Amitava Kumar Quotes

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Amitava Kumar

Profession : Writer

Birth : March 17, 1963

Muslim anger has, of course, been stoked by America's war in Iraq and by Israel's brutal policies toward Palestine and Lebanon.

Amitava Kumar

Imagination makes us shape better stories, sure, but it also allows us to multiply possibilities.

Amitava Kumar

Hemingway's short story 'Hills Like White Elephants' is a classic of its kind. It illustrates Hemingway's 'iceberg theory,' which requires that a story find its effectiveness by hiding more than it reveals.

Amitava Kumar

In the U.S., the FBI or the people I met from the Department of Justice might be ignorant about Islam or about the East more generally, but I felt they were less willing to make blanket judgments about Muslims. This caution was less evident with some of the authorities I met in India.

Amitava Kumar

India allows you the luxury of a million inequalities. You can be a schoolboy selling tea to passengers sitting in a state transport bus, but you are royalty when compared to a shirtless, barefoot village boy, from what was traditionally considered an untouchable caste, living on snails and small fish - and sometimes rats.

Amitava Kumar

The recurring question that anyone from Bihar gets is whether Patna has improved. I'm not interested in answering that question.

Amitava Kumar

In 'Bombay-London-New York,' I speak of the ways in which the 'soft' emotion of nostalgia is turned into the 'hard' emotion of fundamentalism.

Amitava Kumar

I should not romanticize the simplicity of a village. For instance, the place from where I used to buy a packet of glucose biscuits in my village is now selling cellphones.

Amitava Kumar

Writers interest me for their style, their obsessions, the ways in which they approach the world.

Amitava Kumar

I haven't reported in grand detail on rituals of American life, road journeys or malls or the death of steel-manufacturing towns. I think this is because I feel a degree of alienation that I cannot combat.

Amitava Kumar

Writing gives me the license to go, explore, and learn about the world.

Amitava Kumar

Hindi writing, as well as Hindi journalism, is a great gift to Indian writing.

Amitava Kumar

Such is the impurity of our enterprise, as writers or as critics, that even in the act of proclaiming our freedom from the demands of authenticity, we are never free from brandishing it.

Amitava Kumar

A wonderful innovation of the Occupy Wall Street movement was the use of the human microphone - the name given to the body of the audience repeating, amplifying, each statement made by the speaker.

Amitava Kumar

I'm generalizing wildly, but academic books find safety in explanations that reduce the chaos of social life.

Amitava Kumar

Much of what we regard as truth in the war on terror is actually rather suspect.

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, to bargain for more power or cynical advantage.

Amitava Kumar

With non-fiction, there is the struggle to be accurate. With fiction, it is a bit different: the desire to let imagination take you to new places.

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 of such workers - their skills and their histories - introduce contradictions into the system that are not always easily absorbed or dissolved.

Amitava Kumar

Criticism is, or ought to be, a judicious act.

Amitava Kumar