Renuka Govind

“if you were to identify a single person who embodies us Indians the best, who do you think it should be? Ideally, it should be a tribal woman because she is most likely to be carrying the deepest-rooted and widest-spread mtDNA lineage in India today, M2. In a genetic sense, she would represent all of our history, with very little left out. She shares the most with the largest number of Indians, no matter where in the social ladder they stand, what language they speak and which region they inhabit because we are all migrants, and we are all mixed.”
― Tony Joseph, Early Indians: The Story of Our Ancestors and Where We Came From

“People are usually afraid of change because they fear the unknown. But the single greatest constant of history is that everything changes.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow

“History has been unkind to Ambedkar. First it contained him, and then it glorified him. It has made him India’s Leader of the Untouchables, the King of the Ghetto. It has hidden away his writings. It has stripped away the radical intellect and the searing insolence.”
― Arundhati Roy, The Doctor and the Saint: The Ambedkar-Gandhi Debate: Caste, Race and Annihilation of Caste

“Gandhi always said that he wanted to live like the poorest of the poor. The question is, can poverty be simulated? Poverty, after all, is not just a question of having no money or no possessions. Poverty is about having no power.”
― Arundhati Roy, The Doctor and the Saint: The Ambedkar-Gandhi Debate: Caste, Race and Annihilation of Caste