In India, the poverty is so vast that the state cannot control it. It can beat people, but it can't prevent the poor from flooding the roads, the cities, the parks and railway station platforms.

I'm an activist; I have to be angry all the time. That's what we do!

The only dream worth having, I told her, is to dream that you will live while you're alive and die only when you're dead.

I think many people were surprised by the victory of the Congress, because it was really hard to see beyond the sort of haze of hatred that the Hindu nationalists had been spreading.

The revolution cannot be funded. It's not the imagination of trusts and foundations that's going to bring real change.

Memory was that woman on the train. Insane in the way she sifted through dark things in a closet and emerged with the most unlikely ones - a fleeting look, a feeling. The smell of smoke. A windscreen wiper. A mother's marble eyes. Quite sane in the way she left huge tracts of darkness veiled. Unremembered.

I never do anything because I'm a celebrity, as a rule. I do what I do as a citizen.