T.J.S. George > Quotes

“A city is a living, throbbing organism with a soul of its own and, it would often seem, a thinking mind. Cities have memories and dreams, they nurture ambition and bemoan failure.”
― T.J.S. George, Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore

“PhD time—Precious Hours of Drinking.”
― T.J.S. George, Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore

“Dawn never comes to the late riser.”
― T.J.S. George, Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore

“But information technology changed the nature of the narrative, changed even the city’s name from a noun to a verb; Barack Obama publicly objected to American jobs being Bangalored.”
― T.J.S. George, Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore

“Keep the margin low, build volume.”
― T.J.S. George, Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore

“If the rains don’t come when they must, vegetables won’t taste as they should,’ he said.”
― T.J.S. George, Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore

“The overall concept was that forty-eight items should be cooked every day as Lord Krishna’s neivedyam. The main segments of this spread were to be five sweets, five payasams, five fried items, five unboiled items (such as salads), five rasa (such as sambar, rasam), five anna (rice), five vyanjana (pickles, papads) and five jeernakara (digestives such as herbal chutneys). These were not to be repeated each day, a stipulation that forced the chief cooks to become innovators and improvisers, constantly in search of new variations.”
― T.J.S. George, Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore

“It is a fact that the changes that overtook Bangalore from the 1990s onwards were deeper, faster and more far-reaching than earlier changes.”
― T.J.S. George, Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore

“food was not just a physical element related to hunger but a subtle means to the understanding of ambrosia.”
― T.J.S. George, Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore

“IT people represented a kind of fashionable rootlessness.”
― T.J.S. George, Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore

“darshini’, that which is visible. Under Prabhakar’s direction, a friend opened the first Cafe Darshini in Jayanagar in 1983. Roughly modelled on McDonald’s, it had modern kitchen machinery visible from the public area. In front of it was the counter where order-takers handed over the prepared items directly to the customer. There was no furniture other than a new device: an elbow-high pole on which rested a small round tabletop. The customer was to put his plate on the tabletop and eat standing. The only staff in the public area was a cleaning boy who would wipe the tabletop clean as soon as a customer left.”
― T.J.S. George, Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore

“The IT boom, and other forces of rapid change, had altered Bangalore from within, as though unseen hands had reconstituted its DNA. It used to be a city at peace with itself. It was now a bundle of contradictions, a battleground of competing constituencies, where going forward resembled going backward.”
― T.J.S. George, Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore

“A superior cuisine so scrupulously developed could have remained confined to the Brahmin habitats of South Canara. But the entrepreneurial spirit that propelled many of them did not allow that. They carried Udupi’s treasure beyond their district.”
― T.J.S. George, Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore

“The unassuming consumer activist had launched, without realizing its full implications, an idea—that a strong middle class had emerged, willing and able to sustain businesses that were fair in their ways.”
― T.J.S. George, Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore

“bharjari oota, sumptuous meal—a healthy and hygienic Mysore-style spread of unlimited rice, curry, sambar, rasam, chutney, buttermilk.”
― T.J.S. George, Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore

“But it was neither the awesomeness of the towers nor the gorgeous complexity of the carvings that accorded the Madurai Meenakshi Sundareswara Temple its uniqueness. It was the idea. Among the multitude of Hindu shrines, it was the only one dedicated to Shiva and Parvati, not in their familiar forms as the destroyer-restorer and his ever-present consort, but as the romantic god Sundareswara and the fish-eyed beauty Meenakshi”
― T. J. S. George, M. S. Subbulakshmi: The Definitive Biography

“The Internet age saw bands with names like Thermal and a Quarter, The Burning Deck, Lounge Piranhas, Sulk Station, Space Behind the Yellow Room and Clown with a Frown, playing everything from electro-pop to space funk to thrash metal.”
― T.J.S. George, Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore

“Bombay’s strength, like New York’s, lay in its ability to absorb all comers and make them draw vitality and worth from one another, together building—and taking pride in—a cosmopolitan citadel of creativity and enterprise, optimism and goodwill. But, under the crush of a covetous political class, it grew beyond its capacity to absorb people even as more people came in. Violence and mayhem turned Bombay into a provincial town.”
― T.J.S. George, Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore

“The business model was a winner, too, because it was so down to earth.”
― T.J.S. George, Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore

“He revealed to me a world where food was not just a physical element related to hunger but a subtle means to the understanding of ambrosia.”
― T. J. S. George, Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore

“this book is in English, and I prefer to use the English spelling of Bangalore. If a Kannada version appears some day, I shall insist on Bengaluru.”
― T.J.S. George, Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore

“Big companies like ITI, Bharat Electronics and HMT settled into their own well-planned, self-sufficient clusters where the companies assumed responsibility for their employees’ living quarters and schools and shops. IT tore this system apart. They set up fancy headquarters buildings with no thought to the living and commuting needs of their tens of thousands of employees.”
― T.J.S. George, Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore

“the rains don’t come when they must, vegetables won’t taste as they should,’ he said.”
― T.J.S. George, Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore

“The Koshy who founded what became an instant landmark was a Syrian Christian from Kerala, the significance being that Syrian Christian devotion to beef, mutton and fish is almost canonical.”
― T.J.S. George, Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore

“Prabhakar’s reputation was reinforced by the next idea he launched—food sold by weight.”
― T.J.S. George, Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore

“am struck by man’s unceasing struggle to make order out of chaos and the way he ends up making chaos out of order.”
― T.J.S. George, Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore

“information technology (IT), which turned Bangalore into a world city. This attracted not only job seekers in the tens of thousands but also highly qualified Indians who had struck roots abroad and now found the idea of Bangalore alluring.”
― T.J.S. George, Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore

“It is perhaps woven into the texture of the human mind to build and enjoy, then to overbuild and suffer, then to collapse and complain, and then to become argumentative about what happened.”
― T. J. S. George, Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore

“water and land were not the prime elements that led to the rise of Dubai; political will was.”
― T.J.S. George, Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore

“darshini’, that which is visible.”
― T.J.S. George, Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore