Can one drown in one's element... If fish can drown in water, can human beings suffocate in air?

Rohinton Mistry's celebrated novel 'Such a Long Journey' was pulled off the syllabus of Mumbai University because local extremists objected to its content.

...The lesson [comic books] taught children- or this child, at any rate- was perhaps the unintentionally radical truth that exceptionality was the greatest and most heroic of values; that those who were unlike the crowd were to be treasured the most lovingly; and that this exceptionality was a treasure so great that it had to be concealed, in ordinary life, beneath what the comic books called a 'secret identity'.

Too many people spouting too many words, and in the end those words will turn to bullets and stones.

This paranoid Islam, which blames outsider, 'infidels', for all the ills of Muslim societies, and whose proposed remedy is the closing of those societies to the rival project of modernity, is presently the fastest growing version of Islam in the world.

History could claw upward as well as down. The powerful could be deafened by the cries of the poor.

The only people who see the whole picture,' he murmured, 'are the ones who step out of the frame.