Vikram Seth

In the strict ranks of Gay and Straight
What is my status: Stray? Or Great?

Vikram Seth (born 20 June 1952) is an Indian poet and author.

Quotes

• Some men like Jack and some like Jill
  I'm glad I like them both but still
  I wonder if this freewheeling
  Really is an enlightened thing,
  Or is its greater scope a sign
  Of deviance from some party line?
  In the strict ranks of Gay and Straight
  What is my status: Stray? Or Great?
  
  • "Dubious", Mappings (1980) [1]

• All you who sleep tonight
  Far from the ones you love,
  No hands to left or right,
  And emptiness above—
  Know that you aren’t alone.
  The whole world shares your tears,
  Some for two nights or one,
  And some for all their years.
  • "All You Who Sleep Tonight", All You Who Sleep Tonight (1990)

• Imagining the flower-pot attacked it
  The kitten flung the violets near and far
  And yet, who knows? This morning, as I backed it,
  My car was set upon by a parked car.
  
  • "Malefic Things", All You Who Sleep Tonight (1990)

• 'You too will marry a boy I choose,' said Mrs Rupa Mehra firmly to her younger daughter. Lata avoided the maternal imperative by looking around the great lamp-lit garden of Prem Nivas. The wedding-guests were gathered on the lawn. 'Hmm,' she said. This annoyed her mother further.
  • A Suitable Boy (1993) 1.1

• [T]hink of many things. Never place your happiness in one person’s power. Be just to yourself.
  • A Suitable Boy (1993) 17.4

• Is it not love that knows how to make smooth things rough and rough things smooth?
  • An Equal Music (1999) 7.5

• What is the difference between my life and my love? One gets me low, the other lets me go.
  • An Equal Music (1999) 8.6

The Golden Gate (1986)

• In life's brief game to be a winner
  A man must have...oh yes, above
  All else, of course, someone to love.
  • 6.13

• They go to work, attend a meeting,
  Write an equation, have a beer,
  Hail colleagues with a cheerful greeting,
  Are conscientious, sane, sincere,
  Rational, able, and fastidious.
  Through hardened casings no invidious
  Tapeworm of doubt, no guilt, no qualm
  Pierces to sabotage their calm.
  When something's technically attractive,
  You follow the conception through,
  That's all. What if you leave a slew
  Of living dead, of radioactive
  "Collateral damage" in its wake?
  It's just a job, for heaven's sake.
  • 7.7

• Catholic and Episcopalian,
  Lutheran, Baptist, Methodist,
  Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, atheist,
  We are all here; no one is alien
  Now radiation's common laws
  Impel us into common cause.
  • 7.20

• Workers of Lungless Labs—when dying
  Will you be proud you were midwife
  To implements exemplifying
  Assault against the heart of life?
  If you had scruples, you betrayed them.
  What pastoral response acquits
  Those who made ovens for Auschwitz?
  You knew their purpose, yet you made them.
  Indeed, it's said that the banality
  Of evil is its greatest shock.
  It jokes, it punches its time clock,
  Plays with its kids. The triviality
  Of slaughtering millions can't impinge
  Upon its peace, or make it cringe.
  • 7.28

• Killing is dying. This equation
  Carries no mystical import.
  It is the literal truth. Our nation
  Has long believed war was a sport.
  Unoccupied, unbombed, undying,
  While 'over there' the shells were flying,
  How could we know the Russian dread
  Of war, the mountains of their dead?
  We reveled in acceleration
  At every level of the race;
  And even now we're face to face
  With mutual extermination
  We talk as blithely as before
  Of 'surgical strikes' and 'limited war.'
  • 7.29

• Ten hostages is terrorism;
  A million, and it's strategy.
  To ban books is fanaticism;
  To threaten in totality
  All culture and all civilization,
  All humankind and all creation,
  This is a task of decorous skill
  And needs high statesmanship and will.
  • 7.31

• How ugly babies are! How heedless
  Of all else than their bulging selves—
  Like sumo wrestlers, plush with needless
  Kneadable flesh-like mutant elves,
  Plump and vindictively nocturnal,
  With lungs determined and infernal
  (A pity that the blubbering blobs
  Come unequipped with volume knobs).
  • 13.47

Quotes about Seth

• He writes with the omniscience and authority of a large, orderly committee of experts on Indian politics, law, medicine, crowd psychology, urban and rural social customs, dress, cuisine, horticulture, funerary rites, cricket and even the technicalities of shoe manufacture.
  • Vikram Seth (1993). A Suitable Boy. Penguin Books India. p. 1. ISBN 978-0-14-023033-8. 

• Vikram Seth's book A Suitable Boy (1993) that made history as a publishing phenomenon heralded the change from an economist-poet to a full-time writer, making millions in pounds. The media dwelt on its 700,000 words and 1,349 pages, the longest novel published in England since Richardson's Clarissa (1744-48) and longer than Tolstoy's War and Peace (1865-69) — and on Seth's advance of more than 2 million pounds. More relevant are the artistic comparisons made to Jane Austen, George Eliot, Tolstoy and Dickens.
  • Seemita Mohanty (2007). A Critical Analysis of Vikram Seth's Poetry and Fiction. Atlantic Publishers & Dist. p. 159. ISBN 978-81-269-0831-8. 

• A Suitable Boy (which burlesques poetic pretensions) reads like the offspring of an unlikely mating of Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy, with its father's looks and mother's temperament.
  • Jaina C. Sanga (2003). South Asian Novelists in English: An A-to-Z Guide. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 252. ISBN 978-0-313-31885-6. 

• In A Suitable Boy, Seth's traditionalism allows him to rediscover character. Mrs Rupa Mehra becomes too substantial, too vivid a presence to be confined within a novel: she is at once infuriating and endearing, a benevolent Indian version of Mrs Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, a comparison that Seth is typically careful to suggest by equipping her daughter with a Jane Austen novel to read on a train.
  • John Sturrock (1997). The Oxford Guide to Contemporary World Literature. Oxford University Press. p. 219. ISBN 978-0-19-283318-1. 

• Like Midnight's Children, however, A Suitable Boy too is steeped in an awareness of and affection for indigenous literary and cultural traditions, most notably Urdu poetry, Hindustani classical music, the performed Ramayana, the Ramlila, Shia marsiyas or lamentations, Tagore's songs ('Rabindra Sangeet'), and, of course, Hindi cinema.
  • Priyamvada Gopal (29 January 2009). The Indian English Novel: Nation, History, and Narration. Oxford University Press. p. 106. ISBN 978-0-19-954438-7. 

• The diversity and range of Seth's work makes him somewhat of an enigma. However, for a writer who counts such diverse figures as Pushkin, T'ang dynasty Chinese poets, Chaucer, the Elizabethans, Tennyson, novelists like Hardy, Austen, George Eliot, R. K. Narayan, and modern poets like Timothy Steele and Philip Larkin among some of his literary influences, Seth's wide-ranging technique is conceivably not so surprising.
  • Roopali Gupta (1 January 2005). Vikram Seth's Art: An Appraisal. Atlantic Publishers & Dist. p. 6. ISBN 978-81-269-0550-8. 

• In portraying a domestic life constrained, disrupted, and transformed by civil violence, Seth draws on the nineteenth-century historical novels of Scott, Alessandro Manzoni, Theodore Fontane, and Leo Tolstoy.
  • Claudia L. Johnson; Clara Tuite (13 October 2011). A Companion to Jane Austen. John Wiley & Sons. p. 472. ISBN 978-1-4443-5490-4.