Best 1249 quotes in «india quotes» category

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 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 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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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

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

L'oppio inonderà il mercato come un diluvio monsonico

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

Memorialization is not a passive practice but an active conversation.

Love is a forest fire ignited by a firefly

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 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.

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

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.

Me, and thousands of others in this country like me, are half-baked, because we were never allowed to complete our schooling. Open our skulls, look in with a penlight, and you'll find an odd museum of ideas: sentences of history or mathematics remembered from school textbooks (no boy remembers his schooling like the one who was taken out of school, let me assure you), sentences about politics read in a newspaper while waiting for someone to come to an office, triangles and pyramids seen on the torn pages of the old geometry textbooks which every tea shop in this country uses to wrap its snacks in, bits of All India Radio news bulletins, things that drop into your mind, like lizards from the ceiling, in the half hour before falling asleep--all these ideas, half formed and half digested and half correct, mix up with other half-cooked ideas in your head, and I guess these half-formed ideas bugger one another, and make more half-formed ideas, and this is what you act on and live with.

Modernity is kind of a tradition and tradition itself is not a rulebook. It's a dialogue and a dialectical process— just as tradition affects us, we too affect tradition and culture, and we change it.

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.

May be the power lies in the hands of the one who holds the gun... so he just presses the trigger whenever the slightest streak of anger passes his mind... and after a few haunting days he roams freely in the country without fear .. and what about the one who faces the wrath and bears the bullets? He leaves a movement behind... but haven't such movements always been ephemeral? Is death the price you need to pay to open the eyes of those who care but just for a couple of days?

minorityhood is a state of mind, Mr. Diggs. It is a sense of powerlessness, of being out of the mainstream, of being here on sufferance. I refuse to let others define me that way. I tell my fellow Muslims: No one can make you a minority without your consent.

Moral rights form the essence of copyright law. When they conflict with economic rights, moral rights must always prevent

Most people around here prefer undead drivers, so I never get a chance to make any money on steady contracts.

Not every murderer is known, not every death is recorded, not every human being in the history of mankind is remembered and not every God’s name is memorised by me. That doesn’t mean they don’t exist, Dr.Mukherjee.

My mother clutches at the collar of my shirt. I rub her back and feel her tears on my neck. It's been decades since our bodies have been this close. It's an odd sensation, like a torn ligament knitting itself back, lumpy and imperfect, usable as long as we know not to push it too hard.

My brothers and sisters of America, there is not the least shadow of hope that India can ever be Christianised. After two hundred years of vain efforts and of spending millions of dollars with the prestige of the conqueror and backed by British bayonets, Christianity is not supported by the converts themselves. Every bit of Protestant Christianity in India is maintained partly by the money flowing from England and America, and partly by taxes imposed upon the Hindus against their will, which must be paid although the people starve. The people of India as a whole are saturated with religious and philosophical thought. They think and ponder on spiritual matters from childhood to death. Even the street-sweeper is frequently more profoundly versed in subtle metaphysics and divine wisdom than the missionary sent to convert him.

My secret name for the annex was "the hen-coop". Glued to the nesting boxes of their favorite wicker chairs, the inmates sat click-clacking knitting needles, hatching balls of wool, their silence pierced only by an occasional frail voice of meaningless conversation. Flapping imaginary wings, "Cock-a-doodle-dooing," and "Chook-chooking", I ran through crowing, but not so loudly as to frighten them or be rude. I see now the old women's pinched faces, stiff and severe as the potted aspidistras beside them, only masked despair. With nothing to do but breathe, they knitted and crocheted memories and lost dreams into tangible objects. On the hour as though on cue, the old chickens roused, froze suddenly still, before exchanging smiles and nodding some shared secret to one another as the wild music from Bruges' church bells rang out the time from the many belfries, rattling teh panes and vibrating through the "hen house" with deep echoes. And I'd leap to the wild music - a dancing puppet pulled by unseen strings.

Nation has to be proud of itself to move forward. It should be clear that as long as India does not stand-up, there will be no peace in Asia.