Bharati Mukherjee Quotes

One Of The Early Tip-offs To Me About The Enormous Changes That Were Going On With Being In A Bangalore House, Home, Where The Young Woman From A Nearby Village, Who Had Been Hired To Baby Sit Newborn Twins, Suddenly Said After Two Weeks Of Work: 'i'm Sorry, This Is Too Much Work, I'm Going To Try Applying For Call Center Jobs. The Pay Is Better.'

But, Christ, There's A Difference Between Exotic And Foreign, Isn't There? Exotic Means You Know How To Use Your Foreignness, Or You Make Yourself A Little Foreign In Order To Appear Exotic. Real Foreign Is A Little Scary, Believe Me.

I'm Very Moved By Chaos Theory, And That Sense Of Energy. That Quantum Physics. We Don't Really, In Hindu Tradition, Have A Father Figure Of A God. It's About Cosmic Energy, A Little Spark Of Which Is Inside Every Individual As The Soul.

My Life Has Gotten A Little More Complicated Than My Ability To Describe It. That Used To Be The Definition Of Madness, Now It's Just Continuous Overload.

Growing Up In An Old-fashioned Bengali Hindu Family And Going To A Convent School Run By Stern Irish Nuns, I Was Brought Up To Revere Rules. Without Rules, There Was Only Anarchy.

In Traditional Hindu Families Like Ours, Men Provided And Women Were Provided For. My Father Was A Patriarch And I A Pliant Daughter. The Neighborhood I'd Grown Up In Was Homogeneously Hindu, Bengali-speaking, And Middle-class. I Didn't Expect Myself To Ever Disobey Or Disappoint My Father By Setting My Own Goals And Taking Charge Of My Future.

Bengalis Love To Celebrate Their Language, Their Culture, Their Politics, Their Fierce Attachment To A City That Has Been Famously Dying For More Than A Century. They Resent With Equal Ferocity The Reflex Stereotyping That Labels Any Civic Dysfunction Anywhere In The World 'another Calcutta.'

The Picture Of Mother Teresa That I Remember From My Childhood Is Of A Short, Sari-wearing Woman Scurrying Down A Red Gravel Path Between Manicured Lawns. She Would Have In Tow One Or Two Slower-footed, Sari-clad Young Indian Nuns. We Thought Her A Freak. Probably Wed Picked Up On Unvoiced Opinions Of Our Loreto Nuns.

Mother Teresas Detractors Have Accused Her Of Overemphasizing Calcuttans Destitution And Of Coercing Conversion From The Defenseless. In The Context Of Lost Causes, Mother Teresa Took On Battles She Knew She Could Win. Taken Together, It Seems To Me, The Criticisms Of Her Work Do Not Undermine Or Topple Her Overall Achievement.

[on Her Writing Agenda:] Make The Familiar Exotic; The Exotic Familiar.

Ancestral Habits Of Mind Can Be Constricting; They Also Confer One's Individuality.

I Am Aware Of Myself As A Four-hundred-year-old Woman, Born In The Captivity Of A Colonial, Pre-industrial Oral Culture And Living Now As A Contemporary New Yorker.