Rahul Raina > Quotes

“That was before social media, when we could all see how stupid the Americans actually were, in real time.”
― Rahul Raina, How to Kidnap the Rich

“You can’t say anything nice about your parents. That’s the first commandment of being Indian. Unless you’re on camera.”
― Rahul Raina, How to Kidnap the Rich

“If you’re fat and Indian, you’re rich; if you’re fat and poor, you’re lying.”
― Rahul Raina, How to Kidnap the Rich

“I made a lot of money. I don’t know why everyone brown isn’t in this business. The whites are begging for it.”
― Rahul Raina, How to Kidnap the Rich

“That was how I liked people. Straightforward, rude and morally flexible.”
― Rahul Raina, How to Kidnap the Rich

“But that is not what happened. I do not care about what looks good. I care about the truth. Claire changed my life. I owe it to her memory to tell things as they really were.”
― Rahul Raina, How to Kidnap the Rich

“You know, they built a house, got cheated by developers, and now I give them money every month, and whenever I’m not working I feel guilty. They believed in socialism, that they were building a new India, a better country full of equal people,’ she said.”
― Rahul Raina, How to Kidnap the Rich

“At least we ate like kings. I’m a Delhi boy through and through.”
― Rahul Raina, How to Kidnap the Rich

“What was wrong with our drugs, the genteel natural Oriental ones like opium or khat?”
― Rahul Raina, How to Kidnap the Rich

“Sometimes, of course, “God is love” meant blackmailing tea stall owners and twisting them into compliance. Such are the ways of the Christian God.”
― Rahul Raina, How to Kidnap the Rich

“Indians are great appraisers of property. It is the clearest way of seeing where someone is in the world. What is caste compared to square footage? The best valuers are prospective mothers-in-law, of course, but every one of us has the gene.”
― Rahul Raina, How to Kidnap the Rich

“I came up with this bloody show. And who got to star in it? The money men had to go and pick a fucking cheater. You think I wouldn’t find out? Who do you think made the anonymous tip-off to Anjali fucking Bhatnagar? But your lawyers made her stall. I know Himanshu Aggarwal.”
― Rahul Raina, How to Kidnap the Rich

“To be a busybody, you either need lots of money or none of it.”
― Rahul Raina, How to Kidnap the Rich

“If you’re fat and Indian, you’re rich; if you’re fat and poor, you’re lying. It’s only the West where the rich are thin and vegan and moral. His wife wore the usual tight pink workout clothes.”
― Rahul Raina, How to Kidnap the Rich

“That was all we said to one another. If things went wrong, she could run to the West. She’d probably get a book deal for exposing the dark heart of India. We’d be the ones getting fucked. Again.”
― Rahul Raina, How to Kidnap the Rich

“Everyone had cleared out. I seemed to be having this effect on the many places I went, like a Dalit family moving into Hauz Khas, or a Mexican one into a white American suburb.”
― Rahul Raina, How to Kidnap the Rich

“I drove on through the arsehole that is Uttar Pradesh, breeding ground of half the world’s murderers, rapists, dickheads and quiz hosts.”
― Rahul Raina, How to Kidnap the Rich

“Absolutely,’ I said. ‘I agree. I’ll sign us up to a Buddhist prayer retreat in Sikkim first thing.’ Three days of that, vegetarianism and chanting and dead bodies decaying on the hillside and prayer flags fluttering in the fucking wind, and he’d be begging to go back.”
― Rahul Raina, How to Kidnap the Rich

“will do more good yet,’ she said. ‘This school, we cannot go on merely speaking about service and charity while we educate only the daughters of billionaires, of judges, of the police. It is not right. There must be more children like you here. I will not rest until it happens. All the others, they laugh, but I will make them see. You were the first, but you will not be the last. You are the future of this school.’ I had never been the future of anything.”
― Rahul Raina, How to Kidnap the Rich

“Now this isn’t like one of those films, you understand, the ones that start out as comedies, where Shah Rukh and Preity are friends at university, and then after the intermission everyone starts getting cancer and mothers start weeping about family honour until finally there’s a wedding where everyone dances their troubles away.”
― Rahul Raina, How to Kidnap the Rich

“You drink, you gamble, you watch cricket and bet money you don’t have, you lynch Muslims, you beat your kids, and they grow up and do the same.”
― Rahul Raina, How to Kidnap the Rich

“If you were rich, your kid could always take the exams again. Live at home for a year, do some fake internship your golfing buddy arranged”
― Rahul Raina, How to Kidnap the Rich

“It is our great contribution to world culture, that and the bhangra song they play at gora weddings.”
― Rahul Raina, How to Kidnap the Rich

“None of that Old Delhi antiquated, snake-charming nonsense – just homicidal drivers, aggressively corrupt police and choking, lung-throttling pollution.”
― Rahul Raina, How to Kidnap the Rich

“am one of the best exam-takers in Delhi, and so I must be one of the very best in the world. The Chinese are my only competition. There must be thousands of me over there, advancing the careers of the chubby children of communist officials, always fearing the bullet in the back of the head, or being packed off to one of those re-education camps they’ve put the Muslims in, or worse, being sent to make iPhones in the Shenzhen factories with the suicide nets.”
― Rahul Raina, How to Kidnap the Rich

“It was like we had become Americans, litigious and desk-bound, instead of solving things in our time-honoured and effective fashion of death threats, eternal curses and immolating each other’s family members.”
― Rahul Raina, How to Kidnap the Rich

“Not the usual teenage anger about not getting laid enough or not looking like Dwayne Johnson, but something deeper, much more visceral. You move into a multimillionaire’s penthouse apartment in a posh part of Delhi, and you think you’ll be spending your time partying. No. You spend it cleaning up after a teenager..”
― Rahul Raina, How to Kidnap the Rich

“British? Easy. Israeli? It’s just you and us against the Muslims, huh?”
― Rahul Raina, How to Kidnap the Rich

“All my classmates are crorepatis, and me? I don’t have two paise to rub together.’ ‘Your Instagram says otherwise,’ said Rudi. ‘All false, all false! Rented houses, cars, lies! Our backers wanted”
― Rahul Raina, How to Kidnap the Rich

“There was a lesson in this for me: you try to blackmail a kid into giving you a cut of his riches and you end up getting your bloody appendages cut off. I miss that finger. It was a good one. Fucking Delhi. Fucking India.”
― Rahul Raina, How to Kidnap the Rich