Top 100 Quotes & Sayings by Barkha Dutt

For the Modi government, the calls for a 'Naya Kashmir' has paradoxically led them right back to old established political parties after a failed experiment at propping up an 'alternative' regime in the form of the Apni Party and other such flirtations.

Hinduism especially - in the absence of codified rituals or a book of rules to circumscribe it - has always functioned as part philosophy, part mythology, leaving it open to competing and contradictory interpretations.

There comes a time in the life of every government when the media decide that it has blundered so fatally that a complete recovery is now impossible. In such phases - and every single political party has encountered them - editorials become political obituaries that declare the end.

Yes, fear and repression may be permanent citizens in Narendra Modi's Gujarat.

You cannot hurl textbook principles of right and wrong in the age of fake news, WhatsApp campaigns and personality-centric cult politics. Elections are not a moral science class.

I don't care if a flight attendant is fat as long as she doesn't sneak back to the galley for a gossip when she should be pushing down the food trolley. I get annoyed when the food trays are slapped down on my seat by bored and disinterested men and women. I look for warmth and comfort, not cold efficiency.

Much has already been said about the indisputable integrity of men such as AB Bardhan and Prakash Karat. So, why is it that while the sleaze and slime of the political underbelly puts us off, we aren't warmed by the relative virtue and scrubbed-clean morality of the Marxists?

An idea you disagree with has to be fought with a better idea.

Politics was Ahmed Patel's whole life.

In many ways, Ahmed Patel was the mind of Sonia Gandhi. Nearly everything we know about her publicly was constructed or revealed with his enabling.

The real challenge to upholding India's freedoms is how patchy and individual-driven it is when it comes to the judiciary. The system is so arranged that instead of legal precedent and case law setting the template for the court's interventions, the idea of justice is guided by what Judge A or Judge B may think.

Every time that zealots clash with the zany and Religion and Freedom take opposite positions across the trenches, the issue becomes larger than the individual.

The sanctimony that a section of the media wears like a second skin comes undone so fast when the scrutiny is on them.

Wherever I go, people complain about what they see on television. Yet, if you are lapping this up because it's random entertainment or from morbid fascination, you are enablers.

If there is a bulwark against the BJP juggernaut, it can only be India's regional parties. But they too falter in the face of the Modi factor and their own lack of commitment to a full time, 365 days a year, 24-hour-a-day political life.

A hidden camera must never become a lazy substitute for the rigours of old-style reporting.

What other, newer democracies find relatively easy - conducting an election, the counting of votes, the peaceful transition of power - seems to have befuddled the United States (U.S.).

Whether it's Delhi, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana or Odisha, we have seen similar patterns - hostile local politics transform into conciliation of some kind after the state elections.

Grief, like Covid-19, mutates and escapes the inoculation of both time and the reassurance of loving friends. It is less sledgehammer and more screwdriver, drilling little holes in your head and heart, leaving you haunted by the ifs and buts of your decisions.

When Hindustan Motors rolled out the first Ambassador Car in 1957 its sturdy body, rounded contours and Mother Earth simplicity immediately bagged it a place in our collective consciousness.

For too long now we have watched the Left perch prettily on the periphery of the government, enjoying influence without accountability. In the two states where it has actually had to deal with the everyday reality of governance, look at how the Chief Ministers have struggled to marry textbook diktats with the actualities of a Changing India.

People care when service is sluggish and comes from an arrogance and complacency that often besets those who know they can never lose their jobs.

There is an undeniable need to stop candy-flossing the impact of fundamentalism.

The army's original job description was to protect borders, but a demanding country depends on it for everything else too, from rebuilding bridges after a tsunami to keeping the peace when religious riots erupt.

You can't define yourself either in shades of what you are contesting or entirely in antithesis to it. By doing so, what you reveal is that you have nothing to say for yourself. Or that you are unsure of your messaging.

The BJP promised that the end of Article 370 was going to be the close of business-as-usual in Kashmir. But if anything defines business-as-usual, it has been New Delhi's attempts at political engineering in the Valley.

