Truly, there's no alternative to stupidity. Cretinism is the mother of fascism. I have no defence against it, really....

In a country like India, the British were only able to rule the country because it had completely co-opted the elite of the country, who did their work for them.

...a political struggle that does not have women at the heart of it, above it, below it, and within it is no struggle at all.

Have we raised the threshold of horror so high that nothing short of a nuclear strike qualifies as a 'real' war? Are we to spend the rest of our lives in this state of high alert with guns pointed at each other's heads and fingers trembling on the trigger?

I need fiction like you need to eat or exercise.

When people say "the people" or "the public" as though it's the final repository of all morality, I sometimes flinch.

As Indian citizens, we subsist on a regular diet of caste massacres and nuclear tests, mosque breakings and fashion shows, church burnings and expanding cell phone networks, bonded labor and the digital revolution, female infanticide and the NASDAQ crash, husbands who continue to burn their wives for dowry and our delectable stockpile of Miss Worlds. What's hard to reconcile oneself to, both personally and politically, is the schizophrenic nature of it.