Nandakishore Mridula

“One-third of the world’s poorest 1.2 billion people live in India where 1.4 million children die before their fifth birthday—making this the highest percentage in the world. Despite a reduction in the official poverty figures and an improvement in various human development indices, one in four children is still malnourished and 3,000 children die every day from poverty. This is the India that we would prefer not to see, the India that inconveniently comes in the way of slogans and news headlines of India Shining, India galloping forward, India being welcomed to exclusive clubs of the world’s rich and powerful nations.”
― Barkha Dutt, This Unquiet Land: Stories from India's Fault Lines

“We could all learn from the dignified but strong way in which Sartaj summed up his feelings about Dadri. His words contained within them both the tragedy and the promise of our country’s future. ‘I just want to say a small thing and make a plea. We have all read the song, we all know the words,’ he told me. ‘Saare jahan se accha, Hindustan hamara, mazhab nahin sikhata, aapas mein bair rakhna... If we could just follow the sentiments expressed in this song, we will be fine as a country.’ The words were heartbreaking for the sheer generosity of spirit they displayed. They showed perhaps the only way in which the fault lines of this unquiet land can be mended.”
― Barkha Dutt, This Unquiet Land: Stories from India's Fault Lines

“It was sobering to think that the enormous power of the earthquake and the tsunami it had generated had managed to kill 230,000 people in fourteen countries but had still been unable to break down the wall that separated India’s Dalits from their countrymen.”
― Barkha Dutt, This Unquiet Land: Stories from India's Fault Lines

“By the time I was an adult and a working journalist, the India I grew up in had been transformed radically. So had its cultural moorings. In an environment exploding with mobiles and McDonald’s, economic and social ascent became the key drivers of dreams, creating a country within a country; one in which citizenship was no profound, or even, argumentative pact with nation-building but almost a corporate membership in a rewards programme designed to give maximum returns. Liberalization and rapid growth had also played midwife to the birth of a neo middle-class consumed by its own daily battles for survival and self-fulfilment.”
― Barkha Dutt, This Unquiet Land: Stories from India's Fault Lines