You can’t prevent undernourishment so easily, but famines you can stop with half an effort. Then the question was why don’t the governments stop them?

China had managed to reduce their fertility to a large extent because of basic expansion of women's education, not because of the one-child family.

Empowering women is key to building a future we want

There may be countries [where] there's no gender inequality in schooling, even in higher education, but [where there is] gender inequality in high business. Japan is a very good example of that. You might find cases in the United States where at one level women's equality has progressed tremendously. You don't have the kind of problem of higher women's mortality as you see in South Asia, North Africa, and East Asia, China, too, and yet for American women there are some fields in which equality hasn't yet come.

Nearly everywhere Buddhism went, there had been a higher level of literacy, even in miserable Burma, not to mention Thailand and Sri Lanka.

I really do believe that education, despite this massive potential in transforming human lives, has not received the kind of attention that people should have given to it.

People's identities as Indians, as Asians, or as members of the human race, seemed to give way - quite suddenly - to sectarian identification with Hindu, Muslim, or Sikh communities.