The Way Things Were Quotes

“Why not stick with the Indic definition? Of Itihāsa! Which is a compound, as you know, iti-ha-āsa, and when broken down, means, literally, The Way indeed that Things Were. That covers everything: talk, legend, tradition, history . . .”
― Aatish Taseer, The Way Things Were

“I.P. was at that age when our sense of who we are, or of who we have been told we are, chafes against what we discover in our reading. And immediately a choice seems to appear: to let the reading show us the way forward, like water picking its course over unfamiliar ground; or to direct the reading, to channel the stream, so that it confirms what we already think we know. I.P. was among those few people who could do the former. He had a mind that welcomed doubt and uncertainty; he revelled in it, in fact; he was not one to ever make the perilous decision of deciding to know. His mind was happy to grope its way to its own conclusions, happy to breathe easy in a state of unknowing.”
― Aatish Taseer, The Way Things Were

“...if we were to associate the genius of a place with one particular thing – the Russians with literature, say, or the Germans with music, the Dutch and Spanish with painting – we would have to say that the true genius of Ancient India was language.”
― Aatish Taseer, The Way Things Were

“Yes. Go-ghna! Which is apparently an irregular upapada tatpuruṣa. So instead of meaning noxious to kine, it is derived as: for whom a cow is killed.’ Maniraja winced. ‘And guess what that is? A guest! Go-ghna is a synonym for guest. Now go tell the men in saffron that!”
― Aatish Taseer, The Way Things Were

“all the Eastern religions were fundamentally atheistic.”
― Aatish Taseer, The Way Things Were

“In India – unlike, say, Russia, or China – the foreigner was welcomed as a king at first. People regarded him as something rarer and more precious than they were themselves, someone who stood neutral to their own violent differences and internal suspicions.”
― Aatish Taseer, The Way Things Were

“But for the Indian woman,’ Naipaul writes, ‘a foreign marriage is seldom a positive act; it is, more usually, an act of despair or confusion. It leads to castelessness, the loss of community, the loss of a place in the world; and few Indians are equipped to cope with that.”
― Aatish Taseer, The Way Things Were

“India was their supreme affectation! They wore it to dinner, as it were; and, of course, the ways in which they were truly Indian - their blindness to dirt and poverty, their easy acceptance of cruelty -they concealed very well.”
― Aatish Taseer, The Way Things Were

“To what shall I compare my literary pursuits in India? Suppose Greek literature to be known in modern Greece only, and there to be in the hands of priests and philosophers; and suppose them to be still worshippers of Jupiter and Apollo; suppose Greece to have been conquered successively by Goths, Huns, Vandals, Tartars, and lastly by the English; then suppose a court of judicature to be established by the British parliament, at Athens, and an inquisitive Englishman to be one of the judges; suppose him to learn Greek there, which none of his countrymen knew, and to read Homer, Pindar, Plato, which no other Europeans had even heard of. Such am I in this country: substituting Sanscrit for Greek, the Brahmans, for the priests of Jupiter, and Vālmic, Vyāsa, Cālīdāsa, for Homer, Plato, Pindar. William Jones”
― Aatish Taseer, The Way Things Were

“The lounge of the private terminal in Delhi. A place of beige leather sofas and cappuccinos, set deep in that world where a seeling modernity has yet to close over the land, and where in the empty spaces that lie between the elevated roads and the coloured glass buildings there are still, like insects taking shelter under the veined roof of a leaf, the encampments of families who built them. Black pigs still thread their way through the weeds, there are still patient lorry-loads of labourers, waiting among the dazzle of the new cars, for the lights to change. One India, dwarfed and stunted, adheres like a watchful undergrowth to another India which, in very physical ways, as with the roads that fly up out of the pale land, or the chunks of monorail that rise up from the ground like the remnants of an ancient wall, or the blank closed faces of the glass buildings, wishes to shrug off its poorer opposite: to leave it behind; to shut it out; to soar over it. One man, above all, captures the mood of this time: the security guard. In him, this man of expectation – a man not rich himself, but standing guard at the doorway to a world of riches – it is possible to feel the boredom and restlessness of a world that inspires ambition, but cannot answer it. Skanda watches him watching the lounge, with eyes glazed and yellowing from undernourishment. A favourite phrase from college returns: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”
― Aatish Taseer, The Way Things Were

“Father and son had watched him disappear into the musty interior of that old airport, leaving behind him, as easily as he left behind the smell of wet cement, of urine and yellowing paper – the smells of the modern state – his past in India. It was hard not to be moved. Hard not to see it for what it was: the reprisal, cold and unfeeling, of the individual against the society that had tried to break him. He had a great wish in that moment to let India hang, to leave India to the Indians, as it were. And as the inky stamp came onto his passport – 2 NOV 1984 – his only regret was the decorum of it all. He wished he could have let that oily official at Immigration, boredom and sloth and greed etched into his face, know that he was not just another traveller, not just a man leaving on a short trip, but a man leaving for good. A man going voluntarily into exile, with nothing but hatred for his country, and who, if given the opportunity, would gladly have put a stake in her heart.”
― Aatish Taseer, The Way Things Were

“...Such a subcontinental thing to do, no? To bury what is difficult and painful in cerebral things. To let the intellect soak up the blood from a fight. This is what we do. Not because we lack sensitivity, but because we lack the right language for emotion. English has such a jealous hold over us, but it is a hard and brittle thing in our hands. It doesn’t suit the easy melodrama of our natures. And it has a way of making matters of the heart seem at once inert and deeply shameful. So what do upper-class Indian men do when they are too wretched to do anything else? They talk of the Russians! Of Dostoevsky and Belinsky, of “cultural schizophrenia” and “the lackeyishness of thinking”...”
― Aatish Taseer, The Way Things Were