Mother Teresa’s detractors have accused her of overemphasizing Calcuttans’ destitution and of coercing conversion from the defenseless. In the context of lost causes, Mother Teresa took on battles she knew she could win. Taken together, it seems to me, the criticisms of her work do not undermine or topple her overall achievement. Bharati Mukherjee Read Quote
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. Bharati Mukherjee Read Quote
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.’ Bharati Mukherjee Read Quote
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. Bharati Mukherjee Read Quote
I thought of America as Natalie Wood and Bob Wagner sprawled on the edge of a Hollywood swimming pool biting into the same red apple. Bharati Mukherjee Read Quote
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. Bharati Mukherjee Read Quote
I feel empowered to be a different kind of writer. The longer I stay here, the more light filters into my work. I feel very American. I belong. Bharati Mukherjee Read Quote
I don’t feel the depression the people who are always looking back to the ’50s, to ‘Father Knows Best’ feel. I can see the coming of another glorious era. Bharati Mukherjee Read Quote
I truly appreciate the special qualities that America and American national myths offer me. Bharati Mukherjee Read Quote
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!’ Bharati Mukherjee Read Quote
