... a severe woman with a patient but unprevaricating gaze, who turned out to be Indira Gandhi. - Amit Chaudhuri

... this refined language of Indian modernity – an Indian language that was actually first used as a first language by a home-grown cosmopolitan elite – enough to say, with or without humour, 'Ami tomake bhalobashi' ('I love you') or 'Apni kothai thhaken?' ('Where do you live?). These stray statements performed an incantatory 'open sesame' – into the bounded, charmed, small-scale world of 'Bengaliness'. The 'honorary' Bengali might be myopic; might be an aficionado of art-house cinema; might be politically left wing; might have taste for lyric poetry; a tendency towards the autobiographical; an appetite for fish; or display none of these traits.

The car horns created an anxious music, discordant but not indifferent.

... what I've tried to allow is for the essay to be a space in which the consciousness which reads poetry or remembers a line of poetry or listens to music or goes for a walk, is also the consciousness that is inflected and threatened and endangered by the political; is also the consciousness that registers and is permeated by the political. That somehow it is not a separate ... consciousness that is hiding behind the facade of the man who remembers a line of poetry or forgets it, but that it is the same consciousness in which these various things are coming in and going out.