68 Shashi Tharoor Quotes

Shashi Tharoor quotes

1. 'India is not, as people keep calling it, an underdeveloped country, but rather, in the context of its history and cultural heritage, a highly developed one in an advanced state of decay.' [1]

2. '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.' [2]

3. 'Does NRI (Non-Resident Indian) stand for Not Really Indian or Never Relinquished India? I believe a little of both!' [3]

4. '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.' [4]

5. 'Indian nationalism is the nationalism of an idea, the idea of an ever-ever land, emerging from an ancient civilization, sustained by pluralist democracy.' [5]

6. 'We all have multiple identities in India; we are all minorities in India. Our heterogeneity is definitional.' [6]

7. 'No Indian nationalist leader ever needed to say: We have created India; now all we need to do is to create Indians.' [7]

8. 'In building an Indian nation that takes account of the country's true Hindu heritage, we have to return to the pluralism of the national movement.' [8]

9. 'The memories of the first Independence Day may have faded, but the power of that magical moment must never be forgotten.' [8]

10. 'The only possible idea of India is that of a nation greater than the sum of its parts.' [9]

11. 'The idea of India is not based on language, not on geography, not on ethnicity and not on religion. The idea of India is of one land embracing many. You can be many things and one thing: you can be a good Keralite, a good Muslim and a good Indian all at once.' [10]

12. 'Our founding fathers wrote a constitution for a dream. We have given passports to their ideals.' [11]

13. 'If India had a Latin version of the American motto E Pluribus Unum, it would be E Pluribus Pluribum.' [12]

14. 'If America is a melting pot, then to me India is a thali -- a collection of sumptuous dishes in different bowls. Each may not mix with the next, but they combine on your palate to produce a satisfying repast.' [12]

15. 'The pluralism and the linguistic diversity of India is something of which we can truly be proud.' [13]

16. 'Pluralist India must, by definition, tolerate plural expressions of its many identities.' [14]

17. 'India imposes no procrustean exactions on its citizens: you can be many things and one thing.' [15]

18. 'In India we celebrate the commonality of major differences; we are a land of belonging rather than of blood.' [15]

19. 'Ultimately, what matters in determining the validity of a nation is the will of its inhabitants to live and strive together.' [15]

20. '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.' [16]

21. 'India has been born and reborn scores of times, and it will be reborn again. India is for ever, and India is forever being made.' [16]

22. 'Bureaucracy is simultaneously the most crippling of Indian diseases and the highest of Indian art forms.' [16]

23. '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. I move to the strains of a morning raga in perfect evening dress.' [16]

24. '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.' [16]

25. 'How easily we Indians see the several sides to every question! That is what makes us such good bureaucrats, and such poor totalitarians. They say the new international organizations set up by the wonderfully optimistic (if oxymoronic) United Nations are full of highly successful Indian officials with quick, subtle minds and mellifluous tongues, for ever able to understand every global crisis from the point of view of each and every one of the contending parties. That is why they do so well, Ganapathi, in any situation that calls for an instinctive awareness of the subjectivity of truth, the relativity of judgement and the impossibility of action.' [16]

26. 'Even though India has all the attributes of a great power,its most striking asset was actually its soft power.' - Shashi Tharoor at the recently concluded Hindustan Times Leadership Summit in New Delhi.

27. 'India is more than a sum of its contradictions, any truism about India can be contradicted with another truism. There is no fixed stereotype. But even thinking about India makes clear the immensity of the nation-building challenge.' - Shashi Tharoor at the recently concluded PANIIT 2006 in Bombay.

28. 'There is no one way to look at India. There are many Indias. Pluralism is a reality that emerges from the very nature of the country; it is a choice made inevitable by India's geography and reaffirmed by its history. We are all minorities in India.' - Shashi Tharoor at the recently concluded PANIIT 2006 in Bombay.

29. 'The first challenge is that we cannot generalise about India. One of the few generalisations that can safely be made about India is that nothing can be taken for granted about the country.' - Shashi Tharoor at the recently concluded PANIIT 2006 in Bombay.

30. 'I was not blinded by faith, but the encounter was indeed astonishing at several levels. In our private talk, Sai Baba uttered insights about my family and myself that he could not possibly have known....He waved his hand in the air and opened his palm. In it nestled a gold ring with nine embedded stones, a navratan. He slipped it on my finger, remarking, 'See how well it fits. Even a goldsmith would have needed to measure your finger.' [17]

31. 'It was as if he had heard what I wanted,' she said. But a skilled magician can do that, and it would be wrong to see Sai Baba as a conjurer. He has channeled the hopes and energies of his followers into constructive directions, both spiritual and philanthropic.' [17]

32. 'The British are the only people in history crass enough to have made revolutionaries out of Americans.' [16]

33. '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.' [16]

34. 'The vehicles of human politics seem to run off course, but the site of the accident turns out to have been the intended destination.' [16]

35. 'Freedom of the press is the mortar that binds together the bricks of democracy -- and it is also the open window embedded in those bricks.' -- Speech at the UN's World Press Freedom Day, 3 May 2001

36. 'Of course, we meet to mourn that part of our human family that is missing -- to remember the individuals and tell each other their stories. But we also meet to unearth the lessons we can draw from their lives and their fates.': Shashi Tharoor, Under-Secretary-General, at the UN's Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust, 29 January 2007.

37. 'Just as human beings have an almost infinite power to destroy, they also possess an enormous capacity to learn, to grow and to create.' : Shashi Tharoor, Under-Secretary-General, at the UN's Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust, 29 January 2007.

38. 'The UN is the place to draw up blueprints without borders. It is the one indispensable global organisation in our globalizing world.' ... Shashi Tharoor, DNA India, November 12, 2005

1. It's not the side of the bigger army that wins. It's the country that tells a better story.

2. Whereas China has set about systematically striving for Olympic success since it re-entered global competition after years of isolation, India has remained complacent about its lack of sporting prowess.

