Black money is so much a part of our white economy, a tumour in the centre of the brain - try to remove it and you kill the patient.

Traffic in the streets of Bombay is chaotic at best. Riding a bicycle is a dangerous occupation. However, there are hundreds of them on the streets competing with the cars and buses and lorries because it is the poor man's mode of transport.

World can be a bewildering place,and dreams and ambitions are often paths to the most pernicious of traps

Time had changed the magical to mundane

...there was another, gorier parturition, when two nations incarnated out of one. A foreigner drew a magic line on a map and called it the new border; it became a river of blood upon the earth. And the orchards, fields, factories, businesses, all on the wrong side of that line, vanished with a wave of the pale conjuror's wand.

Money can buy the necessary police order. Justice is sold to the highest bidder

After all, our lives are but a sequence of accidents - a clanking chain of chance events. A string of choices, casual or deliberate, which add up to that one big calamity we call life.