Top 35 Karan Mahajan Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Terror is a form of urban planning.”

— Karan Mahajan

2. “Divide and rule. It wasn’t just the British toward the Indians but all parents toward their children.”

— Karan Mahajan

3. “You’ve read Gandhi-ji? He said that the two worst classes of human beings are doctors and lawyers. Lawyers because they prolong fights and doctors because they cure the symptoms, not the cause. Doctors don’t eliminate disease – they perpetuate the existence of doctors.”

— Karan Mahajan

4. “What if I’ve died a long time ago and come here? he wondered. What if the defining characteristic of hell is that you’re locked in an endless, blind battle to reform it?”

— Karan Mahajan

5. “Every way he turned, his past was detonated, revealing tunnels and alternative routes under the packed, settled earth of the present.”

— Karan Mahajan

6. “And you know what happens when a bomb goes off? The truth about people comes out. Men leave their children and run away. Shopkeepers push aside wives and try to save their cash. People come and loot the shops. A blast reveals the truth about places. Don’t forget what you’re doing is noble.”

— Karan Mahajan

7. “Mr. and Mrs. Khurana were forty and forty, and they had suffered the defining tragedy of their lives, and so all other competing tragedies were relegated to mere facts of existence.”

— Karan Mahajan

8. “American life is based on a reassurance that we like one another but won’t violate one another’s privacies. This makes it a land of small talk. Two people greet each other happily, with friendliness, but might know each other for years before venturing basic questions about each other’s backgrounds... In the East, I’ve heard it said, there’s intimacy without friendship; in the West, there’s friendship without intimacy.”

— Karan Mahajan

9. “Every way he turned, his past was detonated, revealing tunnels and alternative routes under the packed, settled earth of the present. For every decision there were a million others he could have made. For every India, a Pakistan of possibilities.”

— Karan Mahajan

10. “When things are good, you can see no other way of living; when things are in ruins, there appear a million solutions for how this fate could have been avoided.”

— Karan Mahajan

11. “Village people had no central conception of truth or time or even of other people’s memories; they always just played dumb when he told them they’d changed their stories.”

— Karan Mahajan

12. “There are no higher values, people in the West say. Live by your own instincts, for yourself, for your own pleasure... In America, you see, you’re not supposed to take care of the elderly. You’re supposed to look after yourself, chase your dreams. But what happens when you grow old? Will your individualism save you?”

— Karan Mahajan

13. “Artists, who are selfish people, become anxious around the self-sacrificing.”

— Karan Mahajan

14. “During these years in the small-talk wilderness, I also wondered why Americans valued friendliness with commerce so much. Was handing over cash the sacred rite of American capitalism – and of American life? On a day that I don’t spend money in America, I feel oddly depressed. It’s my main form of social interaction – as it is for millions of Americans who live alone or away from their families.”

— Karan Mahajan

15. “It occurred to him now that people are defined much more by their association with death than by what they do in life.”

— Karan Mahajan

16. “He was a person who thrived on company, who desired camaraderie, even in its lowest, most base form; he felt that just seeing other people, no matter the circumstances, even if the people were enemies, filled you with health, gave you a reason to live.”

— Karan Mahajan

17. “He had the slick, proprietary attitude that small men from big cities sometimes bring toward big men from small cities.”

— Karan Mahajan

18. “It occurred to him now that people are defined much more by their association with death than by what they do in life. Poor thing, she’s a widow, they say. She lost her mother when she was ten to cancer. I’ve been immune to all this, he thought.”

— Karan Mahajan

19. “Silence is the small man’s only defense.”

— Karan Mahajan

20. “There was a contradiction within Vikas, an open wound: though he was fascinated by the poor, good at joshing with them, he was afraid, thanks to his bourgeois background, of being perceived as poor. Poverty equaled failure.”

— Karan Mahajan

21. “Every child is a packet of disappointments, hurts, dangers.”

— Karan Mahajan

22. “He had to go to bed every night knowing his world had been destroyed and wake up knowing he must feel the opposite and go on.”

— Karan Mahajan

23. “The months and years of struggle were suddenly canceled by three weeks of exercise and some visualization and focus.”

— Karan Mahajan

24. “Life is fragmentary but dreams are not.”

— Karan Mahajan

25. “Back in the market, people collapsed, then got up, their hands pressed to their wounds, as if they had smashed eggs against their bodies in hypnotic agreement and were unsure about what to do with the runny, bloody yolk. Most.”

— Karan Mahajan

26. “But there was no sign of the bomb in the market. Like all other tragedies, it had been covered up; the market had gone into a huddle of concrete and commerce around the blast, paving over the scars like a jungle coming back over a burnt field.”

— Karan Mahajan

27. “No action is safe from meaning.”

— Karan Mahajan

28. “Like men who have failed together, they wanted nothing more than to never see each other again.”

— Karan Mahajan

29. “Ayub had rich, long lashes that throbbed oddly when he was excited. He was a bit like a bulb that hasn’t quite learned to hoard all its electricity into light and so emits it through twitches –.”

— Karan Mahajan

30. “Finally, on a windswept, befogged afternoon, the sort in which all of Delhi is wearing a sweater of atmospheric dirt, he went over with the driver to see the Khuranas.”

— Karan Mahajan

31. “Why do the poor refuse to give an accurate picture of their suffering?”

— Karan Mahajan

32. “The best way to describe what he felt would be to say that first he was blind, then he could see everything. This is what it felt like to be a bomb. You were coiled up, majestic with blackness, unaware that the universe outside you existed, and then a wire snapped and ripped open your eyelids all the way around and you had a vision of the world that was 360 degrees, and everything in your purview was doomed by seeing.”

— Karan Mahajan

33. “Don’t regret things. Look at the present, and pray,” Ayub said. “That’s why I started praying. If you look backwards or forward, you stumble. But prayer keeps you focused on the eternal present.”

— Karan Mahajan

34. “The roots of shame run deep.”

— Karan Mahajan

35. “It didn’t stop – the confusion, the disintegration. Deepa, characterized by her bright, chirpy alertness, was now inert. When they’d come back from meeting Malik Aziz, Vikas had feared she might kill herself, and for a few days he’d stayed home, keeping her under intense watch, with Rajat and his friends making repeated visits. But he saw now what had happened to her was far worse, the mind vacating itself before the body could even act.”

— Karan Mahajan

36. “To ask a child to feel sympathy for the poor is harder than getting him to feel sympathy for a chicken or a goat – at least you can see a goat being slaughtered.”

— Karan Mahajan