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.

I grew up like a boy, also because most of the children who came to our house were boys.

We always said that our struggle was not only against the British as representatives of colonialism, it was against all the evil that existed in India. The evil of the feudal system, the evil of the system based on caste, the evil of economic injustice.

To be a mother, a housewife, never cost me any sacrifice - I savored every minute of those years.

You've never been very generous, you Westerners, toward us Indians. You should have seen that things were changing, albeit slowly. You should have seen that something was happening. Not much, but something.

There exists no politician in India daring enough to attempt to explain to the masses that cows can be eaten.

When I was young, I was very selfish, now not any more.