Every strategy for real social change - land reform, education, public health, the equitable distribution of natural resources ... - has been cleverly, cunningly, and consistently scuttled and rendered ineffectual by those castes and that class of people which has a stranglehold on the political process.

Delhi is a very maligned city, and deservedly so. Yet there's something about it. It's a secret city, it doesn't hang out its wares. It's like a very deep river. Floating right up on top are the institutions of contemporary power: government, politics, media, and then there's the bureaucracy, the diplomatic missions. But it's also the city of intellectual debate, of protest, it's the city where people from all over the country converge to express their anger. And then, underneath all that, there's this crumbling, ancient city, a confluence of so much history.

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

I don't think the state will allow people to occupy a particular space unless it feels that allowing that will end up in a kind of complacency, and the effectiveness and urgency of the protest will be lost.

Non-violence should be a tactic - not an ideology preached from the sidelines to victims of massive violence.

To understand history,' Chacko said, 'we have to go inside and listen to what they're saying. And look at the books and the pictures on the wall. And smell the smells.

It is only now, these years later, that Rahel with adult hindsight recognized the sweetness of that gesture. A grown man entertaining three raccoons, treating them like real ladies. Instinctively colluding in the conspiracy of their fiction, taking care not to decimate it with adult carelessness. Or affection. It is after all so easy to shatter a story. To break a chain of thought. To ruin a fragment of a dream being carried around carefully like a piece of porcelain. To let it be, to travel with it, as Velutha did, is much the harder thing to do.