First Quote Added
April 10, 2026
Latest Quote Added
"I have been asked so many times, mostly by men, ‘Why don’t you write comedies, or plays that celebrate India?’…I tell them: on the day that these things don’t happen any more, I will happily start writing bedroom farces."
"It was not a one-off incident. It has happened over and over again since, and has just become more gory, more brutal. But you can sense the media fatigue around the reporting of crimes against women. If it happens outside of the cities, it’s just another incident. The candlelit vigils don’t happen for women in small towns and villages."
"There’s a charge and immediacy to theatre that I don’t find in any other medium. It’s an artform in the present tense, a medium tailor-made to explore the world you live in NOW…"
"A woman playwright’s job and skill-set are the same as a male playwright’s. Yet I’m aware that fewer female playwrights are staged compared to men - in India, and perhaps across the world. There are fewer women directors in my country than men, and hardly any governmental support to theatre. Both contribute to this unhealthy gender imbalance…"
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.