economics is a science with excellent tools for gaining answers but a serious shortage of interesting questions.
“In the gym, you don't have to say anything, you just have to work out and make studied eye contact (or not make eye contact at all) and someone will come up and talk to you eventually, if they like your triceps. Especially in America. Oh America. How do they bring you up like that? So forward, upbeat, and self-assured? I'm not really complaining. It's just that when you come talk to me, I'm a little bit scared.”
― Into?
― Into?
“Our twenties are glazed in a raging insatiability. No matter how much we do, there is more to be done. More to see, more to experience, more to destruct. These years exude the rawness of life and the imperfection of youth. It’s walking around the kitchen naked with pizza at 3 a.m. It’s drunken life chats in bathroom stalls and falling in love. It’s days that feel like we have it all together and nights when it comes undone. These moments are half forgotten, lost in a blur of fury, of adventure and confusion, of black coffee and red wine. A restless restlessness like nothing we’ve known or will ever know again.”
―
―
“She loved Em and she thought that should be enough. It wasn't. Love is never enough. Madness is enough. It is complete, sufficient unto itself. You can only stand outside it, as a woman might stand outside a prison in which her lover is locked up. From time to time, a well-loved face will peer out and love floods back. A scrap of cloth flutters and it becomes a sign and a code and a message and all that you want it to be. Then it vanishes and you are outside the dark tower again. At times, when I was young, I wanted to be inside the tower so I could understand what it was like. But I knew, even then, that I did not want to be a permanent resident of the tower. I wanted to visit and even visiting meant nothing because you could always leave. You're a tourist; she's a resident.”
― Em and The Big Hoom
― Em and The Big Hoom
“And then Em too would die and I would be alone and the whole world would be different. I had no idea how, but it would, because I would finally have space to myself and then I could exercise the choice to do as I pleased and when I pleased instead of waiting for a stolen moment in the busy life of this 1BHK.
And now the world expanded as people left the flat. As we opened the door together, I discovered departures make the world smaller, slighter, less significant.”
― Em and The Big Hoom
And now the world expanded as people left the flat. As we opened the door together, I discovered departures make the world smaller, slighter, less significant.”
― Em and The Big Hoom
“At this point I realised what it meant to be a man in India. It meant knowing what one could do and knowing what one could only get done. It meant being able to hold onto two patterns simultaneously. One was methodical, hierarchical, regulated and the outcome depended on fate, chance, kings and desperate men. The other was intuitive, illicit and guaranteed. The trick was to know when to shift between the patterns, to peel the file off a table and give it to a peon, to speak easily of one's cousin the minister or archbishop. I did not think I would ever know what these shifts entailed, and that meant, in essence, that I was never going to grow up.”
― Em and The Big Hoom
― Em and The Big Hoom
Nishit’s 2025 Year in Books
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