Quotes from Shashi Tharoor

We tend to reduce everyone else to the limits of our own mental universe and begin privileging our own ethics, morality, sense of duty and even our sense of utility. All religious conflicts arose from this propensity to judge others. If we indeed must judge at all, then it must be "according to his own ideal, and not by that of anyone else".

As late as World War II, among the 'few of the few' who bravely defended England against German invasion in the Battle of Britain were Indian fighter pilots, including a doughty Sikh who named his Hurricane fighter 'Amritsar'.

The British tended to base their refusal to intervene in famines with adequate governmental measures on a combination of three sets of considerations: free trade principles (do not interfere with market forces), Malthusian doctrine (growth in population beyond the ability of the land to sustain it would inevitably lead to deaths, thereby restoring the 'correct' level of population) and financial prudence (don't spend money we haven't budgeted for).

Indeed there were outstanding examples of good governance in India at the time, notably the Travancore kingdom, which in 1819 became the first government in the world to decree universal, compulsory and free primary education for both boys and girls.)

The British in India were never more than 0.05 per cent of the population. The Empire, in Hobsbawm's evocative words, was 'so easily won, so narrowly based, so absurdly easily ruled thanks to the devotion of a few and the passivity of the many.

Hinduism is 'not a definite dogmatic creed, but a vast, complex, but subtly unified mass of spiritual thought and realization.

Our present concept of morality isn't really Hindu at all; it is a legacy both of the Muslim invasion and of the superimposition of Victorian prudery on a people already puritanized by purdah.

This book has no pretensions to infallibility, let alone to omniscience.

it is striking that when slavery was abolished, the British government paid compensation, not to the men and women so inhumanely pressed into bondage, but to their former owners, for their 'loss of property'!)

British cartography defined spaces the better to rule them; the map became an instrument of colonial control. Even the valuable British legacy, the museum, was devised in furtherance of the imperial project because here objects, artefacts and symbols could be appropriated, named, labelled, arranged, ordered, classified and thus controlled, exactly as the people could be.

What the hell does this say about India? Appearances are more important than truths. Gossip is more potent than facts. Loyalty is all one way, from the woman to the man. And when society stacks up all the odds against a woman, she'd better not count on the man's support. She has no way out other than to end her own life. And I'm in love with an Indian. I must be crazy.

As someone once said about water pollution, we all live downstream. We are all interconnected, and we can no longer afford the luxury of not thinking about the rest of the planet in anything we do.

history is neither for excuses nor for revenge 1.

Europe's history of trading relations with India is borne out in the writings of the ancient historians Herodotus, Pliny, Petronius and Ptolemy, and

Historian John Keay put it best: 'The conduct of states, as of individuals, can only be assessed by the standards of their age, not by today's litigious criteria. Otherwise, we'd all be down on the government of Italy for feeding Christians to the lions.

The extortion nightly have been partly excused if the taxes were being returned to the cultivators in the form of public goods or services, but the taxes were sent off to the British government in London.

minorityhood is a state of mind, Mr. Diggs. It is a sense of powerlessness, of being out of the mainstream, of being here on sufferance. I refuse to let others define me that way. I tell my fellow Muslims: No one can make you a minority without your consent.

Indeed, the best form of atonement by the British might be, as Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has suggested, to start teaching unromanticized colonial history in British schools.

The East India Company created, for the first time in Indian history, the landless peasant, deprived of his traditional source of sustenance.

The ryotwari and mahalwari systems of taxation had the additional feature of abolishing all private property which had belonged to the affluent as well as the inferior cultivating classes, thereby abolishing century-old traditions and ties that linked people to the land.

Jinnah proved obdurate: he was determined to obtain Pakistan. The Muslim League leader declared 16 August 1946 as 'Direct Action Day' to drive home this demand. Thousands of Muslim Leaguers took to the streets in an orgy of violence, looting and mayhem, and 16,000 innocents were killed in the resulting clashes, particularly in Calcutta.

The path-breaking writer and thinker on nationalism, Benedict Anderson, has convincingly pointed out that identities uniting large numbers of people could arise only after a certain technological level had been attained.

Discussion is an 'art form' in India, an egocentric ritual of simulated conviction or, at best, a second-hand expression of conscience. Its vitality is attenuated by its own irrelevance.

If India's GDP went down because it 'missed the bus' of industrialization, it was because the British threw Indians under the wheels.