Nandakishore Mridula

“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

“The career of dueling showcases a puzzling phenomenon we will often encounter: a category of violence can be embedded in a civilization for centuries and then vanish into thin air. When gentlemen agreed to a duel, they were fighting not for money or land or even women but for honor, the strange commodity that exists because everyone believes that everyone else believes that it exists. Honor is a bubble that can be inflated by some parts of human nature, such as the drive for prestige and the entrenchment of norms, and popped by others, such as a sense of humor.”
― Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity

“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