Nostalgia is a particular affliction of immigrant fiction, and it’s led to a kind of sclerosis of the form. I hate nostalgia, and I feel it’s good to be aware of the politics of these genres. Neel Mukherjee Read Quote
The bestseller charts, a sure indicator of public taste, tell us with relentless frequency that Marian Keyes or Jeffrey Archer is a better author, by some dizzying six-figure sum, both in numbers of copies and money, than, say, J. M. Coetzee or Patrick White. Are they right? Neel Mukherjee Read Quote
In any restaurant, my eyes alight first, as if by an atavistic pull, on the meat dishes on the menu. In any dinner party I throw, I think of the non-vegetarian dish as central. I view this as a combination of weakness, greed and moral failure. Someone please help. Neel Mukherjee Read Quote
Meat-fetishiser that I was, I used to find willed vegetarianism inexplicable. It was one thing to be a vegetarian because of religious and caste reasons – something I was familiar with because of my Indian upbringing – but to choose to be a vegetarian when you could eat meat for every meal every day? That seemed madness to me. Neel Mukherjee Read Quote
India introduced Britain to vegetarianism – see Tristram Stuart’s excellent first book on this – and it is possible, indeed all too easy, to be a vegetarian in India and eat extraordinarily good, varied food every day, with very few ‘repeats.’ Neel Mukherjee Read Quote
I grew up in financially straitened circumstances and meat, which was expensive, was a rare thing at mealtimes. We ate meat about once a month, if that. Neel Mukherjee Read Quote
Remember that what seems zeitgeisty today is the cause of tomorrow’s bafflement or, worse, ridicule. Neel Mukherjee Read Quote
I don’t read my books, so I don’t allow myself the dangerous luxury of toying with the idea of doing things differently. Neel Mukherjee Read Quote
