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39c6c19
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history is neither for excuses nor for revenge
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Shashi Tharoor |
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96f461f
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So Britain would fight Germany for doing to Poland what Britain had been doing to India for nearly two hundred years.
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Shashi Tharoor |
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3e36fe3
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Tolerance, after all, implies that you have the truth, but will generously indulge another who does not; you will, in an act of tolerance, allow him the right to be wrong. Acceptance, on the other hand, implies that you have a truth but the other person may also have a truth; that you accept his truth and respect it, while expecting him to respect (and accept) your truth in turn. This practice of acceptance of difference--the idea that othe..
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Shashi Tharoor |
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754abf4
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In August 1765, the young and weakened Mughal emperor, Shah Alam II, was browbeaten into issuing a diwani that replaced his own revenue officials in the provinces of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa with the Company's. An international corporation with its own private army and princes paying deference to it had now officially become a revenue-collecting enterprise. India would never be the same again.
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Shashi Tharoor |
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84022bb
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historian William Dalrymple quotes a Mughal official named Narayan Singh as asking after 1765, 'when we have to take orders from a handful of traders who have not yet learned to wash their bottoms?
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Shashi Tharoor |
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2e0373a
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The soldiers of the East India Company obliged, systematically smashing the looms of some Bengali weavers and, according to at least one contemporary account (as well as widespread, if unverifiable, belief), breaking their thumbs so they could not ply their craft.
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Shashi Tharoor |
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eb454e9
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Islam came to Kerala not by the sword, as it did in northern India, but through traders, travellers and missionaries, who brought its message of equality and brotherhood to the coastal people.
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Shashi Tharoor |
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39d0f25
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India, under Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, accounts for 27 per cent of the world economy.
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Shashi Tharoor |
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2c19659
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the British economic historian Angus Maddison has demonstrated, India's share of the world economy was 23 per cent, as large as all of Europe put together. (It had been 27 per cent in 1700, when the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb's treasury raked in PS100 million in tax revenues alone.) By the time the British departed India, it had dropped to just over 3 per cent.
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Shashi Tharoor |
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db48a2a
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At Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, his own favorite, Lance would pray for our connecting flights to be delayed so that he could have even longer in the arcade, shooting down monsters and dragons with no regard for jet lag. How wonderful it is to have your monsters and dragons on a screen in front of you, to be destroyed by the press of a button, and not inside your heart as mine are, hammering away at your soul.
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Shashi Tharoor |
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10cf01f
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The manipulation of currency, throughout a feature of the colonial enterprise, reached its worst during the Great Depression of 1929-30, when Indian farmers (like those in the North American prairies) grew their grain but discovered no one could afford to buy it. Agricultural prices collapsed, but British tax demands did not; and cruelly, the British decided to restrict India's money supply, fearing that the devaluation of Indian currency w..
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Shashi Tharoor |
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003d21f
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When Jamsetji Tata tried to set up India's first modern steel mill in the face of implacable British hostility at the turn of the century (he began petitioning the British for permission in 1883, and raised money from Indian investors; after repeated denials and delays it finally began production in 1912 under his son Dorabji), a senior imperial official sneered that he would personally eat every ounce of steel an Indian was capable of prod..
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Shashi Tharoor |
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9c26e8a
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the cricketer-prince Ranjitsinhji obliged his peasantry, in the midst of a crippling drought, to contribute to the British coffers during World War I; and as his state choked in the grip of famine, he literally burned up a month's revenues in a fireworks display for a visiting viceroy.
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Shashi Tharoor |
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2ea762d
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Babington
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Shashi Tharoor |
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cd2f00c
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Few women, Ganapathi, fail to be excited by the thought of producing children from different men; it is the ultimate assertion of their creative power. Fortunately for mankind, however, or perhaps unfortunately, fewer still have the courage to put their fantasy into practice.)
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Shashi Tharoor |
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bc21e38
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British cartography defined spaces the better to rule them; the map became an instrument of colonial control. Even the valuable British legacy, the museum, was devised in furtherance of the imperial project because here objects, artefacts and symbols could be appropriated, named, labelled, arranged, ordered, classified and thus controlled, exactly as the people could be.
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Shashi Tharoor |
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6fc0cc5
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Great discoveries, Ganapathi, are often the result of making the wrong mistake at the right time. Ask Columbus.
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Shashi Tharoor |
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9934103
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In this Ferguson is at least living up to the ethos of the colonial project, which primarily benefited the European imperialists in material, moral and intellectual terms. Imperialism elevated European notions of humanity to predominance in the world, posited the white male as the apotheosis of the ideal of the Enlightenment, and did so by fiat and military power. In the process imperial historians wrote the 'history' of their subject peopl..
