'I can't help it if people don't love the minorities, the Dalits and Adivasis; they are as much of this country as any other Indian.' 'If I love them, it does not mean I do not love my country.' 'It is ironic and funny that they have laid such severe anti-national charges against me.'
'At the end of the interview, as he walked with us to the elevator, he looked at me and said, "Do you think it was my karma that I should have made this film?"' Arthur J Pais/Rediff.com recalls his encounter with Richard Attenborough.
'If they were really serious (about conferring the Bharat Ratna on Savarkar) what were they doing for the last five years?' 'Why do they have to take so long?' 'Gandhi himself never got the Bharat Ratna so it does not really matter.'
'The TMC has become a private limited company.'
'Savarkar was the closest the RSS had to a freedom movement icon, however flawed.' 'Indira Gandhi wasn't going to gift him to them.' 'And a non-career politician like Dr Singh understands it.' 'It is just that his party never listened to him,' says Shekhar Gupta.
'The sorry image of a wailing leader visiting relief camps for riot victims was completely incoherent with what he did next, blaming the minority community for the disturbance.' Utkarsh Mishra pens a tribute from the heart.
'Under the more strident Modi version of Hindutva, Nehru has almost become a contemporary political figure.' 'The ruling party knows that without total erasure and distortion of Nehru, their fantasies will always be wobbly.'
'Wherever in the world there is political instability, those countries are beset with severe crises today. But India is in a much better position than the rest of the world due to the decisions taken by my government in the national interest,' President Droupadi Murmu said in her address to both Houses of Parliament.
'The BJP will take time to come to power in Andhra.'
During his two day visit, Modi is expected to seal a raft of major deals in defence, nuclear energy and hydrocarbons sectors to further cement their 'special and privileged strategic ties'.
'Nitish's claims of development are false. He has only helped corrupt officials.' 'I want to remind Lalu that this is not the 1990s. This is 2015.' 'I am a bahubali for those looting society.'
Raag Desh is one of the best films of the year, Sreehari Nair raves.
Rangoon haunts in unlikely fashion and, while the director's most straightforward picture, holds enough of its own marvels to justify multiple viewings,' notes Raja Sen.
Trinamool congress MP and Gardiner Professor of History at Harvard University Sugata Bose tells Kavita Chowdhury that there is a sense of fear and insecurity among our minorities.
In a first such action in India's electoral history, the Election Commission had Wednesday ordered campaigning in the nine West Bengal constituencies to end at 10 pm on Thursday, instead of 6 pm on Friday, in the wake of violence between the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Trinamool Congress in Kolkata during Amit Shah's roadshow.
'How can the monument where the prime minister unfurls the flag on Independence Day, in a ceremony broadcast and telecast nationally, be maintained by a private entity?' asks Jyoti Punwani.
Dr Kalam, The Dalai Lama, M F Husain. Mrinalini Sarabhai. Dancer Astad Deboo lists his favourite Indian treasures.
'Look at the number of billionaires, the number of new billionaires in India.' 'Adani and Ambani are not the only ones.' 'What's wrong with people making money as long as it benefits us?'
'Politics has become a toilet because we delegate everything.' 'We have to catch a bus, watch a cricket match, live our life... we feel this (politics) is not part of our responsibility.'
In embarking on building the world's tallest statue, Modi is hoping his stature will also rise - if not across India then at least in Gujarat, says Bharat Bhushan.
'As Indians, we should be claiming and celebrating 'Bhartiyata' rather than seeking commitment to beliefs which are divisive and exclusionary.'
Here's the full text of address to the nation by President Ram Nath Kovind on the eve of the Republic Day 2022.
Attlee said Great Britain had concluded that the Indian element of the army was no longer reliable and that Netaji's Indian National Army had demonstrated that. That had shaken the foundation on which Britain's Indian empire rested, argues Lieutenant General Ashok Joshi (retd).
'The power of love is the greatest power in the world.' 'Add a smile and you can conquer the world,' Bengali actor June Maliah, the Trinamool Congress's candidate for the Medinipur constituency, tells Swarupa Dutt/Rediff.com.
'We should not forget the sacrifice these men made.'
'What was previously buried in the sands of time now gets buried by the weight of banality,' notes Sreehari Nair.
'Art Deco was the last of the truly international styles.'
Addressing the Indian diaspora on the second day of his three-day visit to Malaysia, Modi said India draws strength from its diversity and that his government is working to create an environment where enterprise flourishes and everybody gets basic needs like roof, sanitation, water, health care and education.
Rai Mamta Kumari's first shot at politics ended before it could begin. She had gone to file her nomination with a procession of 56 four wheelers and distributed 1,800 food packets. But then something went wrong.
'A new doctrine now needs to be evolved for a new situation, and the army will do it.' 'You won't see more Kashmiris driven in front of army columns.' 'Nor will the army massacre hundreds, Dyer style,' says Shekhar Gupta.
'There is a design of fundamentalists that the north east must become an Islamic country.'
'Our honourable CM is so shameless that she will say the state is among the safest for women.'
'We want to protect our history, we want to protect our people from getting overwhelmed by the influx from Bangladesh, that is why the people of Assam are out in the streets,' says former Assam chief minister and Asom Gana Parishad leader Prafulla Kumar Mahanta.
'Who are these people on the streets?' 'They are youth and students who were hoodwinked, bluffed by Modi for the last seven years, with a promise of 2 crore jobs every year.' 'And Mamata sings the same tune.' 'But the youth can see that as long as there is Mamata or Modi, there is no hope.'
'Unfortunately, during this pandemic, everybody started saying that well, these are desperate times and desperate times need desperate solutions.' 'Purely out of fear, anxiety, panic, this knowledge that people started acquiring from WhatsApp University and social media, it pushed science completely to the backseat.'
There's no steam in the intolerance debate anymore but the opposing sides still refuse to let it go, says Sampath.
104 years after it was first written, and 76 years after the poet's clarification, the controversy surrounding Rabindranath Tagore's Jana Gana Mana refuses to go away.
'The BJP may well be his ultimate destination.' 'In the process, he has probably shot himself in the foot.' 'It is unlikely that either Scindia or Pilot will be anything other than a No 3 or a No 4 in the Modi-Shah dispensation,' predicts Amulya Ganguli.
Here's the full text of President Ram Nath Kovind's address to the nation on the eve of 72nd Republic Day.
'Jinnah developed a belief that Gandhi had stolen the tag of the leader of the Indian people from him and that he later used religion to reduce Gandhi's idea of a united India to naught was his revenge.'
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