Medavarapu > Medavarapu's Quotes

“India is not, as people keep calling it, an underdeveloped country, but rather, in the context of its history and cultural heritage, a highly developed one in an advanced state of decay.”
― Shashi Tharoor

“So India’s problem turns out to be the world’s problem. What happened in India has happened in God’s name.

The problem’s name is God.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

“Go to Old Delhi,and look at the way they keep chickens there in the market. Hundred of pale hens and brightly colored roosters, stuffed tightly into wire-mesh cages. They see the organs of their brothers lying around them.They know they are next, yet they cannot rebel. They do not try to get out of the coop. The very same thing is done with humans in this country.”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

“India shaped my mind, anchored my identity, influenced my beliefs, and made me who I am. ... India matters to me and I would like to matter to India.”
― Shashi Tharoor

“Me, and thousands of others in this country like me, are half-baked, because we were never allowed to complete our schooling. Open our skulls, look in with a penlight, and you'll find an odd museum of ideas: sentences of history or mathematics remembered from school textbooks (no boy remembers his schooling like the one who was taken out of school, let me assure you), sentences about politics read in a newspaper while waiting for someone to come to an office, triangles and pyramids seen on the torn pages of the old geometry textbooks which every tea shop in this country uses to wrap its snacks in, bits of All India Radio news bulletins, things that drop into your mind, like lizards from the ceiling, in the half hour before falling asleep--all these ideas, half formed and half digested and half correct, mix up with other half-cooked ideas in your head, and I guess these half-formed ideas bugger one another, and make more half-formed ideas, and this is what you act on and live with.”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

“Among the many misdeeds of British rule in India, history will look upon the Act which deprived a whole nation of arms as the blackest.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“In India we celebrate the commonality of major differences; we are a land of belonging rather than of blood.”
― Shashi Tharoor

“Apparently, sir you Chinese are far ahead of us in every respect, except that you don’t have entrepreneurs. And our nation, though it has no drinking water, electricity, sewage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy, or punctuality, ‘’does’’ have entrepreneurs. Thousands and thousands of them. Especially in the field of technology. And these entrepreneurs—"we" entrepreneurs—have set up all these outsourcing companies that virtually run America now.”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

“How can the mind take hold of such a country? Generations of invaders have tried, but they remain in exile. The important towns they build are only retreats, their quarrels the malaise of men who cannot find their way home. India knows of their trouble. She knows of the whole world's trouble, to its uttermost depth. She calls "Come" through her hundred mouths, through objects ridiculous and august. But come to what? She has never defined. She is not a promise, only an appeal.”
― E.M. Forster, A Passage to India: A Reader's Guide to Essential Criticism

“Als it is hard for America to fight wars in the name of freedom, if those people themselves choose for nonfreedom. Can America and England save India from communism, if they vote communist themselves.”
― Oswald Mosley, Ich glaube an Europa: Ein Weg aus der Krise, eine Einführung in das europäische Denken

“India, she now knew, would not be content staying in the background, was nobody's wallpaper, insisted in interjecting itself into everyone's life, meddling with it, twisting it, molding it beyond recognition. India, she had found out, was a place of political intrigue and economic corruption, a place occupied by real people with their incessantly human needs, desires, ambitions, and aspirations, and not the exotic, spiritual, mysterious entity that was a creation of the Western imagination.”
― Thrity Umrigar, The Weight of Heaven

“When the British left, India was a multireligious, multiregional, multiethnic country, exploited, backward, and poor from colonialism.”
― Prem Kishore, India: An Illustrated History

“Over the years, the British had strategically pitted the Muslims against the Hindus, supporting the All India Muslim League and encouraging the notion that the Muslims were a distinct political community. Throughout British India, separate electorates had been offered to Muslims, underscoring their separateness from Hindus and sowing the seeds of communalism. Teh Morley-Minto reforms in 1908 had allowed direct election for seats and separate or communal representation for Muslims. This was the harbinger for the formation of the Muslim League in 1906. In 1940, the Muslim League, representing one-fifth of the total population of India, became a unifying force. They were resentful that they were not sufficiently represented in Congress and feared for the safety of Islam.”
― Prem Kishore, India: An Illustrated History

