Better half of the landscape

"To my mind birds are half the scenery everywhere, and more than half on an Indian plain. The view addresses the eye, and the birds address the ear, and the two should work together. The man whose ear is untaught to enjoy the harmonious discord of the birds, walks alone when he might have company, and loses half the joys of travel and change of scene."
- EHA in The Tribes On My Frontier

Blissful being a bird

"It is always busy, hopping from bush to bush, from morning to night seeking the means of its livelihood, with just enough motion to banish thought! It would be difficult to conceive and healthier of happier life, where the power of thought is small."
- EHA in The Tribes On My Frontier

Credibility of brevity

"Half the art of telling a story, as of preaching a sermon, lies in knowing when to stop."
- EHA in The Tribes On My Frontier

Need for a diversion

"Every hobby is good, a sign of good and an influence for good. Any hobby will draw out the mind; but the one I plead for touches the soul too, keeps the milk of human kindness from souring, puts a gentle poetry into the prosiest life."
- EHA in The Tribes On My Frontier

Prescription for tedium: shift gears!

"The creative output and openness to others' novelty…isn't predicted by the person's age as much as by how long the person has worked in one discipline. Scholars who switch disciplines seem to get their openness rejuvenated. It's not chronological age but "disciplinary" age."
- Robert M. Sapolsky in Monkeyluv

The window diminishes

"As we age, most of us…become less likely to be open to someone else's novelty."
- Robert M. Sapolsky in Monkeyluv

Malleable minds

"Youngsters are the most exploratory, both most likely to make a discovery and most open to changing their behaviour when observing someone else who has."
- Robert M. Sapolsky in Monkeyluv

Familiar tunes

"If you are more than thirty-five years old when some new popular music is introduced, there's a greater than 95 percent chance that you will never choose to listen to that stuff. The window has closed."
- Robert M. Sapolsky in Monkeyluv

Standpoint reversal

"Once, we were kids who believed enough in out immortality that we'd hitch rides with strangers. Now, instead, we flaunt the same irrationality by cheating on our low-fat diets. Once, we had not yet learned that life brings tragedies beyond control. Now, we wonder how we can spare our own children from that knowledge."
- Robert M. Sapolsky in Monkeyluv

Intellect: a function of society

"We are shaped by the sort of society in which we live, and we would not be the same person if we had grown up elsewhere."
- Robert M. Sapolsky in Monkeyluv

Re(a)lationship

"A relationship is the price you pay for the anticipation of it."
- Robert M. Sapolsky in Monkeyluv

The pleasure of 'maybe'

"The pleasure is in the anticipation of a reward…the reward is an afterthought."
- Robert M. Sapolsky in Monkeyluv

Postponement of gratification

"Here's all of us forgoing immediate pleasure to get good grades to get into a good college to get a good job in order to get into the nursing home of our choice."
- Robert M. Sapolsky in Monkeyluv

Body over behaviour

"Relationships can be contentious enough without your glands suckering you into inventing problems that don't exist."
- Robert M. Sapolsky in Monkeyluv

Brain over body

"Sometimes, all you need to do is think a thought and you change the functioning of virtually every cell in your body."
- Robert M. Sapolsky in Monkeyluv

Instant science education

"Now, people tend to crave – and consequently overvalue – virtually anything new. The result is a pretty widespread impression among the lay public, who (for no fault of their own) learn their science in ten-second sound bites…"
- Robert M. Sapolsky in Monkeyluv

Victual vitality

"Perhaps the ancients were right after all. Delicious food, like beautiful form and melodious sound, is certainly one of the five attributes of the realm of desire."
- Mamang Dai in Legends of Pensam

The myth of 'Pan Asia'

"There is no such thing as an Asian ethos or mode of thinking."
- Vikram Seth in From Heaven Lake

Arriving home...slowly

"…on previous occasions that I have returned home after a long absence…I have hardly noticed such details, and certainly have not invested them with the significance I now do. I think it is the gradualness of my journey that has caused this. With air travel the shock of arrival is more immediate: the family,…the climate all strike with simultaneous impact, so that the mind is bewildered, and the particular implications of small things obscured."
- Vikram Seth in From Heaven Lake

