India Quotes

You put cow dung on my face?’ ‘Every day religiously until you were three. Why else do you think your skin is so clear?

Bombay is a city where gossip is treated as a commodity.

But then the subject turned to the spiritual life and Meg talked about her many visits to ashrams in India and her admiration for Swami Muktananda and Gurumayi. That got in the way, especially because he told her of his skepticism regarding the guru industry, and suggested she might profitably read Gita Mehta’s book Karma Cola. “Why are you so cynical?” she asked him, as if she genuinely wanted to know the answer, and he said that if you grew up in India it was easy to conclude that these people were fakes. “Yes, of course there are lots of charlatans,” she said, reasonably, “but can’t you discriminate?” He shook his head sadly. “No,” he said. “No, I can’t.” That was the end of their chat.

Salman Rushdie

The Mississippi and its paddle boats, and the rivers of Bengal and their gleaming steamers evoked a similar atmosphere of romance, of long, song-filled voyages, high winds and lonely sunsets.

Qurratulain Hyder

What better hiding place than an old, woodlice-ridden album of photographs!

Renita D'Silva

We must also remember that in every little village-god and every little superstitious custom is that which we are accustomed to call our religious faith. But local customs are infinite and contradictory. Which are we to obey, and which not to obey? The Brāhmin of Southern India, for instance, would shrink in horror at the sight of another Brahmin eating meat; a Brahmin in the North thinks it a most glorious and holy thing to do—he kills goats by the hundred in sacrifice. If you put forward your custom, they are equally ready with theirs. Various are the customs all over India, but they are local. The greatest mistake made is that ignorant people always think that this local custom is the essence of our religion.

Swami Vivekananda

With me and India it's all about leaving and returning. Madras is home. It's a very complicated relationship. When you are away too long you get homesick, and when you are there too long you are sick of home.

Tishani Doshi

But he’s an untouchable, Shirin.’ ‘He’s my Untouchable Prince Charming, then. Only I am allowed to touch him.

Renita D'Silva

There’s a great drought in my village. People are dying. The price of rice and pulses has rocketed. There is no water anywhere. And here, people are complaining about the rain...

Renita D'Silva

What am I doing here, Reena? Why am I dancing to the tunes of that old hag?’‘You are saving your family.

Renita D'Silva

Prideep pointed to the flames of paraffin lamps as they came alive in the distance and cackled in awe at the experience. (…) I was to discover that making tasty soup with one carrot, ten peas and a little dishwater, was his greatest skill. One wondered what the man would be capable of creating with a blender and a non-stick frying-pan.

Tahir Shah

Have you been reading those books that clueless illiterate Duja in charge of the lending library lets you borrow?’ ‘No, Ma.’ ‘Then what put you in mind of devils possessing nuns to take over the church?

Renita D'Silva

For the first time his senses began to register the exotic, heady atmosphere of Mumbai...the odors most insistently demanded his attention. There were layers upon layers of them, all present at once but individually distinct. They shifted in strength and character with the ocean breeze that blew soft, irregular gusts across his face. First came the sharp tang of engine fuel mingled with an even more acrid burning smell, as though something unnatural had been set alight to blanket the city with a smoldering stench. A shift in the air's direction brought a fresher aroma of salt and brine floating in from the sea. It gave way to the hot smell of spices frying in oil, which in turn incongruously merged with the subtle reek of garbage.

Kathryn Guare

You are a girl, Shirin. Girls don’t run around naked.’‘Why?’‘They just don’t.

Renita D'Silva

Sometimes, it is easier to leave things as they are, rather than to fight, go against the flow.

Renita D'Silva

Now let me ask my countrymen, Have you ever granted a moment's thought to this very vital problem in the building of our nation ? Have you devised any practical remedies to combat this evil ? Will you, my countrymen, go on without making any intelligent effort to lay the axe at the root of this weaknss and misery ? Will you allow the noted chivalry and the noble hardihood of the Indian to sink into oblivion ? Will you make it a thing entirely of the past ? I implore you, I beseech you, I exhort you my brethren in the name of all that is dearest to you to shake off the lethargy, to show to this world that you were sleeping the sleep of lions only, to rise again with redoubled energy and courage to take the work of rebuilding your nation in right earnest.

