We may not have sewage, drinking water, and Olympic gold medals, but we do have democracy.

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...

It’s amazing. The moment you show cash, everyone knows your language.

Here’s a strange fact: murder a man, and you feel responsible for his life – possessive, even. You know more about him than his father and mother; they knew his fetus, but you know his...

Like most people who live in India, I complain about corruption, but know that I can live with corrupt men. It is the honest ones I secretly worry about.

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...

There is no end in India, Mr. Jiabao,as Mr. Ashok so correctly used to say. You’ll have to keep paying and paying the fuckers. But I complain about the police the way the rich complain;...

Let animals live like animals; let humans live like humans. That’s my whole philosophy in a sentence.

I want to read Keats and Wordsworth, Hemingway, George Orwell.

See, the poor dream all their lives of getting enough to eat and looking like the rich. And what do the rich dream of?? Losing weight and looking like the poor.

Like most of my friends in school, I was a member of multiple circulating libraries; and all of us, to begin with, borrowed and read the same things.

Have you ever noticed that all four of the greatest poets in the world are Muslim? And yet all the Muslims you meet are illiterate or covered head to toe in black burkas or looking...

Go to Old Delhi,and look at the way they keep chickens there in the market. Hundred of pale hens and brightly colored roosters, stuffed tightly into wire-mesh cages. They see the organs of their brothers...

In my family, as in most middle-class Indian families I knew when I was growing up, science and mathematics were held in awe.

You ask ‘Are you a man or a demon?’ Neither, I say. I have woken up, and the rest of you are sleeping, and that is the only difference between us.

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...

But without a family, a man is nothing.

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.

Now there are some, and I don’t just mean Communists like you, but thinking men of all political parties, who think that not many of these gods actually exist. Some believe that none of them...

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...

Because in this world, there is a line: on one side are the men who cannot get things done, and on the other side are the men who can. And not one in a hundred...

He can read and write, but he doesn’t get what he’s read. He’s half-baked. The country is full of people like him, I’ll tell you that. And we entrust our glourious parliamentary democracy

When I was writing ‘The White Tiger’ I lived in a building pretty much exactly like the one I described in this novel, and the people in the book are the people I lived with...

I thought, What a miserable life he’s had, having to hide his religion, his name, just to get a jobas a driver—and he is a good driver, no question of it, a far better one...

At a time when India is going through great changes and, with China, is likely to inherit the world from the West, it is important that writers like me try to highlight the brutal injustices...

But isn’t it likely that everyone in this world…has killed someone or other on their way to the top?…All I wanted was a chance to be a man–and for that, one murder is enough.

We’ll call you… Ram. Wait – don’t we have a Ram in this class? I don’t want any confusion, it’ll be Balram. You know who Balram was, don’t you?””No, sir.””He was the sidekick of the...

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.

Inconvenience in progress, work is regretted.

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.

The Rooster Coop was doing its work. Servants have to keep other servants from becoming innovators, experimenters or entrepreneurs. The coop is guarded from the inside.

If we were in India now, there would be servants standing in the corners of this room and I wouldn’t notice them. That is what my society is like, that is what the divide is...

Me, and thousands of others in this country like me, are half-baked, because we were never allowed to complete our schooling. Open our skulls, look in with a penlight, and you’ll find an odd museum...

I never did very well as an immigrant. I’ve lived in several countries and been a disaster everywhere.

Apparently, sir you Chinese are far ahead of us in every respect, except that you don’t have entrepreneurs. And our nation, though it has no drinking water, electricity, sewage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene,...

In India, it’s the rich who have problems with obesity. And the poor are darker-skinned because they work outside and often work without their tops on so you can see their ribs.

A White Tiger keeps no friends. It’s too dangerous.

I am coming back to New York after five years, and it seems that psychics are taking over the city.

Neither you nor I speak English, but there are some things that can be said only in English.

Columbia University, where I went to study in 1993, insisted its undergraduates learn a foreign language, so I discovered French.

I gather you yellow-skinned men, despite your triumphs in sewage, drinking water, and Olympic gold medals, still don’t have democracy. Some politician on the radio was saying that that’s why we Indian are going to...

Greenwich Village always had its share of mind readers, but there are many more these days, and they seem to have moved closer to the mainstream of life in the city. What was crazy 10...

People in this country are still waiting for the war of their freedom to come from somewhere else, from the jungles, from the mountains, from China, from Pakistan. That will never happen. Every man must...

Indians mock their corrupt politicians relentlessly, but they regard their honest politicians with silent suspicion. The first thing they do when they hear of a supposedly ‘clean’ politician is to grin. It is a cliche...

Do you know about Hanuman, sir? He was the faithful servant of the god Rama, and we worship him in our temples because he is a shining example of how to serve your masters with...

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...

India’s great economic boom, the arrival of the Internet and outsourcing, have broken the wall between provincial India and the world.