I'm a Catholic by background. I was raised in Goa, a part of India that was visited by Portuguese missionaries a few hundred years ago, which explains my last name.
When people talk about South Africa, it's all about lions and elephants. But when we talk about India, we talk about tigers.
Once American land, African labor, and European capital were bonded together on the cotton plantation, a new source of cotton could finally outmuscle the peasant household on the Indian Subcontinent.
One of my fantasies in my life has been that I was granted access with a camera to go back in time, and to film the actual campaign of Alexander crossing into India through Iran and Persia.
I was born in New Delhi in 1976.
The British should leave Egypt and … as the price of that policy and the favor England would thereby win from France, you should be able, without spending a shilling or losing a man, to annex China to the Indian Empire.
Under the Julian and Claudian emperors, the Parthians seem to have been the leading power at the mouth of the Indus.
We've gone from the image of India as land of fakirs lying on beds of nails, and snake charmers with the Indian rope trick, to the image of India as a land of mathematical geniuses, computer wizards, software gurus.
My maternal grandmother, Penelope, was a very big figure in my life. She was a child of the Raj, born in India, a debutante who hobnobbed with royals, then married a Canadian, Bill Aitken, who became MP for Bury St Edmunds.
I don't think England is that gray but India is like a long drone.
I believe Bengal is a part of India.
'A Passage To India' by E. M. Forster - It opened my mind to a world I'd never known before.
When a certain swathe of India's population considers the country's ancient past, it doesn't see a country fragmented into kingdoms, savaged by caste divisions, and mired in poverty; rather, what's envisioned is a vast, unified Hindu empire stretching from Kashmir to the Indian tip at Kanyakumari.
The East India Company established a monopoly over the production of opium, shortly after taking over Bengal.
I must say I have a personal love affair with India, with its civilisation, its culture.
Nobody in the Indian subcontinent has suffered or struggled more than Kashmiris.
I am a full Parsi born and brought up in South Mumbai.
Since the early beginning of history, India has been the Klondyke of the world
Everybody knows that the great reversed triangle of land, with its base in the north and its apex in the south, which is called India, embraces fourteen hundred thousand square miles, upon which is spread unequally a population of one hundred and eighty millions of souls.
The historical phase of India began with the Muslim invasion. Muslims were India's first historians.
India's sprawling subcontinent can never become a plus-size Singapore. But perhaps we can weave together an urban web that is the equivalent of a thousand Singapores.
The builders of the British Indian Empire have patiently built its four pillars-the European interests, the army, the Indian princes and the communal divisions.
England has an interesting relationship with the Indian subcontinent because the years of colonization and the history between the two places.
The two biggest legacies of the Raj are the unification of India and the English language. Moreover, without the railways, India would not have been connected and could not have become one country.
Nothing can be more valued than our diversity. Our diversity is the core of our democracy. Freedom becomes meaningless without respect for this diversity. Fundamentalism and fanaticism are becoming stronger in all the countries of Indian subcontinent or South Asia, particularly in India and Pakistan. Forces of fanaticism are gaining upper hand. In my opinion this is as grave a challenge as the challenge of freeing our country from the British rule. It requires mass mobilisation once again on the scale our leaders of freedom struggle did during the British rule. It was easier however, to mobilise the masses against British rule; it is much more difficult to do so against our own internal enemy.
