If you just sit and observe, you will see how restless your mind is. If you try to calm it, it only makes it worse, but over time it does calm, and when it does, there's room to hear more subtle things - that's when your intuition starts to blossom and you start to see things more clearly and be in the present more. Your mind just slows down, and you see a tremendous expanse in the moment. You see so much more than you could see before. It's a discipline; you have to practice it.
Concerning Concealment as a symptom of love for Krsna:"It has been stated, 'although Srimati Radharani developed a deep loving affection for Krsna, She hid Her attitude in the core of Her heart so that others could not detect Her actual condition.
At times there's something so precise and mathematically chilling about nationalism.Build a dam to take away water AWAY from 40 million people. Build a dam to pretend to BRING water to 40 million people. Who are these gods that govern us? Is there no limit to their powers?
State first, subject second, statesman last.
You can take the Indian out of the family, but you cannot take the family out of the Indian.
In your name, the family name is at last because it's the family name that lasts.
Civilians enjoy their time because soldiers sacrifice their time.
Uniform of a soldier and uniform of a student both are equally needed for the nation.
A JEWELRY STORE NAMED INDIAIf you hold this Dazzling emeraldUp to the sky,It will shine a billion Beautiful miraclesPainted from the tearsOf the Most High.Plucked from the lush gardensOf a yellowish-green paradise,Look inside this hypnotic gemAnd a kaleidoscope of Titillating, Soul-raising Sights and colorsWill tease and seduceYour eyes and mind.Tell me, sir.Have you ever heardA peacock sing?Hold your earTo this mystical stoneAnd you will hearSacred hymns flowingTo the vibrationsOf the perfumedWind.
All over India, all over the world, as the sun or the shadow of darkness moves from east to west, the call to prayer moves with it, and people kneel down in a wave to pray to God. Five waves each day - one for each namaaz - ripple across the globe from longitude to longitude. The component elements change direction, like iron filings near a magnet - towards the house of God in Mecca.
India was and to some extent, still is, a nation where its citizens care more about their religious freedom than any other earthly possession. Give them food or not, it doesn’t matter to them, as long as they are allowed to practice their religion. But, take away their religion, they will fight till the last breath of their life.
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.
The times today are too dangerous for the young and the smart to be not bothered. Know the truth. Remember, “We can deny the truth. But, we can’t avoid it.” We have been there; we have all been there. Ask a female friend who is fighting for a better pay scale, ask the father of an immigrant who is nervous about the future of his daughter, ask a gay friend who is fighting for the right to marry, ask an African-American friend who wants her younger brother to be unafraid and proud, ask a homeless worker in Bangladesh whose house just got swept by rising sea levels, ask a young child in Beijing who breathes an air polluted by fossil fuels, ask a child labor in India who works ten hours and twelve hours to get two square meals a day. And, when you ask, you will know. You will know why we need to take it personally.
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.
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).
We preach and practice brotherhood — not only of man but of all living beings — not on Sundays only but on all the days of the week. We believe in the law of universal justice — that our present condition is the result of our past actions and that we are not subjected to the freaks of an irresponsible governor, who is prosecutor and judge at the same time; we depend for our salvation on our own acts and deeds and not on the sacrificial death of an attorney.
Archie Henderson has won no awards, written no books and never played any representative sport. He was an under-11 tournament-winning tennis player as a boy, but left the game when he discovered rugby where he was one of the worst flyhalves he can remember. This did not prevent him from having opinions on most things in sport.His moment of glory came in 1970 when he predicted—correctly as it turned out—that Griquas would beat the Blue Bulls (then still the meekly named Noord-Transvaal) in the Currie Cup final. It is something for which he has never been forgiven by the powers-that-be at Loftus. Archie has played cricket in South Africa and India and gave the bowling term military medium a new and more pacifist interpretation. His greatest ambition was to score a century on Llandudno beach before the tide came in.
The most dangerous people in the world are not the tiny minority instigating evil acts, but those who do the acts for them. For example, when the British invaded India, many Indians accepted to work for the British to kill off Indians who resisted their occupation. So in other words, many Indians were hired to kill other Indians on behalf of the enemy for a paycheck. Today, we have mercenaries in Africa, corporate armies from the western world, and unemployed men throughout the Middle East killing their own people - and people of other nations - for a paycheck. To act without a conscience, but for a paycheck, makes anyone a dangerous animal. The devil would be powerless if he couldn't entice people to do his work. So as long as money continues to seduce the hungry, the hopeless, the broken, the greedy, and the needy, there will always be war between brothers.
The most dangerous people in the world are not the tiny minority instigating evil acts, but those who do the acts for them – for a paycheck. To act without a conscience, but for a paycheck, makes anyone a dangerous animal. The devil would be powerless if he couldn’t entice people to do his work. So as long as money continues to seduce the hungry, the hopeless, the broken, the greedy, and the needy, there will always be war between people.
1. Bangladesh.... In 1971 ... Kissinger overrode all advice in order to support the Pakistani generals in both their civilian massacre policy in East Bengal and their armed attack on India from West Pakistan.... This led to a moral and political catastrophe the effects of which are still sorely felt. Kissinger’s undisclosed reason for the ‘tilt’ was the supposed but never materialised ‘brokerage’ offered by the dictator Yahya Khan in the course of secret diplomacy between Nixon and China.... Of the new state of Bangladesh, Kissinger remarked coldly that it was ‘a basket case’ before turning his unsolicited expertise elsewhere.2. Chile.... Kissinger had direct personal knowledge of the CIA’s plan to kidnap and murder General René Schneider, the head of the Chilean Armed Forces ... who refused to countenance military intervention in politics. In his hatred for the Allende Government, Kissinger even outdid Richard Helms ... who warned him that a coup in such a stable democracy would be hard to procure. The murder of Schneider nonetheless went ahead, at Kissinger’s urging and with American financing, just between Allende’s election and his confirmation.... This was one of the relatively few times that Mr Kissinger (his success in getting people to call him ‘Doctor’ is greater than that of most PhDs) involved himself in the assassination of a single named individual rather than the slaughter of anonymous thousands. His jocular remark on this occasion—‘I don’t see why we have to let a country go Marxist just because its people are irresponsible’—suggests he may have been having the best of times....3. Cyprus.... Kissinger approved of the preparations by Greek Cypriot fascists for the murder of President Makarios, and sanctioned the coup which tried to extend the rule of the Athens junta (a favoured client of his) to the island. When despite great waste of life this coup failed in its objective, which was also Kissinger’s, of enforced partition, Kissinger promiscuously switched sides to support an even bloodier intervention by Turkey. Thomas Boyatt ... went to Kissinger in advance of the anti-Makarios putsch and warned him that it could lead to a civil war. ‘Spare me the civics lecture,’ replied Kissinger, who as you can readily see had an aphorism for all occa
Today, we have mercenaries in Africa, corporate armies from the western world, and unemployed men throughout the Middle East killing their own people - and people of other nations - for a paycheck. To act without a conscience, but for a paycheck, makes anyone a dangerous animal. The devil would be powerless if he couldn't entice people to do his work. So as long as money continues to seduce the hungry, the hopeless, the broken, the greedy, and the needy, there will always be war between brothers.
Srinagar is a medieval city dying in a modern war. It is empty streets, locked shops, angry soldiers and boys with stones. It is several thousand military bunkers, four golf courses, and three book-shops. It is wily politicians repeating their lies about war and peace to television cameras and small crowds gathered by the promise of an elusive job or a daily fee of a few hundred rupees. It is stopping at sidewalks and traffic lights when the convoys of rulers and their patrons in armored cars, secured by machine guns, rumble on broken roads. It is staring back or looking away, resigned. Srinagar is never winning and never being defeated.
Do you know about Hanuman, sir? He was the faithful servant of the god Rama, and we worship him in our temples because he is a shining example of how to serve your masters with absolute fidelity, love, and devotion.These are the kinds of gods they have foisted on us Mr. Jiabao. Understand, now, how hard it is for a man to win his freedom in India.
The aim of life is no more to control the mind, but to develop it harmoniously; not to achieve salvation here after, but to make the best use of it here below; and not to realise truth, beauty and good only in contemplation, but also in the actual experience of daily life; social progress depends not upon the ennoblement of the few but on the enrichment of democracy; universal brotherhood can be achieved only when there is an equality of opportunity - of opportunity in the social, political and individual life.— from Bhagat Singh's prison diary, p. 124
Als it is hard for America to fight wars in the name of freedom, if those people themselves choose for nonfreedom. Can America and England save India from communism, if they vote communist themselves.
From the comfort of distance, [Non resident Indians and Kashmiris] financially and emotionally support ideologies whose consequence they don’t have to face. They are not just a nuisance. As a collective they are dangerous. When men capable of murder receive the affection of engineers and MBAs, it makes them potentially far more lethal.
The failure of India's public institutions to keep pace with the dramatic political, economic and social transformations under way has led to severe gaps in governance. The end result of this disjuncture has been a proliferation of grand corruption - a malaise made up of a diverse array of regulatory, extractive, and political rent-seeking activities.
So spoke the man whose importance originated in the golden harvest he had reaped with the resistless hand of force, from the the legal, but unfortunate possessors, in a far distant region, where the conviction of riches proves certain destruction to the hapless natives, and poverty is considered as the greatest crime their European plunderers can possibly be accused of.
