Quotes from Shashi Tharoor

If America is a melting-pot, then to me India is a thali, a selection of sumptuous dishes in different bowls. Each tastes different, and does not necessarily mix with the next, but they belong together on the same plate, and they complement each other in making the meal a satisfying repast.

The only possible idea of India is that of a nation greater than the sum of its parts.

Great discoveries, Ganapathi, are often the result of making the wrong mistake at the right time.

Bombs and bullets alone cannot destroy India, because Indians will pick their way through the rubble and carry on as they have done throughout history.

Why does man need bread? To survive. But why survive if it is only to eat more bread? To live is more than just to sustain life - it is to enrich, and be enriched by, life.

If you believe in truth and cared enough to obtain it, you had to be prepared actively to suffer for it.

Rabindranath Tagore put it gently to a Western audience in New York in 1930: 'A great portion of the world suffers from your civilisation.' Mahatma Gandhi was blunter: asked what he thought of Western civilization, he replied, 'It would be a good idea'. 'The

The Mahabharata declares, 'What is here is nowhere else; what is not here, is nowhere.

I do not look to history to absolve my country of the need to do things right today. Rather 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. 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. One

While he was alive, he was impossible to ignore; once he had gone, he was impossible to imitate.

India is my country, and in that sense my outrage is personal.

The joke is that one Bengali is a poet, two Bengalis is an argument, three Bengalis is a political party

They say every dog has its day, Ganapathi, but for this terrier twilight came before tea-time.

Indians paid, in other words, for the privilege of being conquered by the British.

It was not just the maharajas who had to suffer: every Indian schoolchild must lament the influence of the British dress code on Indians—especially the tie as a permanent noose around the necks of millions of schoolchildren, in India's sweltering heat, even today.

The past is not necessarily a guide to the future, but it does partly help explain the present.

When we kill people, we feel compelled to pretend that it is for some higher cause. It is this pretence of virtue, I promise you, that will never be forgiven by history.

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.

When I grew up in India, telephones were a rarity. In fact, they were so rare that elected members of Parliament had the right to allocate 15 telephone lines as a favor to those they deemed worthy. If you were lucky enough to be a wealthy businessman or an influential journalist, or a doctor or something, you might have a telephone.

Many of the people who are most considered anti-American would love to partake of the American dream: the unspoken slogan of many protesters outside U.S. embassies abroad is really: 'Yankee go home, but take me with you.'

If you believe in truth and cared enough to obtain it, you had to be prepared actively to suffer for it.

The roots of India's soft power run deep. India's is a civilization that, over millennia, has offered refuge and, more importantly, religious and cultural freedom, to Jews, Parsis, several varieties of Christians, and Muslims.

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.

The Internet is emblematic of an era in which what happens in Southeast Asia or southern Africa - from democratic advances to deforestation to the fight against aids - can affect Americans. As has been observed about water pollution, we all live downstream now.