Bengali Quotes - page 2
‘... this refined language of Indian modernity – an Indian language that was actually first used as a first language by a home-grown cosmopolitan elite – enough to say, with or without humour, ‘Ami tomake bhalobashi' (‘I love you') or ‘Apni kothai thhaken?' (‘Where do you live?). These stray statements performed an incantatory ‘open sesame' – into the bounded, charmed, small-scale world of ‘Bengaliness'. The ‘honorary' Bengali might be myopic; might be an aficionado of art-house cinema; might be politically left wing; might have taste for lyric poetry; a tendency towards the autobiographical; an appetite for fish; or display none of these traits.' [citation needed].
Amit Chaudhuri
The recent trend of the Bengali film industry is to remake South Indian films. My film had a mockery about that since I don't believe in remakes. I won't make a film which is a copy of something. I am very firm in my beliefs, even if that causes me to lose a few producers. There are many people who are making loads of remakes. But at the same time, there are many newcomers who have original ideas, working on new things, and getting producers. It is obviously a bright side of the shoel thing.
Arin Paul
It has definitely influenced my writing. I put appropriate Bengali words in among the English ones because I want that weaving of languages. Concepts from Bengali are sometimes difficult to translate but I want them to have a role. It's complicated. How do you bring them in without putting little explanatory notes? How do you write so you are at once inviting everyone into your book but also creating a special texture that people of your language background would especially appreciate?
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
The shortage of public intellectuals (in the English-speaking world) goes back to the decline of the written media: the first TV intellectual was Foucault, who was at home in both media, but his successors and imitators know only the camera. This forces sound bites upon even the most complex material: see Schama, Ferguson e tutti quanti. Also, and paradoxically: public intellectuals are best when they are grounded in a particular language, culture, debate. Thus Camus was French, Habermas is German, Sen is Bengali, Orwell was deep English. This made their cross-frontier ventures plausible, in the same way that Havel or Michnik today have street cred because they started out as courageous dissidents in a very particular time and place. The opposite is the ridiculous Slavoj Zizek: a "global”' public intellectual who is therefore of no particular interest in any one place or on any one subject. If he is the future of public intellectuals, then they have no future.
Slavoj Žižek
Writer-activist Taslima Nasreen reminded the world with her article ‘A sign of hope - Bengali Muslims are finally protesting Mamata's appeasement politics' in the Print, on 29 June 2009, that even during the rule of the Left, minority appeasement was a given: ‘Imam Barkati of the Tipu Sultan mosque had issued a fatwa against me in broad daylight at a public meeting in Dharamtala (on 10 June 2006), in the heart of the city of Kolkata. He had put a price on my head – for anyone who would murder me. There had been many police officers at that meeting that day, but let alone arresting the imam, no one even questioned why he did something that was ostensibly against the laws of the country. Rather, I remember the police providing him with security and then CM Buddhadeb Bhattacharya and his ministers showering him with favours.'
Taslima Nasrin
This book contains quite a few references to Nazi Germany, and there is a tendency for many people to discount such comparisons because they are so overused and often in simplistic and inappropriate ways. I am no less tolerant of such facile uses of a horrific set of events; and I find their overuse an insult to the memories of the victims. But I am using it rather extensively in this book precisely because the parallel is appropriate, certainly in the similar end foreseen by Islamists for Bengali Hindus and Nazis for Jews. If that recognition awakens the world to action, then this will be one of the most important uses of the comparison since World War II. (6-7)
Richard Benkin
Mulk Raj Anand, an Indian novelist, was convinced of conspiracy. The rapes were so systematic and pervasive that they had to be conscious Army policy, "planned by the West Pakistanis in a deliberate effort to create a new race” or to dilute Bengali nationalism, Anand passionately told reporters.
Mulk Raj Anand
Nixon and Kissinger bear responsibility for a significant complicity in the slaughter of the Bengalis. This overlooked episode deserves to be a defining part of their historical reputations. But although Nixon and Kissinger have hardly been neglected by history, this major incident has largely been whitewashed out of their legacy-and not by accident. Kissinger began telling demonstrable falsehoods about the administration's record just two weeks into the crisis, and has not stopped distorting since. Nixon and Kissinger, in their vigorous efforts after Watergate to rehabilitate their own respectability as foreign policy wizards, have left us a farrago of distortions, half-truths, and outright lies about their policy toward the Bengali atrocities... For all the very real flaws of human rights politics, Nixon and Kissinger's support of a military dictatorship engaged in mass murder is a reminder of what the world can easily look like without any concern for the pain of distant strangers.
Richard Nixon
