Best 1249 quotes in «india quotes» category

I never aspired to be the PM...Why should I quit over a silly issue like corruption? - Devender Singh

In India God is full of gods.

In India, where there are no passports or identity discs, and where religions counts for so much- except among those few who have crossed the 'black water' - I believe that a man wearing a saffron robe, or carrying a beggar's bowl , or with silver crosses on his headgear and chest, could walk from Khyber Pass to Cape Comorin without once being questioned about his destination, or the object of his journey,

In India, it is religion that forms the very core of the national heart. It is the backbone - the bed-rock - the foundation upon which the national edifice has been built.

In India we're fighting to retain a wilderness that we have. Whereas in the west, it's gone. Every person that's walking down the street is a walking bar code. You can tell where their clothes are from, how much they cost, which designer made which shoe, which shop you bought each item from. Everything is civilized and tagged and valued and numbered and put in it's place. Whereas in India, the wilderness still exists-the unindoctrinated wilderness of the mind, full of untold secrets and wild imaginings.

In India, as in other poor countries, we have a line that is invisible and abstract and yet more powerful and pervasive than anything the West or the Japanese have invented. It is called the poverty line. Above the poverty line are three meals a day. Below it is a spectrum that stretches all the way from 2.99 to zero meals. As familiar as a clothes-line, most people in India spend their entire lives trying to reach out beyond it. It is their greatest aspiration. If you are fortunate, if the gods smile and you are lucky, you may get a glimpse of it. You can’t see the line, you can’t touch it, and five hundred million people are trying to get to it.

In India there’s no modernism without barbarism. Strip away the young man’s face and you’ll find an old man’s mind.

In Indian social-cultural-political discourse there is a general tendency to ignore deeper, intellectual thought, and the sensationalist mass media has actually contributed to a great dumbing down of even the educated masses. In this climate where any and all intellectuality has been mostly confined to a few ivory towers of academy, it is difficult to get even the educated and socio-economically privileged section of the society interested in the idea of exploring any deeper intellectual thought. It seems as if the trinity of pop-sociology, pop-psychology and pop-culture has taken over the general mentality of the society leaving little room for any serious, intellectually rigorous discourse on social-cultural phenomena. If at all, there is any serious attempt to think through and understand the observed phenomena, it is almost always done using the intellectual theories and frameworks developed in the Western academic circles. But this habit of non-thinking or thinking only in terms of borrowed categories must change if we want India to awaken to her innate intellectual potential.

In Italy there are about 60 million people and we know how high is the percentage of morons on national soil. However, in China there are about 1.4 billion people and in India almost 1.3 billion. Therefore I wonder then, if more or less all the world is a small village, with how many morons should we have to come to terms on the territory of this stupid planet. It's the same the world over, or the world is the same wherever you go!

In my entire life, I never once heard either of my parents say they were stressed. That was just not a phrase I grew up being allowed to say. That, and the concept of "Me time".

In medieval India, the Hindu Vaishnava system of bhakti-yoga (devotional yoga) developed highly sophisticated categories of relation (rasa) to God, including santa (awe and reverence), vatsalya (parental attitude toward God), dasya (servant of God), sakhya (being friends and playmates with God), and madburya (passionate, romantic love).

In Networking never underestimate anyones connection potential. Sometimes even a small office helper can connect you to the Business Owner !

In Stalin’s famous words, one death is a tragedy; one million deaths is a statistic. In this case, it is not even a particularly good statistic. The very incomprehensibility of what a million horrible and violent deaths might mean, and the impossibility of producing an appropriate response, is perhaps the reason that the events following partition have yielded such a great and moving body of fictional literature and such an inadequate and flimsy factual history. What does it matter to the readers of history today whether there were 200,000 deaths, or 1 million, or 2 million? On that scale, is it possible to feel proportional revulsion, to be five times more upset at 1 million deaths than at 200,000? Few can grasp the awfulness of how it might feel to have their fathers barricaded in their houses and burnt alive, their mothers beaten and thrown off speeding trains, their daughters torn away, raped and branded, their sons held down in full view, screaming and pleading, while a mob armed with rough knives hacked off their hands and feet. All these things happened, and many more like them; not just once, but perhaps a million times. It is not possible to feel sufficient emotion to appreciate this monstrous savagery and suffering. That is the true horror of the events in the Punjab in 1947: one of the vilest episodes in the whole of history, a devastating illustration of the worst excesses to which human beings can succumb. The death toll is just a number.

