26 Quotes by Nikesh Shukla

While 'Rap Trax!' recorded, Neel found some scrap paper and we started writing our first lyrics. Bandying about subject matter and title, we got stuck on the idea of 'cool', so my first rap song became 'Pretty Cool'. It was a symbol of our confidence. We weren't awesome cool or mega cool. We were only... pretty cool.

We'd taken up our positions on the benches between the school hall and a newly-installed outdoor basketball court. Being hip-hoppers, we were obliged to be obsessed with basketball. None of us had a ball.

I was proud to be brown in my own way. Well, I was at school; at school I was brown about the funky stuff that came with being vegetarian, like being really arrogant about it, declaring proudly to a room full of beefeaters when Mad Cow disease initially broke that it was 'Vishnu's way of telling y'all to stop eating and start worshipping'.

Tell me about Gang Starr,' said Nishant, in an effort to start a conversation I'd be interested in. 'One MC, one DJ...' 'Classic combo,' Anand affirmed.'No hype man?''No.''What do we need Anand for?' Nishant shrugged, ever the pragmatist, never the catcher of feelings.

Yo, bredren, we be the illest,' went my proclamation. 'We be the dopest,' Anand would follow. 'Our tunes are going to be good,' Nishant would finish with.

Anand finished up his cola cube transaction. I stepped up and slammed three pound coins on the counter like an oppressed inner-city youth born with the skills of rhythm and rhyme.

Integrate well. Move upwards in society. Be praised – until people worry that you’re doing too well, and then they remember that you’re foreign." (from "The Good Immigrant" by Nikesh Shukla)

Here, my mother’s mother would stitch clothes behind a sewing machine with Turkish women who had only wanted from life the privilege of work. Some decades later I was rolling a mat out, as one rolls the carpet of gentrification over our ancestors’ footprints, onto the floor of a room of exercising white bodies.

It’s a tree falling in a forest conundrum: if a white kid raps all the lyrics to ‘Gold Digger’ and there isn’t a black person around to hear it, is it still racist?