India: A Million Mutinies Now - pg. 157

... about my own Indian family background in far-off Trinidad. I felt that the physical conditions of our life, often poor conditions, told only half the story: that the remnants of the old civilization we possessed gave the in-between colonial generations a second scheme of reverences and ambitions, and that this equipped us for the outside world better than might have seemed likely. But I also recalled something else: the shoddiness of the Indian books we bought, sometimes out of piety towards the ancestral land. I remembered the poor paper, the broken type, the oily ink, the sloping liens, the uneven margins, the rusting metal staples. The idea of India was part of our strength, and it received part of our piety; yet there was this other idea of the Indian reality, of poor goods, of poor machines poorly used.