Quotes from Suketu Mehta

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

A hit man's character is defined above all by narcissism, that complex mix of egotism and self-hatred.

In the looking, I found the cities within me.

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.

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.

It is the sexual frenzy of a closed society, and the women of Golpitha are the gutters for these men's emissions.

This is the biggest difference between the world's two largest democracies: In India, the poor vote.

For in this country, which of all civilizations has been devoted to the most exquisite consideration of the interior life—of the form, structure, and purpose of the self—we are individually multiple, severally alone.

The whole system of visas and borders is less than a hundred years old; it only came into force in most places after World War II.

Democracies have a weakness: If a bad law has enough money or people behind it, it stays on the books.

The man who comes to fix the cable approaches her when she is alone in the house. 'Is there anything to eat?' he asks. 'There are some chapatis,' she replies. 'Can I get something to eat?' he repeats.

It is as difficult to move down the caste ladder as it is to move up.

A friend of mine was working with an international NGO in a refugee camp in Bangladesh in 2017 when she noticed something odd: there were children older than five and younger than two, but very few two- to five-year-olds. It was, she discovered, because when the Rohingya fled from the army and the militias, children of that generation couldn't run as fast as the older ones and were too heavy to be held by their parents. They fell behind, and the soldiers advanced on them with machetes.

The gang war will never end. Because at it's core , it is not the gangsters against the police or the gangster against another. It is a young man with a Mauser against history personal and political, it is revolution one murder at a time.

Love exposes you, makes you vulnerable and kills the personas you built on top of your true self.

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.

A populist is, basically, a gifted story teller; someone who can tell a false story well. And the way to fight them is by telling a true story better.