Instead, their only daughter was only going to Kerala, just a dodgy neighbouring state, doing one of those five-year integrated MA degrees that held no charm, required no intellectual prowess, and did not even further one’s job prospects. ‘Everyone from Kerala comes here to study, but our unique daughter decides to go there. What can I do?’ My father’s intermittent grumbling was amplified by my mother who spoke non-stop about sex-rackets, ganja, alcoholism and foreign tourists, making Kerala – a demure land of lagoons and forty rivers – appear more and more like Goa.

Internet is puberty of society.

In the old days, farmers would keep a little of their home-made opium for their families, to be used during illnesses, or at harvests and weddings; the rest they would sell to the local nobility, or to pykari merchants from Patna. Back then, a few clumps of poppy were enough to provide for a household's needs, leaving a little over, to be sold: no one was inclined to plant more because of all the work it took to grow poppies - fifteen ploughings of the land and every remaining clod to be built; purchases of manure and constant watering; and after all that, the frenzy of the harvest, each bulb having to be individually nicked, drained and scrapped. Such punishment was bearable when you had a patch or two of poppies - but what sane person would want to multiply these labours when there were better, more useful crops to grow, like wheat, dal, vegetables? But those toothsome winter crops were steadily shrinking in acreage: now the factory's appetite for opium seemed never to be seated. Come the cold weather, the English sahibs would allow little else to be planted; their agents would go from home to home, forcing cash advances on the farmers, making them sign /asámi/ contracts. It was impossible to say no to them: if you refused they would leave their silver hidden in your house, or throw it through a window. It was no use telling the white magistrate that you hadn't accepted the money and your thumbprint was forged: he earned commissions on the oppium adn would never let you off. And, at the end of it, your earnings would come to no more than three-and-a-half sicca rupees, just about enough to pay off your advance.

In the West, people learn through the Socratic tradition. The education system was influenced by Western philosophy and is based on constantly questioning the knowledge that’s handed to you and arriving at the truth through that process of questioning. The Indian system took off from the Guru-Shishyha tradition in which your virtue as a student lay in taking tradition or parampara as it is given to you and passing it on to the next generation in the exact same way.

In this city, every deserted street corner conceals a crowd. It appears in a minute when something disrupts the way in which the world is supposed to work. It can disappear almost as instantaneously.

In the temple, I sit on the cool floor next to Grandfather, beneath the stern benevolence of the goddess's glance. Grandfather is clad in only a traditional silk dhoti--no fancy modern clothes for him. That's one of the things I admire about him, how he is always unapologetically, uncompromisingly himself. His spine is erect and impatient; white hairs blaze across his chest.

In your name, the family name is at last because it's the family name that lasts.

Inventions cannot be judged on patent parameters, but patents have the ability to take inventions very far

Inventors do not invent for financial gain, they invent simply because they love to invent

I suddenly imagined the Buddha, staring at his naval, laughing. The truth is so simple, so free.

I saw [Chennai]. It had the usual Indian elements like autos, packed public buses, hassled traffic cops and tiny shops that sold groceries, fruits, utensils, clothes or novelty items. However, it did feel different. First, the sign in every shop was in Tamil. The Tamil font resembles those optical illusion puzzles that give you a headache if you stare at them long enough. Tamil women, all of them, wear flkowers in their hair. Tamil men don't believe in pants and wear lungis even in shopping districts. The city is filled with film posters. The heroes' pictures make you feel even your uncles can be movie stars. The heroes are fat, balding, have thick moustaches and the heroine next to them is a ravishing beauty.

[Taken from a BBC documentary] Tariq was born in Lahore, now in Pakistan, then part of British-ruled India, in 1943. A Catholic school education did nothing to shake his life-long atheism, which he shared with his communist parents.

It’s a pity that the land of great leaders like Chandragupta Maurya, Ashoka and Akbar, has to be led by a dummy PM. - Shruti Ranjan

It feels as though it were just yesterday Grandfather exited my life like a bullet, leaving a bleeding hole behind.

