I am a Bengali and an Englishman.
I am a striking illustration of the survival of the unfittest.
I am often asked: `We hear so many stories about you. Are they true?' I reply, `If they are for me, you should discount 95 per cent, but if against, the whole of 100 per cent.'
When I write in English I am not writing as an Indian or an Englishman. I am just a writer. Writers know no nationality.
I would also set down, as a matter of moral obligation, that I consider Kipling to be the only English writer who will have a permanent place in English literature with books on Indian themes, and who will also be read by everyone who wants to know not only British India but also timeless India.
The Beeb does not have the faintest idea of Victorian norms and etiquette. They play to the popular culture. Britain is a corrupt civilization now.
Do you know what religion is? It is a revolt against death. A revolt against biology, a reaction against decay.
A man who cannot endure dirt, dust, stench, noise, ugliness, disorder, heat and cold has no right to live in India.
Do we live at all? This would seem an absurd question, for none of us commit suicide, though to be honest, I would confess that I have come to feel that a large majority of the persons I know should do so, because I cannot see any point in their remaining alive.
The conduct of American women, however, I cannot even now understand unless I attribute it to the sad but inexorable law of American impingement on Asia that the United States will never export any of its products to the East except those of which every decent American is ashamed, taken with its compliment that in retaliation, the East will set its lowest adventurers on the distributors of American money.
Salvation is never the object of religious observances and worship of the Hindus. The main object is worldly prosperity, and this absorption in the world has made the doctrine of rebirth in it the most appealing and strongly held belief among all notions put forward by them about existence of life after death. They so loved the world that they made the possibility of leaving it for good even after many cycles of rebirth as remote and difficult as possible.