Amit Chaudhuri Quotes

'Internationalism' is a way of reading, and not a demography of readership ...

... "shagging" - a quasi-comical activity, like belching or farting, except it was more taboo and more necessary than these.

This morning he'd discovered the bathroom light on, its lustre wasted in daylight.

These small freshwater fish

... he sang with his eyes squeezed tight, as if he were dropping from a great height.

‘As the sun came up, we/saw the leaves peer out, shivering.’ ( Letter from the Hills )

It's a well-known fact that no novel is taken seriously in India until a good deal of research has gone into it. This stay in the Taj will be my research. Going down the stairs will be research. So will looking out at the sea.

Some books I buy for their title, others for brevity. I love short books - the way you know from the first page that it's going to end.

Writers don't so much write about their own lives as create them, Barthes said; it's an oddly modern idea. Bengalis, similarly, had to make their own history. They did it in houses, tenements, and in neighbourhoods connected by stifling alleys that are no wider than a small room ... And this is why I feel, even now, that the most revealing places in Calcutta are not the museums or the great monuments ... but the houses and lanes in which people live.

This is what's beautiful about staying in a club or hotel: you're invisible, as is your neighbour.

‘To the far left, above your shoulder’s gentle/curve, like golden pods, the sodium vapour/lights in the naval dockyard ... And before us,/a continuous, unreal flare of fire defined/the horizon’s extremity, a stain on a brow.’ ( The Steamer )

Calcutta, for me, was a particular idea of the modern city, and I found it in many forms, works, and genres. ... by 'modernity' I have in mind something that was never new. True modernity was born with the aura of inherited decay and life. ... if you look at paintings and photographs, and see old films of the city, you notice that these walls and buildings were never new – that Calcutta was born to look more or less as I saw it as a child. I'm not referring here to an air of timelessness; the patina that gave to Calcutta's alleys, doorways, and houses their continuity and disposition is very different from the eternity that defines mausoleums and monuments. It's this quality I'm trying to get at when I speak of modernity. ... modernity in the nineteenth century is indistinguishable from nature; perhaps it is nature – in some ways, the culvert, which has emerged from the rock, seems more of its place than the mountain itself.

The dull pulse-like beat started at eleven o’clock at night. It was a new kind of music called ‘rap’. It baffled Ananda even more than disco. He had puzzled and puzzled over why people would want to listen and even move their bodies to an angry, insistent onrush of words – words that rhymed, apparently, but had no echo or afterlife. It was as if they were an extension of the body: never had words sounded so alarmingly physical, and pure physicality lacks empathy, it’s machine-like.

The eye covers distances in a second. It lusts for freedom. Looking out, I often wanted to be free - not of home, but of the city. The eye (if it's gazing upon something it's unhappy with, as I was) might see nothing. Looking up is different. I have the freedom I then wanted.

... the world's cheapest small car, Tata's Nano, worth only $1500. This toy-like ill-fated vehicle, whose destiny it was to look as if it had been prematurely brought into the world, more foetus than car, and whose birth was near abortive and then indefinitely delayed, this car, when it finally took to the road, turned out to have an engine that at times exploded mysteriously. Until 2009, it was seen to be Bengal's quirky but irreplaceable mascot for development.