It is all about the trade of ignorance. And India is such a bronze-age nation that is filled with these trades (astrology, palm reading, vastushashtra and others).

It is hard to write it in words that I can read, that re-establishes the fact that has been haunting me for the past one year.

It did not cross the minds of most Hindus that barring exceptions, they were responsible for Catholicism in India. The outcastes of Hinduism, the untouchables, who fell beyond the pale of the caste system had ample reason to convert to Catholicism. The caste-Hindus, as a matter of fact, left them no choice. As sub-humans they were little better than slaves.

I thought about my [Punjabi] family. The only nakshatram we think about is the division of petrol pumps when we have to see the girl.

It is absolutely okay if you do not have wings & halo to qualify as an Angel, but let your deeds, thoughts, conduct, reflexions & your demeanour perpetually proves that you are an Angel in the human body. Let you continuously believe that there is enough goodness all over in the world & it always prevails in the end. Let you remind yourself once again that it is always protagonist of the story who wins at the end after fighting all the odds. Let you constantly add more colours of happiness, hope, positivity, contentment & of your warmth in the environment while seeking it in everything everywhere all the time. Let everyday your sun rise & shine with all its might & turn whole colorless world into bright yellow & orange. Let your day be full of fun, joy & love. Let you, your life & your memories always remain as colorful as the festival itself or even more. Wish you a very happy & wonderful Holi.

It is as if we were to start hacking a path through the Amazon forest. By the time we have proceeded a hundred yards, the undergrowth takes over again.

It is important to leave behind a rich and memorable legacy than just accumulated history!

It is said that whatever you do is your purpose & that you are your purpose. Still allow yourself to be alligned with universe & your soul more than this world to find & stick to your life's original purpose. Let you setup yourself to use your limitless potential to establish a lifelong partnership with the universe & allow it to be your teacher guiding along your true path. Let you remind yourself that you are the best creation of God. Let you continue doing what you can do honestly with all that you have & celebrate your life, your deeds & your world every day. Let your abilities, potential, love, joy, happiness & shine grow stronger everyday. Stay Smiling & Blessed!

It's not arrogance. [Tamilians] are quiet people.

I was temperamentally better suited to a cognitive discipline, to an introspective field—internal medicine, or perhaps psychiatry. The sight of the operating theater made me sweat. The idea of holding a scalpel caused coils to form in my belly. (It still does.) Surgery was the most difficult thing I could imagine. And so I became a surgeon.

It [the Quit India Resolution] was very far from being the Gita, but like Gita it suffered from flood of explanations, commentaries, and interpretations.

it was too loud for hope it was too silent for victory.

I wonder if the story (though not intended as such by my aunt) is a warning for me, a preview of my own life which I thought I had fashioned so cleverly, so differently from my mother's, but which is only a repetition, in a different raga, of her tragic song. Perhaps it is like this for all daughters, doomed to choose for ourselves, over and over, the men who have destroyed our mothers.

Living in a small town [in India] was like living in a glass house!

Love is a forest fire ignited by a firefly

L'oppio inonderà il mercato come un diluvio monsonico

Many crores of rupees are squandered in this country by way offering gratitude to God and bribing Him to gain greater and greater wealth.

Mahatma Gandhi was as devout a Rambhakt as you can get — he died from a Hindu assassin’s bullet with the words “Hé Ram” on his lips — but he always said that for him, Ram and Rahim were the same deity, and that if Hinduism ever taught hatred of Islam or of non-Hindus, “it is doomed to destruction.

Love is like that girl, who had to drop out of school; Three-and-a-half days each month, Must wear dry grass tied in cloth; In monsoon, the grass is green, So, ash wrapped in cloth, to soak up the blood, seated quietly, alone, book-less.

Mahatma Gandhi alipigwa risasi na kufariki dunia baada ya maisha yake kumfelisha. Lakini kifo chake kiliipatia India uhuru kutoka Uingereza. Hivyo, akafanikiwa.

Man-eaters are finally shot dead.

Marriage: In India a fact . In other parts of the world an obsession.

Marmaduke's theory was that, as he couldn't understand Christianity, it was safe to premise that people whose religion was a mixture of degraded Buddhism and devilworship couldn't understand it either. So he founded a Buddhist mission, to teach 'em their own religion.