Let me make one thing clear. I have never considered mere survival in power as any achievement, just as I have never seen coming to power as an achievement in itself.

Our nuclear scientists and engineers have done a splendid job, and naturally, the entire nation has risen to salute their professional excellence, discipline, and patriotism. They have had the benefit of having been led in the past by great men like Homi Bhabha and Vikram Sarabhai.

Whatever understanding is reached with Pakistan has to be followed honestly, and everybody will have to rise above party politics and be actively committed to make India prosperous.

Who can forget that in critical times of war in 1962, 1965 and 1971, Naga underground organisations did not fire on the Indian Army? They showed restraint.

For 30 years I've been schooled in everything from government, and economics, to medicine and international relations. But don't be impressed. Someone once said being a general assignment reporter simply means you are equally ignorant about most everything. In other words, I know a little about a lot.

Women hold up more than half the sky and represent much of the world's unrealized potential. They are the educators. They raise the children. They hold families together and increasingly drive economies. They are natural leaders. We need their full engagement... in government, business and civil society.

Universities are some of the few places left where a struggle for the commons, for public life, if not democracy itself, can be made visible through the medium of collective voices and social movements energized by the need for a politics and way of life counter to authoritarian capitalism.

The Republicans have lost their standards; they've lost their principles... Really, that's why the machine in the Republican Party is fighting against me... They have never really gone along with lower taxes and less government.