Maximum City Quotes

“And at the moment of contact, they do not know if the hand that is reaching for theirs belongs to a Hindu or Muslim or Christian or Brahmin or untouchable or whether you were born in this city or arrived only this morning or whether you live in Malabar Hill or New York or Jogeshwari; whether you’re from Bombay or Mumbai or New York. All they know is that you’re trying to get to the city of gold, and that’s enough. Come on board, they say. We’ll adjust.”
― Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

“A city like Bombay, like New York, that is a recent creation on the planet and does not have a substantial indigenous population, is full of restless people. Those who have come here have not been at ease somewhere else. And unlike others who may have been equally uncomfortable wherever they came from, these people got up and moved. As I have discovered, having once moved, it is difficult to stop moving.”
― Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

“Each person’s life is dominated by a central event, which shapes and distorts everything that comes after it and, in retrospect, everything that came before.”
― Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

“I am an exile; citizen of the country of longing.”
― Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

“This is the true meaning of exile : some insurmountable force that keeps you from going back.”
― Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

“We lived in Bombay and we lived in Mumbai and sometimes, I lived in both of them at the same time.”
― Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

“You can go home again, and you can also leave again. Once more, with confidence, into the world.”
― Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

“Anybody in the world can come to India and find home.”
― Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

“A hit man's character is defined above all by narcissism, that complex mix of egotism and self-hatred.”
― Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

“For in this country, which of all civilizations has been devoted to the most exquisite consideration of the interior life—of the form, structure, and purpose of the self—we are individually multiple, severally alone.”
― Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

“The different countries of India can be identified by the way each pronounces this word—from the Punjabi “bhaanchod” to the thin Bambaiyya “pinchud” to the Gujarati “bhenchow” to the Bhopali elaboration “bhen-ka-lowda.” Parsis use it all the time, grandmothers, five-year-olds, casually and without any discernible purpose except as filler: “Here, bhenchod, get me a glass of water.” “Arre, bhenchod, I went to the bhenchod bank today.” As a boy, I would try consciously not to swear all day on the day of my birthday. I would take vows with the Jain kids: We will not use the B-word or the M-word.”
― Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

“Democracies have a weakness: If a bad law has enough money or people behind it, it stays on the books.”
― Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

“This is the biggest difference between the world’s two largest democracies: In India, the poor vote.”
― Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

“The stacks of pav have been sprinkled with chutney—
the top half of the inside of the bun is bathed in green chutney, the bottom with red garlic chutney—
and the assistant reaches out with one hand, in one continuous arc of his arm opening the pav, scooping up two of the vadas, one in each nest of pav, and delivering it to the hungry customer. I walk away from the stall and crush the vada by pressing down on it with the pav; little cracks appear in the crispy surface, and the vada oozes out its potato-and-pea mixture. I eat. The crispy batter, the mouthful of sweet-soft pav tempering the heat of the chutney, the spices of the vada mixture —dark with garam masala and studded with whole cloves of garlic that look like cashews—get masticated into a good mouthful, a good mouth-feel. My stomach is getting filled, and I feel I am eating something nourishing after a long spell of sobbing. Borkar has done his dharma.”
― Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

“It is the sexual frenzy of a closed society, and the women of Golpitha are the gutters for these men's emissions.”
― Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

“The man who comes to fix the cable approaches her when she is alone in the house. 'Is there anything to eat?' he asks. 'There are some chapatis,' she replies. 'Can I get something to eat?' he repeats.”
― Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

“When my grandfather's brother first ventured into international territory, to Japan, in the 1930s, he had come back and bow in apology before the caste elders, turban in his hands. But his nephews—my father and my uncle—kept moving, first to Bombay and then across the black water to Antwerp and New York, to add to what was given to them...In my family, picking up and going to another country to live was never a matter for intense deliberation. You went where your business took you.”
― Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

“Rahul identifies the five builders who, along with the V.P. Naik government, ruined Bombay: the Makers, the Rahejas, the Dalamals, the Mittals, and the Tulsianis. Their names are immortalized on the office complexes they constructed at Nariman Point, which, in the original development plan, had been designated for educational and mixed-use residential housing.”
― Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost & Found

“Democracies have a weakness: If a bad law has enough money or people behind it, it stays on the books. This allows the perpetual continuation of the most absurd, unreasonable practices. In America I can walk into a gun show and buy a handgun for less than the price of a good dinner for two, even if I am insane or a convicted criminal. In Bombay I can walk into a flat I’ve rented for a year and stay there for the rest of my life, pass it on to my sons after me, and defy the lawful proprietor’s efforts to get my ass off his property. In”
― Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

“India is the Country of the No. That “no” is your test. You have to get past it. It is India’s Great Wall; it keeps out foreign invaders. Pursuing it energetically and vanquishing it is your challenge. In the guru—shishya tradition, the novice is always rebuffed multiple times when he first approaches the guru. Then the guru stops saying no but doesn’t say yes either; he suffers the presence of the student. When he starts acknowledging him, he assigns a series of menial tasks, meant to drive him away. Only if the disciple sticks it out through all these stages of rejection and ill treatment is he considered worthy of the sublime knowledge.”
― Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

“Each Bombayite inhabits his own Bombay.”
― Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

“On the Churchgate train, past Charni Road station as it sees the sea, past the gymkhanas—Islam, Catholic, Hindu, Parsi—as the shacks fade away, Bombay becomes a different city, an earlier city, a beautiful city. All of a sudden there is the blue sky and the clear water of Marine Drive, and everybody looks toward the bay and starts breathing.”
― Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

“When the rain stops, the air is suddenly sweetened. The trees and the shrubs and the weeds have dispensed fragrance into the air. Hundreds of long brown earthworms are crawling out of the softened ground. Bombay will open its windows and the rain-sweetened air will come in and Bombay will sleep well tonight. And if the first rain is early, you will sleep especially well tonight, because you still have fifteen days left till the beginning of school.”
― Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

“An Irani serves the simplest of menus: tea, coffee, bread and butter (always Polson), salted biscuits, cakes, hard bread, buttered buns, hard-boiled eggs, buns with mincemeat, berry pilaf, and mutton biryani.”
― Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

“Bombay is both, the beautiful parts and the ugly parts, fighting block by block, to the death, for victory.”
― Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

“The railway terminus and university and court buildings of the Fort area are either lovable or Gothic follies, depending on your taste, but you can look at them and feel something. There are no modern buildings in Bombay that make you feel anything.”
― Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

“I live in cities by choice, and I’m pretty sure I will die in a city.”
― Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

“Love exposes you, makes you vulnerable and kills the personas you built on top of your true self.”
― Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

“The gang war will never end. Because at it's core , it is not the gangsters against the police or the gangster against another. It is a young man with a Mauser against history personal and political, it is revolution one murder at a time.”
― Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

“It is as difficult to move down the caste ladder as it is to move up.”
― Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found