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Shashi Tharoor |
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8fbbfa1
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The British, representing a democracy with a free press and conscious of their international image, were susceptible to such shaming. But in Mahatma Gandhi's own day non-violence could have done nothing for the Jews of Hitler's Germany, who disappeared into gas chambers far from the flashbulbs of a war-obsessed press. It is ironically to the credit of the British Raj that it faced an opponent like Mahatma Gandhi and allowed him to succeed. ..
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Shashi Tharoor |
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c8bd2fd
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Holocaust.
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Shashi Tharoor |
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f794bfa
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simple logic of colonialism, under which the rules of humanity applied only to the rulers, for the rulers were people and the people were objects. Objects to be controlled, disciplined, kept in their place and taught lessons like so many animals:
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Shashi Tharoor |
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1509af7
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Agood part of the British case for having created India's political unity and democracy lies in the evolution of three of democracy's building-blocks during the colonial era: a free press, an incipient parliamentary system and the rule of law. This trifecta, which India retains and has continued to develop in its own ways, existed in the colonial era, but with significant distortions, and is therefore worth examining.
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Shashi Tharoor |
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66dc0c7
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Those who have no sons rarely attach any importance to the priorities of those who do, but they resent them deeply.)
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Shashi Tharoor |
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8624907
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British under Clive defeat Nawab Siraj-ud-Daula to become rulers of Bengal, the richest province of India.
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Shashi Tharoor |
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ce90541
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Between opponents who will not physically fight, a punch line is equivalent to a punch.
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Shashi Tharoor |
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526e7cd
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We brought up our sons to 'eat everything', but their mixed genetic inheritance prevailed: one twin took to meat-eating with relish, while the other, at age seven, with no persuasion whatsoever from his father, turned staunchly vegetarian.
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Shashi Tharoor |
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22bcb07
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lack of preference is itself a preference. To put the true leaders of the people on the same level as princes and pretenders and pimps is not virtuous but vicious.
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Shashi Tharoor |
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cd7deed
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Who knows whence this creation had its origin? He, whether He fashioned it or whether He did not, He, who surveys it all from the highest heaven, He knows--or maybe even He does not know. -- Rig Veda, X.129 1 'Maybe even He does not know!' I love a faith that raises such a fundamental question about no less a Supreme Being than the Creator of the Universe Himself. Maybe He does not know, indeed. Who are we mere mortals to claim a knowledge ..
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india
religion
nationalism
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Shashi Tharoor |
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44d2138
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History belongs in the past; but understanding it is the duty of the present.
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Shashi Tharoor |
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aa96852
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It is true that a Hindu without a horoscope is like an American without a credit card, and is subject to many of the same disabilities.
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Shashi Tharoor |
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7c33a50
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Whereas an Akbar might have used such technologies to fuse his diverse people together, the British used them to separate, classify and divide.
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Shashi Tharoor |
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3007c97
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I need scarcely point out,
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Shashi Tharoor |
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45aeabf
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Trudeau's Willy Brandt moment needs to find its British echo.
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Shashi Tharoor |
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d19a238
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Dutch writer Ian Buruma saw as an attempt to remind the English 'of their collective dreams of Englishness, so glorious, so poignant, so bittersweet in the resentful seediness of contemporary little England.
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Shashi Tharoor |
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9528003
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The Atharva Veda points out that the quest for awareness, the search for answers, the journey towards self-realization, never ceases: How does the wind not cease to blow? How does the mind take no repose? Why do the waters, seeking to reach the truth, Never at any time cease to flow? --Atharva Veda, X.7.3731
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Shashi Tharoor |
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3ef7159
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One of the lessons you learn from history is that history sometimes teaches the wrong lessons.
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Shashi Tharoor |
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2efb4bb
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Pluralist India must, by definition, tolerate plural expressions of its many identities.
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Shashi Tharoor |
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5e93013
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The only possible idea of India is that of a nation greater than the sum of its parts.
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Shashi Tharoor |
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ca909da
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The pluralism and the linguistic diversity of India is something of which we can truly be proud.
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Shashi Tharoor |
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de8ecae
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Our founding fathers wrote a constitution for a dream. We have given passports to their ideals.
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Shashi Tharoor |
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a516c76
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India imposes no procrustean exactions on its citizens: you can be many things and one thing.
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Shashi Tharoor |
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bbc89f7
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If India had a Latin version of the American motto E Pluribus Unum, it would be E Pluribus Pluribum.
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Shashi Tharoor |
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da88627
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Extra judicial killings are not acceptable in a society of law.
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Shashi Tharoor |