For me the only point that has remained unchanged through the years is that in India there is still so much poverty.

Not only my parents but the whole family was involved in the resistance - my grandfather and grandmother, my uncles and aunts, my cousings of both sexes. So ever so often the police came and took them away, indiscriminately. Well, the fact that they arrested both my father and mother, both my grandfather and grandmother, both an uncle and an aunt, made me accustomed to looking on men and women with the same eyes, on an absolute plane of equality.

I discovered [Joan of Arc] toward the age of ten or twelve, when I went to France. I don't remember where I read about her, but I recall that she immediately took on a definite importance for me. I wanted to sacrifice my life for my country. It seems like foolishness and yet...what happens when we're children is engraved forever on our lives.

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.

I want to succeed. And I want to succeed in the best way possible, without caring whether people call my actions leftist or rightist.

In all societies that have applied a form of socialism, a certain degree of social economic equality has been achieved.

If you only knew what it did to me to have lived in that house where the police were bursting in to take everyone away! I certainly didn't have a happy and serene childhood.