid, a man of your word, but I see that you are nothing but a paltry hommelette.'
'An omelette?'
'Yes, your word is not worth a dam. — Amitav Ghosh

There's much talk about how there can't be democracy in a region that has problems of illiteracy and poverty. But I bring a different idea to the table when I say, 'Guys, I come from India. I'm more optimistic coming from where I'm coming.' — Bobby Ghosh

How was possible that a small no of men, in the span of a few hours or minutes, could decide the fate of millions of people yet unborn ? How was it possible that the outcome of those brief moments could determine who would determine who would rule whom, who would be rich or poor, master or servant, for generations to come ?
Nothing could be a greater injustice, yet such had been the reality ever since human beings first walked the earth. — Amitav Ghosh

It was a single poppy seed ... she rolled it between her fingers and raised her eyes past the straining sails, to the star-filled vault above. On any other night she would have scanned the sky for the planet she had always thought to be the arbiter of her fate - but tonight her eyes dropped instead to the tiny sphere she was holding between her thumb and forefinger. She looked at the seed as if she had never seen one before, and suddenly she knew that it was not the planet above that governed her life: it was this minuscule orb - at once bountiful and all-devouring, merciful and destructive, sustaining and vengeful. This was her Shani, her Saturn. — Amitav Ghosh

A shower of rain rejuvenates nature; similarly a Good Teacher rejuvenates learners with the beauty of knowledge. A shower of rain in the desert rejuvenates the most barren wasteland and helps hibernating flowers to bloom with an explosion of colour and eagerness; similarly a Great Teacher rejuvenates hibernating learners to bloom with an explosion of love for learning, curiosity and eagerness to explore the world without fear and inhibitions. — Kavita Bhupta Ghosh

Her hair, long, black and flowing, was her great asset, and she liked to wear it over her shoulders, — Amitav Ghosh

Teachers influence more by what they are, what they do, what they represent and what they believe than by what they teach and preach. — Kavita Bhupta Ghosh

A classroom is like a Greenhouse where the teacher must provide essential amenities like knowledge and life-skill with patience and empathy, control temperatures and provide adequate ventilation to release unwanted energies for everyone and everything to bloom. — Kavita Bhupta Ghosh

We are happy we soar very high and when we are not we fall into the depths of an abyss. — Amitav Ghosh

The last few months had passed in a kind of delirium — Amitav Ghosh

Teaching is not about how we see things, it is about how children see things. — Kavita Bhupta Ghosh

I was already well schooled in looking away, the jungle-craft of gentility. — Amitav Ghosh

What would it be like if I had something to defend - a home, a country, a family - and I found myself attacked by these ghostly men, these trusting boys? How do you fight an enemy who fights with neither enmity nor anger but in submission to orders from superiors, without protest and without conscience? — Amitav Ghosh

Hold a bottle by the neck and a woman by the waist. Never the other way around. — Amitav Ghosh

Kanai, the dreamers have everyone to speak for them,' she said, 'But those who try to be strong, who try to build things - no one ever sees any poetry in that, do they? — Amitav Ghosh

To conflict journalists, a tiny, tight-knit tribe, tragedy is practically an occupational requirement: our work requires us to seek it out, measure it, contextualize it, and chronicle it. — Bobby Ghosh

It was as if an embankment had been swept away and I (Neel ) were floundering in a flood , trying not to drown in my grief. — Amitav Ghosh

The only way to find out was to try. — Amitav Ghosh

The government to you is what God is to agnostics
only to be invoked when your own well being is at stake. — Amitav Ghosh

Yet the very name Ganga-Sagar, joining, as it did, river and sea, clear and dark, known and hidden, served to remind the migrants of the yawning chasm ahead; it was as if they were sitting balanced on the edge of a precipice, and the island were an outstretched limb of sacred Jambudvipa, their homeland, reaching out to keep them from tumbling into the void. — Amitav Ghosh

