You don't help a country by supporting a military regime that denies any sign of democracy, and what defeated Pakistan was its military regime.

Maybe I would have considered the problem if I'd met someone with whom I'd have liked to live. But I never met this someone and... No, even if I had met him, I'm sure I wouldn't have got married again. Why should I get married now that my life is so full? No, no, it's out of the question.

Poverty assumes so many aspects here in India. There aren't only the poor that you see in the cities, there are the poor among the tribes, the poor who live in the forest, the poor who live on the mountains. Should we ignore them as long as the poor in the cities are better off? And better off with reference to what? To what people wanted ten years ago? Then it seemed like so much. Today it's no longer so much.

A lot of mythology arose after [Mahatma Gandhi] death. But the fact remains that he was an exceptional man, terribly intelligent, with tremendous intuition for people, and a great instinct for what was right.

I've always been able to do what I wanted. On the other hand, my mother was. She considered the fact of being a woman a great disadvantage. She had her reasons. In her day women lived in seclusion - in almost all Indian states they couldn't even show themselves on the street.

Whenever you take a step forward, you are bound to disturb something.

Politics...You see, it depends on what kind of politics. What we did during my father's generation was a duty. And it was beautiful because its goal was the conquest of freedom.