Long ago, when I was in higher secondary school in Delhi, I read an essay by George Orwell in which he said there was a voice in his head that put into words everything he was seeing. I realised I did that, too, or maybe I started doing it in imitation.

Amitava Kumar

Categorized in : Words School Long Voice

Michael Ondaatje’s work taught me how to be at home in fragments, and how to think about a big story in carefully curated vignettes. All his books were odd, all of them ‘unfinished’ the way Chopin’s Études are unfinished: no wasted gestures, no unnecessary notes.

Amitava Kumar

home book thinking

There is no beginning that is a blank page.

Amitava Kumar

blank-pages blank pages

The border is a marketplace. The invisible hand of the powerful governs the crossings.

Amitava Kumar

invisible-hand powerful hands

India allows you the luxury of a million inequalities. You can be a schoolboy selling tea to passengers sitting in a state transport bus, but you are royalty when compared to a shirtless, barefoot village boy, from what was traditionally considered an untouchable caste, living on snails and small fish - and sometimes rats.

Amitava Kumar

fish you village tea

Culture survives in smaller spaces - not in the history books that erect monuments to the nation's grand history but in cafes and cinema houses, village squares, and half-forgotten libraries.

Amitava Kumar

village cinema culture history

I should not romanticize the simplicity of a village. For instance, the place from where I used to buy a packet of glucose biscuits in my village is now selling cellphones.

Amitava Kumar

place now village simplicity

Each employed immigrant has his or her place of work. It is only the taxi driver, forever moving on wheels, who occupies no fixed space. He represents the immigrant condition.

Amitava Kumar

place moving-on space work

Mistaken identity, of course, has been the province of much postcolonial fiction. An important feature of this writing is the manner in which misrecognition has haunted all cognition.

Amitava Kumar

been important identity writing

The writer will write in his or her words, but the readers, even when they are not reading you, will take it elsewhere entirely.

Amitava Kumar

words will you reading

Imagination makes us shape better stories, sure, but it also allows us to multiply possibilities.

Amitava Kumar

possibilities us better imagination

Criticism is, or ought to be, a judicious act.

Amitava Kumar

judicious act ought criticism

For some members of the radical Left, particularly in the West, people in developing countries are an ideological abstraction, on whom fantasies of liberation are projected from a comfortable distance.

Amitava Kumar

some left distance people

Muslim anger has, of course, been stoked by America's war in Iraq and by Israel's brutal policies toward Palestine and Lebanon.

Amitava Kumar

palestine anger war america

Hemingway's short story 'Hills Like White Elephants' is a classic of its kind. It illustrates Hemingway's 'iceberg theory,' which requires that a story find its effectiveness by hiding more than it reveals.

Amitava Kumar

short story classic white

It is clear from Salman Rushdie's writing that politics and literature cannot be separated. Everything is political.

Amitava Kumar

politics political literature writing

A long, negative review I wrote of Rushdie's novel 'Fury' earned me a rebuke from the writer: He told an administrator at the college where I teach, and who had invited Rushdie to come speak, that he wouldn't share the stage with me.

Amitava Kumar

me speak long negative

No civilization has a monopoly on tolerance; each is capable of bigotry.

Amitava Kumar

each capable tolerance civilization

In the way in which we are living in a much more explosive and more tension-filled society, a society that is driven with more and more contradictions, it is but unavoidable that some of this will also come into cinema. I would, in fact, argue that a part of it is borrowed from Hollywood. It's as if Quentin Tarantino has come to Mumbai.

Amitava Kumar

will cinema society way

Indian writers in English are rank individualists. Even among the progressives, there is a strain of anti-leftism, or at least a suspicion of any organized politics.

Amitava Kumar

rank english indian politics

Neither the writer nor the reader can save the world by themselves. Or escape it entirely.

Amitava Kumar

save escape save-the-world world