Kindle Notes & Highlights
Stepping out of your own small life into the vast cosmos, into history and geography? You’d better be dressed for the occasion.
The places where you were known, the houses, the offices, the para clubs and the community centres – there was way too much politics and noise inside. It was, paradoxically, in the buses, the parks, the markets, the streets and the metro stations where, among strangers, despite the heat and din and crowds, that you found a sort of peace.
like and love are different things.’
‘Jamshedpur is affectionately called Jampot,’
‘The real name of Jamshedpur is Kalimati,’
‘Which Indian city should you visit if things are not going your way?’
Lucknow, the questions of these sort are referred to as chao questions throughout the novel
If I ate my very favourite type of meat in this city, I’d get renewed life force.’
Ranchi(Raan - chi)
In dating circles, there has always been a theory that every romantic relationship has a ‘reacher’ and a ‘settler’.
byaatha, nothing more, nothing less.’ Byaatha. As ubiquitous as prem in the vocabulary of Bengal,
the greatest beauty doesn’t find a husband, the finest homemaker
never gets her house –
At twenty, they’d been sure they would live forever, they’d climb the highest mountains and dive into the deepest oceans – maybe simultaneously – and save lives and make art and find love and be happy. Oh, future happiness. They never questioned its reliable presence.
all banter, no substance.
childhood love is, for all its intensity, ultimately cursed. It seldom leads to happily-ever-afters.
in the first flush of their happiness, which gilded the surfaces of things such that the banal became beautiful, the stupid, cute.
Bloody men are like bloody buses — / You wait for about a year / As soon as one approaches your stop. / Two or three others appear.’
without decay, how would we appreciate youth?’
‘Without destruction, how would we appreciate love?’
Attempt a life in art only if you are ready to fail again and again.
As long as you are unafraid to fail, you will feel the creative energy swirling through your body. Embrace it. It’s harrowing, excruciating, The Worst. It’s also the most glorious feeling on earth. After love, that is. But then, like art, love too is audacious. One fails at it only to return to its door, again and again, humbled and made new.
