Rich Indians typically tried to work around a dysfunctional government. Private security was hired, city water was filtered, private school tuitions were paid. Such choices had evolved over the years into a principle: The best government is the one that gets out of the way. The attacks on the Taj and the Oberoi, in which executives and socialites died, had served as a blunt correction. The wealthy now saw that their security could not be requisitioned privately. They were dependent on the same public safety system that ill served the poor.

A great deal of what is presumed to be intractable or inevitable in this world doesn't strike me that way at all.

...much of what was said did not matter, and that much of what mattered could not be said.

But if writing about people who are not yourself is illegitimate, then the only legitimate work is autobiography; and as a reader and a citizen, I don’t want to live in that world.

I'm useless when I meet writers I love - I go slack-jawed and stupid with awe.

Don't correct me, you don't have any rights over me." "What kind of life is this? So I sit at home , entirely dependent on this man, and then it turns out his heart was never with me. How is it possible to force someone to love me?

There's some way in which we would prefer not to see very clearly the immense gifts and intelligence of some of the people who live in our most abject conditions. Maybe there are some things at work in deciding who gets to be society's winners and who gets to be society's losers that don't have to do with merit.