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

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.

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