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.

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 complicities.

If India breaks your heart with untold inequalities, it also surprises you with the unheralded achievements of its most humble citizens.

Amitava Kumar Quotes