Kodi Rammurthy Naidu

You don’t live in luxury! You are relegated to sleep in the little store room behind the kitchen with the cockroaches and rats and are at the mercy of Mrs. Gupta,’ Reena was indignant. ‘It’s five-star accommodation compared to a mud hut.

Renita D'Silva

GIVE IF YOU CAN. TAKE IF YOU HAVE TO

Satyen Nabar

Freedom is for the educated people who fought for it. We were slaves of the English, now we will be slaves of the educated Indians—or the Pakistanis.

Khushwant Singh

What wouldn’t my people give for a few bites of the biryani she ordered me to throw away yesterday because she said it smelt?

Renita D'Silva

I listen to the sound of India's voices for the last time . Laughter ripples like water . A prayer is a single note held long . There is so much life here . And too much death.I feel a soft brezze caress my face and I look up. An orange ribbon is floating through the air . In India , it's easy to see the wind .

Cathy Ostlere

For, to be woken up at five in the morning by the devotional treacle of Anup Jalota, Hari Om Sharan and other confectioners, all of them simultaneously droning out from several different cassette players; to be relentlessly assaulted for the rest of the day and most of the night by the alternately over-earnest and insolent voices of Kumar Sanu, Alisha Chinoy, Baba Sehgal singing 'Sexy, Sexy, Sexy', and 'Ladki hai kya re baba', 'Sarkaye leyo khatiya' and other hideous songs; to have them insidiously leak into your memory and become moronic refrains running over and over again in your mind; to have your environment polluted and your day destroyed in this way was to know a deepening rage, an impulse to murder, and, finally, a creeping fear at one's own dangerous level of derangement. It was to understand the perfectly sane people you read about in the papers, who suddenly explode into violence one fine day; it was to conceive a lasting hatred for the perpetrators, rich or poor, of these auditory atrocities. (on why he left Varanasi after a few days)

Pankaj Mishra

I watched the rows and rows of chappals left by devotees outside the Hindu temple and wondered if the homeless boys who sometimes steal our chickens ever steal them, and if they do, are they punished, and if so by whom?

Renita D'Silva

A profound impression was created by the discourses of Professor GN Chakravarti and Mrs Besant, who is said to have risen to unusual heights of eloquence, so exhilarating were the influences of the gathering. Besides those who represented our society and religions, especially Vivekananda, VR Gandhi, Dharmapala, captivated the public, who had only heard of Indian people through the malicious reports of interested missionaries, and were now astounded to see before them and hear men who represented the ideal of spirituality and human perfectibility as taught in their respective sacred writings.

Henry Olcott

Every family has secrets, Reena, and they’re there for a reason.

Renita D'Silva

The greatest skeptic must now admit that the land and sea-borne trade of India had given her a world-wide fame not only for her gold, spices and silk, but for her religions and philosophies also.

Virchand Gandhi

I wash the clothes, rinse them and then scrub them again. Will that square little box do that? I am not using any fancy machines when my hands will do.

Renita D'Silva

The battle of Panipat was fought for more than what is usually imagined. It was fought by a people in the far south of India, on behalf of the Mughal Emperor, for the defence of India.

