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April 10, 2026
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"Having grown up watching Hong Kong movies with gorgeous Chinese leads and casts, I didn’t feel starved of representation the way I might likely have felt if I had grown up Asian American in the US, or as a minority race in Singapore…"
"When writing, I often feel like I’m having an out-of-body experience in which I’m as ageless, sexless, classless, raceless as I can ever humanly get…I have to forget myself so I can be fully committed to understanding my character’s motivations in a way that isn’t facile or boxed in…"
"Change is effected by instruments of the state directly—and quickly—on the sociophysical body of the city itself. As the inhabitants of this body, these modifications rub off on us, whether we are aware of their effect on us or not, whether our class cushions us less or more…"
"My responsibility, as an author, is to the novel I am writing, nothing more and nothing less. How that novel comes about to me is a mysterious thing that then becomes a rigorous process, and the balances that I do worry about keeping are narrative, aesthetic, or technical. I’m not willing or able to see myself as any one nationality or ethnicity or gender or sexuality or species when I write, I am just an amorphous storyteller whose personal biography is moot…"
Young though he was, his radiant energy produced such an impression of absolute reliability that Hedgewar made him the first sarkaryavah, or general secretary, of the RSS.
- Gopal Mukund Huddar
Largely because of the influence of communists in London, Huddar's conversion into an enthusiastic supporter of the fight against fascism was quick and smooth. The ease with which he crossed from one worldview to another betrays the fact that he had not properly understood the world he had grown in.
Huddar would have been 101 now had he been alive. But then centenaries are not celebrated only to register how old so and so would have been and when. They are usually celebrated to explore how much poorer our lives are without them. Maharashtrian public life is poorer without him. It is poorer for not having made the effort to recall an extraordinary life.
I regret I was not there to listen to Balaji Huddar's speech [...] No matter how many times you listen to him, his speeches are so delightful that you feel like listening to them again and again.
By the time he came out of Franco's prison, Huddar had relinquished many of his old ideas. He displayed a worldview completely different from that of the RSS, even though he continued to remain deferential to Hedgewar and maintained a personal relationship with him.