"A lie is muck; keep hurling. Someday, some of it will stick on the face."
"In demonizing a hero, media gets ruthlessly zealous; it fetches viewership. Such zealousness, when sponsored, turns fanatical."
"A VIP is the supreme self in our system who is entitled to override all the rights, privileges and spaces of other citizens. On the other hand, to the system, a citizen is a wretched, contemptible non-entity who is condemned to suffer in the name of VIP's interest..."
"Novelty of ideas is not an essential pre-requisite of getting bigger headlines; media management is."
"Which question of Indian democracy is not a potential question of minority interest in India?"
"Hindus are never a religion - at best they are a convoluted collectivity of castes, sub-castes, sects, beliefs, dogmas and superstitions whose opinion leaders are as diverse as the flora and fauna of the tropical rainforests..."
"Hindus are overzealous in flaunting their hollow intellectuality, competitive secularism and half-baked modernity."
"Hindus are a hyper-fragmented tottery entity that is too unrealistic to become a political force."
"Hindus are a hyper-fragmented tottery entity that is too unrealistic to become a political force."
Atomization of society and individualism has never been a celebrated virtue in Indian democracy.
"I give a damn to the facts...I value perceptions."
"True love and true devotion often ask for the same price - Sacrifice."
"Who said tough men and women don't cry? They cry hard in their solitude."
"Because of a connecting language we're all the same on earth. Until we talk, we feel ourselves to be different; but, when we start communicating how similar do we find ourselves - similar in our happiness, in our sorrows, in our meanness and in our stupidities."
"A sari is the most decent, yet most sensuous dress, which may work in innumerable ways for a woman. It's nasty yet elegant, teasing yet chaste, revealing yet decorous and provocative yet honourable; it is outrageously exposing yet it is downrightly respectable. You get to show off your oomph by exposing your carved waist-line, tight curves, silken tummy and the erotic depression of a navel in its middle - all respectably through the revered dress of a sari!"
A Sari is quintessentially Indian - bewitching, yet dignified.
"We believe that democracy is an exquisite system of governance based on the faith and hope of the people - a faith that the political order exists to implement the cherished ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity and a hope that it will ensure justice and peace for them; we believe it's a system of governance where the basis of the sovereign power is people's will - yours and mine will - which means that yours and mine interests will be supreme and decisive... But, friends, this belief is a fallacy. I understand that it would be a painful shock to realize that the faith, you're born and brought up with, is a mistaken faith."
"If democracy is to be judged merely by the provision of electing a government through 5-yearly elections, I agree we've democracy; if democracy is to be judged merely by the provision of a parliamentary system of government to be run by the representatives of the people, I agree we've democracy; if democracy is to be judged merely by a provision of universal franchise enabling each and every citizen to cast a vote, I agree there is democracy; if democracy is judged merely by the right of every citizen to join politics or to fight elections, I believe we've democracy. Yes, all of these are essential pre-requisites of democracy, yet only these don't make a democracy."
"Democracy reflects from the emotional infrastructure of society, i.e., from the value-systems, orientation and willingness of the society and its institutions to work for common welfare; it is reflected in the emotional capacity of society to value and respect the basic ethos of liberty, equality and fraternity."
"Friends, if you find the system collapsing, the reason doesn't lie in democracy; the reason lies within us - within 'we the people' who failed to imbibe the spirit of democracy."
"In our constitution, we describe ourselves as 'We the People'. But, who 'we' are? 'We' are an entity divided into thousands of castes and sub-castes, who believe in multiple religions, sects and sub-sects and speak hundreds of languages and dialects. We're an entity that fights in the name of religion, caste, languages, cultures, boundaries, natural resources and constitutional privileges. Can such an assorted human group ever become 'We'?"
"Democracy gives us freedom but a majority of us have used this freedom to become followers. The people follow blind legacies and pseudo-ideologies..."
"The political system has fundamentally been created around the concept of domination where a group of men usurp the authority to rule over the entire population with the quintessential objective of self-aggrandizement and self-promotion. This is true for any and every forms of governance; whether it is democracy, communism, monarchy or militarism."
"Who says demagogues are for commoners; they know the art of seizing even the best minds of society.
"Remember, the basis of the best of friendships is often temptation."
Your best friend, often, is someone who caters to the meanest interests of your life.
"I'm a bartender of lies; I've cocktails of lies - white lies and malicious lies - which I shake and stir to make a truth."
"A VIP is someone who makes invaluable contribution to the asset or prestige of the nation rather than being a burden on it."
"Mr Sarvapriya, more than anything else, knew the art of silence; he knew well that not speaking on many things wins more political brownie points than speaking on everything."
"For a VIP, rule is what the VIP wants; rules are bent, procedures are bypassed, laws are manipulated and clauses are overlooked in order to comfort the VIP's mood. For a common man, however, rule is what the law enforcing official wants; rules are misinterpreted, procedures are confounded, laws are manipulated and clauses are overlooked to harass the common man until he agrees to comfort the mood of the official."
"In India, the general elections happen to be a period of bemusing developments where politicians and the citizens undergo peaceful and voluntary role-reversals; the politicians decree themselves to be the servants of the people and beseech the people to become their masters. It's quite a temporary phase lasting for as small a duration as the monsoon rainfalls in the north-Indian plains. With the vagaries of elections behind them, both the actors hop back into their original shoes, each finding the reversed role quite uncomfortable to bear."
"There is a vast difference between being correct and being politically correct. All correct statements may not be politically correct in the same way as all incorrect statements are not politically incorrect."