3. India's national elections are really an aggregate of thirty different state elections, each influenced by its own local considerations, regional political currents, and different patterns of political incumbency.

4. The casting of 'Slumdog Millionaire' is a dream. Anil Kapoor, as the sleazy TV host, diamonds winking in his earlobes, has never been better; the quietly understated Irrfan Khan turns in another bravura performance as the police inspector whose questioning brings out Jamal's story.

5. The episode of the 'shoe bomber,' Richard Reid, has suddenly meant more feet being bared at airports than at the average Hindu temple. My solution has been to replace my customary lace-up Oxfords with a pair of slip-on loafers when I fly. Generals are always fighting the last war, and security screeners are the same.

6. Global challenges also require global solutions, and few indeed are the situations in which the United States or any other country can act completely alone.

7. Going abroad to study as a teenager, and joining the United Nations at 22, confirmed my ease with the world of the frequent flyer. I saw the average airport terminal as a familiar haven, like a friend's sitting room. But 9/11 changed all that.

8. Elections are an enduring spectacle of free India, and have provided foreign journalists with the opportunity to remind the world that India remains the world's largest democracy.

9. I believe in an India of pluralism and diversity, not of religious bigotry and caste politics. I believe in an India that is secure in itself and confident of its place in the world, an India that is a proud example of tolerance, freedom and hope for the downtrodden.

10. I don't go by my caste, creed or religion. My works speak for me.

11. Above all, Danny Boyle's 'Slumdog Millionaire' is the work of an artist at the peak of his powers. India is his palette, and Mumbai - that teeming 'maximum city', with 19 million strivers on the make, jostling, scheming, struggling and killing for success - is his brush.

12. Foreigners have a complex set of associations in their minds when they think of America - from Iraq to 9/11, certainly, but also from Coke to jeans. It is entirely possible for people around the world to love American products, American books, American movies, American music, and dislike the policies of the government of America.

13. No one says "Gee Whiz!" very much these days, of course, not even in America - both because that expression has long since been supplanted by others more colourful and less printable, and because our capacity for surprise has long since been dulled by a surfeit of sources.

14. I am proud to represent the capital of Kerala, a state that in so many ways is a trailblazer for India's progress, though in other respects it seems to have been left behind in the race for 21st century development.

15. Five decades ago, as India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, began visibly ailing, the nation and the world were consumed by the question: 'After Nehru, who?' The inexpressible fear lay in the subtext to the question: 'After Nehru, what?'

16. The U.N. guards the vital principles entrenched in its charter, notably the sovereign equality of states and the inadmissibility of interference in their internal affairs. It is precisely because the U.N. is the chief guardian of both these sacrosanct principles that it alone is allowed to approve derogations from them.

17. The steep decline in America's image and standing after 9/11 is a direct reflection of global distaste for the instruments of American hard power: the Iraq invasion, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, torture, rendition, Blackwater's killings of Iraqi civilians.

18. I make no bones about the fact that India matters to me, and I would like to matter to India.

19. Much of the conventional analysis of India's stature in the world relies on the all-too-familiar economic assumptions. But we are famously a land of paradoxes, and one of those paradoxes is that so many speak about India as a great power of the 21st century when we are not yet able to feed, educate and employ all our people.

20. Universality of the UN is a worthwhile thing in its own self because it means that every country belongs, feels it has a stake, and participates, rather than going away and finding other methods of conducting international relations.

21. The Chinese, as befits a Communist autocracy, approached the task of dominating the Olympics with top-down military discipline.

22. Education in India has made monumental progress since Independence but continues to face daunting challenges at multiple levels, particularly in terms of quality, infrastructure and dropout rates. We have islands of excellence floating in a sea of mediocrity.

23. A weak, insecure nation needs sporting heroes, players larger than life on the cricketing field, who can transcend the limitations of their country and team.

24. The United Nations is the preeminent institution of multilateralism. It provides a forum where sovereign states can come together to share burdens, address common problems, and seize common opportunities. The U.N. helps establish the norms that many countries - including the United States - would like everyone to live by.

25. I have been a frequent air traveler since I was a few months shy of my sixth birthday, when my parents packed me off to boarding school two plane rides away from home. Those days of being willingly handed from air hostess to air hostess as an 'unaccompanied minor' made me blase about the rigors of air travel.

26. A philosopher is a lover of wisdom, not of knowledge, which for all its great uses ultimately suffers from the crippling effect of ephemerality. All knowledge is transient linked to the world around it and subject to change as the world changes, whereas wisdom, true wisdom is eternal immutable. To be philosophical one must love wisdom for its own sake, accept its permanent validity and yet its perpetual irrelevance. It is the fate of the wise to understand the process of history and yet never to shape it.

27. Hindu fundamentalism is a contradiction in terms, since Hinduism is a religion without fundamentals; there is no such thing as a Hindu heresy. How dare a bunch of goondas shrink the soaring majesty of the Vedas and the Upanishads to the petty bigotry of their brand of identity politics?

28. Among the many international consequences of Barack Obama's stunning victory in the United States is worldwide introspection about whether such a breakthrough could happen elsewhere. Could a person of color win power in other white-majority countries?

29. Basically, there are two kinds of stereotypes out there in the world about America. There's America the Goliath - the big, powerful, bullying country that pushes its way around the world and gets its ways, pursues its own interests nakedly, irrespective of what others want. And the other stereotype is America, the land of opportunity, where everyone can go and do anything, be anything, make any dreams come true.

30. I'm not a techno-determinist. I believe we need to improve our existing human resources, and technology can only be a complement.