First Quote Added
April 10, 2026
Latest Quote Added
"You want there to be moments [in a song] where something unexpected hits you. They’ve done studies on this. What is it in a song that makes people cry? What is it that moves you? It’s something unexpected."
"If you haven’t played the songs for ten or fifteen years it’s very tingly, it’s exciting. I enjoy playing them. This promoter in Spain — he asked us to do the show in Spain in January and it was really fun and then the records were all coming out. It just seemed like a good time. I thought I should do more of these."
"I‘ve been doing it longer than I would have guessed. I didn’t think when I started Galaxie 500 I’d still be making music in twenty years. Longer than I’d dared to hope, I suppose. Being in an indie band back then, you weren’t allowed to have dreams of being huge. None of the major labels have touched anything that’s remotely left of field since the punk movement. It was all Huey Lewis. That changed with Sonic Youth and then Nirvana signing to Geffen. Alternative became this huge business, and now Arcade Fire or Vampire Weekend can be No. 1."
"Being in an indie band back then, you weren’t allowed to have dreams of being huge. None of the major labels [had] touched anything that’s remotely left of field since the punk movement. It was all Huey Lewis. That changed with Sonic Youth and then Nirvana signing to Geffen. Alternative became this huge business, and now Arcade Fire or Vampire Weekend can be [number one]."
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.