Karan Mahajan > Quotes

“When things are good, you can see no other way of living; when things are in ruins, there appear a million solutions for how this fate could have been avoided.”
― Karan Mahajan, The Association of Small Bombs

“The best way to describe what he felt would be to say that first he was blind, then he could see everything. This is what it felt like to be a bomb. You were coiled up, majestic with blackness, unaware that the universe outside you existed, and then a wire snapped and ripped open your eyelids all the way around and you had a vision of the world that was 360 degrees, and everything in your purview was doomed by seeing.”
― Karan Mahajan, The Association of Small Bombs

“American life is based on a reassurance that we like one another but won’t violate one another’s privacies. This makes it a land of small talk. Two people greet each other happily, with friendliness, but might know each other for years before venturing basic questions about each other’s backgrounds....In the East, I’ve heard it said, there’s intimacy without friendship; in the West, there’s friendship without intimacy.”
― Karan Mahajan

“What if I've died a long time ago and come here? he wondered. What if the defining characteristic of hell is that you're locked in an endless, blind battle to reform it?”
― Karan Mahajan, The Association of Small Bombs

“Silence is the small man’s only defense.”
― Karan Mahajan, The Association of Small Bombs

“During these years in the small-talk wilderness, I also wondered why Americans valued friendliness with commerce so much. Was handing over cash the sacred rite of American capitalism—and of American life? On a day that I don’t spend money in America, I feel oddly depressed. It’s my main form of social interaction—as it is for millions of Americans who live alone or away from their families.”
― Karan Mahajan

“Terror is a form of urban planning.”
― Karan Mahajan, The Association of Small Bombs

“Yes, madam,” he said, with the exceeding politeness of a man who has just imagined raping you.”
― Karan Mahajan, The Association of Small Bombs

“No action is safe from meaning.”
― Karan Mahajan, The Association of Small Bombs

“And you know what happens when a bomb goes off? The truth about people comes out. Men leave their children and run away. Shopkeepers push aside wives and try to save their cash. People come and loot the shops. A blast reveals the truth about places. Don't forget what you're doing is noble.”
― Karan Mahajan, The Association of Small Bombs

“You've read Gandhi-ji? He said that the two worst classes of human beings are doctors and lawyers. Lawyers because they prolong fights and doctors because they cure the symptoms, not the cause. Doctors don't eliminate disease--they perpetuate the existence of doctors.”
― Karan Mahajan, The Association of Small Bombs

“Divide and rule. It wasn’t just the British toward the Indians but all parents toward their children.”
― Karan Mahajan, The Association of Small Bombs

“The months and years of struggle were suddenly canceled by three weeks of exercise and some visualization and focus.”
― Karan Mahajan, The Association of Small Bombs

“It occurred to him now that people are defined much more by their association with death than by what they do in life.”
― Karan Mahajan, The Association of Small Bombs

“Back in the market, people collapsed, then got up, their hands pressed to their wounds, as if they had smashed eggs against their bodies in hypnotic agreement and were unsure about what to do with the runny, bloody yolk. Most”
― Karan Mahajan, The Association of Small Bombs

“He had to go to bed every night knowing his world had been destroyed and wake up knowing he must feel the opposite and go on.”
― Karan Mahajan, The Association of Small Bombs

“The roots of shame run deep.”
― Karan Mahajan, The Association of Small Bombs

“Every child is a packet of disappointments, hurts, dangers.”
― Karan Mahajan, The Association of Small Bombs

“Why do the poor refuse to give an accurate picture of their suffering?”
― Karan Mahajan, The Association of Small Bombs

“There are no higher values, people in the West say. Live by your own instincts, for yourself, for your own pleasure... In America, you see, you're not supposed to take care of the elderly. You're supposed to look after yourself, chase your dreams. But what happens when you grow old? Will your individualism save you?”
― Karan Mahajan, The Association of Small Bombs

“There was a contradiction within Vikas, an open wound: though he was fascinated by the poor, good at joshing with them, he was afraid, thanks to his bourgeois background, of being perceived as poor. Poverty equaled failure.”
― Karan Mahajan, The Association of Small Bombs

“It occurred to him now that people are defined much more by their association with death than by what they do in life. Poor thing, she’s a widow, they say. She lost her mother when she was ten to cancer. I’ve been immune to all this, he thought.”
― Karan Mahajan, The Association of Small Bombs

“Mr. and Mrs. Khurana were forty and forty, and they had suffered the defining tragedy of their lives, and so all other competing tragedies were relegated to mere facts of existence.”
― Karan Mahajan, The Association of Small Bombs

“Every way he turned, his past was detonated, revealing tunnels and alternative routes under the packed, settled earth of the present.”
― Karan Mahajan, The Association of Small Bombs

“Every way he turned, his past was detonated, revealing tunnels and alternative routes under the packed, settled earth of the present. For every decision there were a million others he could have made. For every India, a Pakistan of possibilities.”
― Karan Mahajan, The Association of Small Bombs

“He had the slick, proprietary attitude that small men from big cities sometimes bring toward big men from small cities”
― Karan Mahajan, The Association of Small Bombs

“I just remembered something you said when we first talked. That your pain only went away when you started thinking about others.” “Not just that,” Ayub said. “But when I found God.” ________”
― Karan Mahajan, The Association of Small Bombs

“Finally, on a windswept, befogged afternoon, the sort in which all of Delhi is wearing a sweater of atmospheric dirt, he went over with the driver to see the Khuranas.”
― Karan Mahajan, The Association of Small Bombs

“Mansoor had seen Vikas Uncle’s movies before and had never cared for them. They were serious, stiff, shot in black-and-white, the characters speaking crisp English. Nothing good happened to anyone. People lived enclosed middle-class lives, taunting each other with petty memories, and women and men argued incessantly. “They’re so joyless,” he had told his mother, wondering at how tragic Vikas Uncle’s sensibility had been even before the blast—it was as if he were sitting at a ceremonial fire, fanning a tragedy toward himself. “But they are very acclaimed,” his mother had said reverently.”
― Karan Mahajan, The Association of Small Bombs

“And you know what happens when a bomb goes off? The truth about people comes out. Men leave their children and run away. Shopkeepers push aside wives and try to save their cash. People come and loot the shops. A blast reveals the truth about places.”
― Karan Mahajan, The Association of Small Bombs