Top 74 Being Indian Quotes
#1. I'm sure I went through a stage when I resented being Indian because in every other manner, in terms of cultural reference points and vocabulary and all the rest of it, I was way ahead of everybody else - so the one thing that set me back was being Indian. And I couldn't do anything about it.
Sanjeev Bhaskar
#2. This is the problem with being Indian. It's hard to be one of the family members. Everybody is white usually [in the movie].
M. Night Shyamalan
#3. Traveling between Reardan and Wellpinit, between the little white town and the reservation, I always felt like a stranger. I was half Indian in one place and half white in the other. It was like being Indian was my job, but it was only a part-time job. And it didn't pay well at all.
Sherman Alexie
#4. Being Indian is not blood as much as it is culture.
Tony Hillerman
#5. I like all things natural, and I love being Indian. So clothes-wise, I love wearing Indian. Does my wearing a salwar kameez instead of a dress make me less of an actor, less of a person?
Vidya Balan
#6. Being Indian-American, I have tremendous potential to grow facial hair.
Vivek Murthy
#7. My dad knows every single accent from being an old Yiddish grandpa to being Indian or Jamaican. It was very cool to grow up with that.
Ashley Bell
#8. I didn't literally kill Indians. We were supposed to make you give up being Indian. Your songs and stories and language and dancing. Everything. We weren't trying to kill Indian people. We were trying to kill Indian culture.
Sherman Alexie
#9. Lots of times growing up, I'd just try to do something myself because I believed that being a boy, and being Indian, I should just know how to do things. -Will Bird, Through Black Spruce
Joseph Boyden
#10. When I started doing standup when I was 17, I was talking about being Indian and specifically ethnic jokes. Straightforward stuff that was fairly ignorant that I knew would get the laugh. It wasn't flipping stereotypes; it was using them.
Hari Kondabolu
#11. For golf, being in the Olympics is a big boost. More so for Indian golf.
Jeev Milkha Singh
#12. The major adventure is to claim your authentic, true being, which is not culturally given to you. The culture will not explain to you how to be a real human being. It will tell you how to be banker, politician, Indian chief, masseuses, actress, whatever, but it will not give you true being.
Terence McKenna
#13. Too much of Indian writing in English, it seemed to me, consisted of middle-class people writing about other middle-class people - and a small slice of life being passed off as an authentic portrait of the country.
Aravind Adiga
#14. All politics to me - Indian or white - is an illusion preventing us from being authentic because we're communicating through something that isn't real to us.
John Trudell
#15. The land is sacred. These words are at the core of your being. The land is our mother, the rivers our blood. Take our land away and we die. That is, the Indian in us dies.
Mary Brave Bird
#16. Always be civil to the girls, you never know who they may marry' is a aphorism which has saved many an English spinster from being treated like an Indian widow.
Nancy Mitford
#17. They came with a Bible and their religion- stole our land, crushed our spirit ... and now tell us we should be thankful to the 'Lord' for being saved. Chief Pontiac, American Indian Chieftain
George Washington
#18. It [the Quit India Resolution] was very far from being the Gita, but like Gita it suffered from flood of explanations, commentaries, and interpretations.
R.P. Noronha
#20. If I hadn't left South Africa, I felt I was at risk of being pigeonholed. I looked around and saw actors who, 10 to 15 years into their careers, were still playing stereotypical Afrikaans characters, stereotyped Indian characters. That was not something that I wanted for myself.
Adhir Kalyan
#21. Unusually for an Indian man of his generation, my father, being aware of my mother's intellectual abilities, encouraged her to go abroad by herself to obtain a Ph.D.
Venkatraman Ramakrishnan
#22. Me being a black girl in London, whose mom is first-generation African and whose dad is West Indian, gives me a different view. I'm coming at soul from my own place.
Estelle
#23. They are being driven by a psychopathic Indian apparently bent on killing them all, overtaking on blind rises, racing some other bus to settle an old score, hurtling into corners without slowing down.
Damon Galgut
#24. I am not interested in producing fiction for Indian television at all, the reason being that I don't understand the medium. I can be a judge or a host; I can do that as an individual. But to produce TV content, you have to know the game.
Karan Johar
#25. I have never seen a film being as influenced by the incidents during its making as Highway. The adventures of our north Indian road journey has many stories to tell
Imtiaz Ali
#26. I know a lot about being white - because I have to, I live in the white world. A white person doesn't live in the Indian world. I have to be white every day.
