Shashi Tharoor Quotes

In the Americas, hostility to European traders and resistance to the Christian gospel were considered adequate causes for ‘just’ war, justifying territorial conquest and the enslavement of the losers.

कोई विचार निर्णायक या अन्तिम नहीं है धर्म का मर्म अदृश्य और अज्ञात है सद्‌मार्ग केवल महापुरुषों का सद्‌मार्ग है — यक्ष प्रश्न, श्लोक 11426

I, for one, dearly hope that a British prime minister will find the heart, and the spirit, to get on his or her knees at Jallianwala Bagh in 2019 and beg forgiveness from Indians in the name of his or her people for the unforgivable massacre

कश्मीर की लाला रुख़ (1317-1372) भी भक्ति रस की सन्त कवयित्री के रूप में ख़ूब लोकप्रिय रही थीं। वे भगवान शिव की भक्तिन थीं और दिन-रात उन्हीं के भक्ति रस में डूबी रहती थीं। उन्होंने मुसलमानों और हिन्दुओं में भेद करने से इनकार करते हुए अपनी रचनाओं में खुलकर इन भावनाओं को व्यक्त किया।

Joseph Conrad, no radical himself, described colonialism as ‘a flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly’. As he wrote in 1902, ‘The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.’ Rabindranath Tagore put it gently to a Western audience in New York in 1930: ‘A great portion of the world suffers from your civilisation.’ Mahatma Gandhi was blunter: asked what he thought of Western civilization, he replied, ‘It would be a good idea’.

जिसे हिन्दू ब्रह्म के रूप में, पारसी अहुरा मजदा के रूप में, बौद्ध बुद्ध के रूप में, यहूदी यहोवा के रूप में और ईसाई ‘फ़ादर इन हैवन’ के रूप में जानते है।” उनके लिए वे सब एक ही थे। “जिसका अस्तित्व है वह एक ही है,

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

As late as World War II, among the ‘few of the few’ who bravely defended England against German invasion in the Battle of Britain were Indian fighter pilots, including a doughty Sikh who named his Hurricane fighter ‘Amritsar’.

If India’s GDP went down because it ‘missed the bus’ of industrialization, it was because the British threw Indians under the wheels.

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।

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.

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

Our present concept of morality isn’t really Hindu at all; it is a legacy both of the Muslim invasion and of the superimposition of Victorian prudery on a people already puritanized by purdah.

Much of the British conquest and expansion before 1857 took place against either benign, or not particularly oppressive, native rulers. The Maratha Peshwas, the Mysore rulers and the chess-playing Nawab of Oudh, to name three, were not accused of misgovernance: they were merely too powerful for colonial comfort or too rich to avoid attracting British avarice. (Indeed there were outstanding examples of good governance in India at the time, notably the Travancore kingdom, which in 1819 became the first government in the world to decree universal, compulsory and free primary education for both boys and girls.)

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