Shashi Tharoor quotes - page 2

Partition, split of the nationalist movement didn't happen over ideology or geography. It happened on one key question – is religion the determinant of our nationhood. (Shashi Tharoor)
Secularism as principle and practice is in danger, but I do not see it falling anytime soon: India embodies tolerance and pluralism in its very essence, and I do not believe that forces of hatred can permanently overcome our fundamental secularism. View quote
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. View quote
Shashi Tharoor
The vehicles of human politics seem to run off course, but the site of the accident turns out to have been the intended destination. View quote
Shashi Tharoor
Bureaucracy is simultaneously the most crippling of Indian diseases and the highest of Indian art forms. View quote
Shashi Tharoor
On "Priya Duryodhani": She was a slight frail girl, with a thin tapering face like kernel of a mango and dark-brown eyebrows that nearly joined together over high-ridged nose, giving her to look of a desiccated school teacher at an age when she was barely old enough to enroll at school. She had dark and lustrous eyes. They shone from that finished face like blazing gems on a fading backcloth, flashing, questioning. View quote
Shashi Tharoor
The British had the gall to call Robert Clive 'Clive of India' as if he belonged to the country, when all he really did was to ensure that much of the country belonged to him. View quote
Shashi Tharoor
The pluralism and the linguistic diversity of India is something of which we can truly be proud. View quote
Shashi Tharoor
If America is a melting pot, then to me India is a thali -- a collection of sumptuous dishes in different bowls. Each may not mix with the next, but they combine on your palate to produce a satisfying repast. View quote
Shashi Tharoor
How easily we Indians see the several sides to every question! That is what makes us such good bureaucrats, and such poor totalitarians. They say the new international organizations set up by the wonderfully optimistic (if oxymoronic) United Nations are full of highly successful Indian officials with quick, subtle minds and mellifluous tongues, for ever able to understand every global crisis from the point of view of each and every one of the contending parties. That is why they do so well, Ganapathi, in any situation that calls for an instinctive awareness of the subjectivity of truth, the relativity of judgement and the impossibility of action. View quote
Shashi Tharoor
We all have multiple identities in India; we are all minorities in India. Our heterogeneity is definitional. (Shashi Tharoor)
Basic truth about the colonies, Heaslop. Any time there's trouble, you can put it down to books. Too many of the wrong ideas getting into the heads of the wrong sorts of people. If ever the Empire comes to ruin, Heaslop, mark my words, the British publisher will be to blame. View quote
Shashi Tharoor
Pluralist India must, by definition, tolerate plural expressions of its many identities. View quote
Shashi Tharoor
There is, in short no end to the story of life. There are merely pauses. The end is the arbitrary intervention of the teller, but there can be no finality about the choice. Today's end is, after all tomorrow's beginning. View quote
Shashi Tharoor
If India had a Latin version of the American motto E Pluribus Unum, it would be E Pluribus Pluribum. View quote
Shashi Tharoor
Our founding fathers wrote a constitution for a dream. We have given passports to their ideals. View quote
Shashi Tharoor
I don't go by my caste, creed or religion. My works speak for me. View quote
Shashi Tharoor
The notion of 'world leadership' is a curiously archaic one. The very phrase is redolent of Kipling ballads and James Bondian adventures. What makes a country a world leader? Is it population, in which case India is on course to top the charts, overtaking China as the world's most populous country by 2034? View quote
Shashi Tharoor
I was not blinded by faith, but the encounter was indeed astonishing at several levels. In our private talk, Sai Baba uttered insights about my family and myself that he could not possibly have known....He waved his hand in the air and opened his palm. In it nestled a gold ring with nine embedded stones, a navratan. He slipped it on my finger, remarking, "See how well it fits. Even a goldsmith would have needed to measure your finger." View quote
Shashi Tharoor
What is most important to me is Jawaharlal Nehru's idea of India, India as a pluralist society and polity, an idea which is central to India's survival, which has held now in the four decades after his death and which is all the more in need of defending. View quote
Shashi Tharoor
In building an Indian nation that takes account of the country's true Hindu heritage, we have to return to the pluralism of the national movement. (Shashi Tharoor)
Western dictionaries define secularism as absence of religion but Indian secularism does not mean irreligiousness.It means profusion of religions. View quote
Shashi Tharoor
Im not a techno-determinist. I believe we need to improve our existing human resources, and technology can only be a complement. View quote
Shashi Tharoor
When you ask, rightly, why is today's Muslim feeling offended when Ghazni or Ghori are denounced, the answer is because it is instrumentalised to demonise them today. View quote
Shashi Tharoor