The playwright Richard Sheridan was scathing in his denunciation of the Company, whose operations ‘combined the meanness of a pedlar with the proflig… - Shashi Tharoor

Alex von Tunzelmann’s clever start to her book Indian Summer made my point most tellingly: ‘In the beginning, there were two nations. One was a vast, mighty and magnificent empire, brilliantly organized and culturally unified, which dominated a massive swath of the earth. The other was an undeveloped, semifeudal realm, riven by religious factionalism and barely able to feed its illiterate, diseased and stinking masses. The first nation was India. The second was England.

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

I make no bones about the fact that India matters to me, and I would like to matter to India.