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Link	Quote	Stars	Tags	Author
2958870	had exported an average of PS13,000,000 worth of goods to Britain each year from 1835 to 1872 with no corresponding return of money; in fact, payments to people residing in Britain, whether profits to Company shareholders, dividends to railway investors or pensions to retired officials, made up a loss of PS30 million a year.			Shashi Tharoor
da3b621	When an Englishman wants something, George Bernard Shaw observed, he never publicly admits to his wanting it; instead, his want is expressed as 'a burning conviction that it is his moral and religious duty to conquer those who possess the thing he wants'. Durant is scathing about this pretence: 'Hypocrisy was added to brutality, while the robbery went on.' And			Shashi Tharoor
7b9e91e	Throughout the decades after Independence, the political culture of the country reflected these 'secular' assumptions and attitudes. Though the Indian population was 80 per cent Hindu and the country had been partitioned as a result of a demand for a separate Muslim homeland, three of India's eleven presidents were Muslims; so were innumerable governors, cabinet ministers, chief ministers of states, ambassadors, generals, and Supreme Court ..			Shashi Tharoor
36de16b	alienated			Shashi Tharoor
4b5bded	Indeed there were outstanding examples of good governance in India at the time, notably the Travancore kingdom, which in 1819 became the			Shashi Tharoor
e6e9fd5	History, in any case, cannot be reduced to some sort of game of comparing misdeeds in different eras; each period must be judged in itself and for its own successes and transgressions.			Shashi Tharoor
4889050	flaunting the Kohinoor on the Queen Mother's crown in the Tower of London is a powerful reminder of the injustices perpetrated by the former imperial power. Until it is returned--at least as a symbolic gesture of expiation--it will remain evidence of the loot, plunder and misappropriation that colonialism was really all about. Perhaps that is the best argument for leaving the Kohinoor where it emphatically does not belong--in British hands.		india kohinoor	Shashi Tharoor
77a501d	The British tended to base their refusal to intervene in famines with adequate governmental measures on a combination of three sets of considerations: free trade principles (do not interfere with market forces), Malthusian doctrine (growth in population beyond the ability of the land to sustain it would inevitably lead to deaths, thereby restoring the 'correct' level of population) and financial prudence (don't spend money we haven't budget..			Shashi Tharoor
0054bff	What the hell does this say about India? Appearances are more important than truths. Gossip is more potent than facts. Loyalty is all one way, from the woman to the man. And when society stacks up all the odds against a woman, she'd better not count on the man's support. She has no way out other than to end her own life. And I'm in love with an Indian. I must be crazy.		gossip india love rumors	Shashi Tharoor
9e70c37	As someone once said about water pollution, we all live downstream. We are all interconnected, and we can no longer afford the luxury of not thinking about the rest of the planet in anything we do.			Shashi Tharoor
6f3a74a	minorityhood is a state of mind, Mr. Diggs. It is a sense of powerlessness, of being out of the mainstream, of being here on sufferance. I refuse to let others define me that way. I tell my fellow Muslims: No one can make you a minority without your consent.		minority religions	Shashi Tharoor
0e0f8e5	One American newspaper wholesaler told The New York Times that the Indians "basically replaced the old Jewish and Italian merchants and they've filled a tremendous void because nobody will put in the fourteen and sixteen-hour days that they do quite willingly and that you have to put in when running a newsstand."			Shashi Tharoor
6e9ca0c	Truth is elusive, subtle, manysided. You know, Priscilla, there's an old Hindu story about Truth. It seems a brash young warrior sought the hand of a beautiful princess. Her father, the king, thought he was a bit too cocksure and callow. He decreed that the warrior could only marry the princess after he had found Truth. So the warrior set out into the world on a quest for Truth. He went to temples and monasteries, to mountaintops where sage..		reality truth	Shashi Tharoor
3e45856	How do I pray? Not in any organized form, really; I go to temples sometimes with my family, but they leave me cold. I think of prayer as something intensely personal, a way of reaching my hands out towards my maker. I recite some mantras my parents taught me as a child; there is something reassuring about those ancient words, hallowed by use and repetition over thousands of years.		prayer religion temples	Shashi Tharoor
d17b919	Human beings, to me, are rather like electrical appliances that need to be charged regularly, and prayer is a way of plugging into that charge.		prayer religion	Shashi Tharoor
8ae633d	Hindu fundamentalism," because Hinduism is a religion without fundamentals: no organized church, no compulsory beliefs or rites of worship, no single sacred book. The name itself denotes something less, and more, than a set of theological beliefs. In many languages -- French and Persian amongst them -- the word for "Indian" is "Hindu." Originally "Hindu" simply meant the people beyond the river Sindhu, or Indus. But the Indus is now in Isla..		india religion	Shashi Tharoor
4dc6640	a highly developed country of the past, in an advanced state of decay).			Shashi Tharoor
5206d96	My China Diary and Walking With Lions, were memoirs of his diplomatic and political experiences. The			Shashi Tharoor
4cb3973	Our present concept of morality isn't really Hindu at all; it is a legacy both of the Muslim invasion and of the superimposition of Victorian prudery on a people already puritanized by purdah.			Shashi Tharoor
62f54a0	control. The people's character is deliberately debased, their mind is denationalized and perpetually kept in ignorance and fed with stories of England's greatness and 'mission' in the world... As Pankaj Mishra has observed: European subordination of Asia was not merely economic and political and military. It was also intellectual and moral and spiritual: a completely different kind of conquest than had been witnessed before, which			Shashi Tharoor
