First Quote Added
April 10, 2026
Latest Quote Added
"Sexual Politics by Kate Millett [published in 1970]. The box was open, the genie was out and I couldn’t put it back in."
"I want to do this well."
"What matters in poetry is form, how words work together, the sounds and silences their combinations make. The ordered effects they produce on the attentive hearer."
"A living poem can energise another poem at five hundred years distance, or across the other side of the world."
"Poetry is a collaborative art, and yet—as it is being created—the most solitary and 'individual' of activities."
"Poetry is a process, a form of discovery, which if it serves a cause, transcends it."
"Poetry is a language with a shape"
"Prose uses the medium of language whilst poetry serves language and explores it."
"The reader does not need a technical vocabulary to read poetry, only a voice in the head or out loud which can deliver the sounds."
"In poetry much of the sense and most of the pleasure resides in the sounds the poem make."
"Prose and poetry are different in construction. You can lie back and read prose, and you can read it fast. Poetry on the other hand, requires a different kind of attention and concentration … the effect it has on the ear and the imagination."
"We read with our ears"
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.