Razi Shaikh

“The sea was as dark as dreams and as deep as sleep”
― Orhan Pamuk, A Strangeness in My Mind

“they had let themselves be hired in the port of Aden as stokers and coal trimmers; they had gone out of their familiar world and thought that they were growing beyond themselves in the embrace of the world's incomprehensible strangeness: but soon the boat would reach Aden and those times would recede into the past. They would exchange the Western hat for a turban or a kufiyya, retain the yesterday only as a memory and, each man for himself, return to their village homes in Yemen. Would they return the same men as they had set out - or as changed men? Had the West caught their souls - or only brushed their senses?”
― محمد أسد, The Road To Mecca

“No two persons could be so different from one another in their make up or temperaments. Tagore, the aristocratic artist, turned democrat with proletarian sympathies, represented essentially the cultural tradition of India, the tradition of accepting life in the fullness thereof and going through it with song and dance. Gandhi, more a man of the people, almost the embodiment of the Indian peasant, represented the other ancient tradition of India, that of renunciation and asceticism. And yet Tagore was primarily the man of thought, Gandhi of concentrated and ceaseless activity. Both, in their different ways had a world outlook, and both were at the same time wholly Indian. They seemed to present different but harmonious aspects of India and to complement one another.”
― Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India

“The peasant starved, yet centuries of an unequal struggle against his environment had taught him to endure, and even in poverty and starvation he had a certain calm dignity, a feeling of submission to an all-powerful fate. Not so the middle classes, more especially the new petty bourgeoisie, who had no such background. Incompletely developed and frustrated, they did not know where to look, for neither the old nor the new offered them any hope. There was no adjustment to social purpose, no satisfaction of doing something worthwhile, even though suffering came in its train. Custom-ridden, they were born old, yet they were without the old culture. Modern thought attracted them, but they lacked its inner content, the modern social and scientific consciousness. Some tried to cling tenaciously to the dead forms of the past, seeking relief from present misery in them. But there could be no relief there, for, as Tagore has said, we must not nourish in our being what is dead, for the dead is death-dealing. Others made themselves pale and ineffectual copies of the west. So, like derelicts, frantically seeking some foothold of security for body and mind and finding none, they floated aimlessly in the murky waters of Indian life.”
― Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India