Quotes

When there is stuff being written about your family and people ask you questions which are very personal in nature, it makes you defensive and almost makes you angry.

We have 5000-year-old history which is now almost a part of our DNA. How do you break that? America, for example, doesn't have that history behind it. It romanticizes rebellion. We look down upon rebellion. It's an insult. To think out-of-the-box is looked down upon here.

It would be great to read a script, which is an action script uniquely written so that it doesn't cost an arm or a leg because we are now accustomed to seeing action in the superhero form.

I am not a politician nor an activist but in my small way try and bring change with the kind of films I do.

I choose my films carefully. I have done movies that are sensitive, which deal with some issue and are a mirror of society.

I am most attracted to characters and stories that I can relate to. The traditional formula of 'larger than life' I never found attractive.

Beat up 10 guys, win the girl, and yet you are supposed to be a normal human being. I don't mind doing that as a superhero but not as a real person!

Being a Deol for me is to be honest; walking with my head held high and never having to bow in front of injustice.

'One by Two' is a film about two people who live in the same city and do certain things that affect each other's lives. Yet, they are strangers. It's difficult to put the film in any particular genre or box.

I agree that at the end of the day, it's a man's world, but when I'm doing a film, I am working with the director, not a man or a woman.

Acting is more creative and liberating than production.

If I did an item song, it would be something to watch out for.

Celebrate the excitement of trying build something new and wonderful.

What makes a leader great is not the fact that she (or he) has all the answers, but the ability to inspire and empower us to find the answers.

What's nice about experiments is that they are much more closely tied to what theorists think about the world than normal empirical research. You can design your experiment to exactly ask the question you want to ask. This is not true about normal empirical research.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt eventually became the greatest liberal leader of 20th century United States, but he started as a fiscal conservative. His greatness is founded in his willingness to change his mind to save his country from the Great Depression.

If democracy as we know it has to survive the elites have to regain their credibility. And they have to start by admitting that their economic model is broken.

One problem with globalisation is that bad ideas seem to travel faster than good ones; first there was smearing tomato ketchup on everything; then drinking sugar-soaked cocktails ('Cosmo'-politanism) instead of our traditional whisky soda, and now this idea that we should abandon the poor to their fate in order to protect their dignity.

I mean, I think it's a two-way relationship: I think you should not have too much faith in your own rationality. You should not have too much faith in the rationality of, you know, anybody else either. We all learn together about the way the world is, and I think it's a sort of antidote to wishful thinking of all kinds.

Good intentions and grand theories do not make a good programme. Programmes work best when they're based on a detailed und­er­standing of the problem being solved and how they are implemented on the ground.

If people don't want blue-collar work, our labour costs will remain high and our competitiveness low.

A universal cash transfer in the form of a minimum guaranteed income would mean that automatically everyone has something to fall back on without having to deal with the vagaries of their local panchayat.

This is why universities, and civil society more generally, are so important for a democracy like ours, founded on a genuine idealism that we have a hard time holding on to. They provide a space to question whatever we are doing in the name of things we say we believe in or might believe in.

Celebrate creativity and confidence in the face of adversity.

Even Milton Friedman - doyen of radical free market thought - was willing to consider some government intervention into primary education on the grounds that it is unfair for children to not get a chance in life because they were born to poor parents.