Quotes from Amitava Kumar

In academe, we ought to temper our criticism of the idea of self-help because, in a more complex way, it is precisely what we offer our students through our teaching.

Ideally, I'd like to write poetry for public performances and prose for a different, more contemplative kind of consumption.

My favourite writer is John Maxwell Coetzee.

When we were getting married the Hindu way in Arrah, we had an old guest who asked my wife what her 'good name' was. I think she'd heard that I had married a Muslim. When my wife said, 'Mona Ahmed Ali,' the lady looked at me and exclaimed, 'Oh, so you've married a terrorist.'

Much of what we regard as truth in the war on terror is actually rather suspect.

Mistaken identity, of course, has been the province of much postcolonial fiction. An important feature of this writing is the manner in which misrecognition has haunted all cognition.

In 1997, Alain de Botton published his book 'How Proust Can Change Your Life.' I was charmed by it. I remember using it in a course on cultural criticism for a graduate class that had a mix of theorists and creative writers.

Our public culture is one in which only the young and the beautiful will succeed. If you're forty, you're finished.

Bad writing as a conscious goal is liberating for students: They are freed to be creative in a new and different way.

Such is the impurity of our enterprise, as writers or as critics, that even in the act of proclaiming our freedom from the demands of authenticity, we are never free from brandishing it.

I'm generalizing wildly, but academic books find safety in explanations that reduce the chaos of social life.

I have to tell you, when I hear the song 'Jiya ho Bihar ke Lala,' I want to throw the history books out of the window and dance!

For some members of the radical Left, particularly in the West, people in developing countries are an ideological abstraction, on whom fantasies of liberation are projected from a comfortable distance.

Long ago, when I was in higher secondary school in Delhi, I read an essay by George Orwell in which he said there was a voice in his head that put into words everything he was seeing. I realised I did that, too, or maybe I started doing it in imitation.

One of my earliest lessons in guilt was imparted in childhood through the story of the death of Mahatma Gandhi's father.

What is the difference between the novelist and the liar? At some moments, I have often wondered.

I have a couple of thick files about things that have gone wrong between people; I ought to write about them in the manner of a thriller. It would finally convince me that I was a real writer.

We learn that our lives find narrative form neither in the tired, familiar slogans of our captains nor in the symmetries of ideological camps, but in the differences that thrive behind settled, more clear-cut divisions.

A long, negative review I wrote of Rushdie's novel 'Fury' earned me a rebuke from the writer: He told an administrator at the college where I teach, and who had invited Rushdie to come speak, that he wouldn't share the stage with me.

The recurring question that anyone from Bihar gets is whether Patna has improved. I'm not interested in answering that question.

I don't think any writer is a friend to the reader if he or she is not funny.

Does the entry of Indian H-1B worker augur a change in the relations of production in the world of cybertechnology? No, but the presence of such workers - their skills and their histories - introduce contradictions into the system that are not always easily absorbed or dissolved.

No civilization has a monopoly on tolerance; each is capable of bigotry.

For years, in the wake of Rushdie, I had imagined magical realism to be the last refuge of the non-resident Indian.