Novelists From India

"When you hear the name “Babur”, both sides – Hindus and Muslims – get excited. In Bombay you will get a Hindu backlash, in Hyderabad a Muslim backlash. We live in an insane country. We wouldn’t have to worry about the Christians or the Parsis and probably not the Buddhists. Very, very depressing."

"Opium use is a quick way of showing a person’s character. Within months some people would be stealing from family and friends, but there were people who never did that kind of thing. I used my salary to finance my habit."

"I should have done my novel before this, but I was a journalist and a junkie for 20 years and unlike the junkie cliché, I had good jobs all over the world. I was a books editor, I did financial journalism for Asia Week for five years, I was Bombay correspondent for the South China Morning Post for 18 months, I worked for every newspaper in India doing arts journalism. I was a hardworking junkie."

"A friend from Hong Kong had turned up in Bombay and took me to an opium den in Crawford Market. I walked in and saw this room with three pipes. Everything happened at floor level. It was like a bubble: Bombay noise and heat out there, 19th-century people lying and smoking in here, absolutely self-contained. I couldn’t look at that and not think of it as a piece of literary installation art. I walked in the door and I was hooked. I smoked that day, and loved it and went back. A month or so later I got an aerogramme from my friend saying, “Jeet, get your ass out of that den.”"

"We didn’t know that right before us Hari Kunzru and Amitava Kumar had just read from The Satanic Verses in a separate session. The minute I finished, people were queuing for me to sign copies of Narcopolis. But we were taken to this room where Hari and Amitava were sitting and we weren’t allowed to leave. There was a lawyer, there were police on site and they threatened to close down the festival which made all of us feel like shit. I was full of remorse, because the directors are our friends and we knew how much work they had put into it, but I don’t think we were really in trouble. Even though we were told to make ourselves scarce."

"The thing about opium is that it makes you vomit. You cook the original raw sticky pellet against the bowl of the pipe. And for the first three or four months, you puke. But it’s a clean very easy puke, not like alcohol. You could be walking down the street talking to a friend, turn, puke and keep going. But you do that a lot for the first few months. It takes devotion to become an addict to opium and heroin. You have to keep doing it to get through it. I lost a lot of weight. But the payback is huge. It is pure pleasure. There is a reason why opiates are used as a painkiller: they make you feel better. They’re designed to make you feel better."

"I could feel my colour. I could feel racism...in the way people looked at you, and the way they talked to you. Now, though, because of the mixing of cultures, it seems like some kind of brilliant social experiment...In some ways it seems to me the city of the future."

"You may lose something, but you gain a double perspective, a double vision. Especially in terms of writing, or in terms of art, I think it's tremendously useful."

"A lot of people misspelt the title of the book and called it Necropolis, but I’m fine with that, because the title is a play on that and it is a city of the dead. Narcopolis is a necropolis. Bombay disappears and a lot of the characters die with it. Throughout the book, opium disappears and heroin arrives and the last few chapters point at the future, to what Bombay will be. You can make an accurate educated guess as to what it will be in the future."

"It would be nice if things changed in the sense that they became more cosmopolitan, more inclusive, wider rather than narrower, with a kind of a view towards the future and a view towards many different kinds of people and people from different cultures living together. Because that's what a city really is about...That's the beauty of a great city. And the sad thing is, there was a time when you thought Bombay had it."

"Because that's where I live, and have lived for a few years now. I wouldn't say in food tastes, for instance, that I'm Indian. I would say I'm Chinese, food-wise. That's the food that I like to eat on a daily basis." It's common for people to be a mix of cultures, rather than having one specific identity."

"Indian reviewers don’t read books. They have two days to produce 800 words. They read the prologue and then skim a few pages, then they read all the other reviews. If the first two are negative, you can be sure they will all be negative. If the first two are good, the rest will be good. It’s that low-level, that pathetic. It takes a kind of confidence for a reviewer to have their own opinion about a book. And a lot of people here just don’t care about literary novels."

"It had people from all over the country and the world. The great thing about Bombay as a city was it was a magnet for anybody with talent, or ambition or hunger, or beauty, or intelligence. If you had any of these things and you wanted to make something of yourself, you went to Bombay and the city would reward you. I think all of that changed in 1992, when the last big riots happened in Bombay between Hindus and Muslims. Now when I go back to the city and I look at it, I can see the kind of profound impact that those riots had, and how it's changed the character of the city, and in such a profound way that I don't think it will ever change back to what it was before '92."

"You've got to face facts and the fact is life is a joke, a fucking bad joke, or, no, a bad fucking joke."

"Women are more evolved biologically and emotionally, that’s well known and it’s obvious. But they confuse sex and the spirit; they don’t separate. Men, as you know, always separate: they separate their human and dog natures."

"it came pretty late In a sense it is good. It won’t get over my head."

"Yet, this is a small price I have had to pay for seeking to uphold the freedom of speech and expression."

