Arun Shourie Quotes

Arun Shourie examines plain-spoken, critical views on history, identity and cultural clashes.

8 quotes

  1. In a word, no forcible conversions, no massacres, no destruction of temples. ... Muslim historians of those times are in raptures at the heap of Kafirs [sic] who have been dispatched to hell. Muslim historians are forever lavishing praise on the ruler for the temples he has destroyed, ... Law books like The Hedaya prescribe exactly the options to which these little textbooks alluded. All whitewashed away. Objective whitewash for objective history. And today if anyone seeks to restore truth to these textbooks, the shout, 'Communal rewriting of history.'

  2. They have made present-day India, and Hinduism even more so, out to be a zoo - an agglomeration of assorted, disparate specimens. No such thing as 'India', just a geographical expression, just a construct of the British; no such thing as Hinduism, just a word used by Arabs to describe the assortment they encountered, just an invention of the communalists to impose a uniformity - that has been their stance. For this they have blackened the Hindu period of our history, and, as we shall see, strained to whitewash the Islamic period.

  3. “Another life-lesson: until our minds are emptied, how will we receive?”

  4. “The third set of facts that has an immediate bearing on the question at hand is documented beyond doubt by now. And that is the plasticity of the brain. While it used to be believed till even a few decades ago that the human brain stops ‘growing’ once one reaches adulthood, it is a commonplace now that the brain keeps changing, and can be made to change literally till we die. Nor is it just the way the brain functions that changes, the very structure of the brain changes. The interconnections between its components, the ‘cubic space’ devoted to particular functions, the ability of components to take over the functions of other parts—for instance, the areas devoted to receiving and processing visual inputs taking over the function of ‘hearing’—in each of these and many other ways, the brain remains plastic.8”

  5. “The bail had barely been granted and a faction of the Republican Party of India organized a function in the same hall to felicitate and honour the assailants for having successfully attacked me – a fact that, being merely in the public domain, was obviously not something the court would take note of!”

  6. “Suffering is real. To urge anything that dismisses it as ‘unreal’ is to mock the pain of another.”

  7. “No cosmic purpose is served by our suffering or that of those dear to us—just as no cosmic purpose is served by our being born or by our dying; and that for the simple reason that there is no ‘cosmic purpose’.”

  8. “To derive joy from simple things; to derive joy from beautiful, giving persons; to give back, indeed to give away; to be thankful, as we are so often told we must be, for small mercies.”