Vikram Seth

"Some men like Jack and some like Jill I'm glad I like them both but still I wonder if this freewheeling Really is an enlightened thing, Or is its greater scope a sign Of deviance from some party line? In the strict ranks of Gay and Straight What is my status: Stray? Or Great?"

"All you who sleep tonight Far from the ones you love, No hands to left or right, And emptiness above— Know that you aren’t alone. The whole world shares your tears, Some for two nights or one, And some for all their years."

"Imagining the flower-pot attacked it The kitten flung the violets near and far And yet, who knows? This morning, as I backed it, My car was set upon by a parked car."

"'You too will marry a boy I choose,' said Mrs Rupa Mehra firmly to her younger daughter. Lata avoided the maternal imperative by looking around the great lamp-lit garden of Prem Nivas. The wedding-guests were gathered on the lawn. 'Hmm,' she said. This annoyed her mother further."

"[T]hink of many things. Never place your happiness in one person’s power. Be just to yourself."

"Is it not love that knows how to make smooth things rough and rough things smooth?"

"What is the difference between my life and my love? One gets me low, the other lets me go."

"In life's brief game to be a winner A man must have...oh yes, above All else, of course, someone to love."

"They go to work, attend a meeting, Write an equation, have a beer, Hail colleagues with a cheerful greeting, Are conscientious, sane, sincere, Rational, able, and fastidious. Through hardened casings no invidious Tapeworm of doubt, no guilt, no qualm Pierces to sabotage their calm. When something's technically attractive, You follow the conception through, That's all. What if you leave a slew Of living dead, of radioactive "Collateral damage" in its wake? It's just a job, for heaven's sake."

"Catholic and Episcopalian, Lutheran, Baptist, Methodist, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, atheist, We are all here; no one is alien Now radiation's common laws Impel us into common cause."

"Workers of Lungless Labs—when dying Will you be proud you were midwife To implements exemplifying Assault against the heart of life? If you had scruples, you betrayed them. What pastoral response acquits Those who made ovens for Auschwitz? You knew their purpose, yet you made them. Indeed, it's said that the banality Of evil is its greatest shock. It jokes, it punches its time clock, Plays with its kids. The triviality Of slaughtering millions can't impinge Upon its peace, or make it cringe."

"Killing is dying. This equation Carries no mystical import. It is the literal truth. Our nation Has long believed war was a sport. Unoccupied, unbombed, undying, While 'over there' the shells were flying, How could we know the Russian dread Of war, the mountains of their dead? We reveled in acceleration At every level of the race; And even now we're face to face With mutual extermination We talk as blithely as before Of 'surgical strikes' and 'limited war.'"

"Ten hostages is terrorism; A million, and it's strategy. To ban books is fanaticism; To threaten in totality All culture and all civilization, All humankind and all creation, This is a task of decorous skill And needs high statesmanship and will."

"How ugly babies are! How heedless Of all else than their bulging selves— Like sumo wrestlers, plush with needless Kneadable flesh-like mutant elves, Plump and vindictively nocturnal, With lungs determined and infernal (A pity that the blubbering blobs Come unequipped with volume knobs)."

"He writes with the omniscience and authority of a large, orderly committee of experts on Indian politics, law, medicine, crowd psychology, urban and rural social customs, dress, cuisine, horticulture, funerary rites, cricket and even the technicalities of shoe manufacture."

"Vikram Seth's book A Suitable Boy (1993) that made history as a publishing phenomenon heralded the change from an economist-poet to a full-time writer, making millions in pounds. The media dwelt on its 700,000 words and 1,349 pages, the longest novel published in England since Richardson's Clarissa (1744-48) and longer than Tolstoy's War and Peace (1865-69) — and on Seth's advance of more than 2 million pounds. More relevant are the artistic comparisons made to Jane Austen, George Eliot, Tolstoy and Dickens."

"A Suitable Boy (which burlesques poetic pretensions) reads like the offspring of an unlikely mating of Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy, with its father's looks and mother's temperament."

"In A Suitable Boy, Seth's traditionalism allows him to rediscover character. Mrs Rupa Mehra becomes too substantial, too vivid a presence to be confined within a novel: she is at once infuriating and endearing, a benevolent Indian version of Mrs Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, a comparison that Seth is typically careful to suggest by equipping her daughter with a Jane Austen novel to read on a train."

"Like Midnight's Children, however, A Suitable Boy too is steeped in an awareness of and affection for indigenous literary and cultural traditions, most notably Urdu poetry, Hindustani classical music, the performed Ramayana, the Ramlila, Shia marsiyas or lamentations, Tagore's songs ('Rabindra Sangeet'), and, of course, Hindi cinema."

"The diversity and range of Seth's work makes him somewhat of an enigma. However, for a writer who counts such diverse figures as Pushkin, T'ang dynasty Chinese poets, Chaucer, the Elizabethans, Tennyson, novelists like Hardy, Austen, George Eliot, R. K. Narayan, and modern poets like Timothy Steele and Philip Larkin among some of his literary influences, Seth's wide-ranging technique is conceivably not so surprising."

"In portraying a domestic life constrained, disrupted, and transformed by civil violence, Seth draws on the nineteenth-century historical novels of Scott, Alessandro Manzoni, Theodore Fontane, and Leo Tolstoy."