Shashi Tharoor Quotes

Muslim sociologists and anthropologists have argued that Islam in rural India is more Indian than Islamic, in the sense that the faith as practiced by the ordinary Muslim villagers reflects the considerable degree of cultural assimilation that has occurred between Hindus and Muslims in their daily lives.

"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.

national television broadcast a fifty-two-episode serialization of the Mahabharata, the script was written by a Muslim poet, Dr. Rahi Masoom Raza.

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.

The naval expansionism of the southern Chola and Pallava empires took Indian influences directly to Thailand, Malaya, Indonesia and Cambodia. Later,

In looking to understand the forces that have made us and nearly unmade us, and in hoping to recognize possible future sources of conflict in the new millennium, we have to realize that sometimes the best crystal ball is a rearview mirror.

Justice, in British India, was far from blind: it was highly attentive to the skin colour of the defendant.

(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.) The British charges against the rulers they

As we have seen, by the time it ended, nearly 4 million Bengalis starved to death in the 1943 famine. Nothing can excuse the odious behaviour of Winston Churchill, who deliberately ordered the diversion of food from starving Indian civilians to well-supplied British soldiers and even to top up European stockpiles in Greece and elsewhere. ‘The starvation of anyway underfed Bengalis is less serious’ than that of ‘sturdy Greeks’, he argued.

Our fatalism goes beyond, even if it springs from, the Hindu acceptance of the world as it is ordained to be. I must tell you a little story – a marvellous fable from our Puranas that illustrates both our resilience and our self-absorption in the face of circumstance.’ I sat up against my bolsters and assumed the knowingly expectant attitude of those who are about to tell stories or perform card tricks. ‘A man, someone very like you, Arjun – a symbol, shall we say, of the people of India - is pursued by a tiger. He runs fast, but his panting heart tells him he cannot run much longer. He sees a tree. Relief! He accelerates and gets to it in one last despairing stride. He climbs the tree. The tiger snarls below him, but he feels that he has at last escaped its snapping jaws. But no – what’s this? The branch on which he is sitting is weak, and bends dangerously. That is not all: wood-mice are gnawing away at it; before long they will eat through it and it will snap and fall. The branch sags down over a well. Aha! Escape? Perhaps our hero can swim? But the well is dry, and there are snakes writhing and hissing on its bed. What is our hero to do? As the branch bends lower, he perceives a solitary blade of grass growing on the wall of the well. On the top of the blade of grass gleams a drop of honey. What action does our Puranic man, our quintessential Indian, take in this situation? He bends with the branch, and licks up the honey.’
I laughed at the strain, and the anxiety, on Arjun’s face. ‘What did you expect? Some neat solution to his problem? The tiger changes its mind and goes away? Amitabh Bachhan leaps to the rescue? Don’t be silly, Arjun. One strength of the Indian mind is that it knows some problems cannot be resolved, and it learns to make the best of them. That is the Indian answer to the insuperable difficulty. One does not fight against that by which one is certain to be overwhelmed; but one finds the best way, for oneself, to live with it. This is our natio

The imperial system of law was created by a foreign race and imposed upon a conquered people who had never been consulted in its creation.

Tolerance, after all, implies that you have the truth, but will generously indulge another who does not; you will, in an act of tolerance, allow him the right to be wrong. Acceptance, on the other hand, implies that you have a truth but the other person may also have a truth; that you accept his truth and respect it, while expecting him to respect (and accept) your truth in turn. This practice of acceptance of difference — the idea that other ways of being and believing are equally valid — is central to Hinduism and the basis for India’s democratic culture.

the problem is never with the faith, but with the faithful.

India is my country, and in that sense my outrage is personal. But I seek nothing from history — only an account of itself.

Between opponents who will not physically fight, a punch line is equivalent to a punch.