Bamboo song

"Flute music…is at once the most universal and most particular of sounds. There is no culture that does not have its flute…Each has its specific fingering and compass. It weaves its own associations. Yet to hear any flute, it seems to me, to be drawn into the commonality of all mankind, to be moved by music closest in its phrases and sentences to the human voice."
- Vikram Seth in From Heaven Lake

Travelling...and arriving again

"For a person of fundamentally sedentary habits I have been wandering far too long; a continuously wandering life…would drive me crazy. I marvel at those travellers who, out of curiosity or a sense of mission, wander through unfamiliar environments for years on end. It requires an attitude of mind more capable of contentment with the present than my own. My drive to arrive is too strong."
- Vikram Seth in From Heaven Lake

Sino sombreness

"One of the things I have been seriously deprived of [in China] for most of this year is colour."
- Vikram Seth in From Heaven Lake

Fluke phraseology

"Those who don’t know a language properly are often most expressive in it."
- Vikram Seth in From Heaven Lake

The Tao of water

"In the world there is nothing more submissive and weak than water. Yet for attacking that which is hard and strong nothing can surpass it."
- Lao Tzu

Thoughts on water

"There is enchantment in flowing water. I sit hypnotised by its beauty – water, the most unifying of the elements, that ties land and sea and air in one living ring. It has a channelled flow, unlike air, and its cycles are vaster, accepting all three states on nature…Tasteless, it accepts all tastes, colourless, all colours, reflecting the sky, refracting the white stones of its bed, dissolving or suspending the soils and minerals over which it flows. "
- Vikram Seth in From Heaven Lake

Landscapes and latitude

"Everywhere in the world climatic zones are arranged in latutudinal bands. A north-south journey is therefore likely to be much more varied than an east-west journey of the same length. "
- Vikram Seth in From Heaven Lake

Pecuniary peculiarity

"It is curious how wealth makes some people pleasant by doing away with worry and petty frustration; and how it makes others abominable."
- Vikram Seth in From Heaven Lake

Thoughts in anger

"A mind clouded with rage is fearsome even to itself."
- Vikram Seth in From Heaven Lake

Left, right, and centre

"Dictatorships of the left or right are no less corrupt than democracies… They are, besides, far more arbitrary in their dealings with any person or institution guilty of independent thought or action…"
- Vikram Seth in From Heaven Lake

Stagnation in a People’s Republic

"Few people want to innovate or invent, when the punishment for being wrong is so disproportionate to the reward for being right."
- Vikram Seth in From Heaven Lake

When leaning a new language…

"The intake of new lexical information has to be controlled…learning a language is like making mayonnaise: add too much at once and the mixture will separate out."
- Vikram Seth in From Heaven Lake

Flying in water

"I feel ecstatically free in the water, moving in three dimensions…"
- Vikram Seth in From Heaven Lake

The chainsmoker: when the tobacco stick fails to give a kick

"When he smokes, he has no special expression on pleasure on his face, any more than most people have when merely breathing."
- Vikram Seth in From Heaven Lake

Too much silence

"I enjoy solitude, but tonight my aloneness oppresses me like the magnified sound of blood beating in my ears."
- Vikram Seth in From Heaven Lake

‘Townhouses’ versus Small-town houses

"A stupefying architectural sameness, based on a stupefyingly ugly set of models. Street of standard shop-cuboid follows street of standard shop-cuboid…In the countryside, as one passes...from province to province…the houses change: the building materials, the shape of the doorways, the eaves of the roofs, the style of the walls and courtyards, the number of windows, everything changes with climate and terrain. But this harmony with nature is absent in the stodgy and conformist architecture of the cities. However, the older parts of the cities, the lanes and the alleys, are their one saving grace."
- Vikram Seth in From Heaven Lake

The three-tier freedom of expression

"Once you get past the inevitable questions, conversations broaden out into more interesting channels…Discussions meander on as station follows station, interrupted only by meals…people show a frankness and a curiosity…not expected…Besides, a conversation with a [stranger] whom you will probably never see again triggers no signal for caution."
- Vikram Seth in From Heaven Lake

Why do I wander?

