Siddhartha Deb > Quotes

“Arindam understood well how these aspirers had been given a language of assertion by the times they lived in, and how they had also been handed a vocabulary of rage that is quite disproportionate to their perceived provocations.

It is one of the triumphs of our age that aspirers can be made to feel both empowered and excluded, and that all over the world, one sees a new lumpenbourgeoisie quick to express a sense of victimization, voicing their anger about being excluded from the elite while being callously indifferent to the truly impoverished.”
― Siddhartha Deb, The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India

“We would also like to point out that “Monkey Man” was the westernised version of the name, a clever, polite, convenient media translation of the kind applied once to the words of a famous Indian leader when he described Muslims as “kutte ke bachche” and found it rendered as the Hallmark-sanitised “puppies”. If one were to reverse the translation, and go from English to Hindi, New Delhi Monkey Man would, in the exquisitely racist, casteist and classist way of Indians, become Black Monkey or Kala Bandar.”
― Siddhartha Deb, The Light at the End of the World

“Prabhakar was waiting for me at the bus station, smiling happily through the rain. He led me through the people gathered at the bus station, past shops selling cheap household items and eating places where pakoras were being fried in bubbling oil. The brands and consumerism of urban India had disappeared, and although I felt an acute sense of displacement, I was oddly comforted by the rough utilitarianism of the place, which reminded me of the India I had grown up in.

There were no cafes where I could hide my loneliness behind a cup of coffee and an open laptop, no shopping aisles where I could wander, picking out items that momentarily created an image of a better life. There was no escape here except through human relationships, and for that I was utterly dependent on Prabhakar speeding through the rain on his motorcycle.”
― Siddhartha Deb, The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India

“As Anand speaks, Bibi thinks of how interiors bear no resemblance to exteriors in this city. The same could be said of people, except that the relationship is reversed: the exterior coiffed and polished, the interior in ruins.”
― Siddhartha Deb, The Light at the End of the World