Quotes from Shashi Tharoor

It is true that a Hindu without a horoscope is like an American without a credit card, and is subject to many of the same disabilities.

One of the more difficult questions I used to find myself being asked as a United Nations official, especially when I had been addressing a generalist audience, was: What is the single most important thing that can be done to improve the world?... If I had to pick one thing we must do above all else, I now offer a two-word mantra: Educate girls.

As Henry Nevinson also pointed out, the rule of law, such as it was, functioned in a system in which Indians were 'compelled to live permanently under a system of official surveillance which reads their private letters, detains their telegrams, and hires men to watch their actions'. This, then, was the rule of law the British taught us. We have much to unlearn.

Indians were always subjects, never citizens; throughout the days of Empire, no Indian could have presumed to say 'I am British' the way a French African was encouraged to say 'Je suis français'.

It also meant that decisions were increasingly made in offices, behind closed doors, by foreigners with no connection to those whose fates they were deciding. The public display of the rulers' authority was replaced by the private circulation of incomprehensible paper.

The racism of the colonial state was also reflected in its penal code. The Criminal Tribes Legislation, 1911, gave authority to the British to restrict movement, search and even detain people from specific groups, because their members were deemed to be chronically engaging in 'criminal' activity. This was bad sociology and worse law, but it stayed on the books till after Independence. Worse, its effects were inhumane.

The creation and perpetuation of Hindu–Muslim antagonism was the most significant accomplishment of British imperial policy: the project of divide et impera would reach its culmination in the horrors of Partition that eventually accompanied the collapse of British authority in 1947.

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

The Hindu's first issue counted a grand total of eighty copies, printed with 'one rupee and eight annas' of borrowed money by a group of four law students and two teachers). In

Whereas an Akbar might have used such technologies to fuse his diverse people together, the British used them to separate, classify and divide.

Time is depicted in hymns in the Atharva Veda as perpetually replenishing itself from a full vessel which, in spite of all efforts, can never be emptied. Since time transcends time, it is without beginning or end, without limit; and in that sense it is like God. 'Time am I, world-destroying,' says Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita, stressing 'I am imperishable Time'.

we have reduced our politics to black and white today: either for or against, nothing in between. Fifty Shades of Grey could never be the title of a book about Indian politics. This view of

The playwright Richard Sheridan was scathing in his denunciation of the Company, whose operations 'combined the meanness of a pedlar with the profligacy of a pirate…

The British public is woefully ignorant of the realities of the British empire, and what it meant to its subject peoples.

Like most Hindus, I think I have. I am, as I told you, a believer, despite a brief period of schoolboy atheism — of the kind that comes with the discovery of rationality and goes with an acknowledgement of its limitations.

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.

If the Muslims of the 1520s acted out of ignorance and fanaticism, should Hindus act the same way in the 1980s? By doing what you propose to do, you will hurt the feelings of the Muslims of today, who did not perpetrate the injustices of the past and who are in no position to inflict injustice upon you today; you will provoke violence and rage against your own kind; you will tarnish the name of the Hindu people across the world; and you will irreparably damage your own cause. Is this worth it?

The highest officers in the government had the strongest motives to corruption, and therefore could by no possibility attempt to check the same corruption in those below them…

But in looking to understand the forces that have made us and nearly unmade us, and in hoping to recognize possible future sources of conflict in the new millennium, we have to realize that sometimes the best crystal ball is a rear-view mirror.

The Indian vessels, a contemporary British observer wrote, 'united elegance and utility and are models of patience [sic] and fine workmanship.' Indian workers were considered expert in all shipbuilding materials—wood, iron and brass

subjugation of India under British rule.

He put himself at the head of a movement of irreconcilable imperialist romantics,' wrote Boris Johnson in his recent admiring biography of Churchill. 'Die-hard defenders of the Raj and of the God-given right of every pink-jowled Englishman to sit on his veranda and…glory in the possession of India'. Mahatma

As Manu S. Pillai acidly observes, 'In other words, there is nothing a quiet ghar wapsi cannot solve when it comes to the building of a good dharmocracy.'90

By the end of the nineteenth century, India was Britain's biggest source of revenue, the world's biggest purchaser of British exports and the source of highly paid employment for British civil servants and soldiers all at India's own expense. We literally paid for our own oppression.