Governance in India comes in the iron-clad armour of bureaucracy. Anyone in uniform considers it his or her right that we regard them as some sort of deity. Amitava Kumar Read Quote
We live in a cynical system where the powerful are able to exploit the demand of the aggressive few, from whichever religion or group, to bargain for more power or cynical advantage. Amitava Kumar Read Quote
In the early 1990s, my relatives in Patna, even those who had no interest in reading or writing, wanted Parker fountain pens. Amitava Kumar Read Quote
I like to write about real people, real crimes. But what has increasingly come to interest me, and also appear to me as a challenge, is the idea of doing strange things with what is real. Take what is real and make it more or less real. Amitava Kumar Read Quote
I have a couple of thick files about things that have gone wrong between people; I ought to write about them in the manner of a thriller. It would finally convince me that I was a real writer. Amitava Kumar Read Quote
There is a great deal of freshness and charm in ‘400 Blows.’ There is also a great deal of visual poetry in the way in which Truffaut’s camera looks at his beloved city. Amitava Kumar Read Quote
I haven’t reported in grand detail on rituals of American life, road journeys or malls or the death of steel-manufacturing towns. I think this is because I feel a degree of alienation that I cannot combat. Amitava Kumar Read Quote
In the poetry of immigrants, nostalgia is as common as confetti at parades or platitudes at political conventions. Amitava Kumar Read Quote
I arrived in the U.S. for graduate study in literature in the fall of 1986. I was twenty-three. After a year, I began to paint, even though I had come to the U.S. intending to become a writer. Amitava Kumar Read Quote
