When I'm outside the cities I do feel optimistic. There is such grandeur in India and so much beauty.

There are things that you can't do - like writing letters to a part of yourself. To your feet or hair. Or heart.

I think it was 50 million people across the world who marched against the war in Iraq. It was perhaps the biggest display of public morality in the world - you know, I mean, before the war happened. Before the war happened, everybody knew that they were being fed lies.

From being a dream, dams have become a very cynical corrupt enterprise; a way of letting governments lay their hands on huge sums of money; a way of centralizing resources; a way of snatching rivers away from the poor and giving them to the rich. And so in a sense they've become monuments to corruption.

Either way, change will come. It could be bloody, or it could be beautiful. It depends on us.

Her grief grieved her. His devastated her.

The Congress has historically played covert communal politics in order to create what in India we call vote banks where you pit one community against another and so on in order to secure votes.