Quotes from Barkha Dutt

I feel unabashedly Indian, and this means that not just do I jump to my feet and sing along with the national anthem, it also makes me inexplicably sentimental, proud and teary-eyed.

No one wants to trivialise the gigantic challenge of battling terrorism or undermine the sacrifice of our soldiers and policemen.

If the airline industry were to evolve a common fitness standard for both male and female employees, that would not just be acceptable, it would be entirely desirable.

If you leave out the magnetic stardom of sportsmen and actors, middle-class India today really has just two heroes - the army and the judiciary.

The rise of Right-wing populism globally has divided not just countries, but families. It has broken relationships and torn apart friendships. It has created social media discord and abuse, and led to unprecedented name-calling.

Neither scientific laboratories nor excavation expeditions can unravel the human need to believe in a greater truth, a truth strangely made all the more grand and mysterious by the absence of empirical evidence.

You can't define yourself either in shades of what you are contesting or entirely in antithesis to it. By doing so, what you reveal is that you have nothing to say for yourself. Or that you are unsure of your messaging.

It's never said out aloud, or in so many words, but for many urban, upper caste Indians, 'the backwards' are precisely that - citizens of the hinterland, ungainly and otherworldly - an inconvenient blemish on their shining, gleaming future.

My father, a former Air India official, but essentially an inventor at heart - a man who loved to sometimes break machines just so that he could have the joy of re-engineering them - was a twinkly-eyed, ever-optimistic man of science.

If we began deconstructing the myths at the heart of every religion, we would be citizens of a Marxian Utopia.

The BJP promised that the end of Article 370 was going to be the close of business-as-usual in Kashmir. But if anything defines business-as-usual, it has been New Delhi's attempts at political engineering in the Valley.

A hidden camera can only be a good journalist's last resort. But sometimes, it's the only option.

India's middle-class knows better than most how hard and lonely the struggle of an ordinary man can be.

The BJP brand of Hindutva was originally rooted in middle-class disenchantment with secular hypocrisies; Modi's version is defined simply by hard-edged hatred.

To call the coronavirus a great equaliser turned out to be the greatest falsification of our time.

The truth is that every news channel is a variant of the other and the difference is one of degree.

A hidden camera must never become a lazy substitute for the rigours of old-style reporting.

The Christianity of the St Stephen's College I remember was atmospheric (how we loved the chapel, the choir and the Cross), cultural and entirely subtle.

A message you abhor has to be trumped with a more powerful one.

I am not a big fan of politicians turning tragedy into opportunity, but I believe that which politician a victim's family wants to meet is entirely their decision.

Even atheists and agnostics - and I'm an agnostic - can respond with respect to the cultural infiltration of religion into our everyday lives.

In 2020 we saw the poorest Indian citizen suffer as migrant workers, in the hundreds of thousands, fled the cities on foot, sometimes barefoot, to return to the villages.

Much has already been said about the indisputable integrity of men such as AB Bardhan and Prakash Karat. So, why is it that while the sleaze and slime of the political underbelly puts us off, we aren't warmed by the relative virtue and scrubbed-clean morality of the Marxists?