I spent as much time as I could with Ghosh. I wanted every bit of wisdom he could impart to me. All sons should write down every word of what their fathers have to say to them. I tried. Why did it take an illness for me to recognize the value of time with him? It seems we humans never learn. And so we relearn the lesson every generation and then want to write epistles. We proselytize to our friends and shake them by the shoulders and tell them, "Seize the day! What matters is THIS moment!" Most of us can't go back and make restitution. We can't do a thing about our should haves and our could haves. But a few lucky men like Ghosh never have such worries; there was no restitution he needed to make, no moment he failed to seize.
Now and then Ghosh would grin and wink at me across the room. He was teaching me how to die, just as he'd taught me how to live. — Abraham Verghese

You have to remember, Kanai, she said at length, that as a young man Nirmal was in love with the idea of revolution. Men like that, even when they turn their backs on their party and their comrades, can never let go of the idea: it's the secret god that rules their hearts. It is what makes them come alive; they revel in the danger, the exquisite pain. It is to them what childbirth is to a woman, or war to mercenary. — Amitav Ghosh

To scuttle a boat you don't have to rip out the whole bottom, you just need to remove a few planks, one by one. — Amitav Ghosh

Is it not amazing, Puggly dear, that whenever we begin to congratulate ourselves on the breadth of our knowledge of the world, we discover that there are multitudes of people, in every corner of the earth, who have seen vastly more than we can ever hope to? — Amitav Ghosh

Have we not done enough by our duty, Shireen? Do we not also have a duty to ourselves? — Amitav Ghosh

There seemed never to be a moment when he was not haunted by the fear of being thought lacking by his British colleagues. And yet it seemed to be universally agreed that he was one of the most successful Indians of his generation, a model for his countrymen. Did this mean that one day all of India would become a shadow of what he had been? Millions of people trying to live their lives in conformity with incomprehensible rules? Better to be what Dolly had been: a woman who had no illusions about the nature of her condition; a prisoner who knew the exact dimensions of her cage and could look for contentment within those confines. — Amitav Ghosh

Death is an illusion, Love is not! — Tapan Ghosh

True love is when you relish the orange she eats. — Tapan Ghosh

Our purest deeds are those done subconsciously, Otherwise, they are biased. — Tapan Ghosh

For Ila the current was the real: it was as though she lived in a present which was like an airlock in a canal, shut away from the tidewaters of the past and the future by steel floodgates. — Amitav Ghosh

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

Love is bliss only if you are a giver, not otherwise. — Tapan Ghosh

But if it were true that his life had somehow been molded by acts of power of which he was unaware - then it would follow that he had never acted of his own volition; never had a moment of true self-consciousness. Everything he had ever assumed about himself was a lie, an illusion. And if this were so, how was he to find himself now? — Amitav Ghosh

(He) was in love with the idea of revolution. Men like that, even when they turn their backs on their party and their comrades, can never let go of the idea: it's the secret god that rules their hearts. It is what makes them come alive; they revel in the danger, the exquisite pain. It is to them what childbirth is to a woman, or war to a mercenary. — Amitav Ghosh

You can't change your life. What you can change is YOUR APPROACH. — Tapan Ghosh

I have been facing lots of struggle in my life since my childhood,I don't know how I become gradually more and more stronger internally. — Debabrata Ghosh

It was as if the two women represented the poles of his desires, one of them forthright, spontaneous and simple in her tastes; the other engimatic, sophisticated, wedded to luxury. — Amitav Ghosh

The absence of food doesn't make a man forsake hunger-it only makes him hungrier . — Amitav Ghosh

To use the past to justify the present is bad enough - but it's just as bad to use the present to justify the past. — Amitav Ghosh

On the 11th anniversary of 9/11, it is some consolation that the man most responsible for that terrible morning will not be smiling smugly to himself as satellite TV brings to the leafy boulevards of Abbottabad the somber images of New Yorkers commemorating those who perished in the Twin Towers. — Bobby Ghosh

That he was no stranger to budmashing, barnshooting — Amitav Ghosh

I consider myself lucky that Sonu Nigam, Bikram Ghosh and Taufiq Quereshi came forward to create an original soundtrack to promote my book, something that hasn't been tried here before! — Amish Tripathi

