6 Quotes & Sayings By Kiran Nagarkar

  Kiran Nagarkar is a novelist, an award-winning literary critic and the author of ten award-winning books. He was born in Pune, Maharashtra to a Maharashtrian father and a Bengali mother. He received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Pune Read more

His first novel, The Scent of Jasmine (1995), won the Vodafone Crossword Book Award for Best First Fiction for 1996, and also won the Crossword Book Award for Best Novel in 1998. His second novel, The Life in Question (2002), was chosen by Time magazine as one of the best novels of 2002 in its list of "Best Books of the Year". His third novel, The River Tiber (2006) was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize (2007).

Nagarkar lives in Mumbai with his wife and two children.

1
Pain may be the only reality but if mankind had any sense it would pursue the delusion called happiness. All the philosophers and poets who tell us that pain and suffering have a place and purpose in the cosmic order of things are welcome to them. They are frauds. We justify pain because we do not know what to make of it, nor do we have any choice but to bear it. Happiness alone can make us momentarily larger than ourselves. Kiran Nagarkar
2
You can read all the books in the world on the Nazi concentration camps and the gas chambers, and yet reality will draw upon you only when you are put through that yourself. It is a law of God, or nature, if you prefer, that pain, suffering and grief cannot be transferred or known by proxy. Neither empathy nor sympathy but experience alone is a valid currency of affliction. It alone makes you a card-holding member all allows you to join the club of the wretched of the earth. All else is counterfeit. Kiran Nagarkar
3
When you deal with naked power from an inferior position, perspectives get distorted. He was the aggrieved party and yet he felt guilty and would continue to do so all his life. Kiran Nagarkar
4
Where do songs go when you cease to hear them? Where does the turbulence of the air disappear after thousands of birds flap their wings homeward at eventide? Where are the cries of the Rajput women who spatter their red palm prints on the wall and leap into the flames of johar? Where is my childhood, my catapult, my broken slate, my first parrot, my youth and first sin and all those that followed, where is my old age and the first time I saw the woman from Merta? Ask Gambhiree. She knows it all. Kiran Nagarkar
5
In the meanwhile, just see how profitable the fruits of non-violence are in this life. You stay pure while someone else, someone like me and my Rajput clan, does the sinning and the killing. While you religiously refrain yourself from bloodying your hands, you lend vast sums of money to finance the mightiest armies at minuscule decimal point percentages which add up to monstrous sums of interest. Kiran Nagarkar