Lean Days Quotes

“If beauty is easily exhausted, it is because the ugly never give up.”
― Manish Gaekwad, Lean Days

“A writer may never write if he cannot finish reading. A day of unusual curiousness, as I watch a woman labour over her notebook at a coffee shop across the sea. Because I am not writing, I am not to be taken aback if I accidentally discover that what she is writing is what I have been struggling to say. It is precisely through this kind of shuffle that we have had our stories told.”
― Manish Gaekwad, Lean Days

“A library without the distraction of a few handsome men and women is a library to avoid. If there is no respite from reading, to vacuously rest one’s tired eyes on them — what else is a library for, then? I visit libraries for distractions, way past the history section, and into the poetry corner, where the gentle souls gather.”
― Manish Gaekwad, Lean Days

“At this juncture you must be wondering why this chapter reads like a clipped diary entry or even a concise narration of an unremarkable event. You should know that the harsh terrain rewards a short account where dialogue is kept to the minimum because words can hang mid-air.”
― Manish Gaekwad, Lean Days

“In Bombay, it’s a class issue to get this far with a carpenter, but some of my friends have kinks – secretly inviting daily wage labourers home for a sex fantasy to be fulfilled. Autorickshaw drivers get lucky all the time, and sometimes even manage to steal valuables and never get reported.”
― Manish Gaekwad, Lean Days

“e myth of the Kashmiri women’s dazzling beauty is nowhere more present than it is here in Srinagar – notwithstanding the massive popularity of Katrina Kaif. Women are in large part absent from any real public presence. As and when you see glimpses of them through uttering dupattas and burkhas, it remains a preview to hungry eyes. Where women are beautiful and hidden, there the callous display of their men is intriguing. I see them unmasked as butchers, woodcutters, bus drivers, vegetable vendors, oarsmen, bakers, wool dyers, in the old and the new. Men in a laborious mien. No one is re ned, there is no polish, no nesse; these men are designed by a living that makes no small change for vanity.”
― Manish Gaekwad, Lean Days

“I was reading in anticipation of a similar telegram, with dishwater co ee served before me. I hallucinated about the telegram lying unread at my table. I conjured up and feared my absence from my mother’s funeral. When a loved one is incommunicado, ction takes over our lives and here I was, shunting so frequently between past and present, I seemed to be exhuming my future from it.
‘A book is a suicide postponed,’ the philosopher Emil Cioran once said. Reading books (including the depressing ones) has helped me postpone mine.”
― Manish Gaekwad, Lean Days

“If reading Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast should be of some consolation to an aspiring writer who has, in his days of frugality, at the city’s café India Co ee House, juggled spare coins to tip colonial-era liveried waiters; that he should return one cloudy afternoon four years later, and not bat an eyelid at the hiked rate card of the limited menu, to which mini meals have been added – then to set an alarm in his heart at the sight of a plate of mutton cutlet – a sight so plentiful that his eyes should fog – that his fat wallet should loosen up – handsome tips for halcyon days – that the sta beaming through their prickly taches should touch his table as one does a sacrament – a writer returns to a sodden time, a square feast on a sacred plate.”
― Manish Gaekwad, Lean Days

“A library without the distraction of a few handsome men and women is a library to avoid. If there is no respite from reading, to vacuously rest one’s tired eyes on them – what else is a library for, then?”
― Manish Gaekwad, Lean Days