Shashi Tharoor
Official candidate of India for the succession to United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 2006, and came a close second out of seven contenders in the race.
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 make no bones about the fact that India matters to me, and I would like to matter to India.
Ultimately, what matters in determining the validity of a nation is the will of its inhabitants to live and strive together.
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.
No Indian nationalist leader ever needed to say: We have created India; now all we need to do is to create Indians.
The pluralism and the linguistic diversity of India is something of which we can truly be proud.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Freedom of the press is the mortar that binds together the bricks of democracy -- and it is also the open window embedded in those bricks. -- Speech at the UN's World Press Freedom Day, 3 May 2001