Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I was never the feisty kind of activist.
As a philanthropist, I fund a lot of NGOs.
Everything does not have to be a commodity.
Indian philanthropy doesn't take enough risk.
We all want and need the rule of law to be upheld.
We all require equal access to the justice system.
Luckily, water, though finite, is infinitely renewable.
In India, the concentration of wealth is in a few hands.
We cannot imagine democracies without a vibrant civil society.
India's water challenges are intractable, messy and perennial.
Children's ability to learn is infinite when they are engaged.
The Giving Pledge is not meant to be prescriptive or restrictive.
One size doesn't fit all, and I don't have a monopoly over good ideas.
Being near a water source can determine lives, livelihoods and prosperity.
We often destroy ecology-based livelihoods in the name of employment creation.
No doubt there are dangers involved in letting children go online unsupervised.
Climate change has the potential to swallow up all other issues of development.
I have a philanthropy advisor, Hari Menon, who was earlier at the Gates Foundation.
India is criss-crossed with the most elegant wells that tap into the shallow aquifer.
No single institution or effort can effectively create solutions for societal problems.
Good laws are fair, do not discriminate against any group and are reasonably implementable.
We must overcome our cultural barriers that giving should be a private and silent activity.
For the lakhs living along its banks, the Aghanashini has given people life and livelihoods.
Climate change is already upon us, and its effects are being felt with increasing intensity.
As with oil, water exploitation raises an inter-generational debt that will be hard to repay.
We cannot be mere consumers of good governance, we must be participants; we must be co-creators.
People have to clearly see the connection between their family's health and their sanitation habits.
My grandfather passed away in 1946, too early to see his dream of an independent India being realized.
Frontiersman ideas of individualism stand exposed as we realise just how much our actions impact others.
India's waste problem is gigantic, and with its economy growing steadily, it will be compounded manifold.
India is a groundwater civilization. Almost all Indians use groundwater, directly or indirectly, each day.
When you keep un-bundling various aspects of a social problem, you can arrive at a very basic, common space.
If the privileged in society can use that privilege to privilege others, then the consequences can be tremendous.
Poor governance affects us all - entrepreneurs, homemakers, farmers, labourers, whatever identities we might have.
Bihar has always drawn me, ever since I was a child, brought up on the stories about my grandfather Babasaheb Soman.
I felt very uncomfortable when I became wealthy. One of my ways of dealing with it was to give it forward right away.
Putting a climate change lens on policy making offers a huge opportunity to make smart decisions about India's future.
We have to get smarter about our cities. Especially when it comes to the most basic of public services - water supply.
Unfortunately, the overwhelming moral force exerted by leaders like Gandhi comes by too rarely in the life of a nation.
I believe that any society that allows the creation of legitimate wealth expects that the wealth be used for its benefit.
We all need good laws, and an independent, impartial, and efficient judiciary to verify the constitutionality of those laws.
It was only in 2001 that I set up a foundation, Arghyam. That was pretty much to learn the ropes of how to give, what to do.
India has a long tradition of giving that cuts across all sections of society. It is a living legacy that we can all be proud of.
For centuries, prosperity has been easy to define in material terms. At a personal level, by how much one earns; how much one has.
As ordinary citizens, we don't spend much time reading about and thinking through the creation of new laws or amendments of old ones.
It is one thing to obey a government order. It is quite another to succumb to resurrected irrational fears, especially of 'the other.'
When a government is in fear of dissent from its own citizens, and when its reaction is to shut out that dissent, we should all worry.
What works at scale may be different from scaling what works. Pilots often succeed, while scale-up often fails when the context changes.
I came from a seedha-saadha middle class family in Mumbai. The Infosys story changed our life drastically but we have remained the same.
One of the great conundrums in philanthropy globally is that the way wealth creation happens itself often creates the inequities in society.