Quotes from Shashi Tharoor

as of 1890, 6,000 British officials ruled 250 million Indians, with some 70,000 European soldiers and a larger number of Indians in uniform. In 1911, there were 164,000 Britons living in India (of whom 66,000 were in the army and police and just 4,000 in civil government). By 1931, this had gone up to just 168,000 (including 60,000 in the army and police and still only 4,000 in civil government) to run a country approaching 300 million people.

India has the deepest philosophy still expressed in a vibrant religion, a huge body of literature, amazing art, dance, music, sculpture, architecture, delicious cuisine and yet Indians are in denial mode and wake up only when foreigners treasure India,' wrote Wirth. 'They don't seem to know the value and, therefore, don't take pride in their tradition, unlike Westerners who take a lot of pride in theirs, even if there is little to be proud of.

When Willy Brandt was chancellor of Germany, he sank to his knees at the Warsaw Ghetto in 1970 to apologize to Polish Jews for the Holocaust.

Hinduism professes no false certitudes. Its capacity to express wonder at Creation and simultaneously scepticism about the omniscience of the Creator are unique to Hinduism. Both are captured beautifully in this verse from the 3,500-year-old Rig Veda, the Nasadiya Sukta or Creation Hymn:

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 rearview mirror.

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.

Brutish' as an acceptable substitute for 'British' rule in India!

I need scarcely point out

Trudeau's Willy Brandt moment needs to find its British echo.

One American newspaper wholesaler told The New York Times that the Indians "basically replaced the old Jewish and Italian merchants and they've filled a tremendous void because nobody will put in the fourteen and sixteen-hour days that they do quite willingly and that you have to put in when running a newsstand.

Dutch writer Ian Buruma saw as an attempt to remind the English 'of their collective dreams of Englishness, so glorious, so poignant, so bittersweet in the resentful seediness of contemporary little England.

there were seats reserved for Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and so on. This resulted in the aggravation of communal identities, since what little politics was permitted could quickly devolve into a communal competition for limited resources. Public sentiments could be aroused to exaggerate differences amongst Indians, which redounded to the benefit of the British, who, of course, were above it all.

history is neither for excuses nor for revenge

So Britain would fight Germany for doing to Poland what Britain had been doing to India for nearly two hundred years.

To accept people as one finds them, to allow them to be and become what they choose, and to encourage them to do whatever they like (so long as it does

How do I pray? Not in any organized form, really; I go to temples sometimes with my family, but they leave me cold. I think of prayer as something intensely personal, a way of reaching my hands out towards my maker. I recite some mantras my parents taught me as a child; there is something reassuring about those ancient words, hallowed by use and repetition over thousands of years.

Britain is no longer 'Thatcherite', though in the aftermath of 'Brexit', it may even be worse. The need to temper British imperial nostalgia with postcolonial responsibility has never been greater.

The little court disappears—trade languishes—the capital decays—the people are impoverished—the Englishman flourishes, and acts like a sponge, drawing up riches from the banks of the Ganges, and squeezing them down upon the banks of the Thames.

Human beings, to me, are rather like electrical appliances that need to be charged regularly, and prayer is a way of plugging into that charge.

Global governance is a concept that is used to describe the processes and institutions by which the world is governed, and it was always intended to be an amorphous idea, since there is no such thing as a global government to provide such governance. 'Global governance' is a term that tries to impose a sense of order, real or imagined, on a world without an organized system of government.

Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not to their own facts.

The India that the British East India Company conquered was no primitive or barren land, but the glittering jewel of the medieval world.

The press, in other words, was free, but some newspapers (the British-owned ones) were freer than others.

Jawaharlal Nehru put it sharply: the Indian Civil Service, he said, was 'neither Indian, nor civil, nor a service'.