Was it possible that some men possessed so great a force of character that they could stamp themselves upon their words such that no matter where they were read, or when, or in what language, their own distinctive tones would always be heard? — Amitav Ghosh

The hours are slow in passing as they always are when you are waiting in fear for you know not what: I am reminded of the moments before the coming of a cyclone, when you have barricaded yourself into your dwelling and have nothing else to do but wait. The moments will not pass, the air hangs still and heavy; it is as though time itself has been slowed by the friction of fear. — Amitav Ghosh

I suppose everyone finds the despotisms of other peoples hard to comprehend. — Amitav Ghosh

like the big bed it was enclosed in a permanent canopy of heavy netting. Mosquitoes were the least of the creatures this net was intended to exclude; its absence, at any time, night or day, would have been an invitation for snakes and scorpions to make their way between the sheets. In a hut by the pond a woman was even said to have found a large dead fish in her bed. This was a koimachh, or tree perch, a species known to be able to manipulate its spiny fins in such a way as to drag itself overland for short distances. It had found its way into the bed only to suffocate on the mattress. — Amitav Ghosh

And now, indeed, everything began to look new, unexpected, full of surprises. I had a book in my hands to while away the time, and it occurred to me that in a way a landscape is not unlike a book
a compilation of pages that overlap without any two ever being the same. People open the book according to their taste and training, their memories and desires: for a geologist the compilation opens at one page, for a boatman at another, and still another for a ship's pilot, a painter and so on. On occasion these pages are ruled with lines that are invisible to some people, while being for others as real, as charged and as volatile as high-voltage cables. — Amitav Ghosh

All the while schools and teachers have been working hard 'to fit' the Millennial generation into the orthodox classroom culture, ironically the Millennials are busy shaping the classroom culture to fit themselves. — Kavita Bhupta Ghosh

I wanted to watch her walking, unselfconscious, for as long as possible. — Amitav Ghosh

Nabadwip, a centre of piety and learning consecrated to the memory of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu - saint, mystic, and devotee of Sri Krishna. — Amitav Ghosh

Have faith in fate. You don't have a choice. — Tapan Ghosh

If the charter of your liberties entails death and despair for untold multitudes, then it is nothing but a license for slaughter. — Amitav Ghosh

You are in control only if you control yourself. — Tapan Ghosh

Well sir, if slavery is freedom then I'm glad I don't have to make a meal of it. Whips and chains are not much to my taste. — Amitav Ghosh

Teachers are the architects of a Nation. They build characters, construct personalities and strengthen spirits in learners who become National Assets of tomorrow. — Kavita Bhupta Ghosh

It is by worrying about adversity that people survive; complacency brings catastrophe. — Amitav Ghosh

There is something strikingly different about the quality of photographs of that time. It has nothing to do with age or colour, or the feel of paper ... In modern family photographs the camera pretends to circulate like a friend, clicking its shutters at those moments when its subjects have disarranged themselves to present to it those postures which they would like to think of as informal. But in pictures of that time, the camera is still a public and alien eye, faced with which people feel bound either to challenge the intrusion by striking postures of defiant hilarity, or else to compose their faces, and straighten their shoulders, not always formally, but usually with just that hint of stiffness which suggests a public face. — Amitav Ghosh

In my soul, I am still that small child who did not care about anything else but the beautiful colours of a rainbow. — Papiya Ghosh

I'll never forget the stillness, the hesitation, and a trace of something I'd never before seen on Ghosh's face: cunning. Then it gave in to resignation and a faraway look. For a moment I saw the world through his eyes, his intellect, his sweeping vision ... a vision that recapitulated our birth and looked to the future, looked past his life to the end of mine and beyond. And then and only then did it settle, gather, and focus, on the now, on a moment when the love was so palpable between father and son that the thought that it might end, and this memory be its only legacy, was unacceptable. — Abraham Verghese

When I look into my past the river seems to meet my eyes, staring back, as if to ask, Do you recognize me, wherever you are? Recognition — Amitav Ghosh

