Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Shiv Visvanathan

Quote by Shiv Visvanathan

“I remember my old friend and teacher U.R. Ananthamurthy. Before he died, he left behind a great manuscript, a testament, a manifesto. URA criticised the Nehruvian years but he made a more critical point. Nehru might have made mistakes but Narendra Modi is the mistake that India might regret one day in its angry backlash against the family. Nehru was a classic. Our current regime is a footnote. It can only become history if it destroys the Nehruvian years.”

Quote by Shiv Visvanathan

Create image

Author

Shiv Visvanathan

Browse famous quotes and profile details for Shiv Visvanathan. more

You May Also Like

“Somewhere in the city of Vadodara, a young woman named Zaheera Sheikh stood on the balcony of her friend’s house and watched in helpless stupefaction all the members of her family along with a couple of their staff being engulfed by fires of hatred. Best Bakery which also served as their residence was in flames. It was locked from outside by some people whose slogans would remain beyond Zaheera Sheikh’s comprehension for years. The religious fervour of those slogans would go on scorching her in a different way even years after all her beloved people were interred.”

ReligionIndiaSlogansSectarianismNarendra ModiCommunalismGujarat Riots
Book:Black Hole
Create image

“The flames of hatred had died down in Gujarat. The media reported that more than 2000 Muslims were charred by those flames and at least fifty times that number were rendered homeless. People became refugees in their own homelands. The ashes of their homes and the scorched wails that lingered on in those ashes became a pain that smouldered in the veins of the survivors. Many people chose to abandon those ash heaps. Yet another exodus was merging into the forgotten histories buried in the palimpsest of the country. Wherever there are vanquished people, there are also winners, Ishan realised with a pang. The winners obtained an unprecedented majority in the state election and Mr Narendra Modi was re-elected as the Chief Minister for the third time consecutively.”

ReligionSectarianismNarendra ModiGujaratCommunalismGujarat Riots
Book:Black Hole
Create image

“Their story begins on ground level, with footsteps. They are myriad, but do not compose a series. They cannot be counted because each unit has a qualitative character: a style of tactile apprehension and kinesthetic appropriation. Their swarming mass is an innumerable collection of singularities. Their intertwined paths give their shape to spaces. They weave places together. In that respect, pedestrian movements form one of these 'real systems whose existence in fact makes up the city.' They are not localized; it is rather they that spatialize. They are no more inserted within a container than those Chinese character speakers sketch out on their hands with their fingertips.”

FootstepsPedestrians97
Book:The Practice of Everyday Life
Create image

“...moderate social deviance or class non-conformism I have imputed to the first generation of pedestrians. Improved roads, after all, were one of the principal means by which the country was building a national communications network that would underpin the huge commercial and industrial expansion of the nineteenth century; changing the landscape of the country to produce the arterial interconnection of the modern state in place of a geography of more or less self-enclosed local communities; consolidating the administrative structures of the state and facilitating political hegemony over a rapidly growing and potentially unstable population; and promulgating a 'national' culture in the face of regional diversity and independence. With the main roads such powerful instruments of change, the walker's decision to exploit his freedom to resist the imperative of destination and explore instead by lanes, by-roads and fieldpaths, could well be interpreted as an act of denial, flight or dissent vis-a-vis the forces that were ineradicably transforming British society.”

WalkingPedestriansRoads30
Book:Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel
Create image