Close Quote by Amitava Kumar

I thought I'd be the first to introduce herbal tea to Patna. White tea, ginger tea, rooibos, camomile. No one touched it. On subsequent…

— Amitava Kumar

Any real piece of writing is an act of courage.

— Amitava Kumar

We live in a cynical system where the powerful are able to exploit the demand of the aggressive few, from whichever religion or group,…

— Amitava Kumar

For some members of the radical Left, particularly in the West, people in developing countries are an ideological abstraction, on whom fantasies of liberation…

— Amitava Kumar

The writer will write in his or her words, but the readers, even when they are not reading you, will take it elsewhere entirely.

— Amitava Kumar

My past makes me an insider, but my profession makes me an outsider. A writer always stands outside to report on reality.

— Amitava Kumar

“There is no point in fighting condescension with condescension.”

— Amitava Kumar

We learn that our lives find narrative form neither in the tired, familiar slogans of our captains nor in the symmetries of ideological camps,…

— Amitava Kumar

All good works of art must ask this question: 'You want to breathe free, yes, but do you know how to kiss?'

— Amitava Kumar

An essay is not an op-ed that tells its reader what to think. An essay is a complicated working-out of one's own contradictions and…

— Amitava Kumar

Does the entry of Indian H-1B worker augur a change in the relations of production in the world of cybertechnology? No, but the presence…

— Amitava Kumar

Michael Ondaatje’s work taught me how to be at home in fragments, and how to think about a big story in carefully curated vignettes.…

— Amitava Kumar