Shashi Tharoor Quotes

Our founding fathers wrote a constitution for a dream. We have given passports to their ideals.

Hindu fundamentalism is a contradiction in terms, since Hinduism is a religion without fundamentals; there is no such thing as a Hindu heresy. How dare a bunch of goondas shrink the soaring majesty of the Vedas and the Upanishads to the petty bigotry of their brand of identity politics?

Jawaharlal Nehru’s first Cabinet list set a standard that would never again be matched, while establishing a precedent for diversity that all his successors would strive to emulate. A

The Atharva Veda points out that the quest for awareness, the search for answers, the journey towards self-realization, never ceases: How does the wind not cease to blow?
How does the mind take no repose?
Why do the waters, seeking to reach the truth,
Never at any time cease to flow? — Atharva Veda, X.7.3731

Democracy, Ganapathi, is perhaps the most arrogant of all forms of government, because only democrats presume to represent an entire people: monarchs and oligarchs have no such pretensions. But democracies that turn authoritarian go a step beyond arrogance; they claim to represent a people subjugating themselves. India was now the laboratory of this strange political experiment. Our people would be the first in the world to vote on their own subjugation.

Hindu fundamentalism,” because Hinduism is a religion without fundamentals: no organized church, no compulsory beliefs or rites of worship, no single sacred book. The name itself denotes something less, and more, than a set of theological beliefs. In many languages — French and Persian amongst them — the word for “Indian” is “Hindu.” Originally “Hindu” simply meant the people beyond the river Sindhu, or Indus. But the Indus is now in Islamic Pakistan; and to make matters worse, the word “Hindu” did not exist in any Indian language till its use by foreigners gave Indians a term for self-definition.

I don’t go by my caste, creed, or religion. My works speak for me.

The British are the only people in history crass enough to have made revolutionaries out of Americans.

Hinduism is ‘not a definite dogmatic creed, but a vast, complex, but subtly unified mass of spiritual thought and realization.

If you believed in truth and cared enough to obtain it, Ganga affirmed, you had to be prepared actively to suffer for it. It was essential to accept punishment willingly in order to demonstrate the strength of one’s convictions.

To speak of Hindu fundamentalism, is a contradiction in terms, since Hinduism is a religion without fundamentals. To be an Indian Hindu is to be part of an elusive dream all share, a dream that fills our minds with sounds, words, flavours from many sources that we cannot easily identify.

If India had a Latin version of the American motto E Pluribus Unum, it would be E Pluribus Pluribum.

No government has the right to inject religion into questions of citizenship. Citizenship is a privilege of people of all religions, all castes, all languages, if you're Indian.

Pakistan was created by Jinnah’s will and Britain’s willingness’ — not by Nehru’s wilfulness.

"With the absorption of each native state, the (East India) company official John Sullivan observed in 1840s: "The little court disappears — the capital decays — trade languishes — the capital decays — the people are impoverished — the Englishman flourishes, and acts like a sponge, drawing up riches from the banks of the Ganges, and squeezing them down upon the banks of the Thames.