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. Aravind Adiga Read Quote
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. Aravind Adiga Read Quote
Columbia University, where I went to study in 1993, insisted its undergraduates learn a foreign language, so I discovered French. Aravind Adiga Read Quote
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. Aravind Adiga Read Quote
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. Aravind Adiga Read Quote
India’s great economic boom, the arrival of the Internet and outsourcing, have broken the wall between provincial India and the world. Aravind Adiga Read Quote
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. Aravind Adiga Read Quote
In my family, as in most middle-class Indian families I knew when I was growing up, science and mathematics were held in awe. Aravind Adiga Read Quote
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 of society. Aravind Adiga Read Quote
