* Went to England on a Scholarship in 1950
* After 4 Years @ Oxford, begins to write
* His Grandfather had come from India to Trinidad
* He first visited India, his ancestral land, in 1962 and the book he wrote then "An Area of Darkness".
* My Litereary Beginings & the imaginative promptings of my many sided background.- tagline to the book Findin the Center
* To a Prose writer, the impulse by itself, is nothing. It needed a story and I couldnot think of none for some years.
* I worked out the story in my head for the next 3/4 months; revisited some of the places, I was going to write about; and then feeling fairly secure, I began to write.
* As a story of discovery and grwoing knowledge, it goes beyond the impulse, felt all those years ago in Bombay.
* If "Prologue to an Autobiography" is an account, with the understanding of middle age, of the writer's beginnings, "The crocodiles of Yamoussoukro" shows the writer in his latest development, going about one side of his business: travelling, adding to his knowledge of the world, exposing himself to new people and new relationships.
* A writer after a time carries his world with him. his own burden of experience; human experience and literary experience (one deepening the other).
* I had no views or opinions, no system. I was interested in History; but I was also interested in landscape; above all I was interested -- at times frivolously -- in people as I found them.
* The travel was glamorous. But, travel also made unsuspected demands. It soon became a necessary stimulus for me.
* It broadened my world view. It showed me a challenging world and took me out of my own colonial shell. It became the substitute for the mature social experience; the deepening knowledge of a society -- which my background and the nature of my life denied me.
* to hold oneself in constant readiness for adventure or revelation.
* Always at the beginning there was the possibility of failure. -- of not finding anything; not getting started on the chain of accidents and encounters.
* "The Middle Passage": In September 1960, I went back to Trinidad on a three month scholarship granted by the Govt. of Trinidad and Tobago. No conditions were attached to this ofer, whose only purpose was to enable to revisit the country about which I wrote and from which I had long been separated.
* While I was in Trinidad, the premier, Dr. Eric Williams, suggested, that I should write a non-fiction book about West Indies. The publication of the book would be supported by the Trinidad Govt.
* I could write about any aspect of the region and visit whatever territories, I wished.
* The offer was even more generous than the first. It is in no way , however, an 'Official' book. It is not political; it sells nothing.
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