“Our population of 121 crore is not a limitation – it is the reason we will grow.”
― Sukant Ratnakar, Open the Windows

“Enlightenment, and the death which comes before it, is the primary business of Varanasi.”
― Tahir Shah, Sorcerer's Apprentice

“All pomp and show.” Anjali’s glare at the house would’ve exploded bricks if she’d had superhuman powers. “A fat cow needs a big barn.”
― Nicola Marsh, Busted in Bollywood

“But nothing in India is identifiable, the mere asking of a question causes it to disappear and merge into something else.”
― E. M. Forster

“Time spent in India has a extraordinary effect on one. It acts as a barrier that makes the rest of the world seem unreal.”
― Tahir Shah, Beyond the Devil's Teeth : Journeys in Gondwanaland

“In some peculiar way, indeed, the rules were now beginning to seem quite logical. It was then I knew that I had been in India long enough.”
― Tahir Shah, Beyond the Devil's Teeth : Journeys in Gondwanaland

“The trouble is Indians aren't used to being prosperous. We are more comfortable dealing with poverty- after all, poverty has been the staple here, and has been for many centuries.”
― Shobhaa De, Superstar India: From Incredible To Unstoppable

“On the 26th of January 1950, we are going to enter into a life of contradictions. In politics we will have equality and in social and economic life we will have inequality.
In politics we will be recognizing the principle of one man one vote and one vote one value.
In our social and economic life, we shall, by reason of our social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one man one value.

How long shall we continue to live this life of contradictions?
How long shall we continue to deny equality in our social and economic life?
If we continue to deny it for long, we will do so only by putting our political democracy in peril. We must remove this contradiction at the earliest possible moment or else those who suffer from inequality will blow up the structure of political democracy which this Assembly has so laboriously built up.”
― Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, Writings And Speeches: A Ready Reference Manual

“In India an explanation is often more confusing than what prompted it.”
― Tahir Shah, Beyond the Devil's Teeth : Journeys in Gondwanaland

“Freedom is for the educated people who fought for it. We were slaves of the English, now we will be slaves of the educated Indians—or the Pakistanis.”
― Khushwant Singh, Train to Pakistan

“In India everything has a use and a value.”
― Tahir Shah, Beyond the Devil's Teeth : Journeys in Gondwanaland

“Be as intellectual as you like about it, but India is brilliantly mad. And if you want to love it, you have to hate it first.”
― Simon Dring, On The Road Again: Thirty Years on the Traveller's Trail to India

“In international commerce, India is an ancient country-(19th October, 1899)”
― Virchand Raghavji Gandhi

“India has always had a strange way with her conquerors. In defeat, she beckons them in, then slowly seduces, assimilates and transforms them.”
― William Dalrymple, White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India

“The greatest skeptic must now admit that the land and sea-borne trade of India had given her a world-wide fame not only for her gold, spices and silk, but for her religions and philosophies also.”
― Virchand Raghavji Gandhi

“The ancient paused for a moment, as if his strength were failing. Yet I sensed that there was more to tell. Looking deep into my eyes, he whispered:
'The Gond kingdoms have fallen, their people live dispersed in poverty: the teak trees and the jungles have been cleared... but the importance of the Gonds must not be forgotten!”
― Tahir Shah, Beyond the Devil's Teeth : Journeys in Gondwanaland

“A profound impression was created by the discourses of Professor GN Chakravarti and Mrs Besant, who is said to have risen to unusual heights of eloquence, so exhilarating were the influences of the gathering. Besides those who represented our society and religions, especially Vivekananda, VR Gandhi, Dharmapala, captivated the public, who had only heard of Indian people through the malicious reports of interested missionaries, and were now astounded to see before them and hear men who represented the ideal of spirituality and human perfectibility as taught in their respective sacred writings.”
― Henry Olcott, The Life of Buddha and Its Lessons