If a birth is the fall-out from the explosion caused by the union of two unstable elements, then perhaps a half-life is all we can expect. - Salman Rushdie

For every snake, there is a ladder; for every ladder,a snake

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.

Art is not a luxury. It stands at the essence of our humanity, and it asks for no special protection except the right to exist.