‘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