Sherman Alexie
#27. I see, or at least it appears to me, that there is some concerted effort to discredit them, and categorize the American Indian Movement as some adverse entity, as opposed to it being a manifestation of the desperations of a whole race of people.
Leonard Peltier
#28. As far as my projects are concerned, I have always maintained a healthy balance. My south Indian projects have never taken a backseat even though I've been busy in Hindi. Both regions have loved me, and being wanted by both the north and south film industries is a compliment by itself.
Genelia D'Souza
#29. We live in a trans period. Contemporary issues of sexuality, for example - the exciting aspects of them - have to do with transgenderedness. And there's trans-nationality. There are people like me, for example. I mean, what am I? Am I Indian? Am I American? And I'm not alone in being between things.
Vijay Seshadri
#30. It is ironic that America, with its history of injustice to the poor, especially the black man and the Indian, prides itself on being a Christian nation.
James H. Cone
#31. some words
bring warmth
just by
being
next to each other.
Sanober Khan
#33. My natural hair is jet black. I used to have it down to my bum. And I went through a phase of being obsessed with fake tan. So from the age of 14 to 16, I looked like an Apache Indian!
Abbey Clancy
#34. I have a pretty good knowledge of the Indian world by virtue of living on several different reservations and being exposed to several different cultures and languages.
N. Scott Momaday
#35. When I first came to Harvard, I thought to myself, 'What kind of an Indian am I?' because I did not grow up on a reservation. But being an Indian is a combination of things. It's your blood. It's your spirituality. And it's fighting for the Indian people.
Winona LaDuke
#36. I used to object to being called an Indian writer, and would always say I was a writer who happened to be an Indian, and who happened to write about Indians.
James Welch
#37. Being an Indian means living with the land. And the only way we'll be able to do that is to gain our freedom.
Russell Means
#38. I have a thick skin, which comes from being a not-really-skinny, dark-skinned Indian woman. I haven't fit in every place, and so I'm kind of used to resistance.
Mindy Kaling
#39. She might be without country, without nation, but inside her there was still a being that could exist and be free, that could simply say I amwithout adding a this, or a that, without saying I am Indian, Guyanese, English, or anything else in the world.
Sharon Maas
#40. Being traditional is a choice for me. South Indian families bring up their children with a sense of freedom, self-respect and self-value. We do whatever we have to with earnestness and honesty, including being uninhibited. Yet we hold onto our roots.
Vidya Balan
#41. An Indian philosopher, being asked what were, according to his opinion, the two most beautiful things in the universe, answered: The starry heavens above our heads, and the feeling of duty in our hearts.
Jacques-Benigne Bossuet
#42. That was the fun of acting, being a blank canvas you could transform into the character - Indian princess, 20s vamp, Mother Courage, Oxford don, 94-year-old wife.
Diana Quick
#43. He was flying over India now, still making notes. He remembered hearing an Indian politician on TV talking about the British prime minister and being unable to pronounce her name properly. "Mrs. Torture," he kept saying. "Mrs. Margaret Torture." This was unaccountably funny.
Salman Rushdie
#44. What is the goal of a human being? An Indian person can truly achieve a state of the Absolute Supreme Self [Parmatma, the Lord]. To achieve one's own Absolute Supreme Self state is the ultimate goal!
Dada Bhagwan
#45. I think the best thing about my short-lived political career was that I saw the interiors of Bihar and UP. That is the real India, and, being an Indian, it was really sad to see our own people living in such dismal conditions. It was a real eye-opener.
Sanjay Dutt
#46. I was just very interested in the American frontier and the growth of capitalism - those enormous fortunes that were being made, more often than not, on the blood of poor people, black people, Indian people. They were the ones who paid very dearly for those great fortunes.
Peter Matthiessen
#47. They [some countries] borrowed money to go acquire things, Indian power plants and Danish newspapers and British soccer teams. And they did it willy-nilly, and they themselves a story, that Icelandic history and culture and DNA leaves us very well-suited to being investment bankers.
Michael Lewis
#48. The thing about being an Indian person is that you feel most at home with your own people.
Winona LaDuke
#49. There is not a thought that is being thought in the West or the East that is not active in some Indian mind
E.P. Thompson
#50. For the longest time, Indian women have been okay with being curvy. But I think the modern Indian woman needs to get toned. I don't endorse being thin. Anorexia and bulimia are a reality in India because everybody wants to be thin.
Bipasha Basu
#51. I think it was so unfair that people attacked Freida Pinto for being an Indian, playing a Palestinian.
