Words matter. These are the best Anand Giridharadas Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I’m a Cleveland Indian by birth.
Election time is when you start to hear about ‘average people,’ ‘working families,’ ‘patriotic Americans’ and such.
IT put India on the map of the world and told Indians that they are somebody in the world. There is something about technology that is very empowering: ‘We are designing software for the best companies in the world.’
I have always found it jarring to encounter people born and raised in, say, Switzerland, who are denied its citizenship and still considered Algerians or Turks.
Americans don’t realize how difficult it is to create a Harvard.
Crowdsourcing aid is a cunning way to work around the do-nothing corridors of official Washington. But it also raises complicated questions about the nature of humanitarianism and what it means for a ‘nation’ to help.
Language is one of the only things that we truly share, and I sometimes used this joint inheritance to obfuscate and deflect and justify myself: to re-brand what was good for me as something appearing good for us both, when I threw around terms like ‘the sharing economy’ and ‘disruption’ and ‘global resourcing.’
When rooted, you observe how systems actually affect people.
I am very happy to be an American. I realize what a valuable inheritance that is.
I’m a son of immigrants. I’m not going to reduce my commitment to immigration. But can I empathize with the fact that if your town was 95 percent all white and now it’s down to 60, that that can scare you? Can I empathize with that? Yeah.
Mr. Trump is an entertainer, bringing a rawness and wildness to the presidential race that no other candidate can come close to matching.
When you first arrive in India, you think, ‘God, these Indians treat their servants so badly! How awful!’ It’s something in the air, and something about the way people are, that very few people hold out. I wasn’t able to. Everybody goes local. You stop saying ‘thank you’ and things like that.
Though it is perhaps expected for the bishop of Rome to warn against the idolatry of money, what is striking is how Francis suggests that not only God but also secular politics must outrank economic imperatives.
My mother grew up strong. She was a charismatic leader among her peers, staging plays, organizing projects, raising money for charity; she was fiercely protective of her younger brother, with whom she shared a passion for jazz and rock and roll.
Foundations are the new Birkin bags. Everyone who is anyone has one. Giving is now chic.
Taking offense is, in fact, one of the few things that brings us together.
I have a weakness for treating people’s economic interests as their only interest, ignoring things like belonging and pride and the desire to send a message to those who ignore you.
The American television punditocracy – the pollsters, political consultants and other talking heads who become as ubiquitous as air every election cycle – can be incestuous and herdlike.
In Europe, more than in the United States, worldly people, faced with my Indian skin, reflexively laud my ‘ancient,’ ‘beautiful’ origins, which is heartier praise than Cleveland usually gets from Europeans.
America has two clear tiers of workers: contractors and employees. The former have few regulatory protections; the latter have many.
If you think America is great, remember that every person telling you otherwise may carry a clue to making it greater.
In my reporting, I’ve found that real change escapes many change-makers because powerful illusions guide their projects.
To those portions of the electorate fed up with politics as usual, Mr. Trump’s willingness to say just about anything and to improvise as he goes seems more refreshing and trustworthy than disqualifying.
There is always a gap between what candidates say in the heat of the campaign, when they are not constrained by the realities of governance, and how they act after being sworn into office.
Most of us are too enmeshed in communities to live our ideals. Outsiders have less to lose.
I will not concede for a moment that old privileges should not dwindle. They cannot dwindle fast enough.
Right after college, after growing up in the United States, I moved to India, broadly telling the story of how an old and stagnant country was suddenly waking up. And I came home, back to America, in 2009 after telling that story and writing a book about that.
The burden of citizenship is accepting that what is neither your fault nor your responsibility may be your problem.
Our societies have experienced the magic that occurs when pluralism flourishes and the marginalized assume their proper powers. But loss stalks those victories, as millions revolt against change and supremacies resurface.
I worry when each of us is seduced by visions of the future that have no place for the other.
In America, where no one judged or supervised her, where my father was too busy eating her cooking to notice whether she was eating it, too, my mother found herself newly enchanted by the taste of food.
Our technology promises the magic of constant connectedness. Yet we feel loss in being atomized on separate screens, trapped in filter bubbles of belief, bobbing in a sharing economy in which the technologists seem to own all the shares.
More than any other candidate, Mr. Trump embodies the evolving norms of communication that are being enabled and encouraged by technology and the matrix of connectivity that defines modern life: authenticity over authority, surprise over consistency, celebrity over experience.
