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“And at the moment of contact, they do not know if the hand that is reaching for theirs belongs to a Hindu or Muslim or Christian or Brahmin or untouchable or whether you were born in this city or arrived only this morning or whether you live in Malabar Hill or New York or Jogeshwari; whether you’re from Bombay or Mumbai or New York. All they know is that you’re trying to get to the city of gold, and that’s enough. Come on board, they say. We’ll adjust.”
― Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

“It was when I realised I had a new nationality: I was in exile. I am an adulterous resident: when I am in one city, I am dreaming of the other. I am an exile; citizen of the country of longing.”
― Suketu Mehta

“A city like Bombay, like New York, that is a recent creation on the planet and does not have a substantial indigenous population, is full of restless people. Those who have come here have not been at ease somewhere else. And unlike others who may have been equally uncomfortable wherever they came from, these people got up and moved. As I have discovered, having once moved, it is difficult to stop moving.”
― Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

“Each person’s life is dominated by a central event, which shapes and distorts everything that comes after it and, in retrospect, everything that came before.”
― Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

“I am an exile; citizen of the country of longing.”
― Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

“Before you ask other people to respect the borders of the West, ask yourself if the West has ever respected anybody else's border.”
― Suketu Mehta, This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto

“This is the true meaning of exile : some insurmountable force that keeps you from going back.”
― Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

“Europeans extracted an estimated 222,505,049 hours of forced labour from African slaves between 1619 and 1865. Valued at the US minimum wage, with a modest rate of interest, that’s worth $97 trillion â€� more than the entire global GDP.”
― Suketu Mehta, This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto

“We lived in Bombay and we lived in Mumbai and sometimes, I lived in both of them at the same time.”
― Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

“All told, in the colonial period, Europeans increased their share of global GDP from 20 to 60 per cent, Hickel points out. ‘Europe didn’t develop the colonies. The colonies developed Europe.â€� The Scottish comedian Frankie Boyle sums it up: ‘We fear the arrival of immigrants that we have drawn here with the wealth we stole from them.”
― Suketu Mehta, This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto

“Anybody in the world can come to India and find home.”
― Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

“A hit man's character is defined above all by narcissism, that complex mix of egotism and self-hatred.”
― Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

“You can go home again, and you can also leave again. Once more, with confidence, into the world.”
― Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

“In the looking, I found the cities within me.”
― Suketu Mehta

“The man who comes to fix the cable approaches her when she is alone in the house. 'Is there anything to eat?' he asks. 'There are some chapatis,' she replies. 'Can I get something to eat?' he repeats.”
― Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

“It is the sexual frenzy of a closed society, and the women of Golpitha are the gutters for these men's emissions.”
― Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

“This is the biggest difference between the world’s two largest democracies: In India, the poor vote.”
― Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

“The different countries of India can be identified by the way each pronounces this word—from the Punjabi “bhaanchodâ€� to the thin Bambaiyya “pinchudâ€� to the Gujarati “bhenchowâ€� to the Bhopali elaboration “bhen-ka-lowda.â€� Parsis use it all the time, grandmothers, five-year-olds, casually and without any discernible purpose except as filler: “Here, bhenchod, get me a glass of water.â€� “Arre, bhenchod, I went to the bhenchod bank today.â€� As a boy, I would try consciously not to swear all day on the day of my birthday. I would take vows with the Jain kids: We will not use the B-word or the M-word.”
― Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

“One day in the 1980s, my maternal grandfather was sitting in a park in suburban London. An elderly British man came up to him and wagged a finger in his face. “Why are you here?â€� the man demanded. “Why are you in my country?â€� “Because we are the creditors,â€� responded my grandfather, who was born in India, worked all his life in colonial Kenya, and was now retired in London. “You took all our wealth, our diamonds. Now we have come to collect.â€� We are here, my grandfather was saying, because you were there.”
― Suketu Mehta, This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant's Manifesto

“For in this country, which of all civilizations has been devoted to the most exquisite consideration of the interior life—of the form, structure, and purpose of the self—we are individually multiple, severally alone.”
― Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

“Democracies have a weakness: If a bad law has enough money or people behind it, it stays on the books.”
― Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

“The whole system of visas and borders is less than a hundred years old; it only came into force in most places after World War II.”
― Suketu Mehta, This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto

“The stacks of pav have been sprinkled with chutneyâ€�
the top half of the inside of the bun is bathed in green chutney, the bottom with red garlic chutney�
and the assistant reaches out with one hand, in one continuous arc of his arm opening the pav, scooping up two of the vadas, one in each nest of pav, and delivering it to the hungry customer. I walk away from the stall and crush the vada by pressing down on it with the pav; little cracks appear in the crispy surface, and the vada oozes out its potato-and-pea mixture. I eat. The crispy batter, the mouthful of sweet-soft pav tempering the heat of the chutney, the spices of the vada mixture —dark with garam masala and studded with whole cloves of garlic that look like cashews—get masticated into a good mouthful, a good mouth-feel. My stomach is getting filled, and I feel I am eating something nourishing after a long spell of sobbing. Borkar has done his dharma.”
― Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

“The greatest sorrow, said Dante, was to recall in misery the time when we were happy. The sadness of a lost happy time.”
― Suketu Mehta, This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto

“Democracies have a weakness: If a bad law has enough money or people behind it, it stays on the books. This allows the perpetual continuation of the most absurd, unreasonable practices. In America I can walk into a gun show and buy a handgun for less than the price of a good dinner for two, even if I am insane or a convicted criminal. In Bombay I can walk into a flat I’ve rented for a year and stay there for the rest of my life, pass it on to my sons after me, and defy the lawful proprietor’s efforts to get my ass off his property. In”
― Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

“Today, the eight richest individuals on earth, all men, own more than does half the planet,6 or 3.7 billion people, combined. The top 1 per cent have more wealth than the bottom 99 per cent combined. There are 1,542 billionaires today, whose fortunes rose by a fifth in 2017,7 to $6 trillion â€� equivalent to the GDP of the UK and Germany combined.”
― Suketu Mehta, This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto

“On the Churchgate train, past Charni Road station as it sees the sea, past the gymkhanas—Islam, Catholic, Hindu, Parsi—as the shacks fade away, Bombay becomes a different city, an earlier city, a beautiful city. All of a sudden there is the blue sky and the clear water of Marine Drive, and everybody looks toward the bay and starts breathing.”
― Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

“It is as difficult to move down the caste ladder as it is to move up.”
― Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

“In 1770, the British East India Company â€� the world’s first multinational corporation â€� increased the taxes it forcibly collected on crops, and ten million people, a third of Bengal, starved to death.”
― Suketu Mehta, This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto

“I live in cities by choice, and I’m pretty sure I will die in a city.”
― Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found