Pragyaa Jain

“Until moving to Japan, I’d tended to feel that if my interlocutor didn’t talk, she was expressing her boredom. But I was coming around to becoming cautiously appreciative of what, to a talkative Indian like me, was the ‘peculiar’ Japanese ease with silence.”
― Pallavi Aiyar, Orienting: An Indian in Japan

“Unlike other methods of repair, like welding or glueing, kintsugi’s power was in its refusal to disguise the brokenness of an object, he said. It did not aim to make what was broken as good as new, but to use the cracks to transform the object into something different, and arguably even more valuable.”
― Pallavi Aiyar, Orienting: An Indian in Japan

“I could either abandon the doubts I beheld and be free, or else dwell in the eye of the prejudiced, to be chained there. There are too many enemies in life to be one of yourself.”
― Tiffany McDaniel, Betty

“The country came across like an upper-class spinster from a historical novel with impeccable manners who spent her days dabbing the edges of her mouth with a linen napkin while internally tutting at the uncouth dining etiquette of today’s upstarts, id est: the Chinese.”
― Pallavi Aiyar, Orienting: An Indian in Japan