The 'Renaissance' West Butchered the Rest.If I had to choose between an erudite Aristotle and an unknown ‘soulless’ black slave I would choose the latter. The ascendancy of the West was on a heap of bodies of slaves and trampled humanity through colonization
[Indians] don't think about ghosts as those stereotypical spook in white sheets that scare the knickers off everybody. We believe that we coexist with many, many spirits. They're all around us - because the soul never dies. The body withers away, but the essence of the person remains, watching over us.
The contrast between the familiar and the exceptional was everywhere around me. A bullock cart was drawn up beside a modern sports car at a traffic signal. A man squatted to relieve himself behind the discreet shelter of a satellite dish. An electric forklift truck was being used to unload goods from an ancient wooden cart with wooden wheels. The impression was of a plodding indefatigable and distant past that had crashed intact through barriers of time into its own future. I liked it.
But Khair did not need such proof of her husband's love for her. Over and over again,James had risked everything for her. Most relationships in life can survive - or not - without being put to any really crucial, fundamental test. It was James's fate for his love to be tested not once, but four times....At each stage he could easily have washed his hands off his teenage lover. Each time he chose to remain true to her.That, not the words of any will, was the evidence she could cling onto.
Our lives are encumbered with the dead wood of this past; all that is dead and has served its purpose has to go. But that does not mean a break with, or a forgetting of, the vital and life-giving in that past. We can never forget the ideals that have moved our race, the dreams of the Indian people through the ages, the wisdom of the ancients, the buoyant energy and love of life and nature of our forefathers, their spirit of curiosity and mental adventure, the daring of their thought, their splendid achievements in literature, art and culture, their love of truth and beauty and freedom, the basic values that they set up, their understanding of life's mysterious ways, their toleration of other ways than theirs, their capacity to absorb other peoples and their cultural accomplishments, to synthesize them and develop a varied and mixed culture; nor can we forget the myriad experiences which have built up our ancient race and lie embedded in our sub-conscious minds. We will never forget them or cease to take pride in that noble heritage of ours. If India forgets them she will no longer remain India and much that has made her our joy and pride will cease to be.
Over the years, the British had strategically pitted the Muslims against the Hindus, supporting the All India Muslim League and encouraging the notion that the Muslims were a distinct political community. Throughout British India, separate electorates had been offered to Muslims, underscoring their separateness from Hindus and sowing the seeds of communalism. Teh Morley-Minto reforms in 1908 had allowed direct election for seats and separate or communal representation for Muslims. This was the harbinger for the formation of the Muslim League in 1906. In 1940, the Muslim League, representing one-fifth of the total population of India, became a unifying force. They were resentful that they were not sufficiently represented in Congress and feared for the safety of Islam.
I have grown up listening to my grandparents’ stories about ‘the other side’ of the border. But, as a child, this other side didn’t quite register as Pakistan, or not-India, but rather as some mythic land devoid of geographic borders, ethnicity and nationality. In fact, through their stories, I imagined it as a land with mango orchards, joint families, village settlements, endless lengths of ancestral fields extending into the horizon, and quaint local bazaars teeming with excitement on festive days. As a result, the history of my grandparents’ early lives in what became Pakistan essentially came across as a very idyllic, somewhat rural, version of happiness.
We should have realized it sooner, at least my father should have, that there was no coming back. Not in September when the riots died down, not in October when the subcontinent still lay in shock, not even in November as he had hoped and promised us. Lahore was now lost forever
If I considered the Partition an archeological site, and the many experiences of those who witnessed it as the site’s structural sedimentation, then the deeper I excavated, the more I found, and that too in innumerable renditions.
flaunting the Kohinoor on the Queen Mother’s crown in the Tower of London is a powerful reminder of the injustices perpetrated by the former imperial power. Until it is returned—at least as a symbolic gesture of expiation—it will remain evidence of the loot, plunder and misappropriation that colonialism was really all about. Perhaps that is the best argument for leaving the Kohinoor where it emphatically does not belong—in British hands.
To know India and her peoples, one has to know the monsoon. one has to know the monsoon. It is not enough to read about it in books, or see it on the cinema screen, or hear someone talk about it. It has to be a personal experience because nothing short of living through it can fully convey all it means to a people for whom it is not only the source of life, but also their most exciting impact with nature.
When Sweetu wasn’t being reduced to merely existing as a bride, as a piece of meat to be handled and prodded, to have decorative contraptions stuck into her skull, her interests were otherwise unexpressed. She rarely complained, hardly asked for anything, and maybe that’s because Indian girls grow up going to weddings and we watch the procedure and we know our roles: be demure, don’t complain, cry but don’t scream, get tea for anyone older than you, and calmly meet expectations.
Sometimes a rut can be a comfortable place to be, but ours was full of too many differences and resentments to be wholly comfortable. I had always had my own way in the marriage — about what we’d do, where we’d do it, when, how. Katharine had always argued, and always given in. In the process she’d become more resentful, I guess, except that I was too busy with my own work to notice. But in turn she was less and less appealing to me. She’s a couple of years older than me, I guess you know that, but that wasn’t all. Those stolid American middle-class values, her sensible clothes, her sense of responsibility, her moderation in all things — frankly, they bored me. We made love less and less, and she didn’t even seem to miss it. I did.
Marriage is not kick-boxing, it's salsa dancing.
There are some parts of the world that, once visited, get into your heart and won't go. For me, India is such a place. When I first visited, I was stunned by the richness of the land, by its lush beauty and exotic architecture, by its ability to overload the senses with the pure, concentrated intensity of its colors, smells, tastes, and sounds. It was as if all my life I had been seeing the world in black and white and, when brought face-to-face with India, experienced everything re-rendered in brilliant technicolor.
If Indian weddings for Indian people are the furthest from “fun,” trips to India for Indian people are the furthest from “vacation.” When I told my friends about the upcoming trip, everyone purred about what a great time I’d have, told me to take a lot of photos, told me to eat everything. But if you’re going to India to see your family, you’re not going to relax, you’re not going to have a nice time. No, you’re going so you can touch the very last of your bloodline, to say hello to the new ones and goodbye to the older ones, since who knows when you’ll visit again. You are working.
Whatever happens, happens for the best.' That's how any domestic counselling starts in a Marathi family. Everyone in every family has an inner psychiatrist who rises to the occasion with some home-made mottos, a few lines from Jagjit Singh ghazal. An older generation may quote Tukaram but underlying all this is the bedrock phase: Whatever happens, happens for the best.
In Italy there are about 60 million people and we know howhigh is the percentage of morons on national soil. However, inChina there are about 1.4 billion people and in India almost 1.3billion. Therefore I wonder then, if more or less all the world isa small village, with how many morons should we have to cometo terms on the territory of this stupid planet. It's the same theworld over, or the world is the same wherever you go!
Truth is elusive, subtle, manysided. You know, Priscilla, there’s an old Hindu story about Truth. It seems a brash young warrior sought the hand of a beautiful princess. Her father, the king, thought he was a bit too cocksure and callow. He decreed that the warrior could only marry the princess after he had found Truth. So the warrior set out into the world on a quest for Truth. He went to temples and monasteries, to mountaintops where sages meditated, to remote forests where ascetics scourged themselves, but nowhere could he find Truth. Despairing one day and seeking shelter from a thunderstorm, he took refuge in a musty cave. There was an old crone there, a hag with matted hair and warts on her face, the skin hanging loose from her bony limbs, her teeth yellow and rotting, her breath malodorous. But as he spoke to her, with each question she answered, he realized he had come to the end of his journey: she was Truth. They spoke all night, and when the storm cleared, the warrior told her he had fulfilled his quest. ‘Now that I have found Truth,’ he said, ‘what shall I tell them at the palace about you?’ The wizened old creature smiled. ‘Tell them,’ she said, ‘tell them that I am young and beautiful.
She lifts her eyes, and there is Death in the corner, but not like a king with his iron crown, as the epics claimed. Why, it is a giant brush loaded with white paint. It descends upon her with gentle suddenness, obliterating the shape of the world.
For the first time in decades … For the first time in decades, India is experiencing a Revolution.For the first time in decades, there is status quo disruption.For the first time in decades, our Soldiers are receiving the reverence they must get.For the first time in decades, national interest matters more than personal interest.For the first time in decades, the strength of WE is more than self proclaimed VIP Few.For the first time in decades, corrupt politicians are worried about people standing in queueFor the first time in decades, let us try not to get brainwashed in inconvenience debate.For the first time in decades, let us not fall prey to tactics of bait.For the first time in decades, we are up in arms against dishonest coward.For the first time in decades, India is feeling empowered.For the first time in decades, we have an opportunity to rise above caste, creed and religion.For the first time in decades, we are hopeful for the bright future of next generation.
What the hell does this say about India? Appearances are more important than truths. Gossip is more potent than facts. Loyalty is all one way, from the woman to the man. And when society stacks up all the odds against a woman, she’d better not count on the man’s support. She has no way out other than to end her own life. And I’m in love with an Indian. I must be crazy.
Anybody who has spent time in Indian brothels and also, say, at Indian brick kilns knows that it is better to be enslaved working a kiln. Kiln workers most likely live together with their families, and their work does not expose them to the risk of AIDS, so there's always hope of escape down the road.
