Quotes from Kiran Nagarkar

The mind must have the final say and sway over the body and not the other way round

Life teaches me a hundred things every day, and I forget ninety-nine of them, sometimes all hundred of them.

There is nothing, absolutely nothing, one cannot do without in life. All wants are dispensable as long as one can absent oneself.

I am a very possessive woman. But I knew that if I were to keep you, I would have to let go of you. I

There is no truer meditation than music and no journey of discovery greater than that of looking within. A

Enlightenment and tolerance, it would seem, have little to do with being lettered or unlettered. His

Sometimes I think we have no present, only the past.

We rework our own memories and reinvent ourselves to suit our tastes and predilections every day.

Perhaps moksha lies in not thinking about the afterlife.

Anyway you looked at it, I had little choice but to bray along with the others. It was too late now. I had let my diffidence and dislike for exhibitionism get the better of me.

The past was with my countrymen every moment of their lives. History for then was that fabled second chance. They could rework the past and get it right this time around.

But to censor it would be tantamount to a kind of doctoring. I would be just as guilty of a normative version of the past as the charans and their ilk. And not to write at all would mean that i, too, believes that truth was a good slogan but not to be confronted in the corridors of real life.

You would be entirely justified if you spent your entire life railing against your misfortune. But there is another option. Rise above your fate. Internalize your calamity and give it a heroic dimension as Bhishma did. It was a thoughtful disquisition and its central insight applied to all of us since there is no man born who is not handicapped in one way or another. So it is up to us to make the best of a botched job. After

She was willing to put in as much effort as necessary to discipline Ravan and bring him back to the straight and narrow. But Ravan's mute forbearance wore her down. All her life she had assumed that persistent endeavour was always followed by success. She now realized she was wrong.

They should have killed for water, the men and women of the CWD chawls. People have been known to kill for less: religion; language; the flag; the colour of a person's skin or his caste; breaking the queue at a petrol pump.

Rains are an act of God in India. And God as we know is a law unto himself. He is not responsible, neither is He accountable. That is the essence of God: He gives with two hands and takes away with eight more. Why else would Indian gods and goddesses have several pairs of hands?

You couldn't ever be off your guard with this boy. Even when you had just saved his soul and begun to trust him, he would spring a rotten question on you and drag you all the way down to perdition.

But if detachment is really fear of failure and hence never putting oneself to the test, or if it's fear of being hurt, humiliated or rejected, then one is closing all doors to life, to the possibilities of happiness, pain, dejection, achievement and experience. Reincarnation may be on the cards for most of us but we live this particular life, whether it is maya or whatever else, only once. This is our only chance to engage it. Excess

my joyous companion of the mornings. Who knows what pain we cause our dearest ones?

Who makes up or invents proverbs? They are so often a crockful of never-mind-what. They pile up platitude upon platitude which the officious and unctuous mouth in and out of season and are taken to be the distillates of wisdom.

It's not enough to be honest and loyal, frankly it doesn't matter if you are not, so long as you are perceived to be so.

I have the strange feeling that man created language but now it creates us.

There's something about doing a job well that is akin to art.