Jeet Thayil - Feel Quotes

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My religion is no way of knowing me. Mine is a way of knowing me. When I pray I feel I'm doing something clean. But why pray so the whole neighbourhood hears your prayers? Why use microphones?

Jeet Thayil
I could feel my colour. I could feel racism... in the way people looked at you, and the way they talked to you. Now, though, because of the mixing of cultures, it seems like some kind of brilliant social experiment... In some ways it seems to me the city of the future.

Jeet Thayil
We didn't know that right before us Hari Kunzru and Amitava Kumar had just read from The Satanic Verses in a separate session. The minute I finished, people were queuing for me to sign copies of Narcopolis. But we were taken to this room where Hari and Amitava were sitting and we weren't allowed to leave. There was a lawyer, there were police on site and they threatened to close down the festival which made all of us feel like shit. I was full of remorse, because the directors are our friends and we knew how much work they had put into it, but I don't think we were really in trouble. Even though we were told to make ourselves scarce.

Jeet Thayil
The thing about opium is that it makes you vomit. You cook the original raw sticky pellet against the bowl of the pipe. And for the first three or four months, you puke. But it's a clean very easy puke, not like alcohol. You could be walking down the street talking to a friend, turn, puke and keep going. But you do that a lot for the first few months. It takes devotion to become an addict to opium and heroin. You have to keep doing it to get through it. I lost a lot of weight. But the payback is huge. It is pure pleasure. There is a reason why opiates are used as a painkiller: they make you feel better. They're designed to make you feel better.

Jeet Thayil