Some years ago, the good folks at the Study Centre for Indian Literature and Translation at the American College in Madurai agreed to take my papers. And as I began to send them, I found old diaries and into those diaries, I would copy out passages that struck me as wise or beautiful and often both. I wondered when I had stopped doing this; and then wondered whether I could not start again. I decided also that I would copy out the lines I thought were important to me. My friend the painter Mehlli Gobhai filled endless notebooks with quotations and excerpts from art journals and magazines. So did my other friend the poet Adil Jussawalla.

Here then is some of the wisdom from a year’s crop of books. I have resisted the desire to annotate them. Let them stand or fall for you on their own.

…the goat owned in common dies of hunger.

Evil does not reach its perfect state simply by being committed. It is at least as important that it be wrongly named, since this guarantees that the mind cannot come to see it clear and whole, so long ass this state of affairs persists the evil can safely elude a...

Read more