Vegetarians

"When we started work on setting up a polyester filament yarn project, my chemical engineering and business school background helped me in organizing the work, creating reporting structures, motivating people... in all this, my father and Rasikbhai were two steps ahead of me."

"The first 200-odd people who built Patalganga with me are still around, running different businesses. It has gone into their psyche that we do things differently here. We have taken money from ordinary Indians and we are their trustees. When this is drilled into thousands of people, you automatically get performance."

"I believe India today is potentially poised for another even more stupendous leap on its upward trajectory. India’s relative weight in the global economy and in world affairs in general, is bound to grow for many reasons. By 2030, India is projected to overtake China as the most populous country in the world, with the third largest economy in US dollar terms. Furthermore India is a very young nation with nearly two thirds of its population below the age of thirty-five."

"The US and Europe saw large players in foods by the '50s and '60s; but in India, food has always been a disorganised, fragmented value chain. We believe that India's purchasing power will be food-dominated. The first thing we need is safe to eat food that will, in turn, meet many other needs."

"Even when I was doing chemical engineering, I was working almost full time for Reliance. I finished college at 2.30 pm and went straight to the office. I remember, we were raided and my father was in the US."

"In the '80s, when I came in, the ground rules were made clear to me. 'Build this business from scratch, without taking anyone from Reliance.' That forced you to be very disciplined. I looked around and figured out in three months that this industry runs on heroes."

"My first memories are of the early '60s at mount road which was then an emerging area. We were a close-knit family and the four of us -- Dipti, Nina, Anil and I -- were left to do what we wanted. There were boundaries, of course, but within those, we were not micro-managed. Things have changed so much now. When my kids, Isha and Akash, were in the third standard, we behaved as though it was our exam."

"Our own childhood was totally different. I guess when you are left on your own, you find your true potential. I remember my father never came to our school even once. Nevertheless, he was hugely interested in our all-round development for which he did some amazing things."

"A third track running at that time, apart from academics and the fun stuff, was that my father shared with me his passion for business and entrepreneurship from very early on. Even when I was in high school, I used to spend long hours at office on weekends."

"Broadband and digital services will no longer be a luxury item - a scarce commodity - to be rationed amongst the privileged few,"

"I am a big believer that technology shapes mankind."

"Internet the biggest discovery after printing press."

"So, these were the four components of my upbringing -- the academic stuff where I was left to myself, Mahendrabhai, my father's passion for creating Reliance and the last piece was his deep links with the family."

"Mahatma Gandhi’s dream of self-reliance can be attained by making use of Internet and technology."

"And it has to be non-academic. It is easy to be with your kids and say let's do homework together. But we try to do things, beyond doing lunches and dinners. I learnt that from my father. He was a big nature lover and during our school days, we went to different places every Sunday -- we walked through the forest or had a bath in streams."

"For me, this is a moment of re-dedication to the values, vision and goals of my father, teacher and mentor, Dhirubhai Ambani. To lead by love, by trust, and by example, I learnt these principles from him with humility."

"I have turned into a big nature fan as well....I can afford it more today. These childhood influences have shaped me into what I am today."

"The most urgent reason for prohibition is the good of these depressed classes. No other single measure of reform can help these people, and at once raise them economically and socially as total prohibition can. The rich and the educated may be indifferent about this reform. It is most necessary for saving the poor and the lowly."

"We must learn two things. One is to see ourselves as others see us. We apply one yardstick when we wish to appraise other people. Secondly, we cannot succeed in anything if we act in fear of other people's opinions."

"You must learn how to marry and live a married life. That is true Home Science. Home is made by ma-ried people and children and the science deals with that subject. Please remember that Home Science is not preparation for a profession or a trade; but it is preparation for marriage."

"If we believe that God is everywhere… why should we not believe He is in objects to which so much concentrated devotion is attached? Christians believe in the doctrine of original sin. Hindus believe in the doctrine of acquired sin. But all of us believe that God, by whatever name we call Him, is in the world."

"What is wanted to save parliamentary democracy is an opposition that will operate not privately and behind the closed doors of the party meeting, but openly and periodically through the electorate."

