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April 10, 2026
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"Any government would be really embarrassed to ban Shakespeare."
"The apartheid government was frightened of ridicule. Everyone is frightened of laughter."
"Theatre is a white invention, a European invention, and white people go to it. It's in their DNA. It starts with Shakespeare."
"Life and art get mixed up sometimes – it's what actors draw on."
"My sensitivity to prejudice is high because I was brought up in South Africa. My awareness of all this crap came earlier, and it's stayed with me, and it's why I'm militantly liberal."
"I remember being absolutely shocked in Australia at the absence of black people."
"The only times I saw black people were once in Adelaide and once at the other end of the continent, in both cases looking desperate on the street, sitting in huddles drinking beer. I realised what Australians had done to their indigenous population, to their other: they'd disappeared them."
"In South Africa we were criminal, beastly, vile and disgusting, but we didn't commit genocide."
"You can't envy something you can't be, can you? You sat and admired what was emerging."
"The whole purpose of an actor's life is to find great writing, and when it comes along you leap on it like a puppy on a slipper. You're avid – greedy – hungry – for great gobbets of good writing. That's all we live for."
"I stepped back from acting because I was bringing up a child. You can't do both."
"It's exactly at the moment that they want you most – at the end of the day when it's bathtime, storytime, bedtime – that's when you're walking out the door. I couldn't bear that brave little look as he said, 'Goodbye'. So I thought Josh is more important than a play."
"Nature has a way of dealing with your brain when you have a child – it turns it to porridge."
"You realise retrospectively mother nature has made you absolutely focused and cow-like. Then you realise your child is infinitely cleverer than you will ever be, and wittier and funnier, and you like being in its company and so you think, 'I haven't done a bad job, really."
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.