Julian Schnabel
#52. In Bolivia, the middle class, intellectuals and the self-employed are proud of their Indian roots. Unfortunately, some oligarchic groups continue to treat us as being inferior.
Evo Morales
#53. I'm Indian-American and I think that when I think of myself as being culturally Indian, it had so much to do with when I lived with my parents and was a kid because they would take me to the Diwali festivals. They would take me to the temple, and they would teach me about all the different holidays.
Mindy Kaling
#54. There are plenty of good Indian writers in English, and none of us feel we are carrying the burden of being a poster boy.
Vikram Seth
#55. In America, people think being South Asian is still kind of exotic. When you go outside New York and Chicago and L.A., there are people who have never tried Indian food ... they've never even tasted it!
Aasif Mandvi
#56. I'm a boys' girl! I come from an army background and I haven't known what being a 'good Indian girl' means.
Anushka Sharma
#57. Presence' is actually very important in international sport. It is one thing just being there in the middle, but it is another making people aware of your 'presence'. It is about body language and radiating confidence, something that the West Indian batting legend Viv Richards would personify.
Sachin Tendulkar
#58. I am not comfortable at all with this tag of being dubbed 'the richest Indian' and all the attention that follows for the reason.
Dilip Shanghvi
#59. Here I am: a Russian-speaking Jew living in Canada, and you, an Indian ex-patriot living in San Francisco. All of a sudden we commune in this moment about a much older Russian political dissident.That's the human part of being human: feeling those moments.
David Bezmozgis
#60. Best cure for depression? Watch Indian movies. They will make you laugh, cry, keep you wondering how silly humans can be while being captivated by the wild range of colors used in fabrics and on buildings.
Kambiz Mostofizadeh
#61. I like working with south Indian directors because they are very disciplined. They visualize their entire story and screenplay in their heads even before they start shooting, which I respect. They finish their work on time. Being a disciplinarian myself, this suits my style.
Akshay Kumar
#62. Non-Indian writers usually say "Great Spirit," "Mother Earth," "Two-Legged, Four-Legged, and Winged." Mixed-blood writers usually say "Creator, "Mother Earth," "Two-Legged, Four- Legged, and Winged." Indian writers usually say "God," "Mother Earth," "Human Being, Dog, and Bird."
Sherman Alexie
#63. It was expected of all good middle-class Indian people to build India and, as you know, Indians - when we say, 'build India,' it was all about being an accountant, a lawyer, an engineer. So it was this idea that professionals would build the country.
Shekhar Kapur
#64. When I got to Florida, I was a British kid, but I was also an Indian kid: a brown kid with an English accent. Talk about being an outsider. And that's become the theme of a lot of the stuff I write about.
Aasif Mandvi
#65. A general belief seems to prevail in the colony that the Indians are little better, if at all, than the savages or natives of Africa. Even the children are taught to believe in that manner, with the result that the Indian is being dragged down to the position of a raw Kaffir.
Mahatma Gandhi
#66. In the early days of the Indian Territory, there were no such things as birth certificates. You being there was certificate enough.
Will Rogers
#67. There was no audience for my books. The Indians didn't regard me as an Indian and North Americans couldn't conceive of me of a North American writer, not being white and brought up on wheat germ. My fiction got lost.
Bharati Mukherjee
#68. The short one with the scar shifted from foot to foot. "Yeah, this is Russell," he motioned at the Indian, "and this is Newt." I almost said, "Newt," aloud, but figured we had enough problems without me being a smart-ass. And people say I don't know when to keep my mouth shut.
Laurell K. Hamilton
#69. The more we study the Indian's character the more we appreciate the marked distinction between the civilized being and the real savage.
Nelson A. Miles
#70. I fantasize about everything; being a fireman, an Indian chief, climbing mountains. Anything is possible.
Ted Turner
#71. I'm Indian all the way and always will be. I'm not going to stop fighting until I die, and I hope I'm a good example of a human being and of my tribe.
Anna Mae Aquash
#72. I think there is a real misconception about Indian food being super spicy. And I know that's because when you go into an Indian restaurant, it is pretty spicy. But it doesn't have to be. In fact, my husband can't handle a lot of heat. I've had to temper my cooking so that he can eat with me.
Aarti Sequeira
#73. It rolls the mid-most waters of the world, the Indian Ocean and Atlantic being just its arms.
Herman Melville
#74. I wanted to make an Indian character who wasn't either a) the savage that must be eliminated, the force of nature that's blocking the way for industrial progress, or b) the noble innocent that knows all and is another cliche. I wanted him to be a complicated human being.
Jim Jarmusch
