In our generation, the role models were Gandhi and Nehru. We revered them. They were venerated personalities. I read almost every speech of Nehru.
I could have joined politics during Nehru's or Indira Gandhi's time. I don't want to. I stay away from these things.
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?'
It's because Gandhi believed in villages and because the British ruled from the cities; therefore, Nehru thought of New Delhi as an un-Indian city.
Prime ministers with full majority have behaved differently from each other. Jawaharlal Nehru was a leader who ruled by consensus while Indira Gandhi was considered more unilateral in her approach.
Whatseems to take place outside ideology (to be precise, in the street), in reality takes place in ideology. What really takes place in ideology seems therefore to take place outside it. That is why those who are in ideology believe themselves by definition outside ideology: one of the effects of ideology is the practical denegation of the ideological character of ideology by ideology: ideology never says, 'I am ideological.'
I go for Mao Tse-tung much more than, than Nehru because I think that Nehru brought his country up in a beggar's role.
Bose did not die in 1945. It is wrong. It is a conspiracy of Nehru and the Japanese. Subhash Chandra Bose sought shelter in Russia and was granted asylum. Jawaharlal Nehru knew everything.
I am a secularist in the Gandhian sense of the word, not the Nehruvian one. Nehru thought religion was an antique superstition which stood in the way of rational modern politics. I side with Gandhi, who wanted religious figures out of politics but also was suspicious of purely rational politics.
In some ways, Mr. Modi's foreign policy is a continuation of Dr. Manmohan Singh's, and in some ways, it could be that Mr. Modi was repossessing all the non Nehru-Gandhi leaders of the Congress.
India and Burma have been close friends since the days we were struggling for independence. And I'm a great admirer of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, and all those leaders of India's independence movement. I would like to believe the aspirations and hopes we shared in the past will continue to bind us in the future.
Congress is hiding the details of their party president Rahul Gandhi's citizenship. Rahul Gandhi's real name is Rahul Vincy. They are cheating people by hiding the real names of Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra.
I think ideology is toxic, all ideology. It's not that there are good ones and bad ones. All ideology is toxic, because ideology is a kind of insult to the gift of human free thinking.
Gandhi was inevitable. If humanity is to progress, Gandhi is inescapable. He lived, thought and acted, inspired by the vision of humanity evolving toward a world of peace and harmony. We may ignore Gandhi at our own risk.
Every work of art (unless it is a psuedo-intellectualist work, a work already comprised in some ideology that it merely illustrates, as with Brecht) is outside ideology, is not reducible to ideology. Ideology circumscribes without penetrating it. The absence of ideology in a work does not mean an absence of ideas; on the contrary it fertilizes them.
I see my shows like Gandhi, and I've got little baby Gandhis, and they are changing the world. I know that I'm a bit delusional about that, but I do think of them like Gandhi. They are not celebrities: they are like Gandhi and Mother Teresa.