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8313790
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Muslim sociologists and anthropologists have argued that Islam in rural India is more Indian than Islamic, in the sense that the faith as practiced by the ordinary Muslim villagers reflects the considerable degree of cultural assimilation that has occurred between Hindus and Muslims in their daily lives.
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Shashi Tharoor |
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bc152b3
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The principles he stood for and the way in which he asserted them were always easier to admire than to follow.
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Shashi Tharoor |
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3b3aee7
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Whosoever comes to me, through whatsoever form, I reach him; all men are struggling through paths which in the end lead to me.
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Shashi Tharoor |
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f5e23bc
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Jawaharlal Nehru's first Cabinet list set a standard that would never again be matched, while establishing a precedent for diversity that all his successors would strive to emulate. A
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Shashi Tharoor |
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c1c7703
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While he was alive, he was impossible to ignore; once he had gone, he was impossible to imitate. When
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Shashi Tharoor |
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4c238bc
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Twilight never lasts long in India, but its advent was like opening time at the pubs our rulers had left behind. The shadows fell and spirits rose; the sharp odour of quinine tonic, invented by lonely planters to drown and justify their solitary gins, mingled with the scent of frangipani from their leafy, insect-ridden gardens, and the soothing clink of ice against glass was only disturbed by the occasional slap of a frustrated palm against..
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Shashi Tharoor |
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516d4d9
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It is precisely faith that makes thinking possible, for faith offers the unthought ground out of which thinking can emerge. It is faith that makes moral and other decisions possible, opening to us the horizon against which our actions become meaningful.
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Shashi Tharoor |
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d30e7c2
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Colonialism was made possible, and then sustained and strengthened, as much by cultural technologies of rule as it was by the more obvious and brutal modes of conquest that first established power on foreign shores... Colonialism was itself a cultural project of control.
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Shashi Tharoor |
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5d3c252
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Like most Hindus, I think I have. I am, as I told you, a believer, despite a brief period of schoolboy atheism -- of the kind that comes with the discovery of rationality and goes with an acknowledgement of its limitations.
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Shashi Tharoor |
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4996660
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The assumption on the part of most Indian political parties that overt friendship with Israel would cost its advocates dearly at the Indian ballot box remains a strong factor, especially when elections loom in states with a significant number of Muslim voters. It did not help that pro-Israeli stances were, in the early years, advocated only by the communally minded Hindu chauvinist party the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, which used support for Isra..
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Shashi Tharoor |
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6ffe1e7
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When a marauder destroys your house and takes away your cash and jewellery , his responsibility for his actions far exceeds that of the servant who opened door to him, whether out of fear, cupidity or because he simply he didn't know any better.
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history-politics
politics
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Shashi Tharoor |
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f57b2d3
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equal
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Shashi Tharoor |
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579fad5
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Forget heaven and hell, yaar," he says as he leaves. "It's purgatory I'm concerned about. We call it Earth."
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Shashi Tharoor |
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6c17fd8
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We carry with us the weight of the past, and because we do not have a finely developed sense of history and historicism, it is a past that is still alive in our present. We wear the dust of history on our foreheads, and the mud of the future on our feet.
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Shashi Tharoor |
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0c5f405
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The historian A. J. P. Taylor calls the massacre 'the decisive moment when Indians were alienated from British rule'. No other 'punishment' in the name of law and order had similar casualties: 'The Peterloo Massacre had claimed about eleven lives. Across the Atlantic, British soldiers provoked into firing on Boston Commons had killed five men and were accused of deliberate massacre. In response to the self-proclaimed Easter Rebellion of ..
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Shashi Tharoor |
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961fd81
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The naval expansionism of the southern Chola and Pallava empires took Indian influences directly to Thailand, Malaya, Indonesia and Cambodia. Later,
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Shashi Tharoor |
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2958195
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Pakistan was created by Jinnah's will and Britain's willingness'--not by Nehru's wilfulness.
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Shashi Tharoor |
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489dd7f
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The British did little, very little, of such things. They basked in the Indian sun and yearned for their cold and fog-ridden homeland; they sent the money they had taken off the perspiring brow of the Indian worker to England; and whatever little they did for India, they ensured India paid for it in excess. And at the end of it all, they went home to enjoy their retirements in damp little cottages with Indian names, their alien rest cushion..
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Shashi Tharoor |
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f9fcb7a
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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, semi-feudal realm, riven by religious factionalism and barely able to feed its illiterate, diseased and stinking masses. The first nation was ..
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Shashi Tharoor |
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8a1aec7
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The British conquest of India was the invasion and destruction of a high civilization by a trading company [the British East India Company] utterly without scruple or principle, careless of art and greedy of gain, over-running with fire and sword a country temporarily disordered and helpless, bribing and murdering, annexing and stealing, and beginning that career of illegal and 'legal' plunder which has now [1930] gone on ruthlessly for one..
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Shashi Tharoor |
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5a32349
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Indeed there were outstanding examples of good governance in India at the time, notably the Travancore kingdom, which in 1819 became the first government in the world to decree universal, compulsory and free primary education for both boys and girls.) The British charges against the rulers they
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Shashi Tharoor |
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2d4d7cf
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India is my country, and in that sense my outrage is personal. But I seek nothing from history--only an account of itself.
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Shashi Tharoor |
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fbd78c7
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Hinduism as a faith might espouse tolerance, this does not necessarily mean that all Hindus behave tolerantly.