"I sometimes seem to myself to wander around the world merely accumulating material for future nostalgias."
- Vikram Seth in From Heaven Lake

Unfamiliar places

"…the freshness of the vision may compensate for the ignorance of the viewer."
- Vikram Seth in From Heaven Lake

The benevolent canopy

"The wooded paths…the layers of leaf mould, the sunlight spraying through the branches…Here one can lie in the spring and autumn, and also in summer, when…the cooling canopy of leaves blunts the virulence of the heat."
- Vikram Seth in From Heaven Lake

What is paradise…

"Greenery and flowing water: my father has always said these form his idea of paradise."
- Vikram Seth in From Heaven Lake

Collective-travel blues

"[Restriction] is inherent in group travel, indeed in any form of organised group activity – a discipline, a punctuality, imposed upon the participants…to be hustled by the Group Will into rushing from sight to sight savouring nothing, is, I’m sure, irksome to all of us."
- Vikram Seth in From Heaven Lake

Paradise Lost

"…I had visited Kashmir a couple of years before…The valley was a pastoral idyll…as beautiful as it must have been a century ago…I did not want to go back to Kashmir, did not want to destroy a fragile memory with the sight of guns and roadblocks."
- Patrick French in Younghusband

On high ground in the Great Himalayas

"…the snow peaks were still and serene, monuments, giving nothing away, no indication of movement or feeling, like a wild beast which feigns sleep to confuse its prey."
- Patrick French in Younghusband

The surreptitious taming of India

"Doctrinaire anti-colonialists make the corresponding mistake of viewing British India as the straightforward product of conquest. Unlike the colonial take-over of parts of Africa, or the 1950 Chinese annexation of Tibet, it was in fact obtained largely through guile rather than military force. The process began as a series of legitimate trading agreements…As the years went by and power shifted, princes and nawabs often found their personal interests were best secured by entering into treaties with the British. Political structures in states and villages across the subcontinent began to alter. The gaining of India was a gradual, insidious process, not a sudden invasion.It was only in the last fifty years of the British presence that the pomp and vulgarity of ‘the Raj’…became the face of India…Strict segregation only came into its own in the latter part of British rule…It was only around the turn of the [20th] century that British administrators in India first became seriously concerned with the theory of racial difference, and intellectual justifications for colonial rule."
- Patrick French in Younghusband

Lesser of Evils

“When you have seen the scorpion, you look on the frog as divine.”
- Tibetan proverb

Sublime history

"History is what people believe it to be."
- Patrick French in Younghusband

Coloured history

‘What you must realise…is that there is no such thing as a neutral historical archive. Every text contains its own ideological strategy.’
- Patrick French in Younghusband

Monotony of the desert

"…a blankness of golden-grey desert, in which the simplest landmarks were magnified to gargantuan proportions. The colour and the texture of the distorted rock began to catch my eye: there was so little else to focus on that the texture of the dry yellowness jumped into life as it leapt into escarpments and hollows."
- Patrick French in Younghusband

The Novel Travelogue

"…the difference between travel writing and fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows."
- Paul Theroux in The Great Railway Bazaar

Face of a place

"Travelling over a long distance becomes, after three months, like tasting wine of picking at a global buffet. A place is approached, sampled, and given a mark."
- Paul Theroux in The Great Railway Bazaar

The AC coach: a double trap

"I was trapped by the double glazing. I couldn’t even open the window…experiencing a heightened form of…alienation."
- Paul Theroux in The Great Railway Bazaar

Double take on (un)happy memories

"It is possible at a distance to maintain the fiction of former happiness…and then you return to an early setting and the years fall away and you see how bitterly unhappy you were."
- Paul Theroux in The Great Railway Bazaar

