Only drunks stare at statues .... I never liked the statues keeping vigil, primarily because they were too close to life. - Amit Chaudhuri

It's a very strange middle class…Full of operators and people on the move. It really doesn't value disruptions in that activeness. It doesn't have time for any privileging of daydreaming.

By the second half of the nineteenth century, the importance of light and space as both metaphors or, and habitations for, the human self, or "the substance called the mind", is absolute, especially with Tagore, who, in a letter in 1894 to his niece, would demand, not political freedom ... but "more light, more space".

Afternoon's the most dreamless and introspective time of day, a sort of midnight of the daytime ...