A Quote by Abhijit Banerjee

I was an Indian with zero sense of caste till I was 20. That's an unusual privilege but it came out of the fact that I was a middle-class Bengali.

Abhijit Banerjee

Quote Topics

Bengali Came Caste Class Fact Indian Middle Out Privilege Sense Till Unusual Zero

Quote Author

Abhijit Banerjee
American - Economist
Born: February 21, 1961

I have never experienced racism in the feminist movement, so it concerned me to think that I was unable to see the subject clearly because I came from white, middle-class privilege.

Betty Buckley

I had an Indian face, but I never saw it as Indian, in part because in America the Indian was dead. The Indian had been killed in cowboy movies, or was playing bingo in Oklahoma. Also, in my middle-class Mexican family indio was a bad word, one my parents shy away from to this day. That's one of the reasons, of course, why I always insist, in my bratty way, on saying, Soy indio! - "I am an Indian!"

Richard Rodriguez

We are the ones looking out for the middle class. Who do think pays for the endless expansion of government? Its middle class taxpayers. Our reforms protect middle class taxpayers.

Scott Walker

I actually did a quick survey of how caste plays out in contemporary India. The idea that democracy and development have in some ways eroded caste turned out not to be the case, that it has in fact been entrenched and modernised.

Arundhati Roy

I think that Indian writing in English is a really peculiar beast. I can't think of any literature - perhaps Russian literature in the nineteenth century comes close - so exclusively produced by and closely identified with a tiny but powerful ruling elite, the upper-caste, Anglophone upper middle class, and dependent for so long on book buyers and readers elsewhere.

Pankaj Mishra

Too much of Indian writing in English, it seemed to me, consisted of middle-class people writing about other middle-class people - and a small slice of life being passed off as an authentic portrait of the country.

Aravind Adiga

When I grew up, I realised what an amazing thing my parents did. It was such a big deal for my mom, a middle class woman, to decide to leave her children and husband to go and do her Ph.D. for three years. And my dad, who is even more middle class, a traditional South Indian, to let his wife do that.

Swara Bhaskar

I had a lot of Bengali friends in Delhi. The bands there had Bengali musicians: for example, Indian Ocean. We use to have a good amount of adda and sing songs through the night.

Mohit Chauhan

In fact, the Bengali film industry is becoming more balanced between creativity and commercialization. And if Bollywood can remake south Indian and Hollywood films, why can't we do so!

Rituparna Sengupta

I was not from a middle-class family at all. I did not have middle-class possessions and what have you. But I had middle-class parents who gave me what was needed to survive in society.

Sugar Ray Leonard

If your white privilege and class privilege protects you, then you have an obligation to use that privilege to take stands that work to end the injustice that grants that privilege in the first place.

Ayelet Waldman

The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.

Glenn Reynolds

It's much easier for a middle class Indian entrepreneur to start up a computer company than it is for an Indian company to build roads and transportation systems suitable for a population that is getting wealthier and demanding more basic services.

Jerry A. Webman

In a rural society communities are "given" for the individual. Community is a fact, whether family or religion, social class or caste.

Peter Drucker

To most middle-class feminists, as to most middle-class non-feminists, working-class women remain mysterious creatures to be “reached out to” in some abstract way. No connection. No solidarity.