Neel Mukherjee QUOTES

1 " It could be said of him that while others chased the mirage of happiness, he was happy with being content. "

― Neel Mukherjee , The Lives of Others

2 " There is a large gap between being an activist out of the idealism that comes from books, conversations, the fire of youth and being one because you have lived through the depredations that life has thrown at you. "

― Neel Mukherjee , The Lives of Others

3 " Mollycoddling was the mother's duty; the father's lay elsewhere. As a consequence, his four older children feared and respected him, as they had been taught to do, and the love the professed to feel, had they been asked and had they answered truthfully or even had access to the truth, was of a duty-bound, obligatory kind too, a love issuing from commandment and tradition and the notion of family, not one from the tides of the heart or the unbridled, inexplicable pull of feelings. If painted, that love would take the form of a polite and manicured wash of pleasant colours, not the hurl-and-splatter of impastoed reds. "

― Neel Mukherjee , The Lives of Others

4 " People talk of rage as something fluid; it boils, flows, spills over, scalds. For her, it is not any of these things. Instead it is a vast, frozen sea, solid as rock, unthawable. She has never seen the sea, but she knows it wraps around three-quarters of the world. All her anger is that and more. "

― Neel Mukherjee , The Lives of Others

5 " Events fall into a pattern that we can only discern retrospectively. We credit ourselves with far more agency than we actually possess. Things happen because they happen. "

― Neel Mukherjee , The Lives of Others

6 " I couldn't make any sense of this logic, that the better off got more and those had little got less. The world ran on this law and only on this. "

― Neel Mukherjee

7 " It seemed that the Law of the Fridge was universal across cultures and continents: things went there to die and be forgotten. "

― Neel Mukherjee , A State of Freedom

8 " Battles are won one by one and enemy battalions are destroyed one at a time. Factories are built one at a time. Farmers cultivate one plot after another. We serve ourselves the total amount of food we can consume, but we eat it spoonful by spoonful; to eat it in one go would be impossible.This is known as the piecemeal solution. "

― Neel Mukherjee , The Lives of Others

9 " Dhiren broke the silence by starting to hum a tune under his breath,,,, 'The smile of the moon has spilled over its banks'......I was filled with - with what? An affectionate contempt? A sense of ridicule? Shock that Dhiren, the earthy, self-styled tough guy, had any truck with the kind of music he'd consider effeminate? Tagore seemed to be carried inside all Bengalis, regardless of class or social background, like some inheritable disease, silent, unknown, until it manifested itself at the unlikeliest of times. How irredeemably middle class all this was: The Little Red Book and On Practice on the one hand; on the other hand, the poetry of Jibanananda Das in his cloth sidebag and a coy, cloying Tagore song almost involuntary on his lips. There really was no hope of escape for us.

...... For god's sake, Mao by day and Tagore by moonlight?

Dhiren didn't miss a beat - That's quintessential Bengali soul for you. "

― Neel Mukherjee , The Lives of Others

10 " It could be said of him that while others chased happiness, he was happy with being content. "

― Neel Mukherjee , The Lives of Others

11 " After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities. "

― Neel Mukherjee , A State of Freedom

12 " You take away economic security and the whole pack of cards collapses. Everyone is at each other’s throats. All these vaunted bourgeois values that prop up society – love, duty, honour, respect – all rest on power-relations lubricated by economics. They are the gloss people put on the naked truth: self-interest. "

― Neel Mukherjee , The Lives of Others

13 " Within minutes a small crowd had gathered: what could be more interesting than other people's lives? "

― Neel Mukherjee , The Lives of Others

14 " Why did they all think alike? Typical bourgeois brainwashed homogeneity? How else could this unvarying calculus abouth the worth of one's own kind measured against the lives of others have come about? "

― Neel Mukherjee , The Lives of Others

15 " Whoever said that time blunts all pain did not quite understand that bluntness can wound as grievously as sharp points and edges; "

― Neel Mukherjee , The Lives of Others

16 " So Sona does what he has perfected: he becomes two persons, an outer one that goes through the motions required of him, and an inner one that is the true, pure he. "

― Neel Mukherjee , The Lives of Others

17 " all this immorality and opportunism, this was what characterised them, not altruism, as the stories they had spun would have you believe. But then, this is a world whose running fuel is anecdotes and stories, he reminds himself. "

― Neel Mukherjee , The Lives of Others

18 " Numbers never lie; one can make them, of course, as one can make anything speak another story in another tongue, but they do not have the inherent falsehood that words carry. "

― Neel Mukherjee , The Lives of Others

19 " Childhood friendships were often like that - intense in presence and in the present tense, remote and unreachable in absence. "

― Neel Mukherjee , A State of Freedom

20 " In time-honoured fashion, this is really the eldest daughter-in-law’s investiture as the earthly, domestic symbol of the goddess. It is she who channels Lakshmi’s blessings on the family. In her is vested, by an understanding of priestly transference, the household’s economic prosperity, well-being and harmonious daily life. Beside it, her other daily chores as eldest daughter-in-law –supervising the cook and cleaners and servants and household accounts, caring for her elderly parents-in-law, looking after their meals and medication, deciding which tasks can be ceded to the wives of her three brothers-in-law, keeping a family of twenty (including the servants) ticking over without hiccups or mishaps –all these appear as milk-and-rice, as uncomplicated, bland and digestible as infant fare. "

― Neel Mukherjee , The Lives of Others

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