Life is a dilemma between living a lie and speaking one. — Tapan Ghosh

How had it happened that when choosing the men and women who were to be torn from this subjugated plain, the hand of destiny had stayed so far inland, away from the busy coastlines, to alight on the people who were, of all, the most stubbornly rooted in the silt of the Ganga, in a soil that had to be sown with suffering to yield its crop of story and song? It was as if fate had thrust its fist through the living flesh of the land in order to tear away a piece of its stricken heart. — Amitav Ghosh

Pon my sivvy, Miss Lambert! Aren't you quite the dandyzette today? Fit to knock a feller oolter-poolter on his beam ends! — Amitav Ghosh

I know nothing of this silence except that it lies outside the reach of my intelligence, beyond words - that is why this silence must win, must inevitably defeat me, because it is not a presence at all. — Amitav Ghosh

( ... ) it seemed to me exceedingly peculiar that a man should love flowers as well as opium - and yet I see now that there is no contradiction in this, for are they not perhaps both a means to a kind of intoxication ? Could it not even be said that one might lead inevitably to the other ? — Amitav Ghosh

In a further effort to be helpful, I tried to pry the dentures apart. But Rajkumar had grown impatient and he snatched the tumbler from me. It was only after he had thrust his teeth into his mouth that he discovered that Uma's dentures were clamped within his. And then, as he was sitting there, staring in round-eyed befuddlement at the pink jaws that were protruding out of his own, an astonishing thing happened - Uma leaned forward and fastened her mouth on her own teeth. Their mouths clung to each other and they shut their eyes. — Amitav Ghosh

People like my grandmother, who have no home but in memory, learn to be very skilled in the art of recollection. — Amitav Ghosh

There was no place more solitary than a dark room, with its murky light and fetid closeness. — Amitav Ghosh

Thinking about it later he understood that a battle was a distillation of time: many years of preparation and decades of innovation and change were squeezed into a clash of very short duration. And when it was over the impact radiated backwards and forwards through time, determining the future — Amitav Ghosh

Why don't they complain?"
"They do sometimes. But usually there's nothing in particular to complain about. Take the case of Hardy's appointment: Who was to blame? Hardy himself? The men? It certainly wasn't the CO. But that's how it always is. Whenever one of us doesn't get an appointment or a promotion, there's always a mist of regulations that makes things unclear. On the surface everything in the army appears to be ruled by manuals, regulations, procedures: it seems very cut and dried. But actually, underneath there are all these murky shadows that you can never quite see: prejudice, distrust, suspicion. — Amitav Ghosh

A Teacher who has courage to laugh at herself or himself; laugh with students, and laugh off difficulties is the harbinger of positive trails and cheerful learning outcomes. — Kavita Bhupta Ghosh

Amitav Ghosh's multigenerational saga The Glass Palace, set in colonial Burma, India, and Malaya, tells the story of Rajkumar, once a poor Indian boy, who becomes a wealthy teak trader in Burma, and lovely Dolly, former child-maid to the queen and second princess of Burma. — Nancy Pearl

Your tits are bigger," Shiva said.
"SHIVA!" Hema and Ghosh said at the same time.
"Sorry," he said, surprised by their reaction. "I meant her breasts are bigger," he said.
"SHIVA! That isn't the sort of thing you say to a woman," Hema said.
"I can't say it to a man," Shiva said, looking impatient. — Abraham Verghese

In a way the better the master;the worse the condition of slave,because it makes him forget what he is. — Amitav Ghosh

Nobody knows, nobody can ever know, not even in memory, because there are moments in time that are not knowable. — Amitav Ghosh

Some day, following the example of men like themselves, said Mr Fraser, the Chinese too would take to Free Trade: — Amitav Ghosh

Sometimes, the lascars would gather between the bows to listen to the stories of the greybeards. There was the steward, Cornelius Pinto: a grey-haired Catholic, from Goa, he claimed to have been around the world twice, sailing in every kind of ship, with every kind of sailor - including Finns, who were known to be the warlocks and wizards of the sea, capable of conjuring up winds with a whistle. — Amitav Ghosh

What you have always believed in is the real you. — Tapan Ghosh