Gurcharan Das > Quotes

“Dharma is easiest to spot by its absence: the Mahabharata employs the pedagogical technique of teaching about dharma via its opposite, adharma”
― Gurcharan Das

“Good intentions are useless in the absence of common sense. —JAMI, BAHARISTAN”
― Gurcharan Das, India Unbound

“When individuals blunder, it is unfortuante and their families go down. When rulers fail, it is a national tragedy”
― Gurcharan Das, India Unbound: The Social and Economic Revolution from Independence to the Global Information Age

“One should never do to another what one regards as injurious to oneself. This, in brief, is the law of dharma. —Mahabharata XVIII.113.8”
― Gurcharan Das, The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma

“When ordinary human beings err, it is sad, but when leaders do, it haunts us for generations.”
― Gurcharan Das, India Unbound

“a man who wishes to profess goodness at all times will come to ruin among so many who are not so good. Hence it is necessary for a prince who wishes to maintain his position to learn how not to be good, and to use this knowledge . . . according to necessity.’25”
― Gurcharan Das, The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma

“Although Manmohan Singh, the helmsman, got the credit, it was Rao who took the tough and aggressive decisions and provided the energy and political support. He was shrewd and knew how to deal with dissent. The manner in which he pushed through the industrial policy in the cabinet is an example. At the same time, the reforms would not have happened without Manmohan Singh. To the extent that there was one, he created the road map. In a brilliant move, he set up a set of committees—bank reform under Narsimhan, tax reform under Chelliah, and insurance reform under Malhotra—and they provided crucial intellectual sustenance and legitimacy for reform measures in these areas. It needed Manmohan Singh to come and change the nation’s mind-set to growth. But Manmohan Singh is a reticent man and cautious by nature. On his own, without Rao’s constant support, he would not have done it. The new trade policy would not have come about as speedily without Chidambaram. Varma was a terror as the head of the steering committee and he provided the momentum for the implementation of the reforms for two years. He knew the system well, and he played it in favor of the reforms. Varma’s crucial contributions, I believe, have not been understood or appreciated. In the end, all three—Manmohan Singh, Chidambaram, and Varma—derived their strength from Narasimha Rao.”
― Gurcharan Das, India Unbound

“Individuals thus acquire a right to property by their labour. By means of this right, they sustain the most important of all rights— the right to life. Through this logic, the right to property became a central doctrine of liberalism.”
― Gurcharan Das, The Dilemma of an Indian Liberal

“What sort of ideas, I wondered, might help to give meaning to life when one is in the midst of fundamentalist persons of all kinds who believe that they have a monopoly on truth and some are even willing to kill to prove that?”
― Gurcharan Das, The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma

“Dharma is precisely this 'discipline of ordered existence', a 'belief system that restrains and gives coherence to desires.”
― Gurcharan Das

“Sleeping in the park in a city is a form of civilization. First, you need a city with enough bustle and clatter to make a person yearn for a calm, green spot. Then you need a first-class park,”
― Gurcharan Das, India Unbound

“Despite the many occasions when its characters feel frustrated before the weight of circumstances, and despite blaming their feeling of impotence on daiva, 'fate', moral autonomy shines through in the epic. Because they have some freedom to choose they can be praised when they follow dharma or blamed when they follow adharma. At the moment of making a decision they become conscious of their freedom, and it is this perception of autonomy that gives them the ability to lead authentic moral lives.”
― Gurcharan Das, The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma

“So when Yudhishthira tells Draupadi that eventually human acts do bear fruit, even though the fruit is invisible,56 one might interpret ‘fruit’ to mean the building of character through repeated actions. Yudhishthira was certainly aware that repeated actions had a way of changing one’s inclinations to act in a certain way. That inclination is character.”
― Gurcharan Das, The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma

“The human tendency to evaluate one’s well-being by comparing it with that of another is the cause of Duryodhana’s distress.”
― Gurcharan Das, The Difficulty of Being Good

“Its own position veers towards the pragmatic evolutionary principle of reciprocal altruism: adopt a friendly face to the world but do not allow yourself to be exploited.”
― Gurcharan Das, The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma

“Prashna is ‘question’ in Sanskrit, but it can also mean riddle or puzzle. It points to a ‘baffling, ultimately insoluble crystallization of conflict articulated along opposing lines of interpretation’.”
― Gurcharan Das, The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma

“Commerce they say, encourages the bourgeois virtues of thrift, hard work,self -reliance,and self discipline.”
― Gurcharan Das, India Unbound: The Social and Economic Revolution from Independence to the Global Information Age

“Yudhishthira taught me that moral integrity begins with the awareness of other human beings. The reality of others looms large in Yudhishthira’s consciousness—it is the shining feature of his personality,”
― Gurcharan Das, The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma

“Yudhishthira answers Yaksha's question - what is man? by saying, 'The repute of a good deed touches heaven and earth; one is called a man as long as his repute lasts.”
― Gurcharan Das, The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma

“Customs inspectors could not stop the export of software through telephone lines; labour inspectors could not stop software engineers from talking to customers in America at night; excise inspectors could not harass the IT firms because the government did not levy tax on services. Much like Gurgaon, India’s knowledge economy literally grew at night when the government slept.”
― Gurcharan Das, India Grows At Night

“By deceiving Drona, Yudhishthira corrupts his teacher's relationship with the world. So do we every time we lie - we corrupt the 'other' in the same way.”
― Gurcharan Das, The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma

“The concept of dharma evolved over time, its meaning shifting from a ‘ritual ethics of deeds’ to a more personal virtue based on one’s conscience.”
― Gurcharan Das, The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma

“What matters in the end is conduct, not belief.”
― Gurcharan Das, The Dilemma of an Indian Liberal

“Modern India is a product of Hindu tradition, the religion of Islam, and Western civilization.”
― Gurcharan Das, India Unbound

“I have learned that the Mahabharata is about the way we deceive ourselves, how we are false to others, how we oppress fellow human beings, and how deeply unjust we are in our day-to-day lives. But is this moral blindness an intractable human condition, or can we change it? Some of our misery is the result of the way the state also treats us, and can we redesign our institutions to have a more sympathetic government?”
― Gurcharan Das, The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma

“ahimsa paramo dharma’, ‘non-violence is the highest dharma’.59”
― Gurcharan Das, The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma

“The envy I encountered in the business world, however, was nothing compared to what I would see later in the academic world. ‘The reason academic politics are so bitter is that so little is at stake,’ Henry Kissinger was fond of saying.59 There is a certain misery attached to the academic life, no doubt, in which envy plays a considerable part. As Max Weber noted, ‘Do you think that, year after year, you will be able to stand to see one mediocrity after another promoted over you, and still not become embittered and dejected? Of course, the answer is always: “Naturally, I live only for my calling." Only in a very few cases have I found [young academics] able to undergo it without suffering spiritual damage.’60”
― Gurcharan Das, The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma

“Be intent on the action,
not on the fruits of action.2”
― Gurcharan Das, The Difficulty of Being Good

“envy is a sin of socialism, greed is the failing of capitalism”
― Gurcharan Das, The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma

“people do, in fact, act against their moral convictions and this is an unhappy fact about ourselves’.”
― Gurcharan Das, The Difficulty of Being Good