Words matter. These are the best Bharati Mukherjee Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
There was no audience for my books. The Indians didn’t regard me as an Indian and North Americans couldn’t conceive of me of a North American writer, not being white and brought up on wheat germ. My fiction got lost.
Lepers were a common sight all over India and in every part of Calcutta, but extending help beyond dropping a coin or two into their rag-wrapped stumps was not. As a child I was convinced even touching a spot a leper had rubbed against would lead to infection.
I truly appreciate the special qualities that America and American national myths offer me.
Through my fiction, I make mainstream readers see the new Americans as complex human beings, not as just ‘The Other.’
Growing up in an old-fashioned Bengali Hindu family and going to a convent school run by stern Irish nuns, I was brought up to revere rules. Without rules, there was only anarchy.
I’m very moved by chaos theory, and that sense of energy. That quantum physics. We don’t really, in Hindu tradition, have a father figure of a God. It’s about cosmic energy, a little spark of which is inside every individual as the soul.
I am a naturalized U.S. citizen, which means that, unlike native-born citizens, I had to prove to the U.S. government that I merited citizenship.
The United States exists as a sovereign nation. ‘America,’ in contrast, exists as a myth of democracy and equal opportunity to live by, or as an ideal goal to reach.
Bengalis love to celebrate their language, their culture, their politics, their fierce attachment to a city that has been famously dying for more than a century. They resent with equal ferocity the reflex stereotyping that labels any civic dysfunction anywhere in the world ‘another Calcutta.’
In India, there are real consequences to inattention; drivers who jeopardize pedestrians can be lynched on the spot.
I had a 2-week courtship with a fellow student in the fiction workshop in Iowa and a 5-minute wedding in a lawyer’s office above the coffee shop where we’d been having lunch that day. And so I sent a cable to my father saying, ‘By the time you get this, Daddy, I’ll already be Mrs. Blaise!’
I never have my CNN off, it’s on the whole day. I don’t want to be out of range of television. I’m constantly bombarded by information – Somalia one second, Haiti the next – I need that constant pounding. I couldn’t write without television. I need to have the world in my room.
I am an American, not an Asian-American. My rejection of hyphenation has been called race treachery, but it is really a demand that America deliver the promises of its dream to all its citizens equally.
