The Heart

''That‘s how we keep this crazy place together – with the heart. Two hundred fuckin‘ languages, and a billion people. India is the heart. It‘s the heart that keeps us together. There‘s no place with people like my people, Lin. There‘s no heart like the Indian heart.''

''The Indians are the Italians of Asia,'' Didier pronounced with a sage and mischievious grin. ''It can be said, certainly, with equal justice, that the Italians are the Indians of Europe...They are both people of the Madonna - they deman goddess, even if the religion does not provide one. Every man in both countries is a singer when he is happy and every woman is a dancer when she walks to the shop at the corner. For them, food is music inside the body, and music is food inside the heart. The language of India and the language of Italy, they make every man a poet, and make something beautiful from every banalite. These are nations where love - amore, pyaar - makes a cavalier of a Borsalino on a street corner, and makes a princess of a peasant girl, if only for a second that her eyes meet yours."

 SHANTARAM, Gregory David Roberts

We'll see if this is true. Very soon!