8 Quotes & Sayings By Neel Mukherjee

Neel Mukherjee is an Indian author. He was born in Calcutta (now Kolkata), India in 1967. He was educated at Loreto House, Calcutta, and graduated with a Master's degree in English literature from the University of Calcutta. Mukherjee completed his PhD in English literature from Jadavpur University, Kolkata. He joined the Sanskrit department of the University of Calcutta in 1993 as a lecturer Read more

He started his creative writing career by publishing short stories in the "New Strings" literary magazine published in Kolkata in 1994. His first full-length novel, "The Lives of Others", deal with themes of alienation and isolation in modern life, was published in 1996 by Haranam Enterprises. He has since published three more novels: "The Middle Man" (1998), "The Sky's a Neighborhood" (2003) and "The Hungry Tide" (2009). His last novel, "The Circle of Reason", was published by Penguin Books India on 7 September 2013.

The book was longlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize. Two films have been made from his novels: "The Sky's a Neighborhood" (2005) directed by Anurag Kashyap and starring Rani Mukerji and Rahul Bose, and "The Hungry Tide" (2013) directed by Amit Dutta and starring Priyanshu Chatterjee, Konkona Sen Sharma and Ratna Pathak Shah. In 2015, Mukherjee was awarded The first Katha Sarakhi Award for Literature for his contribution to Bengali literature as well as a cash award of 30 lakhs for his contribution to Hindi literature.

In 2015 he released his first book for children called Pachisi which is a collection of several short stories for children as well as adults. In 2016 he received the Sahitya Akademi Award for Bengali translation for his novel The Sky's a Neighborhood In 2017 he received the Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose National Award for Literature from Government of India .

It could be said of him that while others chased...
1
It could be said of him that while others chased the mirage of happiness, he was happy with being content. Neel Mukherjee
2
There is a large gap between being an activist out of the idealism that comes from books, conversations, the fire of youth and being one because you have lived through the depredations that life has thrown at you. Neel Mukherjee
3
Mollycoddling was the mother's duty; the father's lay elsewhere. As a consequence, his four older children feared and respected him, as they had been taught to do, and the love the professed to feel, had they been asked and had they answered truthfully or even had access to the truth, was of a duty-bound, obligatory kind too, a love issuing from commandment and tradition and the notion of family, not one from the tides of the heart or the unbridled, inexplicable pull of feelings. If painted, that love would take the form of a polite and manicured wash of pleasant colours, not the hurl-and-splatter of impastoed reds. Neel Mukherjee
4
People talk of rage as something fluid; it boils, flows, spills over, scalds. For her, it is not any of these things. Instead it is a vast, frozen sea, solid as rock, unthawable. She has never seen the sea, but she knows it wraps around three-quarters of the world. All her anger is that and more. Neel Mukherjee
5
Events fall into a pattern that we can only discern retrospectively. We credit ourselves with far more agency than we actually possess. Things happen because they happen. Neel Mukherjee
6
I couldn't make any sense of this logic, that the better off got more and those had little got less. The world ran on this law and only on this. Neel Mukherjee
7
The freedom fighters in India's long struggle for independence from British rule, or members of the African National Congress, were once classed as terrorists. History, as they say, is written by victors, but history also has many cunning corridors - how much time must elapse before all those tricky side-passages are revealed? Neel Mukherjee