Quotes from Suketu Mehta

Migrants are the creators of some of the biggest and most liquid capital flows anywhere. They send back some $600 billion in remittances every year,6 which amounts to three times more than the direct gains from abolishing all trade barriers, four times more than all foreign aid, and 100 times the amount of all debt relief.

Today, the eight richest individuals on earth, all men, own more than does half the planet,6 or 3.7 billion people, combined. The top 1 per cent have more wealth than the bottom 99 per cent combined. There are 1,542 billionaires today, whose fortunes rose by a fifth in 2017,7 to $6 trillion – equivalent to the GDP of the UK and Germany combined.

The immigration divide is also an urban–rural divide.4 In country after country, rural voters elect xenophobes. The majority of people who voted for Brexit lived in the British countryside; multicultural London was the Tower of Babel for them. The areas that have the fewest immigrants are the ones most afraid of them.

In 2016, 83 percent of the winners in the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair were children of immigrants.

Countries like Canada realize this, and have seen the burgeoning American resistance to immigration as something to be exploited. "If you guys cannot figure out your immigration system, we're going to invite the best and brightest to come north of the border," said Jason Kenney, Canada's immigration minister for Stephen Harper's Conservative government, before a 2013 trip to the San Francisco Bay Area.

Each Bombayite inhabits his own Bombay.

The railway terminus and university and court buildings of the Fort area are either lovable or Gothic follies, depending on your taste, but you can look at them and feel something. There are no modern buildings in Bombay that make you feel anything.

In 1770, the British East India Company – the world's first multinational corporation – increased the taxes it forcibly collected on crops, and ten million people, a third of Bengal, starved to death.

The first thing that a new migrant sends to his family back home isn't money; it's a story. Of the arduous journey here, the snow on the streets, the rude immigration agent or the kindly social worker; the lights of the Eiffel Tower or the cold reception from the cousins with whom he's staying.

Bombay is both, the beautiful parts and the ugly parts, fighting block by block, to the death, for victory.

The greatest sorrow, said Dante, was to recall in misery the time when we were happy. The sadness of a lost happy time.

I live in cities by choice, and I'm pretty sure I will die in a city.

An Irani serves the simplest of menus: tea, coffee, bread and butter (always Polson), salted biscuits, cakes, hard bread, buttered buns, hard-boiled eggs, buns with mincemeat, berry pilaf, and mutton biryani.

On the Churchgate train, past Charni Road station as it sees the sea, past the gymkhanas—Islam, Catholic, Hindu, Parsi—as the shacks fade away, Bombay becomes a different city, an earlier city, a beautiful city. All of a sudden there is the blue sky and the clear water of Marine Drive, and everybody looks toward the bay and starts breathing.

Rahul identifies the five builders who, along with the V.P. Naik government, ruined Bombay: the Makers, the Rahejas, the Dalamals, the Mittals, and the Tulsianis. Their names are immortalized on the office complexes they constructed at Nariman Point, which, in the original development plan, had been designated for educational and mixed-use residential housing.

When the rain stops, the air is suddenly sweetened. The trees and the shrubs and the weeds have dispensed fragrance into the air. Hundreds of long brown earthworms are crawling out of the softened ground. Bombay will open its windows and the rain-sweetened air will come in and Bombay will sleep well tonight. And if the first rain is early, you will sleep especially well tonight, because you still have fifteen days left till the beginning of school.

And at the moment of contact, they do not know if the hand that is reaching for theirs belongs to a Hindu or Muslim or Christian or Brahmin or untouchable or whether you were born in this city or arrived only this morning or whether you live in Malabar Hill or New York or Jogeshwari; whether you're from Bombay or Mumbai or New York. All they know is that you're trying to get to the city of gold, and that's enough. Come on board, they say. We'll adjust.

It was when I realised I had a new nationality: I was in exile. I am an adulterous resident: when I am in one city, I am dreaming of the other. I am an exile; citizen of the country of longing.

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.

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.

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

This is the true meaning of exile : some insurmountable force that keeps you from going back.

We lived in Bombay and we lived in Mumbai and sometimes, I lived in both of them at the same time.

Europeans extracted an estimated 222,505,049 hours of forced labour from African slaves between 1619 and 1865. Valued at the US minimum wage, with a modest rate of interest, that's worth $97 trillion – more than the entire global GDP.