1) 'When the whole world is dirty, bhai, you have to get dirty to do any cleaning. We can't fight their money without tricks. Once we are in power, it will all be different. We will change everything.'
2) The truth is that human beings like to be ruled. They will talk and talk about freedom, but they are afraid of it.
3) A reputation for ruthlessness can do wonders for peace.
4) He had been good to me. He had never lied to me about money, he had never pretended to lay aside his self-interest, he had backed me as far as possible, to the risk of his life and then a little further, and he had shown me how in this world one thing connects to the next, where business comes together with politics and bhaigiri, how one must live. In this way we had been friends.
5) How little the young value life, they who are so full of it. How little they have seen of death. They think it's a mere pause in a drama, and they imagine the oppressing parents beating their breasts and wailing, and lost in that pleasure they never see the fall, the finality of one's own vanishing.
6) We who were bhais were truly brothers, we lived outside the law and were bound to each other. We were desperate men, and therefore free.
7) Looking at her, I thought: what makes a woman so much a prisoner, why? Why is one man a Dalit and poor, and another not? Why does this happen, and not that? Why did this woman die, and not that one? Why are we not free?
8) But custom floats between men and women, it hides in the stomachs of children and escapes and expands and vanishes in every breath, you cannot kill it, you cannot hold it, you can only suffer it.
9) War comes upon us. We are led in leaning curves towards the battlefield. You may try to avoid it, but find that last flower-lined turn you chose was really an entrance into a blood-soaked arena.
-- Vikram Chandra, "Sacred Games"
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