If I could turn my thoughts into spoken words and share them with someone, they’d become real and mean something. Now, they were only lines that could be erased when I didn’t feel them anymore or hopeful thoughts that, like shadows, would disappear when the sun went away. - Rebecca Meyer, Crooked Lines
Some Christian lawyers—some eminent and stupid judges—have said and still say, that the Ten Commandments are the foundation of all law.Nothing could be more absurd. Long before these commandments were given there were codes of laws in India and Egypt—laws against murder, perjury, larceny, adultery and fraud. Such laws are as old as human society; as old as the love of life; as old as industry; as the idea of prosperity; as old as human love.All of the Ten Commandments that are good were old; all that were new are foolish. If Jehovah had been civilized he would have left out the commandment about keeping the Sabbath, and in its place would have said: 'Thou shalt not enslave thy fellow-men.' He would have omitted the one about swearing, and said: 'The man shall have but one wife, and the woman but one husband.' He would have left out the one about graven images, and in its stead would have said: 'Thou shalt not wage wars of extermination, and thou shalt not unsheathe the sword except in self-defence.'If Jehovah had been civilized, how much grander the Ten Commandments would have been.All that we call progress—the enfranchisement of man, of labor, the substitution of imprisonment for death, of fine for imprisonment, the destruction of polygamy, the establishing of free speech, of the rights of conscience; in short, all that has tended to the development and civilization of man; all the results of investigation, observation, experience and free thought; all that man has accomplished for the benefit of man since the close of the Dark Ages—has been done in spite of the Old Testament.
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.
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?
Osman and Prideep had been in my employment for some weeks. Every Friday I would take the to lunch. It was the high point of their calender. During the meal I would harangue them as a reminder of what they had been hired for: but my orations never seemed to increase their output. I realised later that, in the East, a commitment to produce does not automatically accompany employment.
How can the mind take hold of such a country? Generations of invaders have tried, but they remain in exile. The important towns they build are only retreats, their quarrels the malaise of men who cannot find their way home. India knows of their trouble. She knows of the whole world's trouble, to its uttermost depth. She calls "Come" through her hundred mouths, through objects ridiculous and august. But come to what? She has never defined. She is not a promise, only an appeal.
How do I pray? Not in any organized form, really; I go to temples sometimes with my family, but they leave me cold. I think of prayer as something intensely personal, a way of reaching my hands out towards my maker. I recite some mantras my parents taught me as a child; there is something reassuring about those ancient words, hallowed by use and repetition over thousands of years.
All over India, all over the world, as the sun or the shadow of darkness moves from east to west, the call to prayer moves with it, and people kneel down in a wave to pray to God. Five waves each day - one for each namaaz - ripple across the globe from longitude to longtigude. The component elements change direction, like iron filings near a magnet - towards the house of God in Mecca.
each year India produces thousands upon thousands of eighteen-year olds who have little to no instructed idea of the last sixty years of Indian history. They have no idea if or how those five-year plans worked. They have no idea if or how the Non-Aligned Movement worked. They have no idea about the numerous wars India has fought against Pakistan or China. They have no idea, for instance, of what many people call the greatest threat to India’s internal security: the Naxal movement. What created this Naxal movement? And why is the movement popular where it is? Our youth doesn’t know.
The Indians around here tell a cautionary fable about a great saint who was always surrounded in his Ashram by loyal devotees. For hours a day, the saint and his followers would meditate on God. The only problem was that the saint had a young cat, an annoying creature, who used to walk through the temple meowing and purring and bothering everyone during meditation. So the saint, in all his practical wisdom, commanded that the cat be tied to a pole outside for a few hours a day, only during meditation, so as to not disturb anyone. This became a habit – tying the cat to the pole and then meditating on God – but as years passed, the habit hardened into religious ritual. Nobody could meditate unless the cat was tied to the pole first. Then one day the cat died. The saint's followers were panic-stricken. It was a major religious crisis – how could they meditate now, without a cat to tie to a pole? How would they reach God? In their minds, the cat had become the means.
Apparently, sir you Chinese are far ahead of us in every respect, except that you don’t have entrepreneurs. And our nation, though it has no drinking water, electricity, sewage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy, or punctuality, ‘’does’’ have entrepreneurs. Thousands and thousands of them. Especially in the field of technology. And these entrepreneurs—"we" entrepreneurs—have set up all these outsourcing companies that virtually run America now.
That night my mother had what she considered a wonderful dream. She dreamed of the country of India, where she had never been. There were orange traffic cones and beautiful lapis lazuli insects with mandibles of gold. A young girl was being led through the streets. She was taken to a pyre where she was wound in a sheet and placed up on a platform built from sticks. The bright fire that consumed her brought my mother into that deep, light, dreamlike bliss. The girl was being burned alive, but, first, there had been her body, clean and whole.
If it were not my purpose to combine barbarian things with things Hellenic, to traverse and civilize every continent, to search out the uttermost parts of land and sea, to push the bounds of Macedonia to the farthest Ocean, and to disseminate and shower the blessings of the Hellenic justice and peace over every nation, I should not be content to sit quietly in the luxury of idle power, but I should emulate the frugality of Diogenes. But as things are, forgive me Diogenes, that I imitate Herakles, and emulate Perseus, and follow in the footsteps of Dionysos, the divine author and progenitor of my family, and desire that victorious Hellenes should dance again in India and revive the memory of the Bacchic revels among the savage mountain tribes beyond the Kaukasos…
The mere mention of the Farakka Express, which jerks its way eastward each day from Delhi to Calcutta, is enough to throw even a seasoned traveller into fits of apoplexy. At a desert encampment on Namibia's Skeleton Coast, a hard-bitten adventurer had downed a peg of local fire-water then told me the tale. Farakka was a ghost train, he said, haunted by ghouls, Thuggees, and thieves. Only a passenger with a death wish would go anywhere near it.
Back at the Chateau Windsor there was a rat-like scratching at the door of my room. Vinod, the youngest servant, came in with a soda water. He placed it next to the bag of toffees. Then he watched me read. I was used to being observed reading. Sometimes the room would fill like a railway station at rush hour and I would be expected to cure widespread boredom.
The ancient paused for a moment, as if his strength were failing. Yet I sensed that there was more to tell. Looking deep into my eyes, he whispered: 'The Gond kingdoms have fallen, their people live dispersed in poverty: the teak trees and the jungles have been cleared... but the importance of the Gonds must not be forgotten!
Few of us could speak the other's language, but all of us had by now discovered the lodge's unique 'outside toilet'…which transcended all national barriers. The lodge owner wouldn't let you use it unless you promised to lock yourself in with a special key. Everybody thought this odd, but they understood his concern once inside. The loo was just two parallel blocks of wood laid either side of a big hole in the floor. You went in, squatted down on the blocks, felt the gust of chill air wafting up your nether regions, looked through legs, and watched the bottom fall out of your world for a sheer drop of two thousand feet! The reason for locking the door was obvious. Any unwitting interloper who swung it inwards when you were squatting over that hole was certain to knock you off your perch and straight down it. And that would be a one-way trip to oblivion. With your trousers round your ankles
As a romantic ideal, turbulent, impoverished India could still weave its spell, and the key to it all - the colours, the moods, the scents, the subtle, mysterious light, the poetry, the heightened expectations, the kind of beauty that made your heart miss a beat - well, that remained the monsoon.
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.
Though our castes and institutions are apparently linked with our religion, they are not so. These institutions have been necessary to protect us as a nation, and when this necessity for self-preservation will no more exist, they will die a natural death. But the older I grow, the better I seem to think of these time-honored institutions of India. There was a time when I used to think that many of them were useless and worthless; but the older I grew, the more I seem to feel a diffidence in cursing any one of them, for each one of them is the embodiment of the experience of centuries. A child of but yesterday, destined to die the day after tomorrow, comes to me and asks me to change all my plans; and if I hear the advice of that baby and change all my surroundings according to his ideas, I myself should be a fool, and no one else. Much of the advice that is coming to us from different countries is similar to this. Tell these wiseacres: "I will hear you when you have made a society yourselves. You cannot hold on to one idea for two days, you quarrel and fail; you are born like moths in the spring and die like them in five minutes. You come up like bubbles and burst like bubbles too. First form a stable society like ours. First make laws and institutions that remain undiminished in their power through scores of centuries. Then will be the time to talk on the subject with you, but till then, my friend, you are only a giddy child.
Before I was married, I thought the sound of bangles jangling on my forearms would be delightful. I looked forward to being able to wear bells around my ankles and silver necklaces around my neck, but not any more, not since I had learned what they represented for the man who gave them. A necklace was no prettier than a piece of of rope that ties a goat to a tree, depriving it of freedom.
The government belongs to the poor people of the country. We are custodian of people's hope. For whom should the government be? For educated people or few others. Government should be for the poor. If rich want to educate their children, they can send anywhere. If rich fall ill, hundreds of doctors are at service. So the foremost responsibility of the government should be to listen to the poor and work for them. If we do not work for the poor, the people will never pardon us.
Back at the guest house I tried to acclimatise. A travel-worn adventurer had once told me that leaning with one's head dangling over the end of a bed was the best way to achieve this. It was while I was in this position, the blood rushing to my temples, that the door swung open.