"“It seems, you expect from me an expression of my views on the specific question: What type of missionary workers are wanted in India, rather than on the question whether any missionary workers should come at all to India? I shall respectfully speak my opinion on the latter point. I feel it is not really possible on the ground of logic or on the evidence of miracles to hold that amongst the religions known as Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity, anyone is nearer the truth than any other. You will permit me to object to the exclusive claims for Truth made on behalf of any one of these faiths. If this my first point is granted, the only justification for missionary work is proselytism. But is it good on the whole for men and women to change from one religion to another? I think it is not desirable to make any effort at proselytism. I feel that such efforts undermine the present faith of the people, which is good enough for promoting right conduct in them and to deter them from sin. They tend to destroy family and social harmony, which is not a good thing to do.”"

"His conscience-keeper."

"The tradition in Hinduism is that it is not open to any Hindu, whatever be the name and mental image of the Supreme Being he uses for his devotional exercises, to deny the existence of God that others worship. He can raise the name of his choice to that of the highest, but he can not deny the divinity or the truth of the God of other denominations. The fervor of his own piety just gives predominance to the name and form he gives for his own worship and contemplation, and he treats the other gods as deriving the divinity therefrom. This reduces all controversy to a devotional technique of concentration on a peculiar name and mental form or concrete symbol as representing the supreme being. It makes no difference in the contents of Vedanta to which all devotees equally subscribe… ‘just as all water raining from the skies goes to the ocean, worship of all gods go to Keshava.’"

"There is no reality in the fond expectation that Britain will leave the country in simple response to a Congress slogan. Besides, by asking the British to leave, the Congress was issuing an open invitation to a colonising power more brutal by far, the Japanese."

"Do not demand love. Begin to love. You will be loved. It is the law and no statute can alter it. If we do not follow the law, and let the law die with the teacher, we shall become accomplices to the murderer. But if follow the law with our hearts, [Bapu] will live with us and through us."

"If India's government is to be an institution integrated with her people's lives, if it is to be a true democracy and not a superimposed western institution staged in Indian dress, religion must have an important and recognized place in it with impartiality and reverence for all the creeds and denominations prevailing in India."

"If civilization is to be bound up with material advancement, we must accept its inevitable consequence, loss of freedom in enact proportion to the forward march."

"C. Rajagopalachari, Gandhi's southern commander"

"Probably the ablest and certainly one of the most intransigent' of Gandhi's followers."

"Last March, in the state of Gujarat, two thousand Muslims were butchered in a state-sponsored pogrom. Muslim women were specially targeted. They were stripped, and gang-raped, before being burned alive. Arsonists burned and looted shops, homes, textiles mills, and mosques. More than a hundred and fifty thousand Muslims have been driven from their homes. The economic base of the Muslim community has been devastated. While Gujarat burned, the Indian Prime Minister was on MTV promoting his new poems. In December 2002, the government that orchestrated the killing was voted back into office with a comfortable majority. Nobody has been punished for the genocide. Narendra Modi, architect of the pogrom, proud member of the RSS, has embarked on his second term as the Chief Minister of Gujarat. If he were Saddam Hussein, of course each atrocity would have been on CNN. But since he's not-and since the Indian "market" is open to global investors-the massacre is not even an embarrassing inconvenience."

"Narendrabhai used to give an hour long pravachan (discourse) on Mahatma Gandhi’s Vaishnav Jan bhajan as an integral part of training programs for party workers. He would tell us that a BJP karyakarta (worker) should be one who understands and feels the pain of others. A BJP karyakarta should work for the sukha (well-being) of all and feel the dukha (pain) of all. If we want people to trust political leaders, we have to work for the well-being of all segments of society. If BJP karyakartas lead by working for social good, it will strengthen our nation as well as our samaj (society).” It is an intrinsic part of his political vision that building the organisation and recruiting party workers is not enough; we must have the political maturity to carry the samaj with us. If I had kept detailed notes of those training sessions in which Narendrabhai galvanised party workers, that compendium would have become renowned as an authoritative text on Sangathan Shastra (Treatise on Building Organisations). For instance, he would emphasise the mantra: Pratyek karyakarta ke liye kaam aur pratyek kaam ke liye karyakarta. (For every task, there must be a responsible party worker, and for every party worker, there must be identifiable work). Secondly, he taught us that without a sense of purpose, a sense of larger mission, a party worker becomes a cog in the wheel (uthak baithak ka hissa), performing routine tasks robotically. He was very effective in motivating BJP workers to do something meaningful for the country and for society. He paid a great deal of attention to creating good and honest workers. Most importantly, he paid minute attention to building systems."

