A great Tamil poet, given to decadence and debauchery, once said that the story of his life could serve as an example to the youth on how one should not live. Having lived, or rather, having sleepwalked for ten years through the desolate wastelands of depression, I survived to reach the other side. I believe that this validates my claim to write this book for you.

— Indu Muralidharan

Become aware of yourself. Everything will come to you, Chin may, when you are in that most wonderful place on earth, the center of your being. If you learn just one thing from this book, let it be that once you are aware of yourself, depression cannot hold you back any more than a tiger can be trapped in a spider’s web.

— Indu Muralidharan

Conch pore is real. It is as real as Faludi, Brahma, Lilliput or Macon do. And also as real as San Francisco, Madurai, Edinburgh, Gaborone or Tokyo. You know that fictional towns exist. You visit them all the time.

— Indu Muralidharan

Depression weakens a person at every level and bullies can smell weakness like dogs smell fear.

— Indu Muralidharan

Did you know that Bharatiyar used the pen name “Shelley-Dayan”? He admired the poems of Shelley so deeply that he wrote under the name “Shelley’s servant”. Wasn’t that a wonderful gesture of humility by someone who was such a great poet himself? And later, Bharatiyar had his own Dayan, the poet Subburathinam, who took the pen name Bharathidasan. Subburathinam’s poetry inspired yet another poet who wrote as Strata, short for Subburathina-Dayan. And to think this long chain of inspiration spans centuries, going back to the poets who inspired Wordsworth, who inspired Shelley, who inspired our own Bharat.

— Indu Muralidharan

Everything has a reason, though it cannot always be deduced for we cannot see the full picture of a life at any point in time.

— Indu Muralidharan

Fourteen is the age when time first starts to make its presence felt. Time took on such a variety of hues in those days that even my frozen mind sometimes reflected the colors of the world around me, and I could feel my thoughts fluttering in the humid, salty breeze. At such moments, when the brilliant blue skies, the flaming carpets beneath the Glamour trees in the school grounds and the nut-brown twinkle in Sonia’s eyes splashed into the moments of my life, I felt alive. Only time had no color in the library. In the library, time simply ceased to be.

— Indu Muralidharan

How can we know the dancer from the dance? Did Yeats create his poems, or did his poetry make him a poet? How does one separate the creator from his creation? They create each other. On a mutual plane of reference, one has no existence without the other.

— Indu Muralidharan

I already knew the next story that I was going to rewrite from the beginning. Mine.

— Indu Muralidharan

I felt part of a group for the first time in my life. Not a family, just a group of people who liked being together, who sat as we did, leaning towards each other, leaving just the right amount of space in between, whose thoughts and words flowed easily and naturally, whose voices and accents were so different from each other and yet mingled in harmony as though in a song.

— Indu Muralidharan