Shashi Tharoor quotes

The idea of India is not based on language, not on geography, not on ethnicity and not on religion. The idea of India is of one land embracing many. You can be many things and one thing: you can be a good Keralite, a good Muslim and a good Indian all at once.

Like India herself, I am at home in hovels and palaces, Ganapathi, I trundle in bullock-carts and propel myself into space, I read the vedas and quote the laws of cricket. I move to the strains of a morning raga in perfect evening dress.

I went through a period of schoolboy atheism -- of the kind that comes with the discovery of rationality and goes with the realization of its limitations.

The UN is the place to draw up blueprints without borders. It is the one indispensable global organisation in our globalizing world. ... Shashi Tharoor, DNA India, November 12, 2005

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.

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.

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.

Indian nationalism is the nationalism of an idea, the idea of an ever-ever land, emerging from an ancient civilization, shaped by a shared history, sustained by pluralist democracy.

I had the misfortune of being good at studies, and I say that without any false modesty. Particularly in the Indian system, those who are good at taking exams tend to do well, doesn’t necessarily imply that they have fine minds.

The British are the only people in history crass enough to have made revolutionaries out of Americans.

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

Bureaucracy is simultaneously the most crippling of Indian diseases and the highest of Indian art forms.

The memories of the first Independence Day may have faded, but the power of that magical moment must never be forgotten.

We Indians are notoriously good at being resigned to our lot. Our fatalism goes beyond, even if it springs from, the Hindu acceptance of the world as it is ordained to be. I must tell you a little story - a marvellous fable from our puranas that illustrates our resilience and self-absorption in the face of circumstances. A man is pursued by a tiger. He runs fast, but his panting heart tells him that he cannot run much longer. He sees a tree. Relief! He accelerates and gets to it in one last despairing stride. He climbs the tree. The tiger snarls below him, but he feels that he has at last escaped its snapping jaws. But no - what’s this? The branch on which he is sitting is weak. That is not all: wood-mice are gnawing away at it: before long they will eat through it and it will snap and fall. The branch sags down over a well. Aha! Escape! Perhaps our hero can swim ? But the well is dry and there are snakes writhing and hissing on its bed. As the branch bends lower, he perceives a solitary blade of grass on wall of well. On top of the blade of grass gleams a drop of honey. What is our hero to do? What action does our puranic man quintessential Indian, take in the situation? He bends with the branch and licks up the honey.... What did you expect? Some neat solution to the problem? The tiger changes its mind and goes away? Amitabh Bachchan leaps to the rescue? Don’t be silly. One strength of Indian mind is that it knows some problems cannot be resolved and it learns to make best of them. That is the Indian answer to the insuperable difficulty. One does not fight against that by which one is certain to be overwhelmed; but one finds the best way, for oneself, to live with it. This is our national aesthetic. Without it, india as we know it could not survive.

Satire enables you to recast both the great ideas and great stories and great men in a light that is so unfamiliar that immediately provokes a fresh way of looking at them.

If India had a Latin version of the American motto E Pluribus Unum, it would be E Pluribus Pluribum.

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.

India has been born and reborn scores of times, and it will be reborn again. India is forever, and India is forever being made.

Of course, we meet to mourn that part of our human family that is missing -- to remember the individuals and tell each other their stories. But we also meet to unearth the lessons we can draw from their lives and their fates.… Shashi Tharoor, Under-Secretary-General, at the UN’s Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust, 29 January 2007.

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.