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?'
As an architect you are a builder. You are of course more than a builder. You need to be a militant, you have to be a poet, you have to be a visionary, you have to be an artist. But certainly you have to be a builder. Everything starts from there.
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 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.
And I think that, at some point, I am, as John Lewis and many others, are a bridge-builder. The goal is to bring America together and Americans. We are a great nation. But we must become a greater nation.
When you know the builder, you can have complete confidence in the quality of his work.
Each citizen of India is a nation builder.
When I served as prime minister last time, I failed to prioritize my agenda. I was eager to complete everything at once, and ended my administration in failure. After resigning, for six years I traveled across the nation simply to listen.
I came to architecture from building. Because my father was a builder, everybody was - and is - a builder in my family.
Now, Martin Luther King Jr. was a bridge builder, not a wall builder.
I do see music as complete refuge. It's a universal home, complete common ground between everyone; it comes from a place that has no nation and no boundaries around it.
My dad was a builder, so I didn't have any connection to the arts at all. I never really considered film as a career, but I knew I didn't want to be a builder.
If you are to be an effective nation builder, make it your business, to understand what is really happening in the economy, both nationally and globally.
The failings in Afghanistan don't fall on the shoulders of the American service personnel trying to complete their mission. The failure falls on military leadership unable to adapt to irregular warfare, and a Congress that blindly continues to fund failure.
I'm not a builder of buildings, I'm a builder of collections.