e0904a2	the Bengali intellectual and author of the bestselling Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (1951), with its cringe-worthy dedication to the British empire in India: To			Shashi Tharoor
c8e6e50	crushes the adventurous, the brave, the sensitive, and encourages the timid, the opportunist and time-serving, the sneak and the bully. It surrounds itself with			Shashi Tharoor
e9e270b	1891, a journalist from the Amrita Bazar Patrika managed to rummage through the wastepaper basket at the office of Viceroy Lord Lansdowne. There he found the fragments of a torn-up letter, which with great enterprise he managed to piece together. The letter contained explosive news, revealing as it did in considerable detail the viceroy's plans to annex the Hindu Maharaja-ruled Muslim-majority state of Jammu & Kashmir. To the consternation ..			Shashi Tharoor
ca80f38	Personally, I am far from convinced that the British system is suited to India. The parliamentary democracy we have adopted involves the British perversity of electing a legislature to form an executive: this has created a unique breed of legislator, largely unqualified to legislate, who has sought election only in order to wield (or influence) executive power. It has produced governments obliged to focus more on politics than on policy or ..			Shashi Tharoor
73a474d	history is neither for excuses nor for revenge 1.			Shashi Tharoor
90ff70c	Historian John Keay put it best: 'The conduct of states, as of individuals, can only be assessed by the standards of their age, not by today's litigious criteria. Otherwise, we'd all be down on the government of Italy for feeding Christians to the lions.			Shashi Tharoor
12c5680	Indeed, the best form of atonement by the British might be, as Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has suggested, to start teaching unromanticized colonial history in British schools.			Shashi Tharoor
a53201b	The past is not necessarily a guide to the future, but it does partly help explain the present. One cannot, as I have written elsewhere, take revenge upon history; history is its own revenge.			Shashi Tharoor
71d93b4	Brutish' as an acceptable substitute for 'British' rule in India!			Shashi Tharoor
d547258	Britain is no longer 'Thatcherite', though in the aftermath of 'Brexit', it may even be worse. The need to temper British imperial nostalgia with postcolonial responsibility has never been greater.			Shashi Tharoor
b50cd68	The little court disappears--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.			Shashi Tharoor
597969f	The India that the British East India Company conquered was no primitive or barren land, but the glittering jewel of the medieval world.			Shashi Tharoor
41068b4	Above all, as a Hindu I belong to the only major religion in the world that does not claim to be the only true religion. I find it immensely congenial to be able to face my fellow human beings of other faiths without being burdened by the conviction that I am embarked upon a "true path" that they have missed."		india religion	Shashi Tharoor
bd40e74	The parliamentary democracy we have adopted involves the British perversity of electing a legislature to form an executive: this has created a unique breed of legislator, largely unqualified to legislate, who has sought election only in order to wield (or influence) executive power. It has produced governments obliged to focus more on politics than on policy or performance. It has distorted the voting preferences of an electorate that knows..			Shashi Tharoor
4c54112	Mahatma Gandhi was as devout a Rambhakt as you can get -- he died from a Hindu assassin's bullet with the words "He Ram" on his lips -- but he always said that for him, Ram and Rahim were the same deity, and that if Hinduism ever taught hatred of Islam or of non-Hindus, "it is doomed to destruction."		india islam religion	Shashi Tharoor
2599c4c	India's villages were not self-reliant republics that lived in blissful isolation. They were networked and connected, and it was the destruction of Indian industry that forced people to retreat and focus on farming,			Shashi Tharoor
96475e4	The destruction of artisanal industries by colonial trade policies did not just impact the artisans themselves. The British monopoly of industrial production drove Indians to agriculture beyond levels the land could sustain. This in turn had a knock-on effect on the peasants who worked the land, by causing an influx of newly disenfranchised people, formerly artisans, who drove down rural wages. In many rural families, women had spun and wov..			Shashi Tharoor
2662e6f	When an Englishman wants something, he never publicly admits to his wanting it; instead, his want is expressed as a 'burning conviction that it is his moral and religious duty to conquer those who possess the thing he wants			Shashi Tharoor
9b211e0	It is a bit rich for the Brits to suppress, exploit, imprison, torture and maim a people for 200 years and then celebrate the fact that they are democratic at the end of it. We weren't given democracy, we had to snatch it from your hands			Shashi Tharoor
b0eea20	History belongs to the past, but understanding it is the duty of the present			Shashi Tharoor
66b9054	but it does not want			Shashi Tharoor
d17f4eb	As Henry Nevinson also pointed out, the rule of law, such as it was, functioned in a system in which Indians were 'compelled to live permanently under a system of official surveillance which reads their private letters, detains their telegrams, and hires men to watch their actions'. This, then, was the rule of law the British taught us. We have much to unlearn.			Shashi Tharoor
8e65680	The racism of the colonial state was also reflected in its penal code. The Criminal Tribes Legislation, 1911, gave authority to the British to restrict movement, search and even detain people from specific groups, because their members were deemed to be chronically engaging in 'criminal' activity. This was bad sociology and worse law, but it stayed on the books till after Independence. Worse, its effects were inhumane.			Shashi Tharoor
a93f5ec	The Hindu's first issue counted a grand total of eighty copies, printed with 'one rupee and eight annas' of borrowed money by a group of four law students and two teachers). In			Shashi Tharoor

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