Uday S. Kulkarni

There was just enough room for the tonga to get through among the bullock-carts, rickshaws, cycles and pedestrians who thronged both the road and the pavement--which they shared with barbers plying their trade out of doors, fortune-tellers, flimsy tea-stalls, vegetable-stands, monkey-trainers, ear-cleaners, pickpockets, stray cattle, the odd sleepy policeman sauntering along in faded khaki, sweat-soaked men carrying impossible loads of copper, steel rods, glass or scrap paper on their backs as they yelled 'Look out! Look out!' in voices that somehow pierced though the din, shops of brassware and cloth (the owners attempting with shouts and gestures to entice uncertain shoppers in), the small carved stone entrance of the Tinny Tots (English Medium) School which opened out onto the courtyard of the reconverted haveli of a bankrupt aristocrat, and beggars--young and old, aggressive and meek, leprous, maimed or blinded--who would quietly invade Nabiganj as evening fell, attempting to avoid the police as they worked the queues in front of the cinema-halls. Crows cawed, small boys in rags rushed around on errands (one balancing six small dirty glasses of tea on a cheap tin tray as he weaved through the crowd) monkeys chattered in and bounded about a great shivering-leafed pipal tree and tried to raid unwary customers as they left the well-guarded fruit-stand, women shuffled along in anonymous burqas or bright saris, with or without their menfolk, a few students from the university lounging around a chaat-stand shouted at each other from a foot away either out of habit or in order to be heard, mangy dogs snapped and were kicked, skeletal cats mewed and were stoned, and flies settled everywhere: on heaps of foetid, rotting rubbish, on the uncovered sweets at the sweetseller's in whose huge curved pans of ghee sizzled delicioius jalebis, on the faces of the sari-clad but not the burqa-clad women, and on the horse's nostrils as he shook his blinkered head and tried to forge his way through Old Brahmpur in the direction of the Barsaat Mahal.

Vikram Seth

There's no greater joy in life than enjoying power without responsibility. - Mukta Prajapati

Tuhin A. Sinha

Those English always say, "Look before thou leap". But, as is customary with the English, that is looking the wrong way. I say, Ranga, to look before thou look. Then, when thou actually looks before thou leaps, thou will have already done the leaping up here, and the leaping will be much easier, if thou does it at all.

Ian B.G. Burns

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

Tuhin A. Sinha

The best thing about India is the freedom that one enjoys here, which is also the worst thing about it.

Deepak Rana

I have squandered away my father's political legacy...My personal life is in a mess...Can I turn the tables? - Rhea Malviya

Tuhin A. Sinha

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

Tuhin A. Sinha

I know I have a strong India connect. Is it Subhash Chandra Bose or my father who left my Austrian mother when I was one? - Catherine Khan

Tuhin A. Sinha

Ideology is dead..Politics is about barter..you give some, take back a lot more. Its business at the end of the day. - Ravi Nehra

Tuhin A. Sinha

Sometimes, in the ancient writing samples found in the Indian subcontinent, we find that a mixture of Harappan and Brahmi features has been used. This definitely points towards a continuous evolutionary process that transformed the Harappan script into the later day Brahmi. This also explains why many of the Harappan signs seem to have been simply carried forward (even in actual form) in the Brahmi script.

Subhajit Ganguly

Cricket is about a lot more than playing by the rules, Mistry. It’s a gentleman’s game. Don’t you ever forget that.

Ken Doyle

Kavaata Valves is manufacturers and Exporters of Forge Ball Valve, Forged Ball Valves, Forged Steel Ball Valve in Belgaum, India.

kavaatavalves

Considering the fact that the Harappan script may have been proto-Brahmi, the underlying language to be expected should be Sanskrit, or proto-Sanskrit, or derivatives of Sanskrit. Many of the rules of evolution that apply to scripts are equivalently true for languages too. Like scripts, languages too render themselves to similar evolutionary inspections, as they too carry imprints of their journey down the ages.

Subhajit Ganguly

In 2011 India’s Test team was crowned as world cricket’s leading side for the first time in its history. The foundations for this global domination can be traced to a decade earlier, when a career-defining performance by VVS Laxman helped to turn a whole series on its head as India, in the face of a seemingly unassailable deficit, staged an unbelievable recovery to go on and overpower what many considered to be the finest cricket team ever assembled.

Dave Wilson

Any human being has a fundamental right to fight for their rights, but that (own right) can not include anything that is fundamentally trying to deny others what is their fundamental right.The root of Tyranny of Majority that Telangana is witnessing in India since 1956 and is expected to end in early 2014

Venkat Gandhi

Those who have never seen a leopard under favourable conditions in his natural surroundings can have no conception of the grace of movement, and beauty of colouring, of this the most gracefuL and the most beautiful of all animales in our Indian jungles.

Jim Corbett

Where are the coconut trees bowing allegiance to the wind, the wide open spaces, the verdant green fields?

