'And that means all of us have to be very careful.'
J Sandhya, member, Child Rights Commission, speaks to Shobha Warrier about the recent incident where more than five hundred poor children from Jharkhand, Bihar and West Bengal were being sent to Kerala orphanages, and why children's rights need to be protected with vigour.
'My wife was asked to get out of an autorickshaw because she was married to me. My children were targeted and branded a traitor's children. In spite of the Supreme Court and the NHRC having cleared my case, the state government is yet to close it. Local politicians are behind this. Why can't they close the case, give me compensation, accepting gracefully that they have wronged me?' Dr S Nambi Narayanan, the scientist who was accused and then exonerated in the 1994 ISRO spying case, speaks to Rediff.com's Shobha Warrier about his continuing travails and his recent meeting with Narendra Modi.
'When an individual becomes authoritarian, you can overthrow the individual easily. 'When the system becomes authoritarian, whoever challenges the system will be called a criminal or an anti-national.'
'There is indeed a link between BCG vaccination and resistance to COVID-19.'
'Ultimately, people will revolt at one time or the other.' 'You cannot feed the public with cultural issues forever.'
'I told him, "Balu, you have to get out of the hospital. We have to do a lot of programmes together".' 'When I kissed him on his forehead, tears started rolling from his eyes.' 'I wiped the tears away and prayed.' 'I didn't know that was the last time I was going to see my friend alive.'
'Mortality or hospitalisation has not increased in South Africa because of the new variant.' 'There is nothing to show so far that it is more infectious.' 'I am of the opinion that at the moment, there is no reason to panic.'
'If the government does its job of vaccinating all the population with the booster dose, and also monitoring the virus, and we do our job of wearing a mask and avoiding crowded places, we will be free of this virus in a few months.' time.'
'If we were willing to go to Yemen, one can only imagine our condition. Only those who are desperate will go there.'
'...Rs 137 lakh crores of people's money?' 'It is not the government's money, it is people's money.'
'One cannot take it that the economy has recovered, and the GST payment has increased because of that, or that production is back to January 2020 level.'
'How can I pursue my dream forgoing my identity? I want to fly as a trans man.'
Like many such cases, this case too would have remained under wraps had the survivor not exposed the villains and the crime they had commited.
'The most alarming thing is all our wells have got filled with flood waters.' 'Drinking water is going to be a big problem for all of us.'
'Art has no religion. An artist is an artist.'
'If you want to really grow, it has to be geometric progression like it happened at the Centre or Haryana or Tripura, where you made a quantum jump.' 'This is possible in Kerala provided we present a better alternative with a great leadership, but the current leadership is busy fixing each other.'
'When people who ignored us, when relatives who have not spoken to us for a long time, congratulated us, it was a proud moment for my mother.'
'When you oppose a policy, you are labelled anti-government.' 'The problem is, the policymakers have never done any business in their lives.'
'When restaurants are open, pubs are open and people are moving around, a second wave will happen because you are giving a chance for the virus to spread.'
'The economy needed 3 or 4 major fixes. The major one was, of course, the direct tax structure, but we ended up complicating the existing convoluted tax structure,' says M R Venkatesh, chartered accountant and lawyer.
'If you talk about any kind of equality, you are under attack.'
'We had a great product for the global market and we could sell it globally resulting in this amazing growth.' 'When customers come online and buy a product, they don't look at whether it is created in India or somewhere else.'
'Once I went to meet an MLA with a complaint, but he refused to even listen to me.' 'I was insulted. That is when I decided not to vote for anyone.'
'I told myself, I will be 23 next year. Why can't I be a billionaire too?'
'The lay of the runway is not at all safe.' 'Even operating a 737 is dangerous there.' 'During the monsoon, they must ban landing on runway 10.'
'Whenever a new film of his releases, he uses politics to hype his film.' 'Her party can manage for a short period without Jayalalithaa as the chief minister but if her absence is for a long term, the AIADMK will start crumbling and disintegrating.' 'What keeps the DMK going despite its corrupt image is it is a democratic party in comparison to the AIADMK... Also, many social welfare measures in Tamil Nadu were brought in by the DMK. So they do have a place in the political scene despite corruption.' Gnani Sankaran, the well-known political analyst, discusses the fallout of Jayalalithaa's conviction on Tamil Nadu politics with Shobha Warrier/Rediff.com
'We behaved as if this disease is not a problem for India.' 'We acted as if it would go away. But it didn't go away; it exploded.'
'Social distancing, wearing masks and hygiene should be practised more strictly.'' 'People should not assemble in close spaces as the micro droplets may hang in the air and can last for a longer time.'
'The vaccine policy should be such that all people should get the vaccine free.'
'When you start distributing wealth, you end up distributing poverty.'
'In 2016, we had De-Mon and in 2017, we had GST.' 'The combined impact of these two started showing up in 2019 and 2020.' 'COVID-19 only added insult to injury.'
'The Kanchi Mutt was energised by Pudu Periyava.' 'Instead of people coming to the Mutt, he has taken the Mutt to the people in several dimensions.'
'The UP election results show that people voted not on caste and religion lines; they went above that and voted for development, honesty, pride in the country, etc.' 'If UP can show the way, the rest of the country also can follow.'
'We have struggled to pay the rent, we have struggled to pay the electricity bill, we have struggled to send them to school, to buy books and uniforms but there was food on the table every day!'
'Wastewater containing excreted material can tell us how a community is doing in a particular area pertaining to any epidemic, pandemic, and other bacterial and viral diseases.'
'There is a Covid vaccine-mania that is happening in the world now and the vaccine makers are using this mania for their own gains'
'There is lack of demand because people have no jobs, and no income.' 'Lakhs of people have lost their jobs and they have no income which has led to no demand in the market.'
'I am sceptical of the Indian economy returning to a sustained high-growth trajectory any time soon'
'The question is, how soon we can expect to re-attain the pre-lockdown levels of output and income.'