Locomotion fatigue

"Extensive travelling induces a feeling of encapsulation; and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind…it might have been produced by the sameness of the landscape…"
- Paul Theroux in The Great Railway Bazaar

Tandem journeys

"Train travel animated my imagination and usually gave me the solitude to order and write my thoughts I travelled easily in two directions, along the level rails while Asia flashed changes at the window, and at the interior rim of a private world of memory and language. I cannot imagine a luckier combination."
- Paul Theroux in The Great Railway Bazaar

The railway station: A sample of society

"Indian railway stations are wonderful places for killing time in, and they are like scale models of Indian society."
- Paul Theroux in The Great Railway Bazaar

Theatre on wheels

"Looking out a train in Asia is like watching an unedited travelogue without the obnoxious soundtrack…"
- Paul Theroux in The Great Railway Bazaar

Harmony on rails

"The speed is so easy, and the train disturbs so little the scenes through which it takes us…"
- R.L. Stevenson in Ordered South

Locomotive anonymity

"The conversation…derived an easy candour from the shared journey…and the certain knowledge that neither of us would see each other again."
- Paul Theroux in The Great Railway Bazaar

Slow mode travelling

"All that tramping around with guidebooks…No, no, no. I just like to be still…I like to absorb a country."
- Paul Theroux in The Great Railway Bazaar

The Railway Bazaar

"…railways are irresistible bazaars, snaking along perfectly level no matter what the landscape, improving your mood with speed, and never upsetting your drink. The train can reassure you in awful places – a far cry from the anxious sweats of doom aeroplanes inspire, or the nauseating gas-sickness of the long-distance bus, or the paralysis that afflicts the car passenger. If a train is large and comfortable you don’t even need a destination...
"Nothing is expected of the train passenger. In planes the traveler is condemned to hours in a tight seat; ships require high spirits and sociability; cars and buses are unspeakable."
- Paul Theroux in The Great Railway Bazaar

Doing real science

"...try and give all of the information to help others judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgement in one particular direction or another...The first principle is not to fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool...After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that."
- Richard P Feynman in "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"

Degrees of ignorance

"Ordinary fools are all right: you can talk to them, and try and help them out. But pompous fools - guys who are fools and are covering it all over and impressing people as to how wonderful they are with all this hocus pocus - that, I cannot stand!"
- Richard P Feynman in "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"

Examples catalyse understanding

"I can't understand anything in general unless I'm carrying along in my mind a specific example and watching it go. Some people think...that I'm kind of slow and I don't understand the problem, because I ask a lot of these "dumb" questions."
- Richard P Feynman in "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"

Back to basics

"...the elementary things that you know very well...are kind of fun and delightful. It doesn't do any harm to think them over again...you can have a new way of looking at it."
- Richard P Feynman in "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"

Social irresponsibility

"You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think what you ought to accomplish...you don't have to be responsible for the world you're in. So I have developed a very powerful sense of social irresponsibility...It's made me a very happy man ever since."
- Richard P Feynman in "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"

"Can't" and "Won't"

" 'I could do that, but I won't'...is just another way of saying that you can't."
- Richard P Feynman in "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"

Frog in the well

"Learn what the rest of the world is like. The variety is worthwhile."
- Richard P Feynman in "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"

Fake knowledge

"I don't know what's the matter with people: they don't learn by understanding: they learn by some other way - by rote, or something. Their knowledge is so fragile."
- Richard P Feynman in "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"

Growing up

"The loss of our [elders] fixes us next in the firing line and makes life suddenly so finite. It is the moment when we finally grow up."
- Alexander Frater in Chasing the Monsoon

Aims of Indian bureaucracy

"...I wondered why the apparent aims of India's bureaucracy seemed to be the creating of chaos where none had existed before."
- Alexander Frater in Chasing the Monsoon

Colours of Renewal

"...what I like especially about the monsoon is the way it restores the colours of India. Lambent green plains verging on emerald, lavender hills, grey skies, that wonderful soft light. And also the way it restores your peace of mind."
- Alexander Frater in Chasing the Monsoon

