(Author's break-in:

This chapter might seem to be India-centric but read through it and you will realise that these problems plague people the world over.)

Everything is recycled in India, even dreams.

Exasperating farrago of distortions, misrepresentations and outright lies being broadcast by an unprincipled showman masquerading as a journalist.

Diplomacy is much like the 'lovemaking of elephants', which is accompanied with a lot of bellowing and other sound effects, but, no one can be sure of the consequences for at least the next two years.

India shaped my mind, anchored my identity, influenced my beliefs, and made me who I am... India matters to me and I would like to matter to India.

There's no longer a superpower standoff. But, there are real problems that divide countries around the world and, the UN is still the place where we can get together and try and discuss them.

We wear the dust of history on our foreheads, and the mud of the future on our feet.

(India,) a highly developed country of the past, in an advanced state of decay.

I don't go by my caste, creed or religion. My works speak for me.

Above all, Danny Boyle's 'Slumdog Millionaire' is the work of an artist at the peak of his powers. India is his palette, and Mumbai - that teeming 'maximum city', with 19 million strivers on the make, jostling, scheming, struggling and killing for success - is his brush.

The United Nations is the preeminent institution of multilateralism. It provides a forum where sovereign states can come together to share burdens, address common problems, and seize common opportunities. The U.N. helps establish the norms that many countries - including the United States - would like everyone to live by.

Indian democracy has often been likened to the stately progress of the elephant - ponderous in its gait and reluctant to change course, but, not easily swayed from its new path when it does.

(Education in India) We have islands of excellence floating in a sea of mediocrity.

The fact is, in fact, that probably Hollywood and MTV and McDonalds have done more for American soft power around the world than any specifically government activity.

It is entirely possible for people around the world to love American products, American books, American movies, American music, and dislike the policies of the government of America.

Great discoveries, like Ganapathi, are often the result of making the wrong mistake at the right time.

Why does man need bread? To survive. But, why survive if it is only to eat more bread? To live is more than just to sustain life - it is to enrich, and be enriched by, life.

One cannot, as I have written elsewhere, take revenge upon history; history is its own revenge. 

I tell them that, in fact, everything in India in over-developed, particularly the social structure, the bureaucracy, the political process, the financial system, the university network and, for that matter, the women. 

The Mahabharata declares, 'What is here is nowhere else; what is not here, is nowhere.'

Bombs and bullets alone cannot destroy India, because Indians will pick their way through the rubble and carry on as they have done throughout history.

While he was alive, he was impossible to ignore; once he had gone, he was impossible to imitate.

All knowledge is transient, linked to the world around it and subject to change as the world changes.

Hinduism is the best antidote to Marxism.

India is my country, and in that sense my outrage is personal.

Indians paid, in other words, for the privilege of being conquered by the British.

We must not be deluded into making concessions, whether on Kashmir or any other issue, in the naive expectation that these would end the hostility of the ISI and its cohorts. We must understand that Pakistan’s fragile sense of self-worth rests on its claim to be superior to India, stronger and more valiant than India, richer and more capable than India. This is why the killers of 26/11 struck the places they did, because their objective was not only to kill and destroy, but also to pull down India’s growth, tarnish its success story and darken its lustre in the world. The more we grow and flourish in the world, the more difficult we make it for the Pakistani military to sustain its myth of superiority or even parity. There are malignant forces in Islamabad who see their future resting upon India’s failure. 

When we kill people, we feel compelled to pretend that it is for some higher cause. It is this pretence of virtue, I promise you, that will never be forgiven by history.

It was not just the maharajas who had to suffer: every Indian schoolchild must lament the influence of the British dress code on Indians—especially the tie as a permanent noose around the necks of millions of schoolchildren, in India’s sweltering heat, even today.

As Henry Nevinson also pointed out, the rule of law, such as it was, functioned in a system in which Indians were ‘compelled to live permanently under a system of official surveillance which reads their private letters, detains their telegrams, and hires men to watch their actions’. This, then, was the rule of law the British taught us. We have much to unlearn.

History, in any case, cannot be reduced to some sort of game of comparing misdeeds in different eras; each period must be judged in itself, and for its own successes and transgressions.

If the Muslims of the 1520s acted out of ignorance and fanaticism, should Hindus act the same way in the 1980s? By doing what you propose to do, you will hurt the feelings of the Muslims of today, who did not perpetrate the injustices of the past and who are in no position to inflict injustice upon you today; you will provoke violence and rage against your own kind; you will tarnish the name of the Hindu people across the world; and you will irreparably damage your own cause. Is this worth it?

When a marauder destroys your house and takes away your cash and jewellery , his responsibility for his actions far exceeds that of the servant who opened door to him, whether out of fear, cupidity or because he simply he didn't know any better.

Indeed there were outstanding examples of good governance in India at the time, notably the Travancore kingdom, which in 1819 became the first government in the world to decree universal, compulsory and free primary education for both boys and girls.

Though outwardly there was diversity and infinite variety among our people, everywhere there was that tremendous impress of oneness, which had held all of us together for ages... [India] was a world in itself, a culture and a civilization which gave shape to all things. Foreign influences poured in...and were absorbed. 

Some kind of a dream of unity has occupied the mind of India since the dawn of civilization. That unity was not conceived as something imposed from outside, a standardization of externals or even of beliefs. It was something deeper and, within its fold, the widest tolerance of belief and custom was practiced and every variety acknowledged and even encouraged.

It is striking that when slavery was abolished, the British government paid compensation, not to the men and women so inhumanely pressed into bondage, but, to their former owners, for their ‘loss of property’!

When society stacks up all the odds against a woman, she’d better not count on the man’s support. 

The fact that Nehru had risked his life to save a single Moslem had a profound effect far beyond New Delhi. Many thousands of Moslems, who had intended to flee to Pakistan, now stayed in India, staking their lives on Nehru’s ability to protect them and assure them justice.