Renita D'Silva

There was too much opinion in this country, too many sob stories. Nobody wanted to put a lid on anything; everyone wanted to say it all, about everything. If you as much as said hello to someone on a train or a plane, you were in for the unexpurgated memoirs. Nehru in 1947 had declared us a nation finding utterance - but in fifty years the utterance had become a mad clamour, a crazed babble, an unending howl. We were a nation of Scheherzades, afraid we'd die if, for a moment, we shut up. For myself, I'd mastered a face of steel, and an inscrutable nod. It did not always shut everyone up, but it did to some extent dam the ghastly flow.

Tarun J. Tejpal

And Aziz in an awful rage danced this way and that, not knowing what to do, and cried: "Down with the English anyhow. That's certain. Clear out, you fellows, double quick, I say. We may hate one another, but we hate you most. If I don't make you go, Ahmed will, Karim will, if it's flfty-flve hundred years we shall get rid of you, yes, we shall drive every blasted Englishman into the sea, and then "—he rode against him furiously— "and then," he concluded, half kissing him, "you and I shall be friends.

E.M. Forster

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.

Chetan Bhagat

The pulse of India throbs in the music and the dance-drama. It is in the realm of living that India exposes herself, without consciousness. The poetry, the stoicism in the face of aching tragedy...the languishing air of over-rich beauty, the heaviness of joss-stick perfume...all these are India. The plaintive shepherd's flute surging across forbidding Himalayan valleys; a wandering Rajasthani minstrel intoning an hour-long ballad, carrying with him the breath of middle ages...

Peggy Holroyde

a good traveller has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving" Taoist dictum quoted by Sam Miller

Sam Miller

She leans over Roop the way Sardarji leaned over Satya the years she cried for children, brushing tears from Roop's heavy lashes with her lips. She strokes her head as a mother would, says. "Slpee little one, we are together now."And Roop sleeps, overcome by the afternoon heat.While Satya watches her.So trusting, so very stupid.

Shauna Singh Baldwin

As they left the pier and walked into the park, Chahda looked around appreciatively. "Nice place, this. Capital of New Caledonia. Big island, has 8,548 square mile, also has 53,245 peoples. Eleven thousand in Noumea. That is what says the Worrold Alm-in-ack."Rick and Scotty laughed. It was like old times to hear Chahda quoting from The World Almanac. A Bombay beggar boy, he had educated himself with only the Almanac for his textbook, and he had laboriously memorized everything in it.

John Blaine

She removed the shining black disk from its sleeve, holding it by the edges. After she placed it on the turntable and set the arm into motion, she adjusted the volume on the amplifier, flooding the room with sound. She closed her eyes and began to sway to the music. She could almost feel Clive’s arms guiding her, as he had done so many times over the course of their lives tog

Ken Doyle

I am a Dalit in Khairlanji. A Pandit in the Kashmir valley. A Sikh in 1984. I am from the North East of India when I am in Munirka. I am a Muslim in Gujarat; a Christian in Kandhamal. A Bihari in Maharashtra. A Delhi-wallah in Chennai. A woman in North India. A Hindi-speaker in Assam. A Tamilian in MP. A villager in a big city. A confused man in an indifferent world. We're all minorities.We all suffer; we all face discrimination. It is only us resisting this parochialism when in the position of majoritarian power that makes us human. I hope that one day, I can just be an Indian in India - only then can I be me.

Sami Ahmad Khan

It is the intense spirituality of India, and not any great political structure or social organisation that it has developed, that has enabled it to resist the ravages of time and the accidents of history.

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

He was the first prime minister in a long time who did not have a son or a son-in-law in business or real estate

Sanjaya Baru

He can read and write, but he doesn't get what he's read. He's half-baked. The country is full of people like him, I'll tell you that. And we entrust our glourious parliamentary democracy

Aravind Adiga

The idea of Plato that philosophers must be the rulers and directors of society is practiced in India.

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

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.

Chetan Bhagat

Whoso meditates on the Omniscient, the Ancient, more minute than the atom, yet the Ruler and Upholder of all, Unimaginable, Brilliant like the Sun, beyond the reach of darkness.

Shri Purohit Swami

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