Manjul Bajaj
Manjul Bajaj is a writer from India. She graduated in Economics from Delhi University and then did a Masters in Rural Management and another in Environmental Science. For much of her adult life she worked in the field of rural development. India's seemingly sleepy villages, its seething beneath the surface small towns, the wisdom and courage of ordinary people living unimaginably difficult lives, the diversity, the complexity, the sheer depth of the Indian subcontinent's many traditions, rituals, philosophies and ways of life, its music, literature, crafts and performing arts, its varied languages - all of these fascinate her, as do the many conflicts and contradictions that arise as the country grows and modernizes. Through her fiction she attempts to explore and understand the beauty and confusion of India, and what being a modern person belonging to this very ancient civilization and culture entails.
She lives in Goa with her husband.
“She will not believe me if I tell her love is all anyone ever needs. Everything else – the fast cars, the private aeroplanes, the mansions, the diamonds, the watches, the fancy clothes, the perfect bodies, the publicity, the awards, the applause – all are ways of filling the emptiness created by the lack of love.”
“Whatever wisdom I have has been hard-earned – each meaning carefully culled out of the dictionary of human experiences and emotions and put in its precise place in the matrix. Meaning doesn’t come easy. The Great Crossword Setter in the Sky is capricious and wilful, demanding absolute obedience. You can waste the better part of a lifetime arguing about the randomness of the clues, the setting of the squares, why a certain square is black and not white as you need it to be, question the whole point of doing the crossword – what, after all, is to be gained by solving it. Only after all the chattering is over and you give your complete attention to it, does the perfection of the pattern reveal itself. As is, where is, everything fits. And at the end, when it’s all done, there is no reward to be had – the joy of doing it right is all the reward there ever is. (A Deepavali Gift)”
“Time is like a barber, it shears you first and then shows you your own face in the mirror. (Marrying Nusrat)”
“A well-worn marriage was like a shop-soiled currency note. Its only fault was that it had been in circulation for too long – it didn’t smell fresh, feel crisp to your fingers and fill you with a sense of possibilities as you held it in your hand, like a newly minted, fresh-from-the-press one did.”
“There is no greatness in dying for love, Raakha, she wanted to say. Those who die untimely, violent deaths don’t become ashes. They become guilty scars on the flesh of the living. They become wounds that never heal no matter how much time passes.”
“We are more than our feelings. Feelings are like leaves and flowers on the tree of our being. They are the first to dance in the breeze, the first to blossom in springtime, the first to sparkle in the rain. But come the cold and frost, we discover that the bare branches of our values and the roots of our traditions are the structure we stand on.”
“History remembers only the names of the conquerors. There are no pages devoted to the scruples of the losers.”