Amitava Kumar

“'An Obedient Father' is perhaps the novel that, some might say, Arundhati Roy had wanted to write when she wrote 'The God of Small Things.'”

“When I close my eyes and think of a writer, I don't imagine him or her as someone who is sitting above me on a pedestal, blindfolded, holding the scales of justice in one hand! No, I see sentences.”

“A writer can be subjective, even digressive, or introspective and certainly judgmental. This is a simplification, of course, but as a general rule, it holds true.”

“Mistaken identity, of course, has been the province of much postcolonial fiction. An important feature of this writing is the manner in which misrecognition has haunted all cognition.”

“While I ridicule books of self-help, I'm also quite susceptible to them. They help simplify things.”

“I have to tell you, when I hear the song 'Jiya ho Bihar ke Lala,' I want to throw the history books out of the window and dance!”

“For years, in the wake of Rushdie, I had imagined magical realism to be the last refuge of the non-resident Indian.”

“Muslim anger has, of course, been stoked by America's war in Iraq and by Israel's brutal policies toward Palestine and Lebanon.”

“In the way in which we are living in a much more explosive and more tension-filled society, a society that is driven with more and more contradictions, it is but unavoidable that some of this will also come into cinema. I would, in fact, argue that a part of it is borrowed from Hollywood. It's as if Quentin Tarantino has come to Mumbai.”

“Authenticity does matter, but only as it serves the novel's more traditional literary demands: that the fault lines be drawn where the internal life and the larger world meet.”

“I like listening to Garrison Keillor's 'The Writer's Almanac' with my daughter.”

“You ask a politician a question, like, why they ran in an election, and you'll hear, I assume, something about wanting to contribute to the community or bring about social justice. I had no such high goals.”

“If India breaks your heart with untold inequalities, it also surprises you with the unheralded achievements of its most humble citizens.”

“We learn that our lives find narrative form neither in the tired, familiar slogans of our captains nor in the symmetries of ideological camps, but in the differences that thrive behind settled, more clear-cut divisions.”

“Inequality reigns in horrifying ways, and not everyone can even read, but the world of media and advertising withholds very little from the imagination of the dispossessed.”

“I didn't know V. S. Naipaul very well, and to a large extent, my acquaintance with him was limited to meetings at literary festivals.”

“A postcolonial writer who has often been credited with mixing the mundane with the magical, and history with fiction, is Salman Rushdie.”

“We live in a cynical system where the powerful are able to exploit the demand of the aggressive few, from whichever religion or group, to bargain for more power or cynical advantage.”

“Long ago, when I was in higher secondary school in Delhi, I read an essay by George Orwell in which he said there was a voice in his head that put into words everything he was seeing. I realised I did that, too, or maybe I started doing it in imitation.”

“It's so easy for folks to normalize their opinions, to engage in a groupthink that is damaging.”