telugu-people

"I am a character-driven writer, and I believe that once you define a character, they tell their story. Characters are defined not just by their personality but also by their relationships to other characters. So it’s no surprise that relationships are central to my stories. And relationships are not always smooth and easy – they have edges and help me know my characters and their edges better."

"I think it’s an organic process. I don’t plot. I don’t plan. I start writing and characters and geography emerges. I find that in telling stories, the best laid plans go poof when your characters do what they want to do because you don’t control them—they become real and live their own lives. I certainly am influenced by the people I meet and the places I go to when I create my characters but it’s an intuitive thing, I just know who this person is or that person is and I know their name and I just know. And what I don’t know, he or she tells me."

"At this point in my life, I don’t worry about telling a literary story or the right story; I tell the story I want to tell, the story that makes me feel alive, the questions I want to answer."

"I feel like a citizen of the world. I have now lived outside of India, where I grew up, longer than I lived in India. I have picked up traditions and even accents from India, the United States, and Denmark. I struggle with my cultural identity – where do I really come from? And even harder, where do I really belong? Everywhere or nowhere? Since many of my stories are about women trying to find their place in society, their cultural identities play a major role in driving their narrative."

"With...passionate devotion to the ideals of beauty, harmony, freedom, and aspiration… had the strongest impact on society."

"Tyagaraja is my Bible; I quote Tyagaraja all the time — as with Shakespeare there is something for any occasion."

"The greatest songster-saint that the world has ever produced...He was full of love and devotion to the lord and he had direct ;;w:Darshan|darsana]] [Vision] of the Lord and had also Cosmic Consciousness."

"Proverbially, Thyagaraja’s songs are said to be like grapes that is immediately enjoyable"

"What is the use of sangita (music without bhakti)."

"If Thyagaraja only once with prema called ‘Rama’ forthwith came the response from Sri Rama. O!Thyagaraja, here I am."

"Whenever I go to south India, I hear the songs of Saint Thyagaraja."

"Wont you draw back the curtain within me, O Lord Venkataramana of Tirupati, Open up this screen of envy."

"It is impossible to name another person in this world who can be said to be equal to Tyagaraja in Rama Bhakthi."

"Known as the Bethovan of India he occupies a place in South Indian Music in some respects comparable to that of Western Europe, Not only did he compose music that established enduring repertoire and remains at its center. But he also defined a new kind of cultural consciousness. Even today, Tyagaraja’s songs are thought to represent the best of South India’s cultural heritage."

"It is as a pioneer who has enlarged the possibilities of the art [of Karnataka Music] that Tygayyar is entitled to our fullest admiration...and he is one of the greatest singers of all times whose influence is closely woven into national thought and action. Tirumalya Naidu in his book of Tyagaraja written in 1910."

"In the history of thought, creative and critical epochs succeed each other. Periods of rich and glowing faith are followed by those of aridity and artificiality. When we pass from the Rig-Veda to the Yajur and the Sama-Vedas and the Brahmanas, we feel a change in the atmosphere. The freshness and simplicity of the former give place to the coldness and artificiality of the latter. The spirit of religion is in the background, while its forms assume great importance. The need for prayer books is felt. Liturgy is developed. The hymns are taken out of the Rig-Veda and arranged to suit sacrificial necessities. The priest becomes the lord... The religion of the Yajur-Veda is a mechanical sacerdotalism."

"You Christians seem to us Hindus rather ordinary people making extraordinary claims... If your Christ has not succeeded in making you better men and women, have we any reason to suppose that he would do more for us, if we became Christians?"

"[Radhakrishnan describes the state of dejection he experienced as a student at Madras Christian College:] 'I was strongly persuaded of the inferiority of the Hindu religion to which I attributed the political downfall of India.... I remember the cold sense of reality, the depressing feeling that crept over me, as a causal relation between the anaemic Hindu religon and our political failure forced itself on my mind.'"

"If philosophy of religion is to become scientific, it must become empirical and found itself on religious experience."

"Instead of celebrating my birthday, it would be my proud privilege if 5 September is observed as Teachers' Day."

"In the mystic traditions of the different religions we have a remarkable unity of spirit. Whatever religion they may profess, they are spiritual kinsmen. While the different religions in their historic forms bind us to limited groups and militate against the development of loyalty to the world community, the mystics have already stood for the fellowship of humanity in harmony with the spirit of the mystics of ages gone by."

""Hinduism is therefore not a definite dogmatic creed, but a vast, complex, but subtly unified mass of spirItual thought and realization. Its tradition of the God ward endeavor of the human spirit has been continuously enlarging through the ages."

"A stone is not self any more than a self is a stone."

"We are grown-up infants, and God is a sort of 'wet nurse' to humanity."

"We invent by intuition, though we prove by logic."

"To be ignorant is not the special prerogative of man; to know that he is ignorant is his special privilege."

"We become more religious in proportion to our readiness to doubt and not our willingness to believe."

"We must respect our own dignity as rational beings and thus diminish the power of fraud. It is better to be free than be a slave, better to know than to be ignorant. It is reason that helps us to reject what is falsely taught and believed about God, that He is a detective officer or a capricious despot or a glorified schoolmaster. It is essential that we should subject religious beliefs to the scrutiny of reason."

