Butter chicken in Ludhiana Quotes

“For, to be woken up at five in the morning by the devotional treacle of Anup Jalota, Hari Om Sharan and other confectioners, all of them simultaneously droning out from several different cassette players; to be relentlessly assaulted for the rest of the day and most of the night by the alternately over-earnest and insolent voices of Kumar Sanu, Alisha Chinoy, Baba Sehgal singing 'Sexy, Sexy, Sexy', and 'Ladki hai kya re baba', 'Sarkaye leyo khatiya' and other hideous songs; to have them insidiously leak into your memory and become moronic refrains running over and over again in your mind; to have your environment polluted and your day destroyed in this way was to know a deepening rage, an impulse to murder, and, finally, a creeping fear at one's own dangerous level of derangement. It was to understand the perfectly sane people you read about in the papers, who suddenly explode into violence one fine day; it was to conceive a lasting hatred for the perpetrators, rich or poor, of these auditory atrocities. (on why he left Varanasi after a few days)”
― Pankaj Mishra, Butter chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in small town India

“The most uniform and conspicuous feature of the towns and cities you travel through in North India, and also the most serious menace to civilized life in them, is noise. It accompanies you everywhere – in your hotel room, in the lobby, in the elevator, in the streets, in temples, mosques, gurdwaras, shops, restaurants, parks – chipping away at your nerves to the point where you feel breakdown to be imminent. It isn’t just the ceaseless traffic, the pointless blaring of horns, the steady background roar that one finds in big cities. It is much worse: the electronics boom in India has made cassette players available to anyone with even moderate spending power. Cassettes too are cheap, especially if you buy pirated ones.”
― Pankaj Mishra, Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India

“The two pigeons killed had just given birth. And now the baby pigeon doesn't know who he is. He is going through an identity crisis.”
― Pankaj Mishra, Butter chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in small town India

“FROM BUNDI I wanted to leave immediately for the South – that sunlit place in my imagination, for whose old-world charm and civility I had developed a positive yearning after several months at a stretch in the barbarous North.”
― Pankaj Mishra, Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India

“alternately on his thickly moustached face; he spoke with the unassailable confidence that a college-education in the midst of general illiteracy gives one.”
― Pankaj Mishra, Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India