A Turkish novelist Elif Shafak on languages within herself:

"It was a choice motivated more by her passion for language, by the search for new modes of expression. "There are certain things I'd rather write in English, certain others I'd rather write in Turkish," she explains. "English, to me, is a more mathematical language, it is the language of precision. It embodies an amazing vocabulary and if you are looking for the 'precise word', it is right out there. Turkish, to me, is more sentimental, more emotional." English seems more suited for philosophy, analytical writing or humour, "but if I am writing on sorrow I'd rather use Turkish."

This also points to the idea of contamination or spillage, to use a Rushdie's turn of a phrase, with one language spilling into another, contaminating it. And also why doing translations from Urdu etc are useful in forging a kind of hybrid sensibility, similar to that of Agha Shahid Ali's "Ghazalesque"

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt's metaphors for the human condition

So here we are: not charioteers in charge of wild horses, but a self-reflexive rider sitting atop a large and lumbering automatic elephant that has plenty of its own ideas on how to do things. What has this got to do with happiness?

The answer to that is at the crux of this marvellous book. Haidt's key insight is that emotion is just the expression of the mechanisms by which rider and elephant interact. Happy people are the ones in whom the interaction is smooth, in whom the gears mesh, in whom the different levels add up to a more or less coherent whole. Unhappiness occurs when rider and elephant have major differences about how to do things, a fairly common situation since, while the rider tends to be more interested in happiness, the elephant is bent on achieving prestige and the possibilities for gene dissemination and survival that it brings.

In my case, the rider must be saying "Thou shalt think, create, and write", and the elephant perhaps is saying, "Enough of this monkishness. Let's get us some babes already yaar - we have gene dissemination to think of!" Or as Woody Allen put it more succinctly, in "Love & Death",

"To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering, one must not love. But then, one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be happy, one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness."

From John Updike's latest novel, "The Terrorist",

Shaikh Rashid recites with great beauty of pronunciation the one hundred fourth sura, concerning Hutama, the Crushing Fire:

And who shall teach thee what the Crushing Fire is? It is God's kindled fire, Which shall mount above the hearts of the damned; It shall verily rise over them like a vault, On outstretched columns.

This is line that I have to, have to, use as a refrain somewhere: "Who shall teach thee what the Crushing Fire is?" This could be a line straight out of that an old Anglo Saxon epic.

Binyavanga Wainaina on "How to write about Africa" says

"Always use the word 'Africa' or 'Darkness' or 'Safari' in your title. Subtitles may include the words 'Zanzibar', 'Masai', 'Zulu', 'Zambezi', 'Congo', 'Nile', 'Big', 'Sky', 'Shadow', 'Drum', 'Sun' or 'Bygone'. Also useful are words such as 'Guerrillas', 'Timeless', 'Primordial' and 'Tribal'. Note that 'People' means Africans who are not black, while 'The People' means black Africans."

Substitute spices, curry, mangoes etc for desi writing, and you are on your way.