"The violent extermination of Buddhism in India is legendary. Buddhism grew weaker as it spread wider. The spirit of compromise which breathed in the Xllth Edict of Ashoka that there should be no praising of one's sect and decrying of other sects but on the contrary a rendering of honour to other sects for whatever cause honour may be due to them was its strength and weakness. It accommodated too much. Divinities and heavens slipped into Buddhism from other creeds with the spread of the religion."

"The disciples surrounded with cheap marvels and wonders the lonely figure of that serene Soul, simple and austere in his yellow robes, walking with bared feet and bowed head towards Benares."

"Poets and prophets do not go into committees."

"It takes centuries to make a little history; it takes centuries of history to make a tradition."

"My ambition is to unfold the sources of India in the profound plane of human nature."

"It is true that internationalism is growing. Economists warn us that war does not pay. It is bad business. Some of us are growing pacifist by policy, though not by conviction. The spirit of internationalism is but skin-deep. Except a small minority in each country who remained heroically faithful to its principles, the rest sacrificed their humanity at the altar of their country in the last war. Even the dignitaries of the Church proved themselves to be of the school of Mephistopheles, "who built God a church and laughed his word to scorn." Churches were turned into recruiting offices. The fanatic appeals of all sides to the Almighty must have confused God himself, and the frame of mind in which the onlookers were is well expressed in J. C. Squire's quatrain : —"

"War with its devastated fields and ruined cities, with its millions of dead and more millions of maimed and wounded, its broken-hearted and defiled women and its starved children bereft of their natural protection, its hate and atmosphere of lies and intrigue, is an outrage on all that is human. So long as this devil-dance does not disgust us, we cannot pretend to be civilized. It is no good preventing cruelty to animals and building hospitals for the sick and poor houses for the destitute so long as we willing to mow down masses of men by machine-guns and poison non-combatants, including the aged and the infirm, women and children — and all for what? For the glory of God and the honour of the nation! It is quite true that we attempt to regulate war, as we cannot suppress it; but the attempt cannot succeed. For war symbolizes the spirit of strife between two opposing national units which is to be settled by force. When we allow the use of force as the only argument to put down opposition, we cannot rightly discriminate between one kind of force and another. We must put down opposition by mobilizing all the forces at our disposal. There is no real difference between a stick and a sword, or gunpowder and poison gas. So long as it is the recognized method of putting down opposition, every nation will endeavour to make its destructive weapons more and more efficient. War is its only law add the highest virtue is to win, and every nation has to tread this terrific and deadly road. To approve of warfare but criticize its methods, it has been well said is like approving of the wolf eating the lamb but criticizing the table-manners. War is war and not a game of sport to be played according to rules."

"Man is a paradoxical being-the constant glory and scandal of this world."

"The Gita appeals to us not only by its force of thought and majesty of vision, but also by its fervor of devotion and sweetness of spiritual emotion."

"The insight does not arise if we are not familiar with the facts of the case... The successful practice of intuition requires previous study and assimilation of a multitude of facts and laws. We may take it that great intuitions arise out of a matrix of rationality."

"The readjustment [of previously known facts] is so easy that when the insight is attained it escapes notice and we imagine that the process of discovery is only rational synthesis."

"Knowledge when acquired must be thrown into logical form and we are obliged to adopt the language of logic since only logic has a communicable language."

"The presentation of facts in logical form contributes to a confusion between discovery and proof. If the process of discovery were mere synthesis, any mechanical manipulator of prior partial concepts would have reached the insight and it would not have taken a genius to arrive at it."

"Creative insight is not the final link in a chain of reasoning. If it were that, it would not strike us as inspired in its origin. Intuition is not the end, but part of an ever-developing and ever-dynamic process of realization. There is continual system of “checks and balances” between intuition and the logical method of discursive reasoning. Cognitive intuitions are not substitutes for thought, they are challenges to intelligence. Mere intuitions are blind while intellectual work is empty. All processes are partly intuitive and partly intellectual. There is no gulf between the two."

"Psychic experiences are a state of consciousness beyond the understanding of the normal, and the supernormal is traced to the supernatural."

"We can see objects without the medium of the senses and discern relations spontaneously without building them up laboriously. In other words, we can discern every kind of reality directly."

"All art is the expression of experience in some medium."

"The success of art is measured by the extent to which it is able to render experiences of one dimension into terms of another. Art born out of a creative contemplation which is a process of travail of the spirit is an authentic crystallization of a life process. Its ultimate and in its essence, the poetical character is derived from the creative intuition (that is, integral intuition) which holds sound, suggestion and sense in organic solution."

"Technique without inspiration, is barren. Intellectual powers, sense facts and imaginative fancies may result in clever verses, repetition of old themes, but they are only manufactured poetry. It is not simply a difference of quality but a difference of kind in the source itself."

"Even in the act of composition, the poet is in a state in which the reflective elements are subordinated to the intuitive. The vision, however, is not operative for so long as it continues, its very stress acts as a check on expression."

"In emotional vibrancy experience is recollected not in tranquility... but in excitement."

"The art of discovery is confused with the logic of proof and an artificial simplification of the deeper movements of thought results. We forget that we invent by intuition though we prove by logic."