2
" 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
4
" 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
7
" 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
10
" 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
16
" He regrets his curse, I feel, because he knows that his grief at the killing of the bird – grief, he feels interestingly, not for the dying bird, but for its mate, the hen, whose song turns to a piteous lament – has set free his inspiration. It is the dirty secret of his art. Known among poets as the ādi-kavi – the first poet, a Sanskritic Cædmon, if you will – he is the first to recognize, twenty centuries ago, that, however much poets wish not to cause pain, there is no poetry without pain, no poetry without pity. And from here on, in the Indian imagination, śoka – sorrow or grief – comes to be fused, both conceptually and phonemically, with śloka, poetry! It is this, and nothing besides, that we consider to be the birth of poetry. "
― Aatish Taseer
