22 Quotes by Suketu Mehta

Bombay is a city in which everything is on broad, public display. Nothing is hidden.

I became the confessor. At a certain point, they weren't even talking to me, they were explaining themselves.

I am an exile; citizen of the country of longing.

Each person’s life is dominated by a central event, which shapes and distorts everything that comes after it and, in retrospect, everything that came before.

A city like Bombay, like New York, that is a recent creation on the planet and does not have a substantial indigenous population, is full of restless people. Those who have come here have not been at ease somewhere else. And unlike others who may have been equally uncomfortable wherever they came from, these people got up and moved. As I have discovered, having once moved, it is difficult to stop moving.

All told, in the colonial period, Europeans increased their share of global GDP from 20 to 60 per cent, Hickel points out. ‘Europe didn’t develop the colonies. The colonies developed Europe.’ The Scottish comedian Frankie Boyle sums it up: ‘We fear the arrival of immigrants that we have drawn here with the wealth we stole from them.

Before you ask other people to respect the borders of the West, ask yourself if the West has ever respected anybody else’s border.

You can go home again, and you can also leave again. Once more, with confidence, into the world.

Anybody in the world can come to India and find home.