Words matter. These are the best Aravind Adiga Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
In my family, as in most middle-class Indian families I knew when I was growing up, science and mathematics were held in awe.
It has always been very difficult for writers to survive commercially in India because the market was so small. But that’s not true at all any more. It’s one of the world’s fastest growing and most vibrant markets for books, especially in English.
Having plenty of living space has to be the greatest luxury in a city, and I guess in some sense Bombay is the antithesis of what living in Canada must be.
I never did very well as an immigrant. I’ve lived in several countries and been a disaster everywhere.
Too much of Indian writing in English, it seemed to me, consisted of middle-class people writing about other middle-class people – and a small slice of life being passed off as an authentic portrait of the country.
An honest politician has no goodies to toss around. This limits his effectiveness profoundly, because political power in India is dispersed throughout a multi-tiered federal structure; a local official who has not been paid off can sometimes stop a billion-dollar project.
Mangalore, the coastal Indian town where I lived until I was almost 16, is now a booming city of malls and call-centres. But, in the 1980s, it was a provincial town in a socialist country.
I want to read Keats and Wordsworth, Hemingway, George Orwell.
When I was growing up in the south Indian city of Madras, there were only two political parties that mattered; one was run by a former matinee idol, and the other was run by his former screenwriter.
Columbia University, where I went to study in 1993, insisted its undergraduates learn a foreign language, so I discovered French.
I grew up, as many Indians do, in an archipelago of tongues. My maternal grandfather, who was a surgeon in the city of Madras, was fluent in at least four languages and used each of them daily.
India’s great economic boom, the arrival of the Internet and outsourcing, have broken the wall between provincial India and the world.
I had grown up in a privileged, upper-caste Hindu community; and because my father worked for a Catholic hospital, we lived in a prosperous Christian neighborhood.
