Samanth Subramanian > Quotes

“On my way out, I stopped again at Boloor's house to thank him. He was leaving home as well, and as we walked to the gate together, I filled his ears with praise of Shailaja's fish curry. 'Really, that good, was it?' Boloor asked. 'But then, I wouldn't know,' he continued, this stalwart president of the Mogaveera Vyavasthpaka Mandali and secretary of the Akhila Karnataka Fishermen's Parishad, of the National Fishworkers' Federation and of the Coastal Karnataka Fishermen Action Committee. ' You see, I don't eat fish.”
― Samanth Subramanian, Following Fish: Travels around the Indian Coast

“Shrink the humanity of your enemy, and the fighting must seem easier, more just, less complicated. Warfare consists of several psychological tricks, not least the ones you play upon yourself.”
― Samanth Subramanian, This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan War

“If Bengali cuisine were Wimbledon, the hilsa would always play on Centre Court.”
― Samanth Subramanian, Following Fish: Travels around the Indian Coast

“Fishing is still elemental in the most elemental sense of the word - an activity composed of water and air and light and space, all arranged in precarious balance around a central idea of a man in a boat, waiting for a bite.”
― Samanth Subramanian, Following Fish: Travels around the Indian Coast

“To attempt to write with enthusiasm about food, I have discovered, requires two great qualities: the ability to eat with a catholic, voluminous appetite, and the ability to eat out alone.”
― Samanth Subramanian, Following Fish

“It provided a useful life lesson: anybody who asked you to trust them despite minor infractions was not to be trusted at all.”
― Samanth Subramanian, This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan War

“It is the postscript to the war that offers the most revelatory and startling commentary on Dutugemunu's life. Despite his newfound wealth and his peactime luxuries, Dutugemunu wanders gloomily about his palace, too often remembering the carnage he wrought on the battlefield and worried over the deep karmic deficits he has incurred. The elders of the Sangha, the Buddhist clergy, notice this and send a delegation of eight monks to minister to his anguish.

'In truth, venerable sirs,' Dutugemunu tells the monks when they arrive, 'how can there be comfort to me in that I caused the destruction of a great army of myriads of men?'

'There is no hindrance on the way to heaven because of your acts,' one of the monks assures his king. Slaughtering Tamils is no moral mistake. Only the equivalent of one and a half men died at Dutugemunu's hands, according to the Sangha's official arithmetic, because the Tamils 'were heretical and evil and dies as though they were animals. You will make the Buddha's faith shine in many ways. Therefore, Lord of Men, cast away your mental confusion.'

Being thus exhorted, the great king was comforted; his kill rate would never disturb him again. He does, however, recall that, once upon a breakfast, he ate a red-pepper pod without consciously setting aside a portion of it for the Sangha, as was the royal practice. 'For this,' he decides, 'penance must be done by me.' A hierarchy of sin springs into being, in which dishonouring the Sangha by denying it a due share of a red-pepper pod counts as a graver transgression, worthier of penance, than massacring thousands of Tamils on the battlefield.”
― Samanth Subramanian, This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan War

“Into its pinched streets, the fish-sellers told me, cars from Kolkata arrive daily, sent by government officials or corporate executives just to buy the best of the day's catch. The daily market is the town's centerpiece. For streets together, cereal-sellers sit surrounded by sacks of six or eight types of cereals; fisherwomen with toes reddened by fish blood squat behind cutters, little steel tubs of still-swimming catfish, and turmeric-smeared cuts of fish; on blue tarpaulins, vegetable-sellers arrange potatoes, gourds, red onions, beans both broad and French, big and little aubergines, pumpkins and huge heads of cabbage.”
― Samanth Subramanian, Following Fish: Travels around the Indian Coast

“[Speaking to 29-year-old ex-guerrilla]

'I see it as a process. First, yes, you do negotiate. But if that does not work, then you have to use violence to get what you need. Even if you have to bomb a school.' There was a swagger to that statement, a perverted machismo: only a real man understands the necessity of bombing a school.”
― Samanth Subramanian, This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan War

“It did not convince them that their government was guilty of war crimes, so that they unreservedly condemn it, or that no war crimes were committed, so that they might bask in the relief of a fair victory. Instead, they were trapped in the misery of not knowing what to believe - about their government, about their own indirect complicity in their government’s actions, or about the moral cost of their hard-won peace.”
― Samanth Subramanian, This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan War

“she reasoned that the armed struggle and the Tamil cause were bigger than Lingeswari’s life, and that she eventually came around to recognizing that. This was the leap of faith that Prabhakaran asked Sri Lanka’s Tamils to take. The Eelam movement will consume many of your nearest and dearest, he told them, but it will all, once the fighting was over, be entirely worth the sacrifice. Clinging to this belief was the only way in which the violence-ridden universe of the Tigers could make any sense.”
― Samanth Subramanian, This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan War