"See how Modi met us! He kept track of what time we arrived in the building and came to the elevator to receive us. I was really nervous about the outcome of this meeting. He shook my hand and broke the ice saying in Hindi: “Aayo yaar!” Inside, there was a jhoola (swing). He made me sit next to him on the jhoola. .... After hearing us out with patience, Modi said some of your points are valid but many are exaggerations. ... We saw the point because in contrast to the 2002 riots which lasted 3 days, the riots during Congress regimes used to go on for months on end with some of these earlier riots producing a far higher death toll. The police as well as the administration were thoroughly communalized. It was widely known that the BJP/VHP etc patronized Hindu dons while the Congress party patronized Muslim dons. ... We were touched by the fact that he listened very carefully and gave us proper answers. He had all the facts on his fingertips. We had thus far experienced that Muslims don’t get a proper hearing from any one. We experienced the riots of 1969, of 1985, 1987 and 1992. No chief minister had listened to us. All those were Congress Party chief ministers. They never talked to us. ..."

"Modi was a fascist in every sense [...] I don't mean this as a term of abuse. It's a diagnostic category.”"

"The 40-day lockdown was further extended at a time of sporadic expressions of resistance and anger by migrant workers in a few cities. Extreme precarity doesn’t have a singular expression. While some are responding with anger, others are responding with resignation. The severe distress among is not entirely by chance. It has been marinating for a while but the epic new scale has been manufactured due to the unplanned and unilateral decision of a lockdown taken by the prime minister."

"Wharton’s refusal to Narendra Modi weakens free speech and the quest for justice in 2002 riot cases... In order to listen to someone, one does not need to be an ardent follower or a bitter critic... Freedom of expression knows no boundary. The more we listen to people and ideas, the more enriched we get. When an educational institution gets prescriptive on the kind of speech one can and cannot listen to on the campus, it kills intellectual freedom, a democratic idea that the U.S.A., India, and the U.K. have cherished from times immemorial...Cancelling lectures will not help, in fact it will present Modi- baiters in [a] poor light that they have extinguished all points of reason and debate to have had to resort to such an action...As a Gujarati myself, I consider it to be a gross insult that the chief minister of my state, however wrong one may feel he is, cannot express his views at a global forum, such as the one in Wharton, because a few in the audience don’t like him...."

"I was not an admirer of Modi. But after meeting him, I have developed an admiration for him because I felt, 'Here's a person who is concerned about a matter of national importance.'"

"It is our view and view of many others that Mr Modi shall not be granted the privilege of US visa because of the very serious doubts that remain and that hang over Mr Modi relative to his role in the horrific events of 2002 in Gujarat"

"The abrogation of labour laws in -ruled states (which could not have been done without Modi’s approval) is meant to make the more insecure rather than less. Some officers were punished recently for even suggesting that higher taxes should be collected from the rich. In short, the Modi government in its mindlessness is still picking up the intellectual crumbs that had fallen from the of the metropolitan establishment “four decades” ago, without realising that the world has moved on. [...] Just as in the 1930s, world capitalism, as it had existed until then, had reached a dead-end, and the need for it to be altered for the sake of preserving the system itself, was emphasised by many perceptive bourgeois thinkers, exactly in a similar manner contemporary world capitalism too has reached a dead-end and cannot continue as before. [...] The ruling formation in India, however, is totally oblivious of the world conjuncture. The dead-end of neo-liberalism, which is visible to even bourgeois thinkers in the metropolis, is invisible to our ' brigade. Not only is the Modi government still wedded to the neo-liberal agenda in general, but it has not even deviated from this agenda in the midst of the acute humanitarian crisis unleashed by the pandemic and its own mindless response to it."

"I now invite to address you, “The Merchant of Death.” The “merchant of death” to terrorism, the “merchant of death” to corruption, the “merchant of death” to nepotism, the “merchant of death” to official inefficiency, the “merchant of death” to bureaucratic negligence, the “merchant of death” to poverty and ignorance, the “merchant of death” to darkness and despair."

"Exactly what Narendra did between the ages of seventeen and nineteen, where he went and why, remains obscure. Scraps of information from his walkabout, however, can help assemble a rough itinerary and give a theme to his meanderings. Sitting at home today, he smiles and waves away questions about those years of wandering. But some hints emerge. More than anything else, it was a pilgrimage in the footsteps of Swami Vivekananda. By the time he left home, Narendra had devoured most of the Swami’s literary works, lent to him by a Vadnagar local, Dr Vasantbhai Parikh. Vivekananda had made a deep and, it would turn out, a permanent impression on the young man.... Narendra was turned away from the monkish life... Swami Atmasthanandaji told him that his destiny lay elsewhere, and elsewhere he should seek it. From that point onwards Narendra changed course. The making of Modi was about to begin.... Modi maintains that the core of his own character was always ‘innovation, new ideas’, and in a way that is an echo of what Vivekananda had brought to Indian culture and also to the West."

"My husband said, if he faced any problems on [the] job, he would contact Modi’s office. Modi replied: "Not my office, but me directly." So much for the so-called intolerance of Modi towards people who held views not agreeable to his."

"India and Pakistan, where people starve in the streets, waste billions on military spending because of the Kashmir dispute. Now some of India’s extreme Hindu nationalists warn they want to reabsorb Pakistan, Bangladesh, and even Sri Lanka into Mother India. Previous Indian leaders have been cautious. But not PM Modi. He is showing signs of power intoxication."

"What they narrated to me showed that the media, particularly, [[English language|English[-]language]] media were lapping up one-sided news portraying Modi as the Demon and all his opponents angels. They told us about the earlier riots in which the Hindus were mostly at the receiving end. There were several instances of stone-throwing on Hindus passing through Muslim dominated areas of Ahmedabad. The governments of the day kept a blind eye to all this. All the suppressed passions broke loose at the Godhra carnage, and no government, Modi or no Modi, could have stopped what followed—despicable and condemnable as both the Godhra and post-Godhra killings were."

"Rather than reduce this to the personality of Modi or his lack of knowledge, I am more interested in the fact how the Hindu Right has made a virtue of anti-intellectualism, ignorance, and fake news/propaganda in the last five years, and how people have been asked to believe the most illogical, irrational, untruthful statements coming out, especially from the PM."

"Other than these, the list of Mr Modi's gaffes is quite long. But again, what is crucial to note is that there has not been any scrutiny of this at all by the mainstream media. In this case, the biggest question to be asked is whether the PM actually ordered the Balakot air strike on the basis of his knowledge of radars, overriding military experts? In that case, it is shocking, and dangerous, for it is a national security issue."

"Modi also ensured poor people’s access to justice, by streamlining the administration in the Secretariat. I was told, during Keshubhai’s time and before, the officers were not found on their seats even by 11 am, and they would nowhere be found in Gandhinagar by 3 pm. After Modi took over, the same officers were suddenly found on their seats 9 am to 5 pm, for fear of being reported to Modi, by the people with grievances to resolve."

"All the fantastical claims are coupled with the fact that Mr Modi has not given a single press conference, or an unscripted interview. This makes it impossible to question the PM on critical policy matters, and his grasp of them. [...] Ultimately, I see this as a part of the greatest exercise in anti-intellectualism, propaganda/fake news seen in Independent India, in which it is normal to defend the most absurd statement, and in which it has become impossible to distinguish between truth and falsehood."

"While releasing the tax data, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that it should lead to enhanced insights for policymaking on taxation. What he did not say was that it was a scathing commentary on the nation. Unless the cultural idea of the nation as comradeship and fraternity is complemented by material and economic arrangements that realise this, the nation will remain only in name."