The Rainforest

"...this place had been made by a happy accident of rich volcanic soil and Niagara-like precipication; the result gave rain a new dimesion. Rain had helped build the superstructure of the forest, become part of its fabric and texture. Here it was the stuff of alchemy. An army of gardeners labouring for a hundred years could never have achieved anything so beautiful."
- Alexander Frater in Chasing the Monsoon

Monsoon, the Unpredictable

"If the sky fails, the earth will surely fail too"
- Alexander Frater in Chasing the Monsoon

The first June showers

"The cloud-base blew through the trees like smoke; rain formed...a bank of hanging mist opaque as hill fog."
- Alexander Frater in Chasing the Monsoon

Waiting for Rains in June

"Sleep becomes so difficult we dream with our eyes open."
- Alexander Frater in Chasing the Monsoon

India during Monsoon

"The wind drops, it get very dark, there is terrific thunder and lightning and then--the deluge! Suddenly the air is vey cool and perfumed...It is a time of rejoicing. And renewal...It is also when I feel perhaps most truly Indian."
- Alexander Frater in Chasing the Monsoon

Comforts of a watery curtain

"I liked the sense of privacy [the rain] invoked, the way towering curtains closed around an island and sealed it off from the rest of the world."
- Alexander Frater in Chasing the Monsoon

Clarity of hindsight

"A contemporary historian never writes such a true history as a historian of a later generation...The personal equation has dropped out, and you will remember facts as facts without seeking to put your own interpretation upon them."
- Agatha Christie in The Mysterious Mr Quin

A bush at hand...

"A bush at hand is good for many a bird."
- Ruskin Bond in Book of Nature

Hindsight

No shade tree? Blame not the sun, but yourself.
- Chinese proverb

Nightfall in the tropics

“…nightfall is a sudden affair. No lengthening afternoon and lingering dusk…no sun hovering reluctantly above the horizon – no long and indeterminate twilight. With admirable despatch the sun drops out of the sky like a golden bullet. Day yields to night without a struggle.”
-Matthew Parris in Inca Cola

Imagined fears in darkness

"It is remarkable how confidence returns with daylight."
-Matthew Parris in Inca Cola

Drama and real life

"Perhaps the art of storytelling has led us to expect the wrong thing…all that is irrelevant has been conveniently removed. Life is so shapeless. Stories well-told make the real thing a continuous disappointment and saddle each of us with a secret feeling of inadequacy. Reality never coheres. Its narrative is either incoherent or it is a lie."
-Matthew Parris in Inca Cola

Amplified reality

"So much of the technology we take for granted serves to amplify. It broadcasts sound louder and wider; it internsifies and spreads illumination; it accelerates travel. Our senses adjust for this...so that we are not deafened or dazed, but experience this supercharged world as though it were normal. In doing so, we reduce out ability to experience sensation offered on a lesser scale. We are perhaps numbed to those little sounds and feelings that a quieter, darker, stiller world would offer."
-Matthew Parris in Inca Cola

Mounting contrasts

"At an altitude where the air is thin, sunlight is hotter and shadow colder."
-Matthew Parris in Inca Cola

The world's a small place (seven degrees of separation)

"It is as if at certain key points the faceless millions who make up the census figures, cause the traffic jams and constitute crowd scenes, stand momentarily aside so that just a few of us can bump into each other...Maybe they are holograms. Maybe there really are only a few of us, moving amid phantoms. Millions and millions of phantoms"
-Matthew Parris in Inca Cola

Tricks for Limericks

There are a few tricks
To write limericks:
Just find some words that rhyme
And mix them up big-time
Add some prepositions
And make random partitions
Let your mind cross the border
Don’t worry about the order
The lines will fall in place
But not always with grace
Forget about intelligence
They won’t make any sense
And seem as mad as hatter
But it doesn’t really matter
’Cause very soon after
There’ll be a lot of laughter