"My connection with Calcutta stretches back a long way. It goes back at least to 1857, the year of what my maternal great-grandfather would have called the Indian Mutiny. He managed to escape the uprising in eastern Uttar Pradesh in a boat down the Ganges to Calcutta. My maternal grandfather made his living selling jute in the city. He bought the jute in what is now Bangladesh, which is how my mother happened to be born there. But she met and married my father in Calcutta. He was the first of his family to come to India where he became one of the senior partners of Gillanders Arbuthnot, a Calcutta-based firm."

“It struck me that a sense of uncertainty about ways of reaching God is what makes Hinduism different. Because of its ability to adapt, so many faiths could thrive here.”

“During the nine years that Calcutta was my home, I lived a life which would now be seen as thoroughly politically incorrect. From our youngest days, we were never allowed to forget that we were different - we were English, not Indian. We had an English nanny who saw to that. She supervised us 24x7 and once, finding me learning to count from our driver, she cuffed my head, saying "that's the servants' language, not yours". Inevitably, we were not allowed to play with Indian children. There were even class barriers to the European children we were allowed to play with. My nanny would not allow us to play with children who only had Indian or Anglo-Indian nannies because their parents couldn't afford a "proper nanny", as she saw herself. European society in the Calcutta of those days was divided by a strict class system, not dissimilar to the caste system. Members of the ICS, were considered the Brahmins , while the members of the Indian army were regarded as the Rajputs . As a businessman, my father was a Vaisya , dismissed by the snooty ICS and army as a mere "boxwallah.”

“There is blind secularism in this country . If anyone speaks about Hinduism in this country, they are branded as Hindu fundamentalists.”

“It is not too difficult to find people in that country crying over what they have lost.”

“I hate to lose my connection with the great city of Calcutta.”

“Though I was born in India , I was taught how not to become an Indian.”