"Then there are the addicts, the hunger addicts, the rage addicts, the poverty addicts , and power addicts, and the pure addicts who are addicted not to substances but to the oblivion and the tenderness the substances engender. An addict, if you don't mind me saying so, is like a saint. What is a saint but someone who has cut himself off, voluntarily, from the world's traffic and currency."

"I was born in the south of India but I've never lived there. I went to school in Bombay, and in Hong Kong and in New York. But the place I've lived in the most is Bombay, because I've been there at various stages of my life."

"...body with a concomitant object of gratification, the desire for immortality is in itself the evidence of immortality, as is the existence of its sister state, immutability."

"Our choice was not easy and we had intense deliberations about themes, styles and genre of novels."

"He read because it gave him instant gratification in a way nothing else did, and, as was the case with all addicts, gratification was the important thing. He liked history, travel, anthropology, cookbooks (which he read in the same way as other books for pleasure); he liked books with specialized information."

"He—an addict for 20 years—undoubtedly writes from close experience about that sordid world of pimps and prostitutes, drug addiction and sexual deviance, grotesque crime and heinous punishment. It fascinates as much as it shocks—even as you recoil in horror, knowing you’ll probably never set foot in Mumbai’s innards, you’re dying to know more about them."

"He leaves the reader with a realization. The line between those born with choices and those not so lucky is very thin. The side of the divide you’re born on is purely random."

"My religion is no way of knowing me. Mine is a way of knowing me. When I pray I feel I'm doing something clean. But why pray so the whole neighbourhood hears your prayers? Why use microphones?"

"...has won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature-2013 for his debut novel Narcopolis based on the theme of drug addiction destroying the poor, deranged and marginalised people in Mumbai during 1970s and 80s. He was one of the six shortlisted authors for the DSC prize, was born in Kerala and is also known as a performance poet and musician. He earlier worked as a journalist in New York, Mumbai and Bangalore and his poetry collection."

"How unjust! He deserves a high place in economic history for challenging the Bank-IMF approach on painful austerity, and focusing instead on a few key changes that produced fast growth with minimum pain. The World Bank itself later changed its policy and started targeting “binding constraints” (like industrial licensing). He could have achieved nothing without Rao’s backing. Today, 20 years after the start of India’s economic miracle, let us toast India’s most underrated Prime Minister — Narasimha Rao."

"He did not want to draw attention to himself. So he ingeniously made the delicensing announcement on the morning of the day Manmohan Singh was presenting his first Budget. The media clubbed the Budget and delicensing stories together as one composite reform story. In the public mind, Manmohan Singh was seen as the liberalizer, while Rao stayed in the background."

"He was the visionary who launched the 'look East' policy and gave India's engagement with ASEAN a different meaning. India became a Sectoral Dialogue Partner of ASEAN in 1992 and Full Dialogue Partner in 1996. And now, we sit with them in the summit, as India is the largest trading partner of ASEAN."

"Twenty years ago [1991], he became Prime Minister and initiated economic reforms that transformed India. The Congress party doesn’t want to remember him: it is based entirely on loyalty to the Gandhi family, and Rao was not a family member. But the nation should remember him as the man who changed India, and the world too."

"His master stroke was to appoint Manmohan Singh as finance minister. He wanted a non-political reformer at the centre of decision-making, who could be backed or dumped as required. He presented Singh as the spearhead of reform while he himself advocated a middle path. Yet, ultimately, it was his vision that Singh executed."

"The late former Prime Minster was instrumental in including the second generation reforms in the Congress election manifesto in 1991 as it was a well thought out strategy to steer the country [India] through a distressful economic crisis."

"The idea of economical reforms was not out of blue. It was there in the Congress election manifesto, which was prepared under Narasimha Rao's astute supervision. Then, I used to write the manifesto, and Narsimha Rao used to vet it."

"It was not easy for a normal politician to implement economic reforms, and PVN knew it. He was only the second prime minister after Jawaharlal Nehru to make a person worked in his capacity as governor of RBI the finance minister. Nehru selected C.D. Deshmuk, who had worked as the governor of RBI, to be his finance minister in 1950."

"The Indian and Western elite did not regard any of Nehru’s successors as ‘thinking’ leaders. Indira Gandhi tried hard to win over India’s intellectual elite, but the Emergency broke a nascent link. When men like P.N. Haksar and P.N. Dhar were hounded out of her inner circle, India’s intellectuals deserted her. Rajiv Gandhi was never taken seriously by this elite. Narasimha Rao may have been a scholar in his own right, but he was an ‘outsider’ to India’s metropolitan elite. In Andhra Pradesh, among the Telugu-speaking elite he was known as an ashtavadhani, a literary master. But Delhi’s elite tended to conflate his intellectual achievements with the fact that he was fluent in many languages. Vajpayee too was a highly regarded poet. Indeed, Rao and Vajpayee enjoyed the company of intellectuals and could count many professors among their friends. But in the snobbish world of the metropolitan elite, an Oxbridge type like Dr Singh was regarded as a class apart from these home-grown politician-intellectuals."

