Nandakishore Mridula

“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

“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.”
― Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity

“Feminization is the process in which cultures have increasingly respected the interests and values of women. Since violence is largely a male pastime, cultures that empower women tend to move away from the glorification of violence and are less likely to breed dangerous subcultures of rootless young men.”
― Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity

“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