Best Quotes from The End Of Karma by Somini Sengupta with Page Numbers

His single-minded goal has been to outrun that destiny.

She never, ever rolls her eyes when he tells her about his dreams.

A golden child is different.

I feel a lot of pressure… It’s from inside.

Sudha taught her children to bow each time they crossed her path.

It was a mutual collaboration between me and my mom that brought the magic.

If she could have put an electric fence around it, she would have, so fiercely did she want to make it a sanctuary from the disorder outside.

I make my own.

What he really wanted to do was to get a postgraduate degree in business management.

He is supremely self-confident.

"Perhaps the rains will be good this year, enough to slosh the fields. Perhaps there will be rice, enough to fill half the belly."

"I chose to leave. I chose to be someone."

"The air suddenly cools. It is a good omen, people say."

"She figures some of the other mothers might find it strange, which is fine by her. She isn’t forcing it on anyone. She just wants to make the change herself—quietly, which is her style."

"There were also times when the gates of Central Park offered only a gossamer curtain between this India and that."

"The more Supriya learns about what had happened to this girl, the more burdened she feels. "I feel heavy," she says."

"The village is short of even drinking water. Also, two years of drought have meant no one is able to sow rice in their fields."

"Mani stands out in this crowd. She does not dance. She does not even stir her hips."

"The infinite sky. The clean air. Home. This is why she comes back, once a year, every year, to her mother’s house."

"No one in her family has bothered to arrange a marriage for her. So she chooses a man for herself."

"I feel terrified when I think about those things now. What did I do? Who was I?"

"Each piece of the tableau is as important as the other: a pool of blood, a smashed head, a handwritten note."

"The rebellion makes people distrustful, quiet, afraid of everyone."

"Young people growing up in the wasteland know what else is out there. They know what they have been denied for generations."

"They’re expensive. Villagers need them. There may be a chicken to slaughter the next day, or firewood to be chopped."

"Why not just keep the machete?" I ask. Rakhi looks at me like I am an idiot. The Maoists never keep a machete, she says.

"In my mam's time, when the Maoists briefly flourished, India was a desperately poor country. The Maoists of noonday resurfaced during India’s golden age, at a time of unprecedented prosperity."

"She knows she cannot stay in police custody forever. Nor can she go back to where she comes from."

"We can never eat rice at home" is how Rakhi puts it. This is a literal translation of a Bengali expression that refers to a sense of being cast out.

"I want to live now. I want to have a decent life, like you have. Before, I didn’t care if I lived or died."

There are moments that shape the political outlook of a generation, and sometimes its moral compass as well.

It had proved to be a potent organizing issue for the Sangh for more than half a century.

To redress centuries of subjugation, it set aside government jobs for Dalits and adivasis—quotas that were extended later to intermediary castes officially called 'backward.'

The promise of free India was to radically transform a poor and stratified society into one where all its citizens, regardless of their station at birth, could have a shot at improving their lot.

Political violence is something we grew up with.

The protests hit home. They were about the one thing that affected the life of every Indian: corruption.

If someone was doing the same thing in America, they would be revered. Why not in India?

I had a fear maybe they would brainwash her, convince her you’ll find a better guy.

Had the issue of corruption been solved by my father’s generation we wouldn’t be fighting today.

This would not be his karma. He would not follow the path his parents had in mind. He would make his own.

“When it was born, at midnight, on August 15, 1947, India was a most unlikely nation. It contained a multiplicity of faiths, languages, and races. There was no obvious glue to bind its people, only an idea that was radical for its time.”

“Free expression is a celebrated legacy. From India’s creative ferment has come an extraordinarily rich mix of music, dance, theater, and literature—not to mention the world’s most prolific film industry.”

“India has wrestled with freedom of expression since independence.”

“With all respect, every day, thousands of people die, but still the world moves on.”

“The right to free expression becomes one of democratic India’s increasingly delicate pillars, but it is one that Rinu’s generation takes as a given.”

“They spur an intense legal and political battle, between a state machinery nervous about the nonsense that flows through the pipes of the Internet and a generation of digital natives for whom it is like air.”

“Intolerance is going to result in irreparable violence if we cannot control it now.”

“If you can’t protect your citizens from troublemakers on the street, you might as well squash anything that can upset the troublemakers.”

“The demands of digital natives sharpen India’s dilemma over free expression.”

“The debates over free expression online are nowhere more challenging, in my view, than they are in India.”

Monica asserts herself in one notable way: she chooses to love him. She chooses to love.

Tradition has changed. The new generation wants to live the way they are.

The killings changed Kuldeep’s family in ways that they could barely imagine at the time.

His daughter would live in a different kind of country.

Amit’s principal obsession was to find a good school for her. "I dream she becomes a big personality of the nation," he said.

Love is a powerful fable about trust, devotion, and disobedience.

The most basic freedom is thwarted in India: the freedom to love who you want.

Accident ho gaya,' said Mandeep’s older brother. 'An accident has happened'.

They, too, could afford to live off of the family property. Their father owned two buildings.

It is a case of young men in New India defending traditional rules of power.

"I am not bound by my past. I make me."

"She has risen to all its demands: studied, scored well on the critical exams, become captain of the girls volleyball team."

"If my future will be with him, I’ll be sitting in the house and crying every day."

"What a boon it turns out to be for Arsha. The school is run by a charity... It is where she can prove her mettle. It is where she finds beauty, in song and dance and poetry."

"He loves her but he also sabotages her."

"The main thing I want for my children is that they do something better."

"I want that girls should be able to walk on the road at any time."

"School is her exit ticket from the press stand."

"In my heart it’s still there: can I become a police officer?"

"Each daughter pitches in. I never see Arsha’s brother, Badal, being put to work."