1
" In his essay,Agastya had said that his real ambition was to be a domesticated male stray dog because they lived the best life.They were assured of food,and because they were stray they didn't have to guard a house or beg or shake paws or fetch trifles or be clean or anything similarly meaningless to earn their food.They were servile and sycophantic when hungry;once fed,and before sleep,they wagged their tails perfunctorily whenever their hosts passes,as an investment for future meals.A stray dog was free,he slept a lot,barked unexpectedly and only when he wanted to,and got a lot of sex. "
― Upamanyu Chatterjee , English, August: An Indian Story
3
" Most of us, Ogu, live with a vague dissatisfaction, if we are lucky. Living as we do, upon us is imposed a particular rhythm - birth, education, a job, marriage, then birth again, but we all have minds don't we?
For most Indians of your age, just getting any job is enough. You were more fortunate for you had options before you.
These sound like paternal homilies, don't they, but you've always had surrogate parents, your aunts, and then in Delhi, your Pultukaku, and we've not really spent much time together. "
― Upamanyu Chatterjee , English, August: An Indian Story
14
" The days turned slowly, somewhat with the rhythm of a gently swirling merry-go-round from which one simply cannot get off. They seemed for everybody to be suffused with hate and its variants. One detested, for example—and without quite wanting to—other cars in the morning rush-hour traffic. Later in the day, one felt envious of, or contempt for, one’s office colleagues and the relish with which they played—over their teacups and through their coffee breaks—their games of one-upmanship that would be disrupted only when the acid in their tongues descended to gnaw at their stomach linings or they felt the first paralysing jabs of their hearts going on the blink. Even when, during the day, to relieve stress—except that, paradoxically, it seemed instead to sharpen the desolation, illumine more pitilessly the bleakness, the vanity of their futures—even when one of them throbbed to touch some proximate human, that lust too seemed destructive and replete with hate, a form of battering rancour. "
― Upamanyu Chatterjee , Fairy Tales at Fifty
15
" The railway station provided them all that they needed: flatulence-generating food, tea, water, paan, shelter, electricity, social intercourse, seating, mucky toilets—and drugs, coolies, women and children for sale at most reasonable prices. What more could a man ask for? "
― Upamanyu Chatterjee , Fairy Tales at Fifty
19
" Fifty long years rapidly up and yet how quietly and without fuss they continued to glide into the future on a smooth and silent electric train that had no brakes; not moving dramatically fast but simply and inexorably, as though it, being a monstrous, impassive machine, saw no need to pick up speed to arrive at a future that too would be so unnervingly dull, so much a numbing repetition of fruitless routine, its incapacitating tedium to be interrupted only by death, that final, endless, terrifying yawn. "
― Upamanyu Chatterjee , Fairy Tales at Fifty
