If you want a good play and a show, you need time to prep for it. Artistes must be allowed to practice without being charged for the practice sessions. Let the auditorium charge for the tickets.

I must say that Bengaluru has been one of the best places where I've performed and I would love to associate with the theatre scene here on a personal level.

Over centuries, we have attached too many meanings to religion.

'Jersey' is a very strong story and is driven by emotions.

To be very objective, I am here in this field for thirty five years, and I always knew that Shahid has an incredible capability as an actor.

As an actor, I am not comfortable with an artificial beard.

I have always taken up films that I like. And in the process if I have done films which bring out something that could do society good, I think it's great.

Small events and some songs and dance do not make a film. A film needs to have a proper structure and there has to be an output which would be relevant to people who watch it.

When I was doing theatre in Mumbai, actors won't come because they had television. For many years, I did theatre religiously and in Mumbai, I saw people disrespecting it and it hurt me very badly.

If you continue working hard and be honest towards your work, then success will come.

As an actor you are supposed to do some kind of action in case it is required. I remember this sequence where I was pulled up by a wire 100 ft above the ground. This was my first time that I was hung with a wire and I was a bit scared. But I must say it was a very beautiful experience looking down at everybody from a height.

I admit I'm choosy. That's because I like to concentrate on what I'm doing.

There were certain things that I tried to do on 'Karamchand.' Initially, they were hated, but eventually everyone loved the characterization.

In a play, a few actors perform a few characters, and they need to perform those characters with a certain level of believability so that audiences can actually understand and see them as those characters.

Most of the theatre work that you see in India is very verbose and the visual is whatever you can create on stage.

Even Dopehri,' if somebody has a bit of imagination, the way it's written, they will be able to see that it's a screenplay with dialogues.

I know that people in Dubai are particularly well read, educated and intelligent and that the audience in front of me will come looking forward to an evening that is different from watching a film. That is the kind of crowd that goes to a theatre or a play and I am hoping to see many of them in Dubai.

Children should be kept as normal as possible. At a very young age, they are not even aware of the happenings around them. You need to do whatever you can to grow them normally.

For almost a century since 1918, the centralised nation-state has been the world's default political form. Its various experiments in industrialisation, urbanisation, mass literacy and consumerism have brought more people into public life.

I think there is no reason for us to bring to Islamism or political Islam the fear and ignorance of Western commentators and their hysterical vocabulary.

The Sino-Indian War in 1962 has fundamentally shaped and distorted Indian attitudes towards China. It also obscured a great deal of what has happened in China since 1962.

Enlightenment values of individual freedom are manifested best in individual acts of criticism and defiance.

The French Revolution actualised the Enlightenment's greatest intellectual breakthrough: detaching the political from the theocratic.

In a typically contradictory move, globalisation, while promoting economic integration among elites, has exacerbated sectarianism everywhere else.

Indonesia is hardly immune to catastrophic breakdowns, as the anti-Communist pogrom showed. But, like India, it has been relatively fortunate in evolving a mode of politics that can include many discontinuities - of class, region, ethnicity, and religion.

In 1980, shortly before my 11th birthday, I wrote my first essay in English.

The onslaught of new and complex information, the academic and thinktank cults of expertise, not to mention the impossibility of bohemia in the age of high rents, have conspired to assassinate the public intellectual.

Since the end of the Cold War, metropolitan elites everywhere have identified progress and modernity with the cornucopia of global capitalism, the consolidation of liberal democratic regimes and the secular ethic of consumerism.

My life was made easy - I lived in a village, and by writing for some newspapers and magazines, had enough to live on. I was happy to be there and write.

Tiananmen Square in early 1989 attracted many dreamers like Ma Jian, who returned from Hong Kong to a one-room shack in Beijing in order to join the student protests.

As in the early 20th century, the elemental forces of globalisation have unravelled broad solidarities and loyalties.

Thomas Friedman's 'The World is Flat' sold more copies in India than in the U.K. The market for go-getting business books or wonkish tomes by corporate moguls posing as philosopher kings has grown dramatically in modernising China and India.

Devout Anatolian masses rising from poverty have transformed Turkey politically and economically.

I started out as a novelist and wrote several novels before deciding to publish one, and I fully intend to go back to the form.

Life in a Chinese village is much more organised because the Chinese Communist Party has a presence even in the remotest Chinese village - a presence of the kind that no governmental or non-governmental organisation has in Indian villages.

The British Empire passed quickly and with less humiliation than its French and Dutch counterparts, but decades later, the vicious politics of partition still seems to define India and Pakistan.

My dominant feeling every day is one of great ignorance.

The terrorist attacks of 9/11 briefly disrupted celebrations of a world globalised by capital and consumption.

The Turkish, Arab and Chinese nationalists who built new nation-states out of the ruins of old empires scorned their old, decrepit rulers as much as they did the foreign imperialists who imposed free trade through gunboats.

German writers in the late 18th century were the first to uphold a prickly, literary nationalism, in reaction to the then dominance and prestige of French literature.

Democracy, loudly upheld as a cure for much of the ailing world, has proved no guarantor of political wisdom, even if it remains the least bad form of government.

Economic disasters or foolish wars are hardly guaranteed to bring about large-scale individual self-examination or renew the appeal of truly participatory democracy.

Minorities within nation-states frayed by global capitalism are naturally more resentful of hollowed-out but still heavily centralised systems of political and economic domination.

Just as China achieved much more than India in the realm of public health and education under an austere Communist regime, so its economic growth under a capitalist-friendly government strikes a visitor from India as nothing less than spectacular.

So much of western self-perception and intellectual worldview has been shaped by the moral rhetoric of the Cold War, the discourse in which communism featured as a clear enemy, determined to rule the world.

The White House tapes, the recordings that Nixon made of his conversations in office, have long been recognized as a marvel of verbal incontinence.

The Korean War, which China entered on the side of North Korea, fixed Mao's image in the United States as another unappeasable Communist.

I am often struck by the anxious inferiority many well-educated British people display towards the U.S., particularly Londoners dazzled by New York, when many postcolonials are accustomed to regarding Britain's old imperial cosmopolis as the true capital of the western world.

Gandhi, brought out of his semirural setting and given a Western-style education, initially attempted to become more English than the English.

As the 19th century progressed, Europe's innovations, norms and categories came to achieve a truly universal hegemony.