Shashi Tharoor > Quotes

“India is not, as people keep calling it, an underdeveloped country, but rather, in the context of its history and cultural heritage, a highly developed one in an advanced state of decay.”
― Shashi Tharoor

“India shaped my mind, anchored my identity, influenced my beliefs, and made me who I am. ... India matters to me and I would like to matter to India.”
― Shashi Tharoor

“There is not a thing as the wrong place, or the wrong time. We are where we are at the only time we have. Perhaps it's where we're meant to be.”
― Shashi Tharoor, Riot

“The sun never set on the British empire, an Indian nationalist later sardonically commented, because even God couldn’t trust the Englishman in the dark”
― Shashi Tharoor, An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

“On Gandhi: Don’t ever forget, that we were not lead by a saint with his head in clouds, but by a master tactician with his feet on the ground.”
― Shashi Tharoor

“Everything is recycled in India, even dreams.”
― Shashi Tharoor

“In India we celebrate the commonality of major differences; we are a land of belonging rather than of blood.”
― Shashi Tharoor

“The British are the only people in history crass enough to have made revolutionaries out of Americans.”
― Shashi Tharoor

“Hindu fundamentalism is a contradiction in terms, since Hinduism is a religion without fundamentals; there is no such thing as a Hindu heresy. How dare a bunch of goondas shrink the soaring majesty of the Vedas and the Upanishads to the petty bigotry of their brand of identity politics?”
― Shashi Tharoor, India: From Midnight to the Millennium and Beyond

“Western dictionaries define secularism as absence of religion but Indian secularism does not mean irreligiousness.It means profusion of religions.”
― Shashi Tharoor

“If America is a melting-pot, then to me India is a thali, a selection of sumptuous dishes in different bowls. Each tastes different, and does not necessarily mix with the next, but they belong together on the same plate, and they complement each other in making the meal a satisfying repast.”
― Shashi Tharoor, Bookless in Baghdad: Reflections on Writing and Writers

“A philosopher is a lover of wisdom, not of knowledge, which for all its great uses ultimately suffers from the crippling effect of ephemerality. All knowledge is transient linked to the world around it and subject to change as the world changes, whereas wisdom, true wisdom is eternal immutable. To be philosophical one must love wisdom for its own sake, accept its permanent validity and yet its perpetual irrelevance. It is the fate of the wise to understand the process of history and yet never to shape it.”
― Shashi Tharoor

“The only possible idea of India is that of a nation greater than the sum of its parts.”
― Shashi Tharoor

“Great discoveries, Ganapathi, are often the result of making the wrong mistake at the right time.”
― Shashi Tharoor, The Great Indian Novel

“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.”
― Shashi Tharoor, An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

“Why does man need bread? To survive. But why survive if it is only to eat more bread? To live is more than just to sustain life - it is to enrich, and be enriched by, life.”
― Shashi Tharoor, Bookless in Baghdad: Reflections on Writing and Writers

“Bombs and bullets alone cannot destroy India, because Indians will pick their way through the rubble and carry on as they have done throughout history.”
― Shashi Tharoor, Pax Indica: India and the World of the Twenty-first Century

“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’. ‘The”
― Shashi Tharoor, An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

“If you believe in truth and cared enough to obtain it, you had to be prepared actively to suffer for it.”
― Shashi Tharoor

“India is my country, and in that sense my outrage is personal.”
― Shashi Tharoor, An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

“I do not look to history to absolve my country of the need to do things right today. Rather I seek to understand the wrongs of yesterday, both to grasp what has brought us to our present reality and to understand the past for itself. The past is not necessarily a guide to the future, but it does partly help explain the present. One cannot, as I have written elsewhere, take revenge upon history; history is its own revenge. One”
― Shashi Tharoor, An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

“The Mahabharata declares, 'What is here is nowhere else; what is not here, is nowhere.”
― Shashi Tharoor, Bookless in Baghdad: Reflections on Writing and Writers

“Indians paid, in other words, for the privilege of being conquered by the British.”
― Shashi Tharoor, An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

“When we kill people, we feel compelled to pretend that it is for some higher cause. It is this pretence of virtue, I promise you, that will never be forgiven by history.”
― Shashi Tharoor, An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

“The joke is that one Bengali is a poet, two Bengalis is an argument, three Bengalis is a political party,”
― Shashi Tharoor, India Shastra: Reflections on the Nation in Our Time

“They say every dog has its day, Ganapathi, but for this terrier twilight came before tea-time.”
― Shashi Tharoor, The Great Indian Novel

“It was not just the maharajas who had to suffer: every Indian schoolchild must lament the influence of the British dress code on Indians—especially the tie as a permanent noose around the necks of millions of schoolchildren, in India’s sweltering heat, even today.”
― Shashi Tharoor, An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

“While he was alive, he was impossible to ignore; once he had gone, he was impossible to imitate.”
― Shashi Tharoor, The Great Indian Novel

“History, in any case, cannot be reduced to some sort of game of comparing misdeeds in different eras; each period must be judged in itself and for its own successes and transgressions. The”
― Shashi Tharoor, An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

“When an Englishman wants something, George Bernard Shaw observed, he never publicly admits to his wanting it; instead, his want is expressed as ‘a burning conviction that it is his moral and religious duty to conquer those who possess the thing he wants’. Durant is scathing about this pretence: ‘Hypocrisy was added to brutality, while the robbery went on.’ And”
― Shashi Tharoor, An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India