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Bengalis love to celebrate their language, their culture, their politics, their fierce attachment to a city that has been famously dying for more than a century. They resent with equal ferocity the reflex stereotyping that labels any civic dysfunction anywhere in the world 'another Calcutta.'

People are often shy to acknowledge that they are Bengalis. They somehow take pride in saying that they cannot speak or read the language.

Just learning to think in another language allows you to see your own culture in a better viewpoint.

West Bengal belongs to Bengalis. We should live here like a king and not as servants.

At the age when Bengali youth almost inevitably writes poetry, I was listening to European classical music.

I don't know Bengali perfectly. I don't know how to write it or even read it. I have an accent, I speak without authority, and so I've always perceived a disjunction between it and me. As a result, I consider my mother tongue, paradoxically, a foreign language.

I like to read Bengali novels and short stories. I am not that fond of reading English books, as I don't have a connect with it.

The more we study the Indian's character the more we appreciate the marked distinction between the civilized being and the real savage.

Indian culture certainly gives the Indian mind, including the mind of the Indian scientist, the ability to think out of the box.

I want to live in Kolkata; I don't want to live in Europe - I can't write there. I write in Bengali, and I need to be surrounded by the Bengali language and culture.