Shashi Tharoor Quotes

दूसरों को आँकने की कसौटी उनकी जाति न होकर — जैसाकि मार्टिन लूथर किंग कहा करते थे — उनके चरित्र के तत्त्व या उनकी योग्यताओं का सार था।

In India we celebrate the commonality of major differences; we are a land of belonging rather than of blood.

Truth is elusive, subtle, manysided. You know, Priscilla, there’s an old Hindu story about Truth. It seems a brash young warrior sought the hand of a beautiful princess. Her father, the king, thought he was a bit too cocksure and callow. He decreed that the warrior could only marry the princess after he had found Truth. So the warrior set out into the world on a quest for Truth. He went to temples and monasteries, to mountaintops where sages meditated, to remote forests where ascetics scourged themselves, but nowhere could he find Truth. Despairing one day and seeking shelter from a thunderstorm, he took refuge in a musty cave. There was an old crone there, a hag with matted hair and warts on her face, the skin hanging loose from her bony limbs, her teeth yellow and rotting, her breath malodorous. But as he spoke to her, with each question she answered, he realized he had come to the end of his journey: she was Truth. They spoke all night, and when the storm cleared, the warrior told her he had fulfilled his quest. ‘Now that I have found Truth,’ he said, ‘what shall I tell them at the palace about you?’ The wizened old creature smiled. ‘Tell them,’ she said, ‘tell them that I am young and beautiful.

While he was alive, he was impossible to ignore; once he had gone, he was impossible to imitate.

As Manu S. Pillai acidly observes, ‘In other words, there is nothing a quiet ghar wapsi cannot solve when it comes to the building of a good dharmocracy.’90

If America is a melting-pot, then to me India is a thali, a selection of sumptuous dishes in different bowls. Each tastes different, and does not necessarily mix with the next, but they belong together on the same plate, and they complement each other in making the meal a satisfying repast.

flaunting the Kohinoor on the Queen Mother’s crown in the Tower of London is a powerful reminder of the injustices perpetrated by the former imperial power. Until it is returned — at least as a symbolic gesture of expiation — it will remain evidence of the loot, plunder and misappropriation that colonialism was really all about. Perhaps that is the best argument for leaving the Kohinoor where it emphatically does not belong — in British hands.

The historian A. J. P. Taylor calls the massacre ‘the decisive moment when Indians were alienated from British rule’. No other ‘punishment’ in the name of law and order had similar casualties: ‘The Peterloo Massacre had claimed about eleven lives. Across the Atlantic, British soldiers provoked into firing on Boston Commons had killed five men and were accused of deliberate massacre. In response to the self-proclaimed Easter Rebellion of 1916 in Dublin, the British had executed sixteen Irishmen.’ Jallianwala confirmed how little the British valued Indian lives.

The principles he stood for and the way in which he asserted them were always easier to admire than to follow

Does NRI (Non-Resident Indian) stand for Not Really Indian or Never Relinquished India? I believe a little of both!

We literally paid for our own oppression.

am proud to belong to a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance. We believe not only in universal toleration, but we accept all religions as true. I am proud to belong to a nation which has sheltered the persecuted and the refugees of all religions and all nations of the earth. I am proud to tell you that we have gathered in our bosom the purest remnant of the Israelites, who came to southern India and took refuge with us in the very year in which their holy temple was shattered to pieces by Roman tyranny. I am proud to belong to the religion which has sheltered and is still fostering the remnant of the grand Zoroastrian nation. I remember having repeated a hymn from my earliest boyhood, which is every day repeated by millions of human beings: “As the different streams having their sources in different places all mingle their water in the sea, so, O Lord, the different paths which men take through different tendencies, various though they appear, crooked or straight, all lead to Thee.”. . . [T]he wonderful doctrine preached in the Gita [says]: “Whosoever comes to Me, through whatsoever form, I reach him; all men are struggling through paths which in the end lead to me.

Colonialism was made possible, and then sustained and strengthened, as much by cultural technologies of rule as it was by the more obvious and brutal modes of conquest that first established power on foreign shores… Colonialism was itself a cultural project of control.

इसका दायरा इतना व्यापक था कि गुजरात के महान कवि, दार्शनिक और धर्मोपदेशक नरसी मेहता से लेकर मिथिला के विद्यापति और बंगाल के चैतन्य देव तक कितने ही महापुरुष इस महाधारा से जुड़ते रहे। (चैतन्य देव ने कीर्तनों और कृष्ण के भजनों के माध्यम से बंगाल में एक वैष्णव आन्दोलन ही शुरू कर दिया था।) महाराष्ट्र के सन्त ज्ञानेश्वर, सन्त तुकाराम, सन्त एकनाथ और सन्त नामदेव, कर्नाटक के बसवन्ना और तमिलनाडु के त्यागराज इत्यादि सभी इस आन्दोलन का हिस्सा बनकर अपनी-अपनी भूमिका निभाते रहे और भक्ति का सन्देश फैलाते रहे। कृष्णभक्त शंकर देव देश भर का

To describe his method, Gandhi coined the expression satyagraha, literally, ‘holding on to truth’ or, as he variously described it, truth-force, love-force or soul-force. He disliked the English term ‘passive resistance’ because satyagraha required activism, not passivity. If you believed in Truth and cared enough to obtain it, Gandhi felt, you could not afford to be passive: you had to be prepared actively to suffer for Truth. So non-violence, like many later concepts labelled with a negation, from non-cooperation to non-alignment, meant much more than the denial of an opposite; it did not merely imply the absence of violence. Non-violence was the way to vindicate the truth not by the infliction of suffering on the opponent, but on one’s self. It was essential to willingly accept punishment in order to demonstrate the strength of one’s convictions.