India Quotes

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

~ Cathy Ostlere

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

~ Pankaj Mishra

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

~ Renita D'silva

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

~ Henry Olcott

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

~ Renita D'silva

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

~ Virchand Gandhi

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

~ Renita D'silva

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

~ Renita D'silva

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

~ Tahir Shah

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

~ Salman Rushdie

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

~ Qurratulain Hyder

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

~ Renita D'silva

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

~ Swami Vivekananda

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

~ Tishani Doshi

More dreams are realised and extinguished in Bombay than any other place in India.

~ Gregory David Roberts

Each year India and China produce four million graduates compared with just over 250,000 in Britain.

~ Gordon Brown

Governments and scientists in India need to ensure that politics and religious ideology do not intrude into science. They belong to separate spheres, and if they are not kept separate, it is science in India and the country as a whole that will suffer.

~ Venkatraman Ramakrishnan

Neither India nor Russia perceives a threat from the strength of the other. Each sees a benefit for itself in the increased political and economic strength of the other.

~ Atal Bihari Vajpayee

Cinema in India is like brushing your teeth in the morning. You can't escape it.

~ Shah Rukh Khan

If the elections are a mere fraud, why are terrorists being trained and infiltrated into India at the command of the Inter-Services Intelligence Agency of Pakistan to kill election candidates and to intimidate voters?

~ Atal Bihari Vajpayee

When India got independence, entrepreneurs were seen as a bad lot, as people who would exploit.

~ Nandan Nilekani

India has 2,000,000 gods and worships them all. In religion, all other countries are paupers; India is the only millionaire.

~ Mark Twain

Indeed, the Muslims have all the social evils of the Hindus and something more. That something more is the compulsory system of purdah for Muslim women. These burka women walking in the streets is one of the most hideous sights one can witness in India.

~ B. R. Ambedkar

The centuries-old history and culture of India, majestic architectural monuments and museums of Delhi, Agra and Mumbai have a unique attractive force.

~ Vladimir Putin

Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest.

~ Mahatma Gandhi

Let Indian history be set side by side with Europe history with what there is of the latter century by century and let us see whether India need blush at the comparison.

~ Annie Besant

As far as the public is concerned, India is amazingly secular.

~ Shah Rukh Khan

For centuries, cultures throughout the world have used indigenous technologies to navigate life's complexities. From navigator-priests in Micronesia to mystics in India, vast sums of knowledge are available if we but recognize it.

~ Elizabeth Kapu'uwailani Lindsey

Five decades ago, as India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, began visibly ailing, the nation and the world were consumed by the question: 'After Nehru, who?' The inexpressible fear lay in the subtext to the question: 'After Nehru, what?'

~ Shashi Tharoor

I admire people who come to politics because it takes a lot of courage to be in politics in India.

~ Shekhar Kapur

What is lacking in India are decent social services. The health service is a disaster. Education is a disaster.

~ Esther Duflo

Sexy in India is not considered positive. But, with today's crop of fresh faces in the modelling arena, being sexy is an asset.

~ Aishwarya Rai Bachchan

Even in India the Hindi film industry might be the best known but there are movies made in other regional languages in India, be it Tamil or Bengali. Those experiences too are different from the ones in Bombay.

~ Aishwarya Rai Bachchan

The Golden Temple, Sikhism's holiest shrine, is in northwestern India near the Pakistani border, and it is a delightful place to contemplate the draw of faith.

~ Nicholas Kristof

The diversity of India, of our civilization, is actually a thing of beauty, which is something we are extremely proud of.

~ Narendra Modi

Kashmir, the 86,000-square-mile region in India's north, both is and isn't the India of the popular imagination.

~ Hanya Yanagihara

India lends itself well to fictionalization, but ultimately, it all depends on the writer's imagination.

~ Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

The British Empire passed quickly and with less humiliation than its French and Dutch counterparts, but decades later, the vicious politics of partition still seems to define India and Pakistan.

~ Pankaj Mishra

I have learned so much from India: for instance, the use of aloe vera, which I use, and I find it sad when I see certain arts of oiling slowly fading away.

~ Nargis Fakhri

It's a mistake to believe technology rests outside India. We compete very successfully.

~ Adi Godrej