Just when you think you've achieved something, you realize you've achieved nothing. And still you have to go forward just the same - toward a dream so distant that your road has neither beginning nor end.

It's not at all hard to reconcile the two things if you organize your time intelligently. Even when my sons were little, I was working.

You said, 'How is it possible for democracy to work with an illiterate people who are dying of hunger?' But with that people we made a democracy work.

[Mahatma Gandhi] said that the first president of India ought to be a harijan girl, an untouchable. He was so against the class system and the oppression of women that an untouchable woman became for him the epitome of purity and benediction.

In India you don't find propaganda against Pakistan. During the war there was a little of it, naturally, but even during the war we were able to control it. In fact the Pakistanis were astonished by this. There were prisoners in the camp hospitals who exclaimed, 'What? You're a Hindu doctor and you want to cure me?'

I suggested a compromise to give the banks a year's time and see if they succeed in showing us that nationalization wasn't necessary. The year went by and we realized it hadn't done any good, that the money still ended up in the hands of the rich industrialists or friends of the bankers. So I concluded that it was necessary to nationalize the banks. And we did. Without considering it a socialist gesture or an antisocialist gesture, just a necessary one. Anyone who nationalizes only so as to be considered on the left to me is a fool.

Sometimes we hurt one another without realizing it.