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born 1956 India
Shashi Tharoor (Malayalam: ശശി തരൂര്; Born 9 March 1956 in London) is an Indian politician, author, journalist, and a former diplomat who is currently serving as Member of Parliament, Lok Sabha from Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala since 2009. He also currently serves as Chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Technology.
Also known as: Tharoor, Shashi
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37 quotes
India shaped my mind, anchored my identity, influenced my beliefs, and made me who I am. ... India matters to me and I would like to matter to India.
India has been born and reborn scores of times, and it will be reborn again. India is forever, and India is forever being made.
The Great Indian Novel (1989)
In India we celebrate the commonality of major differences; we are a land of belonging rather than of blood.
Partition, split of the nationalist movement didn’t happen over ideology or geography. It happened on one key question – is religion the determinant of our nationhood.
When you ask, rightly, why is today's Muslim feeling offended when Ghazni or Ghori are denounced, the answer is because it is instrumentalised to demonise them today.
Our founding fathers wrote a constitution for a dream. We have given passports to their ideals.
This is my story of the India I know, with its biases, selections, omissions, distortions, all mine.... Every Indian must for ever carry with him, in his head and heart, his own history of India.
The Great Indian Novel (1989)
Every Hindu may not be conscious of the finer points of his faith, but he has been raised in the tradition of its assumptions and doctrines, even when these have not been explained to him. His Hinduism may be a Hinduism of habit rather than a Hinduism of learning, but it is a lived Hinduism for all that.
Why I Am a Hindu (2018)
As I told you, Ganapathi, I know a great deal about a great deal. Like India herself, I am at home in hovels and palaces, Ganapathi, I trundle in bullock-carts and propel myself into space. I read the vedas and quote the laws of cricket.
What is most important to me is Jawaharlal Nehru's idea of India, India as a pluralist society and polity, an idea which is central to India’s survival, which has held now in the four decades after his death and which is all the more in need of defending.
In India, history was pressed into the nation-building project. There was a desire to allay over some unpleasant details, the destruction of temples, some of the horrors that happened while stressing on the commonalities that also featured throughout the ages.
The British had the gall to call Robert Clive 'Clive of India' as if he belonged to the country, when all he really did was to ensure that much of the country belonged to him.
The Great Indian Novel (1989)
Secularism as principle and practice is in danger, but I do not see it falling anytime soon: India embodies tolerance and pluralism in its very essence, and I do not believe that forces of hatred can permanently overcome our fundamental secularism.
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.
The Great Indian Novel (1989)
To speak of Hindu fundamentalism, is a contradiction in terms, since Hinduism is a religion without fundamentals. To be an Indian Hindu is to be part of an elusive dream all share, a dream that fills our minds with sounds, words, flavours from many sources that we cannot easily identify.
If India had a Latin version of the American motto E Pluribus Unum, it would be E Pluribus Pluribum.
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.
The Great Indian Novel (1989)
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