To a realized master, death and rebirth is in every breath. Death is that of body consciousness, ego and limits of the mind. Rebirth is that of the cosmic mind of being the Spirit. In this realization is liberation.When awake as liberated, each prayer and each moment of meditation is for humanity as there is no more individual ego or identity left. Such realized masters continually gift humanity with the grace of higher consciousness- so that each of us attain our fullest potential in goodness.
The spectacle of what is called religion, or at any rate organised religion, in India and elsewhere, has filled me with horror and I have frequently condemned it and wished to make a clean sweep of it. Almost always it seemed to stand for blind belief and reaction, dogma and bigotry, superstition, exploitation and the preservation of vested interests.
Ultimately, we will lose each otherto something. I would hope for grandcircumstance—death or disaster.But it might not be that way at all.It might be that you walk outone morning after making loveto buy cigarettes, and never return,or I fall in love with another …It might be a slow drift into indifference.Either way, we’ll have to learnto bear the weight of the eventualitythat we will lose each other to something.So why not begin now, while your headrests like a perfect moon in my lap …?Why not reach for the seam in this …night and tear it, just a little, so the fallingcan begin? Because later, when we crosseach other on the streets, and are forcedto look away, when we’ve thrownthe disregarded pieces of our togethernessinto bedroom drawers and the smellof our bodies is disappearing like the sweetdecay of lilies—what will we call it,when it’s no longer love?
What you see and hear is a situation in which languages are less like apples — neat and discrete — and more like oatmeal. It's always been oatmeal in India, and all the varieties of oatmeal continue to merge, despite political pressures to name them as if they were marbles.
I asked Raghav, as we were looking over the wasteland, if the Muslims they burnt would beg for their lives. "Yes they would say, Have mercy on us. But we were filled with such hate; we had Radhabi Chawl on our minds. And even if there was one who said, Let him go, there would be ten others saying, No kill him. And so we had to kill him. "But what if he was innocent?"Raghav looked at me. "His biggest crime was that he was Muslim.
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.
Over the years the Indian leadership, and the educated Indian, have deliberately projected and embellished an image about Indians that they know to be untrue, and have wilfully encouraged the well-meaning but credulous foreign observer to accept it. What is worse, they have fallen in love with this image, and can no longer accept that it is untrue.
I have devoted my whole life to Physical Culture. I shall devote the rest too for the same. I have seen the degradation in which we are at present. I have travelled extensively and all that I have remarked here is from experience; and my suggestions are to meet the situation. I know they would, if adapted remedy the evil; for, I have studied carefully the position. If we in all seriousness wish to call ourselves the descendants of the mighty Yoddhas of past, if we wish not to cast a blot on the fair name of India, if we wish that India should have a future vying with its glorious past, if we wish that we should gain an honorable and equal place among the peoples of the world it should be our sacred resolve from now to wake up from the sleep as a lion; we should muster muscle and steel the body. For all greatness lies in Culture and 1 should only be too gratified if my scheme could put the youth of the country on the right track to achieve our most cherished Ideals.
Suddenly Ammu hoped that it had been him that Rahel saw him in the march. She hoped it had been him that raised his flag and knotted arm in anger. She hoped that under his careful cloak of cheerfulness he housed a living breathing anger against the smug, ordered world that she raged against.
We both disliked rude rickshwalas, shepu bhaji in any form, group photographs at weddings, lizards, tea that has gone cold, the habit of taking newspaper to the toilet, kissing a boy who'd just smoked a cigarette et cetra. Another list. The things we loved: strong coffee, Matisse, Rumi, summer rain, bathing together, Tom Hanks, rice pancakes, Cafe Sunrise, black-and-white photographs, the first quiet moments after you wake up in the morning.
If God's love encompasses the whole world and if everyone who does not believe in him will perish, then surely this question needs to be asked: When, after two thousand years, does God's plan kick in for the billion people he 'so loves' in China? Or for the 840 million in India? Or the millions in Japan, Afghanistan, Siberia, Egypt, Burma ·.. and on and on?Why would a God who 'so loved the world' reveal his message only to a tiny minority of the people on earth, leaving the majority in ignorance? Is it possible to believe that the Father of all Mankind would select as his Chosen People a small Middle Eastern nation, Israel, reveal His will exclusively to them, fight alongside them in their battles to survive, and only after their failure to reach out to any other group, update His plan for the world's salvation by sending His 'only begotten son,' not to the world but, once again, exclusively to Israel?
Democracy is probably the only discovery by mankind which mostly brought it only happiness.
To write about him is to write about Greatness. To discuss him is todiscuss Intellectual Brilliance. To think of him is to think of Modesty,Simplicity and Lucidity. To remember him is to remember Nationalism atits finest hour. He was not one of those who merely achieved greatnessnor certainly one of those upon whom greatness was thrust-he was infact born great.
Christian missions to India imply that India is a land of heathens, and, therefore, stands on the same level with the Andaman or the Fiji Islands. That a country which has been recognised in all ages the world over as the mother of all religions and the cradle of civilisation should be considered as pagan, shows how much ignorance prevails in Christendom. Since the Parliament of Religions, I have been studying Christian institutions, and I have also studied the way in which the Christian ministers and the missionaries are manufactured in this country, and have learned to pity them. We must not blame them too severely, because their education is too narrow to make them broad-minded. I grant that they are good-hearted, that they are good husbands and often fathers of large families, but generally they are very ignorant, especially of the history of civilisation and of the philosophy of religion of India. Most of them do not even know the history of ancient India.We know that in this age of competition, centralisation, and monopoly, very many people are forced out of business. The English say, 'The fool of the family goes into the Church'; so that when a youth is unable to make a living, he takes to missionary work, goes to India, and helps to introduce among the Hindus the doctrines of his church, which have long since been exploded by science.
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,
Some foolish men declare that creator made the world. The doctrine that the world was created is ill advised and should be rejected. If God created the world, where was he before the creation? If you say he was transcendent then and needed no support, where is he now? How could God have made this world without any raw material? If you say that he made this first, and then the world, you are faced with an endless regression. If you declare that this raw material arose naturally you fall into another fallacy, For the whole universe might thus have been its own creator, and have arisen quite naturally. If God created the world by an act of his own will, without any raw material, then it is just his will and nothing else — and who will believe this silly nonsense? If he is ever perfect and complete, how could the will to create have arisen in him? If, on the other hand, he is not perfect, he could no more create the universe than a potter could. If he is form-less, action-less and all-embracing, how could he have created the world? Such a soul, devoid of all morality, would have no desire to create anything. If he is perfect, he does not strive for the three aims of man, so what advantage would he gain by creating the universe? If you say that he created to no purpose because it was his nature to do so, then God is pointless. If he created in some kind of sport, it was the sport of a foolish child, leading to trouble. If he created because of the karma of embodied beings [acquired in a previous creation] He is not the Almighty Lord, but subordinate to something else. If out of love for living beings and need of them he made the world, why did he not take creation wholly blissful free from misfortune? If he were transcendent he would not create, for he would be free: Nor if involved in transmigration, for then he would not be almighty. Thus the doctrine that the world was created by God makes no sense at all, And God commits great sin in slaying the children whom he himself created. If you say that he slays only to destroy evil beings, why did he create such beings in the first place? Good men should combat the believer in divine creation, maddened by an evil doctrine. Know that the world is uncreated, as time itself is, without beginning or end, and is based on the principles, life and rest. Uncreated and indestructible, it endures under the compulsion of its own n
When the people of our hills visit an individual for any particular purpose, as for instance to show their gratitude or to express their thanks, it is customary for them not to go on their mission empty handed.A rose, a marigold, or a few petals of either flower, suffices, and the gift is proffered in hands cupped together.
Biju stepped out of the airport into the Calcutta night, warm, mammalian. His feet sank into dust winnowed to softness at his feet, ad he felt an unbearable feeling, sad and tender, old and sweet like the memory of falling asleep, a baby on his mother's lap. Thousands of people were out though it was almost eleven. He saw a pair of elegant bearded goats in a rickshaw, riding to slaughter. A conference of old men with elegant goat faces, smoking bidis. A mosque and minarets lit magic green in the night with a group of women rushing by in burkas, bangles clinking under the black and a big psychedelic mess of colour from a sweet shop. Rotis flew through the air as in a juggling act, polka-dotting the sky high over a restaurant that bore the slogan "Good food makes good mood". Biju stood there in that dusty tepid soft sari night. Sweet drabness of home - he felt everything shifting and clicking into place around him, felt himself slowly shrink back to size, the enormous anxiety of being a foreigner ebbing - that unbearable arrogance and shame of the immigrant. Nobody paid attention to him here, and if they said anything at all, their words were easy, unconcerned. He looked about and for the first time in God knows how long, his vision unblurred and he found that he could see clearly.
I have heard your orators speak on many questions. One among them the so-called vital question of money which is above all things the most coveted commodity but I, as a Jainist, in the name of my countrymen and of my country, would offer you as the medium of the most perfect exchange between us, henceforth and forever, the indestructible, the unchangeable, the universal currency of good will and peace, and this, my brothers and sisters, is a currency that is not interchangeable with silver and gold, it is a currency of the heart, of the good life, of the highest estate on the earth.
