The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.... It wasn't only the sand drifts and the… - V. S. Naipaul
" "The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it....
It wasn't only the sand drifts and the mud and the narrow, winding, broken roads up in the mountains. There was all that business at the frontier posts, all that haggling in the forest outside wooden huts that flew strange flags. I had to talk myself and my Peugeot past the men with guns — just to drive through bush and more bush. And then I had to talk even harder, and shed a few more bank notes and give away more of my tinned food, to get myself — and the Peugeot — out of the places I had talked us into.
Some of these palavers could take half a day....
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About V. S. Naipaul
Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul (17 August 1932 - 11 August 2018) was a British writer of Indo-Nepalese descent born and raised in Trinidad. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001.
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Also Known As
Birth Name:
Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul
Alternative Names:
V.S. Naipaul
•
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul
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Out of its squalor and human decay, its eruptions of butchery, India produced so many people of grace and beauty, ruled by elaborate courtesy. Producing too much life, it denied the value of life; yet it permitted a unique human development to so many. Nowhere were people so heightened, rounded and individualistic; nowhere did they offer themselves so fully and with such assurance. To know Indians was to take a delight in people as people; every encounter was an adventure. I did not want India to sink [out of my memory]; the mere thought was painful.
A stranger could drive through Miguel Street and just say “Sum!” because he could see no more. But we who lived there saw our street as a world, where everybody was quite different from everybody else. Mam-man was mad; George was stupid; Big Foot was a bully; hat was an adventurer; Popo was a philosopher; and Morgan was our comedian.
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Le Corbusier’s unrendered concrete towers, after 27 years of Punjab sun and monsoon and sub-Himalayan winter, looked stained and diseased, and showed now as quite plain structures, with an applied flashiness: megalomaniac architecture: people reduced to units, individuality reserved only to the architect, imposing his ideas of colour in an inflated Miróesque mural on one building, and imposing an iconography of his own with a giant hand set in a vast flat area of concrete paving, which would have been unbearable in winter and summer and the monsoon. India had encouraged yet another outsider to build a monument to himself.
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