I remember, in my first show in New York, they asked, 'Where is the Indian-ness in your work?'... Now, the same people, after having watched the body of my work, say, 'There is too much Indian philosophy in your work.' They're looking for a superficial skin-level Indian-ness, which I'm not about.
A. Balasubramaniam
In India, nobody really talks about works of art; they always talk about the appreciation of art. You buy this for 3,000 rupees, it'll become 30,000 in two months.
There is no conclusive proof of Unidentified Flying Objects flying over India-China border.
A. K. Antony
Unless India stands up to the world, no one will respect us. In this world, fear has no place. Only strength respects strength.
A. P. J. Abdul Kalam
My 2020 Vision for India is to transform it into a developed nation. That cannot be abstract; it is a lifeline.
Tell me, why is the media here so negative? Why are we in India so embarrassed to recognise our own strengths, our achievements? We are such a great nation. We have so many amazing success stories but we refuse to acknowledge them. Why?
India has to be transformed into a developed nation, a prosperous nation and a healthy nation, with a value system.
India should walk on her own shadow - we must have our own development model.
In India we only read about death, sickness, terrorism, crime.
We will be remembered only if we give to our younger generation a prosperous and safe India, resulting out of economic prosperity coupled with civilizational heritage.
When I took over as president, I studied the Constitution, and the more I studied it, the more I realised that it does not prevent the president of India from giving the nation a vision. So when I went and presented this vision in Parliament and in legislative assemblies; everyone welcomed it, irrespective of party affiliations.
India's trade deficit is because of excess of import over exports.
Today, India is a nuclear weapons state.
India can live without nuclear weapons. That's our dream, and it should be the dream of the U.S. also.
I was in high school when Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru unfurled India's flag in New Delhi.
For 2,500 years, India has never invaded anybody.
All the scientists and technologists should work in appropriate region, specifically the rural technologies, to transform Indian rural sector.
There is not enough funding for basic sciences in India. We have to invest in a big way, and I am pushing that idea.
Today, India consumes about 682 watts per capita, far lesser than developed nations. As India develops, it will definitely require a lot more energy.
I want young Indian composers to be able to do more than just film music. I want to give them the skills that will enable them to create their own palette of sounds instead of having to write formulaic music. It doesn't matter if they become sound engineers, producers, composers or performers - I want them to be as imaginative as they like.
A. R. Rahman
I basically love classical music. I love a lot of musicians playing together and the whole culture of that, whether it's Indian or it's Western.
Compared with other Indian film composers, I only write about six movies a year. Others write up to 60.
Bollywood music is definitely a big part of Indian music and can be a great way to introduce people to the sound. But I hope to continue to incorporate other types of Indian music into my work.
The demand in India is to have a hit, which becomes a promotion for the movie and makes people come to the theater. You have five songs and different promotions based on those. But when I do Western films, the need for originality is greater. Then I become very conscious about the writing.
I feel that, in India, we have films that have tackled various issues over the years, but perhaps one of the issues that we've tackled less is the issue of caste-ism. That's an issue we've more or less stayed away from... although we touched on it briefly in some films like 'Lagaan.'
I'm the daughter of two Indian immigrant doctors, and I have an older sister and younger brother, and none of us have pursued medicine as a career. We're all over the artistic side of things.
My mom always knew I was going to be an actor because I was a ham from the very beginning, so she would push me toward it, which is really unconventional for Indian families to do.
I'm more comfortable weaving Indian flavors into American classics.
Indian food has been huge in the UK forever and ever, but that's because it has a historical rooting. America, I think is really ripe for it. There's been so much interest in Indian culture.
I'm encouraged because you pick up any food magazine and there's two or three recipes involving Indian spices.
The food in south India is the food that I really love because it reminds me of home.
I think there is a real misconception about Indian food being super spicy. And I know that's because when you go into an Indian restaurant, it is pretty spicy. But it doesn't have to be. In fact, my husband can't handle a lot of heat. I've had to temper my cooking so that he can eat with me.
For my parents' generation, the idea was not that marriage was about some kind of idealized, romantic love; it was a partnership. It's about creating family; it's about creating offspring. Indian culture is essentially much more of a 'we' culture. It's a communal culture where you do what's best for the community - you procreate.
When I got to Florida, I was a British kid, but I was also an Indian kid: a brown kid with an English accent. Talk about being an outsider. And that's become the theme of a lot of the stuff I write about.
That's the Indian in me - you must put spices on everything. As a kid, whenever we got sick, my mom would take milk and put turmeric in it. That was our medicine. That was the cure-all. Some people turn to Robitussin.
I was born in Mumbai, but I grew up in England, and then my adulthood has been in the States. I'm an American stuffed with an English person with an Indian person inside. I feel like those things kind of inform me in some way, which I think helps me as an actor.
The average Indian doesn't care about Hollywood movies because they have far too many movies of their own to watch, to miss, and I hope a story like 'Million Dollar Arm,' that is actually about India and deals with these two Indian kids, resonates over there and makes people want to go and see the movie.
In America, people think being South Asian is still kind of exotic. When you go outside New York and Chicago and L.A., there are people who have never tried Indian food... they've never even tasted it!
I was born in India - but never really lived there.
When you're brown and Indian, you get offered a lot of doctor roles.
I'm free to see things objectively because I don't consider myself American, and I don't consider myself British or Indian. I'm kind of an amalgam or mongrel of a lot of different places and experiences. In a lot of ways it's been a good thing for me. It's enabled me to do what I do on 'The Daily Show.'
I'm a little bit like a turducken: I'm sort of like an Indian person, wrapped in a British person, wrapped in an American kind of thing.
My natural hair is jet black. I used to have it down to my bum. And I went through a phase of being obsessed with fake tan. So from the age of 14 to 16, I looked like an Apache Indian!
When India conducted nuclear tests in 1974, I wrote a letter to then-Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto from Holland and offered my services for Pakistani nuclear programme.
In Indian cinema there are no professional voice trainers.
Milk production is one of India's great success stories.
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.
The poverty line in the U.S., for example, has nothing to do with the poverty line in India. It is a relative poverty line. It is reset from time to time but it is related to U.S. median income, so if I set that to be the absolute poverty line everyone in India would essentially be poor.
I think it is a very important point for India to create a bureaucracy that lives on the ground and gets its stimulus from how life is on the ground.
Gujarat is a pro-business state, where civil society organisations are comfortable with working to make sure that business does not suffer. Large parts of the rest of India, for better or worse, are very different.