If a good system of agriculture, unrivaled manufacturing skill, a capacity to produce whatever can contribute to either convenience or luxury, schools established in every village for teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic, the general practice of hospitality and charity amongst each other, and above all, a treatment of the female sex full of confidence, respect, and delicacy, are among the signs which denote a civilized people – then the Hindus are not inferior to the nations of Europe, and if civilization is to become an article of trade between England and India, I am convinced that England will gain by the import cargo.
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.
Bela had thought she knew what love felt like, but when she saw Sanjay at the airport after six long months, her heart gave a great, hurtful lurch, as though it were trying to leap out of her body to meet him. This, she thought. This is it. But it was only part of the truth. She would learn over the next years that love can feel a lot of different ways, and sometimes it can hurt a lot more.
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.
Ansar is an Arabic term that means helpers or supporters. They were the citizens of Medina who helped Prophet Mohammed upon His arrival to the Holy city. While 'Hussain' is a derivation of 'Hassan' that means 'GOOD' (I also owe this one to Khaled Hosseini). That's how my favorite character in my debut novel 'When Strangers meet..' gets his name... HUSSAIN ANSARI, because he is the one who helps Jai realize the truth in the story and inspires his son, Arshad, to have FAITH in Allah.
Sejal had not thought of her home, or of India as a whole, as cool. She was dimly aware, however, of a white Westerner habit of wearing other cultures like T-shirts—the sticker bindis on club kids, sindoor in the hair of an unmarried pop star, Hindi characters inked carelessly on tight tank tops and pale flesh. She knew Americans liked to flash a little Indian or Japanese or African. They were always looking for a little pepper to put in their dish.
We hear all this talk about integrating the world economically, but there is an argument to be made for not integrating the world economically. Because what is corporate globalization? It isn't as if the entire world is intermeshed with each other. It's not like India and Thailand or India and Korea or India and Turkey are connected. It's more like America is the hub of this huge cultural and economic airline system. It's the nodal point. Everyone has to be connected through America, and to some extent Europe.When powers at the hub of the global economy decide that you have to be X or Y, then if you're part of that network, you have to do it. You don't have the independence of being nonaligned in some way, politically or culturally or economically. If America goes down, then everybody goes down. If tomorrow the United States decides that it wants these call center jobs back, then overnight this billion-dollar industry will collapse in India. It's important for countries to develop a certain degree of economic self-sufficiency. Just in a theoretical sense, it's important for everybody not to have their arms wrapped around each other or their fingers wrapped around each others' throats at all times, in all kinds of ways.
I as a Judge of the Supreme Court of America should not be emotional", said Chief Justice Earl Warren, "but I must confess that though I have travelled all over the globe but never was I moved more emotionally than by the speech of the learned Advocate General of -Uttar Pradesh Mr. K.L. Misra today".Sri Siddharth Shankar Ray, Advocate
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 st
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).
Every time the train stopped at a station, we would all hold our breath, making sure not a single sound drifted out of the closed windows. We were hungry and our throats parched. From inside the train we heard voices travelling up and down the platform, saying, “Hindu paani,” and, from the other side, “Muslim paani.” Apart from land and population, even the water had now been divided
The American people spend thousands of dollars to propagate the doctrines of the fall of man, the creation of the world out of nothing in six days by a personal God, vicarious atonement, absolution from sin by the shedding of innocent blood. This is the Christianity offered to the poor and illiterate of India...Christianity has percolated through the layers of dogmatism and bigotry, of intolerance and superstition, of damnation and hell fire. It takes on itself the quality of these layers and imparts them to those that are received within its folds.
India had a very long independence movement. It started in 1886, [with] the first generation of Western-educated Indians. They were all liberals. They followed the Liberal Party in Britain, and they were very proud of their knowledge of parliamentary systems, parliamentary manners. They were big debaters. They [had], as it were, a long apprenticeship in training for being in power. Even when Gandhi made it a mass movement, the idea of elective representatives, elected working committees, elected leadership, all that stayed because basically Indians wanted to impress the British that they were going to be as good as the British were at running a parliamentary democracy. And that helped quite a lot.
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.
O fire, O soulGive us the spark of God-eternal,That friend to friend and friend to foe,One shall we stand before HIM.And the flame of Jatin,And the fire of Bhagath,And the love of the Mahatma in all,O, lift the flag high,Lift the flag high,This is the flag of the Revolution.
And the police got nervous and they began to kick us in our backs and stomachs, and the crowd shouted 'Mahatma Gandhi ki jai!' and someone took a kerosene tin and began to beat it, and someone took a cattle-bell and began to ring it, and they cried, 'With them, brothers, with them!' and they leaped and they ducked and they came down to lie beside us, and we shouted 'Mahatma Gandhi ki jai! Mahatma Gandhi ki jai!
On the 26th of January 1950, we are going to enter into a life of contradictions. In politics we will have equality and in social and economic life we will have inequality.In politics we will be recognizing the principle of one man one vote and one vote one value.In our social and economic life, we shall, by reason of our social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one man one value.How long shall we continue to live this life of contradictions? How long shall we continue to deny equality in our social and economic life? If we continue to deny it for long, we will do so only by putting our political democracy in peril. We must remove this contradiction at the earliest possible moment or else those who suffer from inequality will blow up the structure of political democracy which this Assembly has so laboriously built up.
What hurts me is the fact that in India, a good doctor is one whom you have to take an appointment with even before you fall sick. Else, you will die but not get treated. A good school is one that won't admit you even if you are in Lower Kindergarten. A good minister is one won't meet you till are some VIP. I want to change this in my lifetime by democratizing education and opportunities.
Asif Ali maneuvers the gleaming Mercedes down the labyrinthine lanes of Old Kolkata with consummate skill, but his passengers do not notice how smoothly he avoids potholes, cows and beggars, how skilfully he sails through aging yellow lights to get the Bose family to their destination on time. This disappoints Asif only a little. In his six years of chauffeuring the rich and callous, he has realized that, to them, servants are invisible.
What is it?" she asked. "I'm looking for your wings. You are my guardian angel, aren't you?" "I'm afraid not," she replied, her cheeks dimplingwith a wry smile. "There's too much of the devil in me for that." "Just how much devil," I grinned, "are we talking about here?
I do not need to understand words to know he is disappointed I am not a boy. Some things need no translation. And I know, because my body remembers without benefit of words, that men who do not welcome girl-babies will not treasure me as I grow to woman - though he call me princess just because the Guru told him to.I have come so far, I have borne so much pain and emptiness!But men have not yet changed.
If you think of the world as a global village, a fight between India and Pakistan is like a fight between the poorest people in the poorest quarters - the Adivasis and the Dalits. And in the meantime, the zamindars are laying the oil pipelines and selling both parties weapons.
I fought to stay awake and keep the car on the road. And I thought back to texts I had read from the British Army in India, during the Raj, at the height of their empire. Young subalterns trapped in junior ranks had their own mess. They would dine together in splendid dress uniforms and talk about their chances of promotion. But they had none, unless a superior officer died. Dead men's shoes was the rule. So they would raise their crystal glasses of fine French wine and toast "bloody wars and dread diseases" because a casualty further up the chain of command was their only way to get ahead. Brutal, but that's how it's always been, in the military.
Based on our badly borrowed misunderstanding of the words ‘secular’ and ‘spiritual’ we seemto have become blinded by the dominant intellectual ideology of our times, according to which schools as secular organizations are supposed to not have anything to do with matters of the spirit. Education has, therefore, become concerned only with matters of material life (eventually leading to commodification)... This dichotomy between 'education for social success' and education for spirit' must go if we want to make Indian Education more relevant for the future of India. Education needs to become more integral, more complete through a meaningful synthesis of the two.
This is the kind of corruption we understand, the corruption of the petty clerk writ large, and so this is the kind of corruption we look for. This is the kind of guilt we expect and understand: personal, targeted, involving suitcases. We really need suitcases.
This historic general election, which showed that the British are well able to distinguish between patriotism and Toryism, brought Clement Attlee to the prime ministership. In the succeeding five years, Labor inaugurated the National Health Service, the first and boldest experiment in socialized medicine. It took into public ownership all the vital (and bankrupted) utilities of the coal, gas, electricity and railway industries. It even nibbled at the fiefdoms and baronies of private steel, air transport and trucking. It negotiated the long overdue independence of India. It did all this, in a country bled white by the World War and subject to all manner of unpopular rationing and controls, without losing a single midterm by-election (a standard not equaled by any government of any party since). And it was returned to office at the end of a crowded term.
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.
Give up the idea that by ruling over others you can do any good to them. But you can do just as much as you can in the case of the plant: you can supply the growing seed with the materials for the making up of its body, bringing to it the earth, the water, the air, that it wants. It will take all that it wants by its own nature, it will assimilate and grow by its own nature.
What if you get a virgin (or what you call – pure) girl, and she disrespects you, has affairs outside, insults your parents and becomes a bitch after marriage? And what if the girl isn’t virgin, but she’s pure-hearted, loves and cares for you, respects your parents, is true to you and remains by your side for the rest of your life? What will matter more? Her virginity, or her nature?
