Human sanity was a poor, fragile thing at best, - Salman Rushdie

"I think that we live in a very timid age, and a part of our timidity arises from our unwillingness to offend people. And as a result there are whole tribes of people now who define themselves by their offendedness. I mean, who are you if you are not offended by anything? You're kind of nobody or even worse, you are a liberal. And I just think that whole business defining yourself by anger is very problematic. And then the fact that we all kind of bend over backwards not to induce that anger becomes very often also a problem and a kind of cowardice, if you like. And I think we just need to live in a more robust society in which people say things that other people don't like and the answer to that is not to throw a bomb at them, but to say "I don't like that much" and then get on with the next business."

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.

A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second.