1
2
3
5
8
12
20
33
52
83
133
213
340
543
867
1384
2208
3346
3522
5443
5619
6757
7373
7374
7375
7376
7377
7581
8098
8422
8625
8752
8832
8882
8913
8932
8945
8953
8957
8960
8962
8963
8964
8965
▲
▼
| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 4a66aea | 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. | india past understanding wrongs | Shashi Tharoor | |
| 6dbde74 | 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." | colonialism colonisation exploitation history india | Shashi Tharoor | |
| 6492ab2 | 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.. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 46b1eba | Europe's history of trading relations with India is borne out in the writings of the ancient historians Herodotus, Pliny, Petronius and Ptolemy, and | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| b89107a | 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. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| c4c11fe | 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, | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 81e8e52 | 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: | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 65bf408 | 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 .. | civilization colonialism history | Shashi Tharoor | |
| 37818c1 | 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. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| a91e2ce | We have no word for "Nation" in our language." | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| b802310 | 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. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| fbd1614 | 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 | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 6627499 | 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. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 2380134 | 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.. | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| b90b585 | there is nothing restrictive or self-limiting about the Indian identity it reasserts: it is large, eclectic and flexible, containing multitudes. I | Shashi Tharoor | ||
| 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 | ||
| c795e84 | Adultery, perhaps only a mistake during good times, became a crime when the village needed food. | Maxine Hong Kingston | ||
| 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 |