Indians are the Italians of Asia and vice versa. Every man in both countries is a singer when he is happy, and every woman is a dancer when she walks to the shop at the corner. For them, food is the music inside the body and music is the food inside the heart. Amore or Pyar makes every man a poet, a princess of peasant girl if only for second eyes of man and woman meets.
Go to Old Delhi,and look at the way they keep chickens there in the market. Hundred of pale hens and brightly colored roosters, stuffed tightly into wire-mesh cages. They see the organs of their brothers lying around them.They know they are next, yet they cannot rebel. They do not try to get out of the coop. The very same thing is done with humans in this country.
I do not want that our loyalty as Indians should be in the slightest way affected by any competitive loyalty whether that loyalty arises out of our religion, out of our culture or out of our language. I want all people to be Indians first, Indian last and nothing else but Indians.
These stupid biases and discrimination are the reason our country is so screwed up. It's Tamil first, Indian later. Punjabi first, Indian later. It has to end. National anthem, national currency, national teams - still, we won't marry our children outside our state. How can this intolerance be good for our country?
India, she now knew, would not be content staying in the background, was nobody's wallpaper, insisted in interjecting itself into everyone's life, meddling with it, twisting it, molding it beyond recognition. India, she had found out, was a place of political intrigue and economic corruption, a place occupied by real people with their incessantly human needs, desires, ambitions, and aspirations, and not the exotic, spiritual, mysterious entity that was a creation of the Western imagination.
This is indeed India! "…. The land of dreams and romance, of fabulous wealth and fabulous poverty, of splendour and rags, of palaces and hovels, of famine and pestilence, of genii and giants and Aladdin lamps, of tigers and elephants, the cobra and the jungle, the country of hundred nations and a hundred tongues, of a thousand religions and two million gods, cradle of the human race, birthplace of human speech, mother of history, grandmother of legend, great-grandmother of traditions, whose yesterday’s bear date with the modering antiquities for the rest of nations-the one sole country under the sun that is endowed with an imperishable interest for alien prince and alien peasant, for lettered and ignorant, wise and fool, rich and poor, bond and free, the one land that all men desire to see, and having seen once, by even a glimpse, would not give that glimpse for the shows of all the rest of the world combined.
Symbolic value of the pickling process: all the six hundred million eggs which gave birth to the population of India could fit inside a single, standard-sized pickle-jar; six hundred million spermatozoa could be lifted on a single spoon. Every pickle-jar (you will forgive me if I become florid for a moment) contains, therefore, the most exalted of possibilities: the feasibility of the chutnification of history; the grand hope of the pickling of time!
Even as I took a long, hard look at some of the obvious downsides (Q: 'What are the three things keeping India down? A: Corruption, corruption and corruption.'), I still felt the upsides (Q: 'What is so fantastic about the India story? A: People, people and people.') tilted the scales in our favor.
Above all, as a Hindu I belong to the only major religion in the world that does not claim to be the only true religion. I find it immensely congenial to be able to face my fellow human beings of other faiths without being burdened by the conviction that I am embarked upon a “true path” that they have missed.
The Chinese construction of South Asia’s tallest edifice, the Lotus (a Lotus Sutra in Buddhism) Tower, both points to Beijing’s Peaceful Rise and unsettles some onlookers. For the nervous India and the United States, the cleverly designed and highly sophisticated rising communications tower is more than a Buddhist symbol of Peaceful Rise.
Hindu fundamentalism,” because Hinduism is a religion without fundamentals: no organized church, no compulsory beliefs or rites of worship, no single sacred book. The name itself denotes something less, and more, than a set of theological beliefs. In many languages — French and Persian amongst them — the word for “Indian” is “Hindu.” Originally “Hindu” simply meant the people beyond the river Sindhu, or Indus. But the Indus is now in Islamic Pakistan; and to make matters worse, the word “Hindu” did not exist in any Indian language till its use by foreigners gave Indians a term for self-definition.
The real reason for Father Braganza's laughter was the history of Amrapur. It was a quaint town, nestled amidst barren mountains. The Hindus and Muslims living there were perpetually warring with each other, reacting violently at the slightest provocation. It had started a long time ago, this squabble, and had escalated into a terrible war. Some people say it started centuries ago, but many believe it started when the country gave one final, fierce shrug to rid itself of British rule. The shrug quickly became a relentless shuddering, and countless people were uprooted and flung into the air. Many didn't survive. Perhaps the mountains of Amrapur absorbed the deracinating wave. People weren't cruelly plucked from the town. They remained there, festering, becoming irate and harbouring murderous desires. And while the country was desperately trying to heal its near-mortal wounds and move on, Amrapur's dormant volcano erupted. Momentary and overlooked, but devastating. Leaders emerged on both sides and, driven by greed, they fed off the town's ignored bloodshed. They created ravines out of cracks, fostered hatred and grew richer. The Bhoite family, the erstwhile rulers of the ancient town, adopted the legacy of their British rulers---divide and conquer.
The three flower shops were obliterated. The petals of the once-dewy flowers and their sellers' flesh burnt together. The people reacted and, unlike the birds, they did not react in unison. They ran towards the narrow streets near the masjid, trampling over the old and limping beggars. They pushed and shoved and cursed and cried. The birds circled in the air, pitying the humans who had lost their humanity.
He could not help but admire his posters every time he saw them---the son of a rickshaw puller, now the chief of a prominent political party in this town, who was expected to win by an unprecedented margin of votes in the coming elections. There were many people in the party who begrudged his presence, his power, but they could do nothing. The people of Amrapur loved him and his speeches. Some people called them inflammatory, divisive, and harmful to the peace and harmony of the town. A smile spread across his face every time he heard that word. Has anything ever been achieved by harmony? What would the leaders do with harmony? Why would people come to listen to his speeches in droves if they wanted harmony? Elections can never be won by harmony.
Migration is often accompanied by a feeling of unavoidable disorientation, and the circumstances of 1947 would have pronounced this feeling. In most cases, it would have created an involuntary distance between where one was born before the Partition and where one moved to after it, stretching out their identity sparsely over the expanse of this distance. As a result, somewhere in between the original city of their birth and the adopted city of residence, would lay their essence – strangely malleable.
An India that denies itself to some of us could end up being denied to all of us. This would be a second Partition: and a partition in the Indian soul would be as bad as a partition in the Indian soil. For my sons, the only possible idea of India is that of a nation greater than the sum of its parts. An India neither Hindu nor Muslim, but both. That is the only India that will allow them to continue to call themselves Indians.
Once upon a time, there was a civilization in the eastern side of the world. It was one of the most advanced civilizations on the planet that existed during that time.This civilization was the glorious Indus valley civilization. No, I am not talking about India. I am talking about the land of greatness that got lost in time. Today, in the same geographical location of that great civilization, we have a piece of earth, which is known as “India”. But do not mistake it to be the same glorious land that existed thousands of years ago, along with other magnificent civilizations, such as the Greeks, the Mayans, the Egyptians, the Babylonians etc.
I am pain-stricken to say, since the moment I was born, I have found nothing extraordinary in this ancient land of greatness to be exceptionally proud of. I am not a proud Indian. India at its present condition has given me no reason to feel proud.However, I do feel proud of the ancient Indians, just like I feel proud of the ancient Greeks, the Mayans, the ancient Egyptians, the Babylonians and so on. Scientists are beyond borders, just like the ancient scientists of India, whom you prefer to call as sages.
Now India is a place beyond all others where one must not take things too seriously - the mid-day sun always excepted. Too much work and too much energy kill a man as effectively as too much assorted vice or too much drink. Flirtation does not matter, because every one is being transferred, and either you or she leave the station and never return. Good work does not matter, because a man is judged by his worst output, and another man takes all the credit of his best as a rule. Bad work does not matter, because other men do worse, and incompetents hang on longer in India than anywhere else. Amusements do not matter, because you must repeat them as soon as you have accomplished them once, and most amusements only mean trying to win another person's money. Sickness does not matter, because it's all in the day's work, and if you die, another man takes over your place and your office in the eight hours between your death and burial. Nothing matters except Home-furlough and acting allowances, and these only because they are scarce. It is a slack country, where all men work with imperfect instruments, and the wisest thing is to escape as soon as you ever can to some place where amusement is amusement and a reputation worth the having.
I’m typing this as loudly as I can to deceive our lovely Indian maid that I can type amazingly quickly and that this is of vital importance, and that’s why I need her to come into the house three times a week and clean the floors, scrub the toilets, polish the stainless steel and buff the porcelain. Did I spell that right? I don’t know, but I’m not going to stop to check – she’s listening!
To the traditional Indians, terms such as “intercourse”, “penis”, “vagina”, “clitoris”, “semen”, “masturbation”, “breasts”, etc. are exclusive possessions of the night. The traditional Indians perceive these terms as something “dirty”. No matter how old they look, they really never grow up to talk and discuss about sex.
And then, of course, there was the sari itself. What a garment, Randy! There isn’t another outfit in the world that balances better the twin feminine urges to conceal and reveal. It outlines the woman’s shape but hides the faults a skirt can’t — under a sari a heavy behind, unflattering legs are invisible. But it also reveals the midriff, a part of the anatomy most Western women hide all the time. I was mesmerized, Randy, by the mere fact of being able to see her belly button when she walked, the single fold of flesh above the knot of her sari, the curve of her waist toward her hips. That swell of flesh just above a woman’s hipbone, Randy, is the sexiest part of the female anatomy to me. And I didn’t even have to undress her to see it. I was completely smitten.