For many Indians, their future as global players is linked to the American dream.

The freedom of expression cannot be defined selectively.

I am not a pundit or a psephologist and thus not in the business of calling elections.

Flight attendants need to think on their feet and walk on their toes. An emergency landing can't be steered by a pot-bellied cabin crew that crawls or belly-walks.

It's never said out aloud, or in so many words, but for many urban, upper caste Indians, 'the backwards' are precisely that - citizens of the hinterland, ungainly and otherworldly - an inconvenient blemish on their shining, gleaming future.

In 2020 we saw the poorest Indian citizen suffer as migrant workers, in the hundreds of thousands, fled the cities on foot, sometimes barefoot, to return to the villages.

This Right vs Left fault line has been drawn through all of our nations. In India too, your political choice has come to define all of you. And if you fail the ideological purity test of one or the other side, you are immediately branded a traitor.

Politics is Darwinian. Individuals will prioritise their future first.

We do not have to be trapped in the simple-minded binaries of the western world.

My father, a former Air India official, but essentially an inventor at heart - a man who loved to sometimes break machines just so that he could have the joy of re-engineering them - was a twinkly-eyed, ever-optimistic man of science.

The crests and troughs in Covid-19 cases and the spikes and falls of daily infographics by which we now measure the wellness of our lives have been based mostly on city-driven data.

In many professional spaces, women are fighting twice as hard as men to get to the same place and get the same opportunities. If you then speak out about your experience of sexual harassment, there is every chance you will not be sent on certain assignments.

Most of us will agree that my former medium, television news, has been reduced to tawdry entertainment.

As women, many of us have internalised our lives as a prolonged version of boot camp, a sort of Darwinian call to toughen up or perish. As young women, we are terrified that men we consider our mentors can turn out to be monsters.

Covid-19-affected patients cannot be orphaned.

If the airline industry were to evolve a common fitness standard for both male and female employees, that would not just be acceptable, it would be entirely desirable.

To call the coronavirus a great equaliser turned out to be the greatest falsification of our time.

If anything, I believe, television anchors have become parodies of themselves, self-caricatures if such a thing is possible. And I'd dismiss it all with a scornful laugh if broadcast news were not so dangerous in fanning misogyny, communalism, fake news and divisiveness.

Patriotism need not be puritanical.

Most of us in the media are, by and large, sentimental about our national identity, but comfortable enough in our skins as Indians, to be deeply self-critical. The problem arises when loyalty to India gets mixed up with loyalty to the government of the day.

National security is that old rabbit that's pulled out of the hat every time politicians run out of other tricks to keep you in check.

For the BJP, the conversion of Bengal's cultural Hindu into a political Hindu is a long-standing project.

What people, both while voting or while watching television, seek is the same - to know what you stand for and whether you can tell a story that captures their imagination and holds their attention.

It has become impossible for India to talk about caste with any candour.

I am not a big fan of politicians turning tragedy into opportunity, but I believe that which politician a victim's family wants to meet is entirely their decision.

Our ideas of consent have evolved and changed because feminism has pushed the boundaries.

For decades, the Left has occupied a special place in the minds of educated Indians - outside of the two states (Bengal and Kerala) where it has a political presence and is therefore treated like any other political party.

A message you abhor has to be trumped with a more powerful one.

I'm not a big fan of government interference in most matters.

The truth is that every news channel is a variant of the other and the difference is one of degree.

The rise of Right-wing populism globally has divided not just countries, but families. It has broken relationships and torn apart friendships. It has created social media discord and abuse, and led to unprecedented name-calling.

I don't watch television news and, so, whatever I know is from online snippets released by various channels.

India cannot pretend anymore that none of its citizens fancy membership to the Global Jehad club. We need to examine where our secularism has failed.

For a man once called the Indian Obama by the historian and public intellectual Ramachandra Guha, the diminishing of Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar could not be more dramatic.