india

Not only was it impossible to truly belong in America, but he didn't fit in here anymore either. He was a dweller of two lands, accepted by none.

Over the years the Indian leadership, and the educated Indian, have deliberately projected and embellished an image about Indians that they know to be untrue, and have wilfully encouraged the well-meaning but credulous foreign observer to accept it. What is worse, they have fallen in love with this image, and can no longer accept that it is untrue.

I asked Raghav, as we were looking over the wasteland, if the Muslims they burnt would beg for their lives. "Yes they would say, Have mercy on us. But we were filled with such hate; we had Radhabi Chawl on our minds. And even if there was one who said, Let him go, there would be ten others saying, No kill him. And so we had to kill him. "But what if he was innocent?"Raghav looked at me. "His biggest crime was that he was Muslim.

...if we were to associate the genius of a place with one particular thing _ the Russians with literature, say, or the Germans with music, the Dutch and Spanish with painting _ we would have to say that the true genius of Ancient India was language.

What you see and hear is a situation in which languages are less like apples _ neat and discrete _ and more like oatmeal. It's always been oatmeal in India, and all the varieties of oatmeal continue to merge, despite political pressures to name them as if they were marbles.

Ultimately, we will lose each otherto something. I would hope for grandcircumstance__eath or disaster.But it might not be that way at all.It might be that you walk outone morning after making loveto buy cigarettes, and never return,or I fall in love with another _It might be a slow drift into indifference.Either way, we__l have to learnto bear the weight of the eventualitythat we will lose each other to something.So why not begin now, while your headrests like a perfect moon in my lap _?Why not reach for the seam in this _night and tear it, just a little, so the fallingcan begin? Because later, when we crosseach other on the streets, and are forcedto look away, when we__e thrownthe disregarded pieces of our togethernessinto bedroom drawers and the smellof our bodies is disappearing like the sweetdecay of lilies__hat will we call it,when it__ no longer love?

This earth is His, to Him belong those vast and boundless skies;Both seas within Him rest, and yet in that small pool He lies.

The spectacle of what is called religion, or at any rate organised religion, in India and elsewhere, has filled me with horror and I have frequently condemned it and wished to make a clean sweep of it. Almost always it seemed to stand for blind belief and reaction, dogma and bigotry, superstition, exploitation and the preservation of vested interests.