One Said, 'My grandfather once planted a Langra tree but, before he could eat the fruit, he had to marry it to another tree. A tamarind. Custom decreed it.''I know about that custom,' said a colleague. 'The jasmine is considered a suitable bride for a mango.
India has always had a strange way with her conquerors. In defeat, she beckons them in, then slowly seduces, assimilates and transforms them. Over the centuries, many powers have defeated Indian armies; but none has ever proved immune to this capacity of the subcontinent to somehow reverse the current of colonisation, and to mould those who attempt to subjugate her. So vast is India, and so uniquely resilient and deeply rooted are her intertwined social and religious institutions, that all foreign intruders are sooner or later either shaken off or absorbed.
If America is a melting-pot, then to me India is a thali, a selection of sumptuous dishes in different bowls. Each tastes different, and does not necessarily mix with the next, but they belong together on the same plate, and they complement each other in making the meal a satisfying repast.
In the countryside he heard horns and drums and followed the sound to a temple of granite and marble set in a compound that included shrines and incense stalls, people squatting against the walls, beggars, touts, flower-sellers, those who watch over your shoes for a couple of weightless coins.
Why have the English remained to English? Throughout India's history conquerors have come from elsewhere, and all of them --- Turk, Arab, Hun, Mongol, Persian --- have become Indian. If --- when ---this Pakistan happens, those Muslims who leave Delhi, Lucknow and Hyderabad to go there, They will be leaving their homes. But when the English leave, they'll be going home.
The book of nature has no beginning, as it has no end. Open this book where you will, and at any period of your life, and if you have the desire to acquire knowledge you will find it of intense interest, and no matter how long or how intently you study the pages, your interest will not flag, for in nature there is no finality.
The true history of the world must always be the history of the few; and as we measure the Himalaya by the height of Mount Everest, we must take the true measure of India from the poets of the Veda, the sages of the Upanishads, the founders of the Vedanta and Sankhya philosophies, and the authors of the oldest law-books, and not from the millions who are born and die in their villages, and who have never for one moment been roused out of their drowsy dream of life.
Now let us look to the ancient inhabitants of India. With them, first of all, religion was not only one interest by the side of many. It was the all-absorbing interest; it embraced not only worship and prayer, but what we call philosophy, morality, law, and government, —all was pervaded by religion. Their whole life was to them a religion—everything else was, as it were, a mere concession made to the ephemeral requirements of this life.
Why should anyone, in the name of caste, be considered lowly or be made to do a mean job?. If all in the country are given education, can there exist a caste for doing mean work? It is not because of lack of education that those people are constrained to do contemptible work and are considered lowly?
Religion is trust, and that trust arose in the beginning from the impressions made on the mind and heart of man by the order and wisdom of nature, and more particularly, by those regularly recurring events, the return of the sun, the revival of the moon, the order of the seasons, the law of cause and effect, gradually discovered in all things, and traced back in the end to a cause of all causes, by whatever name we choose to call it.
But, for all that, there is a Beyond, and he who has once caught a glance of it, is like a man who has gazed at the sun —wherever he looks, everywhere he sees the image of the sun. Speak to him of finite things, and he will tell you that the Finite is impossible and meaningless without the Infinite. Speak to him of death, and he will call it birth ; speak to him of time, and he will call it the mere shadow of eternity. To us the senses seem to be the organs, the tools, the most powerful engines of knowledge ; to him they are, if not actually deceivers, at all events heavy fetters, checking the flight of the spirit. To us this earth, this life, all that we see, and hear, and touch is certain. Here, we feel, is our home, here lie our duties, here our pleasures. To him this earth is a thing that once was not, and that again will cease to be ; this life is a short dream from which we shall soon awake. Of nothing he professes greater ignorance than of what to others seems to be most certain, namely what we see, and hear, and touch ; and as to our home, wherever that may be, he knows that certainly it is not here.
That particular fear has the texture you can neither forget nor describe. It is like the fear of the victims of an earthquake, of people who have lost faith in the stillness of the earth. And yet it is not the same. It is without analogy for it is not comparable to the fear of nature, which is the most universal of human fears, nor to the fear of violence of the state, which is the commonest of modern fears. It is the fear that comes from the knowledge that normalcy is utterly contingent, that spaces that surround one, the streets that one inhabits, can become, suddenly and without warning, as hostile as a desert in a flash flood. It is this that sets apart the thousand million people who inhabit the subcontinent from the rest of the world - not language, not food, not music - it is the special quality of loneliness that grows out of the fear of the war between oneself and one's image in the mirror.
The lounge of the private terminal in Delhi. A place of beige leather sofas and cappuccinos, set deep in that world where a seeling modernity has yet to close over the land, and where in the empty spaces that lie between the elevated roads and the coloured glass buildings there are still, like insects taking shelter under the veined roof of a leaf, the encampments of families who built them. Black pigs still thread their way through the weeds, there are still patient lorry-loads of labourers, waiting among the dazzle of the new cars, for the lights to change. One India, dwarfed and stunted, adheres like a watchful undergrowth to another India which, in very physical ways, as with the roads that fly up out of the pale land, or the chunks of monorail that rise up from the ground like the remnants of an ancient wall, or the blank closed faces of the glass buildings, wishes to shrug off its poorer opposite: to leave it behind; to shut it out; to soar over it. One man, above all, captures the mood of this time: the security guard. In him, this man of expectation – a man not rich himself, but standing guard at the doorway to a world of riches – it is possible to feel the boredom and restlessness of a world that inspires ambition, but cannot answer it. Skanda watches him watching the lounge, with eyes glazed and yellowing from undernourishment. A favourite phrase from college returns: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Why do we want to know history? Why does history form a recognized part of our liberal education? Simply because all of us, and every one of us, ought to know how we have come to be what we are, so that each generation need not start again from the same point, and toil over the same ground, but, profiting by the experience of those who came before, may advance towards higher points and nobler aims.
13 million Indians will join the workforce every year from now till 2030. They know their prospects aren’t good. Here’s why: in the years from 1972 to 1983—not celebrated as a time of overwhelming prosperity—the total number of jobs in the economy nevertheless grew 2.3 per cent a year. In the years between liberalization in 1991 and today, jobs have grown at an average of only 1.6 per cent a year. But, if these young people have to be absorbed, then jobs must grow at least 3 per cent a year—almost twice the rate at which they have since liberalization. This is simply not happening. In other words, one out of every two youngsters who starts looking for a job next year won’t find one.
We live in a world today that lacks loving-kindness and compassion for our fellow man and woman. As Gandhi so eloquently stated, "Be the change that you wish to see in the world." We need to strive to be better, to be the image of selflessness. Love and give to those in need--expecting nothing in return. Give out of sincerity and from the depths of our hearts. Have compassion for every man, woman and child, no matter what ethnicity or background they come from. Love is blind. Love is unconditional. Love has the power to heal and redeem, and that is what Humanity should strive for.
None of it made any sense to her - the deceit, the betrayal, the sheer chutzpah of it. Like something from a movie. Who in real life acted this way? But then she remembered this had happened in India, and India was not real life. The most heartbreaking, most desperate, most bizarre stories she had ever heard all came from India. Every story was epic; every emotion was exaggerated; every action was melodramatic. Desperate love, mad obsessions, outbursts of rage, bizarre self sacrifice, self immolation. Young women eat rat poison, jumping off buildings, or burning themselves alive. Young men throwing themselves onto railroad tracks in the path of oncoming trains. And all this self destruction over issues that in the West would be solved by a simple elopement or estrangement from one's parents or a move to a different city.
But doesn't that make sense? That the infinite would be, indeed... infinite? That even the most holy amongst us would only be able to see scattered pieces of the eternal picture at any given time? And that maybe if we could collect those pieces and compare them, a story about God would begin to emerge that resembles and includes everyone? And isn't our individual longing for transcendence all just part of this larger human search for divinity? Don't we each have the right to not stop seeking until we get as close to the source of wonder as possible? Even if it means coming to India and kissing trees in the moonlight for a while?
The main goal of the regulatory policy has been to control the size of Mumbai by penalizing any new development, fearing that economic success would attract more people.’ Yes, we have deliberately planned for our cities to fail. That has been our intent. If they succeed, then more people would move there, ‘who would have to share an already deficient and immutable infrastructure’. Bertaud concludes: ‘This is a very pessimistic view of urban development.' An understatement, so classically French!
It never bored them to hear words, words; they breathed them with the cool night air, never stopping to analyse; the name of the poet, Hafiz, Hali, Iqbal, was sufficient guarantee. India—a hundred Indias—whispered outside beneath the indifferent moon, but for the time India seemed one and their own, and they regained their departed greatness by hearing its departure lamented, they felt young again because reminded that youth must fly.
We all have our patchwork ideas of India, our notions and opinions and prejudices–often fallacious and absurd–of this enormous, disparate country, which, as I take pleasure in reminding newcomers, bigger in population than all but its own continent: Asia. It is a place onto which foreigners have projected their own exotic fantasies and fears, their explanatory and simplifying schemata. And they never seem quite to make up their minds–as they swing from one extreme to the other–whether this country is of great wealth or of appalling poverty, of spiritual renunciation or of unabashed materialism, of fasting or of gluttony, of erotic sophistication or of sexual puritanism, of corruption or of moral superiority. They probably fail to admit that it might be all these things, and even more so, everything in between.
