Aravind Adiga

“So I stood around that big square of books. Standing around books, even books in a foreign language, you feel a kind of electricity buzzing up toward you, Your Excellency. It just happens, the way you get erect around girls wearing tight jeans."Except here what happens is that your brain starts to hum.”

“I put my hand out and wiped the vomit from his lips, and cooed soothing words to him. It squeezed my heart to see him suffer like this - but where my genuine concern for him ended and where my self-interest began, I could not tell: no servant can ever tell what the motives of his heart are."Do we loathe our masters behind a facade of love - or do we love them behind a facade of loathing?"We are made mysteries to ourselves by the Rooster Coop we are locked in.”

“There was a fierce jam on the road to Gurgaon. Every five minutes the traffic would tremble - we'd move a foot - hope would rise - then the red lights would flash on the cars ahead of me, and we'd be stuck again. Eveyone honked. Every now and then, the various horns, each with its own pitch, blended into one continuous wail that sounded like a calf taken from its mother. Fumes filled the air. Wisps of blue exhaust glowed in front of every headlight; the exhaust grew so fat and thick it could not rise or escape, but spread horizontally, sluggish and glossy, making a kind of fog around us. Matches were continually being struck - the drivers of autorickshaws lit cigarettes, adding tobacco pollution to petrol pollution. ”

“These are the three main diseases of this country, sir: typhoid, cholera, and election fever. This last one is the worst; it makes people talk and talk about things that they have no say in ... Would they do it this time? Would they beat the Great Socialist and win the elections? Had they raised enough money of their own, and bribed enough policemen, and bought enough fingerprints of their own, to win? Like eunuchs discussing the Kama Sutra, the voters discuss the elections in Laxmangarh.”

“It is an ancient and venerated custom of people in my country to start a story by praying to a Higher Power."I guess, Your Excellency, that I too should start off by kissing some god's arse."Which god's arse, though? There are so many choices."See, the Muslims have one god."The Christians have three gods."And we Hindus have 36,000,004 divine arses to choose from.”

“Out of respect for the love of liberty shown by the Chinese people, and also in the belief that the future of the world lies with the yellow man and the brown man now that our erstwhile master, the white-skinned man, has wasted himself through buggery, cell phone usage, and drug abuse, I offer to tell you, free of charge, the truth about Bangalore."By telling you my life's story."See, when you come to Bangalore, and stop at a traffic light, some boy will run up to your car and knock on your window, while holding up a bootlegged copy of an American business book wrapped carefully in cellophane and with a title like:TEN SECRETS OF BUSINESS SUCCESS!orBECOME AN ENTREPRENEUR IN SEVEN EASY DAYS!"Don't waste your money on those American books. They're so yesterday."I am tomorrow.”

“The story of a poor man's life is written on his body, in a sharp pen.”