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Shashi Tharoor |
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16f9186
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If you believed in truth and cared enough to obtain it, Ganga affirmed, you had to be prepared actively to suffer for it. It was essential to accept punishment willingly in order to demonstrate the strength of one's convictions. That
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Shashi Tharoor |
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c3dca14
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The British public is woefully ignorant of the realities of the British empire, and what it meant to its subject peoples.
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Shashi Tharoor |
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5b13211
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As Manu S. Pillai acidly observes, 'In other words, there is nothing a quiet ghar wapsi cannot solve when it comes to the building of a good dharmocracy.'90
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Shashi Tharoor |
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c2fb33c
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I, for one, dearly hope that a British prime minister will find the heart, and the spirit, to get on his or her knees at Jallianwala Bagh in 2019 and beg forgiveness from Indians in the name of his or her people for the unforgivable massacre
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Shashi Tharoor |
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76aad71
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One of the more difficult questions I used to find myself being asked as a United Nations official, especially when I had been addressing a generalist audience, was: What is the single most important thing that can be done to improve the world?... If I had to pick one thing we must do above all else, I now offer a two-word mantra: "Educate girls." --
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girls
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Shashi Tharoor |
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0d7664f
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But in looking to understand the forces that have made us and nearly unmade us, and in hoping to recognize possible future sources of conflict in the new millennium, we have to realize that sometimes the best crystal ball is a rear-view mirror.
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Shashi Tharoor |
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4a66aea
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I do not look to history to absolve my country of the need to do things right today. 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.
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india
past
understanding
wrongs
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Shashi Tharoor |
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6dbde74
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With the absorption of each native state, the (East India) company official John Sullivan observed in 1840s: "The little court disappears--the capital decays--trade languishes--the capital decays--the people are impoverished--the Englishman flourishes, and acts like a sponge, drawing up riches from the banks of the Ganges, and squeezing them down upon the banks of the Thames."
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colonialism
colonisation
exploitation
history
india
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Shashi Tharoor |
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6492ab2
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There were other well-known Indian supporters of Empire, most notably the Bengali intellectual and unabashed Anglophile, Nirad C. Chaudhuri, who in a series of books extolled the virtues of the British empire and lamented its passing. (We will discuss specific examples later in this book.) Many ordinary Indians, too, went along with the British; many never felt they had a choice in the matter. But when a marauder destroys your house and tak..
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Shashi Tharoor |
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46b1eba
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Europe's history of trading relations with India is borne out in the writings of the ancient historians Herodotus, Pliny, Petronius and Ptolemy, and
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Shashi Tharoor |
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b89107a
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The path-breaking writer and thinker on nationalism, Benedict Anderson, has convincingly pointed out that identities uniting large numbers of people could arise only after a certain technological level had been attained.
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Shashi Tharoor |
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c4c11fe
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the word 'Hindu' did not exist in any Indian language till its use by foreigners gave Indians a term for self-definition. Hindus, in other words, call themselves by a label that they didn't invent themselves in any of their own languages, but adopted cheerfully when others began to refer to them by that word. (Of course, many prefer a different term altogether--Sanatana Dharma,
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Shashi Tharoor |
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81e8e52
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Hinduism professes no false certitudes. Its capacity to express wonder at Creation and simultaneously scepticism about the omniscience of the Creator are unique to Hinduism. Both are captured beautifully in this verse from the 3,500-year-old Rig Veda, the Nasadiya Sukta or Creation Hymn:
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Shashi Tharoor |
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65bf408
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As we embark upon the twenty-first century, it seems ironically clear that tomorrow's anarchy might still be due, in no small part, to yesterday's colonial attempts at order. I have no wish to give those politicians in postcolonial countries whose leadership has been found wanting in the present, any reason to find excuses for their failures in the past. But in looking to understand the forces that have made us and nearly unmade us, and in ..
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civilization
colonialism
history
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Shashi Tharoor |
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37818c1
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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.
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Shashi Tharoor |
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a91e2ce
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We have no word for "Nation" in our language."
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Shashi Tharoor |
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b802310
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The Indian tricolour was raised just before sunset, and as it fluttered up the flagpole a late-monsoon rainbow emerged behind it, a glittering tribute from the heavens.
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Shashi Tharoor |
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fbd1614
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The fact that Nehru had risked his life to save a single Moslem had a profound effect far beyond New Delhi. Many thousands of Moslems who had intended to flee to Pakistan now stayed in India, staking their lives on Nehru's ability to protect them and assure them justice. In
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Shashi Tharoor |
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6627499
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My friend Keerthik Sasidharan suggested to me, in twenty-first-century terms, that Hinduism is analogous to an open-source operating system on top of which others can build applications to be deployed in the receptive hardware of human brains. All Hinduism demands before the formation of any belief is analytical and logical consistency. Even the existence of God is subject to this test.
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Shashi Tharoor |
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2380134
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Then there was neither non-existence nor existence, Then there was neither space, nor the sky beyond. What covered it? Where was it? What sheltered it? Was there water, in depths unfathomed? Then there was neither death nor immortality Nor was there then the division between night and day. That One breathed, breathlessly and self-sustaining. There was that One then, and there was no other. In the beginning there was only darkness, veiled in..
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Shashi Tharoor |
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b90b585
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there is nothing restrictive or self-limiting about the Indian identity it reasserts: it is large, eclectic and flexible, containing multitudes. I
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Shashi Tharoor |