“Few human movements illustrate the rapid transformation of potential energy into kinetic energy more perfectly than that of the fisherman who has finally felt a tug on his line.”
― Samanth Subramanian, Following Fish: Travels around the Indian Coast

“In the absence of ancient hatreds, chauvinism can easily rustle up modern ones.”
― Samanth Subramanian, This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan War

“And as at every communal puja I have ever attended, there were the requisite distracted children, the whimpering baby, the sombre gentleman up front, and the comforting white noise of women talking and laughing at the back.”
― Samanth Subramanian, Following Fish: Travels around the Indian Coast

“Sinhala Sri was painted on her back.’ The Sri agitations segued smoothly, tragically into the ethnic riots of 1958.”
― Samanth Subramanian, This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan War

“In bothering him, I came to feel, I would be disrupting some phenomenon of nature, like the wretched boy who deliberately blocks the path of a line of purposeful ants.”
― Samanth Subramanian, This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan War

“Perhaps, like real currency, rumour even keeps things liquid, because it does not always require you to commit to an opinion or to modify your views.”
― Samanth Subramanian, This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan War

“Marcel Proust once wrote about the abrupt thrill of a fish breaking the surface of water, comparing it to the flash of a metaphor in prose.”
― Samanth Subramanian, Following Fish

“It was a strange thing to hear from a man in self-imposed exile from his homeland. On the other hand, it sounded just right from a man who had been nothing but an outsider at home. His exile had begun long before he left Sri Lanka for good.”
― Samanth Subramanian, This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan War

“When the news of Prabhakaran’s death had broken, Raghavan had gotten drunk at home and wept complicated tears - for this comrades, for his estranged and cruel friend, for the vast toll of a campaign begun with mere black flags and Solignum graffiti, for the devastation of cause he still believed in, and for a fight that had somewhere gone very horribly wrong.”
― Samanth Subramanian, This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan War

“But the heart weakens without democracy, and there was no democracy within the Tigers. They antagonized their own brothers by killing them.”
― Samanth Subramanian, This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan War

“The market consumes half of Kolaghat's day; after it closes, even though it is only mid-afternoon, a cloud of lethargy descends over the town, until the market reopens the next morning.”
― Samanth Subramanian, Following Fish: Travels around the Indian Coast

“Night fell suddenly in these parts, like a tent collapsing upon unsuspecting campers.”
― Samanth Subramanian, This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan War

“Being a Tamil in the army, he said, was like being a bat. ‘Because the bat is a mammal, he goes and talks to the other mammals, and they say: “No, no, you’re a bird. Get out of here.” Then he goes to the birds, and they say: “No, no, you’re a mammal, you don’t lay eggs.”
― Samanth Subramanian, This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan War

“church”
― Samanth Subramanian, Following Fish

“A true Bengali can take a mouthful of hilsa, and sort meat from bone in his mouth, swallowing the meat and storing the bones to one side, to be extricated later. If you can’t do that, you’re not a real Bengali.”
― Samanth Subramanian, Following Fish

“[describing the Mahavamsa, 6th-century chronicle of Sri Lanka]

The king Yasalakatissa, who had come to his title by killing his older brother during a watersports festival, had a gatekeeper named Subha. Subha was the spitting image of the king, and so Tasalakatissa draped Subha in royal regalia and seated him on the throne. Whole the courtiers clustered around the impostor and sang his praises, Yasalakatissa, having dressed as a gatekeeper and stationed himself at the door, shook with laughter at the ingenuity of his jape.

Then one day Subha addressed the ministers while the king was laughing, 'Why does this gatekeeper laugh in my presence?'
He had King Yasalakatissa killed. Subha then reigned six years. Even when the truth was later discovered, he retained his throne and became known as King Subha.”
― Samanth Subramanian, This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan War

“In old census reports, I found a hint of how British administrators had vivisected Sri Lanka in the early 20th century. In 1901…the census classified people into seven categories—Europeans; Burghers, Sinhalese, Tamils, Moors, referring to Muslims of south Indian origin; Malays; and the indigenous Veddahs of eastern and south-eastern Sri Lanka.

“A mere 10 years later, the matrix had exploded. By ethnicity, a Sri Lankan in 1911 could identify himself in any one of 10 ways, and then again in any one of 11 ways by religious denomination—a multiplicative tumult of identity. Slender distinctions were now officially recognized. A Sinhalese could be a low-country Sinhalese or a Kandyan Sinhalese; a Tamil could be a Ceylon Tamil or an Indian Tamil, depending on how recently his family had settled in Sri Lanka; a Christian could be a Roman Catholic, Presbyterian, Wesleyan, Methodist, Baptist, Congregationalist, or a Salvationist, or he could belong to the Church of England or ‘Other Sects.’ Assembling legislatures based on such muddled ethnic loyalties helped the British by disrupting solidarity and nationalism because, as Governor William Manning once wrote to his secretary of state in London, ‘no single community can impose its will upon the other communities.”
― Samanth Subramanian, This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan War