People From Mumbai

"I don’t think any heroine’s marital status matters. On TV, it’s all about the character. We have so many married actresses playing lead roles on TV shows. We are probably more married on TV than in real life."

"If I have to use an adjective to define myself, then I might use ‘cute’ but I don’t think I’m sexy. If people think that I’m sexy, then I’m happy."

"Besides the long working hours, it can get monotonous meeting the same people and saying the samelines."

"It is giving out a message saying, that sometimes your decisions probably are not supported by your family, but, if you think you are going in a right direction go ahead with it."

"Not at all. It’s so hectic. On your wedding day, you just wear it for like 6 hours and you’re not even concentrating on it because you’re in another zone. But here, you not thinking of the marriage, you’re just shooting and looking at the watch… oh it’s 9 o’clock, I have to leave. It was nice to wear all this initially, but with time it just gets tiring."

"Of course I see both the things. For an actor you don’t have as many years to work as others do. I cannot work from 18 – 50 years of age. No doubt now there are different genres that are giving equally importance to older woman. It’s like make hay when there’s sunshine. I don’t take up a show for money, I take it up for the concept and then I see if the money is good or not."

"Well, I mainly married Neeraj because of love (laughs) and then because I don’t have too many actor friends. Also I always wanted a non actor and I’m glad it happened!"

"I don’t know about that because nobody said anything to me on my face. And if I was being favoured, I would have just come for a couple of hours for the shoot and gone. Instead, I used to be on the sets for more than six hours, rehearsing, performing and then rushing off for my Madhubala shoot!"

"My new fav person to discuss tech, ethics, and the future - filmmaker Anand Gandhi."

"Ship of Theseus writer and director Anand Gandhi is one of those remarkable people who seem to know nearly everything and yet doesn’t boast about it or try to make you feel small."

"In a deeply interconnected world, there is no 'other'."

"One singular aspiration in all my work is to attain the state of awe. And what is awe? Awe is when you come across something that is infinitely complex and inexplicable by all your memory and thought systems — and yet comprehensible in a singular gasp of experience. It is an incredibly important emotion for me - the inexplicable is an invitation to engage with the cosmic void that humanity has been in a constant dialogue with for 250,000 years. And for the longest time, the void hasn’t answered back. In the last century, we have steadily found relevant answers, exponentially accumulating and organising into a more holistic meaning. A century ago the narrative was (and it still is, in many places) that if we probe too much into our universe and selves, we would lose out on our capacity of wonder, but exactly the reverse that has happened. When we’ve looked into the molecule we found the atom and when we looked into the atom we found the electron and when we’ve looked at the electron we have experienced sheer awe at its quantum probabilistic nature. So each time the scope of awe has expanded— expanding with it, our foresight, worldview and free will — for me, a film has to grasp that, and translate that experience."

"The ability and the desire to transmit knowhow, intention, and insight to others around us have co-evolved with humanity itself. Mixed reality is a huge milestone in that human project of record keeping, perspective sharing, empathising, and merging with the ‘other’, a project that began with the first cave painting, or even earlier."

"We now remain, at least on paper, one of the last few countries in the world, where if you don’t die successfully, you’ll go to jail for attempting."

"As a child, I wanted to become a scientist, a magician, a poet, an architect, an illustrator, a sculptor, an actor, a philosopher, a photographer, a playwright and an animator. So by the time I was 13 or 14, I was convinced that it would be possible to a be of all of these if I made films."

"We are closer to understanding ourselves and our environment than we were two centuries or two thousand years ago, so we are definitely more equipped with knowledge and information than the Buddha was, or even Darwin was. Darwin didn’t know about DNA, we know about DNA. Just imagine if we could go back in time and inform Darwin about DNA or inform Buddha about it. What they were dealing with was intuition, with a logical breakdown of what they had observed. We have scientific tools for those things. We are using the energies of the past to create something new and I’m very confident that what I’ve done has never been done before. I feel no pressure about it, I’m just taking the next step."

"What if we were as concerned with what we put into our minds as we are becoming with what we put into our bodies? What if there was inalienable evidence that culture is as important as food - would we scorn at junk culture?"

"The promise of survival beyond individual death or dispersion appeals to the most primal driving force of existence. Promises of transcendence have evolved out of the thriving desire to ward off the inevitable threat of individual death. Most systems propose a more or less perfect immortality – one where memories, hopes, desires, knowledge and even experiences survive the death of the physical body. An engagement and acceptance of this meme makes death particularly irrelevant. The upholding of the promise at the cost of individual sacrifice becomes acceptable. Individual sacrifices even become necessary in validating the promise."

"Seekers of meaning may not find meaning, but they do find each other. (From 'Eulogy for a Friend')"

"Simulation systems (mathematical models, philosophical thought experiments) that don’t have real world applications are like SPACs - shells with all the paperwork in place till something operational is ready to merge into them."

"Sri Lanka will suffer with their batting after Sangakkara's retirement. It will be very difficult for them to win the next Test without him around"

"If you are giving this medicine (spinning track) to opposition, then you should be able to take it yourself. We need to accept that India have struggled against quality spin bowling. If they would have won, there would not have been any talk on the pitch. Whether you win or lose, the next game against Pakistan is a must-win game. Also if you lose, the you are out of the tournament. They have struggled against New Zealand, they might find it even tougher against Pakistan, if this is the kind of pitches they want. India lost because they were over-confident but the NZ think-tank needs to be credited for picking three spinners for this match."

"Virat gave more than 100 per cent against Australia to take India into semifinals. I haven't seen anybody as composed as Virat Kohli under pressure. He is beyond phenomenal. He is the best limited overs batsman"

"I think that the Virat Kohli era has dawned over the last year or so. It's been there ever since he took over the Test captaincy and because he is now going to create a completely different niche as far as Indian cricket is concerned. I think this era of India cricket is going to be a highly entertaining era."

"MS Dhoni knew what to do. His plans showed that he was at the top of his game. Also, the commitment of the players was there to see as they tried to get India out of a sticky situation."

"The improved understanding of the equations of hydrodynamics is general in nature; it applies to all quantum field theories, including those like quantum chromodynamics that are of interest to real world experiments. I think this is a good (though minor) example of the impact of string theory on experiments. At our current stage of understanding of string theory, we can effectively do calculations only in particularly simple — particularly symmetric — theories. But we are able to analyse these theories very completely; do the calculations completely correctly. We can then use these calculations to test various general predictions about the behaviour of all quantum field theories. These expectations sometimes turn out to be incorrect. With the string calculations to guide you can then correct these predictions. The corrected general expectations then apply to all quantum field theories, not just those very symmetric ones that string theory is able to analyse in detail."

"String theory work done in India is pretty good. … There’s no other country with a GDP per capita comparable to India’s whose string theoretic output is anywhere as good. In fact, the output is better than any country in the European Union, but at the same time not comparable to the EU’s as a whole. So you get an idea of the scale: reasonably good, not fantastic. The striking weakness of research in India is that research happens by and large only in a few elite institutions. But in the last five years, it has been broadening out a bit. TIFR and the Harish-Chandra Research Institute (HRI) have good research groups; there are some reasonably good young groups in Indian Institute of Science (IIS), Bengaluru; Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai; some small groups in the Chennai Mathematical Institute, IIT-Madras, IIT-Bombay, IIT-Kanpur, all growing in strength, The Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Pune, has also made good hires in string theory."

"And the sun sets on another year. Much to ponder upon, even more to look forward to..."

"Life is a journey which is far more enjoyable when your holding hands with the ones you love"

"I’m constantly searching for right roles, trying to find what suits me the best. Once I find my metier, I’ll elaborate on that, polish my act and then move on. Some actors quickly find a genre they’re comfortable with and then they perfect it. Others do diverse things until they find what suits them. I’m doing the latter. I still haven’t found the role that I can do full justice to. I’m discovering myself as an actor."

"He does not seem to have understood the gravity of the offence. India's elite lauded the amendments to the IPC, widening the definition of rape, little realizing that they did not apply simply to lower-class men, but could affect them too. While there has been much clamour for the death penalty in cases of rape involving the lower classes, would the elite now like to apply this to themselves?"

"How are all the details relevant to the case and the actual crime? When it is a case of an upper class woman, there is a titillating curiosity and over interest in her life. Her life becomes a free for all."

"Dancing and singing are legitimate professions, not new to women. Banning such bars, would violate the right of these women to earn a livelihood, as laid down under Article 21 of the Constitution, as well as the right to carry on a legitimate profession under Article 19."

"The ‘love jihad’ campaign diligently perpetuates the myth of the insatiably lustful Muslim man. Hindu women, in contrast, are made out to be helpless damsels, prone to seduction. This venomous propaganda has been wreaking havoc in the lives of young couples, with women denied their agency to choose their marriage partners. Within this communally vitiated atmosphere, where every interfaith marriage is viewed as a political conspiracy and every effort is made to keep Hindu girls ‘pure’ from contamination from Muslim boys, can the political party fuelling such an atmosphere spearhead a campaign to enforce the UCC?"

"Not only is the sentence meted out to the young boys from impoverished background too harsh, but our fear is that it will set a bad precedent and serve to dilute the "rarest of rare" premise upon which a verdict of death penalty must hinge as per our criminal jurisprudence. While most countries are moving towards abolition of death penalty, this is a move in the reverse direction."

"The fact that our government shouts "death sentence" and the National Commission for Women ex-chairperson follows it up by calling for castration of rapists just shows a warped belief in a weird linkage between increasingly barbaric and sensational punishments and greater liberation for womankind. If only they'd look at mundane nitty-gritties."

"All these new demands, death penalty for rape and long terms in prison for harassing women will only have the offenders roaming free because the burden of proving "beyond reasonable doubt" will become the victim's problem."

"Sitting in a metropolis like Delhi, it’s easy to pass a judgement that laws are being misused. But we should look at the larger reality where the laws are yet to reach the minimum standards of use."

"Section 497 is based on Old Testament values. It doesn't protect the rights of women, only protects the proprietorial rights of men over their wives' bodies."

"It's a routine thing women go through with cops. They treat women, particularly from the lower classes or those they think of as "loose", in a very humiliating, lecherous manner."

"To paraphrase himself: “give Witzel one archaeological site, and he will produce a comprehensive dictionary, complete with etymological analysis, of its language”."

"In general the only criterion Witzel has in accepting any analysis is that “the results should be close to those found in Witzel 1995, 1999” (§7) – except, of course, where Witzel has reason to believe that something “found in Witzel 1995, 1999” (or any other year) is now inconvenient to his position and fits in with his “opponent’s” position, in which case “results should be close to those convenient to Witzel today”!"

"It is difficult to believe that Witzel is serious in his incredible assertions [about the Sarasvati river]... And when other verses do refer to a river of that name, this river may be “anywhere” from Arachosia to the “night time sky”: anything but the Haryana river – the sky is the limit! In his 1995 papers, he locates the Sarasvati in hymn 6.61 squarely in Kurukshetra in his “Geographical Data” (WITZEL 1995b: 343,349) as well as in his descriptions of Mandala 6: “W/NW, Panjab, Sarasvati, Ganga” (WITZEL 1995b: 318, 320). And nowhere in those papers does he suggest anything contrary!"

"Readers will recall that in the 1830’s, when colonialism and European imperialism was gaining ground in Asia and Africa, a British administrator named Lord Macaulay had made a similar remark to the effect that the languages of India and Arabia have not produced any worthwhile literature in comparison with European languages. Witzel is merely echoing Macaulay’s Eurocentric and racist remarks with respect to the state of Vedic studies in India. While Macaulay’s prejudice can be blamed on the white-supremacist worldview of Imperialists and on the prevalent notions of his era of Colonialism, Witzel’s clearly sounds repugnant in this “post enlightenment” age."

"Witzel’s criticism of my book contains only two “substantial” objections: the issue of an allegedly “original” vs. an allegedly “interpolated” (present day) RV, and the issue of the Anukramanis as allegedly “late” and “unreliable”."

"But while he purports to present the latter, he studiously avoids dealing with the former with truly admirable consistency – a consistency he maintained with steadfast doggedness throughout our e-mail debate and which (I am told) he has been maintaining with equally steadfast doggedness throughout the course of Internet debates with other “Indian Superpatriots.”... Witzel, with characteristic disregard for the truth, claims that my criticism of his papers is based on my own views given in my first 5 chapters, and so it does not merit any reply! The readers must “see for themselves”: my criticism is not based on my views and criteria at all, but on glaring mistakes, contradictions and falsehoods in his own writings... Witzel clearly finds it impossible to defend his 1995 papers which stand totally discredited. Thus, his review already loses half the battle – and “battle” it is, as per the tone and tenor of his review, and his stated view that a “cultural war is in full swing” (§9, pg. 24). Indeed, Michael Witzel has now literally taken it upon himself to prove the advent of Aryan languages into India via the Aryan Invasion Theory or its softer versions. He has published numerous articles, the recent ones being replete with hysterical attacks, non-academic remarks and abuses against those who disagree with his views."

"Witzel rejects my etymology (one of the few etymologies actually proposed by me) of the word purusha (man) from Puru on the direct analogy of manusha (man) from Manu (p.147 OF MY BOOK) and pontificates:"

"Witzel claims to arrive at his conclusions on the basis of a combination of a geographical grid and a chronological grid, but, as we have seen, he does not prepare a chronological grid at all: else, he would never place MaNDala II before MaNDala VI (when the very eponymous RSi of MaNDala II is a descendant of a composer, Sunahotra BhAradvAja, in MaNDala VI) or MaNDala VIII before MaNDala III (when the very eponymous RSi of MaNDala VIII is a descendant of a composer, Ghora ANgiras, in MaNDala III)."

"My book was published in early 2000, and I sent a copy of it to Witzel (not in a nasty spirit, and certainly not in anticipation of bouquets, but only to facilitate a healthy dialogue, or, at the very least, as a matter of courtesy). Earlier, I had also sent a copy to another scholar at Harvard (with whom I had earlier established indirect and temporary contact). Within a month I received an e-mail letter from that scholar ...relating that there had been a discussion between Witzel and himself “about the possibility of Talageri coming to study with him (Witzel) in Harvard to do advanced study or a Ph.D.” Witzel, the scholar wrote, “is the Vedic scholar par excellence, and Shrikant could get proper training and academic credentials if he were to be accepted”. I was asked to “contact Michael Witzel directly”. There was a proviso – as discreetly phrased as the rest of the letter – “provided he is open-minded and flexible in his views, and does not show himself to be intransigent or predisposed to certain ideas”."

"And, on this principle, Witzel’s papers themselves are “devoid of scholarly value”, since he is also “motivated” by the desire to counter the Indian homeland theory. Erdosy testifies that “the principal concern” of scholars (like Witzel) studying South Asian linguistics is to find “evidence for the external origins - and likely arrival in the 2nd millennium BC - of Indo-Aryan languages”; and Witzel himself admits that his historical analysis of the Rigveda is motivated by the desire to counter “recent attempts (Biswas 1990, Shaffer 1984) to deny that any movement of Indo-European into South Asia has occured.”"