In the winter of 1987 India was full of iskeems that had gone awry. Agricultural iskeems, political iskeems, economic iskeems, educational iskeems, stop black money iskeems, attract white tourists iskeems, drinkable water iskeems, animal protection iskeems, women's welfare iskeems, nurture children iskeems, don't scan female foetus iskeems, privatization iskeems, medical iskeems, entertainment iskeems, old India iskeems and new India iskeems.We had mastered the art of nomenclature from the white man.Grand labels could disguise unforgivable things.
I'd been surprised by the depth of emotion that was invested in that curiously archaic phrase 'great power'. What would it mean, I'd asked myself, to the lives of working journalists, salaried technocrats and so on if India achieved 'great power status'? What were the images evoked by this tag?Now, walking through this echoing old palace, looking at the pictures in the corridors, this aspiration took on, for the first time, the contours of an imagined reality. This is what the nuclearists wanted: to sign treaties, to be pictured with the world's powerful, to hang portraits on their walls, to become ancestors. On the bomb they had pinned their hopes of bringing it all back.
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.
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.
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
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.
For years and years, even during the time of my first visit in 1962, it has been said that Calcutta was dying, that its port was silting up, its antiquated industry declining, but Calcutta hadn't died. It hadn't done much, but it had gone on; and it had begun to appear that the prophecy has been excessive. Now it occurred to me that perhaps this was what happened when cities died. They don't die with a bang; they didn't die only when they were abandoned. Perhaps, they died like this: when everybody was suffering, when transport was so hard that working people gave up jobs they needed because the fear the suffering of the travel; When no one had clean water or air; No one could go walking. Perhaps city died when they lost amenities that cities provided, the visual excitement, the heightened sense of human possibility, and became simply places where there were too many people, and people suffered.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 .
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)
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.
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.
Indian cricket, and the youngsters themselves, are dealing with issues inconceivable a few summers ago. Riches and all the attendant temptations are thrown at them before they have started shaving regularly. It's not their fault. It's no one's fault. That is the marketplace. Inevitably, though, it can distract attention from the long struggle towards mastery. Cricket does not give itself away; it expects players to apply themselves, to think and study and seek. It plays tricks, too, pretends that sixes and slower balls and the other shortcuts matter. Cricket sets traps, flatters players and calls them kings when they are barely princes.
A homeland is not gotten as a gift; it is not acquired by privilege or political contracts, it is not bought with gold or held by force. No, it is made with the sweat of the brow; it is the historic creation and collective enterprise of the people, the fruit of its people’s labor bodily, spiritually, morally over the span of generations.
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Bombay, you will be told, is the only city India has, in the sense that the word city is understood in the West. Other Indian metropolises like Calcutta, Madras and Delhi are like oversized villages. It is true that Bombay has many more high-rise buildings than any other Indian city: when you approach it by the sea it looks like a miniature New York. It has other things to justify its city status: it is congested, it has traffic jams at all hours of the day, it is highly polluted and many parts of it stink.
If the war had a noble purpose, it was this - to end the inhumanity those photographs showed. While India rarely spoke about its imperative as the moral one, and few people steeped in realpolitik can shed their cynicism when a politician speaks in moral terms, and the intervention certainly suited India's strategic interests, the fact remains that in the annals of humanitarian interventions, few were as swift, successful, purpose-driven and with humanitarian goals as the Indian intervention to liberate Bangladesh. India went in when it was attacked, and left before its troops became unpopular.
One of the reasons for this cataclysmic change of destinies was the inherent weakness of a decaying agricultural empire of the Mughals which after more than two hundred years of rule over vast areas of India, was at its terminal stage and needed a small push to crumble like a house of cards.That push was given by six East India Companies of different European countries which had extracted rights to trade with India from the Mughals but transformed themselves as the arbiters and protectors of several Indian states. In this process they not only became rich but also militarily strong because in the twilight years of the Mughal empire, deteriorating security environment necessitated to arm themselves to protect their economic interests. Because of their inherent superiority as representatives of rising industrial powers, they had access to modern techniques and technology of warfare, which turned out to be the decisive factor in capturing vast territories in India.
Amid the echoes of the roar of the guns in Flanders, the world is inclined to overlook India's share in it all and the stout proud loyalty of Indian hearts. May this tribute to the gallant Indian gentlemen who came to fight our battles serve to remind its readers that they who give their best, and they who take, are one.
Bhagat Singh revered Lajpat Rai as a leader. But he would not spare even Lajpat Rai, when, during the last years of his life, Lajpat Rai turned to communal politics. He then launched a political-ideological campaign against him. Because Lajpat Rai was a respected leader, he would not publicly use harsh words of criticism against him. And so he printed as a pamphlet Robert Browning’s famous poem, ‘The Lost Leader,’ in which Browning criticizes Wordsworth for turning against liberty. The poem begins with the line ‘Just for a handful of silver he left us.’ A few more of the poem’s lines were: ‘We shall march prospering, not thro’ his presence; Songs may inspirit us, not from his lyre,’ and ‘Blot out his name, then, record one lost soul more.’ There was not one word of criticism of Lajpat Rai. Only, on the front cover, he printed Lajpat Rai’s photograph!
There was a greater truth — that of a glorious struggle, hard-fought and hard-won, in which many fell martyrs and countless others made sacrifices, dreaming of the day India would be free. That day had come. The people of India saw that too, and on 15 August — despite the sorrow in their hearts for the division of their land danced in the streets with abandon and joy.
Kashayam [was] a drink the vanaras had morning, noon and night, and a few times in between. It was a kind of brew with all kinds of herbs thrown in: the thick, sharp-tasting furry karpuravalli, the strong spicy tulsi, the slightly bitter bark of the coconut tree, pungent pepper roots, the breathcatching nellikai, the cool root of vetriver, and just about anything else that was considered edible. And some things that weren’t. In their craze for novelty, vanaras sometimes flung in new kinds of leaves or berries just because they smelt interesting; whole families had been known to fall ill, or even die. Gind’s family were not a very adventurous lot, and stuck to things they knew not to be poisonous. Still, every day’s kashayam was different, and this was a great topic of conversation among the vanaras.
Broaching is a precise machining process in metalworking domain which uses a toothed tool called broach to cut materials into a predetermined shape. Broaching works best for odd shapes where precision machining is needed and hence finds wide application in a number of industry in India and worldwide. Broach resembles a saw to certain extent but unlike a saw, its teeth become larger in size across its length. A broach gives shapes by roughing or removing the material, semi finishing and then by imparting the ultimate finishing. Round or odd shapes, for both internal and external surfaces, can be conveniently formed by broaching. This multi edge tool can shape any metal or metallic alloy but works best on softer materials like plastic, wood, bronze, aluminum, etc. Resharpening of the tool The broach that imparts shape to many work pieces can work properly only when the size and shape of its teeth are perfect. With time and usage, the teeth tend to lose its sharpness and become blunt. Using a dull broach may lead to permanent damage of its teeth. To enhance the broach life and minimize the tooling expense, it needs to be re-sharpened on time. When to opt for resharpeningWhen broaching produce roughly shaped work pieces, it is definitely time for re-sharpening. However, with a little bit of watchfulness, one can even get it sharpened before it delivers poor finish or tearing. Some of the other conditions when this toothed tool will require re-sharpening are:• Excessive hydraulic press pressure required to run the broach• Nicks and scratches on the teeth making it dull • Broach starts drifting• Cutting edges show signs of wear • Chattering occurs while broaching Re-sharpening requires high precision. Removing excessive material from the teeth will adversely affect its longevity. Only proper sharpening will ensure time efficiency and high quality output. Teeth welding, grinding of gullets and teeth crest, reshaping teeth to proper taper are some of the methods used in re-sharpening.Broaching, once used for machining only internal keyways, is now used for machining a plethora of shapes and surfaces for high quantity of work pieces. Broaching requires less tools than most of the other machining process and saves considerable amount of output time and hence favoured for high volume production irrespective of its high cost. In India, broaching finds wide application in the automobile industry. Therefore, a large number of players are foraying into the broach manufacturing industry on a regular basis.
Praise to our Indian brothers, and the dark face have his due!Thanks to the kindly dark faces who fought with us, faithful and few,Fought with the bravest among us, and drove them, and smote them, and slew.That ever upon the topment roof our banner in India blew.
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...
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.
But Mehrunnisa did not know then, would never know, by giving her blessings to this marriage she had set into progress a chain of events that would eventually erase her name from history's pages. Or that Arjumand would become the only Mughal woman posterity would easily recognize. Docile, seemingly tractable and troublesome Arjumand would eclipse even Mehrunnisa, cast her in a shadow...because of the monument Khurram would build in Arjumand's memory - the Taj Mahal.
This great Mughal Emperor [Akbar] was illiterate; he could neither read nor write. However, that had not stopped Akbar from cultivating the acquaintance of the most learned and cultured poets, authors, musicians, and architects of the time - relying solely on his remarkable memory during conversations with them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.