"He gave Manmohan Singh full freedom to navigate the crisis and introduce for-reaching economic reforms. He had himself spearheaded the move for dismantling the license regime as the prime minister while holding additional charge of the industry ministry. He could appreciate the significance of the seminal policy of economic liberalization, [Pranabh said,] as he witnessed the making of the policy being deputy chairperson of the Planning Commission, and commerce minister in PVN's cabinet."

"Despite his caricature as being indecisive, he was one of the most decisive leaders this nation has seen. On all crucial issues, he took decisions that have continued to shape India’s rise over the last two decades. Manmohan Singh may be touted as the father of Indian economic reforms; but as Singh has himself acknowledged, it was Rao who fathered the process. Singh was an economic technocrat with little understanding of political constraints. It was Rao who shielded Singh from the left wing of his own party, a flank that had left no stone unturned in opposing the economic liberalization programme. Rao made economic reforms politically tenable at a time when his own party was out to scuttle his most ambitious undertaking. How ironical, then, that today the same Congress-wallahs try to take credit for India’s economic success without acknowledging Rao’s role."

"He surely failed as prime minister to prevent the tragedy at Ayodhya. But his rivals in the Congress did their own party such disservice by spreading the canard that his (and their) government was responsible for that crime. This, more than anything else, lost them the Muslim vote in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar... any dispassionate reading of recent political history will tell you that this is a self-inflicted injury. The Congress has itself built a mythology whereby the Muslims have come to hold their party as responsible for Babri as the BJP … If you take Justice Liberhan’s indictment of so many in the BJP seriously, you cannot at the same time dismiss his exoneration of Rao, and the government, and the Congress Party under him. You surely cannot put the clock back on so much injustice done to him, like not even allowing his body to be taken inside the AICC building. But the least you can do now is to give him a memorial spot too along the Yamuna as one of our more significant (and secular) prime ministers who led us creditably through five difficult years, crafted our post-Cold War diplomacy, launched economic reform and, most significantly, discovered the political talent and promise of a quiet economist called Manmohan Singh."

"To blame him for the Ayodhya fiasco, [therefore], is not only dishonest [on the part of the Congress party], but also disgraceful. More importantly, Rao’s failure cannot be an excuse to deprive him of all the credit that is his due as the nation’s prime minister at one of the most difficult times in its contemporary history."

"Looking back, I may say that the government of the day made a wrong political judgment. Mr Narasimha Rao paid the price for this. The Congress party paid the price for this wrong political judgment. But it was induced by the lies and false promises of BJP."

"His victory from the Nandyal constituency (in Kadapa district) gave him an entry into the Guinness Book of World Records in 1991 for the maximum votes — 89.5%! — polled. In 1996, he had an opposition to contend with, and still managed to poll 366, 431 votes and defeat the TDP."

"No one during the fifty years of freedom has attempted to tell the truth of contemporary history as you have done. So, in whatever form it comes, it is welcome..."

"My favourite among Indian Prime Ministers is definitely Narasimha Rao. He undid the Nehruvian legacy and stemmed the rising tide of the fateful consequences of Nehru's follies. He actually implemented the BJP programme, just as Atal Behari Vajpayee is now implementing the Congress programme. Rao started liberalizing the economy, lifting the stifling socialist controls. He opened diplomatic relations with Israel. He defeated the Khalistani terrorists, nipped the beginnings of Tamil Tiger separatism on Indian soil in the bud, and pushed back Kashmiri terrorism to the point where the Kasmiri people stopped supporting it so that it is now manned entirely by foreign mercenaries. And he allowed the demolition of the Babri Masjid."

"P. Chidambaram on the issue of the destruction of the disputed structure of Babri Masjid in Ayodhya and its aftermath on the Congress Party following the Liberhan Commission’s report on the demolition of the mosque in:A K Bhattacharya: Rao's ghost may still haunt Congress, BusinessStandard, 16 December 2009"

"He started his career as a rationing officer in the Civil Supplies Department. Later, after he completed his law degree, he worked as a junior lawyer under stalwart Burgula Ramakrishna Rao, who later became the Chief Minister of the state [Andhra Pradesh]."

"It was a decisive period in India's move from a socialist-style economy to greater privatisation, engineered by Mr Singh who was to go on to become prime minister himself."

"He was voted out of office in 1996 - the first Indian outside of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty to last a full-term - the economy was on a path of rapid growth."

"The real Narasimha Rao comes across more in the spoken part of the interview than in the written responses. But then, that is Narasimha Rao: Always preferring to be cautious than to be forthcoming."

"He could speak several Indian and foreign languages, he served under both Indira Gandhi and her son Rajiv, as foreign, defence and home minister. His political activism dated back to the struggle for independence. also a poet and writer and after his retirement he wrote a book following the career of a person rising through the ranks of Indian politics."

"In July 1991, he opened the economy and dismantled import controls, lowered customs duties, and devalued the currency. … The move virtually abolished licensing controls on private investment, dropped tax rates, and broke public sector monopolies. It was felt as though a second independence had arrived."