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.
Even though India has all the attributes of a great power,its most striking asset is actually its soft power. - Shashi Tharoor at the 2006 Hindustan Times Leadership Summit in New Delhi.
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.
India imposes no procrustean exactions on its citizens: you can be many things and one thing.
India is more than the sum of its contradictions. Any truism about India can be contradicted with another truism. There is no fixed stereotype. But even thinking about India makes clear the immensity of the nation-building challenge. - Shashi Tharoor at the PANIIT 2006 in Bombay.
We all have multiple identities in India; we are all minorities in India. Our heterogeneity is definitional.
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.
In India we celebrate the commonality of major differences; we are a land of belonging rather than of blood.
To write fiction you need not just time but a space inside your head -- to create and inhabit an alternative moral universe whose realities have to be consistent in your mind and as real to you as those you dealing with in daily life.
The Jesuits have developed an interesting vocation of educating the privileged of the third world.
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.
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.
The only possible idea of India is that of a nation greater than the sum of its parts.
The instinctive Indian sense that nothing begins and nothing ends. We are all living in an eternal present in which what was and what will be is contained in what is, or to put it in a more contemporary idiom, that life is a series of sequel to history.
Does NRI (Non-Resident Indian) stand for Not Really Indian or Never Relinquished India? I believe a little of both!